The Steel Magnolia

The other day I came across this story:

Archbishop pleads guilty to perjury
ATLANTA (AP) - Court officials say the 80-year-old leader of a suburban Atlanta megachurch pleaded guilty Wednesday to a charge he lied under oath. Cobb County Superior Court Judge Frank Cox said Archbishop Earl Paulk of the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit at Chapel Hill Harvester Church was sentenced to 10 years probation and a $1,000 fine for the felony charge.

Paulk turned himself in to authorities Tuesday night after a warrant was issued for his arrest the previous day. The charges stem from a deposition Paulk gave as part of a civil lawsuit against him, his brother Don and the church by a former church employee who says she was coerced into an affair.

In a 2006 deposition for the lawsuit, the archbishop said under oath that the only woman he had ever had sex with outside of his marriage was former church worker Mona Brewer.

But the results of a court-ordered paternity test revealed in October that Paulk is the biological father of his brother’s son, D.E. Paulk, who is now head pastor at the church. As part of Brewer’s lawsuit, eight women have given sworn depositions that they were coerced into sexual relationships with Earl Paulk.

Paulk’s attorney, Joel Pugh, said he had been working with Cobb County District Attorney Pat Head for weeks on negotiating a deal.

“It was a fair and just resolution of the case for a man who has lived his whole life and done wonderful things but made a mistake,” Pugh said. “He’s ready to move on.”

Pugh had said earlier the warrant came as a surprise to the Paulk family.
The warrant was the result of a months-long probe by Head and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

Head called the sentence “certainly adequate” for Paulk, who had never been charged criminally before.

“There are a lot of allegations about things he has done over the past 15 or 20 years,” Head said. “In trying to determine what is a fair sentence, I can’t look at what he’s been alleged to have done in other counties.”

Paulk’s home and church are in DeKalb County, but the deposition he gave was in an attorney’s office in Cobb County.

Cox said the sentence was not unusual for someone like Paulk, who has no prior record and whose health is “frail.”

Paulk has been in bad health for the last couple of years after a battle with cancer, limiting his activity with the independent charismatic church he and his brother founded in 1960.

At its peak in the early 1990s, the Cathedral at Chapel Hill claimed about 10,000 members and 24 pastors and was a media powerhouse. The church was able to build a Bible college, two schools, a worldwide TV ministry and a $12 million sanctuary the size of a fortress in Decatur outside Atlanta.

Today membership is down to about 1,500, the church has 18 pastors, most of them volunteers, and the Bible College and TV ministry have shuttered — a downturn blamed largely on complaints about the sexual scandals.

Wow! It never ends, does it? But get ready for this, it gets worse! While trying to find more info on the good bishop, I came across this: Sexual predators in the religious scene which includes the above article and so much more!

It seems that there is some guy named Eric Pepin who has created a front for his sexual predation called “Higher Balance Institute.” You can read about it at the above link, and also here: Eric Pepin - Higher Balance Institute - Discussion This last link will give you all the details as well as a glimpse of how this guy operates. Talk about totalitarian. He even gets his lawyers to shut down websites if anybody exposes him! (If this blog disappears, you’ll know why!)

That, of course, made me even more curious. I found the following:

Master Eric Messes Up

File under: Hands Where They Don’t Belong

Eric J. Pepin and an accomplice are in the slammer for photographing and molesting an at-that-time 17-year-old employee of his Higher Balance Institute:

A man who is now 20 was 17 and working for Pepin when he allegedly was sexually abused at the Higher Balance office… in Beaverton and at Pepin’s former home in the city.

Pepin should have stayed out of the child pornography business and just stuck to selling snake oil:

Pepin’s meditation systems, which sell for $79 to $149, help customers develop their “sixth sense” and apply it “inward to awaken a dimensional universe within the mind,” the Web site says.

But like many gurus who have fallen before him, Pepin just couldn’t keep it in his pants:

The boy, Smith wrote, “was taught by Pepin to believe that the sexual contact was only a spiritual necessity.” But after a while, the affidavit says, the boy decided he was being used by Pepin, who bought him meals and paid him $200 after sex.

An all-time classic in the lustful guru’s playbook: “I’m doing this for you, kid.”

We imagine “Master Eric” is about to receive some karmic “balance” of his own, in the form of a horny 300-lb. meth-chef for a bunkmate, only this time he won’t get to be the master anymore.

Then, there is this:

claim: psychic pill boosts paranormal abiity

Dear Friends,

It may come as a surprise to you, or at least we hope it will as we have kept this a Top Secret project for nearly two years. The secret is more or less a very real “Psychic Pill.”

For nearly two decades I have investigated the source of Psychic abilities, suspecting at first then discovering without a doubt that it was located within the brain. Not only do I believe that this source has been located, and isolated, but more importantly I have discovered the actual compounds the brain uses to manifest these Psychic abilities!

My team and I have produced the very first of its kind; a “Psychic Pill”, and it offers remarkable results in as little as sixty minutes. Believe it!

Within the year this product will at first go nationwide, then worldwide with full media coverage, etc. However, currently I am making it available exclusively to you because of your mutual interest and pursuits with the Higher Balance Institute. If you are at all familiar with my materials, then you also know how serious I am about this. This is the real deal.

Our supply is very limited but we will be taking back orders. A bigger shipment is expected to arrive in about two weeks. Because of these available quantities initially, a limited number of customers will receive their orders from the first shipment be sure to get a confirmation number. Others may have to wait as much as several weeks or months thereafter. So if you are as interested and excited as we are, call now to secure your order!

We are expecting heavy calls so please be patient when placing your order. You will also be able to order online which we proffer and will give immediate secured status. All orders will be secured and guaranteed delivery to you as long as you receive a confirmation number, all internet orders are considered secured otherwise orders will not be accepted and state that we are currently sold out. We will post updates on the new website of the shipment schedules as we receive them.

The product is called Magneurol6-S. It uses a unique formula that works with something never heard of before — digestible magnetite; “Magnetized Iron”. Please review the new website at http://www.magneurol.com. You may order from the Magneurol6-S order page or use our Higher Balance website order page.

The company I have created to manage this exciting and cutting edge product is called RemCure. Over time, we will be offering many other rare and highly unique products that actually do what they claim!

Most people will not know that RemCure Enterprises is a sister company to Higher Balance. This is a convenience for you as my highly trained staff will support any questions you (a Higher Balance participant) will have, and yes, Magneurol6-S was specifically designed to work with and dramatically amplify the results from Higher Balance’s already amazing material!

This special e-mail list you are on is giving you advance notice so take advantage of it! We are not likely to send out a snail mail brochure as we expect to be sold out shortly.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Very sincerely,

Eric Pepin

Higher Balance Institute, 515 NW Saltzman Ave, #726, Portland, OR 97229, USA

Yes, that’s right folks! A real “Psychic Pill” and he was going to go national with media coverage though he didn’t have enough to do more than backorders at the time he was sending out this email!

Oh boy!

But that was back in 2005. Before Pepin got arrested for pedophilia? Guess he had to spend his national marketing campaign money on lawyers.

Is there a lesson in this?

I think there is: there are predators everywhere. They prey on people in all walks of life from Catholic to Protestants to New Agers, and one of their chief disguises is Do Gooders, religious teachers, salesmen of “faith” and so on. No matter what you believe, you will have your very own predator to play your belief for all he can get.

Belief is the enemy. Only Truth can set you free. And you have to dig for it because there are liars everywhere.

But really, that takes the cake! A “Psychic Pill”???

The ultimate snake-oil I guess.

Laura Knight Jadczyk has done it again: took the words right out of my mouth:

I nearly snorted my herbal tea through my nose this morning when I read:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, on Friday criticized Sen. Barbara Boxer’s suggestion that because she doesn’t have family in harm’s way, she won’t pay a personal price in the Iraq war.

“In retrospect, gee, I thought single women had come further than that, that the only question is are you making good decisions because you have kids,” Rice said in an interview Friday on Fox News.

As you can see in the photo above, Condi is practiced at exuding Motherly Love in every nuanced look and gesture. She’s holding out her hands for an infant… to devour, I guess. Crocodiles do it.

Barbara Boxer had a valid point when she highlighted the fact that Condolizzard Rice - since she has no children - has little to lose with her war-mongering for Israel. (Perhaps Condi imagines that Israel will reward her with the presidency if she is a loyal and faithful lizzard.)

But oh, my, has the Zionist-controlled media had a field day with this one, rapaciously smearing and defaming Boxer.

“I spoke the truth at the committee hearing, which is that neither Secretary Rice nor I have family members that will pay the price for this escalation,” she said. “My point was to focus attention on our military families who continue to sacrifice because this administration has not developed a political solution to the situation in Iraq.”

What’s interesting is that another story in the news highlights the issue.

Couple who murdered neighbours shock Italy

In this story we are told that a totally normal, middle-aged couple slaughtered four neighbors, including a 2 year-old child, by stabbing them and cutting their throats.

Why?

Because they were “noisy.”

“We just could not stand them anymore,” Bazzi, a petite housemaid obsessed with cleanliness, told investigators as she confessed to killing the two-year-old with a knife. “He was always screaming, my head was exploding,” she said, according to media reports.

According to investigators who had bugged their home after the murders, Romano and Bazzi were heard to say to each other: “See how peaceful it is now? We can finally sleep well.”

Bazzi, 43, was unable to have children, which Italian media have suggested as a possible cause of her anger with the sound of the child’s crying.

Now, one could draw a comparison between the childless Bazzi and Condoleezza Rice who is just sooo upset with the “noise” made by crying Palestinians, Iraqis and Iranians and anyone else who is not as obsessed with democratic cleanliness as she is. “They are always screaming, my head is exploding,” she says in actions, if not words.

Condi and Bush and the rest of the Ziocons would like to be able to say to each other: “See how peaceful it is now? We can finally sleep well.” But they know that this can only happen after they cut the throats of every crying Palestinian, Iraq and Iranian child. And it sure makes it easier for a woman to do it if she doesn’t have children herself.

I would like to remind the reader that not too long ago, when Israel was raping and pillaging Lebanon, there was the following report that I wrote about on my BLOG:

Rice sees bombs as “birth pangs”

Condoleezza Rice has described the plight of Lebanon as a part of the “birth pangs of a new Middle East” and said that Israel should ignore calls for a ceasefire.

“This is a different Middle East. It’s a new Middle East. It’s hard, We’re going through a very violent time,” the US secretary of state said.

I have to say that, as the mother of five children, these remarks stopped me cold in my tracks. Aside from the obvious question “what can Condoleezza Rice - a woman who has never given birth - know about “birth pangs? - there is another more compelling question: what kind of human being can be so callous as to say such a thing when tens of thousands of mothers in the Middle East have suffered the unimaginable grief of seeing their beautiful babies whose birth pangs they DID experience, crushed under the jackboots of rapacious Imperialism and religious fanaticism with War Whore Rice leading the charge?

Few things have ever revealed the psychopathic nature of Condolizzard Rice more clearly than this soulless and truly inhuman series of remarks. Rice has revealed herself to be - like Benny Morris - a morally repellant creature. A crocodile would make a better mother than she would. As Norman Finkelstein has pointed out, the universe inhabited by normal human beings - honest and decent people - is one where the majority concur on the facts AND their moral and legal implications, though they may have different ideas of how to implement a political solution. One could say that all NORMAL people demand an immediate cease-fire. Period. You can work out the details later, but stop NOW before one more precious baby is lost and one more mother regrets the real birth pangs that brought her child into a world where he or she was destined to become only cannon fodder for such as the likes of Condoleezza Rice.

Below is the full story:

Rice Criticizes Boxer

WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Friday criticized Sen. Barbara Boxer’s suggestion that because she doesn’t have family in harm’s way, she won’t pay a personal price in the Iraq war.

“In retrospect, gee, I thought single women had come further than that, that the only question is are you making good decisions because you have kids,” Rice said in an interview Friday on Fox News.

Boxer’s comment came during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing Thursday in which Rice was grilled on President Bush’s new war plans.

“Who pays the price?” Boxer asked Rice, who is unmarried and doesn’t have children. “I’m not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old and my grandchild is too young. You’re not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with immediate family.

“So who pays the price? The American military and their families.”

Boxer, D-Calif., defended herself in a statement Friday.

“I spoke the truth at the committee hearing, which is that neither Secretary Rice nor I have family members that will pay the price for this escalation,” she said. “My point was to focus attention on our military families who continue to sacrifice because this administration has not developed a political solution to the situation in Iraq.”

To fill out the image, let’s look at a previous crossing of swords between Babs and Condi:

Barbara Boxer scorches Condi

January 18, 2005

It’s clear that Condi has been drinking the Kool-Aid for years; she can lie so pathologically and is so unflappable that it boggles the mind. (NYT):

Condoleezza Rice, President Bush’s nominee for secretary of state, refused Tuesday to set any timetable for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, but declared that the United States was making “some progress” in training Iraqi security forces.

…By far the most severe questioning came from Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, whose berating tone clearly rankled Ms. Rice and brought an uncharacteristic flash of irritation. In the morning session, Ms. Boxer focused sharply on Ms. Rice’s position that Saddam Hussein had been close to acquiring nuclear weapons, showing her statements on a cardboard display.

“I personally believe, this is my personal view, that your loyalty to the mission you were given, to sell this war, overwhelmed your respect for the truth,” Ms. Boxer said. “Senator, I have to say that I never, ever lost respect for the truth in the service of anything,” Ms. Rice responded, her voice sharpening. “It is not my nature. It is not my character. And I would hope that we can have this conversation and discuss what happened before, and what went on before and what I said, without impugning my credibility or my integrity.”

Just what IS your nature, Condolizzard? Forget about credibility and integrity; they are rags and tatters by now.

I couldn’t have said it better or agreed more!

Robert Fisk opines that the death of Saddam means that the Neocons’ secrets are safe:

He takes his secrets to the grave. Our complicity dies with him

We’ve shut him up. The moment Saddam’s hooded executioner pulled the lever of the trapdoor in Baghdad yesterday morning, Washington’s secrets were safe. The shameless, outrageous, covert military support which the United States - and Britain - gave to Saddam for more than a decade remains the one terrible story which our presidents and prime ministers do not want the world to remember. And now Saddam, who knew the full extent of that Western support - given to him while he was perpetrating some of the worst atrocities since the Second World War - is dead.

[…]

The whole truth died with Saddam Hussein in the Baghdad execution chamber yesterday. Many in Washington and London must have sighed with relief that the old man had been silenced for ever.

Read the whole thing; it’s a damning indictment. But there’s more. Rupert Cornwell tells us:

How Washington and London helped to create the monster they went to war to destroy

When they hanged him, he was America’s vanquished foe, likened to Hitler and Stalin for the murderous evil of his ways. What is forgotten is that once, for more than a decade, Saddam Hussein was staunchly supported by the US.

Indeed, it was Washington that supplied him with many of the weapons of mass destruction the dictator used against his foes - weapons that one day would serve as a pretext for the US-led invasion that toppled him.

The dealings between the US and Saddam’s Iraq over the quarter of a century before 2003 are a story of deceit, miscalculation and strategic blunders by both sides. And they began, as they would end, in the shadow of a common enemy: Iran.

[…]

Almost from the moment he came to office, the second President Bush had his eye on finishing his father’s business. After a three-week ground war [Saddam] was duly overthrown. But in doing so, the US has achieved exactly what it sought to prevent when it backed him in the 1980s.

It is a matter of debate whether Iraqis are now worse off than under Saddam’s dictatorship. The chaos in their country, however, has produced one undisputed winner: an unchecked Iran, more menacing today than in Ayatollah Khomeini’s time.

And that’s the big problem. Sometimes it seems like the Ziocons don’t have any firing neurons. Everything they have done, from day one after 9/11 (and long before, actually), has been designed to increase the violence on this planet and destabilize human civilization. But then, since the Zio-cons were behind 9/11, it seems that this is what they wanted. They are like virulent bacteria that do not realize that the body they are destroying will be cast into the fire at the end, destroying them as well.

A dictator dies - but tyranny of violence goes on and on

A divided country marked the death of its former dictator with a mixture of carnage and celebration. Around the world, condemnation of the hastily carried-out execution grows. Andrew Malone reports. […]

While America hailed the “act of justice” and exiled Iraqis danced in the streets, celebrating from Sydney to San Francisco, the first bombs of the post-Saddam world exploded on a minibus south of Baghdad, killing 25 people and injuring 62. The morgue was hastily filled with bodies, and the suspected bomber was cornered in the street and murdered by a mob.

While the Vatican and Islamic leaders condemned the execution, life in Iraq continued much as it had throughout Saddam’s rule and the subsequent US-led occupation: with bloodshed, vengeance and death.

Scores of Iraqis are dying every day. It was revealed yesterday that the death toll for US troops since the invasion is just short of 3,000, with 108 killed in December, and pro-Saddam factions swore yesterday that the violence would continue. By last night, the day’s death toll stood at more than 70.

But in Saddam’s home town of Tikrit, where curfews were in force yesterday, many seethed at the hanging of the ousted president, and claimed Saddam was now a martyr in the fight against the US-backed government.

“Saddam will be a hero in our eyes,” said Um Abdullah, a Sunni teacher and teacher in the town, who pledged to wear black to mourn him. ” I have five kids and I will teach them to take revenge on Americans.”[…]

The UK government hailed the fact he had been “held to account” for his crimes, but was strident in its opposition to the death penalty. ” Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, speaking on behalf of the Government, said: “I welcome the fact that Saddam Hussein has been tried by an Iraqi court for at least some of the appalling crimes he committed against the Iraqi people. He has now been held to account.

“The British government does not support the use of the death penalty in Iraq or anywhere else. We advocate an end to the death penalty worldwide, regardless of the individual or the crime.”

Other world powers protested about the grave repercussions. Russia warned the execution will simply add to Iraq’s woes. “The country is being plunged into violence,” said Mikhail Kamynin, the foreign ministry spokesman. “The execution of Saddam Hussein may lead to the further aggravation of the military-political atmosphere and an increase in ethnic and religious tension.”

Libya announced three days of national mourning, calling the execution ” barbaric”.

There was also condemnation from human rights groups and the Vatican. ” An execution is always tragic news, even in the case of a person who is guilty of grave crimes,” said a spokesman for the Holy See. ” Killing the guilty one is not the way to rebuild justice and reconcile society. On the contrary, there is the risk that the spirit of revenge is fuelled.”

In the impoverished village of Awja, where Saddam was born, the people were refusing to accept he was dead and vowed to intensify their battle against American and British troops.

“If Saddam is executed he will be a martyr and he will enter history,” a young man in his twenties said, sceptical that Saddam had in fact been hanged. A man standing beside him added: “If they execute him, we will rise up. We will all become a bomb.”
[…]

But in many parts of the Muslim world, the news of Saddam’s death was met with fury. In Saudi Arabia, Arab pilgrims in Mecca expressed outrage that Iraqi authorities had chosen to execute the former president on a major religious holiday.

“His execution on the day of Eid is an insult to all Muslims,” said a Jordanian pilgrim, Nidal Mohammad Salah. “As a head of state, he should not be executed.”

A radical group based in Syria, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, said in a statement that Saddam’s execution aimed at creating ” more divisions and internal conflicts in Iraq with a view to destroying and partitioning it and controlling its resources”. The death may deepen hatred towards Shia Muslims in Saudi Arabia, a bastion of Sunni Islam, whose Islamic orthodoxy, known as Wahhabism, regards Shias as virtual heretics. […]

In India, home to 140 million Muslims, thousands took to the streets in sporadic protests across the country. They shouted anti-American slogans, burned effigies of President Bush and briefly blocked trains at main railway stations. “This was a glaring example of America’s dictatorship over the rest of the world,” said Maulana Khalid Rasheed, an imam.

In Iraq, thousands watched in silence as state television showed footage of guards in ski masks placing a noose around Saddam’s neck. The footage cut off just before the execution. Biladi, a Shia-run channel, then showed Saddam in a white shroud, lying with his neck twisted at an awkward angle, with blood and a bruise on his left cheek.

