TBR News February 2, 2016
The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C. February 2, 2016: ”The Iowa caucus is over, proving nothing at all. Iowa is filled with militant Jesus Freaks and Cruz is a religious big-mouth. He left wing press is crowing that Trump lost (though not by a big margin) but if Cruz happened to get into the White House, believe it that there would be all manner of nutty religious programs shoved down the national throat. Hillary, intelligent but obnoxious, won over Sanders by a tiny percentage point so look for the self-important bloggers to try to build a city out of soft mud. Current American politics is trivial, programmed and very boring. It is also iniconsequential because powerful business interests, including the banking industry, are the real puppet masters.”
Conversations with the Crow
On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.
Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal , Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment. Three months before, July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md. After Corson’s death, Trento and his Washington lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever
After Crowley’s death and Trento’s raid on the Crowley files, huge gaps were subsequently discovered by horrified CIA officials and when Crowley’s friends mentioned Gregory Douglas, it was discovered that Crowley’s son had shipped two large boxes to Douglas. No one knew their contents but because Douglas was viewed as an uncontrollable loose cannon who had done considerable damage to the CIA’s reputation by his on-going publication of the history of Gestapo-Mueller, they bent every effort both to identify the missing files and make some effort to retrieve them before Douglas made any use of them.
Douglas had been in close contact with Crowley and had long phone conversatins with him. He found this so interesting and informative that he taped and later transcribed them.
These conversations have been published in a book: ‘Conversations with the Crow” and this is an excerpt.
Conversation No. 50
Date, Friday, November 29, 1996
Commenced: 11:20 AM CST
Concluded: 11:55 AM CST
GD: How are you doing today, Robert?
RTC: Had a bad night, Gregory. Couldn’t get to sleep and then dozed off about five. Not a good night.
GD: Take sleeping pills?
RTC: I don’t like to start with things like that. You can get addicted to them so I just put up with it and I will take a nap after lunch. That will help. How are you today?
GD: I’m OK. Been working on the latest Müller book and I got bogged down. When that happens, you have to just stop everything and walk away for a while.
RTC: How is the book coming?
GD: Making it, Robert. Publisher tells me the first book is doing very well.
RTC: Any negative comments?
GD: Not to him.
RTC: Oh, there are some unhappy people back here. The rumors are out that you might do another book so I would be careful talking about its contents to anyone.
GD: Corson and Kimmel have been very interested.
RTC: That’s what I mean. Don’t tell either one of them a damned word.
GD: No, the more curious people get, the less I say. I know Tom is with the FBI so, naturally, I only engage in light conversations with him and Bill is too curious to suit me.
RTC: Bill like to run with the hares and hunt with the hounds, if you follow me.
GD: Yes. Typical.
RTC: Müller died in ’83, didn’t he? GD: Yes. Buried in Oakland.
RTC: Buried under his Company name? GD: No, his real one.
RTC: He sold paintings for us, as I remember.
GD: Oh, yes he did. Your people took over looted Nazi art from the Army after the war and then you know what happened to it.
RTC: Yes, of course. We sold it for profit and if we had any trouble with previous owners, we simply terminated them. Mostly hysterical Jews screaming about this or that but eventually, they were dealt with and business went on.
GD: Heini told me he took in millions.
RTC: Oh, yes, he did. Some of it we used for off the books operations, like snuffing Diem and other nasty businesses and the rest ended up in private hands, let us say.
GD: Well, I recall the beautiful Raphael hanging up in Heini’s office. A fruity looking fellow in a white shirt. It apparently came from a collection in Warsaw along with a Leonardo. The Leonardo was found and sent back but the Raphael ended up with the Gestapo and Heini hid it and later went back for it. Of course he could never sell it but it looked so nice in his home. I can imagine the howls of rage if the Polacks found out about it.
RTC: Yes, indeed. God, how many such scenes we had to take care of.
GD: Terminate with extreme prejudice? RTC: No, that term is used for in-house problems. Like the unfortunate fellow who shot himself in the back of the head and jumped off his little boat with weights on his feet. Things like that.
GD: And Olson?
RTC: Well, he was potential trouble so he did a full gainer out of a hotel window. It wasn’t the long fall that did him in, Gregory, but that sudden stop at the bottom.
GD: Müller told me about that. He said unwanted people like Forrestal rained down all over Washington until he introduced the heart attack drug. He used to feel sorry for people down below. I mean, some woman taking mail to the corner box gets an unwanted individual landing on top of her. Or imagine someone just bought a new Packard and there is a huge mess on their crushed roof and brains splattered all over the rest of the car. No, Heini was right about the heart attacks. Much more plausible and certainly less messy.
RTC: I agree.
GD: Diem?
RTC: Oh that business. I was on the inside with that one. What a mess but typical. Diem and his brother ran Vietnam and were trying to kill off the Buddhists. Kennedy had no idea what was going on over there and was waffling about pouring American troops into the country. The Diem family were crooked as hell and very, very nasty and demanding. Thee were two camps here, Gregory. The first one wanted a major effort there to stop Communism dead in its tracks and the other felt that such actions would become a bottomless pit.
GD: In the event, they were right.
