UK troops receiving ‘trigger happy’ drug

Scotsman | Jun 10, 2007
 
BRITISH troops are being prescribed with a controversial drug which has been blamed for making US pilots “trigger-happy” and causing friendly fire deaths.

The Ministry of Defence has admitted that it prescribes the amphetamine dexedrine, which is capable of keeping users awake for as long as 60 hours.

While the MoD has refused to say what it uses the Class B drug for, leading narcotics experts say that the main purpose is to keep soldiers awake during special operations. However, they have warned that the substance can be highly addictive.

In addition, the MoD has admitted that it permits soldiers to take a drug called kava-kava, from the South Pacific, which is known to be linked to severe liver damage.

Documents obtained under Freedom of Information provisions show that although the amount the MoD spends on dexedrine is just £32 per year, this is estimated to be enough for several hundred 5mg doses. A typical course will see a user given the pills for about two or three days.

Outwith the armed forces, the amphetamine is used to treat narcolepsy, a condition where sufferers cannot stop falling asleep at random times.

In addition to dexedrine, the MoD dispenses a small number of tablets of ephedrine, which has a similar, though less potent, effect.

The ministry also spends about £3,000 a year on melatonin, a substance which aids sleep, in order to get the body clocks of troops into synch after flying long distances.

Amphetamines have been controversially used by the US Air Force to keep pilots awake on long missions, although the UK has always denied giving the ‘go pills’ to its pilots.

In 2002, the ‘Tarnak Farm incident’ saw US fighter-bombers attack a group of Canadian soldiers, killing four and wounding another eight near Kandahar in Afghanistan.

During official hearings into the incident, the US pilots testified that they had been ordered to take amphetamines to keep awake. The pilots blamed the pills for their actions.

One leading defence insider said: “There are not many uses for these drugs in the military apart from keeping soldiers awake for long periods. If you need them for narcolepsy then there is not much point in you being in the army.

“Is it operationally justified? Yes – if you are on deep patrol for days at a time then you need to be awake, otherwise you risk getting killed.”

Dr Paul Skett, a drugs expert at Glasgow University’s Institute of Biological and Life Sciences, said: “It is a matter of concern because these substances are very addictive indeed. They can also make the user aggressive.”

The documents also reveal that the MoD has decided to permit the use of kava-kava, which is popular in Fiji and produces a euphoric high, provided local commanders don’t believe its use compromises operational effectiveness.

It is usually taken as a drink after being ground to a fine powder and mixed with water.

An MoD policy paper on the substance said: “There is some medical evidence that kava-kava could be detrimental to health, in particular that it can cause severe liver damage.”

It added: “Soldiers found to be using kava-kava should be advised of the potential health risks associated with it.”

Stuart Crawford, defence analyst and former colonel in the Royal Tank Regiment, said: “Given the number of Fijian soldiers in the army, you could say it’s not surprising.”

There are an estimated 2,600 Fijians in the British Army.

An MoD spokeswoman said: “Decisions to prescribe medical products are taken for individual clinical reasons by the appropriately qualified service medical professionals.”

She added: “Kava-kava is the national drink of Fiji. It is classed as a food and, as such, is a legal substance.”

Poison gas used in Iraq roadside bombs
POISON gas shells from Saddam Hussein’s stockpile of chemical weapons are being used as roadside bombs against British forces in Iraq, writes Brian Brady.

A series of bombs detonated in the Basra area were made from shells looted from the ammunition dumps discovered before the US-led invasion in 2003, senior defence sources revealed last night.

Defence chiefs have now concluded that insurgents have attacked British Army patrols on at least five occasions using “improvised explosive devices” (IEDs) fashioned from the shells, a senior Cabinet minister confirmed.

It is the first time officials have admitted that British troops have come under attack from chemical agents in Iraq.

The disclosure came as United Nations inspectors warned that Iraqi insurgents had used chemicals such as chlorine, combined with explosives, in at least 10 attacks and could develop other weapons-grade toxic agents.

