Lost Girls

Gimme absolute control, over every living soul,
And lie beside me, baby - that's an order. - Leonard Cohen

Briefly, I'm wondering what to make of Kola Boof.

Nearly a quarter of the Sudanese poet's autobiography, Diary of a Lost Girl, describes her months spent in Morocco in 1996 as Osama bin Laden's unwilling mistress. Boof has been called a "fraud" (a "pathological liar" according to bin Laden biography Peter Bergen) for her iconoclastic portait of Osama as a Van Halen-loving, dope-smoking gangbanger, who "rambled on about his favorite TV shows: The Wonder Years, Miami Vice, and MacGyver." (Bergen and other authorities also assert that bin Laden was not in Morocco in 1996, though the same authorities also say little, or merely repeat bin Laden's own denial, concerning his reported visit to a Dubai hospital in July 2001 where he met with the CIA station chief and Saudi royals.)

Where the Boof story is getting attention these days it's usually played for laughs, on account of bin Laden's supposedly comic infatuation with Whitney Houston. But there's something much more interesting. From an excerpt in September's Harper's magazine: "He said the U.S. government was made up of 'fanatical crusaders' and that he'd once worked as a mind reader and trained secret agents for the CIA."

Now, Boof could be a fraud, though her revelations about bin Laden's secret life are no more bizarre than Amanda Keller's about Mohammed Atta, or Leola McConnell's about Bill Bennett, or Cathy O'Brien's about Dick Cheney, or so many other women and men - and girls and boys - about so many other devout jihadists and born-again crusaders. The behaviour is always shocking, but it should no longer be surprising. No man's a hero to his valet, and neither is he a saint to his mistress or sex slave. If we mean to pierce the public veil we need to hear them out. (Or as Boof says, "in any mansion...it's the maids and the 'whores' who know the most. Trust me.")

And we should also consider the possibility that, even if Boof had been Osama's mistress and he told her such things, he may not have been telling her the truth. Perhaps he thought it a good line, to impress the ladies with his connections. But his connections didn't need embellishment, and "mind reader" strikes me as an unlikely fabrication.

Either Boof is lying, bin Laden was bullshitting, or they're both telling the truth. And the implication of that - of Osama having been a psychic spy and a trainer of agents for the CIA - has much more gravity than his "paramount desire" for Whitney Houston. But it's not as funny, so don't hold your breath for the headlines.

Inside, Outside

Met Prince Phillip at the home of the blues
Said he'd give me information if his name wasn't used - Bob Dylan

It was nice to see, at first, a review in Saturday's Globe and Mail of Barrie Zwicker's Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-up of 9/11. Nice, like the fleeting thrill of validation whenever the press is compelled to acknowledge our realities even on the margins, albeit as a joke. And reviewer Martin Levin's meatless appraisal was all about the punchline:

Now I have little trouble believing it possible that plutocrats of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld axis of ego are orchestrating things for their own benefit and that of their Fortune 500 cronies. Or that the war in Iraq is based on an unsavoury stew of misconceptions, stupidity, wishful thinking and deceit. But what I do have great difficulty believing is that the “perpetrators” are intelligent enough and, I suppose, quite evil enough, not only to concoct such a grand strategy, but to carry it off so deviously that only Zwicker and his allies can discern its true nature.

Levin pairs his review with one of the comic book adaptation of the official 9/11 report. Of that, he writes "though Barrie Zwicker would undoubtedly think the report itself a fraud, this work seems an accurate version of it." He recommends the comic "as a clear and concise record of events and deliberations," and adds a final raspberry in our direction: "But then, I'm just another dupe."

Well, yes. But let's see how he became one, because we're not beyond becoming dupes ourselves.

Levin's argument is not with the content of Zwicker's work; he's simply affronted by the work's existence. For the nerve of "Zwicker and his allies" to challenge the verdicts of conventional history and politics, it seems Levin can do no better than toss off a Who do they think they are? But his issue, and that of many others, runs deeper. Levine's cavalier dismissal of Zwicker's book and his endorsement of a comic is a pathetic appeal to authority that carries an implied Who do we think we are?

By "we" here, I mean the common rabble in whose company Levin includes even himself. The "us," in us and capital-T Them. We're the Outsiders, without privileged information, who can only put our heads together. What do we think we can know?

An appeal to authority is a strong attractor, even to many who profess to question it. The "9/11 Movement" has largely been lost to this crippling way of thought that perpetuates the myth of our own inadequacies. What we need, it's been said for years now, is someone on the inside to blow this wide open. And the Inside has happily obliged, providing a stream of dubious "whistleblowers" to muddy clear waters with sensational scoops and who soon vanish, leaving only confusion behind. The Inside has even gifted 9/11 with leadership: pied pipers who have shifted the focus towards the sexiest and least substantial arguments, and who are embraced and elevated according to the depths of their insider bona fides. Former Bush advisors, Republican bagmen and CIA operatives all speak with the seducing voice of authority, and when they say Nevermind that; look over here, too many of us look. (The rise to prominence of "Scholars for 9/11 Truth" is another example of our too-easily exploited deference to authority, even when the authority addresses issues unrelated to its field of expertise.)

