"It Can't Happen Here" Edition

April 7, 2006

"It Can't Happen Here" Edition
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr81.html

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?

Trust 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.

And yet still you hold out hope, just as you held out hope that George’s Skull & Bones fraternity brother 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.
(http://www.halliburton.com/default/main/halliburton/eng/news/source_files/news.jsp?newsurl=/default/main/halliburton/eng/news/source_files/press_release/2006/kbrnws_012406.html)

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.”
(http://washingtontimes.com/business/20030701-092343-5953r.htm)

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.” (http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7077)

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.” (http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4318) (For much more on ‘emerging technologies,’ see http://www.sunshine-project.org/publications/bk/bk12.html. 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: http://www.sas.org/tcs/weeklyIssues_2006/2006-04-07/feature1p/index.html) 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.

Installations Civilian Inmate Labor Program

http://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/pdf/r210_35.pdf        

r o s e m a r y - the connection between mia farrow, sharon tate, charlie manson and the beatles

http://www.phinnweb.org/livingroom/rosemary/print.html                         

r o s e m a r y
- the connection between mia farrow, sharon tate, charlie manson and the beatles



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Dark Side Of The 60s

[...] as it has been observed by probability theorists, the largest proportion of the truth arrives as a faculty of coincidence. [...] [...] To fully appreciate the law of synchronity -- the meaning that can be revealed by an inadvertent encounter, or a chance event -- it is necessary to put aside all rational logic of reasoning to concentrate instead on the accidents and chances that provide new ways of understanding. The hazards and casualties that happen to us are intelligible only within a system of meaning, and meaning is the products not of individual minds, but of relationships. It is this pattern of relationships that both defines the individual and is defined by him, and it is this complex of affinities that perishes with death. The law of synchronity is grounded in this dark arrangement of contingencies. As Confucian scholar Wang Fu-Chih puts it, "only a man of highest integrity can understand this law; basing itself on its revelation he can grasp the symbols, and observing its small expressions, he can understand the auguries".
In other words, the devil is in the details.

- Brottman, pp. 33-34

1969 is remembered, not only for being the year of the first Moon flight, but also for the gruesome murders committed in California by Charles Manson and his bunch of crazed disciples, called the Manson Family. For many observers this marked the end of the 60s 'Flower Power' and the hippie culture of peace and love, and also the entering into the grimmer era of the 70s, 80s and 90s. The Manson murders also whetted the morbid public appetite, indicating the dark side of the 60s, which remained there under the decade's sunny and carefree outlook. It is also a story of strange coincidences and synchronities; with occult connections and rumours of conspiracy abounding. 'The Age of Aquarius' was the utopian project prevailing in the minds of the youth of the 1960s. No more society's 'games', no more 'hang-ups', no more 'Man', no more repression, no more war. Mind-altering substances, occultism, free love and rock music would pave the way for the new Aquarian society, out of the grimness and darkness of the Age of Pisces, the sinister Kali Yuga period of the Hindus, Philip K. Dick's 'Black Iron Prison'. The hippies would embrace both J.R.R. Tolkien's Luddite pastoralism (where magic was ever-present, and not yet suffocated by the 'satanic mills' as described by William Blake and the crude machinery of Industrial era), and Marshall McLuhan's techno-utopian 'Global Village' with its trans-continental electronic neuro-circuitry. The time was right for the sages, visionaries, revolutionaries, idealists and dreamers but also for the snake-oil merchants, sideshow hucksters, rip-off merchants, opportunists and false prophets.

Charlie Don't Surf

Born in 1934, Charles Manson spent his first term in reformatory school at the age of nine. By the time he drifted to San Francisco in 1967, Manson had spent most of his adult life in jail, mostly for such offences as car theft and credit-card fraud. He also worked some time as a pimp. He found himself in the midst of the new 'psychedelic' culture. The hippies of the Haight-Asbury district took LSD, smoked pot, and called themselves 'flower children'. No one cared that Manson had been a jailbird; on the contrary, it was regarded as being greatly to his credit. Manson was older than most of the 'drop-outs', and girls seemed inclined to regard him as a father-substitute figure. Runaways began to gather round him, and soon the Manson menage in the Haight district seemed to be full of emotionally deprived girls and admiring youths (Manson seems to have been bisexual). If they had never read the 60s counter-culture philosopher Herbert Marcuse, they nevertheless practised his idea that sex could be used a a form of 'unrepressive sublimation' to unfold our higher possibilities.
By 1968, Manson was trying hard to move into the pop music business; Manson's 'Family' even moved for a time into the luxury home of a member, Dennis Wilson, of a successful group called The Beach Boys, best known for their odes to California beach life and surfing (later on, Wilson claimed that he had inadvertently "founded" the Family with Manson). Manson lived with Dennis before the murders for about six months. He saw himself as a would-be singer-songwriter. He recorded several songs in Brian's home studio, and one of them, 'Never Learn Not To Love' (originally titled: 'Cease To Exist') was even released as the B-side of a Beach Boys single and on their album 20/20. Manson's lack of success, though, seems to have made him increasingly embittered. The 'family', now numbering about thirty (and including children) moved out to a ranch owned by an old man named George Spahn, and lived there in exchange for cleaning out the stables.
With so much drug-taking, violence was inevitable. In July 1969, Manson shot a black dope-dealer named Bernard Crowe in the chest; in fact, Crowe recovered and decided not to go to the police. Later that month, Manson and his friend Bobby Beausoleil tried to persuade another drug-dealer, Gary Hinman, to finance a move to Death Valley; when Hinman refused, he was tortured, then stabbed to chest and left to die. On the wall above his body, Beausoleil wrote 'Political piggy' in blood -- intended to lead the police to the belief that the Black Panther movement was responsible. Manson's plan was to cause a revolution by setting whites against blacks (whom he detested).
On 9 August 1969, four Manson followers -- three girls and a man -- drove out to a house in Benedict Canyon which had been earlier rented by Terry Melcher, the son of Doris Day and a man in the pop music business (he had produced among all bands like The Byrds) against whom Manson had a grudge. Melcher was an independent producer working with the Beatles' Apple Records label, and the Beatle-obsessed Manson thought he would get a recording contract through him. When Melcher didn't sign Manson, he became an object of Manson's wrath and probably Melcher was supposed to be one of the victims, but Manson didn't know that Terry had split from that house three months before. Anyway, that Hollywood mansion at 10050 Cielo Drive, Los Angeles, was assaulted by Manson's disciples, who brutally butchered a group of people, who were spending some time there; among them the current resident Sharon Tate, a film actress and the wife of Polish film director Roman Polanski; Tate being at the time pregnant with Polanski's child.
At the time Polanski was in London, but Sharon Tate had three guests to supper, two men and a woman. Afterwards they took MDA, a psychedelic drug, and went into various states of dissociation (Tate was not under influence because of her pregnancy). As the Manson Family members entered the drive, they encountered a youth who had been visiting the houseboy; he was shot in the head. Then they went into the house and killed Sharon Tate and her three guests. The men were shot, the women stabbed to death. The next morning, a maid ran screaming into the street after finding the actress and four others slaughtered in a grotesque scene. The word 'Pig', written with Tate's blood, was found from the murder scene.
Bodies were scattered about the lush green estate. Sharon Tate, who was 8 1/2 months pregnant, had been stabbed to death, then hung from a rafter in the living room. Also slain were Abigail Folger, heiress to the Folger coffee fortune; Wojciech (Voytek) Frykowski, a Polish friend of Polanski's; Jay Sebring, hairdresser to the stars; and Steven Parent, a young man shot while leaving the cottage of his friend, the caretaker.
The murders created the sensation Manson had hoped for; the following day, the 'family' watched the television news-casts with satisfaction. By that evening, every gun and guard dog in the Los Angeles area had been bought by frantic householders. Manson decided to strike again while the iron was hot. That evening, after taking LSD, he led six followers to a house in the affluent Los Feliz district of Los Angeles, the home of a supermarket owner, Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary. Manson walked into their bedroom with a gun and tied them up, then sent in three followers, who stabbed the LaBiancas to death. They wrote 'Death to pigs' in blood on a door, and 'Helter Skelter', Manson's code word for the revolt that would occur when the alarmed whites rose up against the blacks.
But the rising failed to occur; Los Angeles was too accustomed to mass murder to over-react. In the following month, the 'family' moved out to the remote Death Valley. When Manson set on fire a bulldozer belonging to the State rangers, the police raided the ranch and arrested all the hippies. And after more than a month in jail, a family member named Susan Atkins, who had taken part in both sets of murders, told her cell-mate about the killings, and word leaked back to the police.
Charlie Guenther was the man who really broke the Manson case. He worked the Gary Hinman job for Los Angeles Sheriff's Homicide and busted Manson acolytes Mary Brunner and Bobby Beausoleil, who had written 'Pig' and 'Political Piggy' on Hinman's walls after they killed him; similar slogans were scrawled at the Tate-LaBianca crime scenes. Guenther went to LAPD and laid out the Hinman murder. Brunner and Beausoleil were in custody during the Tate-LaBianca time frame. Guenther told the LAPD to check out their friends at the Spahn Movie Ranch. The LAPD ignored Guenther's advice. They solved Tate-LaBianca by fluke luck several months later.
The trial that followed was one of the longest and most expensive in Los Angeles history. Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor -- who later wrote the book Helter Skelter -- called the killings "probably the most bizarre mass murder case we've ever had in America." Charles Manson did his best to turn it into an indictment of society and his judges, explaining that the murders had been committed out of love. Asked if she thought the killing of eight people was unimportant, Susan Atkins retorted by asking whether the killing of thousands with napalm was important. In her memoir, "Headline Justice," reporter Theo Wilson recalled a 10-month trial with "testimony that went from horrifying to ludicrous ... witnesses with names like 'Lotsapoppa, Snake and Ouisch' ... threats of self-immolation and other destruction ... a defense attorney disappearing, his drowned undiscovered until many months later on the very day that the defendants received death sentences from the jury."
Manson's three women co-defendants, Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel, were convicted with him after taking the stand and attempting to absolve him by admitting their own deadly deeds. Another defendant, Charles "Tex" Watson, was found guilty in a separate trial. Their death sentences were commuted to life when the death penalty was briefly outlawed in America in 1972.
President Nixon had denounced Manson even before he and his five co-defendants had been found guilty, and predictably, Manson became a hero of the West Coast 'underground' network. But the trial had the effect of convincing the rest of the world that the whole movement of social revolt was a form of mindless emotionalism whose arguments defied logic; it produced, in fact, precisely the kind of revulsion against the left that the McCarthy witch hunts had created against the right in the 50s. A suitable scapegoat is always needed, and in America, at least, the Manson family had discredited 'revolution', as the writer Colin Wilson concludes.

