March 15, 2012

MEDIA ROOTS — Abby Martin, Media Roots Founder, spoke about citizen journalism and the importance of having an independent, grassroots media telling the truth from the ground up at San Francisco State University on Tuesday, , for the ‘Media Literacy: Corporate Propaganda & Advocating Independent Journalism’ Project Censored event.

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Abby Martin, Founder of Media Roots, San Francisco State University, March 13, 2012

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March 9, 2012

MEDIA ROOTS — “In this same dream I had a girl waiting for me down the hall. I wanted to go out and see her but the nurse wouldn’t let me so after trying to fight my way out and failing I called the MP’s who promptly arrested them. After that I found out that they were going to beat me up so I tried to make friends with the one who appeared to be the leader. It must have worked because I don’t remember a beating.”  —unknown male soldier volunteer at Edgewood 1963, dose: IM 7.0 ug/kg 

When the movie Jacob’s Ladder came out in 1990, many people were probably not aware that it was loosely based on 1968 military experiments conducted in lab and field exercises at the Edgewood Arsenal proving ground in Maryland.  Even though Jacob’s Ladder ends with a brief description of 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate (BZ) and its effects, Adrian Lyne, the film’s director, has denied the powerful and dangerous hallucinogenic compound was ever used on human test subjects.  However, there is evidence to suggest otherwise.  In a recent lawsuit against the U.S. government, a document showing BZ’s solubility in human blood has been uncovered.

A lawsuit was filed last week by eight U.S. military veterans against, virtually, every branch of the Defense Department, including Veterans Affairs and even Attorney General Eric Holder.  The veterans were guinea pigs in a massive military-funded and controlled human drug experiment program, which shows that, among other drugs like Mescaline, LSD, and amphetamines, they also subjected people to a drug which lasts 80 hours and creates a fever-like dream of reality, better described as a waking, walking nightmare called BZ.  

At least one other account exists apart from the one excerpted above from an unknown soldier at Edgewood Arsenal as well as another from a military scientist, Dr. James Moore, who was accidentally exposed trying to synthesize the compound.  In Dr. Moore’s instance, he administered himself with acridine, as an antidote for BZ’s effects.  In the unknown soldier’s case he had over three days of waking nightmares, imagining fights with hospital staff and MPs, and having hour-long imaginary conversations with an ex-girlfriend about her surprise pregnancy announcement.  Beyond this, Media Roots has been unable to locate additional verified first-hand accounts.

BZ was modeled after atropine, an active chemical found in Datura.  Indigenous North and South Americans have used Datura and other similar plants which contain atropine (e.g., Belladona, Brugmansia) in ancient spiritual rituals up until the present day.  Besides psilocybin, and n,n-DMT, atropine-containing medicinal plants are proliferated globally around the world’s ecosystem more than any other hallucinogenic psychoactive drug.  Unlike DMT and psilocybin, Datura never caught on recreationally because of its dangerous and unpredictable nature.  In the wild, Datura plants (or pretty much any plant containing the active ingredient) contain huge differences in potency, making it almost impossible to give someone an accurately measured or safe dose of the plant extract.  Even administering a pure chemical ‘psychedelic’ dosage of atropine can lead to heart failure or stroke.

This didn’t stop the US government during the height of its drug experimentation days from trying to harness its power and re-tool the active chemical in Datura into a powerful weaponized gas to be used on the U.S. military battlefields. 

It’s not hard to guess what the effects were like beyond the trip reports we have based on its similarity to a Datura.  On Erowid.org’s Datura ‘effects’ section, they list delirium capable of bringing about auditory, visual, and tactile hallucinations indistinguishable from reality.  This waking dream-like state can lead to unconscious violent behavior much like a drunken ‘black-out.’  It’s also reported uncommonly large doses can cause hallucinations lasting for two to three days.  This mirrors available data regarding the duration of BZ’s effects.

If the U.S. government in 1968 was willing to go as far as attempt to weaponize, which essentially means aerosolizing it or making it airborne, a more concentrated form of the world’s most terrifying and unpleasant hallucinogen, who can say whether or not they also toyed with doing the same to another more recently discovered hallucinogen, Salvinorin A? The effects of Salvinorin A are just as unpredictable as Datura but far shorter lasting.  We know that in the late ‘90s the Russian government attempted to use a gaseous form of Fentanyl, one of the most powerful opiates—more powerful than oxycontin, heroin or morphine—to diffuse a hostage crisis.  The end result was the tragic, accidental deaths of many of the hostages, by overdose. 

