http://lenzr.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!C608DD7732336975!298.entry

62 Years of Uranium Wars

Hiroshima To Iraq - A Suicidal,Genocidal, Omnicidal Course
By Leuren Moret
04 January


The conduct of secret nuclear wars since 1991, through the use of depleted uranium weaponry by the United States and Great Britain with their allies, has taken place in the Middle East, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan2 and Lebanon.3

It has been carried out for the express purpose of destroying the public health and mutilating the genetic future of vast populations in oil rich and/or pipeline regions. Carpet and grid bombing with depleted uranium weaponry in Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan has guaranteed permanent radioactive terrain contamination.

The recent discovery that U.S. depleted uranium bombs dropped by Israel on Lebanon in 2006 contained enriched uranium4,5 suggests covert testing of fourth generation nuclear weapons.

The United States and its allies are fully aware that this weaponry violates the Geneva and Hague Conventions and the 1925 Geneva Poison Gas Protocol.6 It meets the definition of WMD in the U.S. Code7 in two out of three categories. And its use violates U.S. military law.8 since the U.S. is a signatory to The Hague and Geneva Conventions.

The blueprint for depleted uranium radioactive poison gas weaponry ­ dirty bombs, dirty missiles and dirty bullets ­ was contained in a declassified memorandum9 dated Oct. 30, 1943. It was addressed to Gen. Leslie Groves, who was head of the Manhattan Project, the U.S. effort to build atomic bombs in World War II. The recommendation for development of depleted uranium as kinetic energy penetrators was never mentioned in the Groves memo. It was specifically for depopulation.

The Groves memo makes it clear that in 1943, U.S. scientists recommended using radioactive poison gas weapons in order to contaminate the air, water, soil, food, environment and the blood of exposed populations. The long-term contamination is permanent, since uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, making contaminated areas uninhabitable for eternity. For populations that must continue to live in contaminated areas, the long-term effects are lingering illnesses and mutilation of their DNA.

Widespread depleted uranium contamination of DNA in populations results in the potential mutilation of future generations. Mutations induced in the DNA of a single egg or sperm which form a fertilized egg are expressed and repeated in every cell of the developing organism, and defects are passed on to all future generations11.

Not only are U.S. and allied soldiers exposed and civilian populations genocidally targeted, but the depleted uranium pollution is now global.12,13 In reality, we are all Gulf War veterans. Depleted uranium poison gas weaponry, used on a regional scale, meets U.S. National Security Council goals as stated in the "Global 2000 Report: Vision of a Gloomy World" (1980).14 This report recommended that depopulation in third world countries was imperative to the U.S. government purpose of securing mineral and other strategic resources.

Global atmospheric pollution from depleted uranium particulates will result in massive depopulation on a global scale. By increasing death rates and decreasing birth rates globally, more than 2 billion people will be eliminated. Depleted uranium is the ideal weapon to bring about the New World Order, which is global depopulation. In just a few years it has turned Planet Earth into a Death Star.

Depopulation and the accumulation of capital

The following is the depopulation policy thesis set out in this paper: Intentional depopulation and massive genocide are the core policies by which ruling elites drive international relations, economic aid development, strategic weapons development and the design of engineered wars. The operational goal of this intentional depopulation policy is the reduction of the human population.

With presidential approval, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger presented 2 billion people as the desired level of reduction, but in fact the depopulation policy may seek a 2-4 billion reduction, or up to two thirds of the world's population. This depopulation policy is intended by the world's ruling elite to result in control of mineral and strategic resources and water and total control of the world's wealth. One of the most common political epithets for the depopulation policy is "The New World Order."

"All wars are economic in origin," said Bernard Baruch, advisor to presidents during World Wars I and II. Even the 13th century Crusades in the Middle East were not religious wars, but an attempt by special interests in Europe to restabilize and take control over the wealth and revenues of the Silk Road.15 Theology was created to eliminate the "enemies of God" in order to promote and justify the wars of the Crusades, which were fought for a hidden economic benefit.

History in the Middle East repeats itself in the 21st century. The New World Order depopulation policy was consciously accelerated during World War II with the Manhattan Project. During World War II, the Manhattan Project developed three illegal and infamous weapons of mass destruction: the atomic bombs dropped on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, a defoliant developed as Agent Orange for the Vietnam War, and depleted uranium radioactive poison gas weaponry used in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Lebanon since 1991. These weapons of mass destruction were developed specifically for the purpose of depopulation.

After World War II, the international ruling elite ­ the Illuminati, London Money Power, Bilderberg Group, the Club of Rome, and Skull and Bones ­ and, in the U.S., the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, National Security Council and U.S. State Department have all made depopulation of 2 billion people their top priority. The purpose of this planned human mass genocide is to maximize profits and the accumulation of wealth.

Depopulation in Africa Depopulation policy has targeted Africa more heavily than any other continent and has resulted in the ruling elites looting its vast natural resources. It is a "treasure box" of minerals and precious, rare and strategic metals, with more diversity of resource wealth than any other continent. In the book, "Tiny Rowland: The Ugly Face of Neocolonialism in Africa,"16 are details of the role that Tiny Rowland played, as agent of the British Queen, in turning the 1960s dreams of independence of the African nations into the nightmare of a dying continent, plagued by starvation and disease.

Rowland was the CEO and chief architect of Lonrho, the British multinational company that was the headquarters for looting African countries through economic dirty tricks. Through Lonrho, Rowland became the biggest Western businessman in Africa. The book also details how Rowland set up Rio Tinto Mines for the considerable private and personal uranium holdings, worth over $6 billion, of the Queen of England in former British colonies. Not bad for a German former Nazi youth corps member, who was a convicted criminal in Germany before he changed his name, moved to England and became the Queen's buccaneer.

The depopulation policy thesis extends to international collaboration and alliance between private organizations, universities, corporations, governments, the military and quasi-governmental bodies. The concept for AIDS, a new class of bio-weapon, came out of the Club of Rome and was made in laboratories of the Department of Defense. AIDS was one of the early "exotic" bio-weapons developed. It was developed and administered by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). Congress funded the AIDS development project, used to depopulate Africa in combination with famine, two ways known to rapidly increase death rates.

The role of universities

Universities have played a major role in the development of weapons of mass destruction and implementation of depopulation policies. Grants from the DOD increasingly are playing an important role in science research funding in the U.S. In addition to running the nuclear weapons labs, UC Berkeley began DOD-funded research developing "flying spying robotic insects," "smart dust" and other projects prompted by the 2001 events of 911.

This is benign compared to Johns Hopkins University, the largest single university recipient of DOD funding in the U.S., which receives nearly $350 million a year.17 Johns Hopkins University and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where the Manhattan Project started during World War II, have both been involved with research on another aspect of U.S. depopulation policy, the "genome project."

The genome project is a nearly completed scientific program to map the human genome. Human genome mapping and the development of new bio-weapons go hand in hand. Secretly, and in violation of international law, exotic bio-weapons have been under intense development in more than 100 government and military laboratories in the U.S. during the past few decades. Development of bio-weapons and expansion of the laboratories intensified under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to unprecedented levels after 2000.18 They are cost effective, something penny pincher Donald Rumsfeld was known for, but they are nothing new.

In an interview in 1948 between Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo, and his CIA interrogator, Mueller reflected the same penny pinching cheapskate concern characteristic of fascists: "If Stalin invades Europe ... a little disease here and there would wipe out Stalin's hoards and leave everything intact. Besides, a small bottle of germs is so much cheaper than an atom bomb, isn't it? Why, you could hold more soldiers in your hand than Stalin could possibly command and you don't have to feed them, clothe them or supply them with munitions. On the other hand, the threat of war ... does wonders ... for the economy."19

Apparently, designing new kinds of bio-weapons for the DOD can be dangerous to a scientist's health. More than 50 world-class scientists have been murdered since 2002 in the U.S. and the U.K. Almost all of them were microbiologists working on ethnic specific bio-weapons.20,21 When population control programs have failed in Third World countries, U.S. foreign policy has proven to be covert and vicious. After birth control and sterilization programs failed in India, it became the target of a deadly and demonic form of U.S. depopulation policy ­ involving both bio-weapons and radiation. AIDS has now spread across the southern half of India. Depleted uranium blowing off the Himalayas, over Pakistan and the oil rich sands of Rajasthan, Utar Pradesh and Gujarat is contaminating the northern half of India and the Himalayan headwaters of nine major rivers of Asia.

