Another man who knew too much?

You're one microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan
Designed and directed by his red right hand - Nick Cave

The alphabet agencies are not monolithic; they are labyrinthic. They have their lighter passages, some more than others, where well-meaning people labour to make a difference for the better, and sometimes do. But then there are the darker passages - some, very dark - where others conspire to undo that work, and conceive worse mischief, and often succeed.

Compartmentalization and the cross-agency shadow networks of criminality mean that Special Agents sometimes unwittingly find themselves chasing the tail of their own government. It seems to happen a lot these days. If they ever catch it, look out.

Nowhere are there more examples of this than in the "War on Drugs." We can read the insider accounts of frustrated former DEA Special Agents such as Michael Levine (The Big White Lie) and Cele Castillo (Powderburns), who repeatedly struck their heads upon the glass ceiling of the protected, covert drug trade. And we can see the many cautionary examples of agents who grabbed the tail, and were destroyed for their efforts. The FBI's Darlene Novinger, for instance, whose undercover work had the misfortune of implicating Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush and his son Jeb in a narcotics smuggling operation linked to the Lebanese Phalange.

And here may be another. From Newsday, July 30:

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras -- A U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent was shot and killed in an apparent robbery attempt at a Roman Catholic shrine outside the Honduran capital, officials said Saturday.

Special Agent Timothy Markey was visiting the shrine Friday when two assailants confronted him and shot him twice, according to Honduran federal police and the DEA. Markey was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.

...

Markey began his DEA service in September 1989, according to a statement from the agency. He was assigned to the General Watch Unit at the El Paso Intelligence Center, in Texas, at the time of his death.

And that's about all there is, and probably ever will be, in the American press about the death of Special Agent Markey. Except there may be much more, according to DEA Watch, which exists "to provide all special agents and employees of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration and other narcotics agencies a confidentiality protected platform to express job related and other concerns they could not normally raise to higher-ups, the media or co-workers without exposing themselves to punishment, ridicule, revenge or possible physical harm."

Here are some of those confidential DEA voices commenting on Markey, whom they call "the man who knew too much":

Someone wrote: "HQ tried to make him out to be crazy." That is SOP whenever someone discovers dirt and tries to clean it. The same thing happened to Rick Horn who found out that CIA was bugging the homes of DEA agents all over the world. [For more about Horn, see this RI post from last September.] State refused to stop the practice and our own HQ refused to assist Horn. Some in HQ even suggested Horn was "crazy" and made the whole thing up.

Maybe Tim should have left just like Horn did.

And

Markey was frequently mentioned several times in DEA Watch going back several years (sorry, I didn't save those editions). According to those reports Markey may have been a marked man. So this may not have been a "robbery". It may well have been a planned execution. Street robbers don't usually shoot fleeing victims in broad daylight on a public street. The killers were probably hired hitmen... hitkids.

And

As I recall Timothy had a running gun battle with HQ over his getting the boot out of Venezuela some years back. Constantine reportedly forced Tim to see a shrink because Tim filed complaints about some of the others in the DEA office were crooks. I would take a close look at all those Tim worked with in Venezuela. If any can be found to have lots of money and/or property they can't account for that would mean Tim was right and one or more of them might have arranged Tim's murder to look like a street robbery.

And

There is a major international incident now going on in Venezuela involving DEA. The top people in VZ want nothing to do with DEA because they say our people are part of the problem and not part of the solution. There was talk that Markey was to be interviewd by certain members of Congress to find out what Markey could tell them about the shenanigans in the VZ DEA office. Hmmmm.

And

Not surprised to hear that of all the people walking the streets in that town at that particular hour Tim was the only one singled out for what appears to be a murder and not a robbery gone bad. Back in 2001 Tim reported on U.S. State Department narcotics ventures. He was sent to the shrinks in Chicago under the SRP (Suitability Review Protocal) who diagnosed him with "Axis II, Personality Disorder with Borderline Dependent and Self Defeating Features". Crap!!!

I for one would not be at all surprised to see [DEA Administrator Karen] Tandy come up with a laughable report accusing Tim of arranging for his own murder.

Be careful what you learn about when working with State and CIA. If you learn too much, and try making a public report, you will be marked for death. If you want to report, do it anonymously on DEA Watch.

And

When I talked to Tim just a few days ago he told me he would be meeting with a congressman about what went down in Venezuela a few years ago. Apparently the Bush-Cheney oil people are stirring up a lot of trouble in Venezuela to topple the government so that Halliburton and other companies can move in to take over the oil fields. Apparently Tim knew about some of what was going on just after Bush and Cheney first came to office. Everyone the Bush people didn't consider safe -- or had too much information -- was forced out of Venezuela. There is far more to this incident than meets the eye. Fortunately for Bush he has Tandy who will sweep Tim's death under the rug as nothing more than a case of robbery. Tim died for oil. Another casualty of the Bush-Cheney Oil Wars.

And

It seems far too convenient timing for the one person with the honesty and courage to report wrongdoing in Caracas to suddenly get shot by "kids" attempting to rob an American man when there were tons of women with large purses to snatch. With US-Venezuelan relations currently at a boiling point and military action not unthinkable, along with Congress digging into Markey's reports about DEA corruption in Venezuela, the obvious answer is Markey knew too much.

The context for Markey's killing, suggest these anonymous DEA voices, is Venezuela. Here are two headlines from Caracas on Friday, the day Markey died: Venezuelan General Lopez Hidalgo rules out any agreement with DEA and US Ambassador laments probe into alleged DEA irregularities.

"Conspiracy theory," some may want to sniff. But apparently at the DEA, it's just making conversation.


By the way, here are a couple of threads on the RI discussion board you shouldn't miss:

John Loftus: London bombing mastermind is MI6 agent

John Perkins, shapeshifter

The Great Race and the Marathon of Hope

There's a way to get there, and I'll figure it out somehow
But I'm already there in my mind, and that's good enough for now - Bob Dylan

Thinking about John Bolton the other day got me thinking about Terry Fox. The mind's funny that way.

But first, let me tell you about this friend I had in Grade Six. He was the kind of friend who, even in Grade Six, made me wish I had one less friend. But try telling my parents that. ("He's a nice boy! You want to sit in your room reading all day?") He was the school bully. Not a beat-the-shit-out-of-you bully, though his smile always implied that he could if it came to that, so it never came to that. His metier was psychological abuse. Some eleven-year olds just have a knack for the psy ops, you know?

One week, he got it in his head that I was his "slave." To win my freedom, he said, I needed to beat him in a race. One contest a day was held at recess to see if I could be a free boy again. The first time I beat him I was thrilled, until he told me nuh ah - that was just practice. Darn it! When I beat him again, he said I'd merely earned X number of points; I needed Y to be free. Crap, this is harder than I'd thought.... And I kept competing, because I wanted my freedom, and because every time he moved the goalposts I felt more like a slave.

I'd like to say I woke up one day and told him to go to Hell, but I didn't. The episode just petered out as he found some other child to torment. It wasn't until later that I realized how much a party I'd been to my own enslavement by simply accepting the base premise.

Which brings me to John Bolton, a bully in his own right, and the news that next week, George Bush will take advantage of the congressional recess and appointment him UN ambassador without confirmation from the legislative branch.

That the Senate might have denied Bolton's appointment was clearly possible, which would have meant a rare loss for the Bush Administration. So rare, I can't off the top of my head think of a single thing that's been denied them.

It's difficult to watch the perpetual dashing of hope in America amongst those who still think politics matters, and that political action is sufficient to reverse America's fascist course. To them, it remains a race. C'mon gang - we can win this thing! But their opponent is more than a competitor: he is also the track official, and what a bloody-minded bastard he is. He has neither conscience nor fear of reprisal for tripping them up, tying together their shoelaces and moving the finish line. If he's seen to be running, it's simply to be seen. And so he's not even a true competitor, because there is no competition.

After the Supreme Court rubber-stamped the coup of 2000, I heard "wait until '02!" After Wellstone was murdered and the black boxes began swallowing invisible votes, I heard "wait until '04!" And even before Ohio and the bizarre Skull and Bones shadowplay, I started hearing "wait until '06!" And I tell you, I just can't hear anymore.

Lewis Lapham wonders, in July's Harper's, "why so many people continue to insist that we're living in a democracy that somehow would have been recognizable to Franklin D Roosevelt or even to Richard M Nixon. The belief is bad for the health and mental stability." Perhaps if Kubler-Ross had been a political scientist she would have described it as the first stage of grief upon the death of a republic. Either that, or they are simply inattentive, and still don't know enough to be in denial.

