Police State USA: Battleground America

By Stephen Lendman

Global Research, December 02, 2014

Region: USA

Theme: Police State & Civil Rights

America is more police state than democracy. George Bush institutionalized it. Obama hardened his abusive practices.
Pervasive at federal, state and local levels. Ferguson, MO symbolizes what’s wrong. Obama’s solution:
Downplay Michael Brown’s murder. Ignore militarized police repression.
Arm state and local departments nationwide with more weapons than already supplied. Types used in war theaters.
Militarized America threatens freedom. Turning city streets into battlegrounds.
Washington provides police nationwide with enormous amounts of combat weapons, related equipment and supplies.
Last June, The New York Times headlined “War Gear Flows to Police Departments,” saying:

“(T)ools of combat (flow freely to) local police departments, often with little public notice.” Since 2006:

• 93,763 machine guns;

• 180,718 magazine cartridges;

• hundreds of silencers;

• an unknown number of grenade launchers;

• at least 533 planes and helicopters;

• hundreds of 432 MRAPs (9-foot high, 30-ton mine-resistant/ ambush-protected armored vehicles with gun turrets;

• 5,235 Humvees; and

• 44,900 pieces of night vision equipment.

According to The Times, US police departments “already look and act like military units.” Current policy “obscure(s) the lines between soldier and police officer.”
In the early 1990s, Congress authorized what’s ongoing. Militarizing police. Giving them more firepower than ever. Turning them into combat units. For waging war on city streets. An ACLU report headlined “War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Police,” saying:

“All across the country, heavily armed SWAT teams are raiding people’s homes in the middle of the night, often just to search for drugs. It should enrage us that people have needlessly died during these raids, that pets have been shot, and that homes have been ravaged. Our neighborhoods are not war zones, and police officers should not be treating us like wartime enemies. And yet, every year, billions of dollars worth of military equipment flows from the federal government to state and local police departments. Departments use these wartime weapons in everyday policing, especially to fight the wasteful and failed drug war, which has unfairly targeted people of color.”

Cops don’t serve and protect. They harass, threaten and terrorize ordinary people. Especially America’s most disadvantaged. Blacks and Latinos. Muslims. Immigrants. Unfairly targeted. At home or in public.
“It’s not uncommon for SWAT teams to brutalize bystanders in their search for a suspect,” said the ACLU. “One family in Atlanta was woken up in the middle of the night when officers burst into their home and threw a flashbang grenade into the playpen where a toddler was sleeping.”
Things go on commonly seen in ruthlessness dictatorships. Police state America replicates them. For millions of law-abiding people.
“(W)artime weapons and counter-terrorism strategies mark a shift in the very nature of policing strategies,” said the ACLU.

“If anecdotal (and hard) evidence is any indication, tanks and counter-terrorism strategies encourage overly aggressive policing. SWAT teams have become a key part of increasingly militarized policing strategies. While only a fraction of SWAT-style raids result in actual charges of any kind, they often provoke fear, hurt individuals and families, and result in damages to personal property.”

