Thursday, January 28, 2010

Members of U.S. Congress Ask President Obama to End the Blockade in Gaza

from : http://www.globalresearch.ca



Global Research, January 28, 2010



Washington, D.C. www.adc.org | Last Thursday, 54 Members of the House of Representatives led by Congressman Ellison of Minnesota and Congressman McDermott from Washington State signed a letter to President Obama asking his Administration to lift the blockade on Gaza. In the letter to President Obama, the 54 Members of Congress said "the unabated suffering of Gazan civilians highlights the urgency of reaching a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and we ask you to press for immediate relief for the citizens of Gaza as an urgent component of your broader Middle East Peace." Click here to read the full letter.


ADC President Mary Rose Oakar said "Now is the time to hold our elected Officials accountable to work for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East . These 54 Members should be recognized for their courage in attempting to bring an end to the unfair treatment of the Palestinian people."


The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) urges you to recognize and thank these 54 US House Representatives for exhibiting leadership by contacting them TODAY. Please see below for the list.

Name

State

Phone #

Raul Grijalva

AZ

(202) 225- 2435

Barbara Lee

CA

(202) 225- 2661

Bob Filner

CA

(202) 225- 8045

Diane Watson

CA

(202) 225- 7084

Fortney Pete Stark

CA

(202) 225- 5065

George Miller

CA

(202) 225- 2095

Jackie Speier

CA

(202) 225- 3531

Lois Capps

CA

(202) 225- 3601

Loretta Sanchez

CA

(202) 225- 2965

Lynn Woolsey

CA

(202) 225- 5161

Michael M. Honda

CA

(202) 225- 2631

Sam Farr

CA

(202) 225- 2861

Jim Himes

CT

(202) 225- 5541

Bruce D. Braley

IA

(202) 225- 2911

Andre Carson

IN

(202) 225- 4011

John A. Yarmuth

KY

(202) 225- 5401

James P. McGovern

MA

(202) 225- 6101

John Tierney

MA

(202) 225- 8020

John W. Oliver

MA

(202) 225- 5335

Michael E Capuano

MA

(202) 225- 5111

Stephen F. Lynch

MA

(202) 225- 8273

William D. Delahunt

MA

(202) 225- 3111

Donna F. Edwards

MD

(202) 225- 8699

Elijah E. Cummings

MD

(202) 225- 4741

Carolyn C. Kilpatrick

MI

(202) 225- 2261

John Conyers

MI

(202) 225- 5126

John D. Dingell

MI

(202) 225- 4071

Betty McCollum

MN

(202) 225- 6631

James L. Oberstar

MN

(202) 225- 6211

Keith Ellison

MN

(202) 225- 4755

David E. Price

NC

(202) 225- 1784

Bill Pascrell, Jr.

NJ

(202) 225- 5751

Donald M. Payne

NJ

(202) 225- 3436

Rush D. Holt

NJ

(202) 225- 5801

Eric Massa

NY

(202) 225- 3161

Maurice D. Hinchey

NY

(202) 225- 6335

Paul Tonko

NY

(202) 225- 5076

Yvette D. Clarke

NY

(202) 225- 6231

Marcy Kaptur

OH

(202) 225- 4146

Mary Jo Kilroy

OH

(202) 225- 2015

Earl Blumenauer

OR

(202) 225- 4811

Peter A. Defazio

OR

(202) 225- 6416

Chaka Fattah

PA

(202) 225- 4001

Joe Sestak

PA

(202) 225- 2011

Glenn C. Nye

VA

(202) 225- 4215

James P. Moran

VA

(202) 225- 4376

Peter Welch

VT

(202) 225- 4115

Adam Smith

WA

(202) 225- 8901

Brian Baird

WA

(202) 225- 3536

Jay Inslee

WA

(202) 225- 6311

Jim McDermott

WA

(202) 225- 3106

Gwen Moore

WI

(202) 225- 4572

Tammy Baldwin

WI

(202) 225- 2906

Nick J Rahall II

WV

(202) 225- 3452



The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), which is non sectarian and non partisan, is the largest Arab-American civil rights organization in the United States . It was founded in 1980, by former Senator James Abourezk to protect the civil rights of people of Arab descent in the United States and to promote the cultural heritage of the Arabs. ADC has 38 chapters nationwide, including chapters in every major city in the country, and members in all 50 states.

