Democracy Now! Broadcast Exclusive: Declassified Docs Reveal Military Operative Spied on WA Peace Groups, Activist Friends Stunned

MUST WATCH HERE > http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/28/broadcast_exclusive_declassified_docs_reveal_military

Whistleblower tells of America's hidden nightmare for its sick poor

When an insurance firm boss saw a field hospital for the poor in Virginia, he knew he had to speak out. Here, he tells Paul Harris of his fears for Obama's bid to bring about radical change

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• Paul Harris
• The Observer, Sunday 26 July 2009
• Article history

Patients without health insurance get dental care at a free clinic in Wise, Virginia, held every July for the past three years. More than 25,000 were treated in a weekend Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images

Wendell Potter can remember exactly when he took the first steps on his journey to becoming a whistleblower and turning against one of the most powerful industries in America.

It was July 2007 and Potter, a senior executive at giant US healthcare firm Cigna, was visiting relatives in the poverty-ridden mountain districts of northeast Tennessee. He saw an advert in a local paper for a touring free medical clinic at a fairground just across the state border in Wise County, Virginia.

Potter, who had worked at Cigna for 15 years, decided to check it out. What he saw appalled him. Hundreds of desperate people, most without any medical insurance, descended on the clinic from out of the hills. People queued in long lines to have the most basic medical procedures carried out free of charge. Some had driven more than 200 miles from Georgia. Many were treated in the open air. Potter took pictures of patients lying on trolleys on rain-soaked pavements.

For Potter it was a dreadful realisation that healthcare in America had failed millions of poor, sick people and that he, and the industry he worked for, did not care about the human cost of their relentless search for profits. "It was over-powering. It was just more than I could possibly have imagined could be happening in America," he told the Observer

Potter resigned shortly afterwards. Last month he testified in Congress, becoming one of the few industry executives to admit that what its critics say is true: healthcare insurance firms push up costs, buy politicians and refuse to pay out when many patients actually get sick. In chilling words he told a Senate committee: "I worked as a senior executive at health insurance companies and I saw how they confuse their customers and dump the sick: all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors."

MORE HERE:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/26/us-healthcare-obama-barack-change

Use this Action Item to alert and motivate everyone you can reach

http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=27275

Ask each person to fill it out once for each member of their household and pass it on as widely as possible. Share this Health Freedom Action eAlert with them.
 

Stop the Shot Legal Action 
 

Natural Solutions Foundation has joined with Drs. Gary Null and Ted Koren to expose the rampant illegality of FDA's licensing of 4 vaccines for which no safety testing has been conducted AND the use of the LAIV nasal vaccine to create the pandemic.  The papers will be submitted this week (as our research uncovered more and more that made the case stronger, we revised and perfected the papers multiple times - they will be entered this week and we will publish the brief.)

SOURCE:  http://www.globalhealthfreedom.org/

PLEASE WATCH VIDEO'S BELOW

The following is a transcript from Rachel Maddow's Sept. 16 show of her interview with Christian Right expert Frank Schaeffer:

Maddow gets to the bottom of an "extremely bizarre" political mystery with Christian Right expert Frank Schaeffer.

Posted by Rachel Maddow, AlterNet at 11:00 AM on September 18, 2009.

Rachel Maddow: Public Policy Polling released results from its new poll of residents of the great state of New Jersey.  The poll found that 18 percent of New Jersey conservatives say they are sure that President Obama is the anti-Christ.  No questions asked.  Another 17 percent of New Jersey self-identified conservatives say they just aren‘t sure, but they‘re not willing to rule it out.

What do you think the White House strategy is going to be to rebut the fact that more than one in three conservatives think the president might be the anti-Christ?  At least in New Jersey.  That is a P.R. challenge.

Joining us now is Frank Schaeffer.  He grew up in the religious far right.  He is the author of “Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right and Lived to Take All or Almost All of It Back.”

Mr. Schaeffer, thank you so much for coming back on the show tonight. ... I do not know what possessed this polling firm to ask whether or not people think the president is the anti-Christ, but they did.  Does the response rate among conservatives surprise you?  More than one in three saying yes or they don‘t know.

SCHAEFFER:  Well, I was a child when President Kennedy was assassinated, and my mother thought, because he died of a head wound, foretold in scripture of the anti-Christ he would be resurrected as the anti-Christ.  She thought this might be a possibility.

