Global Research, January 17, 2010
Executive Order Seeks to "Synchronize and Integrate"
In the wake of the Flight 253 provocation, over-hyped terrorism panics, and last year's Big Pharma and media-engineered hysteria over the H1N1 flu pandemic, President Barack Obama signed Executive Order 13528 on January 11.
Among other things, the Executive Order (EO) established a Council of Governors, an "advisory panel" chosen by the President that will rubber-stamp long-sought-after Pentagon contingency plans to seize control of state National Guard forces in the event of a "national emergency."
According to the White House press release, the ten member, bipartisan Council was created "to strengthen further the partnership between the Federal Government and State Governments to protect our Nation against all types of hazards."
"When appointed" the announcement continues, "the Council will be reviewing such matters as involving the National Guard of the various States; homeland defense; civil support; synchronization and integration of State and Federal military activities in the United States; and other matters of mutual interest pertaining to National Guard, homeland defense, and civil support activities."
Clearly designed to weaken the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 which bars the use of the military for civilian law enforcement, EO 13528 is the latest in a series of maneuvers by previous administrations to wrest control of armed forces historically under the democratic control of elected state officials, and a modicum of public accountability.
One consequence of moves to "synchronize and integrate" state National Guard units with those of the Armed Forces would be to place them under the effective control of United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), created in 2002 by Bushist legislators in both capitalist parties under the pretext of imperialism's endless "War on Terror." At the time, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called USNORTHCOM's launch "the most sweeping set of changes since the unified command system was set up in 1946."
The real-world consequences of those changes weren't long in coming.
Following their criminal inaction during 2005's Hurricane Katrina catastrophe, the Bush regime sought, but failed, to seize control of depleted Gulf Coast National Guard units, the bulk of which had been sent to Iraq along with equipment that might have aided the recovery. Bush demanded that then Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco sign over control of the Guard as well as state and local police units as the blood price for federal assistance.
At the height of the crisis, Bush cited presidential prerogatives for doing so under the Insurrection Act, a repressive statute which authorizes the President to federalize National Guard units when state governments fail to "suppress rebellion." How the plight of citizens engulfed by Katrina's flood waters could be twisted into an act of "rebellion" was achieved when Orwellian spin doctors, aided and abetted by a compliant media, invented a new criminal category to cover traumatized New Orleans residents: "Drowning while Black."
Fast forward five years. Given the serious implications such proposals would have for a functioning democracy, the media's deafening silence on Obama's Executive Order is hardly surprising. Like their role as cheerleaders in the escalating wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, media self-censorship tell us much about the state of affairs in "new normal" America.
Like his predecessors in the Oval Office, stretching back to the 1960s with Pentagon "civil disturbance" plans such as Cable Splicer and Garden Plot, both of which are continuously updated, our "change" President will forge ahead and invest the permanent National Security bureaucracy with unprecedented power.
Under color of the 2008 National Defense Authorization Act, an unsavory piece of Bushist legislative detritus, "The President shall establish a bipartisan Council of Governors to advise the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and the White House Homeland Security Council on matters related to the National Guard and civil support missions."
The toothless Council, whose Executive Director will be designated by the Secretary of Defense no less, "shall meet at the call of the Secretary of Defense or the Co-Chairs of the Council."
Will such a Council have veto power over administration deliberations? Hardly. They are relegated "to exchange views, information, or advice with the Secretary of Defense; the Secretary of Homeland Security" and "the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism."
Additional entities covered by the EO with whom the Governors Council will "exchange views" include, "the Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement; the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas' Security Affairs; the Commander, United States Northern Command; the Chief, National Guard Bureau; the Commandant of the Coast Guard; and other appropriate officials of the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, and appropriate officials of other executive departments or agencies as may be designated by the Secretary of Defense or the Secretary of Homeland Security."
In other words, right from the get-go, the Council will serve as civilian cover for political decisions made by the Executive Branch and the security apparat. EO 13528 continues, "Such views, information, or advice shall concern: (a) matters involving the National Guard of the various States; (b) homeland defense; (c) civil support; (d) synchronization and integration of State and Federal military activities in the United States; and (e) other matters of mutual interest pertaining to National Guard, homeland defense, and civil support activities."
When news first broke last summer of Obama's proposal to expand the military's authority to respond to domestic disasters, it was opposed by the National Governors Association (NGA).
Congressional Quarterly reported that a letter sent on behalf of the NGA opposed creation of the Council on grounds that it "would invite confusion on critical command and control issues, complicate interagency planning, establish stove-piped response efforts, and interfere with governors' constitutional responsibilities to ensure the safety and security of their citizens," Govs. Jim Douglas, R-Vt., and Joe Manchin III, D-W.Va., wrote.
According to their August letter to Paul N. Stockton, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas' Security Affairs, Douglas and Manchin III argued that "without assigning a governor tactical control" of military forces during a natural disaster such as a flood or earthquake, or an unnatural disaster such as a terrorist attack or other mass casualty event, the "strong potential exists for confusion in mission, execution and the dilution of governors' control over situations with which they are more familiar and better capable of handling than a federal military commander."
With slim prospects of congressional authorization for the scheme, in fact the 2008 language was removed from subsequent Defense spending legislation, other means were required. Playing bureaucratic hardball with the governors, this has now been accomplished by presidential fiat, further eroding clear constitutional limits on Executive Branch power.
These maneuvers as I have previously written, have very little to do with responding to a catastrophic emergency. Indeed, EO 13528 is only the latest iteration of plans to expand the National Security State's writ and as such, have everything to do with decades-old Continuity of Government (COG) programs kept secret from Congress and the American people.
Derided by neocons, neoliberals and other corporatists as a quaint backwater for "conspiracy theorists" railing against "FEMA concentration camps," Continuity of Government, and the nexus of "civil support" programs that have proliferated like noxious weeds are no laughing matter.
Indeed, even members of Congress are considered "unauthorized parties" denied access "to information on COG plans, procedures, capabilities and facilities," according to a Pentagon document published by the whistleblowing web site Wikileaks, as are the classified annexes of National Security Presidential Directive 51 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20 (NSPD 51/HSPD 20). In a new twist on administration promises of transparency and open government, even the redacted version of these documents have been removed from the White House web site.
As Antifascist Calling previously reported (see: "Vigilant Shield 09: A Cover for Illegal Domestic Operations?"), the Congressional Research Service issued a 46-page report in 2008 that provided details on the COG-related National Exercise Program, a "civil support" operation that war games various disaster scenarios.
Among other things, the document outlines the serious domestic implications of military participation in national emergency preparedness drills. CRS researchers pointed to the Reagan-era Executive Order 12656 (EO 12656) that "directs FEMA to coordinate the planning, conduct, and evaluation of national security emergency exercises." EO 12656 defines a national security emergency as "as any occurrence, including natural disaster, military attack, technological emergency, or other emergency that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the United States."
Such programs, greatly expanded by the Bush-era Homeland Security Presidential Directive 8 (HSPD-8), also removed from the White House web site, established "a national program and a multi-year planning system to conduct homeland security preparedness-related exercises." CRS avers, "The program is to be carried out in collaboration with state and local governments and private sector entities."
The Defense Department's role during such emergencies were intended to focus "principally on domestic incident management, either for terrorism or non terrorist catastrophic events." DoD would play a "significant role" in the overall response. Such murky definitions cover a lot of ground and are ripe with a potential for abuse by unscrupulous securocrats and their corporate partners.
The primary DoD entity responsible for "civil support," a focus of Obama's EO is USNORTHCOM and its active combat component, U.S. Army North. However, as with almost everything relating to COG and current plans under EO 13528 that propose to "synchronize and integrate State and Federal military activities," USNORTHCOM's role is shrouded in secrecy.
As researcher Peter Dale Scott revealed in 2008, when Congressman Peter DeFazio, Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Christopher Carney sought access to classified COG annexes, their request was denied by the White House. Scott wrote: "DeFazio's inability to get access to the NSPD Annexes is less than reassuring. If members of the Homeland Security Committee cannot enforce their right to read secret plans of the Executive Branch, then the systems of checks and balances established by the U.S. Constitution would seem to be failing."
One hammer blow followed another. In 2008, Army Times reported, that the "3rd Infantry Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team [BCT] has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys. Now they're training for the same mission--with a twist--at home."
Analyst Michel Chossudovsky commented, "What is significant in this redeployment of a US infantry unit is the presumption that North America could, in the case of a national emergency, constitute a 'war theater' thereby justifying the deployment of combat units." According to Chossudovsky, "The new skills to be imparted consist in training 1st BCT in repressing civil unrest, a task normally assumed by civilian law enforcement."
"It is noteworthy, the World Socialist Web Site commented, "that the deployment of US combat troops 'as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters' ... coincides with the eruption of the greatest economic emergency and financial disaster since the Great Depression of the 1930s."
"Justified as a response to terrorist threats," socialist critic Bill Van Auken averred, "the real source of the growing preparations for the use of US military force within America's borders lies not in the events of September 11, 2001 or the danger that they will be repeated. Rather, the domestic mobilization of the armed forces is a response by the US ruling establishment to the growing threat to political stability."
Since USNORTHCOM's deployment of a combat brigade on U.S. soil, the capitalist crisis has deepened and intensified. With unemployment at a post-war high and the perilous economic and social conditions of the working class growing grimmer by the day, EO 13258 is a practical demonstration of ruling class consensus when it comes to undermining the democratic rights of the American people.
After all, where the defense of wealth and privileges are concerned corporate thugs and war criminals have no friends, only interests...
Global Research Articles by Tom Burghardt
Showing posts with label globalresearch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label globalresearch. Show all posts
Monday, January 18, 2010
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Vaccination: Federal Health Agencies Continue to Deceive Americans
Congressional Report on a Vaccine Mercury-Autism Link Ignored for Six Years
by Richard Gale and Dr Gary Null
I have no doubt whatever that vaccination is an unscientific abomination and should be made a criminal practice. G. Bernard Shaw
Under normal circumstances, when a public health measure is advocated or mandated, and it is accepted without question by all Federal health agencies, state and local health departments, and promoted by the mainstream media with unquestioning support from the orthodox medical community, then it is assumed that such measures at the very least meet basic scientifically proven criteria. Foremost should be public health safety and that the proven efficacy of a health program be implemented according to rigorous scientific gold standards. When this standard is ignored and denied, as is now being done by our health officials, then the wellbeing of the nation is placed at risk. Consequently, we see the concerns regarding the swine flu vaccine focusing upon supply rather than health. For our government health officials at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), vaccines have been baptized safe and, therefore, there is no reason for further debate. In fact, so certain are those in charge of the nation’s vaccination programs, even democratic discourse about vaccination controversies has been marginalized and smothered. There is no dissenting opinion published in any major industrial medical journal or magazine, nor found on any of government health websites.
When put to the test, a meticulous review of the scientific literature finds that virtually all of the Federal health agencies assumptions are held in error. Furthermore, we are shocked that the CDC, FDA and HHS, with all of their resources, refuse to take into consideration the large body of clinical evidence that contradicts their biased vaccine policies. Our review of the scientific literature is at two levels. First, there is a direct relationship between vaccination and Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). This evidence, as we shall see, was taken under oath during a three year Congressional investigation, which clearly shows that Federal health officials were complicit in covering up the associations between vaccines and neurological damage.
The second level shows irrefutable evidence, from peered reviewed journals in immunology, neurology, toxicology, etc., that the very same mercury used at high toxic levels in the flu vaccines, as well as in trace amounts in other vaccines, is toxic in all circumstances. The pronouncements by the CDC and HHS, promulgated by tabloid medical writers at the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other media outlets, are deceptions based upon medical denialism. We believe it is a crime to inject mercury into the bodies of any pregnant woman and child, while knowing that thimerosal is extremely toxic.
During a televised interview to prepare the American public for a massive campaign to inoculate the population for the H1N1 flu virus, President Obama’s HHS Secretary, Dr. Kathleen Sebelius, told the nation, “study after study, scientist after scientist, has determined that there really is no safety risk with thimerosal.”[1] Glancing at the foot-high stack of published clinical studies on the desk, years of independent research identifying certain neurological impairments, such as Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), and cellular organ damage resulting from vaccines containing the toxic ethylmercury preservative commonly known as thimerosal, it is incomprehensible to fathom the depth of scientific denial in Sebelius’ statement. Was the Secretary blatantly lying to Americans, especially parents of small children six months and older and pregnant mothers, to convince us to line up for flu shots? If we unpack Sebelius’ misleading propaganda and properly rephrase her pronouncement, we can uncover a semblance of truth in her words. Instead it would have been proper for her to inform the nation that “study after study of spurious and flawed research that would likely never pass a graduate school examination, scientist after scientist affiliated or with financial ties to the vaccine industry now dominating our academies and health agencies, have determined that there really is no safety risk with thimerosal.”
This should have been the Secretary’s response if she were honest in addressing many people’s concerns about vaccine safety. Yet, this is not just our interpretive spin about the lack of scientific integrity within the CDC’s and FDA’s pharmaceutical-friendly stance regarding the vaccine-autism controversy; rather it accurately reflects the conclusions from a three year investigation conducted by the Subcommittee on Human Rights and Wellness in the House’s Committee on Government Reform, spearheaded by Rep. Dan Burton (R-Indiana). Published in May 2003, the Committee’s 80-page report, “Mercury in Medicine: Taking Unnecessary Risks,” is a clear indictment charging the CDC, FDA and HHS with scientific bias, prejudiced financial interests with vaccine makers, and administrative incompetence and indecision that puts Americans’ health at risk.[2]
It is a sorry state of affairs when a Congressional committee is forced to undertake a more thorough, concise review of the scientific literature related to a national health crisis, i.e., thimerosal as a causative factor behind the epidemic scourge of neurological and developmental disorders in America’s children, because our Federal health agencies prefer to not upset their clients (or masters) in the pharmaceutical industrial complex. But what is even more disturbing is that after six years since the Committee’s report, nothing has fundamentally changed. Instead, the CDC, FDA and HHS continue their rogue campaigns to spread unfounded medical propaganda and have done next to nothing, aside from issuing promises and marginalizing opposing medical views, to fund and launch the independent research necessary to determine once and for all vaccine safety in young children, developing fetuses and pregnant mothers. And as we wait for medical sanity to descend upon our government agencies, more and more children are injured from the increasing number of scheduled vaccinations, while the burden of health costs continue to mount on the shoulders of parents with neurologically and physically damaged children.
Therefore reviewing some of the Committee’s major findings is warranted to bring them up to date with recent information showing the thimerosal-autism link and to provide evidence for the CDC’s, FDA’s and HHS’s ongoing medical denialism about vaccine safety and their laxity in preserving and addressing public health.
Committee Finding 1: “Mercury is hazardous to humans. Its use in medicinal products is undesirable, unnecessary and should be minimized or eliminated entirely.”
Mercury, in its two most common forms that threaten human health--methylmercury and ethylmercury (thimerosal used in vaccines)--is the second most toxic substance perhaps after uranium. It is over one hundred times more toxic than lead. Therefore ask yourself the question, would you submit your child, or even yourself, to having lead injected directly into his or her bloodstream, permitting it to pass through your child’s neurological system? If you answer in the negative, then know that the mercury in that flu shot being offered at Costco is far more toxic than the lead you just refused.
Although more research has been conducted showing methylmercury’s severe health risks, the Committee, basing its decision on sound scientific evidence, concluded that thimerosal’s toxicity is the same as methylmercury. Among the more serious adverse effects are multiple organ system disorders over the course of a lifetime, neurological and behavioral defects, renal damage, cardiovascular effects even at very low dosages, increased susceptibility to infectious diseases, autoimmune disorders and injury to the immune system, and adverse effects on the reproductive system. Contrary to Sebelius’denialism, a pregnant mother’s exposure to thimerosal due to vaccination runs the risk of mercury crossing the placenta and affecting the developing fetus. The CDC’s current stance that it makes no difference whether vaccines with thimerosal are given to pregnant mothers flies in the face of biomolecular reason and the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) own warnings. Medical evidence for methylmercury disturbing the neuro-development of an infant in utero has been conclusive for many years.[3] The EPA’s website states that for women in reproductive ages, there is the risk of 300,000 newborns each year incurring learning disabilities due to in utero exposure to mercury. Even the FDA acknowledged mercury’s toxic risks to infants back in 1994. According to a National Institutes of Health document, “For fetuses, infants and children, the primary health effects of mercury are on neurological development. Even low levels of mercury exposure, such as result from a mother’s consumption of methylmercury in dietary sources, can adversely affect the brain and nervous system. Impact on memory, attention, language and other skills have been found in children exposed to moderate levels in the womb.” Do any of these symptoms sound like ASD? And if eating a can of tuna fish poses a potential risk, how much greater are the potential neurological injuries when vaccine mercury is injected intramuscularly?
