EvansMediaUSA

Hypocrisy,

Thy Name Is Bush

By Robert Parry

George W. Bush likes to present the “war on terror” as a clear-cut moral crusade in which evildoers who kill innocent civilians must be brought harshly to justice, along with the leaders of countries that harbor terrorists. There are no grays, only blacks and whites.

But evenhanded justice is not the true core principle of the Bush Doctrine. The real consistency is hypocrisy: violence which Bush favors – no matter how wanton the slaughter of innocents – is justifiable, while violence that goes against Bush’s interests – even an insurgency against a foreign military occupation – must be punished without remorse as “terrorism.”

In other words, if Bush hates the perpetrators, they are locked up indefinitely without charge and, at his discretion, can be subjected to “alternative interrogation techniques,” what most of the world considers torture. The rule of law is out the window. Wild West hangin' justice is in. Even the ancient fair trial right of habeas corpus is discarded.

However, when the killers of civilians are on Bush’s side, they get the full panoply of legal protections – and every benefit of the doubt. Under this Bush double standard, therefore, right-wing Cuban terrorists Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, though implicated in a string of murderous attacks on civilians, get the see-no-evil treatment.

On April 19, the 79-year-old Posada was released on bail from federal custody for an immigration violation and allowed to fly to Miami where he will live at home while his case winds its way through the U.S. courts. Bosch, too, has been allowed to live out his golden years in south Florida with the help and protection of the Bush family.

But the evidence in U.S. government files is overwhelming that Posada and Bosch were the architects of the 1976 mid-air bombing of a civilian Cubana airliner, killing 73 people, including young members of the Cuban national fencing team.

Since the conspiracy was hatched in Caracas, Venezuela, where Posada worked as a Venezuelan intelligence officer, the Venezuelan government has sought Posada’s extradition. However, when a Posada friend testified at Posada’s immigration hearing that Venezuela practices torture, Bush administration lawyers let the unverified claim go unchallenged, leading the judge to forbid Posada’s deportation there.

So, the Bush administration, which has subjected its own terrorism suspects to such practices as painful stress positions and simulated drowning by “water-boarding,” wasn’t willing to take the chance that Posada might be abused in Venezuela, even though there was no real evidence that he would be.

Justifying Terrorism

The Bush administration also took no note a year ago when Bosch publicly justified the 1976 mid-air bombing. The stunning TV interview of Bosch by reporter Juan Manuel Cao on Miami’s Channel 41 was cited in articles on the Internet by José Pertierra, a lawyer for the Venezuelan government. But Bosch’s comments caused him no further difficulty. [For Pertierra’s story, see Counterpunch, April 11, 2006]

“Did you down that plane in 1976?” Cao asked Bosch.

“If I tell you that I was involved, I will be inculpating myself,” Bosch answered, “and if I tell you that I did not participate in that action, you would say that I am lying. I am therefore not going to answer one thing or the other.”

But when Cao asked Bosch to comment on the civilians who died when the plane crashed off the coast of Barbados, Bosch responded, “In a war such as us Cubans who love liberty wage against the tyrant [Fidel Castro], you have to down planes, you have to sink ships, you have to be prepared to attack anything that is within your reach.”

“But don’t you feel a little bit for those who were killed there, for their families?” Cao asked.

“Who was on board that plane?” Bosch responded. “Four members of the Communist Party, five North Koreans, five Guyanese.” [Officials tallies actually put the Guyanese dead at 11.]

Bosch added, “Four members of the Communist Party, chico! Who was there? Our enemies…”

“And the fencers?” Cao asked about Cuba’s amateur fencing team that had just won gold, silver and bronze medals at a youth fencing competition in Caracas. “The young people on board?”

Bosch replied, “I was in Caracas. I saw the young girls on television. There were six of them. After the end of the competition, the leader of the six dedicated their triumph to the tyrant. … She gave a speech filled with praise for the tyrant.

“We had already agreed in Santo Domingo, that everyone who comes from Cuba to glorify the tyrant had to run the same risks as those men and women that fight alongside the tyranny.” [The comment about Santo Domingo was an apparent reference to a strategy meeting by a right-wing terrorist organization, CORU, which took place in the Dominican Republic in 1976.]

“If you ran into the family members who were killed in that plane, wouldn’t you think it difficult?” Cao asked.

“No, because in the end those who were there had to know that they were cooperating with the tyranny in Cuba,” Bosch answered.

In an article about Bosch’s remarks, lawyer Pertierra said the answers “give us a glimpse into the mind of the kind of terrorist that the United States government harbors and protects in Miami; terrorists that for the last 47 years have waged a bloody and ruthless war against the Cuban people.”

CIA Files

Beyond Bosch’s incriminating statements, the evidence of his and Posada’s guilt is overwhelming. Declassified U.S. documents show that soon after the Cubana Airlines plane was blown out of the sky on Oct. 6, 1976, the CIA, then under the direction of George H.W. Bush, identified Posada and Bosch as the masterminds of the bombing.

But in fall 1976, Bush’s boss, President Gerald Ford, was in a tight election battle with Democrat Jimmy Carter and the Ford administration wanted to keep intelligence scandals out of the newspapers. So Bush and other officials kept the lid on the investigations. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

Still, inside the U.S. government, the facts were known. According to a secret CIA cable dated Oct. 14, 1976, intelligence sources in Venezuela relayed information about the Cubana Airlines bombing that tied in anti-communist Cuban extremists Bosch, who had been visiting Venezuela, and Posada, who then served as a senior officer in Venezuela’s intelligence agency, DISIP.

The Oct. 14 cable said Bosch arrived in Venezuela in late September 1976 under the protection of Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez, a close Washington ally who assigned his intelligence adviser Orlando Garcia “to protect and assist Bosch during his stay in Venezuela.”

On his arrival, Bosch was met by Garcia and Posada, according to the report. Later, a fundraising dinner was held in Bosch’s honor during which Bosch requested cash from the Venezuelan government in exchange for assurances that Cuban exiles wouldn’t demonstrate during Andres Perez’s planned trip to the United Nations.

“A few days following the fund-raising dinner, Posada was overheard to say that, ‘we are going to hit a Cuban airplane,’ and that ‘Orlando has the details,’” the CIA report said.

“Following the 6 October Cubana Airline crash off the coast of Barbados, Bosch, Garcia and Posada agreed that it would be best for Bosch to leave Venezuela. Therefore, on 9 October, Posada and Garcia escorted Bosch to the Colombian border, where he crossed into Colombian territory.”

The CIA report was sent to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, as well as to the FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies, according to markings on the cable.

In South America, police began rounding up suspects. Two Cuban exiles, Hernan Ricardo and Freddy Lugo, who got off the Cubana plane in Barbados, confessed that they had planted the bomb. They named Bosch and Posada as the architects of the attack.

A search of Posada’s apartment in Venezuela turned up Cubana Airlines timetables and other incriminating documents.

Posada and Bosch were charged in Venezuela for the Cubana Airlines bombing, but the men denied the accusations. The case soon became a political tug-of-war, since the suspects were in possession of sensitive Venezuelan government secrets that could embarrass President Andres Perez.

