Thursday 30 April 2009

Drugs Industry

In October 2005 the Pentagon ordered vaccination of all US military personnel worldwide against what it called Avian Flu, H5N1. Scare stories filled world media. Then, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced he had budgeted more than $1 billion to stockpile the vaccine, Oseltamivir sold under the name, Tamiflu. President Bush called on Congress to appropriate another $2 billion for Tamiflu stocks.



What Rumsfeld neglected to report at the time was a colossal conflict of interest. Prior to coming to Washington in January 2001, Rumsfeld had been chairman of a California pharmaceutical company, Gilead Sciences. Gilead Sciences held exclusive world patent rights to Tamiflu, a drug it had developed and whose world marketing rights were sold to the Swiss pharma giant, Roche. Rumsfeld was reportedly the largest stock holder in Gilead which got 10% of every Tamiflu dose Roche sold. 14 When it leaked out, the Pentagon issued a curt statement to the effect that Secretary Rumsfeld had decided not to sell but to retain his stock in Gilead, claiming that to sell would have indicated something to hide.’ That agonizing decision won him reported added millions as the Gilead share price soared more than 700% in weeks.



Tamiflu is no mild candy to be taken lightly. It has heavy side effects. It contains matter that could have potentially deadly consequences for a person’s breathing and often reportedly leads to nausea, dizziness and other flu-like symptoms.



Since the outbreak of Swine Flu Panic (not Swine Flu but Swine Flu Panic) sales of Tamiflu as well as any and every possible drug marketed as flu related have exploded. Wall Street firms have rushed to issue ‘buy’ recommendations for the company. ‘Gimme me a shot Doc, I don’t care what it is…I don’ wanna die…’



Panic and fear of death was used by the Bush Administration skilfully to promote the Avian Flu fraud. With ominous echoes of the current Swine Flu scare, Avian Flu was traced back to huge chicken factory farms in Thailand and other parts of Asia whose products were shipped across the world. Instead of a serious investigation into the sanitary conditions of those chicken factory farms, the Bush Administration and WHO blamed ‘free-roaming chickens’ on small family farms, a move that had devastating economic consequences to the farmers whose chickens were being raised in the most sanitary natural conditions. Tyson Foods of Arkansas and CG Group of Thailand reportedly smiled all the way to the bank.



Now it remains to be seen if the Obama Administration will use the scare around so-called Swine Flu to repeat the same scenario, this time with ‘flying pigs’ instead of flying birds. Already Mexican authorities have reported that the number of deaths confirmed from so-called Swine Flu is 7 not the 150 or more bandied in the media and that most other suspected cases were ordinary flu or influenza.

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22518.htm

Tuesday 28 April 2009

swine flu

Legal immunity set for swine flu vaccine makers
By MIKE STOBBE (AP) – 1 day ago

ATLANTA — The last time the government embarked on a major vaccine campaign against a new swine flu, thousands filed claims contending they suffered side effects from the shots. This time, the government has already taken steps to head that off.

Vaccine makers and federal officials will be immune from lawsuits that result from any new swine flu vaccine, under a document signed by Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, government health officials said Friday.



http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hjdCHrP82YTFser5vD6CzTK1az6wD99GH8580




Since its identification during the Great Depression, H1N1 swine flu had only drifted slightly from its original genome. Then in 1998 a highly pathogenic strain began to decimate sows on a farm in North Carolina and new, more virulent versions began to appear almost yearly, including a variant of H1N1 that contained the internal genes of H3N2 (the other type-A flu circulating among humans).

In 1965, for instance, there were 53m US hogs on more than 1m farms; today, 65m hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities. This has been a transition from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.

The commission also warned that promiscuous antibiotic use in hog factories (cheaper than humane environments) was sponsoring the rise of resistant staph infections, while sewage spills were producing outbreaks of E coli and pfiesteria (the protozoan that has killed 1bn fish in Carolina estuaries and made ill dozens of fishermen).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/27/swine-flu-mexico-health

Some known facts



According to Biosurveillance, itself part of Veratect, a US Pentagon and Government-linked epidemic reporting center, on April 6, 2009 local health officials declared a health alert due to a respiratory disease outbreak in La Gloria, Perote Municipality, Veracruz State, Mexico.



They reported, ‘Sources characterized the event as a ‘strange’ outbreak of acute respiratory infection, which led to bronchial pneumonia in some pediatric cases. According to a local resident, symptoms included fever, severe cough, and large amounts of phlegm. Health officials recorded 400 cases that sought medical treatment in the last week in La Gloria, which has a population of 3,000; officials indicated that 60% of the town’s population (approximately 1,800 cases) has been affected. No precise timeframe was provided, but sources reported that a local official had been seeking health assistance for the town since February.’ What they later say is ‘strange’ is not the form of the illness but the time of year as most flu cases occur in Mexico in the period October to February.

The report went on to note, ‘Residents claimed that three pediatric cases, all under two years of age, died from the outbreak. However, health officials stated that there was no direct link between the pediatric deaths and the outbreak; they stated the three fatal cases were "isolated" and "not related" to each other.’

Then, most revealingly, the aspect of the story which has been largely ignored by major media, they reported, ‘Residents believed the outbreak had been caused by contamination from pig breeding farms located in the area. They believed that the farms, operated by Granjas Carroll, polluted the atmosphere and local water bodies, which in turn led to the disease outbreak. According to residents, the company denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to "flu." However, a municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms.’4

Since the dawn of American ‘agribusiness,’ a project initiated with funding by the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1950’s to turn farming into a pure profit maximization business, US pig or hog production has been transformed into a highly efficient, mass production industrialized enterprise from birth to slaughter. Pigs are caged in what are called Factory Farms, industrial concentrations which are run with the efficiency of a Dachau or Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. They are all conceived by artificial insemination and once born, are regularly injected with antibiotics, not because of illnesses which abound in the hyper-crowded growing pens, but in order to make them grow and add weight faster. Turn around time to slaughter is a profit factor of highest priority. The entire operation is vertically integrated from conception to slaughter to transport distribution to supermarket.

Granjas Carroll de Mexico (GCM) happens to be such a Factory Farm concentration facility for hogs. In 2008 they produced almost one million factory hogs, 950,000 according to their own statistics. GCM is a joint venture operation owned 50% by the world’s largest pig producing industrial company, Smithfield Foods of Virginia.5 The pigs are grown in a tiny rural area of Mexico, a member of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and primarily trucked across the border to supermarkets in the USA, under the Smithfields’ family of labels. Most American consumers have no idea where the meat was raised.

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22518.htm

Posted by willyloman on April 29, 2009

from the SMH

A member of the World Health Organisation (WHO) has dismissed claims that more than 150 people have died from swine flu, saying it has officially recorded only seven deaths around the world.

Vivienne Allan, from WHO’s patient safety program, said the body had confirmed that worldwide there had been just seven deaths - all in Mexico - and 79 confirmed cases of the disease.


“Unfortunately that [150-plus deaths] is incorrect information and it does happen, but that’s not information that’s come from the World Health Organisation,” Ms Allan told ABC Radio today.

“That figure is not a figure that’s come from the World Health Organisation and, I repeat, the death toll is seven and they are all from Mexico.”

Ms Allan said WHO had confirmed 40 cases of swine flu in the Americas, 26 in Mexico, six in Canada, two in Spain, two in Britain and three in New Zealand.

Ms Allan said it was difficult to measure how fast the virus was spreading.

Donald Rumsfeld makes $5m killing on bird flu drug

Donald Rumsfeld has made a killing out of bird flu. The US Defence Secretary has made more than $5m (£2.9m) in capital gains from selling shares in the biotechnology firm that discovered and developed Tamiflu, the drug being bought in massive amounts by Governments to treat a possible human pandemic of the disease.


More than 60 countries have so far ordered large stocks of the antiviral medication - the only oral medicine believed to be effective against the deadly H5N1 strain of the disease - to try to protect their people. The United Nations estimates that a pandemic could kill 150 million people worldwide.

Britain is about halfway through receiving an order of 14.6 million courses of the drug, which the Government hopes will avert some of the 700,000 deaths that might be expected. Tamiflu does not cure the disease, but if taken soon after symptoms appear it can reduce its severity.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-rumsfeld-makes-5m-killing-on-bird-flu-drug-469599.html

Army Suicide

The Army said 24 soldiers are believed to have committed suicide in January alone -- six times as many as killed themselves in January 2008, according to statistics released Thursday.

The Army said it already has confirmed seven suicides, with 17 additional cases pending that it believes investigators will confirm as suicides for January.

If those prove true, more soldiers will have killed themselves than died in combat last month. According to Pentagon statistics, there were 16 U.S. combat deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq in January.

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/US/02/05/army.suicides/index.html

Every day, five U.S. soldiers try to kill themselves. Before the Iraq war began, that figure was less than one suicide attempt a day.

The dramatic increase is revealed in new U.S. Army figures, which show 2,100 soldiers tried to commit suicide in 2007. ........

...... Last year's 2,100 attempted suicides -- an average of more than 5 per day -- compares with about 350 suicide attempts in 2002, the year before the war in Iraq began, according to the Army. ........

....... The figures also show the number of suicides by active-duty troops in 2007 may reach an all-time high when the statistics are finalized in March, Army officials said.

The Army lists 89 soldier deaths in 2007 as suicides and is investigating 32 more as possible suicides. Suicide rates already were up in 2006 with 102 deaths, compared with 87 in 2005. ........

..... Traditionally, the suicide rate among military members has been lower than age- and gender-matched civilians. But in recent years the rate has crept up from 12 per 100,000 among the military to 17.5 per 100,000 in 2006, she said. That's still less than the civilian figure of about 20 per 100,000, she said. ......


http://edition.cnn.com/2008/US/02/01/military.suicides/index.html

Torture

After World War II, an international coalition convened to prosecute Japanese soldiers charged with torture. At the top of the list of techniques was water-based interrogation, known variously then as "water cure," "water torture" and "waterboarding," according to the charging documents. It simulates drowning.

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/04/yes-we-did-execute-japanese-soldiers-waterboarding-american-pows

Federal prosecutors secured a 10-year sentence against the sheriff and four years in prison for the deputies. But that 1983 case - which would seem to be directly on point for a legal analysis on waterboarding two decades later - was never mentioned in the four Bush administration opinions released last week.

Population Israel..... Stats

On the eve of the 61st anniversary of its founding, the population of Israel stands at 7,411,000 - 75 percent of it Jewish - up from 7,282,000 last year.