The EPA, unlike the FDA, has conducted research into mercury’s toxicity and health risks. While the EPA sets a limit exposure of mercury at 0.1 micrograms/kg, the FDA in its favoritism towards mercury’s use in vaccines raises the stakes to 0.4 micrograms. The FDA’s figure has no valid supporting scientific data and is arbitrary in order to continue sanctioning the use of in vaccines. The World Health Organization (WHO) sets the limit higher; this may account for the WHO’s aggressive campaigns to inoculate the world’s poorer populations with heavily laced-mercury and stockpiled vaccines from the drug makers. The Committee, however, found the EPA evaluation to be “scientifically validated.” Consequently, a person receiving a single flu shot, with 25 mcg/kg of thimerosal would need to weigh approximately 550 pounds for it to be considered a safe quantity. Therefore it is no surprise that the series of four thimerosal-laced flu shots, or 100 mcg/kg, can lead to long-term cumulative damage for any age group, including the later onset of dementia conditions such as Alzheimer’s.[4]
Dr. David Baskin, Professor of Neurosurgery at Baylor College of Medicine, told the Committee that brain tissue absorbs mercury five times more than other body tissues. And infants and small children are furthermore five times more sensitive to mercury’s toxicological effects compared to adults. Dr. Baskin reported on his own studies at Baylor:
“We have the opportunity to actually grow human frontal cortex cells in cell culture. So these are cells from the front part of the brain... We incubate these cells with thimerosal at various doses... [then] detect cell death and cell damage... [showing a slide] These are the cells committing the suicide program and breaking themselves into tiny little pieces with a very low dose of mercury... Don’t forget, we did this in adult brain cells. Remember that infant brain cells are much more sensitive, so there’s a real cause for concern.”
Similar studies conducted at Columbia University have confirmed the Baylor findings.
So why can’t the CDC and other government agencies reproduce these clinical studies to confirm whether or not there is a clear thimerosal-autism link? Well, the CDC, and other research agencies such as the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease (NIAID), simply don’t perform gold standard clinical science. Instead, the CDC relies upon statistical analyses and mathematical algorithms to arrive at their conclusions about vaccines’ and thimerosal’s safety. Preferring to cower in the back of Plato’s cave, concise scientific protocol and biomolecular studies in a laboratory is almost anathema to them. In addition, the kind of studies the vaccine orthodoxy hail as proof to deny a correlation between thimerosal and autism rely upon dreadful research design and ridiculously low numbers of participants. For example, a University of Rochester study comparing children injected with mercury-vaccines versus vaccines without mercury only enrolled 40 subjects; yet, this single study remains in the pro-vaccine orthodoxy’s arsenal against vaccine skeptics. If autism at the time of the study affected 1 in 150 children, then enrolling 40 children is baseless for achieving any valid data. For this reason, another finding by the Committee states:
Committee Finding 2: “To date, studies conducted or funded by the CDC that purportedly dispute any correlation between autism and vaccine injury have been of poor design, under-powered, and fatally flawed. The CDC’s rush to support and promote such research is reflective of a philosophical conflict in looking fairly at emerging theories and clinical data related to adverse reactions from vaccinations.”
The Committee also reports, “Upon thorough review of the scientific literature and internal documents from government and industry, the Committee did in fact find evidence that thimerosal posed a risk. The possible risk for harm from either low dose chronic or one time high level (bolus dose) exposure to thimerosal is not ‘theoretical,’ but very real and documented in the medical literature.”
Furthermore, the report continues,
“Of additional concern has been the CDC’s bias against theories regarding vaccine-induced autism. Rather than aggressively working to replicate clinical findings with laboratory data that showed a relationship between vaccines and autism... the CDC funded researchers who also worked for vaccine manufacturers to conduct population-based epidemiological studies to look at the possible correlation between vaccine injury and a subset of the population that might be injured. The CDC to date has relied too heavily on epidemiological findings. While epidemiological studies are important, they are not a substitute for focused, clinical research.”
And independent clinical research exists. There is lots of it from prestigious institutions such as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, the Cleveland Clinic, Massachusetts General Hospital, the University of California at Irvine, Baylor Medical School, Prof. Boyd Haley at the University of Kentucky, and the dozens of studies by Dr. Mark Geier at the Institute of Chronic Illnesses, all providing evidence for thimerosal’s adverse effects in adults and in the developing brain of a child.
Committee Finding 3: “Manufacturers of vaccines and thimerosal have never conducted adequate testing on the safety of thimerosal. The FDA has never required manufacturers to conduct adequate safety testing on thimerosal and ethylmercury compounds.”
For many decades, the FDA has known about the neurotoxic effects of thimersosal. A review of internal documents from Eli Lilly, the original inventor of ethylmercury in the 1920s, reveals that only one study has ever been performed to investigate thimerosal’s safety in humans and it was “woefully inadequate.” During the actual Committee hearings, Rep. Burton remarked, “You mean to tell me since 1929 we’ve been using thimerosal and the only test you know of is the one that was done in 1929, and every one of those people got meningitis and died?”[5]
In the 1940’s, thimerosal was used in teething powders for infants and resulted in fatal outbreaks of Pink’s Disease (severe mercury poisoning) before being removed in the 50’s. Since many children today receive vaccines with trace amounts of thimerosal, in addition to vaccines containing adjuvant aluminum compounds, an important 1972 study published in the British Medical Journal noted that mercury increases aluminum’s oxidation and produces abnormal heat. In recent years, there is growing evidence of mitochondrial oxidation and cellular damage that may be due to this interaction between mercury and aluminum in vaccines. With a child now receiving 31 and more vaccinations during its first 18 months of life, it would seem that this barbaric practice would have been fully investigated by our health officials to account for the epidemic rise in neurological and behavioral disorders, adult diabetes and asthmatic conditions in American children. Instead, our health officials continue to pump out junk science, for example the recent, seriously flawed NIAID study on H1N1 vaccine safety in pregnant women reported over the major media, to deceive Americans and enroll them in their national vaccination campaigns. The protocol in that study listed any pregnant woman who had a history of alcohol or drug abuse during a 6 year period, diabetes, compromised immune systems, asthmatic and allergic conditions, history of cancer-treatment drugs for 3 years, prescription to psychiatric drugs, and many other conditions as unqualified for the study. These conditions alone would disqualify the large majority of the nation’s pregnant women. Furthermore, any pregnant woman who enrolled in the trial, who spiked a temperature of 100 degrees or greater during the first 72 hours following vaccination, were excluded from the trial. Nevertheless, the CDC and its cronies in the media, particularly the pharmaceutical shills at The New York Times, touted this deranged trial as conclusive evidence that the swine flu vaccine was safe for all pregnant women. These are the kinds of medical distortions we have come to expect from the Federal health agencies.
The Committee’s report states,
“It appears that our Federal regulatory framework (the FDA and its predecessor organizations) failed to require manufacturers to prove thimerosal was safe. They failed to require industry to conduct adequate testing to determine how thimerosal is metabolized. The FDA failed to require that industry conduct studies to determine the maximum safe exposure level of thimerosal. These basic issues should have been proven prior to the introduction of thimerosal into the marketplace, but more than 70 years after its introduction, these issues have still not been adequately addressed... It is clear that the guiding principal for FDA policymakers has been to avoid shaking the public’s confidence in the safety of vaccines. For this reason, many FDA officials have stubbornly denied that thimerosal may cause adverse reactions... given the serious concerns about the safety of thimerosal, the FDA should have acted years earlier to remove this preservative from vaccines and other medications.”
Nevertheless, even during this so-called flu season, the Federal agencies continue to remain entranced in a stupor of scientific denial, perhaps acting in a criminally negligent manner, as thimerosal remains at highly toxic levels in the flu vaccines, and remains in trace amounts in the DTaP, some Hib, and Hepatitis B vaccines.
Although the FDA has repeatedly agreed that mercury is unsafe for over-the-counter medications, one would think that the government could arrive at the simple deduction of an elementary school pupil in agreeing that intramuscular injection of thimerosal would be far more dangerous. During the Committee’s proceedings, Dr. Bernard Schwetz, former Director of the FDA’s National Center for Toxicological Research, has stated, “... the fact that we know that ethylmercury is a skin sensitizer when its put on the skin, and now we’re injecting this IM (intramuscularly) at a time when the immune system is just developing, the functionality of the immune system is just being set at this age [infancy]... What is the effect on the functional development of the immune system when you give a chemical of that kind repeatedly IM?”
Committee Finding 4: “At the same time that the incidence of autism was growing, the number of childhood vaccines containing thimerosal was growing, increasing the amount of ethylmercury to which infants were exposed threefold... The FDA and CDC failed in their duty to be vigilant as new vaccines containing thimerosal were approved and added to the immunization schedule.”
The Commission report states, “There was tremendous reluctance on the part of some officials that a mistake had been made in allowing ethylmercury to be used in vaccines.” The FDA damns itself in a 1999 email by a former FDA official, Dr. Peter Patriarca, then Director of the FDA’s Division of Viral Products, who opines that hastening the removal of thimerosal from vaccines would “raise questions about the FDA being ‘asleep at the switch’ for decades by allowing a potentially hazardous compound to remain in many childhood vaccines, and not forcing manufacturers to exclude it from new products.”
While the Federal health agencies and the professional medical organizations serving the vaccine industrial complex, such as the American Pediatric Association, repeatedly tell us there is no causal relationship between ASD and vaccine mercury, there is a growing body of prestigious scientists, researchers and physicians who feel otherwise. Last October 2009, a Harvard survey reported in the journal Pediatrics the US’s ASD rate needs to be upgraded to 1 in 91, a greater than 30% increase from the previous 1 in 150 ratio several years back.[6] Consequently, the thimerasol-autism debate is far from over and should be pursued with aggressive due diligence and urgency. Moreover, the past history of CDC negligence and its reliance upon poorly designed and flawed science indicates there is no reason why any rational citizen should believe any statistical declaration or medical claim about vaccine safety from government health officials. These are people with severe allergic reactions to real science.
The Autism Society of America (ASA), the world’s largest autism organization and heavily funded by private industry and CDC support, continues to rely on archaic treatments not too dissimilar to BF Skinner’s behavioral work with pigeons. The ASA and the National Alliance for Autism, another advocacy organization supporting research to discredit vaccine-autism links, have been accused of conflict of interests and biased studies. In early 2009, Alison Singer, the senior executive of ASA and an advocate of the fanatical vaccine multi-millionaire and former advisor to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice, Dr. Paul Offit—who believes in a fantasy vaccine heaven where children can survive 10,000 vaccinations unscathed—resigned in protest over her organization’s recent leanings to reconsider a vaccination-autism connection. Each organization’s platform fundamentally ignores a possible vaccine-caused autism and instead favors genetic etiology that has yet to be conclusively discovered—instead, blame the parents’ DNA, not the drug makers and their government collaborators. Yet while the search for a mysterious autism gene persists, more and more children are being neurologically and developmentally damaged. Furthermore, even if such a gene is found, it would be many years before anything medically practical could be done with it.
Committee Finding 5: “A growing number of scientists and researchers believe that a relationship between the increase in neurodevelopmental disorders of autism... and the increased use of thimerosal in vaccines is plausible and deserves more scrutiny.”
In fact, the CDC in June 2000 discovered “a statistically significant positive correlation between the cumulative exposure” of thimerosal and ASD symptoms. The CDC’s analysis of approximately 110,000 records of children with adverse reactions to vaccines, flying in the face of federal health officials’ previous claims about vaccine safety, led to a secretive meeting between top government health officials and vaccine industry representatives at the Simpsonwood Retreat Center near Atlanta. The transcripts of that meeting were later obtained by Robert Kennedy Jr through a Freedom of Information Act. During the meeting, the CDC study’s chief scientist, Dr. Thomas Verstraeten, stated, “This analysis suggests that in our study population, the risks of tics, ADD, language and speech delays, and developmental delays in general may be increased by exposures to mercury from thimerosal-containing vaccines during the first six months of life.” The Congressional review of the Simpsonwood conversations concluded that “It appears that many who participated in the thimerosal debates allowed their standards to be dictated by their desire to disprove an unpleasant theory.” Indeed, this is what eventually occurred after the meeting.
The clandestine Simpsonwood gathering decided to withhold its findings from the public and, instead, proceeded with a new investigation to doctor the same data by employing confounders (subjective, unscientific criteria used to bias a study to prove a desired result). Consequently the CDC’s subsequent study released several years later denied any relationship between thimerosal and ASD. At the end of 2009, this remains the policy position and mindset of the CDC, FDA and HHS while a large body of independent research, with no conflict of interests with government or the vaccine industry, continues to mount against our policy makers reliance upon tabloid science and futile efforts to find causes unrelated to vaccines. And Dr. Thomas Verstaeten? Last heard he joined the vaccine maker GlaxoSmithKline and continued to deny the truth of the CDC’s original Simpsonwood findings.
Since then, Dr. Mark Geier at the Institutes of Chronic Illnesses, through a Freedom of Information Act, obtained all the CDC’s vaccine injury data in its database. After conducting an independent epidemiological study, based on tens of millions of vaccine doses administered in the US, he confirmed the Simpsonwood findings and significant other data to show thimerosal and the DTaP vaccine as contributing causes behind the country’s autism epidemic.[7]
Today, our tax dollars are being spent by our health agencies to sidestep the entire question of vaccine safety and efficacy, and are trying to project autism’s causes on genetic factors. This was the case in 2003, as it is now, when the Committee raised concerns over the NIH’s $27 billion budget, investing only $56 million into autism research, and the majority of that towards genetic causes. Compare that with the $2.2 billion spent on HIV/AIDS research that affects only a tiny percent of the population compared to the hundreds of thousands of children across the nation suffering autism spectrum disorder and neurological damage that they will live with for the remainder of their lives.
In 1975, the FDA undertook a five year review of mercury’s dangers in over-the-counter drugs and topical medicines and ointments. The advisory panel’s report to the FDA concluded that not only “mercury compounds as a class are of dubious value for anti-microbial use” but also “thimerosal was 35-times more toxic to the heart tissue it was meant to protect than the bacteria it was meant to kill.” So why is thimerosal still used in vaccines? Rather than manufacturing single dose vials, which would not require mercury, vaccine makers have found it more cost effective to manufacture multi-dose vials and simply add mercury as a preservative for longer shelf-life. A story in the Columbus Dispatch unveiled that Ohio’s decision to purchase larger quantities of thimerosal-laced flu vaccine rather than the alternative thimerosal-free version was purely based on a financial decision.[8]
Committee Finding 6: “The CDC’s failure to state a preference for thimerosal-free vaccines in 2000 and again 2001 was an abdication of their responsibility.”
After reviewing the CDC’s long-standing habit for promoting illness and staging a war on health, there is a case of one vaccine manufacturer offering to remove thimerosal from its vaccine but being denied permission to do so from the CDC. This incident led the Committee to state, “The CDC’s decision not to endorse thimerosal-free vaccines in 2001 is particularly troubling... Just as disappointing, and even more difficult to understand, is the fact that the CDC, on two separate occasions, refused to publicly state a preference for thimerosal-free vaccines.”
