Bonus read
http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/articles/9-11.htm9/11's Trainer in Terrorism Was an FBI Informant
(Peter Dale Scott Talk in Palo Alto, October 27, 2006)
If I had an hour, I would talk to you about how the 9/11 Report failed to reconcile Dick Cheney's conflicting accounts, which cannot all be true, of what he did on the morning of 9/11 in the bunker beneath the White House. But that story takes two whole chapters of my forthcoming book, The Road to 9/11. So instead I will expand on what I spoke about a month ago in Berkeley, concerning Ali Mohamed, Washington's double agent inside al-Qaeda, and also a chief 9/11 plotter.(1) I want to add important new material tonight. Ali Mohamed, an Egyptian, was a close ally of Osama bin Laden. As he later confessed in court, he also aided the terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri, a co-founder of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and by then an aide to bin Laden, when he visited America to raise money.(2) It is now generally admitted that Ali Mohamed worked for the FBI, the CIA, and U.S. Special Forces.
Patrick Fitzgerald, who testified to the 9/11 Commission about Ali Mohamed, knew him well. In 1994 he had named him as an unindicted co-conspirator in the New York landmarks case, yet allowed him to remain free. This was because, as Fitzgerald knew, Ali Mohamed was an FBI informant, from at least 1993 and maybe 1989.(3) Thus, from 1994 "until his arrest in 1998 [by which time the 9/11 plot was well under way], Mohamed shuttled between California, Afghanistan, Kenya, Somalia and at least a dozen other countries."(4)
What I first wrote in 2004, and again in 9/11 and American Empire, has to my knowledge has not yet been in the US press: it is that in 1993 Ali Mohamed had been detained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Canada, (when he inquired at an airport after an incoming al Qaeda terrorist who turned out to be carrying two forged Saudi passports). Mohamed immediately told the RCMP to make a phone call to the FBI in the United States, and the call secured his release.(5) This release enabled Ali to go on to Kenya, take pictures of the U.S.. Embassy, and deliver them to bin Laden for the Embassy bombing plot.
In August 2006 there was a National Geographic Special on Ali Mohamed. We can take this as the new official fallback position on Ali Mohamed, because John Cloonan, the FBI agent who worked with Fitzgerald on Mohamed, helped narrate it. I didn't see the show, but here's what TV critics said about its contents:
Ali Mohamed manipulated the FBI, CIA and U.S. Army on behalf of Osama bin Laden. Mohamed trained terrorists how to hijack airliners, bomb buildings and assassinate rivals. [D]uring much of this time Mohamed was ... , an operative for the CIA and FBI, and a member of the U.S. Army.(6) ... Mohamed turned up in FBI surveillance photos as early as 1989, training radical Muslims who would go on to assassinate Jewish militant Meir Kahane and detonate a truck bomb at the World Trade Center. He not only avoided arrest, but managed to become an FBI informant while writing most of the al Qaeda terrorist manual and helping plan attacks on American troops in Somalia and U.S. embassies in Africa.(7)
That Mohamed trained al Qaeda in hijacking planes and wrote most of the al Qaeda terrorist manual is confirmed in a new book, The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright, who has seen US Government records.(8) Let me say this again: one of al-Qaeda's top trainers in terrorism and how to hijack airplanes was an operative for FBI, CIA, and the Army.
But what we have heard so far is a fall-back cover-up of even worse truths. Peter Lance, who first wrote the script for the National Geographic special, told about Mohamed's detention and release in Toronto. This important detail, along with others, was cut from the program. Lance withdrew from the project and complained on his website about these and other cuts, such as this one:
"Within days of 9/11 Cloonan ... interviewed Ali, whom the Feds had allowed to slip into witness protection, and demanded to know the details of the plot. At that point Ali wrote it all out - including details of how he'd counseled would-be hijackers on how to smuggle box cutters on board aircraft and where to sit, to effect the airline seizures."(9)
So let us sum up what we know so far about Ali Mohamed:
A key planner of the 9/11 plot, and trainer in hijacking, was simultaneously an informant for the FBI.
This operative trained the members for all of the chief Islamist attacks inside the United States -- the first WTC bombing, the New York landmarks plot, and finally 9/11, as well as the attacks against Americans in Somalia and Kenya.
