This week: • Bird Flu • Rabin • Yahuda •
• Oil for Food • Dick • Stuff •

 

Bird flu or pork panic?

Since our last article on avian flu, interest has exploded across the world. Every news service out there has been screaming about the risks of a global pandemic that is set to rival the outbreak in 1918 that killed 18 million people worldwide. There seems to be no answer to the disease as it spreads relentlessly across Europe with the migrating bird population. As the 2000th US serviceman dies in Iraq, all this media attention focused away from the desert must seem like a dream come true for Bush and Co. However some closer attention by Dr Jim has revealed that the links to his administration are much to close for comfort.

Against all scientific prudence and normal procedure, the world’s population has been stirred into a panic. Everyone is waiting for avian flu to jump species, and start killing people in their thousands. The truth is that this is possible but unlikely. Viruses are notorious for their ability to mutate, but most experts seem to believe that any of the avian flu viruses have a long way to go before they pose any significant threat to humans (especially killing millions of us).

The real question to ask is who stands to gain from this mass hysteria. As already mentioned, the Bush administration is glad of the distraction but one particular company will be rather pleased with itself.

Roche is a large pharmaceutical company based in Switzerland, which manufactures a drug called Tamiflu. This drug is the only medicine currently available that has been shown to reduce the symptoms of seasonal influenza and “possibly” might reduce symptoms of avian flu. Roche holds the patent to this drug which is predictably expensive. It costs 60 dollars for ten pills and experts doubt that the company could be able to meet demand if an outbreak occurred. It is estimated that it would take 10 years and US$16 billion to supply 20 percent of the world’s population. Despite this Roche is refusing to relax patent rules to allow a generic version of the drug to be manufactured. They cite the “fact” that the manufacturing process is too complicated, rather than admitting that they are too greedy.

Where this story really gets interesting is in the origins of Tamiflu. It was developed and patented in 1996 by Gilead Sciences, a biotech firm based in California. Prior to his appointment as US Secretary of Defence, the chairman of the board of Gilead was none other than Donald H. Rumsfeld. He remained in this position until 2001 when he took up Bush’s call to arms. It is reported that Don has continued his interest in the company whilst in office, and is now one its largest stock holders. His share has an estimated market value of US$18 million at current prices. This value will undoubtedly increase dramatically as countries panic buy supplies. Can anyone say “conflict of interest”? 

The little red email believes this story will run and run. This represents the true principles of corrupt “special interest” politics. No doubt Rumsfeld has learnt well from Dick Cheney’s example featuring the Halliburton Corporation. Bush has already ordered the US government to purchase US$2 billion of Tamiflu, and if there is continued political worth in the story, more will soon follow.

 

 

If only he had a middle name

Yigal Amir is Israel’s answer to Lee Harvey Oswald — a patsy in an elaborate assassination that mirrors the 1963 murder of John F. Kennedy remarkably with unaccounted bullets, a similar date and security services involved. 73-year-old Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin died of gunshot wounds ten years ago this month — but the crazed lone gunman theory that has been written into history books does not hold true. On November 4, 1995 Yigal Amir barged his way through a security cordon and fired three times at the PM. One bullet missed and hit a guard; the other two hit Rabin in the stomach and back. Amir, a 25-year-old law student enrolled in an extremist group called Eyal that was fiercely opposed to West Bank concessions Rabin was making, duly confessed and is serving a life imprisonment. Case closed? Nope, as an article in last week’s South China Morning Post mused. After Rabin’s bodyguards failed to block the extremist and he fired, he shouted something strange: “It’s nothing… they’re blanks. It’s a toy gun.”

Corroborating this story, a secret service agent later testified that a policeman shouted: “Calm down. They’re blanks.”

In George, a magazine once run by John Kennedy Junior, Amir’s mother, Guela, explained how bullets thought to be blanks still managed to inflict damage. She highlighted the possible influence of her son’s close friend and former university buddy Avishai Raviv: both a member of Shin Bet — the defence force tasked with protecting the lives of senior ministers — and the leader of Eyal.

