Oliver Stone, byname of William Oliver Stone (born September 15, 1946, New York, New York, U.S.), American film director, screenwriter, and producer known for his ambitious and often controversial movies.
Stone, the son of a wealthy stockbroker, was raised in New York City. He briefly studied at Yale University before dropping out to teach English in South Vietnam. Upon his return, Stone lived in Mexico for a year and again attended Yale for a short period. In 1967, during the Vietnam War, he enlisted in the U.S. Army. He distinguished himself in combat, earning two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star. Stone then enrolled in film school at New York University (B.A., 1971), studying under director Martin Scorsese.
Stone was deeply affected by his war experiences, and his student films, such asLast Year in Viet Nam (1971), dealt directly with the consequences of the Vietnam conflict. After graduating, he directed the horror movies Seizure! (1974) and The Hand (1981), the latter of which starred Michael Caine. Stone also began experimenting with screenwriting, and he won an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for Midnight Express (1978), which was based on the true story of a man brutally abused while imprisoned for drug smuggling in Turkey.
Stone devoted much of the early 1980s to writing screenplays, including Conan the Barbarian (1982), Scarface (1983), which was directed by Brian De Palma and starred Al Pacino, and Year of the Dragon (1985). He returned to directing withSalvador (1986), which he also wrote. In the film, a journalist (played by James Woods) documents the atrocities committed during the El Salvador uprisings of 1980–81. Stone again drew on the trauma of the Vietnam War in Platoon (1986), for which he won another Academy Award, this time for directing. The film navigates the perils of war from the perspective of a new recruit who quickly realizes that the idealism that motivated his decision to enlist was misguided. Stone drew upon personal experience once more for Wall Street (1987), using memories of his father’s career as a stockbroker to conjure an indictment of the greed and deceit governing the financial world. In 1988 he adapted Eric Bogosian’s Off-Broadway play Talk Radio to film.
Stone emphasized the continuing ramifications of the Vietnam War with Born on the Fourth of July (1989). The film, based on the autobiography of Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, chronicles the evolution of a young man, played by Tom Cruise, from patriotic soldier to paraplegic antiwar activist. Stone won an Academy Award for directing that movie and received a fourth career nomination for his writing. The year 1991 saw the release of both JFK, a polarizing investigation of the circumstances surrounding the assassination of Pres. John F. Kennedy, and The Doors, a stylish account of the rise and fall of the titular American rock band. InHeaven and Earth (1993), Stone approached the Vietnam War and its aftermath from the perspective of a young Vietnamese woman.
Stone again courted controversy with Natural Born Killers (1994), a film, written byQuentin Tarantino, about the savagely violent exploits of a married couple, played by Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis. While Stone claimed that the film was meant to be critical of sensationalized violence, some critics found it guilty of exactly what it purported to condemn. Stone then cast Anthony Hopkins in the title role of Nixon (1995), a measured take on the life of the U.S. president. He also developed the screenplay for Evita (1996), an adaptation of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical about Argentine politician Eva Perón (played by Madonna).
Stone revisited some of his favoured motifs, power and violence, in Any Given Sunday (1999), about professional football, and in Alexander (2004), a poorly received biography of Alexander the Great. World Trade Center (2006), a retelling of the events of September 11, 2001, from the viewpoint of two police officers, returned Stone to the centre of public debate. While the film was critically acclaimed, some questioned the propriety of making the film so soon after the tragedy. W. (2008), his biopic of Pres. George W. Bush, drew ire from both extremes of the political spectrum for its refusal to pass definitive judgment, positive or negative, on its subject. Stone later directed Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps(2010), a sequel to the 1987 film that was set amid the global financial crisis of 2008, and Savages (2012), an ensemble thriller about marijuana trafficking that, in its depiction of seedy mayhem, was reminiscent of his earlier U Turn (1997).
In addition to directing and writing, Stone produced many of his own movies. Besides narrative films, he made two documentaries about Latin American politics: Comandante (2003), about Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, and South of the Border (2009), which focused on several other left-wing leaders, notably Venezuelan Pres. Hugo Chávez. With Peter Kuznick, he also created Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States (2012), a 10-part television documentary (and accompanying book) that took an unorthodox look at the preceding century of American political history. In 1997 Stone published a semiautobiographical novel,A Child’s Night Dream.
Sean Stone, son of controversial filmmaker Oliver Stone has acted in his father’s films such as Wall Street, The Doors, JFK, Natural Born Killers and many more. He has starred and directed in his own feature film Greystone Park. Sean joined the team of investigators for the Tru TV hit Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura. Sean currently hosts an alternative media show ‘Buzzsaw’ featuring interviews with whistleblowers, styling itself as the ‘real X files’ looking into the hidden agendas behind the news.
Philip Schneider was born April 23, 1947 and died (many assume murdered) in January 1996. Now Philip Schneider claimed to be an ex-government geologist and structural engineer who was involved in building underground military bases around the United States (possessing a level 3 security clearance, “Rhyolite 38”).
Not only that, but Philip Schneider also claimed he was one of only three people to have survived a deadly battle in which 66 American and NATO “Delta Force” soldiers were killed. This battle allegedly occurred in 1979 between Grey aliens and U.S. military and NATO forces at an underground base at Dulce , New Mexico.
The following is taken from a letter from the ex-wife of Philip Schneider (Cynthia Drayer) after learning of his death.
“Philip’s background was as a Structural Engineer. He was an expert on explosives and their effects on geologic structures. He worked under two social security numbers. Most of his early work in underground mountain bases with Morrison-Knudsen was done using the wrong social security number.
I was later able to prove that he had two numbers through the social security office when I applied for his daughter’s death benefits.
He worked for the Army Corps of Engineers and U.S. Navy with the same wrong number. Only after he obtained SSI in 1981 did his “real” number come into play. He always told me that he had a Rhyolitic Clearance and that his father had a Cosmic Clearance from his work with NATO. And that is the second reason why Philip began lecturing.”
For the last two years of his life, Schneider gave over 30 lectures to a variety of audiences across the globe, concerning conspiracy theories in which he claimed to be leaking information exposing them. However, Schneider was never able or willing to prove his allegations (e.g. showing the entrance to Dulce Base). His claims received little mainstream notice, but caused quite a buzz in UFO enthusiast circles.
Schneider was found dead in his Wilsonville, Oregon apartment on January 17, 1996. He had apparently been dead for several days (perhaps up to a week), and reportedly had a rubber hose wrapped three times around his neck. Tim Swartz writes that “Clackamas County Coroner’s office initially attributed Philip Schneider’s death to a stroke or heart attack.” Some suggest Schneider was murdered; supposedly because he was leaking information to the public, unveiling conspiracies. He in fact claimed to have avoided 13 murder attempts taken on his life during the time in which he was lecturing on conspiracy theories. He suffered multiple physical illnesses (osteoporosis, cancer, injuries). Officially, suicide is now stated as the cause of death.
The medical examiner took blood and urine samples at the autopsy but refused to analyze them, saying that the county would not “waste their money on a suicide”. Although samples would be kept for 12 months, when asked for these samples to be sent to an independent lab 11 months later they were “missing” and presumed “destroyed”. Schneider had missing fingers on his left hand, and limited motion in his shoulders. It may have been physically impossible for him to have held the rubber hose in his left hand with missing fingers and then wrap the hose three times with shoulders that had limited motion. In order to end up where his body was, he had to sit on the edge of his bed, wrap the hose around his neck, slowly and painfully strangle to death, and fallen head first into a wheel chair. Philip was an expert in chemicals and his own medical needs. He had multiple pills at hand that could have ended his life quickly and painlessly. He also had a 9mm handgun that he had borrowed to protect himself.
Born Michael Luther King, Jr., but later had his name changed to Martin Luther King Jr. His grandfather began the family’s long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931; his father has served from then until the present, and from 1960 until his death Martin Luther acted as co-pastor. Martin Luther attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen; he received the B. A. degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, a distinguished Negro institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather had graduated. After three years of theological study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where he was elected president of a predominantly white senior class, he was awarded the B.D. in 1951. With a fellowship won at Crozer, he enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University, completing his residence for the doctorate in 1953 and receiving the degree in 1955. In Boston he met and married Coretta Scott, a young woman of uncommon intellectual and artistic attainments. Two sons and two daughters were born into the family.
In 1954, Martin Luther King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading organization of its kind in the nation. He was ready, then, early in December, 1955, to accept the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in honor of the laureate. The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals. During these days of boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time he emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank.
In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. The ideals for this organization he took from Christianity; its operational techniques from Gandhi. In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles. In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience. and inspiring his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, a manifesto of the Negro revolution; he planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, “l Have a Dream”, he conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson; he was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees; was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963; and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure.
At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement.
On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated.
Murder Conspiracy
After four weeks of testimony and over 70 witnesses in a civil trial in Memphis, Tennessee, twelve jurors reached a unanimous verdict on December 8, 1999 after about an hour of deliberations that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.In a press statement held the following day in Atlanta, Mrs. Coretta Scott King welcomed the verdict, saying ,
“There is abundant evidence of a major high level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband, Martin Luther King, Jr. And the civil court’s unanimous verdict has validated our belief. I wholeheartedly applaud the verdict of the jury and I feel that justice has been well served in their deliberations. This verdict is not only a great victory for my family, but also a great victory for America. It is a great victory for truth itself. It is important to know that this was a SWIFT verdict, delivered after about an hour of jury deliberation. The jury was clearly convinced by the extensive evidence that was presented during the trial that, in addition to Mr. Jowers, the conspiracy of the Mafia, local, state and federal government agencies, were deeply involved in the assassination of my husband. The jury also affirmed overwhelming evidence that identified someone else, not James Earl Ray, as the shooter, and that Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame. I want to make it clear that my family has no interest in retribution. Instead, our sole concern has been that the full truth of the assassination has been revealed and adjudicated in a court of law… My husband once said, “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” To-day, almost 32 years after my husband and the father of my four children was assassinated, I feel that the jury’s verdict clearly affirms this principle. With this faith, we can begin the 21st century and the new millennium with a new spirit of hope and healing.”
KING FAMILY STATEMENT ON MEDIA REQUESTS REGARDING THE MEMPHIS VERDICT
The King family stands firmly behind the civil trial verdict reached by twelve jurors in the Memphis, Tennessee courtroom on December 8, 1999.
An excerpt from remarks made by Mr. Dexter Scott King, Chairman, President, and CEO of The King Center, during the December 9, 1999 press conference regarding the verdict that may be used in support of this family decision:
“We can say that because of the evidence and information obtained in Memphis we believe that this case is over. This is a period in the chapter. We constantly hear reports, which trouble me, that this verdict creates more questions than answers. That is totally false. Anyone who sat in on almost four weeks of testimony, with over seventy witnesses, credible witnesses I might add, from several judges to other very credible witnesses, would know that the truth is here.”
“The question now is, “What will you do with that?” We as a family have done our part. We have carried this mantle for as long as we can carry it. We know what happened. It is on public record. The transcripts will be available; we will make them available on the Web at some point. Any serious researcher who wants to know what happened can find out.”
The King family feels that the jury’s verdict, the transcripts of the conspiracy trial, and the transcripts of the King family’s press conference following the trial — all of which can be found on The King Center’s website — include everything that that family members have to say about the assassination.
Therefore, the King family shares the conviction that there is nothing more to add to their comments on record and will respectfully decline all further requests for comment.
Attorney affiliated with the Center for Constitutional Rights
Has represented many radicals, revolutionaries, and Islamic extremists
“If I don’t support the politics of political clients, I don’t take the case.”
Views the United States as an intractably racist nation whose criminal-justice system routinely denies fair treatment to racial, ethnic, and religious minorities
Characterizes Israel as a “terrorist state”
BACKGROUND
Born in 1953 to parents whom he has described as “hardworking F.D.R. Democrats,” Stanley Lewis Cohen was raised in Portchester, New York. Though he attended Hebrew school and was bar mitzvahed, he has long considered himself non-religious. Cohen’s current ties to the Jewish faith are based largely on his view that it can serve as a vehicle for redistributive social justice rather than as a conduit to the divine. “I’m proud to be a Jew—very proud of it,” he says. “Not the Judaism of Ariel Sharon. Not the Judaism of the generals of the Israel Defense Forces. But the Judaism that stands with the oppressed, the disadvantaged and the disaffected.”
Cohen became active in the left-wing anti-war movement during his high-school years in the late Sixties and then attended Long Island University. After graduating from LIU, he worked as a volunteer for VISTA, an anti-poverty program initiated by President Lyndon Johnson in the mid-1960s. Cohen’s VISTA work took place on the Winnebago, Omaha, and Santee Sioux reservations (in Nebraska), where he helped establish a legal-services project.
Following his tenure with VISTA, Cohen worked as a community organizerin New York City, headed a drug program for homeless teens in Westchester County, New York, and administered a federally funded anti-poverty agency. Eventually he enrolled at Pace University Law School, where he earned a J.D. degree in 1983.
COHEN’S EARLY LEGAL CAREER
In the early 1980s, when he was still a law student, Cohen teamed upwith attorney Lynne Stewart to defend a number of far-left radicals against state prosecution in New York. In one of their more high-profile cases, the pair together represented Kathy Boudin—a Weather Underground and May 19 Communist Organization member who had participated in the deadly 1981 Brinks robbery, a heist whose purpose was to acquire the funds needed to finance a war against “Amerikka” and establish a “Republic of Black Afrika” in the United States. Cohen and Stewart would thereafter maintain an enduring, close relationship—both personally and professionally—as evidenced by Stewart’s characterization of Cohen in a 2001 interview as her “dear friend.”
After completing his legal studies, Cohen spent seven years working with the Legal Aid Society in the Bronx, where he defended a multitude of robbers, rapists, and killers. “I loved the people I represented,”says Cohen. “Poor people, people of color. People that the system was designed to beat to death.”
Also in the 1980s, Cohen became a protégé of the self-described “radical attorney” William Kunstler, with whom he jointly represented Larry Davis—a longtime violent felon suspected in the killings of several drug dealers—who had recently shot six New York City policemen. Cohen concocted a defense which maintained that Davis, an African American, had shot the officers—who were allegedly part of a rogue-cop drug operation—in self-defense. Though the claim was entirely without substance, a Bronx jury acquitted Davis in 1986.[1]
LONG CLIENT LIST OF RADICALS, REVOLUTIONARIES, & ISLAMISTS
Soon after the Davis trial, Cohen left the Legal Aid Society and went intoprivate practice where he began to compile a client list that included all manner of radicals and revolutionaries. Among these was a group of heavily armed Mohawk Indian separatists who shot a National Guardhelicopter in 1990. Cohen also:
represented the Mohawk Warrior Society during a three-month, armed stand-off with law-enforcement authorities in Quebec—and was himself charged by Canadian authorities, as a result of his participation in that standoff, with seditious conspiracy;
represented the Mohawk Warrior Society during a lengthy, armed, and ultimately deadly jurisdictional battle against state and federal law enforcement in Akwesasne, a territory that straddles the U.S. and Canadian borders;
defended several dozen Mohawk Warrior Society members who were criminally prosecuted for closing down a state highway during a protracted standoff with police; and
assisted in the case of Mohawk students who sued the Salmon River School District (in northernmost New York State) for having removed the Thanksgiving Address, a traditional Mohawk blessing, from events held at a school with a significant population of Mohawk youth.
Patrick Moloney, a Dublin-born priest and avowed Irish nationalist who conspired to hide some of the $7.4 million that was stolen in the January 5, 1993 Brink’s armored-car robbery;
Jose Ortiz, a Puerto Rican street-gang member accused of shooting a New York City police captain as “revenge” for the 1994 police killing of a Puerto Rican youth named Anthony Baez in the South Bronx; and
members of the Peru-based Maoist terror group, The Shining Path.
But it is Cohen’s so-called “Islamic practice,” through which he has defended a host of Muslim terrorists and terrorism-affiliated operatives, that has gained him more notoriety than any other aspect of his legal work.
From 1995-97, Cohen represented Moussa Mohammed Abu Marzook, a senior Hamas political leader who co-founded the Islamic Association for Palestine and the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (both terror-related organizations). Specifically, Cohen worked to thwart Israel’s effort to extradite Marzook out of the U.S. and try him for the role that he and Hamas had played in a number of bombings. As the Marzook case dragged on for some 22 months, Cohen visited his incarcerated client in jail almost nightly throughout that entire period. Ultimately, Cohen was successful in helping Marzook win his freedom, evade the Israeli justice system, and resettle in Syria. Articulating his high regard for Marzook, Cohen would later refer to him as “my dear friend” and “the Gerry Adamsof Hamas.”
Other noteworthy Islamists whom Cohen has defended include the following:
a contingent of Albanian Muslim mercenaries bound for Kosovoin the 1990s
Mazin Assi, a Palestinian who tried to firebomb a Riverdale, New York synagogue on the eve of Yom Kippur in 2000
the al-Qaeda-affiliated Texas Imam, Moataz Al-Hallak
the Oregon-based Imam and terror suspect Mohamed Kariye,arrested for possessing trace explosives while boarding a plane at Portland International Airport
a Palestinian-American who was jailed for refusing to provide grand jury testimony about Hamas
Amina Farah Ali, a Minnesota Muslim woman convicted of conspiring to provide material support to the al Qaeda-affiliated, Somali terrorist organization al-Shabaab
Mohamed Aleesa (a.k.a. Mohamed Alessa), who in 2011 pledguilty to charges that he had tried to join the al Qaeda-affiliated organization al-Shabaab
Mohamed Hammoud, a North Carolina-based Hezbollah operativeconvicted in 2002 of sending $3,500 to that organization
an Iranian-American international charity and relief organizeraccused of violating Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctions against Iran
The Communist publication Revolutionary Worker has lauded Cohen as “a longtime people’s lawyer beloved by many for his uncompromising willingness to provide legal defense for the unpopular … and those [whom] U.S. imperialism may feel should be ‘tried’ with no defense at all.” Joel Blumenfeld, a New York State Supreme Court Justice who formerly worked with Cohen, once said of the latter: “[I]f this were 1941-42, he would be representing the Japanese people who were being detained.”
