A provocative new documentary targets Big Pharma’s quest for a female Viagra
You can’t help but feel the anguish of Charletta, a charming 60-something Southerner who appears prominently in Liz Canner’s new documentary, Orgasm Inc. Charletta is so distraught about her inability to achieve orgasm simultaneously with her husband during intercourse that she agrees to be a test subject for a bizarre invention called an “orgasmatron.” But inserting this questionable device in her spine stimulates only her left leg, which shakes uncontrollably when she flips a switch. After the orgasmatron is removed, Charletta shares with Canner her distress at being such a freak. “Not only am I not normal, I’m diseased,” she says. But under questioning by Canner, Charletta discloses that she can, in fact, achieve orgasm in other ways. When Canner tells her that makes her “normal,” since 70 percent of women don’t reach orgasm during coitus, Charletta is stunned. By the end of the film, she seems like a new woman. With a big smile on her face, she tells Canner, “I accept myself the way I am.” If more women could make such a statement, Canner wouldn’t have spent much of the last decade making Orgasm Inc. But the film, which has its New York premiere May 27 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, is a desperately needed antidote to all the hype generated by pharmaceutical companies pursuing their holy grail: a female Viagra. Canner hit on the topic after years of doing documentaries on subjects like human-rights abuses, police brutality, and poverty. Looking for something more upbeat, she was researching female sexuality when she got a call from the pharmaceutical company Vivus, which wanted her to create erotic videos to use in their clinical study of an “orgasm cream” for women.
Vivus had had an initial success with a product for men called Muse, a pellet inserted into the urinary opening with a plastic applicator. The product launched more than a year before Viagra. When the much easier-to-use Viagra pill quickly overcame Muse as the market leader, Vivus started looked at ways to make a product for women’s sexual problems. Canner was bewildered by the purported disease that the new Vivus product was intended to cure—something called “female sexual dysfunction.” “They were telling me that 43 percent of women had this disorder, which I found amazing,” Canner says. “How could that be true if I had never heard of it before?” That question set Canner off on a cross-country quest that included visits with scientists, experts in erotica, and individual women who often suffered profoundly because their sex lives didn’t live up to the glowing imagery displayed in popular culture. She found that the often-cited 43 percent figure actually refers to a 1994 study of all kinds of sexual problems, including a lack of sexual desire, anxiety about performance, and pain during intercourse. Canner ultimately concluded that the catch-all female sexual dysfunction is essentially a phony disease made up by pharmaceutical companies.“A lot of this is about marketing,” she says. “They are trying to sell disorders.” A spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, an industry trade group, said she couldn’t discuss Canner’s charge since “as a trade association we can’t really comment about issues that are specific to individual companies.”
Viagra’s phenomenal success inspired drug companies like Vivus to search for a product that could solve women’s sexual issue with a similar quick fix. That search hasn’t been particularly successful. Pfizer, the maker of Viagra, gave up on creating a similar product for women after eight years of research because, the company said, women’s sexual problems were too complex to be fixed with a pill that targeted the genitals. Vivus also gave up on its attempt to create an orgasm cream for women. One highly touted product, Intrinsa, a testosterone patch from Procter & Gamble, was rejected by a U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory panel in 2004 because of safety and efficacy concerns (it became available in Europe three years ago).
On June 18, the FDA will hold a hearing on the drug flibanserin, from the German manufacturer Boehringer Ingelheim, which was initially tested as an antidepressant. It didn’t lift mood, but it did heighten sexual interest and reduce inhibitions—which led the company to test it on women who were suffering from a lack of sexual desire. The results, presented late last year at the Congress of the European Society for Sexual Medicine in Lyon, France, showed that women in the North American part of the trial who took flibanserin for about six months increased their number of “sexually satisfying events” (including orgasm) to an average of 4.5 from 2.8.
That may sound impressive, but consider this: women in the placebo group increased their average to 3.7. Is the difference between 4.5 and 3.7 significant enough to justify approval and overcome any potential health risk? That’s what the FDA will have to decide. There may be cheaper and faster ways to reduce inhibition—like a glass of wine and a more attentive partner. And the European women didn’t experience the same benefit as their North American sisters, perhaps because they already are less inhibited.
One of the heroines of Canner’s film is Leonore Tiefer, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine. Tiefer calls herself a “sexologist”: she has been studying human sexuality for four decades. She led a campaign against Instrinsa’s approval and hopes that Orgasm Inc. will inspire people to “come down to Washington to raise a little hell” during the flibanserin hearing. Tiefer argues that no single drug could possibly cure all of women’s sexual problems because there are so many potential causes for a woman’s inability to enjoy sex. Male impotence is essentially a mechanical problem that can be cured by a medication that enables erection. But women may turn away from sex for many reasons: physical, emotional, psychological.
Tiefer says sites like sexbrainbody.com sponsored by Boehringer Ingelheim “get the idea in women’s minds that there is a safe and simple solution to their problems so they don’t have to talk to their doctors, they don’t have to talk to their husbands, they don’t have to talk to anybody about this.” Neuroscience about how the brain works to influence sexual desire is still primitive, Tiefer says. “The idea that you have to rebalance your brain? That’s just ludicrous.”
