Banned Episode: Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura - Police State

Tags:

• CORPORATE MEDIA
• DICTATORSHIP

Though he is going head-to-head against the establishment, his first season went to air seamlessly. His second season experienced some issues. There was a lot of heat particularly on one of the episodes called Police State, which exposed the onset on a militarised war consitions style police and martial law state controlling the people. Needless to say the establishment did not like it (perhaps it was too truthful?). Anyway, both seasons have since been re-aired, all except this episode, they will not play it. Watch it and find out why..

9-11 As Occult Trauma Brainwashing

Posted on November 3, 2012 by # 1 NWO Hatr

Henry Makow

The Most Dangerous Book in the World:
9/11 as Mass Ritual, by S. K. Bain, Trine Day, 2012, 354 pages Book Review  (Abridged by henrymakow.com)
Anyone with an innate desire to understand themselves and the world will find a veritable feast in S.K. Bain’s discoveries.
Mind-baffling outrageous crimes have a certain logic, language, and dark humor that repeats itself again and again.

If you aren’t familiar with Aleister Crowley, you will learn how his writings and philosophy have been embraced and disseminated widely by those who believe that a select few should rule over the masses; Bain spells out how the 9/11 events are an “Ode to Aleister Crowley.”
Bain’s work is a virtual Rosetta Stone, a key to decoding the images and signals that constantly bombard us.  Bain modestly acknowledges that he is simply compiling the insights of other writers, thinkers, and researchers who have penetrated the matter in depth.  He quotes sources like Michael Hoffman, who authored Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare  (1989):
“In occult crimes the objective is not linear, that is to say, is not solely bound to the achievement of the immediate effects of the attack on the victim, but may in fact be part of a larger, symbolic ritual magnified by the power of the electronic media, for the purpose of the alchemical processing of the subconscious Group Mind of the masses… it is the subconscious that is being addressed in occult ritual, in a process CIA behavioral scientist Dr. Ewan Cameron termed, ‘psychic driving.’”
The intent of psychic driving is to break down the personality and alter behavior; under the CIA’s MK Ultra program victims were also given drugs to facilitate this process.  Psychic driving can be applied to individuals or on a large scale to an entire population.
It is worth noting here that recreational as well as prescription drugs are becoming ever more prevalent in today’s world, and people are under constant assault from chemicals and pollution in their water, food, and air, as well as in various products, which hinder their cognitive abilities.
Hoffman also warns that revealing the secrets of ritual murder to an “unprocessed, healthy and vigorous population… [would] have proved fatal to them (the perpetrators).
“But to reveal these after-the-fact secrets in our modern time, to a people who have no memory, no will-power and no interest in their own fate… actually strengthens the enslavement of such a people.”
BELIEVE 9-11 OFFICIAL STORY, SUSPEND DISBELIEF
Voltaire wrote, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” As an illustration of this statement, it is now known that the vast majority of American soldiers who fought in Iraq believed that Saddam Hussein had something to do with the 9/11 attacks.
Bain lays out the occult significance of many of the details of 9/11 in such a way that it becomes obvious that it was orchestrated to terrorize people, while the perpetrators of the event ended up laughing at those who fell for it.
He shows how they have flaunted their power through their control over the media and the official narrative. At the same time, we have witnessed the subsequent assassinations, both literal and figurative, of those who have had the temerity to challenge the official story.
The term “conspiracy theorist” was coined and promoted by the CIA to discredit the critics of the Warren Report’s lone nut theory, which was the official attempt to close the case on JFK’s assassination.  The term was then revived in 2001 to be used against those who question the 9/11 narrative.
Daniel Lerner, author of Psychological Warfare Against Nazi Germany, states, “Before you can make a man do as you say, you must make him believe what you say.”
While verifying Bain’s research, I stumbled across the Vigilant Citizen website  which proclaims: “Symbols Rule the World, Not Words Nor Laws.”
Imagine for a moment that you lived in a different country, spoke a different language, and followed a different calendar.  Place and time shape our identity. The rhythms of our lives are significantly determined by the larger culture, and by how our activities intersect with society, social institutions, and networks of transportation.  Places and dates have great meaning in the cultural realm and are amplified by the electronic media, connecting the entire planet via the global news networks. 9/11 was not merely reported in London, Madrid, Bali and India; it was echoed in subsequent “terror attacks.”
SPECULATION
The second half of Bain’s work follows the logic behind 9/11, as well as behind the “terror attacks” of 7/7, into a more speculative realm.
On the Vigilant Citizen website I found a review of “The Cabin in the Woods: A Movie Celebrating the Elite’s Ritual Sacrifices,” which provides a set of rules for understanding mega-rituals that closely reflects Bain’s insights about 9/11:
“Most mega-rituals follow specific rules that are clearly spelled out in the movie. These rules are made to give the rituals more potency while allowing the powers that be to avoid the negative effects of bad karma (according to their weird interpretation of it).
“1st Rule: Announcing What Will Happen Beforehand.”
As Bain says, in the case of 9/11 the writing was all over the wall. There were multiple public warnings, and a blitz of warnings from numerous intelligence agencies, not to mention all the private warnings to prominent people.
The Vigilant Citizen article continues:
“Mega-rituals are often preceded by ‘clues’ in mass media, warning or preparing the victims (and the world) for what’s coming. If after being warned, victims go on by their own free will, then the puppeteers are liberated from karmic responsibility.
During the movie, one technician says:
“They have to make the choice of their own free will. Otherwise, the system doesn’t work. It’s like The Harbinger…this creepy old fuck who is practically wearing a sign saying ‘You Will Die.’ Why do we put him there? The System. They have to choose to ignore him. They have to choose what happens in the cellar. Yeah, we rig the system as much as we need to but, in the end, if they don’t transgress, they can’t be punished…”
[SEE ALSO Makow, Why the Illuminati Expose the Conspiracy
and Aspen  "Why Do the Illuminati Reveal Themselves"?]
“2nd Rule: The Victims Must Seal Their Own Fate
“Although every aspect of their environment is tightly controlled and manipulated by the puppet masters, the victims are still made to choose their fate by their own free will.”
Over half of Bain’s The Most Dangerous Book is devoted to the next mega-9/11 ritual, which he fears is scheduled to happen on 12/25/2012 in Phoenix, Arizona.
S. K. Bain writes ironically as he lays out the plot, the details, and the numerological references, symbols, and players in the upcoming drama, including the globally televised prelude at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London leading up to “Black Christmas.” Here is an excerpt from the foreword, which is written as if in hindsight:
“If only we had been able to use the occult script from 9/11 to decode their plans sooner, in advance… maybe, just maybe, this might have allowed us to stop their next act of false flag terror.  If only…”  The nightmare scenario that he lays out, an “unimaginably horrific assault” upon the city of Phoenix and other targets, becomes an immediate justification for martial law and a global religious war.
The first casualty of war is truth.  At the core of Sun Tzu’s Art of War is the acknowledgement, “All warfare is based on deception.”
The truth about false flag operations, ritual murders, and other violent acts always threatens the criminals responsible for them­ but silence and consent serve to enhance the criminals’ aura of immunity and invincibility.
–

