26/11/2010
BEIRUT (AFP) -- Turkey will not remain silent if Israel attacks Lebanon or Gaza, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in Beirut on Thursday, as ties between the longtime allies remained at an all-time low.
"Does (Israel) think it can enter Lebanon with the most modern aircraft and tanks to kill women and children, and destroy schools and hospitals, and then expect us to remain silent?" Erdogan said at a conference organised by the Union of Arab Banks.
"Does it think it can use the most modern weapons, phosphorus munitions and cluster bombs to kill children in Gaza and then expect us to remain silent?
"We will not be silent and we will support justice by all means available to us."
Turkey was once Israel's closest military and diplomatic ally in the Middle East but ties began to deteriorate when Ankara criticised Israel's December 2008 to January 2009 offensive against Gaza.
Relations then nosedived on May 31, 2010 when Israeli naval commandos stormed a Turkish-registered protest ship, the Mavi Marmara, part of a flotilla attempting to break the Israeli blockade of the Palestinian territory.
Nine Turkish activists were killed in the operation.
Erdogan has said his country will not begin to restore relations with Israel until it apologises for its "savage attack" on the vessel.
Thursday was the final day of the Turkish premier's two-day visit to Lebanon, during which he inaugurated a burns treatment centre in Sidon, a major southern coastal city.
South Lebanon was badly hit during the Hezbollah militia's deadly 2006 war with Israel.
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Friday, November 26, 2010
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
NATO adopts new Strategic Concept
19 Nov. 2010
At their Summit meeting in Lisbon, NATO leaders adopted a new Strategic Concept that will serve as the Alliance's roadmap for the next ten years and that reconfirms the commitment to defend one another against attack as the bedrock of Euro-Atlantic security.
The document lays out NATO's vision for an evolving Alliance that will remain able to defend its members against modern threats and commits NATO to become more agile, more capable and more effective.
"NATO is an unparalleled community of freedom, peace, security and shared values," the Secretary General said. “But the world is changing. We face new threats and new challenges. And this Strategic Concept will ensure that NATO remains as effective as ever in defending our peace, our security and our prosperity."
Stressing that the time has come for NATO to develop new capabilities and new partnerships, the new Strategic Concept paves the way for the Alliance to modernise its ability to carry out its core mission of collective defence, while continuing to promote international stability.
The new Strategic Concept urges Allies to invest in key capabilities to meet emerging threats and agree to develop within NATO the capabilities necessary to defend against ballistic missile attacks and cyber attacks.
"This is an action plan … which sets out clearly the concrete steps NATO will take," stressed the NATO Secretary General, as he presented the new Strategic Concept in Lisbon. “It will put in place an Alliance that is more effective, more engaged and more efficient than ever before.”
The new Strategic Concept offers partner countries around the globe more opportunities for dialogue and cooperation and commits NATO to reinforce cooperation with Russia. It also keeps the door firmly open to membership in NATO to European democracies.
The document highlights the need for NATO to remain ready to play an active role in crisis management operations, whenever it is called to act. Finally, it points to the need for the Alliance to remain cost-effective and makes continuous internal reform a key aspect of the way the Alliance will do business in the future.
Source: /www.nato.int
Link: http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/news_68172.htm.
At their Summit meeting in Lisbon, NATO leaders adopted a new Strategic Concept that will serve as the Alliance's roadmap for the next ten years and that reconfirms the commitment to defend one another against attack as the bedrock of Euro-Atlantic security.
The document lays out NATO's vision for an evolving Alliance that will remain able to defend its members against modern threats and commits NATO to become more agile, more capable and more effective.
"NATO is an unparalleled community of freedom, peace, security and shared values," the Secretary General said. “But the world is changing. We face new threats and new challenges. And this Strategic Concept will ensure that NATO remains as effective as ever in defending our peace, our security and our prosperity."
Stressing that the time has come for NATO to develop new capabilities and new partnerships, the new Strategic Concept paves the way for the Alliance to modernise its ability to carry out its core mission of collective defence, while continuing to promote international stability.
The new Strategic Concept urges Allies to invest in key capabilities to meet emerging threats and agree to develop within NATO the capabilities necessary to defend against ballistic missile attacks and cyber attacks.
"This is an action plan … which sets out clearly the concrete steps NATO will take," stressed the NATO Secretary General, as he presented the new Strategic Concept in Lisbon. “It will put in place an Alliance that is more effective, more engaged and more efficient than ever before.”
The new Strategic Concept offers partner countries around the globe more opportunities for dialogue and cooperation and commits NATO to reinforce cooperation with Russia. It also keeps the door firmly open to membership in NATO to European democracies.
The document highlights the need for NATO to remain ready to play an active role in crisis management operations, whenever it is called to act. Finally, it points to the need for the Alliance to remain cost-effective and makes continuous internal reform a key aspect of the way the Alliance will do business in the future.
Source: /www.nato.int
Link: http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/news_68172.htm.
Israeli media provides a glimpse of how spin drives Israeli diplomacy
November 21, 2010
Didi Remez
On the front page of this morning’s Maariv, senior columnist Ben Caspit reports [full translation at the bottom of the post; Hebrew original here]:
"At least three top Likud figures who were briefed recently by officials very close to Netanyahu on the talks with the Americans, on the letter that has not (yet) been written, on the promises that were not made and the stealth bombers that stole away, say that the prevalent view in the Prime Minister’s Bureau about the US administration is that it is “not a credible administration.” That is the reason, these sources say, for Netanyahu’s insistence on receiving the promises in writing. And that is the reason, say these sources, that some of the promises that Netanyahu heard from the Americans evaporated shortly afterwards."
Caspit agrees with the analysis but is astounded that the Prime Minister’s Bureau should actually say express it, pouring “oil” instead of “water” on the fires of the Israeli-American relationship when it’s “at an unprecedented nadir.”
The ‘moratorium extension deal‘ has created a rare agreement between Maariv and it’s arch-rival Yediot: Netanyahu’s government is diplomatically incompetent. In his Friday column, Nahum Barnea, explains how the deal morphed from an achievement into an embarrassment. as a result of creative communications at the Prime Minister’s Bureau [full translation at bottom of post]:
"Netanyahu’s bureau has an original technique for marketing its messages: Briefings are emailed every few hours to reporters and commentators. The condition is that the information not be attributed to Netanyahu, his advisers, his “surroundings” or his “associates.” This way, the Prime Minister’s Bureau achieves broad circulation for its messages without having to answer questions and without taking responsibility for the facts. It is a wonderfully convenient technique.
The problem is that in the absence of a father, the facts tend to run wild. The impression that was created upon Netanyahu’s return from the United States was that he had obtained a commitment from the administration to accept Israeli construction in East Jerusalem. It later became apparent that there was no such agreement. The impression that was created was that after a 90-day freeze, construction would be resumed everywhere, with the blessing of the US administration. Such an agreement was not reached. The impression that was created was that the administration consented to support the continued Israeli control of the Jordan Valley. Such consent was not reached.
The speed with which the list of American commitments shrank is reminiscent of the classic story about the Jew who wished to send a telegram to his relative in America. The cost of the telegram was based on a charge per word. Each word cost a fortune. The man decided to omit every unnecessary word from the telegram. By the time he reached the mail counter, his telegram had no words left."
Against this background, attacking Obama’s credibility is the logical next step. One spin creates problem A, which a second spin attempts to solve, creating problem B. If short-term image issues, compounded by media amateurism, guides management of the ’strategic relationship’. We can only hope that’s not the case when decisions are made on if and when to go to war. Just in case, it might be a good idea for pundits to stop making fun of Netanyahu over Iran.
—-
"A matter of credibility
Ben Caspit, Maariv, November 21 2010 [page 6 with front-page teaser; Hebrew original here and below this translation]
National Security Adviser Uzi Arad sat in the “Meet the Press” studio and handed out grades to the Americans. Obama’s administration, Arad said, began its battle against the Iranian nuclear program with a “policy of smiles” and believed the Iranians’ talk, “but then sobered up.” In principle, Arad is right. In practice, he isn’t supposed to say that on television. After all, even without this, the Americans don’t much like us.
International diplomacy is built on lies and half truths and in the delicate relationship between Israel and the US this week, there was no reason to give the Americans another reason to get annoyed at us. But every time that it seems to us that we’ve reached the bottom of the barrel, something happens and proves that we’ve still a long way to go before we get there. This something was the decision yesterday to send Arad to the studio. Perhaps because there was nobody else left to send.
Arad’s candid remarks are the tip of a much bigger iceberg. At least three top Likud figures who were briefed recently by officials very close to Netanyahu on the talks with the Americans, on the letter that has not (yet) been written, on the promises that were not made and the stealth bombers that stole away, say that the prevalent view in the Prime Minister’s Bureau about the US administration is that it is “not a credible administration.” That is the reason, these sources say, for Netanyahu’s insistence on receiving the promises in writing. And that is the reason, say these sources, that some of the promises that Netanyahu heard from the Americans evaporated shortly afterwards.
Again, at issue is a big mistake. What the press or ordinary people are permitted, is absolutely forbidden to the prime minister or his close associates. True, the current US administration has shown ineptitude, poor decision-making and problematic behavior. The fact that it has refused to stand behind Bush’s letters to Sharon from April 2004 undermines the basis for any discussions with them. But you don’t say this to politicians. You think this, you take this into account, but you’re careful that it not get out. As it is, the strategic relationship between Israel and the US is at an unprecedented nadir. The level of trust between the White House and the Prime Minister’s Bureau is scraping the bottom of the barrel from below. Automatic matters, such as a veto in the UN Security Council, are now promised as a freeze bribe, and even that for a pre-allotted time period. Cold water must be poured on this, not oil.
One needs to read the article by Dan Kurtzer, the former American ambassador to Israel and Obama’s adviser, which was published yesterday in the Washington Post, to understand how big a deal this is. Kurtzer warns against the deal being cooked up between the Obama administration and Netanyahu. He calls this bribery, he says that this is a mistake both for the Americans, but mainly for Israel, he points out that such a deal would even further rock the strategic basis of the relationship between the two countries. Kurtzer knows what he’s talking about.
Netanyahu, on the other hand, knows less what he’s doing. He’s now stuck with this deal, he can’t accept it or reject it, because now there is no choice. If he doesn’t pass it, he is a lame duck, a dead horse limping toward the edge of the cliff. And if he passes it? Better not to think about that now. It seems that the edge of this cliff is waiting for him on the horizon. These are the kind of impossible situations that only Netanyahu knows how to get into. Now let’s see him get out of it."
Source: Coteret
Link:http://coteret.com/2010/11/21/israeli-media-provides-a-glimpse-of-how-spin-drives-israeli-diplomacy/.
Didi Remez
On the front page of this morning’s Maariv, senior columnist Ben Caspit reports [full translation at the bottom of the post; Hebrew original here]:
"At least three top Likud figures who were briefed recently by officials very close to Netanyahu on the talks with the Americans, on the letter that has not (yet) been written, on the promises that were not made and the stealth bombers that stole away, say that the prevalent view in the Prime Minister’s Bureau about the US administration is that it is “not a credible administration.” That is the reason, these sources say, for Netanyahu’s insistence on receiving the promises in writing. And that is the reason, say these sources, that some of the promises that Netanyahu heard from the Americans evaporated shortly afterwards."
Caspit agrees with the analysis but is astounded that the Prime Minister’s Bureau should actually say express it, pouring “oil” instead of “water” on the fires of the Israeli-American relationship when it’s “at an unprecedented nadir.”
The ‘moratorium extension deal‘ has created a rare agreement between Maariv and it’s arch-rival Yediot: Netanyahu’s government is diplomatically incompetent. In his Friday column, Nahum Barnea, explains how the deal morphed from an achievement into an embarrassment. as a result of creative communications at the Prime Minister’s Bureau [full translation at bottom of post]:
"Netanyahu’s bureau has an original technique for marketing its messages: Briefings are emailed every few hours to reporters and commentators. The condition is that the information not be attributed to Netanyahu, his advisers, his “surroundings” or his “associates.” This way, the Prime Minister’s Bureau achieves broad circulation for its messages without having to answer questions and without taking responsibility for the facts. It is a wonderfully convenient technique.
The problem is that in the absence of a father, the facts tend to run wild. The impression that was created upon Netanyahu’s return from the United States was that he had obtained a commitment from the administration to accept Israeli construction in East Jerusalem. It later became apparent that there was no such agreement. The impression that was created was that after a 90-day freeze, construction would be resumed everywhere, with the blessing of the US administration. Such an agreement was not reached. The impression that was created was that the administration consented to support the continued Israeli control of the Jordan Valley. Such consent was not reached.
The speed with which the list of American commitments shrank is reminiscent of the classic story about the Jew who wished to send a telegram to his relative in America. The cost of the telegram was based on a charge per word. Each word cost a fortune. The man decided to omit every unnecessary word from the telegram. By the time he reached the mail counter, his telegram had no words left."
Against this background, attacking Obama’s credibility is the logical next step. One spin creates problem A, which a second spin attempts to solve, creating problem B. If short-term image issues, compounded by media amateurism, guides management of the ’strategic relationship’. We can only hope that’s not the case when decisions are made on if and when to go to war. Just in case, it might be a good idea for pundits to stop making fun of Netanyahu over Iran.
—-
"A matter of credibility
Ben Caspit, Maariv, November 21 2010 [page 6 with front-page teaser; Hebrew original here and below this translation]
National Security Adviser Uzi Arad sat in the “Meet the Press” studio and handed out grades to the Americans. Obama’s administration, Arad said, began its battle against the Iranian nuclear program with a “policy of smiles” and believed the Iranians’ talk, “but then sobered up.” In principle, Arad is right. In practice, he isn’t supposed to say that on television. After all, even without this, the Americans don’t much like us.
International diplomacy is built on lies and half truths and in the delicate relationship between Israel and the US this week, there was no reason to give the Americans another reason to get annoyed at us. But every time that it seems to us that we’ve reached the bottom of the barrel, something happens and proves that we’ve still a long way to go before we get there. This something was the decision yesterday to send Arad to the studio. Perhaps because there was nobody else left to send.
Arad’s candid remarks are the tip of a much bigger iceberg. At least three top Likud figures who were briefed recently by officials very close to Netanyahu on the talks with the Americans, on the letter that has not (yet) been written, on the promises that were not made and the stealth bombers that stole away, say that the prevalent view in the Prime Minister’s Bureau about the US administration is that it is “not a credible administration.” That is the reason, these sources say, for Netanyahu’s insistence on receiving the promises in writing. And that is the reason, say these sources, that some of the promises that Netanyahu heard from the Americans evaporated shortly afterwards.
Again, at issue is a big mistake. What the press or ordinary people are permitted, is absolutely forbidden to the prime minister or his close associates. True, the current US administration has shown ineptitude, poor decision-making and problematic behavior. The fact that it has refused to stand behind Bush’s letters to Sharon from April 2004 undermines the basis for any discussions with them. But you don’t say this to politicians. You think this, you take this into account, but you’re careful that it not get out. As it is, the strategic relationship between Israel and the US is at an unprecedented nadir. The level of trust between the White House and the Prime Minister’s Bureau is scraping the bottom of the barrel from below. Automatic matters, such as a veto in the UN Security Council, are now promised as a freeze bribe, and even that for a pre-allotted time period. Cold water must be poured on this, not oil.
One needs to read the article by Dan Kurtzer, the former American ambassador to Israel and Obama’s adviser, which was published yesterday in the Washington Post, to understand how big a deal this is. Kurtzer warns against the deal being cooked up between the Obama administration and Netanyahu. He calls this bribery, he says that this is a mistake both for the Americans, but mainly for Israel, he points out that such a deal would even further rock the strategic basis of the relationship between the two countries. Kurtzer knows what he’s talking about.
Netanyahu, on the other hand, knows less what he’s doing. He’s now stuck with this deal, he can’t accept it or reject it, because now there is no choice. If he doesn’t pass it, he is a lame duck, a dead horse limping toward the edge of the cliff. And if he passes it? Better not to think about that now. It seems that the edge of this cliff is waiting for him on the horizon. These are the kind of impossible situations that only Netanyahu knows how to get into. Now let’s see him get out of it."
Source: Coteret
Link:http://coteret.com/2010/11/21/israeli-media-provides-a-glimpse-of-how-spin-drives-israeli-diplomacy/.
Islamic Jihad says Israel planning new war
Published Saturday 20/11/2010
GAZA CITY (Ma'an) -- Islamic Jihad said Saturday that Israeli media campaigns and drills carried out by Israeli forces suggest Israel is planning a new military offensive on the Gaza Strip.
Jihad spokesman Daoud Shehab said Israel was using the media to transmit false information linking militant factions in Gaza with Al-Qaeda, in an effort to recruit regional support for an attack on the coastal enclave.
The Israeli news site Ynet reported Saturday that Israel's Ambassador to the United Nations Meron Reuven filed an official complaint with the UN that projectiles fired from Gaza were endangering regional stability. The letter further said that Israel would use all means necessary to protect its security, the report added.
Shehab said the recent escalation of Israeli attacks on the Strip was not new but followed a long series of offensives which affected all aspects of life in Gaza.
Following Israeli air strikes on Friday and Saturday, a spokesman for Popular Resistance Committees' armed wing said the intensive shelling was clear evidence that Israel was preparing for a comprehensive offensive on the Strip. In a statement issued Saturday, the An-Nasser Brigades spokesman said the escalation in attacks was a declaration of war, adding that recent strikes had targeted civilians.
Israeli forces launched three airstrikes on the central and southern Gaza Strip on Friday afternoon, injuring six residents including two women and a child, medics said. Shelling continued to target southern Gaza overnight.
The Israeli military said the attacks were in response to a series of projectiles launched from Gaza into southern Israel on Thursday and Friday, and a Grad rocket fired into the Negev desert on Friday morning. The rocket was launched hours after local police said Israeli warplanes bombed the shoreline south of Gaza City. No injuries were reported in Israel.
On Thursday, the An-Nasser Brigades claimed responsibility for firing three mortar shells towards an Israeli intelligence headquarters along the Gaza border.
In a statement, the PRC said the operation was in response to Wednesday's assassination of two brothers who were members of the radical Army of Islam group. An Israeli drone targeted a car carrying the brothers, Islam and Muhammad Yassin, in the center of Gaza City. Israel claimed they were plotting to attack Israeli citizens in Egypt's Sinai.
The Jihad spokesman said the objective of firing home-made projectiles was "to warn Israel of the consequences of waging any offensives on Gaza."
While the resistance had only modest capabilities compared to the huge arsenal possessed by Israel, Palestinians were strengthened by their resolve to confront every offense, Shehab said. The resistance would fire not only at the settlements close to Gaza, but deep into Israel, he added.
Shehab condemned the recent proposal by the US offering Israel military and political incentives in exchange for a one-off, temporary freeze on construction in some settlements. The deal is said to include 20 war planes, worth $3 billion, and a guarantee that the US will veto Palestinian attempts to declare a state at the UN Security Council.
The offer was a "bribe to the occupation" from which Palestinians would gain nothing but Israel would benefit twice, Shehab said. The proposal would enforce the occupation and legitimize the resumption of settlement expansion after 90 days he said, adding that Israel would also gain financially and militarily from the deal.
Print
GAZA CITY (Ma'an) -- Islamic Jihad said Saturday that Israeli media campaigns and drills carried out by Israeli forces suggest Israel is planning a new military offensive on the Gaza Strip.
Jihad spokesman Daoud Shehab said Israel was using the media to transmit false information linking militant factions in Gaza with Al-Qaeda, in an effort to recruit regional support for an attack on the coastal enclave.
The Israeli news site Ynet reported Saturday that Israel's Ambassador to the United Nations Meron Reuven filed an official complaint with the UN that projectiles fired from Gaza were endangering regional stability. The letter further said that Israel would use all means necessary to protect its security, the report added.
Shehab said the recent escalation of Israeli attacks on the Strip was not new but followed a long series of offensives which affected all aspects of life in Gaza.
Following Israeli air strikes on Friday and Saturday, a spokesman for Popular Resistance Committees' armed wing said the intensive shelling was clear evidence that Israel was preparing for a comprehensive offensive on the Strip. In a statement issued Saturday, the An-Nasser Brigades spokesman said the escalation in attacks was a declaration of war, adding that recent strikes had targeted civilians.
Israeli forces launched three airstrikes on the central and southern Gaza Strip on Friday afternoon, injuring six residents including two women and a child, medics said. Shelling continued to target southern Gaza overnight.
The Israeli military said the attacks were in response to a series of projectiles launched from Gaza into southern Israel on Thursday and Friday, and a Grad rocket fired into the Negev desert on Friday morning. The rocket was launched hours after local police said Israeli warplanes bombed the shoreline south of Gaza City. No injuries were reported in Israel.
On Thursday, the An-Nasser Brigades claimed responsibility for firing three mortar shells towards an Israeli intelligence headquarters along the Gaza border.
In a statement, the PRC said the operation was in response to Wednesday's assassination of two brothers who were members of the radical Army of Islam group. An Israeli drone targeted a car carrying the brothers, Islam and Muhammad Yassin, in the center of Gaza City. Israel claimed they were plotting to attack Israeli citizens in Egypt's Sinai.
The Jihad spokesman said the objective of firing home-made projectiles was "to warn Israel of the consequences of waging any offensives on Gaza."
While the resistance had only modest capabilities compared to the huge arsenal possessed by Israel, Palestinians were strengthened by their resolve to confront every offense, Shehab said. The resistance would fire not only at the settlements close to Gaza, but deep into Israel, he added.
Shehab condemned the recent proposal by the US offering Israel military and political incentives in exchange for a one-off, temporary freeze on construction in some settlements. The deal is said to include 20 war planes, worth $3 billion, and a guarantee that the US will veto Palestinian attempts to declare a state at the UN Security Council.
The offer was a "bribe to the occupation" from which Palestinians would gain nothing but Israel would benefit twice, Shehab said. The proposal would enforce the occupation and legitimize the resumption of settlement expansion after 90 days he said, adding that Israel would also gain financially and militarily from the deal.
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Economist Ha-Joon Chang on Currency Wars, the G20, and Why "There’s No Such Thing As a Free Market"
November 19, 2010
Korean-born economist Ha-Joon Chang teaches economics at the University of Cambridge and is the author of the forthcoming book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. "Obama] has to buy time to restructure the economy without creating a recession by sustaining this deficit spending, because otherwise our other option is going back to the 1930s," Chang says. "Don’t forget that in the 1930s a lot of countries started cutting this deficit as soon as things looked slightly better, and many of them went back into recession."
Ha-Joon Chang, teaches economics at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of the forthcoming book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. His previous book was titled, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism.
AMY GOODMAN: President Obama has just left again for Portugal. He just came back from his 10-day Asian trip where he emerged from the G-20 summit in Seoul, South Korea saying the countries at the summit had agreed to "Get the global economy back on the path of recovery."
But critics have pointed to Obama’s failure to secure a free trade agreement with South Korea and the lack of progress between the United States and China on currency issues. Before leaving Seoul, Obama defended the $600 billion move by the Federal Reserve to buy up government bonds and rejected claims that the U.S. is waging a currency war by devaluing the dollar. Meanwhile, although the U.S. has accused China of artificially manipulating the price of the yuan for economic gain, Obama failed to win international backing for his effort to pressure China to raise its currency value.
JUAN GONZALEZ: For more on the currency wars, capitalism, and the free market, I spoke to the Korean-born economist Ha-Joon Chang last week. He teaches economics at the University of Cambridge. He’s the author of the forthcoming book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. His previous book was titled, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. I began by asking him for his assessment of President Obama’s visit to Seoul.
HA-JOON CHANG: Currency, I think was unrealistic to expect any concrete agreement there. Both countries have such different views about what is the right way forward; they have all very different interests. So I think it was quite unrealistic to expect anything on that account.
But I think that there was probably a more realistic expectation of the Korea-U.S.A. free trade agreement. But once again, the problem is that the deal was already agreed and then the Americans are asking for more. The South Korean government is actually quite keen to sign this agreement, although I personally oppose it. But even they couldn’t quite stomach it because they had made all the concessions – well they thought they had – and then now the U.S. is coming back, “We want more.”
JUAN GONZALEZ: What were some of those concessions? Because the president portrayed it as an attempt to get more protections for American workers in a renegotiated part of the deal.
HA-JOON CHANG: Yes, that is the fundamental problem with bilateral free trade agreements because when you open up trade in this kind of way, a lot of people on both sides are going to get hurt and none of the countries have come up with an adequate compensation mechanism. It’s understandable that the Korean farmers or U.S. auto workers – people who are going to get hurt – want to protect themselves and oppose these agreements.
JUAN GONZALEZ: In terms of the currency debate, clearly, the United States now and other countries in the world for more than several years have been claiming that China is refusing to peg its currency at what it’s really worth now on the international scene.
And now suddenly though the tide – especially after the Federal Reserve action in the past week, to begin to buy up more bonds and in effect drive the currency value of the U.S. dollar down – now the charges are being leveled against the United States. Who is right here? And what is the role not only of the emerging Third World countries, but also of the European Union in this debate?
HA-JOON CHANG: Well, you know, it is quite understandable why Americans are frustrated by the slowness in the adjustment of the Chinese currency. Let’s get the facts right. It has been adjusted, only very, very slowly. So it is not like China is absolutely refusing to move, but yes, given the imbalances that the U.S. is facing, it looks painfully slow.
But on the Chinese side, you have to understand. First of all, they don’t want the kind of abrupt adjustment that Japan had to make to its own currency in the 1980s in the so-called Plaza Accord, which then created this huge financial bubble and destroyed the Japanese economy. So the Chinese want to do it slowly. Secondly, it’s not just China who manipulates currency value. As you just said, the Fed flooding America with this money is also currency manipulation, so the Chinese are rightly upset.
But on the other hand, yes, the problem is that since the 1970s, we have lived under the notion that only the deficit countries have to make adjustments. Surplus countries have to make adjustments, too. But in the last 30 years, the reigning orthodoxy has been that anyone who is spending beyond his means has to be punished. This is exactly the logic behind the punishment of Third World countries in the debt crisis and later, the Asian economies and Argentine economy.
So in that sense, actually, the very thing the U.S. has tried to impose on the world is coming to haunt itself. If the U.S. has been on the forefront of this logic that it’s only the deficit countries that have to make adjustments, and now other countries are logically saying, “Well, why don’t you then, do the same?”
JUAN GONZALEZ: But in terms of the currency, in terms of this flood now of American capital that is heading overseas now because the government has driven interest rates down here so drastically, several of the emerging economies – certainly Brazil, India, and others – are increasingly looking at how to prevent this entrance into their economies of basically, speculative capital.