Lost Interest

After the Reagan-Bush administration took power in Washington in 1981, the momentum for fully unraveling the mysteries of anti-communist terrorist plots dissipated. The Cold War trumped any concern about right-wing terrorism.

In 1985, Posada escaped from a Venezuelan prison, reportedly with the help of Cuban exiles. In his autobiography, Posada thanked Miami-based Cuban activist Jorge Mas Canosa for providing the $25,000 that was used to bribe guards who allowed Posada to walk out of prison.

Another Cuban exile who aided Posada was former CIA officer Felix Rodriguez, who was close to then-Vice President George H.W. Bush and who was overseeing secret supply shipments to the Nicaraguan contra rebels, a pet project of President Ronald Reagan.

After fleeing Venezuela, Posada joined Rodriguez in Central America and was assigned the job of paymaster for pilots in the White House-run contra-supply operation. When one of the contra-supply planes was shot down inside Nicaragua in October 1986, Posada was responsible for alerting U.S. officials to the crisis and then shutting down the operation’s safe houses in El Salvador.

Even after the exposure of Posada’s role in the contra-supply operation, the U.S. government made no effort to bring the accused terrorist to justice.

By the late 1980s, Orlando Bosch also was out of Venezuela’s jails and back in Miami. But Bosch, who had been implicated in about 30 violent attacks, was facing possible deportation by U.S. officials who warned that Washington couldn’t credibly lecture other countries about terrorism while protecting a terrorist like Bosch.

But Bosch got lucky. Jeb Bush, then an aspiring Florida politician, led a lobbying drive to prevent the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service from expelling Bosch. In 1990, the lobbying paid dividends when Jeb's dad, President George H.W. Bush, blocked proceedings against Bosch, letting the unapologetic terrorist stay in the United States.

In 1992, also during George H.W. Bush’s presidency, the FBI interviewed Posada about the Iran-Contra scandal for 6 ½ hours at the U.S. Embassy in Honduras.

Posada filled in some blanks about the role of Bush’s vice presidential office in the secret contra operation. According to a 31-page summary of the FBI interview, Posada said Bush’s national security adviser, Donald Gregg, was in frequent contact with Felix Rodriguez.

“Posada … recalls that Rodriguez was always calling Gregg,” the FBI summary said. “Posada knows this because he’s the one who paid Rodriguez’ phone bill.” After the interview, the FBI agents let Posada walk out of the embassy to freedom. [For details, see Parry’s Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & Project Truth.]

More Attacks

Posada soon returned to his anti-Castro plotting.

In 1994, Posada set out to kill Castro during a trip to Cartagena, Colombia. Posada and five cohorts reached Cartagena, but the plan flopped when security cordons prevented the would-be assassins from getting a clean shot at Castro, according to a Miami Herald account. [Miami Herald, June 7, 1998]

The Herald also described Posada’s role in a lethal 1997 bombing campaign against popular hotels and restaurants inside Cuba that killed an Italian tourist. The story cited documentary evidence that Posada arranged payments to conspirators from accounts in the United States.

“This afternoon you will receive via Western Union four transfers of $800 each … from New Jersey,” said one fax signed by SOLO, a Posada alias.

Posada landed back in jail in 2000 after Cuban intelligence uncovered a plot to assassinate Castro by planting a bomb at a meeting the Cuban leader planned with university students in Panama.

Panamanian authorities arrested Posada and other alleged co-conspirators in November 2000. In April 2004, they were sentenced to eight or nine years in prison for endangering public safety.

Four months after the sentencing, however, lame-duck Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso – who lives in Key Biscayne, Florida, and has close ties to the Cuban-American community and to George W. Bush’s administration – pardoned the convicts.

Despite press reports saying Moscoso had been in contact with U.S. officials about the pardons, the State Department denied that it pressured Moscoso to release the Cuban exiles. After the pardons and just two months before Election 2004, three of Posada’s co-conspirators – Guillermo Novo Sampol, Pedro Remon and Gaspar Jimenez – arrived in Miami to a hero’s welcome, flashing victory signs at their supporters.

While the terrorists celebrated, U.S. authorities watched the men – also implicated in bombings in New York, New Jersey and Florida – alight on U.S. soil. As Washington Post writer Marcela Sanchez noted in a September 2004 article about the Panamanian pardons, “there is something terribly wrong when the United States, after Sept. 11 (2001), fails to condemn the pardoning of terrorists and instead allows them to walk free on U.S. streets.” [Washington Post, Sept. 3, 2004]

Posada Arrives

Posada reportedly sneaked into the United States in early 2005 and his presence was an open secret in Miami for weeks before U.S. authorities did anything. The New York Times summed up Bush’s dilemma if Posada decided to seek U.S. asylum.

“A grant of asylum could invite charges that the Bush administration is compromising its principle that no nation should harbor suspected terrorists,” the Times wrote. “But to turn Mr. Posada away could provoke political wrath in the conservative Cuban-American communities of South Florida, deep sources of support and campaign money for President Bush and his brother, Jeb.” [NYT, May 9, 2005]

Only after Posada called a news conference to announce his presence was the Bush administration shamed into arresting him. But even then, the administration balked at sending Posada back to Venezuela where the government of Hugo Chavez – unlike some of its predecessors – was eager to prosecute.

At a U.S. immigration hearing in 2005, Posada’s defense attorney called as a witness a Posada friend who alleged that Venezuela’s government practices torture. Bush administration lawyers didn’t challenge the claim, leading the immigration judge to bar Posada’s deportation to Venezuela.

Venezuela’s Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez accused the Bush administration of applying “a cynical double standard” in the “war on terror.”

“The United States presents itself as a leader against terrorism, invades countries, restricts the civil rights of Americans in order to fight terrorism, but when it is about its own terrorists, it denies that they be tried,” Alvarez said.

As for the claim that Venezuela practices torture, Alvarez said, “There isn’t a shred of evidence that Posada would be tortured in Venezuela.” Alvarez added that the claim was particularly ironic given widespread press accounts that the Bush administration has abused prisoners at the U.S. military base in Guatanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Posada-Bosch cases point to one unavoidable and unpleasant conclusion:  that the Bush family regards terrorism – defined as killing civilians for a political reason – as justified or at least tolerable in cases when their interests match those of the terrorists.

Terrorism is only a moral evil to the Bushes when the violence against civilians clashes with the Bush family’s interests.

This blatant hypocrisy often has been aided and abetted by the U.S. news media, which intuitively understands the double standard and acts accordingly. The U.S. press corps downplays or ignores cases in which terrorism has connections to U.S. government officials – and especially to the Bush family.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at www.secrecyandprivilege.com

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

BEIJING - China on Monday gave American regulators permission to enter the country to investigate whether Chinese suppliers exported contaminated pet food ingredients to the United States earlier this year, leading to one of the largest pet food recalls in American history.

Representatives of the United States Food and Drug Administration had been blocked from entering China, despite growing evidence that the tainted pet food that killed at least 16 cats and dogs and sickened thousands of other animals in the United States originated with Chinese exporters of wheat gluten and other animal feed ingredients.