Listen, America. I've been there. The bully won't let you win, even when you do, as you have a number of times now. As soon as you rise to his bogus challenge, you give up your power, and he's got you.

If politics is a race that can never be won, then perhaps parapolitics is a solitary marathon that can never be finished.

If this is it, and the old cancer upon the presidency has metastasized beyond treatment, and all we can do for the American Experiment is make it as comfortable as possible, there is still hope. Hope for us, I mean, and not for a system, nor even possibly for a civilization. Because if what doesn't kill us makes us stronger, perhaps what kills us - or could - makes us strongest. I mean that like Dylan meant this, which he wrote during the Cuban Missile Crisis:

I will not go down under the ground
'cause somebody tells me that death's comin' 'round
An' I will not carry myself down to die
When I go to my grave my head will be high
Let me die in my footsteps
Before I go down under the ground

To me, the metaphorical oomph of the Fox run is not the ringingly hollow "cancer can be beaten." Because, after all, it beat him. Rather, it's "Hey cancer, get a load of me - I'm fucking alive!"

It's not a race, but we have to keep moving. And long may you run.

Plan 9 from Saudi Arabia

"My friend, you have seen this incident, based on sworn testimony. Can you prove that it didn't happen?" - Criswell

No time today for a proper update, but I'm interested in what you make of this article yesterday from Greg Szymanski.

The story is a strange one. Two reputed, former NASA contractors named Rene Welch and Roger Logsdon - they say NASA stole their work; NASA denies any association - claim their work brought them into the orbit of Saudi Royals and the bin Laden family. In 1987, says Logsdon, "two of the bin Laden brothers came some 90 miles from Phoenix, Arizona, and stopped at our doorstep [in Sedona] unannounced. Their bodyguards set up a surveillance parameter around our property and others came into our house, taped up the windows and set up a film projector. The people in this motorcade seemed very scared, and presented this as a matter of life and death":

These men told us to be very cautious and to assume that we were under surveillance by our government. For several hours they showed us films of meetings of key Arabs and U.S. government officials discussing the oil issues. The bottom line was that if the Arabs did not do it their way, the U.S. would simply take their oil by force. They also explained that they have been manipulated into setting up bank accounts where oil profits were siphoned off and were no longer under their control.

They then explained why the World Trade Centers were the ideal target for this purpose. The two bin Ladens showed us this film because they made it very clear how they did not want to be involved with any U.S. plot to manipulate the Arab governments or start a war.

The meeting, writes Szymanski, is corroborated by a third witness, Naomi Niles, who was present when the bin Laden motorcade pulled up, but was not herself a part of the NASA project.

Perhaps most incredibly, Welch claims that while she was employed in NASA's Application Technical Center in Phoenix, researching brain development and mind control, she obtained a secret computer code which uncovered a government-funded study titled “Global Cleanse 2000,” outlining "strategies for global war and population reduction."

Welch says that for 20 years she has had a tacit understanding with FBI and CIA operatives to "shut up and lay low," but she's now broken the deal because, reasonably enough, "what’s the difference if they’re planning global war and mass population reduction"?

What to make of all this?

There's something virtually Fortean about this tale. The Saudi motorcade arriving unannounced, the bin Ladens sharing their Deepest Secrets with the unsuspecting - I want to say humans, because this reads like a classic close encounter. Roger Logsdon may as well have been told, like contactee Herbert Schirmer, "Someday, Watchman, you will see the universe!" (Bin Ladens, like trickster entities, say the darndest things.) The NASA association, which has provided cover for some of the highest crimes and cover-ups of the national security state, and the haunted backdrop of the American Southwest, is almost too perfect.

And "Global Cleanse 2000"? As was posted yesterday on the RI discussion board, it "sounds fake; a project like that would likely be called something more innocuous." Many of us suspect, with good reason, something like Global Cleanse 2000 is in effect. But to be told, You were right, here it is: and guess what it's called? makes me suspect disinformation in mimicry of truth.

I haven't had time to dig into this as I should, and I'm not dismissing it out of hand. It is incredible, but the incredible may also be true. I do think it deserves serious digging, to either discard it or raise it to the next level. But my first reaction is one of wariness. If something falls into our laps that seems to answer too much - a magic key that unlocks too many deep mysteries, perhaps found filed under "Magic Key 2000" - it may raise even more questions than it purports to answer. We ought to be on our guard, and try the key in a few locks before we claim to know its magic. (Or when something gets slipped under our door, as when the MJ-12 documents were slipped under Producer Jaime Shandera's in 1984.) This, on first whiff, smells too much like the disinformation campaign of the "Dulce Papers" that drove UFO researcher Paul Bennewitz out of his right mind, and still seperates too many self-described UFOlogists from their better selves.

This suggests to me that 9/11 researchers and students of Deep Politics, regardless of what they make of the field of UFOlogy, would be well-served by making a study of the many layers of elegant disinformation that have been applied to the subject over the decades by both governments and private interests. Though the subject is different, the pattern of deception is much the same, and recognizing disinformation regardless of its shapeshifting aspect does wonders for one's bullshit detector.

Comparing notes, even with the class freaks, is never a bad idea, whatever the cool kids may think.

Signal/noise

And I know that you know that I know that you show
Something is tearing up your mind. - Bob Dylan

Determining the correct signal-to-noise ratio of history - especially suppressed history - is virtually impossible. While we're still living it, it is impossible. Still, even if the exact ratio eludes us, we need to be serious about the process of seperating signal from noise. The signature mass casuality events of our age carry a lot of noise - most of it background and incidental, but some of it intentional and malicious - and if we aren't smart about what we do with the noise, we risk losing the signal.

Initially and properly following a crime, everything should get swept up as potential evidence. But everything should not stay there: there must be, subsequently, a filtering process to assess evidentiary value. The value of the evidence cannot be judged by gross weight alone: we don't make a case by indiscriminately throwing everything we have. That doesn't get us a serious hearing. That just sets people ducking.

For a small for instance of background noise from 9/11, I suggest "Atta's passport." First of all, of course, it wasn't Atta's, but rather Satam Al Suqami's. But four years after the event, it's still frequently misidentified by too many people who should know better. (Ed Asner made the mistake last year in his videotaped greeting to the 9/11 International Inquiries. I know - it's Ed Asner - but it started my experience of the inquiry on a bum foot, and set a tone that invited unchallenged assumptions.)

The recovery of the passport soon after the attacks set off early alarms for many that things were not as they seemed. And if news of the passport's recovery got people thinking that something wasn't right, then good: everything was wrong. But anomalous events, such as drilling passenger jets at excess speed into office towers, are going to generate anomalous results - results that have nothing to do with the planning of the crime or its cover-up. I've heard the passport sarcastically described as "miraculously unscathed," which it wasn't, and as "fluttering down," which it didn't. It was propelled, along with Suqami's remains and much debris from the impact of Flight 11, onto the streets of Lower Manhattan. Only those few who assert there no patsy hijackers at all aboard the airplanes need the passport to have been planted. And if the necessity of a hypothesis makes too many demands of this sort upon evidence, then that's good indication that the hypothesis should probably be abandoned.

(Much more suspicious, yet overshadowed by the passport in popular thought, was the alleged finding of an Arabic flight manual in Atta's rental car left at Logan airport. The convenience was reminiscent of the early framing of the narrative regarding Lee Harvey Oswald, and anticipated the discovery of Korans in cars nearby the Madrid bombings.)

An example of intentional noise may be Delmart Vreeland. Without rehashing the story, I think Vreeland was an unwitting agent of disinformation who was meant to serve a dual purpose. First, preemptively strike "outrageous conspiracy theories" by poisoning the well with the early word of a con artist. For the first few months following the attacks Vreeland's warning was the story, but Vreeland, the ONI asset, was also a criminal and a liar. To believe him was to discredit yourself. It was Vreeland that David Corn latched onto in his hatchet job on Michael Ruppert that did so much early damage to the reputation of 9/11 skepticism. In retrospect, it almost looks like it was supposed to be that way. Second, for those who went all the way with Vreeland, who were the sponsors of the attacks according to his sources? Why, Russia and Iraq, of course. US authorities were "out of the loop." Imagine that.

It's still early days for London, so it's even harder to tell signal from noise. Remember the Kingstar van across from the bus blast? One of Kingstar's clients "is AMEC, which was not only involved in the renovation of the attacked wing of the Pentagon on Sep11th, but also in the controlled removal of the rubble in DC and at Ground Zero, New York." Twenty-six year old Anthony Fatayi-Williams was one of those killed on the #30 bus. Fatay-Williams was a Nigerian-born exective of AMEC, which is also a rival of Halliburton's in the reconstruction of Iraq.