And yet for four years Mohamed was allowed to move in and out of the country as an unindicted conspirator. Then, unlike his trainees, he was allowed to plea-bargain. To this day he may still not have been sentenced for any crime, and may even be in witness protection.(10)
Peter Lance has charged that Fitzgerald had evidence before 1998 to implicate Mohamed in the Kenya Embassy bombing, yet did nothing and let the bombing happen.(11) In fact, the FBI was aware back in 1990 that Mohamed had engaged in terrorist training on Long Island; yet it acted to protect Mohamed from arrest, even after one of his trainees had moved beyond training to an actual assassination.(12)
Mohamed's trainees were all members of the Al-Kifah Center in Brooklyn, which served as the main American recruiting center for the Makhtab-al-Khidimat, the "Services Center" network that after the Afghan war became known as al Qaeda.(13) The Al-Kifah Center was headed in 1990 by the blind Egyptian Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who like Ali Mohamed had been admitted to the United States, despite being on a State Department Watch List. (14) As he had done earlier in Egypt, the sheikh "issued a fatwa in America that permitted his followers to rob banks and kill Jews."(15)
In November 1990, three of Mohamed's trainees conspired together to kill Meir Kahane, the racist founder of the Jewish Defense League. The actual killer, El Sayyid Nosair, was caught by accident almost immediately; and by luck the police soon found his two co-conspirators, Mahmoud Abouhalima and Mohammed Salameh, waiting at Nosair's house. They found much more: There were formulas for bomb making, 1,440 rounds of ammunition, and manuals [supplied by Ali Mohamed] from the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg marked "Top Secret for Training," along with classified documents belonging to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. The police found maps and drawings of New York City landmarks like the Statue of Liberty, Times Square -- and the World Trade Center. The forty-seven boxes of evidence they collected also included the collected sermons of blind Sheikh Omar, in which he exhorted his followers to "destroy the edifices of capitalism."(16)
All three had been trained by Ali Mohamed back in the late 1980s at a rifle range, where the FBI had photographed them, before terminating this surveillance in the fall of 1989.(17)
The U.S. Government was thus in an excellent position to arrest, indict, and convict all of the terrorists involved, including Mohamed.
Yet only hours after the killing, Joseph Borelli, Chief of NYPD detectives, struck a familiar American note and pronounced Nosair a "lone deranged gunman.."(18) Some time later, he actually told the press that "There was nothing [at Nosair's house] that would stir your imagination ... ..Nothing has transpired that changes our opinion that he acted alone."[19]
Borelli was not acting alone in this matter. His position was also that of the FBI, who said they too believed "that Mr. Nosair had acted alone in shooting Rabbi Kahane." "The bottom line is that we can't connect anyone else to the Kahane shooting," an F.B.I. agent said."(20)
In thus limiting the case, the police and FBI were in effect protecting Nosair's two Arab co-conspirators in the murder of a U.S. citizen. Both of them were ultimately convicted in connection with the first WTC bombing, along with another Mohamed trainee, Nidal Ayyad. The 9/11 Report, summarizing the convictions of Salameh, Ayyad, Abouhalima, and the blind Sheikh for the WTC bombing and New York landmarks plots, calls it "this superb investigative and prosecutorial effort" (i.e. by Cloonan and Fitzgerald).(21) It says nothing about the suppressed evidence found in Nosair's house, including "maps and drawings of New York City landmarks," which if pursued should have prevented both plots from developing.
Almost certainly, the 9/11 Commission knew more about this scandalous situation than they let on. It cannot be just a coincidence that they selected to write the staff reports about al Qaeda and the 9/11 plot, and conduct the relevant interviews, Dietrich Snell, who had been Fitzgerald's colleague in the Southern District of New York U.S. Attorney's office. (Thus Snell presumably drafted the praise for the superb effort by his former colleague Patrick Fitzgerald and the FBI). Of the nine people on Snell's team, all but one had worked for the U.S. Government, and all but two for either the Justice Department or the FBI.(22)
If you go to my website,
www.peterdalescott.net, you will know that: Shortly after 9/11, in October 2001, U.S. and British newspapers briefly alleged that the paymaster for the 9/11 attacks was a possible agent of the Pakistani intelligence service ISI, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh. There was even a brief period in which it was alleged that the money had been paid at the direction of the then ISI Chief, Lieutenant-General Mahmoud Ahmad.(23)
Others have since argued that Saeed Sheikh worked for both America and Britain, since "both American and British governments have studiously avoided taking any action against Sheikh despite the fact that he is a known terrorist who has targeted U.S. and UK citizens."(24) The claim what Saeed Sheikh was recruited by MI-6 in Great Britain has been made by myself, by John Newman, and by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed; recently it has been pointed to in the new book by Pervez Musharraf, the President of Pakistan.(25)
And there may have been other double agents. Last month Robert Baer, a former CIA officer, told an Australian newspaper that ''In 1996, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed [the al-Qaeda mastermind of the 9/11 plot] was in Doha [the capital of Qatar], the CIA found out about it, and wanted to arrest him and people in Washington stopped them. That has never been answered in the 9/11 commission report, why that arrest was stopped."(26)
One week after 9/11, in a story for Pacific News Service, I wrote the following (which is still on my website):
It is important to learn from the serious mistakes made by the United States and CIA in the past. The usual CIA mode of undermining foreign governments it does not like -- from Russia to Cuba to Iran -- has been to organize and train their opponents in criminal activities, including sabotage and smuggling. But time and again this strategy backfires. The problem is that as soon as the United States loses interest in its agents' cause, the sabotage techniques it has taught will more than likely be turned back against it.(27)
This is what happened with al Qaeda.
