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Below
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These news articles include revealing information on nuclear weapon
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Burks for PEERS and the WantToKnow.info Team




Nuking Iran: The Republican
Agenda?

June 6, 2007, Washington
Post


http://blog.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/2007/06/nuking_iran_the_republican_age_1.html

At the
Republican debate, almost all the candidates said that they would not
rule
out a nuclear attack on Iran as a means to prevent it from getting its
own
nuclear weapons. Only one [candidate] would say that attacking Iran --
indeed even threatening to nuke Iran -- is not the right strategy. "We
have to come to our senses about this issue of war and preemption," he
said. The audience applauded, but he didn't get much support from his
fellow candidates. Rep. Duncan Hunter of California was the starkest: "I
would authorize the use of tactical nuclear weapons if there was no other
way to preempt those particular centrifuges," he said. Former New York
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani ... added that "you can't rule out anything and
you
shouldn't take any option off the table." Former Virginia Gov. Jim
Gilmore
also [stated] "all options are on the table" with regard to Iranian
nuclear weapons. Said former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney: "I wouldn't
take any options off the table." After the debate, former Sen. Fred
Thompson of Tennessee, who did not particpate, added his name to the list
of candidates who would consider a preemptive attack against Iran.
Only Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, the "Dennis the Menace" of his
party,
said he opposed a nuclear strike on moral grounds and because he believed
Iran "has done no harm to us directly and is no threat to our national
security." The Iraq war and the war against terrorism are the
central battles of our time, these candidates say. They all profess their
faith in God and the United States, and speak of a moral struggle between
good and evil, between the United States and "radical Islam." Yet they
are
not willing to say that nuclear weapons have no place in modern
confrontations.

Note:
For what a top US general has to say about war manipulations, click here.




FBI Terror Watch List "Out of
Control"

June 13, 2007, ABC News


http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2007/06/fbi_terror_watc.html

A
terrorist watch list compiled by the FBI has apparently swelled to
include
more than half a million names. Privacy and civil liberties advocates say
the list is growing uncontrollably, threatening its usefulness in the war
on terror. The bureau says the number of names on its terrorist watch
list
is classified. A portion of the FBI's unclassified 2008 budget request
posted to the Department of Justice Web site, however, refers to "the
entire watch list of 509,000 names." A spokesman for the interagency
National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which maintains the government's
list of all suspected terrorists with links to international
organizations, said they had 465,000 names covering 350,000 individuals.
Many names are different versions of the same identity. In addition to
the
NCTC list, the FBI keeps a list of U.S. persons who are believed to be
domestic terrorists - abortion clinic bombers, for example, or
firebombing
environmental extremists, who have no known tie to an international
terrorist group. Combined, the NCTC and FBI compendia comprise the watch
list used by federal security screening personnel on the lookout for
terrorists. While the NCTC has made no secret of its terrorist tally, the
FBI has consistently declined to tell the public how many names are on
its
list. "It grows seemingly without control or limitation," said ACLU
senior
legislative counsel Tim Sparapani of the terrorism watch list.
Sparapani called the 509,000 figure "stunning. If we have 509,000
names on that list, the watch list is virtually useless," he told ABC
News. "You'll be capturing innocent individuals with no connection to
crime or terror." U.S. lawmakers and their spouses have been
detained because their names were on the watch list.


Diagnosis: Conflict of Interest


June 13, 2007, New York
Times


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/13/opinion/13carlat.html

The
revelation that the diabetes drug Avandia can potentially cause heart
disease is the latest in a string of pharmaceutical disappointments.
Vioxx
was pulled from the market in 2004 because it doubled the risks for heart
attacks and strokes. Eli Lilly recently paid $750 million to settle
lawsuits alleging that Zyprexa causes diabetes. Many have criticized the
Food and Drug Administration as being too lax about monitoring drug
safety. While those criticisms have merit, there is another culprit: the
transformation of continuing medical education into an enterprise for
drug
marketing. The chore of teaching doctors how to practice medicine
has been handed to the pharmaceutical industry. As a result, dangerous
side effects are rarely on the curriculum. Most states require
that doctors obtain a minimum number of credit hours of continuing
medical
education each year to maintain their medical licenses. Not so long ago,
most of these courses were produced and paid for by universities and
medical associations. But this has changed drastically over the past
decade. Drug-industry financing of continuing medical education has
nearly
quadrupled since 1998, from $302 million to $1.12 billion. Half of all
continuing medical education courses in the United States are now paid
for
by drug companies, up from a third a decade ago. Because pharmaceutical
companies now set much of the agenda for what doctors learn about drugs,
crucial information about potential drug dangers is played down, to the
detriment of patient care. For example, GlaxoSmithKline footed the bill
for dozens of educational courses intended to emphasize the benefits of
Avandia over other drugs.

Note:
For a concise, reliable overview of medical corruption, click here.

