Monday, November 8, 2010

Sunday, November 7 2010

Open Letter to all International
Human Rights Organisations
Who especially handle political asylum cases
Re: Gerry McGeough

The general consensus that society in the north of Ireland must now "move on" from the era of the Troubles is being seriously undermined by an on-going legal saga that is causing growing resentment among nationalists in Tyrone and which is now starting to gain attention elsewhere across Ireland and beyond.

November 1, 2010 saw the resumption of a trial that is raising issues of major concern to international Human Rights groups as well as bringing to light matters that the British government, in particular, would prefer left untouched.

At the centre of the controversy is 52-year-old Gerry McGeough, a teacher and published author from the Brantry area of South Tyrone, who is now the focus of a political and legal storm that has dragged in the Swedish government, the U.S. and German authorities and a host of interested parties from several other nations. Added to this is a growing litany of revelations that has opened a Pandora's Box of secret deals and leaked intelligence memos that are beginning to cause major angst within some political circles.

The saga began on March 8th, 2007, the day after the Stormont Assembly elections when Gerry McGeough, who had stood as an Independent Republican candidate in the Fermanagh/South Tyrone constituency, was dramatically arrested outside the Count Centre in Omagh. A convoy of PSNI vehicles took McGeough to Antrim, where he was eventually charged with membership in the IRA in 1975, when he was 16-years-old, and with wounding a part-time member of the UDR in 1981. The arrest became news headlines within the hour

Shortly after Mr. McGeough's arrest, Vincent McAnespie, an Aughnacloy Building Contractor in his late forties, was also arrested following a raid on his home. The charges against Mr. McAnespie were eventually reduced to possession of weapons in 1981.

Explaining the unusual manner of Mr. McGeough's arrest, the PSNI claimed that they had been looking for him for years but had not been able to locate him until his appearance at the Omagh Count Centre. Mr. McGeough’s lawyers dismissed this as "ridiculous", pointing out that apart from the fact that he had been living openly in the North before the election; he was also one of the most high-profile candidates during the campaign, speaking regularly in public and making appearances on T.V. and live radio programs.

Mr. McGeough’s arrest was politically motivated and sanctioned by the British government. If a political candidate was arrested during an election in Zimbabwe, or anywhere else, the British would be squealing about human rights abuses".

After three weeks in Maghaberry prison, Mr. McGeough's lawyers finally secured bail for him following a considerable legal struggle during which the Prosecution tried to prevent his release by claiming that he was wanted in Germany and the United States for Irish republican related activities in the 1980s. When these accusations were found to be groundless, he was released on strict bail conditions, most of which remain in place over three-and-a-half-years later.

Mr. McGeough, who lives with his Spanish-born wife and their four young children, spent the next couple of years making monthly court appearances during which the case was constantly put back, sometimes for the flimsiest of reasons, such as someone at the DPP had forgotten to post a letter crucial to the investigation.

During this time, the family had to put up with many hardships including having a British Army helicopter hover and clatter over their remote rural home at eleven o'clock one night as small children struggled to sleep. They have also had to endure phone-tapping, e-mail and regular mail interception and disruption. In addition, because of the serious Troubles-related charges against him, Mr. McGeough has not been able to find work as a teacher since his arrest.

In July, 2009, Mr. McGeough suffered a massive heart-attack. That same month, the British government extended the use of the non-jury Diplock Court system for another two years. A notorious legacy of the Troubles, the Diplock Courts were supposed to have been finally phased out by 2009.

On March 8th, exactly three years after his arrest, Mr. McGeough was put on trial before a Diplock Court in Belfast. The previous day, the Sunday Tribune newspaper revealed that a secret deal had been done between the British government and Sinn Féin allowing up to fifty "on-the-run" republicans to receive Royal Pardons since the signing of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

Shaun Woodward, Britain's then Secretary of State for the North, publicly denounced the revelation as "nonsense". Shortly afterwards, McGeough's lawyers produced one of the Pardons and the Northern Ireland Office has since confirmed that a deal had, in fact, been done.

