The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday it was too late to contain the swine flu outbreak in the United States.

CDC acting director Dr. Richard Besser told reporters in a telephone briefing it was likely too late to try to contain the outbreak, by vaccinating, treating or isolating people. “There are things that we see that suggest that containment is not very likely,” he said. He said the U.S. cases and Mexican cases are likely the same virus. “So far the genetic elements that we have looked at are the same.” But Besser said it was unclear why the virus was causing so many deaths in deaths in Mexico and such mild disease in the United States.

Source: Reuters

Missing vials of a potentially dangerous virus have prompted an Army investigation into the disappearance from a lab in Maryland.

The Army’s Criminal Investigation Command agents have been visiting Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, to investigate the disappearance of the vials. Christopher Grey, spokesman for the command, said this latest investigation has found “no evidence of criminal activity.”

The vials contained samples of Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis, a virus that sickens horses and can be spread to humans by mosquitoes. In 97 percent of cases, humans with the virus suffer flu-like symptoms, but it can be deadly in about 1 out of 100 cases, according to Caree Vander Linden, a spokeswoman for the Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. There is an effective vaccine for the disease and there hasn’t been an outbreak in the United States since 1971.

The vials had been at the research institute’s facility at Fort Detrick, home of the Army’s top biological research facility, for more than a decade. The three missing vials were among thousands of vials that were under the control of a senior scientist who retired in 2004. When another Fort Detrick scientist recently inventoried the retired scientist’s biological samples, he discovered that the three vials of the virus were missing. The original scientist’s records about his vials dated back to the days of paper-and-pen inventories.

During the investigation, the retired scientist and another former Fort Detrick researcher cooperated with investigating agents and, according to Vander Linden, they came back to the facility to help look for the vials.

Vander Linden said the investigators know that several years ago an entire freezer full of biological samples broke down and all the samples had to be safely destroyed. But a complete inventory of what was in the freezer was not done before the samples were destroyed. Vander Linden said there’s a “strong possibility” the vials were in that freezer and destroyed, but that isn’t known for sure.

This investigation comes two months after all research at the research institute facility at Fort Detrick was halted for a complete computer-based inventory of all disease samples at the fort. That inventory is expected to be complete before summer and may help solve the mystery of the three missing vials, officials said.

The Army investigation is in its final stages and is expected to be closed soon.

Source: CNN

You couldn’t make it up if you tried. AFP today reports that Al-Qaeda chief in Iraq, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, has been captured and arrested. The problem with this is that al-Baghdadi has already been reported captured, previously reported killed and even said to have never actually existed by the U.S. military.

“Abu Omar al-Baghdadi was arrested today in Baghdad,” Baghdad security spokesman Major General Qasim Atta told AFP.

“It was Iraqi forces who arrested him based on an intelligence tipoff from someone,” he added.

Also known as Abu Hamza al-Baghdadi and Abu Abdullah al-Rashid al-Baghdadi, many questions have surrounded the so called leader of al Qaeda’s political front organization the “Islamic State of Iraq”.

He was thought to have been one of the figures to succeed the equally shadowy Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as a leader of insurgent forces in Iraq in 2006, after al Zarqawi, who was also previously reported captured and killed on several occasions, was laid to rest for good by the PR arm of the Pentagon.

The announcement of al-Baghdadi’s capture today jars with multiple previous reports from up to two years ago, detailing his arrest, his death and even questioning his existence altogether.

In March 2007, the Interior Ministry of Iraq claimed that al-Baghdadi had been captured in Baghdad. This was reported by AP and picked up by the likes of CNN, whose report stated that another insurgent had positively confirmed al-Baghdadi’s identity.

The U.S. military denied that al-Baghdadi was in their custody, however, and one day later Iraqi officials retracted their statements regarding his arrest.

Indeed this back and forth announcement of capture and later retraction occurred three times in the space of one week.

Then one month later, on May 3, 2007, the Iraqi Interior Ministry announced that al-Baghdadi had been killed by American and Iraqi forces north of Baghdad.

However, in July 2007, the U.S. military reported that al-Baghdadi had never actually existed and was, for all intents and purposes, a myth.

A reportedly high ranking “Al Qaeda in Iraq” detainee identified as Khaled al-Mashhadani, then claimed that al-Baghdadi was a fictional character created to give an Iraqi face to a foreign-run terror group, and that the “Islamic State of Iraq” was a “virtual organisation in cyberspace” created by al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Ayub al Masri.

