No Guru, No Method, No Teacher

Thanks for the information: "Never give a sucker an even break"
When he's breaking through to a new level of consciousness
There always seems to be more obstacles in the way - Van Morrison

How to "Question Authority," when it's Authority telling us how to question it?

The year 1956 saw the launch of the first "Disclosure Project," and a model for those that followed. The National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, or NICAP, was a civilian lobby group which called for an end to the US Air Force's embargo on its UFO data. By the mid-50s America already had a number of UFO organizations, but NICAP was to become the largest, and most aggressively dedicated to ending official secrecy.

For an organization with such an outre mandate, and supposed civilian composition, it boasted a lot of heavy brass. As Richard Dolan details in his UFOs and the National Security State, three US admirals sat on NICAP's first board: Rear Admiral Delmar Fahrney, former head of the Navy's guided missile program; Vice Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, first director of the CIA; and Rear-Admiral HB Knowles. Another early board member was Bernard Carvalho, who soon headed up its membership committee. Researcher Philip Coppens notes that Carvalho "was often used as the go-between for private companies owned or run by the CIA, such as Fairway Corporation, an airline company used by the heads of the CIA." If all that wasn't spooky enough, NICAP's first Vice-Chairman was White Russian emigre Count Nicolas de Rochefort who incidentally, and unknown to earnest Chair Donald Keyhoe, served as a member of the CIA's psychological warfare staff.

At the Agency, Rochefort answered to Colonel Joseph Bryan. In late 1959 Bryan, representing himself only as an Air Force officer, approached Keyhoe and asked to see his "really hot cases." Keyhoe, on his guard, refused. Bryan then made a series of public statements about the off-world aspects of the phenomenon, criticizing official secrecy. Keyhoe was finally put at ease, and Bryan too joined the board.

Now, what do you think became of NICAP, and the state of American UFOlogy, for having all these impressive insiders "onboard"?

In 1962 NICAP was at its most popular, and appeared close to surprising success. "In February," Dolan writes, "a plan was germinating among congressmen to end UFO secrecy using a statement by Roscoe Hillenkoetter, by far NICAP's most prestigious member." Keyhoe was instrumental in mapping a strategy with sympathetic congressmen for opening the government's records, and it was understood Hillenkoetter's reputation was the key to getting a serious hearing on the floor. Before Keyhoe could visit the Vice Admiral to plan their next steps, Hillenkoetter announced his resignation from NICAP, stating that he had no intention of proceeding with either an investigation or a statement to Congress, and that the Air Force was "doing all it could" with respect to UFOs. The organization, and Keyhoe, took a huge credibility hit from which neither would ever recover.

By the end of the decade, Bryan had engineered Keyhoe's dismissal, and replacement by an outsider named John Acuff who had formerly served as executive director of the intel-connected Society of Photographic Scientists and Engineers (SPSE). Acuff's management, says Dolan, was either wholly inept or deliberate sabotage: he ended Keyhoe's subcommittee system, told regional members to operate independently and discouraged cooperation, declared all data to be NICAP proprietary knowledge which could not be freely disseminated, and criticism of government UFO policy was no longer permitted. Acuff was succeeded by Alan Hall, a "former CIA covert employee for 30 years," as noted in 1979 by The New York Times Magazine. NICAP, which Nick Redfern in his On the Trail of the Saucer Spies calls "the one organization more than any other that had caused major headaches for officials when it came to the UFO controversy," finally folded the following year. Redfern adds that "some would argue that the downfall of NICAP had been the ultimate intent of the CIA from the beginning," though Colonel Bryan's son contends that "my father’s unswerving, outspoken faith in UFOs...was, I felt, something of an embarrassment.... I do not believe it was the sort of public position an agent would take whose covert goal was to smother interest in UFOs."

On the other hand, you can squeeze the life out of a thing if you embrace it hard enough.