The ADC Research Institute (ADC-RI), which was founded in 1981, is a Section 501(c)(3) educational organization that sponsors a wide range of programs on behalf of Arab Americans and of importance to all Americans.

__________________________________________
Contact:Haythem Khalil, media@adc.org, 202-244-2990


Global Research Articles by American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee


The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website.

.

Presidential assassinations of U.S. citizens

from : http://uruknet.com

Glenn Greenwald

27gg-md_horiz.jpg

January 27, 2010

(updated below - Update II)

The Washington Post's Dana Priest today reports that "U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people." That's no surprise, of course, as Yemen is now another predominantly Muslim country (along with Somalia and Pakistan) in which our military is secretly involved to some unknown degree in combat operations without any declaration of war, without any public debate, and arguably (though not clearly) without any Congressional authorization. The exact role played by the U.S. in the late-December missile attacks in Yemen, which killed numerous civilians, is still unknown.

But buried in Priest's article is her revelation that American citizens are now being placed on a secret "hit list" of people whom the President has personally authorized to be killed:

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. . . .

The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, "it doesn't really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them," a senior administration official said. "They are then part of the enemy."

Both the CIA and the JSOC maintain lists of individuals, called "High Value Targets" and "High Value Individuals," whom they seek to kill or capture. The JSOC list includes three Americans, including [New Mexico-born Islamic cleric Anwar] Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year. As of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens, and an intelligence official said that Aulaqi's name has now been added.

Indeed, Aulaqi was clearly one of the prime targets of the late-December missile strikes in Yemen, as anonymous officials excitedly announced -- falsely, as it turns out -- that he was killed in one of those strikes.

Just think about this for a minute. Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests." They're entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations. Amazingly, the Bush administration's policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges -- based solely on the President's claim that they were Terrorists -- produced intense controversy for years. That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution. Shouldn't Obama's policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind -- not imprisoned, but killed -- produce at least as much controversy?

Obviously, if U.S. forces are fighting on an actual battlefield, then they (like everyone else) have the right to kill combatants actively fighting against them, including American citizens. That's just the essence of war. That's why it's permissible to kill a combatant engaged on a real battlefield in a war zone but not, say, torture them once they're captured and helplessly detained. But combat is not what we're talking about here. The people on this "hit list" are likely to be killed while at home, sleeping in their bed, driving in a car with friends or family, or engaged in a whole array of other activities. More critically still, the Obama administration -- like the Bush administration before it -- defines the "battlefield" as the entire world. So the President claims the power to order U.S. citizens killed anywhere in the world, while engaged even in the most benign activities carried out far away from any actual battlefield, based solely on his say-so and with no judicial oversight or other checks. That's quite a power for an American President to claim for himself.

As we well know from the last eight years, the authoritarians among us in both parties will, by definition, reflexively justify this conduct by insisting that the assassination targets are Terrorists and therefore deserve death. What they actually mean, however, is that the U.S. Government has accused them of being Terrorists, which (except in the mind of an authoritarian) is not the same thing as being a Terrorist. Numerous Guantanamo detainees accused by the U.S. Government of being Terrorists have turned out to be completely innocent, and the vast majority of federal judges who provided habeas review to detainees have found an almost complete lack of evidence to justify the accusations against them, and thus ordered them released. That includes scores of detainees held while the U.S. Government insisted that only the "Worst of the Worst" remained at the camp.

