Is MI6 reading this post?

I just saw an interview with the head of LEAP in the UK - Law Enforcement Against Prohibition). This could cover cannabis for recreational use, which is not so much an industrial hemp issue. It struck a chord as I used to know Annie Machon, a former MI5 agent - and her partner David Shayler. They took to the hemp issue but David only seemed to understand the cannabis part, and used to pester Tony Taylor of Tony's Hemp Corner for cannabis tincture. Ultimately I fell out with both of them - somewhat before David said he was the Messiah and was here to save us from 2012 - and before I rather bluntly told Annie Machon to get a job. In the UK, she is looked to by the press for any opinion on intel related matters, though she no 007...however, this article does touch upon an issue that hits home - intel agencies looking at the internet - as recently, I have had a number of them do just that here. And ironically, I am a law abiding citizen! But some of the political issues drew Homeland Security here, in 2008, and also a company called Cyveillance, which Bush owns via Quinetec - a company he got through underhanded means - taking it out of the hands of the UK taxpayer - stripping it, firing 400 employees - and using it as a shield for Cyveillance (which is based in the Virginia/DC area where so many intel agencies are).

Other viewers have included Lockheed Martin. Cyveillance, by the way, was not interested in hemp, but rather in a possible third party candidate for New York's 12th Congressional District (the one of most interest to spooks - it has embassies, the UN, Missions, CFR, etc.) named Wade Emory Johnson. Third party candidates scare both parties here, when the elections came there were tricks played at the polls to keep people from voting third party. Hence that agency taking a look. On other occasions viewers have looked here and then at seemingly unrelated blogs where I do leak to the editors more info about intrigue, especially about GOP complicity in the Jacob Ostreicher case in Bolivia; which would really get a lot of people here arrested if the truth were outed, it already has occasioned mass arrests in Bolivia.

Anyway, this post is not about hemp, which is an issue that generates some snooping on the part of the powers that wanna-continue-to be, but it is an interesting post nonetheless. So enjoy and know Big Brother is watching!

