by AlicetheCurious » Tue Oct 10, 2006 9:47 am
<!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>The Two Faces Of Rumsfeld</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>2000: director of a company which wins $200m contract to sell nuclear reactors to North Korea<br>2002: declares North Korea a terrorist state, part of the axis of evil and a target for regime change<br><br>Randeep Ramesh <br><br>Friday May 9, 2003 (The Guardian) <br><br>Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, sat on the board of a company which three years ago sold two light water nuclear reactors to North Korea - a country he now regards as part of the "axis of evil" and which has been targeted for regime change by Washington because of its efforts to build nuclear weapons.<br><br>Mr Rumsfeld was a non-executive director of ABB, a European engineering giant based in Zurich, when it won a $200m (£125m) contract to provide the design and key components for the reactors. The current defence secretary sat on the board from 1990 to 2001, earning $190,000 a year. He left to join the Bush administration. <br><br>The reactor deal was part of President Bill Clinton's policy of persuading the North Korean regime to positively engage with the west. <br><br>The sale of the nuclear technology was a high-profile contract. ABB's then chief executive, Goran Lindahl, visited North Korea in November 1999 to announce ABB's "wide-ranging, long-term cooperation agreement" with the communist government. <br><br>The company also opened an office in the country's capital, Pyongyang, and the deal was signed a year later in 2000. Despite this, Mr Rumsfeld's office said that the de fence secretary did not "recall it being brought before the board at any time". <br><br>In a statement to the American magazine Newsweek, his spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said that there "was no vote on this". A spokesman for ABB told the Guardian yesterday that "board members were informed about the project which would deliver systems and equipment for light water reactors". <br><br>Just months after Mr Rumsfeld took office, President George Bush ended the policy of engagement and negotiation pursued by Mr Clinton, saying he did not trust North Korea, and pulled the plug on diplomacy. Pyongyang warned that it would respond by building nuclear missiles. A review of American policy was announced and the bilateral confidence building steps, key to Mr Clinton's policy of detente, halted. <br><br>By January 2002, the Bush administration had placed North Korea in the "axis of evil" alongside Iraq and Iran. If there was any doubt about how the White House felt about North Korea this was dispelled by Mr Bush, who told the Washington Post last year: "I loathe [North Korea's leader] Kim Jong-il."<br><br>...<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3303.htm">www.informationclearingho...le3303.htm</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br><hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--> <br><br>The above article reminded me of some old news:<br><br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13558-2003Dec18.html">www.washingtonpost.com/wp...Dec18.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Rumsfeld Visited Baghdad in 1984 to Reassure Iraqis, Documents Show</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br>Trip Followed Criticism Of Chemical Arms' Use<br><br>By Dana Priest<br>Washington Post Staff Writer<br>Friday, December 19, 2003; Page A42<br><br><br>Donald H. Rumsfeld went to Baghdad in March 1984 with instructions to deliver a private message about weapons of mass destruction: that the United States' public criticism of Iraq for using chemical weapons <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>would not</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> derail Washington's attempts to forge a better relationship, according to newly declassified documents.<br><br>Rumsfeld, then President Ronald Reagan's special Middle East envoy, was urged to tell Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz that the U.S. statement on chemical weapons, or CW, "was made strictly out of our strong opposition to the use of lethal and incapacitating CW, wherever it occurs," according to a cable to Rumsfeld from then-Secretary of State George P. Shultz.<br><br>The statement, the cable said, was not intended to imply a shift in policy, and the U.S. desire "to improve bilateral relations, at a pace of Iraq's choosing," remained "undiminished." "This message bears reinforcing during your discussions."<br><br>...An explicit purpose of Rumsfeld's return trip in March 1984, the once-secret documents reveal for the first time, was to ease the strain created by a U.S. condemnation of chemical weapons.<br><br>...When details of Rumsfeld's December trip came to light last year, the defense secretary told CNN that he had "cautioned" Saddam Hussein about the use of chemical weapons, <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>an account that was at odds with the declassified State Department notes of his 90-minute meeting, which did not mention such a caution</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->. <br><br>...Last year, the Bush administration cited its belief that Iraq had and would use weapons of mass destruction -- including chemical, biological and nuclear devices -- as the principal reason for going to war.