What is your sense of how this will develop? And again, how Europe, which is this other huge power force in the world economic scene, how Europe will react to the debate between the emerging countries and the United States over currency controls?
HA-JOON CHANG: Well, first of all, let’s put this into perspective. The reason why the Fed has to engage in this massive quantitative easing is because of the inability of the American political system to agree on continued deficit spending. So although the brunt of adjustment is put on monetary policy, this is at the root of the problem. In a way, monetary easing wouldn’t be as big if the American political scene is such that it can continue the stimulus package. But it is not going to happen.
So we’re stuck with the situation now. Given the low interest rate and a huge amount of liquidity released into the system, a lot of money is flowing into the so-called emerging economies – that is, middle-level developing countries – and they are really desperate. I mean, some of these countries have seen huge appreciation of their currency values which is making their export difficult.
Now, most of them are beginning to put capital controls in place. This is quite amazing because until recently, it was a mortal sin. Now, in certain countries, even the IMF is saying, maybe you should put capital controls in so that the speculative capital wouldn’t destabilize your economy.
JUAN GONZALEZ: By capital controls, you mean what, precisely? The taxing of investments, of financial investments that are coming in from abroad? Restrictions on their leaving?
HA-JOON CHANG: Yes, well, there are a range of measures. The most kind of draconian measures will be that you have to get government approval when you are bringing money, you have to get approval when you are bringing it out. That is still where a lot of countries are putting, for example, deposit requirements. When you’re bringing money in, you deposit, say, the equivalent of 30% to 50% of the money, which you will get back when and if you leave after, say, a year or two, but if you leave earlier, then you lose the money. So this is to –
JUAN GONZALEZ: To curb speculation.
HA-JOON CHANG: Exactly, yes. Some other countries have studied taxing capital gains from this speculative flows. So a range of measures are being used, but the direction is clear: these speculative inflows cannot be managed through market mechanisms.
Just put it into perspective, even the biggest stock markets in the developing countries are less than 1% or 2% of the U.S. stock market. So a tiny drop flowing out of the U.S. is a flood for these economies so that they need these kind of protective mechanisms.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Ever since the financial collapse a couple of years ago, first, all the governments tried to engage in some sort of stimulus of their economies, but now the clear debate is over is the way forward to reduce deficits and to impose austerity on government spending? Or is it to continue to stimulate economies and promote economic growth? Obviously, you fall clearly on one side or another – could you explain why?
HA-JOON CHANG: Yes. Look, one thing that has to be made clear at the very beginning is that the main reason for these large deficits is not excessive government spending, but falling tax revenue through the collapse in private sector demand. So if we are in a full implement situation, cutting government spending might create room for the private sector to come and create jobs and so on.
But the very reason why we have this deficit is the private sector is not investing, and cutting deficits is not going to make them invest because the root cause of their unwillingness to invest is the problems with their balance sheets. This cut is not going to solve the problem.
But more importantly, in the short run, that is viewed that it is the best if you cut the deficit as much and as quickly as possible. There’s no economic logic. The British government, you know, says to cut the deficit down to basically zero in four years’ time. But four years makes sense in calendar terms, but in economic terms, it doesn’t make any sense.
If you want to cut this deficit, you have to cut to the state of the economy. So maybe in some cases, you can cut it in two years, maybe in some cases it will have to be 12. Unfortunately a lot of deficit hawks have a hidden agenda. They basically want to rollback the welfare state and they’re using it as an excuse to do it.
JUAN GONZALEZ: As Naomi Klein says, “Disaster capitalism is the opportunity to implement policies that you have always wanted to do.”
HA-JOON CHANG: Exactly and then the kind of political sleight of hand they have deployed is quite remarkable. All this crises that have basically been generated by the bankers and other financiers, I mean, these people are still paying themselves billions of bonuses while the poorest people are asked to make the adjustment. I mean, this is outrageous.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Now you are seeing one country after another – Greece, France, England with its austerity measures – and now, of course, the United States, the Debt Commission recommending potentially huge cuts in Social Security and Medicare here in the United States. How do you see President Obama’s policies so far in terms of the way he’s handling this crisis, since he got into office?
HA-JOON CHANG: Well, luckily the U.S. still hasn’t yet given into the deficit hawks, but with the Republican victory in the midterm elections and the Debt Commission, it’s coming. But he has to resist it. He has to, if possible, buy time to restructure the economy, without creating a recession, by sustaining this deficit spending.
Otherwise, the other option is going back to the 1930s. Don’t forget that in the 1930s, a lot of countries started cutting the deficit as soon as things looked slightly better and many of them went back into recession. It is already happening in Ireland. They started cutting the deficit, now they are in bigger trouble.
AMY GOODMAN: Korean-born economist Ha-Joon Chang speaking to Juan Gonzalez. He teaches economics at the University of Cambridge in Britain; the author of the forthcoming book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism; his previous book, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism.
Korean-born economist Ha-Joon Chang teaches economics at the University of Cambridge and is the author of the forthcoming book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. "Obama] has to buy time to restructure the economy without creating a recession by sustaining this deficit spending, because otherwise our other option is going back to the 1930s," Chang says. "Don’t forget that in the 1930s a lot of countries started cutting this deficit as soon as things looked slightly better, and many of them went back into recession."
Ha-Joon Chang, teaches economics at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of the forthcoming book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. His previous book was titled, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism.
AMY GOODMAN: President Obama has just left again for Portugal. He just came back from his 10-day Asian trip where he emerged from the G-20 summit in Seoul, South Korea saying the countries at the summit had agreed to "Get the global economy back on the path of recovery."
But critics have pointed to Obama’s failure to secure a free trade agreement with South Korea and the lack of progress between the United States and China on currency issues. Before leaving Seoul, Obama defended the $600 billion move by the Federal Reserve to buy up government bonds and rejected claims that the U.S. is waging a currency war by devaluing the dollar. Meanwhile, although the U.S. has accused China of artificially manipulating the price of the yuan for economic gain, Obama failed to win international backing for his effort to pressure China to raise its currency value.
JUAN GONZALEZ: For more on the currency wars, capitalism, and the free market, I spoke to the Korean-born economist Ha-Joon Chang last week. He teaches economics at the University of Cambridge. He’s the author of the forthcoming book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. His previous book was titled, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. I began by asking him for his assessment of President Obama’s visit to Seoul.
HA-JOON CHANG: Currency, I think was unrealistic to expect any concrete agreement there. Both countries have such different views about what is the right way forward; they have all very different interests. So I think it was quite unrealistic to expect anything on that account.
But I think that there was probably a more realistic expectation of the Korea-U.S.A. free trade agreement. But once again, the problem is that the deal was already agreed and then the Americans are asking for more. The South Korean government is actually quite keen to sign this agreement, although I personally oppose it. But even they couldn’t quite stomach it because they had made all the concessions – well they thought they had – and then now the U.S. is coming back, “We want more.”
JUAN GONZALEZ: What were some of those concessions? Because the president portrayed it as an attempt to get more protections for American workers in a renegotiated part of the deal.
HA-JOON CHANG: Yes, that is the fundamental problem with bilateral free trade agreements because when you open up trade in this kind of way, a lot of people on both sides are going to get hurt and none of the countries have come up with an adequate compensation mechanism. It’s understandable that the Korean farmers or U.S. auto workers – people who are going to get hurt – want to protect themselves and oppose these agreements.
JUAN GONZALEZ: In terms of the currency debate, clearly, the United States now and other countries in the world for more than several years have been claiming that China is refusing to peg its currency at what it’s really worth now on the international scene.
And now suddenly though the tide – especially after the Federal Reserve action in the past week, to begin to buy up more bonds and in effect drive the currency value of the U.S. dollar down – now the charges are being leveled against the United States. Who is right here? And what is the role not only of the emerging Third World countries, but also of the European Union in this debate?
HA-JOON CHANG: Well, you know, it is quite understandable why Americans are frustrated by the slowness in the adjustment of the Chinese currency. Let’s get the facts right. It has been adjusted, only very, very slowly. So it is not like China is absolutely refusing to move, but yes, given the imbalances that the U.S. is facing, it looks painfully slow.
But on the Chinese side, you have to understand. First of all, they don’t want the kind of abrupt adjustment that Japan had to make to its own currency in the 1980s in the so-called Plaza Accord, which then created this huge financial bubble and destroyed the Japanese economy. So the Chinese want to do it slowly. Secondly, it’s not just China who manipulates currency value. As you just said, the Fed flooding America with this money is also currency manipulation, so the Chinese are rightly upset.
But on the other hand, yes, the problem is that since the 1970s, we have lived under the notion that only the deficit countries have to make adjustments. Surplus countries have to make adjustments, too. But in the last 30 years, the reigning orthodoxy has been that anyone who is spending beyond his means has to be punished. This is exactly the logic behind the punishment of Third World countries in the debt crisis and later, the Asian economies and Argentine economy.
So in that sense, actually, the very thing the U.S. has tried to impose on the world is coming to haunt itself. If the U.S. has been on the forefront of this logic that it’s only the deficit countries that have to make adjustments, and now other countries are logically saying, “Well, why don’t you then, do the same?”
JUAN GONZALEZ: But in terms of the currency, in terms of this flood now of American capital that is heading overseas now because the government has driven interest rates down here so drastically, several of the emerging economies – certainly Brazil, India, and others – are increasingly looking at how to prevent this entrance into their economies of basically, speculative capital.
What is your sense of how this will develop? And again, how Europe, which is this other huge power force in the world economic scene, how Europe will react to the debate between the emerging countries and the United States over currency controls?
HA-JOON CHANG: Well, first of all, let’s put this into perspective. The reason why the Fed has to engage in this massive quantitative easing is because of the inability of the American political system to agree on continued deficit spending. So although the brunt of adjustment is put on monetary policy, this is at the root of the problem. In a way, monetary easing wouldn’t be as big if the American political scene is such that it can continue the stimulus package. But it is not going to happen.
So we’re stuck with the situation now. Given the low interest rate and a huge amount of liquidity released into the system, a lot of money is flowing into the so-called emerging economies – that is, middle-level developing countries – and they are really desperate. I mean, some of these countries have seen huge appreciation of their currency values which is making their export difficult.
Now, most of them are beginning to put capital controls in place. This is quite amazing because until recently, it was a mortal sin. Now, in certain countries, even the IMF is saying, maybe you should put capital controls in so that the speculative capital wouldn’t destabilize your economy.
JUAN GONZALEZ: By capital controls, you mean what, precisely? The taxing of investments, of financial investments that are coming in from abroad? Restrictions on their leaving?
HA-JOON CHANG: Yes, well, there are a range of measures. The most kind of draconian measures will be that you have to get government approval when you are bringing money, you have to get approval when you are bringing it out. That is still where a lot of countries are putting, for example, deposit requirements. When you’re bringing money in, you deposit, say, the equivalent of 30% to 50% of the money, which you will get back when and if you leave after, say, a year or two, but if you leave earlier, then you lose the money. So this is to –
JUAN GONZALEZ: To curb speculation.
HA-JOON CHANG: Exactly, yes. Some other countries have studied taxing capital gains from this speculative flows. So a range of measures are being used, but the direction is clear: these speculative inflows cannot be managed through market mechanisms.
Just put it into perspective, even the biggest stock markets in the developing countries are less than 1% or 2% of the U.S. stock market. So a tiny drop flowing out of the U.S. is a flood for these economies so that they need these kind of protective mechanisms.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Ever since the financial collapse a couple of years ago, first, all the governments tried to engage in some sort of stimulus of their economies, but now the clear debate is over is the way forward to reduce deficits and to impose austerity on government spending? Or is it to continue to stimulate economies and promote economic growth? Obviously, you fall clearly on one side or another – could you explain why?
HA-JOON CHANG: Yes. Look, one thing that has to be made clear at the very beginning is that the main reason for these large deficits is not excessive government spending, but falling tax revenue through the collapse in private sector demand. So if we are in a full implement situation, cutting government spending might create room for the private sector to come and create jobs and so on.
But the very reason why we have this deficit is the private sector is not investing, and cutting deficits is not going to make them invest because the root cause of their unwillingness to invest is the problems with their balance sheets. This cut is not going to solve the problem.
But more importantly, in the short run, that is viewed that it is the best if you cut the deficit as much and as quickly as possible. There’s no economic logic. The British government, you know, says to cut the deficit down to basically zero in four years’ time. But four years makes sense in calendar terms, but in economic terms, it doesn’t make any sense.
If you want to cut this deficit, you have to cut to the state of the economy. So maybe in some cases, you can cut it in two years, maybe in some cases it will have to be 12. Unfortunately a lot of deficit hawks have a hidden agenda. They basically want to rollback the welfare state and they’re using it as an excuse to do it.
JUAN GONZALEZ: As Naomi Klein says, “Disaster capitalism is the opportunity to implement policies that you have always wanted to do.”
HA-JOON CHANG: Exactly and then the kind of political sleight of hand they have deployed is quite remarkable. All this crises that have basically been generated by the bankers and other financiers, I mean, these people are still paying themselves billions of bonuses while the poorest people are asked to make the adjustment. I mean, this is outrageous.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Now you are seeing one country after another – Greece, France, England with its austerity measures – and now, of course, the United States, the Debt Commission recommending potentially huge cuts in Social Security and Medicare here in the United States. How do you see President Obama’s policies so far in terms of the way he’s handling this crisis, since he got into office?
HA-JOON CHANG: Well, luckily the U.S. still hasn’t yet given into the deficit hawks, but with the Republican victory in the midterm elections and the Debt Commission, it’s coming. But he has to resist it. He has to, if possible, buy time to restructure the economy, without creating a recession, by sustaining this deficit spending.
Otherwise, the other option is going back to the 1930s. Don’t forget that in the 1930s, a lot of countries started cutting the deficit as soon as things looked slightly better and many of them went back into recession. It is already happening in Ireland. They started cutting the deficit, now they are in bigger trouble.
AMY GOODMAN: Korean-born economist Ha-Joon Chang speaking to Juan Gonzalez. He teaches economics at the University of Cambridge in Britain; the author of the forthcoming book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism; his previous book, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism.
National Outcry Over TSA Body Scanners and Invasive Pat-Downs
November 19, 2010
As one of the busiest travel seasons of the year approaches there is a public outcry over new airport security measures that include full-body scanners and invasive police-style pat-downs. We speak with the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as New York City Councilman David Greenfield, who introduced a resolution to ban the use of the full body scanners in airports within the city.
Ginger McCall, assistant director of the open government program at the Electronic Privacy Information Center
Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union.
David Greenfield, New York City Councilman representing Brooklyn residents living in the 44th Council District.
JUAN GONZALEZ: We are approaching one of the busiest travel seasons of the year, but there’s an outcry over new airport security measures that include full body scanners and invasive police style pat-downs. Pilots and frequent-flier worry about the radiation the scanners emit. The ACLU has denounced the scans and the group Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC ) has filed a lawsuit to suspend the deployment of body scanners at U.S. airports, pending an independent review. The group alleges the scanning procedures are, “unlawful, invasive, and ineffective.” A national protest is being put together over the Internet, calling on people who are flying on the day before Thanksgiving to opt out of the scans and insist on public pat-downs. The stated goal of the National opt out day is to draw lawmakers’ attention to the new security measures and respect the privacy of the flying public. Here in New York City, City Council members introduced a resolution to ban the use of scanners in the city. This is City Councilman David Greenfield.
COUNCILMAN GREENFIELD: It is an outrage, it’s acceptable, it’s ineffectual and that is why I introduced legislation with the support of many of my colleagues on the City Council to ban these naked body scanners from the entire New York City, including New York’s airports.
AMY GOODMAN: Some lawmakers like Florida’s Republican Congress member John Mica are pushing for airports to switch to private security guards instead of agents for the Transportation Security Administration or TSA. On Wednesday, Republican Congressman Ron Paul of Texas introduced the American Traveler Dignity Act, a bill that would hold airport security agents legally accountable for airline screening procedures.
RON PAUL: What we are putting up with an accepting at this airport is so symbolic of us just not standing up and saying enough is enough. Let’s make sure that every member of Congress goes through this. Get the X-ray, make them look at the pictures, then go through one of those groping pat-downs. Then I think there would be a difference. Have everybody in the executive branch—a Cabinet member, make them go through it and look at it. Maybe they would pay more attention. But this does not work. This is not what makes us safer.
JUAN GONZALEZ: For more on the body scanners and the new airport security procedures, we’re joined by two guests from Washington, D.C. Ginger McCall is assistant director of the Open Government program at EPIC, the Electronic Privacy Information Center. And Chris Calabrese is Legislative Counsel with the ACLU. We welcome you both to Democracy Now!
I was in Washington at the National Airport, Reagan Airport, and I refused to go to the scanner. This was a couple of weeks ago and I saw everyone going through it. I said to the TSA guys, “I don’t get it. Am I the only one?” They said, “You are the only one to refuses to go through.” I think that’s hardly the case. Ginger McCall, can you talk about the scanners, the electronic scanners and what epic is doing about this and the invasive pat-downs if you refuse? Because boy, you sure get one if you refuse to go through the electronic machine.
GINGER MCCALL: EPIC has been working on this issue since about 2005. We’ve actually filed a lawsuit to suspend the program while it’s evaluated for privacy, health and effectiveness. We have really been working on this because these machines are clearly a violation of the Fourth Amendment. They’re highly, highly invasive. It is a procedure that is applied to all American travelers.
AMY GOODMAN: What is the science behind it? I always wondered when your luggage goes through underneath, what kind of scanning does that get? Yet when we go through, what is in those body scanners? What is the level of radiation, not to mention the pictures they are taking of your body?
GINGER MCCALL: There are two different kinds of scanner – there’s millimeter wave and there’s backscatter. The scanners produce a small amount of radiation. It has not really been properly tested. There is not a clear maintenance schedule for who’s going to ensure that the scanners will continue to only put out the proper amount of radiation. There’s not proper testing of the effect of that radiation on children, on pregnant women, on immune-compromised individuals. What happens with the scanners is that you walk through it, you pose, the scanner will scan you and the picture gets sent back to a TSA official in a back room. It is a very, very invasive picture. It shows cellulite. It shows love handles. It is very detailed and very graphic.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And also these scanners are able to store these images as well as to transmit them to other government agencies if necessary?
GINGER MCCALL: EPIC had a Freedom of Information Act request with DHS to get more details on the scanners. We initially made that request. DHS ignored the request. We took them to court over it. As part of that lawsuit, we got documents, procurements specifications documents that were scripted by TSA and this document described everything that TSA require the manufacturers to put in these machines. One of the requirements was these machines be able to store and transmit the images.
JUAN GONZALEZ: We’re also joined on the line by New York City Councilman David Greenfield who represents the 44th District of the city in Brooklyn. On Thursday, Councilman Greenfield and six other councilmembers introduced a resolution to ban the use of the full body scanners in New York. Welcome to Democracy Now! Councilman.
COUNCILMAN GREENFIELD: Thank you, good morning.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Now why did you take this stand? If this passes, Councilman, this would affect the two airports in New York City, Kennedy and LaGuardia?
COUNCILMAN GREENFIELD: Absolutely. I took the stand because every American wants to be safe. You trust the government when the government says this is going to make you safe. What’s shocking is that a lot of research has been done with the folks at EPIC that actually indicates that these scanners do not work. In fact, the safest airport in the world, Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv—their security experts rejected the scanners. The former head of security at Ben Gurion said you could get enough explosives through these naked body scanners to blow up a jumbo jet.
AMY GOODMAN: What is the company that manufactures them and who approved? We’re talking a multimillion dollar sale all over the country as they’re put in all over the country.
COUNCILMAN GREENFIELD: I think that actually is the concern right here. That’s a fascinating question. In fact, last year, right after the Christmas Day bombing, Michael Chertoff, the former director of homeland security ran around and told many news outlets including the New York Times that if only we had these scanners we would have been saved. He conveniently forgot to mention that he actually is the lobbyist for the two manufacturers of this technology. Then they rushed to get a $350 million contract to these two companies.
JUAN GONZALEZ: We’re also joined by Chris Calabrese, the legislative counsel for ACLU. Chris, your organization has also condemned the scanners. Can you talk about your concerns?
CHRIS CALABRESE: They are pretty simple. The fact is, that the government is giving you an intolerable choice. It’s either take a virtual strip search or endure a really aggressive groping. We do not think either of those options is appropriate.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to play something else. The uproar of the new security procedures really picked up after one cellphone video when viral. The video was taken by a man named John Tyner, 31 years old, software engineer. He was flying out of a San Diego and refused to go to the full body scanner and was subjected to enhanced patdown instead. He recorded the encounter with the airport’s security agent, using his cell phone. Listen carefully.
TSA: Also, we are going to be doing a groin check. That means I am going to place my hand on your hip, my other hand on your inner thigh. Slowly go up and slide down.
TYNER: Okay.
TSA: We are going to do that two times in the front, two times in the back.
TYNER: Alright.
TSA: And if you would like a private screening we can make that available for you also.
TYNER: We can do that out here but if you touch my junk I’m going to have you arrested.
TSA: Actually, we’re going to have a supervisor here because of your statement.
AMY GOODMAN: Soon after he said, "If you touch my junk, I will have you arrested," he was told he would face a fine up to $11,000 and be investigated by the TSA. The investigation onto Tyner is still open, but the head of the TSA told a Senate hearing this week that he did not expect anything to come of it. It is also interesting that this is coming at the same time of this news that the Federal Labor Relations Authority is allowing airport security screeners to vote on union representation, clearing the way for a history-making election among federal government employees. We’re talking about 50,000 Transportation Security officers being allowed to vote on union representation. Remember when President Bush had them all under the Department of Homeland Security and said they could not unionize. That has turned around. I think it’s interesting when we have people like the Florida Congress member Mica talking about privatizing these scanners, the people who are doing this, is this also in response to breaking a possible union? Let me put that question to Chris Calabrese.
CHRIS CALABRESE: One thing that is very interesting, DHS came out, the inspector general of DHS, with a report this week that really faulted TSA for its training of screeners, saying was not giving TSA enough time to train people, it wasn’t letting them train at airports. That clearly contributes to this problem and it is something that unionization might fix. Certainly, a union rep would want to make sure all of its members got proper training before they did their job.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Chris, I’d like to ask you to broaden the whole issue of the government’s invasion of citizens and travelers. Your organization, through a foil request, was able to find out that 6,600 travelers have been subjected to electronic searches of their computers or electronic devices over a two-year period as they were traveling and in one case in particular, that of a French-American citizen who was traveling on Amtrak from Montreal to New York and was stopped at the border and his computer was confiscated. Your concerns about this increasing searching of the electronic equipment of American citizens without any search warrants?
CHRIS CALABRESE: The thing is we carry around our entire lives in our pockets now. What the founders would clearly have considered materials covered by the Fourth Amendment – out letters, records about our lives, our financial information, our pictures, if there had been pictures. These are detailed information about our life and I do not think anyone at the time of the Constitution would consider the government to be rummaging around in that information to be OK. But now, because of the way we live now, we carry around in our iPhones and our laptops and it has become almost impossible to travel without it as a business traveler, so the idea that the government can look at it for whatever it wants, and go through it for other investigative purposes, we think that is completely contrary to the Fourth Amendment.
AMY GOODMAN: Chris, you’re also looking at the issue of Facebook and Google. Talk about with the government is demanding they be allowed to have access to.
CHRIS CALABRESE: Right now, the privacy laws in the U.S. are incredibly outdated. The privacy law that governs the internet was actually passed in 1986, so it’s pre-’www’. So you can imagine it does not track terribly well to our existing problems today. So the government can get a lot more information with much less than a warrant standard simply under existing law. For example, email, which I think most people can think of as being protected by a warrant, which is very personal information. After a very limited period of time, 180 days, the government can get that information basically just with a subpoena. No court order, no warrant. We think the law needs to be updated so the government has an appropriate standard whenever it accesses this information.
AMY GOODMAN: What about the demands? Were you surprised about what exactly they’re asking of Google and Facebook? Can you explain for people who are not aware of this latest request, changing, actually, how the Internet works?
CHRIS CALABRESE: Well, what the government has been asking in its most recent request is really to build in a back door into communications. So the way that the Internet and communications are actually architected would have to be changed so if the Government presented some kind of warrant, or some kind of other order, and as we said they do not need a warrant in many cases—the company would have to be able to flip a switch and present the government with all of that information. I mean, not only does that make surveillance easier, it changes the way the Internet works. It is supposed to be a dispersed distributed system that’s secure because the communications between to the people cannot necessarily be broken. If you create a back door, it’s not just the government, it’s hackers and other individuals that can into the back door.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Ginger McCall, your concerns at EPIC about some of these continuing invasions by the government of our use of the Internet as well as our own personal electronic material, whether computers or cell phones?
GINGER MCCALL: Definitely. EPIC we have been following this. We have freedom of information requests regarding the Internet wiretapping proposal that Chris was just talking about. Certainly, if you have an Internet that is constantly monitored, you’ll have a really chilling effect on free speech and.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, David Greenfield is still with us, a councilman from Brooklyn who has sponsored legislation in NYC council to not allow theses scanners to be at LaGuardia and Kennedy, then you would have the patdowns. What is the most effective way to keep people safe at airports?
COUNCILMAN GREENFIELD: What the Israelis actually do is behavioral profiling. They have a conversation with you. These are trained ex-military officials who after they have a conversation, can pick up things like facial tics and nervousness. That seems to be very effective. The problem we have with the TSA is that they engage in theatrics to try to convince us that were safe when in fact we are not safe. Now they’ve crossed the line to endure a virtual strip search. That is why we are introducing legislation to stop the practice.
AMY GOODMAN: That could of course lead to a whole other discussion about racial profiling which we can’t have right now. This is an important discussion to continue. What should be happening at the airports. David Greenfield, a councilman from New York City, Chris Calabrese of the American Civil Liberties Union, is this a concern to you?
CHRIS CALABRESE: I am sorry, the racial profiling?
AMY GOODMAN: Yes.
CHRIS CALABRESE: I think that the problem with the Israeli model is in many ways that it does not scale to the U.S. that doesn’t mean that we should not do as the president said, after the Christmas bombing, more intelligence gathering ahead of time to make sure that we’re catching people before they get to the airport. But the bottom line is we’re in aviation security for the long haul. This is not a short-term thing. TSA needs to turn its attention to developing technologies that not just make a safer, but also protect our dignity and our privacy. I think a good example of that is the swabs that they rub on your hands at the airport that t can detect traces of explosives. That is really what we’re worried about here – someone sneaking a bomb on a plane. I think we should look for explosives. These are much less invasive technologies. They exist. They can be developed. They are much better than a virtual strip or a grope.