I remember the giddy buzz a couple of years ago when Morgan Reynolds became the first figure who could be called a "Bush insider" stepped up as a "9/11 Truth" advocate, and not the most humble one at that. His splashy website and his speaking engagements quickly carried him to the forefront of the "movement's" second wave of leadership - which, unlike the first, is largely consumed by speculative issues of controlled demolition (Reynolds wrote that "WTC demolition is truth inviolate"). It was then that his theories became increasingly bizarre and his conduct particularly divisive and fractious. Now, the planes themselves were hoaxes, and the buildings demolished by "directed energy" beam weapons. Among those signing on to Reynolds' theories was David Shayler, "former MI5 agent turned whistleblower", who alleged last September that "The only explanation is that they were missiles surrounded by holograms made to look like planes." (The Sunday Times smartly remarked, "are we sure this isn’t an MI5 agent posing as Shayler in an attempt to discredit him?")

Bill Christison, a 29-year CIA Veteran and former director of the agency's Office of Regional and Political Analysis, has written that "An airliner almost certainly did not hit The Pentagon. Hard physical evidence supports this conclusion.... The North and South Towers of the World Trade Center almost certainly did not collapse and fall to earth because hijacked aircraft hit them.... These first two points provide the strongest evidence available that the 'official story' of 9/11 is not true." Retired Major General Albert Stubblebine, former director of the US Army Intelligence and Security Command and military patron of remote viewing, now says "I look at the hole in the Pentagon and I look at the size of an airplane that was supposed to have hit the Pentagon. And I said, 'The plane does not fit in that hole.' So what did hit the Pentagon? What hit it? Where is it? What's going on?" And Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration and former Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal, writes "I will begin by stating what we know to be a solid incontrovertible scientific fact. We know that it is strictly impossible for any building, much less steel columned buildings, to 'pancake' at free fall speed. Therefore, it is a non-controversial fact that the official explanation of the collapse of the WTC buildings is false."

What credibility is lent Roberts for having served under Reagan, or for having been in The National Review's radical right stable? ("In their hatred of 'the rich,'" Roberts has also written, "the left-wing overlooks that in the 20th century the rich were the class most persecuted by government. The class genocide [in communist societies] of the 20th century is the greatest genocide in history.") Before "9/11 Truth," Reynolds was calling for the rolling back of US labor regulation, claiming that a minimum wage contributes to unemployment. To those who argue Left and Right are false dichotomies perhaps it doesn't matter, and such characters merely represent the Truth Movement's "Big Tent." But to those who see in 9/11's outline a brutish war of the wealthy few upon the world's many poor, perhaps it should matter a great deal.

Is it a sign of health that such figures have elbowed their way to the front? If he were still alive, we could ask Donald Keyhoe. What should we make of their laser-like focus upon Pentagon missile theory and demolition? Is it confirmation that the movement is on the right track, or that it's gone off the rails and is being led further afield? Why are none of them apparently interested in talking about, say, Norman Mineta's testimony before the 9/11 Commission ("Do the orders still stand?"), and its excision from the commission's video archive and published record? Why are insiders not to be trusted, and their authority rejected, until they begin telling us what some of us want to hear? Then, suddenly, they become guileless figures in the know who do again what they did before: lead us.

The Shock of Awe (Part Two)

It's bright in the heavens and the wheels are flying - Bob Dylan

When Oppenheimer said "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds," I wonder whether he could have imagined how right and how wrong he was, and that he was speaking for more than himself and his bomb, because no force in the world today - and arguably any day - is a more efficient instrument of Will to Death than the United States of America.

The Jackass War

Pat Dollard might agree, and say "Fuck yeah." The former Hollywood agent is now lionized by Fox and Republican revanchists for his midlife makeover to "War on Terror" propagandist. His time self-embedded in Iraq has become Young Americans, the trailer of which plays like Jackass goes to War, and includes footage of a Marine raising a severed Iraqi head to the camera to a thrashing soundtrack of "If you don't like it you can suck my dick!"

Dollard is profiled in the March Vanity Fair - the longest profile in the magazine's history - and when asked about the footage he laughs: "The true savagery in this war is being committed by the American left on the minds of the young men and women serving over there by repeatedly telling them that their cause is lost. My goal is to de-sensitize young people to violence." He calls liberals "nihilistic."