And what do we mean by Inside? Many who push 9/11 as an "inside job" seem to want to push Osama right out of the picture, but bin Laden is himself inside the security-narcotics-terror nexus, composed of factions that interpenetrate one another, which sometimes compete and sometimes strike strategic alliances depending upon what advantages they believe they can gain and how best they can outplay the other. Look at al Qaeda, NATO's silent partner in Bosnia. Look at the ISI, al Qaeda's patron and the CIA's proxy. Look at the drug trafficking common to all, and double agents such as Omar Saeed Sheik. But the fact they're all inside to a certain degree doesn't mean they act as one, without self interest or competing agendas. Inside, there can be a convergence of interests, even at cross purposes.

The pull of authority holds for other subjects that have been pushed even farther to the margins, for which established authority does not even exist. To whom should we appeal for an understanding of the ritual butchery of sheep on Prince Charles's estate (a perpetuation of the occultic slaughter reported last year in Dartmoor)? Necks broken, eyes and tongues gouged out, bodies arranged in a row. It "would have required a number of people and potentially been quite a spectacle," said an RSPCA inspector, adding "it is impossible to guess what the motivation for this brutal attack could be." Not impossible, just beyond the veil of reason, and true insiders will be reluctant to lead us there. So without authority to explain it, most choose not to see it.

But we don't need to get inside, and we shouldn't want to. Inside is a compartmentalized labyrinth that even insiders with the best of intentions would be unable to negotiate. Outside, and from a distance, is perspective. What we need is better Outside intel.

Holding Pattern

There's a lot to get to here but I'm scrambling to meet several deadlines, the most important of which pertains to a 2007 book for Trine Day. I'll be back Tuesday. In the meantime, please use this as an open thread.

Confessions of an Economic Shapeshifter

They sentenced me to 20 years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within - Leonard Cohen

There's a school of liberal American thought - one that serves a gated community - that says John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is about as deep as it gets. If there is a conspiracy, so that mindset goes, then it goes this far: the cheating of nations of their inheritance by persuading their rulers to take on massive developments contracted to US industry, paid for by enormous loans, that in turn become the weapon of indebtedness to buy a government's allegiance. The story Perkins tells in Hit Man is that of the privateering ruin of the world, coordinated by the deniable aegis of covert statecraft, and it's as good as it goes. But it's not Perkins' only story.

Perkins has written other books about his time spent in the wild places of the world, but they're the kind of books liable to embarrass the reader who thinks Hit Man is tell all. He's taken ayahuasca and seen the holy anacondas; discovered the power of dream and learned principles of shapeshifting from the shamans. In fact, "he is currently working with several major corporations to introduce the concepts of shapeshifting and tribal wisdom into the highest levels of executive thinking."

Now, whatever that may mean (and it may include such dispiriting "transformations" as Bono's equity firm buying 40% of Forbes Magazine, which may make MacPhisto more skinwalker than shapeshifter), Perkins doesn't intend shapeshifting to be understood as pure metaphor. (Though presumably, when he describes the CIA's "jackals" who are called in to perform the wet jobs, it's just a figure of speech.) He means, literally, shapeshifting: that it can entail authentic, cellular change.

Perkins' esoteric knowledge may not be known to the casual reader of Hit Man, but the State Department, in its page "Identifying Misinformation," draws attention to Perkins' other titles in order to scare away the faint of mind. Alluding to The World Is As You Dream It: "shamanistic techniques from the Amazon and Andes," the anonymous flunky writes: "As to whether Perkins was acting at the behest of the US government, the world is not "as he dreams it." Higher up the food chain, where people are known to "create our own reality" and "other new realities, which you can study, too," opinions may differ.

Perkins offers some personal accounts of cellular transformation in his book Shapeshifting, the most dramatic drawn from 1994 when a friend, Sarah, was stricken with a deadly virus. Infectious fluid filled her chest cavity such that her heart and lungs were obscured on x-rays. At Thanksgiving, doctors warned her husband William that she was unlikely to survive until Christmas. William had travelled to Ecuador with Perkins and shared his interest in shamanism; Sarah did not. But close to death, she invited him to visit and talk, and then asked if he could use shamanism to heal her. Eventually agreeing, he asks Sarah to lie down and lights a candal by her bed. Fanning her with branches, he "called on Kitiar, Viejo Itza, and several other shamans to assist me. I asked Pachamama to do whatever was appropriate."

And then:

A tiny ball appeared. The size of a marble, it materialized like a sort of hologram of light near her heart. The thought intruded that it was just my imagination. Quickly I chased this thought away and returned to being the observer. The ball grew larger, to the size of a Ping-Pong ball; it had a bluish hue. It was not like a solid object; it appeared more fluid, and seemed to vibrate. It moved slowly around her chest cavity. I had the feeling that it was searching for something. I also had the feeling that I should try to enter it; however, something told me to be wary and to resist this temptation. I shook the branches more forcefully over her body. As I did so, the ball's color changed to a deeper blue, a color approaching black, then it sprouted two branches of its own, which it waved in unison with the rhythm of mine.

Its branches spread and flattened until they became wings. The ball had shifted into the shape of a bat.... It darted about, then swooped through her torso, and I understood that it was drinking up fluid that threatened her life. Again, this came to me in the form of a knowning, like intuition, or a thought that we are sure is correct yet do not understand how we know it. Then the bat lifted up out of her body, flew directly past me and to the open window behind me. Perched on the windowsill facing outside, it made spastic, jerking motions. I realized with a start that it was regurgitating the fluid it had extracted from Sarah.