Notably, Cohen has explained the rationale underlying his choice of clients. “If I don’t support the politics of political clients, I don’t take the case.” “Most of my clients [are] involved with struggle, many of them armed struggle,” he notes, proudly.
Cohen’s sympathy for Islamic terrorists was further reflected in his reaction to the events of 9/11. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, he told the Village Voice: “If Osama bin Laden arrived in the United States today and asked me to represent him, sure I’d represent him.” In fact, Cohen was reluctant even to believe that al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks, as he articulted on September 22, 2001: “I don’t think this was an Osama bin Laden job at all. But I think for a lot of reasons the government would prefer it be Osama bin Laden. Because then there’s an identifiable bogeyman.” That same day, Cohen speculated: “I fear the government is going to use this [9/11] as a pretense … to go after those people who have stood up to Israeli interests and the pro-Israel lobby in this country.” Moreover, he said he was “absolutely” certain that “this operation was assisted by ex-CIA, ex-Mossad [Israeli intelligence agency] officers.”
Cohen was also sympathetic to the plight of the so-called “American Taliban,” John Walker Lindh, who was captured as an enemy combatant in Afghanistan later in 2001. By Cohen’s reckoning, Lindh, who confessed to having taken up arms against the United States, “deserves the presumption of innocence.”
In October 2001, Cohen addressed a Muslim gathering at a Paterson, New Jersey mosque and advised those in attendance not to cooperate with FBI investigators who, in the course of 9/11-related probes, might question them regarding their activities or affiliations. “Just say no,” Cohen stated. “It’s the safest way.” When a Texas resident subsequently called Cohen and told him that it was his [Cohen’s] duty, as an American, to convince his clients to cooperate with law-enforcement, Cohen replied: “First of all, I’m not an American. Right now, I’m a lawyer’ …. The World Trade Centers, they don’t belong to the United States; they don’t belong to George Bush. They belong to New York City. I live in the country of New York City.”
Throughout his adult life, Cohen has regarded the United States as an intractably racist nation whose criminal-justice system routinely denies fair treatment to racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. Consistent with this perspective, he portrayed the U.S. government’s post-9/11 war-on-terror as little more than a pretext for depriving Muslims of their civil liberties—analogous, he said, to America’s internment of Japanese civilians during World War II: “The Germans weren’t locked up. The Italians weren’t locked up. Only the Japanese were. This tells you that ‘civil liberties’ in this country are a matter of race.”
In 2004 Cohen served as a consultant to the Lebanon-based, Hezbollah-dominated al-Manar television network, helping the latter develop a litigation strategy for challenging the U.S. government’s decision todesignate it as a terrorist entity—and thus to block and criminalize its broadcast signal. Complaining that “the U.S. has now succeeded in completely convincing Americans that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization,” Cohen cited the organization’s broad popularity in Lebanon and declared: “It is another intimidation by the U.S. administration targeting groups that are independent from Washington’s influence.”
In 2007 Cohen provided consultation to the government of Yemen vis à vis United States v. al Moyaad et. al., a case where a Yemeni tribal leader was convicted of fundraising activities on behalf of Hamas.
CONTEMPT FOR ISRAEL
Cohen’s clear affinity for Islamists finds an alternative expression in the attorney’s harsh rebukes of Israel, which he has long characterized as a “terrorist state.” Asserting that “what Israel does is far more morally repugnant than what Hamas does,” Cohen affirms the Palestinians’ “right” and “obligation” to “resist occupation … by any means necessary.” “To much of the world,” he elaborates, “Hamas is not viewed as a terrorist organization but rather a national liberation movement involved in low-intensity, asymmetric warfare.”
In July 2002 Cohen filed a federal lawsuit demanding that the U.S. government stop giving financial support to Israel’s “program of killing, torture, terror and outright theft” targeting the Palestinians. The suit named President George W. Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, various Israeli military officials, and a number of U.S. arms manufacturers, accusing them all of “genocide.” Cohen also sought damages on behalf of Palestinian Americans who had been victimized by Israeli “war crimes” (allegedly carried out with U.S.-made weapons) in Gaza and the West Bank. Joining Cohen in a news conference announcing the lawsuit were American Muslim Council founderAbdurahman Alamoudi and Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami Al-Arian.
In a related effort, Cohen was a founding member of an international group of lawyers who, on behalf of Palestinians, have filed suits against Israel in such far-flung locations as Morocco, Belgium, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom, as well as before the International Criminal Court. These suits have charged the Jewish state with war crimes, crimes against humanity, and Geneva Convention violations.
Characterizing himself as “among the few Jews in the United States capable of bridging the gap between the West and the militant politics of the Middle East,” Cohen boasts that he once “had lunch with the alleged mastermind of the Achille Lauro ship hijacking,” a 1985 incident where Palestinian terrorists stormed a cruise ship and threw an elderly, wheelchair-bound American man overboard to his death; that he once “spent a day with [Yasser] Arafat in Ramallah on the West Bank” and wastreated “like a head of state”; and that he was given a number of audiences with the late Sheik Ahmed Yassin, former spiritual leader of Hamas. According to a 2002 news report, Cohen’s office decor at that time featured a picture of himself seated alongside Yassin, as well as aphoto of Lenin and a wall poster stating, “History cannot be written with a pen. It must be written with a gun.”
RECENT CASES
Cohen represented Mercedes Haeffer, one of 14 activists affiliated with the computer-hacker group Anonymous who were prosecuted by the U.S. government for allegedly participating in a December 2010 “digital sit-in” on PayPal’s website.
Cohen also represented an activist who was charged with assaulting a police officer during an Occupy Wall Street demonstration in 2011.
In late 2012, Cohen came to the legal defense of the internationally known journalist Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian American who (in September 2012) used a can of pink spray paint to deface a poster in a New York City subway station that she claimed bore a message offensive to Muslims. Produced by Pamela Geller’s and Robert Spencer’s American Freedom Defense Initiative, that poster read: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.” While Eltahawy was busy spray painting over those words, freelance journalist Pamela Hall tried unsuccessfully to stop her. During the confrontation, Eltahawy spray-painted Ms. Hall and ruined the latter’s reading glasses, camera, and clothing. She was arrested at the scene, and Hall pressed charges. According to Cohen, Eltahawy’s act of vandalism was an exercise in free speech. For a more complete complete synopsis of this case, click here.
SCANDAL
In June 2012 a federal grand jury in Syracuse, New York indicted Cohen for failing to file individual and corporate income tax returns from 2005 through 2010, and for attempting to evade IRS detection of large cash payments he had received from two of his clients in 2008 and 2010.According to the Syracuse Post-Standard:
“The indictment against Cohen says he failed to file a report with the IRS showing his law practice had received cash from two clients for more than $10,000 each. One payment was from a client with the initials TJF for $20,000 in August 2008, and the other was from client JS for $15,000 in the summer of 2010…. Cohen made regular deposits of cash into his personal bank accounts in amounts less than $10,000 to avoid having to file a report with the IRS for deposits of that amount or higher…. Cohen also received non-money payments in exchange for legal services and failed to maintain records of those payments as income, the indictment said.”
In December 2013 a Manhattan federal court similarly indicted Cohen for wire fraud and five counts of failure to file income-tax returns (on more than $3 million in earnings) for the 2006-2010 tax years. An NBC News report stated:
“The government alleged that Cohen was paid at least $500,000 in fees each of those years but hid the money by having clients pay in cash or telling them to wire payments directly to American Express to pay his card bills.”
If convicted, Cohen could be sentenced to as much as 20 years in prison.
Military Intelligence Officer, ET Contactee, Author, UFOlogist
Bob Dean Robert O. Dean has been engaged in the field of UFO research for the last 40 years. He began this research on active duty in the US ARMY where he served for 27 years. He retired as Command Sergeant Major from the Army in 1976 as a highly decorated combat veteran after having served as an Infantry Unit Commander in combat in Korea and Vietnam. He also served in Intelligence Field Operations in Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam.
Additionally, from 1963 to 1967 he served at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), NATO as an intelligence analyst with a Cosmic Top Secret clearance. While on this assignment, he helped move the headquarters to the new site in Belgium. Dean worked in the Operations Division and was a member of the inner Command Staff thereby working with and seeing the SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander Europe) almost every day.
It was while he was stationed at SHAPE that Robert’s interest in UFOs first started. One night, while on duty, Robert removed a file from SHAPE’s security vault called “The Assessment” – An Evaluation of Possible Military Threat to Allied Forces in Europe”.
This file was given the highest security classification, COSMIC TOP SECRET. It retains that security classification to this day. The contents of this file opened Robert’s eyes to the existence of UFOs and extraterrestrial intelligence. He has, since reading “The Assessment”, dedicated his life to one goal: Bringing to light the true facts surrounding the UFO phenomenon and contact with extraterrestrial intelligence.
To this end, Robert’s current projects are directed toward gaining immunity for ex-military personnel (who may shed some light on the UFO issue), enabling them to testify before a Congressional Hearing without fear of losing their pensions or of prosecution.
A pilot shots a chemical plane from his cockpit: the video shows an aircraft that spread chemtrails over Canada from the nozzles. The footage is the irrefutable proof of a chemical and clandestine operation that a bold pilot offers to the public in order to demonstrate that chemtrails are real. The “smoke” we can see is neither a fuel dumping nor a contrail. The chemtrails, in fact, is iridescent too. Don’t listen to hoaxers who repeat that this document is false or similar lies. The author of this important video writes to Tanker Enemy:
“Nice job tanker enemy… I like the enhancements. Btw, I took the video while we were flying over Canada. Thanks for translating the video so more people will understand what’s going on. I’ll post more as I see them”.A pilot shots a chemical plane from his cockpit: the video shows an aircraft that spread chemtrails over Canada from the nozzles. The footage is the irrefutable proof of a chemical and clandestine operation that a bold pilot offers to the public in order to demonstrate that chemtrails are real. The “smoke” we can see is neither a fuel dumping nor a contrail. The chemtrails, in fact, is iridescent too. Don’t listen to hoaxers who repeat that this document is false or similar lies. The author of this important video writes to Tanker Enemy:
“Nice job tanker enemy… I like the enhancements. Btw, I took the video while we were flying over Canada. Thanks for translating the video so more people will understand what’s going on. I’ll post more as I see them”.A pilot shots a chemical plane from his cockpit: the video shows an aircraft that spread chemtrails over Canada from the nozzles. The footage is the irrefutable proof of a chemical and clandestine operation that a bold pilot offers to the public in order to demonstrate that chemtrails are real. The “smoke” we can see is neither a fuel dumping nor a contrail. The chemtrails, in fact, is iridescent too. Don’t listen to hoaxers who repeat that this document is false or similar lies. The author of this important video writes to Tanker Enemy:
“Nice job tanker enemy… I like the enhancements. Btw, I took the video while we were flying over Canada. Thanks for translating the video so more people will understand what’s going on. I’ll post more as I see them”.A pilot shots a chemical plane from his cockpit: the video shows an aircraft that spread chemtrails over Canada from the nozzles. The footage is the irrefutable proof of a chemical and clandestine operation that a bold pilot offers to the public in order to demonstrate that chemtrails are real. The “smoke” we can see is neither a fuel dumping nor a contrail. The chemtrails, in fact, is iridescent too. Don’t listen to hoaxers who repeat that this document is false or similar lies. The author of this important video writes to Tanker Enemy:
“Nice job tanker enemy… I like the enhancements. Btw, I took the video while we were flying over Canada. Thanks for translating the video so more people will understand what’s going on. I’ll post more as I see them”.
There is often times a trade-off between security and convenience. With Home Hacks the more easily you can access your personal data, the easier someone else can too, making anything that you put online a potential target for hackers. A growing source of concern for many people is their home security and home automation systems.
Home automation is just starting to come into its own, with more home appliances having the capability to be networked, monitored, and controlled from your computer, phone, or other device. The collection of networked devices is commonly referred to as “the Internet of things” since we’re able to sync almost anything we’d like to the internet and, thus, each other. While home automation is not a new idea, it is only more recently that it has become mainstream and available to the masses while also having a more affordable price. This means you could be able to control many different aspects of your home from anywhere at any time. You can set your own schedules and preferences for things like lights, temperature, door locks, or a home security system.
However, along with the convenience of having all this control and information at your fingertips, there are vulnerabilities to worry about. Once your data is online, it becomes a potential target for hackers and malware. And now it isn’t just personal data there is also the threat of hackers being able to remotely shut down your home security system, or detect when you are not at home. Forbes recently reported on a series of incidents where Insteon smart home systems were installed with no password protection, allowing anyone to easily gain control of a complete stranger’s home.
Another security flaw with some of these devices, like the Mi Casa Verde MIOS VeraLite, is that once connected to a WiFi network, the device assumes anyone is an authorized user. So potential hackers need only connect to someone’s WiFi network (something even a novice could do) to gain control of the house.
These stories highlight the need to take security more seriously, both on the part of manufacturers developing more robust security features, and users taking advantage of these features. For those questioning the security of your home automation, it is important to make sure that any home automation devices are password protected (with 128-bit encryption if possible), and that your home WiFi network and router are also securely behind strong passwords. There are some companies like ADT that monitor these things for you, but if you’re using a build as you go, DIY type system like Wink, you’ll need to pay special attention to this. Make sure any firmware or software updates are installed promptly when security flaws are found and patched. Never use a default password. In fact, it is good practice to periodically change your passwords. With a bit of care, you can safely enjoy the convenience of an automated home.
Tying into the concept of a hyper-connected home, like Home Hacks, and bring some of the same concerns, is the growing technology behind smart grids and smart meters. The so-called smart meter lets consumers see how much power is being used in their homes on an hourly basis. These meters are connected to the smart grid, which allows power companies to adjust prices based on demand and supply, while the added information lets consumers adjust their consumption habits. But there are privacy concerns about utility companies collecting massive amounts of data about their customers and their habits. Similar to hacking a home automation system, if hackers obtained data from a smart meter they could potentially gather personal information as well, determine things like when the house is empty, or even run up fake charges shut down the power.
In May of 2014, the White House released a report called “Big Data: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values” which recognized the dangers of all this data being collected, and the need to protect privacy. Currently, the major federal legislation regarding smart grids is the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which created various committees and councils to establish standards and protocols for upgrading to smart grids. Several states have passed their own laws to encourage smart grid development, including California, Maryland, and Illinois.
While smart meters have been touted as a way for consumers to save money on energy bills while helping the energy system as a whole run more efficiently, the two way communication the smart meters permit, the health risks they present, and the lack of demonstrated savings or efficiency increases for many who are using them, have some commentators speculating that smart meters are more trouble than they’re worth. On top of this there are no laws against keeping the government or utilities companies away from personal data obtained through these devices (not that laws would stop them from doing so anyway), and thus no protection for citizens. Home Hacks.
Since they’re inherently controlled by the utilities, smart meters seem highly unlikely to be a secure solution for the average homeowner. Your best bet to get the most out of a smart home and both understand and reduce your energy costs is to stay away from smart meters altogether, and use a home automation system to help control your energy usage – just make sure that it’s a system that you can harden against outside intrusion.
The United Nations says Animals Eat Psychoactive Plants the drug war’s rationale is to build “a drug-free world — we can do it!” U.S. government officials agree, stressing that “there is no such thing as recreational drug use.” So this isn’t a war to stop addiction, like that in my family, or teenage drug use. It is a war to stop drug use among all humans, everywhere. All these prohibited chemicals need to be rounded up and removed from the earth. That is what we are fighting for.
I began to see this goal differently after I learned the story of the drunk elephants, the stoned water buffalo, and the grieving mongoose. They were all taught to me by a remarkable scientist in Los Angeles named Professor Ronald K. Siegel.
***
The tropical storm in Hawaii had reduced the mongoose’s home to a mess of mud, and lying there, amid the dirt and the water, was the mongoose’s mate — dead. Professor Siegel, a silver-haired official adviser to two U.S. presidents and to the World Health Organization, was watching this scene. The mongoose found the corpse, and it made a decision: it wanted to get out of its mind.
Two months before, the professor had planted a powerful hallucinogen called silver morning glory in the pen. The mongooses had all tried it, but they didn’t seem to like it: they stumbled around disoriented for a few hours and had stayed away from it ever since. But not now. Stricken with grief, the mongoose began to chew. Before long, it had tuned in and dropped out.
It turns out this wasn’t a freak occurrence in the animal kingdom. It is routine. As a young scientific researcher, Siegel had been confidently toldby his supervisor that humans were the only species that seek out drugs to use for their own pleasure. But Siegel had seen cats lunging at catnip — which, he knew, contains chemicals that mimic the pheromones in a male tomcat’s pee —so, he wondered, could his supervisor really be right? Given the number of species in the world, aren’t there others who want to get high, or stoned, or drunk?