Jolie: the Pretty Face of the Global Slave Gulag

kurtnimmo.com | Jun 10, 2007

Jolie: the Pretty Face of the Global Slave Gulag

By Kurt Nimmo

It’s official. The “UN Goodwill Ambassador” Angelina Jolie will front for the “prestigious” NWO “think tank,” the Council on Foreign Relations. “Angelina Jolie will now be joining former presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, current Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Diane Sawyer and several other distinguished names as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations,” TransWorldNews reports. “The bombshell Oscar winner-turned globe-trotting activist is one of 94 new ‘term members’—a category reserved for up-and-coming young policy thinkers in their early 30s, most from the corporate world, government, academia or the media, who after their five-year terms can apply to join the ‘life membership’ ranks of Cheney, Soros, Greenspan, Kissinger, etc. What this means for Angelina: a chance to kibitz with top global policy experts. What this means for CFR: more paparazzi,” adds the CIA’s favorite newspaper, the Washington Post.

One is reminded of the actress Lana Turner cavorting with mobster Johnny Stompenado, or maybe Liz Renay’s relationship with racketeer Mickey Cohen. Of course, chances are slim to none Jolie will take up with the hoary and criminal likes of Cheney, Soros, Greenspan, or Kissinger, although she may as well, considering the fact she has in essence become a whore for the ruling elite, attaching her “paparazzi” celebrity glow to an organization determined to reduce the world to a one-world slave labor gulag based on the China model of medieval feudalism at the behest of transnational mercantile capitalism. Of course, most Americans remain clueless of this agenda, even as the CFR works diligently to erode their endangered sovereignty. “Most Americans who are even aware of the CFR consider its objectives as visionary rather than a pressing political certainty or reality. Senators, Congressmen, and others in some branch of government service, doubtless for the most part consider an invitation to CFR membership as an honor,” notes Noah W. Hutchings, “and after all, CFR membership enhances political career opportunities and potentiality.”

But never mind. As we know, or rather as the corporate media would have us believe, “the merging of the governments of Canada, the United States and Mexico,” otherwise known as the North American Union, as sketched out by the CFR’s Robert Pastor, is an “urban legend,” part of the insanity of “the xenophobic or frightened right wing of America that is afraid of immigration and globalization,” as Pastor told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In other words, if you are suspicious of the so-called Security and Prosperity Partnership, i.e., the merging of Mexico, Canada, and the United States into a European style “union,” you are naturally a tinfoil hat nutter, never mind Benn Steil, writing for the CFR’s “influential” Foreign Affairs magazine, who tells us “the world needs to abandon unwanted currencies, replacing them with dollars, euros, and multinational currencies as yet unborn.”

As James Madison warned the people of Virginia in 1799, a “nation which reposes on the pillow of political confidence, will sooner or later end its political existence in a deadly lethargy,” as it should be realized there is “a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust.”

It is sincerely unfortunate the American people no longer embrace this “circumspection and distrust” and instead believe, thanks to decades of brainwashing via public education and the incessant babble of 24/7 television, that government is our friend and the president has our best wishes at heart. Indeed, not only is government our friend, but the CFR, and thus the World Bank, IMF, Rockefeller and Ford foundations, et al, are our friends, never mind friends unrealized by most.

Thus Angelina Jolie is the pretty face on the other end of Orwell’s “boot stamping on a human face—forever.” It is sincerely disturbing to realize most Americans will conclude, that is if they ever formulate the thought, the CFR, the North American Union, NAFTA and CAFTA resulting in jobs shipped to China, the vacuum created in the wake of the mugging and disappearance of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and the imposition of the panopticon and high-tech surveillance state are all in our best interest because our cherished celebrities tell us so.

How easily most of us are bamboozled.