The next day Sarah had a radiology appointment which confirmed that a "measurable portion" of the fluid had vanished. The radiologist was surprised, and Sarah's cardiologist told William "Sometimes these things happen." Perkins repeated the healing sessions three times in the next week, after which Sarah had a another examination. The fluid had completely disappeared. Her doctors, their confidence shaken, recommended she travel from Florida to Minnesota's Mayo Clinic for another round of tests, which when complete confirmed that an unexpected healing had occurred.

Perkins recounts other brushes with what could be called either high weirdness, or perhaps more charitably, elevated energies. An evening in the Amazon, for instance, stepping into a clearing and seeing "a blue light flash high up in the top of the canopy. And again. Then it rose out of the forest - a vibrating globe of blue light":

Then another light appeared. This one seemed to materialize out of thin air. The two hovered side by side. Like huge balls of energy, they moved closer to me and then flashed quickly away, disappearing behind the thick wall of the rainforest trees.

These aren't stories which most Amy Goodman-progressives are going to want to hear. But since they are told with the same conviction by the same insider whom they delight to cite as a source for how the world really works, perhaps they should pay them some attention, and accord a similar measure of respect. Maybe then they'd learn the world's workings go also very deep, and strange.

All Work and No Play

I hope to have a new post up later today. In the meantime, here's an open thread.

NoBorderland

Way down in Mexico you went out to find a doctor and you never came back.
I would have gone after you but I didn't feel like letting my head get blown off. - Bob Dylan

It's such a blinding embarassment of weirdness out there, it's hard to know where to look these days. But we need to keep looking at Mexico. Its loose threads may help us tie up things elsewhere.

Of course there's the staggered rebellion of the disenfrachised, belittled or ignored by the same media that lionized and tub-thumped Ukraine's "Orange Revolution." But there are also some curious developments, seemingly out of the blue, in the case of the Ciudad Juárez ritual killings of hundreds of women that may lead us into the black.

Last Thursday in Mexico City, coincident with the delivery of John Karr into the embrace of Homeland Security, came the crowing announcement from the US Embassy that a Mexican citizen was being held in the United States on suspicion of the rape and killing of at least 10 of the women. By another coincidence, Edgar Alvarez Cruz was arrested in Denver, Colorado.

There have since been two more arrests on American soil, one in West Virginia and the other in Sierra Blanca, Texas. The three are being held in El Paso, and are expected to be handed into the care of Mexican authorities some time this week, at least several of whom would appear to be less than grateful:

Some Mexican authorities said privately that they were caught off guard by what they called U.S. Ambassador Tony Garza's "premature announcement" Thursday of the first arrest. Mr. Garza called the arrest of Mr. Álvarez a "major break" in the investigation. But a Mexican law-enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the announcement could "jeopardize the ongoing investigation."

Have we heard something like that recently? Though to be truthful, there doesn't appear to have been much of an investigation ongoing: just three weeks ago a headline in The Independent read "Human rights groups attack decision to close Juarez murders investigation."

These aren't the first arrests in the case, though the consensus of victims' families is that none of the men previously arrested had anything to do with the murders. Two died in custody, one had his conviction overturned, and two of their attorneys were shot to death.

"This case is the most symbolic of everything that has gone wrong in Juarez," Laurie Freeman, a Mexico specialist with the Washington Office on Latin America, told the Denver Post. "It's the one that makes me believe that there is some sort of official complicity in some of the killings."

When I saw that quote several days ago, I thought it might be a good idea to copy the body of the article and not just make note of the link. It was a good idea: the article has since been updated, and the only change I can see is that Freeman's reference to official complicity has been deleted.

Diana Washington Valdez, an investigative reporter for the El Paso Times and author of Harvest of Women, isn't so shy:

The best information we have is that these men are committing crimes simply for the sport of it.... We know of people who've told stories about escaping from certain parties, orgies, which some of these people were present -- they were recognizable people from Juarez society, from Mexican society.

The authorities know who the killers are, and nothing's being done about it. We have two issues here: people who are getting away with murder, and... authorities who have become accomplices, and so this has become crimes of the state.

But those are the Mexican elites and Mexican parties of Mexican high society, protected by Mexican authority. Such things, of course, are inconceivable across the Rio Grande.

Single Pervert Theory

"Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion." - Donnie Darko

As much as the media love a good blood feast, it's beginning to slowly back away from the bizarre John Karr. The seeming Manchurian Paedophile is right to say he's not innocent, but he doesn't contain the mystery of the Ramsey case, which America is likely never to admit to itself.

In the Spring of 1996, months before the Ramsey murder, Karr was apparently attempting to lure children through his "e-mail based crisis feedback program" called Powerwurks. ("All my plans revolve around kids. I am very concerned about the well being of all young people. I'll do anything I can to help find a missing child.") His bogus support group, similar to "Arcadian Fields Ministry," sought to draw kids, at least virtually, into a supposedly "safe and private environment where you can freely and comfortably express your thoughts and feelings on any subject. No subject is banned from discussion. All conversations are strictly confidential and that's a promise!!" (The "thoughts and feelings" Karr meant to encourage was clear from another post on k12.chat.elementary: "Is sex among people under 10 a rarity or common place?")

But Karr's ex-wife, to whom he hasn't spoken since their 2001 divorce following his arrest for possession of child pornography, says he was with her and their children in Alabama the Christmas of JonBenet's death. And Karr's claim to have drugged and raped the little girl he "loved very much" just doesn't match the autopsy report.

