Howard Zinn has died.
Video: A People's History of American Empire by Howard Zinn: on U.S. imperialism, ethnic cleansing, manifest destiny, invasion of Cuba, Phillipines, “this was no passive foreign policy but a series of violent interventions.”
28 January, 2010
25 January, 2010
The Drone Surge: Today, Tomorrow and 2047
by Nick Turse
One moment there was the hum of a motor in the sky above. The next, on a recent morning in Afghanistan's Helmand province, a missile blasted a home, killing 13 people. Days later, the same increasingly familiar mechanical whine preceded a two-missile salvo that slammed into a compound in Degan village in the tribal North Waziristan district of Pakistan, killing three.
What were once unacknowledged, relatively infrequent targeted killings of suspected militants or terrorists in the Bush years have become commonplace under the Obama administration. And since a devastating December 30th suicide attack by a Jordanian double agent on a CIA forward operating base in Afghanistan, unmanned aerial drones have been hunting humans in the Af-Pak war zone at a record pace. In Pakistan, an "unprecedented number" of strikes -- which have killed armed guerrillas and civilians alike -- have led to more fear, anger, and outrage in the tribal areas, as the CIA, with help from the U.S. Air Force, wages the most public "secret" war of modern times.
In neighboring Afghanistan, unmanned aircraft, for years in short supply and tasked primarily with surveillance missions, have increasingly been used to assassinate suspected militants as part of an aerial surge that has significantly outpaced the highly publicized "surge" of ground forces now underway. And yet, unprecedented as it may be in size and scope, the present ramping up of the drone war is only the opening salvo in a planned 40-year Pentagon surge to create fleets of ultra-advanced, heavily-armed, increasingly autonomous, all-seeing, hypersonic unmanned aerial systems (UAS).
Today's Surge
Drones are the hot weapons of the moment and the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review -- a soon-to-be-released four-year outline of Department of Defense strategies, capabilities, and priorities to fight current wars and counter future threats -- is already known to reflect this focus. As the Washington Post recently reported, "The pilotless drones used for surveillance and attack missions in Afghanistan and Pakistan are a priority, with the goals of speeding up the purchase of new Reaper drones and expanding Predator and Reaper drone flights through 2013."
The MQ-1 Predator -- first used in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s -- and its newer, larger, and more deadly cousin, the MQ-9 Reaper, are now firing missiles and dropping bombs at an unprecedented pace. In 2008, there were reportedly between 27 and 36 U.S. drone attacks as part of the CIA's covert war in Pakistan. In 2009, there were 45 to 53 such strikes. In the first 18 days of January 2010, there had already been 11 of them.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the U.S. Air Force has instituted a much publicized decrease in piloted air strikes to cut down on civilian casualties as part of Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy. At the same time, however, UAS attacks have increased to record levels.
The Air Force has created an interconnected global command-and-control system to carry out its robot war in Afghanistan (and as Noah Shachtman of Wired's Danger Room blog has reported, to assist the CIA in its drone strikes in Pakistan as well). Evidence of this can be found at high-tech U.S. bases around the world where drone pilots and other personnel control the planes themselves and the data streaming back from them. These sites include a converted medical warehouse at Al-Udeid Air Base, a billion-dollar facility in the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar where the Air Force secretly oversees its on-going drone wars; Kandahar and Jalalabad Air Fields in Afghanistan, where the drones are physically based; the global operations center at Nevada's Creech Air Base, where the Air Force's "pilots" fly drones by remote control from thousands of miles away; and -- perhaps most importantly -- at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, a 12-square-mile facility in Dayton, Ohio, named after the two local brothers who invented powered flight in 1903. This is where the bills for the current drone surge -- as well as limited numbers of strikes in Yemen and Somalia -- come due and are, quite literally, paid.
In the waning days of December 2009, in fact, the Pentagon cut two sizeable checks to ensure that unmanned operations involving the MQ-1 Predator and the MQ-9 Reaper will continue full-speed ahead in 2010. The 703rd Aeronautical Systems Squadron based at Wright-Patterson signed a $38 million contract with defense giant Raytheon for logistics support for the targeting systems of both drones. At the same time, the squadron inked a deal worth $266 million with mega-defense contractor General Atomics, which makes the Predator and Reaper drones, to provide management services, logistics support, repairs, software maintenance, and other functions for both drone programs. Both deals essentially ensure that, in the years ahead, the stunning increase in drone operations will continue.
These contracts, however, only initial down payments on an enduring drone surge designed to carry U.S. unmanned aerial operations forward, ultimately for decades.
Drone Surge: The Longer View
Back in 2004, the Air Force could put a total of only five drone combat air patrols (CAPs) -- each consisting of four air vehicles -- in the skies over American war zones at any one time. By 2009, that number was 38, a 660% increase according to the Air Force. Similarly, between 2001 and 2008, hours of surveillance coverage for U.S. Central Command, encompassing both the Iraqi and Afghan war zones, as well as Pakistan and Yemen, showed a massive spike of 1,431%.
In the meantime, flight hours have gone through the roof. In 2004, for example, Reapers, just beginning to soar, flew 71 hours in total, according to Air Force documents; in 2006, that number had risen to 3,123 hours; and last year, 25,391 hours. This year, the Air Force projects that the combined flight hours of all its drones -- Predators, Reapers, and unarmed RQ-4 Global Hawks -- will exceed 250,000 hours, about the total number of hours flown by all Air Force drones from 1995-2007. In 2011, the 300,000 hour-a-year barrier is expected to be crossed for the first time, and after that the sky's the limit.
More flight time will, undoubtedly, mean more killing. According to Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann of the Washington-based think tank the New America Foundation, in the Bush years, from 2006 into 2009, there were 41 drone strikes in Pakistan which killed 454 militants and civilians. Last year, under the Obama administration, there were 42 strikes that left 453 people dead. A recent report by the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies, an Islamabad-based independent research organization that tracks security issues, claimed an even larger number, 667 people -- most of them civilians -- killed by U.S. drone strikes last year.
Continue reading at
http://www.truthout.org/nick-turse-the-drone-surge-today-tomorrow-and-204756350
One moment there was the hum of a motor in the sky above. The next, on a recent morning in Afghanistan's Helmand province, a missile blasted a home, killing 13 people. Days later, the same increasingly familiar mechanical whine preceded a two-missile salvo that slammed into a compound in Degan village in the tribal North Waziristan district of Pakistan, killing three.
What were once unacknowledged, relatively infrequent targeted killings of suspected militants or terrorists in the Bush years have become commonplace under the Obama administration. And since a devastating December 30th suicide attack by a Jordanian double agent on a CIA forward operating base in Afghanistan, unmanned aerial drones have been hunting humans in the Af-Pak war zone at a record pace. In Pakistan, an "unprecedented number" of strikes -- which have killed armed guerrillas and civilians alike -- have led to more fear, anger, and outrage in the tribal areas, as the CIA, with help from the U.S. Air Force, wages the most public "secret" war of modern times.
In neighboring Afghanistan, unmanned aircraft, for years in short supply and tasked primarily with surveillance missions, have increasingly been used to assassinate suspected militants as part of an aerial surge that has significantly outpaced the highly publicized "surge" of ground forces now underway. And yet, unprecedented as it may be in size and scope, the present ramping up of the drone war is only the opening salvo in a planned 40-year Pentagon surge to create fleets of ultra-advanced, heavily-armed, increasingly autonomous, all-seeing, hypersonic unmanned aerial systems (UAS).
Today's Surge
Drones are the hot weapons of the moment and the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review -- a soon-to-be-released four-year outline of Department of Defense strategies, capabilities, and priorities to fight current wars and counter future threats -- is already known to reflect this focus. As the Washington Post recently reported, "The pilotless drones used for surveillance and attack missions in Afghanistan and Pakistan are a priority, with the goals of speeding up the purchase of new Reaper drones and expanding Predator and Reaper drone flights through 2013."
The MQ-1 Predator -- first used in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s -- and its newer, larger, and more deadly cousin, the MQ-9 Reaper, are now firing missiles and dropping bombs at an unprecedented pace. In 2008, there were reportedly between 27 and 36 U.S. drone attacks as part of the CIA's covert war in Pakistan. In 2009, there were 45 to 53 such strikes. In the first 18 days of January 2010, there had already been 11 of them.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the U.S. Air Force has instituted a much publicized decrease in piloted air strikes to cut down on civilian casualties as part of Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy. At the same time, however, UAS attacks have increased to record levels.
The Air Force has created an interconnected global command-and-control system to carry out its robot war in Afghanistan (and as Noah Shachtman of Wired's Danger Room blog has reported, to assist the CIA in its drone strikes in Pakistan as well). Evidence of this can be found at high-tech U.S. bases around the world where drone pilots and other personnel control the planes themselves and the data streaming back from them. These sites include a converted medical warehouse at Al-Udeid Air Base, a billion-dollar facility in the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar where the Air Force secretly oversees its on-going drone wars; Kandahar and Jalalabad Air Fields in Afghanistan, where the drones are physically based; the global operations center at Nevada's Creech Air Base, where the Air Force's "pilots" fly drones by remote control from thousands of miles away; and -- perhaps most importantly -- at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, a 12-square-mile facility in Dayton, Ohio, named after the two local brothers who invented powered flight in 1903. This is where the bills for the current drone surge -- as well as limited numbers of strikes in Yemen and Somalia -- come due and are, quite literally, paid.
In the waning days of December 2009, in fact, the Pentagon cut two sizeable checks to ensure that unmanned operations involving the MQ-1 Predator and the MQ-9 Reaper will continue full-speed ahead in 2010. The 703rd Aeronautical Systems Squadron based at Wright-Patterson signed a $38 million contract with defense giant Raytheon for logistics support for the targeting systems of both drones. At the same time, the squadron inked a deal worth $266 million with mega-defense contractor General Atomics, which makes the Predator and Reaper drones, to provide management services, logistics support, repairs, software maintenance, and other functions for both drone programs. Both deals essentially ensure that, in the years ahead, the stunning increase in drone operations will continue.
These contracts, however, only initial down payments on an enduring drone surge designed to carry U.S. unmanned aerial operations forward, ultimately for decades.
Drone Surge: The Longer View
Back in 2004, the Air Force could put a total of only five drone combat air patrols (CAPs) -- each consisting of four air vehicles -- in the skies over American war zones at any one time. By 2009, that number was 38, a 660% increase according to the Air Force. Similarly, between 2001 and 2008, hours of surveillance coverage for U.S. Central Command, encompassing both the Iraqi and Afghan war zones, as well as Pakistan and Yemen, showed a massive spike of 1,431%.
In the meantime, flight hours have gone through the roof. In 2004, for example, Reapers, just beginning to soar, flew 71 hours in total, according to Air Force documents; in 2006, that number had risen to 3,123 hours; and last year, 25,391 hours. This year, the Air Force projects that the combined flight hours of all its drones -- Predators, Reapers, and unarmed RQ-4 Global Hawks -- will exceed 250,000 hours, about the total number of hours flown by all Air Force drones from 1995-2007. In 2011, the 300,000 hour-a-year barrier is expected to be crossed for the first time, and after that the sky's the limit.
More flight time will, undoubtedly, mean more killing. According to Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann of the Washington-based think tank the New America Foundation, in the Bush years, from 2006 into 2009, there were 41 drone strikes in Pakistan which killed 454 militants and civilians. Last year, under the Obama administration, there were 42 strikes that left 453 people dead. A recent report by the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies, an Islamabad-based independent research organization that tracks security issues, claimed an even larger number, 667 people -- most of them civilians -- killed by U.S. drone strikes last year.
Continue reading at
http://www.truthout.org/nick-turse-the-drone-surge-today-tomorrow-and-204756350
I Don't Even Want To Be Alive Anymore
Opinion – The Onion
I Don't Even Want To Be Alive Anymore
BY RUSH LIMBAUGH
http://www.theonion.com/content/opinion/i_dont_even_want_to_be_alive
I know there are a lot of people out there who are upset about some of the things I've been saying on my radio program lately. My comments about the situation in Haiti have hurt and angered many Americans who genuinely care about the plight of the Haitian people, and that hurt and anger will likely never go away. Many of you are probably wondering, "What would compel a human being to say things like that?" Well, here's your answer: I am a very bad person. And, to tell you the truth, I don't really want to be alive anymore.
Try to look at it from my point of view. I have no reason to live. In my 59 years, I've made millions of dollars, built a veritable media empire, and accomplished virtually everything that a man of my limited imagination and worldview could possibly accomplish. And yet, at this point, in no way could you refer to what I'm doing as "living," exactly. I just sort of exist. I derive no real pleasure from life. Oh, sure, I talk a big game about what a golf nut I am and how much I enjoy the taste of a fine cigar, but it's all horseshit. Complete and utter horseshit.
I don't enjoy that stuff. I don't enjoy anything. I don't even want to be here. The sadness and regret I feel every waking hour of my life is absolutely unbearable. I am a miserable pig and I do not want to exist.
The irony is that, even if I did die, the hell I would surely be sent to could not possibly be any worse than the bottomless pool of excrement I already paddle around in like some demented, shit-covered walrus. In fact, every time I hear my voice coming through the headphones I nearly gag, and I think, "What the fuck am I doing?" Why would I say that Michael J. Fox is faking his Parkinson's symptoms? Why would I find it funny to play a song called "Barack the Magic Negro"? Why would I tell people not to give aid to Haiti?
What the fuck is wrong with me?
I live in constant terror and that terror informs my every word, thought, and action.
See, the thing is, I honestly cannot control the bilious hatred and filth that oozes out of my mouth. I want to—believe me, I want to—but I can't. And every time I speak, a tiny voice inside my head is screaming, "Stop talking, you stupid, insensitive prick. JUST STOP FUCKING TALKING. All you do is spread hate and fear, and the world would be a better place without you, you worthless, amoral, cocksucking fuckface."
What I should really do is just commit suicide. I have this little Sunday ritual I started around the time I publicly compared the torture at Abu Ghraib to a fraternity prank, where I climb into my Jacuzzi and put a gun in my mouth. But I can never work up the guts to pull the trigger. A few times I came close to overdosing on prescription pain pills, but my goddamn doctors were always there to save me. If I had any sense, I would just hole myself up in a Red Roof Inn with a case of Jack Daniel's and slowly drink myself into the gaping maw of death itself.
But what can I say? I guess I'm just too much of a fat fucking pussy to follow through.
You know what? I wish someone would just kill me. I'm serious. Yeah, yeah, I know what you're thinking: "Oh my God, how can you say such a thing? You can't print that in a newspaper!" But see, I don't care anymore. I've cried my tears. I've battled my demons, and I've lost. It's over. It's all over. The only thing left for me to do now is just go away. Have I even once contributed a single ounce of good to humanity? Put me out of my misery. I wouldn't make a fuss. I wouldn't even humiliate myself by saying goodbye. For the first time in my odious, pitiful life, I'd accept my fate with quiet dignity.
Then I wouldn't have to live with my wretched, wretched self. Oh, the release.
I've imagined my death a thousand times over, and it's always the same. In my mind's eye, a serene setting comes into view. I see a funeral procession driving down some small-town Main Street in Nowheresville, U.S.A. On one side of the street, a collection of sycophants and morons are paying their respects in subliterate, sanctimonious tones. Meanwhile, on the other side of the street, I can just make out the faint image of a young boy, his brow furrowed in confusion, clutching the hand of his father. "Who is that man, Daddy?" he asks as the hearse containing my bloated, lifeless body rolls by. "Who is that person they speak of?" The father will then lower his head and say, "There, my son, go the remains of Rush Hudson Limbaugh, the most abominable lump of festering dog shit in the history of American broadcasting. May the likes of him never again soil or tarnish the greatness of our fair country."
Please forgive me, everyone. I am so sorry.
I Don't Even Want To Be Alive Anymore
BY RUSH LIMBAUGH
http://www.theonion.com/content/opinion/i_dont_even_want_to_be_alive
I know there are a lot of people out there who are upset about some of the things I've been saying on my radio program lately. My comments about the situation in Haiti have hurt and angered many Americans who genuinely care about the plight of the Haitian people, and that hurt and anger will likely never go away. Many of you are probably wondering, "What would compel a human being to say things like that?" Well, here's your answer: I am a very bad person. And, to tell you the truth, I don't really want to be alive anymore.
Try to look at it from my point of view. I have no reason to live. In my 59 years, I've made millions of dollars, built a veritable media empire, and accomplished virtually everything that a man of my limited imagination and worldview could possibly accomplish. And yet, at this point, in no way could you refer to what I'm doing as "living," exactly. I just sort of exist. I derive no real pleasure from life. Oh, sure, I talk a big game about what a golf nut I am and how much I enjoy the taste of a fine cigar, but it's all horseshit. Complete and utter horseshit.
I don't enjoy that stuff. I don't enjoy anything. I don't even want to be here. The sadness and regret I feel every waking hour of my life is absolutely unbearable. I am a miserable pig and I do not want to exist.
The irony is that, even if I did die, the hell I would surely be sent to could not possibly be any worse than the bottomless pool of excrement I already paddle around in like some demented, shit-covered walrus. In fact, every time I hear my voice coming through the headphones I nearly gag, and I think, "What the fuck am I doing?" Why would I say that Michael J. Fox is faking his Parkinson's symptoms? Why would I find it funny to play a song called "Barack the Magic Negro"? Why would I tell people not to give aid to Haiti?
What the fuck is wrong with me?
I live in constant terror and that terror informs my every word, thought, and action.
See, the thing is, I honestly cannot control the bilious hatred and filth that oozes out of my mouth. I want to—believe me, I want to—but I can't. And every time I speak, a tiny voice inside my head is screaming, "Stop talking, you stupid, insensitive prick. JUST STOP FUCKING TALKING. All you do is spread hate and fear, and the world would be a better place without you, you worthless, amoral, cocksucking fuckface."
What I should really do is just commit suicide. I have this little Sunday ritual I started around the time I publicly compared the torture at Abu Ghraib to a fraternity prank, where I climb into my Jacuzzi and put a gun in my mouth. But I can never work up the guts to pull the trigger. A few times I came close to overdosing on prescription pain pills, but my goddamn doctors were always there to save me. If I had any sense, I would just hole myself up in a Red Roof Inn with a case of Jack Daniel's and slowly drink myself into the gaping maw of death itself.
But what can I say? I guess I'm just too much of a fat fucking pussy to follow through.
You know what? I wish someone would just kill me. I'm serious. Yeah, yeah, I know what you're thinking: "Oh my God, how can you say such a thing? You can't print that in a newspaper!" But see, I don't care anymore. I've cried my tears. I've battled my demons, and I've lost. It's over. It's all over. The only thing left for me to do now is just go away. Have I even once contributed a single ounce of good to humanity? Put me out of my misery. I wouldn't make a fuss. I wouldn't even humiliate myself by saying goodbye. For the first time in my odious, pitiful life, I'd accept my fate with quiet dignity.
Then I wouldn't have to live with my wretched, wretched self. Oh, the release.
I've imagined my death a thousand times over, and it's always the same. In my mind's eye, a serene setting comes into view. I see a funeral procession driving down some small-town Main Street in Nowheresville, U.S.A. On one side of the street, a collection of sycophants and morons are paying their respects in subliterate, sanctimonious tones. Meanwhile, on the other side of the street, I can just make out the faint image of a young boy, his brow furrowed in confusion, clutching the hand of his father. "Who is that man, Daddy?" he asks as the hearse containing my bloated, lifeless body rolls by. "Who is that person they speak of?" The father will then lower his head and say, "There, my son, go the remains of Rush Hudson Limbaugh, the most abominable lump of festering dog shit in the history of American broadcasting. May the likes of him never again soil or tarnish the greatness of our fair country."
Please forgive me, everyone. I am so sorry.
20 January, 2010
Mysterious friend calls Obama out
by Don Williams
Don Williams is a syndicated columnist. He may be reached at:
http://www.mach2.com/williams/synd.php
My flamboyant friend came running fast round the bend in tie-dyed t-shirt, yellow shorts and red shoes. He jogged up on my front porch and started pacing as he pulled a little plastic bag from his shorts, drew out a roll-your-own and pack of paper matches, then lit up. If there was a human being more conflicted than I, here he stood.
So what do you make of it? he gasped amid clouds of smoke.
"What?"
Year One. Obama's been president a solid year and I'm wondering what you think?
"I'm of two minds."
Duh. That's why I'm here. To help you sort it out.
"You read my columns. I'm a guarded supporter. Cautiously optimistic."
Kind of like the orchestra on the Titanic? Serenading us all with that rot about how Obama's doing the best he can. Look at the hand he was dealt. We could all be standing in bread lines by now. How sending 30,000 troops into Afghanistan is his way of getting out dontcha know? How he'll shut down Guantanimo eventually and that any healthcare reform's better than no reform. Just be patient, we've a framework in place for halting global warming one of these days... Yada yada yada.
He emitted smoke rings with his words.
"Are you copping an attitude?"
My, how perceptive we are. Tell me one thing, Oh Scribe. How much longer will your sort of rot wash? We're in Year Two, and if you ask me, Obama's morphing into a Bush-Cheney third term.
"So what would you suggest he do?"
I'd urge him to fight every battle for righteousness' sake.
"Say what?"
Hey, I was raised Southern Baptist, believe it or not. I lay things out in black and white when I get excited. Obama shoulda been the righteous one and gave 'em hell.
"Specifically?"
For starters, he should've leveled with the American public and told us some cold, hard truths.
"Such as?"
Number One, that he was turning away from his predecessors in a very clear way, because they were war criminals and science deniers in the service of Big Oil, the arms merchants and the military industrial complex. He should've acknowledged that our invasion, occupation and bombing of Iraq was based on a pack of lies. He should've told the truth about Curveball, Chalabi and al-Libi, just to name three of the criminals our secret forces either bribed or tortured into telling most of the lies Dick Cheney used to make a phony case for war. You know, all that crap about how Saddam was giving nukes to terrorists and training them in anthrax and so on that made it into all those speeches in 2002 and 2003. And he shoulda told us that 9/11 was in part blowback for failed policies in Afghanistan going back a quarter century. Obama should not have swept that stuff under a rug.
"I'm listening," I said as my friend hot-boxed his smoke so that glowed fiercely. It was clear he was only warming up.