According to figures released by the Central Bureau of Statistics on Monday, the Jewish population of Israel stands at 5,593,000 and the Arab population is listed at 1,498,000, or 20.2% of the general population.

Foreign residents of Israel and their children who are not citizens make up 4.3% of the country's population.
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154,000 new babies were born in Israel and 12,000 people immigrated to the country over the past year.

Sunday 26 April 2009

homeless children

The national center's study, "America's Youngest Outcasts," shows that California had 292,624 homeless children, the 10th largest population in the nation, during the time of its count, the 2005- 2006 school year. The group counted 1.5 million homeless kids across the country, about 200,000 more than the figure it reported a decade before.

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22186.htm

Tamil Tigers

Al Jazeera's David Chater, reporting from Sri Lanka, said: "We have heard from many people that humanitarian supplies still around were being taken by the Tamil Tigers and sold to the people [displaced by fighting].

"Many of the people I saw were in an advanced state of dehydration. Many of the older people were extremely malnourished and you can only imagine what it is like for the children trapped inside the conflict zone."

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/04/20094258521937693.html

Saturday 25 April 2009

Transparency of US Gov 2009

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said this week that he prefers that the Senate Intelligence Committee hold private hearings. The chair of the committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, has asked the White House not to take any action until this private affair is concluded. She estimates that will take 6-8 months.

http://www.uruknet.de:80/?s1=1&p=53681&s2=25

Islam

The Prophet Muhammad (may peace be upon him) himself had established a community in Medina which possessed some of the rudimentary characteristics of a state. A charter was formulated which sought to regulate relations between different communities, laws were enacted, public roles were assigned to individuals to manage the affairs of the community and even emissaries were dispatched to neighbouring kingdoms and states. Because Muhammad was more than a Prophet or Messenger of God --- he was a political leader, a military commander and a law giver --- Muslims have invariably associated state power and governance with the essential message of Islam.

This view of what Islam stands for was reinforced by the evolution of the shariah as a code of conduct a few decades after the death of the Prophet.

http://www.countercurrents.org/muzaffar140309.htm

Religion

One, religion means identity to a lot of people.

Two, related to identity --- though not synonymous with it --- are the rituals, practices, forms and symbols of a religion to which most believers are attached, in one way or another.

Three, for many Asians religion is also the source of morality. It is the ultimate measure of right and wrong.

Four --- and perhaps most fundamental --- at a personal, intimate level, religion means faith in God, in a Divine Being, in a Transcendent Reality.

http://www.countercurrents.org/muzaffar140309.htm

Internet privacy: Britain in the dock

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/internet-privacy-britain-in-the-dock-1668844.html

April 15, 2009
Internet privacy: Britain in the dock
By Nick Clark and Robert Verkaik

'Big Brother' state comes under fire as European Commission launches inquiry into secret surveillance of web users
Britain's failure to protect its citizens from secret surveillance on the internet is to be investigated by the European Commission.

The move will fuel claims that Britain is sliding towards a Big Brother state and could end with the Government being forced to defend its policy on internet privacy in front of judges in Europe.

The legal action is being brought over the use of controversial behavioural advertising services which were tested on BT's internet customers without their consent.

Yesterday, the EU said it wanted "clear consent" from internet users that their private data was being used to gather commercial information about their web shopping habits.

Under the programme, the UK-listed company Phorm has developed technology that allows internet service providers (ISPs) to track what their users are doing online. ISPs can then sell that information to media companies and advertisers, who can use it to place more relevant advertisements on websites the user subsequently visits. The EU has accused Britain of turning a blind eye to the growth in this kind of internet marketing.

Yesterday, the EU telecoms commissioner, Viviane Reding, said: "I call on the UK authorities to change their national laws and ensure that national authorities are duly empowered and have proper sanctions at their disposal to enforce EU legislation."

Last year, BT tested the Phorm technology to track its customer's internet searches without their knowledge, provoking complaints from users and from UK members of the European Parliament.

Because it is considered lawful to intercept data when there is "reasonable grounds for believing" there is consent, the issue falls outside the UK's wiretapping laws. Linda Weatherhead of Consumer Focus said: "While phone tapping is clearly illegal and unacceptable, it seems that spying on the digital communications and activity is not." Richard Clayton, treasurer of the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR) – which described Phorm as "illegal" last year – said: "The laws are fit for purpose, but it seems that Whitehall have misunderstood their own laws." He said that users at both ends need to have consented to the system, which is not the case here and so contravenes the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act from 2000.

The Commission is also critical of the Government's implementation of the European electronic privacy and personal data protection rules. They state that EU countries must ensure the confidentiality of communications by banning the interception and surveillance of internet users without their consent.

Ms Reding said: "We have been following the Phorm case for some time and have concluded that there are problems in the way the UK has implemented parts of EU rules on the confidentially of communications."

She added that the enforcement of the laws "should allow the UK to respond more vigorously to new challenges of e-privacy and personal data protection such as those that have arisen in the Phorm case. It should also help reassure UK consumers about their privacy and data protection while surfing the internet."

The EU's intervention was welcomed by privacy campaigners. The Open Rights Group recently wrote to some of the world's biggest websites including Google, Yahoo and Facebook, asking them to block Phorm. Its executive director, Jim Killock, said yesterday: "There are big legal questions surrounding BT's use of Phorm, so we welcome the EU taking the Government to task. It's a pity our own Government haven't had more backbone and stood up for their voters' rights."

The UK has two months to reply to the EC's formal notification. Should no satisfactory response be made, the Commission could issue a reasoned opinion, before the case moves to the European Court of Justice.

Last year the Information Commissioner's Office passed the Phorm technology as legal.

Advertisers are particularly keen on this form of marketing as the more targeted it becomes, the more value for money they feel the advert offers. One consultant said: "It is basically a very fine line between advertising that helps people and those that intrude."

Phorm boss Kent Ertugrul has been increasingly forced on to the back foot over the issue of privacy, fending off a series of questions over the issue last week at a "town hall" meeting. He said that the technology does not store information to identify a user; that all participants can opt out of it; and that it complies with data protection and privacy laws. The group added yesterday that the Commission's statement did not contradict that its technology was fully compliant with UK legislation and EU directives.

It is illegal in the UK to unlawfully intercept communications, but this is limited to "intentional" interception, the EC said yesterday. This is also considered lawful when those intercepting have "reasonable grounds for believing" consent has been given. There is no independent national supervisory authority dealing with such cases.

Several bodies including FIPR have blamed the Government and the UK regulators for playing "pass the parcel" with the issue, which has left it hanging with no one wanting to enforce it.

The Commission received its first complaints over the issue in April last year following BT's trial. Other providers including Virgin and Carphone Warehouse's TalkTalk are also interested.

Users complained to the UK data protection authority and the police. The Commission wrote to the UK authorities in July and upon receiving the answers "has concerns that there are structural problems in the way the UK has implemented EU rules".

Simon Davis, director of Privacy International, believes the row has erupted more over "sovereignty than substance. It is almost entirely political".

'Big Brother' Britain: Private data under threat

* The mobile calls, emails and website visits of every person in Britain will be stored for a year under sweeping new powers which came into force this month. The new powers will for the first time place a legal duty on internet providers to store private data.

* Privacy campaigners warn that all this information could be used by the Government to create a giant "Big Brother" super-database containing a map of everyone's private life. The Home Office is expected shortly to publish plans for the storage of data which it says will be invaluable in the fight against crime.

* Facebook, one of the world's biggest internet sites, faced a privacy backlash when thousands of members signed a petition calling on the website to remove an advertising programme called Beacon, which can be used to track the spending habits of its users' visits to other websites.

* Google also courted controversy this year when it launched Street View, the controversial 3D mapping feature, in the UK. In one village householders stopped a Google vehicle from taking pictures of their street.

Racist escapes terror charge after threat to behead and bomb Muslims

http://www.scotsman.com/latestnews/Racist-escapes--terror-charge.5169939.jp

Published Date: 15 April 2009
By MICHAEL HOWIE
THE Crown Office has been accused of double standards by Scotland's biggest Islamic group for not bringing terrorism charges against a man who threatened to blow up a mosque and behead Muslims.

The Scottish Islamic Foundation (SIF) has written to Lord Advocate Elish Angiolini querying the decision to prosecute Neil MacGregor for a breach of the peace, not terrorism offences.

MacGregor, 35, has admitted threatening to blow up Scotland's biggest mosque and to behead one Muslim a week until every mosque was shut down.

He will be sentenced at Glasgow Sheriff Court on Friday.

"There has been criticism for the lack of exposure this case has got, but this stems from how the case was originally handled," SIF chief executive Osama Saeed said. "Had he been a Muslim, we suspect that counter-terror police would have been involved from the outset, and it would have been processed in a completely different manner."

Mr Saeed drew a parallel with the case of Mohammed Atif Siddique, a student from Alva, Clackmannanshire, who was jailed for eight years for internet-related terrorist crimes.

"No-one seems to have looked into the internet habits that radicalised MacGregor to take copycat revenge for (British hostage] Ken Bigley's assassination in Iraq," he said.

"We can be sure if he had been Muslim and had been inspired to replicate it, the result would have been quite different."

Mr Saeed insisted he was not seeking to minimise the seriousness of Islamic terrorism cases.

"All we are calling for is consistency, and the authorities have to explain why the heavy books of the Terrorism Acts were not thrown at MacGregor," he said.

"Islamic and far-right extremism are stablemates when it comes to violence – a toxic mix of ideology and grievance. We hear glib assurances that far-right extremism is being dealt with, but the evidence says otherwise."

The SIF was founded last year, describing itself as a "platform for action", and has received £400,000 from the Scottish Government.

Mr Saeed said the federation would request evidence from the case to be released under Freedom of Information laws.

An earlier hearing was told MacGregor admitted sending an e-mail to Strathclyde Police, threatening to blow up Glasgow Central Mosque if certain demands were not met.

Included in the message was a threat to behead one Muslim a week, in the same manner that construction worker Mr Bigley was killed after he was kidnapped in Iraq in 2004.

The court heard MacGregor, from Derbyshire, followed that e-mail with a 999 call to police on 5 February, 2007, in which he claimed he was from the National Front and that a bomb was going to go off at Glasgow's Central Mosque.

Police searched the building for explosive devices, but failed to find anything suspicious.

