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EPA silences employees
2008-07-29, Los Angeles Times/Associated Press
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-epagag29-2008jul29,0,585...

The Environmental Protection Agency is telling its pollution enforcement officials not to talk with congressional investigators, reporters and even the agency's own inspector general, according to an internal e-mail provided to The Associated Press. The June 16 message instructs 11 managers in the EPA's Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, the branch of the agency charged with making sure environmental laws are followed, to remind their staff members to keep quiet. "If you are contacted directly by the IG's office or GAO requesting information of any kind . . . please do not respond to questions or make any statements," reads the e-mail sent by Robbi Farrell, the division's chief of staff. Instead, staff members should forward inquiries to a designated EPA representative, the memo says. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility obtained the e-mail and provided it to the AP. The group is a nonprofit alliance of local, state and federal professionals. Jeff Ruch, its executive director, said ... the e-mail reinforces a "bunker mentality" within EPA under the Bush administration. "The clear intention behind this move is to chill the cubicles by suppressing any uncontrolled information." The Office of Inspector General said it did not approve of the language in the e-mail. "All EPA officials and employees are required to cooperate with OIG," the statement said. "This cooperation includes providing the OIG full and unrestricted access to EPA documents, records, and personnel."

Note: For many revealing reports on government secrecy from major media sources, click here.

Are Our Leading Pediatricians Drug Industry Shills?
2008-07-13, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/12/IN7G11L6TL.DTL

Most parents have never heard of him, but Joseph Biederman of Harvard may be the United States' most influential doctor when it comes to determining whether their children are normal or mentally ill. In 1996, for example, Biederman suggested that drugs like Ritalin might serve 10 percent of American kids for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. By 2004, one in nine 11-year-old boys was taking the drug. Biederman and his team also are more responsible than anyone for a child bipolar epidemic sweeping America (and no other country) that has 2-year-olds on three or four psychiatric drugs. The science of children's psychiatric medications is so primitive and Biederman's influence so great that when he merely mentions a drug during a presentation, tens of thousands of children within a year or two will end up taking that drug, or combination of drugs. This happens in the absence of a drug trial of any kind - instead, the decision is based upon word of mouth among the 7,000 child psychiatrists in America. That's why [the] recent revelation that Biederman did not declare $1.6 million in drug company consulting fees is so important, scary and tragic. American medicine, with psychiatry the most culpable, has fallen back to a time more than 100 years ago. Now once again, drug company money is corrupting medical practice and the maintenance of our country's health. Virtually all doctors who receive drug company money say they are not influenced, but every independent study examining the effects of such money says they are.

Note: For lots more on health issues from reliable, verifiable sources, click here.

The evolution of a conspiracy theory
2008-07-04, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7488159.stm

Nearly seven years after the terrible events of that September day, the US authorities are due to publish the final report on a third tower that also collapsed on 9/11. Unlike the Twin Towers, this 47-storey, 610-foot skyscraper was not hit by a plane. The official explanation is that ordinary fires were the main reason for the collapse of Tower 7. That makes this the first and only tall skyscraper in the world to have collapsed because of fire. Yet despite that all the thousands of tonnes of steel from the building were carted away and melted down. The way official bodies have investigated Tower 7 at the World Trade Center has made some people think they're hiding something. Its destruction was never mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report. An inquiry by the Federal Emergency Management Agency said the building collapsed because intense fires had burned for hours, fed by thousands of gallons of diesel stored in the building for emergency generators. But its report said this had "only a low probability of occurrence" and more work was needed. That was in May 2002. The task has now fallen to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) based at a sprawling campus near Washington DC. For more than two-and-a-half years, scientists there have been studying Tower 7. The officials have been criticised for being slow and even of being frightened to publish. Steven Jones, a former physics professor at Brigham Young University, who has become [a] leading academic voice in the movement, first watched a video of the collapse of Tower 7 in the spring of 2005. But when he did, he said he was taken aback as a physicist.

Note: For a two-page summary of some unanswered questions about what really happened on 9/11, click here.

