A CIA Commander For Libyan Rebels

By Patrick Martin

March 28, 2011 “WSWS” — The Libyan National Council, the Benghazi-based group that speaks for the rebel forces fighting the Gaddafi regime, has appointed a long-time CIA collaborator to head its military operations. The selection of Khalifa Hifter, a former colonel in the Libyan army, was reported by McClatchy Newspapers Thursday and the new military chief was interviewed by a correspondent for ABC News on Sunday night.

Hifter’s arrival in Benghazi was first reported by Al Jazeera on March 14, followed by a flattering portrait in the virulently pro-war British tabloid the Daily Mail on March 19. The Daily Mail described Hifter as one of the “two military stars of the revolution” who “had recently returned from exile in America to lend the rebel ground forces some tactical coherence.” The newspaper did not refer to his CIA connections.

McClatchy Newspapers published a profile of Hifter on Sunday. Headlined “New Rebel Leader Spent Much of Past 20 years in Suburban Virginia,” the article notes that he was once a top commander for the Gaddafi regime, until “a disastrous military adventure in Chad in the late 1980s.”

Hifter then went over to the anti-Gaddafi opposition, eventually emigrating to the United States, where he lived until two weeks ago when he returned to Libya to take command in Benghazi.

The McClatchy profile concluded, “Since coming to the United States in the early 1990s, Hifter lived in suburban Virginia outside Washington, DC.” It cited a friend who “said he was unsure exactly what Hifter did to support himself, and that Hifter primarily focused on helping his large family.”

To those who can read between the lines, this profile is a thinly disguised indication of Hifter’s role as a CIA operative. How else does a high-ranking former Libyan military commander enter the United States in the early 1990s, only a few years after the Lockerbie bombing, and then settle near the US capital, except with the permission and active assistance of US intelligence agencies? Hifter actually lived in Vienna, Virginia, about five miles from CIA headquarters in Langley, for two decades.

The agency was very familiar with Hifter’s military and political work. A Washington Post report of March 26, 1996 describes an armed rebellion against Gaddafi in Libya and uses a variant spelling of his name. The article cites witnesses to the rebellion who report that “its leader is Col. Khalifa Haftar, of a contra-style group based in the United States called the Libyan National Army.”

The comparison is to the “contra” terrorist forces financed and armed by the US government in the 1980s against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The Iran-Contra scandal, which rocked the Reagan administration in 1986-87, involved the exposure of illegal US arms sales to Iran, with the proceeds used to finance the contras in defiance of a congressional ban. Congressional Democrats covered up the scandal and rejected calls to impeach Reagan for sponsoring the flagrantly illegal activities of a cabal of former intelligence operatives and White House aides.

A 2001 book, Manipulations africaines, published by Le Monde diplomatique, traces the CIA connection even further back, to 1987, reporting that Hifter, then a colonel in Gaddafi’s army, was captured fighting in Chad in a Libyan-backed rebellion against the US-backed government of Hissène Habré. He defected to the Libyan National Salvation Front (LNSF), the principal anti-Gaddafi group, which had the backing of the American CIA. He organized his own militia, which operated in Chad until Habré was overthrown by a French-supported rival, Idriss Déby, in 1990.

According to this book, “the Haftar force, created and financed by the CIA in Chad, vanished into thin air with the help of the CIA shortly after the government was overthrown by Idriss Déby.” The book also cites a Congressional Research Service report of December 19, 1996 that the US government was providing financial and military aid to the LNSF and that a number of LNSF members were relocated to the United States.

Read the full article

The Kill Team

How U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan murdered innocent civilians and mutilated their corpses – and how their officers failed to stop them. Plus: An exclusive look at the war crime photos censored by the Pentagon

By Mark Boal

March 27, 2011 “Rolling Stone” — Early last year, after six hard months soldiering in Afghanistan, a group of American infantrymen reached a momentous decision: It was finally time to kill a haji.

