Vicar sends warning over occult activities

A rural vicar has warned people not to dabble in the occult after a sheep’s head was impaled on a pole outside one of his churches.

Telegraph | Nov 26, 2009

Rev Nick Bromfield says he has spotted several signs of black magic worship in the area and even seemingly harmless pub psychic nights and crystal readings can cause untold damage.

Mr Bromfield decided to speak out after seeing increasing evidence of “dark forces” in the Forest and being called on to pick up the pieces when things go wrong.

“I want people to be aware of the potential damage that can be caused by this kind of activity,” he said.

“It might sound medieval to talk about the relationship between good and evil, but there is no middle ground on this. People need to leave well alone.

“I have been told there are people operating in a darker place, and I have seen signs of satanic activity in the Forest.

“It’s difficult to quantify but there is something about borders that attracts occult activity and the seclusion is also very attractive. They are allowing in forces that can do great damage.

“I know a lot of pagans in the Forest and they are as appalled about this as Christians.”

Mr Bromfield, the rector of Drybrook, Lydbrook and Ruardean, is asked to bless around 10 homes a year because of the owners’ fear something is amiss.

So far he has not needed to call in the diocesan deliverance officers who are allowed to perform exorcisms.

But he is regularly asked to help people who have been left angry, upset or sometimes scared after being tempted to contact dead loved ones.

The vicar says he has seen animal carcasses laid out in circles or surrounding stones, which could be a sign of black magic worship in the woodlands.

A few weeks ago a parishioner at one of his churches was upset to find a severed sheep’s head dripping with blood mounted on a pole in the grounds.

“Naturally it wasn’t very pleasant and I burned it,” said the vicar, who fears it could have been a warning.

“But I think it’s something that clergy in many rural parishes have experienced.

“It’s either a malicious deliberate provocative act against the church or our “friends” from that sphere of activity sending a tribute because we are successful.”

Visitors who see Paige’s body on display will see up close the results of an extensive surgical male-to-female transition. She has had full cranial facial reconstruction and separate feminization surgeries for her nose, lips, cheeks, breasts, hips and hair line — plus full-body laser hair removal.

xtra.ca | Nov 20, 2009

TEACHER & COACH. Body Worlds donor Dina Paige says that her body will help educate people about gender after she dies, because it will be plastinated as part of the Body Worlds project. (beyouwithddp.com)

Paige is the first transgendered person to donate her body to the program, which preserves bodies through a process called “plastination” and puts them on display in cities around the world.

The process was created by German scientist Gunther von Hagens, who initially used plastinated bodies for medical instruction and later created the Body Worlds series of public exhibits. More than 28 million people have seen the exhibit around the world, according to the Body Worlds web site.

Paige, a 54-year-old “full-blooded Italian,” runs her own business coaching transgendered people through the transitioning process and says being part of the Body Worlds exhibit will allow her work to continue long after she dies.

“The preserved bodies will last for a thousand years and beyond. The preservation technique is better than the pharaohs,” she says. “I was born a man, and look like a female, and yet have breasts and a penis. I couldn’t think of a better way for humanity to look at and evaluate the issues of what it means to be male, female, or both.”

Visitors who see Paige’s body on display will see up close the results of an extensive surgical male-to-female transition. She has had full cranial facial reconstruction and separate feminization surgeries for her nose, lips, cheeks, breasts, hips and hair line — plus full-body laser hair removal.

Paige says she decided to donate her body when she saw Body Worlds the first time it was in Toronto. The process of donating was simple, she says.

“It’s very much like filling out a donor card,” says Paige. “They ask some questions and let you know what the process is. They have a guide for donors and a guide for survivors. It’s quite simple.”

Donors are not paid for their bodies and must cover the cost of shipping the cadaver to the nearest Institute for Plastination embalming centre. Donors must have died of natural causes, must not be autopsied, and must be “largely intact,” according to the Body Worlds web site. Donors who carry infectious diseases like HIV or hepatitis may be accepted on a case-by-case basis.

Paige recommends that anyone considering donating his or her body should give the matter “sober consideration” and discuss it with their next of kin.

“Let loved ones and relatives who are going to look after the arrangements be very comfortable with it,” she says, noting that her family has been very accepting of her decision.

