April 7, 2003
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April 28, 2003
Whole Body Health
The U.S. mass media's censored and sanitized coverage of the war in Iraq is chiefly responsible for the divergence in American and European public opinions.
The huge divergence between American and world public opinion polls on the war in Iraq reflects the vast differences in war reporting being done by U.S. and foreign mass media networks. Due to self-censorship and official restraints, which govern what U.S. media networks report, Americans are getting a distorted and "sanitized" version of events in Iraq while Europeans and others are much more likely to see news reports and images that convey the brutal reality of the war in Iraq.
The "sanitized" view of the war presented by the U.S. media is dominated by long-distance photos of missile attacks and battlefield scenes reported by reporters who are traveling with U.S. and British soldiers.
Although some 500 reporters are "embedded" with U.S. and British forces in Iraq, their reports from the field are subject to U.S. military embedding restrictions, which give troop commanders control over what can be reported.
An unspoken rule, according to USA Today, is that "negative stories" are "viewed as unpatriotic." This direct and indirect censorship has resulted in Americans receiving a "sanitized" view of the war, despite "vivid footage" from the front lines. The difference in how the war is covered is readily apparent from the disturbing images published by European and Asian news networks - but censored by the U.S. media.
Bild, Germany's most popular newspaper known for its illustrations, carried a headline "Bloody slaughter for Baghdad" on March 26. The front page was taken up with a large photo of an injured U.S. marine, with a number scrawled on his forehead, being carried by another marine from the battlefield.
The following pages presented photos of captured U.S. helicopter pilots, a missing 19-year-old female soldier from West Virginia, and grisly images of the war under the headline, "Hundreds of corpses lie in the desert."
However, the U.S. equivalent of Bild, USA Today, like most American newspapers, censors the unpleasant realities of war by keeping disturbing images out of the paper.
On the same day that Bild carried the "Bloody slaughter" headline with photos of injured, captured, and killed U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians, the lead story on USA Today's on-line news page was about the blooming of Washington's cherry blossoms.
"The Arab world sees pictures of bloodied bodies of young children. They watch scenes crowded with corpses, including gruesome images of dead American soldiers. Americans see almost none of that," The Boston Globe reported on March 26.
"Friends from Syria are sending e-mails to me, asking what are the people in the U.S. telling you about the images of civilian casualties," said Imad Moustapha, chief of public diplomacy at the Syrian Embassy in Washington. "My answer to them is very simple and sad: `Sorry, no one is seeing those images here.' "
A U.S. diplomat in the region told the Globe that the difference in reporting between the U.S. networks CNN and Fox News on the one hand, and the Arabic al Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV networks on the other, made it seem like he was watching different battles.
"The Arab world is seeing trips to the hospitals, grieving parents, while the American cable stations and networks are showing the troops in the field," the diplomat said. "The trouble is, it is creating different memories of the war, and it will reinforce the anger here about what the U.S. is doing."
When a Baghdad marketplace was hit by missiles, which reportedly killed and injured dozens of Iraqi civilians on March 26, U.S. Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, deputy director of operations in Qatar, rejected out-of-hand the allegation that coalition bombs had hit the market and blamed the Iraqis for killing their own civilians. Brooks said he did not "accept the premise . . . that civilians have been killed by coalition bombs."
Suggesting that Iraqis had killed the civilians in the market, Brooks said: "Iraqi civilians (are) being marched out in front of irregular formations while they are firing. Iraqi civilians are being killed on the battlefield by Iraqis. I can't make that point more strongly than I've just done."
Hafez al-Mirazi, Washington bureau chief for the Qatar-based Arabic-language al Jazeera news network, said he was surprised by the U.S. reaction to the broadcast of the footage of the dead Americans and pointed out that his network had carried equally gruesome footage of dead Iraqis.
U.S. Army Lt. Gen. John Abizaid, deputy commander of Combined Forces Command in Qatar, criticized al Jazeera for broadcasting the images.
"The pictures were disgusting," Abizaid said, adding that he did not want other stations to show the video.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said al Jazeera was portraying the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in a negative light. Powell accused the Arabic-language satellite broad caster of a lack of objectivity in covering the war.
"'The U.S. media did not carry anything from us of those casualties," al-Mirazi said. "The American TV carries us live when there is bombing in the skies of Baghdad, the shock and awe. But when it comes to the casualties from the Iraqi or the American side, they don't want to see it.
"If we didn't show them, that would not be realistic journalism," he said. "In America, there is some kind of difference of perspective and environment. The American audience is more accustomed to video games, particularly after the Gulf War of 1991. In the Middle East and the Arab world, people are accustomed to seeing the corpses," he said. "They see the victims of these conflicts."
"But this emphasis on war game imagery is not serving Americans well," Marian Wilkenson, Washington correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald wrote. "Outside the U.S., pictures from al Jazeera of injured Iraqis, burnt children and crying mothers are being transmitted throughout the Arab world and much of Europe. If the conflict intensifies, this will increase. And Americans will have little idea why the war is instilling such antagonism in the Arab world."
While the "most dramatic news of the day," including images of captured U.S. military personnel, was flashed around the world, most Americans did not see the pictures or hear the news, Wilkenson said, due to pressure from the U.S. military.
"The U.S. media censored the story after warnings, threats and exhortations from the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld," Wilkenson wrote, "who said the Geneva Convention makes it illegal for prisoners of war to be `shown and pictured and humiliated.' "
Al Jazeera's English-language and Arabic web sites were both shut down after a spate of suspected hacker attacks on March 25.
Al Jazeera is the most popular Arabic web site in the world. Both it and its English-language web site (english.aljazeera.net), which was only launched on Monday, March 24, were unavailable after suspected attacks crashed both sites.
Managing editor Joanne Tucker said the English site could not be updated for hours on Tuesday.
"We've had a lot of obstacles thrown in our way," Tucker said. "I thought the launch would be quite smooth and wouldn't make too many waves, but the reaction has been amazing. It has been almost surreal."
Speaking from the broadcaster's headquarters in Doha, Qatar, communications manager Jihad Ali Ballout said the company was working to get the sites up and running. "Our people are doing our best but it could take some time," he said.
Asked where the attacks originated, Ali Ballout said: "I
wish I knew. There are rumors that the attacks originated in the
U.S. but at this moment in time we cannot verify that. But it
is worrying and an indication perhaps [that] in certain quarters
there is a fear of freedom of expression and freedom of the press."
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The world's financial and political elite plan to hold their annual secret meeting at a posh French resort near the Palace of Versailles.
Bilderberg
will hold its annual secret meeting at the luxurious Trianon Palace
Hotel in Versailles, France May 15-18. The meeting dovetails with
the Group of Seven meeting of finance ministers in Paris the day
after Bilderberg concludes, on May 19 in Paris. Paris is only
a 20-minute drive from Versailles.
International financiers and political leaders from Europe and North America will be conducting public business behind closed doors at the palatial resort. Banker David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger and high officials of the government and congressional leaders will participate, all pledging absolute secrecy.
Members of the Rothschild family from Europe and Britain will attend, along with high government officials.
Jim Hoagland will attend for the Washington Post and keep his secrecy. Publisher Donald Graham normally attends although he missed last year's session in Chantilly, Va. The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and NBC, CBS, and ABC have also been represented at Bilderberg meetings, binding themselves to a promise of secrecy.
Taxpayers will pay the travel cost for U.S. officials and lawmakers. It is against federal law for administration officials to hold secret meetings with non-officials to plan public policy. American officials will again ignore this law.
Central to the agenda will be planning post-war Iraq. France and Germany had extensive business relationships with pre-war Iraq and opposed the U.S. invasion. But what to do with Iraq's oil will be debated.
