Honduran newspaper discovers murder after 3 days

By Belen Fernandez |Pulse Media | February 27, 2010

A headline in this morning’s edition of the Honduran daily La Tribuna, fervent defender of last year’s coup d’état against President Mel Zelaya, announces the search for the “gang member” that killed the daughter of veteran union organizer and anti-coup resistance figure Pedro Brizuela. The murder of Claudia Larisa Brizuela Rodríguez, which took place on February 24 in the Céleo González neighborhood in the northern city of San Pedro Sula, had not prompted any prior coverage in the mainstream Honduran press despite the papers’ usual predilection for homicide photographs.

Honduran journalistic traditions had also been disrupted in July 2009 by the murder during a demonstration at the Tegucigalpa airport of anti-coup teenager Isis Obed Murillo, whose picture appeared in the daily La Prensa only after his blood had been removed via the Photoshop program. La Tribuna refrains from erasing the pool of blood surrounding Brizuela Rodríguez’ body on her living room floor, or from explaining how it is that members of the National Criminal Investigation Directorate (DNIC) are “hot on the trail” of the alleged gang member when the only identifying information provided by witnesses is that he is short.

During a conversation in San Pedro Sula last August, Pedro Brizuela dismissed his daughter’s concern regarding his potential martyrdom on behalf of the resistance and reasoned that he was already old, anyway. As it turns out, Brizuela Rodríguez’ concern was only slightly misplaced, and she was shot at age 36 upon answering the door at her home—a scene witnessed by her two sons, ages 2 and 8. La Tribuna concludes:

The femicide [of Brizuela Rodríguez] has caused consternation among civil and trade union organizations, due to her father’s decades-long involvement in these sorts of activities.”

El Heraldo had demonstrated similar consternation over popular activity in a July 31 article explaining that anti-coup Honduran teacher Roger Vallejo Soriano had “ended up with a head wound”—which promptly killed him—due to the fact that he had “abandoned his classroom in order to go out and protest in the streets.” Brizuela Rodríguez receives more lenient treatment at the hands of La Tribuna, and instead of being blamed for her own demise is cast as the victim of her father’s past, with any other blame for the crime absorbed by the term “femicide,” as gender-related targeting by gangs is less easy to pin on the current administration of Pepe Lobo.

Lobo, an impending beneficiary of the “greater engagement with the countries of the Western Hemisphere” promised by the U.S. State Department, will rendezvous in Guatemala with Hillary Clinton at the beginning of March. As for why Clinton’s Latin America tour includes both Guatemala and Costa Rica but not Honduras, this question was posed by an attendee at yesterday’s press briefing by Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs Arturo Valenzuela, who confirmed the geographical proximity between Central American nations:

QUESTION: And the flight time between Costa Rica and Guatemala and Honduras –

ANSWER: Yeah. Right. Right. Guatemala.

Valenzuela’s discourse does not become any less enigmatic as the briefing progresses, and he proclaims with the regard to the U.S. position on the recent Honduran crisis:

So we see the outcome in Honduras is a very successful case of standing for a very fundamental principle and that is that you cannot tolerate a coup d’état in a country. This sets a terrible precedent. And in that sense, we join the unanimity of the hemisphere in this regard. But at the same time, a solution had to be found to Honduras.”

As is clear from the lack of a U.S. response to the slew of politically-motivated murders that have occurred in the first month of Lobo’s presidential term, these are to be considered part of the Honduran solution and compatible with Clinton’s call for “principled pragmatism” in condemnation of human rights abuses.

Mainstream Media Questions Inaccuracies in 9/11 Story

The Washington Times publishes story questioning official account.

By Tim King* | Salem-News.com | February 24, 2010

The mainstream press is showing interest in a taboo, however glaring subject; the inconsistencies in the Bush White House 9/11 account.

As The Washington Post reports today, “A lingering technical question about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks still haunts some, and it has political implications: How did 200,000 tons of steel disintegrate and drop in 11 seconds? A thousand architects and engineers want to know, and are calling on Congress to order a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7 at the World Trade Center.”

The problems with the official federal stories are endless and according to some of the world’s top minds, the suggested account is impossible^[1].

When we first began to write about these seemingly pressing questions, our Web Designer Matt Lintz caught the U.S. Air Force attempting to hack into Salem-News.com^[2].

One person who has never let the matter fade away is Richard Gage. He’s a San Francisco architect and founder of the nonprofit Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

Gage told The Washington Times, “In order to bring down this kind of mass in such a short period of time, the material must have been artificially, exploded outwards.”

