Saturday, November 27, 2010

GORDON DUFF: WIKILEAKS, A TOUCH OF ASSANGE AND THE STENCH OF AIPAC

“recent admissions that the Israeli lobby, AIPAC, routinely receives masses of classified information makes them suspect #1 for being the source of Wikileaks”


Wikileaks is like a TV show that never gets off the ground. We started with a “shoot ‘em up” in Iraq, the helicopter slaughter soon forgotten and move on to, well, what? We got a deluge of material from Afghanistan, carefully gleaned to point fingers at Pakistan. When it came down to backing any of it up, it went nowhere.

Considering the massive corruption and drug scandals, even the revelations that President Karzai has been in negotiations with pranksters pretending to be the Talbian, all the really juicy stuff from Afghanistan must have been in another drawer. Then we got Iraq. Ah, Iraq. There, we could check. We know the people who wrote the leaked material. They told us Wikileaks edited it, altered it, redacted it more than the Pentagon.

The “Iraq War Log” was, well…phony. There is one thing that has been consistent about Wikileaks and our prediction is that this next batch, reputed to be millions of highly sensitive documents, will prove our point. Wikileaks is Israel.

Wikileaks is an intelligence operation to weaken and undermine the American government, orchestrated from Tel Aviv, using dozens of operatives, dual citizens, some at the highest authority levels, spies for Israel. Through leaking carefully selected intelligence along with proven falsified documents, all fed to a controlled press, fully complicit, Wikileaks is, in fact, an act of war against the United States.

HOW CAN ISRAEL SIFT THROUGH DEFENSE DOCUMENTS?

This last week, in a lawsuit over an AIPAC, (Israel’s lobby) employee reputedly fired for being caught spying against the US, news stories across the United States reported that, as part of that $20 million civil case, evidence will be presented that masses of classified material come to AIPAC and Israel continually. Is AIPAC Wikileaks? The only evidence of any massive leak discovered in the Pentagon is AIPAC. Last week’s Washington Post story was buried quicker than a carp in a playground: Jeff Stein, at the Washinton Post, reports the following:

Rosen says his actions were common practice at the organization. He said his next move is to show that AIPAC, Washington’s major pro-Israeli lobbying group by far, regularly traffics in sensitive U.S. government information, especially material related to the Middle East. “I will introduce documentary evidence that AIPAC approved of the receipt of classified information,” he said by e-mail. “Most instances of actual receipt are hard to document, because orally received information rarely comes with classified stamps on it nor record’s alerts that the information is classified.”

But Rosen said he would produce “statements of AIPAC employees to the FBI, internal documents, deposition statements, public statements and other evidence showing that [the] receipt of classified information by employees other than [himself] … was condoned … for months prior to being condemned in March 2005 after threats from the prosecutors.”

How does this apply to Wikileaks? The answer, if we bother to put the pieces together, is staring us in the face. The proof, the ultimate proof, however, will be in the current batch of documents that have already been prepared, weeks of work by dozens with access to classified documents, and only one group has that access and can operate with impunity, as was shown in a recent story in Veterans Today:


AIPAC is a sham. The group has, over the years, destroyed anyone who has tried to have it named what it really is, a dangerous foreign lobby and nest of spies. AIPAC is the most feared organization in Washington and most powerful, above any law. A former employee of AIPAC, Steve Rosen, who AIPAC claims was a spy, more appropriately a “caught” spy, now claims his former employer does nothing but spy. Rosen stands to get $20 million in his defamation lawsuit against AIPAC.


He isn’t without motive but we have also learned that Rosen has considerable documentation of AIPAC receiving and disseminating classified information, received from, well, we have to call them traitors, inside the US government. We know that a vast spy ring operates in Washington and that Israel is the center of it.


We also know that Israel, Turkey, India, Pakistan, China and Russia trade American secrets back and forth like baseball cards. We know that AIPAC is deeply involved in this spying. We know that AIPAC claims to hold signed letters of unconditional support from 80% of the members of congress, all of whom received campaign contributions arranged by AIPAC, with many elections financed almost entirely by AIPAC, a group involved, according to the Washington Post and Steve Rosen, in spying on the United States with seeming complicity by the FBI itself.

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The Essence of the Banking Industry

Friday, November 26, 2010

TSA Terrorize A Disabled 4 Year Old Boy By Removing His Leg Braces, Then Forcing Him To Walk

Thursday, November 25, 2010

The TSA and America's Turning Point

Are we a free people or are we not?

