63 Documents the Government Doesn't Want You to Read
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Pay close attention to the portions I’ve highlighted from the NIST report. Why the mainstream TV and press can get a report like this, and it isn’t leading the news cycle and on every front page the next morning, shows you just how controlled the corporate media are.
Also check out David Ray Griffin’s book, The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7, and the website for Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. Here are excerpts from the “NIST Final Report: NIST NCSTAR 1-9: Structural Fire Response and Probable Collapse Sequence of World Trade Center Building 7.”
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FOLLOW THE MONEY
Evidence for Insider Stock Trading Before 9/11
How many of you realize that, almost immediately after the events of 9/11, the FBI set up a team to look into insider stock trading that indicated foreknowledge of what was going to happen? That, of course, could have opened Pandora’s box in terms of a bigger conspiracy than just al Qaeda. This reminds me of the old cliché that goes back to Deep Throat in Watergate—follow the money. Generally if you want to find out who knew what, the money trail will lead you to the knowledge you desire. And 9/11 seems to be a classic example of that.
To set the stage, I’m reprinting with the author’s permission a mindblowing and extremely well-researched article by Kevin Ryan that appeared in the Foreign Policy Journal on November 18, 2010. It’s called “Evidence for Informed Trading on the Attacks of September 11.”
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TURNING A BLIND EYE
The FBI’s “Briefing on Trading” for the 9/11 Commission
Now read the twelve-page memorandum titled “FBI Briefing on Trading” that was prepared in 2003 and declassified four years later by the 9/11 Commission. As you’ll see, the FBI went out of its way to say—more than once in the document—that no evidence existed to support such a nasty theory. Even when there were some “suspicious accounts the SEC turned over,” these were dismissed because their investigation “revealed no ties to terrorism.” You’ll even see a reference to the AIG Insurance Company in here. This document fascinated me both for what it says (certain leads that might yet be tracked down by an investigative journalist) and what it doesn’t say.
PART FIVE
THE “WAR ON TERROR”
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SUBVERTING THE CONSTITUTION
The Justice Department’s Secret Plan
Six weeks after 9/11, Bush’s Justice Department wrote up a long memo with the subject line: “Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States.” As you’ll see from the excerpts, the whole concept basically shreds our Bill of Rights. In short, “legal and constitutional rules regulating law enforcement activity are not applicable.” The military could even “attack civilian targets, such as apartment buildings, offices, or ships where suspected terrorists were thought to be.” And later, “First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully.”
Where does it say that, if you call something “terrorism,” the Constitution and the Bill of Rights can be made null and void? All they’ve got to do is say the word and they can put you under surveillance without a warrant. To me, this smacks of an attack on the foundations of democracy that plays right into the hands of terrorists. It also sets a precedent for the kinds of tactics we went on to see at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and elsewhere.
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NO MORE RULE OF LAW
President Bush’s Justification for Torture
A few months after September 11, President Bush sent out a “mass memo” that lays out why the al Qaeda and Taliban detainees were “unlawful combatants” and so the Geneva Convention calling for humane treatment of POWs did not apply to them. Well, if they’re not covered by an international agreement, shouldn’t they be covered by the laws of the United States and our Constitution and Bill of Rights? My point being, this situation has to fall under somebody’s law. How they can come up with this limbo, inbetween, “make up your own rules” idea is beyond belief. But I guess that’s why you have lawyers, because every lawyer reads the law differently.
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NO FREEDOM OF THE PRESS
The Military’s Astounding “Media Ground Rules” for Guantanamo
Talk about infringement on the freedom of the press! When I came across these Media Ground Rules that had to be signed off on before anyone can gain access to where the detainees are being held at Guantanamo, I was shocked. By the time you memorized all these rules-and-regulations, you’d be so uptight you squeaked. What “policy?” This is the biggest snow job I’ve ever seen. If the media has to follow those rules, they’re not even allowed to ask a question. The Guantanamo brass could have saved all that paper by taking one big sheet and stamping in large letters: MEDIA NOT ALLOWED.
I would have loved to adopt that identical policy when I was governor of Minnesota, with what I used to call “the Minnesota jackals.” Let me put those rules up right outside the governor’s reception room where the media comes in, all those pages as to what you have to abide by. How would that have gone over?
So forget about providing the public any insight into what’s really going on behind the gates of our Naval Station. Which, as you’ll see in the documents that follow, was enough to raise the hair on the back of anyone’s head. (Presuming the head was still intact.)
