The FBI released a heavily redacted document on former Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings, Monday, which revealed the law-enforcement agency is continuing to investigate what it characterized as “controversial reporting” by the journalist, who (was killed by an explosion which also blew the engine out of his mercedes-benz – not al-jazeera’s words) in Los Angeles in June.
The FBI turned over the three-page document to Al Jazeera and Ryan Shapiro, a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who specializes in FOIA research, in response to a joint-Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed against the agency.
One of the excerpts in the FBI document is completely redacted and marked “S” (for “secret”) and “Per Army,” under an exemption aimed at protecting national security. Additional redactions were used to protect techniques and procedures for law-enforcement investigations and prosecutions.
In a declaration released with the records, Denny Argall, the FBI’S public liaison officer, wrote that after the agency searched for responsive records it located one “cross reference” file pertaining to a pending criminal investigation. The FBI would not comment further about the nature of the probe.
The papers revealed that the FBI still considers Hastings’ work highly sensitive; even the title of the case file has been withheld under a FOIA exemption that claims that the information, if disclosed, could interfere with an ongoing law-enforcement investigation.
The documents revealed that on June 11, 2012, the FBI’s Washington field office opened a file and submitted “unclassified media articles” to it in order “to memorialize controversial reporting by Rolling Stone magazine on June 7, 2012.”
The articles in question included a lengthy investigative report published under Hastings’ byline in Rolling Stone on June 7, 2012 — “America’s Last Prisoner of War” — about 27-year-old U.S. soldier Bowe Bergdahl’s deployment to the war in Afghanistan and his capture by the Taliban in June 2009. Bergdahl is believed to still be in the custody of the Taliban.
Three days after Hastings died, the FBI issued a rare public statement denying Hastings was under investigation. “At no time was Michael Hastings under investigation by the FBI,” bureau spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said on June 21.
The spokeswoman’s comments followed an email Hastings sent colleagues a day before he died that read: “The Feds are interviewing my close friends and associates.” But Hasting’s email was referring to the “NSA,” according to the subject line — not to his earlier reporting.
Still, the FBI appeared to have taken great interest in the article Hastings wrote about Bergdahl, whose name is redacted in the document the agency turned over to Al Jazeera and Shapiro.
Where do we even start with this mess? How did America get to this point – where we are in danger of being over-run by the allies of a rogue intelligence agency that we are powerless against? How did the USA go from being the champion of the free world to being the greatest threat to the peace and security of its own citizens, and instant death from remote-control-in-the-skies for everyone else on earth?
It’s tempting to start out with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but the story starts with the creation of the CIA and the National Security State, founded in 1947 by President Harry Truman to address the fact that, with the war against fascism over, it was time for the US government to rid itself of communists and other socialists who had poured into President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal administration. The fear being that communists loyal to Russia’s revolutionary leader and communist party chairman Joseph Stalin would help him gradually transform the US into a communist state.
Government and business leaders wanted to ensure that there were “trusted people” in charge of things here, behind the scenes. These unaccountable, largely unknown people would be free to pursue their own agenda, without interference from government oversight and regulation. They set up fake businesses and NGOs. They hired CIA operatives to help facilitate business overseas and converted media mouthpieces to their cause.
They justified this by making sure the world knew of the dangers of “creeping socialism.” For years, the world was able to watch the Congress of the United States, along with their partners in business, destroy people’s lives by accusing them of being communists. Sometimes the accusations were merely petty acts of malice against people who had rejected the committee chairman’s homosexual advances – this happening in an era much more judgemental and less accepting of ANY expression of sexuality, much less one which many people could not comprehend.
Despite the fact that several courageous individuals succeeded in exposing the gross abuse of power of the anti-communists (even today, one of the more vocal anti-communists’ name is used to describe persecution for political gain – “McCarthyism.”), several of them retained power, and even increased this power in the decades afterwards – both Richard Nixon (HUAC) and Ronald Reagan (anti-communist president of the Screen Actors Guild) eventually took over the White House (in possession of the CIA since the intelligence/industry coup that had JFK assassinated), largely on the political clout earned in the 1940’s and 50’s anti-communist witch-hunts.
The longterm consequences of the 1963 coup has been a nation in a state of perpetual warfare. At first, the war was against the Communist Menace, anywhere on the globe (Greece, Iran, Guatemala, Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, the list goes on…). After the Soviet Union collapsed – as it was always intended to – the old Cold Warriors needed a new boogeyman to seek out and destroy anywhere an oil field or other valuable natural resources were in danger of being stolen from American corporations by foreigners.
However, in the 1970s a glitch in the system developed. The American people had become unwilling to finance and die for wars abroad, being fought for very unclear purposes. Two strategies were developed to compensate for this. First, blue-blood businessmen helped the CIA set up their own drug-running operations. This would give them international contacts, with people who would do just about anything for money. It would also give the CIA a ways of building a “black budget” of money from drug-running operations, with the good people of the United States and their elected representatives none the wiser.
Also, this allowed industries to develop their own private military and intelligence businesses. Both to set up their own smuggling networks, and to deal with those pesky foreigners who kept trying to utilize their nation’s natural resources for the benefit of the local population. How dare they!
This privatization and outsourcing of warfare for the benefit of multinational corporations picked up steam under the guidance of President James Earl Carter, who came up with the brilliant idea of recruiting and arming the most intolerant and violent people to be found on Earth and sending them to fight against the Soviet army in Afghanistan, rather than risk an outright war if the US were involved in some kind of official capacity. These mujahadeen eventually became the current crop of Afghan warlords and Opium barons. We are allegedly at war with this group, forever. We are currently arming this group. Not the exact same people, of course – but the ideology (or “theology” if you want to legitimize their insane version of Islam) remains the same. They exist to cause violence and chaos in countries not under the direct control of one of “their” Imans. There are no nations that fit this description, and the Holy Terror Army (a name i just made up and will now use to refer to any fundamentalist religion that resorts to extreme violence to impose it’s version of “god’s” law on nonbelievers) is spreading nightmarish violence around the world.
Prior to this current age of holy terror, acting President Ronald Reagan expanded the proxy wars to Angola, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Cambodia, and Grenada. His successor invaded Panama and Kuwait. And dirty old man Bill Clinton gave al Qaeda it’s biggest test, installing the CIA’s Holy Terror Army into the former Yugoslavia.
After that, the CIA/al Qaeda alliance was ready for the big time, and despite having trained, funded, and armed the Holy Terror Army, President Slick Willy justified military actions abroad by claiming they were targeting the workings of Holy Terror mastermind Osama bin Laden. This was the reason given for striking a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan being built to provide cheap prescription drugs to a continent being decimated by AIDS. Millions of Africans have died over the years due to this, and not just of AIDS – they’ve died of numerous maladies that could have been treated with pharmaceuticals, but the patent-holders demand prices that few people in Africa can afford.
Which brings us to 9/11/2001, the invasion of a country for fun and profit, and the start of a second perpetual war, the first one being the war on drugs, which the U.S. intentionally escalates by selling arms to drug cartels.
So, the CIA has assassinated an American President, set up an international drug-running operation which employs the most insanely violent people imaginable, and conducts wars with proxy armies which it cannot control, only finance. And the Government continues to use the war on drugs as a pretext to wage war on its own citizens, despite a proven will by the American public to legalize Ganja. But, this isn’t enough.
The war on terror has to be continually justified, despite a proven inability to militarily defeat a state of mind. Otherwise, it could lose its precious funding. Money is hard to come by, with the Government printing it as fast as it can in order to give it to European Banking cartels. There’s nothing left for the rest of us. I guess we are supposed to take solace in the roles left to us – fodder for their highly profitable, never-ending wars – and learn to love Big Brother.
Here in the spring of 2013, it looks as if the cycle has run its course, and the extreme violence of the late 20th century is finally coming back to its spawning grounds in North America. In the past two years, there have been numerous instances of mass shootings that were so obviously orchestrated by someone other than the “fall guy,” who usually ends up dead, that the Government is losing credibility. Washington has lost the Hearts and Minds campaign in the homeland, to the bloggers.
In addition to being nothing more than future collateral damage to our government, Americans are also guinea pigs in Monsanto’s GMO playground. They have been given immunity from prosecution for the damage their poisons are causing.
Our government is unaccountable to us. It is out of control, and the people in the positions of political power can only find solutions to the problems the banks, corporations, Holy War Terrorists, and drug cartel violence create by spreading more of the same.
If the US government continues to escalate the war of attrition it is waging against Americans, there may come a day when we welcome intervention by some foreign power. In the meanwhile, some countries may not wait for an invitation to intervene here. Just as they are saying about Syria, and like they said about Bosnia, the world cannot sit idly by and watch a violent regime continue to slaughter its own people.
It seems like our nation is doomed, and if we don’t want to go down with it, we had damn well better start envisioning our lives in the ruins of the former United States, and living our lives to accommodate the changing world around us – one that an out-of-control CIA completely fucked over. I doubt the people of Yugoslavia had much of an idea how things would go after Tito died. Their society imploded. NATO intervened. Everything fell apart. Fortunes were lost in the destruction. New fortunes were made in the reconstruction – mostly for foreign corporations. And I don’t see things turning out much differently for us.
rob los ricos
The National Security State
The apparatus of the National Security State, largely established in the National Security Act of 1947, laid the foundations for the extension of American hegemony around the globe. In short, the Act laid the foundations for the apparatus of the American Empire. The National Security Act created the National Security Council (NSC) and position of National Security Adviser, as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) as the Pentagon high command of military leaders, and of course, the CIA.
The first major foreign operation carried out by the National Security State, or rather, the “secret government,” was the overthrowing of a democratically elected government in Iran. In 1952, the British were concerned at the efforts of Iran’s new Prime Minister Mohommad Mossadeq, in nationalizing Iran’s oil industry, taking the monopoly away from British Petroleum. So the British intelligence, the SIS, proposed to the Americans a joint operation, and the CIA obliged.
On January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his farewell address to the nation in which he warned America and indeed the world about the growing influence of the National Security State in what he referred to as the “military-industrial complex”:
“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
Eisenhower was speaking from the point of view of having first-hand knowledge of this “influence” in the corridors of power, himself as President being unable to challenge it, and unable to do so simply in the first decade of the American Empire. He was warning against the influence of the interconnected relationship and organized power of the military, government, and industry, in that the growing influence of this “complex” was so vast that it threatened to take over the government and subvert democracy itself. It was the functions of this complex that saw profit created through war and empire, and thus, there was a constant drive and impetus towards pursuing empire and resorting to war. If you build a massive military structure, you are going to use it; if it is profitable to go to war, you will go to war.
Prescott Bush, the father of GHW Bush, later wrote Clover Dulles, the widow of Allen Dulles, in 1969, about his meeting with Allen Dulles after JFK had canned him in fall, 1961. “He [Allen] tried to make a pleasant evening of it, but I was rather sick of heart, and angry too, for it was the Kennedys that brought about the fiasco [Bay of Pigs]. And here they were making Allen to be the goat, which he wasn’t and did not deserve. I have never forgiven them.”
Note the last sentence of Prescott Bush. His son George Herbert Walker Bush says he can’t remember where he was on the day of the JFK assassination, despite his being a US Senate candidate staying in the Dallas, TX Sheraton the night of 11/21/63 and being in Dallas on 11/22/63. GHW Bush helped plan the Bay of Pigs invasion and I think he was involved in the JFK assassination. – from The LBJ-CIA Assassination of JFK
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, it wasn’t the Joint Chiefs alone who were trying to push for war, as the “CIA also played a dangerous game during the crisis,” as Kennedy had ordered the CIA to halt all raids against Cuba during the crisis, “to make sure that no flying sparks from the agency’s secret operations set off a nuclear conflagration.” However, Bill Harvey, the CIA agent in charge of “Operation Mongoose,” the CIA plan which employed the Mafia to attempt to kill Castro, in brazen defiance of Kennedy’s orders, mobilized “every single team and asset that we could scrape together” and then dropped them into Cuba, “in anticipation of the U.S. invasion that the CIA hoped was soon to follow.”`
Robert Kennedy became the conduit through which the back-channel negotiations took place with the Soviets that ultimately ended the crisis without catastrophe. Nikita Khrushchev recounted the situation in his memoirs, in which he explained that Robert Kennedy “stressed how fragile his brother’s rule was becoming as the crisis dragged on,” which struck Khrushchev as “especially urgent.” Robert Kennedy warned the Soviets that, “If the situation continues much longer, the president is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American army could get out of control.” Khrushchev even later wrote that, “for some time we had felt there was a danger that the president would lose control of his military,” and that, “now he was admitting this to us himself.” Thus:
“Moscow’s fear that Kennedy might be toppled in a coup, Khrushchev suggested in his memoirs, led the Soviets to reach a settlement of the missile crisis with the president. “We could sense from the tone of the message that tension in the United States was indeed reaching a critical point.”