The ACLU estimates from 70,000 to 80,000 so-called “no-knock” raids annually.
An astonishing 192 – 219 times daily across America. Up from around 50,000 2005 raids. About 3,000 in 1981. Bursting into homes lawlessly. Unaccountably. Unannounced. Often at night. Terrorizing residents. Including women, children, the elderly and infirm. Innocent victims.
The vast majority of US police departments in cities of 50,000 or more have Police Paramilitary Units (PPUs). Around double the mid-1980s figure.
Growth in smaller communities equally dramatic. Up fourfold since the mid-1980s.
Militarizing police has nothing to do with ensuring public safety. Everything to do with targeting public anger.
Preventing justifiable social upheavals. Crushing them when they erupt. Licensing police to kill.
Thirdworldizing America. Maintaining inequality. The world’s largest gulag prison system.
Incarcerating thousands unjustly. Protecting America’s ruling class from beneficial social change.
Locking down greater Boston after the April 2013 Marathon mass casualty event is an example of harshness to come. Ordinary people went along instead of resisting.
Benjamin Franklin said “(t)hose who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
State-sponsored terrorism defines US policy. Doublespeak duplicity conceals it. Doublethink manipulates public opinion to ignore inconvenient truths.
Martin Luther King called America “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Now more than ever. Threatening fundamental freedoms. Humanity’s survival.
Fear-mongering proliferates. Big Lies are weapons of mass deception. Suppressing hard truths.
People are manipulated to support what harms therm. Nonbelievers targeted ruthlessly.
On December 1, Obama appointed Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey and former Assistant Attorney General Laurie Robinson to co-chair his Task Force on 21st Century Policing.
Partnership for Civil Justice executive director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard expressed outrage, saying:
“We were just dumbfounded when we heard they had chosen Chief Ramsey.” A thug by any standard. A serial civil rights violator.
“You’d be hard-pressed to find a more inappropriate choice,” she stressed. Philadelphia’s gain is America’s loss.
Obama intends instituting his announced policy by executive order. Unilateral diktat authority. “(T)o promote effective crime reduction while building public trust,” he claimed.
“(D)irecting relevant agencies to work together and with law enforcement and civil rights and civil liberties organizations to develop specific recommendations within 120 days.”
Bypassing Congress. Militarizing America more than ever. Mocking fundamental civil rights.
The 1997 fiscal year National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) authorized supplying excess military weapons and equipment to state and local police. The so-called 1033 program.
At least 8,000 law enforcement agencies participate. Receiving billions of dollars of military hardware since 1997.
As part of Washington’s Defense Logistics Agency Disposition Services (DLA) transfer program.
According to DLA, $449 million in 2013 alone. Ferguson unrest drew nationwide attention to what little was known publicly before.
Including tanks on Ferguson streets. Heavily armed police threatening residents.
Police brutality. Mass arrests. No-fly zone implementation to block helicopter news coverage. Suspension of First Amendment rights.
MSM malpractice. Misreporting. Censorship. Oversimplifying. Whitewashing the worst of police violence. Misinformation spread through social media.
Obama’s announced multi-agency review is farcical. Intending cosmetic changes at most.
Saying “I do not want a militarized police culture in America.” While continuing Washington’s 1033 program. Militarization writ large.
Turning city streets into battlegrounds. Making America unsafe to live in.
Obama’s way of “fortify(ing) the trust that must exist between law enforcement officers and the communities they serve.”
Trampling on fundamental civil and human rights. Pretense claiming otherwise. Suppressing police brutality reports.
Obama acknowledged widespread skepticism. Previous discussions and task forces accomplishished nothing.
“Why is this time different,” he asked? “Because the president of the US is deeply invested,” he said.
The same one mocking democratic values. Enforcing police state harshness. The most secretive administration in US history.
Most repressive. Ruthless. Lawless. Waging war on freedom. Whistleblowers exposing government wrongdoing.
Journalists doing their job. Immigrants. People of color. Muslims. America’s most disadvantaged. Ordinary people. Terrorizing them.
While waging multiple direct and proxy wars of aggression. Ousting democratically elected governments. Preventing democracy at home and abroad.
Challenging Russia and China irresponsibly. Recklessly. Risking global war. Humanity’s survival. Madness defines US policy.
As head of state, Obama bears full responsibility. Big Lies conceal his recklessness.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network. It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

YET ANOTHER BANKSTER “SUICIDED” WHILE JOGGING: CONFIRMATION OF THE BOLI ANGLE?

December 2, 2014 by Joseph P. Farrell in Bankers • http://gizadeathstar.com/2014/12/yet-another-bankster-suicided-jogging-confirmation-boli-angle/

Now in case you missed it (and for readers here, I doubt you could, since so many of you sent me various versions of this piece of news), yet another bankster has been suicided, and Mr. G.B. did a bit of additional leg work for which we are grateful, and tracked down some additional information, which we share here. Ms. Melissa Millan, 54, described as being a “senior vice-president at Mass Mutual” and a manager with Citigroup was found stabbed to death on a popular jogging trail near her home. Sadly, Ms. Millan was also a mother, and our hearts and prayers go out to her family at this time at the loss of their loved one in such a cruel and despicable manner:
MassMutual Senior Vice President Found Dead, Stabbed In Chest In Apparent Homicide
Now, while the Zero Hedge article does not give much to go on in terms of possible motivations for the murder, Mr. G.B. as I said, did some additional digging, pulling up Ms. Millan’s LinkedIn profile. For those of you with access to LinkedIn, here’s the link to her profile (and for those of you who don’t have that access, be patient, I’ll summarize):
Melissa Millan’s Linked In Profile
Now, if one scrolls down a bit in this profile, one comes across this notation:

“Sr. Vice President

“MassMutual Insurance

2006 – Present (8 years)

General management of BOLI, Executive Group Life, Worksite DI businesses, and expansion into worksite and voluntary benefits market.”(Bold and italicized emphasis added)

This is extremely intriguing, for as many who have been tracking the banker suicide stories have noted, many of the victims had BOLI policies. BOLI, you’ll recall, are “Bank-Owned Life Insurance” policies, payable to the bank if the person on whom the policy is issued suddenly decides to take walks off of tall bank buildings or to be stabbed to death on a jogging path. In other words, Ms. Millan was heavily involved in an aspect of the murky business of insurance and banking that would, possibly, have allowed her to “see” a pattern in the banker suicides and deaths that we do not see.

More importantly, her sad murder is corroboration that there is indeed something to BOLI aspect of the story. Indeed, one my view it as the first clear indicator of something to the insurance angle. But what might it be?

