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Exposed: Secret Government Collusion with GM Firm

Monday, October 29th, 2007

Ministers are funding genetically modified crop projects with scores of millions of pounds every year and are colluding with a biotech company to ease its GM tests, the IoS can reveal. Geoffrey Lean on a murky tale that Whitehall tried to hide

Ministers are secretly easing the way for GM crops in Britain, while professing to be impartial on the technology, startling internal documents reveal.

The documents, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, show that the Government colluded with a biotech company in setting conditions for testing GM potatoes, and gives tens of millions of pounds a year to boost research into modified crops and foods.

The information on funding proved extraordinarily difficult to get, requiring three months of investigation by an environmental pressure group, a series of parliamentary questions, and three applications for the information.

Friends of the Earth finally obtained still partial information last week which shows that the Government provides at least £50m a year for research into agricultural biotechnology, largely GM crops and food. This generosity contrasts with the £1.6m given last year for research into organic agriculture, in spite of repeated promises to promote environmentally friendly, “sustainable” farming.

Publicly ministers claim to be neutral over GM. Four years ago, at the height of controversy about plans to introduce modified crops to Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair insisted that the Government was “neither for nor against” them. The then Environment minister, Elliot Morley, added: “There is an open and transparent process for their assessment and all relevant material will be put in the public domain.” Last month the Environment Secretary, Hilary Benn, reiterated: “There is no change in the Government’s position.”

But the documents show that ministers have been far from even-handed. One set, obtained by the campaigning group GM Freeze, clearly demonstrate that the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) allowed the biotech giant BASF to help to set the conditions for field trials it has conducted on modified potatoes. On 1 December last year the company was given permission to plant 450,000 modified potatoes in British fields over the next five years, in a series of 10 trials. The set of emails and letters between Defra and the company reveal that officials repeatedly went to remarkable lengths to make sure the trial conditions, supposed to protect the environment and farmers, were “agreeable” to BASF.

On 29 September a department official emailed BASF to inform it of a recommendation by the Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment (Acre), its official advisers on risks to health and the environment from GM, that “the land should be left fallow for two years following each trial” and added “I would like to know whether you think that this is workable for you”. The official pointed out that other EU countries had specified that “berries/true seed should be removed from the trial” but that Acre had “not specified this because the committee believes that this would be a very big job”. The email went on: “If you think this is completely unworkable, I think the committee may be prepared to accommodate a reduction of this fallow period to one year but there may be other conditions (eg removal of flowers/berries).”

The writer added: “In addition to this, Acre has recommended a particular tillage regime, hopefully you are able to accommodate this.”

On 6 October Defra sent BASF a draft of the consent to the trials, adding: “Please let me know whether or not the conditions as they stand would be agreeable to BASF or whether there are any conditions that would be difficult to meet.”

BASF replied on 26 October that it believed that the “probable conditions” were “very agreeable to us”, adding: “We hope that the final conditions will not change too much.”

On 9 November Defra again emailed BASF to check that one of the conditions “does not affect your plans”, and five days later was in touch again to say that it had “redrafted” another “in response to your concerns”.

Yet the department insisted in a written statement last week: “There is no truth in any allegation that Defra was in any way influenced by BASF in relation to the terms under which BASF could conduct trials on GM potatoes in the UK.”

Pete Riley, the campaign director of GM Freeze, said: “That is simply not correct. The documents clearly show that Defra colluded with BASF to ensure that Acre’s conditions for growing their GM crop were to their liking. Its role is to protect the environment and public health. It is supposed to be a watchdog, but the documents reveal it to be the industry’s lapdog.”

Peter Ainsworth, the Conservative environment spokesman, added: “This is a government department that claims to be objective and science-based in its approach to biotechnology, but clearly it has bent over backwards to model its conditions on the requirements of BASF.”

A spokesman for BASF said: “I do not think that they granted us any concessions that would not normally have been granted.”

The funding disclosure came when the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) – which is funded by the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills – revealed that it gave £39.3m to its seven sponsored institutes for research on “agricultural biotechnology” in 2006-07.

The sum has more than doubled, from £15.5m, since 1997, even though the prospects for GM crops in Britain have been declining in this period, with ministers admitting three years ago that none would be grown commercially “for the foreseeable future”.

Besides this “core strategic grant”, the BBSRC also gives tens of millions of pounds a year for similar research to universities and other institutes.