Among the men of Bravo Company, the notion of killing an Afghan civilian had been the subject of countless conversations, during lunchtime chats and late-night bull sessions. For weeks, they had weighed the ethics of bagging “savages” and debated the probability of getting caught. Some of them agonized over the idea; others were gung-ho from the start. But not long after the New Year, as winter descended on the arid plains of Kandahar Province, they agreed to stop talking and actually pull the trigger.

Bravo Company had been stationed in the area since summer, struggling, with little success, to root out the Taliban and establish an American presence in one of the most violent and lawless regions of the country. On the morning of January 15th, the company’s 3rd Platoon – part of the 5th Stryker Brigade, based out of Tacoma, Washington – left the mini-metropolis of tents and trailers at Forward Operating Base Ramrod in a convoy of armored Stryker troop carriers. The massive, eight-wheeled trucks surged across wide, vacant stretches of desert, until they came to La Mohammad Kalay, an isolated farming village tucked away behind a few poppy fields.

Read the full article

Sixth study in recent months links mercury in flu shots to brain damage, autism

Ethan A. Huff
Natural News
March 28, 2011

(NaturalNews) The toxic effects of the mercury, also known in vaccines as Thimerosal, have once again been confirmed, this time by researchers from the University of Brazil. Marking the sixth major study in recent months to condemn the use of mercury in medicine, the new study reveals that mercury causes serious brain damage, and is linked to autism and other developmental diseases in children and Alzheimer’s disease in adults.

Dr. Jose Dorea and his colleagues conducted an extensive, peer-reviewed analysis of various studies and available information in major databases that address the effects of low-dose Thimerosal, or ethylmercury, on neural tissue and behavior. They found conclusively that Thimerosal accumulates in brain tissue, negatively affects brain development, and harms brain cells.

“Mercury is known to cause serious harm, especially to fetuses and children because of their smaller size,” said Lisa Sykes, president of the Coalition for Mercury-free Drugs (CoMeD), a non-profit group dedicated to removing mercury from medicine. “Why remove Thimerosal from pediatric vaccines only to inject it into pregnant women and children with recommended flu shots? They removed Thimerosal from other vaccines, so it should also be removed from flu shots.”

Read the full article

Japanese Authorities Admit Deadly MOX Plutonium Reactor Is Leaking

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
March 25, 2011

While the mass media has all but dropped its interest in the Fukushima crisis to focus on Libya and meaningless side-issues like the death of Elizabeth Taylor, the nuclear nightmare only worsens, as Japanese authorities admit that reactor number 3, which is the only reactor to contain MOX plutonium, is now leaking.

“Japan’s nuclear regulator said one reactor core at the quake-damaged Fukushima Dai-Ichi power plant may be cracked and leaking radiation,” reports Bloomberg.

“It’s very possible that there has been some kind of leak at the No. 3 reactor,” Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman at the Japan Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said in Tokyo today. While radioactive water at the unit most likely escaped from the reactor core, it also could have originated from spent fuel pools stored atop the reactor, he said.”

The water now leaking from reactor number 3 has radiation levels 10,000 times above the level of normal reactor water. Yesterday, two Fukushima technicians received instant radioactive burns when they stepped in the puddle of water, as it burned right through their boots.

The leakage of plutonium and uranium from reactor number 3 is the nightmare scenario that many experts predicted would turn the situation at Fukushima from a crisis to a catastrophe.

The dire consequences of any major leak in reactor number 3 are exemplified by the fact that 4,000 tons of water have been dumped on the reactor, five times more than any of the other five units.

Reactor number 3 runs on MOX or Mixed Oxide fuel, a mixture of plutonium and uranium. Plutonium is the most deadly radioactive isotope known to man, and MOX is two million times more deadly than normal enriched uranium. The Half-life of Plutonium-239 in MOX is 24,000 years and just a few milligrams of P-239 escaping in a smoke plume will contaminate soil for tens of thousands of years.
Read the full article

Understanding Nature Cure

Saturday, February 16, 2008
Understanding Nature Cure
Understanding Nature Cure

Talk given by Shri S Swaminathan
Joint Director, Indian Institute of Natural Therapeutics, New Delhi

To live in health, many people take to medicines. Nature cure tells us that no medicines are actually necessary to live in health as Nature itself provides us with so many medicines. What are they?