So, those of us who come from the evangelical subculture have been weaned with our mother‘s milk on a changing cast list of villains.  It might be Kennedy to one generation, Obama to the next.

MORE HERE:   http://www.alternet.org/blogs/politics/142730/rachel_maddow%3A_why_do_1_3_of_new_jersey_conservatives_think_obama_might_be_the_anti-christ

Repeal telecom immunity and roll back PATRIOT ACT abuses

The House and the Senate are holding hearings on the reauthorization of three key provisions of the USA PATRIOT ACT which are set to expire on December 31.

Senators Feingold and Durbin are using this reauthorization process to reverse Bush era laws that take away our constitutionally guaranteed rights. To this end, they have introduced the JUSTICE Act to bring an end to telecom immunity and roll back some of the worst abuses of the PATRIOT ACT.

One or both of your senators has not yet co-sponsored the JUSTICE Act. Sign our petition at right and help us restore civil liberties stolen by the Bush administration in the wake of September 11.

The JUSTICE Act would completely repeal the provision of the FISA Amendments Act intended to legally immunize big telecoms that illegally assisted in the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program. It would restore protections for the privacy of library and bookstore records. It would also add strong checks and balances to PATRIOT ACT provisions governing FISA orders, wiretaps, and national security letters.

Finally the champions of constitutional rights in the Senate are taking steps to undo the worst of the damage. Please join us in supporting the JUSTICE Act. Clicking here will automatically add your name to the petition (see above).

Thank you for working to build a better world.

Becky Bond, Political Director
CREDO Action from Working Assets

Medical Editors Push for Ghostwriting Crackdown
September 18, 2009, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/business/18ghost.html

The scientific integrity of medical research has been clouded in recent years by articles that were drafted by drug company-sponsored ghostwriters and then passed off as the work of independent academic authors. Yet the leading medical journals have continued to rely largely on an honor system of disclosure to detect such potential bias, asking authors to voluntarily report any industry ties or contributors to their manuscripts. But now, in light of recently released evidence that some drug makers have gone to great lengths to turn scientific articles into marketing vehicles for their products, some influential medical editors are cracking down on industry-financed ghostwriting. These editors are demanding that journals impose tougher disclosure policies for academic authors and that the journals enforce their own rules by actively investigating the provenance of manuscripts and by punishing authors who play down extensive contributions by ghostwriters. Calling for a zero tolerance policy, the editors of the medical journal PLoS Medicine, from the Public Library of Science, called for journals to identify and retract ghostwritten articles and banish their authors. “Authors found to have not declared such interest should be banned from any subsequent publication in the journal and their misconduct reported to their institutions.” In the past, researchers have raised allegations of ghostwriting in articles about quality-of-life drugs like antidepressants, painkillers and diet pills. But the situation has become more serious this year after a few editors said they had discovered ghostwriting in manuscripts about life-and-death products like cancer and hematology drugs.”

Note: For background on the prevalence of ghostwriting in major medical journals, click here and here and here.

A New Look at the 9/11 Commission
September 11, 2009, Time magazine
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1921659,00.html

Former New Jersey attorney general John Farmer served as senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, tasked with investigating the government response to the attacks. His new book, The Ground Truth, picks up where the commission left off — taking a deeper look at the government's ... response to the attacks and exposing officials determined to hide their failings from the inquiry. Farmer uses newly released transcripts and recordings to cast doubt on the official version of events. He spoke with TIME about the attacks. [Time:] Why do you think officials tried to obscure [the truth about 9/11]? [Farmer:] It's almost a culture of concealment, for lack of a better word. There were interviews made at the FAA's New York center the night of 9/11 and those tapes were destroyed. The CIA tapes of the interrogations were destroyed. The story of 9/11 itself, to put it mildly, was distorted and was completely different from the way things happened. [Time:] Some of the distortions you've discussed have fed various conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11. Did you ever see any evidence of a conspiracy? [Farmer:] One of the harmful byproducts of not telling the truth about what happened is that it did fuel all sorts of conspiracy theories about what might have happened. If what the government is telling you isn't true, then the truth could be anything. I think there is evidence that the truth wasn't told and that at least some of that was deliberate.

Note: Many respected scholars, officials and professionals have questioned the 9/11 Commission's report. Click here and here to read some of their statements.