Controversy and conspiracies
2008-07-02, BBC News
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2008/07/controversy_conspiracies_iii.html

World Trade Center Building 7 has become the subject of heated speculation and a host of conspiracy theories suggesting it was brought down by a controlled demolition. And some people suggest it was not just the government and foreign intelligence, but ... even the media that were involved. It is certainly true that on 9/11 the BBC broadcast that WTC7 had collapsed when it was still standing. Then the satellite transmission seemed to cut out mysteriously when the correspondent was still talking. Then [head of BBC News] Richard Porter admitted in his blog last year that the BBC had lost those key tapes of BBC World News output from the day. The internet movie Loose Change has been viewed by more than 100 million people according to its makers and it asks this question in the latest film release: "Where did CNN and the BBC get their information especially considering the building was still standing directly behind their reporters?" It turns out that the respected news agency Reuters picked up an incorrect report and passed it on. They have issued this statement: "On 11 September 2001 Reuters incorrectly reported that one of the buildings at the New York World Trade Center, 7WTC, had collapsed before it actually did. The report was picked up from a local news story and was withdrawn as soon as it emerged that the building had not fallen." And the reason the interview with the BBC correspondent, Jane Standley, ended so abruptly? The satellite feed had an electronic timer, which cut out at 1715 exactly.

Note: How many "coincidences" does it take for people to start to ask questions? How could people know that the building was going to collapse when a skyscraper had never collapsed before from fire? For a useful BBC FAQ on 9/11 alternative theories, click here.

Video star can't stop dancing
2008-06-29, Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/columnists/chi-dancing-matt-0629jun29,...

The new Web video from Matt Harding, accidental professional dancer, is up, and it is spectacular, a cry of life and brotherhood and joy. As Harding toured the world ... filming the third installment in his "Where the Hell Is Matt?" video series, you might have thought that the trick would have played itself out. An ordinary guy doing a kind of running-in-place dance at 69 earthly locales with an ethereal song as soundtrack shouldn't be endlessly endearing and deeply inspiring. But this music-video-length wonder works in surprising ways, especially amid the predominantly crass environment of YouTube. Part of the charm of the video (also at Harding's own wherethehellismatt.com) is his new twist for it. At each stop on his latest set of travels, Harding invited locals to come dance with him. In Chicago, that meant more than 100 people bobbed up and down in front of The Bean sculpture. In Poria, Papua New Guinea, it was a handful of people in full tribal garb accompanying Harding. The collection of disparate peoples doing essentially the same pointless yet joyful thing is a reminder of what's universal in humankind. The teasing glimpse of so many gorgeous spots is a goad to renew your own passport and get moving. Part of the charm comes from the unadorned simplicity of Harding himself—he just looks damned happy to be wherever he is—and the delight that is his story. A video game designer disaffected by the industry's trend toward violence, he quit his job in early 2003 and began traveling. At the suggestion of a friend, he used the video function of a point-and-shoot digital camera and taped himself dancing at all his stops.

Note: Don't miss Matt's inspiring five-minute video available here. For a New York Times article on this fun piece, click here.

McCain's 'big advantage'
2008-06-25, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/24/EDPC11EHS4.DTL

Charlie Black, senior adviser to John McCain, caused a fluff by saying that a terrorist attack on U.S. soil would be a "big advantage" to his candidate. No one mentioned that eight years ago, the Project for a New American Century called for "a new Pearl Harbor" that could move the American people to accept the neoconservative vision of militarized global domination. Then 9/11 happened, lifting George W. Bush from the shadows of a disputed election to the heights of a "war presidency." Bush has taken on unprecedented powers since the events of 9/11. On that day, the president issued his "Declaration of Emergency by Reason of Certain Terrorist Attacks" under the authority of the National Emergencies Act. This declaration, which can be rescinded by joint resolution of Congress, has instead been extended six times. In 2007, the declaration was quietly strengthened with the issuance of National Security Presidential Directive 51, which gave the president the authority to do whatever he deems necessary in a vaguely defined "catastrophic emergency," including everything from canceling elections to suspending the Constitution to launching a nuclear attack. Not a single congressional hearing was held on this directive. Will Congress act decisively to remove the president's emergency powers, challenge the directive and defend the Constitution?