Tony Snow describes Dollard as a "true believer," while a 17-year old high school student writes that "the clips I've seen of Young Americans are an inspiration and its time someone tells the truth. Thanks for putting your life on the line for the better of the country."

But there's much more to Dollard. He's also a meth addict, an alcoholic and serial user and abuser of weaker hearts and minds. He screens for Vanity Fair's Evan Wright a documentary he'd just finished called Three Days, starring himself; a young Latino named Josiah Dollard whom he met in rehab and took in (initially, supposedly, to help remain sober and later to help score drugs), who is variously described as his "lieutenant," "houseboy" and "bitch"; and the love of Josiah's life, a former girlfriend whom Wright identifies only as "Sunshine" who unfortunately chanced to visit their house. The film's scenes of degradation, humiliation and boundary defiance make it sound like a madman's Salo. Or perhaps Paul Bernardo brought up short.

The face of a girl with long black hair fills the screen. Sunshine. Though she is of legal age, she speaks in a child's voice, plaintive and quavering, as Dollard, still offscreen, barks at her, "What's your job on the team?" She giggles. "To sexually satisfy you and clean the house."

Dollard enters the frame, totally nude, a decrepit satyr. A montage ensues of him performing various sex acts with her, intercut with close-ups of the girl smoking a glass pipe. There is unintended comedy: while Dollard is having sex with her on the couch, it catches fire, and the two fail to notice until flames engulf their feet. There is intended comedy: Dollard performs anal sex with her while simultaneously talking on the phone with an agent at William Morris.

In the film, Josiah, who serves as cameraman, does not have sex with Sunshine.... His most significant on-screen presence is to lean close to her and offer encouragements: "What's his name? Say Pat. You're fucking a rich man with accomplishments, not a fucking loser."

...

The film fades to black. Jim Morrison comes across the loudspeakers singing "The End." Dollard narrates in the background about immortality, death, and the horrors he witnessed in Iraq. It cuts to Dollard readying to make his money shot on Sunshine."

...

He turns to Josiah, speaking excitedly. "You love this girl, Josiah. But you know what? You wandered off into a room by yourself to fucking jerk off to a tape of her fucking somebody else. That's who we are. That's who people are! They're scumbags!"

"This is so fucked up," Josiah shouts, "but I like it."

"Exactly, dude!" Dollard claps his hands, like a teacher whose pupil is about to achieve satori. "That's what I told you! That's the whole point to everything around here, with this whole thing, all of it, beyond! It's what everything in my life is about. It's about finding all those truths and those fucking experiences that other people just don't get."

Josiah seems paralyzed, staring at the screen, his huge eyes unblinking. "This is so fucked up," he repeats.

"That's what we do here," Dollard says, pounding the editing table. "We take everything to its furthest limits. We go out. We get in cars. We fucking kill people."

And as awful as it is, Dollard is right. As right as Pasolini was when he had one of Salo's torturers say "We Fascists are the only true anarchists. Once we've become masters of the state, true anarchy is that of power." Transgressive brutality is a path of transformation, at least to a sociopath, and fascism is an ideology of sociopaths. Dollard is embraced by America's fascist elite because behind their paper house of flittering justifications for catastrophe, he's the exultant "Fuck Yeah!" the architects of mayhem still don't dare exclaim in public.

George Bush is not the architect of his wars, but rather another cowboy advocate, and like Dollard he can still delight in them even as he fulfills his job on the team by lying them into being. A couple of weeks ago Washington Life Magazine's Soroush Shehabi, a grandson of a Pahlavi-era minister of Iran, used a presidential reception to warn, Bush, as though he didn't already know, that "one US bomb on Iran and the regime will remain in power for another 20 or 30 years and 70 million Iranians will become radicalized." Bush answered, "I know," to which Soroush responded, "But does Vice President Cheney know?" Bush walked away, chuckling.