Arguing that their client, who is one of the listed "on-the-runs", was being discriminated against for political reasons, Mr. McGeough's legal team secured an adjournment of the trial after three days while they sought the disclosure of documents from the NIO for an "Abuse of Process" application.

Despite ample evidence of the existence of such material, a judge ruled that the NIO need not disclose some forty-one relevant files in the interests of "national security". He also dismissed the "Abuse of Process" application and the trial resumed on September 13th. That day consisted of having a PSNI detective read a full chapter of one of Gerry's books to the court. He had "secured" the book from a library in Dublin. The novel itself, "Defenders", is a work of fiction published in 1998. Incredibly, this has been accepted as "evidence" by the non-jury court.

The trial against Mr. McGeough, which is estimated to have cost £1 million to date, was halted again the following day after McGeough was rushed to hospital where he underwent a further heart procedure on September 17th. He has since been released from hospital and the trial resumed on November 1st.

If convicted, he will spend two years in prison under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement before being eligible for release on license. Mr. McGeough’s children, all of whom were born since the year 2000, are the real victims of the Troubles. This whole experience is a real trauma for them. Why should they have to be put through this?

A staunch supporter of the Peace Process, Mr. McGeough and his supporters believe he is being singled out simply because he stood in the elections and expressed a viewpoint that upset the powers that be. People are verbally upset and now starting to question “why are no British soldiers being put on trial for Bloody Sunday"? And, what about those behind the Dublin/Monaghan bombings? Either the Troubles are over or they're not. If not, then shouldn’t everybody be put on trial before Diplock Courts?

Meanwhile, the Prosecution used alleged Political Asylum application papers from Sweden as the mainstay of its evidence against Mr. McGeough. The move has raised considerable alarm among some international Human Rights groups, who argue that this violates the whole concept of political asylum and is an attack upon the rights of refugees everywhere.

Swedish Civil Servant Helen Hedebris, believed to be fanatically pro-British, obviously had been working in close collaboration with the RUC/PSNI over the years and her testimony for the prosecution, against Mr. McGeough in a Diplock trial, was disgraceful and the Swedish government should hang their head in shame for allowing her to testify for the prosecution.

In their obsessive need to prosecute and imprison this Irishman, the British obviously were prepared to turn international political asylum refugee laws on their head. This move on November 4, 2010 by the British and Swedish governments now has widespread implications for the entire concept of political asylum.

Ironically, under British law, Political Asylum applicants are guaranteed that their documents will be kept confidential and under no circumstances handed over to the authorities in the country they may be fleeing from. The Crown’s prosecution argued that this doesn't apply to material from Sweden?

Supporters of Mr. McGeough and the Good Friday Agreement are now asking that all international Human Rights organizations, especially those dealing with asylum-seekers, take the Swedish and British governments to task for their blatant disregard in using political asylum documents as evidence in the discredited Diplock Court system in the north of Ireland.

What happened here is a stain on Sweden's otherwise excellent record in the area of international Human Rights. Without this Swedish input, Gerry would now be a free man. The British and Swedish governments must now be held accountable for this and we are asking for these Human Rights organizations to press for a review of the decision on the documentation used in Mr. McGeough’s trial.



Helen McClafferty

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Martin Galvin Interview: What It Means For Gerry McGeough If Pronounced Guilty

September 22, 2010

There is a great deal of speculation and assumptions floating around out there in cyber space regarding what type of sentence Gerry McGeough is facing. I asked Martin Galvin, a prominent New York attorney helping out on Gerry's case, to explain what the possibility is if pronounced guilty.

Martin explained that "Under the terms of the deal, if pronounced guilty, Gerry McGeough would first be sentenced to a lengthy jail term. While he would be eligible for early release, after 2 years, (even for someone like Gerry who endured a notorious German prison and 3 years in a federal penitentiary) this is not a minor thing for a man in his 50s with a bad heart serving time in the conditions at Maghaberry with young children.