Thirteen days after the crisis began, the Soviets announced that they would remove the missiles from Cuba, with the US agreeing to remove missiles from US bases in Turkey and “pledging not to invade Cuba,” which Kennedy and future presidents would honour. At the announcement of the end to the crisis, General LeMay roared at Kennedy, “It’s the greatest defeat in our history,” and that, “We should invade today!” A defense analyst at the Pentagon, Daniel Ellsberg, who was consulting with Air Force generals and colonels on nuclear strategy at the end of the crisis, remarked that after the settlement was reached, “there was virtually a coup atmosphere in Pentagon circles,” explaining, “not that I had the fear there was about to be a coup – I just thought it was a mood of hatred and rage. The atmosphere was poisonous, poisonous.” – from lew rockwell, The National Security State and the Assassination of JFK
Zbigniew Brzezinski:
How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahideen
Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs [“From the Shadows”], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?
Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.
Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?
Brzezinski: It isn’t quite that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?
Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic [integrisme], having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
The above has been translated from the French by Bill Blum author of the indispensible, “Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II” and “Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower” Portions of the books can be read at: <http://members.aol.com/superogue/homepage.htm>
Mujahideen trained and funded by the US are among its deadliest foes
American officials estimate that, from 1985 to 1992, 12,500 foreigners were trained in bomb-making, sabotage and urban guerrilla warfare in Afghan camps the CIA helped to set up.
Since the fall of the Soviet puppet government in 1992, another 2,500 are believed to have passed through the camps. They are now run by an assortment of Islamic extremists, including Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted terrorist.– from the gaurdian, Frankenstein the CIA created
CONTROLLING THE ILLEGAL DRUG TRADE
The more one studies the dark history of the US national security state, the more transparent the CIA – Wall Street connections become. The links to the international drug trade are less obvious, but have existed from the beginning, that is, from the days of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Time and again, the same pattern has played out: US military interventions in Southeast Asia, Central America and, since 2001, Afghanistan and Iraq, have been accompanied by a sharp increase in narco-trafficking, with all of the attendant evils. These include the plague of drug addiction, drug-related crime, the devastation of the family and as I hope to show, the corrupting of democratic institutions at home and abroad.
The morally bankrupt policies that are responsible for all of the above have had another deleterious effect: They have crippled our nation’s capacity to play a positive role on the world stage. It is no wonder that foreigners no longer view the United States with admiration and respect, but increasingly with fear and loathing. But US elites are oblivious to such concerns. They do not care, and are quite candid about what they view as the CIA’s pragmatic “need” to associate with unsavory individuals and criminals in the interest of furthering US foreign policy goals. Their realpolitik can be read between the lines of the policy papers. Take, for instance, the 1996 intelligence report, already noted, prepared by Maurice “Hank” Greenberg for the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and for which Greenberg was nominated to replace John Deutch as director of the CIA. In the paper Greenberg affirms that “the capability to undertake [covert operations]….constitutes an important national security tool.” Later, in the section titled “Intelligence and Law Enforcement” he insists that
foreign policy ought to take precedence over law enforcement when it comes to overseas operations. The bulk of U.S. intelligence efforts overseas is devoted to traditional national security concerns; as a result, law enforcement must ordinarily be a secondary concern. FBI and Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agents operating abroad should not be allowed to act independently of either the ambassador or the CIA lest pursuit of evidence or individuals for prosecution cause major foreign policy problems or complicate ongoing intelligence and diplomatic activities.
This means, over and above diplomacy, that when criminals are judged to be intelligence assets, they are granted protection from prosecution for narco-trafficking, money laundering, extortion, rape, even terrorism and murder. In 1982, the CIA and the US Department of Justice actually worked out a secret agreement to this effect. The deal exempted the CIA from having to report drug trafficking by CIA assets, which, notice, made a mockery of then presidential wife Nancy Reagan’s much ballyhooed “just say no” anti-drug campaign. At the time, most Americans trusted Ronald Reagan and believed that his administration was serious about the so-called war on drugs. But hindsight shows that the Reagan White House badly abused the public’s good faith.
The template for Iraq today is not Vietnam, with which it has often been compared, but El Salvador, where a right-wing government backed by the United States fought a leftist insurgency in a 12-year war beginning in 1980. The cost was high — more than 70,000 people were killed, most of them civilians, in a country with a population of just six million. Most of the killing and torturing was done by the army and the right-wing death squads affiliated with it. According to an Amnesty International report in 2001, violations committed by the army and associated groups included ‘‘extrajudicial executions, other unlawful killings, ‘disappearances’ and torture. . . . Whole villages were targeted by the armed forces and their inhabitants massacred.’’ As part of President Reagan’s policy of supporting anti-Communist forces, hundreds of millions of dollars in United States aid was funneled to the Salvadoran Army, and a team of Special Forces advisers, led for several years by Jim Steele, trained front-line battalions that were accused of significant human rights abuses. The United States lost more than 700 soldiers in the war.
The foreign policy advocated by Maurice Greenberg, above, is in large part responsible for the drug-related violence on the streets of our cities, and for the epidemic of narcotic addiction among our children, who have been sacrificed to the false god of national security. But the social carnage is not limited to the United States. Drug addiction in Muslim Iraq was almost unknown prior to the US invasion in 2003; but has since become a major problem. A similar recent explosion of heroin use has occurred in Iran, which, notice, is right next door to Afghanistan, where the poppies are grown with the blessing of the CIA. Such foreign policies are evil, a scourge upon the planet, yet, are intimately associated with US empire building. Quite simply, the US power elite has followed in the footsteps of the British and French who, in their day, also exploited the immensely profitable opium and heroin trade. The writer Chalmers Johnson has termed this descent into darkness the sorrow of empire.
The CIA’s secret collusion with the Department of Justice gave the CIA veto over law enforcement, effectively blunting the capacity of US drug enforcement agencies to interdict the flow of illegal drugs into the US. The timing was no accident. The deal coincided with the start of the CIA’s Contra war in Central America. This explains why, the next year, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), under pressure from the Pentagon, closed its office in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. The flow of drugs through Honduras had not diminished; in fact, just the opposite. For years, the country had been a transfer point for illegal drug smuggling into the US, a reality that Contra leaders readily exploited to finance their war against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas; and they did so with the full knowledge and approval of the CIA. For many years after, Langley’s veto blocked legitimate efforts by US law enforcement to curb the drug trade.
I must emphasize that, meanwhile, the American people were kept in the dark about the policy and its effects, at every point in the chain: from the formulation of the policy to its implementation to the phony packaging of the policy for mass consumption. In fact, we only know about it, today, thanks to a courageous journalist named Gary Webb, who published a groundbreaking series of articles in 1996 in the San Jose Mercury News, exposing Contra links and CIA complicity in the crack cocaine epidemic that ravaged the black communities of Los Angeles in the 1980s. The series, appropriately titled “Dark Alliance”, was one of the first big stories to be carried on the Internet; and later, Webb expanded it into an important book by the same name, in which he lays out the voluminous evidence in stark detail. But it was Webb’s series of articles in 1996 that initially focused media attention on the drug issue; and which compelled CIA director John Deutch to announce an internal investigation. Meanwhile, the agency simultaneously launched a disinformation campaign to discredit Webb, whom it viewed as a serious threat.
The campaign against Gary Webb has been called “one of the most venomous and factually inane assaults on a professional journalist’s competence in living memory.” The fawning mainstream press, always eager to do the CIA’s bidding, appeared to take pleasure in savaging the messenger, even while tacitly conceding that his facts were basically correct. One of the low points occurred on live TV, on November 15, 1996, when NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, wife of Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, referred to Webb’s exhaustively documented expose as “a conspiracy theory,” the kiss of death for any serious journalist. At this same time, as we know, Greenspan was busily engineering the deregulation of Wall Street, setting the stage for the 2008 financial meltdown of the global economy. – from foreign policy journal, Black 9/11: A Walk on the Dark Side Part 3: AIG and the Linkage to the Drug Trade
when assets go bad
Phillip (alternately, “Philip”) Marshall, 54, a career airline pilot who claimed to have once served as a contract pilot for the CIA and DEA during the Iran-Contra affair, shot and killed his two teenage children, and the family dog, then killed himself.
Michael Ruppert. Mike is a former LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) narcotics officer who in the late 1970’s, trained in narcotics by the U.S. Justice Department. The CIA tried to recruit Mike to traffic drugs with them. When Mike tried to expose the corruption that he saw (the moral thing to do), he was fired without cause. As Governor Jesse Ventura says, “Don’t just go along to get along.”
Mike Ruppert has spent the last 25 years fighting the system, trying to expose the lies and tyranny of the CIA (and many other offices of our government). This is no conspiracy theory, Mike Ruppert has presented over 6,000 documents indicting the U.S. government’s involvement in decades of heroin and cocaine drug-trafficking into the cities and towns of the United States. You can subscribe to Mike’s newsletter at www.copvcia.com or go to www.fromthewilderness.com
Sleeping With the Devil: How U.S. and Saudi Backing of Al Qaeda Led to 9/11
Front row, from left: Major Gen. Hamid Gul, director general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), Director of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Willian Webster; Deputy Director for Operations Clair George; an ISI colonel; and senior CIA official, Milt Bearden at a Mujahideen training camp in North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan in 1987. (source RAWA)
The CIA, concerned about the factionalism of Afghanistan … found that Arab zealots who flocked to aid the Afghans were easier to “read” than the rivalry-ridden natives. While the Arab volunteers might well prove troublesome later, the agency reasoned, they at least were one-dimensionally anti-Soviet for now. So bin Laden, along with a small group of Islamic militants from Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestinian refugee camps all over the Middle East, became the “reliable” partners of the CIA in its war against Moscow.
To this day, those involved in the decision to give the Afghan rebels access to a fortune in covert funding and top-level combat weaponry continue to defend that move in the context of the Cold War. Sen. Orrin Hatch, a senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee making those decisions, told my colleague Robert Windrem that he would make the same call again today even knowing what bin Laden would do subsequently. “It was worth it,” he said.
“Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union,” he said.
The United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings ….
The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books ….
John Adams once called the vice presidency, “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived.” FDR’s VP, John Nance Garner, said the job wasn’t “worth a pitcher of warm piss.”
It’s quotes like these that make Dick Cheney—who pretty much ran his own separate government from the VP’s office—all the more impressive, not to mention terrifying. For not only was Cheney out of control, he was out of control in a job that had no controls attached to it. No one had ever thought them necessary before.
Give the man credit for creativity. Cheney found even more ways to overturn the Constitution, undermine the separation of powers, and possibly make the U.S. government an accessory to murder many times over.
The New York Times broke half the story in Sunday’s paper as Scott Shane explained that “the Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney.” Congress finally found out eight years after Cheney gave the order, when CIA Director Leon E. Panetta informed the House and Senate intelligence committees upon learning of the program himself.
According to current law, when a U.S. intelligence agency is involved in a covert action, at least eight members of Congress—the Republican and Democratic leaders of both houses of Congress and of their intelligence committees—must be informed in order for the program to be legal.
CIA defenders insist compliance with the law is actually a gray area because “this program never went fully operational” as one official put it. And Panetta terminated the program as soon as he learned of it. But given the history of both Cheney and many in the CIA’s contempt for both Congress and the Constitution, it’s entirely possible that we still don’t know the full story. – from the daily beast
there are some flaws to this video, but it’s a treasury of good information.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the use of contractors reached a level unprecedented in U.S. military operations. As of March 31, 2010, the United States deployed 175,000 troops and 207,000 contractors in the war zones. Contractors represented 50 percent of the Department of Defense (DOD) workforce in Iraq and 59 percent in Afghanistan.
This increase is the logical outcome of a series of decisions going back decades. Force structure reductions ranging from the post-Vietnam decisions that moved most Army logistics support elements to the Army Reserve and Guard4 to the post–Cold War reduction that cut the Army from 18 to 10 divisions with corresponding cuts in support forces greatly reduced the Services’ ability to support long-term operations. Next, a series of decisions in the 1990s led to the employment of contractors in the Balkans for tasks from traditional camp-building to the new concept of “force development” that saw MPRI training the Croatian army. Finally, the decision to invade Iraq with minimum forces left the United States with too few troops in-theater to deal with the disorder that resulted from the removal of Saddam. Thus, it is understandable that the immediate, unanticipated need for large numbers of logistics and security personnel, the shortage of such troops on Active duty, and the precedent for using contractors in the Balkans caused the Pentagon to turn to contractors to fill the immediate operational needs. However, the subsequent failure to conduct a careful analysis of the wisdom of using contractors is less understandable. The executive branch has conducted numerous investigations into fraud, waste, and corruption in the contracting process. Congress has held hearings and established the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet the U.S. Government has not systematically explored the essential question: Does using contractors in a conflict zone make strategic sense?
By the end of 2009, contractors reported almost 1,800 dead and 40,000 wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. As the fighting in Afghanistan gets worse, contractors are now suffering more deaths than U.S. forces: “In the first two quarters of 2010 alone, contractor deaths represented more than half—53 percent—of all fatalities. This point bears emphasis: since January 2010, more contractors have died in Iraq and Afghanistan than U.S. military soldiers.” For practical purposes, these casualties were “off the books” in that they had no real impact on the political discussions about the war. As Peter Singer noted:
there was no outcry whenever contractors were called up and deployed, or even killed. If the gradual death toll among American troops threatened to slowly wear down public support, contractor casualties were not counted in official death tolls and had no impact on these ratings. . . . These figures mean that the private military industry has suffered more losses in Iraq than the rest of the coalition of allied nations combined. The losses are also far more than any single U.S. Army division has experienced.