Of course, everyone wants to know what Cheney knows, and that's Cheney's delight. For one example some may find ridiculous, but which exists as an example nonetheless, when asked on April 11, 2001 about whether he'd ever been briefed on UFOs Cheney replied "Well, if I had been briefed on it, I'm sure it was probably classified and I couldn't talk about it." He then added, "I have not come across the subject since I've been back in government, on like since January 20th." In other words, he would only say that he hadn't met on the subject in 10 weeks, and any more must remain classified. He could have said much less, but he made instead a near-tacit admission and so strung along "Disclosure" junkies that he may be one of the keepers of the keys. Whether he is or not is a matter of speculation, but why he might like to subtly foster that impression ought to be self-evident.

The "Time of Jacob's Trouble"

One other thing: Dick Cheney also presents a problem for the broad, alternative consensus that America has been warring in Israel's service. There is a kind of truth there, but one which only accounts for the appearance of things rather than their depths, and can't account at all for Cheney's intent. As Joseph Cannon recently wrote, "Does anyone really think that Cheney gives a damn about Zionism or Jews or the return of Jesus or Islamofascism or any of the other religious motivations one hears about?" Radicalizing seventy million Iranians and baiting the entire Muslim world towards acts of retaliation doesn't seem like a sensible strategy for Israeli security, just as we have no problem admitting it isn't one to make America safe, either. So perhaps we should stop thinking that that's really what's going on here.

A couple of years ago I suggested that neoconservatives are the "Lone Gunmen of Iraq. They're the patsies who'll eventually take the fall for its failure, which will actually mean success to the real players who've allowed them the liberty to play their hand." Similarly and in turn, Israel will be sacrificed for the choices of its own patsy-elite who, as I wrote, are not themselves innocent, but neither should perfect blame be laid at their feet. The Dispensationalists' playbook - which is still in play for general consumption, even if few in power actually believe its prophetic narrative - calls for "the Time of Jacob's Trouble," which is the utter ruin of Israel.

"A careful examination of the prophetic Scriptures," writes evangelical author Ben Israel, "indicates calamities for Israel that are yet future":

I have the unwelcome task of giving an overview of what the Scriptures call, "The time of Jacob’s Trouble." It is a painful survey of the devastation and suffering, yet future, for Israel and the Jewish people.... Yes, there have been judgments, desolation, and expulsion in the past; this has been the characteristic pattern of God’s judgments on Israel’s sin, but this Scripture refers to a future and concluding judgment, because it ends with both Israel and the nations round about knowing that God is the Lord. No previous desolation or ruin has ever eventuated in this knowledge....

Part of my controversy with other prophetic spokesmen, who claim that the time of Jacob’s Trouble [Nazi Holocaust] is past, is answered by the fact that the time of Jacob’s Trouble does not have its inception in Europe, but in Israel itself, in the Land. And it indicates, therefore, something that has not yet taken place. But the stage is being set for that eruption and expulsion by the present Jewish presence in the Land that necessarily precedes it.

It's the Christian Armageddon, not the Islamic, which prescribes the annihilation of Israel. If America's Fuck Yeah! cowboy believes he is the Apocalypse President - or, perhaps, if some calved-away, compartmentalized aspect of himself is encouraged to believe such - then it's not for Israel's benefit America is carrying the fight.

For whom, then, should remain a valid question.

Update Coming

Sorry for the delays. A new post will be up midday.

The Chapel of Baby Rose

Let the night begin there's a pop of skin and the sudden rush of scarlet
There's a little boy riding on a goat's head and a little girl playing the harlot
There's a sacrifice in an empty church of sweet li'l baby Rose
And a man in a mask from Mexico is peeling off my clothes - Joan Baez

I'll return to the subject of Friday's post shortly, but first I thought this judgement from Ireland needed attention, and little commentary.

From The Belfast Telegraph:

Inquest jury agree Cynthia Owen gave birth to baby

The jury at the Dun Laoghaire baby inquest has found that the infant girl, found in a plastic bag in a laneway over thirty years ago, was Noleen Murphy, the daughter of Cynthia Owen. When the verdict was read out at Dublin County Coroners Court today, there were loud cheers from Cynthia Owen and her family.

Following three and a half days of evidence and four hours of deliberation, the jury in this inquest returned a unanimous verdict. All twelve members agreed that Cynthia Owen gave birth to the baby girl that was found dead in a plastic bag in Lees Lane in Dun Laoghaire.

