Born in Time (Part Two)

Time marches on, time stands still
Time on my hands, time to kill
Blood on my hands, and my hands in the till
Down at the 7-11 - Warren Zevon

Time Out of Mind

I've always been dismayed by the thought of reincarnation, so its unlikelihood has always been a comfort. Which is why it saddens me to consider that oblivion may have been as much wishful thinking as paradise.

But if the occult is on the table in these times then we need to talk about this, too, since reincarnation is the "great fundamental doctrine" of the Mystery Schools, as Dion Fortune writes in Sane Occultism. And more to the point, the emerging holographic model in which our minds are seen to both extend beyond our material bodies and to have emerged from a common consciousness provides the theoretical construct in which reincarnation becomes scientifically credible, if not inevitable.

Before we go much further, let's recall again the congruities of boundary experience, which are all manifested in part by higher frequencies of electro-magnetic vibration. Remote viewing may be regarded as a subset of astral projection, or out-of-body experience, while an OBE could be called a Near-Death Experience before its time. And the phenomenology of NDEs is remarkably similar to that of UFO encounters, as detailed in Dr Kenneth Ring's The Omega Project. And cords of each lead us to Fortune's fundamental doctrine.

Psychoactive research, too. In Rick Strassman's DMT: The Spirit Molecule he recalls the chill along his spine when he noted for the first time that it took 49 days from conception to the first signs of the human pineal gland, the same span recorded in the Tibetan Book of the Dead from death to reincarnation. (Forty-nine days is also the time of gender differentiation.) Strassman contends that endogenous DMT, produced in the pineal near death, may act as a "scout" for the non-corporeal realm.

Strassman writes:

As we die, if near-death experiences are any indication, there is a profound shift in consciousness away from identification with the body. Pineal DMT makes available those particular non-embodied contents of consciousness. All the factors previously described combine for one final burst of DMT production: catecholamine release; decreased breakdown and increased production of DMT; reduced anti-DMT; and decomposing pineal tissue. Therefore, it may be that the pineal is the most active organ in the body at the time of death....

The consequence of this flood of DMT upon our dying brain-based mind is a pulling back of the veils normally hiding what Tibetan Buddhists call the bardo, or intermediary states between this life and the next. DMT opens our senses to these betwixt states with their myriad visions, thoughts, sounds and feelings. As the body becomes totally inert, consciousness has completely left the body and now exists as a field among many fields of manifest things.

Bruce Moen - who received his training in altered-state projection at the Monroe Institute - describes in his book Voyages into the Unknown OBEs spent as a "first responder" guiding the shocked dead of Oklahoma City towards the souls' "reception centre." He notes he saw a Monroe associate, named Rebecca, doing the same, "her arms spread out in love...providing a portal," and that they acknowledged each other with smiles. Later, in this world, by telephone, they compared notes. ("Oh Bruce, the babies" were her first words.)

Reincarnation was the core tenent of Robert Monroe's philosophy, which he said he learned over decades of astral travel. Remember his "I/There"? Monroe taught that the self we know is merely the fragment of the "Total Self" which is currently living a physical life. The total self is a cluster of many beings who each live many lifetimes. (Since Monroe's death in 1995 Skip Atwater, former Operations and Training Officer of the US military's remote viewing program, has served as the institute's Director of Research.)

Where Life and Death are Memorized

Dr Joel Whitton is a Toronto psychologist who, in 1972, participated in the "Philip" experiment which allegedly created a fictional ghost by the power of a group's applied will (not unlike making a tulpa). In the decades since he has researched reincarnation, and his 13-year work with 30 individuals published in the book Life Between Life.

Of Whitton's subjects, Michael Talbot writes in The Holographic Universe that many "gave uncannily accurate historical details about the times in which they had lived":

Some even spoke languages unknown to them. While reliving an apparent past life as a Viking, one man, a 37-year old behavioral scientist, shouted words that linquistic authorities later identified as Old Norse. After being regressed to an ancient Persian lifetime, the same man began to write in a spidery, Arabic-style script that an expert in Near Eastern languages identified as an authentic representation of Sassanid Pahlavi, a long-extinct Mesopotamian tongue that flourished between A.D. 226 and 651.

Perhaps we should ask now, if we are confident that the subjects are not inventing a past life, can we assume that they are always recalling one? There are endless signals in the superhologram. Could it be that, when tuning in the higher vibrations, their brains-as-receivers instead pick up the cross-talk of disembodied consciousness? Rather than a transmigration of souls, this would mean a certain entanglement. Possibly. Entanglement could account for certain manifestations of mental and spiritual illness, including "possession." But the distinction may be chiefly rhetorical if we all partake of the same consciousness, and it fails to account for the alleged physical footprint of past lives upon the present.

Dr Ian Stevenson, head of the Department of Psychiatric Medicine at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, published an article in 1993 entitled "Birthmarks and Birth Defects Corresponding to Wounds on Deceased Persons." He found that 35% of children who claim to recall past lives bear a birthmark or defect they attribute to a wound suffered in an earlier incarnation.

Stevenson writes:

The cases of 210 such children have been investigated. The birthmarks were usually areas of hairless, puckered skin; some were areas of little or no pigmentation (hypopigmented macules); others were areas of increased pigmentation (hyperpigmented nevi). The birth defects were nearly always of rare types. In cases in which a deceased person was identified the details of whose life unmistakably matched the child's statements, a close correspondence was nearly always found between the birthmarks and/or birth defects on the child and the wounds on the deceased person. In 43 of 49 cases in which a medical document (usually a postmortem report) was obtained, it confirmed the correspondence between wounds: and birthmarks (or birth defects). There is little evidence that parents and other informants imposed a false identity on the child in order to explain the child's birthmark or birth defect. Some paranormal process seems required to account for at least some of the details of these cases, including the birthmarks and birth defects.

Talbot notes that Stevenson has escorted many children to the locales of their past lives, and observed them effortlessly navigate what should have been strange neighbourhoods as they "correctly identified their former house, belongings, and past-life relatives and friends."

Interestingly, and contrary to the presumptions of religion, Stevenson and most NDE researchers find no evidence of "retributive karma" or judgement of "sin" or uncharitable conduct.

Talbot writes that Stevenson has found that:

...although a person's material conditions can vary greatly from one life to the next, their moral conduct, interests, aptitudes, and attitudes remain the same. Individuals who were criminals in their previous existence tend to be drawn to criminal behavior again; people who were generous and kind continue to be generous and kind, and so on. From this Stevenson concludes that it is not the outward trappings of life that matter, but the inner ones, the joys, sorrows, and "inner growths" of the personality, that appear to be most important.

