Sobercircle.com

George W. Bush

No ha habido escasez de controversia cuando viene a los años más jóvenes de nuestro presidente actual. Descrito como irresponsable y risk-taker, Bush ha admitido a un exceso de la consumición del alcohol para mucha de su vida temprana. Él era bien sabido para beber superior a través de universidad, y para ser el tipo de borracho quién actuaba hacia fuera y perdió todas las inhibiciones. A partir de sus años 20 tempranos hasta el tiempo él era 30, Bush fue arrestado para la conducta desordenada, era el actuar visto inadecuado en un número de situaciones sociales de clase superior, y fue arrestado para conducir borracho cercano el hogar de su familia en Maine. Él hizo posteriormente su licencia suspender por dos años. Demandas de Bush haber parado beber después de despertar con una resaca en su 40.o cumpleaños. Mientras que Bush mantiene demandas de su sobriedad, tiene sido prensa reciente que explica su beber, y en junio de 2007, una foto fue tomada que demostraba el arbusto que bebía una cerveza en la cumbre G8 en Alemania.

http://www.realchange.org/bushjr.htm#partied
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush_substance_abuse_controversy

Cantidad borracha de Bush

Drogas ilegales:

Las demandas de Bush él no ha utilizado ninguna drogas ilegal desde 1974. Tienen sido informes que Bush fue arrestado para la posesión de la cocaína, con los expedientes expunged más adelante. Se ha especulado que la cesación de Bush de volar en 1972, como resultado su denegación para tomar un examen físico, era el resultado de su miedo de una prueba subsecuente de la droga que pudo haber encontradolo en la violación de las políticas del uso de la droga.
Lo que sigue es una parodiar de Bush deteriorar-que suena a veces la cadencia del discurso.

Bill Clinton

Durante los años de Clinton, había cierta controversia sobre su uso posible de la marijuana. Mientras que es joven, Clinton admitió a usar la marijuana, aunque él famoso demandó que él “no inhaló.” Este tipo de doble-habla lo revisitó otra vez durante el escándalo de Monica Lewinsky, y Clinton es creído por muchos para haber experimentado con no sólo marijuana pero con un número de otras sustancias ilícitas.
Hay unsubstantiated las rumores que se presentaron sobre un incidente que ocurrió en los años 80 mientras que Clinton era gobernador inmóvil de Arkansas. Según el Dr. Sam Houston, a well respected doctor in Little Rock (and one-time doctor to Hillary’s father), has made claims regarding an alleged cocaine overdose by Clinton. Apparently the incident is well known in Little Rock medical circles and the incident is well chronicled.
According to Dr. Houston, then Governor Clinton arrived at the hospital with the help a state trooper, followed closely behind by his wife, Hillary. While Bill was being treated, it has been claimed that Hillary made numerous threats to on-call doctors, warning that if word leaked about Clinton’s drug use, she would have their medical licenses revoked. Later on, Dr. Houston was quoted by the “Clinton Chronicles” as saying “Dr. Suen, S-U-E-N, a doctor at the medical center here in Little Rock that’s taken care of Bill Clinton for his sinus problems, which may indeed be drug related to cocaine use, as they destroy the sinus passages (there is a word missing here or something). Governor Bill Clinton was taken into the hospital, I believe it was the medical center, on at least one or two occasions, for cocaine abuse and overdosage, in which he actually had to be cared for at the hospital.”

http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a37edb5185038.htm

Richard Nixon

According to a little-publicized report in a recent book chronicling the “secret life” of Richard Nixon, claims were made regarding not only his latent violence and teetering psychosis, but also regarding his use and possible abuse of the drug Dilantin. Dilantin, the brand name of a common antiepileptic known as Phenytoin, slows brain activity. It controls conductivity between brain cells and has been said to have anxiety-controlling and mood-stabilizing effects. Reports from users also claim it produces a strong alcohol-like buzz that can last for days.
Jack Dreyfus, the founder of the Dreyfus Fund, was a major proponent of the use of phenytoin, and was known to have originally prescribed the drug to Nixon himself. Further accounts state that Dreyfus supplied “remarkable amounts” of Phenytoin to Nixon throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Nixon apologetics don’t dispute Nixon’s acceptance of the Dilatin pills, but claim only that he did so as a courtesy to his friend Dreyfus, who had developed a strange obsession with the drug.

http://archives.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/08/28/nixon.book/index.html

John F. Kennedy

Although it is not widely discussed, Kennedy was not a healthy man for much of his life. In fact, he was read his last rites two times before his assassination, and was known for having spent much of his life and presidency covering up his significant illnesses. The most severe of which was Addison’s disease, which required him to take constant doses of testosterone. This dosing is well accounted for, and while it was never at the status of abuse, it was believed by some to be the catalyst behind some of his more infamous infidelities and his significant and difficult-to-control libido.
One of Kennedy’s supposed mistresses (in fact, his supposed favorite mistress), Mary Pinchot Meyer, was known to have described a number of Kennedy’s illegal misgivings, including his use of marijuana and LSD. According to Meyer, as described by James Truitt, she was having a prolonged affair with Kennedy, and had admitted to smoking marijuana with the president. Furthermore, she was later quoted as telling Timothy Leary (LSD advocate), about her experiences on LSD with Kennedy, and a small circle of some of the most powerful men in Washington. The day after the Kennedy assassination, Meyer called Leary desperately sobbing, claiming that “they” could no longer “control him.”

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

Presidential Hopefuls:

Al Gore

While he may currently have achieved a sparkly and glowing aura in the eyes of the nation, Al Gore is rumored by many to have had a somewhat shady past. Including in this haze is his supposed use of drugs during and after his stint in Vietnam and for a period of time after his return from the war. While Gore has publically admitted to smoking pot, he has made claims it was only a “few times.” Former college friends and acquaintances, have a different story to tell, however. According to them, Gore was a significant user of marijuana, and spent a great deal of his time in college smoking pot in his dorm room and watching TV. Friends of Gore, such as John Warnecke, say that Gore got high upwards of three to four times per week. He claimed that Gore liked to get high while listening to the Grateful Dead, and talked about grandiose things like what he would do if he were president. Gore was described by his friends as the sort of stoner who was a mix of melancholy, paranoia and expansiveness.

http://www.realchange.org/gore.htm#drugs

Dan Quayle

Dan Quayle was known to have experimented with a number of illicit drugs during his college years. In his college yearbook at DePauw University, there is one image with a caption “The Trip’ is a colorful psychedelic journey into the wild sights and sounds produced by LSD.” Later on in his career, a convicted drug dealer by the name of Brett Kimberlin told a New York radio station that he had been Quayle’s pot dealer through college. Apparently Quayle bought small quantities of marijuana from the man every month for a period of nearly two years. When he and his wife got married, his dealer gave him a present of some Afghanistan hashish known as “Acapulco Gold.”

http://www.realchange.org/quayle.htm#pot

John Kerry

John Kerry has, in the past, voiced some support for the decriminalization of marijuana and has been quoted as saying “I’ve met plenty of people in my lifetime who’ve used marijuana and who I would not qualify as serious addicts – who use about the same amount as some people drink beer or wine or have a cocktail. I don’t get too excited by any of that.” When asked during a live debate in November 2003 on CNN, Kerry was asked if he had ever smoked marijuana. Honestly, Kerry responded that he had.

http://www.norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=5900

Barack Obama

Recently there has been some controversy surrounding Barack Obama’s admission regarding his drug use during his youth. While he maintains that he has not touched any illegal drugs in at least 20 years, his own biography reveals that he tried a number of illicit substances as a young man. He wrote “I had learned not to care; I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years. Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though.” Obama wrote additionally “Junkie, Pothead, That’s where I’d been headed; the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man.” Eventually, Obama claims, drug use came to hold no appeal, and seemed only a roadblock to his eventual happiness. He writes that he prefers to keep his life as a literal open book, and explains that his drug use, by the time he was 20, was no more than a memory.

http://www.mapinc.org/newsnorml/v03/n1786/a06.html

Alcoholic Presidents:

http://www.doctorzebra.com/prez - Based on the book “The Health of the Presidents.”

