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Thursday, February 25, 2010
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
American Genocides: Is Haiti Next?
Does Obama plan a mass population culling in Haiti?
Reported by Stephen Lendman on Freedoms Phoenix
Date: February 23, 2010
Subject: Imperialism
American Genocides: Is Haiti Next? - by Stephen Lendman
Distinguished historian, scholar and activist Gabriel Kolko studied "the nature and purpose of (American) power (since) the 1870s," calling it "violen(t), racis(t), repressi(ve) at home and abroad (and) cultural(ly) mendaci(ous)." It's been the same since inception, historian Howard Zinn calling colonial America:
"a class society from the beginning. America started off as a society of rich and poor, people with enormous grants of land and people with no land. And there were riots, there were bread riots in Boston, and riots and rebellions all over the colonies, of poor against rich, of tenants breaking into jails to release people who were in prison for nonpayment of debt. There was class conflict. We try to" portray a benevolent nation. We weren't then. We're not now.
We waged war against Native Americans, African-Americans, ordinary Americans, the poor, disadvantaged and women. Since inception, we committed "genocide," according to Zinn: "brutally and purposefully....by our rulers in the name of progress, (who then buried ugly truths) in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth."
At home, profit over human lives and welfare took millions of working American lives. Abroad it was far worse, the result of direct or proxy wars, death squads, torture, occupations, alliances with despots, and neglect. Against indigenous and black Americans, it was worst of all. More on that below.
America's Genocidal Legacy
In his many books, scholar/activist Ward Churchill documented genocide in America. In "A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present," he wrote:
After four centuries of systematic slaughter from 1492 - 1892, "the US Census Bureau concluded that there were fewer than a quarter-million indigenous people surviving," in America, reduced to at most 3% of their original numbers.
Millions were "hacked apart with axes and swords, burned alive and trampled under horses, hunted as game and fed to dogs, shot, beaten, stabbed, scalped for bounty, hanged on meathooks and thrown over the sides of ships at sea, worked to death as slave laborers, intentionally starved and frozen to death during a multitude of forced marches and internments, and, in an unknown number of instances, deliberately infected with epidemic diseases."
Shockingly, "every one of these practices (still continues in new forms). The American holocaust was and remains unparalleled, in terms of its scope, ferocity and continuance over time," thereafter suppressed by denial or silence.
Consider the grimness of the African holocaust, the result of 500 years of colonialization, oppression, exploitation, and slavery, much of it trafficked to America. Black Africans were captured, branded, chained, force-marched to ports, beaten, kept in cages, stripped of their humanity, and often their lives.
Around 100 million or more humans were sold like cattle, many millions perishing during the Middle Passage, a horrifying experience packing human cargo under deplorable conditions in spaces the size of a coffin, in some cases one atop another, in extreme discomfort, with poor ventilation, and so little sanitation that dysentery, smallpox, ophthalmia (causing blindness) and other diseases became epidemics. Conditions below deck were dark, filthy, slimy, full of blood, vomit, and human excrement.
Women were beaten and raped. For some, claustrophobia caused insanity. Others were flogged or clubbed to death. Anyone thought to be diseased was dumped overboard like garbage. Arrivals with three-fourths of departing cargos were considered successful voyages. The Middle Passage claimed as many as half of those trafficked, estimated by some up to 50 million.
Howard Zinn called American slavery "the most cruel form in history: the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture; the reduction of the slave to less than human status by the use of racial hatred, with that relentless clarity based on color, where white was master, black was slave." Is it any different today?
In this environment, blacks were helpless, mistreatment common. Slavery grew with the plantation system. It was "psychological and physical. Slaves were taught discipline....the idea of their own inferiority to 'know their place,' to see blackness as a sign of subordination, to be awed by (their master's) power," to subordinate their will to his.
Zinn described "a complex web of historical threads to ensnare blacks for slavery in America:" poor settlers needing labor, the profit motive, racism, status, and human exploitation to get them - elements today affecting wage slaves and others in agriculture, domestic service, restaurant and hotel work, sweatshop factories, prostitution and sex services, and on US offshore military bases employing forced labor under horrific conditions.
The Conquest and Occupation of the Philippines - the Beginning of "The American Century" (1898 - 1902)
In 1898, President William McKinley created a pretext for war with Spain, forced the Spanish government to cede the Philippines, occupied the country, fought a dirty war, and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Filipinos. Theodore Roosevelt succeeded him, continued the carnage, and won a Nobel Peace Prize.
Expressing his outrage on October 15, 1900, Mark Twain said:
"....I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem....And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land....We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields, burned their villages, turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors, (and) subjugated the remaining ten million by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket...."
He proposed a new American flag "with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones." He was appalled that General Jacob Smith ordered his troops to:
"Kill and burn....this is no time to take prisoners....the more you kill and burn, the better. Kill all above the age of ten....turn (the country into) a howling wilderness."
Occupied Haiti Being Readied for Plunder, Exploitation, and Genocide
On January 20, the Nation magazine's John Nichols offered a disgraceful imperial defense and misreading of Haiti's plight in his article titled, "Obama's Fine Moment," saying:
"Barack Obama has responded to the devastating earthquake in Haiti with precisely the combination of dignity and determination that Americans....expected when they elected him. (He showed) a spirit that has the potential to reassure not just Haitians but Americans."
After its calamitous January 12 earthquake, the reality is far different. Haiti is now occupied for the duration. Conditions on the ground are horrific. Essential aid is obstructed and limited. The likely death toll tops 300,000 and hundreds of thousands more injured, many seriously. A health emergency exists. Malnutrition is rampant, clean water scarce, sanitation nearly non-existent, and tents are available only for a small fraction of those needing them, forcing hundreds of thousands to live in the open.
Diarrheal illnesses and acute respiratory infections are widespread, and signs of other outbreaks are apparent, including tetanus, measles, TB, malaria, dengue fever, diphtheria, typhoid, and others. Their calamitous potential represents a real and growing danger, threatening hundreds of thousands of lives - unaided Haitians perhaps left on their own to perish.
In his February 19 article headlined, "Poor Sanitation in Haiti's Tent Camps Adds to Risk of Disease," New York Times correspondent Simon Romero ignored the tent shortage, but cited public officials warning about the danger of "major disease outbreaks, including cholera.."
Already "a spike in illnesses like typhoid and shigellosis (a form of dysentery)" is evident. Unmentioned are the many others breaking out, the result of contaminated food, water, and flies that "become vectors by taking fecal waste from one place to another," according to Dr. Robert Redfield, co-founder of the University of Maryland's Institute of Human Virology. He added that rain increases the likelihood of spreading diseases like malaria, dengue fever, and many others.
The latest OCHA report understates the seriousness. Saying food aid has "reached over 3.4 million people," unexplained is it's being obstructed, way inadequate, sporadic, and left out entirely are poor areas like Cite Soleil. Also, the half million Haitians who've left or been forced out of Port-au-Prince are largely on their own. Most Haitians have no clean water, use what they can, and risk contracting widespread waterborne diseases, compounding the spreading airborne ones.
OCHA does highlight poor sanitation, only 17,000 tents for 1.2 million or more Haitians without shelter, most living in the open as the rainy season approaches, risking mounting death tolls for deaths from spreading diseases and too little done to treat them.
Yet as of February 25, $680 million in aid has been raised, way over the UN's initial $570 million goal, now upped to nearly $1.5 billion. Where's the money? Why isn't it delivering aid? Why is so little available and conditions on the ground horrific and worsening?
The post-2004 East Asian tsunami is instructive. Around $1.2 billion in aid relief was raised, mostly used for development, not victims. They got nothing, were forced into permanent shantytowns, and are still there. High-end tourism took precedence over rebuilding their homes and restoring their way of life.
That's what Haitians now face - permanent displacement on their own to facilitate plunder, exploitation and perhaps mass deaths because of no aid, too little, and no disease prevention or treatment.
If genocide is planned, that's the model. Henry Kissinger's secret 1974 National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200) was an earlier one. Shaped by Rockefeller interests, it was an action plan for global population reduction - culling unwanted, unneeded "useless eaters."
The scheme involved:
-- mandatory birth control;
-- involuntary sterilizations;
-- legalized abortion;
-- indoctrination of children; and
-- other coercive methods, including withholding disaster relief and food aid when most needed.
The plan specifically said America would conceal its role to avoid charges of imperialism, so would induce the UN and NGOs to do its dirty work.
NSSM 200 was never renounced. Only certain portions were amended, so the basic idea remains policy to achieve global population control by reducing unwanted numbers.
Earlier, compliance was a prerequisite for development aid, the idea being to reduce world head counts by 500 million by 2000. Kissinger wanted control of global resources and new US grain markets in countries like India, Brazil, Nigeria, Mexico and Indonesia, culling populations to facilitate it.
USAID directed Brazil's program, and organizations like the International Planned Parenthood Federation and Family Health International were involved. After 14 years of involuntary sterilizations, the Brazilian Health Ministry estimated 44% of women from 14 - 55 were sterile, including 90% of African descent, the result of extermination by subterfuge, perhaps the same scheme planned for Haiti.
Involuntary birth control, sterilization, starvation, or similar schemes is genocide - precisely what Haitians face by starvation, depravation, disease, neglect, and forced toxic vaccinations.
In early February, a vaccination program began, children under seven for rubella and DPT (diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus), older children and adults for diphtheria and tetanus. Besides involuntary sterilization, Dr. Viera Scheibner, the world's foremost vaccine expert, explains the other dangers in her writing.
She says all vaccines contain harmful toxins, undermine human health, weaken the immune system, often causing the diseases they're designed to prevent. A host of auto-immune ones result, including diabetes, multiple sclerosis, ALS, arthritis, fibromyalgia, rashes, chronic fatigue, memory loss, seizures, dizziness, ulcers, non-healing skin lesions, neuropsychiatric problems, anaemia, chronic diarrhea, and others contributing to serious illnesses and early deaths.
Vaccines can also be bioengineered with deadly toxins able to debilitate, cause disease, and spread epidemics. Given America's genocidal history, perhaps the Obama administration plans one for Haiti. It bears watching and quoting the Genocide Convention.
Its definition under Article II includes "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (and)
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
Genocide is "an odious scourge....a (high) crime under international law....condemned by the civilized world." Historically, its member states commit the worst of them, directly or through proxies, America especially guilty for over two centuries, including the modern era.
America's Genocidal Wars - WW II Terror Bombings
Unlike strategic bombing to destroy an adversary's economic and military might, terror bombings target civilians to break their morale, cause panic, weaken an enemy's will to fight, and inflict mass casualties and punishment.
Geneva and other international laws prohibit it. The Laws of War: Laws and Customs of War on Land (1907 Hague IV Convention's Article 25 states:
"The attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or building which are undefended is prohibited."
Fourth Geneva protects civilians in time of war prohibiting violence of any type against them and requiring treatment for the sick and wounded. The 1945 Nuremberg Principles forbid "crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity." These include "inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war," including indiscriminate killing and "wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity."
In his book, "The Good War: An Oral History of World War II," Studs Terkel explained its good and bad sides through people who experienced it. The good was that America "was the only country among the combatants that was neither invaded nor bombed. Ours were the only cities not blasted to rubble."
The bad was that it "warped our view of how we look at things today (seeing them) in terms of war" and the notion that they're good or why else fight them. This "twisted memory....encourages (people) to be willing, almost eager, to use military force" as a way to solve problems, never mind that they exacerbate them. Wars are never just, in the nuclear age are "lunatic" acts, and horrific earlier by any standard.
America and Britain's carpet/firebombing of Dresden was barbaric against a defenseless German city and one of Europe's great cultural centers. In less than 14 hours, it was ruined, the result of 700,000 phosphorous bombs on 1.2 million people, killing as many as 100,000. City center temperatures reached 1,600 degrees centigrade. Bodies became molten flesh, mostly civilians and wounded soldiers. Dresden had no military importance. Destroying it was morally indefensible. So was firebombing Tokyo.
The war was effectively over, Japan trying to surrender but Roosevelt spurned overtures. He had other plans, one the firebombing Tokyo before the greater ones under Truman in August. On February 24, 1945, one square mile of the city was destroyed before the major March 6 attack demolishing 16 square miles, killing around 100,000 in the firestorm, injuring many more, and leaving over a million homeless. Five dozen other Japanese cities were also firebombed at a time most of the country's structures were wooden and easily consumed.
Yet early in 1945, Japan sent peace feelers, and two days before the February Yalta Conference, Douglas MacArthur sent Roosevelt a 40-page summary of its terms. They were nearly unconditional. The Japanese would accept an occupation, cease hostilities, surrender its arms, remove all troops from occupied territories, submit to criminal war trials, let its industries be regulated, asking only that their Emperor be retained.
Roosevelt categorically refused. So did Truman months before using atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By December, their combined death tolls topped 200,000, but they rose in succeeding months and years. Radiation poisoning kills or causes grievous illnesses, disfiguration, and birth defects. Decades later, they're still being felt. It was gratuitous slaughter against a prostrate country on the verge of surrender, lies then used to justify it.
The attacks were the first salvo of the Cold War, showing the Soviets our strength. Howard Zinn added other reasons - "tin, rubber, oil, corporate profit (and) imperial arrogance."
New Genocides for Old
Post-WW II, America had no enemies nor was any country a threat. Yet millions of North Koreans and Southeast Asians were gratuitously slaughtered to complete Washington's conquest of Asia. In both cases, US confrontations began hostilities, unprovoked acts of war to install client regimes.
Korean expert Bruce Cumings explained "the extraordinary destructiveness of the United States air campaigns against North Korea, from the widespread and continuous use of firebombing, to threats to use nuclear and chemical weapons, and the destruction of huge North Korean dams in the final states of war. (The) air war leveled North Korea and killed millions of civilians. (There was no escape, and by) 1952 just about everything in northern and central Korea has been completely leveled. What was left of the population survived in caves."
Of the North's 22 major cities, 18 were half or more obliterated, the large industrial ones 75 - 100% destroyed, and villages reduced to "low, wide mounds of violent ashes." This was "limited war." Achieving no more than an armistice, a stalemate, America was on a roll. Southeast Asia was next.
Gabriel Kolko called it a predictable consequence of America's ambition, strengths, weaknesses, and quest for world dominance - one conquest at a time on the way to full control.
Like Korea, bombings were horrendous and indiscriminate, dropping eight million tons from 1965 - 1973, threefold WW II's tonnage, amounting to 300 tons for every Vietnamese man, woman and child.
As in Korea, napalm and other incendiary devices were used, plus terror weapons like anti-personnel cluster bombs spewing thousands of metal pellets, indiscriminately hitting everyone in their path.
From 1961 - 1971, dioxin-containing defoliant Agent Orange was used, mainly in the South, Cambodia and Laos. Millions of gallons were sprayed with devastating consequences because dioxin is one of the most toxic known substances, a potent carcinogenic human immune system suppressant. It accumulates in adipose tissue and the liver, alters living cell genetic structures, causes congenital disorders and birth defects, and contributes to diseases like cancer and type two diabetes.
In 1970, Operation Tailwind used sarin nerve gas in Laos, causing many gratuitous deaths. In 1998, former Joint Chiefs Chairman, Admiral Thomas Moorer, confirmed its use on CNN. Then, under Pentagon pressure, the cable channel retracted the report and fired its reporter and producers for refusing to disavow it.
