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.

An Ungrateful Nation

Please read the latest posting from Mark Glenn - In Living Color–Racism and Hatred on Full Display in the Jewish State.

Imagine that Jonathan Pollard's wife has the balls to say that America should apologize for imprisoning her scumbag husband...I'm even referring people to read a Free Republic link! But, as you'll see, not every poster there is in lockstep with the dullards at that site.

Here's an update regarding the kidnapping of the crew of The Spirit of Humanity:

7/5/09 LATEST UPDATES on the GAZA 21 and Cynthia McKinney
As of this morning, the Americans were moved to a detainment facility that is close to the airport.

FLASH: As I am writing this at 7PM EST, the latest unconfirmed reports have Cynthia McKinney returning to the US with the port of entry being NYC sometime in the late afternoon/early evening on Monday 7/6/09. Approximately 24 hours from now. Plan on a welcoming party and a press conference. GET READY! More info will be posted as soon as it is confirmed!

You can read more here:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/McKinney-Relocated-from-Is-by-Meryl-Ann-Butler-090705-681.html
**************************************
***From John Judge:
Friends,
I just got a call confirming that former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and three other U.S. citizens were transferred from the Israeli prison at Ramale to Ben Gurion airport in Israel, the standard site for deportations. This information came originally from Mairead Maguire, the Irish Nobel laureate and was confirmed by the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, which is sending representatives to the airport. Maguire was told that the authorities would return to take her next, but she stated she is concerned about the fate of the remaining prisoners from Yemen, Jordon, the UK, Scotland, Palestine and Denmark, and may refuse to be released until all are released.

My note:
What possible grounds do the Israelis have to release these kidnapped prisoners a few at a time? If one is released then all should be released, since none of them acted differently than the others. I have been told that the form Cynthia McKinney was asked to sign was written in Hebrew, which if true is also illegal. She refused to sign the form, in any case, and then the Israeli authorities claimed that Israeli law required her to be held an additional three days, until Monday, July 6. Her early release today may reflect the level of pressure on Israel and the U.S. authorities generated by your work. By my count, the following twelve prisoners remain in Ramale:

Othman Abufalah, Jordan
Othman is a world-renowned journalist with al-Jazeera TV.

Mansour Al-Abi, Yemen
Mansour is a cameraman with Al-Jazeera TV.

Ishmahil Blagrove, UK
Ishmahil is a Jamaican-born journalist, documentary film maker and founder of the Rice & Peas film production company. His documentaries focus on international struggles for social justice.

Derek Graham, Ireland
Derek Graham is an electrician, Free Gaza organizer, and first mate aboard the Spirit of Humanity.

Alex Harrison, UK
Alex is a solidarity worker from Britain. She is traveling to Gaza to do long-term human rights monitoring.

Denis Healey, UK
Denis is Captain of the Spirit of Humanity. This will be his fifth voyage to Gaza.

Fathi Jaouadi, UK
Fathi is a British journalist, Free Gaza organizer, and delegation co-coordinator for this voyage.

Mairead Maguire, Ireland
Mairead is a Nobel laureate and renowned peace activist.

Lubna Masarwa, Palestine/Israel
Lubna is a Palestinian human rights activist and Free Gaza organizer.

Theresa McDermott, Scotland
Theresa is a solidarity worker from Scotland. She is traveling to Gaza to do long-term human rights monitoring.

Adnan Mormesh, UK
Adnan is a solidarity worker from Britain. He is traveling to Gaza to do long-term human rights monitoring.

Adam Qvist, Denmark
Adam is a solidarity worker from Denmark. He is traveling to Gaza to do human rights monitoring.

-- John Judge
Researcher, Lecturer, Congressional staff
Real Democracy Project
PO Box 7147
Washington, DC 20044
202-583-5347
*******************
FROM FREE GAZA:
Some of the UK FreeGaza 21 detainees likely to be deported Monday, should arrive to Heathrow 13.30 Monday.

