The Disappeared of Canada - How and Why the Killings Have Never Stopped

These activities are not confined to British Columbia. Toronto is not exempt, nor is any other city that counts aboriginal women and children amongst its citizens....

Asking questions, these days, seems to be perilous. But that is exactly what we must do... ask until the answers appear.

Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number.
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep has fallen on you.
Ye are many – they are few.

~ Percy Bysse Shelley

The Disappeared of Canada :

How and Why the Killings Have Never Stopped

A Sequel to last issue’s article “Child trafficking in

Beautiful British Columbia ” in The Agora newspaper

By Kevin D. Annett

www.hiddenfromhistory.org

“Ten of the last dozen women to be taken to the killing site at Piggy’s Palace were accompanied by Mounties or regular cops. You think it was just Willie Picton who was killing them?”

Marion, sex trade worker, downtown eastside of Vancouver , May 10, 2006

In October of 1992, when I was still a United Church clergyman, I was approached by a colleague at my first Presbytery meeting in Nanaimo . The topic of child abuse came up, and after a few moments, the other man, a retired minister, smiled and gave me a sort of insider’s look. He lowered his voice and said to me,

“It’s easy to get a child in this town.”

I must have looked shocked, for his smile faded.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Nothing” he replied. “Some people are, you know, interested in that sort of thing.”

It all felt like an offer, masked but real, like a sort of masonic handshake: something known to insiders only.

The same man had worked in the United Church ’s Alberni Indian residential school for years, and piloted one of the “mission boats” that visited coastal Indian villages. One of my native parishioners later accused him of raping her as a child, but the RCMP threatened her not to press charges.

Later, after I was fired from the church for asking too many questions, I learned of the well-protected child trafficking network that linked the coastal residential schools with wealthy men and clubs in Vancouver . Just how many children disappeared into those clubs and never emerged is unknown; but they are among the more than 50,000 residential school children who cannot be accounted for.

“No crime ever disappears; it just adapts” a journalist once told me. And in British Columbia, the crime of abducting people is rampant, on the rise, and very lucrative, since it is part of a deadly international network in human trafficking.

George Brown is a retired aboriginal RCMP officer who was part of a community-based “Missing Persons’ Task Force” in Vancouver . His group documented hundreds of missing people until their work began to identify the complicity of local police, politicians and businessmen in the disappearances. At that point, George’s group disbanded.

“We didn’t want to get killed” George told me during a videotaped interview in the summer of 2005.

“I was called up by a senior officer in the force and told, ‘George, the number of disappeared women is nine, and it’s going to stay at nine. Stop sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong or you may lose it.’ The fact is I personally know two fellow Mounties who were linked with Picton and making money by bringing girls out to his place. None of the girls ever came back. Everybody knows about it.”

I asked George who “everybody” was. The world-weary man shook his head sadly.

“The Mayor. The Chief of Police. All the senior press people. Hell, you can’t get into those positions without making a deal with the drug lords who run this town. The days of organized crime as a separate thing are over. It’s all business run and legit now. It’s organized corporate crime now – the drug importers from Asia and the real estate developers and the off shore investors, they’re all part of the same gang. The cops all work for them. And body snatching pays well.”

George Brown’s group documented a link between the disappeared women of the downtown eastside and the trans-pacific organ trafficking network based in China . According to sources within the network, at least a dozen women and men are abducted and murdered every month in Vancouver , their bodies disposed of in protected grave sites on the north shore, and their organs shipped overseas.

Most of the disappeared are homeless men, transient youth or sex trade workers.

A year after I interviewed George Brown, I was given more confirmation of his groups’ claims. I received a message to meet a woman named Annie Parker at Oppenheimer Park in Vancouver ’s downtown eastside. Annie was a short, timid woman with haunted eyes and scars along her neck and arms.

“I got these by threatening to go to the press with what I knew” she said matter of factly, pointing to the scars.

“Who did it to you?” I asked.

She told me the man’s name, a senior RCMP officer, and then said,

“Who doesn’t matter. They’re all doing it. It’s called the ‘hooker game’. The Vancouver cops will pick up girls off the street, drug them with scopolamine and film them as they fuck them, in a cop club downtown on Georgia street . Then sometimes they kill the girls and film that too, and sell it for $25,000 as a snuff film.”

I asked her what happens to the bodies.

“That was one of Steve Picton’s specialties. I met all the Pictons. Steve runs a snuff film operation in Coquitlam and then he dumps the bodies at a hunting camp about ten miles up from Horseshoe Bay , near the Sea to Sky highway. There’s a special grave site there with sealed containers in a metal cistern. I was taken there, I seen it. It’s watched over by the Mounties.”

Les Guerin is an aboriginal man who lives and works as a maintenance man on the Musequam Indian reserve near the University of B.C. He claims that the reserve holds at least two body dumping sites from which he personally has excavated human remains, and had them forensically examined.

“As far back as 1989 I saw a man who I later identified as Willie Picton drive onto the Musqueam reserve and bury several large bags. Later when I saw his face on the news, I dug up the bags and had them examined at a lab at SFU. The report says they contain human and pig bones remains, including the humerus, pelvis and skull pieces of a young woman in her twenties.

“The weird thing is I told the Vancouver Police, the press, everybody about this, and nothing was ever done. I sent the police the forensic report, me and my buddy Jim Kew, I told the CBC and even the lawyers for the families of Picton’s victims. Nothing. The cops roped off the site in 2006 and that was that.”

A signed letter from Musqueam Band Housing Officer Glenn Guerin dated October 29, 2004 indicates that Dave Picton was employed by the Museum Indian band for a three month contract during 1990 to provide land fill for local street construction.

Frustrated by the lack of police response, in December of 2005, Les Guerin mailed the bone fragments he obtained from the Picton deposit, along with the forensic report, to Amnesty International’s head office in London , England. The package was returned unopened the following month.

Next month, the eyes of the world will be on British Columbia and its Olympics. But will those eyes perceive the missing men, women and children whose remains lie scattered in hidden graves – and the authorities who put them there? Will the visiting world media record the truth of those who continue to disappear?

Most important, will the killings be stopped?

That depends on us.

………………………………………………………………………………………….

Rev. Kevin Annett is a community minister, educator and award-winning film maker who lives and works in Vancouver ’s downtown eastside. He is a member of the revived Community Task Force into Missing Persons. For more information on this Group, and for a copy of their recent report on which this article is based, contact Kevin at: hiddenfromhistory@yahoo.ca or 1-888-265-1007 (messages).

