dots,dots,dots ........wakey ,wakey ...seeepy heads :o
Clue To 911 – Shooters At Navy Yard And Aurora Linked To ‘NSA-CIA West’
truther
September 25, 2013
Yoichi Shimatsu
The
Washington Navy Yard
shootings ensure that details of Aaron Alexis’s career with U.S.
intelligence agencies will remain inside a deep freezer alongside the dossier on another rogue government agent, the Aurora
movie
shooter James “the Joker” Holmes. These two villains have striking
similarities: Both are linked by an admiration for the ArmaLite AR-15
spray gun and they also suffer bizarre psychiatric disorders, including
chronic
anxiety, heightened paranoia and
strange voices inside their heads.
The other feature in common between these now-retired government
contractors is their work for the emerging new hub for America’s most
advanced espionage capabilities Aurora, Colorado, along with next-door
Denver and other sites in the Rocky
Mountain
region. Alexis had a role in transferring Hewlett Packard network
systems vital to NSA intercepts of satellite communications from NSA
facilities at East Coast naval bases to Colorado.
Buckley airfield in Aurora, home of the Aerospace
Data Center,
is currently being upgraded and expanded. Its huge golf-ball shaped
antennae capture signals from orbiting satellites operated by the
National Reconnaissance Office, NASA and the U.S. Air Force, along with
data intercepted from the orbiting spacecraft of other countries and
private corporations. This intelligence, once analyzed, is shuttled to
the North American Aerospace Command in Colorado Springs, which is also
the
location of the Air Force
Academy. (see “Intelligence service being secretive about who, where and
when; post-9/11 decentralization”
http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_3431085)
In nearby Lakewood, the Federal Center is being remodeled to house
the CIA’s domestic surveillance program, which is aimed eavesdropping on
U.S. citizens with the goal of psychological
profiling of everyone in the borders (http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/cia_moving_domestic_headquarters_to_denver/)
Before he opened fire on an audience at a Batman movie, Holmes
conducted graduate-level neuroscience research in Denver at the
University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus, which integrates
patient care and
clinical trials
with frontline biomedical studies.
(http://www.ucdenver.edu/about/newsroom/newsreleases/Pages/Neuroscience-Program-and-Holmes-information.aspx)
His psychiatric disorders may well be linked to the overexposure to
powerful
electromagnetic radiation from Buckley airfield and other intelligence centers concentrated in the area.
Although this unlikely pair followed separate career tracks and never
met each other, the two shooters were each involved in secret work for
the U.S. government. Since hard
facts about this duo of evil-doers are scarce as hen’s teeth, the only method left to
investigative journalism,
short of a long camping trip in the Rockies, is context analysis and
scenario development. While much of this discussion is admittedly
speculative due to the thinness of evidence and unreliability of
ever-changing media claims, the principal focus here is on the
background to the secret work that Alexis did for the U.S. intelligence
community. Holmes’ research funded by the National Institutes of Health
is given passing mention as another facet of the mountain region’s emergence as America’s “Third Line” of strategic defense and tech-based intelligence gathering.
Operational Secrecy on 911
The Aaron Alexis story begins as so many other tragic events of our
time on September 11, 2001. As told to the British press by his
stepfather Frank Calderon, Alexis was riding up the escalator from the
subway station below the World Trade Center just as the twin towers were
collapsing. For hours, he remained outside the WTC entrance yet
miraculously survived the downpour of shattered glass and splintered
steel. Then, according to the stepfather’s account, Alexis participated
in the rescue work alongside the first respondents over the following
three days. (The Daily Mail, Sept. 18, 2013, Interview by Paul Thompson)
This story of personal heroism was also told to the Seattle police
officers who questioned Alexis in 2004 after he shot the tires of a
car. Alexis suspected the construction workers inside the car of being
assassins sent to kill him. The gun charges were subsequently dropped by
one of America’s toughest police forces, certainly not because of the
cock-and-bull tale about WTC patriotism. Security clearances usually get
the release from police custody of secret agents in event of common
crimes, sparing the CIA the embarrassment of a police report and court
case.
The New York Job
Now let’s move on to the salient points of his role in the WTC
disaster. At the time of 911, the Bedford-Stuyvesant-born Alexis resided
at the Queens home of his stepfather. Calderon himself was employed at
“one of the WTC buildings”, where his night shift normally ended at 7
a.m. After the disaster, the stepfather relocated to Richmond, Virginia,
where he has since done unspecified work at a local bank. (Daily Mail,
Sept. 18) Judging from his modest station in life, Calderon was not a
high-rolling stock analyst tracking Asian stock markets. His night job
was probably as a security guard.
The security company that watched over the World Trade Center was
Stratesec. Its principals until the year prior to the 911 attacks, were
Marvin Bush, the brother of former
president George W. Bush,
and his cousin Wirt Walker III. Stratesec also provided security for
United Airlines (two of its jetliners were supposedly hijacked) and for
Dulles Airport, where one of the commandeered planes reportedly took
off. (This is well-documented by different media, including
www.historycommons.org/ entity.jsp?entity=stratesec )
Alexis, according to his stepfather, worked an IT job inside “a
building in the WTC complex.” (Daily Mail, Sept. 18) The address is off
by a few meters. His stepson was employed by building contractors
renovating the Fiterman Hall office tower for conversion into an urban
campus of the Borough of Manhattan Community College, part of the CUNY
system.
The 15-floor building at 81 Barclay Street represented the largest
grant ever given to City University of New York. The donor was Miles
Fiterman, a lumber tycoon and builder of prefab homes, based in Thief
River Falls, Minnesota. The Bush Foundation and the Fiterman family are
major donors to the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis. (Walker Annual
Report, 2002)
Alexis’s IT job was not anything as flashy as programming or software
design. He wired computer hardware as a lowly electrician’s apprentice.
(His later job for the Navy was as an aircraft electrician and he did
the same type of work for a Hewlett Packard subcontractor at several
navy bases. The task is by no means easy. Connecting routers, modems,
servers, encryption devices, monitors and phone lines for large-scale
customers is more complicated than plugging in personal devices.)
Now the curious aspect to this situation is that the Fiterman tower
sat cater-cornered (catty-corner in Deep South dialect) to the World
Trade Center 7 building. The corners of the two structures were pointed
at each other in an ominous fengshui relationship, as hostile as the
beaks and claws of a pair of fighting roosters.
Conveniently located between the Filterman and WTC-7 was the New York
Telephone
Building, since taken over by Verizon. All wires led into the N.Y. Tel,
and the bundles of phone cables were protected inside underground
utility tunnels that are tall and wide enough for easy access by
linemen.
An Internet
installation
company, especially in those days when DSL meant coaxial cable or
dedicated phone lines, had access to the utility tunnels and links to telephone switch boxes. The CIA through one of its many fronts for wiretapping also had routine access to the NYT system.
At a time when not many office managers had a clue about the
Internet, a DSL provider could easy install a network of wiring through
conduits along the steel girders of the entire World Trade Center.
Router closets and inverter boxes placed right on the support beams
would attract no attention.
Thus, from the demolition control center in the Fiterman could run
cables under the utility tunnels beneath narrow Barclay Street into the
New York Telephone network feeding into the World Trade Center. Former
military electricians, in the uniforms of a friendly Internet provide,
then could efficiently install the boxes packed with electric detonators
and explosives at critical points of the structure. Using pyrotechnics
(fireworks) control software, the programmers would key in the timing
sequence for the blast, as planned by an experienced building-demolition
expert. The Internet is far more efficient a system for killing office
workers and a rival faction inside the CIA than, say, battery-powered
timing devices or chemical fuses.
The other compelling reason for using Internet-triggered demolition,
besides easy unnoticed access to site, is that the blasts had to follow
the crash of remotely controlled jetliners into the towers. The
so-called hijacking is readily done with the remote cockpit software
invented by same Israeli company that designed drone-piloting systems
for the Israel Defense Force and also the Waterfall critical
infrastructure that protects power plants from their Stuxnet virus. The
Internet is a remarkable advance for terrorism, false-flag operations,
propaganda preliminary to a political coup and for deceiving the public
afterwards. 911 was the best pyrotechnics show ever, outdoing the
Reichstag fire.