“My children, who are 29 and 28, are almost sick of me talking about it. I brought my son and daughter to the exhibit and my son is even considering donating his body,” she says.

The remains of victims that were allegedly kidnapped and killed by a criminal gang in the jungle of Peru for human fat trafficking. Photograph: National Police Of Peru/EPA

Peruvian police arrest suspects who allegedly drained their victims and sold liquid as an anti-wrinkle treatment

Guardian | Nov 20, 2009

by Rory Carroll

Peruvian police have arrested a gang which allegedly killed scores of peasants, drained their bodies of fat and sold the liquid abroad as an anti-wrinkle cosmetic.

Three suspects have confessed to killing five people for their fat, said Colonel Jorge Mejia, chief of Peru’s anti-kidnapping police, but the number of victims was believed to be much higher and to date back decades.

Two of the suspects were arrested at a bus station in the capital, Lima, carrying bottles of liquid fat which they claimed were worth up to £36,000 a gallon.

At a news conference police displayed two bottles of fat, which laboratory tests confirmed were human. “The fat was extracted from the thorax and thighs,” said Eusebio Felix Murga, chief of police of Dirincri district. Police also showed a photo of the rotting head of a 27-year-old male victim discovered last month in a coca-growing valley.

Medical experts said human fat had cosmetic applications to keep skin supple but were sceptical about an international black market.

“It doesn’t make any sense at all because in most countries we can get fat so readily and in such amounts from people who are willing and ready to donate,” Adam Katz, a professor of plastic surgery at the University of Virginia medical school, told the Associated Press.

Police named the band the “Pishtacos” after a myth dating to pre-Columbian times of killers who slaughtered victims with machetes to extract fat. The gang allegedly operated in Huanuco, a rural province dotted with Inca temples between the jungle and Andean peaks.

Six members remained at large including the alleged leader, Hilario Cudena, who has been killing to extract fluid for more than three decades, said police.

Sixty people were listed as missing in Huanuco this year alone, though the province is also home to the Shining Path, a drug-trafficking leftist rebel group.

Mejia, the police chief, said his force received a tip four months ago about a trade in human fat. It infiltrated the gang and arrested Serapio Marcos Veramendi and Enedina Estela at a Lima bus station with a litre of human fat in a soda bottle.

Their testimony led to the arrest of another alleged member, Elmer Segundo Castillejos, 29, who led police to the severed head and supplied grisly details: the gang would sever victims’ heads, arms and legs, remove organs and suspend torsos from hooks above candles which warmed the flesh as the fat dripped into tubs below. Castillejos claimed other gangs were engaged in similar killings.

The three suspects were charged with homicide, criminal conspiracy, illegal firearms possession and drug trafficking, according to Lima’s superior court.

Police said they were searching for alleged buyers.

National Debt could top $14 trillion.

CBS | Nov 17, 2009

by Mark Knoller

It’s another record-high for the U.S. National Debt which today topped the $12-trillion mark. Divided evenly among the U.S. population, it amounts to $38,974.34 for every man, woman and child.

Technically, the debt hit the new high yesterday, but it was posted on the Treasury Department website just after 3:00 p.m. ET today. The exact calculation of the debt is a 16-digit tongue-twister and red-ink tsunami: $12,031,299,186,290.07

This latest milestone in the ever-rising journey of the National Debt comes less than eight months after it hit $11 trillion for the first time. The latest high-point is not unexpected, considering the federal deficit for the just-ended 2009 fiscal year hit an all-time high at $1.42-trillion – more than triple the previous year’s record high.

Much of the increase in the deficit and debt is attributed to government spending outpacing revenue – both exacerbated by the recession and the government response to it – including hundreds of billions in bailouts and stimulus spending and tax cuts along with decreased tax revenues due to rising unemployment.

In recent days, President Obama has spoken of the need to bring the rising deficit and debt under control.

“I intend to take serious steps to reduce America’s long-term deficit – because debt-driven growth cannot fuel America’s long-term prosperity,” he said in remarks prepared for delivery to the leader’s meeting last Sunday at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.

The National Debt has increased about $1.6 trillion on Mr. Obama’s watch, though less than $4.9 trillion run up during the presidency of George W. Bush.

But the White House budget review issued in August projects that by the end of the current fiscal year on Sept 30th, the National Debt could top $14 trillion.