COUNCILMAN GREENFIELD: I would add that I do not think we are in favor of racial profiling. I think there’s a significant difference between racial and behavioral profiling. But I think it is also important that, as you mentioned, we should start screening what goes underneath the planes. We still do not have 100% screening of packages that go underneath the airplanes. If you are a terrorist, that is probably a much simpler thing to do that put the bomb on your body.
AMY GOODMAN: We will leave it there. Councilman David Greenfield, of Brooklyn, Chris Calabrese of the ACLU, and Ginger McCall of EPIC, the Electronic Privacy Information Center
As one of the busiest travel seasons of the year approaches there is a public outcry over new airport security measures that include full-body scanners and invasive police-style pat-downs. We speak with the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as New York City Councilman David Greenfield, who introduced a resolution to ban the use of the full body scanners in airports within the city.
Ginger McCall, assistant director of the open government program at the Electronic Privacy Information Center
Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union.
David Greenfield, New York City Councilman representing Brooklyn residents living in the 44th Council District.
JUAN GONZALEZ: We are approaching one of the busiest travel seasons of the year, but there’s an outcry over new airport security measures that include full body scanners and invasive police style pat-downs. Pilots and frequent-flier worry about the radiation the scanners emit. The ACLU has denounced the scans and the group Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC ) has filed a lawsuit to suspend the deployment of body scanners at U.S. airports, pending an independent review. The group alleges the scanning procedures are, “unlawful, invasive, and ineffective.” A national protest is being put together over the Internet, calling on people who are flying on the day before Thanksgiving to opt out of the scans and insist on public pat-downs. The stated goal of the National opt out day is to draw lawmakers’ attention to the new security measures and respect the privacy of the flying public. Here in New York City, City Council members introduced a resolution to ban the use of scanners in the city. This is City Councilman David Greenfield.
COUNCILMAN GREENFIELD: It is an outrage, it’s acceptable, it’s ineffectual and that is why I introduced legislation with the support of many of my colleagues on the City Council to ban these naked body scanners from the entire New York City, including New York’s airports.
AMY GOODMAN: Some lawmakers like Florida’s Republican Congress member John Mica are pushing for airports to switch to private security guards instead of agents for the Transportation Security Administration or TSA. On Wednesday, Republican Congressman Ron Paul of Texas introduced the American Traveler Dignity Act, a bill that would hold airport security agents legally accountable for airline screening procedures.
RON PAUL: What we are putting up with an accepting at this airport is so symbolic of us just not standing up and saying enough is enough. Let’s make sure that every member of Congress goes through this. Get the X-ray, make them look at the pictures, then go through one of those groping pat-downs. Then I think there would be a difference. Have everybody in the executive branch—a Cabinet member, make them go through it and look at it. Maybe they would pay more attention. But this does not work. This is not what makes us safer.
JUAN GONZALEZ: For more on the body scanners and the new airport security procedures, we’re joined by two guests from Washington, D.C. Ginger McCall is assistant director of the Open Government program at EPIC, the Electronic Privacy Information Center. And Chris Calabrese is Legislative Counsel with the ACLU. We welcome you both to Democracy Now!
I was in Washington at the National Airport, Reagan Airport, and I refused to go to the scanner. This was a couple of weeks ago and I saw everyone going through it. I said to the TSA guys, “I don’t get it. Am I the only one?” They said, “You are the only one to refuses to go through.” I think that’s hardly the case. Ginger McCall, can you talk about the scanners, the electronic scanners and what epic is doing about this and the invasive pat-downs if you refuse? Because boy, you sure get one if you refuse to go through the electronic machine.
GINGER MCCALL: EPIC has been working on this issue since about 2005. We’ve actually filed a lawsuit to suspend the program while it’s evaluated for privacy, health and effectiveness. We have really been working on this because these machines are clearly a violation of the Fourth Amendment. They’re highly, highly invasive. It is a procedure that is applied to all American travelers.
AMY GOODMAN: What is the science behind it? I always wondered when your luggage goes through underneath, what kind of scanning does that get? Yet when we go through, what is in those body scanners? What is the level of radiation, not to mention the pictures they are taking of your body?
GINGER MCCALL: There are two different kinds of scanner – there’s millimeter wave and there’s backscatter. The scanners produce a small amount of radiation. It has not really been properly tested. There is not a clear maintenance schedule for who’s going to ensure that the scanners will continue to only put out the proper amount of radiation. There’s not proper testing of the effect of that radiation on children, on pregnant women, on immune-compromised individuals. What happens with the scanners is that you walk through it, you pose, the scanner will scan you and the picture gets sent back to a TSA official in a back room. It is a very, very invasive picture. It shows cellulite. It shows love handles. It is very detailed and very graphic.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And also these scanners are able to store these images as well as to transmit them to other government agencies if necessary?
GINGER MCCALL: EPIC had a Freedom of Information Act request with DHS to get more details on the scanners. We initially made that request. DHS ignored the request. We took them to court over it. As part of that lawsuit, we got documents, procurements specifications documents that were scripted by TSA and this document described everything that TSA require the manufacturers to put in these machines. One of the requirements was these machines be able to store and transmit the images.
JUAN GONZALEZ: We’re also joined on the line by New York City Councilman David Greenfield who represents the 44th District of the city in Brooklyn. On Thursday, Councilman Greenfield and six other councilmembers introduced a resolution to ban the use of the full body scanners in New York. Welcome to Democracy Now! Councilman.
COUNCILMAN GREENFIELD: Thank you, good morning.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Now why did you take this stand? If this passes, Councilman, this would affect the two airports in New York City, Kennedy and LaGuardia?
COUNCILMAN GREENFIELD: Absolutely. I took the stand because every American wants to be safe. You trust the government when the government says this is going to make you safe. What’s shocking is that a lot of research has been done with the folks at EPIC that actually indicates that these scanners do not work. In fact, the safest airport in the world, Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv—their security experts rejected the scanners. The former head of security at Ben Gurion said you could get enough explosives through these naked body scanners to blow up a jumbo jet.
AMY GOODMAN: What is the company that manufactures them and who approved? We’re talking a multimillion dollar sale all over the country as they’re put in all over the country.
COUNCILMAN GREENFIELD: I think that actually is the concern right here. That’s a fascinating question. In fact, last year, right after the Christmas Day bombing, Michael Chertoff, the former director of homeland security ran around and told many news outlets including the New York Times that if only we had these scanners we would have been saved. He conveniently forgot to mention that he actually is the lobbyist for the two manufacturers of this technology. Then they rushed to get a $350 million contract to these two companies.
JUAN GONZALEZ: We’re also joined by Chris Calabrese, the legislative counsel for ACLU. Chris, your organization has also condemned the scanners. Can you talk about your concerns?
CHRIS CALABRESE: They are pretty simple. The fact is, that the government is giving you an intolerable choice. It’s either take a virtual strip search or endure a really aggressive groping. We do not think either of those options is appropriate.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to play something else. The uproar of the new security procedures really picked up after one cellphone video when viral. The video was taken by a man named John Tyner, 31 years old, software engineer. He was flying out of a San Diego and refused to go to the full body scanner and was subjected to enhanced patdown instead. He recorded the encounter with the airport’s security agent, using his cell phone. Listen carefully.
TSA: Also, we are going to be doing a groin check. That means I am going to place my hand on your hip, my other hand on your inner thigh. Slowly go up and slide down.
TYNER: Okay.
TSA: We are going to do that two times in the front, two times in the back.
TYNER: Alright.
TSA: And if you would like a private screening we can make that available for you also.
TYNER: We can do that out here but if you touch my junk I’m going to have you arrested.
TSA: Actually, we’re going to have a supervisor here because of your statement.
AMY GOODMAN: Soon after he said, "If you touch my junk, I will have you arrested," he was told he would face a fine up to $11,000 and be investigated by the TSA. The investigation onto Tyner is still open, but the head of the TSA told a Senate hearing this week that he did not expect anything to come of it. It is also interesting that this is coming at the same time of this news that the Federal Labor Relations Authority is allowing airport security screeners to vote on union representation, clearing the way for a history-making election among federal government employees. We’re talking about 50,000 Transportation Security officers being allowed to vote on union representation. Remember when President Bush had them all under the Department of Homeland Security and said they could not unionize. That has turned around. I think it’s interesting when we have people like the Florida Congress member Mica talking about privatizing these scanners, the people who are doing this, is this also in response to breaking a possible union? Let me put that question to Chris Calabrese.
CHRIS CALABRESE: One thing that is very interesting, DHS came out, the inspector general of DHS, with a report this week that really faulted TSA for its training of screeners, saying was not giving TSA enough time to train people, it wasn’t letting them train at airports. That clearly contributes to this problem and it is something that unionization might fix. Certainly, a union rep would want to make sure all of its members got proper training before they did their job.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Chris, I’d like to ask you to broaden the whole issue of the government’s invasion of citizens and travelers. Your organization, through a foil request, was able to find out that 6,600 travelers have been subjected to electronic searches of their computers or electronic devices over a two-year period as they were traveling and in one case in particular, that of a French-American citizen who was traveling on Amtrak from Montreal to New York and was stopped at the border and his computer was confiscated. Your concerns about this increasing searching of the electronic equipment of American citizens without any search warrants?
CHRIS CALABRESE: The thing is we carry around our entire lives in our pockets now. What the founders would clearly have considered materials covered by the Fourth Amendment – out letters, records about our lives, our financial information, our pictures, if there had been pictures. These are detailed information about our life and I do not think anyone at the time of the Constitution would consider the government to be rummaging around in that information to be OK. But now, because of the way we live now, we carry around in our iPhones and our laptops and it has become almost impossible to travel without it as a business traveler, so the idea that the government can look at it for whatever it wants, and go through it for other investigative purposes, we think that is completely contrary to the Fourth Amendment.
AMY GOODMAN: Chris, you’re also looking at the issue of Facebook and Google. Talk about with the government is demanding they be allowed to have access to.
CHRIS CALABRESE: Right now, the privacy laws in the U.S. are incredibly outdated. The privacy law that governs the internet was actually passed in 1986, so it’s pre-’www’. So you can imagine it does not track terribly well to our existing problems today. So the government can get a lot more information with much less than a warrant standard simply under existing law. For example, email, which I think most people can think of as being protected by a warrant, which is very personal information. After a very limited period of time, 180 days, the government can get that information basically just with a subpoena. No court order, no warrant. We think the law needs to be updated so the government has an appropriate standard whenever it accesses this information.
AMY GOODMAN: What about the demands? Were you surprised about what exactly they’re asking of Google and Facebook? Can you explain for people who are not aware of this latest request, changing, actually, how the Internet works?
CHRIS CALABRESE: Well, what the government has been asking in its most recent request is really to build in a back door into communications. So the way that the Internet and communications are actually architected would have to be changed so if the Government presented some kind of warrant, or some kind of other order, and as we said they do not need a warrant in many cases—the company would have to be able to flip a switch and present the government with all of that information. I mean, not only does that make surveillance easier, it changes the way the Internet works. It is supposed to be a dispersed distributed system that’s secure because the communications between to the people cannot necessarily be broken. If you create a back door, it’s not just the government, it’s hackers and other individuals that can into the back door.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Ginger McCall, your concerns at EPIC about some of these continuing invasions by the government of our use of the Internet as well as our own personal electronic material, whether computers or cell phones?
GINGER MCCALL: Definitely. EPIC we have been following this. We have freedom of information requests regarding the Internet wiretapping proposal that Chris was just talking about. Certainly, if you have an Internet that is constantly monitored, you’ll have a really chilling effect on free speech and.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, David Greenfield is still with us, a councilman from Brooklyn who has sponsored legislation in NYC council to not allow theses scanners to be at LaGuardia and Kennedy, then you would have the patdowns. What is the most effective way to keep people safe at airports?
COUNCILMAN GREENFIELD: What the Israelis actually do is behavioral profiling. They have a conversation with you. These are trained ex-military officials who after they have a conversation, can pick up things like facial tics and nervousness. That seems to be very effective. The problem we have with the TSA is that they engage in theatrics to try to convince us that were safe when in fact we are not safe. Now they’ve crossed the line to endure a virtual strip search. That is why we are introducing legislation to stop the practice.
AMY GOODMAN: That could of course lead to a whole other discussion about racial profiling which we can’t have right now. This is an important discussion to continue. What should be happening at the airports. David Greenfield, a councilman from New York City, Chris Calabrese of the American Civil Liberties Union, is this a concern to you?
CHRIS CALABRESE: I am sorry, the racial profiling?
AMY GOODMAN: Yes.
CHRIS CALABRESE: I think that the problem with the Israeli model is in many ways that it does not scale to the U.S. that doesn’t mean that we should not do as the president said, after the Christmas bombing, more intelligence gathering ahead of time to make sure that we’re catching people before they get to the airport. But the bottom line is we’re in aviation security for the long haul. This is not a short-term thing. TSA needs to turn its attention to developing technologies that not just make a safer, but also protect our dignity and our privacy. I think a good example of that is the swabs that they rub on your hands at the airport that t can detect traces of explosives. That is really what we’re worried about here – someone sneaking a bomb on a plane. I think we should look for explosives. These are much less invasive technologies. They exist. They can be developed. They are much better than a virtual strip or a grope.
COUNCILMAN GREENFIELD: I would add that I do not think we are in favor of racial profiling. I think there’s a significant difference between racial and behavioral profiling. But I think it is also important that, as you mentioned, we should start screening what goes underneath the planes. We still do not have 100% screening of packages that go underneath the airplanes. If you are a terrorist, that is probably a much simpler thing to do that put the bomb on your body.
AMY GOODMAN: We will leave it there. Councilman David Greenfield, of Brooklyn, Chris Calabrese of the ACLU, and Ginger McCall of EPIC, the Electronic Privacy Information Center
Monday, November 15, 2010
Does America Want Peace in Afghanistan?
Rabi ul Sani 13, 1431 A.H, Tuesday March 30, 2010
In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate
This is a main question every one asks. Does America want peace in Afghanistan? However, the following data can help us reach a rationale conclusion: At the beginning of 2009, American had 30,000 troops in Afghanistan which they increased to 68,000 soldiers until the end of the year. This shows 110 percent boost of military man power. In December 2009, US president Obama announced 30,000 more troops for Afghanistan, showing further 30% increase.
In January this year in London Conference on Afghanistan, US supported Hamid Karzai program of reintegration and reconciliation with Taliban i.e. the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Two weeks later, on 13 February, Pentagon launched a massive military operations against Marjah township in Nad Ali district, Helmand province, violating their own commitment to work for peace in the country. Now they are talking of taking the offensive to Kandahar.
So far, America has built 700 bases in the country, the major of them being in Kandahar and Bagram. They allocate hundreds of millions of dollars each year for construction of more bases in Afghanistan. In view of these facts, no one can say America wants peace in Afghanistan. They have hidden and long-term colonialist objectives, not only in Afghanistan but in the whole region.
By using Afghanistan as outpost, Washington wants to follows its policy of expansionism, regime change and disintegration in the neighboring countries. No doubt, America has been flaring up racial discord and religious differences among the people in Afghanistan and the neighboring countries. CIA agents and black water operatives have been given task to destabilize the region as per the long-term American strategy. Those who express common cause with America, should know that Washington would never become their strategic friend. Rather it is a tactical ally which wants to use them against their own people for its colonialist objectives and then discard them as it has done this in the past.
In Afghanistan, the White House rulers and the Pentagon generals do not want peace but only want to weaken the momentum of the war. They never intend to end the war. That is why on the one hand, Robert Gates, says Taliban leadership is irreconcilable or now it is not the right time to talk with Taliban but on the other hand, they offer cash, jobs and retirement bonuses for Taliban's ranks and files. The reason is that Pentagon is not interested in ending the war but they only want to reduce the scope of attacks on their soldiers.
The Afghan Mujahideen are aware of this war stratagem of the enemy. They have shown that Americans can't deceive them by phony overtures of peace. If America really wants peace in Afghanistan, they should draw up a national strategy of reconciliation; stop blind bombardment and night raids; release innocent prisoners and remove the blacks list, send black water and CIA agents back home from Afghanistan and close down all secret prisons in American military bases in Afghanistan which are run by intelligence teams of the Special Force.
There, innocent prisoners are tortured, killed by the Special Force and drowned in Helmand River and other rivers in Afghanistan during the night, with their hands being tied up, without any legal verdict of court. The Americans are committing gross violation of human rights in Afghanistan. However, no one, including the human rights advocacy entities all over the world, raise their fingers because all these are done under the name of promoting democracy and fighting terrorism. The world still has to know that the war started under the name of terrorism is, in fact, an illegitimate war of neo-colonialism, being waged for subjugation of the Afghans and all free people.
We call on all those with wake and free conscience to raise their voice against the American brutalities and violation of humane values in Afghanistan. All should know that Americans kill children, women and old men with impunity and cross all limits in their brutalities.
The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan
Theunjustmedia.com
In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate
This is a main question every one asks. Does America want peace in Afghanistan? However, the following data can help us reach a rationale conclusion: At the beginning of 2009, American had 30,000 troops in Afghanistan which they increased to 68,000 soldiers until the end of the year. This shows 110 percent boost of military man power. In December 2009, US president Obama announced 30,000 more troops for Afghanistan, showing further 30% increase.
In January this year in London Conference on Afghanistan, US supported Hamid Karzai program of reintegration and reconciliation with Taliban i.e. the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Two weeks later, on 13 February, Pentagon launched a massive military operations against Marjah township in Nad Ali district, Helmand province, violating their own commitment to work for peace in the country. Now they are talking of taking the offensive to Kandahar.
So far, America has built 700 bases in the country, the major of them being in Kandahar and Bagram. They allocate hundreds of millions of dollars each year for construction of more bases in Afghanistan. In view of these facts, no one can say America wants peace in Afghanistan. They have hidden and long-term colonialist objectives, not only in Afghanistan but in the whole region.
By using Afghanistan as outpost, Washington wants to follows its policy of expansionism, regime change and disintegration in the neighboring countries. No doubt, America has been flaring up racial discord and religious differences among the people in Afghanistan and the neighboring countries. CIA agents and black water operatives have been given task to destabilize the region as per the long-term American strategy. Those who express common cause with America, should know that Washington would never become their strategic friend. Rather it is a tactical ally which wants to use them against their own people for its colonialist objectives and then discard them as it has done this in the past.
In Afghanistan, the White House rulers and the Pentagon generals do not want peace but only want to weaken the momentum of the war. They never intend to end the war. That is why on the one hand, Robert Gates, says Taliban leadership is irreconcilable or now it is not the right time to talk with Taliban but on the other hand, they offer cash, jobs and retirement bonuses for Taliban's ranks and files. The reason is that Pentagon is not interested in ending the war but they only want to reduce the scope of attacks on their soldiers.
The Afghan Mujahideen are aware of this war stratagem of the enemy. They have shown that Americans can't deceive them by phony overtures of peace. If America really wants peace in Afghanistan, they should draw up a national strategy of reconciliation; stop blind bombardment and night raids; release innocent prisoners and remove the blacks list, send black water and CIA agents back home from Afghanistan and close down all secret prisons in American military bases in Afghanistan which are run by intelligence teams of the Special Force.
There, innocent prisoners are tortured, killed by the Special Force and drowned in Helmand River and other rivers in Afghanistan during the night, with their hands being tied up, without any legal verdict of court. The Americans are committing gross violation of human rights in Afghanistan. However, no one, including the human rights advocacy entities all over the world, raise their fingers because all these are done under the name of promoting democracy and fighting terrorism. The world still has to know that the war started under the name of terrorism is, in fact, an illegitimate war of neo-colonialism, being waged for subjugation of the Afghans and all free people.
We call on all those with wake and free conscience to raise their voice against the American brutalities and violation of humane values in Afghanistan. All should know that Americans kill children, women and old men with impunity and cross all limits in their brutalities.
The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan
Theunjustmedia.com
Arab League may reject Israeli freeze
The Arab League will possibly refuse a new Israeli three-month partial settlement freeze that excludes East al-Quds (Jerusalem), an official from the organization says.
"If there is a settlement freeze that excludes Jerusalem, I cannot imagine that would be acceptable to the Palestinian side or the Arab side," Hesham Youssef, an official with the office of the secretary general of the Arab League, said on Monday.
According to reports, the US has offered a package of incentives to Israel to extend the partial settlement freeze for another three months after the issue stalled the direct talks between Tel Aviv and the Palestinian Authority (PA).
Washington plans to provide Tel Aviv with 20 advanced fighters and has agreed to veto any anti-Israeli resolution at the United Nations Security Council.
Acting PA Chief Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began the negotiations in early September after a 20-month break.
Abbas on Sunday called for an urgent meeting with the Arab League to discuss the new US proposal to Israel before announcing an official decision over the US-sponsored talks.
The PA chief has repeatedly said that any further talks with the Israeli side would depend on ending the settlement construction.
"If there is a settlement freeze that excludes Jerusalem, I cannot imagine that would be acceptable to the Palestinian side or the Arab side," Hesham Youssef, an official with the office of the secretary general of the Arab League, said on Monday.
According to reports, the US has offered a package of incentives to Israel to extend the partial settlement freeze for another three months after the issue stalled the direct talks between Tel Aviv and the Palestinian Authority (PA).
Washington plans to provide Tel Aviv with 20 advanced fighters and has agreed to veto any anti-Israeli resolution at the United Nations Security Council.
Acting PA Chief Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began the negotiations in early September after a 20-month break.
Abbas on Sunday called for an urgent meeting with the Arab League to discuss the new US proposal to Israel before announcing an official decision over the US-sponsored talks.
The PA chief has repeatedly said that any further talks with the Israeli side would depend on ending the settlement construction.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Nutrition - quality whole foods are the currency of life
Whether you believe in creation, or evolution or are undecided, most of us would agree that our bodies (that is our anatomy and physiology and biochemistry - which is really just how we process food and what we do with it) is substantially the same as that of our recent ancestors. So if we have the same body types and we process our food the same way as our great grandparents and great-great grandparents, can we expect dramatic consequences from eating the processed, irradiated, genetically engineered, refined and synthetic "foods" that our ancestors never had access to and never ate?
Indeed we can expect those consequences! Let's consider what happens if you substitute soda or Kool-Aid in your washing machine instead of water. How much longer would it work? What happens if you feed mayonnaise to a goldfish, french fries to a cow, donuts to a horse, assorted chemicals to a human? What happens when we substitute synthetic products for the water and many different nutrients that our cells and our children's cells and internal organs need simply to function well? In fact, the very sad consequences of the latest generations' food choices is becoming more apparent everyday as we are now seeing chronic diseases become epidemic in our society. The United States has the worst health status (life expectancy, morbidity, obesity and infant mortality) of any of the industrialized nations, yet we spend the most money on "healthcare" and take the most pharmaceuticals. Why are Americans getting sicker and sicker while drugging ourselves more and more?
The great expense of poor food choices is charged to both our bodies and the future, as well as to our wallets. A recent experimental trip to a large fast food chain cost $17.26 for four sandwiches and four "regular fries." For my $17.26, I got 2.80 pounds, net weight, of "food," once I had thrown out all the packaging. This amounted to over six dollars per pound, which is triple the average price of organic foods in a typical health food store. And most people think that fast food is cheap, and organic food is expensive!
Forget what you ate until today. What you eat from now on is vitally important to your continued well-being.
Until just a few generations ago, our ancestors were wonderfully fit and healthy compared with present-day generations. The majority lived good, active, healthy lives and ultimately died peacefully in their sleep. Today that is a rarity. Whereas chronic disease, chronic pain, and prolonged end-of-life care were rare for our ancestors, it is becoming much more the expected outcome for us. What single difference between these two centuries impacts our bodies the strongest? The overwhelmingly different factor in our lives is the refined, processed, chemical products that we eat, that our ancestors simply did not eat.
Do we really want to live this way? Let's apply some good, plain common sense to food choices.
Naturopathic physicians have come to understand that, just as you cannot pour soft drinks into your car and expect good performance, you cannot put synthetic and poor quality solids and liquids into your body and expect continued good health. Also, if our species, for better or worse, whether created, evolved or in-between, performs best on whole foods (vegetables, fruits, nuts, eggs, meats, etc.), then we can understand that putting synthetic liquid or solid wastes in your body will simply trash your most valuable possession: your own good health.
What's so great about good health?
Neighbors, co-workers, teachers, mentors and even friends can come and go. Money comes and goes. Material possessions can only be enjoyed by people who are comfortable in their own bodies. On the other hand, your good healthy body, as you preserve and care for it now, is your most valuable financial asset and your very best assurance of a strong youth full of opportunities, as well as a secure, successful middle age and retirement years. There is a lot about naturopathic medicine that is just good plain common sense. As Henry Lindlahr, one of the founding fathers of naturopathic medicine, said in Philosophy of Natural Therapeutics - "Medicines are in conformity with the constructive principle in nature insofar as they, in themselves, are not injurious or destructive to the human organism and insofar as they act as tissue foods and promote the neutralization and elimination of morbid matters and poisons."
In fact, this is exactly the goal of naturopathic medicine: to point out the foods that the patient needs, to promote the elimination of toxins, and above all to follow Hippocrates' instruction to First Do No Harm. In fact, First Do No Harm is the first of the naturopathic principles.
Lindlahr instructed doctors to give patients what they need, take away the toxins that destroy health, and to know when to refrain from doing too much. What could be more important or helpful for a doctor to do for his or her patients than that?
Food choices are a fork in the road that is always in front of you, where one way leads to discomfort and disease, and the other leads to enjoyable life.
It is never too late to improve your health. Food choices are always right there in front of you, with every supermarket item you either stop at or walk past, every restaurant that you either stop at or drive past, allowing you a better choice than what you may have made before.
But can we just turn 180 degrees from soda and fries on the one hand to whole foods on the other hand? How easy is it to start eating collard greens or squash or walnuts? Many people cringe at the idea of eating unfamiliar vegetables, such as arugula, mustard greens, turnip, etc. This is a result of never having eaten these foods prepared in an appetizing and satisfying way. I, along with the rest of my family, also had unthinkingly avoided mustard greens, out of a mistaken assumption of what they might taste like. Then I noticed the fine print on the label of the organic mustard greens from Cal-Organic Farms suggested a recipe, which I have modified as follows: fry some turkey bacon or regular (pork) bacon in a large pot and chop it in small pieces. Add washed, chopped mustard greens and enough water to cover. Boil the mustard greens, but only until slightly wilted. Too many people make the mistake of cooking greens to death, and then being displeased by both the color and the texture of the severely disintegrated leaves that result. What you are looking for is a little wilting, but with the color still bright, and still a succulent, pleasant (believe it or not) flavor. Cynthia Lair ND has written a wonderful cookbook with similar recipes titled Feeding the Whole Family.