The people who created the sexbrainbody.com site say they are helping women learn more about sexual problems. “All women experience sexual dysfunction at some point in their lives,” said Linda Jo Parrish, vice president for institutional advancement at the Society for Women’s Health Research. The cause could be the birth of a baby, menopause, or stress, she says. “To say this is a ‘made-up’ condition does a disservice to women—their health and their relationships—and prevents women from talking about their concerns with health-care providers and partners.”
But women’s health advocates agree with Tiefer. “There is more to good sex than a pill,” says Cynthia Pearson of the National Women’s Health Network. “We can’t let someone’s business model that requires a patentable solution get in the way of a broader inquiry.” Flibanserin’s potential benefit—slightly less than one more sexually satisfying event a month—doesn’t impress her. “Women need to know what’s behind the development of this and other drugs, and just how flimsy the evidence for FSD really is,” she says. “We’ll take advantage of the hearing to make the statement, once again, that we are concerned about drug companies that stress the advantages and play down the risks,” Pearson said. “I don’t think we have as high-level worries about this one as we did about Intrinsa because this one is not a hormone. But I still think there are a lot of warning flags waving on this one and we need to take it seriously.”
Orgasm Inc. also highlights the increased use of cosmetic vaginal procedures that claim to produce “designer vaginas” with such highly questionable practices as trimming vaginal lips, tightening vaginas, and injecting collagen. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has warned against these procedures, pointing out that there is great variety in the appearance of the vaginal area and most of those differences are normal. In the film, Harvard Medical School professor Susan Bennett calls any unnecessary surgery to the vaginal area “a form of genital mutilation.” “We shouldn’t allow it,” Bennett says.
Canner hopes the film will help women be more skeptical about drug-company claims. (A national theatrical release of the film in the U.S. is in the works and the DVD of the movie is currently available at www.orgasminc.org). “A lot of this happens because in the U.S., drug companies have the right to advertise to consumers,” she says, “so they can directly market this stuff to women or they can market this stuff to women’s partners. I think there is a great danger that many healthy women could end up taking drugs that could harm them to fix a disease they don’t have.” What does make a woman more receptive to sex? That’s still something of a mystery. Emory University psychologist Kim Wallen, who is interviewed in the film, has been studying the interaction of hormones and social influences on sexual behavior for many years. Much of his work consists of observing monkeys at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta. He has what could be the film’s best line. As Wallen and Canner watch monkeys engaged in an elaborate sexual dance, she asks him what he has learned about sex by studying primates. Wallen thinks for a moment and then says, “Pay more attention to females.” That’s better than a pill any day.
World View: For all its military might, the US has failed to get its way in Afghanistan and Iraq, severely denting the prestige of the world’s only superpower
The last American troops will withdraw from Iraq in the next three weeks. President Obama and Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, will meet tomorrow in Washington so they can claim that the US emerges from the conflict unweakened and leaves behind an increasingly stable, democratic and prosperous Iraq.
This is misleading spin, carefully orchestrated to allow Mr Obama to move into the presidential election year boasting that he has ended an unpopular war without suffering a defeat. We already had a foretaste of this a couple of weeks ago, when Vice President Joe Biden visited Baghdad to laud US achievements.
Over the years, Iraqis have become used to heavily guarded foreign dignitaries arriving secretly in Baghdad to claim great progress on all fronts before scurrying home again. But even by these lowly standards, Mr Biden’s performance sounded comically inept.
“It was the usual Biden menu of gaffe, humour and pomposity delivered with unmistakable self-confidence and no particular regard for the facts on the ground,” writes the Iraq expert Reidar Visser. Mr Biden even tried to win the hearts of Iraqis by referring to the US achievement in building hospitals in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea, a city he apparently believes is located somewhere in Iraq.
Republican candidates in the presidential election have been denigrated and discredited by gaffes like this. It is a measure of Mr Biden’s reputation for overlong, tedious speeches that the US media did not notice his ignorance of Middle East geography.
Dr Visser points out that “when Biden says ‘we were able to turn lemons into lemonade’, refers to ‘a political culture based on free elections and the rule of law’, and even highlights ‘Iraq’s emerging, inclusive political culture … as the ultimate guarantor of stability’, he is simply making things up.” Sadly, Iraq is a much divided wreck of a country.
In reality, America’s failure to get its way in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade, despite deploying large armies and spending trillions of dollars, has been extraordinarily damaging to its status as sole superpower.
Whatever Washington thought it wanted when it invaded Iraq in 2003, it was not the establishment of Shia religious parties with links to Iran in power in Baghdad. Similarly, in Afghanistan, a surge in US troop numbers and the expenditure of $100bn a year has not led to the defeat of 25,000 mostly untrained Taliban fighters.
Great powers depend on a reputation for invincibility and are wise not to put this too often to the test. The British Empire never quite recovered in the eyes of the world from the gargantuan effort it had to make to defeat a few tens of thousand Boer farmers.