Explosives Inside Filterman
When the 47-story WTC-7 underwent a series of explosions and
collapsed at 5:20 on the afternoon of September 11, the adjacent Post
Office and N.Y. Telephone building sustained no damage. The Fiterman
structure, on the other hand, lost much of its south-facing exterior.
A
strange
thing then happened. After the WTC-7 upper floors imploded, only then
quite inexplicably did a chunk of the Fiterman Building get blown off
and soared over its much-reduced neighbor. Like a mortar round, the
fragment flew a distance of 200 meters before smashing into the glass
atrium of the Winter Garden, which adjoins the yacht harbor on the
Hudson River. (“Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive by Joel
Meyerowitz, Phaedon Press 2006, p.47)
The role of the Fiterman building in the total schema of 911 has gone
virtually unnoticed. The power shot that cracked the glass arch of
Winter Garden could not have been caused by the WTC-7 collapse, which
exploded toward the opposite direction. The trajectory suggests that the
Fiterman’s south face was blown away from inside by a powerful blast
from around the 5th floor. The logical deduction is that explosives were
being stored inside the Fiterman Building, located opposite WTC-7.
(Several maps of the WTC complex are posted online)
Wiring the WTC
The unoccupied Fiterman building was ideal for a demolition team in
need of ample space for explosives, strands of wires, detonators,
vehicles, gas masks, a first-aid station, electric power generators, a
water supply and temporary living quarters. The south-facing rooms had a
direct view onto WTC-7 yet had some degree of protection from a blast
from across the street, due to the Telephone Building. (The site of
conspiracy-theory debunker James Randi has a forum on the Filterman,
which contrary to his objective shows disturbing aspects of its demise.
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=116127}
This scenario of an inside job better explains why Aaron Alexis was
at Ground Zero on 911. Besides the subway station below the twin towers,
there was also a maze of underground walkways that enabled him to pass
underneath the WTC complex without risk from flying shrapnel, smoke and
molten metal raining down onto the plaza. Not a single member of the
firefighting and emergency team has yet come forward with recollections
about a tall young black volunteer toiling in the dust for three days
straight after the disaster.
The likelier reason for his brief presence is that Alex was ordered
to conduct surveillance of the damage done to the towers and then
inspect the temporary cables to WTC-7 from the covert operations center
inside the Fiterman across the street. Those two extra days, September
12 and 13, were probably spent on evidence-removal duty, necessary tasks
such as rolling up detonator wires and disposing of incriminating
residue from Ground Zero. Much of this tedious work was done by
flashlight at nighttime, when emergency crews unfamiliar with the
underground passages dared not enter the smoking hulk.
Enigma Wrapped in Mystery
Soon after 5 p.m. on September 11, the CIA clandestine center in New
York, which organized spying on the UN headquarters and monitored Al
Qaeda worldwide, was blown to smithereens, killing key operatives
investigating links between terrorists and high-ranking politicians. 911
truthers point to the scientific fact that debris from the twin towers
could not possibly have caused the implosion of the WTC-7 intelligence
center, which housed offices of the CIA and Secret Service. (although a
subject of dispute by debunkers, it is now bwidely documented that the
CIA and DoD shared the 25th floor, as cited in WTC-7, Chapter 5, by
Gileanz, DiPaolo, et al.; a list of articles can be found at
http://www.911review.org/Wiki/Building7Collapse.shtml)
Frank Calderon, who probably recommended the next-door Fiterman job
to his stepson, and finagled a position with typical New York nepotism,
was not among the casualties of WTC-7 blast, even if it is highly
probable that he worked at that very site as a security guard, because
otherwise he would have identified the building number in press
interviews.
(Out of consideration for the family’s privacy and peace of mind, it
must be stated here that these scenarios are hypothetical, limited by
the scarcity of evidence, and done solely for the public benefit in
trying to unravel an important chapter of recent history. That the
pieces of this mystery fit together as tightly as a jigsaw puzzle is not
grounds for harassment or annoying phone calls to the family or Navy
Yard survivors.)
While the wreckage at Ground Zero was being slowly demolished by work
crews, the exterior of the Fiterman structure was painstakingly wrapped
with tarps as if its interior had to hidden from sight. Only much later
was the structure demolished without a trace of the workmanship that
had gone on inside. One thing is certain and that’s the Bush family, the
Fitermans and Larry Silverstein won’t be discussing any of this in
public.
The Missing Years
From autumn 2011 until his service with the Navy Reserves started in
2007, Aaron Alexis vanishes into thin air, on record at least. One of
his personally traits that acquaintances mention is that Alexis never
talked much. That goes with the training for a security clearance.
Whatever work he may have performed during those six years would later
qualify him to gain a higher-level security clearance at Navy
communications centers that provide raw intelligence to the NSA and CIA.
One outstanding clue to those missing years was his fluency in the
Thai language, which enabled him to chant sutras more smoothly than most
native Buddhists. (Taunton Daily Gazetter, Mass., as reported by AP)
During the early phase of the war on terrorism, Thailand was a major
transit point for defense contractors heading for Central Command bases
in the Persian Gulf and special-forces camps inside Pakistan,
Afghanistan and Iran.
The massive presence of contractors and intelligence agents in
Thailand was apparent during my volunteer stint immediately after the
2004 Christmas tsunami. According to Thai sources, the death toll of
foreign intelligence personnel began with the drowning of some 350
American uniformed servicemen when the tsunami hit the NSA listening
post inside the Thai Navy’s 3rd region headquarters at Ban Thap Mo base
on the Andaman Sea, just north of Phuket. (reported in a column by Kavi
Chongkittavorn, The Nation newspaper, Bangkok)
More details emerged from local boat captains after they heard about
my non-biased reporting from Kashmir and along the Afghan border. These
small-craft pilots on the Muslim-predominant coast told me that some
3,600 American, British and Israeli defense contractors were killed by
the tsunami after indulging in a holiday all-nighter on Patong Beach in
Phuket. In Krabi, the Israeli Defense Force lost so many of its naval
divers that its navy had to close the Gulf of Aqaba outside Eilat port
to foreign ships for many months thereafter. Some 200 American
mercenaries living in Bangkok were apparently buried in secret graves on
the road to Phuket, which is why the Pentagon demanded the bodies of
all tsunami victims be disinterred for identification. Was foul play
involved? What does one expect from pirates?
The U.S. Navy dispatched four rapid littoral combat vessels from Hong
Kong to Phuket, “the fastest ships ever seen”, according to the local
pilots. On the fabled island of PhiPhi Don, location of the Leonardo
DiCaprio film “The Beach”, Navy helicopters attempted to land but were
chased off by local pirates armed with guns and machetes. Later, after
all the safety deposit boxes in hotels were broken open and emptied, the
helicopters airlifted out every foreign male corpse with a strong
physical built to the Navy vessels, which are equipped with refrigerated
morgues, for DNA identification in Yokusuka, Japan.
Up to that moment, the number of servicemen killed by the tsunami far
exceeded the casualties in the Afghan War. Not a single computer or
memory drive of any Western serviceman ever surfaced, and from what I
could gather at the local bazaar and from an Israeli intelligent agent
planted inside an NGO relief group, all the military hardware was sent
toward the Red Sea via Malaysia and Indonesia. As the local boatmen put
it, “Allah is Great”. For Bin Laden and his paymasters in the Gulf
States, it was a post-Christmas shopping spree.
The wipeout on Dec. 26 showed the CIA to be boys in diapers. During
the previous 18 months, a crew of CIA technicians installed any Agency
communications center at a plush resort in the Krabi area. The reason is
that the listening post at Ban Thap Mo was a joint-intelligence center,
partially overseen by the Royal Thai Navy, to keep watch over Chinese
and Indian naval activities on the petroleum-rich Andaman Sea. The
super-secret Krabi spy facility was aimed at spying on Shell and BP
operations in Sumatra, along with Petronas in Malaysia, and monitor
their influence on the Thai and Burmese militaries. The CIA was
determined to put the oil and gas fields of Indonesia, Malaysia,
Thailand, Malaysia and India under the control of U.S. energy companies.
