Experiments in the Gulag

Jeff Wells of the Rigorous Intuition blog wrote a post recently on gatekeepers, conspiracy and the need to be normal:

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.

It seems that even people who think pretty far outside the box have boundaries. There are places that even they don’t want to go. The problem is that we then end up fighting with one hand tied behind our back. By having internal censors THEY don’t have to employ external censors.

One of the areas that people don’t want to confront is programmed, mind-controlled killers. That research by our government and others has been done on how to do this is a fact beyond dispute. People then try to maintain that the efforts were not successful, or that they were tied to “excesses” of the past and that “they” wouldn’t do that now. Then, thirty years later we find more past excesses that we wouldn’t have believed at the time. Or, as Jeff Wells wrote in another post:

Of all the crimes of the National Security State we're not supposed to discuss, mind control - specifically, mind control induced by ritual abuse and torture - is the one most people don't need telling to keep quiet about.

The subject is so beyond most realms of our experience, and the subject matter, and its implications, so disturbing, it's easier and more respectable to pretend it's not there. Denial may be a comforting fiction, but it revictimizes survivors, and worse: it ensures the abuse perpetuates itself, and towards an end we can only imagine.

Laura Knight-Jadczyk writes about a classic case of denial:

There is a little known fact about hypnosis that is illustrated by the following story:

A subject was told under hypnosis that when he was awakened he would be unable to see a third man in the room who, it was suggested to him, would have become invisible. All the "proper" suggestions to make this "true" were given, such as "you will NOT see so- and-so" etc... When the subject was awakened, lo and behold! the suggestions did NOT work.

Why? Because they went against his belief system. He did NOT believe that a person could become invisible.

So, another trial was made. The subject was hypnotized again and was told that the third man was leaving the room... that he had been called away on urgent business, and the scene of him getting on his coat and hat was described... the door was opened and shut to provide "sound effects," and then the subject was brought out of the trance.

Guess what happened?

He was UNABLE TO SEE the Third Man.

Why? Because his perceptions were modified according to his beliefs. Certain "censors" in his brain were activated in a manner that was acceptable to his ego survival instincts.

The ways and means that we ensure survival of the ego are established pretty early in life by our parental and societal programming. This conditioning determines what IS or is NOT possible; what we are "allowed" to believe in order to be accepted. We learn this first by learning what pleases our parents and then later we modify our belief based on what pleases our society - our peers - to believe.

Anyway, to return to our story, the Third Man went about the room picking things up and setting them down and doing all sorts of things to test the subject's awareness of his presence, and the subject became utterly hysterical at this "anomalous" activity! He could see objects moving through the air, doors opening and closing, but he could NOT see the SOURCE because he did not believe that there was another man in the room.

Now that Abu Ghraib is back in the news thanks to the refusal of the military to release photos showing much more severe abuse of detainees, including unspeakable crimes committed by “our troops” on women and children, these reflexes of denial are going to have to kick into overdrive. What has been going on in all the secret prisons of the gulag? Why? Are they just “excesses,” or are the excesses the point of the enterprise? A look at some of the darker aspects of American History might help us understand.

Here is Peter Levenda in his new book, Sinister Forces, about Dr. Ewen Cameron and the early MKULTRA research:

Cameron believed that schizophrenia and other psychotic states were caused by physical conditions in the brain; like his friend and colleague of many years, Dr. William Sargant, he had a mechanistic view of consciousness and felt that with the right drug and the right procedure all could be made right as rain. This was an approach very attractive to the Technical Services Staff at the CIA. The CIA wanted to hear that there were easy techniques—whether drugs, or hypnosis, or some other mechanisms—to give agents in the field additional weapons in their arsenal. Cameron obliged. To that end, and to both test and prove his theories, he developed procedures known as “psychic driving” and “depatterning.” The procedures were radical and extreme, designed to totally disorient a human being, to strip away layers of consciousness and memory until one came to bedrock, and then to rebuild the personality step by step.

Unfortunately, his patients—some of whom had come to him for mild disorders, such as anxiety—had no foreknowledge of the treatments and had not volunteered for the experimentation….

In the case of Cameron’s psychic driving technique, a patient would be kept isolated in a room—the “sleep room”—and would be administered some combination of drugs and electroconvulsive therapy (what is popularly known as “electroshock”). Sometimes the shocks were given were staggeringly high, and repeated more often than is usual in a therapeutic setting. The normal [p. 228] voltage is usually 110 volts; Cameron used 150 volts. The normal dosage was a single shock lasting a fraction of a second; Cameron’s shocks lasted longer, up to one second (and thus and average of 30 times more powerful than normal) and were done 2-3 times a day as opposed to the more usual once a day or once every two days. Electroshock causes a major convulsion, which is then followed by several minor convulsions. Cameron’s was a variation of the already intense Page-Russell method, but taken up quite a few notches to the point where his patients became disoriented and confused. This was Cameron’s aim, which ws the opposite of what was intended by the already controversial electroconvulsive therapy method.

The drug regimes wasequally severe: a “sleep coctail” was administered to the subjects—one can hardly call them “patients” anymore—consisting of Thorazine, Nembutal, Seconal, Veronal and Phenergan. The subject would be awakened several times a day for the electroshock treatment and for the drug concoction. The combination kept the subject asleep day and night except for the electroshock, during which time his screams could be heard all over Ward 2.

This treatment typically would last from two weeks to a month, with some subjects being “treated” in this manner for over two months. In some cases they would lose control over their bowels, be unable to feed themselves or to tend to normal bodily functions…

The effect of this treatment was to cause the subjects to lose their memory, usually in three stages. In the first stage,much memory was lost, but not the facts of the subject being at the clinic, knowing he is at the clinic and why, and who the doctors and nurses are. The second stage involved the loss of what Cameron called “space-time image”; the subject would not know where he was or why he was there…

The third and final stage of memory loss is complete amnesia. There is only knowledge and memory of the present; there is no reference to past events or feelings. Cameron proudly pointed to this stage as the one where any schizophrenia has disappeared (along, of course, with a lot more!). The mind of the subject is a blank slate. He has been depatterned.

The CIA, satisfied with this level of progress, then asked Cameron to go to the next level: to implant new behavioral patterns in place of the old, erased ones. To do this, Cameron turned to another technique he had developed, which he called “psychic driving.”

This method is, if anything, even more hellish than depatterning, and involves blasting the subject with tape recordings of verbal messages—usually specific for each subject—that played in a loop for sixteen hours a day for weeks. Normally, two tapes were used: the first was a “negative conditioning” tape which concentrated on, obviously, the negative facts of the subject’s life, continually reinforcing these unhealthy images. This would then be replaced by a “positive conditioning” tape,alsoin a loop,also for sixteen hours a day for weeks, which would emphasize the desired behavior instead of the unwanted behavior of the first tape.