Who’s Afraid of Sibel Edmonds?
November 1, 2009 issue, The American Conservative
http://amconmag.com/article/2009/nov/01/00006

Sibel Edmonds has a story to tell. She went to work as a Turkish and Farsi translator for the FBI five days after 9/11. She was fired from the FBI in April 2002 after she raised concerns that one of the translators in her section was a member of a Turkish organization that was under investigation for bribing senior government officials and members of Congress, drug trafficking, illegal weapons sales, money laundering, and nuclear proliferation. On Aug. 8, she was finally able to testify under oath in a court case filed in Ohio and agreed to an interview with The American Conservative based on that testimony. PHILIP GIRALDI: You map out a corruption scheme involving U.S. government employees and members of Congress and agents of foreign governments. So the network starts with a person like [Marc] Grossman in the State Department providing information that enables Turkish and Israeli intelligence officers to have access to people in Congress, who then provide classified information that winds up in the foreign embassies? EDMONDS: Absolutely. And we also had Pentagon officials doing the same thing. We were looking at Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. They had a list of individuals in the Pentagon broken down by access to certain types of information. Some of them would be policy related, some of them would be weapons-technology related, some of them would be nuclear-related. Perle and Feith would provide the names of those Americans, officials in the Pentagon, to Grossman, together with highly sensitive personal information: this person is a closet gay; this person has a chronic gambling issue; this person is an alcoholic. The files on the American targets would contain things like the size of their mortgages or whether they were going through divorces.

Note: Sibel Edmonds is the founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. For lots more on her key testimony, click here. Philip Giraldi is a former CIA officer and The American Conservative’s Deep Background columnist. An ever increasing number of people are waking up to the truth of 9/11.

Legislators for sale
August 3, 2009, MSNBC
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32276889/ns/msnbc_tv-countdown_with_keith_olbermann

A special comment on health care reform in this country. The insurance industry owns the Republican Party. Not exclusively. Pharma owns part of it, too. Hospitals and HMO's, another part. Sen. John Thune of South Dakota ... has thus far received from the Health Sector, campaign contributions ... amounting to $1,206,176. How about Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite? Are you truly worth every dollar of the $369,000,255 ... you have received over the years from the Health Sector? [And Democrat] Bart Gordon of Tennessee ... $1,173,000 in donations from the Health Sector. [Democratic Senator] Max Baucus of Montana, ... you're supposed to be negotiating all this out with the Republicans and hesitant Democrats? Your price has been ... $414,000 in donations from hospitals, about $667,000 from the insurance companies and just over $1,000,000 from Big Pharma. Mr. Baucus, you are not the Senator from Schering-Plough Global Health Care, even if they have already given you $76,000 towards your re-election. We could bring up Senator Hagan ... who, at $628,000, appears to represent the insurance industry and not North Dakota. I could bring up Sen. Carper, and Sen. Blanche Lincoln. I could bring up all the other Democrats doing their masters' bidding in the House or the Senate. Every poll, every analysis, every vote, every region of this country supports health care reform, and the essential great leveling agent of a government-funded alternative to ... profiteering private insurance corporations.

Note: For an excellent analysis of the huge influence of the pharmaceutical industry over our government by the former editor-in-chief of the esteemed New England Journal of Medicine, click here. It's time to get the money influence out of politics and shift from our current one dollar equals one vote to one person equals one vote.

PETITION TO OBAMA AND CONGRESS: "The Fed is secretive and a failure - it needs to be reformed, not given new powers. We want a regulator independent of the banks." Geithner's plan can be stopped, sign now.

Celebrate Grandparents’ Day by Caring for Your Elders

Breaking News: Court Referee Recommends Ruling in Favor of City;
NYC CAN To File Motion To Reject Referee's Recommendation

September 25, 2009

Rather than waiting until the scheduled decision date of Monday, September 28, Referee Louis Crespo issued his "report and recommendations" on Friday, September 25, and recommended that the Court rule in favor of the City.

After reviewing the referee's report, we feel he did not give adequate consideration to the extensive arguments presented in our memorandum of law submitted on Monday, September 21.  The report seemed more a cut and paste from the City's original motion papers than a balanced weighing of the arguments.  In particular, the referee's report failed to analyze the vast majority of NYC CAN's legal points as to why the City's claims were unfounded and its reliance on certain case law wholly inapplicable.