Note: S.K. Bain is the former art director of The Weekly Standard magazine, where he worked with William Kristol, Fred Barnes, David Brooks, Tucker Carlson and others for over five years.
http://www.henrymakow.com/9-11-as-occult-trauma-brainwashing.html

US Elections: From the “Lesser to the Greater Evil”. The Demise of Critical Liberalism

By Prof. James Petras

Global Research, November 03, 2012

Region: USA

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Introduction
There is ample evidence that the Obama Presidency has pulled the US political spectrum further to the Right. On most domestic and foreign policy issues Obama has embraced extremist positions surpassing his Republican predecessor and in the process devastating what remained of the peace and social movements of the past decade.  Moreover, the Obama Presidency has laid the groundwork for the immediate future promising a further extension of regressive policies following the presidential elections: cuts in Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare.  Incumbents and their opposition compete over hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign funding from wealthy donors, which they will have to repay in the post-election period in billion dollar handouts, subsidies, tax abatements, anti-labor and environmental policies.  Not a single positive proposal was put forth by the Obama campaign but numerous militarist and regressive social policies were articulated.  The Obama campaign ran a fear campaign, playing off of the reactionary proposals of the Romney-Tea Party  alliance:  a cover for his own record of unprecedented military spending, sequential wars, immigrant expulsions, mortgage foreclosures and Wall Street bailouts.
In the process, critical liberals have crossed the line, surrendering their integrity by deflecting attention from Obama’s militarist-socially regressive policies to focus on “opposing Romney” as a “greater evil”:  progressives and critical liberals have multiplied and magnified the duplicity of the Obama political apparatus.  In the name of opposing the current ‘greater evil’ (Romney) they dare not enumerate and specify the wanton political crimes and monumental socio-economic in justice perpetrated by their “lesser evil” candidate (Obama).  Will the “progressives” ever play honest and publicly state:  we back Obama in “swing states” because he has “only” murdered 10,000 Afghans, 5,000 Iraqis, is starving 75 million Iranian’s via sanctions, gives $3 billion for Israeli displacement of millions of Palestinians, personally oversees the arbitrary executions of US citizens and promises an extended kill list … because Romney promises to be worse … Expecting honesty from the proponents of ‘lesser evils’ is as farfetched as taking serious their criticisms between elections.
The political damage incurred by the social movements and US working class under the Obama presidency is unprecedented and has laid the groundwork for further social regression and greater imperial bellicosity.
Political Consequences of the Obama Presidency: Past, Present and Future
The Obama Presidency and the run-up to his past and present electoral campaigns have had a devastating impact on popular social movements, engaged in issues of peace, labor, immigrant and constitutional rights and environmental regulation.
The peace movement virtually disappeared as its leaders urged its supporters to turn their activities to supporting Obama’s election.  He rewarded them by escalating military spending, and engaging in sequential wars, directly or by proxy, in seven countries, wreaking havoc and destruction. He faced minimum opposition as ex-peace activists, in dismay, turned away or grabbed a post and apologized for war.  By 2012 the follower- less peace leaders repeat the same mantra to support Obama; but dare not repeat the past lie (in the name of ‘peace’) rather they claim in order ‘to defeat Romney’.
The immigrant rights movements prior to the 2008 election of Obama mobilized several million…. till it was infiltrated and taken over by Mexican-American political hacks from the Democratic Party ad turned into an electoral machine to secure elected posts for themselves and Obama.  He rewarded the immigrants by setting a record: seizing, jailing and expelling 1.5 million immigrants over his tenure in office.  The immigrant rights mass movement has been largely dismantled and now Democratic political hustlers hire canvassers to round up and register, highly disillusioned immigrant voters.