The effects of what BZ would do to a group of armed soldiers would be completely unpredictable and most likely dangerous—what’s depicted in the film Jacob’s Ladder would be a worst-case scenario.  No one really knows the extent to which—or in what situations or environments—the U.S. government actually tested hallucinogenic drugs on its soldiers, which is part of the reason why similar lawsuits in the past have been dismissed.  Only in the last decade has the military declassified enough information that these Guinea pig soldiers have been allowed to tell their health-care providers what took place at Edgewood Arsenal.  It’s unfortunate that, since they volunteered, the U.S. government can pass off responsibility.  But these experiments were done at a time when the general public had no idea what these hallucinogens did, making informed consent unlikely.

Ethically, it would be hard to make the case that these soldiers knew what the consequences would be to their physical and mental healths. 

Written by Robbie Martin, co-host of Media Roots Radio

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UPDATED NEWS — There were no warnings about side effects or potential long-term health risks, according to Wray’s deposition.  Although he wasn’t forced to take the drugs, he was “given an option of not taking the test, but with innuendos — with the option of bad punishment if we did not participate,” he says in the deposition transcript…..Of all the events that took place during Wray’s time at Edgewood, Kathryn says one disturbing memory he told her about that stuck with him for more than three decades:

Wray and eight others were taken to a clinic room and told to lie on cots, where they were hooked up to IVs and left alone, Kathryn says. Within 5 minutes he was so high he could not find his legs, he told her. “Then he said it felt like the bed was floating off of the floor — and then the pain hit.” He described it as a “terrible, terrible headache, so bad he could not open his eyes, so bad he was just screaming in pain,” making him throw up several times. A man in a nearby bunk was “trying to claw his own eyes out” — until Wray and another volunteer managed to get out of their bunks, crawl over to the panicking man and stop him, he told her.

“And while all of this going on, there was a nurse standing in the corner — she was taking notes. She made no attempt to aid this gentleman,” says Kathryn. For days afterward, he was “completely disoriented and terrified the pain would begin again,” Kathryn says.

Read more about Widow blames VA for spouse’s death.

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Photo from US Defense Department Edgewood stock footage

MEDIA ROOTS — Pat Buchanan and Judge Napolitano were fired recently from their respective networks for what is thought to be their outspoken dissent from the U.S.-Israeli lobby.  But whilst the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the C.I.A.’s National Intelligence Estimate, and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta all agree that there is no evidence that Iran has, nor is making, nuclear weaponry, Obama continues to enforce questionable sanctions and command a military that is escalating the threat of war.

The fact that Western media aren’t raising questions about the dangerous risks of Russian and Chinese opposition to U.S. foreign policy, specifically with regard to Syria and Iran, shows the gaping lack of independent mass media in the U.S. reaching enough minds to countervail corporate/establishment propaganda.  This perpetual deception is evident even when lies are corrected for past crimes enabled by the perpetual government efforts of deceiving the public.

In D.C., they say, perception is reality.  According to Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, the current U.S. government may now be the most corrupt in human history.  It doesn’t represent its citizenry nor pre-supposed values of truth, justice, mercy, and so forth.  It does represent, however, the few special interests of the ruling-class.

Oskar Mosquito

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INSTITUTE FOR POLITICAL ECONOMY — President Obama and members of Congress along with Tel Aviv continue to assert that Iran is making a nuclear weapon despite public contradiction by the US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate. According to news reports, Pentagon chief Leon Panetta told members of the House of Representatives on February 16 that “Tehran has not made a decision to proceed with developing a nuclear weapon.” However, in Washington facts don’t count. Only the material interests of powerful interest groups matter.

At the moment the American “Ministry of Truth” is splitting its time between lying about Iran and lying about Syria.  Recently, there were some explosions in faraway Thailand, and the explosions were blamed on Iran.  Last October, the FBI announced that the bureau had uncovered an Iranian plot to pay a used car salesman to hire a Mexican drug gang to kill the Saudi Ambassador to the US.  The White House idiot professed to believe the unbelievable plot and declared that he had “strong evidence,” but no evidence was ever released.  The purpose for announcing the non-existent plot was to justify Obama’s sanctions, which amount to an embargo—an act of war—against Iran for developing nuclear energy.