KILL EVERYBODY: American soldier exposes US policy in Iraq

“KILL EVERYBODY” – US ARMY SPECIALIST DARRELL ANDERSON EXPOSES US POLICY

“I joined in ’03,” ’cause I was broke, I needed money, but I was a young American kid, I wanted to fight in a war. I joined up. [A] month out of training I arrived in Baghdad, Iraq, January ’04. Saddam’s been captured. And I get there and the guys I’m serving with have been there for six months already; they were there in ’03. And I go, “Well, you know what, I think it’s come out that, you know, these people had nothing to do with 9/11, there was no Iraqi on those planes. We can see around here there’s no Al Qaida, there’s no terrorist syndicates in Baghdad, or Iraq. Saddam had stamped ’em out.” And I asked my buddies, “Well, you know, we’re here to find ‘weapons of mass destruction’.” And they laughed at me. And I said, “Well, you know, we’re here to ‘help the people.'” And they laughed at me. And I said, “What’s our mission? What’s our goal?”…They’re like, “All we’re trying to do is make it home alive…” Anderson describes the escalation of violence against unarmed civilians: “In April, they told us, “In a crowded area, if one person shoots at you, kill everybody.” Anderson explains the rationale from the officers, “They [members of the crowd of people] are letting them [the person or persons firing at the U.S. military] attack you. They’re no longer innocent if they’re there at the time of the crime…” (9/11 conference, Chandler AZ Feb 23-25, 2007) 911TV.org /snowshoefilms post-production/ 9:46 (more)

In trying to suppress the Yugoslavian resistance, German Gen. Keitel, supreme commander of the armed forces, issued this order in Sept. 1941:

“In order to nip disorders in the bud the sternest measures must be applied at the first sign of insurrection. It should also be taken into consideration that in the countries in question a human life is often valueless. In a reprisal for the life of a German soldier, the general rule should be capital punishment for 50-100 Communists. The manner of execution must have a frightening effect.”

Perhaps the American generals, the neo-cons, and the new world order planners who direct them are copying the Nazi playbook. More likely, though, they are progressing along parallel lines because they’ve committed the same egregious war crimes; they can only compound their crimes until they “kill everybody” who resists them. The Yugoslavian partisans fighting German fascism were called “communists.” Today, U.S. fascism calls that same resistance in Iraq and Afghanistan “terrorist.” Gen. Keitel was hanged for this and other war crimes by the Nuremberg Tribunal on October 16, 1946. http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/…

After 7 months in Iraq, Darrell Anderson, 22, decided that he wasn’t to risk going back to Iraq to kill or be killed. He fled to Canada, a deserter. While there, though, he felt he wasn’t doing enough to expose and stop the war and returned to U.S. and, possibly, a long prison sentence. Perhaps to undermine the legal case of other deserters in Canada, the U.S. military imprisoned Anderson only a few days, releasing him with a ‘less than honorable’ discharge. Given Anderson’s heroic determination to organize and help GI and other war resisters, the U.S. military may come to believe they’ve made a mistake. 911TV.org / www.SNOWSHOEFILMS.COM

Is Prince Philip an island god?

Information Liberation | Jun 11, 2007

By Nick Squires

Britain’s Duke of Edinburgh may be planning a quiet birthday celebration at home this weekend, but there will be feasting and flag-waving in an isolated jungle village in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu, where he is worshipped as a god.

The Land Cruiser ground up the rough dirt track, pitching and rolling like a boat. The trail was so severely eroded that it was more like a river bed, with miniature canyons gouged out by the monsoon rains.

I had been drawn to this poor excuse for a road by a story so unlikely that it sounded barely credible.

It was one I had wanted to investigate for years.

Legend had it that there was a clutch of villages on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu which – as bizarre as it may seem – worshipped Prince Philip as a god.

How and why they had chosen the Duke of Edinburgh, I had no idea. I fully expected the story to be either false, or wildly exaggerated.

Distant adoration

After an hour’s drive we pulled into a jungle clearing shaded by giant banyan trees.

A short walk led to the village of Yaohnanen, a collection of sagging thatched huts, banana trees and snotty-nosed little kids.
 