He should've apologized to the world for America's role in the deaths of maybe a million Iraqis, the displacement of 5 million others, the emotional and psychic trauma of 14 million more, and he should've appointed a special prosecutor to hold anyone accountable who knowingly propagated a phony whatsit, you know, casus belli, for starting the war or engaging in torture, and if it led to George W. Bush or Dick Cheney, so be it. He coulda started that ball rolling Week One. Don't you hear what I'm sayin'? Obama shoulda been the one who set things right.
"Get real. We would've had rioting in the streets."
Yeah? Instead we had rioting in town halls.
"OK, keep on."
He should've announced we're not bailing out any more banks or Wall Street firms and car companies, rather that he was earmarking a trillion dollars to subsidize upside-down mortgages that would keep worthy people in their homes and refinance banks honestly, from the bottom up, then build a green-friendly energy grid that would employ a million people and break our addiction to oil. He could've announced that Week Two.
"And Week Three?"
Lay out the truth about the great American healthcare rip-off. Put doctors, pharmaceutical companies and insurance firms on notice that he's appointing a panel of actual scientists and doctors to thoroughly assess the healthcare systems of the planet's 50 leading democracies and we're going to pick the three that work best to model ours on, so your Sister Rebecca and my Uncle Frank get the dignified healthcare they deserve.
"Ok, I get your drift."
No, I'm just getting started. I'd have him use his executive authority or whatever arm-twisting pertained in Congress to halt mountaintop removal, depleted uranium, outrageous usury, shut down any plans to build new nukes, and aggressively prosecute anyone in violation of the Clean Air Act.
"And if the economy tanked and Obama went down?"
At least we'd know he stood up.
Don Williams is a prize-winning columnist, short story writer, freelancer, and the founding editor and publisher of New Millennium Writings, an annual anthology of stories, essays and poems. His awards include a National Endowment for the Humanities Michigan Journalism Fellowship, a Golden Presscard Award and the Malcolm Law Journalism Prize. He just finished a novel, "Oracle of the Orchid Lounge," set in his native Tennessee. Publishers or agents may inquire via email. His book of selected journalism, "Heroes, Sheroes and Zeroes, the Best Writings About People" by Don Williams, is due a second printing. For more information, email donwilliams7@charter.net. Or visit the NMW website at www.NewMillenniumWritings.com. In 2007, he gave up his weekly column at the Knoxville News-Sentinel rather than see it cut back to every-other-week by his editors who endorsed Bush-Cheney.
If you'd like to support this column with a donation, please visit... https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=8466358
Don Williams is a syndicated columnist. He may be reached at:
http://www.mach2.com/williams/synd.php
My flamboyant friend came running fast round the bend in tie-dyed t-shirt, yellow shorts and red shoes. He jogged up on my front porch and started pacing as he pulled a little plastic bag from his shorts, drew out a roll-your-own and pack of paper matches, then lit up. If there was a human being more conflicted than I, here he stood.
So what do you make of it? he gasped amid clouds of smoke.
"What?"
Year One. Obama's been president a solid year and I'm wondering what you think?
"I'm of two minds."
Duh. That's why I'm here. To help you sort it out.
"You read my columns. I'm a guarded supporter. Cautiously optimistic."
Kind of like the orchestra on the Titanic? Serenading us all with that rot about how Obama's doing the best he can. Look at the hand he was dealt. We could all be standing in bread lines by now. How sending 30,000 troops into Afghanistan is his way of getting out dontcha know? How he'll shut down Guantanimo eventually and that any healthcare reform's better than no reform. Just be patient, we've a framework in place for halting global warming one of these days... Yada yada yada.
He emitted smoke rings with his words.
"Are you copping an attitude?"
My, how perceptive we are. Tell me one thing, Oh Scribe. How much longer will your sort of rot wash? We're in Year Two, and if you ask me, Obama's morphing into a Bush-Cheney third term.
"So what would you suggest he do?"
I'd urge him to fight every battle for righteousness' sake.
"Say what?"
Hey, I was raised Southern Baptist, believe it or not. I lay things out in black and white when I get excited. Obama shoulda been the righteous one and gave 'em hell.
"Specifically?"
For starters, he should've leveled with the American public and told us some cold, hard truths.
"Such as?"
Number One, that he was turning away from his predecessors in a very clear way, because they were war criminals and science deniers in the service of Big Oil, the arms merchants and the military industrial complex. He should've acknowledged that our invasion, occupation and bombing of Iraq was based on a pack of lies. He should've told the truth about Curveball, Chalabi and al-Libi, just to name three of the criminals our secret forces either bribed or tortured into telling most of the lies Dick Cheney used to make a phony case for war. You know, all that crap about how Saddam was giving nukes to terrorists and training them in anthrax and so on that made it into all those speeches in 2002 and 2003. And he shoulda told us that 9/11 was in part blowback for failed policies in Afghanistan going back a quarter century. Obama should not have swept that stuff under a rug.
"I'm listening," I said as my friend hot-boxed his smoke so that glowed fiercely. It was clear he was only warming up.
He should've apologized to the world for America's role in the deaths of maybe a million Iraqis, the displacement of 5 million others, the emotional and psychic trauma of 14 million more, and he should've appointed a special prosecutor to hold anyone accountable who knowingly propagated a phony whatsit, you know, casus belli, for starting the war or engaging in torture, and if it led to George W. Bush or Dick Cheney, so be it. He coulda started that ball rolling Week One. Don't you hear what I'm sayin'? Obama shoulda been the one who set things right.
"Get real. We would've had rioting in the streets."
Yeah? Instead we had rioting in town halls.
"OK, keep on."
He should've announced we're not bailing out any more banks or Wall Street firms and car companies, rather that he was earmarking a trillion dollars to subsidize upside-down mortgages that would keep worthy people in their homes and refinance banks honestly, from the bottom up, then build a green-friendly energy grid that would employ a million people and break our addiction to oil. He could've announced that Week Two.
"And Week Three?"
Lay out the truth about the great American healthcare rip-off. Put doctors, pharmaceutical companies and insurance firms on notice that he's appointing a panel of actual scientists and doctors to thoroughly assess the healthcare systems of the planet's 50 leading democracies and we're going to pick the three that work best to model ours on, so your Sister Rebecca and my Uncle Frank get the dignified healthcare they deserve.
"Ok, I get your drift."
No, I'm just getting started. I'd have him use his executive authority or whatever arm-twisting pertained in Congress to halt mountaintop removal, depleted uranium, outrageous usury, shut down any plans to build new nukes, and aggressively prosecute anyone in violation of the Clean Air Act.
"And if the economy tanked and Obama went down?"
At least we'd know he stood up.
Don Williams is a prize-winning columnist, short story writer, freelancer, and the founding editor and publisher of New Millennium Writings, an annual anthology of stories, essays and poems. His awards include a National Endowment for the Humanities Michigan Journalism Fellowship, a Golden Presscard Award and the Malcolm Law Journalism Prize. He just finished a novel, "Oracle of the Orchid Lounge," set in his native Tennessee. Publishers or agents may inquire via email. His book of selected journalism, "Heroes, Sheroes and Zeroes, the Best Writings About People" by Don Williams, is due a second printing. For more information, email donwilliams7@charter.net. Or visit the NMW website at www.NewMillenniumWritings.com. In 2007, he gave up his weekly column at the Knoxville News-Sentinel rather than see it cut back to every-other-week by his editors who endorsed Bush-Cheney.
If you'd like to support this column with a donation, please visit... https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=8466358
15 January, 2010
Pat Robertson Blames Haitian Victims
Pat Robertson's Racist Blaming of Haitian Victims; and the Televangelist Misuse of History
By Juan Cole
And you know Christy, something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, uh you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True Story, and so the Devil said OK it's a deal. And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since they've been cursed by one thing after the other desperately poor. That island is Hispaniola is one island. It's cut down the middle. On one side is Haiti on the other side is the Dominican republic. Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etc.. Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island.
It is of course morally despicable for Robertson to blame a horrific earthquake on the supposed misdeeds of the distant ancestors of the current victims! But then, he blamed the September 11 atrocity on the United States, as well. I have nothing against evangelicals in general, and I know that televangelists are peculiar in typically not being under any church authority and so they can hold very strange views. But the Robertson type of evangelicalism strikes me as a social pathology that is actively evil and damaging to rational ethical thinking in our republic.
So what in the world is Pat Robertson talking about? Presumably he is referring to the Haitian Revolution of the 1790s through independence in 1804. The latter part of the revolution was against Napoleon Bonaparte, not against his nephew Napoleon III (r. as emperor 1852-1870). So Robertson was off by a mere 50 or 60 years.
As Charles Tilly pointed out, all revolutions are multiple revolutions. The Rights of Man were declared by the French Convention in 1789. Thomas Jefferson and other US Founding Fathers were delighted about this, by the way. Initially it was the mixed-race free mulattoes who agitated to have the Rights of Man applied to them in Haiti. But then slave revolts broke out and by 1794 the French legislature had abolished slavery in French overseas territories. So you had urbane, French-speaking free persons of color demanding inclusion in the new liberties proclaimed by the French Republic. But you also had slave revolts, in which newly-arrived slaves from West Africa (places such as what is now Benin) participated--though the organization was probably supplied by longer-established slaves. The newly-arrived slaves had after all been free Africans not so long ago. Despite the efforts of French orders such as the Dominicans and Capuchins, many slaves had still not become Christians or wore their Christianity very lightly. Some proportion of the slaves was Muslim, and some historians have suggested that previous slave revolts were led by Muslims. Over time, Muslim Africans were forcibly converted to Catholicism.
So some of the slave revolts invoked African religion against white French colonial power. What many now call voodoo or voudoun is a Haitian version of religious traditions roughly from what is now Benin, Togo, Nigeria and the Congo. The word just means spirit. The African slave religious traditions were expressed in Creole or Kreyole, based on Kwa dialects but incorporating elements of French.
[…]
So Robertson's account sees the assertion of African religion in 1791 against slaving Christianity as a 'pact with the devil' that then led Haiti to be cursed ever after. But even in his own terms, how does he account for the multiple steps by subsequent Haitian states reinstating privileges for Christianity? Even if he does not count Catholicism as Christianity, what about the fact that about a quarter of Haitians are now evangelical Protestants? Didn't the earthquake hit them? And, why is West Africa where the initial African version of voudoun originated and is still practiced by a minority, among the least earthquake-prone regions in the world?
Ultimately, Robertson's version of Haitian history as cursed replicates the old racist anti-Black 'curse of Ham' theme in White American popular religion. Is he saying that Haitians had less right to revolt against European colonialism than did white Americans? (Only about 16% of colonial-era Americans belonged to a church, so it isn't as if they were more pious). And, ultimately, his account fails to deal with the sins of slavery and racism in which Southern US Christian traditions-- Baptism, evangelicalism, etc., were deeply implicated. There is a Southern Baptist church to this day, almost all-white, precisely because it split from the national organization to protect the enslavement of African-Americans.
Evil and the devil are tricky. Robertson projected them on a revolt of African slaves asserting their African traditions against oppressive white colonial society. But they lurk in the traditions of his 700 Club, in the exaltation of irrationality, in blaming the victim, in a subtext of racism, and in a failure to repent for White Christian enslavement of Africans for centuries.
By Juan Cole
And you know Christy, something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, uh you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True Story, and so the Devil said OK it's a deal. And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since they've been cursed by one thing after the other desperately poor. That island is Hispaniola is one island. It's cut down the middle. On one side is Haiti on the other side is the Dominican republic. Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etc.. Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island.
It is of course morally despicable for Robertson to blame a horrific earthquake on the supposed misdeeds of the distant ancestors of the current victims! But then, he blamed the September 11 atrocity on the United States, as well. I have nothing against evangelicals in general, and I know that televangelists are peculiar in typically not being under any church authority and so they can hold very strange views. But the Robertson type of evangelicalism strikes me as a social pathology that is actively evil and damaging to rational ethical thinking in our republic.
So what in the world is Pat Robertson talking about? Presumably he is referring to the Haitian Revolution of the 1790s through independence in 1804. The latter part of the revolution was against Napoleon Bonaparte, not against his nephew Napoleon III (r. as emperor 1852-1870). So Robertson was off by a mere 50 or 60 years.
As Charles Tilly pointed out, all revolutions are multiple revolutions. The Rights of Man were declared by the French Convention in 1789. Thomas Jefferson and other US Founding Fathers were delighted about this, by the way. Initially it was the mixed-race free mulattoes who agitated to have the Rights of Man applied to them in Haiti. But then slave revolts broke out and by 1794 the French legislature had abolished slavery in French overseas territories. So you had urbane, French-speaking free persons of color demanding inclusion in the new liberties proclaimed by the French Republic. But you also had slave revolts, in which newly-arrived slaves from West Africa (places such as what is now Benin) participated--though the organization was probably supplied by longer-established slaves. The newly-arrived slaves had after all been free Africans not so long ago. Despite the efforts of French orders such as the Dominicans and Capuchins, many slaves had still not become Christians or wore their Christianity very lightly. Some proportion of the slaves was Muslim, and some historians have suggested that previous slave revolts were led by Muslims. Over time, Muslim Africans were forcibly converted to Catholicism.
So some of the slave revolts invoked African religion against white French colonial power. What many now call voodoo or voudoun is a Haitian version of religious traditions roughly from what is now Benin, Togo, Nigeria and the Congo. The word just means spirit. The African slave religious traditions were expressed in Creole or Kreyole, based on Kwa dialects but incorporating elements of French.
[…]
So Robertson's account sees the assertion of African religion in 1791 against slaving Christianity as a 'pact with the devil' that then led Haiti to be cursed ever after. But even in his own terms, how does he account for the multiple steps by subsequent Haitian states reinstating privileges for Christianity? Even if he does not count Catholicism as Christianity, what about the fact that about a quarter of Haitians are now evangelical Protestants? Didn't the earthquake hit them? And, why is West Africa where the initial African version of voudoun originated and is still practiced by a minority, among the least earthquake-prone regions in the world?
Ultimately, Robertson's version of Haitian history as cursed replicates the old racist anti-Black 'curse of Ham' theme in White American popular religion. Is he saying that Haitians had less right to revolt against European colonialism than did white Americans? (Only about 16% of colonial-era Americans belonged to a church, so it isn't as if they were more pious). And, ultimately, his account fails to deal with the sins of slavery and racism in which Southern US Christian traditions-- Baptism, evangelicalism, etc., were deeply implicated. There is a Southern Baptist church to this day, almost all-white, precisely because it split from the national organization to protect the enslavement of African-Americans.
Evil and the devil are tricky. Robertson projected them on a revolt of African slaves asserting their African traditions against oppressive white colonial society. But they lurk in the traditions of his 700 Club, in the exaltation of irrationality, in blaming the victim, in a subtext of racism, and in a failure to repent for White Christian enslavement of Africans for centuries.
iONic Update
Starting on Wed., Jan.20, Dr. Carolyn Dean, Ion, and Bob Neveritt will be guests on www.achieveradio.com's CASH FLOW for 3 hours each week - from 2pm-5pm EST.
Achieveradio itself has been picked up by www.powerhitz.com so we will have a wider audience.
Below is a comment from a new listener which inspires us to keep broadcasting:
[My first time tuning in live --- I can see why there would be an audience for a 3 hour program --- really "great stuff" --- from explanations and definitions of the "other side of the veil" to "time" etc. all delivered in fun, funny, clever, rapid word play with Carolyn Dean and Bob Neveritt as great foils to the truly Incredible Ion with his great insights (pun intended)! Ion is also a punster and I can also see that he has a great sense of humor and the ability to put everything into perspective. And, so much wisdom to impart! Could talk for hours on subject of "contrasts" alone. A better program could not have been scripted minute by minute!]
Remember, iON ("a zillion entities from the Guf") just showed up 10 months ago.
With iON, there is only one rule: THERE ARE NO RULES.
Bob Dobbs
11 January, 2010
President Obama, the CIA and the Master of the Cover-Up
President Obama, the CIA and the Master of the Cover-Up
“McLaughlin was the "villain" behind the politicized intelligence on Iraq in the run-up to the war. He perverted the intelligence process, ignored high-level briefings on the weakness of the intelligence on WMD and tried to silence David Kay, the chief of the Iraq Survey Group, when the weapons inspectors found no evidence of strategic weapons in Iraq.”
The Obama administration quietly announced Friday the appointment of John McLaughlin, former deputy CIA director, to head the internal investigation of the intelligence failures that led to the Christmas Day attempted bombing of a Delta airliner headed for Detroit as well as the events leading to the shootings at Fort Hood in November.
With this appointment, President Barack Obama has assured that the culture of intelligence cover-up will continue. McLaughlin has participated in and sought to cover-up many of the CIA's most egregious failures and misdeeds of the past decade. When he left the CIA, he then served as the agency's chief apologist.
So, who is John McLaughlin? Most of official Washington and the mainstream media view McLaughlin as the mild-mannered, professorial CIA bureaucrat, who former CIA director George Tenet called the "smartest man he had ever met."
Few people understand, however, that McLaughlin played the most important role in making sure that the Bush administration received the intelligence that would be used and misused to justify the use of force against Iraq in 2003.
Washington insiders remember that it was CIA director Tenet who told President George W. Bush, "Don't worry, it's a slam dunk," in response to the president's demand for stronger intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to provide to the American people. Few people remember that it was McLaughlin who actually delivered the "slam-dunk" briefing to the president in January 2003.
McLaughlin was the "villain" behind the politicized intelligence on Iraq in the run-up to the war. He perverted the intelligence process, ignored high-level briefings on the weakness of the intelligence on WMD and tried to silence David Kay, the chief of the Iraq Survey Group, when the weapons inspectors found no evidence of strategic weapons in Iraq.
When Kay returned to CIA headquarters from Baghdad, Tenet and McLaughlin made sure that Kay was given a tiny, windowless office at the end of a distant, deserted corridor undergoing construction. It had no secure phone or classified computer. Kay called it Siberia.
McLaughlin was also the villain behind the CIA's preparation of Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations in February 2003 that used phony intelligence to convince an international audience of the need for war. According to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Powell's chief of staff, Tenet and McLaughlin lied to the secretary of state about the sourcing of serious allegations dealing with Saddam Hussein's efforts to obtain strategic weapons.
The most serious allegation came from an Iraqi con man known as "Curveball," who maintained that Iraq had mobile biological laboratories, a key charge in the phony intelligence to justify the Iraq war. German intelligence debriefed Curveball, and German intelligence officials warned the CIA that Curveball was unstable and that there was no validation for his claims. Tyler Drumheller, the chief of CIA's European Division, knew that Curveball was mentally unstable and a liar, and he urged McLaughlin to drop all references to the mobile biological labs from Powell's speech. McLaughlin ignored him, too.
Five weeks after the invasion of Iraq, Powell and McLaughlin shared a table at the White House correspondents' dinner, where McLaughlin, an amateur magician, agreed to perform a few magic tricks during a break in the action. The CIA deputy director conjured coins out of thin air and transformed a single dollar into a $100 bill; everyone at the table laughed except for Powell, who seemed tense and out of sorts.
According to Bob Drogin, who wrote an authoritative book on Curveball, Powell stared at McLaughlin and requested another trick. "Let's see you find the WMD in Iraq," an unsmiling Powell demanded. McLaughlin looked surprised and his broad grin faded. "We will," he replied, "they're there and we'll find them."
In addition to being one of the ideological drivers for the CIA's policies of torture and abuse, secret prisons and extraordinary renditions, McLaughlin demonstrated early in his career that he was a company man willing to do what was necessary to advance his career. In the 1980s, when CIA Director William Casey and his Deputy Robert Gates were "cooking the books" on intelligence dealing with the Soviet Union, Central America and Southwest Asia, McLaughlin offered no dissent.
“McLaughlin was the "villain" behind the politicized intelligence on Iraq in the run-up to the war. He perverted the intelligence process, ignored high-level briefings on the weakness of the intelligence on WMD and tried to silence David Kay, the chief of the Iraq Survey Group, when the weapons inspectors found no evidence of strategic weapons in Iraq.”
The Obama administration quietly announced Friday the appointment of John McLaughlin, former deputy CIA director, to head the internal investigation of the intelligence failures that led to the Christmas Day attempted bombing of a Delta airliner headed for Detroit as well as the events leading to the shootings at Fort Hood in November.
With this appointment, President Barack Obama has assured that the culture of intelligence cover-up will continue. McLaughlin has participated in and sought to cover-up many of the CIA's most egregious failures and misdeeds of the past decade. When he left the CIA, he then served as the agency's chief apologist.
So, who is John McLaughlin? Most of official Washington and the mainstream media view McLaughlin as the mild-mannered, professorial CIA bureaucrat, who former CIA director George Tenet called the "smartest man he had ever met."
Few people understand, however, that McLaughlin played the most important role in making sure that the Bush administration received the intelligence that would be used and misused to justify the use of force against Iraq in 2003.
Washington insiders remember that it was CIA director Tenet who told President George W. Bush, "Don't worry, it's a slam dunk," in response to the president's demand for stronger intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to provide to the American people. Few people remember that it was McLaughlin who actually delivered the "slam-dunk" briefing to the president in January 2003.
McLaughlin was the "villain" behind the politicized intelligence on Iraq in the run-up to the war. He perverted the intelligence process, ignored high-level briefings on the weakness of the intelligence on WMD and tried to silence David Kay, the chief of the Iraq Survey Group, when the weapons inspectors found no evidence of strategic weapons in Iraq.
When Kay returned to CIA headquarters from Baghdad, Tenet and McLaughlin made sure that Kay was given a tiny, windowless office at the end of a distant, deserted corridor undergoing construction. It had no secure phone or classified computer. Kay called it Siberia.
McLaughlin was also the villain behind the CIA's preparation of Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations in February 2003 that used phony intelligence to convince an international audience of the need for war. According to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Powell's chief of staff, Tenet and McLaughlin lied to the secretary of state about the sourcing of serious allegations dealing with Saddam Hussein's efforts to obtain strategic weapons.
The most serious allegation came from an Iraqi con man known as "Curveball," who maintained that Iraq had mobile biological laboratories, a key charge in the phony intelligence to justify the Iraq war. German intelligence debriefed Curveball, and German intelligence officials warned the CIA that Curveball was unstable and that there was no validation for his claims. Tyler Drumheller, the chief of CIA's European Division, knew that Curveball was mentally unstable and a liar, and he urged McLaughlin to drop all references to the mobile biological labs from Powell's speech. McLaughlin ignored him, too.