We have just heard that at least 3 of the 6 British FreeGaza detainees are being put on a flight to London in the morning, due to arrive at Heathrow at 13.30 p.m.

Because it is a Sunday and we have only just heard this news, we are trying to spread the word as well as we can - so we'd be really really grateful if you could forward this email to your contacts. Some relatives and supporters will be there to meet them - but we ask anyone in the London area who is able to go to the airport to meet them to do so.

We are currently unable to make contact with the group, who have been moved to cells at Ben Gurion airport detention center. Once we have confirmation that they are on the morning flight, we will post to our website:
www.freegaza.org

If you live in the London area, please try and make it down to Heathrow to meet them. We expect to have journalists at the airport to report on their deportation, and we are trying to arrange for a press conference in London for later in the afternoon.

More to follow! ... http://www.freegaza.org

And sadly...no word at all from our Commander-In-Chief.

Here are some quotations from Travis Kelly:

"I told you I'm not going to criticize my successor. I'll just tell you that there are people at Gitmo that will kill American people at a drop of a hat and I don't believe that persuasion isn't going to work. Therapy isn't going to cause terrorists to change their mind."

— George W. Bush

"It wouldn't be vintage Bush without a few hearty dollops of mangled verbiage combined with maddening factual inconsistency, now, would it? It almost makes one nostalgic for the daily brain cramps our former president used to deliver with such gruesome consistency. Well, no, actually, not really."

— William Rivers Pitt

“I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of villains. I’m down to Castro and Kim Il Sung.”

— Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, 1991

"When it's time to occupy some mideastern country, or to create a few dozen federal czars and authorities to protect Oblabla's waning "popularity" from any blowback, or to toss 15 TRILLION dollars to the corporations on short notice -- or to provide for their own endless junkets and benefits, including lifetime Single Payer for themselves -- "our" Congress finds the public pocket to be endlessly deep, a cornucopia providing all the miraculous loaves and fishes their milita-corporate overlords can consume."

— jhoffa

"Make no mistake about it, there will be a public option in the final bill – some form of it. We want it to be a fair level playing field, but you need something to keep the big boys honest. And the only thing that really is out there is a public option. We don’t trust the private insurance companies left to their own devices, and neither do the American people."

— Sen. Charles Schumer on Face the Nation

"For the record, neither regional health cooperatives nor state-level public plans, both of which have been proposed as alternatives, would have the financial stability and bargaining power needed to bring down health care costs."

— Paul Krugman

"It is no more meaningful to say that Stalin and George Orwell were both socialists than to observe that Martin Luther King Jr. and George Wallace were both Christians."

— Andrew O'Hehir


THE MEDIA

“You can rock the boat, but you can never say that the entire ocean is in trouble …. You cannot say: By the way, there’s something wrong with our …. system."
— Keith Olbermann

"I have been told by reporters that they will not report their own insights or contrary evaluations of the official 9/11 story, because to question the government story about 9/11 is to question the very foundations of our entire modern belief system regarding our government, our country, and our way of life."
—Air Force Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski

"Mainstream-media political journalism is in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant, but not because of the Internet, or even Comedy Central. The threat comes from inside. It comes from journalists being afraid to do what journalists were put on this green earth to do. . . . There’s the intense pressure to maintain access to insider sources, even as those sources become ridiculously unrevealing and oversensitive. There’s the fear of being labeled partisan if one’s bullshit-calling isn’t meted out in precisely equal increments along the political spectrum... I still believe that no one is fundamentally more capable of first-rate bullshit-calling than a well-informed beat reporter—whatever their beat. We just need to get the editors, or the corporate culture, or the self-censorship – or whatever it is – out of the way.
— former Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin

“All of the institutions we thought would protect us — particularly the press, but also the military, the bureaucracy, the Congress — they have failed. The courts . . . the jury’s not in yet on the courts. So all the things that we expect would normally carry us through didn’t. The biggest failure, I would argue, is the press, because that’s the most glaring…. You’d have to fire or execute ninety percent of the editors and executives. You’d actually have to start promoting people from the newsrooms to be editors who you didn’t think you could control. And they’re not going to do that.”
— Seymour Hersh

"There is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it. The sheer ease with which this machinery has been able to do its work reflects a creeping structural weakness which now afflicts the production of our news."
— The Independent

"We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things that the general public does not need to know and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows."

