The 9-11 "Cover-up" Theorists - Is That ALL It's about?

Sunday, wife Rita and I went over to Victoria, in order for her to visit an optometrist there. I always park away from the rest of the vehicles in the lot, in order to avoid the otherwise certain battering from the car doors of people who respect nothing in this world but their own interests and comfort. I’ve written before about how such matters can tell a historical investigator about a society and nation. About a culture, too. The statistics concerning matters like parking lot courtesy, apartment or condominium complex trash and dumpsters, and more, tell a tale the politically correct and religious have a great deal of difficulty in refuting rationally.

Anyway, as we returned to the car, Phillip, the exchange student from Austria staying with us, noticed that the hood on my car was open. Trust me, there’s no way that can mean anything but the fact that someone has raised and failed to close it completely. More, my car being what it is, that means someone has gone to considerable difficulty. They’ve broken into the passenger compartment of the car.

For the next twenty minutes, while my Rita and Phillip stood a distance away, I did the drill that is checking a car for sabotage, or a bomb. Doing so, I saw that the car had been searched thoroughly, everything in the trunk moved. Since I keep survival gear there, filling the trunk almost to its capacity, that is an elaborate and time consuming process. More, the motion detectors my car is equipped with confirmed that there had been at least two intruders, persons who remained silent during the entire operation. I also saw that the intruders were professionals, inasmuch as they had opened the car and trunk with lock “picking” equipment. In broad daylight, as it was, that narrowed the identity of the trespassers considerably.

Nothing had been stolen. But how about something left? Considering and deciding to take the chance – being stopped on the way home, under the circumstances, ought prove more of an opportunity than otherwise – I signaled Rita and Phillip to get in the car.

The ride home was uneventful. Yesterday, when we awoke to find the garage door open, that being a garage door that can only come to be in that state one way, however, I immediately examined my car again. Sure enough. When I had immediately continued the voluminous record of it all started the day before by mailing it both by regular mail and e-mail to a number of friends confidential and otherwise, I relaxed.

I know, you see, far more about my would-be tormentors than they realize. Oh, they’ve been instructed to remain quiet during their operations – I’ve long since had the reputation with my government for laying ineluctable and devastating traps. More, my story with all its facets is now all over the Word Wide Web, the nation, and the world. I am, in fact, all but “untouchable.”

Legally, that is. This is – obviously – no longer a nation of laws. It will be most interesting to see what comes next.

Returning to our discussion of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 where we left off with French author Thierry Meyssan, whose baseless assertions are fodder for even mainstream European and Middle Eastern media, I note that in his book entitled ‘The Big Lie,’ Meyssan concludes that the Pentagon was struck by a satellite-guided missile(!) — part of an elaborate “U.S. military coup.”

Note that the U.S. military coup to which Meyssan refers occurred in the late forties and early fifties. Note, too, the utter absurdity of the story. Among dozens of things, why would the government – or anyone – attack the World Trade Center with radio-controlled airliners, then the Pentagon with a guided missile – a missile apparently equipped to strew airliner parts about the area in the process of reaching its target? Obviously, Messieur Meyssan has never heard of Occam’s Razor – or keep it simple, stupid.

If, like the operation required to bring down the World Trade Center (did anyone notice I haven’t yet mentioned Building Seven in that regard) by controlled demolition, the shear impossibility of what our modern-day Hercule Poirot claims weren’t enough, we have the argument that the holes in the Pentagon were the wrong size for having been hit by a Boeing 757.

Facts (yeah, I know they irritates hell out of the conspiracy folks, but I only deal in facts)? Well, first: When American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon's exterior wall, Ring E, it created a jagged, irregular hole roughly – we’re not talking cake knives and cookie cutters here - 75 ft. wide. That’s according to the ASCE Pentagon Building Performance investigators and their report. Note, once again, that unlike the conspiracy theorists' scores of witnesses (who have, somehow, magically disappeared [that’s names, addresses, record of existence, names and addresses of relative and associates – all that inconvenient forensic proof stuff]), the investigators, their report, and the statement so literally hundreds of witnesses are available for perusal, review, and criticism.

The Pentagon outer ring’s exterior facade collapsed about 20 minutes after impact, but ASCE based its measurements of the original hole on the number of first-floor support columns that were destroyed or damaged. Computer simulations have later confirmed the findings.

Then, there’s the matter of the second hole, a 16(?) foot one in the Pentagon's Ring C. That one, obviously, was made by Flight 77’s landing gear – the gear was found inside the building near the hole it made.

Aw shucks – Huxley’s “great tragedy of Science–the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”


Next in this smorgasbord of tormented and spastic ratiocination we have the bizarre claim that many Pentagon windows remained in one piece — even those just above the point of impact from the Boeing 757 passenger plane. Now, admittedly, while remembering that I DID come across the Website Pentagonstrike.co.uk and its online animation being circulated in the United States and Europe, I can’t remember what all that was supposed to prove. That I don’t remember almost certainly is due the fact that some things are just not memorable, that due their absurdity and uselessness.

I supposed the "intact windows" directly above the crash site prove an aircraft smaller than a 757 hit the Pentagon. Presumably, a missile would have carried explosives – or maybe the plotters were clever enough to remove the explosives or reduce the charge in order to make it appear that a plane smaller than a 757 hit the building. . . And if the reader is shaking his head in wonderment at the convolute reasoning or plot such information would suggest, he sees why I didn’t pay enough attention to the claim to remember it.

I happen also to know that the windows in the Pentagon are blast-resistant. If they survived the crash, they did just what they were designed to do. Looking it up, I found this from one Ken Hays, Executive Vice-President of Masonry Arts, the Bessemer, Ala., company that designed, manufactured and installed the Pentagon windows: "A blast-resistant window must be designed to resist a force significantly higher than a hurricane that's hitting instantaneously. These (windows) were not designed to receive wracking seismic force," Hays notes. "They were designed to take in inward pressure from a blast event, which apparently they did: [Before the collapse] the blinds were still stacked neatly behind the window glass."

Another lovely theory slain by an ugly fact. Shazam!

Next in the smorgasbord of silly, we have the claim that there was no plane wreckage at the Pentagon. "In reality, a Boeing 757 was never found," pentagonstrike.co.uk, says. “Which,” these latter day Sherlocks insists, “asks the question, ‘What hit the Pentagon on 9/11?’”

That, incidentally – and to demonstrate the logical merit of it all – (proves that) “a small plane, not a 757, hit the building.” We don’t know what hit the building, but that tells us what DID hit the building; we don’t know what hit the Pentagon, but that proves that a missile hit the Pentagon. And, something that left no debris of itself hit the building . . .

Geez – tell me guys: if the government could blow that hole in the Pentagon without leaving any debris at all, what was all that falderal about the WTC? Why were we damning the government for not finding debris THERE? What about all those pictures YOU posted everywhere to prove that a radio-controlled airliner struck? Why would the government use one method here another there, and. . .?

Oh, hell – never mind!

What are the facts, again – those anyone can locate, and check? Well, blast experts like Allyn E. Kilsheimer, (who happens to be CEO of KCE Structural Engineers in Washington, D.C.) myself, and others I know personally, basically say what Kilsheimer says. Kilsheimer was the first structural engineer to arrive at the Pentagon after the crash in order to help coordinate emergency responders.