When I wrote this I did not yet know about the scandal of Ali Mohamed's tolerated terrorism. In 2004, when I did know, I reported a story in the London Independent (but not this country) that Mohamed was on the U.S. payroll at the time he was training the Arab Afghans, and that the CIA, reviewing the case five years after the first WTC bombing, concluded in an internal document that the CIA itself was "partly culpable" in the World Trade Center attack.(28)
I cannot tell you whether (as I would like to think) Mohamed and Saeed were examples of rogue agents out of control (in which case we have a CIA problem), or whether they were agents not out of control (in which case we have of course a much worse CIA problem). One way or the other, we have a fundamental and on-going problem, for which we need a more serious remedy than just putting a Democrat in the White House. As has happened after past intelligence fiascoes, our intelligence agencies were strengthened as a result of the 9/11 Commission, not brought under control, and their budgets were increased.
It's time to confront the reality that these agencies themselves, and their own sponsorship and protection of terrorist activities, have aggravated the greatest threats to our national security. Scott Ritter and others have written that, at this very moment, CIA-backed bombings are being undertaken in Iran by the Mujahideen e-Khalq (MEK or MKO), an opposition group listed by the United States State Department as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.(29) It appears that, as if having learned nothing, the CIA is still sponsoring terrorists.
I want to admit, in all fairness, that certain notable victories have been achieved in the narrow pursuit of al Qaeda. At the same time, after five years of the new broadened war on terrorism, we can say with confidence that the net result to date is a far more dangerous world than we had before.
Peter Dale Scott's latest book (co-edited with David Ray Griffin) is 9/11 & American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out (Olive Branch Press, 2006). His website is
http://www.peterdalescott.net.
Notes
I discuss Ali Mohamed in a book I co-edited with David Ray Griffin: David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott (eds.), 9/11 & American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2006), 74, 76-77.
This admitted connection to al-Zawahiri has led some to identify Mohamed (Abu Mohamed al Amriki) with the al-Amriki alleged by Yossef Bodansky to have acted as go-between between Zawahiri and the CIA: "In the first half of November 1997 Ayman al-Zawahiri met a man called Abu-Umar al-Amriki (al-Amriki means "the American") at a camp near Peshawar, on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. High-level Islamist leaders insist that in this meeting Abu-Umar al-Amriki made al-Zawahiri an offer: The United States would not interfere with or intervene to prevent the Islamists' rise to power in Egypt if the Islamist mujahideen currently in Bosnia-Herzegovina would refrain from attacking the U.S. forces there. Moreover, Abu-Umar al-Amriki promised a donation of $50 million (from unidentified sources) to Islamist charities in Egypt and elsewhere. This was not the first meeting between Abu-Umar al-Amriki and Zawahiri. Back in the 1980s Abu-Umar al-Amriki openly acted as an emissary for the CIA with various Arab Islamist militant and terrorist movements ... then operating under the wings of the Afghan jihad ... . In the late 1980s, in one of his meetings with Zawahiri, Abu-Umar al-Amriki suggested that Zawahiri would need "$50 million to rule Egypt." At the time, Zawahiri interpreted this assertion as a hint that Washington would tolerate his rise to power if he could raise this money. The mention of the magic figure, $50 million, by Abu-Umar al-Amriki in the November 1997 meeting was interpreted by Zawahiri and the entire Islamist leadership, including Osama bin Laden, as a reaffirmation of the discussions with the CIA in the late 1980s about Washington's willingness to tolerate an Islamic Egypt. In 1997 the Islamist leaders were convinced that Abu-Umar al-Amriki was speaking for the CIA -- that is, the uppermost echelons of the Clinton administration" (Bodansky, Bin Laden, 212-13). As we shall see, it is the case that Mohamed was allowed to travel to Afghanistan even after his designation as an unindicted co-conspirator in 1994 (San Francisco Chronicle, 10/21/01).