The person claiming to be Baghdadi continued to release video and audiotapes attacking U.S. occupation of Iraq, but refused to show his face.

The U.S. military’s claim that Baghdadi is a fictitious character was then challenged in May 2008 after a police chief in Haditha said Baghdadi’s real identity is Hamed Dawood Mohammed Khalil al Zawi. “He was an officer in the security services and was dismissed from the army because of his extremism,” the police chief told al Arabiya television.

Now Baghdadi has been reported captured again!

This saga is another example of how a manufactured smoke and mirrors propaganda veils reality. The “war on terror” mantra continues to be propagated as justification to wage permanent occupation and control over the middle east by the global elite.

Al Qaeda in Iraq, al Zarqawi, al Baghdadi and the legions of other al qaeda operatives who have been reportedly captured and killed over and over are used as interchangeable PR tools.

Are or were any of them ever real? Possibly. However that matters little now.

Once again 99% of the corporate media will no doubt enthusiastically champion this latest arrest as a key victory in the continuing war on terror, and the majority of Americans who even notice will not take a second glance at the ludicrous back story.

Thanks to INFOWARS and Steve Watson

As the Washington Post writes of Guantanamo Bay detainee Abu Zubaida:

President George W. Bush had publicly described him as “al-Qaeda’s chief of operations,” and other top officials called him a “trusted associate” of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and a major figure in the planning of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. None of that was accurate, the new evidence showed.

Okay, maybe they got that one wrong.

But certainly Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s confession that he was the mastermind of 9/11 proves his guilt, right?

Well, as the Telegraph notes today:

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed mastermind of 9/11, was waterboarded 183 times in one month, and “confessed” to murdering the journalist Daniel Pearl, which he did not. There could hardly be more compelling evidence that such techniques are neither swift, nor efficient, nor reliable

If one of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s major confessions (Pearl murder) was false, why should we believe his confession about 9/11?

After all, tough-as-nails Navy Seals usually become hysterical when waterboarded once in training sessions. After 183 waterboarding sessions in a month, I wouldn’t be surprised if KSM also confessed to murdering Lincoln and Kennedy.

Source: Washington’s Blog

“I personally expect a major catastrophic event, either biological or worse inside America within the first year of this dictator in office simply so he can place America under martial law.”

Just recently Hussein Obama decided to release confidential CIA data publicly. This raised eyebrows from some, genuinely upset others and fed the idiot thought process associated with Obama appointees and anyone who supports him or advises him.

Noticeably absent was any reference to the results produced by these enhanced interrogation techniques. Good information was derived, terrorist plots were derailed and lives were saved. Yet, there was no mention of this by the White House.

Anyone with any common sense would have to look at water boarding as more of a discomfort or psychological ploy as opposed to actual torture. Since it was also reported that suspects had to have this done to them over one hundred times to break them, I disagree with anyone who chooses to classify this as torture.  If it were indeed torture, they would have broken much sooner. Had we applied some real pain to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed like having his chestnuts roasting on an open fire, several thousand volts to his wet body hanging in a shower, maybe using a blow torch and hammers for persuasion then, maybe, on a receptive day on my part, you might argue the point to me that he was tortured. He planned the murder of tens of thousands of Americans and succeeded in killing 3000 Americans, so I don’t have much sympathy for that Muslim bastard. All in all, I’d say he was treated rather well. Had he been in Egypt or Jordan for the interrogations, he would probably be in the ground right now which is where he should be anyway.

Sleep deprivation isn’t torture either. Almost every person alive experiences this in small doses anyway. Big deal.  Once again, it’s a discomfort, an inconvenience, not torture. Anyone who has had a newborn with colic knows what sleep deprivation is.

The use of insects considered torture? Yes, if they were hornets and thousands of them repeatedly stinging him until all the insects and the terrorist are dead. But the methods we used don’t equate to much more than fishing on a southern US lake on any given night in July or August.

Actually, if you examine the methods that were used, the CIA should be commended on the fact that they have come up with some rather creative psychological discomforts that produce results without resulting in the death of the person being interviewed. Its far better treatment than anyone who is captured by Islamic terrorists would receive. It is better treatment than intelligence services in Islamic countries use, friend or foe.

You cannot tie the CIA’s hands with political correctness and expect them to be effective. Those people put their asses on the line every day and this is the thanks they get from the White House?

