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The Octopus

Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolero

by Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith
Revised Edition
2004, Feral House
ISBN 0922915911
237 pages.

Excerpt

What Danny Casolero had come to see was a collusion of international crime and political power focused around a handful of men, primarily CIA operatives, who had banded together after World War II. Following the associations that Casolero made, starting with the OSS in Albania, the trail of murder and conspiracy led from this tight net of good old boys in US intelligence to a complex weave of major international criminals and power brokers; to Nazis and fascists at least sometimes wearing the uniform of the US military, to drug trafficking networks melding seamlessly into international banking; to private armies and death squads; to secret societies such as Skull & Bones and P2; to men busily engaged in looting banking institutions and national treasuries; and to the presidents and potentates of the world. These men reaped and are still reaping staggering profit while at the same time constructing omnipresent world criminal and fascist networks—all in the name of anti-Communism.

What Danny Casolero planned to expose was an Octopus indeed, and certainly no figment of his imagination.

THIS BOOK IS IN PRINT. Available commercially. Learn more about Danny Casolero.

The Virus and The Vaccine

The true story of a cancer-causing monkey virus, contaminated polio vaccine, and the millions of Americans exposed

by Debbie Bookchin and Jim Schumacher
2005, St. Martin's Griffin
ISBN-10: 0312342721
ISBN-13: 978-0312342722
400 pages.

Amazon.com Review

Past tragedies caused by "miracle drugs" have taught the public to approach cures with caution, and vaccines, in particular, have come under public scrutiny. In The Virus and the Vaccine, journalists Debbie Bookchin and Jim Schumacher uncover the true tale of the polio vaccine and its past and present dangers. Like many medical detective stories before it, this book starts with a chilling anecdote, then flashes back to slowly set the stage for disaster. Baby boomers who only know Jonas Salk and his virus-fighting colleagues as heroes will be disturbed at how some of them downplayed concerns about a monkey virus called SV40 that was present in the polio vaccine. The links between SV40 and human cancer took a long time to define, and breakthroughs in molecular biology made the job more realistic in later decades. Nevertheless, Bookchin and Schumacher argue that a biased scientific bureaucracy in combination with a desperate public and money-hungry pharmaceutical! companies fostered the use of a vaccine that may have increased cancer risk. "The vast majority of baby boomers--almost all of whom received polio vaccine in the late 1950s and early 1960s--have potentially been exposed to the virus," they write. But baby boomers aren't the only ones at risk. The authors reveal that Lederle Laboratories continued to produce potentially contaminated oral polio vaccines well into the 1990s. Although the authors point fingers of blame at some specific targets, they carefully balance their accusations with reminders that public demands for cures must be balanced with careful assessment of new medical treatments.

--Therese Littleton

THIS BOOK IS IN PRINT. Find out more.

Dr. Mary's Monkey

How the Unsolved Murder of a Doctor, a Secret Laboratory in New Orleans and Cancer-Causing Monkey Viruses are Linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, the JFK Assassination and Emerging Global Epidemics

by Edward T. Haslam
2006, Trine Day
ISBN 0977795306
275 pages.

Book Description
The 1964 murder of a nationally known cancer researcher sets the stage for this gripping exposé of medical professionals enmeshed in covert government operations over the course of three decades. Following a trail of police records, FBI files, cancer statistics, and medical journals, this revealing book presents evidence of a web of medical secret-keeping that began with the handling of evidence in the JFK assassination and continued apace, sweeping doctors into coverups of cancer outbreaks, contaminated polio vaccine, the arrival of the AIDS virus, and biological weapon research using infected monkeys.

About the Author
Edward T. Haslam is a former advertising music director and writer, and author of Mary, Ferrie, and the Monkey Virus. He lives in Bradenton, Florida. Jim Marr is the author of Alien Agenda, Crossfire (which was consulted by Oliver Stone during the making of the movie JFK), and Rule by Secrecy. He is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists and Investigative Reporters & Editors and is a former president of the Press Club of Fort Worth. He lives in Fort Worth, Texas.

THIS BOOK IS IN PRINT. Available commercially. Learn more about Edward T. Haslam.

Jihad and Jew-Hatred

Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11

by Matthias Küntzel
2007, Telos Press
ISBN-10: 0914386360
ISBN-13: 978-0914386360
180 pages

Jihad and Jew-Hatred makes a major contribution to the understanding of radical Islamism by tracing the impact of European fascism on the Arab and Islamic world. Drawing extensively on German-language sources, Matthias Küntzel analyzes the close relationship that began in the 1930s between Nazi leaders and Muslim extremists, especially the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the Mufti of Jerusalem. This path-breaking book provides compelling documentation of the Nazi roots of what became Islamo-fascism and jihadist terror.

This study demonstrates in historical detail how the Muslim Brotherhood has consistently placed the hatred of Jews at the center of its ideology and policies through an incendiary rhetoric that interweaves passages from the Koran hostile to Jews with elements of Nazi-style world-conspiracy theories. Ancient prejudice and modern fantasies have become a deadly combination.

Jihad and Jew-Hatred also explains how the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 led to the shift of the center of global antisemitism to the Arab world, laying the foundation for radical Islamist currents in and around the Muslim Brotherhood and more recent terrorist organizations.

Küntzel convincingly shows that antisemitism is no mere supplementary feature of modern jihadism, and certainly no afterthought but its defining ideological core. This hatred also goes far beyond questions of Zionism and Israel. For Islamism, not only is everything Jewish evil, but every evil is Jewish, as the writings of Sayyid Qutb and the Charter of Hamas clearly explain to anyone willing to read them. It was this Jew-hatred that fueled the Jihad of the 9/11 terrorists.

Review
The German scholar Matthias Kuentzel . . . takes anti-Semitism, and in particular its most potent current strain, Muslim anti-Semitism, very seriously indeed. His bracing, even startling, book, Jihad and Jew-Hatred (translated by Colin Meade), reminds us that it is perilous to ignore idiotic ideas if these idiotic ideas are broadly, and fervently, believed. . . . Kuentzel is right to state that we are witnessing a terrible explosion of anti-Jewish hatred in the Middle East, and he is right to be shocked. His invaluable contribution, in fact, is his capacity to be shocked, by the rhetoric of hate and by its consequences. The former Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi once told me that "the question is not what the Germans did to the Jews, but what the Jews did to the Germans." The Jews, he said, deserved their punishment. Kuentzel argues that we should see men like Rantisi for what they are: heirs to the mufti, and heirs to the Nazis.
Jeffrey Goldberg, New York Times

Review
Kuentzel's method is a dialectical masterpiece; he is a social scientist who pursues connections. The suicide attacks of the intifada in Israel are, for Kuentzel, inherently linked to the attacks in America on September 11. That explains his remedy for fighting anti-Semitism: "Whoever does not want to combat anti-Semitism . . . hasn't the slightest chance of beating Islamism." Kuentzel is in many ways the modern successor to Paul Merker, a rare voice in Germany, who, like Merker's view of Arab princes as embodying "reactionary interests," shifts the terms of the discussion to anti-Jewish ideology as the sine qua non of understanding radical political Islam, its destructive energy and its social and political violence.
Benjamin Weinthal, Haaretz

About the Author
Matthias Küntzel is a German author and a political scientist. He is a research associate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a member of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.

THIS BOOK IS IN PRINT. Available commercially. Find out more about Matthias Küntzel.