Friday, April 23, 2010








Massive Anti-Obama Rally Set for

Sunday in New York -

FUCK ANTI AMERICAN HEBREWS,

IF ISRAEL WANTS TO NUKE IRAN LET

THEM DO IT BY THEMSELVES!

ISRAEL HAS IN EXCESS OF 200 NUKES

-LAUNCH READY!

JUST BE PREPARED TO BE WIPED OFF

THE MAP BY RUSSIA AND CHINA.


by Hana Levi Julian
Thousands of Americans are preparing to protest in New York this Sunday against the Obama administration's increasing hostility towards Israel. The event is scheduled to take place outside the Israel Consulate on Sunday, April 25 at 1:00 p.m. EDT. A partial list of organizations who endorsed the demonstration is below.

Beth Gilinsky, head of the Jewish Action Alliance that is sponsoring the event, said, "We are outraged that President [Barack] Obama is scapegoating Israel and wants to expel Jews from their homes in Jerusalem. President Obama and Secretary Hillary Clinton show more anger about a Jewish family building a home in Jerusalem than Iran building a nuclear bomb," she added.

Gilinsky was referring to the brouhaha that ensued following a mis-timed announcement that the fourth stage of a seven-year plan for a housing project in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood of Jerusalem had been approved by Israel's Interior Ministry.

The announcement, made during a visit to the region by Vice President Joe Biden, led to weeks of recriminations and condemnations by U.S. officials, beginning with an immediate, harsh condemnation from Biden himself. Less than 24 hours after he left the country, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to scold him for having embarrassed the vice president and the Obama administration, and delivered a list of concessions and demands Israel was expected to fulfill in response. Other Obama officials followed with statements of criticism of their own.

Not one U.S. official at the time made mention of the formal government ceremony held by the Palestinian Authority during Biden's visit -- the naming of a public square in Ramallah to honor Dalah Mughrabi, the terrorist who led an attack that came to be known as the Coastal Road Massacre. In 1978, Mughrabi and her band of terrorists hijacked a tour bus on the coastal highway, murdering 37 innocent civilians and wounding 71 others, including more than a dozen children.

On the night that PA officials gathered to honor Mughrabi, Biden was delivering a speech at Tel Aviv University in which he repeated his condemnation of Israel for proceeding with the three-year-old housing project in a part of the nation's capital restored to Jerusalem during the 1967 Six-Day War, and thus not recognized by the U.S. government. American officials followed up a day later, when Biden had left the country, with more harsh criticism of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his government.

“Vast segments of the Jewish community will not tolerate the president's continuing attacks on Israel. Grassroots Jewry will not be silent,” Gilinsky vowed. A long list of Jewish organizations as well as a number of Christian and other non-Jewish groups have signed on to the event as well.

The demonstration will also feature a taped statement by former New York City mayor Ed Koch, a strong supporter of Obama's presidential campaign. Koch recently expressed his shock and disappointment with the increasing anti-Israel views expressed by the president and the increasing hostility of his administration towards the Jewish State.

Among the organizations who have officially endorsed the upcoming rally are:

AISH Center

Americans for a Safe Israel

Artists 4 Israel

Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors

Christians and Jews United for Israel

Coalition for Israel

Crown Heights Women for the Security and Integrity of Israel

Dr. Joseph Frager, Jerusalem Reclamation Project

NY Assemblyman Dov Hikind

IsraelAlive

Israel Day Concert in the Park

Jewish Political Education Foundation

Dr. Michael Ledeen, Center for Defense of Democracies

Unity Coalition for Israel

Dr. Herbert London, The Hudson Institute

AMCHA, Coalition for Jewish Concerns

Stand With Us

Endowment for Middle East Truth

World Committee for the Land of Israel

Zionist Organization of America

Z Street

Former New York Mayor Ed Koch addresses participants in a pro-Israel rally in this taped statement. The tape will be played Sunday outside the Israel Consulate in New York City, where thousands of Americans are preparing to protest against the Obama administration's increasing hostility towards Israel.












Psychiatric Drugging of Infants and Toddlers in the US

Evelyn Pringle
NaturalNews
Friday, April 23rd, 2010

The United States has become the psychiatric drugging capital of the world for kids with children being medicated at a younger and younger age. Medicaid records in some states show infants less than a year old on drugs for mental disorders.

The use of powerful antipsychotics with privately insured children, aged 2 through 5 in the US, doubled between 1999 and 2007, according to a study of data on more than one million children with private health insurance in the January, 2010, “Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.”

The number of children in this age group diagnosed with bipolar disorder also doubled over the last decade, Reuters reported.

Of antipsychotic-treated children in the 2007 study sample, the most common diagnoses were pervasive developmental disorder or mental retardation (28.2%), ADHD (23.7%), and disruptive behavior disorder (12.9%).

The study reported that fewer than half of drug treated children received a mental health assessment (40.8%), a psychotherapy visit (41.4%), or a visit with a psychiatrist (42.6%) during the year of antipsychotic use.

“Antipsychotics, which are being widely and irresponsibly prescribed for American children–mostly as chemical restraints–are shown to be causing irreparable harm,” warned Vera Hassner Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, in a February 26, 2010 InfoMail.

“These drugs have measurable severe hazardous effects on vital biological systems, including: cardiovascular adverse effects that result in shortening lives; metabolic adverse effects that induce diabetes and the metabolic syndrome,” she wrote. “Long-term use of antipsychotics has been shown to result in metabolic syndrome in 40% to 50% of patients.”

The lead researcher on the study above, Columbia University psychiatry professor Mark Olfson, told Reuters that about 1.5% of all privately insured children between the ages of 2 and 5, or one in 70, received some type of psychiatric drug in 2007, be it an antipsychotic, a mood stabilizer, a stimulant or an antidepressant.