Ulysses Grant
While some may argue that Ulysses Grant was not by classical terms an “alcoholic,” there is certainly evidence to suggest that he had a problem with drinking. During his military career, he was known for his heavy drinking, but it typically did not interfere with his performance. At one point, however, after his distinguished service during the Mexican war, Grant was stationed in an isolated outpost in Oregon. His loneliness drove him to excessive drinking, which eventually led to his resignation and relief of duties. During his presidency, Grant continued to drink, and was known to have been drunk at his inauguration. Additionally, the President died of throat cancer, which can certainly be attributed at least partially to his heavy alcohol consumption.

Grover Cleveland
Alcohol use has been somewhat of a constant for a number of U.S. presidents. One of the less offending, though still arguably alcoholic presidents, was Grover Cleveland. He was well known to “enjoy beer,” but according to many, he had some trouble controlling his appetite for it. According to one friend, Lyman K. Bass, he drank as many as four to eight beers daily and was well known for his prodigious beer belly.

Martin Van Buren
While not widely considered an alcoholic, Martin Van Buren was certainly a man known for his ability to drink. Like a number of other presidents, Van Buren was able to drink large quantities of alcohol from a young age without seeming drunk. He eventually gained the nickname “Blue Whiskey Van” and it was believed that his heavy drinking lasted well into his time in the White House.

James Buchanan
James Buchanan was known by many as a man with sophisticated taste, who was celebrated by some for his serious drinking abilities. He was known to have complained about the size of champagne bottles in the white house, and was amused when guests mistook his ten-gallon cask of Jacob Baer Whiskey to be his own special blend. He was known to have consumed as many as two or three bottles of cognac and old rye a week, and was known by the press for his ability to resist the effects of alcohol in high doses- an obvious hallmark of alcoholic tolerance.

Franklin Pierce
Franklin Pierce was perhaps the presidency’s greatest drunk, consuming great quantities of alcohol while in office, and appearing drunk in a number of instances. Shortly before he was inaugurated, the president and his wife were involved in a train accident where their only son was nearly decapitated before their eyes. As a result of the traumatic incident (which his wife attributed to God’s intervention in an attempt to remove distractions from his presidential bid), Pierce became significantly depressed and saw the accident as punishment for his sins. Pierce was described as “an alcoholic” by everyone who was close to him. At the end of his presidential term, when asked what was next for him, Pierce was known to have responded by saying “There is nothing left…but to get drunk.”

While not widely considered alcoholics, a number of other presidents were known for their fondness of drink. The following are thought to be some of their favorite cocktails.

Gin and tonic (Gerald Ford)
Martini (Herbert Hoover)
Rum and coke; dry martini (Richard Nixon)
Scotch or brandy (Franklin Roosevelt)
Bourbon (Harry Truman)
Scotch and soda (Lyndon Johnson)

Use of Cannabis in Early Presidencies

While it is certainly debated, there seems to be significant evidence for the use of cannabis by many of our founding fathers. It is unclear just how prevalent smoking of cannabis was during the colonial era, but it is fact that a number of men, including George Washington, were aware of the effects of the drug and likely used it themselves. President George Washington was known to have written a letter with a veiled reference to hashish. He said, “The artificial preparation of hemp, from Silesia, is a real curiosity.” He went on to discuss the dissemination of hemp seeds and the separation of male and female hemp plants in an effort to increase the potency of smoked cannabis. He, along with Thomas Jefferson farmed hemp at one point in their life. Jefferson and Ben Franklin, additionally, were ambassadors to France during the period of time that hashish was in vogue, and they likely partook in these new experiences. According to a researcher at the American Historical Reference Society and consultant for the Smithsonian, Dr. Burke, there is plenty of evidence to suggest a number of our presidents smoked cannabis. According to him, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Taylor and Pierce all took pleasure from smoking hemp during their presidency. Pierce was even quoted as saying that smoking cannabis was the only positive thing about the Mexican War.

By Dr. Bob Curran
RINF Alternative News
 

Atlantis! Lemuria! Shamballha! Shangri-La! The very names conjure up images of sunken cities or forgotten lands hidden in the impenetrable jungle or amongst mountain peaks somewhere beyond the edges of civilization. They also suggest ancient and powerful cultures and technologies long vanished from the world, remnants of which-if popular imagination is to be believed-may still lie slumbering in the caverns far beneath the earth. Is there any truth in such beliefs?

Allied to the names of these ancient places are further stories of legendary sites-places like the Garden of Eden in Christian lore, Ygdrassil, the World-Tree of Viking myth or even Davy Jones’ Locker, recently made famous by the film series Pirates of the Caribbean.

So strong has the lure of these distant, exotic and often fabulous places proven to be that many men have gone in search of them, either as individuals or at the head of expeditions, some of which have been provided by their own countries. A good number have set out to find wealth or land, some have done so for political reasons, and a few for the sheer adventure of the enterprise. Some have returned empty-handed, a number have perished in the attempt, and some have simply vanished, thus fuelling speculation that there might be some truth in such legends.

But it was not only lost explorers who fuelled the popular idea of distant realms. Television and film makers took up the challenge of actually creating these worlds and giving them some sort of immediacy. Popular films on the big screen such as The Lost World, Journey to the Centre of the Earth and even the more recent remake of King Kong, set on a forgotten island where a giant gorilla dwells, have speculated about what sort of environments these places might have. Were they, for example, swarming with prehistoric creatures or homes to advanced cultures that might fight to guard their privacy or be preparing to attack us in our own locations? Indeed the idea of some monstrous race, lurking in the depths far beneath us and armed with futuristic weapons is a common thought which has barely diminished and still stays in the public nightmares, even today. On the other hand, the possibility of a place of monastic tranquillity, shut away from a turbulent world, was also encapsulated in Frank Capra’s 1937 film Lost Horizon, sparking a popular belief that perhaps such a place might well exist tucked away somewhere in the high Eastern mountains. Such a suggestion may still remain, for although orbiting satellites have mapped most of our world for us, there is still a suggestion that in some remote region there is still someone or something-some race of men or creatures-which remains undetected and may either aid or else turn upon mankind at a future date. The possibilities of lost worlds seem endless.

Lost lands have also provided inspiration for some well known writers and appear in many works of literature from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1870 masterpiece The Coming Race to Jack Vance’s 1980s Lyonesse trilogy. Such books have kept these places in the public eye and have stirred the imaginations of countless readers. But why has interest in them remained so strong throughout the years? Why, for example, has the Atlantis story achieved such a hold on popular thought? And why has Shangri-La stayed at the foremost of our minds, becoming almost a cliché?

For some they represent, for example, no more than our deepest hopes and desires for an ideal state of being. They may, as they did for Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party of Germany, symbolize the home of some form of idealized beings or men whose wisdom is far beyond that of the mundane world. Or they may, as they did for Madam Blavatsky, suggest the original cradle of mysticism which surrounds our existence. They may even represent some idealized state towards which mankind can strive.