Contractor casualties are not reported via the Pentagon, but only through the U.S. Department of Labor. Labor’s Web site notes that these are not comprehensive statistics but only represent those injuries and deaths that resulted in insurance claims. Thus, it is difficult if not impossible to determine how many additional casualties were suffered by other nations’ contractors in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
In reality, it is virtually impossible to determine the actual effectiveness of any contractors—armed or unarmed—until they begin to operate in theater (and only then if a member of the U.S. Government can observe the contractors as they operate).
Compounding the problems created by lack of quality control, the government does not control the contractor’s daily contact with abuse, intimidation, and even killing of local civilians such as the DynCorp employee who ran a child sex ring in the Balkans or the September 2007 Blackwater shootings in Nisour Square, Baghdad.
This lack of quality and tactical control greatly increases the impact of the third major problem: the United States is held responsible for everything the contractors do or fail to do. Despite the fact the United States has no effective quality or operational control over the contractors, the local population rightly holds it responsible for all contractor failures.
In addition to undercutting government legitimacy, the use of contractors may actually undercut local government power. In Afghanistan, security and reconstruction contracts have resulted in significant shifts in relative power between competing Afghan qawmsas well as allegations of corruption. Dexter Filkins, writing in the New York Times, notes that the power structure in Orugzan Province, Afghanistan, has changed completely due to the U.S. Government’s selecting Matiullah Khan to provide security for convoys from Kandahar to Tirin Kot:
With his NATO millions, and the American backing, Mr. Matiullah has grown into the strongest political and economic force in the region. He estimates that his salaries support 15,000 people in this impoverished prov ince. . . . This has irritated some local leaders, who say that the line between Mr. Matiullah’s business interest and the government has disappeared. . . . Both General [Nick] Carter [commander of ISAF South] and Hanif Atmar, the Afghan interior minister, said they hoped to disband Mr. Matiullah’s militia soon—or at least to bring it under formal government control. . . . General Carter said that while he had no direct proof in Mr. Matiullah’s case, he harbored more general worries that the legions of unregulated Afghan security companies had a financial interest in prolonging chaos.
Thus, an unacknowledged but serious strategic impact of using contractors is to directly undercut both the legitimacy and the authority of the host nation government. – this article was originally published as Institute for National Strategic Studies Strategic Forum 260 (NDU Press, November 2010)
Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that QinetiQ, a high tech defense contractor specializing in secret satellites drones and software used by U.S. special forces, was the victim of a sustained cybersecurity breach for several years starting in 2007.
According to Bloomberg, documents released in the Anonymous Stratfor hack reveal QinetiQ was compromised as part of a cyber-espionage attack originating in China — and notes the breach was part of a much broader campaign targetting U.S. contractors:
“QinetiQ’s espionage expertise didn’t keep Chinese cyber- spies from outwitting the company. In a three-year operation, hackers linked to China’s military infiltrated QinetiQ’s computers and compromised most if not all of the company’s research. At one point, they logged into the company’s network by taking advantage of a security flaw identified months earlier and never fixed […]
QinetiQ was only one target in a broader cyberpillage. Beginning at least as early as 2007, Chinese computer spies raided the databanks of almost every major U.S. defense contractor and made off with some of the country’s most closely guarded technological secrets, according to two former Pentagon officials who asked not to be named because damage assessments of the incidents remain classified.“
U.S. intelligence reports ranked cyber threats as the top danger facing the country for the first time in April, but tensions have been running high about the government’s ability to protect digital assets and intelligence for years. A 2011 Department of Justice report noted that only 64 percent of FBI agents assigned to national security-related cyber investigations had the appropriate skills and expertise to handle those types of cases.
Government cybersecurity contracting exploded during the Bush Administration, with many roles traditionally filled by government employees or resources outsourced to external companies over whom the government has less oversight. The Obama Administration has made efforts to curb that trend, but that expansion, combined with a lack of cybersecurity expertise in the military and federal agencies, resulted in many cybersecurity defense operations being outsourced or completed under the heavy supervision of outside contractors. – from think progress, The U.S. Outsources Cybersecurity & Defense To Contractors That Keep Getting Hacked
The Syrian government has called on the United Nations to classify a leading rebel group as a terrorist organisation after its leader pledged allegiance to the head of Al Qaeda.
Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani heads the radical Nusra Front rebel group.
In a message posted online on Wednesday he pledged allegiance to the head of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and supported calls for an Islamic state to be created in Syria.
It is now beyond reasonable doubt that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by his own National Security State in what was a violent coup d’état that is, an overthrowing of the legitimate elected government of the United States by force through the use of the clandestine black-ops services of the CIA, elements of the Secret Service, the US military, the FBI and organized crime.
Unless and until the United States publicly discloses to the citizenry that its duly elected government was overthrown in 1963 and that since then the replacement/imposter government has been at least technically/legally speaking illegitimate[12] it will likely be impossible to reverse the increasingly rapid disintegration of America. The reality is that since the murder of President John F. Kennedy, there has been an extra-constitutional imposter “government” in place which prior to that time existed only in the shadows. It has been given many different names including the “war party” the MIMIC (media, intelligence, military, industrial complex) the secret government, the shadow government etc. That entity or “Regime” as a result of the JFK assassination appears to have profoundly altered the trajectory of the United States by placing the country on a constant war footing and building and sustaining an enormous foreign military base presence throughout the world which serves to project American power and enlarge the “empire.” – from jericho rendezvous, After the JFK Assassination–a True Coup d’état: Is the Current US Government Legitimate?
A handful of polls conducted in the days after the Boston Marathon bombings show that US citizens are responding much differently than in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that killed roughly 3,000 people. Not only are Americans more opposed now to giving up personal freedoms for the sake of security than they were after 9/11, but other statistics show that distrust against the federal government continues to climb.
Just one day after the April 15 Boston Marathon bombing, pollsters with Fox News asked a sample of Americans, “Would you be willing to give up some of your personal freedom in order to reduce thethreat of terrorism?” Forty-three percent of the respondents said they would, while 45 percent said no. Comparatively, 71 percent of Americans asked a similar question in October 2001 said they’d be willing to give up personal freedoms, while only 20 percent opposed at the time.
A separate poll conducted by the Washington Post just three days after the Boston Marathon bombing reveals that nearly half of those surveyed say that the government will go too far in trying to prevent future acts of terrorism. The Post asked a random national sample of 588 adults, “Which worries you more: that the government (will not go far enough to investigate terrorism because of concerns about constitutional rights), or that it (will go too far in compromising constitutional rights in order to investigate terrorism)?” Days after the Boston bombing, 41 percent of respondents said the government will not go far enough, compared to 48 percent saying they’ll go too far. When similar questions were asked in 2006 and 2010, 44 percent and 27 percent said the government will go too far, respectively, signaling that for the first time in years Americans are overly concerned about a misuse of power on the part of Washington.
That isn’t to say that the Boston attack is necessarily inspiring Americans to question authority, though. Two months before Tsarnaev brothers allegedly detonated a pair of explosives near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, 53 percent of Americans polled by the Pew Research Center said the federal government is threatening their personal rights and freedoms. In November 2011, that statistic was only 30 percent. – from russia today, Americans troubled more by governmental abuse than terrorism
Police and private security personel monitor security cameras at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative on April 23, 2013 in New York City. (AFP Photo / John Moore)Police and private security personel monitor security cameras at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative on April 23, 2013 in New York City. (AFP Photo / John Moore)Police and private security personel monitor security cameras at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative on April 23, 2013 in New York City. (AFP Photo / John Moore)Police and private security personel monitor security cameras at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative on April 23, 2013 in New York City. (AFP Photo / John Moore)
The Syrian government has called on the United Nations to classify a leading rebel group as a terrorist organisation after its leader pledged allegiance to the head of Al Qaeda.
The call came as the opposition accused forces loyal to president Bashar al-Assad of “savage” killings in the country’s south.
Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani heads the radical Nusra Front rebel group.
In a message posted online on Wednesday he pledged allegiance to the head of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and supported calls for an Islamic state to be created in Syria.
The Syrian regime is demanding the UN “fulfil its role and preserve global security” by classing Nursa Front as an Al Qaeda linked entity.
just like international criminal banking cartels are too rich and powerful for the government to touch, so are giant corporations – especially those that provide the precious oil that allows international trade to be possible.
no crime against humanity or nature is so great as to be a punishable offence. not murdering indigenous people who refuse to allow oil exploration in their homelands in the amazon rainforest, the mountainous islands of indonesia, the niger river delta…anyplace the oil companies destroys through their incompetence and evil machinations – well, that’s the price of doing business. evil business.
if their wreckless disregard for life isn’t enough to convince you of oil companies’ inherent evil, the fact that WE DO NOT EVER NEED TO USE PETROCHEMICALS EVER, FOR ANYTHING, EVER should provide the proverbial icing on the evil cake for anyone with even rudimentary intelligence.
the creation of energy through burning things is pre-19th century technology. it was surpassed and made irrelevant by Nicolai Tesla over 100 years ago.
but, just as the banksters are allowed to launder drug cartel billions, while a teenager smoking a joint in his bedroom could be sent to prison for possessing the products the cartels provide, the rich are allowed to do anything – pollute the land and sea, and kill everything and everyone in the way; molest children by the thousands; steal everything that’s not nailed down – while people without huge piles of money to burn can have their lives ruined – either by being between a corporation and their potential profits, or by being incarcerated for having the exact same habits as the country club crowd has, but not having enough money to hire one of them as your lawyer.
we’ve entered a new age of corporate feudalism, with an uber-class of murderous scumbag psychopaths ruling over people too frightened, confused, misled, blinded, and/or crippled by the corporations and their minions to even know what’s happening around them and to them – much less figure out a way to cope with a ceaseless shit-train of epic atrocities ignored, or facilitated by a government led by a man who can kill with the stroke of his pen; anyone, anywhere.
i, for one, am not a serf, wasn’t born to provide scumbag psychopaths with luxury i cannot even fathom, and will not willingly consent to being treated like i owe the banksters, the government, or any profit-generating entity ANYTHING. i am perfectly willing to see all institutions of power crumble into ruins and pass from our collective memory.
and what about the economy? i’ll let you in on a little secret – until about 100 years ago, hardly ANYONE on earth needed money to survive in this world. we still don’t – we just let the media and government tell us we do.
as far as the banksters, their corporate uber-lords, their minions, mouthpieces, and loyal idiots – as we used to say in texas – i wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire.
below are examples of how the courts look after the interests of foreign corporations, even at the expense of lives and widespread economic damage as a result of their shenanigans.
– rob los ricos
2013/03/16 – OWOC Gulf Flight – Taylor Energy
Three years after the BP Macondo well disaster, the Gulf of Mexico is still covered in oil and barely sustaining visible life above or below the surface. Undisclosed white matter is appearing and leakages with other drill sites appears to be problematic. With such a massive dead zone, it makes you wonder how long oil rigs have negligently been spewing toxins and the rig disaster wasn’t part of a long term plan to expand the dead zone to include the entire Gulf of Mexico; all aimed at turning the entire region into a vast wasteland of oil rigs leaking oil, Corexit and other toxic chemicals into the core engine of the oceans converter belt.
To keep the sheen suppressed under surface water, spraying Corexit is still a daily routine on behalf of BP. So, below where it mentions the Macondo well looks good after one week, it took thousands of gallons of Corexit to break up the sheen and sink the toxic goo below the surface.
Published on Mar 16, 2013
20130316 – On Wings Of Care Gulf Flyover. This video was taken with our belly viewer (the front of the airplane is to the left in this video; that’s our nose wheel showing at the lower left, because the videocamera is tilted slightly forward to give the pilot a short lead time to center the plane over the target. Sorry it looks like we’re flying sideways, that’s how the videocamera fit best into the belly port!). This is the chronic Taylor Energy pollution site, about 12 nm southeast of the Louisiana coast. Lots of rainbow sheen here today, and even some brown weathered crude floating in it near its east end, which is just west of the Nykor Energy platform (unrelated to the sheen). For more photos and videos and discussion, see the article at OnWingsOfCare.org
It’s been labeled the worst environmental disaster in world history, and rightfully so, because the British Petroleum (BP) oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is like the nightmarish gift that keeps on giving. BP and the United States government would have the public believe that all is well in the Gulf. Nothing could be further from the truth. The crisis is not only ongoing; its effects are worsening
The April 20, 2010 the Deep Water Horizon Explosion will be back in the news again. The explosion of this oil rig represents the biggest false flag event in history; the devastation of this false flag event is still being felt and the worst is yet to come. You may have heard about the explosions near the New Madrid Fault and the thousands of generators being shipped to Louisiana by FEMA. Soon all readers of this series will connect the BP oil spill to these recent current events.
Over 34 months later, the oil spill has destroyed the welfare, livelihoods, health and futures of tens of millions of Gulf Coast residents, not to mention the destruction of the fragile ecology in the Gulf of Mexico.