Psychiatric drugs bathe the brains of growing children with agents that threaten the normal development of the brain, according to Dr Peter Breggin, founder of the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology (ICSPP), and author of about 20 books, including “Medication Madness.”

The drugs themselves are causing severe disorders in millions of children in the US, he warns. “Substances like antidepressants, stimulants, mood stabilizers, and antipsychotic drugs cause severe, and potentially permanent, biochemical imbalances.”
An American Phenomenon
A number of presentations at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in May 2009, addressed the diagnosis of bipolar disorder, including one titled, “Pediatric Bipolar Disorder: A Critical Look at an American Phenomenon,” at which Dr Peter Parry, a consultant child & adolescent psychiatrist, and senior lecturer at Flinders University in Australia, presented a survey on, “Australian and New Zealand’s Child and Adolescent Psychiatrists’ Views on Bipolar Disorder Prevalence and on Rates of Pediatric Bipolar Disorder in the USA.”

Dr Parry and his colleagues conducted a survey of child and adolescent psychiatrists in Australia and New Zealand. Of the 199 psychiatrists who responded to the survey, 90.5% thought pediatric bipolar disorder was overdiagnosed in the US.

In an October 1, 2009 article titled, “Medicating Our Children,” Dr Parry reports that since “the mid-1990s in the USA, some researchers have claimed that Paediatric Bipolar Disorder (PBD) frequently starts prior to puberty.”

One of PBD’s main proponents, Harvard University’s Professor Joseph Biederman, stating onset “is squarely in the preschooler age group,” he notes.

Parry explains that “PBD has been created by moving the diagnostic goalposts away from traditional concepts of bipolar disorder.”

“In children,” he says, “episodes were redefined to last hours instead of days or weeks and, instead of manic elation, severe anger in children sufficed as mania.”

“Unlike diagnoses like ADHD or depression, or simply accepting a child has serious emotional and behavioural problems in reaction to various stressors, PBD implies a lifelong severe mental illness requiring of strong psychiatric medication,” Parry warns.

“In the USA,” he says, “the public is furthermore exposed to direct pharmaceutical advertising that can feed the natural desire parents of distressed and aggressive children have for a quick solution by suggesting a simple medication fix.”

“The medicating of America’s children has become intensely controversial, highlighted by the tragic case of Rebecca Riley, a four-year-old Boston girl diagnosed at 28 months old with ADHD and PBD,” he points out.

On April 7, 2009, the author of the book, “Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness,” Christopher Lane, featured an interview on his Psychology Today blog, “Side Effects,” with journalist, Philip Dawdy, the creator of the popular website, Furious Seasons, and discussed the rising number of children being diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

“As for bipolar disorder in kids (meaning pre-teens and younger), it’s simply not an issue in the rest of the world,” Dawdy told Lane. “The bipolar child is a purely American phenomenon.”

“The pharma companies and the Harvard crew worked hand-in-hand to bring America a generation of ADHD kids and bipolar children, and their profound influence can be seen in the millions of children and teens who now carry lifetime diagnoses and take gobs of psychotropic drugs each day, often to their detriment,” he advised.

Lane asked for Dawdy’s opinion on a recent report in the St Petersburg Times that found 23 infants less than one-year-old had been prescribed antipsychotics in Florida in 2007, as well as the drug overdose death of 4-year-old Rebecca Riley in Massachusetts. “How is it possible for psychiatrists to continue prescribing to infants in such numbers without more oversight?” Lane asked.

“What’s gone on with antipsychotics prescribed to infants and toddlers is simply inexplicable to me,” Dawdy said. “The drugs are known to cause huge problems in adults, so why the heck would a doctor give them to little kids, especially infants? It boggles my small mind.”

“I’m no fan of bans or restrictions,” he told Lane, “but this does strike me as a situation where there needs to be a serious rethinking of what we are doing — and maybe there should be a ban on the use of these drugs in kids under, say, 6 years of age.”

An October 2007 report by the University of South Florida found the most common diagnosis for antipsychotic use with children in Florida’s Medicaid program, between July and December 2005, was ADHD. Roughly 54%, or 1,372 cases, involved prescriptions for children five and under and the total number of antipsychotic users in this young age group was 2,549, with all disorders combined, according to the report.
Increased Prescribing to Poor Children
Federally funded research published online in December, 2009, revealed that children covered by Medicaid were prescribed antipsychotics at a rate four time higher than children with private insurance. The data showed that more than 4% of children in Medicaid fee-for-service programs received antipsychotics, compared to less than 1% of privately insured youth. The study found Medicaid kids were more likely to receive antipsychotics for unapproved uses such as ADHD and conduct disorders than privately insured children.

The researchers examined records for children in seven states for the years 2001 and 2004, chosen as representative of the US Medicaid population. But more recent data through 2007 indicates that the disparity has remained, said Stephen Crystal, a Rutgers professor who led the study, according to the December 11, 2009, New York Times.

Antipsychotics were the top selling class of drugs in both 2008 and 2009. With sales of $14.6 billion in 2009, they brought in more than the $13.6 billion earned by both heart burn and cholesterol medications. Antidepressants ranked fourth with sales of $9.9 billion, according to data by IMS Health. In 2008, the drug makers took in $11.3 billion from antiseizure drugs and $4.8 billion from ADHD drugs.

In a new book titled, “Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America,” Robert Whitaker reports that the number of children on government disability rolls due to severe mental illness has increased more than 35-fold since 1987.

The book explores the question of whether the epidemic rise in people disabled by mental illness, among all age groups in the US over the past 20 years, could have been fueled by a drug-based paradigm of care.

It also explores what is happening to children over the long-term who are placed on psychiatric drugs. “Once again, science tells a very clear story, and, as you might imagine, it is one that — when you think of the millions of children so affected — makes you want to weep,” Whitaker stated in a March 26, 2010, notice for the book’s release on the Beyond Meds Website.