"It was absolutely a plane, and I'll tell you why," says Kilsheimer. "I saw the marks of the plane wing on the face of the building. I picked up parts of the plane with the airline markings on them. I held in my hand the tail section of the plane, and I found the black box."

And scores – literally, again – of photos of wreckage inside and outside the building both appeared on television and remain in the record for perusal of anyone taking the time and making the effort necessary. Kilsheimer's eyewitness account is backed up, in other words, by evidence in the form of photos and video. And the CEO adds, "I held parts of uniforms from crew members in my hands, including body parts. Okay?"


Now, what I should do here, were I to subscribe to the my debate opponent's methods in the matter of the 9-11 - is say I KNOW Kilsheimer - just make something up that sounds really good and probative. Make something up out of whole cloth, something that supports my argument. Sure - that would to it.


Instead, I urge the reader to go to the Web, look for any thermo-copy, video, or redaction otherwise of any statement by any witness. See if you can find any photo, video, or other documentary proof of what the declaiming bloviator there insists is fact. Even one recorded and documented statement by any firemen, policemen witness – hobo; I don’t care – will be more than I have been able to come up with. I would absolutely love to get my hands on just one written (typed, recorded, or provable – name it) statement from some credible person who heard or saw explosions in the World Trade Center towers, Building Seven or the Pentagon. See if you can find anything but an attempt to prove something by doubting what is know. More, in other words, of the “I don’t know what happened, but that tells me what happened and who did it” balderdash.

Which reminds me: if the government brought down the Trade Center with controlled demolition, and were able to do all the necessary preparation secretly (those invisible men, able to substantially alter the building without making any noise or leaving any sign) there, why in hell use a missile – hell, even a plane – on the Pentagon?

That’s to ignore a dozen more operational, tactical, and evidentiary inconsistencies fatal to the theorist opportunists.

Here, I choose to digress for a time, in order to expand upon another thing about all this that troubles me. As one with more than fifty years in the hobby and business of making scientific incident and accident investigations and reconstructions, I have seen and heard some “doozy” constructions of myth and the fanciful tale. The World Trade Center affair is the “doozy” of them all. In years to come, I predict that it will become the textbook example of “don’t does” for forensicists, detectives and other kinds of fact investigators. The aftermath of “9-11” has been the Jump to Conclusion Olympics of all time.

Now, of course, the purveyors of all the hype, sales gimmicks, and the like – the opportunist hucksters, in other words – could have been expected. Anyone who lived through the assassination of John Kennedy, the circus surrounding the trial of O.J. Simpson, or the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, could not claim surprise.

That the public has become so easy to dupe is worrisome – stupefyingly so, in fact; and in that I refer more to those who eagerly spread the nonsense, thereby lending it a kind of credibility and power with the otherwise disinterested public and voter. In so doing, the gossip-monger and amateur – meaning for love alone, devoid of profit otherwise – sleuth plays directly into the hands of those he would defeat. By confusing in the interests of sale-ability due notoriety as many things as he possibly can, the huckster and his dupe actually make more certain that historians (like myself) will never know the whole truth.

But it’s not the worst thing we face. And why do I – who has suffered as I have for so many years under the totalitarian hand of government - crap like the story that leads my essay here, seem to defend the government in the matter that is my topic?

I don’t. Just as I once seemed to defend criminals – even the scum of the earth – against the law, I may now seem to defend the damnable U.S. government. But, friend, I don’t defend the government; I defend the truth. All these years ago, when the doing was to prove my downfall and let my enemy the state take everything from me, I defended not the criminal (albeit the U.S. Government), but the U.S. Constitution. You see, I know that whenever any one of us is on trial by the government, we are ALL on trial. Whenever the government violates the civil rights of any one of us - however base, however rotten, however vicious he may be – it violates the civil rights of each and every one of the rest of us.

Whenever anyone, group or individual, violates the truth and the scientific systems by which we know it, it violates the truth, period; it attacks sanity itself, and it plays by so doing into the very hands of those it would use falsehood to destroy. Remember the old saw, that goes, “The first liar never has a chance?” Think about it. When you lie, you assure not only that your lie will be used against you, you assure that lying itself will be used against you. In a nation where there is no truth, the tyrant rules easily. Look around you. We are in this pickle because the truth is not in us, for where there is no truth there cannot be justice.

And where there is no justice is where there is tyranny. Anyone who can believe the 9-11 conspiracy theorists concerning their government can believe their government - and believe that we live in a democracy. THAT's how important is knowing the truth, what it is, and how to know it.

More Conspiracy - But Who's Conspiring against Whom?

Maybe SUPERMAN did it? We can't prove he didn't, so that proves he might have.

In the United States, a hyper-capitalist nation un-matched by any other in that regard, any opportunity to commercialize – to prostitute or pimp - is seized. Any such matter, like the conspiracy theories having to do with the world trade center and “9-11,” is certain to produce a myriad of hucksters, persons seeking to “capitalize.” Video tapes, books, posters, tee shirts – you name it – they will appear for sale. Some - those like tee-shirts - rely simply on the “hype-able” nature of the matter, and the subject’s “notoriety.” Others rely upon the need for the individual to self-aggrandize with his fellows by appearing expert on an otherwise esoteric topic or study. These, of course, infest the internet in the form of Websites with their mendacity.

While obnoxious in their selfish irresponsibility, they are nowhere as much so as those willing to go to the time and expense of producing video tapes, even movies. Pure propagandist theatre, this mass-produced lie preys upon the ignorance of its audience for both monetary and political purpose. Like a movie-maker seeking to entertain, it foists nonsense like that of John Wayne exploding dynamite with a rifle shot, detective John Shaft using a potato as a silencer on a rifle, Hopalong Cassidy shooting the bullet of his opponent in a gunfight out of the air, a slim and sexy slip of a woman knocking the snot out of a pro football lineman type in a street-fight or easily enduring U.S. Navy SEAL training. It’s Billy Dixon’s “Long Shot at Adobe Walls.” All depend upon the ignorance of the viewer for their credibility, using the magic of “special effects” to create otherwise credible illusion.

The principal difference, of course, is purpose.

There is another difference, however, that of simply responsibility. Here, the purpose of the individual or group is the deciding ingredient. Each of us, especially as citizens of the United States, originally a democratic republic and now a nation struggling to regain its former control of government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” has a certain responsibility created by our historic mission as a people. RESPONSIBILITY. Perhaps as old as mankind, the tendency of man to spread hearsay and rumor unverified by either reason, logic, or science, has come to be called “gossip.” In that, it has acquired a certain innocuousness and therefore – supposed, at least – innocence. Just fun. “Dishing dirt,” et cetera.

That cannot be claimed in the case of those like the exploiters of “9-11.” One of the purposes of these people is the spread of hate, hate easily expected to lead to violence. Another, while less damaging in its potential, has the purpose of widespread political effect. Recent surveys suggest that as many as one-third of the U.S. public believe their government deliberately murdered 3,000 people in order to create Reichstag-like reasons for war. That is serious, even catastrophic effect, with serious, possibly even more catastrophic portent.

Like election of a president even worse than the present one, and even more unassailable power for those who by silent coup d’etat have gained control of our nation. I speak, of course, of those in obvious and open control of our government and its policies (another matter for discussion, of course).