Haider Hamed, a Shia in Baghdad whose uncle died in a Saddam purge, asked what would change: “He’s gone but our problems continue.”

Considering the fact that George Bush has, to date, murdered more Iraqis and caused the death of mor Americans than Saddam ever did, we should take careful note of this last comment: Saddam is gone, but our problems continue. And that is true for the whole world as long as the Neocons, with George Bush as their puppet, are in power.

And what do George and the Neocons want now?

Why, Saddam’s alleged billions, of course.

Family clues to Iraq’s missing oil billions

The dictator is dead, and now the hunt for his illicit fortune is intensifying. Officials from the FBI and US Treasury are focusing their inquiries on £2.2bn of illegal oil profits […]

State Department and Treasury officials claim that Syria has failed to account properly for more than $500m in Iraqi oil profits. The cash, deposited in Syria’s central bank, was paid to Syrian ‘businessmen’ after Saddam’s fall, sources say. Syrian officials deny the allegations, saying that visits by American officials to Damascus in the autumn of 2003 failed to uncover any evidence of the missing cash apart from $300m that has already been frozen. […]

In a report submitted to the CIA last year Charles Duelfer, a former UN arms inspectors, estimated that Saddam had amassed $10.9bn ‘through illicit means’ between 1990, when sanctions were imposed, and 2003. The dictator is also believed to have hidden cash in accounts in Switzerland, Japan, Germany and other countries and to have invested in precious stones, possibly diamonds purchased in the Far East. […]

Immediately before the war of 2003, $1.7bn in assets in accounts held in the US in the name of the government of Iraq, the central bank of Iraq, the state organisation for marketing oil, the Rafidain bank and the Rasheed bank was seized. The Bank of England froze £400m in British banks. An additional $495m of previously unknown assets were secured in accounts in Lebanon. […]

Raghad, Saddam’s daughter, lives freely in Amman under the condition that she does not engage in political activities or make public statements. King Abdullah of Jordan granted her and her sister, Rana, asylum on humanitarian grounds after the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.

Raghad, known as ‘Little Saddam’ because she shares her father’s temper, has been accused by the new Iraqi government of using millions allegedly stolen by Saddam to help finance the insurgency. However it is unclear if Raghdad or Rana have much sympathy for their father, though the latter was involved in his legal defence. Saddam ordered the husbands of both women killed in 1996 after accusing them of giving information about Iraq’s weapons to the West. The brothers had defected to Jordan with their families in 1995 and were killed when they accepted Saddam’s offer to return.

Well, assuming they find the money, who do you suppose is going to get it? In fact, a good question is: who got the money in the accounts they froze or confiscated already? I would say that it should all go back to Iraq, but we already know what happens to any money that is slated for Iraq: it goes into Dick Cheney’s pockets via Halliburton.

One thing seems likely: even if Raghad has not been financing the insurgency up to now, she’ll get pretty busy now with the threat of execution hanging over her head - no pun intended. Nothing like backing people into a corner to see just how ugly things can get.

What strikes me as interesting in this whole thing is the conduct of “Saddam” (was he a double, or not? Some people say the real Saddam is secreted away on some deluxe Russian Dacha) as he was led to his execution.

Saddam: The dead dictator

As they put the rope around his neck, the 69-year-old former dictator muttered to himself, “Do not be afraid.” It was still dark outside. The sun had not yet risen. The call to prayer had not yet sounded in the city that Saddam Hussein al-Majid al-Tikriti once ruled through fear.

Now he stood shackled in a prison in a northern suburb of Baghdad ­ the same prison in which his own secret service, al-Mukhabarat, once tortured and killed. The trapdoor at his feet had opened for countless others, on his orders. His own death would be almost as brutal.

The executioner offered Saddam a hood to cover his face during those final moments, but it was refused. “God is great,” said the condemned man. “The nation will be victorious. Palestine belongs to the Arabs.”

Those were his last words. A lever was pulled, the trapdoor swung and his body dropped, half a metre, no more. It was enough, according to a witness: ” We heard his neck snap instantly.”

Saddam Hussein, the Butcher of Baghdad to some but a martyr to his last remaining followers, was dead. He had been executed for crimes against humanity. […]

The execution had been timed to take place just before dawn, the beginning of the holy festival of Eid al-Adha. But the sun was already up in Afghanistan, where a senior Taliban leader said: “Saddam’s hanging on the day of Eid is a challenge to Muslims … the jihad in Iraq will be intensified and attacks on invader forces will increase.”

It was 5.30am in Baghdad yesterday when the Americans handed Saddam over to Iraqi authorities. A helicopter lifted him out of the American-controlled Green Zone to the prison in Kadhimiya now known as Camp Justice.

He went to his death dressed as he had been throughout his trial: in black shoes and trousers and a white shirt buttoned at the throat. He wore a long black overcoat too, as the early morning was cold, but was ordered to remove a black woolly hat. His hair and beard were trimmed, not long and wild as they were when he was captured three years ago, hiding in a hole in the ground.

Saddam was seated as a judge began to read the details of his death sentence for crimes against humanity, passed by a court in Baghdad in November. But when a video camera entered the room he stood up and began to shout back: ” Long live Islam! Down with the West!” Both hands, cuffed at the wrists, held the Koran to his chest.

The 15 people watching remained silent. Some were members of the government. Others were close relatives of 148 men and boys Saddam ordered to be killed in 1982 after somebody from their village attempted to assassinate him during a motorcade. Those were the deaths for which he was sentenced in November, although there are many more associated with his name.[…]

After the charges had been read out and the paperwork signed, his handcuffs were removed and retied so that his hands were behind his back. His legs were tied at the ankles, and the man who once ordered people to be shot just for challenging his opinions suffered the indignity of being carried slowly up a metal staircase to the gallows chamber.

The ceiling was low, the concrete walls grey and bare. Saddam frowned and appeared confused as he stood surrounded by six large men in balaclavas.

“I couldn’t see any remorse on his face,” said the Iraqi national security adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie, who was there. But he added: “He was very broken. He looked really weak.”

There was no Muslim cleric present, but the executioner recited the Muslim statement of witness: “There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet.”

The execution was efficient, said Mr al-Rubaie. “He went down in no time. It was so quick and totally painless, it was over in a second. There was no movement after that.”

The body was left to hang for 10 minutes or so. Gradually those present shook off their nervous silence and the officials congratulated each other. The rope was slackened, the noose removed and a white shroud pulled over the body.[…]

Someone took a picture which shows Saddam lying on a stretcher, not quite completely covered by the shroud. His face and head are bare, his neck twisted at an unnatural angle.

A friend of his eldest daughter, Raghd, living in Jordan, said that she was ” very proud” to have seen her father “facing his executioners so bravely, standing up”.[…]

Now, how cool was that? No matter what anybody says about the guy, he died like a man, on his feet, with courage and words on his lips that bear repeating over and over and over again: “Palestine belongs to the Arabs.”

Come on, can anybody imagine George or Dick or Don or Condi showing that kind of intestinal fortitude in the moments before they KNOW they are gonna die?

The lessons the West must learn from this tyrant’s death

Someone thought they saw fear in his eyes, but it was hard to be sure. Saddam Hussein went quietly to the gallows. Given the momentous nature of the execution, the event was almost an anticlimax. If the great tyrant and mass murderer seemed diminished in the moment of his death, then so were the first architects of his demise.

Beyond the spectre of his atrocities lies the flawed evangelism of the invaders who sought to remove him. They have succeeded, but few tombstones have been more dearly bought. Many thousands of Iraqi civilians have died since the invasion began and more will perish before the New Year starts. As one more bloody dawn broke over Baghdad, Saddam’s last post and requiem were the echo of bullets and the laments of the bereaved. […]

Saddam should not have hanged. Ending his life with a variant of the inhuman punishment he once meted out so lavishly was just another kick against human rights. But in the end, his death seemed more pointless than cruel. President Bush took an early night as the execution warrant was signed. Tony Blair issued no instant comment from his Miami holiday home. What is there left to say? Saddam’s death is less a righteous judgment on his bloodlust than an epitaph to Western folly. The ghastly final truth is that he taught us much more than we taught him.

Saddam Hussein made his attackers forget the limits of their influence and power. The wish to destroy him erased the fact that Iraq has never been moulded to British will and that enemies cannot easily be vanquished when history and logic are fighting on their side. And now his long shadow hangs over a New Year crowded by much else that the West forgot to remember.

The post-Saddam world splits down many fracture lines, almost all connected to the war on terror. Regions of Africa are facing terrible wars, partly because ancient crises simply slipped out of Western minds. Ethnic cleansing, torture and mayhem in Darfur and Somalia have been airbrushed away by disaster in Iraq, peril in Afghanistan, war in Lebanon and a deepening crisis in Palestine. Of the ‘axis of evil’ states, North Korea has the bomb and Iran races towards a nuclear deterrent.[…]

By bitter irony, it took Saddam to drill home that reciprocity and compromise are far preferable to the delusion that Western military power can conquer all. But the paradox of 2007 is this. The West is contemplating a switch to tea-and-cake diplomacy at the very moment when parts of the world cry out in vain for muscular solutions.

Take Darfur, where rape and slaughter pass for social dialogue: As many as 300,000 people have died in three years and two million are homeless. The conflict has spilled over into Chad, and the world stands impotently by, in the hope that President Bashir might graciously put out the welcome mat for the peacekeeping force mandated by the UN.

Take Somalia. The Islamic grouping that maintained rough law and order has fled before the Ethiopian troops tacitly backed by George W Bush. Warlords are already moving into the vacuum at the heart of one of the most savage and anarchic capitals on earth, and the cornerstone of a new war of Christian versus Muslim has been laid. Mogadishu urgently needs all-party talks and UN peacekeepers. Recent history suggests that Tolkien’s army of Isengard is as likely to ride to its rescue.[…]

The old, great powers are effete and cowed by the dead Saddam. When leaders talk of victory in Iraq, they mean: never again. And so humanitarian intervention, the vital long-stop against genocide, becomes unthinkable.

In Africa, in 2007, such cowardice will not suffice. The sheer scale of bloodshed has anaesthetised sorrow and stopped tears. Who weeps for the Darfurian child whose mother left to pick up firewood and never came home? Not many, when the UN High Commission for Refugees works on a shoestring budget of £550m to care for 21 million people.

War zones need more money, more peacekeepers and less of the military force that is either useless or unusable. That means scaling down Western nuclear weapons and redrafting the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Britain, for all the influence it has squandered in Iraq, can help force change in 2007. It can band with Europe and demand concerted action to help Darfur and Somalia. It can lobby for the permanent membership of the UN Security Council to be extended. Its Parliament must stop Trident Two.

These are the lessons of Saddam and of a war that should never have been fought. If the West can reacquaint itself with humanity and history, then some debacles of the past year may yet be laid to rest alongside a dead dictator. As Saddam goes to his grave, it is time to remember who to help, and when to fight, and what to mourn.

As for what will happen next, well, Laura Knight-Jadczyk has some ideas that bear thought. She writes:

It’s a very bad precedent all the way around. George and gang should shy away from doing unto others what they wouldn’t want done to themselves… after all, in the eyes of most of the world, they, too, are War Criminals and are committing genocide. Murdering Saddam Hussein is not going to wash away the blood on the hands of the U.S. Neocons. […]

There are many who think that the real Saddam Hussein, friend of many American Administration officials, was spirited to safety before the fall of Baghdad and a double substituted to play the role for the kangaroo court. The few reports that slipped out suggesting such a ruse were quickly buried and the farce went on - whether with the real Saddam or a double, who knows?

It really doesn’t even matter if it was the real Saddam, a fake Saddam, a real hanging, or a fake hanging. What matters is that this “fact” has been propagated and will now become the mask for a new false flag operation - or even a REAL Muslim Terrorist attack! How about a couple of mini-nukes in the U.S. that will then be blamed on the supporters of Saddam - or Moslems with vengeance in their hearts in general - and used as an excuse to slam the door shut on the U.S., U.K., and wherever else there were members of the “coalition of the bought and paid for”? Whether they are real terrorists or fake terrorists won’t matter.

After all, if Bush and gang know that their pillaging and fleecing of the American people can no longer be covered up, that the economic crash is set to happen like right away, how better to cover that up with some real, dire, national emergencies? Who cares if the stock market crashes, the dollar tanks, or interest rates go up if there are terrorists around every corner?

Heck, the domino effect from this one act could lead us right into a REAL terrorist attack after which martial law would be declared, all elections in the U.S. would be suspended and Bush would become “president for life,” curfews imposed, dissidents arrested and sent to the “Halliburton Holiday Camps”; you just can’t tell, but it could be the spark that ignites the conflagration - the beginning of the end.

I have a really bad feeling about this.

I agree; even if Saddam’s death was “anti-climactic” for some, I predict that we have not yet even begun to feel the repercussions. Bush better watch his backside.

Douglas Reed’s “The Controversy of Zion” now on the internet!

Commencing in 1951, as Britain’s foremost World War II correspondent, he spent more than three years writing “The Controversy of Zion” - all 300.000 words of it. He completed the epilogue in 1956. Although there is correspondence to show that the book was once discussed with his publisher, the manuscript was never submitted, but remained for 22 years gathering dust in his home in Durban, South Africa.

Would he have loved the internet! Now, half a century later, it exists, and must assist in the dissemination of his powerful truth. Several chapters show how much he would have loved this possibility. Just as much as the zionist censors of the internet hate this breach in their worldwide brainwashing and control of the media.

In Europe during the years immediately before and after World War II, the name of Douglas Reed was on everyone’s lips. His books were being sold by the tens of thousands. He was known with intimate familiarity throughout the English-speaking world by a vast army of fans. And then he was banished. Was it this book? Take a look at these chapters and judge for yourself…..

The Controversy of Zion

by Lisa Guliani

Patsy Smullin has run KOBI-TV for the last 30 years, and her father founded it. If anybody would have known Jeff Rense and the supposed 5,000 newscasts he claims to have made, it would be Patsy.

As it happens, Patsy Smullin does remember Jeff Rense, and in two different telephone conversations I had with her over the past few days, she confirmed that he did have a position at her television station for a brief time as a reporter and news anchor. Smullin stressed that Jeff Rense, or “a guy calling himself Jeff Rense” (her words), was employed at KOBI (an NBC affiliate) from June 1983 to May 1984, and she is not aware of him working at any other station in the state of Oregon either prior to his employment at KOBI-TV or afterward. [I would think if he’d worked at other stations previous to his KOBI position, these would be listed on his job application or resume when given to KOBI-TV.]

Patsy had more to say. She revealed that in her experience as Jeff Rense’s employer (and this is a direct quote), “He was not known for his honesty.” Think about it. Patsy Smullin was Rense’s employer some twenty-odd years ago. After all this tiime, the characteristic that has remained clearly in her memory is that “he was not known for his honesty”. What does that say to you? According to Ms. Smullin, at that time Jeff was also involved in several court battles with other people. One wonders if it has anything to do with him not being known for his honesty?

When asked if she could elaborate on the comment she’d made regarding Rense not being known for his honesty, her response was: “Sure. He was a compulsive liar.” Also, when questioned as to the claim that Jeff anchored and produced “5000 newscasts,” Patsy Smullin laughed heartily and stated, “This is absolutely false. He never did that here.” Okay, if not at KOBI-TV, then where? Perhaps Jeff Rense will reveal this to us all at some point so we can check it out.

But on his own website, Jeff Rense claims to have been an award winning news director and TV news anchor for 10-12 years (accounts vary). If not at KOBI, then where?

An American Treasure

“…an award-winning television News Director and News Anchor for over ten years, Jeff continually pushed for higher standards of journalism and responsible, intelligent reporting and inquiry. Regrettably, those goals were often at odds with the irrevocable TV news obsession for tabloid exploitation of the trivial, the tragic and the sensational. The situation became so dubious and distasteful that one day he walked away from his highly-successful news anchor/news director career (as high as a 53 Share of the audience - Nielsen) and moved to radio, recognizing it as the last viable approach to bringing reality to the American public…and now with the internet, to the world.”

Interesting that Rense declares himself to have worked as a news director and TV news anchor. An online search to verify this claim will return only Jeff’s words – repeated endlessly ad nauseum - as to the truthfulness of this assertion. There is literally no data to substantiate this claim anywhere on the Internet. The claim exists only on the Rense website and a few other websites that have copied and pasted the Rense claims onto their own pages.

Here’s another variation on the same theme: Jeff Rense Hosts Sightings

“During 12 years as an award-winning broadcast journalist, Jeff anchored and produced more than 5,000 television newscasts. This devoted single dad is also author of the book AIDS Exposed and passionately investigates ways to prevent diseases and extend life. His brother is Rip Rense, longtime reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Jeff first did radio while an education major at the University of California Santa Barbara, and in 1994 he returned to this first love with the talk radio show “End of the Line.” In 1997, by agreement with Henry (”the Fonz”) Winkler and Paramount Pictures, this show transformed into the ratings star “Sightings.”

_______________________________________________________________

Based on the following article he was a former news anchor at KOBI-TV. However, if one searches KOBI, there is no information on the former popular TV news anchor/news director Jeff Rense to be found.

The Truth Is Up There

“Presiding over this conspiratorial miasma is talk-radio host Jeff Rense, whose weeknight show, Sightings, is broadcast from a studio somewhere in Southern Oregon. (Citing threats to his life, Rense asked WW not to print his exact location.) Five nights a week, millions of Americans (including an estimated 21,000 Portlanders) in 120 cities tune in to Rense to catch up on the latest news on alien abduction, Bigfoot, paranormal phenomena–and chemtrails. A former news anchor at KOBI-TV in Medford, Rense began to hear reports of chemtrails in 1999.”

________________________________________________________________

The above page also says:

“…By the late 1980s, Rense had worked for a handful of network affiliates in the West. He said his ratings were high, and he got ‘lucrative offers’ from several Oregon stations. But he had also become disillusioned with TV news and decided to quit the business….” “…After walking away from his TV career path, Rense returned to Santa Barbara and opened three pet stores…”

“…By the early 1990s, he had sold his All About Pets outlets and in 1994 approached KTMS with his idea for a talk-radio show, or at least his version of one…”

A Professional Broadcast Journalist

“As an award-winning broadcast journalist, Mr. Rense has anchored and produced well over 5,000 live 30-and 60-minute television newscasts… He began his End of the Line radio show which is now in its fourth highly successful year. Recently, the End of the Line was acquired by the Premiere Radio Networks, one of the top two radio syndicators in the U.S., and renamed Sightings On The Radio through an agreement with Paramount.”

“As a journalist and private citizen, he became aware of the misinformation and propaganda surrounding the worldwide AIDS epidemic. Devoting three years of his life to researching, collecting, and compiling information, Mr. Rense authored the underground best-seller, AIDS Exposed, published in 1996. This 420-page book has been acclaimed as ‘overwhelming,’ ‘invaluable’ and ‘the supreme public service’ by broadcasters, medical professionals, and educators alike. Appearing on scores of radio and TV talk shows as an author, Mr. Rense has also been invited to lecture at such institutions as the University of California and USC. He has also written numerous articles, papers, and reports on a wide range of subjects and acts as a consultant on many different issues.”

Rense’s radio show “End of the Line” was renamed “Sightings on the Radio” with Paramount’s backing.

An extensive online search for articles, journalistic reports and papers from Rense’s purported pre-Rense.com prior journalism career yields nothing.

How can this possibly be if he has written ‘numerous articles, papers and reports’? His book, AIDS Exposed, does not appear to be available anymore, with the exception of potential availability of a random used copy, if you’re lucky.

