Aspartame: Sweet Misery A Poisoned World

This is the movie that Pepsi and Coca Cola (and especially Donald Rumsfeld, along with G.D. Searle) don't want you to see.

Henry Louis Gates: Déjà Vu All Over Again - Stanley Fish

I’m Skip Gates’s friend, too. That’s probably the only thing I share with President Obama, so when he ended his press conference last Wednesday by answering a question about Gates’s arrest after he was seen trying to get into his own house, my ears perked up.

As the story unfolded in the press and on the Internet, I flashed back 20 years or so to the time when Gates arrived in Durham, N.C., to take up the position I had offered him in my capacity as chairman of the English department of Duke University. One of the first things Gates did was buy the grandest house in town (owned previously by a movie director) and renovate it. During the renovation workers would often take Gates for a servant and ask to be pointed to the house’s owner. The drivers of delivery trucks made the same mistake.

The message was unmistakable: What was a black man doing living in a place like this?

At the university (which in a past not distant at all did not admit African-Americans ), Gates’s reception was in some ways no different. Doubts were expressed in letters written by senior professors about his scholarly credentials, which were vastly superior to those of his detractors. (He was already a recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the so called “genius award.”) There were wild speculations (again in print) about his salary, which in fact was quite respectable but not inordinate; when a list of the highest-paid members of the Duke faculty was published, he was nowhere on it.

The unkindest cut of all was delivered by some members of the black faculty who had made their peace with Duke traditions and did not want an over-visible newcomer and upstart to trouble waters that had long been still. (The great historian John Hope Franklin was an exception.) When an offer came from Harvard, there wasn’t much I could do. Gates accepted it, and when he left he was pursued by false reports about his tenure at what he had come to call “the plantation.” (I became aware of his feelings when he and I and his father watched the N.C.A.A. championship game between Duke and U.N.L.V. at my house; they were rooting for U.N.L.V.)

Now, in 2009, it’s a version of the same story. Gates is once again regarded with suspicion because, as the cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson put it in an interview, he has committed the crime of being H.W.B., Housed While Black.

He isn’t the only one thought to be guilty of that crime. TV commentators, laboring to explain the unusual candor and vigor of Obama’s initial comments on the Gates incident, speculated that he had probably been the victim of racial profiling himself. Speculation was unnecessary, for they didn’t have to look any further than the story they were reporting in another segment, the story of the “birthers” — the “wing-nuts,” in Chris Matthews’s phrase — who insist that Obama was born in Kenya and cite as “proof” his failure to come up with an authenticated birth certificate. For several nights running, Matthews displayed a copy of the birth certificate and asked, What do you guys want? How can you keep saying these things in the face of all evidence?

He missed the point. No evidence would be sufficient, just as no evidence would have convinced some of my Duke colleagues that Gates was anything but a charlatan and a fraud. It isn’t the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate that’s the problem for the birthers. The problem is again the legitimacy of a black man living in a big house, especially when it’s the White House. Just as some in Durham and Cambridge couldn’t believe that Gates belonged in the neighborhood, so does a vocal minority find it hard to believe that an African-American could possibly be the real president of the United States.

Gates and Obama are not only friends; they are in the same position, suspected of occupying a majestic residence under false pretenses. And Obama is a double offender. Not only is he guilty of being Housed While Black; he is the first in American history guilty of being P.W.B., President While Black.

Source URL

What could I possibly have to say about this debacle?

Just this...if this person was indeed a neighbor...HOW DID SHE NOT KNOW THAT HENRY LOUIS GATES WAS A RESIDENT AT THAT LOCATION? Did he have a secret entrance that he used every other time but this once?

In all of the verbiage committed, I have NOT heard a single individual address this very cogent question.

In other news...I'm still trying to figure out why a seven-year, multi-million dollar investigation has turned into a witch-hunt for some Jersey politicians who accepted pittances mere weeks ago? Subverted Nation has a great posting on the matter.

Cruel But Necessary: Opinions In Jerusalem About The Settlements And Obama

With all the current rhetoric out of Washington regarding an Israeli settlement freeze in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, we wanted to gauge public opinion on the streets of Jerusalem on a sunny, Sunday afternoon last weekend. What we found was shocking but unsurprising. By Joseph Dana (www.josephdana.com) and Antony Loewenstein (www.antonyloewenstein.com).

More Fun And Quotations From Travis Kelly

"Our overseas bases now cost us over $100 billion yearly. Since the DOD sops up over half of the disposable resources of the government, Obama must get control of it. His task will be difficult because the DOD and what President Eisenhower called the "military industrial complex" have cleverly portioned out the work and procurement on the program to virtually every congressional district. Congress will opt for the program even if it bankrupts America."

— William Polk

“They’ve got us hostage, man! The irony is that we have established a reverse economic Darwinism, where we ensure the survival of the fattest, not the fittest, the biggest, not the best.”

— James Brock

“Goldman Sachs made $3.44 billion in profit this past quarter, while the U.S deficit topped $1 trillion for the first time in the nation’s history. Since most of the increase in the federal deficit is due to bailing out the banks and salvaging the greater economy they helped destroy, why is the top investment bank doing so well? Because that was the plan, as devised by [Paulson], a former CEO of Goldman Sachs.”

— Robert Scheer

“He had a $700 million conflict of interest and everything that he did while he was Treasury Secretary, every single thing that he did, has one explanation – what’s good for Hank Paulson?”
— Rep. Alan Grayson

"That's how audacious these assholes are. At least with other banks, you could say that they were just dumb — they believed what they were selling, and it blew them up. Goldman knew what it was doing."

— anonymous hedgefund manager

"Only buy used, only use cash or bank debit cards, or only buy from local merchants. They can only steal from us if we enable them."

— Cindy Sheehan

"You are a den of vipers. I intend to rout you out, and by the Eternal God I will rout you out. If the people only understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system, there would be a revolution before morning."

— Andrew Jackson

"The ignorance in America is overwhelming... The concentration of power in America is frightening."
— Otto von Habsburg


"Three out of four of the big health care firms lobbying on Capitol Hill have former members of Congress or government staff members on the payroll - more than 350 of them - and they're all fighting hard to prevent a public option, at a rate in excess of $1.4 million a day.

That's how it works. And it works that way because we let it. The game goes on and the insiders keep dealing themselves winning hands. Nothing will change - nothing - until the moneylenders are tossed out of the temple, the ATM's are wrested from the marble halls, and we tear down the sign they've placed on government - the one that reads, 'For Sale.' "

--Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

"The conviction that the economy must be autonomous, that it must be shielded from 'influences' of a moral character, has led man to abuse the economic process in a thoroughly destructive way. In the long term, these convictions have led to economic, social and political systems that trample upon personal and social freedom, and are therefore unable to deliver the justice that they promise."
— Pope Benedict in recent encyclical

"Although our civilization has been built on humanistic ideals, in this new age of 'free markets', everything-- science, commerce, agriculture and even seeds-- have become weapons in the hands of a few global corporation barons and their political fellow travelers. To achieve world domination, they no longer rely on bayonet-wielding soldiers. All they need is to control food production."

— Dr. Arpad Pusztai, biochemist

"I was expecting a thank you, all I got back in return was a hostile response. Some of the Madoff investors said I was behaving unprofessionally and was bad-mouthing a competitor. Oh, they were nasty. Nasty! They said the publications were jealous of Bernie. They were being anti-Semitic. People called me an anti-Semite. I'm not only a Jew, I live in Israel."
— Laura Goldman, who tried to warn Palm Beach Country Club investors about Madoff

"Secrecy protects the American people from grisly facts at variance with their self-image."

— journalist Taylor Branch

"The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it."
— Albert Einstein


Travis Kelly Graphics
http://www.tkellygraphics.com

Editorial & History Cartoons
http://www.traviskelly.com

CafePress:
Cartoons on T-Shirts, Posters, Calendars, Mugs and more
http://www.cafepress.com/traviskelly

Travis...as always, your work is golden.

N.J. Politicians, Rabbis Arrested In Federal Money Laundering Sweep - The Star-Ledger

Posted by cdelacru July 23, 2009 07:43AM

NEWARK -- Federal authorities arrested dozens of people today in New York and New Jersey as part of a money laundering and corruption sweep. Those arrested included several New Jersey public officials and rabbis.

The suspects are scheduled to appear in U.S. District Court in Newark later today. Those arrested include Assembly Daniel Van Pelt (R-Ocean), Hoboken Mayor Peter Cammarano, Secaucus Mayor Dennis Elwell and Jersey City Deputy Mayor Leona Beldini, and Jersey City Council President Mariano Vega.
Reena Rose Sibayan/The Jersey JournalPeter J. Cammarano is sworn in as Hoboken's 37th mayor by United States District Court Judge Katharine S. Hayden, Wednesday, July 1. He is joined by his wife, Marita and daughter, Abigail.

Nearly 20 people, including Cammarano, Elwell, and Vega, have already been led into the FBI building in Newark to face the charges.
Town of Secaucus Municipal websiteDennis Elwell

Elwell, 64, and his council slate recently won victory in their contested Democratic June primary contests. Elwell garnered 56 percent of the vote in his contest against town attorney Peter Weiner.

The Drug Czar's High Math - How Phony Statistics About Cocaine Prices Hide The Truth About The War On Drugs - Reason Magazine

http://www.reason.com
http://www.reason.com/news/show/134481.html
Reason Magazine
The Drug Czar's High Math
How phony statistics about cocaine prices hide the truth about the war on drugs

Ryan Grim | August/September 2009 Print Edition

John Walters had some data he wanted to make public, but he also had a credibility problem. Just two years earlier, in 2005, Walters, the country’s drug czar, had cited a hike in the price of cocaine as a battlefield victory in the war on drugs—only to see the price fall just as he was touting the increase. He was ridiculed in some quarters of the press; others decided to stop listening to him.