They agreed that she was born on the fourth of April 1973 at Whites Villas in Dalkey. The cause of death was haemorrhaging from stab wounds.

Cynthia Owen was 11 at the time of her baby's birth. The fact of her childhood pregnancy was hotly denied by her father, brother and now-deceased mother, whom she claims abused her and killed her baby. The fact of grave abuse in the home was attested to by her niece, who has since killed herself.

Possible broader implications of the case were broached in this report from last week:

Psychologists convinced witness was raped

Two psychologists today told Dublin County Coroner Dr Kieran Geraghty that they were in no doubt that Cynthia Owen had been raped and gave birth to a baby that had been murdered.

The inquest heard the 45-year-old told Dr Dawn Henderson that she had been the victim of satanic abuse and also mentioned a paedophile ring, details of which she did not want disclosed at the hearing.

Dr Henderson raised concerns over legal proceedings in relation to the case, and said she feared for other children in the family who were in contact with A, B, C and D.

"Cindy is not mentally ill," said Dr Henderson, clinical psychologist with the North West Wales NHS Trust. "In my opinion she is reacting in a normal way to a very abnormal and horrific childhood experience."

Cynthia Owen is now calling for a public inquiry into the handling of her case, and Ireland's Minister of Justice Michael McDowell is demanding a full report into the conduct of the 33-year old murder investigation. "It is profoundly disturbing but the truth is that some of the allegations made in it are really profoundly disturbing," said McDowell.

There's a brief post from a couple of years ago, based upon an email I received, entitled "She was always surprised they never found those bodies." Here's the story of a baby found in an alleyway wrapped in bloody newspapers with more than 40 stab wounds on her body, and it still took more than 30 years to hear something like the truth spoken in court. When people really don't want to know, even knowing where the bodies are doesn't appear to mean very much.

I'll stand before your altar and tell everything I know
I've come to claim my childhood at the chapel of baby Rose

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Blog, Interrupted

I always hate to do this, but I'm as tired of seeing a stale-dated post at the top of the page as you are. I've been stirring together some ideas for an update and it hasn't quite settled yet, while in the meantime I've become busy with other bits of life, so it will be at least another day before it's ready. Please consider this an open thread.

Fatally Beautiful

She was born in the back of a thirty four Ford
And raised in a foster home
Her guardian made sexual connection with her
Before she was even grown - T Bone Burnett

Jay Leno said that politics is just show business for ugly people, which makes me wonder what business he thinks he's in. But he's not half-wrong, though the truth must be uglier than he could imagine.

Sensational celebrity deaths are sometimes more than distractions, especially when the fame is all about sex and money, because that's so much of what power is about. Just ask George HW Bush. It may be impolitic to whisper about the underage callboys, but we're allowed to have a chuckle at his tapping Teri Hatcher's ass. ("Frisky for an 82-year-old, ain't he?" Nyuk, nyuk.)

Smith's money came from J. Howard Marshall, who came from Yale and American oil, so you can imagine how his bloodline would be anxious to hold onto it. He served as special counsel to Standard Oil during the early war years, when the company was still trading with Germany and in open collaboration with IG Farben. (About which Judge Charles Clark ruled that "Standard Oil can be considered an enemy national.") Marshall went on to take a large stake in Koch Industries, a major financier of far-right interests

I won't bother to speculate here about Smith's death, other than to note the legitimacy such speculation is popularly accorded, which is broadly denied theorizing about similarly suspicious deaths which befall Leno's ugly people. What interests me is that we ought to consider sometimes the fate of the rich and beautiful without worry we're getting suckered into a pop culture edition of Trivial Pursuits.

Smith was a Marilyn Monroe knock-off who traded up, and over-the-top, in her own commodity. And Monroe, more than most beauties, knew something about the entracement of power. And yet her death stands outside the standard corpus of conspiracy literature. Perhaps because her significance is devalued by her celebrity. But more likely, because in death, as in life, she poses a threat to the Camelot mythos.

I don't think we need to choose. And if it's true, then we should say both that the Kennedy assassinations were High Crimes of State and that Monroe's was an assisted suicide.