Web of Coincidences

One aspect of Manson's philosophy especially puzzled me: his strange attitude toward fear. He not only preached that fear was beautiful, he often told the Family that they should live in a constant state of fear. What did he mean by that? [ ... ]
To Charlie fear was the same thing as awareness [ ... ] The more fear you have, the more awareness, hence the more love. When you're really afraid, you come to "Now". And when you are at Now, you are totally conscious.
Manson claimed that children were more aware than adults, because they were naturally afraid. But animals were even more aware than people, he said, because they always live at Now. The coyote was the most aware creature there was, Manson maintained, because he was completely paranoid. Being frightened of everything he missed nothing.

- Bugliosi: p. 320

As most people know, the star of Roman Polanski's 1968 horror classic Rosemary's Baby, Mia Farrow, is the ex-Mrs. Woody Allen (and the ex-Mrs. Frank Sinatra). There's a connection to her and the 1967 film Valley of the Dolls, starring Sharon Tate (who had also been in Polanski's vampire spoof Dance of the Vampires the same year) -- one of Tate's co-stars in the film, Barbara Parkins, was best known from TV's soap opera Peyton Place, which had made Mia Farrow famous. (At some point, Farrow allegedly feared she would be the next victim of the murder spree.) So, if we look closely, we'll find a connection between Peyton Place, Valley of the Dolls, Rosemary's Baby and Charles Manson!
Then to The Beatles: 'Helter Skelter' and 'Piggies' were some songs off The Beatles' White Album (1968), which inspired the murder spree of the Manson Family, who slaughtered Sharon Tate, who was the wife of Roman Polanski, who directed Rosemary's Baby. (Manson and his followers believed the songs held in them some hidden messages, specifically meant for the Family.) Furthermore, as peculiar coincidences go, The Beatles had Mia Farrow as one of their companions on their famous 1968 excursion to India, and John Lennon of The Beatles wrote 'Dear Prudence' (also a song on White Album) for Mia Farrow's younger sister Prudence Farrow (on a lighter note, "Prudence" was also the name of puppy Polanski gave to Sharon Tate). Sadie Mae Glutz was the alias given to the Family member Susan Atkins by Manson even before the appearance of the White Album song 'Sexy Sadie' -- which was directed toward The Beatles' one-time guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, with whom they felt disappointed. Ironically, also Sadie/Susan would let Manson down by carelessly talking about the murders to her cellmates, which was eventually used as a proof in the trial.
It is claimed that at a party in California in 1973, Lennon went berserk, hurling a chair out the window, smashing mirrors, heaving a TV against the wall, and screaming nonsense about Roman Polanski being to blame. And to give a sinister end to the story filled with synchronities (allegedly Lennon and Ono had their own interest in the occult), John Lennon was shot in 1980 in front of the Dakota Building (picture on the right) in New York -- which was used when filming Rosemary's Baby. Also, Rosemary LaBianca was another victim of Manson's murder spree, which in press would later be called the Tate-LaBianca murders. Mark Chapman was the name of Lennon's killer -- Winifred Chapman was the maid who had first found the bodies at 10050 Cielo Drive.
The Beatles members had frequented London's Indica Books and Gallery (this is where Lennon met Yoko Ono), which opened in 1966, where also Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate visited as regular guests -- the film-maker then directing in England Dance of the Vampires (a.k.a. The Fearless Vampire Killers, 1967), with his future wife starring.
Thematically, there are some similarities between Dance of the Vampires and Rosemary's Baby, which seem all the more significant in the aftermath of what happened. In the former film, the suckers of blood are triumphant in the end, spreading evil to the whole world after heroes have failed to stop them; in the latter, the ultimate purpose of all diabolic rites is achived -- the Devil is come among us. In the former film, Polanski's character Alfred is -- even more chillingly in the light of history -- late to save Sharon Tate's Sarah from the vampires; in the latter, Guy Woodhouse (John Cassavetes) is willing to sacrifice his wife, Mia Farrow's Rosemary, to give birth to the Devil, and in the process gain worldly success himself. In Dance of the Vampires, the community of vampires gains victory; in Rosemary's Baby, the coven of witches and Satanists celebrate their Year One by the birth of Devil's offspring.
Furthermore, it should be noted that Krzysztof Komeda, who composed music for Rosemary's Baby, died soon afterwards in curious circumstances because of the head injuries received during a drinking binge, adding to all notoriety gained by Polanski's 1968 film.

1966: Year One

1966 seems to be a crucial year in this story. In March of that year, John Lennon gave his interview to a British journalist, the Stateside results of which seemed to be somewhat unfortunate for the Beatle. When syndicated to the USA that summer, this statement given in the interview by Lennon infuriated the conservative religious right: "Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right, and I will be proved right. We [The Beatles] are more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first -- rock'n'roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me." In the South, where rock'n'roll had exploded with Elvis during the previous decade, mass burnings of Beatles records ensued.
In April 8, 1966, the Time magazine had published its famous "Is God Dead?" issue, also featured in Ira Levin's original book of Rosemary's Baby and the film. The question appeared on the cover of the magazine in bold red letters on a jet black background. (In 1882 Friedrich Nietzsche in The Gay Science had a character called "the madman" running through the marketplace shouting "God is dead!", but in the book, no one took the madman seriously.) The Time magazine article reported that a group of young theologians calling themselves Christian atheists, led by Thomas J. J. Altizer at Emory University, had claimed God was dead. As was the case with US reactions to Lennon's Jesus statement, this hit a cultural nerve and in an appearance on The Merv Griffin Show Altizer was greeted by shouts of "Kill him! Kill him!" (Altizer continued to develop an increasingly apocalyptic theology but did not receive a grant or much attention since 1966.)
As is fitting, Anton Szandor LaVey, who founded The Church of Satan (which ideology was somehow Nietzschean with all its elitist "superman" overtones) in that same year 1966, appears uncredited as an actor and a "technical adviser" on Rosemary's Baby -- a film which theme is connected closely with Satanism. LaVey had launched his Church of Satan on Walpurgisnacht, 30 April, 1966. Some famous Chuch members were, among all, Sammy Davis Jr., and there has been some talk of Jayne Mansfield's connection with LaVey, which has been subsequently denied by all parties concerned. There were also LaVey connections to the Family members, especially Susan Atkins, who had worked previously as a go-go dancer at LaVey's Topless Witches Review show as... "Sharon King".

