After the Tribulation- Alex Jones
Monday, June 10, 2013
The Pentagon May Be Paying a Billion Dollars a Year to the Wrong People
By Richard H.P. Sia, The Center For Public Integrity, June 7, 2013
The Pentagon has been paying hundreds of millions of tax dollars a year to people and companies that don’t deserve it, but its financial management shortcomings are so severe that it’s made little progress in halting the errors or even measuring their magnitude, according to a report released by a Senate committee Thursday.
Although the Defense Department reported making over $1.1 billion in overpayments in FY 2011 to military personnel and retirees, civilian defense workers, contractors, and others, investigators from the Government Accountability Office said that figure is not credible due to missing invoices and other flawed paperwork, as well as errors in arithmetic.
The Pentagon is required by law to ferret out programs susceptible to significant payment errors and then use statistical sampling to estimate the size of those errors, so that Congress can determine the size of the problem. But the GAO found defense finance officials didn’t have procedures in place to collect and maintain the data they need to come up with a credible estimate.
Even when the department could find and document mistaken payments, it frequently did not take cost-effective steps to recover the money, GAO said. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, for example, has spent $256,000 since 2009 on an automated overpayment-detection program that has recovered just one improper payment of $20.79, GAO said.
The Pentagon’s payment system is so weak that sometimes it doesn’t pay what’s owed. By its own estimate, for example, the Pentagon made $238.2 million in overpayments and $48.4 million in underpayments related to travel alone during fiscal 2011, for a total of $286.6 million in incorrect payments.
But when pressed by GAO, defense finance officials were only able to identify $1.6 million, or less than 1 percent, of the program’s estimated overpayments as recoverable, explaining that they lacked supporting documentation for a significant portion of the total.
The Defense Department “is at risk of foregoing the detection and recovery of potentially substantial funds owed to the government,” the GAO report said.
Instead of conducting cost-effective audits to identify funds that can be recovered, GAO said the Pentagon relies on such methods as self-reporting by defense contractors and other recipients of the money, random sampling of payment records, and findings by the Defense Department inspector general or other auditors.
Members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which released the GAO report, expressed anger and frustration over the findings. Several accused the Pentagon of failing to comply with a 2010 law requiring federal agencies to identify, prevent, and recover payments made in error.
“The Department spends about a trillion dollars annually, but officials have no idea how much of that money it loses to waste and fraud. This is simply unacceptable,” said Committee Chairman Tom Carper, who co-sponsored the law with Sen. Susan Collins and others.
Sen. Tom Coburn, ranking member of the committee, cited the GAO’s conclusions while promising to reintroduce legislation requiring the Defense Department to conduct an accurate audit of its books, as required by federal rules the Department has repeatedly flouted.
“When our largest federal agency cannot produce a viable financial audit, it should be no surprise DOD cannot account for how much money it wastes on improper payments,” said Coburn, who vowed to use all the oversight tools at his disposal to expose and prevent defense finance abuses.
The problem is an old one at the Pentagon. Twenty years ago, GAO delivered a scathing report to the same Senate committee documenting a military payroll system that was so badly managed the Army had inadvertently paid $6 million to 2,269 troops who had already quit the service, were absent without leave, or had deserted their units. In one case, a dead deserter was sent a paycheck.
A separate probe at the time revealed that managers at a defense finance and accounting center had miscalculated the pay of more than 201,000 Air Force retirees in 1986, giving them an extra dollar or two each month. It took nine years for managers to correct the error, which ended up costing taxpayers $16 million. Officials said they decided not to try to recover the money because the some of the retirees were probably dead, and the effort to collect would be too expensive.
In the report released Thursday, GAO said the Pentagon acknowledged overpayments in military active-duty and retirement pay as part of the $1.1 billion in erroneous payments in FY 2011. In addition, the Pentagon made overpayments of military health benefits, civilian pay, travel pay, commercial pay to vendors and contractors, and Army Corps of Engineers travel and contractor fees.
GAO faulted the Defense Department comptroller not only for these mistakes, but for doing a poor job of reporting on the issue to Congress. In one instance, the department claimed it would recover $67.6 million in improper military retirement payments while estimating that only $18.8 million in overpayments had actually occurred, GAO said.
Is the price of 'security' worth it?
By Dan Murphy, CS Monitor, June 7, 2013
The revelations of the extent of National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance on US telecommunications this week bring up a chicken and egg problem: Are Americans so safe from terrorist attacks because the surveillance program works, or are they sacrificing privacy so that the government can protect them from a statistically marginal and rare occurrence?
The NSA is very good at electronic surveillance, so good that smart terrorists avoid using phones and the internet to conduct their business. That’s one reason that Osama bin Laden stayed alive for so long and why his former number two and current Al Qaeda boss, Ayman al-Zawahiri, remains alive today.
The fact is, domestic terrorism is an exceedingly rare occurrence and miniscule cause of death in the US, notwithstanding the outsized response attacks draw from citizens and politicians. It’s very difficult to count alleged terrorist plots that may have been thwarted by the snooping effort, but nevertheless, terrorism has been rare in America throughout the sweep of US history.
President Barack Obama defended the program today. “My assessment and my team’s assessment was that they help us prevent terrorist attacks,” he told reporters. “And the modest encroachments on privacy that are involved in getting phone numbers or duration [of calls] without a name attached and not looking at content, that on net it was worth us doing.”
Obama also said “you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience” and “we’re going to have to make some choices as a society.” Both those points are so true as to almost be tautological—though it’s simply not possible to have 100 percent security under any circumstances.
America and its politicians have consistently chosen “more security” and “less privacy” in recent years, but the fear of terrorism, and what’s being given up in the service of that fear, seem all out of proportion to the actual threat.
In 2011 there were zero domestic US victims of “terrorism.” In 2012 there was a single incident of domestic terrorism, when a white supremacist shot and killed six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. This year, there has been a single incident so far, when two Muslim brothers, apparently motivated by hatred of the US and inspired by Al Qaeda-type thinking, murdered 3 people and injured 260 others at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.
The government’s spying powers aren’t supposed to be turned on US citizens, so the program was irrelevant to the 2011 attack. President Barack Obama says that US residents are also exempt, so presumably the program wasn’t relevant to the marathon attack either.
As Micah Zenko wrote last year, a comparable number of Americans were killed by falling televisions as were killed by acts of terrorism in 2011. How bad has terrorism been in recent decades?
In the 1990s, there was an Al Qaeda linked attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 that killed six and the 1995 attack on the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, carried out by two militia movement sympathizers, that killed 168. There were a few other minor incidents in the 1990s that brought the decade’s toll of deaths from terrorism on US soil to about 180.
In the 2000s there are only really two terrorist incidents to speak of. The Al Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001 that killed 2,977 people; and Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s rampage at Fort Hood Texas in 2009, that claimed 13 lives, for a total of 2,990 for the decade.
Of course, this is horrific enough. And violence designed to terrorize in search of a political goal is, in fact, something different than crime, or accidents. But a sense of proportion is sorely needed in considering the danger. Stephen Walt wrote a brief post yesterday taking writer Andrew Sullivan to task for saying that the “consequences of its absence” could be “terrible,” which I think is spot on:
This claim depends on the belief that jihadism really does pose some sort of horrific threat to American society. This belief is unwarranted, however, provided that dedicated and suicidal jihadists never gain access to nuclear weapons. Conventional terrorism—even of the sort suffered on 9/11—is not a serious threat to the U.S. economy, the American way of life, or even the personal security of the overwhelming majority of Americans, because al Qaeda and its cousins are neither powerful nor skillful enough to do as much damage as they might like. And this would be the case even if the NSA weren’t secretly collecting a lot of data about domestic phone traffic. Indeed, as political scientist John Mueller and civil engineer Mark Stewart have shown, post-9/11 terrorist plots have been mostly lame and inept, and Americans are at far greater risk from car accidents, bathtub mishaps, and a host of other undramatic dangers than they are from “jihadi terrorism.”
Over 100,000 people died in drunk driving accidents in the US in the 2000s (the decade with the lowest number of drunk driving fatalities in US history; in the 1990s the toll was over 136,000). About 26,000 Americans die from unintentional falls a year, and about 33,000 from accidental poisoning.
Americans don’t live in fear of those dangers, nor should they. Excessive, exaggerated fear of terrorism is something that, perhaps, the US will get over as it considers the prices being paid.
