USANDTHEM-"fight for the right to say it"

Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com | June 19 2006

Reports today concerning the completed fueling of North Korea's long range Taepodong-2 missile and its planned launch within a month omit several key aspects of the story, including the fact that North Korea already launched a missile that hit Alaska, with the help of the US government.

In March 2003, the Korea Times reported that the U.S. National Assembly included a startling admission in its final report regarding Pyongyang’s missile capabilities.

A nuclear-capable North Korean test warhead was found in Alaska.

``According to a U.S. document, the last piece of a missile warhead fired by North Korea was found in Alaska,’’ former Japanese foreign minister Taro Nakayama was quoted as saying in the report. ``Washington, as well as Tokyo, has so far underrated Pyongyang’s missile capabilities.’’

The 1994 Agreed Framework deal gave North Korea the capacity to generate enough nuclear fuel to produce almost 100 nuclear bombs per year. A 1999 congressional study undertaken by the House North Korea Advisory Group warned,

“Through the provision of two light water reactors [LWRs] under the 1994 Agreed Framework, the United States, through KEDO, will provide North Korea with the capacity to produce annually enough fissile material for nearly 100 nuclear bombs, should the Democratic People's Republic of Korea [DPRK] decide to violate the Nonproliferation Treaty [NPT].”

In April 2002 the Bush administration announced that it would release $95 million of American taxpayer’s dollars to begin construction of the ‘harmless’ light water reactors. Bush argued that arming the megalomaniac dictator Kim Jong-Il with the potential to produce a hundred nukes a year was, “vital to the national security interests of the United States.” Bush released even more money in January 2003, as reported by Bloomberg News,

“President George W. Bush is seeking $3.5 million for the international consortium that continues to build two nuclear reactors for North Korea, even as the U.S. confronts the communist regime over nuclear arms.”

The company that got the contract to deliver equipment and services to build the two light water reactor stations was ABB (Asea Brown Boveri), which describes itself as, “a leader in power and automation technologies that enable utility and industry customers to improve performance while lowering environmental impact.” The contract was valued at $200 million and was signed in January 2000.

It should not surprise us that our old friend Donald Rumsfeld, the man who paved the way for U.S. companies to sell Iraq chemical and biological weapons in 1983, was an executive director for ABB from 2000-2001. Rumsfeld resigned when he was appointed U.S. Secretary of Defense. Wolfram Eberhardt, a spokesman for ABB confirmed that Rumsfeld was at nearly all the board meetings during his involvement with the company. The meetings were held quarterly in Zurich, Switzerland. However, Rumsfeld again displays his uncanny ability to forget things in stating that he ‘doesn’t remember’ the issue of North Korea being brought before the ABB board. Swiss Info concluded,

“Rumsfeld’s position at ABB could prove embarrassing for the Bush administration since while he was a director he was also active on issues of weapons proliferation, chairing the 1998 congressional Ballistic Missile Threat commission.”

North Korea is controlled by a hereditary Stalinist dictatorship that has starved two million of its citizens to death in favor of building a million-man army. Some people put the figure at four million, one-quarter of the population. In the far north of the country there is a network of forced labor gulags where people who have ‘expressed a bland political opinion’ are, along with their entire families, tortured, raped and executed. Horrific bio-chemical experiments are performed on mass numbers of people. Babies are delivered and then stamped to death by the camp guards. If the mother screams while the guards are stamping on the baby’s neck, she is immediately assassinated by a firing squad. These guards are rewarded with bonuses and promotions for ripping out prisoners’ eyeballs.

The North Korean people are enslaved by a government that is using food as a weapon. Perhaps this is why the EU and the United States, via the UN World Food Program, resumed the shipment of hundreds of
thousands of tons in food aid at the end of February 2003. This goes directly to the sitting dictatorship, which then decides who gets it by their level of allegiance to the state. Food aid only increases the power of Kim Jong-Il and yet it is veiled by the UN in bleeding heart humanitarian rhetoric. The money goes straight to enabling the North Korean leadership to live in the lap of westernized luxury with casinos and lavish new cars.

Under the 1994 Agreed Framework, the Clinton administration agreed to replace North Korea’s domestically built nuclear reactors with light water nuclear reactors. So-called government-funded ‘experts’ stated that light water reactors couldn’t be used to make bombs. Not so according to Henry Sokolski, head of the Non-proliferation Policy Education Centre in Washington,

“LWRs could be used to produce dozens of bombs' worth of weapons-grade plutonium in both North Korea and Iran. This is true of all LWRs -- a depressing fact U.S. policymakers have managed to block out.”