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TORTURE TECHNIQUES
The Detainees at Guantanamo
We all saw the horrendous photos and videos from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Not as well known are the Department of Defense’s “Counter-Resistance Strategies” for the detainees being held at our Guantanamo base in Cuba. The first document here is DOD’s official request for approval of various methods under several categories. The second has Rumsfeld’s signature, along with his personal handwritten note that says: “However, I stand for 8–10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?” He’s a real stand-and-deliver guy, I guess.
I simply find this appalling that the United States of America would engage in the practice of torture. We’re supposed to be the country everyone else looks up to. When you participate in this kind of behavior, forget that! When it happens to us, we’ll have no reason to bitch, because if we practice torture the other side will too. The laws of humanity ought to be higher than the laws of war, don’t you think?
The card they’re playing, from Rumsfeld on down, is that somehow Guantanamo isn’t on this earth, because it’s not in the U.S. or I guess anywhere outside our base in Cuba. Is this some sort of Land of Oz? We treat Charles Manson better than we do the detainees at Guantanamo, and yet the detainees have never been convicted of anything. They never stood trial, never had their day in court. But I guess Manson’s different because he’s an American citizen.
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DRUG ABUSE
A Medical Experiment on the Detainees
If you thought government experiments in behavior control ended in the 1970s, guess again. It’s recently come out that the Pentagon forced all the detainees at Guantanamo prison to take high doses of a drug called mefloquine. Supposedly it’s used to combat malaria, but that didn’t seem to make any difference. Our military brass knew that mefloquine had severe side effects, like suicidal thoughts, hallucinations, and anxiety.
To me, this shows the continuing influence of those “experts” we brought here from Germany after World War Two. Here you have doctors stating that you need to know the complete background of the patient before using this substance—and they’re injecting these people with this drug as soon as they’re checked in!
The first document here, from 2002, shows that “standard inprocessing orders for detainees” included 1,250 mg of mefloquine, five times higher than the dose given to people as a preventative. And it’s being given not for its intended purpose, but to study its intended side effects! I’m speechless. What ever happened to the physician’s oath to “do no harm”?
In 2010, Seton Hall University School of Law’s Center
for Policy & Research released a study about all this, and I’m including the Executive Summary.
Drug Abuse: An exploration of the government’s use of mefloquine at Guantanamo
Seton Hall University School of Law
Center for Policy and Research
Executive Summary
Mefloquine is an antimalarial drug that has long been known to cause severe neuropsychological adverse effects such as anxiety, paranoia, hallucinations, aggression, psychotic behavior, mood changes, depression, memory impairment, convulsions, loss of coordination (ataxia), suicidal ideation, and possibly suicide, particularly in patients with a history of mental illness. A prescribing physician must exercise caution and informed judgment when weighing the risks and potential benefits of prescribing the drug. To administer this drug with its severe potential side effects without a malaria diagnosis and without taking a patient’s mental health history is not medically justified. Yet as a matter of official policy, the standard operating procedure implemented by the United States military at Guantanamo Bay was to administer high doses of mefloquine to detainees whether or not any use of the drug was medically appropriate and without consideration of the detainees’ mental health.
It is clear that the military employed a medically inappropriate treatment regime at Guantanamo Bay (GTMO). It is less clear why, although the available evidence supports several possible conclusions. In view of the continued and unexplained refusal of the government to release full medical records for all detainees, it is not possible to determine whether this conduct was gross malpractice or deliberate misuse of the drug. In either case, it does not appear plausible from the available evidence that mefloquine was given to treat malaria. This suggests a darker possibility: that the military gave detainees the drug specifically to bring about the adverse side effects, either as part of enhanced interrogation techniques, experimentation in behavioral modification, or torture for some other purpose. While this Report does not reach a conclusion about the actual motives for this course of conduct, it does explore the legal rules that would apply were it determined that mefloquine was administered not to treat malaria but rather to exploit the neuropsychiatric effects of the drug.
Findings:
This Report demonstrates that the U.S. military routinely administered doses of mefloquine to detainees upon their arrival at GTMO without medical justification:
■ 1250 mg of mefloquine was given to all detainees as a standard measure during inprocessing.
■ Mefloquine is used for treatment of malaria only in mild to moderate cases of infection with the p. vivax or p. falciparum parasite.
■ At GTMO, mefloquine was given to detainees before testing them for malaria, without regard for whether the detainee actually had malaria at all, let alone whether he carried one of the parasites treatable by mefloquine.
■ The standard of care rejects administering mefloquine to persons with a history of mental illness or a family history of mental illness, due to a greatly increased risk of severe adverse side effects for such persons.
■ At GTMO, mefloquine was given to detainees without regard to prior mental health history or family mental health history.
This Report further demonstrates that the U.S. military knew, and any competent medical professional would have known, of the severe side effects caused by mefloquine:
■ Mefloquine was first developed by the United States military.