Or as James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1798:
The management of foreign relations appears to be the most susceptible of abuse, of all the trusts committed to a Government because they can be concealed or disclosed, or disclosed in such parts and at such times as will best suit particular views; and because the body of the people are less capable of judging and are more under the influence of prejudices, on that branch of their affairs, than of any other. Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.
The revelations of the extent of National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance on US telecommunications this week bring up a chicken and egg problem: Are Americans so safe from terrorist attacks because the surveillance program works, or are they sacrificing privacy so that the government can protect them from a statistically marginal and rare occurrence?
The NSA is very good at electronic surveillance, so good that smart terrorists avoid using phones and the internet to conduct their business. That’s one reason that Osama bin Laden stayed alive for so long and why his former number two and current Al Qaeda boss, Ayman al-Zawahiri, remains alive today.
The fact is, domestic terrorism is an exceedingly rare occurrence and miniscule cause of death in the US, notwithstanding the outsized response attacks draw from citizens and politicians. It’s very difficult to count alleged terrorist plots that may have been thwarted by the snooping effort, but nevertheless, terrorism has been rare in America throughout the sweep of US history.
President Barack Obama defended the program today. “My assessment and my team’s assessment was that they help us prevent terrorist attacks,” he told reporters. “And the modest encroachments on privacy that are involved in getting phone numbers or duration [of calls] without a name attached and not looking at content, that on net it was worth us doing.”
Obama also said “you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience” and “we’re going to have to make some choices as a society.” Both those points are so true as to almost be tautological—though it’s simply not possible to have 100 percent security under any circumstances.
America and its politicians have consistently chosen “more security” and “less privacy” in recent years, but the fear of terrorism, and what’s being given up in the service of that fear, seem all out of proportion to the actual threat.
In 2011 there were zero domestic US victims of “terrorism.” In 2012 there was a single incident of domestic terrorism, when a white supremacist shot and killed six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. This year, there has been a single incident so far, when two Muslim brothers, apparently motivated by hatred of the US and inspired by Al Qaeda-type thinking, murdered 3 people and injured 260 others at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.
The government’s spying powers aren’t supposed to be turned on US citizens, so the program was irrelevant to the 2011 attack. President Barack Obama says that US residents are also exempt, so presumably the program wasn’t relevant to the marathon attack either.
As Micah Zenko wrote last year, a comparable number of Americans were killed by falling televisions as were killed by acts of terrorism in 2011. How bad has terrorism been in recent decades?
In the 1990s, there was an Al Qaeda linked attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 that killed six and the 1995 attack on the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, carried out by two militia movement sympathizers, that killed 168. There were a few other minor incidents in the 1990s that brought the decade’s toll of deaths from terrorism on US soil to about 180.
In the 2000s there are only really two terrorist incidents to speak of. The Al Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001 that killed 2,977 people; and Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s rampage at Fort Hood Texas in 2009, that claimed 13 lives, for a total of 2,990 for the decade.
Of course, this is horrific enough. And violence designed to terrorize in search of a political goal is, in fact, something different than crime, or accidents. But a sense of proportion is sorely needed in considering the danger. Stephen Walt wrote a brief post yesterday taking writer Andrew Sullivan to task for saying that the “consequences of its absence” could be “terrible,” which I think is spot on:
This claim depends on the belief that jihadism really does pose some sort of horrific threat to American society. This belief is unwarranted, however, provided that dedicated and suicidal jihadists never gain access to nuclear weapons. Conventional terrorism—even of the sort suffered on 9/11—is not a serious threat to the U.S. economy, the American way of life, or even the personal security of the overwhelming majority of Americans, because al Qaeda and its cousins are neither powerful nor skillful enough to do as much damage as they might like. And this would be the case even if the NSA weren’t secretly collecting a lot of data about domestic phone traffic. Indeed, as political scientist John Mueller and civil engineer Mark Stewart have shown, post-9/11 terrorist plots have been mostly lame and inept, and Americans are at far greater risk from car accidents, bathtub mishaps, and a host of other undramatic dangers than they are from “jihadi terrorism.”
Over 100,000 people died in drunk driving accidents in the US in the 2000s (the decade with the lowest number of drunk driving fatalities in US history; in the 1990s the toll was over 136,000). About 26,000 Americans die from unintentional falls a year, and about 33,000 from accidental poisoning.
Americans don’t live in fear of those dangers, nor should they. Excessive, exaggerated fear of terrorism is something that, perhaps, the US will get over as it considers the prices being paid.
Or as James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1798:
The management of foreign relations appears to be the most susceptible of abuse, of all the trusts committed to a Government because they can be concealed or disclosed, or disclosed in such parts and at such times as will best suit particular views; and because the body of the people are less capable of judging and are more under the influence of prejudices, on that branch of their affairs, than of any other. Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.
Thursday, June 6, 2013
Russia's S-300 missile causes hype, controversy
By Vladimir Isachenkov, AP, Jun 4, 2013
MOSCOW (AP)—It’s the most widely talked about weapon in the news these days, and one of the most elusive. The question of whether or not Russia has supplied the S-300 air defense missile systems to Syria has drawn a flow of opaque statements from senior officials in Russia, the United States, Israel and Western Europe. President Vladimir Putin finally offered an answer Tuesday, saying Russia signed a deal to deliver the missiles to Syria a few years ago, but hasn’t fulfilled it yet.
Here is a glance at the weapon and the controversy surrounding it:
LONG-RANGE CAPABILITY: The S-300 has a range of up to 200 kilometers (125 miles) and the capability to track down and strike multiple targets simultaneously with deadly precision. Russian officials say it’s also capable of shooting down warheads of short- and medium-range ballistic missiles.
Russian officials have boasted that the S-300 is superior to the U.S. Patriot missile system. Putin on Tuesday described it as “perhaps the best such weapon in the world.”
Along with the Russian military, the S-300 is in service with several other ex-Soviet nations and former Soviet bloc countries. Other operators include China, Venezuela and NATO member Greece.
However, the S-300 has never been used in combat, unlike the Patriot system which was used in the 1991 Gulf war and the 2003 war in Iraq.
GAME-CHANGER: Israel has warned that the S-300 shipments to Syria would cross a red line and threatened to attack the missile batteries if they are delivered. The S-300s would limit Israel’s freedom to act even in its own airspace and pose a strong challenge to any possible air attack.
Israel also fears that advanced Russian weapons could fall into the hands of Hezbollah, a key Syrian ally in neighboring Lebanon.
The S-300 is not an instant game-changer: Russian military analysts say missile crews would need a year of training.
SYRIAN DEAL CONTROVERSY: The talk of a sale of the S-300s to Damascus has been around for several years. Last month, Israeli officials asked Russia to cancel what they said was an imminent sale. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rushed to visit Putin to discuss the issue, but neither leader had spoken publicly about the issue until Putin’s statement on Tuesday.
Last week, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov confirmed for the first time that Moscow has a contract to provide S-300s to Syria, but wouldn’t say whether any had been shipped.
Later in the week, a Lebanese TV station said it had an interview in which Syrian President Bashar Assad said his government had received the first batch of S-300s. In the actual interview broadcast later, Assad made no specific reference to the S-300.
BARGAINING CHIP: Russia has shrugged off Western and Israeli criticism of its arms sales to Assad’s regime, but it has clearly abided by certain limits and refrained from providing the most potent arms systems. It has refused persistent Syrian demands to deliver short-range Iskander missiles.
At the same time, the Kremlin’s refusal to cancel the S-300 deal strengthens its hand in arguments with the West over Syria. If the United States or its NATO allies move to provide weapons to Syrian rebels despite strong Russian criticism, Moscow may respond by shipping S-300s.
Russia similarly played the S-300 card in the Iranian nuclear standoff, signing a contract for their delivery but eventually shelving the deal.
MOSCOW (AP)—It’s the most widely talked about weapon in the news these days, and one of the most elusive. The question of whether or not Russia has supplied the S-300 air defense missile systems to Syria has drawn a flow of opaque statements from senior officials in Russia, the United States, Israel and Western Europe. President Vladimir Putin finally offered an answer Tuesday, saying Russia signed a deal to deliver the missiles to Syria a few years ago, but hasn’t fulfilled it yet.
