| How Clinton Betrays Americans | |
| The Anthrax Vaccine Scandals It wasn’t just idle words when Bill Clinton said he “loathed” the military. He has damaged U.S. Armed Services in so many ways that it’s no wonder morale, recruitment and retention levels are at all-time lows. Clinton has used the military to indulge in social experimentation to appease the feminists and gays, and in interventionist experimentation to please his globalist friends. He has also ordered medical experimentation through compulsory anthrax vaccination. It adds up to a shocking betrayal of the men and women in the U.S. Armed Services. Since the Pentagon is in denial and coverup, we can thank CBS 60 Minutes for its February 6th exposé of the case of Major Sonnie Bates and thank Rep. Christopher Shays’ (R-CT) Subcommittee on National Security of the House Government Reform Committee for its scathing report on the vaccine released February 17th. (http://www.house.gov/reform/ns/reports/anthrax1.pdf and reported in New York Times, 2-18-00) Clinton responded to Congressional hearings by issuing Executive Order 13139 on September 30, 1999. It denies servicemen the right to refuse experimental vaccines that are “not yet approved by the FDA for its intended use,” language that obviously covers the anthrax vaccine. The 60 Minutes segment was a sympathetic portrayal of Major Bates, a 14-year decorated pilot and the highest ranking of some 300 servicemen who have been punished for refusing the vaccine, with penalties from prison to bad-conduct discharge to “correctional custody.” The Pentagon then reduced the threat to court-martial Bates to a lesser punishment. More than 1,000 servicemen with exemplary records are awaiting trial on a felony charge of refusing to take the anthrax shot. Hundreds more, including dozens of pilots described as “the cream of the crop,” have left the services. Congressional testimony indicated that, for every one who reported vaccine reactions, three others did not report them because they feared that would be a career killer. The lengthy report of the Shays Subcommittee concludes that the anthrax policy “lacks an essential element in a medical program: trust.” The Pentagon’s “absolutist declarations, heavy-handed propaganda, and ad hominem attacks” against those who question the policy are seen as another chapter in a long history of “military medical malfeasance” that includes lies about nuclear testing, Agent Orange, and Gulf War drugs and vaccines. The long-term effects of the anthrax vaccine have never been studied, but the immediate reactions include autoimmune disorders, lesions, rashes, memory lapses, thyroid problems, blurred vision, inability to drive or read, crippling bone-joint pain, loss of concentration and chronic fatigue. The military has reacted by calling those affected liars, whiners, hypochondriacs, malingerers, hysterical, depressed, or in need of counseling. The Shays report states that the anthrax vaccine is based on old (1950s-era) medical technology, a “dangerously narrow scientific and medical foundation.” Currently, the “safety of the vaccine is not being monitored adequately.” A newly built anthrax vaccine plant failed its FDA safety inspection on December 13, 1999. (Washington Post, 12-14-99) According to the Shays report, even the “efficacy of the vaccine against biological warfare is uncertain. The vaccine was approved for protection against cutaneous (under the skin) infection in an occupational setting, not for use as mass protection against weaponized, aerosolized anthrax,” which is how any enemy would use anthrax. The sole and exclusive manufacturer of the anthrax vaccine, BioPort of Lansing, Michigan, has been cited repeatedly by the FDA for quality deficiencies. It not only has a checkered safety record, but also a checkered financial history. The anthrax vaccine was originally produced by Michigan Biologics Products Institute. It was taken over in September 1998 by BioPort Corporation, a new company created by Intervac L.L.C., in which former Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral William J. Crowe owned 22.5 percent of the stock even though he hadn’t invested a penny. (ABCNEWS.com, 3-12-99) The very next month, BioPort was awarded a Department of Defense (DOD) contract valued at $25.7 million to produce anthrax vaccine. Crowe will be remembered as the former Joint Chiefs Chairman who endorsed Bill Clinton for President in 1992 and gave Clinton “cover” when his draft record was under attack. On August 5, 1999, DOD agreed to pay BioPort nearly double the price specified in the contract: $49.8 million instead of $25.7 million, including advance payments of $18.7 million. DOD also indemnified MBPI/BioPort against all liability from adverse reactions because, according to Army Secretary Louis Caldera, the vaccine involves “unusually hazardous risks associated with the potential for adverse reactions in some recipients and the possibility that the desired immunological effect will not be obtained by all recipients.” It is particularly dangerous to require all service women to receive the anthrax shots since the Centers for Disease Control has warned that pregnant women should not be vaccinated “because it is not known whether the anthrax vaccine can cause fetal harm.” (www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dbmd/diseaseinfo/anthrax_g.htm) Most military women are of childbearing age and at least 10% are pregnant at any one time. The mandatory anthrax vaccination of 2.4 million members of the Armed Services should be terminated immediately. And all those who have had the courage to speak out against this policy, which doesn’t pass the common-sense test, should be restored to duty and their convictions and punishment expunged from their records.