As with almost invariably all events of this nature and caliber, there are lessons to be learned, “lemonade to be made from lemons.” “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” the old German Sprichwort and heraldic motto says. Video tapes like “9/11 Guilt: The Proof is in Your Hands,” by Don Paul, Jim Hoffman, and Celestine Star, while outright (remember John Wayne and the dynamite exploded by rifle fire, the beauty queen U.S. Navy SEAL, and the like?) fraud intended for profit alone, are exemplary of Operation Mockingbird-like propaganda tommyrot also used by tent-show evangelists and fundamentalist preachers the like of Elmer Gantry, Jim Baker, Jimmy Swaggert, and others who use hypnotic technique to dupe and seduce their gullible congregations.

Their hypocritical piety sickens – yes, and infuriates – me. I detest these people!

They are also like the Elmer Gantrys of political punditry, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. They are the odious equivalent of hate-sellers like Ann Coulter, Al Franken, and Rosie O’Donnell. These people are not innocent purveyors of mere gossip. They are the Josef Goebbels, the Vladimir Lenins – and the Henry Kissingers - of propaganda. Make no mistake, they mean, and they serve, those who would rule the world for their own reasons and profit.

I spoke of responsibility. In our miserable schools, and among a people brought under the behavioral yoke that is illegally unreasonable and burdensome totalitarian taxation, the word has lost most of its meaning – even use. What is the responsibility of one who repeats, and thereby spreads, a rumor based upon hearsay and his own ignorance of the rumor’s subject and subject matter?

I digress with purpose here, the better to explain my view. Among the literally dozens of people with whom I have disputed and debated “9-11,” I have not found one – let me repeat that: not one – who had even a smattering of the education or knowledge required to either understand or discus the essential science of his subject. One such individual encountered recently is archetypical of the “’9-11’ Conspiracy” “theorist.” I use italics (digressing even further) with “theorist” because these people are not sufficiently knowledgeable to merit being called such, and the italics denote special meaning.

This is gossip, witnessed by the fact that again and again and again, I have posed questions seeking to learn the credibility of the individuals in question, questions like how to know or calculate the overpressure from the explosives supposedly involved, how to calculate the energy of the falling upper stories (most could not even calculate the mass in question, couldn’t define or calculate mass, had no idea of the forces acting upon structural steel or how it is calculated, how to estimate the speed and energy of the airliners, the actual theory and practice used to bring buildings down by controlled demolition, and fifty more). The answers I received were more typical of today’s evasive, dissimulating, and lying political figures. Some were down right comical. One, for instance, and asked to explain how the Herculean task of preparing the WTC for demolition without prohibitive notice might have been accomplished, responded that is was “well known” – I’ll bet I heard that expression used in this regard five hundred times (think about the logic of that one) – “the government has developed a lot of invisibility techniques just for this kind of thing.”

When I asked how the cutting, sawing, carrying, and hauling, the miles (that’s literally) of wire and equipment, the relatively huge number of personnel, their effects, and more might have been made invisible, I didn’t hear from “Greg” anymore. Too bad, only Jerry Lewis and Red Skelton have ever kept me in mirth longer.

I digress even further because I can’t resist (this one is good to keep to myself): speaking to scoffer concerning anthropogenic global warming recently, I presented the argument that is that of Pascale’s Wager (to date, incidentally, and while I have posed the question repeatedly to those of similar persuasion everywhere including the Web, I have not received a single rebuttal [think about that one, too]). My victim (I admit a certain amount of glee at exposing these intellectual charlatans for what they are in fact), stared. When I delivered the second of the one-two punch, that in any closed system like the earth’s environment, changing even a little – let alone massively - the balance of ingredients as it were could not possibly be done without repercussions of catastrophic proportions – we can’t, for instance, breathe carbon dioxide - he said, and you’ll note that I quote, “Well, we’ll just have to evolve. We have to use fossil fuels – that’s all that’s to it!”

The WTC conspiracy theorists are like that guy (a retired army officer, by the way). The stupid is understandable, but – unless stupidity is its own excuse – the irresponsibility isn’t. If you don’t know about the use of guns and things potentially injurious or lethal, don’t give others advise on their use. To do that is not unlike opening an emergency medical center, despite knowing little or nothing about medicine or treatment of injuries, masquerading as an auto mechanic to provide the public advice concerning care of their cars as an auto mechanic, or pretending to be a psychiatric counselor on the basis of having read the Bible or Koran – in all instance basing your advice upon what you’ve heard from other experts of your kind, gleaned from quick “mouse” trips to Internet website for information.

Small wonder that in some parts of the country licenses are required even for things like mowing others’ lawns professionally. To masquerade as an expert or one knowledgeable entails responsibility for results, something that seems to have escaped the attention of the WTC conspiracy theorists.

Continuing examination of the World Trade Center conspiracy theory, we come to that of “No Stand-Down Order.” Theorists claim that no fighter interceptors were “scrambled” from any of the twenty-odd airbases within close proximity to the high-jacked airliners. Following the suspiciously illogical (I find it hard to believe, still, that anyone – let alone the sort of people invariably cited in these tales – could be so stupid) reasoning of the theorists, one, for instance, says, "On September 11, Andrews AFB had two squadrons of fighter jets with the job of protecting the skies over Washington D.C. They failed to do their job, and there is only one explanation (aside to the reader – check the brilliant logic and reasoning of that one!) for this - our Air Force was ordered to Stand Down on 9/11."

Whew (have I said that before?)! Let’s look at what I found out when I checked this one (from an officer friend at Andrews). On 9/11 there were no more than 14 fighter jets on alert in the contiguous states (later, realizing I had failed to ask how many those were, I learned from another source it meant all of the forty-eight on the continent – something, I might add, that shook my up not a little).

More, there was – as of this writing, still isn’t (think about that one, too) no automatic computer network alarm capable of alerting the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) of the threat represented by the missing planes. Sources other than my friend – who later confirmed them, however – said that civilian air traffic controllers had to use the telephone (reminds me of the guy on Grenada that time who had to use his credit card for a phone call in order to get combat air support in the battle there, then) in order to call NORAD.

I “go parenthetical” again to point out that conspiracy theorists contribute by the kind of nonsense I’m describing here to situations like this. Stupidity, like fear and the effects of nonsensical gossip like this, spread like disease. They infect all levels of society with their spastic effects. Irresponsibility, in short, is like a disease virus, capable of a Butterfly Effect of unimaginable proportions. As our society and nation continue to proliferate and grow, irresponsibility becomes a cancer cell, eating away at the very heart of our political, governmental, and security systems. This isn’t a damned disaster movie – this is real!

I proceed to quote from my notes, these taken from a website I have neglected to record. They are general, so I use them advisedly only - using Google, I could find them, but inasmuch as I make no claim of authorship – and take no credit for them:

"They [civilian Air Traffic Control, or ATC] had to pick up the phone and literally dial us," says Maj. Douglas Martin, public affairs officer for NORAD. Boston Center, one of 22 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regional ATC facilities, called NORAD's Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) three times: at 8:37 am EST to inform NEADS that Flight 11 was hijacked; at 9:21 am to inform the agency, mistakenly, that Flight 11 was headed for Washington (the plane had hit the North Tower 35 minutes earlier); and at 9:41 A.M. to (erroneously) identify Delta Air Lines Flight 1989 from Boston as a possible hijacking. The New York ATC called NEADS at 9:03 am to report that United Flight 175 had been hijacked — the same time the plane slammed into the South Tower. Within minutes of that first call from Boston Center, NEADS scrambled two F-15s from Otis Air Force Base in Falmouth, Mass., and three F-16s from Langley Air National Guard Base in Hampton, Va. None of the fighters got anywhere near the pirated planes.”