Here is a glance at the weapon and the controversy surrounding it:
LONG-RANGE CAPABILITY: The S-300 has a range of up to 200 kilometers (125 miles) and the capability to track down and strike multiple targets simultaneously with deadly precision. Russian officials say it’s also capable of shooting down warheads of short- and medium-range ballistic missiles.
Russian officials have boasted that the S-300 is superior to the U.S. Patriot missile system. Putin on Tuesday described it as “perhaps the best such weapon in the world.”
Along with the Russian military, the S-300 is in service with several other ex-Soviet nations and former Soviet bloc countries. Other operators include China, Venezuela and NATO member Greece.
However, the S-300 has never been used in combat, unlike the Patriot system which was used in the 1991 Gulf war and the 2003 war in Iraq.
GAME-CHANGER: Israel has warned that the S-300 shipments to Syria would cross a red line and threatened to attack the missile batteries if they are delivered. The S-300s would limit Israel’s freedom to act even in its own airspace and pose a strong challenge to any possible air attack.
Israel also fears that advanced Russian weapons could fall into the hands of Hezbollah, a key Syrian ally in neighboring Lebanon.
The S-300 is not an instant game-changer: Russian military analysts say missile crews would need a year of training.
SYRIAN DEAL CONTROVERSY: The talk of a sale of the S-300s to Damascus has been around for several years. Last month, Israeli officials asked Russia to cancel what they said was an imminent sale. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rushed to visit Putin to discuss the issue, but neither leader had spoken publicly about the issue until Putin’s statement on Tuesday.
Last week, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov confirmed for the first time that Moscow has a contract to provide S-300s to Syria, but wouldn’t say whether any had been shipped.
Later in the week, a Lebanese TV station said it had an interview in which Syrian President Bashar Assad said his government had received the first batch of S-300s. In the actual interview broadcast later, Assad made no specific reference to the S-300.
BARGAINING CHIP: Russia has shrugged off Western and Israeli criticism of its arms sales to Assad’s regime, but it has clearly abided by certain limits and refrained from providing the most potent arms systems. It has refused persistent Syrian demands to deliver short-range Iskander missiles.
At the same time, the Kremlin’s refusal to cancel the S-300 deal strengthens its hand in arguments with the West over Syria. If the United States or its NATO allies move to provide weapons to Syrian rebels despite strong Russian criticism, Moscow may respond by shipping S-300s.
Russia similarly played the S-300 card in the Iranian nuclear standoff, signing a contract for their delivery but eventually shelving the deal.
Meet the Doctor Big Pharma Can't Shut Up
By Tamara Strauss, AlterNet, May 30, 2013
The pharmaceutical industry has compromised the Western medical establishment and hooked America on drugs. One psychiatrist is fighting back.
For the last 33 years, David Healy, an Irish psychiatrist and professor at Cardiff University School of Medicine in Wales, has written heavily researched university press books and academic journal articles on various aspects of psychopharmaceuticals. His output includes 20 books, 150 peer-reviewed papers and 200 other published works. He is not only well-pedigreed, with degrees and fellowships from Dublin, Galway and Cambridge medical schools, he is a widely recognized expert in both the history and the science of neurochemistry and psychopharmacology.
Yet Healy says his output and reputation have had little to no effect—both on the pharmaceutical industry he argues buries relevant information about prescription drug harms, and on the psychiatric and medical professions he claims are being “eclipsed” by drug companies.
“It’s been clear to me that writing books or articles banging on the risks and hazards of drugs is just going to increase the sale of drugs,” said Healy, who speaks calmly, dresses mostly in black and looks a bit like Rod Serling.
Rather than write another university publication, Healy has taken his frustration to the street. In November, he launched a nonprofit website called Rxisk.org with a group of like-minded and highly credentialed international colleagues. The site aggregates FDA data about prescription drug side effects and urges patients to submit a detailed report on their own pharmaceutical drug reactions.
Healy is not the first psychiatrist to express boiling frustration with the pharmaceutical industry or to pen dire warnings about drug-based healthcare. He is joined by people like American psychiatrist Peter Breggin, who has written several books critical of “biological psychiatry,” and Irving Kirsch, who directs the Program in Placebo Studies at Harvard Medical School/Beth Israel Deaconess Medical School and is best known for The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth. Healy is the author of such dire sounding titles as Pharmageddon and Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression.
For years, it was fairly easy for people in the pharmaceutical and medical industries to label Healy, Kirsch and Breggin as alarmists. But two summers ago, one of the most prominent members of U.S. medical establishment, Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of New England Journal of Medicine, published an article damning the over-prescription of psychoactive drugs. In two essays in the June 23, 2011 and July 14, 2011 New York Review of Books, Angell backed arguments by the university clinician Kirsh, the mental health journalist Robert Whitaker, and Boston psychiatrist Daniel Carlat that there is something extremely suspicious about the following trends: the number of people treated for depression has tripled since the launch of Prozac in 1987; 10 percent of Americans over age six are taking antidepressants; and 30 antipsychotics like Risperdal, Zyprexa and Seroquel are replacing cholesterol-lowering agents as the top-selling class of drugs in the U.S., largely because they are being prescribed to children.
Angell’s articles should have been a bomb on the medical establishment. She wrote:
“The industry-sponsored studies usually cited to support psychoactive drugs—and they are the ones that are selectively published—tend to be short-term, designed to favor the drug, and show benefits so small that they are unlikely to outweigh the long-term harms. … Both the pharmaceutical industry and the psychiatry profession have strong financial interests in convincing the public that drug treatment is safe and the most effective treatment for mental illnesses, and they also have an interest in expanding the definitions of mental illness.”
But like Healy, Angell’s warnings have fallen on deaf ears. Recent data indicates that U.S. prescription drug use is growing. The September 2012 Consumer Reports National Research Center report found that among the 46 percent of American adults taking prescription drugs, a fourth of those ages 18 to 39 regularly take two prescription drugs, indicating that multiple drug use is no longer confined to older Americans. Congressional testimony in 2012 by the American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians revealed that Americans consume 80 percent of opiate painkillers produced in the world. And a January 2011 report from Stanford University Medical School warned that antispychotics are now regularly being prescribed to treat conditions for which they have not been approved, including anxiety, attention-deficit disorder, sleep difficulties, behavioral problems in toddlers and dementia.
According to a Feb. 7, 2013 report from Drugs.com, the No. 1 best-selling U.S. drug (in dollar volume) is an atypical antipsychotic for schizophrenia treatment called Abilify. Sales for the last quarter of 2012 soared to $1.5 billion, because Abilify is widely prescribed off-label—i.e., not for schizophrenia in adults, but, for example, for irritability in children. Although Bristol-Myers Squibb, the maker of Abilify, was fined $515 million in September 2007 for recommending off-label uses of Abilify, doctors are still doling out the drug. Why?
“The reason for the increase in prescription drug use is that the entire Western medical complex is run by pharmaceutical companies,” said a Stanford University professor of medicine who preferred to remain anonymous (and who was not involved in the 2011 report on antipsychotics). “The medical training you get in Western medical schools is largely about learning which drugs to treat which diseases.” She added: “You would think that recent studies, such as the one that said antidepressants are no more helpful than a placebo, would have an effect. But they haven’t.”
Other university psychiatrists and medical doctors I contacted for this article either wouldn’t talk on the record or didn’t want to be interviewed, confirming an atmosphere Healy describes as “McCarthyist.” “There is a climate of fear,” he said during our interview. “You find that they are very nervous about saying anything about drug treatments or adverse effects of drugs at all. Doctors keep patients on lots of drugs, even if they are uncomfortable with it. And if you ask them why they’re doing so, the answer you’ll get is: ‘Well, this is the standard of care, and if I don’t take care of it this way, I’m going to be in awful trouble.’”
This standard of care is why Rxisk is directed at patients, not doctors, whose financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry are well documented. Rxisk allows users to enter into its search engine the name of a prescription drug and to see the side effects that have been reported to the FDA’s MedWatch website since 2004 as well as from Rxisk’s international data base, for more than 35,000 drug names from 103 countries, totaling 4.5 million adverse drug event reports.
Since the November 2012 launch, Rxisk has received only 10,000 visitors per month. But Healy, Applbaum and the other founders, like Nancy Olivieri, a senior scientist at Toronto General Hospital and University of Toronto Professor of Pediatrics, Medicine, and Public Health Sciences, are not particularly concerned and plan to ramp up and market their efforts slowly. “We’re doing something that’s new and it’s probably going to take awhile for people to cotton on to what’s new about it,” said Healy.