To further drive the point home that Hussein Obama cannot be trusted and is a pathological liar is the fact that he reversed his original decision to negate any prosecutions of personnel who may have been involved in these supposed torture processes within 24 hours. He has openly slapped the CIA in the face and has opened the door for prosecution of people issuing orders and even worse, following orders.

The comparison of these CIA memos to incidents at Abu Ghraib by the main stream media is pure idiocy. Some terrible things happened at Abu Ghraib yet to compare waterboarding and sleep deprivation to those events is asinine. It’s not apples to oranges.

Now, let’s sum this up and place this event and other events as of late into the proper perspective. Obama is systematically placing the few effective government people, patriots, Republicans and anyone who is considered a threat to his illegal control of America on a black list he has carefully prepared.  Obama is playing “romancing the Muslim”, “coddling the communists” and bad mouthing any form of true patriotism within America while wanting to outlaw free speech because he perceives patriotic Americans as threats to his idea of socialist government and his dictatorship agenda. He knows that as it stands at this precise moment in time, he cannot place America and her citizens into the position he desires, that being the position of a police state under a dictatorship. He cannot at this time force us into being participants in a global government. No, it will require one more drastic measure to bring us into the slot he has slated for us as Americans.

I personally expect a major catastrophic event, either biological or worse inside America within the first year of this dictator in office simply so he can place America under martial law.

He has to initiate something like this as his thought process is -he sees a major terrorist event as the only catalyst to use in order to sucker the law enforcement community and military to impose military restraints on America and her citizens, allowing him the dictator powers he needs. It will be sold to the American public, law enforcement and the military as necessary for national security and it will evolve into a systematically controlled stripping Americans of all rights including the right to assemble, the right to protest, the right to free speech, the right to bear arms, all under the guise of national security. Obviously communications will be cut and the media will only broadcast what is vetted for release to anyone fortunate enough to still have communications. Travel will be restricted and leaving the country will not be an available option once martial law goes into effect. Eventually, law enforcement and military will realize what is actually happening yet will have a difficult time in reversing it. Top military and law enforcement will either be bribed or threatened to remain loyal to the dictatorship. Dissenters will be done away with.

It will be much easier for Obama to introduce a captive, disarmed society into a New World Order globalist government because by then we are nothing more than sheep. Question is, what do we do?

Be safe. Stay vigilant.

Thanks Northeast Intelligence Network and Randy Taylor

Seven people have been diagnosed with a new kind of swine flu in California and Texas, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Thursday.

All seven people have recovered but the virus itself is a never-before-seen mixture of viruses typical among pigs, birds and humans, the CDC said.

“We are likely to find more cases,” the CDC’s Dr. Anne Schuchat told a telephone briefing. “We don’t think this is time for major concern around the country.”

Only one of the seven cases was sick enough to be hospitalized and all have recovered, Schuchat said.

CDC officials are unsure whether the cases are related to an unusually late and severe flu season in Mexico in which 20 people have died.

“Generally the period of infection ends during the last week of February and the first week of March, but this year there was an atypical situation where the transmission period was prolonged until April,” Mexico’s Ministry of Health said in a statement.

Canadian officials have asked doctors to keep an eye out for cases of respiratory illness among travelers from Mexico.

“Symptoms from those seriously ill in Mexico include high fever, headache, eye pain, shortness of breath and extreme fatigue with rapid progression of symptoms to severe respiratory distress in about five days,” the British Columbia Center for Disease Control said in a statement.

In the United States, the CDC reported the new strain of swine flu on Tuesday in a boy and a girl from California’s two southernmost counties.

Now, five more cases have been found via normal surveillance for seasonal influenza. None of the patients, whose symptoms closely resembled seasonal flu, had any direct contact with pigs.

Two of the new cases were among 16-year-olds at the same school in San Antonio “and there’s a father-daughter pair in California,” Schuchat said. The boy whose case was reported on Tuesday had flown to Dallas, but the CDC has found no links to the other Texas cases.

The agency will issue daily updates here

HUMAN TO HUMAN

“We believe at this point that human-to-human spread is occurring,” Schuchat said. “That’s unusual. We don’t know yet how widely it is spreading … We are also working with international partners to understand what is occurring in other parts of the world.”

The CDC’s Dr. Nancy Cox said virus samples from the seven appear to carry genes from swine flu, avian flu and human flu viruses from North America, Europe and Asia.

“We haven’t seen this strain before, but we hadn’t been looking as intensively as we have,” Schuchat said. “It’s very possible that this is something new that hasn’t been happening before.”