Five weeks after the invasion of Iraq, Powell and McLaughlin shared a table at the White House correspondents' dinner, where McLaughlin, an amateur magician, agreed to perform a few magic tricks during a break in the action. The CIA deputy director conjured coins out of thin air and transformed a single dollar into a $100 bill; everyone at the table laughed except for Powell, who seemed tense and out of sorts.
According to Bob Drogin, who wrote an authoritative book on Curveball, Powell stared at McLaughlin and requested another trick. "Let's see you find the WMD in Iraq," an unsmiling Powell demanded. McLaughlin looked surprised and his broad grin faded. "We will," he replied, "they're there and we'll find them."
In addition to being one of the ideological drivers for the CIA's policies of torture and abuse, secret prisons and extraordinary renditions, McLaughlin demonstrated early in his career that he was a company man willing to do what was necessary to advance his career. In the 1980s, when CIA Director William Casey and his Deputy Robert Gates were "cooking the books" on intelligence dealing with the Soviet Union, Central America and Southwest Asia, McLaughlin offered no dissent.
08 January, 2010
Army Imprisons Soldier for Singing Against Stop-Loss Policy
Army Stop Loss is a back door draft!
http://www.truthout.org/article/army-imprisons-soldier-singing-against-stop-loss-policy
Army Specialist and Iraq war veteran Marc Hall was incarcerated by the US Army on December 11, 2009, in Liberty County Jail, Georgia, for recording a song that expresses his anger over the Army's stop-loss policy.
Stop-loss is a policy that allows the Army to keep soldiers active beyond the end of their signed contracts. According to the Pentagon, more than 120,000 soldiers have been affected by stop-loss since 2001, and currently 13,000 soldiers are serving under stop-loss orders.
Hall, (aka hip hop artist Marc Watercus), who is in the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, was placed in Liberty County Jail for the song, in which he angrily denounces the continuing policy that has barred him from exiting the military.
(click here to listen to "Stop-Loss," by Marc Watercus)
http://www.truthout.org/article/army-imprisons-soldier-singing-against-stop-loss-policy
Military service members do not completely give up their rights to free speech, particularly not when they are doing so artistically while off duty, as was the case with Hall. He is charged under Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which covers "all disorders and neglects to the prejudice of good order and discipline" and "all conduct of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces." The military is claiming that he "communicated a threat" with his song. Hall mailed a copy of the song to the Pentagon after the Army unilaterally extended his contract for a second Iraq deployment.
Hall planned to leave the military at the end of his contract on February 27, before his commander, Captain Cross at Fort Stewart, moved to have him incarcerated for the song. The military currently intends to keep Hall in pre-trial confinement until he is court-martialed, which is expected to be several months from now.
Jim Klimanski, a civilian military lawyer, member of the National Lawyers Guild and the Military Law Task Force, who is closely following Hall's case, told Truthout that he feels the military is overreacting to the case, and that it is simply a matter of free speech and that the Army's actions violate his First Amendment right to free speech.
"It's a political case, and the military should know that," Klimanski explained, "I think they are overreaching and overreacting because of Maj. Hassan (who went on a shooting spree at Fort Hood on November 5), and I can understand that to some degree, but cooler heads should prevail and they should deal with stop-loss, and maybe we'll get the case thrown out. One would hope that common sense would prevail."
Hall is opposed to the occupation of Iraq, and had told his commander he would not deploy if ordered. His unit deployed to Iraq without him in mid-December, but this is not why Hall is in jail, as he was jailed before his unit was sent to Iraq.
"The military never ordered him to go [to Iraq], they put him in jail before that," Klimanski continued, "They can't charge him with missing movement, because he couldn't go because they put him in jail. He told them he wanted out, he wouldn't go, but they didn't put him in jail for not going."
In a statement on January 5, Hall said, ""My first sergeant called me into his office to discuss the song's nature. I explained to him that the hardcore rap song was a free expression of how people feel about the Army and its stop-loss policy. I explained that the song was neither a physical threat nor any threat whatsoever. I told him it was just hip-hop."
Hall added, "My first sergeant said he actually liked the song and that he did not take it as a threat. He and my commander at the time just recommended me for mental counseling and evaluation."
http://www.truthout.org/article/army-imprisons-soldier-singing-against-stop-loss-policy
Army Specialist and Iraq war veteran Marc Hall was incarcerated by the US Army on December 11, 2009, in Liberty County Jail, Georgia, for recording a song that expresses his anger over the Army's stop-loss policy.
Stop-loss is a policy that allows the Army to keep soldiers active beyond the end of their signed contracts. According to the Pentagon, more than 120,000 soldiers have been affected by stop-loss since 2001, and currently 13,000 soldiers are serving under stop-loss orders.
Hall, (aka hip hop artist Marc Watercus), who is in the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, was placed in Liberty County Jail for the song, in which he angrily denounces the continuing policy that has barred him from exiting the military.
(click here to listen to "Stop-Loss," by Marc Watercus)
http://www.truthout.org/article/army-imprisons-soldier-singing-against-stop-loss-policy
Military service members do not completely give up their rights to free speech, particularly not when they are doing so artistically while off duty, as was the case with Hall. He is charged under Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which covers "all disorders and neglects to the prejudice of good order and discipline" and "all conduct of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces." The military is claiming that he "communicated a threat" with his song. Hall mailed a copy of the song to the Pentagon after the Army unilaterally extended his contract for a second Iraq deployment.
Hall planned to leave the military at the end of his contract on February 27, before his commander, Captain Cross at Fort Stewart, moved to have him incarcerated for the song. The military currently intends to keep Hall in pre-trial confinement until he is court-martialed, which is expected to be several months from now.
Jim Klimanski, a civilian military lawyer, member of the National Lawyers Guild and the Military Law Task Force, who is closely following Hall's case, told Truthout that he feels the military is overreacting to the case, and that it is simply a matter of free speech and that the Army's actions violate his First Amendment right to free speech.
"It's a political case, and the military should know that," Klimanski explained, "I think they are overreaching and overreacting because of Maj. Hassan (who went on a shooting spree at Fort Hood on November 5), and I can understand that to some degree, but cooler heads should prevail and they should deal with stop-loss, and maybe we'll get the case thrown out. One would hope that common sense would prevail."
Hall is opposed to the occupation of Iraq, and had told his commander he would not deploy if ordered. His unit deployed to Iraq without him in mid-December, but this is not why Hall is in jail, as he was jailed before his unit was sent to Iraq.
"The military never ordered him to go [to Iraq], they put him in jail before that," Klimanski continued, "They can't charge him with missing movement, because he couldn't go because they put him in jail. He told them he wanted out, he wouldn't go, but they didn't put him in jail for not going."
In a statement on January 5, Hall said, ""My first sergeant called me into his office to discuss the song's nature. I explained to him that the hardcore rap song was a free expression of how people feel about the Army and its stop-loss policy. I explained that the song was neither a physical threat nor any threat whatsoever. I told him it was just hip-hop."
Hall added, "My first sergeant said he actually liked the song and that he did not take it as a threat. He and my commander at the time just recommended me for mental counseling and evaluation."
Raytheon’s Warrior Training Alliance
by Jeremy Scahill
[Scan down to the bold section on Raytheon - Joan]
Two former Blackwater operatives were arrested by US federal agents on murder charges, stemming from their alleged involvement in the shooting deaths of two Afghan civilians in Kabul in May. They have been identified as Justin Cannon, 27, of Corpus Christi, Texas, and Christopher Drotleff, 29, of Virginia Beach, Virginia. They have been charged with "crimes including second-degree murder, attempted murder and firearms offenses while working as contractors for the U.S. Department of Defense in Afghanistan," according to the Justice Department. The thirteen-count indictment was returned by a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia on Janurary 6 and unsealed today.
The indictment alleges that on May 5, 2009, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Cannon and Drotleff shot and killed two Afghanistan nationals and wounded a third. In a press release, the Justice Department said:
The indictment alleges that at the time of the shootings, Cannon and Drotleff were Department of Defense contractors employed by Paravant LLC, which is a subsidiary of Xe (formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide). According to the indictment, as contractors, Cannon and Drotleff provided training to the Afghan National Army for the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan in the use and maintenance of weapons and weapons systems.
In May, reports emerged that four Blackwater/Xe operatives working for Paravant LLC were alleged to have fired on a civilian car they say they saw as a threat, killing at least one Afghan civilian. According to the Wall Street Journal's August Cole, "At least some of the men, who were former military personnel, had been allegedly drinking alcohol that evening, according to a person familiar with the incident. Off-duty contractors aren't supposed to carry weapons or drink alcohol."
The US military said the incident took place in Kabul on May 5. "While stopped for the vehicle accident, the contractors were approached by a vehicle in a manner the contractors felt threatening," according to the military.
Now, there are many layers to this story, not the least of which is yet another allegation of Blackwater-affiliated personnel drinking and killing in a foreign war zone. (A drunken Blackwater operative allegedly killed a bodyguard to an Iraqi vice president on Christmas Eve 2006 inside Baghdad's Green Zone).
What's more, this represented the first public mention of the Blackwater/Xe subsidiary Paravant, but also the fact that its work was apparently buried in a subcontract with Raytheon, which in turn has a large US Army training contract in Afghanistan. "Raytheon's use of Paravant is for a program called Warfighter Focus, a sweeping U.S. Army training effort valued at more than $11 billion over a 10-year period," reports the Wall Street Journal.
"Warfighter Focus" is carried out by a Raytheon program the company describes in its contract handbook as such [PDF]:
The Raytheon-led Warrior Training Alliance (WTA) team is comprised of over 65 subcontractors with one common mission: to deliver unmatched training support services that cost-effectively meet the U.S. Army's requirement for total warfighter readiness. The WTA's ability to provide a comprehensive range of integrated training services will assist the Army in transitioning to a more collaborative, consolidated and streamlined training environment.
Now, the "Warfighter Focus" contract in and of itself is very intriguing and worthy of further investigation. But it is also particularly interesting given that Blackwater is under multiple investigations (DoJ, Congress, IRS, ATF, etc.) and continues to operate in Afghanistan (in part) on a subcontract through a subsidiary working for a massive defense Goliath. This is how the whole contracting scam works, particularly for companies in trouble. They hide under layers of subcontracts and subsidiaries. Blackwater/Xe of course still holds overt contracts in Afghanistan as well.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100125/scahill3
[Scan down to the bold section on Raytheon - Joan]
Two former Blackwater operatives were arrested by US federal agents on murder charges, stemming from their alleged involvement in the shooting deaths of two Afghan civilians in Kabul in May. They have been identified as Justin Cannon, 27, of Corpus Christi, Texas, and Christopher Drotleff, 29, of Virginia Beach, Virginia. They have been charged with "crimes including second-degree murder, attempted murder and firearms offenses while working as contractors for the U.S. Department of Defense in Afghanistan," according to the Justice Department. The thirteen-count indictment was returned by a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia on Janurary 6 and unsealed today.
The indictment alleges that on May 5, 2009, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Cannon and Drotleff shot and killed two Afghanistan nationals and wounded a third. In a press release, the Justice Department said:
The indictment alleges that at the time of the shootings, Cannon and Drotleff were Department of Defense contractors employed by Paravant LLC, which is a subsidiary of Xe (formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide). According to the indictment, as contractors, Cannon and Drotleff provided training to the Afghan National Army for the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan in the use and maintenance of weapons and weapons systems.
In May, reports emerged that four Blackwater/Xe operatives working for Paravant LLC were alleged to have fired on a civilian car they say they saw as a threat, killing at least one Afghan civilian. According to the Wall Street Journal's August Cole, "At least some of the men, who were former military personnel, had been allegedly drinking alcohol that evening, according to a person familiar with the incident. Off-duty contractors aren't supposed to carry weapons or drink alcohol."
The US military said the incident took place in Kabul on May 5. "While stopped for the vehicle accident, the contractors were approached by a vehicle in a manner the contractors felt threatening," according to the military.
Now, there are many layers to this story, not the least of which is yet another allegation of Blackwater-affiliated personnel drinking and killing in a foreign war zone. (A drunken Blackwater operative allegedly killed a bodyguard to an Iraqi vice president on Christmas Eve 2006 inside Baghdad's Green Zone).
What's more, this represented the first public mention of the Blackwater/Xe subsidiary Paravant, but also the fact that its work was apparently buried in a subcontract with Raytheon, which in turn has a large US Army training contract in Afghanistan. "Raytheon's use of Paravant is for a program called Warfighter Focus, a sweeping U.S. Army training effort valued at more than $11 billion over a 10-year period," reports the Wall Street Journal.
"Warfighter Focus" is carried out by a Raytheon program the company describes in its contract handbook as such [PDF]:
The Raytheon-led Warrior Training Alliance (WTA) team is comprised of over 65 subcontractors with one common mission: to deliver unmatched training support services that cost-effectively meet the U.S. Army's requirement for total warfighter readiness. The WTA's ability to provide a comprehensive range of integrated training services will assist the Army in transitioning to a more collaborative, consolidated and streamlined training environment.
Now, the "Warfighter Focus" contract in and of itself is very intriguing and worthy of further investigation. But it is also particularly interesting given that Blackwater is under multiple investigations (DoJ, Congress, IRS, ATF, etc.) and continues to operate in Afghanistan (in part) on a subcontract through a subsidiary working for a massive defense Goliath. This is how the whole contracting scam works, particularly for companies in trouble. They hide under layers of subcontracts and subsidiaries. Blackwater/Xe of course still holds overt contracts in Afghanistan as well.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100125/scahill3
06 January, 2010
Nuclear Drive Trumps Safety Risks and High Cost
Meltdown, USA: Nuclear Drive Trumps Safety Risks and High Cost
by: Art Levine, t r u t h o u t
http://www.truthout.org/106093Levine
The pro-nuclear Department of Energy is set to offer this month the first of nearly $20 billion in loan guarantees to a nuclear industry that hasn't built a plant since the 1970s or raised any money to do so in years. But although the industry is seeking to cash in on global warming concerns with $100 billion in proposed loan guarantees, environmentalists, scientists and federal investigators are warning that lax oversight by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) of the nation's aging 104 nuclear plants has led to near-meltdowns along with other health and safety failings since Three Mile Island - including what some critics say is a flawed federal health study apparently designed to conceal cancer risks near nuclear plants.
All that is joined by the dangers and risks posed by at least 30 tons yearly of radioactive, cancer-causing, nuclear waste produced at each 1,000 megawatt plant; projected costs of $12 billion to $25 billion for any new plants (built largely through taxpayer support); and their ongoing vulnerability to terrorist attacks at sites like Indian Point, 35 miles from New York.
For instance, a meltdown of the two reactors at Indian Point, dubbed "Chernobyl on the Hudson," could quickly kill nearly 50,000 people with radiation poisoning in a 50-mile radius and cause over 500,000 cancer deaths within six years, according to research by the Union of Concerned Scientists and other experts.
"Nothing's changed," said Paul Gunter, director of Reactor Oversight for the Beyond Nuclear reform group, about nuclear plants. "They're still dirty, dangerous and expensive."
But such concerns stand in sharp contrast to wave of a positive PR about the nuclear industry as the "clean air energy" solution to global warming, driven by ads, campaign donations and lobbying - and abetted by media outlets too often willing to accept industry and Nuclear Regulatory Commission spin at face value.
Even so, there's little reason to have confidence in the NRC's ability to protect the public or successfully monitor the current nuclear plants, let alone any new ones. In fact, with the bulk of its funding coming from nuclear utility industry fees, the agency appears to be literally asleep at the wheel, allowing everything from near meltdowns in a Toledo plant to ignoring internal reports of rent-a-cops at vulnerable nuclear plants sleeping on the job - until the negative publicity became too overwhelming. Ultimately, the agency gave that Exelon company a mild $65,000 fine last year. Meanwhile, researchers for the Project on Government Oversight and Union of Concerned Scientists found that the utility, the Wackenhut Security Firm and the NRC all knew well before the scandal broke publicly that guards were sleeping on the job at the Peach Bottom facility in Pennsylvania.
As one researcher pointed out in 2008 testimony, "Neither Wackenhut nor Exelon nor NRC acted upon the security allegations to correct the problem."
The NRC's coziness with industry extends to some of its own commissioners. As its own inspector general reported, before a Bush-appointed commissioner left in mid-2007, he made decisions that could benefit financially three firms he was negotiating with for jobs - including a ruling that apparently helped loosen regulatory requirements for an emergency cooling system in a Westinghouse plant.
Obama's latest proposed appointee to the agency isn't necessarily any less pro-industry. As Mother Jones reported about Peter Magwood: "Both before and after his time in government, he has worked as an enthusiastic advocate for nuclear interests in the private sector-including for at least one company likely to have business before the NRC in the near future."
Indeed, there are few limits, no matter how absurd, to how far the NRC is willing to go to cut the industry plenty of slack, no matter how dangerous to the public. Take the case of the noncombustible foam that the agency ordered nuclear plants to buy in the late 1990s as a sealant to help prevent the spread of fire from room to room in a plant. It turned out that there was a small problem with this well-meaning plan: the brand of silicone foam bought by most of the nuclear power companies turned out to be, well, combustible. So, did the NRC then promptly order the dangerous, potentially life-threatening foam removed? No, of course not: it just revised its regulations to drop the phrase and requirement of "noncombustibility" for the foam.
Paul Gunter, then with the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, found himself in the Kafkaesque position of having to argue in regulatory comments against the logical insanity of dropping the word "noncombustible" in requirements for fire-preventing foam. In bold letters, he wrote, "NRC PROPOSED ACTION INCREASES THE RISK OF A NUCLEAR ACCIDENT RESULTING FROM THE REDUCTION OF DEFENSE-IN-DEPTH OF FIRE PROTECTION SYSTEMS...." He then attempted to reason with the NRC, noting, "the material in question is designated as a fire-barrier seal." He and other critics did not prevail, and the NRC continues to allow nuclear companies to buy combustible foam as fire prevention sealants. "The shit burns, it's combustible and it leaves charring," Gunter now pointed out, asking, reasonably, how it could possibly meet fire protection standards.
The NRC also uses technicalities in other ways to advance industry interests. As Beyond Nuclear and other critics point out, there's an important reason that so little is known about the dangers of radiation for those living near nuclear plants in America: there's very little well-designed research that has been done on the issue.
There are some exceptions: a Massachusetts Department of Public Health study in the late 1980s, though, found a 400 percent increase in leukemia for those living downwind from the Pilgrim plant, and a recent German government study found that children under five living less than five kilometers from a nuclear plant had twice the risk of contracting leukemia of those living more than five kilometers away.
Continue reading at
http://www.truthout.org/106093Levine
by: Art Levine, t r u t h o u t
http://www.truthout.org/106093Levine
The pro-nuclear Department of Energy is set to offer this month the first of nearly $20 billion in loan guarantees to a nuclear industry that hasn't built a plant since the 1970s or raised any money to do so in years. But although the industry is seeking to cash in on global warming concerns with $100 billion in proposed loan guarantees, environmentalists, scientists and federal investigators are warning that lax oversight by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) of the nation's aging 104 nuclear plants has led to near-meltdowns along with other health and safety failings since Three Mile Island - including what some critics say is a flawed federal health study apparently designed to conceal cancer risks near nuclear plants.
All that is joined by the dangers and risks posed by at least 30 tons yearly of radioactive, cancer-causing, nuclear waste produced at each 1,000 megawatt plant; projected costs of $12 billion to $25 billion for any new plants (built largely through taxpayer support); and their ongoing vulnerability to terrorist attacks at sites like Indian Point, 35 miles from New York.
For instance, a meltdown of the two reactors at Indian Point, dubbed "Chernobyl on the Hudson," could quickly kill nearly 50,000 people with radiation poisoning in a 50-mile radius and cause over 500,000 cancer deaths within six years, according to research by the Union of Concerned Scientists and other experts.
"Nothing's changed," said Paul Gunter, director of Reactor Oversight for the Beyond Nuclear reform group, about nuclear plants. "They're still dirty, dangerous and expensive."
But such concerns stand in sharp contrast to wave of a positive PR about the nuclear industry as the "clean air energy" solution to global warming, driven by ads, campaign donations and lobbying - and abetted by media outlets too often willing to accept industry and Nuclear Regulatory Commission spin at face value.
Even so, there's little reason to have confidence in the NRC's ability to protect the public or successfully monitor the current nuclear plants, let alone any new ones. In fact, with the bulk of its funding coming from nuclear utility industry fees, the agency appears to be literally asleep at the wheel, allowing everything from near meltdowns in a Toledo plant to ignoring internal reports of rent-a-cops at vulnerable nuclear plants sleeping on the job - until the negative publicity became too overwhelming. Ultimately, the agency gave that Exelon company a mild $65,000 fine last year. Meanwhile, researchers for the Project on Government Oversight and Union of Concerned Scientists found that the utility, the Wackenhut Security Firm and the NRC all knew well before the scandal broke publicly that guards were sleeping on the job at the Peach Bottom facility in Pennsylvania.
As one researcher pointed out in 2008 testimony, "Neither Wackenhut nor Exelon nor NRC acted upon the security allegations to correct the problem."
The NRC's coziness with industry extends to some of its own commissioners. As its own inspector general reported, before a Bush-appointed commissioner left in mid-2007, he made decisions that could benefit financially three firms he was negotiating with for jobs - including a ruling that apparently helped loosen regulatory requirements for an emergency cooling system in a Westinghouse plant.
Obama's latest proposed appointee to the agency isn't necessarily any less pro-industry. As Mother Jones reported about Peter Magwood: "Both before and after his time in government, he has worked as an enthusiastic advocate for nuclear interests in the private sector-including for at least one company likely to have business before the NRC in the near future."
Indeed, there are few limits, no matter how absurd, to how far the NRC is willing to go to cut the industry plenty of slack, no matter how dangerous to the public. Take the case of the noncombustible foam that the agency ordered nuclear plants to buy in the late 1990s as a sealant to help prevent the spread of fire from room to room in a plant. It turned out that there was a small problem with this well-meaning plan: the brand of silicone foam bought by most of the nuclear power companies turned out to be, well, combustible. So, did the NRC then promptly order the dangerous, potentially life-threatening foam removed? No, of course not: it just revised its regulations to drop the phrase and requirement of "noncombustibility" for the foam.
