Sarah Palin Wins
Chris Kelly
www.huffingtonpost.com
August 14, 2009
The Senate Finance Committee has stripped a provision to reimburse Medicare doctors who provide end-of-life counseling to dying patients from its version of health care reform. Take that, Hitler. Hitler, like I have to tell you, supports Medicare reimbursement for end-of-life counseling because he wants the Federal government to talk America's old people into killing themselves. We don't know why he wants this. Maybe he's still bitter about the Battle of the Bulge.
And he would have gotten away with it, too, if not for Sarah Palin's Facebook page.
Sarah Palin Facebook status was: "... is fearing Death Panels." (Thumbs down. Doesn't like this.) And that was good enough for Chuck Grassley.
As Grassley explains:
We dropped end-of-life provisions from consideration entirely because of the way they could be misinterpreted and implemented incorrectly.
If you were really, really bone ignorant, for example, you could think they meant, "death panels." Fair enough. You don't want to confuse people into getting Hitlered. But was this idea that complicated? You get the very real impression that if our standard for legislation was "understandable to Palins" we'd have to retire the "Yield" sign.
Does Chuck Grassley mean we can only write laws that make sense to people who can't name a newspaper? ...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-kelly/sarah-palin-wins_b_259395.html
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Friday, August 21, 2009
Hagel Headed for Obama's Intelligence Board (Also, PIAB's John Hamre, 9/11, Markle Foundation, CSIS, ChoicePoint, Zelikow, Judith Miller, etc.)
By Al KamenAugust 14, 2009
Former Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel (R), a senior administration official-in-waiting either later this term or in President Obama's second term (if there is one), is taking another step into Obama's national security team. We're hearing Hagel is in line to co-chair the important President's Intelligence Advisory Board (formerly known as the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board).
Hagel, who is a longtime pal of Vice President Biden and who toured Iraq and Afghanistan with Obama during the campaign, already has been named to replace former House speaker Newt Gingrich on the Defense Policy Board, run by former deputy secretary of Defense John Hamre [see Hamre profile below - AC]. ...
The board, which usually acts in secrecy, is given access to key intelligence information and is charged with giving the president an objective analysis of the quality of that information. Prior chairmen have been folks such as former Bush I national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, former New Hampshire senator Warren Rudman, former House speaker Tom Foley, Gen. Maxwell Taylor and former Johnson administration secretary of defense Clark Clifford.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/13/AR2009081303773.html
JOHN HAMRE PROFILE
Hamre is the ChoicePoint connection to ITT - the communications and Chilean coup-plot people - where he has been a director since '00. This was the same year he became chairman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
Before joining CSIS, Hamre was U.S. deputy secretary of defense, 1997-2000 ... under William Cohen, one of the Senate Republicans who signed Lee Hamilton's martinized Iran-contra report - and under-secretary of defense/comptroller from 1993 to 1997. Before joining the DoD, Dr. Hamre was on the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee, 1984-1993, with responsibilities for oversight of weapons R&D and assorted defense budget issues. From 1978 to 1984, he was deputy assistant director for national security and international affairs at the Congressional Budget Office. Dr. Hamre is a director of MITRE Corp. and Integrated Nano Technologies LPC. He's a Rockefeller Fellow at Harvard Divinity School, and received a Ph.D. in 1978 from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.3
Dr. Hamre is also board chairman of the John and Mary R. Markle Foundation.
The list of Markle grant recipients and partners includes CNN, Infonautics, Crossover Technologies, M.I.T., RAND Corporation, Carnegie-Mellon University and The Brookings Institute.
Some members of the "philanthropic" Markle foundation under Dr. Hamre:
Philip Zelikow: executive director of the 911 Commission.
Judith A. Miller: The New York Times reporter whose articles on Saddam Hussein's WMD program proved to be fictional.
Stewart A. Baker: Chief counsel, NSA.
William P. Crowell: CEO of Cylink, Inc. in Santa Clara, California. Crowell came to Cylink from the NSA, where he had a series of senior positions, including deputy director of operations and deputy director.
Eric Benhamou: vice chairman, Israel21c, a non-profit organization that seeks, according to its website, to "promote the 21st century Israel that exists beyond the conflict."
Paul Schott Stevens: Under President Reagan, special assistant for national security affairs, executive secretary and legal adviser of the NSC.
Robert M. Bryant: former assistant director of the FBI, CEO of the National Insurance Crime Bureau. In November 1999, after 31 years of service, he retired as deputy director of the FBI, where he presided over the Bureau's strategic plan, and served as the agency's chief operations officer. While at the FBI, he directed a number of high-profile investigations, including the Aldrich Ames spy case, the Oklahoma City bombing and the Montana Freeman
standoff.
John O. Marsh: Former Secretary of the Army and Virginia Congressman. A member of the Advisory Panel to Assess Domestic Response Capabilities for Terrorism Involving Weapons of Mass Destruction. Recently, the Panel released its second annual report entitled "Toward a National Strategy for Combating Terrorism."
Morton Halperin: Director of the Washington office of the Open Society Institute. Halperin is a director of policy planning staff at the Department of State. He was special assistant to President Clinton and a senior director at the NSC, 1994-1996. Other positions include director of the Center for National Security Studies, and director of the ACLU's Washington
D.C. office.
Wesley Clark: War profiteer and former "liberal" presidential candidate.
Gilman Louie: President and CEO of In-Q-Tel, a CIA front, delivers new technologies to the intelligence community.
Michael Okerlund Leavitt: Republican governor of Utah, first elected in 1992. Leavitt resigned his office in November 2003, and was sworn in as the administrator of the EPA under Bush the next day. He was confirmed to this office on October 28, 2003. Leavitt also serves on the Homeland Security
Advisory Council.
Ashton Carter: Ford Foundation Professor of Science and International Affairs, International Security Program.
The Bush Dynasty and the bin Ladens
The Bushes of America
By Paul Goldsmith
The East African
August 17 2009
STEVE COLL, AUTHOR OF THE BIN LADENS (SEE The EastAfrican, August 3-9), and Kevin Phillips develop overlapping perspectives of the post World War II economic history of oil and internal politics in Saudi Arabia and the United States. They use the optic of wealthy politically connected families to do this.
Coll follows the progress of the Bin Ladens while constantly updating the varied social and political contexts. Important star and supporting actors feature in both books.
Phillips had more data and published material to draw upon, and the scope of his book reinforces the parallels with Coll’s Bin Laden family account. But where Coll’s vastly entertaining account unfolds like an epic movie, Phillips’ is a long-running documentary.
The story of the Bush dynasty begins at the turn-of-the-century in the American Midwest. The dynasty’s progenitors, Samuel Bush and George Herbert Walker, were very rich. Bush owned Buckeye Steel Casings, which specialised in manufacturing the coupling linking railway cars. Walker was the owner of the largest dry goods store west of the Mississippi.
Railways were the arteries of the young nation’s surging commerce and industry and Samuel Bush was a primary supplier. He became director of several regional lines and the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
Walker used his links to Midwestern industry to become an advisor to J.P Morgan & Co, banker E.H Harriman (father of the future presidential candidate Averell) and St Louis businessman Robert Brookings, founder of the conservative Washington think tank, the Brookings Institute.
The nation’s late entry into the First World War spurred industrial production. Buckeye manufactured shell casings; Sam Bush made profits. Walker (something of a pirate in business) made a killing — brokering some $3.2 million worth of government military purchases, a figure four times the US budget in 1914. He ended up as director of 17 different corporations.
Awash with capital, their wartime roles enabled both families to establish a foothold on the country’s east coast elite. Walker built a summerhouse (Walker’s Point) in Kennebunkport, Maine. The Bush children were regular visitors.
The sons of these midwestern tycoons attended the prestigious New England boarding schools. George Herbert Walker Jr. went to Harvard, Samuel’s son Prescott to Yale; George joined Harvard’s Porcellian Club, Prescott was admitted into Yale’s Skull and Crossbones. Membership to these secret societies cemented their position in the WASP old boy networks, and initiated them into a culture of secrecy that served them well.
THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE dynasty were laid when Prescott Bush married Walker’s favourite daughter, Dorothy, in 1919. Walker subsequently became like a second father to Prescott; this was the template for the relationship between George Herbert Walker Jr. and Prescott’s son, George H.W Bush. Prescott became a senior figure in the Walker family’s investment bank, Brown Brothers Harriman.
Their subordinate role appeared to be a driver to Bush’s ambitions. Phillips observes, “Having to acknowledge and accept the influence of money of two Walker generations cannot have been easy for Samuel Bush and Prescott Bush.”
Elected to the Senate in 1952, Prescott Bush nursed presidential ambitions. But his membership to the same northeastern establishment that forced Joseph Kennedy to transfer his presidential aspirations to his son was an obstacle. The family’s contribution to Nazi Germany was another: Brown Brothers Harriman’s investments helped finance the recovery of industrial interests vital to Hitler’s military build-up.
Bush was also a director of Dillon Read, a firm that financed the company producing 40 per cent of Nazi Germany’s sheet metal. As late as 1938, Prescott Bush’s Wall Street firm participated in a transaction providing the lead used to build the Luftwaffe’s planes.
If Prescott Bush, according to his biographer, “believed in principles, but left no visible footprints, behind the scenes he and his colleagues made an important contribution to the war machine.”
These politically controversial investors were not alone. As board members of International Nickel, John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen helped work out a pre-war agreement with IG. Farmen that provided Germany with the materials used to make armour plating.
DURING HIS TENURE AS ambassador to St James Court, Kennedy senior’s strong support for the “hardworking and progressive Nazis” became a liability, forcing the State Department to use backchannel communications with the British government.
The significant segment of the Wall St industrial elite that continued to support Hitler even after 1939 became a major political headache for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
When Hitler invaded Great Britain they continued to vocalise the view that the conquest of Europe would satisfy Germany, and the Nazis would agree to a Peace Treaty with the US consolidating their gains.
The association between war, capital, and political self-interest is amazing and ironic; a recurring theme of Phillip’s analysis.
Joseph Kennedy’s support for the Nazis is common knowledge, and Neville Chamberlain is branded forever as the Prime Minister who appeased Hitler, but the popular accounts of the war airbrush the extent of the Walker-Bush old boy network’s Nazi linkages.
It is ironic because once the US entered the war after the Battle of Britain, many of the same industrialists, investors, and lawyers became the primary beneficiaries.
The east coast elite went on to dominate the class of professionals who developed international perspectives via their position in bodies like the War Production Board, War Industries Board, Council of National Defence and the Allied Maritime Transport Council.
The World Wars provided the bridge that Wall St bankers and the east coast elite in isolationist America used to span the gap with the international economy.
As Phillips notes, “These various embroilments, despite their potential for scandal, were regarded as unfortunate but, in essence, business as usual. They were also spun for their value as intelligence... many men with these particular involvements, or their family members, went on to become pillars of the US national security and intelligence establishments after World War II.
“A number of their descendants turned up as advisors and appointments in the George H. Bush government.”
The influence of this private sector-state network is the book’s primary thread, and Phillips documents their role in intelligence, the energy sector, armaments and overseas connections. Nation and world have endured multiple reiterations of “Roosevelt’s headache” as a consequence.
Phillips is a traditional Republican and author of the influential 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority, which predicted the rise of the “sunbelt” in politics.
He is upset with how a club of elitist and secretive insiders within the party has subverted the values of the GOP. His own Washington career no doubt equipped him with reams of colourful material on the individuals featured in the book, but he eschews anecdotal asides and personal vignettes.
Rather, the history of insider influence, manipulation, secrecy, deceit, and the ugly innards of familiar events that Phillips reveals are meant to support his dynasty thesis: The progress achieved by liberal polities and enlightened republics is vulnerable to backsliding, reversions to the old order engineered by its elites and aristocrats.
PHILLIPS PERIODICALLY returns to comparisons between the election of George W. Bush and the restoration of the Stuarts in England and the Bourbons in France to debunk the notion of America’s democratic exceptionalism. By page 300, the Bush presidents have become George I and George II.
There are no references to historical materialism in the glossaries of the two books — but the dialectical progression to their shared raison d’etre unfolds clearly enough.
Both stories invariably validate principles of Marxist political economy; and both accounts effectively validate John Cassidy’s oft-quoted 1997 New Yorker article that reviewed the state of the global economy a century after his death and concluded, “Marx got it 95 per cent right.”
A five per cent discrepancy is small, but not insignificant. It is instructive to remember that a yet smaller variance in the genome shared by chimps and humans accounts for their distinctive evolutionary trajectories. The reproduction of the Bush and Bin Laden families’ kinship-based capitalism led to unexpected outcomes that help fill Cassidy’s gap.
The role of Samuel Bush and sons in four American wars is a consistent motif linking the chapters on investment banking, Texas culture and politics, oil and the military-industrial complex, Wall Street-foreign policy linkages and the emergent CIA-security state.
The growing political influence the Bush family represents induces the author to cite Eisenhower’s cautionary warnings about the military-industrial complex and the dangers it poses to American democracy.
Two world wars underscored that oil is the cornerstone of national defence. Insufficient supply of oil hobbled the Nazi war machine; access to Middle Eastern sources was a major comparative advantage for the Allies. Hence Roosevelt’s 1943 “FDR declaration” — “I hereby find the defence of Saudi Arabia is vital to the defence of the United States.”
New opportunities in the international energy sector beckoned. After the war, two Walker-owned companies became the main redevelopers of the Baku oil fields in the Soviet Caucasus. Like Walker, Prescott Bush and sons’ oil wealth did not derive from the commodity itself, but rather through investing in offshore interests.
George H. Bush’s Texas-based companies, Zapata Petroleum and Zapata Offshore, established during the 1950s, operated in the complex domain of offshore investment and tax shelters.
Domestic oil fortunes had remained the province of old eastern families until the 1973 embargo propelled a clutch of Texan oil tycoons into the club.
GEORGE H. WAS IN THE RIGHT place His third generation status within the Wall St banking gentry — and the intelligence — came into play after the American government encouraged oil sheikhs to reinvest their surplus petrodollars in the US as a compensatory policy.
This issue — not oil proper, but the financial interests it generates — marks the intersection of the destinies of the Bin Laden and the Bush families. The secretive transactions and insider connections George H. forged during this phase provided the base for his ambitions: Ambassador to China, CIA director, Senator, Reagan’s vice president, Oval Office.
Salim bin Laden’s career as an agent of the royals and other Saudi investors began around the same time, and this was to bring the bin Ladens into the Bush orbit. The two empire builders shared a proclivity for practical joking.
Like his father, George H. was a lifetime preppy with a penchant for pranks. He raided the grave of Apache chief Geronimo, stole his skull and delivered it to the Skull and Crossbones vault at Yale.
During his tenure as ambassador to China, he subjected state waiters to the $20 bill on a string prank. After becoming president, he kept a voice-activated stuffed monkey at the White House who socked himself in the head when the Commander-in-Chief began to talk.
Phillips’s narrative unmasks the serious business and political activism motivating the sons of Prescott Bush in the covert proxy war in Afghanistan and the two Iraqi invasions. In Afghanistan, Reagan’s “Evil Empire” furnished the casus belli; the Great Game waged by Imperial Britain in the same region provided the operational model. CIA funding for the Afghan Mujahideen went from $30 million in 1984 to $634 million in 1987.