The recently-escalated battle between the American people and the TSA is far more important than it first appears. The final outcome of this argument will determine whether we still live in a nation "of the people, by the people, for the people", or whether we have become a soft tyranny where our democratic forms of elections and representatives have been reduced to a meaningless veneer as in the old Soviet Union or Red China.
The Consent of the Governed

If America has a single founding principle, it is this: no government has any authority to take any action without the consent of the governed. Our Founding Fathers did not object to the principle of paying taxes per se; they objected strongly to the idea of being forced to pay taxes to a government where they had no input. Freedom's cry was not "No taxation" then, and it isn't now; it was "No taxation without representation." The same goes for any other intrusive regulation.

The concept of "the consent of the governed" means more than just voting, however. A hundred years ago, Prohibition was enacted scrupulously according to democratic forms: Congress and then the required number of states passed a constitutional amendment allowing it, and then Congress and the President passed the Volstead Act enforcing it.

However, events quickly revealed that Prohibition did not have the consent of the governed, or at least a very sizable minority of them: whole sectors of American society insisted on having their booze no matter what the law said. The end result was vast wealth poured into crime syndicates; eventually Prohibition was repealed with the nation much the worse off for the experience.

There are many laws on the books today which do not really have the consent of the governed, but the government enforces them with a light touch so as not to provoke a backlash. Consider speed limits: almost everybody speeds, and the police almost never ticket people for going just a hair over. You usually have to be speeding by a good bit, and even then, getting caught is relatively rare. If the police seriously tried to ticket every single speeder, voters would demand that the limits be changed.

Or so we've always assumed - after all, government ultimately answers to the people, doesn't it?

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Wednesday, November 24, 2010

THE HOLOCAUST EXPLAINED

By Eustace Mullins


Holocaust -- from the meaning wholly burnt. 1) a sacrifice wholly consumed by fire. 2) complete consumption by fire. Oxford English Dictionary.

If the Jewish claim that they were the victims of a holocaust in Germany is true, then they were consumed entirely by fire. This Jewish claim is unacceptable because there were so many survivors. Not only were the Jews not consumed wholly by fire, as they claim, but, forty years after this non-event, there are more Jews claiming to be survivors of the Holocaust than there were Jews living at the time of the Holocaust. In one small American suburb, Skokie, Ill. are now residing many thousands of healthy Jews who claim to be "survivors" of the Holocaust.

For more than thirty years, American voters have mutely accepted the fact that anyone seeking public office in the United States must make a routine pledge of undying allegiance to the State of Israel. Few of these voters realize that these office-seekers must also make a ritual obeisance to the Myth of the Holocaust and swear eternal belief in the doctrine that six million Jews were killed by the Germans during World War II. As was noted on the editorial page of the Washington Post, the regnant world journal of international Zionism, on October 29, 1981. "Anyone who refuses to support the State of Israel admits his sympathy for the murderers of six million Jews."

Webster's dictionary defines treason as "the offense of betraying the state or subverting the government of the state to which the subverter belongs." Officeholders of the United States who are sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States and who then pledge allegiance to a foreign government and act in allegiance to that foreign government are guilty of high treason and are subject to the death penalty. The situation is more flagrant in the case of the State of Israel because, from its inception in 1948, the State of Israel has maintained a state of war against the citizens of the United States. If the objective of making war is to subdue another people and to seize their goods and enslave them, then Israel's activities towards the United States can only be described as engaging in constant warfare. Thus the Zionist collaborators all over the United States are giving aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States during a time of war. These acts of treason can only be punished by the death penalty.

The Zionist collaborators have as their sole excuse that they are aiding the Jews because they were the victims of the Holocaust. Unfortunately, this excuse has now been demolished by the revelations that there were no gas chambers and that the Germans had no plan to "exterminate" the Jews. In 1952, I wrote in "Blood and Gold", "The claim that Hitler killed 6,000,000 Jews is belied by their own figures in the World Almanac. Immediately after Germany's surrender, a plane load of American editors and correspondents were flown to the concentration camps, where they were shown huge piles of bones. These were the remains of Russian prisoners of war, but they were filmed and shown all over the United States as 'Jewish bones'. In one of the most revolting attempts to influence public opinion ever known, Jewish owned movie houses showed these gruesome photos over and over again."