Testimony by Federal health officials before the Committee included a litany of excuses based on financial rationales for not concerning itself with the health of American children. The statements by Dr. Roger Bernier from the CDC exemplifies the dangerous level of denial and Federal officials’ refusal to accept preventative health measures, a dire negligence that continues to plague government health agencies in general, and the unproven and potentially unsafe H1N1 vaccine in particular:
“It [removing thimerosal from vaccines] could entail financial losses of inventory if current vaccine inventory is wasted. It could harm one or more manufacturers and may then decrease the number of suppliers”
“The evidence justifying this kind of abrupt policy change [immediate removal of mercury from all vaccines] does not appear to exist, and it could entail financial losses for all existing stocks of vaccines that contain thimerosal.”
The Committee’s interpretation of the CDC’s vaccine policy includes, “The financial health of the industry should never have been a factor in this decision [thimerosal removal]. The financial health of vaccine manufacturers certainly should never have been more important to the Federal health officials than the health and well being of the nation’s children. The CDC has a responsibility to protect the health of the American public. If there were any doubts about the neurological effects of ethylmercury in vaccines on children—and there were substantial doubts—the prevailing consideration should have been how best to protect children from potential harm. However, it appears that protecting the industry’s profits took precedent over protecting children from mercury damage.”
Committee Finding 7: “Thimerosal should be removed from these vaccines. No amount of mercury is appropriate in any childhood vaccine.”
Although thimerosal has been removed from most vaccines, mercury remains in trace amounts in some vaccines, as noted above, and remains at high toxic levels in the flu shots. Studies show that in the presence of aluminum compounds mercury’s toxicity increases dramatically. Vaccines that contain aluminum compounds include the DTaP, Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, pneumococcal, anthrax, and the HPV vaccine. Unfortunately, no studies have been funded by government agencies nor have the vaccine makers undertaken efforts to determine adverse neurological effects when multiple vaccines are given together, as is so often the case when small children visit their pediatricians.
A comparison of the FDA, CDC and HHS claims on thimerosal and multiple vaccination safety with documents from the Department of Defense (DoD) leaves one with the feeling that our national health service is a madhouse, a leper colony of welfare scientists and indecisive medical bureaucrats torn between their allegiance to pharmaceutical firms and the health of the nation. Medical journalist David Kirby has reported on DoD documents he received showing the military raising legitimate concerns about vaccines (thimerosal and the DTaP vaccine) as causative factors for the critical epidemic of ASD among military children.[9] In her article “Autism in the Military, “ Angela Warren calculates the military autism rate at 1 in 67, substantially higher than the recent Harvard study for the civilian population.[10] In addition to thimerosal’s dangers, the military claims its ongoing studies suggest that “a relationship between adverse events and multiple vaccinations exist.” The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology also acknowledges that “exposure to mercury in utero and children may cause mild to severe mental retardation and mild to severe motor coordination impairment.”[11]
Why would the military health officials take a completely different stand on thimerosal and vaccine safety from that of the CDC and HHS? During a recent conversation with a retired Colonel and former Command Surgeon of the US Army Special Operations Command in Africa, Dr. Frank Anders explained why the military health policies and recognition of scientific facts are more accurate and medically humane than that of our Federal health officials. According to Col. Anders, the “power and money these pharmaceutical companies wield [on the FDA and CDC] is awesome.” When he was asked whether or not there is any conformity or agreement between the Department of Defense’s health divisions and the Federal health agencies, including President Obama’s appointments, he stated there was nothing that could affect preventative and therapeutic health policy. There are far more financial incentives, including funds from Congress at the behest of pharmaceutical lobbyists, for FDA and CDC personnel to forge relationships with the drug and vaccine makers. On the other hand, since military health personnel are solely employees of the DoD removed from the vaccine industry and Big Pharma lobbyists, there is less bias and greater scientific integrity towards medical facts and sound science.[12]
Curiously, David Kirby reports that the military health clinics are adopting alternative treatments for ASD--methyl B12, chelation and glutathione--which are not actively promoted by the FDA in their preference for pharmaceutical and psychiatric drugs and behavioral modality treatment. When we asked Col. Anders why this was the case, he responded that it is simply because these alternative treatments work. For example, independent studies show convincingly that thimerosal depletes glutathione in vaccinated children with autism. Glutathione provides cells with the primary defense against heavy metal oxidation, a condition that has been observed extensively in children with ASD. Without glutathione, heavy metal oxidation inflicts severe neurological damage. Alternative treatment for autism includes glutathione replacement; however, this form of treatment is not recognized by the CDC and the orthodox autism organizations in bed with the pharmaceutical industrial complex.[13]
Committee Recommendations: There were two important recommendations made by Rep. Dan Burton’s Committee that Americans should demand from our government and Federal health agencies. First is the recommendation that “studies be conducted that pool the results of independent research that has been done thus far, and a comprehensive approach should be developed to rid humans, animals and the environment from this dangerous toxin [ethyl- and methylmercury].”
The second urgent recommendation is that Congress “enact legislation that prohibits federal funds from being used to provide products or pharmaceuticals that contain mercury, methylmercury or ethylmercury unless no reasonable alternative is available.”
Today, neither of these recommendations have been acted upon. Instead the Obama administration has continued the previous Bush act to provide sanctuary to vaccine makers from lawsuits due to vaccine injury. Our health officials have sunk themselves deeper into dangerously reductive and determinist views about infectious diseases, such as the swine flu, and have strengthened their denial that their entire vaccination program might be leading America’s health to further ruin.
It is unusual for our government and Congress to get anything correct these days and to make sincere, thoughtful decisions that truly benefit American citizens. However, there are those rare occasions when a spark of wisdom actually flares briefly somewhere in Washington. The Rep. Burton’s Committee report’s final statement is as relevant today as it was in mid 2003. Perhaps even more so as we witness the CDC’s public relations campaign threatening citizens with misleading statistics, distorted science (‘science’ being a term that can barely be applied to the kind of tabloid research that Federal officials rely upon today), and unproven fears to shepherd us towards the H1N1 and seasonal flu lines.
“Thimserosal used as a preservative in vaccines is likely related to the autism epidemic. This epidemic in all probability may have been prevented or curtailed had the FDA not been asleep at the switch regarding the lack of safety data regarding injected thimerosal and the sharp rise of infant exposure to his known neurotoxin. Our public health agencies’ failure to act is indicative of institutional malfeasance for self-protection and misplaced protectionism of the pharmaceutical industry.”
As we have witnessed during the recent CDC’s public relations campaign behind the H1N1 vaccine, and the uproar of dissent that questions the safety and national need for mass inoculation, medical discourse has been shut down. This raises the serious concern whether America’s health sciences and democracy can co-exist any longer in the United States. The words of H.H. the Dalai Lama are apropos for understanding the fish tank Federal officials and their sponsored cohorts settled into, “To deny authority of empirical evidence is to disqualify oneself as someone worthy of critical engagement in a dialogue.” Nothing has changed within the US government’s vaccine policy programs, six years after Congress indicted our health leaders with medical denialism.
Richard Gale is the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network and a former Senior Research Analyst in the genomic industry.
Dr. Gary Null is the host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on nutrition and natural health and a multi-award-winning director of progressive documentary films, including Vaccine Nation (2008) and Autism: Made in the USA (2009)
Notes
[1] Kathleen Sebelius interviewed by Katie Couric on CBS, July 30, 2009.
[2] All statements in quotations, unless noted, are from the House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Human Rights and Wellness report, “Mercury in Medicine: Taking Unnecessary Risks,” published May 2003.
[3] Magos L, Brown AW, Sparrow S, Bailey E, Snowden RT, Skipp WR. “The comparative toxicology of ethyl- and methylmercury.” Archives of Toxicology. (1985) 57: 260-267.
[4] Haley, Boyd (Professor and Chair, Department of Chemistry, University of Kentucky). “The relationship of the toxic effects of mercury to exacerbation of the medical condition classified as Alzheimer’s disease.” Presented at Autism One Conference. May 26-29, 2005.
[5] Kirby, David. Evidence of Harm. St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2005.
[6] Kogan MD, Blumberg J, Schieve LA, Boyle CA, Perrin JM, Ghandour RM, Singh GK, Strickland BB, Trevathan E, van Dyck PC. “Prevalence of Parent-Reported Diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder Among Children in the US, 2007” Pediatrics. Published online October 5, 2009.
[7] Geier M, Geier D. “Neurodevelopmental disorders after thimerosal-containing vaccines: A brief communication.” Experimental Biology and Medicine. (2003) Vol. 228, n 6, 660-664.
[8] McCoy, Roger. “Some See Threat in Ohio’s Flu Shot.” The Columbus Dispatch. February 17, 2004.
[9] Kirby, David. “The Pentagon: A Voice of Reason on Vaccines and Autism?” Wellsphere.com December 4, 2008.
[10] Warner, Angela. “Autism in the Military” Age of Autism. July 8, 2008.
[11] Kirby. Op cit.
[12] Private conversation with Col. Frank Anders, November 2009.
[13] James SJ, Slikker W, Melnyk S, New E, Jernigan S. “Thimerosal neurotoxicity is associated with glutathione depletion: protection with glutathione precursors.” Neurotoxicity. (2005) Vol. 26, 1-8.
Global Research Articles by Richard Gale
Global Research Articles by Gary Null
by Richard Gale and Dr Gary Null
I have no doubt whatever that vaccination is an unscientific abomination and should be made a criminal practice. G. Bernard Shaw
Under normal circumstances, when a public health measure is advocated or mandated, and it is accepted without question by all Federal health agencies, state and local health departments, and promoted by the mainstream media with unquestioning support from the orthodox medical community, then it is assumed that such measures at the very least meet basic scientifically proven criteria. Foremost should be public health safety and that the proven efficacy of a health program be implemented according to rigorous scientific gold standards. When this standard is ignored and denied, as is now being done by our health officials, then the wellbeing of the nation is placed at risk. Consequently, we see the concerns regarding the swine flu vaccine focusing upon supply rather than health. For our government health officials at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), vaccines have been baptized safe and, therefore, there is no reason for further debate. In fact, so certain are those in charge of the nation’s vaccination programs, even democratic discourse about vaccination controversies has been marginalized and smothered. There is no dissenting opinion published in any major industrial medical journal or magazine, nor found on any of government health websites.
When put to the test, a meticulous review of the scientific literature finds that virtually all of the Federal health agencies assumptions are held in error. Furthermore, we are shocked that the CDC, FDA and HHS, with all of their resources, refuse to take into consideration the large body of clinical evidence that contradicts their biased vaccine policies. Our review of the scientific literature is at two levels. First, there is a direct relationship between vaccination and Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). This evidence, as we shall see, was taken under oath during a three year Congressional investigation, which clearly shows that Federal health officials were complicit in covering up the associations between vaccines and neurological damage.
The second level shows irrefutable evidence, from peered reviewed journals in immunology, neurology, toxicology, etc., that the very same mercury used at high toxic levels in the flu vaccines, as well as in trace amounts in other vaccines, is toxic in all circumstances. The pronouncements by the CDC and HHS, promulgated by tabloid medical writers at the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other media outlets, are deceptions based upon medical denialism. We believe it is a crime to inject mercury into the bodies of any pregnant woman and child, while knowing that thimerosal is extremely toxic.
During a televised interview to prepare the American public for a massive campaign to inoculate the population for the H1N1 flu virus, President Obama’s HHS Secretary, Dr. Kathleen Sebelius, told the nation, “study after study, scientist after scientist, has determined that there really is no safety risk with thimerosal.”[1] Glancing at the foot-high stack of published clinical studies on the desk, years of independent research identifying certain neurological impairments, such as Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), and cellular organ damage resulting from vaccines containing the toxic ethylmercury preservative commonly known as thimerosal, it is incomprehensible to fathom the depth of scientific denial in Sebelius’ statement. Was the Secretary blatantly lying to Americans, especially parents of small children six months and older and pregnant mothers, to convince us to line up for flu shots? If we unpack Sebelius’ misleading propaganda and properly rephrase her pronouncement, we can uncover a semblance of truth in her words. Instead it would have been proper for her to inform the nation that “study after study of spurious and flawed research that would likely never pass a graduate school examination, scientist after scientist affiliated or with financial ties to the vaccine industry now dominating our academies and health agencies, have determined that there really is no safety risk with thimerosal.”
This should have been the Secretary’s response if she were honest in addressing many people’s concerns about vaccine safety. Yet, this is not just our interpretive spin about the lack of scientific integrity within the CDC’s and FDA’s pharmaceutical-friendly stance regarding the vaccine-autism controversy; rather it accurately reflects the conclusions from a three year investigation conducted by the Subcommittee on Human Rights and Wellness in the House’s Committee on Government Reform, spearheaded by Rep. Dan Burton (R-Indiana). Published in May 2003, the Committee’s 80-page report, “Mercury in Medicine: Taking Unnecessary Risks,” is a clear indictment charging the CDC, FDA and HHS with scientific bias, prejudiced financial interests with vaccine makers, and administrative incompetence and indecision that puts Americans’ health at risk.[2]
It is a sorry state of affairs when a Congressional committee is forced to undertake a more thorough, concise review of the scientific literature related to a national health crisis, i.e., thimerosal as a causative factor behind the epidemic scourge of neurological and developmental disorders in America’s children, because our Federal health agencies prefer to not upset their clients (or masters) in the pharmaceutical industrial complex. But what is even more disturbing is that after six years since the Committee’s report, nothing has fundamentally changed. Instead, the CDC, FDA and HHS continue their rogue campaigns to spread unfounded medical propaganda and have done next to nothing, aside from issuing promises and marginalizing opposing medical views, to fund and launch the independent research necessary to determine once and for all vaccine safety in young children, developing fetuses and pregnant mothers. And as we wait for medical sanity to descend upon our government agencies, more and more children are injured from the increasing number of scheduled vaccinations, while the burden of health costs continue to mount on the shoulders of parents with neurologically and physically damaged children.
Therefore reviewing some of the Committee’s major findings is warranted to bring them up to date with recent information showing the thimerosal-autism link and to provide evidence for the CDC’s, FDA’s and HHS’s ongoing medical denialism about vaccine safety and their laxity in preserving and addressing public health.
Committee Finding 1: “Mercury is hazardous to humans. Its use in medicinal products is undesirable, unnecessary and should be minimized or eliminated entirely.”
Mercury, in its two most common forms that threaten human health--methylmercury and ethylmercury (thimerosal used in vaccines)--is the second most toxic substance perhaps after uranium. It is over one hundred times more toxic than lead. Therefore ask yourself the question, would you submit your child, or even yourself, to having lead injected directly into his or her bloodstream, permitting it to pass through your child’s neurological system? If you answer in the negative, then know that the mercury in that flu shot being offered at Costco is far more toxic than the lead you just refused.
Although more research has been conducted showing methylmercury’s severe health risks, the Committee, basing its decision on sound scientific evidence, concluded that thimerosal’s toxicity is the same as methylmercury. Among the more serious adverse effects are multiple organ system disorders over the course of a lifetime, neurological and behavioral defects, renal damage, cardiovascular effects even at very low dosages, increased susceptibility to infectious diseases, autoimmune disorders and injury to the immune system, and adverse effects on the reproductive system. Contrary to Sebelius’denialism, a pregnant mother’s exposure to thimerosal due to vaccination runs the risk of mercury crossing the placenta and affecting the developing fetus. The CDC’s current stance that it makes no difference whether vaccines with thimerosal are given to pregnant mothers flies in the face of biomolecular reason and the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) own warnings. Medical evidence for methylmercury disturbing the neuro-development of an infant in utero has been conclusive for many years.[3] The EPA’s website states that for women in reproductive ages, there is the risk of 300,000 newborns each year incurring learning disabilities due to in utero exposure to mercury. Even the FDA acknowledged mercury’s toxic risks to infants back in 1994. According to a National Institutes of Health document, “For fetuses, infants and children, the primary health effects of mercury are on neurological development. Even low levels of mercury exposure, such as result from a mother’s consumption of methylmercury in dietary sources, can adversely affect the brain and nervous system. Impact on memory, attention, language and other skills have been found in children exposed to moderate levels in the womb.” Do any of these symptoms sound like ASD? And if eating a can of tuna fish poses a potential risk, how much greater are the potential neurological injuries when vaccine mercury is injected intramuscularly?