For the Agency’s cold warriors, this new Great Game was Kiplingesque adventure; two important operatives in the field even used Kim in their handles. In reality, their great game was more like the Marx Brothers film, Duck Soup.
The Soviet withdrawal concealed their naiveté and sheer incompetence; Mujahideen victory shaded the hubris of their domestic masters — at least for the time being; the Taliban-Al Qaeda problem was lurking in the wings.
No matter, everyone likes a winner. Washington’s conservative establishment revelled in the impending collapse of communism as the 1980s drew to a close. In July 1989, George H. Bush faced off with the gigantic bust of Marx overlooking the auditorium of Budapest’s Karl Marx University and declared, “History does not unfold according to a set of mechanical laws, but is a creative and uniquely human process.”
Salim bin Laden used his travelling road show to open doors. The creativity practised by the Bush dynasties, in contrast, was literally Machiavellian.
Bush senior’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater, reread Machiavelli every year — his disciple Karl Rove perfected the art of cloaking the princely family fortune built on family connections, cronyism, paper entrepreneurialism, tax shelters, and government influence.
BOTH SPIN-DOCTORS WERE adept at using themes like “kindler, gentler politics” and “compassionate conservatism” to market their candidates to the public and to sweep the contradictions under the rug.
The homespun Texas populism they manufactured led one academic to coin the term Mayberry Machiavellianism (after a popular sit-com about a small town sheriff and his bumbling deputy).
Phillips tells us the civic culture in Texas has more in common with Venezuela, Mexico, and Brazil than with the other states in the Union. He reels off statistics showing the Lone Star State’s dismal income distribution, rock-bottom education system, and miserly spending on social services.
Phillips updates the tradition of deceit by tracing the sordid details of the Enron debacle, the BCCI scandal, Halliburton’s special dispensation, and the policies allowing private military contractors to reap massive profit margins. Contradictions galore, but such details are overshadowed by the tradition of kick-ass bravado reflected in three Texan presidents’ penchant for going to war.
George I, however, is the biggest contradiction of them all.
After engineering massive growth of the military and intel sectors on the way up, and after all the deal-making with Royal Saudi clans, the president vacillates when Saddam invades Kuwait. “We don’t like to involve ourselves in Arab countries’ border issues,” is the initial response. This stance changes after Margaret Thatcher confides in him, “The Falklands gave me eight good years.”
The publicity machine is geared up to spew out Saddam-Hitler comparisons — the Bushes should know, both are old family friends — and trump up tales of 312 Kuwaiti babies being ripped out of incubators. A line is drawn in the sand, the “turkey shoot” affair sees F-16s strafe Iraqis fleeing towards Basra, Texas Ranger George Herbert Walker Bush still manages to incite a Shia uprising — then pulls out.
Saddam Hussein sorted out, it’s business as usual at home. The Energy Act of 1992 deregulates the electricity market. Bush fails to win re-election later that year, but before leaving office the Commodities Futures Trading Commission exempts energy derivative contracts and interest rate swaps from federal regulation. The CFTC, chaired by the wife of Republican Senator from Texas, Phil Gramm, truncates the formal process required to review such complex issues.
MRS GRAMM RESIGNS from the CFTC a week later, and resurfaces as an Enron board member the next month. The Skull and Crossbones gang helps Enron get projects in 31 countries. Manipulation of energy futures sends prices spiralling 50-fold. The lights go out in California and the Midwest. Foreign ventures go awry.
After a series of technical cock-ups and human-rights abuses, India pulls the plug on Enron’s $300m contract for the Dubhol power plant. It all begins to unravel. Documents are shipped abroad when a Swiss bank swaps unpaid loans for the subsidiary, Enron Online. More are safe in the Cayman Islands, federal investigators dally on the way to Enron HQ, other records are shredded.
This is mind-numbing stuff. But as Marx once said, “Those who use the simplistic term, the economy, are themselves stupid.” The linchpin of Phillips’ dynasty argument is the election of Bush II.
George Walker Bush did not inherit his father and grandfather’s athleticism and class-inculcated sense of propriety. He did not exactly fit in at Yale, and drifted after graduation.
He partied and his father had to use his network to cover up and expunge a rumoured arrest for cocaine possession. When his community service became public knowledge, it was glossed as a sentence for driving while inebriated.
This low point prompted George W to seek religion. His conversion, which coincided with a string of failures in the oil sector, laid the foundation for “one of the most extraordinary role changes by a major political family in the country’s history.”
According to Phillips’s analysis, this remarkable makeover was the key factor enabling the Republicans to bring several political forces into alignment. The most critical one, American religious fundamentalism, was part of a wider trend manifesting across North Africa and the Middle East, Eastern Europe, the Indian subcontinent, and Southeast Asia. Between 1960 and 2000, membership to the evangelical Southern Baptist Convention grew from 10 million to 17 million; Pentecostal churches 2 million to 12 million.
Other conservative churches grew accordingly, while Episcopalians dropped from 3.5m to 2m, and the United Methodists from 10m to 8 million. Sectarian and policy divisions were rife within the sector, but the Mayberry Machiavellis’ clever promotion of issues fuelling the culture wars turned out the vote.
Support of the evangelical South and economic conservatives generated just enough votes to effect the restoration of this order via the election of George W. Bush in 2001.
Al Gore won the popular vote, but Brother Jeb in Florida and the Supreme Court sealed the deal that sent him home. “Old Bush loyalists returned to Washington like exiled Stuarts flocking back to the London of Charles II in 1660…” Phillips catalogues the appointments rewarding family allies, and the payback dished out to opponents within the Republican party.
Biblical references dominated George W’s 2001 inauguration speech; compassionate conservatism provided the ideological cover for what in policy terms was the opposite.
And the marginalisation of rural America during his first term did not diminish the 84 per cent of the evangelical vote Bush garnered the second time around. In both elections, the son’s religiosity served to distance him from the father and the family’s Masters of the Universe baggage.
Phillips does not dwell on this issue, even though George I justified Operation Desert Storm as a defence of democracy and, “the emerging new world order.” The new world order, for the evangelicals, is an evil conspiracy to replace national sovereignty with world government.
Its forerunner and proxy is the same United Nations George I so eloquently endorsed after the Gulf War: “It is the sacred principles enshrined in the United Nations’ Charter to which the American people will henceforth pledge their allegiance.”
The author proceeds to describe how the regime’s maladaptive unilateralism and the family’s suppressed scandals revived questions about George II’s legitimacy early in his first term — until Osama bin Laden rescued the drifting government on 9-11.
The collapse of the World Trade Centre Twin Towers was a godsend for the neoconservatives running the show.
THE CRISIS OF TERRORIST attacks on US soil served as the pretext for expanding presidential power and reliance on private security allowed the executive to circumvent the legal checks and balances guiding foreign policy.
George W Bush was even more convinced that Americans were primed for another Iraq war, at least one that succeeded and involved few casualties. The parallels between him and Osama bin Laden are obvious enough before 9-11 and the US response bound both actors to a violent political symbiosis.
Not exactly “creative and uniquely human” exemplars of George H. Bush’s historical process, they do corroborate Václav Havel’s more elegant three-word critique of Marxism,
“Consciousness precedes class.” Never before have two battling elephants trampled the grass on such a global scale.
Title: American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush
Author: Kevin Phillips,
Publisher: Penguin, New York
Year: 2004
By Paul Goldsmith
The East African
August 17 2009
STEVE COLL, AUTHOR OF THE BIN LADENS (SEE The EastAfrican, August 3-9), and Kevin Phillips develop overlapping perspectives of the post World War II economic history of oil and internal politics in Saudi Arabia and the United States. They use the optic of wealthy politically connected families to do this.
Coll follows the progress of the Bin Ladens while constantly updating the varied social and political contexts. Important star and supporting actors feature in both books.
Phillips had more data and published material to draw upon, and the scope of his book reinforces the parallels with Coll’s Bin Laden family account. But where Coll’s vastly entertaining account unfolds like an epic movie, Phillips’ is a long-running documentary.
The story of the Bush dynasty begins at the turn-of-the-century in the American Midwest. The dynasty’s progenitors, Samuel Bush and George Herbert Walker, were very rich. Bush owned Buckeye Steel Casings, which specialised in manufacturing the coupling linking railway cars. Walker was the owner of the largest dry goods store west of the Mississippi.
Railways were the arteries of the young nation’s surging commerce and industry and Samuel Bush was a primary supplier. He became director of several regional lines and the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
Walker used his links to Midwestern industry to become an advisor to J.P Morgan & Co, banker E.H Harriman (father of the future presidential candidate Averell) and St Louis businessman Robert Brookings, founder of the conservative Washington think tank, the Brookings Institute.
The nation’s late entry into the First World War spurred industrial production. Buckeye manufactured shell casings; Sam Bush made profits. Walker (something of a pirate in business) made a killing — brokering some $3.2 million worth of government military purchases, a figure four times the US budget in 1914. He ended up as director of 17 different corporations.
Awash with capital, their wartime roles enabled both families to establish a foothold on the country’s east coast elite. Walker built a summerhouse (Walker’s Point) in Kennebunkport, Maine. The Bush children were regular visitors.
The sons of these midwestern tycoons attended the prestigious New England boarding schools. George Herbert Walker Jr. went to Harvard, Samuel’s son Prescott to Yale; George joined Harvard’s Porcellian Club, Prescott was admitted into Yale’s Skull and Crossbones. Membership to these secret societies cemented their position in the WASP old boy networks, and initiated them into a culture of secrecy that served them well.
THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE dynasty were laid when Prescott Bush married Walker’s favourite daughter, Dorothy, in 1919. Walker subsequently became like a second father to Prescott; this was the template for the relationship between George Herbert Walker Jr. and Prescott’s son, George H.W Bush. Prescott became a senior figure in the Walker family’s investment bank, Brown Brothers Harriman.
Their subordinate role appeared to be a driver to Bush’s ambitions. Phillips observes, “Having to acknowledge and accept the influence of money of two Walker generations cannot have been easy for Samuel Bush and Prescott Bush.”
Elected to the Senate in 1952, Prescott Bush nursed presidential ambitions. But his membership to the same northeastern establishment that forced Joseph Kennedy to transfer his presidential aspirations to his son was an obstacle. The family’s contribution to Nazi Germany was another: Brown Brothers Harriman’s investments helped finance the recovery of industrial interests vital to Hitler’s military build-up.
Bush was also a director of Dillon Read, a firm that financed the company producing 40 per cent of Nazi Germany’s sheet metal. As late as 1938, Prescott Bush’s Wall Street firm participated in a transaction providing the lead used to build the Luftwaffe’s planes.
If Prescott Bush, according to his biographer, “believed in principles, but left no visible footprints, behind the scenes he and his colleagues made an important contribution to the war machine.”
These politically controversial investors were not alone. As board members of International Nickel, John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen helped work out a pre-war agreement with IG. Farmen that provided Germany with the materials used to make armour plating.
DURING HIS TENURE AS ambassador to St James Court, Kennedy senior’s strong support for the “hardworking and progressive Nazis” became a liability, forcing the State Department to use backchannel communications with the British government.
The significant segment of the Wall St industrial elite that continued to support Hitler even after 1939 became a major political headache for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
When Hitler invaded Great Britain they continued to vocalise the view that the conquest of Europe would satisfy Germany, and the Nazis would agree to a Peace Treaty with the US consolidating their gains.
The association between war, capital, and political self-interest is amazing and ironic; a recurring theme of Phillip’s analysis.
Joseph Kennedy’s support for the Nazis is common knowledge, and Neville Chamberlain is branded forever as the Prime Minister who appeased Hitler, but the popular accounts of the war airbrush the extent of the Walker-Bush old boy network’s Nazi linkages.
It is ironic because once the US entered the war after the Battle of Britain, many of the same industrialists, investors, and lawyers became the primary beneficiaries.
The east coast elite went on to dominate the class of professionals who developed international perspectives via their position in bodies like the War Production Board, War Industries Board, Council of National Defence and the Allied Maritime Transport Council.
The World Wars provided the bridge that Wall St bankers and the east coast elite in isolationist America used to span the gap with the international economy.
As Phillips notes, “These various embroilments, despite their potential for scandal, were regarded as unfortunate but, in essence, business as usual. They were also spun for their value as intelligence... many men with these particular involvements, or their family members, went on to become pillars of the US national security and intelligence establishments after World War II.
“A number of their descendants turned up as advisors and appointments in the George H. Bush government.”
The influence of this private sector-state network is the book’s primary thread, and Phillips documents their role in intelligence, the energy sector, armaments and overseas connections. Nation and world have endured multiple reiterations of “Roosevelt’s headache” as a consequence.
Phillips is a traditional Republican and author of the influential 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority, which predicted the rise of the “sunbelt” in politics.
He is upset with how a club of elitist and secretive insiders within the party has subverted the values of the GOP. His own Washington career no doubt equipped him with reams of colourful material on the individuals featured in the book, but he eschews anecdotal asides and personal vignettes.
Rather, the history of insider influence, manipulation, secrecy, deceit, and the ugly innards of familiar events that Phillips reveals are meant to support his dynasty thesis: The progress achieved by liberal polities and enlightened republics is vulnerable to backsliding, reversions to the old order engineered by its elites and aristocrats.
PHILLIPS PERIODICALLY returns to comparisons between the election of George W. Bush and the restoration of the Stuarts in England and the Bourbons in France to debunk the notion of America’s democratic exceptionalism. By page 300, the Bush presidents have become George I and George II.
There are no references to historical materialism in the glossaries of the two books — but the dialectical progression to their shared raison d’etre unfolds clearly enough.
Both stories invariably validate principles of Marxist political economy; and both accounts effectively validate John Cassidy’s oft-quoted 1997 New Yorker article that reviewed the state of the global economy a century after his death and concluded, “Marx got it 95 per cent right.”
A five per cent discrepancy is small, but not insignificant. It is instructive to remember that a yet smaller variance in the genome shared by chimps and humans accounts for their distinctive evolutionary trajectories. The reproduction of the Bush and Bin Laden families’ kinship-based capitalism led to unexpected outcomes that help fill Cassidy’s gap.
The role of Samuel Bush and sons in four American wars is a consistent motif linking the chapters on investment banking, Texas culture and politics, oil and the military-industrial complex, Wall Street-foreign policy linkages and the emergent CIA-security state.
The growing political influence the Bush family represents induces the author to cite Eisenhower’s cautionary warnings about the military-industrial complex and the dangers it poses to American democracy.
Two world wars underscored that oil is the cornerstone of national defence. Insufficient supply of oil hobbled the Nazi war machine; access to Middle Eastern sources was a major comparative advantage for the Allies. Hence Roosevelt’s 1943 “FDR declaration” — “I hereby find the defence of Saudi Arabia is vital to the defence of the United States.”
New opportunities in the international energy sector beckoned. After the war, two Walker-owned companies became the main redevelopers of the Baku oil fields in the Soviet Caucasus. Like Walker, Prescott Bush and sons’ oil wealth did not derive from the commodity itself, but rather through investing in offshore interests.