— former Washington Post owner Katherine Graham in speech to CIA, 1988

"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."
— A.J. Liebling, "The Wayward Press," New Yorker magazine

"There is no such thing, at this date of the world’s history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it… The business of the Journalist is to destroy truth; To lie outright; To pervert; To vilify; To fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals for rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and or lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
– John Swinton, former Chief of Staff, The New York Times, circa 1880

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

Retired US Strategic Intelligence General Says 911 is a Fraud!

Here's the link to the page.

I am still on a tear with the asshats at CounterKnowledge - these nitwits still contend that "islamofascists" are responsible, and responsible solely, for the worst attack upon our shores. Bear with me here...

...okay, let's see:

A number of devout "middle eastern" individuals concoct a plan, led by ex-CIA asset, Tim Osman...no, wait - he's known as Osama bin Laden, who is afflicted with a disease that requires the usage of a dialysis machine. Apparently, they were able to evade and/or shut down our national defenses to effect their attack.

And if you believe that, check out these deeds to the Brooklyn Bridge.

Bernie Gets The Max!

So...Bernard Madoff has been sentenced to 150 years in prison.

Good riddance...but the problem still exists: how are WE THE PEOPLE safeguarded from his ilk in the future?

Not by putting the Federal reserve in charge, that's for bloody sure! What's that old adage regarding foxes and henhouses...?

Here's a piece by Mantiq Altayr - Zionist Bullshit - it refers to a piece written by Aron Raskas in the Baltimore Sun - please find that piece below, then go to the link above and read his quite scathing refutation of the "facts" presented.

Settlements are no threat

By Aron U. Raskas

June 7, 2009

As the Obama administration moves to transform Palestinian arguments about Israeli settlements into U.S. policy, an examination of the facts underlying these issues is appropriate. There may be no better place to begin than the swimming pool at Rimonim, a Jewish settlement in the heart of the West Bank.

The scene is a familiar one. Families picnicking together. Mothers yelling at children to be careful. Young children calling out to moms to watch them do dangerous things.

But it is the view from the hilltop pool that is striking. It quickly dispels many of the myths that today masquerade as dogma concerning Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

As one looks out from Rimonim, the most telling fact is what one does not see. Over the miles of rolling hills that unfold across the landscape, there is not a village, building, home or even a herd of sheep to be seen. The scene is the same at other Jewish settlements as well.

Palestinian propaganda machines have for years purveyed the myth of Israeli settlements choking Palestinian communities the way commerce and residential developments have encroached upon rural America. Yet, in reality, nothing like this exists in the largely unsettled expanses of the West Bank.

When Mark Twain walked this land in 1867, he described in his book, Innocents Abroad, this very same "deserted" and "desolate country" with its "rocky and bare" landscape. Today, despite Palestinian efforts to portray it differently, not all that much has changed outside the few towns and villages that dot the land.

Even the pro-Palestinian group Peace Now concedes that Israeli settlements - mostly bedroom communities of Jerusalem or Tel Aviv - occupy less than 3 percent of the West Bank. More than 98 percent of Palestinians already live under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority, and there is no shortage of land there for Palestinian expansion.

Moreover, Israeli professionals living a suburban life with their children in the vast expanse of these territories do not threaten or harm Palestinians. Israeli checkpoints and security measures have been implemented because Palestinians have seemed more interested in destroying Israel and killing Jews than establishing an independent Palestinian state.

Nor are Jewish settlements the result of Israeli colonial aspirations. Most represent the return of the Jewish people to the cities of their ancestors. As Twain painstakingly reported, Jews have lived here since time immemorial, and a drive through these territories highlights the Jewish history - cities, tombs and other landmarks - rooted in this land.

