Declassified docs reveal military operative spied on WA peace groups, activist friends stunned

Amy Goodman and Anjali Kamat - Democracy Now! Broadcast Exclusive

28 Jul, 2009

Newly declassified documents reveal that an active member of Students for a Democratic Society and Port Militarization Resistance in Washington state was actually an informant for the US military. The man everyone knew as “John Jacob” was in fact John Towery, a member of the Force Protection Service at Fort Lewis. The military’s role in the spying raises questions about possibly illegal activity. The Posse Comitatus law bars the use of the armed forces for law enforcement inside the United States. The Fort Lewis military base denied our request for an interview. But in a statement to Democracy Now!, the base’s Public Affairs office publicly acknowledged for the first time that Towery is a military operative. “This could be one of the key revelations of this era,” said Eileen Clancy, who has closely tracked government spying on activist organizations.

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Pfizer unit marketed drug illegally, ex-employee says

Jef Feeley and Margaret Cronin Fisk - Bloomberg

28 Jul, 2009

Pfizer Inc.’s Warner-Lambert unit created a list of 13 ailments that its epilepsy medicine Neurontin could treat as part of its promotion of the drug for unapproved uses, a former employee testified.

“I was trained from day one” to market the drug illegally, David Franklin testified. Franklin, who worked as a medical liaison at the Parke-Davis division of Warner-Lambert, said he encouraged doctors to prescribe Neurontin for uses beyond those approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

“My job was to promote Neurontin and motivate doctors to experiment” on patients, he said today in federal court in Boston. After being hired as a medical liaison, “I was selling drugs,” he said. The uses promoted were from the “snake-oil list” of 13 medical conditions, said Franklin, a microbiologist.

Franklin was the first witness in the trial over claims by the family of Susan Bulger, 39, who hanged herself after taking the drug. Bulger’s family claims Pfizer promoted Neurontin for unapproved uses and failed to warn it could increase the risk of suicide until forced to do so by the government. Bulger started taking the drug in 1999.

The trial of the suit, the first of about 1,200 over Neurontin to go to trial, is expected to last three weeks.

Pfizer fell 59 cents, or 3.6 percent, to $16.03 at 4:15 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. Pfizer shares have fallen 9.5 percent so far this year.

Whistleblower Suit

Franklin filed a federal whistleblower complaint in 1997 alleging the company illegally marketed the drug for attention deficit disorder, pain and other unapproved uses. The suit resulted in a $430 million settlement by Warner-Lambert with the U.S. Justice Department in 2004.

Franklin, who worked at Warner Lambert for four months in 1995 before resigning over the company’s off-label marketing practices, received about $25 million as his share under the federal False Claims Act, the government said at the time.

Warner-Lambert officials used a variety of tactics to persuade doctors to prescribe Neurontin for unapproved uses, Franklin told jurors.

They provided the company’s sales force with a list of ailments that would benefit from Neurontin use, including restless leg syndrome, migraine headaches and withdrawal symptoms from drug and alcohol abuse, Franklin said. The FDA hadn’t approved the drug for any of those illnesses at the time, he added.

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A Rorschach cheat sheet on Wikipedia?

Noam Cohen - New York Times

28 Jul, 2009

There are tests that have right answers, which are returned with a number on top in a red circle, and there are tests with open-ended questions, which provide insight into the test taker’s mind.

The Rorschach test, a series of 10 inkblot plates created by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach for his book “Psychodiagnostik,” published in 1921, is clearly in the second category.

Yet in the last few months, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia has been engulfed in a furious debate involving psychologists who are angry that the 10 original Rorschach plates are reproduced online, along with common responses for each. For them, the Wikipedia page is the equivalent of posting an answer sheet to next year’s SAT.

They are pitted against the overwhelming majority of Wikipedia’s users, who share the site’s “free culture” ethos, which opposes the suppression of information that it is legal to publish. (Because the Rorschach plates were created nearly 90 years ago, they have lost their copyright protection in the United States.)

“The only winners seem to be those for whom this issue has become personal, and who see this as a game in which victory means having their way,” one Wikipedia poster named Faustian wrote on Monday, adding, “Just don’t pretend you are doing anything other than harming scientific research.”

What had been a simmering dispute over the reproduction of a single plate reached new heights in June when James Heilman, an emergency-room doctor from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, posted images of all 10 plates to the bottom of the article about the test, along with what research had found to be the most popular responses for each.

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Migrants to Italy face "a kind of slavery": OIM

ROME (Reuters) - Thousands of migrants are being lured to Italy with false promises of work and forced to live in conditions akin to slavery, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said Tuesday.

In a study of a migrant camp near the town of San Nicola Varco, 100 km (63 miles) south of Naples, IOM officials found some 1,200 migrants squatting in abandoned buildings without water and electricity, eking a living among piles of rubbish.

The young men, most of them from Morocco, were being paid between 15 and 25 euros ($21 and $35) for a 12-hour day laboring in nearby greenhouses and fields, without work contracts. Their employers often charged them for basics like transport and water, in the sweltering summer temperatures of southern Italy.

"The humanitarian emergency has become serious because they are living in conditions that are unsustainable," said Flavio Di Giacomo, spokesman for the IOM in Italy. "The salaries are well below the minimum. It is a kind of slavery."

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Stockpiling deals link baxter to CIA & Carlyle Group: Covert ops discredit official flu response

"...The CIA-influenced media is obviously being used to hype threats of death this year along with this obviously laboratory-created mutant flu, Dr Horowitz said. Follow the money and you realize all roads lead through the CIA to top officials in the companies profiting most from stockpiles of poorly test, virtually experimental, ‘fast-tracked’ vaccines and toxic Tamiflu.

Many people were aware Donald Rumsfeld, the past Secretary of the Defense Department credited by journalist Bob Woodward for pushing George H.W. Bush out of politics and into the role of CIA director, co-founded Gilead Sciences, the maker of Tamiflu. Rumsfeld, 1989-2005, was chief Defense Contractor for the Carlyle Group–possibly the world’s wealthiest military-medical investment firm. Operating as Carlyle Group’s Vice President today is Brian Canann, a chief strategist for global product management within Baxter International Inc’s spin off company, Edwards Lifesciences. Reminiscent of the CIA’s “Project Jefferson“ (also called Clearvision , wherein hyper-weaponized anthrax was first developed at the Battelle Memorial Institute, then assayed by CIA contractors for mass-dispersal via the mail, then mailed two years later following the September, 2001, attacks, Baxter officials are credited for “accidentally“ shipping H5N1 (bioweapons-grade bird flu) contaminated vaccines to several labs in four European countries according to international news reports. Baxter is among a handful of companies producing flu vaccines worth billions of dollars in government stockpiling contracts. ..."

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CIA swine flu assassinations, vaccinations & depopulation