Why Rockefellers Aim at Destroying Farmers Worldwide?

Guest Post by William Engdahl

For the better part of the past century Western pop culture has systematically denigrated and devalued what should be the most honored profession of all. Those who labor with the land, day-in and day-out, to deliver the food that we eat have assumed a social status too often similar to the dirt of the soil they till. No one stops to ask a simple question: What do we do when we have killed off all our farmers?

Some of the more naïve city-dwellers would retort with little reflection, “But we have industrialized food production; we don’t need manual farm labor today.”

Indeed, the numbers are impressive.

Let’s take my homeland, the United States of America. In 1950, a time of general prosperity and strong economic growth, the total US population was 151,132,000 and the farm population was 25,058,000 making farmers just over 12% of the total labor force. There were 5,388,000 farms with an average size of about 87 hectares. Forty years later, in 1990, the year the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended, the USA had a total population of 261,423,000 of which the farm population numbered just under three million, 2,987,552, making farmers a mere 2.6% of the total labor force. The number of farms had shrunk to only 2,143,150, a loss of 60%, but because of industrial concentration, average size was 187 hectares.

Rockefeller’s Agribusiness Revolution

What we are told, those of us whose relation to meat, dairy, fruits and vegetables ends at the supermarket, is that this is a great progress, the liberation of almost 23 million farm workers to get city jobs and live a better life.

It isn’t that simple.

We are not told the true effects on food quality that has been created by the mechanization and industrialization of food production in America since the Harvard Business School, on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, began what they termed “agribusiness,” the conversion of our food supply into a pure for-profit vertically integrated business modelled on the Rockefeller oil cartel.

The raising of hogs, dairy cows, beef cattle, chicken all became industrialized gradually after the 1950’s in the USA. The baby chicks were confined to spaces so tiny they could barely stand. To make them get fat faster, the owners would pump them full of antibiotics and feed them a diet of GMO corn and soya meal. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, 80 percent of all antibiotics sold in the United States are for use on livestock and poultry, not humans. The majority are given to animals mixed in their food or water to speed growth. After all, time is money.

The traditional family farmer, of the sort my late grandfather was in North Dakota prior to the First World War, was driven largely from the land by USDA Government policy, policy that favored industrialization regardless of the quality of food nutrient that resulted. Tractors became computerized, mammoth machines driven by GPS. One such tractor could work remotely and do the work of many farmers of old.

The result was financially fabulous….for the industry owners—ADM, Cargill, Monsanto, for the packagers like Kraft Foods, Kelloggs, Nestle, Unilever, Toepfer, Maggi. The American Rockefeller-Harvard “agribusiness” business model was globalized, beginning with the GATT negotiations of the Uruguay Round of trade liberalization in the late 1980s where the EU dropped much of its traditional protection of domestic farmers in favor of free trade in agriculture products.

During the late 1980’s as the Uruguay Round of GATT trade negotiations was about to give US agribusiness giants what they wanted—freedom to rape the EU and other protected agriculture markets with their highly efficient products, to destroy millions of EU farmers who had farmed with a passion for generations, I went to Brussels to make a background interview as a journalist with a high-level EU Commission bureaucrat responsible for agriculture. He was an apparently well-educated, multi-lingual bureaucrat, Danish-born as he noted. He argued in defense of free trade by declaring, “Why should I pay taxes from Denmark so that Bavarian farmers on their tiny plots of land can remain in business?”

The answer, which I kept to myself then, was simply because the traditional family farmer is uniquely suited to mediate with nature and us to produce food that is healthy for humans and animals to eat. No machine can replace the personal dedication or passion that I have seen again and again in every farmer I have met who truly cares about his livestock or crops.

Now the very same very rich and very loveless people, I call them the American Oligarchs, are systematically doing everything to destroy the human food quality. Clearly in my view, they are doing so with a goal of mass population reduction. There is no other reason the Rockefeller Foundation would spend hundreds of millions of (tax exempt) dollars to create GMO techniques, to support Monsanto and other chemical giants like DuPont, clearly knowing they are slowly poisoning the population to an early death.

Depressing pesticides

This has been demonstrated in independent tests regarding the toxic effects on animals and even human cells in an embryo. Now, independent even of GMO crops, new tests show that ordinary pesticide chemicals sprayed by farm workers or farmers on crops cause neurological damage—depression, Parkinsons’ and even suicide—to the farmers or farm workers using the deadly chemicals.

The US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in their landmark Agricultural Health Study studied a group of 89,000 farmers and other pesticide applicators in Iowa and North Carolina. The mammoth study concluded that, “use of two pesticide classes, fumigants and organochlorine insecticides, and seven individual pesticides—the fumigants aluminum phosphide and ethylene dibromide; the phenoxy herbicide (2,4,5-trichlorophenoxy)acetic acid (2,4,5-T); the organochlorine insecticide dieldrin; and the organophosphate insecticides diazinon, malathion, and parathion—were all positively associated with depression in each case group.”

The study showed that farmers with the highest number of lifetime exposure days to pesticides were 50 percent more likely to later have a depression diagnosis.

The research linked long-term use of pesticides to higher rates of depression and suicide. Evidence also suggests that pesticide poisoning – a heavy dose in a short amount of time – doubles the risk of depression.

After suppressing the effects among farm families for years about the resulting depression and related neurological symptoms, farmers and their families have begun speaking out. Lorann Stallones, an epidemiologist and psychology professor at Colorado State University says, “There’s been a shift – partly because there’s more people talking about being mentally incapacitated.”

Epidemiologist Freya Kamel and her colleagues reported that among 19,000 studied, “those who used two classes of pesticides and seven individual pesticides were more likely to have been diagnosed with depression. Those who used organochlorine insecticides were up to 90 percent more likely to have been diagnosed with depression than those who hadn’t used them. For fumigants, the increased risk was up to 80 percent.”

In France, farmers who used herbicides were nearly twice as likely to have been treated for depression as those who didn’t use herbicides, according to a study published in 2013. The study of 567 French farmers found that the risk was even greater when the herbicide applicators had been doing it for more than 19 years.

In short, we are destroying the nutritional value of the food we eat and slowly destroying the remaining farmers responsible for cultivating that. It is a recipe for the ultimate extinction of life on the planet as we know it. No, that is not an exaggeration.

I firmly believe that honest, nature-conscious organic farmers ought to receive significant tax breaks to encourage other farmers to leave the grotesque agribusiness model behind and return to growing or raising honest food again as they did only a few short decades ago. And severely high taxation ought to be imposed on farmers who use proven toxic chemicals like Roundup by Monsanto or the neonicotinoids like Bayer AG’s Confidor, Gaucho or Advocate, or Poncho, or Syngenta’s Actara, Platinum or Cruiser to name just the most sold.

Right now our regulators in the EU and USA do everything to discourage that, something actually quite stupid, unless, of course, some loveless, power-addicted oligarchs sitting atop their mountain, looking contemptuously down on us normal folk, have decided that’s just what they desire. If so, it’s up to us to stop looking up to those on the mountain and look at what we ourselves have accepted as normal, that is slowly killing us and the farmers who feed us. Maybe the time has come to change that unhealthy situation.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”

Project Coast: Who’s Behind the Recent Ebola Outbreak?

 

Guest Post by  Vladimir Platov

The report issued by the World Health Organization states that the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa is the largest and most complex since the detection of the virus in 1976. This outbreak has reached an all time high in both the number infected with the virus and those deceased from it than in all the previous outbreaks combined. The outbreak started in March 2014 in Guinea and it soon jumped across the border to Sierra Leone and Liberia, and then the infected brought the virus via air and land transport to Nigeria and Senegal. But this time around, the virus was not simply spreading across Africa, but it had managed to reach other continents.

However, if one is to study the facts carefully, then a question arises: how is it that a virus that was first identified in 1976 “suddenly” became so active and able to spread across the African continent and beyond?

