Friday, April 28, 2006

Donald Rumsfeld, Gilead & the Bird Flu Hoax

Pentagon-WHO-CDC H5N1 Bird Flu Scam: Deadly Hoax
by HENRY SEE (SIGNS OF THE TIMES)

The bird flu scare will put the entire media spectacle
in a different light. It is, in many ways, a microcosm
of the lies and manipulations, ranging from mundane
drives such as greed to the deepest of plans by the
powers that be to eliminate large portions of the
world's people.

Let's start with the mundane element of greed.

GREED BY RUMSFELD

Dick Cheney's close association with Halliburton, the
US corporation now making billions off the the US
imposed, organised, and sanctioned suffering of the
Iraqi people, is well known.

Did you know that Donald Rumsfeld is closely
associated with the California biotech firm that
originally developed Tamiflu? You remember Tamiflu.

It is the one drug that is being promoted as the
cure-all for avian flu.

Coincidence? We think not.

In William Engdahl's article published in full today
in our Bird Flu section, he writes:

Tamiflu was developed and patented in 1996 by a
California biotech firm, Gilead Sciences Inc.

Gilead is a NASDAQ (GILD) listed stock company which
prefers to maintain a low profile in the current rush
to Tamiflu.

That might be because of who is tied to Gilead. In
1997, before he became US Secretary of Defense, Donald
H. Rumsfeld was named Chairman of the Board of Gilead
Sciences, where he remained until early 2001 when he
became Defense Secretary.

Rumsfeld had been on the board of Gilead since 1988
according to a January 3 1997 company press release.

An as-yet-unconfirmed report is that Rumsfeld while
Secretary of Defense also purchased an additional
stock in his former company, Gilead Sciences Inc.,
worth $18 million, making him one of its largest if
not the largest stock owners today.

What are the odds that the number two man in the Bush
Reich would be making profits from Iraq while the
number three man would stand to do the same through
bird flu?

Think about that for a moment and let the implications
sink in.

BIRD FLU AND VACCINES

Flu vaccine gets made each year from the strains of
the previous year's flu that researchers guess will be
the closest to flu of the on-coming season.

So a vaccine is always made for last year's flu. That
may be one reason why there are high infection rates
among those who get the vaccine.

Another reason could be that the vaccine itself lowers
the body's natural immunity system.

US soldiers given the Spanish flu vaccine against the
1918 outbreak were seven times more likely to contract
and die from the flu than civilians who had not been
vaccinated. [Vaccination condemned, Eleanor McBean,
1985]

In the Czech Republic, according to Dr Mohammed Kher
Taha, the deputy director of the reference centre at
the Louis Pasteur Institute in Paris, after the
vaccination campaign in 1993, new forms of the virus
appeared that seemed to take their mutations from the
genetic material used in the vaccines themselves! (Cf,
UFC Que choisir, février 2003).

The ineffectiveness of vaccines does not, of course,
prevent their manufacturers, with the complicity of
their friends in government and the media, from
selling millions, if not billions, of dollars of them.

The climate of fear works to create a demand in the
fear-stricken population. It then becomes popular for
a politican to demand stockpiles, which is what Bush
did in November 2005, and is what the World Health
Organization is demanding world-wide.

And each dosage sold puts pennies in the pocket of
Donald Rumsfeld.

POLITICAL MOTIVATIONS

As bad as all of that might be, we have only scratched
the surface of the depravity related to the avian flu
fear mongering.

Look at the large culling of the flocks that has taken
place in Asia and that is now set to begin in France
and other countries.

It is an all-out attack on the small farm, on a way of
life that has escaped to some extent globalization.
Laws and regulations will be brought in first to kill
the birds many people depend upon for their own food
or to sell and make a living.

Then, when their flocks have disappeared, new,
genetically modified birds will be created, birds they
will tell us are resistant to these diseases. Writes
Engdahl:

"There is high-level biological research underway in
Britain and presumably also the United States to
develop a genetic engineering method to make chickens
and other birds 'resistant' to Avian Flu viruses."

We have seen how the GM process works in agriculture.
Farmers buy seed from companies like Monsanto. The
seed belongs to the company, it is their intellectual
property.

The farmer can no longer use a part of one year's crop
to provide the seed for the next. He must return each
year to the company to buy new seed. No longer can
farmers try to become self-sufficient.

With GM products, they are forced to become dependent
upon the corporations that sell the seeds.