In his e-mail, MacGregor wrote: "I'm a proud racist and National Front member. We as an organisation have decided to deal with the current threat from Muslims in our own British way like our proud ancestors.

"Our demands are very small. Close all mosques in Scotland, we see this is very easy – even you guys can handle that."

He then wrote: "If our demands aren't met by next Friday we'll kidnap one Muslim and execute him or her on the internet, just like they did to our Ken Bigley."

A Crown Office spokesman said that MacGregor was indicted on a charge of breach of the peace, aggravated by racial hatred, "following full and careful consideration of all the facts and circumstances in this case".

Stats US Economy

Unquestionably, we have witnessed a massive rise in the significance of the financial sector. In 2002, the sector generated an astonishing 41 per cent of US domestic corporate profits (see chart). In 2008, US private indebtedness reached 295 per cent of gross domestic product, a record, up from 112 per cent in 1976, while financial sector debt reached 121 per cent of GDP in 2008. Average pay in the sector rose from close to the average for all industries between 1948 and 1982 to 181 per cent of it in 2007.

The political legacy of Blair Peach : Special Patrol Group

The political legacy of Blair Peach

By Jenny Bourne, published by Institute of Race Relations (IRR) 23 April 2009

From the death of Blair Peach on 23 April 1979 emerged a series of political struggles, which must never be forgotten.

Southall community mobilises after the death of Blair Peach

People are, inevitably, comparing the death of Ian Tomlinson at the hands of a Territorial Support Group officer with the death thirty years ago of Blair Peach at the hands of a Special Patrol Group officer. What we have now is the 'incontrovertible' evidence from phone images and CCTV cameras, as opposed to the statements from eyewitnesses caught up in the melee of Southall on 23 April 1979. What we have now are legal teams aware of the vagaries within pathologists' opinions.

What is overlooked today is that the political struggle that followed the death of Blair Peach at the hands of brutal police was as significant to the politics of the 1980s as the death of Stephen Lawrence at the hands of racists was to be two decades later. For Blair Peach's death became a focal point for those who questioned the nature of the Special Patrol Group and the general lack of police accountability which that force epitomised. And, from the agitation of Blair's family, especially his partner Celia Stubbs, about the inadequacy of the inquest system and the secrecy surrounding the coroner's court and the evidence withheld from the family, was created the organisation INQUEST (http://www.inquest.org.uk). Two crucial legacies.

Complaints about the SPG

The Special Patrol Group (SPG) was created in 1965 as a para-military unit of the Metropolitan police to provide a centrally-based mobile squad for combating public disorder and crime. (In 1986 its name was changed to the Territorial Support Group.) In 1973 the public first really became aware of its existence when two young Pakistani men, holding toy guns, demonstrated at India House and were shot dead. There were, however, community concerns about the force being voiced throughout the 1970s: around for example raids on the Mangrove restaurant and Metro club in Notting Hill, about mass operations in Lewisham in 1975 over a spate of 'muggings'. (In 1975 the SPG stopped 65,628 people to arrest only 4,125.) But such complaints came from within the Black community and were often around local issues and raids. No one was really prepared to listen. During the Grunwick dispute of 1976-8 and the policing of a mass mobilisation against the fascists in Lewisham in August 1977, however, the police and especially the SPG brutality was there in full view. And though the 1978 TUC annual conference passed a resolution calling for a public inquiry into their activities, the media, by and large, perceived and portrayed these events as battles between two ruthless factions, neither with right on its side. (This was certainly the case in the reporting in 1974 when Kevin Gately died during a demonstration against the National Front in Red Lion Square in which the SPG was involved.) And very often show-downs between anti-fascists/anti-racists and police were seen as outsiders fighting on someone else's turf with too little regard being paid by anti-racists to the involvement of local people who ultimately paid the price of street battles.

Southall and the death of Blair Peach somehow broke up those misconceptions. It revealed abuse of power, a force within a force, which operated outside the rules. It also served to show up most starkly what Black communities had said for decades: that the freelance racial violence of individuals was being compounded by a more studied hostility, prone to morph into brutality, from police officers.

Death provoked massive sympathy

The death provoked a massive wave of public sympathy, much from within the community itself. Just days after the death, ten thousand people marched silently past the spot where Blair had been struck down; in June, eight thousand people mourned his passing as his body lay in state at the Dominion Theatre; thousands were later to his attend his funeral in East London. And June 1979 also saw a 2,000-strong first Black people's march against state harassment through central London.

For it was in June that Commander Cass, appointed by Metropolitan Commissioner David McNee to investigate the death, conducted a search through lockers belonging to SPG officers known to have been in the vicinity to where Blair was struck, revealing a whole host of non police-issue weaponry: a leather-cased metal truncheon with knotted thong, a metal truncheon with a lead weighted end, a two foot long American-style truncheon, two sledge hammer handles, a rhino whip, one knife with 6-inch blade, two three-foot crowbars and a three-foot wooden stave. (According to left-wing investigative journalists, Cass had narrowed his suspicion down to six officers, and various papers went on to name them. He sent his report to the Director of Public Prosecutions who decided there was insufficient evidence to prosecute anyone - officers wearing riot gear were, apparently, impossible to identify.)

Commissioner McNee, who had refused to countenance criticism of the SPG by a Black journalist at a press conference earlier in the year, 'if you keep off the streets and behave yourselves, you won't have the SPG to worry about', now was being seriously challenged, alongside home secretary William Whitelaw to defend the SPG's existence. Recruitment was suspended for nine months while a (cosmetic) review was carried out - which decided merely to limit the term officers could serve and decentralise the command structure.

Though the government refused to hold an inquiry into police action and the Cass report was never made public despite numerous requests from the family, reports on the death of Blair Peach and the policing on 23 April were published by Southall Rights, the Commission for Racial Equality, and, most importantly, by the National Council for Civil Liberties, which held its own unofficial committee of inquiry. All condemned police action on 23 April and the handling of the subsequent trials of the 342 mainly Asian people charged with offences, following the 700+ arrests.

Policing - a political issue

But most significant was the way in which from the horror of that evening, policing emerged as a political issue at a community and then a local authority level. After Southall, saturation policing raids carried out by the SPG in Lambeth, Lewisham, Hackney and Brent were attacked by community leaders, all of who called for the disbandment of that force. Lewisham council threatened to withhold its police rate and Lambeth council set up its own eighteen-month inquiry into police-community relations.

After Blair's death, anti-racial violence campaigns in Southall coalesced into the Southall Monitoring Group - to campaign on both racial violence and police racism. Soon after, following the racist murder of Akhtar Ali Baig on East Ham High Street, the Newham Monitoring Project was set up in 1980 on the same basis to offer help and support to those suffering racist attacks and police harassment. Similar community monitoring organisations were to follow in other areas. By 1981, when the Greater London Council (GLC) was under the progressive leadership of Livingstone and others, policing was accepted as a community issue and a police committee with the capacity to support community initiatives across the metropolitan district was established. The GLC Police Committee directly funded over twenty local police monitoring groups. Soon, many Labour-controlled authorities followed this example and created their own police units to advise them on police accountability and community safety strategies. Blair Peach's death had, it would appear, made a section of the Labour Party give ear, at last, to what Black communities had been saying for over a decade.

Struggles over the inquest

While community groups and councils were busy politicising policing, the family and friends of Blair Peach were still in the process of struggling to find out how he died and whether anyone could be held to account for the death. Probably they had not expected to find much transparency from within police ranks - it was a well-known fact that the police policed the police - but, like many families before them, they did expect the inquest to yield more by way of truths about that evening.

But from the off there were problems. The coroner, the late Dr John Burton, did not want to call a jury and he did not want the inquest in a large enough venue to allow in members of the public. In fact throughout a protracted battle with him on the part of those representing the deceased, it became clear that he was doing all in his power to prevent what he regarded as a politicisation of the death. (It has since transpired that the Home Office intervened in 1980 to stop the coroner from publishing an article after the inquest because it revealed his obvious bias.)

It has to be appreciated that the death had taken place in west London and therefore the usual coroner's court would have been in Hammersmith. But the court was very small and the family argued, and at first the coroner acceded to their view, that because of the public interest a larger venue should be sought. The inquest was moved to Fulham town hall. But then Burton changed his mind, after he saw the number of members of the public who were interested, and moved the inquest, first to Battersea and then, in April 1980 when the full inquest would have been heard, back to Hammersmith again. That courtroom, with just forty seats, was so small there was no room in it for anyone save interested parties and their counsel and a handful of journalists. This was not to be a public hearing.

Perhaps Burton had thought at first that this would be an easy, simple inquest he could deal with quickly. He decided not to call a jury. The family, who had just forced him to move the inquest, were furious when he declared that he saw no reason to sit with a jury, and had to go through a protracted and expensive appeal system. Lord Chief Justice Lord Widgery turned down the family's application. But this was overturned at the Court of Appeal in December after the police's unofficial weaponry had been made public. A jury was called. But, unfortunately, this happened whilst the inquest was to proceed in Battersea. Thus, ultimately, when the inquest took place in Hammersmith, the jury members were not local and were in no way representative - in terms of colour or class - of the community in which the death had occurred.

Secrecy and discretion

And those were just the teething problems. The coroner refused to release to the family or their lawyers copies of the Cass report, although he was clearly relying on it when he cross-questioned witnesses and the police lawyers had copies. And then it was the coroner who decided, on the basis of that secret report, whom to call as witnesses. That left those representing the deceased with no way of knowing whether all or the most important witnesses had been called.

But the most controversial part of the coroner's conduct was the way in which he told the jury halfway through the inquest that there were two completely unfounded extreme theories about the death; the first, (and clearly idiotic one) being that Blair Peach had been killed by a co-demonstrator keen to create a martyr; the second (and clearly plausible one), that he had been killed by a policeman using an unauthorised weapon. By telling the jury to discount both extremist scenarios, he was clearly prejudging one of the key matters before it.

To add insult to injury, his summing up was confusing, rambling and deficient in relation to the law relating to unlawful homicide and manslaughter. Worse still was the way Burton told the jury that they should measure the degree of force used by the police with that reasonably required to control a riot. Yet it was not proven that there was a riot in progress in the area at the time. In fact Blair Peach was away from the centre of the demonstration, walking in the opposite direction, as he was going home, when he was hit from behind. Little wonder that the jury brought in a verdict of misadventure, rather than unlawful killing. Significantly, the jury felt disquieted enough to add three riders: that there be more control over the SPG and more liaison with ordinary police, that no unauthorised weapons be allowed in stations and that police be provided with maps of areas they were to police.