The Beatles and "The Aquarian Conspiracy"

The first United States-grown rock group of that [psychedelic] type, the Grateful Dead, was generated as a British intelligence operation by the Occult Bureau of [Aldous] Huxley and [Gregory] Bateson out of the Palo Alto Veteran's Hospital where they were doing LSD and related experiments.
- Why would British intelligence want to put out a rock group?
This is part of the Satanism business. Call it the counterculture. Call it the Dionysius model of the counterculture. Rock [music] is essentially a revival of the ancient Dionysic, Bacchic rituals. Lots of people for long periods of time in that kind of particular rhythmic ritual which was probably struck upon empirically many thousands of years ago for this type of cult. It does have a relationship to the Alpha rhythms of the brain. It does produce these sorts of states. If combined with a little alcohol and more, shall we say, mood shaping substances, with youth, with funny sex, this does produce a profound change of a countercultural type. Another word for it: New Age. The longer term: Age of Aquarius. People were experimenting with various utopian models, constructing small groups experimentally which were considered New Age types. - Lyndon LaRouche on the 60's counter-culture, rock music, LSD and the occult (see also this...)

It's understandable that the whole 1960s cultural upheaval was to cause worry among the more conservative commentators, who didn't understand the new sounds, styles and ideas, and greeted them as the heralds of something more sinister than merely as some passing fashions or fads. Such conspiracy buffs as John Coleman (in his Conspirator's Hierachy - The Committee of 300) and Lyndon LaRouche, quoted above, go as far as to claim that "Beatlemania" and the subsequent rise of countercultural rock movement were in fact meticulously constructed by Tavistock Institute, a cover organisation of British intelligence service MI6, as to subvert American culture and institutions. This whole affair would be a part of the larger countercultural "Aquarian Conspiracy" instilled in Britain against America...
Coleman goes as far as to confuse music of The Beatles with the "atonal" 12-tone music of 1920s German composers like Arnold Schönberg, and claims that the acclaimed cultural critic Theodor Adorno actually wrote the lyrics for The Beatles! The next quote is probably the most telling of Coleman's attitudes towards the whole rock music culture:

Following the Beatles, who incidentally were put together by the Tavistock Institute, came other "Made in England" rock groups, who, like the Beatles, had Theo Adorno write their cult lyrics and compose all the "music." I hate to use these beautiful words in the context of "Beatlemania"; it reminds me of how wrongly the word "lover" is used when referring to the filthy interaction between two homosexuals writhing in pigswill. To call "rock" music, is an insult, likewise the language used in "rock lyrics." - Dr. John Coleman: Conspirator's Hierachy - The Committee of 300

If you hate The Beatles, popular music and youth culture, fair enough, but at least get your facts right.
To have some counter-balance here, the writer Alex Constantine claims in his Covert War Against Rock that rock artists with connections to counterculture, such as Lennon, were systematically harassed and persecuted by US authorities and covert operations like COINTELPRO and Operation CHAOS. So, both right-wing and left-wing conspiracy fans would indeed have a field day with this case.

Manson's Influences?

Manson is known to have dabbled with Scientology, but it seems his involvement has been brief. Vincent Bugliosi claims also that his teachings had some surprising similarities to those of The Process Church of the Final Judgment, the notorious occult sect of Robert de Grimston.
In 1963, Grimston, then known as Robert Moore and Mary Ann Lean had met at the Hubbard Institute of Scientology, on Fitzroy Street, London. Both were training to be "auditors". They married soon after, and in 1964 left Scientology to set up their own system, Compulsions Analysis. They also adopted the name de Grimston. In 1966 (the same year LaVey also inaugurated his Church of Satan in San Francisco), the cult decamped to Xtul, Mexico, on the north coast of Yucatan. There they apparently discovered Satan. Returning to London in 1967 and funded by a member's inheritance, they turned their Mayfair mansion into a Satanic palace, with all-night coffee bar, movie house and book store, where they sold issues of their magazine, The Process, devoted to Hitler, Satan and gore. Processeans went around in black capes, turtlenecks and silver crosses. They held telepathy classes and preached the coming apocalypse. They approached pop musicians as possible converts. Mick Jagger's then-girlfriend Marianne Faithfull posed in the infamous 'Fear' issue of The Process magazine in 1967. The legendary bandleader Graham Bond got also involved with The Process and died in mysterious circumstances under a tube at Finsbury Park station. Late '67 The Process hit the States, in LA sidling up to members of the West Coast rock establishment -- and Charlie Manson.
"Learn to love fear" was one Process teaching. "Soror H" wrote in a Process newsletter from London: "Manson was clever in his choice of beliefs: the whole Beatles Helter Skelter thing was, of course, a model to instill the PROCESS into his followers, who were more likely to respond to such 'turned-on' symbols than the more traditional ones. The whole thing was a scam; a guru trick, but Manson's intention was to open up the occult centres of perception by a unique pop-based outlook influenced primarily by the PROCESS." Later on, it was denied, though, that Manson would ever have been an actual Process member, but it's possible the Church's teachings may have influenced him. It has to be remembered, though, that the late 1960s spawned various occult and "satanic" cults of which The Process and LaVey's Church of Satan were just some examples. Something was obviously in the air...

The CIA Connection?

Operation CHAOS, launched in 1968, was the Central Intelligence Agency's response to civil unrest and cultural upheaval. The targets of CHAOS -- as was also the case with FBI's COINTELPRO -- were the political dissidents such as the Black Panthers, politically active hippies and public figures such as rock musicians, and the "restless" youth in general.
The use of informants and provocateurs was part of a massive sub rosa campaign to subvert the forces of dissent in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Joining in the CIA and and the FBI in this effort was an alphabet soup of federal agencies: the Internal Revenue Servive (IRS), the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HWW), the intelligence divisions of all the military services, and numerous local police forces. Over a quarter of a million Americans were under "active surveillance" during this period, and dossiers were kept on the lawful political activities and personal lives of millions more. Those affiliated with black militant, antiwar, and New Left groups were prime targets of dirty ticks and other underhanded tactics designed to stir up factionalism and "neutralize" political activists.
The CIA had studied the effects of LSD since the 1950's as means of mind control and "unconventional warfare". It was the medical tests conducted by the Agency that first launched LSD into the youth counterculture, through such enthusiastic advocates as Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey. And consequently, what could be better "human guinea pig farm" for the CIA than Haight-Ashbury, the epicentre of 60s psychedelic counterculture?
It is suggested that Manson had contacts with the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic's personnel who conducted government-backed tests on human behaviour, one of them Roger Smith, Manson's parole officer when he was released in prison March 1967. Also Dr. David Smith of the Clinic, according to Vincent Bugliosi in Helter Skelter, "got to know the [Manson] group through his work in the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic". LSD was instrumental in Manson's power trip and "guru" trip, for his followers to slavishly follow Manson's murderous instructions.
Mid-summer of 1969, one month before the Family massacres, Operation CHAOS went into the most tight security mode -- just another coincidence? To what extent were the CIA aware of Manson's plans?


Manson had had contacts with his victims beforehand. He had met Abigail "Gibby" Folger, the wealthy coffee heiress found dead at Cielo Drive, at the home of the Mamas and Papas member Cass Elliot (who had also been approached by The Process). Folger doled out cash to Manson on occasion, then stopped; the result of which was that Manson turned against her. When Manson lived in San Francisco, Folger loaned $10,000 to the Straight Theater at Haight and Cole Streets. Manson then lived on Cole Street, on the same block as the Process Church. Folger also funded Timothy Leary, the underground film-maker Kenneth Anger, and the Process Church in the establishment of the "Himalayan Academy", not far from the Esalen Institute; Manson being a hanger-on at the Himalayan Foundation (a covert CIA lab?), where he in fact first time may have encountered The Process.
Earlier in the summer of 1969, Abigail Folger had retreated to Big Sur, on the California coast, at The Esalen Institute, a place for intense psychotherapy for the wealthy. She had registered as a volunteer social worker for the Los Angeles County Welfare Department. In 1968, Folger attended fundraisers set up by her mother to aid the Haight-Asbury Medical Clinic around the same time many of the Manson family women were being treated there. Despite all her good-doing (or probably because of their burden) Abigail Folger had somehow fallen into the darker side of the jetset life. She was, more involved in the drug culture that was becoming more prevalent, undoubtedly from her association with Wojciech Frykowski, who was heavily into drugs at the time of murders. The weekend she was in residence, Charles Manson was an invited guest.

Lucifer Rising

The underground film director Kenneth Anger was Anton Szandor LaVey's one-time associate and a devotee of the infamous early 20th-century occultist Aleister Crowley (whose portrait had appeared on the cover of The Beatles 1967 album, among the celebrities appearing with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band). Anger himself makes another interesting late-60's occult connection -- also with his close dealings with The Beatles' biggest "rivals", The Rolling Stones -- and would later write in his notorious Hollywood Babylon:

The '69 Tate massacre was not Old Hollywood. What befell the red house on Cielo Drive resembled the devastation caused by a jet plane crash: the Bad Ship Lollipop piloted by Uncle Sugar. Charlie Manson -- deus ex-garbage can. Wasted lives makes waste, not tragedy. This was the Benedict Canyon where [the "Golden Age" Hollywood film actor] Paul Bern shot himself; his noble shade now has mixed company.