By noon on Wednesday, May 14, the Trianon Palace Hotel will be emptied of all non-Bilderberg guests. Employees of short duration will be sent home. Employees who remain will have been sternly told they will be fired and blacklisted if they reveal anything about what transpires. They will be told not to speak to a Bilderberg participant unless spoken to and never look one in the eye.
In the early afternoon on Wednesday, armed guards will begin patrolling the grounds and barriers placed at the entrance - removed only for personnel and Bilderberg staff. Bilderberg's private security of plainclothesmen will be in evidence. The advance staff will arrive with portfolios for each Bilderberg participant showing who is attending and listing the agenda.
Both uniformed guards and private security will be shown photographs of American Free Press reporter Jim Tucker and possibly others from Europe and Britain who have become "regular" at Bilderberg meetings in recent years.
Reporters have been held in jail for hours for asking questions
outside bilderberg gates. In Sintra, Portugal, guards boasted
of sharpshooters on high rocks who could kill trespassers at night.
So far, it is not known for certain that shots have been fires.
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Cast aside all your misconceptions. The United Nations is no longer the foundation for global rule by a powerful elite. Instead, the New World Order elite not sees the military might of the United States as the vehicle to install a global regime.
Talk of "the American Empire" is in the air. Diverse elite media publications such as U.S. News & World Report and The New York Times Magazine are now bringing into the open what American Free Press was first to warn about as early as its Sept. 24, 2001 issue: the fact that the United States- rather than the United Nations - is emerging as the real driving force behind the long-dreamed-for New World Order.
Indications are that the global elite is preparing to cut loose the United Nations and cast it aside. But don't start celebrating too quickly.
While the demise of the UN may sound like "good news" to many Americans who have spent years fighting the global body in the hope of derailing the push for what the first President Bush described as a "New World Order," there's much more to the story than meets the eye.
In fact, the assorted member states of the United Nations - with the notable exception of the U.S.-Britain-Israel Axis - are actually the very bulwark of opposition to the New World Order. That has happened is that the vast majority of member states that make up the UN are not "going along with the program" and refused to endorse the demand for war against Iraq.
Rather than advancing the New World Order agenda by supporting the intended effort to destroy the "rogue" regime of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, UN officials - supported by nations around the globe (even including such traditional U.S. "Allies" as France and Germany) - actively stood in the way of the drive for war.
That the global elite are preparing to ditch the United Nations was made apparent in an intriguing editorial in the Jan. 26 edition of The Washington Post, the voice of the global elite in Washington. In its editorial, the Post aimed its guns at the UN.
According to the Post, If the UN Security Council refuses to come down hard on Iraq, "council members will have to decide whether to preserve the credibility of the UN - or hand over the enforcement of global order to the United States.
In other words, the United States will now have to assume the responsibility of "the enforcement of global order: - that is, be the vehicle for advancing the New World Order.
This is not the first time that the Post has boosted American imperialism. As ARP pointed out in its Sept. 24, 2001 issue, a new form of "conservative imperialism" with roots in the ranks of an elite group of "former" Trotskyite leftists had emerged as the driving force among top-level policy makers in the George W. Bush administration.
And while the very liberal Washington Post had never been fond of conservatives, during the past decade, as the so-called "conservative movement" increasingly adopted a George bush-style internationalist world view - abandoning the traditional "America first" stance exemplified by Republican nationalists such as the late Sen. Robert A Taft (R-Ohio) - the Post began to trumpet conservatives who now support a new brand of imperialism - the concept of U.S. interventionism and meddling abroad.
On Aug. 21, 2001 the Post featured an article entitled, "Empire or not? A quiet debate over U.S. role" which it billed as one in a series of occasional articles focusing on "Ideas from the Right." The article led off by commenting:
People who label the United States "imperialist" usually mean it as an insult. But in recent years a handful of conservative defense intellectuals have begun to argue that the United States is indeed acting in an imperialist fashion - and that it should embrace the role.
The Post said that his idea of enforcing a new "Pax Americana" is part of a vigorous, expanionistic Reaganite foreign policy" that makes the United States in the Post's words, "an empire of democracy or liberty."
Under this new form of imperialism, the United States is not conquering land or establishing colonies in the style of the old British and Roman empires, but instead "has a dominating global presence military, economically and culturally."
One of the foremost advocates of this new imperialism is Thomas Connelly, deputy executive director of the Project for the New American Century, a Washington think tank organized by William Kristol, a key figure in the pro9Israel lobby. The Post noted that while Kristol's henchman, Donnelly, "has few open supporters, " Donnelly himself contended that many conservative leaders privately agree with him.
"There's not all that many people who will talk about it openly," says Donnelly. "It's discomforting to a lot of Americans. So they use code phrases like ‘America is the sole superpower.'"
So it is that for years as American patriots anxiously looked over their shoulders, worrying about "UN troops on American soil, enforcing the diktat of the New World Order," the real danger was right here at home all along.
It was only after the 9-11 terrorist tragedies that the New World Order elite unveiled their real plan - carefully wrapping it in red-white-and-blue bunting.
In the name of "homeland security" and "patriotism" with American flags flapping bold in the breeze and ensconced in the lapel pins of high-level policy makers in official Washington - an all-out police state apparatus was established under the very noses of the American people who were being readied for an all-out global offensive under the guise of "fighting terrorism" and "advancing democracy" abroad.
It was not "liberals" like Bill and Hillary Clinton or their Waco henchwoman, Janet Reno, who did all this. Instead, the all-out push for a police state in America - and a worldwide empire under the rule of that same police state - came under the regime of George W. Bush - now frequently described as "the new Ronald Reagan' - and his attorney general, John Ashcroft, the "deeply religious" pro-Israel zealot whose first official act after assuming office was to order the first-ever federal SWAT-team raid on a Christian church: the Indianapolis Baptist Temple.
As the United States begins rattling its powerful saber around the globe - with Iraqi leader saddam Hussein being only the first rebel leader marked for extinction - a new American empire is being established.
And many Americans are supporting it - in the name of "patriotism" when, in fact, patriotism has nothing to do with it.
The emerging new American empire is the New World Order and
America's real patriots had better get that straight.
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Bilderberg's passion for secrecy is because evil is conducted in the dark of night while good works are performed in the sunshine.
Last June, after infiltrating Bilderberg at Chantilly, Va. American Free Press revealed there would be no war with Iraq in 2002. The mainstream media was predicting war "by late summer or early fall."
The now-defunct Spotlight was the only newspaper to expose Bilderberg for 20 years. Based on information obtained by infiltrating Bilderberg meetings all over Europe and North America, Spotlight readers learned months in advance that:
The Cold war would end, Minister Margaret Thatcher would be ousted as prime minister of Britain by her own Conservative Party, new taxes would be imposed on Americans, and an obscure governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, was a likely president, among other news beats.
For Decades after its first meeting under the name Bilderberg in 1954, they denied their existence. Bilderberg was a "right-wing" mirage, a product of paranoia.
The Bilderberg-mandated news blackout remains complete in the United States, with the exception of American Free Press and, before that, the now defunct Spotlight.
Bilderberg enforced its media blackout by inviting high officials of The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, ABC, NBC, CBS and other broadcasters to participate - their promise of binding, unending secrecy.
This keeps Associated Press, the world's dominant news service, silent on Bilderberg. AP operates like a farmers' cooperative. Large metropolitan papers and broadcast networks pay far more for AP's wire services than papers and independent broadcasters with small-city circulations.