Yet it is not just ancient history that speaks to the great Jewish legacy. The Jewish presence has been a constant right up to modern times. While many bristle at the terms "Judea" and "Samaria," dismissing them as propaganda invented by extremist "settlers" for political ends, maps, photographs, travel guides and other books have throughout history described these territories by those time-honored names. Even United Nations resolutions - including, notably, the 1947 Partition resolution - used those terms.

Given this history, the rights of the Jewish people in these lands are rich, historic and firmly enshrined. While negotiations about sharing this land may be necessary for the sake of peace, they cannot proceed from a premise that these are "Palestinian lands" or occupied "Palestinian territory." They are, at most, "disputed territories."

Indeed, the Oslo Accords firmly recognized the issue of "settlements" as one of the "final status" issues to be addressed by negotiation after other, less difficult, issues were resolved.

It is wrong for the Obama administration to now seek to prejudice that delicate issue with pronouncements adopting the Palestinian narrative and actions designed to preclude the building of additions to homes and new units necessary to accommodate natural growth in existing Jewish settlements.

The thousands of young children who frequent the Rimonim pool look to the future like children anywhere. They seek only to grow up in peace, experience the joys of youth with sufficient room in their homes and schools and, ultimately, have the right to raise families in the communities that nurtured them from birth.

There is no morally sound reason for the Obama administration to challenge these basic rights.

Aron U. Raskas is a Baltimore attorney currently residing in Jerusalem. His e-mail is aronuraskas@gmail.com.

Isn't it sad when someone can just blindly print lies, and without an adjoining comparison piece present? Well, the internet is the Great Equalizer.

Paterson Threatens NY Senators With Loss Of Pay; Mark Sanford Shows His Feet Of Clay

AP Photo

New York State Governor David Paterson leaves a news conference at the Capitol in Albany, N.Y., Wednesday, June 24, 2009. Paterson said he would withhold senators' pay, and take them to court if they don't do their job.


Updated: 06/25/09 12:19 PM
Dueling factions in Albany working on an agreement
By Tom Precious
NEWS ALBANY BUREAU

ALBANY— Negotiators are working on an agreement so that state senators can begin passing long-stalled bills on Monday, the Democratic head of the GOP-led faction of the Senate said this morning.

Sen. Pedro Espada, in an interview at the Capitol, said he is confident a deal will be struck by tomorrow that will lead to "a resolution of the leadership issues and bring us back - 62 senators - to the Capitol on Monday."

"That's the course we're on," said Espada, the Bronx Democrat whose crossing the aisle on June 8 helped the Republicans take control of the Senate. He was made Senate president for his political help. A fellow Democrat who joined him in the coup has since flipped back, resulting in a 31-31 tie between the two factions.

Espada said staffs and legislative leaders have been talking all morning today about a deal that will keep intact "as close as we can" to the results of the June 8 coup that made him president and Sen. Dean Skelos, a Long Island Republican, the majority leader.

The lawmaker stressed that the sides for the first time are having cordial discussions. "You cannot have an honest dialogue with shields and swords raised and pointed at each other. We've gotten to the point where we're relaxed with each other to really start a negotiation in earnest," Espada said.

Espada said he realizes both factions want to come out of the talks with a "win win for everybody." Democrats have insisted they want at least one of the leadership posts taken during the coup.

Asked if the talks could lead to the Democrats getting one of those posts, Espada said, "We'll let's see what happens. If we approach it philosophically with a win win, if we try to live up to as close as we can to what happened legitimately and legally on June 8 then I think it's real progress."

Asked if that might mean he'd be willing to relinquish his title, Espada said, "No, because that would not be accurate."

Both sides at 3 p.m. are going into an extraordinary session ordered by Gov. David Paterson. Unless a major breakthrough occurs, one idea being floated is that the 31 Democrats will gavel into a session and then gavel out without taking up any bills because they will be one vote short of a quorum. Then Espada and the Republicans will gavel in and do the same.