Of all the harmful actions of modern psychiatry, “the mass diagnosing and drugging of children is the most appalling with the most serious consequences for the future of individual lives and for society,” warns the world-renowned expert, Dr Peter Breggin, often referred to as the “Conscience of Psychiatry.”

“We’re bringing up a generation in this country in which you either sit down, shut up and do what you’re told, or you get diagnosed and drugged,” he points out.

Breggin considers the situation to be “a national tragedy.” “To inflict these drugs on the growing brains of infants and children is wrong and abusive,” he contends.

The kids who get drugged are often our best, brightest, most exciting and energetic children, he points out. “In the long run, we are giving children a very bad lesson that drugs are the answer to emotional problems.”

Dr Nathaniel Lehrman, author of the book, “Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs,” believes that giving infants and toddlers “powerful, brain-effecting psychiatric medication is close to criminal activity.”

“Giving them these drugs,” he says, “has no rationale, and ignores the basic fact that youngsters are very sensitive to their environments, both social and chemical, with the juvenile brain easily damaged by the latter.”
Inventing Disorders
During an interview on ABC Radio National in August 2007, Dr David Healy, the noted British pharmacology expert, and author of the book, “Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder,” told reporter Jane Shields: “Just to give you a feel for how crazy things have actually got recently, it would appear that clinicians in the US are happy to look at the ultrasounds of children in the womb, and based on the fact that they appear to be more overactive at times, and then possibly less active later, they’re prepared to actually consider the possibility that these children could be bipolar.”

On April 9, 2009, Christopher Lane, author of the book, “Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness,” published an interview on his Psychology Today blog with Dr Healy. In the interview, Healy explained the history behind the drastic rise in the sale of anticonvulsants and antipsychotics as “mood stabilizers,” and the diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

“The key event in the mid-1990s that led to the change in perspective was the marketing of Depakote by Abbott as a mood stabilizer,” Healy tells Lane, and further explains:

“Mood stabilization didn’t exist before the mid-1990s. It can’t be found in any of the earlier reference books and journals. Since then, however, we now have sections for mood stabilizers in all the books on psychotropic drugs, and over a hundred articles per year featuring mood stabilization in their titles.

“In the same way, Abbott and other companies such as Lilly marketing Zyprexa for bipolar disorder have re-engineered manic-depressive illness. While the term bipolar disorder was there since 1980, manic-depression was the term that was still more commonly used until the mid-1990s when it vanishes and is replaced by bipolar disorder. Nowadays, over 500 articles per year feature bipolar disorder in their titles.”

“As of 2008, upwards of a million children in the United States — in many cases preschoolers — are on “mood-stabilizers” for bipolar disorder, even though the condition remains unrecognized in the rest of the world,” Healy points out.

“But there is no evidence that the drugs stabilize moods,” he says. “In fact, it is not even clear that it makes sense to talk about a mood center in the brain.”

“A further piece of mythology aimed at keeping people on the drugs,” he reports, “is that these are supposedly neuroprotective — but there’s no evidence that this is the case and in fact these drugs can lead to brain damage.”

Healy says the FDA’s decision to add a black-box warning about suicide to SSRIs likely had little to do with the switch to prescribing antipsychotics as safer for children. What “was quite striking was how quickly companies were able to use the views of the few bipolar-ologists who argued that when children become suicidal on antidepressants it’s not the fault of the drug,” he points out.

“The problem, they said, stems from a mistaken diagnosis and if we could just get the diagnosis right and put the child on mood stabilizers then there wouldn’t be a problem,” he explains.

“There is no evidence for this viewpoint, but it was interesting to see how company support could put wind in the sails of such a perspective,” he says.

Because having just one label was very limiting, Healy says, child psychiatry “needed another disorder — and for this reason bipolar disorder was welcome.”

He reports that the same thing is happening to children labeled with ADHD. “Not all children find stimulants suitable,” he advises, “and just as with the SSRIs and bipolar disorder it has become very convenient to say that the stimulants weren’t causing the problem the child was experiencing; the child in fact had a different disorder and if we could just get the diagnosis correct, then everything else would fall into place.”

A report titled, “Adverse Events Associated with Drug Treatment of ADHD: Review of Postmarketing Safety Data,” presented at the FDA’s March 22, 2006, Pediatric Advisory Committee meeting bears witness to Healy’s explanation by stating in part: “The most important finding of this review is that signs and symptoms of psychosis or mania, particularly hallucinations, can occur in some patients with no identifiable risk factors, at usual doses of any of the drugs currently used to treat ADHD.”

Between January 2000, and June 30, 2005, the FDA identified nearly 1,000 cases of psychosis or mania linked to the drugs in its own database and those from the drug makers themselves.

The antipsychotics are just as dangerous as the SSRI antidepressants, Healy says. “Long before the antidepressants were linked with akathisia, the antipsychotics were universally recognized as causing this problem,” he explains in the Lane interview. “It was also universally accepted that the akathisia they induce risked precipitating the patient into suicidality or violence.”

“They also cause a physical dependence,” Healy states. “Zyprexa is among the drugs most likely to cause people to become physically dependent on it.”

“In addition,” he points out, “these drugs are known to cause a range of neurological syndromes, diabetes, cardiovascular problems, and other problems.”

“It’s hard to understand how blind clinicians can get to problems like these, especially in youngsters who grow obese and become diabetic right before their eyes,” Healy tells Lane.

As for what he calls the “medicalization of childhood,” in the radio interview, Healy points out that “children always have been unhappy, they always have been nervous, but that’s actually part and parcel of being a child.”

“You have to go through these things,” he said. “This is how we learn to cope with the problems of life.”

Children can best be helped in the safest way, he says, “if they’re just seen and if they actually have the opportunity to talk about their problems, and if they get basic and sensible input about how to perhaps help them cope with these problems.”