Capitol Chaos
2008-06-08, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/06/INFS114789.DTL

[California] Assemblywoman Mary Hayashi had no intention of voting for AB2818, a bill that the Castro Valley Democrat feared could undermine its stated goal of protecting affordable housing. But on May 28, she nearly approved it - without her knowledge, and without her presence on the Assembly floor. As the roll call began, Hayashi was engaged in a budget subcommittee meeting on the Capitol's fourth floor. Suddenly, two floors below, the light next to her name on the big electronic voting board in the Assembly chamber turned green, a "yes" vote. Seconds later, it turned red. Then green. Red. Green. Finally, after 22 seconds of alternating colors, the space next to Hayashi's name went blank. While there are conflicting accounts of exactly what caused this dizzying sequence, this much is clear: Two people had their hands on Hayashi's voting switches during the roll call on AB2818 - and one was acting against her will. "Ghost voting" was not the only disturbing episode as the Assembly took up 316 bills in the three days leading up to the deadline for measures to pass their house of origin. In the frenzied treadmill, there was little or no debate on most matters, important bills died when legislators failed to vote, and votes were being cast for members without their express consent. In the Hayashi case, eyewitnesses said her initial "yes" vote was cast by Assemblyman Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, an assistant majority floor leader who colleagues said had taken the liberty of voting for other missing members as bills were being rushed to beat the deadline. "I don't recall it, but I don't deny it either," de León said.

Note: For lots more on problems with voting systems, click here.

Investors' Growing Appetite for Oil Evades Market Limits
2008-06-06, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/05/AR20080605043...

Hedge funds and big Wall Street banks are taking advantage of loopholes in federal trading limits to buy massive amounts of oil contracts, ... helping to push oil prices to record highs. The federal agency that oversees oil trading, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has exempted these firms from rules that limit speculative buying. The CFTC has also waived regulations over the past decade on U.S. investors who trade commodities on some overseas markets, freeing those investors to accumulate large quantities of the future oil supply by making purchases on lightly regulated foreign exchanges. Over the past five years, investors have become such a force on commodity markets that their appetite for oil contracts has been equal to China's increase in demand over the same period, said Michael Masters, a hedge fund manager who testified before Congress on the subject last month. The commodity markets, he added, were never intended for such large financial players. Commodities have become especially enticing to investors as the credit crisis has roiled other investment opportunities such as stocks and debt-related securities. The recent flood of investment money has transformed the markets for oil, as well as uranium, wheat, cotton and other goods, into a volatile realm that some insiders call the Wild West of Wall Street. Michael Greenberger, a professor at the University of Maryland and former CFTC commissioner, said there were loopholes the agency could close without much effort. "There's smoke here, and the CFTC hasn't wanted to look if there's a fire," he said. "But these are dark markets. They don't even know who's doing the trading."

Note: For revealing reports on financial corruption and criminality from major media sources, click here.

40 years after RFK's death, questions linger
2008-06-03, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/03/MNN110S5KH.DTL

Sirhan Sirhan, convicted of killing Robert F. Kennedy 40 years ago this week in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, is living out his days in the California state prison at Corcoran. He is 64 and has never fully explained what happened that night other than to say he can't remember it. "The interesting thing is how under-examined the Robert Kennedy assassination is, compared to President Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.," said David Talbot of San Francisco, author of Brothers, a book that looks into Robert Kennedy's own investigation into his brother's death and his conviction that JFK was the victim of a conspiracy. "Bobby remains the unknown territory," Talbot said. "But even if you look at it minimally, there are questions that come to mind." Over the years, Sirhan has told investigators who interviewed him in prison that he was in a hypnotic trance during the shooting and can't remember it at all. William Turner, a retired FBI agent who wrote a book about the case, ... thinks Sirhan was "hypno-programmed to shoot" and that he was a real-life Manchurian Candidate - [a] brainwashed dupe whose controllers want to assassinate a presidential candidate. Turner suspects the same villains as do the JFK conspiracy theorists - "organized crime and, predominantly, people from the CIA." [Philip Van Praag, a retired electrical engineer and audio expert,] and a fellow investigator, former American Academy of Forensic Scientists president Robert Joling, ... have written a book about the killing, whose title, An Open and Shut Case, is a dig at the police investigation. Joling says an "independent panel of forensic scientists" should be created to "reinvestigate this matter on all the evidence."