The federal government wants you to believe that fires brought the buildings to the ground, yet in all recorded history, no fire has ever toppled a skyscraper. They burn to the framework but they don’t fall down.
Even if it was possible, the World Trade Towers were the least likely candidates. The steel core design of these buildings would not have come down, even if the building collapsed.

Even when you get past that, perhaps finding ways to justify the impossible “official” circumstances, how on earth could any logical explanation account for Building 7?

This is curious, I would suggest that half of all living Americans still don’t realize that a third building also came down that day, and it wasn’t hit by an airplane. But it did contain a lot of records that certain members of the financial industry didn’t miss. Then there are the billions of dollars in missing gold evacuated just before Building 7 pancaked to the ground.

The words of Gage are reflected all over the nation in universities and engineering firms. The Trade Tower buildings were specifically designed to withstand the impact of a jet liner, specifically. Jet fuel is similar to diesel and it doesn’t burn very hot. Firefighters, talking on radios, talked about how the aircraft crash fire in one building were going to easily be extinguisher by a few firefighters.

One of our writers, Jeff Gates, suggested that the only country that benefited from the ensuing wars is Israel.

“For instance, a skilled game theorist could foresee that, in response to a 911-type mass murder, “the mark” (the U.S.) would deploy its military to avenge that attack. With phony intelligence fixed around a preset goal, a game theory algorithm could anticipate that those forces might well be redirected to invade Iraq-not to avenge 911 but to pursue the expansionist goals of Greater Israel^[3].

Enforcing that thought, our writer Maidhc Ó Cathail wrote, “The day after 9/11, Benjamin Netanyahu let slip that the deaths of almost 3,000 Americans was ‘very good’ for Israel. In particular, the mass murder was very good for an emerging sector of the Israeli economy. In Laboratory for a Fortressed World, Naomi Klein detailed the post-9/11 “explosion of Israel’s homeland security sector.”^[4]

Another Salem-News.com writer, Dr. Alan Sabrosky, wrote about the connection between 9/11 and Israel in the article, Treason, Betrayal and Deceit: The Road to 9/11 and Beyond, “Second, only two intelligence agencies had the expertise, assets, access and political protection to execute 9/11 in the air and on the ground: our CIA and Israel’s Mossad. Only one had the incentive, using the ‘who benefits’ principle: Mossad.”^[5]

The answers remain tangled up. Many Americans believe questioning the government over this is unpatriotic, then they turn around and burn effigies of Obama at tea bagger parties. I say it is highly unpatriotic and even disingenuous, to not question facts about the integrity of this nation.

I won’t even start on Shanksville and the Pentagon; those stories are packed with more holes and in your face inconsistencies than there is time for in this report, but I have written about the Pentagon in particular, at great length^[6].

The tragedy of September 11th 2001 is so far reaching that we could never truly describe it. The event was the reasoning to launch two very costly, ongoing wars. The very notion of Arab terrorists selecting the day that is synonymous with emergency response in the U.S. is as hard to believe as the “terrorists” passports recovered so conveniently on the sidewalks in New York that day.

The Washington Times cites how Gage, a member of the American Institute of Architects, managed to persuade more than a thousand of his peers to sign a new petition requesting a formal inquiry.

“The official Federal Emergency Management [Agency] and National Institute of Standards and Technology reports provide insufficient, contradictory and fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers’ destruction. We are therefore calling for a grand jury investigation of NIST officials.”

Gage says technical issues surrounding the collapse of the towers have prompted years of debate, rebuttal and ridicule.

The article cites how he is particularly disturbed by the fall of the 47-story skyscraper, Building 7. This engineer says, like the other two buildings, tower 7 fell in “pure free-fall acceleration.”

He also talked about how more than a hundred first-responders observed flashes and explosions during the fall of the towers.

Even more disturbing evidence Gage says, are “multi-ton steel sections ejected laterally 600 ft. at 60 mph”. He also talked about the “mid-air pulverization of 90,000 tons of concrete & metal decking.”

Firefighters and Trade Tower employees en mass reported explosions before the buildings came down. They also talked about building closures in the weeks preceding 9/11, and men carrying large amounts of equipment into the elevator shafts.

Most experts agree that the buildings could only have come down the way they did if they were imploded. Experts who perform this type of work, common in places like Las Vegas, at least before the nation’s economic downturn, place the main explosives in the elevator shafts, but also in many other strategic locations in a building’s structure.

If you watch the World Trade Towers fall in slow motion, it is easy to observe what appear to be a series of planned explosions, running essentially the length of each building.