You can expect the same model to emerge when it comes
to poultry. After all, all that research has to be
repaid! Even if it is largely financed by tax dollars!

The wonderful thing about this model is that the avian
flu doesn't even have to appear as a pandemic. Flocks
can be killed off as a preventative measure. Not one
person has to die for the plan to succeed.

POPULATION REDUCTION

... The figures for the population who have become
infected and who have not had a serious case are most
likely not included in the figures given when a
mortality rate of over 50% is cited. Much like the
infamous SARS epidemic, the actual deaths are very
low. It was the media fanfare and hysteria that made
the threat seem so serious, so threatening. The flu
itself may not be.

This analysis may well be correct.

The strain of H5N1 may not be as dangerous as we are
being told. It may be difficult for it mutate to a
version that passes directly from human to human.

Unfortunately, this does not mean that the threat is
lessened. The powers that be are clear that they wish
to reduce the world's population. ... We have
discussed many times the work of US, Israeli, and
South Africans on the development of ethnic specific
weapons.

Clearly, biological warfare is the arm of the future.

It is deadly, can be used to pinpoint specific
populations, and can be blamed on nature.

What more could a psychopath want?

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED
http://signs-of-the-times.org/signs/editorials/signs20060309_AvianFluADeadlyHoax.php

The Iraqi Civilian Body Count

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m22858&l=i&size=1&hd=0

April 25, 2006

Dear Editor,

In "Dead Reckoning: Counting Iraq's Civilian Dead" (By
Adam Shemper, Mother Jones, May/June 2006 Issue), Adam
Shemper writes:

"This tally is updated daily on his website,
Iraqbodycount.net, which Dardagan cofounded and runs
with a team of 16 volunteers. The site, also known as
IBC, has been the only consistent record of the war’s
human toll, making it the go-to source for reporters,
activists, and even the Bush administration. (...)

There have been more than a dozen independent surveys
of civilian casualties, including a 2004 report in The
Lancet that concluded 100,000 Iraqi civilians had been
killed, but IBC remains the most-cited source for
casualty numbers.

When asked for a figure last December, President Bush
shrugged "30,000, more or less"—a number very close to
the one on IBC at the time. Afterward, a CNN White
House correspondent reported that Bush officials named
Iraqbodycount.net as the source of the president’s
estimate. "I think he surprised everyone by giving
this figure," said John Sloboda, IBC’s cofounder. (The
president, however, misused the number, thinking it
included Iraqi military and police casualties.)"
Just a few days ago Dahr Jamail and Jeff Pflueger
wrote:
"We are, however, alarmed at their apparent lack of
concern at the way their information is being usurped
by the pro-war camp to manipulate public opinion and
minimize the catastrophe the failed US occupation has
become for Iraqis. The authors of this piece submit
that if, as it claims, IBC is truly a humanitarian
research project armed for greater impact with an
aggressive and sophisticated marketing system, it must
not allow its data to be misused and misrepresented
for pro-war propaganda campaigns.

If IBC cannot prevent the misuse of its data, it would
be better for it to remove its web site and counters
from the Internet permanently. It must then limit
itself to objective scholarly research of the English
media without sophisticated marketing paraphernalia."
(Learning to Count: The Dead in Iraq, by Dahr Jamail
and Jeff Pflueger, truthout, 13 April 2006)
In February, Stephen Soldz wrote:
"If Western reporters, competing for scarce public
attention, are loath to accurately portray the extent
of their ignorance about what is going on in enormous
chunks of Iraq, IBC has no excuse not to acknowledge,
openly and prominently, the resultant limits to their
civilian death tally. To not proclaim loudly that the
IBC count is, by its nature, likely a severe
undercount of the true number of deaths, is to
participate in the culture of deceit and denial of the
costs in civilian lives and suffering that has plagued
this alleged humanitarian intervention from the
beginning. If IBC does not understand this point, then
their efforts at promoting truth have now turned into
its opposite and should cease." (When Promoting Truth
Obscures the Truth: More on Iraqi Body Count and Iraqi
Deaths, by Stephen Soldz, ZNet, 5 February 2006)

About the "Lancet study" and the Iraqi civilian
deaths, you and Mr. Shemper may be interested in the
following.

