Christian Science Monitor

08/23/04

They may not wear breeches or padded doublets. Nor do they boycott tea. But a group of 21st-century revolutionaries in Vermont say they want nothing short of a tax revolt. Their plan? Secede to New Hampshire as a means to save millions in property taxes they say unfairly penalize resort communities across the state. The push began in Killington, a ski town of 1,000 some 25 miles east of the New Hampshire border, where residents voted last spring to explore the practicalities of becoming Granite Staters. Now there are similar rumblings in Dorset, Manchester and Ludlow...

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0823/p03s01-uspo.html


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

by Francis A. Boyle

Beginning with the Reagan/Bush administrations' ascent to power in January of 1981, the United has demonstrated little if any respect for international law, international organizations, and human rights, let alone appreciation of the requirements for maintaining international peace and security. Instead there has been a comprehensive assault upon the integrity of the international legal order. The Reagan administration's foreign policy represented a deviation from basic rules of international deportment and civilized behavior that the United States government had pioneered in promoting for the world community. In many instances elements of the Reagan foreign policy constituted criminal activity under well-recognized principles of both international law and U.S. domestic law, specifically the Nuremberg Charter, the Nuremberg Judgment, and the Nuremberg Principles.

Among the responses to the Reagan administration's attack upon the international and domestic legal orders, was an upsurge in civil resistance activities protesting against U.S. international policies that grossly violated international law and human rights. These citizen protests led to numerous arrests and prosecutions by federal, state, and local governmental authorities all over the country. Soon thereafter, this author began to give advice, counsel and assistance to individuals and groups who had engaged in acts of civil resistance directed against several aspects of the U.S. government's foreign policy: the Nuclear Freeze Movement, the Sanctuary Movement, Greenpeace International, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, the Plowshares Movement, the Pledge of Resistance Campaign, and Gulf War resisters, among others. I also participated in the defense of individuals who engaged in civil resistance protesting against the U.S. government's policies on nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence, Central America and the Caribbean, Southern Africa, Europe, the Middle East, etc. who were independent of formal movements.

In addition, I have also helped defend active duty members of United States armed forces who were persecuted and prosecuted because of their acts of conscience and principle. For example, in the fall of 1990, I served as Counsel for the successful defense of U.S. Marine Corps Lance Corporal Jeff Paterson, the first military resister to Bush Sr.'s Gulf War.

Then I represented U.S.M.C. Lance Corporal David Mihaila in a successful effort to obtain his discharge from the Marine Corps as a Conscientious Objector during Gulf War I. Corporal Mihaila was the Clerk of the Court for the Paterson court-martial proceedings and according to him was motivated to apply for CO status as a result of my oral argument for Corporal Paterson.

In 1991 I served as Counsel for the defense of Captain Dr. Yolanda Huet-Vaughn, who was court-martialed by the U.S. Army in part because of her refusal to administer experimental vaccines to soldiers destined to fight in Gulf War I.

Later, I served as Counsel for the defense of U.S. Army Captain Lawrence Rockwood, who was court-martialed for his heroic efforts to stop torture in Haiti after the Clinton administration had illegally invaded that country in 1994. Most recently, in 2004 I served as Counsel for the defense of U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia, the first military resister to the current Iraq War.

Upon their incarcerations, both Capt. Dr. Huet-Vaughn and Staff Sgt. Mejia were quickly designated as Prisoners of Conscience by Amnesty International. Many Americans are unaware of the existence of American Prisoners of Conscience or Political Prisoners in our own prisons in the United State.

In fact, there are many. Both Captain Dr. Yolanda Huet-Vaughn and Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia are America's equivalent to Vaclav Havel, Andrei Sakharov, Wei Jingsheng, Aung San Suu Kyi, and others who became powerful symbols of the resistance to injustice.

They are the archetypal American Heroes whom we should be bringing into our schools and teaching our children to emulate, not the wholesale purveyors of violence and bloodshed adulated by the U.S. government and the media.

One generation ago the peoples of the world asked themselves: Where were the "good" Germans? Well, there were some good Germans. The Lutheran theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was only the most prominent exemplar of someone who led a life of principled opposition to the Nazi-terror state even unto death.

Today the peoples of the world are likewise asking themselves: Where are the "good" Americans who are prepared to stand up for principle in the face of state terror carried out on a world scale? Well, there are some good Americans. Some of them face arrest and jail for protesting against United States targeting of civilians with weapons of mass destruction (WMD) whose power for human extermination far exceeds even the wildest fantasies of Hitler and the Nazis. Others for protesting against illegal U.S. military interventions around the world since September 11, 2001.

As my friend and colleague former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark once said: "Our jails are filling up with saints!"