They are the Pancha Tatvas, namely

1. Food,
2. Water,
3. Sunshine
4. Air, and
5. Rest.

For you to live in good health, all that you need to do is you must supply all these basic needs correctly. We shall see the above one by one below.
Posted by R. Raghunathan at 12:29 AM 0 comments
Chapter 1 – Food
While food is the most fundamental to living, right food is most fundamental to living in good health. To have the right food, you need to know

When to eat and when not to eat
What to eat and what not to eat
How to eat
How much to eat and How many times to eat,

If you know the answers to these five questions, you would live in good health. Now let us discuss these.
Posted by R. Raghunathan at 12:27 AM 0 comments
1-A Food – When to eat and when not to eat
When to eat and when not to eat

Generally the stomach takes four to five hours to digest any food and get empty for the next input. So let us take care. Let the stomach rest completely before we give the next food. Let us not eat in such a manner that the stomach cannot become empty. Look at the animals. No animal will work on a loaded stomach. When we feed an animal fully, the animal will lie down and will refuse to get up.

Allow the stomach to rest in your own interest. Be kind to your own stomach. Many people do not experience the hunger at all. Why? Because they do not allow the stomach to become empty, as they keep it full all the time. Early morning they start with bed tea, even before washing the teeth. Then they take breakfast as if they had fasted. Then they follow it with a mid-day snack, called a coffee break or tea break. Then they have the lunch. Then comes the afternoon snack and then the dinner, and lastly, a cup of milk at bed time.

Thus, continuously they go on eating, lunching and munching all the time. ‘They never allow the stomach to become empty at any time during the 24 hours of the day and this happens daily on all the 365 days of the year, year after year. If any part of the organism is not given rest, but forced to work all the 24 hours, its tone will be lost.

You will not need even a little drop of medicine throughout your life, provided you follow one principle. Not to eat till the stomach has become empty’. If this is followed, one will not fall ill throughout one’s life. You will not need a drop of medicine.

Eat when you are hungry. Never eat as per watch. Hunger should alone make you eat. Do not say, ‘It is lunch time’ or, ‘It is dinner time’. Know that hunger is an indication of health. If you have got good hunger, you are healthy. If you have lost your hunger, you are unhealthy. Hunger indicates, or should indicate, that your stomach is empty. If the stomach is not empty, you cannot have hunger. When the stomach is empty, you will have lightness in you. Hunger is a physiological need for food. The body needs food and it indicates to you through the sensation of hunger that you should take food.

You can eat, provided four conditions are met.

1. The first, the stomach should have become empty

2. Man is not a body alone. Man is a triple unit of body, mind and spirit. Hence at the time of eating, you must be emotionally calm. You must not be upset emotionally.
Be careful about your mental state at the time of eating. Our mind should be full of cheer and joy. It is very important. In the good old days, before eating the meal, people used to wash their hands and feet and sit for a prayer, calm themselves down and always sit along with their relatives, with children and others, so that there would be a happy atmosphere. Now children have to go to school at 10 am. The elders have to go at 7 am. Well the time is so dislocated that each one sit for meals separately and when you sit for the meals separately our own worries will come and bother us. And if you are bothered, if you are worried, if your mind is upset, your digestion will be nil. That is why in Sanskrit in the vedic scriptures there is a manthra. Kevaladho Bhavathi Kevalashi. Adha means sin. Kevala means along. The person who sits alone and eats alone eats sin. Sit with your family, sit with your children and enjoy with company, sit in cheer sit and eat joyfully. Joy and cheer are to mind what sunshine and dew are to grass and flowers. Please remember it. Many people sit alone worried, worried over something. Still their worries are not removed. But their digestion becomes worse and worse. Eat happily. Say a little prayer. There is nothing in the world which is more soothing to the body than prayer. Prayer is the food for the mind. Prayer is something which is very very essential. Prayer must be done not once a day but every time before the meal. Prayer must be said, prayer is very important. But not a mechanical prayer. It should not be just like the sound coming from the tape recorder. It should be from the soul. It was Gandhiji who said ‘a prayer without words is what is needed, not words without prayer’. So many people have memorized something and while waling they go on repeating mechanically. Their mind is somewhere else. Mechanical prayer is not prayer at all. Some people might be asking, what has prayer to do in a nature cure lecture? Everything that has got a health value, has got some relationship to nature cure. You cannot be healthy unless you have got a calm mind. And it is not possible to have a calm mind, without the right kind of prayer. But prayer, should be really prayer. Prayer from the soul and not pretence. Most of us do prayer only mechanically. We have memorized something and it comes out. And in between if some word is omitted, we become just like the school students suffering. That is not prayer. A memorized prayer is not a prayer is not a prayer at all. Prayer is communion. Words are not needed. So do a little prayer. Calm yourself down. Be cheerful, be joyful and then eat. Simply by being worried you do not remove worry. Everyone has got worries. Who is there in the world who has got no worries? Simply by getting worried are you going to remove the worry? There are ever so many worries, official worries, domestic worries, social worries so many, not one. And by being constantly worried you are only disturbing your sleep, disturbing your digestion and you are worsening yourself. And when you get worsened, your worries get more. Face the problem. After all there is something causing the worry. Face it boldly, understand, study the problem in depth. The solution of a problem lies within the problem, not outside. Study it deeply. So, to those who have got worries [and today I believe almost everybody is worried some more, some less]. I give them a practical suggestion. And I put it before you for your consideration. If you act upon it, your worry will be over in no time. So long as you are worried, even if you take raw vegetables, even if you take fruits, nothing can be digested.