What makes the US inability to win in Iraq and Afghanistan so damaging is that US policy-making has been progressively militarised. Congress will vote the Pentagon vast sums, while it stints the State Department a few billion dollars. “The Department of Defense is the behemoth among federal agencies,” noted the 9/11 Commission Report. “With an annual budget larger than the gross domestic product of Russia, it is an empire.”
But it is an empire that has failed to deliver in recent years, though without paying a political price. A senior US diplomat asked me plaintively several years ago: “Whatever happened to popular scepticism about what generals say that we had after Vietnam? People seem to assume they are telling the truth … they are usually not.”
This is equally true of the British Army, though the British military record in Basra and Helmand was even more dismal than that of the Americans. (The system of embedding the media with the Army has played an important role in safeguarding the military from well-earned criticism.)
For all Mr Obama’s agonising about sending more troops to Afghanistan in 2009, he never had much choice. Leon Panetta, then CIA chief and now Defense Secretary, was contemptuous about the time spent by the White House debating troop reinforcements. He said the political reality was that “No Democratic president can go against military advice, especially if he asked for it. So just do it.” Mr Panetta believed that a decision on the extra 30,000 troops for Afghanistan should have been taken in a week.
The killing of Osama bin Laden and the failure of the military to defeat the Taliban has improved the administration’s ability to disengage from Afghanistan.
It does not look likely that in a presidential election year, after getting out of Iraq and hoping to do the same in Afghanistan, the US will launch a war against Iran.
In the US and Israel there are few votes to be lost in talking tough about Iran, but voters are much less enthusiastic about actually going to war with a stronger opponent than the US ever faced in Iraq or Afghanistan, or Israel in Lebanon.
In the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, the rest of the world is not going to thank the US or Israel for starting a conflict that would close the Strait of Hormuz and send up the price of oil.
It would also be difficult to de-escalate such a confrontation because it serves domestic electoral purposes in Washington, Tel Aviv and Tehran alike. Americans, Israelis and Iranians all define their self-image in terms of opposition to demonic enemies. Any compromise is vulnerable to being sabotaged by domestic political rivals as a deal with the devil.
Overall, US influence is ebbing in the Middle East.
For all Mr Biden’s talking up, the Iraq war was a disaster for the US.
Similarly in Afghanistan, massive military force has produced meagre political dividends. Washington may rejoice that Muammar Gaddafi is gone and Bashar al-Assad may follow him. But the US has lost or is losing its paramount position in Turkey and Egypt as the military establishments of these countries lose control.
The political crisis provoked by the Arab Awakening across the Middle East is not dying away. If anything it is deepening as struggles for power intensify in Egypt and Syria. The outcome of the Libyan civil war may encourage limited foreign intervention, but the ongoing economic crisis makes it riskier for the US or European powers to become involved in wars they cannot see the end of.
The great success of General David Petraeus as US commander in Iraq was to persuade many Americans that they had won when they had not.
He also convinced them that the war had ended, when it had not, because many fewer Americans were being killed. In practice, the verdict of Iraq is likely to hang over US foreign policy for a long time to come. The war may not have had a clear winner, but it showed that superior military force no longer easily translates into political victory.
• Iran and Syria among the countries under sanctions from US • Major US firms accused violating sanctions • SEC has asked to see documentation of business activities
At least a dozen US firms have been told by the US Securities and Exchange Commission that they must disclose their business dealings with and within Syria, Iran and other sanctioned states.
According to the Financial Times, Sony Corp, Caterpillar Inc, American Express, Aecom Technology, Iridex and Veolia Environnement, are among the companies suspected of violating sanctions on governments deemed “state sponsors of terrorism” by the State Department.
The inquiries are part of SEC reviews of companies’ investment risks to security holders.
The United States government has imposed tight sanctions on Iran over its alleged ambitions to build a nuclear bomb, as well as its alleged role in sponsoring groups the State Department labels terrorist organisations, such as Hezbollah.
Syria recently had increasingly tight sanctions applied due to the government’s crackdown on a popular uprising demanding democracy and greater civil freedoms that has grown into a de facto civil war between the state and military defectors.
“We have asked for it back. We’ll see how the Iranians respond,” Obama said following a meeting at the White House with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
The President’s comments were the first official confirmation that the United States had asked for the return of the RQ-70 drone that was reported missing more than a week ago.
In the week since, Pentagon and State Department officials have repeatedly said they were unaware of any efforts by the American government to contact Iran to have the drone returned to the U.S.
Speaking later in the afternoon Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she was doubtful the U.S. would get its “equipment” back.
“Given Iran’s behavior to date, we do not expect them to comply,” she said during a press conference with her British counterpart.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta was also skeptical about the prospects about Iran returning the drone. Speaking to reporters aboard a U.S. military aircraft Panetta said asking that Iran return the drone was an “appropriate request.” Thoughhe added, “I don’t expect that that will happen, but I think it’s important to make that request. ”
He says he doesn’t know the condition of the drone and what Iran or other countries might be able to glean about its capabilities. Panetta said, ”It’s a little difficult to know just frankly how much they are going to be able to get from having obtained those parts. I don’t know the condition of those parts, I don’t know exactly what state they’re in, so it’s a little difficult to tell what they are going to be able to derive from what they have been able to get.”