Paul Gunter, then with the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, found himself in the Kafkaesque position of having to argue in regulatory comments against the logical insanity of dropping the word "noncombustible" in requirements for fire-preventing foam. In bold letters, he wrote, "NRC PROPOSED ACTION INCREASES THE RISK OF A NUCLEAR ACCIDENT RESULTING FROM THE REDUCTION OF DEFENSE-IN-DEPTH OF FIRE PROTECTION SYSTEMS...." He then attempted to reason with the NRC, noting, "the material in question is designated as a fire-barrier seal." He and other critics did not prevail, and the NRC continues to allow nuclear companies to buy combustible foam as fire prevention sealants. "The shit burns, it's combustible and it leaves charring," Gunter now pointed out, asking, reasonably, how it could possibly meet fire protection standards.
The NRC also uses technicalities in other ways to advance industry interests. As Beyond Nuclear and other critics point out, there's an important reason that so little is known about the dangers of radiation for those living near nuclear plants in America: there's very little well-designed research that has been done on the issue.
There are some exceptions: a Massachusetts Department of Public Health study in the late 1980s, though, found a 400 percent increase in leukemia for those living downwind from the Pilgrim plant, and a recent German government study found that children under five living less than five kilometers from a nuclear plant had twice the risk of contracting leukemia of those living more than five kilometers away.
Continue reading at
http://www.truthout.org/106093Levine
05 January, 2010
"Torture, Killing Me Softly" by Tek Nath Rizal
Book Review by Cheryl Welsh
The 2009 book "Torture, Killing Me Softly" by Tek Nath Rizal alleges government mind control torture with secret electromagnetic radiation (EMR) mind control weapons. Tek Nath Rizal was a prominent government consultant to the South Asian country of Bhutan, before he exposed corruption in high places. http://www.mindjustice.org/
He became a popular political figure and internationally recognized human rights activist. His book is about his experience of several years of imprisonment in Bhutan with an emphasis on the EMR mind control torture. The U.S. Department of State and Amnesty International regarded Rizal as a political prisoner and won his release from prison. Rizal has written several books, some of which included his accounts of mind control torture. The books have been very successful in South Asia.
Against all odds, he published this book, "Torture, Killing Me Softly." Mindjustice.org extends our deepest thanks for his great effort and sacrifice. I highly recommend this well written, concise and ground breaking book. For the first time, a variety of medical, government and military professionals publicly acknowledge secret EMR mind control weapons for interrogation and torture in prisons and on POWs, prisoners of war. For example Rizal writes:
Dr. Gurung had served in Military for twenty years. He had actually worked for four years in the quarter guard unit where prisoners were kept and the mind control methods were used on them for procuring information and as a form of torture. He was also surprised that how I was alive, even after this torture. He also understood the gravity of my case as he had been well aware of the ill-effects of this kind of torture.
A highlight of the book is a foreword by Dr. Indrajit Rai, a Nepal member of the Constituent Assembly, and an influential conflict/security expert who is often quoted in South Asian newspapers. Rai is director of the British Gorkha College, Nepal, and served fifteen years in the Indian Navy as Lt. Comdr. Rai taught at Army Staff College, Katmandu for seven years. The title of the foreword is, "Mind Control Device on Tek Nath Rizal." Rai described Rizal as one of the "historic political personalities" of South Asia and corroborated Rizal's account of mind control torture, surveillance and targeting, with references to Rai's military sources from his own extensive military background. Rai advocates the banning of mind control weapons.
Rizal's book sounds like a science fiction horror story about torturers using futuristic brain torture tools in a very medieval fashion. But the facts show that it is much more. The U.S. and other major governments have harnessed science and technology to develop secret electromagnetic radiation (EMR) mind control weapons for intelligence purposes, for interrogation and torture, and for neutralizing the enemy without killing. Included below is a list of EMR mind control weapons monitored by the UN for decades.
Rizal's book is one of the most convincing allegations of government mind control targeting in a long line of high profile mind control claims of torture and political repression. Another case is the 1997 book, "Mind Control Within the United States," by Kai Bashir. The book, (available on amazon.com,) is a riveting and chilling account of mind control targeting in another small South Asian nation; Pakistan. Bashir's mother had tutored the sons of Z. A. Bhutto, President of Pakistan.
Continue reading at:
http://www.mindjustice.org/
The 2009 book "Torture, Killing Me Softly" by Tek Nath Rizal alleges government mind control torture with secret electromagnetic radiation (EMR) mind control weapons. Tek Nath Rizal was a prominent government consultant to the South Asian country of Bhutan, before he exposed corruption in high places. http://www.mindjustice.org/
He became a popular political figure and internationally recognized human rights activist. His book is about his experience of several years of imprisonment in Bhutan with an emphasis on the EMR mind control torture. The U.S. Department of State and Amnesty International regarded Rizal as a political prisoner and won his release from prison. Rizal has written several books, some of which included his accounts of mind control torture. The books have been very successful in South Asia.
Against all odds, he published this book, "Torture, Killing Me Softly." Mindjustice.org extends our deepest thanks for his great effort and sacrifice. I highly recommend this well written, concise and ground breaking book. For the first time, a variety of medical, government and military professionals publicly acknowledge secret EMR mind control weapons for interrogation and torture in prisons and on POWs, prisoners of war. For example Rizal writes:
Dr. Gurung had served in Military for twenty years. He had actually worked for four years in the quarter guard unit where prisoners were kept and the mind control methods were used on them for procuring information and as a form of torture. He was also surprised that how I was alive, even after this torture. He also understood the gravity of my case as he had been well aware of the ill-effects of this kind of torture.
A highlight of the book is a foreword by Dr. Indrajit Rai, a Nepal member of the Constituent Assembly, and an influential conflict/security expert who is often quoted in South Asian newspapers. Rai is director of the British Gorkha College, Nepal, and served fifteen years in the Indian Navy as Lt. Comdr. Rai taught at Army Staff College, Katmandu for seven years. The title of the foreword is, "Mind Control Device on Tek Nath Rizal." Rai described Rizal as one of the "historic political personalities" of South Asia and corroborated Rizal's account of mind control torture, surveillance and targeting, with references to Rai's military sources from his own extensive military background. Rai advocates the banning of mind control weapons.
Rizal's book sounds like a science fiction horror story about torturers using futuristic brain torture tools in a very medieval fashion. But the facts show that it is much more. The U.S. and other major governments have harnessed science and technology to develop secret electromagnetic radiation (EMR) mind control weapons for intelligence purposes, for interrogation and torture, and for neutralizing the enemy without killing. Included below is a list of EMR mind control weapons monitored by the UN for decades.
Rizal's book is one of the most convincing allegations of government mind control targeting in a long line of high profile mind control claims of torture and political repression. Another case is the 1997 book, "Mind Control Within the United States," by Kai Bashir. The book, (available on amazon.com,) is a riveting and chilling account of mind control targeting in another small South Asian nation; Pakistan. Bashir's mother had tutored the sons of Z. A. Bhutto, President of Pakistan.
Continue reading at:
http://www.mindjustice.org/
03 January, 2010
PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1, highlights
http://www.paranoiamagazine.com/volume1_highlights.html
The following articles and interviews are highlights of the coming book PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1. 180 pages. Due in April 2010. Please Pre-Order by Paypal at the bottom of this page or click on the book cover at www.paranoiamagazine.com
The Men That Don’t Fit In
Joan d’Arc Interviews JFK Witness, Roderick A. MacKenzie, III
The story that is about to unwind might sound fantastic. The author of the tale is one “Roderick A. MacKenzie, III” who is 74 years of age. I have no way to corroborate the tale, but nonetheless I feel compelled to delve into it to get the “facts.” Here’s how I got myself inextricably involved: In April of 2009 I received an internet link from conspiracy researcher Ron Patton to an audio interview at ConspiraZine. He suggested I listen to this man who claims to have worked for the Mob in Dallas, Texas before, during and after the JFK assassination of November 22, 1963.
Roderick A. MacKenzie, III is the author of a self-published book called The Men That Don’t Fit In: The Factual History of a Rogues Life from 1934 to 1967 (subtitle: “which includes the very interesting period of the Pre-Cuban Revolution, the Post-Cuban Revolution and Times of Intrigue and Covert Action as well as adventures around the Defense Industrial Security Command Spooks and Characters, the Outfit, the Cuban Affairs Dept., with the bonus insiders view of Circus, Carnival and Outdoor Amusements Life”).
MacKenzie’s story started simply enough. He had a normal upbringing in a lovely rural town dotted with farms and lakes; indeed, as I can vouch, a really nice place to grow up. But he had gotten himself into a little trouble in high school, and his parents strongly suggested he join the Army. So he got out of that one horse town and traveled the world.
After service, MacKenzie eventually landed at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and trained at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s “Flaps and Seals” school in the art of making false I.D.’s. It seems in his early days he had invented a suitcase I.D. system, which he describes as a “complete I.D. factory with blanks of all sorts, certificates, checks and I.D. cards, a small printing press and types, inks, seal making equipment, a compact enlarger, photo print frame, papers and chemical packs, trays and so on.” In fact, according to MacKenzie, this little gift is what enabled him to escape the “Zone of the Interior” in 1964.
MacKenzie claims he was employed by Mafia boss, Sam Giancana, to run the “safe house” in Dallas, Texas when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. MacKenzie claims he didn’t know the event was going to happen; yet, as soon as it happened he realized the “precarious position” he was in. So he disappeared: “Of course,” he explains, “it was a time before the mass effort to identify everyone by the social security, mom’s maiden name, birth date,” and so on.
So, why did MacKenzie finally write The Men That Don’t Fit In? In his introduction, he writes, “It is not easy to answer because in revealing these facts as I know them, I open myself up to being branded everything from a nut case to a wannabe, kook, or liar. I am none of these and care little what the reader thinks. These facts have gnawed at my gut for 46 years and I do not care to head for the eternal dirt nap on the Great Midway Beyond without making an attempt at stating what I know and saw at that time.”
MacKenzie describes the JFK hit as “a classic, well thought-out hit by a very large cast of characters.” He explains, “They brought just about everyone who was anyone in the business of nastiness and criminality together to witness or unwittingly be part of it. I was one such person. We were all disposable, as well, and did not know that either.” Following the assassination, he spent a day drinking with Malcolm “Mac” Wallace, the man who he claims “had directed the killing teams for Lyndon B. Johnson and his Texas Mafia with the help of the other Mafia.” In fact, says MacKenzie, “Mac was quite talkative in a conspirator way.”
In June of 2009 I began an email interview with Roderick A. MacKenzie in order to verify some of the claims in his book. Let’s put Roderick MacKenzie’s cards on the table and see what he’s got.
Joan: You write that Mac Wallace (whom you describe as “Lyndon Baines Johnson’s hit man”) and Jake Miranda (your handler) were working for a government agency called “Permindex Co.” which was part of the Defense Industrial Security Command (DISC). What else can you tell me about that?
MacKenzie: I know that Roselli said we were all under the “Defense Intelligence Security Command Bastards,” and that was what both he and Jake Miranda called them. Later, Del Graham said that outfit caused him to have a heart attack in Tarzana, California, over the Kennedy hit while he was on the phone to Roselli at the Baylor Hospital cafeteria in Dallas. So that’s one of the people Roselli talked with during the hit. Miranda and I were at Baylor cafeteria too, so all three of us were not shooters by our own alibis.
I guess it was DoD that was setting all of us into the slots where we were supposed to be. They paid for everything. I got bucks from the Permindex vouchers in Dallas and New Orleans on the road from Geno La Motta, who got it from Chicago, and at the time I ran safe houses on the carnival routes and in the Holland Avenue safe house in Dallas. Jake Miranda and Mac Wallace had me sign those vouchers for bucks, and Ruby’s sister had me sign one once when Miranda was in New Orleans for money needed to do with my clients at the Holland House.
Joan: Now that you’re talking about the safe house, who actually ran it? The Mob, the CIA, both? Did the cops know about it?
MacKenzie: The safe house I ran on the carnivals was for someone named “Abe.” I guess he was DISC, at least that’s what I was told by the mobsters. The Mob was partnered in there somehow, so was good ole Permindex; the money always goes back to that outfit. I did not ask questions. The folks that were clients were from FBI Branch Five, that Baptist front outfit in Mexico [ACCC], the Chicago Mob and I guess the DoD. No one ever came across as CIA or other alphabet agency.
Joan: You describe Jack Rubenstein (“Ruby”) as a “short fussed guy that goes off at a moment’s notice over little stuff.” You disliked being around him. On what occasions did you have need to be around him?
MacKenzie: The bunch at the Holland Ave safe house were from Rubenstein. The other Mob people and Jake Miranda, who was in contact daily with me, I got my orders from him. Tippit the cop was in the know and brought money and people to me. I don’t think Tippit was a bad cop though. I never thought that Marcello was sending people to the safe house, but that phony preacher/missionary [Jack] Bowen [American Council of Christian Churches] sure sent a lot of “resters” there for very short times.
It all came through Miranda, though Rubenstein tried to get directly involved a time or two, but when I called Miranda he backed off. He did get a couple of signs for the Carousel out of me though. The Mob, DISC, FBI-5 through Rev. Bowen, Percy [Chauncey] Holt were my contacts, plus Tippit a few times. Otherwise I can’t say who ran the safe house. …
Continued in PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1. Pre-Order at the bottom of this page now!
The Necronomicon
By Dan Harms
A recent list of the top ten grimoires, or books of magic, included a book called the Necronomicon. Not too bad for a work that started as a literary in-joke. How did the Necronomicon make the leap from fiction to occult notoriety? Let’s look at the story.
One century ago, a young man named Howard Phillips Lovecraft was living in Providence, Rhode Island. Having left high school due to illness before graduating, he was unable to fulfill his dream of going to Brown University. His once-wealthy family was slipping into genteel poverty, but he was nonetheless expected to uphold the lifestyle of a gentleman of leisure. Lovecraft must have found negotiating these expectations and hopes a difficult situation.
He found an answer in writing. At first he wrote essays on political and cultural topics, but soon he found his true strength: short stories of monsters and tortured souls, written in the style of Edgar Allan Poe. In 1923, he submitted these works to the pulp magazine Weird Tales, where he found himself gaining some success—and a little money on the side.
As Lovecraft continued to write, he sought his own voice, creating a series of fictional props to express his philosophy and aesthetics. The most notable of these creations, the dread Necronomicon, appeared for the first time in his story “The Hound,” written in 1922. This tale centers around two graverobbers who take a magical talisman from a corpse, causing them to be pursued by a horrible undead monster. In their desperation, they consult the Necronomicon for more information on the topic—but it does not tell them how to stop the beast.
In “The Hound,” Lovecraft mentions “Abdul Alhazred” as the book’s author. Alhazred was actually a childhood name of Lovecraft’s during a period when he was fascinated with The Arabian Nights. In a previous story, Lovecraft had even composed a piece of poetry by Alhazred:
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
This poem was to become the leitmotif of Lovecraft’s fiction. Humanity, according to Lovecraft’s cosmology, is but a transitory phenomenon on this planet. Beyond the realm of everyday consciousness are older forces—magic, monsters, lost civilizations, and other mysteries of the universe. The protagonists in his tales are usually men driven to explore the past due to curiosity or compulsion. The horrific—or awe-inspiring—revelations they uncover leave the narrators shaken, missing, or insane…
Continued in PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1. Pre-Order at the bottom of this page now!
Crimson Shadows
Freemasonry, the OTO and the CIA
Interview with Craig Heimbichner
Craig Heimbichner is the author of Blood on the Altar: The Secret History of the World’s Most Dangerous Secret Society, which among other topics covers the relationship between Freemasonic groups, the OTO, the CIA and the military. In this interview, Craig discusses a few of the controversial subjects of his book—blood sacrifice, the homunculus ritual, legal loopholes of the Talmud, Aleister Crowley, Alfred Kinsey, and James Shelby Downard.
Joan d’Arc: In your book, Blood on the Altar, you talk about the “Invisible Government” as an “amorphous grouping of individuals and agencies.” Who are these individuals and agencies, what type of ‘glue’ coheres them, and what, do you surmise, is the origin of this group or these groups? Are they largely made up of patriarchal Freemasonic groups? What do they wish to accomplish?
Craig: These groups comprise the true powerbrokers behind the scenes. As Benjamin Disraeli writes in Coningsby, “the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.”
To give some examples, let’s start with the CIA. Clearly the CIA has operated in the shadows from its inception and has planned major events with world-shaking impact, including assassinations. Officially, where are they in the ‘civics course’ version of government? Where are they in the Constitution? But they exist, and have had great power—from the shadow side, as part of the “Invisible Government.” Just because a group is ‘known,’ as the CIA is, doesn’t mean that its activities are transparent. The CIA retains great power in spite of occasional forays into oversight, real or feigned, from Congress.
We could also bring up financial and military organizations, but I think your question is aiming at a shadow-level behind those groups. That level really gets to the back room, the realm of the dealmakers. The glue that binds them tends to be partly ideological and goal-driven, but there is more to it than that. You mention patriarchal Freemasonic groups, and this is starting to touch on the “glue,” which is actually a larger, sprawling network of fraternal organizations and secret societies. These groups, which have a long and complex history, usually have a large base of well-meaning and clueless members, but the organizations are also perfect covers for those who wish to plot and cut deals, with agendas that can include criminal activities or shady power grabs.
One example of a Masonic group that is usually overlooked would be the National Sojourners—the military organization for Freemasons. I’ve written about this group in my article, “Brotherhood of the Gun,” in the recently published Secret and Suppressed II (Feral House, 2009). Goals of the elites in these various fraternal orgs and secret societies center on the usual—power and money—but there’s a layer past all of that, and domination of the Group Mind is at the heart of their core egomaniacal dreams: the creation of a zombie level of patsies who feed the upper structure of power.
Joan: Tell me more about the National Sojourners. How does this group stay so secretive? One website (masonicworld.com) states that the group “formally brings together Masonic leaders of the uniformed services of the U.S. to further the National Defense, and works to oppose any influence calculated to weaken our National Security.” So this is a surprising claim. What might that include?
Craig: It might include practically anything, if the past eight years under George W. Bush is any indication of what gets pulled off in the name of “National Security.” And it hasn’t ended with Obama, by the way. The problem here is that we are not only dealing with the already secretive world of military decisions, but another layer as well. Goethe (himself a Freemason) famously criticized the Lodge for being a “government within a government.” The danger of a group like the National Sojourners is that we can be dealing with a military within the military, a secretive group of decision-makers within the already protected war-structure that decides to drop bombs and invade countries…
Continued in PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1. Pre-Order at the bottom of this page now!
The Mystery of Albert Pike
Saint or Satanist?
By Robert Guffey
The enigma of Albert Pike is a persistent one. Certain facts are known about him, facts that detractors and supporters alike can both agree upon. He’s a little-known figure whose impact upon American history far exceeds his notoriety. He founded the Scottish Rite and single-handedly created the higher degrees of Freemasonry (degrees 4 through 33). He was Sovereign Grand Commander of the Southern Jurisdiction of Scottish Rite Freemasonry from 1859 to 1891, the year of his death. He was a Confederate General during the American Civil War. He was a powerful attorney in his day. He was also a prominent poet, whose literary works have been forgotten except by a small handful of devotees. He is the author of the most important work on Masonic ritual, philosophy and symbolism, i.e., Morals and Dogma.
On these facts, everyone can agree. It’s the interpretation of these facts that begin to grow a bit misty.
Pike is a polarizing figure. There seems to be very little objective analysis of his impact on history. Mainstream historians rarely, if ever, refer to him. Therefore, we are left with volumes of questionable interpretations that often draw upon half-truths, rumors, innuendoes, misinterpretations, and outright forgeries. Pick up any book that contains even a minor reference to the man and you will find that the interpretation of the author falls into one of two categories: 1) Pike was a genius and a saint whose very touch turned men’s souls into alchemical gold, or 2) Pike was a Satan worshipper whose noxious acts still stain the very heart of the United States of America—indeed, the very world itself.
There is no middle ground among these “researchers.” Pike was either good or evil. Of course, the world would be much simpler if anyone was wholly good or wholly evil. Zen Buddhist Alan Watts once wrote a book entitled The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are in which he advised his readers to drop that dialectic way of thinking, what he called “the game of Black-versus-White” (Watts 30). It only causes confusion because it is a model that does not reflect reality. Human beings are far more complicated than that, and this includes Pike.
With most historical figures, the latter statement could normally go unsaid, but strange as it is to say, a very small minority of pundits have indeed implied that Albert Pike was not human at all (he was really a shape-shifting reptilian in disguise). I’m going to immediately crawl out on a limb, right here in the fifth paragraph, and propose we eliminate that theory for lack of evidence. I hope to now move on to more pressing matters….
But first, picture a scene for me, if you will. Picture an underground train depot, a twisted set of metal tracks sunk about ten feet into the concrete. On either side of the tracks people are yelling at each other: men, women, children… all races, all creeds. Strangely, some of the people who are shouting the loudest have no faces at all. A giant bronze bust of Pike is sitting in the middle of the tracks. In the distance, a train is barreling down upon this immense monument. The train is so loud, nobody can hear what anyone else is saying.
Let’s slow this scene for a moment, turn the volume down on the train, and turn up the volume only on certain individuals… just one at a time. There’s no preferred order amidst this chaos. We’ll select our speakers at random….
Ralph Epperson, a Fundamentalist Christian and author of the book The New World Order, has concluded that Albert Pike was a Satanist whose secret goal was to stamp out all organized religions in the world. (But isn’t Satanism itself an organized religion? Oh, wait, sorry about that. Let’s leave aside editorial intrusions for a moment and just examine the claims.) Here’s Epperson in his own words:
“…Pike considers Lucifer to be the God that is good, and the God of the Bible is the devil, the god of evil. That is what [Pike’s] statement about ‘that which is Below is as that which is Above’ means. That means that the God in the heavens is the god that is below, and the god who is below is the god in the heavens. So the Masons do believe in a god: it is in the fallen lightbearer, Lucifer. There can be no other reasonable explanation of what Mr. Pike just wrote” (Epperson 159).
No other reasonable explanation? This is a common belief among Christians, particularly the Southern Baptists, many of whom are very concerned about the ongoing “threat” of Freemasonry. Most people reading this publication will already be aware of the fact that the hermetic dictum “As above, so below” is a common phrase among the ancient practitioners of alchemy and does not refer in any way to either God or Satan. In fact, the belief systems associated with alchemy no doubt existed long before the Christian religion came into being. But when one is viewing the world through a limited framework, the amount of information one has to draw upon will be equally limited; and thus may lead to numerous misperceptions, like the one we’ve just heard.