Thus, when the media giants say they want no coverage of Bilderberg, they prevail. This keeps small-city editors and broadcasters ignorant because they depend entirely on AP for news outside the town limits.
Liberty Lobby, which burst onto the national scene in 1955, began exposing Bilderberg in its membership newsletters, Liberty Letter and Liberty Lowdown. But most of the public shrugged it off. Sen. James Buckley (R-N.Y.) Denied the existence of bilderberg in a letter to Liberty Lobby at the same time his National Review founder William Buckley, was attending a Bilderberg meeting.
Spotlight, too, was a lonely voice exposing Bilderberg for some years. Then European readers began alerting their local newspapers and broadcast outlets. Since then, there has been an annual blizzard of Bilderberg publicity in Europe, including major newspapers.
Why the total blackout in the mainstream media in the United States? There can be no other explanation except they are collaborating in a criminal conspiracy to hide Bilderberg's evil acts in manipulating world events and the economy for their selfish interests. With the tinkling of a cocktail glass, they have set off wars that spilled the lifeblood of America's young men.
Taxpayers pay the travel costs of high government executives and legislators who attend Bilderberg and they don't fly coach. It is against federal law for government officials to meet secretly with private citizens to plan public policy, but Bilderberg has been immune to this law for half a century.
Newspapermen are unable to shrug off bilderberg as "not newsworthy." for more than 20 years, I have confronted colleagues at the National Press Club in Washington by answering a question with a question.
"If 120 professional football players, or 120 film stars, met secretly for three days in a sealed-off resort behind armed guards, you would try to learn what transpired.
"Why then, is there no interest when 120 of the world's most powerful men - international financiers, heads of states, high officials - meet secretly?"
They have no answer because there is none. But each year, numerous newspapermen ask for copies of the newspaper exposing the latest Bilderberg meeting and make machine copies of Bilderberg documents acquired.
Many have said the Spotlight, and now AFP, performs an important service not only for the public at this time but for history, too, so that future generations will know how news is managed in this country.
But they dare not suggest that their own newspaper or TV station
mention the forbidden word: Bilderberg.
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Not only the current war on Iraq but also the likelihood that the United States will next invade Iran were widely discussed at a huge conference in Washington sponsored by a powerful Israeli lobby.
The Bush administration, in what it unethically called an "off-the-record" session, strongly implied that the United States would invade Iran once the fighting ends in Iraq.
A three-day session of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which ended April 1 in Washington, was attended by about 5,000 advocates of Israel-first policies, including half the Senate and one-third of the House.
After the Iraq War, the United States will place an "extremely high priority" on halting a secret nuclear weapons program in Iran, said John Bolton, under secretary of state for disarmament. He stopped short of saying this country would invade Iran, knowing the absurd "off-the-record" demand wouldn't hold when speaking before thousands of people.
Along with Bolton, a parade of top Bush administration officials attended the confab, including Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Political Director Kenneth Mehlman and Assistant Secretary of State William Burns. Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and Leon S. Fuerth, the former foreign policy adviser to Al Gore, also were in attendance.
The off-the-record nonsense caused "discomfort for the lobbying group," reported The Chicago Tribune, because of "the perception among some political commentators that Jewish groups unduly influenced the Bush administration's decision to wage war against Iraq."
Some commentators say "prominent Jews within the administration conspired to persuade the president to target Iraq because of the threat Saddam Hussein poses to Israel," the Tribune reported.
However, the fact that officials at the highest level of government took time off from war-related efforts to speak at an event sponsored by a lobbying firm indicates the sway this group holds in Washington, noted some observers.
While, for tactical reasons, the Israeli lobby took no position on whether the United States should invade Iraq, participants celebrated the war with one voice.
"We have followed with great admiration your efforts to mobilize the international community to disarm Iraq and bring democracy and peace to the region, to the Middle East and to the rest of the world," Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said in a tribute to Powell.
The Washington Post explained the lobby's "sensitivity" about publicly supporting the war:
"Anything that links Israel to the current war could alienate
friendly Arab states by suggesting the war is driven by Israel's
interests. At home, the embrace of the war by an organization
of influential Jews could fuel anti-Semitic conspiracy theories."
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Around the world, anti-American talk and attitudes are clearly on the rise since America's war of aggression against Iraq commenced March 20.
Several Russian officials have condemned American unilateral action in rhetorical styles no heard since the Brezhnev era. On March 26, the U.S. government threatened that Russia will not have "access" to Iraqi oil in a "new Iraq," so reports Interfax, and international news consortium specializing in Eastern European affairs.
Russian access to Iraqi oil would be up to the "new Iraq," which is another way of saying that it is up to the American evaluation of Russian "cooperation."
"Russia's role in Iraq's postwar rehabilitation depends on the position on Iraq that Moscow hammers out within the next few weeks or months," said U.S. Ambassador to Russia Alexander Vershbow.
Alexander Panarin, professor of political science at Moscow State has said: ‘I can't remember seeing such sharp anti-American moods in Russia since the 1960s."
The upper house of the Russian legislature, the Federation
Council, issued a strongly worded condemnation of American actions
in Iraq by saying:
The United States has been bringing about an act of aggression against the Republic of Iraq since March 20, 2003. Such actions violate very important provisions of the United Nations Charter, and, in addition, ignore international law and global public opinion. Contrary to the statements of American leaders, this military operation is killing people, civilians, every day. Iraq's economic and social infrastructure is being destroyed; moreover, the environmental situation continues to deteriorate.
Just as powerfully, Vladimir Putin, the Russian president has stated that the Iraq War is "the most serious crisis since the end of the Cold War." The war is "in danger of altering global stability and the basis of international law." And further that "the sole correct solution to the problem of Iraq is an immediate end to military activity there and the resumption of a political settlement in the UN Security Council."
The Americans have said that U.S. troops are at risk because the Russians allegedly sold Iraq jamming equipment that interferes with the Global Positioning System technology as well as anti-tank weapons three years ago.
The company that produces them, Aviakonversiya of Moscow, claims that it ships the Iraqis parts, and they assemble the weapons, thereby getting around Iraqi import controls; some of this was done more recently.
This was not enough to satisfy the Americans.
Afterward, the Russians accused the United States of sending its U-2 spy planes into Russian airspace from Georgia, a country on the pro-American side in Iraq. The Russian Ministry of Defense scrambled fighters to stop the spy plane missions before the U.S. backed off.
"Such rhetoric has not been seen since the Cold War," said Alexander Pikayev of the Carnegie Endowment.
Making matters, coming from this recent rhetorical warfare between Russia and the United States, the Russian Foreign Ministry has formally submitted a letter of protest to the State Department, accusing the U.S. of Making "concealed threats" through U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Vershbow, who is vocal in criticizing Russia for selling military equipment to Iraq.
Vershbow also said to Russian diplomats that it was becoming "increasingly unsafe" for them to remain in Baghdad. Memories of the U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade quickly came to their minds.
Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov rejected any legitimacy to the American led and controlled war, saying: "Iraq does not need democracy brought on the wings of the Tomahawk." He also clearly stated that Russia will veto all future American moves at the Security Council.
Bamous Russian journalist Sergei Chugasyev spoke for the general Russian attitude when he wrote last week in Komsomolskaya Pravada No.53:
The Statue of Liberty may be sent to a museum of the latter half of the 20th century together with its ideals that appear to be funny today, with its naive world outlook and its unfounded philosophy. A museum commemorating the "Free World," the moral leader of which the U.S. was believed to be, a country that used to serve as an example for...mankind - a paragon country. The paragon is no more.
Even more serious, the Pravda article warned:
The new world order that existed until recently is changing radically. Not the states will have to look for new ideas and new alliances. The consequences of this search may be far more serious for the U.S. than possible benefits obtained form the redistribution of control over flows of oil and money.
