"The Bourne Ultimatum" - Another Look at How We Are.

In the United States of America, under the now irresistible pressure of economics, everything seems to swiftly devolve into a grotesque caricature of what it was originally. Cancerous, it probably presages the death throes of a once-great nation.

The following is an excerpt from the Impeach for Peace website, and I urge the reader to go there and peruse:

In a meeting Thursday, July 26th, 2007, members of ImpeachForPeace.org and After Downing Street met with Congressman Dennis Kucinich in his Washington DC office to present the Congressman with thousands of "Do It Yourself Impeachments" collected over the past few months. DIY Impeachment Memorials are actually a little known and rarely used part of the Rules of the House of Representatives ("Jefferson's Manual"), which empowers individual citizens to initiate the impeachment against any federal official themselves. These Memorials support the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney.

During our meeting, Congressman Kucinich agreed to place all signers of the DIY Impeachment Memorials specifically referencing Cheney into the Congressional record. Rep. Kucinich also agreed to enter into the record the names of signers of regular petitions to impeach Cheney. Because there is a limit to the number of pages that a representative can submit to the Congressional Record each day, Rep. Kucinich stated he will continue to submit petitions every day until all the names are submitted. The most powerful statement for impeachment is the submission of a Memorial, however, so if you have not yet sent a Memorial for the impeachment of Vice President Cheney to: Impeach For Peace, please do so! Go to http://impeachforpeace.org/ImpeachNow.html and download the Memorial. Then send it to the address listed on the cover letter.

"Jefferson's Manual" is an interpretive guide to parliamentary procedure, and is included (along with the Constitution) in the bound volumes of the Rules of the House of Representatives. It is ratified by each congress (including the current one), and has been updated continuously through the history of our democracy. The section covering impeachment lists the acceptable vehicles for bringing impeachment motions to the floor of the House.

Before the House Judiciary Committee can put together the Articles of Impeachment, someone must initiate the impeachment procedure. Most often, this occurs when members of the House pass a resolution. Another method outlined in the manual, however, is for individual citizens to submit a memorial for impeachment.

Since then, Kucinich has held a press conference informing the public of this.

I hope everyone will enter his name in the Congressional Record, and I have forwarded my own memorial to the congressman. I will also continue to do my best in order get as many people as I can to do likewise.

A couple of days ago, Ed, a friend of ours, Rita, and I went to see the new movie entitled “The Bourne Ultimatum.” A few weeks before, we also went to see the “Good Shepherd” (Matt Damon, it happens, looks so much like my youngest it’s scary). We go largely because a number of my friends always want to hear my view of the flick, me being a charter member of the fraternity of people known as “spooks.” Having seen all of the Bourne series by Robert Ludlum, I can tell the reader that the movies have a lot of realism. Like the Tom Clancy movie Hunt for Red October once was, they can be for those initiated in the shadow wars downright startling in what the author either has learned or extrapolated from already published data.

The CIA not only employs writers like Clancy in order to serve their continuing Operation Mockingbird propaganda, you know, but commissions the writing of novels and the actual production of movies for the same purpose. It’s all about controlling the public mind and opinion – not unlike what the latest movie says happened to its protagonist, a CIA “asset” named Jason Bourne whose original identity is finally revealed to be that of “David Webb.”

The flick’s premise is an eerily familiar one for me, inasmuch as two former clients, both retired members of our military, were individuals with whom the U.S. dealt in a manner similar to David (Jason Bourne) Webb. Hadley Washington was experimented with during the CIA program coded Operation MKULTRA in order to determine the feasibility of what happened to the Bourne Ultimatum’s hero, and to Sergeant First Class Richard Benton who underwent involuntary treatment he still thought then was electroconvulsive therapy. Whatever it was, the treatment excised his memory of secrets learned while he was the cryptography technician at the Pentagon.

More, to questions from my companions this evening, I replied that the U.S. has absolutely – and I use the word pointedly here – no compunctions about killing innocent people (matter of fact, that anyone can, in view of what has happened and continues to happen in Iraq, ask a question like that leaves one like me nonplussed for understanding). Neither are the “assets” of the movies – specialists in murder – unreal. I know that because I was at age fifteen recruited by the U.S. to do exactly that. My refusal to kill Fidel Castro and/or Che Guevara remains the principal source of the government’s formerly vicious and murderous antagonism toward me.

But the movie speaks to matters other than that which is already, incontrovertibly, known. Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy aren’t alone as federal U.S. “insiders.”

Parenthetically, Senator John McCain is on television as I type, telling the public that “if we leave Iraq, al Qaeda will follow us home.” I mention this because in the movie to which I have reference here “David Webb” is at one point – a “flashback” – being “brain-washed.” Sleep deprived, water-boarded, brutalized physically and mentally otherwise, bombarded with psycho-suggestion, and only semi-conscious, the character sits numbly as the CIA doctor (who, incidentally, had a counterpart in reality), harangues. To hear a U.S. Senator and public figure like John McCain say anything as utterly and obviously absurd as “al Qaeda will follow us home,” is too similar to be anything but remarkable here. Only one certain of his audience’s behaviorally-conditioned stupefacation would make such a public statement. Anyone in his normal mind would laugh at such an utterance.