In 2003-04 this sum totalled £27.1m. The BBSRC told Friends of the Earth that it could not provide it with up-to-date information until January, unless it paid a fee of £750, because this “would take considerable effort, beyond the appropriate limit” to assemble. But the figure is believed not to have fallen over the past three years. On top of the BBSRC funding, Defra provided £12.6m for agricultural biotechnology research in 2005-06, the last year for which figures are available.

Nor is it clear how much money goes to genetic modification, since the BBSRC defines agricultural biotechnology as “the application of molecular genetic and other modern biological techniques to crops, livestock and disease-causing organisms”.

It says it is not yet able to provide information on the proportion that has recently been devoted to GM, as opposed to other techniques. But figures on its website show that in 2000-01 about half of its core strategic grant to the seven institutes was spent on the technology.

In contrast, Defra spent £1.6m on research “relating to organic farming”, while BBSRC refuses to provide any funds at all, saying it “does not fund applied work on entire farming systems”.

It justifies spending so much taxpayers’ money on GM before, as it admits, “there is any clear evidence that the public wants them” by saying that research must retain “the flexibility to remain competitive and to respond to changing global situations and changes in consumer demand”.

Yet when the Government officially asked the public, four years ago, about their preferences, 86 per cent said they would not be happy to eat GM foods. By contrast, sales of organic produce rose by 22 per cent last year to break through the £2bn barrier. More than half of Britons now buy it, at least from time to time.

The BBSRC says that its funding for the research on GM crops would continue even if there was “a Europe-wide ban” on growing them commercially.

Kirtana Chandrasekaran, Friends of the Earth’s food campaigner, said: “The Government’s support for GM crops and foods is out of all proportion to its non-existent benefits, let alone the public’s non-existent desire to consume them.

“Despite continually promising to support sustainable agriculture, it is spending tens of millions on a technology that has fallen flat on its face while starving organic farming, which is producing food that people want to buy.

“It is also staggering that there is no clear information in the public domain on exactly how much money is going into GM research, and that it has proved so hard to get even partial figures out into the light of day.”

A farmer’s story: ‘It’s all about control of food production’

The spectre of GM contamination has cost John Turner dear. A succession of trials near his 250 acre farm in Little Bytham, south Lincolnshire, between 2000 and 2002 forced him to stop growing certain crops – suffering heavy financial losses as a result.

“It was a nightmare and we just felt absolutely powerless to do anything over it at all,” he recalled. “Without any real protection against contamination, we were forced to stop growing crops like maize that could be vulnerable to cross-pollination. It wasn’t easy but it was preferable to the damage that could have been done if our crops were no longer GM-free. We feel that we are in remission at the moment, but every few months there seems to be a new PR push from the GM lobby.”

The facts are being twisted to fit a commercial agenda, according to Mr Turner: “There is no sound science behind the push for GM crops. It’s all about money and control of not only the seeds but also food production from one end to the other. The more I find out about it the less I understand why there has been this impetus to force this technology on farming. It has been hugely over-hyped by those trying to promote it. There are plenty of ways of improving crops that don’t involve swapping genes around.

“But farmers could sleepwalk into using GM crops and by the time they realise the proposed benefits just aren’t there they will not be in a position to go back to a GM-free style of agriculture – that’s the danger and that’s been the experience of farmers in other parts of the world.”

Jonathan Owen

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20% of US Troops Suffer Brain Injury

Monday, October 29th, 2007

MoD begins study amid fears that up to 20,000 soldiers may be affected

Matthew Taylor and Esther Addley
The Guardian

The Ministry of Defence is conducting a major study into brain injury in troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan amid fears that thousands of soldiers may have suffered damage after being exposed to high-velocity explosions.The US army says as many as 20% of its soldiers and marines have suffered “mild traumatic brain injury” (mTBI) from blows to the head or shockwaves caused by explosions. The condition, which can lead to memory loss, depression and anxiety, has been designated as one of four “signature injuries” of the Iraq conflict by the US department of defence, which is introducing a large-scale screening programme for troops returning from the frontline.

Defence officials were reluctant to extrapolate directly from the US experience, arguing that the science is still inconclusive and that the US and UK experience in Iraq and Afghanistan has been different. But the Guardian has learned that the government has put in place a series of measures - including a comprehensive screening process - to deal with what could be a 20-fold increase in troops with mTBI. If the most alarming US predictions are accurate, as many as 20,000 UK troops could be at risk.