The war also engulfed Cambodia and Laos killing around 600,000, mostly civilians, and destroying dozens of towns, villages and hamlets - again with secret bombings and terror weapons.
Both in Korea and Southeast Asia, three to four million were killed, vast amounts of destruction inflicted, and incalculable levels of human suffering felt to this day. It was genocide by any definition.
So is America's complicity in Palestine, funding Israel's militarism, belligerence and occupation, causing an estimated 300,000 post-1967 deaths and much more, including 3,600 avoidable under aged five ones annually. In an early 2009 report, UNICEF said:
-- "Armed conflict (kills) dozens of children each year....;"
-- since 2000, poverty has dramatically worsened;
-- in the West Bank, militarized control affects access to jobs, schools and health care;
-- in Gaza, conditions are especially horrendous;
-- throughout the Territories, children are threatened by landmines and other unexploded ordnance;
-- "chronic malnutrition affects nearly 10 per cent of children under age five," and in Gaza conditions are "acute;" and
-- daily violence and deprivation take lives and produce anxiety, phobias and/or depression.
By providing Israel with around $3 billion annually in direct aid, undisclosed additional amounts, the latest weapons and technology, and much more, America is complicit in its crimes - what Palestinian scholar Elias Akleh calls a Palestinian Holocaust, he defines as a "genocidal crime against people based on their ethnicity," one that continues daily, especially in Gaza under siege.
The dirty 1970s and 80s Central American wars killed over 300,000 people, tortured hundreds of thousands throughout the Americas, and drove millions into exile. A June 1986 International Tribunal on Genocide in Central America cited the period 1970 - 1986 experiencing sporadic to intense violence:
-- "verging on a near total break-down of the state institutions and open warfare between state governments, competing rebel forces challenging state authorities and indigenous" peoples. "In the course of resurgent violence, acts of genocide and ethnocide (were) committed against indigenous groups. (Allegations) of state sponsored and rebel force sponsored genocide against indigenous peoples (were) repeatedly made throughout the course of the last fifteen years," including massacres, torture, forced military service, land seizures, arbitrary arrests and imprisonments, population relocations, and attacks amounting to genocide under the UN Convention.
"That there is sufficient evidence to warrant the convening of a (genocide) tribunal goes without question."
America was complicit in the 1990s Rwanda massacres, by militarizing Uganda, funding the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and its Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) to displace France and become Central Africa's dominant power, including in eastern Congo. It used its RPA and Ugandan proxies in Congo's civil war for control of its eastern and southern mining resources, killing millions of Congolese (including by disease, malnutrition and related violence) to secure them, including diamonds, gold, copper, tin, timber, coltan and cobalt (from 64 - 80% of world reserves), treasures for the taking, some of them vital for defense purposes.
Operation Desert Storm began on January 17, 1991, a criminal, gratuitous mass slaughter and destruction of essential to life facilities, including:
-- power plants and dams;
-- water purification facilities;
-- sewage treatment and disposal systems;
-- telephone and other communications;
-- hospitals;
-- schools and mosques;
-- around 20,000 homes, apartments and other dwellings;
-- irrigation sites;
-- food processing, storage and distribution facilities;
-- hotels and retail establishments;
-- transportation infrastructure;
-- oil wells, pipelines, refineries and storage tanks;
-- chemical plants, factories and other commercial operations;
-- government buildings and historical sites; and
-- civilian shelters targeting of innocent men, women and children.
Tens of thousands were gratuitously killed, as many as 200,000 according to independent estimates. Twelve years of genocidal sanctions followed, killing as many as 1.7 million, two-thirds of them children under age five.
From 2003 - 2009, 2.5 million or more died from violent or non-violent causes, again mostly young children, to turn Iraq into a free market paradise, its people reduced to serfs, as part of a greater aim for global dominance and control of world resources and markets.
The 1990s Balkan wars followed the same pattern, dividing Yugoslavia into separate states, culminating with the US-NATO 1999 terror bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia - Serbia-Kosovo. For two and a half months, about 3,000 sorties dropped thousands of tons of ordnance plus hundreds of ground-launched cruise missiles. As in the Gulf War, virtually all vital infrastructure was targeted as well as factories, other businesses, commercial and government buildings, schools, hospitals, churches, and historical landmarks. All were destroyed or heavily damaged.
An estimated $100 billion in damage was inflicted. A humanitarian disaster resulted. Environmental contamination was extensive. Large numbers were killed, injured or displaced, and two million lost their livelihoods. As in Korea, Southeast Asia, and Iraq, it was genocide under the Convention. Afghanistan and Iraq were next, the latter explained above.
September 11 was the pretext, then beginning October 7, 2001, Afghanistan was bombed, invaded and occupied like Iraq. Planned months in advance, war continues to control Eurasia, the key for world dominance, and no wonder. It has 75% of the world's population, most of its resources and physical wealth, three-fourths of its known oil and gas, and is the grandest of grand prizes for its ruler.
Marjah is the latest Afghan offensive, a PR stunt to show progress and perhaps save face for utter failure to this point, except for the human toll. From 2001 - 2007, UN Population Division data estimated 3.2 million deaths, including 700,000 children under age five.
Through 2009, around 4.5 million have died from violent or non-violent causes, including deprivation, disease, starvation, and neglect with no end of conflict in sight - an Afghan genocide like in Korea, Southeast Asia, Yugoslavia, Iraq, and now Haiti, occupied to be strip-mined for profit, its people mere sacrificial pawns, unneeded ones to be forfeited on its alter - an old story for perhaps the world's most long-suffering people.
For over 500 years, it's been victimized by severe oppression, slavery, despotism, colonization, reparations, embargoes, starvation, unrepayable debt, as well as natural and perhaps engineered calamities, the latest for plunder and exploitation - Haiti's centuries old curse, perhaps greater than ever going forward.
Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to the Lendman News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Monday - Friday at 10AM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on world and national issues. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://republicbroadcasting.org/Lendman
http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Article/065370-2010-02-22-american-genocides-is-haiti-next.htm
Reported by Stephen Lendman on Freedoms Phoenix
Date: February 23, 2010
Subject: Imperialism
American Genocides: Is Haiti Next? - by Stephen Lendman
Distinguished historian, scholar and activist Gabriel Kolko studied "the nature and purpose of (American) power (since) the 1870s," calling it "violen(t), racis(t), repressi(ve) at home and abroad (and) cultural(ly) mendaci(ous)." It's been the same since inception, historian Howard Zinn calling colonial America:
"a class society from the beginning. America started off as a society of rich and poor, people with enormous grants of land and people with no land. And there were riots, there were bread riots in Boston, and riots and rebellions all over the colonies, of poor against rich, of tenants breaking into jails to release people who were in prison for nonpayment of debt. There was class conflict. We try to" portray a benevolent nation. We weren't then. We're not now.
We waged war against Native Americans, African-Americans, ordinary Americans, the poor, disadvantaged and women. Since inception, we committed "genocide," according to Zinn: "brutally and purposefully....by our rulers in the name of progress, (who then buried ugly truths) in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth."
At home, profit over human lives and welfare took millions of working American lives. Abroad it was far worse, the result of direct or proxy wars, death squads, torture, occupations, alliances with despots, and neglect. Against indigenous and black Americans, it was worst of all. More on that below.
America's Genocidal Legacy
In his many books, scholar/activist Ward Churchill documented genocide in America. In "A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present," he wrote:
After four centuries of systematic slaughter from 1492 - 1892, "the US Census Bureau concluded that there were fewer than a quarter-million indigenous people surviving," in America, reduced to at most 3% of their original numbers.
Millions were "hacked apart with axes and swords, burned alive and trampled under horses, hunted as game and fed to dogs, shot, beaten, stabbed, scalped for bounty, hanged on meathooks and thrown over the sides of ships at sea, worked to death as slave laborers, intentionally starved and frozen to death during a multitude of forced marches and internments, and, in an unknown number of instances, deliberately infected with epidemic diseases."
Shockingly, "every one of these practices (still continues in new forms). The American holocaust was and remains unparalleled, in terms of its scope, ferocity and continuance over time," thereafter suppressed by denial or silence.
Consider the grimness of the African holocaust, the result of 500 years of colonialization, oppression, exploitation, and slavery, much of it trafficked to America. Black Africans were captured, branded, chained, force-marched to ports, beaten, kept in cages, stripped of their humanity, and often their lives.
Around 100 million or more humans were sold like cattle, many millions perishing during the Middle Passage, a horrifying experience packing human cargo under deplorable conditions in spaces the size of a coffin, in some cases one atop another, in extreme discomfort, with poor ventilation, and so little sanitation that dysentery, smallpox, ophthalmia (causing blindness) and other diseases became epidemics. Conditions below deck were dark, filthy, slimy, full of blood, vomit, and human excrement.
Women were beaten and raped. For some, claustrophobia caused insanity. Others were flogged or clubbed to death. Anyone thought to be diseased was dumped overboard like garbage. Arrivals with three-fourths of departing cargos were considered successful voyages. The Middle Passage claimed as many as half of those trafficked, estimated by some up to 50 million.
Howard Zinn called American slavery "the most cruel form in history: the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture; the reduction of the slave to less than human status by the use of racial hatred, with that relentless clarity based on color, where white was master, black was slave." Is it any different today?
In this environment, blacks were helpless, mistreatment common. Slavery grew with the plantation system. It was "psychological and physical. Slaves were taught discipline....the idea of their own inferiority to 'know their place,' to see blackness as a sign of subordination, to be awed by (their master's) power," to subordinate their will to his.
Zinn described "a complex web of historical threads to ensnare blacks for slavery in America:" poor settlers needing labor, the profit motive, racism, status, and human exploitation to get them - elements today affecting wage slaves and others in agriculture, domestic service, restaurant and hotel work, sweatshop factories, prostitution and sex services, and on US offshore military bases employing forced labor under horrific conditions.
The Conquest and Occupation of the Philippines - the Beginning of "The American Century" (1898 - 1902)
In 1898, President William McKinley created a pretext for war with Spain, forced the Spanish government to cede the Philippines, occupied the country, fought a dirty war, and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Filipinos. Theodore Roosevelt succeeded him, continued the carnage, and won a Nobel Peace Prize.
Expressing his outrage on October 15, 1900, Mark Twain said:
"....I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem....And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land....We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields, burned their villages, turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors, (and) subjugated the remaining ten million by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket...."
He proposed a new American flag "with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones." He was appalled that General Jacob Smith ordered his troops to:
"Kill and burn....this is no time to take prisoners....the more you kill and burn, the better. Kill all above the age of ten....turn (the country into) a howling wilderness."
Occupied Haiti Being Readied for Plunder, Exploitation, and Genocide
On January 20, the Nation magazine's John Nichols offered a disgraceful imperial defense and misreading of Haiti's plight in his article titled, "Obama's Fine Moment," saying:
"Barack Obama has responded to the devastating earthquake in Haiti with precisely the combination of dignity and determination that Americans....expected when they elected him. (He showed) a spirit that has the potential to reassure not just Haitians but Americans."
After its calamitous January 12 earthquake, the reality is far different. Haiti is now occupied for the duration. Conditions on the ground are horrific. Essential aid is obstructed and limited. The likely death toll tops 300,000 and hundreds of thousands more injured, many seriously. A health emergency exists. Malnutrition is rampant, clean water scarce, sanitation nearly non-existent, and tents are available only for a small fraction of those needing them, forcing hundreds of thousands to live in the open.
Diarrheal illnesses and acute respiratory infections are widespread, and signs of other outbreaks are apparent, including tetanus, measles, TB, malaria, dengue fever, diphtheria, typhoid, and others. Their calamitous potential represents a real and growing danger, threatening hundreds of thousands of lives - unaided Haitians perhaps left on their own to perish.
In his February 19 article headlined, "Poor Sanitation in Haiti's Tent Camps Adds to Risk of Disease," New York Times correspondent Simon Romero ignored the tent shortage, but cited public officials warning about the danger of "major disease outbreaks, including cholera.."
Already "a spike in illnesses like typhoid and shigellosis (a form of dysentery)" is evident. Unmentioned are the many others breaking out, the result of contaminated food, water, and flies that "become vectors by taking fecal waste from one place to another," according to Dr. Robert Redfield, co-founder of the University of Maryland's Institute of Human Virology. He added that rain increases the likelihood of spreading diseases like malaria, dengue fever, and many others.
The latest OCHA report understates the seriousness. Saying food aid has "reached over 3.4 million people," unexplained is it's being obstructed, way inadequate, sporadic, and left out entirely are poor areas like Cite Soleil. Also, the half million Haitians who've left or been forced out of Port-au-Prince are largely on their own. Most Haitians have no clean water, use what they can, and risk contracting widespread waterborne diseases, compounding the spreading airborne ones.
OCHA does highlight poor sanitation, only 17,000 tents for 1.2 million or more Haitians without shelter, most living in the open as the rainy season approaches, risking mounting death tolls for deaths from spreading diseases and too little done to treat them.
Yet as of February 25, $680 million in aid has been raised, way over the UN's initial $570 million goal, now upped to nearly $1.5 billion. Where's the money? Why isn't it delivering aid? Why is so little available and conditions on the ground horrific and worsening?
The post-2004 East Asian tsunami is instructive. Around $1.2 billion in aid relief was raised, mostly used for development, not victims. They got nothing, were forced into permanent shantytowns, and are still there. High-end tourism took precedence over rebuilding their homes and restoring their way of life.
That's what Haitians now face - permanent displacement on their own to facilitate plunder, exploitation and perhaps mass deaths because of no aid, too little, and no disease prevention or treatment.
If genocide is planned, that's the model. Henry Kissinger's secret 1974 National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200) was an earlier one. Shaped by Rockefeller interests, it was an action plan for global population reduction - culling unwanted, unneeded "useless eaters."
The scheme involved:
-- mandatory birth control;
-- involuntary sterilizations;
-- legalized abortion;
-- indoctrination of children; and
-- other coercive methods, including withholding disaster relief and food aid when most needed.
The plan specifically said America would conceal its role to avoid charges of imperialism, so would induce the UN and NGOs to do its dirty work.
NSSM 200 was never renounced. Only certain portions were amended, so the basic idea remains policy to achieve global population control by reducing unwanted numbers.
Earlier, compliance was a prerequisite for development aid, the idea being to reduce world head counts by 500 million by 2000. Kissinger wanted control of global resources and new US grain markets in countries like India, Brazil, Nigeria, Mexico and Indonesia, culling populations to facilitate it.
USAID directed Brazil's program, and organizations like the International Planned Parenthood Federation and Family Health International were involved. After 14 years of involuntary sterilizations, the Brazilian Health Ministry estimated 44% of women from 14 - 55 were sterile, including 90% of African descent, the result of extermination by subterfuge, perhaps the same scheme planned for Haiti.
Involuntary birth control, sterilization, starvation, or similar schemes is genocide - precisely what Haitians face by starvation, depravation, disease, neglect, and forced toxic vaccinations.
In early February, a vaccination program began, children under seven for rubella and DPT (diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus), older children and adults for diphtheria and tetanus. Besides involuntary sterilization, Dr. Viera Scheibner, the world's foremost vaccine expert, explains the other dangers in her writing.