Actually, Kenneth Anger plays a part in this story. Anger's one-time lover, musician, hippie, bisexual rogue and the future-devotee of Manson, Bobby "Cupid" Beausoleil had been a guitarist in an early line-up of Arthur Lee's Love. 1967, Anger lived with Beausoleil in San Francisco in an old house where Russian Embassy had previously resided. There they devoted themselves to some hands-on experience of Crowley's so-called "magick" -- a practice Beausoleil may have put to unsavoury use as a henchman for Manson, when he murdered Gary Hinman at the start of the Family's spree.
Beausoleil was supposed to perform at San Francisco's Straight as lead guitarist in the September 21, 1967 celebration of "The Equinox of the Gods" with his band, the Magick Powerhouse of Oz. The 11-piece rock ensemble (11 is a powerful number in Crowley's cabalistic system, symbolising the double phallus of homoerotic sex magic) was formed by Kenneth Anger to create the soundtrack for his forthcoming occult film: Anger planned to film the event as the focal set piece of his Lucifer Rising, where Beausoleil was going to play the lead. Lucifer Rising was supposed to depict the downfall, in Crowleyan terms, of the oppressive Aeon of Osiris (or Christian era), and the movement into the Aeon of Horus (or Lucifer) -- the Crowley-Anger version of the Age of Aquarius, supposedly.
However, Bobby Beausoleil vanished before the evening was through, stealing Anger's van and several cans of film containing practically the entire master rushes of the film, 1600 feet of footage. Furious, the occultist Anger was promptly hexing Beausoleil with the deadly "curse of the toad". Oblivious, Beausoleil sped off towards LA, but his car broke down just outside an isolated ranch in the middle of the Californian desert. There, Bobby was met by a bevy of spaced-out hippie chicks who invited him to stay. He willingly accepted their hospitality and that of the ranch's owner -- Charlie Manson. The rest is, as they say, history.
Anger would create out of the material he had remaining from Lucifer Rising another short of his, Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), where also Anger's friend Anton Szandor LaVey appeared. For Invocation Mick Jagger created some eerie drony sounds with a Moog synthesizer. In the film Anger uses superimposed footage such as magical symbols and talismans projected onto actors, spliced and repeated footage of soldiers leaping out helicopters in Vietnam to create a backdrop of violence and chaos, and the shots of the Rolling Stones performing in London's Hyde Park. Towards the end of the film Mick Jagger is seen holding a child. Bobby Beausoleil's eyes are superimposed on its face, then on the faces of Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg, thus forming a kind of rock'n'roll pentagram. In a final puff of smoke a voodoo doll appears holding a sign that reads: "ZAP YOU'RE PREGNANT -- THAT'S WITCHCRAFT".
Invocation of My Demon Brother: Kenneth Anger as The Magus, Anton Szandor LaVey as Satan. From the same film: Bobby Beausoleil as Lucifer. Kenneth Anger and the Stones members had met in London 1967. Author Tony Sanchez, one of the group's friends, describes that Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger and Keith Richards (who attended Polanski's and Tate's wedding in 1967), and their girlfriends Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg, "listened spellbound as Anger turned them on to Aleister Crowley's powers and ideas". Anger had wanted to cast for Lucifer Rising Mick Jagger as Lucifer and Keith Richards as Beelzebub, but the Stones weren't keen on the idea. Anger claims Jagger agreed at first, then changed his mind.
Anita Pallenberg had met the Rolling Stones in 1965. She immediately began sexual relations with three out of the five members of the group. Anger, commenting on Anita, said, "I believe that Anita is, for want of a better word, a witch.... The occult unit within the Stones was Keith and Anita.... and Brian Jones. You see, Brian was a witch too." Anger says Jones had a third nipple, on his inner thigh; the extra nipple traditionally considered a certain sign of being a witch.
Sanchez writes of Anita Pallenberg in his book, Up And Down With The Rolling Stones,' "She was obsessed with black magic and began to carry a string of garlic with her everywhere -- even to be -- to ward off vampires. She also had a strange mysterious old shaker for holy water which she used for some of her rituals. Her ceremonies became increasingly secret, and she warned me never to interrupt her when she was working on a spell." He continues, "In her bedroom she kept a huge, ornate carved chest, which she guarded so jealously that I assumed it was her drug stash. The house was empty one day, and I decided to take a peep inside. The drawers were filled with scraps of bone, wrinkled skin and fur from some strange animals."
In 1967, the Rolling Stones released an album titled Their Satanic Majesties Request. The next year they would follow with 'Sympathy For The Devil', a key track on their Let It Bleed album, inspired by Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita, and probably by their deals with Kenneth Anger.
Later on, the Stones members' relations with Anger turned sore. Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg were due to be wed by Kenneth Anger in a dawn ceremony on Hampstead Heath, until one morning when Richards came downstairs to find that the front doors of his house had been taken off their hinges, painted gold and then replaced. Convinced there was no way Anger could have got into the house to do this, Richards called off the ceremony, though Anger later claimed that Richards knew all along and had even given him keys. Jagger also became reticient, burning all his occult books.
Ironically, it was Bobby Beausoleil who would eventually compose music for the later version of Lucifer Rising (which premiered not earlier than 1980, starring Marianne Faithfull), while in prison for Manson murders, after Kenneth Anger had fallen off with Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, who was supposed to score the film. Talk about the power of forgiveness on the part of Anger...

Sharon Tate Meets the Ghost of Paul Bern

The supernatural trappings of this story certainly don't stop here.
Kenneth Anger tells in his Hollywood Babylon about the 1932 suicide of movie agent Paul Bern, Hollywood's "Father Confessor". Bern's compassionate nature had earned him this title, and may have well been one of era's famous film star Jean Harlow's reasons for marrying this physically unprepossessing intellectual, twenty-two years her senior. Bern was studio boss Irving Thalberg's assistant at MGM and had been instrumental in bringing Harlow to the Culver City factory.
The odd couple was married on July 2, 1932. Two months later, on September 5, 1932, the butler found Bern's body in his wife's all-white bedroom in their benedict Canyon Mansion. He had shot himself. He was nude, sprawled in front of a full-length mirror, drenched in Jean's favourite perfume, Mitsuoko, shot through the head by a .38 pistol which lay by his side. Jean Harlow was visiting her mother at a time.
The butler did not notify the police but phoned MGM instead. Soon Louis B. Mayer and Thalberg were on the scene. Mayer found a suicide note on top of Harlow's vanity table. It seems Bern had a sexual problem and that he had tried to effect intercourse by artifical means, with a realistic phony phallus. Despite Mayer's initial attempts to hide Bern's note, he turned it over to the police by the insistence of his studio publicist. The next day Bern's first wife, a blonde would-be starlet Dorothy Millette drowned herself in the Sacramento River. Later on, there was some speculation that Paul Bern's death might have been a murder.
By 1966, Bern and Harlow's Benedict Canyon mansion at Easton Drive had ended up to Jay Sebring, the "hairstylist to stars", who was an ex-boyfriend of Sharon Tate's and one of Cielo Drive's 1969 fellow murder victims. Tate was house-sitting this same residence one night while Sebring was away for business. She was awakened by an intruder in the bedroom.
Tate later told columnist Dick Kleiner, "I saw this creepy little man. He looked like all the descriptions I have ever read of Paul Bern." The ghost began to run around the room haphazardly, clumsily bumping into furniture and cursing loudly, while blood spurted from the hole in his head. Frightened, Tate hurried downstairs only to be confronted by the horrifying apparition of someone bound to the newel post, with his throat slashed. Tate later said that she somehow knew that the mutilated figure was Sebring. Then, the apparition vanished.
In 1969, when they were found, Tate and Sebring's bodies were bound by a nylon rope hanging from a roof beam. Sharon Tate had unknowingly seen a vision of her fate in 1966.