David Webb doesn’t laugh. Instead, he accepts the pistol offered him, then shoots to death a helplessly bound, hooded, and gagged man sitting in a corner. David Webb, the CIA doctor then says, no longer exists. He is now Jason Bourne, a CIA “asset.”

For me, the parallel between Jason Bourne, movie character, and the public of the United States of America simply cannot be missed. Not only did I receive training in methods very similar to those taught the movie character, but I lived with SFC Richard Benton for more than a year, seeking to understand, even prove, what had been done to him. When I had tracked down and repeatedly interviewed Hadley Washington, I learned, too. I learned that the Bourne Ultimatum’s Black Briar Program, in reality Operation Mockingbird, is real and ongoing. The propaganda prescription of Nazi Doctor Josef Goebbels has, in other words, reached the zenith of its development, and funded by its victims.

There is, as I have argued here, no other explanation for the history of the United States, and the nations of the world vis a vis the U.S. since World War Two. There is no other explanation for how, in the words of the London Mirror, “59,054,087 Americans can be so dumb.” There is no other explanation for a strategic blunder and pratfall as monumental as Operation Iraqi Freedom, or the apparent willingness of the citizenry of United States to commit murder on a scale seldom equalled in modern history. The callous disregard of the U.S. public for the horrendous suffering of the people in Iraq can only speak of a kind of un-natural stupor. Like the character Jason Bourne in the movie, “The Bourne Ultimatum.”

I must believe that; otherwise, the people of the United States are no better than those who lived in Germany, 1934-1945.

The public, therefore, must NOT be dumb; they are Jason Bournes. Stunned and stupefied by behaviorist Operation Mockingbird propagandists, they hardly listen to the horrors being wreaked on the people of Iraq. Distracted and anesthetized, moreover, by carefully crafted entertainment news – “info-tainment” – they sit in mindless stupor, watching their neighbors’ husbands, sons and daughters shipped away to die in ignominious (oh, yes – they’ll be “remembered;” god, that disgusts me!) obscurity. Reciting endlessly the “support the troops” mantra given them by the cynically complicit behaviorist media, they change their attention from one lurid “story” – its luridity the measure of the contempt held by its orchestrators for their audience-victims - to the next.

Surreal, it’s much like the Bourne Ultimatum itself in its appeal. The Bourne Ultimatum would be a good story on its merits as an adventure yarn alone. But that’s not enough these days. Repeatedly, the audience (those mentally normal, that is) is obliged to digress from the story, in order to watch while the stunt men and special effects technicians “do their thing.” The utterly absurd car – oh yes; and motorcycle – chases and fights scenes contribute utterly nothing but distraction (are you paying attention?) to the story or movie. In one fight scene, we get some insight into the asinine tactical ideation that apparently resulted in planning and deciding to attack Iraq. The fight, immediately after the hero Bourne has been sprinting and leaping across rooftops and over walls, crashing through windows and doors for as long as fifteen minutes, then goes on with intensity and duration far beyond the physical ability of any human being (even one as hyped and hyperplasia-ed as Barry Bonds or today’s equally absurd “athletes” generally).

It is, incontrovertibly, all a microcosm of the nation. Bombarded by relentless propaganda in the form of television “commercial” advertisement, the public accepts as food garbage that is the culinary equivalent to cardboard or plastic, beverage that is near poisonous (or in the case of beer, ersatz and phony), entertainment so primitive and devoid of appeal to the mind in its nature as to bore Bushman or Australian Aborigine. So uneducated and comically stupid that he has collectively become a clown and the butt of wry humor both here and overseas, John Q. Citizen stares in stolid and stultified incomprehension at the bloviating pontification and outright lying of public figures, political pundits, and politicians. Nothing is too preposterous for the American public to believe, so long as it is interspersed among the equivalent (or, in these days of eavesdropping eyes everywhere, actual and video-taped) of spectacular or lurid car chases, macho-minimalist martial arts “fights,” and groaning, clawing, face-sucking, and mutual mouth-chewing sex.

Under the colossal mental mauling, the public has grown as bewildered as the “Bourne Ultimatum” character Jason Bourne; more, though, it has become more and more psychotic. That, too, is as thunderously obvious as today’s daily events. In keeping with its implacable demeanor concerning the people of Iraq, the public here remains aloof from the neurotic and societally-threatening behavior of its own.

So, unless the U.S. public somehow experiences a horror like the murder of his “love interest” in the three Bourne movies, and has a flashback leading it to realization of the Operation Mockingbird brain-washing it has undergone, there will be no escape like that of David Webb in the last scene of The Bourne Ultimatum. “Americans” as they with dumb obliviousness refer to themselves, will go in programmed lock-step to another perfunctory election, obstinately and with cattle or sheep-like certainty that they are choosing their torturing tormentors.

See the movie, then see it you can relate it to the (other) info-tainment in which you are immersed. See the movie, and see your country – yourself, even.