[Cameron also used sensory deprivation] In Cameron’s program, though, no one was allowed out of sensory deprivation until he said it was okay. In one particularly harrowing episode, he left a woman, who presented as simply suffering from menopause—in sensory deprivation for thirty-five days… and this was after a prolonged period of depatterning and 101 days of psychic driving. Cameron wrote this one off: “no favorable results were obtained.” We don’t know what eventually became of this poor woman—whom we know only as “Mary C.”—except for a notation by a CIA official at the time that it was impossible to tell if the sensory deprivation or the psychic driving had done the most damage.

In case the reader is wondering if Dr. Ewen Cameron was a fluke, an accident that was taking place in the backwater of the psychiatric field, it is well to note at this time that Cameron was elected prsident of the American Psychiatric Association (in 1953) and was the first-ever president of the World Psychiatric Association. (Peter Levenda. Sinister Forces: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft. Waterville, OR: Trine Day, 2005, pp. 227-30)

Knowing what they’ve done to North Americans, it’s not hard to imagine they are doing the same or worse to the detainees in the gulag.

To be continued…

What can be done?

So much has been happening recently (false flag bombings, draconian fascist legislation, China removing the dollar peg, etc.), it is hard to keep up. These things are bad, and the news in the near future promises to be worse. See some ominous rumblings in this http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2005/07/this-is-only-drill.html post by Jeff Wells of Rigorous Intuition on possible nuclear terrorism in the U.S. to seal the deal for the fascist takeover. See also this tidbit from Wells's post today:

I've received an email with an unconfirmed report that "last week the government bought up all of the available iodine in stock for treating radioactive poisoning."

While interviewing Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III for a possible Supreme Court nomination, George Bush incongruously "warned me of impending doom."

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.

What can be done?

Today's Signs of the Times has this comment in response to an article about ecological disaster being increasingly unavoidable:

What could we have done to change the outcome? It wasn't laws or revolutions that could have made a difference; it was only the species waking up to its own split personalities and working to fuse them. To make a difference in the outcome, it would have taken a mass awakening to our true natures, and how likely was that ever to happen?

However, we do think that there is hope because we live in a non-linear world. We do think that small acts can have a powerful effect in the long term. That is why we must continue standing up for the truth today, tomorrow, and no matter how horrible it becomes the day after that. We have the conviction that the day that we never believed possible is on its way. Just read the page above and see what a leap it has taken towards chaos since the beginning of July.

Standing for the truth with no anticipation of the outcome is its own reward. However, it is not a choice to be taken out of despair or because we see no other way forward. It is a choice that must be taken because we see that it is the right choice in and of itself, the choice we would make even if there were other possibilities. And there are: we can ignore what has happening, or if we are aware, we can choose to make the best of things, "eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die..." We see people around us every day who have these choices. We see them, we understand why they have taken that route, but we know that we can not. It just isn't possible; it just isn't in us to do that. And we include you in our use of "we", gentle readers, for if you keep coming back to read these pages, it is because you do not want to shut your eyes, you do not want to go back to sleep, because you know that is the worst possible choice of all.

Some Clear Thinking by a Southern Conservative

From Charley Reese's July 20 column:

The state of Israel — which, the last time I checked, was both a foreign and a sovereign nation — wants the American taxpayers to cough up $2.2 billion in addition to our regular $3 billion-or-so annual subsidy to pay for the withdrawal from Gaza.

Unless the American people raise hell about this, it's a done deal. In Washington, whatever Israel wants, Israel gets. Nevertheless, there are several reasons why the American people should rebel at the latest brazen attack on our treasury by Israel and its American supporters.

First, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided unilaterally to withdraw from Gaza. This was in lieu of following the president's peace plan, which Sharon has ignored from the very beginning. Where is it written, on stone or parchment or paper, that the head of a foreign government can decide to do something unilaterally and automatically send the bill to the American taxpayers? We will derive no benefits at all from the withdrawal.

Furthermore, Sharon's adviser spilled the beans in an Israeli newspaper interview. The withdrawal from Gaza is not part of any peace plan. It was just an excuse to put off serious peace negotiations. Sharon will remove about 8,000 settlers from Gaza who are a pain in the government's rear end anyway, shut down four tiny settlements on the West Bank, and that's it. As Sharon's adviser admitted, there won't be any serious negotiations with the Palestinians until they "turn into Finns."

A normal president would view Sharon's actions as unacceptable and his casual expectation that we would pay for it as a personal insult. President George Bush, however, when it comes to Israel, is just like Congress — a candy-bottom. That's why, despite all of our problems, all of our deficits, all of our debts, the U.S. government has gifted Israel with more than $90 billion in recent decades. If Washington gives in, we taxpayers will be spending about $227,000 per Jewish settler. That's a sporty moving expense.

...The proper American attitude should be: "We think, Israel, it is in your interests to make peace with your Arab neighbors. That's your decision, however; if you would prefer to remain at war, that's OK with us, because either way — peace or war — we aren't going to pay for it."

As for those Christian cultists who take one verse out of a very large Jewish Bible and claim that it binds us to help Israel, I would just say that if you believe God wishes modern Zionists to occupy modern Palestine, let him pay for it. When did we get appointed fiscal agent for Almighty God? And when did God ever need anybody's help to do whatever he wanted to do? And where is it written in the Constitution that Congress can tax the American people and hand the money out as a gift to foreign countries?...

Planetary Influences?

I’ve been reading In Search of the Miraculous by Ouspensky about Gurdjieff and came upon this passage:

The conversation began with my question: “Can war be stopped?” And G answered: “Yes, it can.” And yet I had been certain from previous talks that he would answer: “No, it cannot.”

“But the whole thing is: how?” “It is necessary to know a [p. 24] great deal in order to understand that. What is war? It is the result of planetary influences. Somewhere up there two or three planets have approached too near to each other; tension results. Have you noticed how, if a man passes quite close to you on a narrow pavement, you become all tense? The same tension takes place between planets. For them it lasts, perhaps a second or two. But here on earth, people begin to slaughter one another, and they go on slaughtering maybe for several years. It seems to them at the time that they hate one another; or perhaps that they have to slaughter each other for some exalted purpose; or that they must defend somebody or something and that it is a very noble thing to do; or something else of the same kind. They fail to realize to what an extent they are mere pawns in the game. They think they signify something; they think that they can move about as they like; they thing they can decide to do this or that. But in reality all their movements, all their actions, are the result of planetary influences. And they themselves signify literally nothing. (P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous New York, Harcourt (Harvest edition, 2001): 1949. pp. 23-4)

(A quick note about Gurdjieff’s ideas here before getting to the matter at hand: Gurdjieff does not say there is no free will, only that the nearly all people are machines. Some may have a potential to “do” (have free will) but only after long, hard work.)