This time around, in the summer of 2007, Walters went looking for the most receptive audience he could find. So he zipped down New York Avenue to the headquarters of The Washington Times, the conservative daily based in the outskirts of Washington, D.C. Walters, according to a staffer present at the briefing, came with a small staff and a stack of glossy pages making the case that the United States had turned a corner in the war on drugs. Prices for cocaine, he said, were rising fast. And that, he explained, can only mean a decline in supply.

The Times wouldn’t bite. The data were suspiciously thin. Walters’ numbers showing the increased price of cocaine began in 2007. The best comparison data, which he didn’t have with him but could be found online, dated back to the first half of 2003, when the RAND Corporation gathered information for a comprehensive report. The drug czar had sat on the RAND report for a full year after it was completed in 2004 because it showed prices trending downward. The RAND study was also transparent about its methodology, whereas the new numbers Walters was touting, covering the period afterward, came with no explanation of how they were concocted.

Walters finally found a platform one month later in USA Today. Soon the story The Washington Times wouldn’t touch was all over the news. Thanks to the drug czar’s cherry-picked statistics, newspapers were crowing that America was winning the war on cocaine, particularly the effort to suppress production in Latin America.

While Walters was shopping his numbers around, I was in the middle of researching my book on the history of drug trends, This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America. So I filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get whatever data Walters had left out of his presentation. I also asked for information on the methodology and analysis. My request was rejected, even though some of what I was asking for had already been given to Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), who had repeatedly asked for the data. The Department of Justice, where the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is located, explained in denying my request that there was no “public benefit” to disclosing what I had asked for.

Fortunately, the Obama administration disagreed. When Edward Jurith became acting director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) in January, he quietly released the report that Walters had been keeping to himself, posting it on the ONDCP’s website. John Walsh of the left-leaning Washington Office on Latin America first wrote about the new numbers in April, nearly a year after the report was finished. It turns out there was indeed no “benefit” to releasing the information—for Walters, that is.

Rather than an “unprecedented” spike in cocaine prices, the underlying data that Walters had derived his claims from showed that 2007 featured the lowest cocaine prices on record, down 6.6 percent from 2006. Yes, the price bumped up in the middle of the year, but in his victory lap across the media the drug czar neglected to mention that the bump followed a quarter in which cocaine had reached its lowest price level since the government began keeping track in 1981. The “spike” still left cocaine costing $136.93 a gram in September 2007, 13 percent cheaper in constant dollars than the average price for 1999. This was hardly the resounding victory Walters had declared.

The numbers in Walters’ Washington Times handouts were just that: numbers. No explanation, no methodology, no context. In fact, the underlying data came from the System To Retrieve Information from Drug Evidence (STRIDE), derived from undercover buys, wiretaps, and other law enforcement sources of information about the drug trade. The Institute for Defense Analyses, a nonprofit research firm that contracts with the U.S. government, analyzed the data using the same methodology as the RAND researchers and produced the report that the Obama administration released. The STRIDE evidence showed a 26 percent spike in cocaine prices in the middle of 2007. Walters, who never disclosed his own methodology, had claimed the spike was 44 percent.

The newly released numbers and Walters’ data overlapped for 10 quarters. For three of the quarters, the new analysis showed the price of cocaine going in the direction opposite from what Walters’ numbers claimed. It’s one thing to quarrel over the size of a spike. It’s quite another to be wrong on the direction of a trend.

The Dollar Effect

It’s far from clear what caused the brief price hike in 2007. Walters unsurprisingly credited enforcement and interdiction efforts. But it’s unlikely the ONDCP and DEA really had the cocaine cartels in retreat. The more plausible explanation is that cocaine producers were targeting more lucrative markets. The rise of the euro and the concomitant decline of the dollar have made it less profitable to sell cocaine to Americans.

“The euro has replaced the dollar in the Western Hemisphere as the currency of choice among these traffickers, which is an extraordinary shift,” Karen Tandy, head of the DEA, told an antinarcotics conference in Spain in April 2007. “As cocaine use has declined in the U.S. dramatically, in the European market it has risen.”

Officials at the Spain conference said a kilogram of coke that would fetch $30,000 in the United States was worth $50,000 in Europe—and the dollar has fallen further against the euro since then. On April 1, 2007, a dollar was worth about 0.74 euro; a year later, it was worth only 0.63 euro; it’s now at about 0.7. Because of this price differential, it is theoretically profitable to smuggle cocaine out of the United States. Buried in its 2009 National Drug Threat Assessment, the Department of Justice cited the currency exchange rate as one possible explanation for decreased imports. The “declining value of the U.S. dollar provides a financial incentive for drug traffickers to sell cocaine in foreign markets where the wholesale price of cocaine is already much higher than in the United States,” the report said.

Size matters too. The euro is denominated in notes of 200 and 500, making transportation of large sums of money much easier, given that the biggest American note is worth only about 70 euros. When you’re moving hundreds of millions of dollars, that represents a real convenience. Donald Semesky, the DEA’s chief of financial operations, has noted that 90 percent of the €1.7 billion that was registered as having entered the United States in 2005 came through Latin America, “where drug cartels launder their European proceeds.” As the cocaine market has shifted, use along its new
trade routes has grown. A 2008 United Nations report notes increases in use not only in South and Central America but also in Africa, where seizures jumped tenfold from 2003 to 2006 and then doubled again between 2006 and 2007.

West African nations, which make Colombia and Mexico look like models of transparent governance, have become important stopping-off points for coke traffickers on the way to Europe. Out-of-work African youth make cheap foot soldiers, and drug runners with expensive equipment and weaponry have little to fear from airports that are barely electrified and cop cars with empty gas tanks. “Africa is under attack,” warned Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, in a 2008 Washington Post op-ed piece. “States that we seldom hear about, such as Guinea-Bissau and neighboring Guinea, are at risk of being captured by drug cartels in collusion with corrupt forces in government and the military.” From West Africa, the cocaine heads to Spain and Portugal. In 2006, according to the U.N., Spain’s level of coke use was equivalent to America’s for the first time ever.

From the drug cartels’ perspective, the beauty of shifting exports to Europe is that the resulting decline in shipments to the United States can indeed lead to higher prices here. While expanding their business elsewhere, the cartels are getting more money per unit of American product.

So when Walters claimed we were winning the war on cocaine, he was knowingly manipulating the truth. That shouldn’t be a surprise. Walters’ deceptions were just the latest in a long history of propaganda and misbegotten federal policies in which drug enforcement marginally affected the supply of a given substance, prompting drug warriors to declare victory as Americans kept consuming narcotics.

How the War on Pot Hooked the Country on Cocaine

“We’re making no excuses for drugs, hard, soft, or otherwise,” President Ronald Reagan declared on June 24, 1982. Reagan redoubled efforts at curbing drug imports, militarizing drug policy, and successfully pushing mandatory minimum sentences for minor drug offenses. In 1980 the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Report listed fewer than 100,000 arrests for heroin and cocaine, which were tabulated together. By 1989 that figure had jumped to more than 700,000.

But the first battle Reagan would fight in his war was against marijuana. That required laying siege to Northern California, a drug war battleground that until then had largely been ignored. The Campaign Against Marijuana Production began in the harvest season of 1983. U-2 spy planes and military helicopters flew over the Golden State looking for green crops. The DEA reported seizing 64,579 plants that year. Federal law enforcement officers marched in the streets chanting, “War on Drugs! War on Drugs!” The opposition printed bumper stickers: “U.S. Out of Humboldt County.”

The federal haul in Northern California was three times larger in 1984 than the year before. Nationally, pot plant seizures rose from about 2.5 million in 1982 to more than 7 million—an amount that rivals the government’s previous estimate of the entire domestic crop—in 1987. Reagan even began to go after “ditch weed,” a wild variety of cannabis, descended from hemp grown by American farmers for fiber, with so little THC (marijuana’s main psychoactive ingredient) that it is useless for getting high. The first year the White House kept data for ditch weed eradication, it claimed to have uprooted about 9 million plants. That number was up to more than 120 million by 1989, and reached half a billion in 2001.

The 2004 RAND report reveals that these sustained efforts drove up the price of pot. The report also includes a startling, though often misunderstood, observation. “The marijuana price trends…are not highly correlated with trends in prices of other drugs over time,” it says. “While the price of powder, heroin, and, to a lesser extent, crack were falling during the 1980s, the average price of marijuana generally rose.” An eighth of an ounce of pot in 1981 was going for $25 in 2002 dollars. It stayed roughly the same in 1982. By 1986, the price in constant dollars was up to $53, and it hit a high of $62 in 1991, a 150 percent rise over 10 years.

Cocaine, meanwhile, become much more affordable. The drug cost nearly $600 a gram in 1982. As Reagan redirected resources toward battling pot, coke prices began to tumble. By 1989, it was down to $200 a gram, in 2002 dollars, cheaper in real terms than it had been during the last national coke binge a century earlier. At the same time, average purity levels nearly doubled.

Clearly, the price trends of marijuana and cocaine are highly correlated, but the correlation is a negative one. In the 1980s, marijuana price increases drove demand toward other drugs. The war on drugs, hard, soft, or otherwise, helped persuade pot smokers to put down the bong and pick up the crack pipe, the mirror, or the needle. Pot use plummeted under Reagan. In 1979 about half of America’s 12th graders told University of Michigan researchers they had smoked pot that year, the same proportion as five years before. This fraction fell throughout the ’80s, dwindling to one-fifth of the country’s high school seniors in 1992. But the use of other drugs either stayed the same or increased as people started looking for a different, cheaper high. Self-reported use of inhalants by 12th graders rose 75 percent, from 4 percent to 7 percent, between 1981 and 1987. Cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine use all went up during the decade.

The price of heroin dropped by one-third in real terms between 1981 and 1988. By 1996 it had dropped by two-thirds. The DEA didn’t start tracking crack prices until 1986, around the time the drug’s popularity took off; its price promptly fell by about half during the next five years. In rural areas, the price of meth fell by a quarter from the early ’80s to the middle of the decade.

The stated goal of U.S. drug policy is to lower demand by increasing price. Reagan’s drug war did precisely the opposite. The only exception was pot, the least harmful drug covered by the federal Controlled Substances Act.