So in general, what should we eat, ideally? In addition to the above cookbook, there are two other books that may be considered as good general nutritional guides, one a best-selling paperback, and the other a nutrition textbook. The first is Age Defying Diet, by the well-known but often misinterpreted Dr. Robert Atkins. If we manage to put out of our minds for a moment the triple bacon cheeseburgers and candy bars bearing his name that we have come to associate with Dr. Atkins, then there is a lot to be gained from Age-Defying Diet. Quite surprisingly, Atkins encourages much vegetables and fruits along with the meat, dairy, eggs and nuts in his book. In fact, at one point he suggests eating six cups of green vegetables per day. Dr. Atkins' arguments for a whole foods diet are very well documented from hundreds of research article citations. This is in addition to the experiences of approximately 30,000 patients who came through the Atkins Center during his lifetime. In fact, he says, "I know from my own experience with thousands of patients and from avidly reading numerous studies from Europe and the United States that those who consume a diet rich in fresh fruits and vegetables have significantly better health profile than those who eat other carbohydrates..." Robert Atkins MD, Age-Defying Diet. The reason that many people think of meat-only diets in connection with Dr. Atkins is because his weight-loss regimen is considerably more protein-heavy than his maintenance diet, which he describes in Age-Defying Diet. It is the maintenance diet that you want to begin and make peace with, and stay with, in order to successfully and contentedly live on all the foods you need and only the foods you need.
Even better is Dr. Joseph Mercola's book Total Health Cookbook and Program. Dr. Mercola appreciates the differences among the various metabolic types. Some individuals should have a diet that somewhat favors meat while others should have a diet that somewhat favors vegetables. Of course everyone should include some of both in their daily diet. Included in the book is a section on determining your metabolic type.
Another wonderful and well-referenced book on nutrition, that is more oriented toward the health care professions, is Medical Nutrition from Marz, by Russell Marz, ND. Dr. Marz does a wonderful job of bringing the biochemistry to life and relating nutritional strategies to various disease states. However, a companion primer on biochemistry may be necessary for the uninitiated reader.
Here are the best foods in a nutshell, including the nut: your body already truly and deeply loves vegetables, even if your taste buds don't love them yet.
Maximize whole vegetables. These are best organic and either raw or minimally cooked. In fact, fill up on vegetables all you like. That way you'll have less room for junk. If this sounds too simple to be true, remember that this ridiculously simple rule is the food maxim of healthy, slim adults. Try it, even if you only do it late in the day or every other day. If you can't find much fresh organic food in your area, try looking into the new movement called Community Supported Agriculture. This is a fast growing movement of small local farms throughout the United States that sell fresh seasonal food, usually organic, by subscription. You either pick it up at the farm or at an intermediate location, or they deliver to you. See www.csacenter.org. Once you try organic food right from the field, that has not been trucked hundreds or thousands of miles, you'll love the freshness of the produce so much, it would be hard to go back to supermarket food that has either been sitting around two weeks before you buy it, or worse, that came off an assembly line overlooking the industrial landscape surrounding the New Jersey turnpike. (That is where your processed food additives and flavorings and colorings come from, you know.) You think junk food can be addicting? Try healthy food! Freshness and taste and the deepest satisfaction of your body's basic metabolic needs are food addictions too! Once you are hooked, let them be your vices.
A rainbow of vegetables and fruits
Make your meal a rainbow. Green vegetables are such a staple of a healthy diet that they should be eaten every day. However, wonderful as green vegetables are, they do not provide the full spectrum of nutrients. Remember also the orange vegetables, such as sweet potato, squash, pumpkin and orange bell pepper, which provide the very important flavonoids. Red vegetables, such as tomatoes, are also important for lycopene. The liver alone has several hundred functions. These many jobs require the fuel of each of the different beneficial molecules found in a rich variety of healthy foods. In contrast, such nutrients are not available in junk food, even if they may have been added back in the factory.
Fruits are excellent, but avoid them in any concentrated form. Jams, jellies, fruit juice and other fruit-based processed foods are so concentrated that they produce high insulin responses. Insulin rushes are the very most important thing you need to avoid in order to maintain good health and appropriate weight. If you find yourself able to spend an hour in the kitchen a few times a year, try this simple recipe for unsweetened preserves.
Have a rainbow of whole fruits for the same reason as having a rainbow of vegetables. You need the nutrients that are represented in the various colors.
Meats, dairy, nuts, legumes and seeds
If you seem to do well eating meat, then go for high quality meat. Your best choices are organic, free-range meats. The more people ask for these in supermarkets, the more supermarkets will begin to carry them. In addition to the usual meats - buffalo, ostrich and venison are all nutritious and quite good. Roasting is better than frying. Organ meats such as liver are more highly nutritious than muscle meats, but both are good. Eggs and organic and raw cheese and milk will be beneficial to some and allergenic to others. It is best to pay attention to your body and watch for symptoms after eating dairy and eggs. The most highly allergenic foods are dairy, wheat, eggs, soy, citrus, peanuts and corn. That doesn't mean that you should avoid all of them, but these 7 foods are less digestible than others, so watch for feelings of fatigue or discomfort after eating them, even 12-24 hours later.
Snack on nuts and seeds. Walnuts, pecans, almonds, hazelnuts, cashews, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, as well as butters made from seeds and nuts are very highly nutritious and should be eaten frequently, unless one is allergic. Walnuts, high in omega-3 fatty acids, are a very important brain food for everyone, especially children. Other foods high in omega-3 fatty acids are flaxseed, grass-fed beef and salmon. Legumes are an important source of protein and other nutrients, especially when combined with rice or other whole grains.
Leave the refined carbs behind at the supermarket
Minimize, or better yet get rid of, refined grains and refined sugar of all kinds. These contribute nothing to your health, as all nutrition has been extracted from them. Worse, they actively deplete good health, because they cause excessive insulin release, which is the worst factor in arterial plaque, as well as countless other health problems. Try to eliminate as much as possible breads, cookies, bagels, pretzels, donuts, candy and sodas. But how do you do this when daily life is so full of these items? The battle over junk food is won or lost at the supermarket, not at home. In other words, if you come home with a box of cookies, you will probably eat them, because after all, being only human, it is nearly impossible to let them simply sit there in the cabinet a few feet away from you the same way the whole wheat pasta has been sitting there for six months. Rather, fighting the willpower battle at the supermarket is made much easier by simply walking on past the unhealthy food. Or better, not even walking down those aisles. In fact, some naturopaths advise to simply shop the periphery of the supermarket and nothing more. That way, you pick up the whole fruits and vegetables, meat and dairy, and come home with a much healthier, and less expensive, set of grocery items than if you had gone up and down the interior aisles where all the processed foods are.
The only kind of diet that will do you any good is one that you can be comfortable with long-term and features the above criteria.
Don't count calories. You could drive yourself up a wall trying to figure out how many calories you are eating or should eat. Counting calories is almost certain to end up making you feel deprived of food while wasting your time with meaningless numbers.
Above all, make a kind of peace with this way of eating. Find a quantity and variety of vegetables, fruits, meat, dairy and nuts and legumes that is so comfortable and so easy for you that you stay with these foods long term. The goal is to have such a well balanced and therefore satisfying diet, that there is nothing wanting and thus no need to cheat. You will find that some of these foods are so tasty that they become comfort foods for you. Rely on these when you feel the need for a comfort food. Give it at least sixteen weeks. If you are not feeling considerably better in that time and much thinner (if you are already overweight), then you need to modify this diet, so that it is something that you don't feel the need to cheat on. Cheating, as every dieter knows, costs so much that you may as well glue cookies on your thighs and tummy rather than eating them. Enrich your whole foods diet with so many different whole foods of your liking that you feel no need to cheat. Keep enough healthy convenience foods (i.e. fruits and nuts) on hand that you reach for those when you need to snack, because they are so visually appealing, fragrant, tasty, seasonally fresh and in great variety in your colorful and overflowing fruit bowl. If you feel you need something more filling with your fruit snack or fruit and nut snack, have some organic cheese with it. These items also pack and keep very nicely in a bag to take to work.
What do you do if eating whole foods seems to be too much of a change?
Start very slow and very easy. Dr. Steven Ehrlich of Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine is sensitive to people trying to change their diet, and the frustration that they may feel. Dr. Ehrlich instructs his students, "Have your patients add something rather than subtract from their diet To start, have them eat one apple a day." Here is an almost free change that one can make, a good tasting, easy to store, easy to carry, highly nutritious convenience food that is available year round. (Not to mention that it's probably the least messy thing you can eat on the go). Of course, after the patient masters this, Dr. Ehrlich gradually challenges his patients further with more and more good foods, but always gently, at the patient's own pace, considering individual appetites, and with great compassion. Surreptitiously (and insidiously!) the unhealthy items in the diet start falling away as patients fill up more and more on apples and later other whole fruits and vegetables. Let us all live up to such wonderful compassion as Dr Ehrlich teaches, as we ever so gently redirect others away from the plethora of processed foods that surround us in the supermarkets and the highway fast food outlets toward something more tasty, more nutritious, more aligned with our genetically acquired needs, and . . . more natural!
Indeed we can expect those consequences! Let's consider what happens if you substitute soda or Kool-Aid in your washing machine instead of water. How much longer would it work? What happens if you feed mayonnaise to a goldfish, french fries to a cow, donuts to a horse, assorted chemicals to a human? What happens when we substitute synthetic products for the water and many different nutrients that our cells and our children's cells and internal organs need simply to function well? In fact, the very sad consequences of the latest generations' food choices is becoming more apparent everyday as we are now seeing chronic diseases become epidemic in our society. The United States has the worst health status (life expectancy, morbidity, obesity and infant mortality) of any of the industrialized nations, yet we spend the most money on "healthcare" and take the most pharmaceuticals. Why are Americans getting sicker and sicker while drugging ourselves more and more?
The great expense of poor food choices is charged to both our bodies and the future, as well as to our wallets. A recent experimental trip to a large fast food chain cost $17.26 for four sandwiches and four "regular fries." For my $17.26, I got 2.80 pounds, net weight, of "food," once I had thrown out all the packaging. This amounted to over six dollars per pound, which is triple the average price of organic foods in a typical health food store. And most people think that fast food is cheap, and organic food is expensive!
Forget what you ate until today. What you eat from now on is vitally important to your continued well-being.
Until just a few generations ago, our ancestors were wonderfully fit and healthy compared with present-day generations. The majority lived good, active, healthy lives and ultimately died peacefully in their sleep. Today that is a rarity. Whereas chronic disease, chronic pain, and prolonged end-of-life care were rare for our ancestors, it is becoming much more the expected outcome for us. What single difference between these two centuries impacts our bodies the strongest? The overwhelmingly different factor in our lives is the refined, processed, chemical products that we eat, that our ancestors simply did not eat.
Do we really want to live this way? Let's apply some good, plain common sense to food choices.
Naturopathic physicians have come to understand that, just as you cannot pour soft drinks into your car and expect good performance, you cannot put synthetic and poor quality solids and liquids into your body and expect continued good health. Also, if our species, for better or worse, whether created, evolved or in-between, performs best on whole foods (vegetables, fruits, nuts, eggs, meats, etc.), then we can understand that putting synthetic liquid or solid wastes in your body will simply trash your most valuable possession: your own good health.
What's so great about good health?
Neighbors, co-workers, teachers, mentors and even friends can come and go. Money comes and goes. Material possessions can only be enjoyed by people who are comfortable in their own bodies. On the other hand, your good healthy body, as you preserve and care for it now, is your most valuable financial asset and your very best assurance of a strong youth full of opportunities, as well as a secure, successful middle age and retirement years. There is a lot about naturopathic medicine that is just good plain common sense. As Henry Lindlahr, one of the founding fathers of naturopathic medicine, said in Philosophy of Natural Therapeutics - "Medicines are in conformity with the constructive principle in nature insofar as they, in themselves, are not injurious or destructive to the human organism and insofar as they act as tissue foods and promote the neutralization and elimination of morbid matters and poisons."
In fact, this is exactly the goal of naturopathic medicine: to point out the foods that the patient needs, to promote the elimination of toxins, and above all to follow Hippocrates' instruction to First Do No Harm. In fact, First Do No Harm is the first of the naturopathic principles.
Lindlahr instructed doctors to give patients what they need, take away the toxins that destroy health, and to know when to refrain from doing too much. What could be more important or helpful for a doctor to do for his or her patients than that?
Food choices are a fork in the road that is always in front of you, where one way leads to discomfort and disease, and the other leads to enjoyable life.
It is never too late to improve your health. Food choices are always right there in front of you, with every supermarket item you either stop at or walk past, every restaurant that you either stop at or drive past, allowing you a better choice than what you may have made before.
But can we just turn 180 degrees from soda and fries on the one hand to whole foods on the other hand? How easy is it to start eating collard greens or squash or walnuts? Many people cringe at the idea of eating unfamiliar vegetables, such as arugula, mustard greens, turnip, etc. This is a result of never having eaten these foods prepared in an appetizing and satisfying way. I, along with the rest of my family, also had unthinkingly avoided mustard greens, out of a mistaken assumption of what they might taste like. Then I noticed the fine print on the label of the organic mustard greens from Cal-Organic Farms suggested a recipe, which I have modified as follows: fry some turkey bacon or regular (pork) bacon in a large pot and chop it in small pieces. Add washed, chopped mustard greens and enough water to cover. Boil the mustard greens, but only until slightly wilted. Too many people make the mistake of cooking greens to death, and then being displeased by both the color and the texture of the severely disintegrated leaves that result. What you are looking for is a little wilting, but with the color still bright, and still a succulent, pleasant (believe it or not) flavor. Cynthia Lair ND has written a wonderful cookbook with similar recipes titled Feeding the Whole Family.
So in general, what should we eat, ideally? In addition to the above cookbook, there are two other books that may be considered as good general nutritional guides, one a best-selling paperback, and the other a nutrition textbook. The first is Age Defying Diet, by the well-known but often misinterpreted Dr. Robert Atkins. If we manage to put out of our minds for a moment the triple bacon cheeseburgers and candy bars bearing his name that we have come to associate with Dr. Atkins, then there is a lot to be gained from Age-Defying Diet. Quite surprisingly, Atkins encourages much vegetables and fruits along with the meat, dairy, eggs and nuts in his book. In fact, at one point he suggests eating six cups of green vegetables per day. Dr. Atkins' arguments for a whole foods diet are very well documented from hundreds of research article citations. This is in addition to the experiences of approximately 30,000 patients who came through the Atkins Center during his lifetime. In fact, he says, "I know from my own experience with thousands of patients and from avidly reading numerous studies from Europe and the United States that those who consume a diet rich in fresh fruits and vegetables have significantly better health profile than those who eat other carbohydrates..." Robert Atkins MD, Age-Defying Diet. The reason that many people think of meat-only diets in connection with Dr. Atkins is because his weight-loss regimen is considerably more protein-heavy than his maintenance diet, which he describes in Age-Defying Diet. It is the maintenance diet that you want to begin and make peace with, and stay with, in order to successfully and contentedly live on all the foods you need and only the foods you need.
Even better is Dr. Joseph Mercola's book Total Health Cookbook and Program. Dr. Mercola appreciates the differences among the various metabolic types. Some individuals should have a diet that somewhat favors meat while others should have a diet that somewhat favors vegetables. Of course everyone should include some of both in their daily diet. Included in the book is a section on determining your metabolic type.
Another wonderful and well-referenced book on nutrition, that is more oriented toward the health care professions, is Medical Nutrition from Marz, by Russell Marz, ND. Dr. Marz does a wonderful job of bringing the biochemistry to life and relating nutritional strategies to various disease states. However, a companion primer on biochemistry may be necessary for the uninitiated reader.
Here are the best foods in a nutshell, including the nut: your body already truly and deeply loves vegetables, even if your taste buds don't love them yet.
Maximize whole vegetables. These are best organic and either raw or minimally cooked. In fact, fill up on vegetables all you like. That way you'll have less room for junk. If this sounds too simple to be true, remember that this ridiculously simple rule is the food maxim of healthy, slim adults. Try it, even if you only do it late in the day or every other day. If you can't find much fresh organic food in your area, try looking into the new movement called Community Supported Agriculture. This is a fast growing movement of small local farms throughout the United States that sell fresh seasonal food, usually organic, by subscription. You either pick it up at the farm or at an intermediate location, or they deliver to you. See www.csacenter.org. Once you try organic food right from the field, that has not been trucked hundreds or thousands of miles, you'll love the freshness of the produce so much, it would be hard to go back to supermarket food that has either been sitting around two weeks before you buy it, or worse, that came off an assembly line overlooking the industrial landscape surrounding the New Jersey turnpike. (That is where your processed food additives and flavorings and colorings come from, you know.) You think junk food can be addicting? Try healthy food! Freshness and taste and the deepest satisfaction of your body's basic metabolic needs are food addictions too! Once you are hooked, let them be your vices.
A rainbow of vegetables and fruits
Make your meal a rainbow. Green vegetables are such a staple of a healthy diet that they should be eaten every day. However, wonderful as green vegetables are, they do not provide the full spectrum of nutrients. Remember also the orange vegetables, such as sweet potato, squash, pumpkin and orange bell pepper, which provide the very important flavonoids. Red vegetables, such as tomatoes, are also important for lycopene. The liver alone has several hundred functions. These many jobs require the fuel of each of the different beneficial molecules found in a rich variety of healthy foods. In contrast, such nutrients are not available in junk food, even if they may have been added back in the factory.
Fruits are excellent, but avoid them in any concentrated form. Jams, jellies, fruit juice and other fruit-based processed foods are so concentrated that they produce high insulin responses. Insulin rushes are the very most important thing you need to avoid in order to maintain good health and appropriate weight. If you find yourself able to spend an hour in the kitchen a few times a year, try this simple recipe for unsweetened preserves.
Have a rainbow of whole fruits for the same reason as having a rainbow of vegetables. You need the nutrients that are represented in the various colors.
Meats, dairy, nuts, legumes and seeds
If you seem to do well eating meat, then go for high quality meat. Your best choices are organic, free-range meats. The more people ask for these in supermarkets, the more supermarkets will begin to carry them. In addition to the usual meats - buffalo, ostrich and venison are all nutritious and quite good. Roasting is better than frying. Organ meats such as liver are more highly nutritious than muscle meats, but both are good. Eggs and organic and raw cheese and milk will be beneficial to some and allergenic to others. It is best to pay attention to your body and watch for symptoms after eating dairy and eggs. The most highly allergenic foods are dairy, wheat, eggs, soy, citrus, peanuts and corn. That doesn't mean that you should avoid all of them, but these 7 foods are less digestible than others, so watch for feelings of fatigue or discomfort after eating them, even 12-24 hours later.
Snack on nuts and seeds. Walnuts, pecans, almonds, hazelnuts, cashews, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, as well as butters made from seeds and nuts are very highly nutritious and should be eaten frequently, unless one is allergic. Walnuts, high in omega-3 fatty acids, are a very important brain food for everyone, especially children. Other foods high in omega-3 fatty acids are flaxseed, grass-fed beef and salmon. Legumes are an important source of protein and other nutrients, especially when combined with rice or other whole grains.
Leave the refined carbs behind at the supermarket
Minimize, or better yet get rid of, refined grains and refined sugar of all kinds. These contribute nothing to your health, as all nutrition has been extracted from them. Worse, they actively deplete good health, because they cause excessive insulin release, which is the worst factor in arterial plaque, as well as countless other health problems. Try to eliminate as much as possible breads, cookies, bagels, pretzels, donuts, candy and sodas. But how do you do this when daily life is so full of these items? The battle over junk food is won or lost at the supermarket, not at home. In other words, if you come home with a box of cookies, you will probably eat them, because after all, being only human, it is nearly impossible to let them simply sit there in the cabinet a few feet away from you the same way the whole wheat pasta has been sitting there for six months. Rather, fighting the willpower battle at the supermarket is made much easier by simply walking on past the unhealthy food. Or better, not even walking down those aisles. In fact, some naturopaths advise to simply shop the periphery of the supermarket and nothing more. That way, you pick up the whole fruits and vegetables, meat and dairy, and come home with a much healthier, and less expensive, set of grocery items than if you had gone up and down the interior aisles where all the processed foods are.
The only kind of diet that will do you any good is one that you can be comfortable with long-term and features the above criteria.
Don't count calories. You could drive yourself up a wall trying to figure out how many calories you are eating or should eat. Counting calories is almost certain to end up making you feel deprived of food while wasting your time with meaningless numbers.
Above all, make a kind of peace with this way of eating. Find a quantity and variety of vegetables, fruits, meat, dairy and nuts and legumes that is so comfortable and so easy for you that you stay with these foods long term. The goal is to have such a well balanced and therefore satisfying diet, that there is nothing wanting and thus no need to cheat. You will find that some of these foods are so tasty that they become comfort foods for you. Rely on these when you feel the need for a comfort food. Give it at least sixteen weeks. If you are not feeling considerably better in that time and much thinner (if you are already overweight), then you need to modify this diet, so that it is something that you don't feel the need to cheat on. Cheating, as every dieter knows, costs so much that you may as well glue cookies on your thighs and tummy rather than eating them. Enrich your whole foods diet with so many different whole foods of your liking that you feel no need to cheat. Keep enough healthy convenience foods (i.e. fruits and nuts) on hand that you reach for those when you need to snack, because they are so visually appealing, fragrant, tasty, seasonally fresh and in great variety in your colorful and overflowing fruit bowl. If you feel you need something more filling with your fruit snack or fruit and nut snack, have some organic cheese with it. These items also pack and keep very nicely in a bag to take to work.
What do you do if eating whole foods seems to be too much of a change?
Start very slow and very easy. Dr. Steven Ehrlich of Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine is sensitive to people trying to change their diet, and the frustration that they may feel. Dr. Ehrlich instructs his students, "Have your patients add something rather than subtract from their diet To start, have them eat one apple a day." Here is an almost free change that one can make, a good tasting, easy to store, easy to carry, highly nutritious convenience food that is available year round. (Not to mention that it's probably the least messy thing you can eat on the go). Of course, after the patient masters this, Dr. Ehrlich gradually challenges his patients further with more and more good foods, but always gently, at the patient's own pace, considering individual appetites, and with great compassion. Surreptitiously (and insidiously!) the unhealthy items in the diet start falling away as patients fill up more and more on apples and later other whole fruits and vegetables. Let us all live up to such wonderful compassion as Dr Ehrlich teaches, as we ever so gently redirect others away from the plethora of processed foods that surround us in the supermarkets and the highway fast food outlets toward something more tasty, more nutritious, more aligned with our genetically acquired needs, and . . . more natural!
America conducts subversive activities in friendly territories
The United States found itself embroiled in a major spy scandal. As many as five countries caught the Americans illegally spying on their citizens.
Nobody would think it was strange if we were talking about the citizens of Russia, China, Iran, Syria and Venezuela. With these five countries, everything is clear: U.S. officials constantly refer to them as those presenting threats to the national security. But this time the U.S. was caught by quite friendly countries of Northern Europe - Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Finland and Sweden.
The scandal erupted earlier this month. On November 3, Norwegian television channel TV2 released a report which stated that over ten years, a group of Americans have been doing surveillance on 15 to 20 Norwegian subjects - mostly participants of various kinds of rallies. Potential terrorists and other undesirable persons were photographed, and the information was sent to Washington.
The report stated that the purpose of the surveillance was supposedly to prevent terrorist attacks against U.S. embassies. Nordic Governments were not informed of such actions.
The spokesman of the U.S. State Department, Philip Crowley, on November 11 said that the Norwegian authorities have been notified about a covert operation. "We are implementing the program throughout the world and are vigilant against people who can keep track of our embassies, as we understand that our diplomatic missions are a potential target," he explained.
However, the Scandinavians were not satisfied with this comment. A representative of the American embassy was called to the Norwegian Foreign Ministry for an explanation, but no clear answers were provided. It turns out that the surveillance was conducted without the knowledge of the Norwegian authorities.
If it was limited to Norway, this episode could have been considered an isolated case. Yet, after the Norwegians, Denmark spoke about the surveillance of its citizens. Local newspaper Politiken wrote that all American embassies have groups of employees leading external surveillance of suspicious persons in order to address threats to the U.S. security. It has been suggested that Denmark was hardly an exception.
Former head of the Danish security service PET Jorgen Bonniksen said that he had never heard of such groups: "If this is true, then we have to deal with illegal intelligence operations in Denmark. On Danish territory such operations can be conducted by PET, and PET only," he stressed.
The current head of PET, Jakob Scharf, made it clear: if illegal activity is determined, "of course, we will take action." Justice Minister of Denmark Lars Barfoeda has been summoned for an explanation to the Folketing (parliament). The U.S. Embassy in Copenhagen, as well as in Oslo, provided no clear comments.
Followed by Norwegians and Danes, Swedes brought up the illegal activities of American agents. According to the Minister of Justice of Sweden Beatrice Ask, people connected with the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm have been spying on people on the Swedish territory since 2000. The Minister stated that it "is not yet known whether in this case Swedish law was violated." She did not rule out that the objects of the surveillance actually might have been people who pose a threat to the U.S. security.
On his part, head of the local security police Anders Danielsson directly accused the U.S. of violating international norms. He said that the U.S. did not bother to inform the Swedish authorities of their intentions. "The Swedish security police (SÄPO) did not give the U.S. a permission to engage in activities that are contrary to Swedish law," he said.
Representatives of the U.S. embassy were quick to say that "they have nothing to hide" and that they have notified the Swedish authorities about their actions. However, Sweden is the third country which had been "made aware." Could the Scandinavian countries have entered into a conspiracy to defame the United States?
When we talk about three countries at once, it looks like a trend. Following its neighbors, Finland grew concerned as well. Local security police SUPO originally said it had not found anything illegal in the activities of the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki. However, they immediately proceeded to a more detailed verification. Apparently, the Finns also did not believe the assurances of the Americans.
Only the small Iceland with the population of 320 thousand with no army is lacking to complete the picture. On November 11 it was revealed that the islanders also have questions for the U.S. Local authorities immediately declared that they suspected members of the American Embassy in Reykjavik in espionage. The diplomatic mission is being verified.
This is a stunning picture. The U.S. did not even consider it necessary to inform its allies of its actions on their territory, as if they were colonies. In fact, Denmark, Iceland and Norway joined NATO and, consequently, they entered the circle of the closest allies of the U.S. Finland and Sweden are not members of the North Atlantic alliance, but are working with it very closely. That's how Americans value their allies.
However, Washington seems to have confused Scandinavians with Poland, Lithuania and Romania. These countries have repeatedly been suspected of placing secret CIA prisons on their territories. The authorities of these states have been blindly following in the footsteps of American politics in the past two decades. This is not true about rich countries of Northern Europe. Given the national pride of the Scandinavians, they are unlikely to forgive the Americans the dismissive attitude.