Once again, we are inundated by the Jewish propaganda, as the ludicrous bone pictures, some of which have been established as having been taken during World War I, become our daily fare. The Public Broadcasting System, financed with taxpayers funds, recently showed a series of "holocaust" films, each more incredible than the last. In one, an elderly Jewess returns to Auschwitz, where she claims to have been incarcerated forty years age. "It voss a death camp?" she exclaims. She then stated that she remained there for four years, although the Germans "killed everybody every day." She was then asked how she has survived. "I hid in the camp," she explained, "but I had nothing to eat for three years."

After this astounding statement, she pointed to the rows of peaceful barracks and shrieked, "But just look ! You can see for yourself it actually happened !" The bemused viewer, seeing only a pleasant rural scene, apparently was expected to conjure up visions of six million Jews being marched to the gas chambers.

Nearly all of the Jewish "survivors" claim that they lived in the "death camps" from three to four years, while "everybody was being killed". It seems obvious that no one could survive in a "labor camp", which is what these camps actually were. Over the entrance to each camp was placed a sign, "Arbeit Machs du Frei," or, "Work Makes You Free".

In the "Nation", Sept. 26, 1981, Albert Speer, the German Minister for Armaments, was quoted as having answered, in response to a demand from the leaders of the Jewish community in South Africa that he verify that Jews were killed during World War II by the Germans, so that they could prosecute the distributors of the pamphlet, "Did Six Million Really Die ?", "I couldn't." Although Speer refused to submit to pressure from the Jews that he lie and "confess" that the Jews had been killed, he did admit some sort of "collective guilt" in the matter, but denied that he had any direct knowledge of any Holocaust activities. His admission of "guilt" brought praise from the Jewish agitator, Simon Weisenthal, who then proceeded to endorse Speer's new book, "Infiltration". However, this book defined the camps as labor camps. On p. 9, Speer writes, "During factory inspections, I saw concentration camp prisoners working in our plants among German workers."

Note that Speer does not even identify these laborers as Jews. On p. 41, he writes, "During my inspection (at Mauthausen, March, 1943,) I was surprised to see expensive granite retaining walls, on which barracks, likewise of native stone, had been erected. Everything was clean and orderly. The level, say, of an average anti aircraft barrack. The camp made an almost romantic impression with its stone portal and mediaeval castle yards, its pseudohistorical walls and towers."

The German soldier in the field never enjoyed such pleasant quarters as did the labor camp workers. Otto Friedrich, a senior editor of Time Magazine, wrote an article in Atlantic Monthly, Sept. 1981, which he stated was based entirely on the writings of survivors of the camps, and which could hardly be accused of painting a rosy picture of their existence. In "The Kingdom of Auschwitz", Friedrich writes, "Auschwitz was a society of extraordinary complexity. It had its own soccer stadium, its own library, its own soccer stadium, its own library, its own photo lab, and its own symphony orchestra ... There was no reason that a death camp should have a hospital at all, yet the one at Auschwitz grew to considerable size, with about twenty doctors and more than three hundred nurses."

Friedrich ignores the implications of his own writing, that a "death camp" with a large modern hospital is not a death camp at all, but a health camp. All of the camps had their own symphony orchestras, an amenity which was not provided by any of the twenty two military stations at which this writer served in the United States Air Force throughout World War II. Friedrich also writes that Auschwitz had its own brothel for the workers. And a photo lab, in which the inmates could develop their snapshots of the millions of Jews being herded into the gas chambers ? No such photos have ever been exhibited. Later in his article, Friedrich writes that Auschwitz actually was developed throughout the war into a vast industrial complex, with a network of thirty-four outlaying camps, which provided workers for cement plants, coal mines, and a steel factory. I.G. Farben operated a huge synthetic rubber plant there.

An intensely religious person, Adolf Hitler had written in Mein Kampf that "Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord ... The fight against Jewish world Bolshevization requires a clear attitude towards Soviet Russia. You cannot drive out the Devil with Beelzebub."