If you are mentally agitated, if you are excited, even though your stomach is empty, you will not be able to digest the food. For, the digestive secretion depends upon the brain condition. If the brain is excited, if there is tension, there would be no digestive secretion. So, please ensure that the stomach has become empty and also, at the same time, you are mentally calm. If you are very much agitated, just calm down and then eat. Do not eat when you are agitated.

Now the stomach is empty and the mind is calm. Can we eat? No. Even if the mind is calm, the body must be free from fatigue. If the body is fatigued, if you are too tired or exhausted, even though the stomach is empty, you should not eat. The reason is, when we get exhausted physically, we need to go to bed and not to the dining table. What we need is rest, and not food, because, at that time your digestive glands would not work. So, do not eat when you are tired and fatigued.

We should not feel any pain or any other discomfort anywhere in the body. In other words, any severe discomfort – may be a headache, may be pain due to an injury – do not eat at that time.

Now suppose there is no pain, or discomfort in the body, the stomach is empty, the mind is calm, the body is not tired, still we should fulfill one more condition. And that is : you must be prepared to take rest after taking food. If we have no time to take rest after a meal, if we have to rush to the station or the office for work, we must not eat. Many people eat and rush to the bus stand, go to do physical and mental work. If we start doing mental or physical work of strenuous type immediately after meal, energy is needed to do the external work. Work and digestion cannot go together. In the good old days, people used to start their activity at 0400 or 0500 hrs [04.00 am or 05.00 am] and by 1000 hrs [10.00 am] or 1100 hrs [11.00 am] they used to compete all their work and then have their meal and rest thereafter and do little work in the evening. But, these days, we have the Indian type of eating for the western mode of working. We start our day somewhere at 0800 or 0900 hrs [08.00 am or 09.00 am] and go right upto 1700 hrs or 2000 hrs [07.00 pm or 08.00 pm]. We have no rest at all. Our place of work is far away from our residence. We have no rest, physical or mental. If we fill our stomach and do outside work, we become inefficient in the outside work and also the inside work.