The FDA confirmed Monday that it has now opened a criminal investigation into the pet food scandal, but the agency did not name the target or say whether any American companies may have intentionally laced animal feed with banned ingredients. On Tuesday, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce is scheduled to hold hearings on how to secure the safety of the country's food supply.

Last Thursday, the FDA expanded its already large pet food recall after it found more evidence that an industrial chemical called melamine had contaminated the supplies of additional pet food makers, including Royal Canin US and C. J. Foods.

The agency, which has already recalled more than 60 million packages of pet food, is also investigating imports of rice protein from China.

Regulators in California said this week that they had found melamine in rice protein animal feed that was fed to livestock, and the fear is that the chemical could have entered the human food supply chain through hogs.

Laboratory testing in California had detected melamine in urine from hogs at the American Hog Farm in Ceres, California. California regulators have alerted anyone who purchased pork from American Hog Farm from April 3 to April 18 to be cautious.

In its news release over the weekend, the FDA also identified a second Chinese company that had exported animal feed tainted with melamine to American pet food and animal feed suppliers.

Reached by telephone Monday in China, the company, Binzhou Futian Biological Technology, declined to comment. Earlier this month, regulators said another Chinese company, the Anying Biological Technology Development Company in Xuzhou, had sold wheat gluten contaminated with melamine to suppliers of American pet food.

China's State Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, which is responsible for overall food safety issues here, declined to respond to questions sent to the agency Monday.

American regulators now believe the Chinese companies may have intentionally added melamine to their feed ingredients to artificially bolster the protein count in those supplies in order to meet requirements.

A Chinese expert here said Monday that it was possible melamine could have been used to bolster protein counts.

"If the melamine level is high, it must have been added intentionally." Liu Laiting, a professor of animal sciences at the Henan University of Technology. "The amine in melamine can boost the protein level in tests, because it has chemical element N. It's also likely to increase the adhesiveness of the gluten." Liu added that melamine was hard to detect in ordinary tests.

Regulators have not made a definitive link between melamine and the deaths of animals that consumed it. But melamine is not approved for use in animal or human foods and therefore any use of it would be illegal.

The pet food scandal could seriously harm United States-China trade relations if it was determined that Chinese companies had intentionally altered food ingredients. And even if the contamination was unintentional, the scandal could cast a pall over imports of food or feed ingredients from China, where food safety measures are widely believed to be lax.

In March 2007, millions of concerned pet owners became aware of the massive recall by Menu Foods of 60 million cans and packages of contaminated, poisonous cat and dog food, in an effort to prevent the development of acute kidney disease and even death in the nation’s pets. This one company in Canada, Menu Foods Income Fund, produced over one billion containers of pet food in 2006. This compounded and processed food for dogs and cats was distributed to the major brand name pet food companies and mega-stores for sale under very different labels.

So which labels to trust? And how can one trust the industry when Menu Foods, after receiving many complaints about problems with its products, took 3 weeks to notify the FDA after running feed tests on some 50 cats and dogs that resulted in the unnecessary suffering and deaths even more animals. Noted in the press as a ‘horrible coincidence’, the CFO of Menu Foods sold about half of his stake in the company three weeks before the widespread pet food recall.

On March 19, The FDA notified the press that the manufacturer, Menu Foods, had performed tests on 40-50 dogs and cats on Feb 27, ostensibly one week after receiving reports of dogs and cats dying from kidney failure. Seven of the test animals died, cats being more severely affected than dogs.

This recall eventually involved around 100 different brand names and distributors, including major well known ones such as Iams, Eukanuba, Nutro, Hills, Nutriplan, Royal Canin, Pet Pride, Natural Life vegetarian dog food, Your Pet, America’s Choice-Preferred Pet, Sunshine Mills, as well as store brands such as PetSmart, Publix, Winn-Dixie, Stop and Shop Companion, Price Chopper, Laura Lynn, KMart, Longs Drug Stores Corp, State Bros. Markets and Wal-Mart, and a host of private labels of mainly canned (moist) cat and dog foods. Under each brand name are usually many different varieties of cat and dog foods, and this meant that hundreds of different types of pet food were recalled. When coupled with the soon to follow recalls of other pet food manufacturers that had bought the purportedly poisonous gluten themselves and did not contract with Menu Foods, notably other well known company brand names like Purina, Alpo, and Del Monte Pet Products, the quantity of food recalled must be in the hundreds of thousands of tons.

The FDA has no mandatory authority to demand a pet food recall. All recalls are ‘voluntary’, upon written request notification by the FDA. There is no mandatory requirement for pet food manufacturers to inform the FDA in a timely fashion, or any penalty for not doing so. Even so, upon request, IAMS recently recalled pet foods supplemented with Cadmium, and in early 2006 Royal Canin recalled some of their prescription-only dog food that contained toxic levels of Vitamin D 3, that is also, in high doses, used as a rat poison. Some people believe that this is the main problem behind the ‘melamine cloud’ that the FDA has set up, and that independent laboratory tests are called for. But at this stage of the investigation, I concur with others (see www.aplus-flint-river-ranch.com) that Vitamin D is not the issue in this massive recall. Testing for this would have been on top of the FDA’s agenda, and if problematic, impossible to ultimately hide from public knowledge.

This debacle of the commercial processed pet food industry puts us all on notice. Better quality controls, oversight and testing are called for, but one must be realistic. There have been recent massive recalls of human food commodities, including ground beef, poultry, onions, and spinach. Costs aside, no system of mass production can be fail-safe. The recycling of human food industry by-products, and products considered unfit for human consumption, into livestock feed and processed pet food presents a monumental risk-management challenge.

I began to receive letters from dog and cat owners thanking me for ‘saving their animal’s lives’ because they were feeding them the kind of home-made diet that I have been advocating as a veterinarian for some years. Other letters document the suffering and deaths of several companion animals, their care givers’ disbelief, outrage, and financial as well as emotional loss. These letters came during and after what turned out to be the largest pet food recall in the industry’s history. Many people had veterinary bills in the $ 3-6,000.00 range, many of whom, on fixed incomes, had to take out credit card loans and pay exorbitant interest.

On March 23, 2007 the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets announced that they had found ‘rat poison’ in contaminated wheat gluten imported from China initially thought responsible for the suffering and deaths of an as yet uncounted numbers of cats and dogs across North America. The poison is a chemical compound called aminopterin.

Veterinary toxicologists with the ASPCA and American College of Internal Veterinary Medicine shared my concern that there may be some other food contaminant (s) in addition to the aminopterin that was sickening and killing many pets. Experts were not convinced that the finding of rat poison contamination was the end of the story.

On March 30, the FDA reported finding a widely used compound called melamine, described as a chemical used in the manufacture of plastics, as a wood resin adhesive and protective, in the wheat gluten. The FDA claimed that the melamine was the cause of an as yet uncounted number of cat and dog poisonings and deaths. The FDA could not find the rat poison, aminopterin, in the samples it analyzed. However a lab in Canada, at the University of Guelph, confirmed the presence of rat poison.