Signal or noise? I don't know. There may be no there there, but until we know for certain, or as certain as we can know anything here, there's no harm poking around and asking questions, so long as we're prepared to discard the line of inquiry if it comes to nothing. We need to be humble enough to sometimes back up the way we came, saying "I wouldn't go down there if I were you" to people we pass on the way, rather than bash our heads stubbornly against dead ends, shouting "After me!" There is, after all, a synchronicity to ordinary events, so we should admit that it is present in extraordinary events as well.

Now, the simultaneous wargames and simulations, on both 9/11 and 7/7 - this, so to speak, is a there, if there ever was one.

"liberate tutemae"

This is the Age of Magic, Where everything is run by Spells!
This is the Age of Magic, Where everything is run by Spells!
- from "Merlin," Bohemian Grove play of 1999


What is the mission, again?

I asked the question yesterday regarding the rape and torture of children at Abu Ghraib. And the answer, for me, is also the summation of much of what we've studied here.

The mission is brutalization. Not just of the captives, but of the captors and their codependent subjects in the Homeland. Because the transformative mission extends beyond the literal confines of Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, to the imaginative boundaries of Empire, in a New Age for the End of Days, at least as we have known them. And we should have seen enough by now to have seen it coming.

Consider the similarities to accounts of Satanic Ritual Abuse. Kathleen Sullivan has written of the impact of the initial release of torture images: "Many survivors...are experiencing an additional set of reactions....wave after wave of devastating emotions and flashbacks after each new revelation is made public. What was done to the prisoners is too similar to what was perpetrated against most of us." And again I recommend Professor Pan's "Sex, Drugs, Mind Control, and Gitmo" for a penetrating analysis of the method behind the mad kink. (From The New York Post: Iraq's feared Abu Ghraib jail was one big sex romp.... "There was a bed found in one of the abandoned buildings. There was a mattress on the ground. They had chairs all circled around it and candles all over the place," said Bischel, adding the chairs were "obviously for an audience.")

Abuse. Everyone can see that. Satanic. Many can see that, too, at least as a powerful adjective signifying transgression. The actions can be rightly called devilish even by those for whom the Devil and the Dark Gods have neither literal nor symbolic meaning. But ritual - that's where most falter. To nearly everyone, the ritual remains invisible, here and everywhere. (The Hosanna Church crimes, for one contemporary instance, which have been denuded of their purpose by the FBI and the District Attorney.)

America is held in a death-grip by fascists of a National Socialist pedigree - the manifestation of the demonic in the political realm. So we should know the religion of the High Criminals less by their public professions of faith than by the blood offerings they make.

Understandably, talk of ritual is off-putting to secular rationalists. But by ignoring how important ritual is to some, crimes can go unsolved, and criminals free.

Jack the Ripper, for one.

As Ivor Edwards, author of Jack the Ripper's Black Magic Rituals, told The Guardian:

One avenue, which was never explored by the police of the day, mainly due to their ignorance, was occult ritual murder, including the doctrine that certain organs should be removed from murdered prostitutes, killed at pre-arranged sites, which were to be located at the four points of the compass.

Edwards took compass bearings of the Ripper's first four victims and found they were laid out in a cross, facing North, South, East and West. Measureing the distances between them, "I found that by joining some of the sites together, you created two equilateral triangles; a sacred symbol which, in occult doctrine, Satan devised to be used in worship of him."

The Guardian adds:

After examining the position of the fifth and last victim, 25-year-old Marie Jeanette Kelly, Edwards realised that all the women were killed within a 500-yard radius and that, by joining the sites together, it was possible to create the Vesica Piscis, a fish-like symbol worshipped by the early Christians. By murdering his victims and leaving their bodies in that way, the killer intended a tribute to Satan.

Edwards said the organs removed by the Ripper - the heart, kidneys, genitalia and womb - were those routinely used in black magic rituals.

Edwards' candidate for the Ripper is a physician and occultist named Dr Robert Donston Stephenson, alias Roslyn D'Onston, who had boasted of at least two killings in Africa, had his name given to London police by four friends as a Ripper suspect after having made partial confessions, whose wife mysteriously vanished, and who himself disappeared without a trace shortly after the turn of the century.

In his unpublished article "Jack the Ripper," Aleister Crowley writes:

After the last of the murders, an article appeared in the newspaper of W. T. Stead, the Pall Mall Gazette, by Tau Tria Delta, who offered a solution for the motive of the murders. It stated that in one of the grimoires of the Middle Ages, an account was given of a process by which a sorcerer could attain "the supreme black magical power" by following out a course of action identical with that of Jack the Ripper.

...

In every case, either Saturn or Mercury were precisely to the Eastern horizon at the moment of the murder (by precisely, one means within a matter of minutes).

Mercury is, of course, the God of Magic, and his averse distorted image the Ape of Thoth, responsible for such evil trickery as is the heart of black magic, while Saturn is not only the cold heartlessness of age, but the magical equivalent of Satan. He is the old god who was worshipped in the Witches' Sabbath.

"Tau tri delta" also published an article entitled "African Magic" in the November 1890 issue of Lucifer, the Theosophical journal. Here is an interesting excerpt concerning the typical necromancer:

The very least of the crimes necessary for him (or her) to commit to attain the power sought is actual murder, by which the human victim essential to the sacrifice is provided . . . Yet, though the price is awful, horrible, unutterable, the power is real.

"Tau tri delta" went on to explain that a necromancer needed "a certain portion of the body of a harlot" and that the Ripper murders marked the points of a profaned cross over London. "Tau tri delta" was later determined to be none other than Dr Robert Donston Stephenson.

Crowley was only 13 at the time of the Ripper killings, but became great friends with Stephenson in later years.

Stephenson and the young Crowley


"From Hell" - Jack even supplied a return address, and still they couldn't catch him.

When I call fascism with a National Socialist pedigree the manifestation of the demonic in the political realm, perhaps the image of Lt. Col. Michael Aquino comes to mind, performing his magickal working in Himmler's castle. The picture needn't be that vivid to be true, though sometimes it is. Another example is the "traditional Satanic" Order of Nine Angles, about which I'll say more later. First, about their "Dark Gods" - from where do they come?

The acausal universe itself may be described as that aspect of the cosmos bounded by acausal time and possessing more than three spatial dimensions; the causal universe may be described as that aspect of the cosmos bounded by causal, or linear, time and possessing three spatial dimensions at right angles to each other. The entities known to esoteric tradition as the Dark Gods are beings which exist in the acausal universe. Other such beings probably exist in the acausal realm, but the Dark Gods are known to us through having, at various times in our evolution, "intruded" into our spatial universe.

Black magick, but magick nonetheless, and to most people that means nonsense. But science may be catching up to the mumbo jumbo.

In Parallel Worlds, physicist Michio Kaku writes that:

Anyone who can tap into the fourth spatial dimension (or what is today called the fifth dimension, with time being the fourth) can indeed become invisible, and can even assume the powers normally ascribed to ghosts and gods.... [I]n a four- dimensional world we are the flatlanders, oblivious of the fact that higher planes of existence might hover right above ours. We believe that our world consists of all that we can see, unaware that there may be entire universes right above our noses. Although another universe might be hovering just inches above us, floating in the fourth dimension, it would appear to be invisible.

Kaku adds, "several experiments are now being conducted to detect the presence of parallel universes that might be hovering just above ours."

In the science fiction-horror film Event Horizon, a rescue vessel approaches an experimental, hyperdimensional craft which had unexpectedly returned to our reality:


D.J.: I wasn't going to tell you this. I've been listening to the distress signal, and I, um, think I made a mistake in the translation.
Miller: Go on.
D.J.: I thought it said "liberate mae" - "save me." But it's not "mae." It's "liberate tutemae" - "save yourself." And it gets worse - there - I think that says "ex inferis." "Save yourself...from hell."
Miller: You don't believe in that kind of Stuff, do you?
D.J.: Whoever sent that message, he sure believes in Hell.


We're accustomed to interpret "higher" as more advanced, more evolved - our moral superior. Unfortunately, with respect to "higher" dimensions, I think that will prove - may already have been proven - a logical fallacy.

People sometimes ask me for advice. All I know to say is liberate tutemae ex inferis, and hope I've just seen too many movies.

If we're lucky the Spells won't hurt us
If we're not, then you'd better hide!
For this is the Age of Magic
Where all the rules are cast aside!

"Must I paint you a picture?"