Now let’s pan over to the other side of the tracks, shall we? …
Continued in PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1. Pre-Order at the bottom of this page now!
The Uninvited States of America
Tavistock Agenda Revealed
By Iona Miller
They wind you up because they know what makes you tick. The “Tavistock Clinic,” one of Britain’s leading psychiatric research establishments, studied shellshock (post-traumatic stress) in World War I, but switched to developing psychological warfare in 1922. Rather than helping traumatized soldiers, it calculated their breaking points. Tavistock shock doctrine now permeates global life. Their social engineers are a Who’s Who: Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, Edward Bernays, Eric Trist, A.K. Rice, Eric Miller, Aldous Huxley, and more.
Tavistock sent German-born psychologist, Kurt Lewin, to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1945 to establish the Research Center for Group Dynamics in the U.S. Lewin is the founder of “social psychology.” The Center moved to the University of Michigan in 1948 where it became the Institute for Social Research, and continued to co-opt legitimate psychosocial research and exploit mass psychology. By then, the original Clinic became part of Britain’s National Health Service.
In 1946, the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations split off a policy-making “mother of all think tanks,” publicly claiming to research and direct groups and organizations while it continued massive covert operations in social engineering. The think tank registered as a charity in September 1947, in London, England. It devised and spread interdisciplinary models of Group Relations and training in management, administration and sociopolitics. Promoting creativity and organizational policy, it remains an influential intelligence organization tied to MI6, CIA, Project Paperclip German scientists, Rockefeller Foundation, and cryptocracy.
Founder, John Rawlings Rees, claimed: “Public life, politics and industry should all . . . be within our sphere of influence . . . If we are to infiltrate the professional and social activities of other people I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity! We must aim to make it permeate every educational activity in our national life . . . We have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church: the two most difficult are law and medicine.”
Former MI6 Intelligence officer John Coleman first exposed their covert activities with his insider knowledge in his 2005 book, The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations: Shaping the Moral, Spiritual, Cultural, Political, and Economic Decline of the United States of America: “The enemy is clearly identifiable as the Committee of 300, the Club of Rome, NATO, the Black Nobility, CFR and all of its affiliate organizations, the think tanks, and research institutes controlled by Stanford and … last, but certainly not least, the military establishment.”
Coleman includes the Eastern Liberal Establishment “aristocracy,” its banks, insurance companies, giant corporations, petroleum cartels, foundations, communications networks, publishing houses, radio and television networks and the movie industry. Mission creep has penetrated organizations far beyond “the Tavi,” and they are scripting our wars, our lives and our future. As the power behind the think tank thrones, instead of “doctoring the soul” the clone organizations systematically attack it. The consensual goals of mental health and group relations parted company. The promise became a curse.
What if everything you were brought up to think about society, every layer of cultural meaning about healing and freedom, was wrong? What if someone was subverting your beliefs, ideas and values with behavioral tricks to use them against you? In “the world according to Tavistock,” social drivers are disguised as their exact opposites to create a worldview that is illusory, reinventing the world in distorted form.
Tavistock invented what you should believe. It is no accident that we have become victims of future shock in the Long Crisis. It’s a battle for your soul. Ego is mental structure, not a separate entity from soul. Whether you view it psychologically or spiritually, soul is structured through ego development with mental forms, i.e. words and images. It can also be fragmented with them. We lose our soul when we lose our dreams.
What appears progressive, nurturing or good can have exactly the reverse effect. But seeing the world as it is, not as we are told or wish it to be, brings us closer to real solutions. Turning away from or denying the darkness doesn’t make it go away. Embodying our collective shadow, Tavistock is a hydra-headed Secret Agent that runs rampant, aggravating the interconnecting set of global problems.
How is the mind bent and toward what ends? The masses are bent through control of resources and the environment, mind control, massive manipulation, crisis and social turbulence. Nonprofit foundations have teamed with corporate, military and governmental entities to form a covert control force. The art of war became a management problem. Unintended consequences result. Under the guise of prevention they create oppression. …
Continued in PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1. Pre-Order at the bottom of this page now!
Messages From Space
Long Delayed Echoes and Other Intelligent Contact
By Joan d’Arc
In the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s, American radio engineer Karl Jansky discovered radio waves enamating from the Milky Way. With the development of RADAR during World War II, the military began using large radio telescopes to listen to the chatter of the stars. The first official crib monitor was erected in 1960, and was called Project Ozma after Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz. The plan was hatched by then-Director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), Frank Drake.
After four weeks of aiming their rotating antenna at the constellations of Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, both over ten light years away from Green Bank, West Virginia, Project Ozma ended in apparent frustration, like many similar Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) projects. To this day, writes Michael Theroux in his paper, “Detecting Biodynamic Signals,” no signals have been found by “standard radio-astronomical methods”.
The major difficulty with conventional interstellar communications based on radio-astronomy, says Theroux, is that it “assumes that an extraterrestrial civilisation’s technology is comparable to, and has evolved to a state equal to our own.” This is an anthropocentric assumption, as technological R&D can never be assumed to follow a parallel trajectory. Indeed, some fringe scientists have suggested that intelligent messages might even be emanating from inside the solar system.
Many scientists had reasoned that the signal from an extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) would consist of a string of prime numbers, so the receiver might be able to discriminate intelligent signals from the noise of natural background radiation. However, in his 1974 book, The Galactic Club, Ronald Bracewell concluded otherwise; expecting instead “a little poetry or art,” and, perhaps, “a program that would rivet our attention”. He wrote of the hypothetical message we should perhaps be expecting: “messages might be nested within messages—short items, frequently repeated, sandwiched between episodes of a longer story repeated less frequently, all of which is contained within an even longer communication”.
After considering the “anticlimactic” slowness of interstellar communication, Bracewell was the first to propose, in 1960, the idea that a highly technological civilization might send a messenger probe into circular orbit of a star in the mid-point of that star’s habitable zone. He proposed that the hypothetical robot probe (now known as a “Bracewell probe”) would contain radio equipment for use in communicating with another advanced technological society.
Bracewell believed that a dispatch of such messenger probes would be undertaken by a “Class 2” civilization, and “would already have been followed by some of the 10 million communities more advanced than we, which are distributed, albeit thinly, throughout the galaxy.” He proffered, “possibly such a program is currently being engaged in by our nearest superior community,” from 30 to 300 light-years away. He gave this hypothetical advanced civilization the name Superon.
Continuing his hypothetical dialogue, Bracewell wrote, “After settling into the approximate orbit where the inhabited planet should be, the probe begins a program of investigation, supplementing its internal power source with stellar power.” He speculated: “It is quite possible that a probe arrived in our solar system when our radio transmissions had not yet begun .… the earth could have been the target of a messenger probe as recently as a few decades ago, but even then we did not have commercial broadcast transmitters in operation”.
All that would be needed to tune into such broadcasts, he said, was a simple radio receiver with a knob. He further speculated, “If an alien probe near the earth picks up a terrestrial broadcast from a radio transmitter that you are listening to and then amplifies and retransmits it, you will hear first the direct transmission followed by a repeat equal to the time taken to travel out to the probe and back. The general effect will be like an echo” (Bracewell 73). This now widely documented phenomenon, under research for the past several decades, is known as Long Delayed Echoes (LDEs). …
Continued in PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1. Pre-Order at the bottom of this page now!
Grandson of the Apollo Hoax Theory
Joan d’Arc Interviews MoonFaker videographer
Jarrah White
Australian Jarrah White has carried on the Apollo moon hoax research that began in the 1970s and continued into the 1990s, taking it to video format for the modern generation of YouTubers with documentaries titled, MoonFaker: Carrying The Liar; MoonFaker: Exhibit C; MoonFaker: Rocks & Crocks; and MoonFaker: Radioactive Anomaly. In this interview, which took place in summer of 2009, White proves he’s equal to the task of “the Grandson of the Apollo Hoax Theory.”
Joan d’Arc: Jarrah, thank you for your unflagging duty to carry on the moon hoax research for the next generation. It’s very important that this information remains available. So, who were the grandfathers of the Apollo Hoax Theory? One of them, I presume, was Ralph René, author of the 1994 book NASA Mooned America?
Jarrah White: Yes, Ralph René was indeed one of those grandfathers. It is interesting to note that a lot of people assume I am the grandson of Jack White. In actuality I am known as “The Grandson” because I picked up from were Bill Kaysing left off. Kaysing was known as “The Grandfather of the Apollo Hoax Theory” because he wrote and published the first book on the subject back in 1974.
I guess you could say that I now take on after Ralph too. Ralph was still alive and kicking when I became “The Grandson.” Before he died he had sent me his various research materials, such as the document that NOAA sent him during the writing of his book, and lawsuit papers from the Kaysing/Lovell trial. It was as though he knew his time was near and he had nominated me to carry on after him.
d’Arc: You do indeed look like rock singer, Jack White! When did you first meet Ralph René and how did you two come to be such close friends?
White: Ralph and I met over the phone many years ago when I first tried to obtain a copy of NASA Mooned America. As he put it, the post office had done more damage to him than any other government entity, and at first there were some troubles getting it sent. But the delivery problems were soon sorted.
After that he and I maintained communication over both telephone and email. I would often do everything in my power to help him whenever I could; be it digging up information he was in need of, sending video footage that he tried to obtain, or just generally help introduce his book to a wider audience. I always recommended his book to others and not once did I use his research without stating where that research came from.
Before I brought my MoonFaker series out, the only voice Ralph ever had through YouTube was his brief appearance on the Fox special and that disgraceful Penn & Teller episode that tried to portray him as some crackpot. That all changed when I released the MoonFaker series. Ralph had granted me many hours of his time for various over-the-phone interviews, which provided great insight for my videos. I can’t stress to you enough how far I would go out of my way just to make his research heard and prove that his points are indeed valid.
If you would like to see some hugely significant videos that Ralph contributed to, I recommend MoonFaker: Carrying The Liar, MoonFaker: Exhibit C, MoonFaker: Rocks & Crocks and MoonFaker: Radioactive Anomaly.
d’Arc: René died by suicide on December 10, 2008. You had spoken to him just the day before? How did he seem at that time? Did his suicide shock you?
White: I had spoken to him over the phone on November 30th. He had stated over email he was dying, but really he meant he was in a lot of pain and knew his time would come sooner or later. As you might already know, Ralph spent many years of his life doing manual labor and subsequently became crippled by arthritis in both knees. He suffered from this pain for the remaining years of his life, simply because there is very poor health care in the United States. American hospitals are not run like they are in Australia, where a patient simply walks into the clinic and gets the help he needs. In the states, patients are often refused service, be it medication or surgery, and the corrupt health insurance companies do everything in their power to deny people health cover.
Ralph was in desperate need of hip-joint surgery, but the doctors first subjected him to a pre-operation stress test. Basically, if you don’t pass the test, you don’t get the surgery. As Ralph described it, “It was a test that an Olympic athlete with a sprained ankle couldn’t pass, let alone a man on a walker.” The last thing I said to him over the phone was, “Ralph this may sound like a stupid question, but how much longer do you think you have left?” and his exact reply was, “As long as I can hold out.”
He continued sending emails in the following days. The last I received from him was on December 9th (Sydney time). After that I didn’t hear from him. It wasn’t until a week later that I learned that Ralph had committed suicide.
From what I had been told it all started on December 8th. Ralph was driving with his girlfriend when there was a terrible accident and the van flipped. Both were injured but alive. Ralph was taken to the hospital but taken home the next day by a neighbour. The crash had worsened Ralph’s regular hip pain to the point he became an insomniac. On the morning of December 10, he called up his neighbour to ask where his van was. Later that night he asked his girlfriend to go home early. The next day another neighbour found his body. He also found Ralph’s will and a box of goodbye postcards that he had prepared in advance.
My initial reaction was shock and disbelief. Shock because Ralph was a very dear friend to me, and disbelief because he explicitly stated in his book that he was not suicidal. But I guess even the non-suicidal have their limits. I’ve come to learn that when one is in that much pain and there is no other option, it’s no longer suicide but relief through release. At the end of the day it was ultimately the car crash that pushed him over the edge. I strongly believe that had he not had that accident he would most likely still be here today.
d’Arc: Why have you chosen to take on this work? Did you realize at first that you would be the focus of so much anger from the mainstream scientific establishment? Why do you think people get so upset at this research?
White: As a kid I wanted to be the first man on Mars. It was my dream and I spent my life studying astronomy, collecting space books, magazines and newspaper articles, taping documentaries and news reports off the telly. Back then I believed that men had been to the moon.
Later I learned of the Apollo moon landing conspiracy theory, but I took it with a grain of salt. I looked back to everything I had already learned about astronomy, I read the conspiracy material, and of course, I came upon website after website trying to prove that the moon missions were real.
In reading through these pro-NASA websites it quickly became apparent that the webmasters in question were not trying to offer any refuting evidence at all, but rather muddy the waters, lead astray those who are without ready access to the conspiracy research or even the source material, and generally spread false rumors and incite unfounded hatred against anyone who doubts Apollo. It’s propaganda, which is why I subsequently refer to these individuals as ‘propagandists.’…
Continued in PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1. Pre-Order at the bottom of this page now!
Robin Hood
Yorkshire’s Buried Treasure
By Barbara Green
Deep in the heart of an ancient woodland in West Yorkshire, hidden beneath a formidable barrier of fierce thorns and dense undergrowth, there is a hidden grave. Here rests the mortal remains of Robin Hood, the Prince of Robbers, England’s outlaw hero, bloodily slain by the Prioress of Kirklees Nunnery six hundred years ago and cast into an unhallowed grave.
Who was the evil nun and why did she commit so foul a murder? What was the role of Red Roger of Doncaster, the convent priest? Is it possible that he was really Will Scarlet, turned monk, also the prioress’s lover? Who was the prioress? Was she Dame Mary Startin, who died of the Black Death in 1350?
All that is left of this medieval whodunit is a ruined grave, hidden in deep woodland, within the derelict priory gatehouse where Robin was so gruesomely done to death. Was the famous outlaw a victim of thwarted passion, pagan sacrifice, bad nursing, accident, natural causes or—vampirism? The entire area where this horrific drama took place is shrouded in, according to one writer, “… a mystery which local people only reluctantly tried to penetrate.”
Today, Robin lies forgotten and unmourned in his lonely and desolate sepulchre, for few people know of the grave’s existence or its whereabouts. Why is this so? Should not such a monument be an international place of pilgrimage, and should Yorkshire, not Nottingham, be the centre of the famous folk hero’s legend? These are the mysteries this article attempts to unravel.
In 1983 I was asked to nurse Sir John Armytage, the 8th baronet of Kirklees Hall, in his last illness. I was the Brighouse district nurse at the time. Sir John passed away and the following year I asked Lady Armytage, his widow, if I could visit Robin Hood’s grave. Lady Armytage had inherited the estate while Sir Martin, Sir John’s son by his first wife, moved away. Shortly afterwards Lady Armytage sold the hall (which was turned into luxury flats) but kept the farm and historical sites, and went on to build a new house on the priory ruins.
In the following years I became very interested in the legend of Robin Hood, and after researching the Yorkshire connections I wrote a book called Marian’s Christmas Rose about Maid Marian with reference to Kirklees Priory. I asked Lady Armytage if I could take the book to the Kirklees Annual Garden Party in 1985. In response, Lady A and her “organiser,” Mrs. James, paid an uninvited visit to my home. Mrs. James waved the book around, complaining that it mentioned Kirklees. She stated that it could not be sold at Kirklees because it would interest people in Robin’s grave and no one was allowed to visit it. Lady A remained silent throughout this visit.
In 1985, I formed the Yorkshire Robin Hood Society (YRHS) with a friend, Ruth Harrington. Lady Armytage was invited to become a Patron but declined, saying she was “too busy.” Later, Ruth and I were filmed by the BBC programme Look North, but we had to go to Shibden Park as Lady Armytage would not let us film on site. The following year Ruth and I visited the Nottingham Medieval Market to sell my book, Marian Christmas Rose, which caused a ruckus. We were reported to the Sheriff of Nottingham. In 1987, Ruth and I were filmed by TV for a programme called FAX in Wakefield library because we were again refused permission at Kirklees. This film was never broadcast.
Later in the year we visited London in order to meet John Pope de Locksley of the London Robin Hood Club. We met at the Barnet Carnival, where we also made the acquaintance of Lord Sean Manchester, who offered to become Patron of the YRHS. We were very pleased about this, though we later learned that Lord Manchester was a famous “vampire hunter” who is descended from Lord Byron.
The following year I was filmed again, with another member, Evelyn Friend, by the BBC for a programme called People. Once more, the Yorkshire Robin Hood Society was not allowed to go to the grave, though the film crew was allowed, provided they kept the location secret. When the film was broadcast, Evelyn and I were furious to find that all our comments about the grave had been edited out, and we were left talking about trivial things—Evelyn’s most memorable line being, “I am Robin Hood in drag.” …
Continued in PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1. Pre-Order at the bottom of this page now!
The Great American Moon Hoax
Joan d’Arc Interviews Ralph René (1995)
Ralph René, author of NASA Mooned America!, believes that there have been no manned flights to the moon. In this exclusive interview, René asserts that the Apollo moon photos are studio creations. He also shows that NASA has lied about deadly solar radiation and the true temperature in space, and charges that NASA has instituted a policy of lying by its “astro-nots.” So what did NASA really do with the money that went into its deep space pockets? Currently enjoying a wave of popularity in Russia, René believes the Apollo program helped to finance the CIA’s secret war in Laos and Cambodia.
Joan: René, you claim that NASA faked the photos of Apollo moon landings, and in your book you analyze several of these photographs showing why they are hoaxes. Let’s talk about the most famous official NASA photograph, from the cover of your book. The photo of Alan Bean entitled “Astronaut Collecting Lunar Samples, Apollo XII” was purportedly taken on the moon by Peter Conrad on October 20, 1969. At first glance it is an artistically contrived picture of an astronaut with the reflection of another astronaut, standing some distance away, reflected in his faceplate. Is it actually possible for astronauts to get this creative on the moon?
René: I think that the creative layout was the result of a composite picture from studio photos created by snip and paste in a photo lab.
Joan: So, in your estimation, what’s wrong with this picture? [See Alan Bean photo on page 52]
René: The first thing I noticed about the photo was that the shadow side of Al Bean’s suit was brightly lit. The top front of Bean’s left shoulder and his whole left side is much too bright for the singularly directional sun light found in the vacuum of space.
The next thing is that the lower inside of his right arm should have been in a shadow. Then there is the fact that the Moon’s actual horizon is on the same level as the horizon reflected in Bean’s faceplate. Both faceplates are curved, and mirrored curves double the angle of incidence. Obviously since only two astro-nots were supposed to be on the Moon, this photo had to have been snapped by Peter Conrad. But when you take a magnifying glass to the original photo, Conrad’s hand is nowhere near where the camera should be. In fact, Conrad has no camera, or if he has his hand obscured the lens. An X-ray camera perhaps!
Examination of Bean’s shadow as shown in his faceplate shows that the two figures were less than 10 feet apart. Because of the faceplate’s curvature, the camera that took the picture had to be at least 10 feet in the air directly between them. Since we don’t see anything there, it had to have been either taken from a camera boom using a timer mechanism to trip the shutter, or there was another astro-not (stage hand) on that camera boom that we have never been told about.
We’ve all seen the TV travel adventures where a lone man pits his life against the wilderness and goes from hither to thither being photographed from every angle by … nobody! And if these explanations don’t sit well, try this one. The Man in the Moon is very tall and happened to be passing, so he obligingly snapped the shot for the two tourists before he went on his way.
Another problem is found in the shiny object in Bean’s hand. Again there is no shadow side even though his shadow (shown in his face plate) proves that the sun was behind him and off to his right. Since neither flash nor spotlight can compete with the light from the Sun the brightness is inexplicable.
Look at the bright circular object that is level with the top of his helmet and off to his far right side. Notice the two long structural—looking objects below it. It looks like a spotlight on scaffolding, doesn’t it? Spotlights light best that which they are aimed at, hence the name. Check out Conrad! Of all the places one can imagine, the Moon must be evenly lit because it lacks atmosphere, clouds and trees. Why should an extremely bright pool of light be centered on Conrad? Does the Sun play favorites on the Moon?
If you look at Conrad’s feet you will notice the main shadow on his right going toward his rear and another one on his left coming forward. Two shadows, one Sun. Strange things were happening on the Moon….
Continued in PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1. Pre-Order at the bottom of this page now!
Programmed to Kill
Al Hidell Interviews David McGowan
A deluge of news reports, books, and movies has shaped the public perception of serial killers and mass murderers. They are generally assumed to be solitary, deranged loners whose killings always fit a certain pattern. It is perhaps the ultimate “Lone Nut Theory.” In his book Programmed to Kill, author David McGowan explodes these common assumptions, revealing largely hidden facts that suggest there’s more to the serial killer phenomenon than meets the eye.
Al Hidell: Your book Programmed to Kill suggests that some serial killers have connections to political figures, the FBI and CIA, and Satanic cults. Let’s start with the political figures. Two examples you cite are George W. Bush’s unusually lenient treatment of notorious serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, and his brother Jeb Bush’s similar compassion towards Lucas’ partner in crime. While this isn’t proof of the killers’ high-level political connections, it’s certainly odd. Can you describe what happened, and what made it unusual?
David McGowan: Henry Lee Lucas was convicted of numerous counts of first-degree murder, and was credited with scores, maybe even hundreds, of additional uncharged murders, many of them involving such depravities as torture, mutilation, cannibalism and necrophilia. Nevertheless, he had the unique distinction of being the only man to have his death sentence commuted during George W. Bush’s tenure as governor of the state of Texas. Governor Bush personally, and quite uncharacteristically, requested that the Texas State Board of Pardons and Paroles (whose members were his own appointees) review Lucas’ case. Strangely enough, that board uncharacteristically issued a recommendation that Lucas’ sentence be commuted, and Bush then quietly signed the order sparing his life.
This all happened in June of 1998, but the media never really bothered to report the story, most likely because Bush’s efforts on behalf of Lucas defy any reasonable explanation. This is, after all, the same governor who eagerly, sometimes even gleefully, signed off on every other execution order that crossed his desk, even in cases where there had been clear irregularities in the condemned inmate’s conviction, and even in cases where the inmate was a woman, a juvenile, or was mentally impaired.