Now when the stomach is empty, and the mind emotionally calm, with no discomfort in the body, and if we are prepared to take rest after the meal, then only we should eat. Otherwise, do not eat. Most of us have to do work during day time. So take a very light meal. Do not take the conventional meal. Many people say, ‘I have plenty of work to do, so unless I eat, how will I get energy for the work?’ Suppose we start our work at 1000 hrs [10.00 am] and we sit down at home for the morning meal at 0900 hrs [09.00 am] thinking that this is going to give energy for the work to be done at 1000 hrs. Now, the food that has gone into the stomach will not be digested in one hour, and so, is not going to release energy in one hour. It takes at least 5 to 6 hours to get digested. The digested part of the food first goes into the small intestine and assimilation has to take place before giving energy to your system. It takes at least 12 hours, if you are healthy, before energy could be released from it. So, from the food that you take in the morning at 0900 hrs, its value will be made available to you at 2100 hrs and you cannot have it by 1000 hrs. It is a little childish to think that the food taken just now is going to give you energy just now. It is a little time consuming affair, so never eat if you have got work ahead i.e. if you have plenty of work to do. Take a little fruit or little fruit juice or something very light.

We are all eating wrongly at wrong times and so we are not able to digest. Even if you put a first class food, a really good food, in the stomach at the wrong time, it is dirt and nothing more. So do not eat wrongly. If you know this, when and when not to eat, problem is solved.
Posted by R. Raghunathan at 12:26 AM 0 comments
1-B Food – What to eat and what not to eat
Read the full article

TSA Scanner Radiation ’10X Higher than Expected’

TSA to retest airport body scanners for radiation

Allison Young and Blake Morrison
USA Today
March 12, 2011

The Transportation Security Administration announced Friday that it would retest every full-body X-ray scanner that emits ionizing radiation — 247 machines at 38 airports — after maintenance records on some of the devices showed radiation levels 10 times higher than expected.

The TSA says that the records reflect math mistakes and that all the machines are safe. Indeed, even the highest readings listed on some of the records — the numbers that the TSA says were mistakes — appear to be many times less than what the agency says a person absorbs through one day of natural background radiation.

Even so, the TSA has ordered the new tests out of “an abundance of caution to reassure the public,” spokesman Nicholas Kimball says. The tests will be finished by the end of the month, and the results will be released “as they are completed,” the agency said on its website.

The TSA “has repeatedly assured me that the machines that emit radiation do not pose a health risk,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said in a written statement Friday. “Nonetheless, if TSA contractors reporting on the radiation levels have done such a poor job, how can airline passengers and crew have confidence in the data used by the TSA to reassure the public?”

Read the full article

Maine town declares food sovereignty

Friday, March 11, 2011 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer

(NaturalNews) The town of Sedgwick, Maine, currently leads the pack as far as food sovereignty is concerned. Local residents recently voted unanimously at a town hall meeting to pass an ordinance that reinforces its citizens’ God-given rights to “produce, process, sell, purchase, and consume local foods of their choosing,” which includes even state- and federally-restricted foods like raw milk.

The declaration is one of the first of its kind to be passed in the US, and it is definitely not the last. Several other Maine towns — including Penobscott, Brooksville, and Blue Hill — all have similar ordinances up for vote in the coming weeks.

“Tears of joy welled in my eyes as my town voted to adopt this ordinance,” said Mia Strong, a Sedgwick resident who frequents local farms. “I am so proud of my community. They made a stand for local food and our fundamental rights as citizens to choose that food.”

In addition to simply declaring food sovereignty, the ordinance also declares it a crime for state and federal authorities to violate ordinance provisions in any way. The law specifically states that “[i]t shall be unlawful for any law or regulation adopted by the state or federal government to interfere with the rights recognized by this Ordinance.” This includes, of course, any attempt to enforce the unconstitutional provisions of the S 510 the HR 2751 food tyranny bills that were recently passed (http://www.naturalnews.com/030789_F…).

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/031667_food_freedom_Maine.html#ixzz1GXjK5dk1

World cheers as the CIA plunges Libya into chaos

David Rothscum
David Rothscum Reports
March 2, 2011

How was Libya doing under the rule of Gadaffi? How bad did the people have it? Were they oppressed as we now commonly accept as fact? Let us look at the facts for a moment.

Before the chaos erupted, Libya had a lower incarceration rate than the Czech republic. It ranked 61st. Libya had the lowest infant mortality rate of all of Africa. Libya had the highest life expectancy of all of Africa. Less than 5% of the population was undernourished. In response to the rising food prices around the world, the government of Libya abolished ALL taxes on food.

People in Libya were rich.