Radioactive wars

Heavy grid and carpet bombing with depleted uranium by the U.S. military on the eastern side of Afghanistan beginning in 2001 guaranteed heavy contamination in areas where deep snows in the mountainous regions provide water for Pakistan and parts of western India. By contaminating vital water supplies in vast regions with radioactive contaminants, a secret and invisible low level nuclear war is being carried out against Asia. Radioactive wars with low level radiation will mutilate the DNA of all exposed living things.

This is not just a war against people; it is a war against the environment. Few living things will escape the slow radioactive poisoning which mutilates DNA and is passed on to all future generations.

Biological weapons are under development and testing for population control. Forced sterilization as a means of population control has been covertly introduced in Third World countries, where women receiving vaccines were never able to have a live birth after the vaccination. This was reported in a BBC documentary on women in the Philippines and Mexico who had been used as guinea pigs for a new experimental pregnancy vaccine.22

The HCG vaccine makes a woman's body reject new pregnancies. Black women have involuntarily been sterilized in South African hospitals with the HCG vaccine. They were told, after the birth of a baby, that "we could not leave the hospital until they had 'this shot.'"23 Black newborns, born to parents without AIDS, were given vaccinations before they left the hospital in South Africa, and the babies were soon found to have AIDS.24

In some American Indian tribes, up to 80 percent of the women are sterile. Biopharmaceutical crops are a disaster waiting to happen. Dr. Ignacio Chapela reported that spermicidal corn was being tested by drug companies in Mexico: "Some in Mexico are worried that biopharmaceutical corn could pollute their corn fields. Silvia Ribeiro, who heads the ETC Group's office in Mexico City, has noted with concern that the California-based Epicyte Corp. boasts a spermicidal corn for use as a contraceptive. 'The potential of spermicidal corn as a biological weapon is very high,' she warned, and reminisced about the use of forced sterilizations against indigenous peoples."25

We can no longer trust what used to be sustainers of life. The depopulation weapons of the ruling elite are in the air, in food, in vaccines, in medical procedures, in drinking water, in soils and even in our bodies to be passed on to future generations. The irony in this demonic plan is that we were never informed. The decision was made for us ­ to face genocide and the death of birth.

Nuclear power

The greatest number of nuclear reactors are concentrated in Europe, North America and Japan ­ where the most democratic governments in the world are located. Understandably, democratic governments would be the first targets of the ruling elite in forming a one world corporate government. For this reason, nuclear power has been implemented by powerful hidden forces, despite widespread and long term opposition by citizens in those "democratic" countries. The fact that nuclear power is the most costly energy technology ­ with no solution to disposal of radioactive waste ­ was ignored.

Nuclear power plants deliver the same lethal fission products in their emissions over a period of months and years that a nuclear bomb delivers in a nano second. Chronic exposure to low level radiation in emissions released from nuclear power plants may be deadlier in many ways than one acute exposure to a nuclear bomb detonation. Fresh fission products with very short half-lives from atmospheric tests decay in the atmosphere. But these same dangerous fission products arrive in communities within hours in emissions from nuclear power plants.

Chronic exposure of populations over the past decades has caused untold suffering, public health damage and the sacrifice of generations of children ­ the future of our countries.

Radiation Radiation has a very powerful mutagenic effect, destroying DNA and the genetic future of individuals and populations chronically exposed. It also destroys brain functioning and causes many radiation related illnesses. High rates of infertility, particularly linked to radiation, are increasing globally since 1945. Twenty years ago, 80 percent of men's sperm globally was normal and 20 percent had DNA damage. Today, it is reversed, with only 20 percent of global sperm normal and 80 percent with damaged DNA.

The goal of the New World Order is to reduce birth rates and increase death rates globally. Dr. Ernest Sternglass and the Radiation and Public Health Project26 have independently collected over 6,000 baby teeth from children living around nuclear power plants. They found that strontium-90 radiation levels are as high or higher now in baby teeth than during atmospheric testing. Dr. Sternglass, who was asked by President Kennedy to testify in Congress about the link between radiation from fallout and cancer in children, helped convince the Senate to sign the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963. He has recently stated, "What we've done is to replace the fallout from bomb testing with the so-called small permitted releases from nuclear plants."27

Domestically, the U.S. government program to promote nuclear power as energy "too cheap to meter" under President Eisenhower had a hidden military agenda as the only known source of plutonium for nuclear weapons. In keeping with the ruling elites' policy of depopulation, intentional genocide and maximization of profit, the nuclear power program has been used as a secret and covert strategic weapon and a very deadly form of engineered nuclear war. Russia and Japan now have the distinction of being two of a few countries in the world where the death rates are higher than the birth rates. Does radiation in these countries have something to do with the distinction of having achieved the ultimate goal of the New World Order?

The Chernobyl accident, releasing huge amounts of fresh fission products into the atmosphere on April 26, 1986, contributed to the downfall of the Soviet Union. The radiation traveled around the world, causing breast cancer clusters wherever it rained the fission products out of the atmosphere. Russia is a sick old man from the impact of that accident. A scientific illustrator traced the path of Chernobyl radiation across Europe by mapping defective insects under the path of the Chernobyl cloud.

Today, Europe is in a pandemic of diabetes as a result of radiation from French atmospheric testing in the Sahara, Chernobyl and depleted uranium used on battlefields since 1991. Japan already has very high infertility, with a declining birth rate and an increasing death rate, as well as an epidemic of radiation related illnesses from the 56 nuclear reactors in Japan. But the opening of Rokkasho, the largest nuclear reprocessing plant in the world, on April 1, 2006, will destroy Japan.

It seems prophetic that it began operating on April Fool's Day, or maybe it's just more CIA twisted humor. The agreement to build the world's first thermonuclear reactor, now located at Rokkasho in northern Japan, ironically was made in a 1985 summit between Reagan and Gorbachov. It will release the equivalent emissions in one year of 365 new nuclear reactors. There are only about 411 commercial nuclear reactors in the world. Japan will soon have the equivalent radioactive emissions of 419 nuclear reactors, in a country the size of California. Japan has a magnitude 8 or greater earthquake every 5 years! Governments around the world are covering up the radiation related illnesses around nuclear power plants, the Chernobyl accident and low level radiation.

There are people in high places in Japan who know what the impact of Rokkasho will be on the health of the environment and public health. The information is already available in the annual vital statistics published each year by the Japanese government. So why would a government knowingly poison and destroy its own citizens? There is a very powerful international hidden nuclear alliance. Nuclear power and uranium supplies and prices are controlled globally by the Rothschild syndicate.

This power and control was not at first obvious. In a two volume series, "The Rothschilds," Japanese journalist Takashi Hirose exposed the well-concealed mechanisms for the Rothschild syndicate's control of nuclear power. A Rothschild serves as the business manager for the Queen of England, who privately and secretly owns massive interests in uranium holdings in Africa, Canada and Australia through Rio Tinto Mines. Hirose's charts of Rothschild intermarriages in his books reveal that the Rothschild syndicate has for centuries extensively intermarried with royal families and nobility globally. He also revealed that Princess Diana's mother was a Rothschild through intermarriages several generations back.

It is easy to understand how the ruling elite and London Money Power have shared common interests and goals, since they mutually benefit by forming alliances. And they know elected officials are easy to bribe. Three secret nuclear wars With little awareness in the global community, the global ruling elite have carried out three continuous and overlapping secret nuclear wars since the end of World War II, with atmospheric testing, nuclear power plants and depleted uranium weaponry. Nuclear technologies certainly meet their depopulation policy goals and, at the same time, the maximization of profits ­ since they own the uranium sources needed for nuclear fuel and have vested interests in nuclear energy. There are also ties to pharmaceutical companies, which further their goals of maximizing profits. They get paid to make the mess, they get paid to clean it up and they get paid to treat the illnesses they caused.