Afro-Americans were the most neglected sector of the US working class under Obama:  they experienced the highest levels of unemployment and home foreclosures and the longest period of joblessness.  They became politically invisible as Obama bent over front ways to appease rabid White racists seeking to label him a ‘black president’.  The established black leadership-political and religious – and the media  celebrities went all out to block any expression of grass-roots opposition, claiming it would only “help the racists” – ignoring Obama’s embrace and bail out of White Wall Street and showing his backside to millions of black households under water. Without movement or leadership, fearful of the problem (economic racism) and the solution (4 more years of invisibility under Obama) most black workers are left to abstain or hold their nose and vote for ‘Oreo’ Obama.
The Occupy Wall Street Movement, precisely because it was independent of the Democratic Party and fed up with Obama’s total subservience to Wall Street, provided a temporary voice for the vast majority of Americans opposed to both political parties.  The local and state Democratic officials applauded “the cause” and then repressed the movement.
A spontaneous movement without political direction, and lacking an alternative political leadership, was incapable of confronting the Obama regime:  the movement declined and disintegrated, many sympathizers sucked up by the Obama ‘lesser evil’ propaganda campaign. The mass popular animus to Wall Street was defused by Obama’s claim to have saved “the economy” from catastrophe by channeling $4.5 trillion dollars into the bankers’ pockets.
Constitutional rights were savaged by Obama’s defense of military trials, Bush era tortures, expansion of arbitration executive power including the assumption of Presidential power to assassinate US citizens without a trial.  While legal organizations fought the good fight for civil liberties, the vast majority of liberals were notable by their absence from any sustained democratic movement upholding the rights of 40 million Americans under police surveillance, especially Muslim citizens and immigrants.  They chose not to embarrass their Democratic President:  they placed the re-election of a police-state Democrat over and above their putative defense of constitutional rights.  No mass marches for civil liberties; no protests against Home Land Security; no campus-wide free speech movements against the abrogation of the right to criticize Israel .
For decades, the trade union confederation and senior citizen movements defended Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.  With Obama in office, openly declaring and preparing major reductions and regressive clauses on coverage (raising age qualification) and indexing, there is no significant protest movement.   Programs which for the better part of a century (social security) or half century (Medicare, Medicaid) were considered untouchable are now, according to Obama, “on the table” to be gutted (“reformed”, “adjusted”).  The trade union millionaire bosses hire a small army of campaign workers and raise over a $150 million to re-elect a President who promises to make huge cuts in medical programs for pensioners and the poor.  Obama has legitimated the regressive social positions of the far-right while the Democratic Party neutralized any trade union opposition or mobilization.
Last but not least, the Obama regime has co-opted progressive liberal social critics via backdoor support.  In the name of “opposing Romney” the progressive pundits, like Chomsky and Ellsberg, end up in alliance with Wall Street and Silicon Valley billionaires, Pentagon militarists, Homeland Security boosters and Zionist ideologues (Dennis Ross) to elect Obama. Of course, the support of the progressives will be accepted -but hardly acknowledged- but they will have no influence on future Obama policy after the election:  they will be discarded like used condoms.
The Future:  Post-Election Consequences
With or without the re-election of Obama, his regime and policies have laid the groundwork for an ever more regressive and reactionary social agenda:  living standards including health, welfare, social security will be cut drastically. Afro-Americans will remain invisible except to the police and racist judicial system.  Immigrants will be hunted down and driven out of homes and jobs:  immigrant student dreams will become nightmares of fear and trepidation.  Death squads, proxy and drone wars will multiply to prop up a bankrupt US empire.  Unaccountable and hypocritical progressives will shift gears and criticize the president they elected; or if it’s Romney they will attack the same vices they overlooked during Obama’s electoral campaign:  more cuts in public spending and climate change will result in greater deterioration in everyday life and basic infrastructure; more floods, fires, plagues and blackouts.  New Yorkers will learn to detox their toilet water; they might be drinking and bathing in it.