When it comes to cleverness, the drug czar has nothing on the drug market, as the latest cocaine price data show. People like to get high, and they’ll find a way to do it. Chop down all the pot plants, and the dealer will still have blow. Push them both down, and some guy will cook up something crazy with gasoline and Sudafed.

If there’s one certainty about American drug use, it’s this: We’re always looking for a better way to feed our voracious appetite for getting stoned—for something cheaper, faster, or more powerful. Drug trends feed themselves as word spreads about the amazing new high that’s safe and nonaddictive, cheap and available. Then we discover otherwise—and go searching for the next great high. We often circle back to the original drug, forgetting why we quit it in the first place. Drug czars past and present can gin up whatever numbers they like, but they can never change that reality.

Ryan Grim (ryan@huffingtonpost.com) covers Congress for The Huffington Post. He is the author of This Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America (Wiley).

September 11th Planes...Not?

No Longer Alone...Ron Paul Fights The Fed! Wall Street Journal

No Longer Alone Ron Paul Fights the Fed! Wall Street Journal

Thanks to Uncle Sam (472250938) Darla 4 RON PAUL (73060206) & Dreamer (50584125)
No Longer Alone Ron Paul Fights the Fed!

Source

By Sudeep Reddy

Rep. Ron Paul usually stands far outside the mainstream in Congress, particularly in his campaign to kill the Federal Reserve. But the Texas Republican now has the bulk of his colleagues standing alongside him in a fight against the central bank’s autonomy.

His bill to audit the Fed, just three pages long, has 274 co-sponsors — every House Republican and almost 100 Democrats — and counting. “People are upset,” he says. “People are demanding more transparency of the Fed, and they’re supporting me on this.”

The longtime Fed critic would prefer an economy without a central bank, where the market sets interest rates and troubled firms are left to sink. He blames the Fed for the past century’s financial bubbles and worries about its ability to monetize debt to finance government spending, even though Fed officials insist they’d never allow it.

Mr. Paul sees transparency as a first step in making the public more aware of the Fed’s ability to electronically print money to support the banking system. The revelations from an audit will “expose to the American people exactly how the Federal Reserve operates,” he says. “Because when they fully understand how they operate, what they do, how they manipulate monetary policy and interest rates, they will finally figure out that it’s the Fed that has caused all the mischief.”

Most of the lawmakers who have signed on as co-sponsors of the legislation don’t share Mr. Paul’s anti-Fed stance. They say Congress has an oversight role and needs a full accounting of how much money the Fed has lent — and to whom.

Some lawmakers signed up as an expression of disapproval after learning more about the Fed’s decisions to lend money to firms such as AIG. Many others say greater scrutiny is critical before any discussion of expanding the Fed’s authority in other areas, as the Obama administration proposes. “Bringing transparency and accountability to the Federal Reserve through an audit will help ensure that tax dollars are not wasted,” said Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, the House’s top Republican.

Rep. Brad Sherman, a California Democrat, says none of the Depression-era lawmakers who gave the Fed its power to lend to non-financial institutions “ever thought it would involve trillions of dollars.” He said the Fed system’s unique structure, with private officials leading the regional Fed banks, also needs a review by congressional auditors. “Anyone exercising governmental power should be subjected to governmental oversight.”

Even lawmakers who are less eager to sign on acknowledge the momentum. If the Fed gets added responsibilities, “there wouldn’t be any question in my mind that a bill would be passed,” said Rep. Paul Kanjorski, a senior Democrat who has not taken a position on the legislation. “They would have to buy into much more regular audit control of the Fed.”

Mr. Paul recognizes that his movement to audit the central bank ultimately may help the Obama administration expand the Fed’s oversight role in the economy.

“I think what they’ll do is they’ll give in to some of the transparency at the same time they’ll give them more power,” Mr. Paul said. “We’re going to be bugging you a lot more. We’re going to be keeping eyes on you. That might be the way. Maybe inadvertently I’ll help them get more power at the Fed.”

I posted at the WSJ blog page, that if we do not nationalize the Federal reserve, we should all get ready to be paid in RICE.

Texe Marrs - Holocau$t Dogma Unmasked

Thanks to News From The West for the posting.

Obama Lynching Party - By Israel Shamir

Happy Monday, dear readers! If you are a regular visitor, you will know that I have not been too enamoured with the non-actions of our Commander-In-Chief, Barack Hussein Obama...no words of disapproval for the kidnapping of the crew of the Spirit of Humanity, notably former Congresswoman, Cynthia McKinney; no real actions to stop the ongoing land theft occurring in Palestine (like Mike Rivero says...just stop the checks!)...but if I read this right, he may not be in a position to do much of anything...at least for now.

Obama Lynching Party

By Israel Shamir

The honeymoon President Barack Obama has enjoyed with the media since his inauguration was abruptly over – after the Cairo Speech. After his promise of peace with the Islamic world, in no time this savior of America, the man who said Yes, We Can became increasingly lonely and besieged by an unlikely coalition of Zionists, the loony left and right-wing racists.

Barack Obama has become the bane of Israeli Jews, wrote the Jewish Forward’s Nathan Jeffai. Only 6% of Jewish Israelis consider his views pro-Israel, while over 50% see him as pro-Palestinian and about 30% consider him neutral. This President is lethal for both Israel and the free world, exclaimed the starry-eyed British Zionist columnist, Melanie Phillips. Obama, she said, is destroying “the security not just of Israel but the world through his reckless appeasement of Iran”. He “has actively undercut the Iranian democrats… Obama has decided America will ‘live with’ a nuclear Iran. Which leaves Israel hung out to dry”. There are hundreds, nay, thousands of such pieces, relentlessly attacking the President for trying to stop Israel’s abuse of Palestine. They turn the man who received some 80% of the Jewish vote into a black monster craving for Jewish blood.

The Israel Lobby’s hatred of the president became a new secret taboo never to be spoken of, just silently acknowledged – like the Israel Lobby’s drive for the Iraq war and for a bombing of Iran. In a short video shot by Max Blumenthal, young American Jews on a visit to Israel speak with fiery hatred about their new president. This video opened a narrow window into the even more narrow viewpoint of Jewish Obama-haters. In no time, the window was shut and this evidence destroyed. Click the offered link, if you wish, you’ll find no video. YouTube removed it “due to terms of use violation”. (There is an alternative link, still not discovered by the Search-and-Destroy team of AIPAC). An important and rather sane American voice, the Huffington Post also took the video down, claiming it “had no news value”. Richard Silverstein mused that “for some liberal political websites posting material that is too embarrassing for Israel is not kosher, even if it is Israelis or Jews themselves who are doing the embarrassing.”

The neocons attacked Obama because of his stand on Iran. When the President refused the pressure and did not try to de-legitimise the Iranian government, Paul Wolfowitz, the man behind the Iraq War personally demanded to see more blood.

However, the truly horrific power of the Lobby is in its ability to mobilize masses of people of ostensibly differing views and lead them to a single goal. After the Lobby began drawing his blood, certain left-wing writers and our internet media happily joined the Obama lynching party.

William Blum is not a neocon like Wolfowitz or Caroline Glick, he is a strong critic of the American Empire. Like more than a few American Jews, Blum compared Obama with Adolf Hitler. Blum is not that hard on Israel. He would not compare Zionists with Hitler. “Instead of getting entangled in who [Israel or the Palestinians] started the current mess”, he writes, as if it is an obscure point; he stresses that “Israel's existence is not at stake” and wonders about the legacy of “the idealistic Zionist pioneers”. But Obama is a Hitler for Blum, because … Hitler also gave a speech for peace and against war (!?). For LaRouche, Obama is like Hitler for some other crazy reason. The mad Trot wing of the Lobby usually has its own, special reasons to be against enemies of the Jews, but their bottom line is always the same as for the stalwart Republican women’s group.

Blum typifies the left-wing Obama bashers. They do not care that Obama has been endorsed by Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. They disregard the voice of Patrick Seale, the doyen of Middle East journalism, a friend of the Syrian Assads who was fully satisfied with Obama’s advances. They are surely more radical.

They complain that Obama did not actually congratulate Ahmadinejad and did not support him. They complain that he did not undo in a month everything that was done during last hundred years. They complain that he did not dismiss everybody who was somebody in Clinton administration. They complain that the US did not join Iran and North Korea in the Axis of Evil. They complain that Obama did not put all the Goldman Sachs staff into a maximum security prison, next to Bernie Madoff.

The Obama lynching party does not even try to be fair: any story can be provided with a misleading anti-Obama headline. Our friend Cynthia McKinney, the wonderful ex-Congresswoman and a Green Party presidential candidate, joined the Free Gaza run trying to break the Israeli-imposed Gaza siege. This was a noble and daring enterprise, alas, doomed to fail: as expected, the Israeli state-run pirates seized their ship in international waters and briefly jailed her before deporting her. The story was correctly written by the Free Gaza movement, but afterwards, it was forwarded and placed on our friends’ sites under false and misleading headline: “Obama State Dept. intervenes to block Free Gaza aid voyage”. (You can read it here and here, among the rest). The headline as it appears was not provided by Free Gaza. The US State Department actually did NOT intervene. The Left leg of the Lobby succeeded in smearing Obama – though the State Department is run by Mme Clinton, and President Obama can’t yet override her and all the rest. Other unwitting agents of the Lobby re-ran the same story under the headline “Obama okays Israel's piracy”. Nothing in the text (by Paul Craig Roberts) implies or justifies the headline.

Obama bashers ask why he did not send the Sixth Fleet to lift the Gaza siege, and why Navy Seals did not protect Cynthia McKinney, and they conclude that the president “betrayed” Cynthia and Gaza. Instead, they could pay attention to the fact that the American mainstream media gave zero coverage to the Free Gaza plight. The Masters of Discourse, media lords, the networks are the guilty ones, not the President.