Healy said it’s important to remember that severe mental illness is rare in children and that most children with a mental health problem do not need medication. Children are being picked up and put on pills “who really don’t need to be on these pills and who are going to be injured by them,” he warned.

“I think possibly 10 to 15 years up the road,” he told Shields, “we’re going to be looking at a generation of children who will have been seriously injured by the treatments that they appear ever-increasingly likely to be put on now.”

But the administration of multiple drugs at once complicates the situation so that it may be impossible to determine which drugs are most responsible for the adverse reactions children experience, according to Dr Breggin.

“Because so many doctors and so many drug companies will share the blame for mistreating these children, they will be unable to seek redress against individual perpetrators through the courts when they grow up,” he explains.



Civil War Looms as Kyrgyzstan Riots Grow

Posted By Jason Ditz On April 20, 2010 @ 5:00 pm In Uncategorized | 3 Comments

It is now nearly two weeks since the Kyrgyzstan government of Kermanbek Bakiyev was ousted, a victim of growing uprisings that he tried, and failed, to put down with police violence. Late last week, after unsuccessfully trying to convince the UN to invade and reinstall him, Bakiyev fled to Kazakhstan and had reportedly resigned. Its power seemingly assured, the post-uprising government moved forward with promises of an eventual election.

But normalcy is no easy thing in Kyrgyzstan, and despite Bakiyev being long gone the protesters have remained on the streets of the capital of Bishkek, seizing property from the city’s ethnic minorities and generally spreading mayhem.

Perhaps an even bigger issue long term is that the rural southern portion of the nation, long loyal to Bakiyev, still hasn’t accepted the new government’s control. In Jalal Abat, the local governor Faizullah Rakhmanov held a rally of some 1,000 Bakiyev supporters, promising they would soon march north against the capital and restore Bakiyev to power.

Bakiyev, for his part, seems nowhere to be seen since having fled to Kazakhstan, but his role as the presumptive leader of a civil war still festering in the south seems very much beside the point for a nation where deep divisions and a history of dubious democratic rule have left many, many scars.





Intelligence Report, Spring 2010, Issue Number: 137

Threats and Punishment

By Sonia Scherr

On March 22, 2007, Jennifer Petsche arrived home from her job at Citibank around 4:30 p.m. and began cooking dinner. When the phone rang, she let the answering machine pick up. As she listened to the message, her ordinary day turned into something very different.

“I was astonished,” she later recalled. “In my 14 years at Citibank, I had never had a card member call me at home.”

The man on the line calmly informed her that he was Bill White, that he wanted to talk to her, and that he had sent her an E-mail. Earlier that day, the same man had left her a message on her voicemail at work insisting that he speak with her, even though she was not involved in a credit card dispute between White and Citibank. After receiving the second message at home, Petsche was sufficiently alarmed that she called her husband and notified a night supervisor at Citibank. She slept poorly that night, wondering about the contents of the E-mail.


Bill White

When she got to work at Citibank’s Kansas City, Mo., office around 7:30 the next morning, the E-mail was in her inbox. It contained her current and prior addresses, including the location of her parents’ home. White compared Petsche to Chicago judge Joan Lefkow and provided a Web link to information about the 2005 murder of Lefkow’s mother and husband in their home after a neo-Nazi posted Lefkow’s home address on the Web. “I must admit I have run out of patience with you and your smug attitude,” he wrote. “I hope the fact that I’ve obviously paid someone to find you conveys the seriousness with which I take your current attitude.”

What White failed to anticipate is that authorities would take him seriously. He was found guilty by a federal jury in Roanoke, Va., last December of threatening several people, including Petsche. His convictions followed the mistrial in Brooklyn, N.Y., 11 days earlier of Hal Turner, a blogger and Internet radio host from New Jersey, who’d been charged with threatening over the Internet to assault and murder three federal judges in Chicago. The arrests of Turner and White shut down their blogs, forced Turner off the air, and obliterated White’s neo-Nazi organization, the American National Socialist Workers Party, which in 2008 had 35 chapters in 28 states. Writing from jail shortly before his trial began, White lamented that “the federal government has launched a massive effort to ‘decapitate’ white organizations.”

But the implications of these high-profile cases go beyond the crippling effect on the defendants’ hate activities. White supremacists increasingly have been using the Internet to broadcast their views and to reach potential followers. For years, White and Turner have been among the loudest voices of bigotry in cyberspace, regularly posting people’s personal information and suggesting they should be harmed. Their trials show that while the border separating ugly but legal hate speech from criminal threats isn’t well defined, there are limits to what can be said even in the still new and largely unregulated realm of the Internet.

“We live in a world where rhetoric is increasingly tilting toward violence, where extremists are becoming adept at going up to the line but not crossing it,” said Brian Levin, a lawyer who directs the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. “The law is struggling to untangle protected hate speech from unprotected violence and threats, which often come in the same package. These trials put hate-mongers on notice: If they target their venom too narrowly, too violently and too explicitly, they run the risk of crossing from political discourse to prison.”

Testing the Limits


Hal Turner

Long before they faced charges in connection with their words, Bill White, 32, and Hal Turner, 47, regularly tested the bounds of free speech. In 1996, while a student at the University of Maryland, White became one of the first people to use the Internet to harass his enemies when he posted the phone number of a woman he believed was abusing her teenage daughter. “You should be able to write what you want on the Internet, whether it’s true or not,” he told The Washington Post at the time.

Though he was then a fan of Malcolm X, White’s unusual political trajectory eventually took him from left-wing anarchist to neo-Nazi. He founded and led the American National Socialist Workers Party and, until his arrest in October 2008, ran Overthrow.com, one of the best-read websites on the neo-Nazi scene. In September 2007, he used his website to broadcast the home addresses and phone numbers of five of the six black teenagers who faced harsh criminal penalties after a schoolyard fight in Jena, La. “Lynch the Jena 6!” he proclaimed in a headline on the website, adding the suggestion that his readers “get in touch and let them know justice is coming.” As a result, the governor provided the teens’ families with police protection.