She died of barbiturate overdose - beside her naked body was found an empty bottle of Nebutal - and yet her stomach was empty. John Miner, a deputy DA who attended the autopsy, witnessed a small amount of liquid, but as Donald Wolfe notes in The Assassination of Marilyn Monroe, "we did not detect any sign that would indicate it contained any heavy drugs or sedatives." The examiner's report reads that "a smear made from the gastric contents and examined under the polarized microscope shows no refractile crystals," which is inconsistent with ingestion of a large amounts of barbiturates. Coroner Thomas Noguchi requested analysis of Monroe's kidneys, stomach, urine and intestines, which would have revealed how the barbiturates had entered her system. The laboratory samples disappeared. Miner remarks, "in the entire history of the LA County coroner's office there had never been a previous instance of organ samples vanishing."

A week before her death, Monroe spent a weekend at Lake Tahoe's Cal-Neva Lodge as a doped-up plush-toy of owners Frank Sinatra and Sam Giancana. Later, friend Ralph Roberts said Monroe described it as a "nightmare," and that she'd felt more like a prisoner than a guest. Photographer Billy Woodfield, who'd worked with both Monroe and Sinatra, told Wolfe that Sinatra gave him a roll of film from the weekend to develop: "In his darkroom the photographer was shocked to see that the photos were of an unconscious Marilyn Monroe being sexually abused in the presence of Sam Giancana and Sinatra. Marilyn had been drugged in order for the compromising photos to be taken." Woodfield advised Sinatra to burn them.

FBI electronic surveillance of Giancana corroborated the account. Agent Bill Roemer remembers a conversation, after Monroe's death, between Giancana and Johnny Rosselli:

The conversation was muted, but what I had gleaned was that Giancana had been at Cal-Neva...with Sinatra and Marilyn the week before she died. There, from what I had been able to put together, she was involved in an orgy. From the conversation I overheard, it appeared she may have had sex with Giancana. Rosselli said to Giancana, "You sure get your rocks off fucking the same broads as the brothers, don't you?"

The weekend over, Marilyn flew back to LA and entered her limousine barefoot, "out of it - a mess."

Suddenly, what's so far-fetched about "presidential models"? Or did you think this just happened in the movies?

The Monolith Monsters

That's the word, don't you know?
From the guys that's running the show.
Let's be perfectly clear boys and girls:
C*nts are still running the world. - Jarvis Cocker

It's always fascinating, and important as well, when conspirators become "conspiracy theorists." Just not always for the same reason.

There are the career insiders who, in timely fashion, step up as "whistleblowers" to entrain the American Mind by mischief. Philip Corso, for instance. In 1997, only one year before his death from a heart attack at 83, the retired Lieutenant Colonel released The Day After Roswell. Corso claimed to have both viewed the remains of Roswell aliens and to have shepherded the reverse engineering of UFO crash artifacts by the private sector, which became products such as fibre optics and integrated circuit chips.

Corso had no evidence for this, and the names he named were all dead. All he had was his word, which he underscored a month before he died with a sworn oath, as well as his reputation and distinguished service. In his review of The Day After Roswell, Michael Lindemann drew attention to this:

What to make of Colonel Philip Corso and his book? If he were not a highly decorated, highly credible military officer, he would likely be passed off by most people as a blatant hoaxer. But why would this particular man tell such very tall tales at the end of his life, if the tales are simply untrue? That question will likely vex more than a few readers of "The Day After Roswell," a book that will probably push the Roswell controversy to new heights in this Roswell-happy year of 1997.

I should note that Roswell, as I regard it, is the paramount disinformation story of American UFOlogy. It has sent generations down the wrong path, chasing the presumption of "nuts and bolts" spacecraft and their ET occupants, and served to both suppress the true phenomenon's psi and occult components and to mask the US military's deep black tech. Roswell is also responsible for the focus on passive "disclosure" - tell us the truth! - rather than on a citizens' investigation to learn the truth for themselves.