Note: To listen to a highly revealing presentation by Sirhan's lawyer, Lawrence Teeter, on the many lines of evidence proving Sirhan was not a lone gunman, click here. For further revealing reports on major political assassinations, click here.

Superfast internet may replace world wide web
2008-04-09, The Telegraph (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/06/ninternet106.xml

The internet could soon be made obsolete by a new "grid" system which is 10,000 times faster than broadband connections. Scientists in Switzerland have developed a lightning-fast replacement to the internet that would allow feature films and music catalogues to be downloaded within seconds. The latest spin-off from CERN, the particle physics centre that created the internet, the grid could also provide the power needed to send sophisticated images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call. David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technology could change society. He said: "With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine." The power of the grid will be unlocked this summer with the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a new particle accelerator designed to investigate how the universe began. The grid will be turned on at the same time to store the information it generates, after scientists at CERN, based near Geneva, realised the internet would not have the capacity to capture such huge volumes of data. The grid has been built with fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data, unlike the internet. There are 55,000 grid servers already installed, a figure which is expected to rise to 200,000 within the next two years. Britain has 8,000 servers on the grid system, meaning access could be available to universities as early as this autumn.

Permissible Assaults Cited in Graphic Detail
2008-04-06, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/05/AR20080405020...

Thirty pages into a memorandum discussing the legal boundaries of military interrogations in 2003, senior Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo tackled a question not often asked by American policymakers: Could the president, if he desired, have a prisoner's eyes poked out? Or, for that matter, could he have "scalding water, corrosive acid or caustic substance" thrown on a prisoner? How about slitting an ear, nose or lip, or disabling a tongue or limb? What about biting? These assaults are all mentioned in a U.S. law prohibiting maiming, which Yoo parsed as he clarified the legal outer limits of what could be done to terrorism suspects as detained by U.S. authorities. The specific prohibitions, he said, depended on the circumstances or which "body part the statute specifies." But none of that matters in a time of war, Yoo also said, because federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes by military interrogators are trumped by the president's ultimate authority as commander in chief. In the sober language of footnotes, case citations and judicial rulings, the memo explores a wide range of unsavory topics, from the use of mind-altering drugs on captives to the legality of forcing prisoners to squat on their toes in a "frog crouch." It repeats an assertion in another controversial Yoo memo that an interrogation tactic cannot be considered torture unless it would result in "death, organ failure or serious impairment of bodily functions." Yoo, who is now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, also uses footnotes to effectively dismiss the Fourth and Fifth amendments to the Constitution, arguing that protections against unreasonable search and seizure and guarantees of due process either do not apply or are irrelevant in a time of war. He frequently cites his previous legal opinions to bolster his case.

Administration Asserted a Terror Exception on Search and Seizure
2008-04-04, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/03/AR20080403041...

The Justice Department concluded in October 2001 that military operations combating terrorism inside the United States are not limited by Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, in one of several secret memos containing new and controversial assertions of presidential power. The memo, sent on Oct. 23, 2001, to the Defense Department and the White House by the Office of Legal Counsel, focused on the rules governing any deployment of U.S. forces inside the country "in the event of further large-scale terrorist activities." Administration officials declined to detail what domestic military operations were being contemplated at the time. The memo has not been formally withdrawn. The Fourth Amendment assertion is one of several far-reaching legal arguments revealed by the disclosure Tuesday of a 2003 Justice Department memo that authorized harsh military interrogations. In its footnotes, asides and central text, that 81-page memo asserted nearly unlimited presidential powers during a time of war. The document disclosed, for example, that the administration's top lawyers had declared that the president has unfettered power to seize oceangoing ships as commander in chief; that Congress has no ability to pass legislation governing the interrogations of enemy combatants; and that federal laws prohibiting assault and other crimes did not apply to military interrogators. One section discussed to what extent the president might be allowed to legally maim a prisoner, such as through the use of a "scalding, corrosive, or caustic substance." A footnote argued that Fifth Amendment guarantees of due-process rights "do not address actions the Executive takes in conducting a military campaign against the Nation's enemies."