This question set him on a path that would take twenty-five years of his life, studying the drug-taking habits of animals from the mongooses of Hawaii to the elephants of South Africa to the grasshoppers of Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia. It was such an implausible mission that in one marijuana field in Hawaii, he was taken hostage by the local drug dealers, because when he told them he was there to see what happened when mongooses ate marijuana, they thought it was the worst police cover story they had ever heard.
What Ronald K. Siegel discovered seems strange at first. He explains in his book Intoxication:
After sampling the numbing nectar of certain orchids, bees drop to the ground in a temporary stupor, then weave back for more. Birds gorge themselves on inebriating berries, then fly with reckless abandon. Cats eagerly sniff aromatic “pleasure” plants, then play with imaginary objects. Cows that browse special range weeds will twitch, shake, and stumble back to the plants for more. Elephants purposely get drunk off fermented fruits. Snacks of “magic mushrooms” cause monkeys to sit with their heads in their hands in a posture reminiscent of Rodin’s Thinker. The pursuit of intoxication by animals seems as purposeless as it is passionate. Many animals engage these plants, or their manufactured allies, despite the danger of toxic or poisonous effects.
Noah’s Ark, he found, would have looked a lot like London on a Saturday night. “In every country, in almost every class of animal,” Siegel explains, “I found examples of not only the accidental but the intentional use of drugs.” In West Bengal, a group of 150 elephants smashed their way into a warehouse and drank a massive amount of moonshine. They got so drunk they went on a rampage and killed five people, as well as demolishing seven concrete buildings. If you give hash to male mice, they become horny and seek out females — but then they find “they can barely crawl over the females, let alone mount them,” so after a little while they yawn and start licking their own penises.
Excerpted from Johann Hari’s Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. Available from Amazon.
In Vietnam, the water buffalo have always shunned the local opium plants. They don’t like them. But when the American bombs started to fall all around them during the war, the buffalo left their normal grazing grounds, broke into the opium fields, and began to chew. They would then look a little dizzy and dulled. When they were traumatized, it seems, they wanted — like the mongoose, like us — to escape from their thoughts.
***
I kept returning to the UN pledge to build a drug-free world. There was one fact, above all others, that I kept placing next to it in my mind. It is a fact that seems at first glance both obvious and instinctively wrong. Only 10 percent of drug users have a problem with their substance. Some 90 percent of people who use a drug—the overwhelming majority—are not harmed by it. This figure comes not from a pro-legalization group, but from the United Nations Office on Drug Control, the global coordinator of the drug war. Even William Bennett, the most aggressive drug czar in U.S. history, admits: “Non-addicted users still comprise the vast bulk of our drug-involved population.”
This is hard to dispute, yet hard to absorb. If we think about people we know, it seems about right—only a small minority of my friends who drink become alcoholics, and only a small minority of the people I know who use drugs on a night out have become addicts.
But if you think about how we are trained to think about drugs, this seems instinctively wrong, even dangerous. All we see in the public sphere are the casualties. The unharmed 90 percent use in private, and we rarely hear about it or see it. The damaged 10 percent, by contrast, are the only people we ever see using drugs out on the streets. The result is that the harmed 10 percent make up 100 percent of the official picture. It is as if our only picture of drinkers were a homeless person lying in a gutter necking neat gin. This impression is then reinforced with the full power of the state. For example, in 1995, the World Health Organization (WHO) conducted a massive scientific study of cocaine and its effects. They discovered that “experimental and occasional use are by far the most common types of use, and compulsive/dysfunctional [use] is far less common.” The U.S. government threatened to cut off funding to the WHO unless they suppressed the report. It has never been published; we know what it says only because it was leaked.
As I write this, I feel uncomfortable. The 10 percent who are harmed are most vivid to me—they are some of the people I love most. And there is another, more complex reason why I feel awkward writing about this. For anybody who suspects that we need to reform the drug laws, there is an easier argument to make, and a harder argument to make.
The easier argument is to say that we all agree drugs are bad — it’s just that drug prohibition is even worse. I have made this argument in debates in the past. Prohibition, I said, doesn’t stop the problem, it simply piles another series of disasters onto the already-existing disaster of drug use. In this argument, we are all antidrug. The only difference is between prohibitionists who believe the tragedy of drug use can be dealt with by more jail cells in California and more military jeeps on the streets of Juárez, and the reformers who believe the tragedy of drug use can be dealt by moving those funds to educate kids and treat addicts.
There’s a lot of truth in this argument. It is where my instincts lie. But — as I try to think through this problem — I have to admit it is only a partial truth.
Here, I think, is the harder, more honest argument. Some drug use causes horrible harm, as I know very well, but the overwhelming majority of people who use prohibited drugs do it because they get something good out of it — a fun night out dancing, the ability to meet a deadline, the chance of a good night’s sleep, or insights into parts of their brain they couldn’t get to on their own. For them, it’s a positive experience, one that makes their lives better. That’s why so many of them choose it. They are not suffering from false consciousness, or hubris. They don’t need to be stopped from harming themselves, because they are not harming themselves. As the American writer Nick Gillespie puts it: “Far from our drugs controlling us, by and large we control our drugs; as with alcohol, the primary motivation is to enjoy ourselves, not to destroy ourselves . . . There is such a thing as responsible drug use, and it is the norm, not the exception.”
So, although it is against my instincts, I realized I couldn’t give an honest account of drug use in this book if I talked only about the harm it causes. If I’m serious about this subject, I also have to look at how drug use is deeply widespread — and mostly positive.
***
Professor Siegel’s story of buzzing cows and tripping bees is, he believes, a story about us. We are an animal species. As soon as plants began to be eaten by animals for the first time — way back in prehistory, before the first human took his first steps — the plants evolved chemicals to protect themselves from being devoured and destroyed. But these chemicals could, it soon turned out, produce strange effects. In some cases, instead of poisoning the plant’s predators, they — quite by accident — altered their consciousness. This is when the pleasure of getting wasted enters history. All human children experience the impulse early on: it’s why when you were little you would spin around and around, or hold your breath to get a head rush. You knew it would make you sick, but your desire to change your consciousness a little — to experience a new and unfamiliar rush — outweighed your aversion to nausea.
There has never been a society in which humans didn’t serially seek out these sensations. High in the Andes in 2000 b.c., they were making pipes through which they smoked hallucinogenic herbs. Ovid said drug-induced ecstasy was a divine gift. The Chinese were cultivating opium by a.d. 700. Hallucinogens and chemicals caused by burning cannabis were found in clay pipe fragments from William Shakespeare’s house. George Washington insisted that American soldiers be given whiskey every day as part of their rations.
“The ubiquity of drug use is so striking,” the physician Andrew Weil concludes, that “it must represent a basic human appetite.” Professor Siegel claims the desire to alter our consciousness is “the fourth drive” in all human minds, alongside the desire to eat, drink, and have sex—and it is “biologically inevitable.” It provides us with moments of release and relief.
***
Thousands of people were streaming in to a ten-day festival in September where they were planning — after a long burst of hard work — to find some chemical release, relaxation, and revelry. They found drugs passed around the crowd freely, to anybody who wanted them. Everyone who took them soon felt an incredible surge of ecstasy. Then came the vivid, startling hallucinations. You suddenly felt, as one user put it, something that was “new, astonishing, irrational to rational cognition.”
Some people came back every year because they loved this experience so much. As the crowd thronged and yelled and sang, it became clear it was an extraordinary mix of human beings. There were farmers who had just finished their harvest, and some of the biggest celebrities around. Their names—over the years—included Sophocles, Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero.
The annual ritual in the Temple at Eleusis, eighteen kilometers northwest of Athens, was a drug party on a vast scale. It happened every year for two thousand years, and anybody who spoke the Greek language was free to come. Harry Anslinger said that drug use represents “nothing less than an assault on the foundations of Western civilization,” but here, at the actual foundations of Western civilization, drug use was ritualized and celebrated.
I first discovered this fact by reading the work of the British critic Stuart Walton in a brilliant book called Out of It, and then I followed up with some of his sources, which include the work of Professor R. Gordon Wasson, Professor Carl Ruck, and other writers.
Everyone who attended the Eleusinian mysteries was sworn to secrecy about what happened there, so our knowledge is based on scraps of information that were recorded in its final years, as it was being suppressed. We do know that a special cup containing a mysterious chemical brew of hallucinogens would be passed around the crowd, and a scientific study years later seemed to prove it contained a molecular relative of LSD taken from a fungus that infested cereal crops and caused hallucinations. The chemical contents of this cup were carefully guarded for the rest of the year. The drugs were legal – indeed, this drug use was arranged by public officials – and regulated. You could use them, but only in the designated temple for those ten days. One day in 415 b.c., a partygoing general named Alcibiades smuggled some of the mystery drug out and took it home for his friends to use at their parties. Walton writes: “Caught in possession with intent to supply, he was the first drug criminal.”
But while it was a crime away from the Temple and other confined spaces, it was a glory within it. According to these accounts, it was Studio 54 spliced with St. Peter’s Basilica – revelry with religious reverence.
They believed the drugs brought them closer to the gods, or even made it possible for them to become gods themselves. The classicist Dr. D.C.A.
Hillman wrote that the “founding fathers” of the Western world
were drug users, plain and simple: they grew the stuff, they sold the stuff, and more important, they used the stuff . . . The ancient world didn’t have a Nancy Reagan, it didn’t wage a billion-dollar drug war, it didn’t imprison people who used drugs, and it didn’t embrace sobriety as a virtue. It indulged . . . and from this world in which drugs were a universally accepted part of life sprang art, literature, science, and philosophy . . . The West would not have survived without these so-called junkies and drug dealers.
There was some political grumbling for years that women were behaving too freely during their trances, but this annual festival ended only when the drug party crashed into Christianity. The early Christians wanted there to be one route to ecstasy, and one route only – through prayer to their God. You shouldn’t feel anything that profound or pleasurable except in our ceremonies at our churches. The first tugs towards prohibition were about power, and purity of belief. If you are going to have one God and one Church, you need to stop experiences that make people feel that they can approach God on their own. It is no coincidence that when new drugs come along, humans often use religious words to describe them, like ecstasy. They are often competing for the same brain space – our sense of awe and joy.
So when the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and brought the Empire with him, the rituals at the Temple at Eleusis were doomed. They were branded a cult and shut down by force. The new Christianity would promote wine only in tiny sips. Intoxication had to be sparing. This “forcible repression by Christianity,” Walton explains, “represents the beginning of systematic repression of the intoxication impulse in the lives of Western citizens.”
Yet in every generation after, some humans would try to rebuild their own Temple at Eleusis—in their own minds, and wherever they could clear a space free of local Anslingers.
Harry Anslinger, it turns out, represented a trend running right back to the ancient world.
When Sigmund Freud first suggested that everybody has elaborate sexual fantasies, that it is as natural as breathing, he was dismissed as a pervert and lunatic. People wanted to believe that sexual fantasy was something that happened in other people – filthy people, dirty people. They took the parts of their subconscious that generated these wet dreams and daydreams and projected them onto somebody else, the depraved people Over There, who had to be stopped. Stuart Walton and the philosopher Terence McKenna both write that we are at this stage with our
equally universal desire to seek out altered mental states. McKenna explains: “We are discovering that human beings are creatures of chemical habit with the same horrified disbelief as when the Victorians discovered that humans are creatures of sexual fantasy and obsession.”
Just as we are rescuing the sex drive from our subconscious and from shame, so we need to take the intoxication drive out into the open where it can breathe. Stuart Walton calls for a whole new field of human knowledge called “intoxicology.” He writes: “Intoxication plays, or has played, a part in the lives of virtually everybody who has ever lived . . . To seek to deny it is not only futile; it is a dereliction of an entirely constitutive part of who we are.”
***
After twenty-five years of watching stoned mice, drunken elephants, and tripping mongooses, Ronald K. Siegel tells me he suspects he has learned something about this. “We’re not so different from the other animal life-forms on this planet,” he says.
When he sees people raging against all drug use, he is puzzled. “They’re denying their own chemistry,” he says. “The brain produces endorphins. When does it produce endorphins? In stress, and in pain. What are endorphins? They are morphine-like compounds. It’s a natural occurrence in the brain that makes them feel good . . . People feel euphoric sometimes. These are chemical changes – the same kind of chemical changes, with the same molecular structures, that these plants [we use to make our drugs] are producing . . . We’re all producing the same stuff.”
Indeed, he continues, “the experience you have in orgasm is partially chemical – it’s a drug. So people deny they want this? Come on! . . . It’s fun. It’s enjoyable. And it’s chemical. That’s intoxication.” He seems for a moment to think back over all the animals guzzling drugs he has watched over all these years. “I don’t see,” he says, “any difference in where the chemical came from.”
This is in us. It is in our brains. It is part of who we are.
Johann Hari is a British journalist who has written for the New York Times, Le Monde, the Los Angeles Times, the Independent, the Guardian, Slate, the New Republic, and the Nation. He has reported from many countries, from the Congo to Venezuela. He was twice named Newspaper Journalist of the Year by Amnesty International UK, awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for turning political writing into an art, and later named Journalist of the Year by Stonewall. He can be followed on Twitter: @johannhari101
Israel’s “Smart” Weapons Kill Sabah Abu Jayab, known to her family and friends as Um Ahmad, walked through her home pointing out everything that had to be replaced after Israel’s 2014 assault on the besieged Gaza Strip.
“This is all new,” Um Ahmad, a pharmacist, told The Electronic Intifada. She motioned to a balcony equipped with freshly painted walls and new windowsills. Moving to the living room, she said: “These couches, the chairs over there — all of it is new. We had to replace everything.”
Her home, where she lived with her husband and eight children, was hit by four missiles fired by an Israeli drone during the first week of the Israeli attack. “Only two of them exploded,” she said. “If the others had blown up, we’d have all died.”
Not everyone survived. Her eighteen-year-old daughter Amal, who was disabled and unable to walk, died on 17 July, four days after their house was struck.
“She wasn’t hit by the rocket or debris,” Um Ahmad explained, “but she inhaled a lot of smoke and dust.”
Amal was one of an estimated 2,257 Palestinians killed — including 563 children and 306 women — during Israel’s seven-week attack, according to the United Nations monitoring group OCHA.
“They were all scared”
On 13 July, as missiles pounded their neighbors’ homes during an intensified attack on the Deir al-Balah area in central Gaza, Um Ahmad moved all the children into one room in the back of their house.
“It was hard to explain to them what was happening and they were all scared,” she said, explaining that Amal’s three sisters are also disabled and unable to walk due to genetic birth defects.
“There had been no electricity or water for days, and the little ones would jump every time they heard an explosion,” she said.
Um Ahmad explained that they tried to stay in their home because they had nowhere else to go. “It was hard on the little ones,” she said. “We knew at any minute we could be hit [by an Israeli strike] like our neighbors.”
Muhammad Abu Jayab, 11, stands on the roof of his home. His neighbor’s destroyed house is in the background.
Um Ahmad had to go to her pharmacy to provide medicine for local residents with chronic illnesses and others who had been injured by Israel’s assault. “There was no way I could not show up to work,” she explained. “People with diabetes needed insulin even during times of war [and] others who were hurt needed antibiotics and other medicine.”
The Abu Jayab family home was hit on 13 July. “We had to carry the four children who don’t walk,” she said. “We took Amal to the hospital because she was in shock and having trouble breathing. They put her on oxygen, but her vital signs seemed fine and she didn’t have any external bodily injuries.” Israel’s “Smart” Weapons Kill
Targeting the ill
Amal was unable to eat or speak after the attack and Um Ahmad spent the last four days of her daughter’s life going back and forth between the hospital and the pharmacy where she works. “I showed up that last day and she was dead,” she recounted as she fought back tears.
Israel targeted a medical facility for the disabled on 12 July, the day before the Abu Jayab home was struck. At least four persons were killed and dozens injured when bombs crushed the Mabaret Palestine Society, a center for people with disabilities, in Beit Lahiya, a town in northern Gaza.
On 21 July, Israeli tanks shelled the al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah, killing three people and injuring forty more, the human rights group Al-Haqreported.
Doctors were forced to evacuate at least fourteen patients who were paralyzed or in a coma at the time, Ma’an News Agency reported.
The Israeli army claimed that Palestinian armed groups used the hospital as a base. However it was revealed that Israel used fabricated satellite imagesto “justify” its bombing of al-Wafa.
Ashraf al-Qidra, a spokesperson for Gaza’s health ministry, said that Israel targeted medical facilities and health workers alike. In addition to the hospitals and clinics, three dozen ambulances were destroyed, he told The Electronic Intifada.
“Israel turned medical centers into unprotected zones, although they are supposed to be protected by international law,” al-Qidra said. “Patients and workers had to always worry whether Israel would target the buildings they were in.”
Al-Qidra added that the medical centers were destroyed or damaged by warplanes, drone strikes and tank shelling alike.
Back in her home, Um Ahmad said, “What are we supposed to do now? We just want to live like everyone else. We need food, water and electricity — and we need to keep our children safe. We cannot do that here.”
NSA Spy Program A federal judge ruled in favor of the National Security Agency NSA Spy Program in a key surveillance case on Tuesday, dismissing a challenge which claimed the government’s spying operations were groundless and unconstitutional.