With the help of my driver-cum-interpreter, Lui, I was introduced to the chief of the village. Jack Naiva was a bright-eyed old man of about 80, with grey hair and a faded sarong wrapped around his wiry body.

I felt deeply foolish telling him I had come to his village to ask if he worshipped the Queen’s husband.

I wondered if it was all some sort of elaborate joke.

But the look on Chief Jack’s face told me it was not. He dispatched one of the villagers and a few minutes later the man returned from a hut with three framed pictures. They were all official portraits of the Prince.

The first, in black and white, looked like it was taken in the early 1960s.

The second was dated 1980 and showed the Prince holding a traditional pig-killing club – a present from the islanders.

The most recent was from seven years ago.

They had all been sent from London with the discreet permission of Prince Philip, who is apparently well aware that he is the subject of such distant adoration.

Ancient legend

Chief Jack squatted on the ground as he told me how the Prince Philip cult had come about.

It seems that it emerged some time in the 1960s, when Vanuatu was an Anglo-French colony known as the New Hebrides.

For centuries, perhaps millennia, villagers had believed in an ancient story about the son of a mountain spirit venturing across the seas to look for a powerful woman to marry.

They believed that unlike them, this spirit had pale skin.

Somehow the legend gradually became associated with Prince Philip, who had indeed married a rich and powerful lady.

Villagers would have seen his portrait – and that of the Queen – in government outposts and police stations run by British colonial officials.

Their beliefs were bolstered in 1974, when the Queen and Prince Philip made an official visit to the New Hebrides. Here was their ancestral spirit, resplendent in a white naval officer’s uniform, come back to show off his bride.

“He’s a god, not a man,” the chief told me emphatically, pointing at the portraits.

Response to colonialism

None of the cult followers can read or write. They told me – somewhat amazingly – that it was only this year that they learnt the date of the Prince’s birthday – 10 June. As Philip turns 86 and they are planning to mark the occasion with a feast and ceremonial drinking of kava, an intoxicating brew made from the roots of a pepper tree which makes your mouth go numb.

They have even acquired a large Union flag which they are going to run up a bamboo flag pole.

It is easy to see all this as so much South Seas mumbo jumbo.

But that would be a grave mistake, anthropologists told me.

Millennial movements like this were a highly sophisticated response by islanders in the South Pacific to the arrival of colonialism and Christianity.

By combining the fundamentals of their ancient beliefs with new elements gleaned from their contact with the West, they were able to preserve their culture.

There is, of course, a delicious irony in all this.

Prince Philip, after all, is a man who has a reputation for making politically incorrect gaffes, often about foreigners.

He once advised British students not to stay too long in China for fear of becoming “slitty-eyed”.

And he asked a group of stunned aborigines if they still threw spears at each other.

The villagers of Tanna may live a life far removed from the splendour of Buckingham Palace and Balmoral in far away Britain. But they are as firm in their beliefs as Prince Philip is in his.

I suspect that if they were ever to meet, they would get along rather well.

Bohemian Grove members worship 80s Pinup girl

One-time Bond girl and 1976 Miss Wales Sian, as she was in her 1980s heyday

The gentlemen’s club for the rich and famous that worships a 1980s Page 3 girl

Daily Mail | Jun 10, 2007

By SHARON CHURCHER in New York and ALAN RIMMER in London

A former British topless model has become the extraordinary obsession of members of America’s most illustrious and secretive men’s club, which is trying to track her down in time for its 100th anniversary party next month.

The Bohemian Grove Club holds an annual summer camp at which members, who include Henry Kissinger, former President George Bush Senior, Clint Eastwood and Bob Weir, founder member of Sixties rock band the Grateful Dead, debate world politics, perform weird mock Druid ceremonies – and, it turns out, ogle a poster of a blonde in a thong.

Related

Secretive Bohemian Club convenes at the mysterious “Grove”

Bohemian Grove Human Sacrifice Ritual To Appear On Cartoon Network

The Mail on Sunday can reveal that she is one-time Bond girl and 1976 Miss Wales, Sian Adey-Jones, 49, whom we have tracked down to Ibiza.