Gage says evidence of “advanced explosive nano-thermitic composite material” was found in the World Trade Center dust. Of course Rudy Gulliani, mayor of New York at the time, had all of the building evidence shipped away from the state almost immediately.

There is a long list of federal investigators who say they were not allowed to do their jobs or complete the investigation. Tie this to the revelations in 9/11 Commissioner John Farmer’s book: “The Ground Truth: The Story Behind America’s Defense on 9/11″, where the author builds the inescapably convincing case that the official version is almost entirely untrue, according to our writer Gordon Duff, and you just might be lifting a corner of the dirtiest rug that ever was used to suppress truth^[7].

Gage says the group’s petition at ae911truth.org is already on its way to members of Congress.

He Told The Washington Times, “Government officials will be notified that ‘Misprision of Treason,’ U.S. Code 18 (Sec. 2382), is a serious federal offense, which requires those with evidence of treason to act.”

“The implications are enormous and may have profound impact on the forthcoming Khalid Shaikh Mohammed trial.”

For me, the biggest story here is that a mainstream member of the press published this article, I am amazed and encouraged. It is hard to suggest that we have perhaps been had in the biggest and worst way possible, but honesty is the only thing that matters.

Israeli Espionage – Part 1 of 4

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEOecRtBU7U

Israeli Espionage – Part 2 of 4

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o17SSuuZDkA

Israeli Espionage – Part 3 of 4

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VclAeKYYvBc

Israeli Espionage – Part 4 of 4

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVRsmodmCTE

Also, this video from CoreofCorruption.com which was released just over a year ago, details the information regarding four alleged “art students” who had free access to the Trade Towers, including construction passes, in the immediate weeks preceding 9/11:

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dA9MvV-SrCo

References:

[1] Apr-07-2006 : Huge Contradictions in Official Theories on 9/11 Crash at Pentagon – Tim King Salem-News.com

[2] Apr-16-2006: U.S. Air Force Hackers Caught in Their Tracks by Salem-News.com – Tim King Salem-News.com

[3]Oct-20-2009: How Israel Wages Game Theory Warfare – Jeff Gates Salem-News.com

[4] Jan-20-2010: The Merchants of Fear: Israel’s Profiting from Homeland Insecurity – Maidhc Ó Cathail Sabbah.biz

[5] Sep-10-2009: Treason, Betrayal and Deceit: The Road to 9/11 and Beyond – Alan Sabrosky Sabbah.biz

[6] Mar-21-2006: What Really Hit The Pentagon? – Tim King Salem-News.com

[7] Sep-11-2009: The 9/11 Commission Rejects own Report as Based on Government Lies – Gordon Duff Salem-News.com

* Tim King is a former U.S. Marine with twenty years of experience on the west coast as a television news producer, photojournalist, reporter and assignment editor. In addition to his role as a war correspondent, this Los Angeles native serves as Salem-News.com’s Executive News Editor. Tim spent the winter of 2006/07 covering the war in Afghanistan, and he was in Iraq over the summer of 2008, reporting from the war while embedded with both the U.S. Army and the Marines. Tim holds numerous awards for reporting, photography, writing and editing, including the Oregon AP Award for Spot News Photographer of the Year (2004), first place Electronic Media Award in Spot News, Las Vegas, (1998), Oregon AP Cooperation Award (1991); and several others including the 2005 Red Cross Good Neighborhood Award for reporting. Serving the community in very real terms, Salem-News.com is the nation’s only truly independent high traffic news Website. You can send Tim an email at this address: newsroom@salem-news.com

Source: Salem-news.com

A Trip to America’s Most Toxic Place

Inside Hanford

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR | October 17, 2008 | Richland, Washington

The outback of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in eastern Washington State is called the T-Farm. It’s a rolling expanse of high desert sloping toward the last untamed reaches of the Columbia River. The “T” stands for tanks—huge single-hulled containers buried some fifty feet beneath basalt volcanic rock and sand holding, the lethal detritus of Hanford’s fifty-year run as the nation’s H-bomb factory.

Those tanks had an expected lifespan of thirty-five years; the radioactive gumbo inside them has a half-life of 250,000 years. Dozens of those tanks have now started to corrode and leak, releasing the most toxic material on earth—plutonium and uranium-contaminated sludge and liquid—on an inexorable path toward the Columbia River, the world’s most productive salmon fishery and the source of irrigation water for the farms and orchards of the Inland Empire, centered on Spokane in eastern Washington.

Internal documents from the Department of Energy and various private contractors working at Hanford reveal that at least one million gallons of radioactive sludge have already leaked out of at least sixty-seven different tanks. Those tanks and others continue to leak and, according to these sources, the leaks are getting much larger.