She says all vaccines contain harmful toxins, undermine human health, weaken the immune system, often causing the diseases they're designed to prevent. A host of auto-immune ones result, including diabetes, multiple sclerosis, ALS, arthritis, fibromyalgia, rashes, chronic fatigue, memory loss, seizures, dizziness, ulcers, non-healing skin lesions, neuropsychiatric problems, anaemia, chronic diarrhea, and others contributing to serious illnesses and early deaths.
Vaccines can also be bioengineered with deadly toxins able to debilitate, cause disease, and spread epidemics. Given America's genocidal history, perhaps the Obama administration plans one for Haiti. It bears watching and quoting the Genocide Convention.
Its definition under Article II includes "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (and)
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
Genocide is "an odious scourge....a (high) crime under international law....condemned by the civilized world." Historically, its member states commit the worst of them, directly or through proxies, America especially guilty for over two centuries, including the modern era.
America's Genocidal Wars - WW II Terror Bombings
Unlike strategic bombing to destroy an adversary's economic and military might, terror bombings target civilians to break their morale, cause panic, weaken an enemy's will to fight, and inflict mass casualties and punishment.
Geneva and other international laws prohibit it. The Laws of War: Laws and Customs of War on Land (1907 Hague IV Convention's Article 25 states:
"The attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or building which are undefended is prohibited."
Fourth Geneva protects civilians in time of war prohibiting violence of any type against them and requiring treatment for the sick and wounded. The 1945 Nuremberg Principles forbid "crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity." These include "inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war," including indiscriminate killing and "wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity."
In his book, "The Good War: An Oral History of World War II," Studs Terkel explained its good and bad sides through people who experienced it. The good was that America "was the only country among the combatants that was neither invaded nor bombed. Ours were the only cities not blasted to rubble."
The bad was that it "warped our view of how we look at things today (seeing them) in terms of war" and the notion that they're good or why else fight them. This "twisted memory....encourages (people) to be willing, almost eager, to use military force" as a way to solve problems, never mind that they exacerbate them. Wars are never just, in the nuclear age are "lunatic" acts, and horrific earlier by any standard.
America and Britain's carpet/firebombing of Dresden was barbaric against a defenseless German city and one of Europe's great cultural centers. In less than 14 hours, it was ruined, the result of 700,000 phosphorous bombs on 1.2 million people, killing as many as 100,000. City center temperatures reached 1,600 degrees centigrade. Bodies became molten flesh, mostly civilians and wounded soldiers. Dresden had no military importance. Destroying it was morally indefensible. So was firebombing Tokyo.
The war was effectively over, Japan trying to surrender but Roosevelt spurned overtures. He had other plans, one the firebombing Tokyo before the greater ones under Truman in August. On February 24, 1945, one square mile of the city was destroyed before the major March 6 attack demolishing 16 square miles, killing around 100,000 in the firestorm, injuring many more, and leaving over a million homeless. Five dozen other Japanese cities were also firebombed at a time most of the country's structures were wooden and easily consumed.
Yet early in 1945, Japan sent peace feelers, and two days before the February Yalta Conference, Douglas MacArthur sent Roosevelt a 40-page summary of its terms. They were nearly unconditional. The Japanese would accept an occupation, cease hostilities, surrender its arms, remove all troops from occupied territories, submit to criminal war trials, let its industries be regulated, asking only that their Emperor be retained.
Roosevelt categorically refused. So did Truman months before using atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By December, their combined death tolls topped 200,000, but they rose in succeeding months and years. Radiation poisoning kills or causes grievous illnesses, disfiguration, and birth defects. Decades later, they're still being felt. It was gratuitous slaughter against a prostrate country on the verge of surrender, lies then used to justify it.
The attacks were the first salvo of the Cold War, showing the Soviets our strength. Howard Zinn added other reasons - "tin, rubber, oil, corporate profit (and) imperial arrogance."
New Genocides for Old
Post-WW II, America had no enemies nor was any country a threat. Yet millions of North Koreans and Southeast Asians were gratuitously slaughtered to complete Washington's conquest of Asia. In both cases, US confrontations began hostilities, unprovoked acts of war to install client regimes.
Korean expert Bruce Cumings explained "the extraordinary destructiveness of the United States air campaigns against North Korea, from the widespread and continuous use of firebombing, to threats to use nuclear and chemical weapons, and the destruction of huge North Korean dams in the final states of war. (The) air war leveled North Korea and killed millions of civilians. (There was no escape, and by) 1952 just about everything in northern and central Korea has been completely leveled. What was left of the population survived in caves."
Of the North's 22 major cities, 18 were half or more obliterated, the large industrial ones 75 - 100% destroyed, and villages reduced to "low, wide mounds of violent ashes." This was "limited war." Achieving no more than an armistice, a stalemate, America was on a roll. Southeast Asia was next.
Gabriel Kolko called it a predictable consequence of America's ambition, strengths, weaknesses, and quest for world dominance - one conquest at a time on the way to full control.
Like Korea, bombings were horrendous and indiscriminate, dropping eight million tons from 1965 - 1973, threefold WW II's tonnage, amounting to 300 tons for every Vietnamese man, woman and child.
As in Korea, napalm and other incendiary devices were used, plus terror weapons like anti-personnel cluster bombs spewing thousands of metal pellets, indiscriminately hitting everyone in their path.
From 1961 - 1971, dioxin-containing defoliant Agent Orange was used, mainly in the South, Cambodia and Laos. Millions of gallons were sprayed with devastating consequences because dioxin is one of the most toxic known substances, a potent carcinogenic human immune system suppressant. It accumulates in adipose tissue and the liver, alters living cell genetic structures, causes congenital disorders and birth defects, and contributes to diseases like cancer and type two diabetes.
In 1970, Operation Tailwind used sarin nerve gas in Laos, causing many gratuitous deaths. In 1998, former Joint Chiefs Chairman, Admiral Thomas Moorer, confirmed its use on CNN. Then, under Pentagon pressure, the cable channel retracted the report and fired its reporter and producers for refusing to disavow it.
The war also engulfed Cambodia and Laos killing around 600,000, mostly civilians, and destroying dozens of towns, villages and hamlets - again with secret bombings and terror weapons.
Both in Korea and Southeast Asia, three to four million were killed, vast amounts of destruction inflicted, and incalculable levels of human suffering felt to this day. It was genocide by any definition.
So is America's complicity in Palestine, funding Israel's militarism, belligerence and occupation, causing an estimated 300,000 post-1967 deaths and much more, including 3,600 avoidable under aged five ones annually. In an early 2009 report, UNICEF said:
-- "Armed conflict (kills) dozens of children each year....;"
-- since 2000, poverty has dramatically worsened;
-- in the West Bank, militarized control affects access to jobs, schools and health care;
-- in Gaza, conditions are especially horrendous;
-- throughout the Territories, children are threatened by landmines and other unexploded ordnance;
-- "chronic malnutrition affects nearly 10 per cent of children under age five," and in Gaza conditions are "acute;" and
-- daily violence and deprivation take lives and produce anxiety, phobias and/or depression.
By providing Israel with around $3 billion annually in direct aid, undisclosed additional amounts, the latest weapons and technology, and much more, America is complicit in its crimes - what Palestinian scholar Elias Akleh calls a Palestinian Holocaust, he defines as a "genocidal crime against people based on their ethnicity," one that continues daily, especially in Gaza under siege.
The dirty 1970s and 80s Central American wars killed over 300,000 people, tortured hundreds of thousands throughout the Americas, and drove millions into exile. A June 1986 International Tribunal on Genocide in Central America cited the period 1970 - 1986 experiencing sporadic to intense violence:
-- "verging on a near total break-down of the state institutions and open warfare between state governments, competing rebel forces challenging state authorities and indigenous" peoples. "In the course of resurgent violence, acts of genocide and ethnocide (were) committed against indigenous groups. (Allegations) of state sponsored and rebel force sponsored genocide against indigenous peoples (were) repeatedly made throughout the course of the last fifteen years," including massacres, torture, forced military service, land seizures, arbitrary arrests and imprisonments, population relocations, and attacks amounting to genocide under the UN Convention.
"That there is sufficient evidence to warrant the convening of a (genocide) tribunal goes without question."
America was complicit in the 1990s Rwanda massacres, by militarizing Uganda, funding the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and its Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) to displace France and become Central Africa's dominant power, including in eastern Congo. It used its RPA and Ugandan proxies in Congo's civil war for control of its eastern and southern mining resources, killing millions of Congolese (including by disease, malnutrition and related violence) to secure them, including diamonds, gold, copper, tin, timber, coltan and cobalt (from 64 - 80% of world reserves), treasures for the taking, some of them vital for defense purposes.
Operation Desert Storm began on January 17, 1991, a criminal, gratuitous mass slaughter and destruction of essential to life facilities, including:
-- power plants and dams;
-- water purification facilities;
-- sewage treatment and disposal systems;
-- telephone and other communications;
-- hospitals;
-- schools and mosques;
-- around 20,000 homes, apartments and other dwellings;
-- irrigation sites;
-- food processing, storage and distribution facilities;
-- hotels and retail establishments;
-- transportation infrastructure;
-- oil wells, pipelines, refineries and storage tanks;
-- chemical plants, factories and other commercial operations;
-- government buildings and historical sites; and
-- civilian shelters targeting of innocent men, women and children.
Tens of thousands were gratuitously killed, as many as 200,000 according to independent estimates. Twelve years of genocidal sanctions followed, killing as many as 1.7 million, two-thirds of them children under age five.
From 2003 - 2009, 2.5 million or more died from violent or non-violent causes, again mostly young children, to turn Iraq into a free market paradise, its people reduced to serfs, as part of a greater aim for global dominance and control of world resources and markets.
The 1990s Balkan wars followed the same pattern, dividing Yugoslavia into separate states, culminating with the US-NATO 1999 terror bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia - Serbia-Kosovo. For two and a half months, about 3,000 sorties dropped thousands of tons of ordnance plus hundreds of ground-launched cruise missiles. As in the Gulf War, virtually all vital infrastructure was targeted as well as factories, other businesses, commercial and government buildings, schools, hospitals, churches, and historical landmarks. All were destroyed or heavily damaged.
An estimated $100 billion in damage was inflicted. A humanitarian disaster resulted. Environmental contamination was extensive. Large numbers were killed, injured or displaced, and two million lost their livelihoods. As in Korea, Southeast Asia, and Iraq, it was genocide under the Convention. Afghanistan and Iraq were next, the latter explained above.
September 11 was the pretext, then beginning October 7, 2001, Afghanistan was bombed, invaded and occupied like Iraq. Planned months in advance, war continues to control Eurasia, the key for world dominance, and no wonder. It has 75% of the world's population, most of its resources and physical wealth, three-fourths of its known oil and gas, and is the grandest of grand prizes for its ruler.
Marjah is the latest Afghan offensive, a PR stunt to show progress and perhaps save face for utter failure to this point, except for the human toll. From 2001 - 2007, UN Population Division data estimated 3.2 million deaths, including 700,000 children under age five.
Through 2009, around 4.5 million have died from violent or non-violent causes, including deprivation, disease, starvation, and neglect with no end of conflict in sight - an Afghan genocide like in Korea, Southeast Asia, Yugoslavia, Iraq, and now Haiti, occupied to be strip-mined for profit, its people mere sacrificial pawns, unneeded ones to be forfeited on its alter - an old story for perhaps the world's most long-suffering people.
For over 500 years, it's been victimized by severe oppression, slavery, despotism, colonization, reparations, embargoes, starvation, unrepayable debt, as well as natural and perhaps engineered calamities, the latest for plunder and exploitation - Haiti's centuries old curse, perhaps greater than ever going forward.
Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to the Lendman News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Monday - Friday at 10AM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on world and national issues. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://republicbroadcasting.org/Lendman
http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Article/065370-2010-02-22-american-genocides-is-haiti-next.htm
2 Kids Shot at School Near Columbine
David Knowles Writer
(Feb. 23) -- Two middle school students were shot Tuesday afternoon at a Colorado school.
The gunman, an adult male, opened fire at Deer Creek Middle School in Littleton, Colo., just after 3 p.m. Tuesday, around the time school was being dismissed. He was taken into custody by the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department.
One of the victims was shot in the chest, and the other in the arm, according to Fox affiliate KDVR-TV. Both of the students were taken to a hospital, but their injuries are said not to be life-threatening. So far, the relationship, if any, between the children and the shooter is unknown, a Sheriff's Department spokesman said.
Witnesses said the shooter wore all black and was tackled by a teacher at the school.
"I heard a gunshot and everybody was running away," Levi Shaffer, a seventh-grader at Deer Creek, told reporters. "I was a little confused and then I saw the shooter. I saw him put out a second shot and that's when the bus driver told us all to get down, so we got down. I was really scared."
Deer Creek Middle School is three miles from Columbine High School, the site of one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.
Filed under: Nation, Crime
Click on title above for original article w/ video
(Feb. 23) -- Two middle school students were shot Tuesday afternoon at a Colorado school.
The gunman, an adult male, opened fire at Deer Creek Middle School in Littleton, Colo., just after 3 p.m. Tuesday, around the time school was being dismissed. He was taken into custody by the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department.
One of the victims was shot in the chest, and the other in the arm, according to Fox affiliate KDVR-TV. Both of the students were taken to a hospital, but their injuries are said not to be life-threatening. So far, the relationship, if any, between the children and the shooter is unknown, a Sheriff's Department spokesman said.
Witnesses said the shooter wore all black and was tackled by a teacher at the school.
"I heard a gunshot and everybody was running away," Levi Shaffer, a seventh-grader at Deer Creek, told reporters. "I was a little confused and then I saw the shooter. I saw him put out a second shot and that's when the bus driver told us all to get down, so we got down. I was really scared."
Deer Creek Middle School is three miles from Columbine High School, the site of one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.
