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US medical terrorism in Pakistan

May 27, 2012 by Dan Canuckistan

Americans of all types — Democrats and Republicans, even some Good Progressives — are just livid that a Pakistani tribal court (reportedly in consultation with Pakistani officials) has imposed a 33-year prison sentence on Shakil Afridi, the Pakistani physician who secretly worked with the CIA to find Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil. [...]

What Dr. Afridi actually did was concoct a pretextual vaccination program, whereby Pakistani children would be injected with a single Hepatitis B vaccine, with the hope of gaining access to the Abbottabad house where the CIA believed bin Laden was located. The plan was that, under the ruse of vaccinating the children in that province, he would obtain DNA samples that could confirm the presence in the suspected house of the bin Laden family. But the vaccine program he was administering was fake: as Wired‘s public health reporter Maryn McKenna detailed, “since only one of three doses was delivered, the vaccination was effectively useless.” An on-the-ground Guardian investigation documented that ”while the vaccine doses themselves were genuine, the medical professionals involved were not following procedures. In an area called Nawa Sher, they did not return a month after the first dose to provide the required second batch. Instead, according to local officials and residents, the team moved on.”

That means that numerous Pakistani children who thought they were being vaccinated against Hepatitis B were in fact left exposed to the virus. Worse, international health workers have long faced serious problems in many parts of the world — including remote Muslim areas — in convincing people that the vaccines they want to give to their children are genuine rather than Western plots to harm them. These suspicions have prevented the eradication of polio and the containment of other preventable diseases in many areas, including in parts of Pakistan. This faux CIA vaccination program will, for obvious and entirely foreseeable reasons, significantly exacerbate that problem.

As McKenna wrote this week, this fake CIA vaccination program was “a cynical attempt to hijack the credibility that public health workers have built up over decades with local populations” and thus “endangered the status of the fraught polio-eradication campaign, which over the past decade has been challenged in majority-Muslim areas in Africa and South Asia over beliefs that polio vaccination is actually a covert campaign to harm Muslim children.” She further notes that while this suspicion “seems fantastic” to oh-so-sophisticated Western ears — what kind of primitive people would harbor suspicions about Western vaccine programs? – there are actually “perfectly good reasons to distrust vaccination campaigns” from the West (in 1996, for instance, 11 children died in Nigeria when Pfizer, ostensibly to combat a meningitis outbreak, conducted drug trials — experiments — on Nigerian children that did not comport with binding safety standards in the U.S.).

Source

Posted in "war on terror", biowar |

Nazi Nutjob Bill White: From Informant to Fugitive

May 27, 2012 by AnonAF

by Vladimir Widerstand

Looks like the ever  repugnant  Bill White has broken  his contract with the pigs and gone “fugitive.”

We  warned all who’d listen the whole script Team Snitch-White were selling of  “A federal district court overturned (White’s) convictions on First Amendment grounds and White was released in April 2011″  was something only an imbecile or a nazi would believe.

Yes it seems White was  on Federal Probation the whole time trading info for freedom points.  That is until he  realized his treachery was exposed and he made his dash for the border before he ended up experiencing some real justice.

What follows is  the Roanoke newspaper clipping about Herr White being on the “lam”…  note no mention of overturned convictions at  all  -  a nice attempt at concealing  one of the Feds informant programs is our best guess!

 

from Roanoke.com

Authorities say William A. White is on the lam

Federal marshals are pursuing leads on William A. White’s whereabouts. He has been missing for about 10 days.

By Laurence Hammack

Former neo-Nazi leader William A. White is being sought by federal authorities on a probation violation.

White, who is on supervised release after serving two and a half years in prison for making threats, left his home in Rockbridge County without the permission of his probation officer, said Ron Donelson, a senior inspector with the U.S. Marshals Service.

“We’re actively looking for him,” Donelson said Wednesday.

White had been scheduled to appear in U.S. District Court in Roanoke on May 14 for a resentencing after an appeals court ruled that the judge in his case did not properly follow sentencing guidelines.