It gets worse. The same document projects that by the end of the decade, the National Debt will hit $24.5 trillion — exceeding the Gross Domestic Product projected for 2019 of $22.8 trillion.

The new debt number adds urgency to Treasury Department calls on Congress to quickly raise the statutory limit on the National Debt which now stands at $12.104 trillion. The debt ceiling was last raised in February as part of the $787 billion Recovery Act stimulus bill.

The debt also costs a fortune to maintain. In the fiscal year just ended, the National Debt cost taxpayers over $383 billion. And that amount means the government is only paying 3.3 percent interest. If interest rates go up, so does the amount paid on the debt.

And we’re paying it to scores foreign countries which hold $3.5 trillion of the U.S. Debt.
China leads the pack holding nearly $800 billion in U.S. Government securities, followed closely by Japan with $731 billion.

Among the smaller nations lending the U.S. money are Luxembourg, Taiwan, Singapore and Ireland.

Mr. Obama has said he hopes the health care plan pending in Congress will serve to curb the growth in the debt by reducing the amount government spends on health care. But it’s a claim disputed by critics who say it will have the opposite effect.

VOA | Nov 17, 2009

By Al Pessin

The U.S. Army reported Tuesday that the number of suicides among soldiers this year has already equaled the number for all of last year, and so will rise for the fifth consecutive year, in spite of a major effort to combat the trend. The Army’s number two officer says he is significantly short of the type of professionals who could help reverse the trend.

The vice chief of the Army, General Peter Chiarelli was frank about the latest statistics.

“This is horrible, and I do not want to downplay the significance of these numbers in any way,” he said.

The general reported there have been 140 suicides among active duty soldiers this year, and another 71 among reservists and members of the National Guard, some of whom had been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.

“We talk about these incidents of suicide using figures and percentages,” he said. “However the grim reality is each case represents an individual, a person, with family and friends and a future ahead of him or her. Every single loss is devastating.”

But while the overall numbers are up, General Chiarelli says the rate has eased in recent months. Nearly 30 percent of Army suicides this year happened in January and February, with a steady decline since then except for a couple of months. But the general says in spite of extensive efforts, officials and doctors can not say why the rate is up in some months or down in others, or why it has risen steadily for the last five years.

“Everywhere I try to cut this and look at and try to find the causal effect I get thwarted, and that’s why we think we’ve got to look, in its totality, at a whole bunch of different issues. And it’s going to take time,” he said.

The general says even seemingly obvious causes are not confirmed by the data. For example, about a third of the suicides are among soldiers who have never deployed to the war zones. But he says the Army has begun to identify some factors that could contribute to the high suicide rates, including post-traumatic stress, mild brain injuries that may not be diagnosed, substance abuse and the deployment of small numbers of soldiers far from bases that offer mental health services.

Indeed, the general says he could use at least 750 more mental health workers in the Army, in addition to the 900 who have been added to the force in the last two years. He says he also needs up to 300 more substance abuse counselors.

“We are an army that is based on authorizations that were prior to eight years of war,” said General Chiarelli. “And I have been pounding the system to say, ‘we have got to sit down and determine what we need after eight years of war.”

The U.S. Army has been focused on mental health issues for several years, but concern was heightened earlier this month when a soldier killed 12 colleagues and one civilian in a shooting rampage on a base in Texas. The alleged gunman is an officer, and a psychiatrist who specializes in stress, and was scheduled to be deployed to Afghanistan. He is also a Muslim, who is now believed to have militant leanings.

The Army is funding a huge mental health study which will keep track of as many as half a million soldiers during the next five years. It is also implementing a variety of innovative programs designed to make it easier for soldiers to report their own problems, and to help comrades who show signs of being suicidal.

“This is a matter of life and death, and it is absolutely unacceptable to have individuals suffering in silence because they’re afraid their peers or superiors will make fun of them, or worst [that] it will adversely affect their careers,” said the general.

General Chiarelli says soldiers need to realize that mental problems are just like bullet wounds and broken legs, and must be treated by trained professionals. He calls dealing with the Army’s mental health and suicide problems the toughest challenge he has faced in his 37 years of service.

VOA | Nov 17, 2009

An international watchdog group says Afghanistan and Iraq, two countries that receive billions of dollars in international aid, are among the world’s most corrupt nations.