“Perhaps somebody — either Raviv or someone else — was surreptitiously supposed to have disabled Yigal’s gun, either by removing the firing pin or by replacing the bullets with blanks, before the shooting,” Guela Amir said.

Either way, after the shooting, Rabin’s car became “lost” for at least 10 minutes on a 45-second drive to hospital by an experienced chauffeur, on clear, cordoned-off streets. On his arrival at hospital, despite publicly only sustaining two wounds, Rabin had a third in the chest.

Blood was “gushing” from it, according to witnesses whose statements conflicted with earlier reports of no blood at the crime scene and no blood being found there later. The wound seemed all the more odd because Rabin had supposedly been shot from behind, as confirmed by video evidence.

Damningly, surgeon Mordechai Guttman said: “The first two wounds, to the chest and abdomen, occurred before Rabin’s arrival. The third frontal chest wound had to have been inflicted after he entered the hospital.”

The thorny facts and allegations became the basis for a slew of exposés and the question remains: Was the gunman at the heart of the action a pawn?

According to Barry Chamish, the most prominent cover-up theorist, Amir’s “attack” was staged to arouse sympathy for Rabin and revive his declining popularity, not dissimilar to Taiwan’s Chen Shui-bian who took a bullet and with it the presidential election last year. Chamish suggests that Yoram Rubin, the prime minister’s bodyguard, shot him dead somewhere on the long ride to hospital on the orders of rival Shimon Peres.

“The conspiracy theories have never had it better,” historian Tom Segev wrote in the liberal daily Ha’aretz ahead of Friday’s anniversary of the assassination.

One poll found that 25 percent of Israelis believe the conspiracy theories, another that only 35 percent consider Rabin’s confessed killer, Yigal Amir, to be the “main culprit.”

Much like JFK’s Zapruder film, there is a key video of the Rabin assassination, known as the Kempler video, that has been widely kept under wraps but which you can view here.

Also well worth checking out is the Rabin conspiracy theorist-in-chief Barry Chamish’s website where Shimon Peres emerges with considerable quantities of blood on his hands.

 

 

Yahuda does Hollywood

This week, during a routine rummage in Mr Bang’s wastepaper basket, we uncovered this letter, which may explain why Yahuda has taken to wearing a beret and jodphurs and sporting a cigarette holder in his mouth.

To: Olivier Hirschbiegel, Director of Der Untergang (The Downfall)
From: Yahuda Bangs, Angry American Abroad.

Dear Mr. Hirschbiegel,

I’ve got a script to pitch, and because of the amazing job you did with Downfall I think you’re just the director to bring my vision to the big screen. Like your film, my idea is also an adaptation chronicling the final days of a powerful clique of men watching everything they’ve struggled for collapsing under the combined weight of incompetence, corruption and hubris.  Unlike yours, my film will be in English; but I am curious how the title — “Dubyafall” — will translate into various European languages…with the rising Euro, I’m thinking we can make big box from Lisbon to Warsaw.

Since you’re a busy man, I’ve only sent you the first scene:

We open with a quick montage, like Fahrenheit 9/11, only without any narrative. I’m thinking some CNN clips from the Enron scandal, Powell’s UN speech justifying the war, the famous mission accomplished still, early coverage of the Plame thing, the ‘Brownie’s doing a great job’ audio clip. I’m thinking three minutes, tops. We just want to bring the viewer up to speed with the many instances of Bush administration cronyism, deception and incompetence leading up to the beginning of the film (think of the montage as an appetizer before the actual bratwurst).

When the credits/montage ends, we pan in from a high altitude shot of the White House and slowly zoom in. Then, when the viewer expects the shot to go into the White House, it actually swerves under it.

Voice Over (heard as camera passes through dirt): In the very near future, a quarter mile beneath the White House in the hermetically sealed “Under Oval Office” a presidency is disintegrating. Under attack from both left and right, a heavily medicated president remembers happier times while his inner circle falls apart…

The scene opens with Dubya sitting at — almost dwarfed by — a large mahogany desk (can we get Will Ferrell for Dubya or has Bewitched made him box office poison?) His eyes are glassy. He is clearly drunk or drugged, perhaps both. The only other person on the set is Dick Cheney (this may be a stretch, but I think with a little makeup Philip Seymour Hoffman would really add gravitas to the role). Cheney is busy sorting papers from a filing cabinet into two piles while Dubya looks on dreamily. Dubya picks up a telephone.