On 29 October 2004, the British medical journal The
Lancet published 'Mortality before and after the 2003
invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey’:
Making conservative assumptions, we think that about
100000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the
2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of
the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition
forces accounted for most violent deaths.
(Interpretation)

Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces
were women and children. (Findings)

Source: Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion
of Iraq: cluster sample survey, The Lancet, Published
online October 29,2004
This study reads:
"The researchers found that the majority of deaths
were attributed to violence, which were primarily the
result of military actions by Coalition forces. Most
of those killed by Coalition forces were women and
children... Eighty-four percent of the deaths were
reported to be caused by the actions of Coalition
forces and 95 percent of those deaths were due to air
strikes and artillery." ('Iraqi Civilian Deaths
Increase Dramatically After Invasion', October 28,
2004)
The Financial Times, on November 19, 2004 wrote:
"This survey technique has been criticised as flawed,
but the sampling method has been used by the same team
in Darfur in Sudan and in the eastern Congo and
produced credible results. An official at the World
Health Organisation said the Iraq study 'is very much
in the league that the other studies are in ... You
can't rubbish (the team) by saying they are
incompetent'". (Stephen Fidler, 'Lies, damned lies and
statistics,' Financial Times, November 19, 2004)
The Chronicle of Higher Education on January 27, 2005
wrote
"’Les has used, and consistently uses, the best
possible methodology,’ says Bradley A. Woodruff, a
medical epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention. Indeed, the United Nations and
the State Department have cited mortality numbers
compiled by Mr. Roberts on previous conflicts as fact
-- and have acted on those results. (...) Mr. Roberts
has studied mortality caused by war since 1992, having
done surveys in locations including Bosnia, Congo, and
Rwanda. His three surveys in Congo for the
International Rescue Committee, a nongovernmental
humanitarian organization, in which he used methods
akin to those of his Iraq study, received a great deal
of attention. 'Tony Blair and Colin Powell have quoted
those results time and time again without any question
as to the precision or validity,’ he says."
(Researchers Who Rushed Into Print a Study of Iraqi
Civilian Deaths Now Wonder Why It Was Ignored, by LILA
GUTERMAN, The Chronicle of Higher Education, January
27, 2005)
According to Les Roberts (Center for International
Emergency Disaster and Refugee Studies at Johns
Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, one of the
world’s top epidemiologists and lead author of the
Lancet report) there might be as many as 300,000 Iraqi
civilian deaths (Do Iraqi Civilian Casualties Matter?,
By Les Roberts, AlterNet, February 8, 2006)

The horror inflicted by our governments, with our
money and in our name, might be way far more
horrifying. Dr Gideon Polya recently wrote:
"AVOIDABLE MORTALITY (technically, excess mortality)
is the difference between the actual mortality in a
country and the mortality expected for a peaceful,
decently-run country with the same demographics (i.e.
with the same birth rate and the same population age
profile). Avoidable mortality is a fundamental
parameter to be considered in any sensible discussion
of human affairs – it is the bottom-line issue when
assessing the success or otherwise of societal,
regional and global policies. (...)

Ignoring mass mortality simply ensures its continuance
and denying past atrocities simply ensures their
repetition – history ignored yields history repeated.
Thus the actuality of the Jewish Holocaust (6 million
deaths) was not formally acknowledged by the Allies
until 30 months before the end of World War 2 in
Europe. This tardiness in reportage must surely have
contributed significantly to this atrocity.

However, TODAY Mainstream Media are comprehensively
ignoring the horrendous magnitude of the avoidable
post-invasion deaths in Occupied Iraq and Afghanistan
(presently totaling 2.3 million deaths) and the
avoidable deaths in the First World-dominated
non-European World (presently 14.8 million deaths each
year)." (Layperson’s guide to counting Iraq deaths, by
Dr Gideon Polya, MWC News Magazine, 6 April 2006)

Thursday, April 27, 2006

WHO IS CHARLES HILL (OF THE PROJECT FOR THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY)?

http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/story34.html

Inside the Iran-contra Cover-Up

"... When [George] Shultz returned to the State Department, he dictated a note to his aide, CHARLES HILL, who wrote down that Reagan's men were "rearranging the record." They were trying to protect the president through a "carefully thought out strategy" that would "blame it on Bud" McFarlane. As part of that strategy, virtually all of Reagan's top advisers, including Shultz, gave false and misleading testimony to Congress and prosecutors. Their accounts essentially blamed the illegalities on Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North and his bosses at the National Security Council, McFarlane and Poindexter. Pretty much everyone else -- at the CIA, Defense Department, the Vice President's Office and the White House -- claimed ignorance. Even though Oliver North testified in 1987 that he was the "fall guy" in this implausible scenario, the Democrats and much of the press corps still fell for it. There was a clicking of wine
glasses around Washington as the "men of zeal" cover story was enshrined as the official history of the Iran-contra affair. A painful Watergate-style impeachment battle had been averted. ..."
-----------------
http://www.pinknoiz.com/covert/icsummary.html