The hearing was canceled with no explanation listed in court records. Later in the week, a probation officer stopped by White’s home and found that he had left.

As a condition of his probation, White is required to keep in regular contact with supervising officials and notify them when he moves, Donelson said.

Donelson said federal marshals are following several leads on White’s whereabouts but declined to elaborate.

White, who once was the self-proclaimed commander of the American National Socialist Workers Party, was convicted in Roanoke of making racially charged threats, usually by email or on a website he maintained at the time.

U.S. District Judge James Turk sentenced White in 2010 to 30 months in prison. White was released about a year ago and had been living most recently in Rockbridge County.

The 34-year-old was leading a relatively quiet existence — at least compared with his earlier days in Roanoke, when he was organizing a white supremacy movement and posting racially incendiary remarks on an almost daily basis to his now-defunct website, overthrow.com.

White’s rhetoric — which often tested the fine line between free speech and criminal threats — landed him in jail in 2008, about the time he was preparing to publish a magazine that pictured then-presidential candidate Barack Obama in the cross hairs of an assassin’s rifle.

A federal jury in Roanoke convicted White in December 2009 of making threats against people who unknowingly offended his sense of white superiority: a group of apartment tenants in Virginia Beach who sued their landlord for discrimination; a university administrator in Delaware involved with a diversity program; and a bank employee in Kansas City, Mo., who handled White’s credit card account in a way that displeased him.

After his release from prison in April 2011, White spent a short time living with his parents in suburban Maryland before moving to Rockbridge County.

He was seen almost daily in a coffee shop in downtown Lexington until a few weeks ago, said Doug Harwood, editor of The Rockbridge Advocate, a magazine that covers the region.

In March, White found himself back in court, charged with littering for distributing fliers promoting a book he had written, “The Centuries of Revolution: Democracy, Communism, Zionism.”

At the time, White sent emails to media outlets, saying he was distributing the fliers to mailboxes and paper boxes in the region.

He was charged with littering in Augusta County after a sheriff’s deputy saw a number of the leaflets — which bore the advisory “politically incorrect content” — being tossed from his car window, authorities said.

After being convicted and fined in General District Court, White appealed.

His case was scheduled to be heard in Circuit Court on May 17, about the time federal authorities realized White was no longer living in Lexington.

After White did not show up for his trial, he was convicted in his absence, fined $250 and ordered to pay $164 in court costs, according to Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Robert Boylan.

A criminal conviction could be another violation of White’s probation, although it was unclear how seriously federal authorities would view the misdemeanor matter.

Mike Price, White’s federal probation officer, declined to comment Wednesday.

A Facebook page maintained under the name Bill White, and featuring his photograph, lists his address as Tehran, Iran.

It is unclear whether the Facebook account is actually White’s, but the website of one of White’s followers provides a link to the page. A search of Facebook produced no accounts in his name.

Donelson, of the marshals service, said he was aware of the posting but said he doubted that White was in Iran.

On Wednesday afternoon, someone posted to the Facebook page a link to a roanoke.com story reporting that White was missing and federal authorities were searching for him.

“LOL LOL LOL,” the posting read. “Good luck with this one.”

 

 

Posted in ACAB, capitalism, funny but true, government crimes |

Al Jazeera Liars Build False Impression of Cuban-Venezuelan Social Initiatives

May 26, 2012 by AnonAF

Earlier this week Al Jazeera English published an article by Nikolas Kozloff, a former academic turned author who now spends his time writing satire and lambasting the Venezuelan government while hiding behind his Oxford PhD as a veil of objectivity. The focus of Kozloff’s latest article was the Cuban-Venezuelan “Barrio Adentro” initiative, a social mission which provides free healthcare to Venezuela’s poor, and free, community based training for Venezuelan medical students.

Despite the program being one of the government’s most popular, and the fact that it is often cited as an exemplary case of Cuban internationalism and solidarity, in his article Kozloff instead decides to detail the alleged “harrowing” conditions that Cuban doctors are subjected to while treating patients in Venezuela.