A senior commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said on Sunday that Iran would not send the drone back, according to translations of Iranian television by the Associated Press.
“This is not only an intelligence victory for us, but a defeat for our enemies,” the commander said.
President Obama did not say how U.S. officials asked Iran to return the drone, since there are no diplomatic relations between the two countries.
But U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss sensitive diplomatic issues, told ABC News the request was made through the Swiss ambassador in Tehran, who represents American interests there in the absence of a U.S. embassy.
Officials say the RQ-70 drone was flying a mission for the CIA over Iran at the time that its operators lost control of the drone.
Publicly, American officials have remained tight-lipped about the drone’s mission and have not strayed beyond a vague statement issued by coalition military forces in Afghanistan shortly after Iranian state-run media claimed they had shot down an American drone. That statement referred to an unarmed American reconnaissance aircraft that had been flying a mission over Western Afghanistan.”
Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it. H. L. Mencken
COLONEL SIXX: NOW IF WE CAN JUST KEEP THOSE OATH BREAKERS AWAY FROM THEM. THEY ARE MADE UP MOSTLY OF COPS. COPS ARE THE BIGGEST LIARS IN THE WORLD.
I WANT YOU TO LOOK YOURSELF IN THE MIRROR AND ASK YOURSELF THIS QUESTION: AM I READY AND WILLING TO KILL PAUL, MY SISTERS FAT ASS HUSBAND THAT IS A “POLICE OFFICER” KNOWING THAT HE WOULD KILL ME?
IF YOU CAN, YOU CAN LIVE.
IF YOU CAN’T, GO AHEAD AND PAY FOR YOUR GRAVE, HEADSTONE, AND CASKET NOW ON INSTALLMENTS
COPS KILLED PEOPLE IN NEW ORLEANS TRYING TO LEAVE TOWN OVER A BRIDGE. THEY WERE CONVICTED BY FEDERAL COURTS AND ARE GONE TO JAIL.
A COP SHOT OSCAR GRANT IN OAKLAND SETTING OFF RIOTS. HE GOT OUT OF JAIL AND RAN OFF TO NEVADA BECAUSE HE KNEW THAT TO STAY IN OAKLAND WOULD MEAN CERTAIN AND DESERVED DEATH.
HE SAID HE WAS REACHING FOR HIS TASER AND GOT THE GUN BY MISTAKE.
IF I, IN THE RAIN, IN THE DARKNESS OF MIDNIGHT, AND BLINDFOLDED PUT MY HAND DOWN A WOMAN’ S PANTS, I WILL KNOW IF SHE IS REALLY A WOMAN AND NOT PRETENDING TO BE IN SUCH A SHORT PERIOD OF TIME IT CAN’T BE MEASURED.
YOU MAY BE INTERESTED TO KNOW THAT IF MARTIAL LAW WERE DECLARED IN THIS NATION TONIGHT, THE FIRST PEOPLE TO CONFRONT, DISARM, AND TAKE AWAY THEIR ABILITY TO MOVE IS POLICE OFFICERS. THE ONLY LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT THAT WILL BE RECOGNIZED BY THE MILITARY IS THE DULY ELECTED SHERIFF OF THE COUNTY WHERE THE COPS ARE. PERIOD.
SINCE I HATE COPS THAT HAVE NOT EVEN BEEN BORN YET, I WOULD FIND THAT TO BE A PART OF THE JOB THAT MIGHT BE ORGASMIC.
I DID NOT WRITE THE FOLLOWING, BUT IT SAYS SO MUCH OF WHAT I SAY EVERY DAY, I HAD TO PUBLISH IT.
I was not going to comment on the death of SEAL Team 6, until I read the article on your website “The Execution of SEAL Team Six, Penned by Ann Barnhardt”. http://rense.com/general94/execc.htm
She has tracked the chronology very well as cited in her essay. She is right; the Obama Administration is beyond desperate to appear to have any results at all in these pathetic 3 years we have had to endure this completely arrogant nitwit in the Oval Office. But it goes much deeper.
The CIA never gets involved in such operations unless there is a real risk that their covert operations will be exposed for the world to see. That is when the CIA goes into panic mode.
It saddens me to see any US soldier killed, maimed, or even have their life upended to be deployed to serve one of the greatest lies ever invented on this planet. There was never a Global War on Terror until the US invented it, deployed it with two objectives. First, a resurgence of military power while the USSR broke apart – China was not a threat then but is now. They made a wrong assumption that the US is the world’s only Superpower.
Second, the US has an agenda to control world energy supplies so it can control the economies of other nations so they can neither be Superpower status nor competitors.
That idea was a pipedream, too.
That is what The Grand Chessboard is all about. That lunatic notion has now been embedded into our laws, our federal government policies and our economic and war policies. It was an idiotic idea when they hatched it, and it has now killed the nation that dreamed it up and probably rightfully so. It was an elitist arrogant fascist idea, and failed.