It is repeat business ­ extreme capitalism at its best. The best way to stop it is for cities, towns and villages to get off the grid. Citizens must own the energy companies and shift energy choices to renewable, passive and non-destructive forms of energy. The oil economy is a con game with extortion, racketeering and fraud thrown in. The "peak oil" scare is a hoax, which any geologist knows because it recycles every 20 years to boost oil prices. His Excellency Shiekh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, Saudi oil minister from 1962 to 1986, believes that the oil age will end not for lack of oil but because of technology: "(T)he oil prices were destined to crash in the long term and the world would never use up the last drop of oil, because it would not need to: 'The Stone Age did not come to an end because we had a lack of stones, and the oil age will not come to an end because we have a lack of oil.'"28

Globally, nuclear power is being cleverly promoted as "clean energy" and as a solution to global warming by establishment propaganda peddlers like Al Gore, but it is not. There is a hidden agenda and secret economic partnership between members of the ruling elite, with vested interests and huge profits to be made from promotion of nuclear power. The hidden partnership of ruling elites, more specifically certain members of the British and U.S. economic empires, was exposed in "The Queen's Death Star: Bush, Cheney, Howard and the Queen."29

Close to the heart of it is the City of London-centered financier oligarchical group headed by Royal Consort Prince Philip. In faith and in practice, the Royal Consort is a great fan of genocide: "If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels," he said.30 The Royal Consort was merely reflecting the pessimistic Malthusian economic predictions regarding the future of humanity and "population explosion" in the 18th century.

The wealthy Englishman Thomas Robert Malthus expected that forces such as war, pestilence, famine and plague would eliminate a swelling population. Thoughts of depopulation policy for economic gain by the ruling elite were alive and well, even in the 18th century. A secret new nuclear war is developing in Asia, promoted by a partnership of the same ruling elites in the British and U.S. economic empires. Recently, international relations have been driving nuclear power as a form of economic aid development in the countries known as the "Tiger Economies": South Korea, Japan, China and India.

The rising economic power of the Tiger Economies is the greatest threat to the British and U.S. economic empires. Since 2003, nuclear power has been forced onto South Korea, Japan, China and India by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Prime Minister Howard of Australia. The developing British nuclear power program in Asia is a revisit to the Opium Wars in China several centuries ago. The Opium Wars were created purely for British economic gain by weakening the leading government in the world for millenia. The hidden agenda of depopulation and weakening countries that pose a threat is being repeated by impacting the vibrant developing economies in Asia with long lingering illnesses from radiation poisoning and mutilation of the genetic future of vast populations.

Nothing new, the British and U.S. economic empires are infamous for being "economic hit men" with an insatiable hunger for other people's resources and wealth.

Privatizing nuclear weapons for the ruling elites

The nuclear weapons program in the U.K. was privatized in the 1980s. The British contractors are corporations with ties to the London Money Power. Control of nuclear weapons should always be in civilian hands, not under the control of the military, because they will use them to do their job ­ to kill people and destroy things with no responsibility for the aftermath. But "in civilian hands" does not mean in the hands of corporations controlled by the ruling elites either.

They are even more likely to use them to meet their long held goals of depopulation and accumulation of wealth. Following in the footsteps of Britain, the U.S. nuclear weapons program has been undergoing privatization over the past four years. George Schultz, former CEO of Bechtel and former Secretary of State, helped facilitate that transition. Bechtel is one of the new corporate partners on the management contract for Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab, in partnership with the University of California, the sole unchallenged manager for 61 years. Two very important contract changes were made in the process of negotiating the new contract, which was awarded to the University and Bechtel in December 2005. Los Alamos and/or Livermore nuclear weapons labs became manufacturing facilities for production of plutonium cores for nuclear weapons.

This violates the charter of the University of California, which is to conduct basic scientific research at the nuclear weapons labs. And the second very important change in the contract, which was brought up momentarily at a UC Regents' meeting by a sitting regent, was the contract phrase which eliminates academic freedom for scientists conducting research at Los Alamos.

(Emphasis added - B.M.)

ANALOG AFRICA No.3 - AFRICAN SCREAM CONTEST

Raw & Psychedelic Afro Sounds
From Benin & Togo 70s
14 tracks compilation available on CD and double vinyl (Release Date March, 2008)

This project initially took off in August, 2005 when I arrived in Cotonou without any special expectations, just hoping to lay my hands on few good records.
What I found in the process cannot really be described in words. This first trip was followed by eight more to the region. Thirty Months and a few thousand Records later Analog Africa is proud to present this compilation which comes with a 44 pages full liners notes and features many rare photographs handed to me directly by the artists.

16 interviews were made and recorded in various cities in Benin & Togo with musicians, producers & sound engineers who kindly offered their support to reconstruct the history of the 70s music scene. Composers gave me a detailed biography, hilarious anecdotes and sometimes the story behind their song. (S)
More infos soon...........to contact me directly: analogafrica@yahoo.com
ALL TRACKS OFFICIALLY LICENSED

1.Lokonon André & Les Volcans - Mi kple Dogbekpo
2.Picoby Band D´Abomey - Mi Ma Kpe Dji
3.Gabo Brown & Orchestre Poly-Rythmo - It´s a Vanity
SAMPLE1 - LISTEN HERE
4.El Rego et ses commandos - Se Na Min
SAMPLE1 - LISTEN HERE
5.Napo de Mi Amor Et Ses Black Devil´s - Leki Santchi
SAMPLE1 - LISTEN HERE
6.Orchestre Poly-Rythmo - Gbeti Madjro
7.Roger Damawuzan - Wait For Me
8.Ouinsou Corneille & Black Santiagos - Vinon so Minsou
9.Orchestre Super Jheevs des Paillotes - Ye Nan Lon An
SAMPLE1 - LISTEN HERE
10.Tidiani Kone - Djanfi Magni
11.Discafric Band - Houiou Djin Nan Zon Aklumon
12.Le Super Borgou de Parakou - Congolaise Benin Ye
13.Vincent Ahehehinnou - Ou c´est Lui Ou C´est Moi
14.Les Volcans de la Capital - Oya Ka Jojo


"One of the most satisfying and exciting records of
the year so far."
Music Week

"A thrilling discovery."
The Observer

"An explosive afro-funk collection dripping in the
feel of hot nights in crumbling mud-brick nightclubs."
The Daily Telegraph

"Raucous funk gems from the 1970s."
The Word

"Samy Ben Redjeb has struck black gold here."
Time Out*****

"One of the party albums of the year ... extraordinary
music that mostly never heard in the west."
The Guardian ****

"I can't think of a more invigorating way to start the
day than with this wriggling bag of jagged, ragged 70s
funk."
Songlines ****

"The rawest funk, roughest guitars and squawkingest
saxes."
Mojo ****

"The music lives up to the title: funky electric
guitars, honking saxophones and voodoo rhythms, with
strong influences from soul, highlife and Latin
music."
Evening Standard ****

"Astounding."
Kruger magazine

"Wonderfully eccentric arrangement and tuning ...
Browntastic."
The Wire

"Sterling work."
Observer Music Monthly

"Benin and Togo mixed highlife and nascent Afrobeat
into a psychedelic echo chamber."
Financial Times ****

"An exuberant blend of Cuban, Congolese and high-life
strains, streaked with slithery psychedelic guitar
fills."
The Independent (Independent Music supplement)

"When New York slicksters thought they were at the
centre of the universe - Studio 54, say – these bands
were taking the coolest parts of funk, soul and disco,
reinventing it and, at the same time, transforming
their own music and culture... A lot of the reaction
to West African blues has focused on origins and a
going-back-to-roots, but the groove in Benin and Togo
was far deeper and far more inventive than that."
BBC Music Online

"One funky freak-out of a history lesson."
Straight No Chaser

The Organiser

Like many others, I’ve been riveted by the Real Estate Tax Collectors’ strike and sit-in. How did these civil servants manage to launch such bold and sustained collective action over a period of months? And if indeed their grievances have been festering since 1974, why was it only now that they took action? Most puzzling of all is how they managed to garner sympathetic media coverage and drum up public support. After all, the Egyptian civil servant is not exactly a beloved figure. Who hasn’t had a bad experience with some obstructionist, misanthropic muwazzaf? (Yes, I’ve been stung a few times). The tax collector especially is richly reviled, perceived as a thief in official garb, extracting revenues for a state that has long ceased to provide protection and services. How is it that tax collectors all of a sudden became sympathetic figures with a just cause? With all of these questions and more, I went in search of an unusual tax collector, a lifelong political activist, and a very endearing man with a wicked sense of humor: the remarkable Kamal Abu Eita.