As soon as I read that I remembered reading that Earth and Mars will be closer together than they will be for a long time on October 30th (a day before that scary date) this year. Not the closest ever, as some of the internet rumors are saying but pretty close (69 million km.) And with Mars being the god of war, well, maybe we have a start date for the big war. Interestingly, the closest approach ever in recorded history (56 million km.) actually happened in August of 2003, the summer the war in Iraq really heated up. And if you don’t believe that this would influence events, remember (with Umberto Eco and Jeff Wells) it’s not whether or not YOU believe this but whether THEY believe this that matters. SOMEONE is going to make the decision to strike the final match and they have to decide when.

What worries me is this. According to recent polls, whatever the effect of the London Bombings had on Tony Blair, they didn’t help Bush much in the United States. That means the one they are planning for the U.S. will need to be much worse in order to turn the public around on Bush and the war plans (for Iran, of course, but also Syria, Cuba, Venezuela, etc.). A large scale bad event (THEY keep saying one is inevitable) in an important (preferably anti-Bush) American city seems to be what they are planning. Logically this would mean New York, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles. Since New York had its turn that leaves the other four. As long as Bush and the war were reasonable popular, they didn’t have to do it, but now, with the Bush administration teetering before the abyss, something more drastic might be needed. Or maybe they decide to throw Bush overboard with a scandal and impeachment showing the “system works” while putting more skilled managers in charge of the Plan. No doubt there are also forces that would be opposing such an action. It seems unclear at the moment who is going to prevail, but it does seem clear that

The evidence from 911, Madrid, and now London each taken in isolation proves that the people responsible were not those who are being blamed for it in the Official Story. Taken together, the similarities between the weak cover stories and poorly-disguised patsies in each story reinforce the conclusion.

More on the London Bombings

Coming a week after further revelations that the European terrorist bombings of the 1970s, blamed on radical leftwing groups, were actually carried out by rightwing networks in the state security services, how can people not at least question the official explanation of the 7/7 London bombings? After forty years of revelations about COINTELPRO agents provocateurs, false flag operations, etc.?

With the media going full force with their official story, we need to keep our eye on the ball. We need to ask how, by whom, and why.

First, how? Here’s how a London false flag bombing could be carried out, from Paul Joseph Watson :

Ten Step Method To Staging a Terrorist Attack

1) Hire a Crisis Management firm to set up an exercise that parallels the terrorist attack you are going to carry out. Have them run the exercise at the precise locations and at the very same time as the attack. If at any stage of the attack your Arabs get
caught, tell the police it was part of an exercise.

2) Hire four Arabs and tell them they're taking part in an important exercise to help defend London from terrorist attacks. Strap them with rucksacks filled with deadly explosives. Tell the Arabs the rucksacks are dummy explosives and wouldn't harm a fly.

3) Tell four Arabs to meet up at London Underground and disperse, each getting on a different train. Make sure Arabs meet in a location where you can get a good mug shot of them all on CCTV which you can later endlessly repeat to drooling masses on television.

4) While four Arabs are in London, plant explosives in their houses in Leeds. Plant some explosives in one of their cars in Luton for the police to later discover. Remember that Qu'ran and flight manual in the hijackers' car? Ha ha, they fell for that one hook, line and sinker. No need to change tactics on this one.

5) Before the bombings take place, make sure you warn any of your buddies who are scheduled to be anywhere near where the bombs go off. If this gets leaked to the press, just deny it.

6) 4th Arab goes out partying in London night before and ends up getting out of bed late. No worries, the 9/11 'hijackers' did the same thing but that didn't cause us a big problem. 4th Arab catches bus to see if other Arabs are waiting for him. 4th Arab starts hearing about explosions in the London Underground. 4th Arab comes to the realization that this he is being set up and freaks out. 4th Arab starts fiddling in his rucksack. 4th Arab sets bomb off and is blown up…

7) After the bombs go off, put out a story for over an hour that the explosions are a simple electrical fault. This gives you cover time to make sure the lazy bus Arab is dead and any other hired Arabs who reneged are also dead. Make sure any CCTV footage that doesn't support your official story is either seized or destroyed.

8) A few hours after the bombings, have one of your boys post an 'Al-Qaeda statement' claiming responsibility. Don't worry about the whole 'misreferencing the Qu'ran' thing, these idiots don't have the attention spans to figure it out.

9) After you have made sure that all the Arabs are dead and you are managing the story accordingly, wait for four days until the police piece together the story and find the explosives you planted in Leeds and in the car in Luton. Remember that Qu'ran and flight manual in the hijackers' car? Ha ha, they fell for that one hook, line and sinker. No need to change tactics this time either. The time delay will convince the gullible public that a real investigation is taking place. Create a background of the hired Arabs being militant Muslims. The drooling masses, as was the case with the '9/11 hijackers,' will ignore stories of neighbours saying they were the quiet, educated types who liked children and playing sports….

10) Sit back and enjoy as Blair and his minions grandstand in front of television cameras about staying the course in the war on terror. The pay raise, extra agency funding, and power to strip more freedoms and liberties made the ten easy steps to staging a terrorist attack a worthwhile venture. The dozens of dead people were necessary collateral damage. This is a dirty war, we need to be less moral than the terrorists to defeat them.

And that's how the government staged the bombings in ten easy steps. Granted, you can interchange different pieces of the puzzle. The bombers could be real terrorists that knew exactly what they were doing. All you would need to do is control the 'mastermind' behind the attack and make sure his boys carried out the job in the way you wanted. Voila.

That answers how it could be done and perhaps who didn’t do it. But who did? Thanks to Cryptogon for noticing a Guardian article that says that the website that published the phony claim of responsibility by the stupidly-named “Secret Organization of Al-Qaida Jihad in Europe” was hosted on a server in HOUSTON, owned by a Bush-connected Texan, for goodness sake:

The US said that "extremists utilise a website controlled by al-Faqih and Mira on messageboards to post al-Qaida-related statements and images. While Mira has issued disclaimers warning users to not attribute postings on Mira message boards to al-Qaida, information available to the US and UK governments shows that the messages are intended to provide ideological and financial support to al-Qaida affiliated networks and potential recruits."

Mr Faqih has always vigorously denied being involved with terrorism. Yesterday he was indignant about being linked to the website.

"It does not belong to me at all," he told the Guardian. "It is a Zionist smear."

He had seen the message on Thursday morning and doubted its authenticity. "It was only there for a few minutes, and they misquoted the Qur'an." He also said the website - or more accurately a bulletin board - could be used by anyone.

The server in Houston has intriguing connections. Everyone's Internet was founded by brothers Robert and Roy Marsh in 1998 and by 2002 had an income of more than $30m (now about £17m).

Renowned for his charitable work, Roy Marsh counts among his friends President George Bush's former sister-in-law, Sharon Bush, and the president's navy secretary.