It has truly failed; they are too arrogant in DC to admit it. History will show that it was an Ivory Tower aberration born in a presumption of self-importance and power that did not exist. Being a Superpower militarily can assure peace, it does not assure victory when the Superpower lied and is in the wrong. You see, when they have to admit defeat is says two things very loudly.
First, they were wrong and not near as powerful as they pretend to be. When the veil of arrogance is ripped away it will be easy to see what pathetic excuses as humans they are.
Secondly, once they have to admit defeat their power will be taken away and then the real truth will surface. At that time, many in the US will be indictable under some very serious charges such as genocide, war crimes, treason, and willful murder just to protect their sorry asses. I think ST6 was just sent on one of those ‘willful murder’ missions to silence the truth. I will tell the whole story soon on your radio show.
This nutcase Global War on Terror was planned in Washington DC during the time period of 1994 to 1996. My office was in DC from 1989 to 1996 and you already know some about my affiliation with the Republican National Committee. Their biggest concern was how to ‘sell it’ to America.
Pakistan is not pro-terrorism. The problem with Pakistan is they sided with CHINA (and India) and screwed up The Grand Chessboard. What we are seeing from the Bush and Obama Administrations toward Pakistan is a temper tantrum and neither China nor Pakistan is going to back down. Both clearly see and know that the US Grand Chessboard plan has failed, they lost; the US will not win no matter how hard they try or how many US soldiers are wounded or killed serving this Great Lie.
There are major pipelines being done that checkmate the Grand Chessboard. One is from Iran to Pakistan and India, the IPI Pipeline and they turned to China as the financial partner. The other is discussed below and is sponsored by China and Pakistan. (And I think it is fitting that the three Bridas Corporation pipelines that have been done have also negated their Grand Chessboard plan.) That Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline that was to have run from Ashgabat Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan, through Baluchistan Province, Pakistan to the port of Gwadar. The problem is now it is a Chinese commercial port and naval base. It is a major strategic hub for China. The US is delusional in its thinking that only it has the right to locate military bases around the world. The US has reasonable control over everything but Helmand Province in Afghanistan, the one that borders on Baluchistan Province, Pakistan. They do not control Helmand or Baluchistan, which is why the CIA is very active there trying to destabilize and take it over. The Chinese are building a large pipeline from Gwadar to eastern China while Washington DC dithers around trying to find their ass with both hands and a flashlight as to how they can push China out. Without Gwadar, they have to come up with an entire new plan for that Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline that they have conspired for over 30 years to steal from first Russia (Russia Afghan War 1980-1988) and then secondly from Bridas Corporation in 2001. As you know, Bridas Corporation is from Argentina. They smartly aligned with Russia, Iran and China after they were wronged by the US in Turkmenistan, Pakistan and lastly, Afghanistan. They had the entire deal sewed up and the US went way out of its way to push them aside during the Clinton and Bush Administrations. The US took the position that they could not let the USSR build that pipeline, develop the vast oil and natural gas of the Caspian Basin, and be a major energy and economic player in the world through energy might alone. Well, Russia endured and is now the world’s largest energy producer. Even after the CIS states split from USSR, the Russian Federation now controls most of the oil and natural gas in the former USSR states of Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Those were our objectives and we lost; DC does not want the American people to wake up to that fact. Is it not odd that the CIS states know they can trust the Russia Federation and China more than they can the US? That sort of puts a black-eye on our version of democracy, especially the form at gunpoint while they kick our ass with contracts and pens.
The simple answer is there have now been over three decades of US sponsored terrorism and hostile actions in those areas to try to bully them into submission to the US game plan.
It amazes me that the US prefers to seek oil by war when the US has the largest known reserves of oil just in the Dakota / Montana area and Alaska. It is all about The Grand Chessboard, about domination, control, manipulation, etc and we have lost. They do not want to admit defeat because then maybe Americans will decide it is time they be shown the door, possibly a prison cell door.
It is far beyond ‘vote them out’; some truly deserve to be in prison for the rest of their life or executed. The Chinese plan to pipe oil from Africa and Iran (and any place else they purchase it in that region) from Gwadar to China. They have no intentions of allowing the US and UK to control their economy by controlling who gets the Caspian Basin oil and natural gas, or oil and LNG from Iran, too.
Both China and Russia have already made it clear to Washington DC that any attack on Iran will be viewed as an attack on the vital interests of Russia and China.