This is a weeping song
A song in which to weep
While all the men and women sleep - Nick Cave

Those who were awaiting Friday's court-ordered release of more, and still more grievous, images of inhumanity from Abu Ghraib know it didn't happen. (I wonder, could any have been surprised?) Here's the story, entitled "U.S. defies order to give up Abu Ghraib abuse photos":

Lawyers for the Defense Department are refusing to cooperate with a federal judge's order to release secret photographs and videotapes related to the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal. The lawyers said in a letter sent to the federal court in Manhattan late Thursday that they would file a sealed brief explaining their reasons for not turning over the material, which they were to have released by Friday.

...

[In June, Judge Alvin Hellerstein] rejected arguments from the government that releasing the photographs would violate the Geneva Conventions because prisoners might be identified and "further humiliated," but he ordered any identifying features to be removed from the images.

In the letter sent Thursday, Sean Lane, an assistant U.S. attorney, said that the government was withholding the photographs because they "could result in harm to individuals" and that it would outline the reasons in a sealed brief to the court.

You see, it's quite simple really: it's the evidence of torture, not the torture itself - including, reportedly, child rape - that violates the prisoners' rights. It's their images which are protected by the Geneva Conventions. They themselves are not.

Such criminal contempt for law and common justice, such lunatic reasoning, suggests the question: Do they mean to drive every last, sane one of us mad? Maybe so. More than 20 years ago, during the - incredibly - relatively benign Reagan years, Bruce Cockburn sang "No adult of sound mind / Can be an innocent bystander." And that really drops us in it, doesn't it? Because we cannot consider ourselves truly informed unless we also shoulder the suspicious-looking rucksacks of empathetic knowledge. It bears down on us, knowing what we know, and not knowing what to do with it. And it's a burden which most of us must bear in virtual silence, surrounded by good people who remain blithely unaware of the abominations, the crystallization of unprecedented crises, and the ever-more bizarre vortex swirling about the All-Seeing Eye.

These days, it's almost enough to get you stopped on the subway.

America has already processed the softer scenes of prisoners set upon by dogs, stacked naked in pyramids, forced to perform sex acts on one-another, smeared in excrement and posed for electrocution. And the usual Americans have made peace with them, in their "freedom isn't free" subterfuge of every decent thing. Are they ready for the harder stuff? If not, after years of a concerted dulling of consciences, how much worse must they be?

From German television, via DailyKos, here is an artist's rendering of one such photograph, depicting the beating of an apparently naked eight-year old girl:



George Orwell wrote that "the nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."

The images exist, and are as real as the torture they document. But since the government contends - and it must be with a delicious smirk - that their release would violate the Geneva Conventions, Americans may never see them.

Here's one image from Iraq which Americans are entitled to see: members of the 983rd Engineer Battalion of Camp Ramadi, posing in Rush Limbaugh's "Club G'itmo" wear. The t-shirts bear such slogans as "I Got My Free Koran and Prayer Rug at G'itmo":



"We will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defence of our great nation, and rid the world of evil," said a member of US Special Forces on an Afghan hillside early in 2002, while consecrating a memorial to the victims of September 11. That's his mission.

Last year, Donald Rumseld said regarding the unreleased images, "I looked at them last night, and they're hard to believe.” They show acts "that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhumane." And yet the White House, led by Dick Cheney, is thwarting Republican efforts to regulate the treatment of detainees.

What is the mission, again?

Father, why are all the children weeping?
They are merely crying son
O, are they merely crying, father?
Yes, true weeping is yet to come

The "Consolation" of Conspiracy

Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard.
Some of us are prisoners, the rest of us are guards. - Bob Dylan

"The dust hadn’t even settled after the terrorist atrocities in London and already the conspiracy theories...had begun," writes Cinnamon Stillwell in "The London Conspiracy Theories: Here We Go Again." Nevermind that settled dust also covers tracks, as unpolished first reports get squeegee'd from the record. And disregard the fact that every reconstruction of the events must posit a conspiracy of some sort, and that they are not even theories, but hypotheses.

Nevermind all that, as here they go again, baiting the genuine skeptics in the Aeon of Bizarro.

Most irksome are Stillwell's patronizing conclusions:

It never ceases to amaze me how many well-educated, otherwise rational people insist on pushing these fantasies. Unable to cope with the nihilistic and horrifying threat of Islamic terrorism, they instead turn to familiar demons.... How long these people can continue their delusions is unknown, but something tells me that a great number of them will simply have to be written off as functionally insane while the rest of us attend to the business of fighting Islamic terrorism.

In some ways I understand this need to find more comforting answers. There’s been many a day since 9/11 that I’ve wished this threat wasn’t real. But it is. At some point, all of us will have to shake off the conspiracy theories and face that truth.

I don't mind so much being dismissed as mad, so long as I'm not locked up in a psychiatric hospital for the politically insane. Though since that day came for Soviet dissidents, and the Western calender is running just a little behind, we shouldn't be surprised if our questions will eventually be addressed with a pharmacological magic bullet. Rather, what I find most disagreeable about this popular refutation of "conspiracy theory" is that such thinking is somehow comforting.

Tell me what I say is crazy, without bothering to hear what I'm saying. I'm fine with that. Hell, I listen to what I'm saying and sometimes I wonder myself. As a fellow "conspiracy theorist" recently told me, "I feel like the guy in A Beautiful Mind, minus the genius part." Adding things up which are not to be added can do that to you. It's a crazy-making world out there, once you start paying attention to it. Just don't presume to tell me how I feel about it.

And I won't presume to tell you, so you tell me: how did you feel when the floor first fell away from beneath you? When the comforting assumptions of consensus reality folded up upon themselves, and you saw the lone gunmen as cardbard figures, and you glimpsed the grinning skulls beneath the smooth skin of the killers, what did that do to your insides? When you felt the vertiginous drop, did you throw up your hands and let out a "Wheeeeee!"?

(Perhaps there are some who do. Perhaps that's what sets apart the conspiracy buffs from the rest of us. They get a rush from the horror, but it's as real and as threatening as an amusement ride. They've internalized nothing. It means nothing. And that's paranoid style.)

"Comforting answers"? I felt physically ill when I added up what I'd learned about 9/11 and I saw what I got. I didn't want it to be true, and I still don't. I want none of it to be true. If only Oswald had acted alone. But he didn't. So like it or not, here I am.

And it was only at the public execution of John F Kennedy - that is, with the eruption of conspiracy fact into public consciousness - that conspiracy theory became a disreputable subject. Until then, such talk could be heard from, and even encouraged by, some of America's most senior officials. "The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists," wrote J. Edgar Hoover. As I read Eisenhower's better-late-than-never warning about the military-industrial complex, and how Americans must remain "alert and knowledgeable" and "should take nothing for granted" in order to guard against its "acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought," I can hear Scott McClelland's rote rebuttal: "That's a conspiracy theory, Dwight, and I won't dignify that with a response. Next question - Jeff Gannon, Talon News."

There's an account by Fred J Cook, an early critic of the Warren Report, of coming up against the Left Gatekeepers at The Nation, in Martin Schotz's History Will Not Absolve Us. In 1964, Cook submitted a seven-page memorandum "tearing at the guts of the report" to Editor Carey McWilliam. He knew their editorial policy was endorsement of the findings, but he "felt that The Nation was the only magazine with sufficent independence and nerve to print the kind of article I wanted to write." After three weeks of silence, McWilliam rejected it, telling him that he could find no flaw in his reasoning, but that The Nation didn't want to criticize the Report.

A year and a half later, as criticism of the Report became more acceptable and more vocal, McWilliam relented, and published it with a disclaimer that it was only Cook's opinion, then immediately followed it up with a ridiculing piece by a university professor lambasting "conspiracy theory." The author was, in fact, a MOCKINGBIRD asset of the CIA, and later admitted in a fit of conscience to Cook's friend and fellow researcher Vince Salandria that yes, they were right, but that "The truth is too terrible. The American people would never be able to stand it."

Who's comforting who?

In a village you know to be a prison, you should question the motives of your consoling minders.




By the way, two signs for the discomforted, who may be gauging the storm signals:

I've received an email with an unconfirmed report, though from a reputedly good source, that "last week the government bought up all of the available iodine [ie, potassium iodide] in stock for treating radioactive poisoning."

And, according to the latest issue of The American Conservative:

The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing--that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack--but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections.

Be seeing you.

This is only a drill...

"In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he had happened in some connection to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, 'just to keep the people frightened.'" - 1984

I've already posted about this story on the RI discussion board, but given the recently heightened shrillness in the pro-Bush media regarding the inevitability and even the imminence of an "American Hiroshima" - "the multiple detonation of nuclear weapons already smuggled into the U.S. over the Mexican border" - and word of nuclear terrorism simulations this summer (and we should all know by now what often accompanies "simulations"), I thought I'd post it here as well, in hope that some readers may bring light to the heat of reports of unusual activity at a long-abandoned military base in Texas.