His website is: www.hiddenfromhistory.org

Read and Hear the truth of Genocide in Canada, past and present, at this website: www.hiddenfromhistory.org , and watch Kevin's award-winning documentary film UNREPENTANT on the same website.

UNREPENTANT: Kevin Annett and Canada's Genocide
- Winner, Best Foreign Documentary Film, Los Angeles Independent Film Festival, March 2007
- Winner, Best Canadian Film, Creation Aboriginal Film Festival, Edmonton, 2009

Soon to be released feature film, THE DIARY, based on Kevin Annett's epic struggle to bring to light genocide in Canada - see the trailer at:
www.thediarymovie.com/trailer

“Kevin is more deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize than many who have received it in the past.”
- Dr. Noam Chomsky
Institute Professor Emeritus
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

“A courageous and inspiring man." (referring to Kevin Annett)
- Mairead Corrigan-Maguire
Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
Belfast , Northern Ireland

"As a long time front line worker with the Elders' Council at the Downtown Eastside Women's Centre, I stand behind what Kevin Annett is trying to do for our people. The genocide that continues today and which stemmed from the residential schools needs to be exposed. Kevin Annett helps break the silence, and brings the voice of our people all over the world."
Carol Muree Martin - Spirit Tree Woman
Nisgaa Nation

"I gave Kevin Annett his Indian name, Eagle Strong Voice, in 2004 when I adopted him into our Anishinabe Nation. He carries that name proudly because he is doing the job he was sent to do, to tell his people of their wrongs. He speaks strongly and with truth. He speaks for our stolen and murdered children. I ask everyone to listen to him and welcome him."
Chief Louis Daniels - Whispers Wind
Elder, Turtle Clan, Anishinabe Nation
Winnipeg, Manitoba

Ayn Rand

"When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed."

Ayn Rand - (1905-1982) Author - Source: Atlas Shrugged, Francisco's "Money Speech"

Haiti Has Larger Oil Reserves Than Venezuela Say Scientists (An Olympic Pool Compared to a Glass of Water)

http://remixxworld.blogspot.com/2010/01/haiti-has-larger-oil-reserves-than.html

I have heard rumors that Haiti has vast oil reserves -- and that the globalists want these reserves. However, the globalists cannot get the reserves, because the oil belongs to the Haitian people. So the globalists do not allow the Haitians to exploit the oil reserves, because it would allow the Haitian people to prosper. It would allow the Haitians to build proper infrastructure, so that 7.0 earthquakes do not have such a devastating effect.

The article below is translated from French (read the original here) using Google, so it may not be 100% translated and of course verify whether these scientists are to be believed. Nevertheless, as I stated in my previous article Haiti Has Huge Resources of Gold and Iridium Says Former Dominican Petroleum Refinery President Leopoldo Espaillat Nanita, it is interesting that Bill Clinton and George Soros have been recently talking about rebuilding Haiti's infrastructure and starting business ventures in the country. Perhaps Clinton, Soros and the many other globalists have confirmed that these oil, gold, uranium, zyconium and iridium deposits DO exist in Haiti and they want to gain control at the expense of the Haitian people.


###

Haiti is full of oil say Daniel and Ginette Mathurin

Scientists Daniel and Ginette Mathurin indicate that under Haitian soil is rich in oil and fuel fossible which were collected by Haitian and foreign experts. "We have identified 20 sites Oil, launches Daniel Mathurin stating that 5 of them are considered very important by practitioners and policies.

The Central Plateau, including the region of Thomond, the plain of the cul-de-sac and the bay of Port-au-Prince are filled with oil, he said, adding that Haiti's oil reserves are larger than those of Venezuela. An Olympic pool compared to a glass of water that is the comparison to show the importance of oil Haitian compared to those of Venezuela, "he explains.

Venezuela is one of the world's largest producers of oil.

Daniel Mathurin reveals that investigations of several previous governments have allowed to verify the existence of these large deposits of oil. It reminds a document of Lavalas party to power in 2004, had specified the number of sites in Haiti hydrocarbons.

According to Daniel et Ginette Mathurin, the lake region, with cities like Thomazeau and Cornillon, contains large deposits of oil.

Asked about the non-exploitation of these sites, Ginette Mathurin said that these deposits are declared strategic reserves of the United States of America. While stating his incomprehension of such a situation, it reminds that the Caribbean is considered the backyard of the United States.

But Daniel and Ginette Mathurin indicate that the U.S. government in 2005 authorized the use of strategic reserves of the United States. This door must be used by the Haitian political négiciations to launch with U.S. companies with a view to exploiting these deposits adds Daniel Mathurin

Experts argue that the government acted Jean Claude Duvalier had verified the existence of a major oilfield in the bay of Port-au-Prince shortly before its fall.

Moreover, Daniel et Ginette Mathurin show that uranium 238 and 235 and the deposit zyconium exist in several regions including in Jacmel. Uranium is used in nuclear reactors to produce electrical energy.

Dr. David Kelly's post mortem to be kept secret for 70 years...

Vital evidence which could solve the mystery of the death of Government weapons inspector Dr David Kelly will be kept under wraps for up to 70 years.

In a draconian – and highly unusual – order, Lord Hutton, the peer who chaired the controversial inquiry into the Dr Kelly scandal, has secretly barred the release of all medical records, including the results of the post mortem, and unpublished evidence.

The move, which will stoke fresh speculation about the true circumstances of Dr Kelly’s death, comes just days before Tony Blair appears before the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War.

It is also bound to revive claims of an establishment cover-up and fresh questions about the verdict that Dr Kelly killed himself.

Tonight, Dr Michael Powers QC, a doctor campaigning to overturn the Hutton findings, said: ‘What is it about David Kelly’s death which is so secret as to justify these reports being kept out of the public domain for 70 years?’
Campaigning Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker, who has also questioned the verdict that Dr Kelly committed suicide, said: ‘It is astonishing this is the first we’ve known about this decision by Lord Hutton and even more astonishing he should have seen fit to hide this material away.’

The body of former United Nations weapons inspector Dr Kelly was found in July 2003 in woods close to his Oxfordshire home, shortly after he was exposed as the source of a BBC news report questioning the Government’s claims that Saddam Hussein had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, which could be deployed within 45 minutes.

Lord Hutton’s 2004 report, commissioned by Mr Blair, concluded that Dr Kelly killed himself by cutting his wrist with a blunt gardening knife.