A search on the publisher of this book, Bioalert Press, coughs up nothing as far as any listing for a company website. The top link on Google search for Bioalert Press says: Bookstore– Balaam’s Ass Suggests you Read These Good Books– Health AIDS Exposed– Jeffrey Rense– BioAlert Press– Order from Jeffrey Rense, Box 764, Goleta, CA 93116. www.balaams-ass.com/bookstor/health.htm -

The above Google link would not come up for me in multiple attempts on different days. Regarding the Balaam’s Ass link, one has to order the book directly from Jeff Rense. Is Bioalert Press really just Rense? Has anyone out there ever heard of BioAlert Press?

I find it very ironic that Rense claims to have become so disillusioned with the nature of the mainstream news broadcast business and its inclination to report tabloid style and sensationalistic material, when all anyone has to do is peruse the Rense.com website for 10 minutes to realize that this well-funded site – funded by the same mainstream businesses that Rense claims to detest – is full of nothing but a never-ending series of sensationalistic, tabloid-type, speculative, unsubstantiated or fabricated “news” articles. I have to ask: Is it only wrong, disillusioning and distasteful when “other” people do it, Jeff? Or are you doing it for them?

Furthermore, online searches for any evidence of Jeff Rense’s longstanding claims regarding his extremely elusive broadcast journalism career path result in even more dead ends. There is an article on the Rense website entitled “The Most Dangerous Man in Talk Radio”, authored by an alleged LA writer named Kennedy Grey.

In this article, Kennedy Grey tells us, “When Jeff Rense walked away from a #1 rated Oregon TV news anchor position, people suspected job burnout. But Rense wasn’t burned out on his job - his dissatisfaction was with the entire news media mainstream itself. Grey also states that Jeff spent “Twelve years as on on-air news anchor and News Director “up and down the west coast”. Grey further says, “Rense set out to re-invent himself into a liberator of truth from the confines of a corrupt and bloated news broadcast industry.” He directly quotes Jeff Rense, who states that “Radio is theatre of the mind - a classroom of the mind.”

Very interesting comments, aren’t they? The news anchor/news director statement is impossible to verify via the Internet, and thus far Jeff Rense is not forthcoming with information in spite of email sent to him containing a link to our website inquiry dated Friday, May 26, 2006 entitled Who is “Jeff Rense”?.

Does anyone have a copy of any of these 5,000 Jeff Rense newscasts? We’d sure like to see one. Thus far, we have not been able to locate anyone other than one person who remembers seeing Jeff Rense anchoring a TV newscast.

Only one TV news station’s call letters has been identified thus far. KOBI-TV 5 out of Medford, Oregon, which is an NBC affiliate. Pretty slim pickings. Nevertheless, I made a few phone calls to Medford, Oregon. One would think that as popular as Jeff Rense supposedly was, surely someone would remember him from the 1980s – particularly if he had produced and anchored 5000 newscasts up and down the West Coast. I contacted the Mail Tribune and spoke with an employee in the newsroom there. She had never heard of Oregon’s (former) #1 top rated news anchor, Jeff Rense. I’m awaiting a call back from Bob Hunter, editor of the Mail Tribune newspaper, to see if he has any recollections on this matter.

“5000 newscasts” is a lot of face-time, wouldn’t you agree?

Three calls to Rense’s former place of employment, KOBI-TV, speaking to four people who worked there didn’t help Rense very much. The first three individuals I spoke to had never heard of Jeff Rense and have no idea who he is. The fourth person was the owner of KOBI-TV, Patsy Smullin.

Jeff claims to have left KOBI due to his disillusionment with the mainstream news business and the tendency of TV news to sensationalize and dip into tabloid reporting, as stated above. I read Jeff’s published claims about this to Patsy Smullin. She responded, “That’s not the reason he gave to us at all. He said he was leaving to join his wife in their pet store.” (I am currently checking out the pet store information.)

Overall, Patsy Smullin did not give the impression that Jeff Rense had been a good employee while at KOBI-TV. In fact, her remarks lead one to believe that he was dishonest and untrustworthy. It was all I could do to restrain myself from asking if he conducted newscasts while wearing a wig.

The question we are entitled to ask is: why would Jeff Rense make so many claims about himself, and why would he twist the truth and make public assertions that are simply not true? Isn’t the “reinvented Jeff Rense” supposed to be all about truth and realism as opposed to sensationalistic, tabloid-style garbage? If one looks through his massive website, is it conceivable that a person might have some difficulty trying to discern the difference between Rense shinola and honest-to-god truth? Where does one end and the other begin? Furthermore, is Jeff Rense the person we really want to ask? Maybe that’s a little like asking the Bush Gang to investigate 911? (Oh, right! That’s already been done. Vanity Fair called it a “whitewash.”)

—————————————-

“Jeff Rense” is a familiar name to countless political/conspiracy talk radio listeners and web surfers. In these circles, virtually everyone has heard of Rense.com. What very few people realize, or have even stopped to think about, is that very little is known about Jeff Rense himself. The available online biographical information is vague and deals in generalities, and has been copied and pasted from one web page to another over the years. The Rense legend has been dished out for public consumption in small, measured doses over time in word-bytes, with hardly anyone daring to openly question its veracity. Rense fans embrace, and often even vehemently defend the legend; those who don’t end up being ridiculed and attacked. That’s a curious feature of Rense’s position as a “Don of Conspiracy Theory.”

Jeff Rense is an interesting guy, wouldn’t you say? He’s almost a “legend,” and is even listed on a government site as the number one purveyor of “misinformation.” That’s quite an accomplishment in a world where “conspiracy theories” are mostly ignored and/or ridiculed. You could even say that it’s very good PR to get on such a list.

My curiosity about Jeff Rense began to grow when I realized that he has maintained a large Internet presence for over a decade, and despite this, there is virtually no information on him other than that which one finds on his website. How has Jeff Rense managed to keep information about himself off the world wide web all these years? That’s an interesting question.

We live in a time that discourages curiosity about the ‘wrong” topics – that’s a hallmark of the Fascist Bushistas - and it seems that questioning Rense is definitely “off limits”. We have to wonder why that is? Asking questions about the ‘wrong” people is treated almost as sacrilege. We love to hold our heroes and gurus high, don’t we? But we have learned the hard way that questions are only discouraged by those who have something to hide.

What could such a nice guy, such a great “patriot” as Jeff Rense possibly have to hide?

After spending some time combing through his claims and trying to find verification, I began to realize that “Jeff Rense” is little more than a reinvention. He has made some very interesting claims over the years, particularly with respect to his former stints in broadcasting and journalism; claims that served as building blocks in the creation of a legend, a legend constructed from the twisting of truth.

Well, let’s look at “Jeff Rense” shall we?

Claim #1: On the Rense.com homepage, we see the following:

“7-time Peabody Award Nominee”

Rense Peabody Talkers claim

Peabody Awards

Truth: The Rense.com website claims 7 Peabody Award nominations. The Peabody Awards do not have nominees. Anyone can fill out an entry, and then later the winners are announced. The following is an email from the Peabody Awards Foundation:

“The Peabody Awards program receives between 1,000 and 1,200 entries each year. We have a 15 member judging panel that meets several times during the judging season, as well as listening to/watching entries alone in their homes. They discuss all entries as a group, usually awarding between 30 and 35 Peabodys each year. There are no set number of awards given, and the board does not choose winners according to categories. We do not have a list of finalists or “nominees” as other awards programs have.

Basically we have entrants and winners.

Danna L. Williams Senior Administrative Assistant, emailed Feb. 6th 2006 ”

In other words, you could nominate me, I could nominate you, and we could all nominate Bozo the Clown. The Peabody panel will most likely be interested in these suggestions, but ultimately it is THEY who choose the winners – not the public. There are no official lists of “nominees”. Rense’s website claim to be a “7 Time Peabody Award Nominee” is not only misleading, it means essentially nothing. It is presented to create a false impression of Rense’s achievements, basically it’s deceptive bullshit.

Talkers Magazine

Claim # 2: The Rense website states: “Talkers magazine top 100 Host”

Talkers Magazine ‘Heavy Hundred’

Truth: Please note that Jeff Rense isn’t listed in the top 100, and he isn’t even listed in the additional 250 names cited in the rest of Talkers Top Radio Show Host picks for 2006. Rense failed to make the cut for 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, etc. Rense was on the list once about 6 or 7 years ago, according to a response to my inquiry from Talkers. In fact, they find it pretty interesting that Jeff Rense is continuing to present this claim on his website, creating the appearance of his inclusion on this popular list, when in fact he is currently not listed. Talkers characterized this misleading representation in one word: “deceptive”, saying they will be keeping an eye on Rense and any Talkers-related claims from here on. Take a look at the list linked above. Call Talkers Magazine and ask them yourself if he is indeed on the Heavy Hundred list.

Claim #3: Rense’s Myspace web page at:

Rense My Space Profile lists his location as Ashland, Oregon – yet his Rense.com fan page says he is in California. Which is it? Oregon or California? Does Rense have two residences? If so, how does one afford two residences on an Internet radio income?

Of course, the answer could be that one is his residence and the other is his business address, but again I ask: if he is just doing his thing because he is a “true patriot,” knowing how hard it is for other true patriots to make ends meet, we have to ask who is paying for his office? What money is backing him? His MySpace page states an income of $100,000-$150,000 per year. That’s a pretty good chunk of change for a guy who claims to be in the business out of the goodness of his heart and his interest in truth.

Claim #4: Jeff Rense From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“Former television news anchorman Jeff Rense, who lives in Santa Barbara, California, is a popular conspiracy theorist and is the host of the Jeff Rense program which is broadcast on terrestrial radio and on the Internet. He originally became famous in the 90’s with the program “Sightings”. His radio program and website (See below) cover such subjects as UFO reports, paranormal phenomena, conspiracy theories, reports of new diseases and a plethora of other material rarely covered by the mainstream media. Jeff Rense leans towards a populist approach regarding politics and media. Rense does not subscribe to any conventional political standpoint and many of his views are simultaneously left and right leaning. Rense has one brother: writer, Rip Rense. His step mother, New York socialite and editor-in-chief of Architectural Digest Magazine, is Paige Rense. His father, now deceased, was sports journalist, Arthur F. Rense (1917-1990). Jeff Rense is also a vegan.”

Here we learn that Rense’s views are simultaneously both left-leaning and right-leaning. Sounds like an impossible contortion to me. It is also established from more than one source that Jeff’s father, Arthur Rense, formerly a sportswriter and sometime poet, also landed a job at Douglas Aircraft doing PR. How does a poet and sports writer qualify for work as a public relations director at Douglas Aircraft, one of the biggies of the Military Industrial Complex? Here is the NY Times obituary for Arthur Rense:

Arthur F. Rense, Public Relations Executive, 74
Published: January 5, 1991

“Arthur F. Rense, a retired public relations executive, died on Dec. 28 at his home in Las Vegas, Nev. He was 74 years old. He died of leukemia, said his wife, Paige Rense, editor in chief of Architectural Digest. Mr. Rense had been director of public relations for the Summa Corporation, owned by Howard R. Hughes, until he retired in 1985. He had been public relations director for the missiles and space systems division of Douglas Aircraft Company and director of public relations at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Calif. Besides his wife, Mr. Rense is survived by three sons from a former marriage, Kirk of Irvine, Calif., Jeff of Santa Barbara , Calif., and Rip of Sherman Oaks, Calif.; four brothers, Randy, Andy and Frank, all of Cleveland, and William of Denver; and two grandchildren.”

Regarding Summa Corporation: The Washington Post for April 1, 1975, carried this information:

Summa Corp. is the financial umbrella under which most of (Howard)Hughes’ worth is contained. . . .Most recently, another Summa “asset” hit the news: the $350 million Hughes Glomar Explorer vessel that Hughes built at the behest (and the expense of) the Central Intelligence Agency . . . Mormons, Hughes, & CIA

Summa Corporation has been tied to CIA contracts on more than one occasion, to say the least. Douglas Aircraft Company is also well-known for its numerous government contracts, not to mention the starring role it is now playing in Bush’s Endless War. So again I ask: how did “poet and sports writer” Arthur Rense end up as public relations director for Douglas Aircraft and Summa Corp? In bed with the Feds? More importantly, what kind of connections does his son Jeff have with these same gangs? After all, his views are “both left and right” which suggests that he could have “left” views to vacuum in his audience all the while subtly converting them to “right” views.

Douglas Aircraft also has ties with RAND Corporation:

RAND (Encyclopedia)

The RAND Corporation is an American think tank.

“A think tank is a group of individuals dedicated to high-level synergistic research on a variety of subjects, usually in military laboratories, corporations,… first formed to offer research and analysis to the U.S. military. The organization has since expanded to working with other government and commercial organizations Project RAND was set up in 1945 by the USAAF, under contract to the Douglas Aircraft Company. An interesting aside, Condoleezza Rice is a former RAND CorporationTrustee 1991-1997 and current Secretary of State for the United States, a war whore if ever there was one.”

Okay, I think everybody knows that Summa, Douglas Aircraft, and RAND are all major players with DOD, military and intelligence agencies in the fascist government that Jeff Rense claims to oppose. Yet we find that his father, Arthur Rense, poet, sports writer, was “somehow” a public relations director for both Douglas Aircraft and Summa Corporation? I would very much like to hear Jeff Rense publicly discuss this curious fact one of these fine days and explain how he could live much of his life with alphabet soup guys swarming around and avoid being sucked into the game. Funny how this topic never seems to come up, isn’t it? Perhaps he just keeps forgetting to mention it.

Now I want to come back to the fact that Jeff Rense has been “honored” by being listed on an official government website as a major purveyor of “disinformation.” Among the conspiracy minded crowd, that is a high kudo indeed. But is it evidence that Jeff truly is a news source standing in opposition to the Bush Reich and their Endless Wars of Lies and Agression? Maybe not. As Robin Ramsay, Editor of Lobster Magazine, wrote in the February issue of Fortean Times:

Recently, the US State Department has begun trying to rebut some of the current conspiracy theories about America. Their first targets were a couple of websites - www.rense.com and Conspiracy Planet - and the late Joe Vialls, an Australian. What a boost for the named sites! Attacked by the State Department![…]

[Y]ou don’t have to be a PR genius to see that what you simply mustn’t do is launch official attacks: all they do is amplify and legitimise the theories by announcing that they are deemed to be worth attacking. [Fortean Times 206, February 2006, p. 19]

What a coup for Rense and Alex Jones! To be officially declared the primo disinfo sites! Now, if you know anything about COINTELPRO, you expect that the real COINTELPRO operations will be attacked “officially” in order to legitimize them exactly as Robin Ramsay has described. That also means that those who are honest and sincere seekers of truth and who do their homework and expose the lies of the Bush Reich will most certainly NOT be martyred by the official government. It’s way too dangerous and gives them legitimacy. Rather, they will be defamed by the “officially designated disinformation agents” – and dare we say it? – agents of COINTELPRO - such as Jeff Rense, Alex Jones and similar disinformation agents that have received the Bush Reich seal of approval. In fact, it seems that this is a well-orchestrated plan that is described in detail in that much maligned document, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” A really good way to keep your eye on the ball is to consider Protocol 12…

Now, it is important when reading the Protocols to not assign it’s origin to any national, ethnic, or religious group. Rather, consider it to be a statement of any group that seeks to control and dominate and use the public for their own gain Then you will truly begin to understand who is who. (Excerpts of Protocol 12: Control of the Press are located at the end of this article):

Recently, Jeff Rense accused WING TV of engaging in deception, trickery, subterfuge, lying, slandering and libel, just to name a few of the charges. He has publicly called Victor Thorn and myself “dirtball scum” and together with Alex Jones and their groupies, charged us with being “cointelpro assets, government agents and un-American operatives.” True to form and apparently attached to Rense at the hip and the lip, (and linked on the official government site, I should add), Alex Jones reinforces, endorses, and repeats Rense’s vomitus, only louder. What’s amusing about this is that Rense, Jones, nor any of their groupie parrots have yet to substantiate any of these bogus charges made against us.

Let me get this straight: nobody has to qualify with data anything they say, including (and particularly) veteran journalist Jeff Rense? Alex Jones has yet to qualify any of his ridiculous comments about us either, and he refuses to hold himself accountable for his own words.

Ask yourself: Why? Is it conceivable to anyone out there that they cannot PROVE the things they say about WING TV? Moreover, this begs the question, can they prove any and all of the other “gospel-truth” claims they’ve made over the years? That is another very good question.

You see, we are supposed to just believe what they say simply because they say it. Forget about facts, data or substantiation. Forget about showing evidence of their assertions; forget about journalistic ethics; just nod your head and agree. Don’t ask questions. Gobble up the lies and twisted half-truths and get your fill of the fix du jour. After all, in the words of Jeff Rense, it is all a “theater of the mind”.

What we observe is that both Rense and Jones pander to a “least common denominator” audience demographic, the people out there who don’t bother to check things out for themselves and will just repeat what they hear and read over and over, like good little automatons. This is the ideal Rense-Jones target audience, one which will worship blindly, surrender critical thinking skills, believe without questioning or disagreement, and of course, shell out the bucks.

Incidentally, I did a search on Kennedy Grey, the LA writer who penned the article about Rense entitled “The Most Dangerous Man in Talk Radio”. He (she) is supposedly the founder of a group called RAS, an acronym for ‘Rock Against Suicide’. Unfortunately, a Google search for Kennedy Grey did not yield a website for the RAS group anywhere, but there is an interview with Kennedy Grey on this website: The Internet Nirvana Fan club.

Nirvana Fan Club. Oh boy, how impressive. A Curt Cobain suicide website.

I was not able to find any links online to Grey’s organization, RAS, or to Kennedy Grey, other than the single article he wrote which is published on Rense.com. I would like to find Kennedy Grey and ask whether he/she even bothered to check out any of the claims Rense made to him in the interview. I’d like to learn if Kennedy Grey is a real person, for that matter, or just a construct of Rense. Whatever the case may be, it doesn’t look like Grey checked out any of the statements Rense made in that interview. If some fact-checking had been done, Grey’s article would probably be written a bit differently. At the very least, it should have been.

Rense and Alex Jones enjoy howling that “Honest-to-God patriots” NEVER attack other patriots. That sounds a lot like:

“For any attempt to attack us, if such still be possible, we shall inflict fines without mercy…. No one shall with impunity lay a finger on the aureole of our government infallibility. The pretext for stopping any publication will be the alleged plea that it is agitating the public mind without occasion or justification.” [Protocols]

The fact is, those who do the research know that the Founding Fathers engaged in a great deal of spirited, heated, sincere dispute with one another. Some of them hated one another with a passion, yet in spite of this animosity, worked together for the common good of all; as the cause was greater than themselves, and they all knew this to be true. So where do Rense and Jones come off bellowing such obnoxious bullshit, especially when we consider the fact that merely branding oneself a “patriot” does not necessarily make it so. I could call myself “Madonna”, but that doesn’t mean I AM Madonna.

Appearances can be very deceiving, especially when some so-called “patriots” choose to hide behind microphones in undisclosed locations, behind wigs and a couple of re-touched, photo-shopped cartoon pictures of themselves, and when all they choose to disclose is a limited amount of extremely vague babble about their alleged past accomplishments, achievements, or experience designed solely to “create a legend”.

And then, when we discover, with a minimum of investigation, that their claims do not hold up, that it is all completely manipulated, twisted, exaggerated, amplified and contorted facts designed to present a false front, we are entitled to question everything else. Why do people tell lies, whether overtly or by omission? Some do it because of mental issues, some do it for profit, and some do it just because they can.

Bottom line: Jeff Rense has falsely accused WING TV of trading in lies, deception, duplicity, innuendo, disinformation and trickery. Jeff Rense better start looking in the mirror, because I see a so-called “patriot” that needs to come clean about a few things, someone who is “not known for his honesty”.

Definitions of deception on the Web:

• misrepresentation: a misleading falsehood
• the act of deceiving
• magic trick: an illusory feat; considered magical by naive observers
• Deception is providing intentionally misleading information to others.
• To practice deceit.
• To give a false impression: appearances can deceive.
• To cause to believe what is not true; mislead.
• to cause to accept as true or valid what is false or invalid intransitive verb : to practice deceit
• be false to; be dishonest with - 2: cause someone to believe an untruth

Stay tuned, because this investigation is not over. More to follow soon.