The EPA, unlike the FDA, has conducted research into mercury’s toxicity and health risks. While the EPA sets a limit exposure of mercury at 0.1 micrograms/kg, the FDA in its favoritism towards mercury’s use in vaccines raises the stakes to 0.4 micrograms. The FDA’s figure has no valid supporting scientific data and is arbitrary in order to continue sanctioning the use of in vaccines. The World Health Organization (WHO) sets the limit higher; this may account for the WHO’s aggressive campaigns to inoculate the world’s poorer populations with heavily laced-mercury and stockpiled vaccines from the drug makers. The Committee, however, found the EPA evaluation to be “scientifically validated.” Consequently, a person receiving a single flu shot, with 25 mcg/kg of thimerosal would need to weigh approximately 550 pounds for it to be considered a safe quantity. Therefore it is no surprise that the series of four thimerosal-laced flu shots, or 100 mcg/kg, can lead to long-term cumulative damage for any age group, including the later onset of dementia conditions such as Alzheimer’s.[4]
Dr. David Baskin, Professor of Neurosurgery at Baylor College of Medicine, told the Committee that brain tissue absorbs mercury five times more than other body tissues. And infants and small children are furthermore five times more sensitive to mercury’s toxicological effects compared to adults. Dr. Baskin reported on his own studies at Baylor:
“We have the opportunity to actually grow human frontal cortex cells in cell culture. So these are cells from the front part of the brain... We incubate these cells with thimerosal at various doses... [then] detect cell death and cell damage... [showing a slide] These are the cells committing the suicide program and breaking themselves into tiny little pieces with a very low dose of mercury... Don’t forget, we did this in adult brain cells. Remember that infant brain cells are much more sensitive, so there’s a real cause for concern.”
Similar studies conducted at Columbia University have confirmed the Baylor findings.
So why can’t the CDC and other government agencies reproduce these clinical studies to confirm whether or not there is a clear thimerosal-autism link? Well, the CDC, and other research agencies such as the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease (NIAID), simply don’t perform gold standard clinical science. Instead, the CDC relies upon statistical analyses and mathematical algorithms to arrive at their conclusions about vaccines’ and thimerosal’s safety. Preferring to cower in the back of Plato’s cave, concise scientific protocol and biomolecular studies in a laboratory is almost anathema to them. In addition, the kind of studies the vaccine orthodoxy hail as proof to deny a correlation between thimerosal and autism rely upon dreadful research design and ridiculously low numbers of participants. For example, a University of Rochester study comparing children injected with mercury-vaccines versus vaccines without mercury only enrolled 40 subjects; yet, this single study remains in the pro-vaccine orthodoxy’s arsenal against vaccine skeptics. If autism at the time of the study affected 1 in 150 children, then enrolling 40 children is baseless for achieving any valid data. For this reason, another finding by the Committee states:
Committee Finding 2: “To date, studies conducted or funded by the CDC that purportedly dispute any correlation between autism and vaccine injury have been of poor design, under-powered, and fatally flawed. The CDC’s rush to support and promote such research is reflective of a philosophical conflict in looking fairly at emerging theories and clinical data related to adverse reactions from vaccinations.”
The Committee also reports, “Upon thorough review of the scientific literature and internal documents from government and industry, the Committee did in fact find evidence that thimerosal posed a risk. The possible risk for harm from either low dose chronic or one time high level (bolus dose) exposure to thimerosal is not ‘theoretical,’ but very real and documented in the medical literature.”
Furthermore, the report continues,
“Of additional concern has been the CDC’s bias against theories regarding vaccine-induced autism. Rather than aggressively working to replicate clinical findings with laboratory data that showed a relationship between vaccines and autism... the CDC funded researchers who also worked for vaccine manufacturers to conduct population-based epidemiological studies to look at the possible correlation between vaccine injury and a subset of the population that might be injured. The CDC to date has relied too heavily on epidemiological findings. While epidemiological studies are important, they are not a substitute for focused, clinical research.”
And independent clinical research exists. There is lots of it from prestigious institutions such as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, the Cleveland Clinic, Massachusetts General Hospital, the University of California at Irvine, Baylor Medical School, Prof. Boyd Haley at the University of Kentucky, and the dozens of studies by Dr. Mark Geier at the Institute of Chronic Illnesses, all providing evidence for thimerosal’s adverse effects in adults and in the developing brain of a child.
Committee Finding 3: “Manufacturers of vaccines and thimerosal have never conducted adequate testing on the safety of thimerosal. The FDA has never required manufacturers to conduct adequate safety testing on thimerosal and ethylmercury compounds.”
For many decades, the FDA has known about the neurotoxic effects of thimersosal. A review of internal documents from Eli Lilly, the original inventor of ethylmercury in the 1920s, reveals that only one study has ever been performed to investigate thimerosal’s safety in humans and it was “woefully inadequate.” During the actual Committee hearings, Rep. Burton remarked, “You mean to tell me since 1929 we’ve been using thimerosal and the only test you know of is the one that was done in 1929, and every one of those people got meningitis and died?”[5]
In the 1940’s, thimerosal was used in teething powders for infants and resulted in fatal outbreaks of Pink’s Disease (severe mercury poisoning) before being removed in the 50’s. Since many children today receive vaccines with trace amounts of thimerosal, in addition to vaccines containing adjuvant aluminum compounds, an important 1972 study published in the British Medical Journal noted that mercury increases aluminum’s oxidation and produces abnormal heat. In recent years, there is growing evidence of mitochondrial oxidation and cellular damage that may be due to this interaction between mercury and aluminum in vaccines. With a child now receiving 31 and more vaccinations during its first 18 months of life, it would seem that this barbaric practice would have been fully investigated by our health officials to account for the epidemic rise in neurological and behavioral disorders, adult diabetes and asthmatic conditions in American children. Instead, our health officials continue to pump out junk science, for example the recent, seriously flawed NIAID study on H1N1 vaccine safety in pregnant women reported over the major media, to deceive Americans and enroll them in their national vaccination campaigns. The protocol in that study listed any pregnant woman who had a history of alcohol or drug abuse during a 6 year period, diabetes, compromised immune systems, asthmatic and allergic conditions, history of cancer-treatment drugs for 3 years, prescription to psychiatric drugs, and many other conditions as unqualified for the study. These conditions alone would disqualify the large majority of the nation’s pregnant women. Furthermore, any pregnant woman who enrolled in the trial, who spiked a temperature of 100 degrees or greater during the first 72 hours following vaccination, were excluded from the trial. Nevertheless, the CDC and its cronies in the media, particularly the pharmaceutical shills at The New York Times, touted this deranged trial as conclusive evidence that the swine flu vaccine was safe for all pregnant women. These are the kinds of medical distortions we have come to expect from the Federal health agencies.
The Committee’s report states,
“It appears that our Federal regulatory framework (the FDA and its predecessor organizations) failed to require manufacturers to prove thimerosal was safe. They failed to require industry to conduct adequate testing to determine how thimerosal is metabolized. The FDA failed to require that industry conduct studies to determine the maximum safe exposure level of thimerosal. These basic issues should have been proven prior to the introduction of thimerosal into the marketplace, but more than 70 years after its introduction, these issues have still not been adequately addressed... It is clear that the guiding principal for FDA policymakers has been to avoid shaking the public’s confidence in the safety of vaccines. For this reason, many FDA officials have stubbornly denied that thimerosal may cause adverse reactions... given the serious concerns about the safety of thimerosal, the FDA should have acted years earlier to remove this preservative from vaccines and other medications.”
Nevertheless, even during this so-called flu season, the Federal agencies continue to remain entranced in a stupor of scientific denial, perhaps acting in a criminally negligent manner, as thimerosal remains at highly toxic levels in the flu vaccines, and remains in trace amounts in the DTaP, some Hib, and Hepatitis B vaccines.
Although the FDA has repeatedly agreed that mercury is unsafe for over-the-counter medications, one would think that the government could arrive at the simple deduction of an elementary school pupil in agreeing that intramuscular injection of thimerosal would be far more dangerous. During the Committee’s proceedings, Dr. Bernard Schwetz, former Director of the FDA’s National Center for Toxicological Research, has stated, “... the fact that we know that ethylmercury is a skin sensitizer when its put on the skin, and now we’re injecting this IM (intramuscularly) at a time when the immune system is just developing, the functionality of the immune system is just being set at this age [infancy]... What is the effect on the functional development of the immune system when you give a chemical of that kind repeatedly IM?”
Committee Finding 4: “At the same time that the incidence of autism was growing, the number of childhood vaccines containing thimerosal was growing, increasing the amount of ethylmercury to which infants were exposed threefold... The FDA and CDC failed in their duty to be vigilant as new vaccines containing thimerosal were approved and added to the immunization schedule.”
The Commission report states, “There was tremendous reluctance on the part of some officials that a mistake had been made in allowing ethylmercury to be used in vaccines.” The FDA damns itself in a 1999 email by a former FDA official, Dr. Peter Patriarca, then Director of the FDA’s Division of Viral Products, who opines that hastening the removal of thimerosal from vaccines would “raise questions about the FDA being ‘asleep at the switch’ for decades by allowing a potentially hazardous compound to remain in many childhood vaccines, and not forcing manufacturers to exclude it from new products.”
While the Federal health agencies and the professional medical organizations serving the vaccine industrial complex, such as the American Pediatric Association, repeatedly tell us there is no causal relationship between ASD and vaccine mercury, there is a growing body of prestigious scientists, researchers and physicians who feel otherwise. Last October 2009, a Harvard survey reported in the journal Pediatrics the US’s ASD rate needs to be upgraded to 1 in 91, a greater than 30% increase from the previous 1 in 150 ratio several years back.[6] Consequently, the thimerasol-autism debate is far from over and should be pursued with aggressive due diligence and urgency. Moreover, the past history of CDC negligence and its reliance upon poorly designed and flawed science indicates there is no reason why any rational citizen should believe any statistical declaration or medical claim about vaccine safety from government health officials. These are people with severe allergic reactions to real science.
The Autism Society of America (ASA), the world’s largest autism organization and heavily funded by private industry and CDC support, continues to rely on archaic treatments not too dissimilar to BF Skinner’s behavioral work with pigeons. The ASA and the National Alliance for Autism, another advocacy organization supporting research to discredit vaccine-autism links, have been accused of conflict of interests and biased studies. In early 2009, Alison Singer, the senior executive of ASA and an advocate of the fanatical vaccine multi-millionaire and former advisor to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice, Dr. Paul Offit—who believes in a fantasy vaccine heaven where children can survive 10,000 vaccinations unscathed—resigned in protest over her organization’s recent leanings to reconsider a vaccination-autism connection. Each organization’s platform fundamentally ignores a possible vaccine-caused autism and instead favors genetic etiology that has yet to be conclusively discovered—instead, blame the parents’ DNA, not the drug makers and their government collaborators. Yet while the search for a mysterious autism gene persists, more and more children are being neurologically and developmentally damaged. Furthermore, even if such a gene is found, it would be many years before anything medically practical could be done with it.
Committee Finding 5: “A growing number of scientists and researchers believe that a relationship between the increase in neurodevelopmental disorders of autism... and the increased use of thimerosal in vaccines is plausible and deserves more scrutiny.”
In fact, the CDC in June 2000 discovered “a statistically significant positive correlation between the cumulative exposure” of thimerosal and ASD symptoms. The CDC’s analysis of approximately 110,000 records of children with adverse reactions to vaccines, flying in the face of federal health officials’ previous claims about vaccine safety, led to a secretive meeting between top government health officials and vaccine industry representatives at the Simpsonwood Retreat Center near Atlanta. The transcripts of that meeting were later obtained by Robert Kennedy Jr through a Freedom of Information Act. During the meeting, the CDC study’s chief scientist, Dr. Thomas Verstraeten, stated, “This analysis suggests that in our study population, the risks of tics, ADD, language and speech delays, and developmental delays in general may be increased by exposures to mercury from thimerosal-containing vaccines during the first six months of life.” The Congressional review of the Simpsonwood conversations concluded that “It appears that many who participated in the thimerosal debates allowed their standards to be dictated by their desire to disprove an unpleasant theory.” Indeed, this is what eventually occurred after the meeting.
The clandestine Simpsonwood gathering decided to withhold its findings from the public and, instead, proceeded with a new investigation to doctor the same data by employing confounders (subjective, unscientific criteria used to bias a study to prove a desired result). Consequently the CDC’s subsequent study released several years later denied any relationship between thimerosal and ASD. At the end of 2009, this remains the policy position and mindset of the CDC, FDA and HHS while a large body of independent research, with no conflict of interests with government or the vaccine industry, continues to mount against our policy makers reliance upon tabloid science and futile efforts to find causes unrelated to vaccines. And Dr. Thomas Verstaeten? Last heard he joined the vaccine maker GlaxoSmithKline and continued to deny the truth of the CDC’s original Simpsonwood findings.
Since then, Dr. Mark Geier at the Institutes of Chronic Illnesses, through a Freedom of Information Act, obtained all the CDC’s vaccine injury data in its database. After conducting an independent epidemiological study, based on tens of millions of vaccine doses administered in the US, he confirmed the Simpsonwood findings and significant other data to show thimerosal and the DTaP vaccine as contributing causes behind the country’s autism epidemic.[7]
Today, our tax dollars are being spent by our health agencies to sidestep the entire question of vaccine safety and efficacy, and are trying to project autism’s causes on genetic factors. This was the case in 2003, as it is now, when the Committee raised concerns over the NIH’s $27 billion budget, investing only $56 million into autism research, and the majority of that towards genetic causes. Compare that with the $2.2 billion spent on HIV/AIDS research that affects only a tiny percent of the population compared to the hundreds of thousands of children across the nation suffering autism spectrum disorder and neurological damage that they will live with for the remainder of their lives.
In 1975, the FDA undertook a five year review of mercury’s dangers in over-the-counter drugs and topical medicines and ointments. The advisory panel’s report to the FDA concluded that not only “mercury compounds as a class are of dubious value for anti-microbial use” but also “thimerosal was 35-times more toxic to the heart tissue it was meant to protect than the bacteria it was meant to kill.” So why is thimerosal still used in vaccines? Rather than manufacturing single dose vials, which would not require mercury, vaccine makers have found it more cost effective to manufacture multi-dose vials and simply add mercury as a preservative for longer shelf-life. A story in the Columbus Dispatch unveiled that Ohio’s decision to purchase larger quantities of thimerosal-laced flu vaccine rather than the alternative thimerosal-free version was purely based on a financial decision.[8]
Committee Finding 6: “The CDC’s failure to state a preference for thimerosal-free vaccines in 2000 and again 2001 was an abdication of their responsibility.”
After reviewing the CDC’s long-standing habit for promoting illness and staging a war on health, there is a case of one vaccine manufacturer offering to remove thimerosal from its vaccine but being denied permission to do so from the CDC. This incident led the Committee to state, “The CDC’s decision not to endorse thimerosal-free vaccines in 2001 is particularly troubling... Just as disappointing, and even more difficult to understand, is the fact that the CDC, on two separate occasions, refused to publicly state a preference for thimerosal-free vaccines.”
Testimony by Federal health officials before the Committee included a litany of excuses based on financial rationales for not concerning itself with the health of American children. The statements by Dr. Roger Bernier from the CDC exemplifies the dangerous level of denial and Federal officials’ refusal to accept preventative health measures, a dire negligence that continues to plague government health agencies in general, and the unproven and potentially unsafe H1N1 vaccine in particular:
“It [removing thimerosal from vaccines] could entail financial losses of inventory if current vaccine inventory is wasted. It could harm one or more manufacturers and may then decrease the number of suppliers”
“The evidence justifying this kind of abrupt policy change [immediate removal of mercury from all vaccines] does not appear to exist, and it could entail financial losses for all existing stocks of vaccines that contain thimerosal.”