RTC: Yes, but that is now, based on hindsight, but at the time, no one knew just what to do. We were technically only advising Diem. We had a deal with the French, at least the Company did, to support any régime that would protect their interest there. Lots of rubber and there was also untapped oil fields offshore. Jack was an idealist at times and got pulled this way and that. I mean we felt that a strong military presence there was good. We could use that country as a base of operations to expand into Laos and other areas but we had to act like we were supporting the democratic movements in Saigon. Diem was a vicious dictator and was surrounded with totally corrupt officials so he was not a good image for us. After we talked about it somewhat, it was decided to get rid of him and his brother and put in new people. We talked with dissident generals and pretty well set up a putsch. The idea was not to run him out of the country but to kill both of them and set an example for others.
GD: Was Kennedy in on it? RTC: OF course, he knew in advance. We tarted it up and he went for it. But kept waffling this way and that so we just told the generals to go ahead. They grabbed the two of them and chopped them both up with bayonets in the back on an armored car. I personally told our people there that it ought to be done and the bodies tossed out on the street as an example to others.
GD: Admiral Byng.
RTC: Yes, just so. Kennedy was presented with a fiat and went along.
GD: And what about the usual Congressional investigations? RTC: We did what we always do, Gregory. Private talks with key people on the hill and the whole thing is rigged from the beginning.
GD: You told them the truth? RTC: Oh, be a realist here. Of course not. We lie to Congress and the White House every day. We know so much about all of them, just like old Hoover did, that they shut up and we have our people at the New York Times write things up the way we wish. And then the public goes off and watches a football game and opens another beer.
GD: Could any of this ever get out? RTC: No. Say some gung ho reporter wants to do a story on how we killed Diem or something else like that. We would hear about it at once because we have our people in all the major papers and television offices so we would get the word right away. The usual drill is to call up the editor and have a talk with him and the reporter gets assigned to inspect whale shit somewhere.
GD: And if he gets too curious or won’t give up?
RTC: There’s always the heart attack or the road accident.
GD: Of falling out of the window.
RTC: Not much of that anymore. As you say, too messy.
GD: Heini used to off them and then turn up the heat in their house until they got really ripe.
RTC: Not personally? GD: No, he used Arno to off people. Arno is a real jewel. He’s a Lutheran minister at the present time but Heini told me once that Arno loved the knife and some of his victims looked like something Picasso would have painted
RTC: (Laughter) Yes, well, we had some of those too.
GD: I recall the Diem business. That was the turning point over there. The hawks won out.
RTC: What a mess that was, Gregory. Now mind you, I felt that Diem just would not listen to us and was causing such bad publicity here by his undemocratic behavior that I really don’t think we had much of a choice. Kennedy was a twit and proved to be so unreliable in the business that we eventually decided he had to go too. Johnson would do what he was told but Kennedy was as independent as a hog on ice so onto the face of the fifty cent piece and into the hearts of all Americans. You won’t find Johnson on a coin but he put plenty of them into his pocket. Give me the crook over the idealist any time.
GD: I agree. Anyway, I am writing the art business up for the new book. They never took anything really big but all the small stuff fell through the cracks. Müller used to call it degenerate filth and that Hitler was right about it but I notice he never burnt any of the Klees or Picassos. You can get money for all of that and I find that money has such a soothing effect, Robert.
RTC: Yes, I believe it does. It is the root of all evil, after all.
GD: No, the actual Biblical quotation is that the love of money is the root of all evil.
RTC: One or the other.
(Concluded at 11:55 AM CST)
Remember Kosovo?
We “liberated” it into chaos
February 1, 2016
by Justin Raimondo
Tom Dispatch
In Pristina, the capital of the make-believe country of Kosovo, there is a street named after Bill Clinton, and a statue of Bill – done in the Socialist Realist style – towers over the main square. They also named a boulevard after George W. Bush, perhaps to hedge their bets after the Republicans took the White House. You couldn’t ask for a more “pro-American” country than this one: but that’s just on the surface. Undercurrents of rabid nationalism – and real resentment of the Americans and Europeans who have been baby-sitting the Kosovars all these years – is now breaking out that threatens whatever modicum of stability Kosovo has ever known.
Kosovo declared its independence in 2008, but in reality it is the US Embassy, rather than the Parliament building in Pristina, that is the epicenter of governance in what amounts to an American protectorate in the heart of Europe. And this essentially colonialist relationship, combined with Bill Clinton’s decision in the 1990s to unleash the often violent spirit of Albanian nationalism, is rupturing the fragile state apparatus.
Twenty or so years after the American “liberation” of Kosovo forcibly separated it from the former Yugoslavia, the country is a mess. Unemployment is massive: crime is pandemic; and an ultra-nationalist movement, Vetevendosje, is on the rise. Vetevendosje wants to achieve the dream of the old Kosovo Liberation Army: a “Greater Albania.” Toward this end, the ultra-nationalists, who polled some 14% of the vote in the last elections, are demanding union with Albania – just as the KLA did. Their leader, one Albin Kurti, disdains representative democracy, which he sees as an instrument of “neo-liberalism”:
“We think that representative democracy is not enough – direct participatory democracy ensures a more vibrant society. Representative democracy is illegitimate, it creates alienation and limits choice.”
In short, Kurti and his comrades want mob rule. Furthermore, they want a crackdown on what they see as Serb irredentism: a recent agreement, presided over by the US and the European Union, granted beleaguered Serbs in the northern part of the country the right to form a union of Serb municipalities. The nationalists abhor this, and have launched a series of violent protests, not only in the streets but also in the halls of the Parliament. Vetevendosje MPs have let loose with tear gas grenades at least nine times, by my count, in order to bring the proceedings to a halt.