All Of Them Witches

As for Roman Polanski, Mikita Brottman's Hollywood Hex accounts how less than a year after his eight-months pregnant wife was knifed to death by the Manson Family, Polanski commenced filming William Shakespeare’s bloodiest play, Macbeth (1971). Notoriously, there's been talk of the "Macbeth's curse", misfortunes that have reportedly happened during the theatrical productions of this play. (The theory goes that Shakespeare included actual black magic spells in the incantations of the play's weird sisters. Those who appear in the play or those who mention the play's name within the confines of a theater, other than on the stage, risk having these evils brought down on them.) While the filming proceeded smoothly for the most part, eerie parallels between the screenplay and the Manson murders first raised eyebrows among the crew and, later, among critics. We are reminded how Sharon Tate, was hanged before being stabbed to death, and how that image (a body thrashing at the end of a rope) became a dominant visual motif in the movie. The famous "out damn’d spots" scene in which Lady Macbeth tries to expunge the blood on her hands also takes on double-meaning when we read that Manson’s followers tried to wash their own blood-stained hands at a near-by garden hose minutes after murdering Polanski’s wife. There are countless other parallels: the notion of a fetus being "untimely ripped from his mother’s womb"; the description of small children being massacred (which Polanski visualizes with copious blood); and ultimately, Shakespeare’s description of Scotland as a lacerated woman and "each day a gash / Is added to her wounds."
Brottman claims that Polanski’s macabre vision of Macbeth owes its existence to Charlie Manson. One is the product of the other. Or perhaps, and this is the heart of the argument, they are both products of each other. They both come from some strange well of supernaturalism. And, as Brottman suggests, their ultra-violent images intertwine until we can’t tell them apart. When actor Terence Baylor as MacDuff was supposed describe the death of his wife and child, Polanski instructed him, "You’ll do it this way. I know."

The Age Of Aquarius Turns Into The Age Of Antichrist

Anton Szandor LaVey claimed to have cast a venomous curse on the hippie culture he loathed. This happened in a ceremony entitled 'The Rising Forth', which took place on that same fateful night of 8 August 1969. A black-clad group gathered in a candle-lit chamber to launch this hex with the words: "Beware, you psychedelic vermin! Your smug pomposity with its thin disguise of tolerance will serve you no longer! We know your mark and recognise it well. We walk the night as the villains no longer! Our steeds await and their eyes are ablaze with the fires of Hell!" Woodstock in August 1969 had almost coincided with Manson murders that LaVey claimed this magical working had triggered.
Also the arrest of Family members in late took place about the same time with the disastrous Rolling Stones outdoor concert of Altamont in 6 December 1969, which, with the death toll of three and over a hundred injured, marked for many the end of the era of peace and love. The Hell's Angels were hired to act as "security", but finally it was the audience who needed security from the rampaging Angels, who kept assaulting crowd members. As the Stones launched into their song, 'Under My Thumb, audience member Meredith Hunter pulled a gun; the Angels claim he aimed it at Jagger, wearing sorcerer's robes with the Greek letter Omega (the last letter in Greek alphabet, meaning also "the end") adorned over it; others claimed Hunter was defending himself from the Angels. Within moments Hunter was swamped by Angels, who stabbed and kicked him to death. The Stones stopped playing, Jagger -- unaware of what had just happened -- remarking: "‘Something very funny always happens when we start that number".


David Dalton wrote on Manson:

When you need a monster one will appear. The one thing that most determines the way we think about Manson was his timing. He is a demon of the Zeitgeist, immaculate in his terror and confusion. Appearing with almost supernatural precision in the last months of the '60s, he seemed to call into question everything about the counterculture. His malign arrival synchronised so perfectly with America's nervous breakdown that is hard not to bestow occult meanings on him. The idea was that he was merely a projection of our darkest thoughts is a card he played ruthlessly. He endlessly toyed with the idea that he was just a mirror, a materialisation. Manson's cobbling together of hippy philosophy -- apocalyptic prophecy, Zen paradox, radical politics, pop occultism, acid logic, hipster jargon -- was seamless and so mesmerising that any challenge would ricochet back on you.

The canonization of Manson by certain segments of the counterculture was a measure of how desperate and bitter people had become in the final days of the 1960s. Tuesday's Child, an underground paper in Los Angeles, named him Man of the Year and ran his picture with the word "hippie" as the caption. The Weathermen went a step further by lauding Manson as a heroic, acid-ripped street figher who offed some "rich honky pigs"; the Weatherpeople proclaimed 1970 "The Year of the Fork", after the instrument of LaBiancas' slaughter. Vincent Bugliosi goes as far as to compare Charlie Manson to Adolf Hitler (known also for his occult interests); it is known that Manson himself was fascinated with Hitler and the Third Reich. What made both Hitler and Manson (morbidly) intriguing was the inexplicable and hypnotic -- if not downright demonic -- charisma, and the influence they exerted over their followers. In a typical twist, Manson compared his position to that of the US President, who sent young Americans to be killed in Vietnam. Unlike in other known case histories of serial killers, who mostly were loners acting individually, Manson knew how to delegate.

Family Legacy

There are also some bizarre afterwords to this story, as the popular culture's infatuation with Manson still goes on.
Trent Reznor, the main man of the industrial dance act Nine Inch Nails, claimed that he had -- totally without his knowing, he insisted -- rented the same Cielo Drive mansion (which address had now, for understandable reasons, been changed) to record NIN's 1994 album Downward Spiral, whose many songs, such as Piggies and March of the Pigs, were closely entangled around Manson mythology.
Furthermore, Reznor claimed, many freak occurrences happened during the recording of album, such as various electric devices turning on and off without any visible reason; strange dark figures seen on the surveillance monitors, and other classic haunted house phenomena detected. Was this just a sick publicity stunt from Reznor, trying to milk on Manson's popular counter-culture status, or was there actually some truth behind these claims; this probably can't be said for sure.
Later, Reznor produced in the very same Hollywood Hills house another shock-horror rock band, which called themselves Marilyn Manson -- that was also the artist name of their flamboyant leader, one Brian Warner, who, suitably, had once been Anton Szandor LaVey's pupil...
Nowadays the ex-Cielo Drive 10050 mansion has been totally demolished, with a new construction all over the site. The address is now 10066.
As for Charles Manson, now in California's Corcoran State Prison, he is still said to get four fan letters a day; more mail than any prisoner in the United States.

Recommended reading

"Democracy's Baby", an essay by Jason Wynd (sadly offline now) tells one version of what might have happened: was the Manson case just an intricate Manchurian Candidate or even a Kennedy assassination-type of plot to put an end to the 60's counter-culture by demonising hippy? Or was even more involved there?
Conspiracy theories abound: it was just too convenient for the Nixon regime -- let's get a gang of crazed hippies on LSD to murder a bunch of Hollywood celebrities, add some Beatles quotes in the whole messy soup (remember Lennon's anti-establishment stance), and voilá: you have successfully discredited the whole 1960s counterculture.
And to think of all supernatural and occult connections of this story -- is there really some of kind of curse or just bad karma? There are just too many strange coincidences around. One thing that is sure is that the investigations will go on at the pHinnWeb Bunker...

Bibliography:

Kenneth Anger: Hollywood Babylon. (New York: Dell, 1975)

Gavin Baddeley: Lucifer Rising. Sin, Devil Worship & Rock'n'Roll. (London: Plexus Books, 1999)

Mikita Brottman: Hollywood Hex - An Illustrated History of Cursed Movies. Creation Cinema Collection #13. (London: Creation Books, 1999)

Vincent Bugliosi, Curt Gentry: Helter Skelter. The True Story of the Manson Murders. (New York: WW Norton & Co, 1974/1994)

Ivan Butler: The Cinema of Roman Polanski. (London/New York: Zwemmer-Barnes, 1969)

Alex Constantine: The Covert War Against Rock: What You Don't Know About the Deaths of Jim Morrison, Tupac Shakur, Michael Hutchence, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Phil Ochs, Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, John Lennon, The Notorious B.I.G. (Venice, CA: Feral House, 2000).

David Dalton: Pleased To Meet You... Mojo, September 1999, p. 76.

Erik Davis: TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information. (San Francisco: Harmony Books, 1998)

James Ellroy: My Dark Places (London: Century Books/Random House, 1996)

Mia Farrow: What Falls Away: A Memoir (New York: Bantam, 1997)

Simon Goddard: Luck of the Devil -- Kenneth Anger. Uncut, January 2002, p. 108.

Gary Valentine (a.k.a. Lachman): Season of the Witch. Mojo, September 1999, pp. 78-89.

Gary Valentine Lachman: Turn Off Your Mind. The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius. (London, Sidgwick & Jackson, 2001; ISBN: 0283063661.)

Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain: Acid Dreams. The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, Th

Assorted Weirdness

u find "nuggets" everywhere?                 http://davesweb.cnchost.com/nws

NEWSLETTER #82
July 25, 2006

Assorted Weirdness
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr82.html

First off, it turns out that the photo of John Kerry and Anton LaVey appears to be a hoax – which serves me right, I suppose, for rather gratuitously tacking it onto the last newsletter. Snopes.com has debunked the photo, and, while Snopes.com is far from being the most credible source of information, their debunking of this particular hoax appears pretty convincing. (http://www.snopes.com/photos/politics/lavey.asp)

The hoax photo was created by persons unknown by combining the photo to the left of LaVey alongside one of his disciples, Marilyn Manson, and the photo to the right of Kerry with some guy named Rami Salami. I have to say though that it is a pretty clever hoax that someone obviously spent a little time on. Reversing the images and adding shadowing behind Kerry are clever touches, as are the fake edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, the clever caption added to the photo, and the inclusion of a portion of a fabricated article. Kudos to whoever created this hoax – but please don't do it again. It makes me look bad.