Tragic: Forensic experts at work in the Oxfordshire woods where Dr Kelly's body was found in 2003
It was dismissed by many experts as a whitewash for clearing the Government of any culpability, despite evidence that it had leaked Dr Kelly’s name in an attempt to smear him.

Only now has it emerged that a year after his inquiry was completed, Lord Hutton took unprecedented action to ensure that the vital evidence remains a state secret for so long.

A letter, leaked to The Mail on Sunday, revealed that a 30-year ban was placed on ‘records provided which were not produced in evidence’. This is thought to refer to witness statements given to the inquiry which were not disclosed at the time.

In addition, it has now been established that Lord Hutton ordered all medical reports – including the post-mortem findings by pathologist Dr Nicholas Hunt and photographs of Dr Kelly’s body – to remain classified information for 70 years.

The normal rules on post-mortems allow close relatives and ‘properly interested persons’ to apply to see a copy of the report and to ‘inspect’ other documents.

Lord Hutton’s measure has overridden these rules, so the files will not be opened until all such people are likely to be dead.

Last night, the Ministry of Justice was unable to explain the legal basis for Lord Hutton’s order.

The restrictions came to light in a letter from the legal team of Oxfordshire County Council to a group of doctors who are challenging the Hutton verdict.

Last year, a group of doctors, including Dr Powers, compiled a medical dossier as part of their legal challenge to the Hutton verdict.

They argue that Hutton’s conclusion that Dr Kelly killed himself by severing the ulnar artery in his left wrist after taking an overdose of prescription painkillers is untenable because the artery is small and difficult to access, and severing it could not have caused death.

In their 12-page opinion, they concluded: ‘The bleeding from Dr Kelly’s ulnar artery is highly unlikely to have been so voluminous and rapid that it was the cause of death. We advise the instructing solicitors to obtain the autopsy reports so that the concerns of a group of properly interested medical specialists can be answered.’

Tonight, Dr Powers, a former assistant coroner, added: ‘Supposedly all evidence relevant to the cause of death has been heard in public at the time of Lord Hutton’s inquiry. If these secret reports support the suicide finding, what could they contain that could be so sensitive?’

The letter disclosing the 70-year restriction was written by Nick Graham, assistant head of legal and democratic services at Oxfordshire Council.

It states: ‘Lord Hutton made a request for the records provided to the inquiry, not produced in evidence, to be closed for 30 years, and that medical (including post-mortem) reports and photographs be closed for 70 years.’
Nicholas Gardiner, the Chief Coroner for Oxfordshire, confirmed that he had seen the letter.

Speaking to The Mail on Sunday today, he said: ‘I know that Lord Hutton made that recommendation. Someone told me at the time. Anybody concerned will be dead by then, and that is quite clearly Lord Hutton’s intention.’

Asked what was in the records that made it necessary for them to be embargoed, Mr Gardiner said: ‘They’re Lord Hutton’s records not mine. You’d have to ask him.’

He added that in his opinion Lord Hutton had embargoed the records to protect Dr Kelly’s children.

The inquest into Dr Kelly’s death was suspended before it could begin by the then Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer. He used the Coroners Act to designate the Hutton Inquiry as ‘fulfilling the function of an inquest’.

News that the records will be kept secret comes just days before Mr Blair gives evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry on Friday.

To date, Dr Kelly’s name has scarcely been mentioned at the inquiry. One source who held a private meeting with Sir John Chilcot before the proceedings began said that Sir John had admitted he ‘did not want to touch the Kelly issue’ .

A spokesman for the Ministry of Justice said: ‘Any decision made by Lord Hutton at the time of his inquiry was entirely a matter for him.’

A spokesman for Thames Valley Police said yesterday that it would not be possible to search their records during the weekend.

The Mail on Sunday was unable to contact Lord Hutton

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245599/David-Kelly-post-mortem-kept-secret-70-years-doctors-accuse-Lord-Hutton-concealing-vital-information.html
http://www.iraq-war.ru/article/216224

What Government Really Means

“The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitable he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is apt to spread discontent among those who are.”

~ H.L. Mencken

I give a good number of speeches each year. For some time I’ve asked audiences a question: “What useful purpose does the US government serve?” I do that not to be challenging or provocative, but to actually find out if anyone else can think of a useful purpose the government serves. The question at first shocks, then amuses and then perplexes almost everyone because it is both so obvious and outrageous that no one ever thinks of asking it. Most people accept the institution of government because it has always been there; they have always assumed it was essential. People do not question its existence, much less its right to exist.

Government sponsors untold waste, criminality and inequality in every sphere of life it touches, giving little or nothing in return. Its contributions to the commonweal are wars, pogroms, confiscations, persecutions, taxation, regulation and inflation. And it’s not just some governments of which that’s true, although some are clearly much worse than others. It’s an inherent characteristic of all government.

The essence of something is what makes the thing what it is. But surprisingly little study of government has been done by ontologists (who study the first principles of things) or epistemologists (who study the nature of human knowledge). The study of government almost never concerns itself with whether government should be, but only with how and what it should be. The existence of government is accepted without question.

What is the essence of government? After you cut through all the rhetoric, the doublethink and the smokescreen of altruism that surround the subject, you find that the essence of government is force. And the belief it has the right to initiate the use of force whenever expedient. Government is an organization with a monopoly, albeit with some fringe competition, on the use of force within a given territory. As Mao Zedong said, “The power of government comes out of the barrel of a gun.” There is no voluntarism about obeying laws. The consent of a majority of the governed may help a government put a nice face on things, but it is not essential and is, in fact, given with any enthusiasm.

A person’s attitude about government offers an excellent insight into their character. Political beliefs reflect how a person thinks men should relate to one another; they offer a practical insight into how he views humanity at large and himself in particular.

There are only two ways people can relate in any given situation: voluntarily or coercively. Almost everyone, except overt sociopaths, pays at least lip service to the idea of voluntarism, but government is viewed as somehow exempt. It’s widely believed that a group has prerogatives and rights unavailable to individuals. But if that is true, then the Ku Klux Klan, the Irish Republican Army, the PLO — or, for that matter, any group from a lynch mob to a government — all have rights that individuals do not. In fact, all these groups believe they have a right to initiate the use of force when they find it expedient. To the extent that they can get away with it, they all act like governments.