Keiser Report: Wall St. Vomitorium (E362)

MUST READ: Exposing The Obankster In Obama

Obama’s Power to Trick Us Comes from Our Willingness to Be Tricked

Guest post submitted by Matt Stoller. Matt worked for Alan Grayson and Dylan Ratigan, and is now a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and a political analyst on Brand X with Russell Brand on the FX Network.  You can follow him on Twitter here.

Jokes reveal truths, which is why the best way to appreciate the real Obama, not the fabled character of hope and change, is how he tells jokes.  He’s good at, no, great at telling jokes.  He kills at comedic performances, and his sense of timing is magnificent.  Jokes, though, show how someone really sees the world, and the joke I’m thinking of is one he made during a speech in March 2009, when the revelations of AIG’s massive retention bonuses became public.  It had been less than two months since Obama’s inauguration, but the major policy framework of the administration – the bailouts – had been laid down.  The AIG bonus scandal was outrageous to the public, a symbol of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars being funneled to an arrogant corporation that had helped destroy the economy.

Barack Obama had stepped up to the lectern to deliver a stern rebuke to AIG executives who had taken bonuses with taxpayer money.  Obama talked of the outrage of an irresponsible company, and how his administration would do everything within its power to get the money back.  But a few minutes in, he coughed, slightly, choking a bit, as his mouth was a bit dry.  But after he coughed, he stopped, and reflected on the gesture with a joke.  ”I’m choked, choked with anger”, he said.  Obama chuckled.  Reporters laughed.  And it was funny, really funny.  Because everyone in the room knew that Obama wasn’t actually angry about the AIG bonuses, and never intended to do anything about it.  No one there was angry about the bonuses, and everyone knew nothing would happen to AIG executives.  The House would pass bills, which would die in the Senate.  The only people angry were Americans at large, who could not believe that their government worked for Wall Street.  So the joke was funny, ironic, cool.  But the moment wasn’t right for it, because this was a serious time for outrage – so Obama quickly reverted to form, and the teleprompter took over.

Obama Chokes Up With Fake Outrage Over AIG Bonuses

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Pundits didn’t reflect on this “joke”.  No one really noted it.  It was very much like George Bush’s comment to reporters that was only later highlighted by Michael Moore, when Bush was on a golf course and perfunctorily said “we must find these terrorist killers….” and then turned to swing a golf club.  ”Now watch this drive.”  Obama had risen to that level of duplicity, not a lie in the conventional sense of saying something that wasn’t true, but an entirely constructed false persona.  He had polished the tools of the Presidency – the utter banality of PR, the constipated talking points, the routine abuse of power – and taken them to a new level with a self-aware sense of irony about his own narcissistic dishonesty.  His challenge was so outrageous – I dare you to call me on what a liar I am as I joke about how much I am lying to you right now – that he turned an obnoxious bluff into art.

Obama had shown this breathtaking tendency to con people as they knew they were being conned before, the most public time during the campaign being his cynical answer when he was asked about his promise to renegotiate NAFTA.  He had said, when fighting for union votes with Clinton, “I will make sure we renegotiate (NAFTA).”  Even as he said this, it turns out that campaign advisor Austan Goolsbee had gone to Canada to assure them this was a lie (sure enough, Obama’s trade policies are identical to Bush’s, or worse).  And once the election ended, and Obama was asked about his broken promise by a reporter, he gave the following answer.

“This is fun for the press to try to stir up whatever quotes were generated during the course of the campaign,” President Obama said during his Transition in early December, when a reporter asked him about criticisms he and now-Secretary of State Clinton had made about each other’s foreign policy views.

“They’re your quotes, sir,” said the reporter, Peter Baker of the New York Times.

“No, I understand. And you’re having fun,” Obama continued. “And there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m not faulting it.”