Originally, BP was ordered to initiate $20 billion in restitution to the Gulf Coast victims. In retrospect, BP has never made full restitution to the victims. The overall physical health of the region has been decimated and the mainstream media and government officials reaching as high as President Obama have been complicit in covering up the geological and medical magnitude of the event. Even to this day, BP is still covertly carpet bombing Corexit in the Gulf and the much of the environmental catastrophe remains untouched by the BP cleanup crews.
BP Urges Government To Halt Gulf Oil Disaster Relief Payments For Future Losses
Oil giant BP is urging the federal government to stop making payments to Gulf Coast residents affected by last year’s Gulf of Mexico oil geyser. BP claims that the improving economic conditions among areas hit the hardest by the oil provide enough evidence to show that they no longer need to be compensated for future losses from the environmental disaster.
To date, roughly $4.5 billion worth of claims have been paid out of the $20 billion fund established by the government and funded by BP to pay victims of the oil catastrophe. Claims continue to be filed with the government seeking compensation for their losses.
BP is not attempting to halt payments to current claimants with recognizable losses – only those who are claiming that their future income will be impacted. The company released a letter to the government and to the press.
To determine if BP’s claims of economic recovery are true, all you have to do is look to the past. The Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred more than 20 years ago, yet oil still coats areas of Alaska today. And the difference between the two oil leaks is that with Exxon, we knew exactly how much oil was spilled into Prince William Sound. In that case, it was roughly 11 million gallons of oil.
However, there is no precise measurement of how much oil poured into the Gulf of Mexico, but the best estimates say that it was as much as 184 million gallons of oil. It is highly unlikely that all of this oil disappeared or washed up on beaches. When this oil eventually turns up, claims will continue to be filed by those affected.
But it isn’t just the economy that BP is saying has recovered; they also make the claim that the fishing industry is back to pre-spill health.
BP has sued to block what could be billions of dollars in settlement payouts to businesses over the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
The London-based oil giant accused the court-appointed administrator for the settlement, Patrick Juneau, of trying to rewrite the terms of the deal. BP said Juneau violated the settlement in the way he used a complex formula to determine the payments to businesses.
Last week, BP warned investors that the settlement’s price tag will be “significantly higher” than initially estimated.
“Although the ultimate exposure is at this time inestimable, it grows daily and could cost BP billions,” the company’s lawyers wrote Friday.
U.S District Judge Carl Barbier appointed Juneau and has upheld his decisions for calculating payments. Juneau’s spokesman declined to comment on BP’s lawsuit.
Attorneys who worked on the class-action settlement with BP said the payments to businesses were spelled out in the agreement.
“Simply put, BP undervalued the settlement and underestimated the number of people and businesses that qualify under the objective formulas that BP agreed to,” attorneys Steve Herman and Jim Roy said in a statement.
“At the same time BP lauds its efforts for restoring the Gulf in the media, it blames others in court for its own mistakes to avoid responsibility for its own conduct,” Strange said in statement Thursday.
Strange said that if BP underestimated how much it would owe under the terms of its agreement, that is BP’s problem, not the citizens’.
“BP cannot undo a settlement it wrote and signed, just to avoid its consequences. The courts should not allow it,” he said.
U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier in New Orleans has scheduled an April 5 hearing on BP’s request to prevent payments of what the oil company calls fictitious or inflated claims that are being made as part of the settlement.
Separately, BP filed a complaint against the settlement program and its administrator, Patrick Juneau, alleging breach of contract. The complaint doesn’t seek monetary damages, but it does ask that Juneau be ordered to change how he interprets the agreement so that he complies with what BP believes the agreement says.
And Strange said in his statement that “a legion of BP attorneys wrote and negotiated the terms” of the agreement.
“But now, BP is objecting to the terms of the agreement it signed. This challenge is not surprising; it is consistent with BP’s past behavior,” he said.
as expected, the u.s. has already begun to denounce the terrorists organizations it has embedded into the syrian conflict. by beginning to shift the focus of the conflict away from regime change and towards developing the latest stage for the “war on terror” spectacle, the u.s. will be able to take charge of the operation from behind the scenes, by claiming “state secrets” for the unwinnable “war” against terrorism.
one has to wonder at this point how long israel will tolerate a growing u.s. presence along their frontier, and allow NATO to establish bases there. expect some surprizes in this conflict. (putin and israel’s netanyahu’s willingness to cooperate, for one – rlr)if there are chemical weapons attacks, they might well come from israel. if there is a nuclear strike, it will definitely come from israel – either there in syria or in iran. but it will be blamed on ‘terrorists.”
terrorist militia in syria displays flags of loyalty to “al qaeda.” article at National Review Online.
most likely, the reason this operation is happening now is to provide the israeli air force a fly-over zone for future attacks against iran, and on into central asia in the future, as the israeli state continues to ethnically cleanse their lands and the bordering areas.
israel has pursued a program of ethnic cleansing since it’s inception, in order to overwhelm their neighbors with refugees. this destablizes the neighboring country, causing internal conflict which the israelis then take advantage of by invading their neighbors and expanding its own borders – which the state of israel still refuses to define.
after the NATO/US invasion of syria, do not expect there to be any relief for the syrian people. their future will become just like it is for present-day palestinians, the lebanese, the iraqis and the people of aghanistan. if the u.s. is unable to successfully squash the egyptian people’s ongoing uprising and install a dictatorship there (which they have done, installing al sisi, a jewish general – rlr), very likely they will be subject to becoming just another theater of operations for the “war on terror.”
in keeping with the bush crime family’s and u.s. foreign policy objectives since the reagan era, once a terrorist group that the u.s. has funded, armed, and trained is no longer needed, they are then either given the bum’s rush out the door, or they are exterminated – or both. as they did to varying degrees with chaing kai-shek in china, manuel noriega in panama, jonas savimbi in angola, the mujahideen in afghanistan, saddam hussein in iraq, and gaddafi in libya. diem in vietnam was driven into the countryside and shot in the head.
just because most americans are not aware of how their government and economy functions, that doesn’t mean people around the world don’t notice.
with NATO primed and ready to support a u.s. invasion of syria, both the u.k. and france have already recognized theirs and our terrorist networks there as the “legitimate” government of syria. however, there is a sore point to this that may hold up the invasion for a minute – the day prior to the official status given the murdering thugs NATO has imported into syria (mostly from iraq – and armed with weapons smuggled out of libya) the u.s. blacklisted one of the primary factions of the “rebels,” the al-nusra front in syria.
of course, it’s impossible for us to know from this distance what is actually happening in syria, especially with the state-run media controlling information, and with their internet at times shut down completely, it remains a highly censored and dangerous cyber realm. still, the al-nusra front in syria is seen to be so vital to the terrorists and their plans for syria’s future, they are demanding the group be removed from the list of terrorist organizations by the u.s.
no matter what happens from this point on, the goal has already been accomplished. syria has slipped into a violent, chaotic quagmire that it will not recover from for generations to come. just as planned. if i were living in jordan, i’d be making plans to immigrate soon – they are likely next on the list for regime change, after iran. can’t be helped, as they border the borderless israel.
THE DETAILS:
U.S. blacklists al-Nusra Front fighters in Syria
By Saad Abedine and Laura Smith-Spark, CNN
The U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions Tuesday on leaders of the jihadist al-Nusra Front in Syria, hours after the State Department moved to blacklist the rebel group as a foreign terror organization linked to al Qaeda in Iraq.The Treasury also sanctioned two armed militia groups that operate under the control of the Syrian government, Jaysh al-Sha’bi and Shabiha, it said.
Syrian opposition groups have voiced their opposition to the U.S. move against the rebel fighters, suggesting that they are being targeted because they oppose a new anti-government coalition.
this pic from the alexander higgins website, which has mysteriously disappeared…
The move came the same day President Barack Obama recognized the leading Syrian opposition coalition as the legitimate representative of the country’s people.
“We’ve made a decision that the Syrian Opposition Coalition is now inclusive enough, is reflective and representative enough of the Syrian population that we consider them the legitimate representative of the Syrian people in opposition to the Assad regime,” he told ABC’s Barbara Walters.
In recent months, the radical Islamist al-Nusra Front has emerged as one of the most effective groups in the Syrian resistance, drawing on foreign fighters with combat experience in Iraq and elsewhere. (i just want to point out that the “foreign fighters with combat experience” are terrorists who have been killing american and NATO soldiers in afghanistan and iraq.)
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland confirmed Tuesday that the al-Nusra Front had been added to the list of aliases for al Qaeda in Iraq, already designated a foreign terrorist organization.
She said the group had claimed nearly 600 attacks in several cities in the past year, including suicide bombings, and was responsible for the deaths of “numerous innocent Syrians.”
Al-Nusra “has sought to portray itself as part of the legitimate Syrian opposition while it is, in fact, an attempt by AQI to hijack the struggles of the Syrian people for its own malign purposes,” she said.
Syrian terrorists defy US and pledge allegiance to jihadi group
Rebel groups across Syria are defying the United States by pledging their allegiance to a group that Washington will designate today a terrorist organization for its alleged links to al-Qaeda.
A total of 29 opposition groups, including fighting “brigades” and civilian committees, have signed a petition calling for mass demonstrations in support of Jabhat al-Nusra, an Islamist group which the White House believes is an offshoot of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
The petition is promoting the slogan “No to American intervention, for we are all Jabhat al-Nusra” and urges supporters to “raise the Jabhat al-Nusra flag” as a “thank you”.
“These are the men for the people of Syria, these are the heroes who belong to us in religion, in blood and in revolution,” read a statement widely circulated on Syrian opposition Facebook pages.
Jabhat al-Nusra made its mark early this year with a string of suicide bombings, a tactic it continues to use. Aided by fighters from abroad and Syrians who have returned from other wars in the Middle East, it has also led battles for a number of military bases and has secured a string of recent victories. Along with allied jihadist groups, it captured the Sheikh Suleiman base west of Aleppo yesterday morning, and has also dented the infrastructure of the regime in the Syrian capital, Damascus.
Although Jabhat al-Nusra remains separate from the Free Syrian Army, many FSA leaders now recognise its strength and order their forces to cooperate with it.
NATO and US puppet regimes recognize Syrian opposition as legit government
Western powers and Arab nations have recognized Syria’s new opposition coalition as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people at talks in Morocco, according to a draft declaration. But feelings about arming the rebels are mixed.
“For now we have decided not to move on this,” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said. “We shall see in the coming months.”
Many Western powers are reticent about sending weapons because they believe that some rebel groups, notably the al-Nusra Front, have links to al Qaeda and will seek to impose Islamic law if they succeed in toppling Assad.
Fabius, whose government was the first to recognize the Syrian opposition, welcomed the creation of a military council aimed at helping to coordinate rebel factions’ military operations.
But suspicions regarding al-Nusra Front were a “problem” which meant that France and Britain had no intention immediately of reviewing a three-month extension of an arms embargo on Syria, he said.
“For now we are not moving,” he said. “There is no question of putting jihadis into this mechanism and this will be discussed more and more now that Nusra has been added to the list.”
Fabius said the meeting had exposed differences of opinion on how the al-Nusra Front should be treated, with Arab states asking why a group which has proved its effectiveness against Assad’s forces had been sidelined.
The leader of Syria’s opposition coalition urged the United States to review its designation of the group, saying that religion was a legitimate motivation for rebel fighters.
Britain’s military chiefs have drawn up contingency plans to provide Syrian rebels with maritime, and possibly air, power in response to a request from David Cameron, senior defence sources said on Monday night.
However, they said the UK would act only if the US did so and made it clear that British chiefs of staffs are seriously worried about the consequences of intervening in the Syrian crisis.
Military sources have privately been expressing growing concern about pressure from Downing Street.
Officials compared it to the pressure applied by Cameron before Britain and France took the lead in the campaign of air strikes on Libya early last year.
Options have been sent by defence chiefs to No 10, sources told the Guardian on Monday night. However, one source added: “We are a long way from doing anything.” An official said: “The US is leading the way. We are not there yet.”
At Cameron’s request, General Sir David Richards, chief of the defence staff, chaired a meeting in London a month ago, sources said. In attendance were senior military figures from France, the US, Turkey, Jordan and the Gulf states of Qatar and the UAE who, with Saudi Arabia, have been in the vanguard of those supporting the Syrian rebels.
more: (SORRY, BUT THESE LINKS ALL APPEAR TO BE DEAD…?)
US to formally recognise Syrian opposition
Barack Obama says US will recognise opposition coalition as the de facto administration of Syrian regions under rebel control
Russia and US in Geneva talks over future of Syria
But foreign minister says ‘brainstorming session’ with UN envoy does not signal Moscow’s support for Assad is waning
Israel considering military attack on Syria
The pretext is being used to justify a possible military assault on Syria even if it means triggering a broader conflict across the region.
Israel is apparently laying the groundwork for a possible military attack on Syria by alleging that Damascus could be using chemical weapons against the Syrian people.
1000s of Jordanian protesters hold demo, call for reforms
Jordanians have been holding demonstrations since January 2011, demanding political reforms, including the election of the prime minister by popular vote and an end to corruption.