Sokolski has also gone on the record as saying,

“These reactors are like all reactors, they have the potential to make weapons. So you might end up supplying the worst nuclear violator with the means to acquire the very weapons we're trying to prevent it acquiring.”

The U.S. State Department contends that the light water reactors cannot be used to produce bomb grade material and yet in 2002 urged Russia to end its nuclear co-operation with Iran for the reason that it doesn’t want Iran armed with weapons of mass destruction. Russia is building light water reactors in Iran. The State Department announced on its own web site,

“In the official answer to a question asked at the January 31 State Department daily briefing, the State Department said the United States has "consistently urged Russia to cease all [nuclear] cooperation with Iran, including its assistance to the light water reactor at Bushehr.”

“We have underscored to Russia that an end to Russian nuclear assistance to Iran would allow the United States and Russia to reap the full promise of our new strategic relationship, benefiting Russia economically and strategically far more than any short-term gain from construction of additional reactors or other sensitive transfers to Iran.”

According to the State Department, light water reactors in Iran can produce nuclear material but somehow the same rule doesn’t apply in North Korea.

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP) -- Acting at the mayor's request, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco said Monday she will send National Guard troops and state police to patrol New Orleans streets following a bloody weekend in which six people were killed.

"The senseless slaying of five teenagers this weekend is shocking," Blanco said in a statement. "Things like this should never happen, and I am going to do all I can to stop it."

The governor did not specify how many troops and officers she planned to deploy.

Earlier Monday, Mayor Ray Nagin asked for as many as 300 National Guardsmen and 60 state police officers.

Nagin sought the troops after five teenagers in an SUV were shot and killed in the city's deadliest attack in at least 11 years.

This is the first time the National Guard will be used for law enforcement in the United States since the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Police said the SUV attack was apparently motivated by drugs or revenge. Also, a man was stabbed to death Sunday night in an argument over beer.

"Today is a day when New Orleanians are stepping up. We've had enough," Nagin said. "This is our line in the sand. We're saying we're not going any further."

Nagin said he would not allow criminals to take over when the city is still trying to recover from the hurricane.

The mayor said troops should be posted in heavily flooded neighborhoods to free police to concentrate on hot spots elsewhere.

Community leaders have raised fears that the violence could discourage people from moving back to New Orleans.

Governor calls for curfew
The National Guard had as many as 15,000 soldiers in the city in the weeks after Katrina. As many as 2,000 stayed until February, said Louisiana National Guard spokesman Lt. Col. Pete Schneider.

Blanco said plans were being crafted last week to step up anti-crime efforts, but the weekend slayings forced authorities to move faster.

She said she was talking with New Orleans Police Chief Warren Riley about his exact needs.

"I will not tolerate criminal behavior. We must protect our citizens. Having more law enforcement patrolling the streets is a direct deterrent to the criminal element," Blanco said.

She urged the mayor to put a juvenile curfew in place.

"I have two warnings: First, to parents, keep your teenagers off the streets and out of trouble. Second, to judges, I am urging you to keep hardened criminals where they belong -- in jail and off the streets. We must protect our citizens."

Nagin's request had been backed by the City Council.

"If we don't have wind knocking us down, we have shooters knocking us down, and that's unacceptable," said City Council President Oliver Thomas.

Reaction to the mayor's request was mixed.

"As we tell people to come home, we have to keep these areas safe," said LaToya Cantrell, president of the Broadmoor Improvement Association, a heavily flooded neighborhood.

"It's long overdue. Neighborhoods should not have been left alone to begin with. Pulling out was a mistake."

But Sherman Copelin, president of the New Orleans East Business Association, cautioned that handing over some neighborhoods to troops unfamiliar with those areas could be a mistake, saying officials should not "let someone come in and be a housekeeper."

The killings over the weekend brought this year's murder toll to 53, raising fears that violence was back on the rise in a city that was plagued by violent crime before Katrina drove out much of the population last year.

Crime has been creeping back into the city: 17 killings in the first three months of 2006, and 36 since the start of April.

At least three other people, ages 16 to 27, have been fatally shot in the same area where the five teenagers were killed early Saturday. (Watch cops work the scene on the narrow, blood-stained street -- :40)

In addition to Nagin's request for troops and state police, the City Council said it would consider increasing overtime for police to put more officers on the street. It also called for a "crime summit" within two weeks.

"We have to deal with it now," Councilman Arnold Fielkow said. "If we don't make people feel safe in their homes, nothing will happen. Let's make this priority No. 1."

Cynthia Willard-Lewis, who represents predominantly black eastern New Orleans, said a big part of the solution will be getting young people off the streets and into caring environments such as schools.

She suggested opening schools after hours but didn't say how that could have prevented Saturday's 4 a.m. shooting.