Filed under: Nation, Crime
Click on title above for original article w/ video
Monday, February 22, 2010
ANTHRAX, HUMAN, 2001 - USA (02): FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION CASE CLOSED
****************************************************************************A ProMED-mail postProMED-mail is a program of theInternational Society for Infectious Diseases ******[1]Date: 19 Feb 2010Source: NPR (National Public Radio) [edited] FBI To Close Investigation Of 2001 Anthrax Attacks--------------------------------------------------The FBI is formally closing its investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks, NPR has learned from sources familiar with the case. Officials are expected to announce Friday afternoon [19 Feb 2010] that former Army scientist Bruce Ivins was responsible for mailing anthrax to politicians and journalists in 2001, and that he worked alone. A total of 5 people died, and 17 were sickened by the attacks. The Department of Justice will be unsealing documents related to the case Friday, victims have been notified. [Byline: Dina Temple-Raston] --Communicated by:ProMED-mail ******[2]Date: 19 Feb 2010Source: CNN.com [edited] FBI concludes investigation into 2001 anthrax mailings------------------------------------------------------The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced that it has concluded its investigation into the 2001 anthrax mailings, saying Friday [19 Feb 2010] that a biodefense researcher carried out the attacks alone. The anthrax letters killed 5 people and sickened 17 shortly after the 11 Sep 2001 terrorist attacks. The letters, filled with bacterial spores, were sent to Senate Democratic leaders and news organizations. "By 2007, investigators conclusively determined that a single spore-batch created and maintained by Dr. Bruce E. Ivins at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) was the parent material for the letter spores," said a report released Friday by the FBI. Evidence developed from that investigation established that Dr. Ivins, alone, mailed the anthrax letters." There was no immediate response from Ivins' lawyer. Ivins, 62, committed suicide in July 2008 as federal agents were closing in on him, police said. In September and October 2001, at least 5 envelopes were mailed to Sen. Patrick Leahy, then-Sen. Tom Daschle and news organizations in New York and Boca Raton, Florida. Each envelope contained a photocopy of a handwritten note. The 5 who died included a supermarket tabloid photo editor in Florida [at one of the targeted news organizations], 2 Washington postal workers, a New York hospital worker and a 94-year-old woman in Connecticut [all of whom handled contami,ated mail]. The investigation into the anthrax mailings, code-named "Amerithrax," was one of the largest and most complex in the history of law enforcement, according to the FBI. He [Ivins] had spent more than 30 years as a civilian microbiologist at the Army's biological research laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland, where he was trying to develop a better vaccine against anthrax. At the time of his death, Ivins was under a temporary restraining order sought by a social worker who had counseled him in private and group sessions. He also had been hospitalized in the weeks leading up to his death for psychiatric examination after he threatened to kill co-workers, investigators "and other individuals who had wronged him," according to documents released in the case. Federal prosecutors named Ivins the culprit in the anthrax attacks after his death. Court records released by authorities showed that Ivins was "the custodian of a large flask of highly purified anthrax spores that possess certain genetic mutations identical to the anthrax used in the attacks." The government had taken steps in the weeks leading up to Ivins' death to restrict his access to his lab. But critics point out that then-Attorney General John Ashcroft publicly declared another Fort Detrick scientist, Steven Hatfill, a "person of interest" in the anthrax attacks. Hatfill was never charged but sued over the matter, settling with the government for USD 5.8 million. His case has fueled skepticism about the allegations against Ivins. In November 2008 the U.S. Supreme Court threw out Hatfill's libel lawsuit against The New York Times over reports linking him to the anthrax probe. A federal appeals court had concluded Hatfill was a "public figure" and failed to prove the reports were "malicious." In the report released on Friday [19 February 2010], the FBI said Hatfill had been eliminated as a suspect. The report outlines the government's evidence against Ivins, saying that the researcher was alone late at night in the lab where the anthrax strain RMR-1029 was stored in the days leading up to the mailings. The lab also contained the equipment capable of drying the anthrax, a function that was forbidden, the report said. "Dr. Ivins was never in the habit of working excessive late night hours in the lab, either prior to or after the mailings," it said. Ivins was under "intense personal and professional pressure" in the months leading up to the anthrax attacks, the report said, citing the researchers' e-mails and statements to friends. The anthrax vaccine program to which he had devoted his entire career of more than 20 years was failing. The anthrax vaccines were receiving criticism in several scientific circles, because of both potency problems and allegations that the anthrax vaccine contributed to Gulf War Syndrome," it said. "Short of some major breakthrough or intervention, he feared that the vaccine research program was going to be discontinued. Following the anthrax attacks, however, his program was suddenly rejuvenated." The report also said that Ivins' e-mails and statements show a "man driven by obsessions." "In the month before his suicide," it said, "his homicidal tendencies became more pronounced, as he posted violent messages on the Internet regarding a reality TV star and made death threats during a group therapy session." It also says that Ivins made several statements and actions that showed "evidence of a guilty conscience." They included sending an e-mail to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that suggested "nonsensical explanations for why the 1st victim might have contracted inhalation anthrax," and repeatedly made efforts to shift the blame for the mailings to friends and colleagues. "At one point, he sent an e-mail to himself documenting 12 reasons why 2 of his former colleagues, who were also his 2 best friends, likely committed the anthrax attacks," the report said. --Communicated by:ProMED-mail [The new Amerithrax Documents are available online at: for many FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) FBI documents from Amerithrax investigation.I suspect we have not heard the last of this. - Mod.MHJ] [see also:Anthrax, human, 2001 - USA 20100125.02812009----Anthrax, human, 2001 - USA (03): NAS review 20090507.1707Anthrax, human, 2001 - USA (02): evidence 20090227.0817Anthrax, human, 2001 - USA: review 20090104.00332008----Anthrax, human, 2001 - USA (12): comment 20080928.3074Anthrax, human, 2001 - USA (11): review 20080924.3019Anthrax, human, 2001 - USA (10): evidence 20080828.2696Anthrax, human, 2001 - USA (09): evidence 20080819.2591Anthrax, human, 2001 - USA (08): evidence, drugs 20080818.2566Anthrax, human, 2001 - USA (07): letters, evidence 20080812.2492Anthrax, human, 2001 - USA (06): letters, evidence 20080811.2488Anthrax, human, 2001 - USA (05): letters, evidence 20080807.2428Anthrax, human, 2001 - USA (04): letters, evidence 20080806.2412Anthrax, human, 2001 - USA (03): 20080805.2406Anthrax, human, 2001 - USA (02): letters, evidence 20080805.2392Anthrax, human - USA 2001: letters, new suspect 20080803.2371And more ...]..........................dk/mhj/ejp/jw*##########################################################*************************************************************ProMED-mail makes every effort to verify the reports thatare posted, but the accuracy and completeness of theinformation, and of any statements or opinions basedthereon, are not guaranteed. The reader assumes all risks inusing information posted or archived by ProMED-mail. ISIDand its associated service providers shall not be heldresponsible for errors or omissions or held liable for anydamages incurred as a result of use or reliance upon postedor archived material.************************************************************Donate to ProMED-mail. Details available at:************************************************************Visit ProMED-mail's web site at .Send all items for posting to: promed@promedmail.org(NOT to an individual moderator). If you do not give yourfull name and affiliation, it may not be posted. Sendcommands to subscribe/unsubscribe, get archives, help,etc. to: majordomo@promedmail.org. For assistance from ahuman being send mail to: owner-promed@promedmail.org.########################################################################################################################
ZeuS on the LeuS; Global Hack Attack
Click on title above for original article
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704398804575071103834150536.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704398804575071103834150536.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Joe Stack's Manifesto / Suicide Note
Today, a single engine plane crashed into a office building in Austin, Texas. In that building were the offices of the IRS. There was speculation as to whether or not this was an accident or an intentional act. Several hours later, a suicide note was discovered signed by a U.S. citizen, Joe Stack, who had a long history of problems with the IRS and was "Fed UP" with US Government. Below is the full text of Joe Stacks suicide note; at the end of the note I have posted a link to Joe Stacks business website, but it has since been poofed off of the internet.
-------------------------
If you’re reading this, you’re no doubt asking yourself, “Why did this have to happen?” The simple truth is that it is complicated and has been coming for a long time. The writing process, started many months ago, was intended to be therapy in the face of the looming realization that there isn’t enough therapy in the world that can fix what is really broken. Needless to say, this rant could fill volumes with example after example if I would let it. I find the process of writing it frustrating, tedious, and probably pointless… especially given my gross inability to gracefully articulate my thoughts in light of the storm raging in my head. Exactly what is therapeutic about that I’m not sure, but desperate times call for desperate measures.
We are all taught as children that without laws there would be no society, only anarchy. Sadly, starting at early ages we in this country have been brainwashed to believe that, in return for our dedication and service, our government stands for justice for all. We are further brainwashed to believe that there is freedom in this place, and that we should be ready to lay our lives down for the noble principals represented by its founding fathers. Remember? One of these was “no taxation without representation”. I have spent the total years of my adulthood unlearning that crap from only a few years of my childhood. These days anyone who really stands up for that principal is promptly labeled a “crackpot”, traitor and worse.
While very few working people would say they haven’t had their fair share of taxes (as can I), in my lifetime I can say with a great degree of certainty that there has never been a politician cast a vote on any matter with the likes of me or my interests in mind. Nor, for that matter, are they the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say.
Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours? Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political “representatives” (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the “terrible health care problem”. It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.
And justice? You’ve got to be kidding!
How can any rational individual explain that white elephant conundrum in the middle of our tax system and, indeed, our entire legal system? Here we have a system that is, by far, too complicated for the brightest of the master scholars to understand. Yet, it mercilessly “holds accountable” its victims, claiming that they’re responsible for fully complying with laws not even the experts understand. The law “requires” a signature on the bottom of a tax filing; yet no one can say truthfully that they understand what they are signing; if that’s not “duress” than what is. If this is not the measure of a totalitarian regime, nothing is.
How did I get here?
My introduction to the real American nightmare starts back in the early ‘80s. Unfortunately after more than 16 years of school, somewhere along the line I picked up the absurd, pompous notion that I could read and understand plain English. Some friends introduced me to a group of people who were having ‘tax code’ readings and discussions. In particular, zeroed in on a section relating to the wonderful “exemptions” that make institutions like the vulgar, corrupt Catholic Church so incredibly wealthy. We carefully studied the law (with the help of some of the “best”, high-paid, experienced tax lawyers in the business), and then began to do exactly what the “big boys” were doing (except that we weren’t steeling from our congregation or lying to the government about our massive profits in the name of God). We took a great deal of care to make it all visible, following all of the rules, exactly the way the law said it was to be done.
The intent of this exercise and our efforts was to bring about a much-needed re-evaluation of the laws that allow the monsters of organized religion to make such a mockery of people who earn an honest living. However, this is where I learned that there are two “interpretations” for every law; one for the very rich, and one for the rest of us… Oh, and the monsters are the very ones making and enforcing the laws; the inquisition is still alive and well today in this country.
That little lesson in patriotism cost me $40,000+, 10 years of my life, and set my retirement plans back to 0. It made me realize for the first time that I live in a country with an ideology that is based on a total and complete lie. It also made me realize, not only how naive I had been, but also the incredible stupidity of the American public; that they buy, hook, line, and sinker, the crap about their “freedom”… and that they continue to do so with eyes closed in the face of overwhelming evidence and all that keeps happening in front of them.
Before even having to make a shaky recovery from the sting of the first lesson on what justice really means in this country (around 1984 after making my way through engineering school and still another five years of “paying my dues”), I felt I finally had to take a chance of launching my dream of becoming an independent engineer.
On the subjects of engineers and dreams of independence, I should digress somewhat to say that I’m sure that I inherited the fascination for creative problem solving from my father. I realized this at a very young age.
The significance of independence, however, came much later during my early years of college; at the age of 18 or 19 when I was living on my own as student in an apartment in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. My neighbor was an elderly retired woman (80+ seemed ancient to me at that age) who was the widowed wife of a retired steel worker. Her husband had worked all his life in the steel mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big business and the union that, for his 30 years of service, he would have a pension and medical care to look forward to in his retirement. Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing because the incompetent mill management and corrupt union (not to mention the government) raided their pension funds and stole their retirement. All she had was social security to live on.
In retrospect, the situation was laughable because here I was living on peanut butter and bread (or Ritz crackers when I could afford to splurge) for months at a time. When I got to know this poor figure and heard her story I felt worse for her plight than for my own (I, after all, I thought I had everything to in front of me). I was genuinely appalled at one point, as we exchanged stories and commiserated with each other over our situations, when she in her grandmotherly fashion tried to convince me that I would be “healthier” eating cat food (like her) rather than trying to get all my substance from peanut butter and bread. I couldn’t quite go there, but the impression was made. I decided that I didn’t trust big business to take care of me, and that I would take responsibility for my own future and myself.
Return to the early ‘80s, and here I was off to a terrifying start as a ‘wet-behind-the-ears’ contract software engineer... and two years later, thanks to the fine backroom, midnight effort by the sleazy executives of Arthur Andersen (the very same folks who later brought us Enron and other such calamities) and an equally sleazy New York Senator (Patrick Moynihan), we saw the passage of 1986 tax reform act with its section 1706.
For you who are unfamiliar, here is the core text of the IRS Section 1706, defining the treatment of workers (such as contract engineers) for tax purposes. Visit this link for a conference committee report (http://www.synergistech.com/1706.shtml#ConferenceCommitteeReport) regarding the intended interpretation of Section 1706 and the relevant parts of Section 530, as amended. For information on how these laws affect technical services workers and their clients, read our discussion here (http://www.synergistech.com/ic-taxlaw.shtml).
SEC. 1706. TREATMENT OF CERTAIN TECHNICAL PERSONNEL.
(a) IN GENERAL - Section 530 of the Revenue Act of 1978 is amended by adding at the end thereof the following new subsection:
(d) EXCEPTION. - This section shall not apply in the case of an individual who pursuant to an arrangement between the taxpayer and another person, provides services for such other person as an engineer, designer, drafter, computer programmer, systems analyst, or other similarly skilled worker engaged in a similar line of work.
(b) EFFECTIVE DATE. - The amendment made by this section shall apply to remuneration paid and services rendered after December 31, 1986.
Note:
· "another person" is the client in the traditional job-shop relationship.
· "taxpayer" is the recruiter, broker, agency, or job shop.
· "individual", "employee", or "worker" is you.
Admittedly, you need to read the treatment to understand what it is saying but it’s not very complicated. The bottom line is that they may as well have put my name right in the text of section (d). Moreover, they could only have been more blunt if they would have came out and directly declared me a criminal and non-citizen slave. Twenty years later, I still can’t believe my eyes.
During 1987, I spent close to $5000 of my ‘pocket change’, and at least 1000 hours of my time writing, printing, and mailing to any senator, congressman, governor, or slug that might listen; none did, and they universally treated me as if I was wasting their time. I spent countless hours on the L.A. freeways driving to meetings and any and all of the disorganized professional groups who were attempting to mount a campaign against this atrocity. This, only to discover that our efforts were being easily derailed by a few moles from the brokers who were just beginning to enjoy the windfall from the new declaration of their “freedom”. Oh, and don’t forget, for all of the time I was spending on this, I was loosing income that I couldn’t bill clients.
After months of struggling it had clearly gotten to be a futile exercise. The best we could get for all of our trouble is a pronouncement from an IRS mouthpiece that they weren’t going to enforce that provision (read harass engineers and scientists). This immediately proved to be a lie, and the mere existence of the regulation began to have its impact on my bottom line; this, of course, was the intended effect.
Again, rewind my retirement plans back to 0 and shift them into idle. If I had any sense, I clearly should have left abandoned engineering and never looked back.
Instead I got busy working 100-hour workweeks. Then came the L.A. depression of the early 1990s. Our leaders decided that they didn’t need the all of those extra Air Force bases they had in Southern California, so they were closed; just like that. The result was economic devastation in the region that rivaled the widely publicized Texas S&L fiasco. However, because the government caused it, no one gave a shit about all of the young families who lost their homes or street after street of boarded up houses abandoned to the wealthy loan companies who received government funds to “shore up” their windfall. Again, I lost my retirement.
Years later, after weathering a divorce and the constant struggle trying to build some momentum with my business, I find myself once again beginning to finally pick up some speed. Then came the .COM bust and the 911 nightmare. Our leaders decided that all aircraft were grounded for what seemed like an eternity; and long after that, ‘special’ facilities like San Francisco were on security alert for months. This made access to my customers prohibitively expensive. Ironically, after what they had done the Government came to the aid of the airlines with billions of our tax dollars … as usual they left me to rot and die while they bailed out their rich, incompetent cronies WITH MY MONEY! After these events, there went my business but not quite yet all of my retirement and savings.