Denmark is the only country that followed the U.S. without asking questions. Sweden and Finland harshly condemned the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Norway was among the first to withdraw its troops from Iraq, as well as (unlike Americans) has signed an agreement with Russia on the delimitation of the Arctic shelf. Even little Iceland allowed itself to contradict the States when it refused to extradite the late chess player Robert Fisher, who was facing a jail term at home.
The explanation of the incident with the need to combat terrorism, of course, can be taken into account. Radical Islamists are making themselves visible in Denmark and Sweden, as well as Norway and Finland. Yet, the United States could have informed the local security forces of their suspicions as these countries also have qualified staff. And as for surveillance of Icelanders - it is simply ridiculous. They have fewer than a hundred of Muslims, let alone Islamists.
The author of numerous books on the work of intelligence Alexander Kolpakidi commented on the behavior of the U.S. agents in the Nordic countries for Pravda.ru.
"There is nothing surprising here. U.S. intelligence services have always behaved that way around the globe. Virtually all countries of the world, including the members of European Union and NATO, have secret CIA tracking stations. This is not the first scandal of this kind. For example, several years ago, the Greek police found one of these stations having mistaken it for a terrorist base. When the attack began, "terrorists" opened a furious fire, killing a police officer.
Why is America conducting subversive activities in foreign territories, including, apparently friendly countries? This is because in an era of the global crisis, the U.S. changed its strategy. If before it had adhered to the concept of the "golden billion" according to which the good life was allowed to a limited group of countries, mainly Western countries, but now it has changed the strategy to the "golden million," which implies that the good life is the exclusive privilege of the U.S. ".
Sergei Balmasov
Vadim Trukhachev
Pravda.Ru
Nobody would think it was strange if we were talking about the citizens of Russia, China, Iran, Syria and Venezuela. With these five countries, everything is clear: U.S. officials constantly refer to them as those presenting threats to the national security. But this time the U.S. was caught by quite friendly countries of Northern Europe - Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Finland and Sweden.
The scandal erupted earlier this month. On November 3, Norwegian television channel TV2 released a report which stated that over ten years, a group of Americans have been doing surveillance on 15 to 20 Norwegian subjects - mostly participants of various kinds of rallies. Potential terrorists and other undesirable persons were photographed, and the information was sent to Washington.
The report stated that the purpose of the surveillance was supposedly to prevent terrorist attacks against U.S. embassies. Nordic Governments were not informed of such actions.
The spokesman of the U.S. State Department, Philip Crowley, on November 11 said that the Norwegian authorities have been notified about a covert operation. "We are implementing the program throughout the world and are vigilant against people who can keep track of our embassies, as we understand that our diplomatic missions are a potential target," he explained.
However, the Scandinavians were not satisfied with this comment. A representative of the American embassy was called to the Norwegian Foreign Ministry for an explanation, but no clear answers were provided. It turns out that the surveillance was conducted without the knowledge of the Norwegian authorities.
If it was limited to Norway, this episode could have been considered an isolated case. Yet, after the Norwegians, Denmark spoke about the surveillance of its citizens. Local newspaper Politiken wrote that all American embassies have groups of employees leading external surveillance of suspicious persons in order to address threats to the U.S. security. It has been suggested that Denmark was hardly an exception.
Former head of the Danish security service PET Jorgen Bonniksen said that he had never heard of such groups: "If this is true, then we have to deal with illegal intelligence operations in Denmark. On Danish territory such operations can be conducted by PET, and PET only," he stressed.
The current head of PET, Jakob Scharf, made it clear: if illegal activity is determined, "of course, we will take action." Justice Minister of Denmark Lars Barfoeda has been summoned for an explanation to the Folketing (parliament). The U.S. Embassy in Copenhagen, as well as in Oslo, provided no clear comments.
Followed by Norwegians and Danes, Swedes brought up the illegal activities of American agents. According to the Minister of Justice of Sweden Beatrice Ask, people connected with the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm have been spying on people on the Swedish territory since 2000. The Minister stated that it "is not yet known whether in this case Swedish law was violated." She did not rule out that the objects of the surveillance actually might have been people who pose a threat to the U.S. security.
On his part, head of the local security police Anders Danielsson directly accused the U.S. of violating international norms. He said that the U.S. did not bother to inform the Swedish authorities of their intentions. "The Swedish security police (SÄPO) did not give the U.S. a permission to engage in activities that are contrary to Swedish law," he said.
Representatives of the U.S. embassy were quick to say that "they have nothing to hide" and that they have notified the Swedish authorities about their actions. However, Sweden is the third country which had been "made aware." Could the Scandinavian countries have entered into a conspiracy to defame the United States?
When we talk about three countries at once, it looks like a trend. Following its neighbors, Finland grew concerned as well. Local security police SUPO originally said it had not found anything illegal in the activities of the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki. However, they immediately proceeded to a more detailed verification. Apparently, the Finns also did not believe the assurances of the Americans.
Only the small Iceland with the population of 320 thousand with no army is lacking to complete the picture. On November 11 it was revealed that the islanders also have questions for the U.S. Local authorities immediately declared that they suspected members of the American Embassy in Reykjavik in espionage. The diplomatic mission is being verified.
This is a stunning picture. The U.S. did not even consider it necessary to inform its allies of its actions on their territory, as if they were colonies. In fact, Denmark, Iceland and Norway joined NATO and, consequently, they entered the circle of the closest allies of the U.S. Finland and Sweden are not members of the North Atlantic alliance, but are working with it very closely. That's how Americans value their allies.
However, Washington seems to have confused Scandinavians with Poland, Lithuania and Romania. These countries have repeatedly been suspected of placing secret CIA prisons on their territories. The authorities of these states have been blindly following in the footsteps of American politics in the past two decades. This is not true about rich countries of Northern Europe. Given the national pride of the Scandinavians, they are unlikely to forgive the Americans the dismissive attitude.
Denmark is the only country that followed the U.S. without asking questions. Sweden and Finland harshly condemned the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Norway was among the first to withdraw its troops from Iraq, as well as (unlike Americans) has signed an agreement with Russia on the delimitation of the Arctic shelf. Even little Iceland allowed itself to contradict the States when it refused to extradite the late chess player Robert Fisher, who was facing a jail term at home.
The explanation of the incident with the need to combat terrorism, of course, can be taken into account. Radical Islamists are making themselves visible in Denmark and Sweden, as well as Norway and Finland. Yet, the United States could have informed the local security forces of their suspicions as these countries also have qualified staff. And as for surveillance of Icelanders - it is simply ridiculous. They have fewer than a hundred of Muslims, let alone Islamists.
The author of numerous books on the work of intelligence Alexander Kolpakidi commented on the behavior of the U.S. agents in the Nordic countries for Pravda.ru.
"There is nothing surprising here. U.S. intelligence services have always behaved that way around the globe. Virtually all countries of the world, including the members of European Union and NATO, have secret CIA tracking stations. This is not the first scandal of this kind. For example, several years ago, the Greek police found one of these stations having mistaken it for a terrorist base. When the attack began, "terrorists" opened a furious fire, killing a police officer.
Why is America conducting subversive activities in foreign territories, including, apparently friendly countries? This is because in an era of the global crisis, the U.S. changed its strategy. If before it had adhered to the concept of the "golden billion" according to which the good life was allowed to a limited group of countries, mainly Western countries, but now it has changed the strategy to the "golden million," which implies that the good life is the exclusive privilege of the U.S. ".
Sergei Balmasov
Vadim Trukhachev
Pravda.Ru
Facts About The History Of Central Banks In The US That Our Children Are No Longer Taught In School
End of The American Dream
Today, most American students don’t even understand what a central bank is, much less that the battle over central banks is one of the most important themes in U.S. history. The truth is that our nation was birthed in the midst of a conflict over taxation and the control of our money. Central banking has played a key role in nearly all of the wars that America has fought. Presidents that resisted the central bankers were shot, while others shamefully caved in to their demands. Our current central bank is called the Federal Reserve and it is about as “federal” as Federal Express is. The truth is that it is a privately-owned financial institution that is designed to ensnare the U.S. government in an endlessly expanding spiral of debt from which there is no escape. The Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression and the Federal Reserve is at the core of our current economic crisis. None of these things is taught to students in America’s schools today.
In 2010, young Americans are taught a sanitized version of American history that doesn’t even make any sense. As with so many things, if you want to know what really happened just follow the money.
The following are 41 facts about the history of central banks in the United States that every American should know….
#1 As a result of the Seven Years War with France, King George III of England was deeply in debt to the central bankers of England.
#2 In an attempt to raise revenue, King George tried to heavily tax the colonies in America.
#3 In 1763, Benjamin Franklin was asked by the Bank of England why the colonies were so prosperous, and this was his response….
“That is simple. In the colonies we issue our own money. It is called Colonial Script. We issue it in proper proportion to the demands of trade and industry to make the products pass easily from the producers to the consumers.
In this manner, creating for ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power, and we have no interest to pay to no one.”
#4 The Currency Act of 1764 ordered the American Colonists to stop printing their own money. Colonial script (the money the colonists were using at the time) was to be exchanged at a two-to-one ratio for “notes” from the Bank of England.
#5 Later, in his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin explained the impact that this currency change had on the colonies….
“In one year, the conditions were so reversed that the era of prosperity ended, and a depression set in, to such an extent that the streets of the Colonies were filled with unemployed.”
#6 In fact, Benjamin Franklin stated unequivocally in his autobiography that the power to issue currency was the primary reason for the Revolutionary War….
“The colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters had it not been that England took away from the colonies their money, which created unemployment and dissatisfaction. The inability of the colonists to get power to issue their own money permanently out of the hands of George III and the international bankers was the prime reason for the Revolutionary War.”
#7 Gouverneur Morris, one of the authors of the U.S. Constitution, solemnly warned us in 1787 that we must not allow the bankers to enslave us….
“The rich will strive to establish their dominion and enslave the rest. They always did. They always will… They will have the same effect here as elsewhere, if we do not, by (the power of) government, keep them in their proper spheres.”
#8 Unfortunately, those warning us about the dangers of a central bank did not prevail. After an aborted attempt to establish a central bank in the 1780s, the First Bank of the United States was established in 1791. Alexander Hamilton (who had close ties to the Rothschild banking family) cut a deal under which he would support the move of the nation’s capital to Washington D.C. in exchange for southern support for the establishment of a central bank.
#9 George Washington signed the bill creating the First Bank of the United States on April 25, 1791. It was given a 20 year charter.
#10 In the first five years of the First Bank of the United States, the U.S. government borrowed 8.2 million dollars and prices rose by 72 percent.
#11 The opponents of central banking were not pleased. In 1798, Thomas Jefferson said the following….
“I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution – taking from the federal government their power of borrowing.”
#12 In 1811, the charter of the First Bank of the United States was not renewed.
#13 One year later, the War of 1812 erupted. The British and the Americans were at war once again.
#14 In 1814, the British captured and burned Washington D.C., but the Americans subsequently experienced key victories at New York and at New Orleans.
#15 The Treaty of Ghent, officially ending the war, was ratified by the U.S. Senate on February 16th, 1815 and was ratified by the British on February 18th, 1815.
#16 In 1816, another central bank was created. The Second Bank of the United States was established and was given a 20 year charter.
#17 Andrew Jackson, who became president in 1828, was determined to end the power of the central bankers over the United States.
#18 In fact, in 1832, Andrew Jackson’s re-election slogan was “JACKSON and NO BANK!”
#19 On July 10th, 1832 President Jackson said the following about the danger of a central bank….
“It is not our own citizens only who are to receive the bounty of our government. More than eight millions of the stock of this bank are held by foreigners… is there no danger to our liberty and independence in a bank that in its nature has so little to bind it to our country? … Controlling our currency, receiving our public moneys, and holding thousands of our citizens in dependence… would be more formidable and dangerous than a military power of the enemy.”
#20 In 1835, President Jackson completely paid off the U.S. national debt. He is the only U.S. president that has ever been able to accomplish this.
#21 President Jackson vetoed the attempt to renew the charter of the Second Bank of the United States in 1836.
#22 Richard Lawrence attempted to shoot Andrew Jackson, but he survived. It is alleged that Lawrence said that “wealthy people in Europe” had put him up to it.
#23 The Civil War was another opportunity for the central bankers of Europe to get their hooks into America. In fact, it is claimed that Abraham Lincoln actually contacted Rothschild banking interests in Europe in an attempt to finance the war effort. Reportedly, the Rothschilds were demanding very high interest rates and Lincoln balked at paying them.
#24 Instead, Lincoln pushed through the Legal Tender Act of 1862. Under that act, the U.S. government issued $449,338,902 of debt-free money.
#25 This debt-free money was known as “Greenbacks” because of the green ink that was used.
#26 The central bankers of Europe were not pleased. The following quote appeared in the London Times in 1865….
“If this mischievous financial policy, which has its origin in North America, shall become endurated down to a fixture, then that Government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off debts and be without debt. It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce. It will become prosperous without precedent in the history of the world. The brains, and wealth of all countries will go to North America. That country must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe.”
#27 Abraham Lincoln was shot dead by John Wilkes Booth on April 14th, 1865.
#28 After the Civil War, all money in the United States was created by bankers buying U.S. government bonds in exchange for bank notes.
#29 James A. Garfield became president in 1881, and he was a staunch opponent of the banking powers. In 1881 he said the following….
“Whoever controls the volume of money in our country is absolute master of all industry and commerce…and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.”
#30 President Garfield was shot about two weeks later by Charles J. Guiteau on July 2nd, 1881. He died from medical complications on September 19th, 1881.
#31 In 1906, the U.S. stock market was setting all kinds of records. However, in March 1907 the U.S. stock market absolutely crashed. It is alleged that elite New York bankers were responsible.
#32 In addition, in 1907 J.P. Morgan circulated rumors that a major New York bank had gone bankrupt. This caused a massive run on the banks. In turn, the banks started recalling all of their loans. The panic of 1907 resulted in a congressional investigation that ended up concluding that a central bank was “necessary” so that these kinds of panics would never happen again.
#33 It took a few years, but the international bankers finally got their central bank in 1913.
#34 Congress voted on the Federal Reserve Act on December 22nd, 1913 between the hours of 1:30 AM and 4:30 AM.
#35 A significant portion of Congress was either sleeping at the time or was already at home with their families celebrating the holidays.
#36 The president that signed the law that created the Federal Reserve, Woodrow Wilson, later sounded like he very much regretted the decision when he wrote the following….
“A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men … [W]e have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world–no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men.”
#37 Between 1921 and 1929 the Federal Reserve increased the U.S. money supply by 62 percent. This was the time known as “The Roaring 20s”.
#38 In addition, highly leveraged “margin loans” became very common during this time period.
#39 In October 1929, the New York bankers started calling in these margin loans on a massive scale. This created the initial crash that launched the Great Depression.
#40 Rather than expand the money supply in response to this crisis, the Federal Reserve really tightened it up.
#41 In fact, it was reported that the U.S. money supply contracted by eight billion dollars between 1929 and 1933. That was an extraordinary amount of money in those days. Over one-third of all U.S. banks went bankrupt. The New York bankers were able to buy up other banks and all kinds of other assets for pennies on the dollar.
But are American students being taught any of this today?
Of course not.
In fact, it is a rare student that can even adequately explain what a central bank is.
We have lost so much of what is important about our history.
And you know what they say – those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
It is absolutely critical that we educate as many Americans as possible about what is really going on in our financial system and about why we need to make some truly fundamental changes.
Today, most American students don’t even understand what a central bank is, much less that the battle over central banks is one of the most important themes in U.S. history. The truth is that our nation was birthed in the midst of a conflict over taxation and the control of our money. Central banking has played a key role in nearly all of the wars that America has fought. Presidents that resisted the central bankers were shot, while others shamefully caved in to their demands. Our current central bank is called the Federal Reserve and it is about as “federal” as Federal Express is. The truth is that it is a privately-owned financial institution that is designed to ensnare the U.S. government in an endlessly expanding spiral of debt from which there is no escape. The Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression and the Federal Reserve is at the core of our current economic crisis. None of these things is taught to students in America’s schools today.
In 2010, young Americans are taught a sanitized version of American history that doesn’t even make any sense. As with so many things, if you want to know what really happened just follow the money.
The following are 41 facts about the history of central banks in the United States that every American should know….
#1 As a result of the Seven Years War with France, King George III of England was deeply in debt to the central bankers of England.
#2 In an attempt to raise revenue, King George tried to heavily tax the colonies in America.
#3 In 1763, Benjamin Franklin was asked by the Bank of England why the colonies were so prosperous, and this was his response….
“That is simple. In the colonies we issue our own money. It is called Colonial Script. We issue it in proper proportion to the demands of trade and industry to make the products pass easily from the producers to the consumers.
In this manner, creating for ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power, and we have no interest to pay to no one.”
#4 The Currency Act of 1764 ordered the American Colonists to stop printing their own money. Colonial script (the money the colonists were using at the time) was to be exchanged at a two-to-one ratio for “notes” from the Bank of England.
#5 Later, in his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin explained the impact that this currency change had on the colonies….
“In one year, the conditions were so reversed that the era of prosperity ended, and a depression set in, to such an extent that the streets of the Colonies were filled with unemployed.”
#6 In fact, Benjamin Franklin stated unequivocally in his autobiography that the power to issue currency was the primary reason for the Revolutionary War….
“The colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters had it not been that England took away from the colonies their money, which created unemployment and dissatisfaction. The inability of the colonists to get power to issue their own money permanently out of the hands of George III and the international bankers was the prime reason for the Revolutionary War.”
#7 Gouverneur Morris, one of the authors of the U.S. Constitution, solemnly warned us in 1787 that we must not allow the bankers to enslave us….
“The rich will strive to establish their dominion and enslave the rest. They always did. They always will… They will have the same effect here as elsewhere, if we do not, by (the power of) government, keep them in their proper spheres.”
#8 Unfortunately, those warning us about the dangers of a central bank did not prevail. After an aborted attempt to establish a central bank in the 1780s, the First Bank of the United States was established in 1791. Alexander Hamilton (who had close ties to the Rothschild banking family) cut a deal under which he would support the move of the nation’s capital to Washington D.C. in exchange for southern support for the establishment of a central bank.
#9 George Washington signed the bill creating the First Bank of the United States on April 25, 1791. It was given a 20 year charter.
#10 In the first five years of the First Bank of the United States, the U.S. government borrowed 8.2 million dollars and prices rose by 72 percent.
#11 The opponents of central banking were not pleased. In 1798, Thomas Jefferson said the following….
“I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution – taking from the federal government their power of borrowing.”
#12 In 1811, the charter of the First Bank of the United States was not renewed.
#13 One year later, the War of 1812 erupted. The British and the Americans were at war once again.
#14 In 1814, the British captured and burned Washington D.C., but the Americans subsequently experienced key victories at New York and at New Orleans.
#15 The Treaty of Ghent, officially ending the war, was ratified by the U.S. Senate on February 16th, 1815 and was ratified by the British on February 18th, 1815.
#16 In 1816, another central bank was created. The Second Bank of the United States was established and was given a 20 year charter.
#17 Andrew Jackson, who became president in 1828, was determined to end the power of the central bankers over the United States.
#18 In fact, in 1832, Andrew Jackson’s re-election slogan was “JACKSON and NO BANK!”
#19 On July 10th, 1832 President Jackson said the following about the danger of a central bank….
“It is not our own citizens only who are to receive the bounty of our government. More than eight millions of the stock of this bank are held by foreigners… is there no danger to our liberty and independence in a bank that in its nature has so little to bind it to our country? … Controlling our currency, receiving our public moneys, and holding thousands of our citizens in dependence… would be more formidable and dangerous than a military power of the enemy.”
#20 In 1835, President Jackson completely paid off the U.S. national debt. He is the only U.S. president that has ever been able to accomplish this.
#21 President Jackson vetoed the attempt to renew the charter of the Second Bank of the United States in 1836.
#22 Richard Lawrence attempted to shoot Andrew Jackson, but he survived. It is alleged that Lawrence said that “wealthy people in Europe” had put him up to it.
#23 The Civil War was another opportunity for the central bankers of Europe to get their hooks into America. In fact, it is claimed that Abraham Lincoln actually contacted Rothschild banking interests in Europe in an attempt to finance the war effort. Reportedly, the Rothschilds were demanding very high interest rates and Lincoln balked at paying them.
#24 Instead, Lincoln pushed through the Legal Tender Act of 1862. Under that act, the U.S. government issued $449,338,902 of debt-free money.
#25 This debt-free money was known as “Greenbacks” because of the green ink that was used.
#26 The central bankers of Europe were not pleased. The following quote appeared in the London Times in 1865….
“If this mischievous financial policy, which has its origin in North America, shall become endurated down to a fixture, then that Government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off debts and be without debt. It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce. It will become prosperous without precedent in the history of the world. The brains, and wealth of all countries will go to North America. That country must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe.”
#27 Abraham Lincoln was shot dead by John Wilkes Booth on April 14th, 1865.
#28 After the Civil War, all money in the United States was created by bankers buying U.S. government bonds in exchange for bank notes.
#29 James A. Garfield became president in 1881, and he was a staunch opponent of the banking powers. In 1881 he said the following….
“Whoever controls the volume of money in our country is absolute master of all industry and commerce…and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.”
#30 President Garfield was shot about two weeks later by Charles J. Guiteau on July 2nd, 1881. He died from medical complications on September 19th, 1881.
#31 In 1906, the U.S. stock market was setting all kinds of records. However, in March 1907 the U.S. stock market absolutely crashed. It is alleged that elite New York bankers were responsible.
#32 In addition, in 1907 J.P. Morgan circulated rumors that a major New York bank had gone bankrupt. This caused a massive run on the banks. In turn, the banks started recalling all of their loans. The panic of 1907 resulted in a congressional investigation that ended up concluding that a central bank was “necessary” so that these kinds of panics would never happen again.
#33 It took a few years, but the international bankers finally got their central bank in 1913.
#34 Congress voted on the Federal Reserve Act on December 22nd, 1913 between the hours of 1:30 AM and 4:30 AM.
#35 A significant portion of Congress was either sleeping at the time or was already at home with their families celebrating the holidays.
#36 The president that signed the law that created the Federal Reserve, Woodrow Wilson, later sounded like he very much regretted the decision when he wrote the following….
“A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men … [W]e have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world–no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men.”
#37 Between 1921 and 1929 the Federal Reserve increased the U.S. money supply by 62 percent. This was the time known as “The Roaring 20s”.
#38 In addition, highly leveraged “margin loans” became very common during this time period.
#39 In October 1929, the New York bankers started calling in these margin loans on a massive scale. This created the initial crash that launched the Great Depression.
#40 Rather than expand the money supply in response to this crisis, the Federal Reserve really tightened it up.
#41 In fact, it was reported that the U.S. money supply contracted by eight billion dollars between 1929 and 1933. That was an extraordinary amount of money in those days. Over one-third of all U.S. banks went bankrupt. The New York bankers were able to buy up other banks and all kinds of other assets for pennies on the dollar.
But are American students being taught any of this today?
Of course not.
In fact, it is a rare student that can even adequately explain what a central bank is.
We have lost so much of what is important about our history.
And you know what they say – those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
It is absolutely critical that we educate as many Americans as possible about what is really going on in our financial system and about why we need to make some truly fundamental changes.
Monday, November 8, 2010
British MPs visit Hamas lawmakers
08-11-2010
Al Qassam website/Agencies - Two British MPs visited on Saturday two Palestinian lawmakers who are holed up in the Red Cross center in Jerusalem facing expulsion from the city by Israeli authorities.
MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Andrew Slaughter, both members of the Labour Party, met with Palestinian Legislative Council members Muhammad Totah and Ahmad Atoun in the Red Cross headquarters, along with members of the press and peace activist Lubna Masarwa.
The British officials said their visit was intended to express solidarity with the Palestinian people and rejection of Israel's violation of Palestinians' human rights.
The PLC members updated the two MPs on their situation and also condemned what they said was an "international silence" over Israel's violations of international law.
Totah and Atoun were elected to the PLC in 2006 as members of Hamas' Change and Reform list. Immediately following their election Israel ordered them to resign or have their Jerusalem residency revoked.
When they refused to step down, they were sentenced to prison terms, and upon their release, had their residency cards confiscated. Israel has ordered them to leave Jerusalem the city that has been their families' home for generations. Two other Hamas lawmakers, Muhammad Abu Tir and Khaled Abu Arafah, were also ordered to leave the city this year.
Totah and Atoun refuse to leave the city, and are remaining in the Red Cross compound in defiance. If they exit the compound they face immediate arrest and expulsion by Israeli authorities.
Asked about the MPs' visit, Fadi Adeeb, a spokesman for the British Consulate in Jerusalem said: "They [the MPs] came here own their own. They don't represent the government."
Britain, like the US, European Union, and Canada, regards Hamas as a terrorist organization and refuses official contact with the group.
Al Qassam website/Agencies - Two British MPs visited on Saturday two Palestinian lawmakers who are holed up in the Red Cross center in Jerusalem facing expulsion from the city by Israeli authorities.
MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Andrew Slaughter, both members of the Labour Party, met with Palestinian Legislative Council members Muhammad Totah and Ahmad Atoun in the Red Cross headquarters, along with members of the press and peace activist Lubna Masarwa.
The British officials said their visit was intended to express solidarity with the Palestinian people and rejection of Israel's violation of Palestinians' human rights.
The PLC members updated the two MPs on their situation and also condemned what they said was an "international silence" over Israel's violations of international law.
Totah and Atoun were elected to the PLC in 2006 as members of Hamas' Change and Reform list. Immediately following their election Israel ordered them to resign or have their Jerusalem residency revoked.
When they refused to step down, they were sentenced to prison terms, and upon their release, had their residency cards confiscated. Israel has ordered them to leave Jerusalem the city that has been their families' home for generations. Two other Hamas lawmakers, Muhammad Abu Tir and Khaled Abu Arafah, were also ordered to leave the city this year.
Totah and Atoun refuse to leave the city, and are remaining in the Red Cross compound in defiance. If they exit the compound they face immediate arrest and expulsion by Israeli authorities.
Asked about the MPs' visit, Fadi Adeeb, a spokesman for the British Consulate in Jerusalem said: "They [the MPs] came here own their own. They don't represent the government."
Britain, like the US, European Union, and Canada, regards Hamas as a terrorist organization and refuses official contact with the group.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Bleak future for the Mideast
By Hassan A. Barari
Few could forget the fourth of November 1995 when Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin delivered his last speech. Some 400,000 - of the once vibrant peace camp - had gathered to express their support for his policies of peace with the Palestinians. Few moments after, a zealot student from Bar Ilan University shot him dead.