According to Kozloff’s article, Cuban medical personnel are overworked, obliged to treat 60- 70 patients a day, constantly spied on, and used by the Venezuelan state for political purposes. The sources of Kozloff’s outlandish statements are none other than leaked documents from the US embassy in Caracas, which, the cables reveal, has been aiding dissident Cuban doctors to apply to the US government for “humanitarian parole” so that they might be transferred to Miami as “asylum seekers”.

According to the documents, 73 Cuban medical personnel were transferred to Miami by 2009. Despite the fact that over 80,000 Cubans have worked in the mission, with 30,000 Cuban medical personnel currently working in Venezuela, Kozloff finds that these 73 Cubans are representative enough of the whole Barrio Adentro mission for him to conclude that the program is “fraying at the edges” in the run-up to this year’s elections.

But questionable e-mails written by staunchly anti-Cuban US diplomats might not be the best sources for judging the merits of a social program which has, by all accounts, dramatically increased Venezuelans’ standards of living. So much so, that despite the vast amounts of propaganda against the healthcare program, the opposition’s candidate, Henrique Capriles Radonski, has been forced to pledge that he will maintain it should he by some miracle win the elections this year.

Kozloff’s selective analysis of the state of the Barrio Adentro program is typical of most “political commentaries” covering the Venezuelan elections in the international press, which are currently contributing to a distorted understanding of Venezuela’s political reality in the run up to the October elections.

Opposition Out of Touch

While most commentators either stress Capriles’ youth (he’s 39) and his energetic campaign, or apparent “indecision” on the part of Venezuelan voters, the reality on the ground is quite different in Venezuela. The opposition have faced defeat after defeat for the past two months.

Not only do nearly all polls in Venezuela give Chavez a 20-30% lead over his opponent, but the Capriles campaign has also made several tactical mistakes. In a move that alienated working class voters in May, Capriles announced that he did not attend the country’s International Workers’ Day march because he was an “employer” and not an employee. His campaign has also been responsible for the persecution and assault of several community media journalists, harking back to the days of repression under previous governments.

In the international arena, in a subtle snub against the Venezuelan opposition coalition, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos stated in an interview that Chavez represented “stability” for the continent that was both essential for regional unity and beneficial for Colombia. Meanwhile US ally and former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe’s vocal support for Capriles has backfired, only serving to reinforce the perception of Capriles as the candidate of US imperialism amongst the Venezuelan public. Just this week, Capriles’ US advisor, Peter Greenberg, also admitted that Chavez’s lead over Capriles was “irreversible”.

These concerns are also being echoed by conservatives inside the country with even rightwing journalists such as Rafael Poleo mourning Capriles’ “hopeless” election campaign and members of the opposition coalition demanding that the campaign be restructured. “Capriles could be out anywhere today, but the rest of the country does not know about it… (his) strategy is not working, his candidacy is not growing, and Chavez’s illness has hyper-personalized electoral debate. People are only talking about Chavez”, explained Oscar Schemel, President of the Hinterlaces polling company.

Throughout this election campaign the opposition’s most serious failure is to have misunderstood the extent to which new mechanisms of participatory democracy have grown in Venezuela. The concept of democracy has taken on new meaning and the working class and organized communities are currently at the helm of an unprecedented experiment with radical new forms of democratic participation. Citizens’ democratic participation is now channelled through communal councils, communes, socialist workers’ councils and cooperatives, which extend the democratic process into their everyday lives and allow them to transform their own socio-cultural surroundings. Venezuelan democracy is no longer reducible to national elections every 6 years, rather it is something constructed every single day.

Following an unsuccessful 12-year battle against Chavez waged on its own terrain, the opposition is now attempting to compete on the Revolution’s terrain and the results are perhaps even less rewarding. The opposition has totally failed to understand just how Venezuela’s political terrain is constantly shifting and continuously being propelled forwards by the country’s new grassroots democratic format.

