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“Tasmania produces about 40 percent of the world’s medicinal opium poppies”

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The comic series follows members of a government think tank that was tasked with coming up with 9/11-type “unthinkable” terrorist scenarios that now are coming true. (See this article for more on the series.)

Sable wrote of his experiences: “Flying from Los Angeles to New York for a signing at Jim Hanley’s Universe Wednesday (May 13th), I was flagged at the gate for ‘extra screening’. I was subjected to not one, but two invasive searches of my person and belongings. TSA agents then ‘discovered’ the script for Unthinkable #3. They sat and read the script while I stood there, without any personal items, identification or ticket, which had all been confiscated.

Read more here: Comics artist Mark Sable detained for Unthinkable acts - SFScope - Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror

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It makes for a great story-line – the kind the international media embrace with relish: thrusting young Moldovans grab their iPhones, rush to the town square, and Twitter their way to a revolution against a Communist Party that had just stolen an election. The story-line has been written with orange and with roses and tulips and almost with denim, the press reducing the phenomena in each case to a few slogans repeated until they become accepted as reality with little further analysis.

Such is the case with recent events in Moldova, where even a casual reading of the vast contradictions between objective reality and the developing story-line – the “Twitter Revolution” – is glaringly obvious.

The protests, which intensified Tuesday, were sparked by claims that the Communist Party of President Vladimir Voronin rigged parliamentary elections last Sunday – a vote they were widely expected to win – to gain enough of a margin to amend the constitution and extend Voronin’s rule beyond that which is currently permitted. While the press lauds the “spontaneous” mass organization to overthrow Voronin, one does not have to dust the scene of the crime too carefully to see US foreign policy fingerprints all over the place.

Let us begin with the Twitterers. According to a New York Times article, one of the leaders of the Twitter Revolution claimed she was able to get 15,000 people into the streets with “six people, 10 minutes for brainstorming and decision-making, several hours of disseminating information through networks, Facebook, blogs, SMSs and e-mails.” That is impressive.

In the same article we are told, correctly, that Moldova is among the poorest countries in Europe. The average monthly salary is approximately 2532 lei, which equals about US$230. Contrasted with the average US salary of approximately US$4,000 per month, this demonstrates the real poverty of Moldova.

Yet according to the website of one of the leading mobile networks operators in Moldova, that Twitter-friendly iPhone would set back a young Moldovan 6,599 lei, or the equivalent of about two and a half times his monthly salary. For an American that would be the equivalent of a US$10,000 iPhone. Not many kids would have one. Even basic high-speed internet access on a lesser instrument would set a young Moldovan back nearly 500 lei per month, or the equivalent of US$800 for an average American. How does this impoverished nation afford such luxuries?

Just as many of us cast a skeptical eye on the sudden emergence of massive plasma-screen televisions in also-poor Ukraine during the “Orange Revolution,” the idea that thousands of young Moldovans are spending such sums on their Twittering seems equally implausible.

So what is fueling this revolution? A brief glance at the website of one of the Moldovan NGOs leading the effort to overthrow the elected Moldovan government, that of the “Hyde Park Organization,” reveals an interesting benefactor: at the bottom of the page, next to a seal of the United States, one can read that “This website is hosted free of charge through the Internet Access Training Program (IATP). IATP is a program of the Bureau of Educational & Cultural Affairs (ECA), US Department of State, funded under the Freedom Support Act (FSA).”

Digging a bit further, one can see on the website of the US Agency for International Development that the United States government, through cut-out organizations like the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, is funneling large sums of money to Moldova for programs with such fascinating titles as “Strengthening Democratic Political Activism in Moldova (SPA).” USAID boasts that this program is “cultivating new political activists who can formulate and pursue concrete political objectives…” No doubt.

Another program, titled the “Internet Access and Training Program” may hold a clue as to where all these Twitterers came from. According to the US government, this program “provides local communities with free access to the Internet and to extensive training in all aspects of information technology.” Does the training come with iPhones?

The media, with story-line already inked out, mock the Moldovan president’s claims that the protests were “well designed, well thought out, coordinated, planned and paid for,” but isn’t that what the USAID website has already claimed? After all, to what end does the US train and fund NGOs in projects such as the “Moldova Citizen Participation Program,” whose goal is to “build… the capacity of citizens to create tangible and positive change in their own communities through civic activity and democratic practices…by providing training, mentoring, and funding for citizen-initiated projects and strengthening the capacity of NGOs and citizen groups to mobilize their community, advocate for change, and hold government accountable”? In the previous color revolutions we have seen the perversion of “democracy” to mean getting enough people getting to the street to overthrow an elected government.