Surveillance for and scrutiny of influenza has been stepped up since 2003, when H5N1 bird flu reappeared in Asia. Experts fear this strain, or another strain, could spark a pandemic that could kill millions.

The influenza A strain is an H1N1, the same subtype as one of the seasonal flu viruses now circulating. Now that the normal influenza season is waning, it may be easier to spot cases of the new swine flu, Schuchat said.

The CDC is asking doctors to think about the possibility of swine flu when patients appear with flu-like symptoms, to take a sample and send it to state health officials or the CDC for testing.

Cox said the CDC is already preparing a vaccine against the new strain, just in case.

“This is standard operating procedure,” he said.

Source: Reuters

Five months into the school year and fearing bad publicity, Atlanta Public Schools kicked 105 students out of class on Jan. 30 for failing to get vaccinations they should have had on Day One, documents show. The district says all its schools are now 100 percent in compliance with state law on vaccinations.

Meanwhile, the Fulton County School System said last week that all its kindergartners and sixth-graders, except 212 students at three schools, are properly vaccinated.

Those two Atlanta-area districts were the worst at ensuring their students complied with Georgia’s school vaccination law when they were audited during the 2007-08 school year, Spotlight reported last fall.

Since then, school and health officials said they’ve gone to extraordinary lengths, including home visits and organized trips to clinics, to make sure this year’s kindergartners and sixth-graders have all required shots. (Those two grades are the ones health departments audit.)

Article Continued at Atlanta-Journal Constitution

Don’t Suspect a Friend, Report Him!

As most of us know, Kansas City, Missouri is a haven for international and domestic terrorists. Pakistan and Afghanistan are small potatoes compared to this insurgency stomping ground. The kooks who tend to flourish in Missouri are young, law-abiding liberty-seekers who advocate Ron Paul’s limited-government ideas; third-party proponents who supported Bob Barr’s presidential bid; and constitutionalists who stand behind Chuck Baldwin’s push to inform the masses of the menace posed by our unconstitutional government.
Recently, a Freeman in Missouri pointed out a website to me that he saw advertised on the local tube: PrepareMetro KC. The purpose of the website-courtesy of the Metropolitan Emergency Managers Committee-is to convince the comfortably numb among the masses that they can “help detect and prevent terrorism.” The website reports:

Terrorist operations begin with extensive planning. You can help prevent and detect terrorism—and other types of crime—by watching out for suspicious activities and reporting them to the proper authorities. Watch for the Seven Signs of Terrorism:

* Surveillance
* Seeking Information
* Testing Security
* Acquiring Supplies
* Suspicious Behavior
* Trial Runs
* Getting into Position

The Metropolitan Emergency Managers Committee is kind enough to include a video version of “Identifying Terrorists for Dummies.” In the video, actors play out the seven signs so you can learn what a terrorist looks like. Accordingly, “anything out of the ordinary” is deemed a “possible terrorist plot or threat,” and it is stressed that such abnormal behavior must be seriously assessed and investigated. At 3:55 of the propaganda production, a jogger runs by a man on a park bench writing in his notepad. I looked for signs of grenades, big ole bombs ‘neath the bench, or an assemblage of scary-looking darkies toting box cutters in the background, but no such thing is apparent. However, since spending time alone to write in a notepad outdoors is a highly suspicious, deviant, and subversive activity, the jogger, disturbed by the sinister notebook, stops to pull out her cell phone and call the police.  She’s being a good girl, executing the kind of response the chief fearmongers desire from a model citizen. This stuff is like chicken soup for the loyalist soul. We’re all Soviet snitches now.

Continued at Taki’s

Why, then, the relentless waterboarding of these two men? It turns out that high Bush officials put heavy pressure on Pentagon interrogators to get Mohammed and Zubaydah to reveal a link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 hijackers, in order to justify Bush’s illegal and unnecessary invasion of Iraq in 2003. That link was never established.

President Obama released the four memos in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the ACLU. They describe unimaginably brutal techniques and provide “legal” justification for clearly illegal acts of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. In the face of monumental pressure from the CIA to keep them secret, Obama demonstrated great courage in deciding to make the grotesque memos public. At the same time, however, in an attempt to pacify the intelligence establishment, Obama said, “it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.”

In startlingly clinical and dispassionate terms, the authors of the newly-released torture memos describe and then rationalize why the devastating techniques the CIA sought to employ on human beings do not violate the Torture Statute (18 U.S.C. sec. 2340).