The Environmental Protection Agency identified melamine as a contaminant and byproduct of several pesticides, including cryomazine. People began to question if there is also pesticide contamination of the wheat gluten. Was there a possibility of deliberate contamination, or was it the result of gross mismanagement and lack of effective food-safety and quality controls that account for levels of melamine reported to be as high as 6.6% in FDA analyzed samples of the wheat gluten?

The widely used insect growth regulator cryomazine is not only made from melamine. It also breaks down into melamine after ingestion by an animal. Wheat gluten is wheat gluten, fit for human consumption, so the question still remains, what was wrong with this imported gluten that it was only bought for use in pet food?

On April 6, 2007, FDA’s veterinarian Stephen Sundlof told CNN that the melamine found in the contaminated wheat gluten from China could actually have been added as’cheap filler’. Melamine crystal is a urea-derived, synthetic nitrogen product that is used as a fertilizer that could have been added to the wheat gluten, But in fact it is NOT cheap. Fine Chem Trading Ltd Special Offers lists China Melamine Price Indication for 1 metric ton at $1,130, while other sources list China wheat gluten at around $750.

How this melamine got into the gluten is still an open question, and some toxicologists still doubt that this is the main cause of so many dogs and cats becoming sick and even dying from kidney failure.

As for the actual origin of the melamine, this chemical is the parent of a widely used crop insecticide called cryomazine that is actually absorbed by plants after being sprayed, and is converted into melamine. This could be the source of gluten contamination, and was why the gluten was not considered fit for human consumption. But melamine, according to Dr. Sundlof “is not very toxic as a chemical.” Since it was found in some 873 tons of wheat gluten from China the dilution in the vast volume of pet foods being recalled must be considerable. So perhaps melamine is a smoking gun, a symptom and not the primary cause of so many animals becoming sick, and even dying.

Pesticides are used extensively on rice crops, and many varieties of GM/transgenic rice have been planted in Asia. This may account for the presence of melamine in rice protein identified in two of Natural Balance’s cat and dog foods that lead to a recall on April 16, 2007 after people reported that their cats and dogs were getting sick on the dry food.

The possibility of synergism of toxic pet food contaminants, where two or more harmful additives or contaminants resulted in this pet food poisoning pandemic, still remains open. The massive pet food recall in 2004 of dry cat and dog food manufactured in Thailand by Pedigree Pet Foods after reports of kidney failure in hundreds of pets, mostly puppies, in nine Asian countries is a matter of public record, but no toxic agent/s were ever reported to the public by this multinational pet food company.

On April 3 Associated Press named the US importer as ChemNutra of Las Vegas, reporting that the company had recalled 873 tons of wheat gluten that had been shipped to three pet food makers and a single distributor who in turn supplies the pet food industry. Close to 100 different brand labels of cat and dog food were recalled.

Until there is evidence to the contrary, the following concerns remain to be addressed by the FDA:

1. The wheat gluten imported from China was not for human consumption, because, I believe, it had been genetically engineered. The FDA has a wholly cavalier attitude toward feeding animals such ‘frankenfoods’ but places some restrictions when human consumption is involved (yet refuses appropriate food labeling).

2. The ‘rat poison’ aminopterin is used in molecular biology as an anti-metabolite, folate antagonist, and in genetic engineering biotechnology as a genetic marker. This could account for its presence in this imported wheat gluten.

3. The ‘plastic’, ‘wood preservative’, contaminant melamine, the parent chemical for a potent insecticide cyromazine, could possibly have been manufactured WITHIN the wheat plants themselves as a genetically engineered pesticide. This is much like the Bt. insecticidal poison present in most US commodity crops that go into animal feed.

4.So called ‘overexpression’ can occur when spliced genes that synthesize such chemicals become hyperactive inside the plant and result in potentially toxic plant tissues, lethal not just to meal worms and other crop pests, but to cats, dogs, birds, butterflies and other wildlife; and to their creators.

My initial suspicion was that the FDA had been aware that the gluten came from genetically engineered wheat that was considered safe for animal consumption. To admit that the gluten came from a genetically engineered food crop could harm the US agricultural biotechnology industry by raising valid consumer concerns: So better for the FDA to focus on the melamine question.

I could be wrong. But a greater wrong is surely for the pet food industry to use food ingredients and food and beverage industry by-products considered unfit for human consumption; to continue to do business without any adequate government oversight and inspection; and for government to give greater priority and support to agricultural biotechnology ( that requires far more food quality and safety tests and surveillance than conventional crops— all at the public’s expense)—than to organic, humane, ecologically sound farming practices.

Possibly glufosinate and glyphosate, herbicides that are liberally applied to crops across the US, and are absorbed by crops that are genetically engineered (transgenic or GM, genetically modified), so that they are not harmed by the weed killers while all else growing in the fields is wiped out, could be part of the problem. These widely used herbicides have caused kidney damage and other health problems in laboratory tested animals.

These and other agrichemicals are probably in the pet food that made so many animals sick and even die, and are in most of the crops and crop by-products currently being fed to beef cattle, pigs, poultry, and dairy cows whose produce is not Certified Organic.

Farmed animals, whose various produce non-vegans consume, are also fed corn and other feeds from genetically engineered crops that produce their own insecticide called Bt. High levels of Bt in crops have made farmers ill and poisoned sheep. Since pet foods show no labels to the contrary, and the FDA does not even permit the labeling of human foods when they contain GM ingredients, we have no way of knowing what we are really eating or feeding to our pets.

(For details see my books ‘KILLER FOODS: What Scientists Do to Make Food Better is not Always Best.’ The Lyons Press, 2004 and “EATING WITH CONSCIENCE: THE BIOETHICS OF FOOD. New Sage Press, 1997)).

While my theory that a melamine-like derivative insecticide like cryomazine could have been produced within the wheat plants as a result of genetic engineering may not hold up, and we are dealing instead with a simple chemical contamination, accidental or deliberate, one fact remains. Two independent laboratories found the chemical aminopterin in samples of the recalled pet food that they identified as a rat poison. And that it is, but rarely used, and costly. This chemical is used as a genetic/DNA marker, and is included in U S Patent 6130207, filed Nov 5, 1997 (Cell-specific molecule and method of importing DNA into a nucleus).

Although the U S has resisted the temptation of genetically engineering the staff of life—wheat, our daily bread, —China has forged ahead, in collaboration with the UK’s Rothamsted Agricultural Research Center to develop GM/transgenic varieties of wheat, as well as rice and other commodity crops.

So it is surely incumbent upon the FDA to determine if this imported wheat gluten from China was genetically engineered. It possibly was, since it was not bought for human consumption; maybe an experimental crop with anti -fungus blight and viral disease genetic insertions that could have gone haywire as a result of ‘overexpression.’ Other endogenous toxins not yet identified could well have resulted in so much sickness, suffering and death in companion animals across North America.

The ‘life science’ industry has convinced legislators that genetically engineered crops are safe, and ‘substantially equivalent’ to conventional varieties of food and animal feed crops. But the scientific evidence, and documented animal safety tests, point in the opposite direction. The US government even attempted to have genetically engineered seeds and foods included under the National Organic Standards.

