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.