Iran-contra Investigation
Executive Summary

The key notes, taken by CHARLES HILL, Shultz's
executive assistant, were nearly verbatim, contemporaneous accounts of Shultz's meetings within the department and Shultz's reports to HILL on meetings the secretary attended elsewhere. The Hill notes and similarly detailed notes by Nicholas Platt, the State Department's executive secretary, provided the OIC with a detailed account of Shultz's knowledge of the Iran arms sales. The most revealing of these notes were not provided to any Iran/contra investigation until 1990 and 1991. The notes show contrary to his early testimony that he was not aware of details of the 1985 arms transfers, Shultz knew that the shipments were planned and that they were delivered. Also in conflict with his congressional testimony was evidence that Shultz was aware of the 1986 shipments.

Independent Counsel concluded that Shultz's early
testimony was incorrect, if not false, in significant respects, and misleading, if literally true, in others. When questioned about the discrepancies in 1992, Shultz did not dispute the accuracy of the Hill notes. He told OIC that he believed his testimony was accurate at the time and he insisted that if he had been provided with the notes earlier, he would have testified differently. Independent Counsel declined to prosecute because there was a reasonable doubt that Shultz's testimony was willfully false at the time it was delivered.

Independent Counsel concluded that Hill had willfully withheld relevant notes and prepared false testimony for Shultz in 1987. He declined to prosecute because
Hill's claim of authorization to limit the production of his notes and the joint responsibility of Shultz for the resulting misleading testimony, would at trial have raised a reasonable doubt, after Independent Counsel had declined to prosecute Shultz....
----------------
http://www.hoover.org/bios/hill.html

Charles Hill
Research Fellow

Expertise: International political affairs

Charles Hill, a career minister in the U.S. Foreign Service, is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. Hill was executive aide to former U.S. secretary of state George P. Shultz (1985–89) and served as special consultant on policy to the secretary-general of the United Nations from 1992 to 1996. He is also diplomat in residence and lecturer in International Studies at Yale University.

Among Hill's awards are the Superior Honor Award from the Department of State in 1973 and 1981; the Distinguished Honor Award in 1978; the Presidential Meritorious Service Award in 1986; the Presidential Distinguished Service Award in 1987 and 1989; and the Secretary of State's Medal in 1989. He was granted an honorary doctor of laws degree by Rowan University.

In 1983, Hill was appointed chief of staff of the State Department, following his serving as deputy assistant secretary for the Middle East.

His career took him to the Middle East in 1978, where he was deputy director of the Israel desk; in 1979 he became political counselor for the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv. In 1981, he was named director of Israel and Arab-Israeli affairs, and in 1982 he served as deputy assistant secretary for the Middle East.

Hill began his career in 1963 as a vice consul in Zurich, Switzerland. In 1964, he became a Chinese-language officer in Taichubg, Taiwan, and in 1966 was appointed as a political officer in Hong Kong. He was mission coordinator at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon in 1971–1973, and then in the State Department as China cultural exchange negotiator. He was involved in the 1974 Panama Canal negotiations,
then became a member of the policy planning staff as a speech writer for Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1975.

During 1970, he was a fellow at the Harvard University East Asia Research Center. He was a Clark fellow at Cornell University in 1989.

He received an A.B. degree from Brown University in 1957, a J.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1960, and an M.A. degree in American studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1961.

Hill has collaborated with former U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali on Egypt's Road to Jerusalem, a memoir of the Middle East peace negotiations, and Unvanquished, about U.S. relations with the U.N. in the post–cold war period, both published by Random House. Hill is the editor of the three-volume Papers of U.N. Secretary-Generalm Boutros-Ghali, published by Yale University Press.