Here comes the high octane speculation of the day. Thus far the BOLI angle has been advanced by some to argue that these victims are being offed to cash in on their BOLI policies to prop up failing banks. But this angle has never seemed convincing to me, because there are simply too few banker deaths for such an explanation to make sense, even if those BOLI policies are for substantial amounts of money. The numbers, in short, do not seem to add up to be adequate for this explanation to make sense. However, as noted above, we now have a clear murder of someone involved with that end of the banking business, dealing explicitly with BOLI policies. At this juncture, let us factor in the deaths of some other bankers, among whom were some involved in FOREX (foreign exchange, i.e., currency and securities exchange), and, in the case of non-banker mortgage title business owner Richard Talley, someone involved in mortgage title investigation and clearing. So, assuming all these deaths to be related, what emerges from this?

In each of these cases, the deaths were of people who might have been in a position to see patterns (or, alternatively, of people whom someone else suspected of having seen a pattern). What connects BOLI(insurance), FOREX, and mortgages? If you’ve been following Catherine Austin Fitts’ hypotheses and her story of massive mortgage fraud in HUD, or following my hypothesis of a hidden postwar system of finance, FOREX, insurance, and mortgage fraud and manipulation are the precise areas at which that hidden system interfaces with the public one. Each of these would also have been familiar with computerized transactions and high-frequency trading, and possibly with the opportunities these afforded for further manipulation and harvesting of money by that system.

So again, to my mind, the possibility remains open that whoever is committing these murders, they might not be coming, ultimately, from inside the banking and finance community, but rather, from inside the the various national security apparatuses behind the modern western system of international finance.

November 21, 2014 by Daniel Spaulding

The Subversion-Industrial Complex

Playing in good faith by the rules of the world controllers earns certain undesirable peoples precisely zero credit. As a case in point, recent elections held in the war-ravaged east of Ukraine have unsurprisingly been summarily dismissed by Washington and Brussels. Any political expression running contrary to the aims and ends of the globalist superclass is denounced as illegal and illegitimate, with selective application of international law the one observable norm.
A political order is only deemed legitimate if said elites classify it such. Thus popular elections in the breakaway east, known again by its older name Novorussia, are dismissed wholesale as Russian-backed manipulation. (After all, the globalists believe that choreography of elections should be the exclusive purview of the State Department and assorted NGOs.) Likewise, the governments of Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Kyrgyzstan have been challenged or threatened by the West over their pursuit of closer relations with Russia, even though each has gained power through internationally recognized democratic processes.
Sidestepping its professed principles, the Western establishment has been quite willing to embrace sundry violent Ukrainian nationalists and neo-Nazi factions in its bid to turn the Ukraine into a NATO launch pad for projecting influence into Russia and the rest of Eurasia. Sponsorship and training of thuggish Ukrainian nationalists, who have already expressed their inclination toward committing acts of terrorism inside Russia, is but another disastrous step toward a new Cold War.
Aside from enabling Ukrainian Waffen-SS throwbacks and potential terrorists, the rulers of the West also project their insidious cultural pathologies into Russia, with the “anarchist” punk band Pussy Riot serving as the most blatant of examples. The American people themselves should not be blamed for the genesis of this plague, for they were its first victims. The systematic, scientific weaponization of culture was simply introduced and perfected in America, the elites’ laboratory for subversive projects. And despite the clamoring of old Cold War conservatives, the “Communist conspiracy” that has wrecked their traditional social and religious institutions was conceived not in the Kremlin, but in the higher echelons of Langley and the boardrooms of Fifth Avenue. What is now identified as cultural Marxism, the project of the exiled Freudian-Marxists of the German Frankfurt School, was funded and promoted through academia, the media, and the intelligence agencies by wealthy oligarchs who ultimately ran all of these institutions. Their revolutionary social model is now being exported to the rest of the world as a tool to undermine the remnants of traditional societies, especially in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and absorb them into the globalist control matrix.

How should we scare the couch potatoes now?