The latest violence occurred this month when 10,000 Albanian nationalist demonstrators converged on government headquarters, set it afire, and went on a rampage that didn’t end until police dispersed them with ample quantities of tear gas. Opposition leaders have said they will not relent until either new elections are called, or a referendum on union with Albania is scheduled. The government responds with the assertion that the protests are designed to drag the whole country into “crime and anarchy.”
Yet one could easily make the case that “crime and anarchy” has been the rule ever since Kosovo was “liberated” US force of arms. Since “liberation day,” the minority Serb population has been subjected to murder, confiscation of property, the burning of their churches, and their effective marginalization within the new order. Indeed, in the north, where a small number still hang on, they must be protected by KFOR troops, including 641 American soldiers rotated in from US bases in Germany. In view of the recent violence, and perhaps in anticipation of more, it looks like that number is being beefed up with National Guard units.
Indeed, Kosovo has been deemed a “Mafia state” by none other than the Council of Europe, which has been investigating the trafficking of human organs by highly placed members of the Kosovo government, including Prime Minister Hacim Thaci, the KLA commander and Albanian Mafia “godfather” who is the most powerful man in Kosovo. As the Guardian reported:
“Kosovo’s prime minister is the head of a ‘mafia-like’ Albanian group responsible for smuggling weapons, drugs and human organs through eastern Europe, according to a Council of Europe inquiry report on organised crime.
“Hashim Thaçi is identified as the boss of a network that began operating criminal rackets in the runup to the 1998-99 Kosovo war, and has held powerful sway over the country’s government since.
The report of the two-year inquiry, which cites FBI and other intelligence sources, has been obtained by the Guardian. It names Thaçi as having over the last decade exerted ‘violent control’ over the heroin trade. Figures from Thaçi’s inner circle are also accused of taking captives across the border into Albania after the war, where a number of Serbs are said to have been murdered for their kidneys, which were sold on the black market.”
This has been systematically covered up by Kosovo’s American and British overlords, but the Germans are not so tolerant. A report in Die Welt traces the jailing of three German intelligence agents in Kosovo to revenge for Berlin’s compilation of “ a 67-page long, hard-hitting analysis by the BND about organized crime in Kosovo and a confidential report contracted by the German military, the Bundeswehr.”
Die Welt goes on to inform us that:
“In contrast to the CIA and MI6, both German intelligence reports accuse Thaci as well as former Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj and Xhavit Haliti of the parliamentary leadership of far-reaching involvement in organized crime.
“The BND writes: ‘The key players (including Haliti, Haradinaj, and Thaci) are intimately involved in inter-linkages between politics, business, and organized crime structures in Kosovo.’ At the end of the 1990s, the report accuses Thaci of leading a ‘criminal network operating throughout Kosovo.’ At that time he was a co-founder of the Kosovo Liberation Army, and led the Albanian delegation at the 1999 conference at Rambouillet that preceded the Kosovo war.”
The US wasn’t blind to Thaci’s criminal career: they just didn’t care. Madeleine Albright was making goo-goo eyes at him, he was hailed by Joe Biden as “the George Washington of his country” and he was lionized by the Clinton administration’s media camarilla. When the Mafia leader came to Washington, he was greeted enthusiastically by Hillary Clinton, who babbled:“It’s a great pleasure for me to welcome Prime Minister Thaci back to Washington and here to the State Department. The prime minister has shown great leadership, and he has helped to promote democracy, stability, and the rule of law in Kosovo. And he is leading his country toward the future that the people of Kosovo desire and that the United States wants to see for them, full partnership in European and Euro-Atlantic institutions.”
That was in 2012. Today, as Kosovo unravels, and the genie she and her husband let out of the bottle – Albanian ultra-nationalism – threatens to start another war in Central Europe, no one is holding her accountable. Yet it was Hillary who nagged Bill into bombing Belgrade and hooking up with the virulent Kosovo Liberation Army, which today constitutes one of the most powerful criminal gangs in Europe. Kosovo is the heroin capital of the continent, and Albanian ultra-nationalists are pushing for confrontation with neighboring Montenegro and Macedonia, as well as Serbia.
Libya, Syria, Iraq, Kosovo – these countries, which lie in ruins, are grotesque monuments to the criminality of American “regime-change” operations, which have wreaked havoc everywhere they’ve been successful. With a record like this, it’s incredible that the same pack of buzzards in Washington are allowed to go on their merry way, without having to answer to anyone for their crimes. Indeed, the two leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination, Mrs. Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders, both supported this disastrous war: Sanders defends his vote in favor of it to this day. Yet is he held accountable by his “anti-interventionist” supporters? Of course not.
In a disgusting display of victor’s “justice,” the leaders of the Serbian resistance to the Albanian onslaught were hauled before the self-styled “International War Crimes Tribunal” at the Hague – a kangaroo court – and sentenced to long jail terms, while thugs like Thaci were elevated to high office and given millions in US “aid” to dole out to their Mafia hit men. That Thaci and his enablers – the Clintons and the European politicians who participated in the rape of Serbia – aren’t behind bars for destroying an entire nation is indicative of the kind of world we live in – a Bizarro World, where up is down, the guilty are hailed as saints, and the innocent are consigned to obloquy.