New alliances are beginning to form against the United states and the "mono-polar" world of the New World Order. This is significant particularly given anti-American statements issued from official German and French sources, as well as from the Chinese and other global powerhouses.
The post-Cold War era is under attack, and much of the civilized world is now actively seeking alliances to balance the United States due to the Bush administration's war against the entire Arab world.
According to the March 26 issue of the Russian newspaper, Pravda, the vice speaker of the Duma, Vladimir Averchenko, also the first deputy chairman of the People's Party, believes that an invasion of Russia by American forces is coming soon.
"America plans to seize 15 percent of the world's oil reserve located in Iraq. To achieve the goal, Americans kill Iraqi children and old people," Averchenko said. "Russia holds 37 percent of the world oil reserve, and there is no guarantee that Americans don't have an intention to attack Russia next.
M. Raphael Johnson is the editor of the authentic historical
magazine The Barnes Review.
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American and Asian military analysts are fearful that the Bush administration's decision to wage an aggressive war against Iraq is emboldening North Korea which has stepped up efforts to expand its nuclear weapons program.
Experts are fearful that the communist North Koreans may launch a sneak attack across the demilitarized zone (DMZ) that has separated the two Koreas since 1953.
They believed that the strident Marxist regime ruling the North may decide to take advantage of the U.S. military being tied down with the war on Iraq.
North Korea sent a recent message to the U.S.-led UN Command stating it will no longer send its delegates to the liaison officers' meeting at the border village of Panmunjom, where military representatives of both sides have met almost weekly since the war ended.
"It is meaningless to sit together with the U.S. forces to discuss any issue as long as it remains arrogant," the North Koreans said.
They claimed they are fearful that when the U.S. is finished with Iraq it plans to turn against them, sparking a "second Iraq crisis."
The North Koreans announced the end to the meetings after they broadcast that they were "reserving the right" to process fuel rods from a nuclear plant they had restarted at Yongbong that experts say could yield enough plutonium for several atomic bombs within months.
A retired Air Force intelligence officer attached to the top secret National Security Agency (NSA), who spent years in Korea working on South Korean and U.S. electronic defenses against the North, told American Free Press that the North Koreans most likely already have two or three nuclear warheads or bombs.
The United States does not have sufficient men or weaponry to halt a North Korean invasion of South Korea.
Of 37,000 U.S. troops in south Korea abut 14,000 are deployed along the DMZ.
U.S. officials bristle when the U.S. force in South Korea is referred to as a "tripwire," giving the implication that they would serve as a sacrifice to slow down a large North Korean invasion force until reinforcements can arrive.
Even under the "tripwire" concept, the hope of sending sufficient reinforcements to South Korea to turn back an invasion is unrealistic.
The U.S. military has 10 active divisions, eight of which are already deployed to the Persian Gulf, Bosnia and Afghanistan.
The U.S. Navy is today only a shadow of its former self.
It has been reduced by four battleship battle groups of 10 or so ships each. The battleships, Iowa, Missouri, New Jersey and Wisconsin have been removed from the lines.
Now the Navy has 12 carrier battle groups, five of which are deployed to the Persian Gulf, three are under going extensive maintenance and the forth has just been removed from a maintenance period but is not yet ready for sea duty. This leaves only three available for action, one f which has been dispatched to waters of the Korean Peninsula.
This leaves two capable of deployment.
Even if both reserve carriers were sent to Korea they would not be sufficient to turn the tide of a North Korean invasion of the South.
North Korea has developed long-range missiles that are capable of hitting just about anywhere in the continental United States and South Korea and Japan. The missiles are capable of carrying nuclear warheads, as well as stores of chemical and biological weapons.
Recent public opinion polls, taken largely among an American populace that is less than well informed, show Americans believe that North Korea presents a far greater threat than Iraq.
"America is simply not prepared for a war with Iraq and
North Korea at the same time and would be forced to stem the tide
in Korea only by using nuclear weapons, which could ignite Wor;d
War III," the retired officer said.
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President Bush is stealth bombing the voters with a new, secret free trade agreement.
United States and Chilean negotiators have surreptitiously approved the definite draft for a free trade agreement between both countries, signaling the end of nearly two years of talks held behind the backs of civil society and legislators alike.
Chilean chief negotiator Osvaldo Rosales stated on March 29 that once the translation in both Spanish and English was ready, President George W. Bush "will be in condition to announce the date in which the free trade agreement will be signed."
U.S. and Chilean authorities say that the agreement will be ratified by Congress before autumn of 2003.
Bush had already notified Congress on Jan. 30 his intent to commit the United States to a trade agreement with Chile, only a month after both nations concluded negotiations in Washington.
Even as Bush and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick commended the alleged virtues of the agreement —which was obediently echoed by Chile's President Ricer do Lagos—many questioned the most ominous implications that it would have for both countries.
Although the impact of Chile's gross domestic product (GDP) is negligible to an economy such as that of the United States with an economic output more than 130 times greater than that of Chile—less enthusiastic analysts have highlighted the negative effects that the agreement can bring.
The trade agreement with Chile signals for the United States the stepping stone for what former President George H.W. Bush envisioned as the Free Trade Area of the Americas, an 800-million-person market extending from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego encompassing every nation in the Americas except for communist Cuba.
The agreement's impact for the United States will accordingly be seen in the cumulative effect of associating itself with a number of economies that are able to produce at a cheaper cost than the American industry. However, the proposed pact will also provide fertile ground for unscrupulous capitalists to move their businesses south of the border just like they have done in Mexico thanks to NAFTA.
Chile's authorities were also quick in congratulating themselves after the successful end of 14 rounds of trade talks, promising their people a number of alleged benefits that the agreement would bring to their country after nearly four years of economic slowdown and a national unemployment rate consistently bordering on 10 percent.
The administration of Lagos nonetheless hid the fact that more than 95 percent of Chile's exports to the United States are natural resources with little or no manufacture, the bulk of which is comprised of highly de valued copper. Given how on average the United States applies a meager 0.7 percent tariff to such imported products, there is little for Chile to gain when such import barriers are eventually removed.
In contrast, Chile's agribusiness industry, which exports such value-added products as canned and frozen fruit, along with sensitive goods such as wheat, will see how a large part of its output will only be relieved of duties within a 12-year period.
A particularly critical issue for agribusiness is the removal of Chilean price supports—affecting products such as wheat and beet sugar—within a 12-year period. Only a few months ago, the authorities promised local producers that they would never remove the important protective mechanism, under which import duties for a given product may vary according to its price level.
The wheat industry, which provides work for some 60,000 Chileans, had been successful in maintaining the implementation of price supports for the country's trade agreements with Canada and the European Union. Understandably so, the unexpected concession to U.S. negotiators proved to be a huge blow for local producers.
Nonetheless, what is perhaps the most important point of contention regarding the agreement is the forceful removal of Chile's reserve requirements, one of the few financial protections implemented by the country's Central Bank in order to prevent the rapacious effects of speculative capital.
Reserve requirements, a fraction of a bank's deposits that it must withhold from loans or investments in order to maintain a protective reserve, were widely used by Chile during the 1990s.
Financial analysts contend that their implementation was pivotal in sheltering the Chilean economy from the massive capital flight experienced during the Asian economic crisis, which ravaged neighboring Argentina as well as immersed South America in a profound economic crisis.
Concern over the dismantling of the Chilean financial controls was even shared by a handful of Democrat legislators during a hearing at the House Financial Services Committee on April 1. The session dealt with objections to the Bush administration's proposal to push trade agreements with Chile and Singapore.