Officially, Judge Lehner has up to 60 days to either adopt, modify, or reject the referee's report and recommendation, and render a decision.  However, with the deadline for inclusion on the ballot fast approaching, NYC CAN lawyers will bring a motion on Monday, September 28 to ask the Court to reconsider the matter immediately, and render a judgment in favor of the Petitioners.  We anticipate that the matter will be heard and decided on Tuesday, September 29, or Wednesday, September 30.

Judge Lehner may decide the case on the paperwork submitted, or hear oral arguments as well.  If oral arguments are ordered, the proceeding should be open to the public.  If so, we will ask everyone who can to attend and help maintain the tidal wave of support that will crescendo with the March For Answers on Sunday.

Only in fighting to the very end will the voices of 80,000 New Yorkers resonate across the country, and those who are still asleep awaken to the mockery of justice in a local government claiming it has no jurisdiction over thousands of its residents being murdered.

The 9/11 Commission Report - a disgrace to any society that considers itself just, democratic and transparent; and a shameless affront to those who died on September 11th - is on its last legs.

MORE HERE >  http://www.nyccan.org/Court_Referee_Recommends_Ruling_in_Favor_of_City.php

Families, First
Responders
and Survivors

Concerned
Citizens

Dear friends,

Grassroots International partner Stop the Wall Campaign alerted us to the arrest of Mohammad Othman on September 22nd by Israeli soldiers on the Allenby Bridge Crossing, the border separating Jordan from the Palestinian West Bank.  He is now being held in Huwara prison as a prisoner of conscience, arrested solely for his human rights work.  Please take action now to help build international pressure for his immediate release.

Mohammad, 33 years old, has dedicated the last 10 years of his life to the defense of Palestinian human rights.  He has worked tirelessly against the dispossession of Palestinian farmers (including his own family).

His village, Jayyous, has been devastated by the Israeli settlement of Zufim and the Wall built by Israel that separates Palestinians from their land in the West Bank.  Jayyous is a small farming community, seventy-five percent of whose farmland and wells are now on the other side of the Wall - with no access for its people to tend their fields and grow food to feed their families.

Mohammad was returning from a human rights tour in Norway, during which he met with senior Norwegian officials, including Finance Minister Kristen Halvorsen.  This is not the first time Palestinian human rights defenders have been arrested after trips abroad.  Recently, Muhammad Srour, an eyewitness at the UN Fact Finding Mission on Gaza, was arrested on his way back from Geneva.  This arrest was a clear act of reprisal against Srour for speaking out about the Israeli government's violations of international law.  Arresting Palestinians as they return from travel is being used to try to silence Palestinian human rights defenders.

Please let your voice be heard by bringing this case to the US Consulate in Tel Aviv and the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC.  Mohammad Othman's initial hearing is scheduled for Tuesday, September 29, so please take action now.  Together we can help secure Mohammad's release.

Thank you for all you are doing,

Ron G.

The 9/11 Commission Rejects its own Report as Based on Government Lies

Gordon Duff Salem-News.com

How long have we watered the Tree of Deceit with the blood of patriots?

(CINCINNATI, Ohio) - In John Farmer’s book: “The Ground Truth: The Story Behind America’s Defense on 9/11″, the author builds the inescapably convincing case that the official version... is almost entirely untrue...

The 9/11 Commission now tells us that the official version of 9/11 was based on false testimony and documents and is almost entirely untrue. The details of this massive cover-up are carefully outlined in a book by John Farmer, who was the Senior Counsel for the 9/11 Commission.

Farmer, Dean of Rutger Universities' School of Law and former Attorney General of New Jersey, was responsible for drafting the original flawed 9/11 report.

Does Farmer have cooperation and agreement from other members of the Commission? Yes. Did they say Bush ordered 9/11? No. Do they say that the 9/11 Commission was lied to by the FBI, CIA, Whitehouse and NORAD? Yes. Is there full documentary proof of this? Yes.

Farmer states...“at some level of the government, at some point in time…there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened... I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described …. The [Norad air defense] tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years. This is not spin.”

The 9/11 Commission head, Thomas Kean, was the Republican governor of New Jersey. He had the following to say... “We to this day don’t know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us, it was just so far from the truth. . . " When Bush's own handpicked commission failed to go along with the cover up and requested a criminal investigation, why was nothing done?

9/11 Commission member and former US Senator, Bob Kerrey, says, "No one is more qualified to write the definitive book about the tragedy of 9/11 than John Farmer. Fortunately, he has done so. Even more fortunately the language is clear, alive and instructive for anyone who wants to make certain this never happens again."