Oregon town tense amid dueling protests after wildlife refuge takeover
February 1, 2016
by Jimmy Urquhart
Reuters
Burns, Oregon-Tension flared in the deeply divided town of Burns, Oregon, on Monday as 500 demonstrators on both sides of an armed occupation of a federal wildlife refuge squared off, brandishing signs and yelling at each other days after one of the occupiers was shot dead by state police.
Only four people remain at the refuge after several were arrested or left last week.
Residents angered by the four-week presence of the armed occupiers and their supporters started crowding the streets in front of the Harney County Courthouse in late morning, seeking to serve as a counter-protest to a noon (2000 GMT) demonstration called at the courthouse by supporters of the occupation.
Shortly before noon, the mostly residential streets around the courthouse in this community of less than 3,000 had swelled with protesters – about 300 opposed to the occupiers and 200, some of them from out of town, in favor. Some of the demonstrators had sidearms.
Those opposed to the militia shouted, “Go home!” Supporters, some carrying signs with a photograph of LaVoy Finicum, an occupier who was shot by police last week, shouted back, “We are home.”
The tense demonstrations continued for nearly four hours.
“We’re trying to make the militia leave our town,” Andrew Snyder, 20, said before the two sides faced off.
Like many here, Snyder agrees with the occupiers’ goal of reducing federal control over lands where cattle graze. But he said the occupation of the refuge is wrong and that they should take their fight to court.
“I want to feel safe in my town,” said Lindsay Davies, 37, a mother of three who says her young children are afraid of the armed protesters walking around the community. “It feels like a threat when people are carrying guns and you see guns all over the place.”
Finicum, 54, was killed on Wednesday by police during the arrests of occupation leader Ammon Bundy and several other protesters at a traffic stop. Bundy on Tuesday will challenge a judge’s order that he be held without bail pending trial on federal conspiracy charges.
The occupation began Jan. 2, when Bundy and at least a dozen followers took the refuge to protest federal control of millions of acres of western land.
Over the weekend, the remaining occupiers said they lost cellular and Internet connections, the Oregonian newspaper reported.
“That’s part of the negotiations and we’re not commenting on the negotiations,” said FBI spokeswoman Beth Ann Steele, speaking for the joint task force of law enforcement agencies working on the standoff.
(Writing and additional reporting by Sharon Bernstein in Sacramento, California; Editing by Bill Trott, Bernard Orr)
Obama and the Pentagon Plan Massive Military Escalation and the Media Barely Seem to Care
U.S. troops are going back into Iraq, our presence in Libya is escalating, and Obama has widened the war in Afghanistan—all without much of a public debate.
January 27, 2016
by Adam Johnson
AlterNet
Almost five years after the United States and its NATO allies launched a campaign in Libya to overthrow Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the United States is on the verge of massively escalating its military operations in the war-torn country. According to the New York Times, the new effort is “expected to include airstrikes and raids by elite American troops.” It is unclear how long this newest effort will last.
The announcement comes on the heels of U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter announcing combat troops were going back to Iraq last week. While U.S special forces have been conducting “clandestine reconnaissance missions in Libya to identify militant leaders and map out their networks” over the past year, the New York Times report marks the first time overt combat troops will be deployed in the North African nation.
The 2011 campaign was itself something of a bait and switch. What was originally sold as simply a no-fly zone quickly became regime change. A few weeks after the UN-sanctioned bombing of Libya’s infrastructure and air capacity, the scope of the campaign pivoted when President Obama, along with Presidents Sarkozy and Cameron of France and the UK respectively, announced the entirely new objective: NATO airstrikes, in concert with ongoing CIA support of rebels, to overthrow the Qaddafi government.
After this was quickly achieved, the pundit classes rallied to congratulate a job well done. As Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept noted Wednesday:
War advocates such as Anne-Marie Slaughter and Nicholas Kristof were writing columns celebrating their prescience and mocking war opponents as discredited, and the New York Times published a front-page article declaring: “U.S. Tactics in Libya May be a Model for Other Efforts.”
It was widely expected that Hillary Clinton, one of the leading advocates for and architects of the bombing campaign, would be regarded as a Foreign Policy Visionary for the grand Libya success: “We came, we saw, he died,” Clinton sociopathically boasted about the mob rape and murder of Qaddafi while guffawing on 60 Minutes.
Despite the fanfare at the “overthrow” of Qaddafi (who suffered a brutal death at the hands of a mob), not much has been made of the U.S. military’s slow escalation of its involvement in Libya over the past year. This time the objective, much like in Iraq after the U.S. deposed its leader, is destroying the presence of ISIS, a process that could take, in the words of former Defense Secretary Panetta, “thirty years.” And it’s an escalation that has largely gone under the public’s radar.
Slowly trickling wars are a common feature in U.S. policy. The latest war in Iraq against ISIS was originally sold as “limited,” “humanitarian” airstrikes to save the Yezidi trapped on a mountain from ISIS, and it has now gone on for over a year and a half, spans two countries, and soon will include “boots on the ground.” All this with neither the corporate media nor Congress, which hasn’t yet brought military authorization to a vote, paying much attention.This new level of indifference on the part of the public about what is an ISIS war spiraling into a massive global effort has even bothered the normally hawkish Times. In the context of Libya, it wrote:
This significant escalation is being planned without a meaningful debate in Congress about the merits and risks of a military campaign that is expected to include airstrikes and raids by elite American troops.
That is deeply troubling. A new military intervention in Libya would represent a significant progression of a war that could easily spread to other countries on the continent. It is being planned as the American military burrows more deeply into battlegrounds in Syria and Iraq, where American ground troops are being asked to play an increasingly hands-on role in the fight.