But wait: "inner growth" would appear to include criminality - be all the bastard you can be - as there is neither judgement nor reward beyond that which we make for ourselves. And accordingly, ancient, evil souls would be inclined to re-manifest once again as dark actors and vectors of calamity, though perhaps more skilled for having incorporated the lessons of many lifetimes.

By this perspective, reincarnation sheds its religious ardor and becomes all about experiment. But whose?

Cold Irons Bound

Late one evening in October, 1973, at 2,500 feet and good visibility, the crew of an Army Reserve helicopter flying from Columbus to Cleveland saw a red light to the west, heading south. Initially, it was taken to be a F-100 out of Mansfield, though Richard Dolan writes in UFOs and the National Security State that the airbase later confirmed there were no aircraft in the area. Abruptly, the light changed direction and headed directly towards them. Captain Lawrence J Coyne, with 19-years flying experience, tried to radio an airport but found his communication equipment had failed. He then sent his craft into a dive to 1,700 feet as the light drew close, stopping dead directly in front revealing a cigar-shaped, metallic body with a small dome ontop. One crewman thought he saw windows. The red light was shining on the front of the object, a white light on the side and a green on the bottom. The object then positioned itself above the helicopter and remained stationary for 10 seconds, flooding the cockpit with green light before continuing west. As it departed the helicopter radio returned to working order. Oddly, the altimeter showed them to now be at 3,500 and climbing, yet the stick for descent still pointed down and Coyne had not attempted to ascend.

Witnesses on the ground included a family of five driving below on a rural road, who saw both object and helicopter and the green light. Another witness, Jeanne Elias, was in bed watching TV and put a pillow over her head at the sound of the diving helicopter. The noise woke up her 14-year old son and the green light bathed his bedroom.

Resolute debunker Philip Klass said the crew must have misidentified a meteor, and that the witnesses on ground had to be lying.

The crew received peculiar attention in the aftermath. Captain Coyne received a call from the Department of the Army, Surgeon General's Office, inquiring whether he had since had any "unusual dreams." He reported a particularly lucid dream of an out-of-body [OBE] experience.

Richard L Thompson, in his concordance of UFO accounts and ancient Vedic texts entitled Alien Identities, quotes Sgt John Healey, one of the helicopter crewmen:

As time would go by, the Pentagon would call us up and ask us, Well, has this incident happened to you since the occurrence? And in two of the instances that I recall, what they questioned me, was, number one, have I ever dreamed of body separation, and I have - I dreamed that I was dead in bed and that my spirit or whatever was floating, looking down at me lying dead in bed... and the other thing was if I had ever dreamed of anything in spherical shape. Which definitely had not occured to me.

The Pentagon frequently called Captain Coyne with similar questions, and would inquir after all the crew members. "One wonders," writes Thompson, "who in the Pentagon might be interested in the UFO/OBE connection."

Perhaps this is a good place to reintroduce the egg imagery common to UFOs and the soul, and occult workings meant to open portals and birth a new aeon. Whitley Strieber writes in Transformation that his visitors told him, "We recycle souls."

Death Is Not the End

The idea of Alex Proyas' Dark City came in in a recurring chidhood nightmare, of darkclad, vampiric "strangers" playing God to a somnambulant people. One day you may be a subway driver; the next, an investment broker, and you were to never remember you'd been anything else. The subjects were treated with indifference, and though sometimes they would be given a good life it was incidental to the benefit of the hidden strangers, who fed upon their emotions. A good film, that would make a crummy blueprint for eternity.

Because here's the rub: If Charles Fort is correct, and we're "property," the lease may not expire with our mortal body. If reincarnation is a fact, then its purpose is not likely a benefit to us, insofar as "us" has any sensible meaning. If non-human intelligence is fabricating spiritual phenomena in this world, what is to prevent it from doing the same in the next? If criminal souls do return to this existence and, by their nature and by the system that rewards it, so often rise to cruel power, then who would benefit more than hungry spirits that feed upon the traumas they inflict? And might some occult traditions exist in order to pass on the knowledge of the perseverance of the soul in order to maintain earthly power from grave to grave?

Time, they say, will tell.

Open Thread

Ah, nuts. I've been trying to piece together the follow-up to the previous post, but it's 3:30 AM and I'm not nearly there yet, and it's making less sense to me the longer I stay awake. I'm afraid I'll need to take a little more time with this. Not that there's a shortfall of things to talk about. So please, have at it.

Born in Time (Part One)

You're comin' thru to me in black and white
When we were made of dreams - Bob Dylan

You've seen the story of the presidential doodles. There are many odd and revealing examples, such as GHW Bush's "any more dead ones?" (ABC News says his sad and teary face "gives the note a bit of melancholy, or maybe humor," appropriately ambiguous for a man of shimmering surface and black depths), but the one perhaps receiving the most notice hasn't even been reproduced online. It's a page from John F Kennedy, on which he's written, repeatedly, "9-11," and underscored the word "conspiracy" next to it.

Paul Joseph Watson wondered whether this was some kind of "inside joke" or a "hat tip to the 9/11 truth movement" before concluding "one thing's for sure - it's weird." I'd say rather that two things are certain: it's both weird, and it's not.

ABC explains the numbers, without accounting for the word "conspiracy," by saying that "It turns out that was the tally of a committee vote, not a foreshadowing of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks." But that's a misapprehension of foreshadowing, which always carries within it a duality, referencing both a prosaic explanation and a supra-prosaic that is revealed only in hindsight. If this were, say, a Richard Condon novel and not living history, and so foreshadowing just a literary device, there would be no dispute that Kennedy's doodle fit the definition. It's disputed now because people object to the impression that we may be the characters instead of the authors of our lives.

Kennedy's doodle didn't "predict" 9/11 any more than The Coup's cover art or The Lone Gunman's pilot episode, but all three are suggestive of a grander conspiracy - the grandest - that encompasses all of human history. I'm talking about the conspiracy of consciousness. That by encoding the narrative of history with artful gestures of interpretation - the things that make us go hmmm - consciousness conspires to bring us to comprehension.

Consider for a moment the familiar JFK and Abraham Lincoln coincidences, how their stories seem to enfold, and unfold, one another. Such details as Lincoln's election to congress in 1846, JFK's exactly 100 years later, and each entering the presidency 14 years after that; Lincoln's having a secretary named Kennedy, and Kennedy's a secretary Lincoln, and each being succeeded by a man named Johnson; both were shot in the head on a Friday, Lincoln by a man with three names born in 1839 who fled a theatre to a warehouse, while Kennedy's alleged three-named gunman, born in 1939, fled a warehouse to a theatre; "Kennedy" and "Lincoln" each contain seven letters, and John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, 15 - you know the list, and how it goes on.