(2004)
---------------
http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/09.010B.lemann.order.htm

The Next World Order
The Bush Administration may have a brand-new doctrine
of power.
by Nicholas Lemann
The New Yorker Magazine

"The outside experts on the Middle East who have the most credibility with the Administration seem to be Bernard Lewis, of Princeton, and Fouad Ajami, of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, both of whom see the Arab Middle East as a region in need of radical remediation. Lewis was invited to the White House in December to brief the senior foreign-policy staff. "One point he made is,
Look, in that part of the world, nothing matters more than resolute will and force," the senior official I had lunch with told me--in other words, the United States needn't proceed gingerly for fear of inflaming the "Arab street," as long as it is prepared to be strong. The senior official also recommended as interesting thinkers on the Middle East CHARLES HILL, of Yale, who in a recent essay declared, "Every regime of the Arab-Islamic world has proved a failure," and Reuel Marc Gerecht, of the American Enterprise Institute, who published an article in The Weekly Standard about the need for a change of regime in Iran and Syria. (Those goals, Gerecht told me when we spoke, could be accomplished through pressure short of an invasion.) ..."
----------
http://www.hoover.org/pubaffairs/newsletter/00fall/onair.html

Hoover on the Air

On August 1, Research Fellow CHARLES HILL was a guest on The World (BBC). He was the guest of the Austin Hill Show on KTKP-AM, Phoenix, Ariz. (Independent), on August 24 to discuss the readiness and morale of the
U.S. military. On August 28, he was the guest of WERC-AM Radio—Birmingham, Ala. (ABC, Wall Street Journal Radio, AM/FM Radio Network), and on the nationally syndicated Mancow Muller Show, which is based in Chicago, to talk about U.S. military readiness.
---------------
http://www.adelaideinstitute.org/newsletters/n196.htm

Project for the New American Century

William Kristol, Ken Adelman, Gary Bauer, Jeffrey Bell, William J. Bennett, Ellen Bork, Linda Chavez, Eliot Cohen, Midge Decter, Thomas Donnelly, Nicholas Eberstadt, Hillel Fradkin, Frank Gaffney, Jeffrey Gedmin, Reuel Marc Gerecht, CHARLES HILL, Bruce P. Jackson, Donald Kagan, Robert Kagan, John Lehman, Tod Lindberg, Rich Lowry, Clifford May, Joshua Muravchik, Martin Peretz, Richard Perle, Daniel Pipes, Norman Podhoretz, Stephen P. Rosen, Randy Scheunemann, Gary Schmitt, William Schneider, Jr., Marshall Wittmann, R. James Woolsey
----------------
http://www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=28939

March 30, 2005
Professors make voices heard on opinion pages
Faculty feels tension between academic, popular
writing
BY AMANDA RUGGERI
Staff Reporter

... Diplomat-in-Residence CHARLES HILL said he will never turn down an offer to write an op-ed. Sometimes, his habit of saying yes can be problematic, he said. Last summer, The Wall Street Journal asked him to submit an op-ed on the 9/11 Commission before the report had been released. He had to scramble to
find a way to look at the unreleased report.
"Even when a piece is apparently impossible to do, when I have had to give lectures or travel, I still do it," he said. ...
----------------
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=11231

From: Jim Sleeper
Dear John Fund,

You called me at home this morning, Saturday, March 4, seeking information or a comment on the enrollment of the former Talibani spin doctor Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi as a non-degree student at Yale. You told me, as you tell readers in this, your second column in a row on the subject, that you are shocked, shocked that no one in authority at Yale would say anything about it to you. When I asked if you'd tried CHARLES HILL, a neoconservative Diplomat in Residence there, a Vulcan on the Iraq War and a scourge of terrorism, or the historian John Gaddis, who supports Hill as his colleague in their “Grand Strategy” seminar for bright students drawn to the national-security state, you said that even they weren't talking.

What? Not even Hill, who, writing in your own Journal in 2004, blamed inadequate intelligence performance mainly on “a decline in the quality of personnel, brought about by pressures for diversity” that bypass “broad-based historical and area-studies…. gained at ‘elite’ colleges and universities”? Gosh, John, I
could almost feel the pain in your false ingenuous wonderment on the phone: Could it be that Yale, for which you have the highest regard, has something to hide here and that even its truth-tellers have been muzzled?...
--------------
Scott McLemee
Big Man on Campus

http://www.mclemee.com/id165.html
Newsday, 26 February 2006

THE MAN ON WHOM NOTHING WAS LOST: The Grand Strategy
of Charles Hill, by Molly Worthen. Houghton Mifflin, 354 pp.