And, of course, they also stand for worlds of wonder. The idea of a kingdom such as Lyonesse, drowned forever beneath the freezing waters of the ocean through the petulant whim of a spoiled daughter; of a nightmarish city like Irem, raised in the desert by unseen demonic forces; of the lost land of Bimini where gushing water confers eternal youth on all those who drink from a wonderful fountain there, all excite and entice us. The vision of the lost golden city of El Dorado, hidden deep in the South American jungle or the less material treasure of contentment to be found in the mystical monastic city of Shangri-La somewhere amongst the towering Himalayan peaks, lures something in all of us. In earlier times, those destinations were a goal that might be attained through adventure and daring. In many ways, they also represented the last great challenge of Mankind.

As travel and new communications cause our perceptions of the world to shrink and become more routinely predictable, these places represent the last wild and unknown locations and may still offer a chance for exploration, excitement and danger. Because of this, the idea of lost lands, vanished places and long-disappeared civilizations will not go away.

By Hal Turner

Three weeks ago, I published a brief snippet on the front page of my web site reporting the governments of the US Canada and Mexico are conspiring in secret to merge the three nations into a new entity called the North American Union.

There has been much talk of this on various internet blogs for over a year. Most of those blogs have been smeared as “conspiracy theorists” and have been largely ignored by the main stream.

What prompted my interest in the issue was money: I was sent professional images of actual AMERO coins by someone in the US Treasury! The person included a note saying they like my radio show and are frightened by what’s been going on in secret within our government.

This Treasury Department person was outraged that our country was beginning to coin money as part of a merger that would do away with our country, via a merger the American public knew nothing about!

When I got the professional images of the AMERO coin, I was finally intrigued enough to make mention of it on my web site. My site has gotten over 20 Million visits in the last couple years and is becoming more popular because of the brutal honesty and timely delivery of news that folks don’t find elsewhere. This story about AMERO coins would fit my niche of breaking news, so I ran a snippet of a story.

As part of my report, I included the professional images sent to me by the Treasury person. They appear below:

I also mentioned that very pricey “Collector Proofs” of the coins were also being Minted in Silver and Gold, and I posted an image of one such Silver Proof, shown below:

The story went on to say that the US Government has intentionally overspent itself for the purpose of irreversibly Bankrupting the country. The idea is that they will drive the country into economic failure, then when millions of Americans are panicking at the prospect, offer them a solution of merging the three countries as “the only possible way” to avoid losing everything.

They will force Canada into the merger by telling them the US currency they hold and rely upon will be worthless and the only way Canada can even hope to salvage any of the funds is to join the NAU.

They will sell it to the Mexican people by saying it will instantly improve their buying-power and quality of life.

In reality, the value of the US and Canadian dollars will be significantly reduced to counter the worthless peso being absorbed. People in the US and Canada will suffer great financial loss while Mexicans will see significant gain. In the meantime, the financial elite and the politicians they own will make out like bandits!

That’s the reason politicians are doing this: to get rich for themselves and their financial elite pals.

The folks in power within government and their buddies in Banking and finance know that in any currency switch, some lose big while others gain big. Really big! In fact, folks with foreknowledge of such a switch can make hundreds-of-millions, perhaps even billions for themselves overnight. Those without foreknowledge (common folks like you and me) usually end up being wiped out.

INSTANT, FULL BLAST “SPIN”

I published the images and the small story and went to bed. I had no idea what my little story would do.

Within a matter of hours, there was a full blown effort to discredit my story and the images as fake.

I was accused of lying. I was accused of having “photoshopped” the images by creating them in Adobe Photoshop.

Within a couple days, a basic web site for AMERO “FANTASY COINS” was erected on the internet and word of that site was spread quickly. The site contained the same images as I had run on my front page, so clearly whatever “SPIN” was happening was being driven by others who also had the professional images.

There was intense effort to claim the whole idea of these coins was a fantasy and there was absolutely no truth to them whatsoever. That effort to “spin” the story out of existence worked. Folks quickly lost interest. I did not.

Get me the real thing by any means necessary

I reached out to the person in the Treasury who first alerted me to the coins. That person told me “The shit hit the fan around here when your story ran.” The person went on to say “They told everyone in all the Mints that anyone revealing information about the AMERO would be fired and perhaps even criminally prosecuted for endangering national security.”

Ahhhh yes, the grand old catch-all of national security. When they wheel that one out, you just KNOW they’re pissed off about something!

I told the Treasury person that the only way anyone might believe this is happening, is for me to actually get one of the coins. The Treasury guy balked. He said “there’s no way to get one without stealing it.”

I though about that for a moment. . . . . then decided that if my government is concealing the actual Minting of coins for a new sovereign entity which may end up with power over me, but which I haven’t been told about, then that government deserves whatever gets done to it.

I told the Treasury person to get me an Amero by any means necessary - even if that meant stealing it. The Treasury person said it would require them to think about for awhile and if it could be done, I would get one in the mail.

I waited. And waited. Frankly, after about three weeks, I lost track of the story — until today. A real AMERO coin arrived at my home in the mail this afternoon!

The real thing arrives!

Today, I received a single 20 AMERO coin in the mail. A real coin. Real metal, really MINTED by the US Mint in Denver, CO. The proof that it is being Minted in Denver is that the coin is stamped with the Mint Identity letter “D” on the bottom right of the side with the eagle just like regular US coins already in circulation today!

Click each image to enlarge it, CLICK TWICE TO SUPER ENLARGE IT!!

Please note the letter “D” stamped below and to the right of the Planet earth at the bottom right of the coin in this photo. That “D” stands for the United States Mint at Denver, CO.

VIDEO!

So that you can see this is a real, metal coin, I have made a small video of me holding the coin, turning it, then dropping it on a wooden table top so you can hear what it sounds like when it hits.
Download the Windows Media Video here

I WAS RIGHT!

I stand vindicated. All those who claimed I fabricated the images now owe me an apology. All those who claimed these were “fantasy” coins can now explain why anyone in their right mind would spend Millions of dollars to create the rare and expensive professional dies and plates necessary for minting coins that will not be issued?

The simple truth is, the coins are real. The plan to merge the US, Canada and Mexico is real. Our government is lying about it and the fact they are minting money at the Denver Mint bearing the name of Union of North America is proof.

So America, Canada and Mexico, our governments are betraying us and planning to merge our countries without our knowledge or consent, or by financial disaster they bring-on intentionally. What are we going to do about it?

For my part, the Second Amendment comes to mind.

– Hal Turner

The Observer

Fragments of bomb timer that helped to convict a Libyan ex-agent were ‘practically carbonised’ before the trial, says bankrupt Swiss businessman

The key piece of material evidence used by prosecutors to implicate Libya in the Lockerbie bombing has emerged as a probable fake.
Nearly two decades after Pan Am flight 103 exploded over Scotland on 21 December, 1988, allegations of international political intrigue and shoddy investigative work are being levelled at the British government, the FBI and the Scottish police as one of the crucial witnesses, Swiss engineer Ulrich Lumpert, has apparently confessed that he lied about the origins of a crucial ‘timer’ - evidence that helped tie the man convicted of the bombing to the crime.

The disaster killed 270 people when the London to New York Boeing 747 exploded in mid-air. Britain and the US blamed Libya, saying that its leader, Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, wanted revenge for the US bombing of Tripoli in 1986. At a trial in the Netherlands in 2001, former Libyan agent Abdulbaset al-Megrahi was jailed for life.

He is currently serving his sentence in Greenock prison, but later this month the Scottish Court of Appeal is expected to hear Megrahi’s case, after the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission ruled in June that there was enough evidence to suggest a miscarriage of justice. Lumpert’s confession, which was given to police in his home city of Zurich last week, will strengthen Megrahi’s appeal.

