SURVIVAL OF A WHISTLEBLOWER

To be a whistleblower is not easy. Particularly not in healthcare, which is riddled with financial conflicts of interest, corruption, political ambitions about becoming re-elected by promising people screenings that do more harm than good, and personal hobby horses.

Part of big pharma’s business model is organized crime, which envolves fraud, both in research and marketing. Our prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death, after heart disease and cancer, and I have estimated, based on the best research I could find, that psychiatric drugs alone are also the third leading cause of death. Yet, hardly anyone raises an eyebrow; in fact, we irrigate whole populations with psychiatric drugs as if they were mental fertilizers.

Most whistleblowers suffer a terrible fate. Peter Rost has described how things went for 233 people who blew the whistle on fraud: 90% were fired or demoted, 27% faced lawsuits, 26% had to seek psychiatric or physical care, 25% suffered alcohol abuse, 17% lost their homes, 15% got divorced, 10% attempted suicide and 8% went bankrupt. But in spite of all this, only 16% said that they wouldn’t blow the whistle again. I shall try to explain how it was possible for me to blow the whistle for 30 years and yet still have a highly rewarding career.

PETER C. GØTZSCHE Professor Peter C. Gøtzsche graduated as a Master of Science in Biology and Chemistry in 1974 and as a Physician 1984. He is a specialist in internal medicine; worked with clinical trials and regulatory affairs in the drug industry 1975-1983, and at hospitals in Copenhagen 1984-95. SUMMER INSTITUTE

The 2018 Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality took place on June 19 – 27, 2018, at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany.

Chemtrails. The Realities of Geoengineering and Weather Modification

By Prof. James F. Tracy

Global Research, November 08, 2012

Url of this article:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/chemtrails-the-realities-of-geoengineering-and-weather-modification/5311079

Over the past decade evidence has increasingly emerged indicating how geoengineering and weather modification programs designed to inflict major impacts on the atmosphere and environment are fully operational.

Despite such developments the CO2-specific anthropogenic theory of global warming touted by foundation-funded environmental groups and public relations dominates much of popular discourse and the prevailing worldview of intellectuals.

By drawing attention away from actually existing efforts of atmospheric experimentation and manipulation, such coordinated efforts are complicit in the impending environmental catastrophe they profess to be rallying against. The repeated claim of CO2-driven climate change without acknowledgment of geoengineering-related environmental intervention is a severe perversion of both meaningful scientific inquiry and public opinion with overwhelming implications for all life on earth.

“While scientists continue research into any global climatic effects of greenhouse gases, we ought to study ways to offset any possible ill effects. Injecting sunlight-scattering particles into the stratosphere appears to be a promising approach. Why not do that?”—Edward Teller[1]

“To accept opinions in their terms is to gain the good solid feeling of being correct without having to think. “—C. Wright Mills[2]

For anyone who looks up in the sky every so often while fostering some recollection of what a sunny day used to resemble, the reality of geoengineering—what are often referred to as “chemtrails”—can no longer be easily dismissed. For over a decade military and private jet aircraft have been spraying our skies with what numerous independent researchers, journalists, and activists observe to be an admixture of aluminum, barium, strontium, and other dangerous heavy metals. Such substances distributed into the atmosphere as microscopic subparticulates eventually descend to earth where they are breathed by living things and absorbed by the soil and plant life.

“A glimpse into new death technologies” intended to modify weather and the environment “is in legislation introduced by Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich,” investigative writer Amy Worthington wrote almost a decade ago. Kucinich’s

unsuccessful Space Preservation Act of 2001 was intended to ban space deployment of:

*electronic, psychotronic and information weaponry

*high altitude ultra low frequency weapons

*plasma, electromagnetic, sonic and ultrasonic weapons

*laser weapons

*strategic, theater, tactical or extraterrestrial weapons

*chemical biological, environmental climate or tectonic weapons

*chemtrails (this term was stricken from a later version, suggesting duress)

In their quest to remain top dog in the kill chain, the purveyors of perpetual war have deliberately dimmed earth’s life-giving sunlight, and reduced atmospheric visibility with lung-clogging particulates and polymers. This ecological terrorism has severely compromised public health, according to thousands of testimonials.[3]

A recently discovered NASA document from 1966 indicates that weather modification efforts have been underway since the 1940s. “There is ... great motivation to develop effective countermeasures against the destructive measures of weather,” the paper observes,

and, conversely, enhance the beneficial aspects. The financial and other benefits to human welfare of being able to modify weather to augment water supplies, reduce lightening, suppress hail, mitigate tornados, and inhibit the full development of hurricanes would be very great.[4]

According to the report, in 1964 the National Science Foundation formed a Special Commission on Weather Modification. Thereafter, weather weapons in the form of cloud seeding were used to flood North Vietnamese supply lines during the Vietnam War.[5] More recent documentation points to private and government bodies’ active pursuit of weather modification, including the US Department of Homeland Security’s Hurricane Aerosol and Microphysics Program.[6] And in mid-2012 scientists proposed a $5 billion geoengineering plan to potentially unleash one million tons of particulates in the upper atmosphere each year to “cut world greenhouse gas emissions.”[7]

Since this is such an open program—taking place in plain sight directly over our heads—why is there almost complete silence about it in academic circles as well as mainstream and “alternative” progressive media outlets, particularly if one is to conclude that academe and the press are where disinterested inquiry and the dissemination of information and ideas in the public interest are allegedly anticipated and guaranteed? Indeed, geoengineering and weather manipulation are “a scientific taboo,” Michel Chossudovsky points out.