George H. Bush’s Texas-based companies, Zapata Petroleum and Zapata Offshore, established during the 1950s, operated in the complex domain of offshore investment and tax shelters.
Domestic oil fortunes had remained the province of old eastern families until the 1973 embargo propelled a clutch of Texan oil tycoons into the club.
GEORGE H. WAS IN THE RIGHT place His third generation status within the Wall St banking gentry — and the intelligence — came into play after the American government encouraged oil sheikhs to reinvest their surplus petrodollars in the US as a compensatory policy.
This issue — not oil proper, but the financial interests it generates — marks the intersection of the destinies of the Bin Laden and the Bush families. The secretive transactions and insider connections George H. forged during this phase provided the base for his ambitions: Ambassador to China, CIA director, Senator, Reagan’s vice president, Oval Office.
Salim bin Laden’s career as an agent of the royals and other Saudi investors began around the same time, and this was to bring the bin Ladens into the Bush orbit. The two empire builders shared a proclivity for practical joking.
Like his father, George H. was a lifetime preppy with a penchant for pranks. He raided the grave of Apache chief Geronimo, stole his skull and delivered it to the Skull and Crossbones vault at Yale.
During his tenure as ambassador to China, he subjected state waiters to the $20 bill on a string prank. After becoming president, he kept a voice-activated stuffed monkey at the White House who socked himself in the head when the Commander-in-Chief began to talk.
Phillips’s narrative unmasks the serious business and political activism motivating the sons of Prescott Bush in the covert proxy war in Afghanistan and the two Iraqi invasions. In Afghanistan, Reagan’s “Evil Empire” furnished the casus belli; the Great Game waged by Imperial Britain in the same region provided the operational model. CIA funding for the Afghan Mujahideen went from $30 million in 1984 to $634 million in 1987.
For the Agency’s cold warriors, this new Great Game was Kiplingesque adventure; two important operatives in the field even used Kim in their handles. In reality, their great game was more like the Marx Brothers film, Duck Soup.
The Soviet withdrawal concealed their naiveté and sheer incompetence; Mujahideen victory shaded the hubris of their domestic masters — at least for the time being; the Taliban-Al Qaeda problem was lurking in the wings.
No matter, everyone likes a winner. Washington’s conservative establishment revelled in the impending collapse of communism as the 1980s drew to a close. In July 1989, George H. Bush faced off with the gigantic bust of Marx overlooking the auditorium of Budapest’s Karl Marx University and declared, “History does not unfold according to a set of mechanical laws, but is a creative and uniquely human process.”
Salim bin Laden used his travelling road show to open doors. The creativity practised by the Bush dynasties, in contrast, was literally Machiavellian.
Bush senior’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater, reread Machiavelli every year — his disciple Karl Rove perfected the art of cloaking the princely family fortune built on family connections, cronyism, paper entrepreneurialism, tax shelters, and government influence.
BOTH SPIN-DOCTORS WERE adept at using themes like “kindler, gentler politics” and “compassionate conservatism” to market their candidates to the public and to sweep the contradictions under the rug.
The homespun Texas populism they manufactured led one academic to coin the term Mayberry Machiavellianism (after a popular sit-com about a small town sheriff and his bumbling deputy).
Phillips tells us the civic culture in Texas has more in common with Venezuela, Mexico, and Brazil than with the other states in the Union. He reels off statistics showing the Lone Star State’s dismal income distribution, rock-bottom education system, and miserly spending on social services.
Phillips updates the tradition of deceit by tracing the sordid details of the Enron debacle, the BCCI scandal, Halliburton’s special dispensation, and the policies allowing private military contractors to reap massive profit margins. Contradictions galore, but such details are overshadowed by the tradition of kick-ass bravado reflected in three Texan presidents’ penchant for going to war.
George I, however, is the biggest contradiction of them all.
After engineering massive growth of the military and intel sectors on the way up, and after all the deal-making with Royal Saudi clans, the president vacillates when Saddam invades Kuwait. “We don’t like to involve ourselves in Arab countries’ border issues,” is the initial response. This stance changes after Margaret Thatcher confides in him, “The Falklands gave me eight good years.”
The publicity machine is geared up to spew out Saddam-Hitler comparisons — the Bushes should know, both are old family friends — and trump up tales of 312 Kuwaiti babies being ripped out of incubators. A line is drawn in the sand, the “turkey shoot” affair sees F-16s strafe Iraqis fleeing towards Basra, Texas Ranger George Herbert Walker Bush still manages to incite a Shia uprising — then pulls out.
Saddam Hussein sorted out, it’s business as usual at home. The Energy Act of 1992 deregulates the electricity market. Bush fails to win re-election later that year, but before leaving office the Commodities Futures Trading Commission exempts energy derivative contracts and interest rate swaps from federal regulation. The CFTC, chaired by the wife of Republican Senator from Texas, Phil Gramm, truncates the formal process required to review such complex issues.
MRS GRAMM RESIGNS from the CFTC a week later, and resurfaces as an Enron board member the next month. The Skull and Crossbones gang helps Enron get projects in 31 countries. Manipulation of energy futures sends prices spiralling 50-fold. The lights go out in California and the Midwest. Foreign ventures go awry.
After a series of technical cock-ups and human-rights abuses, India pulls the plug on Enron’s $300m contract for the Dubhol power plant. It all begins to unravel. Documents are shipped abroad when a Swiss bank swaps unpaid loans for the subsidiary, Enron Online. More are safe in the Cayman Islands, federal investigators dally on the way to Enron HQ, other records are shredded.
This is mind-numbing stuff. But as Marx once said, “Those who use the simplistic term, the economy, are themselves stupid.” The linchpin of Phillips’ dynasty argument is the election of Bush II.
George Walker Bush did not inherit his father and grandfather’s athleticism and class-inculcated sense of propriety. He did not exactly fit in at Yale, and drifted after graduation.
He partied and his father had to use his network to cover up and expunge a rumoured arrest for cocaine possession. When his community service became public knowledge, it was glossed as a sentence for driving while inebriated.
This low point prompted George W to seek religion. His conversion, which coincided with a string of failures in the oil sector, laid the foundation for “one of the most extraordinary role changes by a major political family in the country’s history.”
According to Phillips’s analysis, this remarkable makeover was the key factor enabling the Republicans to bring several political forces into alignment. The most critical one, American religious fundamentalism, was part of a wider trend manifesting across North Africa and the Middle East, Eastern Europe, the Indian subcontinent, and Southeast Asia. Between 1960 and 2000, membership to the evangelical Southern Baptist Convention grew from 10 million to 17 million; Pentecostal churches 2 million to 12 million.
Other conservative churches grew accordingly, while Episcopalians dropped from 3.5m to 2m, and the United Methodists from 10m to 8 million. Sectarian and policy divisions were rife within the sector, but the Mayberry Machiavellis’ clever promotion of issues fuelling the culture wars turned out the vote.
Support of the evangelical South and economic conservatives generated just enough votes to effect the restoration of this order via the election of George W. Bush in 2001.
Al Gore won the popular vote, but Brother Jeb in Florida and the Supreme Court sealed the deal that sent him home. “Old Bush loyalists returned to Washington like exiled Stuarts flocking back to the London of Charles II in 1660…” Phillips catalogues the appointments rewarding family allies, and the payback dished out to opponents within the Republican party.
Biblical references dominated George W’s 2001 inauguration speech; compassionate conservatism provided the ideological cover for what in policy terms was the opposite.
And the marginalisation of rural America during his first term did not diminish the 84 per cent of the evangelical vote Bush garnered the second time around. In both elections, the son’s religiosity served to distance him from the father and the family’s Masters of the Universe baggage.
Phillips does not dwell on this issue, even though George I justified Operation Desert Storm as a defence of democracy and, “the emerging new world order.” The new world order, for the evangelicals, is an evil conspiracy to replace national sovereignty with world government.
Its forerunner and proxy is the same United Nations George I so eloquently endorsed after the Gulf War: “It is the sacred principles enshrined in the United Nations’ Charter to which the American people will henceforth pledge their allegiance.”
The author proceeds to describe how the regime’s maladaptive unilateralism and the family’s suppressed scandals revived questions about George II’s legitimacy early in his first term — until Osama bin Laden rescued the drifting government on 9-11.
The collapse of the World Trade Centre Twin Towers was a godsend for the neoconservatives running the show.
THE CRISIS OF TERRORIST attacks on US soil served as the pretext for expanding presidential power and reliance on private security allowed the executive to circumvent the legal checks and balances guiding foreign policy.
George W Bush was even more convinced that Americans were primed for another Iraq war, at least one that succeeded and involved few casualties. The parallels between him and Osama bin Laden are obvious enough before 9-11 and the US response bound both actors to a violent political symbiosis.
Not exactly “creative and uniquely human” exemplars of George H. Bush’s historical process, they do corroborate Václav Havel’s more elegant three-word critique of Marxism,
“Consciousness precedes class.” Never before have two battling elephants trampled the grass on such a global scale.
Title: American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush
Author: Kevin Phillips,
Publisher: Penguin, New York
Year: 2004
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Reviewing a Nazi-Soviet Pact 60 Years On
By David Marples
The Moscow Times, Issue 4215, Opinion
http://www.moscowtimes.ru/article/1016/42/381052.htm
August 20, 2009
The Moscow Times » Issue 4215 » Opinion
Sunday marks the 70th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a nonaggression treaty between the two totalitarian powers of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, as well as a secret protocol that divided Eastern Europe into spheres of influence between Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin.
In May, President Dmitry Medvedev authorized a commission to investigate cases of historical revisionism of World War II to the detriment of Russia. The move followed the approval a year earlier of new school textbooks that reassessed the role of Stalin, acknowledging that he had made some errors but noting in turn his achievements and successes, particularly in the war years. Taken together, they symbolize the new Russian policy of identifying contemporary Russia with the former Soviet regime.
Last month, Russia responded furiously to a proposal by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to declare Aug. 23 a commemoration of the victims of fascism and communism. In Moscow’s view, it is not possible to equate the evils of Nazism with Stalin’s regime.
Reporter Ilya Kanavin recently focused on the pact on “Vesti Nedeli,” citing historian Natalya Narochnitskaya’s view that by the terms of the pact, the Soviet Union was only regaining territories that were formerly part of the Russian Empire. Citing this same author, Kanavin maintained that Stalin was obliged to make a deal with Hitler for the following reasons:
• It was essential to keep the German army as far from the Soviet border as possible because the Soviet Union was at war with Imperial Japan in the Far East and could not be fighting on two fronts simultaneously.
• Germany and Poland at that point were in close collusion and could even be termed allies, based on a 1934 agreement that contained secret clauses on mutual military aid. Kanavin emphasized that such secret protocols were a staple of treaties in this period.
• With the removal of some 38,000 Soviet officers during the purges, Stalin needed time to train new military leaders and produce more arms.
• Stalin was isolated because the only potential allies, Britain and France, had no intention of reaching an agreement with the Soviet Union. A year earlier, the two democratic countries had participated in the notorious Munich Agreement that led to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia through the policy of appeasement. Only Winston Churchill opposed Hitler, but world leaders were supposedly more afraid of Stalin than the German dictator.
• Kanavin maintained that the Soviet Union should not be blamed for giving Hitler a free hand in his assigned sector of Poland. Stalin then had little choice but to sign the agreement, in full knowledge that he was only postponing the conflict.
These arguments can be questioned on a number of grounds, not least because they distinguish between a rapacious Hitler regime and a defensive-minded and implicitly benign Stalin government that eventually would bear the brunt of the war.
The comment that Stalin was occupying only territories formerly under the Russian Empire is inaccurate. In the summer of 1940, for example, after forcing the Romanians out of Bessarabia, Stalin also occupied northern Bukovina (today it is Ukraine’s Chernovtsy region) that had never been under Russian rule. When Molotov visited Germany late in 1940, he made several more territorial demands that reportedly led Hitler to accelerate plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Eastern Poland’s Volhynia region was part of the Russian Empire, but eastern Galicia had only been under Russian rule briefly during World War I. It is hard to perceive acquisition of these territories as anything other than the westward expansion of the Soviet Union.
But it is the assault on the annexed population that belies the arguments of Kanavin and Narochnitskaya, particularly because there are several instances of collaboration between the two occupying powers. Both systematically eradicated the Polish population — the Nazis overtly and the Soviets through deportations and secret executions in forests such as Katyn. More than 26,000 Polish officers were executed at three separate prison camps.
Stalin, however, claimed to be liberating subject populations — Ukrainians and Belarussians — who wished to join the Soviet Union. The Soviet advance only took place 16 days after the German invasion of western Poland. In this way, the Russian side did little fighting — only in Grodno did the Poles offer much resistance — and was able to pose as a friendly power.
However, having eliminated all vestiges of Polish rule, the new government organized mass deportations of Ukrainians, Belarussians and Jews in 1940 and 1941. A similar policy was deployed after the Soviet Union occupied the three Baltic States in the summer of 1940.
Medvedev and Russian historians have to face a few home truths. Even Kanavin conceded that the mass execution of Red Army officers weakened the Soviet military. But this action was part of the terror that the Stalin regime applied both domestically and in newly conquered territories, committing mass murders on an epic scale. Today, the Baltic states consider the entire period between 1940 and 1990 as Soviet occupation. That is why their citizens initially welcomed the Germans in the summer of 1941. Large sectors of western Ukraine remain alienated from Moscow today for the same reason.
By the agreement of Aug. 23, 1939, the two dictators acted in Machiavellian fashion. It is facile to suggest that Stalin should be regarded differently because he emerged as a victorious war leader responsible for the defeat of fascism. His naive trust in Hitler, manifested by the treaty, also was responsible for the Soviet failure to respond in the first days of the Great Patriotic War, leading to the mass loss of territory and capture of millions of Soviet citizens.
Aug. 23 was a dark day for Russia, as it was for the rest of Europe. That is how it should be remembered.
David Marples, a professor of Russian history at the University of Alberta, Canada, is the author of “The Collapse of the Soviet Union, 1985-1991.”
The Moscow Times, Issue 4215, Opinion
http://www.moscowtimes.ru/article/1016/42/381052.htm
August 20, 2009
The Moscow Times » Issue 4215 » Opinion
Sunday marks the 70th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a nonaggression treaty between the two totalitarian powers of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, as well as a secret protocol that divided Eastern Europe into spheres of influence between Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin.
In May, President Dmitry Medvedev authorized a commission to investigate cases of historical revisionism of World War II to the detriment of Russia. The move followed the approval a year earlier of new school textbooks that reassessed the role of Stalin, acknowledging that he had made some errors but noting in turn his achievements and successes, particularly in the war years. Taken together, they symbolize the new Russian policy of identifying contemporary Russia with the former Soviet regime.
Last month, Russia responded furiously to a proposal by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to declare Aug. 23 a commemoration of the victims of fascism and communism. In Moscow’s view, it is not possible to equate the evils of Nazism with Stalin’s regime.