Having posed for the poster in 1980 at the height of her career as a Page 3 pin-up and appeared in the 1985 007 film A View To A Kill, she now lives on the island with her Italian husband Rocco, son Dylan, 14, and adopted daughter Tallulah, four.

She was bemused to learn that some of America’s wealthiest men wanted to “honour” her with a black-tie dinner at the club’s 2,700-acre forested compound north of San Francisco this summer.

Since club rules ban all women except those employed to work at events, they cannot invite Sian herself.

Instead, they want her to send them a “formal greeting” – with a current picture of herself.

Sian said: “I’m flattered to be in the hearts and minds of such important people but my modelling career is in the past now. And, since they are so secretive, how do I know if this will be a nice gentlemen’s dinner or men leaping around doing weird and distasteful things in a forest?”

The £5,000-a-year club’s strict code bans its 2,300 members from discussing its activities but, speaking on condition of anonymity, the 25 members leading the hunt for Sian assured us that their intentions were honourable.

One of them, a California financier, said: “The poster hangs on the outside wall of a cabin in an area of the camp called Skidoo and has become rather famous throughout the club because of the artistic photography and the beauty of the subject.

“This summer will be the 100th anniversary, so we thought a black-tie dinner honouring her would be a nice thing to do.

“We would like to read out a message from her, maybe something along the lines of Miss Adey-Jones saying, “I am glad I could improve on your ambience.”

“And we’d like a current snapshot, which we’ll show alongside the poster. We just want to do something nice for a woman who has meant so much to us.”

Though the poster has been displayed at the camp for 27 years, the members had no idea of Sian’s identity and asked California internet expert Raymond Lopez to help.

He said: “Someone thought she was the former British model Caroline Cossey, who was a Bond girl in For Your Eyes Only.

That would have been fascinating because Caroline is a transsexual who was born a boy but when I found her in Atlanta, where she now lives, she said, “I hate to disappoint you but it’s Sian Adey-Jones.”

“The organisers of the Miss Wales competition in 2004 had held an event with former winners but Sian didn’t participate so they couldn’t help.

“Finally, we got a number for Sian’s mother in Wales but, maybe because of the time difference, she never replied to our messages. With the dinner fast approaching, members have been worrying that they were running out of time.”

Next month’s dinner will be preceded by traditional club rituals, which include an arcane Druid rite, the Cremation of Care, in which torch-wielding men in crimson robes burn an effigy representing the cares of the world and high-living that they leave behind for 17 days.

They insist the idea is to concentrate on lofty discussions about the state of the world. But Sian said she needed to be convinced.

“This sounds like rich and famous men banning women so they can run around like Boy Scouts,” she said.

A club spokesman said the members seeking Sian were “very nice fellas”. He added: “It sounds like a sweet idea and if she sends them a greeting, they will be as pleased as a bunch of boys could possibly be.”

• They dress as women and get drunk

The Bohemian Grove Club has been called the world’s most exclusive old boys’ club.

Tony Blair, John Major and Prince Philip have reputedly been guests at the California estate where its 2,300 luminaries meet twice a year – for a long weekend in May and 17 days in July – under a veil of secrecy.

They are lodged in clusters of log cabins, including the Skidoo Encampment, where Sian’s image is hung.

With a combined worth estimated at £50billion, they say their goal is to “draw inspiration from nature” while they hammer out new solutions to world problems.

Visitors have reported, however, that their rituals include getting “howling drunk”, dressing up as women and burning an effigy called “Care” under a giant statue of an owl. Peter Phillips, a sociology professor who has been a guest at the club, insists:

“It’s all very tongue-in-cheek.” Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger delivers a breakfast lecture every July on topics that have included the Iraq War.

“Part of the tradition is that Henry should be interrupted at the start of his talk by a Mexican band,” says a member. “After they play a tune, the band withdraws and Henry continues.”