“The big print giveth and the small print taketh away.”
~ Tom Waitts ~

Protocol 12: Control of the Press

1. The word “freedom,” which can be interpreted in various ways, is defined by us as follows –

2. Freedom is the right to do what which the law allows. This interpretation of the word will at the proper time be of service to us, because all freedom will thus be in our hands, since the laws will abolish or create only that which is desirable for us according to the aforesaid program.

3. We shall deal with the press in the following way: what is the part played by the press to-day? It serves to excite and inflame those passions which are needed for our purpose or else it serves selfish ends of parties. It is often vapid, unjust, mendacious, and the majority of the public have not the slightest idea what ends the press really serves. We shall saddle and bridle it with a tight curb: we shall do the same also with all productions of the printing press, for where would be the sense of getting rid of the attacks of the press if we remain targets for pamphlets and books? …

For any attempt to attack us, if such still be possible, we shall inflict fines without mercy…. No one shall with impunity lay a finger on the aureole of our government infallibility. The pretext for stopping any publication will be the alleged plea that it is agitating the public mind without occasion or justification.

I BEG YOU TO NOTE THAT AMONG THOSE MAKING ATTACKS UPON US WILL ALSO BE ORGANS ESTABLISHED BY US, BUT THEY WILL ATTACK EXCLUSIVELY POINTS THAT WE HAVE PRE-DETERMINED TO ALTER. WE CONTROL THE PRESS

4. NOT A SINGLE ANNOUNCEMENT WILL REACH THE PUBLIC WITHOUT OUR CONTROL. Even now this is already being attained by us inasmuch as all news items are received by a few agencies, in whose offices they are focused from all parts of the world. These agencies will then be already entirely ours and will give publicity only to what we dictate to them.

5. If already now we have contrived to possess ourselves of the minds of the GOY communities to such an extent that they all come near looking upon the events of the world through the colored glasses of those spectacles we are setting astride their noses; if already now there is not a single State where there exist for us any barriers to admittance into what GOY stupidity calls State secrets: what will our positions be then, when we shall be acknowledged supreme lords of the world in the person of our king of all the world ….

6. Let us turn again to the FUTURE OF THE PRINTING PRESS. Every one desirous of being a publisher, librarian, or printer, will be obliged to provide himself with the diploma instituted therefore, which, in case of any fault, will be immediately impounded. With such measures THE INSTRUMENT OF THOUGHT WILL BECOME AN EDUCATIVE MEANS ON THE HANDS OF OUR GOVERNMENT, WHICH WILL NO LONGER ALLOW THE MASS OF THE NATION TO BE LED ASTRAY IN BY-WAYS AND FANTASIES ABOUT THE BLESSINGS OF PROGRESS. Is there any one of us who does not know that these phantom blessings are the direct roads to foolish imaginings which give birth to anarchical relations of men among themselves and towards authority, because progress, or rather the idea of progress, has introduced the conception of every kind of emancipation, but has failed to establish its limits …. All the so-called liberals are anarchists, if not in fact, at any rate in thought. Every one of them in hunting after phantoms of freedom, and falling exclusively into license, that is, into the anarchy of protest for the sake of protest…. FREE PRESS DESTROYED

7. We turn to the periodical press. … if there should be any found who are desirous of writing against us, they will not find any person eager to print their productions. Before accepting any production for publication in print, the publisher or printer will have to apply to the authorities for permission to do so. Thus we shall know beforehand of all tricks preparing against us and shall nullify them by getting ahead with explanations on the subject treated of.

8. Literature and journalism are two of the most important educative forces, and therefore our government will become proprietor of the majority of the journals. This will neutralize the injurious influence of the privately-owned press and will put us in possession of a tremendous influence upon the public mind …. If we give permits for ten journals, we shall ourselves found thirty, and so on in the same proportion. This, however, must in no wise be suspected by the public. For which reason all journals published by us will be of the most opposite, in appearance, tendencies and opinions, thereby creating confidence in us and bringing over to us quite unsuspicious opponents, who will thus fall into our trap and be rendered harmless.

9. In the front rank will stand organs of an official character. They will always stand guard over our interests, and therefore their influence will be comparatively insignificant. 10. In the second rank will be the semi-official organs, whose part it will be to attack the tepid and indifferent.

11. In the third rank we shall set up our own, to all appearance, opposition, which, in at least one of its organs, will present what looks like the very antipodes to us. Our real opponents at heart will accept this simulated opposition as their own and will show us their cards.

12. All our newspapers will be of all possible complexions — aristocratic, republican, revolutionary, even anarchical - for so long, of course, as the constitution exists …. Like the Indian idol “Vishnu” they will have a hundred hands, and every one of them will have a finger on any one of the public opinions as required. When a pulse quickens these hands will lead opinion in the direction of our aims, for an excited patient loses all power of judgment and easily yields to suggestion. Those fools who will think they are repeating the opinion of a newspaper of their own camp will be repeating our opinion or any opinion that seems desirable for us. In the vain belief that they are following the organ of their party they will, in fact, follow the flag which we hang out for them.

13. In order to direct our newspaper militia in this sense we must take special and minute care in organizing this matter. Under the title of central department of the press we shall institute literary gatherings at which our agents will without attracting attention issue the orders and watchwords of the day. By discussing and controverting, but always superficially, without touching the essence of the matter, our organs will carry on a sham fight fusillade with the official newspapers solely for the purpose of giving occasion for us to express ourselves more fully than could well be done from the outset in official announcements, whenever, of course, that is to our advantage.

14. THESE ATTACKS UPON US WILL ALSO SERVE ANOTHER PURPOSE, NAMELY, THAT OUR SUBJECTS WILL BE CONVINCED TO THE EXISTENCE OF FULL FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND SO GIVE OUR AGENTS AN OCCASION TO AFFIRM THAT ALL ORGANS WHICH OPPOSE US ARE EMPTY BABBLERS, since they are incapable of finding any substantial objections to our orders. ONLY LIES PRINTED

15. Methods of organization like these, imperceptible to the public eye but absolutely sure, are the best calculated to succeed in bringing the attention and the confidence of the public to the side of our government. Thanks to such methods we shall be in a position as from time to time may be required, to excite or to tranquillize the public mind on political questions, to persuade or to confuse, printing now truth, now lies, facts or their contradictions, according as they may be well or ill received, always very cautiously feeling our ground before stepping upon it …. WE SHALL HAVE A SURE TRIUMPH OVER OUR OPPONENTS SINCE THEY WILL NOT HAVE AT THEIR DISPOSITION ORGANS OF THE PRESS IN WHICH THEY CAN GIVE FULL AND FINAL EXPRESSION TO THEIR VIEWS owing to the aforesaid methods of dealing with the press. We shall not even need to refute them except very superficially.

16. Trial shots like these, fired by us in the third rank of our press, in case of need, will be energetically refuted by us in our semi-official organs.

17. Even nowadays, already, to take only the French press, there are forms which reveal masonic solidarity in acting on the watchword: all organs of the press are bound together by professional secrecy; like the augurs of old, not one of their numbers will give away the secret of his sources of information unless it be resolved to make announcement of them. Not one journalist will venture to betray this secret, for not one of them is ever admitted to practice literature unless his whole past has some disgraceful sore or other …. These sores would be immediately revealed. So long as they remain the secret of a few the prestige of the journalist attacks the majority of the country - the mob follow after him with enthusiasm.

18. Our calculations are especially extended to the provinces. It is indispensable for us to inflame there those hopes and impulses with which we could at any moment fall upon the capital, and we shall represent to the capitals that these expressions are the independent hopes and impulses of the provinces. Naturally, the source of them will be always one and the same - ours. WHAT WE NEED IS THAT, UNTIL SUCH TIME AS WE ARE IN THE PLENITUDE POWER, THE CAPITALS SHOULD FIND THEMSELVES STIFLED BY THE PROVINCIAL OPINION OF THE NATIONS, I.E., OF A MAJORITY ARRANGED BY OUR AGENTUR. What we need is that at the psychological moment the capitals should not be in a position to discuss an accomplished fact for the simple reason, if for no other, that it has been accepted by the public opinion of a majority in the provinces.

19. WHEN WE ARE IN THE PERIOD OF THE NEW REGIME TRANSITIONAL TO THAT OF OUR ASSUMPTION OF FULL SOVEREIGNTY WE MUST NOT ADMIT ANY REVELATION BY THE PRESS OF ANY FORM OF PUBLIC DISHONESTY; IT IS NECESSARY THAT THE NEW REGIME SHOULD BE THOUGHT TO HAVE SO PERFECTLY CONTENDED EVERYBODY THAT EVEN CRIMINALITY HAS DISAPPEARED … Cases of the manifestation of criminality should remain known only to their victims and to chance witnesses - no more.

I think that all of the above may sound very familiar to all of you reading this. The only difference is that now we work with the Internet and not printed materials. But the principles are the same.

by Victor Thorn of WING TV

This could be quite possibly the biggest question ever asked of truth seekers everywhere: do you truly want to see the cold-blooded killers who were responsible for the 9-11 attacks brought to justice, or do you want to continue playing ring-around-the-rosie and tossing handkerchiefs at the issue?

I ask this question because right now we know the “hows” of 9-11 (World Trade Center controlled demolitions, and no Flights 77 and 93 at the Pentagon and Shanksville). We also know the “whys” of 9-11 (a new Pearl Harbor to facilitate a Middle East invasion).

So, doesn’t it seem like a logical step to finally focus our attention on the “whos” of 9-11?

I’m not talking about the “plumbers” who actually planted explosives inside the twin towers, or even the “Evil 13” hands-on implementers (see: Phantom Flight 93).

Instead, what I’m referring to is the ultimate driving force behind this diabolical plot: the nation of Israel. They are, as a few other brave souls have pointed out, the lumbering elephant in a room which most everyone in the 9-11 truth movement, alternative media, and patriot movement refuse to confront (or even acknowledge, for that matter).

This situation is so glaringly apparent that it seems as if the Israeli Lobby is sponsoring most every 9-11 event, along with the majority of Internet “truth” sites and radio shows. I mean, it appears as if every possible avenue of investigation is fair game (even those that are patently absurd) except for one: ISRAEL. The protection racket which has been erected around this issue is so obvious that I can’t believe more truth-seekers aren’t erupting over it.

But then again, since Israel’s Lobby has cornered the 9-11 market, what’s so surprising about this revelation? That’s how this entire scenario was planned from day one – way before the events of September 11, 2004 ever unfolded.

If you don’t believe me, look at the following figures in the 9-11 truth movement (some of whom have otherwise done fine work):

Alex Jones: refuses to examine Israel’s role as a key conspirator in the 9-11 attacks
Dave von Kleist: refuses to examine Israel’s role as a key conspirator in the 9-11 attacks
9-11 Truth.org: refuses to examine Israel’s role as a key conspirator in the 9-11 attacks
Dylan Avery: refuses to examine Israel’s role as a key conspirator in the 9-11 attacks
Jim Hoffman: refuses to examine Israel’s role as a key conspirator in the 9-11 attacks
Paul Thompson: refuses to examine Israel’s role as a key conspirator in the 9-11 attacks
Webster Tarpley: refuses to examine Israel’s role as a key conspirator in the 9-11 attacks
Carol Brouillet: refuses to examine Israel’s role as a key conspirator in the 9-11 attacks
Kyle Hence: refuses to examine Israel’s role as a key conspirator in the 9-11 attacks
David Ray Griffin: refuses to examine Israel’s role as a key conspirator in the 9-11 attacks
Nicolas Levis: refuses to examine Israel’s role as a key conspirator in the 9-11 attacks
Phil Berg: refuses to examine Israel’s role as a key conspirator in the 9-11 attacks
Bob Bowman: refuses to examine Israel’s role as a key conspirator in the 9-11 attacks
Mike Ruppert: refuses to examine Israel’s role as a key conspirator in the 9-11 attacks
Tom Flocco: refuses to examine Israel’s role as a key conspirator in the 9-11 attacks
Jenna Orkin: refuses to examine Israel’s role as a key conspirator in the 9-11 attacks
Paul J. Watson: refuses to examine Israel’s role as a key conspirator in the 9-11 attacks
Wayne Madsen: refuses to examine Israel’s role as a key conspirator in the 9-11 attacks
Jimmy Walter: refuses to examine Israel’s role as a key conspirator in the 9-11 attacks
Gabriel Day: refuses to examine Israel’s role as a key conspirator in the 9-11 attacks
Janice Matthews: refuses to examine Israel’s role as a key conspirator in the 9-11 attacks
David Kubiak: refuses to examine Israel’s role as a key conspirator in the 9-11 attacks
Les Jamieson: refuses to examine Israel’s role as a key conspirator in the 9-11 attacks
M. Chossudovsky: refuses to examine Israel’s role as a key conspirator in the 9-11 attacks

I could continue for pages, but instead I’ll simply ask: why aren’t these individuals covering Israel’s direct involvement in the planning, coordination, execution, and cover-up of the 9-11 attacks?

Especially when the terrorist nation of ISRAEL was directly involved in 9-11.

If you’re still not convinced, take a look at George Noory’s Coast-to-Coast AM radio show. The only 9-11 figures who are ever full-fledged guests on his show are those who belong to the “club” – i.e. those who unflinchingly protect Israel at any cost. Furthermore, in the ten+ years that it’s been on the air where literally every conceivable subject under the sun has been discussed, not once has there ever been a show devoted to Israel’s multitudinous crimes - EVER! Doesn’t anyone ever scratch their head and wonder why? Do you think it could be deliberate, especially considering that they’re owned by Clear Channel? Also, don’t be fooled when these individuals use diversionary buzzwords such as “neo-con,” “Illuminati,” “New World Order,” or “globalist,” for they’re nothing more than a way to sugar-coat the reality of this situation. Even the use of “Zionist” isn’t fully sufficient, for if we’re going to expose the true 9-11 culprits, let’s identify them forthwith: the nation of Israel and the Israeli Lobby.

Luckily there are a few courageous souls such as John Kaminski, Eric Hufschmid, Mike Rivero, Christopher Bollyn, Michael Collins Piper, Bill Brumbaugh, and the American Free Press who have exposed Israel’s involvement in 9-11, while others such as Morgan Reynolds, Professor Jim Fetzer, and Vyzygoth are at least willing to discuss and/or acknowledge the problem. So, sure, the Israeli Lobby will continue to allow a few “limited hang-outs” to be thrown into the public arena (i.e. Charlie Sheen), but be damn sure about one thing: the perpetrators behind 9-11 blew their operation big-time, and they now know that more and more people realize that it was an inside job. The only thing they’re trying to salvage right now is the identity of who ultimately planned and benefited the most from 9-11 — ISRAEL.

If you want the ultimate, unimpeded 9-11 truth, there’s only one direction left to investigate: Israel. Everything else is simply spinning your wheels (i.e. being manipulated by Israel via the assorted members of their protection racket).

Well, there it is, right out in the open. And while we are looking at that dead elephant in the middle of the living room floor that everyone is denying exists, let’s look at something else. Remember the alleged hoax, “The Protocols of Zion”? Well, it’s not looking so hoaxy these days especially Protocol 12 when considered in the light of the 911 Coverup:

PROTOCOL No. 12 Control of the Press

1. The word “freedom,” which can be interpreted in various ways, is defined by us as follows -

2. Freedom is the right to do that which the law allows. This interpretation of the word will at the proper time be of service to us, because all freedom will thus be in our hands, since the laws will abolish or create only that which is desirable for us according to the aforesaid program.

3. We shall deal with the press in the following way: what is the part played by the press to-day? It serves to excite and inflame those passions which are needed for our purpose or else it serves selfish ends of parties. It is often vapid, unjust, mendacious, and the majority of the public have not the slightest idea what ends the press really serves. We shall saddle and bridle it with a tight curb: we shall do the same also with all productions of the printing press, for where would be the sense of getting rid of the attacks of the press if we remain targets for pamphlets and books? The produce of publicity, which nowadays is a source of heavy expense owing to the necessity of censoring it, will be turned by us into a very lucrative source of income to our State: we shall lay on it a special stamp tax and require deposits of caution-money before permitting the establishment of any organ of the press or of printing offices; these will then have to guarantee our government against any kind of attack on the part of the press.

For any attempt to attack us, if such still be possible, we shall inflict fines without mercy. Such measures as stamp tax, deposit of caution-money and fines secured by these deposits, will bring in a huge income to the government. It is true that party organs might not spare money for the sake of publicity, but these we shall shut up at the second attack upon us. No one shall with impunity lay a finger on the aureole of our government infallibility. The pretext for stopping any publication will be the alleged plea that it is agitating the public mind without occasion or justification. I BEG YOU TO NOTE THAT AMONG THOSE MAKING ATTACKS UPON US WILL ALSO BE ORGANS ESTABLISHED BY US, BUT THEY WILL ATTACK EXCLUSIVELY POINTS THAT WE HAVE PRE-DETERMINED TO ALTER. WE CONTROL THE PRESS

4. NOT A SINGLE ANNOUNCEMENT WILL REACH THE PUBLIC WITHOUT OUR CONTROL. Even now this is already being attained by us inasmuch as all news items are received by a few agencies, in whose offices they are focused from all parts of the world. These agencies will then be already entirely ours and will give publicity only to what we dictate to them.

5. If already now we have contrived to possess ourselves of the minds of the GOY communities to such an extent the they all come near looking upon the events of the world through the colored glasses of those spectacles we are setting astride their noses; if already now there is not a single State where there exist for us any barriers to admittance into what GOY stupidity calls State secrets: what will our positions be then, when we shall be acknowledged supreme lords of the world in the person of our king of all the world ….

6. Let us turn again to the FUTURE OF THE PRINTING PRESS. Every one desirous of being a publisher, librarian, or printer, will be obliged to provide himself with the diploma instituted therefore, which, in case of any fault, will be immediately impounded. With such measures THE INSTRUMENT OF THOUGHT WILL BECOME AN EDUCATIVE MEANS ON THE HANDS OF OUR GOVERNMENT, WHICH WILL NO LONGER ALLOW THE MASS OF THE NATION TO BE LED ASTRAY IN BY-WAYS AND FANTASIES ABOUT THE BLESSINGS OF PROGRESS. Is there any one of us who does not know that these phantom blessings are the direct roads to foolish imaginings which give birth to anarchical relations of men among themselves and towards authority, because progress, or rather the idea of progress, has introduced the conception of every kind of emancipation, but has failed to establish its limits …. All the so-called liberals are anarchists, if not in fact, at any rate in thought. Every one of them in hunting after phantoms of freedom, and falling exclusively into license, that is, into the anarchy of protest for the sake of protest….

7. We turn to the periodical press. We shall impose on it, as on all printed matter, stamp taxes per sheet and deposits of caution-money, and books of less than 30 sheets will pay double. We shall reckon them as pamphlets in order, on the one hand, to reduce the number of magazines, which are the worst form of printed poison, and, on the other, in order that this measure may force writers into such lengthy productions that they will be little read, especially as they will be costly. At the same time what we shall publish ourselves to influence mental development in the direction laid down for our profit will be cheap and will be read voraciously. The tax will bring vapid literary ambitions within bounds and the liability to penalties will make literary men dependent upon us. And if there should be any found who are desirous of writing against us, they will not find any person eager to print their productions. Before accepting any production for publication in print, the publisher or printer will have to apply to the authorities for permission to do so. Thus we shall know beforehand of all tricks preparing against us and shall nullify them by getting ahead with explanations on the subject treated of.

8. Literature and journalism are two of the most important educative forces, and therefore our government will become proprietor of the majority of the journals. This will neutralize the injurious influence of the privately-owned press and will put us in possession of a tremendous influence upon the public mind …. If we give permits for ten journals, we shall ourselves found thirty, and so on in the same proportion. This, however, must in no wise be suspected by the public. For which reason all journals published by us will be of the most opposite, in appearance, tendencies and opinions, thereby creating confidence in us and bringing over to us quite unsuspicious opponents, who will thus fall into our trap and be rendered harmless.