The possibility of climatic or environmental manipulations as part of a military and intelligence agenda, while tacitly acknowledged, is never considered as relevant. Military analysts are mute on the subject. Meteorologists are not investigating the matter, and environmentalists are strung on global warming and the Kyoto protocol.[8]

In this way such a condition is also attributable to the deleterious effect of intellectual disengagement and naivete originating within scholarly and journalistic communities that, combined with well-funded public relations efforts promoting the CO2-specific theory of global warming, eventually compromises the reasoning and communicative capacities of the broader public sphere.

The Trouble with Normal

When individuals share certain understandings and rationalities about themselves, their profession, and the broader society and culture, as is the overwhelming case in academe or journalism, they possess a binding ideology, and thereby a basis where certain perceptions and beliefs may become readily embraced or dismissed. Concepts inimical to such firm convictions are verboten. Moreover, the heavy reliance on foundation funding combined with rigid hiring and peer review processes ensure that ideas and research challenge this institutional matrix and the broader order of things in only playful and generally non-threatening ways.

Speaking as someone who works in the academy, the fear of being rejected as a crackpot also plays a large role in self-censorship. I never wholly dismissed the chemtrail phenomenon or the reports of chemtrail activists. Yet the very idea of such a nefarious program was so disturbing and surreal that several years ago I half-heartedly sought out a variety of what appeared to be conflicting information of both chemtrail activists and skeptics via online sources to placate and thereby suppress my concerns. After all, I thought, if there was anything to such claims they would be interrogated and ferreted out by university research itself and the independent progressive-left news media and intelligentsia that I relied on so heavily to form my worldview. The real problem, clearly articulated by United Nations agencies, Noble laureates and from seemingly every corner of our mediated environments is the abundance of carbon dioxide and the threat it poses in the form of melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and severe weather events.

Not until 2010, when I happened across the documentary What in the World Are They Spraying? (WITWATS) did I become more fully convinced that coordinated geoengineering programs not only exist, but that they are far-reaching in scope and have major implications for life on earth. Perhaps alongside the alleged scourge of CO2-induced global warming, geoengineering programs that are purportedly in place to “curb” such processes actually pose the greatest threat to humanity and the environment. Like Monsanto, which seeks to control all facets of agriculture and thus our physiological makeup, the US military’s self-admitted objective is to “control the weather” through atmospheric manipulation by 2025.[9]

Living in a tropical climate and spending much of the time outdoors I eventually became something of a novel “skywatcher.” Upon closer observance it has become increasingly difficult to ignore the activity of numerous high altitude aircraft leaving plumes that over the course of several hours expand and coalesce to make massive cloudlike formations that could be easily mistaken for overcast above sometimes naturally-occurring cumulus clouds. I recognized how throughout most of the year this was an almost daily phenomenon initiated by planes with sometimes bizarre and inconsistent flight paths.

When I contacted to Federal Aviation Administration in Fort Lauderdale on a day with high aerial activity of this nature, I was consoled by an overly polite FAA agent that the trails were merely “water vapor,” and that dispersal of any substances several miles overhead would have but negligible effects at ground level. While it is true that jet engines can briefly produce plumes akin to cirrus clouds resulting from the exhaust process, the prevalence of this activity once I became aware of it struck me as highly unusual, and geoengineering activists contend that the inexplicable and often dangerous admixture of microscopic heavy metal particulates now common in our air—particularly aluminum—originate in the persistent contrails. A variety of air samples, most recently by activists at losangelesskywatch.com, confirm this phenomenon.[10]

In late 2011 my six year old daughter had a long-running respiratory ailment which prompted me to send off a small sample of her hair for lab analysis. The results indicated a high level of aluminum.[11] This was disturbing especially given that she had received an abbreviated vaccine regimen, drank water run from a state-of-the-art reverse osmosis filter, and ate only organic food. Her pediatrician expressed some astonishment, asking whether we use aluminum cookware. Apart from this he could offer no explanations and merely prescribed a popular antibiotic for the cough. While there may have been no correlation between the symptoms, it seemed as if the often obscure and bizarre government projects pointed to by “conspiracy theorists” had now struck home in a most intimate way.

It was around this time that I proposed to my department chair we invite WITWATS co-director Michael Murphy to screen his film and give a public talk on campus. Earlier that year a colleague hosted De Franklin Lopez, the director of EndCiv, a provocative documentary profiling the ideas of radical environmental activist and writer Erick Jensen that compares CO2-producing activities with the severest forms of colonial exploitation and Nazi war crimes while advocating violence and vandalism to save the earth. The screening was well-attended by faculty and graduate students.

At the time our department also included on faculty a talented documentary filmmaker whose work has become a platform for proselytizing on anthropogenic global warming and the many lifestyle changes necessary to thwart it. I took for granted that the university was a place where a variety of ideas, however controversial, could be presented, scrutinized, and pondered. However, after emailing the WITWATS YouTube link to my superior I was told in no uncertain terms, “That’s far right propaganda.”