CBS | June 19 2006

On the sun-splashed Caribbean island of St. Kitts, Yale University researchers are injecting millions of human brain cells into the heads of monkeys afflicted with Parkinson's disease.

In China, there are 29 goats running around on a farm with human cells coursing through their organs, a result of scientists dropping human blood cells into goat embryos.

The mixing of humans and animals in the name of medicine has been going on for decades. People are walking around with pig valves in their hearts and scientists have routinely injected human cells into lab mice to mimic diseases.

But the research is becoming increasingly exotic as scientists work with the brains of mice, monkeys and other mammals and begin fiddling with the hot-button issue of cloning. Scientists Are Trying New Combinations In The Name Of Research. Harvard University researchers are attempting to clone human embryonic cells in rabbit eggs.

Such work has triggered protests from social conservatives and others who fear the blurring of species lines, invoking the image of the chimera of Greek mythology, a monstrous mix of lion, goat and serpent.

During his State of the Union speech in January, President Bush called for a ban on "human cloning in all its forms" and "human-animal hybrids," labeling it one of the "most egregious abuses of medical research."

He didn't elaborate, but scientists working in the field believe that by "hybrids," the president meant creating living animals with human traits - something they say they aren't doing.

Other critics are calling for stricter regulations of the research.

"The technology is advancing quicker than the regulations," said Osagie Obasogie of the Oakland-based Center for Genetics and Society, which opposes the mixing of human and animal cells.

But scientists say the ethically charged work will help them better understand disease and hopefully cure some illnesses. They argue their work will never result in the birth of any living being, but lets them experiment with human disease without using people.

"The president touched on a nerve that we all feel," said Doug Melton, the Harvard researcher trying to eliminate the need for women to donate their eggs for cloning research by creating human embryonic stem cells in rabbit eggs.

"The prospect of having animals that are chimeras is frightening. This is not that kind of research. These experiments don't make animals, they make cells."

Melton's work, if successful, would reduce the need for female donors, who have to take fertility drugs to increase their egg production and undergo invasive procedures to extract the eggs. But he has not yet succeeded in extracting human stem cells from the cloned rabbit eggs.

United Kingdom researchers led by Dolly the Sheep creator Ian Wilmut are planning similar experiments, which aim to copy a Chinese research team's success with goats, reported in the journal Cell Research in 2003.

"The concerns about chimeras and mixing species may be justified in some circumstances," Yale researcher Gene Redmond said by e-mail from his St. Kitts laboratory, where he's studying Parkinson's disease by injecting human brain cells into monkeys. "But there are strong scientific reasons to do it in many cases and great benefits to be had for humanity."

Redmond's work is funded by the U.S. government, but he works in St. Kitts because it and the neighboring island of Nevis have a large population of feral African monkeys. The research aims to reverse the symptoms of Parkinson's by supplying dopamine, a chemical in the brain whose absence is thought to cause the disease.

"There seems to be little or no chance that the monkeys would be 'humanized,"' because of the relatively few and highly specialized human cells that are being implanted, Redmond said.

Still, it's research like Redmond's that upsets critics the most.

Stanford University bioethicist Christopher Scott said "the stuff that raises the most ethical concerns" are the experiments that implant human cells into animals' brains.

So far, Scott and others know of no researcher that has come close to putting enough human cells into animal brains to confer any signs of humanity, such as emotion.

In December, for instance, Parkinson's disease researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego reported they had created mice with .01 percent human cells by injecting about 100,000 human embryonic stem cells per mouse, a trace amount that didn't remotely come close to "humanizing" the rodents.

Most scientists also argue that the "architecture" of animals' heads couldn't support a brain of mostly human cells. The animals are also wired differently and couldn't survive with a human brain.

Still, there's enough concern about human-animal mixing that the influential National Academy of Sciences addressed it last year when it issued guidelines for stem cell research.

The report endorsed research that co-mingles human and animal tissue as vital to ensuring that experimental drugs and new tissue replacement therapies are safe for people. But the report warned that the "idea that human neuronal cells might participate in 'higher order' brain functions in a nonhuman animal, however unlikely that may be, raises concerns that need to be considered."

The report recommends that each institution involved in stem cell research create a formal, standing committee to specifically oversee the work, including experiments that mix human and animal cells.

Drawing ethical boundaries that no research appears to have crossed yet, the Academies recommend a prohibition on mixing human stem cells with embryos from monkeys and other primates. But even that policy recommendation isn't tough enough for some who advocate for formal regulations.

"You don't want a monkey with 95 percent of its brain cells being human," said Obasogie of the Center for Genetics and Society, "and to ensure that takes more than a recommendation."