The globalists’ rancor against Russia, however, is more clearly manifest in a malicious, yet ever more childish, smear campaign against Russian President Vladimir Putin. Whatever his faults, Russia’s leader is now frequently depicted in the West’s elite-controlled mass media as the incarnation of evil and the veritable reoccurrence of German dictator Adolf Hitler. It must be understood that the drive to demonize Putin is not aimed exclusively, or even primarily, at the Russian people, who are not particularly sensitive to the foreign press carnival. Rather, the anti-Putin media hysteria targets Western populations.
As the elites continue to shred ever-dwindling liberties, degrade traditional culture, and flood the nations they rule with successive waves of desperate third world immigrants, Westerners are presented not only with a wider array of vapid consumer goods and more preposterous and perverted sexual options – they are also subjected to continuous media psy-op campaigns to convince them that every uncooperative dictator and geopolitical rival of the West (particularly America) is an existential security threat that must be confronted. In this frenzy to manufacture consent, Westerners are bombarded non-stop with paranoid rhetoric declaring that Putin, the love child of Hitler and Stalin, is preparing to send his tanks rolling across the North European Plain in a quest to reestablish the long-defunct Soviet Union. That NATO, in fact, has advanced eastward to Russia’s borders, despite previous agreements to not expand into former Warsaw pact nations, goes unmentioned in almost all US and European media commentary.
The wider project of elite-contrived subversion is thus aimed in varying manners and mediums at both the Russians, via cultural distortion, political destabilization, and terrorism, and Western populations through cynical fear-mongering unleashed via the corporate mass media. Should ordinary Americans, for example, see the Russian nation as their enemy? We are being viciously exploited financially and brought into ever increasing debt, not by Putin or the Russian state, but by a transnational plutocracy, a reality that is intentionally suppressed in our collective consciousness.

Technocracy is love.

The twentieth century German writer Ernst Jünger observed this trend over sixty years ago in his book The Forest Passage. He opined that in the West, and especially in United States, media-fueled hysteria

…finds its best feeding grounds; and it is propagated through networks that operate at the speed of light. The need to hear the news several times a day is already a sign of fear; the imagination grows and paralyzes itself in a rising vortex. The myriad antennae rising above our megacities resemble hairs standing on end – they provoke demonic contacts.

Witnessing the anti-Russian propaganda spewed forth daily from CNN, FOX News, the New York Times, and the BBC, this observation rings true now more than ever. Jünger further noted this fear, now spread to both East and West:

The West is afraid of the East, the East afraid of the West. Everywhere on the planet people live in daily expectation of terrifying attacks, and in many places there is also the fear of civil war.

So what relief can be found from media malice, cultural ruination, war and rumors of war, and the general dehumanization of modern man? Are despair and resignation the only options? Certainly we must agree with the Russian philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev, who said that we have entered “a period of great difficulty for human personality, for freedom of spirit, for higher culture.” Yet the globalist oligarchs, technocrats, and others who seek the complete domination of their fellow man most certainly do not have the final word. As Berdyaev foresaw, a “mobilization of spirit can be set up against modern collective insanity and demonic possession.” This spiritual resistance would be a “new Christian piety” to “be revealed in our world.”
Slowly and in fits and starts, the embers of this spiritual mobilization and rebirth of Christian piety, the spiritual resistance to the crushing dehumanization of globalism, have already begun to burn. A Russia that in the twentieth century found salvation neither in godless communism nor godless capitalism is drawing toward Berdyaev’s vision. And perhaps in time this light will burn bright enough to awaken souls in Western Europe and North America, those who have forgotten the faith that sustained their ancestors for almost two thousand years.

The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy

Review of Graeme MacQueen’s Book

By Prof. Edward Curtin

Global Research, December 01, 2014

Region: USA

Theme: 9/11 & 'War on Terrorism', Intelligence

The anthrax attacks that followed those of 9/11 have disappeared from public memory in ways analogous to the pulverization of the Twin Towers and World Trade Center Building 7. For the towers, at least, ghostly afterimages persist, albeit fading like last night’s nightmare. But the anthrax attacks, clearly linked to 9/11 and the Patriot Act, are like lost letters, sent, but long forgotten. Such disappearing acts are a staple of American life these days. Memory has come upon hard times.
With The 2001 Anthrax Deception, Professor Graeme MacQueen, founding Director of the Center for Peace Studies at McMaster University, calls us back to a careful reconsideration of the anthrax attacks. It is an eloquent and pellucid lesson in inductive reasoning and deserves to stand with David Ray Griffin’s brilliant multi-volume dissection of the truth of that tragic September 11th. MacQueen makes a powerful case for the linkage of both events, a tie that binds both to insider elements deep within the U.S. government, perhaps in coordination with foreign elements.
MacQueen’s thesis is as follows: The criminal anthrax attacks were conducted by a group of conspirators deep within the U.S. government who are linked to, or identical with, the 9/11 perpetrators. Their purpose was to redefine the Cold War into the Global War on Terror and in doing so weaken civil liberties in the United States and attack other nations.
Obviously these are explosive charges that demand substantial evidence connected logically in a compelling thesis.
MacQueen, in countering anti-conspiratorial thinkers of the left and right who approach such issues with minds like beds already made up, explains his method thus: “The tools of investigation are no different from those used to test other proposals. We use evidence and reason. In some cases we will be able to make confident assertions and in other cases we shall have to acknowledge that we are speculating, but even in this second case we will do our best to ground our speculation in evidence. Ideology, national loyalty, outrage and ‘common sense’ will not do the job.”
There is no doubt that his thesis, backed up by abundant evidence and some intriguing speculation, is a conspiracy theory, just like the 9/11 Commission Report’s explanation of 9/11 and the Bush administration’s neo-con and media assisted conspiratorial tying of Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda to 9/11 and the anthrax attacks. “We would have to look very hard to find anyone who does not hold a conspiracy theory about 9/11,” he writes. “And for this reason it is silly to denigrate people for holding a conspiracy theory about this event.”