Just like Kozloff, the Venezuelan opposition continues to look at Venezuela from a distance. Their sources are US diplomats, US political advisors or the Venezuelan elite. From this perspective, Barrio Adentro is merely a political strategy. For Kozloff, it is merely the product of a transient deal with Cuba which can be rolled back should another government take power. For Capriles it is a program he must pledge to maintain in order to have any chance of winning votes.

But for many Venezuelans Barrio Adentro is more than a political strategy and more than a program, it is a social process which has become an integral part of their everyday lives, which has brought dignity, value and identity, and shaped their communities and changed their educational possibilities. These are changes that can’t be perceived from the upper class district of Altamira in Caracas, and much less from a newsroom in New York.

source.

Posted in counter culture, Venezuela, Cuba, geopolitics, alternative economics, media (controlled), revolution, health issues |

In the Military? Something to Think About from Thomas Sankara.

May 26, 2012 by AnonAF

“When you are bearing arms that can spit fire and death, and when you can receive orders standing to attention in front of a flag, without knowing who will benefit from this order or this arm, you become a potential criminal who’s just waiting to spread terror around you. How many soldiers are going around such and such a country, and bringing grief and desolation without understanding that they are fighting men and women who argue for the same ideals as their own. If they knew! Children of workers who see their parents going on strike against reactionary regimes accept to fight for the reactionary leaders since they joined the army. So a soldier without any political or ideological training is a potential criminal.

— Thomas Sankara

Posted in counter culture, government crimes, militarism, revolutionary quotes |

Leila Khaled: Icon of Palestinian Liberation

May 24, 2012 by AnonAF


The cancelation of the Manchester launch of Leila Khaled: Icon of Palestinian Liberation has only brought the book broader publicity, said author and Electronic Intifada contributor Sarah Irving in an interview yesterday.

The biography has received unexpected attention after a phone harassment campaign led to the cancelation of its 24 May launch at a Manchester bookstore. Another Manchester launch has been scheduled for 25 May at the Manchester Digital Laboratory.

Perhaps it is only fitting that the legendary Palestinian revolutionary Leila Khaled is in the headlines once again today. Khaled was forced to flee the coastal Palestinian city of Haifa during the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine and eventually became involved with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist Palestinian party. She is most famous for forcing the world to pay attention to Palestine�s plight by hijacking two passenger airplanes in 1969 and 1970. An image of her holding an AK-47 while wearing a kuffiyeh, the traditional checkered scarf, is one of the most recognizable icons of the Palestine liberation struggle.

Khaled was interviewed by The Electronic Intifada in 2008 and was the subject of a recent documentary film by Lina Makboul, Leila Khaled, Hijacker. But as Sarah Irving pointed out during our interview yesterday, hers is the first biography of Khaled.

continued.

Posted in activism, counter culture, Palestine, revolution, socialism |

“Vatileaks” and Vatican Banksters

May 23, 2012 by AnonAF

The Vatican is threatening to take legal action against those responsible for publishing a new book of leaked internal documents. The book sheds light on power struggles and corruption inside the Holy See and the thinking of its embattled top banker.

Pope Benedict XVI has already appointed a commission of cardinals to investigate the “Vatileaks” scandal. It erupted earlier this year with the publication of leaked memos alleging corruption and mismanagement in Holy See affairs and internal squabbles over its efforts to comply with international anti-money-laundering norms.

The publication Saturday of “His Holiness” by Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, added fuel to the fire, reproducing confidential letters and memos to and from Pope Benedict and his personal secretary which, according to the Vatican, violated the pope’s right to privacy.

Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi said in a statement Saturday the book was an “objectively defamatory” work that “clearly assumes characters of a criminal act.” He warned the Holy See would get to the bottom of who “stole” the documents, who received them and who published them. He warned the Holy See would seek international cooperation in its quest for justice, presumably with Italian magistrates.

The Vatican had already warned of legal action against Nuzzi after he published letters in January from the former second-highest Vatican administrator to the pope. In those letters the administrator begged not to be transferred for having exposed alleged corruption that cost the Holy See millions of euros in higher contract prices. The prelate, Monsignor Carlo Maria Vigano, is now the Vatican’s US ambassador.