Following a lengthy and good-natured exchange (which included an apology) there was no moral or monetary support forthcoming, which prevented me from approaching other university-related funding sources. Aided by Murphy’s honest willingness to forego an honorarium, I helped to support his campus visit to speak to one of my classes and present the film to the broader public. The screenings and question and answer sessions were very well-received by the students especially, all of whom can detect baloney a mile or two away. Yet despite publicity for the screening and personal invitations to colleagues I found it instructive that none were in attendance.

The story provides a microcosmic demonstration of the limited parameters for the exchange of information and ideas, that are at least as constrictive in the academy—which asserts a license on what constitutes truth and knowledge—as they are in the broader public sphere that is typically policed by ideas and assumptions that have legitimacy and rootedness in academic circles. Along these lines, within mainstream and specifically progressive media the hypothesized ecological dangers of CO2 have become the default line of reasoning for environmental issues. And, as public discourse in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy suggests, such notions overwhelmingly constitute the precognitive conditions and informational frames through which “extreme weather” events are interpreted.

The CO2 Noise Machine

A significant portion of the underlying research and public relations maneuvers of conventional environmental groups alleging CO2’s baneful and poisonous nature are funded almost entirely by major philanthropic foundations, and this goes a long way in drowning out other arguably more clear-cut and well-documented explanations of weather events, above all geoengineering and weather modification programs.

A foremost reason for the CO2 climate change theory’s endurance is the perceived legitimacy of its proponents, a widescale uncritical acceptance of its assumptions by mainstream and purportedly “alternative/progressive” media figures and outlets, and a limited understanding of the dubious science often based on drastically tortured and opaquely-constructed measurements and data. That a minority of climate scientists and seemingly impartial United Nations entities such as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have apparently managed to convince a wide swath of opinion leaders and policy makers that the atmosphere is heating up because of genuinely miniscule increases in carbon dioxide is a feat that takes substantial resources and coordination.[12]

A passage from “economic hitman” John Perkins’ second semiautobiographical book provides an illustrative example how the CO2 theory of climate change becomes a deep-seated component of an ostensibly well-informed individual’s outlook and belief system.

I checked the clock on the bookcase and, aware that I had dallied too long, headed for the shower. As I passed the radio I flicked it on the local NPR station ... Then suddenly the words of the radio announcer caught my attention.

“Within less than a hundred years,” she said, “all the maple trees—and the fall foliage—will be gone from Massachusetts. According to a recent scientific study, global warming will make our climate here similar to North Carolina’s. So” she sighed, “enjoy this year’s display. We may not have many more like it.” I stood there for a moment staring through the bathroom window. Outside, the old red maple next to the house bowed in the wind, its branches scrapping against the wall. The familiar sound now seemed foreboding, a death rattle. I felt absolutely devastated.[13]

Scratching the veneer of some of the major climate change movers and shakers one finds a very well-financed assemblage of entities with major philanthropic foundation ties. Indeed, the Rockefeller Foundations alone are major players behind the anthropogenic global warming “activism” and propaganda. For example, in 2009 the Rockefeller Family Foundation gave $3,500,000 to Grace Communications Fund, an organization that “builds partnerships and develops innovative media strategies that increase public awareness of the relationships among food, water, and energy systems.” Also in 2009 Rockefeller gave $775,000 to the Natural Resource Defense Council, whose foremost agenda is “curbing global warming” and “creating a clean energy future.” Another $650,000 was channeled to the World Wildlife Federation, $350,000 to the Center for Climate Strategies, and $200,000 to the Sierra Club.[14]

As bizarre as it may seem, such organizations are funded to such a degree because of their express intent on austerity and even depopulation programs. Toward this end they speak in one powerful voice that climate change is caused by the CO2-specific consumptive practices of human beings. Curiously, however, these extremely well-funded groups completely ignore actually existing or impending environmental upheavals brought about by geoengineering, dangerously designed nuclear power plants, the wanton disbursal of depleted uranium, and the proliferation of genetically modified organisms throughout the food supply.

A leading mouthpiece of the CO2 global warming hysteria is science author and journalist Bill McKibben, who oversees the popular 350.org publicity outlet. Through this effort McKibben has succeeded in convincing young and old alike to draw attention to the “scientific” assertion that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are advancing from the low 300s to 400 parts per million of overall atmospheric gases—an ominous .01 percent—by sending in money, buying 350.org paraphernalia, partaking in civil disobedience and even hiking across the United States. This is an impressive public relations accomplishment. More importantly, however, such antics cleverly lend themselves toward authenticating the notion that most every extreme weather event is attributable to dangerous CO2 levels. This conjecture has become as central part a part of the powerful liberal and progressive opinion generating apparatus as the declarations of eugenicists seeking to build a master Nordic race a century ago—an assemblage of scientists and publicists who were, uncoincidentally, funded by some of the same interests.