The Zurich-based Swiss businessman Edwin Bollier, who has spent nearly two decades trying to clear his company’s name, is as eager for the appeal as is Megrahi. Bollier’s now bankrupt company, Mebo, manufactured the timer switch that prosecutors used to implicate Libya after they said that fragments of it had been found on a Scottish hillside.

Bollier, now 70, admits having done business with Libya. ‘Two years before Lockerbie, we sold 20 MST-13 timers to the Libyan military. FBI agents and the Scottish investigators said one of those timers had been used to detonate the bomb. We were shown a fuzzy photograph and I confirmed the fragments looked as though they came from one of our timers.’

However, Bollier was uneasy with the photograph he had been shown and asked to see the fragments. He was finally given permission in 1998 and travelled to Dumfries to see the evidence.

‘I was shown fragments of a brown circuit board which matched our prototype. But when the MST-13 went into production, the timers contained green boards. I knew that the timers sold to Libya had green boards. I told the investigators this.’

Back in Switzerland, Bollier’s company was in effect bankrupt, having faced a lawsuit from Pan Am and having lost major clients, such as the German federal police to which Mebo supplied communications equipment.

In 2001, Bollier spent five days in the witness box at the Lockerbie trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands. ‘I was a defence witness, but the trial was so skewed to prove Libyan involvement that the details of what I had to say was ignored. A photograph of the fragments was produced in court and I asked to see the pieces again. When they were brought to me, they were practically carbonised. They had been tampered with since I had seen them in Dumfries.’

Few people apart from conspiracy theorists and investigative journalists working on the case were prepared to believe Bollier until the end of last month, when Lumpert, one of his former employees, walked into a Zurich police station and asked to swear an affidavit before a notary.

I.P.O. Information Service
flamesong

On 4 August 2007 Dr. Hans Koechler received from Mr. Edwin Bollier, head of the Swiss-based company MEBO AG, a copy of the German original of an Affidavit, dated 18 July 2007 and signed by Mr. Ulrich Lumpert, former employee (electronics engineer) of MEBO AG, Zurich, related to the Lockerbie case.

In a statement released today, Dr. Hans Koechler, who has followed the Lockerbie proceedings since the beginning of the trial in the Netherlands in May 2000, highlighted basic aspects and questions of this new revelation that appear to be of relevance not only in connection with the upcoming second appeal of the convicted Libyan national, but also for new prosecutorial action ex officio by the Scottish authorities.

In his affidavit Mr. Lumpert implicitly admits having committed perjury as witness No. 550 before the Scottish Court in the Netherlands. He states (Par. 2) that he has stolen a handmade (by him) sample of an “MST-13 Timer PC-board” from MEBO company in Zurich and handed it over, on 22 June 1989 (!), to an “official person investigating the Lockerbie case.” He further states (in Par. 5) that the fragment of the MST-13 timer, cut into two pieces for “supposedly forensic reasons,” which was presented in Court as vital part of evidence, stemmed from the piece which he had stolen and handed over to an investigator in 1989. He further states that when he became aware that this piece was used for an “intentional politically motivated criminal undertaking” (vorsätzliche politisch kriminelle “Machenschaft”) he decided, out of fear for his life, to keep silent on the matter.

The rather late admission of Mr. Lumpert is consistent with an earlier revelation in the British and Scottish media according to which a former Scottish police officer (whose identity has not yet been disclosed to the public) stated “that the CIA planted the tiny fragment of circuit board crucial in convicting a Libyan” for the bombing of the Pan Am jet (Scotland on Sunday, 28 August 2005).

Upon receipt of the document, Dr. Koechler informed the owner of MEBO AG on 7 August 2007 that Mr. Lumpert will have to submit his affidavit under oath before the competent judicial authorities of Scotland. In the meantime (22 August 2007), the owner of MEBO AG has requested the Scottish judicial authorities – by way of the Swiss Prosecutor’s office and on the basis of the agreement on mutual judicial assistance between the UK and Switzerland – to investigate the alleged criminal manipulations referred to in Mr. Lumpert’s statement.

In his capacity as UN-appointed observer of the Lockerbie trial, Dr. Hans Koechler has repeatedly raised the issue of the timer fragment and expressed his amazement at the Defense team’s refusal to look into the matter during Mr. Megrahi’s appeal when questions as to the reliability of forensic evidence had already been raised. (See Dr. Koechler’s appeal report, Par. 10 [c] of 26 March 2002; his statement of 23 August 2003, Par. 10; and his statement of 14 October 2005, Par. 2.)

It is to be recalled that, as witness before the Lockerbie court, Mr. Edwin Bollier had raised the issue of the manipulation of the timer fragments, but was brusquely interrupted in his testimony by the presiding Judge and prevented from giving further information in this matter.

In the meantime (information received on 26 August 2007), Mr. Lumpert has revised part of his Affidavit (Par. 5); he now states that the letter “M” on the timer fragment (supposedly for the German word Muster: sample), unlike previously stated, has been engraved by himself. In view of this and earlier statements, Mr. Lumpert’s credibility will have to be assessed very carefully by the competent judicial authorities and he will have to be made aware of the consequences, in terms of criminal law, of lying to the Court.

At the same time, the credibility of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) is also at stake. In its News Release of 28 June 2007, in which it had announced the referral of Mr. Al-Megrahi’s case to the Scottish High Court for a second appeal, the SCCRC found it necessary to “absolve” the investigating authorities of any suspicion of wrongdoing. Should Mr. Lumpert’s confession be proven to be true, the SCCRC’s statement – “The Commission undertook extensive enquiries in this area but found nothing to support that allegation or to undermine the trial court’s conclusions in respect of the fragment” – will appear highly questionable, even dubious. The public will have to ask why a supposedly independent judicial review body would try to exonerate “preventively” officials in a case which is being returned to the High Court for a second appeal because of suspicions of a miscarriage of justice.

If it is indeed the rule of law that governs the Scottish polity, the Scottish judicial authorities will have to deal with this new revelation ex officio – independently of how the appeal court in Mr. Megrahi’s case will evaluate this witness’s confession of perjury.

Those responsible for the midair explosion of PanAm flight 103 will have to be identified and brought to justice. If there was any wrongdoing, criminal and/or due to incompetence, of the judicial authorities in the investigation and prosecution of the Lockerbie case, this will also have to be dealt with through proper procedures of criminal law. A continuation of the rather obvious cover-up which we have witnessed up until now is neither acceptable for the citizens of Scotland nor for the international public, Dr. Koechler stated.

Granma International
flamesong
21st August 2007

On August 20, the 11th Circuit Appeals Court in Atlanta heard convincing allegations by the legal team defending the five Cuban anti-terrorist fighters imprisoned in the United States.

The defense lawyers submitted that the prosecution committed serious procedural errors and used intimidation to pressure the jury of the initial trial, which took place in Miami in a climate of apparent hostility toward the five heroes.

For the first time eminent foreign legal professionals were present at the hearing of the case of Gerardo Hernández, Fernando González, Ramón Labaniño, Antonio Guerrero and René González, known as the Five in the international campaign for their release.

Alicia Jrapko, a member of the International Free the Five Committee, told the Cuban radio and TV Roundtable program over the phone that the presence of prestigious international lawyers was much larger than before and signified strong backing for the Cuban anti-terrorist fighters.

Juan Guzmán, the Chilean attorney who brought charges against the ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet, was present and informed the Roundtable program (again by phone) that the U.S. government was unable to refute the defense truths, as reflected in the international media.