And, of course, any pilot who flies in the air traffic system knows why it couldn't find the hijacked flights. When the hijackers turned off the planes' transponder signal identifiers, Air Traffic Control both local and continental had to search the literally thousands of absolutely identical radar blips in what may be the country's busiest air corridors. Doesn’t anybody remember the German kid who flew his Cessna through the Soviet Union's much-vaunted air defenses into the Kremlin?

Of course, to the conspiracy theorist, trained intensively as he is by Hollywood, that is the proverbial “piece of cake.” No problem!

And what of NORAD's sophisticated, radar surveillance of the continent? Remember what I said about corollary lessons “9-11” can teach? Check this one: “NORAD may ring the continent,” one source said, but it’s looking outward for threats, It’s like a doughnut – no coverage in the middle.” When I wrote my paper in 1978, one of the observations I made concerning the feasibility of an attack using high-jacked airliners or National Guard jets (bet you didn’t think of that; and when, after enough senators had read my paper, a “red flag” operation revealed that literally hundred of armed jet fighters could have been stolen – in one instance sixteen WERE) was that NORAD was prepared to track and flight originating in the United States. They weren’t seen as threats and NORAD wasn't therefore prepared to track them.

Are you still wondering how New Orleans and FEMA’s pratfall there could have happened? You’re going to vote for all these Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giulliani, John McCain “leaders” who have brought us this “clusterf---” in the first place? Hell, you deserve the “9-11” conspiracy pimps.

Let’s see – where were we? Oh, yeah (and we’d better hurry – more nonsense daydreaming is undoubtedly going on, with even more wondrous theorization and “evidence”): theorists and “9-11” pimps asseverate that it has long (it’s like “everybody knows”) been SOP – standard operating procedure - to immediately intercept off-course planes failing to respond to communications from air traffic controllers. Obviously unaware that she was talking to a nearly life-long pilot, one bloviating bubblehead on the Truthout website sagely informed me, “When the Air Force ‘scrambles’ fighters to intercept off-course aircraft and those that enter restricted airspace in a matter of minutes.” At least, she got the “scrambles” jargon right. The facts? This from the same Website I quoted a moment ago:

“In the decade before 9/11, NORAD intercepted only one civilian plane over North America: golfer Payne Stewart's Learjet, in October 1999. With passengers and crew unconscious from cabin decompression, the plane lost radio contact but remained in transponder contact until it crashed. Even so, it took an F-16 one hour and 22 minutes to reach the stricken jet. Rules in effect back then, and on 9/11, prohibited supersonic flight on intercepts. Prior to 9/11, all other NORAD interceptions were limited to offshore Air Defense Identification Zones (ADIZ). ‘Until 9/11 there was no domestic ADIZ,’ FAA spokesman Bill Schumann tells PM. After 9/11, NORAD and the FAA increased cooperation, setting up hotlines between ATCs and NORAD command centers, according to officials from both agencies. NORAD has also increased its fighter coverage and has installed radar to monitor airspace over the continent.”

Once again, bald-faced lying by persons with obviously only television and movie theater schooling, and supposed facts without the most remote basis in reality made up out of whole cloth, all taking advantage – or, astonishingly, availing itself of - the audiences similar “expertise.” Incredible!

Next, we have the mythology engendered by and grown up around the “9-11” attack on the Pentagon. At 9:37 A.M. on 9/11, 51 minutes after Flight 175 hit the World Trade Center, the Pentagon was struck by a Boeing 757, American Airline Flight 77. More than a hundred people, all of them interviewed on the record, saw the plane hit the building, yet conspiracy theorists insist the evidence demonstrated that a missile – or a much smaller aircraft – hit the Pentagon. The amateur – not really, actually; “amateur” by definition implies the knowledge of one devoted to the practice of study of something, hardly the case here – sleuths claim that two holes were visible in the Pentagon immediately after the attack.

Neither of the two holes, the would-be Sherlock Holmes’ say, is big enough to have been made by a wide-bodied jetliner. That, you will notice is people who have never been to the scene of a plane crash, much less ever investigated one. They have never seen an aircraft burn or explode. That’s except, of course, on television or in the movies.

The impact of the Flight 77 left a 75-ft.-wide entry hole in the building's exterior wall, and a 16-ft.-wide hole in Ring C, the Pentagon's middle ring. Conspiracy theorists claim both holes are far too small to have been made by a Boeing 757. "How does a plane 125 ft. wide and 155 ft. long fit into a hole which is only 16 ft. across?" asks one Website "dedicated to discovering the bottom line truth to what really occurred on September 11, 2001."

The shear naiveté of such a remark betrays the speaker for his ignorance, assuming as it must that the building and its composition would have no effect on the aircraft. Presumably, the “expert” believes a 757 or other aircraft could just fly through the building and depart, to leave a perfect silhouette of its frontal profile in the building. What is astonishing – and worrisome in what it implies concerning the intelligence of the Websites readers – is that anyone dares say anything so vapid to an audience.

Neither Internet cuckoo-birds alone. Books have been authored by the dozens and hundreds, each lasting testimonial to its author’s lack of knowledge, information, and powers of ratiocination. One unhinged individual, Thierry Meyssan, writes, "This attack could only be committed by United States military personnel against other U.S. military personnel."

The truth? Pretty much what a real expert said, that being ASCE team member Mete Sozen, a professor of structural engineering at Purdue University (note that the italics are mine). “In this case, one wing hit the ground; the other was sheared off by the force of the impact with the Pentagon's load-bearing columns,” Sozen who specializes in the behavior of concrete buildings, said. “What was left of the plane flowed into the structure in a state closer to a liquid than a solid mass. If you expected the entire wing to cut into the building," Sozen told Popular Mechanics Magazine, "it couldn't happen."

And the reader may (if he’s more astute than the conspiracy theorists) note that the ASCE and other experts - unlike all the supposed firemen, policemen, and other nameless witnesses and experts cited by the conspiracy theory hucksters - are both on the record and available for contact.

Next time, even wilder stuff – the U.S. Government shot down Flight 93 (and, by now, probably others, Flight 175 was a tanker, not an airliner, and it was flown into the World Trade Center by radio control, there was no plane wreckage at the Pentagon, and much, much more.

Actually, I believe I can prove that the CIA had Superman hypnotized, and that it was he who seized first one aircraft after another and hurled them into the building. One wonders why Superman would have bothered with the airplanes - oh yeah, of course – the government wanted to be sure the public had an excuse to go to war. If Superman had done it, why . . . Hmmmm.

Maybe we need to think about this some more? Next time, more discussion of the “World Trade Center cover-up.”

"The Bookful Block-head, Ignorantly Read . . .," and, for Instance, 9-11.

A recent discussion on TagWord with the personable members there stimulates this, my latest “rant” (strange, isn’t it, that in the land of free speech almost every example of such has pejorated to the point of becoming anathema; if there is anything we seem to hate more as a nation than free speech, I can only wonder what it is . . .). Having learned from and stimulated by Internet forums like Truthout, Alternet, Useless Knowledge, MySpace, and others, I recently elicited my latest sampling of the public discourse by commenting on a now well-festered subject, the World Trade Center and what has become part of the vernacular as “9-11.” I have revisited that particular matter a number of times, in order to “thicken” my study by way of stirring the pot again. It has, you know, become cult-ified – grown into a new religious doctrine.