Of course, a grab bag of coincidence a century apart should defy the conventions of even the loosest conspiracy model. But in a holographic model, things change. It is consciousness - not individual consciousness, but the collective consciousness of all life - that draws locality and temporality out of the wave pattern of higher vibrations that form the holographic universe and constructs the space and time setting for our life narrative. And consciousness is a storyteller, employing literary devices such as foreshadowing as well as metaphor in our waking curiosity and dream state, while some astral project and remote view, and as plant shamans, with heads full of snakes, explore innerspace via such gateways as DMT and ayahuasca.

JFK didn't "plan" 9/11, or have "inside info" as I've seen some Randiesque skeptics sarcastically assert. But repeating patterns, even across centuries or great distances, may still evidence a conspiracy. But the better kind: one of undifferentiated consciousness provoking us within the continuum towards greater reading comprehension.

Perhaps to help it write a happier ending.

Too Much Monkey Business

Say one more stupid thing to me
before the final nail is driven in - Bob Dylan

In celebration of Hugo Chavez belling the devil in his own sanctuary, I watched again Venezuela Bolivariana: People and the Struggle of the 4th World War. If you haven't seen it, or if you've only seen it once, check it out. It does a wonderful job of setting Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution in the context of Latin America's decades' old appetitite for a scrape with the forces of globalism. There's a wealth of wisdom and inspiration here, in the words of humble people feeling their power for the first time. ("President Bush," says one, "if you want to invade our country, you'll find a people who has a constitution in their hands. And we'll shoot you with a constitution!") This time, it's the words of activist and street performer Roberto Borges that stuck with me. Speaking of the opposition, he says "It's not only the weapon that fires. It's the weapon that seeks to make us idiots, which is the media."

Very briefly, three current examples of how that weapon is deployed against us.

Story: US threatened to bomb Pakistan after 9/11, in which Pervez Musharraf tells 60 Minutes that "the intelligence director told me that [Richard Armitage] said, 'Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age.'" This shouldn't even be a story, as Armitage's threat was reported as early as September 12, 2001 in Deutsche Presse-Agentur. Furthermore, it's only a second-hand account. What is worth reporting is whose hand it was. This unnamed intelligence director was none other than Mahmood Ahmed, Pakistan's 9/11 paymaster, who famously authorized ISI-al Qaeda double agent Omar Saeed Sheikh to wire $100,000 to Mohammed Atta just weeks before the attack. I say "famously," though it is only to us, because it's one of a multitude of facts that create an alternate map of the world that seems to convey a true landscape, but that is so unlike the one which most people have been dulled into accepting they inhabit.

Ahmed, of course, was already in Washington for his high-level meetings on "terrorism," so Armitage didn't have far to travel.

Story: Gosch Photos Tipster Sought, in which West Des Moines police announce they "want to know who sent them a letter telling them the photos delivered to Johnny Gosch's mother were fakes." According to the tipster, the photo of the three bound boys originated in Tampa, and harmlessly depicted kids "challenging each other to an escape contest," but Florida investigator Nelson Zalva has produced nothing to support that flimsy reed.

As I said last week, the most suspicious aspect of the story is the identity and the motivation of the anonymous tipster, who was both closely monitoring the Gosch story and able to direct authorities to a Florida state official who said he knew the pictures were harmless, but couldn't prove it.

Incredibly, predictably, that lead was enough for police to release a statement to the press that the photos could be fake, which much of the press spun as statement of fact. As far as the media were concerned, the photos were debunked before they were properly investigated, and so it looked, for those who sought a reason not to look any further, that it was just more of crazy old Noreen and her conspiracy theories. Noreen, by the way, posted on Thursday that she has now received a death threat. "I must be getting very close to the final answer for someone to take this step," she writes. Zalva, she told 4acloserlook.com, is thought to be close to Jeb Bush.

Story: Skeptic Magazine debunks 9/11 conspiracy theories, in which Phil Molé expends 7,154 words affirming the gullible assumptions of those who wear the false crown of skepticism.

159 words are devoted to the few millions of "put options," ignoring the billions worth in insider trading (including one $5 billion transaction); the sudden resignation on Sept 12, 2001, "effective immediately" and without reason given, of Mayo Shattuck III, head of the Alex Brown unit of Deutsche Bank, which was the principal institution involved in the trades; and the more than $100 million in suspicious transactions on WTC computers during the attacks, and the subsequent supression of their data recovery.

247 words are taken to debunk the "FEMA arrived early" story, ignoring Giuliani's unpublished testimony before the 9/11 commission which confirmed that hundreds of FEMA employees were already on site with equipment for a scheduled bioweapons drill.

334 words are used to say that Flight 93 didn't land at Cleveland. It didn't.

351 words are spent on "stand down," when it's properly understood as a failure to "stand up," since on June 1 2001 discretion to shoot down was taken away from field command and entrusted solely to the Secretary of Defense. An order rescinded shortly after the attacks. The article mentions none of this.

535 words are given to a history lesson in Middle East terror, ignoring the role of the CIA and its regional proxies in funding and training and "stirring up" Muslim extremists.

816 words are spent on the fallacious Pentagon missile strike theory.

1,117 words are devoted to the shallow psychobabble that conspiracy theories are "comforting."

And 3,595 words - half of the total - are spent on demolition theory, attention to which, I've repeatedly said, is a waste of our energies.

But undoubtedly it's mission accomplished for Phil Molé, and Skeptic readers can pride themselves again on their steadfast conventional wisdom. Neither are likely to read Daniel Hopsicker's September 15 report on Wolfgang Bohringer, one of Atta's German "brothers" during his mobbed-up Florida days. They'll never have heard of Bohringer, wouldn't accept as a source something called "Mad Cow Morning News" ("Oh, pleeeease," I can hear their syrupy cry), and so they will never really know Atta.

The weapon has made them idiots. I suggest we follow Boots Riley's advice, and pick a bigger weapon.