This is cynicism as art.  It’s literally a Presidential candidate running on hope and change saying that campaign promises are a joke and a ruse.  His comments on AIG were similarly dishonest.  When Barack Obama spoke about the AIG money, he gave a well-constructed speech in which he discussed how his administration would do everything legally possible to block the payment of those bonuses.  Of course, those bonuses had been paid out days before he made the statement, so the idea that he’d “block” the bonuses was already something of deception.  His promises to do everything legal to claw back the money were also misleading – Obama didn’t get the money back, and never intended to.  In fact, the administration had weeks earlier asked Chris Dodd to insert a provision into law ensuring the AIG bonuses would be paid – and then blamed Dodd for the fiasco.

Politicians play hardball all the time.  They lie on a regular basis, it’s one of the tricks of the trade.  But Obama’s politics, and his career, are built on an exquisitely and brilliantly constructed narrative of integrity and progress.  He is the outsider become the insider, the multi-racial meritocrat whose black and white heritage came together into the ultimate conciliator and political leader.  His is the story of America, that of a brilliant Harvard Law school educated striver with roots in community organizing, who became a powerful orator, and then America’s first black President.  Progressive in spirit, cautious in temperament, he first and foremost understands the challenges facing the nation, the powerful injustice of slavery’s heritage, even though he ultimately finds solace in his belief in America, in American institutions, and in the ultimate goodness of the American way of life.

But there is another narrative, a real narrative about Barack Obama and his administration.  Obama is the ultimate cynic, a dishonest, highly reactionary social and corporate ladder climbing con artist.  Obama is the guy who calls a female reporter “sweety”, who plays poker with the guys, and who thinks that his senior advisor’s decision to cash out after making a “modest” salary of $172,000 at the White House is just natural.  He’s the guy who used the rationale that he’s a father of two girls as to why he doesn’t want young women to have access to Plan B.  He was in favor of gay marriage in 1996, flip flopped for political reasons, and then pretended to change his mind as a matter of conscience.  He runs on populism with a worse record than George W. Bush on income inequality.  His narcissism, and the post-modern ironic sense of self-awareness of how his narrative is put together and tended, is his defining character trait.  It’s not just that he’s a liar.  Lyndon Johnson was a liar, but LBJ lied us into a war in Vietnam as well as a war on poverty.  FDR lied all the time, for good and ill.  Obama’s entire edifice is based on lying almost entirely to help sustain his image, with almost no interest in sound policy-making.  Obama understands banking, and war, and women’s issues, and corruption and Citizens United.  Like a great con artist, he has studied his mark, the American voter, and specifically the Democratic voter, and he undersands which buttons to push.

Many criticize Obama, with the idea that he doesn’t understand, and if only he understood, he would change his mind.  This is part of his false narrative of hope and change.  But Obama reads Paul Krugman – he studied the left intensely and spent years as a community organizer.  He understands his opposition, those crying out for justice against the powerful, and finds them laughable, finds in them weakness at best, a punchline at worst.  He reads his left-wing opponents so he can absorb the talking points, and rebut them.  Some think that Obama can be appealed to around the better angels of nature, that he’s naturally with “the left” but must be gently praised.  But again, this is more of the false hope and change narrative.  Obama understands Saul Alinsky.  He gets left-wing ideas.  But he hates the left, with the passion of any bully towards his victims.  To him, they are chumps, weak, pathetic, losers.  They are such pathetic losers, in fact, that they will believe anything he tells them.  And Obama has no better nature, he is what he’s done in office, someone who murders children with drone strikes and then jokes about it to his rich friends.

Yves wrote about this narrative a few weeks ago, when she pointed out his career in the Illinois state Senate was based on working for billionaire developers to destroy poor neighborhoods.   Few really gets who he is, at his core, and almost no one is willing to publicly point it out.  There are some who went to law school with him, who saw his enormous grasping social climbing tendencies, his eager corporate good old boy persona, his narcissistic calculations.  But they are drowned out by the institutional left-wing voices, the fanboy reporters, the sycophantic labor leaders, the slavishly worshipful foundations, and the voters who cannot hear any alternative to the hope and change they know and love.  The only mainstream narrative challenging hope and change is the stupid right-wing storyline that he’s a Kenyan Muslim socialist.  That’s just racist idiocy.  But there are those on the right who understand Obama’s narcissism, and they may just make that their electoral narrative.

Think about this problem in a slightly different way.  It’s been three years.  Why hasn’t been there a great iconic impersonator of Barack Obama, like Tina Fey and Sarah Palin or Will Ferrell (or James Adomian) and George W. Bush?  A comic impersonator reveals something about the core of an individual.  The people imitating Obama seem to think that he’s far more left-wing and principled beneath the surface, that if he let out who he really was, how really angry he is at the Republicans, that’s the parody they hit.  It falls flat, because it’s not true to who he is.  The truth is that he’s a narcissistic sociopath dressed up as a cool corporate brand.  The real Obama parody is an Obama who wears an Air Force One fleece over an Obama t-shirt, who says to a reporter “Now hang on, let me finish, speaking slowly and avoiding your question, which is, by the way excellent.”  He’s President, and if you’re upset with him, don’t worry, look at that beautiful photo of Obama smiling and pointing.