Terrorists, Mobs and Governments

You might object that the important difference between the KKK, IRA, PLO or a simple mob and a government is that they aren’t “official” or “legal.” Apart from common law concepts, legality is arbitrary. Once you leave the ken of common law, the only distinction between the “laws” of governments and the ad hoc proceedings of an informal assemblage such as a mob, or of a more formal group like the KKK, boils down to the force the group can muster to impose its will on others. The laws of Nazi Germany and the USSR are now widely recognized as criminal fantasies that gained reality on a grand scale. But at the time those regimes had power, they were treated with the respect granted to any legal system. Governments become legal or official by gaining power. The fact that every government was founded on gross illegalities — war or revolt — against its predecessor is rarely an issue.

Force is the essence of government. But the possession of a monopoly on force almost inevitably requires a territory, and maintaining control of territory is considered the test of a “successful” government. Would any “terrorist” organization be more “legitimate” if it had its own country? Absolutely. Would it be any less vicious or predatory by that fact? No, just as most governments today (the ex-Communist countries and the kleptocracies of the Third World being the best examples), demonstrate. Governments can be much more dangerous than the mobs that give them birth. The Jacobin regime of the French Revolution is a prime example.

Is the State Necessary?

The violent and corrupt nature of government is widely acknowledged by almost everyone. That’s been true since time immemorial, as have political satire and grousing about politicians. Yet almost everyone turns a blind eye; most not only put up with it, but actively support the charade. That’s because although many may believe government to be an evil, they believe it is a necessary evil. (The larger question of whether anything that is evil is necessary, or whether anything that is necessary can be evil, is worth discussing — perhaps in another forum.)

What, arguably, makes government necessary is the need for protection from other, even more dangerous, governments. I believe a case can be made that modern technology obviates this function.

One of the most perversely misleading myths about government is that it promotes order within its own bailiwick, keeps groups from constantly warring with each other and somehow creates togetherness and harmony. In fact, that’s the exact opposite of the truth. There’s no cosmic imperative for different people to rise up against one another — unless they’re organized into political groups. The Middle East, now the world’s most fertile breeding ground for hatred, provides an excellent example.

Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together peaceably in Palestine, Lebanon and North Africa for centuries, until the situation became politicized after WWI. Until then an individual’s background and beliefs were just personal attributes, not a casus belli. Government was at its most benign, an ineffectual nuisance that concerned itself mostly with extorting taxes. People were busy with that most harmless of activities, making money.

But politics does not deal with people as individuals. It scoops them up into parties and nations. And some group inevitably winds up using the power of the state (however innocently or “justly” at first) to impose its values and wishes on others, with predictably destructive results. What would otherwise be an interesting kaleidoscope of humanity then sorts itself out according to the lowest common denominator peculiar to the time and place.

Sometimes that means along religious lines, as with the Muslims and Hindus in India, or the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland; or ethnic lines, like the Kurds and Iraqis in the Middle East or the Tamils and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka; sometimes its mostly racial, as whites and East Indians found out throughout Africa in the 70s, or Argentines, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and other Latins discovered more recently. Sometimes it amounts to no more than personal beliefs, as the McCarthy era in the 1950s and the Salem trials in the 1690s proved.

Throughout history government has served as a vehicle for the organization of hatred and oppression, benefiting no one except those who are ambitious and ruthless enough to gain control of it.

Regards,
Doug Casey

Imagining Liberty: The Misean Vision

I’m finding it ever more difficult to describe to people the kind of world that the Mises Institute would like to see, with the type of political order that Mises and the entire classical-liberal tradition believed would be most beneficial for mankind.

It would appear that the more liberty we lose, the less people are able to imagine how liberty might work. It is a fascinating thing to behold.

• People can no longer imagine a world in which we could be secure without massive invasions of our privacy at every step, and even being strip-searched before boarding airplanes, even though private institutions manage much greater security without any invasions of human rights;
  
  
• People can no longer remember how a true free market in medical care would work, even though all the problems of the current system were created by government interventions in the first place;
  
  
• People imagine that we need 700 military bases around the world, and endless wars in the Middle East, for “security,” though safe Switzerland doesn’t;
  
  
• People think it is insane to think of life without central banks, even though they are modern inventions that have destroyed currency after currency;
  
  
• Even meddlesome agencies like the Consumer Products Safety Commission or the Federal Trade Commission strike most people as absolutely essential, even though it is not they who catch the thieves and frauds, but private institutions;
  
  
• The idea of privatizing roads or water supplies sounds outlandish, even though we have a long history of both;
  
  
• People even wonder how anyone would be educated in the absence of public schools, as if markets themselves didn’t create in America the world’s most literate society in the 18th and 19th centuries.

This list could go on and on. But the problem is that the capacity to imagine freedom — the very source of life for civilization and humanity itself — is being eroded in our society and culture. The less freedom we have, the less people are able to imagine what freedom feels like, and therefore the less they are willing to fight for its restoration.

This has profoundly affected the political culture. We’ve lived through regime after regime, since at least the 1930s, in which the word freedom has been a rhetorical principle only, even as each new regime has taken away ever more freedom.

Now we have a president who doesn’t even bother to pay lip service to the idea of freedom. In fact, I don’t think that the idea has occurred to Obama at all. If the idea of freedom has occurred to him, he must have rejected it as dangerous, or unfair, or unequal, or irresponsible, or something along those lines.

To him, and to many Americans, the goal of government is to be an extension of the personal values of those in charge. I saw a speech in which Obama was making a pitch for national service, the ghastly idea that government should steal 2 years of every young person’s life for slave labor and to inculcate loyalty to leviathan, with no concerns about setting back a young person’s professional and personal life.Now we have a president who doesn’t even bother to pay lip service to the idea of freedom. In fact, I don’t think that the idea has occurred to Obama at all. If the idea of freedom has occurred to him, he must have rejected it as dangerous, or unfair, or unequal, or irresponsible, or something along those lines.

How did Obama justify his support of this idea? He said that when he was a young man, he learned important values from his period of community service. It helped form him and shape him. It helped him understand the troubles of others and think outside his own narrow experience.

Well, I’m happy for him. But he chose this path voluntarily. It is a gigantic leap to go from personal experience to forcing a vicious national plan on the entire country. His presumption here is really taken from the playbook of the totalitarian state: the father-leader will guide his children-citizens in the paths of righteousness, so that they all will become god like the leader himself.

To me, this comment illustrates one of two things. It could show that Obama is a potential dictator in the mold of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, for the presumptions he puts on exhibit here are just as frightening as any imagined by the worst tyrants in human history. Or, more plausibly, it may be an illustration of Hannah Arendt’s view that totalitarianism is merely an application of the principle of the “banality of evil.”