Government is the art of the possible, the art of compromise. Rulers need consensus, and consensus can’t be built if the media is hostile. The American mainstream media is Jewish-owned and Jewish-operated, and it has its own red lines. Rulers who forget this get impeached or assassinated. When President J F Kennedy tried to stop and undo the Dimona Project, he was killed, and his position taken by Lyndon B Johnson, that most devout Zionist who allowed Israelis to build their nuclear arsenal and to attack the USS Liberty. If Obama were to send the Fleet, he would be assassinated, and his place would be taken by an arch-zionist Vice President Joe Biden. What’s worse, the American public would not understand his steps. A hostile media would not allow him to be understood.

Obama had built-in limitations: without Biden as the surety, he would never have been allowed to win. Without Axelrod and Rahm, he would not be allowed to rule. These limitations are the direct result of America being formed, educated and guided by its pre-eminently Jewish elites of the last fifty years. The majority of Americans are pro-Israel and are pro-Jewish. This can change, but probably not as fast and as drastically as some would like. This is not only the Congress that is devoted to Jewish causes: a few generations of Americans have been brought up on Hollywood brainwashing, Holocaust stories and Israel worship. By speaking against the settlements, Obama already came very close to the red line no American leader may cross but at his own peril. He may do more, and he should be pushed to do more, but it is the Lobby and its media lords who should be attacked, not the President.

We should be more aware of the distortions created by Obama’s would-be lynchers. The coup d’etat in Honduras was presented as “Obama’s First Coup d’Etat” by many sites who swallowed the crypto-Zionist Trot lie - actually, Obama condemned the coup immediately. Our friend and expert on Latin America, Maria Poumier, writes in a penetrating essay Obama did not invade Honduras:

“The putsch in Honduras failed, thanks to Obama. This is the view of Fidel Castro and of Chavez. The coup was planned by the Zionist Lobby, by Miami neocons, who want to push the blame on Obama… but Chavez and Fidel [Mme Poumier has an access to both leaders] greet with enthusiasm the “chavization of Obama”. A Cuban analyst interprets the events in Honduras as “a sign of the declining American Empire’s loss of control”. After the failure to radio-control a civil war in Iran, partly because of the coolness and unwillingness of Obama, it is a new rout for the hawks, so let us be happy with our success.”

Maria Poumier admits that “Obama’s freedom of action is very limited. Neither the CIA nor the Pentagon wants to obey him. Zionists in the Democrat Party intended to manage him. But they miscalculated. He is not a raw material for their schemes… Obama may rule as a king by divine right, being endorsed by the people of the whole world, and he knows it. He is torn between two possible roles: to be the Chavez or Ahmadinejad of the north, or to stick to the role that was envisaged by the original scenario, the role of a modernizing instrument of the malicious empire. A king can be a good king if the people support him and push him in the right direction. He can achieve nothing, if the intellectuals succeed in antagonising the people against him.”

I am worried that the Lobby succeeded in activating so many forces against Obama. The most outspoken enemies of Jews also got hitched up to the wagon. Not only they are infiltrated, they are easy to manipulate. A reference to Rahm Emanuel would suffice for them to join in the Lobby’s attack on the president. They spread malicious jokes about Rahm commanding Obama and gleefully number all the Jews in the Administration. I once witnessed the same modus operandi in action against Vladimir Putin. The Russian president was ferociously attacked for exiling and jailing Jewish oligarchs, and at the same time, the Lobby’s agents spread around pictures of Putin in a kippa and listed the Jews in his administration. The idea is to undermine the people’s trust in the President, be it Putin or Obama.

Putin and Obama are due to meet this week. They may compare notes: how to survive the Lobby’s attack; and Putin, not the most brilliant of the two, nevertheless may give sound advice. Putin won by removing the mass media from the oligarchs’ clutches. They lost their TV stations, and after that they were not dangerous anymore. They still have their regional newspapers, and they are as hostile to Putin as ever, but without TV they can’t hypnotise the mass man.

The same advice could be given by Chavez – it is thanks to his satellite TV network TELESUR, that the putschists in Honduras failed to get international recognition. Now Chavez intends to take the media away from the hostile media lords. This should be done in the US, too. A free media is not necessarily a Jewish-owned one, after all!

“No, I will not take part in the lapidation of Obama”, concludes Maria Poumier, and I second her decision: I would not take part in the lynching. I agree with the view of our friend Gilad Atzmon, who wrote:

“President Obama seems to realise what is going on. He knows about the humiliation, he knows about the starvation of Gaza. The fact that he allows himself to juxtapose the Holocaust and Gaza proves that he is a million years ahead of most Palestinian solidarity campaigners who are reluctant to engage in this necessary equation just to avoid offending one Jew or another.

The president has still long way to go. And yet, President Obama has made a major step in the last few days. He is now marching America towards humanism. He reclaims the American ideology of liberty. I salute the man, I salute the great intellect, I salute the humanist. Gladly I am to admit that God has blessed America. But someone had better take very good care of the safety of its president. He has some fierce and relentless enemies out there. And as we know, they do not stop on red!”

The enemies of Obama are indeed plentiful, from out-and-out racists who hate to be ruled by a Black, to Zionists who are afraid Obama will take an independent course, to loony radicals of the left and of the right. We should stop them, not add to their numbers.

Let's see what happens to Bowe Bergdahl.

Senator Barbara Boxer Accused Of Racism By Head Of Black Chamber Of Commerce

WTC7 -The Smoking Gun Of 9/11 (Updated)

Nano-Thermite Took Down The WTC Complex? - Russia Today

Could the most audacious terrorist attack in history be a sophisticated masterpiece of demolition? Please view Russia Today's interview with Dr. Niels Harrit.

PrisonPlanet has a nice little posting, and one of the responses directly correlates to the video above:

LRRP 1968 Says:
July 16th, 2009 at 5:56 am

“the World Trade Center buildings collapsed as a result of fires ignited by jet fuel.”

The above is absolutely and physically impossible. Thermodynamics 101.

Weakened steel does not fail explosively. It gradually loses strength along it’s stress-strain curve and then only in the areas that attain the temperatures required to fail. Steel is an excellent heat conductor and will conduct heat away from the point of application. The materials “specific heat” will show you how much it has to absorb in order to get hot. This is measured in BTU’s / mass. You can have flames as hot as you like but if there is not enough heat energy available to heat up the material you will do nothing.

An example of this is your stove at home. A gas range burns propane at 3254 F. An aluminum pan melts at 1220 F. This should make it impossible to cook on a gas range, as the pan would melt or at least soften into putty, but it does not because heating materials is complex and actually pretty difficult. Heat goes away very fast and you have to continue to pour BTUs into it above the rate that it loses the heat. This is not easy.

I just made myself a omelet, the pan miraculously didn’t melt.

There was not enough heat value in the jet fuel to come anywhere close to making the steel hot enough to fail. You will run out fuel long before that happens and the math is straight forward.

You simply take the tons of steel in question, the amount of BTU’s it would take to make the steel hot, including the concrete and the air and you just can’t do it.

In fact it is so far from possible, the fires cannot be a factor, the temperature would not have even come close to the starting of the elastic region.

Anyone who repeats the “jet fuel burns at xxx and steel loses yy% of it strength at xxx temp” is an idiot or a liar or just cannot understand the physics involved here.

That this was an “official” explanation tells me that they are lying. When a suspect lies, ask any cop what that tells him.

– as an aside, jet fuel burns at 1800 degrees all right – IN A JET ENGINE. A jet engine forces air through a compressor to get enough volume and mass of O2 to support the combustion. You cannot get the fuel to burn at anywhere near that temp in open air, there is not enough mass air flow for an optimal stoichiometric ratio.

Even if you could, which you can’t kerosene only yields 18,500 Btu/lb in perfect conditions.

In open air you’d be lucky to get 20% of that efficiency, but even at 100% efficiency there aren’t enough BTU’s to heat up the steel past about 700 degrees.

If you use a full fuel loading with zero gallons burned in the fireball and zero gallons sent down the elevator shaft to blow up the lobby you still only have enough fuel to to get the steel up to 500 degrees or so. That’s with optimal heat transfer into the steel, best case conditions of delta-T and R values, with worst case delta-t for the heat LOSS from the steel. As material heat up they radiate and conduct heat AWAY at a rate governed by the temperature and ambient factors. So the hotter the steel gets the more heat it LOSES. This is why steel mills use crucibles to hold the steel as well as the heat.

The specific heat of steel is 240 btu/ton per degree > to raise the temp from ambient to 1800 degrees would require 432,000 btu/s ton at OPTIMAL efficiency. The concrete requires even more over 800,000 btu’s.

The the air also has to heat up, and air being a poor conductor and all the humidity in the air, the specific heat of water is 8 times higher than steel and 5 times high than concrete.

It’s a rather long equation but not really complex. Bottom line, not enough BTU to make the steel hot enough to fail. Can’t be done. Something else brought the buildings down. If they didn’t fall immediately after the impacts there is now way the fires could have triggered it as the tensile and compressive strength of the steel did not change at all ( reference the stress-strain diagram for structural steel) after the fires did their work. It never exceeded it’s maximum working stress, if it did, the top would have fallen over towards the point of maximum damage. It would have done this slowly as the stress progressed along to top of the curve to the point of maximum or ultimate strength. The metal would be very deformed at this point.

From the the origin to the point called proportional limit, the stress-strain curve is a straight line. This is called Hooke’s Law that within the proportional limit, the stress is directly proportional to strain up to the elastic limit. That is the limit beyond which the material will no longer go back to its original shape when the load is removed, or it is the maximum stress that may be developed such that there is no permanent or residual deformation when the load is entirely removed.

The structural damage by the impact either failed the structure right away or the it brought it past the elastic limit. If it reached a certain point – the curve here is actually longer that the portion from 0-the EL, the steel will start to deform plastically, that is bend like taffy. There was zero evidence of this.

The diagram for the temperatures tells us that the steel would have to attain a consistent temperature across the entire beam of way over 1500-1800 degrees, a point stress is not enough to induce failure, and there is no way to a localized temperature peak this high without the heat conducting to the rest of the beam. This is shown by the transfer equation is governed by the composition and shape of the beam, Shape is vital in that an I-beam or box had a high surface area to volume ratio, This means heat loss radiated away form the source of the heat is going to be very high, also humidity in the air will absorb the heat faster as water can take a lot of heat before raising it’s temperature so initial heat transfer AWAY form the steel will be even higher.