David Healy does not consider himself a radical. He prescribes antidepressants and other prescription drugs to his patients. He runs a national university school of psychological medicine. “I’m fairly conservative. I’m a very mainstream doctor, really,” he said. But as New York Times reporter Benedict Carey pointed out in a 2005 story, the Irishman living on an island off the coast of Wales “has achieved a rare kind of scientific celebrity: he is internationally known as a scholar and pariah.”
Healy’s status as an outcast arises from his grave concern that blockbuster drugs like Prozac and other antidepressants can lead to suicide, murder and unforeseen mental health problems. In the 1990s, he began to publish academic journal papers providing evidence that antidepressants could increase the risk of suicide. Although many colleagues denied the link, by 2004 American and British drug regulators issued strong warnings supporting Healy’s and other’s claims.
This was vindication for Healy. But it did not prevent him from losing in 2001 a job offer to direct the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in the University of Toronto’s Department of Psychiatry.
Healy has tried to draw attention to the connection between the increasing use of antidepressants and antispychotics and the increasing number of school shootings. On a Jan. 30, 2013 blog and video on Rxisk.org, he claimed that 90 percent of school shooters in North America and Europe were on or withdrawing from meds at the time of the incident. In our interview he pointed to a list on SSIRStories.com, a patient anecdote website that is being integrated into Rxisk, that documents which perpetrators were on which drugs for violent acts in schools between 1988 and 2011.
The only semi-mainstream figure to have paid attention to this claim is filmmaker Michael Moore, who created a video on the subject in 2012, calling for an investigation. Unsurprisingly, there has been no move to look at the correlation, since one could argue that the school shooters are psychologically disturbed and should be on more meds. Indeed, across the country, there is a drive to keep a lookout for students with possible mental health problems and to report those who seem odd.
“The problem is,” says Healy, “that it’s really going to lead to a greater use of pills. The key thing is to make sure that people who get put on them are really going to be helped by them. Once you identify the problem, the pill will be the answer, because it’s the answer for the person who has identified the problem. It may not be the answer for the person who is having to take the pill.”
One of Healy’s main problems these days is that few people listen to him. “I published a list of 98 drugs that can cause you to commit suicide or homicide. I was waiting for the world to come to an end, but nothing happened.” He continued, “If I make a claim and I don’t have scientific proof to back it up, pharmaceuticals are going to sue me.” There have been no lawsuits, which makes Healy think that silence is part of pharmaceutical companies’ tactics. “They’ve learned that the worst thing they can do is argue. If they jump up and down and say, ‘Listen to the foolish things Healy is saying,’ that would be a good way to hear about Healy. So they’re very good at not responding, maintaining their cool.”
All of this sounds rather paranoid, but then again none of the dozen university psychiatrists or drug company scientists I reached out to wanted to talk about Healy or his claims. Neither Eli Lilly nor GlaxoSmithKline could “find time” to respond to my inquiries about Healy and Rxisk.
Among David Healy’s many concerns about the state of modern medicine is the marginalization of doctors. Doctors, he’s said, are like cogs in a machine, spending a minimum of time with patients, doling out drugs pushed by pharmaceutical companies, and wrangling with insurance companies over costs.
In his 2012 book Pharmageddon, Healy argues (and provides evidence) that close to 30 percent of the clinical drug trials that have been undertaken remain unreported; and of the 50 percent that have been reported, almost all are ghostwritten by scientists for pharmaceutical companies.
Perhaps more frighteningly, Healy reports that roughly 25 percent of published clinical drug trials are statistically altered, to provide evidence that a drug works well and is safe. And in 100 percent of the cases, the data from the trials remain inaccessible to scrutiny. Yet, he writes, 80 percent of the reports on adverse consequences of drug treatment, dismissed as anecdotes, have turned out to be correct. “Given these facts,” Healy writes, “it is not reasonable to suggest that the observations of doctors and patients are less reliable than clinical trial evidence.”
Tanya Jensen is a fairly typical middle-aged woman. She is 37 years old, has two little kids, and occasional bouts of mild depression. (To protect her identity, her name has been changed.) When her husband lost his job in 2008 and had trouble finding work, Tanya took on a full-time job with a long commute and a part-time job. Within a few months, she felt frazzled. She began to notice that some of her mom friends, who had their own reasons for feeling frazzled, were taking antidepressants, especially Celexa. So at a checkup with her general practitioner, she inquired whether she could try the drug. Her physician agreed and wrote her a prescription for the generic version of Celexa, citalopram, at 10 mg a day, the lowest dosage, asking Jensen to check in if anything went wrong.
Jensen liked the drug. It made her feel less anxious. But a year later, the Jensens’ situation improved and Tanya decided it was time to wean herself from the pills. Jensen said she worried “about being on the drug for the rest of her life, when it was unclear how it could affect her brain or behavior long-term.” As recommended by her physician, Jensen cut the dosage to 5 mg a day for 10 days and then to 5 mg a day every other day for the next 10 days. But at the end of the 20-day period, she had withdrawal symptoms: night sweats, emotional volatility, anger, aggression, suicidal impulses. Her husband begged her to go back on citalopram and she did.
A year passed, and Jensen decided she was ready to go off citalopram again. She proceeded with the same reduced dosage regimen and by the end of the 20-day period was, she said, “as close to manic as I hope I’ll ever come: full of rage, prone to tantrums, sweating buckets at night, and feeling suicidal, especially while driving.” Again her husband begged her to go back on citalopram and she did so.
That’s when Jensen started doing Internet research on citalopram and found Rxisk.org. There, she said, she found the best available information on citalopram and other people’s withdrawal symptoms, including a long list of adverse side-effects and the percentage of people who had reported them. When Jensen filled out a Rxisk Report, she received a 9+ score, indicating that she had become drug dependent. “This was alarming, but not really surprising,” she said.
Per RxISK’s recommendation, Jensen made an appointment with her doctor to discuss her problem. Jensen had switched health insurance providers, so she had a new general practitioner, a female MD with a degree from the University of Bombay, whom she chose, “hoping that she would be a less typical American doctor.” But Jensen was disappointed. The doctor said, “But you feel less anxious, and your dose is so low. When I fill out a prescription for 10 mg of citalopram, the computer prompts me to up the dose. It actually recommends I prescribe 20 mg, not 10 mg.” Jensen asked if she had other recourse, but her doctor waved off her concern. Before leaving the examination room, she handed Jensen a six-month prescription of citalopram. Jensen did get her doctor’s permission to review her Rxisk Report. But Jensen said that since emailing the report on May 10, 2013, she has heard nothing from her doctor.
“What upsets me most,” Jensen said, “is that my original doctor never told me about citalopram’s very well-documented withdrawal problems. This was just never part of the discussion, either because she didn’t have the time or didn’t know that stopping citalopram can be very tricky for some people. And what’s scary is that when I tried to communicate my problem with the second doctor, I was patted on the head like a child and handed 900 more pills.”
Healy is aware that changing doctor’s views on pharmaceuticals is a David and Goliath battle. That’s why he and his colleagues have another potential audience for Rxisk data: investors and insurance companies. “The shrewd investor in pharma companies wants to know what the adverse effects of a drug are,” said Healy. Rxisk is therefore positioning itself to provide data from the trials the companies are most keen to hide. In addition, Rxisk hopes to find clients in HMOs and insurance companies, which are looking for ways to cut drug costs.
“Many of drugs advertised are rigged to look better than previous generations of drugs and are costed sometimes 10, 20, 30, or 40 times higher than the generic drug,” Rxisk co-founder Applbaum said. “A bit of research through the data will show that the claims of improvement are false.”
Applbaum and Healy also point out that the cost of adverse side-effects to prescription drugs in the U.S. is huge—estimated to be $100 million in hospital costs alone. The same 1998 University of Toronto study they cite found that pharmaceuticals are the country’s fourth leading cause of death. Healy and Applbaum point to other galling statistics: the U.S. spends twice as much on healthcare as anyone else in the world, consuming a total of 45 percent of the world’s pharmaceuticals. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization ranks the country 37th in the quality of our care.