This was posted a couple of hours ago on Democratic Underground, where it's been met by the usual hoots of derision:

I've been in touch with a truck driver friend. He told me he dropped his regular trailer at the company's terminal in CA, and bobtailed to a huge abandoned military base in Texas. He was given a non-descript white trailer.

There are now 300 trucks from his company, as well as hundreds from others. They're locked in on the grounds, and more trucks are arriving all the time. He's been sitting since early Saturday. They've been told they aren't allowed out of their trucks for more than twenty minutes, and there is a gubmint "roach coach" that comes by at mealtimes.

He said last night, a bunch of buses came in to take the drivers to a truckstop two hours away, where they all got free showers. He has no idea what they'll be hauling, or how long he'll be sitting there.

Any ideas?

The original poster later added these details:

He's been calling me by cell phone. The base is long ago abandoned. The truckstop two hours away is near Weatherford (just outside Ft.Worth).

When he called the other night the drivers were surmising that they were preparing just in case the hurricane hit Texas. I told him there was no way they would be going to those lengths before a hurricane. Anyway, it didn't happen, and the operation continues. Oh yeah...he said he's being paid $200 per day to sit there.

On the RI board, "Connut" has posted that for the past several days 30 or so Red Cross Disaster Relief trucks have been sitting in an Austin hotel parking lot. (Austin, of course, is far north of where Hurricane Emily recently hit.)

A strange, unconfirmed story, but these are strange and largely unconfirmed times, and the list of reasons why pyromaniacs in high places may desire to set inextinguishable fires only lengthens. It could be a hoax, it could be disinformation, it could be nothing; sometimes the dots we mean to connect are just spots before our eyes. But sometimes not. And so I'm throwing it out here to see if it rings a bell for anyone, before all our bells get rung again.

It's enough to make you paranoid

And Operation Zapata was the code name for the Bay of Pigs,
Like the Bushes' oil company - what a funny coincidence - Paranoid Larry

And sometimes, I think that's the idea.

Once you begin to smell something fishy, it's hard to smell anything else. And as soon as you start grasping the semiotics of conspiracy, you see tells, like inside jokes shared with the doomed, made on the dual assumptions that nobody is going to believe you and there's nothing you can do about it. Or at least I see them. (Hey, call me paranoid.)

Which brings us to the Zapata Corporation. You know the story: the Texas oil and gas company co-founded by George Herbert Walker Bush in 1953, which allegedly served the CIA well in both the ramp-up to the Bay of Pigs and its burgeoning narcotics business. (Those Caribbean platforms belonging to its future director - which intelligence agency could resist?)



In the 1990s Zapata got out of the energy sector and "became a top US producer of marine protein through its majority holdings in Omega Protein." It's no longer Texas-based; it's now headquarted in Rochester, New York. But a nod or two to its legacy remain.

Here is something I bet you didn't know: since August 19, 1998, Zapata Corporation is squatting on the domain name "paranoid.com." (Do a "whois" search and see.) Why a fish oil firm would hold onto paranoid.com, I can't imagine. Why a fish oil firm with Zapata's history would, I can only guess. It has the ring of another inside joke.

Like, say, a photograph of George HW Bush sharing a bed with his granddaughters. The picture is undated, but it appears to be of late-1980s vintage, when stories were being whispered about Bush's "problem", and his association with the Franklin Credit Union's Lawrence King was becoming an issue. But there he is. And something else besides:



I can hear his studied, folksy disgust at the inference that there is anything unwholesome about this image. But Mr President, the pyramid in your lap....

Even when we get the joke, it's not particularly funny, is it?

Interview with Jackie McGauley, Part Two

Digging for the McMartin tunnels

This is the second part of my interview with Jackie McGauley, leader of the McMartin parents and organizer of the tunnel dig. Part One can be read here.


How did you learn of abuse your daughter had suffered?

There were signs but we did not know what they meant. We asked other parents and their children were having the same problems. We all thought it must be normal. Who would imagine that the school and others in the community had gotten to so may of our children?

Some children talked about airplane trips. One young boy remarked that the feeling he got in his stomach as an elevator descended was just like that he felt in the airplane. We asked the teachers about the signs and they always had an answer. They played an airplane game.

My daughter was "only" at the preschool from 1983 until it closed in January 1984 for 2 days a week. She had had several severe diaper rashes. She wouldn't tell me about her time at the school. She would just say "kids."

I firest heard about the investigation from Peggy Buckey herself. She was letting parents in one at a time to look at a closet. When I asked what was going on, Peggy told me it did not concern me. As it turned out, only the parents of children that complained of being locked in a closet were allowed in. The closet was a free standing one that had shelves. We added a picture of one in the scientific archaeological report of the successful search for tunnels under the preschool building done in 1990.

Later Peggy told me her son Ray was accused of molesting a child and that it was ridiculous because "he could not hurt a fly." When I tried to ask other parents they would not tell me anything. Later I found out they thought maybe I was involved because I didn't know about the police investigation.


Ray and Peggy Buckley

Both Peggy and Virginia spent a lot of time with me and confided in me that they were the victims of a vendetta and may have to close the school. I had no idea that by August 1983 a full police investigation was under way, much less what it was all about. Babette Spitler and the others begged me to keep my daughter in the preschool. Spitler became the new Director.

The school was closed (they told me voluntarily) 18 months after my daughter had started going there. She went 2 days a week for 4 hours a day. She had severe asthma attacks on Monday mornings. My ex husband, being from an extremely frugal Scottish family, asked if we could send her on Fridays to make up the time.

Ray, Peggy and Betty appeared on the evening news in February, 1984. I asked my daughter if she knew the man on TV. She said, "Mr. Ray." I was stunned. I called the Manhattan Beach Police Department who referred me to Children's Institute International (CII). We could not get an appointment for her until the end of March.

Kee MacFarlane and Dr. Astrid Heger examined her...that opened the floodgates. She began to tell me and show me incredible things. She was terrified. I credit Kee MacFarlane's sensitivity and Dr. Heger's expertise to unlock the secrets she had been keeping.


How did Ted Gunderson enter both the investigation and your personal life? How long did you live together?

I'd love to clear up the misconception that gunderson (I never capitalize his name) was involved in the investigation. He was never formally hired or paid in any way. He simply stuck himself in by offering to do things. Who wouldn't trust the retired chief of the Los Angeles division of the FBI who introduced you to senators and former State Attorney Generals? Some things we allowed him to do but many of his ideas and attempts to take over were rejected.

He was a persistent presence. He became so annoying that eventually the parents would not talk to him. I always thought in some way that he would help our cause. He was present at the Archaeological dig as often as he could and he talked to the ever present media as the rest of us were exhausted or did errands for the crew. At the time we did not know what he was up to and did not think it would be harmful to let him talk, as we thought he said positive things.

I want you to know that allowing him to be involved was the demise of any credibility we had.


Gunderson, then and now

His reputation was well known by law enforcement, but he is such a slick con man that we had no clue what we were getting ourselves in to. I have to say that it was mostly my fault for letting him be involved. Later I found out he was COINTELPRO. Years later when I read the description of that program it all made perfect sense. (Click here: "A Short History of FBI COINTELPRO") I met ted at a California State Social Services Hearing ion San Diego, where I was formally asked, by an invitation I got in the mail, to testify. He approached me in the hallway because I was known then for keeping a file of documentation on the issue. I had appeared on several news programs and talk shows.

How he wormed his way into my home is a rather long story. Basically he tried to hire me to not only work with him, but do research for attornies, which I did maybe twice, then started hanging around our apartment. I had just been diagnosed with malignant melanoma and while waiting for results of the test, was told I may only have three months to live. He got into a nasty fight with my downstairs neighbor and my landlord doubled my rent. I had thrown him out once because of his nasty temper towards the neighbors. While looking for another place to live and still communicating with him, he found a big house one block from my children's school. Needless to say the children loved the house. Against my better judgment, I agreed to let him move in with us and share expenses. This was almost immediately after we finished finding the tunnels at the preschool. I was not only exhausted, but I had contracted Psittacosis (parrot fever) which can be fatal. My temperature was so high seemed as if I were cooking from the inside. I was very sick for weeks, ted refused to help me. He took the checks I had made out to pay bills and told me he had to give his daughter the money. That was just the start of almost 4 years of my decent into debt and serious health problems.


What caused your falling out with Gunderson? How do you regard him now, and how would you assess his part in the McMartin investigation?

I may have already answered that in the above answer.