Webster Tarpley , author of one of the better biographies of George H.W. Bush, calls the operation a classic false flag operation designed, he argues, by the Powers that Be to push Bush and Blair into a war with Iran. Apparently, B & B may have been getting cold feet. After all, many expected an attack on Iran by as early as last month. According to Tarpley,

Last week's London explosions carry the characteristic features of a state-sponsored, false flag, synthetic terror provocation by networks within the British intelligence services MI-5, MI-6, the Home Office, and the Metropolitan Police Special Branch who are favorable to a wider Anglo-American aggressive war in the Middle East, featuring especially an early pre-emptive attack on Iran, with a separate option on North Korea also included. With the London attacks, the Anglo-American invisible government adds another horrendous crime to its own dossier.

Tarpley points to the foreknowledge of the crimes as evidence for his hypothesis:

SCOTLAND YARD KNEW IN ADVANCE

That the British Government knew in advance that blasts would occur is not open to rational doubt. Within hours of the explosions, Israeli Army Radio was reporting that "Scotland Yard [London police headquarters] had intelligence warnings of the attacks a short time before they occurred." This report, repeated by IsraelNN.com, added that "the Israeli Embassy in London was notified in advance, resulting in Foreign 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 an economic summit." This report is attributed to "unconfirmed reliable sources." At around the same time, the Associated Press issued a wire asserting that "British police told the Israeli Embassy in London minutes before Thursday's explosions that they had received warnings of possible terror attacks in the city," according to "a senior Israeli official." This wire specifies that "just before the blasts, Scotland Yard called the security officer at the Israeli Embassy to say that they had received warnings of possible attacks."

According to eyewitness reports from London, BBC claimed between 8:45 and some minutes after 10 AM that the incidents in the Underground were the result of an electrical power surge, or alternatively of a collision. Foreign bigwigs, presumably not just Netanyahu, were warned, while London working people continued to stream into the subway. These reports have been denied, repudiated, sanitized, and expunged from news media websites by the modern Orwellian Thought Police, but they have been archived by analysts who learned on 9/11 and other occasions that key evidence in state-sponsored terror crimes tends to filter out during the first minutes and hours, during the critical interval when the controlled media are assimilating the cover story peddled by complicit moles within the ministries. These reports are not at all damaging to Israel, but are devastating for British domestic security organs. An alternative version peddled by Stratfor.com, namely that the Israelis warned Scotland Yard, is most probably spurious but still leaves the British authorities on the hook. Which Scotland Yard official made the calls? Identify that official, and you have bagged a real live rogue network mole.

Another more general element of foreknowledge can be seen in the fact reported by Isikoff and Hosenball of Newsweek that, since about November 2004, the US FBI, but not other US agencies, has been refusing to use the London Underground.

Add to that, the drill that matches the crime, a pattern we have seen before, and you have a false flag operation conducted with just enough cover to fool most people who don’t ask disturbing questions while sending a frightening message to those of us who do ask such questions:

Operations like these are generally conduited through the government bureaucracies under the cover of a drill or exercise which closely resembles the terror operation itself. So it was with Amalgam Virgo and the multiple exercises held on 9/11, as I show in my 9/11 Synthetic Terror Made in USA (Joshua Tree CA: Progressive Press, 2005). So it was with the Hinckley attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan, when a presidential succession exercise was scheduled for the next day, as I showed in my George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography (1992; reprint by Progressive Press, 2004). An uncannily similar maneuver allows the necessary work to be done on official computers and on company time, while warding off the inquisitive glances and questions of curious co-workers at adjoining computer consoles.

We still haven’t answered the question of who, though. Here Tarpley’s hypothesis makes a lot of sense:

My thesis is that the London explosions represent a form of communication on the past of the transatlantic Anglo-American financier faction with Bush, Blair, and the heads of state and government assembled at Gleneagles, Scotland for the G-8 meeting on the day of the blast. The London deaths were designed to deliver an ultimatum in favor of early war with Iran. Here a word of clarification may be necessary. The demonization of Bush by his many enemies, while understandable, risks blurring the basic realities of power in the US and UK. Since the Bay of Pigs and the Kennedy assassination (to go back no further than that), we have been aware of a secret team. During the Iran-contra era, the same phenomenon was referred to as an invisible, secret or parallel government. This is still the matrix of most large-scale terrorism. The questions arises for some: do Bush and Cheney tell the invisible government what to do, or does the invisible government treat the visible office holders as puppets and expendable assets? To ask the question is to answer it: Bush, Cheney & Co. are the expendable puppets. The explanation of terror is not Bush MIHOP, as some seem to argue, but rather invisible government MIHOP, an altogether more dire proposition.

How then does the invisible faction communicate with the public mouthpieces? Given the violence of the power relations involved, we can be sure that it is not a matter of sending out engraved invitations announcing that the honor of Bush's presence is requested at the launching of an attack on Iran. Rather, the invisible and violent rogue network communicates with Bush, Blair, and others by means coherent with their aggressive nature as they did on 9/11. Bush, of course, is a weak and passive tenant of the White House whose instinct is to do virtually nothing beyond the day-to-day routine.

We therefore need to note that the London blasts come after two months of vigorous and impatient prodding of Bush by the invisible government. On May 11, a small plane almost reached the White House before it was turned away, while the Congress, the Supreme Court, and the White House (but not the Pentagon, the Treasury, etc.) were evacuated amid scenes of panic. The White House went to red alert, but Bush was not informed until it was all over, and was riding his bicycle in the woods near Greenbelt, Maryland. Flares were dropped over the Brookland district and Takoma Park, MD. The resemblance of all this to a classic coup scenario was evident. On May 18, a live hand grenade, which turned out to be a dud, landed near Bush as he spoke at a rally in Tbilisi, Georgia.

On June 29, the approach of another small plane led to an evacuation of the Congress and the Capitol, again with scenes of panic. On the afternoon of July 2, no fewer than three small planes came close to Bush's Camp David retreat in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland; this story was suspiciously relegated to the local news page of the Washington Post. The details of these incidents are of little interest; what counts is the objective reality of a pattern. These incidents also provide background for Bush's unbalanced behavior on July 5 at Gleneagles, when he crashed into a policeman while riding on his bicycle. Then came the London blasts on July 7.

What is it that the invisible government wants Bush and Blair to do? Scott Ritter announced last January that Bush had issued an order to prepare an attack on Iran for the month of June. According to a well-informed retired CIA analyst I spoke with on July 3, this order actually told US commanders to be ready to attack Iran by the end of June. This project of war with Iran is coherent with most of what we know about the intentions of the US-UK rogue faction, and thus provides the immediate background for the London explosions. The Bush administration and the Blair cabinet have failed to deliver decisive military action, and the invisible government is exceedingly impatient.