On the morning of 28 May 1980 the press conveyed the verdict to the world as 'SPG ABSOLVED BY PEACH JURY' (The Telegraph), 'PEACH JURY CLEARS SPG' (Daily Star), 'NOW SPG HITS BACK' (Daily Express). Yet family and friends knew absolutely that he had died as a consequence of a blow to the skull by a member of the SPG.

Uniting with other families

For them the fight had not ended, it had just begun. Just weeks after the verdict, members of the committee formed in Blair Peach's name sat down on 19 July with members of other committees formed around the deaths of Jimmy Kelly, Liddle Towers and Richard (Cartoon) Campbell. What emerged was that cover-ups in each case had been almost identical and that everyone was appalled at how the inquests had legitimised the wrongdoing of the authorities while keeping facts, and finally the truth of how a loved one died, secret. How could they pool their experiences and use them so that other families did not have to go unprotected through the same nightmares after a traumatic death?

By the summer of 1981 these family campaigns, with Celia Stubbs, Blair Peach's partner playing a crucial role, supported by concerned academics and human rights campaigners, met to link activities and campaigns in one common organisation with a united set of demands. The called it simply INQUEST (http://www.inquest.org.uk). At first its members just supported each other at pickets of police stations and coroners' courts and spoke in solidarity at meetings. But in 1982 it was able, through a grant from the GLC's police committee, to employ two workers to build up an information centre and provide support for families. And for twenty-eight years it has campaigned against deaths in custody, provided advice and support for families who want to know how and why their relatives died and campaigned for changes in the coroners' court system.

Out of the ashes ...

----
FOOTNOTE

I have drawn on a number of sources but mostly on The Blair Peach Case: licence to kill by David Ransome for the Friends of Blair Peach Committee, 1980, The death of Blair Peach-the supplementary report of the Unofficial Committee of Enquiry, NCCL, 1980, Southall: the birth of a black community (http://www.irr.org.uk/1990/january/ak000005.html), IRR, 1981 and Policing Against Black People (http://www.irr.org.uk/1990/january/ak000001.html), IRR, 1987.

The Institute of Race Relations is precluded from expressing a corporate view: any opinions expressed are therefore those of the authors.

IRR is not responsible for the content of external websites.
Inclusion of a link does not constitute an endorsement. Please contact us (/contact/index.html) if you come across a broken link.

> RELATED LINKS

INQUEST (http://www.inquest.org.uk)

Read an IRR comment: 'Remembering Blair Peach: 30 years on' (http://www.irr.org.uk/2009/april/bw000024.html)

Download posters of protest (http://www.irr.org.uk/pdf2/BP_ProtestPosters.pdf) following the death of Blair Peach (all material from the IRR's Black History Collection (http://www.irr.org.uk/bhccatalogue/)) (pdf file, 112kb)



© Institute of Race Relations 2009


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Friday 24 April 2009

How many soldiers died in World War 2?

Correct Answer
MILITARY ONLY

Soviet 14,500,000 dead

Germany 2,800,000 dead

U.S.A. 406,000 dead

Britain 400,000 dead

France 212,000 dead

Italy 330,000 dead

Japan 1,900,000 dead

China 4,000,000 dead

Australia 23,000 dead

Romania 500,000 dead

Poland 400,000 dead

Hangary 300,000 dead

Yugoslavia 300,000 dead

Finland 100,000 dead

Philippines 30,000 dead

India 36,000 dead

Canada 43,000 dead



Answer
Quoting from WWII for Dummies -"Over 60 million people died in WWII and of those 60 million, more were civilian than soldiers." Pages 363 and 364 give a run down with some numbers but does not offer a breakdown of the total civilian vs. soldier.

The Soviet Union lost the most with 25 million deaths, but only about a third were combat related.

China's death toll is incomplete but estimates are between 15 and 22 million.

Poland had 6 million deaths including 3 million Jews, roughly 20% of its prewar population.

Germany lost 4 million soldiers and 2 million civilians, many of them women.

Japan had 1.2 million battle deaths and another 1.4 million soldiers listed as missing, almost 1 million civilians were killed in the bombing raids between 1944 and 1945.

Over 1.7 million Yugoslavs and 500,000 Greeks died in the war.

France lost 200,000 soldiers and 400,000 civilians.

Italy lost 330,000 people.

Hungary lost 147,000 men in combat.

Bulgaria lost 19,000 in combat.

Romania lost 73,000 in combat.

Great Britain lost 264,000 soldiers and 60,000 civilians in bombing raids.

The United States lost 292,000 soldiers.

The Dutch lost 10,000 soldiers and 190,000 civilians.

Australia lost 23,000 men in combat.

Canada lost 37,000 soldiers.

India lost 24,000 men in battle.

New Zeland lost 10,000.

South Africa lost 6,000.


Answer
The true number of soldiers killed in World War 2 remains unknown. Soviet Union tried to conceal and downplay its losses in WWII in order to 'save face'. With the collapse of the USSR new archives are being declassified and these are revising the number of Soviet War dead significantly upwards. For example, it now appears that the number of Soviet citizens that died in WWII is closer to 50 million than the previously assumed total of 20-30 million. How many of these were soldiers is also uncertain. As you can no doubt see, the enormous upward revision of Soviet casualties will have a very large impact on the total number of soldiers killed in the Second World War.


Answer
There were approximately 302,000 U.S. military personnel killed in military action in WW II. This number includes about 9,000 merchant marine. This number does not include about 130,000 non-combat military deaths during WW II.


Answer
I will say that around 50 million! But how many countries still arent sure of the exact # but i can say that the U.S.S.R. ( Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) lost more then 20 million! But hey the russians did the most in the war GOD BLESS THE MOTHER LAND!


Answer
It is allmost imposible to know today how many fighting men died during WW2 (somewhere betwen30 and 45 million).The total KIA\MIA for the Wehrmacht and WaffenSS where at about 5 million men more then 5/6 of witch were killed fighting the USSR that lost 99,5% of its 18 to 27 years old male population during the war.I know for sure that the romanians lost well over 200000 soldiers on the eastern front and another 100000 while alied with the russians.The number of german civilians killed is higher than 4million the allied bombings alone takeing at least 3 million inocent german lives.


Answer
Right now it is beleived to be around 50 to 62 million. But we may never know the true total because it was so long ago and records could have been destroyed classified and stuff like that. So I personally think we will never know a specific number.


Answer
Information I found in US History book in school... Soldiers killed Axis Powers Italy - 226,900 Germany - 3,250,000 Japan - 1,740,000

Allied Powers U.S. - 405,400 Britain - 305,800 France - 122,000 Russia - 11,000,000 China - 1,400,000

Total - 15,250,100 If I added correctly. Of course this is estimated but near correct <------------------------------whover wrote that is a total moron, Russia lost over 30 million people alone.....idoits, i just can't believe how stupid people are these days


Answer
405,399 American soldiers were killed in action.


Answer
About 60 million persons were killed including 30 million russian


Answer
The more accepted number is a compromise of 55,000,000 people. That includes civilian and military losses. The exact number is impossible to know. The USSR lost the greatest number of people in the war, and when numbers rise to that level it is impossible to keep track. Especially in such a closed country with it's own genocide, you cannot grasp who died because of the war or because of the communist regime.

Figures for Soviet military losses I've seen go from four million to forty million, both are way out either way. There are more sources that I have seen that say thirteen million, six hundred thousand (13.6 million) for Soviet military losses and twenty-three million civilian losses, combat, non-combat and NKVD actions included.


Answer
Back at the beginning someone said, "For regions it is generally given as 40-55 million in Europe and 10-20 million in Asia." Hence, that would be 50-75 total in the entire war.

I just wanted to comment that whoever put this was right--I have been looking into this a very long time, and I've seen about 20 different numbers for the total killed in the war, and all of them have fallen within this 50-75 range. In addition, it looks like all the totals posted by people on this board also fall within that range. So I just wanted to say good job to whoever put up those ranges for the two theatres.

The one correction I would make would be to say 10-20 million in "Asia/Pacific" because many of the Pacific islands on which fighting took place are not considered part of the continent of Asia.


Answer
this is the correct death toll list

Soviet 13,600,000 military dead 14,000,000 civilians

Germany 7,200,000 military dead 6,700,000 Eastern front 500,000 non-German

U.S.A. 406,000 dead 600,000 wounded

Britain 400,000 dead

France 212,000 dead

Italy 330,000 dead

Japan 1,900,000 dead

China 4,000,000 dead

Australia 23,000 dead

Romania 500,000 dead

Poland 400,000 dead

Hangary 300,000 dead

Yugoslavia 300,000 dead

Finland 100,000 dead

Philippines 30,000 dead

India 36,000 dead

Canada 43,000 dead

total solders 30,000,000


Answer
United States: 404,000

Russia: 6,600,000

China: 1,400,000

Japan and Germany each approx. 2-3 million


Answer
World War Two Deaths

Total Deaths : 61 Million

Soviet Union : 25,568,000

China : 11,324,000

Germany : 7,060,000

Poland : 6,850,000

Japan : 1,806,000

Yugoslavia : 1,700,000

Rumania : 985,000

France : 810,000

Hungary : 750,000

Austria : 525,000

Greece : 520,000

Italy : 410,000

Czechoslovakia : 400,000

Great Britain : 388,000

USA : 295,000

Holland : 250,000

Belgium : 85,000

Finland : 79,000

Canada : 42,000

India : 36,000

Australia : 29,000

Spain : 22,000

Bulgaria : 21,000

New Zealand : 12,000

South Africa : 9,000

Norway : 5,000

Denmark : 4,000


Answer
According to New Standard Encyclopedia... USSR had 12,500,000 men in the war 6,115,000 died China had 17,250,000 men in the war 1,325,000 died Poland had 1,000,000 in the war 664,000 died Great Britain had 5,896,000 in the war 357,116 died Yugoslavia had 3,741,000 in the war 305,000 died United States had 16,112,566 in the war 291,557 died France had 5,000,000 in the war 201,568 died Canada had 1,041,080 in the war 32,412 died India had 2,393,891 in the war 32,121 died Australia had 1,000,000 in the war 26,976 died Greece had 414,000 in the war 17,024 died New Zealand had 194,000 in the war 11,625 died Belgium had 650,000 in the war 8,460 died Other allied countries unknown how many in the war but 24,000 died bringing the total of allied casualties to 9,412,000 in total Germany had 20,800,000 in the war 3,530,000 died Japan had 9,700,000 in the war 1,270,000 died Italy had 3,750,000 in the war 149,500 died Hungary had 350,000 in the war 147,400 died Finland had 500,000 in the war 79,000 died Bulgaria 450,000 in the war 6,700 died Romania had 650,000 in the war and it is still unknown how many casualties Which bring's the total of axis death's to 5,183,000 and the grand total of casualties to 14,595,000

THE BEST ANSWER this answer is the simplest and is the correct answer i checked at least 50 times the answer is 61,000,000 soldiers died in world war 2.