Reporter Ilya Kanavin recently focused on the pact on “Vesti Nedeli,” citing historian Natalya Narochnitskaya’s view that by the terms of the pact, the Soviet Union was only regaining territories that were formerly part of the Russian Empire. Citing this same author, Kanavin maintained that Stalin was obliged to make a deal with Hitler for the following reasons:
• It was essential to keep the German army as far from the Soviet border as possible because the Soviet Union was at war with Imperial Japan in the Far East and could not be fighting on two fronts simultaneously.
• Germany and Poland at that point were in close collusion and could even be termed allies, based on a 1934 agreement that contained secret clauses on mutual military aid. Kanavin emphasized that such secret protocols were a staple of treaties in this period.
• With the removal of some 38,000 Soviet officers during the purges, Stalin needed time to train new military leaders and produce more arms.
• Stalin was isolated because the only potential allies, Britain and France, had no intention of reaching an agreement with the Soviet Union. A year earlier, the two democratic countries had participated in the notorious Munich Agreement that led to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia through the policy of appeasement. Only Winston Churchill opposed Hitler, but world leaders were supposedly more afraid of Stalin than the German dictator.
• Kanavin maintained that the Soviet Union should not be blamed for giving Hitler a free hand in his assigned sector of Poland. Stalin then had little choice but to sign the agreement, in full knowledge that he was only postponing the conflict.
These arguments can be questioned on a number of grounds, not least because they distinguish between a rapacious Hitler regime and a defensive-minded and implicitly benign Stalin government that eventually would bear the brunt of the war.
The comment that Stalin was occupying only territories formerly under the Russian Empire is inaccurate. In the summer of 1940, for example, after forcing the Romanians out of Bessarabia, Stalin also occupied northern Bukovina (today it is Ukraine’s Chernovtsy region) that had never been under Russian rule. When Molotov visited Germany late in 1940, he made several more territorial demands that reportedly led Hitler to accelerate plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Eastern Poland’s Volhynia region was part of the Russian Empire, but eastern Galicia had only been under Russian rule briefly during World War I. It is hard to perceive acquisition of these territories as anything other than the westward expansion of the Soviet Union.
But it is the assault on the annexed population that belies the arguments of Kanavin and Narochnitskaya, particularly because there are several instances of collaboration between the two occupying powers. Both systematically eradicated the Polish population — the Nazis overtly and the Soviets through deportations and secret executions in forests such as Katyn. More than 26,000 Polish officers were executed at three separate prison camps.
Stalin, however, claimed to be liberating subject populations — Ukrainians and Belarussians — who wished to join the Soviet Union. The Soviet advance only took place 16 days after the German invasion of western Poland. In this way, the Russian side did little fighting — only in Grodno did the Poles offer much resistance — and was able to pose as a friendly power.
However, having eliminated all vestiges of Polish rule, the new government organized mass deportations of Ukrainians, Belarussians and Jews in 1940 and 1941. A similar policy was deployed after the Soviet Union occupied the three Baltic States in the summer of 1940.
Medvedev and Russian historians have to face a few home truths. Even Kanavin conceded that the mass execution of Red Army officers weakened the Soviet military. But this action was part of the terror that the Stalin regime applied both domestically and in newly conquered territories, committing mass murders on an epic scale. Today, the Baltic states consider the entire period between 1940 and 1990 as Soviet occupation. That is why their citizens initially welcomed the Germans in the summer of 1941. Large sectors of western Ukraine remain alienated from Moscow today for the same reason.
By the agreement of Aug. 23, 1939, the two dictators acted in Machiavellian fashion. It is facile to suggest that Stalin should be regarded differently because he emerged as a victorious war leader responsible for the defeat of fascism. His naive trust in Hitler, manifested by the treaty, also was responsible for the Soviet failure to respond in the first days of the Great Patriotic War, leading to the mass loss of territory and capture of millions of Soviet citizens.
Aug. 23 was a dark day for Russia, as it was for the rest of Europe. That is how it should be remembered.
David Marples, a professor of Russian history at the University of Alberta, Canada, is the author of “The Collapse of the Soviet Union, 1985-1991.”
Conservative Columnist Claims UK Health Plan would have Killed Stephen Hawking/Hawking Thanks UK Health Plan for Saving his Life
Excerpt: "Who cares if Professor Stephen Hawking lives or dies. Actually, we all do," Hugh Muir, guardian.co.uk, 11 August 2009:
" ... The danger, says the Investor's Business Daily, is that [Obama] borrows too much from the UK. 'The controlling of medical costs in countries such as Britain through rationing, and the health consequences thereof, are legendary. The stories of people dying on a waiting list or being denied altogether read like a horror script … People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless."
Hawking IS British, and he has no problem with UK's National Health Service - in fact, he loves it:
" ... We say his life is far from worthless, as they do at Addenbrooke's hospital, Cambridge, where Professor Hawking, who has motor neurone disease, was treated for chest problems in April. As indeed does he. 'I wouldn't be here today if it were not for the NHS,' he told us. "I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived." Something here is worthless. And it's not him. ... "
"Worthless" are the "conservatives" who kill with facile lies.
- AC
" ... The danger, says the Investor's Business Daily, is that [Obama] borrows too much from the UK. 'The controlling of medical costs in countries such as Britain through rationing, and the health consequences thereof, are legendary. The stories of people dying on a waiting list or being denied altogether read like a horror script … People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless." Hawking IS British, and he has no problem with UK's National Health Service - in fact, he loves it:
" ... We say his life is far from worthless, as they do at Addenbrooke's hospital, Cambridge, where Professor Hawking, who has motor neurone disease, was treated for chest problems in April. As indeed does he. 'I wouldn't be here today if it were not for the NHS,' he told us. "I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived." Something here is worthless. And it's not him. ... "
"Worthless" are the "conservatives" who kill with facile lies.
- AC
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
America's Expansive Bioweapons Industrial Complex
by Tom Burghardt
www.australia.to
The dystopian British sci-fi film 28 Days Later opens with animal rights activists breaking into the Cambridge Primate Research facility to free chimpanzees used in a secret weapons program.
Terrified by the intrusion, a scientist warns the raiders that the chimps are infected with a genetically-modified pathogen. Ignoring his admonition, the chimps are let loose from their cages and immediately attack everyone in sight, unleashing a plague of unimaginable proportions.
Despite the film's fanciful scenario (with animal rights' campaigners clearly focused in the cross-hairs) this grim, cautionary tale does contain a kernel of truth. While marauding gangs of flesh-eating zombies haven't invaded our cities, a subtler threat looms on the horizon.
The sixth anniversary of the murder of British bioweapons expert Dr. David Kelly on July 17, 2003, lifted the lid on more than government lies that smoothed the way for the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq; it exposed the shadowy world of germ warfare research in Britain and the United States.
Along with the 2001 anthrax attacks in America that murdered five people and exposed some 10,000 others to a weaponized form of the bacteria, Kelly's death under highly questionable circumstances focused attention on the West's bioweapons establishment. For a fleeting instant, all eyes were trained on an international network of medical researchers, corporate grifters and Pentagon weaponeers busy as proverbial bees experimenting with deadly microorganisms.
And then as they say, things went dark; as more bodies piled up, cases were "closed" and the money kept on flowing...
An Expansive Bioweapons-Industrial Complex
The production of biological weapons were ostensibly banned when the United States signed the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) in 1975. However, the absence of any formal verification regime limited, some would argue purposely so, the effectiveness of the treaty from the get-go.
Indeed, a giant loop hole in the BWC allows for the production of "small quantities" of pestilential agents "for medical and defensive purposes." Note however, it is is not the production of said agents that are prohibited as such but rather, their transformation into "weapons, equipment or means of delivery ... for hostile purposes or in armed conflict."
And with the September 11 and anthrax attacks as a pretext, the United States embarked on a systematic and reckless program to expand research into the creation of prohibited weapons systems. Along with renewed interest in these dodgy projects, now euphemistically dubbed "biodefense" to avoid breaching the BWC, came a huge increase in funding as new facilities are built and older ones "upgraded." A May 2009 report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) estimates that overall government spending has "increased from $690 million in FY2001 to $5.4 billion in FY2008."
According to the Washington D.C.-based Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation since the 2001 terrorist attacks "the U.S. government has spent or allocated nearly $50 billion among 11 federal departments and agencies to address the threat of biological weapons. For Fiscal Year 2009 (FY2009), the Bush Administration proposes an additional $8.97 billion in bioweapons-related spending, approximately $2.5 billion (39%) more than the amount that Congress appropriated for FY2008."
The bulk of these funds according to the Center have gone to the Department of Health and Human Services' Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA ($31.5 billion), the Defense Department ($11.8 billion), Department of Homeland Security ($3.3 billion) and Project BioShield ($5.5 billion).
Yet according to numerous studies, deadly pathogens are far more likely to spread like wildfire as the result of a laboratory accident than an attack by germ-wielding terrorists. As I write, labs with Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) and Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) facilities are sprouting up like poisonous mushrooms across the United States.
A BSL-3 lab designation means that a facility is equipped to handle indigenous or exotic agents that may cause serious or potentially lethal disease after inhalation. Examples of substances handled by a BSL-3 lab include tuberculosis, anthrax, West Nile virus, SARS, salmonella, and yellow fever.
On the other hand, a BSL-4 lab handles the most deadly pathogens known to humankind; in other words, aerosol-transmitted infectious agents that cause fatal diseases for which no known treatments are available. Examples of substances handled by a BSL-4 lab include: Marburg virus, Ebola virus, Lassa fever and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever.
CRS researchers reported that "Non-federal entities have also expanded or constructed additional high-containment laboratories. In addition to the threat of bioterrorism, an increasing awareness of the threat posed by emerging and re-emerging diseases has led to the proliferation of high-containment laboratories internationally, as the technologies used are widely available."
Shockingly, CRS was unable to determine the exact number of BSL-3 laboratories currently operating in America. However Congress' research arm said that "the total amount of planned or existent BSL-4 space in the United States has increased by an estimated twelve-fold since 2004."
Much of this work, conveniently, is being contracted out to private corporations with little or no effective oversight. Among the more prominent firms to have received the federal government's largesse for BSL-3 and BSL-4 work according to CRS, one finds the "Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute, Battelle Memorial Institute, Southern Research Institute, and others." Indeed, much can be hidden here, including outsourced secret weapons research, under the rubric of "proprietary information" and "intellectual property" of course!
During 2007 hearings before Congress' Committee on Energy and Commerce's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, committee Chairman Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) said:
These BSL–3 and 4 labs are the facilities where research is conducted on highly infectious viruses and bacteria that can cause injury or death. Some of the world's most exotic and most dangerous diseases are handled at BSL–3 and 4 labs, including anthrax, foot-and-mouth disease and Ebola fever. The accidental or deliberate release of some of the biological agents handled at these labs could have catastrophic consequences. Yet, as we will hear from the Government Accountability Office, GAO, no single Government agency has the ultimate responsibility for ensuring the safety and securing of these high-containment labs. However, GAO states there is a major expansion of the number of BSL laboratories is occurring both in United States and abroad but the full extent of that expansion is unknown. ("Germs, Viruses and Secrets: The Silent Proliferation of Bio-Laboratories in the United States," Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, U.S. House of Representatives, October 4, 2007, Serial No. 110-70, pp. 1-2)
The hearings revealed that no one "in the Federal Government even knows for sure how many of these labs there are in the United States, much less what research they are doing or whether they are safe and secure." Neither "safe" nor "secure" such facilities however, are highly profitable.
During 2007 alone, some 100 "incidents" were reported; however, "there are indications that the actual number of incidents may be much higher," according to Rep. Stupak. Reporting guidelines are so lax that dangerous pathogens such as hantavirus, SARS and dengue fever "are not on the select agent list" nor are there requirements "that the theft, loss or release of these agents ... be reported to Federal officials."
According to Edward Hammond, director of the now-defunct Sunshine Project, some 20,000 people working at more than 400 sites in the U.S. conduct research on organisms that can be used as bioweapons. This represents a tenfold increase in employment at such facilities since the 2001 anthrax attacks.
Using the Freedom of Information Act to pry data from the federal government, Hammond obtained records from a score of university biosafety committees. What he discovered was disturbing to say the least. Plague, anthrax, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, tularemia, brucellosis and Q fever; these are some of the deadly pathogens that escaped containment through poor safety practices and resulted in the inadvertent sickening of lab workers.
Scientists have warned for years that the more people who handle these toxic substances, the higher the probability that mishaps will occur. Among the more well-publicized incidents, Hammond reported the following:
* Texas A&M University: workers were exposed to Q fever when it escaped containment;
* University of New Mexico: one worker was jabbed with an anthrax-laden needle while another was stuck with a syringe filled with an undisclosed, genetically altered microbe;
* University of Ohio Medical Center: workers are exposed to and infected with Valley Fever;
* University of Chicago: a syringe puncture of a lab worker with an undisclosed substance that required heavy containment, most likely anthrax or plague;
* University of California at Berkeley: workers handled the air-borne toxin Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever without containment. It had been mislabeled as "harmless".
More recently, Global Security Newswire reported in June that an inventory at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Md., "found nearly 10,000 more vials of potentially lethal pathogens than were known to be stored at the site."
Claiming that there are "multiple layers of security," Ft. Detrick's deputy commander Col. Mark Kortepeter said it was "extremely unlikely" that any of the center's samples had been smuggled out. "Unlikely," but not impossible.
Amongst the 9,200 extra samples uncovered during the inventory were "bacterial agents that cause plague, anthrax and tularemia; Venezuelan, Eastern and Western equine encephalitis viruses; Rift valley fever virus; Junin virus; Ebola virus; and botulinum neurotoxins." So much for a "culture of safety"!
Any one of these pathogens should they escape or made to "disappear," could be transformed into a doomsday weapon.
Designer Genes, Designer Weapons
In Emerging Technologies: Genetic Engineering and Biological Weapons, researcher Edward Hammond described how "Genetic engineering can contribute to offensive BW programs in a variety of ways. With genetic manipulation, classical biowarfare agents such as anthrax or plague may be made more efficient weapons. Barriers to access to agents such as smallpox, Ebola or the Spanish flu are being lowered by genetic and genomic techniques."
No longer the province of science fiction, recombinant DNA research is being exploited by enterprising corporate grifters for decidedly sinister purposes. Hammond writes that while "access to highly virulent agents and strains is increasingly regulated and restricted," with lethal toxins such as the smallpox virus "eradicated outside the laboratory more than 20 years ago ... it is only a question of time before the artificial synthesis of agents or agent combinations becomes possible."
The available evidence suggests such work, alarmingly, is advancing at a rapid rate.
In 2002, poliovirus was synthesized by a research team at the University of New York in Stony Brook. Hammond writes that "researchers built poliovirus 'from scratch' through chemical synthesis. Starting with the gene sequence of the agent, which is available online, the researchers synthesized virus sequences in the lab and ordered other tailor-made DNA sequences from a commercial source. They then combined them to form the full polio genome. In a last step, the DNA-sequence was brought to life by adding a chemical cocktail that initiated the production of a living, pathogenic virus. The experiment was funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)."