During the hearing, Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati stressed the importance of capital controls in preventing a financial crisis. A similar observation had already been made in February by his colleague Joseph Stiglitz—recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Science in 2001—who noted: "capital restrictions meant that when Latin America was sent into recession and depression" during the 1990s "Chile was spared largely."
In marked contrast to its depressed neighbors, Chile boasted for most of the past decade an average 7 percent growth in its GDP.
CONVERSATIONS MIRED IN SECRECY
If its patent shortcomings were not enough, civil activists both in the United States and Chile have issued repeated complaints against the utmost secrecy in which the negotiations were carried out. According to Rodrigo Pizarro, a Chilean economist from the London School of Economics, information on the agreements was never given to interested legislators, leading him to point out that negotiations lacked "democratic legitimacy" and amounted "to a way of governance that is unacceptable."
Already in December, the U.S. environmental group Earthjustice had secured a landmark victory at the U.S. District Court of Washington as a judge ruled against the U.S. trade representative's desire to conceal all documents related to the negotiations with Chile.
On the occasion, Earthjustice's director of international programs, Martin Wagner, pointed out how the "U.S.-Chile trade agreement is yet another back-room deal, like NAFTA and GATT, created behind closed doors by special interests who seem allergic to any public oversight or transparency."
Although U.S. Trade Representative Zoellick has not yet disclosed the full text of the agreement to the public, he already presented the deal to what was officially described in a Feb. 28 release as "31 advisory committees, comprising over 700 practitioners representing diverse interests and views."
Even as the agreement was predictably commended by big business
representatives, the labor advisory committee, headed by former
President of United Steel workers George Becker, released a strongly-worded
condemnation of the pact, pointing out how the deal repeated "the
same mistakes of" NAFTA and would likely "lead to the
same deteriorating trade balances, lost jobs, trampled rights
and inadequate economic development."
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As usual Congress couldn't resist seeding a bill to fund the country's war efforts in Iraq with money for special interests.
The president asked Congress recently to authorized new funding for the war in Iraq, which was not paid for in the wasteful budget recently passed in the House of Representatives.
You might assume that Congress would simply approve legislation that pays for military supplies and hardware, troop wages, ammunition, fuel, food and the like. In other words, the bread and butter items that our troops need to prosecute the war in Iraq.
We must undersand that America is in a financial crisis. Tax revenues are down due to the faltering economy, but congressional spending has exploded by more than 22 percent in just two years. As a result, annual deficits have risen rapidly, and the national debt now approaches $6.5 trillion. Almost all of this new spending has been completely unrelated to homeland defense or national security concerns. The same old failed domestic agencies and special-interest pork programs have received the bulk of the dollars. While Congress should fund constitutional federal functions like national defense, our very solvency as a nation is being threatened by unconstitutional spending.
Here are some examples of what ended up in the "war funding" bill:
* $3.2 billion for an airline bailout - even though the airlines
always seem to be troubled and always feel they deserve tax money.
If we bail out the airlines, why not the hotels, restaurants,
and rental car agencies that have been affected by 9-11 and the
war in Iraq? Why ot every industry that's suffering?
* $125 million for congressional security, to make sure members
are safe even if the country is not;
* $11 million for salaries and expenses for the House of Representatives,
who already approved a pay raise for themselves last fall;
* $250 million for Department of Agriculture grants;
* $69 million for something called the Bill Emerson Humanitarian
Trust;
* $5.5 million for the Library of Congress;
* $6.8 million for the Congressional Research Service and General
Accounting Office;
* $100.000 for the U.S. Court of International Trade.
The bill also includes $8 billion in foreign aid, which is especially egregious given the state of the American economy. How can we ask taxpayers to send billions abroad with things so tough for many here at home?
The $8 billion includes:
* $1 billion in for Israel;
* $1 billion in "economic assistance" for Turkey, even
though it refused to let America use its bases to stage our assault
on Iraq and has only gudgingly allowed use of its airspace;
* $700 million for Jordon;
* $500 million for Egypt;
* $127 million for Afghanistan;
* $175 million for Pakistan;
* $170 million to train the "Afghan National Army."
The list goes on and on. All of this is of course in addition to the standard foreign aid we send these nations and many others every year.
These are just some examples of how Congress takes every possible opportunity to spend your money, even when it should be focused on the war in Iraq. Was it really too much to ask for a clean bill to fund the president's request, a bill unencumbered by port handouts and useless foreign aid? Apparently not even war can prevent Congress from shamelessly sticking its hands in your pockets while cloaking itself in "support the troops" retoric.
Rep. Ron Paul is a congressman from Texas.
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Congress does much gurgling over supporting "our troops" while at the same time, slashing veterans benefits.
House Republicans are pressing ahead with their budget resolution that contains nearly $30 billion in cuts to veterans programs over the next 10 years. I passed the House on a narrow 215-212 vote and is now in conference to resolve differences with the Senate version.
The budget resolution, which is a blueprint for final budget legislation, cuts compensation for service-connected disabilities by $14.6 billion and cuts veterans' health care funding by $14.2 billion, both over the next 10 years.
More than 12 percent of the population, of 26.5 million Americans, are veterans, according to the Census Bureau. Many were promised lifetime health care as an inducement to enlist, but now the Veterans Affairs Department has reneged on this promise and it was sustained by the courts.
If these cuts survive, "We will be turning our backs on these men and women who were told they would get the education, disability and health care benefits they so rightfully deserve," Rep. James Moran (D-Va.) Wroted in a local weekly, The Falls Church News-Press.
The American Legion, Disabled Veterans of America and the Paralyzed
Veterans of America all oppose these cuts in the budget resolution.
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The wholesale looting and destruction of Iraq's cultural heritage—described as a "global catastrophe" — occurred when U.S. military forces were withdrawn from sites, allowing the plundering to continue.
The U.S. military, which became the occupying power after ousting the regime in Baghdad and other cities, is being blamed for allowing the wholesale plundering and destruction of Iraq's museums and libraries. Because the U.S. military chose not to protect important cultural sites, places that it had been advised in advance to guard, while it protected others, some say there appears to have been a secret agreement to allow Mesopotamia's cultural treasures to be stolen or destroyed.
Adding to the controversy, a number of historians and archaeologists have claimed that some of the looters targeted specific priceless artifacts and had keys to vaults.
"It looks as if part of the looting was a deliberate planned action," said McGuire Gibson, president of the American Association for Research in Baghdad and a University of Chicago professor. "They were able to take keys for vaults and were able to take out important Mesopotamian materials put in safes. I have a suspicion it was organized outside the country."
The looting of the National Museum of Iraq, considered to have been the world's greatest repository of Mesopotamian culture with thousands of artifacts up to 7,000 years old, began early on Thursday, April 10, according to media reports, and continued through Friday.
"This is a terrible tragedy," Dr. John Curtis of the British Museum said. "Iraq is the cradle of civilization and this was a museum which contained a large portion of the world's cultural heritage."
At midday on April 17, Raid Abdul Ridhar Mohammed, an Iraqi archaeologist went looking for U.S. troops to come to the museum to stop the plundering. As reported in The New York Times, Mohammed found a U.S. Abrams tank in Museum Square. Five Marines followed him to the museum and opened fire over the heads of the looters.
This drove several thousand looters away in minutes, Mohammed said, but when the Marines and the tank left after 30 minutes, the looters returned and the plundering continued.
Nothing more was done to prevent what became the total destruction of the contents of the museum. Not a single pot or display case remained intact, according to witnesses, after the 48-hour rampage at the museum.