Lucas’ partner, Ottis Toole, also managed to get his death sentence set aside, even though he was convicted and sentenced in Florida, a state that is not known for shying away from enforcing the death penalty, and even though his crimes were every bit as heinous as those of his partner. I believe, though, that the commutation of Toole’s sentence predated the reign of Governor Jeb Bush.
Hidell: OK, so Jeb gets a pass on this one. Do Texas and Florida have anything else in common besides being controlled by the Bush Boys?
McGowan: As I discuss in the book, Texas and Florida have several things in common: they are two of the three states that provide a point-of-entry into the country for the vast majority of the illicit drugs trafficked through South and Central America; they are both rife with cult activity; and they have both been home to an inordinate number of serial killers. As you noted, at the time I began writing my book, Texas and Florida were both controlled by members of the Bush family. Interestingly enough, the third point of entry for illegal drugs, the state of California, which is also rife with cult activity, and which has also spawned an extraordinary number of serial killers, has now fallen under the control of someone who appears to be a close confidant of the Bush clan, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Hidell: You suggest serial killers Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy had political connections. What led you to that conclusion?
McGowan: First, let me say that I am not necessarily arguing that any hard and fast conclusions can be drawn about any specific killer from the evidence presented in my book. From my perspective, the key to understanding the world that we live in is pattern recognition. I approached this book in much the same way that I approached my last book, Understanding the F-Word: American Fascism and the Politics of Illusion—by combing the published literature for all the inconvenient facts that are generally just sort of brushed over because they don’t fit the official story. Just as my previous effort was an alternative political history of 20th century America, created from largely hidden threads, this book is an alternative history of violent, sensational crime in 20th century America. And what I found was that many of the threads that ran through my last book also run through this book.
Since this book is ultimately about fleshing out the hidden patterns that connect the life stories of the various notorious figures profiled therein, the case that the book attempts to make is necessarily a cumulative one. In other words, it is very easy to dismiss bits and pieces of evidence that tend to indicate, for example, that a particular serial killer had political and/or intelligence connections as simply an anomaly, a coincidence, an insignificant detail, etc. It is much more difficult to dismiss such evidence when it can be seen repeating in so many seemingly unrelated cases.
With that disclaimer out of the way, let me add that the most intriguing indication of Dahmer’s political connections was his ability, while on a senior class field trip to Washington, D.C., to spontaneously arrange, with an impromptu call from a payphone, a private tour of both the Vice President’s office and the office of prominent political columnist Art Buchwald. Needless to say, that’s not something that the average 17-year old kid can pull off. …
Continued in PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1. Pre-Order at the bottom of this page now!
The Sons of the Sun of God
Joan d’Arc Interviews Acharya S
Acharya S is the author of several books on the subject of “astrotheology” and the mythical nature of the pantheon of gods that people the sky. She was classically educated and is a member of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Greece. She has served as a trench master on archaeological excavations in Corinth, Greece, and Connecticut, USA, as well as a teacher’s assistant on the island of Crete. She has traveled extensively around Europe and speaks, reads and/or writes English, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian, German and Portuguese. She has cross-referenced the Bible in the original Hebrew and ancient Greek. And she has written some of my favorite books, including The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold, Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled and her latest bombshell, Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection.
Joan: A “mythicist” is someone who perceives biblical characters as being mythical and the origin of myths as being based in nature worship and “astrotheology.” How did you come to be a mythicist and astrotheologist? Does this necessarily mean you’re an atheist?
Acharya: I began reading about myths—especially the Greek myths—when I was a small child. After that time, I had a growing curiosity about mythology and religion, which has evolved into a longstanding passion. By young adulthood, I knew a significant amount about the religions and myths of many cultures around the world. But I myself did not really have a religion.
I was born into a mild Protestant sect and attended a Congregational Church, but I rejected it all as boring from about the age of seven onward, and I emancipated myself at 12. I went to Greece when I was 14, and the rest, as they say, is history… and archaeology… and mythology.
With all that strong background in mythology for so many years, I was prepared for when I had the epiphany of the mythical nature of Jesus. I don’t mean the vague sense of rejection of the miracles that many people likely experience, leading them to become “evemerists,” or those who believe Christ was a real man to whose mundane biography his ardent followers attached many fables and fairytales. A mythicist is someone who perceives the gospel as a whole to be mythical, with no historical core to the onion when the mythological layers have been peeled. This contention is not to say, however, that there are no historical characters in the New Testament. Herod and Pilate appear firmly rooted in the historical record, for example. But the gospel story itself is like Gulliver’s Travels, a historical novel that is placed in England but that nonetheless remains fictional.
When it comes to the Greek and Roman gods, practically everyone is a mythicist, believing these characters, such as Zeus and Hercules, not ever to have been “real people” but to represent in large part natural phenomena, such as storms, thunderbolts, wind, the sea, the sun and so on. All told, the religion and mythology of old were very concerned with not only the afterlife and underworld but also the here and now of this world, which they likewise perceived as sacred.
The cosmic part of this nature worship is called “astrotheology,” specifically the reverence for and worship of the sun, moon, planets, stars, constellations and so on.
Being convinced of the mythical nature of many gods, godmen and heroes of old, and being fascinated by the astrotheological origin of many myths and traditions, does not necessarily make or require one to become an atheist. I have no interest in being categorized in either the theist or atheist camp, and I have no desire to create either theists or atheists with my writing. What you do with your own mind is up to you, so long as it doesn’t spill out onto others in a negative fashion. If you wish to sit and daydream about a beautiful, heavenly place where there is a radiant being of bliss you call “God,” not only is it none of my business, but I would actually encourage you to do so, if it brings some joy to your life.
If, however, something tragic happens—and it always does—and you wish to think there could not possibly be any good god in charge of everything, your thoughts too would be none of my business, except that I would say they are entirely appropriate for the situation. Frankly, the archaeoastronomical, astrotheological and cosmological knowledge expressed by the ancients—one of the planks of mythicism—is so exciting to me that it fills me with the wonder and awe often deemed a religious experience. Yet, I neither believe nor dismiss it. I simply enjoy it. …
Continued in PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1. Pre-Order at the bottom of this page now!
Deep Secrets of a UFO Think Tank
RAND, Battelle and Memory Metal
By Anthony BragaliaSince the 1940’s the U.S. government has quietly engaged one of its key defense and intelligence agency contractors as a secret UFO “think tank.” New investigation reveals that the esteemed RAND Corporation has given far more than a passing thought to things extraterrestrial. RAND’s hidden history of UFO involvement has been discovered to include work in policy analysis, evaluation of evidence, and in advising on the potential technological advantages achieved from UFO study. Telling connections have also been found between RAND and the Roswell crash event of 1947.
RAND Corporation was established in 1946 by the U.S Army Air Force as Project RAND (“Research ANd Development”) and is today registered as a nonprofit organization. It is funded through government contracts, university collaborators and “private donors.” RAND’s primary agency clients include the CIA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Headquartered in Santa Monica, California, the think tank maintains branches worldwide. RAND’s stated mission is to “help to improve policy and decision making through objective research and analysis.” Its work is officially conducted “for the public welfare and security of the United States of America.”
Over thirty Nobel Prize winners have been employed by RAND. From physics to economics, the 2,000-person think tank provides high-level information and evaluation to the U.S. government. Deeper review shows that RAND has conducted studies in such areas as weapons development, intelligence gathering and analysis, and the design of sensitive underground installations for the U.S. Air Force. Far more concealed is RAND’s intimate involvement in highly-classified UFO study for the U.S. government.
From its very inception, the men of RAND knew much about saucers. RAND was conceived by Donald Douglas, CEO of Douglas Aircraft (protégé of Dr. Jerome Hunsaker at MIT) along with two military officer luminaries who carried with them significant “UFO histories”: Major General Curtis LeMay (the U.S. Air Force’s Chief of Development) and General Hap Arnold (considered the “father” of the modern U.S. Air Force).
In May of 1948, RAND was separated from Douglas Aircraft and became its own operating entity. Among RAND’s earliest government reports was the release of the enigmatically titled, “Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship.”
Curtis LeMay expressed deep interest and concern about flying saucer phenomena. More than this, LeMay himself was a keeper of the purported 1947 Roswell UFO crash debris. This was revealed in a stunningly candid interview with the late U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater. Goldwater (a former U.S. Presidential Candidate, Major General and Command Pilot) was General LeMay’s professional associate and close friend. LeMay’s UFO involvement was related by Goldwater in a live worldwide broadcast with CNN’s Larry King in 1994. The USAF had just issued its report that debunked the Roswell crash of 1947 as a Mogul balloon. Goldwater (who died just a few years later) informed King that he knew the truth to be far different.
He knew this, he explained, because in the 1960’s he had approached LeMay about the crashed UFO issue. Goldwater—who no doubt held the highest security clearances—told Larry King: “I think at Wright-Patterson, if you could get into certain places, you’ll find what the Air Force and the government knows about UFOs. Reportedly, a spaceship landed. It was all hushed up. I called Curtis LeMay and I said, ‘General, I know we have a room at Wright-Patterson where you put all of this secret stuff. Could I go in there?’ I’ve never heard General LeMay get mad, but he got madder than hell at me, cussed me out and said, ‘Don’t ever ask me that question again!’” Goldwater never did.
LeMay was very well acquainted with Roswell Army Air Field Base Commander Butch Blanchard. Blanchard oversaw the base at the time of the Roswell crash event in 1947. It is believed that Blanchard helped issue the original press release on the crash, which prompted the famous headline, “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region.” Blanchard’s former wife and daughter say that he was visibly upset by the event. He repeated only, “those Russians have some amazing things.” …
Continued in PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1. Pre-Order at the bottom of this page now!
Inside Job
An Interview with David Ray Griffin
David Ray Griffin has been called a leading proponent of alternative theories questioning the 9/11 “official conspiracy theory.” He is the author of several books on 9/11, including The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, Debunking 9/11 Debunking, The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive and The Mysterious Collapse of WTC7. He is a member of the group, Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice, and is a frequent contributor to the Journal of 9/11 Studies. He is a retired professor of philosophy of religion and theology. He is co-director of the Center for Process Studies at the Claremont School of Theology.
Joan d’Arc: David, the day after 9/11 you began writing a history of American imperialism. You write that at that time you had accepted the government’s “official conspiracy theory” of 9/11 and the “liberal” interpretation that 9/11 was “blowback for U.S. foreign policy.” What made you initially begin instead looking at the attacks as a “false flag operation”?
David Ray Griffin: When I first heard the theory that 9/11 was an inside job, I dismissed it, thinking even the Bush administration wouldn’t do something this heinous. But then a colleague sent information about a website (WantToKnow.info) that contained an abbreviated version of Paul Thompson’s “Complete 9/11 Timeline.” I found in it hundreds of stories from the mainstream press that contradicted some aspect of the official account of 9/11. It took only a few hours to see that something was seriously wrong.
Joan: What are the essential differences between the false flag view and the government’s official conspiracy theory?
David: The most obvious difference between the two conspiracy theories is the identity of the conspirators. The government says they were Osama bin Laden and various members of al-Qaeda. The alternative theory says that they were central members of the Bush administration and the military. A less obvious difference, which it takes a little study to see, is that, although each theory has its supporting evidence, all the evidence supporting the government’s theory crumbles upon examination.
Joan: So in the government’s conspiracy theory, we wake up the very next morning and see the mug shots of 19 Muslim hijackers on the front page of the newspaper and learn the now familiar term Al Qaeda. But you claim that all of this evidence—passports, luggage, phone calls, security videos, bin Laden confession videos, etc.—is suspect. Do you believe this evidence was planted?
David: Yes. My evidence to support this claim, which is contained in The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, is summarized in an online essay, “Was America Attacked by Muslims on 9/11?” (davidraygriffin.com) The fact that some of the evidence was planted is obvious. For example, does anyone really believe that when Flight 11 hit the North Tower, creating a giant fireball, a passport could have flown out of Satam al-Suqami’s pocket, escaped from the cabin of the plane and from the building unsinged by the fire, and floated to the ground where it would be found by a passerby?
But with some of the purported evidence, one must do some research to see that it was planted. For example, I learned only while writing my 2008 book 9/11 Contradictions that the most important story about the discovery of evidence implicating al-Qaeda had been invented several days after 9/11. This was the story that officials in Boston had found Mohamed Atta’s luggage, which contained many pieces of incriminating evidence, including Atta’s will. The story was that he and another member of al-Qaeda had on September 10 driven a Nissan rental car up to Portland, Maine, stayed overnight and then caught a commuter flight back to Boston the next morning. Although they made the transfer, Atta’s luggage did not.
This story first appeared on September 16. The first story had been that this evidence had been found in a Mitsubishi Atta had rented and left in the Boston airport, and that the Muslims who had taken the commuter flight to Boston after staying overnight in Portland were two brothers named Bukhari. On September 13, however, the FBI discovered that neither of the Bukharis had died on 9/11 (one had died the year before, the other was still alive). So the authorities simply changed the story, saying that it was Atta and another man who drove the Nissan to Portland and took the commuter flight to Boston the next morning. The incriminating evidence, instead of being found in a Mitsubishi, was found in Atta’s luggage. The new story resulted in the absurdity that Atta had planned to take his will on a flight he was going to crash into the World Trade Center.
Joan: Were any other alleged hijackers found to be alive and well?
David: Yes. The clearest case is that of Waleed al-Shehri, who showed up alive in Morocco ten days after 9/11, explaining to journalists and U.S. authorities that he could not possibly have been on Flight 11, as the FBI had alleged. His story was reported in the British press, including the BBC. And yet when the 9/11 Commission issued its report in 2004, it suggested that al-Shehri had stabbed one of the flight attendants shortly before American 11 crashed into the North Tower.
Joan: Regarding the bin Laden “confession” I have read that the FBI has admitted it has no evidence of bin Laden’s involvement in 9/11 and that he’s actually wanted for the bombing of U.S. Embassies in 1998. How can the U.S. be involved in two wars—Iraq and Afghanistan—on the pretext of searching for a terrorist who is not wanted at all for the events of 9/11?
David: Yes, this admission (which I discuss in New Pearl Harbor Revisited and “Was America Attacked by Muslims on 9/11?”) is simply one of the dozens of damning facts that our “free press” refuses to publish. Another one—about which I’ve just completed a small book—is that Osama bin Laden has probably been dead since December 15, 2001 (the day his funeral was reported). This means, of course, that all the bin Laden audiotapes and videotapes that have appeared since then have been fabricated, as former CIA operative Robert Baer has suggested. (Baer told me: “I believe there’s a vast industry of contractors, corporations, and pundits who need bin Laden alive, all of them eating at the trough.”) …
Continued in PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1.
And there’s MORE! Way more!
Pre-Order here!
http://www.paranoiamagazine.com/volume1_highlights.html
The following articles and interviews are highlights of the coming book PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1. 180 pages. Due in April 2010. Please Pre-Order by Paypal at the bottom of this page or click on the book cover at www.paranoiamagazine.com
The Men That Don’t Fit In
Joan d’Arc Interviews JFK Witness, Roderick A. MacKenzie, III
The story that is about to unwind might sound fantastic. The author of the tale is one “Roderick A. MacKenzie, III” who is 74 years of age. I have no way to corroborate the tale, but nonetheless I feel compelled to delve into it to get the “facts.” Here’s how I got myself inextricably involved: In April of 2009 I received an internet link from conspiracy researcher Ron Patton to an audio interview at ConspiraZine. He suggested I listen to this man who claims to have worked for the Mob in Dallas, Texas before, during and after the JFK assassination of November 22, 1963.
Roderick A. MacKenzie, III is the author of a self-published book called The Men That Don’t Fit In: The Factual History of a Rogues Life from 1934 to 1967 (subtitle: “which includes the very interesting period of the Pre-Cuban Revolution, the Post-Cuban Revolution and Times of Intrigue and Covert Action as well as adventures around the Defense Industrial Security Command Spooks and Characters, the Outfit, the Cuban Affairs Dept., with the bonus insiders view of Circus, Carnival and Outdoor Amusements Life”).
MacKenzie’s story started simply enough. He had a normal upbringing in a lovely rural town dotted with farms and lakes; indeed, as I can vouch, a really nice place to grow up. But he had gotten himself into a little trouble in high school, and his parents strongly suggested he join the Army. So he got out of that one horse town and traveled the world.
After service, MacKenzie eventually landed at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and trained at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s “Flaps and Seals” school in the art of making false I.D.’s. It seems in his early days he had invented a suitcase I.D. system, which he describes as a “complete I.D. factory with blanks of all sorts, certificates, checks and I.D. cards, a small printing press and types, inks, seal making equipment, a compact enlarger, photo print frame, papers and chemical packs, trays and so on.” In fact, according to MacKenzie, this little gift is what enabled him to escape the “Zone of the Interior” in 1964.
MacKenzie claims he was employed by Mafia boss, Sam Giancana, to run the “safe house” in Dallas, Texas when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. MacKenzie claims he didn’t know the event was going to happen; yet, as soon as it happened he realized the “precarious position” he was in. So he disappeared: “Of course,” he explains, “it was a time before the mass effort to identify everyone by the social security, mom’s maiden name, birth date,” and so on.
So, why did MacKenzie finally write The Men That Don’t Fit In? In his introduction, he writes, “It is not easy to answer because in revealing these facts as I know them, I open myself up to being branded everything from a nut case to a wannabe, kook, or liar. I am none of these and care little what the reader thinks. These facts have gnawed at my gut for 46 years and I do not care to head for the eternal dirt nap on the Great Midway Beyond without making an attempt at stating what I know and saw at that time.”
MacKenzie describes the JFK hit as “a classic, well thought-out hit by a very large cast of characters.” He explains, “They brought just about everyone who was anyone in the business of nastiness and criminality together to witness or unwittingly be part of it. I was one such person. We were all disposable, as well, and did not know that either.” Following the assassination, he spent a day drinking with Malcolm “Mac” Wallace, the man who he claims “had directed the killing teams for Lyndon B. Johnson and his Texas Mafia with the help of the other Mafia.” In fact, says MacKenzie, “Mac was quite talkative in a conspirator way.”
In June of 2009 I began an email interview with Roderick A. MacKenzie in order to verify some of the claims in his book. Let’s put Roderick MacKenzie’s cards on the table and see what he’s got.
Joan: You write that Mac Wallace (whom you describe as “Lyndon Baines Johnson’s hit man”) and Jake Miranda (your handler) were working for a government agency called “Permindex Co.” which was part of the Defense Industrial Security Command (DISC). What else can you tell me about that?
MacKenzie: I know that Roselli said we were all under the “Defense Intelligence Security Command Bastards,” and that was what both he and Jake Miranda called them. Later, Del Graham said that outfit caused him to have a heart attack in Tarzana, California, over the Kennedy hit while he was on the phone to Roselli at the Baylor Hospital cafeteria in Dallas. So that’s one of the people Roselli talked with during the hit. Miranda and I were at Baylor cafeteria too, so all three of us were not shooters by our own alibis.
I guess it was DoD that was setting all of us into the slots where we were supposed to be. They paid for everything. I got bucks from the Permindex vouchers in Dallas and New Orleans on the road from Geno La Motta, who got it from Chicago, and at the time I ran safe houses on the carnival routes and in the Holland Avenue safe house in Dallas. Jake Miranda and Mac Wallace had me sign those vouchers for bucks, and Ruby’s sister had me sign one once when Miranda was in New Orleans for money needed to do with my clients at the Holland House.
Joan: Now that you’re talking about the safe house, who actually ran it? The Mob, the CIA, both? Did the cops know about it?
MacKenzie: The safe house I ran on the carnivals was for someone named “Abe.” I guess he was DISC, at least that’s what I was told by the mobsters. The Mob was partnered in there somehow, so was good ole Permindex; the money always goes back to that outfit. I did not ask questions. The folks that were clients were from FBI Branch Five, that Baptist front outfit in Mexico [ACCC], the Chicago Mob and I guess the DoD. No one ever came across as CIA or other alphabet agency.
Joan: You describe Jack Rubenstein (“Ruby”) as a “short fussed guy that goes off at a moment’s notice over little stuff.” You disliked being around him. On what occasions did you have need to be around him?
MacKenzie: The bunch at the Holland Ave safe house were from Rubenstein. The other Mob people and Jake Miranda, who was in contact daily with me, I got my orders from him. Tippit the cop was in the know and brought money and people to me. I don’t think Tippit was a bad cop though. I never thought that Marcello was sending people to the safe house, but that phony preacher/missionary [Jack] Bowen [American Council of Christian Churches] sure sent a lot of “resters” there for very short times.
It all came through Miranda, though Rubenstein tried to get directly involved a time or two, but when I called Miranda he backed off. He did get a couple of signs for the Carousel out of me though. The Mob, DISC, FBI-5 through Rev. Bowen, Percy [Chauncey] Holt were my contacts, plus Tippit a few times. Otherwise I can’t say who ran the safe house. …
Continued in PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1. Pre-Order at the bottom of this page now!
The Necronomicon
By Dan Harms
A recent list of the top ten grimoires, or books of magic, included a book called the Necronomicon. Not too bad for a work that started as a literary in-joke. How did the Necronomicon make the leap from fiction to occult notoriety? Let’s look at the story.
One century ago, a young man named Howard Phillips Lovecraft was living in Providence, Rhode Island. Having left high school due to illness before graduating, he was unable to fulfill his dream of going to Brown University. His once-wealthy family was slipping into genteel poverty, but he was nonetheless expected to uphold the lifestyle of a gentleman of leisure. Lovecraft must have found negotiating these expectations and hopes a difficult situation.
He found an answer in writing. At first he wrote essays on political and cultural topics, but soon he found his true strength: short stories of monsters and tortured souls, written in the style of Edgar Allan Poe. In 1923, he submitted these works to the pulp magazine Weird Tales, where he found himself gaining some success—and a little money on the side.
As Lovecraft continued to write, he sought his own voice, creating a series of fictional props to express his philosophy and aesthetics. The most notable of these creations, the dread Necronomicon, appeared for the first time in his story “The Hound,” written in 1922. This tale centers around two graverobbers who take a magical talisman from a corpse, causing them to be pursued by a horrible undead monster. In their desperation, they consult the Necronomicon for more information on the topic—but it does not tell them how to stop the beast.