Why has Bush been dithering on invading Iran? Maybe even they can see it would be a disaster, especially given troop levels now. No doubt Bush’s plummeting popularity prior to the bombing played a part as well, as did Bush’s vulnerability to charges of impeachable offenses in the Valerie Plame scandal and in the cooking of intelligence in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. There have even been rumors of a coup attempt in the works by factions opposed to the Neocon agenda. The problem is, the London bombings put more pressure on Blair and Bush, and allows them to take away more rights from citizens, but it doesn’t yet rally the public around invading Iran. What new event will they have to orchestrate to do that?

7/7 Coincidences

Wow, sometimes the level of coincidences in life are amazing! Just as with the U.S. government on 9/11, the British government was conducting anti-terrorist training excercises on 7/7 simulating bombs in transit stations! What are the odds of that? Also, all four closed circuit TV cameras (the UK probably has more of these than anyone) on the bus that blew up didn't work that day. See this in the Daily Mirror (thanks to Humint Events Online for this reference):

Senior Yard sources said: "It will be the biggest, most intensive and focused investigation in British policing history."

British Transport Police have recovered nearly a million used tickets from barriers across the rail network, hoping some will carry the bombers' fingerprints as they travelled into London.

But the investigation received a serious setback when it was discovered the CCTV cameras on the bus that blew up were not working so detectives will not get vital images of the bomber.

One senior Yard source said: "It's a big blow and a disappointment. If the cameras had been running we would have had pin-sharp close-up pictures of the person who carried out this atrocity.

"We don't know if the driver forgot to switch them on or if there was a technical problem but there are no images."

The bus had four cameras - one covering people getting on, the second at the exit doors and one on each deck scanning the length of the vehicle.

Don't you hate when that happens?

Rigorous Intuition http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2005/07/kick-at-darkness.html has this about the first coincidence:

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.

Another coincidence. Both Bush after 9/11 and Blair after 7/7 refused official inquiries. From Signs of the Times:

After 9/11, Bush refused to have an official inquiry. The evidence at the site of the collapsed towers in New York was quickly removed and shipped to China as scrap metal, so quickly in fact that no investigation was ever carried out on the support structures, an investigation that would have shown whether or not they collapsed due to metal fatigue as claimed by the official story, or whether they had been weakened by explosive charges, as suggested by many independent investigators into 9/11. Many people claim to have heard explosions, and one man says he was in the basement of one of the towers where minutes prior to the plane crash dozens of stories above there was an explosion that took out some of the supports.

There are holes in just about every aspect of the official story, from these in New York, to questions about the "crash" of Flight 93, to the Pentagon, the standing down of North American air defense, and on and on. No wonder Bush did not want an inquiry.

The official commission that submitted its report last summer was to have been the first of two. After Bush's "re-election", it was announced the second would never occur.

All of which raises serious questions about who was in fact responsible for the 9/11 attacks. If you were the president of the United States, and your country was attacked, killing almost 3,000 of your countrymen, wouldn't you want to do everything in your power to find out how and why it happened? If you don't, doesn't that seem a bit suspicious, as if such an inquiry might uncover some disquieting truths?

...We have gone over a bit of "ancient history" because, lo and behold, we find a similar response to the London bombings from Tony Blair. Blair has rejected the opposition's call for an inquiry into the London bombings.

Blair said an inquiry would be a "ludicrous diversion " from the fake manhunt.

One thing the mainstream press has said seems true: The same people who did 9/11 and the Madrid bombings are responsible for the London bombings.

New Bush-Iraq-911 Song

Check out this new Bush-Iraq-911 song by Away with the Fairys .

Yet Another False Flag?

Before jumping to conclusions about the London bombings, read Signs of the Times for 7/7/2005. Also three posts by Kurt Nimmo and this one by Rigorous Intuition.

Here is an excerpt from the Signs of the Times comment:

We would like to appeal to all our readers to think about these attacks rationally. First of all, ask yourself, what does "al-qaeda" or any other "previously unknown" Islamic group have to gain from carrying out these attacks at this particular time in London. Coming on the very day that the "G8" leaders meet in Scotland, the only tangible results of the attacks have been to vector British and world public attention TOWARDS the "reality" of "Arab terrorism" and AWAY from the crimes of people like Bush and Blair as regards the pillaging of the resources (both human and natural) of third world countries. On the very day that G8 leaders were expected to deliver on the demands of the World public to alleviate "third world" debt, "al-qaeda" steps in and saves them the trouble by bringing "terrorism" center stage.
One of the most troubling aspects of "Arab terror" attacks in Europe and the US is that the victims are almost always ordinary civilians. By now, any Arab terrorist strategist should surely have realised that their issue is not with the civilian population of Western nations but rather with the politicians that make the decisions, many of which run contrary to the will of the people. The massive anti-Iraq war demonstrations around Europe and the US made this point quite clear. In this case, what does "al-qaeda" have to gain from attacking London trains and buses filled with civilian workers when it is patently obvious that civilian deaths at the hands of "terrorists" will do nothing to sway the average Western government from their political and military designs on the Middle East, quite the opposite in fact.

It really is a no brainer that "al-qaeda" terrorism very definitely serves the agenda of Bush and Blair.

Another most interesting aspect to today's London bombings is that right next door to the scene of one of the attacks on the London Metro, the Great Eastern Hotel was hosting a conference on the Israeli economy, attended by Israeli finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu, one of the most extreme right-wing "Zionist" members of Sharon's Likud party and a staunch opponent of next month's Gaza pullout plan. Most bizarrely of all, one initial report claimed that the Israeli embassy had received advance warning of the attacks from British police, a claim that Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom later denied, while another report had British police denying that they had received advance warning of the attacks from the Israeli embassy, which then THEY denied! What seems clear is that one or other or even both DID know of the attacks in advance and now both are attempting to cover up that fact.

Contrary to the headlines on mainstream news sources and claims by the British government, the attacks today in London bear all the hallmarks of yet another false flag operation carried out by the intelligence aparatus of the UK, the US or Israel (or a combination of all three). Perhaps now is a good time to talk about the fact that, on many, many occasions in the past, US, British and Israeli intelligence agencies have employed "false flag" operations to further their political and military goals. Indeed, the idea of attacking oneself or the population of one's own country and then blaming it on your enemies is as "old as the hills" and is a core element of covert intelligence agency tactics.