Although Clinton had been promoting the ICC for the last five years, he didn’t sign it at its final negotiating session in Rome in 1998 because of vigorous opposition from the Pentagon. Now we discover that, even though the United States didn’t sign it, Americans can be tried by this court anyway! According to the treaty’s text, all nations, whether signatories or not, will be subject to the ICC’s jurisdiction. The court will insist that Americans comply with its demands for information, evidence, witnesses and suspects. The Clinton Administration says it is trying to insert new language into the treaty to make it “unlikely” that U.S. troops would ever be called before the court. The Europeans reply that it is “out of the question” to renegotiate any portion of the treaty because any language exempting U.S. troops would also shield Saddam Hussein and other bad guys from prosecution. The treaty will go into effect at the Hague with an 18-member court as soon as 60 nations ratify the treaty. All members of the European Union (EU) are enthusiastic supporters of the treaty and UN chief Kofi Annan is lobbying for speedy ratification. The ICC is modeled after the war crimes tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia. It would be empowered to try individuals, in contrast to the long-existing World Court which can only adjudicate disputes among nations. The ICC plans to prosecute charges of war crimes, genocide and other “crimes against humanity” whose definition is still evolving, without direct authorization of the UN Security Council. That means our U.S. Security Council veto will be irrelevant. The European Union has promised financial and legal assistance to get the court started, and it is expected that the court’s costs thereafter will be paid by the UN’s regular budget. That means the United States, which didn’t sign or ratify the treaty, will be paying a fourth of its costs for the privilege of subjecting American citizens to trial. The International Criminal Court is so contrary to American constitutional law that one wonders how the Clinton Administration dared to participate in its drafting. The U.S. Constitution does not permit our government to delegate its judicial authority to an institution that is not a U.S. court. The ICC treaty purports to legalize hauling up U.S. citizens before the court and trying them without our Bill of Rights guarantees such as a grand-jury indictment and a public trial by an impartial jury in the place where the crime was committed. The ICC would not respect our due process guarantees such as the privileges against self-incrimination, double jeopardy, ex post facto laws, and the writ of habeas corpus. ICC trials would take place before judges who are not appointed by the United States and not even Americans, who would be enforcing laws that are not yet written. Americans should wake up and realize that the ICC is part of a powerful push by our erstwhile allies to lock America into a European political, judicial and military structure in which the United States would have only one vote. The International Criminal Court would sacrifice American citizens on the altar of Bill Clinton’s global “web of institutions and arrangements” which he promised the United Nations on September 22, 1997 and hopes will be his legacy. The price of his global web would be our freedom and our constitutional rights.