While scientists and environmental health experts, along with the Sierra Club’s Laurel Hopwood, are pointing to agrichemicals and to the pollen of genetically engineered crops as being possibly responsible for the collapse of the honey bee population—that could mean an agricultural apocalypse, —veterinarians and toxicologists are unraveling the cause of the epidemic of food poisoning and untimely death of thousands of beloved cats and dogs across the nation. My theory awaits answer from the FDA, namely that the most probable cause was the source of the poison. It had been extracted from wheat genetically engineered to produce its own insecticidal chemical, or an as yet unidentified biopharmaceutical or other chemical that became concentrated in the gluten after it arrived in the US.

This latest pet food recall in North America should mobilize the public and their elected representatives to take control of how our food is produced, and where it comes from. Without labeling as to country of origin and method of production, with Organic Certification being the watermark, prepared human foods and manufactured pet foods (that should include no ingredients considered unsafe for human consumption) can no longer be considered safe and wholesome.

The FDA’s Dr. Stephen Sundlof, Director of the Center for Veterinary Medicine, (CVM) told a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on April 11 that the FDA had 16 reported deaths and some 9,000 complaints of adverse reactions. This figure of 16 deaths is curiously low since I have, as of April 19, 20 reported deaths—13 dogs and 7 cats— from readers of my syndicated newspaper column ‘Animal Doctor’ that is far from being in every city across the US. Now surely the FDA & CVM have better communication networks with consumers and veterinarians than I. And if not, then why not?

Or is the FDA down-playing the severity of this nation-wide pet food poisoning scandal? One major question has not yet been answered—why was the imported wheat gluten not intended for human consumption?

What is the pet food industry doing to compensate people for their veterinary expenses? Evidently nothing. They are just setting up yet another expert committee. Duane Ekedahl, head of the Pet Food Institute (PFI) that represents the pet food industry, told the senators at this hearing that the Institute had set up a National Pet Food Commission, as he held up a full page ad that the PFI had placed that day in major newspapers. He asserted that “Pet foods are perhaps the most regulated product on market shelves.”
When challenged by Sen. Richard Durbin, representatives for the PFI and the American Association of Feed Control Officials, whose AFCO labeling is standardized on most processed pet foods but can give no valid guarantees on quality or safety, became extremely defensive and contradicted themselves when it came to actual inspection and testing of ingredients. Dr. Sundlof cited a Federal inspection rate frequency of only 30% for the last 3 years for pet food processing facilities that was actually more than usual because of the mad cow disease issue.

This pet food recall is a wake-up call to every consumer as well as every pet owner. The FDA has questions to answer (go to www.fda.gov/cvm). Surely it is now incumbent upon the Pet Food Institute in Washington DC (www.petfoodinstitute.org) to coordinate with all the pet food manufacturers involved, and with agribusiness pet food subsidiaries for which it lobbies and represents, an emergency fund to compensate people for all veterinary expenses resulting from their animal companions becoming sick and even dying, and requiring life-long care as a consequence of this largest pet food recall in recent history.

Postscript.

There are many vested interests that would like to see this poisoned pet food pandemic forgotten because it exposes the unhealthful nature of industrial food production, processing and marketing that harm people and their animal companions, as well as wildlife and the increasingly dysfunctional natural environment. Mercury, lead, arsenic, cadmium, dioxins, and thousands of other industrial pollutants, and especially those highly toxic petrochemicals used ironically in the production and preservation of food—from fertilizers to herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides, now contaminate our drinking water, our food, even the milk of human, polar bear, whale and elephant mothers: and lead to the untimely death, often after prolonged suffering, of our loved ones, including our animal companions. This need not be, but will continue so long as there is public apathy and indifference rather than outrage and political action.

ADDENDUM: As this saga is on-going, I must periodically update.

April 18, 2007, Wilbur Ellis Co. of San Francisco, that imported rice protein from China, is voluntarily recalling all lots distributed to date to pet food manufacturers, because of melamine contamination, and is urging all pet food manufacturers who have used this rice protein to recall any pet food that may be on supermarket shelves. Natural Balance was the first company to respond to this concern, recalling two of their dry foods for cats and dogs on April 18. This second recall epidemic spread as more pet food manufacturers like Blue Buffalo dry kitten food and several cat and dog dry foods manufactured by Royal Canin hastily recalled their products that contained contaminated rice protein/gluten.

Then corn gluten was found contaminated with melamine in S. Africa where Royal Canin withdrew its dog foods from the market.

A hog farm in California was under quarantine because, although the pigs were healthy, melamine was found in their urine. Their feed was suspect since Diamond Pet Food’s Lathrop CA facility that produces Natural Balance pet food had bought contaminated rice protein from China and had sold ‘salvage pet food’ to the farm for pig feed.

****According to an AP news release on April 20, the Chinese authorities had told the FDA that the wheat gluten was an industrial product not meant for pet food.****

This is the pivotal point. Was there any deliberate contamination by the Chinese, and if so, why? Melamine is more costly than gluten.

The FDA’s Dr. Sundlof stated at the onset of this debacle that melamine is used in the manufacture of plastics and may have been deliberately added as a cheap fake protein supplement to inflate the protein content. But gluten, be it of corn, wheat or rice origin, is used in the manufacture of new generation biodegradable plastic utensils, grocery bags etc.

This leaves me with the terrible thought that the multinational pet food industry, following the economistic mandate of lowest-cost feed formulation based on simplistic nitrogen/protein and other ingredient assays in their ‘scientific’ formulation of ‘balanced’ diets for pets, thought they could get a good deal by incorporating industrial grade product gluten in pet foods. But what they actually purchased on the world market was never intended for human or animal consumption, but for the manufacture of biodegradable food containers, utensils and plastic shopping bags. This is essentially what went into pet foods, causing untold numbers to suffer, and many to die. May be industrial grade soy with melamine, imported from China, is also in some manufactured pet foods, and these will be on recall next.

The high morbidity and mortality rate in dogs and cats associated with this largest pet food recall ever could well have been aggravated by other chemical contaminants in pet foods that can harm the kidneys, liver, digestive, endocrine, immune and other systems of our animal companions. And the industrial crops of corn, wheat and rice, and possibly soy, grown in China for biodegradable plastic manufacture, could well have been genetically engineered, raising additional health and environmental concerns. But the details of this may never be fully unraveled.
 

Dr. Fox writes the syndicated newspaper column Animal Doctor, with United Features, NY, and is author of the forthcoming two books on pet care, Dog Body, Dog Mind: Exploring Canine Consciousness and Well-Being, and Cat Body, Cat Mind: Exploring Feline Consciousness and Total Well-Being, published by The Lyons Press. His website is www.doctormwfox.org

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

Dare To Look Back

Dare To Look Back

By Sheila Samples

"...the high office of the President has been used to ferment a plot to destroy the American's freedom, and before I leave office, I must inform the citizens of this plight."