Lambs to the Marketplace

The world of illusion is at my door,
I ain't a-haulin' any of my lambs to the marketplace anymore. - Bob Dylan


In 1905 Aleister Crowley led an experienced team of Swiss and Italian mountaineers to Nepal's then-unscaled Kanchenjunga, the world's third highest peak. Showell Styles tells what happened in his On Top of the World:

The party advanced up the glacier and reached a height of 20,400 feet on the face below the main peak and to the west of it; and here, at Camp VII, the Swiss called a conference at which Crowley was formally deposed from leadership because of his sadistically cruel treatment of the porters. Crowley refused to accept this. The expedition was then called off, and all except Crowley started down for the lower camps. There was a slip which set off an avalanche. All of them were swept down and buried under the snow.... Pache was dead, and the porters too.

Crowley had heard the frantic calls for help but had not troubled to come out of his tent. That evening he wrote a letter, later printed in an English newspaper, commenting that he "was not over-anxious in the circumstances to render help. A mountain accident of this kind is one of the things for which I have no sympathy whatever." Next morning he climbed down, keeping well clear of his late companions who were toiling to recover the bodies, and proceeded to Darjeeling by himself. As a Satanist, it seems, he was doing rather well.

But what is a Satanist? Crowley would have said he wasn't one, and he would have made a strong argument, since the figure "Satan" is the adversary of a God he didn't acknowledge in a religion he despised. Many occultists have made similar cases, resisting the simple either/or's of the dominant culture. And even though much of the religious aesthetics and dogma may appear similar, we should probably concede this point.

But there's something else that distinguishes Satanism, at least if we may use it as shorthand for an ethos rather than as an attitude of devotion towards a fallen angel. And that's the Ye shall be as gods come on, that manifests both as radical individualism ("Do what thou wilt") and a lack of pity towards the "herd." ("We should not protect the weak and vicious from the results of their own inferiority," said Crowley.)

In The Occult, Colin Wilson writes that Crowley "had almost no capacity for natural affection. It is this that makes him a 'monster.'" The metaphysics and the sex magick were not beside the point, but they were another point. It's by his profound lack of charity that we can rightly call Crowley Satanic, and his conduct on the slopes of Kanchenjunga was a magnificent example.

As was George Bush's contemptuous behaviour during Katrina, eating cake and strumming a guitar while the poor of New Orleans were purged. Or his mocking of Karla Faye Tucker, and his sniggered lynch joke before Coretta Scott King. It's in the way all of these people smile when they speak of tragedy, and use the sufferings of others for their own political alchemy. (That the tortures of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay quickly took on aspects of ritual sexual abuse are not tricks of the light.)

I don't know if Dick Cheney dons a black robe and drinks cats' blood. It wouldn't surprise me, but I don't know; though I do remember he was dressed for a duck hunt at Auschwitz. But I have no qualms about calling him a Satanist.

Many of the elite, for whom Cheney is a factotum, obtainted and maintain their privilege by the application of Satanitic sentiment, whether or not they know it as such. They exalt their will and make it the vector of their ambition, and are merciless to those weaker than themselves unless there's something in it for them, for a while. Natural affections are stunted, and unnatural passions - the perogative of the old gods - are indulged. Sociopathologies of power are perhaps, also, the demonstration of a Satanic disposition.

At least this helps me to accept as true as well as horrible a story like this from last week, updating a post of last February:

Ties Between Elites and Child Sex Rings "Beyond Imagination"

The complicity in Mexico between child sex rings and the political and business elites "goes beyond what we can even imagine," says activist Lydia Cacho, who faces death threats and was even thrown briefly into prison for revealing those ties in a book. "What we have just seen is only the tip of the iceberg," Cacho told IPS, after the local media aired Tuesday recordings of telephone conversations between two prominent politicians and a hotel owner now in prison, and a wealthy local businessman.

The number of Mexican politicians and businessmen involved in child pornography and sex rings "would shock us if we knew the real extent of the phenomenon," said Cacho.

...

"Los demonios del Edén" contains the personal accounts of minors who talk about the sexual abuse they suffered at the hands of a ring in which prominent figures were allegedly involved. The youngsters describe how the hotel owner sexually abused them himself, set up a prostitution ring to allow others to abuse them, and photographed them in order to sell the pornographic images on the Internet.

Only those dead to pity would take such lambs to the marketplace, and such people could properly be called Satanists. But then, the market may be more than just a place.

Magician J Edward Cornelius writes of opening gateways for astral creatures in Aleister Crowley and the Ouija Board that "some people have wondered if an elemental is really dangerous when it shape-shifts into our wildest dreams or fantasies.... The more a person communicates with an elemental the stronger it becomes. It gains its strength by feeding on your life-energy. This relationship is properly or magickally called a marriage - more precisely, a Lesser Marriage."

That is to say, entities evoked by a magician to fulfill a certain need will also take something in return. They have to feed.

Cornelius again:

Every Medium will attest to the fact that after communicating with the spirit world they become very tired or drained. Where did their energy go? Energy cannot dissipate; it has to go somewhere even if it is absorbed by an invisible entity. When I once asked a similar question of my own teacher, he said, "Look, I eat, you eat and they eat - what's the problem?" I thought about it and replied, "I guess there is no problem."

The danger, Cornelius writes, is in "allowing the entity to use you as the source of its feeding," drawing psychic energy to the point of burnout. He compares the "elemental" that may be called through a gateway to a microscopic parasite accespted as part of nature, but also to a lion: "The consequences of its feeding can often be disastrous where a human is concerned. Whether one loses body or psyche to any "feeder," visible or invisible, is not a reality one wishes to embrace."

The danger, he warns, is greatest to children, who are regarded as tastier food, because their spirits are naturally more open to finer planes of existence:

The choice of feeding off the youngest person by an elemental, although seemingly baneful, is simply because of the nature of a human's psychic system. The older a person gets, the harder it is to open that which time has begun to close down; we become earthbound with age.... The more earthbound or wrapped in Maya we become, the more destined we are toward an earthly grave. Most children, on the other hand, are simply "open" for anything. Magicians must learn to be like children.

And to survive, children made to be meat for hungry spirits of this world or another need to close down.

In The Secret Spiritual World of Children, Tobin Hart tells the story of Liz, a six-year old girl who began reporting strange visitations in her bedroom. A green and purple monster would appear in one corner, followed by a man who seemed "a little scary." Her parents noticed an unpleasant smell, like filthy socks, would fill the room after a supposed encounter, for which cleaning and doing laundry would have no effect. The smell was accompanied by a feeling of disgust and fear.

Hart writes:

When the smell and the feeling seemed present, they would discover that Liz would often masturbate. In and of itself this, of course, is no reason for concern, it is normal for children to masturbate. But in this case it seemed excessive and also remarkably tied to her reports of this visitor; it was as if a wave of energy wafted over her. Was this some invisible sexual predator? they wondered.