McKibben’s 350.org project is the public face of his 501(c)(3) 1Sky Education Fund, which between its founding in 2007 and 2009 took in close to $5,000,000 in foundation money and “public contributions.” In 2010 the Rockefeller Brothers Fund gave 1Sky $200,000. The key “scientific” paper McKibben points to as support for his dire warnings on climate change, “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim,” coauthored by NASA scientist James Hansen, was partially funded through Rockefeller Foundation money.[15]

The piece is not so much a scientific report as it is a set of mandates calling for drastic social and political action to avert continued CO2 “buildup.” “Preservation of a climate resembling that which humanity is accustomed,” the authors assert, “requires that most remaining fossil fuel carbon is never emitted to the atmosphere.” Independent researchers and journalists assert that such proposed policies based on tying carbon emissions to atmospheric decay, many of which are already underway in some US states at the local level, will inevitably curtail further industrial development (and consequently economic growth) of almost every type and circumvent existing property rights while ushering in a new age of near-feudal hardship.[16]

McKibben and 350.org are an especially proficient example of the many foundation-supported promotional outlets that, in the tradition of Edward Bernays, have since the late 1990s fundamentally altered public perception and discourse on weather and the climate. This is particularly the case among members of the intelligentsia who disturbingly accept the pronouncements of calculating figures such as McKibben and Vice President Al Gore—individuals that routinely demonstrate their contempt for science and the public interest by trumpeting the assumed inevitability of an uncertain theory. As a result the CO2 explanatory phantom dominates center stage and wholly removes from consideration far more probable causes of unusual and extreme weather.

Piece of Mind through Conformity

The established intellectual communities’ uncritical acceptance of the CO2-specific description of climate change has far less to do with its plausibility or scientific soundness—the “science” is too opaque for pedestrian comprehension and its accompanying shortcomings and qualifications are routinely and fraudulently downplayed—than it does with the overall ubiquity of the notion and an especially naïve faith in the fair and equitable production and dissemination of scientific knowledge.

The reasoning goes something like this. If non-CO2-related explanations of unusual weather patterns existed, the benevolent and impartial foundations would recognize their significance and fund such countervailing scientific research. As the histories of modern medicine, psychiatry, eugenics, and public education suggest, however, the reality is that the dominant paradigm is not the one that is ultimately the most valid and principled, but rather the one that is best funded. In this regard the foundations’ wealthy benefactors call the tune and run the show.

The overall effort has been a public relations coup of immense proportions not because it has seized the hearts and minds of the general public, many of which remain skeptical of the theory, but rather among educated opinion leaders who through personal mystification with their own credentials and titles are the most steadfast in the beliefs they are inured to accept. Even the few who have misgivings about the prevalent explanation of climate change and less examined yet entirely conceivable causes will seldom speak their minds for fear of incurring the wrath of their colleagues and peers, thus perpetuating a professional sphere that more closely resembles a Stalinist inquisition than one where free and open debate are fostered.

In order to preserve ones sanity, reputation and specialized status one need recognize the importance of alignment with an unexamined belief in what one has been told by the “experts” and their spokespersons while simultaneously assuming excessive skepticism toward the readily apparent phenomena of everyday life, however well-documented and alarming they may be. We may seldom have any more clear, sunny days, storms may be of mainly synthetic derivation and direction, and in less than a generation children could be developing Alzheimer’s by their late teens, but are these sufficient reasons to jeopardize one’s professional and social standing?

To broach the topic of weather control and geoengineering programs not only indicates an unhealthy lack of faith in overwhelmingly powerful yet poorly understood institutions and their guiding rationales. It also runs counter to that “good solid feeling of being correct without having to think.” Such dialogue suggests bad taste, especially when one can discuss Paul Krugman’s latest column or where to buy the best arugula. For these reasons I’ve tentatively resigned myself to a fate befitting a well-educated and properly conditioned member of the intellectual class. Realizing that my destiny and that of my loved ones can no longer be considered exclusively our own, I’ve finally learned to stop worrying and love chemtrails.

Notes

---

1. Edward Teller, “Sunscreen for Planet Earth,” Hoover Institution Digest, no. 1, 1998, http://www.hoover.org/publications/hoover-digest/article/6791. Article originally published under title, “The Planet Needs a Sunscreen,”Wall Street Journal, October 17, 1997.

2. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, New York: Oxford University Press, 312.

3. Amy Worthington, “Chemtrails: Aerosol and Electromagnetic Weapons in the Age of Nuclear War,” GlobalResearch.ca, June 1, 2004,http://globalresearch.ca/articles/WOR406A.html

4. Geoengineeringwatch.org, “1966 US Government Document Outlines National Weather Modification Programs and Implications,” November 1, 2012,http://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/a-recomended-national-program-in-weather-modification-icas-report-10a/

5. Paul Joseph Watson, “Exclusive Video: The Father of Weaponized Weather,” Infowars, February 2, 2011, http://www.infowars.com/the-father-of-weaponized-weather/

6. Richard W. Spinrad to William Laska, “Response to Statement of Work: Hurricane Aerosol and Microphysics Program,” US Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Silver Springs, MD, July 29, 2009,http://voices.washingtonpost.com/capitalweathergang/noaa_letter_dhs_hurricane_modification.pdf

7. Allister Doyle and David Fogarty, “’Sunshade’ to Fight Climate Change Costed at $5 Billion Year,” Reuters, August 31, 2012,http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/08/30/climate-sunshade-idINDEE87T0K420120830

8. Michel Chossudovsky, “The Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction: ‘Owning the Weather for Military Use,’” GlobalResearch.ca, September 27, 2004,http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO409F.html

9. Tamzy J. House, James B. Near Jr. et al, “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather by 2025,” United States Air Force, 1996,http://csat.au.af.mil/2025/volume3/vol3ch15.pdf

10. Losangelesskywatch.org, “Lab Test Results,” n.d., http://losangelesskywatch.org/lab-test-results

11. S_Tracy_Hair_Analysis_0112 (pdf), January 2012.

12. Donna LaFramboise, The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert, CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2011.