There is also some controversy over the comments attributed to ecologist Eric Pianka, with Pianka claiming that his lecture was misrepresented by an academic rival seeking to tarnish his reputation (http://www.cbc.ca/story/science/national/2006/04/05/ecology-prof-20060405.html?print). Pianka, however, didn't actually deny the genocidal comments attributed to him, and a university spokesman, curiously enough, defended Pianka’s right to hold such views: "'We have a lot of different points of view on the University of Texas at Austin campus. And we certainly support our faculty in saying what they think,' said Don Hale, a spokesman for the University of Texas. 'They have the right to express their point of view,' he said. 'But they're expressing their personal point of view.'"

That is certainly an enlightened policy. Too bad it doesn't appear to apply to all the university faculty members across the country whose "personal points of view" happen to be critical of the Bush regime.

The previously cited article from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reveals some interesting facts about the unusual ecologist with the disturbing views on population control. We learn, for example, that Pianka "became disabled at the age of 13 when he set off a bazooka shell that he picked up on an army base and developed gangrene in his leg." Before reading this, I didn’t even realize that a thirteen-year-old kid could wander onto an army base and shuffle off with a live bazooka round. Believe it or not, I thought the army actually kept better track of such things. You learn something new every day.

Despite his disability, by the way, Pianka “spent 10 years as a hermit in the desert,” before emerging from the wilds to become a respected scientist. In other words, he's kind of like a Ted Kaczynski in reverse. Put a 'hoodie' and some aviator sunglasses on him and he could probably pass for Ted's long-lost brother. I wonder if they were in the same MK-ULTRA class back in their college days?

Pianka now lives with a herd of bison, including an enormous bull named – why does this not surprise me? – Lucifer. You can read all about it in Pianka's, uhmm, obituary, which he has thoughtfully penned himself (http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/obit.html). He has also posted a brief explanation of his views on population control, concluding with, predictably enough, an endorsement of Richard Heinberg's fictional 'Peak Oil' book (http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/Everybody.html). (For an interesting take on Heinberg, by the way, drop by here for a visit: http://www.dreamsend.blogspot.com/. And while you're there, see if you can wake Ty up and get him writing again.)

* * * * * * * * * *

I suppose I next need to address some of the questions that have come in concerning the “Cheney’s Got a Gun” newsletters. "Were you actually trying to say," inquiring minds want to know, "that we should believe those crazy stories about Cheney's passion for playing The Most Dangerous Game?"

Well ... uhmm ... yeah, I guess I was rather strongly implying it, without actually saying it. In retrospect, that seems a little wimpy. But explicitly leveling such accusations does tend to make one seem a bit mentally unbalanced, so I opted to be rather coy. However, as regular readers will recall, I have touched upon this topic once before, in Newsletter #50 (February 16, 2004), following the widely publicized Cheney/Scalia duck hunting trip:

This one is from the "things that make you go 'hmmm ...'" files.

A story that has been circulating in the conspiracy community for quite some time now holds that our back-up quarterback, Dick Cheney, has a fondness for playing "The Most Dangerous Game." In other words, he allegedly likes to, quite literally, hunt humans. Preferably young, naked, female humans. For sport.

I know what you're thinking, so let me just say that I don't make this stuff up. Nor do I vouch for its veracity. All that I am saying is that these claims have been made – albeit not, to my knowledge, by the most credible of sources. Nevertheless, what is being claimed is not beyond the realm of possibility. After all, what we are talking about here, on the one hand, is abhorrent and psychopathic behavior. And on the other hand, we are talking about Dick Cheney. These two things are not, quite obviously, mutually exclusive.

... Consider the following report from the venerable Los Angeles Times:

"Two Black Hawk helicopters were brought in and hovered nearby as Cheney and Scalia were whisked away in a heavily guarded motorcade to a secluded, private hunting camp owned by an oil industry businessman [identified as Wallace Carline, the head of Diamond Services Corp.] ... the Cheney-Scalia trip drew the attention of local officials because of the unusual security precautions ... on the morning of Jan. 5, a large security contingent was in place -- two Black Hawk air combat rescue helicopters, a line of armored sport utility vehicles and a ring of federal agents and sheriff's deputies who set up a security perimeter. The area was declared a no-fly zone for other aircraft ... Perry [Ken Perry, of the Perry Flying Center at the Harry P. Williams Airport] said Cheney was among the first to deplane, followed by Scalia and a young woman who was identified to Perry as one of the justice's daughters. Both Perry and Naquin [David Naquin, the local sheriff] said there were orders prohibiting photographs of those who exited the planes and climbed into the motorcade. But two days later, Cheney returned to the airport without Scalia, and photographs were allowed ... Scalia stayed on to hunt a few more days, the sheriff said, but local officials said it was unclear how he returned to Washington." [David G. Savage and Richard A. Serrano "Scalia Was Cheney Hunt Trip Guest," Los Angeles Times, February 5, 2004]

Uhmm, would it be considered rude to ask what happened to Scalia's 'daughter'? Why is there no mention of how she returned to Washington? And would Scalia really have brought his daughter along on such an outing? Since it wasn't a big secret that Scalia and Cheney were there, doesn't it seem reasonable to conclude that the ban on photographs was intended to protect the young woman's identity? And did Scalia really hang around to hunt for a few more days, despite the fact that, according to Sheriff Naquin, the hunting "was terrible. There were very few ducks killed."?

Is it possible that Scalia and Cheney opted to leave separately so as not to highlight the fact that someone in their party had gone missing? Since no one saw Scalia leave, then it follows that no one can confirm whether his 'daughter' left with him. And even if she did, doesn't this story, at the very least, have the makings of a good sex scandal? I mean, when two older guys and a young woman go duck hunting for a couple of days and no one brings back any ducks, people are going to talk. And if the two guys come back without ducks or the girl, then I think we could have a serious problem.

That secretive, high-security hunting outing was the first indication that maybe those hushed rumors about Cheney weren't so crazy after all. The second clue surfaced in September of 2004, when the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel inadvertently published a rather, uhhh, revealing photograph of our illustrious vice president. But before discussing that further, I have to note here, for the uninformed, that the same women who have accused Cheney of having a fondness for hunting humans have also claimed that he is an unusually well-endowed man. Yes, that's right: Cheney not only is a big dick, he also allegedly has a big dick – which seems to be on display in the Sentinel photo to the right.

Of course, there are other explanations. Some have suggested that Big Dick was wearing a colostomy bag. Or maybe he had just taken a large dump in his shorts. Maybe he smuggles ferrets in his pants. Maybe he has a partially developed conjoined twin growing out of his left thigh. Or maybe, as his accusers have claimed, he really is packing a schlong that would make even Milton Berle and Tommy Lee feel inadequate.

According to an article that appeared in Milwaukee Magazine, what you see in the photo is exactly what it appears to be: "Guldan [the photographer who captured the image of Cheney on a campaign stop in Wisconsin] got a call from a reader the next day. 'Did you notice anything unusual about that picture?' the reader asked. Upon closer inspection, it seems the vice president’s smile was not his biggest, ahem, asset. Is that what we think it is? 'You’re not imagining it,' Guldan says of the unintentionally revealing photo. Let’s just say the snugness of Cheney’s pants left little to the imagination, and we’re not talking about his waistline."

The Journal Sentinel, by the way, has opted to deny all requests to reprint the copyrighted photo. Unauthorized scans of the newsprint version, however, have been known to circulate around the cyber world.

But what are we to make of them? Do they validate the women's stories? If the alleged witnesses are right about Cheney's, uhmm, endowments, then are they right about other things as well? Is there some other way they could have learned of Cheney's unusual assets? I don't claim to have the answers to those questions. All I'm saying is that maybe Cheney's curious duck hunting trip, and his even more curious quail hunting trip, provide disturbing clues to the nature of the world we live in.

* * * * * * * * * *

Sometimes you find essential truths about that world in the most unexpected of places. Take, for example, an obscure motion picture bearing the not-very-promising title of “Peeping Tom.” I’m going to go out on a limb here and speculate that none of you have ever heard of this film, unless there happens to be a hardcore 'film geek' or two in the crowd.

I stumbled across it largely by accident. The wife, you see, bestowed a Netflix membership on me this past Christmas. And after several weeks of renting movies, “Peeping Tom” came up on my list of recommended rentals (which probably tells you more about my viewing habits than you really need to know). Based on the title and the brief synopsis provided by Netflix, it didn’t look to be of much interest, but it had received good reviews so I decided to give it a chance. After all, how bad could it be? It’s not like Charleton Heston was cast in the starring role.