While poliovirus is not "well suited" as a bioweapon, "the experiment exemplifies possibilities that generate real problems if similar techniques become applicable to agents such as smallpox." Hammond averred that in 2002 "such a technique was demonstrated." Indeed, "the full sequences of at least two different smallpox strains are available in the internet, and most recently a new internet site dedicated to poxvirus genomic sequences has been launched."
As frightening as the potential for genetically engineering smallpox as a bioweapon, U.S. researchers, led by a Pentagon pathologist "recently began to genetically reconstruct" the dangerous influenza strain responsible for the 1918-1919 pandemic. "In one experiment" Hammond informs us, "a partially reconstructed 1918 virus killed mice, while virus constructs with genes from a contemporary flu virus had hardly any effect." During the 1918-1919 outbreak some 40 million people died in the global pandemic.
Hammond reports that a sample of lung tissue from a 21-year-old soldier who died in 1918 at Ft. Jackson in South Carolina "yielded what the Army researchers were looking for: intact pieces of viral RNA that could be analysed and sequenced. In a first publication in 1997, nine short fragments of Spanish flu viral RNA were revealed. Due to the rough tissue preparation procedure in 1918, no living virus or complete viral RNA sequences were recovered."
But far from inhibiting Pentagon researchers, biowarfare proponents were jumping for joy when Army scientists recovered intact pieces of viral RNA that were then subsequently pulled apart and analyzed. By 2002 according to Hammond, "four of the eight viral RNA segments had been completely sequenced, including the two segments that are considered to be of greatest importance for the virulence of the virus."
Which leads to a queasy sense that perhaps the current outbreak of the H1N1 strain of swine flu may be the result of some mad experiment gone awry. Adrian Gibbs, a prominent Australian scientist who collaborated on research that led to the development of the Tamiflu drug, told Bloomberg News "the new strain may have accidentally evolved in eggs scientists use to grow viruses and drugmakers use to make vaccines. Gibbs said he came to his conclusion as part of an effort to trace the virus's origins by analyzing its genetic blueprint."
"The sooner we get to grips with where it's come from, the safer things might become," Gibbs told Bloomberg. "'It could be a mistake' that occurred at a vaccine production facility or the virus could have jumped from a pig to another mammal or a bird before reaching humans, he said."
Gibbs is no crank and his claims, at least initially, were taken seriously by the World Health Organization (WHO). Kenji Fukada, WHO's assistant director-general of health security and environment said the agency is reviewing Gibbs' report. On the other hand, the American Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta dismissed the findings, deciding there is "no evidence" to support the scientist's conclusions.
His research is considered credible and the scientist said his analysis is supported by other researchers, including Richard Webby, a virologist at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis who found "the new strain is the product of two distinct lineages of influenza that have circulated among swine in North America and Europe for more than a decade."
Gibbs told the financial publication he saw no evidence that "the swine-derived virus was a deliberate, man-made product." The researcher said, "I don't think it could be a malignant thing. It's much more likely that some random thing has put these two viruses together."
Fukada later said that Gibbs' proposition "didn't fit the evidence." The WHO official added that the organization will need to review Gibbs' research article when it is published, but he indicated that "it is unlikely to change the experts' conclusions."
Perhaps Gibbs is wrong and his findings will be relegated to the sidelines. Having said that however, the danger that H1N1 or some derivative might be weaponized cannot be dismissed out of hand.
Indeed, the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine was so-alarmed by the prospect that in 2003 they commented, "the possibility for genetic engineering and aerosol transmission [of influenza] suggests an enormous potential for bioterrorism." Unsaid, of course, was the gravest threat posed by such dark research may be state terrorism, more specifically, American state terrorism.
Plum Island
If past is prologue, it might be an instructive exercise to take a short detour down memory lane.
One spooky facility that played a key role in America's Cold War bioweapons programs is the 840-acre Plum Island Animal Disease Center (PIADC). Under the nominal control of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Plum Island shared close ties with the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Md.
According to a series of striking reports by researcher Mark Sanborne, Plum Island's "spiritual godfather" was none other than one Dr. Erich Traub, "a Nazi scientist with a fascinating history." Traub spent the pre-war years as a scientific fellow at the Rockefeller Institute in Princeton, N.J., "studying bacteriology and virology, while still finding time to hang out at Camp Sigfried, headquarters of the American Nazi movement in Yaphank, Long Island, 30 miles west of Plum Island."
Citing evidence uncovered by researcher by Michael Christopher Carroll in his exposé Lab 257, when war broke out, Traub returned to Germany and became the head of Insel Riems, the Nazi state's secret biological warfare research facility located on an island in the Baltic Sea. A fanatical Nazi, Traub tested germ and viral sprays over the occupied Soviet Union "while reporting directly to Heinrich Himmler."
With a CV such as this one would have expected Traub to have landed in prison or at the end of a rope. Think again!
After the war Traub worked briefly for the Soviets before escaping into the embrace of Operation Paperclip, Washington's covert employment program for useful Nazi scientists. As Werner von Braun was to rockets, Traub was to germs: He promptly went to work for the Naval Medical Research Institute and gave operational advice to the CIA and the biowarriors at Fort Detrick. Indeed, his detailed description of his work at Insel Riems probably helped inspire the selection of Plum Island by the Army: both the German and U.S. facilities were situated on islands where the prevailing winds blew (mostly) out to sea. (Mark Sanborne, "'Bionoia' Part 3: The Mystery of Plum Island: Nazis, Ticks and Weapons of Mass Infection," World War 4 Report, No. 121, May 1, 2006)
But that's all in the past, right? Well, not entirely...
Carroll builds a compelling case that the 1975 outbreak and subsequent pandemic spread of Lyme Disease, a tick-borne pathogen first identified in Old Lyme, Connecticut "just 10 miles across Long Island Sound from Plum Island," may have originated when a secret bioweapons experiment went awry.
Since its 1975 appearance nearly 300,000 cases have been reported in 49 states, although given its mimetic abilities and confusing, multi-symptom manifestations, the CDC estimates that only one in 10 cases are recognized as such, which means potentially some three million Americans may have been infected by the pathogen.
Indeed, what makes Lyme the perfect cover as a bioweapon is its capacity as "a devious, multi-systemic, inflammatory syndrome that mimics other illnesses by encompassing a range of afflictions, including chronic and crippling pain and fatigue that untreated can spread to organs and the central nervous system, causing depression, palsy, memory loss, psychosis, and even encephalitis and death," Sanborne grimly informs us.
Why then, would America's biowarriors concern themselves with a disease that "incapacitates but rarely kills" its victims? According to Sanborne, "the logic is brutally simple." Drawing an analogy between how a wounded soldier puts greater stress on an army than a dead one, "gradually sickening a population places greater economic and social stress on a society than simply killing a limited number of people with a more direct and virulent attack."
And if such a disease can be transmitted via a natural vector like ticks or mosquitoes that already possess built-in plausible deniability so to speak "and can confuse medical authorities by presenting a broad array of symptoms that mimic other conditions (Bb, like its more famous relative syphilis, has been called the 'Great Imitator'), then so much the better," Sanborne wrote.
Carroll discovered during his research that entomologist Dr. Richard Endris and African swine fever team leader Dr. William Hess, traveled to Cameroon and other parts of Africa on "tick-hunting safaris." By the time the pair had finished their collection, they had reared "over 200,000 hard and soft ticks of multiple species."
Lab containment practices were cited as "unsafe" by outside consultants who "strongly recommended" the construction of a "modern, approved insectory be undertaken for future research." (emphasis in original) The pair were fired in 1988 and the tick colony destroyed, but the question remains: were the ticks already out of the bag?
There is also evidence that Plum Island researchers experimented with more than ticks. Carroll averred,
Dr. Endris also conducted experiments with sand flies on Plum Island in 1987 to test transmission of leishmaniasis, a bacterial ailment that if left untreated, has a human mortality rate of almost 100 percent. It is characterized by irregular bouts of fever, substantial weight loss, and swelling of the spleen and liver. The work was performed under contract for Fort Detrick, and serves as another example of a deadly germ warfare agent worked on at Plum Island for the Army, with no public knowledge or public safety precautions taken. (Michael Christopher Carroll, Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Germ Laboratory, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005, p. 24)
Like other parts of America's bioweapons-industrial complex, disease outbreaks and subsequent cover-ups go hand in hand. The New York Times reported in 2004 that "the highly contagious foot and mouth virus had briefly spread within the Plum Island Animal Disease Center in two previously undisclosed incidents earlier this summer."
Fear not, lab spokesperson Donald W. Tighe told the paper "the virus had remained within the laboratory's sealed biocontainment area. He said there had been no risk to humans or animals inside or outside the laboratory." An investigation "is continuing." Alarmingly, in 1991, Hurricane Bob knocked out power on the island for several hours and disabled the air pressure systems that contained the viruses. At the time, lab spokespersons assured the public "they were safe."
Plans are afoot to close the facility. Global Security Newswire reported in February that the Department of Homeland Security is planning a new, $450 million facility to be built on the Kansas State University campus.
However, The New York Times revealed that "additional costs" would bring the total to about $630 million." The National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBADF) would have "safety built into every square inch," DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano assured critics.
Coming to a City Near You!
Despite lax oversight and a veritable $50 billion ocean of cash washing over universities, corporations and the military, since 2002 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has spent billions on the construction of new BSL-3 and BSL-4 facilities. More are planned, including those already under construction in major U.S. cities.
One Boston resident, alarmed by the prospect that Boston University Medical Center officials were building "a biological defense laboratory in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods" told the Los Angeles Times, "We heard anthrax and Roxbury-South End," she recalled. "Then we heard Ebola. The last thing we heard was bubonic plague. We looked at each other and said, 'No way are they bringing that ... into our community.'"
Seven years later, the $198-million lab complex stands completed between an apartment building and a flower market. But state and federal lawsuits by anxious residents, backed by skeptical scientists, have blocked the opening until late next year at the earliest.
The battle marks the first major setback in the vast growth since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks of labs authorized to research the world's most dangerous diseases. It also underscores a growing debate over the safety and security of such labs--and whether so many are needed. (Bob Drogin, "Biodefense Labs Make Bad Neighbors, Residents Say," Los Angeles Times, May 17, 2009)
Working class Boston residents aren't the only people alarmed by the explosive growth of such facilities.
According to a 2008 University of California budget document the Board of Regents recommended the allocation of $3,998,000 for a project to renovate and "upgrade" the existing laboratory facility "for programs that require Bio-safety Level 3 (BSL3) containment" on the U.C. Davis campus.
With students and workers reeling under draconian state budget cuts, out-of-control fee hikes and mass layoffs, why would the State of California waste nearly $4 million for such a facility? "The BSL3 space is needed" we are informed, "for research programs utilizing infectious and pathogenic organisms." Indeed, "the facility would be designed to accommodate research studies involving in-vitro experimentation utilizing infected avian, murine, arthropod hosts, and the development of genetic markers for a wide range of disease agents that require BSL3 containment."
But as with most of America's bioweapons-industrial complex, illicit and illegal research is carried out with little or no oversight.
The antinuclear Bay Area watchdog group Tri-Valley CAREs (TVC), has been monitoring and protesting the expansion of America's nuclear weapons complex for decades, with a particular focus on the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
An ubiquitous "public-private partner" of the U.S. national security state, LLNL is a "limited liability corporation" comprised of five partners: the University of California, Bechtel, BWX Technologies, Washington Group International and Battelle--all heavy-hitters in the biotech, construction, defense, energy, nuclear and security worlds.
According to TVC, the group obtained government documents as a result of Freedom of Information Act litigation demonstrating that LLNL had violated federal regulations and had carried out "restricted experiments" that were discovered by the Centers of Disease Control inspection in August 2005. CDC, the Department of Energy and LLNL covered up the inspector's report.
Restricted experiments are experiments utilizing recombinant DNA that involve the deliberate transfer of a drug resistance trait to select agents that are not known to acquire the trait naturally. Select agents, which include anthrax and plague, are biological agents and toxins having the potential to pose a severe threat to public health and safety.
Because of the dangers involved in transferring drug resistance to select agents, restricted experiments require approval from the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Livermore Lab did not have that approval, but ran the experiments anyway. ("Livermore Lab Caught Conducting Illegal Restricted Bio-Experiments," Tri-Valley CAREs, Press Release, May 26, 2009)
According to the watchdog group, the experiments were carried out by the lab at the same time of the accidental release of anthrax in August-September 2005. Five individuals were exposed to the deadly pathogen and a $450,000 fine was levied against the facility. TVC noted that "the relevant details of the 2005 anthrax accident were kept from the public at the time, just as happened with the illegal experiments that are coming to light today."
LLNL has opened a BSL-3 facility and is planning to experiment with pathogens that can be used as offensive weapons. Activities contemplated include, "aerosolizing (spraying) pathogens such as plague, tularemia and Q fever, in addition to anthrax. Moreover, government documents disclose that planned experiments in the BSL-3 include genetic modification and potentially novel manipulation of viruses, prions and other agents."
What of LLNL's close partner, Battelle Memorial? According to a blurb on their web site, the firm's national security brief includes what they euphemistically call "vaccine and therapeutic product development." Battelle "specialists" at their Aberdeen, Maryland research facility (adjacent to USAMRIID's Ft. Detrick bioweapons complex) "study aerosolized microorganisms that may be possibly used in terrorist attacks."
Indeed, Ft, Detrick is currently undergoing the largest expansion in its history. Investigative journalists Bob Coen and Eric Nadler revealed in Dead Silence: Fear and Terror on the Anthrax Trail that the recently-opened "National Biodefense Analysis Countermeasures Center ... contains heavily guarded and hermetically sealed chambers in which scientists will simulate terrorist attacks and use lethal germs and toxins."
Coen and Nadler aver, "this, remember, is the facility that officialdom claims was the source of the only significant germ war attack on US soil." Conveniently enough, "Battelle has the $250 million contract to manage the operation."
But the journalists uncovered more, much more than insipid government pronouncements on "biodefense." During a interview with constitutional law scholar Francis Boyle, a University of Illinois professor and acknowledged expert on the Biological Weapons Convention, Boyle told the investigative sleuths that the "Pentagon is ready to wage anthrax war."
"Look at the Department of Defense's Chemical and Biological Defense Program Report to Congress, April 2007, page 22, Table 2-5. Information Systems Modernization Strategy, Mid FY09-13," Boyle told Coen and Nadler.
"Here you find a study" Boyle asserted, that estimates the "human effects from a 5,000 weapon worldwide strike; to predict fatalities and incapacitation, both initial and delayed and to accommodate population moves including area evacuations or sheltering in place. Now how does that strike you?"
Sounds like business as usual!
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The dystopian British sci-fi film 28 Days Later opens with animal rights activists breaking into the Cambridge Primate Research facility to free chimpanzees used in a secret weapons program.
Terrified by the intrusion, a scientist warns the raiders that the chimps are infected with a genetically-modified pathogen. Ignoring his admonition, the chimps are let loose from their cages and immediately attack everyone in sight, unleashing a plague of unimaginable proportions.
Despite the film's fanciful scenario (with animal rights' campaigners clearly focused in the cross-hairs) this grim, cautionary tale does contain a kernel of truth. While marauding gangs of flesh-eating zombies haven't invaded our cities, a subtler threat looms on the horizon.