A few days ago, the president of Israel, Shimon Peres, stood in the same place, commemorating Rabin’s memory. Absent that night were the hundreds of thousands that once belonged to the Israeli peace camp. Only a few thousand people attended the event. The modest turnout came as a statement about the retreat of the peace camp in Israel. No one can claim that there is a powerful peace camp in Israel any more.
Much has changed in 15 years. Israel’s society moved to the right in a way never expected before. Nowadays, it is simply not possible to think of a peace coalition in Israel. Israelis, on the whole, gave up on the possibility of making peace with the Palestinians. So did the latter, for that matter. Much troubling is the fact that the gap between the two sides has widened, becoming unbridgeable.
It is hard to avoid the feeling that with the advent of new actors (Iran and its proxies), the situation has been further complicated. For instance, how can Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas sign a peace agreement in which he has to concede much to the Israelis? It is unthinkable. This accounts for his refusal to resume peace negotiations with the Israelis until they freeze settlement activities.
The Palestinian leadership is both week and isolated. Additionally, Palestinians lost hope and are more preoccupied with daily life issues, such as moving from one city to another, which can take hours thanks to the existence of Israel’s provocative checkpoints.
On the other hand, the once positive third party (the United States) is no longer influential. The American influence in the region as a whole has waned considerably. Implicit in all statements coming from Washington is that the administration cannot force either party to the conflict to make peace.
Coupled with this is the ascendance of Iran as a player that can spoil any effort to bring about peace in the Middle East. If the peace process fails, which is a likely scenario, Iran and its proxies will have reason to celebrate.
Israelis and Americans alike understand this logic yet seem incapable of pushing the peace process forward. The problem is that many Israelis believe that the status quo is sustainable.
Contrary to what they claim, peace is not on the agenda. Many in our region, chief among them King Abdullah, warned repeatedly that in the absence of peace, Israel’s security cannot be maintained.
It is easy to understand that a war could erupt if the process fails.
Under the circumstances, the nice words uttered by Peres last Friday rang hollow; the reality on the ground is bleak.
The majority of pundits and analysts believe that peace is an illusion. The two parties cannot simply wake up tomorrow and sign a peace agreement even if they would like to see this eventuality. Anyway, Peres’ words were unheard. The main TV stations in Israel refused to broadcast the event alive. This can only mean that the audience and viewers in Israel no longer believe in the message that Peres tried to convey.
In a nutshell, there is no peace camp in Israel and the way to influence Israel is through Washington.
hassbarari@gmail.com
2 November 2010
Few could forget the fourth of November 1995 when Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin delivered his last speech. Some 400,000 - of the once vibrant peace camp - had gathered to express their support for his policies of peace with the Palestinians. Few moments after, a zealot student from Bar Ilan University shot him dead.
A few days ago, the president of Israel, Shimon Peres, stood in the same place, commemorating Rabin’s memory. Absent that night were the hundreds of thousands that once belonged to the Israeli peace camp. Only a few thousand people attended the event. The modest turnout came as a statement about the retreat of the peace camp in Israel. No one can claim that there is a powerful peace camp in Israel any more.
Much has changed in 15 years. Israel’s society moved to the right in a way never expected before. Nowadays, it is simply not possible to think of a peace coalition in Israel. Israelis, on the whole, gave up on the possibility of making peace with the Palestinians. So did the latter, for that matter. Much troubling is the fact that the gap between the two sides has widened, becoming unbridgeable.
It is hard to avoid the feeling that with the advent of new actors (Iran and its proxies), the situation has been further complicated. For instance, how can Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas sign a peace agreement in which he has to concede much to the Israelis? It is unthinkable. This accounts for his refusal to resume peace negotiations with the Israelis until they freeze settlement activities.
The Palestinian leadership is both week and isolated. Additionally, Palestinians lost hope and are more preoccupied with daily life issues, such as moving from one city to another, which can take hours thanks to the existence of Israel’s provocative checkpoints.
On the other hand, the once positive third party (the United States) is no longer influential. The American influence in the region as a whole has waned considerably. Implicit in all statements coming from Washington is that the administration cannot force either party to the conflict to make peace.
Coupled with this is the ascendance of Iran as a player that can spoil any effort to bring about peace in the Middle East. If the peace process fails, which is a likely scenario, Iran and its proxies will have reason to celebrate.
Israelis and Americans alike understand this logic yet seem incapable of pushing the peace process forward. The problem is that many Israelis believe that the status quo is sustainable.
Contrary to what they claim, peace is not on the agenda. Many in our region, chief among them King Abdullah, warned repeatedly that in the absence of peace, Israel’s security cannot be maintained.
It is easy to understand that a war could erupt if the process fails.
Under the circumstances, the nice words uttered by Peres last Friday rang hollow; the reality on the ground is bleak.
The majority of pundits and analysts believe that peace is an illusion. The two parties cannot simply wake up tomorrow and sign a peace agreement even if they would like to see this eventuality. Anyway, Peres’ words were unheard. The main TV stations in Israel refused to broadcast the event alive. This can only mean that the audience and viewers in Israel no longer believe in the message that Peres tried to convey.
In a nutshell, there is no peace camp in Israel and the way to influence Israel is through Washington.
hassbarari@gmail.com
2 November 2010
TISSUE, SKIN, BONE AND ORGAN HARVESTING AT ISRAEL’S NATIONAL FORENSIC INSTITUTE
Body Parts and Bio-Piracy
By NANCY SCHEPER-HUGHES
Editorial Note: Nancy Scheper-Hughes is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she directs the doctoral program in medicine and society. Since 1996, she has been involved in active field research on the global traffic in human organs, following the movement of bodies, body parts, transplant doctors, their patients, brokers, and kidney sellers, and the practices of organ and tissue harvesting in several countries – from Brazil, Argentina, and Cuba, to Moldova, Israel and Turkey, to India, South Africa, and the United States. She is a co-founder of Organs Watch, an independent, medical human rights, research and documentation center at UC Berkeley.
What follows is her detailed report on the tissue, skin, bone and organ harvesting conducted for many years at Israel’s L. Greenberg National Institute of Forensic Medicine, a.k.a. The Abu Kabir Institute, under the aegis of its former director and current chief pathologist, Dr. Yehuda Hiss. Long before Donald Boström leveled allegations of organ-harvesting from Palestinians in the Swedish tabloid, Aftonbladet, in August 2009, causing furious accusations of “blood libel,” Dr. Scheper-Hughes had already interviewed Dr. Hiss and had on tape the interview that forms part of her report here.
Dr. Scheper-Hughes says her purpose here is to refute the controversial official statements of the Ministry of Health and the IDF that while there may have been irregularities at the National Forensic Institute, they have long since ended. To this day, she says, they have failed to acknowledge, punish, or rectify various medical human rights abuses, past and present at the National Forensic Institute. While many of the allegations are widely known, the testimony by Israeli state pathologist and IDF (reserve) Lt. Col. Chen Kugel has never been published in English and his allegations are known only within Israel. Dr. Scheper-Hughes invited Dr. Kugel to speak publicly on this topic in the U.S. on May 6, 2010.
There are three lawsuits ongoing in Israel at the present moment concerning the Forensic Institute and Dr. Hiss. Two concerns alleged abuses against the dead bodies of Israeli citizens. The third concerns Rachel Corrie, a U.S. citizen who was killed in Gaza in 2003 while protesting the demolition of houses. Transcripts of court proceedings show that Corrie’s autopsy was conducted in contravention of an Israeli court order that an official from the U.S. Embassy be present. These transcripts also show Dr. Hiss conceding that he had kept samples from Corrie’s body without her family’s knowledge. Dr. Hiss also testified that he was uncertain where these samples now are. For his part, Dr. Kugel asserts that abuses at the Institute continue to this day.
The Scheper-Hughes article takes care to note Dr. Kugel’s description of his former mentor, Dr. Hiss, as a man who saw himself as willing to take great personal and professional risks “to serve a noble end… to help the war-wounded victims of terrorist attacks,” with his actions “as something sublime, or even heroic, as a modern-day Robin Hood.” AC/JSC
In July 2009, I was identified as the “whistle-blower” in the arrest by New Jersey FBI agents of a Brooklyn organs trafficker, an orthodox rabbi, Isaac Rosenbaum,1,2 whose unorthodox business activities I had uncovered several years earlier while investigating an international network of outlaw transplant surgeons, their brokers, lawyers, kidney hunters, insurance and travel agents, safe house operators, and “baby sitters” to mind sick and anxious international “transplant tourists.” The particular criminal network, in which Rosenbaum played a bit part, originated in Israel through a “company” run by a well-known crime boss Ilan Peri, who had over the years established shady transplant deals and kidney transplant outlets and connections in Turkey, Moldova, the Ukraine, Brazil, Germany, South Africa, the Philippines, China, Kosovo, Azerbaijan, Columbia, and the United States.3
The arrests, amidst gunfire in the operating rooms, of two of Ilan Peri’s transplant associates – Dr. Zaki Shapira, formerly of Rabin Medical Center, Petach Tikva, Israel, and his Turkish associate Dr. Yusuf Sonmez – in a private hospital in Istanbul in 20074 gave pause to the Israeli Ministry of Health which, until then, had permitted Israeli sick funds (medical insurance) to reimburse living donors overseas with transplants, many of them trafficked from the former Soviet Union countries. The kidney sellers captured in the Turkish shootout, however, were two Palestinians, Omar Abu Gaber, age 42, and Zaheda Mahammid, age 26. The organ recipients were an Israeli man of 68, Zeev Vigdor, and a younger South African man, John Richard Halford, who were filmed on Turkish TV being carried out of the operating room on stretchers and taken to another hospital before being returned home, without the transplants they had so desired.
After his release from a German prison in 2007, Peri returned to Israel, where he was investigated for tax fraud,5 detained, but released because Israel’s organ-transplant laws were murky with respect to the legality of “brokering” overseas transplants using paid donors. In 2008, two new laws were passed by the Israeli Parliament (Knesset): one that paved the way for applying brain death criteria that would satisfy the ultraorthodox, and the other that outlaws buying, selling and brokering organs for transplant.6 The Ministry of Health no longer reimburses overseas transplants unless they are legal. Peri continues to organize transplant tours, but today, he claims, using only deceased donor organs and legal pathways.
In its heyday (1997-2007), the Israeli transplant tourism/organ-trafficking network was an ingenious and extremely lucrative multimillion-dollar program that supplied a few thousand Israeli patients and diasporic Jews worldwide with the “fresh” organs and transplants they needed. With Rosenbaum’s arrest, the U.S. media were suddenly interested in the Israeli-based transplant-trafficking scheme, now that there was a proven link to hospitals in New York City.
The NYC Commissioner of Health and the FBI, whom I alerted years earlier about the Rosenbaum transplant gang, had dismissed the information as lacking credibility. How could patients and kidney sellers from two different countries be smuggled into hospitals for illegal transplants? How would they get through the red tape required for any transplant operation? It sounded like an old wives’ tale, an urban legend, or a blood libel against Jewish surgeons and their patients. And that was the worst suspicion of all.
Although the criminal justice system refused to believe the story I gave them, transplant surgeons working in hospitals in the U.S. who had been approached by Ilan Peri and his associates, including Isaac Rosenbaum, knew it to be true and knew that some of their colleagues were complicit in transplant crimes that ranged from violating the National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) in the buying and selling organs, to fraud, deception, money laundering, taking bribes, participating in organized crime and human trafficking. The Rosenbaum case, still in preparation, will be the first U.S. federal prosecution of crimes related to organs trafficking.7
The Aftonbladet Story Breaks
Then, in August 2009, another organ-trafficking story broke, one that linked Rosenbaum’s U.S.-Israel organ-brokering and money-laundering schemes with much older allegations of organ-and-tissue stealing from the bodies of Palestinian “terrorists” and stone throwers’ following autopsy at Israel’s National Forensic Institute in Abu Kabir, a neighborhood of Tel Aviv. These allegations, dating back to the early 1990s, were recycled by a Swedish journalist Donald Boström in a left-leaning Swedish tabloid, Aftonbladet, on August 17, 2009.8
Headlined “Our Sons Plundered for Their Organs,” Boström’s feature story was a mix of organ-theft accusations, seemingly coincidental connections, and political rhetoric. The information was based on Boström’s research in Israel and the Occupied Territories during the first Intifada, and his award-winning book, Inshallah,9 published in 2001, where Bostrom first introduced the allegations of body tampering and organ-and-tissue theft from Palestinian dead brought for autopsy to the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute. Boström’s article suggested that Palestinian bodies were being harvested as the “spoils of war.”
The Aftonbladet story, instantly translated into Hebrew and English, created a firestorm of protest that included a libel lawsuit by anti-defamation lawyers in New York City and a boycott of Swedish industries. Boström was labeled an anti-Semite, and the story he “dredged up from the sewer” was labeled a despicable “blood libel” against Israel and the world’s Jews.
I read these news reports with mounting dread. Like Boström, I was once greeted during a research visit to Israel in 2003 with an ugly headline and centerfold ( “New Blood Libel on French TV – Israel Steals Kidneys of Orphan Children in Moldova”) in Makor Rishon, a right-wing tabloid.10 The feature story reviewed an hour-long TV documentary by French filmmaker Catherine Bentellier, Kidneys Worth their Weight in Gold. I had traveled with the filmmaker to Moldova in 2001, where we interviewed people in villages that had been ravaged by organs traffickers targeting young men and trafficking them to Turkey, the Ukraine and Georgia as paid, sometimes coerced, kidney providers to Israeli transplant patients. The “blood libel” accusation featured medieval woodcuts and a blurry photo of me patting the hand of a Moldovan orphan in his crib.
With respect to the Swedish “blood libel” against the National Forensic Institute at Abu Kabir, the main issue that wasn’t raised in the avalanche of articles, editorials, and news columns published in Israel, Europe and the United States was one simple question, “Was the organ theft story true?” And were there any grounds for linking the tissue theft from the dead to the organization of illicit transplant tours for Israeli patients? Were there any grounds for linking the one story with another?
Introducing Dr Yehuda Hiss
I knew the answer. In July 2000, while studying the growth of organized transplant tours run by underworld brokers in Israel, I conducted a formal, audiotaped interview with the director of Israel’s National Forensic Institute, Dr. Yehuda Hiss, at Abu Kabir, in which he openly and freely discussed the “informal” procurement of organs and tissues from the bodies of the dead brought to the Institute for examination and autopsy. Hiss described a kind of “presumed” consent, one invented by him and shared with no one except, by example, with his medical students and residents and interns. He pursued a quiet policy of aggressive tissue, bone, skin, and organ harvesting, purportedly for the greater good of his country, a country at war, and for the good of his countryman. Professor Hiss, viewed by many Israelis and by the New York Times as a hero because of his service to the nation in handling bodies killed by terrorists and suicide bombers, deemed his behavior as patriotic. He was, in his own mind, not so much “above the law,” as representing the law, a much higher law, his law, supremely cool, rational, and scientifically and technically correct. The country was at war, blood was being spilled everyday, soldiers were being burned, and yet Israelis refused to provide tissues and organs needed. So, he would take matters into his own hands.
The taped interview was a smoking gun, but I feared the unintended consequences of making it public. The tape sat, more or less untouched, in my archives for ten years. But now it was necessary to set the record straight. But before I did so, I wanted to give professor Hiss a chance to explain, or even to correct, the things he had admitted to in the 2000 interview. Prior to leaving for a research trip in September-October 2009, accompanied by Dan Rather and his team for a news report on the criminal networks built around organ trafficking in Turkey, Moldova, and Israel, I contacted Yehuda Hiss in Israel (through one of my several Israeli research assistants) requesting a follow-up interview.
The Ministry of Health thwarted his initial acceptance. A private interview in his home was proposed, but Hiss (and his lawyers) wanted to review beforehand any questions I wished to raise. Then the Ministry of Health denied Hiss permission to speak with me at all, under any circumstances. While being interviewed about the effects of the changes in transplant laws and practices, several medical and transplant colleagues in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem often interjected disparaging references to the “despicable blood libel by the Swedish media,” even though they knew full well – and knew that I knew – that tucked inside Boström’s tabloid story was a real medical and political scandal of international proportions. I understood their nervousness about the topic, but not their denial of a known fact that was being manipulated into a global political tool of the Israeli government.
Just before returning to the United States, I met with Meira Weiss, a distinguished anthropologist and former professor at Hebrew University, and Chen Kugel, M.D., a forensic pathologist who had worked side by side with his mentor, Yehuda Hiss, at the Institute. Both Weiss and Dr. Kugel urged me to write a rebuttal to those in Israel who were “crying wolf” and using blood libel accusations to bludgeon their critics into submission. Weiss reminded me of the taped interview, done in 2000, with Dr. Hiss, as she herself had arranged the interview and was present during it, and she was as stunned as I was at the boldness and arrogance of Hiss’ revelations. Chen Kugel, a military officer (reserve) and former forensic pathologist at the Institute, agreed that the truth should be told to the global community, though perhaps not by them. Both had suffered enough. Both had been forced out of their jobs.
My interview with Yehuda Hiss at the Institute had come about in the following circumstances. In July 2000, three years into the Organs Watch project, I was given a file and a photo by an Israeli human rights lawyer, Lynda Brayer, at her organization’s headquarters in Bethlehem. The Society of St. Yves was created to provide legal assistance to Palestinian families, whose relatives had suffered the demolition of their homes, forced removals, and other abuses. The organization was then representing the family of Abdel Karim Abdel Musalmeh, who was shot in the head on November 8, 1995, by IDF snipers. The single bullet that killed Abdel is clearly indicated in the photo, which was part of the autopsy record. A military order for the demolition of Musalmeh’s home in Beit Awa, a village outside of Hebron, preceded his murder by the IDF as a “wanted person on the run.” The lawyers were arguing a case to allow the home to stand, so that Abdel’s widow and their six children would not be homeless. If murder and dispossession were not enough, Musalmeh’s body was returned to his wife in tatters. The autopsy report attributed death by rifle shot to brain. Why, then, was the body subjected to a total dissection and the removal of cornea and skin? I agreed to look into it.
When I first shared this information and the graphic photo with Meira Weiss, she reassured me at that time that there was no organ or tissue harvesting at the Institute. She had witnessed hundreds of autopsies – of Israelis, Arabs, Arab-Israelis, Russian immigrants, foreigners, and Palestinians. While bodies were opened and organs examined, they were returned to the body, except for small tissue samples as needed for forensic examination in the laboratories above the morgue. There were practices Weiss had observed that were not in compliance with international codes of ethics and internal law, the 1975 Helsinki Accords on the use of human subjects.11 There were acts of deviance by certain staff members. Tattoos, for example, were sometimes removed with a knife from the bodies of new immigrants to Israel, mostly Russian and Ukrainian, always suspect of nor being Jewish enough. Tattoos gave them away, and so they were treated with hostility. Penises might be circumcised, postmortem, without the knowledge or consent of relatives. The bodies of Jews and Muslims were treated differently. When Palestinians were brought in, following conflict, they were subjected to a complete autopsy, as required to produce information for the Palestinian Authority. On the other hand, the bodies of Israeli soldiers were respected, and autopsies were often discreet and partial.
Allegations About the Forensic Institute
The National Institute of Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir, a Tel Aviv suburb, is Israel’s national depository of dead bodies requiring identification, examination, and autopsy. It serves two purposes, on the one hand, as a scientific institute affiliated with the Sackler School of Medicine (Tel Aviv University), through which it operates a state-of-the-art genetics laboratory. On the other hand, the Institute is controlled and closely supervised by the chevra kadisha – the orthodox religious organization has a virtual monopoly on all burials in Israel, except for the military. The Institute is a civil organization working under the Ministry of Health. On the other hand, it is an arm of the security police and the military.
The Institute is then both a traditional medical-legal mortuary and, off the record, Israel’s primary source of tissues, bone, and skin needed for transplantation, plastic surgery, research and medical teaching. The illicit traffic in organs, tissues, bone and the stockpiling of assorted body parts at the Institute is what anthropologists call a public secret, something that every one inside the society knows about but which is never discussed, and certainly never admitted to those outside the society. But, in fact, allegations and official investigations of organ-and-tissue trafficking at the Forensic Institute have been ongoing in Israel since 1999 up to the present day. Yehuda Hiss has been, off and on, the focus of public scrutiny. He has been sued, and he has been decorated. He has been both upbraided and rewarded, fired from his position as director of the Institute, and given a new title, senior pathologist, with a higher salary.
Allegations of Hiss’ confiscation of organs, tissues and other body parts date back to November 1999, with an investigative report in the local Tel Aviv newspaper Ha’ir, which stated that medical students under Hiss’ direction were allowed to practice on bodies sent to the Institute at Abu Kabir for autopsy, and that body parts were transferred for transplant and other medical uses without permission from the families concerned. In 2000, the newspaper Yediot Aharonot published a price list for body parts that Hiss had sold to university researchers and to medical schools. A committee of international forensic experts was appointed by the Minister of Health to investigate practices at the Institute. It took two years for the investigation to be completed, during which time, according to Hiss’ former assistant and protégé, Chen Kugel, much of the evidence was destroyed. Nonetheless, according to Kugel, Hiss still had a huge collection of body parts in his possession at Abu Kabir, when the Israeli courts ordered a search in 2002. Israel National News reported at the time, “Over the past years, heads of the Institute appear to have given thousands of organs for research without permission, while maintaining a ‘storehouse’ of organs at Abu Kabir.” Hiss was reprimanded but allowed to continue his activities, which he defended as necessary for medicine, for the defense of the Israeli state, and for the advancement of science.
In 2005, new allegations of organs trafficking at Abu Kabir surfaced, and Hiss admitted to having removed parts from 125 bodies without authorization. Following a plea bargain with the state, the attorney general decided not to press criminal charges, and Hiss was given only a reprimand, and he continues on as chief pathologist at Abu Kabir, that is, the state of Israel’s official head pathologist. Illegal harvesting of bodies was simultaneously prohibited and tolerated. Hiss was, in fact, the state’s answer to the chronic scarcity of tissues and organs. He recognized the need produced by the deep cultural reluctance of families to tamper with the bodies of the dead, which allowed him to cross a line and to do as he pleased with the bodies entrusted to him.
Interviewing Dr Hiss
When I met professor Yehuda Hiss for the first and, as it turned out, the only time, the pathologist struck me as a formidable, frightening, and brilliant man. A Polish immigrant to Israel, with striking blue eyes, short beard, wiry body, and a tense, hypervigilant and belligerent demeanor, he commands attention. The interview took place on July 21, 2000, in Hiss’ office at the Institute, in the presence of a staff member and Meira Weiss. We were all, I think, shocked by his revelations. Hiss allowed the interview to be audiotaped, but parts of our conversation were off the record, and the tape was turned off at those moments. What follows now is a transcription of the audiotape pared down, some asides deleted.
YH: My name is Yehuda Hiss. I am a forensic specialist. Here we do forensic medicine, as well as anatomical pathology. I do both. The main issue, here, as compared to other countries, is that [in Israel] we have only one [forensic] Institute for the entire country. And it is very conveniently located in the center of Israel, so that the bulk of the population is located very near to us….There are another twenty medical centers in various places, each with its own department of pathology. But very few complete autopsies are performed in Israel.
I began my training in anatomical pathology in 1974, in Sheba (Tel Hashomer). We had only three residents, and we would perform about 850 complete autopsies [each year]. Today, there are 6-8 residents, and the hospital that trains residents in anatomical pathology is three times as big, but residents today perform only 40-50 mostly incomplete autopsies [per year]. So, this is representative of what is going on in the state of Israel. We did 800 per year 25 years ago with fewer residents, and only 40-50 per year today with many more resources. The only place where complete autopsies are conducted in Israel happens to be here.
Now, about the question of harvesting organs – it’s strange. Not only here, in Israel, but elsewhere it all depends on the personal approach of those in charge of pathology or organs harvesting. In my case, when I was a resident in Tel Hashomer – a hospital linked to the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) – we would collaborate with the army and we would provide the army with grafted (harvested) skin for burn victims, and, from time to time, they would ask us for cornea. So, I would be involved in it because I was in charge, with two others, and we would provide this.
NS-H: Why cornea to the military?
YH: For injuries perhaps. Maybe it was easier [for the military] to make this request of us, and, once we had gotten permissions to perform – and the family agreed – to the autopsy, we would take some skin and take the cornea. For autopsy, we always had to ask permission of the family, unless it was a court order [a criminal case].
NS-H: There is some resistance here, in Israel, to autopsy – both Jewish and Arab – right?
YH: Yes. We did everything off the record, highly informal. We never asked for the families’ permission.
Then we started harvesting cornea for several Israeli hospitals, initially for Tel Hashomer, because I had friends there who knew me well. I suggested this to them at various meetings. I was amazed because no one had ever come to us to ask. Why are you not coming over to us? I told them how it worked at Case Western Reserve Hospital [in Cleveland]. So, then they started to come from hospitals in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv. Everything was done on a friendly basis between us and our colleagues in various departments. I felt strongly that these corneas should go to public patients and not to private clinics. We were not paid for harvesting, but we weregiven some donations, equipment that we needed.
Whatever was done here was off the record, highly informal. We never asked permission of the family. But we would harvest only from bodies that the family agreed to allow an autopsy. So, we would never harvest where there were objections to the autopsy.
NS-H: The law allows this?
YH: The law demands permissions for autopsy, but not for harvesting. I read this in the law books….There was an addendum to the law in 1981, that you should ask the permission of the family – for autopsy…. We were free to take skin from the back of legs. We took cornea. We would not take cornea from those bodies where we suspected that the families might want to open the eyelids. There are some Orthodox and some Oriental [Arab] families who open the eyelids and throw sand on top of them. We knew whom to avoid. Also we only removed the cornea, not as we did in Teleshemer [hospital], the whole eyeball. And we would close and glue the eyelids, and we would cover any place where we had removed something. And, similarly, we would take [skin] only from the back of the legs. In the beginning of the 1990s, we began to take some long bones from the legs. Then we were asked for cardiac valves, and we did a few of them, because of the lack of collaboration between us and major thoracic departments. Then, beginning in 1995, we started to do it more formally. It was done according to a certain list of priorities, established by various medical centers and specific departments. It was done as a kind of semi-legal thing. At that point, we would inform the Ministry of Health. Before that time [1995], it was only between me/the Institute and the various departments and medical centers – informally. Later, we decided that it should be done through the Ministry of Health.
NS-H: Your chief is the Minister of Health, but you were free to do quite a lot without any interference from them?
YH: Yes, correct, but there are things that really should be done with some instruction and through the Ministry of Health. It was unclear for many years.
NS-H: In some countries of Latin America, the IMF [Forensic Institutes] is under the jurisdiction of the police, but in others, like Cuba, it is under the Ministry of Health. In the old South Africa, it was under the military police – and here?