In order relate the two microcosmic measures of national discourse, I also sallied – sortéed, might be a more apt term - into the discussion on several websites of national health care vis-à-vis capitalism. There were a couple more subjects, too, as members of the TW site would attest, and soon the Internet forensic wort had begun fermenting nicely. The WTC, 9-11 matter has reached a “spiritus frumenti” content of about 100 proof. Whew!

The Newspeak media helped mightily the metastasis of what might be called the public thought process with still more of the “nappy-headed hoes” (assuming that’s how you spell the neologism so beloved of worthies like the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Reverend Al Sharpton, and their pettifogging, Senator Jack S. Phogbound like), race-Pecksniffian and chip-on-the-shoulder, demagogues’ manna from heaven, words as booby-traps, like (my god, people, haven’t we had enough of this old-ladies-knitting-circle, fish-wives, panty-hose effeminate and metrosexual gay, Nancy Grace, Greta Van Susteren, Kimberly Guilfoyle, tabloid news crap - how the hell far can you take this “hate speech” bullshit, without losing ALL credibility?).

Even more to the point of my parenthetical question, how stupid can your argument get before anyone of the modest intellect necessary to recognize it as such may legally ignore it? MUST I respect and defer to witchcraft, shamanism, Santeria, and voodoo? I am required – by law, as it now seems I am - to listen respectfully when someone tells me the Blessed Virgin has appeared in the scum on a shower curtain (no, I’m not joking – it happened a while ago here in South Texas) and it’s a “sign?” From god?

Today’s discourse has become so . . . metastasized, was the word I used, wasn’t it? - as to have become so cancer-ridden, so utterly useless, that we have come as a nation to the point of absurdities that can only be explained among otherwise healthy brains by schizoid psychosis. There may be a question concerning whether the kind of stupidity the public displays is due lack of education, education that is deliberately conducive to error and stupidity, behavioral conditioning directed toward stultification and thought process confusion, or the like, but there can be no doubt where what is happening and why are concerned.

As I type this, for instance, a news program announces that a governor has repudiated his oath of office, refusing to enforce the law having to do with illegal immigration. He stands in defiance of the law, yet remains in office. It is as though he says, “I refuse to do what you chose me to do, which is the will of the people, but since you chose me I will do as I damned please – everything I can against your interests.” How is such thing possible? More to the point (again) how can you still pretend that a nation where that can be is a democracy?

Still, my discussions – especially with the breed who call themselves “conservative” (my god, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and the like are “CONSERVATIVE?”) - result in my being told again and again, day after day, that we are a democracy. Today, we learn that while seventy-six percent of the public is emphatically opposed to illegal immigration, politicians and the government they constitute don’t care. Democracy. Rule by the people. Sure.

The people can do nothing, but the people rule? Tell, me, someone – at what point in all this are we NOT a democracy?

Oh, but I’ve been here before. In spades. For more than two decades, 1977 to 2001, I lived in the “Nation of Laws,” where the government literally – in print, electronically, and by public action - mocked the law. That’s publicly. While the public stood idly by, watching like well-fed sheep. To a very large degree, nothing has changed yet to this day.

But my story was one occurring years ago, no one cared (or cares – and obviously), and I am more interested now in how its implications then – the ones no one found worth effort so much as attention – have resulted now. As if to assist here, the television – the Glen Beck Show and a cuckoo bird Catholic apologist – reinforces my growing fear of my demented nation. The Catholic apologist, head of one Catholic Church laity organization or councils, pontificates by extension that all sex without church sanction is evil. His analogy comes in a claim that everyone evil – i.e., not subscribing to his view of the procreative act.- would “graft a condom on male children and say, ‘have at it.’” Sex not intended to procreate, in other words, is evil.

Now, I wouldn’t care what a cuckoo-bird like that thinks or does – he’s in my view as sick in his way as the people who confuse the function of their genitals otherwise – but the fact that he might very well impose upon me in the same way that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer flaunts the law having to do with illegal immigration and President of the United States George W. Bush flaunts the U.S. Constitution. When the law becomes whatever the powerful – whether it be the all-sex-of-which-we-don’t-approve-is-evil, “the-word-is-flat-factions” or the “born-again” individual in office – say it is, I’m scared. The prospect of living in a nation governed by the Word Trade Center conspiracy theorists is alone enough to increase the frequency and intensity of my shooting practice, in other words.

I just don’t want to be in this cuckoo’s nest any more, to put it even more simply.

Still, I keep trying. The grandkids will be here when I’m gone. I keep hoping to discover a sociological, even political algorithm by which to turn around this stampede into societal insanity. I want the few rational people among us – that’s white, Anglo-Saxon males, thinking like traditional white Anglo-Saxon males who built our country, then held it together through a civil war, two world wars, and a great depression – to take it back.

Oh, it’s incontrovertibly true that we are no longer the eighty-nine percent majority that we were as late as 1965. Neither is it arguable that it’s there that things began to go to hell in a hand-basket, and I find it damned suspicious that no one but me seems to connect those facts. But I can’t legally say that anymore, CAN I? “Racist!” “Sexist!” Politically incorrect!” Maybe even “hate speech.”

Not as bad, maybe, as referring to someone as a “nappy-headed hoe,” or a “queer,” or the dreaded N-word, but that depends on who hears, right? Just trying to compose any kind of statement these days is to walk in a minefield of verbal high explosives. And the “mines” are being invented as I write this – no way to know until I step on one.

Still, I have to do something, and there must be some part of normal societal and national thought processes remaining unaffected by the politically correct paralysis. Like Patrick Henry, I know of no way to deal with the future except study of the past, and having been all my life an ardent historian, I consider what it was that once made us the greatest nation in history. What do we need to do again?

First, I think, we must, by teaching and demanding study and observation of the age-old rules of epistemology, logic, reason, and mathematics, begin to restore the public's consciousness, its sensorium, its ability to deliberate and reason productively and for its own benefit. That would mean to stop the dissemination of not only utterly false and nonsensical information on the publicly electronic media – television, radio, Internet, and elsewhere – but to provide for public debate and discourse that is logically valid in its content.

It is, in that regard, high time that moderators in public political debate, for instance, be logicians capable of pointing out to the audience fallacious statements, claims, and reasoning.

Oh, yes, I know – “free speech.” Free speech the right; the right as a matter of law. I agree, as I always have. In fact, I believe that therapy for our mentally deranged society absolutely requires restoration of free speech and the right of expression, however hateful or unpopular. Of all the oxymoronically contradictory premises we labor under as a society today, none is moreso than that of controlled free speech and expression.

You’re damned right I think you should say what you think. But what of responsibility? Ever hear, anybody, of the rule that says the right of free speech does not extend to make yelling “fire!” in a crowded theater? What about the responsibility of truth? Is it not one thing to have an opinion, another to spread for reasons or self-interest shared or otherwise falsehood, gossip, and propaganda deliberately contrived to make others act against their own best interests?

Part of a group somehow become lost in the wilderness, does not one who proclaims knowledge of the right direction in which to proceed have an obligation to know that he is right? Doesn’t “right” mean “I’ve been this way before? I know?”

Is it not a kind of societal sin to use one’s freedom of speech to spread unfounded ideas that may be crucial to his fellow citizen’s life, to our democracy, to our children, and to our way of life as a nation? Has not freedom of speech, in other words, the same responsibilities attendant any right protected by a free society? Isn’t a false assertion made on the radio, on television, or the Internet, for instance, like giving false information to the police or government? Isn’t it even more wrong – immoral – when self-serving, made only in the interests of the individual or group?