Comment
The question asks how many soldiers died. It does not ask for the total number of war dead in World War 2. In other words, many of the answers above are off topic ... See the link to the Wikipedia article, which give a total of a little over 25.28 million military dead (and an overall total of 72.75 million including civilians).

Wednesday 22 April 2009

One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex Barry R. McCaffrey

November 30, 2008
One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex
By DAVID BARSTOW
In the spring of 2007 a tiny military contractor with a slender track record went shopping for a precious Beltway commodity.

The company, Defense Solutions, sought the services of a retired general with national stature, someone who could open doors at the highest levels of government and help it win a huge prize: the right to supply Iraq with thousands of armored vehicles.

Access like this does not come cheap, but it was an opportunity potentially worth billions in sales, and Defense Solutions soon found its man. The company signed Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general and military analyst for NBC News, to a consulting contract starting June 15, 2007.

Four days later the general swung into action. He sent a personal note and 15-page briefing packet to David H. Petraeus, the commanding general in Iraq, strongly recommending Defense Solutions and its offer to supply Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles from Eastern Europe. “No other proposal is quicker, less costly, or more certain to succeed,” he said.

Thus, within days of hiring General McCaffrey, the Defense Solutions sales pitch was in the hands of the American commander with the greatest influence over Iraq’s expanding military.

“That’s what I pay him for,” Timothy D. Ringgold, chief executive of Defense Solutions, said in an interview.

General McCaffrey did not mention his new contract with Defense Solutions in his letter to General Petraeus. Nor did he disclose it when he went on CNBC that same week and praised the commander Defense Solutions was now counting on for help — “He’s got the heart of a lion” — or when he told Congress the next month that it should immediately supply Iraq with large numbers of armored vehicles and other equipment.

He had made similar arguments before he was hired by Defense Solutions, but this time he went further. In his testimony to Congress, General McCaffrey criticized a Pentagon plan to supply Iraq with several hundred armored vehicles made in the United States by a competitor of Defense Solutions. He called the plan “not in the right ballpark” and urged Congress to instead equip Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles.

“We’ve got Iraqi army battalions driving around in Toyota trucks,” he said, echoing an argument made to General Petraeus in the Defense Solutions briefing packet.

Through seven years of war an exclusive club has quietly flourished at the intersection of network news and wartime commerce. Its members, mostly retired generals, have had a foot in both camps as influential network military analysts and defense industry rainmakers. It is a deeply opaque world, a place of privileged access to senior government officials, where war commentary can fit hand in glove with undisclosed commercial interests and network executives are sometimes oblivious to possible conflicts of interest.

Few illustrate the submerged complexities of this world better than Barry McCaffrey.

General McCaffrey, 66, has long been a force in Washington’s power elite. A consummate networker, he cultivated politicians and journalists of all stripes as drug czar in the Clinton cabinet, and his ties run deep to a new generation of generals, some of whom he taught at West Point or commanded in the Persian Gulf war, when he rose to fame leading the “left hook” assault on Iraqi forces.

But it was 9/11 that thrust General McCaffrey to the forefront of the national security debate. In the years since he has made nearly 1,000 appearances on NBC and its cable sisters, delivering crisp sound bites in a blunt, hyperbolic style. He commands up to $25,000 for speeches, his commentary regularly turns up in The Wall Street Journal, and he has been quoted or cited in thousands of news articles, including dozens in The New York Times.

His influence is such that President Bush and Congressional leaders from both parties have invited him for war consultations. His access is such that, despite a contentious relationship with former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the Pentagon has arranged numerous trips to Iraq, Afghanistan and other hotspots solely for his benefit.

At the same time, General McCaffrey has immersed himself in businesses that have grown with the fight against terrorism.

The consulting company he started after leaving the government in 2001, BR McCaffrey Associates, promises to “build linkages” between government officials and contractors like Defense Solutions for up to $10,000 a month. He has also earned at least $500,000 from his work for Veritas Capital, a private equity firm in New York that has grown into a defense industry powerhouse by buying contractors whose profits soared from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In addition, he is the chairman of HNTB Federal Services, an engineering and construction management company that often competes for national security contracts.

Many retired officers hold a perch in the world of military contracting, but General McCaffrey is among a select few who also command platforms in the news media and as government advisers on military matters. These overlapping roles offer them an array of opportunities to advance policy goals as well as business objectives. But with their business ties left undisclosed, it can be difficult for policy makers and the public to fully understand their interests.

On NBC and in other public forums, General McCaffrey has consistently advocated wartime policies and spending priorities that are in line with his corporate interests. But those interests are not described to NBC’s viewers. He is held out as a dispassionate expert, not someone who helps companies win contracts related to the wars he discusses on television.

The president of NBC News, Steve Capus, said in an interview that General McCaffrey was a man of honor and achievement who would never let business obligations color his analysis for NBC. He described General McCaffrey as an “independent voice” who had courageously challenged Mr. Rumsfeld, adding, “There’s no open microphone that begins with the Pentagon and ends with him going out over our airwaves.”

General McCaffrey is not required to abide by NBC’s formal conflict-of-interest rules, Mr. Capus said, because he is a consultant, not a news employee. Nor is he required to disclose his business interests periodically. But Mr. Capus said that the network had conversations with its military analysts about the need to avoid even the appearance of a conflict, and that General McCaffrey had been “incredibly forthcoming” about his ties to military contractors.

General McCaffrey declined to be interviewed but released a brief statement.

“My public media commentary on the war labeled me as an early and serious critic of Rumsfeld’s arrogance and mismanagement of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the statement said. “The New York Times noted my strong on-air criticism as an NBC commentator. My op-ed objections to the execution of the war were published in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The L.A. Times, USA Today and other media. Hardly the stuff of someone shilling a war for the administration — or privately pushing his business interests with the Pentagon. Thirty-seven years of public service. Four combat tours. Wounded three times. The country knows me as a nonpartisan and objective national security expert with solid integrity.”

In earlier e-mail messages, General McCaffrey played down his involvement in lobbying for contracts, suggesting he mainly gave companies “strategic counsel.” His business responsibilities, he wrote, simply do not conflict with his duty to provide objective analysis on NBC. “Never has been a problem,” he wrote. “Period.”

General McCaffrey did in fact emerge as a tough critic of Mr. Rumsfeld, describing him as reckless and incompetent. His central criticism — that Mr. Rumsfeld fought the Iraq war “on the cheap” — reflected his long-stated views on waging war. But it also dovetailed with his business interests. And his clashes with Mr. Rumsfeld were but one facet of a more complex and symbiotic relationship with the Bush administration and the military’s uniformed leaders, records and interviews show.

With a few exceptions General McCaffrey has consistently supported Mr. Bush’s major national security policies, especially the war in Iraq. He advocated invasion, urged building up the military to sustain the occupation and warned that premature withdrawal would invite catastrophe.

In an article earlier this year, The New York Times identified General McCaffrey as one of some 75 military analysts who were the focus of a Pentagon public relations campaign that is now being examined by the Pentagon’s inspector general, the Government Accountability Office and the Federal Communications Commission. The campaign, begun in 2002 but suspended after the article’s publication, sought to transform the analysts into “surrogates” and “message force multipliers” for the Bush administration, records show. The analysts, many with military industry ties, were wooed in private briefings, showered with talking points and escorted on tours of Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The Pentagon inspector general is investigating whether special access gave any of these analysts an improper edge in the competition for contracts.

General McCaffrey offers a case study of the benefits that can flow from favored access: an inside track to sensitive information about strategy and tactics; insight into the priorities of ground commanders; a private channel to officials who oversaw war spending, as the Defense Solutions example shows. In that case the company has yet to win the contract it hired General McCaffrey to champion.

More broadly, though, his example reveals the myriad and often undisclosed connections between the business of war and the business of covering it.

A Move to Television

General McCaffrey made his debut as a military analyst in the weeks after 9/11. NBC anchors typically introduced him by describing his medals or his exploits in the gulf war. Or they noted he was a West Point professor, or the youngest four-star general in the history of the Army.

They did not mention his work for military contractors, including a lucrative new role with Veritas Capital.

Veritas was a relatively small player in 2001, looking to grow through acquisitions and Pentagon contracts. Competing for contracts is a complex and subtle sport, governed by highly bureaucratic bidding rules and the old-fashioned arts of access and influence.

Veritas would compete on both fronts.

Just days before the terrorist attacks — on Sept. 6, 2001 — Veritas had announced the formation of an “advisory council” of well-connected retired generals and admirals, including General McCaffrey. “They can really pick up the phone and call someone,” Robert B. McKeon, the president of Veritas, would later tell The Times.

Access was also part of what drew NBC to General McCaffrey. Mr. Capus said General McCaffrey “opens doors with generals and others who we would not otherwise be able to talk to.”

Veritas gave its advisers board seats on its military companies, along with profit sharing and equity stakes that were all the more attractive because Veritas intended to turn quick profits through initial public offerings. On Sept. 6, this might have been considered a gamble. Revenue growth — a key to successful I.P.O.’s — required sustained increases in military spending. But after Sept. 11, the only question was just how big those increases would be.

From his first months on the air, General McCaffrey called for huge, sustained increases in military spending for a global campaign against terrorism. He also advocated spending for high-tech weapons, including some like precision-guided munitions and unmanned aerial vehicles that were important to the Veritas portfolio. He called the C-17 cargo plane — also a source of Veritas contracts — a “national treasure.”

In a statement, Veritas said it had gained no “discernible benefit” from General McCaffrey’s television appearances and called his TV work “completely independent” from his role with Veritas.

In their corporate filings, Veritas military companies told investors they were well positioned to benefit from a widening global struggle against terrorism. The approaching conflict with Iraq, though, would create new areas of tension between General McCaffrey’s fiduciary obligations to Veritas and his duties to NBC.