At second glance, Karr appears to be nothing but a dead soul who took the Gary Glitter Adventure Tour, and staring at a Thai jail cell after having lost everything but his perversion, fell back upon his morbid obsession with the Ramsey case as his last advantage. And Homeland Security, for its own reasons, was happy to oblige. Karr may still have some truth to tell, but that depends upon his yet-unverified resume, which alleges he was employed "in some of the most prestigious schools in the United States, working with children from high-profile families" between 1996 and 2001.

Six years ago a different wrinkle was added to the Ramsey story, which America's national media wasn't nearly as interested in reporting. From Boulder's Daily Camera, February 25, 2000:

DA pursues new Ramsey lead

District Attorney Alex Hunter has turned over new information to Boulder police and the FBI that he says could provide a major breakthrough in solving the 3-year-old JonBenét Ramsey murder case.

The information is from testimony and documents provided voluntarily by a 37-year-old California woman who was brought forward by Boulder attorney Lee Hill. The woman said she has suffered a lifetime of sexual and physical abuse, beginning at age 3. Her story, if true, could mean the Ramsey case is tangled in sexual abuse and involves more people than originally thought.

...

Hill, who is a former San Diego County deputy district attorney and former special assistant U.S. attorney and is experienced in investigative work, said, "She is among the most credible witnesses I have ever interviewed." He is representing the woman in her decision to give information to authorities.

The woman has described to police years of sexual and physical abuse in California homes at the hands of adults who stayed at holiday and other parties after other guests had left for the evening. Then, she said, another "party," one of sexual abuse for the gratification of a select group of adults, would begin.

In talking to detectives, the woman draws parallels between sexual techniques used at these sessions and the physical evidence of garroting that investigators found on the body of JonBenét Ramsey. The woman told detectives she believes JonBenét was killed accidentally when an asphyxiation technique used to stimulate an orgasmic response during a child sex and porno "party" went too far.

The woman told police she knows firsthand about asphyxiation (choking) to produce a sexual response because it had been done to her when she was a child. The woman said in her experience little girls were dressed provocatively and trained to say provocative things, such as, "It's a pleasure to please you."

She told police that when girls did not perform as expected, they were struck on the head. That was because their hair covered the wound. A big night for such "parties" was Christmas night, she said. Over the years, she said, many parties were held then because a large number of cars around a house did not arouse suspicion in the neighborhood and the children had a full week to heal from their wounds before returning to school.

JonBenét Ramsey's death occurred overnight Christmas 1996. The autopsy report concluded she suffered a blow on the head and was strangled.

The woman said she knows the Ramseys through the Fleet White family. She said the godfather to her mother is Fleet White Sr., 86, of California. Fleet White Jr. of Boulder and John Ramsey were close friends until the death of JonBenét.

On March 10 of that year, this story appeared in the Daily-Times Call:

Messages warn therapist to avoid figure in sex ring

BOULDER — The California therapist who is treating the so-called Mystery Woman in the JonBenet Ramsey murder case has received telephone messages ordering her to stay away from her patient, who has come forward with allegations of lifelong sexual abuse by a ring that includes figures in the Ramsey case.

The five messages were left at the office of Mary Bienkowski over what is believed to be a six-month period. One of the calls appears to be made by one woman and the other four made by a second woman.

...

The text of the calls follows:

1. (Caller One) "Hello Mary. This is a very interested party in regards to (Mystery Woman's) welfare. (Her) past and her future are of no, of no concern to you. She made an error in judgement when she came to see you and you have caused her nothing but pain and suffering. Her main concern now is her new husband and her family. She has started a life and is going to be moving as far away from you as possible. She belongs with her family and nobody else. She is off limits to you."

2. (Caller Two) "Hello. Leave (Mystery Woman) alone. We take care of our own. Everything. And nothing is any of your business."

3. (Caller Two) "Hello. It's high time that you caught on that (Mystery Woman) doesn't have time for your foolishness. Thank you."

4. (Caller Two) "(Mystery Woman) is going on an extended vacation with her family and while there will seek medical care for her problems. (Mystery Woman) has forgotten more than you will ever know. So."

5. (Caller Two) "Hello. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will never hurt us. So leave (Mystery Woman) alone. It's against the law to disturb the peace. Don't forget it."

Bienkowski on Thursday said that when Boulder detectives interviewed her on Wednesday, they questioned "the structure, not the content of her treatment."

Bienkowski said she felt detectives were "looking for ways to invalidate the statements."

Alex Constantine has much more here.

On October 13, 1999, the day after the announcement that there would be no charges filed in the Ramsey case following the adjournment of the Grand Jury, Denver journalist and Panama Deception Oscar winner Joe Calhoun was given a 23-page file "of such a bizarre nature," he told Constantine, "I was extremely circumspect about regarding it as a collection of genuine documents and confidential memos I jokingly referred to it to some of my colleagues as The Blair Witch Project of the JonBenet Ramsey case. I didn't pursue any of the leads mentioned in the file until recently." What Calhoun had received in October was the story of Belinda Shultz, and her allegations that her son Nicholas had been sexually abused by his father and others at "satanic' sex rituals in Texas and Colorado.

It was only after the "mystery woman," Nancy Krebs, came forward that Calhoun "decided to give it a second look, since the information contained therein seemed to parallel the information the woman was providing Boulder D.A. Alex Hunter and the police. Upon rereading all of the information contained in it, and cross-referencing names, the entire file had more of a flow of information." (Krebs' first questioning by Boulder police can be read here, and here is the transcript of a radio interview from 2000.)