Guzmán appreciated the questions put by the sitting judges and stated that there is really no evidence to justify the charges of espionage against the prisoners, nor that of “conspiring to commit murder,” brazenly brought against two of them.

It was also abundantly clear that Miami was not an appropriate venue for the original trial, where the Five were handed down sentences ranging from 15 years’ imprisonment to two life terms, because the jury was intimidated, a point firmly established by the defense appeal, Guzmán added.

The Chilean legal professional thought that the defense achieved its main objective: to communicate the poor conduct of the U.S. government and the shortcomings of the jury selected for the Miami trial.

“In line with my legal experience, my impression was that those who have knowledge of this case would have to rule in favor of the five Cubans,” Guzmán affirmed.

The multinational TV networks Telesur and CNN covered aspects of the hearing and antecedents in the case of the Five.

This September the Cuban patriots will have completed nine years of arbitrary detention in the United States after they were sentenced for crimes that they did not commit in a rigged trial in Miami, lacking in procedural guarantees, as confirmed by UN experts and three judges at the Court of Appeals in the first hearing.

Chávez condemns U.S. protection of terrorist Posada Carriles
Granma International
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The United States’ harboring of terrorist Luis Posada Carriles is one more example of how U.S. rulers are threatening the world, said Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

The leader recalled, “It has been more than two years since we applied for the extradition of one of the worst terrorists in the history of the continent.” The U.S. has yet to agree despite the accumulation of evidence supporting the demand.

“He (Posada Carriles) is a terrorist”, said Chávez, “The whole world knows it, and the U.S. government knows it better than any one else, yet it refuses to extradite him and has only charged him with the violation of immigration laws. Now he is freely walking the streets of Miami.”

Chávez raised the issue during a press conference as he ended his visit to Uruguay as part of a tour begun in Argentina, also to include Ecuador and Bolivia.

“He has committed murder, planted bombs, trained terrorists and torturers, yet they accuse him only of violating immigration laws, even though Cuba has handed over exact details showing how, where and with whom he entered the United States.”

Chávez added that this was why Sean Penn (the U.S. actor) told him in Caracas that the rulers of that country were “a threat to the world”.

flamesong

On 8th June 2001 in a federal court in Miami five Cuban men, Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González and René González were convicted of charges of false identification, espionage and conspiracy to commit murder. Their sentences ranged from 75 years to life.

Cuba has been the bogey man for the American people since the Castro-led revolution resulted in the ousting of US puppet Fulgencio Batista in January 1959 and the resulting expulsion of American tax exiles and gangsters. Many of the exiled settled in Florida and have since waged a largely unreported ‘private’ terrorist war on Cuba which has resulted in the deaths of over 3000 Cubans.

The five men, known as the Miami Five in Cuba and the Cuban Five in Miami were sent to infiltrate and monitor the anti-Cuban terrorist activities of such groups as Brothers to the Rescue, Comandos F4, CORU, Alpha 66 and Omega 7, based in Miami and warn of planned terrorist attacks - though it transpired that the groups activities were know, if not supported, by the FBI and CIA. As a result of the information they supplied, many terrorist act were pre-empted and two aircraft involved in these attacks were shot down.

However, the five were arrested on 12th September 1998 and held in solitary confinement for 17 months. The trial, which began in November 2000, was held in Miami and the defence lawyers argued from the outset that this could not lead to a fair trial - given the local anti-Cuban sentiment - and five times the judge denied a change of venue.

Four years after their conviction (and after seven years in prison) their convictions were overturned and they were granted a new trial outside Florida. Within two months a panel of twelve judges began deliberating thier case and a year later their retrail was denied.

They remain in prison. The wives of two men, Gerardo Hernández and René Gonzáles, are persistently denied visas to visit their husbands. Amnesty International challenged the fairness of the trial in an open letter to the U.S. State Department in 2006 and continue to monitor the situation. Those who have champione their cause include Eight Nobel laureates - amongst them Desmond Tutu and Günter Grass.

Caught on camera.
The Federal Prosecutor for Southern Florida, Guy Lewis (right) steps up to hug Jose Basulto, the head of the so called ‘Brothers to the Rescue’ organisation after sentencing the hearings. Basulto, a former CIA agent and vetran of the Bay of Pigs invasion is a member of the Cuban American National Foundation. He was at the forefront of the campaign to keep Elian Gonzalez in the US and has admitted to having made attemps on the life of Fidel Castro. It was Basulto’s planes that were shot down by Cuban air force Migs in 1996 when they violated Cuban airspace despite repeated warnings not to do so. These pictures talken from US television prove the close links between the Federal prosecutor’s office and the Cuban-American Mafia. Is it possible that the Miami Five got a fair trial?

There is an international campaign to Free The Five. In the UK, Father Geoff Bottoms works tirelessly to raise awareness and frequently travels to Cuba and Miami to represent the prisoners and was awarded the Cuban Frienship Medal by Fidel Castro for his work.

By ANGELA DOLAND

The official story goes like this: On the last night of Jim Morrison’s life, the rocker went to a movie in Paris, listened to records, fell ill and died of heart failure in his bathtub at the age of 27.

But rumors have always swirled around the death of The Doors frontman and, 36 years later, a former Paris nightclub manager is telling a different story. In a new book, Sam Bernett says that Morrison died in a toilet stall of his club after what he believes was a heroin overdose.

He writes of his shock on finding Morrison’s body: “The flamboyant singer of ‘The Doors,’ the beautiful California boy, had become an inert lump crumpled in the toilet of a nightclub.” Bernett, whose French-language book is called “The End: Jim Morrison,” says he believes two drug dealers brought Morrison’s body back to his apartment.

Bernett, who was in his early 20s when Morrison died in 1971, went on to become a prominent radio personality, rock biographer and a vice president of Disneyland Paris. Though he was pestered for years by reporters investigating Morrison’s death, he kept his story quiet until his wife suggested writing a book last year.

“For me it’s a very bad (memory),” Bernett told The Associated Press.

Rumors have long suggested that Morrison died of an overdose and that he had fallen ill at the nightclub, but witnesses did not come forward.

Patrick Chauvel, a noted war photographer and writer, sometimes helped run the bar at the club. He recalls giving a hand to men who were carrying Morrison in a staircase there.

“I think he was already dead,” said Chauvel, who considered putting the episode in a 2005 book before his publisher cautioned against it. Chauvel said he thought an ambulance would have been called if Morrison were still alive.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It was a long time ago, and we weren’t drinking only water.”

An official at the Paris prosecutor’s office said it was very unlikely the case on Morrison’s death would be reopened or that anybody could be prosecuted in the affair, because the statute of limitations — the time limit on legal proceedings — had run out.

Stephen Davis, the author of “Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend,” says he would not rewrite history because of the new book. Based on his reporting, he believes Morrison did overdose at the club, but that it was shortly before his death — not the same night — and that he survived the experience.

“It just seems likely that if he died in the toilet of a nightclub, it would have come out before now,” Davis said.

Morrison came to Paris in March 1971 at a troubled time in his life. At a 1969 concert in Florida, he was accused of exposing his genitals to the audience. He was convicted of indecent exposure and profanity, and the episode led to promoters canceling concerts and earned the band a stream of negative publicity.

Morrison left for Paris with his appeal pending. There, he lived in a Right Bank apartment with his girlfriend, Pamela Courson, and he wandered the streets, sightseeing and toting around a plastic bag containing his writings. In Paris, he gained so much weight as to become almost unrecognizable, and his health suffered.

He also partied. Morrison spent “practically every night” at the Rock and Roll Circus, the hip Left Bank nightclub that Bernett managed, where stars like Roman Polanski and Marianne Faithfull were regulars, Bernett said.