First I wanted to know how Abu Eita became a real estate tax collector, so we started at the beginning. Kamal Muhammad al-Rifa’i Abu Eita was born on March 1, 1953, one of eight children of a minaret-maker in Bulaq al-Dakrur who went on to establish a contracting business. Kamal enrolled at Cairo University in fall 1972, and like generations of Egyptians before and after him, received a first-rate political education at this storied institution. He became active in campus politics and was a founding member of the Nasserist Thought Club (Nadi al-Fikr al-Nasiri), the student initiative that midwifed the contemporary Nasserist movement. After college, Abu Eita joined the Tagammu’ party until the formation of the Nasserist party in 1992, which he joined but then left for the neo-Nasserist Karama movement in 1999.

Throughout his political career, Abu Eita combined partisan commitment with para-partisan advocacy on behalf of a wide range of causes, from peasants to prisoners of conscience to public sector workers. For his efforts, he has been imprisoned a whopping 19 times. “I’ve been a guest at all of Bulaq’s police stations and nearly all of the country’s prisons!” he chuckles. Especially significant for the December sit-in is Abu Eita’s capacity to enrich his organising with his politics while at the same time not imposing his politics on his fellow tax collectors.

Abu Eita’s unlikely career as a civil servant began immediately after college. Right after graduating in 1976 with a B.A. in philosophy, he applied for a teaching position with the Ministry of Education but was turned down for security reasons. He spent six months as a clerk in the Giza governorate and was then transferred to the Giza Traffic administration, but the office responsible for the security of the Israeli embassy was located there and Abu Eita was deemed a threat (!), so he was transferred back to the Giza governorate and stayed there until 1979, when a friend casually let him know that the Real Estate Tax Authority was hiring with decent salaries. So Abu Eita applied and became a tax official.

Next, the conversation turned to Abu Eita’s tenure in the Authority from 1979 to the present. In 1982, he was instrumental in establishing the first union for Real Estate Tax officials, but did not become a member for fear that his superiors would crush the fledgling experience. Four years later, when the initiative had gathered steam, Abu Eita ran for union elections and became vice president. He continued to contest union elections, winning the highest number of votes in every election and becoming president until 2006, when the government weighed in with all forms of administrative interference and intimidation to ensure pliant unions led by cooperative henchmen. As with the parliamentary elections, the labour and civil servants’ union elections in 2006 witnessed meddling at the vote-counting stage by poll workers, and Abu Eita lost. He now laughs when remembering this: “And I kept bringing them sandwiches and tea all day, those sons of bitches! But it’s ironic, losing the elections actually gave me freedom of manoeuvre to manage this strike.”

So how does one organize government clerks to coordinate a strike and sit-in, and why now? As usual with such collective action, there are important but forgotten precedents and equally important but also forgotten triggers. Abu Eita reminds that the precedent was set in March 1999, when property tax collectors gathered in Tahrir Square to demand benefit raises, then staged a sit-in in front of parliament and the office of the Minister of Finance. Their demands were met, though less than 10% of tax collectors participated in the sit-in. “The government agreed to our demands in 1999 because the economic reform and privatization programs were not as far along and the state’s fiscal crisis wasn’t as severe,” Abu Eita explains, arguing that today the government is more strapped than ever, rendering ministers extremely reluctant to concede to wage increases of the sort tax collectors are demanding.

If tax collectors had the 1999 precedent to go on, they were also prodded to action by a more proximate trigger. In 2005 as is well known, the government issued a new law attaching sanitation fees to the electricity bill and entrusting the Electricity Authority to collect the fees. What is less well known is that before the new law, property tax collectors were the ones tasked with collecting sanitation fees, earning a minuscule commission that was nevertheless important given their hardscrabble lives. Added to the persistent corruption and mismanagement of the municipal governments that supervise tax collectors, the new sanitation law was the last straw that galvanised the civil servants to action.

“First, my comrades and I talked to fellow collectors all over the country and found that they were all on our side, not allied with the administration as many were in 1999. When I suggested a one-day protest, they said, ‘Why only a day, why not a sit-in?’ So we tried a sit-in on 2 May, the day after Labour Day. Then we added more actions gradually. On 10 September, we gathered in front of the government complex in Giza for a full day and held up signs that read “My salary equals 2 kilos of meat,” and “My salary is worth one pair of shoes.” The Daqahliyya local picked up the thread and began their own sit-in. All the while, we were constantly sending letters to officials, with no response. In the meantime, collectors in 15 out of the 27 governorates were holding their own sit-ins, and a new motto began to emerge, “And we won’t collect!” Remember that the peak season for property tax collection is October, November, and December. Because of our action, the state lost 80% of its revenues from real estate this year.”

“On 21 October, we headed to the Ministry of Finance in Nasr City and called out to the Minister, “Come down from your ivory tower!” but of course he didn’t because he was busy in America. We then walked in a huge procession to the Cabinet building, but security prevented us from entering to negotiate. On 13 and 14 November, we held our sit-in at the Egyptian Trade Union Federation on Gala’ Street; they locked all the bathrooms and meeting rooms, leaving us only the pavement of the entrance. Then and there we decided to hold another sit-in but didn’t publicise the location until the last minute, and that was the Hussein Higazy sit-in that started on 3 December.” It was at that final sit-in where Abu Eita could be seen carried aloft on the shoulders of his colleagues, innovating catchy, eloquent slogans and waving the keys to the offices and file cabinets that he and his colleagues had abandoned in their walkout.

There was something about the December sit-in that captured the public imagination in a way that surpassed even the massive Mahalla strikes of December 2006 and September 2007. The reasons for this are complex and will not be fully apparent until some time has passed and we gain some distance to analyse, but there’s no doubt that the tax officials’ collective leadership and deft tactics succeeded in making the lowly tax collector a stand-in for the hardworking, downtrodden everyman and woman, ravaged by high prices and hovering on the brink of poverty. Significantly, the civil servants courted both regime figures and anonymous members of the public. Their slogans were careful to appeal to the president and invoke his sense of fairness and to praise the Interior Minister for the discipline of his forces. Their conduct of the sit-in respected the residents of Hussein Higazy Street and sought to minimise disruption to their lives (no bullhorns or slogans after 10 pm, for instance).

The residents were won over. Abu Eita recalls the details of their supportive acts. “They made their bathrooms available to the women and children in the sit-in; they removed the rugs from their living rooms and threw them down to us to cushion the freezing pavement; one resident sent his wife and children to his in-laws and offered up his apartment for the protestors to sleep in.” Opposition papers reported that street residents also refused to file complaints against the sit-in with the city government.

After 11 days of the sit-in, Finance Minister Youssef Boutros-Ghali, acting on orders from Hosni Mubarak, informed the collectors that their core demands for affiliation with the Ministry and wage parity with general tax collectors would be fulfilled; that they would receive bonuses equivalent to four months’ pay; and that no tax collector would be punished for participating in the sit-in. This agreement was finalised yesterday, the last day of the year.

So concludes this remarkable episode of the last quarter of 2007, the first time since 1924 that civil servants staged a work stoppage to ameliorate their conditions. As we usher in 2008, I can’t help wondering what comes next in Egypt’s extraordinary cycle of protest.


*Photos courtesy of Hamada Abu Ghali

http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/

Radioactive Ammunition Fired in Middle East May Claim More Lives Than Hiroshima and Nagasaki
by Sherwood Ross

By firing radioactive ammunition, the U.S., U.K., and Israel may have triggered a nuclear holocaust in the Middle East that, over time, will prove deadlier than the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan.

So much ammunition containing depleted uranium (DU) has been fired, asserts nuclear authority Leuren Moret, “The genetic future of the Iraqi people for the most part, is destroyed.”

“More than ten times the amount of radiation released during atmospheric testing (of nuclear bombs) has been released from depleted uranium weaponry since 1991,” Moret writes, including radioactive ammunition fired by Israeli troops in Palestine.

Moret is an independent U.S. scientist formerly employed for five years at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and also at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, both of California.

Adds Arthur Bernklau, of Veterans For Constitutional Law, “The long- term effect of DU is a virtual death sentence. Iraq is a toxic wasteland. Anyone who is there stands a good chance of coming down with cancer and leukemia. In Iraq, the birth rate of mutations is totally out of control.”