Was Aaron Alexis work for the CIA on the Andaman project, or was his
work in Thailand restricted to monitoring the Muslim insurgents in south
Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, which led to the arrest of top
leaders in the Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiya, which bombed hotels in
Jakarta.
There is one other CIA posting in Thailand that could use his
technical skills then, and that is the rendition airfield and
interrogation center at Udon Thani, the Vietnam-era airbase for B-52
bombers, in the Isaan region of northeast Thailand, run under the cover
of a Radio Free Asia station. RF Asia was expanding its presence as a
Internet news resource, right up his alley. This amazing fluency in Thai
would have been seen as a job asset for the CIA. A point to note, here,
is that the Alexis tire-shooting incident occurred in 2004 in Seattle,
three years before he was seconded to the Navy, and the rendition
controversy that rattled the Bush administration in 2006 may have been a
factor for this transfer.
Despite the best efforts of the CIA and NSA, the Christmas tsunami
made it clear that the war on terrorism was already lost, regardless of
divine will or the devil’s doing. Arrogance, corruption and ineptitude
had scuttled the post-911 crusade.
As for Aaron Alexis, many of he acquaintances including Thai Buddhist
friends have remarked that he constantly carped about insufficient
funds and race discrimination. Yet at Christmas season 2004 he was lucky
to be a lower-ranking contractor stuck on some remote U.S. base in a
desert or in amazingly boring Qatar or Bahrain rather than partying on
the beach at Phuket. Sometimes a bit of bad luck can be a blessing in
disguise. Though I never saw him there, if Alexis did make it to south
Thailand for the rescue and recovery work, it was no paradise. The
stench of bloated decomposing corpses was hideous, clinging to one’s
skin, hair and nostrils for weeks after.
Working for the NSA
By the end of 2007, Alexis was living in the USA. Readjusting to the
States can be a huge letdown and even a culture shock after making as
much as a thousand dollars a day as a defense contractor in the Persian
Gulf. In Dubai, which boasts the longest bar in the world, you’d see the
Americanos just arrived from Baghdad and Doha stumbling in at about 11
p.m. to splash out on single-malt whiskey or a Guinness stout and enjoy
the eye-candy from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and other stans passing
themselves off as bleach-blonde Russians and easygoing Ethiopian ladies
posing as exotic Eritreans and Somalis. Nothing’s real in Dubai, the
land of mirages.
It’s all part of the pecking order, with Lebanese and Iranian women
at the top of the desirables list down on through the former Soviet
ranks, then the Chinese and last but least, the bottom-rung Eurotrash
tourists. Reverse racism in the Gulf, under which brown, black and
yellow beauty fetch more attention than white, is probably a reason why
Aaron Alexis was so embittered on his return to the racial rightside-up
United States.
The Rising Cost of Living
Alexis joined the Navy Reserves in 2007 and served until early 2011.
Never promoted, he was a aviation electrician’s mate third-class, a
grade with pay levels as low as the rank. The Navy Reserves is
definitely not an officer-track opportunity or road to self-enrichment.
Yet, during those four years, Alexis rented an apartment in Oak Hills, a
high-end gated neighborhood of Fort Worth (Guardian, Sept.17) and on
his many travels stayed at luxury hotels, including the Marriot in
Providence, Rhode Island, which is favored by much higher-ranking
officers.
What was the secret to a luxury lifestyle on a sailor’s budget?
Answer: The CIA. The Agency routinely embeds its intelligence agents
into the military Reserves, which provide weapons training, unlimited
ammunition, base privileges, cheap beer, fast food, access to secure
communications and free air transport to practically anywhere in the
world. As a result, Navy and Marine Reserve units acting as the CIA
paramilitary force often operated with better transport, superior
firepower, more air cover and keener intelligence than regular Army
units. (These points are based on my interview of a Marine reservist-CIA
agent, who exposed the torture at Abu Graibh.) The Navy-Marine
intranet, maintained by Hewlett-Packard, is the world’s largest
institutional communications network. Bandwidth is never a problem.
While not embedded in the military, Edward Snowden was a dual CIA-NSA
employee because of his assignment to human intelligence and
on-the-ground covert operations in Geneva, Switzerland, along with
eavesdropping. Aaron Alexis, in contrast, wore three hats NSA, CIA and
Navy Reserves – thereby earning a sizeable pay package that allowed
extended visits to Thailand and plush accommodations wherever he went.
Hop, Skip and Jump
A review of his movements shows that Alexis hops, skips and jumps
from base to base on assignments for the NSA and CIA. The perks of
working for several
intelligence agencies
include time off for language classes and extended vacation breaks en
route to distant jobs. For a short while, at least, Aaron Alexis was
something of a James Bond.
The following are some of the locations where he worked. (Information
on these military facilities can be found at GlobalSecurity.org and
Wikipedia)
Fort Worth: His home base was the Naval Station Fort Worth Joint
Reserve Base in White Settlement, Texas. Its landlocked airfield is used
by fighter squadrons of the Navy, Marines and Air Force Reserves. More
important, the base is headquarters for the Naval Reserve Intelligence
Command, which along with its far-flung spy operations has also earned a
reputation for breaking encrypted codes. There in Texas, the CIA and
NSA collect and analyze data and analysis from their Reservist spies
aboard planes and ships and with infantry brigades around the world.
(White Settlement is where Alexis worked after leaving the Reserves as a
waiter at a Thai restaurant, meditated at a Buddhist temple and was
disappointed by a sweetheart. See the Daily Mail, Sept.18)
Seattle: There are no official disclosures about Alexis’s work
assignment in this West Coast city where he had a run-in with the police
over shooting out tires. Nevertheless his tasks are readily surmised.
Naval Reserve Intelligence Area One/Northwest is based at Whidbey
Island, site of the racy Richard Gere movie “An Officer and a
Gentleman”. As an aircraft electrician’s mate, his task would have been
to upgrade the on-board computers and encrypted radio transceivers on
the Prowlers, Growlers and Aries jets, which are all used for electronic
warfare. Pilot training here involves all four services across the
Pacific theater.
(The narrow-apeture radar extensively used around the Puget Sound’s numerous naval facilities along with radar-suppressing
electromagnetic pulses
probably accounted for the severe psychological disorders Alexis
suffered, including anxiety, paranoia and hearing voices inside his
skull. (While passing the Whidbey area by car twice in June 2013, my
Casio G-shock watch malfunctioned and the radio went dead.)
Newport: The naval station on the Rhode Island shore is home to 50
Reserves units from all four services. The base is also headquarters for
the Naval Security Force, which trains military police for occupation
of foreign countries, including Iraq, Afghanistan and other territories.
The Naval War College at this base provides a highly secretive training
program for Navy Reserve Intelligence officers, and Alexis would have
upgraded its Internet-based communications and learning network.
Bangkok and Hua Hin: The Joint U,S. Military Advisory Group, located
near Lumpini Park, Bangkok, provides weapons and training to the Thai
military. Alexis was mainly assigned to Hua Hin, a small port on the
Gulf of Thailand, about an 80-minute drive south of Bangkok. The Thai
navy forces have the unique duty there of protecting the residence of
the King of Thailand, and also for seagoing interdiction against Muslim
insurgents in the southern provinces along with signals-intercepts and
intelligence gathering on jihadist groups operating in the south and
adjoining Malaysia. (His Buddhist faith meant that Alexis was a low
security risk in the war as compared with a follower of Islam. BTW, I
formerly taught media studies at a university in Hua Hin, where I have
observed naval exercises from the beach.)