This was in my presentation at ‘9-11-2004, Confronting the Evidence’. This came out the day before on September 10, 2001: “”September 10, 2001: “Those who control the oil routes out of Central Asia will impact all future direction and quantities of flow and the distribution of revenues from new production,” wrote energy expert James Dorian in Oil & Gas Journal, published the day before the terrorist attacks.”” That is exactly what they were after and they have lost. It was checkmate even before they engineered the attack on the US so they could justify attacking Afghanistan. Think on this what sort of desperation would cause a nation to attack itself so it had the excuse to launch a war that was lost before they launched it? Take a close look at America right now and even a blind man can see it. The US is in decline in just about every category except bullshit, lies, fraud and military belligerence to get their way. So, without further ado this is additional information for your readers. If you are one of those Americans that clings to the belief that the US Navy SEAL Team 6 (ST6) recently cornered and killed Osama bin Laden, this essay is for you. The likelihood that they killed Osama bin Laden is less than 1%. Reputable sources knew that Osama would die of natural causes (renal failure) sometime during 2001 to 2003. The elite US Navy SEAL Team 6, a counter-terrorism force under DEVGRU may well have been sent to head off and silence the truth. If you are emoting or saddened by the news that the entire US Navy SEAL Team 6 is now dead due to a Chinook helicopter crash in Afghanistan, stop, read and pay attention. It is time to take off the rose-colored glasses. It is time for the American Mushrooms to get the cow manure out of the ears and come out into the light. It is far more likely that SEAL Team 6 was sent to kill someone that was about to be a major liability to the US. Someone that was going to spill out the truth, nothing but the truth and many asses in DC would be in big trouble. By big trouble I mean charges of murder, treason, and war crimes, just to name a few. Some may even be facing genocide charges at The Hague when all the truth comes out. An elite group of shitforbrains Americans have willfully bankrupted the United States just so they could line their pockets with trillions of dollars in oil and gas that is in the Caspian Basin. One of their dilettante ringleaders even wrote their bible, their operational mantra game plan, otherwise known as ‘The Grand Chessboard’. That was not an instructional manual to play chess, it was an illusion and delusion of what the author and his sycophant buddies thought they could pull off. They do not want Americans to learn that most of the natural gas is gone; it has all been tied up by Russia, China, India, etc. They do not want Americans to learn that most of the oil is now gone too, having been contracted with companies that can get something done including the drilling and the pipelines. Of course, it was sort of difficult to come up with an excuse as to why we needed to attack Afghanistan. They had never done anything to the US. Voila!!! September 11, 2001, Pearl Harbor happened again, go shop America while Mighty Mouse GW rides to the rescue and defense of America. I often wonder what Americans pay attention to. I have seen at least 100 times that even though Osama bin Laden was on the FBI Top 10 Most Wanted, there was not any mention that he was wanted for being the ‘mastermind’ behind 9-11. If he was such a high priority target due to 9-11, why did they fail for almost 10 years to state exactly why they were after him? Silence the truth is the correct answer. His involvement in the Russia-Afghan War was directly related to US desires to block Russia from benefitting from the energy resources that the USSR had within its footprint. I have been waiting for 10 years for even one person in the United States government to mention the name Bridas Corporation. They had the pipeline deal under contract; all the way, until the US decided they wanted that pipeline and all of that oil and natural gas. Since 9-11-2001, Bridas has built pipelines from Turkmenistan across Iran to the Black Sea. Another one from Turkmenistan north into Russia and will soon finish construction of a very long pipeline from Turkmenistan to the eastern part of China. Americans have not been told this yet, but Russia and China are excellent at chess, these arrogant twits in DC suck. The Grand Chessboard game is over, done, the US lost. That all being done while Washington DC was circle-jerking off themselves and America with every lie and excuse under the Sun as to why they cannot get the nation-building done in Iraq or Afghanistan. Liars never win, trespassing is rarely condoned by anyone and we (the United States) are the trespassers and the transgressors. We as a nation lied our way into this mess and there is no lie that will get us out of it. It disgusts me when they talk about nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq while they are rapidly killing America. The US has had 10 years and has not gotten the job done since September 11, 2001. However, the planning and the hostile actions began way before then when the CIA and black-ops special forces were operating out of Baku Azerbaijan as the US Chamber of Commerce and MEGA Oil (no kidding, no pun intended) to be closer and able to destabilize easier without Americans being any the wiser that a covert war was in progress during the 1980s and 1990s leading up to 9-11-2001. It was all about that damned Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline to exploit the vast reserves of the Caspian Basin area. Some readers may remember the names Gary Best, Simon Mann, two of those black-ops operatives that were MEGA Oil as a front. Simon Mann is the person who was captured while trying to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea and assassinate its president. Mann was a British military operative that became a mercenary, sort of like the long list of people who served and then became what was then known as Blackwater USA, now Xi Corporation. Since the US plans to come through Afghanistan have been blocked for the most part, the only other route out (without mending fences with Iran) is across the Caspian Sea and slipping through the narrow gap that is Georgia on the east end of the Black Sea. George W Bush was 100% behind the Georgia assault on South Ossetia in August 2008. He wanted Russia backed up to the north side of the Caucasus Mountains and widen that pipeline right-of-way. Well, that hockey game ended badly for GW because Russia hit hard and fast, final score was about