In its annual corruption report, Transparency International named Somalia as the world’s most corrupt country, scoring a low rating of 1.1 on a 10-point scale. It was followed closely by Afghanistan at 1.3, Burma at 1.4, and Sudan and Iraq, which were tied for fourth with scores of 1.5.

The group rates New Zealand as the country least afflicted by corruption, giving it a score of 9.4, followed by Denmark at 9.3, and Singapore and Sweden tied at 9.2.

Transparency International says overall the 2009 corruption list is “of great concern” because the majority of the 180 countries surveyed scored under five in the ranking.

The Berlin-based group says fragile, unstable states scarred by war and ongoing conflict continue to be the most plagued by corruption.

Transparency International Chair Huguette Labelle says the international community must find efficient ways to help war-torn countries develop and sustain their own institutions.

The organization’s program coordinator Patrick Berg says countries like Botswana, Mauritius and Cape Verde that have made efforts to improve their governance structures have improved their standing.

1950 b/w file photo of 10 year old twins Brian Thomas Sullivan (left) and Kevin James Sullivan from Islington, London, who carry their luggage to the boat train ‘Rangitoto’ as they leave Liverpool Street station in London bound for Auckland, New Zealand. Britain and Australia are saying sorry to thousands of British children who were promised a better life overseas, only to suffer abuse and neglect thousands of miles from home. The British government said Sunday that Prime Minister Gordon Brown will apologize for 20th-century child migrant programs that saw thousands of poor British children sent to Australia, Canada and other former colonies until the 1960s. Many ended up in institutions or were sent to work as farm laborers. (AP Photo / pa File)

Australia apologizes to Brit kids sent to colonies

Associated Press | Nov 16, 2009

by Rod Mcguirk And Jill Lawless

CANBERRA, Australia – When John Hennessey was 10 years old, he was sent from a war-weary Britain to an orphanage in Australia, where he was told food was plentiful and children rode kangaroos to school.

Instead, he was beaten and sexually abused, leaving him emotionally scarred and with a stutter that persists 60 years later.

“There’s no other country in the world that has deported their children to the other side of the world and then abandoned them,” the 72-year-old said before an emotional ceremony Monday in Australia, where Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized for his country’s role in a shameful episode in British colonial history.

Related

Sex-slave trafficking soars in UK

“They stole our innocence,” he added, calling his caretakers in Australia “a ring of pedophiles.”

Rudd acknowledged the deep wounds inflicted by the programs that sent an estimated 150,000 British children to distant colonies — intending to ease pressure on post-World War II Britain’s social services, provide orphaned or abandoned children with a fresh start and supply the empire with a sturdy supply of white workers. Rudd extended condolences to the 7,000 survivors of the programs who still live in Australia, many of whom grew up in institutions where they were physically and sexually abused or were sent to work as farm laborers.

“We are sorry,” Rudd said. “Sorry that as children you were taken from your families and placed in institutions where so often you were abused. Sorry for the physical suffering, the emotional starvation and the cold absence of love, of tenderness, of care. Sorry for the tragedy — the absolute tragedy — of childhoods lost.”

The ceremony at Parliament House comes one day after the British government said Prime Minister Gordon Brown would apologize next year for the child migrant programs, which lasted from 1618 to 1967. After 1920, most of the children went to Australia.

Rudd also apologized to the “forgotten Australians” — children who suffered while in state care during the last century. According to a 2004 Australian Senate report, more than 500,000 children were placed in foster homes, orphanages and other institutions during the 20th century. Many were emotionally, physically and sexually abused.

After Rudd spoke, Hennessey climbed the stage to show the prime minister a framed photograph of his mother, May Mary Hennessey, who handed her 4-week-old son over to nuns at an English Roman Catholic orphanage because she was not married. In 1947, the Irish order of Christian Brothers offered to take care of him and other supposed orphans in Australia.

“They said to us kangaroos will take us to school, there’s food everywhere, and we said: ‘of course we’ll go’ — little did we know it was on the other side of the world,” Hennessey said.

Sparsely populated Australia’s close shave with Japanese invasion during World War II inspired a national motto of “populate or perish” and triggered a wave of Australian government-assisted migration from Europe.

Australia had an immigration policy that favored British and white immigrants until the 1970s.