At around 1 a.m. on July 3, 1971, Morrison went to the club and was joined by two men — drug dealers who sold him heroin for Courson, Bernett said. At one point, Bernett noticed that Morrison had disappeared. Later, the bouncer broke down the door of a locked toilet stall, and they discovered Morrison unresponsive, Bernett said.

Bernett says he asked a doctor, a club customer, to examine the singer.

“When we found him dead, he had a little foam on his nose, and some blood too, and the doctor said, ‘That must be an overdose of heroin,’” Bernett said. Bernett added that he did not see Morrison take any heroin that night but said the singer was known to sniff the drug because he was afraid of needles.

Bernett says the two drug dealers insisted Morrison was just unconscious and carried him out of the club. Though Bernett says he wanted to call the paramedics and authorities, the club’s owner ordered him to keep quiet to avert a scandal.

Bernett believes the dealers brought Morrison’s body home and dropped it into the bathtub, a last attempt to revive him.

Morrison’s girlfriend, who died three years later of an overdose, told police an entirely different story.

Courson said the couple went to the movies and out for dinner that night, listened to records and fell asleep. According to her testimony in police records, Morrison awoke in the night feeling ill and took a hot bath. Courson said she found him dead in the tub.

Morrison was buried in Pere Lachaise cemetery, in a small ceremony without fanfare, on July 7, 1971. No autopsy was ever performed.

__

Associated Press Writer Verena von Derschau in Paris contributed to this report.

[Robin Lindley is a Seattle attorney and writer who covers international affairs, human rights, politics, law, medicine, the media, and arts. He was a chair of the World Peace through Law Section of the Washington State Bar Association, and a staff attorney with the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations on the investigation of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.]

In the African-American community, a mistrust of doctors and medical research is widespread and deeply rooted in a history of involuntary, abusive and non-therapeutic experimentation on blacks documented since at least the eighteenth century. 

In her acclaimed new book, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, journalist and bioethicist Harriet Washington traces this mistrust in the first comprehensive history of the medical mistreatment of African Americans.

Publisher’s Weekly praised Washington as a “great storyteller,” and named Medical Apartheid one of the best books of 2006, finding it “even at its most distressing, compulsively readable.” PW, Kirkus and Booklist each honored the book with starred reviews, and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association bestowed its Honor Nonfiction Award for 2007 on Medical Apartheid.

Washington’s book details horrific abuses by the guardians of health.

Africans found unfit by slave ship surgeons were routinely thrown overboard to die at sea en route to the Americas.

Physicians in the antebellum south believed that blacks were immune to pain and conducted hideous experiments on men, women and children without anesthesia. 

More recent experiments include non-consensual and disproportionate sterilization of blacks like the “Mississippi appendectomy” performed on civil rights legend Fannie Lou Hamer. 

Blacks were also the subjects of painful radiation and dermatological studies.

 In the 1960’s, a neurosurgeon removed parts of the brains of black boys to regulate “behavior problems.” 

And, from 1932 until 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service in its Tuskegee experiments promised to treat hundreds of black men for syphilis, but actually provided no treatment, and instead watched the men die slow, painful deaths.

Harriet Washington is a Visiting Scholar at DePaul University School of Law, and a former Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School and at Stanford University.  She has written extensively on medicine and ethics for publications from USA Today to the New England Journal of Medicine and the Harvard Public Health Review.

Robin Lindley:  What prompted your interest in bioethics, and your new book?

Harriet Washington:  I was always interested in bioethics.  I started as a pre-medical student, like a lot of medical writers.   When I finished college, I ran a small poison center for the university, and stumbled across case files showing a dramatic disparity in the way black and white patients with the same pathology were treated.  I was most struck by how differently blacks were treated in research.  I knew that participating in medical research was inherently risky, but protections are in place to limit the risk and to assure that people know the risks.  All these protections seemed eschewed when it came to black people.  The more I learned, the more I realized it was not part of the historical canon—this aspect of health care disparities was all but ignored.

That piqued my interest.  When I became a journalist, I knew I wanted to do [the book], but not until 2002 when I did the clinical ethics fellowship at Harvard did I feel I had the tools to do an ethical analysis so that I would end up with something meaningful.

RL:   When you told physicians of your plans for the book, wasn’t there disbelief about the history of medical experimentation on African-Americans?

HW:    Several physicians told me that, including physicians in the history of medicine, which I found staggering.  There is a resistance to acknowledging these things, but there’s no question they transpired.  In the book, I use as references mainstream medical articles and physicians’ own writings.

RL:   Can you discuss scientific racism in the antebellum period?

HW:   We call it scientific racism now, but back then it was only science.  The people who studied black people in the antebellum period were southern physicians because then 90 percent of black people then lived in the south.  Physicians supported the enslavement system, and it probably couldn’t have persisted without the physicians who said blacks were inferior and made by the Creator to be the workhorses of the white man.  It was the physicians’ role to help the planter in keeping slaves not healthy, but fit for work, and in keeping slaves subjugated. 

There was conflation between medical treatment and punishment.  A physician would jocularly advise a planter that a slave needed “nine drops of essence of rawhide.”  There were physicians who actually prescribed physical punishment as “treatment” for ‘black diseases’—slaves [who resisted slavery]—who ran away, or didn’t work, or were intractable.

RL:   One southern physician you write about is Dr. James Marion Sims, an esteemed, one-time president of the American Medical Association, who performed horrific experiments on black women and children. 

HW:   I thought he was a wonderful benefactor, the father of American gynecology—until I read his own writings.  Now I know he was also an abuser of unwilling black subjects.  I was staggered by the things he described.  Sims, the so-called benefactor of women, often used the metaphors of imprisonment and of controlling and imprisoning a woman for her own good.  He wasn’t referring only to black women, but his perfect subjects were enslaved black women who he bought or otherwise acquired to perfect distressingly painful, invasive reproductive surgeries that made his fortune. 

He used black women.  He performed 30 surgeries on one slave woman and, after repeatedly slicing and suturing the genitalia for four or five years, he perfected a repair for vesicovaginal fistula, a horrible complication of childbirth, and made his medical fortune. 

He went north, headed the American Medical Association, and even went to France to become the toast of the Second Empire where he treated Empress Eugenie.  All across the world, he’s usually spoken of as a wonderful hero, and that’s the face he turned to white women.  But black women, and black men, saw a different face.  He forced surgery [without anesthesia] on a black male slave named Sam.  Sims blithely wrote about it in a medical journal, and the editors chimed in that he’d done a wonderful thing:  he proved it was possible to operate on people whether or not they were willing. 

RL:   And Dr. Sims experiment on many women and children?

HW:   About 13 women by my best count.  At any one time, [Sims kept] at least five women in the shack he called a hospital, [but was actually] a laboratory where he confined people.

He also operated on several black children.  He believed that a form of tetany, considered an infectious disease, could be treated in black children by re-arranging particular skull bones.  He never explained how opening the skulls of infants and moving their bones around treated an infectious disease.  Scientific racists believed that black people were less intelligent than white people [because] the skull bones of black children closed early, essentially trapping the brain before it could develop fully. 

RL:   Did any of these children survive these horrific operations?

HW:   That’s a chilling thing.  When these subjects are referred to, we rarely find out what happened.  That wasn’t the point.  He didn’t report if the slave infants recovered or died.  In fact, with the surgery on captive women for vaginal fistula, he only records fixing a fistula of one woman, [and] never mentioned what happened to the others.

RL:   And you write that researchers saw blacks as “clinical material,” and used the bodies of blacks for dissection in medical schools.