No evidence should be required for rational people to avoid assuming that Government accusations are inherently true, but for those do need it, there is a mountain of evidence proving that. And in this case, Anwar Aulaqi -- who, despite his name and religion, is every bit as much of an American citizen as Scott Brown and his daughters are -- has a family who vigorously denies that he is a Terrorist and is "pleading" with the U.S. Government not to murder their American son:

His anguish apparent, the father of Anwar al-Awlaki told CNN that his son is not a member of al Qaeda and is not hiding out with terrorists in southern Yemen.

"I am now afraid of what they will do with my son, he's not Osama Bin Laden, they want to make something out of him that he's not," said Dr. Nasser al-Awlaki, the father of American-born Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. . . .

"I will do my best to convince my son to do this (surrender), to come back but they are not giving me time, they want to kill my son. How can the American government kill one of their own citizens? This is a legal issue that needs to be answered," he said.

"If they give me time I can have some contact with my son but the problem is they are not giving me time," he said.

Who knows what the truth is here? That's why we have what are called "trials" -- or at least some process -- before we assume that government accusations are true and then mete out punishment accordingly. As Marcy Wheeler notes, the U.S. Government has not only repeatedly made false accusations of Terrorism against foreign nationals in the past, but against U.S. citizens as well. She observes: "I guess the tenuousness of those ties don’t really matter, when the President can dial up the assassination of an American citizen."

A 1981 Executive Order signed by Ronald Reagan provides: "No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination." Before the Geneva Conventions were first enacted, Abraham Lincoln -- in the middle of the Civil War -- directed Francis Lieber to articulate rules of conduct for war, and those were then incorporated into General Order 100, signed by Lincoln in April, 1863. Here is part of what it provided, in Section IX, entitled "Assassinations":

The law of war does not allow proclaiming either an individual belonging to the hostile army, or a citizen, or a subject of the hostile government, an outlaw, who may be slain without trial by any captor, any more than the modern law of peace allows such intentional outlawry; on the contrary, it abhors such outrage. The sternest retaliation should follow the murder committed in consequence of such proclamation, made by whatever authority. Civilized nations look with horror upon offers of rewards for the assassination of enemies as relapses into barbarism.

Can anyone remotely reconcile that righteous proclamation with what the Obama administration is doing? And more generally, what legal basis exists for the President to unilaterally compile hit lists of American citizens he wants to be killed?

What's most striking of all is that it was recently revealed that, in Afghanistan, the U.S. had compiled a "hit list" of Afghan citizens it suspects of being drug traffickers or somehow associated with the Taliban, in order to target them for assassination. When that hit list was revealed, Afghan officials "fiercely" objected on the ground that it violates due process and undermines the rule of law to murder people without trials:

Gen. Mohammad Daud Daud, Afghanistan's deputy interior minister for counternarcotics efforts, praised U.S. and British special forces for their help recently in destroying drug labs and stashes of opium. But he said he worried that foreign troops would now act on their own to kill suspected drug lords, based on secret evidence, instead of handing them over for trial.

"They should respect our law, our constitution and our legal codes," Daud said. "We have a commitment to arrest these people on our own" . . . .

Ali Ahmad Jalali, a former Afghan interior minister, said that he had long urged the Pentagon and its NATO allies to crack down on drug smugglers and suppliers, and that he was glad that the military alliance had finally agreed to provide operational support for Afghan counternarcotics agents. But he said foreign troops needed to avoid the temptation to hunt down and kill traffickers on their own.

"There is a constitutional problem here. A person is innocent unless proven guilty," he said. "If you go off to kill or capture them, how do you prove that they are really guilty in terms of legal process?" . . .

So we're in Afghanistan to teach them about democracy, the rule of law, and basic precepts of Western justice. Meanwhile, Afghan officials vehemently object to the lawless, due-process-free assassination "hit list" of their citizens based on the unchecked say-so of the U.S. Government, and have to lecture us on the rule of law and Constitutional constraints. By stark contrast, our own Government, our media and our citizenry appear to find nothing wrong whatsoever with lawless assassinations aimed at our own citizens. And the most glaring question for those who critized Bush/Cheney detention policies but want to defend this: how could anyone possibly object to imprisoning foreign nationals without charges or due process at Guantanamo while approving of the assassination of U.S. citizens without any charges or due process?