The memos justify 10 techniques, including banging heads into walls 30 times in a row, prolonged nudity, repeated slapping, dietary manipulation, and dousing with cold water as low as 41 degrees. They allow shackling in a standing position for 180 hours, sleep deprivation for 11 days, confinement of people in small dark boxes with insects for hours, and waterboarding to create the perception they are drowning. Moreover, the memos permit many of these techniques to be used in combination for a 30-day period. They find that none of these techniques constitute torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Waterboarding, admittedly the most serious of the methods, is designed, according to Jay Bybee, to induce the perception of “suffocation and incipient panic, i.e. the perception of drowning.” But although Bybee finds that “the use of the waterboard constitutes a threat of imminent death,” he accepts the CIA’s claim that it does “not anticipate that any prolonged mental harm would result from the use of the waterboard.” One of Bradbury’s memos requires that a physician be on duty during waterboarding to perform a tracheotomy in case the victim doesn’t recover after being returned to an upright position.

As psychologist Jeffrey Kaye points out, the CIA and the Justice Department “ignored a wealth of other published information” that indicates dissociative symptoms, changes greater than those in patients undergoing heart surgery, and drops in testosterone to castration levels after acute stress associated with techniques that the memos sanction.

The Torture Statute punishes conduct, or conspiracy to engage in conduct, specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering. “Severe mental pain or suffering” means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from either the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering, or from the threat of imminent death.

Bybee asserts that “if a defendant acts with the good faith belief that his actions will not cause such suffering, he has not acted with specific intent.” He makes the novel claim that the presence of personnel with medical training who can stop the interrogation if medically necessary “indicates that it is not your intent to cause severe physical pain.”

Now a federal judge with lifetime appointment, Bybee concludes that waterboarding does not constitute torture under the Torture Statute. However, he writes, “we cannot predict with confidence whether a court would agree with this conclusion.”

Bybee’s memo explains why the 10 techniques could be used on Abu Zubaydah, who was considered to be a top Al Qaeda operative. “Zubaydah does not have any pre-existing mental conditions or problems that would make him likely to suffer prolonged mental harm from [the CIA’s] proposed interrogation methods,” the CIA told Bybee. But Zubaydah was a low-ranking Al Qaeda operative, according to leading FBI counter-terrorism expert Dan Coleman, who advised a top FBI official, “This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality.” This was reported by Ron Suskind in his book, The One Percent Doctrine.

The CIA’s request to confine Zubaydah in a cramped box with an insect was granted by Bybee, who told the CIA it could place a harmless insect in the box and tell Zubaydah that it will sting him but it won’t kill him. Even though the CIA knew that Zubaydah had an irrational fear of insects, Bybee found there would be no threat of severe physical pain or suffering if it followed this procedure.

Obama’s intent to immunize those who violated our laws banning torture and cruel treatment violates the President’s constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

U.S. law prohibits torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and requires that those who subject people to such treatment be prosecuted. The Convention against Torture compels us to refer all torture cases for prosecution or extradite the suspect to a country that will undertake a criminal investigation.

Obama has made a political calculation to seek amnesty for the CIA torturers. However, good faith reliance on superior orders was rejected as a defense at Nuremberg and in Lt. Calley’s Vietnam-era trial for the My Lai Massacre. The Torture Convention provides unequivocally, “An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification for torture.”

There is evidence that the CIA was using the illegal techniques as early as April 2002, three to four months before the August memo was written. That would eliminate “good faith” reliance on Justice Department advice as a “defense” to prosecution.

The Senate Intelligence Committee revealed that Condoleezza Rice approved waterboarding in July 17, 2002 “subject to a determination of legality by the OLC.” She got it two weeks later from Bybee and John Yoo. Rice, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales and George Tenet reassured the CIA in Spring 2003 that the abusive methods were legal.

Obama told AP’s Jennifer Loven in the Oval Office: “With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that is going to be more of a decision for the Attorney General within the parameters of various laws, and I don’t want to prejudge that.” If Holder continues to carry out Obama’s political agenda by resisting investigations and prosecution, Congress can, and should, authorize the appointment of a special independent prosecutor to do what the law requires.

The President must fulfill his constitutional duty to ensure that the laws are faithfully executed. Obama said that “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.” He is wrong. There is more to gain from upholding the rule of law. It will make future leaders think twice before they authorize the cruel, illegal treatment of other human beings.

Thanks to  Global Research and Prof. Marjorie Cohn