The sixth anniversary of the murder of British bioweapons expert Dr. David Kelly on July 17, 2003, lifted the lid on more than government lies that smoothed the way for the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq; it exposed the shadowy world of germ warfare research in Britain and the United States.
Along with the 2001 anthrax attacks in America that murdered five people and exposed some 10,000 others to a weaponized form of the bacteria, Kelly's death under highly questionable circumstances focused attention on the West's bioweapons establishment. For a fleeting instant, all eyes were trained on an international network of medical researchers, corporate grifters and Pentagon weaponeers busy as proverbial bees experimenting with deadly microorganisms.
And then as they say, things went dark; as more bodies piled up, cases were "closed" and the money kept on flowing...
An Expansive Bioweapons-Industrial Complex
The production of biological weapons were ostensibly banned when the United States signed the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) in 1975. However, the absence of any formal verification regime limited, some would argue purposely so, the effectiveness of the treaty from the get-go.
Indeed, a giant loop hole in the BWC allows for the production of "small quantities" of pestilential agents "for medical and defensive purposes." Note however, it is is not the production of said agents that are prohibited as such but rather, their transformation into "weapons, equipment or means of delivery ... for hostile purposes or in armed conflict."
And with the September 11 and anthrax attacks as a pretext, the United States embarked on a systematic and reckless program to expand research into the creation of prohibited weapons systems. Along with renewed interest in these dodgy projects, now euphemistically dubbed "biodefense" to avoid breaching the BWC, came a huge increase in funding as new facilities are built and older ones "upgraded." A May 2009 report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) estimates that overall government spending has "increased from $690 million in FY2001 to $5.4 billion in FY2008."
According to the Washington D.C.-based Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation since the 2001 terrorist attacks "the U.S. government has spent or allocated nearly $50 billion among 11 federal departments and agencies to address the threat of biological weapons. For Fiscal Year 2009 (FY2009), the Bush Administration proposes an additional $8.97 billion in bioweapons-related spending, approximately $2.5 billion (39%) more than the amount that Congress appropriated for FY2008."
The bulk of these funds according to the Center have gone to the Department of Health and Human Services' Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA ($31.5 billion), the Defense Department ($11.8 billion), Department of Homeland Security ($3.3 billion) and Project BioShield ($5.5 billion).
Yet according to numerous studies, deadly pathogens are far more likely to spread like wildfire as the result of a laboratory accident than an attack by germ-wielding terrorists. As I write, labs with Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) and Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) facilities are sprouting up like poisonous mushrooms across the United States.
A BSL-3 lab designation means that a facility is equipped to handle indigenous or exotic agents that may cause serious or potentially lethal disease after inhalation. Examples of substances handled by a BSL-3 lab include tuberculosis, anthrax, West Nile virus, SARS, salmonella, and yellow fever.
On the other hand, a BSL-4 lab handles the most deadly pathogens known to humankind; in other words, aerosol-transmitted infectious agents that cause fatal diseases for which no known treatments are available. Examples of substances handled by a BSL-4 lab include: Marburg virus, Ebola virus, Lassa fever and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever.
CRS researchers reported that "Non-federal entities have also expanded or constructed additional high-containment laboratories. In addition to the threat of bioterrorism, an increasing awareness of the threat posed by emerging and re-emerging diseases has led to the proliferation of high-containment laboratories internationally, as the technologies used are widely available."
Shockingly, CRS was unable to determine the exact number of BSL-3 laboratories currently operating in America. However Congress' research arm said that "the total amount of planned or existent BSL-4 space in the United States has increased by an estimated twelve-fold since 2004."
Much of this work, conveniently, is being contracted out to private corporations with little or no effective oversight. Among the more prominent firms to have received the federal government's largesse for BSL-3 and BSL-4 work according to CRS, one finds the "Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute, Battelle Memorial Institute, Southern Research Institute, and others." Indeed, much can be hidden here, including outsourced secret weapons research, under the rubric of "proprietary information" and "intellectual property" of course!
During 2007 hearings before Congress' Committee on Energy and Commerce's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, committee Chairman Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) said:
These BSL–3 and 4 labs are the facilities where research is conducted on highly infectious viruses and bacteria that can cause injury or death. Some of the world's most exotic and most dangerous diseases are handled at BSL–3 and 4 labs, including anthrax, foot-and-mouth disease and Ebola fever. The accidental or deliberate release of some of the biological agents handled at these labs could have catastrophic consequences. Yet, as we will hear from the Government Accountability Office, GAO, no single Government agency has the ultimate responsibility for ensuring the safety and securing of these high-containment labs. However, GAO states there is a major expansion of the number of BSL laboratories is occurring both in United States and abroad but the full extent of that expansion is unknown. ("Germs, Viruses and Secrets: The Silent Proliferation of Bio-Laboratories in the United States," Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, U.S. House of Representatives, October 4, 2007, Serial No. 110-70, pp. 1-2)
The hearings revealed that no one "in the Federal Government even knows for sure how many of these labs there are in the United States, much less what research they are doing or whether they are safe and secure." Neither "safe" nor "secure" such facilities however, are highly profitable.
During 2007 alone, some 100 "incidents" were reported; however, "there are indications that the actual number of incidents may be much higher," according to Rep. Stupak. Reporting guidelines are so lax that dangerous pathogens such as hantavirus, SARS and dengue fever "are not on the select agent list" nor are there requirements "that the theft, loss or release of these agents ... be reported to Federal officials."
According to Edward Hammond, director of the now-defunct Sunshine Project, some 20,000 people working at more than 400 sites in the U.S. conduct research on organisms that can be used as bioweapons. This represents a tenfold increase in employment at such facilities since the 2001 anthrax attacks.
Using the Freedom of Information Act to pry data from the federal government, Hammond obtained records from a score of university biosafety committees. What he discovered was disturbing to say the least. Plague, anthrax, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, tularemia, brucellosis and Q fever; these are some of the deadly pathogens that escaped containment through poor safety practices and resulted in the inadvertent sickening of lab workers.
Scientists have warned for years that the more people who handle these toxic substances, the higher the probability that mishaps will occur. Among the more well-publicized incidents, Hammond reported the following:
* Texas A&M University: workers were exposed to Q fever when it escaped containment;
* University of New Mexico: one worker was jabbed with an anthrax-laden needle while another was stuck with a syringe filled with an undisclosed, genetically altered microbe;
* University of Ohio Medical Center: workers are exposed to and infected with Valley Fever;
* University of Chicago: a syringe puncture of a lab worker with an undisclosed substance that required heavy containment, most likely anthrax or plague;
* University of California at Berkeley: workers handled the air-borne toxin Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever without containment. It had been mislabeled as "harmless".
More recently, Global Security Newswire reported in June that an inventory at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Md., "found nearly 10,000 more vials of potentially lethal pathogens than were known to be stored at the site."
Claiming that there are "multiple layers of security," Ft. Detrick's deputy commander Col. Mark Kortepeter said it was "extremely unlikely" that any of the center's samples had been smuggled out. "Unlikely," but not impossible.
Amongst the 9,200 extra samples uncovered during the inventory were "bacterial agents that cause plague, anthrax and tularemia; Venezuelan, Eastern and Western equine encephalitis viruses; Rift valley fever virus; Junin virus; Ebola virus; and botulinum neurotoxins." So much for a "culture of safety"!
Any one of these pathogens should they escape or made to "disappear," could be transformed into a doomsday weapon.
Designer Genes, Designer Weapons
In Emerging Technologies: Genetic Engineering and Biological Weapons, researcher Edward Hammond described how "Genetic engineering can contribute to offensive BW programs in a variety of ways. With genetic manipulation, classical biowarfare agents such as anthrax or plague may be made more efficient weapons. Barriers to access to agents such as smallpox, Ebola or the Spanish flu are being lowered by genetic and genomic techniques."
No longer the province of science fiction, recombinant DNA research is being exploited by enterprising corporate grifters for decidedly sinister purposes. Hammond writes that while "access to highly virulent agents and strains is increasingly regulated and restricted," with lethal toxins such as the smallpox virus "eradicated outside the laboratory more than 20 years ago ... it is only a question of time before the artificial synthesis of agents or agent combinations becomes possible."
The available evidence suggests such work, alarmingly, is advancing at a rapid rate.
In 2002, poliovirus was synthesized by a research team at the University of New York in Stony Brook. Hammond writes that "researchers built poliovirus 'from scratch' through chemical synthesis. Starting with the gene sequence of the agent, which is available online, the researchers synthesized virus sequences in the lab and ordered other tailor-made DNA sequences from a commercial source. They then combined them to form the full polio genome. In a last step, the DNA-sequence was brought to life by adding a chemical cocktail that initiated the production of a living, pathogenic virus. The experiment was funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)."
While poliovirus is not "well suited" as a bioweapon, "the experiment exemplifies possibilities that generate real problems if similar techniques become applicable to agents such as smallpox." Hammond averred that in 2002 "such a technique was demonstrated." Indeed, "the full sequences of at least two different smallpox strains are available in the internet, and most recently a new internet site dedicated to poxvirus genomic sequences has been launched."
As frightening as the potential for genetically engineering smallpox as a bioweapon, U.S. researchers, led by a Pentagon pathologist "recently began to genetically reconstruct" the dangerous influenza strain responsible for the 1918-1919 pandemic. "In one experiment" Hammond informs us, "a partially reconstructed 1918 virus killed mice, while virus constructs with genes from a contemporary flu virus had hardly any effect." During the 1918-1919 outbreak some 40 million people died in the global pandemic.
Hammond reports that a sample of lung tissue from a 21-year-old soldier who died in 1918 at Ft. Jackson in South Carolina "yielded what the Army researchers were looking for: intact pieces of viral RNA that could be analysed and sequenced. In a first publication in 1997, nine short fragments of Spanish flu viral RNA were revealed. Due to the rough tissue preparation procedure in 1918, no living virus or complete viral RNA sequences were recovered."
But far from inhibiting Pentagon researchers, biowarfare proponents were jumping for joy when Army scientists recovered intact pieces of viral RNA that were then subsequently pulled apart and analyzed. By 2002 according to Hammond, "four of the eight viral RNA segments had been completely sequenced, including the two segments that are considered to be of greatest importance for the virulence of the virus."
Which leads to a queasy sense that perhaps the current outbreak of the H1N1 strain of swine flu may be the result of some mad experiment gone awry. Adrian Gibbs, a prominent Australian scientist who collaborated on research that led to the development of the Tamiflu drug, told Bloomberg News "the new strain may have accidentally evolved in eggs scientists use to grow viruses and drugmakers use to make vaccines. Gibbs said he came to his conclusion as part of an effort to trace the virus's origins by analyzing its genetic blueprint."
"The sooner we get to grips with where it's come from, the safer things might become," Gibbs told Bloomberg. "'It could be a mistake' that occurred at a vaccine production facility or the virus could have jumped from a pig to another mammal or a bird before reaching humans, he said."
Gibbs is no crank and his claims, at least initially, were taken seriously by the World Health Organization (WHO). Kenji Fukada, WHO's assistant director-general of health security and environment said the agency is reviewing Gibbs' report. On the other hand, the American Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta dismissed the findings, deciding there is "no evidence" to support the scientist's conclusions.
His research is considered credible and the scientist said his analysis is supported by other researchers, including Richard Webby, a virologist at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis who found "the new strain is the product of two distinct lineages of influenza that have circulated among swine in North America and Europe for more than a decade."
Gibbs told the financial publication he saw no evidence that "the swine-derived virus was a deliberate, man-made product." The researcher said, "I don't think it could be a malignant thing. It's much more likely that some random thing has put these two viruses together."
Fukada later said that Gibbs' proposition "didn't fit the evidence." The WHO official added that the organization will need to review Gibbs' research article when it is published, but he indicated that "it is unlikely to change the experts' conclusions."
Perhaps Gibbs is wrong and his findings will be relegated to the sidelines. Having said that however, the danger that H1N1 or some derivative might be weaponized cannot be dismissed out of hand.
Indeed, the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine was so-alarmed by the prospect that in 2003 they commented, "the possibility for genetic engineering and aerosol transmission [of influenza] suggests an enormous potential for bioterrorism." Unsaid, of course, was the gravest threat posed by such dark research may be state terrorism, more specifically, American state terrorism.
Plum Island
If past is prologue, it might be an instructive exercise to take a short detour down memory lane.
One spooky facility that played a key role in America's Cold War bioweapons programs is the 840-acre Plum Island Animal Disease Center (PIADC). Under the nominal control of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Plum Island shared close ties with the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Md.
According to a series of striking reports by researcher Mark Sanborne, Plum Island's "spiritual godfather" was none other than one Dr. Erich Traub, "a Nazi scientist with a fascinating history." Traub spent the pre-war years as a scientific fellow at the Rockefeller Institute in Princeton, N.J., "studying bacteriology and virology, while still finding time to hang out at Camp Sigfried, headquarters of the American Nazi movement in Yaphank, Long Island, 30 miles west of Plum Island."
Citing evidence uncovered by researcher by Michael Christopher Carroll in his exposé Lab 257, when war broke out, Traub returned to Germany and became the head of Insel Riems, the Nazi state's secret biological warfare research facility located on an island in the Baltic Sea. A fanatical Nazi, Traub tested germ and viral sprays over the occupied Soviet Union "while reporting directly to Heinrich Himmler."
With a CV such as this one would have expected Traub to have landed in prison or at the end of a rope. Think again!
After the war Traub worked briefly for the Soviets before escaping into the embrace of Operation Paperclip, Washington's covert employment program for useful Nazi scientists. As Werner von Braun was to rockets, Traub was to germs: He promptly went to work for the Naval Medical Research Institute and gave operational advice to the CIA and the biowarriors at Fort Detrick. Indeed, his detailed description of his work at Insel Riems probably helped inspire the selection of Plum Island by the Army: both the German and U.S. facilities were situated on islands where the prevailing winds blew (mostly) out to sea. (Mark Sanborne, "'Bionoia' Part 3: The Mystery of Plum Island: Nazis, Ticks and Weapons of Mass Infection," World War 4 Report, No. 121, May 1, 2006)
But that's all in the past, right? Well, not entirely...
Carroll builds a compelling case that the 1975 outbreak and subsequent pandemic spread of Lyme Disease, a tick-borne pathogen first identified in Old Lyme, Connecticut "just 10 miles across Long Island Sound from Plum Island," may have originated when a secret bioweapons experiment went awry.
Since its 1975 appearance nearly 300,000 cases have been reported in 49 states, although given its mimetic abilities and confusing, multi-symptom manifestations, the CDC estimates that only one in 10 cases are recognized as such, which means potentially some three million Americans may have been infected by the pathogen.
Indeed, what makes Lyme the perfect cover as a bioweapon is its capacity as "a devious, multi-systemic, inflammatory syndrome that mimics other illnesses by encompassing a range of afflictions, including chronic and crippling pain and fatigue that untreated can spread to organs and the central nervous system, causing depression, palsy, memory loss, psychosis, and even encephalitis and death," Sanborne grimly informs us.