So he's not, as Lindemann noted, a blatant hoaxer, and I can't imagine a persuasive personal reason to fabricate such a fabulist narrative so close to his death. Still I think it should be evident, even to those who deny the existence of a genuine UFO phenomenon, that it means something that a man of Corso's stature signed off on The Day After Roswell. I suspect that the reason was service in furtherance of disinformation.

It's astonishing the rubbish we can swallow when we credulously open our mouths and say Feed me. Paul Hellyer became a brief blip on the media's radar a while back, when the former - as in 40-year former - Canadian Defense Minister went public with his late-life advocacy for UFO "disclosure." He was hailed as an "insider" and instantly graduated to keynote speaker at "Exopolitics" conferences. Unfortunately, Hellyer's insider knowledge didn't amount to much: "I finally concluded, especially after reading a book called The Day After Roswell written by Colonel Philip Corso, that unidentified flying objects are, in fact real," he told MSNBC. (Hellyer supports his case for the Corso book by adding that he heard, second hand, that an unnamed US Air Force General said "Every word of it is true, and more." An unnamed General would say that.)

Now let's consider the conspirator cum conspiracy theorist Zbigniew Brzezinski. Last week, while excoriating Bush's Iraq policy before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he warned of "a plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran." He sees the scenario unfolding with

Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks, followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure, then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the US blamed on Iran, culminating in a "defensive" [his own quotation marks] US military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

On leaving the hearing, Brzezinski was pointedly asked by reporter Barry Grey whether he was "suggesting that the source of a possible provocation might be the US government itself." He responded that he had "no idea. As I said, these things can never be predicted. It can be spontaneous." Grey followed up, "Are you suggesting there is a possibility it could originate within the US government itself?" To which Brzezinski replied, "I’m saying the whole situation can get out of hand and all sorts of calculations can produce a circumstance that would be very difficult to trace."

This is the same Brzezinski, of course, who rhetorically asked, of his early sponsorship of Islamic radicals as US proxies, "What was more important in the world view of history? The possible creation of an armed, radical Islamic movement, or the fall of the Soviet Empire? A few fired-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?" (And note, Brzezinski's policy of instigation was launched in Afghanistan against it's pro-Soviet government in order to goad the USSR into its bloody quagmire.) His book The Grand Chessboard (published, I realize with a slight frisson of synchronicity, the same year as Corso's), was cited early in the days following 9/11 as America's road-map of geopolitical ambition in the 21st Century. He knows better than most the reach of the hidden hand. Now, he's dropping broad hints that the US may manufacture a provocation in Iraq, blame it upon Iran and catastrophically broaden the war. So what do we do when they begin to sound like us?

On the one hand we should always be cautious about blithely accepting the word of deep-power embeds, but I also think it helps our understanding along if we admit that their world is neither static nor monolithic. It may appear from a distance that they're all in it together - and at our distance the differences between factions of the global elite may be too nuanced and rarefied to hold much meaning for us - but I believe there's a dynamism among conspirators that often seems lost on their theorists, some of whom like to project a virtual hive-mind upon the powerful. Rather than an undifferentiated block of them, I imagine an inter-penetrating Venn diagram of rival interests, means and analyses, and while Brzezinski is certainly in the thick of it that doesn't mean his opposition to the White House's adventurism is a sham intended only for public consumption. Though his reasons are certainly not the same as mine. (Brzezinski, interested in the efficient projection of American power, can foresee its ruin by the Cheney/Bush model, but he seems to regard it as the accident of bad policy rather than an intentional controlled collapse.)

One further example of insider "tinfoil."

On the evening of November 23, 1963, a man named Garrett Underhill showed up, anxious and unexpected, at the New York City residence of his friends Robert and Charlene Fitzsimmons. Underhill had driven up from Washington DC, where he worked as a military and intelligence expert for Fortune magazine. He was also a longtime CIA asset with particular expertise and interest in both the covert arms trade and Cuba.

When he arrived at the Fitzsimmons' home it was late, and Robert was already asleep. Charlene was preparing for their trip to Europe, and Underhill unburdened himself while she packed.