Moret, a Berkeley, Calif., Environmental Commissioner and past president of the Association for Women Geoscientists, says, “For every genetic defect that we can see now, in future generations there are thousands more that will be expressed.”

She adds, “the (Iraq) environment now is completely radioactive.”

Dr. Helen Caldicott, the prominent anti-nuclear crusader, has written: “Much of the DU is in cities such as Baghdad, where half the population of 5 million people are children who played in the burned- out tanks and on the sandy, dusty ground.”

“Children are 10 to 20 times more susceptible to the carcinogenic effects of radiation than adults,” Caldicott wrote. “My pediatric colleagues in Basra, where this ordnance was used in 1991, report a sevenfold increase in childhood cancer and a sevenfold increase in gross congenital abnormalities,” she wrote in her book, “Nuclear Power is not the Answer”(The New Press).

Caldicott goes on to say the two Gulf wars “have been nuclear wars because they have scattered nuclear material across the land, and people—particularly children— are condemned to die of malignancy and congenital disease essentially for eternity.”

Because of the extremely long half-life of uranium 238, one of the radioactive elements in the shells fired, “the food, the air, and the water in the cradle of civilization have been forever contaminated,” Caldicott explained.

Uranium is a heavy metal that enters the body via inhalation into the lung or via ingestion into the GI tract. It is excreted by the kidney, where, if the dose is high enough, it can induce renal failure or kidney cancer. It also lodges in the bones where it causes bone cancer and leukemia, and it is excreted in the semen, where it mutates genes in the sperm, leading to birth deformities.

Nuclear contamination is spreading around the world, Caldicott adds, with heaviest concentrations in regions within a 1,000-mile radius of Baghdad and Afghanistan.

These are, notably, northern India, southern Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tibet, Pakistan, Kuwait, the Gulf emirates, and Jordan.

“Downwind from the radioactive devastation in Iraq, Israel is also suffering from large increases in breast cancer, leukemia and childhood diabetes,” Moret asserts.

Doug Rokke, formerly the top U.S. Army DU clean-up officer and now anti-DU crusader, says Israeli tanks fired radioactive shells during the invasion of Lebanon last year. U.S. and NATO forces also used DU ammunition in Kosovo. Rokke says he is quite ill from the effects of DU and that members of his clean-up crew have died from it.

As a result of DU bombardments, Caldicott writes, “Severe birth defects have been reported in babies born to contaminated civilians in Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan and the incidence and severity of defects is increasing over time.”

Like symptoms have been reported among infants born to U.S. service personnel that fought in the Gulf Wars. One survey of 251 returned Gulf War veterans from Mississippi made by the Veterans Administration found 67% of children born to them suffered from “severe illnesses and deformities.”

Some were born without brains or vital organs or with no arms, hands, or arms, or with hands attached to their shoulders.

While U.S. officials deny DU ammunition is dangerous, it is a fact Gulf War veterans were the first Americans ever to fight on a radioactive battlefield, and their children apparently are the first known to display these ghastly deformities.

Soldiers who survived being hit by radioactive ammunition, as well as those who fired it, are falling ill, often showing signs of radiation sickness. Of the 700,000 U.S. veterans of the first Gulf War, more than 240,000 are on permanent medical disability and 11,000 are dead, published reports indicate.

This is an astonishing toll from such a short conflict in which fewer than 400 U.S. soldiers were killed on the battlefield.

Of course, “depleted uranium munitions were and remain another causative factor behind Gulf War Syndrome(GWS),” writes Francis Boyle, a leading American authority on international law in his book “Biowarfare and Terrorism,” from Clarity Press Inc.

“The Pentagon continues to deny that there is such a medical phenomenon categorized as GWS—even beyond the point where everyone knows that denial is pure propaganda and disinformation,” Boyle writes.

Boyle contends, “The Pentagon will never own up to the legal, economic, tortious, political, and criminal consequences of admitting the existence of GWS. So U.S. and U.K. veterans of Gulf War I as well as their afterborn children will continue to suffer and die. The same will prove true for U.S. and U.S. veterans of Bush Jr.’s Gulf War II as well as their afterborn children.”

Boyle said the use of DU is outlawed under the 1925 Geneva Convention prohibiting poison gas.

Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, writes in his “The Sorrows of Empire”(Henry Holt and Co.) that, given the abnormal clusters of childhood cancers and deformities in Iraq as well as Kosovo, the evidence points “toward a significant role for DU.”

By insisting on its use, Johnson adds, “the military is deliberately flouting a 1996 United Nations resolution that classifies DU ammunition as an illegal weapon of mass destruction.”

Moret calls DU “the Trojan Horse of nuclear war.” She describes it as “the weapon that keeps killing.” Indeed, the half-life of Uranium-238 is 4.5-billion years, and as it decays it spawns other deadly radioactive by-products.

Radioactive fallout from DU apparently blew far and wide. Following the initial U.S. bombardment of Iraq in 2003, DU particles traveled 2,400 miles to Great Britain in about a week, where atmospheric radiation quadrupled.

But it is in the Middle East, predominantly Iraq, where the bulk of the radioactive waste has been dumped.

In the early Nineties, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority warned that 50 tons of dust from DU explosions could claim a half million lives from cancer by year 2000. Not 50 tons, but an estimated two thousand radioactive tons have been fired off in the Middle East, suggesting the possibility over time of an even higher death toll.

Dr. Keith Baverstock, a World Health Organization radiation advisor, informed the media, Iraq’s arid climate would increase exposure from its tiny particles as they are blown about and inhaled by the civilian population for years to come.

The civilian death toll from the August, 1945, U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been put at 140,000 and 80,000, respectively. Over time, however, deaths from radiation sickness are thought to have claimed the lives of another 100,000 Japanese civilians.

Sherwood Ross is a Miami, Florida-based free-lance writer who covers military and political topics. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com. Ross has worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and several wire services and is a contributor to national magazines.

(Emphasis added - B.M.)

USA BIG BUSINESS REFUSE TO REDUCE THE GLOBAL WARMING CATASTROPHIC IMPACT AS THEY OPPOSE THE BALI AGREEMENT ON REDUCING THE POLLUTION OF OUR PLANET

by Benjamin Merhav

The following two current news items have been downloaded from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) website. This ABC has radio stations and a TV channel. It is financed and controlled by the Australian federal government. Therefore it is a conservative, pro-USA news organisation, like the Australian government itself. The new labour Rudd government is committed to continue the traditional Australian subservience to USA imperialism, even at the cost of catastrophic results for all life on our planet, especially to third world and poor countries which are already suffering horrendous loses of life and infra structure as a result.

However, even such subservience cannot avoid the inevitable disclosure of some facts to the public, as the following two news items show. The first one reveals some of the catastrophic consequences; the second one reveals a little about the USA government intransigence.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/12/13/2117667.htm

Global warming causing record disasters: report

Posted 3 hours 45 minutes ago

Sidr" height="192" width="285">

Disaster zone: A man perches on a dead cow in the aftermath of last month's cyclone in Bangladesh (AFP Photo: Jewel Samad)

• Audio: Arctic Ocean could be ice-free by 2013 (AM)
• Related Story: US stalling on short-term climate targets

The International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) says global warming caused a record number of natural disasters across the world in 2007, up nearly 20 per cent from a year earlier.

"As of 10 October 2007, the Federation had already recorded 410 disasters, 56 per cent of which were weather-related, which is consistent with the trend of rising numbers of climate change-related disasters," the IFRC said in its World Disasters Report.

In 2006, the IFRC recorded 427 natural disasters, a rise of 70 per cent in the two years since 2004.

Over the last 10 years, the number of natural disasters rose by 40 per cent from the previous decade, while the number of deaths caused by disasters doubled to 1.2 million people from 600,000, the report said.

The number of people on average affected by natural disasters each year rose to 270 million from 230 million over the same period.

"Better reporting of smaller disasters partially explains these increases. However, more severe disasters are also on the increase," the IFRC report said.

The report warned that vulnerable groups in society such as women, disabled people, the elderly and ethnic minorities face extra hardships when coping with natural disasters.