In 2004, White began his self-described “ghetto beautification project,” buying distressed properties in a poor neighborhood of Roanoke, Va. He frequently maligned his tenants, writing about their alleged drug use, criminal records and prostitution. Among the names he used for African Americans were “niggers,” “nig-rats” and “vermin.” One lawyer who represented four of White’s renters in court battles told the Intelligence Report that White published falsehoods about his tenants in order to intimidate them.

Turner also has a lengthy history of slandering his enemies and even suggesting they should be killed. In 2007, he railed against then President George W. Bush, saying that “a well-placed bullet can solve a lot of problems.” He has written that “we need to start SHOOTING AND KILLING Mexicans as they cross the border.” In a case that’s still pending, he was charged last June with inciting violence after he posted a blog entry that encouraged followers to take up arms against two Connecticut lawmakers. He was upset about a bill that would have given more power to the laity in the Roman Catholic Church.

Unlike White, however, Turner was a paid FBI informant for several years, beginning in June 2003. This magazine’s blog publicized Turner’s informant status in January 2008, shortly after unidentified hackers posted E-mail correspondence between Turner and an FBI agent in the forum of Turner’s website for his radio program, “The Hal Turner Show.” The article quoted several experts in police procedure who sharply criticized the FBI’s use of an informant who regularly encouraged his followers to commit violence.

New details that emerged during the trial revealed the extent of Turner’s FBI involvement. Despite repeatedly targeting public figures on his website, he received thousands of dollars from the FBI for intelligence on white supremacist organizations such as the Aryan Nations and National Alliance. According to an April 2006 report from U.S. Capitol Police in Turner’s court file, Special Agent Stephen Haug, Turner’s FBI handler, told his colleagues “that Turner quotes the constitution better than most lawyers and knows where the line is and knows not to cross it.” The report continued: “S/A Haug is continuously monitoring Turner and said that Turner is all talk and no action. Turner is an ego maniac and loves it when police officials contact him.”

The FBI even paid for his plane ticket when he flew to Brazil to court a potential National Alliance donor. According to court documents, the trip allowed Turner to identify 12 people of interest to the FBI, including an Arab who talked about doing business with Turner in order to provide supplies to Iraqi insurgents.

Known by his FBI code name of Valhalla, Turner was considered a reliable informant who gave potentially life-saving information. An FBI memo dated Nov. 12, 2007, requested permission to again use Turner as an informant, three months after the FBI had severed its relationship with him because of “serious control problems.” The memo, filed in federal court, stated that Turner had provided information that prevented more than 10 acts of violence and led to multiple arrests. “Writer considers the re-opening of the above referenced CHS [confidential human source] as a critical step to the prevention of domestic terrorism and lone wolf actions inside the United States,” the memo stated. (Trial testimony suggested that Turner did not resume work as an informant; the FBI wouldn’t comment, citing its policy of not releasing information about informants.)

According to the November 2007 memo, the agency had dropped Turner because he was ignoring his handlers’ instructions to cease making indirect violent threats and to stop organizing large-scale public rallies. “These rallies drew national media attention and required significant local resources in terms of event security,” the memo said. Indeed, as Turner’s trial got under way, the mayor of Kingston, N.Y., demanded that the FBI reimburse his city $80,000 to cover the cost of police overtime and other expenses associated with Turner’s November 2005 rally there.

‘True Threats’ and the Law
What finally landed Turner in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn were his blog entries blasting a June 2, 2009, decision by the 7th U.S. Circuit of Appeals in Chicago that essentially upheld local handgun bans. He wrote that Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook and Judges Richard Posner and William Bauer “deserve to be killed” and posted their photographs, work locations, and a photograph of their courthouse that was modified to show the locations of “anti-truck bomb barriers.” According to statements one juror made to the press, government prosecutors failed to persuade most jurors, who voted 9-3 for Turner’s acquittal. With the jury deadlocked, Judge Donald Walter declared a mistrial on Dec. 7 and scheduled a new trial for March 1.

Like Turner, White posted on his blog personal information about his perceived enemies, including home phone numbers and addresses, along with threatening language. On Dec. 18, a federal jury in Roanoke convicted him of threatening Petsche, as well as a university administrator and a human rights lawyer, and of intimidating tenants in Virginia Beach who had filed a lawsuit against their landlord. In February, U.S. District Judge James Turk dismissed the charge of threatening the human rights lawyer, but upheld the other portion of the jury’s verdict. White was acquitted of threatening Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts and a former New Jersey mayor, and of threatening Petsche with the intent to extort. White’s sentencing has been set for April 14.

The key question in both the White and Turner proceedings was whether the defendants’ statements amounted to criminal threats or only to fiery rhetoric, which is constitutionally protected. “That’s the line that courts struggle with in these cases,” said Larry Rosenthal, a professor at Chapman University School of Law School in Orange, Calif.

(Lawyers for both sides in the White case declined to comment, while lawyers in Turner’s federal case are under a gag order while Turner is awaiting retrial.)

The Supreme Court has addressed the nature of “true threats” in a number of cases. In Watts v. the United States, for instance, the Court reversed Robert Watts’ felony conviction for threatening the president at a Vietnam War protest in Washington D.C. After implying that he intended to dodge the draft, Watts allegedly said, “If they ever make me carry a rifle, the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J. They are not going to make me kill my black brothers.” The Court stated that his words were hyperbole, aimed at making a political point, rather than a true threat to assassinate the president. In Virginia v. Black, on the other hand, the Court upheld a Virginia state law that prohibited cross burning with the intent to intimidate. The Court stated that intimidation constitutes a type of true threat, which it defined as “a speaker direct[ing] a threat to a person or group of persons with the intent of placing the victim in fear of bodily harm or death.”