The parents prayed and sought advice on ritual cleansing. These seemed to work a little, but the visitor kept returning until Liz began to recognize the power to establish her own boundaries. She told it to go away, and when it did, she began to pity it.

"It's a hard world for little things," Lillian Gish says aloud in Night of the Hunter as she watches an owl snatch a rabbit. It's hard to be prey. It's harder to be prey that can pity the predator. But empathy is a big part of that which makes us us, and not them. And perhaps that can be a weapon, as well, to help distinguish the many from the few. They can't eat us all, but they may die trying.

But first of all, we need the eyes to see what's on the menu.

Secret Agent Man

There's a man who leads a life of danger
To everyone he meets he stays a stranger

Parsing the statements of George Bush is of course handicapped by the man's uncommon illiteracy, though when he sticks to his prepared texts we can get some indication of what his keepers want us to hear, even if Bush himself doesn't know what he's saying. Take, for one bizarre instance, the opening remarks to his Rose Garden news conference last Friday.

In defence of torture and secret prisons he boasted of the "valuable information" obtained by the CIA from waterboarding "men like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed" (whose telephone conversations with Mohammed Atta, including final approval for the attacks on September 10, are known to have been monitored and translated by the NSA, but apparently not acted upon).

Much like Atta's unacknowledged Florida life of strippers, booze and cocaine, the supposed mastermind of September 11 was a high-living womanizer who loved clubbing and lavish hotels, and who once impressed a girlfriend by flying a helicopter past her office window trailing a banner that read "I love you."

There remains the mystery of his arrest, which even today can only be called an alleged arrest, not least because he was confidently reported killed in a shootout on 9/11's first anniversary. ("Now it has emerged that Kuwaiti national Khalid Shaikh Mohammed did indeed perish in the raid," said Asia Times.)

A witness present in the house when Khalid was said to have finally been seized was adament that "the only people in the house were my brother, his wife and their kids.... I have absolutely no idea why the police came here." For The Guardian, Isobel Hilton wrote that in Pakistan, the story of his arrest "appears to be almost entirely fictional." And there's the famous photo of Khalid, fat and unshaven against a wall of peeling paint. But according to The Sunday Times a "thorough search of the house shows there is no such wall."

To allay doubts of Khalid's capture, Pakistan's ISI held a first-ever press briefing and screened a laughable eight minutes of footage purportedly taken during the raid. "Broken doors, blood-stained walls and wrists in handcuffs were all shown but curiously, no face shots...not even the well publicized 'arrest' photo of Mohammed that has been widely circulated and questioned. When one CNN reporter, Tom Minter asked why, the ISI said the tape had been edited but that the actual footage did record his face but had been edited out for the presentation." Pakistani intelligence had its own good reasons to attempt deception as, like 9/11 paymaster Omar Saeed Sheikh, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was not only an al Qaeda commander but also an ISI operative. Which is why both men wanted Daniel Pearl dead.

If Khalid actually is in custody, he has remained out-of-sight from all but his CIA minders. The Kean Commission relied heavily upon Khalid's account of 9/11 to construct their own story - he's mentioned in 272 paragraphs of the report - but no commission representative was permitted to meet him or take his testimony: there is no corroboration that the account given was actually his own. The commission supplied questions to his captors, and his captors returned transcripts of interrogations that allegedly contained Khalid's answers. Its claim of authenticity rests solely upon the goodwill of the Agency.

But back to Bush and his Friday remarks:

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed described the design of planned attacks of buildings inside the U.S. and how operatives were directed to carry them out. That is valuable information for those of us who have the responsibility to protect the American people. He told us the operatives had been instructed to ensure that the explosives went off at a high -- a point that was high enough to prevent people trapped above from escaping.

Even allowing for the bell curve of his usual nonsense, what sense does this make?

The Guardian transcript has Bush saying that Khalid "described the design of plane attacks," rather than the official "planned attacks." The video, available from the White House website, confirms "planned." Perhaps the Guardian couldn't quite believe what it was hearing. Because Bush went on to say that the operatives of the planned attacks were instructed in the placement of explosives. Adding, as though it's the clearest thing in the world, that Khalid disclosed the explosives were to detonate at "a point high enough to prevent people trapped above from escaping."

Before we rush to judgement, believing Bush is letting it slip that the towers were demolished, watch the video. Bush isn't riffing here; he isn't straying from the prepared text. His remarks were crafted with care. So why would he be given such lines, which could so easily be construed by 9/11 skeptics as an inadvertant admission of controlled demolition? Perhaps because, as I believe was Rumsfeld's intention when he "misspoke" of a "missile" striking the Pentagon the very week Thierry Meyssan launched his "no plane" website, that's precisely where they want our attention, whether or not demolition is a fact. (And it will only be our attention, as the corporate press either don't have the ears or the stomach for it.)

So here's the scene: the White House invoking invisible man Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to excite our imagination with an oddly-worded statement strongly suggestive of demolition, when our attention would be better rewarded by considering Khalid himself, his service to the ISI and the ISI's service to US intelligence. But Bush will never be written the words to encourage such thoughts.

Gosch, again

"You have an overactive imagination."
"These are just the facts, Rich. I mean, I haven't even begun
to let my imagination loose on this thing." - Cutter's Way

Briefly, there's some movement on the story of the photographs left at Noreen Gosch's door.

A tip out of Florida is apparently prompting West Des Moines police to conclude that not only do the photos fail to depict Johnny Gosch, but they don't even show a crime scene. (First reports spoke of an "anonymous tipster," but that has since been spiked from the corporate news.)

The unattributed lead drew police attention to Nelson Zalva, a retired Florida sheriff's investigator currently employed by the State Attorney's Office, who claims, with remarkable imprecision, that "he investigated a case in either 1978 or 1979. He said he identified the boys in the photos. Zalva said they voluntarily posed for the pictures, but he couldn't recall why."

On apparently nothing more than the strength of Zalva's word, police in Des Moines appear ready, and relieved, to accept that the delivery of the photos was simply a cruel hoax.

Noreen has responded:

The West Des Moines Police released a statement, indicating that they received an anonymous note saying "there was an investigator in Florida who had investigated and identified the boys in the recent photo, which they appeared bound and gagged in 1979". They also stated this photo had been on the internet since 1979.