===================================

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/12/13/2117436.htm

US stalling on short-term climate targets

Posted 6 hours 31 minutes ago
Updated 4 hours 55 minutes ago

PNG PM Michael Somare" height="190" width="285">

No Plan B: Prime Minister Kevin Rudd at the Bali climate talks (AFP: Jewel Samad)

• Video: Rudd to visit E Timor after Bali Summit (ABC News)
• Audio: Yudhoyono slams US refusal to commit to emissions targets (AM)
• Audio: UN secretary general fears emissions targets too ambitious for US (AM)
• Related Story: Environment group welcomes PM's 'road map'
• Related Story: Wong urges cooperation, flexibility at climate summit
• Related Story: Rudd hints at US inaction on climate change
• Related Story: Global warming causing record disasters: report
• Related Link: UN Climate Change Conference

The United States is resisting efforts to include short-term targets in the final Bali declaration at the UN climate change conference.

The US is joined by Australia, Canada, and Japan in its opposition to signing up for global emission cuts of between 25 and 40 per cent by 2020.

Australia says it supports global emissions cuts, but is waiting on advice from economic research.

But US delegation spokeswoman Paula Dobriansky says a group of developed countries are considering removing a reference to interim cuts in the final declaration.

"We don't want to be prejudging outcomes here," she said.

"The very positive aspect about this is we are in discussions with other countries. In fact many countries have also registered the point of view that they don't want a pre-judgement made here."

Yesterday Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called for a Bali road map to launch the next round of the Kyoto agreement, and took a swipe at the US for its refusal to sign up to Kyoto.

In an address to the conference Mr Rudd said Australia agreed on the need for a "shared global emissions goal" and for developed countries to embrace a "further set of binding emissions targets".

He also took aim at the US for its refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

"There is no plan B, there is no other planet any of us can escape to," he said.

"We need all developed nations, those within the framework of the Kyoto Protocol and those outside, to embrace comparable efforts.

"We must now move forward as a truly united nations with developed and developing countries working in parallel."

Mr Rudd says the Federal Government will decide on its position when research it has commissioned from climate change expert Professor Ross Garnaut is released next June.

Meanwhile, in the United States, several Republican presidential candidates have supported efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions, during their final debate before next month's primary elections.

With three weeks to go before voting begins in the state of Iowa, hopefuls including Senator John McCain and former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani say climate change must be addressed.

Senator McCain says future generations will suffer if emissions cuts are not made.

"We can do it with technology, with caps and trade, with capitalist and free enterprise motivation," he said. "I'm confident that we can pass on to our children and grandchildren a cleaner and better world."

(Emphasis added- B.M.)

Scenes from a Sit-in

Since Monday, thousands of tax collectors from the Real Estate Tax Authority have made a downtown street their home. They've converged on Cairo from all over the country to stage a massive sit-in in front of the Cabinet building. Their demands: wage parity with their better-paid colleagues in the General Tax and Sales Tax Authorities, and transferring their affiliation from the corruption-ridden municipal governments to the Finance Ministry (a demand they've made since 1976). Real estate tax collectors in the provinces are refraining from all revenue collection until their demands are met.

al-Karama's talented Peter Alfred has kindly shared these photos of the strike and sit-in. Peter has beautifully captured the determination, the humour, and the solidarity of these humble public functionaries, their refusal to cave in to the entreaties and threats of amn al-dawla and various nervous official emissaries.



As with the second Mahalla strike in Ramadan, hundreds of women civil servants are out in full force, braving the cold winter air and shattering tired stereotypes; they're camping out day and night alongside their male co-workers. What do state feminists, "women's empowerment" do-gooders, and assorted ladies who lunch have to say about that? Oh that's right, nobody cares what they think.

Also out in full force is the indefatigable Kamal Abu Eita, citizen-activist extraordinaire. Like Kamal Khalil, Abu Eita is a fixture at nearly every street protest in Egypt in the past 10 years. But he does have a day job, and it is in fact as a tax collector for the Real Estate Tax Authority, so this protest hits very close to home. Abu Eita is a walking treasure trove of information and insight about this most unusual and most significant of public protests.

Why is it significant? Because it's probably the largest and most coordinated strike action by functionaries of the Egyptian state in modern times. Because it opens a fascinating window onto the mysterious workings of a mammoth bureaucracy. Because it has the potential to cripple the state's lifeline (no revenue, no state). And because it's part of a grand wave of social protest that has been sweeping the country for nearly a decade.

Stay tuned.

PROF. FRANCIS BOYLE : THE PENTAGON IS POISED TO RESUME OPEN AIR WEAPONS TESTING (OF BIOLOGICAL AND/OR CHEMICAL WEAPONS)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Boyle, Francis FBOYLE@law.uiuc.edu
Date: Dec 4, 2007 10:30 AM
Subject: FW: [biodefense] FW: Scoop Link: Pentagon Poised To Resume Open Air Weapons Testing
To: ben.merhav@gmail.com
Francis A. Boyle
Law Building504
E. Pennsylvania Ave.Champaign,
IL 61820 USA217-333-7954
(Voice)217-244-1478 (Fax)
(personal comments only)

EXCERPTS :

"...The Pentagon's annual report apparently calls for both the developmental and operational "field testing of (CBW) full systems," not just simulations.The Pentagon's report to Congress contains the following passage: "More than thirty years have passed since outdoor live-agent chemical tests were banned in the United States, and the last outdoor test with live chemical agent was performed, so much of the infra structure for the field testing of chemical detectors no longer exists or is seriously outdated. The currently budgeted improvements in the T&E infrastructurewill greatly enhance both the developmental and operational fieldtesting of full systems, with better simulated representation of threats and characterization of system response."

"T&E" is an acronym for testing and evaluation."Either the military has resumed open-air testing already or they are preparing to do so," said Francis Boyle, a University of Illinois Professor of International Law who authored the implementing legislation for the U.S. Biological Weapons Convention signed into law by President George Bush Sr. and who has tracked subsequent developments closely."

I am stunned by the nature of this development," Boyle said. "This is a major reversal of policy." The 1972 treaty against germ warfare, which the U.S. signed, forbids developing weapons that spread disease, such as anthrax, a pathogen that is regarded by the military as "ideal" for conducting germ warfare."The Pentagon is fully prepared to launch biological warfare by means of anthrax," Boyle charged. "All the equipment has been acquired and all the training conducted and most combat-ready members of U.S. armed forces have been given protective equipment and vaccines that allegedly would protect them from that agent."

Open-air testing takes research into deadly agents out of the laboratories in order to study their effectiveness, including their aerial dispersion patterns, and whether they actually infect and kill in field trials. Since the anthrax attacks on Congress in October, 2001,the Bush administration has funded a vast biological research expansion at hundreds of private and university laboratories in the U.S. and abroad involving anthrax and other deadly pathogens.The anthrax attacks killed five people, including two postal workers,injured 17 others and temporarily shut down the operations of the U.S.Congress, Supreme Court, and other Federal entities.

Although a Federal statute permits the president to authorize open-air testing of CBW agents, Boyle said this "does not solve the compliance problem that it might violate the international Chemical Weapons Convention and the Biological Weapons Convention as well as their related domestic implementing legislation making such violations crimes."Boyle charged the U.S. is already "in breach" of both conventions and also of U.S. domestic criminal law implementing them.

In February, 2003,for example, the U.S. granted itself a patent on an illegal, long-range biological-weapons grenade, evidently for offensive purposes.Boyle said the development of anthrax for possible offensive purposes is underscored by the government's efforts "to try to stockpile anthrax vaccines and antibiotics for 25-million plus Americans to protect the civilian population in the event there is any 'blowback' from the use of anthrax in biowarfare abroad by the Pentagon.""In theory," Boyle added, "you cannot wage biowarfare abroad unless you can protect your civilian population from either retaliation in kind, or blowback, or both." Under Project BioShield, Homeland Security is spending $5.6 billion to stockpile vaccines and drugs to fight anthrax,smallpox, and other bioterror agents. The project had been marked by delays and operational problems and on December 12th last year Congress passed legislation to pump another $1 billion into BioShield to fund three years of additional research by the private sector.