Despite these Supreme Court opinions, there is still ambiguity in true threat case law, said Robert O’Neil, director of The Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Speech. Some lower courts require that the speaker intend to threaten the victim (though not necessarily intend to carry out the threat); others look at whether a “reasonable person” would find a statement threatening regardless of whether the speaker intended it that way.

Ultimately, “it comes down to the content of the words and the context in which they were said,” explained Christina Wells, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Law.

For instance, a statement might be viewed as more of a threat when it’s made in person rather than during a long-distance phone call or over the Internet, or when it’s addressed to a specific person rather than to a general audience. In fact, those kinds of considerations — along with Turner’s past history as an FBI informant, which allowed the defense to argue that Turner had been betrayed by the government that encouraged his heated rhetoric — may explain the different outcomes in the Turner and White cases. Turner’s rants against the judges were confined to his website, whereas White also vilified and harassed his targets directly through personal E-mails, phone calls and mailings. “Once someone gets contacted, you’ve really invaded someone’s personal space, and all of these people were reasonably frightened for their safety,” Wells said. “The more specific and the more personal statements are, the easier it is for a judge or jury to say, ‘You don’t get to do that.’ White really went after these people individually, and that’s where I think the difference is. I can’t see this getting overturned on appeal, quite frankly.”

On the other hand, Wells said, the newness of the Internet affects how people may perceive threats. Though anonymous threats aren’t unique to the Web, she said, “The medium really seems to scare people. It may be because the anonymity seems so mysterious and untraceable — and it can be. It may also be that you have so little sense of whether the threat is real; is the person nearby or across the world? It can be very disorienting.”

In addition, the Internet is unique in the way it allows users to propagate information, Wells said. For instance, personal data that’s posted online is capable of reaching a larger audience and therefore may feel more threatening to the victim, who doesn’t know if a reader will decide to take action. “It’s the lack of control and the wide dissemination of the information that changes the perception of the threatening nature,” she said. “It seems somehow more threatening to people than a person simply holding a sign on a street corner with personal information. I’m not sure that the fact that the Internet is involved will actually change threat analysis in any given case, but it does explain why people argue that the Internet might be a game changer with threat analysis.”

Some free speech experts say that the fact that White and Turner made many of their statements online may not matter to the court one way or the other. “Internet speech is really no different than any other kind of speech,” Rosenthal said. “The courts have tried to adopt an approach that is medium-neutral. The First Amendment rules don’t change based on the medium that is used to engage in the communication, so your First Amendment rights shouldn’t change.”

Among the first cases to address Internet speech was Planned Parenthood of Columbia/Willamette Inc. v. American Coalition of Life Activists, a civil lawsuit brought by Planned Parenthood and several abortion doctors against some of the nations most hard-line anti-abortion activists and groups. A central issue in the suit was the legality of the “Nuremburg Files,” an online listing of abortion providers and other supporters of abortion rights, with lines through the names of those who’d been murdered and the names of those who’d been wounded in gray. There were no explicit calls to violence on the website, but a federal jury decided in 1999 that the list constituted a true threat and awarded $107 million to the plaintiffs. The verdict was overturned by a panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, but later affirmed by the full court. “The decision held that a reasonable jury could find Internet speech to be threatening — and thus unprotected by the First Amendment — based on the events and facts surrounding the defendant’s speech together with its express language,” said Helen Norton, a professor at the University of Colorado Law School.

Like the Nuremburg Files, the Turner and White cases also could have an indelible impact on true-threat jurisprudence, said David Hudson, a scholar at Vanderbilt University’s First Amendment Center. “True threat law is very muddled and lower courts don’t apply the same legal tests to determine what exactly is a true threat,” he wrote in an E-mail. “I think these cases — if they go up in the court system — have the potential to be precedent setting.”

http://family-of-hal-turner.blogspot.com/
email: family.of.hal.turner@gmail.com

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Congress Investigating Prosecutor in Turner Case

US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and several of his assistants are under Congressional Investigation for allegedly manufacturing evidence and forcing witnesses to lie. One of the Assistants named in the Congressional investigation is Assistant US Attorney William Hogan who is prosecuting Hal Turner over an Editorial written last year.

One corrupt aspect of the Turner case that may interest Congress has to do with concealing of evidence by the government. A “blanket letter of declination” was issued by the New Jersey United States Attorney’s office which said the government would not prosecute Hal Turner for anything on his radio show or web site. Instead of honoring that letter, the US Attorney from Chicago circumvented the New Jersey US Attorney’s Office and brought a prosecution against Turner in Chicago. Even worse, when Turner’s defense lawyers found out that the Blanket Letter of Declination existed, they subpoenaed it, but the US Attorney from Chicago asked the court to CONCEAL that letter from the Jury!

Sadly, the court agreed to CONCEAL THE EVIDENCE, saying the letter was “attorney work product” and could not be used by Turner’s defense lawyers. This is yet another example of the deceitful tactics being employed by the US Attorney in Chicago in his politically-correct witch hunt against radio host and blogger Hal Turner.

Below, you can read about other shenanigans being undertaken by the US Attorney in Chicago which seem to prove that the entire office out there is little more than a den of vipers. Details below.

Original story located at: http://www.prnewschannel.com/absolutenm/templates/?z=4&a=1978

(PRNewsChannel) / Washington, D.C. / In an apparent expansion of a four-year
congressional investigation of United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois Patrick Fitzgerald's office, a U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee will call witnesses today to determine if the prosecutor's office manufactured evidence and forced witnesses to lie to obtain a 2003 conviction of a then prominent Chicago real estate developer and attorney.