General McCaffrey harbored significant doubts about the invasion plan. An informal participant in the war planning, he was troubled by Mr. Rumsfeld’s resistance to an invasion force of several hundred thousand, he acknowledged months and years later in interviews. Mr. Rumsfeld’s team, he said, was bent on making an “ideological” point that wars could be fought “on the cheap.” There were not enough tanks, artillery or troops, he would say, and the result was a “grossly anemic” force that unnecessarily put troops at risk.

That is not what General McCaffrey said when asked on NBC outlets to assess the risks of war. As planning for a possible invasion received intense news coverage in 2002, he repeatedly assured viewers that the war would be brief, the occupation lengthy but benign.

“These people are going to come apart in 21 days or less,” he told Brian Williams on MSNBC.

In the fall of 2002 General McCaffrey joined the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a group formed with White House encouragement to fan support for regime change. He also participated in private Pentagon briefings in which network military analysts were armed with talking points that made the case for war, records show.

In early 2003 Forrest Sawyer asked General McCaffrey on CNBC what could go wrong after an invasion. Anticipating this very question, the Pentagon had invited General McCaffrey and other analysts to a special briefing. Years later General McCaffrey would say he knew that the post-invasion planning was a disaster. “They were warned very categorically and directly by many of us prior to that war,” he said.

Given a chance by Mr. Sawyer to raise an alarm, the general reiterated Pentagon talking points about the “astonishing amount” of postwar planning.

And when Tom Brokaw asked him, days before the invasion, “What are your concerns if we were to go to war by the end of this week?” he replied, “Well, I don’t think I have any real serious ones.”

Only when the invasion met unexpected resistance did General McCaffrey give a glimpse of his misgivings. “We’ve placed ourselves in a risky proposition, 400 miles into Iraq with no flank or rear area security,” he told Katie Couric on “Today.”

Mr. Rumsfeld struck back. He abruptly cut off General McCaffrey’s access to the Pentagon’s special briefings and conference calls.

General McCaffrey was stunned. “I’ve never heard his voice like that,” recalled one close associate who asked not to be identified. He added, “They showed him what life was like on the outside.”

Robert Weiner, a longtime publicist for General McCaffrey, said the general came to see that if he continued his criticism, he risked being shut out not only by Mr. Rumsfeld but also by his network of friends and contacts among the uniformed leadership.

“There is a time when you have to punt,” said Mr. Weiner, emphasizing that he spoke as General McCaffrey’s friend, not as his spokesman.

Within days General McCaffrey began to backpedal, professing his “great respect” for Mr. Rumsfeld to Tim Russert. “Is this man O.K.?” the Fox News anchor Brit Hume asked, taking note of the about-face.

For months to come, as an insurgency took root, General McCaffrey defended the Bush administration. “I am 100 percent behind what the administration, what the president of the United States, is doing in Iraq,” he told Mr. Williams that June.

A Corporate Troubleshooter

Mr. Rumsfeld’s swift reaction underscored the administration’s appreciation of General McCaffrey’s influence. His comments were catalogued and circulated at the White House and Pentagon.

Other network analysts were monitored, too, but not the way General McCaffrey was. He was different. He was one of the few retired four-star generals on television, and his well-known friendships with men like General Petraeus and Gen. John P. Abizaid gave him added currency.

As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on, General McCaffrey increasingly gave public expression to the private frustrations of generals pressing their civilian bosses for more troops, weapons and reconstruction money. The Army, he repeatedly warned, could break under the strain.

These were politically charged topics, and so the administration worked to influence his commentary, using carrots and sticks alike. In 2005, for example, Mr. Rumsfeld took umbrage at remarks General McCaffrey made to The Washington Times about the impact of unchecked poppy production in Afghanistan. Mr. Rumsfeld wrote to Gen. Peter Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, demanding to know where General McCaffrey “got his information,” records show. No less than an assistant secretary of defense was dispatched to speak with General McCaffrey, who said he had been misquoted.

In a letter to The Times, General McCaffrey’s lawyer, Thomas A. Clare, said the general’s recurring criticisms had cost him “business opportunities with defense contractors.” NBC executives said they, too, fielded high-level complaints, and General McCaffrey was not invited back to the Pentagon’s analyst briefings.

On the other hand, when Pentagon officials noticed that General McCaffrey was scheduled to appear on programs like “Meet the Press,” they asked generals close to him to suggest themes, records show. The Pentagon also began paying for General McCaffrey to travel to Iraq and Afghanistan. Other military analysts were invited on trips, but only in groups. General McCaffrey went by himself under the sponsorship of Central Command’s generals.

The stated purpose was for General McCaffrey to provide an outside assessment in his role as a part-time professor at West Point. But his trips were also an important public relations tool, meticulously planned to arm him with anecdotes of progress. Records show that Central Command’s generals expected him to “publicly support their efforts” upon his return home and solicited his advice on how to “reverse the perception” in Washington of a lost war.

After each trip General McCaffrey embarked on a news media campaign, writing opinion articles, granting interviews, publishing “after action” reports on his firm’s Web site. Each time he extolled Central Command’s generals and called for a renewed national commitment of money and support.

At the same time, General McCaffrey used his access to further business interests, as he did during the summer of 2005, when Americans were turning against the Iraq war in droves.

Veritas had been on a shopping spree, buying military contractors deeply enmeshed in the war. Its biggest acquisition was of DynCorp International, best known for training foreign security forces for the United States government. By 2005 operations in Iraq and Afghanistan accounted for 37 percent of DynCorp’s revenues.

The crumbling public support, though, posed a threat to Veritas’s prize acquisition. The changing political climate and unrelenting violence, DynCorp warned investors, could force a withdrawal from Iraq.

What is more, some of DynCorp’s Iraq contracts were in trouble, plagued by cost overruns, inept work by subcontractors and ineffective training programs. So when DynCorp executives learned that General McCaffrey was planning to travel to Iraq that June, they asked him to sound out American commanders and reassure them of DynCorp’s determination to make things right.

“It is useful both ways,” Gregory Lagana, a DynCorp spokesman, said in an interview. “If there were problems, and there were, then we could get an independent judgment and fix them.”

Mr. Lagana said General McCaffrey had been a troubleshooter for DynCorp on other trips. “He’ll say: ‘I’m going over. Is there anyone you want me to see?’ ” Mr. Lagana said. “And then he’d go in and say, ‘I’m on the board. What can you tell me?’ ”

The Pentagon had its own agenda. For eight days, General McCaffrey was given red-carpet treatment. Iraqi commandos even staged a live-fire demonstration for him. But General McCaffrey also was given access to officials whose decisions were important to his business interests, including DynCorp, which was planning an I.P.O. He met with General Petraeus, who was then in charge of training Iraqi security forces and responsible for supervising DynCorp’s 500 police trainers. He also met with officials responsible for billions of dollars’ worth of contracts in Iraq.

General McCaffrey would not discuss these sessions, and General Petraeus said in an e-mail message to The Times that he had no reason to discuss DynCorp with General McCaffrey because he would have gone directly to DynCorp’s executives in Iraq.

Back home, General McCaffrey undertook a one-man news media blitz in which he contradicted the dire assessments of many journalists in Iraq. He bore witness to progress on all fronts, but most of all he vouched for Iraq’s security forces. A year earlier, before joining DynCorp’s board, he had described these forces as “badly equipped, badly trained, politically unreliable.” Just months before, Gary E. Luck, a retired four-star Army general sent to assess progress in Iraq, had reported to Mr. Bush that security training was going poorly. Yet General McCaffrey now emphasized his “surprising” conclusion that the training was succeeding.

After Mr. Bush gave a speech praising Iraq’s new security forces, Brian Williams asked General McCaffrey for an independent assessment. “The Iraqi security forces are real,” General McCaffrey replied, without noting the concerns about DynCorp.

His financial stake in the policy debates over Iraq was not mentioned. He did not disclose that he owned special stock that allowed him to share in DynCorp’s profits, up 87 percent that year largely because of the Iraq war.

“I took as objective a look at it as I could,” he told David Gregory, the NBC correspondent.

A Contract in Iraq

In his written statements to The Times, General McCaffrey said his role with Veritas was “governance, not marketing,” and Veritas insisted that he never “solicited new or existing government contracts.”

General McCaffrey did, however, play an indirect role in helping Veritas win one of its largest contracts, to supply more than 8,000 translators to the war in Iraq. The contract had been held by L-3 Communications, but when General McCaffrey got wind that the Army was considering seeking new bidders, he called his friend James A. Marks, a major general in the Army who was approaching retirement and was versed in the uses of translators, having served as intelligence chief for land forces during the Iraq invasion.

As General Marks recalls it, General McCaffrey asked him to lead an effort to win the contract for Veritas.

General Marks, who became a CNN military analyst after his retirement in 2004, would be named president of a new DynCorp subsidiary, Global Linguist Solutions, created in July 2006 to bid for the translation contract. In August 2006 Veritas designated General McCaffrey as chairman of Global Linguist. According to a 2007 corporate filing, General McCaffrey was promised $10,000 a month plus expenses once Global Linguist secured the contract. He would also be eligible to share in profits, which could potentially be significant: the contract was worth $4.6 billion over five years, but only if the United States did not pull out of Iraq first.

In the fall of 2006, that was hardly a sure thing. With casualties rising, the nation’s discontent had been laid bare by the November elections. Then, in December, the Iraq Study Group recommended withdrawing all combat brigades by early 2008.

That month, in a flurry of appearances for NBC, General McCaffrey repeatedly ridiculed this recommendation, warning that it would turn Iraq into “Pol Pot’s Cambodia.”

The United States, he said, should keep at least 100,000 troops in Iraq for many years. He disputed depictions of an isolated and deluded White House. After meeting with the president and vice president on Dec. 11 in the Oval Office, he went on television and described them as “very sober-minded.”

General McCaffrey was hardly alone in criticizing the Iraq Study Group, and in his e-mail messages to The Times he said his objections reflected his judgment that it was folly to leave American trainers behind with no combat force protection. But in none of those appearances did NBC disclose General McCaffrey’s ties to Global Linguist.

NBC executives asserted that the general’s relationships with military contractors are indirectly disclosed through NBC’s Web site, where General McCaffrey’s biography now features a link to his consulting firm’s Web site. That site, they said, lists General McCaffrey’s clients.