This alternative narrative is a hard truth to hear, because it carries with it an implicit rejection of American exceptionalism.  Yes, American institutions are no better, and in many ways are more malignant, than those of many other countries.  Yes, our political leaders, our press, our military leadership, operate in service to sociopathic aims.  Yes, our freedoms are often an illusion, unless you fit a very narrow criteria.  Yes, our banks are run to rob us, yes, our CIA spies on us, and yes, our government is fundamentally anti-democratic.  Yes, our President is a con artist, and yes, nearly every reporter who writes about him participates in this set of lies, because of careerism, social financial reasons, or a simple lack of competence or imagination.

But, the idea that the king is always good, which is where the hope and change narrative draws its deep strength, is something we do not have to accept.  We as people can break this spell, and speak to our own dignity, as citizens.  We can learn our own power, if in no other manner than in saying at the voting booth and in public, “I do not accept your lies, and though you might take it by force, I will not grant you my consent willingly.”  We can choose not to address our political officials by their titles.  We can work to organize ourselves, and our lives, with those of us who understand that power is something that must be taken, with money, organization, but most of all, with moral courage.  It is not something that politicians have except through our consent, consent we have been giving for decades, to a rotten political class.  This is what they truly fear.  This is why they spend tens of billions on propaganda, on advertising, on symbols and personalities and celebrity.  This is why they hide the workings of our government and banks and institutions of power in the language of boring bureaucrat-ese.  This is ultimately why they are weak.  Because in order for them to do their work quietly, we must go about our day, and believe either the hope and change narrative, or the Kenyan socialist narrative, scoffing at the opposing “team” who thinks what we do not.  Instead, we can choose an alternative narrative, that power and consent come from us, come from the choices that we make, as people, and as citizens.  And we will no longer believe that Barack Obama, that cool, brilliant, self-aware con artist is anything but what he has revealed himself to be.

