Psyche, Science, and Society

Canadian psychologist barred for life from US for using LSD 30 years ago

Alternet reports about a Canadian psychologist and psychotherapist who has been barred from the US for life because, as a Goodle search revealed, he used LSD 30 years ago:

The Blaine border guard explained that Feldmar had been pulled out of the line as part of a random search. He seemed friendly, even as he took away Feldmar’s passport and car keys. While the contents of his car were being searched, Feldmar and the officer talked. He asked Feldmar what profession he was in.

When Feldmar said he was psychologist, the official typed his name into his Internet search engine. Before long the customs guard was engrossed in an article Feldmar had published in the spring 2001 issue of the journal Janus Head. The article concerned an acid trip Feldmar had taken in London, Ontario, and another in London, England, almost forty years ago. It also alluded to the fact that he had used hallucinogenics as a “path” to understanding self and that in certain cases, he reflected, it could “be preferable to psychiatry.” Everything seemed to collapse around him, as a quiet day crossing the border began to turn into a nightmare….

The official said that under the Homeland Security Act, Feldmar was being denied entry due to “narcotics” use. LSD is not a narcotic substance, Feldmar tried to explain, but an entheogen. The guard wasn’t interested in technicalities. He asked for a statement from Feldmar admitting to having used LSD and he fingerprinted Feldmar for an FBI file.

Then Feldmar disbelievingly listened as he learned that he was being barred from ever entering the United States again. The officer told him he could apply to the Department of Homeland Security for a waiver, if he wished, and gave him a package, with the forms.

He can appeal for a waiver, but it costs thousands of dollars in lawyers fees, and he would have to reapply every year!

Nine months after being turned back at the border, Feldmar has concluded that his banishment is permanent. The waiver process is exhausting, costly and demeaning. The David and Goliath aspect of the situation is too daunting.

This is devastating to his family and friends. “My father was doing nothing wrong, illegal, suspicious, or at all deviant in any way, when he was trying to visit the U.S.,” his daughter, Soma, an instructor at a Denver college, says. “In terms of family it really sucks. “

Feldmar is far from alone in his exclusion from “the land of the free”:

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security denied Professor John Milios entry into the country upon his arrival at John F. Kennedy International Airport last June. Milios, a faculty member at the National Technical University of Athens, had planned to present a paper at a conference titled “How Class Works” at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Milios told Academe Online that U.S. officials questioned him at the airport about his political ideas and affiliations and that the American consul in Athens later queried him about the same subjects. Milios, a member of a left-wing political party, is active in Greek national politics and has twice been a candidate for the Greek parliament. Milios’s visa, issued in 1996, was set to expire in November. The professor had previously been allowed entry into the United States on five separate occasions to participate in academic meetings.

The American Civil Liberties Union, on behalf of the American Academy of Religion, the American Association of University Professors and PEN American Center, filed a lawsuit this year challenging a provision of the Patriot Act that is being used to deny visas to foreign scholars. They did this after Professor Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss intellectual, had his visa revoked under “the ideological exclusion provision” of the Patriot Act, preventing him from assuming a tenured teaching position at the University of Notre Dame. It’s a suit that attempts to prevent the practice of ideological exclusion more generally, a practice that led to the recent exclusions of Dora Maria Tellez, a Nicaraguan scholar who had been offered a position at Harvard University, as well as numerous scholars from Cuba.

In March 2005, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request to learn more about the government’s use of the Patriot Act ideological exclusion provision. Cuban Grammy nominee Ibrahim Ferrer, 77, who came to fame in the 1999 film Buena Vista Social Club, was blocked by the U.S. government from attending the Grammy Awards, where he was nominated for the Best Latin album award in 2004. So were his fellow musicians Guillermo Rubalcaba, Amadito Valdes, Barbarito Torres and the group Septeto Nacional with Ignacio Pineiro. The list goes on.

2 comments April 25th, 2007

Greg Palast on attorneygate: Don’t Fire Gonzales

Greg Palast sends the following article on the Justice Department attorney purge scandal. In it he reminds us that Alberto Gonzales is simply a patsy and that the real issue isn’t the firing of the federal attorney’s, but why they were fired, namely, bogus voter suppression claims being used to steal the 2008 election. Palast calls for firing Karl Rove. However, his evidence implies that the eight replacement attorney’s, carefully selected to be willing to pursue bogus election fraud claims in the run-up to the 2008 elections, must themselves be replaced immediately. And, while we’re at it, lets fire and prosecute Gonzales for his major crime: aiding and abetting torture.