Since the demonstrations began, Jordanian ruler King Abdullah II has sacked three prime ministers to appease the protesters.
strange what you can find on the internet…this is from 2003, when i was incarcerated in the oregon state penetentiary…from autonomedia interactivist exchange
This year started on an interesting note. On January 2nd, Oregon Department of Corrections Security Threat Group manager (Benny Ward) came by to visit. He threatened to send me into exile in Eastern Oregon — far from my daughter in Portland — if I didn’t move out of the cell I shared with Brian McCarvill.
Brian is currently suing ODOC over their mailroom policies, which have resulted in the rejection of anarchist literature sent to him. This has been something that has bothered me the past 3 years — I have over 200 mail violations notices concerning letters and publications sent to me here in prison. Their favorite reasons for such “violations” are because the publications are “anarchist-related” or because of “STG symbol” — in this case, a circled “a,” a symbol used internationally for “anarchy”. I support Brian’s lawsuit. Plus, he is a valued and trusted friend. We chose not to split up. Brian actually said he could get more legal work done in the hole because he’d have more free time.
On January 7th, we received write-ups about “unauthorized activity” and “disobedience of an order.” This had to do with a card writing campaign I’d initiated a month earlier. I’d asked people to send postcards to us with a circled “a” symbol on them, along with the caption “This is not a gang symbol.” (Apparently, we received something like 650 such cards.)
Two days after receiving the write-up, we were called to a disciplinary hearing. After discussing the issue with me, the hearings officer told me, “I find you guilty of continuing to be involved in the anarchist movement”.
Pretty illuminating, as this was not what I was charged with. But it does actually sum up ODOC’s attitude towards me. It has not been easy, but I have attempted to stay involved with events on the outside of these walls. I’ve been incarcerated since the international Reclaim the Streets day of solidarity to oppose the G-8 summit in Cologne, Germany, June 18th 1999. I’ve missed out on the Battle of Seattle, the anti-IMF/WB protests, the protests against both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions and GW Bush’s bloodless coup.
The summary of my hearing contained a few lies and half-truths, designed to make me appear to be a threat to the safety and the security of ODOC facilities, if not the world at large.
The hearings officer noted that I threatened to use my 30 years of organizing skills to “cause trouble” for ODOC. What I actually said was that I’d assured Benny Ward as well as the STG managers here at OSP that I would not use my extensive organizing skills to create trouble for them (i just wanted to do my time and get out intact). And I asked if it would be too much to expect that I be allowed to have my mail? Apparently it is. (was: Brian won the lawsuit – he does that a lot – and they started allowing a lot more stuff in.)
The most alarming aspect of this, though, is the fact that ODOC has come to the conclusion that I am a member of the Earth Liberation Front. This despite the fact that I’ve never been arrested for an action by the ELF, nor have I ever been questioned about any actions by the ELF. Indeed, there is no evidence or rumor of evidence that can connect me to the ELF in any way whatsoever.
The ELF is a clandestine group whose sole purpose is to carry out acts of sabotage against corporations and research facilities that the ELF considers responsible for despoiling the earth.
As such, it has been listed as a terrorist organization, and is one of the targeted focal points for several Joint Task Force(s) on Terrorism in cities and states across the US.
I am a writer and an activist. It has been a deliberate decision on my part not to undertake acts of sabotage, since I lack the skill and knowledge to do so effectively and safely. So far, no one has been hurt or killed by an ELF action.
Despite losing my job in the prison infirmary, being sent to the hole for 120 days and being labeled a “terrorist,” I will continue to write for anarchist and “alternative” publications. I am an enemy of the New World Order. We, the people, shall overthrow the rule of corporate power.
Sì Se Puede!
Rob
ps – may, 2012; i miss my comrade Brian – feel free to write letters of support to him. envelopes must contain a full name and return address:
Brian McCarvill #11037967
Snake River Correctional Institution
777 Stanton Blvd
Ontario, Oregon 97914-8335
to add a little more retrospective background to this story:
i was getting threats from other prisoners because of the over-the-top censorship from the mail room. it reached the point that they were rejecting any publication with a visible circle-a on it. mind you, this was during the short-lived “riot tourist” era in the early 21st century. there were photos of people carrying banners and waving flags with @s on them in newspapers, magazines, etc. a lot of them, even in local dailies and other mainstream publications. and they were not being allowed inside. so, as you can imagine, there were complaints and finger-pointing, with much of the blame being directed at me.
Brian and i had agreed that this was an issue worth fighting over. for one thing, Brian is a very capable, self-taught litigator. he regularly kicks the State Attorney’s best lawyers’ asses in court cases. Brian encourages other prisoners to litigate, and usually works as a clerk and legal aid in the legal library – when such positions are allowed.
to get back to the story, we were 100 percent certain we would win this – it has been litigated and decided before, but neither the ODOC nor apparently the State Attorney’s office have very high competency standards, and really think they can just do whatever. the US supreme court sorta kinda agrees, but also have firmly ruled that your constitutional rights do not end at the gate when someone is sent to prison.
the court decision came after we had been locked up in the DSU (the hole) for almost four months. we won. we knew we would, and we had been telling people that it was in the courts, be patient. i won’t say we came out to hero’s welcomes, but many of the prisoners who knew what was what came up and shook our hands, usually with many on-lookers (this is called “showing” respect. almost means the same as “if you got a problem with this guy, you got a problem with me.”) i also made it a point of asking people who had flicked me shit about their mail if it had gotten better. got a few apologies, got a few thanks, and also got a few requests concerning legal issues. if there wasn’t an easy, obvious answer for their questions, i’d refer them to the legal floor to request an advisor who had access to the legal library. i had a little skill – kept reference material in my cell. (best place to start: Prisoners’ Self Help Litigation Manual)
Brian got shipped out to another facility shortly afterwards. there’s more to this story, but i’m not sure people would believe me if i wrote about it. i suppose it could be verified through ODOC records, but i’m not into it. tell ya what, though – buy me a pint or two and i’ll tell you all about it. cheers!
when drug wars collide with u.s. foreign policy, no one is safe
A TALE OF TWO CARTELS
if i were a little more callous or jaded, i’d publish more horrific images with this post, but they are trauma-inducing. the violence of the mexican-cartel dominated phase of the drugwar is on a level of brutality that can only be characterized as psychotic and insane – sadistic is an understatement, considering the torture for days, often with propane torches, the beheadings, the bodies hacked to pieces and left in piles, the bloody torsos…just do an image search for “cartel violence” if you’re interested, but it’s difficult to take. and there’s so much of it. so much pain, so much suffering, so many bodies, so much money, so many crimes, so many levels…
one of the consequences of active cooperation between a drug cartel and intelligence agencies of the u.s. has been an increase in over-the-top, insanely bloody violence. to be sure, once it is known that a certain group of people cooperate with the authorities to incarcerate or otherwise eliminate cartel members, the cartels seek to set an example of what people who cooperate with the authorities can expect when the cartels catch up with them. it doesn’t matter to the cartels that some people might be responsible for doing away with a rival gangster. what’s important to them is that some people have cooperated with the law.
sadly enough, the law can’t always protect people from cartels: not their informants, not the bystanders in the streets, not even the police are safe from the violence of the cartels. the one thing an informant cannot expect from the cartels? mercy.
This is the story of two drug cartels. one is comprised of a long-standing mexican cartel based out of sinaloa mexico. it is currently headed by El Chapo (“Shorty’) Guzman, who has been in a leadership position with the sinaloa federation for a long, long time. long enough to have ties to elements within the u.s. government. how cozy is the united states government with the sinaloa federation? enough to sell them weapons – tens of thousands of small arms since 2006. if you can call it selling. many of the weapons were acquired by undercover intelligence assets, with money provided by the taxpayers of the u.s.a.
the u.s./sinaoloa coalition:
from the l.a. times:
When the ATF made alleged gun trafficker Manuel Fabian Celis-Acosta its primary target in the ill-fated Fast and Furious investigation, it hoped he would lead the agency to two associates who were Mexican drug cartel members. The ATF even questioned and released him knowing that he was wanted by the Drug Enforcement Administration.
But those two drug lords were secretly serving as informants for the FBI along the Southwest border, newly obtained internal emails show.
More proof that drug kingpins were paid FBI informants
According to the LA Times today, Congressman Darrell Issa, R-CA, and Senator Charles Grassley, R-IA, stated in a memo to the their respective committees in the House and Senate that the ATF should have known that the drug kingpins in question were FBI informants and shut down the operation immediately.
But regardless of whether or not the ATF agents on the ground knew that the kingpins were informants, top level Administration officials knew as indicated by hundreds of documents previously released by the Department of Justice.
Further, an internal Congressional memo made public in February shows that most if not all of the Mexican drug cartel suspects supposedly targeted by the ATF were paid FBI informants.
How, then, could a scheme such as Fast and Furious be described as a ‘sting operation’ when the very suspects it was designed to ‘catch’ were working for our own government?
The problem with the House investigation of Fast and Furious as it moves forward is that it is too narrowly focused. It has become obvious that multiple levels of the federal government were involved in the scandal, including the FBI, the State Department, and Homeland Security.
in exchange for protection from arrest, the sinaloas have provided the u.s. with information on rival cartels, thus enabling spectacular busts, while keeping the cocaine, heroin and pot flowing into the u.s., courtesy their partners.
this arrangement could go back quite a while, seeing as how elusive “el chapo” guzman has been over the years.
while still an up-and-coming lieutenant for the guadalajara cartel, el chapo was captured in guatemala, after narrowly escaping an attempted assassination that instead killed a roman catholic cardinal. he was extradited back to mexico and held at a maximum security prison in guadalajara until 2001, when he escaped in a laundry truck – allegedly with the aid of prison officials and guards.
since then, his sinaloa-based operations have thrived, with el chapo taking over smuggling routes along the mexico/u.s. border in both tijuana and ciudad juarez. despite his notoriety – there is an entire genre of nacrocorridors, inspired by his status in sinaloa as a modern-day robin hood, forbes magazine lists him as one of the world’s most powerful billionaires, ahead of former president sarkozy of france and current ruler of venezuela, hugo chavez – he continues to expand his operations. his wife even crossed the border into l.a. to have twin girls.
co-incidently enough, since his jaibreak, many of his rivals have suffered defeat after defeat at the hands of mexican president felipe calderon’s aggressive war on drugs. calderon was elected on a promise to utilize the military to destroy the cartels, after former president vincente fox’s top narco-cop was found to have taken almost $500,000 from one of el chapo’s allies.
both the united states of mexico and america state publicly that capturing el chapo is their number-one priority, but the evidence points to the contrary conclusion – in short, that el chapo is in collusion with powerful people in the u.s.a. and mexico.
in 2001, just months after his escape from prison, some rival druglords in colombia attempted to give the u.s. DEA information on el chapo, in return for lenient treatment. shortly thereafter, el chapo eluded capture in los cabos, baja california. that first year out was quite eventful for him, as he was constantly on the move, the mexican police hot on his trail. in the ensuing chaos, his brother was captured.
el chapo is purported to have helped mexican authorities imprison one of his former rivals and sometime partner alfredo beltran, then launched an attack upon the remainders of the beltran leyva gang.
the current, real, horrific drugwar began in earnest bloodiness on may 8th, 2008, when the beltran leyva gang killed el chapo’s son, edgar. in retaliation, el chapo began a bloody war of attrition that spread slowly from his homebase until it has engulfed people from texas to colombia. in the first three months of fighting, 500 people died, including dozens of police.
THE RIVALS: the main rivals to the u.s./sinaloa coalition are the zetas – an insanely violent cartel that specializes in committing atrocities against their opponents, be they journalists, recalcitrant addicts, informers, police, judges, or gangstas not under their control.
there are a couple of minor players in this tale – like the juarez, michoacan, and gulf coalitions – who had been involved in the drug trade for longer. the zetas were a gang of military deserters who became hitmen for the gulf coalition, though the two are currently in a bloody dispute – along with the u.s./sinaloa coalition – over control of drug traffic along the u.s./mexico border, particularly along the texas border.
the gulf coalition has been around long enough that they are firmly entrenched in some places, like veracruz, matamoros, and reynosa. yet, the zetas are attacking their rivals in 23 mexican states. they are such a feared enemy, the former leader of the juarez cartel moved to colorado, turned himself in, and demanded protection in return for information. he likely sold out his former employees in exchange for protection from them.
click on image to see more maps, from compiled by borderland beat
in central america, meanwhile, 15 members of the michoacan/la familia cartel have been busted – including the leader Gabriel Maldonado Soler, a former federal police agent – and the cartel effectively shut down. courts in nicaragua and costa rica have been busy prosecuting cartels, as has mexican president calderon.
with each bust or death, a power vacuum is created for the survivors to fight to fill. though the zetas have been quick to snatch up the spoils, the sinaloa federation has been busy building alliances with other old-school cartels, including the remnants of la familia, the gulf cartel, leftovers of the juarez cartel. the tijuana cartel has also been alarmed about the appearance of zetas in their domain and are alleged to be in alliance with the u.s./sinaloa coalition.
as i write this – over a period of two weeks – the zetas are waging an offensive campaign in the heart of their enemies’ territory.
there have been days-long gunbattles in rural sinaloa, journalists slaughtered in veracrua, and reynosa is a free-fire zone. the media there stopped mentioning narco-violence long ago. there was an attack on a colombia-themed nightclub in mexico city. people have been hacked to pieces in nuevo laredo, and others hung from a bridge that connects to the u.s.