By this time, I’m thinking that it might be good for a change. Bye to California, I’ll try Austin for a while. So I moved, only to find out that this is a place with a highly inflated sense of self-importance and where damn little real engineering work is done. I’ve never experienced such a hard time finding work. The rates are 1/3 of what I was earning before the crash, because pay rates here are fixed by the three or four large companies in the area who are in collusion to drive down prices and wages… and this happens because the justice department is all on the take and doesn’t give a fuck about serving anyone or anything but themselves and their rich buddies.
To survive, I was forced to cannibalize my savings and retirement, the last of which was a small IRA. This came in a year with mammoth expenses and not a single dollar of income. I filed no return that year thinking that because I didn’t have any income there was no need. The sleazy government decided that they disagreed. But they didn’t notify me in time for me to launch a legal objection so when I attempted to get a protest filed with the court I was told I was no longer entitled to due process because the time to file ran out. Bend over for another $10,000 helping of justice.
So now we come to the present. After my experience with the CPA world, following the business crash I swore that I’d never enter another accountant’s office again. But here I am with a new marriage and a boatload of undocumented income, not to mention an expensive new business asset, a piano, which I had no idea how to handle. After considerable thought I decided that it would be irresponsible NOT to get professional help; a very big mistake.
When we received the forms back I was very optimistic that they were in order. I had taken all of the years information to Bill Ross, and he came back with results very similar to what I was expecting. Except that he had neglected to include the contents of Sheryl’s unreported income; $12,700 worth of it. To make matters worse, Ross knew all along this was missing and I didn’t have a clue until he pointed it out in the middle of the audit. By that time it had become brutally evident that he was representing himself and not me.
This left me stuck in the middle of this disaster trying to defend transactions that have no relationship to anything tax-related (at least the tax-related transactions were poorly documented). Things I never knew anything about and things my wife had no clue would ever matter to anyone. The end result is… well, just look around.
I remember reading about the stock market crash before the “great” depression and how there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows when they realized they screwed up and lost everything. Isn’t it ironic how far we’ve come in 60 years in this country that they now know how to fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class (who doesn’t have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their asses and it’s “business-as-usual”. Now when the wealthy fuck up, the poor get to die for the mistakes… isn’t that a clever, tidy solution.
As government agencies go, the FAA is often justifiably referred to as a tombstone agency, though they are hardly alone. The recent presidential puppet GW Bush and his cronies in their eight years certainly reinforced for all of us that this criticism rings equally true for all of the government. Nothing changes unless there is a body count (unless it is in the interest of the wealthy sows at the government trough). In a government full of hypocrites from top to bottom, life is as cheap as their lies and their self-serving laws.
I know I’m hardly the first one to decide I have had all I can stand. It has always been a myth that people have stopped dying for their freedom in this country, and it isn’t limited to the blacks, and poor immigrants. I know there have been countless before me and there are sure to be as many after. But I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure nothing will change. I choose to not keep looking over my shoulder at “big brother” while he strips my carcass, I choose not to ignore what is going on all around me, I choose not to pretend that business as usual won’t continue; I have just had enough.
I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be white washed and ignored that the American zombies wake up and revolt; it will take nothing less. I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are. Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer. The cruel joke is that the really big chunks of shit at the top have known this all along and have been laughing, at and using this awareness against, fools like me all along.
I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.
The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.
Joe Stack (1956-2010)
02/18/2010
-------------
RIP Joe.
Click on title above to visit Joe Stacks website;
http://embeddedart.com/home.htm
Britain's top military intelligence agency accused of covering up its complicity in the CIA torture of a U.K. citizen
Click on title above for original article;
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/02/17/cia-torture-case-entangles-british-government-prompts-charges-o
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/02/17/cia-torture-case-entangles-british-government-prompts-charges-o
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
All-Dem House Caucus Makes Millions Selling Influence
Frum Judicial Watch
Tue, 02/16/2010 - 11:53am
The all-Democrat Congressional Black Caucus is a shady enterprise that skirts federal fundraising laws by using unregulated “charities” and “nonprofits” to raise tens of millions of dollars from corporations and industries seeking to influence members.
Extremely powerful and influential, the congressional caucus is a fund-raising juggernaut that essentially sells access and influence, according to a major newspaper report that offers scathing details of the group’s crooked dealings. Like so many other Washington political organizations, the Black Caucus has an official fund-raising arm subject to federal rules, but it dodges those laws with a network of “nonprofit groups” that lets it rake in unlimited amounts of cash from corporations and labor unions.
The money is supposed to help disadvantaged African-Americans but instead most of it is spent on lawmakers’ costly golf outings and annual casino jaunts as well as elaborate galas where lobbyists and executives who donate to caucus charities can mingle with lawmakers and push their agendas.
In the last four years alone, the Congressional Black Caucus’s unregulated charitable wings took in at least $55 million but the bulk of the cash was not spent on true charitable causes. Four million dollars—all from major corporations—went to purchase a headquarters on prestigious Embassy Row in Washington D.C. and nearly $1 million was spent on the group’s gala dinner and conference billed as “Hollywood on the Potomac.”
Ironically, much of the cash comes from companies that have long been viewed as detrimental to the group’s crucial black constituents. Among them are cigarette manufacturers, internet poker operators, beer companies and the controversial rent-to-own industry long criticized for charging minorities high monthly fees for appliances and computers.
Anecdotes of unscrupulous deals between black legislators and donors abound in the newspaper article, which points out that all eight open House Ethics Committee investigations focus on Black Caucus members and most involve accusations of improper ties to private businesses. After all, some of the nation’s most powerful lawmakers belong to the group. They include the third-ranking House member (South Carolina’s James Clyburn), four House committee chairmen and more than a dozen subcommittee leaders.
Among the most prominent are New York’s Charles Rangel, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, and Michigan’s John Conyers, chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Rangel is under investigation for tax evasion, using his office to raise money from corporations with business before him, illegally accepting multiple rent control apartments and hiding assets. Conyers, whose Detroit City Councilwoman wife recently pleaded guilty to bribery, was previously investigated for illegally forcing congressional staffers to be personal servants and work on several state and local campaigns.
http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2010/feb/all-dem-house-caucus-makes-millions-selling-influence
Tue, 02/16/2010 - 11:53am
The all-Democrat Congressional Black Caucus is a shady enterprise that skirts federal fundraising laws by using unregulated “charities” and “nonprofits” to raise tens of millions of dollars from corporations and industries seeking to influence members.
Extremely powerful and influential, the congressional caucus is a fund-raising juggernaut that essentially sells access and influence, according to a major newspaper report that offers scathing details of the group’s crooked dealings. Like so many other Washington political organizations, the Black Caucus has an official fund-raising arm subject to federal rules, but it dodges those laws with a network of “nonprofit groups” that lets it rake in unlimited amounts of cash from corporations and labor unions.
The money is supposed to help disadvantaged African-Americans but instead most of it is spent on lawmakers’ costly golf outings and annual casino jaunts as well as elaborate galas where lobbyists and executives who donate to caucus charities can mingle with lawmakers and push their agendas.
In the last four years alone, the Congressional Black Caucus’s unregulated charitable wings took in at least $55 million but the bulk of the cash was not spent on true charitable causes. Four million dollars—all from major corporations—went to purchase a headquarters on prestigious Embassy Row in Washington D.C. and nearly $1 million was spent on the group’s gala dinner and conference billed as “Hollywood on the Potomac.”
Ironically, much of the cash comes from companies that have long been viewed as detrimental to the group’s crucial black constituents. Among them are cigarette manufacturers, internet poker operators, beer companies and the controversial rent-to-own industry long criticized for charging minorities high monthly fees for appliances and computers.
Anecdotes of unscrupulous deals between black legislators and donors abound in the newspaper article, which points out that all eight open House Ethics Committee investigations focus on Black Caucus members and most involve accusations of improper ties to private businesses. After all, some of the nation’s most powerful lawmakers belong to the group. They include the third-ranking House member (South Carolina’s James Clyburn), four House committee chairmen and more than a dozen subcommittee leaders.
Among the most prominent are New York’s Charles Rangel, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, and Michigan’s John Conyers, chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Rangel is under investigation for tax evasion, using his office to raise money from corporations with business before him, illegally accepting multiple rent control apartments and hiding assets. Conyers, whose Detroit City Councilwoman wife recently pleaded guilty to bribery, was previously investigated for illegally forcing congressional staffers to be personal servants and work on several state and local campaigns.
http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2010/feb/all-dem-house-caucus-makes-millions-selling-influence
DCs Top 10 Most Corrupt Politicians - 2007
Just a reminder. Click on title above to see;
http://www.judicialwatch.org/judicial-watch-announces-list-washington-s-ten-most-wanted-corrupt-politicians-2007
http://www.judicialwatch.org/judicial-watch-announces-list-washington-s-ten-most-wanted-corrupt-politicians-2007
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Professor Charged in Deadly Alabama Shooting, Goes Ballistic after Tenure Denied
Kristin M. Hall
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (Feb. 13) -- A biology professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who authorities say opened fire at a faculty meeting is facing a murder charge after the shooting spree that left three dead and three wounded.
Amy Bishop, 42, was charged Friday night with one count of capital murder, which means she could face the death penalty if convicted. Three of Bishop's fellow biology professors were killed and three other university employees were wounded. No students were harmed in the shooting, which happened in a community known for its space and technology industries.
According to media reports, Bishop was upset after being denied tenure.
UAH student Andrew Cole was in Bishop's anatomy class Friday morning and said she seemed perfectly normal.
"She's understanding, and was concerned about students," he said. "I would have never thought it was her."
Bishop, a neurobiologist who studied at Harvard University, joined the UAH biology faculty as an assistant professor in fall 2003. She was taken Friday night in handcuffs from a police precinct to the county jail and could be heard saying, "It didn't happen. There's no way. ... They are still alive."
Police said they were also interviewing a man as "a person of interest."
University spokesman Ray Garner said the three killed were Gopi K. Podila, the chairman of the Department of Biological Sciences, and two other faculty members, Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson.
Three others were wounded, two critically, in the gunfire, which Davis' husband, Sammie Lee Davis, said occurred at a meeting over a tenure issue. The wounded were identified as department members Luis Cruz-Vera, who was listed in fair condition, and Joseph Leahy, in critical condition in intensive care, and staffer Stephanie Monticello, also in critical condition in intensive care.
Sammie Lee Davis said his wife was a researcher who had tenure at the university.
In a brief phone interview, he said he was told his wife was at a meeting to discuss the tenure status of another faculty member who got angry and started shooting. He said his wife had mentioned the suspect before, describing the woman as "not being able to deal with reality" and "not as good as she thought she was."
Bishop and her husband placed third in a statewide university business plan competition in July 2007, presenting a portable cell incubator they had invented. They won $25,000 to help start a company to market the device.
Robin Conn, The Huntsville Times / AP
Medical workers take two shooting victims from the Shelby Center on the campus of the University of Alabama-Huntsville to an ambulance on Friday.
Biology major Julia Hollis was among the students who gathered to support each other and try to make sense of the news.
"When someone told me it was a staff person and it was faculty I was in complete denial," said Hollis, 23, who had taken classes with two of the instructors who were killed. "It took me a bit for it to sink in."
Students offered varying assessments of Bishop.
Andrea Bennett, a sophomore majoring in nursing, described Bishop as being "very weird" and "a really big nerd."
"She's well-known on campus, but I wouldn't say she's a good teacher. I've heard a lot of complaints," Bennett said. "She's a genius, but she really just can't explain things."
Bennett, an athlete at UAH, said her coach told her team Bishop had been denied tenure and that may have led to the shooting.
Amanda Tucker, a junior nursing major from Alabaster, Ala., had Bishop for anatomy class about a year ago. Tucker said a group of students complained to a dean about Bishop's performance in the classroom.
"When it came down to tests, and people asked her what was the best way to study, she'd just tell you, 'Read the book.' When the test came, there were just ridiculous questions. No one even knew what she was asking," said Tucker.
But Nick Lawton, 25, described Bishop as funny and accommodating with students.
"She lectured from the textbook, mostly stuck to the subject matter at hand," Nick Lawton said. "She seemed like a nice enough professor."
Sophomore Erin Johnson told The Huntsville Times a biology faculty meeting was under way when she heard screams coming from a conference room.
University police secured the building and students were cleared from it. There was still a heavy police presence on campus Friday night, with police tape cordoning off the main entrance to the university.
The Huntsville campus has about 7,500 students in northern Alabama, not far from the Tennessee line. The university is known for its scientific and engineering programs and often works closely with NASA.
The space agency has a research center on the school's campus, where many scientists and engineers from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center perform Earth and space science research and development.
The university will remain closed next week and all athletic events were canceled to give students and staff time to grieve. Counselors were available to speak with students.
It's the second shooting in a week on an area campus. On Feb. 5, a 14-year-old student was killed in a middle school hallway in nearby Madison, allegedly by a fellow student.
Mass shootings are rarely carried out by women, said Dr. Park Dietz, who is president of Threat Assessment Group Inc., a Newport Beach, Calif.-based violence prevention firm.
A notable exception was a 1985 rampage at a Springfield, Pa., mall in which three people were killed. In June 1986, Sylvia Seegrist was deemed guilty but mentally ill on three counts of murder and seven counts of attempted murder in the shooting spree.
Dietz, who interviewed Seegrist after her arrest, said it was possible the suspect in Friday's shooting had a long-standing grudge against colleagues or superiors and felt complaints had not been dealt with fairly.
Gregg McCrary, a retired FBI agent and private criminal profiler based in Fredericksburg, Va., said there is no typical outline of a mass shooter but noted they often share a sense of paranoia, depression or a feeling that they are not appreciated.
Associated Press Writers Phillip Rawls and Desiree Hunter in Montgomery, Ala., Thomas Watkins in Los Angeles, and Jacob Jordan and Daniel Yee in Atlanta contributed to this report.
Filed under: Nation, Crime, Top Stories
http://www.aolnews.com/crime/article/3-dead-in-shooting-at-university-of-alabama-huntsville/19356792
Thursday, February 11, 2010
UK Court Publishes Details of Alleged CIA Torture
Theunis Bates Contributor
LONDON (Feb. 10) – A London court on Wednesday ordered the British government to disclose confidential U.S. intelligence showing that a British resident and former Guantanamo Bay inmate suffered "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" while in American custody.
U.K. Foreign Secretary David Miliband had previously refused to allow the publication of U.S. material dealing with the treatment of Binyam Mohamed, who was arrested in Pakistan in 2002. Divulging this information, warned Miliband, could jeopardize Britain's intelligence-sharing deal with the U.S. and damage future anti-terror operations.
Leon Neal, AFP / Getty Images
A London court ruled Wednesday that the British government must disclose confidential U.S. intelligence regarding the treatment of former Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed, pictured here at a fundraising event last year.
However, three of the country's top judges dismissed these protests, pointing out that similar material concerning Mohamed had already been published in the United States.
This once-top secret intelligence – which was passed from the CIA to British security service MI5 in 2002 – can now be read on the U.K. Foreign Office Web site. The document supports Mohamed's claim, which he made repeatedly since his release from Guantanamo in 2009, that while British intelligence agents may not have taken part in his torture, they knew it was happening.