MI5, The War on Drugs, and the Internet
By Bea Xu

Annie Machon is a former intelligence officer for the MI5 who resigned in 1996 with then-partner David Shayler to whistle-blow on the crimes and incompetence of the UK Security Service. Now the director of LEAP Europe (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) and an avid political campaigner, Annie speaks to Beatrice Xu about her experiences, and how they provide an insider’s commentary on the ‘three wars’ that threaten our civil liberties today.
What was it like working for the MI5 and why did you finally decide to resign and blow the whistle?
The most incendiary [department of MI5] in literal terms was working for G branch: International Terrorism. Right from the start, it was a disappointment and a surprise, because during the recruitment process they said that they wanted a new generation of intelligence officers to work against counter-terrorism threats. They could see the writing was on the wall about their usual areas of work: subversion, the political stuff, and espionage, because the Cold War was ending. Shamefully, they knew they were going to get some new work coming in: the investigation of the IRA on the UK mainland had been announced in parliament but the implementation was delayed until October 1992. This meant that they had recruited all these new people but had no jobs to put them in. So we were farmed out to these old sects. That’s partly why the counter-subversion section was kept artificially going long after it was realised there was no threat there: to make sure there were jobs to put the officers in, in order to have the right number of officers when they took on this new stream of work. What we’re talking about here is illegal investigations into UK political activists, extended even when they were deemed not to be a threat to national security, purely to give jobs to the boys! So that was quite an early shock.
What was it like to be ‘on the run’ in Europe immediately after the whistle-blowing?
Intensely stressful. It was very frightening because we had no other options, as we saw it at the time. The only people we could legally take our evidence to about crimes are the heads of agencies we wanted to report for committing the crimes. You can’t go to your MP; you can’t even go to the police under the draconian terms of the Official Secrets Act 1989. David [Shayler] had some experience because he started working life as a journalist, so he had some notion of the concept of what it would mean to blow the whistle. He decided it would be better to go straight to the press and create a bit of a stink. Then, because of the pressure from the media, there would have to be an inquiry into the crimes he was reporting.
How did your MI5 work get you interested in the drug trade?
One of my jobs with MI5 was working in T-branch on the Irish issue, looking at terrorist logistics – which is the import and export, infiltration and exfiltration of weapons and personnel. I was working very closely with customs across the UK and hearing all sorts of horror stories from them. This was the Investigations division of customs, the hardcore undercover section, and they were saying: “Well we can stop one or two shipments [of narcotics], but actually it’s a drop in the ocean”. I was living and working in central London in my twenties in the 1990s; anyone could get whatever they wanted on the streets of London. Then of course, roll on a few years and Shayler gets convicted with the breach of Official Secrets Act and is sent to Belmarsh High Security Prison – even there the prisoners could get whatever drugs they wanted. He said on his first night he was sharing a cell with some man who was chasing the dragon. The whole idea of a drug-free world might be a nice utopia but realistically, it’s not happening. So really it’s a case of how to manage the issue.
You are very much against the “war on drugs”. As the director of LEAP (Europe), you are calling for a repeal of drug prohibition. What is the “tight system of legalised regulation” that you propose in its place?
We’re looking at a system where drug flow and drug consumption has drastically increased over the same time and the price of drugs has usually drastically decreased. The war on drugs is an abject failure. And it’s funding organised crime: Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UNODC at the time of the financial crisis in 2008, went on record and said that the only thing keeping the banks from liquidity was drug money – so that’s how big this trade is. It’s about $500bn a year- and it could be regulated by governments.
How we would go on to regulate it is the interesting question. There are various proposals: Uruguay is considering is legalising cannabis and making sure that the government has control over the growth, production and sale of it – that it is regulated in the same way as tobacco and alcohol, and taxing it as well. This financial argument is becoming stronger now as countries are becoming more broke. Then you have slightly wider models like Portugal or the Czech Republic, who have decriminalised all drugs. Decriminalisation is different from legalisation. Decriminalisation is where the users are not penalised for their use, but the drug trade is still illegal and the organised criminals still have control of the trade – a bit like with the Dutch coffee shop system.
Until we get proper, controlled legalised regulation we won’t know quite how effective the system could be. But prohibition has failed so publicly that any other policy would have been abolished years ago – yet everyone has an emotional investment in [the belief] that drugs are bad. [Drugs] are inanimate things.
But your work on drugs is merely one piece of a triptych: what you call the ‘three wars’ of drugs, terror and the internet. Could you explain where you see these three issues overlap?
It evolved from a belief in the original intentions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 – that has always informed my critique of how the intelligence industries work, how police forces within democracy should work. That took me into looking at digital civil liberties where you get the copyright lobby trying to stamp out what they call ‘piracy on the internet’, even though it’s legal in many European countries and beyond, to protect their profits. And they use the same arguments: “We’ve got to clamp down on the internet, we’ve got to data mine everybody and store every message and look at deep-packet stuff in order to protect against organised crime, terrorists and paedophiles”. They are trying to strip away hard-won basic rights of freedom of expression and privacy from the internet in order to protect us from these greater crimes. This very much overlaps with the war on drugs because in the last 40 years we’ve seen the pressure from the state to take away our basic freedoms in order to investigate organised crime in the drug trade and terrorism. It’s estimated by the Drug Enforcement Administration that at least half of the recognised terrorist groups are funded by the drug-trade, so the overlap between organised crime and terrorism is very strong. In Afghanistan, since our intervention, the west has blown about $6bn on that war. One of the things they said was to eradicate the poppy growth industry, and in fact the acreage has doubled in that time. I think it comes down to basic freedoms, basic human rights and basic dignity.
Since your days on the run, are you continuing to take online security measures?
I don’t think I’m of interest to [the MI5]; they have far more pressing things to investigate, but it’s not just about the state spies. I think any concerned citizen now needs to be aware of all the data-mining that’s done by the Americans (and reports of the Government Communications Headquarters about to start in the UK – if it hasn’t already) and where we don’t have any privacy on the internet. Things like the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000) have been used and abused, not just by intelligence agencies but even local councils to snoop on citizens living in their boroughs. Just taking basic precautions on the internet like using PGP to encrypt your emails is a way of ensuring your privacy. You now can’t guarantee that you will have privacy in your communications from your government.
From your research on surveillance and the internet, is there anything you think avid users of social media should be aware of?
I would say that big companies like Facebook and Google are a spy’s wet dream. When I was in the intelligence agencies, if you had a target you thought was of interest or threat to national security, one of the jobs was to profile or investigate them. ‘Investigating’ meant bugging their phones, bugging their flats, following them around, perhaps even sending in an agent to report on them. And by that you found out who they were talking to, who their contacts were and potentially what they were trying to organise – be it political activism […], terrorism or radicalism. Now of course we all do it to ourselves by saying what we’re up to, who we’re talking to and who our friends are on Facebook.
There’s a wonderful talk I saw recently by a man called Professor Eben Moglen at an event called Re:publica (Berlin, 2012).By using all these cunning arguments about copyright, piracy, paedophilia, terrorism, organised crime … big companies and governments are trying to strip away those freedoms to put in place ways that everything can be monitored and information can be removed. So it could be our generation that gives away freedom of thought, because freedom of thought depends on free information and free media.
But the ethos of something like Wikileaks, for example, is that all information should be available and stored. It’s a sort of modern Alexandria library, through which people can realise the levers put on national governments by big corporations, so they can be informed citizens and make the right choice.