Nicaragua leader in Iran, calls for New World Order

Reuters | Jun 10, 2007

Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega speaks at Tehran university in a ceremony in Iran, Sunday, June 10, 2007. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Sunday he hopes Nicaragua and Iran can work together to create a fairer world order, as he welcomed Ortega for the two leaders’ second visit this year. (AP Photo/Hasan Sarbakhshian)

TEHRAN (Reuters) – Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, who wants more aid from the United States, called on Sunday for a new world order to replace “capitalism and imperialism”, at the start of a trip to arch U.S. foe Iran.

His comments echoed some remarks by his Iranian counterpart who often attacks “imperialist” and “arrogant powers”, although Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a more vehement critic of Washington.

Ortega has raised eyebrows in Washington, which broke diplomatic relations with Iran in 1980, for forging ties with the Islamic Republic. But the Nicaraguan president said he did not need permission about who to befriend.

“We have chosen our friends by our own will and we haven’t got permission from anyone,” Ortega said shortly after arriving in Tehran, the official IRNA news agency reported.

“In negotiation with America we have explained our personal and political positions towards imperialism … Imperialism and capitalism should be removed and we should create a peaceful and friendly world,” Ortega added.

Ortega, a Cold War-era enemy of Washington, had earlier said he would travel to Iran on a jet loaned to him by Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, a former U.S. foe who has been developing better ties with Washington.

The Nicaraguan president, like Ahmadinejad, is also an ally of U.S. antagonist President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

The Iran trip will focus in part on getting Iranian investment in Nicaraguan factories that build tractors and other agricultural equipment, Ortega said before the visit. Business links were a topic when Ahmadinejad visited Managua in January.

“In this trip (by Ortega), the agreements between the two countries which were agreed in Nicaragua will be finalised and put into effect,” Ahmadinejad said, IRNA reported.

State media also quoted Ahmadinejad saying Nicaragua had been wounded by “the lashes of colonialism”. Ortega, a former Marxist guerrilla who fought U.S.-backed Contra rebels during his 1980s government, later on Sunday met Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

“Today America is the most hated government in the world,” Khamenei told him, the ISNA news agency reported.

Putin hails New World Order

Scotsman | Jun 10, 2007

“Further global progress is now possible only through a quest for universal consensus in the movement towards a New World Order.”

– Mikhail Gorbachev, in an address to the United Nations, December 1988

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum June 10, 2007. REUTERS/Alexander Demianchuk

ST PETERSBURG, Russia (Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin called on Sunday for the creation of a new world economic order that gives greater clout to fast-growing emerging nations.

Days after attending a Group of Eight summit in Germany, Putin suggested that club was outdated and failed to reflect a shift in economic power away from the industrialised West to countries like his own.

“If 50 years ago, 60 pct of the world’s gross domestic product came from the G7, now it’s the other way round, and 60 percent of the world’s GDP is produced outside,” Putin said in a speech to a major economic conference.

He also took aim at financial organisations such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, saying they were created in “a completely different reality” and had lost relevance in the fast-changing global economy.

Russia is enjoying an unprecedented spell of economic growth that has enabled it to pay down its foreign debts and accumulate foreign exchange reserves of over $400 billion — the world’s third largest.

Putin said the world needed to reduce its dependency on the dollar as a reserve currency, and plugged the rouble as one alternative. Russia abolished capital controls last year.

“We need several financial centres and several reserve currencies,” Putin told an audience of international chief executives and government leaders attending the St Petersburg International Economic Forum.

Putin declared Russia open to foreign investment, highlighting opportunities to invest in the power generation sector, now undergoing reforms to create market competition, and in infrastructure.

But he called for industrialised nations not to throw up barriers to Russian companies seeking to invest abroad.

“We see how in developed countries despite the doctrine of free investment there are completely different approaches,” he said.

“It turns out that foreign investment is not always seen as positive and foreign participation is practically closed in those sectors such as infrastructure, telecoms and energy.”