Note: For further disturbing reports on threats to civil liberties, click here.

The Language of Autism
2008-02-28, New York Times
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/the-language-of-autism

Are people with autism trapped in their own world? Or are the rest of us just trapped in ours? After seeing 27-year-old Amanda Baggs ... you may rethink your views of the so-called "normal" world. Ms. Baggs, who lives in Burlington, Vt., is autistic and doesn’t speak. But she has become an Internet sensation as a result of an unusual video she created called "In My Language." For the first three minutes of the video, she rocks, flaps her hands, waves a piece of paper, buries her face in a book and runs her fingers repeatedly across a computer keyboard, all while humming a haunting two-note tune. Then, the words "A Translation" appear on the screen. Although Ms. Baggs doesn’t speak, she types 120 words a minute. Using a synthesized voice generated by a software application, Ms. Baggs types out what is going on inside her head. The movement, the noise, the repetitive behaviors are all part of Ms. Baggs’ own "native" language, she says via her computerized voice. It’s a language that allows her to have a "constant conversation" with her surroundings. "My language is not about designing words or even visual symbols for people to interpret. It is about being in a constant conversation with every aspect of my environment, reacting physically to all parts of my surroundings. Far from being purposeless, the way that I move is an ongoing response to what is around me. The way I naturally think and respond to things looks and feels so different from standard concepts or even visualization that some people do not consider it thought at all. But it is a way of thinking in its own right." [Ms. Baggs'] video is a clarion call on behalf of people with cognitive disabilities whose way of communicating isn’t understood by the rest of the world.

Note: If you want to expand your understanding of people and our world, don't miss the most amazing eight-minute video clip at the link above, or click here to view it now.

What FBI whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds found in translation
2008-02-17, Dallas Morning News (Dallas' leading newspaper)
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/points/stories/DN-sibe...

Most Americans have never heard of Sibel Edmonds, and if the U.S. government has its way, they never will. The former FBI translator turned whistle-blower tells a chilling story of corruption at Washington's highest levels – sale of nuclear secrets, shielding of terrorist suspects, illegal arms transfers, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, espionage. Ms. Edmonds' account is full of dates, places and names. And if she is to be believed, a treasonous plot to embed moles in American military and nuclear installations and pass sensitive intelligence to Israeli, Pakistani and Turkish sources was facilitated by figures in the upper echelons of the State and Defense Departments. Her charges could be easily confirmed or dismissed if classified government documents were made available to investigators. But Congress has refused to act, and the Justice Department has shrouded Ms. Edmonds' case in the state-secrets privilege, a rarely used measure so sweeping that it precludes even a closed hearing attended only by officials with top-secret security clearances. Ms. Edmonds' revelations have attracted corroboration in the form of anonymous letters apparently written by FBI employees. There have been frequent reports of FBI field agents being frustrated by the premature closure of cases dealing with foreign spying, particularly when those cases involve Israel, and the State Department has frequently intervened to shut down investigations based on "sensitive foreign diplomatic relations." Curiously, the state-secrets gag order binding Ms. Edmonds, while put in place by DOJ in 2002, was not requested by the FBI but by the State Department and Pentagon – which employed individuals she identified as being involved in criminal activities. If her allegations are frivolous, that order would scarcely seem necessary.

Note: The author of this article, Philip Giraldi, is a retired career CIA officer. For further powerful details of Sibel Edmonds' revelations, click here.

Davos: Wealth, power and a sprinkling of stardust
2008-01-22, The Independent (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers)
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/davos-wealth...