9. In the front rank will stand organs of an official character. They will always stand guard over our interests, and therefore their influence will be comparatively insignificant.

10. In the second rank will be the semi-official organs, whose part it will be to attack the tepid and indifferent.

11. In the third rank we shall set up our own, to all appearance, opposition, which, in at least one of its organs, will present what looks like the very antipodes to us. Our real opponents at heart will accept this simulated opposition as their own and will show us their cards.

12. All our newspapers will be of all possible complexions — aristocratic, republican, revolutionary, even anarchical - for so long, of course, as the constitution exists …. Like the Indian idol “Vishnu” they will have a hundred hands, and every one of them will have a finger on any one of the public opinions as required. When a pulse quickens these hands will lead opinion in the direction of our aims, for an excited patient loses all power of judgment and easily yields to suggestion. Those fools who will think they are repeating the opinion of a newspaper of their own camp will be repeating our opinion or any opinion that seems desirable for us. In the vain belief that they are following the organ of their party they will, in fact, follow the flag which we hang out for them.

13. In order to direct our newspaper militia in this sense we must take special and minute care in organizing this matter. Under the title of central department of the press we shall institute literary gatherings at which our agents will without attracting attention issue the orders and watchwords of the day. By discussing and controverting, but always superficially, without touching the essence of the matter, our organs will carry on a sham fight fusillade with the official newspapers solely for the purpose of giving occasion for us to express ourselves more fully than could well be done from the outset in official announcements, whenever, of course, that is to our advantage.

14. THESE ATTACKS UPON US WILL ALSO SERVE ANOTHER PURPOSE, NAMELY, THAT OUR SUBJECTS WILL BE CONVINCED TO THE EXISTENCE OF FULL FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND SO GIVE OUR AGENTS AN OCCASION TO AFFIRM THAT ALL ORGANS WHICH OPPOSE US ARE EMPTY BABBLERS, since they are incapable of finding any substantial objections to our orders. ONLY LIES WILL BE PRINTED

15. Methods of organization like these, imperceptible to the public eye but absolutely sure, are the best calculated to succeed in bringing the attention and the confidence of the public to the side of our government. Thanks to such methods we shall be in a position as from time to time may be required, to excite or to tranquillize the public mind on political questions, to persuade or to confuse, printing now truth, now lies, facts or their contradictions, according as they may be well or ill received, always very cautiously feeling our ground before stepping upon it ….

WE SHALL HAVE A SURE TRIUMPH OVER OUR OPPONENTS SINCE THEY WILL NOT HAVE AT THEIR DISPOSITION ORGANS OF THE PRESS IN WHICH THEY CAN GIVE FULL AND FINAL EXPRESSION TO THEIR VIEWS owing to the aforesaid methods of dealing with the press. We shall not even need to refute them except very superficially.

16. Trial shots like these, fired by us in the third rank of our press, in case of need, will be energetically refuted by us in our semi-official organs.

17. Even nowadays, already, to take only the French press, there are forms which reveal masonic solidarity in acting on the watchword: all organs of the press are bound together by professional secrecy; like the augurs of old, not one of their numbers will give away the secret of his sources of information unless it be resolved to make announcement of them. Not one journalist will venture to betray this secret, for not one of them is ever admitted to practice literature unless his whole past has some disgraceful sore or other …. These sores would be immediately revealed. So long as they remain the secret of a few the prestige of the journalist attacks the majority of the country - the mob follow after him with enthusiasm.

18. Our calculations are especially extended to the provinces. It is indispensable for us to inflame there those hopes and impulses with which we could at any moment fall upon the capital, and we shall represent to the capitals that these expressions are the independent hopes and impulses of the provinces. Naturally, the source of them will be always one and the same - ours.

WHAT WE NEED IS THAT, UNTIL SUCH TIME AS WE ARE IN THE PLENITUDE POWER, THE CAPITALS SHOULD FIND THEMSELVES STIFLED BY THE PROVINCIAL OPINION OF THE NATIONS, I.E., OF A MAJORITY ARRANGED BY OUR AGENTUR. What we need is that at the psychological moment the capitals should not be in a position to discuss an accomplished fact for the simple reason, if for no other, that it has been accepted by the public opinion of a majority in the provinces.

19. WHEN WE ARE IN THE PERIOD OF THE NEW REGIME TRANSITIONAL TO THAT OF OUR ASSUMPTION OF FULL SOVEREIGNTY WE MUST NOT ADMIT ANY REVELATION BY THE PRESS OF ANY FORM OF PUBLIC DISHONESTY; IT IS NECESSARY THAT THE NEW REGIME SHOULD BE THOUGHT TO HAVE SO PERFECTLY CONTENDED EVERYBODY THAT EVEN CRIMINALITY HAS DISAPPEARED … Cases of the manifestation of criminality should remain known only to their victims and to chance witnesses - no more.

And for a deeper look, try reading THIS.

The purpose of our quest: Terminating the perpetual Holocaust

By John Kaminski skylax@comcast.net

for B-r and Maisoon

“The minute you let her under your skin, then you begin to make it better.” — The Beatles, Hey Jude

“Anyone who criticises Israel’s actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle East policy,” the authors have written, “…stands a good chance of being labelled an anti-Semite. Indeed, anyone who merely claims that there is an Israeli lobby runs the risk of being charged with anti-Semitism … Anti-Semitism is something no-one wants to be accused of.” This is strong stuff in a country where - to quote the late Edward Said - the “last taboo” (now that anyone can talk about blacks, gays and lesbians) is any serious discussion of America’s relationship with Israel. — Robert Fisk, Breaking the Last Taboo, The United States of Israel

The woman I love speaks of the need for “an end game,” something that will begin to resolve this cancerous impasse that separates spin from reality and gives us wars for profit and misery for all those not on the inside of the big money game.

She more than I knows that the Jewish question — and its manipulative influence on every aspect of human endeavor — is the pivot point of any possible solution. The actual Jewish question is simply this: How dangerous is it for everybody else when one group, acting only in the interests of itself because this is its stated goal — gains ascendance over every other group when this stated goal is the destruction or subjugation of every other group?

How dangerous is it? Just look at the world.

The epiphany that triggers the “end game” investigation is realizing that this calculated ascendance has already happened, and that the preponderance of people in the world are ruled by the vicious mercy of those who control the money. If you have any question about who controls the money then you are deficient in history, as is most of the world’s human population.

The necessity for “an end game” strategy, she told me, was to avoid a worldwide Jewish holocaust — a new, real one, not like the fake, old one — because once everybody found out what was really going on — and what had been done to them and those they love — every Jew anywhere would be in very serious trouble. The backlash when you realize the monstrous magnitude of the manipulation and the thievery — not to mention the outright senseless slaughter — would be chilling.

Now, you may ask, what have Jews done to deserve such rancor and alarm?

The answer depends of how much of the story you think you know — how much of the history of destabilized societies (think Bolshevik Revolution, a wholly Jewish enterprise), of gaining control of other religions (think Scofield Bible and Martin Luther, not to mention those televangelists who profane their pulpits), and think most relevantly about who presently dominates world wide media.

Do you know about Palestine, really? Jewish media flipped the labels: the real story is Palestinian freedom fighters and Jewish terrorists. Israel is a “country” founded on terror and maintained in the same way.

Most importantly, remember this. Use of the word “holocaust” triggers a pre-programmed response in everyone, due to four decades of intense propaganda about the abuse of Jews by Germans. The dumbed-down American populace (you know! the bunch that accepts torture as part of democracy) now fully endorses the fabricated Jewish media view of the events of World War II, even though it was principally invented and embellished in the 1960s. The mainstream accounts of the Holocaust are so phony that many countries controlled by Jews have passed laws making it illegal to even discuss these matters as a way to stifle the debate, maintain the mindset, and conceal the fraud.

Yet a majority of the world’s people — especially savvy politicians who realize what it takes to get ahead — accept this fiction as the cost of doing business. It is called selling your soul.

The dead children of Palestine and the radioactive families of Iraq are an acceptable cost of doing business to the creeps who push the buttons and drop the bombs — all of them guilty of genocide under the terms of Nuremburg and Geneva. At whose behest were these crimes committed? That is the question everyone in the world needs to ask.

Remember? When Poppy Bush told reporter Sarah MacClendon: “If people really knew what we’re doing, they’d drag us out into the streets and hang us.” This is the future each Jew faces when the general public finally learns what has been done to them over time by a small group which, through control of money and media, has finally managed to turn the society of humans into a flouride-numbed herd of programmable consumers with consciences permanently anesthetized.

Those who would defend the Hebrew tribe would counter: It has always been this way. Why blame Jews?

Because Judaism and its unnatural offspring Christianity and Islam are at the center of all this turmoil back to time immemorial. And because today, Jewish money controls all of the banks and newspapers in the entire Western world, at least through advertising pressure, but principally by actual ownership.

The answer would be (and the knowledge every member of the tribe seeks to conceal) that “yes, it has always been this way”, is precisely BECAUSE OF the history of the tribe, which even in the days before Babylon was establishing itself as a divisive force in ancient India before it brought the scourge of religious mind control into the palaces of Western civilization. Now we see it clearly in the depleted uranium dust now wafting around the world as America strangles itself for the profit of its Jewish overlords.

The report by Walt and Mearsheimer referred to by Robert Fisk at the top of this essay was a recent brouhaha created for media consumption to test the public’s perception of Israel’s rule of the United States. Now, of course, Israel doesn’t rule the United States, the Jewish community that lives in the U.S. and supports Israel rules the United States.

The Walt-Mearsheimer report merely restates the obvious: that no one gets elected to Congress without Jewish support. Thus we have a one-sided view of events in the world which is shaped by bought-off legislators and reinforced by media, all controlled by the Jewish community.

Public response to these conclusions has been muted and in fact barely heard as big media has stifled its dissemination except in some obvious cases of character assassination, principally by Alan Dershowitz and other kneejerk Jewish spin doctors.

The public can’t understand the events of the world because virtually all the information disseminated about it is controlled by Jewish partisans, from twisted schoolbooks to dangerous medical myths to popular movies that denigrate the family and promote irresponsible promiscuity and betrayal.

Worse, otherwise principled news outlets are intimidated not run stories germane to this critical theme because of potential and inevitable losses to their profitmaking future.

And principled historians who attempt to point out the fraud of this Jewish Holocaust mystique remain moldering in European jails, imprisoned for “defaming the memory of the dead.” Free speech crushed under the Jewish media heel.

What will happen when everybody finds out about Jewish control of medicine through the invention of psychology? Or how the American family system was undermined and destroyed by Jewish media and a wholly Jewish women’s liberation movement? What will happen when everybody finds out that America’s higher educational system is now completely controlled by those who control the thoughts of those young malleable minds it molds? And feeds them fatal drugs as it does so.

How do we stop this madness? By identifying what is being done to us, and who is doing it.

When the world does that (IF the world ever does that), then Jews will certainly need protection from the surviving irate victims of the harm they have done with their selfish social engineering schemes.

But the alternative to considering potential “end game” strategies is even worse.

It means we will never find out who we really are, or what kind of world we really live in. It means a perpetual future of semi-conscious slavery, with no chance of transcending the controls that diminish our lives.

It means we give up the last chance we’ll ever have to attain genuine, self-actualized freedom, because every single second and every single cell in our bodies will have been taken over and polluted by the forces of evil now running the world.

And if you don’t believe that, just sit back and listen to the bombs until it’s your turn to cry.

John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida. “Recipe for Extinction,” his latest collection of Internet essays which are seen on hundreds of websites around the world, is now available for purchase at http://www.johnkaminski.com/

NEWSLETTER #81
April 7, 2006
Dave McGowan
The Center for an Informed America

Published on Signs of the Times

At the risk of offending anyone out there, I really need to ask a question here: what the hell is the matter with you people? And by “you people,” I don’t mean specifically the regular readers of these newsletters, but rather the American people in general. So to all you John and Jane Q. Publics out there, let me rephrase the question: what the hell does it take to get a reaction out of you?

I realize, of course, that there has been a serious dumbing-down of American society and culture over the years. And I realize that government operatives have virtually complete control over the flow of information, so that virtually every thing you read, hear or see is, at best, an approximation of reality. And I realize that you have been systematically conditioned, over the course of many decades, to revere the institutions of this society - the very same institutions whose spokesmen are routinely called upon to serve you up a nice steaming platter of lies.

None of that, however, fully explains the near complete paralysis of the American people as a whole. So let me ask the question once again: what the hell does it take to get a reaction out of you? Let’s quickly run through a partial list of things that, thus far, have failed to inspire you to summon your inner Howard Beales: two consecutive stolen presidential elections; back-to-back wars, both of them unprovoked and brazenly illegal, with more on the horizon; the deaths of well over two thousand of your sons and daughters in Central Asia and the Middle East, and the maiming and disfiguring of thousands more; the ongoing slaughter of tens of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis; countless corporate/political scandals directly tied to the Bush mob; diligent efforts by a veritable army of 9-11 skeptics (including a growing list of people that some of you might find more credible than us wacky Internet ‘conspiracy theorists’) to convince you that the official story of the ‘terrorist’ attacks of September 11 is a nothing more than a fairy tale; passage of the Patriot Act, and various other attacks on your civil, privacy, and due process rights; the entirely preventable deaths of an unknown number of people in New Orleans; military occupation of southern Louisiana; sanctioning of secret military tribunals; revelations of the widespread use of, and official sanction of, various forms of torture; getting slapped in the face with the Abu Ghraib photos; indefinite, warrantless detentions without access to legal counsel; illegal domestic surveillance; open witch-hunting of ‘liberal’ members of academia (though it is perfectly acceptable for a former Phoenix Program assassin and torturer to educate your children); gross invasions of your privacy - at airports, at sporting events, when entering many public buildings, even when sitting at home on your computer; massive cuts in social spending, even while hundreds of billions of dollars are spent waging war and militarizing domestic law enforcement; massive tax cuts that primarily benefit corporate America; the steady erosion of the nation’s education and healthcare systems; trashing of the environment and environmental protections; the accumulation of an almost unfathomable level of debt; and the act of grand theft masquerading as Medicare ‘reform.’

Through all of this and more, you have sat silently by. So again I must ask: what the hell will it take? How much worse does it have to get? How much worse will you allow it to get? And if you continue to sit by and do nothing, who do you think is going to save you from the increasingly bleak future we face? Who do you think is going to stop all the madness for you?

Amazingly enough, some of you actually seem to believe that a ‘censure’ resolution is the answer to the nation’s woes, as if a firm pronouncement of “Bad George!” - perhaps coupled with a swat with a rolled-up newspaper - will effect a drastic change in the national landscape. Others seem to think that impeachment proceedings will rid the country of its diseased organs, but how you have convinced yourselves of such a bizarre notion is beyond my level of understanding. I know that a lot of phony ‘progressive’ websites regularly offer up such claims as some sort of political pacifier, but that doesn’t mean that you have to eagerly suckle that teat.

Who do you think is going to conduct impeachment proceedings, or pass a censure resolution? The venerable United States Congress? The very same Congress that just overwhelmingly passed an extension of the Patriot Act? As I recall, when the act was first passed, you dutifully bought into the lie that many of the congressmen who voted “Aye” did so only because they hadn’t had time to actually read the legislation. Buying into that lie, of course, allowed you to preserve your image of Congress as some sort of effective counterbalance to the gang in the White House. But four years, one would think, should have been adequate time for even the slowest readers among our elected representatives to catch up on what it was that they passed into law.

So I’m curious to know: what sort of mental gymnastics are required to still view this Congress as a body interested in, or capable of, reigning in this administration?

What actions by this Congress give you hope for the future? The regular allocation of tens of billions in additional dollars to fund an illegal war based on fully-exposed lies? The moves to retroactively legalize Bush’s illegal domestic surveillance programs? The Medicare ‘reform’ bill? The bankruptcy ‘reform’ bill? The sterling work done investigating the 9-11 attacks and the unnatural disaster in New Orleans? The routine rubber-stamping of reactionary political appointees? The fast-tracking of ‘free trade’ legislation, predictably coupled with the wholesale ‘outsourcing’ of jobs and widespread attacks on wages and benefits? The fact that, for five years, this Congress has marched in total lockstep with the Bush administration, sparing King George the trouble of having to veto a single piece of legislation?

McCain and BushTrust me when I say that I too would like to hold onto a glimmer of hope that America’s cancer can be excised through normal political channels, so please tell me what it is that I am missing? What is it that you so desperately cling to? Is it the occasional meaningless posturing by the likes of Russ Feingold, John McCain, Ron Paul, and Harry Reid? Is it because there are occasionally a few token dissenters in the crowd when Congress votes on a major piece of legislation? Or is it because you think that the midterm elections are going to magically usher in a new Congress with a new mindset? Are you one of those who hold out hope that elections are going to fix things? Have you convinced yourself that as long as you show up at your polling place every two years, you are doing your part to halt the headlong plunge into overt fascism?

Some of you think we can just ride out these bad times for a few more years, until the next presidential election rolls around, when some great and wise Democrat will take office and miraculously roll back the landscape to the way it was before the bad men came riding into town. Of course, you held out that same hope leading up to the 2004 elections, because you knew, with a certainty, that the American people were not going to confirm the appointment of this would-be president. And you were right. But guess what? It didn’t matter, because it had already been established that in the twenty-first century, election results need not correlate with actual votes cast.

And so you watched it happen once again - after patiently waiting for four years to deliver your message to Washington, you watched passively as another presidential election was stolen in broad daylight - and now you sit back and wait once again. You wait for Hillary Clinton to come and save the day, because you see a Hillary presidency as a backdoor way to get your hero, Bill Clinton, back in the White House. But as I noted just a few newsletters ago, it becomes more obvious with each passing week that Bill and Hillary are wearing Team Bush jerseys. Just weeks after posting that newsletter, it was revealed (albeit discretely) that your hero, Bill Clinton, was a key player working behind the scenes to facilitate his buddy George’s Dubai ports deal.

Anton LeVay and John Kerry And yet still you hold out hope, just as you held out hope that George’s Skull & Bones fraternity brother (seen here cozying up to another kindred spirit, the late Anton LaVey of the Church of Satan) would end the madness. You hold out hope even though all the Democratic Party’s potential presidential contenders have demonstrated repeatedly that they will only attack Bush from the political right. They will not question the underlying legitimacy of the ‘War on Terrorism,’ they will only assert that that ‘war’ is not being waged aggressively enough. And they will not question the legality of the war in Iraq, they will only question how that war is being waged.

None of the outrages committed by this administration, either individually or collectively, have awakened you from your slumber, so I seriously doubt that there is anything that I could reveal here that would provide the necessary wake-up call. Nevertheless, I will give it my best shot.

What if I were to tell you, for starters, that our benevolent leaders have already got the ball rolling on an ambitious plan to build concentration camps? Right here on American soil! You would, of course, laugh heartily as you dismissed such sensational claims as the product of the overactive imagination of some Internet crackpots - which is exactly why I’m not going to tell you any such thing. Instead, I’m going to let Halliburton break the news to you, in the form of a press release issued on January 24, 2006. You can read it for yourself if you like; it’s posted on the company’s website. If you stop by for a visit, this is what you’ll find:

ARLINGTON, Virginia - KBR announced today that its Government and Infrastructure division has been awarded an Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract to support the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities in the event of an emergency. KBR is the engineering and construction subsidiary of Halliburton (NYSE:HAL).

With a maximum total value of $385 million over a five-year term, consisting of a one-year based period and four one-year options, the competitively awarded contract will be executed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Fort Worth District … The contract, which is effective immediately, provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing ICE Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) Program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs. The contingency support contract provides for planning and, if required, initiation of specific engineering, construction and logistics support tasks to establish, operate and maintain one or more expansion facilities.