During the war, while fighting on two fronts, Hitler allowed himself to be swayed from these fervent sentiments by an extremely clever campaign on the part of the Jews. Having been warned that the Allies planned a campaign of terror bombing against German civilians, it was necessary that the Jews be evacuated from German cities. Through their close contacts with a number of Nazi bureaucrats, the leaders of the Jewish communities organized whereby the Jews would be evacuated in "the eastward migration". Even Speer approved the plan, but specified that "The ablebodied Jews destined for eastward migration must therefore interrupt their journey and do armaments labor." The result was that the labor camps were established in rural areas, far from the cities, and the Jews were spared the ordeal of the terrible bombings which engulfed German women and children in torrents of flame and phosphorus bombs. There was a Holocaust in Germany during World War II, but the victims were Germans, in a well-planned campaign of genocide, while the evacuated Jews survived en masse.

After the war, with their genius for perverting the truth, the Jews completely reversed the facts. Instead of the Holocaust engulfing German non-combatants in the cities, the victims were now the Jews, who had been "exterminated" in the "death camps". Since the evacuation of the Jews, the "eastward migration", had been organized at the behest of the Jewish leaders, many Jews now believed their own propaganda, and accused the Jewish leaders of having organized the "extermination" of European Jewry. Thus Hannah Arendt, a leading Jewish intellectual, writes bitterly, in "Eichmann in Jerusalem", "Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another with the Nazis." Of course they cooperated, so successfully that while a million German women and children died in mass bombing raids on German cities, not a Jewish life was lost. The Allied bombing of Berlin killed so many German families that Eisenhower is remembered there today by the wry sobriquet, "the Mad Butcher of Berlin". The firestorms created by bombing the cities of Cologne, Hamburg, Dresden and other German cities remain the greatest atrocities of World War II.

It was to obscure the real atrocities of World War II that the Myth of the Jewish Holocaust was invented. Its earliest application was intended to cover up the discovery that the Soviet Army had systematically murdered 14,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest. These Polish officers comprised the most highly educated and skilled segment of the Polish population. Stalin ordered them exterminated to facilitate Communist rule in Poland. It was the Katyn massacre which later became the inspiration for the stories of columns of Jews being marched into rural areas and executed. Indeed, the basic purpose of the invention of the Holocaust Myth was to prevent Soviet Russia from being embarrassed by any mention of the Katyn Forest massacre at the Nuremberg Trials. Roosevelt's pro-Communist regime battled valiantly to assist Russia in covering up the Katyn horror. Elmer Davis, who had been placed in the Office of War Information by James Paul Warburg, refused to mention this atrocity in his broadcasts, while W. Averell Harriman cooperated in keeping the story out of print until the Nuremberg Trials had been completed. "Jewish Comment", May 21, 1943, sneered at the German discovery of the massacre as follows; "After its sensational success with the story of the 10,000 Polish officers allegedly killed by the Soviets, the German Propaganda Ministry has evidently determined to explore further possibilities of splitting the Allies."

Because of the many atrocities committed by the Jewish-directed Allies, not only the firestorm incineration of German civilians in many German cities, but the incineration of hundreds' of thousands of Japanese civilians in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Operation Keelhaul, the murder of one million anti-Communist Russians who were ordered handed over to the Soviet executioners by Eisenhower, and many other horrors, it was necessary to invent a German atrocity which would eclipse these horrors. The "extermination" of the Jews seemed made to order. Since there was no basis for any numerical figures, the earliest projections were that 12,000,000 Jews had been killed. Wiser heads among the Jews suggested that no figure higher than one million should be advanced, since a larger figure was likely to be discredited, thus invalidating the entire Holocaust claim. Some Jewish writers in New York began to publicize a figure of six million, and this soon gained such wide currency that the Jews had to settle for it, and it has remained the standard figure ever since. The self appointed "historian" of the Holocaust, Lucy S. Davidowicz, coyly presents a figure of 5,933,900 in her "Holocaust Reader". Certainly no one objects to rounding this off to the more practical figure of six million. Congressman George G. Sadowski, in opposing the Marshall Plan, stated, "That 10,000,000 Jews were killed, tortured, placed in slave labor camps ... that all means nothing." Congressional Record, Feb. 23, 1948.

While protecting the Jews from the horrors of the Allied bombing raids, the Germans were forced by the exigencies of the war to leave the Jews largely to their own devices. As a result, the Jews, in the midst of war and universal devastation, thrived with their talents for black marketeering and scavenging. As Werner Sombart has written, "Wars are the Jews harvests." In "The War Against the Jews", Lucy Davodowicz writes of the Jewish profiteers, "This new class -- smugglers, underworld, nouveaux riches -- became the clientele for dozens of cafes, restaurants, and nightclubs that mushroomed in the ghetto. They passed their time dining, drinking, dancing."