Patty Gerstenblith, law professor at Chicago's DePaul University, said the looting of the museums of Iraq was "completely inexcusable and avoidable."
Mobs wrecked and sacked Baghdad's government buildings, hospitals, museums and libraries, while U.S. troops protected the Ministry of Oil and Ministry of Interior.
Arsonists torched Iraq's National Library, in which countless priceless artifacts and books were lost. Even the Ministry for Religious Affairs, where a building housing thousands of Korans, many of them illuminated and hand written, several thousand years old, had been burned to a charred shell.
"When Baghdad fell to the Mongols in 1258, these books survived," said Abdel Karim Anwar Obeid, the ministry's general manager, "And now they didn't survive. You can't put a price on this loss."
Many Iraqis are convinced that U.S. troops encouraged the looting, according to Financial Times reporters in Baghdad. "I told the American major, you caused this," said an Iraqi who leads a neighborhood committee in Baghdad. "You wanted to overthrow the government, so you should have taken responsibility for security. If you'd put just one soldier on each government building, this wouldn't have happened."
The German Embassy and the French cultural center in east Baghdad appear to have been left unprotected and were totally plundered. John F. Burns of The New York Times suggested that Iraqi mobs attacked the German and French buildings for political reasons rather than attributing it to the fact that they were left undefended by the U.S. military forces that controlled the capital.
Burns also suggests that the looting of UNICEF, the UN agency that has worked to relieve malnutrition and improve the welfare of Iraqi children, was done for bizarre political reasons rather than the more obvious lack of protection.
Under international law, the military occupation force is responsible for protecting embassies and cultural sites. The 1954 Hague Convention, which has not been ratified by the U.S. or Britain, requires the occupying military power to protect artistic and cultural treasures in wartime.
Robert Fisk of The Independent (UK) visited the looted museums and libraries shortly after they had been plundered. "The looters had gone from shelf to shelf, systematically pulling the statues and pots and amphora of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Medes, the Persians and the Greeks and hurling them on to the concrete floor.
"How could they do this? Why, when the city was already burning, when anarchy had been let loose—and less than three months after American archaeologists and Pentagon officials met to discuss the country's treasures and put the Baghdad archaeological museum on a military database—did the Americans allow the mobs to destroy the priceless heritage of ancient Mesopotamia?
"The Iraqis did it," Fisk claims. "They did it to their own history, physically destroying the evidence of their own nation's thousands of years of civilization. Not since the Taliban embarked on their orgy of destruction against the Buddhas of Bamiyan and the statues in the museum of Kabul—perhaps not since World War 2—have so many archaeological treasures been wantonly and systematically smashed to pieces."
Fisk, however, does not say how he knows that it was Iraqis who were responsible for the wanton destruction of Baghdad's libraries and museums. Why Iraqis would indulge in such wanton destruction of their cultural heritage is not easily explained.
Glass cutters not available in Iraq were found in the museum and a huge bronze bust weighing hundreds of pounds missing its head which would have required a fork lift to remove it indicate that well organized professional cultural thieves were mixed in with the mob.
The missing artifacts are worth billions of dollars on the world market. A group of antiquity dealers and collectors known as the American Council for Cultural Policy has been lobbying the U.S. government to relax legislation that protects Iraq's heritage by preventing sales abroad.
William Pearlstein, the group's treasurer, said that Mesopotamian antiquities will be safer in American museums and private collections than in Iraq.
The Archaeological Institute of America, considered to be "more responsible" by serious archaeologists, has argued strongly against this.
While the large pieces will be harder to sell, the smaller unpublished items such as coins, cuneiform tablets, pottery, figurines, and bronze weapons are likely to dominate sectors of the antiquities market, according to David Keys, archaeology correspondent for The Independent.
"They will probably end up at the art markets of Paris,
via Jordan, Israel, and Switzerland, New York, London, and Tokyo."
With billions in profits to be made "the more unscrupulous"
dealers will find ways to erase the Iraqi provenance of the stolen
objects, Keys said.
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A former Nebraska member of Congress has filed a motion to
prevent the White House from taking any further actions in Iraq
and wants a judge to look into allegations of war crimes against
President Bush, reports Associated Press. Rep. Clair Callan says
Bush is in violation of international treaties for waging an aggressive
war against a country that did not attack the United States. Callan
filed suit April 10. The White House has 60 days to respond to
the motion.
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China is now known as "the workshop of the world" but will the doors soon be closing?
China, with salve wages and government props, is the cheapest place on Earth to produce anything and the western world hears the "giant sucking sounds" of industry and jobs fleeing their countries.
But, reports John Van Eck in U.S.A.-China Letter, China has an "out-of-control boom heading inevitably toward a bust."
As is the case with centrally planned and run economies, Van Eck cites reports in China's official newspaper that 10 million Chinese are actually unemployed but being carried on the payrolls of state-owned companies.
But these state-owned companies are borrowing money from state owned banks to stay afloat, Van Eck says.
By some estimates, he says, these state-owned banks have 60 percent to 70 percent of their loans tied up with state-owned firms that will never be able to repay, totaling more than $700 billion.
Estimates place the cost to the Chinese government of cleaning up a financial meltdown at approximately $500 billion - nearly 43 percent of the country's gross domestic product.
TRYING TO KEEP THE BOAT AFLOAT
China is trying to offset this by inducing more industries to bring their jobs to China and the Communist Party leadership is contemplating new taxes to underwrite the extensive social services required.
The Chinese are also propping up the banks with capital injections which come from increasing tax revenues as a result of the 8 percent growth in productivity enjoyed by the communist state.
"Total Chinese exports grew wq percent in 2002 to $322 billion and have doubled in just the past five years," reports The Financial Times of London.
"The gleaming outposts of Microsoft, BP, Honda or General Electric make nonsense out of the stereotype that China exports little more than plastic toys," the paper said.
But even the flood of jobs gushing into China from the United States and Europe is not enough to keep abreast of population increases.
When the banks run dry because of unpaid loans, the bust will be heard, Van Eck reasons.
EXPORTING DEATH
There are natural elements, too, working against China that could hasten the bust.
When SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome emerged in China, officials lied about the seriousness of the highly contagious, new disease, fearing the tourist industry would suffer. When the world learned, tourism was virtually killed. Air travel is now largely confined to Asian nations where the disease is extensive.
Are products made in China by infected workers and shipped overseas also exporting SARS? Scientists are trying to determine that.
Scientists believe the disease originated with peasants in rural China where pugs and humans live in close proximity to each other. Though research is still being done, the virus, SARS, is believed to have "jumped" between pigs to humans.
Tens of thousands of rural Chinese come into the large cities and take jobs working 60 hours a week at 39 cents an hour, straight time. They bring SARS with them.
The World Health Organization says it does not believe any "goods, products or animals arriving from SARS-affected areas pose a risk to public health...to date there is no epidemiological information to suggest that contact with goods, products or animals shipped from SARS-affected areas has been the source of SARS infection in humans."
However, the international organization is concerned that "SARS
may be caused by contact with animals." As a result, international
health experts are monitoring so called "tertiary infections,"
where people who have had no contact with known carriers are found
to succumb to infection. Possibly, they were contaminated by tainted
products.
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This spring and summer Americans and Canadians could be facing a new onslaught of mosquito-borne West Nile virus.
The West Nile virus in North America is different and more dangerous that the strain in Africa, say Canadian researchers. Scientists studying the virus at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg made the discovery.
Michael Drebot, a research scientist at the lab, calls it a "hot virus." "There's more of a tendency to invade the central nervous system and infect neurons and brain stem regions within the individual," said Drebot.