But good theory of any kind necessitates facts to make it credible, and MacQueen provides a plethora of these, while the Bush administration made allegations and promises of evidence that was never delivered. He aptly quotes researcher Elias Davidsson ‘s evidentiary points concerning the 9/11 hijackers:

‘The following five classes of evidence should have been produced by U.S. authorities in September 2001 or shortly thereafter.

1. Authenticated flight lists;

2.Authenticated boarding cards;

3. Authenticated security videos from the airports;

4. Sworn testimonies of personnel who attended boarding of the aircraft;

5. Formal identification of the bodies or bodily remains from the crash sites, including chain-of-custody reports.”

Not only does MacQueen provide copious documented facts to support his case, but he does it in a systematically logical way that leaves the official story in shambles. If a crime were being prosecuted (as it should, but war was waged instead), MacQueen marshals a case for conviction beyond a reasonable doubt.

The anthrax letter attacks began on September 18, 2001 when the first letters were mailed from Princeton, New Jersey. Between October 3 and November 20 twenty-two people were infected with dried anthrax spores and five died. Between October 6 and October 8 especially highly refined and aerosolized anthrax letters were sent to two key Democratic Senators, Thomas Daschle and Patrick Leahy. Before October 3 when the first case, that of Robert Stevens who died two days later, was diagnosed, the FBI claimed that “no one except the perpetrators knew…that the attacks were in progress.”
Yet The New York Times, between September 12 and October 3, made reference to the possibility of biological or chemical terrorist attacks 76 times, 27 references specifically to anthrax. Many of these warnings came from government leaders. Of course the Times was home to Judith Miller, notorious for her deceptions regarding Iraq’s WMD, and whose book Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War, was about to be published in the first few days in October. In that book Miller et al. assert that Iraq might use a terrorist group to unleash a bioweapon against the United States.
Just coincidentally, throughout the month of October as the anthrax attacks became public, the Bush administration and the mainstream media pushed the claim that Al Qaeda (already accused of 9/11) and Saddam Hussein (slyly implicated by innuendo) were responsible for the anthrax attacks. Once the U.S. started bombing Afghanistan on October 7, alleged Al Qaeda retaliation enhanced the claim. No evidence was presented. The Washington Post, vying with The New York Times for Cassadran bragging rights, had published a September 27 article “Al Qaeda May Have Crude Chemical Capabilities.” This double foreign group suggestion – that Bin Laden’s group, state-sponsored by Iraq, sent the anthrax spores – was promoted vigorously throughout October. The crude anthrax letters written to Tom Brokaw of NBC News and Senator Daschle with their 09-11-01 headings and Muslim extremist language, released to the public on October 23, seemed to clinch the case.
MacQueen writes,

“Much evidence suggests that this option was meant to carry the day and was central to the original plan. An attack on the U.S. by groups of foreign Muslims using weapons of mass destruction could clearly serve to legitimize internal repression, external aggression, and a host of ancillary transformations. This scenario was established in advance of the anthrax attacks and pushed hard in October 2001 as citizens got sick and died of anthrax, as the Patriot Act was pushed through Congress and the large scale NSA domestic spying was launched, as the invasion of Afghanistan began, and as preparations were made to invade Iraq.”