The document addresses a period soon after Mohamed's arrest, when he was being held by Pakistani interrogators at the request of the U.S. under suspicion of receiving training from al-Qaida in Afghanistan. It reveals that Mohamed was subjected to "continuous sleep deprivation," had been chained up throughout interrogations and was exposed to "threats and inducements" that played on his fear of being "removed from United States custody and 'disappearing.' " This treatment, the paper continued, led to Mohamed's being kept on suicide watch.
In their summary of the case, the London judges said, "Although it is not necessary for us to categorize the treatment reported, it could readily be contended to be at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by the United States authorities."
Ethiopian-born Mohamed, 31 -- who moved to the United Kingdom as a teenager and converted to Islam in 2000 – has long denied having any connections to terrorism and says he was simply arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He claims he flew to Pakistan in May 2001 to help kick a drug habit and later that year headed to Afghanistan, as he wanted to see a "pure" form of Islam under the Taliban.
On his return to Karachi airport in 2002, Mohamed was held on charges of using a false passport and handed over to American authorities, who put him on an "extraordinary rendition" flight to Morocco, where he was tortured. (He says a Moroccan torturer named Marwan slashed his chest and genitals with a scalpel during interrogations.)
Mohamed was then taken to a "dark prison" run by the U.S. in Afghanistan, where he says he was forced to listen to a recording of rapper Eminem, played at deafening volume, continually for a whole month. His next stop was Guantanamo.
The U.S. eventually dropped all charges against Mohamed. On his return to the U.K. in '09, he lodged a civil damages lawsuit against the government, which he accused of being complicit in his torture, since an MI5 officer had interviewed him when he was held in Pakistan. In 2008, Britain's High Court ruled that MI5's involvement in Mohamed's mistreatment had gone "far beyond that of a bystander or witness to the alleged wrongdoing."
Wednesday's revelations are part of a revised version of that 2008 ruling, which – on first release – was missing seven paragraphs of comments from the judges. The foreign minister had appealed against the publication of those specific lines, but on Wednesday the Court of Appeal declined his request.
Human rights activists have celebrated the release of the blocked paragraphs and are now calling for a full public inquiry into the affair. "It has been clear for over a year that the Foreign Office has been more concerned with saving face than exposing torture," said Shami Chakrabarti, director of campaign group Liberty. "These embarrassing paragraphs reveal nothing of use to terrorists, but they do show something of the U.K. government's complicity with the most shameful part of the war on terror."
There are likely to be more revelations about Mohamed's apparent mistreatment in coming months. U.K. police are investigating the MI5 agent who questioned Mohamed to find out if he broke any British laws on torture. According to Clive Stafford-Smith, Mohamed's lawyer, the seven paragraphs released Wednesday are just "crumbs" and there is "a vast body of other information out there showing Binyam Mohamed was abused."
Filed under: Nation, World
http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/uk-court-publishes-details-of-alleged-cia-torture/19353061
Sunday, February 7, 2010
TUBERCULOSIS - HAITI: POST-EARTHQUAKE
************************************
A ProMED-mail post
ProMED-mail is a program of the
International Society for Infectious Diseases
Date: Fri 5 Feb 2010
Source: The New York Times [edited]
At a fly-infested clinic hastily erected alongside the rubble of the
only tuberculosis sanatorium in this country, Pierre-Louis Monfort is
a lonely man in a crowded room. Haiti has the highest tuberculosis
rate in the Americas, and health experts say it is about to
drastically increase. But amid the ramshackle remains of the hospital
where the country's most infected patients used to live, Mr Monfort
runs the clinic alone, facing a vastness of unmet need that is as
clear as the desperation on the faces around the room.
"I'm drowning," said Mr Monfort, 52, flanked by a line of people
waiting for pills as he emptied a bedpan full of blood. All of the
hospital's 50 other nurses and 20 doctors died in the earthquake or
have refused to return to work out of fear for the building's safety
or preoccupation with their own problems, he said. Mr Monfort joked
that the earthquake had earned him a promotion from a staff nurse at
the sanatorium to its new executive director.
In normal times, Haiti sees about 30 000 new cases of tuberculosis
each year. Among infectious diseases, it is the country's 2nd most
common killer, after AIDS, according to the World Health Organization.
The situation has gone from bad to worse because the earthquake set
off a dangerous diaspora. Most of the sanatorium's several hundred
surviving patients fled and are now living in the densely packed tent
cities where experts say they are probably spreading the disease. Most
of these patients have also stopped taking their daily regimen of
pills, thereby heightening the chance that there will be an outbreak
of a strain resistant to treatment,experts say.
At the city's General Hospital, Dr Megan Coffee said, "This right here
is what is going to be devastating in 6 months," and she pointed to
several tuberculosis patients thought to have a resistant strain of
the disease who were quarantined in a fenced-off blue tent. "Someone
needs to go and help Monfort, or we are all going to be in big trouble."
A further complication is that definitively diagnosing tuberculosis
takes weeks. So doctors are instead left to rely on conspicuous
symptoms like night sweats, severe coughing and weight loss. "But look
around," Dr Coffee said. "Everyone is thin, everyone is coughing from
the dust and everyone is sweating from the heat."
Dr Richar D'Meza, the coordinator for tuberculosis for the Haitian
Ministry of Health, said his office and the World Health Organization
had begun stockpiling tuberculosis medicines. "We are very concerned
about a resistant strain, but we are also getting ready," he said,
adding that he is assembling medical teams to begin entering tent
camps to survey for the disease. "This will begin soon," he said. "We
will get help to these people soon."
For Mr Monfort, it is not soon enough. He scavenges the rubble daily
for medicines and needles. He sterilizes needles using bleach and then
reuses the bleach to clean the floors. In his cramped clinic, 8 of the
sickest and most contagious patients lay on brown- and red-stained
beds. He said he had lost count of how many more were sleeping in
other pockets alongside the hospital. Hundreds come daily to pick up
medicine. Outside the clinic, the air is thick with the sickening
smell of rotting bodies. Occasionally a breeze carried a waft of char
from small cooking fires nearby, offering a respite from the stench
and the flies.
Mr Monfort began to explain that his biggest problem was a lack of
food. Suddenly a huge crash shook the clinic. A patient screamed.
Everyone stood still, eyes darting. A man outside yelled that another
section of the hospital had collapsed. People looking for materials to
build huts had pulled wood pilings from a section of the hospital
roof, which then fell as the scavengers leapt to safety, the man said.
Mr Monfort looked to the ground silently as if the weight of his
lonely responsibility had just come crashing down. "These people are
dying and in pain here," he said. "And no one seems to care."
The dire scene at Mr Monfort's clinic speaks to a larger concern: as
hospitals and medical staff are overrun by people with acute
conditions, patients who were previously getting treatment for cancer,
HIV, and other chronic or infectious diseases have been pushed aside
and no longer have access to care.
At the Champ de Mars, [a man] sat on a curb, one shoe missing, his
blue polo shirt torn, his head cupped in his hands. "I have TB, and I
am also supposed to get dialysis every other day," he said, explaining
that he was a doctor's assistant before the earthquake and meticulous
about his treatments. "I have not had dialysis in 3 weeks, and I feel
my blood is rotting from inside." Waving his hand over a sea of tents
and tarpaulins, he added, "It is like this country."
Back at the clinic, Mr Monfort struggled to fix an IV that had missed
the vein and was painfully pumping fluids under a patient's skin.
Another ghost of a man hobbled to the doorway on crutches, moaning for
help. "Please wait, please wait," Mr Monfort said in a tense whisper.
The biggest source of stress, Mr Monfort said, is that his 3 children
and wife are living on the street because the earthquake destroyed
their home. His wife begs him daily to stay with them. Instead, unpaid
and without a mask or gloves to wear, he walks to the sanatorium each
day at 6 am and stays until 8 p.m. when most of the patients drift to
sleep. "Why don't you just leave us to die?" asked [a patient]. Mr.
Monfort looked offended by the notion. But he did not answer and the
question seemed to stick with him.
The ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus once wrote that there was a
type of suffering so intense that, even in our sleep, it bores into
the heart until eventually, "in our own despair, against our will," it
taps into a terrible wisdom. After several minutes in silence, Mr
Monfort spoke of that wisdom. He referred to it as a "strange hope"
that had sprung from the suffering of his patients and the loss and
abandonment of his fellow staff members. "These people here are dying,
but they keep me alive," he said. "I know they are hurting more than
me and not complaining. So," he said, handing another walk-in patient
a packet of pills, "I must continue."
[Byline: Ian Urbina]
--
Communicated by:
ProMED-mail Rapporteur Mary Marshall
[Photo of a hospital in Haiti today
- Mod.JW]
[Following the devastation caused by the earthquake on 12 Jan 2010
that centered about 10 miles (15 kilometers) southwest of Haiti's
capital, Port-au-Prince, the interruption of treatment for chronic
diseases (such as, TB, HIV, diabetes, end-stage renal disease,
hypertension) and loss of patient follow-up were likely to cause
significant problems. However, even before the earthquake,
tuberculosis and HIV infection were major public health problems in
Haiti. The following is extracted from USAID report on tuberculosis in
Haiti available at
:
Haiti has the highest per capita tuberculosis (TB) burden in the Latin
America and Caribbean region. After HIV/AIDS, TB is the country's
greatest infectious cause of mortality in both youth and adults (6814
deaths in 2007). Haiti is among the 8 priority countries identified by
the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) for TB control in the
region. According to the World Health Organization's (WHO's) 2009
Global Tuberculosis Control Report, Haiti had and estimated 29 333 new
TB cases in 2007 [incidence of 306 cases per 100 000 population].
...The DOTS [that is, directly observed therapy, the internationally
recommended strategy for TB case management] treatment success rate
was 82 percent in 2006, a slight increase from 78 percent in 2003.
DOTS coverage fell to 70 percent in 2007 compared with 91 percent in
2006, though it was still above the 2005 level of 55 percent. However,
in some highly dense metropolitan settings, such as areas in
Port-au-Prince, coverage can be as low as 13 percent. ...
Since 1998, the Ministry of Health (MOH) has supported the DOTS
strategy in order to strengthen the national TB program, the Programme
National de Lutte contre la Tuberculose (PNLT -- National Prtogram of
the Fight Against TB), and approved national guidelines and norms for
TB control in 2002. However, the program lacked political and
financial support from the government, and there is a lack of skilled
technical human resources at the central level of the PNLT. A major
problem in combating TB is that co-infection with HIV can run as high
as 30 percent in some urban areas. Strong stigma and cultural barriers
attached to TB also interfere with case detection and adherence to
treatment. Multidrug-resistant (MDR) TB has increased from 1.4 percent
in 2004 to 1.8 percent in 2007 [among new cases]. ...
WHO has issued a public health risk assessment to facilitate the
response of those aiding the earthquake-affected population in Haiti
available at
.
Haiti and the Dominican Republic occupy the Caribbean island of
Hispaniola in the Greater Antillean archipelago. A
HealthMap/ProMED-mail interactive map of Hispaniola can be found at
. - Mod.ML]
[see also:
Meningococcemia, fatal - Dominican Republic ex Haiti 20100206.0401
2009
---
Tuberculosis, XXDR - USA: FL ex Peru 20091230.4387
Tuberculosis, MDR - China 20090114.0151
2008
---
Tuberculosis, XDR - Austria ex Romania 20080803.2373
Tuberculosis, MDR, XDR - Peru 20080412.1337
Tuberculosis, XDR - Namibia 20080403.1231
Tuberculosis, XDR - UK (Scotland) ex Somalia 20080322.1094
Tuberculosis, MDR, XDR - Worldwide: WHO 20080228.0813
Tuberculosis, MDR - South Africa 20080208.0521
Tuberculosis, MDR - Papua New Guinea 20080206.0478
Tuberculosis, XDR - Botswana, South Africa 20080118.0222
2007
----
Tuberculosis, XDR, MDR: genome sequences 20071122.3780
Tuberculosis - Uganda (02): MDR, susp. RFI 20071004.3284
Tuberculosis, XDR - South Africa (11): fugitives 20071002.3251
Tuberculosis, XDR - worldwide (02) 20070623.2034
Tuberculosis, XDR, airplane exposure - multicountry (USA, France,
Canada, Czech Rep.) 20070529.1738
Tuberculosis, XDR, 2003-2006 - Europe (Germany, Italy) 20070403.1132
Tuberculosis, XDR, 1993-2006 - USA 20070322.1005
Tuberculosis, XDR, 1991-2003 - Spain 20070302.0738
Tuberculosis, XDR - worldwide 20070205.0456
........................................ml/mj/jw
*##########################################################*
************************************************************
ProMED-mail makes every effort to verify the reports that
are posted, but the accuracy and completeness of the
information, and of any statements or opinions based
thereon, are not guaranteed. The reader assumes all risks in
using information posted or archived by ProMED-mail. ISID
and its associated service providers shall not be held
responsible for errors or omissions or held liable for any
damages incurred as a result of use or reliance upon posted
or archived material.
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A ProMED-mail post
ProMED-mail is a program of the
International Society for Infectious Diseases
Date: Fri 5 Feb 2010
Source: The New York Times [edited]
At a fly-infested clinic hastily erected alongside the rubble of the
only tuberculosis sanatorium in this country, Pierre-Louis Monfort is
a lonely man in a crowded room. Haiti has the highest tuberculosis
rate in the Americas, and health experts say it is about to
drastically increase. But amid the ramshackle remains of the hospital
where the country's most infected patients used to live, Mr Monfort
runs the clinic alone, facing a vastness of unmet need that is as
clear as the desperation on the faces around the room.
"I'm drowning," said Mr Monfort, 52, flanked by a line of people
waiting for pills as he emptied a bedpan full of blood. All of the
hospital's 50 other nurses and 20 doctors died in the earthquake or
have refused to return to work out of fear for the building's safety
or preoccupation with their own problems, he said. Mr Monfort joked
that the earthquake had earned him a promotion from a staff nurse at
the sanatorium to its new executive director.
In normal times, Haiti sees about 30 000 new cases of tuberculosis
each year. Among infectious diseases, it is the country's 2nd most
common killer, after AIDS, according to the World Health Organization.
The situation has gone from bad to worse because the earthquake set
off a dangerous diaspora. Most of the sanatorium's several hundred
surviving patients fled and are now living in the densely packed tent
cities where experts say they are probably spreading the disease. Most
of these patients have also stopped taking their daily regimen of
pills, thereby heightening the chance that there will be an outbreak
of a strain resistant to treatment,experts say.
At the city's General Hospital, Dr Megan Coffee said, "This right here
is what is going to be devastating in 6 months," and she pointed to
several tuberculosis patients thought to have a resistant strain of
the disease who were quarantined in a fenced-off blue tent. "Someone
needs to go and help Monfort, or we are all going to be in big trouble."
A further complication is that definitively diagnosing tuberculosis
takes weeks. So doctors are instead left to rely on conspicuous
symptoms like night sweats, severe coughing and weight loss. "But look
around," Dr Coffee said. "Everyone is thin, everyone is coughing from
the dust and everyone is sweating from the heat."
Dr Richar D'Meza, the coordinator for tuberculosis for the Haitian
Ministry of Health, said his office and the World Health Organization
had begun stockpiling tuberculosis medicines. "We are very concerned
about a resistant strain, but we are also getting ready," he said,
adding that he is assembling medical teams to begin entering tent
camps to survey for the disease. "This will begin soon," he said. "We
will get help to these people soon."