Nuzzi, author of Vatican SpA, a 2009 volume laying out shady dealings of the Vatican Bank based on leaked documents, said he was approached by sources inside the Vatican with the trove of new documents. Most of them are of fairly recent vintage and many of them painting the Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, in a negative light.

Much of the documentation is fairly Italy-centric: about a 2009 scandal over the ex-editor of the newspaper of the Italian bishops’ conference, a previously-unknown dinner between Benedict and Italy’s president, and even a 2011 letter from Italy’s pre-eminent talk show host Bruno Vespa to the pope enclosing a check for 10,000 euro for his charity work and asking for a private audience in exchange.

But there are international leaks as well, including diplomatic cables from Vatican embassies from Jerusalem to Cameroon. Some concern the conclusions of the pope’s delegate to the disgraced Legion of Christ religious order. In a memo sent to the pope last autumn he warned that the financial situation of the order, beset by a scandal over its pedophile founder, “while not grave, is serious and pressing.”

Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, the head of the Institute for Religious Works, otherwise known as the Vatican Bank, gets significant ink. His private memos to the pope with his take on the Vatican’s response to the global financial crisis and how to handle the church’s tax exempt status amid Italian government efforts to crack down on tax evasion have also been published.

The bank has been trying for some two years to remedy its reputation as a shady tax haven beset by scandals. One of them is the collapse of Italy’s Banco Ambrosiano and the death of its head, Roberto Calvi, who also helped manage Vatican investments and was found hanging from London’s Blackfriars Bridge in 1982.

In a bid to show it has mended its ways, the Institute for Religious Works this week invited ambassadors from 35 countries in for a tour and a chat with its managing director as part of a new transparency campaign. The tour came on the same day Holy See representatives were in Strasbourg discussing the first draft of a report from a Council of Europe committee on the Vatican’s compliance with international norms to fight money laundering and terrorism financing.

British Ambassador Nigel Baker, who went on the Institute for Religious Works tour, later blogged that the Vatican’s reputation depends on showing that its institutions are transparent.

“Plenty still needs to be done. But the Holy See needs to stick to its guns. It is in their interest, and ours,” Baker wrote.

source.

Posted in capitalism, government crimes, Italy, Vatican, world |

Anti-Chavez Minority: “Solidarity” With Zionists

May 23, 2012 by AnonAF

Benjamín Nentayahu (left) with Antonio Ledezma

Over the weekend, Venezuela’s anti-Chavez minority confirmed reports that one of their own recently met with right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and promised to re-establish ties with Israel if the opposition is somehow successful in this year’s presidential election. Speaking on behalf of the opposition’s socalled Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD), Metropolitan Mayor of Caracas Antonio Ledezma is said to have promised both economic and political rewards in exchange for Israeli support of MUD presidential hopeful, Henrique Capriles Radonski.

Though the MUD have been totally unable to improve their standing in polls which predict a sweeping electoral victory for Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez this October 7, Ledezma’s comments in Israel provide a troubling glimpse at wishful opposition thinking in a post-Chavez period.

“SOLIDARITY” WITH ISRAEL?

Though he was in Jerusalem last week for the 28th International Mayors Conference, opposition lawyer and politician Antonio Ledezma took advantage of his publicly-financed trip to meet privately with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as the country’s Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman. Asked about the closed-door meetings, Ledezma said  he had used his time in Israel to spread “the message that the Venezuelan nation has respect for Israel”.

Ledezma told reporters he spoke with Netanyahu and Liberman about “the Venezuelan people’s solidarity with the Jewish community” and, “in addition, our (opposition) disposition to reestablish relations with the State of Israel under a new government presided by Henrique Capriles Radonski”.

“In contrast to the current political policy in Venezuela”, he said, “Capriles will re-establish our historical ties”.

Not needing to say so openly, Ledezma’s reference to “historical ties” includes both the United States and Israel, in contrast to Chavez administration policies favoring relations with the entirety of the Global South, including China, Russia, Iran and Cuba, to name just a few.