Martin went on to to say that "The problem with this type of sentence is the fact it is "a release on license or parole", which can be revoked at any time for little or no reason other than the constabulary claims to have intelligence information that you are associating with people they dislike. (eg Terry McCafferty). McCafferty was jailed a few weeks after his release. It was claimed there was intelligence information that he was associating with dissident Republicans. After 15 months it was admitted that there had been no intelligence information against him. This could mean a quick return to Maghaberry prison under the original sentence".

For those of you not familiar with the Terry McCafferty case, the following was taken from the Irish News, Monday, March 29, 2010: The Irish News reported "Alleged Real IRA leader” Terry McCafferty was released from Maghaberry Prison after the Sentence Review Commissions ruled his detention illegal on the basis that the case against him was unreliable. McCafferty had been released on licence in November 2008, half-way through a 12-year sentence for possession of explosives, but, as noted at the time, in December 2008 the Secretary of State revoked his parole licence and he was re-arrested at Belfast International Airport. Since then there has been a legal battle over the case, which included a December 2009 Court of Appeal ruling rejecting a legal challenge to the decision to revoke McCafferty’s licence. As part of that legal battle the attorney general appointed a special advocate to represent McCafferty at hearings which he was not allowed to attend because of sensitive intelligence material presented to the commission by security agencies. The case took a dramatic turn earlier this month when the special advocate announced he was withdrawing from the case, claiming he was not being allowed to properly represent the alleged dissident. However, McCafferty’s lawyer Paul Pierce was last night informed that the sentence review commission had recommended the prisoner’s immediate release. Welcoming the move, Mr. Pierce said: “My client has been held in prison without any valid evidence for the last 15 months. “He will be considering a civil action against the secretary of state for this illegal detention.”

I hope the above information helps people to have a better understanding of exactly how serious are the consequences facing Gerry at this time. I cannot impress enough upon republicans that if Gerry is convicted, not only will it serve to prove the British government did not hold up their end of the Good Friday Agreement, but it will now set a precedent, going forward, that all republicans will now be in jeopardy if the RUC/PSNI decide you are next.

Helen McClafferty


For more legal information on Gerry's case, you can download and listen to Martin Galvin on WBAI's Radio Free Eireann on Saturday, September 18, 2010 show

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Noellee Nothing But...

Noellee Nothing But... LLC is a new handmade jewelry company founded by Victoria Gonzalez. Victoria considers herself creative and artistic, always wanting to dedicate herself to creating "art"; however it was not until about 4 years ago when she began creating her own jewelry that she felt she had found the passion she was looking for.

Every piece she made was thoughtfully and meticulously made and able to be worn by all types of women. Her creations, of which there are no two alike, have always been admired by friends and family with expressions such as "very feminine", "fashionable", "striking", and "expressive"...pieces that make a woman feel feminine and admired.

Wanting to share these feelings with as many women as possible, a year ago she took the advice of many and ventured out to create her own home-base company. Her beautiful daughter was the inspiration of the name Noellee who told her "Every woman should wear nothing but Noellee, if they want to be noticed".

Hey not such a bad idea when it looks this good. Have a look...

Saturday, August 7, 2010

Like it Is

I have a new game that I "like" to play when walking around the city. Whenever I'm crossing a street alongside two or more young women, I count the number of times the word "like" was said by the time they get to the other side.

Although this is mainly a young woman's condition, I've noticed that many young men are also prone to peppering their conversations with the word, especially when conversing with a young woman. Perhaps they use it as a way to "get down" to her level?

Occasionally I'll just explode. Like the time I was trapped in an elevator with two "like"-minded ladies. When I suddenly started spouting the word over and over, they stopped talking and looked at me with consternation. When I explained that hearing the word drove me nearly crazy, one of them even agreed and apologized, offering the excuse: "I guess I can't help it because I hear the word all the time". To which I replied: "Well so do I, and that's why I don't use it!"