Peter Lance, "Triple Cross: National Geographic Channel's Whitewash of the Ali Mohamed Story," Huffington Post, 8/29/06,
http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20060829/ cm_huffpost/028270. Unfortunately Lance's book on Mohamed, Triple Cross, was not yet available as this book went to press. Cf. Lawrence White, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 181-82; Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror (New York: Random House, 2002), 236; Lawrence Wright, New Yorker, 9/16/02: "In 1989 -- Mohamed talked to an F.B.I. agent in California and provided American intelligence with its first inside look at Al Qaeda."
Raleigh News & Observer, 10/21/01,
http://www.knoxstudio. com/shns/story.cfm?pk=ALIMOHAMED-10-24-01&cat=AN.
Toronto Globe and Mail, 11/22/01,
http://www.mail-archive.
com/hydro@topica.com/msg00224.html; Peter Dale Scott, "How to Fight Terrorism," California Monthly, September 2004,
http://www.alumni.berkeley.edu/Alumni/C ... rorism.asp. Mohamed's companion, Essam Marzouk, is now serving 15 years of hard labor in Egypt, after having been arrested in Azerbaijan. Mohamed's detention and release was months after the first WTC bombing in February 1993, and after the FBI had already rounded up two of the plotters whom they knew had been trained by Ali Mohamed.
Dave Shiflett, Bloomberg News, 8/28/06,
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... refer=home.
Glenn Garvin, Miami Herald,
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/en ... 310462.htmLawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 181. The Report claims (56) that "Bin Ladin and his comrades had their own sources of support and training, and they received little or no assistance from the United States." But Wright reports that Mohamed, while on a leave from the U.S. army, went to Afghanistan and trained "the first al-Qaeda volunteers in techniques of unconventional warfare, including kidnappings, assassinations, and hijacking planes." This was in 1988, one year before Mohamed left active U.S. Army service and joined the Reserve.
Peter Lance, "Triple Cross: National Geographic Channel's Whitewash of the Ali Mohamed Story," Huffington Post, 8/29/06,
http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20060829/cm _huffpost/028270.
According to publicity for the National Geographic special, Mohamed is "currently in U.S. custody," but "his whereabouts and legal status are closely guarded secrets" (Rocky Mountain News, 8/28/06, 2D). Lance wrote that Mohamed was put into the witness protection program. "David Runke [Ruhnke], a defense attorney in the African embassies bombing case, says, ``I think the most likely thing that will happen is he'll be released, he'll be given a new name and a new identity, and he will pick up a life someplace.''' (Shiflett, Bloomberg News, 8/28/06). As of November 2001, Mohamed had not been sentenced and was still believed to be supplying information from his prison cell.
"Ali Mohamed had stayed in [El-Hage's] Kenyan home in the mid 90's as they plotted the bombings. Another agent in Fitzie's squad Dan Coleman, had searched El-Hage's home a year before the bombings and found direct links to Ali Mohamed and yet Fitzgerald failed to connect the dots" (Lance, "Triple Cross," Huffington Post, 8/29/06).
Peter Lance, 1000 Years for Revenge (New York: Regan Books/ Harper Collins, 2003), 29-37.
Robert Dreyfuss, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2005), 278; John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America, and International Terrorism (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 87-88; Lance, 1000 Years for Revenge, 29-31; Independent, 11/1/98.
Rahman was issued two visas, one of them "by a CIA officer working undercover in the consular section of the American embassy in Sudan" (Peter L.. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden [New York: Free Press, 2001], 67). FBI consultant Paul Williams writes that Ali Mohamed "settled in America on a visa program controlled by the CIA" (Paul L. Williams, Al Qaeda: Brotherhood of Terror [[Upper Saddle River, NJ]: Alpha/ Pearson Education, 2002], 117). Others allege
http://www.pennlive.com/news/2016/12/fb ... _miss.htmlFBI investigating what happened to $300K in missing drug money seized by AG's office: report
on December 11, 2016 at 4:59 PM
Missing drug money from a local bust has prompted an FBI investigation into the whereabouts of the cash, according to a report from The Morning Call.