Larry Hancock, in Someone Would Have Talked:

Underhill's concern was that he had become aware of a "clique" within the CIA - a clique dealing with weapons and gun running and making money. These individuals had Far Eastern connections, narcotics was mentioned, supposedly the clique was manipulating political intrigues to serve their own ends. Underhill believed that these individuals had been involved with JFK's murder; he felt that JFK had become aware of their dealings and was about to move against them in some fashion. He also believed that members of the clique knew that Underhill was aware of their dealings and that his own life could well be in jeopardy. Underhill had fled Washington in fear of his life, avoiding his normal haunts at the Harvard Club in DC to seek refuge with his friends.

Robert Fitzsimmons later told Jim Garrison that they couldn't take Underhill seriously because "we couldn't believe that the CIA could contain a corrupt element every bit as ruthless, and much more efficient, than the Mafia." Their friend couldn't tell Garrison anything. In May, 1964 the body of the right-handed Underhill was found in his unlocked apartment, shot behind his left ear. Death was ruled a suicide.

It must have sounded strange to early-Sixties ears to hear such things said of the CIA. Particularly those odd and seemingly incongruous mentions of narcotics and "Far Eastern Connections" (like Yale's old "China hands"?) Yet today, more than 40 years after his murder, and 15 since Casolaro's, it makes such awful sense that we can say that despite his intelligence pedigree, at least Garrett Underhill was speaking the truth.

The Laughing Cow

There comes a time, when the operation of the machine is so odious, that you cannot even tacitly participate. You've got to place your body on the gears, the levers, all the apparatus, and you've got to indicate to those who own it, and those who run it, that unless you are free, the machine will be prevented from working at all - Mario Savio

I don't mean to blog for therapy, but I think I should mention, following the last post, that I feel lighter now for having posted it. That jumble of impressions had been bearing down on me for a while, and though trying to bring them to coherence was hard, now that I've found a place to put them, I don't carry their weight in the same way.

Which isn't to say I'm all of a sudden John Q Pangloss. Pessimists may be assured I still hold our position to be hopeless. With the great methane sinks of the Arctic starting to vent, and the prospect of a massive assault on Iran approaching stupefying inevitability, what else could I think? I don't regard it as excessive to believe we've reached the end, regardless of the end having been anticipated since the beginning. It's unlikely that the sky will roll up like parchment one day and that will be that. We'll probably go on living well beyond the end, marking each incremental degradation as the New Normal, and with the dust of death settled on every sweet thing. (In other words, less The Omega Man, more Children of Men.)

And perhaps, if hopelessness is where this story ends, it's where we can begin to write another.

Derrick Jensen, in an issue of Orion magazine from last Spring (and also discussed here on the RI forum), wrote that "the most common words I hear spoken by any environmentalists anywhere are, 'We're fucked'":

Frankly, I don't have much hope. But I think that's a good thing. Hope is what keeps us chained to the system, the conglomerate of people and ideas and ideals that is causing the destruction of the Earth.

...

Many people are afraid to feel despair. They fear that if they allow themselves to perceive how desperate our situation really is, they must then be perpetually miserable. They forget that it is possible to feel many things at once. They also forget that despair is an entirely appropriate response to a desperate situation. Many people probably also fear that if they allow themselves to perceive how desperate things are, they may be forced to do something about it.

...

And when you quit relying on hope, and instead begin to protect the people, things, and places you love, you become very dangerous indeed to those in power. In case you're wondering, that's a very good thing.

Perhaps some Democrats who pinned their hopes on the 2006 midterms, only to see the disgrace of "non-binding resolutions" at least one war too late, will die to hope and become dangerous to the System of Control. Most have already picked up the stakes of their hope and moved them downfield to 2008. Until we're hopeless nothing will change, except for the worse, and the world's circumstance will become even less tractable.

What do we do, when hope dies? If are programmed, then we become the virus. If we are food, then we become the toxin. If we are cattle, then we protect our calves. If we are hunted, then we rear up and kick the hunter in his own damned head.

As Kipling, of all people, said, We are the taint in the blood. We had better be.


By the way, since the comments field here has become difficult slogging lately, I've opened a thread on the RI forum for any who care to remark on this post in a moderated environment.