Boyle said evidence the U.S. has super-weapons-grade anthrax was demonstrated in the October, 2001, anthrax mail attacks on Senators Thomas Daschle(D-S.D.) and Patrick Leahy(D-Vt.) The strain of highly sophisticated anthrax employed has allegedly been traced back to the primary U.S. Army biological warfare campus at Ft. Detrick, Md. The attacks killed five persons and sickened 17 others. A current effort to expand Ft. Detrick has sparked widespread community opposition,according to a report in the Baltimore Sun."Obviously, someone working for the United States government has a stockpile of super-weapons grade anthrax that can be used again domestically for the purposes of political terrorism or abroad to wage offensive warfare," Boyle said.

The Associated Press has reported the U.S. Army is replacing its Military Institute of Infectious Diseases at Ft. Detrick "with a new laboratory that would be a component of a biodefense campus operated by several agencies." The Army told AP the laboratory is intended to continue research solely for defense against biological threats.Undercutting the argument U.S. research is for "defensive" purposes is the fact government scientists have been creating new strains of pathogens for which there is no known cure. Richard Novick, a professor of microbiology at New York University, has stated, "I cannot envision any imaginable justification for changing the antigenicity of anthrax as a defensive measure." Changing a pathogen's antigenicity means altering its basic structure so that existing vaccines will prove ineffective against it.Biological warfare involves the use of living organisms for military purposes. Such weapons can be viral, bacterial, and fungal, among other forms, and can be spread over a large geographic terrain by wind, water,insect, animal, or human transmission, according to Jeremy Rifkin,author of "The Biotech Century"(Penguin).

Boyle said the Federal government has been plowing money into upgrading Ft. Detrick, Md., and other CBW facilities where such pathogens are studied, developed, tested, and stored. By some estimates, the U.S.since 2002 has invested some $43 billion in hundreds of government,commercial, and university laboratories in the U.S. for the study of pathogens that might be used for biological warfare.According to Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright,more than 300 scientific institutions and 12,000 individuals have access to pathogens suitable for biowarfare and terrorism. Ebright found that the Number of National Institute of Health grants to research infectious diseases with biowarfare potential shot up from 33 in the 1995-2000period to 497 by 2006.Ebright has stated the government's ten fold expansion of Biosafety Level-4 laboratories, such as those at FortDetrick, raises the risk of accidents and the diversion of dangerous organisms. "If a worker in one of these facilities removes a single viral particle or a single cell, which cannot be detected or prevented,that single particle or cell can form the basis of an outbreak."During the Cold War era, notably in the Fifties and Sixties, various Government agencies engaged in open-air CBW testing on U.S. soil and on naval vessels at sea to study the effects of weaponized pathogens. U.S. cities, including New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, were among the targets and sickness and even a number of deaths were reported as a result.

According to an article titled "Lethal Breeze" by Lee Davidson in the Deseret News of Salt Lake City of June 5, 1994, "In decades of secret chemical arms tests, the Army released into Utah winds more than a half million pounds of deadly nerve agents." Among them, he said, was VX, a pinhead-sized drop of which can be lethal. The tests were conducted at Dugway Proving Ground but Davidson said the evidence suggests "some(agents) may have escaped with the wind."Pentagon documents obtained by the News listed 1,635 field trials or demonstrations with nerve agents VX, GA and GB between 1951 and 1969,"when the Army discontinued use of actual nerve agents in open-air tests after escaped nerve gas apparently killed 6,000 sheep in Skull Valley,"Davidson wrote. The Skull Valley strike also sickened a rancher and members of his family.Boyle has previously charged the Pentagon with "gearing up to fight and 'win' biological warfare" pursuant to two Bush national strategy directives adopted in 2002 "without public knowledge and review." He contends the Pentagon's Chemical and Biological Defense program was revised in 2003 to implement those directives, endorsing "first-use"strike of chemical and biological weapons in war.

The implementing legislation Boyle wrote that was enacted unanimously by Congress was known as the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989.Boyle has written extensively on the subject. Among his published works are "Biowarfare and Terrorism" and "Destroying World Order: U.S. Imperialism In the Middle East Before and After September 11th," both from Clarity Press."

(Emphasis added - B.M.)

Francis Boyle: Our Nuremberg Moment

http://dennisloo.blogspot.com/2007/12/francis-boyle-our-nuremberg-moment.html


Law and Resistance:The Republic in Crisis and the People's Response

Speech by Professor Francis A. Boyle ,University of Illinois College of Law

Tuesday, November 20, 2007 - 6 p.m.

Northwestern University School of Law Lincoln Auditorium 357 E. Chicago Avenue

Sent by Francis Boyle - Nov 21, 2007 Chicago, Ill.

Sponsored by: National Lawyers Guild, Northwestern University Student Law School and Chicago Chapter of the NLG



Since the impeachable installation of George Bush Jr. as President by the U.S. Supreme Court's Gang of Five, the people of the world have witnessed a government in the United States that has demonstrated little if any respect for fundamental considerations of international law, human rights, or the United States Constitution.



Instead, the world has watched a comprehensive and malicious assault upon the integrity of the international and domestic legal orders by a group of men and women who are thoroughly Machiavellian and Straussian in their perception of international relations and in their conduct of both foreign affairs and American domestic policy.



Even more seriously, in many instances specific components of the Bush Jr. administration's foreign policy constitute ongoing criminal activity under well recognized principles of both international law and United States domestic law, and in particular the Nuremberg Charter, the Nuremberg Judgment, and the Nuremberg Principles, as well as the Pentagon's own U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 on The Law of Land Warfare, which applies to President Bush Jr. himself as Commander-in-Chief of United States Armed Forces under Article II, Section 2 of the United States Constitution.

Depending on the substantive issues involved, these international and domestic crimes typically include but are not limited to the Nuremberg offences of “crimes against peace”-- so far Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and perhaps their longstanding threatened war of aggression against Iran. Their criminal responsibility also concerns “crimes against humanity” and war crimes as well as grave breaches of the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the 1907 Hague Regulations on land warfare: torture at Guantanamo, Bhagram, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere; enforced disappearances, assassinations, murders, kidnappings, extraordinary renditions, “shock and awe,” depleted uranium, white phosphorous, cluster bombs, Fallujah, etc. Furthermore, various members of the Bush Jr. administration have committed numerous inchoate crimes incidental to these substantive offences that under the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles as well as U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 (1956) are international crimes in their own right: planning, and preparation, which they are currently doing today against Iran; solicitation, incitement, conspiracy, complicity, attempt, aiding and abetting.

Of course the terrible irony of today's situation is that six decades ago at Nuremberg the U.S. government participated in the prosecution, punishment and execution of Nazi government officials for committing some of the same types of heinous international crimes that the Neo-Conservative Straussian members of the Bush Jr. administration currently inflict upon people all over the world. To be sure, I personally oppose the imposition of capital punishment upon any human being for any reason no matter how monstrous their crimes, whether they be Bush Jr., Tony Blair, or Saddam Hussein.

According to basic principles of international criminal law set forth in paragraph 501 of U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10, all high level civilian officials and military officers in the U.S. government who either knew or should have known that soldiers or civilians under their control (such as the C.I.A. or mercenary contractors) committed or were about to commit international crimes and failed to take the measures necessary to stop them, or to punish them, or both, are likewise personally responsible for the commission of international crimes. This category of officialdom who actually knew or should have known of the commission of these international crimes under their jurisdiction and failed to do anything about them include at the very top of America's criminal chain-of-command President Bush Jr. and Vice-President Cheney; former U.S. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld; Secretary of State Rice; Director of National Intelligence Negroponte, who was previously in charge of the contra terror war against the people of Nicaragua that murdered 35, 000 civilians; National Security Advisor Hadley; his Deputy Elliot Abrams, who was also criminally responsible for murdering 35,000 people in Nicaragua; former U.S. Attorney General Gonzales, criminally responsible for the torture campaign launched by the Bush Jr. administration; and the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staffs along with the appropriate Regional Commanders-in-Chiefs, especially for Central Command CENTCOM).