UPDATE: In comments, sysprog documents the numerous countries condemned in 2009 by the U.S. State Department for "extra-judicial killings." I trust that it goes without saying that it's different (and better) when we do it than when They do it, because we're different (and better), but it still seems worth noting.

UPDATE II: James Joyner argues that this "hit list" policy is not much different than our drone attacks in Pakistan, which Obama has substantially escalated, and that "no one seems to be complaining about the President's authority" to kill suspected Terrorists there. Actually, there are substantial questions about the legality of those drone attacks, though the complete secrecy behind which the program operates makes those questions very difficult to address. Beyond that, though, there's a substantial difference between a government which (a) targets foreign nationals whom it claims are part of a enemy organization and (b) targets its own citizens for assassination without any due process. They both have substantial legal and moral problems, and killing innocent foreigners is obviously no better than killing one's own innocent citizens, but (a) is at least a fairly common act of war, whereas (b) -- as the U.S. Government itself has long argued -- is a hallmark of tyranny. There's a much greater danger from allowing a government to target its own citizens for extra-judicial killings.



:: Article nr. 62651 sent on 28-jan-2010 02:54 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=62651

Link: www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2010/01/27/yemen/index.html


The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website.

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Monday, January 25, 2010

Latest Bin Laden Video Is a Forgery: All References to Current Events Are Made During Video Freeze

from : http://www.boomantribune.com/

by George Maschke
Sun Sep 9th, 2007 at 06:10:31 AM EST

Osama Bin Laden's widely publicized video address to the American people has a peculiarity that casts serious doubt on its authenticity: the video freezes at about 1 minute and 36 58 seconds, and motion only resumes again at 12:30. The video then freezes again at 14:02 remains frozen until the end. All references to current events, such as the 62nd anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan, and Sarkozy and Brown being the leaders of France and the UK, respectively, occur when the video is frozen! The words spoken when the video is in motion contain no references to contemporary events and could have been (and likely were) made before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The audio track does appear to be in the voice of a single speaker. What I suspect was done is that an older, unreleased video was dubbed over for this release, with the video frozen when the audio track departed from that of the original video.

The video may be downloaded as a 677 mb MPEG file here.



The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website.

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Sunday, January 24, 2010

Vatican bank charged with money-laundering

from : http://www.presstv.ir


Sun, 24 Jan 2010 10:34:44 GMT
Font size :

The Bank of the Vatican has been accused of laundering USD 200 million by proxy through an Italian creditor, a report indicates.

The allegation of the Vatican bank's financial corruption has been made by an Italian magazine that pointed to the financial institute's purported involvement in stealth fiscal transactions —via several accounts —with Italy's UniCredit Bank, Russia Today television network quoted the Panorama magazine as reporting.

“This corruption is continuing on a regular basis in the Vatican,” claimed Janathan Levy, a lawyer familiar with the bank.

“Again, there's no reason for a religion to have a bank that does worldwide commercial activities, dealing in gold, dealing in insurance, dealing in property and then hiding behind the Roman Catholic Church," Levy pointed out.

“I had the privilege to walk inside this bank. It's nothing like a bank,” the Russian news channel quoted another lawyer, Massimiliano Gabrieli, as saying.

“If you go there you deposit or withdraw money without limit, without any kind of receipt for the bank and for the client. All you have is a single card with a number,” he stated.

The British London Telegraph, has recently ranked the Bank of the Vatican ahead of the Bahamas, Switzerland and Liechtenstein in banking secrecy.

The Vatican has denied all charges.

GHN/JG



The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website.