After his trial and conviction, Peter Palivos, 51, presented the committee with evidence showing that prosecutors forced witnesses to lie against him or face charges themselves.

"They wanted to frame me to get me to become a witness against George Ryan, but I have nothing incriminating to say against the man," Palivos said in Oct. 2005 (http://cbs2chicago.com/topstories/Peter.Palivos.2.321955.html).

After hearing the evidence, which includes sworn affidavits from witnesses who say there were forced to lie about Mr. Palivos, three separate House Judiciary Subcommittees asked the U.S. Justice Department to investigate "possible prosecutorial misconduct" by Fitzgerald's office.

Though the investigation has apparently been ongoing for nearly four years, this is the first time it has become public.

The committee's investigation is seeking to discover the scope of wrongdoing involved after failing to get satisfactory replies from the U.S. Dept. of Justice, which committee members believe should have followed up on its discoveries.

WHO IS U.S. ATTORNEY PATRICK FITZGERALD?

Besides being the current United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, Fitzgerald is also a member of the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Special Counsel.

He was the federal prosecutor in charge of the investigation of the Valerie Plame affair, which led to the prosecution and conviction of Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff.

He has also been involved in high-profile cases, including former Ill. Gov. George Ryan and several aides to Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. His office is currently investigating an alleged plot to sell Barack Obama's vacated U.S. Senate seat to the highest bidder, which led to the arrest of Ill. Gov. Rod Blagojevich on December 9, 2008--one year ago yesterday--and to his impeachment a few months later.

Gov. Blagojevich has steadfastly proclaimed his innocence.

Antoin "Tony" Rezko, a former campaign contributor to President Obama, convicted in 2008 of fraud and bribery, wrote a letter to his sentencing judge saying Fitzgerald and his prosecutors were pressuring him to lie against then Sen. Barack Obama and Gov. Blagojevich when neither was involved in wrongdoing. (Rezko letter)

Blagojevich's former fundraiser, Chris Kelly, committed suicide after admitting to bribery in an unrelated case to obtain government contracts. Before his death, Kelly suggested he was being squeezed by Fitzgerald's office, suggesting that prosecutors were pressuring him to cooperate with their investigation of Blagojevich, which he refused to do.

SCOPE OF U.S. HOUSE JUDICIARY INVESTIGATION

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee, which has the oversight and authority to investigate the judiciary branch of the U.S. government, began examining the Palivos case nearly four years ago.

Palivos alleges that he was convicted on a concocted obstruction of justice charge after he refused to lie for prosecutors in their investigation of former Ill. Gov. George Ryan, who is serving time in federal prison on corruption charges.

Palivos says he was told by federal agent Thomas Heinzer that he would be 'framed with that crime' unless he cooperated in the office's investigation. When he did not, he was subsequently indicted and convicted.

"For my honesty I earned the wrath of U.S. Attorney Fitzgerald’s office. That office proceeded to create an obstruction of justice crime against me by bullying witnesses and defense attorneys and they even manufactured evidence. These prosecutorial misconduct methods succeeded in wrongfully indicting, convicting and imprisoning me."

Following Palivos' trial, witnesses gave the House Judiciary Committee sworn affidavits “stating that they were forced to lie and the prosecutors on the case engaged in misconduct” in his case, prompting the committee to expand its investigation.

The documents the committee received also contained evidence, which appeared to show federal prosecutors prepared a false affidavit, falsified interview statements, threatened a defense attorney with a trumped-up obstruction of justice charge if he filed a motion, suborned perjury and withheld exculpatory evidence that would have prevented the imprisonment of an innocent man--Mr. Palivos.

On March 30, 2009 the Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Courts and Competition Policy, U.S. Congressman Hank Johnson in a letter regarding Mr. Palivos' case, wrote, "It appears his case is a good example of prosecutorial misconduct." (Misconduct suspected)

On May 7, 2009 the House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers and Subcommittee Chairman Johnson wrote a joint letter to Attorney General Holder requesting a “fresh examination” of Mr. Palivos’ case and for the DOJ to produce six federal prosecutors and agents for interviews: Asst. U.S. Attorney Patrick Collins, Small Business Administration Agent Thomas Heinzer, AUSA William Hogan, AUSA Marsha McClellan, AUSA Pierre Talbert and former AUSA Eric Wilson.

The U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Competition hearing is scheduled for 1:00 PM in the Rayburn House Office Building, Room 2237 on Thursday, December 10, 2009.

House Judiciary's web site: http://judiciary.house.gov Phone: 202-225-3951.

TIMELINE:

October 23, 2007: Peter Palivos case mentioned by HJC Subcommittee as warranting "additional scrutiny and committee action." (Palivos case warrants action)

January 16, 2008: Letter to DOJ written by HJC Chairman John Conyers and Congressman Bobby Scott, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security. (Conyers to DOJ letter)

February 29, 2008: DOJ responds with letter to Chairman Conyers. (DOJ response)

March 30, 2009: HJC Subcommittee Chairman Hank Johnson concludes misconduct occurred in Palivos case. (Misconduct suspected)

May 7, 2009: HJC Chairmen Conyers and Johnson write letter to Attorney General Holder requesting a “fresh examination” of Mr. Palivos’ case. (Chairmen letter to Holder)

July 10, 2009: Assistant Attorney General Weich writes DOJ response with similar language from previous letters seemingly disregarding a ‘fresh examination’ of the case. (AAG Weich response)

Dec. 10, 2009: Hearing before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Competition. Chairman Johnson is expected to mention the Palivos case and Mr. Palivos and his wife, Vicky, will sit in the front row for the hearing. However, the hearing today is about judicial recusals, not prosecutorial misconduct or U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.