To get an answer one must study the history of US secret experiments in this area, although Washington strives to hide it from public attention.

As follows from leaked files and a number of media publications, the Ebola virus had been extensively studied back in 1980 in South Africa as a potential biological weapon. This project that goes under the codename Project Coast was launched by Dr. Wouter Basson, also known as “Dr. Death”, who practiced medicine in South Africa during apartheid times and was a personal physician to Pieter Willem Botha, who was the sitting prime minister of South Africa at that time. The project aimed at creating biological and chemical weapons, which were to destroy or sterilize the black population, bringing death to all the political opponents of apartheid.

In principle, the idea behind Project Coast, is not new. As reported in a recent publication of The Age magazine, an Australian microbiologist and Nobel laureate Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet urged the Australian government to develop biological weapons against “over-populated countries of Southeast Asia” in 1947. During a secret meeting in 1947 with The New Weapons and Equipment Development Committee microbiologists recommended “to form a research group tasked to create biological weapons that could be unleashed by contaminating foods supplies in order to control the population of Indonesia and other Asian countries.”

Among the components for the new biological weapons developed under Project Coast, the United States picked Marburg and Ebola fever viruses whose strains were shipped to a secret laboratory in South Africa. A report titled “The Rollback of South Africa’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Program,” that was published in 2001 by Dr. Stephen F. Burgess, a professor of the Department of International Security Studies, US Air War College, and Helen E. Purkitt, a professor of international relations at the U.S. Naval Academy, states that back in 1984, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) shipped eight tubes with Ebola and Marburg strains to South Africa. These authors behind the report claim that not only were the CIA and MI6 informed about Project Coast, but the Bush administration and Margaret Thatcher were as well.

Bioweapons expert Jeanne Guillemin wrote in her book “Biological Weapons: From the Invention of State-Sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism,” that “the project‘s growth years were from 1982 to 1987, when it developed a range of biological agents (such as those for anthrax, cholera, and the Marburg and Ebola viruses and for botulism toxin)…“

The history of Basson’s project is surrounded by profound mystery. As he himself stated in front of the Supreme Court of Appeal: “CIA agents in Pretoria threatened me with death in two steps from the US embassy entrance on Schoeman Street, they demanded me to keep the details of our studies a secret.” According to an article published in 2001 in New Yorker, the US Embassy in Pretoria was fairly terrified by the prospect that Basson could reveal the role Washington played in Project Coast.

In 2013, Basson, dubbed “Doctor Death” by the South African media, was found guilty of unprofessional conduct by the Health Professions Council of South Africa.

As for the actual prosecution of “Doctor Death”, in 2002, after thirty months of trial, when a total of 150 witnesses were heard and 40,000 documents were presented to the court that proved Wouter Basson was involved in numerous cases of poisoning and flat-out slaughter during the apartheid era, as while being connected to the deaths of more than 2,000 South Africans, the the Supreme Court of Appeal failed to find any offense in his actions.

Biological weapons program led by Doctor Basson saw its end in 1994, but no independent verification of the actual destruction of pathogenic strains has ever been provided. A direct order to destroy all strains was issued directly to Dr. Basson, but according to the Wall Street Journal, the actual destruction of virus strains depended solely on his honesty.

Basson pointed out that he had contacts with a number of Western agencies that were providing “moral and other forms of support” to Project Coast. In particular, in an interview for the documentary “Anthrax War,” Basson repeatedly claimed that he met Dr. David Kelly, the prominent UN weapons inspector that visited Iraq (Kelly was a high level UK expert on biological weapons).

Some may find it suspicious that once the investigation of the Project Coast began Dr. David Kelly was found dead near his house in Oxfordshire in 2003. As for the causes of death, the official version put forward by the British authorities states that Kelly committed suicide. However, medical experts had serious doubts about this fact. In addition, a Mail Online article published in 2007 specified that a week before his death Dr. Kelly was to be questioned by MI5 concerning his ties with Dr. Basson due to the rise of public discontent of the criminal nature of Project Coast and the degree of British involvement in it.

The suspicions about the connection of the latest Ebola outbreak in Africa and the “research work” that “Doctor Death” carried out in South Africa were expressed by the Ghana Times newspaper in September. Earlier, a similar statement was made by Zimbabwe’s Minister of Health Dr. Timothy Stamps, when he underlined that Zimbabwe became the target of biological weapons tests that had been developed by Wouter Basson.

The Commission that was studying the crimes committed in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, led by Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu, confirmed that more than a thousand people were killed during the apartheid era in South Africa, not only as a result of arrests, torture and assassinations but also by biological weapons tests.

It should be noted that the leakage of harmful strains studied in secret laboratories that operated under the direct control of Washington in different countries has already become a pattern. In June more than 80 scientists and regular employees were exposed to anthrax in a secret biological laboratory in Atlanta US, due to carelessness. This accident has not simply presented a threat to their health and lives, but could potentially trigger an epidemic of this extremely dangerous disease. Similar incidents are occurring in other countries where secret Pentagon and US intelligence laboratories are trying to develop new types of biological weapons in violation of the “Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction” that was signed back in 1972 only to enable Washington to establish its own “control” over microbiological studies .

The troubling fact is that the number of such biological laboratories has been increasing for years. Back in 2006 their number reached 400 laboratories which were designed to facilitate the “war on terror”, Washington is actively redeploying such research laboratories to third-world countries where there’s a possibility to study the effectiveness of viruses aimed at different animals and local populations. In case of a possible military confrontation in a region, the effect of such viruses can be devastating for the region. Thus, in Ukraine alone, where the risks of regional contamination with lethal viruses is extremely high due to ongoing political instability one can find 11 such laboratories, some of them are deployed in contested areas. For this reason, one shouldn’t be surprised by the recent outbreak of anthrax in the Odessa region in the spring and summer of this year.

Hundreds of such laboratories exist in other countries, particularly in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Burundi, Kenya, Uganda, India, Iraq, Tanzania, South Africa, Central and Southeast Asia, and Latin America.

In this regard, the increasing amount of reports on Pentagon’s involvement in the Ebola outbreak is not surprising, neither are the claims that Pentagon experts have already found “the effective cure” for this disease.

First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2014/12/11/rus-e-bola-kto-vinovat-v-ee-vspy-shke/

America’s Illusion of Free Will

The mainstream U.S. news media’s narrow parameters, especially on foreign policy issues, give the American people little opportunity to engage in meaningful debate or to influence outcomes. Typically, public perceptions are managed and consensus is manufactured, as Lawrence Davidson writes.

By Lawrence Davidson

Most Americans believe they have a range of choices in their daily lives and that they may choose among them freely. That is, they intuitively believe that their choices are made autonomously and without outside interference.

They would probably be surprised to learn that what they take for granted in this regard, the exercise of what is called free will, is a hotly debated topic among learned men and women in fields of study as widely separated as physics, philosophy and theology.

President George W. Bush in a flight suit after landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, to give his “Mission Accomplished” speech about the Iraq War.

For instance, many physicists are convinced that if one could know the position and momentum of all the atoms in the universe, one could accurately predict the future behavior of those atoms (including the ones that make up you and me). Of course, one cannot acquire that sort of total knowledge, but the proposition does call into question free will in principle.

Philosophers, in their turn, have debated whether free will is compatible with a natural world where cause and effect is the prevailing physical mechanism. And theologians have spent an equal amount of time trying to figure out how free will can coexist with their assumed omniscient and omnipotent God.

One doesn’t have to have a graduate degree in physics, philosophy or theology to question the notions that people have a wide range of choices and the unfettered will to choose among them. A close consideration of our social and cultural milieu reveals strong deterministic influences – particularly the mass media and its engines of advertising and selective news dissemination.

How many individual daily decisions are determined by some degree of media manipulation? Well, for many they can include what we eat, what we wear, how we entertain ourselves, how we groom ourselves, even whether we feel safe or unsafe (and buy or don’t buy that burglar alarm).