LEAP (http://www.leap.cc/) asks for support from students and is currently seeking a student platform from which to speak, represented by two former UK chief constables amongst other spokespersons.

COCA LEAVES PICKED ON BY WESTERN BULLIES

Hemp is not the only plant demonised for profit and political games; stevia and coca are also in that league. Bolivia is fighting back against this injustice. Rrom the Bolivian Information Forum comes this report:


Banning coca chewing a 'no-brainer'
Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca made a flying visit to London on January 20 as part of a diplomatic tour of Europe to garner support for Bolivia’s proposed amendment to the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. The amendment would decriminalise the practice of chewing coca leaves. During the visit to London - which followed stops in Spain, France and Belgium - Choquehuanca met with UK Government officials in the Home Office and was interviewed by the BBC and CNN. Speaking about misconceptions regarding traditional uses of the coca leaf, he said: “We have been practicing the chewing of coca leaves for thousands of years… this means that it is a fundamental part of our culture. What we are asking the countries of the international community is that they let us, Bolivians, exercise, practice and strengthen our culture. We don’t understand why some countries would want to attack our culture.”

The chewing of coca is a practice that goes back to time immemorial in Bolivia. Not only is it a way of countering physical fatigue and staving off hunger, but it has deep religious significance among indigenous peoples in the Andean region. Its use is widespread in Ecuador, Peru, northern Argentina and northern Chile, as well as in Bolivia. Coca tea (mate) is widely used by visitors to the highlands as the best remedy for dealing with the symptoms of altitude sickness.

Although coca is one of the ingredients in the manufacture of cocaine, it is in itself a completely benign substance. As well as being used for chewing, it is also used to make a number of products, including toothpaste, flour and soft drinks. The Bolivian authorities have sought to develop these products as alternative uses for coca. It takes huge amounts of coca leaves to produce only small quantities of refined cocaine. The Bolivian authorities have stressed their total opposition to the production of cocaine and are fighting to reduce trafficking of the drug.

Bolivian governments have long argued the need to reform the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs so as to enable a distinction to be drawn between the harmless consumption of coca and the use of coca for cocaine. Reform has always met with fierce opposition, particularly from the United States. The United States was one of the main architects of the 1961 Convention. The Convention specifically mandated the phasing out of coca chewing over a 25 year period, a period which elapsed in 1986. The ban on coca chewing was based on a 1950 report. According to the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) and the Transnational Institute, the evidence on which this was based was unscientific and “blatantly racist”.

The Morales government, which took office in 2006, approached UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon in 2009, requesting that the ban on coca chewing should be removed from the Convention. President Evo Morales has argued strongly that coca consumption is a key aspect of indigenous identity in Bolivia, and that the 1961 Convention is an affront to Bolivian sovereignty in this matter. Under UN rules, states have 18 months in which to register their observations to such a proposed change. This 18 month period ends on January 31, 2011.

Predictably, the United States has sought to organise resistance to such a change. It wishes the unreformed 1961 Convention to remain the basis for international law on the issue of coca. For its part, the Bolivian government has sought to lobby other Latin American countries to support it in its stand. It has had considerable success, winning the backing of UNASUR, the grouping of South American states, as well as ALBA, the alliance that also includes a number of Caribbean states, including Cuba, as well as Ecuador, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia.

However it only takes one country to block a change in the rules, which the United States can therefore do. But the Bolivian government is keen to ensure that European governments do not simply cave in to US pressure on this point and that they provide support to Bolivia on an issue which has been aptly described as a ‘no-brainer’. A leader article in the Economist magazine this week draws a stark comparison between US responses to the brutally violent drug wars raging in Mexico and the “storm in an Andean teacup” over Bolivia’s modest proposal.