YH: Independence is very important. This institution was established in 1954 under the auspices of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Then, in the early 1970s, it came under the police department. Then, in 1975 or ’76, it came under the Ministry of Health. We are now part of the Ministry of Health, and the director-general of the ministry is our boss, but we are actually completely independent. Until a few years ago, all medical centers were under the Ministry of Health, but in the late 1990s they have become independent. There are only a few still directly under the Ministry of Health. Since then, they are more interested in what we are doing here and in our capacities [to harvest tissues], and so we now get more demands and we feel that it should be regulated. We want to be on record, too, for the various costs that are involved in the harvesting of skin and cornea, bones, pulmonary values and so forth… . But until then, this was just between us and the various hospitals that we serviced, but we wanted there to be some control over this.
NS-H: How were the prices set?
YH: In 1996, we made up a list of the various medical services that we provided, a list of hundreds or thousands of shekels – there were expenses that we wanted to recoup. We would collaborate only with public hospitals. On one occasion, about ten years ago, there was a case of a head of a department who used one or two corneas donated to the hospital from a pathology Institute – and he used them for his private patients. This is the only case known to me – where tissue donated for general use was used privately. Since 1998, because of popular pressure, there was a sharp decline in autopsies, and we were made to ask permission of all families for autopsy and for harvesting, or for dissection, or for training of military medical students. It was all because a man went to the newspapers just recently to scream that his son, who died in military service, was used for medical experimentation and medical training. And a furor resulted in the country and permissions for autopsies declined. Since then – about two years ago [1998] – we were told to ask permission for everything. [This is a reference to the late Sergeant Zeev Buzaglo of the Golani Brigade, who was killed in a training accident in April 1997. When his father, Dr. Haim Buzaglo, a pediatrician, came to see his son’s body, he saw that it had been harmed at the Institute – NS-H].
NS-H: Why [is] the military [involved in this]?
YH: There is a special relationship between the Institute and the army because of the current political situation in Israel. All Israelis feel that we all have an obligation to help out in some way, and because we all served in the army, we all have a personal stake in the army ever after. We are all linked to the army. And because of this, we took it for granted. We never asked. We thought it was part of the duty of all Israelis to cooperate.
YH [pointing out data from his files]: Look, here is the data. Since January–April we received here 705 bodies. Of these, 500 were not suitable for harvesting. Either the bodies were too decomposed, or because of infections. Only 175 were adequate for harvesting. We called all of them, and 98 refused. Twelve we could not locate the next of kin. Only 65 out of them agreed. So, I would say we have an acceptance rate of less than one-third.
When we cannot find the next of kin, we do not harvest by law. Originally, the law required only that we inform the family that harvesting is going to take place. Now, we not only inform, we have to ask them for permission. So, because of this one bad incident, the backlash is overriding the Parliament and the law of the land.
[Here NS-H explains how in some states in the U.S. there is “presumed” consent for cornea harvesting, as in California, but most people were totally unaware that it was going on. The law was more or less kept a secret.]
YH: Yes, this was our policy for many years, and then one case, one bad scandal, and it is all over for us. Now, young military medical personnel no longer can get the training they need and, when they are sent to Lebanon or to the Palestinian territories – and there are injuries, they have to intervene without proper training, so that they are actually experimenting on living soldiers. That is what all this has brought us. No previous experience, no training whatsoever with the human body. They have to practice [surgery] on dogs – but never on humans! This is an absurdity! I would not want anyone to perform a tracheotomy or colostomy on me without any previous experience or training. Would you? Today, they do virtual training on computerized bodies and so on, but it’s not the same thing.
NS-H: So, no biotech firms that want your material?
YH: In Israel, 100 per cent of the skin harvested goes to Hadassah Hospital’s skin bank – it is for military purposes only – no biotech firms have access. There is another skin bank in the south of the country, to which the Institute is not linked – but I know that if something happens – if one of the burn centers need skin for a private patient, say, they can take skin from the Hadassah skin bank, but they have to repay it. Logistically, we are only linked to Hadassah.
Since six months ago, we have a new man working with us downstairs, who is a kind of mortuary assistant, and he is harvesting skin, bones, cornea, and bones. Before him, there was only an arrangement with the army – they used to send us here every week a plastic surgeon, who would come here to harvest skin for the skin bank in Hadassah. This lasted for many years. More than 12 or 13 years he did this. Since 1987-1988, every other week, a plastic surgeon would come here to harvest skin. But now we no longer have this direct relationship with the army since this latest scandal. Now, we have our own mortuary assistant, who is paid to harvest for us all the skin, bone, cornea, etc., that is needed. He helps out in other activities as well.
NS-H: When you ask permission, do some say you can take this and not that organ?
YH: Some say do not touch the heart or the brain – some are afraid you might want to take the skin. But it is not like you are skinning a rabbit or something, and we say, no, it is not like that – it is gentle, there is no blood – we are not peeling the skin off. It is not like scalping a person. We take only a superficial layer off – from the back and the legs. And we tell them, too, that we are only taking the thin tissue [from the eye] and not the globe.
In order to fulfill both Jewish and Muslim laws about the disposal of the dead, everything is done immediately. We start working here at about 6 in the morning. By 7 a.m., we have the whole list of all the bodies that are going to be coming in that day. Only some of these are going to be autopsied. And then this person here draws up a list about what will be done to whom. And then we are on the phone.
NS-H: Are there special techniques for how to present this request to people?
Staff member: We have to know how to read people.
YH: – Yes, but this is not for me. From the very beginning, I said, “Please free me from this! I cannot possibly talk to people about these things.” I am not patient like this.
Staff member: He loves the dead. But not the living! [Laughter]
YH: Yes, I switched to forensics from clinical medicine because I wanted the patients to shut up already! So, we say that X will do it – but she is too busy – and, really, we need a social worker to do this …
NS-H: Any other body parts taken – like pituitary glands?
YH: When I was a medical resident, we would take pituitary glands. Today, we have chemical substitutes, but when I was a resident, I used to rush to the refrigerator to deposit pituitary glands in a bottle with water. I would collect them – sure, of course! Also, tiny bones from inside the ear – these are very good for some surgical procedures. We would do this about twice a year.
NS-H: Some of these small bones were used for training NASA astronauts for space travel, and its effects on balance? And what about transnational sales?
YH: You can buy cornea from Russia for $300 each, I think…. In Moscow, you can get a kidney for $20,000 and cornea for a few dollars, because they really don’t care… At every autopsy, they take what they want, and they have a tremendous stockpile of organs that they can draw on. They have skin and cornea. In some large medical centers in Russia, you can get fresh kidney that they get from auto accidents – and in Turkey as well. So, in both places you can get transplanted organs for just $20,000 – including the kidney – because they have a stockpile of them. I know because I was part of a transplant procurement organization, and we studied this. It is very cheap. It is well done by very good surgeons there. In fact, there is a surplus of kidneys in Russia. They have surplus because fewer people there can afford transplants.
NS-H: There is some doubt about whether Russia was using the international standards for determining brain death.
YH: Yes, sometimes our surgeons would accompany our Israeli patients to Russia, and they would perform the surgery there and the kidney was from a Russian. The surgery would be performed by Israeli doctors in Russia, with Russian kidneys. Some are leading transplant surgeons from Israel…
NS-H: Yes, transplant tourism, some of this has been reported in the newspapers.
YH: Right. They would go once a month for a few days and would perform five or six surgeries there, and the patient would come back here to recuperate.
NS-H: The UCSF medical ethics board decided that if people who want to break the law and travel to China or the Philippines to be transplanted, then we will not provide you with follow-up care – you can go to a private institution.
YH: Many things in Israel are done on a personal basis and through connections… I think that in Israel everything should be as equitable as possible. One should not have to depend on connections or money. If advertising and the media would only persuade the Israeli population to donate organs from deceased victims from trauma… [ and even though there is nothing in Talmudic law against organ harvesting from the dead], a religious family will find a rabbi who will agree with them. I try to tell them how important it is to donate, and they will say, “I need to discuss this with my rabbi” – and nine times out of ten they come back with a negative answer. That is, the answer that they want….
Dr Chen Kugel, Whistleblower
As can be seen from the transcript, Hiss readily admitted to the non-consensual, informal tissue, skin, bone and organ harvesting to serve the needs of the country. Until he arrived in 1987 as chief pathologist at the Forensic Institute, there was no organ or tissue harvesting. He explained to his staff that this practice was common elsewhere in the world, in the U.S., at Case Western Reserve, where he had studied, and in other forensic Institutes he had visited. It was a “presumed consent” without the backing of the population, or the law. Although it was in violation of tissue and organs laws, Hiss thought it could be justified for a war-torn and traumatized country like Israel. Hiss admitted that the organs-and-tissue harvesting was “informal” and its legality unclear. From his perspective as a state pathologist, little harm was done by the careful removal of some organs that would never be missed by the deceased and about which the family would never have to know. Medical students in military training were brought into the morgue after Hiss and his team completed their legally mandated autopsies, to be trained in the removal of organs.
After my tape was released in Israel, on December 19, 2009, to Israeli TV’s Channel 2, government officials for the army and the Ministry of Health admitted that organs and tissues were harvested from the dead bodies of both Palestinians and Israelis throughout the 1990s, but that the practice ended in 2000. Dr. Hiss, however, publicly denied everything on tape – including his words to me. Today, he says that he denies it all – the stockpiling of body parts, the perjury, and the organ harvesting. He denies everything. He says that everything was all done in agreement with and by law, and that families consented to harvest for transplantation. No organs were taken for studies, he said, none at all.
In May 2010, Dr. Chen Kugel and Meira Weiss spoke at a special conference I organized at the University of California, before a working group of experts, including anthropologists, transplant surgeons, pathologists, detectives, prosecutors, and human rights activists.
Chen Kugel, the unheralded and original (unnamed outside of Israel) whistle-blower on the Forensic Institute, said that the situation was much worse than what Yehuda Hiss admitted in his interview with me in 2000. Kugel’s comments stand as a first-person account from a military officer and a forensic pathologist. When he returned to Israel to work at the Forensic Institute in 2000, after several years in the United States, where he was working in various hospitals and forensic programs, he says he immediately realized that something was terribly wrong. He tried to address the problems with three medical residents, and with them together to have a meeting with the director. Kugel was the spokesperson, and he told Hiss that it was wrong to harvest organs and tissues without permission, and that “giving false evidence in court is also not okay.” This went nowhere, and so the group wrote a letter of complaint to the Ministry of Health, outlining the illegalities. The Ministry of Health reacted with alacrity: they fired the three residents and punished Kugel, who, as a military officer working for the IDF, could not be fired. Then they went to the media and spilled the entire story about what exactly was going on.
Kugel: “Organs were sold to anyone”
In fact, according to Kugel, “Organs were sold to anyone; anyone that wanted organs just had to pay for them.” While skin, heart valves, bones, and corneas were removed and used for transplants, solid organs – hearts, brains, livers – “were sold for research, for presentations, for drills for medical students and surgeons.”
There was a price for these organs, low – $ 300 for a femur, for example – and should a client want all the organs from a body, that could be arranged, not the body itself, but all the organs removed and sold, Kugel said, for about $2,500.
Amid the uproar prompted by the whistle-blowers, Hiss waged his own media campaign and tried to convince the public that everything that was done was to serve a noble end, to help the war-wounded victims of terrorist attacks, and the sick. He presented his conduct, in Dr. Kugel’s descripton, “as something sublime or even heroic, as a modern-day Robin Hood. Taking from the dead and giving to the innocent victims.”
So, whom were the organs taken from? Kugel asked rhetorically. The answer was they were taken from everyone, from Jews and Muslims, from soldiers and from stone throwers, from terrorists and from the victims of terrorist suicide bombers, from tourists and from immigrants. There were only two considerations – the physical condition of the body and its organs, and the ability to conceal what they were doing.
Most of the victims of illegal organ harvesting, according to Kugel, were not even subject to autopsy, they were simply harvested. They hid the damage by putting pipes and glass eyes, and broom sticks, and toilet paper and plastic skull caps to cover the place where the brain was removed, and so on. The Institute, Kugel said, was counting on one thing: that most Israelis do not view the body after death except once, to verify that the body is the right one. The body is wrapped in a winding sheet, or might be wrapped in plastic sheets for the burial company to come for it. In that case, the staff would warn the burial employees, who were not well educated, not to open the sheet because the body was contaminated with an infectious disease. It was more difficult to take organs from soldiers because their bodies were supervised by the military, which was more difficult to fool. “But organs were taken from soldiers,” Kugel said. It was easier to take tissues and organs from the new immigrants, and, needless to say, easiest of all to take from the Palestinians. They would be going back across the border, and, “if there were any complaints coming from their families, they were the enemy and so, of course, they were lying and no one would believe them”.
What Kugel found most amazing was the uproar around the Boström article, when there was abundant detail in the Israeli press about the Institute whose affairs were discussed heatedly by commissions, finding blatant evidence of illegalities despite the attempts to destroy all the evidence. After these things were exposed, it took two years for the judge, or the head of the special inquest, to decide whether or not Hiss should be sued. Then, it took the police two years to begin a serious investigation. The end result was that Hiss was removed as director of the Institute but, as previously noted, retained as senior pathologist and given a salary increase. Kugel was dismissed from his post because, during the investigation, he spoke with one of the witnesses who had buried evidence – human body parts – and thus was seen as interfering with the trial. He was censored and blacklisted from teaching at all but one of Israel’s universities. To Dr. Kugel the prime issue had nothing at all to do with science: it was about disrespect, about hoarding body specimens, about turning the Institute into a factory of bodies. The Institute’s conduct was motivated by money, by power, and by authoritarian paternalism of the sort that says, “We know what’s good for you, we’ll decide what happens to you, the person who doesn’t know anything. We’ll decide.” And that’s the reason why that happened, and Dr. Kugel asserts it is happening to this day.
Questions About Rachel Corrie’s Autopsy
On March 14, 2010, the Haifa District Court heard testimony in the civil law suit filed by the family of the slain U.S. citizen and Gaza peace activist, Rachel Corrie, against the State of Israel for her unlawful killing in Rafah, Gaza. Corrie, an American college student and human rights activist, was crushed to death on March 16, 2003, by a Caterpillar D9R bulldozer. During the hearing, Dr. Hiss, who conducted the autopsy of Rachel Corrie at the request of the Israeli military, admitted that he had violated an Israeli court order that required an official from the U.S. Embassy to be present as a witness. Hiss stated that it was his policy not to allow anyone who is not a physician or a biologist to observe autopsy. Hiss admitted that he had retained samples of tissues and organs from Corrie’s body for examination and testing without informing the Corrie family. Hiss was uncertain about whether the samples had been buried with other body samples from the Institute. Corrie’s parents, Cindy and Craig, were shocked by these chilling admissions and really do not know quite what to make of them or what, if anything, they should do about it. They are seeking, they told me, only the truth and symbolic damages of $1.00. The prevention of harm to others is, they say, far more important than money.
Finally, what links the story of Yehuda Hiss at the National Forensic Institute and Isaac Rosenbaum and the international network of organs traffickers in Israel? Perhaps only the same sad fact that hysteria about organs scarcities – whatever that chilling phrase evokes – have driven both the medical abuses of the dead and the medical abuses of those who were trafficked to service transplant tourists from Israel to New York City, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, among other sites. When Dr. Zaki Shapira began putting out feelers for kidney sellers in the early 1990s to serve the needs of his transplant patients at Bellinson Hospital in Tel Aviv, he found them close at hand, Palestinian guest workers. Palestinians were, he told me in Bellagio in 1996 at a conference on organ trafficking, “pre-disposed” to sacrifice their organs. Or, perhaps, to be sacrificed. It works both ways. CP
Nancy Scheper-Hughes is the author of several books on poverty and health, including Death without Weeping: the Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil – listed by CounterPunch in its top 100 non-fiction books published in English in the 20th Century. She can be reached at:
nsh@berkeley.edu
link: http://www.intifada-palestine.com/2010/10/tissue-skin-bone-and-organ-harvesting-at-israels-national-forensic-institute/.
By NANCY SCHEPER-HUGHES
Editorial Note: Nancy Scheper-Hughes is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she directs the doctoral program in medicine and society. Since 1996, she has been involved in active field research on the global traffic in human organs, following the movement of bodies, body parts, transplant doctors, their patients, brokers, and kidney sellers, and the practices of organ and tissue harvesting in several countries – from Brazil, Argentina, and Cuba, to Moldova, Israel and Turkey, to India, South Africa, and the United States. She is a co-founder of Organs Watch, an independent, medical human rights, research and documentation center at UC Berkeley.
What follows is her detailed report on the tissue, skin, bone and organ harvesting conducted for many years at Israel’s L. Greenberg National Institute of Forensic Medicine, a.k.a. The Abu Kabir Institute, under the aegis of its former director and current chief pathologist, Dr. Yehuda Hiss. Long before Donald Boström leveled allegations of organ-harvesting from Palestinians in the Swedish tabloid, Aftonbladet, in August 2009, causing furious accusations of “blood libel,” Dr. Scheper-Hughes had already interviewed Dr. Hiss and had on tape the interview that forms part of her report here.
Dr. Scheper-Hughes says her purpose here is to refute the controversial official statements of the Ministry of Health and the IDF that while there may have been irregularities at the National Forensic Institute, they have long since ended. To this day, she says, they have failed to acknowledge, punish, or rectify various medical human rights abuses, past and present at the National Forensic Institute. While many of the allegations are widely known, the testimony by Israeli state pathologist and IDF (reserve) Lt. Col. Chen Kugel has never been published in English and his allegations are known only within Israel. Dr. Scheper-Hughes invited Dr. Kugel to speak publicly on this topic in the U.S. on May 6, 2010.
There are three lawsuits ongoing in Israel at the present moment concerning the Forensic Institute and Dr. Hiss. Two concerns alleged abuses against the dead bodies of Israeli citizens. The third concerns Rachel Corrie, a U.S. citizen who was killed in Gaza in 2003 while protesting the demolition of houses. Transcripts of court proceedings show that Corrie’s autopsy was conducted in contravention of an Israeli court order that an official from the U.S. Embassy be present. These transcripts also show Dr. Hiss conceding that he had kept samples from Corrie’s body without her family’s knowledge. Dr. Hiss also testified that he was uncertain where these samples now are. For his part, Dr. Kugel asserts that abuses at the Institute continue to this day.
The Scheper-Hughes article takes care to note Dr. Kugel’s description of his former mentor, Dr. Hiss, as a man who saw himself as willing to take great personal and professional risks “to serve a noble end… to help the war-wounded victims of terrorist attacks,” with his actions “as something sublime, or even heroic, as a modern-day Robin Hood.” AC/JSC
In July 2009, I was identified as the “whistle-blower” in the arrest by New Jersey FBI agents of a Brooklyn organs trafficker, an orthodox rabbi, Isaac Rosenbaum,1,2 whose unorthodox business activities I had uncovered several years earlier while investigating an international network of outlaw transplant surgeons, their brokers, lawyers, kidney hunters, insurance and travel agents, safe house operators, and “baby sitters” to mind sick and anxious international “transplant tourists.” The particular criminal network, in which Rosenbaum played a bit part, originated in Israel through a “company” run by a well-known crime boss Ilan Peri, who had over the years established shady transplant deals and kidney transplant outlets and connections in Turkey, Moldova, the Ukraine, Brazil, Germany, South Africa, the Philippines, China, Kosovo, Azerbaijan, Columbia, and the United States.3
The arrests, amidst gunfire in the operating rooms, of two of Ilan Peri’s transplant associates – Dr. Zaki Shapira, formerly of Rabin Medical Center, Petach Tikva, Israel, and his Turkish associate Dr. Yusuf Sonmez – in a private hospital in Istanbul in 20074 gave pause to the Israeli Ministry of Health which, until then, had permitted Israeli sick funds (medical insurance) to reimburse living donors overseas with transplants, many of them trafficked from the former Soviet Union countries. The kidney sellers captured in the Turkish shootout, however, were two Palestinians, Omar Abu Gaber, age 42, and Zaheda Mahammid, age 26. The organ recipients were an Israeli man of 68, Zeev Vigdor, and a younger South African man, John Richard Halford, who were filmed on Turkish TV being carried out of the operating room on stretchers and taken to another hospital before being returned home, without the transplants they had so desired.
After his release from a German prison in 2007, Peri returned to Israel, where he was investigated for tax fraud,5 detained, but released because Israel’s organ-transplant laws were murky with respect to the legality of “brokering” overseas transplants using paid donors. In 2008, two new laws were passed by the Israeli Parliament (Knesset): one that paved the way for applying brain death criteria that would satisfy the ultraorthodox, and the other that outlaws buying, selling and brokering organs for transplant.6 The Ministry of Health no longer reimburses overseas transplants unless they are legal. Peri continues to organize transplant tours, but today, he claims, using only deceased donor organs and legal pathways.
In its heyday (1997-2007), the Israeli transplant tourism/organ-trafficking network was an ingenious and extremely lucrative multimillion-dollar program that supplied a few thousand Israeli patients and diasporic Jews worldwide with the “fresh” organs and transplants they needed. With Rosenbaum’s arrest, the U.S. media were suddenly interested in the Israeli-based transplant-trafficking scheme, now that there was a proven link to hospitals in New York City.
The NYC Commissioner of Health and the FBI, whom I alerted years earlier about the Rosenbaum transplant gang, had dismissed the information as lacking credibility. How could patients and kidney sellers from two different countries be smuggled into hospitals for illegal transplants? How would they get through the red tape required for any transplant operation? It sounded like an old wives’ tale, an urban legend, or a blood libel against Jewish surgeons and their patients. And that was the worst suspicion of all.
Although the criminal justice system refused to believe the story I gave them, transplant surgeons working in hospitals in the U.S. who had been approached by Ilan Peri and his associates, including Isaac Rosenbaum, knew it to be true and knew that some of their colleagues were complicit in transplant crimes that ranged from violating the National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) in the buying and selling organs, to fraud, deception, money laundering, taking bribes, participating in organized crime and human trafficking. The Rosenbaum case, still in preparation, will be the first U.S. federal prosecution of crimes related to organs trafficking.7
The Aftonbladet Story Breaks
Then, in August 2009, another organ-trafficking story broke, one that linked Rosenbaum’s U.S.-Israel organ-brokering and money-laundering schemes with much older allegations of organ-and-tissue stealing from the bodies of Palestinian “terrorists” and stone throwers’ following autopsy at Israel’s National Forensic Institute in Abu Kabir, a neighborhood of Tel Aviv. These allegations, dating back to the early 1990s, were recycled by a Swedish journalist Donald Boström in a left-leaning Swedish tabloid, Aftonbladet, on August 17, 2009.8
Headlined “Our Sons Plundered for Their Organs,” Boström’s feature story was a mix of organ-theft accusations, seemingly coincidental connections, and political rhetoric. The information was based on Boström’s research in Israel and the Occupied Territories during the first Intifada, and his award-winning book, Inshallah,9 published in 2001, where Bostrom first introduced the allegations of body tampering and organ-and-tissue theft from Palestinian dead brought for autopsy to the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute. Boström’s article suggested that Palestinian bodies were being harvested as the “spoils of war.”
The Aftonbladet story, instantly translated into Hebrew and English, created a firestorm of protest that included a libel lawsuit by anti-defamation lawyers in New York City and a boycott of Swedish industries. Boström was labeled an anti-Semite, and the story he “dredged up from the sewer” was labeled a despicable “blood libel” against Israel and the world’s Jews.
I read these news reports with mounting dread. Like Boström, I was once greeted during a research visit to Israel in 2003 with an ugly headline and centerfold ( “New Blood Libel on French TV – Israel Steals Kidneys of Orphan Children in Moldova”) in Makor Rishon, a right-wing tabloid.10 The feature story reviewed an hour-long TV documentary by French filmmaker Catherine Bentellier, Kidneys Worth their Weight in Gold. I had traveled with the filmmaker to Moldova in 2001, where we interviewed people in villages that had been ravaged by organs traffickers targeting young men and trafficking them to Turkey, the Ukraine and Georgia as paid, sometimes coerced, kidney providers to Israeli transplant patients. The “blood libel” accusation featured medieval woodcuts and a blurry photo of me patting the hand of a Moldovan orphan in his crib.
With respect to the Swedish “blood libel” against the National Forensic Institute at Abu Kabir, the main issue that wasn’t raised in the avalanche of articles, editorials, and news columns published in Israel, Europe and the United States was one simple question, “Was the organ theft story true?” And were there any grounds for linking the tissue theft from the dead to the organization of illicit transplant tours for Israeli patients? Were there any grounds for linking the one story with another?
Introducing Dr Yehuda Hiss
I knew the answer. In July 2000, while studying the growth of organized transplant tours run by underworld brokers in Israel, I conducted a formal, audiotaped interview with the director of Israel’s National Forensic Institute, Dr. Yehuda Hiss, at Abu Kabir, in which he openly and freely discussed the “informal” procurement of organs and tissues from the bodies of the dead brought to the Institute for examination and autopsy. Hiss described a kind of “presumed” consent, one invented by him and shared with no one except, by example, with his medical students and residents and interns. He pursued a quiet policy of aggressive tissue, bone, skin, and organ harvesting, purportedly for the greater good of his country, a country at war, and for the good of his countryman. Professor Hiss, viewed by many Israelis and by the New York Times as a hero because of his service to the nation in handling bodies killed by terrorists and suicide bombers, deemed his behavior as patriotic. He was, in his own mind, not so much “above the law,” as representing the law, a much higher law, his law, supremely cool, rational, and scientifically and technically correct. The country was at war, blood was being spilled everyday, soldiers were being burned, and yet Israelis refused to provide tissues and organs needed. So, he would take matters into his own hands.
The taped interview was a smoking gun, but I feared the unintended consequences of making it public. The tape sat, more or less untouched, in my archives for ten years. But now it was necessary to set the record straight. But before I did so, I wanted to give professor Hiss a chance to explain, or even to correct, the things he had admitted to in the 2000 interview. Prior to leaving for a research trip in September-October 2009, accompanied by Dan Rather and his team for a news report on the criminal networks built around organ trafficking in Turkey, Moldova, and Israel, I contacted Yehuda Hiss in Israel (through one of my several Israeli research assistants) requesting a follow-up interview.
The Ministry of Health thwarted his initial acceptance. A private interview in his home was proposed, but Hiss (and his lawyers) wanted to review beforehand any questions I wished to raise. Then the Ministry of Health denied Hiss permission to speak with me at all, under any circumstances. While being interviewed about the effects of the changes in transplant laws and practices, several medical and transplant colleagues in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem often interjected disparaging references to the “despicable blood libel by the Swedish media,” even though they knew full well – and knew that I knew – that tucked inside Boström’s tabloid story was a real medical and political scandal of international proportions. I understood their nervousness about the topic, but not their denial of a known fact that was being manipulated into a global political tool of the Israeli government.