With this phrase, Arendt meant to draw attention to how people misunderstand the origin and nature of evil regimes. Evil regimes are not always the product of fanatics, paranoids, and sociopaths, though, of course, power breeds fanaticism, paranoia, and sociopathology. Instead, the total state can be built by ordinary people who accept a wrong premise concerning the role of the state in society.

If the role of the state is to ferret out evil thoughts and bad ideas, it must necessarily become totalitarian. If the goal of the state is that all citizens must come to hold the same values as the great leader, whether economic, moral, or cultural, the state must necessarily become totalitarian. If the people are led to believe that scarce resources are best channeled in a direction that producers and consumers would not choose on their own, the result must necessarily be central planning.

On the face of it, many people today do not necessarily reject these premises. No longer is the idea of a state-planned society seen as frightening. What scares people more today is the prospect of a society without a plan, which is to say a society of freedom. But here is the key difference between authority in everyday life — such as that exercised by a parent or a teacher or a pastor or a boss — and the power of the state: the state’s edicts are always and everywhere enforced at the point of a gun.

It is interesting how little we think about that reality — one virtually never hears that truth stated so plainly in a college classroom, for example — but it is the core reality. Everything done by the state is ultimately done by means of aggression, which is to say violence or the threat of violence against the innocent. The total state is really nothing but the continued extension of these statist means throughout every nook and cranny of economic and social life. Thus does the paranoia, megalomania, and fanaticism of the rulers become deadly dangerous to everyone.

It begins in a seemingly small error, a banality. But, with the state, what begins in banality ends in bloodshed.

Let me give another example of the banality of evil. Several decades ago, some crackpots had the idea that mankind’s use of fossil fuels had a warming effect on the weather. Environmentalists were pretty fired up by the notion. So were many politicians. Economists were largely tongue-tied because they had long ago conceded that there are some public goods that the market can’t handle; surely the weather is one of them.

Enough years go by and what do you have? Politicians from all over the world, every last one of them a huckster of some sort only pretending to represent their nations, gathering in a posh resort in Europe to tax the world and plan its weather down to precise temperatures half a century from now.

In the entire history of mankind, there has not been a more preposterous spectacle than this!

I don’t know if it is tragedy or farce that the meeting on global warming came to an end with the politicians racing home to deal with snowstorms and record cold temperatures.

I draw attention to this absurdity to make a more general point. What seems to have escaped the current generation is the notion that was once called freedom. Let me be clear on what I mean by freedom. I mean a social or political condition in which people exercise their own choices concerning what they do with their lives and property. People are permitted to trade and exchange goods and services without impediment or violent interference. They can associate or not associate with anyone of their own choosing. They can arrange their own lives and businesses. They can build, move, innovate, save, invest, and consume on terms that they themselves define.

What will be the results? We cannot predict them, any more than I can know when everyone in this room will wake up tomorrow morning, or what you will have for breakfast. Human choice works this way. There are as many patterns of human choice as there are humans who make choices.

The only real question we should ask is whether the results will be orderly — consistent with peace and prosperity — or chaotic, and thereby at war with human flourishing. The great burden born by the classical liberal tradition, stretching from medieval times to our own, is to make believable the otherwise improbable claim that liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of orderliness.

To be sure, that generation of Americans that seceded from British rule in the late 18th century took the imperative of liberty as a given. They had benefitted from centuries of intellectual work by true liberals who had demonstrated that government does nothing for society but divide and loot people in big and small ways. They had come to believe that the best way to rule a society is not to rule it at all, or, possibly, rule it with the people’s consent in only the most minimal way.

Today, this social order sounds like chaos, not anything we dare try lest we be overrun with terrorists and drug fiends, amidst massive social, economic, and cultural collapse. To me this is very interesting. It is the cultural condition that comes about in the absence of experience with freedom. More precisely, it comes about when people have no notion of the relationship between cause and effect in human affairs.

One might think that it would be enough for most people to log-on to the World Wide Web, browse any major social-networking site or search engine, and gain direct experience with the results of human freedom. No government agency created Facebook and no government agency manages its day-to-day operation. It is the same with Google. Nor did a bureaucratic agency invent the miracle of the iPhone, or the utopian cornucopia of products available at the Walmart down the street.

Meanwhile, look at what the state gives us. The department of motor vehicles. The post office. Spying on our emails and phone calls. Full-body scans at the airport. Restrictions on water use. The court system. Wars. Taxes. Inflation. Business regulations. Public schools. Social Security. The CIA. And another ten thousand failed programs and bureaucracies, the reputation of which is no good no matter who you talk to. Now, one might say, oh sure, the free market gives us the dessert but the government gives us the vegetables to keep us healthy. That view does not account for the horrific reality that more than 100 million people were slaughtered by the state in the 20th century alone, not including its wars.

This is only the most visible cost. As Frédéric Bastiat emphasized, the enormity of the costs of the state can only be discovered in considering its unseen costs: the inventions not brought to market, the businesses not opened, the people whose lives were cut short so that they could not enjoy their full potential, the wealth not used for productive purposes but rather taxed away, the capital accumulation through savings not undertaken because the currency was destroyed and the interest rate held near zero, among an infinitely expandable list of unknowns.

To understand these costs requires intellectual sophistication. To understand the more basic and immediate point that markets work and the state does not, needs less sophistication, but it still requires some degree of understanding of cause and effect. If we lack this understanding, we go through life accepting whatever exists as a given. If there is wealth, there is wealth, and there is nothing else to know. If there is poverty, there is poverty, and we can know no more about it.

It was to address this deep ignorance that the discipline of economics was born in Spain and Italy, the homes of the first industrial revolutions, in the 14th and 15th centuries, and came to the heights of scientific exposition in the 16th century, to be expanded and elaborated upon in the 18th century in England and Germany, in France in the 19th century, finally achieving its fullest presentation in Austria and America in the late-19th and 20th centuries.

And what did economics contribute to human sciences? What was the value that it added? It demonstrated the orderliness of the material world through a careful look at the operation of the price system and the forces that work to organize the production and distribution of scarce goods.

Its main lesson was taught again and again for centuries: government cannot improve on the results of human action achieved through voluntary trade and association. This was its contribution. This was its argument. This was its warning to every would-be social planner: your dreams of domination must be curbed.

In effect, this was a message of freedom, one that inspired revolution after revolution, each of which stemmed from the conviction that humankind would be better off in the absence of rule than in its tyrannical presence. But consider that what had to come before the real revolutions: there had to be this intellectual work that prepared the field of battle, the epic struggle that lasted centuries and continues to this day, between the nation-state and the market economy.