Fight Over Vaccine-Autism Link Hits Court


June 10, 2007, Washington
Post


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/09/AR2007060901344.html

For more
than a decade, families across the country have been warring with the
medical establishment over their claims that routine childhood vaccines
are responsible for the nation's apparent epidemic of autism. In an
extraordinary proceeding that begins tomorrow, the battle will move from
the ivory tower to the courts. Nearly 5,000 families will seek to
convince
a special "vaccine court" in Washington that the vaccines can cause
healthy
and outgoing children to withdraw into uncommunicative, autistic shells
--
even though a large body of evidence and expert opinion has found no
link.
The court has never heard a case of such magnitude. The shift from
laboratory to courtroom means the outcome will hinge not on scientific
standards of evidence but on a legal standard of plausibility. The
decision could not only change the lives of thousands of American
families
but also have a profound effect on the decisions of parents around the
world about whether to vaccinate their children. Advocates of the
vaccine
theory have argued that the increase in cases was triggered by a
mercury-based preservative in vaccines that, they say, is toxic to
children's brains. The law requires people claiming they were harmed by a
vaccine to bring the case in the special court first, but if they lose,
they can still file suit in civil courts. Scientific advocates for the
vaccine-autism theory ... say fears about damaging public health
programs have prompted scientists and the government to hide evidence of
a
problem. Many of the families believe that the medical establishment and
the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have conspired in a
massive coverup.

Note:
For a powerful report on the alleged link between autism and vaccines, click
here. For more
reliable news on this crucial issue, click here.

In Iraq's four-year looting frenzy, the allies
have become the vandals

June 8, 2007, The Guardian (one of
the U.K.'s leading newspapers)


http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/heritage/story/0,,2098275,00.html

Fly into
the American air base of Tallil outside Nasiriya in central Iraq and the
flight path is over the great ziggurat of Ur, reputedly the earliest city
on earth. Ur is safe within the base compound. But its walls are
pockmarked with wartime shrapnel and a blockhouse is being built over an
adjacent archaeological site. When the head of Iraq's supposedly
sovereign
board of antiquities and heritage, Abbas al-Hussaini, tried to inspect
the
site recently, the Americans refused him access to his own most important
monument. Under Saddam you were likely to be tortured and shot if you let
someone steal an antiquity; in today's Iraq you are likely to be tortured
and shot if you don't. The tragic fate of the national museum in Baghdad
in April 2003 was as if federal troops had invaded New York city, sacked
the police and told the criminal community that the Metropolitan was at
their disposal. The local tank commander was told specifically
not
to protect the museum for a full two weeks after the invasion. Even the
Nazis protected the Louvre. America [has converted]
Nebuchadnezzar's great city of Babylon into the hanging gardens of
Halliburton. In the process the 2,500-year-old brick pavement to
the Ishtar Gate was smashed by tanks and the gate itself damaged.
Babylon
is being rendered archaeologically barren. Outside the capital some
10,000
sites of incomparable importance to the history of western civilisation,
barely 20% yet excavated, are being looted as systematically as was the
museum in 2003. When [archeologists] tried to remove vulnerable carvings
from the ancient city of Umma to Baghdad, [they] found gangs of looters
already in place with bulldozers, dump trucks and AK47s.


I blame myself for our downfall in
Iraq

June 6, 2007, The Telegraph (one
of
the U.K.'s leading newspapers)


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/06/10/wirq110.xml

A former
American army torturer has laid bare the traumatic effects of American
interrogation techniques in Iraq - on their victims and on the
perpetrators themselves. Tony Lagouranis conducted mock executions,
forced
men and boys into agonising stress positions, kept suspects awake for
weeks
on end, used dogs to terrify detainees and subjected others to
hypothermia.
But he confesses that he was deeply scarred by the realisation that what
he
did has contributed to the downfall of American forces in Iraq. Mr
Lagouranis, 37, suffered nightmares and anxiety attacks on his return to
Chicago. Between January 2004 and January 2005, he tortured
suspects, most of whom he says turned out to be innocent. He says that he
realised he had entered a moral dungeon when he found himself reading a
Holocaust memoir, hoping to pick up torture tips from the Nazis.
"When I first got back I had a lot of anxiety. I had a personal
crisis because I felt I had done immoral things and I didn't see a way to
cope with that. I saw a psychologist. I had a lot to work through." He
says that helped prevent him becoming "a totally broken human being". Mr
Lagouranis has written a recently published book about his experiences,
Fear
Up Harsh, a term for intimidating a detainee by shouting at him. He
makes clear that torture has cost America its moral authority in Iraq by
detaining innocent people and treating them badly. He writes: "My
actions,
combined with the actions of the arresting infantry who left bruises on
their prisoners, and the actions of the officers who wanted to get
promotions, repeated in microcosm all over this country, had a cumulative
effect. I could blame Bush and Rumsfeld, but I would always have to also
blame myself."