The DNA of an unidentifed white male is beneath JonBenet's fingernails and mixed with her blood. Whatever guilt the Ramseys may bear in their daughter's death is shared, just as JonBenet was likely shared in life.

It's perhaps easy to see how Belgians, already familiar with the disclosure of its fascist secret army's false flag terror of the Brabant massacres, could admit that Marc Dutroux has friends in high places who also preyed upon their children. After Brabant, what, now, could be inconceivable?

Even after 9/11, most Americans aren't there yet.

The Massacre of the Innocents

The truth will cause your heart to seize - Anti-Flag

You're a Belgian, and it's 1985. For three years, the province of Brabant has been traumatized by an unexplained wave of exceptionally brutal assaults upon unexceptional targets (supermarkets, restaurants, factories; the common places of ordinary people). Theft is not the motive; only small amounts of money are stolen by the hooded men, seemingly for incident, and often found dumped soon after. The motive is only terror.

From Daniele Ganser's description of the final attack, November 9, on the Delhaize supermarket in Aalst:

A prominent day in the Christmas season, November 9 is St Martin's day in Belgium, the local Santa Claus, and children on the night before leave carrots in front of the house for the horse of St Martin and go to bed with wishes for wonderful Christmas presents. The next morning, a busy Saturday, people hurried to the Delhaize supermarket to make their last minute purchases. What happened thereafter was reconstructed from the testimony of witnesses. A Volkswagon GTI was parked outside the supermarket and three armed men with hoods over their heads came out of the car. The tallest of the three produced a pump-action shotgun, opened fire at point blank range and finished off in cold blood two shoppers instantly. Upon reaching the checkout counter he began to fire randomly at anything that moved. "I saw three masked men coming out at the rear. A man said to his child "Drop down! There they are! ... One bystander who tried to flee was shot at, seven or eight bullets through his car and a shot grazing behind the ear." Total panic reigned. "One woman whose face was covered in blood, was screaming something about her child. I don't know exactly what." There was little cover or shelter for the terrified shoppers in the aisles of the supermarket from the three masked gunmen. In the ensuing massacre eight people, including a whole family, died, and seven more were injured. A husband and wife and their 14-year-old daughter were finished off in cold blood at the supermarket checkout. Another father and his nine-year old daughter were killed in their car trying to flee. The takings from the raid amounted to a meagre couple of thousand pounds, found later in a canal in an unopened sack. The killers escaped without a trace and have not been identified, nor arrested, nor tried ever since. The actors behind the series known as the Brabant massacres remain unidentified until today.

But that's not all we know.

In 1990 a parliamentary report into the massacres concluded that the killers were members or former members of the security forces: "extreme right-wingers who enjoyed high-level protection and were preparing a right-wing coup," wrote Phil Davidson in Britain's The Independent on Sunday. "The Brebant killings were part of a conspiracy to destabilize Belgium's democratic regime, possibly to prepare the ground for a right-wing coup." Just months later, the hidden architecture of fascist terror was revealed when Belgium's secret "stay behind" army - its own Gladio network - was disclosed. (It's from Ganser's NATO's Secret Armies, which tells similar stories from all across Western Europe, that the above excerpt is drawn.)

A militant branch of Belgium's extreme right-wing Front de la Jeunesse, the FJ, was called "Group G," as it was almost entirely composed of members of the Belgian Gendarmerie. The Gendarmes were also members of the military secret service, which was directed by the same branch that ran Belgium's secret army. By 1979 Group G was renamed the Westland New Post, but it remained distinct in its members' roll of military secret police. Its commander during the massacres was a man named Paul Latinus, who had been recruited in 1967 at the age of 17 by the US Defence Intelligence Agency, and until a left-wing magazine exposed him in 1981 had worked as an advisor to the Labour Minister.

In Allan Francovich's 1992 documentary Gladio he interviewed one of Group G's first members, Gendarme Martial Lekeu, who fled to Florida in 1984 after threats against his family. Lekeu testified that in 1983 he had gone to the special branch investigating the massacres with information implicating the secret service. "I was surprised that no arrests had been been made and I know that I did report myself what was going on," he told Francovich, as quoted by Ganser. "We were respecting killing like that - random killing or going into supermarkets and killing people, even kids.... So I told a gentleman I met: 'Do you realize members of the Gendarmerie of the army are involved in that?' His answer was 'Shut up! You know, we know. Take care of your own business. Get out of here!' What they were saying was that democracy was going away, the leftists were in power, the socialists and all this, and they wanted more power."

WNP member Michel Libert explained to Francovich that "One received orders. We can go back to, say, 1982. From 1982 to 1985, there were projects." Sensitive projects. He claimed he had been directed to case supermarkets: "What kind of locks are there? What sort of protection do they have that they could interfere with our operations? Does the store manager lock up? Or do they use an outside security company?" His superior told him that "You, Mr Libert, know nothing about why we're doing this. Nothing at all. All we ask is that your group, with cover from the Gendarmerie, with cover from Security, carry out a job." He adds: "We carried out the orders and sent in our reports."

From Florida, Lekeau said "the guns they were using were coming from far away and that's exactly what we had planned, to organize gangs and groups like that and let them go by themselves, but make sure they will survive and make sure to supply them and you know just to create a climate of terror in the country - [a] so-called 'Left movement" who will do a terrorist attempt just to make-believe, make the population believe that these terrorist attempts were done by the left."

Now, you're an American, and it's 2006.

Breaking News

I need to give attention to some things this week - most of them, happily, good things - so unfortunately posting will need to be light. Please use this as an open thread, and I'll see you in a few days.