For Mr Monfort, it is not soon enough. He scavenges the rubble daily
for medicines and needles. He sterilizes needles using bleach and then
reuses the bleach to clean the floors. In his cramped clinic, 8 of the
sickest and most contagious patients lay on brown- and red-stained
beds. He said he had lost count of how many more were sleeping in
other pockets alongside the hospital. Hundreds come daily to pick up
medicine. Outside the clinic, the air is thick with the sickening
smell of rotting bodies. Occasionally a breeze carried a waft of char
from small cooking fires nearby, offering a respite from the stench
and the flies.
Mr Monfort began to explain that his biggest problem was a lack of
food. Suddenly a huge crash shook the clinic. A patient screamed.
Everyone stood still, eyes darting. A man outside yelled that another
section of the hospital had collapsed. People looking for materials to
build huts had pulled wood pilings from a section of the hospital
roof, which then fell as the scavengers leapt to safety, the man said.
Mr Monfort looked to the ground silently as if the weight of his
lonely responsibility had just come crashing down. "These people are
dying and in pain here," he said. "And no one seems to care."
The dire scene at Mr Monfort's clinic speaks to a larger concern: as
hospitals and medical staff are overrun by people with acute
conditions, patients who were previously getting treatment for cancer,
HIV, and other chronic or infectious diseases have been pushed aside
and no longer have access to care.
At the Champ de Mars, [a man] sat on a curb, one shoe missing, his
blue polo shirt torn, his head cupped in his hands. "I have TB, and I
am also supposed to get dialysis every other day," he said, explaining
that he was a doctor's assistant before the earthquake and meticulous
about his treatments. "I have not had dialysis in 3 weeks, and I feel
my blood is rotting from inside." Waving his hand over a sea of tents
and tarpaulins, he added, "It is like this country."
Back at the clinic, Mr Monfort struggled to fix an IV that had missed
the vein and was painfully pumping fluids under a patient's skin.
Another ghost of a man hobbled to the doorway on crutches, moaning for
help. "Please wait, please wait," Mr Monfort said in a tense whisper.
The biggest source of stress, Mr Monfort said, is that his 3 children
and wife are living on the street because the earthquake destroyed
their home. His wife begs him daily to stay with them. Instead, unpaid
and without a mask or gloves to wear, he walks to the sanatorium each
day at 6 am and stays until 8 p.m. when most of the patients drift to
sleep. "Why don't you just leave us to die?" asked [a patient]. Mr.
Monfort looked offended by the notion. But he did not answer and the
question seemed to stick with him.
The ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus once wrote that there was a
type of suffering so intense that, even in our sleep, it bores into
the heart until eventually, "in our own despair, against our will," it
taps into a terrible wisdom. After several minutes in silence, Mr
Monfort spoke of that wisdom. He referred to it as a "strange hope"
that had sprung from the suffering of his patients and the loss and
abandonment of his fellow staff members. "These people here are dying,
but they keep me alive," he said. "I know they are hurting more than
me and not complaining. So," he said, handing another walk-in patient
a packet of pills, "I must continue."
[Byline: Ian Urbina]
--
Communicated by:
ProMED-mail Rapporteur Mary Marshall
[Photo of a hospital in Haiti today
- Mod.JW]
[Following the devastation caused by the earthquake on 12 Jan 2010
that centered about 10 miles (15 kilometers) southwest of Haiti's
capital, Port-au-Prince, the interruption of treatment for chronic
diseases (such as, TB, HIV, diabetes, end-stage renal disease,
hypertension) and loss of patient follow-up were likely to cause
significant problems. However, even before the earthquake,
tuberculosis and HIV infection were major public health problems in
Haiti. The following is extracted from USAID report on tuberculosis in
Haiti available at
Haiti has the highest per capita tuberculosis (TB) burden in the Latin
America and Caribbean region. After HIV/AIDS, TB is the country's
greatest infectious cause of mortality in both youth and adults (6814
deaths in 2007). Haiti is among the 8 priority countries identified by
the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) for TB control in the
region. According to the World Health Organization's (WHO's) 2009
Global Tuberculosis Control Report, Haiti had and estimated 29 333 new
TB cases in 2007 [incidence of 306 cases per 100 000 population].
...The DOTS [that is, directly observed therapy, the internationally
recommended strategy for TB case management] treatment success rate
was 82 percent in 2006, a slight increase from 78 percent in 2003.
DOTS coverage fell to 70 percent in 2007 compared with 91 percent in
2006, though it was still above the 2005 level of 55 percent. However,
in some highly dense metropolitan settings, such as areas in
Port-au-Prince, coverage can be as low as 13 percent. ...
Since 1998, the Ministry of Health (MOH) has supported the DOTS
strategy in order to strengthen the national TB program, the Programme
National de Lutte contre la Tuberculose (PNLT -- National Prtogram of
the Fight Against TB), and approved national guidelines and norms for
TB control in 2002. However, the program lacked political and
financial support from the government, and there is a lack of skilled
technical human resources at the central level of the PNLT. A major
problem in combating TB is that co-infection with HIV can run as high
as 30 percent in some urban areas. Strong stigma and cultural barriers
attached to TB also interfere with case detection and adherence to
treatment. Multidrug-resistant (MDR) TB has increased from 1.4 percent
in 2004 to 1.8 percent in 2007 [among new cases]. ...
WHO has issued a public health risk assessment to facilitate the
response of those aiding the earthquake-affected population in Haiti
available at
Haiti and the Dominican Republic occupy the Caribbean island of
Hispaniola in the Greater Antillean archipelago. A
HealthMap/ProMED-mail interactive map of Hispaniola can be found at
[see also:
Meningococcemia, fatal - Dominican Republic ex Haiti 20100206.0401
2009
---
Tuberculosis, XXDR - USA: FL ex Peru 20091230.4387
Tuberculosis, MDR - China 20090114.0151
2008
---
Tuberculosis, XDR - Austria ex Romania 20080803.2373
Tuberculosis, MDR, XDR - Peru 20080412.1337
Tuberculosis, XDR - Namibia 20080403.1231
Tuberculosis, XDR - UK (Scotland) ex Somalia 20080322.1094
Tuberculosis, MDR, XDR - Worldwide: WHO 20080228.0813
Tuberculosis, MDR - South Africa 20080208.0521
Tuberculosis, MDR - Papua New Guinea 20080206.0478
Tuberculosis, XDR - Botswana, South Africa 20080118.0222
2007
----
Tuberculosis, XDR, MDR: genome sequences 20071122.3780
Tuberculosis - Uganda (02): MDR, susp. RFI 20071004.3284
Tuberculosis, XDR - South Africa (11): fugitives 20071002.3251
Tuberculosis, XDR - worldwide (02) 20070623.2034
Tuberculosis, XDR, airplane exposure - multicountry (USA, France,
Canada, Czech Rep.) 20070529.1738
Tuberculosis, XDR, 2003-2006 - Europe (Germany, Italy) 20070403.1132
Tuberculosis, XDR, 1993-2006 - USA 20070322.1005
Tuberculosis, XDR, 1991-2003 - Spain 20070302.0738
Tuberculosis, XDR - worldwide 20070205.0456
........................................ml/mj/jw
*##########################################################*
************************************************************
ProMED-mail makes every effort to verify the reports that
are posted, but the accuracy and completeness of the
information, and of any statements or opinions based
thereon, are not guaranteed. The reader assumes all risks in
using information posted or archived by ProMED-mail. ISID
and its associated service providers shall not be held
responsible for errors or omissions or held liable for any
damages incurred as a result of use or reliance upon posted
or archived material.
************************************************************
Become a ProMED-mail Premium Subscriber at
************************************************************
Visit ProMED-mail's web site at
Send all items for posting to: promed@promedmail.org
(NOT to an individual moderator). If you do not give your
full name and affiliation, it may not be posted. Send
commands to subscribe/unsubscribe, get archives, help,
etc. to: majordomo@promedmail.org. For assistance from a
human being send mail to: owner-promed@promedmail.org.
############################################################
############################################################
U.S. to Blame for Lack of Access to Pediatric Critical Care, Experts Say
DISEASE SITUATION, POST-EARTHQUAKE - HAITI
******************************************
A ProMED-mail post
ProMED-mail is a program of the
International Society for Infectious Diseases
Date: Tue 2 Feb 2010
Source: Haiti: Operational Biosurveillance [edited]
Haiti Epidemic Advisory System
------------------------------
The UN Health Cluster [the Global Health Cluster, under the leadership
of the World Health Organization, is made up of more than 30
international humanitarian health organizations that have been working
together over the past 2 years to build partnerships and mutual
understanding and to develop common approaches to humanitarian health
action. See
]
is now sending teams of individuals to assess various areas of Haiti.
Over 246 responder organizations signed up as part of the Health
Cluster, and reports of activities were requested from all of them.
However only 46 reports were received. This implies an operational
distraction towards the immediate priorities of food, water,
sanitation, and shelter provision to the refugees, among other more
urgent priorities. As a result, situational awareness for infectious
disease events remains limited and heavily depending on
non-traditional surveillance methodologies.
Diarrheal illness
-----------------
Current reports indicate an active trend of increasing incidence in
the IDP [? internally displaced persons] camps. Periodic rainfall
predicted this week [week of 1 Feb 2010], with sustained rains in the
PAP [Port au Prince] area anticipated beginning in March.
Precipitation may further compromise indigenous water sources and
exacerbate what limited sanitation is available.
Pandemic H1N1
-------------
Current reports indicate an active trend of increasing respiratory
disease in the IDP camps. There has been no formal evaluation or
laboratory confirmation of pH1N1 [pandemic H1N1] to our knowledge.
Advisory issued on 2 Feb [2010] based on the observation that patient
transfers for ventilator beds has been extremely difficult,
particularly in regards to pediatric beds. Those at risk for severe
clinical outcomes from pH1N1 infection include children and pregnant
women. Further, we have documented in multiple countries adverse
clinical outcomes seen in indigenous peoples with poor access to
adequate healthcare, as is the case in Haiti. With the coming rains in
March to encourage crowding in IDP camps, the potential for outbreaks
is moderate. No evidence of pandemic vaccine deployment campaigns by
responding agencies in Haiti. Potential to see serious pediatric
illness requiring pediatric intensive care and ventilatory capabilities.
Anthrax
-------
Extremely difficult to assess actual risk under present conditions.
Prudence suggests a conservative, vigilant, and proactive posture.
Prior post detailed risk factors for Artibonite Valley, which
historically has seen a peak of human cases in the May-June time frame.
Dengue
------
Risk for outbreaks is moderate with the coming sustained rains in
March. Vector breeding sites will increase, as will the potential for
dengue transmission. Heaviest transmission typically seen in the later
half of the year. We have not seen plans yet for mosquito nets
provided to IDP camps.
Pediatric mortality in Haiti
----------------------------
We have been following multiple reports of a commonly observed problem
with disasters in undeveloped or developing countries: lack of
specialized care for children. Specifically, lack of access to
pediatric critical care services.
"On most days, at least one patient died, usually a child."
"It's ridiculous how many kids die from diarrhea, and it's going to
get worse with all the people crowded together... When the rains come,
it could be a slaughter."
"A 15-year-old got gangrene 3 days after being told she would be
heading to Miami for medical care. On Friday, she lost the lower half
of one leg and the foot on the other. Another 14-year-old, whose name
frenzied doctors can't recall, died on Tuesday."
"[Another woman] is still waiting to leave. The quake ripped the skin,
muscles and tendons off her leg. She has to be completely sedated
every time her dressing is changed."
"These are not optimal conditions... This is a dirty, grassy hospital.
It is not the Johns Hopkins ICU."
Lack of access to pediatric critical care stems from several problems:
1. Lack of field-capable pediatric critical care resources that
includes neonatal capabilities
2. Limited capability at military facilities on the ground in Haiti
3. State of Florida blocking transfers from Haiti to appropriate
facilities, claiming lack of financial reimbursements
4. Political sensitization around alleged abduction of children by
missionaries at the Dominican Republic border
5. HHS [? USA Department of Health and Human Services] criteria for
patient transfer claimed to be rigid, "case by case", and inflexible.
6. DHS [? USA Department of Homeland Security] blocking admission to
the United States for patients without paperwork, visas, etc. where a
significant portion of these children are without guardians, parents,
or paperwork.
From a pediatric point of view, we have been primarily concerned
about diarrheal disease, respiratory disease, dengue, and malaria as
primary killers of children during this time. The reasoning for this
prioritization is due to relative ease in control. Vaccination
campaigns are already underway for diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis.
We would assume given the public health and medical personnel's
publicized concerns about measles they will extend coverage to include
measles. However the disruptors mentioned above have the ability to
spread quickly and kill many children under the present conditions,
and especially during the rainy season due to the difficulty in
gaining effective control.
It has been suggested at the UN Health Cluster that formation of the
IDP camps represents a better sanitary situation than the slums of
Port au Prince. While that may be the case for a short time, a
combination of crowding, pressure on limited and undeveloped
sanitation capacity, and the coming rains will rapidly put this idea
to the side.
Haiti's children remain at serious risk. Lack of access to appropriate
care and appropriate public health intervention will ensure continued
high fatality rates in the weeks to come.
Cubans engaged in vector control
--------------------------------
Cuban anti-vector specialists have cleared areas from rats and
rodents, have fumigated them and implemented measures to control
vectors. However, the demand of these tasks is beyond their
possibilities, in view of the prevailing hygienic situation. This is
the 1st time we've seen a dedicated effort to conducting a vector
control campaign, albeit likely of limited value due to the sheer
magnitude of the problem.
Sepsis, gangrene, tetanus, and lack of pediatric intensive care
---------------------------------------------------------------
"They returned to their respective hospitals in [the States] over the
weekend after sweating through 20-hour shifts in a 150-bed hospital
north of Port-au-Prince crammed with 400 patients. They slept on the
floor, helplessly watched many Haitians die in their care, and used
cardboard, ironing boards, and anything else they could find as
makeshift operating tables.
The 1st patient, a 13-year-old boy, came to the hospital with a
mangled leg after he was rescued from beneath a pile of rubble. The
doctors pinned his leg back together using prosthetics and tools they
had brought with them; during the surgery, he was awake and singing.
Later, a mother came to the hospital carrying her unconscious 2-week
old baby, a girl infected with sepsis. The surgeons resuscitated her
but were without a pediatrician. They then tried bringing the baby and
her mother to a nearby US Navy ship, only to find they did not have
the proper physician there, either. They eventually boarded a UN
ambulance, roaming across treacherous roads to a main Haitian
hospital, only for the baby to die upon arrival." - medical response
team from California.
"The conditions are really dire, but we have no choice. Each procedure
has to be carried out that day, to avoid the onset of gangrene.
Fortunately I have everything I needed for anaesthetics and pain
management. The pharmacy was in another building that hadn't been
destroyed. It's complicated and frustrating not having all the
equipment at hand. I saw a tetanus case, a child of 10 years. She was
convulsing on the 1st day, and stiff, with spasms, by the 2nd. Tetanus
is hard to treat if you're not properly equipped. You need to
administer a sedative to relax the patient, and then monitor her
really closely, as her breathing can stop. This patient was on oxygen,
and we monitored her as best we could, but it was a hit-and-miss
affair. We needed a properly equipped intensive care unit, where there
weren't so many risks. The worst, the most annoying thing, was that we
had breathing apparatus in the cargo plane, but as we'd been delayed,
it wasn't yet installed." - pediatric anesthesiologist with MSF
[Medecins Sans Frontieres].