Anyone who contacts me about him, and there have been many, including Joe Klass, Polly Klass' grandfather, I warn them that he is a con man and will destroy their credibility if not con them out of money. The Klass family did not hire him, though he has given talks about how he worked that case and mine. The prosecutor, D.A. Greg Jacobs, Sonoma County, will back that up. ted lee gunderson is a dangerous person.

He alone claims he was part of our investigation. We try our best to warn people about him. You don't need to take my word for it, ask anyone else who was involved. When I added up all of the damage he caused me, I was over $30,000 in debt. As a single mother of two small children I had no choice but to file bankruptcy. ted does not have a physical address. The addresses he uses are of other people, and a P.O. box drop in Santa Monica. Unfortunately with any high profile case there will be a lot of rumors and conjecture. Also there are a lot of well meaning people who try to attach themselves to our cause. I learned to try to be diplomatic while sifting out the crazies.

McMartin's "Happy Face" closet:


I'll have more from Jackie later.

The Prophet Greenspan

Steal a little and they throw you in jail;
Steal a lot, and they make you king. - Bob Dylan

In Confessions of an Economic Hitman, John Perkins reflects on the World Trade Center during his first visit to New York City following their destruction on September 11:

I went on around the block, to Pine Street. There I came face-to-face with the world headquarters of Chase, the bank David Rockefeller built, a bank seeded with oil money and harvested by men like me. This bank, an institution that served the Economic Hit Men and that was a master at promoting global empire, was in many ways the very symbol of the corporatocracy.

I recalled reading that the World Trade Center was a project started by David Rockefeller in 1960, and that in recent years the complex had been considered an albatross. It had the reputation of being a financial misfit, unsuited to modern fiber-optic and Internet technologies, and burdened with an inefficient and costly elevator system. Those two towers once had been nicknamed David and Nelson. Now the albatross was gone.

One of the most important lessons of 9/11 was that we should never take our eyes off the money. Billions were made in the destruction of the towers, without even accounting for the uptick in oil and arms that followed. (See here for the account of what happened to the WTC data recovery to "unlock the truth behind an unexplained surge in financial transactions," according to a hopelessly naive report of December, 2001.) Follow the money is a cliche because its truth became trite by matching an overly-familiar pattern. Like the scorpion that jabs the turtle carrying it to shore, the power elite can't forego an opportunity to make a sting. "It's in my nature."

"Does Alan Greenspan have some explaining to do?" begins a provocative analysis of the actions of the Federal Reserve in the hours before the London bombings by The Cunning Realist - an "executive in the financial industry" who describes himself as a "lifelong conservative with a strong independent streak." (And judging by his blogroll, which includes links to Andrew Sullivan, The National Review and Talking Points Memo, I'd say he pegged himself pretty well.)

He writes:

It is difficult to overestimate the importance to the financial markets of Fed-created liquidity. In a paper from August 2003, researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis wrote, "Open market operations are not another weapon in the Fed's arsenal, but the only weapon in its arsenal."

With that in mind, what happened last week is fascinating. Here are two charts of the Fed's recent level of activity. The first shows the expanding and shrinking daily size of the temporary liquidity pool. The date (ending on July 8th) is indicated on the bottom of the chart, and the size of the pool in billions is on the left:



The second graph represents the Fed's injections of permanent liquidity:



The Cunning Realist adds:

"The terrorist attacks in London took place on Thursday. The Fed dramatically increased the pool of liquidity available for stocks to a multi-year high 48 hours before that---an ideal amount of time for that liquidity to filter into the market---and kept it elevated for the next few days. And indeed, it worked. The stock market saw heavy buying right at the opening bell on Thursday and has shot straight up since then.

"Why did the Fed do this? Was it just another coincidence in our financial markets that somehow managed to immediately precede a major geopolitical event?"

Fintan Dunne of breakfornews.com has also picked up the story, and writes that the Federal Reserve "has previously supported financial markets by increasing liquidity to boost the stock market - as happened after 9/11. But... the Fed had already hugely increased liquidity 48 hours before [the London attacks], just in time for that liquidity to filter into the market."

I found it interesting that the Cunning Realist writes "financial professionals generally consider this 'man behind the curtain' stuff. Those who are aware of it don't like to discuss it, because it implies that stocks rise and fall based on something other than fundamentals and their own acumen."

They say you have to be lucky to be good, but they would say that. After all, they're the carnies calling the suckers into the tent of the marketplace. You pay your money and you take your chance. And if you play the game, you might get lucky, but you don't get to roll with Rockefeller and Greenspan. Because maybe to be good, more than being lucky, you need to be bad.

Pictures from a demolition

I don't know what to make of this yet, except to say look at this:



The photo is the BBC's, taken in the immediate aftermath of the London bus bombing. Notice the white "Kingstar" van parallel-parked opposite the site of the blast? (The van is facing the opposite direction of the bus; the front of the bus had just passed.) Any guess what business is Kingstar's? Would you believe, "Controlled Demolition...in areas where minimal disruption and minimal noise requirements are paramount"?

It may turn out to be nothing, as things sometimes turn out to be, but it's at least another curio for the increasingly curious case of the suicide bombers who weren't. "Why did they buy return train tickets to Luton? Why did they buy pay & display tickets for cars? Why were there no usual shouts of 'Allah Akhbar'? Why were bombs in bags and not on their bodies?" asks The Daily Mail.

No shortage of good questions these days. That's the thing about bad days.

The Disease of Conceit

Ain't nothing too discreet / About the disease of conceit - Bob Dylan

Language, being the virus that it is, often makes me sick. These days, not so much from the perpetual misdiagnosis of "conspiracy theory" (conspiracy is a hypothesis, doc; deep politics is the theory), as at the gatekeeping virologists' nerve to call what they do "skepticism."

The Skeptics Society, which claims ownership of the term, defines it as "the application of reason to any and all ideas.... When we say we are 'skeptical,' we mean that we must see compelling evidence before we believe."

Right there we can see the argumentative circularity, and the richness and the weirdness of life that must forever lie beyond the pale for such people. "Show me," they say. Yet evidence compelling to them must necessarily conform to "reason" (in other words, to a trumped-up rationality with control issues), and so all evidence that transgresses reason (or more accurately, puts rationality in its place) is invalidated. In this manner, the paranormal and much of what we call the parapolitical can never be proven to such people. "Show me," they say, and yet these same people are more likely than not to accept official narratives of controversial history without having been shown anything. Rather, it's us, the "conspiracy theorists," who are saying "show me," and meaning it. We're the ones withholding judgement. We're the true skeptics, and I want us to stake a claim on the word.

The society adds that "modern skepticism is embodied in the scientific method, that involves gathering data to formulate and test naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena."

Here the problem narrows, and sharpens, to the reduction of skepticism to scientific method. But much of our experience of the world, even of the "natural" world, cannot be subjected to a scientific method and still retain its meaning for us.

Just last week, scientist Richard Dawkins opened a conference with the caution that the Universe is to weird to understand, and that there is a "narrow range of reality that we judge to be normal." Scientific method is moving uncomfortably beyond the "skeptic," who seems a hide-bound Newtonian from the perspective of our quantum politics.

Have you ever browsed the Skeptic's Dictionary? A word that comes to mind to describe the intellects at play there is credulous. Virtually all that is offered is assurance to those who don't want such things to be true that they needn't worry, and need inquire no further.

For instance, the complete entry for "Xenoglossy" is the "alleged speaking or writing in a language entirely unknown to the speaker. The probability of this happening is about zero." Well, he said, brushing off his hands, that takes care of that.

Under "Mind control," we read that:

...a common complaint from the mind-controlled is that they can't get therapists to take them seriously. That is, they say they can only find therapists who want to treat them for their delusions, not help them prove they're being controlled by their government. Thus, it is not likely that the 'mind-controlled CIA zombies' will be accused of having delusions planted in them by therapists, as alien abductees have, since they claim they cannot get therapists to take their delusions seriously.

Either the author did not respect the subject enough to seriously research it, or he did and hopes the reader won't, because it's an absolute fabrication.

I'll let just one example stand for many. (And let's note this: these kind of skeptics must paint with the broadest of brushes, because if only one contrary fact is admitted, everything crumbles.) Dr Valerie Wolf, testifying before the Presidential Commission on Radiation Experiments in 1995, said that:

...in preparation for my testimony at these hearings, I called nearly 40 therapists across the country to find out what they knew about the link between radiation and mind control and to get what other therapists were seeing in clients who had been used in mind control experiments.... Generally, it appears that therapists across the country are finding clients who have been subjected to mind control techniques. The consistency of their stories about the purpose of the mind control and torture techniques such as electric shock, use of hallucinogens, sensory deprivation, spinning, hypnosis, dislocation of limbs and sexual abuse is remarkable. There is almost nothing published on this aspect of mind control used with children and these clients come from all over the country, having had no contact with each other.