Those who use the media to try to sway our behavior declare that they are simply providing information that allows informed choices or, as one pro-advertising web site says, “advertising ensures that we don’t have to settle for second best. It helps us exercise our right to choose.”

However, this is problematic. Advertisers seek to restrict choice, not broaden it and ultimately they want to determine the choice for you. So, generally, what you see as a range of choices is really limited options within a predetermined context – the context of the marketplace. And your freedom of choice? Your choice may well be made on the basis of which product sponsor is most effective in manipulating your perceptions.
This is media determinism in action and it has proven very successful. U.S. businesses spend some $70 billion a year on TV advertising alone. And, as one ad executive comments, “companies would not invest [that much money] in something they thought didn’t work.”

This is discouraging news for those who believe in the everyday consumer’s freedom of choice, though indeed this sort of media persuasion leads to death and destruction only occasionally (think anorexia). There are, however, other categories of our lives where media determinism is much more likely to lead us right off the proverbial cliff, i.e., in politics and issues of war or peace.

Media Determinism: Political

Given the ubiquitous presence of the media and its influence, the use of persuasive advertising has long since found its way into the realms of politics and policy promotion. Once again, the object is to limit choices, in this case by shutting down debate that is outside an acceptable frame, and thereby sweep you along with enthusiasm or resignation to adopt one of the allowed choices.

You would think that when it comes to choosing political leaders and deciding between war or peace, the public would deserve information approaching objectivity. This is exactly what they never get.
For instance, political campaign promises and party platforms are almost never scrutinized by the media, nor does the media point out that they are only rarely translated into post-election blueprints for action. Instead the media present manipulated information, mostly in the form of expensive campaign ads, as data upon which to base voter choices.

Millions are swayed by these ads and millions more, recognizing the vacuous quality of the undertaking, opt out of the political process altogether. The former play inside a manipulated game with severely limited choices; often the latter unhappily acquiesce to the prevailing system because challenging it seems pointless. Yet such is the power of the myth of democracy that the process rolls on while the charade is glorified in the media and no one seems able to change it.

In times of emergency the practice of media determinism gets worse. What little critical inclination might exist among journalists is suppressed in the name of national unity. The press rallies around a government position or storyline. This can be seen in the follow-up to the 9/11 attacks in 2001. An investigation as to why these attacks were carried out was suppressed, i.e., what U.S. policies in the Middle East prompted al-Qaeda’s suicide hijackers to fly planes into buildings.

Thus, any possibility for the public to examine the ongoing U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East was also shut down. The official line was that such critiques were attempts to blame the victim. In the same way, any option for the prevention of future attacks was limited to a military one rather than seriously considering diplomatic or policy change alternatives. President George W. Bush’s approval rating at this time had reached 90 percent.

The alliance between government and media can be seen in what soon followed. President Bush’s determination to attack Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, led to an orchestrated campaign of misinformation. In March 2003, as the invasion took place, polls showed that between 72 percent and 76 percent of Americans supported the President’s war.

In doing so, did they exercise free choice? Most of them would probably have told you that they did. Yet a strong argument can be made that because of the misinformation given them in the run-up to the war – for instance, misinformation about the Iraqi people’s desire to be rescued from Saddam Hussein and the notorious issue of weapons of mass destruction – they were in fact victims of media determinism.
It turns out, however, that it is difficult for the media to sustain a campaign of misinformation in the face of gross contradiction. Thus, when U.S. troops were not welcomed with flowers as they invaded Iraq, and the weapons of mass destruction were nowhere to be found, the administration’s approval ratings took a dive. But by the time the events revealed the misleading nature of government-media information, the damage had been done.

Despite having been shown to be misleading, the role and style of media news presentation has not changed much. Today, external issues vital to the nation’s future — such as the dangerous alliance with Israel, deadly drone campaigns, the catastrophic potential of global warming and the deteriorating relations with Russia, as well as internal ones, such as the need for more aggressive economic regulatory enforcement, the expansion of health care reform and increased taxation of the wealthy — are little discussed in the media or, when mentioned, come to us in suspiciously biased form.

Truly, objective information and fair-minded analysis are hard to come by – and the encouragement of meaningful debate about substantive topics is absent from the major media.
So what is real, free choice and what is media determinism? The picture sketched above suggests that the former is significantly limited by the latter. This appears to be the case when it comes to mundane things as well as matters of life or death.

How many of us understand this to be the case? It has to be very few, for if very many realized the situation, they would surely demand that the media break its alliance with the powerful. Without honest information, there can be no meaningful pathway to free choices.

Lawrence Davidson is a history professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. He is the author of Foreign Policy Inc.: Privatizing America’s National Interest;　America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood; and Islamic Fundamentalism.

On The Doorstep of The Worst Financial Panic In History

  
Guest Post By Bill Holter

Many who will read this work have been sitting patiently waiting for the house of cards to collapse.  For me personally, I confess the current maniacal financial bubble has gone on much longer than I ever imagined.  What did we miss?  

Are we wrong or just early?  In my opinion, we were early, mathematically correct yet the “rules” changed.  For my part, I can say that I missed just how much “leverage” could be used to extend the game.  In the current instance, we are not even talking about garden variety leverage.  We live in a world where leverage is leveraged, leveraged again and again and again.  We have personal, public and “private” (OTC) leverage. The garden variety leverage is bad enough as is sovereign leverage, but the real problem are derivatives piled on top of derivatives with collateral which in many cases no longer even exists.  Too much leverage in the past has always led to burst bubbles.  All bubbles eventually burst …and it looks like this one is bursting now.

While I originally thought about talking of Venezuela and Ukraine today, and making a comparison and wondering which one will bankrupt first, it dawned on me …the current bubble is busting right now!  From a big picture standpoint, the Fed was forced to stop QE because they were taking too much collateral from the system.  The baton was then passed to Japan because the Germans said “nien” to the ECB.  QE3 started in Sept. 2012 …which is exactly the point in time where the world of asset valuations was turned further upside down.  Call these last two years the “last gasp” or whatever you’d like, the world does not have the ability to reflate any further and in fact, the “bubble of all bubbles” looks to be deflating piece by piece, let me explain this.

Oil is arguably the most important commodity on the planet from a financial standpoint.  Oil has collapsed in price by over 40% in less than 3 months.  There are many repercussions from this, oil exporting nations are watching as their coffers run dry and  the economic activity from lower prices means lower individual employment.  From a financial standpoint the oil derivatives outstanding have already killed someone (we just don’t know who yet) and the “underpinning” of the dollar has been weakened.  My last point needs an explanation.  The dollar is otherwise known as the “petrodollar” because petro revenues have been for years recycled back into dollar assets, lower oil revenues means lower recycling.  This action had already begun while oil was still over $100 per barrel as less demand for dollar assets was evident.  Now, on top of less “willingness” on the part of petroleum exporters to recycle, they have less (or none) to recycle.  No problem because the Fed will just monetize you say?  Think again!

Look what is currently happening.  The reflation of the reflation of U.S. real estate is failing.  Oil has deflated 40%+++.  High yield credit is in an outright crash and already at record “wides” to Treasuries.  The euro and yen have deflated drastically …even against gold.  The Chinese stock market dropped over 5% last night, this is like a 900 point drop in the Dow.  They changed their “collateral rules” and now only AAA and AA credits can be used as collateral.  While speaking of China, let’s not forget their shadow banking system which has basically now been frozen solid.  Commodities across the board have been hammered lower while growth rates across the globe (except of course the U.S. as we lie about every economic report) have either slowed drastically or turned negative.  The “reflation” is clearly failing!  There is no way around it, we are watching a credit contraction unfold.