■ Mefloquine is a quinolone, a drug family the CIA experimented with under a project called MKULTRA that studied psychotropic drugs for behavioral modification for use as a weapon and interrogation tool.
■ As of 2002, Roche USA, the manufacturer of mefloquine under the brand name Lariam, warned of its contraindications and at least some of its severe side effects on the drug’s package insert.
■ Beginning at least as early as 1990, multiple peer-reviewed medical studies documented the severe adverse effects associated with mefloquine.
While it is impossible to make definitive conclusions as to the purposes for this policy without additional information, particularly detainee medical records, the available evidence may support one of several possible conclusions:
■ Gross medical malpractice: If government intended this mefloquine regime for malaria treatment and control, it was done in a manner that jeopardized the health and perhaps the lives of the detainees and that violated basic standards of medical care.
■ Mefloquine was given in order to bring about the adverse effects for one of three reasons. Any of these would likely satisfy the legal definition of torture as articulated by the Department of Justice in 2002.
o As part of a program of enhanced interrogation, the psychotropic effects of mefloquine may have been intended as an aid to breaking a detainee’s resistance. This would be the psychological equivalent of waterboarding.
o As part of an experimental study to gather data on the side effects of mefloquine.
o As a punitive measure.
Methodology
This Report documents the administration of mefloquine to detainees and establishes that the U.S. military’s administration was a violation of normal standards of medical care. The Center for Policy and Research at Seton Hall School of Law typically issues reports based on government documents. In this case, however, that has proved impossible because the government has continually refused to release detainee’s medical records to the detainees or their attorneys. The only medical record available is that of ISN 693.
Additionally, two pages of the inprocessing form for ISN 760 are available and were analyzed. In order to supplement these sources, the Center’s Research Fellows analyzed other publicly-available documents. These include contemporaneous statements by government authorities regarding malaria treatment practices at GTMO, Standard Operating Procedures, and published, peer reviewed medical studies.
***
I. Mefloquine was not given to detainees in a manner consistent with malaria treatment. Mefloquine is an antimalarial drug that can be used for prophylaxis or for treatment with different dosages and administration for each. The dosage administered and the timing of each dose of mefloquine to detainees suggests that the military may have used it for treatment purposes without first ascertaining whether the detainee actually had malaria. It is highly likely that the military was treating uninfected individuals with high doses of a dangerous drug.
The prophylactic dosage of mefloquine, 250 mg, is much smaller than the treatment dose given to GTMO detainees, 1250 mg, and is administered once per week as opposed to the single dose1 used for treatment purposes.2 Severe adverse side effects do occur during prophylactic use, but adverse effects during use for treatment are far more common and more severe, probably due to the larger dosage. Use of mefloquine, even when used to treat a confirmed case of the disease, is contraindicated3 when the patient has a history of certain disorders.4
Detainees were given 1250 mg of mefloquine during inprocessing at GTMO; 750 mg as an initial dose and 500 mg 12 hours later.5 There is no indication that the routine administration of mefloquine to arriving detainees considered each detainee’s medical history.6 Administering the drug at the higher treatment dose without previously determining the need for any treatment was a dramatic departure from the accepted standard of medical care.7 Doctors have widely prescribed mefloquine, commercially sold as Lariam by manufacturer Roche USA, throughout the United States and elsewhere as a prophylactic against malaria infection. 10 Mefloquine can cross the blood-brain barrier,11 and has a relatively long half-life at 15 to 33 days until elimination.12 This means that the drug can enter brain tissue and remains in the body for a long period of time. As Dr. G. Richard Olds, an internationally recognized tropical disease specialist and Founding Dean of the University of California at Riverside School of Medicine, told the Center, “Mefloquine is fat soluble and as a result it does build up in the body and has a very long half-life. This is important since a massive dose of this drug is not easily corrected and the �
��side effects’ of the drug could last for weeks or months.” Dr. Olds’s view is well supported by the medical literature reviewed by the Center for this Report.
A. Side Effects Can Be Severe
Mefloquine, at any dose, is known to cause adverse neuropsychiatric effects such as anxiety, paranoia, hallucinations, aggression, psychotic behavior, mood changes, depression, memory impairment, convulsions, loss of coordination (ataxia), suicidal ideation, and possibly suicide.14 As many as 25% of persons who have taken mefloquine reported such severe side effects.15 These neuropsychiatric side effects are more prevalent and more severe in patients with a history of certain disorders and conditions or when taken in combination with certain medications, requiring careful prescribing that is dependent on a thorough and complete review of each patient’s medical history.16