“The Archbishop met us at Fremantle (in Western Australia),” Hennessey said. “I can still remember his words. He said: ‘Welcome to Australia. We want white stock because we’re terrified of the yellow peril.’”

A 1998 British parliamentary inquiry, meanwhile, noted “a further motive was racist: the importation of ‘good white stock’ was seen as a desirable policy objective in the developing British Colonies.”

When Hennessey arrived in Boys Town orphanage — now an elite private school in the farming village of Bindoon, 55 miles (90 kilometers) north of the western city of Perth — the boys slept for more than a year on thin mattresses and iron beds on verandahs until they built their own dormitories.

“When it rained and was windy, we’d get wet and yet the brothers were inside tucked away in their lovely warm beds,” Hennessey said.

Hennessey said his stutter began with a particularly violent and harrowing assault at the orphanage when he was 12 years old. He was stripped naked and nearly beaten to death by the headmaster for eating grapes he had taken from a vineyard without permission because he was hungry.

“What terrified me most was that in my mind I thought: ‘That’s my father. What’s he doing?’ I had nobody else, and he was the one I’d looked up to,” Hennessey said.

He left Boys Town at the age of 17 and became a house painter and decorator in Campbelltown, 40 miles (70 kilometers) southwest of Sydney on the east coast.

After a 13-year search, he was reunited with his mother in England in 1999, when she was 86. She had eventually married, but three pregnancies subsequent to Hennessey’s birth had ended in miscarriages.

Hennessey said he never told his mother, who died in 2005, about the abuse he’d suffered.

“It was bad enough me not being there, but if she realized I was sexually abused and physically abused, you could image how she’d think because she had a guilt complex,” Hennessey said through reddened eyes.

Andrew Murray, a former Australian senator who was sent from Britain to an orphanage in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, called on Australia to pay reparations.

British High Commissioner Valerie Amos said her government had not yet addressed the compensation question, though Britain has been trying to make amends since the late 1990s by funding trips to reunite migrants with their families in Britain.

Brown’s office said officials would consult with representatives of the surviving children before making a formal apology.

Youtube | Nov 6, 2009

Posted by: SignificantImagery

The dollar will get “utterly destroyed” and become “virtually worthless”, said Damon Vickers, chief investment officer of Nine Points Capital Partners. Due to the huge wage disparities between the United States and emerging markets like China, Vickers said that may resolve itself in some type of a global currency crisis.

“If the global currency crisis unfolds, then inevitably you get an alignment of a global world government. A new global currency and a new world order, so we may be moving towards that,” he said.

For those who have claimed this is a fake clip I suggest you visit CNBC’s website:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/33709379

Note the inverted pyramid/illuminati triangle with the hypnotic spinning lights of Nine Points Capital Partners in the background. – PJ

RNW | Nov 12, 2009

By Robert Chesal

No prospects for the future, tired of life or suicidal? Anyone who wants to take matters of life and death into their own hands can get plenty of information on how to end it all from the Dutch Right to Die Association (NVVE). The association has made suicide tips available on a new website.

Spokesperson for the association Walburg de Jong says the website is meant to give people information so that they can end their lives in a “humane way without resorting to horrific methods like throwing themselves off a roof or in front of a train.”

But doesn’t that encourage people to commit suicide? Not according to Ms De Jong: “Firstly it is only for members, so people can only enter the site with a log-in code.” You only have access to the site if you are a member, which costs €17.50 per year.

But this appears not to be true. This morning, a number of Radio Netherlands journalists managed to log in to the part of the site with these instructions without the log-in code. The association blames this on human error. After we pointed this out to the association, the site was blocked for non-members.

Step-by-step guide

On the site, the association gives detailed information on medicines which can be used for suicide. It also states in which countries they are available and the names they are known under. The methods are also explained step-by-step. This is from the introduction:

There are two main methods for committing suicide using medicines.

In the second method, you take lethal medicine in combination with sleeping tablets and antiemetics, to prevent vomiting. Death is caused by cardiac arrest or apnoea. The information given here only concerns the second method and is based on reliable data, as far as we know.

Huge demand

There are around 1,500 suicides in the Netherlands every year, a large percentage are committed by people over the age of 60. Ms De Jong: “These are people who say ‘my life is over but I do not have a classifiable illness, so I am not eligible for euthanasia’. Or people who are sick, but whose doctor does not want to use euthanasia.”