Dubya (into receiver): Operator? Get me Turd Blossom. Yes, T… U… R…

Cheney (stuffing fistfuls of paper into a paper shredder): Not going to connect, George. Rove’s in hiding…witness protection program. He can’t help us now.

Dubya: Oooh…that’s nice. He’s a nice man. Don’t you think so, Dick?

Cheney: Sure thing George, big time. Listen, you should get yourself ready. Last helicopter and all that…

Dubya: I like helicopters.

A distant explosion is heard. Moments later, Scott McClellan (Kevin Spacey…Or is he too big for a bit part?) runs into the room with a stack of newspapers and magazines under one arm. He is dishevelled and looks completely exhausted.

Dubya: Hey, it’s Scotty! Let’s have drinks!

Cheney (lurching up): McClellan! What the fuck? I told you to stay up top and hold a defensive line!

McClellan: I’m sorry sir…sirs, I mean. There were too many of them…reporters coming in from all sides. We were expecting it from the left, but not from the right. Dear Jesus, even O’Reilly is back-pedalling on the Libby thing…he’s saying that you — you, Mr. Cheney, personally — called him first, but that he turned down the tip because it seemed “too dirty”. He’s really covering his ass, sir.

Cheney (snarling viciously): Bastard! I’ll break that asshole’s balls! And you…get back up there and keep holding them back. Sing, dance… tell them the president is considering Alan Dershowitz for O’Connor’s seat… throwing the liberals a bone… Hah! That should buy us some time.

McClellan: I can’t sir…I can’t face them. There are just too many, sir…they’re coming from all sides.

Cheney raises his left arm and slowly clenches fist. McClellan sinks to his knees, choking…

McClellan: I’m…sorry…sir….

Cheney (coolly): Apology accepted, Mr. McClellan. (Turns to Dubya, who is fiddling with the radio.) George, don’t do that…

Radio: … NPR hourly update, this just in… according to polls the President’s approval ratings have shrunk to new lows on the heels of mass resignations by key cabinet members…

Cheney (savagely ripping cord from wall): Damn it George, I told you not to fiddle with that thing. Now help me with this suitcase. We’ve got to get you to Kennebunkport pronto. If the press gets hold of you in this state they’ll have a fucking field day.

McClellan (rises to one knee, gasping): Sir…I think you…should see…this… (presses forward January, 2006 People Magazine.)

Camera zooms in on cover showing photograph of sombre looking Barbara Bush. “Where I went wrong: a mother’s confession” is splashed on the cover.

Cheney: Er…George, you’d better stay here. I’m off to Wyoming.

Dubya: …Wyoming is where cowboys live, Dick.

Scene one fades to black…

Anyway Ollie, that’s just the first scene, and obviously the situation is still very volatile…facts on the ground still fluid and so forth. But get back to me ASAP. If we time it right, I see big box office potential for this one…

Eagerly awaiting your reply, I am yours truly

Yahuda Bangs.

 

 

Volcker report another whitewash

The release this past week of the Volcker report into the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal drew widespread denials, terse dismissals and protestations of innocence. Headlines from across the globe were peppered with words like “denies”, “trashes”, “doubts” and “faulty” as politicians and corporations quickly adopted rule number two of the 25-point truth suppression handbook appearing indignant and incredulous. So far reaching are the accusations in the 600 plus page report that indicts firms from New Zealand to India, Britain to Russia for paying bribes to the Saddam Hussein regime for oil kickbacks from 1996 that there is a risk that little action will be taken — two wrongs making a right. If thousands of companies are implicated in bribery and currying favour, then the sense that “everybody was doing it” might drown out the role of particular individuals and companies. More than 2,500 companies — including the likes of Volvo, Siemens and DaimlerChrysler — from more than 60 countries stand accused of bribing Hussein and Co to conduct illegal business during the sanctions era post Gulf War One. While there are some Americans and British mentioned, part of the purpose of the report — highlighting so many Russian, German and French firms — is probably to subliminally show why these nations were anti-war; they had too much to lose.