<br><br>But throughout 1980s, while Iraq was fighting a prolonged war with Iran, the United States saw Hussein's government as an important ally and bulwark against the militant Shiite extremism seen in the 1979 revolution in Iran. Washington worried that the Iranian example threatened to destabilize friendly monarchies in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.<br><br>Publicly, the United States maintained neutrality during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, which began in 1980.<br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Privately, however, the administrations of Reagan and George H.W. Bush sold military goods to Iraq, including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological agents, worked to stop the flow of weapons to Iran, and undertook discreet diplomatic initiatives, such as the two Rumsfeld trips to Baghdad, to improve relations with Hussein.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>...<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://newsmine.org/archive/coldwar-imperialism/iraqgate/rumsfeld-1984-baghdad-visit.txt">newsmine.org/archive/cold...-visit.txt</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Who knows more about the toxicity of aspartame than the FDA. Their toxicologists, Doctors Adrian Gross and Jacqueline Verrett strenuously objected to aspartame approval for 16 years. It wasn't just that aspartame is not safe and in original studies triggered brain tumors, seizures and all sorts of other tumors, it was that the manufacturer filtered out what they didn't want FDA to see. <br> <br>...<br><br>Don Rumsfeld, currently Secretary of Defense, was CEO of Searle and said he would call in his markers and get aspartame approved. To Rumsfeld the fact the FDA said "no" meant only he would have to use politics instead of science to get this neurotoxin approved, knowing full well it would poison the public, causing in humans the injuries seen in lab animals, brain tumors and seizures. He was on Reagan's transition team and the day after Reagan took office Arthur Hull Hayes was appointed to approve this toxin, since no former FDA Commissioner had been willing to do so. <br> <br>ASPARTAME WAS APPROVED BY PRESIDENTIAL ORDER <br> <br>President Reagan knew it would take 30 days to get Hayes to FDA so he wrote an executive order making the outgoing FDA Commissioner powerless to oppose aspartame. From the congressional record, Senate, page S5497, May 7, l985: <br> <br>"Two FDA officials have told Common Cause Magazine that Hayes was determined to push aspartame forward, in part as a signal that the Reagan administration was ushering in a new regulatory era. One official privy to some of the deliberations made at Hayes' level says the "people at the top" were not receptive to important concerns raised about the quality and validity of some of the key tests submitted in support of aspartame." <br> <br>"There were real questions" about the reliability and interpretation of the data "that were glossed over" at the commissioner's level, this official says, adding that Hayes and his close associates wanted FDA scientists to concentrate on providing rationales for overturning the l980 Public Board of Inquiry instead of focusing on the fact that there were unresolved issues about a number of key tests." <br> <br>John Hoey, M.D. in reviewing Marcia Angell's book, "The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It" (10/7/2004) says: <br> <br>"By Angell's account, the current slide toward the commercialization and corruption of clinical research coincided with the election of President Ronald Reagan in l980 and the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act, a new set of laws that permitted and encouraged universities and small businesses to patent discoveries from research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Research paid for by the public to serve the public instantly became a private and salable, good, one that is producing drug sales of more than $200 billion a year." <br> <br>...<br><br>...Dr. Hayes wouldn't take "no" because he was there to get aspartame approved. As the Congressional Record continues, Senate, S5497, May 7, l985: "Hayes' decisions to approve aspartame for use in dry foods such as cereals in l981 and soft drinks in l983 does not square with the role of the FDA is supposed to play. ...<br><br>In l986 the Community Nutrition Institute in Washington, D.C. petitioned FDA to ban aspartame because so many were having seizures and going blind from the free methyl alcohol in the drug. Aspartame is sold as an additive but it's a neurotoxic drug. FDA law requires an additive be inert or non-reactive. The medical text on aspartame disease lists countless diseases and symptoms and drug interactions by the toxin. <br> <br>...