The bodies of seven men where found dead next to a soccer field just a few meters from the Sierra Madre school in Ciudad Juarez, Chih. Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2008. The bodies had their hands tied, showed signs of torture and had a shot to the head. “Narcomantas” (banners with messages against rival drug gangs) where found next to the bodies. Ciudad Juarez, Chih. Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2008. Photo: Staff / El Diario
The Revolution continues not to happen, despite the presence of many revolutionary organizations in this country. Or is the presence of these groups actually inhibiting revolutionary activity here in the US? I don’t want to examine this point too deeply now, but I do wish to address the first point above, and that is the failure of allegedly revolutionary organizations to gain any following amongst the masses they always discuss at their meetings and in their literature.
The main activity of most revolutionary groups is to educate people about the need to rise up and overthrow the capitalist system which oppresses them. No doubt, they are sincere in this desire to reach out and organize the masses.
Despite appearances to the contrary, most people are too cynical to blindly follow self-appointed leaders — unless they see there is something immediately rewarding to them, personally, in doing so. The difficult part for the revolutionaries is not the actual educational aspects of this form of organizing, but is to be found in the challenge of educating people while not awakening in them a sense of empowerment.
Sure, every revolutionary group would like to see people arise and set alight the Powers That Be – but only if the resulting revolution would result in the rise to power of their revolutionary organization. To this regard, they are not to be seen as enemies of the system, but as yet another faction in contention for State power. The revolutionaries don’t want to smash the State; they want to be the State. This is why so few people – college students, mostly – fall for their schemes.
It’s all but impossible for people to live in this era and not have an opinion about the legitimacy of authority. Almost everyone has run afoul of some code of conduct, law or regulation at some point in their lives, and almost every one of these instances very likely convinced the transgressors of the unfairness of the enforcing authority’s power, or the idiocy of the rule/law/code transgressed. With few exceptions, authoritative power is seen as something rather arbitrary by most people.
This distrust of authority can become a knee-jerk reaction that is difficult to unlearn, as it tends to burn itself deeply into the psyche of the person who it has transgressed. Why do you think we have to attend school for so long? Definitely, it is because we must be trained in obedience. This is why so many kids detest school. They do not desire to submit to an authority that is pre-existent, which they were given no voice in establishing.
Sometime in a person’s life, she must learn to handle the fact that she must recognize some entity’s power over her, whether that power emanates from a religion, school, family, or workplace. This generally does not make the person happy. To most people, it is humiliating.
Looking for a job, for instance, is possibly the least favorite activity most people experience during their lifetimes. Since almost all of us are forced to work by the economic structure society imposes upon us, we manage to struggle through the pain and humiliation as best we can, often with some combination of booze, drugs, pharmaceuticals, religion and sex.
And when we hear someone speak about the need for revolution in our country, even when sympathetic to the message, folks generally tend to hope that someone else will take up the challenge, seeing as how they don’t have the time or energy, or think they don’t have the strength and courage needed to fight against the authorities. This is the weakness the revolutionary groups seek out in their intended victims. If there is a general feeling of something being very wrong in our society, but people feel helpless in the face of the overwhelming task of overthrowing the social order, the revolutionary group has at least a slight chance to convert some of the population into followers.
But, here lies the trick: how does one awaken another person’s sense of indignation at the ills of society, while maintaining that person’s willingness to submit to the group’s purpose? lt would be so much easier for the revolutionaries if they could hypnotize their intended followers into accepting the group’s leadership. This is, of course, precisely what the revolutionaries attempt to do.
By ceaselessly bleating the same slogans, the group can entrap their intended victims into believing that their group is much different than the many other tiny revolutionary groups. Some gullible people will accept the group’s message and begin to adopt that party’s doctrine. If the hypnosis doesn’t take effect, the revolutionaries can always try to use guilt, try to shame people into submission. This works particularly well on people who were raised as Catholics, by the way.
It’s quite a difficult trick, trying to move people to action, while keeping them docile enough to be herded around by the leadership of the revolutionaries. No wonder revolutionaries find so little success in these endeavors. Most revolutionary literature is more boring than can be tolerated. And it is often written in some obscure idiom that is only decipherable to the initiated, much like the Bible. Indeed, the revolutionaries often offer the same thing as the bible-thumpers: salvation!
By joining their movement, people are told, together they can save the Nation, the Earth, the Blue Footed Booby – depending on the focus of the group. Still, there’s that knee-jerk reaction to authority that most Americans never seem to fully outgrow.
Why awaken to one scam, just to be lulled to sleep again by a different one? Why choose Boss 13 over Boss A? This changing-of-the-guard has happened so often that its futility is glaringly obvious, even though this is not bluntly stated in textbooks. The combination of boring obscurity and the spectre of yet another authoritarian regime the wannabe revolutionary groups represent is not a winner in many people’s hearts and souls. In a nation obsessed by the mythology of self-reliance, it’s difficult to sell doctrines which require blind obedience. Not to the people most likely to arise with the rage needed to achieve any drastic changes in the systems that oppress us. In the marketplace of ideas, then – although the System gets much of the blame for what is going wrong – the revolutionary’s attempt to take over State power, rather than overthrow the System and disperse power into the population, does not gain a wide following. The revolutionaries are content to sit on the sidelines of history, and only make a fuss when some weakness in the System presents itself — like the current economic depression.
Inevitably, they will attract a number of people with their own ideas about what should be done about the situation at hand, and the revolutionaries will patiently explain that only their leadership can provide the proper solutions. Maybe not in this lifetime, though.
During the Bush II regime, Junta leaders demanded that leftists, environmentalists, and scientists never condemn the American Way of Life. That is to say, they were willing to go to war in order to secure oil and gas for Americans to use for whatever purpose they desired. As long as American citizens are willing to send their children to war in distant lands to ensure the flow of petrochemicals to the Fatherland, we can rest assured in knowing that there will be plenty of gas for our commutes to work, trips to the mall, and riding lawnmower races. Rather than criticizing consumers about the incredible amount of damage their lifestyles are inflicting upon the biosphere — as the revolutionaries often do — the Bush Junta insisted that it was inexcusable to suggest that the American Way of “Life” was in any way wrong. Which message do you think most people wanted to hear? That their over-consumption of the world’s resources must end before we destroy our planet’s ability to support life, or that everything’s just fine the way it is? Yes, Americans, like most people, are guided more by immediate self-interest than they are by wisdom gained by introspection and observation. This is what the revolutionary groups recognize as well. They do not call for a drastic change in the way we live our lives, they just want the ability to collect and spend the tax money we pay to the government in order to do so. It would be wonderful to think that the emergence of radical environmentalism would have produced some sort of alternative vision for our collective future at this point in the (end)game, but it hasn’t – and perhaps can’t.
Here we are, 30-odd years after the first Earth Day, and the most extreme change most people can envision in their lives is to drive hybrid cars to their wretched, demeaning jobs. (Just for the sake of enlightenment — there are regular, internal-combustion engine cars that are more fuel-efficient than hybrids. You IDIOTS!)
Youth are at least acknowledging the horrors they will have to face during their lifetimes, but even though they are questioning the consumerist lifestyle, what they generally come up with is more of the same – like riding bikes to their wretched, demeaning, collectively-owned-and-managed jobs, with some recycling thrown in along the way.
It’s clear to me that what we are suffering from is a failure of imagination. We cannot envision a world, or a way of life, that is vastly different (personally rewarding, nurturing, co-operative, gentle on our planet) because it is beyond the reach of our imagination.
At least part of the blame for this is the prevalence of Pragmatism in most educated people’s minds. Pragmatism is a way of thinking that is meant to defeat imaginative thinking and stifle creativity. We are told to be “practical” or “realistic.” This is a way of thinking that is inherently submissive. It is how a slave justifies her continued obsequience to her master, or a person trapped in an abusive relationship rationalizes her consent to remain in the relationship. Pragmatism discards the immense possibilities for the future in favor of those more immediately obtainable.
In this era of dwindling resources, Pragmatism is the logic of gradual, mass suicide, which rejects life and its infinite potential. Few of us find any meaning, comfort, or reward in our present lives, yet we cling to them. It’s all we know. Pragmatically thinking, there are powerful forces in place — economics, religion, police, and military, to name a few — which enforce consumerism, to ensure we do not wander astray of the Ruling Powers’ plans for our lives. This is a philosophy of fear. We are afraid of what will happen to us if we turn away from economics as our source of survival. We are afraid of how the police will treat us. We are afraid of the concentration camps and prisons our government is busy building to contend with the future unrest which will arise as the economy continues to take more from the majority of the population and hands it over to those already massively wealthy. But, by abandoning the workers here in favor of cheaper labor overseas, the Ruling Powers have left us little choice but to look for answers elsewhere, often in black markets. Their economic models just do not work, and require government intervention every now and then in order to continue to exist.
While preaching to the voters that it is tragically inappropriate – even evil – to suggest the government provide healthcare to its people (the way almost every nation on Earth already does), the public mouthpieces of the monied elite demand taxpayer money to protect their investment swindles. When the current economic meltdown began to spiral out of control, the voting public expressed their disapproval for any sort of bailout for the embezzlers and con-men responsible for the mess. Most public officials acknowledged that their constituents were voicing their opposition to such subsidies by a margin of 10-1. Yet there was never even a hint of doubt that the swindlers would get the funds they demanded. The needs and opinions of the general public mean nothing to the people in power in this country. Money — huge, mountainous piles of money, inaccessible to the vast majority of the population – is what this economy is all about.
And where is the outrage over this debacle — the greatest single instance of theft in recorded history? The public has moved on to other issues, mostly because they have to work so much harder in order to maintain their standard of living. Also, many of them were suckered into believing that a changing of the guard in the White House could potentially lead to a re-assessment of priorities by the government. What most people desire is a fix to the economic ills the nation is experiencing. They want what they see on TV. They desire to purchase the good things in life — a home and everything that makes a home life comfortable and desirable. They social change without having to sacrifice their privileged positions as first world consumers in order to achieve it. If we are not capable of envisioning a lifestyle vastly different from the one handed down to us, or the one depicted in advertisements and sitcoms, it’s because any sort of alternative vision of how to organize our lives has not been presented to us.
The one model we have now (Work or Starve!) was originally forced on people through overwhelming military force. Where people did not acquiesce to such a lifestyle, campaigns of genocide were – and still are to this day – conducted until the resisters are unable to continue with their ways of providing for themselves outside of Western economies. Instead of radically transforming our lives so that we can meet our needs without over-taxing what our environment can provide for us, even the Visionaries among us can only seem to envision more of the same — only “New and Improved,” or “Sustainable!” This society is horribly sick and twisted.
Even now, as our elected (or self-appointed) leaders demand human sacrifice (the war in Iraq, the War on Drugs, etc.) to the god of the marketplace, many people refuse to question the values that shape our society. And how can we, when so many of us require pharmaceuticals, booze or other coping mechanisms in order to function in our day-to-day roles?
Our consumer-driven way of life is destroying us as human beings as well as our planet’s ability to support life, yet we still reproduce our places within it, day after wretched day. What the fuck is wrong with us?
This may sound silly, but it’s something that bothered me as a child and pisses me off to this day: Some of the iconic cartoons I grew up watching on Saturday morning served to re-enforce consumerism in the viewers by presenting it as both natural and never-changing. From the Flintstone’s Stone-Age to the futuristic lifestyle of the Jetsons, the lives depicted were little different from the lives being lived by the viewers. The level of technology may have changed from one show to the next, but the consumerist lifestyle was never any different: Work, buy, try to get ahead, buy some more! How can we break out of this cycle, when every element of society forces us to accept it as some sort of natural occurrence?
It’s not enough that some of us attempt to think outside of the proverbial box. We have to think beyond the means used to produce boxes.
The imperative we face now – those of us who can see beyond the mechanisms of the Ruling Powers – is to enact our visions of very different ways of relating to the places where we dwell. In order to do so, we must band together with strong-willed and like-minded people in order to produce working models of how we think life could be, were there not coercive forces severely limiting our options. It’s also important that more than one model of a different society be created. There should be as many as there are people committed to making their visions manifest in reality. There are, after all, many different ecosystems here on Earth, and each provides different challenges for the people who desire to live within them, based on their unique attributes, as well as the amount of damage industrialism has inflicted upon them.
It is not difficult to live on this planet. It has nurtured an astonishing variety of such ecosystems capable of providing for every imaginable need a human population requires in order to thrive. Everything we need is available almost everywhere, if we only know where (and how) to look for it. The greatest danger and difficulty will be found in the struggle to rid ourselves of the control the Ruling Powers possess in enforcing their lifestyle upon the rest of us.