With the only "official" 9/11 report now totally false, where do we go from here? Who is hurt by these lies? The families of the victims of 9/11 have fought, for years, to get to the truth. For years, our government has hidden behind lies and secrecy to deny them closure.

In 2006, The Washington Post reported..."Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources. Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission..."

What does Farmer's book tell us? Farmer offers no solutions, only a total and full rejection of what was told and his own his own ideas concerning the total failure of honesty on the part of the government, a government with something to hide.

Farmer never tells us what. Nobody could keep a job in the public sector speaking out more than Farmer has. What were Farmer's omissions? There are some. Now that we know that intelligence given the 9/11 Commission wasn't just lies from our own government but based on testimony coerced through torture from informants forced to back up a cover story now proven false, a pattern emerges.

We know that, immediately after 9/11, many more potential suspects and informants were flown directly to Saudi Arabia by Presidential order than were ever detained and questioned. We will never know what they could have said. Their testimony would have been vital to any real investigation were they not put beyond the reach of even Congress and the FBI.

Putting aside all other questions of recent evidence of CIA involvement with bin Laden prior to 9/11 or altered physical evidence involving the Pentagon attack, any failure to call to account the systematic perjury committed by dozens of top government officials, now exposed as a certainty is an offense to every American.

What do we know? We know the conjecture about 9/11 still stands but for certain, we know we were lied to, not in a minor way, but systematically as part of a plot covering up government involvement at nearly every level, perhaps gross negligence, perhaps something with darker intent.

Are we willing to live with another lie to go with the Warren Report, Iran Contra and so many others? Has the sacrifice of thousands more Americans, killed, wounded or irreparably damaged by a war knowingly built on the same lies from the same liars who misled the 9/11 Commission pushed us beyond willingness to confront the truth?

Have we yet found where the lies have begun and ended? There is no evidence of this, only evidence to the contrary. The lies live on and the truth will never be sought. The courage for that task has not been found.

Can anyone call themselves an American if they don't demand, even with the last drop of their blood, that the truth be found?

How long have we watered the Tree of Deceit with the blood of patriots?

Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran and a regular contributor to Veterans Today. He specializes in political and social issues. You can see a large collection of Gordon's published articles at this link: VeteransToday.com.

He is an outspoken advocate for veterans and his powerful words have brought about change. Gordon is a lifelong PTSD sufferer from his war experiences and he is empathetic to the plight of today's veterans also suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We greatly appreciate the opportunity to feature Gordon's timely and critical reports on Salem-News.com, a news organization staffed by a number of veterans, particularly former U.S. Marines.

You can send Gordon Duff an email at this address: Gpduf@aol.com

List Of USA States Which Have Implemented Legal Actions In Response To The H1N1 virus

FightBackH1N1
Wednesday, Sept 23rd, 2009

New York : According to the CDC, the following states have implemented legal actions in response to the H1N1 virus:

Florida – the Florida surgeon general suspended distribution permit requirements Florida statutes to allow wholesale distribution of Tamiflu and Relenza. The state has also distributed a series of blank quarantine order forms, including a voluntary home quarantine agreement, a quarantine to residence order, a quarantine to residence order (non-compliance), a quarantine to facility order, quarantine detention order, quarantine of facility order, building quarantine closure order and area quarantine closure order.

Iowa – In addition to the facility quarantine order listed above, Iowa has also made available forms for voluntary home confinement, home quarantine and home isolation.

Massachusetts – Massachusetts lists its own procedures for isolation and quarantine.

North Carolina – The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services released a draft isolation order that would provide for imprisonment for up to two years and pretrial detention without bail for any citizen who fails to comply with an isolation order.

Washington – Washington grants authority to local health officers to issue emergency detention orders causing citizens to be immediately and involuntarily isolated or quarantined for up to 10 days.

Clearly this has nothing to do with public health and the qualitative ethical practice of medicine. What about all the people who already had swine flu? Those people, who have already built natural immunity, if forced to quarantine in close quarters with a bunch of other people who may have other types of infectious diseases such as seasonal flu, etc., then become exposed to other infectious diseases and are at greater health risk. This seems like a great plan to help SPREAD whatever disease(s) they want to spread!

SOURCE:   http://www.prisonplanet.com/list-of-usa-states-which-have-implemented-legal-actions-in-response-to-the-h1n1-virus.html