Take, for example, the Madrid train bombing of March 11th 2004. 191 people were murdered, supposedly by al-Qaeda, yet all of the victims were simple, working class people, many of whom had protested against the Iraq invasion and the then Spanish government's decision to send troops to Iraq. So why would al-qaeda, an organisation that claims to represent the interests of the Islamic people, want to attack innocent people who to some extent share their opposition to pro-American European governments? It just doesn't make sense, and the claim that the "terrorists" are just crazy and that there is no logic to their actions is not in keeping with the lucid and erudite demands that the "terrorists" have made. Because the Madrid train bombings lead to the ousting of the right-wing Aznar administration, the argument has also been made that this was the actual goal of "al-qaeda" in carrying out the bombings, yet "Arab terrorists" won few supporters in Spain by killing 191 innocent Spaniards, and most analysts had been expecting a popular swing towards the left at the polls regardless. No indeed, the most obvious explanation is that, like the train bombings in London today, the Madrid train attacks of "3/11" were an attempt to turn Spanish (and wider Europe and and world) public opinion against "Arabs" in general and garner support for Bush and Sharon's war on the Arab population of the Middle East.

They go on to make the connection between this operation and the web of false flag operations uncovered againg this week carriesd out in Italy and Western Europe in the 1970s by a shadowy right-wing network with ties to U.S. Neocons:

The shadow of a false flag operation has in fact been spread across the headlines over the past couple of weeks, yet due to the chronic lack of real journalism in the US, the general public is mostly unaware of it. Last month an Italian judge called for the detention of 13 alleged CIA agents who had "rendered" (abducted) from Milan to Egypt Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, a Muslim Cleric and CIA informant on February 17, 2003 according to Albanian intelligence officials as published in the Chicago Tribune on July 2, this year. While the official line is that the Americans were CIA agents, there is reason to believe that they were in fact part of “a covert team of U.S. Defense Department Special Forces, mercenaries, and intelligence agents who are now the subject of international arrest warrants” as Wayne Madsen writes.

Running parallel to this is the story from the Italian daily Corriere della Sera that Italian officials have uncovered an underground police network while investigating the death of Fabrizio Quattrocchi, an Italian private security contractor slain in Iraq in 2004. The investigation by the Genoa Public Prosecutor's Office revealed that the officially illegal anti-terror police, called the Department of Strategic Antiterrorism Studies (DSSA), was staffed by Freemasons and shadowy CIA operatives. Among the 50 people that are being investigated are Gaetano Saya and Riccardo Sindoca, both Freemasons and DSSA directors with links to the extreme right and intelligence organizations including "Gadio".

...It would seem reasonable to assume that there is indeed a very definite connection between a group of American "black ops" personnel with ties to the Pentagon who were involved in kidnapping a Muslim Cleric in Italy who was on their payroll as an informer and a shadowy extra-judicial Italian anti-Muslim terrorist organisation founded by two Italians who were also being funded by the Pentagon. The mention of the term "Gladio" and Saya and Sindoca being affiliated with this organisation is very interesting. Chris Floyd writing in the Moscow Times explains the essence of "Operation Gladio":

'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.'

Operation Gladio [was] a decades-long covert campaign of terrorism and deceit directed by the intelligence services of the West -- against their own populations. Hundreds of innocent people were killed or maimed in terrorist attacks -- on train stations, supermarkets, cafes and offices -- which were then blamed on "leftist subversives" or other political opponents. The purpose, as stated above in sworn testimony by Gladio agent Vincenzo Vinciguerra, was to demonize designated enemies and frighten the public into supporting ever-increasing powers for government leaders -- and their elitist cronies.

First revealed by Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti in 1991, Gladio (from the Latin for "sword") is still protected to this day by its founding patrons, the CIA and MI6. Yet parliamentary investigations in Italy, Switzerland and Belgium have shaken out a few fragments of the truth over the years. These have been gathered in a new book, "NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe," by Daniele Ganser, as Lila Rajiva reports on CommonDreams.org.

Originally set up as a network of clandestine cells to be activated behind the lines in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, Gladio quickly expanded into a tool for political repression and manipulation, directed by NATO and Washington. Using right-wing militias, underworld figures, government provocateurs and secret military units, Gladio not only carried out widespread terrorism, assassinations and electoral subversion in democratic states such as Italy, France and West Germany, but also bolstered fascist tyrannies in Spain and Portugal, abetted the military coup in Greece and aided Turkey's repression of the Kurds.

Among the "smoking guns" unearthed by Ganser is a Pentagon document, Field Manual FM 30-31B, which details the methodology for launching terrorist attacks in nations that "do not react with sufficient effectiveness" against "communist subversion." Ironically, the manual states that the most dangerous moment comes when leftist groups "renounce the use of force" and embrace the democratic process. It is then that "U.S. army intelligence must have the means of launching special operations which will convince Host Country Governments and public opinion of the reality of the insurgent danger." Naturally, these peace-throttling "special operations must remain strictly secret," the document warns.

What seems to be true is that Operation Gladio was the brain child of American intelligence personnel after the (so-called) defeat of Fascism during WWII. It goes without saying that the very existence of tyrants like Hitler and Mussolini was extremely useful for the "allies", particularly the Americans. After all, when your goal is global hegemony, you need a good reason to send the troops overseas. However, with the defeat of the Nazis, America was forced to find a new boogeyman, or rather boogey ideology, to justify continual war. Very quickly after WWII, "the commies are coming" became the new battle cry and with it came a plan to establish "stay-behind" groups of mercenaries trained by Americans in the art of guerilla warfare in the event that a Communist (or in any way left-leaning) government should gain strength in any strategically important (from the point of view of the US) nation.

Here is some of what Jeff Wells of Rigorous Intuition wrote:

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."

And 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. And numbers matter a great deal. 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.

Idiocy of the Imperial Liberals, Part 2

Continued from Part 1:

What the imperial liberal believes is that the United States military could in some theoretically possible way actually do “good” or “help” some situation in the world. If this is the case, even if only in theory, it absolves them from having to face facts about exactly whose interests are being served by the military and exactly what types of crimes are being committed by that military and the power structure it serves.

The Kosovo War is usually used as an example by the imperial liberals. It was also used as a precedent by the Bush gang, especially when persuading liberals to support the invasion of Iraq. Clinton wasn’t able to get U.N. Security Council authorization but attacked Serbia anyway. Since the Kosovo War had what could be seen as a “good” outcome, and since there were no U.S. casualties, and since it was undertaken with a broad coalition, it is held dear by the imperial liberals as an example of the possibility of the beneficial application of attacks by the U.S. military.

But again, this absolves them in their minds from examining carefully the lead up to that war. What did the U.S. and NATO demand from Serbia in their ultimatum? Basically that Serbia or the former Yugoslavia open up their economy completely for exploitation by Western capitalism, that they allow complete access as well to NATO countries’ security and intelligence operations, among other things. Basically, they were asked to give up their sovereignty.

It also absolved them from looking behind the news media’s interpretation of the casus belli, the story of the evil, genocidal Serbs (not that Milosevic wasn’t evil or genocidal—I believe he was) and the innocent, victimized Kosovo muslims. It was more of an evil vs. evil dispute, as the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Kosovo after the war has proven. It was also a power grab by NATO, who took complete control over a region that was divided between Russian (Soviet) and NATO influence after World War II, with the majority of influence given to the Soviet side.