Unfortunately, this press release caused a media storm and much confusion because they neglected to also mention that the detective only saw the photo of the "THREE BOYS ON THE BED". At no time had he ever seen the photo of Johnny Gosch ... the black/white photo below. We also know that the internet as we know it ..... did not exist in 1979.

We want to let people know so this will answer the questions you all must have in your minds by now. This press release was issued incorrectly and prematurely by the West Des Moines Police.

Johnnygosch.com has also posted the following photograph which accompanied the other two left on Noreen's doorstep. (There may, in fact, be many more.) The man depicted, according to information accompanying the package, was a perp who abused Johnny and many others. Noreen handed it over to police, who remarked that the man is "dead and there is a device around his neck called a ligature." ("Dream's End" asks on the RI forum: "Was it already understood by the rest of you that the idea that this perp has a ligature around his neck brings us back to the JonBenet case?")





According to Noreen Gosch, the only photograph Nelson Zalva has claimed to ID is the colour picture of three boys bound and gagged on a bed. According to Zalva, he remembers the photograph well enough but can't remember the year, and reassures police that no crime was committed but can neither recall why, nor apparently produce evidence to support his claim. And perhaps most suspicious, there's the "anonymous tipster" who was both following the Gosch story and who also claimed to knew the details of an obscure case which came across the desk of a Tampa investigator nearly 30 years before. If there's nothing to the story and the boys were bound, gagged and photographed voluntarily all in good fun, then why the need for anonymity from the tipster who hooked up Zalva with the police halfway across the country?

Given Florida's record on missing, abused and murdered children - it was in a Tallahassee park that the CIA's predatory paedophilic cult the Finders were arrested - tips from state officials ought to be, shall we say, thoroughly vetted.

Coincidentally, Monday was Florida's eighth annual Missing Children's Day, which this year fell on September 11. Jeb Bush remarked, "We feel sorrow for the children we have lost and we also feel sorrow for the Americans and others, frankly, that lost their lives five years ago in the cowardly attacks on our country."

Bush added, "I'm not sure why God decided to bring these two acts together." But they do seem to go together, don't they?

Final Destination

If it keep on rainin', the levee gonna break
If it keep on rainin', the levee gonna break
Some people still sleepin', some people are wide awake - Bob Dylan (2006)

A seven-year old girl named Jenny was riding in the backseat of her family car when suddenly she asked, "Mommy, if a man in a big truck, a man who can't speak English, bangs into our car and doesn't hurt us but smashes the car, do we have to pay to get the car fixed?" Tobin Hart writes in The Secret Spiritual World of Children that her mother thought, What an odd question, and then explained how insurance worked. A few minutes later their car was hit by a dump truck, driven by a man who couldn't speak English. Though no one appeared hurt Jenny was hysterical, and was taken to the hospital for examination, during which she blurted out tearfully to the physician "It was my fault!" Asked what was her fault, she said "I knew the accident was going to happen and I didn't tell Mommy."

It wouldn't have helped, of course. A warning from Jenny that their car was soon to be struck by a non-English speaking man driving a truck and her mom would have thought, What an odd remark.

Whatever the basis for Jenny's alarm - intuition, premonition or something else - it would not likely have been recognized by her mother as sufficient grounds to pull off the road or change direction. Jenny would probably have been a silly girl for getting so worked up about some crazy notion in her head. If her mother's mind were typically rationalist, her daughter would be chided for magical thinking. They might even have been arguing as the truck hit.

Jenny's warning would almost certainly have been ignored. But what about the next time she sees something coming? How might her sensible mother respond then?

Following on from the post The Massacre of the Innocents, there's an interesting current thread on the RI forum regarding Gladio, Europe's "stay-behind" armies and alleged Pentagon Field Manual FM 30-31B. The document lays out a program of "intelligence guidance" for fascist cells to wage false-flag terror in NATO nations that "do not react with sufficient effectiveness" against "communist subversion." It adds that a crisis moment arrives once leftist groups "renounce the use of force" and become engaged in democratic systems. At such a time, "U.S. army intelligence must have the means of launching special operations which will convince Host Country Governments and public opinion of the reality of the insurgent danger."

The field manual was first published in the Turkish newspaper Baris in 1973, during a "whole range of mysterious acts of violence and brutality which shocked the Turkish society," writes Daniele Ganser in NATO's Secret Armies. He adds that, "thereafter, the Baris journalist who had come into the possession of the secret manual disappeared and was never heard of again." It next appeared in 1976, in the Spanish newspaper Triunfo after Franco's death, despite great pressure to prevent publication. In both occasions, publication was met with silence from the US State Department. Then, when the US Embassy in Italy got wind that the monthly magazine Controinformazione was going to translate and distribute the document it informed the publisher that it would be "inopportune" to do so. But it did so, and the issues were confiscated, and US officials then, for the first time, claimed in a letter that the document was a forgery (in fact, claimed there was not even an attachment "A" to FM30-31, which is now demonstrably false).

From Ganser:

After the discover of the secret NATO armies across Europe researchers started to investigate the direct link between FM 30-31 and the stay-behind armies. Allan Francovich in his BBC documentary on Gladio presented a copy of FM 30-31B to senior US officials. Ray Cline, Deputy CIA Director for Intelligence in the 1960s, confirmed: "This is an authentic document." William Colby, CIA Director from 1973 to 1976 and closely involved with operation Gladio and the stay-behinds in numerous countries of Western Europe, in front of the camera, was reluctant to face this dark side of his country and claimed: "I have never heard of it." Also CIA propaganda expert Michael Ledeen shied away from the sensitive document and claimed it to be a Soviet forgery. While Licio Gelli, the Italian Freemason and leader of the anti-Communist P2 frankly told Francovich: "The CIA gave it to me."

The case for stay-behind terror has been made and admitted many times over and doesn't rest upon a authenticity of a single document (though the State Department would have it so, since it's easier to deny a piece of paper than generational conduct). The significance of FM30-31B is that it appeared nearly a decade before the story of Gladio, the "Strategy of Tension" (in which forgery-advocate Ledeen had a hand) and Western Europe's other Stay-Behind networks broke publically. If it was a forgery then it was of an extremely rare order, as it accurately anticipated the next ten years of hidden European history.

But in 1973, the publication of FM30-31B appeared to most as Jenny's warning. It was an extremely odd thing to say that nativist far-right cells colluding with the CIA might attempt to discredit Europe's democratic left by waging false-flag acts of terror, because most of the examples were either still buried by history or were yet to come. Today, and to us, false flags have become such a part of our psycho-political landscape that some have trouble recognizing any other flag flying. But even when we err, given the lay of the land it's on account of caution rather than paranonia.