They will use every method of coercion and violence available to them to either force us back into the vast herd of their docile servants, or kill us if we will not be enslaved. As it stands now, they seem to be poised to jettison the bulk of humanity, as tremendous numbers of us are no longer required to fulfill their needs. To use the U.S. as just the most glaring example: Our standard of living has (just in my lifetime) gone from being equal to or above that of any nation on Earth to being “better than Somalia.” The U.S. ceased being a First World nation when it was crushed under the heel of the Reagan regime. And the bottom of this downward trend is nowhere to be seen. Food prices continue to rise, while people’s ability to purchase food continues to erode, even among those still legally employed.
What we truly require in these times are courage and resolve.
We must turn away from slavish obsequience to this dead-end society. Since we are all but blind to any other vision of a society, there is no blueprint or pathway prepared for us to follow in order to establish a radically different method of conducting our lives. But we must turn away from the one we are trapped in now. In doing so, we will suffer – and not a little. But not to do so is suicide.
We can create options for ourselves and our offspring— human beings are clever and adaptable creatures – and we need to do it immediately!
The one issue that continually comes to my mind is the abolition of economics. At the very least, the use of money as a means of exchange and accumulation should be abandoned. There is absolutely no sane argument for continuing along that path. It has only brought about severe limitations in the way most people conduct their lives, while rewarding thieves, thugs, warlords and swindlers. If that is not readily apparent to you, you should remind yourself every day that during this economic debacle, where over one-third of America’s accumulated wealth has evaporated in less than one year, the oil corporations and their subsidiaries are recording unprecedented profits. Then, ask yourself a question: Is this something worth the sacrifice of our children?
i don’t know what to make of this…sometimes things just come my way, and i think “wtf?!?”…this appears to be the transcript of a talk someone made right around 2001…it reads like serious discourse…whatever…i like it…rlr
The Alien conquest of Earth is nearing completion. Places once thought to be too remote or densely forested for Alien assimilation have been successfully invaded and the free Humans there are in danger of being coerced into either integrating with the Aliens’ plundering of their homelands, or are being relocated (or exterminated). As the depletion of Gaia’s fossil memories nears termination, the value placed on them by the Aliens increases, which helps them escalate their attack upon the Wild Earth, as they can pay greater bounties to their minions.
There is no need to examine the methods utilized by the Aliens to achieve their conquest – Earth history is still not being suppressed, just ignored. However, it is necessary to understand how thoroughly they have ingrained their system of control into our fellow captives’ lives.
Until the last quarter century, it was still possible to enter into discussions of human-based concerns with the Alien’s slavemasters. This is no longer possible, as Alien control of media – even so-called “alternative” or “radical” media – are so completely under the influence of Alien ideas that even Human concerns are only addressed in Alien contexts. The world over, the Alien “economic” system has supplanted the Gaia-centric ones, which provided lives of abundance for all living beings the past millions of years. These nature-based systems are breaking down and the ability of Gaia to sustain life for complex organisms – without the utilization of Alien technology – is beginning to look doubtful.
The Aliens’ slaves don’t seem to grasp the seriousness of this situation, mostly due to Alien control of their consciousness through media and slave indoctrination systems – overt, subtle or coercive.
There are signs that resistance efforts are beginning to attract the attention of dissidents among the slave population, though there is still a lot of education required before they come to grips with the enormity of Alien control over their existence. The overwhelming majority of the dissidents still concern themselves with integration into the Alien slave system and control of Alien systems, rather than with the overthrow of these systems and re-integration into Gaian systems.
Many slaves are too immersed in their slave activities to either envision a wild, free existence or – more sadly still – even be aware of how they perpetuate and enforce Alien control over the Earth. Nevertheless, even with the almost absolute control over Human activity the Aliens exert, there is a growing feeling of uneasiness among the Slave population as Gaian systems breakdown or become noticeably erratic.
As a result, there have been at least the beginning stirrings of a militant opposition to the Aliens’ slavemasters.
Over the past decade, there have been numerous demonstrations against slavemaster organizations – the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the World Economic Forum, the list could go on – no matter where they choose to congregate and confer. Perhaps “demonstration” is too humble a description of these opposition gatherings – “assault” is a more accurate term. The avowed goal of the assailants is to disrupt the slavemasters conferences and prevent them from conducting their business. In this regard, they have achieved little success, with the exceptions of the WTO conference in Seattle, USA or 11/30/99 and WB/IMF summit in Prague, Czechoslovakia. As slavemaster of the 18th century remarked – plenty of slaves can be paid to kill the unruly slaves. So, not only has there been a massive use of paramilitary and police forces against the rebellious slaves, there has also been division among the dissidents, many of whom are frightened of angering their masters and losing whatever privileges they’ve been granted.
Still, there are a number of reasons to be encouraged by this astonishing development, though its significance should not be overstated. While it is exciting to see fits of rebellion among the slaves, so far it has not moved beyond symbolic acts of protest. Not only that, but the participants don’t seem to understand how to move beyond symbolic protest, or even what it is about their actions that makes them important.
I want to briefly mention what it is that I believe is most encouraging about this rebelliousness and what could help it grow into an actual – rather than symbolic- opposition movement, before concluding my remarks about this phenomena with a few words about its shortcomings.
First of all, there are two important aspects to these International Days of Solidarity that are of historic significance. The global scope of actions in opposition to slavemaster institutions on 9/26/00 and 6/18/99 was nothing less than spectacular. The slogan “Think globally, act locally” took on a new, more vibrant characteristic on those dates, particularly on 6/18/99, when various Alien systems’ Headquarters were directly targeted and their operations disrupted for the day.
This happened in dozens of countries around the world – stock exchanges, international banks, offices of the WB/IMF, WTO, even entire cities – were overrun with people out to celebrate their love of life and opposition to the effects of Alien activity, which constrains or otherwise destroys life and the potentials inherent in life.
The other aspects of the IDS I find significant is the fact that slaves in the most advanced areas of Alien development seem to be willing to abandon their privileged status in order to challenge Alien activity. Notably, the sudden arrival of the slaves in the USA into the fray – after years of such actions elsewhere – on 11/30/99 sent a wave of excitement throughout the world. Finally, the global resistance had achieved an undeniable presence, due to the high level of privileges allowed slaves there in the past.
In the year after the Seattle uprising, there have been attempts to recreate that symbolic victory by assailing meetings by other Alien and slavemaster institutions. This is certainly a welcomed starting point toward challenging the Alien’s hold on our planet, however, getting beyond the starting point either hasn’t occurred to the participants or they are not yet capable of doing so, either in thought or deed.
Which brings up the topic of the shortcomings of the nascent global resistance.
There is no doubt the IDS events like those of 6/18, 11/30 and 9/26 are inspiring more people to challenge Alien authority and to question Alien activity in regards to their effects upon Earth. Unfortunately, even those taking to the streets for these IDS actions are still influenced by media coverage – or more precisely, the lack of media coverage – of these worldwide manifestations of discontent.
What I mean is that too much emphasis is being placed on specific, transitory targets – i.e. conferences – while the dozens upon dozens of solidarity actions around the world receive little attention outside their immediate vicinity. This is as true for the alleged “alternative” and non-commercial media as it is for the Alien-controlled media. No one wants to mention how widespread the opposition actually is. We can expect the Alien media to silence their opposition, but the self-imposed muffling of dissident voices is rather odd.
This can in part be explained due to the fact that this newly-emergent opposition is widespread. So much so that no group or ideology can claim to represent it, not clamorous Trotskyites, Maoist robots, liberal cowards, socialist traitors, nor slave organizations.
Rather than embrace or learn from the more militant factions arising during the IDS, the various slave factions instead find reasons to attack one another as well as the rowdier participants of the IDS for not meeting some or another measurement of ideological purity. This displays – yet again – the important role the loyal slave organizations play in the divide-and-conquer strategy of the Aliens. The discounting of localized actions during IDS shortchanges the movement in its potential for growth or more expansive tactics while placing unnecessary emphasis on participating in the disruption of the targeted conference. Strategically, this is a purely symbolic action to begin with. These organizations have offices worldwide which implement long-term Alien programs everyday. To really have an effect upon Alien activity, the IDS activists should emphasize the disruption of continuous, localized activities of the targeted organizations.
The focus upon traveling to targeted cities has led to the emergence of a jet-set elite of privileged slaves who are desperately trying to control the rebellious spirit of the dissident slaves. Also, it’s clearly evident that many of the same tactics utilized by the Aliens and their lackeys during the last episode of global unrest (1968-’71) are being used again.
As we know from previous experience, during this formative stage of dissident activity, the slavemasters will allow a certain amount of public unrest. This gives them and their Alien overlords a chance to take note of who is participating in the street fighting and place them under closer surveillance. The apparent toleration of public dissent also gives the slavemasters an excuse to resort to harsher methods of control later – done for the sake of protecting the public order.
A word of caution – there is a history of loyal slaves pretending to be rebellious. Though some of these people actually are employed by slavemaster organizations, others are merely interested in becoming upper-echelon slavemasters themselves and will aid the various police organizations in identifying truly rebellious slaves. Dissident slaves who publicly proclaim sympathy or solidarity with the Aliens’ hired thugs should be avoided. So far, this hasn’t been much of a concern, as there is little in the way of concrete challenges to the authority of the slavemasters occurring within the IDS movement.
One has to wonder when the tens -if not hundreds- of thousands of unruly slaves will decide to take actual, effective measures to halt Alien activity. Or whether or not they are even able to do so, either conceptually or in action.
Meanwhile, the more militant rebels are being jailed at an alarming rate. Though this has not yet resulted in a serious depletion in the ranks of IDS participants, the escalation of arrests of and jail sentences for militant dissidents may cost the movement in the long term. Not only in lost comrades, but also in the number of slaves willing to face the consequences of rebellion. Not to mention the cost of legal defense and support for the captives.
In contrast to the futility of IDS events is the much more effective worldwide resistance to Alien plans for modifying life on Earth through genetic engineering. Though some of these actions have been carried out as public acts of destructive solidarity, many more have been done clandestinely. No doubt, there are many more genetic experiments being conducted – in secret and on a small scale – than we are aware of. However, even the slaves conducting the Alien experiments acknowledge that acts of sabotage against test crops has, in some instances, set back their research by as much as a decade.
If the IDS campaigners were to adopt the tactics of the anti-genetix activists, Alien control over the Earth would be in serious jeopardy. To further point out the relative pointlessness of the IDS events, the example of the Earth Liberation Front should be examined and I’ll give a brief account of their activities and organization.
To start off, let’s see how the ELF describes itself, this being a quote from “Resistance: Journal of the North American ELF Press Office.”
“The ELF is an underground, direct action organization that commits acts of economic sabotage against those who profit from the destruction of the natural environment…
“The ELF has no central authority, no public meetings and no mailing list…
“Due to this loose structure, actions could potentially be carried out against anyone who profits from the destruction of the natural environment…
“If we are to actually succeed in preserving all…which keeps us alive…We need to organize and partake in direct actions which defend ourselves from the murderous greed that is destroying our environment and ultimately killing us all.”
Also, from a separate article:
“The ELF does not commit merely symbolic acts to simply gain attention to any particular issues…
“The earth, and all of us born of it, are under attack…
“The only problems I can find with actions like these are that they are not happening frequently enough, and at severe enough levels…That the oppressive system itself isn’t brought to its knees by the people taking direct action and fighting back…”
The author also speculates that this is becoming at least a possibility in the near future and asks, “What other choice do we have?”
Since ’97, while the IDS movement was beginning to grow, the publishers of “Resistance…” have been notified of more than 20 actions which have resulted in over $34 million worth of damage to Gaia’s plunderers. This is quite a remarkable achievement, to be sure, and the emergence of ELF is encouraging.
We all know, however, that not only are the Aliens continuing their life-destroying activities in the regions they control, they are currently moving into new, previously untouched areas such as the mountains of New Guinea and the cloud forests of Columbia. Though the native people there are desperately struggling to halt the Alien intrusion into their homelands, they are receiving little attention and even less support from the dissident slaves in lands under Alien control.
In the war over Columbia, the slavemasters there are using chemical weapons to poison entire regions – the water, the soil, the plants and animals, even free Humans. The poison is being supplied be slavemasters in the U.S.A.
As of yet, there have been no ELF-type resistance to this campaign, or even IDS-type actions, either. Indeed, one must wonder if IDS participants would – even begrudgingly – actually help in the efforts to poison the mountainous forests of Columbia and hunt the free Humans there if their masters commanded them to do so.
With IDS emphasis on recurrent spectacular public events, I am left to speculate about the motivation and level of commitment of IDS activists. Since targets for IDS-type actions are plentiful, most slaves can work one into their master’s schedules and thus not inconvenience their masters and incur their wrath.
After the IDS, many of the participants then return to doing the Aliens’ bidding. As of now, there are only a few slaves willing to shed their chains and risk being labeled as runaway slaves, renegades. And who can blame them? A defiant slave can be held in captivity for years – either encaged in a slave correctional facility or required to regularly report directly to a slavemaster in order to confirm the slave’s continued servitude and even pay a monthly ransom to prevent the slave from being put into a cage.
Once encaged, a slave faces dire circumstances. Not only will the slave be separated from his/her comrades, but also potentially forgotten. Unfortunately for the encaged slave, the more militant – and thus more supportive – comrades at large might be both too busy carrying out more acts of defiance against the slavemasters, or too underground to maintain contact.
