Cluck of a find: Chicken filled with cocaine

• STERLING, Va. - A close inspection by Customs and Border Protection officers at Dulles International Airport turned up something unexpected. Inside a fully-cooked chicken they found cocaine with an estimated street value of $4,300.
• The 60.4 grams (2.3 ounces) of coke was found inside two small, clear plastic bags inside the chicken’s cavity.

CIA Officer Robert Steele Says what is Wrong with the US Military/Intelligence Community, Banksters and the Illegal Drug Trade.

• i agree with him on the several points, but hear some red flags in his speech and wonder if his inclusion on a site that has honest ties to the US military (this is hosted on the First Earth Battalion page) makes him credible in all his “change the system” glory. For example on one point, i think the whole “banksters problem” is legit, but simplistic, and in no way encapsulates ALL the control systems vying for top dog status that in turn makes the world go ‘round in very violent ways. This omission can be telling of his true agenda. Steele might be a disinfo agent in the same sense that makes Earth Battalion ideals seem embraceable by left communities… stir in some nice new age beliefs but the rub is to still let Uncle Sam’s Army run the show…that’s not change I can believe in. -Ledger.

Big hat tip to Uncertain Times.

poortaste:

sunsmudge:

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee could vote as soon as this Thursday, November 5 on an amendment that will legally prevent some of the government’s top advisers from even discussing the idea of legalizing or decriminalizing drugs as a solution to the failed “war on drugs.”

Yes, you read that right. The Senate just might censor its own policy advisers from giving science-based advice.

Please take a second to click through and read this, and then take action against it. Whether you support cannabis legalization or not, it is important to stop our lawmakers from censoring common sense (scientific evidence) from entering the discussion.

• The United Nations cannot account for tens of millions of dollars provided to the troubled Afghan election commission, according to two confidential U.N. audits and interviews with current and former senior diplomats. (Read both [1] audits [2].)
• As Afghanistan prepares for a second round of national voting, the documents and interviews paint the fullest picture to date of the finances of the election commission, which has been accused of facilitating election fraud and operating ghost polling places. The new disclosures also deepen the questions about the U.N.’s oversight of money provided by the United States and other nations to ensure a fair election in Afghanistan.
• “Everybody kept sending money” to the elections commission, said Peter Galbraith, the former deputy chief of the U.N. mission in Afghanistan. “Nobody put the brakes on. U.S. taxpayers spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a fraudulent election.” Galbraith, a deputy to the senior U.N. official in Afghanistan, was fired last month after protesting fraud in the elections.

(Equally important is the connection between Afghan President Karzai’s brother whose opium trading power, backed by CIA dollars, created thousands of fake ballots. More here.)

thedaytheytriedtokillme:

Brother of Afghan Leader Is Said to Be on C.I.A. Payroll

KABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.

The ties to Mr. Karzai have created deep divisions within the Obama administration. The critics say the ties complicate America’s increasingly tense relationship with President Hamid Karzai, who has struggled to build sustained popularity among Afghans and has long been portrayed by the Taliban as an American puppet. The C.I.A.’s practices also suggest that the United States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the lucrative Afghan drug trade, a major source of revenue for the Taliban.

More broadly, some American officials argue that the reliance on Ahmed Wali Karzai, the most powerful figure in a large area of southern Afghanistan where the Taliban insurgency is strongest, undermines the American push to develop an effective central government that can maintain law and order and eventually allow the United States to withdraw.

Other Western officials pointed to evidence that Ahmed Wali Karzai orchestrated the manufacture of hundreds of thousands of phony ballots for his brother’s re-election effort in August. He is also believed to have been responsible for setting up dozens of so-called ghost polling stations — existing only on paper — that were used to manufacture tens of thousands of phony ballots.