Time Bomb

I want everyone to remember why they need us - V for Vendetta

Some brief thoughts on the latest mass-induced near-death experience.

The crawl on MSNBC Thursday night read Terror in the Sky: Mass Murder on an Unimaginable Scale! Well, no; and I mean no to everything.

There is no terror in the sky, unless you're Iraqi or Lebanese, or reside in northern Israel or any of the world's other free-fire zones and might expect to see death fall from it. Or unless we can include the sky itself, churning with strange weather and unwholesome artifacts, and a sun that now seems to burn an alien white. Because if we look up, we may just catch our breath.

The mass murder never was, and the unimaginable scale! was imagined more than ten years ago, and given the name Project Bojinka. Substitute the Pacific for the Atlantic, and toss in the assassination of the Pope and the crashing of a plane into CIA headquarters for good measure, and you have a thwarted operation that's earned its exclamation point. But 2006 isn't 1995, and today citizens of the great crusader nations must be reminded, repeatedly and at the pleasure of their minders, just how vulnerable they are, and therefore dependent upon the dark mills of empire that intentionally exacerbate those same vulnerabilities.

"Weeks before September 11th, this is going to play big," boasts a naturally unnamed White House official in the AFP story "Bush Seeks Political Gains from Foiled Plot." Bush and Blair conferred last weekend on the "imminent attack" (though neither man was sufficiently moved to break off their vacations), and the White House tooled its response to Joe Lieberman's defeat at the hands of a "far left" cut 'n runner accordingly. The thwarting of the plot (with a man inside, as is the custom in plots both thwarted and unthwarted) became itself a time bomb, rigged to detonate in the faces of populist leaders who even modestly reflect the now conventional wisdom that the war is an abject failure (at least according to how failure is conventionally understood). This would be a reminder and an example that the threat is real, though the threat was no less real - and possibly more real - when Bojinka was foiled in 1995.

Last night on the RI forum, "sunny" wondered "So, if the plot was foiled, why was the terror alert raised? That in itself tells me everything I need to know."

Let one happen, stop the rest. Should we to be grateful then that, for whatever reason, they stop some?

The Predator Class (Part Two)

I came upon a butcher, he was slaughtering a lamb,
I accused him there with his tortured lamb.
He said, "Listen to me, child, I am what I am
and you, you are my only son." - Leonard Cohen

In February of last year, the same month diplomat/child pornographer Arie Scher was named Israel's consul to Australia, Shaine Moore was found dead in his Adelaide home, ten days after he was reported missing. On March 18, 2005, South Australia Police declared his suspicious death a "major crime" and "suspected murder," while withholding results of the post mortem for "operational reasons." (This past Monday, David Richard Fraser pleaded not guilty to Moore's murder.)

Moore had been an informant in investigations conducted by the office of Peter Lewis - at the time, South Australia's parliamentary speaker - into an alleged murderous elite circle of paedophiles, which counted as a member at least one prominent state politician. He was the second informant to be murdered. (The first, Robert Woodland, was found "bashed to death last December [2004] in Adelaide's south parklands. His murder is unsolved.") By April 2005, two more would be killed. ("Pedophile link to 4th murder.") The same month, the South Austalian government forced Lewis 's resignation from the office of Speaker, and the same day it "took the extraordinary step...of introducing legislation to the Lower House which would limit parliamentary privilege by preventing media outlets from naming any MP or public official allegedly involved in sexual misconduct, even if he is identified in Parliament."

In his resignation speech, Lewis said:

The most outrageous thing of all, which disturbs me most about the information which has come in to my office is not the matter of paedophiles in South Australia's parliament but what appears to be the related and organised activities of those paedophiles in high public office—that is, the judiciary, the senior ranks of human services portfolios, some police, and MPs, across the nation, especially within the ranks of the Labor Party.... Paedophiles of the kind to which I am referring here are the most gracious and beguiling of people in the community and are able to manipulate the opinions of others and attract their favourable attentions more effectively than most. It is not surprising that we find them in the jobs and roles of leadership. Their guile and cunning enable them to conceive of ways to organise their activities so that they are almost impossible to prevent, detect and prosecute.

Since the days of laundering Southeast Asian drug money through such shells as the Nugan Hand bank, Australia has been a significant hub in the global nexus of organized crime and intelligence, supporting a national class of elites whose allegiance is not to the nation state and whose morality is unbound by law. On the single occasion Australia's blind allegiance - almost literally blind, with respect to the NSA's installation at Pine Gap - was challenged, during the government of Gough Whitlam, the CIA helped engineer Whitlam's fall. Australia is that important.

The Australian outback, like the American desert, is an ancient and unorganized space that was a stage for strange displays to its original human inhabitants, who regarded their home as shared with wild spirits that were themselves inhuman. And like the American desert, the outback has become a "proving ground" for other strange displays, those of deep black technologies that don't appear to be of this world even when they are, and a host to persistent rumours of occultic twists to the story of military intelligence. Location, location, location.

Australia and Great Britain were the only members of note in George Bush's "coalition of the willing." Perhaps we should consider Australia's alleged ring of paedophiles holding "high public office" - a "wild" allegation that saw four informants murdered - alongside the suppressed revelations of Britain's Operation Ore, that senior members of Tony Blair's cabinet are suspected paedophiles and consumers of child pornography. Perhaps the "special relationship" of the major coalition partners has been bonded by more than blood, and the glint of madness that's come to Blair's eyes in recent years has revealed its method.