One internal report shows the results from a borehole drilled into the ground between two of Hanford’s largest tanks. Using gamma spectrometry, geologists detected a fifty-fold increase in contamination between 1996 and 2002. The leak from those tanks, and perhaps an underground pipeline, was described as “insignificant” a decade ago. Six years later that radioactive dribble had swelled up into a “continuous plume” of highly radioactive Cesium-137.

Obviously, there’s been a major radioactive breach from those tanks, but to date the Department of Energy has refused to publicly report the incident. Even though it was reported by their own geologists.

A few hundred yards away, a tank called TY-102, the third largest tank at Hanford, is also leaking. Radioactive water is draining out of this single-hulled container and a broken subsurface pipe into what geologists call the “vadose zone,” the stratum of subsurface soil just above the water table. In an internal 1998 report, the Grand Junction Office of the DOE detected significant contamination forty-two to fifty-two feet below the surface, and concluded in a memo to Hanford managers that the “high levels of gamma radiation” came from “a subsurface source” of Cesium-137, which likely resulted from leakage from tank TY-102.”

This alarming report was swiftly buried by Hanford officials. So, too, was the evidence of leakage at tanks TY-103 and TY-106. Instead, the DOE publicly declared that portion of the tank farm to be “controlled, clean and stable.”

No surprises here. The long-standing strategy of the DOE has been to conceal any evidence of radioactive leaking at Hanford, a policy that was excoriated in a 1980 internal review by the department’s Inspector General, which concluded that “Hanford’s existing waste management policies and practices have themselves sufficed to keep publicity about possible tank leaks to a minimum.”

Needless to say, the Reagan years didn’t augur a new forthrightness from the people who run Hanford. Seven years and several congressional hearings after the Inspector General’s report was released, bureaucratic cover-up and public denial were still the DOE’s operational reflex to any disturbing data bubbling up out of Hanford’s boreholes. By 1987, Hanford officials had learned an important lesson in the art of concealment: The easiest way to avoid bad press and public hostility is to simply stop monitoring sites that seemed the most likely to produce unpleasant information.

It is now clear that the tanks began leaking as early as 1956, only a few years after the Atomic Energy Commission began pumping the poisonous sludge into the giant subterranean containers. It is also clear that the federal government covered up evidence of those leaks since the moment it learned of them.

How many tanks are leaking? How far has the contamination spread? The DOE isn’t talking. It isn’t even looking for answers. But geologists estimated that the faster migrating contaminants, such as uranium, will move from the groundwater beneath Hanford’s central plateau to the Columbia in something like twenty-five years. That means that the first traces of radiated water could have started seeping into the Columbia in 2001.

This reckless strategy persists. In a document called “Official Characterization Plan of Hanford”—essentially a kind of 3-D map of contamination at the site—the DOE chose not to include Cobalt-60, a highly radioactive material that is present at deep levels across the tank farm. In addition, the Hanford plan fails to mention the fact that its own surveys have shown large amounts of Cesium-137 and Cobalt-60 forming radioactive pools in the geological stratum, called the plio-pleistocene unit, the last barrier between Hanford’s soils and water table.

If the DOE remains locked onto this course it will never acknowledge or even investigate the potentially lethal flow of radioactivity toward the great river of the West. That’s because the managers of Hanford say they will only research potential leaks if they detect a level of contamination several times higher than that ever recorded at Hanford—a standard clearly designed to shield them from ever having to pursue any subsurface leak investigation or publicly admit the existence of such leaks.

To help Hanford’s managers avoid ever discovering such embarrassing leaks, the site plan calls for them to drill the penetrometer holes, through which contamination is measured, only to a depth of forty feet—or two feet above the bottom of the tanks, guaranteeing that they will avoid picking up any radioactive traces from the region of the most dangerous contamination.

There’s a reason the Hanford managers want the public to believe that most of the contamination at the site is limited to the surface terrain. Theoretically, the topsoil can be scooped up and, with large government contracts, transferred to a more secure site or zapped into a glass-like substance through the big vitrification center now under construction. There’s no way to de-contaminate groundwater or the Columbia River. Their only hope for containment is to contain the issue politically by plumbing the leaks from whistleblowers.

There’s no question that the subsurface leakage is serious, extensive, and dangerous. The internal survey of Hanford by the Grand Junction Office detected high levels of C-137 deeper than 100 feet below the surface—and sixty feet deeper than the current plan calls for probing. That report concluded that both C-137 and CO-60 had “reached groundwater in this area of the tank farm.”