Make no mistake: it is this battle’s outcome that is the most serious obstacle to the establishment and preservation of freedom. The political order in which we live is but an extension of the capacities of our collective cultural imagination. Once we stop imagining freedom, it can vanish, and people won’t even recognize that it is gone. Once it is gone, people can’t imagine that they can or should get it back.

I’m reminded of the experience of an economist associated with the Mises Institute who was invited to Kazakhstan after the fall of the Soviet Union. He was to advise them on a transition to free markets. He talked to officials about privatization and stock markets and monetary reform. He suggested no regulations on business start-ups. The officials were fascinated. They had become convinced of the general case for free enterprise. They understood that socialism means that officials were poor too.

The economist listened to this point and kept waiting for the objection. He nodded his head that this is precisely what people will do. After some time, the government officials became more explicit. They said that they cannot simply step aside and let people move anywhere they want to move. This would mean losing track of the population. It could cause overpopulation in some areas and desolation in others. If the state went along with this idea of free movement, it might as well shut down completely, for it would effectively be relinquishing any and all control over people.And yet, an objection was raised. If people are permitted to open businesses and factories anywhere, and we close state-run factories, how can the state properly plan where people are going to live? After all, people might be tempted to move to places where there are good-paying jobs and away from places where there are no jobs.

And so, in the end, the officials rejected the idea. The entire economic reform movement foundered on the fear of letting people move — a freedom that most everyone in the United States takes for granted, and which hardly ever gives rise to objection.

Now, we might laugh about this, but consider the problem from the point of view of the state. The whole reason you are in office is control. You are there to manage society. What you really and truly fear is that by relinquishing control of people’s movement, you are effectively turning the whole of society over to the wiles of the mob. All order is lost. All security is gone. People make terrible mistakes with their lives. They blame the government for failing to control them. And then what happens? The regime loses power.

In the end, this is what it always comes down to for the state: the preservation of its own power. Everything it does, it does to secure its power and to forestall the diminution of its power. I submit to you that everything else you hear, in the end, is a cover for that fundamental motive.

And yet, this power requires the cooperation of public culture. The rationales for power must convince the citizens. This is why the state must be alert to the status of public opinion. This is also why the state must always encourage fear among the population for what life would be like in the absence of the state.

The political philosopher who did more than anyone else to make this possible was not Marx nor Keynes nor Strauss nor Rousseau. It was the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who laid out a compelling vision of the nightmare of what life is like in the absence of the state. He described such life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The natural society, he wrote, was a society of conflict and strife, a place in which no one is safe.

He was writing during the English civil war, and his message seemed believable. But, of course, the conflicts in his time were not the result of natural society, but rather over the control of leviathan itself. So his theory of causation was skewed by circumstance, akin to watching a shipwreck and concluding that the natural and universal state of man is drowning.

And yet today, Hobbesianism is the common element of both left and right. To be sure, the fears are different, stemming from different sets of political values. The left warns us that if we don’t have leviathan, our front yards will be flooded from rising oceans, big business moguls will rob us blind, the poor will starve, the masses will be ignorant, and everything we buy will blow up and kill us. The right warns that in the absence of leviathan society will collapse in cesspools of immorality lorded over by swarthy terrorists preaching a heretical religion.

The goal of both the left and right is that we make our political choices based on these fears. It doesn’t matter so much which package of fear you choose; what matters is that you support a state that purports to keep your nightmare from becoming a reality.

Is there an alternative to fear? Here is where matters become a bit more difficult. We must begin again to imagine that freedom itself could work. In order to do this, we must learn economics. We must come to understand history better. We must study the sciences of human action to re-learn what Juan de Mariana, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Frédéric Bastiat, Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, Murray N. Rothbard, and the entire liberal tradition understood.

What they knew is the great secret of the ages: society contains within itself the capacity for self-management, and there is nothing that government can do to improve on the results of the voluntary association, exchange, creativity, and choices of every member of the human family.

If you know this lesson, if you believe this lesson, you are part of the great liberal tradition. You are also a threat to the regime, not only the one we live under currently, but every regime all over the world, in every time and place. In fact, the greatest guarantor of liberty is an entire population that is a relentless and daily threat to the regime precisely because they embrace this dream of liberty.

The best and only place to start is with yourself. This is the only person that you can really control in the end. And by believing in freedom yourself, you might have made the biggest contribution to civilization you could possibly make. After that, never miss an opportunity to tell the truth. Sometimes thinking the unthinkable, saying the unsayable, teaching the unteachable, is what makes the difference between bondage and sweet liberty.

The title of this talk is “the Misesian vision.” This was the vision of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. It is the vision of the Mises Institute. It is the vision of every dissident intellectual who dared to stand up to despotism, in every age.

I challenge you to enter into the great struggle of history, and make sure that your days on this earth count for something truly important. It is this struggle that defines our contribution to this world. Freedom is the greatest gift that you can give yourself, and give all of humanity.

Regards,
Lewellyn H Rockwell, Jr.
LewRockwell.com

DNA Evidence Can Be Fabricated, Scientists Show

By ANDREW POLLACK

Scientists in Israel have demonstrated that it is possible to fabricate DNA evidence, undermining the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases.

The scientists fabricated blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor of the blood and saliva. They also showed that if they had access to a DNA profile in a database, they could construct a sample of DNA to match that profile without obtaining any tissue from that person.

“You can just engineer a crime scene,” said Dan Frumkin, lead author of the paper, which has been published online by the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics. “Any biology undergraduate could perform this.”

Dr. Frumkin is a founder of Nucleix, a company based in Tel Aviv that has developed a test to distinguish real DNA samples from fake ones that it hopes to sell to forensics laboratories.

The planting of fabricated DNA evidence at a crime scene is only one implication of the findings. A potential invasion of personal privacy is another.

Using some of the same techniques, it may be possible to scavenge anyone’s DNA from a discarded drinking cup or cigarette butt and turn it into a saliva sample that could be submitted to a genetic testing company that measures ancestry or the risk of getting various diseases. Celebrities might have to fear “genetic paparazzi,” said Gail H. Javitt of the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University.

Tania Simoncelli, science adviser to the American Civil Liberties Union, said the findings were worrisome.

“DNA is a lot easier to plant at a crime scene than fingerprints,” she said. “We’re creating a criminal justice system that is increasingly relying on this technology.”

John M. Butler, leader of the human identity testing project at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, said he was “impressed at how well they were able to fabricate the fake DNA profiles.” However, he added, “I think your average criminal wouldn’t be able to do something like that.”