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Thursday, January 21, 2010

Playing with mother earth ! Part 1




What the heck is that ?





after reviewing and reviewing the CBS video ,to LOT this is clearly a beam emitted from earth towards the sky .
But
the russians as seen on the CBS video ,claimed it was a spiraling missfired "Bulava" (nuclear sea to surface ICBM ) missile .

the logic of truth says :

the fact remains that a spiraling missile would have been there visible
only for a short moment .
witnesses said ,the whole event was more than
12 minutes long .

what they are doing with or to our Planet for heavens sake ?






sources say :

up to
1 billion watts had been used to create this (ionic ?) beam !

wiki says :

The European Incoherent Scatter Scientific Association (EISCAT) operates an ionospheric heating facility, capable of transmitting over 1 GW effective radiated power (ERP), near Tromsø, Norway.[12]
wiki art. end



at the end a black spot appeared in the sky !

interesting is that :

V. Putin statet ( highlighted in red ) in the mid 90's ;

from Wikipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAARP

HAARP : Potential for use as a weapon

The HAARP project became the subject of controversy in the mid-1990s, following claims that the antennas could be used as a weapon. In August 2002, a critical mention of HAARP technology came from the State Duma (parliament) of Russia. The Duma issued a press release on the HAARP written by the international affairs and defense committees, signed by 90 deputies and presented to then President Vladimir Putin. The statement claimed:

The U.S. is creating new integral geophysical weapons that may influence the near-Earth medium with high-frequency radio waves ... The significance of this qualitative leap could be compared to the transition from cold steel to firearms, or from conventional weapons to nuclear weapons. This new type of weapons differs from previous types in that the near-Earth medium becomes at once an object of direct influence and its component.[13]

According to Pravda, this concern is paralleled in the April 1997 statement by the U.S. Secretary of Defense over the power of such electromagnetic weaponry.[14]

Wiki end .

go to HAARP !

Russia - US ties getting tighter ?

new:


Haiti EarthQuake H.A.A.R.P ? 2010



Norway Time Hole “Leak” Plunges Northern Hemisphere Into Chaos


remember :

HAARP has nothing to do with the Large Hydron collider of CERN !


US Forces in Haiti to Grow to 20,000

from : http://www.sott.net


American Forces Press Service
Thu, 21 Jan 2010 21:48 EST

Roughly 20,000 U.S. troops will be supporting relief efforts in Haiti by Jan. 24, military officials said, adding to the 13,000-strong American force currently there.

Comprising the force will be the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, the 82nd Airborne Division's 2nd Brigade and thousands of other troops operating afloat off the Haitian coast and on shore, distributing provisions, assisting in medical operations and helping to maintain security. Some 2,200 Marines of the 24th MarineExpeditionary Unit are slated to arrive within 48 hours, military officials said.

"The 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit is a huge part of enabling us to extend our reach to places around the country that may need our assistance but we just haven't been there yet," Army Lt. Gen. P.K. Keen, the top U.S. commander in Haiti, said on The Pentagon Channel today.

The additional forces come as international aid continues pouring into Haiti following a magnitude 7 earthquake that struck Jan. 12, creating what an official called one of the greatest humanitarian emergencies in the history of the Americas.

About 2,000 Marines of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit that came ashore earlier this week have zeroed in on an area west of Port-au-Prince where much of the larger destruction occurred, according to Air Force Gen. Douglas Fraser, the commander of U.S. Southern Command.

In the meantime, some 1,400 flights are waiting to land at the congested Toussaint Louverture International Airport in the capital of Port-au-Prince, where the United States is overseeing upwards of 140 flights daily asofficials look to open additional airfields, Fraser told Pentagon reporters today. Reports of bottlenecking at the airport have emerged as its capacity has swelled from an average of 13 commercial aircraft daily arrivals before the quake.

As of yesterday, an airport about 30 miles southeast of the Haitian capital in the city of Jacmel became operational in addition to the San Isidro airport in neighboring Dominican Republic, where officials are looking to open a third airport in Maria Montez.