In “The Hound,” Lovecraft mentions “Abdul Alhazred” as the book’s author. Alhazred was actually a childhood name of Lovecraft’s during a period when he was fascinated with The Arabian Nights. In a previous story, Lovecraft had even composed a piece of poetry by Alhazred:
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
This poem was to become the leitmotif of Lovecraft’s fiction. Humanity, according to Lovecraft’s cosmology, is but a transitory phenomenon on this planet. Beyond the realm of everyday consciousness are older forces—magic, monsters, lost civilizations, and other mysteries of the universe. The protagonists in his tales are usually men driven to explore the past due to curiosity or compulsion. The horrific—or awe-inspiring—revelations they uncover leave the narrators shaken, missing, or insane…
Continued in PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1. Pre-Order at the bottom of this page now!
Crimson Shadows
Freemasonry, the OTO and the CIA
Interview with Craig Heimbichner
Craig Heimbichner is the author of Blood on the Altar: The Secret History of the World’s Most Dangerous Secret Society, which among other topics covers the relationship between Freemasonic groups, the OTO, the CIA and the military. In this interview, Craig discusses a few of the controversial subjects of his book—blood sacrifice, the homunculus ritual, legal loopholes of the Talmud, Aleister Crowley, Alfred Kinsey, and James Shelby Downard.
Joan d’Arc: In your book, Blood on the Altar, you talk about the “Invisible Government” as an “amorphous grouping of individuals and agencies.” Who are these individuals and agencies, what type of ‘glue’ coheres them, and what, do you surmise, is the origin of this group or these groups? Are they largely made up of patriarchal Freemasonic groups? What do they wish to accomplish?
Craig: These groups comprise the true powerbrokers behind the scenes. As Benjamin Disraeli writes in Coningsby, “the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.”
To give some examples, let’s start with the CIA. Clearly the CIA has operated in the shadows from its inception and has planned major events with world-shaking impact, including assassinations. Officially, where are they in the ‘civics course’ version of government? Where are they in the Constitution? But they exist, and have had great power—from the shadow side, as part of the “Invisible Government.” Just because a group is ‘known,’ as the CIA is, doesn’t mean that its activities are transparent. The CIA retains great power in spite of occasional forays into oversight, real or feigned, from Congress.
We could also bring up financial and military organizations, but I think your question is aiming at a shadow-level behind those groups. That level really gets to the back room, the realm of the dealmakers. The glue that binds them tends to be partly ideological and goal-driven, but there is more to it than that. You mention patriarchal Freemasonic groups, and this is starting to touch on the “glue,” which is actually a larger, sprawling network of fraternal organizations and secret societies. These groups, which have a long and complex history, usually have a large base of well-meaning and clueless members, but the organizations are also perfect covers for those who wish to plot and cut deals, with agendas that can include criminal activities or shady power grabs.
One example of a Masonic group that is usually overlooked would be the National Sojourners—the military organization for Freemasons. I’ve written about this group in my article, “Brotherhood of the Gun,” in the recently published Secret and Suppressed II (Feral House, 2009). Goals of the elites in these various fraternal orgs and secret societies center on the usual—power and money—but there’s a layer past all of that, and domination of the Group Mind is at the heart of their core egomaniacal dreams: the creation of a zombie level of patsies who feed the upper structure of power.
Joan: Tell me more about the National Sojourners. How does this group stay so secretive? One website (masonicworld.com) states that the group “formally brings together Masonic leaders of the uniformed services of the U.S. to further the National Defense, and works to oppose any influence calculated to weaken our National Security.” So this is a surprising claim. What might that include?
Craig: It might include practically anything, if the past eight years under George W. Bush is any indication of what gets pulled off in the name of “National Security.” And it hasn’t ended with Obama, by the way. The problem here is that we are not only dealing with the already secretive world of military decisions, but another layer as well. Goethe (himself a Freemason) famously criticized the Lodge for being a “government within a government.” The danger of a group like the National Sojourners is that we can be dealing with a military within the military, a secretive group of decision-makers within the already protected war-structure that decides to drop bombs and invade countries…
Continued in PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1. Pre-Order at the bottom of this page now!
The Mystery of Albert Pike
Saint or Satanist?
By Robert Guffey
The enigma of Albert Pike is a persistent one. Certain facts are known about him, facts that detractors and supporters alike can both agree upon. He’s a little-known figure whose impact upon American history far exceeds his notoriety. He founded the Scottish Rite and single-handedly created the higher degrees of Freemasonry (degrees 4 through 33). He was Sovereign Grand Commander of the Southern Jurisdiction of Scottish Rite Freemasonry from 1859 to 1891, the year of his death. He was a Confederate General during the American Civil War. He was a powerful attorney in his day. He was also a prominent poet, whose literary works have been forgotten except by a small handful of devotees. He is the author of the most important work on Masonic ritual, philosophy and symbolism, i.e., Morals and Dogma.
On these facts, everyone can agree. It’s the interpretation of these facts that begin to grow a bit misty.
Pike is a polarizing figure. There seems to be very little objective analysis of his impact on history. Mainstream historians rarely, if ever, refer to him. Therefore, we are left with volumes of questionable interpretations that often draw upon half-truths, rumors, innuendoes, misinterpretations, and outright forgeries. Pick up any book that contains even a minor reference to the man and you will find that the interpretation of the author falls into one of two categories: 1) Pike was a genius and a saint whose very touch turned men’s souls into alchemical gold, or 2) Pike was a Satan worshipper whose noxious acts still stain the very heart of the United States of America—indeed, the very world itself.
There is no middle ground among these “researchers.” Pike was either good or evil. Of course, the world would be much simpler if anyone was wholly good or wholly evil. Zen Buddhist Alan Watts once wrote a book entitled The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are in which he advised his readers to drop that dialectic way of thinking, what he called “the game of Black-versus-White” (Watts 30). It only causes confusion because it is a model that does not reflect reality. Human beings are far more complicated than that, and this includes Pike.
With most historical figures, the latter statement could normally go unsaid, but strange as it is to say, a very small minority of pundits have indeed implied that Albert Pike was not human at all (he was really a shape-shifting reptilian in disguise). I’m going to immediately crawl out on a limb, right here in the fifth paragraph, and propose we eliminate that theory for lack of evidence. I hope to now move on to more pressing matters….
But first, picture a scene for me, if you will. Picture an underground train depot, a twisted set of metal tracks sunk about ten feet into the concrete. On either side of the tracks people are yelling at each other: men, women, children… all races, all creeds. Strangely, some of the people who are shouting the loudest have no faces at all. A giant bronze bust of Pike is sitting in the middle of the tracks. In the distance, a train is barreling down upon this immense monument. The train is so loud, nobody can hear what anyone else is saying.
Let’s slow this scene for a moment, turn the volume down on the train, and turn up the volume only on certain individuals… just one at a time. There’s no preferred order amidst this chaos. We’ll select our speakers at random….
Ralph Epperson, a Fundamentalist Christian and author of the book The New World Order, has concluded that Albert Pike was a Satanist whose secret goal was to stamp out all organized religions in the world. (But isn’t Satanism itself an organized religion? Oh, wait, sorry about that. Let’s leave aside editorial intrusions for a moment and just examine the claims.) Here’s Epperson in his own words:
“…Pike considers Lucifer to be the God that is good, and the God of the Bible is the devil, the god of evil. That is what [Pike’s] statement about ‘that which is Below is as that which is Above’ means. That means that the God in the heavens is the god that is below, and the god who is below is the god in the heavens. So the Masons do believe in a god: it is in the fallen lightbearer, Lucifer. There can be no other reasonable explanation of what Mr. Pike just wrote” (Epperson 159).
No other reasonable explanation? This is a common belief among Christians, particularly the Southern Baptists, many of whom are very concerned about the ongoing “threat” of Freemasonry. Most people reading this publication will already be aware of the fact that the hermetic dictum “As above, so below” is a common phrase among the ancient practitioners of alchemy and does not refer in any way to either God or Satan. In fact, the belief systems associated with alchemy no doubt existed long before the Christian religion came into being. But when one is viewing the world through a limited framework, the amount of information one has to draw upon will be equally limited; and thus may lead to numerous misperceptions, like the one we’ve just heard.
Now let’s pan over to the other side of the tracks, shall we? …
Continued in PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1. Pre-Order at the bottom of this page now!
The Uninvited States of America
Tavistock Agenda Revealed
By Iona Miller
They wind you up because they know what makes you tick. The “Tavistock Clinic,” one of Britain’s leading psychiatric research establishments, studied shellshock (post-traumatic stress) in World War I, but switched to developing psychological warfare in 1922. Rather than helping traumatized soldiers, it calculated their breaking points. Tavistock shock doctrine now permeates global life. Their social engineers are a Who’s Who: Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, Edward Bernays, Eric Trist, A.K. Rice, Eric Miller, Aldous Huxley, and more.
Tavistock sent German-born psychologist, Kurt Lewin, to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1945 to establish the Research Center for Group Dynamics in the U.S. Lewin is the founder of “social psychology.” The Center moved to the University of Michigan in 1948 where it became the Institute for Social Research, and continued to co-opt legitimate psychosocial research and exploit mass psychology. By then, the original Clinic became part of Britain’s National Health Service.
In 1946, the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations split off a policy-making “mother of all think tanks,” publicly claiming to research and direct groups and organizations while it continued massive covert operations in social engineering. The think tank registered as a charity in September 1947, in London, England. It devised and spread interdisciplinary models of Group Relations and training in management, administration and sociopolitics. Promoting creativity and organizational policy, it remains an influential intelligence organization tied to MI6, CIA, Project Paperclip German scientists, Rockefeller Foundation, and cryptocracy.
Founder, John Rawlings Rees, claimed: “Public life, politics and industry should all . . . be within our sphere of influence . . . If we are to infiltrate the professional and social activities of other people I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity! We must aim to make it permeate every educational activity in our national life . . . We have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church: the two most difficult are law and medicine.”
Former MI6 Intelligence officer John Coleman first exposed their covert activities with his insider knowledge in his 2005 book, The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations: Shaping the Moral, Spiritual, Cultural, Political, and Economic Decline of the United States of America: “The enemy is clearly identifiable as the Committee of 300, the Club of Rome, NATO, the Black Nobility, CFR and all of its affiliate organizations, the think tanks, and research institutes controlled by Stanford and … last, but certainly not least, the military establishment.”
Coleman includes the Eastern Liberal Establishment “aristocracy,” its banks, insurance companies, giant corporations, petroleum cartels, foundations, communications networks, publishing houses, radio and television networks and the movie industry. Mission creep has penetrated organizations far beyond “the Tavi,” and they are scripting our wars, our lives and our future. As the power behind the think tank thrones, instead of “doctoring the soul” the clone organizations systematically attack it. The consensual goals of mental health and group relations parted company. The promise became a curse.
What if everything you were brought up to think about society, every layer of cultural meaning about healing and freedom, was wrong? What if someone was subverting your beliefs, ideas and values with behavioral tricks to use them against you? In “the world according to Tavistock,” social drivers are disguised as their exact opposites to create a worldview that is illusory, reinventing the world in distorted form.
Tavistock invented what you should believe. It is no accident that we have become victims of future shock in the Long Crisis. It’s a battle for your soul. Ego is mental structure, not a separate entity from soul. Whether you view it psychologically or spiritually, soul is structured through ego development with mental forms, i.e. words and images. It can also be fragmented with them. We lose our soul when we lose our dreams.
What appears progressive, nurturing or good can have exactly the reverse effect. But seeing the world as it is, not as we are told or wish it to be, brings us closer to real solutions. Turning away from or denying the darkness doesn’t make it go away. Embodying our collective shadow, Tavistock is a hydra-headed Secret Agent that runs rampant, aggravating the interconnecting set of global problems.
How is the mind bent and toward what ends? The masses are bent through control of resources and the environment, mind control, massive manipulation, crisis and social turbulence. Nonprofit foundations have teamed with corporate, military and governmental entities to form a covert control force. The art of war became a management problem. Unintended consequences result. Under the guise of prevention they create oppression. …
Continued in PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1. Pre-Order at the bottom of this page now!
Messages From Space
Long Delayed Echoes and Other Intelligent Contact
By Joan d’Arc
In the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s, American radio engineer Karl Jansky discovered radio waves enamating from the Milky Way. With the development of RADAR during World War II, the military began using large radio telescopes to listen to the chatter of the stars. The first official crib monitor was erected in 1960, and was called Project Ozma after Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz. The plan was hatched by then-Director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), Frank Drake.
After four weeks of aiming their rotating antenna at the constellations of Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, both over ten light years away from Green Bank, West Virginia, Project Ozma ended in apparent frustration, like many similar Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) projects. To this day, writes Michael Theroux in his paper, “Detecting Biodynamic Signals,” no signals have been found by “standard radio-astronomical methods”.
The major difficulty with conventional interstellar communications based on radio-astronomy, says Theroux, is that it “assumes that an extraterrestrial civilisation’s technology is comparable to, and has evolved to a state equal to our own.” This is an anthropocentric assumption, as technological R&D can never be assumed to follow a parallel trajectory. Indeed, some fringe scientists have suggested that intelligent messages might even be emanating from inside the solar system.
Many scientists had reasoned that the signal from an extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) would consist of a string of prime numbers, so the receiver might be able to discriminate intelligent signals from the noise of natural background radiation. However, in his 1974 book, The Galactic Club, Ronald Bracewell concluded otherwise; expecting instead “a little poetry or art,” and, perhaps, “a program that would rivet our attention”. He wrote of the hypothetical message we should perhaps be expecting: “messages might be nested within messages—short items, frequently repeated, sandwiched between episodes of a longer story repeated less frequently, all of which is contained within an even longer communication”.
After considering the “anticlimactic” slowness of interstellar communication, Bracewell was the first to propose, in 1960, the idea that a highly technological civilization might send a messenger probe into circular orbit of a star in the mid-point of that star’s habitable zone. He proposed that the hypothetical robot probe (now known as a “Bracewell probe”) would contain radio equipment for use in communicating with another advanced technological society.
Bracewell believed that a dispatch of such messenger probes would be undertaken by a “Class 2” civilization, and “would already have been followed by some of the 10 million communities more advanced than we, which are distributed, albeit thinly, throughout the galaxy.” He proffered, “possibly such a program is currently being engaged in by our nearest superior community,” from 30 to 300 light-years away. He gave this hypothetical advanced civilization the name Superon.
Continuing his hypothetical dialogue, Bracewell wrote, “After settling into the approximate orbit where the inhabited planet should be, the probe begins a program of investigation, supplementing its internal power source with stellar power.” He speculated: “It is quite possible that a probe arrived in our solar system when our radio transmissions had not yet begun .… the earth could have been the target of a messenger probe as recently as a few decades ago, but even then we did not have commercial broadcast transmitters in operation”.
All that would be needed to tune into such broadcasts, he said, was a simple radio receiver with a knob. He further speculated, “If an alien probe near the earth picks up a terrestrial broadcast from a radio transmitter that you are listening to and then amplifies and retransmits it, you will hear first the direct transmission followed by a repeat equal to the time taken to travel out to the probe and back. The general effect will be like an echo” (Bracewell 73). This now widely documented phenomenon, under research for the past several decades, is known as Long Delayed Echoes (LDEs). …
Continued in PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1. Pre-Order at the bottom of this page now!
Grandson of the Apollo Hoax Theory
Joan d’Arc Interviews MoonFaker videographer
Jarrah White
Australian Jarrah White has carried on the Apollo moon hoax research that began in the 1970s and continued into the 1990s, taking it to video format for the modern generation of YouTubers with documentaries titled, MoonFaker: Carrying The Liar; MoonFaker: Exhibit C; MoonFaker: Rocks & Crocks; and MoonFaker: Radioactive Anomaly. In this interview, which took place in summer of 2009, White proves he’s equal to the task of “the Grandson of the Apollo Hoax Theory.”
Joan d’Arc: Jarrah, thank you for your unflagging duty to carry on the moon hoax research for the next generation. It’s very important that this information remains available. So, who were the grandfathers of the Apollo Hoax Theory? One of them, I presume, was Ralph René, author of the 1994 book NASA Mooned America?
Jarrah White: Yes, Ralph René was indeed one of those grandfathers. It is interesting to note that a lot of people assume I am the grandson of Jack White. In actuality I am known as “The Grandson” because I picked up from were Bill Kaysing left off. Kaysing was known as “The Grandfather of the Apollo Hoax Theory” because he wrote and published the first book on the subject back in 1974.
I guess you could say that I now take on after Ralph too. Ralph was still alive and kicking when I became “The Grandson.” Before he died he had sent me his various research materials, such as the document that NOAA sent him during the writing of his book, and lawsuit papers from the Kaysing/Lovell trial. It was as though he knew his time was near and he had nominated me to carry on after him.
d’Arc: You do indeed look like rock singer, Jack White! When did you first meet Ralph René and how did you two come to be such close friends?
White: Ralph and I met over the phone many years ago when I first tried to obtain a copy of NASA Mooned America. As he put it, the post office had done more damage to him than any other government entity, and at first there were some troubles getting it sent. But the delivery problems were soon sorted.
After that he and I maintained communication over both telephone and email. I would often do everything in my power to help him whenever I could; be it digging up information he was in need of, sending video footage that he tried to obtain, or just generally help introduce his book to a wider audience. I always recommended his book to others and not once did I use his research without stating where that research came from.
Before I brought my MoonFaker series out, the only voice Ralph ever had through YouTube was his brief appearance on the Fox special and that disgraceful Penn & Teller episode that tried to portray him as some crackpot. That all changed when I released the MoonFaker series. Ralph had granted me many hours of his time for various over-the-phone interviews, which provided great insight for my videos. I can’t stress to you enough how far I would go out of my way just to make his research heard and prove that his points are indeed valid.
If you would like to see some hugely significant videos that Ralph contributed to, I recommend MoonFaker: Carrying The Liar, MoonFaker: Exhibit C, MoonFaker: Rocks & Crocks and MoonFaker: Radioactive Anomaly.
d’Arc: René died by suicide on December 10, 2008. You had spoken to him just the day before? How did he seem at that time? Did his suicide shock you?
White: I had spoken to him over the phone on November 30th. He had stated over email he was dying, but really he meant he was in a lot of pain and knew his time would come sooner or later. As you might already know, Ralph spent many years of his life doing manual labor and subsequently became crippled by arthritis in both knees. He suffered from this pain for the remaining years of his life, simply because there is very poor health care in the United States. American hospitals are not run like they are in Australia, where a patient simply walks into the clinic and gets the help he needs. In the states, patients are often refused service, be it medication or surgery, and the corrupt health insurance companies do everything in their power to deny people health cover.
Ralph was in desperate need of hip-joint surgery, but the doctors first subjected him to a pre-operation stress test. Basically, if you don’t pass the test, you don’t get the surgery. As Ralph described it, “It was a test that an Olympic athlete with a sprained ankle couldn’t pass, let alone a man on a walker.” The last thing I said to him over the phone was, “Ralph this may sound like a stupid question, but how much longer do you think you have left?” and his exact reply was, “As long as I can hold out.”
He continued sending emails in the following days. The last I received from him was on December 9th (Sydney time). After that I didn’t hear from him. It wasn’t until a week later that I learned that Ralph had committed suicide.
From what I had been told it all started on December 8th. Ralph was driving with his girlfriend when there was a terrible accident and the van flipped. Both were injured but alive. Ralph was taken to the hospital but taken home the next day by a neighbour. The crash had worsened Ralph’s regular hip pain to the point he became an insomniac. On the morning of December 10, he called up his neighbour to ask where his van was. Later that night he asked his girlfriend to go home early. The next day another neighbour found his body. He also found Ralph’s will and a box of goodbye postcards that he had prepared in advance.
My initial reaction was shock and disbelief. Shock because Ralph was a very dear friend to me, and disbelief because he explicitly stated in his book that he was not suicidal. But I guess even the non-suicidal have their limits. I’ve come to learn that when one is in that much pain and there is no other option, it’s no longer suicide but relief through release. At the end of the day it was ultimately the car crash that pushed him over the edge. I strongly believe that had he not had that accident he would most likely still be here today.
d’Arc: Why have you chosen to take on this work? Did you realize at first that you would be the focus of so much anger from the mainstream scientific establishment? Why do you think people get so upset at this research?
White: As a kid I wanted to be the first man on Mars. It was my dream and I spent my life studying astronomy, collecting space books, magazines and newspaper articles, taping documentaries and news reports off the telly. Back then I believed that men had been to the moon.
Later I learned of the Apollo moon landing conspiracy theory, but I took it with a grain of salt. I looked back to everything I had already learned about astronomy, I read the conspiracy material, and of course, I came upon website after website trying to prove that the moon missions were real.
In reading through these pro-NASA websites it quickly became apparent that the webmasters in question were not trying to offer any refuting evidence at all, but rather muddy the waters, lead astray those who are without ready access to the conspiracy research or even the source material, and generally spread false rumors and incite unfounded hatred against anyone who doubts Apollo. It’s propaganda, which is why I subsequently refer to these individuals as ‘propagandists.’…
Continued in PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1. Pre-Order at the bottom of this page now!
Robin Hood
Yorkshire’s Buried Treasure
By Barbara Green
Deep in the heart of an ancient woodland in West Yorkshire, hidden beneath a formidable barrier of fierce thorns and dense undergrowth, there is a hidden grave. Here rests the mortal remains of Robin Hood, the Prince of Robbers, England’s outlaw hero, bloodily slain by the Prioress of Kirklees Nunnery six hundred years ago and cast into an unhallowed grave.
Who was the evil nun and why did she commit so foul a murder? What was the role of Red Roger of Doncaster, the convent priest? Is it possible that he was really Will Scarlet, turned monk, also the prioress’s lover? Who was the prioress? Was she Dame Mary Startin, who died of the Black Death in 1350?
All that is left of this medieval whodunit is a ruined grave, hidden in deep woodland, within the derelict priory gatehouse where Robin was so gruesomely done to death. Was the famous outlaw a victim of thwarted passion, pagan sacrifice, bad nursing, accident, natural causes or—vampirism? The entire area where this horrific drama took place is shrouded in, according to one writer, “… a mystery which local people only reluctantly tried to penetrate.”
Today, Robin lies forgotten and unmourned in his lonely and desolate sepulchre, for few people know of the grave’s existence or its whereabouts. Why is this so? Should not such a monument be an international place of pilgrimage, and should Yorkshire, not Nottingham, be the centre of the famous folk hero’s legend? These are the mysteries this article attempts to unravel.