In the camps, the Jewish inmates assumed complete charge of their administration. They converted the camps into training schools in which they subjected their students to the most intensive methods of Jewish survival and victory. Every morsel of food, clothing, every sexual pleasure and other aspect of life, became the vehicle of the most vicious bartering and maneuvering for advantage. Friedrich quotes one of them in "The Kingdom of Auschwitz". Concentration camp existence ... taught us that the whole world is really like a concentration camp. The world is ruled by neither justice nor morality; crime is not punished nor virtue rewarded. The world is ruled by power. We are laying the foundation for some new, monstrous civilization."

In fact, the Jews used the camps as the opportunity to recreate the most intensive Talmudic training schools for themselves, a rigid education which they had lost since emerging from their mediaeval ghettoes. Now, raging in their genetic powerhouses which they recreated in the camps, they prepared themselves for the inevitable ending of the war, when they loosed themselves upon the wartorn nations of the earth like the most devastating plagues from Pandora's box. When they descended upon the helpless Christians, they immediately created a "new, monstrous civilization". As one Jew boasted, "When I left the concentration camp, I suddenly realized that I could take anybody."

The graduates of this school for power quickly became wealthy and influential residents of many countries. One and all, they were fanatical Zionists; they were united in their contempt for the "goyim", the gentile cattle whom they proposed to enslave and manipulate. With the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, they quickly converted the government of the United States into a vassal of Tel Aviv, and used the wealth of the greatest country in the world to advance their goals in other nations. In every instance, they used the Myth of the Holocaust to advance their objectives. The goyim were inundated with stories and movies of "the extermination" of the Jews. Anne Roiphe wrote, in "Generation Without a Memory,", p. 62, "When gas became costly and ran short, they threw the infants and children directly into burning ovens." She fails to tell us what sort of fuel the Germans were using for their "burning ovens". The Jews continually wrote of the "modern technology" which had enabled the Germans to dispose of millions of Jews, and invariably, the sole illustration of this "technology" was a pair of small ovens which seemed a relic of the nineteenth century, and which could have disposed of only a few bodies a day. A crematorium requires a temperature of 2200 degrees Fahrenheit for the first ninety minutes, and then 1800 degrees for from sixty to one hundred fifty minutes, and even this does not burn bones. Lacking fuel supplies, the Germans could not even have provided the necessary fuel to embark on any program of burning victims.

The Jews then introduced lurid stories of chemical experiments on the victims. In fact, the Washington Post recently carried a series of horror stories in which helpless victims were given chemical substances which caused then intense agony, vomiting and convulsions, loss of hair and many other excruciating symptoms. However, the victims were not Jews in Nazi concentration camps. They were patients at the National Institute of Health in Washington, where government doctors experimented on them with various chemicals for cancer treatments. Most of the victims died in agony, without the slightest amelioration of their cancers. In American prisons, chemical testing of various substances on prisoners has been going on for many years. While our government continues to appropriate millions of dollars for the pursuit of "Nazi war criminals", these chemical experiments in our prisons and hospitals go on without interruption.

The "Nazi hunter", Simon Weisenthal, has become a cult figure in Washington, despite the revelations that throughout World War II he was a Gestapo agent. He has come under increasing criticism from many of his fellow Jews for his claim that he alone has kept the Holocaust Myth alive in recent years. Soon he may even claim that he invented the entire myth. Meanwhile, the American people, driven to the brink of bankruptcy by our support of the State of Israel, can find no prospect of relief.

Now the United States faces the possibility of a lawsuit projected by a group of German citizens, for the sum of $400 billion. This claim is based on the more than 100 billion marks which West Germany has been forced to pay the State of Israel as "reparations" for "the extermination of six million Jews." Not only was the claim false, but it was extorted from the German people solely because of the continued military occupation of West Germany by the United States. The Germans point out that in all the prosecutions of former camp guards, they have only been charged with "beating and kicking" the Jewish inmates. None of them has been charged with actually "gassing" anyone. Kurt Becker, of the Press Information Office in Bonn, Germany, stated in Newsweek, June 8, 1981, that as of Dec. 31, 1980, West Germany had paid to the State of Israel 63 billion DM, or $30 billion, and was still committed to pay a further $9.5 billion. In addition, German firms have been forced to pay Israel many more billions as reparations to Jewish "laborers", and to furnish many billions of dollars worth of electrical systems, telephone systems, and other technological gifts to Israel.