By October 26, once Bush had signed the Patriot Act, that case began falling apart, but not before the two Democratic Senators, Daschle and Leahy, who had resisted ramrodding the bill into law, had received their own lethal anthrax letters as possible reminders.
When R. W. Apple Jr. wrote a New York Times front page article on October 18, “City of Power, City of Fears,” and said, “the government has been caught completely by surprise by the anthrax attacks,” he may not have known about the exercise termed Dark Winter, conducted four months earlier on June 22-23, though one would think he might have known of the plethora of references to anthrax in his own paper in the few weeks before the attacks became known. Maybe he thought the Bush administration didn’t read the New York Times for intelligence.
MacQueen,in a greatly significant piece of sleuthing, however, lets us know about Dark Winter, a biological warfare simulation planned and conducted by Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies/Center for Strategic and International Studies at Andrews Air Force Base with uncanny parallels to the actual anthrax attacks. Some oddities follow. Dark Winter had anonymous letters sent to the mainstream media with threats of anthrax. Dark Winter claimed that the perpetrators are probably state-sponsored international terrorists. Dark Winter claimed that “a prominent Iraqi defector is claiming Iraq arranged the bioweapons attacks on the U.S. through intermediaries.” Dark Winter concludes that the attacks necessitate harsh restrictions on civil liberties, possibly Martial Rule. Dark Winter has a fictional television anchor announce that “still no group claims responsibility for unleashing the smallpox virus, but NCR has learned that Iraq may have provided the technology behind the attack to terrorist groups based in Afghanistan.”
And yes, not to be missed, we learn that Dark Winter’s simulation’s actors included Apple’s New York Times’ colleague Judith Miller, soon to be the New York Times best- selling author of Germs, playing a reporter for the New York Times; James Woolsey, former CIA Director and supporter of The Project for the New America Century (we’ll need a new Pearl Harbor, folks); and Jerome Hauer,a member of the Committee on the Present Danger, and “an important figure in the linking of the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax attacks,” who played the FEMA director.
Once the government’s accusations against Al Qaeda and Iraq fell apart but the Patriot Act had become law, NSA spying commenced, and the war in Afghanistan proceeded apace, the FBI changed its tune and pursued the lone wolf perpetrator theory, first accusing a scientist named Steven Hatfill and then, after he sued and eventually received $5.82 million in compensation, they accused Bruce Ivins, a scientist working on an anthrax vaccine at Fort Derrick in Maryland. MacQueen shows in detail how that claim came apart and resulted in a case without credibility but with Ivins committing suicide. But, he concludes, the Ivins accusation served its purpose of diverting attention from the real reason for the anthrax attacks and its culprits.

Finally, MacQueen details how the anthrax evidence leads to some of the alleged 9/11 hijackers in Florida as they lay down a trail of incriminating “evidence” we were meant to follow, linking crop-dusters/anthrax to 9/11. Mohamed Atta, the alleged 9/11 ringleader, supposedly went into a U.S. Department of Agriculture office seeking a $650,000 loan to buy and enlarge a crop-duster. He made

sure the agent knew and could spell his name, and when she balked at the loan, “he asked what would stop him from going around her desk, cutting her throat, and taking the money from the large safe in the office.” He then admired a photo of Washington, D.C., asked to buy it, inquired about security at the World Trade Center, implied he was associated with Al Qaeda, and told her that Bin Laden “ ‘would someday be known as the world’s greatest leader.’ “

MacQueen sardonically comments, “And that is the story of how a terrorist leader, engaged in a top-secret operation, sought a government loan to help him with his plan.”
For one familiar with Lee Harvey Oswald’s (or his double’s) antics to make himself unforgettable on visits to a car dealership and a rifle range before JFK’s assassination, the Atta charade should ring a bell. MacQueen makes a powerful case that the various crop-duster incidents were “disinformation” and that their purpose was to link 9/11 to the anthrax attacks and, notably, to Iraq. He notes that it was also at this time that the fictitious story of Atta meeting with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague was widely circulated to “solidify this connection.” He argues that once the FBI admitted that the anthrax attacks were not a foreign operation but the claim had served its purpose, the crop-duster stories vanished into obscurity. However, he concludes, “Given that the anthrax attacks were a domestic operation, and given that the alleged hijackers were implicated in that operation prior to its occurrence, the conclusion cannot be avoided: the 9/11 attacks were also a domestic operation.”
But as few can forget, on February 5, 2003 at the UN Security Council, the Iraq/anthrax/crop-duster claim arose from its sleep in the infamous, fraudulent presentation by Colin Powell as he slyly tied Iraq back to the anthrax attacks and shilled for war against Iraq. That feat of propaganda was but one of at least 532 occasions when eight top members of the Bush administration made at least 936 false statements on Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction and its links to Al Qaeda, according to a study conducted by The Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism and released in 2008.
Anyone concerned about the truth behind 9/11 and the anthrax attacks should read this profoundly important book. It is filled with tight argumentation backed by solid evidence, and even the speculative parts ring true.
In closing I will mention MacQueen’s fascinating penultimate chapter wherein he speculates about the significance of the repeated word “unthinkable” by the media and government officials following George W. Bush’s use of the term “rethink the unthinkable” in a May 1, 2001 speech at the National Defense University. The mainstream media used the word “unthinkable” repetitively throughout October 2001 when referring to the anthrax attacks. And one of the early anthrax threatening letters sent to Tom Brokaw, begins: “The Unthinkabel” (sic) – showing, of course, how Muslim terrorists can’t spell English. “There is a pattern here,” MacQueen writes.

“The pattern may not signify a grand plan, or, indeed, conscious intent at all – there may be no conspiracy – but, whatever the origins of the ‘unthinkable’ discourse, it deserves investigation and contemplation.”

Words matter, and those repeated enough matter more, words such as ground zero, homeland, and unthinkable. “He who wants to persuade should not put his trust in the right argument,” Joseph

Conrad wrote in Lord Jim. “The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.”

MacQueen has chosen sense through argument, and rather than dismissing his as unthinkable, thinking people everywhere should engage it.