Ichigaya, Tokyo: After leaving the Reserves in early 2011, Alexis was
likely assigned by his subcontractor boss to the Hewett-Packard offices
in Tokyo’s Ichigaya district, the headquarters of Japan’s Self-Defense
Force and its
anti-ballistic missile command. The CIA and NSA spy on their close allies. Trust is the hallmark of a defeated empire.
Fingers on Top Secrets
Whatever the corporate-controlled news media is reporting, Alexis was
not a morose loser and misfit. In 2011, he enrolled as an online
student to earn a Bachelor of Science degree in aeronautics at
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Fort Worth. (Guardian, Sept. 17)
Anyone contemplating suicide amid mass murder is not going to be
studying aerodynamics, navigation, flight controls and the finer points
of aircraft engineering.
After leaving the Navy Reserves, his new task with The Experts, an IT
subcontractor based in Alexandria, Virginia, was to disconnect the
Hewlett Packard signals-intercepts hardware in the Washington DC area,
which includes the
National Security Agency
headquarters in Fort Mead, Maryland. The mainframe computers and
servers were being relocated to the new NSA West center at Buckley
airfield in Aurora, Colorado.
This removal of equipment and personnel to the NSA-CIA centers in
Colorado was ordered after series of post-911 debates and studies on the
increasing risks of concentrating America’s core intelligence assets on
the East Coast, or for that matter along the West Coast. With the same
strategic considerations that guide China’s military, which puts its
nuclear and missile forces deep inside the interior of continental Asia,
America’s intelligence chiefs decided to reposition vital electronic
intelligence-gathering capabilities to the Rocky Mountain region in the
American heartland.
Swarming the Human Mind
Among their array of evermore advanced intelligence tools, the
Pentagon and NSA have cooperated with the Israel Institute of Technology
(Technion) on a Hewett-Packard Israel project called The Swarm. Led by
Ruth Berg, a former researcher at MIT and NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, this
image-based software assembles the files, emails, Twitter messages,
voice calling and transactions of target individuals into an evolving
map that can predict their innermost thoughts and future decisions. The
Swarm is essentially the precognition program depicted in the Tom Cruise
movie on pre-crime prevention. (www.hpl.hp.com/israel)
Precognitive mapping is also aimed at predicting hidden psychological
disorders and criminal (disobedient) tendencies. The Swarm’s diagnostic
algorithms are relevant to the neuroscience research of James Holmes,
whose studies in molecular biology focused on the biological sources of
non-predictable (disorderly, creative) behavior. Toward these goals of
total mind-control,
President Barack Obama
early this year released $1 billion in funding for a national Brain
Initiative.
(http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/04/02/fact-sheet-brain-initiative)
Its key U.S. private-sector partner is Eli Lilly, the
pharmaceutical company
that produced LSD for the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program in the 1960s. (see US
patent 2997470, Richard P. Pioch, Purdue University, “Lysergic Acid
Amides “, 1956-03-05)
Alexis was prescribed a sedative at the VA hospital in Providence
after complaining about his mental-health issues and later went to the
VA in Washington DC for a refill. (Navy Times, Sept.18) The
psychiatrists at the NSA and CIA probably viewed Aaron Alexis as a
dedicated and loyal agent who was starting to show signs of a nervous
breakdown. He was not exceptional. The only thing that made him stand
out was the espionage vulnerabilities associated with his work.
Thousands of people worldwide are suffering from the same symptoms,
which can be attributed to microwave telecommunications networks,
aperture radar and electronic warfare technology, including voices
shouting commands to commit violence, the unbearable torture of
screeching noises inside the skull, short-term memory loss and
blackouts. (My extensive interviews with a Japanese imprisoned for
stabbing a British professor who specializes in telepathy theory led to
the correlation of his disorders with the introduction of microwave
transceivers on for the Motorola digital mobile phone service to U.S.
military bases in Okinawa and the British Telecom’s experiments with the
TETRA system in London.)
These symptoms of electromagnetic-related psychological disorders are
usually wrongly diagnosed as PTSD, resulting in drug treatment with
antidepressants that eventually worsen the condition. (there are many
critics among veterans group; a short summary is ast
www.nbcnews.com/id/43994382/ns/health- health_care ) At first the
supervisors will shrug off incidents like the Seattle tire shooting,
sweeping the problem under the carpet with excuses, for instance, the
errant serviceman’s overdrinking or having the blues over a sexual
affair gone sour. As the symptoms worsen and become no longer treatable
with drugs, the institutional response is to find a way to dispose of
the victim.
Any electronics technician who is conversant with the codes, hardware
and software used by intelligences agencies is either a prized asset or
a serious liability. There can be no in-between.. For his overseers,
transferring Alexis to the new HP operations at NSA West in Aurora was a
high-risk proposition. The time had come for preventative measures.
Termination Papers
Despite the high salary, much of it untaxed, the double identity that
comes with an intelligence career can make for a lonely existence.
Every one of his social contacts would have been routinely investigated
and vetted to reduce the potential for espionage and a subsequent
security breach. Thus, Alexis avoided family visits, which accounts for
why his sister’s husband had never met him in person. For that same
reason, immediately after the Washington Navy Yard incident, the
controlled mass media intensively interviewed his circle of Thai friends
in Fort Worth to determine whether any secrets had been spilled during
meditation retreat, an espionage technique used by the Aum Shinrikyo
sect on Soviet weapons scientists. (A series of articles was published
in the Japan Times Weekly, based on reports from the National Police
Agency and interviews with Aum members,)
After his visit to the VA hospital in Newport, as Alexis showed
worsening signs. His superiors would have come to a final decision. To
allow him to be confined in a sanatorium or move abroad to Thailand was
out of the question, due to the risk of discovery by civilian doctors,
other patients, attorneys and foreign spies.
A man who knows much too much and cannot be helped might be deployed
in other ways, as a fall guy for extrajudicial executions. On the
morning of September 16, witnesses were reported in many media outlets
as seeing two or three gunmen, one of them a black man of about 50 years
of age, an unmistakable difference from the 34-year-old Alexis. The
shorter stockier gunman was dressed in green fatigues and fired an
AR-15.
When the FBI learned within several minutes that Alexis had rented
the ArmaLite for two days only but did not purchase one from a gun store
near his stepfather’s residence in Virginia, the AR-15 was dropped from
media reports like a hot potato. The story was changed to a sawed-off
Remington 12-gauge shotgun, a weapon that lacks an individual ballistic
signature. Unlike a rifle bullet, buckshot leaves no traces on its
pellets or inside the shotgun barrel.
Buckshot is, of course, not the ideal ordnance for a mass killing, as
its lethality and accuracy are limited to close range. So far, no
stories have emerged of Navy Yard victims with their heads blown off or
intestines spilling out. Most were shot at some distance. The
higher-pitched sounds of firing were reattributed to a pair of handguns
he allegedly removed from two of his dead victims. It all adds up to an
incoherent script, sloppily directed theater and poor gunnery, which in
fact was not so imprecise. Most of the scriptwriters need to weeded out.
Lethal Price of National Security
Was the content of the brains of one man worth the killing of a dozen
people? It’s worth far more than that to the intelligence services and
their political masters. The elimination of a bunch of civilian
employees nearing retirement is, if anything, a cost-saving measure for a
military pinched by budget sequestration. Let the insurance companies
carry the burden and save the money instead for another aircraft
carrier. National security is sacrosanct, random people are expendable.
As for the moral cost, nobody is innocent.
It is a fair assumption to suggest that among the dozen fatalities,
one or more of the victims employed at some top-secret project at the
Navy Yard was or were overdue for an exit. It is the proverbial case of
killing two, three birds with one stone.
Why then has the CIA not yet terminated James Holmes as was done to
Aaron Alexis? The neuroscientist remains alive because his scientific
concepts are still marginally useful to the spymasters. Once the
inquisitors are done squeezing out every drop of knowledge, the Joker,
too, will meet his Maker. As precognition arrives with The Swarm, people
will soon learn to become predictable at all times. Remember always:
Silence is golden, obedience is platinum or you, too, could end up as
collateral damage inside The Yard.