Why then, would America's biowarriors concern themselves with a disease that "incapacitates but rarely kills" its victims? According to Sanborne, "the logic is brutally simple." Drawing an analogy between how a wounded soldier puts greater stress on an army than a dead one, "gradually sickening a population places greater economic and social stress on a society than simply killing a limited number of people with a more direct and virulent attack."
And if such a disease can be transmitted via a natural vector like ticks or mosquitoes that already possess built-in plausible deniability so to speak "and can confuse medical authorities by presenting a broad array of symptoms that mimic other conditions (Bb, like its more famous relative syphilis, has been called the 'Great Imitator'), then so much the better," Sanborne wrote.
Carroll discovered during his research that entomologist Dr. Richard Endris and African swine fever team leader Dr. William Hess, traveled to Cameroon and other parts of Africa on "tick-hunting safaris." By the time the pair had finished their collection, they had reared "over 200,000 hard and soft ticks of multiple species."
Lab containment practices were cited as "unsafe" by outside consultants who "strongly recommended" the construction of a "modern, approved insectory be undertaken for future research." (emphasis in original) The pair were fired in 1988 and the tick colony destroyed, but the question remains: were the ticks already out of the bag?
There is also evidence that Plum Island researchers experimented with more than ticks. Carroll averred,
Dr. Endris also conducted experiments with sand flies on Plum Island in 1987 to test transmission of leishmaniasis, a bacterial ailment that if left untreated, has a human mortality rate of almost 100 percent. It is characterized by irregular bouts of fever, substantial weight loss, and swelling of the spleen and liver. The work was performed under contract for Fort Detrick, and serves as another example of a deadly germ warfare agent worked on at Plum Island for the Army, with no public knowledge or public safety precautions taken. (Michael Christopher Carroll, Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Germ Laboratory, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005, p. 24)
Like other parts of America's bioweapons-industrial complex, disease outbreaks and subsequent cover-ups go hand in hand. The New York Times reported in 2004 that "the highly contagious foot and mouth virus had briefly spread within the Plum Island Animal Disease Center in two previously undisclosed incidents earlier this summer."
Fear not, lab spokesperson Donald W. Tighe told the paper "the virus had remained within the laboratory's sealed biocontainment area. He said there had been no risk to humans or animals inside or outside the laboratory." An investigation "is continuing." Alarmingly, in 1991, Hurricane Bob knocked out power on the island for several hours and disabled the air pressure systems that contained the viruses. At the time, lab spokespersons assured the public "they were safe."
Plans are afoot to close the facility. Global Security Newswire reported in February that the Department of Homeland Security is planning a new, $450 million facility to be built on the Kansas State University campus.
However, The New York Times revealed that "additional costs" would bring the total to about $630 million." The National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBADF) would have "safety built into every square inch," DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano assured critics.
Coming to a City Near You!
Despite lax oversight and a veritable $50 billion ocean of cash washing over universities, corporations and the military, since 2002 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has spent billions on the construction of new BSL-3 and BSL-4 facilities. More are planned, including those already under construction in major U.S. cities.
One Boston resident, alarmed by the prospect that Boston University Medical Center officials were building "a biological defense laboratory in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods" told the Los Angeles Times, "We heard anthrax and Roxbury-South End," she recalled. "Then we heard Ebola. The last thing we heard was bubonic plague. We looked at each other and said, 'No way are they bringing that ... into our community.'"
Seven years later, the $198-million lab complex stands completed between an apartment building and a flower market. But state and federal lawsuits by anxious residents, backed by skeptical scientists, have blocked the opening until late next year at the earliest.
The battle marks the first major setback in the vast growth since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks of labs authorized to research the world's most dangerous diseases. It also underscores a growing debate over the safety and security of such labs--and whether so many are needed. (Bob Drogin, "Biodefense Labs Make Bad Neighbors, Residents Say," Los Angeles Times, May 17, 2009)
Working class Boston residents aren't the only people alarmed by the explosive growth of such facilities.
According to a 2008 University of California budget document the Board of Regents recommended the allocation of $3,998,000 for a project to renovate and "upgrade" the existing laboratory facility "for programs that require Bio-safety Level 3 (BSL3) containment" on the U.C. Davis campus.
With students and workers reeling under draconian state budget cuts, out-of-control fee hikes and mass layoffs, why would the State of California waste nearly $4 million for such a facility? "The BSL3 space is needed" we are informed, "for research programs utilizing infectious and pathogenic organisms." Indeed, "the facility would be designed to accommodate research studies involving in-vitro experimentation utilizing infected avian, murine, arthropod hosts, and the development of genetic markers for a wide range of disease agents that require BSL3 containment."
But as with most of America's bioweapons-industrial complex, illicit and illegal research is carried out with little or no oversight.
The antinuclear Bay Area watchdog group Tri-Valley CAREs (TVC), has been monitoring and protesting the expansion of America's nuclear weapons complex for decades, with a particular focus on the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
An ubiquitous "public-private partner" of the U.S. national security state, LLNL is a "limited liability corporation" comprised of five partners: the University of California, Bechtel, BWX Technologies, Washington Group International and Battelle--all heavy-hitters in the biotech, construction, defense, energy, nuclear and security worlds.
According to TVC, the group obtained government documents as a result of Freedom of Information Act litigation demonstrating that LLNL had violated federal regulations and had carried out "restricted experiments" that were discovered by the Centers of Disease Control inspection in August 2005. CDC, the Department of Energy and LLNL covered up the inspector's report.
Restricted experiments are experiments utilizing recombinant DNA that involve the deliberate transfer of a drug resistance trait to select agents that are not known to acquire the trait naturally. Select agents, which include anthrax and plague, are biological agents and toxins having the potential to pose a severe threat to public health and safety.
Because of the dangers involved in transferring drug resistance to select agents, restricted experiments require approval from the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Livermore Lab did not have that approval, but ran the experiments anyway. ("Livermore Lab Caught Conducting Illegal Restricted Bio-Experiments," Tri-Valley CAREs, Press Release, May 26, 2009)
According to the watchdog group, the experiments were carried out by the lab at the same time of the accidental release of anthrax in August-September 2005. Five individuals were exposed to the deadly pathogen and a $450,000 fine was levied against the facility. TVC noted that "the relevant details of the 2005 anthrax accident were kept from the public at the time, just as happened with the illegal experiments that are coming to light today."
LLNL has opened a BSL-3 facility and is planning to experiment with pathogens that can be used as offensive weapons. Activities contemplated include, "aerosolizing (spraying) pathogens such as plague, tularemia and Q fever, in addition to anthrax. Moreover, government documents disclose that planned experiments in the BSL-3 include genetic modification and potentially novel manipulation of viruses, prions and other agents."
What of LLNL's close partner, Battelle Memorial? According to a blurb on their web site, the firm's national security brief includes what they euphemistically call "vaccine and therapeutic product development." Battelle "specialists" at their Aberdeen, Maryland research facility (adjacent to USAMRIID's Ft. Detrick bioweapons complex) "study aerosolized microorganisms that may be possibly used in terrorist attacks."
Indeed, Ft, Detrick is currently undergoing the largest expansion in its history. Investigative journalists Bob Coen and Eric Nadler revealed in Dead Silence: Fear and Terror on the Anthrax Trail that the recently-opened "National Biodefense Analysis Countermeasures Center ... contains heavily guarded and hermetically sealed chambers in which scientists will simulate terrorist attacks and use lethal germs and toxins."
Coen and Nadler aver, "this, remember, is the facility that officialdom claims was the source of the only significant germ war attack on US soil." Conveniently enough, "Battelle has the $250 million contract to manage the operation."
But the journalists uncovered more, much more than insipid government pronouncements on "biodefense." During a interview with constitutional law scholar Francis Boyle, a University of Illinois professor and acknowledged expert on the Biological Weapons Convention, Boyle told the investigative sleuths that the "Pentagon is ready to wage anthrax war."
"Look at the Department of Defense's Chemical and Biological Defense Program Report to Congress, April 2007, page 22, Table 2-5. Information Systems Modernization Strategy, Mid FY09-13," Boyle told Coen and Nadler.
"Here you find a study" Boyle asserted, that estimates the "human effects from a 5,000 weapon worldwide strike; to predict fatalities and incapacitation, both initial and delayed and to accommodate population moves including area evacuations or sheltering in place. Now how does that strike you?"
Sounds like business as usual!
http://www.australia.to/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=13059:americas-expansive-bioweapons-industrial-complex&catid=115:headlines&Itemid=203
Four Arrested for Protesting John Yoo at Berkeley
Washington Post
Wash. Post/Indy Media
Tuesday Aug 18th, 2009
BERKELEY, Calif. -- Anti-war activists protested Monday at the University of California, Berkeley to call for the firing of a law professor who co-wrote legal memos that critics say were used to justify the torture of suspected terrorists.
Campus police arrested at least four people who refused to leave the university's law school building.
The demonstrators said John Yoo should be dismissed, disbarred and prosecuted for war crimes for his work as a Bush administration attorney from 2001 to 2003, when he helped craft legal theories for waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques.
Shouting "war criminal," the protesters confronted Yoo as he entered a lecture hall on the first day of class at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law, where the tenured professor is teaching a civil law course this semester.
Yoo mostly ignored the demonstrators and waited for police to remove them from the classroom before he began teaching. Several officers then stood outside the lecture hall to prevent protesters and journalists from entering. ...
Continued: http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/08/18/18616438.php
Wash. Post/Indy Media
Tuesday Aug 18th, 2009
BERKELEY, Calif. -- Anti-war activists protested Monday at the University of California, Berkeley to call for the firing of a law professor who co-wrote legal memos that critics say were used to justify the torture of suspected terrorists.
Campus police arrested at least four people who refused to leave the university's law school building.
The demonstrators said John Yoo should be dismissed, disbarred and prosecuted for war crimes for his work as a Bush administration attorney from 2001 to 2003, when he helped craft legal theories for waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques.
Shouting "war criminal," the protesters confronted Yoo as he entered a lecture hall on the first day of class at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law, where the tenured professor is teaching a civil law course this semester.
Yoo mostly ignored the demonstrators and waited for police to remove them from the classroom before he began teaching. Several officers then stood outside the lecture hall to prevent protesters and journalists from entering. ...
Continued: http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/08/18/18616438.php
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
The Politics of Fiji Water
" ... Gilmour was a powerful presence in Fiji long before he got into the water business. Back in 1969, he launched what would become—with help from a couple of Saudi princes—the region's biggest hotel chain, the Southern Pacific Hotel Corporation, which built a massive resort complex in Fiji. His investors and advisers have included everyone from notorious arms trader Adnan Khashoggi to George H.W. Bush ... "Fiji Water: Spin the Bottle
Posted by Mehret Tesfaye
Mother Jones/Ethiopian Review - August 16th, 2009
http://www.ethiopianreview.com/articles/24247
THE INTERNET CAFÉ in the Fijian capital, Suva, was usually open all night long. Dimly lit, with rows of sleek, modern terminals, the place was packed at all hours with teenage boys playing boisterous rounds of video games. But one day soon after I arrived, the staff told me they now had to shut down by 5 p.m. Police orders, they shrugged: The country's military junta had declared martial law a few days before, and things were a bit tense.
I sat down and sent out a few emails—filling friends in on my visit to the Fiji Water bottling plant, forwarding a story about foreign journalists being kicked off the island. Then my connection died. "It will just be a few minutes," one of the clerks said.
Moments later, a pair of police officers walked in. They headed for a woman at another terminal; I turned to my screen to compose a note about how cops were even showing up in the Internet cafés. Then I saw them coming toward me. "We're going to take you in for questioning about the emails you've been writing," they said.
What followed, in a windowless room at the main police station, felt like a bad cop movie. "Who are you really?" the bespectacled inspector wearing a khaki uniform and a smug grin asked me over and over, as if my passport, press credentials, and stacks of notes about Fiji Water weren't sufficient clues to my identity. (My iPod, he surmised tensely, was "good for transmitting information.") I asked him to call my editors, even a UN official who could vouch for me. "Shut up!" he snapped. He rifled through my bags, read my notebooks and emails. "I'd hate to see a young lady like you go into a jail full of men," he averred, smiling grimly. "You know what happened to women during the 2000 coup, don't you?"
Eventually, it dawned on me that his concern wasn't just with my potentially seditious emails; he was worried that my reporting would taint the Fiji Water brand. "Who do you work for, another water company? It would be good to come here and try to take away Fiji Water's business, wouldn't it?" Then he switched tacks and offered to protect me—from other Fijian officials, who he said would soon be after me—by letting me go so I could leave the country. I walked out into the muggy morning, hid in a stairwell, and called a Fijian friend. Within minutes, a US Embassy van was speeding toward me on the seawall.
Until that day, I hadn't fully appreciated the paranoia of Fiji's military regime. The junta had been declared unconstitutional the previous week by the country's second highest court; in response it had abolished the judiciary, banned unauthorized public gatherings, delayed elections until 2014, and clamped down on the media. (Only the "journalism of hope" is now permitted.) The prime minister, Commodore Frank Bainimarama, promised to root out corruption and bring democracy to a country that has seen four coups in the past 25 years; the government said it will start working on a new constitution in 2012.
The slogan on Fiji Water's website—"And remember this—we saved you a trip to Fiji"—suddenly felt like a dark joke. Every day, more soldiers showed up on the streets. When I called the courthouse, not a single official would give me his name. Even tour guides were running scared—one told me that one of his colleagues had been picked up and beaten for talking politics with tourists. When I later asked Fiji Water spokesman Rob Six what the company thought of all this, he said the policy was not to comment on the government "unless something really affects us."
If you drink bottled water, you've probably drunk Fiji. Or wanted to. Even though it's shipped from the opposite end of the globe, even though it retails for nearly three times as much as your basic supermarket water, Fiji is now America's leading imported water, beating out Evian. It has spent millions pushing not only the seemingly life-changing properties of the product itself, but also the company's green cred and its charity work. Put all that together in an iconic bottle emblazoned with a cheerful hibiscus, and everybody, from the Obamas to Paris and Nicole to Diddy and Kimora, is seen sipping Fiji.
That's by design. Ever since a Canadian mining and real estate mogul named David Gilmour launched Fiji Water in 1995, the company has positioned itself squarely at the nexus of pop-culture glamour and progressive politics. Fiji Water's chief marketing whiz and co-owner (with her husband, Stewart) is Lynda Resnick, a well-known liberal donor who casually name-drops her friends Arianna Huffington and Laurie David. ("Of course I know everyone in the world," Resnick told the UK's Observer in 2005, "every mogul, every movie star.") Manhattan's trendy Carlyle hotel pours only Fiji Water in its dog bowls, and this year's SXSW music festival featured a Fiji Water Detox Spa. "Each piece of lobster sashimi," celebrity chef Nobu Matsuhisa declared in 2007, "should be dipped into Fiji Water seven to ten times."
And even as bottled water has come under attack as the embodiment of waste, Fiji seems immune. Fiji Water took out a full-page ad in Vanity Fair's 2007 green issue, nestled among stories about the death of the world's water. Two bottles sat on a table between Al Gore and Mos Def during a 2006 MySpace "Artist on Artist" discussion on climate change. Fiji was what panelists sipped at the "Life After Capitalism" conference held in New York City during the 2004 RNC protests; Fiji reps were even credentialed at last year's Democratic convention, where they handed out tens of thousands of bottles.