Corruption at the United Nations will once again become the focus of the attention when the real scandal all along was the barbaric UN-sponsored economic sanctions that killed millions. And once again, British antiwar leader George Galloway is the focus of allegations of wrongdoing, when the real criminals are the powerful US politicians who accuse him.

The stated aim of the UN-administered oil-for-food program, begun in 1996, to help Iraqi citizens suffering the effects of sanctions imposed on Iraq after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait that lead to the 1991 Gulf War. Iraq was allowed to begin selling limited amounts of oil in exchange for importing food and other needed supplies. According to the UN, 3.4 billion barrels of Iraqi oil valued at about $65 billion were exported under the program between December 1996 and the US-led invasion in March 2003.

All money collected from oil sales went into a UN-controlled bank account in New York. Iraq could apply for funds for food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies. Some 30 percent (later decreased to 25 percent) of the money was skimmed off the top of all revenues for the oil-rich monarchy of Kuwait--as reparations for the invasion.

The oil-for-food program fell far short of relieving the devastating impact of sanctions. In 1999, a UNICEF survey reported that in southern and central Iraq--where 85 percent of Iraq’s population lives--the death rate for children under five years old more than doubled from 56 deaths per 1,000 live births (from 1984 to 1989) to 131 (from 1994 to 1999).

The impact of the sanctions led UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq Denis Halliday to resign in 1998, stating, “We are in the process of destroying an entire society.” His successor, Hans von Sponeck, would resign two years later.

Volcker’s report ignores the crime of sanctions carried out for more than a decade against the people of Iraq — Bush I, Clinton, Major and Blair all should be on trial for these heinous acts.

 

 

Cheney on his way out

Here’s how we see things panning out for the scandal tainted White House. Dick Cheney will soon claim that ol’ dodgy ticker of his is giving him way too much gip and he’ll call it a day, with Condi Rice — the likely 2008 Republican runner — taking the Veep seat. Why this is likely to happen sooner rather than later is not necessarily because of the revelations that will emerge from the Libby trial, damaging as they might be, but because Dick is being fingered as the man responsible for Abu Ghraib etc — one scandal too many we feel for the man who is still paid squillions by Halliburton. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, told National Public Radio last week he had traced a trail of memos and directives authorizing questionable detention practices up through Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s office directly to Cheney’s staff.

“The Secretary of Defense under cover of the vice president’s office,” Wilkerson said, “regardless of the president having put out this memo” — “they began to authorize procedures within the armed forces that led to what we’ve seen.”

He said the directives contradicted a 2002 order by President George W. Bush for the US military to abide by the Geneva conventions against torture.

“There was a visible audit trail from the vice president’s office through the Secretary of Defense, down to the commanders in the field,” authorizing practices that led to the abuse of detainees, Wilkerson said.

The directives were “in carefully couched terms,” Wilkerson conceded, but said they had the effect of loosening the reins on US troops, leading to many cases of prisoner abuse, including at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, that were contrary to the Geneva Conventions.

“If you are a military man, you know that you just don’t do these sorts of things,” Wilkerson said, because troops will take advantage, or feel so pressured to obtain information that “they have to do what they have to do to get it.”

Wilkerson also called David Addington, the vice president’s lawyer, “a staunch advocate of allowing the president in his capacity as commander in chief to deviate from the Geneva Conventions.”

On Monday, Cheney promoted Addington to his chief of staff to replace I. Lewis Libby, who has been indicted over the unmasking of a CIA agent.

Wilkerson also told National Public Radio that Cheney’s office ran an “alternate national security staff” that spied on and undermined the president’s formal National Security Council.

He said National Security Council staff stopped sending e-mails when they found out Cheney’s staff members were reading their messages.

Wilkerson has also said recently that Cheney and Rumsfeld operated a “cabal” that hijacked US foreign and military policy. For Cheney, the man in charge of so much corruption and desecration, the Halliburton seat that has been kept nice and warm for him is just around the corner.

 

 

Stuff we like

A hotchpotch of stuff we’ve found and enjoyed recently on the Weird Wide Web.