Russia 50, US backed Georgia 0. The president of Georgia finally had to admit publicly that it was not Russian aggression; he started it with full backing of the US. I was the first person to write that it was Georgia that started it, not Russia. Just two days before that attack, Jeff Rense and I did a radio show and discussed that Georgia would be a flashpoint. Little did we know that the attack was only 2 days away. Bush never admitted that he put about 4,000 Blackwater USA mercenaries in Georgia. Their probable mission is to destabilize Dagestan, a Russia province that is needed to run a huge pipeline from Kazakhstan, across the Caspian Sea, through tiny Georgia to the Black Sea. US military forces were planning, procuring and practicing the invasion of Afghanistan as early as March 2001, a full 6 months before September 11, 2001. That is not a hard fact to verify. They did not want piss-ant little nations (their opinion, not mine) like Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan profiting from that mother-lode of oil and natural gas. They spent over 30 years, all the way back to President Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski creating Al Qaeda to go in there and disrupt their governments, the USSR and anyone else who got in their way. Old Zbig is the author of the book ‘The Grand Chessboard’. I have read it, was written by a delusional power broker that just happens to be a diehard Russia hater as a vocation. Russia grew up, Zbig went off in La-La Land. The objective was to break up the USSR and take over all of the oil and natural gas. Uh, they managed to break up the USSR but in the energy game they lost!! Pens and contracts have proven to be mightier than US military power, and the nitwit plan that was hatched because of The Grand Chessboard. The US government has still not admitted that its true objective in Afghanistan is not nation building and democracy is just a pretense. The true mission is a pipeline from Turkmenistan, across Afghanistan and Pakistan to the ocean. Our ‘elite’ have a big stake, big investment that they stand to lose if they cannot get that pipeline done. One has to dig very deep to find the truth when Washington DC is in Industrial Lie Mode. This was also part of my presentation at ‘9-11, Confronting the Evidence’: “23 Feb 2003: OPIC agrees to fund the pipeline and Bush has guaranteed to protect it with U.S. troops (without telling the United States citizens). “23-02-03 Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan (TAP) have signed a protocol for trans-Afghanistan Gas Pipeline Project However, some recent reports had indicated that the United States was willing to police the pipeline infrastructure through permanent stationing of its troops in the region. The US ExIm Bank, the Trade and Development Agency (TDA) and the Overseas Private Insurance Corporation (OPIC) had also shown readiness to finance such a project, if leading American energy giants come forward.” Leading Russian and Chinese oil companies have completely negated their Grand Chessboard. It is hard to grasp the level of stupefying ignorance of arrogance that abides in Washington DC. Those same CIS states set up their own national oil companies as well, for the benefit of their own people, not the US insiders. Of course, that Bush commitment to permanently station US troops in Afghanistan happened without notifying the US public and was just about 1 month before Bush and Blair launched their other war crimes against the people of Iraq on March 20, 2003. I have met many Iraqi exiles in Europe. They openly discuss that their life was much better under Saddam Hussein than this pretense democracy and freedom the US thumps it chest about delivering to the Iraqi people. For any American that does not or cannot accept what the definition of a war crime is, it is simply when a nation lies, falsifies intelligence to justify war, and there was NO LEGITMATE THREAT TO THE SECURITY OF THE ATTACKING NATION. The US and UK are both egregiously guilty of that definition. The Grand Chessboard book was their plan. The PNAC (Project for a New American Century) was their lobbying group. It is now all gone up in smoke, we lost. The Chilcote Report in the UK is now pointing the blame at Tony Blair as the liar and war criminal he is. That by implications indicts George W Bush, Dick Cheney and the entire cabal of liars that cooked up this lunatic plan. The objective of the US was military, energy and economic domination of the entire world. The US lost that battle on September 11, 2001. That is the day that America defined just how truly desperate they are to keep this a unipolar world led by the US. Most Americans do not know that the northern third of Afghanistan is not controlled by the Afghans or the puppet government in Kabul. It is controlled by General Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek that was a stay behind after Russia pulled out in 1988. It is pretty well known that he is a CIA asset. Not enough Americans read the expose I wrote as ‘Pop Goes the Bush Mythology Bubble, Part 6’. In that article I introduced readers to Todd Engstrom, who was as of 9-11-2001 part of UNMIK. That acronym stands for UN Mission in Kosovo. It is sort of hard to make a connection between Kosovo and Afghanistan, other than it was yet more US military belligerence where it did not belong. Of course, let us not forget that Clinton had serious need to Wag the Dog to get America’s mind off the Monica Lewinsky fiasco. Mr. Engstrom was assigned with others to guard a large amount of cash (crates of cash, billions of dollars) that left Kosovo on a military transport for the Caspian Basin area the same day that WTC 1, 2, 7 and the others lay in ruin. The plane landed, the crates were transferred to helicopters and then flown into Northern Afghanistan. Well, since I have already given readers a hint of who controls the northern third of Afghanistan, try doing the math as part of the ‘wake up exercise’. In the book I wrote I disclosed that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld flew to Central Asia immediately after 9-11, went into Northern Afghanistan and met with General Rashid Dostum and Mohammed Atta. It was in the print media outside of the US and I made sure the footnote had the link and the pertinent part of the article. Hmm, Mohammed Atta, wasn’t he the alleged ringleader of the 9-11 hijacker / terrorist evildoers? His passport just conveniently survived the maelstrom and was found on the street in New York City. The Defense Department, White House and Washington DC avoid the issue that 9 or 10 of the alleged hijackers / terrorists / evildoers have