Yoichi Shimatsu, a Hong Kong-based science writer and former editor of the Japan Times Weekly in Tokyo, has done
investigative journalism on intelligence affairs in the Asia region over several decades.
The Washington Navy Yard shootings
ensure that details of Aaron Alexis’s career with U.S. intelligence
agencies will remain inside a deep freezer alongside the dossier on
another rogue government agent, the Aurora movie shooter James “the
Joker” Holmes. These two villains have striking similarities: Both are
linked by an admiration for the ArmaLite AR-15 spray gun and they also
suffer bizarre psychiatric disorders, including chronic anxiety,
heightened paranoia and strange voices inside their heads.
The other feature in common between these now-retired government
contractors is their work for the emerging new hub for America’s most
advanced espionage capabilities Aurora, Colorado, along with next-door
Denver and other sites in the Rocky Mountain region. Alexis had a role
in transferring Hewlett Packard network systems vital to NSA intercepts
of satellite communications from NSA facilities at East Coast naval
bases to Colorado.
Buckley airfield in Aurora, home of the Aerospace Data Center, is
currently being upgraded and expanded. Its huge golf-ball shaped
antennae capture signals from orbiting satellites operated by the
National Reconnaissance Office, NASA and the U.S. Air Force, along with
data intercepted from the orbiting spacecraft of other countries and
private corporations. This intelligence, once analyzed, is shuttled to
the North American Aerospace Command in Colorado Springs, which is also
the location of the Air Force Academy. (see “Intelligence service being
secretive about who, where and when; post-9/11 decentralization”
http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_3431085)
In nearby Lakewood, the Federal Center is being remodeled to house
the CIA’s domestic surveillance program, which is aimed eavesdropping on
U.S. citizens with the goal of psychological profiling of everyone in
the borders
(http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/cia_moving_domestic_headquarters_to_denver/)
Before he opened fire on an audience at a Batman movie, Holmes
conducted graduate-level neuroscience research in Denver at the
University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus, which integrates
patient care and clinical trials with frontline biomedical studies.
(http://www.ucdenver.edu/about/newsroom/newsreleases/Pages/Neuroscience-Program-and-Holmes-information.aspx)
His psychiatric disorders may well be linked to the overexposure to
powerful
electromagnetic radiation from Buckley airfield and other intelligence centers concentrated in the area.
Although this unlikely pair followed separate career tracks and never
met each other, the two shooters were each involved in secret work for
the U.S. government. Since hard facts about this duo of evil-doers are
scarce as hen’s teeth, the only method left to investigative journalism,
short of a long camping trip in the Rockies, is context analysis and
scenario development. While much of this discussion is admittedly
speculative due to the thinness of evidence and unreliability of
ever-changing media claims, the principal focus here is on the
background to the secret work that Alexis did for the U.S. intelligence
community. Holmes’ research funded by the National Institutes of Health
is given passing mention as another facet of the mountain region’s
emergence as America’s “Third Line” of strategic defense and tech-based
intelligence gathering.
Operational Secrecy on 911
The Aaron Alexis story begins as so many other tragic events of our
time on September 11, 2001. As told to the British press by his
stepfather Frank Calderon, Alexis was riding up the escalator from the
subway station below the World Trade Center just as the twin towers were
collapsing. For hours, he remained outside the WTC entrance yet
miraculously survived the downpour of shattered glass and splintered
steel. Then, according to the stepfather’s account, Alexis participated
in the rescue work alongside the first respondents over the following
three days. (The Daily Mail, Sept. 18, 2013, Interview by Paul Thompson)
This story of personal heroism was also told to the Seattle police
officers who questioned Alexis in 2004 after he shot the tires of a
car. Alexis suspected the construction workers inside the car of being
assassins sent to kill him. The gun charges were subsequently dropped by
one of America’s toughest police forces, certainly not because of the
cock-and-bull tale about WTC patriotism. Security clearances usually get
the release from police custody of secret agents in event of common
crimes, sparing the CIA the embarrassment of a police report and court
case.
The New York Job
Now let’s move on to the salient points of his role in the WTC
disaster. At the time of 911, the Bedford-Stuyvesant-born Alexis resided
at the Queens home of his stepfather. Calderon himself was employed at
“one of the WTC buildings”, where his night shift normally ended at 7
a.m. After the disaster, the stepfather relocated to Richmond, Virginia,
where he has since done unspecified work at a local bank. (Daily Mail,
Sept. 18) Judging from his modest station in life, Calderon was not a
high-rolling stock analyst tracking Asian stock markets. His night job
was probably as a security guard.
The security company that watched over the World Trade Center was
Stratesec. Its principals until the year prior to the 911 attacks, were
Marvin Bush, the brother of former
president George W. Bush,
and his cousin Wirt Walker III. Stratesec also provided security for
United Airlines (two of its jetliners were supposedly hijacked) and for
Dulles Airport, where one of the commandeered planes reportedly took
off. (This is well-documented by different media, including
www.historycommons.org/ entity.jsp?entity=stratesec )
Alexis, according to his stepfather, worked an IT job inside “a
building in the WTC complex.” (Daily Mail, Sept. 18) The address is off
by a few meters. His stepson was employed by building contractors
renovating the Fiterman Hall office tower for conversion into an urban
campus of the Borough of Manhattan Community College, part of the CUNY
system.
The 15-floor building at 81 Barclay Street represented the largest
grant ever given to City University of New York. The donor was Miles
Fiterman, a lumber tycoon and builder of prefab homes, based in Thief
River Falls, Minnesota. The Bush Foundation and the Fiterman family are
major donors to the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis. (Walker Annual
Report, 2002)
Alexis’s IT job was not anything as flashy as programming or software
design. He wired computer hardware as a lowly electrician’s apprentice.
(His later job for the Navy was as an aircraft electrician and he did
the same type of work for a Hewlett Packard subcontractor at several
navy bases. The task is by no means easy. Connecting routers, modems,
servers, encryption devices, monitors and phone lines for large-scale
customers is more complicated than plugging in personal devices.)
Now the curious aspect to this situation is that the Fiterman tower
sat cater-cornered (catty-corner in Deep South dialect) to the World
Trade Center 7 building. The corners of the two structures were pointed
at each other in an ominous fengshui relationship, as hostile as the
beaks and claws of a pair of fighting roosters.
Conveniently located between the Filterman and WTC-7 was the New York
Telephone Building, since taken over by Verizon. All wires led into the
N.Y. Tel, and the bundles of phone cables were protected inside
underground utility tunnels that are tall and wide enough for easy
access by linemen.
An Internet installation company, especially in those days when DSL
meant coaxial cable or dedicated phone lines, had access to the utility
tunnels and links to telephone switch boxes. The CIA through one of its
many fronts for wiretapping also had routine access to the NYT system.
At a time when not many office managers had a clue about the
Internet, a DSL provider could easy install a network of wiring through
conduits along the steel girders of the entire World Trade Center.
Router closets and inverter boxes placed right on the support beams
would attract no attention.
Thus, from the demolition control center in the Fiterman could run
cables under the utility tunnels beneath narrow Barclay Street into the
New York Telephone network feeding into the World Trade Center. Former
military electricians, in the uniforms of a friendly Internet provide,
then could efficiently install the boxes packed with electric detonators
and explosives at critical points of the structure. Using pyrotechnics
(fireworks) control software, the programmers would key in the timing
sequence for the blast, as planned by an experienced building-demolition
expert. The Internet is far more efficient a system for killing office
workers and a rival faction inside the CIA than, say, battery-powered
timing devices or chemical fuses.
The other compelling reason for using Internet-triggered demolition,
besides easy unnoticed access to site, is that the blasts had to follow
the crash of remotely controlled jetliners into the towers. The
so-called hijacking is readily done with the remote cockpit software
invented by same Israeli company that designed drone-piloting systems
for the Israel Defense Force and also the Waterfall critical
infrastructure that protects power plants from their Stuxnet virus. The
Internet is a remarkable advance for terrorism, false-flag operations,
propaganda preliminary to a political coup and for deceiving the public
afterwards. 911 was the best pyrotechnics show ever, outdoing the
Reichstag fire.