And if there is a duty to be truthful and accurate attendant the right of free speech, is there not, in turn, a duty to have a way to know when one is right, and to learn what that is? Is it not one thing to argue something believing on the basis of hearsay and very little personal knowledge of the matter that you are correct, but quite another to argue knowing you do so on no basis of proven logic, science, and mathematics? Does a computer “mouse” trip by one who knows little or nothing of the subject or matter, to a website composed by someone totally unknown to the individual in question, with total unknown expertise, knowledge, and credentials, justify one’s saying he “knows?”

Someone, columnist Sidney Harris, I think, once observed that while, "Knowledge fills a large brain; it merely inflates a small one." Put the lack of necessary effort in learning resulted from the computer with that “small one,” you’ve created an Alexander Pope’s “bookful block-head, ignorantly read, with loads of learned lumber in his head.” Lord, have I ever been through Internet lumber yard after lumber yard in the past few years!

Parenthetically, I urge the reader here to use the World Trade Center Controlled Demolition matter as an example. The exercise can be an entertaining one, for one thing, and one very informative in the light of my discussion here. Check each claim and argument for substance logically (consistent, for instance with all other information, data, and reasoning), mathematically, and scientifically. As, by all means, the obvious question – how could everything being claimed have been done without notice by the tens of thousands of people who worked in, lived and worked near, and frequented the World Trade Center? That will probably stop you, but continue anyway – in order to relate the matter to others much in the news these days.

It’s time you learned to recognize the smell of bullshit.

Continuing with my discussion of “rights,” do those even abysmally ignorant of the given subject have the right by way of their right of free speech to promulgate to others as fact their uninformed, ill-advised, and specious point of view?

Legally sure; but how about morally . . .?

My intensive study of the public discourse over the past forty years has revealed a precipitous – so sudden as to suggest cataclysmic occurrence – decline in individual and, perhaps axiomatically, societal ratiocination – the ability to reason (not merely think). Everywhere in the nation, educators report the same phenomenon. Whereas columnists like James J. Kilpatrick, Sydney Harris, and others began reporting the same thirty years ago, even comedians have of late begun using public stupidity as a shtick in their comic routines and programs. Overseas - Europe, Japan, and the Orient generally – “American” stupidity – especially when related to what has now become our celebrated arrogance - is the subject of head wagging amazement and, in some cases, glee (our bumbling, bungling president, if only in that regard, is a national catastrophe).

And, to digress somewhat, that “arrogance” comment strikes a familiar chord. You see, I have long since discerned what seems a new kind of arrogance, that of the extremist and extremism. As I wrote in my last essay, the extremist is by nature and behavior – de facto – religious; religious in his intractable self-assurance that he cannot be wrong. Availing himself of some right he somehow believes ancillary to that protected by the U.S. Constitution, he becomes a pope speaking ex cathedra – i.e., infallible. Things, however legally, scientifically, or logically absurd, become fact simply by his saying so. It’s his “right.”

Hmmmm….. If it’s illegal (I speak only of legality here, not morality) to have sex with a child younger than a certain age, why is it legal – in the face of the assertion’s utter impossibility - to assure him that the World Trade Center was destroyed with controlled demolition by the United States Government? How about my using my stature as a celebrity of one kind or the other to assure the ignorant and uninformed – the indigent and poor, for instance – that federal spending on Iraq (only for instance) has no bearing on his taxes, his chances of medical care for his children, or the like? Incapable of the simplest interest calculation, with no idea whatever how – the process both legally, and procedurally - a dollar comes to be, or why, and how its value is derived, what is the individual’s responsibility to others when discussing the economy?

Totally ignorant of anything having to do with warfare, military tactics, the Tactical Numerical Deterministic Model, Vegetius, Saxe, Clausewitz, Frederick the Great, or even the history of numerous battles, what is the social responsibility of the individual when discussing the supposed reasons for our having invaded? For leaving or staying? For assessing the strategic, tactical, political, societal, national, and moral meanings of “victory” and “defeat?”

Inasmuch as no rational person can doubt that were Iran to attack and attempt to destroy Israel, we would totally destroy Iran, what is all the jingoist blabber by neo-conservatism, and the hand-wringing tut-tutting of the knee-jerk liberal really about? Having been told categorically that Iran’s security and continued existence is directly dependent upon that of Israel, why would – how would Iran dare – attack Israel?

Oh, yeah, I hear you. You really believe that Moslems who knew there would be no one left to practice their beloved religion or worship their beloved prophet and “Allah” would attack, anyway? You’re not “ratiocinating.” You’re not free, either.

So, in answer to Steve and several others, if there were one thing I could do in an effort to restore our country to its erstwhile greatness, it would be to restore a sense of responsibility in the individual. There’s a mental experiment most will still be able to handle. Create a truth serum equivalent, a responsibility serum, in the life of every citizen, see what happens.

And, as anthropologist Margaret Mead once observed, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

Of Blowhard Hypocrite Individuals, Blowhard Hypocrite Nations, and Sea Changes.

As one who has almost literally been everywhere, seen everything and done everything, I am seldom surprised at anything a human being does. A few days ago, having heard that Rush Limbaugh, railing in his customary fashion against anything left of Attila the Hun, called someone a “phony soldier.”

Rush Limbaugh! Rush Limbaugh the bloviating bottom-feeder of the right-wing media, the pompous prince of perissologia, the Brahmin of bombiphiologia, and the White Houses Uriah Heep; the craven, crawling, pill-popping, self-indulging sop who dodged the draft during the Vietnam era by way of a pilonidal cyst (an ingrown hair) on his corpulent ass! Man, the soaring hypocrisy of a Rush Limbaugh calling someone - anyone - else a “phony” is astounding, stupefying – like watching a guppy morph into a whale. At the rate this guy is going, "a Rush Limbaugh" will one day serve as periphrastic reference to loud-mouthed, bloviating, hypocrisy. I can think of no one in history more archetypical.

Only one person encountered during my lifetime rivals this Colonel Blimp for outrageous remarks, that being Limbaugh’s Jack Spratt counterpart in reverse, Ann Coulter. The fat loudmouth and the emaciated loudmouth lead their mentally scrofulous cohort on FoxNews and the ridiculously Rabelaisian right, seemingly willing – striving, even - to say absolutely anything contemptible and disgusting. It’s as it they’re intent – hired, maybe – upon testing the limits of free speech.

It’s something, however, I hope they continue; and I deplore those on the left who seek to shut them up. This Senator Jack S. Phogbound of the Dogpatch White House media, together with FoxNews’ emaciated harridan harpy Coulter speak for me and anyone actually conservative or moderate – the extreme left is too similar in method and too similarly engaged to notice - with everything they say.

There is no way anything I could say would make either look more ridiculous than they themselves already do.

Having said that, however, I am reminded of recent comment concerning my essay on the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to weigh in on the matter of torture. Like the statistically documented majority of our citizenry, most people in the world of “blogging” seem to wonder – demand, even – “what can be done.”

The great majority of U.S. citizens disapprove of both their president and congress – I hope that is also the case with our national Bartelby the Scrivener Supreme Court – and are dumb-founded to realize that it means nothing where the behavior and actions of their nation are concerned.