The Bolivia Information Forum would therefore urge the British government not to acquiesce on this issue, and to make clear its support for a change in international rules which are clearly at variance with – amongst other things – the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Peoples' World Conference

on Climate Change and the
Rights of the Mother Earth

(This was sent to me by the Bolivian Mission to the UN, it details their upcoming programme in La Paz. Contact information can be found at the end, I strongly urge anyone to pass this information around and attend if you can)

NEWSLETTER NO.1, 25 January 2010
www.cmpcc.org
Registration opens for Peoples' World Conference on Climate Change and
the Rights of the Mother Earth
Just over a month after President Evo Morales of Bolivia issued his call at
Copenhagen for “the people to decide,” registration has opened for the Peoples'
World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of the Mother Earth. You
can register for the conference at: http://200.105.147.98/indexe.php
Join a Working Group
The work of organizing the conference begins in February, when more than 16 working groups will begin the preparation via email on key climate issues. These working groups include Structural Causes, Harmony with Nature to “Live Well,” Rights of the Mother Earth, Referendum on Climate Change, Climate Justice Tribunal, Climate Refugees, Indigenous Peoples, Climate Debt, Shared Vision, Kyoto Protocol and Emission Reduction Commitments, Adaptation, Financing, Technology Transfer, Forests and Climate Change, Dangers of Carbon Markets, Action Strategies, and others based on the suggestions of participants.
The working groups will discuss these issues in advance of the conference and prepare draft documents for discussion in Cochabamba.
The Conference Program
In addition to the working groups, there will also be a series of main plenary events and self organized events put together by participants. The conference will end with a dialogue among peoples and governments and a mass event in Cochabamba's football stadium on April 22nd, 2010. More information on the program of the conference can be seen at: http://cmpcc.org/2010/01/05/call/ More than 10,000 people are expected to attend the summit, to be held in Cochabamba, Bolivia, from April 19th to 22nd, 2010. Many more will also participate via the Internet, and in campaign actions on the final day of the conference, April 22nd, which marks UN International Mother Earth Day. Groups mobilize to make conference a success.
From the moment the conference was announced, Bolivia has received countless requests for information from a wide range of civil society organizations. For what Copenhagen showed was that while the leaders of the world's richest nations failed to deliver a just and binding accord, peoples' movements were hugely successful in putting climate change on the international agenda. Many of those groups are now engaging with the Peoples' World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of the Mother Earth to put forward a constructive and effective agenda and platform for tackling climate change.
Many initiatives are in the early stages, but there are already proposals from Britain for a working group on labor and green jobs, youth activists in Bolivia are talking of putting on a parallel youth climate event, activists in the US are exploring bringing delegations of people affected by environmental contamination in industrialized countries. Other groups are already announcing platforms that they would like to be adopted globally. The hosts of the conference are open to all ideas for making this unprecedented event a success. The key to this will be for social organizations to push forward these initiatives and put the resources into them to make them succeed.
What you can do to support the conference?
If you represent a social organization, academic institution, youth, women, labor
or religious organization committed to tackling the root causes of climate change.. .
! Register and come to the conference http://200.105.147.98/indexe.php
! If you can't come, put it on your calendar. We hope to set up virtual participation if we can find the resources
! Publicize it to your networks
! Blog, write, twitter, and talk about it
! Get involved in one of the working groups
If you represent the media...
! Sign up to attend or receive press releases by emailing media@cmpcc.org
! Cover the event
If you represent a funding body...
! Look to fund the participation of delegates from other Southern countries and from low-income communities who wouldn't otherwise be able to participate
CONTACTS
General inquiries and registration – info@cmpcc.org
Working Groups - workingroup@cmpcc.org
Self-Organized events - selforganized@cmpcc.org
Press inquiries – media@cmpcc.org
www.cmpcc.org

HEMP GROWS HIGH IN THE HIGHLANDS

How high does hemp grow, is a question I am often asked. One answer to this is: up to 30'. Which of course is the exception, rather than the rule, as most of it grows nowadays 8-10'. The other answer is 7,000' or more, that is in altitude. This is covered on pp. 6-8 of Hemp for Victory, where 19th century authors J. Forbes Royle and Major Heber Drury noted its growth in India and Nepal. The former wrote:

The plant I have seen in a very luxuriant state at least ten or twelve feet high, in the Himalayas, at elevations of 6000 and 7000 feet, especially in the neighbourhood of buffalo sheds.

The latter, quoting an 1840 account of Capt. H. Huddlestone, adds:

The real Hemp, or cultivated kind, is chiefly grown on high lands, and principally on the northern faces of the mountains, in well prepared and abundantly manured soils close to villages, or in recently cleared lands by burning the primeval forests, the soil of which, from the accumulated decomposed vegetable matter of several years, is rich enough to ensure the superior growth of the plant and an abundant crop without any manure for one season. No irrigation is ever resorted to, and very little is produced under an elevation of 3000 feet, the heat of the valley being detrimental to its quality, and the plant appears to flourish best at elevations of from between 4000 to 7000 feet.