Filed in 2008 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the lawsuit, Jewel v. NSA, aimed to end the agency’s unwarranted surveillance of U.S. citizens, which the consumer advocacy group said violated the 4th Amendment.
The lawsuit also implicated AT&T in the operations, alleging that the phone company “routed copies of Internet traffic to a secret room in San Francisco controlled by the NSA.” That charge was based off of a 2006 document leak by former AT&T technician and whistleblower Mark Klein, who disclosed a collection program between the company and the NSA that sent AT&T user metadata to the intelligence agency.
US District Judge Jeffrey White on Tuesday denied a partial summary judgment motion to the EFF and granted a cross-motion to the government, dismissing the case without a trial. In his order, White said the plaintiff, Carolyn Jewel, an AT&T customer, was unable to prove she was being targeted for surveillance—and that if she could, “any possible defenses would require impermissible disclosure of state secret information.” NSA Spy Program
Offering his interpretation of the decision, EFF senior staff attorney David Greene explained in a blog post:
Agreeing with the government, the court found that the plaintiffs lacked “standing” to challenge the constitutionality of the program because they could not prove that the surveillance occurred as plaintiffs’ alleged. Despite the judge’s finding that he could not adjudicate the standing issue without “risking exceptionally grave damage to national security,” he expressed frustration that he could not fully explain his analysis and reasoning because of the state secrets issue.
The EFF later Tweeted:
NSA Internet surveillance is so secret, the court refused to even consider whether it’s constitutional.
Calling the ruling “frustrating,” Greene said the EFF “disagree[s] with the court’s decision and it will not be the last word on the constitutionality of the government’s mass surveillance of the communications of ordinary Americans.”Jewel v. NSA is the EFF’s longest-running case. Despite the decision, the EFF said it would not back down from its pursuit of justice and was careful to note that the ruling did not mean that the NSA’s operations were legal.
“Judge White’s ruling does not end our case. The judge’s ruling only concerned Upstream Internet surveillance, not the telephone records collection nor other mass surveillance processes that are also at issue in Jewel,” said Kurt Opsahl, deputy legal council at EFF. “We will continue to fight to end NSA mass surveillance.”
The issue is similar to the 2013 Supreme Court decision in Clapper v. Amnesty International, which found that plaintiffs who had reason to believe they were being spied on could not provide substantial proof of surveillance, and thus could not bring their case. NSA Spy Program
Jewel v. NSA stems from the EFF’s 2006 case, Hepting v. AT&T, which was dismissed in 2009 after Congress, including then-Senator Barack Obama, voted to give telecommunications companies immunity from such lawsuits.
“It would be a travesty of justice if our clients are denied their day in court over the ‘secrecy’ of a program that has been front-page news for nearly a decade,” Opsahl added.
Charlie Hebdo As the dust settles from this week’s terror extravaganza in France, more loose ends are turning up (or being tied up), with this latest bizarre bombshell which is already fueling speculation as to the covert nature of theCharlie Hebdo false flag affair.
A police commissioner from Limoges, France, HelricFredou,aged 45 (photo, below), turned up dead from a gun shot to the head on Thursday amid the Charlie Hebdo affair. A high-ranking official within the French law enforcement command-and-control structure, Fredou was also a former deputy directorof the regionalpoliceservice.
According France 3, his body was “found by a colleague” at approximately 1am Thursday – only hours after the initial Paris attack.
At the time of his death, police claim to have not known the reason for his alleged suicide. This was reflected in their official statements to the media: “It is unknownat this timethe reasons forhis actions”. However, a back story appears to have been inserted simultaneously, most likely from the very same police media liaisons, who then told the press that Fredou was ‘depressed and overworked’. For any law enforcement officer in France, it would seem rather odd that anyone would want to miss the biggest single terror event in the century, or history in the making, as it were.
Here is a link to the original report in the French media, which confirms that Commissioner Fredou was indeed working on the Charlie Hebdo case:
“TheFredouCommissioner, like all agentsSRPJ,workedyesterdayon the caseof the massacreat the headquarters ofCharlieHebdo.In particular, hewas investigatingthe family ofone of the victims. He killed himselfbeforecompleting its report. A psychological ‘cell’was set upin thepolice station.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: It is not yet known to 21WIRE exactly how the fatal gun shot occurred, but if any other past political and high-profile ‘suicided’ cases are anything to go by, authorities will claim that this victim either shot himself in the back of the head, with his non-shooting hand. In addition, if that were the case, there would also be a lack of gun powder burns on the hands according to the autopsy.
UK-based investigative reporter Morris108, interviews ‘Phil in France’ regarding this new development:
Even more bizarrely, an almost identical event took place just over one year earlier, November 2013 in Limoges, when the number 3 ranked SRPJ officer had killed himself in similar circumstances, with his weapon in the police hotel. Allegedly, his colleague discovered his body. The prosecution ruled that case was a suicide too, and the police officer had left a suicide note to his family in which he expressed “personal reasons” for his surprising action. Stay tuned for more updates on this story at 21WIRE.
Sputnik News
Police commissioner, who had been investigating the attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine committed suicide with his service gun on Thursday night.
Police commissioner Helric Fredou, who had been investigating the attack on the French weekly satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, committed suicide in his office. The incident occurred in Limoges, the administrative capital of the Limousin region in west-central France, on Thursday night, local media France 3 reports.
Helric Fredou, 45, suffered from ‘depression’ and experienced ‘burn out’ [according to the official statement]. Shortly before committing suicide, he met with the family of a victim of the Charlie Hebdo attack and killed himself preparing the report.
Fredou began his career in 1997 as a police officer at the regional office of the judicial police of Versailles. Later he returned to Limoges, his hometown. Since 2012 he had been the deputy director of the regional police service.
“We are all shocked. Nobody was ready for such developments”, a representative of the local police union told reporters.
On January 7, 2015, two gunmen burst into the editorial office of Charlie Hebdo magazine, known for issuing cartoons, ridiculing Islam. The [suspected] attackers, later identified as brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi, killed 12 people and injured 11, and escaped from the scene. Following two days of nationwide manhunt, the suspects were killed on Friday by French police some 20 miles northeast of Paris.
Isreal is Getting Away with Murder On January 28th a barrage of Israeli artillery fire struck near the South Lebanese village of Ghajar, killing United Nations peacekeeper Francisco Javier Soria. Soria, 36, was a Spanish citizen deployed with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, a peacekeeping mission tasked with maintaining the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon in the occupied Golan Heights.
His death came in the midst of a recent flare-up of violence between Israel and Hezbollah, and Spain’s ambassador to the United Nations placed blame for the incident upon the Israeli Defence Forces, citing an “escalation of violence [which] came from the Israeli side.” The exact circumstances which led to Soria’s death are still under investigation; Israeli officials expressed condolences for his death and said their forces were responding to fire in the area.
What is clear however is that Israeli forces have been killing an alarming number of United Nations personnel in the course of their recent military operations — and that UN officials have vociferously criticized the attacks, sometimes saying they appeared deliberate.
This past summer in the Gaza Strip, Israel forces attacked seven different schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, schools that had been serving as temporary shelters for the displaced population of the territory. Despite repeated warnings, condemnations and entreaties, United Nations targets were hit again and again by Israeli airstrikes and shelling during the conflict.
As many of 46 civilians are believed to have been killed in these attacks, as well as eleven UNRWA staff members. One particularly lethal strike on a UN-administered elementary school in Beit Hanoun killed 15 civilians and wounded 200 others. That attack reportedly sent shrapnel flying into crowds of families who had been awaiting transportation in the school’s playground.
In the wake of these and other bombings, UNRWA chief Chris Gunness broke down in tears during a live television interview while decrying the “[wholesale] denial” of Palestinian rights by Israeli forces during the operation.
Instead of offering contrition for these deadly incidents, Israeli officials continued to justify them with unsubstantiated, and vigorously deniedallegations that UNRWA schools were near sources of rocket fire and were thus simply caught in the crossfire. An investigation by Human Rights Watch looking at several of Israel’s attacks on these schools said that they, “did not appear to target a military objective or were otherwise unlawfully indiscriminate.”
Indeed, the idea that Israel’s repeated bombing of these schools may have simply been “mistakes” is difficult to countenance.
In one shelling incident which targeted a school in Rafah, United Nations personnel notified the IDF on 33 separate occasions that the facility was being used as a shelter for civilians. United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon publicly denounced the attack as a “moral outrage and a criminal act”, adding that “nothing is more shameful than attacking sleeping children”.
Even the United States, normally Israel’s most uncritical defender on the world stage, was moved to state that it was was “appalled” by what it described as a “disgraceful” attack on the school.
As egregious as these incidents were however, they are far from the first time in recent years in which Israel has targeted United Nations operations for shelling and airstrikes.
During the 2008-2009 Gaza War, Israeli forces targeted not only UNRWA schools (one of them pictured above) but even the compound housing the headquarters of the agency in the Gaza Strip. That attack, which involved the use of illegal white phosphorus munitions, destroyed tons of vital food aid and medical supplies which the large refugee population of the territory relied upon for basic sustenance.
Isreal is Getting Away with Murder At the time, Israeli officials claimed that they had been responding to rocket fire which had emanated from the compound, a claim which UN officials described as “total nonsense”.
In another notorious incident from Israel’s 2006 war with Lebanon, Israeli aircraft and artillery bombed a single United Nations outpost for upwards of six hours, despite receiving repeated pleas during this time from UN officials to cease fire. Four peacekeepers were killed in what then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan described as an “apparently deliberate” act.
Israel has long had a contentious relationship with United Nations agencies operating in the Middle East. Israeli officials have in past accused UN personnel of offering shelter to militants (a charge the organization strenuously denies), and has also more broadly suggested that the organization is responsible for prolonging the Israel-Palestine conflict due to its provision of refugee status and services to displaced Palestinians and their descendants.
In the wake of the most recent Gaza conflict, some Israeli political figures even called for UNRWA to formally be recognized as a “hostile organization”, an outrageous suggestion which nevertheless provides some insight into the hostility with which the UN is often viewed today in official circles.
Israel’s repeated bombing and shelling of United Nations positions in the region comes against this backdrop, with Soria’s death being only the latest incident in which Israeli forces have been responsible for killing UN personnel. To date, no one has been held legally responsible for any of these attacks.
By way of contrast, imagine the response if Hamas or Hezbollah had repeatedly and unrepentantly killed United Nations officials in the course of their conflict with Israel. Imagine if United Nations schools housing thousands of displaced civilians been struck time and again by militant groups, who in the wake of the bloodshed either denied responsibility outright or sought to justify their actions.
Furthermore, imagine if these attacks inflicted widespread civilian casualties and came despite repeated pleas and entreaties from UN officials to cease fire.
The outcry would rightly be deafening, yet this is exactly what Israel has done again and again in its conflicts in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip without consequence. As a result of this burgeoning culture of impunity, partly enabled by the unprecedented diplomatic protection offered to Israeli officials by the United States, UN personnel and facilities have increasingly been subject to deadly violence from the Israeli military.
As Pierre Krähenbühl, commissioner-general of UNRWA, stated in the aftermath of a deadly bombing against a UN-administered school in Gaza this past summer, “this [attack] is an affront to all of us, a source of universal shame. Today, the world stands disgraced.”
How to identify CIA The operations of secret intelligence agencies aiming at the manipulation of public opinion generally involve a combination of cynical deception with the pathetic gullibility of the targeted populations. There is ample reason to believe that the case of Edward Joseph Snowden fits into this pattern. We are likely dealing here with a limited hangout operation, in which carefully selected and falsified documents and other materials are deliberately revealed by an insider who pretends to be a fugitive rebelling against the excesses of some oppressive or dangerous government agency. But the revelations turn out to have been prepared with a view to shaping the public consciousness in a way which is advantageous to the intelligence agency involved. At the same time, gullible young people can be duped into supporting a personality cult of the leaker, more commonly referred to as a “whistleblower.”
A further variation on the theme can be the attempt of the sponsoring intelligence agency to introduce their chosen conduit, now posing as a defector, into the intelligence apparatus of a targeted foreign government. In this case, the leaker or whistleblower attains the status of a triple agent. Any attempt to educate public opinion about the dynamics of limited hangout operations inevitably collides with the residue left in the minds of millions by recent successful examples of this technique. It will be hard for many to understand Snowden, precisely because they will insist on seeing him as the latest courageous example in a line of development which includes Daniel Ellsberg and Julian Assange, both still viewed by large swaths of naïve opinion as authentic challengers of oppressive government. This is because the landmark limited hangout operation at the beginning of the current post-Cold War era was that of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon papers, which laid the groundwork for the CIA’s Watergate attack on the Nixon administration, and more broadly, on the office of the presidency itself. More recently, we have had the case of Assange and Wikileaks.
Using these two cases primarily, we can develop a simple typology of the limited hangout operation which can be of significant value to those striving to avoid the role of useful idiots amidst the current cascade of whistleblowers and limited hangout artists. In this analysis, we should also recall that limited hangouts have been around for a very long time. In 1620 Fra Paolo Sarpi, the dominant figure of the Venetian intelligence establishment of his time, advised the Venetian senate that the best way to defeat anti-Venetian propaganda was indirectly. He recommended the method of saying something good about a person or institution while pretending to say something bad. An example might be criticizing a bloody dictator for beating his dog – the real dimensions of his crimes are thus totally underplayed.
Limited hangout artists are instant media darlings
The most obvious characteristic of the limited hangout operative is that he or she immediately becomes the darling of the controlled corporate media. In the case of Daniel Ellsberg, his doctored set of Pentagon papers were published by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and eventually by a consortium totaling seventeen corporate newspapers. These press organs successfully argued the case for publication all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where they prevailed against the Nixon administration. Needless to say, surviving critics of the Warren Commission, and more recent veterans of the 9/11 truth movement, and know very well that this is emphatically not the treatment reserved for messengers whose revelations are genuinely unwelcome to the Wall Street centered US ruling class. These latter are more likely to be slandered, vilified and dragged through the mud, or, even more likely, passed over in complete silence and blacked out. In extreme cases, they can be kidnapped, renditioned or liquidated.
Cass Sunstein present at the creation of Wikileaks
As for Assange and Wikileaks, the autumn 2010 document dump was farmed out in advance to five of the most prestigious press organs in the world, including the New York Times, the London Guardian, El Pais of Madrid, Der Spiegel of Hamburg, and Le Monde of Paris. This was the Assange media cartel, made up of papers previously specialized in discrediting 9/11 critics and doubters. But even before the document dumps had begun, Wikileaks had received a preemptive endorsement from none other than the notorious totalitarian Cass Sunstein, later an official of the Obama White House, and today married to Samantha Power, the author of the military coup that overthrew Mubarak and currently Obama’s pick for US ambassador to the United Nations. Sunstein is infamous for his thesis that government agencies should conduct covert operations using pseudo-independent agents of influence for the “cognitive infiltration of extremist groups” – meaning of those who reject in the establishment view of history and reality.Sunstein’s article entitled “Brave New WikiWorld” was published in the Washington Post of February 24, 2007, and touted the capabilities of Wikileaks for the destabilization of China.
Perhaps the point of Ed Snowden’s presence in Hong Kong is to begin re-targeting these capabilities back towards the original anti-Chinese plan. Snowden has already become a media celebrity of the first magnitude. His career was launched by the US left liberal Glenn Greenwald, now writing for the London Guardian, which expresses the viewpoints of the left wing of the British intelligence community. Thus, the current scandal is very much Made in England, and may benefit from inputs from the British GCHQ of Cheltenham, the Siamese twin of the NSA at Fort Meade, Maryland. During the days of his media debut, it was not uncommon to see a controlled press organ like CNN dedicating one third of every broadcast hour of air time to the birth, life, and miracles of Ed Snowden.
Another suspicious and tell-tale endorsement for Snowden comes from the former State Department public diplomacy asset Norman Solomon. Interviewed on RT, Solomon warmly embraced the Snowden Project and assured his viewers that the NSA material dished up by the Hong Kong defector used reliable and authentic. Solomon was notorious ten years ago as a determined enemy of 9/11 truth, acting as a border guard in favor of the Bush administration/neocon theory of terrorism.
Limited hangouts contain little that is new
Another important feature of the limited hangout operation if that the revelations often contain nothing new, but rather repackage old wine in new bottles. In the case of Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers, very little was revealed which was not already well known to a reader of Le Monde or the dispatches of Agence France Presse. Only those whose understanding of world affairs had been filtered through the Associated Press, CBS News, the New York Times, and the Washington Post found any of Ellsberg’s material a surprise. Of course, there was method in Ellsberg’s madness. The Pentagon papers allegedly derived from an internal review of the decision-making processes leading to the Vietnam War, conducted after 1967-68 under the supervision of Morton Halperin and Leslie Gelb. Ellsberg, then a young RAND Corporation analyst and militant warmonger, was associated with this work.
Upon examination, we find that the Pentagon papers tend to cover up such CIA crimes as the mass murder mandated under Operation Phoenix, and the massive CIA drug running associated with the proprietary airline Air America. Rather, when atrocities are in question, the US Army generally receives the blame. Politicians in general, and President John F. Kennedy in particular, are portrayed in a sinister light – one might say demonized. No insights whatever into the Kennedy assassination are offered. This was a smelly concoction, and it was not altogether excluded that the radicalized elements of the Vietnam era might have carried the day in denouncing the entire package as a rather obvious fabrication. But a clique around Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn loudly intervened to praise the quality of the exposé and to lionize Ellsberg personally as a new culture hero for the Silent Generation. From that moment on, the careers of Chomsky and Zinn soared. Pentagon papers skeptics, like the satirical comedian Mort Sahl, a supporter of the Jim Garrison investigation in New Orleans and a critic of the Warren Commission, faced the marginalization of their careers.