The contract may also provide migrant detention support to other U.S. Government organizations in the event of an immigration emergency, as well as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency, such as a natural disaster.
(Haliburton article)

Since there is little indication that America is about to be bum-rushed by “an emergency influx of immigrants,” it seems safe to say that the real purpose of these ‘detention centers’ is to “support the rapid development” of these mysterious, unspecified “new programs.” It doesn’t take much reading between the lines to recognize that the “new programs” will involve mass detentions following the next disaster to strike the country, whether it be real or imagined, and whether it be of natural or unnatural origins.

The good news here is that, should you find yourself suddenly occupying a room at Guantanamo on the Pacific, you won’t have to worry about having a lot of idle time on your hands. That’s because the U.S. Army has an ambitious Civilian Inmate Labor Program in effect that you can read all about right here: http://www.army.mil/usapa/epubs/pdf/r210_35.pdf. As you can see, this report, direct from the Headquarters of the Department of the Army, “provides guidance for establishing and managing civilian inmate labor programs on Army installations. It [also] provides guidance on establishing prison camps on Army installations.”

As I’m sure you’ll agree, this sounds like a really great program. First of all, it insures that all the shuttered military bases in the country will still provide a benefit to society. And it provides an answer to that vexing question: in this time of greatly increased militarism, why all the base closures in recent years? Turns out they make great forced-labor camps. And everyone wins: the Army is provided with “a source of labor at no direct cost to Army installations to accomplish tasks that would not be possible otherwise due to the manning and funding constraints under which the Army operates,” and you, the inmate, are “provid[ed] meaningful work.”

Think of the possibilities here, folks: one day you’re out demonstrating against a clearly illegal and immoral war, and the next day you’re doing the Army’s shit work at a military base cum concentration camp!

Due to your new employer’s “funding constraints,” brought on by the difficulty of operating with a paltry annual budget of less than half a trillion dollars, “the Army is not interested in, nor can afford, any relationship with a corrections facility if that relationship stipulates payment for civilian inmate labor,” so it’s a pretty safe bet that you won’t be getting paid. In fact, your new employer will pretend that you don’t really work there at all: “Inmates are not Department of Army employees and are not regarded as such. Inmates must not be referred to as employees. They will not be paid from Department of the Army funds, nor receive any personal or private gratuity for work accomplished or services rendered. Interservice, interagency, or interdepartmental support agreements and/or memoranda of agreement with the corrections facility must not create any appearance of employment of inmates.”

This DoD program ostensibly applies only to federal inmates, but there are numerous loopholes that allow for state and local inmates to be drafted into a little forced labor as well. In fact, the program appears to provide incentive for a massive expansion of the number of state and local inmates (already the highest in the world, both in absolute numbers and on a per capita basis). “Inmate labor programs using State and local civilian inmates,” you see, is allowed if said inmates are drawn from “on-post prison camps.” And “Section 2667, Title 10, United States code governing leases of DoD property allows acceptance of inmate labor as payment in kind for real property leased to correctional systems for use as prison camps.”

In other words, any correctional entity can acquire facilities in which to incarcerate you at no cost. So, like I said, everyone wins with this arrangement: the Army gets a steady supply of free slave labor, the correctional system gets free space to house additional inmates, and you are given meaningful employment. Sounds like a sweet deal for everyone.

In addition to the Civilian Inmate Labor Program, the Department of Defense has also drafted an ambitious new Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support. In the Foreword, we find that “Protecting the United States from direct attack is the highest priority of the Department of Defense.” This is apparently a new policy, since the Defense Department obviously did nothing to protect the United States either before or during what were purportedly “direct attacks” on the United States on September 11, 2001. Reading on, we learn that “The military has traditionally secured the United States by projecting power overseas. While our current missions abroad continue to play a vital role for the security of our Nation, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 emphasized that we are confronting fundamentally different challenges from those faced during the Cold War.”

Different challenges, of course, require different responses. The “terrorists,” you see, seek to “exploit the openness of our society to their advantage.” Even with all the changes we have seen in the last several years, our society is apparently still entirely too open. The solution to this problem, according to the Pentagon, is to take the military power that we have traditionally projected overseas, and project it right here in the Fatherland Homeland. What we need is an “active, layered defense” that is “global, seamlessly integrating US capabilities in the forward regions of the world, the global commons of space and cyberspace, in the geographic approaches to US territory, and within the United States. It is a defense in depth.”

Ahh, yes, what we need is military control of everything - the nation, the world, the heavens, and the cyber world. What we need to do is create a world where ‘terrorists,’ as well as garden-variety dissidents and other persons-of-interest, will have no place to run and no place to hide. Because we are, you see, “a nation at war, a war whose length and scope may be unprecedented.” To keep pace with this changing and dangerous world, the “DoD will continue to transform US military forces to execute homeland defense missions in the forward regions, approaches, US homeland, and global commons.”

The DoD wants us to know that the “Department of Defense is responsible for homeland defense,” and the “Department is prepared to conduct homeland defense missions whenever the President, exercising his constitutional authority as Commander in Chief, authorizes military action.” The DoD also wants us to know that it “maintains land forces capable of responding rapidly, when so directed, to threats against DoD personnel, defense critical infrastructure, or other domestic targets.” Among other duties, these land forces can be used “to support civilian law enforcement in responding to civil disturbances,” or to provide “critical CBRNE [chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or high-yield explosive mass casualty attacks] consequence management capabilities in support of civil authorities … DoD must therefore equip and train these war-fighting forces, as necessary, for domestic CBRNE consequence management.”

So the plan, it would appear, is to call in combat troops to deal with a variety of domestic situations, including “civil disturbances” and “manag[ing] the consequences of an attack or a disaster.” As we all remember from last summer, the DoD and the DHS have already run practice drills in the state of Louisiana, with rather predictable results.

In addition to the illegal domestic deployment of U.S. military forces, the Pentagon’s plan for Total War also includes a massive amount of “information sharing across traditional military-civilian boundaries.” Already in the works are the development of “automated tools to improve data fusion, analysis, and management, to track systematically large amounts of data, and to detect, fuse, and analyze aberrant patterns of activity,” as well as the development of “capabilities to cue, surveil, identify, engage, and access potential threats in real time. Detection and tracking capabilities must be all-weather, around-the-clock, and effective against moving targets.”

The grave threat we face today - as opposed to the rather quaint threat of global nuclear annihilation that we faced during the Cold War - “necessitates an unprecedented degree of shared situational awareness among Federal agencies, with state, local, tribal, and private entities, and between the United States and its key foreign partners.” Note that the inclusion of “private entities” on the information sharing list is undoubtedly a reference to quasi-governmental paramilitary groups like the infamous Blackwater, which has already been deployed domestically in New Orleans. Note also that, throughout Latin America and other parts of the world, “information sharing” with such mercenary groups has usually involved corrupt governments supplying hit lists and/or round-up lists.

What?! Death squads? People gone missing in the middle-of-the-night? Here?! In America?! Why, that’s just absurd! Things like that can’t happen here, in the land of the free and the home of the brave!

That is what you’re thinking, isn’t it? That is the thought that you have always used to comfort yourself. As long as you can remain firm in your commitment to the idea that nothing truly bad can happen in the greatest nation on earth, then you can continue to ignore all evidence to the contrary. It doesn’t matter that Halliburton has announced that it has a contract to build detention centers, because you know that the notion of concentration camps in America is absurd. It doesn’t matter that the Army is operating a Civilian Inmate Labor Program, because you know that the very idea of forced-labor camps in America is ridiculous. It doesn’t matter that the Department of Defense has drafted an ambitious plan to deploy military forces domestically, because you know that the Posse Comitatus Act forbids any such thing.

Not too many years ago, your list of things that “can’t happen here” probably included indefinite ‘detentions’ in horrendous conditions without access to legal counsel. It probably also included the official endorsement of torture and assassination as ‘war’ fighting tools. It undoubtedly included the domestic deployment of military forces and mercenaries to deal with the aftermath of a hurricane. And it surely included the installation of an illegitimate president through massive voter fraud and Supreme Court intervention. It probably even included open pronouncements that America is now in a state of endless war.

None of that could happen here - you said so yourself, if I recall correctly - but all of it and more already has. Concentration camps and forced labor camps can’t happen here, but the plans have already been drawn up and the contracts have already been awarded. How many more things that “can’t happen here” have to happen before you come to terms with the fact that America does not have some sort of invisible shield around it that protects you from the evils that befall other nations? Before you answer, let’s take a look at some of the other ways that the Pentagon is keeping America safe from the ever-present threat of ‘terrorism.’

According to the Strategy for Homeland Defense report, the DoD will “ensure persistent wide-area surveillance and reconnaissance of the US maritime approaches,” which will, of course, “require that Navy forces be placed under periodic command and control of US Northern Command as appropriate.” That seems fair. After all, if we’ve already signed up the Army, the Air Force, the Department of Homeland Security, Blackwater, and federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement entities, it wouldn’t be right to deny the Navy the opportunity to do some domestic policing.

Reading on through the DoD report, we learn that “Implementation of the Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support may require several new technological investments. Three areas of particular interest for further exploration are advanced information and communications technology, new generations of sensors, and non-lethal capabilities.”

“The placement of sensors on high altitude platforms,” we are told, “including new generations of unmanned aerial vehicles, satellites, and aerostats, could allow sustained surveillance of wide areas of the earth’s surface.” The Pentagon is also working feverishly to develop “an urban surveillance system that would use computers and thousands of cameras to track, record and analyze the movement of every vehicle in a city. Named ‘Combat Zones That See,’ the project is designed to help the U.S. military protect its troops abroad and fight in cities overseas. Police, scientists and privacy experts say the unclassified technology could be adapted easily to spy on Americans. The CTS’ centerpiece is groundbreaking computer software that is capable of automatically identifying vehicles by size, color, shape and license tag, or drivers and passengers by face … The project is being overseen by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is helping the Pentagon develop technologies for combating terrorism and fighting wars in the 21st century. Its other projects include developing software that scans databases of everyday transactions and personal records worldwide to predict terrorist attacks and creating a computerized diary that would record and analyze everything a person says, sees, hears, reads or touches.”
(Washington Times)

As for so-called non-lethal weapons, “potential application to homeland defense missions include: counter-personnel technology, used to deny entry into a particular area, temporarily incapacitate individuals or groups, and clear facilities, structures, and areas,” and “counter-material technology, to disable, neutralize, or deny an area to vehicles, vessels, and aircraft, or disable particular items of equipment.” In other words, what is referred to as ‘non-lethal technology’ is actually crowd-control technology. And ‘terrorists’ don’t, as far as I know, tend to gather in crowds. Angry Americans tend to gather in crowds, for the purpose of exercising their alleged constitutional right to assemble. Or at least they should.

Over the last several years, New Scientist magazine has taken a look at some of this emerging crowd-control technology. In June 2004, the publication revealed that “Weapons that can incapacitate crowds of people by sweeping a lightning-like beam of electricity across them are being readied for sale to military and police forces in the US and Europe. At present, commercial stun guns target one person at a time, and work only at close quarters. The new breed of non-lethal weapons can be used on many people at once and operate over far greater distances.” As the manufacturer of one of these weapons systems gushed, “We will be able to fire a stream of electricity like water out of a hose at one or many targets in a single sweep.” (http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6014)

In March 2005, we learned that the “US military is funding development of a weapon that delivers a bout of excruciating pain from up to 2 kilometres away. Intended for use against rioters, it is meant to leave victims unharmed. But pain researchers are furious that work aimed at controlling pain has been used to develop a weapon. And they fear that the technology will be used for torture.” The explicit goal of the research is to create a weapon capable of causing “the maximum pain possible.” (New Scientist)

Returning once again to the Pentagon strategy paper, we find that the Department of Defense will “identify opportunities to share appropriate non-lethal capabilities with domestic law enforcement agencies.” The Pentagon, it seems, is all about sharing. And that’s a good thing, since these weapons systems will certainly come in handy at those times when batons, pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets, bean bags and tasers just aren’t enough to break up a legally assembled crowd of pissed-off American citizens.

Elsewhere on the technology front, “A scientist funded by the US government has deliberately created an extremely deadly form of mousepox, a relative of the smallpox virus, through genetic engineering. The new virus kills all mice even if they have been given antiviral drugs as well as a vaccine that would normally protect them. The work has not stopped there. The cowpox virus, which infects a range of animals including humans, has been genetically altered in a similar way … the research brings closer the prospect of pox viruses that cause only mild infections in humans being turned into diseases lethal even to people who have been vaccinated.” (New Scientist) (For much more on ‘emerging technologies,’ see Sunshine Project. I would provide some excerpts here, but the report really should be read in its entirety to fully grasp all the disturbing avenues of research currently being conducted in US labs, including the development of ethnic-specific biological weapons, weapons aimed at wiping out food supplies, reproductive control weapons, and the resurrection of the Spanish Flu, last seen wiping out some 20-40 million people.)

So there you have it, folks: concentration camps, forced labor, martial law, global surveillance, sadistic forms of crowd control, genocidal biological weapons - all this and more is looming in the not-too-distant future. And our trusty servants in Washington will have no trouble finding some handy justification for fully activating and expanding these programs. A seemingly natural disaster, such as an earthquake or hurricane, could serve as the trigger. So too could another ‘terrorist’ attack, and the Homeland Defense report promises us that more are coming: “Terrorists will seek and potentially gain surreptitious entry into the United States to conduct mass casualty attacks against Americans on US soil … Terrorists and/or rogue states will attempt multiple, simultaneous mass casualty attacks against the US homeland.”

These triggering events could themselves be triggered by any sudden increase in the anger level of average Americans. Because the truth is, you see, that beneath all the bluster and arrogance, the Washington gang is terrified of you. It’s hard to believe, I know, but it is true nonetheless. Even though you have sit idly by while your beloved Constitution and Bill of Rights have been thoroughly trampled over, the powers-that-be view you as a sleeping giant that, if fully awakened, is capable of laying waste to their cherished plans.

Although they have convinced you that you are utterly powerless, they know that that is not the case. They know that they would not be able to contain the seething anger of the masses should it ever fully surface. They know the fury that will be unleashed should the dormant beast awaken to the fact it has been deliberately and systematically lied to. And they fear that some day soon one of their provocations will awaken you.

They will never let you see that fear, of course, for to do so would shatter the illusion that they are omnipotent and you are powerless to resist. But the fear is there, lurking just beneath the arrogant façade. In Washington, in the halls of academia, and in the newsrooms of Fox and CNN and ABC and NBC and CBS, the fear is palpable. It can be found in all the institutions of society that are complicit in serving you up your daily portion of lies.

Their greatest fear is facing the beast at full strength, for they know that if that day of reckoning ever comes, there will be hell to pay for their transgressions against the American people. And so they try to weaken the beast while it lies dormant - by demoralizing it, and by breaking it up into smaller, more manageable pieces, preferably pieces that can be played against each other. And as long as the American people continue to play along, by allowing Washington to dictate the rules of this game, the beast will remain too weak to fight back against the considerable oppressive powers of the state.

The rest of the world has a better understanding of how this game must be played. Turn on your television set and you might catch a glimpse of a few million French citizens taking to the streets to express their anger at their government’s labor policies. Turn to another channel and you might see half-a-million Latino immigrants marching through the streets of Los Angeles to protest proposed immigration reforms. And yet the American people, as a whole, cannot summon the energy to take to the streets even as your sons and daughters are being fed into the meat grinder in Iraq.

Make no mistake about it: those images from Paris and Los Angeles scare the shit out of the criminals in Washington, as can be discerned from the tone of the news coverage provided by the Western media. They look at those masses of humanity and begin picturing such scenes in every big city across this nation. And then they imagine public anger becoming so widespread that they begin to lose control of the militarized law enforcement agencies all across the country that they rely upon to keep the masses at bay.

So what’s it going to be, people? Are you going to continue to sit passively in the bleachers, or are you going to take to the streets in numbers previously unseen on these shores? Are you going to initiate a general strike and shut corporate America down? Are you going to storm the offices of all the major media outlets and let the opinion-shapers know that aiding and abetting the criminals in Washington is itself a crime, and one that has severe consequences?

Is it not your responsibility to act to protect your children if they are in danger? And can we not agree that virtually all of the key figures in the media are not merely messengers, as we are to believe, but rather highly-paid propagandists for the State? And can we not also agree that the propaganda being sold poses a direct threat to our children’s futures? If a ‘common criminal,’ so to speak, were posing a direct and very serious threat to your children’s safety, would you sit idly by doing nothing?

Is it not perfectly obvious that we would not be in our current predicament if we had anything resembling a free and independent press? Washington would still harbor a desire to implement an overtly fascist agenda, to be sure, but without a compliant media machine to obscure the truth and shape public opinion, those plans would remain but a dream. Without a compliant media, we would not be living in a post-911 world, because no ‘terrorist’ attacks would have occurred on September 11, 2001. Why? Because without a propaganda machine masquerading as a free press, such an audacious and patently fraudulent story could have never been sold to the American people, just as the lie-based wars in Central Asia and the Middle East could have never been marketed.

When your children come to you ten or twenty years in the future (and they will - assuming, of course, that they survive that long, given the unfolding plans to wipe out 90% of humanity, likely justified on the basis of the junk science known as ‘Peak Oil’ theory: Ebola for Population Reduction) to ask why you were asleep at the wheel while the country was evolving into an overtly fascist police state, what will you tell them? That there was nothing you could do? And when they then ask if you were truly powerless or if you just allowed yourself to be convinced that you were, what will you tell them then?

The Pentagon’s Homeland Defense report concludes as follows: “The Department of Defense must change its conceptual approach to homeland defense. The Department can no longer think in terms of the ‘home’ game and the ‘away’ game. There is only one game. The Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support is a significant step toward this strategic transformation. Defending the US homeland - our people, property, and freedom - is our most fundamental duty. Failure is not an option.”

As has been demonstrated repeatedly in various foreign adventures, the US Department of Defense has little interest in defending freedom or people. Its primary function is the acquisition and defense of property - property ‘owned’ by US and multinational corporations. In the ‘Homeland’ as elsewhere, the role of the military will be to protect corporate property and corporate profits, at the expense of the rights and the freedoms of the people - and quite likely at the expense of the very lives of the people.

The responsibility of defending the rights and freedoms of the American people falls squarely on your shoulders. Nobody else is going to do it for you. It is your most fundamental duty. And failure is definitely not an option.

‘Anders’
Signs of the Times
04/04/2006

I have been looking at Rense’s website for the last two years and have gathered from Laura’s research that he most likely, whether consciously or not, is an asset of Cointelpro. Rense’s website gives the image of having no limits on what they will put up and yet there are some glaring omissions.

One of these omissions is in regards to birdflu. The site is like ‘birdflu central’ with daily updates on birdflu occurring all over the planet, yet there has not been one article in respect to the likelihood that Birdflu is a HOAX.

Another omission is in regard to drastic climate changes, METEORS, the many recent meteor sightings and the many recent discoveries of impact crater from meteors around the world. The signs website has an excellent supplement on Meteors found here.

The last omission that I will mention here is in regard to the Signs website and the pentagon Strike video, which considering the fact that 500+million people have seen it, should feature on Rense’s lefthand column as a permanent feature and a permanent link to the Producers thereof, namely Signs of the Times.

One can look at this from the point of view of what is of paramount importance for the PTB, and what they don’t want the populace to see. If indeed it is true, that Rense is an arm of Cointelpro, then the important things are the things omitted from the site, some of which I mentioned above. It follows, that nothing that appears on Rense is important at all. It is only for keeping the population distracted!

The Facts are:

1) the US is spending as if there is no tomorrow and as though they will never ever have to pay the money back.

2) The speed with which the US is implementing a world clamp down and a control on the populace is without parallel in modern history.

3) There is hardly any attempt at disguising their fascist march for world domination, as though they know that they will not be held accountable, ever.