“So it’s killing the economy overall, and the recognition is seeping in that we’re doing something wrong,” said Applbaum. “We believe that our little piece of it—the over-prescription of drugs, the polypharmacy, the prescribing of drugs when none are needed—can help healthcare costs come down.”
Both Applbaum and Healy believe the FDA won’t or can’t be a force for change. Since the Drug Efficacy Amendments were passed in 1962, requiring drug manufacturers to prove to FDA the effectiveness of their products before marketing them, Healy says drug makers must show, first, that a drug works, and second, that it is safe. “The result has been that the effectiveness profile has taken over and safety has been lost sight of,” said Healy. “At Rxisk, we’re trying to restore safety to its due place.”
The pharmaceutical industry has compromised the Western medical establishment and hooked America on drugs. One psychiatrist is fighting back.
For the last 33 years, David Healy, an Irish psychiatrist and professor at Cardiff University School of Medicine in Wales, has written heavily researched university press books and academic journal articles on various aspects of psychopharmaceuticals. His output includes 20 books, 150 peer-reviewed papers and 200 other published works. He is not only well-pedigreed, with degrees and fellowships from Dublin, Galway and Cambridge medical schools, he is a widely recognized expert in both the history and the science of neurochemistry and psychopharmacology.
Yet Healy says his output and reputation have had little to no effect—both on the pharmaceutical industry he argues buries relevant information about prescription drug harms, and on the psychiatric and medical professions he claims are being “eclipsed” by drug companies.
“It’s been clear to me that writing books or articles banging on the risks and hazards of drugs is just going to increase the sale of drugs,” said Healy, who speaks calmly, dresses mostly in black and looks a bit like Rod Serling.
Rather than write another university publication, Healy has taken his frustration to the street. In November, he launched a nonprofit website called Rxisk.org with a group of like-minded and highly credentialed international colleagues. The site aggregates FDA data about prescription drug side effects and urges patients to submit a detailed report on their own pharmaceutical drug reactions.
Healy is not the first psychiatrist to express boiling frustration with the pharmaceutical industry or to pen dire warnings about drug-based healthcare. He is joined by people like American psychiatrist Peter Breggin, who has written several books critical of “biological psychiatry,” and Irving Kirsch, who directs the Program in Placebo Studies at Harvard Medical School/Beth Israel Deaconess Medical School and is best known for The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth. Healy is the author of such dire sounding titles as Pharmageddon and Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression.
For years, it was fairly easy for people in the pharmaceutical and medical industries to label Healy, Kirsch and Breggin as alarmists. But two summers ago, one of the most prominent members of U.S. medical establishment, Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of New England Journal of Medicine, published an article damning the over-prescription of psychoactive drugs. In two essays in the June 23, 2011 and July 14, 2011 New York Review of Books, Angell backed arguments by the university clinician Kirsh, the mental health journalist Robert Whitaker, and Boston psychiatrist Daniel Carlat that there is something extremely suspicious about the following trends: the number of people treated for depression has tripled since the launch of Prozac in 1987; 10 percent of Americans over age six are taking antidepressants; and 30 antipsychotics like Risperdal, Zyprexa and Seroquel are replacing cholesterol-lowering agents as the top-selling class of drugs in the U.S., largely because they are being prescribed to children.
Angell’s articles should have been a bomb on the medical establishment. She wrote:
“The industry-sponsored studies usually cited to support psychoactive drugs—and they are the ones that are selectively published—tend to be short-term, designed to favor the drug, and show benefits so small that they are unlikely to outweigh the long-term harms. … Both the pharmaceutical industry and the psychiatry profession have strong financial interests in convincing the public that drug treatment is safe and the most effective treatment for mental illnesses, and they also have an interest in expanding the definitions of mental illness.”
But like Healy, Angell’s warnings have fallen on deaf ears. Recent data indicates that U.S. prescription drug use is growing. The September 2012 Consumer Reports National Research Center report found that among the 46 percent of American adults taking prescription drugs, a fourth of those ages 18 to 39 regularly take two prescription drugs, indicating that multiple drug use is no longer confined to older Americans. Congressional testimony in 2012 by the American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians revealed that Americans consume 80 percent of opiate painkillers produced in the world. And a January 2011 report from Stanford University Medical School warned that antispychotics are now regularly being prescribed to treat conditions for which they have not been approved, including anxiety, attention-deficit disorder, sleep difficulties, behavioral problems in toddlers and dementia.
According to a Feb. 7, 2013 report from Drugs.com, the No. 1 best-selling U.S. drug (in dollar volume) is an atypical antipsychotic for schizophrenia treatment called Abilify. Sales for the last quarter of 2012 soared to $1.5 billion, because Abilify is widely prescribed off-label—i.e., not for schizophrenia in adults, but, for example, for irritability in children. Although Bristol-Myers Squibb, the maker of Abilify, was fined $515 million in September 2007 for recommending off-label uses of Abilify, doctors are still doling out the drug. Why?
“The reason for the increase in prescription drug use is that the entire Western medical complex is run by pharmaceutical companies,” said a Stanford University professor of medicine who preferred to remain anonymous (and who was not involved in the 2011 report on antipsychotics). “The medical training you get in Western medical schools is largely about learning which drugs to treat which diseases.” She added: “You would think that recent studies, such as the one that said antidepressants are no more helpful than a placebo, would have an effect. But they haven’t.”
Other university psychiatrists and medical doctors I contacted for this article either wouldn’t talk on the record or didn’t want to be interviewed, confirming an atmosphere Healy describes as “McCarthyist.” “There is a climate of fear,” he said during our interview. “You find that they are very nervous about saying anything about drug treatments or adverse effects of drugs at all. Doctors keep patients on lots of drugs, even if they are uncomfortable with it. And if you ask them why they’re doing so, the answer you’ll get is: ‘Well, this is the standard of care, and if I don’t take care of it this way, I’m going to be in awful trouble.’”
This standard of care is why Rxisk is directed at patients, not doctors, whose financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry are well documented. Rxisk allows users to enter into its search engine the name of a prescription drug and to see the side effects that have been reported to the FDA’s MedWatch website since 2004 as well as from Rxisk’s international data base, for more than 35,000 drug names from 103 countries, totaling 4.5 million adverse drug event reports.
Since the November 2012 launch, Rxisk has received only 10,000 visitors per month. But Healy, Applbaum and the other founders, like Nancy Olivieri, a senior scientist at Toronto General Hospital and University of Toronto Professor of Pediatrics, Medicine, and Public Health Sciences, are not particularly concerned and plan to ramp up and market their efforts slowly. “We’re doing something that’s new and it’s probably going to take awhile for people to cotton on to what’s new about it,” said Healy.
David Healy does not consider himself a radical. He prescribes antidepressants and other prescription drugs to his patients. He runs a national university school of psychological medicine. “I’m fairly conservative. I’m a very mainstream doctor, really,” he said. But as New York Times reporter Benedict Carey pointed out in a 2005 story, the Irishman living on an island off the coast of Wales “has achieved a rare kind of scientific celebrity: he is internationally known as a scholar and pariah.”
Healy’s status as an outcast arises from his grave concern that blockbuster drugs like Prozac and other antidepressants can lead to suicide, murder and unforeseen mental health problems. In the 1990s, he began to publish academic journal papers providing evidence that antidepressants could increase the risk of suicide. Although many colleagues denied the link, by 2004 American and British drug regulators issued strong warnings supporting Healy’s and other’s claims.
This was vindication for Healy. But it did not prevent him from losing in 2001 a job offer to direct the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in the University of Toronto’s Department of Psychiatry.
Healy has tried to draw attention to the connection between the increasing use of antidepressants and antispychotics and the increasing number of school shootings. On a Jan. 30, 2013 blog and video on Rxisk.org, he claimed that 90 percent of school shooters in North America and Europe were on or withdrawing from meds at the time of the incident. In our interview he pointed to a list on SSIRStories.com, a patient anecdote website that is being integrated into Rxisk, that documents which perpetrators were on which drugs for violent acts in schools between 1988 and 2011.
The only semi-mainstream figure to have paid attention to this claim is filmmaker Michael Moore, who created a video on the subject in 2012, calling for an investigation. Unsurprisingly, there has been no move to look at the correlation, since one could argue that the school shooters are psychologically disturbed and should be on more meds. Indeed, across the country, there is a drive to keep a lookout for students with possible mental health problems and to report those who seem odd.