Raw field response conditions in Haiti
--------------------------------------
Email from Alison Thompson sent to her parents in Sutherland Shire
(Sydney) on 24 Jan 2010. Subject: Hell in Haiti
"Hi mum and dad -- I won't be around when they announce my award on
[26 Jan 2010]. I am with Sean Penn, Diana Jenkins, Oscar, and 15
doctors embedded in the US 82nd Airborne (USA) Division. Dante would
describe it as hell here. There is no food and water and hundreds
dying daily. The aid is all bottlenecked and not reaching here.
The other day I assisted with amputation (holding them down) while
they used a saw to cut a young boy's leg off with no pain killers.
Today I went with a strike force and army patrol in hummers into the
streets and walked 5 miles through the camps set up on every street
corner. Sewage and bodies stench is everywhere. As I attend to a
patient 30 people crowd around me and it's hard to breath. I nearly
fainted today as the sewage smell went straight down my throat. I went
white and dizzy but couldn't sit down as sewage is running through the
streets. There is much infection and it feels like the job is too big.
No antibiotics anywhere
"Good news, today our New York doctors evacuated 18 patients with
spinal injuries out to Miami and we're all so excited. Our MASH unit
[US Mobile Army Surgical Hospital] is in the 82nd's air base
overlooking a refugee camp of over 50 000 people. The refugees start
singing Christian songs at 4 am and line up for food until the army
hands it out at 8 am (that's if there is any food). On the 1st night I
was in the nearby jungle camping under the stars with my team and woke
up to the beautiful music drawing me to them. I thought it was a
church and we went to find it and came across the 82 Airborne camp and
the refugee camp. (That's how we ended up here, as it wasn't safe to
stay where we were even though we had our own security force). We are
totally self sufficient with food, gas, and medicines and have a
private donor (Diana Jenkins who was a refugee in camps in Bosnia as a
child -- her family died of starvation in the camps.) Sean Penn is
here purely as a volunteer and is cutting through bureaucracy to get
aid moving and food water and medicines to the people. There is no
agenda but to save lives. Helicopters fly overhead and it feels like
Viet Nam. That night 50 000 people sung me to sleep and they sing
every night for the world to save them. There is always hope but she's
not here right now.
Alison xxx"
--
Communicated by:
James Wilson, MD
Executive Director
The Global Institute For Disruptive Events (GuIDE)
More reports of typhoid & tetanus
----------------------------------
From a team of 15 San Francisco Bay Area physicians: treated cases of
tetanus and typhoid fever.
From a team of physicians from Yale-New Haven Hospital: treated a
6-year-old girl with typhoid peritonitis.
[These reports from the field give a vivid picture of the scale of the
disaster caused by the earthquake in Haiti. Hundreds of thousands of
people are displaced, many with injuries sustained in the earthquake,
acute infections, or chronic illnesses, all in immediate need of
shelter, food, clean water, sanitation, and medical care.
WHO has issued a public health risk assessment to facilitate the
response of those aiding the earthquake-affected population in Haiti,
available at
.
Haiti and the Dominican Republic occupy the Caribbean island of
Hispaniola in the Greater Antillean archipelago. A
HealthMap/ProMED-mail interactive map of Hispaniola can be found at
. - Mod.ML]
[Gideon (Global Infectious Disease & Epidemiology Network) is
providing a free download of "Infectious Disease of Haiti". It is
available at
Mod.LM]
[see also:
Tuberculosis - Haiti: post-earthquake 20100207.0409
Meningococcemia, fatal - Dominican Republic ex Haiti 20100206.0401
........................................ml/mj/jw
*##########################################################*
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A ProMED-mail post
ProMED-mail is a program of the
International Society for Infectious Diseases
Date: Tue 2 Feb 2010
Source: Haiti: Operational Biosurveillance [edited]
Haiti Epidemic Advisory System
------------------------------
The UN Health Cluster [the Global Health Cluster, under the leadership
of the World Health Organization, is made up of more than 30
international humanitarian health organizations that have been working
together over the past 2 years to build partnerships and mutual
understanding and to develop common approaches to humanitarian health
action. See
is now sending teams of individuals to assess various areas of Haiti.
Over 246 responder organizations signed up as part of the Health
Cluster, and reports of activities were requested from all of them.
However only 46 reports were received. This implies an operational
distraction towards the immediate priorities of food, water,
sanitation, and shelter provision to the refugees, among other more
urgent priorities. As a result, situational awareness for infectious
disease events remains limited and heavily depending on
non-traditional surveillance methodologies.
Diarrheal illness
-----------------
Current reports indicate an active trend of increasing incidence in
the IDP [? internally displaced persons] camps. Periodic rainfall
predicted this week [week of 1 Feb 2010], with sustained rains in the
PAP [Port au Prince] area anticipated beginning in March.
Precipitation may further compromise indigenous water sources and
exacerbate what limited sanitation is available.
Pandemic H1N1
-------------
Current reports indicate an active trend of increasing respiratory
disease in the IDP camps. There has been no formal evaluation or
laboratory confirmation of pH1N1 [pandemic H1N1] to our knowledge.
Advisory issued on 2 Feb [2010] based on the observation that patient
transfers for ventilator beds has been extremely difficult,
particularly in regards to pediatric beds. Those at risk for severe
clinical outcomes from pH1N1 infection include children and pregnant
women. Further, we have documented in multiple countries adverse
clinical outcomes seen in indigenous peoples with poor access to
adequate healthcare, as is the case in Haiti. With the coming rains in
March to encourage crowding in IDP camps, the potential for outbreaks
is moderate. No evidence of pandemic vaccine deployment campaigns by
responding agencies in Haiti. Potential to see serious pediatric
illness requiring pediatric intensive care and ventilatory capabilities.
Anthrax
-------
Extremely difficult to assess actual risk under present conditions.
Prudence suggests a conservative, vigilant, and proactive posture.
Prior post detailed risk factors for Artibonite Valley, which
historically has seen a peak of human cases in the May-June time frame.
Dengue
------
Risk for outbreaks is moderate with the coming sustained rains in
March. Vector breeding sites will increase, as will the potential for
dengue transmission. Heaviest transmission typically seen in the later
half of the year. We have not seen plans yet for mosquito nets
provided to IDP camps.
Pediatric mortality in Haiti
----------------------------
We have been following multiple reports of a commonly observed problem
with disasters in undeveloped or developing countries: lack of
specialized care for children. Specifically, lack of access to
pediatric critical care services.
"On most days, at least one patient died, usually a child."
"It's ridiculous how many kids die from diarrhea, and it's going to
get worse with all the people crowded together... When the rains come,
it could be a slaughter."
"A 15-year-old got gangrene 3 days after being told she would be
heading to Miami for medical care. On Friday, she lost the lower half
of one leg and the foot on the other. Another 14-year-old, whose name
frenzied doctors can't recall, died on Tuesday."
"[Another woman] is still waiting to leave. The quake ripped the skin,
muscles and tendons off her leg. She has to be completely sedated
every time her dressing is changed."
"These are not optimal conditions... This is a dirty, grassy hospital.
It is not the Johns Hopkins ICU."
Lack of access to pediatric critical care stems from several problems:
1. Lack of field-capable pediatric critical care resources that
includes neonatal capabilities
2. Limited capability at military facilities on the ground in Haiti
3. State of Florida blocking transfers from Haiti to appropriate
facilities, claiming lack of financial reimbursements
4. Political sensitization around alleged abduction of children by
missionaries at the Dominican Republic border
5. HHS [? USA Department of Health and Human Services] criteria for
patient transfer claimed to be rigid, "case by case", and inflexible.
6. DHS [? USA Department of Homeland Security] blocking admission to
the United States for patients without paperwork, visas, etc. where a
significant portion of these children are without guardians, parents,
or paperwork.
From a pediatric point of view, we have been primarily concerned
about diarrheal disease, respiratory disease, dengue, and malaria as
primary killers of children during this time. The reasoning for this
prioritization is due to relative ease in control. Vaccination
campaigns are already underway for diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis.
We would assume given the public health and medical personnel's
publicized concerns about measles they will extend coverage to include
measles. However the disruptors mentioned above have the ability to
spread quickly and kill many children under the present conditions,
and especially during the rainy season due to the difficulty in
gaining effective control.
It has been suggested at the UN Health Cluster that formation of the
IDP camps represents a better sanitary situation than the slums of
Port au Prince. While that may be the case for a short time, a
combination of crowding, pressure on limited and undeveloped
sanitation capacity, and the coming rains will rapidly put this idea
to the side.
Haiti's children remain at serious risk. Lack of access to appropriate
care and appropriate public health intervention will ensure continued
high fatality rates in the weeks to come.
Cubans engaged in vector control
--------------------------------
Cuban anti-vector specialists have cleared areas from rats and
rodents, have fumigated them and implemented measures to control
vectors. However, the demand of these tasks is beyond their
possibilities, in view of the prevailing hygienic situation. This is
the 1st time we've seen a dedicated effort to conducting a vector
control campaign, albeit likely of limited value due to the sheer
magnitude of the problem.
Sepsis, gangrene, tetanus, and lack of pediatric intensive care
---------------------------------------------------------------
"They returned to their respective hospitals in [the States] over the
weekend after sweating through 20-hour shifts in a 150-bed hospital
north of Port-au-Prince crammed with 400 patients. They slept on the
floor, helplessly watched many Haitians die in their care, and used
cardboard, ironing boards, and anything else they could find as
makeshift operating tables.
The 1st patient, a 13-year-old boy, came to the hospital with a
mangled leg after he was rescued from beneath a pile of rubble. The
doctors pinned his leg back together using prosthetics and tools they
had brought with them; during the surgery, he was awake and singing.
Later, a mother came to the hospital carrying her unconscious 2-week
old baby, a girl infected with sepsis. The surgeons resuscitated her
but were without a pediatrician. They then tried bringing the baby and
her mother to a nearby US Navy ship, only to find they did not have
the proper physician there, either. They eventually boarded a UN
ambulance, roaming across treacherous roads to a main Haitian
hospital, only for the baby to die upon arrival." - medical response
team from California.
"The conditions are really dire, but we have no choice. Each procedure
has to be carried out that day, to avoid the onset of gangrene.
Fortunately I have everything I needed for anaesthetics and pain
management. The pharmacy was in another building that hadn't been
destroyed. It's complicated and frustrating not having all the
equipment at hand. I saw a tetanus case, a child of 10 years. She was
convulsing on the 1st day, and stiff, with spasms, by the 2nd. Tetanus
is hard to treat if you're not properly equipped. You need to
administer a sedative to relax the patient, and then monitor her
really closely, as her breathing can stop. This patient was on oxygen,
and we monitored her as best we could, but it was a hit-and-miss
affair. We needed a properly equipped intensive care unit, where there
weren't so many risks. The worst, the most annoying thing, was that we
had breathing apparatus in the cargo plane, but as we'd been delayed,
it wasn't yet installed." - pediatric anesthesiologist with MSF
[Medecins Sans Frontieres].
Raw field response conditions in Haiti
--------------------------------------
Email from Alison Thompson sent to her parents in Sutherland Shire
(Sydney) on 24 Jan 2010. Subject: Hell in Haiti
"Hi mum and dad -- I won't be around when they announce my award on
[26 Jan 2010]. I am with Sean Penn, Diana Jenkins, Oscar, and 15
doctors embedded in the US 82nd Airborne (USA) Division. Dante would
describe it as hell here. There is no food and water and hundreds
dying daily. The aid is all bottlenecked and not reaching here.
The other day I assisted with amputation (holding them down) while
they used a saw to cut a young boy's leg off with no pain killers.
Today I went with a strike force and army patrol in hummers into the
streets and walked 5 miles through the camps set up on every street
corner. Sewage and bodies stench is everywhere. As I attend to a
patient 30 people crowd around me and it's hard to breath. I nearly
fainted today as the sewage smell went straight down my throat. I went
white and dizzy but couldn't sit down as sewage is running through the
streets. There is much infection and it feels like the job is too big.
No antibiotics anywhere
"Good news, today our New York doctors evacuated 18 patients with
spinal injuries out to Miami and we're all so excited. Our MASH unit
[US Mobile Army Surgical Hospital] is in the 82nd's air base
overlooking a refugee camp of over 50 000 people. The refugees start
singing Christian songs at 4 am and line up for food until the army
hands it out at 8 am (that's if there is any food). On the 1st night I
was in the nearby jungle camping under the stars with my team and woke
up to the beautiful music drawing me to them. I thought it was a
church and we went to find it and came across the 82 Airborne camp and
the refugee camp. (That's how we ended up here, as it wasn't safe to
stay where we were even though we had our own security force). We are
totally self sufficient with food, gas, and medicines and have a
private donor (Diana Jenkins who was a refugee in camps in Bosnia as a
child -- her family died of starvation in the camps.) Sean Penn is
here purely as a volunteer and is cutting through bureaucracy to get
aid moving and food water and medicines to the people. There is no
agenda but to save lives. Helicopters fly overhead and it feels like
Viet Nam. That night 50 000 people sung me to sleep and they sing
every night for the world to save them. There is always hope but she's
not here right now.
Alison xxx"
--
Communicated by:
James Wilson, MD
Executive Director
The Global Institute For Disruptive Events (GuIDE)
More reports of typhoid & tetanus
----------------------------------
From a team of 15 San Francisco Bay Area physicians: treated cases of
tetanus and typhoid fever.
From a team of physicians from Yale-New Haven Hospital: treated a
6-year-old girl with typhoid peritonitis.
[These reports from the field give a vivid picture of the scale of the
disaster caused by the earthquake in Haiti. Hundreds of thousands of
people are displaced, many with injuries sustained in the earthquake,
acute infections, or chronic illnesses, all in immediate need of
shelter, food, clean water, sanitation, and medical care.
WHO has issued a public health risk assessment to facilitate the
response of those aiding the earthquake-affected population in Haiti,
available at
Haiti and the Dominican Republic occupy the Caribbean island of
Hispaniola in the Greater Antillean archipelago. A
HealthMap/ProMED-mail interactive map of Hispaniola can be found at
[Gideon (Global Infectious Disease & Epidemiology Network) is
providing a free download of "Infectious Disease of Haiti". It is
available at
Mod.LM]
[see also:
Tuberculosis - Haiti: post-earthquake 20100207.0409
Meningococcemia, fatal - Dominican Republic ex Haiti 20100206.0401
........................................ml/mj/jw
*##########################################################*
************************************************************
ProMED-mail makes every effort to verify the reports that
are posted, but the accuracy and completeness of the
information, and of any statements or opinions based
thereon, are not guaranteed. The reader assumes all risks in
using information posted or archived by ProMED-mail. ISID
and its associated service providers shall not be held
responsible for errors or omissions or held liable for any
damages incurred as a result of use or reliance upon posted
or archived material.
************************************************************
Become a ProMED-mail Premium Subscriber at
************************************************************
Visit ProMED-mail's web site at
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(NOT to an individual moderator). If you do not give your
full name and affiliation, it may not be posted. Send
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