The more sheepish among the rest of the slave population will likely be either upset with the encaged slave for “rocking the boat,” or too afraid of unwanted attention from the slavemasters. This leaves the encaged slave with little contact or support from uncaged slaves.
So far, the fear of being caged hasn’t stifled enthusiasm for the IDS movement, much to the credit of the slaves involved.
To conclude, I think it is still too early to commence with actions to openly re-align ourselves, and our enslaved fellow Humans, with Gaia and take her from Alien control. The day to do so may come sooner than we could expect, though, if ELF and anti-genetix types of mass revolt were to arise on a global scale and truly set back efforts by the Aliens for absolute domination of the Earth.
Thanks for your attention, now go back to your efforts on behalf of Gaia.
Progress is a lie used to justify the domination of the world by Europeans and their post-colonial bastard offspring. Global warming, chemical warfare, women and children sold into slavery: it’s all the price of progress. Genocide isn’t a concern of Progress, Progress is only concerned with economics.
Let’s imagine a people living peacefully along the shores of a lake, as their ancestors have done for centuries. Families share garden plots and homes. People hunt and fish. The people are, as a whole, are healthy. No one goes hungry, and their culture of dancing, festivals, folk medicine and sharing encourages everyone to integrate into the community.
This is unacceptable. These people are not generating profits for corporations or banks, nor paying taxes to a government. These people and their land need to be developed. Let’s have a look at these people after a couple of generations of progress.
First of all, disease killed off a great many of them when they first encountered Haoles (Hawaiian for “death breathers”). With liquor and firearms, the developers corrupted a few of the people to help seize lands once held in common by the community. The majority of the people refused to go along with this plan, so the military was brought in to subjugate them.
With military occupation achieved, Progress picked up steam.
A dam was built upstream from the lake, to provide electricity for future development. Water is also diverted from the lake for use by the town that has grown around the military base. A paper and lumber mill once employed some of the people, but when the forest was gone, the mills closed.
The lake is full of mercury and dioxin– by-products of industrial processes. People still eat the fish, which gives them cancer. The land is all owned by former military leaders, who raise cattle on it. Jobs are hard to come by and most people work servicing the military: doing laundry, cooking food, prostituting themselves. The soldiers, in return give the people unwanted children, venereal diseases, liquor and drugs.
This is Progress on a micro level, and this Progress has been repeated over and over again-in the Americas, Africa, Asia, even in Europe. On a larger scale, the lie of Progress is even easier to see. Look at Argentina. Once, it had an economy built around beef production. After the Great Depression, Argentinians were determined to progress into a first world nation, like Canada or Australia. It took them 50 years, but they made it.
Sadly for them, this wasn’t acceptable to global corporate and financial interests. You see, first world nations require a great deal of the world’s natural resources to maintain their affluent lifestyles. There just isn’t enough to share! No, there is only enough for a few first world countries. I don’t know—how bout eight?! So the IMF and World Bank stepped into Argentina and destroyed its economy. Just 10 years ago, Argentina was a prosperous country. Now its economy is all but imaginary, the currency unstable, unemployment is greater than 50 percent and the economy is centered around debt servicing, just like any other third world country. And it’s happening again, in Greece and Romania.
This is Progress: the disempowerment of local people in order to increase the power of global corporations and financial institutions.
“For those in whom a local mythology still works, there is an experience both of accord with the social order, and of harmony with the universe. For those, however, in whom the authorized signs no longer work – or, if working produce deviant effects – there follows inevitably a sense both of dissociation from the local social nexus and of quest within and without, for life, which the brain will take for “meaning”. Coerced into the social pattern, the individual can only harden to some figure of living death; and if any considerable number of the members of a civilization are in this predicament, a point of no return will have passed.”
…Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Vol. 4: Creative Mythology
Mythology, according to the late Joseph Campbell, serves four major purposes:
To reconcile our individual consciousness to the mysteries of life as it is – that is, as it exists without our interpreting it or trying to relate it to our existence;
To make sense of the universe in a context our contemporary minds can grasp;
To enforce the moral order of the society we are born into;
To encourage us as individuals to grow, both inwardly and socially, in a manner that respects our relationships to ourselves, our culture, the greater world around us and the infinite mystery of being.
Leaders of Western Civilization long ago recognized that their mythologies weren’t working. So, they launched a reign of terror to destroy all the forces threatening the ancient order so many emperors, high priests and prophets had so long suffered to create, rather than admit that the world and its many societies, climates and ecosystems could not possibly be crushed into a single, all – encompassing, tightly controlled social entity.
The brutality of these attempts to conquer nature and reduce human existence to soul-destroying drudgery has left us shocked into numbness and psychotically clinging to literal interpretations of Bronze Age mythology that no one back then believed, knowing as they did the cosmological tale-between-the lines that gave these myths meaning at a level unapproachable by factual historic tales.
The only new mythology to have arisen since the bloody death-throes of the ancient religions is grounded in the all-too-human theory of historical progress and its dual doctrines of economic development and scientific knowledge. Too busy chasing after income to experience life, much less reflect on one’s place in the infinite mystery of being, the westernized person is left hollow by the bankruptcy of her society’s spiritual disconnection to the rest of the universe.
“The profession of views that are not one’s own and the living of life according to such views – no matter what the resultant sense of social participation, fulfillment, or even euphoria may be – eventuates inevitably in self-loss and falsification. For in our public roles and conventional beliefs we are – after all! – practically interchangeable. “Out there” we are not ourselves, but at best only what we are expected to be, and at worst what we have got to be.
The intent of the old mythologies to integrate the individual in his group, to imprint on his mind the ideals of that group, to fashion him according to one or another of its orthodox stereotypes, and to convert him thus into an absolutely dependable cliche, has become assumed in the modern world by an increasingly officious array of ostensibly permissive, but actually coercive, demythologized secular institutions.
“A new anxiety in relation to this development is now becoming evident, however; for with the increase, on one hand, of our efficiencies in mass indoctrination and, on the other, of our uniquely modern occidental interest in the fosterage of authentic individuals, there is dawning upon many a new and painful realization of the depth to which the imprints, stereotypes, and archetypes of the social sphere determine our personal sentiments, deeds, thoughts, and even capacities for experience…”
(J.C., ibid.)
When a young person enters the workforce, she is expected to have achieved a state of detachment from the consequences of her actions. Yes, cars cause pollution, but she has to get to work. Fertilizers and pesticides are destroying entire bioregions, but organic food is too expensive or hard to find. And so on.
Older societies and cultures encouraged youth to take inward and actual journeys in order to find their place in the world, not – as our culture does – shut themselves away from themselves and their sense of empathy for and connection to other living entities. In the place of a feeling of at-one-ness, we are given a few limited social roles to perform.
A young man named Kip Kinkel walked into his high school one morning, armed – the day after he’d shot and killed his parents. He opened fire, wounding and killing dozens of his fellow students. Weeping as he surrendered to the police, Kip – when asked why he had done this – could only repeat over and over “I had to, I had no choice.” An awkward, shy boy, Kip’s parents were both educators – his father athletic, his mother scholarly, his sister both. Unable to match his sister’s performance in the classroom and unable to live up to his tennis coach father’s expectations, Kip was continually forced into categorizations he could not fit. And rather than allow Kip the freedom to explore his own potentials, his limitations were continuously exposed. He could not be what his parents tried so patiently to make him. Kip saw two options; to be seen as a complete failure while surrendering his life to other people’s worldviews, or to fight back in self-defense. The many other school-related massacres and the high instance of teenage suicides in the U.S. are indications of how greatly our cultural mythology fails to induce even so much as a perception of meaning to our lives.
A universal myth of earlier societies concerns the questing hero. The hero is caught up in some circumstance which requires a journey, during which she is presented with an array of challenges that she overcomes and leads her to some sort of gift – a magic object or an extra-ordinary revelation- which will bring to her people peace and prosperity.
In our spiritually dead society, such tales are seen as stories of a time long ago lost to us.
To living, dynamic people, however, these stories serve as instructions and preparation for their very own adolescent journey of quest, when an old child ventured into the wilderness for a time and upon returning, would have been transformed into an adult, ready to take her place in the community. This is such a momentous change in the person’s life that she usually takes a new name – a name suggested by her experiences during her wilderness quest. She has experienced the cycle of death and rebirth, like the seasons and the waxing and waning moon.
Human beings have the longest period of childhood of any animal on Earth. This is good in that it provides an ample time to learn and grow, to explore one’s self as well as one’s society and one’s relationship to it. Unfortunately, this lengthy period also provides us with time to flounder, to lose our way and to become disoriented and misinformed about our society, our communities, and ourselves. Indeed, this is the goal of our education system – to indoctrinate us into the belief that the world is progressing from an age of superstition to an age of scientific rationalism. The results of this blind faith in cold machinery and learning which denies inward growth are so profound now that few people are anymore able to turn a blind eye towards them. More people are beginning to doubt the validity of our society’s goals and our roles within it, and still more people are turning away from them altogether.
This is a time of human development that will define us as a species for all time. Will we redefine our lives in such a manner as to regain our place in the organic nature of this splendid, living world, or will we go extinct and take most of our fellow creatures along with us?
“Today the walls and towers of the culture world…are dissolving; and whereas heroes then could set forth of their own free will from the known to the unknown, we today, willy-nilly, must enter the forest…and, like it or not, the pathless way is the only way now before us…
“In this life -creative adventure the criterion of achievement will be, the courage to let go of the past, with its truths, its goals, its dogmas of “meaning,” and its gifts: to die to the world and to come to birth from within…
“Thus, creative mythology does not come from authority (like theology)…but from the insights, sentiments, thought and vision of an adequate individual…it corrects the authority…left behind by lives once lived…it restores to existence the quality of adventure …that is no thing but life, not as it will be, or as it should be, as it was or as it never will be, but as it is – in depth, in process – here and now.”
(J.C., ibid.)
The colonies are self-destructing – it's a scorched earth policy, a war of attrition, so the survivors are left with NOTHING!
![Prescott Bush, the father of GHW Bush, later wrote Clover Dulles, the widow of Allen Dulles, in 1969, about his meeting with Allen Dulles after JFK had canned him in fall, 1961. "He [Allen] tried to make a pleasant evening of it, but I was rather sick of heart, and angry too, for it was the Kennedys that brought about the fiasco [Bay of Pigs]. And here they were making Allen to be the goat, which he wasn't and did not deserve. I have never forgiven them." Note the last sentence of Prescott Bush. His son George Herbert Walker Bush says he can't remember where he was on the day of the JFK assassination, despite his being a US Senate candidate staying in the Dallas, TX Sheraton the night of 11/21/63 and being in Dallas on 11/22/63. GHW Bush helped plan the Bay of Pigs invasion and I think he was involved in the JFK assassination.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170317063547im_/https://roblosricos.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/bushjfkbookdepo2.jpg?w=474)
I must emphasize that, meanwhile, the American people were kept in the dark about the policy and its effects, at every point in the chain: from the formulation of the policy to its implementation to the phony packaging of the policy for mass consumption. In fact, we only know about it, today, thanks to a courageous journalist named Gary Webb, who published a groundbreaking series of articles in 1996 in the San Jose Mercury News, exposing Contra links and CIA complicity in the crack cocaine epidemic that ravaged the black communities of Los Angeles in the 1980s. The series, appropriately titled “Dark Alliance”, was one of the first big stories to be carried on the Internet; and later, Webb expanded it into an important book by the same name, in which he lays out the voluminous evidence in stark detail. But it was Webb’s series of articles in 1996 that initially focused media attention on the drug issue; and which compelled CIA director John Deutch to announce an internal investigation. Meanwhile, the agency simultaneously launched a disinformation campaign to discredit Webb, whom it viewed as a serious threat.
This lack of quality and tactical control greatly increases the impact of the third major problem: the United States is held responsible for everything the contractors do or fail to do. Despite the fact the United States has no effective quality or operational control over the contractors, the local population rightly holds it responsible for all contractor failures.
but, just as the banksters are allowed to launder drug cartel billions, while a teenager smoking a joint in his bedroom could be sent to prison for possessing the products the cartels provide, the rich are allowed to do anything – pollute the land and sea, and kill everything and everyone in the way; 
Two days after receiving the write-up, we were called to a disciplinary hearing. After discussing the issue with me, the hearings officer told me, “I find you guilty of continuing to be involved in the anarchist movement”.
destructive solidarity, many more have been done clandestinely. No doubt, there are many more genetic experiments being conducted – in secret and on a small scale – than we are aware of. However, even the slaves conducting the Alien experiments acknowledge that acts of sabotage against test crops has, in some instances, set back their research by as much as a decade.
“For those in whom a local mythology still works, there is an experience both of accord with the social order, and of harmony with the universe. For those, however, in whom the authorized signs no longer work – or, if working produce deviant effects – there follows inevitably a sense both of dissociation from the local social nexus and of quest within and without, for life, which the brain will take for “meaning”. Coerced into the social pattern, the individual can only harden to some figure of living death; and if any considerable number of the members of a civilization are in this predicament, a point of no return will have passed.”