Plato’s Phaedo – Esoteric Analysis

jay008 

Triads of philosophy

By: Jay
Phaedo is the dialogue of Plato that concerns Socrates’ final words.  The discussion revolves around a proposal by Socrates’ associates to defend his views of the afterlife and the immortality of the soul, followed by a counter argument by a Pythagorean, and a final rebuttal by Socrates before the recounting of his drinking the hemlock.  A great read, the work constitutes one of Plato’s most notable dialogues: The influence of Phaedo on subsequent Western thought is clearly tremendous. Until recently, I hadn’t thought about it since my undergrad days of philosophy 101, where we read a selection and hit the highlights of the doctrine of forms and immortality of the soul.  Returning to the unabridged work years later and with a much wider range of knowledge, the discussion struck me as profound as much as it is bizarre and mysterious.   In this article, we will investigate the epistemological, metaphysical and esoteric teachings sprinkled along the way, as well as problematic areas.
Early in the dialogue, Socrates mentions his desire to practice the “arts” based on a recurring dream he has had.  In response to queries about this, Socrates tells his friends “philosophy is the greatest of the arts,” based on his attempt to create an Aesop’s Fable of his own about the duality involved in pleasure and pain.  The dialogue is also littered with reference to “initiation into the Mysteries,’ the allegorical understanding given in religious initiations, and that the “initiates of the Mysteries” are prepared for journey of the dead undertaken in the afterlife.  Pleasure, he argues, is dialectically tied to pain, and both tend to ever bring their opposite.  In this life, our attachment to bodily pleasure and passion thus becomes a hindrance that wears down the lofty, immortal nature of the soul.  The allegorical meaning of the Rites of the Mysteries is therefore the philosophical understanding of how to live well so that in the next life one can pass on to blissful Valhalla.  However, Socrates does not entirely “spiritualize” or “allegorize” the rites of the gods – he follows them in both senses.
The references to the Mysteries and the rites of religion is curious, given the standard, secular version of this topic in academic settings, which generally focuses on a cursory overview and a discarding of any esoteric ideas in the dialogues.  Marxist, feminist and statist education in our day is universally programmed to read all great works as externally imposed class and gender warfare diatribes, subverting everything wholesome and wondrous in them.  And should you happen upon a male professor that isn’t a feminist/Marxist, you likely got an atheist materialist who scoffed at anything in the work beyond his feeble grasp.  Contrary to these sophistical losers, Phaedo is a religious treatise about initiatic knowledge through revelation.  While all of its theses and ideas are not what I would recommend, Phaedo is a perennialist document, and not a secular one.
For Plato and Socrates, the “philosopher” is he who lives according to virtue and reason, cultivating the pleasures of the soul/intellect, and not the pleasures and passions of the baser desires of the body.  The key to this path is grasping first that there are absolutes – absolute truth, goodness, beauty, etc.  These are universal forms that are recollected from our past lives, and ultimately back to the One, or the Monad, from which all things mysteriously emanated.  Man “sees” truly by his soul, and seeing with this higher, awakened eyesight allows one to peer into the higher realm of existence where truth is eternal, not subject to the chaotic flux and temporal finitude and change of this life.  Anti-material and, anachronistically, gnostic elements emerge here, and later Christian theology, for example, would connect gnostic movements to Platonism.  One thinks of Origen’s debates with Celsus, for example, or Augustine and Porphyry, and in both of those cases, Augustine and Origen unfortunately share too many of Platonism’s presuppositions.  Regardless, the anti-physical stance of Platonism actually demonstrates origins in much older traditions of the far east.  As the Timaeus recounts, the “mysteries” of Pythagoreanism and Platonism are those of Egypt.
As I’ve criticized before in Augustine, the clear influence of Platonic errors is evident from Phaedo.  The ascetic tendency to “despise the body” is present, also hearkening to older, ascetic traditions found in traditions like Hinduism, so we are again presented with a perennial tradition at work here that is based on syncretic principles.  The “seeing” the soul does is achieved by the awakening of the philosophical sense, where the soul wanders through the mirror reflections and copies of things (the particulars), on the way back to the One (the universals and the Monad), and then to engage in the cyclical process again, where Socrates gives a detailed account of how the transmigration of souls takes place.   The unfortunate and central place of Western dialectics is given prime place here, where the eternal realm of unchanging forms is set over against the temporal realm of illusory reality.  Ancient far eastern ideas of maya and empirical “reality” as un-reality and deception are clearly present here, and along with the transmigration of souls, these ridiculous doctrines should be dropped, based as they are on pagan conceptions of cyclical time and the chain of being, wherein God, forms, man and matter, are all placed at different levels on the same continuum of being.  All based on the presupposition of dialectics raised to a status of ultimate metaphysical principle, contraries and oppositions found in nature are not transcended by setting these forces in eternal dualistic opposition.
In this scheme, death is on the same continuum as life, as a “natural” process, and time is illusory.  The central absurdity here is that if life is illusory, then the realization of life is illusory, as well.  In other words, a presuppositional critique of the faulty metaphysical assumptions of Platonism can actually free us from the dialectical tensions and allow us to plumb its depths for good points and insights.  Nevertheless, the central problem here is the dualistic tension of binary opposition, where all binaries require their opposite.  So, pleasure requires and brings pain, death requires and brings life, etc.  By this reasoning, time necessitates eternity, and the good requires and necessitates either evil or negation of the good, etc.  If that is true, then the eternality of the good is based on the simultaneous eternality of evil.  If the two require and necessitate the other, then the value judgment of adjudicating something as “good” and something as “bad” must also be illusory, relative, and whichever appellation is chosen, can logically be interchanged with the other.  If both good and evil are relative terms based on the eternality of both in dualistic tension, then good is evil, and evil is good, and we are back at monism. Numerous other ways of modelling this presupposition as contradictory nonsense could be given, but this should be sufficient to show it’s nonsensical on its own grounds.
In like manner, the location of knowledge of the forms is placed by Plato in past lives.  Transmigration of the soul and reincarnation (clearly borrowed from older pagan religions) is nonsensical on numerous grounds, but the most obvious is the impossible bridge or link between the realm of the forms and this life of flux.  How can the good, eternal, invariant and universal actually be in our realm of the opposite?  It cannot, and for Plato the only bridge between these two realms is the human intellect.  Since the human intellect clearly makes connections and associations that extend beyond the empirical, how is this possible?  If human autonomy and rationalistic primacy of intellect is the starting point for epistemology, then it stands to reason that the knowledge of universals we obtain must originate in a past life.   However, this does not solve the problem of finitude, as the ability to link what Kant called a transcendental unity of apperception or a unitive identity in an object over time (identity over time), cannot be solved by a finite human intellect.  The only way out of this dilemma is an infinite Divine Mind which contains all the logoi (forms), and not a human intellect.  The human intellect is a small mirror of this Logos, but it is not a mirror of the divine Monad’s essence (as Platonism, Origenism, Augustinianism, and Thomism say).