The scientists fabricated DNA samples two ways. One required a real, if tiny, DNA sample, perhaps from a strand of hair or drinking cup. They amplified the tiny sample into a large quantity of DNA using a standard technique called whole genome amplification.

Of course, a drinking cup or piece of hair might itself be left at a crime scene to frame someone, but blood or saliva may be more believable.

The authors of the paper took blood from a woman and centrifuged it to remove the white cells, which contain DNA. To the remaining red cells they added DNA that had been amplified from a man’s hair.

Since red cells do not contain DNA, all of the genetic material in the blood sample was from the man. The authors sent it to a leading American forensics laboratory, which analyzed it as if it were a normal sample of a man’s blood.

The other technique relied on DNA profiles, stored in law enforcement databases as a series of numbers and letters corresponding to variations at 13 spots in a person’s genome.

From a pooled sample of many people’s DNA, the scientists cloned tiny DNA snippets representing the common variants at each spot, creating a library of such snippets. To prepare a DNA sample matching any profile, they just mixed the proper snippets together. They said that a library of 425 different DNA snippets would be enough to cover every conceivable profile.

Nucleix’s test to tell if a sample has been fabricated relies on the fact that amplified DNA — which would be used in either deception — is not methylated, meaning it lacks certain molecules that are attached to the DNA at specific points, usually to inactivate genes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/science/18dna.html?_r=1&sq=Israeli%20Scientists%20Show%20DNA%20Evidence%20Can%20be%20Fabricated&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print

BREAKING! MADSEN EXPOSES FALSE FLAG DETROIT DELTA FLIGHT BOMBING!

Note: there is no url included as this information is only available to paying members of the Wayne Madsen website. However because of the
significance of this report a member has kindly sent this along to be circulated. Please pass this along to as many people as you can ....Ruth

December 30-31, 2009 -- Intelligence sources: Plane incident a false flag involving trinity of CIA, Mossad, and RAW. publication date: Dec 30, 2009