Yet, gold has bottomed?  How could this be?  Gold surely should be close to or even under $1,000 if you listen to the Dent’s and Armstrong’s of the world?  Let me put this together for you.  Everything is “controlled”.  By “controlled” I mean “price.”  The price of everything is controlled.  I could have said “hidden.”  The “hiding” process began in 2008-09 when the Fed took all sorts of toxic (insolvent) paper on to their balance sheet.  They did this to hide their values.  Yes, they did this to get liquidity into the banks but in my mind their primary reason was to get these assets off the market so they could not be used as “comps” are in real estate.  They carry these on their books at par when they could not even get .18 cents on the dollar when they tried to sell them.  Do you see?  This is where the scheme kicked into high gear.

Back to gold, how could it possibly be going higher if all of a sudden asset values are declining or deflating?  First, gold has also been “priced”.  Gold, more than any other asset (except silver) HAD to be “priced.”  It had to be suppressed because the numbers on the thermometer had to be altered to foster confidence.  As you know, I absolutely believe gold’s price has been “made” on the paper markets.  Nothing else could explain a falling price with increasing and greater demand than supply.  If other markets are being lost control of, then so are gold and silver, they are only moving away from being controlled and towards a natural price.
It looks like to me that “confidence” if it is not broken yet, will very soon because control is being lost in too many of these markets.  Was the price drop in oil a “control” measure by the U.S. to punish Russia?  I believe yes, this was “our” plan but not “THE” plan.  As I wrote a week ago, we may have thought it was our bright idea but I am sure the new Chinese/Saudi relations are as big of a factor, if not greater.  Because so many different markets now begin to tell a story opposite of the “official” story, it tells me that “control” is now beginning to slip.  If you doubt this, think to yourself ”why have we had extraordinary measures” for six years?  Why are we still six years later talking about recovery?  What happened to the “expansion” phase?  It’s like the Dutch boy with all of his fingers and toes in the dike, leaks are springing up everywhere and with each one more control is lost!  If I am correct and this is true then we will either see massively convulsive markets or an outright closure and re set of prices.

Please remember this, volatility will create more volatility just as a small fire or fires in a dry forest will spread and create more fire.  Volatility will create losses and losses will create bankruptcies.  It is these bankruptcies which will turn winners on the other sides of trades …also into losers.

Quite simply, we have lived through the greatest Ponzi scheme of all time where leverage of over 100 to (probably 1,000 to one when all is said and done) has been employed for control.  The recent volatility suggests that control is finally being lost.  If this is true and I firmly believe it is, we are on the doorstep of the worst financial panic event in all of human history.  The sad part is the humanity.  Only a small percentage of the global population ever even played in this game but everyone and I mean everyone will be affected by it!
Be prepared.

US Sanctions on Russia Show Our Blatant Disregard for Human Life

Guest Post by Patrick Smith

You can look at the Russian economy two ways now and you should. So let’s: It is an important moment in the destruction of something and the construction of something else, and we had better be clear just what in both cases. The world we live in changes shape as we speak.

Truth No. 1: Russians are besieged. Sanctions the West has insisted on prosecuting in response to the Ukraine crisis — Washington in the lead, the Europeans reluctant followers — are hitting hard, let there be no question. Oil prices are at astonishing lows, probably if not yet provably manipulated by top operatives in the diplomatic and political spheres.

Truth No. 2: Russians are hot. With an energetic activism just as astonishing as the oil prices, Russian officials, President Putin in the very visible lead but with platoons of technocrats behind him, are forging an extensive network of South-South relationships — East-East, if you prefer — that are something very new under the sun. Some of us were banging on about South-South trade and diplomatic unity as far back as the 1970s; I have anticipated the arriving reality since the early years of this century. But I would never have predicted the pace of events as we have them before us. Stunning.

Holiday surprise: There is a Truth No. 3 and it is this: Truth No. 1, the siege of the Russian economy, is proving a significant catalyst in the advance of Truth No. 2, the creative response of a nation under ever-mounting pressure.

Timothy Snyder, the Yale professor whose nitwittery on the Ukraine crisis is simply nonpareil (and praise heaven he has gone quiet), exclaimed some months ago that Putin is threatening to undermine the entire postwar order. I replied in this space the following week, Gee, if only it were so.

Already it seems to be. But miss this not: Russia is advancing this world-historical turn with a considerable assist from its adversaries in the West, not alone. For all the pseuds who pretend to know Schumpeter but know only one thing, the creative destruction bit, how is this as a prime example of the phenom?
Details in a sec, but this thought first: We are all bound to pay close attention to these events because they matter to everyone, whether this is yet obvious or not. Probably in our lifetimes — and I had it further out until recently — we will begin to inhabit a different planet.

And it stands to be a better one, if you accept that equilibrium, interdependence, cooperation and all those other notions Washington is frightened to death of will make for a more secure world than our lopsided primacy, incessant confrontations, drone murders, waterboarding, nuclear arsenals and the National Endowment for Democracy’s subversions will ever deliver for us.

How much more capable, equally, will be a human community that addresses its problems with the wisdom not of one civilization, which happened by historical circumstance to modernize in the material sphere before others, but with the smarts and imaginations and perspectives of many?

Those details come in flurries now and fall into two files, destruction and construction. To the former first.
The economics ministry in Moscow has just forecast a swoon in its outlook for 2015. On a dime, it shifts from a prediction of 1.2 percent growth to 0.8 percent contraction. The math is easy: This is a rip of 2 percentage points right out of Russia’s middle. No sentient American should have any difficulty understanding what these numbers will mean to many millions of ordinary Russians.

The ministry’s report is the first to anticipate the consequences of the several rounds of sanctions imposed this year, the 34 percent drop in the ruble’s value this year and the collapse in oil prices. The last are now far below what Russia needs — about $105 a barrel — if the petroleum sector is to contribute to national revenues. As detailed in this space a few weeks ago, there are ample grounds to question whether price patterns in global oil markets are the consequence of American manipulations.

As to the ruble, we saw this coming months ago as reports of “silent sanctions,” as financial services people call them, began to come through. Off-the-books sanctions is the better term. A few at a time — HSBC, Lloyd’s — banks began denying credit to Russian enterprises; as documented, these decisions were at the  Treasury Department’s informal urging.

Reflecting the creep of interdependence in the global economy, financing from Western banks is vital to Russian corporations of all sizes. At this point, my sources in the markets tell me, the spigot is off: Credit and all customary loan rollovers are virtually unavailable across the board.

This is the anatomy of much suffering that is about to get done. Is the course wise? Is there a point? Is it other than ridiculous to posit some “net-positive” justification for this?
I see nothing good in this whatsoever. I see recklessness.

Think of it this way, as an old friend from Asia days suggests. Currency speculators abandoned the Thai baht en masse in 1997 and before we knew it Thailand had dragged all of East Asia into prolonged crisis. Remember? Now consider the size of the Thai economy — tiny in the scheme of things, and heavily agricultural still.

Now consider the size of the Russian economy. It is the world’s No. 2 producer of natural gas and No. 3 producer of oil. In terms of nominal gross domestic product — standard measure — Russia’s economy, at $2.1 trillion, is slightly larger than Italy’s. Another measure, purchasing power parity, values Russia’s economy at $3.5 trillion, but never mind: Even by nominal GDP, Russia is the world’s No. 8 economic power.
Comfortable now with the sanctions regime, are we?
The cliques in Washington are because the U.S. trades very little with Russia and they have no grasp of limits of any kind. This is cynicism made flesh when you consider Europe’s vulnerabilities. The contagious economic and social crisis is already spreading to nations near Russia’s borders.

As Germans and other Europeans understand, take down this beast and the blood will spatter everywhere. Now you can see, maybe, why one consequence of the Ukraine crisis is a serious deterioration of relations between America and those known as “the allies,” a term that has masked many complications since the Cold War’s onset.

As to the point of it all, it gets bitterer the more we learn of Ukraine and its arriving future.
Long ago, an English diplomat in Tokyo wrote to his Foreign Office in London, “The Japanese can neither love the Americans nor endure being loved by them.” It is dead on the fate of Ukrainians so far as one can make out. All signs are they are in for the suffocating embrace. Here comes the neoliberal order. It will be very weird to watch.