Bosch. Garden of Earthly Delights. Forms and Archetypes.

The bridge between the infinite and the finite is the human nous, a faculty given by God to know God.  The human nous is able to, through remembrance of God (not remembrance of past lives) achieve actual gnosis of the logoi (forms) through union with God, not intellectual and rational accumulation of facts.  The rationalist tendency to identify intellect and soul in Platonism must be rejected, as this identification is also the root of the anthropological trend the West would take, turning it to its own oblivion.  The reason for this is Plato’s idea that the soul, because it is invisible, must be a perfect unity, like the original Monad, and thus in dialectical tension, the multiplicity and flux of the body is in tension against the perfect unity of the soul, identified with the intellect.  No, man is not a duality of body and soul in tension, but a body, soul and spirit, and by returning to God through repentance and love, his heart (nous) is changed, thus altering his intellect, placing intellect under the rule of nous.  For Plato, it’s man’s intellect that is primary – for Orthodoxy, it is man’s heart that must change in submission to God which cleanses the mind to submit to the nous, and thereby man perceived the truth of things (logoi).  For Plato, theosis is achieved by man’s intellect – biblically, theosis is achieved by placing intellect under the dominance of the heart and God’s law.
However, these criticisms aside, Plato’s argument against naïve empiricism is excellent and crucial.  The mind of man does connect similar concepts in objects of experience, and these connecting concepts themselves are not empirically experienced.  They are also not mere token terms invented by social structures, but real ideas, real connecting universals that objects share through participation in the universal.  This doctrine of participation of many things in one, while retaining their identities was chosen in the patristic era because of this balance, over against Aristotelian hylomorphism.  Hylomorphism and Aristotelian thought excludes the possibility of more than one unity in an object – any singular substance must be an absolutely simple substance.  However, for Plato, there is at least the notion of the balance of the one and the many in an object, which is able to share the universal characteristics of roundness, whiteness, etc., without roundness and whiteness and particularity losing their real identity.  Plato’s arguments about forms from the problem of the one and the many are the ultimate antidote to the naïve empiricism and scientism that have so drugged the masses in our day.  Socrates even jokes that in his young days, he was taken up by the naïve empirical natural science of Anaxagoras, as if it was the answer to everything, only later in life coming to the realization that it was a fundamentally flawed and presuppositionally nonsensical view, which attempted to explain causality by reference to other causes or descriptions.  This circular, contradictory nonsensical view would be highlighted a few millennia later by David Hume, who would take the skepticism of empiricism to its logical conclusions – total insanity and the destruction of all possibility of knowledge.