If as they will say that the fireproofing was all blown away by the impact makes it even harder, as the steel can radiate more heat if it is uncovered.

We can also calculate the rate of heat transfer INTO the steel beams. It is a function of the differential temperature, the specific heat of the steel, the surface area of the expose material and the R value of the air or any remaining building materials between the flame and the steel, as well as the airflow ( mass flow rate of hot air).

Al these factors except R can be definitively identified. using the maximum value for R, you’d run out of fuel ( assuming 100% fuel loading on the plane with zero for elevator shaft and fireball) before you got a 700 degree T-rise anywhere.

But the Kean Commission weenies also state that vast amounts of fuel poured down the elevator shafts to account for the damage to the ground floor. So where that that leave us?

You’d be lucky to be able to do a marshmallow roast with what was left after the fireball anyway.

It doesn’t work and there is no way to make it work. the official story is a sham and any one who believes it is an ignorant fool.

I couldn't have said it better.

Craig Ferguson 7/8/9A Late Late Show WHITE LINES

Proof that cocaine does NOT rot the brain.

Actually, let's go one better - read this information from the Transnational Institute:

# In 1995 the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) announced in a press release the publication of the results of the largest global study on cocaine use ever undertaken. The most important recommendation holds that: "WHO/PSA should investigate the therapeutic benefits of coca leaf" and a broader statement on researching the impact on health at individual and population levels of different legislation and drug control measures. However, a decision in the World Health Assembly banned the publication of the study. The US representative threatened that "if WHO activities relating to drugs failed to reinforce proven drug control approaches, funds for the relevant programmes should be curtailed". This led to the decision to discontinue publication. In the short article WHO: 'Six Horsemen ride out' there is more information on this case.
A part of the study has been recuperated and is now available on the TNI's Drugs & Democracy website. We feel this information is valid, important and needs to be available in the public domain:
# The Cocaine Project Briefing Kit, March 3, 1995 [PDF]
# The Natural History of Cocaine Abuse: A case study endeavour Programe on Substance Abuse - World Health Organisation, September 1995 [PDF] (Press releases)
# Fragment from the minutes of World Health Assembly Committee B meeting where the formerly mentioned threats were made. [PDF]

The Vancouver Sun reported on the non-release of the report:

The report notes, for instance, that health problems from "the use of legal substances, particularly alcohol and tobacco, are greater than health problems from cocaine use."

If that weren't enough, it states that "few experts describe cocaine as invariably harmful to health," and that problems "are mainly limited to high-dosage users." Indeed, "occasional cocaine use does not typically lead to severe or even minor physical or social problems . . . a minority of people start using cocaine or related products, use casually for a short or long period, and suffer little or no negative consequences, even after years of use."

To top it off, the report states that the "use of coca leaves . . . has positive therapeutic, sacred and social functions for indigenous Andean populations" -- a reference to South American aboriginals who have used coca leaves for thousands of years.

There is NO LOGICAL EXPLANATION for the illegality of cocaine, other than to create a black market and jack up the price beyond any reasonable means, and making it against the law to demonize those that do indulge. Unless you're Tony Montana, you simply won't experience the detrimental effects of unlimited cocaine usage.

Now, if you want to see the effects of pharmaceuticals upon someone...unless you've been in a well for the last couple of weeks, Michael Jackson was a victim of pharmaceutical abuse...and it was prescribed by DOCTORS. Of course, if you read this posting at Xymphora, this may have been the design of the pharmaceuticals, to weaken, destabilize and eventually, kill, its mark.

Of course, thanks goes to Unknown News for the link that started this whole brouhaha.

Pope Benny Calls For "New World Financial Order"

New 7/7 Bombing Photo Contradicts Official Story - PrisonPlanet

- Alex Jones’ Prison Planet.com - thanks to Michael Rivero for the link

New 7/7 Bombing Photo Contradicts Official Story

Posted By admin On July 8, 2009 @ 9:59 am In Featured Stories, News In Focus, Paul Watson Articles


Image appears to duplicate witness statement that bomb was planted under train

New 7/7 Bombing Photo Contradicts Official Story - [click link to see full image]

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, July 8, 2009

A new photo released on the fourth anniversary of the 7/7 attacks in London appears to contradict the government’s official story that Muslims with backpack bombs were responsible for the Tube and bus bombings which killed 52 people.

The image seemingly dovetails with a survivor’s eyewitness statement that the bombs on the Tube trains were placed underneath the carriage and that suicide bombers were nowhere to be seen.

Debunkers have attempted to dismiss this vital hole in the official story by claiming that questions about eyewitnesses stating bombs were placed under the train have been explained. London Guardian journalist Mark Honigsbaum interviewed witnesses who stated that “tiles, the covers on the floor of the train, suddenly flew up, raised up,” when the bombs were detonated. Honigsbaum later said that the quotes were taken out of context when they were cited as evidence that the bombs were planted under the trains – and debunkers duly seized on this in an attempt to dismiss the entire issue.

However, one very reliable eyewitness statement is very clear in making it plain that no suicide bombers were involved, and the bomb could only have been planted underneath the train, contradicting the official story completely.

The words of 7/7 survivor Bruce Lait, who was just yards from the explosion when it happened, cannot be taken out of context.

Lait, a victim of the Aldgate Station bombing, described to the Cambridge Evening News [3] how he and his partner were sitting nearest to the bomb when it detonated.

“We’d been on there for a minute at most and then something happened. It was like a huge electricity surge which knocked us out and burst our eardrums. I can still hear that sound now,” he said.

He and Crystal were helped out of the carriage. As they made their way out, a policeman pointed out where the bomb had been.

“The policeman said ‘mind that hole, that’s where the bomb was’. The metal was pushed upwards as if the bomb was underneath the train. They seem to think the bomb was left in a bag, but I don’t remember anybody being where the bomb was, or any bag,” he said.

In his statement, Lait makes clear four things – according to what he witnessed, there was no suicide bomber, there was no rucksack or backpack that could have contained a bomb, there was nobody around the location where the bomb exploded, and the bomb appeared to have been placed underneath the train.

The fact that the policeman had to warn them of a “hole” as they were being led out to safety obviously suggests that the hole was in the floor and therefore a potential hazard to them exiting the train.

The photo displayed below is currently being carried on the Daily Mail website with the caption; “Warped and blackened by the blast, this is the Piccadilly Line carriage where Jermaine Lindsay’s bomb detonated at Russell Square station. A forensics officer in white rubber gloves inches his way along the floor – itself sheared away in the blast, exposing metal beams – searching for the smallest of clues.” Note that Bruce Lait’s comments refer to the Aldgate tube bombing. This photo is from the Russell Square bombing, but it appears to dovetail his testimony that the bombs were planted under the train.

Despite the fact that the image is cut off at the point where the hole begins, one can clearly see it at the very bottom of the picture. The cabling underneath the floor cover is exposed and the area to the right of the hole is raised up, as if pressure has been exerted from underneath.

The contention that there were no suicide bombers actually on the train at all, as Bruce Lait contends, is consistent with other evidence surrounding the attacks.

The fact that the ID’s of all the so-called suicide bombers were found in pristine condition right next to where the bombs went off strongly suggests the planting of evidence to frame patsies. The ID’s would have had a reasonable chance of surviving relatively unscathed if the bomb was not in the backpack with them, but underneath the train.

On the other hand the backpack bombs could have just been the diversionary blasts to enable patsies to be framed, just like the planes flying into the towers acted as the diversionary cover for the explosives planted inside the World Trade Center.

Remember that the London Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorist Branch themselves reported [4]that from studying the behavior of the alleged suicide bombers before the attacks via CCTV footage, the bombers “did not fit the preconceived terrorist profile.”

The suspects were seen to be arguing with cashiers, walking in and out of shops, including McDonalds, and “bumping into people” in the minutes before the blasts – hardly the behavior of people who are in the final crucial moments of planning a terror attack in which they will be killed, and who wish to go unnoticed.

“I’ve seen the CCTV footage of these people. They do not appear to be on their way to commit any crime at all,” a London Metropolitan Police representative said.

“The roundtrip tickets, the fact that one of them spent a lot recently repairing his car and one of them had a family and was the teacher of the disabled and underprivileged children, it doesn’t ring right,” said Paul Beaver [5], a security and defense expert in London with close police contacts. “If you had that much commitment, how are you going to take your life? It’s happened in Palestine, but these people were brought up in the UK.”

Turning back to the question of devices planted under the train, the get out clause of the “exercise” or “drill” scenario would have also provided culpability cover if investigators started asking questions about objects underneath the carriage.

As we have exhaustively documented [6], such a drill did take place on the morning of 7/7.

A consultancy agency with government and police connections was running an exercise for a company that revolved around the London Underground being bombed at the exact same times and locations as happened in real life on the morning of July 7th.

For individuals to plant bombs underneath trains and secure them in place without being caught, they would need to secure access to the trains. In this scenario, London Underground could have been told that a dummy device was to be placed underneath the train as part of an exercise to test security and alertness. When the real attacks happened some LU officials would have been alarmed but their suspicions would have dampened when it was revealed that the bombs were carried in backpacks, meaning that the drill was just a strange ‘coincidence’.

It is important to stress that this is just one piece of evidence amidst a myriad of smoking guns that all directly contradict the government’s official story. A summary of that evidence can be found here. [7] An archive containing further stories can be found here [8].

Questions surrounding the 7/7 bombings have been met with a stonewall response from the British government, leading victims’ relatives to call for an independent inquiry [9].

Scotland Yard’s former head of counter-terrorism Andy Hayman, who was Assistant Commissioner for Special Operations at the time of the bombings in 2005, has also publicly called for an independent investigation [10] into the bombings.