• Dr. Diane Harper, lead researcher in the development of two human papilloma virus vaccines, Gardasil and Cervarix, said the controversial drugs will do little to reduce cervical cancer rates and, even though they’re being recommended for girls as young as nine, there have been no efficacy trials in children under the age of 15.
• Dr. Harper, director of the Gynecologic Cancer Prevention Research Group at the University of Missouri, made these remarks during an address at the 4th International Public Conference on Vaccination which took place in Reston, Virginia on Oct. 2-4. Although her talk was intended to promote the vaccine, participants said they came away convinced the vaccine should not be received.
• “I came away from the talk with the perception that the risk of adverse side effects is so much greater than the risk of cervical cancer, I couldn’t help but question why we need the vaccine at all,” said Joan Robinson, Assistant Editor at the Population Research Institute.
• Dr. Harper began her remarks by explaining that 70 percent of all HPV infections resolve themselves without treatment within a year. Within two years, the number climbs to 90 percent. Of the remaining 10 percent of HPV infections, only half will develop into cervical cancer, which leaves little need for the vaccine.
• She went on to surprise the audience by stating that the incidence of cervical cancer in the U.S. is already so low that “even if we get the vaccine and continue PAP screening, we will not lower the rate of cervical cancer in the US.”
• There will be no decrease in cervical cancer until at least 70 percent of the population is vaccinated, and even then, the decrease will be minimal.
• Apparently, conventional treatment and preventative measures are already cutting the cervical cancer rate by four percent a year. At this rate, in 60 years, there will be a 91.4 percent decline just with current treatment. Even if 70 percent of women get the shot and required boosters over the same time period, which is highly unlikely, Harper says Gardasil still could not claim to do as much as traditional care is already doing.

• Amid rapidly deteriorating security conditions in Pakistan, cultural activity has been one of the worst affected aspects of life. The increasing threat of attacks on musical and theatrical performances and other cultural events have made the authorities wary of gatherings that could provide terrorists with attractive targets.
• Recently, the shrines of locally revered Sufi mystic saints – where music and dancing are common occurrences – have come under threat following a series of attacks on places used for spiritual practices not tolerated by orthodox sects. The most notable of these was the bombing of the tomb of Rehman Baba, a popular Pashtun poet.
• Earlier this summer, a weekly ritual that has taken place for several hundred years at the shrine of a Sufi saint in Lahore was abruptly discontinued due to bomb threats. In an unprecedented move, the police clamped down on the procession, causing a scuffle to break out as the saint’s adherents resisted. The shrine, dedicated to the highly revered Baba Shah Jamal, who lived in the city in the 16th-17th century, is famous for this ritual, which is usually attended by thousands of people. Over the years, the procession, centred on the hypnotic drum-beat of a dhol and dancing mystics and dervishes, has developed a reputation as a den of hashish-smoking and debauchery.
• The popularity of shrine culture in Muslim societies is, strangely, responsible for the rise of the Islamic orthodoxy that now threatens its very existence. Contrary to popular belief, fundamentalist sects such as Wahhabism sprang up as a violent reaction to a similar kind of shrine culture which had become prominent in the Islamic tradition of the Arabian peninsula. Just as Wahhabism is a relatively recent addition to Islamic culture in general, its arrival in Pakistan dates back only 20 years or so. “Wahhabism doesn’t organically exist in these parts,” says Qalander Bux Memon, a professor of political science and regular attendee of Shah Kamal, “it has been imported from Saudi Arabia, and is officially upheld by oil money, due to geopolitical interests”.
• The culture of shrine visitation predates Islam in south Asia. The Sufi saints who have inspired cult followings were radical poets, social critics, and reformers who travelled to areas such as the Punjab through Persia, often on foot. Their message was simply one of peace, love, tolerance, and of introspection dedicated to exploring the divine within the boundaries of human experience.

2009 UN World Drug report - The Big Picture

• The 2009 United Nations World Drug report, released earlier this year, notes that 2009 marks “the end of the first century of drug control (it all started in Shanghai in 1909)”, and that the illicit drug market worldwide has now become a $320 billion-per-year industry. As drug-related violence in Mexico appears to continue unabated, and crackdowns in Afghanistan are being made against its massive opium crops, new efforts are also being made worldwide in methods of enforcement and treatment of recovering addicts. Collected here are a handful of recent images from the rough world of illegal drugs across the globe. (37 photos total)

buffleheadcabin:

The flow of opiates from Afghanistan to the world’s drug markets.
Read the article: World failing to dent heroin trade, U.N. warns
Also the BBC article: Afghan opium fuels ‘global chaos’
Factoid: The report confirmed an estimate that $400 million in drug profits goes to the Taliban. Just one of the reasons that they are fighting so well.