Agents from the attorney general's office stopped a van carrying $1.77 million in June 2014 on the Pennsylvania Turnpike near Carlisle. It is believed that $300,000 from that seizure is missing. The Drug Enforcement Agency sent the attorney general's office a letter explaining that a wiretapped conversation revealed more money should have been in the van, according to the report.
Officials with the FBI and the attorney general's office did not confirm the investigation, but the FBI has been inquiring about the missing money since last fall, according to the report. The owner of the van, Frederick Goldberg, of Florida, pleaded guilty to running a nationwide marijuana ring in November 2015.
The attorney general's office waited nearly two years to disclose the seizure, according to a separate report from the Morning Call. Additional questions have swirled around the incident, including whether proper protocol was followed and if the relevant parties were notified of the seizure. Cumberland County
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/cr ... story.htmlFBI agent who stole heroin sentenced to 3 years in prison - The ...
Washington Post › crime › 2015/07/09
Jul 9, 2015 - A onetime FBI agent who fed his drug addiction by stealing heroin seized as evidence in criminal cases was sentenced Thursday to ...
Link du jour
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... up-kitchenhttps://www.prisonactivist.orghttp://boydownthelane.com/2016/12/11/en ... reativity/http://fortunesociety.orghttp://www.humankindness.org/newsletters/Heat is Online
https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... -in-a-yearFossil fuel divestment
Fossil fuel divestment funds double to $5tn in a year
UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon welcomes new total revealing concern over coal, oil and gas investments has entered financial mainstream
A demonstration demanding divestment from fossil fuel at the New York Stock Exchange, Wall Street, New York. Photograph: Dorothy Chi Hung Lam/Courtesy 350.org
Damian Carrington
Monday 12 December 2016 11.00 EST
The value of investment funds committed to selling off fossil fuel assets has jumped to $5.2tn, doubling in just over a year.
The new total, published on Monday, was welcomed by the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, who said: “It’s clear the transition to a clean energy future is inevitable, beneficial and well underway, and that investors have a key role to play.”
The fossil fuel divestment campaign began on university campuses in 2011 but the new report reveals that concerns over investments in coal, oil and gas have now entered the financial mainstream, with more than 80% of the funds now committed to divest being managed by commercial investment and pension funds.
The report found that 688 institutions and more than 58,000 individuals across 76 countries are now committed to divestment, including major financial institutions such as the world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund, owned by Norway, and Allianz and Aegon.
Institutions worth $2.6 trillion have now pulled investments out of fossil fuels
Read more
“I commend today’s announcement that a growing number of investors are backing a shift away from the most carbon-intensive energy
https://robertscribbler.com/2016/12/09/ ... r-the-gun/Rendered Uninhabitable by Heat — It’s Not Just Sudan, Parts From North Africa to the Middle East are Under the Gun
“North Africa is already hot and is strongly increasing in temperature. At some point in this century, part of the region will become uninhabitable.” — Dr. Johannes Lilieveld
“The number of climate refugees could increase dramatically in future. Researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Cyprus Institute in Nicosia have calculated that the Middle East and North Africa could become so hot that human habitability is compromised.” — The Max Planck Institute
****
Heatwaves so hot that it’s impossible to perform any activity outdoors without threat of injury or worse. Raging dust storms that make the very air unbreathable. Massive droughts that wreck agricultural productivity and biodiversity altogether. Sections of Africa and the Middle East are currently getting a taste of these new, dangerous climate conditions. But their frequency could increase by five fold or more over the next 30-40 years — threatening harm, government collapse, and the forced dislocation of millions.
Sudan Could be Made Uninhabitable by Climate Change
Due to human-caused warming, these kinds of events are already happening in places like Sudan with increasing frequency. And a recent report by CNN shows that this North African state is under threat of becoming uninhabitable to human beings due to climate change.
(A new infertile crescent. Climate change increases desertification risks for semi-arid regions across Africa. Image source: Grid-Arendal, Columbia University and CNN.)
Drought has impacted agriculture to the extent that 1.9 million people in this nation of 40 million could face hunger over the next couple of years. A further 3.2 million face water shortages. And in the ironic juxtaposition that often comes with climate change — since 2013 about 600,000 people have been displaced due to the deluges that have more and more often come at the end of the long, dry periods.
For Sudan, the problems are just beginning. By mid-Century surface temperatures in the region could warm by between 1.1 and 3.1 degrees Celsius. And so much additional warming will multiply the occurrence of the kinds of harmful heatwaves, droughts, and dust storms that are happening today many times over. In the end, Sudan is at risk of being abandoned as its lands are taken in by a climate unfit for human habitation.