John F. Kennedy (November 12, 1963, Columbia U, 10 days before his assassination)

Sheila Samples is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular contributor for a variety of Internet sites. Contact her at: rsamples@sirinet.net

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

The Apostles of Deception

By Charles Sullivan

What passes for Christianity among the people, like so many things American, is not the genuine article. The sermons that rise from many of the pulpits of the churches of America are, I suspect, as counterfeit as a six dollar bill; as phony as the people running the country. But those whose faith is blind are incapable of seeing truth. That is the trouble with blind faith. It does not, it cannot, see. I have always been wary of organized religion.

Every pastor, every minister of every church in the land should denounce what is happening in America and violently projected upon the world. They should criticize the wretched lies of the president and his murderous regime. They should condemn union busting, racism and sexism, corporate greed and war. They should deplore the obscene accumulation of property and wealth, while emphasizing service to the community and the poor. Most often, however, a perverted version of Christianity gives the appearance of moral credence to war and conquest.

It appears to me that the majority of the American people are followers who willingly bow down to that which they perceive as authority. The people want to be lead. They have a deep seated desire to be directed, to be told not only what to do, but how to live. Millions of them are waiting for a messiah to appear who will lead them to the Promised Land—a messiah that requires nothing from them before the judgment day. They only have to profess their faith and to follow—to do as they are told by the religious hierarchy, and wait.

Of course, followers require leaders, and that makes them vulnerable to charlatans and frauds. The trouble with leaders and followers is that leaders often mislead and followers obediently trail them to the very gates of hell. During the course of the journey, superstition and ignorance gradually replace rationality and knowledge. Truth gets lost in the shuffle or is cast into the flames of desire. Thus we find ourselves standing at the brink of an old and familiar abyss, the onslaught of a new age of darkness and fear. Lies supplant truth, darkness replaces light. War is peace; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength. The lessons of history remain unlearned and endlessly repeat themselves in rhythmic cycles of human comedy and tragedy.

We cannot avoid the responsibility of citizenship by simply following the lead of others or waiting for the return of Jesus. To do so is to give up our humanity and to become the mere servants of power. We have a responsibility to the truth, to justice, the earth, and toward one another that must supersede all else, if we are the moral beings we purport to be. That is why each of us is endowed with a conscience. We must decide right and wrong for ourselves and struggle against the swift current of public opinion more often than not.

In many ways we have abrogated our responsibilities as citizens to others in our consent to be governed. This was a grave mistake. The idea of leadership sets some up above others. It gives special power and privileges to a few and hence unwarranted influence and power over the many. We do not need leaders. We need those who will genuinely represent us and the public welfare. We need people like ourselves. We need us, we the people, to run things. There is no substitute for being informed, active, and conscientious citizens. It must therefore be understood that real citizenship will require physical, mental, and spiritual effort on our part, especially since truth is kept so well hidden from public view. This does not appear likely to happen any time soon.

We see this phenomenon of following, which is akin to giving up our freedoms, at play in the political arena, as well as in other circles of power. The hapless people are always looking for a redeemer, a quick fix—a liberator. We are conditioned to think that we can simply take a pill and our disease will miraculously disappear without effort on our part. Nature does not work that way. We expect miracles to occur in place of doing the hard work of citizenship. If there is a promised land, we must get there by our own collective effort. We must arrive not as individuals, but together as working class people struggling in common cause.

Yet we continue to believe in knights in shining armor, rather than saving ourselves and the republic of which we are a part. Now we are asking ourselves: Is Barach Obama the one to lead us to peace and prosperity? Will it be Hillary Clinton? John Edwards? John McCain? Is it Rudi Giuliani? If we believe that any or all of these people—each of them put forth by the money changers—is the answer, we are looking in the wrong places. By definition, darkness is the absence of light. We must at least start looking in the light.

We must stop expecting miracles and rescuers to make things right for us. We must realize that justice is our responsibility. Justice doesn’t just happen. Good people have to care enough to make it happen. Failing this, we will continue to have pervasive corruption—a government that betrays the public interest and pursues an agenda of its own. We will have wars in Viet Nam and Iraq and social and economic disparity at home. We cannot afford to wait for an oracle to appear. Global climate change is upon us and it demands something from each of us here and now.

Heretofore, justice has not been the American way. We must make it the American way, and we must do it now. If we want to be more than economic slaves and pawns to the super rich, we must get involved in the issues. We must make government serve us, and we must make it just.

Millions of Americans claim to follow Jesus. Some even claim that we are a Christian nation. Yet every generation seems to crucify Christ all over again, to nail him to the cross and parade him through the streets with a crown of thorns on his head. We had Dr. Martin Luther King, the genuine article, but those in authority—the gluttonous counterfeiters of power—crucified him, aided by cheering throngs of racists. Dr. King, perhaps more than any man who has lived in our time, embodied the moral teachings of Jesus.

It is no irony that the most Christ-like among us today continue to be crucified by the money changers living in the present.

Clearly the spirit of Jesus lived and breathed in our time in the person of Dr. Martin Luther King. So did the spirit of Allah and all the great religions of the world. Dr. King gave more than lip service to religious doctrine, he breathed life into them—he made them real and relevant again. And, like Jesus, he too was crucified by the money changers. Blind obedience to authority—mob mentality—is a very dangerous and destructive force.

So put away your toy American flags, your yellow ribbons. They are irrelevant to the issue of social justice. No nation has a monopoly on virtue. Real faith, real service, are not confined to national borders. Integrity lives and breathes in the hearts of men and women doing the slow work of justice, often alone and in opposition to the formal conventions of society—as history attests.

Dr. King understood that there was no easy way out; no time to wait for a second coming. Like Jesus, his path required struggle against injustice; direct non-violent confrontation with evil that lived deep in the belly of the beast. It required courage, conviction, personal sacrifice and moral vigilance. It required character, a willingness to die for one’s beliefs. Through his extraordinary moral example, Dr. King was not so much a leader as he was an emissary for truth and justice, which must be the core of any faith worth its salt. Dr. King’s beliefs, unlike the counterfeiters who have come after him, demanded equality and justice, reckoning with truth. That is what made him so dangerous, so feared by the purveyors of violence and injustice.

Now we have fools and con men, pretenders and flim-flam artists: hucksters, jilters, jokers and clowns fleecing the hapless flock. We have Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, George Bush, Hillary Clinton, and those masquerading as the Christian right marching us into war after war, and carrying us down the stairs to hell and despair—misleaders and pompous frauds one and all!

The phony evangelicals have stolen the pulpit and the ignorant and foolish have fallen under their spell. Blind followers seduced by a belief in specters and miracles obey their every command and do their bidding. It is just another scam to grab power and influence over the trusting flock before the slaughter. Such people are serfs and fools, not thoughtful citizens or seekers of truth. Beware of any faith that is not organized around justice and equality. Snake oil salesmen abound.

Within the religious hierarchy the high priests of fraud are treated like deities with a direct conduit to god, entitled to power and privileges that ordinary citizens do not have. They are no better than fortune tellers dressed in bright robes. Once again they have diverted the masses from the real path to salvation and led them astray. They have erased the thin line that separates church and state and made a mockery of humankind’s quest for understanding and justice.

It was they who, in the words of song writer Woody Guthrie, “laid poor Jesus in his grave”. They do it every time.