It's like some kind of like Generation Gap.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

10 Ways Mother Earth Will Strike Back If We Don't Stop Our Wanton Destruction of the Environment

AlterNet / By Scott Thill
March 21, 2010

Bad news. Thanks to perfectly timed, premeditated reality assassinations like so-called ClimateGate, nearly half of Americans may now believe that the various threats of climate change are exaggerated. That's the highest quotient ever since polling on the issue commenced. But there is good news: They're on the wrong side of history and science, and Earth will still get the last laugh on all of them, and us for that matter.

Welcome to our existential nightmare. From rising seas and runaway droughts and storms to the outer limits of dystopian catastrophes like the fart apocalypse -- I'll explain later -- our planet has no shortage of ways to bitch-slap us back into our dangerous reality, whether we want it to or not.

Of course, we could stave off some of the more egregious probabilities of extinction, if we acted now to limit global warming's inexorable rise to 2 degrees. But that means a determined destruction of the status quo, and that's always messy for those who like things just the way they are, thank you very much. But they'll still get theirs. How? Let us count the ways.

1. Envirogees: If you're one of those righteously indignant climate change deniers who also hates immigration, you're in for a world of hurt. According to scientists and scholars, climate refugees could hit 50 million this year and explode to 150 million over the next 50. Hordes of these envirogees, as I call them, will be turned out of their environmentally sensitive homes in China, India, the United States and elsewhere.

They will doubtless end up in the backyards of disgruntled citizens who like to mumble or scream about things they won't settle for in their backyards. If you think immigration is a problem now, just wait until Mother Earth starts cleaning house.

2. Dead Zones: Deniers might like to point out that hypoxic oceans and lakes, known as dead zones in ecological parlance, could be just as attributable to overpopulation as to global warming. Whatever. Their increased frequency is making climate change worse, no matter the prime cause, as if there could ever be such a thing. From shrinking the sex organs of our planet's fish to fucking up its food chain and escalating the ocean's nitrous oxide emissions, dead zones are deep threats.

More nitrous oxide, a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, means more ozone depletion, which means more cancer, crop depletion and much worse.

3. Rising Tides: Of course, most deniers, especially those who live near oceans, probably won't be worrying about their chemical content once catastrophic climate change's more severe symptoms arrive. They'll be too busy fleeing the rising tide.

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fourth Assessment Report prophesied that global warming would increase sea levels by 190-580 millimeters by 2100. More recent research has doubled the bar to an upper limit of two meters. Which probably means that in another few years, the already catastrophic limit will be raised again, perhaps by another 100 percent, at which point there won't be much point in measuring anything at all. Coastal metropoles like Los Angeles, Miami, London, Sydney and others will literally be drowning in data.

It's an object lesson in ironic reversal: ClimateGate deniers were partially right about the IPCC's projections, although they were wrong in thinking they were too severe. In fact, they were too conservative.

4. Fart Apocalypse! The hits just keep on coming, when it comes to global warming and the oceans. Take methane, for example, which like nitrous oxide is a killer greenhouse gas. Plus, it smells terrible, like someone took a crap right in your head.

Now imagine being choked by it, as it is belched from the oceans in a toxic feedback loop and dominates the atmosphere. It's probably happened before in one or more of a variety of extinction events like the Permian-Triassic, more scarily known as the Great Dying. But it could be happening again, as the permafrost melts and farts methane into the ocean and thereby the sky.
Health care dictatorship: A crime against America
Mike Adams
March 23, 2010

It’s amazing that the day before the health care “reform” bill is passed in America, the FDA announces that one of the most popular statin drugs sold in America causes so much kidney damage that it might kill you. And then the day after this health care bill passes, the FDA announces that a popular rotovirus vaccine made by Merck is being halted because it is contaminated with a mysterious DNA sequence from a pig virus called porcine circovirus type 1 or PCV-1.