In contrast, after World War I, the Reparations Commission submitted to Germany a demand that $30 billion be paid, to be divided among all the nations which Germany had fought in that war. Of this demand, only a few million dollars was ever paid, yet the State of Israel has already exacted from West Germany more money than was asked by all the nations whom Germany fought in World War I. The East Democratic Republic of Germany has denied that Germany owes any reparations to the State of Israel, and has paid nothing, leaving the United States as the nation solely responsible for forcing West Germany to pay many billions to the State of Israel. The German government would never have paid this money without the force of the American occupying power, yet American taxpayers are told that we maintain a military presence in West Germany to oppose Russian aggression. The farcical nature of this explanation of our military collection agency is exposed when it is admitted that American forces in West Germany could only delay a Russian advance from two to four hours !

The payments which the American military has demanded that West Germany pay to Israel have contributed heavily to West Germany's economic problems, and are responsible for the growing anti-American feeling in Germany. Many Germans openly sneer at the "mongrel culture" of the United States and call us a "nation of mulattoes", due to the presence of many black troops occupying West Germany.

Because of the nature of the dictatorship maintained by the force of the American military occupying army, in which no German is allowed to question the Myth of the Holocaust, the German patriots believe the only way to expose this conspiracy on behalf of Israel is to sue the United States for the return of all the "Holocaust" payments to Israel, with interest. This demand will soon be brought before the World Court. Meanwhile, Americans must decide what action to take to salvage their collapsing economy from the demands made on it by the insatiable Israeli power. Only the complete exposure of the Holocaust hoax will free our government officials from their commitments to ever increasing payments to the State of Israel.

Source

FDA sidesteps safety concerns over TSA body scanners



The United States Transportation Security Administration has recently come under scrutiny for, among other things, its use of X-ray full-body scanners in airports to see through clothes and to detect non-metallic explosives. But are they safe? A group of UC-San Francisco professors recently raised a number of safety concerns regarding these scanners. While the Obama administration attempted to address these worries, its assertion that the scanners are safe appears to fall short.

The TSA has slowly been implementing the use of X-ray scanners in airports (so far, 38 airports have 206 of the machines) in order to see through passengers' clothes and check them for explosive devices. Officials have asserted that the machines are okay to use on the basis of the everyday use of X-rays in medical offices. However, a group of four UCSF professors pinpointed several important differences between the medical X-ray machines and those used in airports. They described the issues in a letter to Dr. John P. Holdren, the assistant to the president for science and technology.

A normal X-ray image is a familiar sight—depending on the exposure, an X-rayed person typically appears only as a skeleton. This is because the X-rays used in those machines penetrate the skin and can only scatter off of the larger atoms in bones.

Unlike a medical X-ray, the TSA X-ray machines are a sci-fi fan's dream: they are lower-energy beams that can only penetrate clothing and the topmost layers of skin. This provides TSA agents with a view that would expose any explosives concealed by clothing. But according to the UCSF professors, the low-energy rays do a "Compton scatter" off tissue layers just under the skin, rather than the bone, possibly exposing some vital areas and leaving the tissues at risk of mutation.

When an X-ray Compton scatters, it doesn't shift an electron to a higher energy level; instead, it hits the electron hard enough to dislodge it from its atom. The authors note that this process is "likely breaking bonds," which could cause mutations in cells and raise the risk of cancer.

Because the X-rays only make it just under the skin's surface, the total volume of tissue responsible for absorbing the radiation is fairly small. The professors point out that many body parts that are particularly susceptible to cancer are just under the surface, such as breast tissue and testicles. They are also concerned with those over 65, as well as children, being exposed to the X-rays.

The professors pointed to a number of other issues, including the possibility that TSA agents may scan certain areas more slowly (for example, the groin, to prevent another "underwear bomber" incident like the one in December 2009), exposing that area to even more radiation. But the letter never explicitly accuses the machines of being dangerous; rather, the professors encourage Dr. Holdren to pursue testing to make sure that the casual use of these X-rays is safe.

Dr. Holdren passed the letter on to the Food and Drug Administration for review. But, in the FDA's response, the agency gave the issues little more than a data-driven brush off. They cite five studies in response to the professors' request for independent verification of the safety of these X-rays; however, three are more than a decade old, and none of them deal specifically with the low-energy X-rays the professors are concerned about. The letter also doesn't mention the FDA's own classification of X-rays as carcinogens in 2005.