The Pinochet case proves that international trials of individuals are political, not legal, proceedings, and certainly a far cry from what we in America understand as constitutional due process. The same week that Spain’s headline-grabbing judge demanded that the British arrest Pinochet, Spain’s Prime Minister was hosting Fidel Castro with full diplomatic honors. The left hates Pinochet because he overthrew the Communist regime of Salvador Allende in Chile. Yet, Pinochet voluntarily held a free election in 1990 and gave up power to a democratic government, after which the Chileans made him Senator for Life; and Chile has remained free and prosperous ever since. Political double standards, not equal protection of the laws, would be the rule under any international tribunal such as the ICC. Call the roll of the murderous thugs and current and former Communist dictators who stay in power by force or retire in luxury without fear of being arrested, extradited, or tried. Uganda’s Idi Amin, who is estimated to have killed 300,000 of his political opponents, is living in Saudi Arabia. Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier of Haiti lives in a chateau in southern France. Mikhail Gorbachev, who presided over the Gulag and the bloody invasion of Afghanistan, heads a prestigious think-tank in San Francisco and enjoys top-dollar honoraria for speeches promoting world government. Poland’s last Communist boss, Wojciech Jaruzelski, who murdered anti-Communist activists, was given a lifetime pension by his country. Yasser Arafat and former dictators from India, Cambodia, the Congo, and elsewhere travel freely around the world. Could former President George Bush be arrested on an extradition request from Iraq and charged with the war crime of killing civilians during the Gulf War? Could Henry Kissinger be grabbed and tried for bombing Cambodia during the Vietnam War? Could Argentina demand the extradition of Margaret Thatcher for sinking its ships during her war over the Falklands? How about arresting Queen Elizabeth II for past British crimes against the Irish? Could Bill Clinton be arrested and charged with “intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians . . . clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated”? That’s one of the “war crimes” listed in the ICC Statute, and it’s a fair description of his attack on Sudan’s pharmaceutical factory in 1998. The ICC should be soundly rejected because it would interfere with constitutional rights guaranteed to every American and threaten the ability of the United States to defend our national security.
The WTO is a 14-page charter that was surreptitiously added, without debate or publicity, to the 22,000-page revision of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). WTO is not a trade agreement at all but a stealth treaty inserted into GATT in order to evade the constitutional requirement that treaties need a two-thirds Senate majority. WTO’s origin grew out of the Bretton Woods Conference at the end of World War II, when a three-legged plan was proposed to control the global economy. The World Bank, which makes loans to developing nations, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which makes loans for foreign reconstruction and development projects, were born in December 1945 and have been bleeding the U.S. taxpayers ever since. The third leg, then called the International Trade Organization (ITO), was blocked by U.S. Senators because it would diminish U.S. sovereignty and interfere with U.S. laws. GATT, which is simply a contractual relationship among sovereign nations, then became the basic multilateral agreement on global trade and has been negotiating rounds of tariff reductions ever since. When the final Uruguay Round of GATT Multilateral Trade Negotiations was signed in Morocco on April 15, 1994, the globalists returned to their 1947 plan of creating an actual organization with the power to control world trade. The WTO charter was then slipped into the GATT document that Congress passed. The WTO is a supra-national body in Geneva that sets, administers, and enforces the rules of global trade. It includes a legislature, called the Ministerial Conference, consisting of 135 nations each with one vote; an executive branch consisting of a Director-General and an unelected multinational bureaucracy with a secretariat, committees, councils and review bodies; and a supreme court of trade called the Dispute Settlement Board that decides trade disputes and whose rulings cannot be vetoed by any nation. The WTO is based on the one-country-one-vote pattern. The United States has only one vote out of 135, the same vote as Somalia, Haiti, Cuba or Rwanda. We have no veto. Most of the 135 are dictatorships and not our friends. They look upon international organizations as vehicles to finance their socialist economies and ruling classes out of U.S. wealth and technology. The WTO’s procedures are dramatically different from those used in prior years by GATT. GATT required a consensus decision to impose a penalty recommended by a dispute panel, and the United States could reject rulings that intruded on our interests. Under the WTO, unilateral action is forbidden. The United States must abide by the judgments of WTO’s Dispute Settlement Board, which deliberates and votes in secret. WTO is a direct attack on our sovereignty because it can force us to change our laws to comply with WTO rulings. Article XVI, paragraph 4, states: “Each Member shall ensure the conformity of its laws, regulations, and administrative procedures with its obligations.” The WTO has the final say about whether U.S. laws meet WTO requirements. The WTO can impose financial penalties and sanctions if WTO decides that our laws don’t fully obey its dictates.