It’s always difficult to tell if public indifference is what leads to a media blackout or the other way around, but the Times is correct that a broad public discussion about the wisdom of committing to potentially decades-long military efforts is disturbingly absent.
When the U.S. began its anti-ISIL efforts in August 2014, ISIL was in two countries. Now, after tens of thousands of aerial ordinances have been dropped on two continents, ISIS now has a presence in over 20 countries. The U.S. has even expanded its war in Afghanistan to include ISIS, the White House announced last Thursday. None of the major presidential candidates, including the most progressive member of the U.S. Congress, Bernie Sanders, outwardly opposes the U.S.’ current anti-ISIL efforts, including the once-unpopular drone program.
Over the past two weeks, the Defense Department and the Obama administration have been peppering the media with their plans to massively increase the war effort in Libya as well as Iraq, Afghanistan and potentially elsewhere. All the evidence points to the fact that war-makers in Washington and Brussels are gearing up for a major effort that could very well last a long time. The question is, will we ever have a public debate about it?
World Health Organisation declares Zika virus public health emergency
UN body acts over mosquito-borne virus to trigger funding for prevention campaign and research to establish exact link to serious birth defects
February 1, 2016
by Sarah Boseley and Jonathan Watts
The Guardian
The World Health Organisation has declared that the clusters of brain-damaged babies born in Brazil – linked to but not proven to be caused by the Zika virus – constitute a public health emergency of international concern.
The declaration, made by the WHO director Margaret Chan, will trigger funding for research to try to establish whether the Zika virus, spread by mosquitoes, is responsible for the large numbers of babies born with abnormally small heads in Brazil. It will also put resources behind a massive effort to prevent pregnant women becoming infected and, through mosquito control, stop the virus spreading.
Chan called the birth of thousands of babies with microcephaly “an extraordinary event and a public health threat to other parts of the world”. She was speaking following a meeting of the WHO’s international health regulations emergency committee, summoned to advise the director general on whether to make the declaration, which calls in international resources and expertise.
“Members of the committee agreed that the situation meets the conditions for a public health emergency of international concern. I have accepted this advice,” she said.
Chan, who was criticised for being slow to make a similar declaration while Ebola spread across west Africa, sidestepped the question when asked if she felt that was a factor in the response to the Zika crisis in Brazil.
“It is important to realise that when the evidence first becomes available of such a serious condition like microcephaly and other congenital abnormalities, we need to take action, including precautionary measures,” she said.
Tropical disease experts involved in the Ebola epidemic applauded the declaration. “The WHO faced heavy criticism for waiting too long to declare the Ebola outbreak a public health emergency and they should be congratulated for being far more proactive this time,” said Dr Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust. “Today’s declaration will give the WHO the authority and resources it needs to lead the international response to Zika.”
Chan called for countries to refrain from imposing any sort of travel restrictions on those Latin American countries where the Zika virus is spreading.
Jonathan Ball, professor of molecular virology at Nottingham University, said: “A kneejerk response would be to ban travel and trade with countries affected, but the truth is that the potential problem is much wider. It wouldn’t really be feasible to lock down the affected countries to try to stop the spread of a virus that is carried by the Aedes mosquito, especially when affected and unaffected countries border one another.
“Until populations can build up sufficient immunity, either through natural infection or through vaccination, then the risk to pregnant women is real and therefore this group need to take extra care to avoid becoming exposed.”
Prof David Heymann, chair of the emergency committee, stressed that the most serious issue was not the Zika virus itself, which causes a mild illness, but the microcephaly cases in babies. “Zika alone would never be a public health emergency of international concern,” he said. “It is not a clinically serious infection.” For that reason, he said, it was a very difficult decision.
The microcephaly clusters so far have appeared in Brazil and – in 2014 before anybody realised the significance – Polynesia. That, said Heymann, showed “it appears to be spreading”.
Brazil has dispatched hundreds of thousands of troops on mosquito-eradication campaigns in the the worst affected areas, but the government is struggling to comprehend let alone cope with the epidemic.
While reported cases have spiked since the virus was first identified in the country last year, officials admit their estimate of 1.5m cases is based on guesswork.
“Eighty percent of the people infected by Zika do not develop significant symptoms,” the health minister Marcelo Castro told Reuters. “A large number of people have the virus with no symptoms, so the situation is more serious that we can imagine.”
In an effort to get a clearer picture, the authorities have instructed local health authorities to report on all cases from next week, when most states should have the equipment and personnel to carry out Zica tests. It will ban people who have the virus from donating blood.
Despite the lack of reliable data, Castro said researchers were convinced that the virus was the cause of a spike in reported cases of microcephaly. A link has not been proven, but concerns are growing because the disease and the abnormality have both risen sharply.
Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, acknowledged at the weekend that the country was losing the battle. “We do not have a vaccine for Zika yet. The only thing we can do is fight the mosquito,” she told reporters during a visit to the emergency headquarters of the anti-Zika campaign. “As long as [the mosquitoes] are reproducing, we are all losing the battle. We have to mobilise to win it”.
Public health officials, backed by 220,000 troops, have stepped up efforts to kill breeding grounds of the Aedes mosquito, particularly in the poverty stricken northeast, where most cases have been concentrated.
On Monday, Rousseff signed a law allowing health officials access to any building to eradicate breeding grounds.