Notice also that the careers of Morton Halperin and Leslie Gelb positively thrived after they entrusted the Pentagon papers to Ellsberg, who revealed them. Ellsberg was put on trial in 1973, but all charges were dismissed after several months because of prosecutorial misconduct. Assange lived like a lord for many months in the palatial country house of an admirer in the East of England, and is now holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. He spent about 10 days in jail in December 2010.Assange first won credibility for Wikileaks with some chum in the form of a shocking film showing a massacre perpetrated by US forces in Iraq with the aid of drones. The massacre itself and the number of victims were already well known, so Assange was adding only the graphic emotional impact of witnessing the atrocity firsthand.
Limited hangouts reveal nothing about big issues like JFK, 9/11
Over the past century, there are certain large-scale covert operations which cast a long historical shadow, determining to some extent the framework in which subsequent events occur. These include the Sarajevo assassinations of 1914, the assassination of Rasputin in late 1916, Mussolini’s 1922 march on Rome, Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, the assassination of French Foreign Minister Barthou in 1934, the assassination of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945, in 1963 Kennedy assassination, and 9/11. A common feature of the limited hangout operations is that they offer almost no insights into these landmark events. In the Pentagon Papers, the Kennedy assassination is virtually a nonexistent event about which we learn nothing. As already noted, the principal supporters of Ellsberg were figures like Chomsky, whose hostility to JFK and profound disinterest in critiques of the Warren Commission were well-known.
As for Assange, he rejects any further clarification of 9/11. In July 2010, Assange told Matthew Bell of the Belfast Telegraph: “I’m constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud.” This is on top of Cass Sunstein’s demand for active covert measures to suppress and disrupt inquiries into operations like 9/11. Snowden’s key backers Glenn Greenwald and Norman Solomon have both compiled impressive records of evasion on 9/11 truth, with Greenwald specializing in the blowback theory.
The Damascus road conversions of limited hangout figures
Daniel Ellsberg started his career as a nuclear strategist of the Dr. Strangelove type working for the RAND Corporation. He worked in the Pentagon as an aide to US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. He then went to Vietnam, where he served as a State Department civilian assistant to CIA General Edward Lansdale. In 1967, he was back at RAND to begin the preparation of what would come to be known as the Pentagon papers. Ellsberg has claimed that his Damascus Road conversion from warmonger to peace angel occurred when he heard a speech from a prison-bound draft resister at Haverford College in August 1969. After a mental breakdown, Ellsberg began taking his classified documents to the office of Senator Edward Kennedy and ultimately to the New York Times. Persons who believe this fantastic story may be suffering from terminal gullibility.
In the case of Assange, it is harder to identify such a moment of conversion. Assange spent his childhood in the coils of MK Ultra, a complex of Anglo-American covert operations designed to investigate and implement mind control through the use of psychopharmaca and other means. Assange was a denizen of the Ann Hamilton-Byrne cult, in which little children that were subjected to aversive therapy involving LSD and other heavy-duty drugs. Assange spent his formative years as a wandering nomad with his mother incognito because of her involvement in a custody dispute. The deracinated Assange lived in 50 different towns and attended 37 different schools. By the age of 16, the young nihilist was active as a computer hacker using the screen name “Mendax,” meaning quite simply “The Liar.” (Assange’s clone Snowden uses the more marketable codename of “Verax,” the truth teller.) Some of Assange’s first targets were Nortel and US Air Force offices in the Pentagon. Assange’s chief mentor became John Young of Cryptome, who in 2007 denounced Wikileaks as a CIA front.
Snowden’s story, as widely reported, goes like this: he dropped out of high school and also dropped out of a community college, but reportedly was nevertheless later able to command a salary of between $120,000 and $200,000 per year; he claims this is because he is a computer wizard. He enlisted in the US Army in May 2004, and allegedly hoped to join the special forces and contribute to the fight for freedom in Iraq. He then worked as a low-level security guard for the National Security Agency, and then went on to computer security at the CIA, including a posting under diplomatic cover in Switzerland. He moved on to work as a private contractor for the NSA at a US military base in Japan. His last official job was for the NSA at the Kunia Regional SIGINT Operations Center in Hawaii. In May 2013, he is alleged to have been granted medical leave from the NSA in Hawaii to get treatment for epilepsy. He fled to Hong Kong, and made his revelations with the help of Greenwald and a documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras. Snowden voted for the nominally anti-war, ultra-austerity “libertarian” presidential candidate Ron Paul, and gave several hundred dollars to Paul’s campaign.
Snowden, like Ellsberg, thus started off as a warmonger but later became more concerned with the excesses of the Leviathan state. Like Assange, he was psychologically predisposed to the world of computers and cybernetics. The Damascus Road shift from militarist to civil libertarian remains unexplained and highly suspicious. Snowden is also remarkable for the precision of his timing. His first revelations, open secrets though they were, came on June 5, precisely today when the rebel fortress of Qusayr was liberated by the Syrian army and Hezbollah. At this point, the British and French governments were screaming at Obama that it was high time to attack Syria. The appearance of Snowden’s somewhat faded material in the London Guardian was the trigger for a firestorm of criticism against the Obama regime by the feckless US left liberals, who were thus unwittingly greasing the skids for a US slide into a general war in the Middle East.
More recently, Snowden came forward with allegations that the US and the British had eavesdropped on participants in the meeting of the G-20 nations held in Britain four years ago. This obviously put Obama on the defensive just as Cameron and Hollande were twisting his arm to start the Syrian adventure. By attacking the British GCHQ at Cheltenham, Britain’s equivalent to the NSA, perhaps Snowden was also seeking to obfuscate the obvious British sponsorship of his revelations. Stories about Anglo Americans spying on high profile guests are as old as the hills, and have included a British frogman who attempted an underwater investigation of the Soviet cruiser that brought party leader N. S. Khrushchev for a visit in the 1950s. Snowden has also accused the NSA of hacking targets in China — again, surely no surprise to experienced observers, but guaranteed to increase Sino-American tensions. As time passes, Snowden may emerge as more and more of a provocateur between Washington and Beijing.
Limited hangouts prepare large covert operations
Although, as we have seen, limited hangouts rarely illuminate the landmark covert operations which attempt to define an age, limited hangouts themselves do represent the preparation for future covert operations. In the case of the Pentagon papers, this and other leaks during the Indo-Pakistani Tilt crisis were cited by Henry Kissinger in his demand that President Richard Nixon take countermeasures to restore the integrity of state secrets. Nixon foolishly authorized the creation of a White House anti-leak operation known as the Plumbers. The intelligence community made sure that the Plumbers operation was staffed by their own provocateurs, people who never were loyal to Nixon but rather took their orders from Langley. Here we find the already infamous CIA agent Howard Hunt, the CIA communications expert James McCord, and the FBI operative G. Gordon Liddy. These provocateurs took special pains to get arrested during an otherwise pointless break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the summer of 1972. Nixon could easily have disavowed the Plumbers and thrown this gaggle of agent provocateurs to the wolves, but he instead launched a cover up. Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, equipped with a top secret security clearance from the Office of Naval Intelligence, then began publicizing the story. The rest is history, and the lasting heritage has been a permanent weakening of the office of the presidency and the strengthening of the worst oligarchical tendencies.
Assange’s Wikileaks document dump triggered numerous destabilizations and coups d’état across the globe. Not one US, British, or Israeli covert operation or politician was seriously damaged by this material. The list of those impacted instead bears a striking resemblance to the CIA enemies’ list: the largest group of targets were Arab leaders slated for immediate ouster in the wave of “Arab Spring.” Here we find Ben Ali of Tunisia, Qaddafi of Libya, Mubarak of Egypt, Saleh of Yemen, and Assad of Syria. The US wanted to replace Maliki with Allawi as prime minister of Iraq, so the former was targeted, as was the increasingly independent Karzai of Afghanistan.
Perennial targets of the CIA included Rodriguez Kirchner of Argentina, Berlusconi of Italy, and Putin of Russia. Berlusconi soon fell victim to a coup organized through the European Central Bank, while his friend Putin was able to stave off a feeble attempt at color revolution in early 2012. Mildly satiric jabs at figures like Merkel of Germany and Sarkozy of France were included primarily as camouflage. Assange thus had a hand in preparing one of the largest destabilization campaigns mounted by Anglo-American intelligence since 1968, or perhaps even 1848. If the Snowden operation can help coerce the vacillating and reluctant Obama to attack Syria, our new autistic hero may claim credit for starting a general war in the Middle East, and perhaps even more. If Snowden can further poison relations between United States and China, the world historical significance of his provocations will be doubly assured. But none of this can occur unless he finds vast legions of eager dupes ready to fall for his act. We hope he won’t.
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DEEP UNDERGROUND MILITARY BASES Unknown to most Americans is a dark secret, and it’s right under our noses. It’s the reality of the existence of DEEP UNDERGROUND MILITARY BASES. These Underground bases get prominent play in dark rumors circulating about captured extraterrestrials and alien technology.
In America alone there are over 120 Deep Underground Military Bases situated under most major cities, US AFBs, US Navy Bases and US Army Bases, as well as underneath FEMA Military Training Camps and DHS control centers. There are also many Deep Underground Military Bases under Canada. Almost all of these bases are over 2 miles underground and have diameters ranging from 10 miles up to 30 miles across!
They have been building these bases day and night, unceasingly, since the 1940s. These bases are basically large cities underground connected by high-speed magneto-levity trains that have speeds up to 1500 MPH. Several books have been written about this activity.
Richard Souder, a Ph.D. architect, risked his life by talking about this. He is the author of the book, ‘Underground Bases and Tunnels: What is the Government Trying to Hide’.
He worked with a number of government agencies on deep underground military bases. The average depth of these bases is over a mile, and they again are basically whole cities underground. They have nuclear powered laser drilling machines that can drill a tunnel seven miles long in one day. (Note: The September, 1983 issue of Omni (Pg. 80) has a color drawing of ‘The Subterrene,’ the Los Alamos nuclear-powered tunnel machine that burrows through the rock, deep underground, by heating whatever stone it encounters into molten rock.)
Murdered for Whistleblowing on his involvement in (being tricked into helping design), Deep Underground Military Bases
Demolition & Structural Engineer
DUMBs Whistleblower Phil Schneider died from suicide, ‘officially’. His own catheter, strangled him, while he was limited to his own wheel chair. Suspicious? Anyone with functional brain would probably think so.
This base is the Geo location ‘Area’ where MH 730 (Malaysian Airliner) went Missing Coincidence?
Hidden in Plain Sight – Hollywood Zombie Thriller RESIDENT EVIL
(2003) If Hollywood is Showing us in the Movies, then they already have it long before they potentially ‘give the enemy ideas’. Interesting position that puts the secret keepers in..
This is BY FAR the Most Accurate ‘Hollywood‘ Depiction of a very real ‘Deep Underground Military Base’. DULCE underground Facililty (well documented) has been presented in a similar way.
Massively Popular – Now Cult Classic Video Game ‘Half Life‘ Plot is Centered around a Secret Underground Government Lab, Where Things Go Awry…
Plot
Physicist Gordon Freeman arrives late for work at the Black Mesa Research Facility. As part of an experiment, he pushes an unusual material into a machine for analysis. The spectrometer explodes, creating a “resonance cascade” that opens a portal to another dimension,Xen. Surviving scientists urge Gordon to head to the surface, where he defends himself against hostile Xen creatures and Marines sent to cover up the incident.
This Topic is Directly Connected to the Occult / UFO / Secret Technology,
and Especially, the Human Trafficking of Woman and Children
In America alone there are over 120 Deep Underground Military Bases situated under most major cities, US AFBs, US Navy Bases and US Army Bases, as well as underneath FEMA Military Training Camps and DHS control centers. There are also many Deep Underground Military Bases under Canada. Almost all of these bases are over 2 miles underground and have diameters ranging from 10 miles up to 30 miles across! They have been building these bases day and night, unceasingly, since the 1940s. These bases are basically large cities underground connected by high-speed magneto-levity trains that have speeds up to 1500 MPH. Several books have been written about this activity. Richard Souder, a Ph.D. architect, risked his life by talking about this. He is the author of the book, ‘Underground Bases and Tunnels: What is the Government Trying to Hide’. He worked with a number of government agencies on deep underground military bases. The average depth of these bases is over a mile, and they again are basically whole cities underground. They have nuclear powered laser drilling machines that can drill a tunnel seven miles long in one day. (Note: The September, 1983 issue of Omni (Pg. 80) has a color drawing of ‘The Subterrene,’ the Los Alamos nuclear-powered tunnel machine that burrows through the rock, deep underground, by heating whatever stone it encounters into molten rock.)
The Black Projects sidestep the authority of Congress, which as we know is illegal. There is much hard evidence out there. Many will react with fear, terror and paranoia, but you must snap out of it and wake up from the brainwashing your media pumps into your heads all day long. Are you going to be a rabbit in the headlights, or are you going to stand up and say enough is enough? The US Government through the NSA, DOD, CIA, DIA, ATF, ONI, US Army, US Marine Corp, FEMA and the DHS has spent in excess of 12 trillion dollars building the massive, covert infrastructure for the coming One World Government and New World Religion over the past 40 years.
There is the Deep Underground Military Base underneath Denver International Airport, which is over 22 miles in diameter and goes down over 8 levels. It’s no coincidence that the CIA relocated the headquarters of its domestic division, which is responsible for operations in the United States, from the CIA’s Langley headquarters to Denver. Constructed in 1995, the government and politicians were hell bent on building this airport in spite of it ending up vastly overbudget. Charges of corruption, constant construction company changes, and mass firings of teams once they had built a section of their work was reported so that no “one” group had any idea what the blueprint of the airport was. Not only did locals not want this airport built nor was it needed, but everything was done to make sure it was built despite that. Masonic symbols and bizarre artwork of dead babies, burning cities and women in coffins comprise an extensive mural as well as a time capsule – none of which is featured in the airport’s web site section detailing the unique artwork throughout the building. DIA serves as a cover for the vast underground facilities that were built there. There are reports of electronic/magnetic vibrations which make some people sick and cause headaches in others. There are acres of fenced-in areas which have barbed wire pointing into the area as if to keep things in, and small concrete stacks that resemble mini-cooling towers rise out of the acres of nowhere to apparently vent underground levels. The underground facility is 88.3 square miles deep. Basically this Underground Base is 8 cities on top of each other! The holding capacity of such leviathanic bases is huge. These city-sized bases can hold millions and millions of people, whether they are mind controlled, enslaved NWO World Army Soldiers or innocent and enslaved surface dwellers from the towns and cities of America and Canada.
There is Dulce Base, in New Mexico. Dulce is a small town in northern New Mexico, located above 7,000 feet on the Jicarilla Apache Indian Reservation. There is only one major motel and a few stores. It’s not a resort town and it is not bustling with activity. But Dulce has a deep, dark secret. The secret is harbored deep below the brush of Archuleta Mesa. Function: Research of mind related functions, genetic experiments, mind control training and reprograming. There are over 3000 real-time video cameras throughout the complex at high-security locations (entrances and exits). There are over 100 secret exits near and around Dulce. Many around Archuleta Mesa, others to the south around Dulce Lake and even as far east as Lindrith. Deep sections of the complex connect into natural cavern systems. Level 1 – garage for street maintenance. Level 2 – garage for trains, shuttles, tunnel-boring machines and disc maintenance. Level 3 – everyone is weighed, in the nude, then given a jump suit uniform. The weight of the person is put on a computer I.D. card each day. Change in over three dollars requires a physical exam and X-ray. Level 4 – Human research in ‘paranormal’ areas – mental telepathy, mind control, hypnosis, remote viewing, astral traveling – etc. The technology is apparently here to allow them to know how to manipulate the ‘Bioplasmic Body’ Development of a laser weapon that can remotely cause burns and discomfort on it’s target. They can lower your heartbeat with Deep Sleep ‘Delta Waves,’ induce a static shock, then reprogram, Via a Brain- Computer link. Level 5 -security is severe. Armed guards patrol constantly, and in addition to weight sensitive areas there (are) hand print and eye print stations. Here, is the device that powers the transfer of atoms. Level 6 – Level 6 is privately called ‘Nightmare Hall’. It holds the genetic labs. Experiments done on fish, seals, birds, and mice that are vastly altered from their original forms.
Then there is the Greenbrier Facility, in White Sulfer Springs, West Virginia under the Greenbriar Resort. The Continuity of Government facility intended since 1962 to house the United States Congress, code-named Casper, is located on the grounds of the prestigious Greenbrier resort. The bunker is beneath the West Virginia wing, which includes a complete medical clinic. Construction of the facility, which began in 1959, required 2.5 years and 50,000 tons of concrete. The steel-reinforced concrete walls of the bunker, which is 20 feet below ground, are 2 feet thick. The facility includes separate chambers for the House of Representatives and the Senate, as well as a larger room for joint sessions. These are located in the “Exhibit Hall” of the West Virginia Wing, which includes vehicular and pedestrian entrances which can be quickly sealed by blast doors. They don’t even hide this one, and it’s even a tourist attraction. The Underground vault was built to meet the needs of a Congress-in-hiding – in fact the hotel is a replica of the White House. The underground area has a chamber for the Senate, a chamber for the House and a massive hall for joint sessions. Although the hotel says it gives tours of the 112,000 square area daily, the installation still stands at the ready, its operators still working under cover at the hotel. The secrecy that has surrounded the site has shielded it both from public scrutiny and official reassessment.