Explosives Inside Filterman
When the 47-story WTC-7 underwent a series of explosions and
collapsed at 5:20 on the afternoon of September 11, the adjacent Post
Office and N.Y. Telephone building sustained no damage. The Fiterman
structure, on the other hand, lost much of its south-facing exterior.
A strange thing then happened. After the WTC-7 upper floors imploded,
only then quite inexplicably did a chunk of the Fiterman Building
get blown off and soared over its much-reduced neighbor. Like a mortar
round, the fragment flew a distance of 200 meters before smashing into
the glass atrium of the Winter Garden, which adjoins the yacht harbor on
the Hudson River. (“Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive by Joel
Meyerowitz, Phaedon Press 2006, p.47)
The role of the Fiterman building in the total schema of 911 has gone
virtually unnoticed. The power shot that cracked the glass arch of
Winter Garden could not have been caused by the WTC-7 collapse, which
exploded toward the opposite direction. The trajectory suggests that the
Fiterman’s south face was blown away from inside by a powerful blast
from around the 5th floor. The logical deduction is that explosives were
being stored inside the Fiterman Building, located opposite WTC-7.
(Several maps of the WTC complex are posted online)
Wiring the WTC
The unoccupied Fiterman building was ideal for a demolition team in
need of ample space for explosives, strands of wires, detonators,
vehicles, gas masks, a first-aid station, electric power generators, a
water supply and temporary living quarters. The south-facing rooms had a
direct view onto WTC-7 yet had some degree of protection from a blast
from across the street, due to the Telephone Building. (The site of
conspiracy-theory debunker James Randi has a forum on the Filterman,
which contrary to his objective shows disturbing aspects of its demise.
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=116127}
This scenario of an inside job better explains why Aaron Alexis was
at Ground Zero on 911. Besides the subway station below the twin towers,
there was also a maze of underground walkways that enabled him to pass
underneath the WTC complex without risk from flying shrapnel, smoke and
molten metal raining down onto the plaza. Not a single member of the
firefighting and emergency team has yet come forward with recollections
about a tall young black volunteer toiling in the dust for three days
straight after the disaster.
The likelier reason for his brief presence is that Alex was ordered
to conduct surveillance of the damage done to the towers and then
inspect the temporary cables to WTC-7 from the covert operations center
inside the Fiterman across the street. Those two extra days, September
12 and 13, were probably spent on evidence-removal duty, necessary tasks
such as rolling up detonator wires and disposing of incriminating
residue from Ground Zero. Much of this tedious work was done by
flashlight at nighttime, when emergency crews unfamiliar with the
underground passages dared not enter the smoking hulk.
Enigma Wrapped in Mystery
Soon after 5 p.m. on September 11, the CIA clandestine center in New
York, which organized spying on the UN headquarters and monitored Al
Qaeda worldwide, was blown to smithereens, killing key operatives
investigating links between terrorists and high-ranking politicians. 911
truthers point to the scientific fact that debris from the twin towers
could not possibly have caused the implosion of the WTC-7 intelligence
center, which housed offices of the CIA and Secret Service. (although a
subject of dispute by debunkers, it is now bwidely documented that the
CIA and DoD shared the 25th floor, as cited in WTC-7, Chapter 5, by
Gileanz, DiPaolo, et al.; a list of articles can be found at
http://www.911review.org/Wiki/Building7Collapse.shtml)
Frank Calderon, who probably recommended the next-door Fiterman job
to his stepson, and finagled a position with typical New York nepotism,
was not among the casualties of WTC-7 blast, even if it is highly
probable that he worked at that very site as a security guard, because
otherwise he would have identified the building number in press
interviews.
(Out of consideration for the family’s privacy and peace of mind, it
must be stated here that these scenarios are hypothetical, limited by
the scarcity of evidence, and done solely for the public benefit in
trying to unravel an important chapter of recent history. That the
pieces of this mystery fit together as tightly as a jigsaw puzzle is not
grounds for harassment or annoying phone calls to the family or Navy
Yard survivors.)
While the wreckage at Ground Zero was being slowly demolished by work
crews, the exterior of the Fiterman structure was painstakingly wrapped
with tarps as if its interior had to hidden from sight. Only much later
was the structure demolished without a trace of the workmanship that
had gone on inside. One thing is certain and that’s the Bush family, the
Fitermans and Larry Silverstein won’t be discussing any of this in
public.
The Missing Years
From autumn 2011 until his service with the Navy Reserves started in
2007, Aaron Alexis vanishes into thin air, on record at least. One of
his personally traits that acquaintances mention is that Alexis never
talked much. That goes with the training for a security clearance.
Whatever work he may have performed during those six years would later
qualify him to gain a higher-level security clearance at Navy
communications centers that provide raw intelligence to the NSA and CIA.
One outstanding clue to those missing years was his fluency in the
Thai language, which enabled him to chant sutras more smoothly than most
native Buddhists. (Taunton Daily Gazetter, Mass., as reported by AP)
During the early phase of the war on terrorism, Thailand was a major
transit point for defense contractors heading for Central Command bases
in the Persian Gulf and special-forces camps inside Pakistan,
Afghanistan and Iran.
The massive presence of contractors and intelligence agents in
Thailand was apparent during my volunteer stint immediately after the
2004 Christmas tsunami. According to Thai sources, the death toll of
foreign intelligence personnel began with the drowning of some 350
American uniformed servicemen when the tsunami hit the NSA listening
post inside the Thai Navy’s 3rd region headquarters at Ban Thap Mo base
on the Andaman Sea, just north of Phuket. (reported in a column by Kavi
Chongkittavorn, The Nation newspaper, Bangkok)
More details emerged from local boat captains after they heard about
my non-biased reporting from Kashmir and along the Afghan border. These
small-craft pilots on the Muslim-predominant coast told me that some
3,600 American, British and Israeli defense contractors were killed by
the tsunami after indulging in a holiday all-nighter on Patong Beach in
Phuket. In Krabi, the Israeli Defense Force lost so many of its naval
divers that its navy had to close the Gulf of Aqaba outside Eilat port
to foreign ships for many months thereafter. Some 200 American
mercenaries living in Bangkok were apparently buried in secret graves on
the road to Phuket, which is why the Pentagon demanded the bodies of
all tsunami victims be disinterred for identification. Was foul play
involved? What does one expect from pirates?
The U.S. Navy dispatched four rapid littoral combat vessels from Hong
Kong to Phuket, “the fastest ships ever seen”, according to the local
pilots. On the fabled island of PhiPhi Don, location of the Leonardo
DiCaprio film “The Beach”, Navy helicopters attempted to land but were
chased off by local pirates armed with guns and machetes. Later, after
all the safety deposit boxes in hotels were broken open and emptied, the
helicopters airlifted out every foreign male corpse with a strong
physical built to the Navy vessels, which are equipped with refrigerated
morgues, for DNA identification in Yokusuka, Japan.
Up to that moment, the number of servicemen killed by the tsunami far
exceeded the casualties in the Afghan War. Not a single computer or
memory drive of any Western serviceman ever surfaced, and from what I
could gather at the local bazaar and from an Israeli intelligent agent
planted inside an NGO relief group, all the military hardware was sent
toward the Red Sea via Malaysia and Indonesia. As the local boatmen put
it, “Allah is Great”. For Bin Laden and his paymasters in the Gulf
States, it was a post-Christmas shopping spree.
The wipeout on Dec. 26 showed the CIA to be boys in diapers. During
the previous 18 months, a crew of CIA technicians installed any Agency
communications center at a plush resort in the Krabi area. The reason is
that the listening post at Ban Thap Mo was a joint-intelligence center,
partially overseen by the Royal Thai Navy, to keep watch over Chinese
and Indian naval activities on the petroleum-rich Andaman Sea. The
super-secret Krabi spy facility was aimed at spying on Shell and BP
operations in Sumatra, along with Petronas in Malaysia, and monitor
their influence on the Thai and Burmese militaries. The CIA was
determined to put the oil and gas fields of Indonesia, Malaysia,
Thailand, Malaysia and India under the control of U.S. energy companies.