The new law allows health officials access to all homes, and public and private buildings, even if the property’s owner cannot be located. Officials can request backup from police to raid any building suspected of being a mosquito breeding ground.
An estimated 1.5 million Brazilians have caught Zika, a virus first detected in Africa in the 1940s and unknown in the Americas until it appeared in May. The Pan-American Health Organisation said the virus had since spread to 24 countries and territories in the hemisphere.
By next month, the labs will have a test that can detect all three viruses borne by the Aedes mosquito – dengue, Chikungunya and Zika. The test, however, will only be effective during the initial infection period of five days.
One of the main drivers of the WHO’s declaration of an emergency is to fund and launch studies to find out where there is a definitive association with the Zika virus. Chan said: The evidence is growing and it is getting stronger. We need a coordinated international response to get to the bottom of this.”
“It is a very complicated issue,” said Heymann. “To figure out the link with Zika virus, large numbers of cases of microcephaly have to be traced and assessed and the exposure of the mother to Zika virus has to be established. But the USA is working with Brazil and studies will start in the next two weeks.”
Chen said surveillance needed to be strengthened. Scientists involved in the studies will need reliable reports of every case of microcephaly, which may not automatically be reported to doctors, especially in remote and poorer areas of Latin America. The WHO declaration will also encourage research and development of a vaccine against the virus and reliable diagnostic tests.
However, the Brazilian president’s chief of staff said on Monday it would take researchers between three and five years to develop a vaccine against the virus.
Jacques Wagner told reporters that Brazilian researchers are working with researchers in the United States.
In his words, “If we are really lucky, it could be three years. But it could be between three and five years.”
Domestic Control Measures
by Harry von Johnson, PhD
FEMA And REX 84 In April 1984, President Reagan signed Presidential Directorate Number 54 that allowed FEMA to engage in a secret national “readiness exercise” under the code name of REX 84. The exercise was to test FEMA’s readiness to assume military authority in the event of a “State of Domestic National Emergency” concurrent with the launching of a direct United States military operation in Central America. The plan called for the deputation of U.S. military and National Guard units so that they could legally be used for domestic law enforcement. These units would be assigned to conduct sweeps and take into custody an estimated 400,000 undocumented Central American immigrants in the United States.
The immigrants would be interned at 10 detention centers to be set up at military bases throughout the country. REX 84 was so highly guarded that special metal security doors were placed on the fifth floor of the FEMA building in Washington, D.C. Even long-standing employees of the Civil Defense of the Federal Executive Department possessing the highest possible security clearances were not being allowed through the newly installed metal security doors. Only personnel wearing a special red Christian cross or crucifix lapel pin were allowed into the premises. Lt. Col. North was responsible for drawing up the emergency plan, which U.S. Attorney General William French Smith opposed vehemently. The plan called for the suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the government over to FEMA, appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments and the declaration of Martial Law. The Presidential Executive Orders to support such a plan were already in place. The plan also advocated the rounding up and transfer to “assembly centers or relocation camps” of a least 21 million American Negroes in the event of massive rioting or disorder, not unlike the rounding up of the Jews in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. The second known time that FEMA stood by was in 1990 when Desert Storm was enacted. Prior to President Bush’s invasion of Iraq, FEMA began to draft new legislation to increase its already formidable powers. One of the elements incorporated into the plan was to set up operations within any state or locality without the prior permission of local or state authorities. Such prior permission has always been required in the past. Much of the mechanism being set into place was in anticipation of the economic collapse of the Western World. The war with Iraq may have been conceived as a ploy to boost the bankrupt economy, but it only pushed the West into deeper recession. Rex 84, short for Readiness Exercise 1984, was a classified “scenario and drill” developed by the United States federal government to suspend the United States Constitution, declare martial law, place military commanders in charge of state and local governments, and detain large numbers of American citizens who are deemed to be “national security threats”, in the event that the President declares a “State of National Emergency”. The plan states, events causing such a declaration would be widespread U.S. opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad, such as if the United States were to directly invade Central America. To combat what the government perceived as “subversive activities”, the plan also authorized the military to direct ordered movements of civilian populations at state and regional levels.
Rex 84 was written by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who was both National Security Council White House Aide, and NSC liaison to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and John Brinkerhoff, the deputy director of “national preparedness” programs for the FEMA. They patterned the plan on a 1970 report written by FEMA chief Louis Giuffrida, at the Army War College, which proposed the detention of up to 21 million “American Negroes”, if there were a black militant uprising in the United States. Existence of a master military contingency plan (of which REX-84 was a part), “Garden Plot” and a similar earlier exercise, “Lantern Spike”, were originally revealed by journalist Ron Ridenhour, who summarized his findings in an article in CounterSpy. Operation ‘Cable Splicer’ and ‘Garden Plot’ are the two sub programs which will be implemented once the Rex 84 program is initiated for its proper purpose. Garden Plot is the program to control the population. ‘Cable Splicer’ is the program for an orderly takeover of the state and local governments by the federal government. FEMA is the executive arm of the coming police state and thus will head up all operations. The Presidential Executive Orders already listed on the Federal Register also are part of the legal framework for this operation.
The camps all have railroad facilities as well as roads leading to and from the detention facilities. Many also have an airport nearby. The majority of the camps can house a population of 20,000 prisoners. Currently, the largest of these facilities is just outside of Fairbanks, Alaska. The Alaskan facility is a massive mental health facility and can hold approximately 2 million people.