13. John Perkins, The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth About Global Corruption, New York: Dutton, 271-272.

14. All tax-related information obtained through GuideStar, http://www2.guidestar.org/Home.aspx, and Foundation Center, http://foundationcenter.org/

15. James Hansen, Makiko Sato, Pushker Kharecha et al, “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Begin?” 2008 (Unpublished)http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.1126 or www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TargetCO2_20080407.pdf

16. See, for example, Rachel Koire, Behind the Green Mask: UN Agenda 21, The Post-Sustainability Press, 2011. Also Susanne Posel’s excellent coverage and analysis of Agenda 21 at http://occupycorporatism.com/category/united-nations-2/agenda-21/

Copyright © 2012 Global Research

‘Sad day’ for whistleblowers, union warns as board rules on fired scientists

Mike Blanchfield

The Canadian Press

OTTAWA—Two of three scientists fired by Health Canada in a long-running whistleblowing saga have lost a bid to get their jobs back.

And one of the country’s largest public service unions is calling it a “sad day” for bureaucrats who want to raise concerns about public safety.

In a decision released without fanfare last week, the Public Service Labour Relations Board dismissed the grievances of Shiv Chopra and Margaret Haydon, who were fired for insubordination in 2004.

It did, however, rule that Gerard Lambert was wrongly dismissed.

The three scientists — probably the country’s best-known whistleblowers — have sparked headlines since the 1990s in a series of high-profile disputes over food safety. They have said publicly they were pressured by their bosses to approve drugs despite human safety concerns.

In the late 1990s, they publicly opposed rBST, a bovine growth hormone, which enhances milk production in cows. Their criticism led to a Senate inquiry and a decision not to approve the drug.

The Professional Institute of the Public Service says it will likely appeal the 208-page decision, which followed 150 days of hearings over nearly five years.

“Today is a sad day,” PIPS President Gary Corbett said Monday. “The government of Canada offers little protection to whistleblowers.”

“Their only defiance is that they resisted commercial pressure and provided evidence to official parliamentary committees. Cases of dismissal like these do nothing good to help public-service whistleblowers to come forward and denounce wrongdoing within their departments.”

Chopra, perhaps the most outspoken of the group and the author of a book that is scathingly critical of Health Canada, echoed the sentiment.

“The issue here is not just some employees losing their jobs or whistleblowing,” said Chopra. “We’re not talking about our rights ... the public’s right to know from the people they pay to protect their health and safety — that is the issue.

“All you Canadians — everybody is involved here.”

Lambert greeted the ruling with mixed feelings. The ruling reinstated his job, and an adjudicator will have 90 days to determine how much compensation he is eligible to receive.

Speaking in a soft, halting voice, Lambert estimated that he is owed “$250,000 at least,” but that the ordeal has left him stressed and unhealthy. Neither he nor his two fellow colleagues found other work over the last seven years.

“I was sorry for them and my wife asked me why you are not smiling about the decision because you will be reinstated,” Lambert said.

Still, he said he would like to return to work, “as soon as possible.”

Prior to their firings in June 2004, the scientists raised numerous concerns.

They warned that carbadox, a drug used to promote growth in pigs, could produce carcinogenic residues. They said that Baytril, used to promote growth in cows and chickens, could produce antibiotic resistance in humans.

Chopra criticized then-health minister Allan Rock’s response to the anthrax scare that followed the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. The scientist questioned the expenditure of millions to stockpile antibiotics, saying the fear of bioterrorism was overblown.

Chopra and Haydon warned in 2003, before Canada’s first case of mad cow disease, that measures to prevent the disease were inadequate. They called for a total ban on the use of animals parts in the feed of other animals.

Chopra criticized the board for not directly addressing the broader issue of public safety in its ruling last week.

“Meanwhile the damage to public health continues, and companies keep on selling the same stuff,” he said.

Chopra cited last week’s recall of 36 million pounds of ground turkey by American meat company Cargill as evidence of a continuing problem.

“This is a global problem, right now, of food safety.”

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1036200--sad-day-for-whistleblowers-union-warns-as-board-rules-on-fired-scientists

Whistleblower exposes GlaxoSmithKline's dangerous practices

Drug company whistle-blower Cheryl Eckard talks about her experience trying to fix problems at GlaxoSmithKline. Her discoveries about the dangerous practices of the company made her a key figure in a federal lawsuit.

Original interview and video.

Mercola's take on Avandia, another dangerous GSK drug.

"...GSK's blockbuster diabetes drug Avandia made headlines again last year when it became clear that the drug not only had major risks, but that GSK kept the dangers of the drug under tight wraps—for a very long time.

As it turns out, GSK spent 11 years covering up trial data that showed that Avandia was a risky drug for the heart—again providing indisputable evidence that the drug paradigm is about money, not health. Avandia topped the list of drugs linked to fatal adverse events in 2009, according to an analysis of U.S. FDA records, with 1,354 deaths reported that year alone. As a result, the FDA recently decided to restrict access to the drug.