On university campuses there is very often a professor who is also a legend. He (it is usually a man) is learned, but also worldly; he projects an aura of authority suggesting some deeper intimacy with real life. His courses are listed in history, literature or political science, but his real subject is himself. Each lecture feels like a rite of initiation. The bureaucracy must find a way of coping with students
who want to take all of their electives with him.

Charles Hill -- a former Foreign Service officer who served in important positions under Henry Kissinger and George Schultz - has for a few years now taught a class at Yale University called Grand Strategy. Young aspirants to the diplomatic corps flock to it. His disciples are transfigured by the experience and copy down his blackboard diagrams as keys to the secrets of world power. Molly Worthen, a recent Yale graduate, was one of Hill's junior illuminati, and her book The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost is an authorized biography of the great man.

But it is also a quest for the source of his greatness -- not to mention a meditation on the inner meaning (to her) of that quest. It is, in other words, both the reconstruction of an academic cult of personality and the most lasting of its symptoms. The author has some literary gifts, but they have not ripened; her prose is garrulous and repetitive, and she tends to mistake sententious comments (Hill's and her own) for profound thought. The result is not a book so much as it is an alumni-magazine profile gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Hill himself does not seem to be at fault. The word "modest" might not apply, but he does seem to understand that his career, while distinguished in its way, is of decidedly minor interest. His place in the history books will be as the source of raw material used in a footnote: Throughout his term as executive assistant to Schultz, Hill kept handwritten notebooks
running to more than 20,000 pages, some of which ended up as evidence in the Iran-Contra investigations.

Hill managed not to reveal some pertinent notes to investigators. (Worthen puts on a pro-forma display of brow-furrowing over his ethics in this matter. But she dutifully parrots the conservative line that executive privilege is now menaced by a "liberal media elite.")

The case of the missing notebooks is, perhaps, the most exciting moment in the entire book. Hill's life was that of a functionary who moved behind the scenes
-- analyzing Chinese newspapers from the mainland during the 1960s, for example, or writing the speeches through which Kissinger sought to convey to the world that he possessed a moral center.

Such work was challenging, no doubt, and amply rewarded with inside-the-Beltway status. It did not make for a happy home life. Hill comes across as a single-minded careerist who did not notice his wife's alcoholism until she mentioned it during the final days of their marriage. If not for the element of hero worship pervading the book, one might suspect an element of sarcasm in Worthen's title, which is borrowed from Henry James' injunction to be "one of the people on whom nothing was lost."

There is, in all of this, the substance of a good novella; but as a biography, it reads like the story of a Machiavelli who never got around to writing The Prince. Worthen insists (in the rapt tones of a true believer) that Hill's career has fitted him to be an excellent and life-transforming professor. In his lectures, she says, Hill transcends the limits of normal university teaching, where students are dissuaded from "reading the Western canon and practicing the art of sweeping judgment, but rather digging claustrophobic holes in some untold corner of the human experience, perhaps the history of the New York subway line number 9, or the changing role of laundresses in Jakarta."

Be that as it may, something is missing from Worthen's gale-force proclamations of wonder at the capacity of "Charlie" to bestride the world like a colossus. There is nothing resembling a substantial idea in the entire book. Worthen presents Hill as a neoconservative guru. But her portrait is that of a mind bearing less resemblance to the political philosopher Leo Strauss
than a walking edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.

Banalities pass as insights. "This is not to say," she writes at one point, "that Charlie does not fear for the fate of human character." (Gosh, big guy, we do appreciate your concern and will all try to do better.)

Even with such depths to plunge, the author never
forgets herself entirely. Or at all, really. The narrative flow is regularly interrupted by her musings on the difficulties of biographical research, the changing estimate of Charlie's character, and invocations of how awesome Grand Strategy is (so
awesome, in fact, that it need never be defined). She also indulges in a considerable amount of "my generation" babble: "We sit in coffee shops and complain about the doldrums of 'real jobs,' the stress of having to commit to a career that won't ever let out for the summer," etc.