Nowhere in Fiji Water's glossy marketing materials will you find reference to the typhoid outbreaks that plague Fijians because of the island's faulty water supplies; the corporate entities that Fiji Water has—despite the owners' talk of financial transparency—set up in tax havens like the Cayman Islands and Luxembourg; or the fact that its signature bottle is made from Chinese plastic in a diesel-fueled plant and hauled thousands of miles to its ecoconscious consumers. And, of course, you won't find mention of the military junta for which Fiji Water is a major source of global recognition and legitimacy. (Gilmour has described the square bottles as "little ambassadors" for the poverty-stricken nation.)
"We are Fiji," declare Fiji Water posters across the island, and the slogan is almost eerily accurate: The reality of Fiji, the country, has been eclipsed by the glistening brand of Fiji, the water.
ON THE MAP, Fiji looks as if someone dropped a fistful of confetti on the ocean. The country is made up of more than 300 islands (100 inhabited) that have provided the setting for everything from The Blue Lagoon to Survivor to Cast Away. Suva is a bustling multicultural hub with a mix of shopping centers, colonial buildings, and curry houses; some 40 percent of the population is of Indian ancestry, descendants of indentured sugarcane workers brought in by the British in the mid-19th century. (The Indian-descended and native communities have been wrangling for power ever since.) The primary industries are tourism and sugar. Fiji Water says its operations make up about 20 percent of exports and 3 percent of GDP, which stands at $3,900 per capita.
Getting to the Fiji Water factory requires a bone-jarring four-hour trek into the volcanic foothills of the Yaqara Valley. My bus' speakers blasted an earsplitting soundtrack of Fijian reggae, Bob Marley, Tupac, and Big Daddy Kane as we swerved up unpaved mountain roads linked by rickety wooden bridges. Cow pastures ringed by palm trees gave way to villages of corrugated-metal shacks and wooden homes painted in Technicolor hues. Chickens scurried past stands selling cell phone minutes. Sugarcane stalks burning in the fields sent a sweet smoke curling into the air.
Our last rest stop, half an hour from the bottling plant, was Rakiraki, a small town with a square of dusty shops and a marketplace advertising "Coffin Box for Sale—Cheapest in Town." My Lonely Planet guide warned that Rakiraki water "has been deemed unfit for human consumption," and groceries were stocked with Fiji Water going for 90 cents a pint—almost as much as it costs in the US.
Rakiraki has experienced the full range of Fiji's water problems—crumbling pipes, a lack of adequate wells, dysfunctional or flooded water treatment plants, and droughts that are expected to get worse with climate change. Half the country has at times relied on emergency water supplies, with rations as low as four gallons a week per family; dirty water has led to outbreaks of typhoid and parasitic infections. Patients have reportedly had to cart their own water to hospitals, and schoolchildren complain about their pipes spewing shells, leaves, and frogs. Some Fijians have taken to smashing open fire hydrants and bribing water truck drivers for a regular supply.
The bus dropped me off at a deserted intersection, where a weather-beaten sign warning off would-be trespassers in English, Fijian, and Hindi rattled in the tropical wind. Once I reached the plant, the bucolic quiet gave way to the hum of machinery spitting out some 50,000 square bottles (made on the spot with plastic imported from China) per hour. The production process spreads across two factory floors, blowing, filling, capping, labeling, and shrink-wrapping 24 hours a day, five days a week. The company won't disclose its total sales; Fiji Water's vice president of corporate communications told me the estimate of 180 million bottles sold in 2006, given in a legal declaration by his boss, was wrong, but declined to provide a more solid number.
From here, the bottles are shipped to the four corners of the globe; the company—which, unlike most of its competitors, offers detailed carbon-footprint estimates on its website—insists that they travel on ships that would be making the trip anyway, and that the Fiji payload only causes them to use 2 percent more fuel. In 2007, Fiji Water announced that it planned to go carbon negative by offsetting 120 percent of emissions via conservation and energy projects starting in 2008. It has also promised to reduce its pre-offset carbon footprint by 25 percent next year and to use 50 percent renewable energy, in part by installing a windmill at the plant.
The offsetting effort has been the centerpiece of Fiji Water's $5 million "Fiji Green" marketing blitz, which brazenly urges consumers to drink imported water to fight climate change. The Fiji Green website claims that because of the 120-percent carbon offset, buying a big bottle of Fiji Water creates the same carbon reduction as walking five blocks instead of driving. Former Senior VP of Sustainable Growth Thomas Mooney noted in a 2007 Huffington Post blog post that "we'd be happy if anyone chose to drink nothing but Fiji Water as a means to keep the sea levels down." (Metaphorically speaking, anyway: As the online trade journal ClimateBiz has reported, Fiji is using a "forward crediting" model under which it takes credit now for carbon reductions that will actually happen over a few decades.)
Fiji Water has also vowed to use at least 20 percent less packaging by 2010—which shouldn't be too difficult, given its bottle's above-average heft. (See "Territorial Waters.") The company says the square shape makes Fiji Water more efficient in transport, and, hey, it looks great: Back in 2000, a top official told a trade magazine that "What Fiji Water's done is go out there with a package that clearly looks like it's worth more money, and we've gotten people to pay more for us."
Selling long-distance water to green consumers may be a contradiction in terms. But that hasn't stopped Fiji from positioning its product not just as an indulgence, but as an outright necessity for an elite that can appreciate its purity. As former Fiji Water CEO Doug Carlson once put it, "If you like Velveeta cheese, processed water is okay for you." ("All waters are not created equal" is another long-standing Fiji Water slogan.) The company has gone aggressively after its main competitor—tap water—by calling it "not a real or viable alternative" that can contain "4,000 contaminants," unlike Fiji's "living water." "You can no longer trust public or private water supplies," co-owner Lynda Resnick wrote in her book, Rubies in the Orchard.
A few years back, Fiji Water canned its waterfall logo and replaced it with a picture of palm fronds and hibiscus: "Surface water!" Resnick wrote in Rubies. "Why would you want to suggest that Fiji came from surface water? The waterfall absolutely had to go." One company newsletter featured the findings of a salt-crystal purveyor who claimed that Fiji Water rivals the "known and significant abilities of 'Holy Healing Waters' in Lourdes, France or Fatima, Portugal." Switching effortlessly from Catholic mysticism to sci-fi, he added that the water's "electromagnetic field frequency enables Fiji Water to stimulate our human self-regulation system."
In keeping with this rarefied vibe, Fiji Water's marketing has focused on product placement more than standard advertising; from appearances on The Sopranos, 24, The View, and Desperate Housewives to sponsorship of events like the Emmy Awards, the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer, and Justin Timberlake's "Summer Love" tour, it's now "hard to find an event where our target market is present and Fiji isn't," according to Resnick. As far back as 2001, Movieline anointed it one of the "Top 10 Things Young Hollywood Can't Get Through the Day Without." At the Academy Awards, E! has handed out Fiji bottles to the stars; as it happens, the complex where the Oscars is held was owned until 2004 by Fiji Water founder David Gilmour's real estate empire, Trizec (which before its acquisition by Brookfield Properties in 2006 was one of the largest real estate companies in North America, with projects including everything from the Sears Tower to Enron HQ).
In a 2003 interview, Gilmour told the London Times that "the world's water is being trashed day by day." He would know: Before launching Fiji Water, he cofounded Barrick Gold, now the largest gold mining enterprise in the world, with operations in hot spots from Tanzania to Pakistan. Its mines, often in parched places like Nevada and Western Australia, use billions of gallons of water to produce gold via a toxic cyanide leaching process. Barrick's practices are so damaging that after an environmental review of the company, the Norwegian government announced last year that it would divest itself of some $200 million in Barrick stock.
Gilmour was a powerful presence in Fiji long before he got into the water business. Back in 1969, he launched what would become—with help from a couple of Saudi princes—the region's biggest hotel chain, the Southern Pacific Hotel Corporation, which built a massive resort complex in Fiji. His investors and advisers have included everyone from notorious arms trader Adnan Khashoggi to George H.W. Bush; in 2004, Colin Powell presented him with the Secretary of State's Award for Corporate Excellence for his work in Fiji. Gilmour's Fijian holdings include the exclusive Wakaya resort, which boasts six staffers to each guest and has hosted Bill Gates, Nicole Kidman, and Keith Richards (who famously fell off a tree there); he also owns Zinio, an electronic publishing company that produces the digital version of Mother Jones magazine. He declined to be interviewed for this story.
In the early 1990s, Gilmour got wind of a study done by the Fijian government and aid organizations that indicated an enormous aquifer, estimated at more than 17 miles long, near the main island's north coast. He obtained a 99-year lease on land atop the aquifer, brought a former Fijian environment minister on board, and launched an international marketing blitz inviting consumers to sample water preserved since "before the Industrial Revolution." To this day, Fiji Water has nearly exclusive access to the aquifer; the notoriously corrupt and chronically broke government has not been able to come up with the money or infrastructure to tap the water for its people.
BY THE TIME Gilmour put Fiji Water up for sale in 2004, it was the fourth most popular imported bottled water in the United States. He found eager buyers in the Resnicks, who made their fortune with the flower delivery service Teleflora and the collectibles company Franklin Mint. The Beverly Hills-based couple are also agribusiness billionaires whose holdings include enough almond, pistachio, and pomegranate acreage to make them the biggest growers of those crops in the entire Western Hemisphere; a 2004 report by the Environmental Working Group calculated that in 2002 alone, their agricultural water subsidies totaled more than $1.5 million. They own a pesticide company, Suterra, and Lynda Resnick almost single-handedly created the pomegranate fad via their Pom Wonderful brand.
Fiji Water wasn't the Resnicks' first foray into the water industry: Years ago, they gained control of one of the largest underground water reservoirs in the nation, the Kern Water Bank on the edge of California's Central Valley. This vast holding system—built with public funds in 1999 to help buffer the effects of droughts—stores water from California's aqueducts and the Kern River; it's estimated to be worth more than $180 million on the open market and has allowed the Resnicks to double their acreage of fruits and nuts since 1994, according to the Los Angeles Times.
With the profits from their enterprises, the Resnicks have been major players on the political scene, giving more than $300,000 each over the past decade. They have supported mostly marquee Democrats—Obama, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, Al Franken—though both also donated to the McCain campaign. They give millions to museums, environmental organizations, and other charities: Lynda is a trustee of the Aspen Institute, and Stewart is on the board of Conservation International. One of Britney Spears' recent meltdowns led to her stay at the Stewart and Lynda Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital at UCLA. In June, the California Institute of Technology announced the creation of the Resnick Sustainability Institute after receiving a $20 million donation from the couple. Fiji Water also gives to a range of conservation groups, including the Waterkeeper Alliance, Oceana, the Nature Conservancy, and Heal the Bay.
The charitable works Fiji Water brags about most often, however, are its efforts in Fiji itself—from preserving rainforests to helping fund water and sanitation projects to underwriting kindergartens. This January, after catastrophic floods swept the main island of Viti Levu, the company also donated $500,000 to the military regime for flood relief, and gave another $450,000 to various projects last summer. True, some of Fiji Water's good works are more hope than reality: Though Lynda Resnick insists that "we only use biofuels," the Fiji plant runs on diesel generators, and a project to protect 50,000 acres of rainforest—plugged on the actual bottle label—has yet to obtain a lease. Still, Resnick told New York's WNYC last year, "We do so much for these sort of forgotten people. They live in paradise, but they have a very, very hard life."
Fiji Water may be well advised to spread a bit of its wealth around locally. During the 2000 coup, a small posse of villagers wielding spearguns and dynamite seized on the chaos to take over the bottling plant and threaten to burn it down. "The land is sacred and central to our continued existence and identity," a village spokesman told the Fiji Times, adding that "no Fijian should live off the breadcrumbs of past colonial injustices." Two years later, the company created the Vatukaloko Trust Fund, a charity targeting several villages surrounding its plant. It won't say how much it has given to the trust, but court proceedings indicate that it has agreed to donate .15 percent of its Fijian operation's net revenues; a company official testified that the total was about $100,000 in 2007. (For perspective, the trade journal Brandweek put Fiji Water's marketing budget at $10 million in 2008; it recently dropped $250,000 to become a founding partner of the new Salt Lake City soccer stadium.)
Perhaps mindful of the unpleasantness of 2000, today Fiji Water executives refer constantly to the company's role in Fiji's economic life. "Our export revenue is paying for the expansion of water access at a pace that Fiji's government has never achieved," the company told the BBC in 2008. "If we did…cease to exist," sustainability VP Mooney told U.S. News & World Report the same year, "a big chunk of the economy would be gone, the schools that we built would go away, and the water access projects would go away."
What Mooney didn't say is that though Fiji Water may fill a void in the impoverished nation, it also reaps a priceless benefit: tax-free status, granted when the company was founded in 1995. The rationale at the time, according to the company: Bottled water was a risky business with uncertain chances of success. In 2003, David Gilmour said that his ambition for Fiji Water was "to become the biggest taxpayer in the country." Yet the tax break, originally scheduled to expire in 2008, remains in effect, and neither the company nor the government will say whether or when it might end. And when Fiji has tried to wring a bit of extra revenue from the company, the response has been less than cooperative. Last year, when the government attempted to impose a new tax on water bottlers, Fiji Water called it "draconian" (a term it's never used for the regime's human rights violations) and temporarily shut down its plant in protest.
While Lynda Resnick has called for "very public conduct" by private companies, she seems to appreciate that, as she wrote in her book, "transparency is a lot easier to talk about than it is to realize." The closely held company won't disclose basic data about its business (such as total charity expenditures), and it's gone to some length to shelter assets in secretive tax havens: The Fijian operation, according to court documents filed last year, is owned by an entity in Luxembourg, while its American trademarks are registered to an address in the Cayman Islands.
At the moment, Fiji's government certainly seems in no mood to confront Fiji Water—quite the contrary. "Learning from the lessons of products, we must brand ourselves," Fiji's ambassador in Washington told a news site for diplomats in 2006, adding that he was working with the Resnicks to try to increase Fiji Water's US sales. A Fiji Water bottle sits at the top of the embassy's home page, and the government has even created a Fiji Water postage-stamp series—the $3 stamp features children clutching the trademark bottles.
Fiji Water, for its part, has trademarked the word "FIJI" (in capital letters) in numerous countries. (Some rejected the application, but not the United States.) It has also gone after rival Fijian bottlers daring to use their country's name for marketing. "It would have cost too much money for us to fight in court," says Mohammed Altaaf, the owner of Aqua Pacific water, which ended up taking the word "Fiji" out of its name. "It's just like branding a water America Water and denying anyone else the right to use the name 'America.'"
When such practices are criticized, Fiji Water's response is simple: "They don't have a ton of options for economic development," Mooney told U.S. News & World Report, "but bottled water is one of them. When someone buys a bottle of Fiji, they're buying prosperity for the country." Without Fiji Water, he said, "Fiji is kind of screwed."
- motherjones.com
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