4) There is a lack of exposure of the lies of the U.S. from other nations, who have intelligence services with satellite surveillance and who surely know what is going on.

5) The US is using Depleted Uranium in the Middle East and other places indiscriminantly, as though the consequences of radiation of vast areas (including Europe and the U.S.) is of no concern.

Talking to a friend about this, the question that was brought up was why don’t they want the populace to ponder the possibility of cataclysmic earthchanges in the very near future, if they are happy to entertain the notion of perpetual war or economic megabust or whatever else is on Rense?

One answer that we came up with is this:

If the PTB have been given advance notice of an imminent (within the next 5-10 years) comet strike (such as the cyclical comet strike with a cycle of 3600 years as mentioned by Laura), then it would be important for the PTB to vector the attention of the populace into all kinds of areas of no real importance.

If the populace knew that the world would be impacted by a massive cataclysm in say April 2009 then:

1) the populace would not be as easily controlled.

2) They would probably reevaluate their life and maybe not go to work.

3) The world economy would collapse, but in a nonlinear fashion, in other words, not when the PTB plans to pull it.

4) The people, from journalist to military official, might not continue to compromise their souls (if they have one) for their masters in order to pay their mortgage/lifestyle unless they are also promised salvation in an underground bunker, which is doubtful.

The PTB, including other world leaders, would have been promised a safe haven, most likely in some deep underground bunker or a ‘rapture’ for the religiously-minded. This would explain why they go about things as though they will never be held accountable.

Building of underground cities requires massive amounts of money, tunnel workers and industries related to the building thereof. A collapse before time of the world economy would severely hamper the effort of the PTB in creating a safe haven. If not, then maybe an angry and cheated population, whose attention were not distracted on bogus terrorists etc., would hamper the plans of the PTB. Donald Hunt mentions the issue of crowd control and possible riots in Monday’s economic report here.

In a recent interview, Richard Dolan claims that there is extensive tunneling going on in America. He mentions a quote from Rumsfeld of the missing 2.6 trillion dollars from the Pentagon’s coffers in 2001. The interview can be found here.

Whether the above answer is the answer or just part of the answer is open to discussion, but the fact remains that certain things appear to be deliberately omitted from Rense, and that in itself raises obvious questions. As I have already mentioned, I seriously doubt that any of the things mentioned on Rense are of any real importance, other than providing us with evidence of the direction that the PTB don’t want us to look.

I came across this article today (it’s a couple of days old) and it really shocked me. I know I’ve been saying things along this line myself, and certainly it is what Signs of the Times talks about repeatedly, but here it is, in sort of a mainstream setting, coming right out and saying that the End of Civilization is at hand.

But there is more to this than meets the eye. It begins to sound a bit like apologetics for Neocons. The “Peak Oil” business, for example, seems to me to be an excuse already prepared for when the masses finally go after those criminals that have taken over this country. They’ll say “but we did it all for YOU!” (the American people, that is). And who will blame them if it was all done to get resources for America, to save the “American Way of Life,” and all that apple pie?

But is it really that simple? See what you think; here’s the whole article from Countercurrents:

I had a mild epiphany the other day: it’s not President Bush who’s living in a fantasy world, it’s most of his critics who are. I’m no apologist for Bush – I neither like nor dislike him. He’s no more significant to me than a fly buzzing around outside my window. So permit me to explain my reasoning.

People look at Bush’s invasion of Iraq and see a miserable failure. But a failure to do what? Democratize Iraq? Eliminate Iraq’s WMD arsenal? Reduce global terrorism? If those were, in fact, the reasons for invading Iraq, then the invasion would have to be classified as a failure. But what if the real reason was to secure Iraq’s oil supplies, perhaps not for immediate use, and perhaps not even for use by the United States? Then the invasion of Iraq would have to be judged a success, a “mission accomplished,” so to speak.

Or take Bush’s seemingly irresponsible handling of the domestic economy. How can any sane person fail to understand that cutting revenue while increasing spending will produce deficits, and that those deficits cannot increase in perpetuity? Sooner or later that accumulated debt has got to have consequences. Bush appears to be acting as if there were no tomorrow. But what if there really were no tomorrow, financially speaking? In that case, the reckless economic policies of today would not only be irrelevant, but might actually be shrewd. I mean, if one knows that he is not going to have to pay back his debts tomorrow, then why not borrow money like crazy today? In fact, if civilization is coming to an end, then why not use all that borrowed money to stock up on guns and vital resources, such as oil?

Now, I’m just one person. And I’ve been closely studying economic, environmental, and energy issues for only a few years. And I’m no expert. Yet I’ve come to the conclusion – and I don’t want to be a “Chicken Little” here – that civilization as we have known it for the last century is doomed. Our wasteful manner of living – heck, the sheer size of our human population – is unsustainable. Everywhere you look you can see signs of strain on the Earth, from spreading pollution of the air, water, and land, to disappearance of life in the seas, to depletion of natural resources. Something’s got to give. Things simply cannot continue as they have.

If I can see this, I would guess the United States Government, what with its thousands of full time experts, probably can too. Now, if you are the government (and I don’t mean Tom “I am the federal government” DeLay), and your experts tell you that civilization as we know it is doomed, what do you do? Well, for starters, you do not tell your population of sheeple. That would precipitate panic and result in premature doom, which would consume the government along with everything else. Above all, government seeks to survive, so you would maintain the facade of normalcy for the benefit of your population while you use what time you have left to prepare, as quietly as possible, for the inescapable future.

What will matter in this future? Commodities, principally energy, food, and water. Everything else is secondary. Money is far down the list in importance.

So how would you, the government, prepare for a future world in which commodities are king? By securing today as many of those commodities as possible. Hence, the U.S. government’s binge of military base building throughout the commodity-rich regions of the world. What would you not worry about? Money. The only concern you might have for money is to prevent its premature demise. Hence, the smoke and mirrors used to paint a pretty but false portrait of the economy. Some will argue that the government needs more than just energy, food, and water to survive. True, but by controlling the bulk of the world’s key commodities, everything else can be procured, including human labor and loyalty.

In preparing for the future demise of civilization you would also seek to increase the government’s power as much and as rapidly as possible. Why? To maintain control over those increasingly precious resources, and equally important, to control people – especially your own people – by force, if necessary. Viewed in this light, the government’s aggressive pursuit of power during the last five years makes perfect sense. Ironically, President Bush got it right when he reportedly referred to the now totally eviscerated United States Constitution as a “god damned piece of paper.” That’s really all it is anymore.

So what fantasy world are Bush’s critics living in? The fantasy world in which civilization can continue as it has in the past. That we can continue to improve the standard of living of everyone in the world if we just return to a more sharing and egalitarian way of life, like that which we enjoyed between World War II and the mid 1970s. This is a fantasy. The Earth has finite limits. We are finally starting to grasp that fact with respect to oil. But oil depletion is merely the first in a series of coming crises ensuing from the finite confines of our planet. The fundamental problem – and I’m not a Malthusian – is that there are simply too many people for the Earth to sustain. This is why fish are disappearing from the oceans, why the supply of oil is unable to keep up with demand, why the globe is being deforested, why animal and plant species are going extinct, why water wars are in the offing. Perhaps if people were wiser and more willing to share, and implicitly, less greedy, we could sustain the more than six billion people on Earth, but, alas, such idealism does not describe human beings.

The one thing that has enabled the human population to grow to the immense dimensions we see today is oil, the resource facing the greatest challenge from depletion. As the oil supply diminishes, in the absence of herculean efforts to use oil more efficiently and fairly, large numbers of human beings will die off. Before then, soaring prices for oil will probably destroy the economies of the countries most dependent on the stuff, if not the entire intricately linked world economy. This is what I mean by the end of civilization. Of course life will go on. But it won’t be anything like what we’ve been accustomed to. Life will be more like that of the Middle Ages, in which a few wealthy lords controlled all the resources and possessed all the power, and the rest of the people – the lucky ones, anyway – were veritable slaves under these lords. In many ways that state of affairs exists today, but it’s unseen by all but the most observant individuals. The future I’m talking about, though, is considerably more spartan than what the worker bees enjoy today.

I believe that what we’re witnessing today is the inception of a titanic and protracted competition for survival: between countries, between civilizations, between governments and their people. Moreover, I believe the Bush administration is the first to recognize this competitive future, which explains its fundamentally different – seemingly feckless – behavior compared to past administrations. Bush’s favored courtiers, which include corporations, are profiting today and will become the new nobility in the coming New Middle Ages.

Truth and Distractions

The governments of the world, and the U.S. Government in particular, don’t want their people to know the truth. Governments usually end up seeing themselves as entities distinct from their people, and usually end up competing against them. That is true of almost every government on Earth today, and is especially true of the U.S. Government. Keeping the truth from people helps a government achieve its goals, for if the people knew the truth they might demand that the government start actually serving them.

One way to keep the truth from people, aside from today’s favored approach of simply suppressing it, is to feed them a steady diet of compelling distractions.

Elections are one such distraction. Elections arouse peoples’ passions and keep them entertained for weeks or months. Elections even give people the illusion of participation, when, in fact, elections mean absolutely nothing in a country like the United States, which is run by money. Of course, elections are run by, and legitimized by governments.

Sex is another good distraction, both sex scandals and sex-related social issues. Look at how much mileage the media got out of the Catholic Church sex abuse scandals. By comparison, sexual abuses by the government’s own schoolteachers outnumber those by the church, but we hear nary a word about them because they reflect negatively on the government, and the media cooperates in keeping this quiet. Sex between consenting adults, which ought to be nobody’s business except the participants’, also consumes our attention. Look at how much attention people pay to homosexuality. Why is that anybody else’s business? It’s not, obviously, but it’s a great distraction from important things, such as the government’s reverse-Robin Hood economic policies. The same with abortion. Abortion is a personal matter for the people involved. It’s none of society’s business. But government stokes the flames of debate about abortion and it consumes peoples’ attention. Sexually transmitted diseases – diseases in general – are also good distractions and have the added benefit of instilling fear in the population.

Crime is a perennial distraction. Even when the crime rate is falling, the government seems to hype the crime statistics, making it seem as if you’re putting your life at risk by merely setting foot outside your front door. Of course, “crime” breeds prisons, and prisons empower the government. Given the benefits of crime to the government, it comes as no surprise that the government creates crime by criminalizing harmless behavior such as using drugs or hiring a prostitute.

Religion is also a distraction. Domestically, the fashionable debate today revolves around the separation of church and state. There really ought not be any debate. The United States Constitution is unequivocal: the United States Government shall not recognize any particular religion. End of story. It does not say how states may address religion, but it does say that all powers not prohibited to the states belong to the states. In my opinion, then, if a state wants to recognize a religion, it may do so.

The “clash of civilizations” is perhaps the newest distraction, and a completely contrived one at that. The Muslim-Christian antipathy that exists today is both a religious and a cultural distraction. Decades ago, when we were affluent, we were taught to celebrate cultural diversity on our planet. Today that same diversity is touted as the explanation for the “clash of civilizations.” Granted, different cultures are, well, different. But that doesn’t mean that conflict must ensue, and for decades there was no conflict. Clearly, the flames of cultural conflict are being stoked. By whom? The governments of the world and the media. For example, just look at how European media companies and European governments colluded recently to provoke Muslims with those silly cartoons. Cultural conflict not only distracts the masses, but it provides governments with a credible justification to increase their power, for instance, to regulate headgear worn in schools and restrict immigration. Of course, “terrorism” is ancillary to this clash of civilizations and serves to intensify anxiety in the population. How many acts of terrorism are actually perpetrated by governments? It’s impossible to say, but it’s definitely more than zero, a lot more. So why does a government perpetrate an act of terrorism? To create a distraction, to increase its power, or both.

One thing all of these distractions have in common is collusion – intentional or incidental – between the government and the media. The government seems to be involved in all of these distractions to varying degrees, ranging from merely exaggerating the importance of some distractions to actively orchestrating others. And none of these distractions could successfully distract the public without the zealous participation of, and amplification by, the media. One might argue that the media is naturally drawn to report sensational news, as a moth is drawn to light, and most of these distractions qualify as sensational. But I don’t think it’s purely coincidental that the media relishes these stories when there is so much overlap between the agendas of the government and the corporations that comprise the “media.”

Both entities seek to dominate, exploit, and control the “little people.” And the little people, being xenophobic, uneducated, and fearful, are easily manipulated in a formulaic manner to help undermine their own welfare. Simply look at their support for Bush, a leader who has systematically attacked their standard of living, not to mention their liberties. All Bush had to do was push a few buttons labeled “religion,” “sex,” and “culture” to get them to react like Pavlovian dogs. And all this button pushing was, of course, happily assisted by the media.

Resource Competition

We humans like to think of ourselves as so much more sophisticated than “lower” animals. In affluent times and places we can afford to worry about silly things like what movies will win Oscar awards, whether our body looks good at the gym, or where we will take our next family vacation.

But our existence still depends on this fundamental equation: survival = food + water + shelter.

In leaner times, like those we’re heading into, the above equation becomes sharply apparent.

Food production today is highly dependent on oil. Oil powers our farm implements, oil and natural gas are ingredients in commercial pesticides and fertilizers, and oil transports food to market. Today food travels as far as 10,000 miles from where it’s produced to where it’s consumed, which would be impossible without oil. Oil vastly increases agricultural productivity. So it’s because of our largess of oil that the human population has been able to grow as large as it has. One might say that humans eat oil. We can, of course, produce food without oil – barring such evil manifestations as crops that are genetically engineered to require the use of petroleum-based pesticides – but without oil food production will be much lower.

Water is a resource we take for granted. We act as though there is no limit to the supplies of water, and that there are no repercussions to our profligate consumption of it. We’re building cities in places without adequate water supplies – Phoenix and Las Vegas come to mind – and we’re using up vast reservoirs of non-replenishable “fossil” water, such as the Ogallala Aquifer in the American Midwest. Just as we’re failing to plan for economic “rainy days,” we’re failing to regulate our water usage to prepare for a literal lack of rainy days. We seem to think that the replenishable water supply patterns will remain unchanged, an especially optimistic expectation if the Earth’s climate is truly in the midst of major change. But the water situation is even worse in some other places than in America. Water delivery is partly dependent on energy, just as food production is. It takes energy to pump water from the ground, to transport it to where it’s consumed, and even to treat it. Of course, food production is vitally dependent on water.

I hardly need mention the importance of oil except to say that for the first time in history, the demand curve is passing the supply curve. Moreover, the supply curve will soon be heading downward and we’ll find ourselves perpetually chasing this ever dwindling supply downhill. When demand merely exceeds supply the price of oil will increase. But when demand exceeds supply and the supply starts to diminish, then prices will really go up, enough to destroy economies or render impractical the transportation of food and water to some places. But the gap between supply and demand means more than just higher prices. It also means shortages. Those who can afford to buy oil will usually have their needs satisfied, albeit at higher cost. But those who cannot pay the price will do without. Occasionally, even those who can afford to buy oil will be forced to do without because from time to time there simply won’t be any oil to buy on the global market, at any price. Imagine going to your local gas station and seeing a sign out front reading “Sorry, no gas.” Imagine going to your local grocery store and seeing empty shelves because the trucks that deliver goods to the store had no diesel fuel. Imagine having to bundle up in two layers of sweaters inside your house because you have to make half your normal allotment of home heating oil last the entire winter. These hypothetical scenarios will become reality and will occur with increasing frequency as time goes on.

What’s going to happen when people have to vigorously compete for food, water, and energy in order to survive? I think it’s going to get vicious. My opinion of humanity holds that in the face of such adversity, it will be every man for himself. Countries will compete against countries. States will compete against states. Cities will compete against cities. Governments will even compete against their citizens. Civilization, in the sense of the word “civility,” will be no more. Perhaps genetically engineered terminator seeds, depleted uranium, and exotic diseases are secretly intended to reduce the human population to alleviate resource competition.

Clearly, the U.S. invasion of Iraq is one of the opening salvos in the coming resource wars. And the U.S.’s belligerence toward Iran is undoubtedly due to Iran’s possession of vast oil and natural gas resources. Bear in mind that a country need not seek control of vital resources with the intention of consuming them. The country that controls resources can use those resources either as a lever to compel other countries to behave a certain way, or to buy other resources or finished goods, such as weapons and integrated circuit chips.

The End of Money

The 1970s was the apotheosis of the “American Dream.” Wedged between the preceding decade of civil unrest and the subsequent decade of recessions, rapidly rising homelessness, and mass layoffs, the 1970s was a comparatively idyllic decade. It certainly had its problems – stagflation, for instance – but even while living during that time I felt it was a special decade. Life was good; people were happy, friendly, and mellow; TV shows and movies were cheerful; civil liberties were at their peak; government power was at its lowest ebb; the country was affluent and at its peak of industrial prowess. It’s not a coincidence that the tallest buildings in America were built during the 1970s. Those buildings were icons of American industry and power. Although the Vietnam War raged during the first half of the 1970s, it was in the process of winding down and came to an end by the middle of that decade. The cessation of the Vietnam War was as much a reflection of the peoples’ desire to “live and let live” as it was a military defeat. Military conscription also ended in that decade, and even the cold war cooled off because of détente.

Unfortunately, what we didn’t realize at the time was that we would never again have it so good. The 1970s represented a “tipping point,” to use the popular vernacular, for the American Dream. That was when globalization really started to take off and when the serious decline of American industry began, the steel and auto industries being among the first casualties. Interestingly, the 1970s was also the decade of peak oil production in the United States, after which point we became increasingly reliant on imported oil, which greased our downward slide. What I didn’t realize until writing this was how crucial a role President Nixon played in creating this tipping point. Nixon opened the door to trade with China, a major player in today’s globalized economy. Nixon disassociated the U.S. dollar from gold, facilitating the destruction of wealth through unrelenting devaluation of the dollar. Nixon launched the war on drugs, a precursor to today’s war on terror (or is it the war of terror, I can’t tell?). Both the drug war and war on/of terror consume wealth in order to serve the imperial ambitions of the U.S. Government, but contribute nothing to the country’s production of wealth.

The 1980s was a decade in which previously accumulated wealth was systematically extracted, mainly through the mechanism of “Merger Mania.” The 1980s was a decade of marked industrial and economic decline, which was masked to a large extent by releasing into the economy some of the wealth squeezed out of these mergers, as well as by the massive accumulation of debt. The transformations of the 1980s also introduced a new component: the injection of foreign wealth into the country. Many of the assets sold in the 1980s were purchased by foreigners, especially the Japanese, a trend which accelerated toward the latter half of the decade, highlighting America’s economic decline. The 1980s also marked the inception of the mythical “service economy” theory to justify the profitable exporting of American jobs. The economy is like a pyramid. Forming the foundation of this pyramid is the one true source of wealth: natural resources – the free wealth given to us by the Earth and the Sun. Mining for minerals and energy, agriculture, fishing, and forestry are the source of all other wealth. Above this foundation are industries that utilize its products. These second level industries consist primarily of manufacturers that take raw materials and produce something of greater value. Above the manufacturers are companies that serve them, including law firms, advertising agencies, shipping companies, airlines, hotels, restaurants, and even entertainment. As wealth moves up this pyramid a little wealth, constituting salaries and savings, is retained by each level in the pyramid. The myth of the service economy, the darling theory of the 1980s, is that a country could retain the top of the pyramid and outsource the base of it. During the last three decades we have transfered much of the base of this economic pyramid to countries such as China and India and indeed, initially, the money kept flowing to the top of the pyramid which remained in the United States. But after a while, a new top of the pyramid began to form in those countries where we had shipped the base of the pyramid. Witness today not only the exodus of high tech jobs to China and India, but that in those countries pure service companies, such as advertising agencies, are also starting to flourish.