Kit Malia, a cognitive rehabilitation therapist who will oversee the programme to treat TBI at Headley Court military rehabilitation centre in Surrey, said: “I think the issue is that we don’t know whether the Americans are correct. But if the American figures are correct, this is massive. Absolutely massive.”

Surgeon commodore Lionel Jarvis, director of medical policy at the MoD, said the UK is doing all it can to improve diagnosis and treatment of the condition and is “running very, very much in parallel” with the US. He added: “The only significant difference is that there is a much higher political profile on this in the US.”

He said the MoD had drawn up a list of measures to help deal with mTBI that included circulating information to all ranks in the field on what symptoms to look out for; plans to screen all service personnel when they return from combat; a four-stage treatment programme at Headley Court; and research into body armour to improve protection for the brain.

Liam Fox, the Conservative defence spokesman, said: “It is a dereliction of duty, a failure of duty of care. They are already well behind the US in terms of identifying this disease. We have to ask again why should US troops be getting better care than British troops?”

The mTBI injury can occur when a soldier gets a blow on the head or is in close proximity to an explosion. The increased use of improvised explosive devices (IEDS) - roadside bombs - in Iraq and Afghanistan means more troops are at risk than in previous conflicts, and experts say that even the most advanced helmets cannot protect the brain from the shock waves.

A US neurologist and former doctor at the US department of veterans affairs, P Steven Macedo, said: “The enemy combatants are not trying to put missiles or bullets into our troops - they are trying to blow up their vehicles with IEDs. But the vehicles and the men wear heavy armour so what goes through them in many cases is the blast wave and we are beginning to see the impact this is having on the neurological make-up of our troops. This is the first war since the first world war where the major cause of injuries is blasts.”

Advances in brain scanning have revealed that soldiers can sustain bruising and blood clots on the brain, even if there is no visible injury. If the condition is not diagnosed it can lead to long-term problems - from depression and anxiety to violence and relationship break-up.

Dr Macedo said US army doctors are reporting that up to 20% of soldiers coming home from Iraq have “blast injuries”, with 15% of those never recovering. “Someone suffering from this will still be able to use a knife and fork, still be able to talk and walk but they may struggle with bad moods, memory problems or become easily agitated. It is like a computer which is not running programmes properly: you can function but not as quickly or effectively as before.”

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Giuliani Dishonesty: Secret 9/11 Commission Testimony

Monday, October 29th, 2007

Mike Aivaz and Muriel Kane

David Shuster, substituting for Keith Olbermann as host of Countdown, reported on Thursday that Rudy Giuliani’s description of himself as the only candidate who foresaw the danger posed by al Qaeda before 9/11 has now been refuted by a leaked document.

Typical of Giuliani’s claims on the campaign trail is a speech he gave last summer in which he said of the pre-9/11 period, “Bin Laden declared war on us. We didn’t hear it. … I thought it was pretty clear at the time — but a lot of people didn’t see it, couldn’t see it.”

Wayne Barrett, a reporter for New York’s Village Voice and author of Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, has now obtained leaked memos describing Giuliani’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission which directly contradict that claim.

Barrett told Shuster that taken as a whole, Giuliani’s testimony “was a confession of ignorance. He basically said, ‘I knew nothing about al Qaeda.’”

For example, Giuliani acknowledged that even though he had received information on threats between 1998 and 2001, “At the time I had no idea it was al Qaeda.” He further told the commission that after 9/11, “we brought in people to brief us on al Qaeda. … We had nothing like this pre 9/11, which was a mistake.”

Giuliani’s testimony, like that of other witnesses describing New York City’s response on 9/11, was supposed to remain secret until after the 2008 presidential election.

Barrett also emphasized Giuliani’s continuing ignorance of technological systems involved in the fight against terrorism. As late as April 2004, when he testified before the commission, Giuliani admitted that he didn’t know much about a New York Police Department system called ComStat — which he’s now saying he’d like to see extended nationwide. He was also unable to answer questions about the malfunctioning radios which caused many deaths among firefighters or about a repeater installed in the World Trade Center after the 1993 bombing to amplify radio communications.

“He still wasn’t studying the response issues,” Barrett said.

The following video is from MSNBC’s COUNTDOWN with Keith Olbermann, broadcast on October 25, 2007

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All in the (Crime) Family: Bush & Blackwater

Monday, October 29th, 2007

Like a cancer, private mercenary firm spreads influence in local communities. When the private military company Blackwater USA, a firm tied to the Bush family through marriage and to right-wing extremist and racist groups through politics and money, established its headquarters in Moyock, North Carolina in an former military reservation in the Great Dismal Swamp, just south of the Virginia border, practically no one noticed.