• from introduction: Recently I published two articles pointing to suggestive similarities between the recurring deep events in recent American history – those events which, because of their intelligence aspects, are ignored, misrepresented, or covered up in the American media. The first article pointed to overall similarities in many deep events since World War II. The second pointed to surprising points of comparison in the two deep events which were followed shortly by major U.S. wars: the John F. Kennedy assassination and 9/11. In the background of all these events, I suggested, was recurring evidence of the milieu “combining intelligence officials with elements from the drug-trafficking underworld.”
• In this essay I shall first attempt to lay out the complex geography or network of that milieu, which I call the global drug connection, and its connections to what has been called an “alternative” or “shadow” CIA. I shall then show how this network, of banks, financial agents of influence, and the alternative CIA, contributed to the infrastructure of the Kennedy assassination and a series of other, superficially unrelated, major deep events.
• In this narrative, the names of individuals, their institutions, and their connections are relatively unimportant. What matters is to see that such a milieu existed; that it was on-going, well-connected, and protected; and that, with increasing independence from governmental restraint, it played a role in major deep events in the last half century.
• This of course strengthens the important hypothesis to be investigated, that this on-going milieu may also have contributed to the disaster of 9/11.

• Vanishing of the Bees, which will be released in Britain next month, claims the cause is the use of a new generation of pesticides that weakens the bees and makes them more susceptible to other diseases.
• The problem first appeared in America in the winter of 2004, when many beekeepers across the country found that their bees had suddenly vanished, leaving behind empty hives. Since then scientists have failed to find a single cause for it.
• The film goes on to suggest that neonicotinoid pesticides, some of them made by Bayer, one of the world’s biggest chemical companies, may be behind the disappearances.
• The pesticides include the widely-used imidacloprid (marketed under the trade name Gaucho), which has been banned in France following pressure from beekeepers. It is still in use in Britain, the US and elsewhere.
• Neonicotinoids are systemic compounds, which means they are applied to seeds rather than sprayed on to growing plants. They enter into the plants themselves and affect the insect pests that consume them.
• In theory, insects that are not pests should not be affected. But Vanishing of the Bees, made by the independent filmmakers George Langworthy and Maryam Henein, suggests that long-term, low-level exposure to these compounds may be having a sub-lethal but debilitating effect on honey bees.

• MONTERREY, Mexico — Soldiers raiding a drug gang safehouse in northern Mexico found money-stuffed envelopes earmarked for various police forces and one marked for “press,” authorities said Tuesday.
• Four people were arrested and $5 million in U.S. and Mexican currency was seized during the raid Monday in the industrial city of Monterrey, according to an army statement. Soldiers, acting on an anonymous tip, also seized drugs, money counting machines, cell phones and five vehicles.
• Monterrey and the surrounding state of Nuevo Leon, which borders Texas, have been a focus of the federal government’s crackdown on police corruption.

• For the past eight years, his daughters say, he’d been working with a strain of bacteria called yersinia pestis, trying to develop a stronger vaccine for the plague, once the world’s worst health scourge.
• The weakened strain he was using, however, isn’t supposed to make healthy people sick.
• And that is the big mystery now for investigators with the Centers for Disease Control and the state and city public health departments who’ve been looking for clues at the U. of C. labs.
• Brooke and Leigh Casadaban say they’re not satisfied with the answers they’ve been given so far.
• How did their father, who had flu-like symptoms, enter the hospital a week ago Sunday morning and die 12 hours later with no one suspecting that it could be related to the plague?
• Leigh, who is following in her father’s footsteps, now attends her father’s alma mater Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says it may be up to her to solve this.
• “I plan to go to the lab to read his papers and notes and go and really understand what he was trying to do,” said Leigh Casadaban.
• Leigh and Brooke say they’ve been told that their father is the first person in the Chicago area to die from this bacterium, an infection that is usually cured with antibiotics. They say they’re not eager to file a lawsuit. But they are wondering now if someone at the hospital or the university should have been able to spot this before it was too late.