Why bother with all this? The same reason the US funded the other color revolutions. The same reason the US announced missile defense facilities in Poland and Czech Republic. The same reason the US has propped up and provided massive military aid to a creepily unstable Mikheil Saakashvili in Georgia. Encircle Russia. Maintain the empire. In 2003 Voronin was our “democrat” when he stuck it to Russia over the breakaway region of Transnistria, refusing to sign on to the Russian settlement plan. When Voronin later mended fences with Russia the long knives came out for him. In the words of one observer of the region, this current revolt is against the communists (Voronin) who were yesterday the democrats against the communists in Transnistria. Dizzying.

Demand obedience from foreign rulers or make them face the consequences. It is a project that is not only destined to fail, but is in fact in the process of failing already. And did anyone notice that we have a new president and administration in the US?

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statism watch » Blog Archive » Moldova’s ‘Twitter Revolution’: Made in America?

A chyron which accompanied a report on CNN’s Newsroom program on Wednesday about the arrest of a leader of an organization inspired by the Minuteman Project, referred to her and her accused accomplices as “extremists.” Despite qualifying how the largest Minuteman organization had distanced itself from the suspects, anchor Rick Sanchez questioned how she became a “player in the anti-immigration movement.”

Sanchez took the human interest story approach to the segment, which began 26 minutes into the 3 pm Eastern hour of the CNN program. He first displayed the picture of a young girl who was one of two murder victims in the case, and gave the following description: “Things are not always as they seem, right? And I want to illustrate this now with a picture of a beautiful little girl- there she is. Her name is Brisenia Flores- take a close look, because it may be the only way that you’ll be able to see this little girl. Why? Because this little girl- Brisenia Flores- is now dead.”

After giving some details of the crime, the anchor continued by describing the suspects: “Shawna Ford and two other suspects are now being held on a bond of a million dollars for the deaths of Brisenia Flores and her father….Let me tell you who Shawn Forde is. She’s the executive director of a group that’s called Minuteman American Defense. Police say that Forde planned the killing of the little girl and her father to steal drugs and money, and make it look like it was the work of a drug cartel.”

Entire article here:

CNN Graphic Labels Minuteman Movement ‘Extremists’ | NewsBusters.org

PsiOp Radio 78 - 090621 Father’s Day Summer Solstice Special

www.PsiOpRadio.com

The first time Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld pressured the CIA to mislead Congress was in 1975 and 1976, when Cheney was chief of staff to President Gerald Ford and Rumsfeld was Ford’s secretary of defense.

Cheney, having held a series of positions alongside Rumsfeld — starting under him in the Nixon administration — also became campaign manager for Ford’s reelection campaign. George H. W. Bush was head of the CIA, appointed by Jerry Ford when Ford switched Rumsfeld from White House chief of staff to secretary of defense.*

The mission of the three men was to protect the Ford presidency and some elements in the CIA from the Church Committee. According to researcher Lamar Waldron, they succeeded.

Entire article here:

Cheney and Rumsfeld pressured CIA to mislead Congress in the 1970s, too

By JESSE J. HOLLAND.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Tuesday overturned a long-standing ruling that stopped police from initiating questions unless a defendant’s lawyer was present, a move that will make it easier for prosecutors to interrogate suspects.

The high court, in a 5-4 ruling, overturned the 1986 Michigan v. Jackson ruling, which said police may not initiate questioning of a defendant who has a lawyer or has asked for one unless the attorney is present. The Michigan ruling applied even to defendants who agreed to talk to the authorities without their lawyers.

The court’s conservatives overturned that opinion, with Justice Antonin Scalia saying “it was poorly reasoned.”

Under the Jackson opinion, police could not even ask a defendant who had been appointed a lawyer if he wanted to talk, Scalia said.

“It would be completely unjustified to presume that a defendant’s consent to police-initiated interrogation was involuntary or coerced simply because he had previously been appointed a lawyer,” Scalia said in the court’s opinion.

Scalia, who read the opinion from the bench, said the decision will have “minimal” effects on criminal defendants because of the protections the court has provided in other decisions. “The considerable adverse effect of this rule upon society’s ability to solve crimes and bring criminals to justice far outweighs its capacity to prevent a genuinely coerced agreement to speak without counsel present,” Scalia said.

The Michigan v. Jackson opinion was written by Justice John Paul Stevens, the only current justice who was on the court at the time. He and Justices David Souter, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented from the ruling, and in an unusual move Stevens read his dissent aloud from the bench. It was the first time this term a justice had read a dissent aloud.

“The police interrogation in this case clearly violated petitioner’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel,” Stevens said. Overruling the Jackson case, he said, “can only diminish the public’s confidence in the reliability and fairness of our system of justice.”