Officials say the disaster has killed between 100,000 to 200,000 people and the Red Cross estimates some 3 million people have been affected. To date, the United States has delivered 1.4 million bottles of water, 700,000 meals and 22,000 pounds of medical equipment, which are being disbursed among some 100 distribution sites, Fraser said.

While the cost of relief efforts is difficult to estimate given its scope, Fraser placed the figure at $100 million. The Defense Department pledged up to $20 million in emergency relief funds in days forHaiti, and sprang troops into action following the quake.

Off the Haitian coast are 20 U.S. ships, with the floating hospital vessel USNS Comfort among them, adding medical capabilities and supplying about 600 medical personnel and 1,000 desperately needed hospital beds. As of yesterday, roughly 270 U.S. medical personnel on the ground had treated more than 5,100 people inHaiti .








The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website.


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Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Haiti Has Larger Oil Reserves Than Venezuela Says Scientists (An Olympic Pool Compared to a Glass of Water)

from : http://remixxworld.blogspot.com

I have heard rumors that Haiti has vast oil reserves -- and that the globalists want these reserves. However, the globalists cannot get the reserves, because the oil belongs to the Haitian people. So the globalists do not allow the Haitians to exploit the oil reserves, because it would allow the Haitian people to prosper. It would allow the Haitians to build proper infrastructure, so that 7.0 earthquakes do not have such a devastating effect.

The article below is translated from French (read the original here) using Google, so it may not be 100% translated and of course verify whether these scientists are to believed. Nevertheless, as I stated in my previous article Haiti Has Huge Resources of Gold and Iridium Says Former Dominican Petroleum Refinery President Leopoldo Espaillat Nanita, it is ironic that Bill Clinton and George Soros have been talking about rebuilding Haiti's infrastructure and starting business ventures in the country. Perhaps Clinton, Soros and many other globalists have confirmed that these oil, gold, uranium, zyconium and iridium deposits DO exist in the Haiti and they want to gain control at the expense of the Haitian people.

###

Haiti is full of oil say Daniel and Ginette Mathurin

Scientists Daniel and Ginette Mathurin indicate that under Haitian soil is rich in oil and fuel fossible which were collected by Haitian and foreign experts. "We have identified 20 sites Oil, launches Daniel Mathurin stating that 5 of them are considered very important by practitioners and policies.

The Central Plateau, including the region of Thomond, the plain of the cul-de-sac and the bay of Port-au-Prince are filled with oil, he said, adding that Haiti's oil reserves are larger than those of Venezuela. An Olympic pool compared to a glass of water that is the comparison to show the importance of oil Haitian compared to those of Venezuela, "he explains.

Venezuela is one of the world's largest producers of oil.

Daniel Mathurin reveals that investigations of several previous governments have allowed to verify the existence of these large deposits of oil. It reminds a document of Lavalas party to power in 2004, had specified the number of sites in Haiti hydrocarbons.

According to Daniel et Ginette Mathurin, the lake region, with cities like Thomazeau and Cornillon, contains large deposits of oil.

Asked about the non-exploitation of these sites, Ginette Mathurin said that these deposits are declared strategic reserves of the United States of America. While stating his incomprehension of such a situation, it reminds that the Caribbean is considered the backyard of the United States.

But Daniel and Ginette Mathurin indicate that the U.S. government in 2005 authorized the use of strategic reserves of the United States. This door must be used by the Haitian political négiciations to launch with U.S. companies with a view to exploiting these deposits adds Daniel Mathurin

Experts argue that the government acted Jean Claude Duvalier had verified the existence of a major oilfield in the bay of Port-au-Prince shortly before its fall.

Moreover, Daniel et Ginette Mathurin show that uranium 238 and 235 and the deposit zyconium exist in several regions including in Jacmel. Uranium is used in nuclear reactors to produce electrical energy.

related Artikel :

Haiti: An Unwelcome Katrina Redux” by C.Mckinney

http://www.infowars.com/haiti-an-unwelcome-katrina-redux/



The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website.