Questions of possibly more US-sponsored state terror in the Philippines have returned, following an unexplained "anti-terror experiment" smuggling bombing components through airport security. ("I am reminded," writes Amirah Ali Lidasan, "of an incident in May 2003, about an American by the name of Michael Meiring who accidentally set off an explosion in his room at the Evergreen hotel in Davao City. According to media reports, Meiring was mysteriously 'whisked away' by men believed to be agents of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation at the hospital where he was admitted. He was boarded onto a helicopter and nothing was heard from him again.")

And this story, just yesterday, marking another September 11:

Colombia military in bomb scandal

Army officers in Colombia have been accused of placing car bombs around the capital in the latest military scandal to hit the country.

...

In the latest scandal, army officers are accused of placing car bombs around Bogota, including one that went off wounding more than a dozen soldiers and killing a civilian. The motivation was to claim reward money from the government, which offers payments of up to $400,000 (£220,000) for information on the activities of Marxist rebels and drugs traffickers.

In another incident, 10 policemen were killed by the army in what was presented as a friendly fire tragedy. However, evidence has shown that they were killed at point-blank range. Several soldiers, including a colonel, have been arrested and accused of murdering the policemen on the orders of a notorious drug baron.

Mr Uribe insisted that these scandals are isolated incidents and that things are getting better.

And in Belgium, home of NATO and Marc Dutroux, two more soldiers have been arrested for being part of a neo-Nazi network suspected of planning "terrorist actions" aimed at "destabilizing" the country.

Is a pattern manifesting itself yet? And is it better parsed by a paradigm, often soft-sold by conservatives and "patriots" who conflate the UN with the NWO, that there is no qualitative difference between the left and the right, or one which holds that the enemy is and always has been characteristically fascist? That's not "playing politics": it's reading history, and recognizing an international legacy of privileged criminal perversion conspiring by its nature to crush us and maintain our weak posture that implies we can do nothing about it. "If humanity still has hope of survival," writes the Zapatistas' Subcommandante Marcos, "that hope is in the pockets formed by the excluded ones, the left-overs, the ones who are disposible." If that makes sense to you, then you agree that left and right remain valid categories, even unto the parapolitical depths.

Like Jenny's mother, Americans were warned of 9/11 by precedence, exigence and coincidence. And many now, to some measure and by whatever means, have finally received it. But America's still on the road, with much of the rest of the world strapped in the backseat, barrelling towards its final destination. If the warnings remain ineffective we had better think about how we're going to grab the wheel.

License to Spin

Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone that knows more than they do
- Bob Dylan

Have you seen the "revelation" that Anderson Cooper interned for the CIA during his sophomore and junior summers away from Yale? "Soon after" his post-graduate time in Hanoi studying Vietnamese, says the Radar report, "Cooper apparently gave up his Bond fantasy to pursue a career in journalism."

Bond fantasy. You hear that a lot from people who either don't know better or who know much worse. Sure, there are plenty of whoring dipsomaniacs on the company payroll, but I bet even James Angleton's car didn't have an ejector seat. Most so-called intelligence work - and especially that of media assets - is better suited to a cubicle than a jetpack.

The Bond conceit has been played by hooked-up lone-nutter Gus Russo, who says his initial skepticism of the Warren Report "was fueled by the naivete (perhaps it was the arrogance) of a seasoned teenager who had read all the James Bond novels. I knew about spies, and fake defectors, and sharpshooters, and patsies. The government couldn't fool me!" As soon as he'd finished consulting on Oliver Stone's JFK, Russo began speaking highly of an up-and-coming debunker named Gerald Posner, and in a 1993 symposium in Chicago he shocked fellow researchers by ridiculing the notion that Oswald was associated with US intelligence. "How many of you think Oswald was some kind of James Bond?" he asked. "I thought this was an oddly posed question," writes investigator Jim DiEugenio. "Nobody had ever reported Oswald owning an Aston-Martin, or leading an army of underwater scuba divers in a spear-gun fight, or employing all kinds of mechanical gadgetry to disarm his enemies. Far from it." Oswald was simply too marginal and unstable a character to be a player, claims Russo, ignoring the fact that it's on the margins that the unstable characters get played. (Though in recent years he's refined his position to allow that Oswald actually did figure in a conspiracy. A communist conspiracy.)

Cooper, of course, has more of the Bond, or Blofeld, about him than Oswald. Never has a patsy been both a Vanderbilt (and though most of the family squandered their inheritance, mother Gloria did alright for herself) and a Yalie. "Yale has influenced the Central Intelligence Agency more than any other university," says historian Gaddis Smith, "giving the CIA the atmosphere of a class reunion." The spy slang "spook" initially referred to a member of a Yale secret society. (See also "Spooks in Blue" and "For God, Country, Yale and the CIA" by the Yale Daily News.)

Cooper's internships nearly two decades ago don't imply that he's "on the payroll." But the payroll isn't very long. It's the assets, not the agents that predominate in the media, and his summer work is a strong indicator of affinity: something the Agency would not be inclined to forget as it follows the progress of his career, even as Cooper's viewers remain in the dark.

This is something to be remembered by 9/11 truthseekers who are ready to settle instead for heroes, and uncritically embrace longtime intelligence veterans as sudden "converts" and spokespersons. Like 28-year CIA analyst William Christison, whose "Stop Belittling the Theories About September 11" was widely astroturfed last month. His leading points, that an "airliner almost certainly did not hit The Pentagon" and "controlled demolition" brought down the towers, are the most contentious and speculative and least profitable arguments that can be made for 9/11 complicity. As with "former Bush insider" Morgan Reynolds' triple-dog-dare-ya that there were no planes at the World Trade Center either, more sensible observers need to ask why certain people with certain backgrounds are advancing certain positions, rather than be gratified that persons of a certain stature are saying something, anything, even when it's wrong or uncertain or foolish.



Briefly, thanks to "pepsified thinker" on the RI board for this update on The Massacre of the Innocents":

Belgian neo-Nazis in 'terror plot'

Belgian police yesterday arrested 17 alleged neo-Nazis, mostly serving soldiers, who were said to be planning to destabilise the country's institutions in a series of terrorist attacks. In simultaneous raids on five army barracks and 18 private addresses across the northern Flanders half of Belgium, police uncovered a homemade bomb and numerous weapons.

The raids by 150 police officers in East Flanders, Antwerp and Limburg were the most dramatic breakthrough in a two-year investigation into far-right activists allegedly operating inside the armed forces.