“The problem is,” says Healy, “that it’s really going to lead to a greater use of pills. The key thing is to make sure that people who get put on them are really going to be helped by them. Once you identify the problem, the pill will be the answer, because it’s the answer for the person who has identified the problem. It may not be the answer for the person who is having to take the pill.”
One of Healy’s main problems these days is that few people listen to him. “I published a list of 98 drugs that can cause you to commit suicide or homicide. I was waiting for the world to come to an end, but nothing happened.” He continued, “If I make a claim and I don’t have scientific proof to back it up, pharmaceuticals are going to sue me.” There have been no lawsuits, which makes Healy think that silence is part of pharmaceutical companies’ tactics. “They’ve learned that the worst thing they can do is argue. If they jump up and down and say, ‘Listen to the foolish things Healy is saying,’ that would be a good way to hear about Healy. So they’re very good at not responding, maintaining their cool.”
All of this sounds rather paranoid, but then again none of the dozen university psychiatrists or drug company scientists I reached out to wanted to talk about Healy or his claims. Neither Eli Lilly nor GlaxoSmithKline could “find time” to respond to my inquiries about Healy and Rxisk.
Among David Healy’s many concerns about the state of modern medicine is the marginalization of doctors. Doctors, he’s said, are like cogs in a machine, spending a minimum of time with patients, doling out drugs pushed by pharmaceutical companies, and wrangling with insurance companies over costs.
In his 2012 book Pharmageddon, Healy argues (and provides evidence) that close to 30 percent of the clinical drug trials that have been undertaken remain unreported; and of the 50 percent that have been reported, almost all are ghostwritten by scientists for pharmaceutical companies.
Perhaps more frighteningly, Healy reports that roughly 25 percent of published clinical drug trials are statistically altered, to provide evidence that a drug works well and is safe. And in 100 percent of the cases, the data from the trials remain inaccessible to scrutiny. Yet, he writes, 80 percent of the reports on adverse consequences of drug treatment, dismissed as anecdotes, have turned out to be correct. “Given these facts,” Healy writes, “it is not reasonable to suggest that the observations of doctors and patients are less reliable than clinical trial evidence.”
Tanya Jensen is a fairly typical middle-aged woman. She is 37 years old, has two little kids, and occasional bouts of mild depression. (To protect her identity, her name has been changed.) When her husband lost his job in 2008 and had trouble finding work, Tanya took on a full-time job with a long commute and a part-time job. Within a few months, she felt frazzled. She began to notice that some of her mom friends, who had their own reasons for feeling frazzled, were taking antidepressants, especially Celexa. So at a checkup with her general practitioner, she inquired whether she could try the drug. Her physician agreed and wrote her a prescription for the generic version of Celexa, citalopram, at 10 mg a day, the lowest dosage, asking Jensen to check in if anything went wrong.
Jensen liked the drug. It made her feel less anxious. But a year later, the Jensens’ situation improved and Tanya decided it was time to wean herself from the pills. Jensen said she worried “about being on the drug for the rest of her life, when it was unclear how it could affect her brain or behavior long-term.” As recommended by her physician, Jensen cut the dosage to 5 mg a day for 10 days and then to 5 mg a day every other day for the next 10 days. But at the end of the 20-day period, she had withdrawal symptoms: night sweats, emotional volatility, anger, aggression, suicidal impulses. Her husband begged her to go back on citalopram and she did.
A year passed, and Jensen decided she was ready to go off citalopram again. She proceeded with the same reduced dosage regimen and by the end of the 20-day period was, she said, “as close to manic as I hope I’ll ever come: full of rage, prone to tantrums, sweating buckets at night, and feeling suicidal, especially while driving.” Again her husband begged her to go back on citalopram and she did so.
That’s when Jensen started doing Internet research on citalopram and found Rxisk.org. There, she said, she found the best available information on citalopram and other people’s withdrawal symptoms, including a long list of adverse side-effects and the percentage of people who had reported them. When Jensen filled out a Rxisk Report, she received a 9+ score, indicating that she had become drug dependent. “This was alarming, but not really surprising,” she said.
Per RxISK’s recommendation, Jensen made an appointment with her doctor to discuss her problem. Jensen had switched health insurance providers, so she had a new general practitioner, a female MD with a degree from the University of Bombay, whom she chose, “hoping that she would be a less typical American doctor.” But Jensen was disappointed. The doctor said, “But you feel less anxious, and your dose is so low. When I fill out a prescription for 10 mg of citalopram, the computer prompts me to up the dose. It actually recommends I prescribe 20 mg, not 10 mg.” Jensen asked if she had other recourse, but her doctor waved off her concern. Before leaving the examination room, she handed Jensen a six-month prescription of citalopram. Jensen did get her doctor’s permission to review her Rxisk Report. But Jensen said that since emailing the report on May 10, 2013, she has heard nothing from her doctor.
“What upsets me most,” Jensen said, “is that my original doctor never told me about citalopram’s very well-documented withdrawal problems. This was just never part of the discussion, either because she didn’t have the time or didn’t know that stopping citalopram can be very tricky for some people. And what’s scary is that when I tried to communicate my problem with the second doctor, I was patted on the head like a child and handed 900 more pills.”
Healy is aware that changing doctor’s views on pharmaceuticals is a David and Goliath battle. That’s why he and his colleagues have another potential audience for Rxisk data: investors and insurance companies. “The shrewd investor in pharma companies wants to know what the adverse effects of a drug are,” said Healy. Rxisk is therefore positioning itself to provide data from the trials the companies are most keen to hide. In addition, Rxisk hopes to find clients in HMOs and insurance companies, which are looking for ways to cut drug costs.
“Many of drugs advertised are rigged to look better than previous generations of drugs and are costed sometimes 10, 20, 30, or 40 times higher than the generic drug,” Rxisk co-founder Applbaum said. “A bit of research through the data will show that the claims of improvement are false.”
Applbaum and Healy also point out that the cost of adverse side-effects to prescription drugs in the U.S. is huge—estimated to be $100 million in hospital costs alone. The same 1998 University of Toronto study they cite found that pharmaceuticals are the country’s fourth leading cause of death. Healy and Applbaum point to other galling statistics: the U.S. spends twice as much on healthcare as anyone else in the world, consuming a total of 45 percent of the world’s pharmaceuticals. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization ranks the country 37th in the quality of our care.
“So it’s killing the economy overall, and the recognition is seeping in that we’re doing something wrong,” said Applbaum. “We believe that our little piece of it—the over-prescription of drugs, the polypharmacy, the prescribing of drugs when none are needed—can help healthcare costs come down.”
Both Applbaum and Healy believe the FDA won’t or can’t be a force for change. Since the Drug Efficacy Amendments were passed in 1962, requiring drug manufacturers to prove to FDA the effectiveness of their products before marketing them, Healy says drug makers must show, first, that a drug works, and second, that it is safe. “The result has been that the effectiveness profile has taken over and safety has been lost sight of,” said Healy. “At Rxisk, we’re trying to restore safety to its due place.”
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
U.N. Panel Reports Increasing Brutality by Both Sides in Syria Conflict
By Nick Cumming-Bruce, NY Times, June 4, 2013
GENEVA—Reporting “new levels of brutality” in Syria’s more than two-year-old conflict, United Nations investigators said on Tuesday they believed chemical weapons and thermobaric bombs were used in recent weeks and urged the international community to cut off supplies of weapons that could only result in more civilian casualties.
“Syria is in free fall,” Paulo Pinheiro, the chairman of the Commission of Inquiry investigating the hostilities in Syria told the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. “Crimes that shock the conscience have become a daily reality. Humanity has been the casualty of this war.”
The four-member panel commission said its report to the council “documents for the first time the systematic imposition of sieges, the use of chemical agents and forcible displacement.”
“War crimes, crimes against humanity and gross human rights violations continue apace,” it added, reporting 17 incidents that could be called massacres between mid-January and mid-May.
The findings played directly into the increasingly divisive debate in Europe and the United States about the possibility of supplying weapons to the rebels seeking the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad after more than two years of strife that have turned into a full-blown civil war in which an estimated 80,000 people have died.