These U.S. government officials and their immediate subordinates are responsible for the commission of crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and war crimes as specified by the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles as well as by U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 of 1956. Today in international legal terms, the Bush Jr. administration itself should now be viewed as constituting an ongoing criminal conspiracy under international criminal law in violation of the Nuremberg Charter, the Nuremberg Judgment, and the Nuremberg Principles, because of its formulation and undertaking of serial wars of aggression, crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and war crimes that are legally akin to those perpetrated by the former Nazi regime in Germany. As a consequence, American citizens possess the basic right under international law and the United States domestic law, including the U.S. Constitution, to engage in acts of civil resistance designed to prevent, impede, thwart, or terminate ongoing criminal activities perpetrated by Bush Jr. administration officials in their conduct of foreign affairs policies and military operations purported to relate to defense and counter-terrorism.

For that very reason, large numbers of American citizens have decided to act on their own cognizance by means of civil resistance in order to demand that the Bush Jr. administration adhere to basic principles of international law, of U.S. domestic law, and of our own Constitution in its conduct of foreign affairs and military operations. Mistakenly, however, such actions have been defined to constitute classic instances of "civil disobedience" as historically practiced in the United States. And the conventional status quo admonition by the U.S. power elite and its sycophantic news media for those who knowingly engage in “civil disobedience” has always been that they must meekly accept their punishment for having performed a prima facie breach of the positive laws as a demonstration of their good faith and moral commitment.

Nothing could be further from the truth!

Today's civil resisters are the sheriffs! The Bush Jr. administration officials are the outlaws!

Here I would like to suggest a different way of thinking about civil resistance activities that are specifically designed to thwart, prevent, or impede ongoing criminal activity by members of the Bush Jr. administration under well-recognized principles of international and U.S. domestic law. Such civil resistance activities represent the last constitutional avenue open to the American people to preserve their democratic form of government with its historical commitment to the rule of law and human rights.

Civil resistance is the last hope America has to prevent the Bush Jr. administration from moving even farther down the path of lawless violence in Southwest Asia, military interventionism in Latin America and Africa, and nuclear confrontation with Iran, North Korea, Russia, and China.

Such measures of "civil resistance" must not be confused with, and indeed must be carefully distinguished from, acts of "civil disobedience" as traditionally defined. In today's civil resistance cases, what we witness are U.S. citizens attempting to prevent the ongoing commission of international and domestic crimes under well-recognized principles of international law and U.S. domestic law. This is a phenomenon essentially different from the classic civil disobedience cases of the 1950s and 1960s where incredibly courageous African Americans and their supporters were conscientiously violating domestic laws for the express purpose of changing them.

By contrast, today's civil resisters are acting for the express purpose of upholding the rule of law, the U.S. Constitution, human rights, and international law.

Applying the term “civil disobedience” to such civil resistors mistakenly presumes their guilt and thus perversely exonerates the Bush Jr. administration criminals.Civil resistors disobeyed nothing, but to the contrary obeyed international law and the United States Constitution.

By contrast, Bush Jr. administration officials disobeyed fundamental principles of international law as well as U.S. criminal law and thus committed international crimes and U.S. domestic crimes as well as impeachable violations of the United States Constitution. The civil resistors are the sheriffs enforcing international law, U.S. criminal law and the U.S. Constitution against the criminals working for the Bush Jr. administration!

Today the American people must reaffirm our commitment to the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles by holding our government officials fully accountable under international law and U.S. domestic law for the commission of such grievous international and domestic crimes. We must not permit any aspect of our foreign affairs and defense policies to be conducted by acknowledged “war criminals” according to the U.S. government's own official definition of that term as set forth in U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 (1956), the U.S. War Crimes Act, and the Geneva Conventions.

The American people must insist upon the impeachment, dismissal, resignation, indictment, conviction, and long-term incarceration of all U.S. government officials guilty of such heinous international and domestic crimes. That is precisely what American civil resisters are doing today!

This same right of civil resistance extends pari passu to all citizens of the world community of states. Everyone around the world has both the right and the duty under international law to resist ongoing criminal activities perpetrated by the Bush Jr. administration and its nefarious foreign accomplices in allied governments such as in Britain, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Georgia, etc.

If not so restrained, the Bush Jr. administration could very well precipitate a Third World War. In this regard, during the course of an October 17, 2007 press conference, President Bush Jr. terrorized the entire world with the threat of World War III if he could not work his illegal will upon Iran. Then Russian President Vladimir Putin responded in kind by likewise terrorizing the entire world with the prospect of yet another Cuban Missile Crisis if he did not get his way on the needlessly provocative anti-ballistic missile systems that the Bush Jr. administration plans to locate in Poland and the Czech Republic.

The publicly threatened U.S./Israeli attack upon Iran could readily set off a chain of events that would culminate in World War III, and could easily go nuclear. It is my opinion that the Bush Jr. administration would welcome the outbreak of a Third World War, and in any event is fully prepared to use tactical nuclear weapons against Muslim and Arab states and peoples.

After September 11, 2001 the United States of America has vilified and demonized Muslims and Arabs almost to the same extent that America inflicted upon the Japanese and Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor. As the Nazis had previously demonstrated with respect to the Jews, a government must first dehumanize and scapegoat a race of people before its citizens will tolerate if not approve their elimination: Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In post-9/11 America we are directly confronted with the prospect of a nuclear war of extermination conducted by our White Racist Judeo-Christian Power Elite against People of Color in the Muslim and Arab worlds in order to steal their oil and gas. The Crusades all over again. But this time nuclear Armageddon stares all of humankind right in the face!

We American lawyers must be inspired by the stunning example set by those heroic Pakistani lawyers now leading the struggle against the brutal Bush-supported Musharraf military dictatorship. We American lawyers must now lead the fight against the Bush Jr. dictatorship! This is our Nuremberg Moment!Thank you. B) Copyright 2007 by Francis A. Boyle. All Rights reserved.***

[Francis Boyle is professor of law at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. A Harvard law graduate, for the last twenty years he has been involved as lawyer and/or witness in the major cases challenging U.S. defense policy, notably nuclear issues and, in recent years, preemptive wars. He speaks and writes regularly on civil resistance and anti-war issues. Most recently he helped to defend Camilo Mejia, the first military resister to the current Iraq War.]



(Emphasis added - B.M.)

I've been burning to post these past couple of weeks, but the secretary who usually transcribes my words (from my state-of-the-art personal voice recording device to the computer) has been on strike, along with the rest of the support staff at the firm. It's been a frustrating situation, for sure. It's long been our practice at the firm to pay secretaries only for the time they spend performing certain tasks for us: answering the phone, making photocopies, sharpening our pencils, cutting our meat. As a matter of philosophy, we've felt it unnecessary to pay them for being idle, when they can be sitting at their desks doing other income-producing work if they like. (One secretary, for instance, earns almost $400 a year selling magazine subscriptions to recruiting candidates she pressures into buying while they wait for her boss to be ready for their interviews.) So, just like attorneys, they're required to clock every minute of their time, and we determine, at the end of every two-week period, how much time they've spent on productive work, and therefore how much they should get paid.

And now they've gotten greedy.

We've always maintained, as a matter of philosophy, that we can only pay for the kind of work that we're absolutely certain provides value, because otherwise there is room left for abuse. The secretaries are insisting that we pay them for the time they spend on the Internet. And since we're not yet able to distinguish productive Internet time from wasteful and unproductive Internet time, we've maintained that time spent on the computer counts as unproductive time and we will not pay for it. Three weeks ago, they decided they cared enough about this issue that they all banded together and struck. In response, we assigned our associates to do double duty, and have dug in our heels. We can afford a long strike more than they can, and, as a matter of philosophy, we refuse to cave in to their ridiculous demands.

After all, who hasn't passed by a secretary and seen her on MySpace? Or playing solitaire? Or online shopping? Why should we pay them for that? They can be using eBay to sell their possessions, or Craigslist to make extra money on the side for what the young people are calling "casual encounters." It's not our duty to double-pay them. Just like we can't double-bill our clients except in certain circumstances.

As more and more of them lose their homes, I feel confident they will come to their senses and return to work. In the meantime, although it's a strain on our associates, they're certainly paid well enough to handle it, and it's not like us partners aren't feeling the strain as well. Many of us have started working part of the day from home, putting our spouses to work as support staff. Of course, many of our spouses are less than entirely competent. So we're definitely feeling the brunt of this. When the Internet is proven to actually add value to the business process, perhaps we will consider paying the secretaries for their time spent using it, if we're feeling generous and can make up for it by trimming their health insurance benefits. But for now, we fight the good fight, and hope for a just and proper outcome.