<br><br>This goes along with conversations with Dr. James Bowen who says because aspartame damages the mitocondria of the cell it will interact with all drugs and as a chemical hypersensitization agent will interact with vaccines, unsafe sweeteners like Splenda or sucralose ( chlorinated hydrocarbon) and toxins. <br> <br>Dr. Bowen wrote about the biochemical interactions between aspartame and other poisons including many pharmaceuticals .... Further he wrote: "Because aspartame in the processes of digestion and metabolism, forms about ten other known severe poisonings, and intermediate metabolites, its potential for drug related interactions is immeasurable. <br><br>To top that off, the aspartame molecule is so heinously poisonous in different ways that it never passed a single FDA standard toxicity test. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>So Donald Rumsfeld, CEO of aspartame manufacturer Searle employed political power to get it approved, after the FDA for 16 years refused to allow it on the market because of aspartame toxicity. Then Reagan took direct executive measures to paralyze FDA from further action against aspartame.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> <br> <br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Our FDA has never been the same since. Deadly chemicals now being blessed by FDA are marketed as wholesome pharmaceuticals, are just the tip of the iceberg, and result of Rumsfeld's damage to FDA.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> <br><br>...What the original tests showed is that at a dose of three cans of pop per day, scaled to the weight of the animal, aspartame releases DKP, a recognized virulent brain carcinogen. No other chemical causes the brain cancer rate to jump as much." <br> <br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.global-conspiracies.com/aspartame_interacts_with_all_drugs_vaccines_and_toxins.htm">www.global-conspiracies.c...toxins.htm</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Rumsfeld's growing stake in Tamiflu<br><br>Defense Secretary, ex-chairman of flu treatment rights holder, sees portfolio value growing.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>October 31, 2005: 10:55 AM EST <br>By Nelson D. Schwartz, Fortune senior writer<br> <br>NEW YORK (Fortune) - The prospect of a bird flu outbreak may be panicking people around the globe, but it's proving to be very good news for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other politically connected investors in Gilead Sciences, the California biotech company that owns the rights to Tamiflu, the influenza remedy that's now the most-sought after drug in the world. <br><br>Rumsfeld served as Gilead (Research)'s chairman from 1997 until he joined the Bush administration in 2001, and he still holds a Gilead stake valued at between $5 million and $25 million, according to federal financial disclosures filed by Rumsfeld. <br><br>The forms don't reveal the exact number of shares Rumsfeld owns, but in the past six months fears of a pandemic and the ensuing scramble for Tamiflu have sent Gilead's stock from $35 to $47. That's made the Pentagon chief, already one of the wealthiest members of the Bush cabinet, at least $1 million richer. <br><br>Rumsfeld isn't the only political heavyweight benefiting from demand for Tamiflu, which is manufactured and marketed by Swiss pharma giant Roche. (Gilead receives a royalty from Roche equaling about 10% of sales.) Former Secretary of State George Shultz, who is on Gilead's board, has sold more than $7 million worth of Gilead since the beginning of 2005. <br><br>Another board member is the wife of former California Gov. Pete Wilson. <br><br>"I don't know of any biotech company that's so politically well-connected," says analyst Andrew McDonald of Think Equity Partners in San Francisco. <br><br>What's more, the federal government is emerging as one of the world's biggest customers for Tamiflu. In July, the Pentagon ordered $58 million worth of the treatment for U.S. troops around the world, and Congress is considering a multi-billion dollar purchase. Roche expects 2005 sales for Tamiflu to be about $1 billion, compared with $258 million in 2004. <br><br>Rumsfeld recused himself from any decisions involving Gilead when he left Gilead and became Secretary of Defense in early 2001. And late last month, notes a senior Pentagon official, Rumsfeld went even further and had the Pentagon's general counsel issue additional instructions outlining what he could and could not be involved in if there were an avian flu pandemic and the Pentagon had to respond. <br><br>As the flu issue heated up early this year, according to the Pentagon official, Rumsfeld considered unloading his entire Gilead stake and sought the advice of the Department of Justice, the SEC and the federal Office of Government Ethics. <br><br>Those agencies didn't offer an opinion so Rumsfeld consulted a private securities lawyer, who advised him that it was safer to hold on to the stock and be quite public about his recusal rather than sell and run the risk of being accused of trading on insider information, something Rumsfeld doesn't believe he possesses. So he's keeping his shares for the time being.<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://money.cnn.com/2005/10/31/news/newsmakers/fortune_rumsfeld/index.htm">money.cnn.com/2005/10/31/.../index.htm</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--> <br><br><br> <br> <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=alicethecurious>AlicetheCurious</A> at: 10/10/06 8:02 am<br></i>