This book both subjects U.S. foreign policy to scrutiny from the perspective of international law and human rights, as well as telling their stories of protest against inhumanity and injustice.

This book comes at a critical time in the history of the United States of America as a constitutional Republic with a commitment to the rule of law and human rights, both at home and abroad. In international legal terms, the Bush Jr. administration should be viewed as constituting an ongoing criminal conspiracy under international criminal law in violation of the Nuremberg Charter, the Nuremberg Judgment, and the Nuremberg Principles because of its formulation and undertaking of wars of aggression, crimes against humanity, and war crimes that are legally akin to those perpetrated by the former Nazi regime in Germany.

As a consequence, American citizens possesses the basic right under international law and United States domestic law, including the American Constitution, to engage in acts of civil resistance in order to prevent, impede, thwart, or terminate ongoing criminal activities perpetrated by U.S. government officials in their conduct of foreign affairs policies and military operations purported to relate to defense and counter-terrorism.

This same right of civil resistance extends pari passu to all citizens of the world community of states. Everyone around the world has both the right and the duty under international law to resist ongoing criminal activities perpetrated by the Bush Jr. administration and its foreign accomplices in allied governments. If not so restrained, the Bush Jr. administration could very well precipitate a Third World War.

The time for preventive action is now. Civil resistance is the way to go. People power can overcome power politics. Popular movements have succeeded in toppling tyrannical, dictatorial and authoritarian regimes throughout former Communist countries in Eastern Europe, as well as in Asia, and most recently in Latin America. It is time once again to exercise People Power in the United States of America.

Despite the best efforts by the Bush Jr. Leaguers to the contrary, we American Citizens still have our First Amendment Rights: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Association, Freedom of Assembly, Freedom to Petition our Government for the Redress of these massive Grievances, Civil Resistance, etc.

We are going to have to start vigorously exercising all of our First Amendment Rights right now. We must use them or else, as the saying goes, we will lose them. We must act not only for the good of the Peoples of Southwest Asia, but for our future, that of our children, that of our nation as a democratic society committed to the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution. This book will give the reader the intellectual tools necessary to battle the international and domestic legal nihilism of the Bush Jr. administration; the Ashcroft Police State; America's Nuclear and Hydrocarbon Empires; and the U.S. Power Elite before they run completely amok all over the world as well as here at home. The Nazis had their "homeland" too.

The Athenians lost their democracy. The Romans lost their Republic. And if we Americans do not act now we could lose our Republic. The United States of America is not immune to the laws of history!

Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954 (voice)
217-244-1478 (fax)
fboyle@law.uiuc.edu
(personal comments only)

by Bob Smith

No Force, No Fraud

The Nanny Psychology, part 1
http://babelogue.citypages.com:8080/bsmith/2004/08/19


The Nanny Psychology, part 2

08/20/04

The nanny attitude has become synonymous with the way many of us think about our government. We elect individuals and then come to think of them as capable of controlling everything, making decisions about what is right and wrong, good and bad for us, and providing us with security.

The direct result of such sloppy thinking and careless compliance can only be an ever-expanding government, higher taxes, and more intrusion into every aspect of private life, until we are left with the ugly choice of becoming dull, obedient slaves, or having to dredge up our last gasp of individuality and force ourselves to revolt...

http://babelogue.citypages.com:8080/bsmith/2004/08/20


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

http://news.scotsman.com/politics.cfm?id=950022004


Informant: foxhall69gtown

I am forwarding MindFreedom's programme of activism against President Bush's proposal to screen for mental illnesses the entire US population. The British Medical Journal

http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/328/7454/1458

(among many other online publications) highlights how dangerous an assault this could be on people's basic rights. Indeed, anyone who has just completed reading your 14.08.2004 bulletin with its first two postings on "non-lethal" mindcontrol weaponry (including MW induced hearing-voices phenomena) could easily imagine this scenario: large swathes of the US population hostile to the present administration being "prepared" for a successful entry into the mentally ill category. All it would take is deploying some of that military technology that covertly manipulates the minds and emotions of targeted victims.

Best, Imelda, Cork

From: Swftl@aol.com
Subject: {Slick-D}
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2004 16:01:18 EDT

Does your child shrink from strangers? Speak at inappropriate times? Seem easily distracted? If so, they may soon face government-ordered, forced medication.

In April 2002, President Bush passed an Executive Order that established the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, to conduct a "comprehensive study of the United States mental health service delivery system." One of the initiative's major objectives is to identify and treat mental illness in school children because "despite their prevalence, mental disorders often go undiagnosed," leading to "young children [being] expelled from preschools and childcare facilities for severely disruptive behaviors and emotional disorders."