Last month, Britain and France pressed their partners in the European Union to allow an embargo on arms supplies to Syria to lapse, potentially allowing European governments to arm the rebels they support politically and diplomatically. At the same time, Moscow has said it will supply government forces with advanced ground-to-air missiles.
The findings seemed to take tacit aim at the Russian decision while reinforcing arguments made by European opponents of weapons supplies.
President Vladimir V. Putin, speaking at a televised news conference at the European Union-Russia summit in Yekaterinburg, said on Tuesday:
“I will remind you that Russian deliveries of weapons to Syria are completed on the basis of transparent, internationally recognized contracts. They do not violate any international regulations. And they are carried out strictly in the bounds of international law. With regard to the S-300, it is indeed one of the best antiaircraft complexes in the world, if not the best. It is a serious weapon, of course. We don’t want to disturb the balance in the region. The contract was signed several years ago. For the time being it has not been fulfilled.”
The panel cited increasing use of indiscriminate weapons, including cluster munitions, barrel bombs and surface-to-surface missiles as evidence of the “flagrant disregard” of government forces for the distinction between combatants and civilians demanded by international law. “There is a strong element of retribution in the government’s approach, with civilians paying a price for “allowing” armed groups to operate within their towns,” the report said.
Both sides had adopted siege tactics, trapping civilians in their homes and cutting off supplies of food, water, medicines and electricity, the report stated, in clear breach of international law. The panel also reported instances in which forces of both sides have used attacks or the threat of them to drive civilians out of particular areas, which is also a war crime.
Graphic description of the toll on civilians caught in the weeks-old siege of Qusayr in western Syria by government forces starkly illustrated the panel’s findings, with reports of women and children living in bunkers and foxholes to escape artillery and aerial bombardment. “We couldn’t leave the hole for a week. We ate the little food we had brought with us. My children were crying constantly,” a woman who managed to escape to Lebanon told the United Nations Refugee Agency.
“You leave and you risk being killed by a bomb or you stay and face a certainty of being killed,” the agency said another woman told its staff.
The conflict “is becoming more horrific every day,” Mr. Pinheiro said.
After more than two years of conflict, it was clear a military stalemate now prevailed. “It’s an illusion that more weapons will tip the balance between the two parties. No one is winning,” Mr. Pinheiro said. The report warned that “increased arm transfers hurt the prospect of a political settlement to the conflict, fuel the multiplication of armed actors at the national and regional levels and have devastating consequences for civilians.”
GENEVA—Reporting “new levels of brutality” in Syria’s more than two-year-old conflict, United Nations investigators said on Tuesday they believed chemical weapons and thermobaric bombs were used in recent weeks and urged the international community to cut off supplies of weapons that could only result in more civilian casualties.
“Syria is in free fall,” Paulo Pinheiro, the chairman of the Commission of Inquiry investigating the hostilities in Syria told the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. “Crimes that shock the conscience have become a daily reality. Humanity has been the casualty of this war.”
The four-member panel commission said its report to the council “documents for the first time the systematic imposition of sieges, the use of chemical agents and forcible displacement.”
“War crimes, crimes against humanity and gross human rights violations continue apace,” it added, reporting 17 incidents that could be called massacres between mid-January and mid-May.
The findings played directly into the increasingly divisive debate in Europe and the United States about the possibility of supplying weapons to the rebels seeking the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad after more than two years of strife that have turned into a full-blown civil war in which an estimated 80,000 people have died.
Last month, Britain and France pressed their partners in the European Union to allow an embargo on arms supplies to Syria to lapse, potentially allowing European governments to arm the rebels they support politically and diplomatically. At the same time, Moscow has said it will supply government forces with advanced ground-to-air missiles.
The findings seemed to take tacit aim at the Russian decision while reinforcing arguments made by European opponents of weapons supplies.
President Vladimir V. Putin, speaking at a televised news conference at the European Union-Russia summit in Yekaterinburg, said on Tuesday:
“I will remind you that Russian deliveries of weapons to Syria are completed on the basis of transparent, internationally recognized contracts. They do not violate any international regulations. And they are carried out strictly in the bounds of international law. With regard to the S-300, it is indeed one of the best antiaircraft complexes in the world, if not the best. It is a serious weapon, of course. We don’t want to disturb the balance in the region. The contract was signed several years ago. For the time being it has not been fulfilled.”
The panel cited increasing use of indiscriminate weapons, including cluster munitions, barrel bombs and surface-to-surface missiles as evidence of the “flagrant disregard” of government forces for the distinction between combatants and civilians demanded by international law. “There is a strong element of retribution in the government’s approach, with civilians paying a price for “allowing” armed groups to operate within their towns,” the report said.
Both sides had adopted siege tactics, trapping civilians in their homes and cutting off supplies of food, water, medicines and electricity, the report stated, in clear breach of international law. The panel also reported instances in which forces of both sides have used attacks or the threat of them to drive civilians out of particular areas, which is also a war crime.
Graphic description of the toll on civilians caught in the weeks-old siege of Qusayr in western Syria by government forces starkly illustrated the panel’s findings, with reports of women and children living in bunkers and foxholes to escape artillery and aerial bombardment. “We couldn’t leave the hole for a week. We ate the little food we had brought with us. My children were crying constantly,” a woman who managed to escape to Lebanon told the United Nations Refugee Agency.
“You leave and you risk being killed by a bomb or you stay and face a certainty of being killed,” the agency said another woman told its staff.
The conflict “is becoming more horrific every day,” Mr. Pinheiro said.
After more than two years of conflict, it was clear a military stalemate now prevailed. “It’s an illusion that more weapons will tip the balance between the two parties. No one is winning,” Mr. Pinheiro said. The report warned that “increased arm transfers hurt the prospect of a political settlement to the conflict, fuel the multiplication of armed actors at the national and regional levels and have devastating consequences for civilians.”
Tuesday, June 4, 2013
Pace Yourself
A compilation
Download Audio (7.9MB)
“In quietness and confidence shall be your strength.”1 The Bible doesn’t promote hurry. The only verse I can remember any preachers or anybody else using to try to make us rush was, “The king’s business required haste.”2 But for that one scripture, I think there must be a hundred that tell us to go slow, or words to that effect—even to take it easy.
Maybe that’s why God created mules and donkeys—as an illustration of how we should pace ourselves. They are plodders. They are very slow, but they have more endurance and can carry heavier loads than horses. They are the workhorses of the backwoods. They can negotiate trails that horses would kill themselves on, carrying loads for miles that a horse couldn’t, especially not a racehorse.
Racehorses can spurt for a few rounds around the track, and that’s it. They’re extremely high-strung, nervous, and are just not workhorses. They’re not plodders; they’re not load carriers. But pack mules and donkeys are—and they’re as stubborn as they come. You cannot rush them. They just plod along, but they do it and they get there. It’s like Aesop’s fable of the tortoise and the hare: The tortoise was slow but he got there.
I can’t count the times I’ve told taxi drivers, “Go slow and you live longer. Live fast and you’ll die quicker.” That certainly is true. Doctors and health experts have said that pressure and tension are killing people, and that many of today’s illnesses are either from pressure and tension or improper diet. Pressure and speed are killing people through heart trouble, nervous trouble, and high blood pressure.
Lord, help us to go slow. We shouldn’t waste time, but we need to trust the Lord instead of being rushed and impatient. Patience indicates slowness, plodding along, doing our work persistently, and not wasting time, but also not getting fretful and worried and all worked up about it. Impatience is marked by speed, hurry, rush, haste, push, pressure, tension. Patience shows faith. Impatience shows lack of faith. Impatience shows that we don’t think the job is going to get done unless we hurry and push it and rush it.
But if we’ve got faith that Jesus is going to take care of it somehow, we can afford to be patient and go slow and do it right.—David Brandt Berg3
*
There is always something new on the horizon. The Lord showed me this truth in a vision almost twenty years ago as I was considering enrolling in a Bible school program sponsored by our church three evenings a week. It was a major commitment for my husband Dave and me. At the time we had three small children at home, and yet we felt God calling us to a new level of ministry. I was excited, but apprehensive.
Once we made the decision, I began to feel that this commitment would be “the thing” that would make “all” the difference in the world.
As I was considering this decision, God gave me a vision of a horizon. My husband and I were heading toward it, but as we finally came near to it, another horizon appeared out beyond the first one. It represented yet another place to reach for once we had arrived at the current one.