Drury notes of its growth in Katmandoo, and further quotes an anonymous source as to its growth in mountainous regions:

All along the Himalayas - that is in Nepaul, in Kemaon, in Gurwhal, and up to the newly acquired hills of the Punjab, at elevations of from 3,000 to 4,000 to 7,000 feet - Hemp is cultivated by the Hillmen, though chiefly for their own use, at some say, the plants growing to 8 to 10, or some say, 12 or 14 feet.

India continued to produce hemp into the 20th century, with 11,000 tons produced in 1904 and 36,000 tons in 1919. A german agriculural tract from 1916 shows hemp growing 20' tall in Nepal.

Chinese practice for small landowners in Southwest China has been to use the level land for crops such as rice, and the sloping land, that is not as conducive to rice, for hemp. With hemp's affinities for growth at high altitudes, of a mile or more, and its ability to grow on sloping terrain, it is ideal for mountainous countries, such as Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. It could well provide a new fibre, and reduce the dependency of these countries on imported fibres such as jute and cotton, both of which use much water. In addition, the nutritious seeds could provide a valuable export, the by-product of which, the cake, could be used to feed cattle and fish. The inner fibre, not useful for fabric, could be used for paper, most of which is imported into these countries from Southeast Asia, where its production threatens the rain forests.

Presently some hemp is still grown in the Himalayas, but new laws in Nepal make it technically illegal, save for wild grown hemp, which villagers still harvest to make textiles and press for seeds (see related posts on this blog).

Hopefully it will continue to be grown in the 'Indies' and find a new home in the Andies....

OBITUARY NOTICE

I note with sadness the passing of a great agriculturalist, who was a great inspiration to me as he was also my grand uncle. Below is an article about him. May more people follow his example and improve our agriculture so we can feed everyone.

________________________

Norman Borlaug, 1914-2009, the Greatest Human Being That Ever Lived

Lisa Spinelli in The Phoenix, 15 September, 2009

With all these recent celebrity deaths, it's pretty lame of us media types that we haven't given more press/public attention to a real hero that has passed away. While Patrick Swayze may have made a lot of great films and seemed like a nice guy, and Michael Jackson was the King of Pop and an amazing entertainer, Norman Borlaug was a true hero that saved hundreds of millions of people's lives. Borlaug, dubbed the "Greatest Human Being That Ever Lived" by Penn and Teller, died of lymphoma at the age of 95 in his Dallas home on Saturday, September 12.
A Nobel Peace Prize winner, Borlaug was also the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal and has been called the father of the Green Revolution. He has also been credited with saving more lives than ANYONE that has ever lived. Why? Because he helped to develop a high-yielding, short-straw wheat variety that was more resilient than any other wheat out there. This meant that millions of people in Mexico, India and Pakistan were saved from eminent starvation with the development of this new wheat. Crops were established and hundreds of millions of people projected to be starving to death by the 1980s were saved. Since its creation, the dwarf wheat he helped create has been planted in crops in six Latin American countries, six in the Near and Middle East, and several countries in Africa and helped save millions more from famine.
"There are 800 million hungry people on earth, as many as 400 million in Asia alone," Borlaug said at the IARI Auditorium at New Delhi on March 16 2005. He went on to say, "We will have to double the world food supply by 2050," a feat he saw as improbable with our current agricultural resources and means.
Still actively pursuing his dreams to end world hunger through biotechnology well into his 90s, this amazing man was still the president of the Sasakawa Africa Association, an sister organization of the Carter Center and whose goal is to test and promote higher-yielding technology for maize, wheat, rice, grain legumes, and roots and tubers to help feed African nations, up until this year. And he was also still teaching at Texas A&M with a center there named after him, the Norman E. Borlaug Center for Southern Crop Improvement.. He also has numerous other research centers across the world in Bolivia, the UK, and the US standing in his name. Borlaug is immortalized within a stained glass window called the "World Peace Window" at St. Mark's Cathedral in Minneapolis, Minnesota and is survived by his two children, his grandkids and more than a pair of great grandkids.
It says something as a country and as a society when we give more press to someone who entertains than who helps actually save lives. I'm not saying we shouldn't mourn Swayze's or Jackson's deaths, far from it, I was totally struck when I heard about MJ dying and even a bit sad about Swayze. But to have SUCH little press out there about this true global hero's death is just down right despicable when every other image on TV, like CNN, is still about MJ and now Swayze (and yes Kennedy too but that's a whole other ball of wax) and there's a mere two-second blip about Borlaug. Sad. The man deserves a great tribute and he should be plastered all over the TV screens as well as all the dailies.
This man has done so much to help our world and the human race it's impossible for me to have time to relate it all right now. Here are some more credible places to read about this amazing individual: New York Times, and ForbesNorman Borlaug, 1914-2009, the Greatest Human Being That Ever Lived