Executive Orders associated with FEMA that would suspend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These Executive Orders have been on record for nearly 30 years and could be enacted by the stroke of a Presidential pen:..
EXECUTIVE ORDER 10990
allows the government to take over all modes of transportation and control of highways and seaports.
EXECUTIVE ORDER 10995
allows the government to seize and control the communication media.
EXECUTIVE ORDER 10997
allows the government to take over all electrical power, gas, petroleum, fuels and minerals.
EXECUTIVE ORDER 10998
allows the government to seize all means of transportation, including personal cars, trucks or vehicles of any kind and total control over all highways, seaports, and waterways.
EXECUTIVE ORDER 10999
allows the government to take over all food resources and farms.
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11000
allows the government to mobilize civilians into work brigades under government supervision.
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11001
allows the government to take over all health, education and welfare functions.
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11002
designates the Postmaster General to operate a national registration of all persons.
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11003
allows the government to take over all airports and aircraft, including commercial aircraft.
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11004
allows the Housing and Finance Authority to relocate communities, build new housing with public funds, designate areas to be abandoned, and establish new locations for populations.
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11005
allows the government to take over railroads, inland waterways and public storage facilities.
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11051
specifies the responsibility of the Office of Emergency Planning and gives authorization to put all Executive Orders into effect in times of increased international tensions and economic or financial crisis.
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11310
grants authority to the Department of Justice to enforce the plans set out in Executive Orders, to institute industrial support, to establish judicial and legislative liaison, to control all aliens, to operate penal and correctional institutions, and to advise and assist the President.
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11049
assigns emergency preparedness function to federal departments and agencies, consolidating 21 operative Executive Orders issued over a fifteen year period.
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11921
allows the Federal Emergency Preparedness Agency to develop plans to establish control over the mechanisms of production and distribution, of energy sources, wages, salaries, credit and the flow of money in U.S. financial institution in any undefined national emergency. It also provides that when a state of emergency is declared by the President, Congress cannot review the action for six months. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has broad powers in every aspect of the nation. General Frank Salzedo, chief of FEMA’s Civil Security Division stated in a 1983 conference that he saw FEMA’s role as a “new frontier in the protection of individual and governmental leaders from assassination, and of civil and military installations from sabotage and/or attack, as well as prevention of dissident groups from gaining access to U.S. opinion, or a global audience in times of crisis.” FEMA’s powers were consolidated by President Carter to incorporate the…
National Security Act of 1947
allows for the strategic relocation of industries, services, government and other essential economic activities, and to rationalize the requirements for manpower, resources and production facilities.
1950 Defense Production Act
gives the President sweeping powers over all aspects of the economy.
Act of August 29, 1916
authorizes the Secretary of the Army, in time of war, to take possession of any transportation system for transporting troops, material, or any other purpose related to the emergency.
International Emergency Economic Powers Act
enables the President to seize the property of a foreign country or national. These powers were transferred to FEMA in a sweeping consolidation in 1979.
‘Pogrom atmosphere spreading in Germany’ – head of Leipzig police
February 2, 2016
RT
At least five reported attacks on asylum seekers’ homes in Saxony, eastern Germany, over the weekend has prompted the head of local police to voice fears of a “pogrom atmosphere spreading with dangerous intensity” across the country.
“I am really very worried,” Leipzig police commissioner Bernd Merbitz told the Leipziger Volkszeitung daily. “We are moving toward a situation in which violent mood-makers intentionally use people’s fear to whip up hysteria against asylum policy and to justify violence against refugees,” he added.
Two of the affected homes are located in Leipzig, Saxony’s largest city, with another in Chemnitz, in the northern foothills of the Ore Mountains
One of the incidents reportedly took place in Holzhausen, in south-east Leipzig. An unknown person broke into a building housing asylum seekers and attempted to ignite flammable liquid, the investigators reported. The fire was extinguished before it spread across the building.
Another incident took place in Grimma, a town in the Free State of Saxony. An assailant threw large rocks through the window of a building where asylum seekers are based. Luckily, there was nobody in the room during the attack, Leipziger Volkszeitung reported.
In the third incident, which reportedly occurred Saturday night, a group of five to seven people tried to ignite a self-made explosive device in front of a future refugee accommodation center in Leipzig’s Meusdorf district, Leipziger Volkszeitung reported.
“My Saxon police colleagues see themselves increasingly under aggression and stress. This is unprecedented [violence] and unacceptable,” Merbitz said.
Germany could let in some 1.5 million refugees this year alone – last year the number stood at 1.1 million. The country is preparing to allocate tens of billions of euros for migrant accommodation, integration and language lessons.
The sharp increase of the number of migrants in Germany has also caused a spike in incidents between newcomers and locals. Last month more than 20 refugees were identified as having been among those suspected of taking part in attacks on women in Cologne. The incident occurred on New Year’s Eve when hundreds of men, allegedly from North African states, attacked women, robbing and sexually harassing them.
Over 1,200 people fell victim to attacks on New Year’s Eve in German cities, more than a half of them suffering sexual assaults, State Interior Minister Ralf Jager said.
Following the attacks in Cologne, volunteers organized a group of guards to patrol the streets of Dusseldorf “in order to prevent violence and make it clear that with our presence it will absolutely not be tolerated.” The group’s page on Facebook, entitled ‘Dusseldorf on alert,’ has already gained more than 14,000 followers.