Back to Iraq, when Donald Rumsfeld had to testify in Congress recently, there was an amazing exchange with Senator Robert Byrd which went completely unreported in the mainstream press.

"Mr. Secretary, I've watched you with a considerable amount of amusement . . . I don't think I've ever heard a secretary of defense who likes to lecture the committee as much as you. You may not like our questions, but we represent the people . . . We ask the questions that the people ask of us whether you like it or not . . . The problem is we didn't ask enough questions at the beginning of this war that we got into, Mr. Bush's war . . . I don't mean to be discourteous [but] I've just heard enough of your smart answers to these people here who are elected . . . So get off your high horse when you come up here." Rumsfeld could not summon up a reply.

The media usually likes such drama. It certainly sounds like something that would made good television. But it didn't appear. This goes to show that the media is completely behind the war and behind the undemocratic assumptions behind it. Why? According to Barry Grey:

Why are the New York Times and the Democratic Party so intent on continuing the war? Because they speak for a political establishment that supports the project of global hegemony. Whatever disagreements emerge between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, they are always over tactics, not aims. They all believe that the economic and political viability of American capitalism depends on US domination of the world’s strategic resources—such as oil—as well as international markets and sources of cheap labor.

They fear, moreover, that a Vietnam-style defeat would profoundly discredit the existing social and political order in the eyes of the American working class, with far-reaching and dangerous consequences.

The lineup of all factions of the American political establishment behind the war—and against the majority of Americans who oppose it—demonstrates that the struggle against the war is inseparably bound up with a struggle against the entire social and political system. Just as it is not possible to discuss “where we go from here” in Iraq outside of a discussion of the origins of the war, it is not possible to seriously oppose the war without opposing the capitalist system which gave rise to it, and the American financial oligarchy which authored it and in whose interests it is being waged.

The starting point for a struggle against the war must be the demand for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all US troops. The US government must pay full reparations for the destruction it has wreaked in Iraq, and reparations to the families of US soldiers killed in the war, as well as to soldiers wounded in the fighting.All those involved in the criminal conspiracy that produced the war must be held accountable both politically and legally. They must be placed before an independent tribunal and tried for war crimes.

The Idiocy of the Imperial Liberals of the U.S. Establishment

The establishment liberals criticize Bush for losing the war, not, however, for starting it. But the only important fact about the war is that is is illegal, immoral and stupid. The charges against the top Nazis in the Nuremberg Trials were the planning and prosecution of aggressive war: attacks on countries that did not threaten the attacker. At least the Neoconservative war mongers have some intellectual consistency. To read the convoluted crap of the establishment liberals, or neoliberals in their organs of the establishment media such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The New Republic, or to listen to the leading politicians in the Democratic Party, is to descend into a thicket of wrong assumptions, assumptions that can only lead to wrong conclusions and disastrous actions.

It’s such a tightly-woven mess that we need to unpack the assumptions by carefully examining passages of their work. Let’s look at an article in this week’s New Yorker by George Packer. It is an account of the internal debates about the justification of the war of a man whose son was killed in Iraq. Packer’s views on the subject are clear, though.

The idea of diminishing the threat from the Middle East by spreading democracy, beginning with Iraq, had occurred to the Bush Administration before W.M.D. turned out not to exist. Some officials had been promoting the notion for years, and the President had made the argument in a speech before the American Enterprise Institute a month before the invasion. But this was hardly the casus belli that the Administration had presented to the American people. When the Administration changes its rationale later on, without ever admitting to the shift, it had every appearance of a bait-and-switch.

Nevertheless, the idea deserved to be taken seriously by the political opposition at home and by America’s allies. A few Democrats, like Biden and Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, took up the idea without diluting their criticism of the Administration’s conduct in Iraq. This was a difficult mental balancing act, but it was also important, because what Iraqis and democracy needed most was a thoughtful opposition that could hold the Bush Administration to its own promises. Yet most of the war’s critics, including leaders of the Democratic Party, refused to engage in debate. They turned the subject back to the missing weapons or they scoffed at the Administration’s sincerity, or they muttered about the dangers of utopianism, or they said nothing. As a result, the Administration never felt concerted pressure from the left to insure that Iraq emerged from the war with a viable democracy. (“The Home Front: A Soldier’s Father Wrestles with the Ambiguities of Iraq,” The New Yorker, July 4, 2005, p. 57.)

Where to begin? How about this: “The idea of diminishing the threat from the Middle East by spreading democracy, beginning with Iraq…” Already, before the sentence is even completed, we have two faulty assumptions: One, that there is a “threat” from the Middle East, two, that you can spread “democracy” throughout the region, beginning in Iraq. What is unspoken? That you can spread “democracy” by bombing a country, killing harrassing and poisoning the population, that the “threat” comes from Muslim countries and groups and not from Israel, that there is a unified “we” (“Americans”) that can be “threatened.”

This “idea” of creating democracy in Iraq and spreading it around the Middle East, Packer argues, “deserved to be taken seriously by the political opposition at home and by America’s allies.” It can only be taken seriously by those who don’t know anything about the real situation in the world. It can be used as a propaganda message to manipulate people, but it can’t be taken seriously. According to this establishment liberal (liberals who want a career in the Empire) these ideas can be taken seriously by—and this is a favorite word of these types—“thoughtful” people.

Packer then goes on to name some “good Democrats,” i.e., imperialist Democrats, who limit their criticisms of the war to the lack of effectiveness in prosecuting it and who never question the assumptions behind U.S. foreign policy: the disgusting Senator Joseph Biden and Richard Holbrooke: “A few Democrats, like Biden and Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, took up the idea without diluting their criticism of the Administration’s conduct in Iraq.” Actually, there is no way to take up that “idea” without diluting their criticism of the Administration’s conduct in Iraq. Ask John Kerry.

We are then told that what Iraq needed was a “thoughtful” opposition to Bush in the United States:

This was a difficult mental balancing act, but it was also important, because
what Iraqis and democracy needed most was a thoughtful opposition that could
hold the Bush Administration to its own promises.

Not only Iraq but a sort of personified “democracy” needed that as well. What Iraqis more likely needed was clean water, safe streets, food, jobs, a lack of depleted uranium and an absence of foreign infidel troops. But these establishment, imperial liberals need to cling to the illusion that there is a democracy in the United States, that the party out of power needs to provide “thoughtful” opposition, that this is not a struggle between good and evil within the United States political system not between it and other abstractions like “tyranny.” They also cling to the idea that the outcome of the war depend on what happens within the corridors of power in the United States and in the debates of citizens. This they share with the Neocons: the feeling that the natives don’t matter. That the United States lost the Vietnam War not because of the tough and brave struggle of the Vietnamese people but because of a lack of “resolve” in the United States.