December 30-31, 2009 -- Intelligence sources: Plane incident a false flag involving trinity of CIA, Mossad, and RAW. The Christmas Day attempt by the Nigerian son of a prominent Nigerian banker and business tycoon connected closely to top Nigerian leaders to detonate a chemical improvised explosive device aboard Delta Airlines flight 253 from Amsterdam Schiphol to Detroit was a false flag operation carried out by the intelligence tripartite grouping of the
CIA, Mossad, and India's Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), according to WMR's Asian intelligence sources who closely monitor the activities of
the three agencies in India and Southeast Asia. The tripartite alliance of the CIA, Mossad, and RAW were behind the terrorist attacks on Mumbai earlier this year and on December 28, Rupee News reported the three agencies worked together, along with former Afghan KHAD intelligence agents, to assassinated former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto: "The Benazir assassination was pre-planned and executed via triangulation by Khad, RAW, CIA and Mossad using the most modern radio active weapons available in the market. The Israeli PM publicly admitted helping India in Kargil recently. The purpose of the
covert Khad, RAW, CIA, Mossad operations is to destabilize Pakistan. The IMF plan to de-fang Pakistan in 2000 did not work, but provincial
autonomy will make the center bankrupt triggering an implosion." The outcome of the failed terrorist attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on the Detroit-bound plane has resulted in major Christmas gifts for the neocons and militarists who still call the shots on U.S. policy: the deployment of privacy-invasive millimeter wave (MMW) full body scanning equipment at airports in North America and Europe [ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, Representative Peter King (R-NY), who is an ardent defender of the Catholic Church and its prelates in Ireland, has defended the scanning system which can image the naked bodies of passengers, including children and babies], an increase in the U.S. military and intelligence presence in Yemen, retention of US PATRIOT Act surveillance provisions, an increase in racial profiling of Arabs and Muslims -- and because Mutallab is African -- blacks in the United States, and more cumbersome travel restrictions for airline passengers. The neocon propagandists are already spinning counter-claims to reports that indicate that Mutallab was a witting accomplice of a larger plot cooked up by American, Israeli, ajd Indian intelligence agents to carry out yet another false flag terror operation on American soil. The eyewitness testimonies of Michigan attorney Kurt Haskell and his attorney wife Lori Haskell are being pilloried by the corporate media after the two were featured on major U.S. television networks. Haskell and his wife witnessed a "well-dressed Indian man" arrange for Mutallab to board Delta 253 without a passport at the check-in desk at Schiphol. Haskell told CBS News: "Only the Indian man spoke, and what he
said was, this man needs to board the plane, and he doesn't have a passport. And the ticket agent then responded saying you need a passport to board the plane, and the Indian man then said he's from Sudan. We do this all the time." WMR has learned that the Indian man is suspected by Asian intelligence services of being an RAW agent who used his influence to convince airline and airport security personnel that Mutallab was a bona fide Sudanese refugee. Mutallab reportedly spent several hours in a Schiphol airport lounge before boarding the Delta flight. Dutch agents are reportedly scanning Schiphol CCTV footage and have reason to believe that Mutallab had accomplices at the airport, which bolsters the witness accounts of the Haskells. The FBI has
interviewed the Haskells and the bureau, as is its modus operandi, appears to be intimidating witnesses and pressuring them to support the government's party line. The neocon spin machine is also refuting reports that Mutallab traveled to the United States without a passport and that his ticket was only one-way. The facts emerging are that Mutallab was not traveling on a Nigerian passport but on an Italian passport. Mutallab's father, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, happens to hold the Italian Order of Merit. In addition, Mutallab's ticket was purchased in Accra, Ghana with $2,831 in cash and was later re-issued, on December 16, with a different itinerary at the KLM office in Lagos. The original itinerary was Lagos-Amsterdam-Detroit-Amsterdam-Accra but the return leg on January 8, 2010, was changed from Amsterdam to Lagos instead of Accra. Previously, WMR reported that the security company that cleared Mutallab in Schiphol is ICTS, a firm that is headquartered in Israel and Amstelveen, Netherlands. The firm also cleared attempted shoe bomber Richard Reid for a Miami-bound American Airlines flight from Paris in December 2001. Reid, who was bound for Antigua, was profiled after he purchased his ticket at a travel agency in the 18th arrondisement in Paris. Reid had previously traveled to Turkey, Pakistan, Israel, Egypt, the Netherlands, Belgium and France and he obtained pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN), a component of the explosive Semtex, and his specially-designed shoes in Amsterdam. Reid was linked by French authorities to French convert to Islam Jerome Courtailler, who, in 2004, was sentenced in absentia by a Dutch court to six years for plotting to attack U.S. targets in Belgium and France. Mutallab's undershorts also contained PETN. There is a possibility that Mutallab was recruited to carry out a false flag attack after another one failed on November 13. A Somali man was arrested at Mogadishu airport with the same chemicals, powder, and syringe combination that Mutallab used to ignite his clothing. The Somali man was attempting to board a Daallo Airlines flight from Mogadishu to Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland, Djibouti, and Dubai. Daallo is the national flag carrier of Djibouti and is owned by Dubai World's Istithmar World Aviation (IWA) Holdings. Dubai World's recent financial woes sent shock waves through the global financial community. It is also noteworthy that Delta 253 passenger Jasper Schuringa, the young man who wrestled Mutallab to the ground and prevented him from carrying out his terrorist mission, was driven to Schiphol on Christmas morning by his friend Chris Van Amersfoort. Van Amersfoort's Facebook page lists himself as a "fan of" Dubai World's owner "His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum," the Emir of Dubai. Daallo Airlines has an interline agreement with a single U.S. airline, which happens to be Delta Airlines, the same airline that saw Mutallab successfully board its flight 253 in Schiphol. The ahas similar agreements with other airlines that fly to the United States, including Qatar Airways, Saudia, Ethiopian Airlines, and Alitalia. Schuringa's father works for Shell and in 1993 they were evacuated by the French foreign Legion from Gabon during riots by demonstratorsopposed to the tainted re-election of Gabon's presidential dictator Omar Bongo. The Curacao-born Jasper Schuringa attended film school in Miami and he also lived in Oman. After accusations in the media that he was publicizing himself over the Muttalab incident, Schuringa largely receded from public view. Schuringa was en route to Costa Rica via Detroit to visit his sister. The National Counter-terrorism office in The Hague is being mum about any connections it had with Schuringa, according to the Dutch paper Parool. On October 18, a little less than a month prior to the attempt by the syringe- and chemical-armed Somali to board the Daallo Airlines flight from Mogadishu, Shaykh Muqtaar Abu Zubeyr, the leader of Somalia's radical Al Shahab Islamic Movement, warned Somalis in leaflets distributed in Mogadoshu's Bakaraha market and other points in the city not to fly on Daallo Airlines, Somalia's largest carrier, because he said the airline had "close ties" with the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia, the United States and the "Jewish government" of Israel. Before moving from Egypt, Mutallab was in an MBA course in Dubai at the time of the Daallo warning. Mutallab later dropped out of school in Dubai. Mutallab's father Umaru, the retired Chairman of First Bank of Nigeria (FBN), is among the top elite of Nigeria, counting among his friends the top royalty of northern Nigeria, including the Emir of Gombe, the Emir of Zazzau, and the Sultan of Sokoto, as well as Nigerian President Umaru Musa Yar' Adua, who has been recovering from a mysterious illness in Saudi Arabia. Mutallab's empire included FBN (UK), which its president described as "the very first UK bank owned by a Nigerian bank and could be counted as an equal to other UK banks." Mutalan was also a contender to be President of the National Council of the Nigeria Stock Exchange. In 2003, Mutallab formed Nigeria's first Islamic bank, Jaiz International Bank.
The same bureaucratic stove-piping issues used by the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement communities to explain away the lack of intelligence on the 9/11 attacks are at play with the Delta 253 incident. Of course, all these problems were to have been solved by the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the Directorate of National Intelligence. Mutallab was entered as a terrorist suspect in the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) database of 500,000 names maintained by the Director of National Intelligence's National Counter-terrorism Center (NCTC) but not on the "no fly" list maintained by the Transportation Security Administration(TSA). On November 19, just six days after the Somali attempted to board the plane in Mogadishu with a syringe and chemicals, the elder Mutallab met with the CIA Station Chief at the U.S. embassy in Abuja, the Nigerian capital. Mutallab told the CIA official that he was concerned about the radicalization of his son, who was called "Alfa" -- a term for Islamic scholar -- while attending the British International School in Lome, Togo. The elder Mutallab was quite emphatic that his son posed a significant security risk. After dropping out of the MBA program in Dubai, the younger Mutallab turned off his cell phone and destroyed the phone's SIM card before leaving Dubai for Yemen where it is said he wished to imrove his Arabic. It is not known who bought Mutallab's ticket to Detroit in Accra and why the return destination was changed from Accra to Lagos. Mutallab's multiple entry visa for the United States was issued on June 16, 2008 with an expiration date of June 16, 2010. In response to the elder Mutallab's warning, the U.S. embassy in Abuja, the embassy sent a Visa Viper cable to the State Department and NCTC on November 20. However, Mutallab's name was not added to the no-fly list. The State Department is refusing to disclose the classification of Mutallab's visa and State Department spokesman Ian Kelly is refusing to reveal information on Mutallab's visa application. The Daily Trust of Abuja penned the following editorial in the aftermath of the flight 253 incident: "The story caused anxiety among regular air travellers, not only for the safety of planes, but also for the kind of reception that Nigerian travellers to Europe and the US, especially Muslim ones, are likely to get in the next months and years. The story also excited Northern Nigeria's many conspiracy theorists, who think another grand Western plot is in the offing to tarnish the image of Muslims, possibly as a prelude to another invasion." The editorial added, "Among officials of Nigeria's embattled Federal Government, though, the story caused a mix of anxiety and relief. Anxiety, because
it threatens to throw this country's fitful Rebranding Campaign into further chaos. But it provided welcome relief from endless newspaper commentaries on President Yar'adua's health." The Nigerians are obviously suspicious also about those behind the attempt on the aircraft. The Abuja editorial continues: "Bringing down a plane is not a thought that comes easily to people in Northern Nigeria. Most people here, with me as a typical example, cannot breathe easily in a plane until it hits the tarmac. A man who holds fast to a plane's aluminium frame for support during a turbulent take-off hardly can think of bombing it. This explosive substance that Faruk allegedly used in the Delta Airlines plane, pentaerythritol or PETN, may be known to British school kids, but I have never heard of it. To think that I once taught in a university's Faculty of Science. If indeed Faruk told the Americans that he was an Al-Qaeda operative, then he was a very poor one, to be frank. His bomb, which he said he got in Yemen, was weak [exploding like a fire cracker] and technically deficient [failed to go off properly]. He was easily subdued by a film producer, did not struggle when he was grabbed, did not say anything when they held him, and almost as soon as he reached the FBI station, he began to sing like a canary. Sounds very much like the gentle British lad that he is.