The reason this is important is because cholesterol drugs and vaccines represent what conventional American medicine is all about: Drugs and injections. It’s not about health and prevention; it’s about drugs and injections (and surgery too, of course).

And the legislation that was just passed is focused entirely on how to expand the failed system of drugs and injections so that it causes harm to everyone rather than just those who voluntarily choose to be suckered into it. This is the medical equivalent of a wartime draft that forces soldiers into battle against their will. Except this isn’t a war against some foreign enemy — it’s a war being waged against your body by the pharmaceutical industry, the cancer industry, the surgery pushers and all the corporations that prey upon the public for their sick-care profits.

What Dr. Julian Whitaker had to say about it
I was sitting in the office of Dr. Julian Whitaker in Newport Beach, California this morning at the Whitaker Wellness Center (www.WhitakerWellness.com), chatting about this health care legislation. Needless to say, he was fuming about it, and we decided to record a quick video featuring some of his comments.

I’ll be sharing that video soon on NaturalNews, but the upshot of it is that Dr. Whitaker is extremely concerned about the government taking over health care and interfering in the all-important doctor-patient relationship. He’s also quite rightly convinced that this new legislation is going to result in tens of trillions of dollars in new sick-care cost burdens that stand to financially devastate the national economy as they rise to 30% or even 40% of GNP over the next several years.

Dr. Whitaker is the kind of “alternative medicine” doctor whose medicine should be mainstream. If all the diabetes, heart disease and cancer patients across the country were given the kind of nutritional advice espoused at the Whitaker Wellness Center, we could actually save our nation from sick-care bankruptcy by greatly reducing health care costs across the board. Use of pharmaceuticals would plummet, and many medically useless surgeries such as coronary bypass surgery would simply be abandoned.

The epidemic of vitamin D deficiency in America
The Whitaker Wellness Center tests nearly every patient for their vitamin D levels, by the way. And guess what they find? I was talking with the Whitaker Wellness lab technician this morning and found that roughly 95% of new patients have deficient vitamin D levels. (They are then prescribed very high levels of supplementary vitamin D until they get back up to “normal” levels, of course.)


Most hospitals in America — and most doctors practicing medicine — don’t even test for vitamin D levels. That’s why there is an unseen epidemic of vitamin D deficiency in America today. This epidemic, by the way, is responsible for probably 80% of all cancers, at least a third of heart disease, perhaps a quarter or all diabetes cases, and countless cases of osteoporosis, depression, psychosis and kidney disorders.

So why don’t mainstream doctors test for vitamin D levels? Here’s the shocking but uncensored answer that medicine just doesn’t want to hear: Because doctors are nutritionally illiterate. They are so lost in their drugs, surgeries, poison chemotherapy treatments and ballooning egos that they have forgotten the simplest and most powerful elements of health and healing: Nutrients.

So while America wastes trillions of dollars every decade on treating cancer, diabetes, heart disease and depression, a significant portion of all those diseases could be cheaply, safely and readily prevented with a dime a day of vitamin D supplementation. It’s the smartest investment you can probably make in the health outcome of any population.

This is relevant because vitamin D isn’t even mentioned in the new health care legislation. It’s as if the vitamin didn’t even exist! Washington is preoccupied with only this thought: Who will pay for all the disease? And yet nobody has the brains (or the balls) to ask the far more important question: How can we make people healthier and prevent disease in the first place?

Why did the U.S. government mandate seatbelts in automobiles to save lives, but it won’t even acknowledge the desperate need for vitamin D supplementation to save lives?

A crime against America
It’s disgusting, really, to realize that the answers to America’s health care crisis are so simple, so affordable, so obvious and so readily available… and yet our lawmakers remain stuck in a disease-and-bankruptcy mentality, making the problem worse while our fellow Americans suffer and die from preventable disease.