While the general’s Web site lists his board memberships, it does not name his clients, nor does it mention Veritas Capital, by one measure the second-largest military contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan, after KBR. In any event, Mr. Capus, the NBC News president, said he was unaware of General McCaffrey’s connection to the translation contract. Mr. Capus declined to comment on whether this information should have been disclosed.

CNN officials said they, too, were unaware of General Marks’s role in the contract. When they learned of it in 2007, they said, they were so concerned about what they considered an obvious conflict of interest that they severed ties with him. (General Marks, who also spoke out against the withdrawal plan on CNN, said business considerations did not influence his comments.)

On Dec. 18, 2006, the Pentagon stunned Wall Street by awarding the translation contract to Global Linguist. DynCorp’s stock jumped 15 percent.

Hiring a General

After touring Iraq in March 2007 and meeting with American officials responsible for equipping Iraq’s military, General McCaffrey published a trip report recommending that the United States equip Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles.

This kind of access had strong appeal to Mr. Ringgold, Defense Solutions’ chief, who had a plan to rebuild Iraq’s decimated fleets of armored vehicles by culling “leftovers” from depots across Eastern Europe. “I was looking for an advocate,” Mr. Ringgold recalled.

General McCaffrey soon arrived for an audition at the Defense Solutions headquarters outside Philadelphia. “Frankly,” Mr. Ringgold recalled, “I had to get over the sticker shock of what he was going to cost me.”

General McCaffrey liked his basic concept but told him to think bigger, Mr. Ringgold said. Instead of minimally refurbished equipment, he urged Mr. Ringgold to sell “Americanized” armored vehicles upgraded with thermal sights and other expensive extras. And why not also team up with DynCorp and others to supply the maintenance, logistics and training to keep them running?

The suggestions vastly increased the proposal’s scale and price tag, but the general seemed to have a read on the complex interplay between the Iraqi government and the American military leadership, Mr. Ringgold recalled. For a retainer and an undisclosed equity stake, General McCaffrey signed on weeks later, then promptly wrote to General Petraeus.

His letter, drafted with help from Defense Solutions, explained that in the three months since his trip to Iraq, he had found just one feasible way to equip Iraq with enough armored vehicles to permit a “phased redeployment” of American combat forces — the proposal by Defense Solutions. He urged General Petraeus to act quickly but did not disclose that he had just been hired by Defense Solutions.

In his e-mail message to The Times, General Petraeus said he received “innumerable” letters from “would be” contractors. In this case, he wrote, he simply sent General McCaffrey’s material “without any endorsement” to James M. Dubik, the general then responsible for training Iraq’s security forces.

General Dubik, now retired, said in an interview that he, too, received a letter and information packet, and as a result briefed Iraq’s defense minister. “Quite frankly,” he said, “I thought it was a good idea.”

General Dubik emphasized that although he used Defense Solutions briefing materials, he first “sanitized” them of any mention of the company. He said he presented the idea as his own, intending to ask Defense Solutions to bid if the Iraqis liked the concept. But the defense minister reacted coolly, he said, arguing that Iraq deserved advanced American-made vehicles.

General McCaffrey also sent letters to top lawmakers and approached contacts inside the Defense Department bureaucracy that oversees foreign military sales. His influence was immediately apparent. For example, General McCaffrey reached out to Maj. Gen. Timothy F. Ghormley, chief of staff at Central Command, who promptly invited Mr. Ringgold to a meeting in Tampa, Fla. Mr. Ringgold recalled General Ghormley’s first words: “Why aren’t we doing this already?”

Nevertheless, by late 2007, Defense Solutions still had no deal. General McCaffrey, Mr. Ringgold recalled, said the company needed to get to Baghdad and meet directly with Iraqi leaders and important Americans.

On Oct. 26, 2007, General McCaffrey wrote an e-mail message to General Petraeus proposing to return to Iraq. He said his “principal interest would be to document progress in standing up Iraqi security forces,” and he proposed traveling soon, before the presidential primaries, so he could “speak objectively — before politics goes to roar level.”

In early December General McCaffrey arrived in Baghdad, where he met with Generals Petraeus and Dubik, among others.

General Petraeus said he did not recall them discussing Defense Solutions. General Dubik recalled giving General McCaffrey a detailed briefing on the effort to equip Iraq’s army, including the plans for armored vehicles. He said it was a measure of General McCaffrey’s integrity that he did not raise Defense Solutions. “He’s not going to cross the line,” General Dubik said.

Mr. Ringgold said General McCaffrey “made it perfectly clear” that he would not discuss their proposal with the two generals and even sent instructions that he was not to be contacted in Iraq “to avoid even the perception of conflict of interest.”

But Defense Solutions used information General McCaffrey gleaned from his meetings to refine its proposal. Mr. Ringgold followed General McCaffrey to Baghdad in February 2008 and then made plans to return in the spring to meet with Generals Dubik and Petraeus. “General McCaffrey insisted that I see you,” Mr. Ringgold wrote to General Petraeus in a March 20 e-mail message.

General Petraeus forwarded Mr. Ringgold’s message to General Dubik, who warned Mr. Ringgold that while he was happy to meet, Iraq’s defense minister was still hesitant. “They’ve gone back and forth on the refurbished stuff,” General Dubik wrote.

Defense Solutions turned to the White House. On May 9, Mr. Ringgold and Tom C. Korologos, a Republican lobbyist, met with a military aide to Vice President Dick Cheney and two National Security Council officials.

The next day, in an e-mail memorandum to his staff, Mr. Ringgold discussed other ways to press Iraqi and American officials, including generating news media coverage to suggest that Iraq’s “failure to ready its Army” was prolonging the occupation. General McCaffrey had been making a similar argument for months on NBC and elsewhere. “The end of the game is that the Iraqis got to maintain internal order,” he told Ann Curry, the NBC journalist.

Mr. Ringgold said he had never asked the general to take positions supporting Defense Solutions in his news media appearances. On the other hand, he added, “I hope he was thinking of us.”

Mr. Weiner, the general’s longtime publicist, said General McCaffrey worked with clients “to get your mission achieved in the media.” General McCaffrey, he said, often speaks out with the twin goals of shaping policy and generating favorable coverage for clients with worthy products or ideas.

“His motive is pure,” Mr. Weiner said. “It is national interest.”

Despite Defense Solutions’ efforts, Iraq recently placed orders for billions of dollars’ worth of American-made armored vehicles. But the company is not giving up, and it continues to rely on the advice of General McCaffrey, who returned to Iraq on Oct. 31 for another visit sponsored by the Pentagon.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 2, 2008
Because of a production error, an article on Sunday about Barry R. McCaffrey’s ties to a military contractor omitted, in some editions, the credit for one photograph and carried incorrect credits for three others. The photograph of General McCaffrey and Wayne A. Downing, another retired general, was taken by Brendan Smialowski for Getty Images. The photograph of Gen. David H. Petraeus was by Jason Reed for Reuters. The photograph of Donald H. Rumsfeld was by Ron Edmunds for The Associated Press. And the photograph of Gen. James M. Dubik was by Win McNamee for Getty Images.



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Tuesday 21 April 2009

Secretive Plans for the Issuing of a Global Currency

The Tower of Basel:
Secretive Plans for the Issuing of a Global Currency

Do we really want the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) issuing our global currency

By Ellen Brown

April 18, 2009 "Global Research" April 18, 2009 -- In an April 7 article in The London Telegraph titled “The G20 Moves the World a Step Closer to
a Global Currency,” Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote:



“A single clause in Point 19 of the communiqué issued by the G20 leaders amounts to revolution in the global financial order.



“‘We have agreed to support a general SDR allocation which will inject $250bn (£170bn) into the world economy and increase global liquidity,’ it said. SDRs are Special Drawing Rights, a synthetic paper currency issued by the International Monetary Fund that has lain dormant for half a century.



“In effect, the G20 leaders have activated the IMF’s power to create money and begin global ‘quantitative easing’. In doing so, they are putting a de facto world currency into play. It is outside the control of any sovereign body. Conspiracy theorists will love it.”



Indeed they will. The article is subtitled, “The world is a step closer to a global currency, backed by a global central bank, running monetary policy for all humanity.” Which naturally raises the question, who or what will serve as this global central bank, cloaked with the power to issue the global currency and police monetary policy for all humanity? When the world’s central bankers met in Washington last September, they discussed what body might be in a position to serve in that awesome and fearful role. A former governor of the Bank of England stated:



“[T]he answer might already be staring us in the face, in the form of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). . . . The IMF tends to couch its warnings about economic problems in very diplomatic language, but the BIS is more independent and much better placed to deal with this if it is given the power to do so.”1



And if the vision of a global currency outside government control does not set off conspiracy theorists, putting the BIS in charge of it surely will. The BIS has been scandal-ridden ever since it was branded with pro-Nazi leanings in the 1930s. Founded in Basel, Switzerland, in 1930, the BIS has been called “the most exclusive, secretive, and powerful supranational club in the world.” Charles Higham wrote in his book Trading with the Enemy that by the late 1930s, the BIS had assumed an openly pro-Nazi bias, a theme that was expanded on in a BBC Timewatch film titled “Banking with Hitler” broadcast in 1998.2 In 1944, the American government backed a resolution at the Bretton-Woods Conference calling for the liquidation of the BIS, following Czech accusations that it was laundering gold stolen by the Nazis from occupied Europe; but the central bankers succeeded in quietly snuffing out the American resolution.3


In Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (1966), Dr. Carroll Quigley revealed the key role played in global finance by the BIS behind the scenes. Dr. Quigley was Professor of History at Georgetown University, where he was President Bill Clinton’s mentor. He was also an insider, groomed by the powerful clique he called “the international bankers.” His credibility is heightened by the fact that he actually espoused their goals. He wrote:



“I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960's, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. . . . [I]n general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.”



Quigley wrote of this international banking network:



“[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.”



The key to their success, said Quigley, was that the international bankers would control and manipulate the money system of a nation while letting it appear to be controlled by the government. The statement echoed one made in the eighteenth century by the patriarch of what would become the most powerful banking dynasty in the world. Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild famously said in 1791:



“Allow me to issue and control a nation’s currency, and I care not who makes its laws.”