500 Million People Under Extreme Heat and Drought in Africa and Middle East by mid-Century
But it’s not just Sudan that’s facing a flip into nation-wrecking climate conditions. By 2050, extreme heat related events will be happening five times more frequently as the Earth warms up along a desiccating crescent in Africa and onward throughout a good chunk of the Middle East. During summers, by mid Century, temperatures throughout this vulnerable zone could be as much as 5 degrees Celsius hotter than they are today.
(Temperatures are set to rise to extreme levels across Africa and the Middle East due to fossil fuel burning and related Earth System warming. The impacts produce a high risk for mass migration away from these regions as hothouse conditions take hold. Image source: The Max-Planck Institute.)
Including Sudan, more than 500 million people live in this region. And according to the Max-Planck Institute, extremely hot days — of which there were 16 each year within this vulnerable area from 1986 to 2005 — will increase five-fold to 80 by 2050 and up to 118 to 200 by 2100.
Added extraordinary and persistent heat will bake moisture out of soils, ruin forests, and advance deserts. It will produce days when wet bulb temperatures approach or exceed the limit of human endurance (35 C) time and time again. Such a high prevalence and intensity of adverse conditions will make the current problems faced by the region seem mild and moderate by comparison. In the end, numerous places are likely to become basically unlivable.
Call For Action
Given the coming hardship and what is likely to be a preventable mass migration, scientists and environmentalists are calling for action. CNN and others have highlighted a need for aid to Africa and the Middle East. But as helpful as aid is to those desperate and struggling to survive, the primary driver of the whole problem is human-based fossil fuel emissions. And unless that stops, this region and its highly vulnerable peoples, among others around the world, will be very hard hit.
Michelle Yonetani, a senior advisor on disasters from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center noted that encouraging governments to increase commitments to act on climate is “perhaps one of the most indirect ways [to help], but [it is] globally the most important. Now really is the time to push governments to act…” Otherwise, vast regions within Africa and the Middle East face destabilization, collapse, and mass migration over rather short time horizons.
Links:
Climate Change Could Render Sudan Uninhabitable
The Max Planck Institute
Internal Displacement Monitoring Center
Grid-Arendal, Columbia University
http://anthraxvaccine.blogspot.com/2016 ... -dave.htmlSaturday, December 10, 2016
The Heroin Epidemic and the News/ DC Dave
The following piece was written by DC Dave, who shares my take on the opioid crisis, and its roots in the US deployment in Afghanistan. He has elaborated on the heroin epidemic, noting how the mass media have shied away from a realistic discussion and interpretation of the epidemic of injected opioids sweeping the world, which killed (newly reported this week by CDC) 15,000 Americans in 2015. Why did it take a year to come up with the 2015 number? I previously discussed the fact that CDC has been assigning deaths in which fentanyl was found (even when the death was obviously due to injection) as "prescription opioid deaths." I suspect that as fentanyl use and deaths skyrocketed faster than those due to heroin during the past two years, this turned into a problem for CDC. Fentanyl tends to be mixed with heroin or to replace heroin as a similar, stronger, cheaper alternative narcotic, which can be synthesized without poppies or opium. So assigning all fentanyl deaths to prescription drugs is being noticed, and criticized. The states and communities know whether people are dying from prescription fentanyl or from a needle. My last post showed that Massachusetts is now releasing its own statistics. While CDC claims over 50% of narcotic OD deaths are due to prescription drugs, Massachusetts says sorry, but our illicit narcotic OD deaths are 80%, and prescription OD deaths are only 20%. Here is DC Dave's piece:
Heroin Epidemic and the News
When you discover something that seems to you to be important but then you notice that the people who tell us what is supposed to be news are ignoring it, you know that it must be really important. I can cite a number of examples just from my own web site. Most recently we had the almost total press blackout of the justice system wrist slap of the man most responsible for the flood of illegal aliens into the country. It figures that they would black out the news of the piddling punishment that the man, Stan Eury, received, because they had blacked out his prosecution, and most of what they had reported on his operations previously had, amazingly enough, been favorable.
Before that we had their total failure to report in 2004 that the long suppressed report on the suspicious 1949 death of Secretary of Defense James Forrestal had at long last been made public. The press silence was extremely telling. They couldn’t report it because it was full of information that contradicted what they had unanimously told us for 55 years, that is, that Forrestal, the leading opponent in the U.S. government of recognition of the new state of Israel, had killed himself.