My jaw hit the corner of my desk when I read last week that Ukraine’s new finance minister, one Natalie Jaresko, is 1) an American citizen, granted a Ukraine passport simultaneously with her cabinet appointment, 2) a former State Department officer, 3) recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars in that $5 billion Victoria Nuland famously bragged of spending in State’s effort to yank Ukraine westward and 4) a participant in apparently extensive insider dealing via the investment management company she co-founded after leaving State.

Get this:
Jaresko served as president and chief executive officer of Western NIS Enterprise Fund (WNISEF), which was created by the U.S. Agency for International Development with $150 million to spur business activity in Ukraine. She also was co-founder and managing partner of Horizon Capital, which managed WNISEF’s investments at a rate of 2 percent to 2.5 percent of committed capital, fees exceeding $1 million in recent years, according to WNISEF’s 2012 annual report.

Her title at Horizon Capital must be CCIO, chief conflict of interest officer.
Full credit, given with gusto: The above passage is from the long exposé of this sordid business by Robert Parry, whose work on Ukraine is invaluable. Read this piece here: a riveting read covering a tangled web. Parry, in turn, cites John Hellmer, a former Moscow correspondent who recently explored Jaresko’s story as State Department official (and diplomat in post-Soviet Kiev) turned recipient of USAID funds.
Surely this is the right person to regulate Ukraine’s financial markets, counter corruption with archangelic purpose and negotiate with Washington, the Europeans and the IMF in behalf of Ukrainians’ interests. No wonder the parliament in Kiev erupted when Jaresko’s appointment was announced.
Footnote here: That $150 million fund State handed Jaresko has lost more than a third of its value since the Ukrainian economy tanked. As she steps into office, Kiev’s foreign reserves are down to $10 billion and shrinking, while inflation roars at 22 percent.

My jaw has been bruised, to be honest, since, as the Ukraine crisis got hot, Vice President Biden’s son, R. Hunter, was named to the board of Burisma Holdings, Ukraine’s No. 1 producer of natural gas. I cannot make out who is the chief conflict of interest officer here, Joe or the boy.

News comes of our Hunter, it turns out. The Wall Street Journal reported recently that he was bounced from the U.S. Navy Reserve earlier this year after a positive drug test. If the 44-year-old were Ukrainian (or any other nationality) and had been so charged, he would not be allowed into this country. This is the kind of person America is now happy to send abroad.

More substantively, Burisma announced last month that it will now commence drilling near Slavyansk, where Ukrainian troops have been dodging bullets while installing the company’s hydraulic fracturing equipment. Slavyansk, alert readers will recall, was the object of three months’ sustained bombing and artillery shelling prior to this announcement.

Overseeing all this is Jaresko and — second of three foreigners named to a new cabinet — Aivaras Abromavicius, a Lithuanian and a partner in an asset-management firm called East Capital. He will be the incoming economy minister, such as there is an economy.

Why these foreigners? In my read, Biden is a straight-out emissary sent to shepherd American corporations into the resource game via joint ventures or what have you, we will have to see, and the others are roughly the equivalent of compradors — in effect, bought-off locals.

Here is a tableau worth a moment’s consideration: Over here, Vicky Nuland stands before a Chevron plaque as she explains to business executives how well the $5 billion was spent. Here we have Hunter Biden doing Burisma’s legal work. Over here we have a small-town mayor in Romania who is run out of town for selling Chevron a fracking lease. (This you can read of in the Times.) And over there, also in the Times report, we have the Lithuanians forcing Chevron to abandon a shale-drilling project after widespread demonstrations opposing it.

You want to know why I hold the neoliberal agenda and those who advance it in contempt? This is why. We watch a corporate shark-feed. It has nothing to do with democracy. There is nothing in this for Ukrainians. They are about to hear their first lectures on the virtues of “austerity.”
I have three remarks.

One, the greed at the cost of human life and society is so brazen here it causes me to stop typing to reread the sentences. Can market-consciousness have brought us this low?
Two, please count the number of times you have read the words “Chevron,” “Burisma” or “shale-gas interests” in any account of Ukraine by correspondents covering it. I can find no mention of any from those in the field. This is “the power of leaving out,” as I often put it, in spades. I rest the case (for now).
Three, there is a deeper tragedy. Ukrainians live between East and West. This is not only a matter of geography: There is among them a mix of Eastern consciousness and Western consciousness. Accordingly, they had a chance to stand as the very best the new century offers us, a planet whose old divisions could be erased in favor of a more fulsome idea of the successful society and its potential.
This chance is now all but lost — destroyed by those who resisted it.

What I find remarkable now is that Moscow does not seem to be taking Ukraine’s misfortune and the West’s aggressions against Russia itself passively — or even negatively, for that matter. So we pass from the destructive file to the constructive.

Neil MacFarquhar, a standout in the New York Times’ Moscow bureau for his full-frontal prejudices, gave as negative an account as he could when he covered Putin’s year-end address. I had another read. This guy is bloodied, O.K., but he is not bowed, and I would advise against waiting for it.
I did like the Times’ head, parenthetically: “Putin, Amid Stark Challenges, Says Russia’s Destiny Is at Hand.” Without going histrionic, that is likely to prove precisely what is at hand. My favorite MacFarquhar sentence: “Mr. Putin enjoyed ever-greater support from March to August, but in the months since, as sanctions began to bite with inflation, support began to erode — though his approval ratings remain in the 80s.”
You have to love a paper that will publish this. Somehow.

Look at Putin’s foreign agenda this past year: Latin America just as the sanctions came in — an intentional finger in Washington’s eye, as I read it — then China, China again recently, Turkey more recently, India just now. He has not been to Iran, but there, as in all these other places, he has forged or reiterated promising relations. The deals cut are too numerous to list.

A couple are worth mentioning. The twin gas deals with China, worth nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars, are historic all by themselves. In six years’ time China will be buying more gas from Russia than the latter now sells to Europe. And do not miss this: My sources tell me that this gas can be priced such as to crowd the U.S. at least partially out of the Asian market.

Other side of the world: Putin has just canceled a planned pipeline to southeastern Europe, the South Stream. This is the defeat Western media put it over as, surely: Russia loses some customers. But two points: One, it was soon enough clear that the Europeans, having used South Stream as leverage in the sanctions game, probably overplayed their hand. The day following the announcement they were struggling for composure so far as I can make out.

Two, Putin stunned everyone with his decision from Ankara, where he stood with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to announce that South Stream would be rerouted to serve the Turkish market. Think about this: It is more than a new deal; there are significant political and diplomatic implications in this, given Turkey’s traditional alliances, its EU aspirations and so on.

This is the way the world changes shape, the way new worlds get built. Think of these new ties in terms of the old trade routes. Many things other than goods traveled along them. As then, the traffic will run in both directions, making our latest globalization the two-way street it should have been from the first.
One could say it is not the West’s world any longer, and I called it “post-Western” in a book several years ago. This is not quite so. It is ours, but only to the extent that it is destined to be everybody’s, if I read history rightly. As an American, my biggest regret on this score — apart from all the suffering caused in our names — is  that my country seems bent on doing almost everything it can to lose out on a great deal of what would be its share in the arriving era; this in the name of prolonging a time that is no longer.

Patrick Smith is the author of “Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century” was the International Herald Tribune’s bureau chief in Hong Kong and then Tokyo from 1985 to 1992. During this time he also wrote “Letter from Tokyo” for the New Yorker. He is the author of four previous books and has contributed frequently to the New York Times, the Nation, the Washington Quarterly, and other publications.