Blackwater was founded in 1997 by Erik Prince, a former US Navy SEAL and right-wing fundamentalist Christian from Michigan. Prince’s father is Edgard Prince, who founded the Family Research Council with Gary Bauer. Erik Prince’s sister is Betty DeVos, who is married to Dick DeVos, the son of Amway co-founder and Mormon bigwig Richard DeVos. The General Counsel for Erik Prince’s Blackwater parent company, the Prince Group, is Joseph Schmitz, the Pentagon’s former Inspector General. Schmitz’s brother, John Schmitz, Jr. deputy counsel to George H. W. Bush and who is married to the sister of Columba Bush, Jeb Bush’s wife.

The father of John and Joseph was extreme right-wing Republican Congressman John Schmitz, Sr. Their sister is Mary Kay Letourneau, a former Washington State schoolteacher jailed for having sex with a thirteen year old American Samoan student who she later married.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Kay_Letourneau

Safely ensconced in North Carolina and flush with money as a result of Pentagon contracts ensured by Joseph Schmitz and the Bush family, Blackwater began to expand nationally. Using stealth and guile, the company targeted small communities in order to establish regional military training centers.

http://www.oregontruthalliance.org/?q=node/344

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Ruling By Decree

Monday, October 29th, 2007

By Jacob Hornberger

Immediately after he denounced Fidel Castro for being a dictator, President Bush unilaterally decreed new sanctions against Iran, moving the United States closer to war against Iran.

Would someone please tell me how it is that Bush exercises such omnipotent power, without even a peep from both Congress and the mainstream press? How is he able to take such serious and ominous action against a sovereign and independent country without going to Congress for permission?

Weren’t we taught in civics classes in our public schools that Congress enacts the laws, the president enforces them, and the judiciary interprets them? How can the president now rule by decree, enacting and enforcing laws whenever he wants, especially ones that are likely to send our nation into war? How is that different from what a dictator does?

Bush also recently labeled a branch of the Iranian military, the elite Quds unit, to be a “terrorist” organization, again without congressional approval. That seems to me to be a rather ridiculous notion. Either the Iranian government is a terrorist organization or it’s not. To separate out a branch of the Iranian government for being a terrorist organization makes as much sense as saying that the CIA and the Pentagon, but not the U.S. government, are terrorist organizations.

Consider, for example, Syria. It’s a country whose regime has been labeled “terrorist” by the U.S. government. That’s why President Bush says that he won’t talk to Syria, which is itself an odd claim, given that the CIA cut a secret deal with Syria to torture a Canadian citizen named Maher Arar. The deal was cut after the CIA kidnapped Arar on American soil and whisked him off to Syria for torture pursuant to the deal that the CIA cut with Syria.

But maybe President Bush is deliberately lying when he says the U.S. government won’t talk to Syria because maybe he’s thinking the same thing about the CIA as he apparently does about Iran’s Qud unit - that the CIA is a separate and independent organization bearing no real relationship to the U.S. government.

Yet, implicitly conceding that the CIA is a core part of the U.S. government yesterday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told a congressional hearing that “We do not think the case was handled as it should have been.” According to MSNBC, “When asked whether the United States relied on diplomatic assurances from Syria that the engineer, Maher Arar, would not be tortured, Rice said she would respond later because her memory of certain details ‘has faded a bit.’”

Unfortunately, like the mainstream press, the members of Congress missed the opportunity to ask Rice the critical questions: How is it that the CIA cut a torture deal with a terrorist state that President Bush says the U.S. government hasn’t talked to?

Who was the CIA official who cut the deal? Who was the Syrian official with whom he cut the deal? Was the deal put into writing?

What were the exact terms of the deal? Were the means of torture agreed upon? Did they agree that Arar would remain incarcerated for a year?

Was President Bush aware of the deal prior to the time it was cut, and if so, wouldn’t that mean that President Bush has been lying to the American people about not talking to Syria?

What are the implications, moral and otherwise, of cutting a torture deal with a regime that President Bush says is a terrorist organization and with whom he says the U.S. government hasn’t talked to?

All this just goes to show what a fraud and a sham the “war on terrorism” is and how it is nothing more than a cover for the U.S. government’s own wrongful conduct.