Pleased with the opposition spokesman, and in direct reference to the Chavez administration, Israel’s Foreign Minister responded to Ledezma’s comments by stating, “nations in the global village of today need reasonable governments that help encourage cooperation among peoples”.

Guaranteeing an opposition victory, Ledezma added that “our people, who don’t know how to mistreat, who value peace and love for one’s neighbor, mustn’t be confused with the decisions of an intemperate administration which has broken our historical relations and is on its way out”.

The right-wing mayor, who withdrew from opposition primaries for lack of electoral potential, told Israeli media he believed “the opposition’s chances are equal (to Chavez’s) and even greater, mostly because it is bringing a message of renewal to all of Venezuela”. Ledezma added that he hopes “the current government will allow for democratic elections”.

President Chavez, who holds a double-digit lead against Capriles Radonski in every poll taken to date, instructed his government to break relations with Israel after the Israeli military killed some 1,500 Palestinians and wounded another 5,000 during its 2009 siege on Gaza.

At that time, the Venezuelan Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a press release stating that “Israel has repeatedly ignored the calls of the United Nations, consistently and shamelessly violating the resolutions approved by overwhelming majorities of member countries, increasingly placing itself on the margin of international law” and added that “Israel’s state terrorism has cost the lives of the most vulnerable and innocent: children, women, and the elderly”.

During his 3-day trip to Israel, the opposition’s Ledezma made no mention of Israel’s segregationist policies towards the Palestinians, the widely-condemned but ongoing blockade against those in Gaza, nor did he question the inhuman prison conditions currently under international scrutiny as several Palestinian hunger strikers near death.

PROMISING RESOURCES

Late last week, Venezuelan philosopher and TV journalist Miguel Angel Perez Pirela denounced the meeting between Ledezma and the Israeli Prime Minister, calling it “further evidence” of opposition plans to “destabilize” the country. Pirela reminded viewers that MUD spokesmen have now met with former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, with right-wing members of the anti-Chavez community in Southern Florida, and, now, with Israel’s Netanyahu.

Pirela explained that Ledezma spent tax-payer funds to finance his trip to Israel, and used his time in the Middle East to request Israeli support for MUD presidential hopeful Capriles Radonski. In exchange for support, he said, Israel was promised “access to the country’s resources” if the opposition were to somehow take this year’s presidential election.

“He who doesn’t want to see has the right not to; he can joke things off and accuse us of paranoia”, said Pirela, “but this smells rotten”.

“There are strong signs that they [opposition figures] are showing us the exact location from which the bullets will be fired”, he said, suggesting recent opposition meetings in Colombia, Miami, Florida, and Israel are evidence of a larger opposition strategy  to destabilize Venezuela with international support.

With respect to Israel, in December 2011 and with no evidence to back his assertions, Israeli Vice Prime Minister Moshe Ya´alon accused Venezuela of working with Iran to create a “terrorist infrastructure” across the Americas that could be used to “attack the interests of the United States”.

In response to his statements, Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry affirmed, “such abusive and tendentious statements, which come from the representative of a government that itself participates in terrorist attacks against the Arab peoples, are part of a continuous campaign of aggression against our people”.

DEFENDING REVOLUTION

Speaking at a pro-Chavez rally on Friday, Mayor of the Caracas Libertador Municipality and head of the Chavez re-election campaign Jorge Rodriguez denounced the opposition’s international positioning. In the border state of Tachira backing grassroots efforts to re-elect Venezuela’s socialist President, Rodriguez accused Capriles Radonski of traveling to Colombia “to seek advice from known drug trafficker and confessed paramilitary figure, (former President) Alvaro Uribe”.

Rodriguez told those gathered, “the lazy Mayor of Caracas, Mayor Ledezma, recently made his way to Israel and is also meeting with representatives of the extreme right”.

“They’ve already lost hope in winning the election”, Rodriguez  affirmed,  “but if they try taking the path of destabilization they’ll face the people and homeland, ready to defend the Revolution”.

source.

Posted in capitalism, colored "revolutions", imperialism, Venezuela, zionism |

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