West Nile virus is caused by a bite from an infected mosquito. But only one out of every 100 mosquitoes in an area affected by West Nile will actually be infected with the virus. In many parts of the United states, the risk of being bitten by an infected mosquito is greatest from July to early September. But in warmer, wetter areas in the American Southwest, mosquito bites can be a risk all year.
Discovered in 1937 in the West Nile District of Uganda, this virus probably didn't make its way to the United States until 1999. But it has been a major cause of concern during the summer months ever since, particularly in states located in the eastern, southern, and middle parts of the country.
The rate of infection and the scope of the suffering caught the medical community by surprise. Some of Dr. Jim Bruntun's patients have not recovered from the virus after six months. Those infected have "features we haven't seen since polio was around...so paralyzed they can't move, they can't breathe. It's very dramatic and it brings home just how bad it can be," said Bruntun.
We had over 4,000 cases in North America, and this was the largest West Nile virus outbreak ever recorded," said Drebot. The 2002 outbreak of West Nile virus in North America was remarkable in that for the first time on record it spread from mother to child, seeping into the blood supply.
Not everyone who gets bitten by an infected mosquito will get the virus. And although children can get West Nile virus, it is rare for them to become very sick from it. People over 50 years old and those with weakened immune systems are most at risk for the infection. Most of the time, symptoms of West Nile are similar to the flu and include fever, headache, back stiffness, muscle ache, malaise, joint pain, swollen glands and rash.
Experts say that if a mosquito from overseas could make it's
way to North America and spread the West Nile virus, there's a
good chance the peoples of the Western Hemisphere could face other
mosquito-borne diseases like yellow fever, dengue fever and malaria
in the very near future.
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What should the average American do to stave off colds and viruses?
A new disease, caused by what many are calling a coronavirus, similar to common cold viruses, is threatening mankind. Origination in the Far east, its influence is spreading around the world with the aid of the airlines. At present there are only a hundred or so scattered casualties.
What can we do to protect ourselves?
Until something better comes along, our best protection is a strong immune system.
Many years ago Dr. Linus Pauling and his friends were recommending vitamin C - Ascorbic acid - as the first line of defense against colds.
Pauling wrote a book Vitamin C and the Common Cold. It disclosed that ascorbic acid was one of the few substances with anti-viral capabilities. He was ridiculed and vilified. In addition, he was denied any recognition for his work with vitamin C by his peers at the National Academy of Science.
The vestiges of this hostility remain in the form of the ridiculously low RDA for vitamin C, 60 mg. per day. This may be enough to prevent healthy young men from getting scurvy, but it certainly is not enough to give those of us - the majority of whom are not healthy young men - any real protection against disease.
"The Tufts University Guide to Total Nutrition," published in 1990, states that although many people consume mmore that the RDAs; the RDA Committee has seen no evidence of benefits gained from over consumption.
I suspect that the committee didn't look very hard.
Dr. Sheldon Morgan of the University of California edited a nutrition book in 1997, which suggested that people should consider taking anti-oxidant supplements including vitamins C and E. Morgan also noted that your diet cannot supply enough vitamin E.
The fact that vitamins cannot be patented may have made it impossible to obtain the very large sums of money necessary for "gold standard" tests, which alone are convincing to the Brahams of nutritional science.
Ascorbic acid is said to be most protective close to bowel tolerance levels. These levels vary from person to person with stress, injury and disease conditions.
Pauling said he took 18 grams per day. He reported that this provided him with protection against colds.
I usually take about 16 grams per day and I get very few colds. I have taken 32 grams per day and it ger very few colds. I have taken 32 grams in 24 hours after surgery without experiencing any difficulty from vitamin C.
In the past experts on the use of vitamin C recommended that people take relatively large amounts of it frequently at the first sign of a cold. I recall that, in 1939, a graduate student at a leading technical school dissolved 10 grams of ascorbic acid in a liter of distilled water and took 100 milliliters of the solution every half hour in order to get rid of an incipient cold before going to a party.
Other immune system enhancers have recently been advertised.
MGN-3, a proprietary product made from mushrooms, is one of them. It is reported to substantially increase the activity of killer T-cells.
The influenza virus killed millions of people, including a
substantial part of our Army, near the start of the last century.
Let us hope that the new virus will be less effective.
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SARS the next pandemic? Is it more hype than bite? Is it bio-engineered? Is this a case of the only thing we have to fear is fear itself?
If people aren't careful, the disease may catch up with the hype. Even with the "war" dominating television news, the story of a new infection called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARD) has captured attention as if it were the second coming of the 1918 flu epidemic.
SARS has already claimed more victims worldwide than two other widely hyped killers - the infamous Madcow disease and the gory Ebola virus - combined, which means SARS may have claimed somewhere around 150 lives world wide so far.
What's true?
Truth is, nobody knows. But opinions and disconnecting facts abound. For ezample, Dr. Leonard G. Horowitz, best-selling author and Harvard trained scientist who has written about viral terrors including HIV and Ebola as well as biological warfare, has posted on the Internet a lengthy piece titled: "SARS - A Great Gloval SCAM!"
Horowitz sees the media hype as part of a modern day "psyops" game where the powers-that-be are practicing a little "manipulation of populations" via the media.
A Russian scientist, Sergei Kolesnikov, is said to have held a press conference in Irkutsk on April 10 to announce that SARS is so "atypical" that he believes it has been produced artificially in a laboratory and somehow "escaped" to become a threat, or else it is, indeed, bio-warfare perpetrated by "unsanctioned" mad scientists against the world.
According to an unconfirmed Internet story, Kolesnikov explained that the viruses allegedly making up the SARS disease are"a synthesis of two viruses, the natural compound of which is impossible - this can only be done in a laboratory."
Even the peer-previewed scientific literature is agreeing that two distinct virus families "appear to be involved."
According to the journal Science "just as evidence seemed to point to a paramyxovirus, researchers fingered a candidate from a very different virus family, the coronavirus. The World Health Organization (WHO) says both may be involved."
No sooner had two possible viruses been suggested than C.J Peters, University of Texas center for Biodefense expert, added that a human parvovirus or a Hantavirus could be involved. There is only one known Hantavirus that is spread from person to person, however, an Andes virus from South America.
Marjorie Pollack of ProMED, quoted in the March 21 issue of Science said: Mother Nature is by far the worst bioterrorist out there.
Perhaps Horowitz is right - if you are not donfused yet, you soon will be.
German researchers said the SARS virus appeared on electron micrographs to be of the family of viruses causing such common diseases as mumps, measles and parainfluenza - the paramyxovirdae.
In Canada, scientists found a particular paramyxovirus called "the human metapneumovirus" in six out of eight SARS patients. This little devil has been isolated from children with respiratory infections going back to 2001 and has been found in patients in various parts of the world.
However, in Hong Kong, which is the vortex of the media's SARS tornado, and where a robust economy has been killed by fear of the disease, researchers identified a coronavirus as the culprit. The coronavirus family is behind the common cold in humans and pneumonia in animals.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says it has "respect for" the paramyxovirus findings, but considers the coronavirus family the lead dog in this hunt.
Julie Gerberding of CDC explained that a coronavirus was cultured from two patients and that they "found it to occur specifically in lung and kidney tissues affected by the disease."
Dr. Ab Osterhaus of the Netherlands, considered one of the world's top experts in such viral diseases said:
"To clinch the case, we will have to identify the virus in more patients and possibly confirm the findings with animal studies." Osterhaus said the syndrome produce by coronavirus is "not quite like SARS, but it's still possible that a paramyxovirus is involved. SARS might require an infection with multiple viruses."