The 1990s was a period of greatly accelerating globalization and economic decline for the United States, aided and abetted by such treaties as NAFTA, GATT, and the WTO. Again, this massive decline was masked by the illusion of wealth that persisted during the huge stock market bubble of the latter half of the 1990s. Like merger mania before it, the stock market bubble attracted a lot of foreign wealth. A bit more previously accumulated wealth was extracted from rising human productivity here in the United States during the 1990s.

Finally, the 2000s so far represent an era massively dependent on inflows of foreign wealth. With our previously accumulated wealth now exhausted and little means left for fundamental wealth production, about the only thing keeping the U.S. economy afloat these days is consumer spending and deficit spending by the government, both of which are financed by growing mountains of debt, which is owed to foreigners. The United States has largely been reduced to a nation of people that sell each other hamburgers, with foreigners paying the checks. Asset sales to foreigners continue as well, the failed Chinese bid for Unocal and the not-so-failed Dubai bid to run some of our seaports being prominent recent examples.

During the last thirty years in America two persistent trends are clear: the steady depletion of existing wealth and decline in the means to produce new wealth; and the steady rise of an imperial U.S. Government.

Today, the economic imbalances in the United States economy are so vast that I cannot see how they can be corrected gracefully. Even more astonishing to me is that people keep buying financial instruments like U.S. Treasury bills. Do these investors really believe they’re ever going to get their money back? The national debt is so large that paying it down is nearly impossible, especially since there is no political will to either increase taxes or reduce spending. Obviously, the U.S. Government knows it cannot pay down the national debt, which is why it covertly relies on dollar devaluation to reduce the value of the national debt.

It’s only a matter of time before the majority of investors in dollar-denominated financial instruments open their eyes and stop buying those assets. When that happens the dollar is doomed. The government’s only recourse when it cannot borrow money will be to print dollars, which will only accelerate the dollar’s demise, possibly even inducing hyperinflation along the way.

If oil prices skyrocket because of the global supply and demand relationship and harm the U.S. economy, that could accelerate the dollar’s demise as well. I personally don’t see how the dollar can avoid substantial devaluation, either slowly or rapidly. I hope the decline is gradual.

All of the world’s government-issued currencies are in similar straits. None are firmly backed by finite, physical resources, such as gold. Consequently, all currencies have the potential to suffer from devaluation, even more so since the economies of the world’s countries are so intricately linked together. If one currency abruptly collapses, especially an important one like the dollar, they could all come crashing down.

Additionally, faith in the world’s currencies depends in part on globalization. The willingness of an investor in Japan to buy American dollars depends in part on the investor’s expectation of a continuing economic relationship between Japan and America. But in an era where global trade is increasingly challenged by oil shortages, faith in other countries’ currencies will diminish too. Countries will increasingly prefer to conduct international trade using universal mediums like gold instead of currency.

If currencies such as the dollar become worthless, even local trade may be conducted using gold or other precious metals. Such trade may, in fact, have to be conducted in black markets, since financially distressed governments will probably seek to confiscate all gold and precious metals from their citizens.

The bottom line is that government-issued currency will be a thing of the past. So how will the government continue to exist?

Acquisition of Resources

Without money or credit, government can only continue to exist through force. The United States government is particularly well endowed in this regard and has demonstrated its willingness to use force to acquire resources, and not as a last resort either.

Iraq’s oil is the first such resource to be acquired by military force. Iran’s oil and natural gas may well be the next. In the long run, the energy-rich regions of central Asia will also attract the hungry gaze of the U.S. Empire. Of course, other powerful, populous, and hungry countries, such as China and India, will also have designs on these energy-rich regions, which will probably result in significant wars. Oil from the Middle East will probably become so valuable that countries will have to provide a military escort for every tanker carrying oil across the ocean.

Domestically, energy will be controlled by the government. It will satisfy its needs first, corporations will have their needs satisfied second, and the populace will be forced to ration whatever is left.

Food is also critical to the government, comprised, as it is, of people. So it’s logical to assume that the government will at some point take control of food production. As with energy, the government will satisfy its own food requirements first, and the populace will be left to ration whatever is left.

If water becomes a scarce or unreliable resource, then we can assume that the government will take control of that as well.

In a future where money has no value, the only way a government can retain people is by providing them with food, water, and shelter. In fact, in a future world where resource competition is the order of the day, people will probably covet a government job – as a bureaucrat, a laborer, or a soldier – simply because it will mean three square meals a day and a roof over their head.

Of course, government needs more than just food, water, and shelter. Government needs weapons, vehicles, computers, communications gear, and myriad other manufactured items. Some of these things are manufactured wholly in other countries, or depend in part on components from other countries. Without money the government cannot buy these things. But it can trade precious resources, such as oil, water, and food, for them. Some critical factories, such as domestic weapons plants, may be taken over wholesale by the government for security reasons.

Slave Labor

Government cannot operate on resources and material alone. It also needs labor. Some of that labor can be “purchased” in exchange for resources. But in order for the government to operate “profitably” it will have to employ slave labor, that is, labor it doesn’t have to pay so richly for.

We already have such a precedent. Many of the two million people already incarcerated in this country are veritable slave laborers. They “earn” anywhere from twenty-five cents to one dollar per hour, often working for major American corporations. But in some cases these poor prisoners are then charged room and board for being in prison, thus wiping out their minuscule income. In effect, since they are being forced to work without making any net income, they are slaves. It does not challenge the imagination to envision future slave laborers working in factories manufacturing everything from machine guns to computers, or working on farms to produce food, returning each night to sleep in their prison cells.

The United States military is currently exploring ways to utilize civilian prisoners to satisfy the military’s labor needs. It’s only a matter of time before they come up with a justification for doing so.

Once the framework for utilizing slave laborers – all nice and legal, of course – is established, it’s quite easy to increase the pool of potential laborers, if necessary. The government merely has to criminalize more behaviors. Caught driving your car on the “wrong” day? Three months in prison loading ammunition cartridges. Caught possessing gold coins? Six months in prison assembling computers. Caught saying “subversive” things over the telephone to your aunt? Five years on a prison farm – for the both of you – tending crops. Of course, prison sentences will likely be accompanied by asset forfeiture, that is, if you have anything the government wants. There is already a precedent today for asset forfeiture too, even for minor offenses such as hiring a prostitute or having a marijuana cigarette in your car. Heck, simply walking through an airport today with “too much” cash on your person might result in it being confiscated.

Conclusion

Although this essay has mainly been a description of the United States and its future, much of it is applicable to the world as a whole. Some other countries may well face worse times ahead because they lack the natural resources and/or military might that the United States possesses.

The goal of this essay is not to propose solutions to the many problems facing us, although there are solutions, but to explain the seemingly irrational behavior we see around the world. Viewing the world today in light of the foregoing essay, Bush’s actions are understandable, even though I don’t endorse them: the competitive pursuit of resources, the rolling back of civil liberties, the carefree handling of the economy.

Well, doesn’t that make you feel all warm and fuzzy to know that George Bush is just doing what he is doing for YOU?

But what if that is not the case?

Here’s another view by Joe Quinn in his article: Ruppert and Hopsicker Co-Opting the 9-11 Truth Movement Or Exposing the Big Con – Lies and Disinformation At The End Of Civilisation As We Know It:

[…] If we look at the situation dispassionately (not an easy thing to do given the subject matter - “you’re all gonna die” - tends to make people a little emotional don’t ya know), what seems to be true about Mike’s message is that it is so shocking that it tends to have the effect of suspending the critical thinking capabilities of people who hear it. In a way it is like one of those doomsday cults where blind faith is asked for and given because: “we’re all gonna be toast pretty soon anyway, so what have you got to lose?”

It is also, coincidentally, a very good way to focus attention away from 9-11.

Of course, I am not saying that Mike is running a cult of any description, I am just saying that, whether Mike is aware of it or not, his message tends to promote emotional rather than critical thought, and thinking with our emotions tends to exacerbate an already problematic situation.

I think I can say without much fear of dispute, that, whether he planned it or not (or whether someone else planned it with him in mind), Mike has become somewhat of a saviour for his followers.

By his own admission, the following are Mike’s core beliefs about what needs to be done:

Instead of advocating war I oppose it. Anyone who has attended any of my more than 35 lectures in eight countries (more than 15,000 live audience members) will know, of a certainty, that my position on solutions is absolutely clear. I advocate an immediate cessation of all military conquest and imperialism by the US government and industrialized powers; an end to the war on terror.

I advocate an immediate convening of political, economic, spiritual and scientific leaders from all nations to address the issue of Peak Oil (and Gas) and its immediate implications for economic collapse, massive famine and climate destruction (partially as a result of reversion to coal plants which accelerate global warming). This would, scientifically speaking, include immediate steps to arrive at a crash program – agreed to by all nations and in accordance with the highest spiritual and ethical principles – to stop global population growth and to arrive at the best possible and most ethical program of population reduction as a painful choice made by all of humanity.

I hope that the sharp and sudden increase in heart rate and blood pressure that the words “population reduction” must surely have caused in readers was not too much to handle, and that we can continue and rationally consider the practicality of just what is being suggested by Mike.

The first question that can be reasonably asked is: “What planet has Mike been living on for the past 50 years?”

Please tell me when exactly the wonderful, life-respecting, spiritual beings took over the planet? Was it while I was at the toilet?

Seriously though, can ANYONE imagine Cheney or Putin or Blair or Zhu Rongji, or any other world leader for that matter, who by definition of their position of power have been completely corrupted by that power, suddenly exhibiting “the highest spiritual and ethical principles”? Just about every world leader, including the supposedly “spiritual” ones, have been presiding over mass depopulation for centuries, and they didn’t need any stinkin’ ethics or morals to do it; glee and relish was all it took! […]

According to Mike, when big government and big oil exploration and drilling companies proclaim to the world that “we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel here folks”, it is not that these patently corrupt men are attempting to manipulate world opinion, but rather that, faced with the dire consequences that peak oil portends for humanity, they are simply concerned for our well-being and future. Ruppert fails however to address the question of whether or not it is reasonable to believe that such men would suddenly undergo a complete reversal of the ethics that had motivated them up until that point in their lives.

As we all know, oil does not naturally flow out of the ground pre-refined into the various forms that are required to keep the post-industrial world turning and well-fed. There is a long and costly process involved in getting the oil to the gas station, and it would not happen if it were not financed by the large multinational oil companies that naturally have very close ties to the governments that require the oil in order for them to have a country and a population to rule over.

If there is an alleged shortage of oil, it is just as plausible that such claims are the result of some new government/corporate strategy rather than the actual drying up of resources.

Consider also the fact that, if we are to believe that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were solely to steal the oil resources of those countries, then things have not panned out as the Neocons hoped. Most reports have been telling us that the expected reserves in Iraq are just not there. Which begs the question: are we really to believe that all the big brains in the US “think-tanks” did not foresee this?

Of course I am not for a moment suggesting that depopulation does not form a part of the plans of ‘the powers that be’. There is too much evidence that governments have, for many years, been working on developing ever better ways to kill ever more people. My problem with Ruppert is that by promoting his “peak oil” debate, he ever so subtly diverts attention away from those who are really responsible for our current predicament and lays the blame for the impending demise of civilisation as we know it at the door of mother nature and the unfortunate fact that she has run out of oil. […]

The truth is that the real reasons for the events of 9-11 are much more insidious than any of the theories that have to date been proffered. As part of the process of investigation, most 9-11 investigators have, at least once, suggested that if everyone were just to look to “who benefits”, the solution to the whole enigma would quickly present itself. The important thing to remember about the “who benefits” approach however, is that, having identified the party that benefits the most from an event, that lead must be doggedly pursued, regardless of the lack of evidence of that party’s involvement in the event. Indeed, in such a case, a lack of evidence can constitute the most important piece of evidence if we consider that those with the most to gain often have the most to lose if their involvement were to be revealed. And in this case, the wherewithal needed to pull off such a major attack and deception is so vast, that those responsible would certainly have the means and know-how to plant evidence to blame it on others while eliminating the evidence that points back to the truly guilty parties.

As the twin towers crumbled to the ground, the average Western citizen’s perception of Arabs, already suffering from long years of subtle propaganda by the Western press, took an equally disastrous nose-dive. In one fell swoop, millions of people in that big nebulous area of the world known to many Americans as “the Middle East” became “dangerous terrorists” and the soon-to-be recipients of the whipped-up fury and indignation of the American people, conveyed on their behalf by the “world’s most awesome military machine”. 9-11 then, certainly secured the enthusiastic consent of the American people for an invasion of whichever country the US government decided to frame for the attacks.

However, it is our contention that Ruppert’s argument that the 9-11 attacks were carried out to facilitate an oil grab by the US government in the face of “peak oil” also makes little sense.

As a result of the first gulf war and under the oil for food program, any Iraqi oil resources that were required for American consumption had already been secured by US interests, so there was therefore little to be gained by the US government embroiling its military in what was always going to be a costly and unwinnable guerrilla war. One has only to look at the pre-eminent global position of the US over the past 50 years to see that its policies were already working quite nicely. So why risk military and economic catastrophe by invading Iraq? Indeed, there was little to be gained from the most recent US invasion of the Middle East if it is understood only in terms of securing oil for consumption. The invasion, in fact, uses up VAST quantities of oil, to what end?

Imagine that, for whatever reason, you were planning a radical reshaping of the Middle East, and you had concluded that, to get the job done, war and the destruction of an entire race of people therein was necessary. Imagine also that you are well aware that you cannot just unilaterally set off a major conflagration, principally because public opinion and certain other nations would not stand for it. Realising that you need some way to mould public opinion towards accepting war and at the same time render impotent those nations that pose a threat to your plans, what might be the best way to do it?

By far the most effective tool for shaping public opinion is fear. And by far the best way to control other nations is economically, or rather, through the control of their oil supply. Hence, 9-11 and the “war on terror”.

Unless the US actually physically controls Middle Eastern oil reserves, however, they have no way of controlling to whom those reserves are sold. The only way to do so is to fabricate a reason for invading each oil-rich country in turn and either permanently occupy them or install a proxy government that will do your bidding. This, it would seem, is the process we see unfolding currently with the “war on terror” and the invasion of Iraq. Iran is probably next. Venezuela may follow. Of course, the public must be given a plausible reason as to why the wells have “run dry”, which is the reason for the dissemination of the peak oil myth.

However, maintaining the military necessary for such a task demands tremendous economic and human resources. The costs are driving the United States further and further into debt. At the same time, Bush is giving tax breaks to his wealthy support base, narrowing the income base within the US to pay for his military follies. This makes the US more and more dependent upon foreign governments to shore up the US debt, to the cost of nearly $2 billion a day. The day that the rest of the world decides to take a hit on the value of their dollar reserves in order to bring the US predator to its knees, is the day the war machine will begin to collapse, bringing down with it the fabled “American Way of Life”.

But what can be the motivation behind such an insane plot? What can drive a group of people, against all reason and logic, to risk the economic destruction of their own country and therefore their power base?

Such a question cannot be answered without looking at the one country for which successive US governments have bent over backwards to accommodate; which takes us back to Israel. […]

Now I understand that all of the above paints a complex and somewhat confusing picture, and you may be struck with the feeling that there is still something missing, some factor that is needed to explain that recklessness with which the main global players are toying with the planet and the lives of every individual on it. One might even say that they are acting like men who have nothing to lose. We have already made a case to suggest that peak oil is a distraction and certainly not the main issue.

So what IS the main issue?

In August 17, 1999, the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau published an article by Robert S. Boyd entitled: Comets may have caused Earth’s great empires to fall which included the following: (emphases, ours)

Recent scientific discoveries are shedding new light on why great empires such as Egypt, Babylon and Rome fell apart, giving way to the periodic “dark ages’’ that punctuate human history. At least five times during the last 6,000 years, major environmental calamities undermined civilizations around the world.

Some researchers say these disasters appear to be linked to collisions with comets or fragments of comets such as the one that broke apart and smashed spectacularly into Jupiter five years ago.

The impacts, yielding many megatons of explosive energy, produced vast clouds of smoke and dust that circled the globe for years, dimming the sun, driving down temperatures and sowing hunger, disease and death.

The last such global crisis occurred between AD 530 and 540– at the beginning of the Dark Ages in Europe — when Earth was pummeled by a swarm of cosmic debris.

In a forthcoming book, Catastrophe, the Day the Sun Went Out, British historian David Keys describes a 2-year-long winter that began in AD 535. Trees from California to Ireland to Siberia stopped growing. Crops failed. Plague and famine decimated Italy, China and the Middle East.

Keys quotes the writings of a 6th-century Syrian bishop, John of Ephesus:

“The sun became dark. … Each day it shone for about four hours and still this light was only a feeble shadow.”

A contemporary Italian historian, Flavius Cassiodorus, wrote:

“We marvel to see no shadows of our bodies at noon. We have summer without heat.”

And a contemporary Chinese chronicler reported, “Yellow dust rained like snow.”

Dendrochronologist, Mike Baillie, established that:

Analysis of tree rings shows that at in 540 AD in different parts of the world the climate changed. Temperatures dropped enough to hinder the growth of trees as widely dispersed as northern Europe, Siberia, western North America, and southern South America.

A search of historical records and mythical stories pointed to a disastrous visitation from the sky during the same period, it is claimed. There was one reference to a “comet in Gaul so vast that the whole sky seemed on fire” in 540-41.

According to legend, King Arthur died around this time, and Celtic myths associated with Arthur hinted at bright sky Gods and bolts of fire. In the 530s, an unusual meteor shower was recorded by both Mediterranean and Chinese observers. Meteors are caused by the fine dust from comets burning up in the atmosphere. Furthermore, a team of astronomers from Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland published research in 1990 which said the Earth would have been at risk from cometary bombardment between the years 400 and 600 AD.

[…] Famine followed the crop failures, and hard on its heels bubonic plague that swept across Europe in the mid-6th century. […]

Now these are not the voices of the evangelical, “the end of the world is nigh”, types, but rather sober university professors who have spent many years in scientific research in their chosen fields. The conclusions they have come to are shocking for sure, but it behooves all of us to put aside our sacred cows for a moment and look at the facts. Over the past few years the incidence of meteorite sightings and impacts around the world has gone through the proverbial roof, as have several of the meteorites, although in opposite directions. We have been charting these events for the past 2 years, and we can safely say that something is definitely ‘up’.

Given the controlled nature of not only the media, but also the academic world, if there was a threat to our planet from some sort of cyclical cometary shower as suggested by Ballie and Boyd, the chances of such information coming to general public awareness, against the wishes of the ruling elite, are very slim. The likelihood is that our leaders would do everything within their power to conceal such information, forcing those members of the public with a drive to know the truth to collect and decipher the bits and pieces of ‘loose’ data themselves. This is exactly what we have been doing for many years now.

The fact is that the idea that the earth experiences cyclical catastrophes, and that a select few of the “elite” are in possession of this information, explains rather well the current warmongering by the US and the political maneuvering by other major powers.

Think about it. If the people who are really in control of the US government know that, in the very near future, the demographics and power balance on the planet are going to be radically and unpredictably restructured by meteorite impacts, they would surely seek to prepare for such an event. Having held power for so long, their preparations would most likely center around a strategy to ensure that, when the dust settles and they emerge from their bunkers, they are able to retake control of the planet. Practically, this would involve a process of conquering as much of the planet and its resources as possible, and we note that this is essentially what successive US governments have been doing for the past 50 years.

If there is one thing above all others that has lead to the precipice upon which we currently sit as a species, it is knowledge, or the lack of it, and the fact that certain small groups of so-called ‘elite’ have always sought to maintain a monopoly on it at the expense of the masses of humanity. Clearly, therefore, it is knowledge that is and always has been the most prized ‘commodity’ on this planet. Unfortunately, the catch 22 to beat them all is the fact that almost no one realises this.

Why?

Because the knowledge that knowledge is key has been deliberately and rigorously denied them by the propaganda of religion where “faith” and “blind belief” in the leader is the key to salvation. The salient point is that it is, and always has been, only in the darkness of ignorance of the true state of their reality that ordinary people can be merrily led down the path that leads, over and over again, to their own destruction.