As I pondered what I was seeing, the Lord revealed to my heart that there would constantly be new goals out in front of us. … I regret to say that even though I did the reaching and I was not complacent, it took several more years before I learned to enjoy each step of the journey.
I was always going somewhere and never truly enjoying anywhere. I was deceived by thinking that I would have joy when I arrived—that now was only a time of sacrifice and hard work.
I am very thankful for the Holy Spirit’s patient and continuing work with me as He taught me to enjoy every aspect of my life—the beginning of projects, the middle, and the finish, the people in my life, my home, myself, and the ministry in which God has placed me.—Joyce Meyer4
*
“Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life.”5 The secret of being “faithful until death” is to be faithful one day at a time. You can only live one day at a time; you can only be faithful one day at a time. So don’t worry about whether you were faithful yesterday or not, or whether you’re going to be faithful tomorrow. Just do your best to be faithful today. The Bible tells us to forget the past,6 and tomorrow will take care of itself7—or the Lord will take care of it. Just be faithful today. Don’t worry about your whole life. Don’t keep asking yourself, “Am I going to be faithful until the day I die, so I can be sure to get a crown of life?”
If you think about trying to be faithful for the rest of your life, that scares you, that worries you. That’s just too overwhelming, and you feel that you’ll never make it. But what about today? Weren’t you pretty faithful today? Surely you did a lot of things faithfully today.
Only the Lord can keep you faithful. Of course, you have to give Him a little cooperation; you have to pray and listen to Him, you have to read His Word, and you have to try to do what you know He wants you to do. But that’s the easy part. It’s His job to keep you faithful—full of faith, filled with faith that comes from Him. And if you don’t have enough faith, all you have to do is read and listen to the Word. That’s the source of faith. If you do that, He’ll give you all the faith you need. Just keep reading the Word and trusting the Lord and don’t worry.
You don’t have to have faith for tomorrow. You don’t have to have faith for next week or next month, and certainly not for next year or many years from now. You don’t have to have faith for the future now. You’ll get it when the time comes. The only faith you need now is for today.
You don’t even have to have faith for a whole day. Just have faith for this moment—right now. Just have faith for one moment at a time. When you wake up in the morning, you don’t need to worry, “Have I got faith for today?” Just get up and have faith for each little thing that you do throughout the day. That’s all you have to have faith for. If faith no larger than a grain of mustard seed can move an entire mountain,8 then it shouldn’t even take a microscopic speck of faith to keep you doing all the things that you need to do in a day.—David Brandt Berg9
Published on Anchor June 2013. Read by Bethany Kelly.
Music by Michael Dooley.
1 Isaiah 30:15.
2 1 Samuel 21:8.
3 More Like Jesus (Aurora Production AG, 2001).
4 Enjoying Where You Are on the Way to Where You Are Going (Warner Books Edition, 1996).
5 Revelation 2:10.
6 Philippians 3:13.
7 Matthew 6:34.
8 Matthew 17:20.
Download Audio (7.9MB)
“In quietness and confidence shall be your strength.”1 The Bible doesn’t promote hurry. The only verse I can remember any preachers or anybody else using to try to make us rush was, “The king’s business required haste.”2 But for that one scripture, I think there must be a hundred that tell us to go slow, or words to that effect—even to take it easy.
Maybe that’s why God created mules and donkeys—as an illustration of how we should pace ourselves. They are plodders. They are very slow, but they have more endurance and can carry heavier loads than horses. They are the workhorses of the backwoods. They can negotiate trails that horses would kill themselves on, carrying loads for miles that a horse couldn’t, especially not a racehorse.
Racehorses can spurt for a few rounds around the track, and that’s it. They’re extremely high-strung, nervous, and are just not workhorses. They’re not plodders; they’re not load carriers. But pack mules and donkeys are—and they’re as stubborn as they come. You cannot rush them. They just plod along, but they do it and they get there. It’s like Aesop’s fable of the tortoise and the hare: The tortoise was slow but he got there.
I can’t count the times I’ve told taxi drivers, “Go slow and you live longer. Live fast and you’ll die quicker.” That certainly is true. Doctors and health experts have said that pressure and tension are killing people, and that many of today’s illnesses are either from pressure and tension or improper diet. Pressure and speed are killing people through heart trouble, nervous trouble, and high blood pressure.
Lord, help us to go slow. We shouldn’t waste time, but we need to trust the Lord instead of being rushed and impatient. Patience indicates slowness, plodding along, doing our work persistently, and not wasting time, but also not getting fretful and worried and all worked up about it. Impatience is marked by speed, hurry, rush, haste, push, pressure, tension. Patience shows faith. Impatience shows lack of faith. Impatience shows that we don’t think the job is going to get done unless we hurry and push it and rush it.
But if we’ve got faith that Jesus is going to take care of it somehow, we can afford to be patient and go slow and do it right.—David Brandt Berg3
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There is always something new on the horizon. The Lord showed me this truth in a vision almost twenty years ago as I was considering enrolling in a Bible school program sponsored by our church three evenings a week. It was a major commitment for my husband Dave and me. At the time we had three small children at home, and yet we felt God calling us to a new level of ministry. I was excited, but apprehensive.
Once we made the decision, I began to feel that this commitment would be “the thing” that would make “all” the difference in the world.
As I was considering this decision, God gave me a vision of a horizon. My husband and I were heading toward it, but as we finally came near to it, another horizon appeared out beyond the first one. It represented yet another place to reach for once we had arrived at the current one.
As I pondered what I was seeing, the Lord revealed to my heart that there would constantly be new goals out in front of us. … I regret to say that even though I did the reaching and I was not complacent, it took several more years before I learned to enjoy each step of the journey.
I was always going somewhere and never truly enjoying anywhere. I was deceived by thinking that I would have joy when I arrived—that now was only a time of sacrifice and hard work.
I am very thankful for the Holy Spirit’s patient and continuing work with me as He taught me to enjoy every aspect of my life—the beginning of projects, the middle, and the finish, the people in my life, my home, myself, and the ministry in which God has placed me.—Joyce Meyer4
*
“Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life.”5 The secret of being “faithful until death” is to be faithful one day at a time. You can only live one day at a time; you can only be faithful one day at a time. So don’t worry about whether you were faithful yesterday or not, or whether you’re going to be faithful tomorrow. Just do your best to be faithful today. The Bible tells us to forget the past,6 and tomorrow will take care of itself7—or the Lord will take care of it. Just be faithful today. Don’t worry about your whole life. Don’t keep asking yourself, “Am I going to be faithful until the day I die, so I can be sure to get a crown of life?”
If you think about trying to be faithful for the rest of your life, that scares you, that worries you. That’s just too overwhelming, and you feel that you’ll never make it. But what about today? Weren’t you pretty faithful today? Surely you did a lot of things faithfully today.
Only the Lord can keep you faithful. Of course, you have to give Him a little cooperation; you have to pray and listen to Him, you have to read His Word, and you have to try to do what you know He wants you to do. But that’s the easy part. It’s His job to keep you faithful—full of faith, filled with faith that comes from Him. And if you don’t have enough faith, all you have to do is read and listen to the Word. That’s the source of faith. If you do that, He’ll give you all the faith you need. Just keep reading the Word and trusting the Lord and don’t worry.
You don’t have to have faith for tomorrow. You don’t have to have faith for next week or next month, and certainly not for next year or many years from now. You don’t have to have faith for the future now. You’ll get it when the time comes. The only faith you need now is for today.
You don’t even have to have faith for a whole day. Just have faith for this moment—right now. Just have faith for one moment at a time. When you wake up in the morning, you don’t need to worry, “Have I got faith for today?” Just get up and have faith for each little thing that you do throughout the day. That’s all you have to have faith for. If faith no larger than a grain of mustard seed can move an entire mountain,8 then it shouldn’t even take a microscopic speck of faith to keep you doing all the things that you need to do in a day.—David Brandt Berg9
Published on Anchor June 2013. Read by Bethany Kelly.
Music by Michael Dooley.
1 Isaiah 30:15.
2 1 Samuel 21:8.
3 More Like Jesus (Aurora Production AG, 2001).
4 Enjoying Where You Are on the Way to Where You Are Going (Warner Books Edition, 1996).
5 Revelation 2:10.
6 Philippians 3:13.
7 Matthew 6:34.
8 Matthew 17:20.