The Obama administration had asked the court to overturn Michigan v. Jackson, disappointing civil rights and civil liberties groups that expected President Barack Obama to reverse the policies of his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush.

The Justice Department, in a brief signed by Solicitor General Elena Kagan, said the 1986 decision “serves no real purpose” and offers only “meager benefits.” The government said defendants who don’t wish to talk to police don’t have to and that officers must respect that decision. But it said there is no reason a defendant who wants to should not be able to respond to officers’ questions.

Eleven states also echoed the administration’s call to overrule the 1986 case.

The decision comes in the case of Jesse Jay Montejo, who was found guilty in 2005 of the shooting death of Louis Ferrari in the victim’s home on Sept. 5, 2002.

Montejo was appointed a public defender at his Sept. 10, 2002 hearing, but never indicated that he wanted the lawyer’s help. Montejo then went with police detectives to help them look for the murder weapon. While in the car, Montejo wrote a letter to Ferrari’s widow incriminating himself.

When they returned to the prison, a public defender was waiting for Montejo, irate that his client had been questioned in his absence. Police used the letter against Montejo at trial, and he was convicted and sentenced to death. He appealed, but the Louisiana Supreme Court upheld the conviction and sentence.

The Supreme Court sent the case back for a determination of whether any of Montejo’s other court-provided protections, like his Miranda rights, were violated.

The case is Montejo v. Louisiana, 07-1529.

The Associated Press: Court: Suspects can be interrogated without lawyer

On Sunday, May 24th, a New Moon was in the sky, a Bengal tiger at the Memphis Zoo bit a zookeeper, a Sikh religious leader was killed in Austria, and then a nuclear bomb was exploded in North Korea and riots occurred in Punjab.

Meanwhile, on May 24th, Malta Today reported that naturalists have recorded thousands of painted lady butterflies, above, (Vanessa cardui) currently migrating over the Maltese islands.

The Copycat Effect: The Butterfly Effect: Moon/Tiger/Temple Attack/N-Bomb/Punjab Riots at www.CopycatEffect.blogspot.com

By Bruce Falconer, Mother Jones
Posted on May 23, 2009, Printed on May 26, 2009
www.alternet.org/story/140206/

Their stories are a staple of conspiracy culture: broken men, suffering hallucinations and near-total amnesia, who say they are victims of secret government mind-control experiments. Think Liev Schreiber in The Manchurian Candidate or Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory. Journalists are a favorite target for the paranoid delusions of this population. So is Gordon Erspamer—and the San Francisco lawyer’s latest case isn’t helping him to fend off the tinfoil-hat crowd. He has filed suit against the CIA and the US Army on behalf of the Vietnam Veterans of America and six former American soldiers who claim they are the real thing: survivors of classified government tests conducted at the Army’s Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland between 1950 and 1975. “I get a lot of calls,” he says. “There are a lot of crazy people out there who think that somebody from Mars is controlling their behavior via radio waves.” But when it comes to Edgewood, “I’m finding that more and more of those stories are true!”

That government scientists conducted human experiments at Edgewood is not in question. “The program involved testing of nerve agents, nerve agent antidotes, psychochemicals, and irritants,” according to a 1994 General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) report (PDF). At least 7,800 US servicemen served “as laboratory rats or guinea pigs” at Edgewood, alleges Erspamer’s complaint, filed in January in a federal district court in California. The Department of Veterans Affairs has reported that military scientists tested hundreds of chemical and biological substances on them, including VX, tabun, soman, sarin, cyanide, LSD, PCP, and World War I-era blister agents like phosgene and mustard. The full scope of the tests, however, may never be known. As a CIA official explained to the GAO, referring to the agency’s infamous MKULTRA mind-control experiments, “The names of those involved in the tests are not available because names were not recorded or the records were subsequently destroyed.” Besides, said the official, some of the tests involving LSD and other psychochemical drugs “were administered to an undetermined number of people without their knowledge.”

Erspamer’s plaintiffs claim that, although they volunteered for the Edgewood program, they were never adequately informed of the potential risks and continue to suffer debilitating health effects as a result of the experiments. They hope to force the CIA and the Army to admit wrongdoing, inform them of the specific substances they were exposed to, and provide access to subsidized health care to treat their Edgewood-related ailments. Despite what they describe as decades of suffering resulting from their Edgewood experiences, the former soldiers are not seeking monetary damages; a 1950 Supreme Court decision, the Feres case, precludes military personnel from suing the federal government for personal injuries sustained in the line of duty. The CIA’s decision to use military personnel as test subjects followed the court’s decision and is an issue Erspamer plans to raise at trial. “Suddenly, they stopped using civilian subjects and said, ‘Oh, we can get these military guys for free,’” he says. “The government could do whatever it wanted to them without liability. We want to bring that to the attention of the public, because I don’t think most people understand that.” (Asked about Erspamer’s suit, CIA spokeswoman Marie Harf would say only that the agency’s human testing program has “been thoroughly investigated, and the CIA fully cooperated with each of the investigations.”)