In the US, Avandia is now only available to new patients if they are unable to achieve glycemic control using other medications and, in consultation with their health care professional, decide not to take a different drug for medical reasons. Europe decided to ban the drug due to its exaggerated health risks."

"One aspect that truly worries me is that while the criminal cases we've seen in the past several years are related to drugs, many of these companies, including GSK, also produce VACCINES.

And guess what?

They're typically not liable for damages from, or harm done by, contaminated or otherwise dangerous vaccines! We've recently seen evidence of "mistakes" in vaccine manufacturing as well, but vaccine makers are rarely if ever punished for these willful errors and omissions, which should provide you some further food for thought..."

John Pilger's investigation into the war on Wikileaks

By John Pilger

John Pilger's Investigation Into the War on WikiLeaks and His Interview With Julian Assange

Friday 14 January 2011

by: John Pilger, t r u t h o u t | Interview

Founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange. (Photo: Ben Bryant / Flickr)

The attacks on WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, are a response to an information revolution that threatens old power orders in politics and journalism. The incitement to murder trumpeted by public figures in the United States, together with attempts by the Obama administration to corrupt the law and send Assange to a hell-hole prison for the rest of his life, are the reactions of a rapacious system exposed as never before.

In recent weeks, the US Justice Department has established a secret grand jury just across the river from Washington in the eastern district of the state of Virginia. The object is to indict Assange under a discredited espionage act used to arrest peace activists during the First World War, or one of the "war on terror" conspiracy statutes that have degraded American justice. Judicial experts describe the jury as a "deliberate set up," pointing out that this corner of Virginia is home to the employees and families of the Pentagon, CIA, Department of Homeland Security, and other pillars of American power.

"This is not good news," Assange told me when we spoke this past week, his voice dark and concerned. He says he can have "bad days - but I recover." When we met in London last year, I said, "You are making some very serious enemies, not least of all the most powerful government engaged in two wars. How do you deal with that sense of danger?" His reply was characteristically analytical. "It's not that fear is absent. But courage is really the intellectual mastery over fear - by an understanding of what the risks are and how to navigate a path through them."

Regardless of the threats to his freedom and safety, he says the US is not WikiLeaks' main "technological enemy." "China is the worst offender. China has aggressive, sophisticated interception technology that places itself between every reader inside China and every information source outside China. We've been fighting a running battle to make sure we can get information through, and there are now all sorts of ways Chinese readers can get on to our site."

It was in this spirit of "getting information through" that WikiLeaks was founded in 2006, but with a moral dimension. "The goal is justice," wrote Assange on the homepage, "the method is transparency." Contrary to a current media mantra, WikiLeaks material is not "dumped." Less than one percent of the 251,000 US embassy cables have been released. As Assange points out, the task of interpreting material and editing that which might harm innocent individuals demands "standards [befitting] higher levels of information and primary sources." To secretive power, this is journalism at its most dangerous.

On 18 March 2008, a war on WikiLeaks was foretold in a secret Pentagon document prepared by the "Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch." US intelligence, it said, intended to destroy the feeling of "trust," which is WikiLeaks' "center of gravity." It planned to do this with threats to "exposure [and] criminal prosecution." Silencing and criminalizing this rare source of independent journalism was the aim: smear the method. Hell hath no fury like imperial Mafiosi scorned.

Others, also scorned, have lately played a supporting part, intentionally or not, in the hounding of Assange, some for reasons of petty jealousy. Sordid and shabby describe their behavior, which serves only to highlight the injustice against a man who has courageously revealed what we have a right to know.

As the US Justice Department, in its hunt for Assange, subpoenas the Twitter and email accounts, banking and credit card records of people around the world - as if we are all subjects of the United States - much of the "free" media on both sides of the Atlantic direct their indignation at the hunted.

"So, Julian, why won't you go back to Sweden now?" demanded the headline over Catherine Bennett's Observer column on 19 December, which questioned Assange's response to allegations of sexual misconduct with two women in Stockholm last August. "To keep delaying the moment of truth, for this champion of fearless disclosure and total openness," wrote Bennett, "could soon begin to look pretty dishonest, as well as inconsistent." Not a word in Bennett's vitriol considered the looming threats to Assange's basic human rights and his physical safety, as described by Geoffrey Robertson QC, in the extradition hearing in London on 11 January.

In response to Bennett, the editor of the online Nordic News Network in Sweden, Al Burke, wrote to the Observer explaining, "plausible answers to Catherine Bennett's tendentious question" were both critically important and freely available. Assange had remained in Sweden for more than five weeks after the rape allegation was made - and subsequently dismissed by the chief prosecutor in Stockholm - and that repeated attempts by him and his Swedish lawyer to meet a second prosecutor, who reopened the case following the intervention of a government politician, had failed. And yet, as Burke pointed out, this prosecutor had granted him permission to fly to London where "he also offered to be interviewed - a normal practice in such cases." So, it seems odd, at the very least, that the prosecutor then issued a European arrest warrant. The Observer did not publish Burke's letter.