Libya had the highest gross domestic product (GDP) at purchasing power parity (PPP) per capita of all of Africa. The government took care to ensure that everyone in the country shared in the wealth. Libya had the highest Human Development Index of any country on the continent. The wealth was distributed equally. In Libya, a lower percentage of people lived below the poverty line than in the Netherlands.

How does Libya get so rich?

The answer is oil. The country has a lot of oil, and does not allow foreign corporations to steal the resources while the population starves, unlike countries like Nigeria, a country that is basically run by Shell.

Like any country, Libya suffers from a government with corrupt bureaucrats that try to gain a bigger portion of the pie at the cost of everyone else. In response to this, Kadaffi called for the oil revenue to be distributed directly to the people, because in his opinion, the government was failing the people. However, unlike the article claims, Gaddafi is not the president of Libya. In fact he holds no official position in the government. This is the big mistake that people make. They claim that Gaddafi rules over Libya when in fact he doesn’t, his position is more or less ceremonial. He should be compared to a founding father.

The true leader of Libya is an indirectly elected prime-minister. The current prime-minister is Baghdadi Mahmudi.

Calling Gaddafi the leader of Libya is comparable to calling Akihito the leader of Japan.

Contrary to what your media is sketching, opinions in Libya vary. Some people support Gaddafi but want Mahmudi out. Others want both out. Many just want to live their life in peace. However, effort is taken to sketch the appearance of a popular revolt against the supposed leader of Libya, Gaddafi, when in fact he is just the architect of Libya’s current political system, a mixture of pan-Arabism, socialism, and Islamic government.

Videos of Pro-Gaddafi protests are disappearing from Youtube as we speak.
Read the full article

Dr. Jonas Salk, inventor of polio vaccine, exposed experimenting on mental patients

Dr. Jonas Salk, inventor of polio vaccine, exposed as criminal-minded scientist who conducted illicit medical experiments on mental patients

Mike Adams
Natural News
March 3, 2011
Jonas Salk(NaturalNews) Dr. Jonas Salk, one of the “gods” in the cult of pharmacology — a man who is credited with inventing the polio vaccine — has now been exposed as a medical criminal who conducted illegal medical experiments on mental patients. This fact has come to light courtesy of the Associated Press, believe it or not, which has been investigating the history of medical experiments as part of a press effort leading up to scheduled bioethics meetings in Washington.

According to the Associated Press, Dr. Jonas Salk co-authored a clinical trial that “injected experimental flu vaccine in male patients at a state insane asylum in Ypsilanti, Mich., then exposed them to flu several months later.” The victims of this medical experiment were described as “senile and debilitated,” meaning that obtaining their rational consent to participate in such experiments would have been impossible. And that means Dr. Jonas Salk — one of the most highly-worshipped figures throughout modern medicine — was conducting this trial in violation of medical ethics and in violation of the law.

Isn’t it interesting how the vaccine industry and its medical journal propaganda mouthpieces always hurl accusations at people like Dr. Andrew Wakefield, claiming he violated medical ethics for taking blood samples with consent, but when one of their own heroes gets caught engaging in criminal medical experiments involving the injection of insane mental patients without consent, they have nothing to say about it?

In the pro-vaccine cult of pharmacology, any researcher who concludes that vaccines are good for you is considered “right” no matter what laws they violate, what victims they kill or what kind of evils they have to commit in order to achieve their fabricated results. The vaccine industry, as we see throughout history, has openly allowed criminal scientists to operate its clinical trials — even when human victims were maimed or killed in the process. (And not much has changed since, it seems…)

The Big Lie about the polio vaccine

This trial involving Dr. Jonas Salk was, not surprisingly, federally funded. And it’s just the beginning of the lies and deceptions about Dr Jonas Salk and the polio vaccine. For starters, the polio vaccine was a failure and didn’t eradicate polio at all, but we’ll save that discussion for another story. Today’s topic is illegal medical experiments conducted by mad scientists working for the vaccine and pharmaceutical industries.

And on that topic, the true history of the criminal medical experiments that have been done in order to boost the profits of Big Pharma will absolutely shock you. As the AP reports:

Read the full article