Relinquishing our right to control our own trade policies to a bunch of foreign bureaucrats in Geneva, accountable to no one, is a prescription for international mischief. No secret global organization should be controlling U.S. trade, investment or technology, or making decisions about our jobs, production, labor standards, environment, or security. The multinational corporations like what WTO does and the way it does it behind closed doors. WTO makes it safe for them to shift their operations anywhere in the world, where there are no U.S.-style labor or environmental regulations and 50 workers can be hired for the wage of one American, and then enjoy duty-free access back into the United States. China has been Exhibit A of those who believe that a global economy should be our primary goal and that trade with China’s new “entrepreneurial class” will lead that Communist country toward capitalism and democracy. Ten years of trade have produced no such evidence. A book published in Hong Kong in 1998, China’s Pitfall by Shanghai economist He Qinglian, exposes what really happened as the tremendous investment of U.S. money poured into China. Communist totalitarianism simply shifted into an oligarchy run by a clique of gangsters hostile to the United States. This book “resoundingly” vindicates the skeptics, according to the New York Review of Books. (Oct. 8, 1998) He Qinglian proves that the so-called “reform” initiated by Deng Ziaoping was “a process in which power-holders and their hangers-on plundered public wealth.” The Communist bosses used their political power to transfer to themselves the state property that had been accumulated during 40 years of the people’s sweat under Mao Tse-tung. Deng issued a call for everyone to go into business and get rich, “even more boldly” and “even faster.” His message led virtually every Party official to join the racket, using “sordid methods,” bribes, kickbacks, and ignoring contracts and debts. Friends or children of powerful officials took control of the most productive sections of state enterprises. One process was popularly called “official turnaround,” whereby officials would buy raw materials or commodities at fixed prices and then “turn around” to reap large illicit profits by selling on the private market. Public funds were used for speculation in real estate or stocks. If they made profits, the officials would keep it; if not, they would pass along the losses to state accounts. Joint enterprises with foreign businesses allowed the preferred officials to deposit their profits in overseas accounts (which was illegal for others). He Qinglian calculates that this outflow of capital to private foreign accounts amounted to about half as much as the total foreign investment coming into China. He Qinglian writes that a current popular saying is: “In the 90s we slaughter whoever we see.” The word “slaughter” (zai) corresponds to the American expression “rip off.” The large foreign investment that, in the mid-1990s, ranged between 30 and 40 billion U.S. dollars a year, created the illusion that China was producing new wealth. This illusion was augmented by the fact that China’s state banks took the personal savings of ordinary citizens (the equivalent of U.S. $240 billion), and used the money to support state enterprises propped up with “loans” that could never be repaid. The underworld economy, including drug trafficking, smuggling, sale of human beings, counterfeiting, prostitution and pornography, has merged with the legitimate economy. In parts of China, underworld gangsters have either assumed political power or made alliances with Communist officials to form a force that “treats farmers almost like slaves.” While the world is told that China is progressing toward a Western-style economic system, Communist bosses have kept their socially and financially privileged positions. It’s not “reform” at all; He Qinglian calls it a “government-underworld alliance.” Whatever you call it, it’s certainly not capitalism or democracy. Meanwhile, China is pocketing over $5 billion per month (by selling us $6 billion of their goods and buying only $1 billion in U.S. goods) and using this unprecedented profit to build up its military-industrial complex. |