“Incidents of less gravity have attracted the status of a public inquiry — train crashes, a death in custody, and even other terrorist attacks. How can there not be a full, independent public inquiry into the deaths of 52 commuters on London’s transport system?,” said Hayman.

However, individuals who produced Internet documentaries about these questions, such as the author of 7/7: Ripple Effect, 60-year-old Anthony John Hill, have been targeted for character assassination by the media, and in particular the BBC. Hill was arrested merely for sending a copy of his DVD to a jury member after authorities accused him of perverting the course of justice.

Article printed from Alex Jones’ Prison Planet.com: http://www.prisonplanet.com

URL to article: http://www.prisonplanet.com/new-77-bombing-photo-contradicts-official-story.html

URLs in this post:

[1] Prison Planet.com: http://prisonplanet.com

[2] Image: http://prisonplanet.tv/signup.html

[3] Cambridge Evening News: http://prisonplanet.com/Pages/Jul05/250705under.html

[4] London Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorist Branch themselves reported : http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/july-7-tube-bomber-argued-with-cashier-shortly-before-blast-513288.html

[5] said Paul Beaver: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,163859,00.html

[6] As we have exhaustively documented: http://www.prisonplanet.com../articles/july2005/090705bombingexercises.htm

[7] found here.: http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/august2005/070805finalword.htm

[8] found here: http://www.prisonplanet.com../archives/london/index.htm

[9] leading victims’ relatives to call for an independent inquiry: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1197419/Conspiracy-fever-As-rumours-swell-government-staged-7-7-victims-relatives-proper-inquiry.html

[10] has also publicly called for an independent investigation: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article6539369.ece

Copyright © 2008 PrisonPlanet.com. All rights reserved.

Looks to me as if the wheels are coming off of the dog-and-pony show that is the "official narrative" of the recent "Islamic terrorist" attacks the world has suffered recently. I am truly appalled at the reactions of the quislings and enablers; do you really think that you'll be allowed a seat at their table?

Understand this: you are all USEFUL IDIOTS, to be discarded once you are NO LONGER USEFUL.

The Great "Global Warming" Swindle

This is a complete and utter ripoff of the American public.

Please contact your senators and ensure that this bill does not pass.

Update From Cynthia McKinney

Audio of Cynthia Mckinney Speaking to WBAI's Wake-up Call (now shortened to 2 hours by the new management.) Part 1

Audio of Cynthia Mckinney Speaking to WBAI's Wake-up Call (now shortened to 2 hours by the new management.) Part 2

What's Wrong With The War Against Drugs - Nick Davies

Good day, dear readers. I have railed often against pharmaceuticals in my diatribes here...but nothing makes the point more than this document that I found at Flat Earth News. I know that the scumbags of the world who wish for WE THE PEOPLE to endlessly murder ourselves with their poisonous pharmaceuticals will come down upon me like a plague. They will continue to demonize narcotics, despite the fact that Coca-Cola actually used to contain cocaine, to NO ONE'S PHYSICAL, MENTAL OR PSYCHOLOGICAL DETRIMENT.

Please, read on.

What's wrong with the war against drugs

The Guardian, February 2001

On April 3 1924, a group of American congressmen held an official hearing to consider the future of heroin. They took sworn evidence from experts, including the US Surgeon General, Rupert Blue, who appeared in person to tell their committee that heroin was poisonous and caused insanity and that it was particularly likely to kill since its toxic dose was only slightly greater than its therapeutic dose.

They heard, too, from specialist doctors, like Alexander Lambert of New York's Bellevue Hospital, who explained that "the herd instinct is obliterated by heroin, and the herd instincts are the ones which control the moral sense... Heroin makes much quicker the muscular reaction and therefore is used by criminals to inflate them, because they are not only more daring, but their muscular reflexes are quicker." Senior police, a prison governor and health officials all added their voices. Dr S Dana Hubbard, of the New York City health department, captured the heart of the evidence: "Heroin addicts spring from sin and crime... Society in general must protect itself from the influence of evil, and there is no greater peril than heroin."

The congressmen had heard much of this before and now they acted decisively. They resolved to stop the manufacture and use of heroin for any purpose in the United States and to launch a worldwide campaign of prohibition to try to prevent its manufacture or use anywhere on the planet. Within two months, their proposal had been passed into law with the unanimous backing of both houses of the US Congress. The War Against Drugs was born.

To understand this war and to understand the problems of heroin in particular, you need to grasp one core fact. In the words of Professor Arnold Trebach, the veteran specialist in the study of illicit drugs: "Virtually every 'fact' testified to under oath by the medical and criminological experts in 1924... was unsupported by any sound evidence." Indeed, nearly all of it is now directly and entirely contradicted by plentiful research from all over the world. The first casualty of this war was truth and yet, 77 years later, it still goes on, more vigorous than ever, arguably the longest-running conflict on the planet.

Drugs and fear go hand in hand. The war against drugs is frightening - but not, in reality, for the reasons which are claimed by its generals. The untold truth about this war, which has now sucked in every country in the developed world, is that it creates the very problem which it claims to solve. The entire strategy is a hoax with the same effect as an air force which bombs its own cities instead of its enemy's. You have to go back to the trenches of Flanders to find generals who have been so incompetent, so dishonest, so awesomely destructive towards those for whom they claim to care.

The core point is that the death and sickness and moral collapse which are associated with Class A drugs are, in truth, generally the result not of the drugs themselves but of the black market on which they are sold as a result of our strategy of prohibition. In comparison, the drugs themselves are safe, and we could turn around the epidemic of illness and death and crime if only we legalised them. However, it is a contemporary heresy to say this, and so the overwhelming evidence of this wars self-destructive futility is exiled from almost all public debate, now just as it was when those congressmen met.

Take heroin as a single example. And it's a tough example. In medical terms, it is simply an opiate, technically known as diamorphine, which metabolises into morphine once it enters its user's body. But, in terms of the war against drugs, it is the most frightening of all enemies. Remember all that those congressmen were told about 'the great peril'. Remember the Thatcher government's multi-million pound campaign under the slogan 'Heroin Screws You Up'. Think of Tony Blair at the 1999 Labour Party fulminating about the 'drug menace' or of William Hague last year calling for 'a stronger, firmer, harder attack on drugs than we have ever seen before'. And now look at the evidence.

Start with the allegation that heroin damages the minds and bodies of those who use it, and consider the biggest study of opiate use ever conducted, on 861 patients at Philadelphia General Hospital in the 1920s. It concluded that they suffered no physical harm of any kind. Their weight, skin condition and dental health were all unaffected. 'There is no evidence of change in the circulatory, hepatic, renal or endocrine functions. When it is considered that some of these subjects had been addicted for at least five years, some of them for as long as twenty years, these negative observations are highly significant.'

Check with Martindale, the standard medical reference book, which records that heroin is used for the control of severe pain in children and adults, including the frail, the elderly and women in labour. It is even injected into premature babies who are recovering from operations. Martindale records no sign of these patients being damaged or morally degraded or becoming criminally deviant or simply insane. It records instead that, so far as harm is concerned, there can be problems with nausea and constipation.

Or go back to the history of 'therapeutic addicts' who became addicted to morphine after operations and who were given a clean supply for as long as their addiction lasted. Enid Bagnold, for example, who wrote the delightful children's novel, National Velvet, was what our politicians now would call 'a junkie', who was prescribed morphine after a hip operation and then spent twelve years injecting up to 350 mgs a day. Enid never - as far as history records - mugged a single person or lost her 'herd instinct', but died quietly in bed at the age of 91. Opiate addiction was once so common among soldiers in Europe and the United States who had undergone battlefield surgery that it was known as 'the soldiers' disease'. They spent years on a legal supply of the drug - and it did them no damage.

We cannot find any medical research from any source which will support the international governmental contention that heroin harms the body or mind of its users. Nor can we find any trace of our government or the American government or any other ever presenting or referring to any credible version of any such research. On the contrary, all of the available research agrees that, so far as harm is concerned, heroin is likely to cause some nausea and possibly severe constipation and that is all. In the words of a 1965 New York study by Dr Richard Brotman: "Medical knowledge has long since laid to rest the myth that opiates observably harm the body." Peanut butter, cream and sugar, for example, are all far more likely to damage the health of their users.

Now, move on to the allegation that heroin kills its users. The evidence is clear:
you can fatally overdose on heroin. But the evidence is equally clear, that - contrary to the claims of politicians - it is not particularly easy to do so. Opiates tend to suppress breathing, and doctors who prescribe them for pain relief take advantage of this to help patients with lung problems. But the surprising truth is that, in order to use opiates to suppress breathing to the point of death, you have to exceed the normal dose to an extreme degree. Heroin is unusally safe, because - contrary to what those US congressmen were told in 1924 - the gap between a therapeutic dose and a fatal dose is unusually wide.

Listen, for example, to Dr Teresa Tate, who has prescribed heroin and morphine for 25 years, first as a cancer doctor and now as medical adviser to Marie Curie Cancer Care. We asked her to compare heroin with paracetomol, legally available without prescription. She told us: "I think that most doctors would tell you that paracetamol is actually quite a dangerous drug when used in overdose, it has a fixed upper limit for its total dose in 24 hours and if you exceed that, perhaps doubling it, you can certainly put yourself at great risk of liver failure and of death, whereas with diamorphine, should you double the dose that you normally were taking, I think the consequence would be to be sleepy for a while and quite possibly not much more than that and certainly no permanent damage as a result." Contrary to the loudly expressed view of so many politicians, this specialist of 25 years experience told us that when heroin is properly used by doctors, it is "a very safe drug".

Until the American prohibitionists closed him down in the 1920s, Dr Willis Butler ran a famous clinic in Shreveport, Louisiana for old soldiers and others who had become addicted to morphine after operations. Among his patients, he included four doctors, two church ministers, two retired judges, an attorney, an architect, a newspaper editor, a musician from the symphony orchestra, a printer, two glass blowers and the mother of the commissioner of police. None of them showed any ill effect from the years which they spent on Dr Butler's morphine. None of them died as a result of his prescriptions. And, as Dr Butler later recalled: "I never found one we could give an overdose to, even if we had wanted to. I saw one man take 12 grains intravenously at one time. He stood up and said, 'There, that's just fine,' and went on about his business."