Consider this. C-137 is a slow traveling contaminant. How far have faster moving radioactive materials, such as uranium, spread? No one knows. No one is even looking.

The DOE and Hanford’s contractors want to close down the C Quadrant of the tank farm and declare it cleaned up, even though more than 10 percent of the waste at that site remains in tanks with documented leaks. There is mounting evidence that a plume of Tritium-contaminated sludge has recently penetrated the groundwater there as well.

John Brodeur is one of the nation’s top environmental engineers and a world-class geologist. In 1997, after a whistleblower at Hanford disclosed evidence that the groundwater beneath the central plateau had been contaminated by plumes of radioactivity, Hazel O’Leary commissioned Brodeur to investigate how far the contamination had spread. It proved to be a nearly impossible assignment since the DOE and its contractors had taken extreme measures to conceal the data or avoid collecting it entirely.

A decade later, Brodeur has once again been asked to assess the situation at one of the most contaminated sites on earth, this time for the environmental group Heart of the Northwest. His conclusions are disturbing.

“There remains much that we don’t know about the subsurface contamination plumes at Hanford,” says John Brodeur. “The only way to solve this dilemma is to identify what we don’t know up front and get it out on the table for discussion. This is difficult to do in the chilling work environment where bad data are commonplace, lies of omission are standard practice and people lose their jobs because they disagreed with some of the long-held institutional myths at Hanford.”

This essay is adapted from a chapter in Born Under a Bad Sky: Notes from the Dark Side of the Earth (CounterPunch/AK Press).

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest books, Born Under a Bad Sky and Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland (co-edited with Joshua Frank) are just out from AK Press. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net.

Source

Michael Heart: WE WILL NOT GO DOWN (Song for Gaza)

Message from Michael

Dear friends,

I have been overwhelmed by the warmth and the friendship you have all given me in response to my song for Gaza, “We Will Not Go Down”. I am doing my best to go through your numerous messages, emails and comments, and ask you to kindly bear with me until I am able to do so. Please forgive me if I am not able to respond to each and everyone of you; but please also know that I really appreciate your messages.

My original intention to donate proceeds from the sale of the MP3 to charity has been complicated by technical matters; therefore, I have decided to make the song available free of charge (for personal, individual use only – all rights reserved). I would like to request that after downloading the song from this page, you kindly donate directly to a charity or an organization dedicated to alleviate the suffering of the Palestinian people. Worthy of note is UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East), which has been helping Palestinian refugees since their dispossession in 1949. Please click here to donate through them: http://www.un.org/unrwa/

Thank you for your continued encouragement of my work as a musician, for your purchases of my CD (available here), and for spreading the song, the video and the message as you have been doing. I am grateful for every demonstration of support I have received from you, and for every thought and prayer that has gone to the people of Gaza.

Sincerely,

Michael Heart

US soldiers kill Iraqi tribal chief’s son

Dawn Media | February 27, 2010

AQUBA: US soldiers killed an Iraqi tribal chief’s son and wounded his wife in what the Americans on Saturday called a tragic accident, although local accounts of the incident differed.

US troops were travelling through the district of Kanaan, northeast of Baghdad, late on Thursday when Zhaheri tribe chief Thaher Zaihud al-Zhaheri’s son, Ahmed, walked outside the family’s front door and was shot dead, the tribal leader said.

Further gunfire wounded Zhaheri’s wife in the leg.

According to the US military, American soldiers were conducting a reconnaissance patrol ahead of a combined operation with Iraqi security forces when the “tragic accident” occurred.

“Villagers responded to what they thought were intruders and began firing in the darkness, which caused other residents to come out of their homes and also fire their rifles,” a statement said.

“Thinking they were under attack, the US soldiers returned fire to protect themselves. Regrettably, as a result of this gunfire exchange, a young man was killed and a woman was wounded.”

The statement said an investigation had been launched.

According to Zhaheri, however, there was no shooting prior to the family hearing a noise near their home and they thought there might be thieves in their village, Saisabanah.

“Ahmed went outside and when he opened the door and walked outside, the Americans shot and killed him,” he told AFP.

“They continued shooting at our house and one bullet hit my wife’s leg.” Zhaheri’s account of the incident was repeated by an Iraqi military officer in Diyala’s provincial security operations centre.

Saisabanah is a village of around 10 houses, and families there are known to have fought US forces since the 2003 invasion.

Zhaheri’s wife Sabiha Nahath Saud, 56, was in stable condition, according to Ahmed Alwan, a doctor at the main hospital in Baquba, Diyala’s provincial capital.