In the Netherlands both active euthanasia, when a doctor gives a lethal dose of medicine to end the life of a patient, and assisting suicide fall under criminal law. However, doctors who adhere to strict rules are not prosecuted. The doctor has to be convinced that the patient’s request to end his or her life is voluntary and well-considered. The patient has to be suffering intolerable pain with no prospect for improvement. But where many doctors think this refers to physical pain, the Dutch Right to Die Association thinks mental suffering is an acceptable reason for euthanasia or suicide.

Help with suicide

Truus Hoyinck, member of the NVVE since 1991, thinks it is fine for the association to actively help people commit suicide. “I believe in self-determination. Years ago I ordered the Scottish book with suicide tips. I thought it was awful because it said you had to put a plastic bag over your head and wait until you suffocated. So if there is a better way, I’m all for it.”

Aftercare

Suicide can also go wrong. Under the heading ‘Aftercare’ the suicide website says that should the attempt fail, the association’s support service  “is always prepared to talk about the experience.”

Membership of the Dutch Right to Die Association is open to Dutch people and foreigners. A limited amount of information is available in English on the site, but says – after numerous requests from abroad – that it does not prescribe medicines and does not have doctors who offer euthanasia or other help.

NVVE website

Raw Story | Nov 4, 2009

By Daniel Tencer

The CIA relied on intelligence based on torture in prisons in Uzbekistan, a place where widespread torture practices include raping suspects with broken bottles and boiling them alive, says a former British ambassador to the central Asian country.

Craig Murray, the rector of the University of Dundee in Scotland and until 2004 the UK’s ambassador to Uzbekistan, said the CIA not only relied on confessions gleaned through extreme torture, it sent terror war suspects to Uzbekistan as part of its extraordinary rendition program.

“I’m talking of people being raped with broken bottles,” he said at a lecture late last month that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network. “I’m talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I’m talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on.”

Human rights groups have long been raising the alarm about the legal system in Uzbekistan. In 2007, Human Rights Watch declared that torture is “endemic” to the country’s justice system.

Murray said he only realized after his stint as ambassador that the CIA was sending people to be tortured in Uzbekistan, country he describes as a “totalitarian” state that has never moved on from its communist era, when it was a part of the Soviet Union.

Suspects in Uzbekistan’s gulags “were being told to confess to membership in Al Qaeda. They were told to confess they’d been in training camps in Afghanistan. They were told to confess they had met Osama bin Laden in person. And the CIA intelligence constantly echoed these themes.”

“I was absolutely stunned — it changed my whole world view in an instant — to be told that London knew [the intelligence] coming from torture, that it was not illegal because our legal advisers had decided that under the United Nations convention against torture, it is not illegal to obtain or use intelligence gained from torture as long as we didn’t do the torture ourselves,” Murray said.

UK/USA made use of Uzbek torture

Murray asserts that the primary motivation for US and British military involvement in central Asia has to do with large natural gas deposits in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. As evidence, he points to the plans to build a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan that would allow Western oil companies to avoid Russia and Iran when transporting natural gas out of the region.

Murray alleged that in the late 1990s the Uzbek ambassador to the US met with then-Texas Governor George W. Bush to discuss a pipeline for the region, and out of that meeting came agreements that would see Texas-based Enron gain the rights to Uzbekistan’s natural gas deposits, while oil company Unocal worked on developing the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline.

“The consultant who was organizing this for Unocal was a certain Mr. Karzai, who is now president of Afghanistan,” Murray noted.

Murray said part of the motive in hyping up the threat of Islamic terrorism in Uzbekistan through forced confessions was to ensure the country remained on-side in the war on terror, so that the pipeline could be built.

“There are designs of this pipeline, and if you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, as against other NATO country forces in Afghanistan, you’ll see that undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline route. It’s what it’s about. It’s about money, it’s about oil, it’s not about democracy.”

The Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline is slated to be completed in 2014, with $7.6 billion in funding from the Asian Development Bank.

Murray was dismissed from his position as ambassador in 2004, following his first public allegations that the British government relied on torture in Uzbekistan for intelligence.

The following videos were posted to YouTube by the Real News Network on Oct. 26 and Nov. 4, 2009.