As a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty, Iran has the right to develop nuclear energy.  IAEA inspectors are permanently in Iran and report no diversion of nuclear material to a weapons program.

Read more about Silencing the Critics (published last week by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts).

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Photo by Flickr user AZRainman

MEDIA ROOTS — The U.S. blindly took another giant step further into tyranny last week—no, really.

In most corporate and, even, many independent news outlets, the public was kept up-to-date with the deaths of singer Davy Jones and conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart.  However, relatively little attention was given to the annihilation of Constitutionally-protected civil liberties executed by the National Defense Authorization Act, which went into effect  Wednesday, March 1.  On the very same day two celebrities coincidentally died from unexpected heart-attacks in the U.S., a bipartisan Congress carefully dealt orchestrated attacks against the First Amendment.

Instead of the anti-democratic new law merely taking effect, the House resolved to further the scope of the NDAA by preventing assembly near public officials guarded by the Secret Service.  Not only is the U.S. tradition of protesting at the White House under siege—now those vying to replace the presidency are also exempt from the ‘nuisance’ of protesters.  499 Congressional Representatives voted in favor of HR 347—the Federal Restriction Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act—only three voted against: Paul Broun (R-GA), Justin Amash (R-MI), and Ron Paul (R-TX).

The President signed the NDAA into law on New Year’s Eve, but hardly did a media firestorm result from the fact that the military is now legally able to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens solely based on suspicion.  That’s right.  Despite Presidential Policy Directive 14, future protesters at the White House could be locked up indefinitely, without due process of the law.  Of course, Attorney General Eric Holder has begun engaging in Orwellian semantical double-speak regarding due process in cases of arbitrary targeted killings when he spoke before law school students today at Chicago’s Northwestern University:

“Due process and judicial process are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security.  The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.”

It’s a terrible precedent Holder is working to set with regard to due process, which may easily spread to the First Amendment and other rights once the Fifth Amendment is undermined.  Although, no one may be “deprived of life” without due process of law under the Fifth Amendment, Holder claims that due process “doesn’t necessarily come from a court.”

Author Naomi Wolf reminded the world the day before NDAA Day 1 that U.S. citizens are “sleepwalking into becoming a police state.”  She explained further:

“Overstated?  Let’s be clear: the NDAA grants the president the power to kidnap any American anywhere in the United States and hold him or her in prison forever without trial.  The president’s own signing statement, incredibly, confirmed that he had that power.  As I have been warning since 2006: there is not a country on the planet that you can name that has ever set in place a system of torture, and of detention without trial, for an “other”, supposedly external threat that did not end up using it pretty quickly on its own citizens.”

The American Civil Liberties Union is now calling on all U.S. citizens to pressure the Senate to clean up the NDAA.  People must specifically demand that no president ever be given the power to use the military far from armed conflict to imprison civilians indefinitely, especially within U.S. borders.  Additionally, no President should be required to put civilians into military custody without charge.  Chris Anders from the ACLU explains:

“The United States itself should be off-limits for the military to impose indefinite detention without charge or trial.  It would be unconstitutional for the president to apply the NDAA provisions here at home, but the Senate rejected explicit protections to reinforce the Constitution’s and the Posse Comitatus Act’s protections.”

But without much leverage other than the power of the vote, which most voters perpetually award to the same politicians they protest, U.S. civilian demands are easily dismissed, as the Democrat and Republican parties know they have monopolized the political process.  Perhaps, it’s time to boycott both corporate political parties responsible for so much oppression.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges is suing the President for signing the NDAA.  He, along with several other plaintiffs, such as Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg, blame both political parties for the passing of this totalitarian law.  They suspect that the corporate state ensured its passage because of potentially imminent uprisings in the United States.  In Hedges’ own words:

“This demented ‘war on terror’ is as undefined and vague as such a conflict is in any totalitarian state.  The NDAA expands our permanent war to every spot on the globe.  It erases fundamental constitutional liberties.  It means we can no longer use the word ‘democracy’ to describe our political system.”

Chris Hedges on Alex Jones’ Infowars discusses the lawsuit.

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Oskar Mosquito is a regular contributor to Media Roots.

Photo provided by Flickr user DVIDSHUB.

***UPDATE

Obama recently came out to issue new guidelines for the NDAA provision, but the move is simply a PR stunt.  It does not strip his absolute power of indefinitely detaining U.S. citizens.

Abby