Heroin can be highly addictive - which is a very good reason not to start taking it. In extreme doses, it can kill. But the truth which has been trampled under the cavalry of the drug warriors is that, properly prescribed, pure heroin is a benign drug. The late Professor Norman Zinberg, who for years led the study of drug addiction at Harvard Medical School, saw the lies beneath the rhetoric: "To buttress our current program, official agencies, led originally by the old Federal Bureau of Narcotics, have constructed myth after myth. When pushers in schoolyards, 'drug progression', drugs turning brains to jelly, and other tales of horror are not supported by facts, they postulate and publicize others: 'drugs affect chromosomes'; 'drugs are a contagious disease'. Officials go on manufacturing myths such as the chromosome scare long after they are disproved on the self-righteous assumption that 'if they have scared one kid off using drugs, it was worth the lie.'"

Take away the lies and the real danger becomes clear - not the drugs, but the black market which has been created directly by the policy of prohibition. If ever there is a war-crimes trial to punish the generals who have gloried in this slaughter of the innocent, the culprits should be made to carve out in stone: "There is no drug known to man which becomes safer when its production and distribution are handed over to criminals."

Heroin, so benign in the hands of doctors, becomes highly dangerous when it is cut by black market dealers - with paracetomol, drain cleaner, sand, sugar, starch, powdered milk, talcum powder, coffee, brick dust, cement dust, gravy powder, face powder or curry powder. None of these adulterants was ever intended to be injected into human veins. Some of them, like drain cleaner, are simply toxic and poison their users. Others - like sand or brick dust - are carried into tiny capillaries and digital blood vessels where they form clots, cutting off the supply of blood to fingers or toes. Very rapidly, venous gangrene sets in, the tissue starts to die, the fingers or toes go black and then have only one destiny - amputation. Needless suffering - inflicted not by heroin, but by its black market adulterants.

Street buyers cannot afford to waste any heroin - and for that reason, they start to inject it, because smoking or snorting it is inefficient. The Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine records that a large proportion of the illness experienced by black market heroin addicts is caused by wound infection, septicaemia, and infective endocarditis, all due to unhygienic injection technique. Street users invariably suffer abscesses, some of them of quite terrifying size, from injecting with infected needles or drugs. Those who inject repeatedly into the same veins or arteries will suffer aneurysms - the walls of the artery will weaken and bulge; sometimes they will start to leak blood under the skin; sometimes, these weakened arteries will become infected by a dirty needle and rupture the skin, leaving the user to bleed to death.

In the mid 1990s, the World Health Organisation estimated that 40% of recent AIDS cases internationally had been caused by drug users sharing injecting equipment. The British record on AIDS is better because in the late 1980s, the government quietly broke with its prohibition philosophy and started to provide clean needles. Nevertheless, by June last year, one thousand black market drug users in this country had died of AIDS which was believed to have been contracted from dirty needles. More needless misery and death.

Far worse, however, is the spread of Hepatitis C, which can kill by causing cirrhosis and sometimes cancer in the liver. The official estimate is that 300,000 people in this country are now infected. Dr Tom Waller, who chairs Action on Hepatitis C says the truth is likely to be much worse. And almost all of these victims are black market drug users who contracted the disease by sharing dirty injecting equipment. Dr Waller says there is now a 'major epidemic', threatening the lives of 'a great many people'. Needlessly.

Street buyers buy blind and so they will overdose accidentally: they have no way of telling how much heroin there is in their deal. Dr Russell Newcombe, senior lecturer in addiction studies at John Moores University in Liverpool, has found the purity of street heroin varying from 20% to 90%. "Users can accidentally take three or four times as much as they are planning to," he says. It is peculiarly ironic that governments set out to protect their people from a drug which they claim is dangerous by denying them any of the safeguards and information which they insist must apply to the consumption of drugs which they know to be harmless. (Compare, for example, the mandatory information on the side of a bottle of Vitamin C tablets with the information available to a black market heroin user.)

Street buyers often run short of supplies - and so they mix their drug with anything else they can get their hands on, particularly alcohol. Heroin may be benign, but if you mix it with a bottle of vodka or a handful of sedatives, your breathing is likely to become extremely depressed. Or it may just stop. In any event, whether it is poisonous adulterants or injected infection; whether it is death by accidental overdose or death by poly-drug use: it is the black market which lies at the root of the danger. The healthiest route, of course, is not to take the drug at all: but for those who are addicted, prohibition inflicts danger and death. Needlessly. Water would become dangerous if it were banned and handed over to a criminal black market.

The same logic applies to drugs which, unlike heroin, are inherently harmful - like alcohol, which is implicated in organic damage (liver) and social problems (violence, dangerous driving). American bootleggers brewed their moonshine with adulterants like methylated spirits, which can cause blindness. (Hence the proliferation of blind blues singers.) And there are documented cases of drinkers during prohibition injecting alcohol, with all of the attendant dangers. (It is instructive to look back on the prohibitionists' efforts to justify their war against alcohol with hugely inflated statements of its danger. In his history of drugs, Emperors of Dreams, Mike Jay records the claims that alcohol was an 'environmental poison' which generated cretinism and several otherwise unrecognised syndromes including 'blastopthoric degeneration' and ‘alcoholic diathesis'.)

The risks of consuming LSD and Ecstacy are increased enormously by their illegal and unsupervised manufacture. Nobody knows what they are swallowing. Yet, when a Brighton company developed a test to check the purity of Ecstacy, the government's drugs advisor, Keith Hellawell, condemned it and warned that the company risked prosecution. It is the same with black market amphetamines: speed alone may not kill, but speed with a blindfold is highly likely to finish you off.

In the same way, the classic signs of social exclusion among addicts are the product not of their drug but of the illegality of the drug. If addicts fail to work, it is not because heroin has made them workshy, but because they spend every waking minute of the day hustling. If addicts break the law, it is not because the drug has corrupted their morality, but because they are forced to steal to pay black market prices. If addicts are thin, it is not because the drug has stripped away their flesh, but because they spend every last cent on their habit and have nothing left for food. Over and over again, it is the black market, which has been created by the politicians, which does the damage.

The man to whom the government turns for advice on drugs, Keith Hellawell, appears to know none of this. When we interviewed him for Channel Four, he insisted that heroin itself was dangerous and then repeatedly dodged requests to come up with any evidence at all to justify his claim. Subsequently, when we offered his department as much time as they would like to find any evidence, they failed to come up with anything at all and passed the question to the department of health, who also failed. It is fair to conclude that the government's drugs adviser literally does not know the first thing about heroin.

The confusion between the effect of the drug and the effect of the black market is riddled not only through government policy but also through government statistics which completely ignore the distinction with the result that teams of researchers study drug policy, use compromised statistics and simply recycle the confusion, thus providing politicians with yet more false fuel for their fire. Home Office figures on drug deaths, for example, are hopelessly compromised. Eighteen months ago, the department of health, which might have been expected to know better, produced new guidelines for doctors dealing with drug users and recorded the following: "Generally there is a greater prevalence of certain illnesses amongst the drug misusing population, including viral hepatitits, bacterial endocarditis, HIV, tuberculosis, septicaemia, pneumonia, deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary emboli, abscesses and dental disease." All of it true of the black market. None of it true of the drug. No attempt to make the distinction.

The black market damages not only drug users but the whole community. Britain looks back at the American prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s and shudders at the stupidity of a policy which generated such a catastrophic crime wave. Yet, in this country now, the prohibition of drugs has generated a crime boom of staggering proportions. Research suggests that in England and Wales, a hard core of black market users is responsible for some £1.5 billion worth of burglary, theft and shoplifting each year - they are stealing £3.5 million worth of property a day. As a single example, Brighton police told us they estimate that 75% of their property crime is committed by black market drug users trying to fund their habit. And yet goverments refuse to be tough on the cause of this crime - their own prohibition policy.

The global version of this damage was put succinctly by Senator Gomez Hurtado, former Colombian ambassador to France and a high court judge, who told a 1993 conference: "Forget about drug deaths and acquisitive crime, about addiction and AIDS. All this pales into insignificance before the prospect facing the liberal societies of the West, like a rabbit in the headlights of an oncoming car. The income of the drug barons is an annual five hundred thousand million dollars, greater than the American defence budget. With this financial muscle they can suborn all the institutions of the state and, if the state resists, with this fortune they can purchase the firepower to outgun it. We are threatened with a return to the Dark Ages of rule by the gang. If the west relishes the yoke of the tyrant and the bully, current drug policies promote that end."

Having attacked and maimed and killed the very people they claimed to be protecting; having inflicted a crime wave on the same communities which they said they were defending; having run up a bill which now costs us some £1.7 billion a year in this country alone: this war's generals might yet have some claim to respect if they were able to show that they had succeeded in their original objective of stopping or, at least, of cutting the supply of prohibited drugs. They cannot.

In December 1999, the chief constable of Cleveland police, Barry Shaw, produced a progress report on the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, which marked the final arrival of US drugs prohibition in this country: "There is overwhelming evidence to show that the prohibition-based policy in this country since 1971 has not been effective in controlling the availability or use of proscribed drugs. If there is indeed a war against drugs, it is not being won... Illegal drugs are freely available, their price is dropping and their use is growing. It seems fair to say that violation of the law is endemic, and the problem seems to be getting worse despite our best efforts."

Mr Shaw was able to point to a cascade of evidence to support his view: between 1987 and 1997, there had been a tenfold increase in the seizure of illicit drugs, and yet the supply on the streets was so strong that the price of these drugs had kept dropping; in 1970, only 15% of people had used an illegal drug, but by 1995, 45% had; in 1970, 9,000 people were convicted of a drugs offence but in 1995 94,000 were. The Home Office responded to the chief constable's report with complete silence: they refused even to acknowledge receiving it. Internal reports from the American Drugs Enforcement Agency confirm the chief constable's conclusion. (They say Britain now produces so much cannabis that we actually export it to Holland.)