In its debunking of "alien abductions," the dictionary never strays from the ET hypothesis, arguing against the probability of travelling interplanetary distances without raising the theoretical likelihood of parallel worlds.

Regarding the late Harvard psychiatrist, Dr John Mack, who took seriously the abduction phenomenon, the dictionary sneers:

...until the good doctor or one of his patients produces physical evidence that abductions have occurred, it seems ore reasonable to believe that he and his patients are deluded or frauds. Of course, the good doctor can hide behind academic freedom and the doctor/patient privacy privilege. He can make all the claims he wants and refuse to back any of them up on the grounds that to do so would be to violate his patients' rights. He can then publish his stories and dare anyone to take away his academic freedom. He is in the position any con person would envy: he can lie without fear of being caught.

Again, the broadest brush is employed - the "good doctor" is a con man - because if they are wrong once, their world slips away.

And there is ample physical evidence for both UFOs and abductions. Another solitary example to stand for many: The case of "Dr X," the French health professional Jacques Vallee introduced to us in Confrontations. When attending to his crying toddler early morning November 2, 1968, he noticed a light outside the child's window. He didn't pay it much attention until his son was asleep again, and then he stepped out on the balcony and observed two large disks moving slowly over neighbouring homes. The objects merged, and a white beam was directed toward the ground below. "Finally the disk made a movement that brought it to a vertical position, and the white beam caught the doctor squarely on the balcony. He heard a bang and the object vanished, leaving only a whitish form like cotton candy."

Afterwards he experienced abdominal pain, and a red, equalateral triangle with sides of six inches in length appeared around his navel. His doctor believed it to be a psychosomatic reaction to his "dream" of an object which was somehow associated with a triangle. "But when the same shape appeared on the abdomen of the child, and when the same phenomena recurred in successive years, the psychosomatic explanation had to be discounted." (A thermographic examination in 1984 found "intense cutaneous erythema of triangular shape, centered over the umbilicus; absence of visible superficial vessel.... resistant to cooling.")

The encounter also accompanied spontaneous healing of a permanent disability on the right side of his body he had incurred ten years before from a mine explosion while in the French army. And this just scratches the weirdness, as Dr X and his wife were subsequently "plagued by poltergeist activity" and by visitations "so fantastic as to stretch credulity, yet they appear to be verifiable by other family members." But let's not invite the rolled eyes of the "skeptic" with such episodes. But it's too late for that. Even the medical records of Dr X and his son are inadmissable as evidence because they do not conform to "reason," and so will not be seriously considered.

Cocksureity seems the hallmark contradiction of such skeptics. Stage magician Penn Jillette is such a one. He says that people should "learn to carry their intelligence the way James Dean carried his cigarette." In other words, as an affectation.

Jillette could have said the way Peabody carried his bowtie, but it wouldn't have been as cool.

MI5 and the Welsh Paedophile Ring

Seeing things that are there: MI5's Eye in the Pyramid

Apologies for the extended absence, and my thanks for your understanding. I needed it, and I've made some good progress on my book.

While I get up to speed here, I thought I'd pass along, courtesy of a reader, what appears to be another link in the global chain of the protected exploitation of children by intelligence agencies and their elite patrons.

The blog Nona digs into an old story, previously unknown to me, of a paedophile ring in North Wales. Allegedly, "MI5 used to take foreign diplomats to the North Wales homes, give them boys to 'play' with, secretly filmed them as they buggered, abused and tortured boys then kept the tapes as evidence. Over a dozen victims who complained of abuse by the paedophile ring 'have met suspicious deaths.'" Nona supplies many corroborating links, such as State cover-up of high level paedophile ring and Public Figures Named in Paedophile Ring, as well as those which detail the whitewash that made it all go away.

Nona also provides this provocative quote from One Girl's War: Personal Exploits in MI5's Most Secret Section, by Joan Miller, published in 1986, concerning MI5 Chief Charles Henry Maxwell-Knight, the model for his friend Ian Fleming's "M":

His first wife Gladys, I learnt, died in the Overseas Club after some sort of occult misadventure in which the notorious Aleister Crowley was involved - certainly I'd never been willing to enquire too deeply into that incident. Black magic was not a subject that held any attraction for me. I accepted M's interest in it, hoping it was purely academic, but, for myself, I preferred to leave it well and truly alone: M understood this. When I tore up a photograph of Aleister Crowley which he had kept, as I believed it to be unlucky, he only laughed.

In Unholy Alliance, Peter Levenda writes that "Himmler was obsessed by the idea that British Intelligence was being run by the Rosicrucian Order and that occult adepts were in charge of MI5.... how would he have reacted had he known that the formidable Maxwell Knight...was a disciple of Crowley himself." And not just Knight, but also figures such as OTO initiate and novelist Dennis Wheatley, a favourite author of Hermann Goring, and member of Winston Churchill's Joint Planning Staff.

As Levenda says, "Oh, how the black candles would have burned that night!"

Kick at the darkness

'til it bleeds daylight.

It seems appropriate this morning to continue with a Cockburn theme.

From yesterday's post:

You may by now have read the report that - shades of 9/11 - there were simultaneous exercises in the London subway, at the identical stations, at the exact time of the blasts. You may not have had the chance to read it on Democratic Undergound, because though the original source is an audio clip and transcript from the BBC, it's the polarizing Alex Jones who brought it to our attention. So in the dumper it goes. How lucky for some.

We have more than PrisonPlanet on the story now. Over the weekend, the CBC conducted it's own interview with Peter Power, regarding London's amazing - and eerily familiar - coincidence. Power is Managing Director of Visor Consultants, "which on the morning of July 7 was co-incidentally running a security exercise for a private firm, simulating multiple bomb explosions in the London Underground, at the same stations that were subsequently attacked in real life." (Note: the link is to the program CBC News: Sunday and does not appear permanent. Hopefully one will be forthcoming.)

Researcher Paul Thompson (The Terror Timeline) made the following transcription from the broadcast:

Evan Solomon: We've heard something quite extraordinary - could be a coincidence or not - that your firm, on the very day that the bombs went off in London, were running an exercise simulating three bombs going off, in the very same tube stations that they went off. How did this happen? Coincidence, or were you acting on information that you knew?

Peter Power: I don't think you could say that we had some special insight into the terrorist network, otherwise I would be under arrest myself. The truth of it is -

Solomon: But it is a coincidence.

Power: It's a coincidence, and it's a spooky coincidence. Our scenario was very similar - it wasn't totally identical, but it was based on bombs going off, to the time, the locations, all this sort of stuff. But it wasn't an accident, in the sense that London has a history of bombs, and the reason why our emergency services did so well, and prepared probably better than any other city in the world, sadly they have to be. So it wasn't exactly rocket science or totally out of the pale to come up with that scenario unusual though it be to stop the exercise and go into real time, and it worked very well, although there was a few seconds when the audience didn't realize whether it was real or not.

It's thanks to Paul that I found the CBC link, which he posted early this morning on Democratic Underground. Curiosly, he mentioned it was the third time he'd posted the story, and that the previous two had been deleted without explanation. Moments later, that was deleted as well. I must have posted the story half a dozen times myself on several other DU boards, and on each occasion the story vanished within minutes.

Yesterday I'd thought the gatekeeper's problem was Alex Jones, but clearly it goes deeper than that, as posts linked to the PrisonPlanet article remain. Why? To serve as negative examples of "debunked" conspiratorial thought? It's the mainstream corroboration that was made to disappear. (Though, as of this writing, the story is finally seeming to stick in this thread. Perhaps the problem came down to a cranky moderator finishing a graveyard shift.)

Anything else? Oh yeah - Tony Blair is rejecting calls for an inquiry into the attacks. Granted, it's the Conservatives who are making the calls, but it's something to watch.

By the way, I don't expect I'll be posting this week. Or so says my looming deadline. I'd encourage new readers to dip into the archives, and everyone to visit the links and the Rigorous Intuition Forum.