Says the commission, "Each year, young children are expelled from preschools and childcare facilities for severely disruptive behaviors and emotional disorders." The committee's solution? Nationwide mental health testing for all children and the prescription of "specific medications for specific conditions" should a kid's psychological wellness not be up to par.

Unfortunately, the American Psychiatric Association's idea of "specific conditions" could include everything from acting shy ("avoidant personality disorder") to bragging ("narcissistic personality disorder").

As Governor's State University psychologist Helen Timpone recently wrote in an Illinois Leader editorial, "Attempting to screen children for possible mental health challenges would be mind-boggling." The occasion for Timpone's warning: last week, Illinois jumped the gun and followed the commission's suggestion by implementing comprehensive mental health screenings for children between the ages of 0-18, called the Children's Mental Health Act, signed into law last spring.

Public forums on the Act held this summer were mobbed by parents concerned at the prospect of being forced to medicate their children should the kids be deemed "abnormal" by mental health tests. "Evaluating mental conditions is not based on scientific evidence, it's subjective," said Larry Trainor, father of four and a member of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, speaking to the Illinois Leader. "What if they find a student has a math disorder, a reading disorder? Would that... cause the parents to put their children with a drug?"

A concern that may have some validity: in a May 2003 press release by the Committee on Education and the Workforce, Katherine Bryson, a State Legislator from Utah, warns that "school personnel faced with children who often have not been properly taught to read, who may be coming to school on a breakfast of sugar or no breakfast at all, who could be affected by lead, mercury or other toxic substances... are assessing them in the classroom as having a ˜learning disorder' or [ADHD]. From here, parents are being coerced into drugging their child with threats of the child's expulsion or charges of medical neglect by Child Protective Services against the parents."

"Parents are losing their right to choose," says Bryson. "They are being told that ADHD is a ˜neurobiological' disorder when even the Surgeon General's 1999 report on mental health cannot confirm this. They are being denied access to tutoring or additional educational services for the sake of a 'quick fix'
drug like Ritalin that some studies say is more potent than cocaine."

A recent CNN report stated that already an estimated 6 million American children take Ritalin every day--up 500% from 1990. That doesn't even include other stimulants or antidepressants. Should mandatory mental screening spread nationwide, we may well see an unprecedented, epidemic jolt of ADHD and depression that (of course) will have to be "treated accordingly".

Which is, if not in the best interest of our children, at least in someone's best interest. Pennsylvania government worker Allen Jones revealed in May that officials controlling the Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP), a psychological screening initiative held up as a model for President Bush's New Freedom plan, had received cash and perks from drug companies whose products the program prescribes.

Jones told the British Medical Journal and the New York Times that a "political/pharmaceutical alliance," is "poised to consolidate the TMAP effort into a comprehensive national policy to treat mental illness with expensive, patented medications of questionable benefit and deadly side effects, and to force private insurers to pick up the tab." He was subsequently fired from his position.

News of a tie between big drug companies and the government doesn't come as much of a surprise--after all, the pharmaceutical industry has one of the most powerful lobbies in the U.S. Pharmaceutical firms have contributed a combined
$764,274 to President Bush's 2004 election campaign--more than five times what they've given to the Kerry coffers. And George Bush Sr. sat on the board of directors for drug giant Eli Lilly whose CEO was recently appointed to the Homeland Security Council.

Aside from wrong diagnoses, another concern is the stigmatization of children who have been identified as having problems. Once diagnosed, the label "mental disorder" could easily remain in a child's records throughout its school years... and maybe beyond.

Some Illinois parents have vowed to challenge their children's health screens in court, or to even leave the state if the program goes ahead. "This is just one more step in the state separating the parent from the child," Larry Witherspoon, a concerned father, told newswithviews.com. "Good-bye, Nazi Illinois."

Faced with such opposition, the State has backpedaled somewhat from its original plan to require schools to conduct psychological evaluations. "We realized that we weren't as explicit as we need to be," told Barbara Shaw, chair of a task force hammering out the program's details, the Suburban Chicago News. "The screenings that we are discussing are voluntary. We would encourage that screenings happen, but we won't require it."

Skeptics have a different view: Karen Hayes, associate director of Concerned Women for America of Illinois, a public policy women's organization, says, "They kept telling us at the hearing that it was voluntary. But the minute you put those health standards into learning standards, you've ceased to make them voluntary."

On June 22, 2004 the House Appropriations Committee doled out $20 million for 'State Incentive Transformation Grants' to begin implementing the New Freedom Initiative nationwide. The Bill passed the Labor HHS Appropriations Committee on July 14, but hasn't been voted on by the House or the Senate yet.

If you feel you should do something about it, call upon your state representatives to vote against the bill--and for the Child Medication Safety Act, which would prohibit schools from bullying parents into medicating their kids as a condition for attending school.


Informant: Kathy