This record straightening is crucial because it describes the perfidious behavior of the Swedish authorities - a bizarre sequence confirmed to me by other journalists in Stockholm and by Assange's Swedish lawyer Bjorn Hurtig. Not only that, Burke cataloged the unforeseen danger Assange faces should he be extradited to Sweden. "Documents released by WikiLeaks since Assange moved to England," he wrote, "clearly indicate that Sweden has consistently submitted to pressure from the United States in matters relating to civil rights. There is ample reason for concern that if Assange were to be taken into custody by Swedish authorities, he could be turned over to the United States without due consideration of his legal rights."

These documents have been virtually ignored in Britain. They show that the Swedish political class has moved far from the perceived neutrality of a generation ago and that the country's military and intelligence apparatus is all but absorbed into Washington's matrix around NATO. In a 2007 cable, the US Embassy in Stockholm lauds the Swedish government dominated by the conservative Moderate Party of Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt as coming "from a new political generation and not bound by [anti-US] traditions [and] in practice a pragmatic and strong partner with NATO, having troops under NATO command in Kosovo and Afghanistan."

The cable reveals how foreign policy is largely controlled by Carl Bildt, the current foreign minister, whose career has been based on a loyalty to the United States that goes back to the Vietnam War when he attacked Swedish public television for broadcasting evidence that the US was bombing civilian targets. Bildt played a leading role in the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a lobby group with close ties to the White House of George W. Bush, the CIA and the far right of the Republican Party.

"The significance of all this for the Assange case," notes Burke in a recent study, "is that it will be Carl Bildt and perhaps other members of the Reinfeldt government who will decide - openly or, more likely, furtively behind a façade of legal formality - on whether or not to approve the anticipated US request for extradition. Everything in their past clearly indicates that such a request will be granted."

For example, in December 2001, with the "war on terror" under way, the Swedish government abruptly revoked the political refugee status of two Egyptians, Ahmed Agiza and Mohammed al-Zari. They were handed to a CIA kidnap squad at Stockholm airport and "rendered" to Egypt, where they were tortured. When the Swedish ombudsman for justice investigated and found that their human rights had been "seriously violated," it was too late.

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The implications for the Assange case are clear. Both men were removed without due process of law and before their lawyers could file appeals to the European Human Rights Court and in response to a US threat to impose a trade embargo on Sweden. Last year, Assange applied for residency in Sweden, hoping to base WikiLeaks there. It is widely believed that Washington warned Sweden through mutual intelligence contacts of the potential consequences. In December, prosecutor Marianne Ny, who reactivated the Assange case, discussed the possibility of Assange's extradition to the US on her web site.

Almost six months after the sex allegations were first made public, Assange has been charged with no crime, but his right to a presumption of innocence has been willfully denied. The unfolding events in Sweden have been farcical, at best. The Australian barrister James Catlin, who acted for Assange in October, describes the Swedish justice system as "a laughing stock ... There is no precedent for it. The Swedes are making it up as they go along." He says that Assange, apart from noting contradictions in the case, has not publicly criticized the women who made the allegations against him. It was the police who tipped off the Swedish equivalent of the Sun, Expressen, with defamatory material about them, initiating a trial by media across the world.

In Britain, this trial has welcomed yet more eager prosecutors, with the BBC to the fore. There was no presumption of innocence in Kirsty Wark's "Newsnight" court in December. "Why don't you just apologise to the women?" she demanded of Assange, followed by: "Do we have your word of honour that you won't abscond?" On Radio 4's "Today" program, John Humphrys, the partner of Bennett, told Assange that he was obliged to go back to Sweden "because the law says you must." The hectoring Humphrys, however, had more pressing interests. "Are you a sexual predator?" he asked. Assange replied that the suggestion was ridiculous, to which Humphrys demanded to know how many women he had slept with.

"Would even Fox News have descended to that level?" wondered the American historian William Blum. "I wish Assange had been raised in the streets of Brooklyn, as I was. He then would have known precisely how to reply to such a question: 'You mean including your mother?'"

What is most striking about these "interviews" is not so much their arrogance and lack of intellectual and moral humility; it is their indifference to fundamental issues of justice and freedom and their imposition of narrow, prurient terms of reference. Fixing these boundaries allows the interviewer to diminish the journalistic credibility of Assange and WikiLeaks, whose remarkable achievements stand in vivid contrast to their own. It is like watching the old and stale, guardians of the status quo, struggling to prevent the emergence of the new.

In this media trial, there is a tragic dimension, obviously for Assange, but also for the best of mainstream journalism. Having published a slew of professionally brilliant editions with the WikiLeaks disclosures, feted all over the world, The Guardian recovered its establishment propriety on 17 December by turning on its besieged source. A major article by the paper's senior correspondent Nick Davies claimed that he had been given the "complete" Swedish police file with its "new" and "revealing" salacious morsels.

Assange's Swedish lawyer Hurtig says that crucial evidence is missing from the file given to Davies, including "the fact that the women were re-interviewed and given an opportunity to change their stories" and the tweets and SMS messages between them, which are "critical to bringing justice in this case." Vital exculpatory evidence is also omitted, such as the statement by the original prosecutor, Eva Finne, that "Julian Assange is not suspected of rape."

Having reviewed the Davies article, Assange's former barrister James Catlin wrote to me: "The complete absence of due process is the story and Davies ignores it. Why does due process matter? Because the massive powers of two arms of government are being brought to bear against the individual whose liberty and reputation are at stake." I would add: so is his life.