Before that, in 1997, the press had completely blacked out the news that Kenneth Starr’s report on the death of deputy White House counsel Vincent W. Foster, Jr., contained, by judges’ order, 20 pages that thoroughly undermined the conclusion that Foster had committed suicide. In Part 3 of my “America’s Dreyfus Affair, the Case of the Death of Vincent Foster,” I called it “The Great Suppression of ’97.”
These stories are plainly of enormous importance, and the fact that they are completely ignored by the American news media magnifies their importance. So too is the story of the heroin-death epidemic that is currently ravaging the country. In this case the news hasn’t been ignored completely, but it has been spun in such a way that one would hardly realize its magnitude. In the first place, only the lesser news organs dare suggest that the sharply rising death rate in the country from drug overdoses might be coming from widely available cheap heroin. “Heroin’s Death Toll Reaches Another Gruesome Landmark,” a headline that appeared above an October 16, 2016, article in the leftist Mother Jones magazine is one that you will never see in The Washington Post, The New York Times, or one of their many clones around the country. The article’s subtitle was even more disturbing: “Most states now lose more citizens to overdoses than to car accidents.”
The heroin factor in drug overdose deaths is also played down by the major news media by focusing all of what inadequate attention they have given to the problem on the deaths from prescription opioids. The Washington Post furnished a good recent example of what I am talking about on October 22 of this year. I posted an online comment, which received a supporting response from a medical doctor. Since, together, they get us right into the heart of the distorted reporting on the matter, I reproduce them both here:
I believe this is a very misleading statement: "Prescription narcotics cause more overdose deaths every year than any street drug, including heroin."
The following is from an article by Meryl Nass, MD:
"According to CDC itself, 'CDC has programmatically characterized all opioid pain reliever deaths (natural and semisynthetic opioids, methadone, and other synthetic opioids) as ‘prescription’ opioid overdoses.' That means illegally produced drugs in these categories are being designated as prescription drugs, when they are not. A further confounder is that heroin metabolizes to morphine, which is a prescription drug. So if fully metabolized at the time of autopsy, a death due to heroin will be labeled as due to a prescription narcotic."
Dr. Nass observes further: "While nationally, heroin overdoses jumped from 1.0 per 100,000 in 2010 to 3.4 per 100,000 in 2014, the number of prescribed narcotics held steady over the same period. A 2015 UN document noted that 'A recent [US government] household survey in the United States indicated that there was a significant decline in the misuse of prescription opioids from 2012 to 2013.'"
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/01/ny-times-depth-article-us-heroin-epidemic-gets-cause-solution-wrong.html *
Furthermore, the statistics do not distinguish between accidental and intentional drug overdose deaths. You know what you're getting from a prescription drug, but not from heroin bought on the street. I believe that all this fuss about out-of-control prescription drugs is a big smokescreen to cover for what is overwhelmingly an epidemic of deaths from heroin overdoses. Most of that heroin comes from Afghanistan and the producers are protected by our government.
To which “Pathologist, MD,” replied:
You are exactly spot-on correct. I've been saying this for over two years to deaf/blind ears/eyes including the CDC who's just fine with their bogus statistics. A competent high school math student should be able to debunk CDC stats which are hyperbole and designed for one thing - the addictionologists who've taken over at the CDC (like Andrew Kolodny - a psychiatrist/addictionologist who worked with Tom Frieden while they were together in NYC before Friedenbecame head of the CDC). If anyone will do a bit of research, instead of getting to the root causes of this problem, a band of zealots took over the CDC so-called 'prescription drug epidemic' and embellished everything in the language of addiction when only a small fraction of legitimate chronic pain patients have ANY problems with addiction issues (around 5%). Instead, they inflate numbers and create problems for patients while doing nothing for the real problem - illicit drugs and mostly young addicts. Then the major networks (like CNN and 60 minutes) pile on without doing any research whatsoever to further embellish the illegal side by taking pain medication away from legitimate patients. And NO ONE wants to hear from patients - I'm a 30 year senior in-house staff hospital physician who can't get an audience with anyone in power - they'd rather mislead everyone. Editors of major media outlets are aware of this but have chosen to take the low road and are doing nothing but making it all worse for everyone. Whether they're innumerate (bad at math) or prefer hyperbole, it's all the same. Misinformation on a grand scale and screwing over patients. How honorable.
Ignoring for the moment the last point in my letter, that most of the heroin behind the drug overdose surge is coming from Afghanistan, we can easily find support for Dr. Nass’s claim that heroin deaths are mainly behind the drug-death surge in the CDC’s own literature.