HURRICANE FLOODS NEWS

Universe Unraveling...the Fate of Those Who Do Not Love the Empire

The Southeast Asian country of Laos in the late 1950s and early 60s was a complex and confusing patchwork of civil conflicts, changes of government and switching loyalties. The CIA and the State Department alone could take credit for engineering coups at least once in each of the years 1958, 1959 and 1960. No study of Laos of this period appears to have had notable success in untangling the muddle of who exactly replaced whom, and when, and how, and why. After returning from Laos in 1961, American writer Norman Cousins stated that “if you want to get a sense of the universe unraveling, come to Laos. Complexity such as this has to be respected.” 1
Syria 2012 has produced its own tangled complexity. In the past 18 months it appears that at one time or another virtually every nation in the Middle East and North Africa as well as members of NATO and the European Union has been reported as aiding those seeking to overthrow the regime of Bashar al-Assad, while Russia, China, and several other countries are reported as aiding Assad. The Syrian leader, for his part, has consistently referred to those in combat against him as “terrorists”, citing the repeated use of car bombs and suicide bombers. The West has treated this accusation with scorn, or has simply ignored it. But the evidence that Assad has had good reason for his stance has been accumulating for some time now, particularly of late. Here is a small sample from recent months:
•”It is the sort of image that has become a staple of the Syrian revolution, a video of masked men calling themselves the Free Syrian Army and brandishing AK-47s — with one unsettling difference. In the background hang two flags of Al Qaeda, white Arabic writing on a black field … The video, posted on YouTube, is one more bit of evidence that Al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists are doing their best to hijack the Syrian revolution.” (New York Times, July 24, 2012)
•A leading German newspaper reported that the German intelligence service, BND, had concluded that 95% of the Syrian rebels come from abroad and are likely to be members of al Qaeda. (Die Welt, September 30, 2012)
•”A network of French Islamists behind a grenade attack on a kosher market outside Paris last month also planned to join jihadists fighting in Syria … Two suspects were responsible for recruiting and dispatching people ‘to carry out jihad in some countries – notably Syria’,” a state prosecutor said. (Associated Press, October 11, 2012)
•”Fighters from a shadowy militant group [Jabhat al-Nusra] with suspected links to al-Qaida joined Syrian rebels in seizing a government missile defense base in northern Syria on Friday, according to activists and amateur video. …The videos show dozens of fighters inside the base near a radar tower, along with rows of large missiles, some on the backs of trucks.” (Associated Press, October 12, 2012)
•”In a videotape posted this week on militant forums, the Egyptian-born jihadist Ayman al-Zawahiri … urged support for Syria’s uprisings.” (Associated Press, October 28, 2012)
According to your favorite news source or commentator, President Assad is either a brutal murderer of his own people, amongst whom he has had very little support; or he’s a hero who’s long had the backing of the majority of the Syrian population and who is standing up to Western imperialists and their terrorist comrades-in-arms, whom the US is providing military aid, intelligence, and propaganda services.
Washington and its freedom fighters de jour would like to establish Libya II. And we all know how well Libya I has turned out.
Of backward nations and modern nations
Page one of the October 24 Washington Post contained a prominent photo of a man chained to a concrete wall at a shrine in Afghanistan. The accompanying story told us that the man was mentally ill and that “legend has it that those with mental disorders will be healed after spending 40 days in one of the shrine’s 16 tiny concrete cells”, living “on a subsistence diet of bread, water and black pepper.” Every year hundreds of Afghans bring mentally ill relatives to the shrine for this “cure”.
Immediately to the right of this story, constituting the paper’s lead story of the day, we learn that the United States is planning to continue its policy of assassinating individuals, via drone attacks, for the foreseeable future. This is Washington’s “cure” for the mental illness of not believing that America is the savior of mankind, bringing democracy, freedom and happiness to all. (The article adds that the number of “militants and civilians” killed in the drone campaign over the past 10 years will soon exceed 3,000 by some estimates, surpassing the number of people killed on September 11.)
Undoubtedly there are many people in Afghanistan, high and low, who know that their ancient cure is nonsense, but the chainings have continued for centuries. Just as certain, there are American officials who know the same about their own cure. Here’s a senior American official: “We can’t possibly kill everyone who wants to harm us. … We’re not going to wind up in 10 years in a world of everybody holding hands and saying, ‘We love America’.” Yet , we are told, “Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaeda continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight.”
We can also be confident that there have been people chained to the wall in Afghanistan who were not particularly mentally ill to begin with but became so because of the cure. And just as certain, there have been numerous people in several countries who were not anti-American until a drone devastated their village, family or neighbors.
The Post article also reported that Adm. Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, returned from Pakistan a while ago and recounted a heated confrontation with his counterpart, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. “Mullen told White House and counterterrorism officials that the Pakistani military chief had demanded an answer to a seemingly reasonable question: After hundreds of drone strikes, how could the United States possibly still be working its way through a ‘top 20′ list?”
American officials defended the arrangement even while acknowledging an erosion in the caliber of operatives placed in the drones’ cross hairs. “Is the person currently Number 4 as good as the Number 4 seven years ago? Probably not,” said a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official. “But it doesn’t mean he’s not dangerous.” The Post added this comment: “Internal doubts about the effectiveness of the drone campaign are almost nonexistent.”
The next day we could read in the Post: “There is ample evidence in Pakistan that the more than 300 [drone] strikes launched under Obama have helped turn the vast majority of the population vehemently against the United States.”
Wake up and smell the bullshit. Then go vote.
After the second presidential debate in early October, Luke Rudkowski of the media group We Are Change asked Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, about President Obama’s widely reported “kill list” of Americans and foreigners who can be assassinated without charge or trial.

Luke Rudkowski: “If President Romney becomes president, he’s going to inherit President Barack Obama’s secret ‘kill list’? This is going to be debated. How do you think Romney will handle this ‘kill list,’ and are you comfortable with him having a ‘kill list’?”