The Committee’s interpretation of the CDC’s vaccine policy includes, “The financial health of the industry should never have been a factor in this decision [thimerosal removal]. The financial health of vaccine manufacturers certainly should never have been more important to the Federal health officials than the health and well being of the nation’s children. The CDC has a responsibility to protect the health of the American public. If there were any doubts about the neurological effects of ethylmercury in vaccines on children—and there were substantial doubts—the prevailing consideration should have been how best to protect children from potential harm. However, it appears that protecting the industry’s profits took precedent over protecting children from mercury damage.”
Committee Finding 7: “Thimerosal should be removed from these vaccines. No amount of mercury is appropriate in any childhood vaccine.”
Although thimerosal has been removed from most vaccines, mercury remains in trace amounts in some vaccines, as noted above, and remains at high toxic levels in the flu shots. Studies show that in the presence of aluminum compounds mercury’s toxicity increases dramatically. Vaccines that contain aluminum compounds include the DTaP, Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, pneumococcal, anthrax, and the HPV vaccine. Unfortunately, no studies have been funded by government agencies nor have the vaccine makers undertaken efforts to determine adverse neurological effects when multiple vaccines are given together, as is so often the case when small children visit their pediatricians.
A comparison of the FDA, CDC and HHS claims on thimerosal and multiple vaccination safety with documents from the Department of Defense (DoD) leaves one with the feeling that our national health service is a madhouse, a leper colony of welfare scientists and indecisive medical bureaucrats torn between their allegiance to pharmaceutical firms and the health of the nation. Medical journalist David Kirby has reported on DoD documents he received showing the military raising legitimate concerns about vaccines (thimerosal and the DTaP vaccine) as causative factors for the critical epidemic of ASD among military children.[9] In her article “Autism in the Military, “ Angela Warren calculates the military autism rate at 1 in 67, substantially higher than the recent Harvard study for the civilian population.[10] In addition to thimerosal’s dangers, the military claims its ongoing studies suggest that “a relationship between adverse events and multiple vaccinations exist.” The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology also acknowledges that “exposure to mercury in utero and children may cause mild to severe mental retardation and mild to severe motor coordination impairment.”[11]
Why would the military health officials take a completely different stand on thimerosal and vaccine safety from that of the CDC and HHS? During a recent conversation with a retired Colonel and former Command Surgeon of the US Army Special Operations Command in Africa, Dr. Frank Anders explained why the military health policies and recognition of scientific facts are more accurate and medically humane than that of our Federal health officials. According to Col. Anders, the “power and money these pharmaceutical companies wield [on the FDA and CDC] is awesome.” When he was asked whether or not there is any conformity or agreement between the Department of Defense’s health divisions and the Federal health agencies, including President Obama’s appointments, he stated there was nothing that could affect preventative and therapeutic health policy. There are far more financial incentives, including funds from Congress at the behest of pharmaceutical lobbyists, for FDA and CDC personnel to forge relationships with the drug and vaccine makers. On the other hand, since military health personnel are solely employees of the DoD removed from the vaccine industry and Big Pharma lobbyists, there is less bias and greater scientific integrity towards medical facts and sound science.[12]
Curiously, David Kirby reports that the military health clinics are adopting alternative treatments for ASD--methyl B12, chelation and glutathione--which are not actively promoted by the FDA in their preference for pharmaceutical and psychiatric drugs and behavioral modality treatment. When we asked Col. Anders why this was the case, he responded that it is simply because these alternative treatments work. For example, independent studies show convincingly that thimerosal depletes glutathione in vaccinated children with autism. Glutathione provides cells with the primary defense against heavy metal oxidation, a condition that has been observed extensively in children with ASD. Without glutathione, heavy metal oxidation inflicts severe neurological damage. Alternative treatment for autism includes glutathione replacement; however, this form of treatment is not recognized by the CDC and the orthodox autism organizations in bed with the pharmaceutical industrial complex.[13]
Committee Recommendations: There were two important recommendations made by Rep. Dan Burton’s Committee that Americans should demand from our government and Federal health agencies. First is the recommendation that “studies be conducted that pool the results of independent research that has been done thus far, and a comprehensive approach should be developed to rid humans, animals and the environment from this dangerous toxin [ethyl- and methylmercury].”
The second urgent recommendation is that Congress “enact legislation that prohibits federal funds from being used to provide products or pharmaceuticals that contain mercury, methylmercury or ethylmercury unless no reasonable alternative is available.”
Today, neither of these recommendations have been acted upon. Instead the Obama administration has continued the previous Bush act to provide sanctuary to vaccine makers from lawsuits due to vaccine injury. Our health officials have sunk themselves deeper into dangerously reductive and determinist views about infectious diseases, such as the swine flu, and have strengthened their denial that their entire vaccination program might be leading America’s health to further ruin.
It is unusual for our government and Congress to get anything correct these days and to make sincere, thoughtful decisions that truly benefit American citizens. However, there are those rare occasions when a spark of wisdom actually flares briefly somewhere in Washington. The Rep. Burton’s Committee report’s final statement is as relevant today as it was in mid 2003. Perhaps even more so as we witness the CDC’s public relations campaign threatening citizens with misleading statistics, distorted science (‘science’ being a term that can barely be applied to the kind of tabloid research that Federal officials rely upon today), and unproven fears to shepherd us towards the H1N1 and seasonal flu lines.
“Thimserosal used as a preservative in vaccines is likely related to the autism epidemic. This epidemic in all probability may have been prevented or curtailed had the FDA not been asleep at the switch regarding the lack of safety data regarding injected thimerosal and the sharp rise of infant exposure to his known neurotoxin. Our public health agencies’ failure to act is indicative of institutional malfeasance for self-protection and misplaced protectionism of the pharmaceutical industry.”
As we have witnessed during the recent CDC’s public relations campaign behind the H1N1 vaccine, and the uproar of dissent that questions the safety and national need for mass inoculation, medical discourse has been shut down. This raises the serious concern whether America’s health sciences and democracy can co-exist any longer in the United States. The words of H.H. the Dalai Lama are apropos for understanding the fish tank Federal officials and their sponsored cohorts settled into, “To deny authority of empirical evidence is to disqualify oneself as someone worthy of critical engagement in a dialogue.” Nothing has changed within the US government’s vaccine policy programs, six years after Congress indicted our health leaders with medical denialism.
Richard Gale is the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network and a former Senior Research Analyst in the genomic industry.
Dr. Gary Null is the host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on nutrition and natural health and a multi-award-winning director of progressive documentary films, including Vaccine Nation (2008) and Autism: Made in the USA (2009)
Notes
[1] Kathleen Sebelius interviewed by Katie Couric on CBS, July 30, 2009.
[2] All statements in quotations, unless noted, are from the House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Human Rights and Wellness report, “Mercury in Medicine: Taking Unnecessary Risks,” published May 2003.
[3] Magos L, Brown AW, Sparrow S, Bailey E, Snowden RT, Skipp WR. “The comparative toxicology of ethyl- and methylmercury.” Archives of Toxicology. (1985) 57: 260-267.
[4] Haley, Boyd (Professor and Chair, Department of Chemistry, University of Kentucky). “The relationship of the toxic effects of mercury to exacerbation of the medical condition classified as Alzheimer’s disease.” Presented at Autism One Conference. May 26-29, 2005.
[5] Kirby, David. Evidence of Harm. St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2005.
[6] Kogan MD, Blumberg J, Schieve LA, Boyle CA, Perrin JM, Ghandour RM, Singh GK, Strickland BB, Trevathan E, van Dyck PC. “Prevalence of Parent-Reported Diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder Among Children in the US, 2007” Pediatrics. Published online October 5, 2009.
[7] Geier M, Geier D. “Neurodevelopmental disorders after thimerosal-containing vaccines: A brief communication.” Experimental Biology and Medicine. (2003) Vol. 228, n 6, 660-664.
[8] McCoy, Roger. “Some See Threat in Ohio’s Flu Shot.” The Columbus Dispatch. February 17, 2004.
[9] Kirby, David. “The Pentagon: A Voice of Reason on Vaccines and Autism?” Wellsphere.com December 4, 2008.
[10] Warner, Angela. “Autism in the Military” Age of Autism. July 8, 2008.
[11] Kirby. Op cit.
[12] Private conversation with Col. Frank Anders, November 2009.
[13] James SJ, Slikker W, Melnyk S, New E, Jernigan S. “Thimerosal neurotoxicity is associated with glutathione depletion: protection with glutathione precursors.” Neurotoxicity. (2005) Vol. 26, 1-8.
Global Research Articles by Richard Gale
Global Research Articles by Gary Null
Friday, November 13, 2009
A Morally Bankrupt Military: When Soldiers and Their Families Become Expendable
Global Research, November 12, 2009
Truthout - 2009-11-11
The military operates through indoctrination. Soldiers are programmed to develop a mindset that resists any acknowledgment of injury and sickness, be it physical or psychological. As a consequence, tens of thousands of soldiers continue to serve, even being deployed to combat zones like Iraq and/or Afghanistan, despite persistent injuries. According to military records, over 43,000 troops classified as "nondeployable for medical reasons" have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan nevertheless.
The recent atrocity at Fort Hood is an example of this. Maj. Nidal Hasan had worked as a counselor at Walter Reed, hearing countless stories of bloodshed, horror and death from dismembered veterans from the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. While he had not yet served in Iraq or Afghanistan, the major was overloaded with secondary trauma, coupled with ongoing harassment about his being a Muslim. This, along with other factors, contributed towards Hasan falling into a desperation so deep he was willing to slaughter fellow soldiers, and is indicative of fissures running deep into the crumbling edifice upon which the US military stands.
The case of Pvt. Timothy Rich also demonstrates the disastrous implications of the apathetic attitude of the military toward its own. Not dissimilar from Major Hasan, who clearly would have benefited from treatment for the secondary trauma he was experiencing from his work with psychologically wounded veterans, one of the main factors that forced Private Rich to go absent without leave (AWOL) was the failure of the military to treat his mental issues.
Rich told Truthout, "In my unit, to go to sick call for mental health was looked down upon. Our acting 1st Sergeant believed that we shouldn't have mental issues because we were too 'high speed.' So I was afraid to go because I didn't want to be labeled as a weak soldier."
What followed was more harrowing.
"The other problems arose when I brought my girlfriend down to marry her. My unit believed her to be a problem starter so I was ordered not to marry her, taken to a small finance company by an NCO and forced to draw a loan in order to buy her a plane ticket to return home. They escorted her to the airport and through security to ensure that she left. Once the NCO left she turned around and hitchhiked back to Fort Bragg. Before the unit could discover us, we went to the courthouse and got married. We were then summoned by my Commander, Captain Jones, to his office and reprimanded. He called me a dumb ass soldier and a shit bag for marrying her and told my wife that she was a fool to marry someone as stupid as me. Members of my unit started referring to me as Pvt. Bitch instead of Pvt. Rich. The entire episode caused a lot of strain in our relationship. Unable to cope with all this, I bought two plane tickets and went AWOL with my wife."
Rich was later apprehended when a federal warrant was issued against him. After 11 days in a country jail, he was transported back to Fort Bragg in North Carolina. On August 17, 2008, he was wrongly assigned to Echo Platoon that was part of the 82nd Airborne, whereas his unit was part of the 18th Airborne.
Rich recollects, "I was confused when they assigned me to the 82nd. I was dismissed as a liar when I brought this up with my NCO Sgt Joseph Fulgence and my commander, Captain Thaxton. I ended up spending a year at Echo before being informed that I was never supposed to have been in the 82nd."
At Fort Bragg, he was permitted to seek mental health treatment and was diagnosed with schizophrenia, psychosis, insomnia and a mood disorder. This, however, did not stop his commander from harassing him. His permanent profile from the doctor restricted him from being on duty before 0800 (8 AM) hours, but his commander, Sergeant Fulgence, dismissed the profile as merely a guideline and not a mandatory directive. The soldier was accused of using mental health as a pretext to avoid duty. So, Rich was up every morning for first formation at 0545 (5:45 AM). It wasn't until he refused to take his medication because it made him groggy in the morning that his doctor called his commander and settled the matter. By then, Rich had already been forced to violate his profile for six months.
During this period, his mental health deteriorated rapidly. The combined effect of heavy medication and restrictions on his home visits resulted in his experiencing blackouts that led him to take destructive actions in the barracks. When he was discovered talking about killing the chain of command, he was put on a 24-hour suicide watch that seemed to have served little purpose, because on August 17 he was able to elude his guards and make his way to the roof of his barracks.
"I climbed onto the roof of the building and sat up there thinking about my family and my situation and decided to go ahead and end my suffering by taking a nose dive off the building," Rich explained to Truthout.
His body plummeted through the air, bounced off a tree, and he landed on his back with a cracked spine. The military gave him a back brace, psychotropic drugs and a renewed 24-hour suicide watch, measures as effective in alleviating his pain as his failed suicide attempt.
When Truthout contacted him just days after his failed suicide attempt, a fatigued Rich detailed his hellish year-long plight of awaiting a discharge that never came. "I want to leave here very bad. For four months they have been telling me that I'll get out next week. It got to the point that the NCOs would tell me just to calm me down that I'd be going home the next day. They went as far as to call my wife and requesting her to lie that she was coming to get me the next day. I eventually stopped believing them. I didn't see an end to it, so I figured I'd try and end it myself."
The noncommissioned officers in his barracks thought it was hilarious that Rich had jumped, and he was offered money for an encore that could be videotaped.
At the time he was in a "holdover" unit, comprised mostly of AWOL soldiers who had turned themselves in or had been arrested. Others in his unit had untreated mental health problems like him or were suffering from severe PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) from deployments in Iraq and or Afghanistan.
According to Rich, every soldier in his platoon was subjected to abusive treatment of some kind or the other. "It even got to the point when our 1st Sergeant Cisneros told us that if it were up to him we all would all be taken out back and shot, and that we needed to pray to our gods because we were going to pay (for our actions)."
Tim's wife Megan had to bear his never-ending ordeal in equal measure. She witnessed the military's callousness up close. She informed Truthout, "Since February of this year, Tim's unit had been telling him he would be out in two weeks. After two weeks when he asked, they would repeat the same thing. At times he would get excited and start packing his belongings and I would try to figure out how to get him home to Ohio. He would call me crying in relief because he thought we were going to be together again real soon. The military forced me to lie to him too. When he realized they did not mean to release him he grew very destructive during his black out spells. Eventually he simply gave up on coming home."
Megan first realized there was a problem with the way the military was treating her husband when she noticed him doing and saying things that were out of character for him, like apologizing for not being a good husband and father and being openly suicidal. He had also begun to self-medicate with alcohol, an increasing trend among soldiers not receiving adequate mental-health treatment from the military.
She revealed to Truthout, "He had quit for the girls and me but it seems like he could not handle the stress and needed an escape. This caused a huge problem between us and we began to argue about it. He became severely depressed, pulled away from me, and started to do things he normally doesn't do, such as giving away his money and belongings, and telling the recipients that he wouldn't need those things in hell."
She sensed that her husband would be in trouble if he were to stand up for himself, so she began to advocate on his behalf. Her attempts to do so met with fresh abuse from his commanders. The chain of command banned her from the company barracks and had her escorted off post. The couple was commandeered into Sergeant Fulgence's office where they were chastised. The sergeant referred to Megan as "a bad mother" and "a bitch." When Megan attempted to leave the office in protest, the sergeant ordered her to stay and listen to what he had to say.
This was followed by an encounter with the commander of the platoon, Commander Thaxton. The commander in this case ordered Tim to shut up, and threatened him with confinement. He demanded that Megan explain what kind of mother would bring her child to a new location without a place to live. She tried telling him that the AER loan was for her to come to Fort Bragg since they had lost their house after Tim's arrest and loss of job. Although the paperwork for the loan clearly stated that it was for her travel, food and lodging at Fort Bragg, the commander insisted it was for an apartment. When Tim intervened to say that the $785 would not be sufficient to pay rent and bills, especially since he wasn't being paid his wages and his wife couldn't work because of the baby, and according to Tim, both Sergeant Fulgence and Captain Thaxton "had a nice laugh over that" and dismissed the duo, referring to them as "juvenile dumb-asses."