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Charity accused of child trafficking

Monday, October 29th, 2007

· 16 EU nationals held over planned airlift of ‘orphans’
· Jet charter company says it had permit for flight

Xan Rice in Nairobi, Dale Fuchs in Madrid and Alasdair Sandford in Paris
Monday October 29, 2007
The Guardian

Seven Spanish crew members of a plane hired to spirit 103 children out of Chad are being held by police, along with nine French citizens detained last week, it was confirmed yesterday, as international condemnation grew over a French charity’s bizarre attempt at humanitarianism.The crew were seized along with six members of the charity Zoe’s Ark and three French journalists. The charity claimed its operation “Children Rescue” sought to save the lives of Darfur orphans, aged between one and 10, by housing them with families in France who had each paid more than €2,000.

But Chad’s president, Idriss Deby Itno, who visited the children in the eastern city of Abeche on Friday, described the mission as “child trafficking” and promised severe punishment. France has signalled that it will not intervene to help its detained nationals. Its ambassador to Chad, Bruno Foucher, yesterday described the plan as “a completely illegal operation”, adding: “The members of the association who took part in this whole illegal manipulation will answer for their acts in Chad.”

Aid agencies, including the United Nations’ children’s fund Unicef have also condemned the charity’s actions.

The Chadian authorities are still trying to establish whether the children are orphans, whether some are as sick as the charity claimed, and where they come from. Aid workers suspect that many did not come from Sudan’s Darfur region, but are Chadian.

Girjet, the Barcelona-based charter airline hired to fly the children to France, said yesterday that the plane’s captain, first officer and five flight attendants, four of them women, were in police custody. The company denied any knowledge of a plan to host the children with French families, who waited at an airport near Rheims on Thursday night before learning that the flight was aborted.

“We were told that the children were injured in the conflict [in Darfur] and that we were supposed get these children to French territory to be taken care of, and then they would be taken back, one by one by a different carrier, to their territory once they were OK,” Fernando Zarza, head of Girjet’s flight coordination department told the Guardian. “When we landed, we were taken by surprise by all these questions of illegal adoptions of kids.” He claimed the company had received a permit from the Chad government authorising the evacuation for health reasons.

The case has caused a storm in France, where the authorities have known about the proposed airlift for months. Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, called Mr Deby on Saturday to express “solidarity with the children”. Even the Elysée palace has been drawn into the affair, describing as “totally false” claims that Zoe’s Ark had the backing of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s estranged wife Cécilia.

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Schwarzenegger: ‘Marijuana is not a drug, it’s a leaf’

Monday, October 29th, 2007

By Ciar Byrne

Already facing enough problems with the wild fires that have swept California, the state’s governor Arnold Schwarzenegger may have stepped into a new row by claiming that marijuana is not a drug. In an interview with GQ magazine, the Hollywood star turned governor of California insisted: “I didn’t take any drugs.”

The interviewer, former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan, put it to the star that he had admitted smoking marijuana in the past. In Pumping Iron, the bodybuilding documentary which launched his career 30 years ago, he was shown taking a drag on a spliff.

“That is not a drug. It’s a leaf,” said Austrian-born Mr Schwarzenegger, 60. “My drug was pumping iron, trust me,” he added.

When George Butler’s critically acclaimed 1977 documentary Pumping Iron was re-released in 2002, before Mr Schwarzenegger ran for governor of California, he was unconcerned by the scene showing him smoking marijuana, saying – in a pointed reference to former US president Bill Clinton who claimed never to have inhaled: “I did smoke a joint and I did inhale. The bottom line is that’s what it was in the Seventies, that’s what I did. I have never touched it since.” Mr Schwarzenegger said that it was not necessarily a matter of public interest whether politicians had taken class-A drugs.

He said: “What would you rather have? A politician taking the stuff and not saying, but making the best decisions and improving things? Or a politician who names the drugs he or she has taken but makes lousy decisions for the country?”

The Republican governor, renowned for his green policies, said Washington had not done enough on the environment. “So we pick up the slack and show the rest of the world America is not just Washington. There are 600 mayors in America who have joined the Kyoto treaty. For us, it is very important that America gets back the great reputation it once had.”

He said: “I think we have to do everything we can as a country to get out of the Iraq war, and to take a lead on the environment.”

Despite his insistence that the US must finish the war in Iraq, Mr Schwarzenegger included Tony Blair in a list of the greatest leaders in history, alongside Nelson Mandela, John F Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.

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