Debbie Wasserman Schultz: “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Luke Rudkowski: “Obama has a secret ‘kill list’ which he has used to assassinate different people all over the world.”
Debbie Wasserman Schultz: “I’m happy to answer any serious questions you have.”
Luke Rudkowski: “Why is that not serious?”
Debbie Wasserman Schultz: “Because I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Luke Rudkowski: “Of course you don’t.”
The existence of the U.S. ‘kill list’ has been publicly known for nearly two years and was the subject of a 6,000-word exposé in the New York Times in May.
At the same event, Sierra Adamson of We Are Change asked former White House Press Secretary and current Obama campaign adviser Robert Gibbs about the U.S. killing of Abdulrahman Awlaki, the teenage son of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen.
Sierra Adamson: “Do you think that the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, who was an American citizen, is justifiable?”
Robert Gibbs: “I’m not going to get into Anwar al-Awlaki’s son. I know that Anwar al-Awlaki renounced his citizenship.”
Sierra Adamson: “His son was still an American citizen.”
Robert Gibbs: “Did great harm to people in this country and was a regional al-Qaeda commander hoping to inflict harm and destruction on people that share his religion and others in this country. And…”
Sierra Adamson: “That’s an American citizen that’s being targeted without due process of law, without trial. And he’s underage. He’s a minor.”
Robert Gibbs: “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father. If they’re truly concerned about the well-being of their children, I don’t think becoming an al-Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.” 2
To demonstrate that the bullshit is bipartisan, we now present Mr. Mitt Romney, speaking during the presidential foreign policy debate: “Syria is Iran’s only ally in the Arab world. It’s their route to the sea. It’s the route for them to arm Hezbollah in Lebanon, which threatens, of course, our ally, Israel.”
However, a look at a map reveals firstly that Iran does not share a border with Syria; there’s something called Iraq in between; and secondly that Iran already has access to the sea on both its north and south; actually about 1100 miles of coastline. Romney has made this particular blunder repeatedly, and the Washington Post has pointed it out on several occasions. Post columnist Al Kamen recently wrote: “We tried so hard back in February to get Romney to stop saying that.” 3
Of course, neither Obama nor the debate moderator pointed out Romney’s errors.
The sanctity of life
“I’m as pro-life as a person gets,” Congressman Paul Ryan, the Republican candidate for vice-president, told the conservative Weekly Standard in 2010. 4
How nice. Yet the man supports all of America’s wars, each of which takes the lives of large numbers of people, both American and foreign; and he’s opposed to national health insurance, which would save countless more lives. The good congressman is also an avid hunter and supporter of gun-owners’ rights, so he apparently is not too pro-life concerning other creatures of God’s Kingdom. Of course, what Ryan actually means by “life” is an embryo or fetus, perhaps even a zygote. Oh wait, that’s not all of it – corporations are also people whose lives Ryan cherishes.
The fate of those who do not love the empire
On October 7 Hugo Chávez won his fourth term in office as president of Venezuela. The feeling of frustration that must have descended upon the Venezuelan and American power elite is likely reminiscent of Chile, March 1973, when the party of another socialist and American bête noire, Salvador Allende — despite the best intentions and dollars without end of the CIA — won about 44 percent of the vote in congressional elections, compared to some 36 percent in 1970. It was said to be the largest increase an incumbent party had ever received in Chile after being in power more than two years. The opposition parties had publicly expressed their optimism about capturing two-thirds of the congressional seats and thus being able to impeach Allende. Now they faced three more years under him, with the prospect of being unable, despite their most underhanded efforts, to prevent his popularity from increasing even further.
During the spring and summer the Agency’s destabilization process escalated. There was a whole series of demonstrations and strikes, with a particularly long one by the truckers. Time magazine reported: “While most of the country survived on short rations, the truckers seemed unusually well equipped for a lengthy holdout.” A reporter asked a group of truckers who were camping and dining on “a lavish communal meal of steak, vegetables, wine and empanadas” where the money for it came from. “From the CIA,” they answered laughingly. 5
There was as well daily sabotage and violence, including assassination. In June, an abortive attack upon the Presidential Palace was carried out by the military and the ultra-right Patria y Libertad.
In September the military prevailed. “It is clear,” said the later US Senate investigating committee, “the CIA received intelligence reports on the coup planning of the group which carried out the successful September 11 coup throughout the months of July, August, and September 1973.” 6 The United States had also prepared the way for the military action through its economic intervention and support of the anti-Allende media.
Chávez has already been overthrown once in a coup that the United States choreographed, in 2002, but a combination of some loyal military officers and Chávez’s followers in the streets combined for a remarkable reversal of the coup after but two days. The Venezuelan opposition will not again make the mistake of not finishing Chávez off when they have him in their custody.
Both Hugo Chávez and Salvador Allende had sinned by creating “nationalistic” regimes that served the wrong “national interest”. The hatred felt by the power elite for such men is intense. The day after the legally and democratically elected Venezuelan leader was ousted, but before being restored to power, the New York Times (April 13, 2002) was moved to pen the following editorial:
“With yesterday’s resignation [what the coup leaders called it] of President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator. Mr. Chávez, a ruinous demagogue, stepped down after the military intervened and handed power to a respected business leader.”
It should be noted that the “respected business leader”, Pedro Carmona, quickly dissolved the National Assembly and the Supreme Court, and annulled the Venezuelan constitution.
And keep in mind that in the United States the New York Times is widely regarded as a “liberal” newspaper; most conservatives would say “very liberal”, if not “socialist”.
Notes
1.William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, chapter 21 ↩
2.Democracy Now, October 25, 2012 ↩
3.Washington Post, October 24, 2012, column by Al Kamen ↩
4.New York Times, August 12, 2012 ↩
5.Time, September 24, 1973, p.46 ↩
6.Covert Action in Chile, 1963‑1973, a Staff Report of The Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (US Senate) December 18, 1975, p.39 ↩
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William Blum is the author of:
•Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
•Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
•West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
•Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire
Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org