After Tim returned from being AWOL and was brought up on charges, he went through 706 (a psychology board) that declared him mentally incompetent at the time of his being AWOL. It took a painfully long amount of time for the charges to be dismissed without prejudice. The soldier believes that his superiors deliberately refused to do the requisite paperwork for his clearance and subsequent resumption of his pay.
He told Truthout, "Every time I came on base I got arrested even though I was on active duty again. Then my wife and I got an AER loan for her to come down to Fort Bragg. When she got there and my pay continued to be withheld, the AER money ran out and my wife and child had to sleep in the van we owned. When my unit found out they called the Military Police and ordered me to give custody of my daughter to my father."
When Tim refused to do that, they punished him by confining him to the barracks and barring his wife from entering the base. To add insult, the chain of command took away his van keys and said that neither he nor Megan was allowed use it.
The nightmare ended when the military finally released Pvt. Timothy Rich, and by default, Megan. He was discharged and "allowed" to enter the ranks of US citizens searching for jobs and health care. Their traumatic journey to that starting point is what distinguishes them from their civilian counterparts.
Rich's advice to anyone thinking of joining the military today: "Don't join. Everything they advertise and tell you about how it's a family friendly army is a lie."
Sgt. Heath Carter suffered a similar fate at the hands of an indifferent military command. Upon return from the invasion of Iraq, he discovered that his daughter Sierra was living in an unsafe environment in Arkansas under the care of his first wife, who had full custody of the child. Heath and his new wife, Teresa, started consulting attorneys in order to secure custody of Sierra, who also suffered from a life-threatening medical condition. Precisely during this time, the military chose to keep changing Carter's duty station from Fort Polk, Louisiana, to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, then to Fort Stewart, Georgia. Not only did these constant transfers make it difficult for Carter to see his daughter, they also reduced his chances of gaining custody of Sierra. Convinced that this was a matter of life and death for his daughter, he requested compassionate reassignment to Fort Leavenworth, Missouri, about two hours from his first wife's home in Arkansas.
His appeals to the military command, the legal department, chaplain and even to his congressman failed, and the military insisted that he remain at Fort Stewart, Georgia. Having run out of all available avenues, in May 2007 he went AWOL from Fort Stewart and headed home to Arkansas where he fought for and won custody of Sierra, and was able to literally save her life by obtaining needed medical care for her.
However, on January 25 of this year, Carter was arrested at his home by the military police, who flew him back to Fort Stewart where he has been awaiting charges for the past eight months. Being a sergeant, he is in a regular unit and not in a holdover, but that does not help his cause. Initially, his commander told him it would take a month and a half for him to be sent home. Several months later, it was decided he would receive a court-martial.
Carter feels frustrated, "Now I have to wait for the court martial. It's taken this long for them to decide. If we had known it would take this long, my family could have moved down here. Every time I ask when I'll have a trial, they say it is only going to be another two weeks. I get the feeling they are lying. They have messed with my pay. They're trying to push me to do something wrong."
His ordeal has forced Carter to reflect on the wars. He admits that, although his original reason for going AWOL was personal and he had otherwise been proud of his missions, he sees things in Iraq differently today. "I don't think there is any reason for us to be there except for oil."
Yet, both Private Rich and Sergeant Carter were offered deployments to Afghanistan amid their struggles. It is soldiers like these that the military will use to fill the ranks of the next "surge" of troops into Afghanistan, which at the time of this writing, appears to be as many as 34,000 troops.
The stage is set for more tragic incidents like the recent massacre at Fort Hood.
Sarah Lazare contributed to this report.
Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist, is the author of "The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan," (Haymarket Books, 2009), and "Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq," (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from occupied Iraq for nine months as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last five years.
Dahr Jamail is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Dahr Jamail
Truthout - 2009-11-11
The military operates through indoctrination. Soldiers are programmed to develop a mindset that resists any acknowledgment of injury and sickness, be it physical or psychological. As a consequence, tens of thousands of soldiers continue to serve, even being deployed to combat zones like Iraq and/or Afghanistan, despite persistent injuries. According to military records, over 43,000 troops classified as "nondeployable for medical reasons" have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan nevertheless.
The recent atrocity at Fort Hood is an example of this. Maj. Nidal Hasan had worked as a counselor at Walter Reed, hearing countless stories of bloodshed, horror and death from dismembered veterans from the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. While he had not yet served in Iraq or Afghanistan, the major was overloaded with secondary trauma, coupled with ongoing harassment about his being a Muslim. This, along with other factors, contributed towards Hasan falling into a desperation so deep he was willing to slaughter fellow soldiers, and is indicative of fissures running deep into the crumbling edifice upon which the US military stands.
The case of Pvt. Timothy Rich also demonstrates the disastrous implications of the apathetic attitude of the military toward its own. Not dissimilar from Major Hasan, who clearly would have benefited from treatment for the secondary trauma he was experiencing from his work with psychologically wounded veterans, one of the main factors that forced Private Rich to go absent without leave (AWOL) was the failure of the military to treat his mental issues.
Rich told Truthout, "In my unit, to go to sick call for mental health was looked down upon. Our acting 1st Sergeant believed that we shouldn't have mental issues because we were too 'high speed.' So I was afraid to go because I didn't want to be labeled as a weak soldier."
What followed was more harrowing.
"The other problems arose when I brought my girlfriend down to marry her. My unit believed her to be a problem starter so I was ordered not to marry her, taken to a small finance company by an NCO and forced to draw a loan in order to buy her a plane ticket to return home. They escorted her to the airport and through security to ensure that she left. Once the NCO left she turned around and hitchhiked back to Fort Bragg. Before the unit could discover us, we went to the courthouse and got married. We were then summoned by my Commander, Captain Jones, to his office and reprimanded. He called me a dumb ass soldier and a shit bag for marrying her and told my wife that she was a fool to marry someone as stupid as me. Members of my unit started referring to me as Pvt. Bitch instead of Pvt. Rich. The entire episode caused a lot of strain in our relationship. Unable to cope with all this, I bought two plane tickets and went AWOL with my wife."
Rich was later apprehended when a federal warrant was issued against him. After 11 days in a country jail, he was transported back to Fort Bragg in North Carolina. On August 17, 2008, he was wrongly assigned to Echo Platoon that was part of the 82nd Airborne, whereas his unit was part of the 18th Airborne.
Rich recollects, "I was confused when they assigned me to the 82nd. I was dismissed as a liar when I brought this up with my NCO Sgt Joseph Fulgence and my commander, Captain Thaxton. I ended up spending a year at Echo before being informed that I was never supposed to have been in the 82nd."
At Fort Bragg, he was permitted to seek mental health treatment and was diagnosed with schizophrenia, psychosis, insomnia and a mood disorder. This, however, did not stop his commander from harassing him. His permanent profile from the doctor restricted him from being on duty before 0800 (8 AM) hours, but his commander, Sergeant Fulgence, dismissed the profile as merely a guideline and not a mandatory directive. The soldier was accused of using mental health as a pretext to avoid duty. So, Rich was up every morning for first formation at 0545 (5:45 AM). It wasn't until he refused to take his medication because it made him groggy in the morning that his doctor called his commander and settled the matter. By then, Rich had already been forced to violate his profile for six months.
During this period, his mental health deteriorated rapidly. The combined effect of heavy medication and restrictions on his home visits resulted in his experiencing blackouts that led him to take destructive actions in the barracks. When he was discovered talking about killing the chain of command, he was put on a 24-hour suicide watch that seemed to have served little purpose, because on August 17 he was able to elude his guards and make his way to the roof of his barracks.
"I climbed onto the roof of the building and sat up there thinking about my family and my situation and decided to go ahead and end my suffering by taking a nose dive off the building," Rich explained to Truthout.
His body plummeted through the air, bounced off a tree, and he landed on his back with a cracked spine. The military gave him a back brace, psychotropic drugs and a renewed 24-hour suicide watch, measures as effective in alleviating his pain as his failed suicide attempt.
When Truthout contacted him just days after his failed suicide attempt, a fatigued Rich detailed his hellish year-long plight of awaiting a discharge that never came. "I want to leave here very bad. For four months they have been telling me that I'll get out next week. It got to the point that the NCOs would tell me just to calm me down that I'd be going home the next day. They went as far as to call my wife and requesting her to lie that she was coming to get me the next day. I eventually stopped believing them. I didn't see an end to it, so I figured I'd try and end it myself."
The noncommissioned officers in his barracks thought it was hilarious that Rich had jumped, and he was offered money for an encore that could be videotaped.
At the time he was in a "holdover" unit, comprised mostly of AWOL soldiers who had turned themselves in or had been arrested. Others in his unit had untreated mental health problems like him or were suffering from severe PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) from deployments in Iraq and or Afghanistan.
According to Rich, every soldier in his platoon was subjected to abusive treatment of some kind or the other. "It even got to the point when our 1st Sergeant Cisneros told us that if it were up to him we all would all be taken out back and shot, and that we needed to pray to our gods because we were going to pay (for our actions)."
Tim's wife Megan had to bear his never-ending ordeal in equal measure. She witnessed the military's callousness up close. She informed Truthout, "Since February of this year, Tim's unit had been telling him he would be out in two weeks. After two weeks when he asked, they would repeat the same thing. At times he would get excited and start packing his belongings and I would try to figure out how to get him home to Ohio. He would call me crying in relief because he thought we were going to be together again real soon. The military forced me to lie to him too. When he realized they did not mean to release him he grew very destructive during his black out spells. Eventually he simply gave up on coming home."
Megan first realized there was a problem with the way the military was treating her husband when she noticed him doing and saying things that were out of character for him, like apologizing for not being a good husband and father and being openly suicidal. He had also begun to self-medicate with alcohol, an increasing trend among soldiers not receiving adequate mental-health treatment from the military.
She revealed to Truthout, "He had quit for the girls and me but it seems like he could not handle the stress and needed an escape. This caused a huge problem between us and we began to argue about it. He became severely depressed, pulled away from me, and started to do things he normally doesn't do, such as giving away his money and belongings, and telling the recipients that he wouldn't need those things in hell."
She sensed that her husband would be in trouble if he were to stand up for himself, so she began to advocate on his behalf. Her attempts to do so met with fresh abuse from his commanders. The chain of command banned her from the company barracks and had her escorted off post. The couple was commandeered into Sergeant Fulgence's office where they were chastised. The sergeant referred to Megan as "a bad mother" and "a bitch." When Megan attempted to leave the office in protest, the sergeant ordered her to stay and listen to what he had to say.
This was followed by an encounter with the commander of the platoon, Commander Thaxton. The commander in this case ordered Tim to shut up, and threatened him with confinement. He demanded that Megan explain what kind of mother would bring her child to a new location without a place to live. She tried telling him that the AER loan was for her to come to Fort Bragg since they had lost their house after Tim's arrest and loss of job. Although the paperwork for the loan clearly stated that it was for her travel, food and lodging at Fort Bragg, the commander insisted it was for an apartment. When Tim intervened to say that the $785 would not be sufficient to pay rent and bills, especially since he wasn't being paid his wages and his wife couldn't work because of the baby, and according to Tim, both Sergeant Fulgence and Captain Thaxton "had a nice laugh over that" and dismissed the duo, referring to them as "juvenile dumb-asses."
After Tim returned from being AWOL and was brought up on charges, he went through 706 (a psychology board) that declared him mentally incompetent at the time of his being AWOL. It took a painfully long amount of time for the charges to be dismissed without prejudice. The soldier believes that his superiors deliberately refused to do the requisite paperwork for his clearance and subsequent resumption of his pay.
He told Truthout, "Every time I came on base I got arrested even though I was on active duty again. Then my wife and I got an AER loan for her to come down to Fort Bragg. When she got there and my pay continued to be withheld, the AER money ran out and my wife and child had to sleep in the van we owned. When my unit found out they called the Military Police and ordered me to give custody of my daughter to my father."
When Tim refused to do that, they punished him by confining him to the barracks and barring his wife from entering the base. To add insult, the chain of command took away his van keys and said that neither he nor Megan was allowed use it.
The nightmare ended when the military finally released Pvt. Timothy Rich, and by default, Megan. He was discharged and "allowed" to enter the ranks of US citizens searching for jobs and health care. Their traumatic journey to that starting point is what distinguishes them from their civilian counterparts.
Rich's advice to anyone thinking of joining the military today: "Don't join. Everything they advertise and tell you about how it's a family friendly army is a lie."
Sgt. Heath Carter suffered a similar fate at the hands of an indifferent military command. Upon return from the invasion of Iraq, he discovered that his daughter Sierra was living in an unsafe environment in Arkansas under the care of his first wife, who had full custody of the child. Heath and his new wife, Teresa, started consulting attorneys in order to secure custody of Sierra, who also suffered from a life-threatening medical condition. Precisely during this time, the military chose to keep changing Carter's duty station from Fort Polk, Louisiana, to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, then to Fort Stewart, Georgia. Not only did these constant transfers make it difficult for Carter to see his daughter, they also reduced his chances of gaining custody of Sierra. Convinced that this was a matter of life and death for his daughter, he requested compassionate reassignment to Fort Leavenworth, Missouri, about two hours from his first wife's home in Arkansas.
His appeals to the military command, the legal department, chaplain and even to his congressman failed, and the military insisted that he remain at Fort Stewart, Georgia. Having run out of all available avenues, in May 2007 he went AWOL from Fort Stewart and headed home to Arkansas where he fought for and won custody of Sierra, and was able to literally save her life by obtaining needed medical care for her.
However, on January 25 of this year, Carter was arrested at his home by the military police, who flew him back to Fort Stewart where he has been awaiting charges for the past eight months. Being a sergeant, he is in a regular unit and not in a holdover, but that does not help his cause. Initially, his commander told him it would take a month and a half for him to be sent home. Several months later, it was decided he would receive a court-martial.
Carter feels frustrated, "Now I have to wait for the court martial. It's taken this long for them to decide. If we had known it would take this long, my family could have moved down here. Every time I ask when I'll have a trial, they say it is only going to be another two weeks. I get the feeling they are lying. They have messed with my pay. They're trying to push me to do something wrong."
His ordeal has forced Carter to reflect on the wars. He admits that, although his original reason for going AWOL was personal and he had otherwise been proud of his missions, he sees things in Iraq differently today. "I don't think there is any reason for us to be there except for oil."
Yet, both Private Rich and Sergeant Carter were offered deployments to Afghanistan amid their struggles. It is soldiers like these that the military will use to fill the ranks of the next "surge" of troops into Afghanistan, which at the time of this writing, appears to be as many as 34,000 troops.
The stage is set for more tragic incidents like the recent massacre at Fort Hood.
Sarah Lazare contributed to this report.
Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist, is the author of "The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan," (Haymarket Books, 2009), and "Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq," (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from occupied Iraq for nine months as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last five years.
Dahr Jamail is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Dahr Jamail
Saturday, September 26, 2009
U.S., NATO Poised For Most Massive War In Afghanistan's History
by Rick Rozoff
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15364
Global Research, September 24, 2009
Stop NATO
Over the past week U.S. newspapers and television networks have been abuzz with reports that Washington and its NATO allies are planning an unprecedented increase of troops for the war in Afghanistan, even in addition to the 17,000 new American and several thousand NATO forces that have been committed to the war so far this year.
The number, based on as yet unsubstantiated reports of what U.S. and NATO commander Stanley McChrystal and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen have demanded of the White House, range from 10,000 to 45,000.
Fox News has cited figures as high as 45,000 more American soldiers and ABC News as many as 40,000. On September 15 the Christian Science Monitor wrote of "perhaps as many as 45,000."
The similarity of the estimates indicate that a number has been agreed upon and America's obedient media is preparing domestic audiences for the possibility of the largest escalation of foreign armed forces in Afghanistan's history. Only seven years ago the United States had 5,000 troops in the country, but was scheduled to have 68,000 by December even before the reports of new deployments surfaced.