The Guardian has profited hugely from the WikiLeaks disclosures, in many ways. On the other hand, WikiLeaks, which survives on mostly small donations and can no longer receive funds through many banks and credit companies thanks to the bullying of Washington, has received nothing from the paper. In February, Random House will publish a Guardian book that is sure to be a lucrative best seller, which Amazon is advertising as "The End of Secrecy: the Rise and Fall of WikiLeaks." When I asked David Leigh, the Guardian executive in charge of the book, what was meant by "fall," he replied that Amazon was wrong and that the working title had been "The Rise (and Fall?) of WikiLeaks." "Note parenthesis and query," he wrote, "Not meant for publication anyway." (The book is now described on the Guardian web site as "WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy.") Still, with all that duly noted, the sense is that "real" journalists are back in the saddle. Too bad about the new boy, who never really belonged.

On 11 January, Assange's first extradition hearing was held at Belmarsh Magistrates Court, an infamous address because it is here that people were, before the advent of control orders, consigned to Britain's own Guantanamo, Belmarsh prison. The change from ordinary Westminster magistrates' court was due to a lack of press facilities, according to the authorities. That they announced this on the day Vice President Joe Biden declared Assange a "high tech terrorist" was no doubt coincidental, though the message was not.

For his part, Assange is just as worried about what will happen to Bradley Manning, the alleged whistleblower, being held in horrific conditions which the US National Commission on Prisons calls "tortuous." At 23, Private Manning is the world's pre-eminent prisoner of conscience, having remained true to the Nuremberg principle that every soldier has the right to "a moral choice." His suffering mocks the notion of the land of the free.

"Government whistleblowers," said Barack Obama, running for president in 2008, "are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal." Obama has since pursued and prosecuted more whistleblowers than any other president in American history.

"Cracking Bradley Manning is the first step," Assange told me. "The aim clearly is to break him and force a confession that he somehow conspired with me to harm the national security of the United States. In fact, I'd never heard his name before it was published in the press. WikiLeaks technology was designed from the very beginning to make sure that we never knew the identities or names of people submitting material. We are as untraceable as we are uncensorable. That's the only way to assure sources they are protected."

He adds: "I think what's emerging in the mainstream media is the awareness that if I can be indicted, other journalists can, too. Even the New York Times is worried. This used not to be the case. If a whistleblower was prosecuted, publishers and reporters were protected by the First Amendment that journalists took for granted. That's being lost. The release of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, with their evidence of the killing of civilians, hasn't caused this - it's the exposure and embarrassment of the political class: the truth of what governments say in secret, how they lie in public; how wars are started. They don't want the public to know these things and scapegoats must be found."

What about the allusions to the "fall" of WikiLeaks? "There is no fall," he said. "We have never published as much as we are now. WikiLeaks is now mirrored on more than 2,000 websites. I can't keep track of the of the spin-off sites: those who are doing their own WikiLeaks ... If something happens to me or to WikiLeaks, 'insurance' files will be released. They speak more of the same truth to power, including the media. There are 504 US embassy cables on one broadcasting organisation and there are cables on Murdoch and Newscorp."

The latest propaganda about the "damage" caused by WikiLeaks is a warning by the US State Department to "hundreds of human rights activists, foreign government officials and business people identified in leaked diplomatic cables of possible threats to their safety." This was how The New York Times dutifully relayed it on 8 January, and it is bogus. In a letter to Congress, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has admitted that no sensitive intelligence sources have been compromised. On 28 November, McClatchy Newspapers reported, "US officials conceded they have no evidence to date that the [prior] release of documents led to anyone's death." NATO in Kabul told CNN it could not find a single person who needed protecting.

The great American playwright Arthur Miller wrote: "The thought that the state ... is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied." What WikiLeaks has given us is truth, including rare and precious insight into how and why so many innocent people have suffered in reigns of terror disguised as wars and executed in our name; and how the United States has secretly and wantonly intervened in democratic governments from Latin America to its most loyal ally in Britain.

Javier Moreno, the editor of El Pais, which published the WikiLeaks logs in Spain, wrote, "I believe that the global interest sparked by the WikiLeaks papers is mainly due to the simple fact that they conclusively reveal the extent to which politicians in the West have been lying to their citizens."

Crushing individuals like Assange and Manning is not difficult for a great power, however craven. The point is, we should not allow it to happen, which means those of us meant to keep the record straight should not collaborate in any way. Transparency and information, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, are the "currency" of democratic freedom. "Every news organisation," a leading American constitutional lawyer told me, "should recognize that Julian Assange is one of them and that his prosecution will have a huge and chilling effect on journalism."

My favorite secret document - leaked by WikiLeaks, of course - is from the Ministry of Defense in London. It describes journalists who serve the public without fear or favor as "subversive" and "threats." Such a badge of honor.

Wikileaks and the craft of journalism

The reason we need Wikileaks and similar whistle blower sites is that conventional media is not doing the job it supposed to do - digging up stories and exposing the truth. What happened to all those investigative journalists like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein whose work led to the resignation of Nixon?!

Democracy Now! on the latest Wikileaks release

With Amy Goodman,
Daniel Ellsberg-Pentagon Papers whistleblower,
Greg Mitchell-writes the "Media Fix" blog for "The Nation"
and As'ad Abu Khalil-professor of political science at California State University, author of "The Battle for Saudi Arabia".