The Predator Class (Part One)

There'll be phantoms
There'll be fires on the road
and the white man dancing - Leonard Cohen

In the middle of his September, 2004 address to the UN General Assembly, making the case that America's purpose is to "build a better world beyond the war on terror," George Bush had this to say:

Because we believe in human dignity, America and many nations have joined together to confront the evil of trafficking in human beings. We're supporting organizations that rescue the victims, passing stronger anti-trafficking laws, and warning travelers that they will be held to account for supporting this modern form of slavery. Women and children should never be exploited for pleasure or greed, anywhere on Earth.

It was a rare where did that come from moment during one of Bush's more lucid performances. And while it's appropriate to place the exploitation of children in the context of the "war on terror," he was disingenuous about what that place should be.

Consider this BBC story from July 5, 2000:

Wanted Israeli diplomat flees Brazil

Police in Rio de Janeiro say an Israeli diplomat suspected of belonging to an international child pornography ring has fled Brazil and returned to Israel.

The Israeli diplomatic mission confirmed that its vice-consul, Arie Scher, had flown home at the request of the Israeli government, which it said had ordered an investigation into the allegations.

Police want to question him in connection with pornographic pictures and videotapes of young children found in the home of a Hebrew language teacher arrested on Tuesday.

The children were pictured and filmed at the diplomat's house.

Police said the pictures had been published on the internet with the apparent aim of attracting foreign paedophiles to Rio de Janeiro.

Scher was to resurface five years later, when he was appointed Israel's new consul to Australia replacing Amir Laty, a spy who was himself expelled for seducing diplomats, defense specialists and journalists "in the hope of cultivating young women with access to government secrets."

That sex is a tool of espionage should not be much of a story, though it should, still, at least be a story. Despite its glamorization and parody in film, whoring for intelligence remains largely invisible and unacknowledged. Remember August 2004, when New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey resigned on account of a relationship with former Israeli naval lieutenant Golan Cipel, the man he had named his state's homeland security czar? Speculation that Cipel may have cultivated the affair as an intel op was duct-taped over as both "anti-gay" and "anti-semitic," by American liberals on the usual forums who pretended to have never heard the name Pussy Galore.

But "international child pornography" is a sex crime of a different order. And Scher's Australian placement and support from his Foreign office, which rejected the accusations against him as "terribly exaggerated," suggest kiddie porn wasn't a Blame it on Rio personal indiscretion, but rather something that came with the job. Much like the human smuggling scandal out of the US embassy in Azerbaijan that saw Ambassador Reno Harnish shuffled sideways to an environmental posting engaged in the "fight against bird flu."

A question to consider is why someone like Scher, who in his previous posting was apparently engaged in the covert pursuit of luring foreign paedophiles to his host country, would be considered an appropriate appointee for the position of consul to Australia.

Open Thread

I'll be posting later today. In the meantime, if you like, you can continue the conversation here.

Area 9/11

"I think that you'll find a little S&M will be necessary to trigger off a good healthy dose of hallucinations." - Videodrome

9/11 changed everything. Dissenters are uncommonly quick to call bullshit on that talking point. And maybe it didn't. But it changed me.

"The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena: the Videodrome," says the McLuhanesque Brian O'Blivion, referring to the pirate broadcast of a torture and murder circus that contains in its transmission a frequency that triggers the tumorous growth of new organs of perception in the brains of its viewers. "The television screen is the retina of the mind's eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality, and reality is less than television."

For almost all of us, 9/11 was only a televised event. Yet, like Ruby shooting Oswald live in America's livingroom, and like Videodrome, it was also a spectacular trauma; the unscheduled program was also programming, inducing a national trance to initiate the stage-managed winding down of our familiar world. But it also created within us fresh capacities of insight, and that too may have been the intent.

Apart from the chain-smoking, and though there's not much to laugh about, the opening sequence of Who Killed John O'Neill? is comically familiar. I don't sleep, I don't eat, I don't shower, I don't shave.... I don't do anything but think. I filled eight binders with tabs like "Osama," "Foreknowledge" and "Anthrax" with articles like the Guardian's "CIA Agent Alleged to Have Met Bin Laden in July," Newsweek's "Alleged Hijackers May Have Trained at U.S. Bases" and the Baltimore Sun's "Anthrax Matches Army Spores." I started reading again the samizdat history of the National Security State, though now with greater urgency and comprehension, because the existential stakes had been raised, and having seen the towers fall I felt as though I knew already how the story ended.

We were getting rewired: the new eyes that 9/11 gave us were entraining our brains to penetrate our flat screens to the real-world paramechanics of power, money and appetite. (Remaining on the surface analyzing pixels, with 9/11 as nothing but a special event broadcast while forgetting that it was filmed before a live audience, is how the more absurd hypotheses of holographic airplanes and pods arise.)

And there are a lot of us putting on this new flesh: a full third of Americans now, according to a poll this past week, suspect federal officials either "assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East." Lee Hamilton, the former vice chairman of the Kean Commission and trusted Bush family fixer stretching all the way back to the October Surprise and Iran/Contra acknowledges "One out of three sounds high, but that may very well be right." (Hamilton is a Democrat, it should be noted, because if your wiring isn't up to code for these days that still matters.)