names that are directly tied to the US military. While our investigators were trying to locate Mr. Todd Engstrom to get all of the details of that secret military flight, he wound up dead in Iraq when the vehicle he was in was hit by an RPG. It was known that we were looking for him. It is not very likely that SEAL Team 6 killed Osama bin Laden. They were probably sent to kill a problem before the truth got out. They may have been sent to kill who was in control of the Pakistan China pipeline that originates at Gwadar. Losing Gwadar means they have no place to run the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline to so they can get the oil and natural gas to the ocean. It is more likely that SEAL Team 6 was sacrificed to silence them so it never got out that Osama bin Laden was never found; was not killed by SEAL Team 6. That information does not fit the Official Story (Official Delusion) that DC has tried to maintain and has failed. The respect for the US around this world is at an all-time low. The US has become a predator, a liar, and a warmonger, the pre-eminent terrorist on the face of this planet, all in the name of greed for certain US insiders. One of the facts about the assault that supposedly took out Osama bin Laden is that ST6 is part of DEVGRU, an elite counter-terrorism group that operates under the Joint Chiefs of Staff command. For the entire Osama bin Laden mission control of that group was handed over to the CIA. They were sent to eliminate a problem and it evidently scared them enough to send the most elite team they have. The only reason the CIA gets involved in such an operation is their covert actions are about to be exposed. Their dirty deeds are about to be front page news. That is the most likely reason ST6 was sent and sent under CIA operational control. Think on that. DC is terrified of the Truth. I find it both saddening and laughable that they supposedly track down and kill Osama bin Laden in May and just months later the US gets downgraded to AA+ credit due to the wanton excesses of DC and Wall Street. I guess the Guinness Book of World Records can list that as the most expensive manhunt in history since it bankrupted the world’s largest economy nation. Think on that, too. The official story from the Defense Department is that these brave counter-terrorism soldiers, an elite and classified group sent on very sensitive missions, was on its way to reinforce US troops. Hmm, are we to deduce that they would risk the most elite, most highly trained soldiers and did not have any other US soldiers they could have sent? That would be such a waste it does not even make sense. They are no longer a classified group since Barky Obama wanted to brag about his ‘accomplishment’ and let anyone and everyone know about ST6. Compared to the fiasco he has been in office, that is akin to a little boy bragging about his first penile erection. The question comes up as to why ST6 was still in Afghanistan, since they are so covert and classified and elite and why operational control was handed over to the CIA. It is also likely that they were headed to take out another threat that was about to expose the entire US charade. The CIA intervenes when it is necessary to silence and maintain its covert nature. Think on that. They may have hit someone that was about to spill the beans on a wide variety of US transgressions and dirty deeds the CIA has been up to. I have multiple sources who indicate that there have been many chances for peace in Afghanistan but for some reason Bush and Obama do not want there to be peace. They keep intentionally making sure that peace cannot be accomplished. My guess it is another temper tantrum that the Grand Chessboard is in checkmate and we lost. Think on that one. Frankly, I do not believe a single word that Washington, DC or their media mouthpieces have to say. They have been caught in too many lies to trust them on any subject, any word or sentence. I walked out on the RNC in 1996, but in parting I told them they were lunatics to think they could pull it off, a global war on terror aimed at Islamic nations that had vast oil and natural gas resources. Lust for money, lust for greed, lust for power are not justifications that create a Just War. They would kill America doing so and they have. What they were afraid of is the decline of America if we lost control as the leading economic and energy Superpower. They already knew in 1994-1996 that America was in decline. They were desperate to find a way to get that back, thinking in error that this would always be a unipolar world led by the US. They could already see that it was becoming a multi-polar world and the US could no longer control the shots. That is why they did it. It brings me no joy to say today that I was right. We did not learn from Vietnam, we have not learned from Afghanistan or Iraq that we were never in the right. Lies cannot be twisted enough to make an Unjust War into a Just War. Just look at America right now and weep for the damage they have done in the name of greed and their delusions of grandeur. The world grew up, changed for the better and the US did not. When a person adds it all up, it is really quite sad.
• Eurozone to contract by 1.5% in 2012, bank predicts • Standard Chartered says “triple shock” will undermine economy • Asia to see lower growth, but will drive global recovery
The eurozone economy is to contract by even more than previously thought in 2012, according to forecasters at Standard Chartered bank.Economists said the nations that use the single euro currency will see their economies shrink by 1.5% next year, while the United Kingdom, which recently opted out of a new European Union fiscal accord, will see its economy decline by 1.3%.
Analysts at Standard Chartered had previously predicted growth of 0.6% in the UK economy.
While it expects European economies to contract, the bank predicted the world economy as a whole would grow by 2.2% next year.
Standard Chartered said Asia would drive the global economies recovery, despite a predicted slowdown in growth from 7.3% in 2011 to 6.5% in 2012.
“It will be a recovery made in the East and felt in the West. If ever one needed to illustrate the shift in the balance of power, this is it,” said chief economist Gerard Lyons.
Standard Chartered economist Thomas Costerg said Europe’s economy would suffer a triple shock; consumers and businesses will lose confidence and spend less, banks will tighten credit and national governments are being forced to cut budgets.
The result of this triple shock will be a recession throughout Europe.
You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to.
Colonel6's Blog 