The governor on Wednesday had vowed court action if the chamber shuttered during a special session that he had ordered.

Paterson's office issued a statement late Wednesday saying there was no need to seek a court order to get senators back to work.

"The leadership from both the Republicans and Democrats has notified my office that they will attend tomorrow's Extraordinary Session, Paterson's statement said. "By complying with their constitutionally mandated obligations, there will be no need to seek a court order tomorrow. However, I will continue to use every power at my disposal to ensure that the Senate gets back to the people's business."

When senators meets today, they will consider 10 new bills that Paterson wants approved.

Missing from today’s agenda are controversial bills Paterson sought Wednesday, such as one to legalize same-sex marriage.

While they will come to session, Democrats already contended that the gatherings are likely illegal. They insist they cannot act on legislation without the Assembly also here in special session. They pushed that point Wednesday by holding only a five-minute session after declaring Paterson’s call for a session unconstitutional.

“Are we kidding?” snapped Paterson, saying he would not call the Assembly back to have it reconsider bills that it already has approved. The Assembly had a simple retort: “The Assembly has passed these bills,” said Dan Weiller, an Assembly Democratic spokesman.

So went Day 17 of “Albany Held Hostage.”

It began with Democrats locking themselves in the chamber — two at a time in two-hour shifts — at 6 a. m. One would sit at the podium, the other in the majority leader’s chair to carry out what they believe is a legal statement that the Democrats control the house. At one point, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani checked in from afar, saying the state should hold a constitutional convention to remedy the parliamentary showdown now under way.

Neither side will recognize the other’s leadership claims — meaning that the Legislature has become, in essence, tricameral: an Assembly and two Senates. After a dueling session Tuesday, which saw shouting as lawmakers ran two sessions at the same time in the chamber, Republicans boycotted the Wednesday session.

Espada responded to the governor’s tongue-lashings Wednesday. “We don’t need lectures,” he said, accusing the governor of wanting “to be the ringleader to the circus” at the Capitol.

Espada and the GOP called for binding arbitration; Democrats said that would take too long, since dozens of state and local laws are set to expire Tuesday without Senate approval.

Earlier, Republicans were back in court, this time as plaintiffs. They want a state judge to order the Democratic-appointed Senate secretary — the chamber’s top staffer — to stop hindering GOP-led sessions. Angelo Aponte, who does not recognize the GOP control, has blocked access to actual bills, locked doors, and turned off microphones and cameras that supply Internet coverage.

State Supreme Court Justice Thomas McNamara, who a week ago tossed out a case by Democrats asking him to settle the coup dispute, was told by a GOP lawyer that the Senate under Aponte had been turned into a Third World-like chamber. A Democratic lawyer said the judge has no jurisdiction over internal Senate matters.

McNamara pleaded with the sides to resolve the dispute — for the good of the state. “I guess I’m talking like a human being, but I don’t understand what’s going on. You guys have to resolve this,” said the judge, who will rule Friday.

Paterson aides made sure that the media were on hand when his counsel, Peter Kiernan, hand-delivered to Senate Democratic and Republican lawyers copies of bills that the governor wanted considered Wednesday afternoon.

“The whole point of the governor calling these extraordinary sessions is to try to force the two sides to resolve this nonsense and get a working and functioning [Senate] majority,” Kiernan said, “because it’s paralyzing this state.”

tprecious@buffnews.com

Find this article at:
http://www.buffalonews.com/home/story/713908.html

I wish to salute Governor Paterson, and for ONE REASON ONLY - he is attempting to UPHOLD THE CONSTITUTION.

Remember that thing, fellow Americans? Written on hemp paper? Describes our rights? Shows established guidelines for proper government?

Yeah...that little thing.

Once again, kudos to Governor Paterson for his attempt to reestablish the will of WE THE PEOPLE.

In other news...Mark Sanford, once a contender for the Republican candidacy for 2012, has now screwed the pooch (no insult intended to the woman involved in the extramarital affair).