Just before returning to the United States, I met with Meira Weiss, a distinguished anthropologist and former professor at Hebrew University, and Chen Kugel, M.D., a forensic pathologist who had worked side by side with his mentor, Yehuda Hiss, at the Institute. Both Weiss and Dr. Kugel urged me to write a rebuttal to those in Israel who were “crying wolf” and using blood libel accusations to bludgeon their critics into submission. Weiss reminded me of the taped interview, done in 2000, with Dr. Hiss, as she herself had arranged the interview and was present during it, and she was as stunned as I was at the boldness and arrogance of Hiss’ revelations. Chen Kugel, a military officer (reserve) and former forensic pathologist at the Institute, agreed that the truth should be told to the global community, though perhaps not by them. Both had suffered enough. Both had been forced out of their jobs.
My interview with Yehuda Hiss at the Institute had come about in the following circumstances. In July 2000, three years into the Organs Watch project, I was given a file and a photo by an Israeli human rights lawyer, Lynda Brayer, at her organization’s headquarters in Bethlehem. The Society of St. Yves was created to provide legal assistance to Palestinian families, whose relatives had suffered the demolition of their homes, forced removals, and other abuses. The organization was then representing the family of Abdel Karim Abdel Musalmeh, who was shot in the head on November 8, 1995, by IDF snipers. The single bullet that killed Abdel is clearly indicated in the photo, which was part of the autopsy record. A military order for the demolition of Musalmeh’s home in Beit Awa, a village outside of Hebron, preceded his murder by the IDF as a “wanted person on the run.” The lawyers were arguing a case to allow the home to stand, so that Abdel’s widow and their six children would not be homeless. If murder and dispossession were not enough, Musalmeh’s body was returned to his wife in tatters. The autopsy report attributed death by rifle shot to brain. Why, then, was the body subjected to a total dissection and the removal of cornea and skin? I agreed to look into it.
When I first shared this information and the graphic photo with Meira Weiss, she reassured me at that time that there was no organ or tissue harvesting at the Institute. She had witnessed hundreds of autopsies – of Israelis, Arabs, Arab-Israelis, Russian immigrants, foreigners, and Palestinians. While bodies were opened and organs examined, they were returned to the body, except for small tissue samples as needed for forensic examination in the laboratories above the morgue. There were practices Weiss had observed that were not in compliance with international codes of ethics and internal law, the 1975 Helsinki Accords on the use of human subjects.11 There were acts of deviance by certain staff members. Tattoos, for example, were sometimes removed with a knife from the bodies of new immigrants to Israel, mostly Russian and Ukrainian, always suspect of nor being Jewish enough. Tattoos gave them away, and so they were treated with hostility. Penises might be circumcised, postmortem, without the knowledge or consent of relatives. The bodies of Jews and Muslims were treated differently. When Palestinians were brought in, following conflict, they were subjected to a complete autopsy, as required to produce information for the Palestinian Authority. On the other hand, the bodies of Israeli soldiers were respected, and autopsies were often discreet and partial.
Allegations About the Forensic Institute
The National Institute of Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir, a Tel Aviv suburb, is Israel’s national depository of dead bodies requiring identification, examination, and autopsy. It serves two purposes, on the one hand, as a scientific institute affiliated with the Sackler School of Medicine (Tel Aviv University), through which it operates a state-of-the-art genetics laboratory. On the other hand, the Institute is controlled and closely supervised by the chevra kadisha – the orthodox religious organization has a virtual monopoly on all burials in Israel, except for the military. The Institute is a civil organization working under the Ministry of Health. On the other hand, it is an arm of the security police and the military.
The Institute is then both a traditional medical-legal mortuary and, off the record, Israel’s primary source of tissues, bone, and skin needed for transplantation, plastic surgery, research and medical teaching. The illicit traffic in organs, tissues, bone and the stockpiling of assorted body parts at the Institute is what anthropologists call a public secret, something that every one inside the society knows about but which is never discussed, and certainly never admitted to those outside the society. But, in fact, allegations and official investigations of organ-and-tissue trafficking at the Forensic Institute have been ongoing in Israel since 1999 up to the present day. Yehuda Hiss has been, off and on, the focus of public scrutiny. He has been sued, and he has been decorated. He has been both upbraided and rewarded, fired from his position as director of the Institute, and given a new title, senior pathologist, with a higher salary.
Allegations of Hiss’ confiscation of organs, tissues and other body parts date back to November 1999, with an investigative report in the local Tel Aviv newspaper Ha’ir, which stated that medical students under Hiss’ direction were allowed to practice on bodies sent to the Institute at Abu Kabir for autopsy, and that body parts were transferred for transplant and other medical uses without permission from the families concerned. In 2000, the newspaper Yediot Aharonot published a price list for body parts that Hiss had sold to university researchers and to medical schools. A committee of international forensic experts was appointed by the Minister of Health to investigate practices at the Institute. It took two years for the investigation to be completed, during which time, according to Hiss’ former assistant and protégé, Chen Kugel, much of the evidence was destroyed. Nonetheless, according to Kugel, Hiss still had a huge collection of body parts in his possession at Abu Kabir, when the Israeli courts ordered a search in 2002. Israel National News reported at the time, “Over the past years, heads of the Institute appear to have given thousands of organs for research without permission, while maintaining a ‘storehouse’ of organs at Abu Kabir.” Hiss was reprimanded but allowed to continue his activities, which he defended as necessary for medicine, for the defense of the Israeli state, and for the advancement of science.
In 2005, new allegations of organs trafficking at Abu Kabir surfaced, and Hiss admitted to having removed parts from 125 bodies without authorization. Following a plea bargain with the state, the attorney general decided not to press criminal charges, and Hiss was given only a reprimand, and he continues on as chief pathologist at Abu Kabir, that is, the state of Israel’s official head pathologist. Illegal harvesting of bodies was simultaneously prohibited and tolerated. Hiss was, in fact, the state’s answer to the chronic scarcity of tissues and organs. He recognized the need produced by the deep cultural reluctance of families to tamper with the bodies of the dead, which allowed him to cross a line and to do as he pleased with the bodies entrusted to him.
Interviewing Dr Hiss
When I met professor Yehuda Hiss for the first and, as it turned out, the only time, the pathologist struck me as a formidable, frightening, and brilliant man. A Polish immigrant to Israel, with striking blue eyes, short beard, wiry body, and a tense, hypervigilant and belligerent demeanor, he commands attention. The interview took place on July 21, 2000, in Hiss’ office at the Institute, in the presence of a staff member and Meira Weiss. We were all, I think, shocked by his revelations. Hiss allowed the interview to be audiotaped, but parts of our conversation were off the record, and the tape was turned off at those moments. What follows now is a transcription of the audiotape pared down, some asides deleted.
YH: My name is Yehuda Hiss. I am a forensic specialist. Here we do forensic medicine, as well as anatomical pathology. I do both. The main issue, here, as compared to other countries, is that [in Israel] we have only one [forensic] Institute for the entire country. And it is very conveniently located in the center of Israel, so that the bulk of the population is located very near to us….There are another twenty medical centers in various places, each with its own department of pathology. But very few complete autopsies are performed in Israel.
I began my training in anatomical pathology in 1974, in Sheba (Tel Hashomer). We had only three residents, and we would perform about 850 complete autopsies [each year]. Today, there are 6-8 residents, and the hospital that trains residents in anatomical pathology is three times as big, but residents today perform only 40-50 mostly incomplete autopsies [per year]. So, this is representative of what is going on in the state of Israel. We did 800 per year 25 years ago with fewer residents, and only 40-50 per year today with many more resources. The only place where complete autopsies are conducted in Israel happens to be here.
Now, about the question of harvesting organs – it’s strange. Not only here, in Israel, but elsewhere it all depends on the personal approach of those in charge of pathology or organs harvesting. In my case, when I was a resident in Tel Hashomer – a hospital linked to the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) – we would collaborate with the army and we would provide the army with grafted (harvested) skin for burn victims, and, from time to time, they would ask us for cornea. So, I would be involved in it because I was in charge, with two others, and we would provide this.
NS-H: Why cornea to the military?
YH: For injuries perhaps. Maybe it was easier [for the military] to make this request of us, and, once we had gotten permissions to perform – and the family agreed – to the autopsy, we would take some skin and take the cornea. For autopsy, we always had to ask permission of the family, unless it was a court order [a criminal case].
NS-H: There is some resistance here, in Israel, to autopsy – both Jewish and Arab – right?
YH: Yes. We did everything off the record, highly informal. We never asked for the families’ permission.
Then we started harvesting cornea for several Israeli hospitals, initially for Tel Hashomer, because I had friends there who knew me well. I suggested this to them at various meetings. I was amazed because no one had ever come to us to ask. Why are you not coming over to us? I told them how it worked at Case Western Reserve Hospital [in Cleveland]. So, then they started to come from hospitals in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv. Everything was done on a friendly basis between us and our colleagues in various departments. I felt strongly that these corneas should go to public patients and not to private clinics. We were not paid for harvesting, but we weregiven some donations, equipment that we needed.
Whatever was done here was off the record, highly informal. We never asked permission of the family. But we would harvest only from bodies that the family agreed to allow an autopsy. So, we would never harvest where there were objections to the autopsy.
NS-H: The law allows this?
YH: The law demands permissions for autopsy, but not for harvesting. I read this in the law books….There was an addendum to the law in 1981, that you should ask the permission of the family – for autopsy…. We were free to take skin from the back of legs. We took cornea. We would not take cornea from those bodies where we suspected that the families might want to open the eyelids. There are some Orthodox and some Oriental [Arab] families who open the eyelids and throw sand on top of them. We knew whom to avoid. Also we only removed the cornea, not as we did in Teleshemer [hospital], the whole eyeball. And we would close and glue the eyelids, and we would cover any place where we had removed something. And, similarly, we would take [skin] only from the back of the legs. In the beginning of the 1990s, we began to take some long bones from the legs. Then we were asked for cardiac valves, and we did a few of them, because of the lack of collaboration between us and major thoracic departments. Then, beginning in 1995, we started to do it more formally. It was done according to a certain list of priorities, established by various medical centers and specific departments. It was done as a kind of semi-legal thing. At that point, we would inform the Ministry of Health. Before that time [1995], it was only between me/the Institute and the various departments and medical centers – informally. Later, we decided that it should be done through the Ministry of Health.
NS-H: Your chief is the Minister of Health, but you were free to do quite a lot without any interference from them?
YH: Yes, correct, but there are things that really should be done with some instruction and through the Ministry of Health. It was unclear for many years.
NS-H: In some countries of Latin America, the IMF [Forensic Institutes] is under the jurisdiction of the police, but in others, like Cuba, it is under the Ministry of Health. In the old South Africa, it was under the military police – and here?
YH: Independence is very important. This institution was established in 1954 under the auspices of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Then, in the early 1970s, it came under the police department. Then, in 1975 or ’76, it came under the Ministry of Health. We are now part of the Ministry of Health, and the director-general of the ministry is our boss, but we are actually completely independent. Until a few years ago, all medical centers were under the Ministry of Health, but in the late 1990s they have become independent. There are only a few still directly under the Ministry of Health. Since then, they are more interested in what we are doing here and in our capacities [to harvest tissues], and so we now get more demands and we feel that it should be regulated. We want to be on record, too, for the various costs that are involved in the harvesting of skin and cornea, bones, pulmonary values and so forth… . But until then, this was just between us and the various hospitals that we serviced, but we wanted there to be some control over this.
NS-H: How were the prices set?
YH: In 1996, we made up a list of the various medical services that we provided, a list of hundreds or thousands of shekels – there were expenses that we wanted to recoup. We would collaborate only with public hospitals. On one occasion, about ten years ago, there was a case of a head of a department who used one or two corneas donated to the hospital from a pathology Institute – and he used them for his private patients. This is the only case known to me – where tissue donated for general use was used privately. Since 1998, because of popular pressure, there was a sharp decline in autopsies, and we were made to ask permission of all families for autopsy and for harvesting, or for dissection, or for training of military medical students. It was all because a man went to the newspapers just recently to scream that his son, who died in military service, was used for medical experimentation and medical training. And a furor resulted in the country and permissions for autopsies declined. Since then – about two years ago [1998] – we were told to ask permission for everything. [This is a reference to the late Sergeant Zeev Buzaglo of the Golani Brigade, who was killed in a training accident in April 1997. When his father, Dr. Haim Buzaglo, a pediatrician, came to see his son’s body, he saw that it had been harmed at the Institute – NS-H].
NS-H: Why [is] the military [involved in this]?
YH: There is a special relationship between the Institute and the army because of the current political situation in Israel. All Israelis feel that we all have an obligation to help out in some way, and because we all served in the army, we all have a personal stake in the army ever after. We are all linked to the army. And because of this, we took it for granted. We never asked. We thought it was part of the duty of all Israelis to cooperate.
YH [pointing out data from his files]: Look, here is the data. Since January–April we received here 705 bodies. Of these, 500 were not suitable for harvesting. Either the bodies were too decomposed, or because of infections. Only 175 were adequate for harvesting. We called all of them, and 98 refused. Twelve we could not locate the next of kin. Only 65 out of them agreed. So, I would say we have an acceptance rate of less than one-third.
When we cannot find the next of kin, we do not harvest by law. Originally, the law required only that we inform the family that harvesting is going to take place. Now, we not only inform, we have to ask them for permission. So, because of this one bad incident, the backlash is overriding the Parliament and the law of the land.
[Here NS-H explains how in some states in the U.S. there is “presumed” consent for cornea harvesting, as in California, but most people were totally unaware that it was going on. The law was more or less kept a secret.]
YH: Yes, this was our policy for many years, and then one case, one bad scandal, and it is all over for us. Now, young military medical personnel no longer can get the training they need and, when they are sent to Lebanon or to the Palestinian territories – and there are injuries, they have to intervene without proper training, so that they are actually experimenting on living soldiers. That is what all this has brought us. No previous experience, no training whatsoever with the human body. They have to practice [surgery] on dogs – but never on humans! This is an absurdity! I would not want anyone to perform a tracheotomy or colostomy on me without any previous experience or training. Would you? Today, they do virtual training on computerized bodies and so on, but it’s not the same thing.
NS-H: So, no biotech firms that want your material?
YH: In Israel, 100 per cent of the skin harvested goes to Hadassah Hospital’s skin bank – it is for military purposes only – no biotech firms have access. There is another skin bank in the south of the country, to which the Institute is not linked – but I know that if something happens – if one of the burn centers need skin for a private patient, say, they can take skin from the Hadassah skin bank, but they have to repay it. Logistically, we are only linked to Hadassah.
Since six months ago, we have a new man working with us downstairs, who is a kind of mortuary assistant, and he is harvesting skin, bones, cornea, and bones. Before him, there was only an arrangement with the army – they used to send us here every week a plastic surgeon, who would come here to harvest skin for the skin bank in Hadassah. This lasted for many years. More than 12 or 13 years he did this. Since 1987-1988, every other week, a plastic surgeon would come here to harvest skin. But now we no longer have this direct relationship with the army since this latest scandal. Now, we have our own mortuary assistant, who is paid to harvest for us all the skin, bone, cornea, etc., that is needed. He helps out in other activities as well.
NS-H: When you ask permission, do some say you can take this and not that organ?
YH: Some say do not touch the heart or the brain – some are afraid you might want to take the skin. But it is not like you are skinning a rabbit or something, and we say, no, it is not like that – it is gentle, there is no blood – we are not peeling the skin off. It is not like scalping a person. We take only a superficial layer off – from the back and the legs. And we tell them, too, that we are only taking the thin tissue [from the eye] and not the globe.
In order to fulfill both Jewish and Muslim laws about the disposal of the dead, everything is done immediately. We start working here at about 6 in the morning. By 7 a.m., we have the whole list of all the bodies that are going to be coming in that day. Only some of these are going to be autopsied. And then this person here draws up a list about what will be done to whom. And then we are on the phone.
NS-H: Are there special techniques for how to present this request to people?
Staff member: We have to know how to read people.
YH: – Yes, but this is not for me. From the very beginning, I said, “Please free me from this! I cannot possibly talk to people about these things.” I am not patient like this.
Staff member: He loves the dead. But not the living! [Laughter]
YH: Yes, I switched to forensics from clinical medicine because I wanted the patients to shut up already! So, we say that X will do it – but she is too busy – and, really, we need a social worker to do this …
NS-H: Any other body parts taken – like pituitary glands?
YH: When I was a medical resident, we would take pituitary glands. Today, we have chemical substitutes, but when I was a resident, I used to rush to the refrigerator to deposit pituitary glands in a bottle with water. I would collect them – sure, of course! Also, tiny bones from inside the ear – these are very good for some surgical procedures. We would do this about twice a year.
NS-H: Some of these small bones were used for training NASA astronauts for space travel, and its effects on balance? And what about transnational sales?
YH: You can buy cornea from Russia for $300 each, I think…. In Moscow, you can get a kidney for $20,000 and cornea for a few dollars, because they really don’t care… At every autopsy, they take what they want, and they have a tremendous stockpile of organs that they can draw on. They have skin and cornea. In some large medical centers in Russia, you can get fresh kidney that they get from auto accidents – and in Turkey as well. So, in both places you can get transplanted organs for just $20,000 – including the kidney – because they have a stockpile of them. I know because I was part of a transplant procurement organization, and we studied this. It is very cheap. It is well done by very good surgeons there. In fact, there is a surplus of kidneys in Russia. They have surplus because fewer people there can afford transplants.
NS-H: There is some doubt about whether Russia was using the international standards for determining brain death.
YH: Yes, sometimes our surgeons would accompany our Israeli patients to Russia, and they would perform the surgery there and the kidney was from a Russian. The surgery would be performed by Israeli doctors in Russia, with Russian kidneys. Some are leading transplant surgeons from Israel…
NS-H: Yes, transplant tourism, some of this has been reported in the newspapers.
YH: Right. They would go once a month for a few days and would perform five or six surgeries there, and the patient would come back here to recuperate.
NS-H: The UCSF medical ethics board decided that if people who want to break the law and travel to China or the Philippines to be transplanted, then we will not provide you with follow-up care – you can go to a private institution.
YH: Many things in Israel are done on a personal basis and through connections… I think that in Israel everything should be as equitable as possible. One should not have to depend on connections or money. If advertising and the media would only persuade the Israeli population to donate organs from deceased victims from trauma… [ and even though there is nothing in Talmudic law against organ harvesting from the dead], a religious family will find a rabbi who will agree with them. I try to tell them how important it is to donate, and they will say, “I need to discuss this with my rabbi” – and nine times out of ten they come back with a negative answer. That is, the answer that they want….
Dr Chen Kugel, Whistleblower
As can be seen from the transcript, Hiss readily admitted to the non-consensual, informal tissue, skin, bone and organ harvesting to serve the needs of the country. Until he arrived in 1987 as chief pathologist at the Forensic Institute, there was no organ or tissue harvesting. He explained to his staff that this practice was common elsewhere in the world, in the U.S., at Case Western Reserve, where he had studied, and in other forensic Institutes he had visited. It was a “presumed consent” without the backing of the population, or the law. Although it was in violation of tissue and organs laws, Hiss thought it could be justified for a war-torn and traumatized country like Israel. Hiss admitted that the organs-and-tissue harvesting was “informal” and its legality unclear. From his perspective as a state pathologist, little harm was done by the careful removal of some organs that would never be missed by the deceased and about which the family would never have to know. Medical students in military training were brought into the morgue after Hiss and his team completed their legally mandated autopsies, to be trained in the removal of organs.
After my tape was released in Israel, on December 19, 2009, to Israeli TV’s Channel 2, government officials for the army and the Ministry of Health admitted that organs and tissues were harvested from the dead bodies of both Palestinians and Israelis throughout the 1990s, but that the practice ended in 2000. Dr. Hiss, however, publicly denied everything on tape – including his words to me. Today, he says that he denies it all – the stockpiling of body parts, the perjury, and the organ harvesting. He denies everything. He says that everything was all done in agreement with and by law, and that families consented to harvest for transplantation. No organs were taken for studies, he said, none at all.
In May 2010, Dr. Chen Kugel and Meira Weiss spoke at a special conference I organized at the University of California, before a working group of experts, including anthropologists, transplant surgeons, pathologists, detectives, prosecutors, and human rights activists.
Chen Kugel, the unheralded and original (unnamed outside of Israel) whistle-blower on the Forensic Institute, said that the situation was much worse than what Yehuda Hiss admitted in his interview with me in 2000. Kugel’s comments stand as a first-person account from a military officer and a forensic pathologist. When he returned to Israel to work at the Forensic Institute in 2000, after several years in the United States, where he was working in various hospitals and forensic programs, he says he immediately realized that something was terribly wrong. He tried to address the problems with three medical residents, and with them together to have a meeting with the director. Kugel was the spokesperson, and he told Hiss that it was wrong to harvest organs and tissues without permission, and that “giving false evidence in court is also not okay.” This went nowhere, and so the group wrote a letter of complaint to the Ministry of Health, outlining the illegalities. The Ministry of Health reacted with alacrity: they fired the three residents and punished Kugel, who, as a military officer working for the IDF, could not be fired. Then they went to the media and spilled the entire story about what exactly was going on.
Kugel: “Organs were sold to anyone”
In fact, according to Kugel, “Organs were sold to anyone; anyone that wanted organs just had to pay for them.” While skin, heart valves, bones, and corneas were removed and used for transplants, solid organs – hearts, brains, livers – “were sold for research, for presentations, for drills for medical students and surgeons.”
There was a price for these organs, low – $ 300 for a femur, for example – and should a client want all the organs from a body, that could be arranged, not the body itself, but all the organs removed and sold, Kugel said, for about $2,500.
Amid the uproar prompted by the whistle-blowers, Hiss waged his own media campaign and tried to convince the public that everything that was done was to serve a noble end, to help the war-wounded victims of terrorist attacks, and the sick. He presented his conduct, in Dr. Kugel’s descripton, “as something sublime or even heroic, as a modern-day Robin Hood. Taking from the dead and giving to the innocent victims.”
So, whom were the organs taken from? Kugel asked rhetorically. The answer was they were taken from everyone, from Jews and Muslims, from soldiers and from stone throwers, from terrorists and from the victims of terrorist suicide bombers, from tourists and from immigrants. There were only two considerations – the physical condition of the body and its organs, and the ability to conceal what they were doing.
Most of the victims of illegal organ harvesting, according to Kugel, were not even subject to autopsy, they were simply harvested. They hid the damage by putting pipes and glass eyes, and broom sticks, and toilet paper and plastic skull caps to cover the place where the brain was removed, and so on. The Institute, Kugel said, was counting on one thing: that most Israelis do not view the body after death except once, to verify that the body is the right one. The body is wrapped in a winding sheet, or might be wrapped in plastic sheets for the burial company to come for it. In that case, the staff would warn the burial employees, who were not well educated, not to open the sheet because the body was contaminated with an infectious disease. It was more difficult to take organs from soldiers because their bodies were supervised by the military, which was more difficult to fool. “But organs were taken from soldiers,” Kugel said. It was easier to take tissues and organs from the new immigrants, and, needless to say, easiest of all to take from the Palestinians. They would be going back across the border, and, “if there were any complaints coming from their families, they were the enemy and so, of course, they were lying and no one would believe them”.
What Kugel found most amazing was the uproar around the Boström article, when there was abundant detail in the Israeli press about the Institute whose affairs were discussed heatedly by commissions, finding blatant evidence of illegalities despite the attempts to destroy all the evidence. After these things were exposed, it took two years for the judge, or the head of the special inquest, to decide whether or not Hiss should be sued. Then, it took the police two years to begin a serious investigation. The end result was that Hiss was removed as director of the Institute but, as previously noted, retained as senior pathologist and given a salary increase. Kugel was dismissed from his post because, during the investigation, he spoke with one of the witnesses who had buried evidence – human body parts – and thus was seen as interfering with the trial. He was censored and blacklisted from teaching at all but one of Israel’s universities. To Dr. Kugel the prime issue had nothing at all to do with science: it was about disrespect, about hoarding body specimens, about turning the Institute into a factory of bodies. The Institute’s conduct was motivated by money, by power, and by authoritarian paternalism of the sort that says, “We know what’s good for you, we’ll decide what happens to you, the person who doesn’t know anything. We’ll decide.” And that’s the reason why that happened, and Dr. Kugel asserts it is happening to this day.
Questions About Rachel Corrie’s Autopsy
On March 14, 2010, the Haifa District Court heard testimony in the civil law suit filed by the family of the slain U.S. citizen and Gaza peace activist, Rachel Corrie, against the State of Israel for her unlawful killing in Rafah, Gaza. Corrie, an American college student and human rights activist, was crushed to death on March 16, 2003, by a Caterpillar D9R bulldozer. During the hearing, Dr. Hiss, who conducted the autopsy of Rachel Corrie at the request of the Israeli military, admitted that he had violated an Israeli court order that required an official from the U.S. Embassy to be present as a witness. Hiss stated that it was his policy not to allow anyone who is not a physician or a biologist to observe autopsy. Hiss admitted that he had retained samples of tissues and organs from Corrie’s body for examination and testing without informing the Corrie family. Hiss was uncertain about whether the samples had been buried with other body samples from the Institute. Corrie’s parents, Cindy and Craig, were shocked by these chilling admissions and really do not know quite what to make of them or what, if anything, they should do about it. They are seeking, they told me, only the truth and symbolic damages of $1.00. The prevention of harm to others is, they say, far more important than money.
Finally, what links the story of Yehuda Hiss at the National Forensic Institute and Isaac Rosenbaum and the international network of organs traffickers in Israel? Perhaps only the same sad fact that hysteria about organs scarcities – whatever that chilling phrase evokes – have driven both the medical abuses of the dead and the medical abuses of those who were trafficked to service transplant tourists from Israel to New York City, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, among other sites. When Dr. Zaki Shapira began putting out feelers for kidney sellers in the early 1990s to serve the needs of his transplant patients at Bellinson Hospital in Tel Aviv, he found them close at hand, Palestinian guest workers. Palestinians were, he told me in Bellagio in 1996 at a conference on organ trafficking, “pre-disposed” to sacrifice their organs. Or, perhaps, to be sacrificed. It works both ways. CP
Nancy Scheper-Hughes is the author of several books on poverty and health, including Death without Weeping: the Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil – listed by CounterPunch in its top 100 non-fiction books published in English in the 20th Century. She can be reached at:
nsh@berkeley.edu
link: http://www.intifada-palestine.com/2010/10/tissue-skin-bone-and-organ-harvesting-at-israels-national-forensic-institute/.
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