Most Americans will not believe that an American Holocaust will happen until they see it happening with their own eyes. Till then, it is just another strange conspiracy theory for them to laugh at. This is no laughing matter. When it happens, it will be to late to stop it. The US Government has been involved covertly in the creation of an army of loyal, brainwashed soldiers of the future. They will have cybernetic and microchip implants and will fight anywhere in the world, without question, with total loyalty and without hesitation or fear. These soldiers were created at Brookhaven National Laboratories BNL, the National Ordinance Laboratories NOL and the Massachussetts Institute of Technology MIT, and covertly transferred under DOD and NSA control and planning. Many of these soldiers are stationed in the Deep Underground Military Bases like the one under Denver International Airport. All of this information has been researched, and it has taken much effort to fit it together properly. There are many mag-lev subterraenean train networks that stretch from the these complexes and go out to other underground bases. All soldiers working in these bases are microchipped and under total Psychotronic Mind Control. Of the missing “Milk Carton People” that the FBI used to post on milk cartons, some were taken to these underground bases for genetic experimentation, microchipping, psychotronic mind control and cybernetic implantations for future use as brainwashed soldiers of the NWO. Every year in America hundreds of thousands of people go missing. The creation of a total Global Fascist Police State by the Illuminati will happen if we do not all wake up and see what is happening. I find it amazing that so many Americans, Scandanavians and Western Europeans refuse to believe that there are millions of UNISF and UNMNTF Troops in America. Under the Partnerships For Peace Program PFPP set up by President Bill Clinton in early 1993, thousands of troops a month have been coming into America. These Fascist criminals parade as our friends and leaders, while stripping away democratic rights that will be replaced with a Corporatist and Fascist dictatorship, unless people, and especially Americans, wake up now. Here are the locations of some Deep Underground Military Bases in America:
ALASKA 1. Brooks Range, Alaska 2. Delta Junction, Alaska 2a. Fort Greeley, Alaska. In the same Delta Junction area.
ARIZONA 1. Arizona (Mountains) (not on map) Function: Genetic work. Multiple levels 2. Fort Huachuca, Arizona (also reported detainment camp) Function: NSA Facility 2. Luke Air Force Base 3. Page, Arizona Tunnels to: Area 51, Nevada Dulce base, New Mexico 4. Sedona, Arizona (also reported detainment camp) Notes: Located under the Enchantment Resort in Boynton Canyon. There have been many reports by people in recent years of “increased military presence and activity” in the area.5. Wikieup, Arizona Tunnels to: Area 51 6. Yucca (Mtns.), Arizona
CALIFORNIA 1: 29 Palms, California Tunnels to: Chocolate Mts., Fort Irwin, California (possibly one more site due west a few miles) 2: Benicia, California 3. Catalina Island, California Tunnels to: I was told by someone who worked at the Port Hueneme Naval Weapons Division Base in Oxnard that they have heard and it is ‘common rumor’ that there is a tunnel from the base to this Island, and also to Edwards Air Force Base, possibly utilizing old mines. . 4. China Lake Naval Weapons Testing Center 5. Chocolate Mountains, California Tunnels to: Fort Irwin, California 6. Death Valley,California Function: The entrance to the Death Valley Tunnel is in the Panamint Mountains down on the lower edge of the range near Wingate Pass, in the bottom of an abandoned mine shaft. The bottom of the shaft opens into an extensive tunnel system 7. Deep Springs, California Tunnels to: Death Valley, Mercury, NV, Salt Lake City 8. Edwards AFB, California Function: Aircraft Development – antigravity research and vehicle development Levels: Multiple Tunnels to: Catalina Island Fort Irwin, California Vandenburg AFB, California Notes: Delta Hanger – North Base, Edwards AFB, Ca. Haystack Buttte – Edwards, AFB, Ca. 9. Fort Irwin, California (also reported detainment camp) Tunnels to: 29 Palms, California Area 51, Nevada Edwards AFB. California Mt. Shasta, California 10. Helendale, California Function: Special Aircraft Facility Helendale has an extensive railway/shipping system through it from the Union Pacific days which runs in from Salt Lake City, Denver, Omaha, Los Angeles and Chicago 11. Lancaster, California Function: New Aircraft design, anti-gravity engineering, Stealth craft and testing Levels: 42 Tunnels To: Edwards A.F.B., Palmdale 12. Lawrence-Livermore International Labs, California The lab has a Human Genome Mapping project on chromosome #19 and a newly built $1.2 billion laser facility 13. Moreno Valley, California Function unknown 14. Mt. Lassen, California Tunnels to: Probably connects to the Mt. Shasta main tunnel. 15. Mt. Shasta. Function: Genetic experiments, magnetic advance, space and beam weaponry. Levels: 5 Tunnels to: Ft. Irwin, California North 16. Napa, California Functions: Direct Satellite Communications, Laser Communications. Continuation of Government site. Levels: Multi-level Tunnels to: Unknown Notes: Located on Oakville Grade, Napa County, Ca. 87 Acres 17. Needles, California Function unknown 18. Palmdale, California Function: New Aircraft Design, anit-gravity research 19. Tehachapi Facility (Northrop, California – Tejon Ranch Function: Levels: 42 Tunnels to: Edwards, Llona and other local areas Notes: 25 miles NW of Lancaster California, in the Tehachapi mountains. 20. Ukiah, California Function unknown
COLORADO 1. Near Boulder, Co. in the mountains Function unknown 2. Cheyenne Mountain -Norad -Colorado Springs, Colorado Function: Early Warning systems – missile defense systems – Space tracking Levels: Multiple Tunnels to: Colorado Springs, Function: Early warning systems, military strategy, satellite operations Levels: Multiple NORAD is a massive self-sustaining ‘city’ built inside the mountain Tunnels to: Creede, Denver, Dulce Base, Kinsley. 3. Creede, Colorado Function unknown Tunnels to: Colorado Springs, Colorado – Delta, Colorado – Dulce Base, New Mexico 4. Delta, Colorado Function unknown Tunnels to: Creede Salt Lake, Utah 5. Denver International Airport (also a detainment camp) Function: Military research, construction, detainment camp facilities Levels: 7 reported Tunnels to: Denver proper, Colorado and Rocky Mountain “safehousing”, Colorado Springs, Colorado (Cheyenne Mtn.)
6. Falcon Air Force Base, Falcon, Colorado Function: SDI, Satellite Control Levels: Multiple Tunnels to: Colorado Springs, possibly more. 7. Fort Collins, Colorado Function: Suspect high precision equipment manufacturing for space. 8. Grand Mesa, Colorado Function unknown 9. Gore Range Near Lake, west of Denver, Co. Function: Library and Central Data Bank 10. San Juan Valley, Colorado Hidden beneath and in an operating Buffalo Ranch Function unknown 11. Telluride, Colorado Function unknown 12. University of Denver, Co (Boulder area) Function: Genetics, geology/mining as related to tunneling and underground construction. 13. Warden Valley West of Fort Collins, CO Function Unknown Tunnels to: Montana
GEORGIA Dobbins Air Force Base, Marrietta GA Function: test site for plasma and antigravity air craft, experimental crafts and weapons
INDIANA Kokomo, Indiana Function Unknown Notes: for years people in that area have reported a “hum” that has been so constant that some have been forced to move and it has made many others sick. It seems to come from underground, and “research” has turned up nothing although it was suggested by someone that massive underground tunneling and excavating is going on, using naturally occurring caverns, to make an underground containment and storage facility.
KANSAS 1. Hutchinson, Kansas Function unknown Tunnels to: Kinsley, Nebraska. Note: I recieved this report concerning this base: “I can vouch for the underground base in Hutchinson, Ks. The entrance to the tunnel is underneath Hutchinson Hospital and is huge. I was walking down that tunnel when I was a kid and at the end of this tunnel is a rock face wall with a 90 degree turn to the right. I stopped and refused to go any further down the tunnel, my instincts told me to stop. I distinctly remember hearing screams coming from there. These were not just cries for help, but more like blood curtailing horrifying screams like someone had just been murdered. I really want to know what was and probably still is going on down there. You are free to report the story, but please keep my name anonymous.” 2. Kansas City, Kansas Function unknown Notes: Entrance near Worlds of Fun 3. Kinsley, Kansas Function unknown Tunnels to: Colorado Springs, Colorado; Hutchinson, Kansas; Tulsa Kokoweef Peak, SW California Notes: Gold stored in huge cavern, blasted shut. Known as the “midway city” because it’s located halfway between New York and San Francisco.
MASSACHUSETTS Maynard MA, FEMA regional center. Wackenhut is here too.
MONTANA Bozeman, Mont. Function: Genetics
NEVADA Area 51 – Groom Lake – Dreamland – Nellis Air Force Base Area 51 was said to exist only in our imaginations until Russian satellite photos were leaked to US sources and it’s amazing how you can get photos all over of it now, even posters. They’ve been busy little bees building this base up. Function: Stealth and cloaking Aircraft research & development. ‘Dreamland (Data Repository Establishment and Maintenance Land) Elmint (Electromagnetic Intelligence), Biological weapons research and genetic manipulation/warfare storage, Cold Empire, EVA, Program HIS (Hybrid Intelligence System),BW/CW; IRIS (Infrared Intruder Systems), Security: Above ground cameras, underground pressure sensors, ground and air patrol 2. Blue Diamond, Nevada Function unknown 3. Fallon Air Force Base area (the flats, near Reno) “American City” restricted military sites southwest of Fallon 4. Mercury, Nevada Function unknown 5. Tonopah, Nevada Function unknown 69: San Gabriel (mountains) On Western side of Mojave Desert Function unknown Notes: Heavy vibrations coming from under the forest floor which sounds like geared machinery. These vibrations and sounds are the same as heard in Kokomo, Indiana and are suspected underground building/tunneling operations.
NEW MEXICO 1. Albuquerque, New Mexico (AFB) Function unknown Levels: Multiple Tunnels to: Carlsbad, New Mexico Los Alamos, New Mexico Possible connections to Datil, and other points. 2. Carlsbad, New Mexico Functions: Underground Nuclear Testing Tunnels to: Fort Stockton, Texas. Roswell 3. Cordova, New Mexico Function unknown 4. Datil, New Mexico Function unknown Tunnels to: Dulce Base
5: Dulce Base, New Mexico. Tunnels to: Colorado Springs, Colorado Creed, Colorado Datil, N.M. Los Alamos. Page, Arizona Sandia Base Taos, NM
6. Los Alamos, New Mexico Functions: Psychotronic Research, Psychotronic Weapons Levels: Multiple Tunnels to: ALB AFB, New Mexico Dulce, New Mexico Connections to Datil,Taos 7. Sandia Base, New Mexico Functions: Research in Electrical/magnetic Phenomena Levels: Multiple Tunnels to: Dulce Base Notes: Related Projects are studied at Sandia Base by ‘The Jason Group’ (of 55 Scientists). They have secretly harnessed the ‘Dark Side of Technology’ and hidden the beneficial technology from the public. 8. Sunspot, NM Function unknown 9. Taos, New Mexico Function unknown Tunnels to: Dulce, New Mexico; Cog, Colorado Notes: Several other sidelines to area where Uranium is mined or processed. 10. White Sands, NM Function: Missile testing/design Levels: Seven known
NEW HAMPSHIRE There may be as many as three underground installations in New Hampshire’s hills, according to reports.
NEW YORK New York, New York Function unknown Tunnels to: Capitol Building, D.C.
OHIO Wright-Patterson Air Force Base – Dayton, Ohio Function: Air Force Repository. Rumored to house stealth technology and prototype craft
OREGON 1. Cave Junction, Oregon Function: Suspected Underground UFO Base Levels: At least one Notes: Suspected location is in or near Hope Mountain. Near Applegate Lake, Oregon, just over into California. Multiple shafts, access areas to over 1500 feet depth. Built using abandoned mine with over 36 known miles of tunnels, shafts. 2. Crater Lake, Oregon Tunnels: possible to Cave Junction 3. Klamath Falls, Oregon 4. Wimer, Oregon (Ashland Mt. area) Function: Underground Chemical Storage Levels: At least one
PENNSYLVANIA Raven Rock, Pa (near Ligonier) Function: working back up underground Pentagon – sister site of Mt. Weather Notes: 650′ below summit, 4 entrances.
TEXAS 1. Calvert, Texas Function unknown 2. Fort Hood, Texas (also reported detainment camp) Levels: Multiple 3. Fort Stockton, Texas Function: Unknown Tunnels to: Carlsbad, New Mexico UTAH 1. Dugway, Utah Function: Chemical Storage, Radiation storage. 2. Salt Lake City Mormon Caverns Function: Religions archives storage. Levels: Multiple Tunnels to: Delta, Colorado & Riverton, Wyoming
VIRGINIA Mount Poney – Near Culpepper, Virginia Function unknown
WASHINGTON 1. Mt. Rainier, Washington Function unknown. Levels: Multiple Tunnels to: Unknown Yakima Indian Reservation Function unknown Notes: Southeast of Tacoma Washington, on the Reservation, in an area 40 by 70 miles. Unusual sounds from underground (Toppenish Ridge). Low flying Silver Cigar shaped craft seen to disappear into the Middle fork area of Toppenish creek.
Washington DC: The Function: Part of a massive underground relocation system to house select government and military personnel in the event of cataclysmic event. Tunnels to: New York City; Mt. Weather.
WEST VIRGINIA: Greenbrier Facility, White Sulfer Springs, West Virginia under the Greenbriar Resort.
WYOMING: Riverton, Wyoming Function unknown Tunnels to: Salt Lake, Utah Denver, Colorado.
Alberto Behar Mr Behar died instantly when his single-engine plane nosedived shortly after takeoff Friday from Van Nuys Airport He worked on two Mars missions and spent years researching how robots work in harsh environments like volcanoes and underwater As part of the NASA team exploring Mars with the Curiosity rover, Behar was responsible for a device that detected hydrogen on the planet’s surface as the rover moved.
47-year old NASA Scientist Alberto Behar helped to prove that there had once been water on Mars according to the sad Daily Mail story published to announce his recent death in a plane crash that happened on Friday in LA, California. While plane crashes do happen and scientists do die, Behar’s name has now been added to a very long list of scientists and astronomers who have met their untimely ends prematurely, leading us to ask, did Behar know something that ‘they’ don’t want the rest of society to find out?
Robotics expert, NASA at the JPL.
Alberto Behar Mr Behar died instantly when his single-engine plane nosedived shortly after takeoff Friday from Van Nuys Airport He worked on two Mars missions and spent years researching how robots work in harsh environments like volcanoes and underwater As part of the NASA team exploring Mars with the Curiosity rover, Behar was responsible for a device that detected hydrogen on the planet’s surface as the rover moved.
47-year old NASA Scientist Alberto Behar helped to prove that there had once been water on Mars according to the sad Daily Mail story published to announce his recent death in a plane crash that happened on Friday in LA, California. While plane crashes do happen and scientists do die, Behar’s name has now been added to a very long list of scientists and astronomers who have met their untimely ends prematurely, leading us to ask, did Behar know something that ‘they’ don’t want the rest of society to find out?
Patrick Daniel “Pat” Tillman was an American football player who left his professional career and enlisted in the United States Army in June 2002 in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. During his stay in Afghanistan, he quickly realized there was deception behind USA’s going to war and that it seemed to be more about ‘theft of resources’.
Due to tight media control & manipulation of the facts, few Americans were aware that Tillman, just recently before his death, had become vocal of his anti ‘war-for-oil’ sentiments within the ranks. He was also concerned with the USA’s disregard for heavy civilian casualties, and treatment of the population.
Independent investigators have pointed out that Tillman was scheduled to meet & greet (whistle-blow) with Noam Chomsky in public, upon his return from Military service. Pat Tillman was well respected and highly influential during a critical ramp-up to what would become an even larger ‘war’. It is reasonable to suspect that he became a potential threat to the military-industrial-complex agenda.
Highly Suspicious Death & Cover-Up:
The official version of events (after a long and shady cover-up) were announced to be that Tillman’s death was due to an accidental ‘friendly fire’ incident. However the *leaked autopsy report showed that he was killed at very close range ‘assassination style’ with a triple tap shot to the forehead, which would be quite impossible if indeed a friendly fire ‘accident’.
Huey Percy Newton was an African-American political and urban activist who, along with Bobby Seale, co-founded the Black Panther Party in 1966. Many well educated activists would argue this group was ultimately undermined by FBI tactics and COINTELPRO, to destroy their image decrease effectiveness within the community.
Newton earned a Ph.D. in history of consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1980. His doctoral dissertation was entitled War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America.
Later, Newton’s widow, Frederika Newton, would discuss her husband’s often-ignored academic leanings on C-SPAN‘s “American Perspectives” program on February 18, 2006.
On August 22, 1989, Newton was fatally shot on Center Street in the Lower Bottoms neighborhood of West Oakland by 24-year-old BGF member and drug dealer Tyrone Robinson, in what some say was a ‘setup’ involving the FBI.
Newton’s last words, as he stood facing his killer, were, “You can kill my body, and you can take my life but you can never kill my soul. My soul will live forever!”