HW:   When blacks were still enslaved, it was a simple matter because, as the property of the master, there wasn’t even a question of asking anyone else’s consent. Obtaining bodies for anatomical dissection was very difficult with a strong social sentiment against it.  It was not only illegal, but socially reprehensible, to cut up a dead body.  However, modes of practicing medicine were changing and people expected a physician to be familiar with the body.  So whose bodies were used?   Black people’s because they were so convenient.  You simply went to someone who owned slaves and got their dead bodies.  

Then the social landscape began changing.  When slavery was abolished, you no longer could commandeer the bodies of black people with impunity—you had to be surreptitious, and there were several ways to do it.  There were hospitals or wings of hospitals that were designated for blacks only where physicians would use black bodies with impunity.  While they were alive, the people were used for clinical display—to display procedures or disorders.  When they died, the bodies were simply moved to the anatomical laboratory. 

However, this didn’t supply enough bodies, so physicians began taking fresh bodies from graveyards.  After a while, laws banned this use of bodies, and medical schools became more circumspect.  They began using black porters to obtain bodies.  The Medical College of Georgia used Grandison Harris, a huge, strapping man.  He was so strong, he could go to a black cemetery and pull bodies out with his powerful arms.

Fortunately for me, very specific documentation was kept on the bodies.  In 1989, the Medical College of Georgia renovated an old laboratory.  Construction workers found a cache of ten thousand human bones marked by anatomists in India ink and clearly discarded medical training material.  Three-quarters of them came from the nearby black cemetery.

RL:   So human remains were treated in effect as medical waste?

HW:   Exactly.  They found these bones jumbled together with broken test tubes and beakers, even with the bones of animals that had been used for medical research.  There was no attempt to place them in any order, or invest the site with any dignity. This very sad scene was repeated at hospitals throughout the country.

RL:   Can you describe the Tuskegee syphilis experiments?

HW:   It started as a beneficent experiment in 1928 with Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald, the founder of Sears Roebuck who had devoted himself to positive health initiatives to help black people—to start programs that they would take over. Unfortunately, the stock market crash in 1929 wiped out Rosenwald’s fortune so there was no money for that project.

The Public Health Service of the United States stepped in [in 1932], but public health physicians didn’t care about black self-sufficiency, and showed they didn’t care about black health either.  They decided to take black people with syphilis and, instead of treating them, simply watched them.   About 400 black men with syphilis were recruited under the guise that they would be treated.  They were not told they had syphilis, but that they had “bad blood”—a folk term that could mean many things including venereal disease.  They had 200 men as controls.  For the next forty years, they watched these men die.  The physicians were very open that their intent was to simply trace the progression of disease.

The physicians also wanted to validate their belief that syphilis treated blacks and whites differently.  White people with syphilis were held to suffer horribly devastating neurological consequences [such as] deafness, blindness, paralysis, but [the researchers] said black people only had problems with their muscles and hearts, because the nervous systems of black people were so primitive and underdeveloped compared to whites.  They took the data, manipulated it, and then falsely claimed they had proved that black people did not suffer any neurological consequences from syphilis, proving indirectly that black people had very inferior brains and nervous systems.

So the physicians were focused on everything except treatment.  In the 1940’s, penicillin was found to cure syphilis.  It was like a Holy Grail—as though scientists had now developed a shot to cure AIDS.   The Surgeon General, Thomas Parran, had made finding a cure for syphilis his mission, so he and the Public Health Service were thrilled.  Everyone got shots for syphilis, except for the men in the experiment.  Most of the men died slow, lingering, painful deaths—and so did many of their wives, girlfriends and children.

In 1972, the study was stopped when Peter Buxtun, a young investigator for the PHS, discovered the study and told a journalist friend who wrote about it.  When it hit the newspapers, and people in the United States—black and white—were horrified that the Public Health Service, the group that supposedly guards our health, would do this to a group of powerless, old black men. 

In 1997, Bill Clinton issued an apology for the study.  There were still a few survivors, and there was a dramatic and cathartic White House ceremony.  It’s wonderful that he issued the apology, and it’s even better that part of the resolution was a bioethics center established at Tuskegee University.  But all in all it’s very sad because subsequent events have shown that we didn’t learn what we should have.  After the Tuskegee study—although historians speak as though it was the only important abuse of black people—there were many other abuses as bad or worse than Tuskegee.

RL:   It seems you’ve done the definitive study of the Tuskegee experiment.

HW:   It’s because like anyone who studies history, I had access to the work of earlier historians such as James Jones [author of Bad Blood] and Allen Brandt who had done good investigations.  I took their work further by interviewing some important actors and addressing questions that had largely been ignored.

RL:   Among the most chilling experiments you describe were the brain operations Dr. Orlando Andy performed on black children.  Weren’t these fairly recent?

HW:   It was in the 1960’s—not the antebellum past.  Writing that part had me in tears, it was so upsetting.  Dr. Orlando J. Andy of the University of Mississippi was performing lobotomies, which were done then, and it was disturbing because our understanding of the brain was cruder then.  Andy presented it as therapeutic for boys with behavior problems.  He used six-, seven-, eight-, nine-year-old boys who had been institutionalized.  To say a boy had a behavior problem when you’re not a psychologist, when you don’t have psychological report, when you don’t have details, when the boy’s institutionalized and his parents are not part of the informed consent equation, it’s quite abusive. 

What’s a behavior problem?  Most six to nine-year-old boys are quite annoying at some time, but that doesn’t mean they should have parts of their brains taken out.  One case Andy wrote up as an example of his best work was five repeated surgeries on the same black boy, precipitated by “a behavior problem” that nobody ever quantified.

When you look at the mores of the segregation-era south then, there was a very narrow range of behavior for black men and boys.  Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy, was tortured and murdered on suspicion of whistling at a white woman.  So for Andy, a non-psychologist, to say the boy had a behavior problem and that’s why he repeatedly went in and took out important areas of the brain is shocking. At that time, they didn’t understand all the functions of the amygdala, so he’d take out the amygdala, and when that didn’t help, he’d take out the fornix, and then he’d take out part of the frontal lobe.  He notes what he removed, and how he tried to see what happened.  It was very much research and not therapy, and very recklessly done.

And, by the end, these children who had lobotomies were barely functional.  These children who had been functional could no longer walk or talk or had seizures.  It was horrifying, and made worse by Andy saying he didn’t want his work restricted to young black boys.  He felt that rioting blacks should have lobotomies, as did other neurosurgeons. 

In the late sixties or early seventies, several physicians got a huge grant from the government to explore doing lobotomies.  These lobotomies were actually performed on black prisoners, not white ones, in several state prisons.  Here were doctors who had a very troubling agenda of performing lobotomies on black people whose politics they did not like, and this was done in prisons, which are civil rights deserts.

This mentality has not gone away.  We saw it in New York City with the fenfluramine experiments where only blacks boys were allowed by protocol—no white boys were allowed—and they were given the toxic drug fenfluramine to monitor serotonin levels because researchers wanted to prove that these black boys had brain changes that would show them to be potential criminals. 

The same thing happened in the 1970’s in Baltimore when a physician affiliated with Johns Hopkins looked for chromosomal abnormalities that he said could be tied to a propensity for violence.  He looked at a pool of boys that was 85 percent black.  

RL:   Are there survivors of Dr. Andy’s haunting experiments?

HW:   It’s likely there are survivors but, by the time of his writing, they had lost brain function and were institutionalized.  They could still be lost in institutions.   I am still haunted by this.  It’s so frightening, especially when I see that the mentality that drove it has not gone away.