As it turned out, “Peeping Tom” is a remarkable film with a curious history. As the story goes, this cinematic gem was almost lost to the world forever, and remained virtually unseen for the first twenty years of its existence. Upon its release in the UK (it was a British production), it was immediately attacked by the media. The assault was so harsh and unrelenting that the film was pulled from theaters within a week and the movie’s director, previously one of the most highly-regarded film directors then working, left the country and moved to Australia, his career and reputation in ruins.

The year was 1960. Three months after “Peeping Tom” was pulled from theaters, a film that it is now frequently compared to by film historians, Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” arrived in theaters and received a considerably more favorable response. By then, “Peeping Tom” had disappeared and wouldn’t be seen again for two full decades, when it was apparently rediscovered by American filmmakers Martin Scorcese and Francis Ford Coppola. Though the film is now available on DVD, it remains a largely buried treasure.

The film's plot-line revolves around a protagonist named Mark Lewis (seen here in the film's brief nude scene - the first in a major studio production - which I have included here in an obvious attempt to increase traffic to my website), an oddly sympathetic psychopath played by Austrian actor Karl Boehm. By day, the creepy yet charismatic Lewis works in the mainstream film industry as an assistant cameraman. But by night, our anti-hero pursues other interests – such as soliciting the services of prostitutes, shooting pornographic films, brutally murdering a series of attractive young women, and, last but certainly not least, producing snuff films.

Quite a heady mix, I have to say, for a film that appeared on movie screens (albeit very briefly) nearly half-a-century ago. And there’s more! As is noted in a British television documentary that is included on the DVD, the Mark Lewis character was “driven to voyeurism and murder by traumatic childhood experiences at the hands of his psychologist father.” Huh?! Traumatic childhood abuse at the hands of a psychologist? ... resulting in the spawning of a serial killer/snuff film maker? Who would have ever guessed that?

In the film, Mark Lewis’ father is depicted as having devoted his life to studying the human reaction to fear. Of particular interest was the fear reaction in – you guessed it – children. And being the depraved and sadistic sort of guy that he was, his favorite test subject was his own son, whom he systematically traumatized throughout the boy’s childhood, while, naturally enough, carefully documenting each act of abuse on film. So now the son, having been properly conditioned by the father, carries on the family tradition by filming the fear on his victims’ faces at the moment of their violent death. To pass the time between kills, our leading man spends endless hours viewing his sizable film library, which includes both the films of his own torture as a child and his own self-produced snuff films.

And where, you may be wondering, did such a deranged, disturbing, yet oddly familiar storyline come from? To answer that question, we must turn to the bonus documentary entitled “A Very British Psycho,” produced for British television in 1997. There we learn that although the film is most closely associated with disgraced director Michael Powell, it was actually the creation of Leo Marks, described by the documentary’s narrator as “a figure as secretive and mysterious as his near namesake, Mark Lewis.”

Mr. Marks, as it turns out, was at one time a high-level intelligence operative. Imagine my surprise at that revelation!

We also learn that Leo Marks spent a considerable amount of his childhood in a bookstore co-owned by his father. From the age of eight, young Leo’s dad took him to work daily, where he spent his time reading through the store’s three-story collection of rare books. The entire third floor of the store, as Marks recalled, was filled with “occult and Masonic books.” The store, by the way, was named Marks and Co. Booksellers, but it later became much better known by its street address, 84 Charing Cross Road.

Just after the onset of World War II, Leo Marks was put in charge of a division of a newly established British intelligence entity known as the SOE, or Special Operations Executive. Considered to be a master code-breaker, Marks was said to be obsessed with creating increasingly sophisticated codes, his ultimate goal being to create an unbreakable code. Though quite young at the time, he was placed in charge of all codes and ciphers for the SOE. That, at least, was his official assignment.

It appears, however, that Marks’ true goal was not so much to create an unbreakable code, which he acknowledged was not possible, but rather to create unbreakable agents. The same kind of agents, in other words, that George Estabrooks discussed in his seminal book, “Hypnotism.” The kind of agents that famed covergirl Candy Jones later revealed herself to be. The kind of agents who will not give up information even if subjected to severe torture, because they’re not even aware that they are carrying information. The kind of agents who are not just unwilling, but unable to give up their data without the proper, uhmm, ‘handling.’

As I have written several times before, Estabrooks, a prominent American military psychiatrist, claimed that programs aimed at creating such agents were fully operational during World War II (contrary to the claims of the vast majority of MK-ULTRA researchers, who claim that Western intelligence agencies didn't even begin researching such programs until after the war). Leo Marks, operating on the other side of the Atlantic during WWII, seems to have been working on a parallel course. Many of the agents who worked under Marks at that time, perhaps not surprisingly, happened to be attractive young women. And many of them worked on highly-classified assignments that took them deep into Nazi-occupied Europe.

The documentary filmmakers located and spoke to a couple of these women, many decades after the fact, and they had some rather revealing recollections – or perhaps I should say non-recollections – of their days spent working under Marks in the SOE. One of the women, speaking of her former boss, recalled that he “had a way of, of talking to you and you forgot the first bit he said. You know what I mean? You just simply forgot it. It’s a sort of knack he has. If he doesn’t want you to remember it, he sees that you don’t.” Another shared the fact that she has very limited recall of her SOE days: “The strange thing is that, although I remember it all very clearly – the interview, where we worked, which was on Baker Street – I can see it all. But the actual work, I can’t remember.” She added that it made her wonder if maybe Leo Marks had “some sort of Svengali influence.”

Marks himself shared with the filmmakers that there “was an attempt made to help them [the female agents] to forget.” He then quickly added, with a sly smile, “But if you are on the verge of asking me what it was, I have brainwashed myself into forgetting it.” He also offered a cryptic description of how he would prep his agents before sending them on assignment: “Before going to brief an agent for the last time, I tried to develop an inner ear, because the best communication is unconscious. It’s what the unconscious says to the unconscious.”

You don’t have to read too deeply between the lines to recognize that Leo Marks and the agents he was 'prepping' were deeply involved in a World War II mind-control project – a project that involved sending young female couriers deep into Nazi territory. And it was that very project, appropriately enough, that provided the inspiration for the movie “Peeping Tom.” As Marks candidly told his interviewer, “the idea of writing ‘Peeping Tom’ was born in the briefing rooms of SOE.”

Let’s briefly review the major thematic elements of this curious story that was “born in the briefing rooms of SOE”: if I recall correctly, we begin with a mixture of serial murder, snuff films, sadistic psychiatrists and ritualized child abuse; we next toss in a little pornography and prostitution, and then serve up the vile mix over a hidden subtext of occult influences, Nazis and mind control operations. And all this, mind you, in a feature film released in 1960, many years before such terms as “mind control,” “serial killer” and “snuff film” would enter the Western lexicon.

As I watched the film and the accompanying documentary, all of this seemed very familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. I knew I had read something with similar themes – Nazi and occult influences, child pornography and prostitution, mind control operations, ritualized child abuse, serial murder, snuff films, sadistic psychiatrists – but what was it? And then it hit me! It was an obscure book entitled "Programmed to Kill." Leo Marks had, it appears, slyly revealed some of the hidden connections nearly four decades before I began my own research.

The point of all this, I suppose, is that I have good news for those of you who have read the book and thought to yourself, "I wonder when the movie version is going to be coming out?" As it turns out, it has already completed its brief theatrical run. But you can still catch it on DVD.

Before moving on, I should mention another interesting factoid about this most fascinating of films: director Powell’s original pick to play the lead role in this film was Laurence Harvey, who would shortly thereafter portray that most enigmatic of mind-controlled killers, "The Manchurian Candidate." Harvey’s daughter, curiously enough, was herself the subject of a recent Hollywood film, a poorly-made and highly-fictionalized account of the life and times of a young woman who, despite (or perhaps because of) her privileged upbringing, inhabited a shadowy, seedy, violent world of crime, corruption and covert intelligence operations. Domino Harvey, the subject of the film, turned up dead just before the movie’s scheduled release.

That sort of thing happens in Hollywood. It's really nothing to be concerned about.

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Before venturing too far off the topic of serial killers, I suppose I need to revisit the case of the so-called BTK killer. As I am sure you all recall, I last commented on the case back in March 2005, following the arrest of patsy Dennis Rader. If you've forgotten, here's the Cliff Notes version: the 'BTK' killings began with the targeted assassinations of Joseph Otero, a military intelligence operative, and three members of his family. Later on, the murders of six women were said to be connected and all ten of the deaths were written off as the work of yet another of those mythical creatures known as serial killers.