Media Contacts:
Glenn Selig
PR firm: The Publicity Agency
Email: glenn@thepublicityagency.com
Phone: (813) 300-5454
Web: www.thepublicityagency.com

Justin Herndon
PR firm: The Publicity Agency
Email: justin@thepublicityagency.com
Phone: (813) 708-1220 x7778 or (813) 528-6815
Web: www.thepublicityagency.com

Patrick Flanary
PR firm: The Publicity Agency
Email: pflanary@seligmultimedia.com
Phone: (813) 708-1220 x7781
Web: www.thepublicityagency.com

Source: thepublicityagency.com
http://www.roryoconnor.org/blog/2009/06/10/patrick-fitzgeralds-private-jihad/

Okay, so he’s one of the “sexiest men alive” — but what does Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. Attorney in Chicago and Special Counsel in the CIA leak case, have against us poor, unsexy journalists? It’s bad enough that Fitzie won’t answer my questions: (“Rory. I just wanted to get back to you and let you know that I am going to decline to be interviewed. Thank you. Pat”) It’s worse that he was responsible for the jailing of New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who spent 85 days behind bars. Now comes word that Fitzgerald, who must have too much time on his hands now that Scooter Libby has been freed and Rod Blagojevich indicted, spent much of the last year and a half going after another journalist, Peter Lance, in an attempt to kill a new edition of Lance’s investigative book Triple Cross by threatening to sue both the author and his publisher for libel.

Originally published in November 2006 by Regan Books, a division of Harper­Collins, Triple Cross uncovers the story of how Al Qaeda master spy Ali Mohamed infiltrated U.S. intelligence in the years leading up to 9/11 – “and how the FBI’s elite bin Laden squad failed to stop him.” Among the radicals trained by Ali Mohamed –and photographed by the FBI in 1989 — one would go on to kill Rabbi Meier Kahane in 1990; three were convicted in the World Trade Center bombing in 1994; and two (including Kahane’s killer) were later convicted by then-Assistant U.S. Attorney Fitzgerald in 1995 in what became known as the “Day of Terror” plot to blow up the bridges and tunnels into Manhattan. The book also details how the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s offices in New York prosecuted terrorists before 9/11, including “Blind Sheik” Omar Abdel Rahman, who infamously tried to blow up the World Trade Center, and others who bombed US embassies in Africa. And Lance alleges that Fitzgerald, when he was an assistant U.S. attorney in the 1990s, discounted information that may have revealed the existence of an Al Qaeda cell in New York years prior to September 11, 2001.

Fitzgerald’s stab at censorship is especially chilling coming from such a powerful prosecutor. But the lawman says he has no choice, since the book, which focuses on cases Fitzgerald prosecuted as Chief of Organized Crime and Terrorism in the Southern District of New York, is “a deliberate lie masquerading as the truth” and maintains that “it defames me or casts me in a false light,” as he said in one of four threatening letters sent to Lance’s publisher.

Although he wouldn’t speak to me, Fitzgerald did tell the Associated Press that the charges in Triple Cross far surpass normal criticism, which “goes with the territory” for public figures such as United States Attorneys. “This is different,” Fitzgerald contended. “The book lied about the facts and alleged that I deliberately misled the courts and the public in ways that in part caused the deaths in the 1998 embassy bombing attacks and in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.” Fitzgerald told the AP he decided to protest because “it is outrageous to falsely accuse me of causing those deaths corruptly.”

Although undoubtedly a public figure, Fitzgerald has been waging a private jihad to get Lance’s book killed. He has written repeatedly to HarperCollins — owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. — demanding it “cease publication” and “withdraw” copies of Triple Cross, which was originally published in hard cover in 2006. His first letter to the publisher alleged that “Triple Cross makes a number of statements of fact which defame me (and others) and which are easily proven to be objectively false.” He asked the publisher to stop selling all hard cover copies, not to print a new paperback edition, and to acknowledge errors. His most recent letter arrived June 2. “To put it plain and simple,” Fitzgerald wrote, “if in fact you publish the book this month and it defames me or casts me in a false light, HarperCollins will be sued.”

The letters — one of which was sent via fax from the U.S. Attorney’s Office — are unusual to say the least. “We certainly find it highly offensive that a federal prosecutor would do something like this,” Gregg Leslie of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press told Newsweek.

But Fitzgerald is resolute, charging that Lance’s claims in Triple Cross are “outrageously dishonest” and that Lance “alleged that I deliberately misled courts and the public” in ways that led to the 9/11 attacks. The book most notably accuses Fitzgerald of botching the handling of a key FBI informant who doubled as a Qaeda spy, and also suggests the prosecutor filed a false affidavit, perhaps to cover up the relationship between an FBI agent and a leading mob figure.

Lance responds by asserting that Fitzgerald is trying to “kill” his book with “baseless” allegations. “Patrick Fitzgerald accuses me of making charges in the book that I never made,” he says. “At the same time, he continually fails to respond to the substantive allegations documented in 604 pages, 1,425 end notes and 32 pages of documentary appendices.”

Ironically, Fitzgerald’s latest and most surprising assault on the Fourth Estate may also be the best thing that ever happened to Lance and Triple Cross. “That’s the ultimate irony,” Lance admits. “The book wasn’t reviewed by a single U.S. publication. If Fitzgerald never did anything, it would have just faded into obscurity… this is the true lesson of censorship.”

The new edition of Triple Cross will appear June 16 — complete with a new introduction that’s describes Fitzgerald’s attempts at censorship. In the meantime, Lance is on the offensive, alerting fellow journalists, giving interviews, and readying a press conference at the National Press Club on his pub date for a full blown discussion of the Fitzgerald/censorship issue.

Peter Lance’s website: www.peterlance.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Fitzgerald


THESE GUYS LOOK LIKE THEY'RE UNDER 18 DONCHA THINK!














High times for American marijuana smokers as police allow thousands of '4/20' pot protesters to light up across the country. AMERICA'S #1 CASH CROP!