Erspamer’s involvement in the case is deeply personal. His father was a government scientist during Operation Crossroads, a series of nuclear tests conducted at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in the summer of 1946; he was present aboard a research vessel for the “Baker” test, during which a 21-kiloton thermonuclear bomb was detonated 90 feet below water. The blast resulted in massive radioactive contamination. Erspamer’s father and the rest of the ship’s crew, he says, all died in middle age from radiogenic diseases. Erspamer makes his living in the field of energy litigation, but has twice before argued class action suits for veterans—one for soldiers who, like his father, were exposed to radiation during nuclear tests (a case he ultimately lost in a 1992 appellate decision) and more recently one on behalf of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans denied treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. The case is on appeal in California’s 9th Circuit. “Nobody out there is doing these types of cases,” he says. “It’s really sad because the veterans are left holding the bag, and it’s not a very pretty bag.”

One of those vets is Frank Rochelle. Unlike those of other test veterans, portions of his heavily redacted medical records have survived, providing a rare, if incomplete, account of his experiences. In 1968, while posted at Virginia’s Fort Lee as a 20-year-old Army draftee, he saw a notice calling for volunteers for the Edgewood program. Among the promised incentives were relief from guard duty, the freedom to wear civilian clothes, three-day weekends, and, upon completion, a medal of commendation—all for participation in experiments that, according to the notice, would help the military test a new generation of equipment, clothing, and gas masks. Upon his arrival at the testing facility in Maryland, he says he was asked to sign a series of documents, including a release form and a secrecy agreement. The tests would be risk free, he says he was told, and any drugs given would not exceed normal dosage. Over the next two months, however, he was subjected to three rounds of experiments that, Rochelle says, left him permanently damaged. His medical records indicate that he was exposed to nonlethal incapacitating agents like DHMP and glycolate, both of which act as sedatives that produce hallucinations. In the latter case, Rochelle says he was taken into a gas chamber and strapped to a chair by two men in white lab coats, who affixed a mask to his face and told him to breathe normally. He quickly lost consciousness. According to Erspamer’s complaint, “Over the next two to three days, Frank was hallucinating and high: he thought he was three feet tall, saw animals on the walls, thought he was being pursued by a 6-foot-tall white rabbit, heard people calling his name, thought that all his freckles were bugs under his skin, and used a razor to try to cut these bugs out. No one from the clinical staff intervened on his behalf…”

Medical records indicate that Rochelle went through a third round of testing, but he has no memory of it. For years he’s been having nightmares about the Edgewood tests and now suffers from anxiety, memory loss, sleep apnea, tinnitus, and loss of vision, all of which he claims are direct results of the experiments. Still, he didn’t inform his doctor of the tests until 2006, believing that he was still bound by the oath of secrecy he swore in 1968. (The government finally released human test subjects to speak to their physicians about the tests in June 2006, under the condition that they not “discuss anything that relates to operational information that might reveal chemical or biological warfare vulnerabilities or capabilities.”)

Rochelle’s story is similar to those of Erspamer’s other plaintiffs, all of whom claim to be suffering debilitating health effects stemming from the experiments. Of course, substantiating these claims is a challenge, given that most of the medical records were destroyed upon completion of the program. Rochelle’s records remain intact, but for “others we have less information,” says Erspamer. “We spent a great deal of time on that topic, and we are confident that the plaintiffs are who they say they are, were where they said they were, and got what they said they got,” in terms of exposure to experimental chemicals. “Who bears the burden on that issue when the defendants destroyed the evidence?” Erspamer asks. “They’ve put all that stuff through the shredder.”

Compensation for injuries sustained during human testing of chemical and biological agents is not unprecedented. Last year, more than 350 servicemen who served as test subjects at Porton Down, a secret military research facility where the British government conducted its own series of mind-control experiments, were granted nearly $6 million in compensation in an out-of-court settlement with the UK’s Ministry of Defence. Likewise, in 2004, the Canadian government began offering $18,000 payments to eligible veterans of experiments at its testing facilities. Nevertheless, says Erspamer, “No American soldiers have ever been compensated.” The CIA and the Army “just hope they’re all gonna die off, and they will unless somebody does something.”

AlterNet: Government Experiments on U.S. Soldiers: Shocking Claims Come to Light in New Court Case