Get your lovely T-shirts while they’re hot!
Everybody loves a winner. Nobody likes a loser. Nobody likes to be a loser. So with this in mind, Canned Revolution have set it up so that you can now buy your own Canned Revolution T-Shirt, and pretend that you won it in our competition. We’ll back up any claims to being a lucky winner by anyone who purchases a freshly tinned t-shirt to help the cause.

Owning your own Canned Revolution shirt could be a great way of life for you — imagine the friends, the opportunities, the fame, the copious offers of gratuitous sex.

Don’t delay! Buy your way into coolness today by clicking here.

 

The state we’re in
Brian Bogart, University of Oregon’s first graduate student in Peace Studies helps run www.strikeforpeace.org. In this article he details the military industrial complex’s stranglehold over the US. Making and selling weapons has been America’s top industry since 1950, the US has sustained this weapons-based economy by supplying more than 200 wars in 55 years, and that some 310,000 companies and 400 colleges are on the Pentagon’s ever expanding payroll.

 

Bill Gates inhales
Well at least that’s what Websense made of the Microsoft site, when they listed it as marijuana-related.

 

Mr Undiplomatic pokes holes in UK renditioning call
Our favourite undiplomat, Craig Murray, has a good look at what torture means on the ground and how outsourcing it makes very little sense in this article in the Independent: if the information extracted under outsourced torture is so valuable then why doesn’t the UK torture people itself? And if the government’s need for information doesn’t warrant the torture of people in the UK, why should it outsource to another country, thereby encouraging torture? Read the whole article for a trip into the rabbit hole of moral bankruptcy that is TWOT™.

 

Dahr Jamail’s take on Iraq after the constitution
Dahr Jamail is best known for his rather hard-hitting unembedded, un-hotel-bound Iraq reportage website. In this recent interview, he talks about his take on Iraq.

 

Lamma three: mostly free
Despite Fantasy Island’s best efforts including letters written by the Canned Revolution collective read out in court one of the Lamma Three received a two consecutive 6-month sentences last Thursday for drug-related offenses. The little red email will miss Alan in the coming 12 months but is relieved that his better half got off with just a fine. To help Linda out through these trying times you can purchase a now truly retro Free The Lamma Three tshirt — available in bud green, Gitmo orange or even a seasonal Xmas red these fashion items are truly a limited special edition. If you want one — priced at just HK$75 — call +852 2982 1607. We’ll even slash out the Three with a marker pen and put a One in if you want for the sake of authenticity and posterity.

 

Don’t forget to get your war on
Get your war on is still going strong and still as ascerbic as ever. After the saccharin sweetness of the mainstream news take this bitter and twisted pill as an antidote.

 

Amazon customer up for judicial review?
OK so it’s not quite an adbust, but it is an amusing perversion of Amazon’s customer review marketing tool. Click on the pic for a big link, and read the top review.

That’s right! You too can get one of our t-shirts. Simply brush up your Photoshop skills and send your corporate subversion images to adbusting@cannedrevolution.com, such as the one above to stand a chance of being selected the weekly winner of our brand new little red adbuster of the week competition. The winner will be chosen by the revolutionary collective here on our own Fantasy Island. Alternatively, for those who don’t fancy your chances of winning but are still budding anti-establishment artists and hanker for one of our shirts, you still have hope. Simply send us five of your designs in five consecutive weeks and, so long as the images, are yours (and we have ways of checking!), a t-shirt will be winging its way to you.
Adbusting — the choice of a new generation. For more on adbusting, click here.

 

The Meteor-illogical Office report
This week’s missive to the there’s-no-global-warming- honest,-no,-really,-we-might-be-funded-by-big-energy,-but-trust-us brigade comes from the folk at the BBC who have put these before and after pictures together as irrefutable proof of change.

 

The Little Red Email Osama bin Laden Sweepstakes Shirt Contest!
Don’t forget: if you fancy a free Canned Revolution t-shirt, you can win one by simply guessing the date of Osama’s media debut as a US prisoner. Send your expected date of bin Laden’s first television appearance as an American prisoner to osamasweepstakes@cannedrevolution.com.