Was Aaron Alexis work for the CIA on the Andaman project, or was his
work in Thailand restricted to monitoring the Muslim insurgents in south
Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, which led to the arrest of top
leaders in the Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiya, which bombed hotels in
Jakarta.
There is one other CIA posting in Thailand that could use his
technical skills then, and that is the rendition airfield and
interrogation center at Udon Thani, the Vietnam-era airbase for B-52
bombers, in the Isaan region of northeast Thailand, run under the cover
of a Radio Free Asia station. RF Asia was expanding its presence as a
Internet news resource, right up his alley. This amazing fluency in Thai
would have been seen as a job asset for the CIA. A point to note, here,
is that the Alexis tire-shooting incident occurred in 2004 in Seattle,
three years before he was seconded to the Navy, and the rendition
controversy that rattled the Bush administration in 2006 may have been a
factor for this transfer.
Despite the best efforts of the CIA and NSA, the Christmas tsunami
made it clear that the war on terrorism was already lost, regardless of
divine will or the devil’s doing. Arrogance, corruption and ineptitude
had scuttled the post-911 crusade.
As for Aaron Alexis, many of he acquaintances including Thai Buddhist
friends have remarked that he constantly carped about insufficient
funds and race discrimination. Yet at Christmas season 2004 he was lucky
to be a lower-ranking contractor stuck on some remote U.S. base in a
desert or in amazingly boring Qatar or Bahrain rather than partying on
the beach at Phuket. Sometimes a bit of bad luck can be a blessing in
disguise. Though I never saw him there, if Alexis did make it to south
Thailand for the rescue and recovery work, it was no paradise. The
stench of bloated decomposing corpses was hideous, clinging to one’s
skin, hair and nostrils for weeks after.
Working for the NSA
By the end of 2007, Alexis was living in the USA. Readjusting to the
States can be a huge letdown and even a culture shock after making as
much as a thousand dollars a day as a defense contractor in the Persian
Gulf. In Dubai, which boasts the longest bar in the world, you’d see the
Americanos just arrived from Baghdad and Doha stumbling in at about 11
p.m. to splash out on single-malt whiskey or a Guinness stout and enjoy
the eye-candy from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and other stans passing
themselves off as bleach-blonde Russians and easygoing Ethiopian ladies
posing as exotic Eritreans and Somalis. Nothing’s real in Dubai, the
land of mirages.
It’s all part of the pecking order, with Lebanese and Iranian women
at the top of the desirables list down on through the former Soviet
ranks, then the Chinese and last but least, the bottom-rung Eurotrash
tourists. Reverse racism in the Gulf, under which brown, black and
yellow beauty fetch more attention than white, is probably a reason why
Aaron Alexis was so embittered on his return to the racial rightside-up
United States.
The Rising Cost of Living
Alexis joined the Navy Reserves in 2007 and served until early 2011.
Never promoted, he was a aviation electrician’s mate third-class, a
grade with pay levels as low as the rank. The Navy Reserves is
definitely not an officer-track opportunity or road to self-enrichment.
Yet, during those four years, Alexis rented an apartment in Oak Hills, a
high-end gated neighborhood of Fort Worth (Guardian, Sept.17) and on
his many travels stayed at luxury hotels, including the Marriot in
Providence, Rhode Island, which is favored by much higher-ranking
officers.
What was the secret to a luxury lifestyle on a sailor’s budget?
Answer: The CIA. The Agency routinely embeds its intelligence agents
into the military Reserves, which provide weapons training, unlimited
ammunition, base privileges, cheap beer, fast food, access to secure
communications and free air transport to practically anywhere in the
world. As a result, Navy and Marine Reserve units acting as the CIA
paramilitary force often operated with better transport, superior
firepower, more air cover and keener intelligence than regular Army
units. (These points are based on my interview of a Marine reservist-CIA
agent, who exposed the torture at Abu Graibh.) The Navy-Marine
intranet, maintained by Hewlett-Packard, is the world’s largest
institutional communications network. Bandwidth is never a problem.
While not embedded in the military, Edward Snowden was a dual CIA-NSA
employee because of his assignment to human intelligence and
on-the-ground covert operations in Geneva, Switzerland, along with
eavesdropping. Aaron Alexis, in contrast, wore three hats NSA, CIA and
Navy Reserves – thereby earning a sizeable pay package that allowed
extended visits to Thailand and plush accommodations wherever he went.
Hop, Skip and Jump
A review of his movements shows that Alexis hops, skips and jumps
from base to base on assignments for the NSA and CIA. The perks of
working for several intelligence agencies include time off for language
classes and extended vacation breaks en route to distant jobs. For a
short while, at least, Aaron Alexis was something of a James Bond.
The following are some of the locations where he worked. (Information
on these military facilities can be found at GlobalSecurity.org and
Wikipedia)
Fort Worth: His home base was the Naval Station Fort Worth Joint
Reserve Base in White Settlement, Texas. Its landlocked airfield is used
by fighter squadrons of the Navy, Marines and Air Force Reserves. More
important, the base is headquarters for the Naval Reserve Intelligence
Command, which along with its far-flung spy operations has also earned a
reputation for breaking encrypted codes. There in Texas, the CIA and
NSA collect and analyze data and analysis from their Reservist spies
aboard planes and ships and with infantry brigades around the world.
(White Settlement is where Alexis worked after leaving the Reserves as a
waiter at a Thai restaurant, meditated at a Buddhist temple and was
disappointed by a sweetheart. See the Daily Mail, Sept.18)
Seattle: There are no official disclosures about Alexis’s work
assignment in this West Coast city where he had a run-in with the police
over shooting out tires. Nevertheless his tasks are readily surmised.
Naval Reserve Intelligence Area One/Northwest is based at Whidbey
Island, site of the racy Richard Gere movie “An Officer and a
Gentleman”. As an aircraft electrician’s mate, his task would have been
to upgrade the on-board computers and encrypted radio transceivers on
the Prowlers, Growlers and Aries jets, which are all used for electronic
warfare. Pilot training here involves all four services across the
Pacific theater.
(The narrow-apeture radar extensively used around the Puget Sound’s numerous naval facilities along with radar-suppressing
electromagnetic pulses
probably accounted for the severe psychological disorders Alexis
suffered, including anxiety, paranoia and hearing voices inside his
skull. (While passing the Whidbey area by car twice in June 2013, my
Casio G-shock watch malfunctioned and the radio went dead.)
Newport: The naval station on the Rhode Island shore is home to 50
Reserves units from all four services. The base is also headquarters for
the Naval Security Force, which trains military police for occupation
of foreign countries, including Iraq, Afghanistan and other territories.
The Naval War College at this base provides a highly secretive training
program for Navy Reserve Intelligence officers, and Alexis would have
upgraded its Internet-based communications and learning network.
Bangkok and Hua Hin: The Joint U,S. Military Advisory Group, located
near Lumpini Park, Bangkok, provides weapons and training to the Thai
military. Alexis was mainly assigned to Hua Hin, a small port on the
Gulf of Thailand, about an 80-minute drive south of Bangkok. The Thai
navy forces have the unique duty there of protecting the residence of
the King of Thailand, and also for seagoing interdiction against Muslim
insurgents in the southern provinces along with signals-intercepts and
intelligence gathering on jihadist groups operating in the south and
adjoining Malaysia. (His Buddhist faith meant that Alexis was a low
security risk in the war as compared with a follower of Islam. BTW, I
formerly taught media studies at a university in Hua Hin, where I have
observed naval exercises from the beach.)
Ichigaya, Tokyo: After leaving the Reserves in early 2011, Alexis was
likely assigned by his subcontractor boss to the Hewett-Packard offices
in Tokyo’s Ichigaya district, the headquarters of Japan’s Self-Defense
Force and its
anti-ballistic missile command. The CIA and NSA spy on their close allies. Trust is the hallmark of a defeated empire.