An additional 45,000 troops would bring the U.S. total to 113,000. There are also 35,000 troops from some 50 other nations serving under NATO's International Security Assistance Force in the nation, which would raise combined troop strength under McChrystal's command to 148,000 if the larger number of rumored increases materializes.
As the former Soviet Union withdrew its soldiers from Afghanistan twenty years ago the New York Times reported "At the height of the Soviet commitment, according to Western intelligence estimates, there were 115,000 troops deployed." [1]
Nearly 150,000 U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan would represent the largest foreign military presence ever in the land.
Rather than addressing this historic watershed, the American media is full of innuendos and "privileged" speculation on who has leaked the information and why, as to commercial news operations the tawdry world of Byzantine intrigues among and between American politicians, generals and the Fourth Estate is of more importance that the lengthiest and largest war in the world.
One that has been estimated by the chief of the British armed forces and other leading Western officials to last decades and that has already been extended into Pakistan, a nation with a population almost six times that of Afghanistan and in possession of nuclear weapons.
Two weeks ago the Dutch media reported that during a visit to the Netherlands "General Stanley McChrystal [said] he is considering the possibility of merging...Operation Enduring Freedom with NATO's ISAF force." [2] That is, not only would he continue to command all U.S. and NATO troops, but the two commands would be melded into one.
The call for up to 45,000 more American troops was first adumbrated in mid-September by U.S. armed forces chief Michael Mullen, with the Associated Press stating "The top U.S. military officer says that winning in Afghanistan will probably mean sending more troops." [3]
Four days later, September 19, Reuters reported that "The commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan has drawn up a long-awaited and detailed request for additional troops but has not yet sent it to Washington, a spokesman said on Saturday.
"He said General Stanley McChrystal completed the document this week, setting out exactly how many U.S. and NATO troops, Afghan security force members and civilians he thinks he needs." [4]
The Pentagon spokesman mentioned above, Lieutenant-Colonel Tadd Sholtis, said, "We're working with Washington as well as the other NATO participants about how it's best to submit this," refusing to divulge any details. [5]
Two days later the Washington Post published a 66-page "redacted" version of General McChrystal's Commander's Initial Assessment which began with this background information:
"On 26 June, 2009, the United States Secretary of Defense directed Commander, United States Central Command (CDRUSCENTCOM), to provide a multidisciplinary assessment of the situation in Afghanistan. On 02 July, 2009, Commander, NATO International Security Assistance Force (COMISAF) / U.S. Forces-Afghanistan (USFOR-A), received direction from CDRUSCENTCOM to complete the overall review.
"On 01 July, 2009, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe and NATO Secretary General also issued a similar directive.
"COMISAF [Commander, NATO International Security Assistance Force] subsequently issued an order to the ISAF staff and component commands to conduct a comprehensive review to assess the overall situation, review plans and ongoing efforts, and identify revisions to operational, tactical and strategic guidance."
The main focus of the report, not surprising given McChrystal's previous role as head of the Joint Special Operations Command, the Pentagon's preeminent special operations unit, in Iraq, is concentrated and intensified counterinsurgency war.
It includes the demand that "NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) requires a new strategy....This new strategy must also be properly resourced and executed through an integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency campaign....This is a different kind of fight. We must conduct classic counterinsurgency operations in an environment that is uniquely complex....Success demands a comprehensive counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign."
McChrystal's evaluation also indicates that the war will not only escalate within Afghanistan but will also be stepped up inside Pakistan and may even target Iran.
"Afghanistan's insurgency is clearly supported from Pakistan. Senior leaders of the major Afghan insurgent groups are based in Pakistan, are linked with al Qaeda and other violent extremist groups, and are reportedly aided by some elements of Pakistan's ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence].
"Iranian Qods Force [part of the nation's army] is reportedly training fighters for certain Taliban groups and providing other forms of military assistance to insurgents. Iran's current policies and actions do not pose a short-term threat to the mission, but Iran has the capability to threaten the mission in the future."
That the ISI has had links to armed extremists is no revelation. The Pentagon and the CIA worked hand-in-glove with it from 1979 onward to subvert successive governments in Afghanistan. That Iran is "training fighters for certain Taliban groups" is a provocational fabrication.
As to who is responsible for the thirty-year disaster that is Afghanistan, McChrystal's assessment contains a sentence that may get past most readers. It is this:
"The major insurgent groups in order of their threat to the mission are: the Quetta Shura Taliban (05T), the Haqqani Network (HQN), and the Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin (HiG)."
The last-named is the guerrilla force of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the largest recipient of hundreds of millions (perhaps billions) of U.S. dollars provided by the CIA to the Peshawar Seven Mujahideen bloc fighting the Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan from 1978-1992.
While hosting Hekmatyar and his allies at the White House in 1985 then President Ronald Reagan referred to his guests as "the moral equivalents of America's founding fathers.”
Throughout the 1980s the CIA official in large part tasked to assist the Mujahideen with funds, arms and training was Robert Gates, now U.S. Secretary of Defense.
Last December BBC News reported:
"In his book, From the Shadows, published in 1996, Mr Gates defended the role of the CIA in undertaking covert action which, he argued, helped to win the Cold War.
"In a speech in 1999, Mr Gates said that its most important role was in Afghanistan.
"'CIA had important successes in covert action. Perhaps the most consequential of all was Afghanistan where CIA, with its management, funnelled billions of dollars in supplies and weapons to the mujahideen, and the resistance was thus able to fight the vaunted Soviet army to a standoff and eventually force a political decision to withdraw,' he said." [6]
Now according to McChrystal the same Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who was cultivated and sponsored by McChrystal's current boss, Gates, is in charge of one of the three groups the Pentagon and NATO are waging ever-escalating counterinsurgency operations in South Asia against.
To make matters even more intriguing, former British foreign secretary Robin Cook - as loyal a pro-American Atlanticist as exists - conceded in the Guardian on July 8, 2005 that "Bin Laden was...a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally 'the database', was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians."
Russian analyst and vice president of the Center for Political Technologies Sergey Mikheev was quoted in early September as contending that "Afghanistan is a stage in the division of the world after the bipolar system failed. They [U.S. and NATO] wanted to consolidate their grip on Eurasia...and deployed a lot of troops there. The Taliban card was played, although nobody had been interested in the Taliban before." [7]
Pentagon chief Gates' 27 years in the CIA, including his tenure as director of the agency from 1991-1993, is being brought to bear on the Afghan war according to the Los Angeles Times of September 19, 2009, which revealed that "The CIA is deploying teams of spies, analysts and paramilitary operatives to Afghanistan, part of a broad intelligence 'surge' that will make its station there among the largest in the agency's history, U.S. officials say.
"When complete, the CIA's presence in the country is expected to rival the size of its massive stations in Iraq and Vietnam at the height of those wars. Precise numbers are classified, but one U.S. official said the agency already has nearly 700 employees in Afghanistan.
"The intelligence expansion goes beyond the CIA to involve every major spy service, officials said, including the National Security Agency, which intercepts calls and e-mails, as well as the Defense Intelligence Agency, which tracks military threats."
U.S. and NATO Commander McChrystal will put the CIA to immediate use in his plans for an all-out counterinsurgency campaign. The Los Angeles Times article added:
"McChrystal is expected to expand the use of teams that combine CIA operatives with special operations soldiers. In Iraq, where he oversaw the special operations forces from 2003 to 2008, McChrystal used such teams to speed up the cycle of gathering intelligence and carrying out raids aimed at killing or capturing insurgents.
"The CIA is also carrying out an escalating campaign of unmanned Predator missile strikes on Al Qaeda and insurgent strongholds in Pakistan. The number of strikes so far this year, 37, already exceeds the 2008 total, according to data compiled by the Long War Journal website, which tracks Predator strikes in Pakistan."
Indeed, on September 13 it was reported that "Two NATO fighter jets reportedly flew inside Pakistan's airspace for nearly two hours on Saturday.
"The airspace violation took place in different parts of the Khyber Agency bordering the Afghan border." [8]
Two days later "NATO fighter jets in Afghanistan...violated Pakistani airspace and dropped bombs on the country's northwest region.
"NATO warplanes bombed the South Waziristan tribal region....Moreover, CIA operated spy drone planes continued low-altitude flights in several towns of the Waziristan region." [9]
The dramatic upsurge in CIA deployments in South Asia won't be limited to Afghanistan. Neighboring Pakistan will be further overrun by U.S. intelligence operatives also.
On September 12 a petition was filed in the Supreme Court of Pakistan contesting the announced expansion of the U.S. embassy in the nation's capital.
"Pakistani media have been reporting that the United States plans to deploy a large number of marines with the plan to expand its embassy in Islamabad." [10]
The challenge was organized by Barrister Zafarullah Khan, who "said that Saudi Arabia was also trying to get 700,000 acres (283,400 hectares) of land in the country."
He was quoted on the day of the presentation of the petition as warning "Giving away Pakistani land to U.S. and Arab countries in this fashion is a threat for the stability and sovereignty of the country" and "further added that the purpose of giving the land to U.S. embassy was to establish an American military base...there.
"He maintained that such a big land was enough even to construct a military airport." [11]
Intelligence personnel and special forces are being matched by military equipment in the intensification of the West's war in South Asia.
On September 10 Reuters revealed in an article titled "U.S. eyes military equipment in Iraq for Pakistan" that "The Pentagon has proposed transferring U.S. military equipment from Iraq to Pakistani security forces to help Islamabad step up its offensive against the Taliban...."
A U.S. armed forces publication a few days afterward wrote that "U.S. hardware is moving out of Iraq by the ton, much of it going straight to the overstretched forces in increasingly volatile Afghanistan" and "The U.S. military has already started moving an estimated 1.5 million pieces of equipment - everything from batteries to tanks - by ground, rail and air either to Afghanistan for immediate use...." [12]
In the middle of this month "U.S. military leaders infused Gen. Stanley McChrystal's ideas of how to win the war in Afghanistan" by conducting a large-scale counterinsurgency exercise in Grafenwoehr, Germany.
"Dozens of Pashtun speakers joined more than 6,500 U.S. troops and civilians in an exercise for the Afghanistan-bound 173rd Airborne Brigade and Iraq-bound 12th Combat Aviation Brigade. It was the largest such exercise ever held by the U.S. military outside of the United States...." [13]
The Pentagon and NATO have their work cut out for them.
"A security map by the London-based International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) showed a deepening security crisis with substantial Taliban activity in at least 97 percent of the war-ravaged country.
"The Council added that the militants now have a permanent presence in 80 percent of the country." [14]
The United States is not alone in sinking deeper into the Afghan morass.
On September 14 U.S. ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder, in celebrating the "resilience and deep-seated support from our allies for what is happening in Afghanistan," was equally enthusiastic in proclaiming "Over 40 percent of the body bags that leave Afghanistan do not go to the U.S. They go to other countries...." [15]
Daalder also gave the lie to earlier claims that NATO troop increases leading up to last month's presidential election were temporary in nature by acknowledging that "Many of the extra troops that NATO countries sent to Afghanistan for the August presidential elections would stay on." [16]
Leading up to the Washington Post's publication of the McChrystal assessment, NATO's Military Committee held a two-day conference in Lisbon, Portugal which was attended by McChrystal and NATO's two Strategic Commanders, Admiral Stavridis (Supreme Allied Commander, Operations) and General Abrial (Supreme Allied Commander, Transformation) which "focused mainly on the operation in Afghanistan and on the New Strategic Concept." [17]
The 28 NATO defense chiefs present laid a wreath to the Alliance's first war dead, those killed in Afghanistan.
Earlier this month the Washington Post reported that "The U.S. military and NATO are launching a major overhaul of the way they recruit, train and equip Afghanistan's security forces," an announcement that came "in advance of expected recommendations by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal." [18]
The article quoted Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee:
"We're going to need many more trainers, hopefully including a much larger number of NATO trainers. We're going to need a surge of equipment that is coming out of Iraq and, instead of coming home, a great deal of it should be going to Afghanistan instead." [19]
According to the same report, this month NATO will "will establish a new command led by a three-star military officer to oversee recruiting and generating Afghan forces.
"The goal is to 'bring more coherence' to uncoordinated efforts by NATO contingents in Afghanistan while underscoring that the mission 'is not just America's challenge'..." [20]
Contributing to its quota of body bags, NATO has experienced losses in Afghanistan that have reached record levels. "According to the icasualties website, 363 foreign soldiers have died in Afghanistan so far this year, compared to 294 for all of 2008." [21]
This month Britain lost its 216th soldier in the nearly eight-year war. Canada lost its 131st. Denmark its 25th. Italy its 20th. Poland, where a recent poll showed 81 percent support for immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan, its 12th.
Russian ambassador to Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov, who had been in the nation in the 1980s, was cited by Associated Press on September 12 as reflecting that in 2002 the U.S. had 5,000 troops in the nation and "Taliban controlled just a small corner of the country's southeast."
"Now we have Taliban fighting in the peaceful Kunduz and Baghlan (provinces) with your (NATO's) 100,000 troops. And if this trend is the rule, if you bring 200,000 soldiers here, all of Afghanistan will be under the Taliban."
Associated Press also cited Kabulov's concern that "the U.S. and its allies are competing with Russia for influence in the energy-rich region....Afghanistan remains a strategic prize because of its location near the gas and oil fields of Iran, the Caspian Sea, Central Asia and the Persian Gulf."
He also said "Russia has questions about NATO's intentions in Afghanistan, which...lies outside of the alliance's 'political domain'" and "Moscow is concerned that NATO is building permanent bases in the region."
The concerns are legitimate in light of this month's latest quadrennial report by the Pentagon on security threats which "put emerging superpower China and former Cold War foe Russia alongside Iran and North Korea on a list of the four main nations challenging American interests." [22]
At the same time a U.S. military newspaper reported on statements by Pentagon chief Robert Gates:
"Gates said the roughly $6.5 billion he has proposed to upgrade the [Air Force] fleet assures U.S. domination of the skies for decades.
"By the time China produces its first - 5th generation - fighter, he said, the U.S. will have more than 1,000 F-22s and F-35s. And while the U.S. conducted 35,000 refueling missions last year, Russia performed about 30.
"The secretary also highlighted new efforts to support robust space and cyber commands, as well as the new Global Strike Command that oversees the nuclear arsenal." [23]
To add to Russian and Chinese apprehensions about NATO's role in South and Central Asia, ten days ago the U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan, which borders Russia and China, "offered to Kazakhstan to take part in the peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan."
At the opening ceremony of the NATO Steppe Eagle-2009 military exercises in that nation envoy Richard Hoagland said "Kazakhstan may again become part of the international NATO peacekeeping force in Afghanistan." [24]
Radio Free Europe reported on September 16 that NATO was to sign new agreements with Kyrgyzstan, which also borders China, for the use of the Manas Air Base that as many as 200,000 U.S. and NATO troops have passed through since the beginning of the Afghan war.
On the same day NATO' plans for expanding transit routes through the South Caucasus and the Caspian Sea region were described. "[T]he air corridor through Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan is the most feasible.
"This route will be best suited if ISAF transport planes fly directly to Baku from Turkey or any other NATO member....Moreover, it [Azerbaijan] is not a CSTO [Collective Security Treaty Organization] member, which allows Azerbaijan more freedom for maneuver in the region when dealing with NATO." [25]
Just as troops serving under NATO command in the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan now include those from almost fifty countries on five continents, so the broadening scope of the war is absorbing vaster tracts of Eurasia and the Middle East.
America's longest armed conflict since that in Indochina and NATO's first ground war threatens to not only remain the world's most dangerous conflagration but also one that plunges the 21st Century into a war without end.
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15364
Global Research, September 24, 2009
Stop NATO
Over the past week U.S. newspapers and television networks have been abuzz with reports that Washington and its NATO allies are planning an unprecedented increase of troops for the war in Afghanistan, even in addition to the 17,000 new American and several thousand NATO forces that have been committed to the war so far this year.
The number, based on as yet unsubstantiated reports of what U.S. and NATO commander Stanley McChrystal and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen have demanded of the White House, range from 10,000 to 45,000.