This is not a biography, but a study in self-absorption by proxy. The publisher ought to be ashamed. The manuscript should have been left in a drawer, where it might embarrass the author 10 years from now, and in private.
--------------
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/product-description/0618574670/102-9860152-4065719

Excerpt: THE MAN ON WHOM NOTHING WAS LOST: The Grand
Strategy of Charles Hill, by Molly Worthen

"The genius of Charles Hill is his silence. In books
and in school we had encountered the far-off places and the Great Men whom he served: Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Israel; Ellsworth Bunker and Henry Kissinger, George Shultz and Boutros Boutros-Ghali. But he never mentioned them in class, and as artless freshmen we had yet to pick up on the gossip that the upperclassmen traded after his lectures. Most of us
were too young to remember the Iran-Contra affair, at the time preferring Saturday morning cartoons to Oliver North. We did not know that our professor"s notebooks helped to break open the investigation. Our ignorance was for the best. His
presence, his hold on the class, was enough to make us freeze in our seats. Filled at first with the happy murmur of weekend
gossip, the room snapped silent at nine o"clock when Professor Hill walked in. He wore a stone-colored suit, and he did not speak or look at us until he had taken his seat at the head of the table and pulled his yellow legal pad from his backpack. The
backpack, please note, was made of dignified brown leather and detracted only slightly from the overall gravity of his image.
He sat leaning close to the table, his back straight and motionless as a marble figure tipping imperceptibly from its column. During the week we spent studying the Romans, Professor Hill passed around a picture of the bust of Emperor Vespasian. He called it "The Roman Face." There was a resemblance between my instructor and the emperor"s ancient countenance, rough-hewn and furrowed, with wide, sad eyes that laid bare a life of hard decisions. Vespasian, too, had a strong mouth that rarely looked to speak, and then only to rapt attention. The emperor even had the same ears—medium-sized, protruding just a bit. Professor Hill claimed to have
never thought of the likeness...."
----------------------
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:hJKEVZ9qECcJ:www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp%3FAID%3D26347+%22charles+hill%22+AND+the+cia&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=3

September 24, 2004
For God, Country, Yale and the CIA

A number of Yale graduates have worked for the Office
of Strategic Services, the CIA's predecessor. They dominated the CIA's leadership throughout the Cold War period and continue to join the agency in large numbers, said Diplomat-in-Residence Charles Hill, who teaches Studies in Grand Strategy with professors John Gaddis and Paul Kennedy.

CIA recruiters visit other college campuses, but they seem to have a predilection for Yalies -- it could have something to do with "nostalgia for the 'Old Blue' mentality," Hill said, or it could be that Yalies are simply more attractive candidates than their Ivy League counterparts.

"People who go to Yale are people of high character," he said. "In intelligence agencies, you need people with character; they've got to be intrepid, you have to know that they're going to do the job."
--------------

http://www.namebase.org/main4/Robert-Charles-Hill.html
NameBase

HILL ROBERT CHARLES

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Kruger,H. The Great Heroin Coup. 1980 (113, 165)
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AT&T SEEKS TO SUPPRESS NSA PHONE TAP DOCUMENTS

"AT&T built a secret room in its San Francisco switching station that funnels Internet traffic data from AT&T WorldNet dialup customers and traffic from AT&T¹s massive internet backbone to the NSA..."
-------------
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70650-0.html

AT&T SEEKS TO HIDE SPY DOCS
By Ryan Singel
Wired
April 12, 2006

AT&T is seeking the return of technical documents
presented in a lawsuit that allegedly detail how the
telecom giant helped the government set up a massive
internet wiretap operation in its San
Francisco facilities.

In papers filed late Monday, AT&T argued that
confidential technical documents provided by an
ex-AT&T technician to the Electronic Frontier
Foundation shouldn¹t be used as evidence in the case
and should be returned.

The documents, which the EFF filed under a temporary
seal last Wednesday, purportedly detail how AT&T
diverts internet traffic to the
NSA via a secret room in San Francisco and allege that
such rooms exist in other AT&T switching centers.

The EFF filed the class-action lawsuit in the Federal
District Court in Northern California in January,
seeking damages from AT&T on behalf of AT&T customers
for alleged violation of state and federal laws.

Mark Klein, a former technician who worked for AT&T
for 22 years,
provided three technical documents, totaling 140
pages, to the EFF and
to The New York Times, which first reported last
December that the Bush administration was
eavesdropping on citizens¹ phone calls without
obtaining warrants.

Klein issued a detailed public statement last week,
saying he came forward because he believes the
government¹s extrajudicial spying
extended beyond wiretapping of phone calls between
Americans and a party with suspected ties to
terrorists, and included wholesale monitoring of the
nation¹s Internet communications.

AT&T built a secret room in its San Francisco
switching station that
funnels Internet traffic data from AT&T WorldNet
dialup customers and
traffic from AT&T¹s massive internet backbone to the
NSA, according to a statement from Klein....