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Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Yummy! Ammonia -Treated Pink Slime Now in Most U.S. Ground Beef


from : http://www.sott.net

Jennifer Poole
Alternet
Fri, 01 Jan 2010 23:03 EST

You're not going to believe what millions of Americans have been eating the last few years (Thanks, Bush! Thanks meat industry lobbyists!).

You're not going to believe what you've been eating the last few years (thanks, Bush! thanks meat industry lobbyists!) when you eat a McDonald's burger (or the hamburger patties in kids' school lunches) or buy conventional ground meat at your supermarket:

According to today's New York Times, The "majority of hamburger" now sold in the U.S. now contains fatty slaughterhouse trimmings "the industry once relegated to pet food and cooking oil," "typically including most of the material from the outer surfaces of the carcass" that contains "larger microbiological populations."

This "nasty pink slime," as one FDA microbiologist called it, is now wrung in a centrifuge to remove the fat, and then treated with AMMONIA to "retard spoilage," and turned into "a mashlike substance frozen into blocks or chips".

Thus saving THREE CENTS a pound off production costs. And making the company, Beef Products Inc., a fortune. $440 million/year in revenue. Ain't that something?

And to emphasize: this pink slime isn't just in fast food burgers or free lunches for poor kids:
With the U.S.D.A.'s stamp of approval, the company's processed beef has become a mainstay in America's hamburgers. McDonald's, Burger King and other fast-food giants use it as a component in ground beef, as do grocery chains. The federal school lunch program used an estimated 5.5 million pounds of the processed beef last year alone.
Bush's U.S.D.A. also allowed these "innovators" to get away with listing the ammonia as "a processing agent" instead of by name. And they also OKd the processing method -- and later exempted the hamburger from routine testing of meat sold to the general public - strictly based on the company's claims of safety, which were not backed by any independent testing.

Because the ammonia taste was so bad ("It was frozen, but you could still smell ammonia," said Dr. Charles Tant, a Georgia agriculture department official. "I've never seen anything like it.") the company started using a less alkaline ammonia treatment, and now we know - thanks to testing done for the school lunch program - that the nasty stuff isn't even reliably killing the pathogens.

But government and industry records obtained by The New York Times show that in testing for the school lunch program, E. coli and salmonella pathogens have been found dozens of times in Beef Products meat, challenging claims by the company and the U.S.D.A. about the effectiveness of the treatment. Since 2005, E. coli has been found 3 times and salmonella 48 times, including back-to-back incidents in August in which two 27,000-pound batches were found to be contaminated. The meat was caught before reaching lunch-rooms trays.

In July, school lunch officials temporarily banned their hamburger makers from using meat from a Beef Products facility in Kansas because of salmonella - the third suspension in three years, records show. Yet the facility remained approved by the U.S.D.A. for other customers.

Presented by The Times with the school lunch test results, top [U.S.D.A.] department officials said they were not aware of what their colleagues in the lunch program had been finding for years.

The New York Times article today has a rather innocuous headline, "Safety of beef processing method is questioned."

I'd say this quote from the U.S.D.A. department microbiologist, Gerald Zirnstein, who called the processed beef "pink slime" in a 2002 e-mail message to colleagues, represents the situation better: "I do not consider the stuff to be ground beef, and I consider allowing it in ground beef to be a form of fraudulent labeling."

I've been thinking about an action item on this issue, and I've got three ideas:
  1. Write Michelle Obama through this web form: here or snail mail: The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500

  2. Print out the NY Times article and give it to the manager of your local supermarket, and ask them if they sell any kind of ground beef that doesn't contain this "pink slime" or if their butchers will grind meat fresh for you

  3. Just stop buying the damned stuff altogether.


The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website.

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Sunday, January 17, 2010

Year of Resistance: Interview with Eva Golinger

from : http://www.venezuelanalysis.com


Eva Golinger: Venezuela is a very wealthy country in oil and gas reserves. It's actually one of the largest oil producers in the world. It has over 24% of oil reserves in the entire world. That's a lot for a country of 27 million people. And of course it lies close to the United States.... It's only two and a half hours approximately to fly to Miami, and in fact Venezuela's maritime territory borders US territory: it borders the colony of Puerto Rico. So, this is a very strategic place.