The letter concludes that "the potential health risks from a full-body screening with a general-use X-ray security system are minuscule." But the increased surface area and volume of absorption area, plus the frequency with which many people travel, suggests that this use at least bears further scrutiny. US pilots' associations have also encouraged their members to opt for the pat-down in the meantime.

Of course, these pat-downs have recently become rather invasive, so now travelers must choose between a little irradiation and being felt up by a non-doctor.

However, the TSA does have a potential solution in hand. Of the 68 airports scanning for explosives, 30 are using millimeter-wave scanners that don't use X-rays at all; they hit the surface of the body with safer radio waves. If the TSA committed to using only this type of equipment, it could avoid the safety concerns regarding the X-ray full body scanners completely.

Source

Next step for tight security could be trains, boats, metro

The next step in tightened security could be on U.S. public transportation, trains and boats.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says terrorists will continue to look for U.S. vulnerabilities, making tighter security standards necessary.

“[Terrorists] are going to continue to probe the system and try to find a way through,” Napolitano said in an interview that aired Monday night on "Charlie Rose."

“I think the tighter we get on aviation, we have to also be thinking now about going on to mass transit or to trains or maritime. So, what do we need to be doing to strengthen our protections there?”

Napolitano’s comments, made a day before one of the nation’s busiest travel days, come in the wake of a public outcry over newly implemented airport screening measures that have been criticized for being too invasive.

The secretary has defended the new screening methods, which include advanced imaging systems and pat-downs, as necessary to stopping terrorists. During the interview with Rose, Napolitano said her agency is now looking into ways to make other popular means of travel safer for passengers and commuters.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, introduced legislation this past September that would authorize testing of body scanners at some federal buildings.

Napolitano’s comments were in response to the question: “What will they [terrorists] be thinking in the future?” She gave no details about how soon the public could see changes in security or about what additional safety measures the DHS was entertaining.

The recently implemented airport screening methods have made John Pistole, who heads the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the focus of growing public ire.

On Monday, Pistole said he understood peoples’ privacy concerns and that the TSA would consider modifying its screening policies to make them “as minimally invasive as possible,” but he indicated the advanced-imaging body scans and pat-down methods would remain in place in the short term, including during the high-volume Thanksgiving period of travel.

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Senator Rockefeller To TSA Chief John Pistole: “I Think You’re Doing A Terrific Job”

The backlash against new TSA airport screening procedures has reached a deafening crescendo, and so you would think that the politicians in Washington D.C. would be getting the message. But so far, most of them seem to be just as supportive of the TSA as ever. For example, what did the chairman of the Senate committee overseeing air travel, Jay Rockefeller, have to say to TSA chief John Pistole during a Senate hearing on these new security procedures the other day? "I Think You're Doing A Terrific Job." Yes, you read that correctly. Senator Rockefeller had nothing but praise for Pistole and the new screening procedures. Apparently Rockefeller thinks that TSA officials feeling up the genitals of U.S. air travelers with the fronts of their hands is a wonderful thing. It is even being reported that in some instances TSA officials are actually reaching down the pants of men and up the skirts of women during these enhanced pat-downs. Not only is this totally criminal, but considering the fact that TSA officials do this countless times without changing their gloves it is also a serious health hazard. But most of our "leaders" in Washington D.C. continue to insist that we should stop protesting because this is all being done "for our own good".

But should we expect anything less from elitists such as Rockefeller? This is the same guy who is publicly talking about how wonderful it would be if the FCC would just go in and shut down Fox News and MSNBC. He also has publicly expressed his belief that we would probably be "better off" if the Internet had never been invented. Obviously Rockefeller is not a big fan of freedom of expression.

But it is not just Rockefeller that is applauding these new TSA security procedures.

U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar seems convinced that the American people will change their minds once they understand the reasons behind these new rules. According to Klobuchar, the American people "have to understand that this is being done for their best interests and their safety."

U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill also believes that ordinary Americans will quickly change their opinions once they fully understand what is going on....

"And then I think we can--the majority of Americans I think--I hope will become supportive of the measures that TSA is trying to do to keep us safe."

Do you think that Klobuchar and McCaskill will still feel the same way once they have been groped and fondled by TSA officials?


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