Drug Giants Accused of Ignoring

 Fake Medicines that Kill Millions

By Saeed Shah

The world’s major drug companies have been accused of turning a blind eye to the multibillion-dollar trade in fake medicine that has resulted in an explosion of child malaria deaths in developing countries.

Governments have not tackled the problem and pharmaceutical companies are burying the issue, afraid that any publicity given to their medicines being faked will lead to a fall in the sale of the genuine product, according to a documentary.

The problem has been particularly acute with the treatment of malaria in Africa, with anti-malaria drugs faked on an industrial scale. Professor Nick White, of Oxford University, one of the world’s leading experts on malaria, said: “We estimate that there are more than one million deaths each year - which is the equivalent of seven jumbo jets going down every day. And 90 per cent of those deaths are in children.”

Professor White said that counterfeit medicine was a major reason why malaria had become, over the past 30 years, Africa’s biggest child killer, from an illness that used to be easily treated with medicines.

Some of the fake drugs contain no medicine at all, but others have tiny traces of the real ingredients - which leads to another, potentially bigger problem: it allows the malaria parasite to build up resistance to the drug.

Nigeria’s campaigning drugs regulator, Dora Akunyili, described counterfeiting as “mass murder”. She told the documentary, which will be aired today on The Business Channel, a satellite station: “The fake drug racket and the silence associated with it have led to the resurgence of malaria… The companies kept quiet. The regulators were paid off and everybody was helpless. Drug counterfeiters operated in this country and in most developing countries for almost three decades, unchallenged.”

There is now just one family of drugs left that malaria has not built up resistance to, Artemisinins - which are also being faked. Professor White said: “Resistance to the Artemisinins would be an absolute catastrophe for our current attempts to try to control malaria.”

It is estimated that the global fake drug racket is worth $40bn (£20bn) a year, and between 50 and 90 per cent of medicine in some African and Asian countries is counterfeit. Graham Satchwell, the former head of security at GlaxoSmithKline, the British-based global pharmaceutical giant, told The Independent: “Each therapy area is highly competitive, so if one person’s drug is undermined, their market share will suffer. It takes a brave company to say they have a problem.”

Mr Satchwell said that the “majority of the industry are sitting on their hands”, rather than tackling the problem - for instance through radio tracking of their products. He also pointed out that the figures from the industry’s own organisation, the Pharmaceutical Security Institute, showed many cases of counterfeiting in the US, but hardly any in China or Africa - despite firm evidence from other sources that tens of thousands die each year in China and Africa as a result of fake medicines each year.

Dr Akunyili said: “If the companies had risen up to their responsibilities early enough, the issue of the preponderance of fake drugs would not have gotten to the level it got in Nigeria. It is this silence that is actually largely encouraging drug counterfeiting”

Dr Martin Meremikwu, of Calabar University Hospital, in southern Nigeria, said that he had seen child malaria deaths soar. He said that, by the time children who had been treated with fake drugs got to the hospitals, it was often too late to save them.

“Malaria should not kill people. It’s a curable disease. But if the patient uses the wrong drug - either because they are fake or they are ineffective because of higher resistance - then they are lying here with complications.

“And in children, young children, the time between a mild disease and a severe disease can be as little as eight hours, or 24 hours or 12 hours. So time is of the huge essence here. You really cannot afford to try some other drug before trying a good one. You can’t. Because you don’t have that time.”

The drugs don’t work

• WHO estimates that 200,000 of the one million malaria deaths every year would be prevented if all the drugs taken were genuine. The popularity of combination malaria drugs - which are more expensive than other treatments - has seen counterfeit peddlers cash in on the opportunity to boost sales. In Cambodia, Tanzania and Cameroon, up to 90 per cent of such drugs on sale in local markets are believed to contain nothing but chalk or maize flour.

• As recently as 2001, about 68 per cent of medicines in circulation in Nigeria were unregistered, and as much as 41 per cent were believed to be fake.

© 2007 Independent News and Media Limited

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

As Chairman Carl Levin of Senate Armed Services conceded Sunday, Congress is not going to de-fund the war in Iraq, even if Bush vetoes every Democratic timetable for withdrawal.

The war will go on – backed by a Democratic Congress.

If Majority Leader Reid is not bluffing about his threat to vote with Russ Feingold to cut off funds, Harry will be rolled by a bipartisan coalition that includes dozens of members of his own caucus.

For Democrats recall the consequences of having voted to cut off funds for the war in Vietnam, into which JFK and LBJ had plunged the United States. Whatever Americans think about a war, they are not a forgiving crowd when it comes to those perceived as having abandoned the troops or ensured defeat.

That is what Democrats are toying with today. That is why the GOP has begun to pound Speaker Pelosi, after her runaway strut through the Middle East, to get her vacationing colleagues back to Washington, and get that $100 billion for the troops and the war passed.

No matter how Harry and Nancy bridle, the Congress they lead will give Bush exactly what he demands. And the final vote to fund the war, no strings attached, will tear at the seams of a Democratic Party whose base favors a rapid if not immediate withdrawal.

The Democratic Congress thus faces this April a humiliating climb-down, and all because of a Democratic Senate's vote in October 2002 – Tom Daschle, Reid, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, John Edwards, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd all assenting – to give George Bush his blank check for war.

If I had known then what I know now, I would never have voted for the war, John Edwards assures us of the most important vote that he, Hillary, Biden and Dodd ever cast – the votes that ensured America would commit the greatest strategic blunder of their lifetimes.

This is not to absolve President Bush of culpability for what historians will surely call "Bush's War," or the neoconservatives who howled for war on Iraq from the moment the planes hit the towers, and who had plotted and propagandized for war on Iraq for years before 9-11.

Yet, Democratic courage in October 2002 might have stopped the stampede, for Democrats were the last, best hope of the opponents of war. But they failed the nation. What the nation got was a vote to "get the issue behind us," so Democrats could focus on holding the Senate, which they lost in any event.

Now that we have passed the four-year mark in a war that has lasted longer than the War Between the States or World War II, what does the profit-and-loss statement look like?

On the credit side, Iraq has been liberated from Saddam Hussein and a Baath Party that tyrannized and terrorized Iraqis for decades. Saddam is dead, his henchmen have met justice, and none will hold power again. Kurds are free. The Shia are liberated from Saddamite and Sunni oppression.

The price of liberation, however, is scores of thousands of Iraqi dead, many tortured and murdered by their own kinsmen, a ravaged nation, a sectarian civil war, al-Qaida in Anbar, 2 million exiles, the flight of Iraqi Christians, the probable break-up of the nation and the reversion of Iraq to the status of a failed state.

For America, the consequences have been enormous, when one considers that, measured by U.S. casualties, this is not a major war.

We have lost 3,200 dead and 25,000 wounded, with no end to the bleeding in sight. The worldwide sympathy America enjoyed after 9-11 is history. America is severed from old allies and despised around the world. Our reputation suffers from Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Haditha.

The material costs of the war run into the hundreds of billions, and hundreds of billions more before it ends. The U.S. Army is "breaking" or "almost broken," depending on whether one agrees with the ex-Army chief of staff or Colin Powell.