Huey Percy Newton was an African-American political and urban activist who, along with Bobby Seale, co-founded the Black Panther Party in 1966. Many well educated activists would argue this group was ultimately undermined by FBI tactics and COINTELPRO, to destroy their image decrease effectiveness within the community.
Newton earned a Ph.D. in history of consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1980. His doctoral dissertation was entitled War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America.
Later, Newton’s widow, Frederika Newton, would discuss her husband’s often-ignored academic leanings on C-SPAN‘s “American Perspectives” program on February 18, 2006.
On August 22, 1989, Newton was fatally shot on Center Street in the Lower Bottoms neighborhood of West Oakland by 24-year-old BGF member and drug dealer Tyrone Robinson, in what some say was a ‘setup’ involving the FBI.
Newton’s last words, as he stood facing his killer, were, “You can kill my body, and you can take my life but you can never kill my soul. My soul will live forever!”
Huey Percy Newton was an African-American political and urban activist who, along with Bobby Seale, co-founded the Black Panther Party in 1966. Many well educated activists would argue this group was ultimately undermined by FBI tactics and COINTELPRO, to destroy their image decrease effectiveness within the community.
Newton earned a Ph.D. in history of consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1980. His doctoral dissertation was entitled War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America.
Later, Newton’s widow, Frederika Newton, would discuss her husband’s often-ignored academic leanings on C-SPAN‘s “American Perspectives” program on February 18, 2006.
On August 22, 1989, Newton was fatally shot on Center Street in the Lower Bottoms neighborhood of West Oakland by 24-year-old BGF member and drug dealer Tyrone Robinson, in what some say was a ‘setup’ involving the FBI.
Newton’s last words, as he stood facing his killer, were, “You can kill my body, and you can take my life but you can never kill my soul. My soul will live forever!”
The Big Story Torture Everyone Is Missing Senate Torture Report
While the torture report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee is very important, it doesn’t address the big scoop regarding torture.
Instead, it is the Senate Armed ServicesCommittee’s report that dropped the big bombshell regarding the U.S. torture program.
Senator Levin, commenting on a Armed Services Committee’s report on torture in 2009, explained:
The techniques are based on tactics used by Chinese Communists against American soldiers during the Korean War for the purpose of eliciting FALSE confessions for propaganda purposes. Techniques used in SERE training include stripping trainees of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, subjecting them to face and body slaps, depriving them of sleep, throwing them up against a wall, confining them in a small box, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatures [and] waterboarding.
Former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration…
For most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.”
It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document…
When people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder,” he continued.” Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam . . .
A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 thatinterrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under “pressure” to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.
“While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq,” Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”
“I think it’s obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link (between al Qaida and Iraq),” [Senator] Levin said in a conference call with reporters. “They made out links where they didn’t exist.”
Levin recalled Cheney’s assertions that a senior Iraqi intelligence officer had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in the Czech Republic capital of Prague just months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred.
Despite what you’ve seen on TV, torture is really only good at one thing: eliciting false confessions. Indeed, Bush-era torture techniques, we now know, were cold-bloodedly modeled after methods used by Chinese Communists to extract confessions from captured U.S. servicemen that they could then use for propaganda during the Korean War.
So as shocking as the latest revelation in a new Senate Armed Services Committee report may be, it actually makes sense — in a nauseating way. The White House started pushing the use of torture not when faced with a “ticking time bomb” scenario from terrorists, but whenofficials in 2002 were desperately casting about for ways to tie Iraq to the 9/11 attacks — in order to strengthen their public case for invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 at all.
***
Gordon Trowbridge writes for the Detroit News: “Senior Bush administration officials pushed for the use of abusive interrogations of terrorism detainees in part to seek evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq, according to newly declassified information discovered in a congressional probe.
Colin Powell’s former chief of staff (Colonel Larry Wilkerson) wrote in 2009 that the Bush administration’s “principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qaeda.”
Indeed, one of the two senior instructors from the Air Force team which taught U.S. servicemen how to resist torture by foreign governments when used to extract false confessions has blown the whistle on the true purpose behind the U.S. torture program.
[Torture architect] Jessen’s notes were provided to Truthout by retired Air Force Capt. Michael Kearns, a “master” SERE instructor and decorated veteran who has previously held high-ranking positions within the Air Force Headquarters Staff and Department of Defense (DoD).
***
The Jessen notes clearly state the totality of what was being reverse-engineered – not just ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ but an entire program of exploitation of prisoners using torture as a central pillar,” he said. “What I think is important to note, as an ex-SERE Resistance to Interrogation instructor, is the focus of Jessen’s instruction. It is EXPLOITATION, not specifically interrogation. And this is not a picayune issue, because if one were to ‘reverse-engineer’ a course on resistance to exploitation then what one would get is a plan to exploit prisoners, not interrogate them. The CIA/DoD torture program appears to have the same goals as the terrorist organizations or enemy governments for which SV-91 and other SERE courses were created to defend against: the full exploitation of the prisoner in his intelligence, propaganda, or other needs held by the detaining power, such as the recruitment of informers and double agents. Those aspects of the US detainee program have not generally been discussed as part of the torture story in the American press.”
Air Force Col. Steven Kleinman, a career military intelligence officer recognized as one of the DOD’s most effective interrogators as well a former SERE instructor and director of intelligence for JPRA’s teaching academy, said …. “This is the guidebook to getting false confessions, a system drawn specifically from the communist interrogation model that was used to generate propaganda rather than intelligence” …. “If your goal is to obtain useful and reliable information this is not the source book you should be using.”
Much of the 9/11 Commission Report was based upon the testimony of people who were tortured
At least four of the people whose interrogation figured in the 9/11 Commission Report have claimed that they told interrogators information as a way to stop being “tortured.”
The 9/11 Commission itself doubted the accuracy of the torture confessions, and yet kept their doubts to themselves
Today, Raymond McGovern – a 27-year CIA veteran, who chaired National Intelligence Estimates and personally delivered intelligence briefings to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, their Vice Presidents, Secretaries of State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many other senior government officials –provides details about one torture victim (Al-Libi) at former Newsweek and AP reporter Robert Parry’s website:
But if it’s bad intelligence you’re after, torture works like a charm. If, for example, you wish to “prove,” post 9/11, that “evil dictator” Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda and might arm the terrorists with WMD, bring on the torturers.
It is a highly cynical and extremely sad story, but many Bush administration policymakers wanted to invade Iraq before 9/11 and thus were determined to connect Saddam Hussein to those attacks. The PR push began in September 2002 – or as Bush’s chief of staff Andrew Card put it, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”
By March 2003 – after months of relentless “marketing” – almost 70 percent of Americans had been persuaded that Saddam Hussein was involved in some way with the attacks of 9/11.
The case of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, a low-level al-Qaeda operative, is illustrative of how this process worked. Born in Libya in 1963, al-Libi ran an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan from 1995 to 2000. He was detained in Pakistan on Nov. 11, 2001, and then sent to a U.S. detention facility in Kandahar, Afghanistan. He was deemed a prize catch, since it was thought he would know of any Iraqi training of al-Qaeda.
The CIA successfully fought off the FBI for first rights to interrogate al-Libi. FBI’s Dan Coleman, who “lost” al-Libi to the CIA (at whose orders, I wonder?), said, “Administration officials were always pushing us to come up with links” between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
CIA interrogators elicited some “cooperation” from al-Libi through a combination of rough treatment and threats that he would be turned over to Egyptian intelligence with even greater experience in the torture business.
By June 2002, al-Libi had told the CIA that Iraq had “provided” unspecified chemical and biological weapons training for two al-Qaeda operatives, an allegation that soon found its way into other U.S. intelligence reports. Al-Libi’s treatment improved as he expanded on his tales about collaboration between al-Qaeda and Iraq, adding that three al-Qaeda operatives had gone to Iraq “to learn about nuclear weapons.”
Al-Libi’s claim was well received at the White House even though the Defense Intelligence Agency was suspicious.
“He lacks specific details” about the supposed training, the DIA observed. “It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers. Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest.”
Meanwhile, at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, Maj. Paul Burney, a psychiatrist sent there in summer 2002, told the Senate, “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq and we were not successful. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link … there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”
***
President Bush relied on al-Libi’s false Iraq allegation for a major speech in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002, just a few days before Congress voted on the Iraq War resolution. Bush declared, “We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases.”
And Colin Powell relied on it for his famous speech to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, declaring: “I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these [chemical and biological] weapons to al-Qaeda. Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story.”
Al-Libi’s “evidence” helped Powell as he sought support for what he ended up calling a “sinister nexus” between Iraq and al-Qaeda, in the general effort to justify invading Iraq.
For a while, al-Libi was practically the poster boy for the success of the Cheney/Bush torture regime; that is, until he publicly recanted and explained that he only told his interrogators what he thought would stop the torture.
You see, despite his cooperation, al-Libi was still shipped to Egypt where he underwent more abuse, according to a declassified CIA cable from early 2004 when al-Libi recanted his earlier statements. The cable reported that al-Libi said Egyptian interrogators wanted information about al-Qaeda’s connections with Iraq, a subject “about which [al-Libi] said he knew nothing and had difficulty even coming up with a story.”
According to the CIA cable, al-Libi said his interrogators did not like his responses and “placed him in a small box” for about 17 hours. After he was let out of the box, al-Libi was given a last chance to “tell the truth.” When his answers still did not satisfy, al-Libi says he “was knocked over with an arm thrust across his chest and fell on his back” and then was “punched for 15 minutes.”
After Al-Libi recanted, the CIA recalled all intelligence reports based on his statements, a fact recorded in a footnote to the report issued by the 9/11 Commission. By then, however, the Bush administration had gotten its way regarding the invasion of Iraq and the disastrous U.S. occupation was well underway.
***
Intensive investigations into these allegations – after the U.S. military had conquered Iraq – failed to turn up any credible evidence to corroborate these allegations. What we do know is that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were bitter enemies, with al-Qaeda considering the secular Hussein an apostate to Islam.
Al-Libi, who ended up in prison in Libya, reportedly committed suicide shortly after he was discovered there by a human rights organization. Thus, the world never got to hear his own account of the torture that he experienced and the story that he presented and then recanted.
Hafed al-Ghwell, a Libyan-American and a prominent critic of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime at the time of al-Libi’s death, explained to Newsweek, “This idea of committing suicide in your prison cell is an old story in Libya.”
Paul Krugman eloquently summarized the truth about the torture used:
Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.
There’s a word for this: it’s evil.
Torture Program Was Part of a Con Job
As discussed above, in order to “justify” the Iraq war, top Bush administration officials pushed and insisted that interrogators use special torture methods aimed at extracting false confessions to attempt to create a false linkage between between Al Qaida and Iraq. And see this and this.
And at 2:40 p.m. on September 11th, in a memorandum of discussions between top administration officials, several lines below the statement “judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [that is, Saddam Hussein] at same time”, is the statement “Hard to get a good case.” In other words, top officials knew that there wasn’t a good case that Hussein was behind 9/11, but they wanted to use the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to justify war with Iraq anyway.
(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.
Therefore, the Bush administration expressly justified the Iraq war to Congress by representing that Iraq planned, authorized, committed, or aided the 9/11 attacks.
Indeed, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind reports that the White House ordered the CIA to forge and backdate a document falsely linking Iraq with Muslim terrorists and 9/11 … and that theCIA complied with those instructions and in fact created the forgery, which was then used to justify war against Iraq. And see this.
Suskind also revealed that “Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official ‘that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.’ ”
Cheney made the false linkage between Iraq and 9/11 on many occasions.
For example, according to Raw Story, Cheney was still alleging a connection between Iraq and the alleged lead 9/11 hijacker in September 2003 – a year after it had been widely debunked. When NBC’s Tim Russert asked him about a poll showing that 69% of Americans believed Saddam Hussein had been involved in 9/11, Cheney replied:
It’s not surprising that people make that connection.
And even after the 9/11 Commission debunked any connection, Cheney said that the evidence is “overwhelming” that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein’s regime , that Cheney “probably” had information unavailable to the Commission, and that the media was not ‘doing their homework’ in reporting such ties.
Again, the Bush administration expressly justified the Iraq war by representing that Iraq planned, authorized, committed, or aided the 9/11 attacks. See this, this, this.
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill – who sat on the National Security Council – also says that Bush planned the Iraq war before 9/11.
Top British officials say that the U.S. discussed Iraq regime change even before Bush took office.
And in 2000, Cheney said a Bush administration might “have to take military action to forcibly remove Saddam from power.” And see this.
The administration’s false claims about Saddam and 9/11 helped convince a large portion of the American public to support the invasion of Iraq. While the focus now may be on false WMD claims, it is important to remember that, at the time, the alleged link between Iraq and 9/11 was at least as important in many people’s mind as a reason to invade Iraq.
So the torture program was really all about “justifying” the ultimate war crime: launching an unnecessary war of aggression based upon false pretenses.
Postscript: It is beyond any real dispute that torture does not work to produce any useful, truthfulintelligence. Today, the following question made it to the front page of Reddit:
Why would the CIA torture if torture “doesn’t work”? Wouldn’t they want the most effective tool to gather intelligence?
The Senate Armed Services Committee report gave the answer.
The Pirate Bay In what seems to be a final nail in The Pirate Bay’s coffin, one of the founders of this mega torrent site, Peter Sunde today stated that he was glad that TPB was shut down. This statement was made by him in a blogpost on a aptly named website, Copy Me Happy. Peter who has already faced the wrath of the law for his role in starting the Pirate Bay, was released last month after serving five months in a Swedish prison.
Peter stated that he didnt care that TPB was raided by authorities, “News just reached me that The Pirate Bay has been raided, again. That happened over 8 years ago last time. That time, a lot of people went out to protest and rally in the streets. Today few seem to care. And I’m one of them.” he adds, “Why, you might ask? Well. For multiple reasons. But most of all, I’ve not been a fan of what TPB has become.”
While giving reasons as to why he things TPB gone is a good riddance, Peter writes,
“TPB has become an institution that people just expected to be there. Noone willing to take the technology further. The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old design. It never changed except for one thing – the ads. More and more ads was filling the site, and somehow when it felt unimaginable to make these ads more distasteful they somehow ended up even worse. The original deal with TPB was to close it down on it’s tenth birthday.”
“Instead, on that birthday, there was a party in it’s “honour” in Stockholm. It was sponsored by some sexist company that sent young girls, dressed in almost no clothes, to hand out freebies to potential customers. There was a ticket price to get in, automatically excluding people with no money. The party had a set line-up with artists, scenes and so on, instead of just asking the people coming to bring the content. Everything went against the ideals that I worked for during my time as part of TPB.”
“The past years there was no soul left in TPB. The original team handed it over to, well, less soul-ish people to say the least. From the outside I felt that noone had any interest in helping the community if it didn’t eventually pay out in cash. The attention for new artists (the promo bay) felt more like something TPB had to do in order to keep it’s street cred. The street cred I personally tried to destroy when being part of TPB, multiple times, in order to make sure that people stopped idolizing TPB the way they did. Mostly it didn’t work though.”
In an interview to Ars Technica five years ago, Sunde had stated that TPB ownership was transferred to an unnamed organization, which then transferred ownership to a shady shell corporation called Reservella.
Apparently everything boiled down to ethics, social responsibility and commercial interests as far as Peter was concerned. He said they had started TPB with a shared objective of helping the community but as years passed, TPB become more and more commercialised and went afar from its stated objectives. He hopes that something better will rise to take the place of TPB in the vacuum left behind due to its closure, “But from the immense void that will now fill up the fiber cables all over the world, I’m pretty sure the next thing will pan out. And hopefully it has no ads for porn or viagra. There’s already other services for that.”
CIA Torture Pseudonyms Update: The “Associates” of “Company Y” are now known, as is “CIA officer 2.” Additional people and details have become known.
The press has been hard at work uncovering the pseudonyms used and nailing down the true identities of the site. I compile them here.
The most important outstanding questions: who are Detainees “R” & “S,” and where is detention site “red?” While I feel pretty strongly about redacting the names of low-level personnel from the NSA slides, which are technical in nature, I have zero interest in protecting torturers. The public has a right to know where these black sites were, and the detainees deserve a name and a fair trial.
Detention sites:
BLACK – RomaniaBLUE – “Quartz” – Stare Kiejkuty, Poland
BROWN – Afghanistan
COBALT – “Salt Pit” – Afghanistan
GRAY – Afghanistan
GREEN – Thailand
INDIGO – Guantanamo
MAROON – Guantanamo
ORANGE – Afghanistan
VIOLET – Lithuania
RED – This could be an additional site in one of the above countries, or someplace entirely different. It is mentioned only once in the report, on page 140 of 499, and the entry is almost entirely redacted.
Companies:
Company Y – Mitchell, Jessen & Associates, based in Spokane, Washington.The “Associates” are David Ayers, Randall Spivey, James Sporleder, Joseph Matarazzo, and Roger Aldrich.
It should be noted that there is no “Company X” in this report, I found this peculiar. It seems that there should be one, and as it happens there are several shady “Companies’ known: “Premier Executive Transport Services” Incorporated in Dedham Massachusetts, is known to have been part of the CIA rendition program. The names of its officers include “Coleen Bornt,” “Brian Dice” and “Tyler Edward Tate.” These are fictitious people.