It seems as though Nazis turn up in the last place you look - like America - and it seems to be the case especially when you're not looking for them. Some Belgians, at least, are looking.

The Clown at Midnight

"Nobody laughs at a clown at midnight." - Lon Chaney

More people than ever are ready to believe it's midnight in America, and not many of them think there's anything funny about it. But when was the last time you noticed the hands on the clock move? How long has it been midnight?

In The Secret Doctrine, Helena Blavatsky writes that "occult philosophy teaches that even now, under our very eyes, the new Race and Races are preparing to be formed, and that it is in America that the transformation will take place, and has already commenced." In 1888 America still seemed like a vigorous novelty that might give something new and good to the world, rather than one of its weirder places of ancient dark that could pull it down to hell. Blavatsky was optimistic about the New Race that America was begetting. She presumed that the transformation involved the elevation of consciousness, which would lift all life with it. Generations later, I think we can say it hasn't quite worked out that way.

"Fascism is the supreme expression of religious mysticism," states Wilhelm Reich in The Mass Psychology of Fascism. "It transposes religion from the 'otherworldliness' of the philosophy of suffering to the 'this worldliness' of sadistic murder." Pasolini knew that, too, and showed us that he did with Salo. ("Our guide restored the divine character of monstrosity thanks to reiterated actions. That is to say: rites.")

Fascist mysticism is at the same time relentlessly materialistic, and its "New Race" attained by dominating matter which includes the masses, which are just meat to enact the will of the leadership. The Nazi New Man owed so much to American eugenics, the shadow it casts in 21st century America is more of a homecoming. (Anti-fascism may be back in style in Washington, though just the style, as Bush's handlers shift again the terms of conflict to now suggest America is at war with "Islamofascists." Or, I know you, are but what am I?)

Animals are turning up mutilated in Louisana's Tangipahoa Parish, home of the Hosanna Church Satanic sex cult, whose black-robed elders drew pentagrams on the floor of the "youth hall," raped children and forced them into bestiality. Yesterday, Baton Rouge television reported that Tangipahoa Sheriff's detectives were investigating the "killing of three cats, a dog and a horse; and the mutilation of another dog and two horses." All had their throats slashed by a sharp blade, and there are no suspects or leads. The Sheriff's office notes, with supposed reassurance, that the mutilations and slayings "do not appear to be ritualistic." (The Hosanna Church also practiced the mutilation and sacrifice of cats, though since prosecutors are determined to whitewash occult intent right out of their case, some may contend there was no ritualistic intent there either.)

No one told these people to do this. I don't believe Pastor Louis Lamonica and the rest of his suburban congregation-cult were programmed to ritually assault children, or even that they are necessarily connected to a wider, and deeper, network of devil-worshipping paedophiles. It seems to be inchoate knowlege among those who seek power in dark places that the defilement of the innocent, particularly children, makes for strong magick. Just as disbelief seems the natural defense posture of those who are preyed-upon.

Maybe it's always been midnight in America. It's simply taken a clown in the White House to alert Americans to their missing time. If so, what should we expect a minute past?

In July 2005, Colin Campbell's newsletter of the Assocation for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas published an argument for Social Darwinism by William Stanton entitled "Oil and People." Stanton called those who couldn't grok the necessity of extreme population reduction "sentimentalists," and argued that human rights needed to be replaced by "cold logic." They have had their day, wrote Stanton:

Individual citizens, and aliens, must expect to be seriously inconvenienced by the single-minded drive to reduce population ahead of resource shortage. The consolation is that the alternative, letting Nature take its course, would be so much worse.... When, through old age, accident or disease, an individual becomes more of a burden than a benefit to society, his or her life is humanely ended. Voluntary euthanasia is legal and made easy. Imprisonment is rare, replaced by corporal punishment for lesser offences and painless capital punishment for greater.

Cold logic and mystical, sadistic murder. In a good and necessary cause, we'll be told. And not a word about the magick.

"Why are they doing this?"

Early next mornin' as the crowd it passed by
The little boy was gone and they all wondered why - Hank Williams

No time right now to comment, other than to wonder if America will ever be ready to follow the rabbit on this one.

Break in the Johnny Gosch Case?

West Des Moines, August 31 - Investigators say there could be a break in one of Iowa's most well known cold cases.

In 1982 12-year-old Johnny Gosch disappeared while on his paper route. But just this weekend, Gosch's mother says she found two pictures outside her home. West Des Moines Police say the pictures are of young males about 10 to 14-years-old.

Police along with the Iowa Department of Criminal Investigation are now trying to determine if the pictures are authentic or doctored with a computer.

More disturbing details emerge in this AP story:

Mother of Abducted Child Gets Photos 24 years Later of Boy Bound, Gagged

Des Moines, Iowa - The mother of a boy abducted 24 years ago said she is bewildered by two photographs left at her front door, apparently showing her son and two other children bound and gagged.

The old photos appear to show 12-year-old Johnny Gosch with his mouth gagged and his hands and feet tied. The boy is wearing the same sweatpants Johnny was wearing when he disappeared while delivering newspapers on the morning of Sept. 5, 1982, his mother said.

"It's like reliving it," Noreen Gosch told The Associated Press on Thursday night. "But the bigger picture is, 'Why are they doing this?'

"Whoever had these photos had them for 24 years. I don't understand why they would do this now. It must be some kind of message."

Gosch said investigators confirmed the photos were authentic and likely taken within "hours or days" of the abduction. She said they were checking for fingerprints that could lead them to the source and possibly a breakthrough in a case that has long baffled authorities. The other boys in the photo were unidentified.

Meanwhile, Ivy League business professor Lawrence Scott Ward, a consultant to the Executive Office of the President and the Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention, has been nabbed at Dulles Airport holding luggage containing videos of him having sex with children as young as eight. And in Atlanta, Israeli diplomat Yosef Sagir Ofri has been arrested on suspicion of possession of child pornography and the attempted seduction of a child online.

Three incidents reported in isolation. And there is, of course, no evident direct connection. Only something like pattern recognition. Are we mad, or wrong, for recognizing it? Some would say. As Duane "Dewey" Claridge, former head of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, told ABC's Nightline regarding Gary Webb's Dark Alliance: "Don't give me that conspiracy bullshit! There's never been a conspiracy in this country." And that was just with respect to the agency's deniable hand in the global narcotics trade. Imagine the denials to the charge of covert child abduction and the peddling of underage flesh. Yet the pattern abides.

"I don't understand why they would do this now. It must be some kind of message."

What kind of message do they usually send?