The same week we saw the limited hangout's most risque striptease yet with the release of Vanity Fair's "NORAD tapes", bringing at last into mainstream discourse NORAD's coincident gaming of hijacked aircraft the morning of September 11:

"When they told me there was a hijack, my first reaction was 'Somebody started the exercise early,'" [Lieutenant Colonel] Nasypany later told me. The day's exercise was designed to run a range of scenarios, including a "traditional" simulated hijack in which politically motivated perpetrators commandeer an aircraft, land on a Cuba-like island, and seek asylum. "I actually said out loud, 'The hijack's not supposed to be for another hour.'"

The author, associate producer of United 93, Michael Bronner, promptly adds: "The fact that there was an exercise planned for the same day as the attack factors into several conspiracy theories, though the 9/11 commission dismisses this as coincidence. After plodding through dozens of hours of recordings, so do I." And so we can suspect why NORAD entrusted to Bronner's care the glossy unveiling of just one of 9/11's wargames. (Kyle Hence's 11 Questions Avoided by the Media On NORAD Tapes makes a nice, concise refutation of Bronner's plodding.)

Then there was the story in the Washington Post that "some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon's initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission." Naturally, the assumed intent of the Pentagon's criminal fraud goes no deeper than the hiding of "the bungled response to the hijackings." Commission members dare go no further, because their deliberately misleading report places them on the Pentagon's own side of manufactured history.

Has the Bush administration been "rocked" by these cautious disclosures? Only in the fantasy life of Democrats still awaiting their Fitzmas. Rather, it presses ahead with the next war, expands Guantanamo Bay, and intends to "allow the secretary of defense to add crimes at will to those under the military court's jurisdiction," meaning that dissidents "not directly involved in acts of international terrorism" may be subject to the Pentagon's discretionary justice.

I occasionally receive the comment that it's a waste of our energies to give any regard at all to strange things in the sky and weird visitations, because even if they exist, there's nothing we can do about them. If so, then for all our energies, what have we been able to do about this White House?

If there's a touch, and perhaps more, of the demonic about both, there's also a phantasmic daimonism. Their methods are to display, as well as evade. Discs and giant triangles have lit up American skies with performances of flashing coloured lights, demanding attention while denying comprehension. In the mid-80s, New York's Hudson Valley became a venue for a public exhibition of silent running isosceles triangles 400 feet or more from tip to tip, blinking garishly to the towns below, and were reported by seven thousand eyewitnesses. Perhaps even more disturbing than the prospect of them being of otherworldly origin, is the prospect that they are not.

The new flesh of 9/11 enhances our perception, but not our reach. We can look up and see - we're invited to - but the invitation is one to reinforce a sense of helplessness. The great public spectacles written in the sky - the gaudy lights and the falling towers - are meant to debilitate us, and pin our hopes passively upon a "disclosure" by the intelligence community's own information warriors. Nothing good, and nothing true, can come of that.

In a Rumsfeldian sense, we should know enough now to know that we know enough. But the insight 9/11's new flesh gives us into America's unnatural state of affairs becomes debilitation, if nothing changes by it. How to be the change is our challenge. Perhaps our last challenge.

Arcadian Fields Forever

Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see


This isn't what I'm still hoping to post later, but I thought this headline today deserved its own thread:

Man Says Sex With Kids a Sacred Ritual

CLEVELAND -- A man accused of sexually assaulting nine boys with physical or mental disabilities told a judge that having sex with children is a sacred ritual protected by civil rights laws.

Phillip Distasio, who said he is the leader of a church called Arcadian Fields Ministries, represented himself at his pretrial hearing Wednesday. He is charged with 74 counts including rape, pandering obscenity to minors and corrupting another with drugs.

"I'm a pedophile. I've been a pedophile for 20 years," he said in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Wednesday. "The only reason I'm charged with rape is that no one believes a child can consent to sex. The role of my ministry is to get these cases out of the courtrooms."

Distasio said some of his congregants are among the victims in this case. Distacio, of Rocky River, is accused of molesting two disabled boys he tutored at his home and raping seven autistic boys at a Cleveland school for special-needs students where he was a teacher's aide. All but one of the victims were under 13.

Distasio's Arcadian Fields website can be found here (though probably not for long), where he goes by the name of "Brother Pateticus," who "has taken it upon himself to revive the concept of making house calls in order to distribute sacrament to the needy and housebound."

An apparent email from "Pateticus" to Nambla members is more forthcoming about his church's true sacrament:

According to all outward appearances, the sanctuary will not be for boylovers. Anyone coming into this arrangement is going to have to put on a performance from time to time so that we can continue to deter the public eye from our true objectives. This is going to require a significant amount of creativity and intelligence from those who come to me for assistance.

I have gone to great lengths to construct a very elaborate rouse [sic] among which your members will be allowed to hide--so long as they are careful. If we pull this off properly, Nambla will appear to be one of many anonymous donors that are already lined up to contribute to the more publicly acceptable causes that this ministry is set up to support. Among the political chaos that we generate, your members will be allowed to disappear, co-exist or even re-locate.

On a Yahoo group he began called "Class Cutters," the home page of which is illustrated by a photograph of disabled children making faces through the emergency door of a school bus, he posted on March 19 last year: "We need to be careful... We can't be using anyone's real name in any text files or emails that might be accessible to the public--especially in the yahoo group... Class Cutters is a group parenting initiative, this means that every parent signing up will have a curriculum that is catered towards the unique needs of their child(ren)."

By the way, what was the last anyone's heard from Ponchatoula?

Operators Are Standing By

I hope to post later today. In the meantime, here's an open thread.