The ''Thin Blue Line'' Serves No Purpose

Guest Post by Brandon Smith


Like many people, I grew up watching numerous television shows and mainstream movies depicting a world in which the common police officer stood as a sentinel of civilized society against a seething underbelly of violence and chaos just beneath the surface of the world around us. Through public schooling, we were indoctrinated to fear the drug culture as a breeding ground of gangland destruction and to worship law enforcement officials as the only barrier between us and a cocaine-frosted wasteland. We were led to believe that every day police were holding back a tide of crime and terrorism. The so-called “thin blue line” was an indispensable part of a safe and prosperous nation.

To criticize or present opposition to the institution of state and federally funded law enforcement is often considered tantamount to treason – or, at the very least, it is considered unpatriotic. After all, we have all been told every moment of our lives that a world without police would immediately turn into a frothing, frenzied orgy of mass insanity and that average human beings cannot be trusted to take responsibility for the day-to-day security of their neighborhoods and towns. Official doctrine today demands a designated warrior class, separate from the rest of us, to handle the protection and care of weakling citizens.

Now, it is important to note that there are in fact many good people working in the field of law enforcement. This is not under debate and not relevant to the point I am about to make. The problem is not necessarily with all the individuals who make up law enforcement; the problem is with the existence and mandate of the institution itself. I personally do not “hate” cops per se (though some of them deserve to be hated). But I do hate corrupt government structures, and law enforcement has become the grasping arm of the elitist machine.

The downfall of any policing system arises when individuals are separated from the responsibility for their own security and society is delegated into classes of protectors, or sheepdogs, and sheep. As I have outlined in many articles, government itself has become an entity foreign to the interests of the American people. Through the false left/right paradigm, elitists have taken away the ability of the public to participate in civic duties and to preserve our principles rather than sacrifice them in the name of the “greater good.” City and state police are not subject to the tides of political elections, even if elections actually mattered. They are part of an unaccountable bureaucratic monstrosity that shifts only according to the whims of the establishment.

The existence of a separate government-controlled warrior class has caused crisis and catastrophe all throughout human history. Invariably, this warrior class ends up exalting itself as superior to the functions and values of the citizenry, rather than maintaining a sense of duty to the citizenry. The claim that the average American is not capable of proper self-security or community security is perhaps the most successful lie of the past century. This is not to say that warriors do not exist. Some people develop the proper mindset, while others do not. However, becoming a warrior is a personal psychological and spiritual pursuit meant to overcome the detriments of fear and has nothing whatsoever to do with government recognition. The fact that many law enforcement officials often refer to non-LEOs as “civilians” is a rather laughable example of the delusions of the government-paid bureaucratic warrior class in action, fantasizing as if they have been deployed to Afghanistan while writing speeding tickets in suburbia.

In the early days of America, the common citizenry through the formation of the militia WAS the warrior class. Every last able-bodied person was a sentinel and defender of the peace. The sheriff, the only elected and constitutional form of law enforcement, often had a posse, which was, again, made up of regular citizens. There was no exalted Praetorian Guard — only friends, family and neighbors. There was no need for a government dominated law enforcement structure back then, nor is there a need for one now.

The militia system was slowly eroded over decades and replaced with centralized law enforcement under the direct influence of the political elite. Currently, using the Department of Homeland Security and the integration of “fusion centers,” the police are now an army under direct federal control, equipped with military-grade technology through the 1033 program. When Barack Obama called for the creation of a “civilian national security force” just as powerful and well-funded as the military back in 2008, this is clearly what he was referring to. The results of police militarization are thoroughly negative.

In my recent article 'The Ferguson conundrum solved by community security,' I discussed the complete lack of LEO protection against looting and arson during the Ferguson, Missouri, riots, which led the Oath Keepers to provide security for innocent business owners, filling the void left behind. Law enforcement officials were apparently too busy harassing peaceful protesters and journalists to deal with the threat of a burning city, or too busy guarding government building and revealing where their true loyalties rest. I have heard arguments that the Ferguson police were not to blame for the failure because they were under orders from their superiors and under pressure from the federal government. While I would note that each individual officer has the right and the duty to refuse immoral orders, regardless of whether or not LEOs refused to protect businesses out of personal choice, or out of fear of losing their jobs, the fact remains that the public is often left to face criminality without the aid of police. And, because this is an undeniable reality, the public must take back responsibility for its security.

Whether one believes that the shooting of Michael Brown was justified or not, the police response after the fact only reinforced public expectations of corruption. Ferguson is only one example in a multitude of police abuses, and these abuses are not relegated to any one ethnicity. Leftists are not wrong when they point out the dangerous evolution of law enforcement into a government goon squad (the liberty movement was warning the world about it long before the left ever figured out what was going on). But in their half-sighted examinations, they make the mistake of believing police abuse is purely race-related. In reality, police abuse is universal — from Tamir Rice, the black 12-year-old in Cleveland shot dead by police less than two seconds after their arrival for having a toy gun in his pants, to the murder of Kelly Thomas, a white homeless man shot with a stun gun in the face and beaten in the street for 10 minutes straight until dead by California police for the crime of “not sitting still as ordered.”

In nearly all of these cases of overt police force, even when video evidence clearly indicates wrongdoing, LEOs are acquitted by the system. The reason for this should be obvious: The establishment must keep the warrior class happy, content, and untouchable; otherwise, the they loses power. No corrupt system is going to punish its own unless utterly necessary to its survival, because if it did, it would then have to admit that it is not entirely trustworthy, causing the people to question whether its existence is more dangerous than the villains it is supposed to protect us from. Government generally only cares about perpetuating its own existence; it does not care about the safety of the populace. In this way, police become a kind of Mafia or cult with their own set of rules outside of the purview of the rest of society and immune to any form of justice.

What is truly disturbing are the lengths to which some Americans (and other law enforcement) will go to rationalize any and all actions taken by police, even if they result in the death of an innocent. The Stockholm Syndrome certainly seems to be at work as portions of the public continue to worship LEOs as saviors who can do no wrong. Mention the idea of getting rid of state police, and the LEO fan club cries out in terror like children separated from their parents at a crowded shopping mall. In the end, though, all children must eventually grow up and start taking care of themselves.

At bottom, police are not protectors of the public good, not even in a technical or legal sense. Law enforcement organizations have even argued in the Supreme Court that their job is NOT to prevent crime but to enforce the law after the fact, and they have won using this assertion. That is to say, a police officer is NOT legally required to protect a person from harm, only to institute state policy once a crime is committed.

What government law enforcement is admitting to in its argument is that it does not provide security, which is what we in the liberty movement have known all along. The only service police provide is to clean up the mess left over when the carnage of a crime has subsided. If law enforcement has any purpose at all, it is to keep the public in check and in line - to promote the farce that without government protection, chaos will rule.

The communist Cheka, a security organization founded by Vladimir Lenin at the beginning of the Bolshevik takeover of Russia, was notorious for random arrests and killings of civilians in the name of peace and security. Many communist Russians, true believers in the Bolshevist cause, refused to accept that the Cheka were capable of criminal abuse. They assumed that those killed must have been enemies of the state, just as the government proclaimed. And when they themselves were arrested for no apparent reason, they wrote letters from the gulags to Stalin, naively believing that he would save them from what must have been a bureaucratic error.

In fact, the Cheka had been given orders directly from the state to fill a quota of arrests in order to justify the constant propaganda the state produced warning of agents of “capitalist evil” around every corner. The Cheka, the secret police, were given warrior-class status and free reign to assert their authority over anyone, at any time, for any reason. America is only a short step away from a similar nightmare, and many in our nation suffer from the same naive faith in statism as the Russians did years ago.

The only way to avoid such a horror is to remove state-sanctioned law enforcement from the picture entirely. Is this "throwing the baby out with the bathwater"? No. Rather, it is saving the baby from a swirling virulent cesspool.

As we saw in grand scale in Ferguson, LEOs are essentially useless to the public. In response, members of the Ferguson community welcomed the Oath Keepers and their Community Preparedness Team strategy. In time, Oath Keepers CPT will train locals to provide their own protection without need for any outside aid. When locals provide their own security, when every citizen is a member of the warrior class, abuse is far less likely because the watchmen have no motivation to abuse themselves.