For a few days an obscene proportion of the world's wealth and clout will be concentrated in one normally obscure Alpine town, [Davos, Switzerland]. Some 27 heads of state or government; 113 cabinet ministers; hundreds of chief executives, bankers, sovereign wealth fund managers, economists and the media: about 2,500 participants in all. So who's coming and what will they be chattering about? The official co-chairs of the Forum are mostly well-known names: Tony Blair, of JP Morgan; James Dimon, chairman and CEO of JP Morgan; KV Kamath, MD and CEO of India's ICICI Bank; Henry Kissinger, chairman of Kissinger Associates; Indra K Noovi, chairman and CEO of PepsiCo; David J O'Reilly, chairman and CEO of Chevron Corporation; and Wang Jianzhou, CEO of China Mobile Communications Corporation. The prominent role allotted to Mr Wang, while not entirely novel, is nonetheless significant. In 2008, for the first time, China will contribute more to the growth of the world economy than the United States. Double-digit growth in China should still just be possible this year, and it alone seems to stand between the world and a full-blown recession. Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) from China and elsewhere have already been busy re-capitalising the West's stricken banks. The recycling of trillions of dollars of trade surpluses and petro dollars means that such deals will become more prevalent. Davos will provide one more opportunity for distressed American investment bankers to bump into munificent Singaporean or Qatari or Chinese SWF managers.

Note: Yet these meetings are kept largely secret. Why isn't the media giving lots more coverage to this gathering of some of the most powerful people on the planet? For other reliable, verifiable reports on secret meetings of the power elite of the world, click here.

Was Pelosi aware of CIA's tactics?
2007-12-12, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/12/EDR7TS7DI.DTL

When the CIA destroyed those prisoner interrogation videotapes, were they also destroying the truth about Sept. 11, 2001? After all, according to the 9/11 Commission report, the basic narrative of what happened on that day - and the nature of the enemy in this war on terror that Bush launched in response to the tragedy - comes from the CIA's account of what those prisoners told their torturers. The commission was never allowed to interview the prisoners, or speak with those who did, and was forced to rely on what the CIA was willing to relay instead. On the matter of the existence of the tapes, we know the CIA deliberately lied. Why should we believe what we've been told about what may turn out to be the most important transformative event in our nation's history? On the basis of what the CIA claimed the tortured prisoners said, President Bush launched ... an endless war that threatens to bankrupt our society both financially and morally. How important were those "key witnesses" to the 9/11 Commission report? Check out the disclaimer on page 146 about the commission's sourcing of the main elements laid out in its narrative: "Chapters 5 and 7 rely heavily on information obtained from captured al Qaeda members ... Assessing the truth of statements by these witnesses ... is challenging. Our access to them has been limited to the review of intelligence reports. We submitted questions for use in the interrogations, but ... were told that our requests might disrupt the sensitive interrogation process." Videos were made of those "sensitive" interrogations, which were accurately described as "torture" by one of the agents involved, John Kiriakou, in an interview with ABC News. Yet when the 9/11 Commission and federal court judges specifically asked for such tapes, they were destroyed by the CIA, which then denied their existence.

Note: Author Robert Scheer goes on to ask what did House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other key Congressional Democrats know about the torture techniques used by the CIA, and when did they know it? For a powerful summary of many major-media reports raising questions about what really happened on 9/11, click here.

Nanotubes seen as new weapon in cancer fight
2007-11-02, Houston Chronicle (Houston's leading newspaper)
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl?id=2007_4453780

In what a dying Rick Smalley called the most important application from his Nobel Prize-winning discovery [of fullerines], Houston researchers are using [carbon] nanotubes heated by radio waves to kill cancer cells. In a paper posted online by the journal Cancer, a team at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and Rice University reported that the technique destroyed liver cancer tumors in rabbits and caused no side effects. It is thought to hold the same potential for many other cancers. "I don't want to overstate matters — I'm the biggest skeptic in the world — given the challenges still ahead of us," Dr. Steven Curley, an M.D. Anderson surgical oncologist and the paper's senior author, said Thursday. "But my hope is that this will be a very useful tool to safely and efficiently treat a lot of types of cancer." The therapy marries two disparate disciplines: the relatively ancient field of radio waves and nanotechnology, the cutting-edge science of the ultra-small. The rabbit study found the therapy worked only when the two were used together. It works not by poisoning but by creating a localized hyperthermia — or small fever — that destroys the cancer cells' membranes, protein and even DNA. The cells then die and are carried out of the body through normal kidney functions. In the experiment recounted in Cancer, the rabbits were injected with a solution of single-walled carbon nanotubes — hollow cylinders of pure carbon measuring about a billionth of a meter across — then exposed to two minutes of radio-frequency treatment. The result, researchers said, was the thermal destruction of 100 percent of the tumors. The idea was inspired by John Kanzius, an M.D. Anderson leukemia patient and retired Pennsylvania radio and television station owner. He developed a radio-frequency generator after undergoing chemotherapy and noting its effect on himself and other patients.