America's position in the Middle East is as imperiled as ever it was in the Cold War, with the king of Saudi Arabia accusing us of an "illegal foreign occupation" of Iraq, and Arab peoples professing pandemic detestation of America and preferring Osama bin Laden as man and leader to George W. Bush.

Most Americans are bitter at how the world perceives us today, given the sacrifices we made over 60 years to ensure that freedom did not die and the world would be a better place. But then gratitude has never been a long suit of the human race.

Yet if the world does not love us, and the American Empire is gone, are we not well rid of it? Perhaps Bush should be thanked for having shown it is not worth the cost and for having booted it away.

Pat Buchanan was twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and the Reform Party’s candidate in 2000. He is also a founder and editor of The American Conservative. Now a political analyst for MSNBC and a syndicated columnist, he served three presidents in the White House, was a founding panelist of three national TV shows, and is the author of seven books.

Copyright 1997-2007 - WorldNetDaily.com Inc 

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

Conservatives for the Constitution

By John Nichols

Just imagine if one of the leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination endorsed this radical agenda:

• End the use of military commissions to prosecute crimes.

• Prohibit the use of secret evidence or evidence obtained by torture.

• Prohibit the detention of American citizens as enemy combatants without proof.

• Restore habeas corpus for alleged alien combatants.

• End National Security Agency warrantless wiretapping.

• Empower Congress to challenge presidential signing statements.

• Bar executive use of the state secret privilege to deny justice.

• Prohibit the President from collaborating with foreign governments to kidnap, detain of torture persons  abroad.

• Amend the Espionage Act to permit journalists to report on classified national security matters without threat of persecution.

• Prohibit of the labeling of groups or individuals in the U.S. as global terrorists based on secret evidence.

Of course, it is difficult to conceive of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or even the somewhat more Constitutionally-courageous John Edwards going to such extremes.

They are, above all, cautious candidates. They don't want to be accused of getting too serious about maintaining the basic underpinnings of the Republic.

Only the nuttiest of radicals who ask that candidates for president would ask that candidates for nation's top job to start talking about the notion that the lawless presidency of George W. Bush has created a Constitutional crisis.

So what left-wing cabal is promoting the above assault on the executives excesses of the Bush administration?

The group that's advancing this so-called "American Freedom Agenda" is chaired by Bruce Fein, a former Nixon administration aide who served as deputy attorney general under President Reagan and who helped to formulate some of the serious -- pre-blue dress -- arguments for impeaching Bill Clinton. Fein is joined by former Georgia Republican Congressman Bob Barr, veteran conservative fund-raiser Richard Viguerie and David Keene, the former aide to Bob Dole who for many years has served as chairman of the American Conservative Union.

What gives? How come conservatives are taking the lead in the fight to restore basic Constitutional protections?

"The most conservative principles of the Constitution have been repeatedly violated in the last several years," says Fein. "[The] Founding Fathers engrafted a system of checks and review of one branch by another -- a system of due process safeguards against injustice that is likely to occur because of prejudice and fear. And those checks and balances have eroded enormously over the last several years, particularly since 9/11."

Viguerie is even blunter, suggesting that "a constitutional crisis... has developed to alarming proportion under President George W. Bush."

Rejecting the suggestion that conservatives must remain silent because Bush is supposedly one of their own, Viguerie says, "Conservatives must not fail to oppose the massive expansion of presidential powers out of fear they will be aid and comfort to the Left. Concern about one branch of government acquiring excessive power should not be the providence of liberals, moderates, or conservatives. It must be the concern of all Americans who value liberty…"

Barr echoes that view, arguing that, "[We]" cannot sit by and wait thirty years for court decisions. We cannot wait until another four-year election cycle is concluded to have the Bill of Rights restored and defended."

The American Freedom Agenda campaign is the vehicle that these conservatives have established, with a self-described twofold mission: "the enactment of a cluster of statutes that would restore the Constitution's checks and balances as enshrined by the Founding Fathers; and, making the subject a staple of political campaigns and of foremost concern to Members of Congress and to voters and educators. Especially since 9/11, the executive branch has chronically usurped legislative or judicial power, and has repeatedly claimed that the President is the law. The constitutional grievances against the White House are chilling, reminiscent of the kingly abuses that provoked the Declaration of Independence."

The agenda was launched two weeks ago. So far, one candidate has expressed support for it: Texas Congressman Ron Paul, the libertarian Republican who explains that: "[They] say that the executive branch is always hungry. That's why it's up to the people, up to the congress to reign in the power of the executive branch."

Paul's right to sign on. The question now is whether any Democratic presidential contenders will join him in doing so.

The restoration of the Constitution's system of checks and balances ought not be a project of the left or right. It ought to be something that every presidential candidate can endorse. And, for Democrats, the American Freedom Agenda initiative creates a perfect opportunity to do the right thing with "political cover." After all, if Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or John Edwards were to express support for the restoring the system of checks and balances and undoing the damage done to the Constitution during the Bush years, they tell the Democratic strategists who constantly counsel ideological caution: "Don't worry, I'm not taking any risks. I'm just making like the conservatives."

John Nichols' new book is THE GENIUS OF IMPEACHMENT: The Founders' Cure for Royalism. Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson hails it as a "nervy, acerbic, passionately argued history-cum-polemic [that] combines a rich examination of the parliamentary roots and past use of the 'heroic medicine' that is impeachment with a call for Democratic leaders to 'reclaim and reuse the most vital tool handed to us by the founders for the defense of our most basic liberties.'"

Feeling sad? Researchers at Britain's University of Leicester reckon you might just be in the wrong country. According to Adrian White, an analytic social psychologist at Leicester who developed the first "World Map of Happiness," Denmark is the happiest nation in the world.

White's research used a battery of statistical data, plus the subjective responses of 80,000 people worldwide, to map out well-being across 178 countries. Denmark and five other European countries, including Switzerland, Austria, and Iceland, came out in the top 10, while Zimbabwe and Burundi pulled up the bottom.

Not surprisingly, the countries that are happiest are those that are healthy, wealthy, and wise. "The most significant factors were health, the level of poverty, and access to basic education," White says. Population size also plays a role. Smaller countries with greater social cohesion and a stronger sense of national identity tended to score better, while those with the largest populations fared worse. China came in No. 82, India ranked 125, and Russia was 167. The U.S. came in at 23.

IT'S SUBJECTIVE.  White's study, to be published later this year, was developed in part as a response to the British media's fascination with life satisfaction. A recent BBC survey concluded that 81% of Britain's population would rather the government make them happier than richer.

Despite its often bleak weather, England ranked relatively happy at 41. "There is increasing political interest in using measures of happiness as a national indicator along with measures of wealth," White says. "We wanted to illustrate the effects of global poverty on subjective well-being to remind people that if they want to address unhappiness as an issue the need is greatest in other parts of the world."

To produce the "Happy Map," White dug deep. He analyzed data from a variety of sources including UNESCO, the CIA, The New Economics Foundation, and the World Health Organization. He then examined the responses of 80,000 people surveyed worl