Research on monkeys has led scientists to believe a previously unidentified coronavirus is behind the SARS epidemic. Analysis of the genetic make-up of the coronavirus seems to support this conclusion.
Viruses are strange and unique creatures. At Whole Body Health we are reminded of the HIV-AIDS controversy over the past two decades where one of the world's leading virologists, Peter Duesberg, took issue with the entire establishment over the truth of the alleged family of "killer" viruses.
Duesberg argued that HIV was not the cause of the disease and was an overly hyped dud. Duesberg wrote a book with his interesting counter-opinion, Inventing the Aids Virus, published by Regnery in 1996.
Once, during an appearance on the talk show, Radio Free America, Duesberg was confronted by another expert, who claimed HIV was bioengineered for warfare purposes.
Duesberg quipped: "What warfare? HIV is like shooting blanks!"
If the experts can't get it together, what are we in the street to do?
At least with the viruses suspected in SARS the researchers are able to match all the requirements for assuming infectious disease cause - something that is still not accomplished with HIV-AIDS, according to Duesberg.
SARS has proved to be a killer, nonetheless. In fact, one of the original WHO research-physicians, Dr. Carlo Urbani of Italy, succumbed to the disease while working with victims in Vietnam.
The WHO officials now believe the epidemic may have started in Guangdong province, China, where SARS had claimed 34 lives and 806 patients between last fall and early this April.
After stonewalling the world, the Chinese officials finally admitted the viral outbreak seems to be serious. Then their lead scientist tossed a monky wrench into the spokes of the research bicycle. Dr. Tao Hung, who heads up the Chinese research operations, suggested the viruses appear to have company in this "syndrome."
The word "syndrome" always accompanies a disease that is not clearly understood.
According to The Lancet, Hung found traces of a Chlamydia-like bacterium in samples taken from organs of Sars victims who died.
The bacteria-involvement claim caused a minor uproar.
"It goes against common sense," remarked Masato Tashiro, a top Japanese expert. Chlamydia is "normally" non-lethal. Antibiotics, which work against bacteria but not against viruses, "have not proven effective in treating this syndrome."
Now the mutation of a common bacterium into a more potent strain must be considered, which expands the ramifications exponentially. Dr. Joseph Mercola, a practitioner of natural medicine who publishes a newsletter on the Internet, a www.mercola.com, had perhaps the most logical and interesting take on the SARS hype.
Fighting SARS with today's technology, said Mercola, will be "an exercise in futility because:
"There is no vaccine in the world that will control this disease. No amount of anti-viral measures will help. You won't be able to use a surgical mask to prevent acquiring the disease."
Therefore, Mercola, and many other natural practitioners, say that the only solution to the infectious threat is to "activate one's immune system."
However, he did not suggest anything to remedy the hype and the scare mongering that accompanies this latest potential epidemic. However, peace of mind might accompany some logical preparation.
Mercola points out that the various infecting agents are not the problem, but the weakened immune systems of Americans in general are the problem.
Eating junk foods, including refined and packaged flour products replete with sugar, trans fatty acids and chemicals; living around pesticides, high tension wires, microwave towers, and polluted air, drinking fluoridated water, soda pop and alcoholic beverages; popping down drugs of ever description and prescription all tend to weaken immunity.
When people eat junk, sleep poorly and face stress day-in and day-out they are far more susceptible to infectious disease.
Mercola pointed out:
This is the way God designed us; this is not a design failure. God doesn't make junk. The only reason why SARS is able to kill people is because they have weakened immune systems resulting from: A diet focused on large amounts of processed foods. Unresolved emotional stresses, Inadequate sleep and exercise.
I am so personally convinced of this truth that I would have no problem treating patients with SARS because I am absolutely confident this virus is no match for my immune system.
Americans are fortunate to have dietary supplements readily available to them that are known to build strong immunity. Some of the more common supplements include MaitakeGold, a patented product from Japan; olive leaf extract; Echinacea, and Lactoferrin.
So, let's eat right, supplement the diet, and take it in stride.
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Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader who is blamed for having brought the invasion and devastation upon his nation, has been an "instrument" of the CIA for more than 40 years.
Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator ousted by the joint U.S. and British invasion of Iraq, was an "instrument" of the Central Intelligence Agency for decades, according to a recent article by Richard Sale, intelligence correspondent for United Press International (UPI).
Saddam's first contact with U.S. intelligence occurred in 1959, when he was part of a CIA-authorized six-man assassination team tasked with killing them Iraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abdul Karim Qasim. The CIA had targeted Qasim because of his embrace of the Soviet Union.
Saddam, who was at the time in his early 20s, was part of the U.S. plot to assassinate Qasim, according to a former senior State Department official. Saddam was installed in an apartment in Baghdad on al-Rashid Street, directly opposite Qasim's office at Iraq's Ministry of Defense, to observe Qasim's movements.
Adel Darwish, Middle east expert and author of Unholy Babylon, said that the move was done "with full knowledge of the CIA," and that Saddam's CIA handler was an Iraqi dentist working for both CIA and Egyptian intelligence.
Iraq, a member of anti-Soviet Baghdad since the mid-1950s, had been a buffer and strategic asset in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Other members of the Baghdad Pact included Turkey, Britain, Iran and Pakistan.
However, when Qasim suddenly withdrew Iraq from the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact in 1959, in Washington it "freaked everybody out," according to a former senior State Department official.
Iraq had begun to buy arms from the Soviet Union and Qasim had placed Iraqi communists into positions of power. The change brought about by Qasim's embrace of the Soviet Union prompted CIA Director Allan Dulles to say publicly that Iraq was "the most dangerous spot in the world."
The assassination of Qasim had been set for Oct. 7, 1959, but it ws completely botched, as sale writes: "One former CIA official said that the 22-year-old Saddam lost his nerve and began firing too soon, killing Qasim's driver and only wounding Qasim in the shoulder and arm."
Qasim survived and Saddam, whose calf had been grazed by a fellow would-be assassin, escaped to Tikrit, thanks to CIA and Egyptian intelligence agents, several U.S. government officials said.
Saddam crossed into Syria and was transferred by Egyptian intelligence agents to Beirut, according to Darwish and former senior CIA officials. While Saddam was in Beirut, the CIA paid for Saddam's apartment, and put him through a training course, former CIA officials told UPI. The agency then moved Saddam to Cairo.
During his time in Cairo Saddam made frequent visits to the U.S. Embassy where he had contact with CIA agents named by Sale as Miles Copeland and CIA station chief Jim Eichelberger. One former U.S. government official, who knew Saddam at the time, said he "was known as having no class. He was a thug - a cutthroat."
Qasom was later killed in a Baath Party coup in February 1963. Saddam subsequently became head of the secret intelligence apparatus of the Baath Party, al-Jahaz a-Khas.
The CIA had cultivated "close ties" with Qasim's ruling Baath Party, as it had with the intelligence service of Egyptian leader Gamel Nassar, according to a veteran CIA operative, Miles Copeland, who told UPI of these connections in the 1980s.
Roger Morris, a former Natinal Security Council staffer in the 1970s, in a recent public statement, confirmed that the CIA had chosen the authoritarian and anti-communist Baath Party "as its instrument."
The CIA/Defense Intelligence Agency relationship with Saddam continued and developed when he became Iraqi leader. The relationship intensified after the start of the Iran-Iraq war in September 1980.
Curing the war, the CIA regularly sent a team to Iraq to provide Saddam with battlefield intelligence, according to a former DIA official.
This former official said that he personally had signed off
on a document that shared U.S. satellite intelligence with both
Iraq and Iran in an attempt to produce a military stalemate. "When
I signed it, I thought I was losing my mind," the former
official told UPI.
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