Note: For many hopeful new developments in the search for cancer cures, click here.

Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations
2007-10-04, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/washington/04interrogate.html?ex=1349150400...

When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations. But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document; according to officials briefed on it, [it was] an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency. The new opinion ... for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures. Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard. The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush’s second term and Mr. Gonzales’s tenure at the Justice Department. Congress and the Supreme Court have intervened repeatedly in the last two years to impose limits on interrogations, and the administration has responded as a policy matter by dropping the most extreme techniques. But the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums, officials said. They show how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics.

"One of the Eeriest Moments Amid the Carnage of 9/11"
2007-09-12, CNN
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0709/12/acd.01.html

JOHN KING: Today, six years after 9/11, a mystery endures about just what happened in the skies over the White House that terrible day. A plane flew right over it, but why, and what was it? For conspiracy theorists, the image is a gold mine. It appeared overhead just before 10 a.m., a four- engine jet ... in the nation's most off-limits airspace. On the White House grounds and the rooftop, a nervous scramble. And still today, no one will offer an official explanation of what we saw. Two government sources familiar with the incident tell CNN it was a military aircraft. They say the details are classified. This comparison of the CNN video and an official Air Force photo suggests the mystery plane is among the military's most sensitive aircraft, an Air Force E-4B. Note the flag on the tail, the stripe around the fuselage, and the telltale bubble just behind the 747 cockpit area. MAJ. GEN. DON SHEPPERD (RET.), U.S. AIR FORCE: There are many commercial versions of the 747 ... that look similar, but I don't think any of them that have the communications pod like the ... Air Force E-4 does behind the cockpit. KING: The E-4B is a state of the art flying command post, built and equipped for one reason: to keep the government running no matter what, even in the event of a nuclear war, the reason it was nicknamed the doomsday plane during the Cold War. Ask the Pentagon, and it insists this is not a military aircraft, and there is no mention of it in the official report of the 9/11 Commission. [In] sum: the lack of any official explanation feeds an ominous conspiracy. This is from an online discussion about the plane on the web site 911blogger.com. "I have always thought these planes were exactly that, mission control for the 9/11 attack on our country."

Note: For many other anomalous major media reports which collectively suggest that the official story of 9/11 may be a cover-up, click here.

Iraq corruption whistleblowers face penalties
2007-08-25, MSNBC/Associated Press
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20430153/

One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted. Or worse. For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods. He had thought he was doing a good and noble thing when he started telling the FBI about the guns and the land mines and the rocket-launchers — all of them being sold for cash, no receipts necessary, he said. The buyers were Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry employees. The seller, he claimed, was the Iraqi-owned company he worked for, Shield Group Security Co. “It was a Wal-Mart for guns,” he says. “It was all illegal and everyone knew it.” So Vance says he blew the whistle, supplying photos and documents and other intelligence to an FBI agent in his hometown of Chicago because he didn’t know whom to trust in Iraq. For his trouble, he says, he got 97 days in Camp Cropper, an American military prison outside Baghdad. Congress gave more than $30 billion to rebuild Iraq, and at least $8.8 billion of it has disappeared. “If you do it, you will be destroyed,” said William Weaver, professor of political science at the University of Texas-El Paso and senior advisor to the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. “Reconstruction is so rife with corruption. Sometimes people ask me, ‘Should I do this?’ And my answer is no. If they’re married, they’ll lose their family. They will lose their jobs. They will lose everything,” Weaver said.

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