The 9/11 Hijackers: Where Are They Today?

A former high-level intelligence official told me,
"Whatever trail was left was left deliberately--for
the F.B.I. to chase." New Yorker 10/1/01 by Seymour
Hersh

Tracking the 19 Hijackers - What are they up to now?
At least 9 of them survived 9/11

For more, see http://www.welfarestate.com/911/#15
...

NPR, Alfred P. Sloan & the Corporate Roots of American Fascism

NPR, National Public Radio, boasts daily that
itreceives funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- no excuses offered. Back in the day,
Sloan, chairman of General Motors, was known far and
wide as a homegrown fascist, a supporter of the
National Socialist Party to such an extent that he
covertly but actively collaborated in the
militarization of Germany and supported Hitler's war.
Trotting out the name A.P. Sloan, as NPR does, without
a peep of repudiation from listeners, is only possible
if the public is criminally complacent and has no clue
as to who is steering the ship.

- Alex Constantine
---
http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/sloan.html
Sloan - Facing the Corporate Roots of American Fascism

Alfred Pritchard Sloan, Jr. (1875-1966)

By Richard Sanders, Editor, Press for Conversion!

Sloan was a member, Advisory Council of the American
Liberty League.

Son of a coffee and tea importer, Alfred Sloan, became
America’s first great corporate celebrity. His
greatest contributions to his class included the
destruction of mass transit, the crushing of labour
strikes at du Pont's General Motors (GM), arming
Hitler before and during WWII and promoting President
Wilson’s slogan that “What’s good for General Motors
is good for the U.S.” (That’s GM president Charles
Wilson, 1941-1953).

Armed with an MIT electrical engineering degree in
1895, Sloan was a machine shop president in 1899. His
company merged with two others to form GM in 1918.
Sloan was vice-president and then president (1923) and
GM’s chairman (1937-1956). Under Sloan’s leadership,
GM systematically bought up and destroyed America’s
highly-efficient electric train, streetcar and tram
infrastructure, and literally burnt the vehicles.
Knowing the public preferred streetcars over
fume-belching buses, GM bought up America’s largest
bus operator (Omnibus) and largest bus manufacturer
(Yellow Coach). Manhattan was their symbolic starting
point. GM acquired controlling interest in its rail
system and then dismantled it (1926-1936). Bus
services were decreased and mass PR campaigns were
launched selling the notion that what people really
wanted was cars. Thus, Sloan “motorized” America for
GM.

Sloan unceasingly propagated the myth that
corporations are central to public happiness and
prosperity. This helped cover up the fact that
corporations will quickly sacrifice public interest in
their selfish drive towards greater profits. David
Farber, author of Sloan Rules: Alfred P. Sloan and the
Triumph of General Motors (2002) said:

"There’s a lot I don’t like about Mr. Sloan. His
steady opposition to making safer automobiles, his
dismissal of workers’ rights, his inability to see
Adolf Hitler as evil and dangerous..., and his general
disregard for social justice and the common good make
him a not very lovable figure. Those failings are
usually not weaknesses in a corporate manager, even as
they make Sloan less than a model of good citizenship.
But good citizenship has little to do with maximizing
corporate profits. Which makes it pretty obvious to me
that putting corporate leaders in charge of our public
good is ill-advised."

Farber also notes that GM destroyed Sloan’s files to
protect itself from lawsuits regarding antitrust
issues, the neglect of automobile safety and its
investments in Nazi Germany.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, established in 1934,
had assets worth over $1.3 billion in 2002.

GM is the world’s largest company. With operations in
104 countries and sales of $125 billion a year, GMs
revenues are the equivalent of the world’s 6th largest
country.

References:

Jill Rapaport and Scott Butek, General Motors and You:
An Appreciation of James Klein and Martha Olson's
"Taken for a Ride"
Google cache:
http://www.interactivist.net/transportation/ride.html

An interview with David Farber, author of Sloan Rules:
Alfred P. Sloan and the Triumph of General Motors,
2002.
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/238040in.html

Source: Press for Conversion! magazine, Issue # 53,
"Facing the Corporate Roots of American Fascism,"
March 2004. Published by the Coalition to Oppose the
Arms Trade.

Order a Copy: Order a hard copy of this 54-page issue
of Press for Conversion! on the fascist plot to
overthrow President F.D.Roosevelt and the corporate
leaders who planned and financed this failed coup.