Well, now! Fancy that. Take the tabloid gentry like Limbaugh, Coulter, Hannity, and their tawdry horse manure masquerading as thought from their scum-sucking public, the U.S. public at large would become a lemming-like mass migration to whatever equivalent of oblivion they might find – something like another Princess Dianna, Chandra Levy, Natalee Holloway, Anna Nicole Smith, smut-fest. The nation perennially stupefied by the CIA Operation Mockingbird Media writhes in its intellectual death throes, its metastasizing brain releasing the creature’s bowels like those of a dying whale. Unfortunately – to use the broadest euphemism possible – parts of the body politic remain healthy and sane, yet forced to participate in the mindless spasms and resulting insult to itself and whatever of its former dignity remains. Ripped from one Brobdingnagian extreme to another, paralysis to spasm, we ride the dying giant like a flea on a Mastodon, helpless to leave.

Shit (pun, perhaps, intended and apropos)! It’s like being the normal and sane child being reared in a home for the retarded. “One flew east and one flew west and one flew over the cuckoo’s nest.” We cannot free ourselves from the Looney Tunes left or the Nurse Ratched right.

The extremist - whether true-believer, neo-conservative, and knee-jerk liberal, after all - is like a guy who plans a car trip by laying a compass on a map, noting the direction and determining that he will drive exactly in that direction without deviation. No matter the curves and turns, corners and intersection with other streets, roads, or highways, no matter what may happen en route, he will drive straight ahead – “damn the torpedoes.” And damn anybody who happens to get in the way.

Ah, well. In response to my friend Steve (whom I mentioned here last time, too), I made the following observation:

Steve,

No, actually this predates Goebbels and Hitler by centuries. All the way back to Julius Caesar and "divide and conquer." The Mockingbird Media tactic is known to propagandists as "System Overload or System Collapse." This is based on the fact that any cybernetic or reasoning system faced with conflicting data simply waits until the scales (as it were) tips one way of the other. Keep the system fighting with itself, it stays frozen or overloads (remember the Star Trek segment wherein Captain Kirk asked "Vger," the thing destroying galaxies and headed toward Earth such a question?)

Today's right and left media use this ploy continually. It's insidiously beautiful, because it appears so democratic. More, immigration, both legal and illegal, have much to do with the astonishing state of our society and government. We have factionalized thereby the nation to a degree many of us never thought possible, with the national discourse having become much like most of the Sunday morning "panel" shows, wherein everyone tries to shout everyone else down, and the audience can have no idea what the hell is going on, much less what is being discussed.

A corollary is the tax system. Completely chaotic, no logic rhyme nor reason possible, it makes IRS a de facto dictator. The great wonder is that a nation having lived under anything as obviously unconstitutional and “un-American” as the tax code can wonder at an electorate powerless to do anything about Iraq, the border with Mexico, the health care mess, or a dozen more issues similar.

What the hell would anything rational expect? How the hell can anything even basically paying attention continue to parrot mindless myths portraying that as democracy? What - the meaning of the word has changed like so many others?

Anyway, here we are. With all the nation's factions screaming to demand what THEIR ism, asm, spism, or spasm wants, the military industrial complex and its puppet government does exactly what it damned pleases. Check Iraq, the Mexico border, education, and dozens more. It's divide and conquer, all right. Ann Coulter, Keith Olberman, Al Franken, Bill O'Reilly and the rest are team-mates working on the same project.

Trust me, amigo - I've been watching and studying this all since I was a kid. More, when I was still in high school, and had delivered a rather impassioned speech about the wonders of our system of government, my grandfather chuckled. "The Constitution is like a bit in a horse’s mouth. The horse doesn't want that bit there, and if he gets a chance, he spits it out. To let the government’s courts protect the Constitution is like letting a horse decide how tight the bridle should be."

Like so many things my grandfather told me, I never forgot that. If the poeple don't enforce the Constitution, no one will. They haven't and we've lost it. It's that simple.

Like I said, wonderfully paralyzing to the national discourse. Operation Mockingbird works.

Like many others of late, my friend, you begin to recognize what my own studies of the national discourse long ago revealed. Each website I have more recently joined - left and right - has this information and logic-less tic-tac-toe sort of thing as its sine qua non. Like I said, wonderfully paralyzing to the national discourse. Mockingbird "judo" works. The result is that NO reasoning occurs. The public couldn't agree on putting out the garbage.

For a dictator, perfect.

Hal
P.S. "Judo" is to say “use the enemy’s strength against him.” In a democracy, use democracy to make the free enslave themselves. Remember Gibbons' quote about the Athenians?

Unless some kind of new Age of Enlightenment occurs, the Human Race faces cataclysmic change. We’re not only in serious trouble, but – thanks to the Mockingbird Media – and an education system even deeper in the toilet than the rest of the nation’s societal systems - we have no idea that we are. I don’t suppose there is any way, really, to sound the alarm – to do that would require shouting louder than the likes of FoxNews – but what the hell:

As we enter twenty-first century, the world is in the midst of three great and simultaneous revolutions, each one of immense significance historically and scientifically. One is revolt of the world’s people against totalitarian rule, revolutions like those in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Poland, China, and the Soviet Union. Profound democratic change is also underway in South America and Southern Africa.

After decades of geopolitical freeze, like the polar icepack, the ice seems to be breaking up. The one sour note, of course, is the totalitarianism of government by corporation. Driven to obey its prime directive - consume the planet and exploit its people, that is - humanity’s General Bullmoose must be put in his place before any true democracy can exist. A world governed as the United States is, by a five hundred, thirty-two member congress controlled by fifty-six thousand corporate lobbyists, will be no more free than the people of the U.S. are.

Dealing with the new Roman Empire long since established by corporate colonialism may well prove prohibitive.

Another revolution which is underway, after all, is that of globalization of the world's economy. U.S. hegemony of the rest of the planet by economic means, that is. Over the past twenty to twenty-five years there has developed an international struggle making many standard economic theories obsolescent or already obsolete. Rising world awareness of the U.S. Pax Romana seeks to end the long-held concept of national economies ruled by the U.S. dollar. Unifying more and more against U.S. economic colonialism, isolated and stultified local and regional economies of the world are increasingly awakening to exert their influence.

Nothing might more serve to demonstrate this fact than the concomitant rise of U.S. neo-conservatism. The economic natives have become restless, and the corporate white hunters seek means to pacify them while keeping them subservient and satisfied with status quo. Anyone who doesn’t agree “hates us for our freedoms.”

My mention of the word “prohibitive” as respects U.S. economic totalitarianism ought be considered by the individual as a means of tactical intelligence. Consider, for instance that with workers in the United States now competing not only with workers in other parts of their own country, but with workers in Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, Mexico, and soon, probably even Eastern Europe, the heretofore large American corporations can scarcely, even, be called "American," anymore.

At the same time, neo-conservatism preaches its new form of Nazism and “lebensraum,” major corporate greed has resulted in U.S. corporate subsidiaries overseas, with factories, and even corporate management offices all over the world; that while smaller corporations unable to colonialize foreign nations seek to grow bigger by importing illegal aliens (the new slave labor) with which to supplant U.S. citizen workers from Mexico and elsewhere.

As the result, the international economy little resembles that of even twenty years ago.

Finally, there is the "information revolution," a technological sea change, which has played an important role in making the other two happen. Its implications where global consciousness of the human race are concerned can hardly be overestimated. This is a sea change affecting the seven seas, indeed, the entire water planet, with the explosive spread of computers and other information technologies, and more importantly, the impact of this technology is simply impossible to overstate.