In 1983 I was asked to nurse Sir John Armytage, the 8th baronet of Kirklees Hall, in his last illness. I was the Brighouse district nurse at the time. Sir John passed away and the following year I asked Lady Armytage, his widow, if I could visit Robin Hood’s grave. Lady Armytage had inherited the estate while Sir Martin, Sir John’s son by his first wife, moved away. Shortly afterwards Lady Armytage sold the hall (which was turned into luxury flats) but kept the farm and historical sites, and went on to build a new house on the priory ruins.
In the following years I became very interested in the legend of Robin Hood, and after researching the Yorkshire connections I wrote a book called Marian’s Christmas Rose about Maid Marian with reference to Kirklees Priory. I asked Lady Armytage if I could take the book to the Kirklees Annual Garden Party in 1985. In response, Lady A and her “organiser,” Mrs. James, paid an uninvited visit to my home. Mrs. James waved the book around, complaining that it mentioned Kirklees. She stated that it could not be sold at Kirklees because it would interest people in Robin’s grave and no one was allowed to visit it. Lady A remained silent throughout this visit.
In 1985, I formed the Yorkshire Robin Hood Society (YRHS) with a friend, Ruth Harrington. Lady Armytage was invited to become a Patron but declined, saying she was “too busy.” Later, Ruth and I were filmed by the BBC programme Look North, but we had to go to Shibden Park as Lady Armytage would not let us film on site. The following year Ruth and I visited the Nottingham Medieval Market to sell my book, Marian Christmas Rose, which caused a ruckus. We were reported to the Sheriff of Nottingham. In 1987, Ruth and I were filmed by TV for a programme called FAX in Wakefield library because we were again refused permission at Kirklees. This film was never broadcast.
Later in the year we visited London in order to meet John Pope de Locksley of the London Robin Hood Club. We met at the Barnet Carnival, where we also made the acquaintance of Lord Sean Manchester, who offered to become Patron of the YRHS. We were very pleased about this, though we later learned that Lord Manchester was a famous “vampire hunter” who is descended from Lord Byron.
The following year I was filmed again, with another member, Evelyn Friend, by the BBC for a programme called People. Once more, the Yorkshire Robin Hood Society was not allowed to go to the grave, though the film crew was allowed, provided they kept the location secret. When the film was broadcast, Evelyn and I were furious to find that all our comments about the grave had been edited out, and we were left talking about trivial things—Evelyn’s most memorable line being, “I am Robin Hood in drag.” …
Continued in PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1. Pre-Order at the bottom of this page now!
The Great American Moon Hoax
Joan d’Arc Interviews Ralph René (1995)
Ralph René, author of NASA Mooned America!, believes that there have been no manned flights to the moon. In this exclusive interview, René asserts that the Apollo moon photos are studio creations. He also shows that NASA has lied about deadly solar radiation and the true temperature in space, and charges that NASA has instituted a policy of lying by its “astro-nots.” So what did NASA really do with the money that went into its deep space pockets? Currently enjoying a wave of popularity in Russia, René believes the Apollo program helped to finance the CIA’s secret war in Laos and Cambodia.
Joan: René, you claim that NASA faked the photos of Apollo moon landings, and in your book you analyze several of these photographs showing why they are hoaxes. Let’s talk about the most famous official NASA photograph, from the cover of your book. The photo of Alan Bean entitled “Astronaut Collecting Lunar Samples, Apollo XII” was purportedly taken on the moon by Peter Conrad on October 20, 1969. At first glance it is an artistically contrived picture of an astronaut with the reflection of another astronaut, standing some distance away, reflected in his faceplate. Is it actually possible for astronauts to get this creative on the moon?
René: I think that the creative layout was the result of a composite picture from studio photos created by snip and paste in a photo lab.
Joan: So, in your estimation, what’s wrong with this picture? [See Alan Bean photo on page 52]
René: The first thing I noticed about the photo was that the shadow side of Al Bean’s suit was brightly lit. The top front of Bean’s left shoulder and his whole left side is much too bright for the singularly directional sun light found in the vacuum of space.
The next thing is that the lower inside of his right arm should have been in a shadow. Then there is the fact that the Moon’s actual horizon is on the same level as the horizon reflected in Bean’s faceplate. Both faceplates are curved, and mirrored curves double the angle of incidence. Obviously since only two astro-nots were supposed to be on the Moon, this photo had to have been snapped by Peter Conrad. But when you take a magnifying glass to the original photo, Conrad’s hand is nowhere near where the camera should be. In fact, Conrad has no camera, or if he has his hand obscured the lens. An X-ray camera perhaps!
Examination of Bean’s shadow as shown in his faceplate shows that the two figures were less than 10 feet apart. Because of the faceplate’s curvature, the camera that took the picture had to be at least 10 feet in the air directly between them. Since we don’t see anything there, it had to have been either taken from a camera boom using a timer mechanism to trip the shutter, or there was another astro-not (stage hand) on that camera boom that we have never been told about.
We’ve all seen the TV travel adventures where a lone man pits his life against the wilderness and goes from hither to thither being photographed from every angle by … nobody! And if these explanations don’t sit well, try this one. The Man in the Moon is very tall and happened to be passing, so he obligingly snapped the shot for the two tourists before he went on his way.
Another problem is found in the shiny object in Bean’s hand. Again there is no shadow side even though his shadow (shown in his face plate) proves that the sun was behind him and off to his right. Since neither flash nor spotlight can compete with the light from the Sun the brightness is inexplicable.
Look at the bright circular object that is level with the top of his helmet and off to his far right side. Notice the two long structural—looking objects below it. It looks like a spotlight on scaffolding, doesn’t it? Spotlights light best that which they are aimed at, hence the name. Check out Conrad! Of all the places one can imagine, the Moon must be evenly lit because it lacks atmosphere, clouds and trees. Why should an extremely bright pool of light be centered on Conrad? Does the Sun play favorites on the Moon?
If you look at Conrad’s feet you will notice the main shadow on his right going toward his rear and another one on his left coming forward. Two shadows, one Sun. Strange things were happening on the Moon….
Continued in PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1. Pre-Order at the bottom of this page now!
Programmed to Kill
Al Hidell Interviews David McGowan
A deluge of news reports, books, and movies has shaped the public perception of serial killers and mass murderers. They are generally assumed to be solitary, deranged loners whose killings always fit a certain pattern. It is perhaps the ultimate “Lone Nut Theory.” In his book Programmed to Kill, author David McGowan explodes these common assumptions, revealing largely hidden facts that suggest there’s more to the serial killer phenomenon than meets the eye.
Al Hidell: Your book Programmed to Kill suggests that some serial killers have connections to political figures, the FBI and CIA, and Satanic cults. Let’s start with the political figures. Two examples you cite are George W. Bush’s unusually lenient treatment of notorious serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, and his brother Jeb Bush’s similar compassion towards Lucas’ partner in crime. While this isn’t proof of the killers’ high-level political connections, it’s certainly odd. Can you describe what happened, and what made it unusual?
David McGowan: Henry Lee Lucas was convicted of numerous counts of first-degree murder, and was credited with scores, maybe even hundreds, of additional uncharged murders, many of them involving such depravities as torture, mutilation, cannibalism and necrophilia. Nevertheless, he had the unique distinction of being the only man to have his death sentence commuted during George W. Bush’s tenure as governor of the state of Texas. Governor Bush personally, and quite uncharacteristically, requested that the Texas State Board of Pardons and Paroles (whose members were his own appointees) review Lucas’ case. Strangely enough, that board uncharacteristically issued a recommendation that Lucas’ sentence be commuted, and Bush then quietly signed the order sparing his life.
This all happened in June of 1998, but the media never really bothered to report the story, most likely because Bush’s efforts on behalf of Lucas defy any reasonable explanation. This is, after all, the same governor who eagerly, sometimes even gleefully, signed off on every other execution order that crossed his desk, even in cases where there had been clear irregularities in the condemned inmate’s conviction, and even in cases where the inmate was a woman, a juvenile, or was mentally impaired.
Lucas’ partner, Ottis Toole, also managed to get his death sentence set aside, even though he was convicted and sentenced in Florida, a state that is not known for shying away from enforcing the death penalty, and even though his crimes were every bit as heinous as those of his partner. I believe, though, that the commutation of Toole’s sentence predated the reign of Governor Jeb Bush.
Hidell: OK, so Jeb gets a pass on this one. Do Texas and Florida have anything else in common besides being controlled by the Bush Boys?
McGowan: As I discuss in the book, Texas and Florida have several things in common: they are two of the three states that provide a point-of-entry into the country for the vast majority of the illicit drugs trafficked through South and Central America; they are both rife with cult activity; and they have both been home to an inordinate number of serial killers. As you noted, at the time I began writing my book, Texas and Florida were both controlled by members of the Bush family. Interestingly enough, the third point of entry for illegal drugs, the state of California, which is also rife with cult activity, and which has also spawned an extraordinary number of serial killers, has now fallen under the control of someone who appears to be a close confidant of the Bush clan, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Hidell: You suggest serial killers Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy had political connections. What led you to that conclusion?
McGowan: First, let me say that I am not necessarily arguing that any hard and fast conclusions can be drawn about any specific killer from the evidence presented in my book. From my perspective, the key to understanding the world that we live in is pattern recognition. I approached this book in much the same way that I approached my last book, Understanding the F-Word: American Fascism and the Politics of Illusion—by combing the published literature for all the inconvenient facts that are generally just sort of brushed over because they don’t fit the official story. Just as my previous effort was an alternative political history of 20th century America, created from largely hidden threads, this book is an alternative history of violent, sensational crime in 20th century America. And what I found was that many of the threads that ran through my last book also run through this book.
Since this book is ultimately about fleshing out the hidden patterns that connect the life stories of the various notorious figures profiled therein, the case that the book attempts to make is necessarily a cumulative one. In other words, it is very easy to dismiss bits and pieces of evidence that tend to indicate, for example, that a particular serial killer had political and/or intelligence connections as simply an anomaly, a coincidence, an insignificant detail, etc. It is much more difficult to dismiss such evidence when it can be seen repeating in so many seemingly unrelated cases.
With that disclaimer out of the way, let me add that the most intriguing indication of Dahmer’s political connections was his ability, while on a senior class field trip to Washington, D.C., to spontaneously arrange, with an impromptu call from a payphone, a private tour of both the Vice President’s office and the office of prominent political columnist Art Buchwald. Needless to say, that’s not something that the average 17-year old kid can pull off. …
Continued in PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1. Pre-Order at the bottom of this page now!
The Sons of the Sun of God
Joan d’Arc Interviews Acharya S
Acharya S is the author of several books on the subject of “astrotheology” and the mythical nature of the pantheon of gods that people the sky. She was classically educated and is a member of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Greece. She has served as a trench master on archaeological excavations in Corinth, Greece, and Connecticut, USA, as well as a teacher’s assistant on the island of Crete. She has traveled extensively around Europe and speaks, reads and/or writes English, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian, German and Portuguese. She has cross-referenced the Bible in the original Hebrew and ancient Greek. And she has written some of my favorite books, including The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold, Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled and her latest bombshell, Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection.
Joan: A “mythicist” is someone who perceives biblical characters as being mythical and the origin of myths as being based in nature worship and “astrotheology.” How did you come to be a mythicist and astrotheologist? Does this necessarily mean you’re an atheist?
Acharya: I began reading about myths—especially the Greek myths—when I was a small child. After that time, I had a growing curiosity about mythology and religion, which has evolved into a longstanding passion. By young adulthood, I knew a significant amount about the religions and myths of many cultures around the world. But I myself did not really have a religion.
I was born into a mild Protestant sect and attended a Congregational Church, but I rejected it all as boring from about the age of seven onward, and I emancipated myself at 12. I went to Greece when I was 14, and the rest, as they say, is history… and archaeology… and mythology.
With all that strong background in mythology for so many years, I was prepared for when I had the epiphany of the mythical nature of Jesus. I don’t mean the vague sense of rejection of the miracles that many people likely experience, leading them to become “evemerists,” or those who believe Christ was a real man to whose mundane biography his ardent followers attached many fables and fairytales. A mythicist is someone who perceives the gospel as a whole to be mythical, with no historical core to the onion when the mythological layers have been peeled. This contention is not to say, however, that there are no historical characters in the New Testament. Herod and Pilate appear firmly rooted in the historical record, for example. But the gospel story itself is like Gulliver’s Travels, a historical novel that is placed in England but that nonetheless remains fictional.
When it comes to the Greek and Roman gods, practically everyone is a mythicist, believing these characters, such as Zeus and Hercules, not ever to have been “real people” but to represent in large part natural phenomena, such as storms, thunderbolts, wind, the sea, the sun and so on. All told, the religion and mythology of old were very concerned with not only the afterlife and underworld but also the here and now of this world, which they likewise perceived as sacred.
The cosmic part of this nature worship is called “astrotheology,” specifically the reverence for and worship of the sun, moon, planets, stars, constellations and so on.
Being convinced of the mythical nature of many gods, godmen and heroes of old, and being fascinated by the astrotheological origin of many myths and traditions, does not necessarily make or require one to become an atheist. I have no interest in being categorized in either the theist or atheist camp, and I have no desire to create either theists or atheists with my writing. What you do with your own mind is up to you, so long as it doesn’t spill out onto others in a negative fashion. If you wish to sit and daydream about a beautiful, heavenly place where there is a radiant being of bliss you call “God,” not only is it none of my business, but I would actually encourage you to do so, if it brings some joy to your life.
If, however, something tragic happens—and it always does—and you wish to think there could not possibly be any good god in charge of everything, your thoughts too would be none of my business, except that I would say they are entirely appropriate for the situation. Frankly, the archaeoastronomical, astrotheological and cosmological knowledge expressed by the ancients—one of the planks of mythicism—is so exciting to me that it fills me with the wonder and awe often deemed a religious experience. Yet, I neither believe nor dismiss it. I simply enjoy it. …
Continued in PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1. Pre-Order at the bottom of this page now!
Deep Secrets of a UFO Think Tank
RAND, Battelle and Memory Metal
By Anthony BragaliaSince the 1940’s the U.S. government has quietly engaged one of its key defense and intelligence agency contractors as a secret UFO “think tank.” New investigation reveals that the esteemed RAND Corporation has given far more than a passing thought to things extraterrestrial. RAND’s hidden history of UFO involvement has been discovered to include work in policy analysis, evaluation of evidence, and in advising on the potential technological advantages achieved from UFO study. Telling connections have also been found between RAND and the Roswell crash event of 1947.
RAND Corporation was established in 1946 by the U.S Army Air Force as Project RAND (“Research ANd Development”) and is today registered as a nonprofit organization. It is funded through government contracts, university collaborators and “private donors.” RAND’s primary agency clients include the CIA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Headquartered in Santa Monica, California, the think tank maintains branches worldwide. RAND’s stated mission is to “help to improve policy and decision making through objective research and analysis.” Its work is officially conducted “for the public welfare and security of the United States of America.”
Over thirty Nobel Prize winners have been employed by RAND. From physics to economics, the 2,000-person think tank provides high-level information and evaluation to the U.S. government. Deeper review shows that RAND has conducted studies in such areas as weapons development, intelligence gathering and analysis, and the design of sensitive underground installations for the U.S. Air Force. Far more concealed is RAND’s intimate involvement in highly-classified UFO study for the U.S. government.
From its very inception, the men of RAND knew much about saucers. RAND was conceived by Donald Douglas, CEO of Douglas Aircraft (protégé of Dr. Jerome Hunsaker at MIT) along with two military officer luminaries who carried with them significant “UFO histories”: Major General Curtis LeMay (the U.S. Air Force’s Chief of Development) and General Hap Arnold (considered the “father” of the modern U.S. Air Force).
In May of 1948, RAND was separated from Douglas Aircraft and became its own operating entity. Among RAND’s earliest government reports was the release of the enigmatically titled, “Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship.”
Curtis LeMay expressed deep interest and concern about flying saucer phenomena. More than this, LeMay himself was a keeper of the purported 1947 Roswell UFO crash debris. This was revealed in a stunningly candid interview with the late U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater. Goldwater (a former U.S. Presidential Candidate, Major General and Command Pilot) was General LeMay’s professional associate and close friend. LeMay’s UFO involvement was related by Goldwater in a live worldwide broadcast with CNN’s Larry King in 1994. The USAF had just issued its report that debunked the Roswell crash of 1947 as a Mogul balloon. Goldwater (who died just a few years later) informed King that he knew the truth to be far different.
He knew this, he explained, because in the 1960’s he had approached LeMay about the crashed UFO issue. Goldwater—who no doubt held the highest security clearances—told Larry King: “I think at Wright-Patterson, if you could get into certain places, you’ll find what the Air Force and the government knows about UFOs. Reportedly, a spaceship landed. It was all hushed up. I called Curtis LeMay and I said, ‘General, I know we have a room at Wright-Patterson where you put all of this secret stuff. Could I go in there?’ I’ve never heard General LeMay get mad, but he got madder than hell at me, cussed me out and said, ‘Don’t ever ask me that question again!’” Goldwater never did.
LeMay was very well acquainted with Roswell Army Air Field Base Commander Butch Blanchard. Blanchard oversaw the base at the time of the Roswell crash event in 1947. It is believed that Blanchard helped issue the original press release on the crash, which prompted the famous headline, “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region.” Blanchard’s former wife and daughter say that he was visibly upset by the event. He repeated only, “those Russians have some amazing things.” …
Continued in PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1. Pre-Order at the bottom of this page now!
Inside Job
An Interview with David Ray Griffin
David Ray Griffin has been called a leading proponent of alternative theories questioning the 9/11 “official conspiracy theory.” He is the author of several books on 9/11, including The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, Debunking 9/11 Debunking, The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive and The Mysterious Collapse of WTC7. He is a member of the group, Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice, and is a frequent contributor to the Journal of 9/11 Studies. He is a retired professor of philosophy of religion and theology. He is co-director of the Center for Process Studies at the Claremont School of Theology.
Joan d’Arc: David, the day after 9/11 you began writing a history of American imperialism. You write that at that time you had accepted the government’s “official conspiracy theory” of 9/11 and the “liberal” interpretation that 9/11 was “blowback for U.S. foreign policy.” What made you initially begin instead looking at the attacks as a “false flag operation”?
David Ray Griffin: When I first heard the theory that 9/11 was an inside job, I dismissed it, thinking even the Bush administration wouldn’t do something this heinous. But then a colleague sent information about a website (WantToKnow.info) that contained an abbreviated version of Paul Thompson’s “Complete 9/11 Timeline.” I found in it hundreds of stories from the mainstream press that contradicted some aspect of the official account of 9/11. It took only a few hours to see that something was seriously wrong.
Joan: What are the essential differences between the false flag view and the government’s official conspiracy theory?
David: The most obvious difference between the two conspiracy theories is the identity of the conspirators. The government says they were Osama bin Laden and various members of al-Qaeda. The alternative theory says that they were central members of the Bush administration and the military. A less obvious difference, which it takes a little study to see, is that, although each theory has its supporting evidence, all the evidence supporting the government’s theory crumbles upon examination.
Joan: So in the government’s conspiracy theory, we wake up the very next morning and see the mug shots of 19 Muslim hijackers on the front page of the newspaper and learn the now familiar term Al Qaeda. But you claim that all of this evidence—passports, luggage, phone calls, security videos, bin Laden confession videos, etc.—is suspect. Do you believe this evidence was planted?
David: Yes. My evidence to support this claim, which is contained in The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, is summarized in an online essay, “Was America Attacked by Muslims on 9/11?” (davidraygriffin.com) The fact that some of the evidence was planted is obvious. For example, does anyone really believe that when Flight 11 hit the North Tower, creating a giant fireball, a passport could have flown out of Satam al-Suqami’s pocket, escaped from the cabin of the plane and from the building unsinged by the fire, and floated to the ground where it would be found by a passerby?
But with some of the purported evidence, one must do some research to see that it was planted. For example, I learned only while writing my 2008 book 9/11 Contradictions that the most important story about the discovery of evidence implicating al-Qaeda had been invented several days after 9/11. This was the story that officials in Boston had found Mohamed Atta’s luggage, which contained many pieces of incriminating evidence, including Atta’s will. The story was that he and another member of al-Qaeda had on September 10 driven a Nissan rental car up to Portland, Maine, stayed overnight and then caught a commuter flight back to Boston the next morning. Although they made the transfer, Atta’s luggage did not.
This story first appeared on September 16. The first story had been that this evidence had been found in a Mitsubishi Atta had rented and left in the Boston airport, and that the Muslims who had taken the commuter flight to Boston after staying overnight in Portland were two brothers named Bukhari. On September 13, however, the FBI discovered that neither of the Bukharis had died on 9/11 (one had died the year before, the other was still alive). So the authorities simply changed the story, saying that it was Atta and another man who drove the Nissan to Portland and took the commuter flight to Boston the next morning. The incriminating evidence, instead of being found in a Mitsubishi, was found in Atta’s luggage. The new story resulted in the absurdity that Atta had planned to take his will on a flight he was going to crash into the World Trade Center.
Joan: Were any other alleged hijackers found to be alive and well?
David: Yes. The clearest case is that of Waleed al-Shehri, who showed up alive in Morocco ten days after 9/11, explaining to journalists and U.S. authorities that he could not possibly have been on Flight 11, as the FBI had alleged. His story was reported in the British press, including the BBC. And yet when the 9/11 Commission issued its report in 2004, it suggested that al-Shehri had stabbed one of the flight attendants shortly before American 11 crashed into the North Tower.
Joan: Regarding the bin Laden “confession” I have read that the FBI has admitted it has no evidence of bin Laden’s involvement in 9/11 and that he’s actually wanted for the bombing of U.S. Embassies in 1998. How can the U.S. be involved in two wars—Iraq and Afghanistan—on the pretext of searching for a terrorist who is not wanted at all for the events of 9/11?
David: Yes, this admission (which I discuss in New Pearl Harbor Revisited and “Was America Attacked by Muslims on 9/11?”) is simply one of the dozens of damning facts that our “free press” refuses to publish. Another one—about which I’ve just completed a small book—is that Osama bin Laden has probably been dead since December 15, 2001 (the day his funeral was reported). This means, of course, that all the bin Laden audiotapes and videotapes that have appeared since then have been fabricated, as former CIA operative Robert Baer has suggested. (Baer told me: “I believe there’s a vast industry of contractors, corporations, and pundits who need bin Laden alive, all of them eating at the trough.”) …
Continued in PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1.
And there’s MORE! Way more!
Pre-Order here!
http://www.paranoiamagazine.com/volume1_highlights.html
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)