In June of 2005, Rader - "in a voice so dispassionate that he might have been discussing the tulips in his garden ... so coldly, so matter-of-factly, with no flinching and no emotion" - confessed to all ten of the murders, thus eliminating the need for a messy trial during which the state might have had to actually present something that there was a serious shortage of: evidence. Not that there was anything unusual about that; many serial killers have been courteous enough to spare the state the impossible task of having to prove their case without benefit of actual evidence. It's so much easier to just wrap things up with a confession and guilty plea, leaving all the unanswered questions swept under the rug. (P.J. Huffstutter and Stephanie Simon "Serial Killer Cooly Admits His Guilt," Los Angeles Times, June 28, 2005)

The way in which Rader delivered his confession, however, was a bit unusual. As the Los Angeles Times reported, "the terms Rader used to describe his killings - 'trolling' for victims, 'stalking' his prey - startled former FBI profiler Clint Van Zandt. 'He's quoting serial killer tradecraft,' Van Zandt said. 'These are words that I would use standing up in front of a class of FBI agents or law enforcement officers talking about serial killers.'" (Nicholas Riccardi and Alan Zarembo "Killers Words, Traits Familiar to the Experts," Los Angeles Times, June 28, 2005)

I am pretty sure that Van Zandt was later heard to say, "Who the hell coached this guy?! What the fuck were you people thinking?! 'Real' serial killers aren't supposed to talk that way! This isn't a goddamned TV show!"

Rader's preposterous confession left many questions unanswered. As the Times acknowledged, he "did not talk about why he had taunted law enforcement with letters and phone calls, or why he stopped killing after the murder of Delores E. Davis in 1991. Nor did he explain why he resumed sending reporters puzzles and clues in March 2004."

Not only did he not explain why he stopped killing, he failed to explain how he stopped killing. As any 'true crime' aficionado can tell you, once a 'serial killer' has tasted blood, they will not and cannot stop killing until they are caught. How then are we to explain the pattern of Rader's alleged crimes? After offing four members of the Otero family in a single morning, Rader supposedly killed just six more victims over the course of the next seventeen years, and then, for no apparent reason, stopped killing entirely for the next fifteen years, during which time he lived a normal, violence-free, and rather nondescript life. But then, having supposedly gotten away with the murders, and with the trail having grown hopelessly cold, Rader decided, for no reason at all, to begin sending taunting letters once again. This was not, mind you, because he had suddenly reacquired the urge to kill, since no additional murders were threatened or committed, but because he wished to give the police an opportunity to finally close the book on this case.

To explain the wildly inconsistent Modus Operandi at the various crime scenes, Rader claimed in his confession that he sometimes "forgot to bring his hit kit" and thus had to improvise. Call me a skeptic if you will, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to call "Bullshit!" on that one. Are we really to believe that a guy who committed just six murders over seventeen years, spending on average, I'm assuming, about three years to plan each one, forgot to bring his killing tools on about half of those six missions?

Apparently that is exactly what we are to believe, for one of the detectives who worked the case assured the Times that Rader was a "bumbling idiot," and bumbling idiots "are the hardest to track." Rader "was so disorganized," said the detective, that "there was not a pattern of any kind." I guess it's a good thing then that Rader sent all those taunting messages, or else law enforcement officials might have actually been fooled into believing that the crimes weren't really connected at all!

Who would have known, after all, that the elusive pattern to these crimes was that there was no pattern at all? And who would have guessed, by the way, that a bumbling idiot could mastermind ten murders and then elude authorities for some thirty years?

* * * * * * * * * *

From deep within the bowels of the May 25, 2006 edition of the Los Angeles Times:

German Child Molester Sentenced to 20 Years
Paul Schaefer, the German leader of a former religious cult in Chile, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for sexual abuse of more than two dozen children, a lawyer involved in the prosecution said. Schaefer, 84, fled Chile in 1997. He was arrested in Argentina last year. Schaefer still faces human rights abuse charges relating to aiding the Augusto Pinochet military regime.

What makes this story of interest is a little fact that the Times' editors left out: Schaefer is the expatriate Nazi credited with founding Chile's notorious Colonia Dignidad. And if you don't understand the significance of that, then Google it or something. I don't have time to explain right now. I would though like to point out that Pinochet's was a puppet regime controlled by the good ole USA. So the work that Schaefer was doing for Pinochet? ... was really work that he was doing for the boys in Washington. Because we all know that spreading democracy around the world sometimes involves a little torture, an execution or two, and a side order of sadistic pedophilia.

* * * * * * * * * *

Thanks to my Netflix membership, I made another rather remarkable discovery: women, it seems, have gone through an extraordinary period of evolutionary development in the last few decades.

When I first started up my Netflix account, you see, I had a little trouble filling up my queue with future rentals, due primarily to the fact that most Hollywood offerings these days are virtually unwatchable. So I had to go retro, so to speak, by populating my rental list with films that I remembered from my formative years in that most vapid of American decades, the 1970s. The first thing I discovered, shockingly enough, is that "Billy Jack" and "The Omega Man" are not films that have aged well. But that's not really relevant to our discussion.

What's important here is that films from the 1970s featured a lot of boobies. But they weren't like the boobies of today. In the 1970s, women's breasts came in all different shapes and sizes. Nature was, as far as I can tell, still experimenting with various breast configurations. Some were, by today's standards, quite small. Indeed, it is not uncommon today to see a set of man-boobs on "The Biggest Loser" that put women's breasts from the 1970s to shame.

Some were also bizarrely shaped, resembling cones, or, in some cases, fried eggs. Tragically, some were also strikingly asymmetrical, with one breast clearly larger than the other. Curiously, breasts also moved in strange ways in the 1970s, sometimes bouncing, sometimes jiggling, and sometimes actually lying flat when the breast's owner lied on her back! It is pretty obvious, in retrospect, that the 1970s represented an early period in the evolution of the female breast.

As anyone who watches movies or television today knows, women's breasts are now uniformly large, firm, beautifully proportioned, perfectly symmetrical, and nearly immobile. Actually, that's not entirely true; sometimes they are large, firm, immobile, and wildly out of proportion to the rest of the woman's body. So the common denominators, I suppose, are that they are large, firm and immobile.

From this, we can safely conclude that large, firm, immobile breasts are important for the survival of the species -- so important that in just thirty short years, virtually all women with small, pointy breasts have died off, while large breasted women have thrived. And it's all for the best, I suppose. After all, the less evolved women from the 1970s, were they still around today, would have a hard time finding work in Hollywood. Worse yet, they would likely have to resort to some rather creative bra stuffing to avoid public ridicule.

Speaking of evolution, by the way, there is something that I have long been curious about: how exactly does Darwinian evolutionary theory account for the prevalence of human homosexuality? Surely we can all agree, without passing any moral judgment on the gay lifestyle, that homosexuality is a human variation that does not favor survival of the species. That much seems clear. And according to Darwin, those traits that do not favor perpetuation of the species will die out through the process of natural selection. Why then, after millions of years of alleged human evolution, are there still so many gay individuals among us? Does this make sense to anyone?

The question becomes, I suppose, one of whether homosexuality is a genetic or a learned behavior. Curiously enough, those who claim that homosexuality is an acquired condition that can be 'cured' tend to come from the Christian Right camp, which also teaches that the theory of human evolution is entirely bogus, while those who believe that homosexuality is a genetic condition tend to come from the left/liberal camp, which enthusiastically embraces evolutionary theory. In other words, those who preach evolutionary theory view homosexuality in a way that contradicts Darwin's principals, while those who preach creationism view homosexuality in a way that is consistent with Darwin's principals.

Personally, I think both sides are full of shit. But that's just me.

By the way, while we're on the subject of evolution, can someone please explain to me why I was born with so many useless - and, in some cases, potentially harmful - body parts? To date, various surgeons have carved away my tonsils, my wisdom teeth and my foreskin, though not necessarily in that order. I'm thinking about getting rid of my appendix next, and then maybe my little toes. What I'm saying, I guess, is that my body was pretty poorly designed when I first acquired it, brand new off the showroom floor. I've had most of the flaws repaired, but the point is that I wouldn't have had to if my body had been intelligently designed, or if it had been the refined product of a lengthy process of evolutionary development.

Of course, only a fool would question the theory of evolution, even though the theory is most closely associated with a man who, along with other members of his clan, was a key figure in the eugenics movement, and even though the concept of natural selection just happens to nicely compliment the eugenics agenda, which, in turn, dovetails nicely with the agenda of the 'Peak Oil' crowd, whose theory, as we all know, rests upon the notion of oil as a 'fossil fuel,' which is taken as a given by most of the scientific community, which just goes to show you, I suppose, that you shouldn't always listen to the scientific community.

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