Prohibition has not merely failed to cut the supply of illicit drugs: it has actively spread drug use. The easiest way for new users to fund their habit is to sell drugs and consume the profit; so they go out and find more new users to sell to; so it is that when one child in the classroom starts using, others soon join in; one user in the street and neighbours soon follow. Black market drug use spreads geometrically. The Health Education Authority in 1995 found that 70% of people aged between eleven and thirty five had been offered drugs at some time. Pushers push. When Britain began to impose prohibition of heroin in 1968, there were fewer then 500 heroin addicts in Britain - a few jazz musicians, some poets, some Soho Chinese. Now, the Home Office says there may be as many as five hundred thousand. This is pyramid selling at its most brilliantly effective.

In private, the Home Office's best defence is that they are so short of reliable intelligence on drugs that nobody can finally prove that the war is lost: they simply don't know how much heroin or cocaine is imported, or many people are using it. At the Cabinet Office, Keith Hellawell argues that the 30 years since the Misuse of Drugs Act do not really count, because, until he took over, British governments did not have a real strategy. He told us he was supporting new international tactics (which he could not divulge) and was now seeing figures (which he could not give us) to suggest finally they were going to succeed. This recalls earlier declarations that "we have turned the corner on drug addiction" (President Nixon, 1973) or "Heroin availability continues to shrink" (DEA,1978). In the meantime, world heroin production has tripled in the last decade, cocaine production has doubled and, in the Home Secretary's Blackburn constituency, police say drug use in the Asian community has soared by 300% in four years.

But the underlying point is even more worrying: once you understand that the real danger comes from the black market and not from the drug, you can see that even if, with some magic formula, the generals started to cut the supply of these drugs, the result would be disastrous. The price of heroin, for example, would start to rise and, since there is no evidence at all that heroin addicts cut their consumption to fit their wallets, they would have to commit more crime to fund their habits. And if the dealers also responded like good entrepreneurs, they would try to keep their prices down by adding even more pollutants to the heroin, thus increasing the health risks to users.

This government has not begun to consider legalisation. No matter the truth about the danger and the death, no matter the truth about the cause of crime, the position is, as Jack Straw put it to the 1997 Labour conference: "We will not decriminalise, legalise or legitimise the use of drugs". Why? The obvious answer was offered to us by Paul Flynn, Labour backbencher and staunch opponent of prohibition: "It is being fuelled by politicians who are vote gluttons, who believe that there is popularity and votes to be gained by appearing to be tough on drugs."

While Keith Hellawell and other prohibitionists are embarrassed by their screaming lack of success, those who want to legalise can point to clear evidence that providing a clean supply of drugs will help with the physical and mental health of users, will cut crime in the community and drain the life out of the black market.

The Swiss, for example, in 1997 reported on a three-year experiment in which they had prescribed heroin to1,146 addicts in 18 locations. They found: "Individual health and social circumstances improved drastically... The improvements in physical health which occurred during treatment with heroin proved to be stable over the course of one and a half years and in some cases continued to increase (in physical terms, this relates especially to general and nutritional status and injection-related skin diseases)... In the psychiatric area, depressive states in particular continued to regress, as well as anxiety states and delusional disorders... The mortality of untreated patients is markedly higher." They also reported dramatic improvements in the social stability of the addicts, including a steep fall in crime.

There are equally impressive results from similar projects in Holland and Luxemburg and Naples and, also, in Britain. In Liverpool, during the early 1990s, Dr John Marks used a special Home Office licence to prescribe heroin to addicts. Police reported a 96% reduction in acquisitive crime among a group of addict patients. Deaths from locally acquired HIV infection and drug-related overdoses fell to zero. But, under intense pressure from the government, the project was closed down. In its ten years' work, not one of its patients had died. In the first two years after it was closed, forty one died.

There is room for debate about detail. Should we supply legalised drugs through GPs or specialist clinics or pharmacists? Should we continue to supply opiate substitutes, like methadone, as well as heroin? Should the supply be entirely free of charge to guarantee the extinction of the black market? How would we use the hundreds of millions of pounds which would be released by the 'peace dividend'? But, if we have any compassion for our drug users, if we have any intention of tackling the causes of crime, if we have any honesty left in our body politic, there is no longer any room for debate about the principle. Continue the war against drugs? Just say No.

Additional research by Jane Cassidy

See below for quotes on prohibition of drugs and alcohol

"All penalties for drug users should be dropped ... Making drug abuse a crime is useless and even dangerous ... Every year we seize more and more drugs and arrest more and more dealers but at the same time the quantity available in our countries still increases... Police are losing the drug battle worldwide." Raymond Kendall, secretary general of Interpol, January 1994

"The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this."
Albert Einstein "My First Impression of the U.S.A.", 1921

"The current policies are not working. We seize more drugs, we arrest more people, but when you look at the availability of drugs, the use of drugs, the crime committed because of and through people who use drugs, the violence associated with drugs, it's on the increase. It can't be working." Keith Hellawell, Guardian 23 May 1994, three years before he was appointed drugs adviser to the government.

"Our emphasis here is based not only on the growing seriousness of drug-related crimes, but also on the belief that relieving our police and our courts from having to fight losing battles against drugs will enable their energies and facilities to be devoted more fully to combatting other forms of crime. We would thus strike a double blow: reduce crime activity directly, and at the same time increase the efficacy of law enforcement and crime prevention." Milton Friedman "Tyranny of the Status Quo"

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other in order that the people may require a leader. -- Plato

Prohibition is an awful flop.
We like it.
It can't stop what it's meant to stop.
We like it.
It's left a trail of graft and slime
It don't prohibit worth a dime
It's filled our land with vice and crime,
Nevertheless, we're for it.
-- newspaperman Franklin P. Adams, 1931, in the New York World, on the release of the Wickersham Commission report

I am against Prohibition because it has set the cause of temperence back twenty years; because it has substituted an ineffective campaign of force for an effective campaign of education; because it has replaced comparatively uninjurious light wines and beers with the worst kind of hard liquor and bad liquor; because it has increased drinking not only among men but has extended drinking to women and even children. -- William Randolph Hearst, initially a supporter of Prohibition, explaining his change of mind in 1929. From "Drink: A Social History of America" by Andrew Barr (1999), p. 239.

"There is thus general agreement throughout the medical and psychiatric literature that the overall effects of opium, morphine, and heroin on the addict's mind and body under conditions of low price and ready availability are on the whole amazingly bland." Edward M. Brecher, 1972

"The available evidence indicates that heroin, when provided in pure form, is a relatively safe drug. Hence it is primarily the illegal nature of the drug, rather than its pharmacological properties, which leads to the health and social problems associated with its use." Ostini, Bammer, Dance and Goodwin. 'The Ethics of Experimental Heroin Maintenance.' Journal of Medical Ethics, 1993.

"When heroin-dependent persons have been provided with daily maintenance doses under medical supervision, marked physiological deterioration or significant psychological impairment has not been observed. In fact, most of the serious adverse consequences of chronic heroin use are generally related to lifestayle and factors involving needle administration." Cox et al, Toronto Addiction Research Foundation

"Heroin is very addictive but does not in itself cause any serious illnesses, nor does it harm any organs or tissues." Dr Ben Goldacre Dr Ben Goldacre, 'Methadone and Heroin: An Exercise in Medical Scepticism'

"To our surprise we have not been able to locate even one scientific study on the proved harmful effects of addiction. Earlier investigators had apparently assumed that the ill effects were so obvious as not to need scientific verification. " Dr. George H. Stevenson, British Columbia, 1956.

Dr Van den Brink, in charge of Duthc research into prescription of heroin for drug users, preparing report for Dutch Health Minister Borst, press interview: "We can only do what is within our reach. But if we thought that treating heroin addicts with heroin was nonsensical and dangerous, we would not make these recommendations."

"The addict when not deprived of his opium showed no abnormal behavior which distinguished him from a nonaddict." yielded similar findings. Dr. George B. Wallace on two studies at Bellevue Hospital in New York City

"It has not been possible to maintain that addiction to morphine causes marked physical deterioration per se." Dr Harris Isbell, director of the Public Health Service's Addiction Research Center in Lexington, 1958,

"The addict under his normal tolerance of morphine is medically a well man." Dr Walter G. Karr, University of Pennsylvania biochemist,1932

"Given an addict who is receiving (adequate) morphine ... the deviations from normal physiological behavior are minor (and) for the most part within the range of normal variations." Dr. Nathan B. Eddy, after reviewing the world literature on morphine, 1940

"Medical knowledge has long since laid to rest the myth that opiates inevitably and observably harm the body." Drs Richard Brotman, Alan S. Meyer, and Alfred M. Freedman, 1965:

"The incidence of insanity among addicts is the same as in the general population." Dr Marie Nyswander, 1956.

"As to possible damage to the brain, the result of lengthy use of heroin, we can only say that neurologic and psychiatric examinations have not revealed evidence of brain damage.... This is in marked contrast to the prolonged and heavy use of alcohol, which in combination with other factors can cause pathologic changes in brains, and reflects such damage in intellectual and emotional deterioration, as well as convulsions, neuritis, and even psychosis." Dr. George H. Stevenson, British Columbia 1956.

"Morphine does not cause any permanent reduction in intelligence." Drs Harris Isbell and H. F. Fraser, Public Health Service addiction center, Lexington, Kentucky, 1950.

"In spite of a very long tradition to the contrary, clinical experience and statistical studies clearly prove that psychosis is not one of 'the pains of addiction.' Organic deterioration is regularly produced by alcohol in sufficient amount but is unknown with opiates." Deputy Commissioner Henry Brill, New York State Department of Mental Hygiene, chairman of the American Medical Association's narcotics committee, after a survey of 35,000 mental hospital patients. 1963.

"That individuals may take morphine or some other opiate for twenty years or more without showing intellectual or moral deteriorationis a common experience of every physician who has studied the subject." Dr Lawrence Kolb, US assistant surgeon general, 1925.