Arguments that this will lead to a culture of "warlords" invariably pop up when discussing the concept of community based security. Of course, when every member of a community is trained to defend themselves, abusive warlord do not last long, but then again, neither do abusive governments, which I suppose is the true reason why decentralized community security is treated with such disdain. This is yet another contrived attempt to insinuate that the American people cannot be trusted with their own defense, but the government can. It is built around the illusion that state police are somehow "impartial observers" and actors. This has simply never been so. State-controlled police have every motivation to protect state interests, and as long as they are given free license to do whatever they please without consequence, most of them will continue to do so. Impartiality is non-existent in the world of law enforcement.

Police misconduct has a cumulative effect on a culture. We do not forget all of the oversteps of the past; we merely file them away until we finally reach a breaking point. It is important for LEOs to understand that while they may have a relative immunity to legal reparations, they are not immune to the rage of the populace and will likely find their fragile warrior personas rather inadequate when that day arrives. For the true constitutional police out there, it is time to take sides, either with good American people or with the corrupt establishment. It is impossible to serve both. The illusion of the “thin blue line” is quickly fading. The only question now is: What is going to replace it? The establishment would have you believe there are only two options: total chaos or martial law. But there has always been a third alternative they seek to suppress: the return of community defense, the resurgence of localized responsibility and the victory of personal liberty over false security.

You can read more from Brandon Smith at Alt-Market, where this article first appeared. 

REMINDER: Alt-Market's winter donation drive is now underway! If you would like to support the publishing of articles like the one you have just read, visit our donations page here. We greatly appreciate your patronage. You can contact Brandon Smith at: brandon@alt-market.com

#TortureReport:The Goal of the Torture Was to Produce False Information to Justify War - Armed Services Committee

Source -  Washingtons Blog

The Big Story Torture Everyone Is Missing.

While the torture report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee is very important, it doesn’t address the big scoop regarding torture.

Instead, it is the Senate Armed Services Committee’s report that dropped the big bombshell regarding the U.S.  torture program.
Senator Levin, commenting on a Armed Services Committee’s report on torture in 2009, explained:

The techniques are based on tactics used by Chinese Communists against American soldiers during the Korean War for the purpose of eliciting FALSE confessions for propaganda purposes. Techniques used in SERE training include stripping trainees of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, subjecting them to face and body slaps, depriving them of sleep, throwing them up against a wall, confining them in a small box, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatures [and] waterboarding.

 WHY WOULD THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT WANT TO PRODUCE FALSE INFORMATION THROUGH CONFESSIONS OBTAINED BY TORTURE???

McClatchy filled in important details:

Former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration…
For most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.”
It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document…
When people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder,” he continued.”  Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam . . .
A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under “pressure” to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.
“While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq,” Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”
“I think it’s obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link (between al Qaida and Iraq),” [Senator] Levin said in a conference call with reporters. “They made out links where they didn’t exist.”
Levin recalled Cheney’s assertions that a senior Iraqi intelligence officer had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in the Czech Republic capital of Prague just months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred.

The Washington Post reported the same year:

Despite what you’ve seen on TV, torture is really only good at one thing: eliciting false confessions. Indeed, Bush-era torture techniques, we now know, were cold-bloodedly modeled after methods used by Chinese Communists to extract confessions from captured U.S. servicemen that they could then use for propaganda during the Korean War.
So as shocking as the latest revelation in a new Senate Armed Services Committee report may be, it actually makes sense — in a nauseating way. The White House started pushing the use of torture not when faced with a “ticking time bomb” scenario from terrorists, but when officials in 2002 were desperately casting about for ways to tie Iraq to the 9/11 attacks — in order to strengthen their public case for invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 at all.
***
Gordon Trowbridge writes for the Detroit News: “Senior Bush administration officials pushed for the use of abusive interrogations of terrorism detainees in part to seek evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq, according to newly declassified information discovered in a congressional probe.

Indeed, one of the two senior instructors from the Air Force team which taught U.S. servicemen how to resist torture by foreign governments when used to extract false confessions has blown the whistle on the true purpose behind the U.S. torture program.
As Truthout reported:

Jessen’s notes were provided to Truthout by retired Air Force Capt. Michael Kearns, a “master” SERE instructor and decorated veteran who has previously held high-ranking positions within the Air Force Headquarters Staff and Department of Defense (DoD).
***
The Jessen notes clearly state the totality of what was being reverse-engineered – not just ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ but an entire program of exploitation of prisoners using torture as a central pillar,” he said. “What I think is important to note, as an ex-SERE Resistance to Interrogation instructor, is the focus of Jessen’s instruction. It is EXPLOITATION, not specifically interrogation. And this is not a picayune issue, because if one were to ‘reverse-engineer’ a course on resistance to exploitation then what one would get is a plan to exploit prisoners, not interrogate them. The CIA/DoD torture program appears to have the same goals as the terrorist organizations or enemy governments for which SV-91 and other SERE courses were created to defend against: the full exploitation of the prisoner in his intelligence, propaganda, or other needs held by the detaining power, such as the recruitment of informers and double agents. Those aspects of the US detainee program have not generally been discussed as part of the torture story in the American press.”

In a subsequent report, Truthout notes:

Air Force Col. Steven Kleinman, a career military intelligence officer recognized as one of the DOD’s most effective interrogators as well a former SERE instructor and director of intelligence for JPRA’s teaching academy, said ….  “This is the guidebook to getting false confessions, a system drawn specifically from the communist interrogation model that was used to generate propaganda rather than intelligence”  …. “If your goal is to obtain useful and reliable information this is not the source book you should be using.”

Interrogators also forced detainees to take drugs … which further impaired their ability to tell the truth.
And one of the two main architects of the torture program admitted this week on camera:

You can get people to say anything to stop harsh interrogations if you apply them in a way that does that.

And false confessions were, in fact, extracted.
For example:

• A humanitarian aid worker said: torture only stopped when I pretended I was in Al Qaeda

• Under torture, Libyan Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi falsely claimed there was a link between Saddam Hussein, al-Qaida and WMD

• President Bush mentioned Abu Zubaydah as a success story, where torture saved lives. Zubaydah was suspected of being a high-ranking al-Qaida leader. Bush administration officials claimed Zubaydah told them that al-Qaida had links with Saddam Hussein. He also claimed there was a plot to attack Washington with a “dirty bomb”. Both claims are now recognized to be false, even by the CIA, which also admits he was never a member of al-Qaida.

• One of the Main Sources for the 9/11 Commission Report was Tortured Until He Agreed to Sign a Confession that He Was NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO READ

• The so-called 9/11 mastermind said: “During … my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear” (the self-confessed 9/11 “mastermind” falsely confessed to crimes he didn’t commit)

And the 9/11 Commission Report was largely based on a third-hand account of what tortured detainees said, with two of the three parties in the communication being government employees. And the government went to great lengths to obstruct justice and hide unflattering facts from the Commission.
According to NBC News:

• Much of the 9/11 Commission Report was based upon the testimony of people who were tortured

• At least four of the people whose interrogation figured in the 9/11 Commission Report have claimed that they told interrogators information as a way to stop being “tortured.”