Fingers on Top Secrets
Whatever the corporate-controlled news media is reporting, Alexis was
not a morose loser and misfit. In 2011, he enrolled as an online
student to earn a Bachelor of Science degree in aeronautics at
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Fort Worth. (Guardian, Sept. 17)
Anyone contemplating suicide amid mass murder is not going to be
studying aerodynamics, navigation, flight controls and the finer points
of aircraft engineering.
After leaving the Navy Reserves, his new task with The Experts, an IT
subcontractor based in Alexandria, Virginia, was to disconnect the
Hewlett Packard signals-intercepts hardware in the Washington DC area,
which includes the
National Security Agency
headquarters in Fort Mead, Maryland. The mainframe computers and
servers were being relocated to the new NSA West center at Buckley
airfield in Aurora, Colorado.
This removal of equipment and personnel to the NSA-CIA centers in
Colorado was ordered after series of post-911 debates and studies on the
increasing risks of concentrating America’s core intelligence assets on
the East Coast, or for that matter along the West Coast. With the same
strategic considerations that guide China’s military, which puts its
nuclear and missile forces deep inside the interior of continental Asia,
America’s intelligence chiefs decided to reposition vital electronic
intelligence-gathering capabilities to the Rocky Mountain region in the
American heartland.
Swarming the Human Mind
Among their array of evermore advanced intelligence tools, the
Pentagon and NSA have cooperated with the Israel Institute of Technology
(Technion) on a Hewett-Packard Israel project called The Swarm. Led by
Ruth Berg, a former researcher at MIT and NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, this
image-based software assembles the files, emails, Twitter messages,
voice calling and transactions of target individuals into an evolving
map that can predict their innermost thoughts and future decisions. The
Swarm is essentially the precognition program depicted in the Tom Cruise
movie on pre-crime prevention. (www.hpl.hp.com/israel)
Precognitive mapping is also aimed at predicting hidden psychological
disorders and criminal (disobedient) tendencies. The Swarm’s diagnostic
algorithms are relevant to the neuroscience research of James Holmes,
whose studies in molecular biology focused on the biological sources of
non-predictable (disorderly, creative) behavior. Toward these goals of
total mind-control,
President Barack Obama
early this year released $1 billion in funding for a national Brain
Initiative.
(http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/04/02/fact-sheet-brain-initiative)
Its key U.S. private-sector partner is Eli Lilly, the
pharmaceutical company
that produced LSD for the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program in the 1960s. (see US
patent 2997470, Richard P. Pioch, Purdue University, “Lysergic Acid
Amides “, 1956-03-05)
Alexis was prescribed a sedative at the VA hospital in Providence
after complaining about his mental-health issues and later went to the
VA in Washington DC for a refill. (Navy Times, Sept.18) The
psychiatrists at the NSA and CIA probably viewed Aaron Alexis as a
dedicated and loyal agent who was starting to show signs of a nervous
breakdown. He was not exceptional. The only thing that made him stand
out was the espionage vulnerabilities associated with his work.
Thousands of people worldwide are suffering from the same symptoms,
which can be attributed to microwave telecommunications networks,
aperture radar and electronic warfare technology, including voices
shouting commands to commit violence, the unbearable torture of
screeching noises inside the skull, short-term memory loss and
blackouts. (My extensive interviews with a Japanese imprisoned for
stabbing a British professor who specializes in telepathy theory led to
the correlation of his disorders with the introduction of microwave
transceivers on for the Motorola digital mobile phone service to U.S.
military bases in Okinawa and the British Telecom’s experiments with the
TETRA system in London.)
These symptoms of electromagnetic-related psychological disorders are
usually wrongly diagnosed as PTSD, resulting in drug treatment with
antidepressants that eventually worsen the condition. (there are many
critics among veterans group; a short summary is ast
www.nbcnews.com/id/43994382/ns/health- health_care ) At first the
supervisors will shrug off incidents like the Seattle tire shooting,
sweeping the problem under the carpet with excuses, for instance, the
errant serviceman’s overdrinking or having the blues over a sexual
affair gone sour. As the symptoms worsen and become no longer treatable
with drugs, the institutional response is to find a way to dispose of
the victim.
Any electronics technician who is conversant with the codes, hardware
and software used by intelligences agencies is either a prized asset or
a serious liability. There can be no in-between.. For his overseers,
transferring Alexis to the new HP operations at NSA West in Aurora was a
high-risk proposition. The time had come for preventative measures.
Termination Papers
Despite the high salary, much of it untaxed, the double identity that
comes with an intelligence career can make for a lonely existence.
Every one of his social contacts would have been routinely investigated
and vetted to reduce the potential for espionage and a subsequent
security breach. Thus, Alexis avoided family visits, which accounts for
why his sister’s husband had never met him in person. For that same
reason, immediately after the Washington Navy Yard incident, the
controlled mass media intensively interviewed his circle of Thai friends
in Fort Worth to determine whether any secrets had been spilled during
meditation retreat, an espionage technique used by the Aum Shinrikyo
sect on Soviet weapons scientists. (A series of articles was published
in the Japan Times Weekly, based on reports from the National Police
Agency and interviews with Aum members,)
After his visit to the VA hospital in Newport, as Alexis showed
worsening signs. His superiors would have come to a final decision. To
allow him to be confined in a sanatorium or move abroad to Thailand was
out of the question, due to the risk of discovery by civilian doctors,
other patients, attorneys and foreign spies.
A man who knows much too much and cannot be helped might be deployed
in other ways, as a fall guy for extrajudicial executions. On the
morning of September 16, witnesses were reported in many media outlets
as seeing two or three gunmen, one of them a black man of about 50 years
of age, an unmistakable difference from the 34-year-old Alexis. The
shorter stockier gunman was dressed in green fatigues and fired an
AR-15.
When the FBI learned within several minutes that Alexis had rented
the ArmaLite for two days only but did not purchase one from a gun store
near his stepfather’s residence in Virginia, the AR-15 was dropped from
media reports like a hot potato. The story was changed to a sawed-off
Remington 12-gauge shotgun, a weapon that lacks an individual ballistic
signature. Unlike a rifle bullet, buckshot leaves no traces on its
pellets or inside the shotgun barrel.
Buckshot is, of course, not the ideal ordnance for a mass killing, as
its lethality and accuracy are limited to close range. So far, no
stories have emerged of Navy Yard victims with their heads blown off or
intestines spilling out. Most were shot at some distance. The
higher-pitched sounds of firing were reattributed to a pair of handguns
he allegedly removed from two of his dead victims. It all adds up to an
incoherent script, sloppily directed theater and poor gunnery, which in
fact was not so imprecise. Most of the scriptwriters need to weeded out.
Lethal Price of National Security
Was the content of the brains of one man worth the killing of a dozen
people? It’s worth far more than that to the intelligence services and
their political masters. The elimination of a bunch of civilian
employees nearing retirement is, if anything, a cost-saving measure for a
military pinched by budget sequestration. Let the insurance companies
carry the burden and save the money instead for another aircraft
carrier. National security is sacrosanct, random people are expendable.
As for the moral cost, nobody is innocent.
It is a fair assumption to suggest that among the dozen fatalities,
one or more of the victims employed at some top-secret project at the
Navy Yard was or were overdue for an exit. It is the proverbial case of
killing two, three birds with one stone.
Why then has the CIA not yet terminated James Holmes as was done to
Aaron Alexis? The neuroscientist remains alive because his scientific
concepts are still marginally useful to the spymasters. Once the
inquisitors are done squeezing out every drop of knowledge, the Joker,
too, will meet his Maker. As precognition arrives with The Swarm, people
will soon learn to become predictable at all times. Remember always:
Silence is golden, obedience is platinum or you, too, could end up as
collateral damage inside The Yard.
Yoichi Shimatsu, a Hong Kong-based science writer and former editor
of the Japan Times Weekly in Tokyo, has done investigative journalism on
intelligence affairs in the Asia region over several decades.
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