How is this not a crime against America? To suppress health truth while our brothers and sisters die from diseases that we know could be prevented is simply inexcusable. This status quo cannot be allowed to stand. The cost in human lives and suffering is beyond what our nation can bear.

I’m afraid — but totally serious — that the best thing that can happen right now for America is for all the old guard drugs-and-surgery doctors and health officials to go get vaccinated and die as quickly as possible so that the younger, more integrative physicians can get into positions of authority and start to make a positive difference. It’s time for a revolution in medicine, and that revolution is never going to happen as long as the very people who defend the current medical mafia remain in power.

Scientific revolutions are often brought about only by the passing away of those who resist progress, and the same is true in medicine. We’ve been stuck in the germ theory of medicine for at least a century, and the AMA has worked diligently to suppress natural healing therapies during those hundred years. But now something has to change. And it will change.

Medicine is broken
The results of our broken sick-care system speak for themselves: America has the fattest, most diseased and most medically-bankrupt population in the world. That’s not an exaggeration, it’s a statistical fact. Western medicine does not work.

The cancer industry is a dismal failure and it actually causes more cancers than it prevents. Vaccines are a joke: Vitamin D has been scientifically proven to work over 600% more effectively at preventing the flu in children, for example, than a vaccine shot. (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/ne…)

Figuring out who pays for sickness is not health care reform. Real reform can only come from promoting health and nutrition, period.

I’ll argue this point with any doctor from any medical school anywhere in the world: My vitamin D works better than your vaccine! My nutrition works better than your poison. Preventing disease costs a small fraction of the expense required to treat disease that is allowed to develop.

Why is this commonsense idea totally rejected in Congress and the White House? Why has the idea of universal health care coverage devolved into an expansion of the medical mafia who only seek to keep our people diseased and trapped in a medical system that will bleed them of their hard-earned dollars?

Thank goodness several states are already planning to fight this. Florida is one of them:

“The health care reform legislation passed by the U.S. House of Representatives last night clearly violates the U.S. Constitution and infringes on each state’s sovereignty,” said Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum today. “On behalf of the State of Florida and of the Attorneys General from South Carolina, Nebraska, Texas, Utah, Pennsylvania, Washington, North Dakota, South Dakota and Alabama if the President signs this bill into law, we will file a lawsuit to protect the rights and the interests of American citizens.”
I’ll be talking about this more when I’m speaking live at the Health Freedom Expo this weekend in Long Beach, California, by the way. I’ll be covering this topic in more detail. You can get tickets for the entire event (which includes my presentation) at www.HealthFreedomExpo.com

Hope to see you there!


Source:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2215987420100322

Saturday, January 9, 2010

Raising H-1b cap will accelerate loss of U.S. jobs and technology to India

Reporting from Mumbai India, Anand Giridharadas' article "Outsourcers corner market for U.S. skilled worker visas" (International Herald Tribune, April 12, 2007) explains how the H-1b visa is "now a critical tool for Indian outsourcing vendors to gain expertise and win contracts from Western companies to transfer critical operations to places like Bangalore."

"It has become the outsourcing visa," the Indian commerce minister, Kamal Nath, said by telephone this week while attending global trade talks in New Delhi, at which India is pushing the United States for a larger H-1B quota.

"If at one point you had X amount of outsourcing," he said, "and now you have a much higher quantum of outsourcing, you need that many more visas."

Last year eight of the 10 largest H-1B applicants were outsourcing firms with major operations in India. U.S. SEC filings reveal that Infosys alone had 6,800 U.S. employees on H-1Bs as of September 2006. In 1998, the figure was 231.

Tata Consultancy Services sent Atul Pevekar to Minnesota on an H-1B. His assignment: to work with a U.S. retailer to relay its information technology needs back to TCS's Indian staff, to which the retailer has outsourced scores of jobs. "I am a link between the people who are doing coding in India and the client."

Losing jobs and technology to India is not in the best interests of the U.S. or of U.S. citizens. Congress needs to suspend the H-1b program now.