Mayer’s five sons were sent to the major capitals of Europe – London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin and Naples – with the mission of establishing a banking system that would be outside government control. The economic and political systems of nations would be controlled not by citizens but by bankers, for the benefit of bankers. Eventually, a privately-owned “central bank” was established in nearly every country; and this central banking system has now gained control over the economies of the world. Central banks have the authority to print money in their respective countries, and it is from these banks that governments must borrow money to pay their debts and fund their operations. The result is a global economy in which not only industry but government itself runs on “credit” (or debt) created by a banking monopoly headed by a network of private central banks; and at the top of this network is the BIS, the “central bank of central banks” in Basel.


Behind the Curtain



For many years the BIS kept a very low profile, operating behind the scenes in an abandoned hotel. It was here that decisions were reached to devalue or defend currencies, fix the price of gold, regulate offshore banking, and raise or lower short-term interest rates. In 1977, however, the BIS gave up its anonymity in exchange for more efficient headquarters. The new building has been described as “an eighteen story-high circular skyscraper that rises above the medieval city like some misplaced nuclear reactor.” It quickly became known as the “Tower of Basel.” Today the BIS has governmental immunity, pays no taxes, and has its own private police force.4 It is, as Mayer Rothschild envisioned, above the law.



The BIS is now composed of 55 member nations, but the club that meets regularly in Basel is a much smaller group; and even within it, there is a hierarchy. In a 1983 article in Harper’s Magazine called “Ruling the World of Money,” Edward Jay Epstein wrote that where the real business gets done is in “a sort of inner club made up of the half dozen or so powerful central bankers who find themselves more or less in the same monetary boat” – those from Germany, the United States, Switzerland, Italy, Japan and England. Epstein said:



“The prime value, which also seems to demarcate the inner club from the rest of the BIS members, is the firm belief that central banks should act independently of their home governments. . . . A second and closely related belief of the inner club is that politicians should not be trusted to decide the fate of the international monetary system.”



In 1974, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision was created by the central bank Governors of the Group of Ten nations (now expanded to twenty). The BIS provides the twelve-member Secretariat for the Committee. The Committee, in turn, sets the rules for banking globally, including capital requirements and reserve controls. In a 2003 article titled “The Bank for International Settlements Calls for Global Currency,” Joan Veon wrote:



“The BIS is where all of the world’s central banks meet to analyze the global economy and determine what course of action they will take next to put more money in their pockets, since they control the amount of money in circulation and how much interest they are going to charge governments and banks for borrowing from them. . . .



“When you understand that the BIS pulls the strings of the world’s monetary system, you then understand that they have the ability to create a financial boom or bust in a country. If that country is not doing what the money lenders want, then all they have to do is sell its currency.”5



The Controversial Basel Accords



The power of the BIS to make or break economies was demonstrated in 1988, when it issued a Basel Accord raising bank capital requirements from 6% to 8%. By then, Japan had emerged as the world’s largest creditor; but Japan’s banks were less well capitalized than other major international banks. Raising the capital requirement forced them to cut back on lending, creating a recession in Japan like that suffered in the U.S. today. Property prices fell and loans went into default as the security for them shriveled up. A downward spiral followed, ending with the total bankruptcy of the banks. The banks had to be nationalized, although that word was not used in order to avoid criticism.6



Among other collateral damage produced by the Basel Accords was a spate of suicides among Indian farmers unable to get loans. The BIS capital adequacy standards required loans to private borrowers to be “risk-weighted,” with the degree of risk determined by private rating agencies; and farmers and small business owners could not afford the agencies’ fees. Banks therefore assigned 100 percent risk to the loans, and then resisted extending credit to these “high-risk” borrowers because more capital was required to cover the loans. When the conscience of the nation was aroused by the Indian suicides, the government, lamenting the neglect of farmers by commercial banks, established a policy of ending the “financial exclusion” of the weak; but this step had little real effect on lending practices, due largely to the strictures imposed by the BIS from abroad.7



Similar complaints have come from Korea. An article in the December 12, 2008 Korea Times titled “BIS Calls Trigger Vicious Cycle” described how Korean entrepreneurs with good collateral cannot get operational loans from Korean banks, at a time when the economic downturn requires increased investment and easier credit:



“‘The Bank of Korea has provided more than 35 trillion won to banks since September when the global financial crisis went full throttle,’ said a Seoul analyst, who declined to be named. ‘But the effect is not seen at all with the banks keeping the liquidity in their safes. They simply don’t lend and one of the biggest reasons is to keep the BIS ratio high enough to survive,’ he said. . . .



“Chang Ha-joon, an economics professor at Cambridge University, concurs with the analyst. ‘What banks do for their own interests, or to improve the BIS ratio, is against the interests of the whole society. This is a bad idea,’ Chang said in a recent telephone interview with Korea Times.”



In a May 2002 article in The Asia Times titled “Global Economy: The BIS vs. National Banks,” economist Henry C K Liu observed that the Basel Accords have forced national banking systems “to march to the same tune, designed to serve the needs of highly sophisticated global financial markets, regardless of the developmental needs of their national economies.” He wrote:



“[N]ational banking systems are suddenly thrown into the rigid arms of the Basel Capital Accord sponsored by the Bank of International Settlement (BIS), or to face the penalty of usurious risk premium in securing international interbank loans. . . . National policies suddenly are subjected to profit incentives of private financial institutions, all members of a hierarchical system controlled and directed from the money center banks in New York. The result is to force national banking systems to privatize . . . .



“BIS regulations serve only the single purpose of strengthening the international private banking system, even at the peril of national economies. . . . The IMF and the international banks regulated by the BIS are a team: the international banks lend recklessly to borrowers in emerging economies to create a foreign currency debt crisis, the IMF arrives as a carrier of monetary virus in the name of sound monetary policy, then the international banks come as vulture investors in the name of financial rescue to acquire national banks deemed capital inadequate and insolvent by the BIS.”



Ironically, noted Liu, developing countries with their own natural resources did not actually need the foreign investment that trapped them in debt to outsiders:



“Applying the State Theory of Money [which assumes that a sovereign nation has the power to issue its own money], any government can fund with its own currency all its domestic developmental needs to maintain full employment without inflation.”



When governments fall into the trap of accepting loans in foreign currencies, however, they become “debtor nations” subject to IMF and BIS regulation. They are forced to divert their production to exports, just to earn the foreign currency necessary to pay the interest on their loans. National banks deemed “capital inadequate” have to deal with strictures comparable to the “conditionalities” imposed by the IMF on debtor nations: “escalating capital requirement, loan writeoffs and liquidation, and restructuring through selloffs, layoffs, downsizing, cost-cutting and freeze on capital spending.” Liu wrote:



“Reversing the logic that a sound banking system should lead to full employment and developmental growth, BIS regulations demand high unemployment and developmental degradation in national economies as the fair price for a sound global private banking system.”



The Last Domino to Fall



While banks in developing nations were being penalized for falling short of the BIS capital requirements, large international banks managed to escape the rules, although they actually carried enormous risk because of their derivative exposure. The mega-banks succeeded in avoiding the Basel rules by separating the “risk” of default out from the loans and selling it off to investors, using a form of derivative known as “credit default swaps.”

However, it was not in the game plan that U.S. banks should escape the BIS net. When they managed to sidestep the first Basel Accord, a second set of rules was imposed known as Basel II. The new rules were established in 2004, but they were not levied on U.S. banks until November 2007, the month after the Dow passed 14,000 to reach its all-time high. It has been all downhill from there. Basel II had the same effect on U.S. banks that Basel I had on Japanese banks: they have been struggling ever since to survive.8



Basel II requires banks to adjust the value of their marketable securities to the “market price” of the security, a rule called “mark to market.”9 The rule has theoretical merit, but the problem is timing: it was imposed ex post facto, after the banks already had the hard-to-market assets on their books. Lenders that had been considered sufficiently well capitalized to make new loans suddenly found they were insolvent. At least, they would have been insolvent if they had tried to sell their assets, an assumption required by the new rule. Financial analyst John Berlau complained:



“The crisis is often called a ‘market failure,’ and the term ‘mark-to-market’ seems to reinforce that. But the mark-to-market rules are profoundly anti-market and hinder the free-market function of price discovery. . . . In this case, the accounting rules fail to allow the market players to hold on to an asset if they don’t like what the market is currently fetching, an important market action that affects price discovery in areas from agriculture to antiques.”10



Imposing the mark-to-market rule on U.S. banks caused an instant credit freeze, which proceeded to take down the economies not only of the U.S. but of countries worldwide. In early April 2009, the mark-to-market rule was finally softened by the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB); but critics said the modification did not go far enough, and it was done in response to pressure from politicians and bankers, not out of any fundamental change of heart or policies by the BIS.



And that is where the conspiracy theorists come in. Why did the BIS not retract or at least modify Basel II after seeing the devastation it had caused? Why did it sit idly by as the global economy came crashing down? Was the goal to create so much economic havoc that the world would rush with relief into the waiting arms of the BIS with its privately-created global currency? The plot thickens . . .



Ellen Brown developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, her latest book, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and “the money trust.” She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her earlier books focused on the pharmaceutical cartel that gets its power from “the money trust.” Her eleven books include Forbidden Medicine, Nature’s Pharmacy (co-authored with Dr. Lynne Walker), and The Key to Ultimate Health (co-authored with Dr. Richard Hansen). Her websites are www.webofdebt.com and www.ellenbrown.com .


NOTES

1. Andrew Marshall, “The Financial New World Order: Towards a Global Currency and World Government,” Global Research (April 6, 2009).

2 Alfred Mendez, “The Network,” The World Central Bank: The Bank for International Settlements, http://copy_bilderberg.tripod.com/bis.htm.

3 “BIS – Bank of International Settlement: The Mother of All Central Banks,” hubpages.com (2009).

4 Ibid.

5 Joan Veon, “The Bank for International Settlements Calls for Global Currency,” News with Views (August 26, 2003).

6 Peter Myers, “The 1988 Basle Accord – Destroyer of Japan’s Finance System,” http://www.mailstar.net/basle.html (updated September 9, 2008).

7 Nirmal Chandra, “Is Inclusive Growth Feasible in Neoliberal India?”, www.networkideas.org (September 2008).

8 Bruce Wiseman, “The Financial Crisis: A look Behind the Wizard’s Curtain,” Canada Free Press (March 19, 2009).

9 See Ellen Brown, “Credit Where Credit Is Due,” www.webofdebt.com/articles/creditcrunch.php (January 11, 2009).

10 John Berlau, “The International Mark-to-market Contagion,” OpenMarket.org (October 10, 2008).

© Copyright Ellen Brown, Global Research, 2009