• The 9/11 Commission itself doubted the accuracy of the torture confessions, and yet kept their doubts to themselves

Details here.
Today,
Today, Raymond McGovern – a 27-year CIA veteran, who chaired National Intelligence Estimates and personally delivered intelligence briefings to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, their Vice Presidents, Secretaries of State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many other senior government officials – writes at former Newsweek and AP reporter Robert Parry’s website:

But if it’s bad intelligence you’re after, torture works like a charm. If, for example, you wish to “prove,” post 9/11, that “evil dictator” Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda and might arm the terrorists with WMD, bring on the torturers.
It is a highly cynical and extremely sad story, but many Bush administration policymakers wanted to invade Iraq before 9/11 and thus were determined to connect Saddam Hussein to those attacks. The PR push began in September 2002 – or as Bush’s chief of staff Andrew Card put it, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”
By March 2003 – after months of relentless “marketing” – almost 70 percent of Americans had been persuaded that Saddam Hussein was involved in some way with the attacks of 9/11.
The case of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, a low-level al-Qaeda operative, is illustrative of how this process worked. Born in Libya in 1963, al-Libi ran an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan from 1995 to 2000. He was detained in Pakistan on Nov. 11, 2001, and then sent to a U.S. detention facility in Kandahar, Afghanistan. He was deemed a prize catch, since it was thought he would know of any Iraqi training of al-Qaeda.
The CIA successfully fought off the FBI for first rights to interrogate al-Libi. FBI’s Dan Coleman, who “lost” al-Libi to the CIA (at whose orders, I wonder?), said, “Administration officials were always pushing us to come up with links” between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
CIA interrogators elicited some “cooperation” from al-Libi through a combination of rough treatment and threats that he would be turned over to Egyptian intelligence with even greater experience in the torture business.
By June 2002, al-Libi had told the CIA that Iraq had “provided” unspecified chemical and biological weapons training for two al-Qaeda operatives, an allegation that soon found its way into other U.S. intelligence reports. Al-Libi’s treatment improved as he expanded on his tales about collaboration between al-Qaeda and Iraq, adding that three al-Qaeda operatives had gone to Iraq “to learn about nuclear weapons.”
Al-Libi’s claim was well received at the White House even though the Defense Intelligence Agency was suspicious.
“He lacks specific details” about the supposed training, the DIA observed. “It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers. Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest.”
Meanwhile, at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, Maj. Paul Burney, a psychiatrist sent there in summer 2002, told the Senate, “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq and we were not successful. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link … there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”
Just What the Doctor Ordered
President Bush relied on al-Libi’s false Iraq allegation for a major speech in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002, just a few days before Congress voted on the Iraq War resolution. Bush declared, “We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases.”
And Colin Powell relied on it for his famous speech to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, declaring: “I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these [chemical and biological] weapons to al-Qaeda. Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story.”
Al-Libi’s “evidence” helped Powell as he sought support for what he ended up calling a “sinister nexus” between Iraq and al-Qaeda, in the general effort to justify invading Iraq.
For a while, al-Libi was practically the poster boy for the success of the Cheney/Bush torture regime; that is, until he publicly recanted and explained that he only told his interrogators what he thought would stop the torture.
You see, despite his cooperation, al-Libi was still shipped to Egypt where he underwent more abuse, according to a declassified CIA cable from early 2004 when al-Libi recanted his earlier statements. The cable reported that al-Libi said Egyptian interrogators wanted information about al-Qaeda’s connections with Iraq, a subject “about which [al-Libi] said he knew nothing and had difficulty even coming up with a story.”
According to the CIA cable, al-Libi said his interrogators did not like his responses and “placed him in a small box” for about 17 hours. After he was let out of the box, al-Libi was given a last chance to “tell the truth.” When his answers still did not satisfy, al-Libi says he “was knocked over with an arm thrust across his chest and fell on his back” and then was “punched for 15 minutes.”
After Al-Libi recanted, the CIA recalled all intelligence reports based on his statements, a fact recorded in a footnote to the report issued by the 9/11 Commission. By then, however, the Bush administration had gotten its way regarding the invasion of Iraq and the disastrous U.S. occupation was well underway.
***
Intensive investigations into these allegations – after the U.S. military had conquered Iraq – failed to turn up any credible evidence to corroborate these allegations. What we do know is that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were bitter enemies, with al-Qaeda considering the secular Hussein an apostate to Islam.
Al-Libi, who ended up in prison in Libya, reportedly committed suicide shortly after he was discovered there by a human rights organization. Thus, the world never got to hear his own account of the torture that he experienced and the story that he presented and then recanted.
Hafed al-Ghwell, a Libyan-American and a prominent critic of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime at the time of al-Libi’s death, explained to Newsweek, “This idea of committing suicide in your prison cell is an old story in Libya.”

Paul Krugman eloquently summarized the truth about the torture used:

Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.
There’s a word for this: it’s evil.

Torture Program Was Part of a Con Job

As discussed above, in order to “justify” the Iraq war, top Bush administration officials pushed and insisted that interrogators use special torture methods aimed at extracting false confessions to attempt to create a false linkage between between Al Qaida and Iraq. And see this and this.
But this effort started earlier …

5 hours after the 9/11 attacks, Donald Rumsfeld said “my interest is to hit Saddam”.

He also said “Go massive . . . Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”
And at 2:40 p.m. on September 11th, in a memorandum of discussions between top administration officials, several lines below the statement “judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [that is, Saddam Hussein] at same time”, is the statement “Hard to get a good case.” In other words, top officials knew that there wasn’t a good case that Hussein was behind 9/11, but they wanted to use the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to justify war with Iraq anyway.
Moreover, “Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the [9/11] attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda”.
And a Defense Intelligence Terrorism Summary issued in February 2002 by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency cast significant doubt on the possibility of a Saddam Hussein-al-Qaeda conspiracy.
And yet Bush, Cheney and other top administration officials claimed repeatedly for years that Saddam was behind 9/11. See this analysis. Indeed, Bush administration officials apparently swore in a lawsuit that Saddam was behind 9/11.
Moreover, President Bush’s March 18, 2003 letter to Congress authorizing the use of force against Iraq, includes the following paragraph:

(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.

Therefore, the Bush administration expressly justified the Iraq war to Congress by representing that Iraq planned, authorized, committed, or aided the 9/11 attacks.
Indeed, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind reports that the White House ordered the CIA to forge and backdate a document falsely linking Iraq with Muslim terrorists and 9/11 … and that the CIA complied with those instructions and in fact created the forgery, which was then used to justify war against Iraq. And see this.
Suskind also revealed that “Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official ‘that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.’ ”
Cheney made the false linkage between Iraq and 9/11 on many occasions.
For example, according to Raw Story, Cheney was still alleging a connection between Iraq and the alleged lead 9/11 hijacker in September 2003 – a year after it had been widely debunked. When NBC’s Tim Russert asked him about a poll showing that 69% of Americans believed Saddam Hussein had been involved in 9/11, Cheney replied:

It’s not surprising that people make that connection.

And even after the 9/11 Commission debunked any connection, Cheney said that the evidence is “overwhelming” that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein’s regime , that Cheney “probably” had information unavailable to the Commission, and that the media was not ‘doing their homework’ in reporting such ties.
Again, the Bush administration expressly justified the Iraq war by representing that Iraq planned, authorized, committed, or aided the 9/11 attacks. See this, this, this.
Even then-CIA director George Tenet said that the White House wanted to invade Iraq long before 9/11, and inserted “crap” in its justifications for invading Iraq.
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill – who sat on the National Security Council – also says that Bush planned the Iraq war before 9/11.
Top British officials say that the U.S. discussed Iraq regime change even before Bush took office.
And in 2000, Cheney said a Bush administration might “have to take military action to forcibly remove Saddam from power.” And see this.
The administration’s false claims about Saddam and 9/11 helped convince a large portion of the American public to support the invasion of Iraq. While the focus now may be on false WMD claims, it is important to remember that, at the time, the alleged link between Iraq and 9/11 was at least as important in many people’s mind as a reason to invade Iraq.
So the torture program was really all about “justifying” the ultimate war crime:  launching an unnecessary war of aggression based upon false pretenses.
Postscript:   It is beyond any real dispute that torture does not work to produce any useful, truthful intelligence.  Today, the following question made it to the front page of Reddit:

Why would the CIA torture if torture “doesn’t work”? Wouldn’t they want the most effective tool to gather intelligence?

The Senate Armed Services Committee report gave the answer.