Don’t Fire Gonzales

by Greg Palast
Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Before President Bush fired his sorry ass, US Attorney David Iglesias of New Mexico, in a last sad attempt to suck up to his Republican padrones, allowed his chief mouthpiece, Norm Cairns, to speak with me. He shouldn’t have.

That was two years back, while I was investigating strange doings in New Mexico and Arizona, where, simultaneously, state legislators, Republicans all, claimed they had evidence of “voter fraud.” Psychiatrists call this kind of mutual delusional behavior folie a deux. I suspected something else: I smelled Karl Rove.

In the New Mexico legislature, a suburban Albuquerque political hackette, Justine Fox-Young (her real name), claimed to have “several” specific cases of vote identity rustling. Like Joe McCarthy waving his list of “Communists,” she waived documents of “evidence” of illegal voting on the floor of the Legislature. I called Ms. Fox-Young and asked her to send me the papers.

The “evidence” never arrived. Maybe her fax machine was broken. I called Justine.

Q. Justine, you’ve uncovered criminals! Did you turn their names over to the US Attorney?

A. Well, no, but someone did.

Whose initials are Karl Rove?

She swore to me that US Attorney Iglesias would back up her story: he was investigating the evil voters and was about to indict them.

So I got Iglesias’ guy Norm on the phone. Was Iglesias prosecuting, or actively investigating, one single real case of voter fraud?

Norm went into a lengthy swirly-whirly river of diving, ducking bullshit. I dove in.

Me: In other words, you can’t back her story?

Norm: Well, yeah, uh, I guess you’d say that’s true.

I guess I will say that, Norm. Fox-Young had just plain made it up; fibbed, lied, faked the evidence.

There was a multi-state con in operation. But what was it? Each of these bogus claims of voter fraud was attached to a sales pitch for a state law to tighten voter ID requirements — to prevent these ne’er-do-wells from voting twice. In Arizona, one crack-pot Republican legislator, the Hon. Russell Pearce, claimed he had evidence that five million Mexicans had illegally crossed the border to vote.

The point: Rove knew that a “challenge” operation by the Republican Party, run from his office, knocked out 300,000 voters — mainly poor ones, voters of color. His crew wanted to hike that higher.

The notable thing about this crime of voter identity theft is that it doesn’t happen. You are more likely to encounter ballot boxes that spontaneously combust. I found cases of voters struck by lightening — but out of 120 million votes cast, I couldn’t find a dozen criminal cases of a bandit stealing someone’s identity to vote.

Since the Republicans couldn’t find such criminals, they had to make them up. Force prosecutors to bring false charges against innocent voters (one did just that in Wisconsin) or at least claim they were hot on the trail of the fraudulent voters.

Iglesias, though a Republican, wouldn’t bring bogus charges. And he wouldn’t lie about active investigations that didn’t exist except in Rove’s imagination.

That was his mistake.

Rove’s right-hand hit-man, Tim Griffin, added Iglesias to the hit list of prosecutors who were cut down on December 7, 2006.

Griffin himself, after the December 7 firings, was appointed by Attorney General Gonzales, at Rove’s personal request, to one of the newly-vacated slots as US Attorney for Arkansas. The sleeper cell of Rove-bot US attorneys is now in place to bless voter suppression games in 2008.

I’ve previously reported for BBC that Griffin was the Man in the Memos who directed the massive, wrongful purge of African-American soldiers in 2004 — the ‘caging’ list scam. Based on that expose, voting rights lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said, “Griffin and Rove should be in jail, not in office.” That, too is another story — But the important thing to pick up here is:

1. It’s all about the 2008 election.
2. It’s not about Gonzales.

We’ve been here before. Gonzales is getting Libby’d. Takes the bullet for Karl Rove and the White House. If you wondered why the Republican jackals like the sinister Senator Specter piled on Gonzales — it’s because they were told to.

These guys learned from Richard Nixon. In 1973, when Nixon was getting hammered over Watergate, he threw the Senate Committee his Attorney General, a schmuck named Kleindeist. Famously, Nixon’s own Rove, a devious creep named John Erlichman, told Nixon to leave the Attorney General, “twisting slowly in the wind.”

Rove and Bush are doing the Nixon Twist on Gonzales.

Look, I have no sympathy for Alberto the Doomed. He’s guilty of a crime I employed in racketeering cases: “Willful failure to know.” It’s a kind of fraud; Alberto was going way out of his way to not know what he had to know, that Rove and the President were toying with prosecutors.