Traditionally, there have been governments before Hugo Chávez who were subservient to US interests. In fact, over 40 years after the fall of the last dictatorship in 1958, pretty much the governments here in place were clients of the United States. It was a client state. By the time Chávez came to power in 1998, Venezuela had pretty much privatized most of its industries that had been public industries, including communications, electricity, basic social services, heathcare. And the oil industry was on its way to being privatized and of course it could be privatized and handed over to US corporations. So, Chávez comes to power and he changes all of that. And he actually wins with a huge majority in 1998.... The majority of Venezuelans voted for him precisely because they were sick and tired of the old corrupt system that had kept increasing poverty and basically destroying the country and its infrastructure. So this all begins to change when he gets power. . . . New laws are implemented, agrarian reform, redistribution of oil wealth and that of the whole hydrocarbon industry.... This begins to affect really powerful interests, not just in Venezuela but outside Venezuela....

Throughout the 20th century, the US fought bitterly the rise of communism in this hemisphere. It has blockaded inhumanely Cuba for over 50 years and tried to isolate it. It installed dictatorships in the rest of the region in the sixties, the seventies, and the eighties in order to prevent the spread of communism. Now here we have a government in the 21st century with all its oil wealth, its tremendous popularity, talking again about implementing an economic system that prioritizes social needs and redistributing the wealth, at the same time maintaining its tremendous oil production and branching out... with other countries in the world like China, Russia, and Iran, in the end helping to change the balance of power and to lesson the influence and control of the US empire over the world.

All of this obviously affects tremendously these powerful interests, inside the United States particularly but also around the world, and they use their media power to control and try to demonize the image of President Chávez. It's much easier to try to remove a president from power or encourage regime change in a country if you can say that that head of state that you wanna overthrow is a terrible person, a demon doing awful things, a dictator. That's part of what this campaign against the person of Hugo Chávez in the international media has really been about. Here, I've been living in Caracas for over five years, and I can tell you this is the furthest thing from any kind of dictatorship. It's also not communism, whatsoever. We are on a path to implementing a new sort of social model that we're calling "socialism of the 21st century" but it's really a combination of capitalism and socialism. We're trying to figure out what works best here in Venezuela....

My opinion is that Obama's administration is much more dangerous towards Latin America than Bush's was, because with Bush we didn't have military bases being built right next to Venezuela. There's been a rapid escalation in aggression towards particularly Venezuela but also Cuba.... We have the case of the coup in Honduras against President Zelaya. That was a total scheme concocted by Washington, with its allies of course, right-wing economic elite in Honduras and multinationals, and yet they used what they call "smart power" -- Hillary Clinton and Obama's new strategy, as opposed to "soft power" and "hard power" -- to confuse heads of state in the region and the media. They used this discourse of condemning the coup but not pushing for the reinstatement of President Zelaya, all kinds of things, really to buy time, in the process that went on so long that the coup eventually got consolidated, and the US in the end stepped forward as pretty much the only country that recognizes the illegal government in Honduras, funding and supporting it. Now it's all come out. But in the first few months a lot of people were very wary of blaming the Obama administration for any role in that coup in Honduras, which is incredible, because there hasn't been one single coup d'état in Latin America throughout history that hasn't been somehow managed and ordered by Washington....

Eva Golinger is the author of The Chávez Code: Cracking U.S. Intervention in Venezuela and Bush versus Chávez: Washington’s War on Venezuela. This interview was broadcast on 10 January 2010. Read Golinger's blog Postcards from the Revolution at www.chavezcode.com. Visit the Web site of Cindy Sheehan's Soap Box: www.cindysheehanssoapbox.com. The text above is an edited partial transcript of the interview.



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