Fox News has cited figures as high as 45,000 more American soldiers and ABC News as many as 40,000. On September 15 the Christian Science Monitor wrote of "perhaps as many as 45,000."
The similarity of the estimates indicate that a number has been agreed upon and America's obedient media is preparing domestic audiences for the possibility of the largest escalation of foreign armed forces in Afghanistan's history. Only seven years ago the United States had 5,000 troops in the country, but was scheduled to have 68,000 by December even before the reports of new deployments surfaced.
An additional 45,000 troops would bring the U.S. total to 113,000. There are also 35,000 troops from some 50 other nations serving under NATO's International Security Assistance Force in the nation, which would raise combined troop strength under McChrystal's command to 148,000 if the larger number of rumored increases materializes.
As the former Soviet Union withdrew its soldiers from Afghanistan twenty years ago the New York Times reported "At the height of the Soviet commitment, according to Western intelligence estimates, there were 115,000 troops deployed." [1]
Nearly 150,000 U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan would represent the largest foreign military presence ever in the land.
Rather than addressing this historic watershed, the American media is full of innuendos and "privileged" speculation on who has leaked the information and why, as to commercial news operations the tawdry world of Byzantine intrigues among and between American politicians, generals and the Fourth Estate is of more importance that the lengthiest and largest war in the world.
One that has been estimated by the chief of the British armed forces and other leading Western officials to last decades and that has already been extended into Pakistan, a nation with a population almost six times that of Afghanistan and in possession of nuclear weapons.
Two weeks ago the Dutch media reported that during a visit to the Netherlands "General Stanley McChrystal [said] he is considering the possibility of merging...Operation Enduring Freedom with NATO's ISAF force." [2] That is, not only would he continue to command all U.S. and NATO troops, but the two commands would be melded into one.
The call for up to 45,000 more American troops was first adumbrated in mid-September by U.S. armed forces chief Michael Mullen, with the Associated Press stating "The top U.S. military officer says that winning in Afghanistan will probably mean sending more troops." [3]
Four days later, September 19, Reuters reported that "The commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan has drawn up a long-awaited and detailed request for additional troops but has not yet sent it to Washington, a spokesman said on Saturday.
"He said General Stanley McChrystal completed the document this week, setting out exactly how many U.S. and NATO troops, Afghan security force members and civilians he thinks he needs." [4]
The Pentagon spokesman mentioned above, Lieutenant-Colonel Tadd Sholtis, said, "We're working with Washington as well as the other NATO participants about how it's best to submit this," refusing to divulge any details. [5]
Two days later the Washington Post published a 66-page "redacted" version of General McChrystal's Commander's Initial Assessment which began with this background information:
"On 26 June, 2009, the United States Secretary of Defense directed Commander, United States Central Command (CDRUSCENTCOM), to provide a multidisciplinary assessment of the situation in Afghanistan. On 02 July, 2009, Commander, NATO International Security Assistance Force (COMISAF) / U.S. Forces-Afghanistan (USFOR-A), received direction from CDRUSCENTCOM to complete the overall review.
"On 01 July, 2009, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe and NATO Secretary General also issued a similar directive.
"COMISAF [Commander, NATO International Security Assistance Force] subsequently issued an order to the ISAF staff and component commands to conduct a comprehensive review to assess the overall situation, review plans and ongoing efforts, and identify revisions to operational, tactical and strategic guidance."
The main focus of the report, not surprising given McChrystal's previous role as head of the Joint Special Operations Command, the Pentagon's preeminent special operations unit, in Iraq, is concentrated and intensified counterinsurgency war.
It includes the demand that "NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) requires a new strategy....This new strategy must also be properly resourced and executed through an integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency campaign....This is a different kind of fight. We must conduct classic counterinsurgency operations in an environment that is uniquely complex....Success demands a comprehensive counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign."
McChrystal's evaluation also indicates that the war will not only escalate within Afghanistan but will also be stepped up inside Pakistan and may even target Iran.
"Afghanistan's insurgency is clearly supported from Pakistan. Senior leaders of the major Afghan insurgent groups are based in Pakistan, are linked with al Qaeda and other violent extremist groups, and are reportedly aided by some elements of Pakistan's ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence].
"Iranian Qods Force [part of the nation's army] is reportedly training fighters for certain Taliban groups and providing other forms of military assistance to insurgents. Iran's current policies and actions do not pose a short-term threat to the mission, but Iran has the capability to threaten the mission in the future."
That the ISI has had links to armed extremists is no revelation. The Pentagon and the CIA worked hand-in-glove with it from 1979 onward to subvert successive governments in Afghanistan. That Iran is "training fighters for certain Taliban groups" is a provocational fabrication.
As to who is responsible for the thirty-year disaster that is Afghanistan, McChrystal's assessment contains a sentence that may get past most readers. It is this:
"The major insurgent groups in order of their threat to the mission are: the Quetta Shura Taliban (05T), the Haqqani Network (HQN), and the Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin (HiG)."
The last-named is the guerrilla force of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the largest recipient of hundreds of millions (perhaps billions) of U.S. dollars provided by the CIA to the Peshawar Seven Mujahideen bloc fighting the Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan from 1978-1992.
While hosting Hekmatyar and his allies at the White House in 1985 then President Ronald Reagan referred to his guests as "the moral equivalents of America's founding fathers.”
Throughout the 1980s the CIA official in large part tasked to assist the Mujahideen with funds, arms and training was Robert Gates, now U.S. Secretary of Defense.
Last December BBC News reported:
"In his book, From the Shadows, published in 1996, Mr Gates defended the role of the CIA in undertaking covert action which, he argued, helped to win the Cold War.
"In a speech in 1999, Mr Gates said that its most important role was in Afghanistan.
"'CIA had important successes in covert action. Perhaps the most consequential of all was Afghanistan where CIA, with its management, funnelled billions of dollars in supplies and weapons to the mujahideen, and the resistance was thus able to fight the vaunted Soviet army to a standoff and eventually force a political decision to withdraw,' he said." [6]
Now according to McChrystal the same Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who was cultivated and sponsored by McChrystal's current boss, Gates, is in charge of one of the three groups the Pentagon and NATO are waging ever-escalating counterinsurgency operations in South Asia against.
To make matters even more intriguing, former British foreign secretary Robin Cook - as loyal a pro-American Atlanticist as exists - conceded in the Guardian on July 8, 2005 that "Bin Laden was...a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally 'the database', was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians."
Russian analyst and vice president of the Center for Political Technologies Sergey Mikheev was quoted in early September as contending that "Afghanistan is a stage in the division of the world after the bipolar system failed. They [U.S. and NATO] wanted to consolidate their grip on Eurasia...and deployed a lot of troops there. The Taliban card was played, although nobody had been interested in the Taliban before." [7]
Pentagon chief Gates' 27 years in the CIA, including his tenure as director of the agency from 1991-1993, is being brought to bear on the Afghan war according to the Los Angeles Times of September 19, 2009, which revealed that "The CIA is deploying teams of spies, analysts and paramilitary operatives to Afghanistan, part of a broad intelligence 'surge' that will make its station there among the largest in the agency's history, U.S. officials say.
"When complete, the CIA's presence in the country is expected to rival the size of its massive stations in Iraq and Vietnam at the height of those wars. Precise numbers are classified, but one U.S. official said the agency already has nearly 700 employees in Afghanistan.
"The intelligence expansion goes beyond the CIA to involve every major spy service, officials said, including the National Security Agency, which intercepts calls and e-mails, as well as the Defense Intelligence Agency, which tracks military threats."
U.S. and NATO Commander McChrystal will put the CIA to immediate use in his plans for an all-out counterinsurgency campaign. The Los Angeles Times article added:
"McChrystal is expected to expand the use of teams that combine CIA operatives with special operations soldiers. In Iraq, where he oversaw the special operations forces from 2003 to 2008, McChrystal used such teams to speed up the cycle of gathering intelligence and carrying out raids aimed at killing or capturing insurgents.
"The CIA is also carrying out an escalating campaign of unmanned Predator missile strikes on Al Qaeda and insurgent strongholds in Pakistan. The number of strikes so far this year, 37, already exceeds the 2008 total, according to data compiled by the Long War Journal website, which tracks Predator strikes in Pakistan."
Indeed, on September 13 it was reported that "Two NATO fighter jets reportedly flew inside Pakistan's airspace for nearly two hours on Saturday.
"The airspace violation took place in different parts of the Khyber Agency bordering the Afghan border." [8]
Two days later "NATO fighter jets in Afghanistan...violated Pakistani airspace and dropped bombs on the country's northwest region.
"NATO warplanes bombed the South Waziristan tribal region....Moreover, CIA operated spy drone planes continued low-altitude flights in several towns of the Waziristan region." [9]
The dramatic upsurge in CIA deployments in South Asia won't be limited to Afghanistan. Neighboring Pakistan will be further overrun by U.S. intelligence operatives also.
On September 12 a petition was filed in the Supreme Court of Pakistan contesting the announced expansion of the U.S. embassy in the nation's capital.
"Pakistani media have been reporting that the United States plans to deploy a large number of marines with the plan to expand its embassy in Islamabad." [10]
The challenge was organized by Barrister Zafarullah Khan, who "said that Saudi Arabia was also trying to get 700,000 acres (283,400 hectares) of land in the country."
He was quoted on the day of the presentation of the petition as warning "Giving away Pakistani land to U.S. and Arab countries in this fashion is a threat for the stability and sovereignty of the country" and "further added that the purpose of giving the land to U.S. embassy was to establish an American military base...there.
"He maintained that such a big land was enough even to construct a military airport." [11]
Intelligence personnel and special forces are being matched by military equipment in the intensification of the West's war in South Asia.
On September 10 Reuters revealed in an article titled "U.S. eyes military equipment in Iraq for Pakistan" that "The Pentagon has proposed transferring U.S. military equipment from Iraq to Pakistani security forces to help Islamabad step up its offensive against the Taliban...."
A U.S. armed forces publication a few days afterward wrote that "U.S. hardware is moving out of Iraq by the ton, much of it going straight to the overstretched forces in increasingly volatile Afghanistan" and "The U.S. military has already started moving an estimated 1.5 million pieces of equipment - everything from batteries to tanks - by ground, rail and air either to Afghanistan for immediate use...." [12]
In the middle of this month "U.S. military leaders infused Gen. Stanley McChrystal's ideas of how to win the war in Afghanistan" by conducting a large-scale counterinsurgency exercise in Grafenwoehr, Germany.
"Dozens of Pashtun speakers joined more than 6,500 U.S. troops and civilians in an exercise for the Afghanistan-bound 173rd Airborne Brigade and Iraq-bound 12th Combat Aviation Brigade. It was the largest such exercise ever held by the U.S. military outside of the United States...." [13]
The Pentagon and NATO have their work cut out for them.
"A security map by the London-based International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) showed a deepening security crisis with substantial Taliban activity in at least 97 percent of the war-ravaged country.
"The Council added that the militants now have a permanent presence in 80 percent of the country." [14]
The United States is not alone in sinking deeper into the Afghan morass.
On September 14 U.S. ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder, in celebrating the "resilience and deep-seated support from our allies for what is happening in Afghanistan," was equally enthusiastic in proclaiming "Over 40 percent of the body bags that leave Afghanistan do not go to the U.S. They go to other countries...." [15]
Daalder also gave the lie to earlier claims that NATO troop increases leading up to last month's presidential election were temporary in nature by acknowledging that "Many of the extra troops that NATO countries sent to Afghanistan for the August presidential elections would stay on." [16]
Leading up to the Washington Post's publication of the McChrystal assessment, NATO's Military Committee held a two-day conference in Lisbon, Portugal which was attended by McChrystal and NATO's two Strategic Commanders, Admiral Stavridis (Supreme Allied Commander, Operations) and General Abrial (Supreme Allied Commander, Transformation) which "focused mainly on the operation in Afghanistan and on the New Strategic Concept." [17]
The 28 NATO defense chiefs present laid a wreath to the Alliance's first war dead, those killed in Afghanistan.
Earlier this month the Washington Post reported that "The U.S. military and NATO are launching a major overhaul of the way they recruit, train and equip Afghanistan's security forces," an announcement that came "in advance of expected recommendations by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal." [18]
The article quoted Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee:
"We're going to need many more trainers, hopefully including a much larger number of NATO trainers. We're going to need a surge of equipment that is coming out of Iraq and, instead of coming home, a great deal of it should be going to Afghanistan instead." [19]
According to the same report, this month NATO will "will establish a new command led by a three-star military officer to oversee recruiting and generating Afghan forces.
"The goal is to 'bring more coherence' to uncoordinated efforts by NATO contingents in Afghanistan while underscoring that the mission 'is not just America's challenge'..." [20]
Contributing to its quota of body bags, NATO has experienced losses in Afghanistan that have reached record levels. "According to the icasualties website, 363 foreign soldiers have died in Afghanistan so far this year, compared to 294 for all of 2008." [21]
This month Britain lost its 216th soldier in the nearly eight-year war. Canada lost its 131st. Denmark its 25th. Italy its 20th. Poland, where a recent poll showed 81 percent support for immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan, its 12th.
Russian ambassador to Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov, who had been in the nation in the 1980s, was cited by Associated Press on September 12 as reflecting that in 2002 the U.S. had 5,000 troops in the nation and "Taliban controlled just a small corner of the country's southeast."
"Now we have Taliban fighting in the peaceful Kunduz and Baghlan (provinces) with your (NATO's) 100,000 troops. And if this trend is the rule, if you bring 200,000 soldiers here, all of Afghanistan will be under the Taliban."
Associated Press also cited Kabulov's concern that "the U.S. and its allies are competing with Russia for influence in the energy-rich region....Afghanistan remains a strategic prize because of its location near the gas and oil fields of Iran, the Caspian Sea, Central Asia and the Persian Gulf."
He also said "Russia has questions about NATO's intentions in Afghanistan, which...lies outside of the alliance's 'political domain'" and "Moscow is concerned that NATO is building permanent bases in the region."
The concerns are legitimate in light of this month's latest quadrennial report by the Pentagon on security threats which "put emerging superpower China and former Cold War foe Russia alongside Iran and North Korea on a list of the four main nations challenging American interests." [22]
At the same time a U.S. military newspaper reported on statements by Pentagon chief Robert Gates:
"Gates said the roughly $6.5 billion he has proposed to upgrade the [Air Force] fleet assures U.S. domination of the skies for decades.
"By the time China produces its first - 5th generation - fighter, he said, the U.S. will have more than 1,000 F-22s and F-35s. And while the U.S. conducted 35,000 refueling missions last year, Russia performed about 30.
"The secretary also highlighted new efforts to support robust space and cyber commands, as well as the new Global Strike Command that oversees the nuclear arsenal." [23]
To add to Russian and Chinese apprehensions about NATO's role in South and Central Asia, ten days ago the U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan, which borders Russia and China, "offered to Kazakhstan to take part in the peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan."
At the opening ceremony of the NATO Steppe Eagle-2009 military exercises in that nation envoy Richard Hoagland said "Kazakhstan may again become part of the international NATO peacekeeping force in Afghanistan." [24]
Radio Free Europe reported on September 16 that NATO was to sign new agreements with Kyrgyzstan, which also borders China, for the use of the Manas Air Base that as many as 200,000 U.S. and NATO troops have passed through since the beginning of the Afghan war.
On the same day NATO' plans for expanding transit routes through the South Caucasus and the Caspian Sea region were described. "[T]he air corridor through Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan is the most feasible.
"This route will be best suited if ISAF transport planes fly directly to Baku from Turkey or any other NATO member....Moreover, it [Azerbaijan] is not a CSTO [Collective Security Treaty Organization] member, which allows Azerbaijan more freedom for maneuver in the region when dealing with NATO." [25]
Just as troops serving under NATO command in the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan now include those from almost fifty countries on five continents, so the broadening scope of the war is absorbing vaster tracts of Eurasia and the Middle East.
America's longest armed conflict since that in Indochina and NATO's first ground war threatens to not only remain the world's most dangerous conflagration but also one that plunges the 21st Century into a war without end.
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