RL:   And you describe research in prisons with captive pools of subjects.

HW:   Yes.  And last year, a government panel recommended reopening of prisons to research, and it’s almost certain prisons will be opened to research.

I’m very concerned about what’s happened recently with research in this country.  We’ve got someone at the helm of NIH [National Institutes of Health] clinical trials who has adopted, in my opinion, a very cavalier attitude toward the rights of some research populations: prisoners seem to be one, and Third-World patients another.  Subjects in Africa and other parts of the Third World have been treated horribly by American researchers.  Things are done with them against their will, without their knowledge, and they’re offered much lower standards of research care and treatment—and this is justified as “practical ethics.”  Practical ethics means we will do one thing in Guinea and another in Connecticut, that some people’s lives and rights mean more than others.

If you’re talking about the law, which gives minimal protections, a person has to give permission to participate in experiments.  But in 1996, the law changed, and people can now be experimented on without their consent or their knowledge.  If you’re unconscious and admitted to an emergency department, doctors can use you in a research protocol without asking your permission, without informing you.   That 1996 federal provision has been used by companies that have devices to perfect and drugs to sell, and it’s been done with the blessing of some at NIH who are now at the helm.   Things we don’t consider fair are now done with impunity, and legally.  And ethicists use semantics to defend their actions.

RL:   But non-consensual experimentation contravenes the Nuremberg protocols and other ethical protocols.

HW:   The first sentence of the Nuremberg Code says, “The voluntary consent of the subject is absolutely essential.”  But the Nuremberg Code is toothless, with no enforceable penalties for noncompliance.  There are federal regulations that seek to legally constrain research institutions, but too often, the miscreants are never tried or punished.   I’m not saying that the mass of physicians is amoral or bad.  I believe the opposite is true.  But I am saying they regard the Nuremberg Code as a good code for Nazi barbarians, but not anything to which they need to subscribe.

RL:   What would you like your readers to take away from the book? 

HW:   Most of the change has been positive for black people and other research subjects.   Most people are no longer forced into research or abused with impunity because they’re black.  Research precautions do not perfectly protect people today, but the rampant abuse of yesterday does not exist anymore.  That’s very positive, and I’m happy to acknowledge that. 

The bad news is that our researchers use Third World and developing countries as their personal laboratory.  There’s abuse very similar to what blacks went through in the early days of our republic.   We have to demand that our researchers treat people abroad the same way they treat people here.

The other thing is for black people to understand that we have been abused, but that avoiding medical care and research is not something we can afford.  It’s very dangerous for us, and is already harming us. For example, black people get hepatitis C more than white people, but the only conventional medication, Interferon, doesn’t work for black people.  Part of the problem is that so few black people participate in research initiatives that we don’t know about problems soon enough. 

Having said that, because there are still inequities and research is still dangerous, we also must charge government and researchers to tighten protections.  The institutional review board (IRB) system, which is designed to protect patient subjects, does not work well and needs to be fixed.  There also should be a course for research subjects to explain their rights, and how to protect themselves.  Except for emergent situations, no one should be permitted to be a research subject who has not taken that course.  Today, medical research subjects know only what the involved researcher chooses to tell them about the research, and that’s not good enough.

http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/38691.html

DER Führer Adolf Hitler ist tot. These six words, announcing the death of the Nazi leader, should have brought the Second World War to an end in November 1943.

The sentence was part of a press release drafted by disaffected German officers who hatched an audacious plot to kill Hitler and then use a secret army to seize control of key sites before suing for peace with the Allies.

The full story - which surpasses any Hollywood war movie for drama, farce and ironic twists - has been uncovered by a German academic who closely examined detailed records left behind by the plotters.

Major General Henning von Tresckow created a new force of around 20,000 troops based in German-controlled territory in the east, telling High Command it was needed to protect against a potential revolt by slave labourers.

Tresckow then organised a ‘fashion parade’ at which Hitler was to inspect new uniforms, little suspecting one of the models was a suicide bomber. Once the Führer was dead, Tresckow planned to blame the killing on rogue SS elements, use his secret army to take command, and end the war.

But the putsch was foiled days before it was due to be launched, thanks to the RAF. The uniforms were among the casualties from two nights of bombing raids on Berlin, so the plot was abandoned.

Documents minutely detailing every moment of the overthrow of Nazi Germany and its aftermath were immediately buried by the panicked plotters. They were uncovered by the victorious Soviets in 1945 and lay in Moscow archives until a recent study by Professor Peter Hoffmann of the McGill University, Montreal.

Hoffman, a world authority on wartime resistance to Hitler within the German army, believes another of the plotters was Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the man who earned his place in history by almost killing the Führer with a briefcase bomb in 1944.

Interest in the subject of anti-Hitler plotting is likely to reach new heights later this year when Hollywood actor Tom Cruise begins shooting a major movie in which he plays Stauffenberg.

The new research shows Tresckow was an equal, if not greater, threat to Hitler. Among a close-knit group of conspirators, he worked on the demise of a man he called “the enemy of the world” and a “dancing dervish”.

At least two earlier plots have been uncovered, both involving cognac bottles packed with explosives. After they failed, Tresckow began work, in the summer of 1943, on a far more ambitious scheme.

Trescow’s plan was to kill Hitler at his war HQ, dubbed the ‘Wolf’s Lair’, in East Prussia, now part of the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. Hitler would be shown new German army winter uniforms, one of them modelled by Axel von dem Bussche, a decorated war hero who had vowed to kill the Führer after witnessing a massacre of Soviet Jews. Bussche would pose in the new uniform while holding two hand grenades, fully aware he too would die.

Meanwhile, Tresckow and his colleagues used their power to assign divisions to a new internal security force. The cover story for creating the army was to put down any attempts to rebel by enemies of the Reich such as slave workers.

It was planned that the army would begin an exercise 12 hours before the assassination and move in on Hitler’s East Prussian HQ, with other troops deploying near government offices in Berlin.

Seven hours before the assassination, commanders would establish the exact location of SS troops and two hours after that be fully prepared for combat against them.

Within 10 minutes of Hitler’s death, the code-words for a successful operation would be given, and the next phase of the plan would begin.

At “X plus 25 minutes” Tresckow’s army would occupy the Wolf’s Lair, along with the East Prussian HQs of Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, and Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.

After 30 minutes, a news statement was to be read on German radio, saying that Hitler was dead and accusing a “a traitorous clique” of SS and party leaders for trying to take personal advantage of the dismal situation on the Eastern Front. The statement would reassure the nation that a group of army officers had taken control and would bring stability.

But then disaster struck. On the nights of November 22 and 23, a series of bombing raids destroyed the trains containing the fashion show uniforms.

Hoffmann told Scotland on Sunday: “The plans demonstrate, and give details of, a thorough and promising preparation of a coup to seize control of Germany that was to accompany the assassination. This would have been followed by immediate armistice talks, or surrender. The plans show that the preparations of autumn 1943 were more thorough and promising of success than any other plans.”

He added: “The plans demonstrate Tresckow’s central role in these preparations, and his role as the driving force and leader of the movement to remove Hitler and his regime.”

Professor David Stafford, of Edinburgh University’s Centre for Second World War Studies, said: “The timing is very significant. It was after the great defeats of 1943 and the German Army knew the writing was on the wall. It is fascinating that we are still learning new things about the Second World War.”

Stauffenberg was executed for his role in the July 1944 attempt to kill Hitler, and Tresckow killed himself with a grenade because he feared being tracked down. Bussche - the only one of the three who was meant to die in the plots - survived the war and died in 1993.

http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=618852007