From 2000 through 2013, the age-adjusted rate for drug-poisoning deaths involving heroin nearly quadrupled from 0.7 per 100,000 in 2000 to 2.7 per 100,000 in 2013. During this 14-year period, the age-adjusted rate showed an average increase of 6% per year from 2000 through 2010, followed by a larger average increase of 37% per year from 2010 through 2013…
Several factors related to death investigation and reporting may affect measurement of death rates involving specific drugs. For example, toxicological tests to determine the types of drugs present may vary by jurisdiction. Measurement errors related to these factors are more likely to affect substance-specific death rates than the overall drug-poisoning death rate. In 2013, 22% of drug-poisoning deaths did not include information on the specific types of drugs involved. Some of these deaths could potentially involve heroin or opioid analgesics.
Metabolic breakdown of heroin into morphine in the body can make it difficult to distinguish between deaths from heroin and deaths from morphine based on the information on the death certificate. Some deaths reported to involve morphine could actually be deaths from heroin. This may result in an undercount of heroin-related deaths.
A person examining the tables and charts in that report entitled “Drug-poisoning Deaths Involving Heroin: United States 2000-2013” can easily come to the conclusion that it is readily available cheap heroin that is primarily responsible for the surge in drug overdose deaths in recent years. As Dr. Nass says in another article, “The true cause of the current heroin epidemic is massive amounts of heroin flooding into the U.S., exceeding what can be sold in our large cities, and now finding its way into even the tiniest hamlets.”
Local Reporting Better
One of those hamlets is Nashville, the county seat of my home county of Nash in North Carolina. The chief of Nashville’s police department recently instituted a program inviting addicts to turn themselves in for treatment, with a promise of no punishment by the law.
Of the 32 people who responded, “29 were addicted to heroin or opioid painkillers, two were crack-cocaine users and one abused alcohol.” "If you've got a thousand-percent increase here, it's not really something you can sweep under the rug," [Town Manager Hank] Raper said. "It's already here. It's not a matter of 'We'll address it when it gets her
http://ticklethewire.com Reid: FBI Director Comey Should Be Investigated Over Russian Hacking Probe
Sen. Harry Reid.
By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com
Sen. Harry Reid has called on an investigation of FBI Director James Comey on Saturday, alleging he refused to reveal information about Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election.
The Senate Democratic leader alluded to reports that the CIA had concluded people with Russian connections disclosed hacked Democratic emails to WikiLeaks to help Donald Trump win the election, the Washington Post reports.
“The FBI had this material for a long time but … Comey, who’s of course a Republican, refused to divulge this information,” Reid told MSNBC. “… He has let the country down for partisan purposes.”
Reid even compared Comey to J. Edgar Hoover and said he should be investigated by the Senate and “should be investigated by other agencies of the government including the security
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/loca ... story.htmlFBI Warned Illinois Republican Party That Its Email System May Have Been Hacked
The FBI warned the Illinois Republican Party in June that hackers may have targeted GOP political email accounts.
But party officials said the FBI never mentioned potential links to the investigation of Russia trying to hack America’s political system, the Chicago Triune reports, citing the state GOP’s executive director.
Nick Klitzing said the party found of its 18 emails on DCLeaks.com, which appears to be connected to a unit controlled by Russia’s military intelligence agency, GRU.
But the emails in question largely belong to inactive or rarely used accounts andante back to 2015.
Republicans are trying to distance themselves from the hacking controversy after the CIA said there’s substantial ev
then see FBI agents caught committing voter fraud
https://books.google.com/books?id=ZesCA ... UQ6AEINDAHhttps://article25news.wordpress.com/201 ... -long-ago/http://www.thelandesreport.com/donsanto.htmDOJ and FBI - The Landes Report
www.thelandesreport.com › donsanto
In the 1979 election, which is the focus of the deposition – Gates said he received ... Another Cincinnati Bell employee, named Bob Draise, admitted to being ...
[DOC]
Download - The Landes Report
www.thelandesreport.com › Lynn'sArticles
It appears that elements within the FBI may have not only been aware of ... Cincinnati Bell officials denied Gates' allegations that are part of a six-year-old civil suit ...
[PDF]
FROM THE votefraud.org ARCHIVES - The Landes Report
www.thelandesreport.com › Gates-Condit
May 15, 1986 - The commercial also features former Bell employee Robert Draise , who was ... Gates'deposition claims he told the FBI, the U.S. Attorney's ofice in.