Other companies suspected of involvement in rendition include: “Stevens Express Leasing” “Richmor Aviation” “Rapid AirTrans” “Path Corporation”
Businesses:
Business Q – Associated with Zubair, associated with Hambali
Torture Doctors:
“Grayson Swigert” – James Mitchell”Hammond Dunbar” – Bruce Jessen
CIA Officers:
CIA Officer 1 – COBALT Site manager – Matthew Zirbel. Zirbel’s corrupt CIA boss (Convicted) Kyle “Dusty” Dustin Foggo overruled the 10 day suspension Zirbel received in the murder of Gul Rahman (innocent).CIA Officer 2 – Torturer at COBALT and BLUE – Albert El Gamil – retired from CIA in 2004.
[Redacted] – Ron Czarnetsky, CIA Chief of Station on Warsaw, Poland from 2002 to 2005. This would make him responsible for site BLUE.
[no mention] Alfreda Frances Bikowsky – Made herself involved in Waterboarding in Poland (BLUE) in March of 2003. Took trip unassigned and on own dime. Was “scolded” and told it “wasn’t supposed to be entertainment.” Would have been there at the same time as Mitchell and Jessen.
Assets:
Asset X – Directly involved in the capture of KSM.Asset Y – Reports on Janat Gul
Persons:
Person 1 – al-Ghuraba group member, with an interest in airplanes and aviation. “intelligence indicates the interest was unrelated to terrorist activity.”
Detainees:
Detainee R – Held by foreign government, rendered to CIA custodyDetainee S – Held by foreign government
Barrett Brown is an American journalist, essayist and satirist. He is often referred to as an unofficial spokesperson for the hacktivist collective Anonymous, a label he disputes. He is credited with the creation of Project PM, a research outfit and information collective determined to expose agents of the corporate military spying apparatus. Brown’s large vocabulary and quick wit often make his thoughts a joy to read.
The seven guys with whom I recently spent two months living in a small room at the Kaufman County Jail while awaiting transfer were in the distressing habit of compulsively watching local TV news, which is the lowest form of news. They would even watch more than one network’s evening news program in succession, presumably so as to get differing perspectives on the day’s suburban house fires and rush-hour lane closings rather than having to view these events through a single ideological prism.
One day, there was a report about a spate of bank robberies by a fellow the media was dubbing the Lunch Money Bandit after his habit of always striking around noon, when tellers were breaking for lunch. Later that week, there was another report on the suspect, accompanied by surveillance footage — and then, shortly afterward, he was actually brought in to our cell, having just been captured when the cops received a tip from a former accomplice who’d been picked up on unrelated charges.
Lunch Money was an affable twentysomething guy from New Orleans who’d lost his two front teeth fighting off a couple of assailants who’d tried to rob his family’s motel room after Katrina and had already done four years in federal prison for other bank robberies. He would have gladly taken a real job if he’d been able to find one, he said. Still, he conceded, “I just love robbing banks.” I couldn’t imagine what there is to love about such a career; this isn’t the old days when a bank robbery entailed brandishing a Tommy gun, dynamiting a safe, and tearing off in a stolen Model T roadster with your hard-drinking flapper girlfriend and a dozen cloth sacks adorned with dollar sign symbols. These guys today just sort of walk up to the teller and hand over a note to the effect that they have a gun (which they don’t — going armed carries a more serious charge, and there’s no point in bringing a gun to a bank that’s federally insured, even in Texas).
Drug dealers find bank robbers to be fascinating eccentrics and tend to pepper them with questions. One cocaine entrepreneur asked Lunch Money, “What if, like, when you handed her the note, the bitch just laughed in your face?”
“Man, that’d be fucked up,” he replied thoughtfully, visibly shaken by this potential revolution in human affairs.
One night, as we all lay in our bunks discussing the wicked world, Lunch Money proclaimed that Magic Johnson had never actually had HIV and that the whole thing had merely been a plot by the CIA, which had paid him handsomely to fake it so that he could later pretend to “recover” and the U.S. medical establishment could take credit for having developed such effective HIV treatments. As evidence, he noted that Johnson was inexplicably worth over a billion dollars. I debated with him about this for an hour. I’m not too bothered by my five-year prison sentence, as it will be neat to get out when it’s over and see to what extent video game graphics have improved while I was away, but I sure would like to get back the hour I spent arguing about Magic Johnson’s HIV status with the fucking Lunch Money Bandit.
***
The other day I was woken up at 4:30 am, escorted to a small, bare room, strip-searched, put in handcuffs and leg shackles, had a heavy chain wrapped around my midsection, and placed in the back of a dark and cage-lined van that looked like something from one of those Saw movies. But this was good news. It meant that, having recently gotten my ludicrous sentence, I’d now been “designated.” A crack team of specially trained federal prison picker-outers had chosen a facility for me. I was now to begin the multi-stage pilgrimage to the particular compound where I’ll be spending the next one to two years, depending on whether I get into any further trouble (so, two years).
For the majority of federal defendants, this Prisoner’s Progress, as I’m pleased to call it, entails “catching chain,” or being put on the weekly prison bus and taken to the federal inmate processing facility in Oklahoma, where the federal government has been sending its victims since the Trail of Tears. They’ll spend a week or so there before being shipped in turn to their designated prison. Prisons being far more humane than the amusingly horrid little detention centers where most inmates facing charges are kept until they inevitably give in and plea to a crime, this journey is viewed with fond anticipation by federal prisoners, who thus constitute the only population in human history among which it is common to be excited about the prospect of going to Oklahoma.
As for me, I’d rather rip off my own balls and mail them to Stratfor as restitution than set foot in a third-rate state like Oklahoma, regardless of what wonders may lie at the end of that particular rainbow, so it’s a fine thing that I was just going down the road to the Fort Worth Federal Correctional Institution, which will be my home for the next, er, two years. I know little of Fort Worth other than that it’s a lawless haven for half-caste Indian fighters and shiftless part-time cowhands looking to blow their greenbacks and Comanche scalps at one of the town’s countless Chinese-run opium dens, nor am I bothered by the possibility that what little I do know about the town may be 130 years out of date and racist. But I specifically requested that I be sent to this benighted city’s federal prison. For one thing, I’d already “toured the campus,” as it were, shortly after my arrest, when I spent two months at FCI Fort Worth’s jail unit so that the resident psychologists could subject me to a competency evaluation. (Based on their report, Judge Sam Lindsay declared me competent to participate in a trial, which is more than I can say for Judge Sam Lindsay.)
Fort Worth is also the only federal prison aside from FCI Seagoville that’s located near Dallas, and I’m pretty sure I’m still banned from that one, as noted in a prior column, and naturally I want to be close to my parents so that they can visit me with some regularity. My mom, a writer and editor and former flight attendant and South Texas beauty queen who once took me on a vacation to see a swimming pig at a place called Aquarena Springs, is a valuable fountainhead of media gossip, including which outlets are currently going down in flames (The New Republic, as it turns out), and always makes sure to let me know whether and to what extent my haircut is inadequate. Sometimes, if I happen to have a pimple, she insists on popping it right then and there in the visiting room, right in front of the other criminals. Note that I am 33 years old and, arguably, a hardened convict.
Likewise, my dad is my chief source of information regarding plot developments in what I gather to be a popular television program called The Blacklist, new episodes of which he details to me at great length at every opportunity, although I have never asked him for these reports or expressed any interest in the show whatsoever. Incidentally, when I was a kid, he took me on five different occasions to see a film called Hard Target in which the protagonist, ably portrayed by Jean Claude van Damme, finds himself hunted for sport by a wealthy fellow and his mercenary squad of professional trackers, all of whom he ends up killing in turn. My dad also gave me a promotional poster for this movie and, for years afterward, would turn to me and solemnly proclaim the film’s tagline, “Don’t hunt what you can’t kill,” which I suppose is as good advice as any.
Last time he came for a visit, he began to relate to me, apropos of nothing, the nature and potential killing power of some sort of subterranean supervolcano located at Yellowstone and the general circumstances under which it will someday explode and kill a great majority of North Americans, an event which he prophesied with obvious relish. It’s not that he’s one of those ecological mystics who despise humanity and long to see Mother Earth fight back against the ravages of industrial sentience or some such irritating thing. Quite the contrary. In my younger days, he would often drag me around East Texas and command me to assassinate deer and wild boars with rifles he would supply for the purpose, even though I had no ideological differences with any of these animals, and one time, when I was 17, he took me to East Africa to help him exploit the resident natural resources alongside a group of ex-military adventurers with whom we had somehow managed to attach ourselves (this expedition failed rather spectacularly), and lately he seems to have gotten involved in fracking. So he’s certainly no partisan of Nature. It’s just that he’s fond of power in its rawest forms, and if he smiles at the prospect of 400 million deaths, it is only because he feels that man is insufficiently reverent of this particular supervolcano, this god-made-manifest, which therefore has no choice but to lash out against us as punishment. He’s also a longtime pillar of the Dallas Safari Club and on at least one occasion of which I am aware was literally almost eaten by a lion. I could go on and on. Thankfully my parents are divorced, and so I usually only have to deal with these hyperactive Southern Gothic archetypes one at a time these days. Occasionally, though, they set aside their differences in order to come harass me together, and I eventually emerge from the visitation room looking haunted.
I wasn’t taken straight to Fort Worth from Kaufman County, as that would be too quick and easy and cost effective, the prison being less than a half-hour’s drive away; rather, I was taken to the federal courthouse in downtown Dallas to wait for another ride to the Mansfield jail, where I’d already spent much of 2013, and from which I’d eventually be taken to Fort Worth next time a U.S. Marshal happened to be going in that general direction. At the end of the day’s no doubt majestic federal court proceedings, I was placed back in the chew-your-arm-off-and-only-then-shall-I-give-you-the-key van for the ride over to Mansfield. In the rusty cage next to mine were two girls, shackled like I was, who had been to court that afternoon. One had been crying; she’d just been sentenced to eight years for conspiracy to distribute marijuana despite having originally been given reason to expect considerably less time, as she’d cooperated with the FBI. The agents had clearly found her testimony helpful, as they’d met with her a second time, but nonetheless they’d neglected to ask the judge for the sentence reduction they’d promised her in exchange. Like most drug dealers, this girl was in the habit of making and keeping bargains on the strength of her word and expected others to do likewise, but then she’d never dealt with the FBI before.
Just as she finished sobbing out her story, something rather incredible happened: the U.S. Marshal who was driving us back to the jail, having been listening to this account, apparently decided that he was sick of serving as another cog in a fascist system that literally places females in chains and ruins their lives over consensual non-crimes like selling marijuana, because he pulled over, stepped out of the van, came around the back, unlocked the girl’s cage, removed her chains and leg irons and handcuffs, gave her all the cash he had on him, kissed her on the forehead, and advised her to hitchhike to Mexico and then catch a flight to Europe, where she’d have another chance at life, far away from the all-seeing state that had sought to deprive her of her youth and freedom.
Just kidding. Actually he drove us to the jail while the girl cried in her cage.
***
Quote of the Day:
“Truth does not often escape from palaces.” —William Durant
***
Editor’s note: Barrett Brown has been incarcerated since September 2012. Go here to read earlier installments of “The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Jail.” If you’d like to send him a book, here’s his Amazon wish list.
Barrett Brown #45047-177 FCI Fort Worth P.O. Box 15330 Fort Worth, TX 76119
Edward Joseph “Ed” Snowden is an American computer professional who leaked classified information from the National Security Agency, starting in June 2013.Edward Joseph “Ed” Snowden is an American computer professional who leaked classified information from the National Security Agency, starting in June 2013.Edward Joseph “Ed” Snowden is an American computer professional who leaked classified information from the National Security Agency, starting in June 2013.Edward Joseph “Ed” Snowden is an American computer professional who leaked classified information from the National Security Agency, starting in June 2013.Edward Joseph “Ed” Snowden is an American computer professional who leaked classified information from the National Security Agency, starting in June 2013.
Edward Joseph “Ed” Snowden is an American computer professional who leaked classified information from the National Security Agency, starting in June 2013.Edward Joseph “Ed” Snowden is an American computer professional who leaked classified information from the National Security Agency, starting in June 2013.Edward Joseph “Ed” Snowden is an American computer professional who leaked classified information from the National Security Agency, starting in June 2013.Edward Joseph “Ed” Snowden is an American computer professional who leaked classified information from the National Security Agency, starting in June 2013.Edward Joseph “Ed” Snowden is an American computer professional who leaked classified information from the National Security Agency, starting in June 2013.
Che Guevara Ernesto “Che” Guevara, commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist.
Che Guevara Ernesto “Che” Guevara, commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist.Che Guevara Ernesto “Che” Guevara, commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist.Che Guevara Ernesto “Che” Guevara, commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist.Che Guevara Ernesto “Che” Guevara, commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist.Che Guevara Ernesto “Che” Guevara, commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist.Che Guevara Ernesto “Che” Guevara, commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist.Che Guevara Ernesto “Che” Guevara, commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist.Che Guevara Ernesto “Che” Guevara, commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist.
Che Guevara Ernesto “Che” Guevara, commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist.
Che Guevara Ernesto “Che” Guevara, commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist.Che Guevara Ernesto “Che” Guevara, commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist.Che Guevara Ernesto “Che” Guevara, commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist.Che Guevara Ernesto “Che” Guevara, commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist.Che Guevara Ernesto “Che” Guevara, commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist.Che Guevara Ernesto “Che” Guevara, commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist.Che Guevara Ernesto “Che” Guevara, commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist.Che Guevara Ernesto “Che” Guevara, commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist.
Princess Diana Diana, Princess of Wales, was the first wife of Charles, Prince of Wales, who is the eldest child and heir apparent of Queen Elizabeth II.
Widely unknown, is that Diana, a true humanitarian, was an outcast of the Royal Family. There are many indicators that she had extensive ‘dirt’ on the family and wasn’t shy about using her influence to eventually expose their true colors. Also, the family was not pleased with her joining bloodlines with Dodi Fayed, son of a wealthy Egyption billionaire.. Rumor is that she was with child at the time of her death, and this was handed down as her punishment. In her journal was found an entry that proves she already considered an attempt on her life:
“..i think they are planning some kind of accident with my vehicle…”
Many independent researchers and investigators have determined that she was killed in ‘ritual’ fashion, surrounded by deep, intentional, occult symbolism. The method & time of death, striking the 13th pillar in the tunnel, and the above-ground location all have connections to ancient Babylon, with what some even say includes a ‘fulfillment of divine purpose’.
Top experts in this complex assassination where the Family takes down one of its own using MK-Ultra connected driver Henry Paul are David Icke, Chris Everard, and Jordan Maxwell, among others.
Danny Casolaro Shortly before his death, Casolaro told people that he was nearly ready to reveal a wide-ranging conspiracy spanning the Inslaw case, Iran-Contra, the alleged October Surprise conspiracy, and the closure of BCCI.[7]David Corn writes in The Nation that the papers Casolaro left behind reveal few clues, except that he was in over his head, but was tenacious.[8]
His papers included old clippings, handwritten notes that were hard to read, and the names of former CIA officers and arms dealers. Corn writes that the notes show Casolaro was influenced by the Christic Institute and that he had pursued material fed to him by a reporter who worked for Lyndon LaRouche.[8] Richard Fricker writes in Wired that Casolaro had been led into a “Bermuda Triangle of spooks, guns, drugs and organized crime.”[9]
Danny Casolaro Journalist, Freelance Writer
Danny Casolaro Shortly before his death, Casolaro told people that he was nearly ready to reveal a wide-ranging conspiracy spanning the Inslaw case, Iran-Contra, the alleged October Surprise conspiracy, and the closure of BCCI.[7]David Corn writes in The Nation that the papers Casolaro left behind reveal few clues, except that he was in over his head, but was tenacious.[8]
His papers included old clippings, handwritten notes that were hard to read, and the names of former CIA officers and arms dealers. Corn writes that the notes show Casolaro was influenced by the Christic Institute and that he had pursued material fed to him by a reporter who worked for Lyndon LaRouche.[8] Richard Fricker writes in Wired that Casolaro had been led into a “Bermuda Triangle of spooks, guns, drugs and organized crime.”[9]
Danny Casolaro Journalist, Freelance Writer
Danny Casolaro Shortly before his death, Casolaro told people that he was nearly ready to reveal a wide-ranging conspiracy spanning the Inslaw case, Iran-Contra, the alleged October Surprise conspiracy, and the closure of BCCI.[7]David Corn writes in The Nation that the papers Casolaro left behind reveal few clues, except that he was in over his head, but was tenacious.[8]
His papers included old clippings, handwritten notes that were hard to read, and the names of former CIA officers and arms dealers. Corn writes that the notes show Casolaro was influenced by the Christic Institute and that he had pursued material fed to him by a reporter who worked for Lyndon LaRouche.[8] Richard Fricker writes in Wired that Casolaro had been led into a “Bermuda Triangle of spooks, guns, drugs and organized crime.”[9]
Sean Stone, son of controversial filmmaker Oliver Stone has acted in his father’s films such as Wall Street, The Doors, JFK, Natural Born Killers and many more. He has starred and directed in his own feature film Greystone Park. Sean joined the team of investigators for the Tru TV hit Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura. Sean currently hosts an alternative media show ‘Buzzsaw’ featuring interviews with whistleblowers, styling itself as the ‘real X files’ looking into the hidden agendas behind the news.