The village idiot takes the throne
His the wind in which all must sway
All sane people, die now
Be lifted up and carried away
You've got no home in this world of sorrows

The Trouble with Normal

Person in the street shrugs: "Security comes first"
But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse - Bruce Cockburn

So DailyKos has conducted a "mass banning" of those who had been "perpetuating a series of bizarre, off-the-wall, unsupported and frankly embarassing conspiracy theories." I hope no one is terribly surprised by this development. From the darlings of alternative media, purges usually follow their contributors' binges of unproscribed spelunking into the deep politics of a mass event. If someone like Kos doesn't distance himself from inquiries that offend mainstream sensibilities he risks the loss of the honourary privileges extended to the pacified blogosphere, and where is he then? Just another former Republican who has a problem with women. And since inquiry isn't his strong suit - Kos regards the theft of the 2004 election as just another "conspiracy theory" and can write with a Bushian lack of irony that he has a "high tolerance level for material I deem appropriate" - making it a sacrificial offering to the incurious middle couldn't have been a tough call.

More than truth, such people crave respectability, which they call "credibility" because it conforms to the conventional wisdom of those whose approval they seek. This becomes the capital they believe they trade for "influence," which is nothing more than their place in punditry's pecking order.

They want, dear God, to be normal. That was never much to which to aspire, and it ain't what it used to be.

If we want to uncover hidden truths then we have to go deep, and when we go deep we have to get our freak on, because the truths we dredge up transgress the assumptions of respectable society.

Those who choose the course of bobble-headed agreement with their "betters" in hope of finding favour, may very well find it. As far as the mainstream consenus is concerned, it's the only avenue of reward. But the truth will be closer to the freaks who don't worry about getting down and dirty.

Naturally, the trigger for this latest round of house cleaning was the attack on London. And, as usual on such occasions, the hammer came down just as things are getting interesting.

Even though all speculation at this early stage is conspiracy theory, only some speculation is expected to wear that demeaning epithet like a dunce cap. A "senior US counterterrorism official" can say, anonymously and without support, that he worries it may have been the work of al-Zarqawi. And reporters, rather than convulse in spit-takes or consider why it serves US interests to float such a preposterous allegation, write it all down as though he were serious. Such figures are considered, by default, to be "informed" sources, even though they are actually the worst kind of conspiracy theorists: they don't respect their theory enough to back up their baseless assertion, which they make only because they are pushing an agenda.

Regardless of how informed our speculations may be, we should know by now they will never be respectable so long as the conventions that protect the criminals in high places remain assumed by the Gatekeepers, and uninformed argument-by-ridicule is sufficient to silence critics beyond the gate.

You may by now have read the report that - shades of 9/11 - there were there were simultaneous exercises in the London subway, at the identical stations, at the exact time of the blasts. You may not have had the chance to read it on Democratic Undergound, because though the original source is an audio clip and transcript from the BBC, it's the polarizing Alex Jones who brought it to our attention. So in the dumper it goes. How lucky for some. (And it's not just Alex Jones. "Did I just post an article here two minutes ago? 'False Flag Over London'? And now it's gone?" asked one of several confused DUers who tried posting the piece by John Leonard.)

America's had trouble with normal since the day it watched a police narcotics informant silence a self-described patsy on live television. It's degraded to the point at which it needed rebranding as the "New Normal" to still be recognizable to most Americans, who aren't sheep so much as lobsters who believe it's supposed to be this hot. And since at least the disclosure of Operation Gladio, and the revelations of connivance of Western military intelligence with fascists, gangsters and secret societies to wage false flag terror to discredit Europe's democratic Left, no speculation should be discounted out of hand, and nothing should be taken at face value. As Gladio agent Vincenzo Vinciguerra testified, "You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple: to force...the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security." Person in the street shrugs: "Security comes first...."

Those who would silence inquiry with ridicule either don't know this history (this living history, as Italy is rocked by disclosure of a Gladio-like, ultra-right secret team conducting parallel "counter-terrorism"), or do, and don't want us to know it.

For the most part, "progressive" and "alternative" forums are full of preening, ignorant bullshitters with little grasp of the evidence and no appreciation for parapolitics, who contentedly squeeze greasy farts in the faces of researchers and activists who know what time it is. (It's a bitter irony that activist Andy Stephenson died last week, whose "tinfoil hat" is being refashioned as a halo by the same, facile piss artists of the "moderate left" who perpetually misrepresented his contributions as conspiracy crap that makes us look bad.)

So we're outside the gate, thank God. And if we want to do good work, that's where we'll stay. Because the walls need to be breached, and the gate that beckons us to normalcy is part of the problem.

Rome never looks where she treads.
Always her heavy hooves fall
On our stomachs, our hearts or our heads;
And Rome never heeds when we bawl.
Her sentries pass on - that is all,
And we gather behind them in hordes,
And plot to reconquer the Wall,
With only our tongues for our swords - Rudyard Kipling, "A Pict Song"

Does anyone really know what time it is?

Some time ago a crazy dream came to me.
I dreamt I was walkin' into World War Three. - Bob Dylan

A few, brief thoughts about London.

I think, at this early stage, we should be cautious about all sweeping presumptions. We know false flag operations are not paranoid conjecture - that many have been conducted by governments against their own populations is no less true for its being hidden - but that doesn't mean every flag is false. Synthetic terror exists, in part, because there is such a thing as unsynthesied terror: violence without stage management, perpetrated by unco-opted forces unpenetrated by its enemy's Intelligence. Though naturally, that many more people today than four years ago would gladly give their lives to strike a blow against crusader nations is also by design, according to the neoconservatives' rule-by-spiralling-chaos theory.

In the confusion, early reports detailing warnings of the attacks are being scrubbed from wire services, while security agencies are going into safe mode. An original story remains posted on Arutz Sheva, which quotes Israeli Army Radio as saying "Scotland Yard had intelligence warnings of the attacks a short time before they occurred. The Israeli Embassy in London was notified in advance, resulting in Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu remaining in his hotel room rather than make his way to the hotel adjacent to the site of the first explosion, a Liverpool Street train station, where he was to address and economic summit."

Earliest reports spoke of six bombs. There only four detonations. Much later, two unexploded devices were found. A question: what was the media's original source for there being six bombs?

"The Secret Organization of al Qaeda in Europe" has claimed responsibility, yet another "previously unknown" group. Though, since it has "al Qaeda" in its name, that will mean to most people, simply, that "al Qaeda" did it, as though it were a top-down outfit of villainy such as SMERSH or KAOS or the Legion of Doom. The forbidden knowledge that al Qaeda was subcontracted by Britain's MI6 and paid £100,000 in 1996 for an assassination attempt upon Muammar Qaddafi is unlikely to be heard now over Blair's tremulous turn at "They hate us for our freedoms."

Assassination researcher Lisa Pease, who knows how the spin cycle tends to eclipse the unvarnished truth of such events, writes:

As I watched the CNN coverage of the London bombings today, I heard multiple experts, including Octavia Nasser (also spelled Nasr), say the group claiming responsibility didn't use known signatures of Al Qaeda. They even quoted the Koran incorrectly! I wish I had taped what she said, as I knew this was likely truth. Sure enough, a few hours later, all anyone would say was that this was definitely an act of Al Qaeda. Sigh. Like so many other covert operations, the truth disappears quickly in the quicksand of the "official story."

What, if anything, should we make of the date? 07.07/2005 = 777. Such calculations have never been important to me. But as I've said, it doesn't matter what's important to me; what matters is, what's important to them. So incredulity be damned: numbers matter a great deal to certain interested parties who are initiates in Western hermetic orders, lodges and secret societies. To a Qabalist, 777 is "traditionally the number of the Flaming Sword or creative Lightning Flash...which, when overlain on the Tree of Life, touches every Sephirah in turn and certain Paths, with a total of 777." 777 is the title of Aleister Crowley's celebrated volume of Qabalistic teachings.

Some more fun with numbers was posted by "st4" on the Rigorous Intuition forum:

Here's some math. Please correct it if it's wrong:
1394 days since 911
483 days since the Madrid bombing
1394 - 483 = 911

And since now we're paying attention to such things, we might as well note that Bush's speech last week, graced by the bizarre backdrop of grinning ghosts and nine-striped flags evoking the dimensions of the twin towers, was delivered nine days before the blasts.

Rudy Giuliani in London, recounting his experience near the site of the first bombing, should have been enough to make even The Amazing Randi do a double take. And that FoxNews host Brian Kilmeade could say, just hours after the blasts, that "I think that works to our advantage, in the Western world's advantage, for people to experience something like this together, just 500 miles from where the attacks have happened," begs someone to ask the question, Cui bono?

As Xymphora says, "Yesterday, George Bush faced 7 world leaders who were going to force him to admit the reality of climate change. Now, he won't have to."

Britain bloodied in the "War on Terror" means, to American eyes, she's now the circus bride in Freaks. It "works to our advantage...for people to experience something like this together." It might have seemed like a good idea at the time, Mr Blair, but that's how you make a chicken lady of yourself.

One of us, one of us....