Gonzales is their glove-puppet. Why fire him? The nation watches these hearings and wants to kill something. But why shoot the puppet? It’s time to fire the puppeteer. Eh, Mr. Rove?

Add comment April 25th, 2007

Lancet Iraq mortality author Riyadh Lafta’s Canadian talk cancelled

Dr. Ali Al-Ebadi of Vancouver, BC, posted this article in the Comments — on the refusal of the United States and Britain to give visas to Lancet Iraq mortality study author Riyadh Lafta resulting in cancellation of his American and Canadian talks — with a request that I publish it:

The first victim of US-led occupation of Iraq

The truth is certainly the first in an endless series of victims of the war.

A public talk by Dr. Riyadh Lafta of Baghdad’s Al-Mustansiriya University College scheduled for Friday, April 20, 2007 at Simon Fraser University’s Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, in Vancouver, has been cancelled. American and British authorities denied him a visit visa. Alternative arrangements at the University of Washington (U of W) in Seattle have been made for a talk by Dr. Les Roberts, co-author with Dr. Lafta of a Lancet article on Iraqi deaths published in October 2006. The study estimated 654,965 persons have died as a consequence of the occupation. Of these, 601,027 have died from violence. The event in Vancouver was moderated by Dr. Tim Takaro, who is studying the rise in childhood cancer in Iraq with Dr. Lafta and researchers from the U of W.

More than 100 Canadians in Vancouver, including three of Iraqi origin, attended the conference and, during the question period, many individuals enthusiastically discussed issues related to studies about victims of US occupation of Iraq.

Dr. Les Roberts told the audience in Seattle and Vancouver that he presented the project of Iraq casualties study to CNN and CBS. Both American channels declined to cooperate with him because of the inconvenience it might cause but they were willing to support him if he would have agreed to conduct a poll about freedom, democracy, and security in Iraq. Roberts said that he was astonished that such a report did not even move the US Congress to any investigation.

It is well-established that US Army intensively used depleted uranium ammunition against thousands of Iraqi tanks and soldiers’ trucks during George H. Bush 1991 war and George W. Bush 2003 war against Iraq. In both wars, the abandoned military vehicles literally became first a ‘playground’ for children and animals from neighboring villages in southern Iraq and near Basra before some of them was removed to military junkyards. All exposed individuals were practically subjected to a variable intensity of toxic uranium radiation. Depleted uranium ammunition is considered a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) by definition and practice.

For Iraqi researchers there is a well-known link between the US Army uses of depleted uranium ammunition in 1991 and 2003 and the drastic increase and / or new occurrence of many cancers and anomalies in humans, animals and plants. Thus far, there are no published comprehensive statistical data taken from pre- and post-occupation Iraqi government sources to clearly substantiate this link. In addition, White House and Pentagon officials maintained complete denial of such relationship and prevented any independent academic research to find out and publish the truth. Iraqi civilians are by no means the only victims of such denial. American and other allies’ soldiers who were subjected to the radiation of depleted uranium ammunition and other vaccination programs and later developed the so-called Iraq or Gulf War Syndrome are denied any specific medical care in their own countries.

More interestingly, on searching the name ‘Riyadh Lafta’ in Arabic on Google search engine Thursday night, April 19, 2007 only one hit was shown that was a translation from English about the study of 2006.

In conclusion, the academic truth-spreading mission of Dr. Riyadh Lafta fell a victim to the following unfortunate factors:

1. George W. Bush’s and Tony Blair’s mentality of warmongering, intolerance of occupation critic, and fear of international legal percussions of admitting wrongdoing and using WMD has its direct effect on government policy on all levels and on the media.

2. Necessity for hiding all genocidal activities of US-led occupation of Iraq, and mass destruction of civil infrastructures, including health and social care and, when revealed, simply denying and discrediting the source.

3. Strict monopoly of media moguls who are still supporting the main goals of occupation even if they disagree about some domestic political issues.

4. Lack of civil courage of many American and British journalists.

5. All of the above directly applies to US-loyal occupation governments and media in Iraq, and the translated Arabic media.

6. Overconfidence in the USA and UK authorities.

7. Fear of Congressmen, who supported the visit, of political escalation that may jeopardize financial support to the University of Washington.

The Canadian research partner, Dr. Tim Takaro, emphatically said at the end of the conference that he will not give up on the visit of Dr. Lafta to Canada during this year.

1 comment April 25th, 2007