The population’s opinion regarding the country’s open-door policy has clearly shifted over the last year, with a surge in support for the right-wing, anti-migration AfD (Alternative for Germany) party.
Frauke Petry, one of AfD’s leaders, recently made waves when she said that police should have the right to use firearms, if necessary, to prevent migrants and refugees from crossing the German border illegally.
Opinion: No grounds for an all-clear
Amid the joy that Donald Trump did not win the Iowa Republican caucus, it must not be forgotten that Ted Cruz, an arch-conservative, evangelical hardliner, did, says DW’s Ines Pohl.
February 2, 2016
DW
The news regarding the Republican caucus is not good. For at least two reasons: A man who insults women shamelessly, is universally suspicious of Muslims and advocates building a high wall on the border with Mexico won 24.3 percent of the votes. Many will be relieved that he did not garner more to actually win, but they should be on their guard.
With his racist and misogynistic rhetoric, Donald Trump has come second place in the Republican presidential nomination race. This is reason for concern.
Plenty was written about the fact that the Iowa caucus was largely about expectations and that accordingly the favorites Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump had most to lose. That’s true.
But in all the analyses and covers stories about expectation management, how the other candidates were hoping to win over the small, evangelical state with their programs was sometimes ignored.
That is the second piece of bad news. Ted Cruz is a real evangelical hardliner who has spoken out clearly against equal rights for minorities such as homosexuals or Muslims and against abortion rights and has said he would reverse the Iran deal and abolish Obamacare. On the day of the caucus, he told his audience in a small gym that he would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s legal capital if he became president – to thundering applause. A questionable understanding of Middle East policy.
He received 28 percent of the Republican votes. Ted Cruz, it can be said, is arch-conservative going on reactionary. While Donald Trump can be coarse and boorish, there is still some hope that his sheer sense of business might prevent him from causing utter chaos if ever he were voted into a position of responsibility. It says a lot about the Republican camp that one finds oneself looking for something positive in Trump.
Sanders’ success will shape the campaign
What about the Democrats? Bernie Sanders has succeeded in bringing Hillary Clinton and her “Operation Iowa”, planned with military precision, into major distress. In the end, she may win by a whisker and this will be important for her. But not for Bernie Sanders or his supporters, who celebrated bagging around 50 percent of the Democratic votes at an airport hotel as a clear victory. There was an uproar when the gray-haired ex-revolutionary and youth hero made his appearance at around 11pm.
That’s the good news from Iowa. Nobody but Sanders’ most fervent fans really believes that the self-proclaimed Democratic socialist can actually win a majority in the whole country and secure the Democratic nomination. His ideas are too far-fetched, his political concepts too elaborate and his agenda too narrow. In terms of foreign policy, he simply cannot compete with Hillary Clinton, as has become increasingly clear in the debates. But he and his grassroots supporters are now the counterweight needed by Clinton so that she is not forced to go in a certain direction by Trump and Cruz. She has to uphold her liberal ideas of society if she does not want to give Sanders more ammunition.
The election campaign has now begun in earnest. It will be dirty, as the past few days in Iowa made clear. Therefore, it can only be good news that a decent dreamer is still in the game and will still be able to help shape the debate for some time.
Massive spammer jailed for two years over millions of illegal texts
Phillip Fleitz, 31, was ‘architect’ of scheme that mined cellphone numbers and bombarbed them with messages that conned users into clicking marketing links
February 2, 2016
AP
A man who helped send millions of illegal spam messages to US and international cellphones and computers has been sentenced to 27 months in federal prison.
Phillip Fleitz, 31, was handcuffed and ordered to immediately begin serving the sentence by a federal judge in Pennsylvania.
Fleitz’s two co-defendants previously received probation for their roles and defense attorney Stephen Capone argued Fleitz should receive a similar sentence.
But the judge agreed with US attorney Jimmy Kitchen, who said “Fleitz was the architect. It was his idea. He was the first to do it” and enlisted the others.
“This was a sophisticated and serious scheme,” US District Judge Maurice Cohill Jr said in imposing the sentence.
Fleitz was one of a dozen US residents charged with marketing illegal computer skills on Darkode.com, a cybercriminal marketplace disabled by the FBI in July. Seventy people in the US and 19 other countries were targeted in that takedown.
From September 2011 to February 2013 Fleitz and two others earned between $2,000 to $3,000 weekly by conspiring to violate a 2003 law designed to protect cellphone and computer users from unwanted marketing and pornography emails and text messages.
Fleitz has acknowledged operating the computer servers in China that the trio used to infiltrate personal computers of hundreds of thousands to millions of people in the United States and abroad.
Naveed Ahmed, 27, was sentenced to two years’ probation in 2015. He wrote a program that helped match cellphone numbers with their carriers. That enabled the scammers to bombard the phones with unsolicited messages. Dewayne Watts, who is confined to his home for six months as part of his two-year probation, wrote the text messages meant to entice phone users to respond.
The computer and text-message spam both included internet links. Those who received the text messages were told they had won gift cards that could be accessed by clicking the links.
In reality those who responded were routed to web pages controlled by internet “cost per action” networks – marketing companies that gather email addresses and other personal information. Such companies are legal but using spam to drive traffic to them is not.
“I just want to say I’m sorry,” Fleitz said, adding that the rules and regulations governing such marketing are among the things that “make this country great” and should be followed. “I was stupid for not doing so.”