Packer finishes the passage with this: “As a result, the Administration never felt concerted pressure from the left to insure that Iraq emerged from the war with a viable democracy.” It’s hard to imagine packing so much wrongness into one sentence. When has the Bush regime felt ANY pressure from the left? And even if they did, how could that have “insured” (man, you used to be able to count on the copy editors of The New Yorker not to let something like that through and to replace it with the correct word: “ensured”) a viable democracy in Iraq.

In whose interest is it for there to be anything like a “viable democracy” in Iraq? Not in Israel’s and Israel was the one pushing this war; the American people never demanded we invade Iraq. Israel wants (and will probably get) a weakened Iraq divided into many warring parts. It was not in the interest of the elite in the United States. They always wanted a united Iraq under the control of a military dictator who aligned himself with the United States. It was always a project of the elite. I’ll never forget when the foreign policy team of the Clinton adminstration addressed a rally at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio in the nineties trying to explain their policy of bombing Iraq and imposing sanctions. They were shocked to see many loud protesters opposing the war. They had never given any thought to what the public might think of the policy.

Packer probably thinks that he just wrote a hard-hitting criticism of Bush, but he takes absolutely at face value all the nonsense about democracy in the Middle East and is completely blind to the real motives behind the invasion. Now let’s let this next passage, a fantasy worthy of Tolkien, wash over us:

In the fall of 2002, it still might have been possible for President Bush to construct and Iraq policy that united both parties and America’s democratic allies in defeating tyranny in Iraq. Such a policy, however, would have required the Administration to operate with flexibility and openness. The evidence on unconventional weapons would have had to be laid out without exaggeration or deception. The work of U.N. inspectors in Iraq would have had to be supported rather than undermined. Testimony to Congress would have had to be candid, not slippery. Administration officials who offered dissenting views or pessimistic forecasts would have had to be treated as grownups, and not, as Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, once suggested, as ten-year-olds.

After the invasion, European allies would have had to be coaxed into joining an effort that desperately needed their help. French, German, and Canadian companies would have had to be invited to bid on reconstruction contracts, not barred by an order signed by Paul Wolfowitz (who once wrote that American leadership required “demonstrating that your friends will be protected and taken care of, that your enemies will be punished and that those who refuse to support you will live to regret having done so”). American contractors close to the Pentagon would have had to be subjected to extraordinary scrutiny, to avoid even the appearance of corruption. The U.N. would have had to be brought into Iraq as an equal partner, not as a tool of American convenience. The top civilian in Iraq might even have had to be a Democrat, or a moderate Republican such as the retired General Anthony Zinni, whom a senior Administration official privately described as the best-qualified person for the job… The occupation authority would have had to favor hiring not political appointees but competent, non-partisan experts. It would have had to put the interests of Iraqi society ahead of the White House agenda.

And when no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq the Administration would have had to admit it… Officials and generals who were responsible for scandal and failure would have had to be fired, not praised or promoted. When reporters asked the President to name one mistake he had made in Iraq, he would have had to name five, while assuring the country that they were being corrected. He would have had to summon all his rhetorical skill to explain to the country why, in spite of the failure to find weapons, ending tyranny in Iraq and helping it to become a pioneering democracy in the Middle East was morally correct, important for American security, and worthy of a generational effort. In fact, he would have had to explain this before the war, when the inspectors were turning up no signs of weapons, and thus allow the country to have a real debate about the real reasons for the war, so that when the war came it would not come amid rampant suspicions and surprises, and America would not be alone in Iraq.

The Administration’s early insistence on Iraq’s imminent threat to national security later made it difficult for many Americans to accept broader arguments for democracy. (Ibid., p. 54)

I guess what he means is that in some alternate universe this war can be a success. But if the political leaders were so wise, they would never have seen the need to invade Iraq. All the high-minded democracy rhetoric serves only to cover up the U.S. elites’ naked self-interest as the leaders of world capitalism and/or their subordination to the interests of the state of Israel as defined by the Israeli right-wing. And all that really matters is that this war is one of the great crimes in history.

And Now for Some Real Heretics, Part 17

Continued from Part 16:

In case anyone wonders what is the present-day relevance of all this speculation about the true nature of Yahweh/Jehovah, take a look at these quotes from leaders of the Christian Reconstructionism or Christian Dominionism, perhaps the strongest theological positions within the Republican Party and the Bush Regime. Here is a quote from Cobb County Georgia’s Rev. Joseph Morecraft:

"And how do you terrorize an evil doer?" he asked. "You enforce Biblical law!" The purpose of government, he said, is "to protect the church of Jesus Christ," and, "Nobody has the right to worship on this planet any other God than Jehovah. And therefore the state does not have the responsibility to defend anybody's pseudo-right to worship an idol!" "There ain't no such thing" as religious pluralism, he declared. Further, "There has never been such a condition in the history of mankind. There is no such place now. There never will be."

Here is a little background on the movement from the same article:

What is Reconstructionism?

Reconstructionism is a theology that arose out of conservative Presbyterianism (Reformed and Orthodox), which proposes that contemporary application of the laws of Old Testament Israel, or "Biblical Law," is the basis for reconstructing society toward the Kingdom of God on earth.

Reconstructionism argues that the Bible is to be the governing text for all areas of life--such as government, education, law, and the arts, not merely "social" or "moral" issues like pornography, homosexuality, and abortion. Reconstructionists have formulated a "Biblical world view" and "Biblical principles" by which to examine contemporary matters. Reconstructionist theologian David Chilton succinctly describes this view: "The Christian goal for the world is the universal development of Biblical theocratic republics, in which every area of life is redeemed and placed under the Lordship of Jesus Christ and the rule of God's law."

…The Origin of Reconstructionism

The original and defining text of Reconstructionism is Institutes of Biblical Law, published in 1973 by Rousas John Rushdoony--an 800-page explanation of the Ten Commandments, the Biblical "case law" that derives from them, and their application today. "The only true order," writes Rushdoony, "is founded on Biblical Law.
All law is religious in nature, and every non-Biblical law-order represents an anti-Christian religion." In brief, he continues, "Every law-order is a state of war against the enemies of that order, and all law is a form of warfare."

Cobb County Georgia, where Christian Reconstructionism has been implemented more than anywhere else is also a reputed center for occult ritual abuse. See Rigorous Intuition’s Jeff Wells’s interview with Kathleen Sullivan:

I have met other sadistic perpetrators who clearly did not believe in the occult, and yet were quite adept in using occult teachings and ritual implements, stone altars, etc. to terrorize, control, and torture victims. There is a considerable network of such cell groups operating in and around Cobb County, Georgia.

Is it a coincidence that these two frightening movements have centers in the same county? Or that ritual satanic occult abuse rings have been found in fundamentalist churches recently? I don’t think so.

To be continued...