International transmission of data now makes possible, and has provided for, even daily maintenance of business enterprises scattered all around the globe, with computers and computer-supported communication even transforming the nature of work, and creating a new international division of labor.

More, satellite technology has provided man with swift, sometimes even instantaneous, witness to events anywhere in the world. The further result is that all three of the revolutions I speak of here are feeding off one another, with internationalization of economic activity impossible without the rapid spread of the information technology.

Even further, many, or most, of the democratic revolutions all over the world would not have happened without the economic reform promoted by computer technology, and that these revolts and uprisings have spread so rapidly is due the availability of mass communications technologies like television, fax machines, satellites, and computers.

Frankly, I doubt that anyone can predict accurately the eventually total effect of the revolutionary process we are now in. Years ago, for instance – and on the other hand – I insisted to a number of my friends that the Internet would produce a candidate for President of the United States, and supplant the hideously transparent coup d’etat and military industrial complex corporation cabal now in power here. The rise of Texas Congressman Ron Paul speaks to the question of how accurate my prophesy was, as does the rise of Unity08. The coup plotters, fifty-six thousand Washington lobbyists, and other evidences of our death as a democratic nation will not go quietly, however, something that makes the future uncertain. Already, concerted efforts to stop the free exchange of ideas on the Internet are underway, most obviously in the form of the Bush Administration’s outrageous assault on personal privacy and other related aspects of the Bill of Rights. Using Operation Mockingbird devices like still another of its protection racket “wars” – a new War on Drugs called the “War on Pornography,” for instance – the government seeks to gain total control of computerized communication.

To the government – not only here, but with rulers everywhere - the Internet represents nothing less than the ability to think freely, to obtain information not filtered through and altered by the ruler’s media. It is the ability to relate directly with reality, rather than through an electronical cloud or fog erected by government. Mark well my words, there is no way they will tolerate that.

We are, in other words, at a watershed in human history. The poor, the heretofore ignorant and the therefore heretofore exploited, are about to discover why that is so. History is about, finally, to actually – without re-writing and re-structuring, without being taught by those to whom control of the reality that is history is most important – speak.

If you think that doesn’t represent a sea change, you haven’t been paying attention – meaning you were somehow separated from your forebears, from your parents and grandparents. You were taught, instructed, and shaped by those to whom your education was equivalent to today’s television “commercial.”

Chains and manacles, you know, aren’t the only way to keep – and make - a slave.

Another Day "That Will Live in Infamy" - The Supreme Court Protects Torturers

Today, October the Tenth, is always a bad day. Beverly, my wife and high school sweetheart died on this day forty-seven years ago. Since then, bad things have happened again and again on the Tenth of October. My government, for instance, tried to kill me on this date, twenty-one years ago.

And so it is that I should not have been surprised to hear as soon as I turned on the television set this morning, that the U.S. Government has been up to its old tricks. At the computer – the truth is always much easier to come by there – I was directed by several friends and family members to articles like this one:


“WASHINGTON - A German man who says he was abducted and tortured by the CIA as part of the anti-terrorism rendition program lost his final chance Tuesday to persuade U.S. courts to hear his claims.

“The Supreme Court rejected without comment an appeal from Khaled el-Masri, effectively endorsing Bush administration arguments that state secrets would be revealed if courts allowed the case to proceed.

“El-Masri, 44, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, says he was mistakenly identified as an associate of the Sept. 11 hijackers and was detained while attempting to enter Macedonia on New Year's Eve 2003.

“He claims that CIA agents stripped, beat, shackled, diapered, drugged and chained him to the floor of a plane for a flight to Afghanistan. He says he was held for four months in a CIA-run prison known as the "salt pit" in the Afghan capital of Kabul.

“After the CIA determined it had the wrong man, el-Masri says, he was dumped on a hilltop in Albania and told to walk down a path without looking back.

“The lawsuit against former CIA director George Tenet, unidentified CIA agents and others sought damages of at least $75,000.

"’We are very disappointed,’ Manfred Gnijdic, el-Masri's attorney in Germany, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from his office in Ulm.

"’It will shatter all trust in the American justice system,’ Gnijdic said, charging that the United States expects every other nation to act responsibly, but refuses to take responsibility for its own actions.

"’That is a disaster,’ Gnijdic said.

“El-Masri's claims, which prompted strong international criticism of the rendition program, were backed by European investigations and U.S. news reports. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that U.S. officials acknowledged that el-Masri's detention was a mistake.

“The U.S. government has neither confirmed nor denied el-Masri's account and, in urging the court not to hear the case, said that the facts central to el-Masri's claims "concern the highly classified methods and means of the program."

“El-Masri's case centers on the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program, in which terrorism suspects are captured and taken to foreign countries for interrogation. Human rights activists have objected to the program.

“President Bush has repeatedly defended the policies in the war on terror, saying as recently as last week that the U.S. does not engage in torture.

“El-Masri's lawsuit had been seen as a test of the administration's legal strategy to invoke the doctrine of state secrets and stop national security suits before any evidence is presented in private to a judge. Another lawsuit over the administration's warrantless wiretapping program, also dismissed by a federal court on state secrets grounds, still is pending before the justices.

“Conservative legal scholar Douglas Kmiec said the Bush White House uses the doctrine too broadly. "The notion that state secrets can't be preserved by a judge who has taken an oath to protect the Constitution, that a judge cannot examine the strength of the claim is too troubling to be accepted," said Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine University.

“The court has not examined the state secrets privilege in more than 50 years.

“A coalition of groups favoring greater openness in government says the Bush administration has used the state secrets privilege much more often than its predecessors.

“At the height of Cold War tensions between the United States and the former Soviet Union, U.S. presidents used the state secrets privilege six times from 1953 to 1976, according to OpenTheGovernment.org. Since 2001, it has been used 39 times, enabling the government to unilaterally withhold documents from the court system, the group said.

“The state secrets privilege arose from a 1953 Supreme Court ruling that allowed the executive branch to keep secret, even from the court, details about a military plane's fatal crash.

“Three widows sued to get the accident report after their husbands died aboard a B-29 bomber, but the Air Force refused to release it claiming that the plane was on a secret mission to test new equipment. The high court accepted the argument, but when the report was released decades later there was nothing in it about a secret mission or equipment.

“The case is El-Masri v. U.S., 06-1613.”


I chose to include that, verbatim, here because I fear I might lose my temper and throw caution to the winds. These, after all, are torturers. More, I have been in their sights before. I have listened covertly to their criminal machinations, heard them plot their outrages of the law and our U.S. Constitution. I know these people.

At least, I thought I did. Now this. Were I not already well-versed concerning how great is the corruption of the absolutely powerful, I couldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t believe it. The “Nation of Laws,” the “Home of the Brave.” Torturers!

Nothing – not the death of my sweetheart wife, not betrayal by my own country, not the bullets passing through my flesh on that occasion – has ever wounded me as deeply as this. God – I am so angry!

And ashamed. Ashamed for the millions of men who lie in graveyards and on battlegrounds all around the world, dead because they would pay that price for their country’s honor, honor now besmirched by the action a government comprised mostly away of cowards who would not so much as serve in their country’s uniform.

I am ashamed for generations of children, for our children today and for their children that their country, its honor sullied and flag disgraced, will never again be able to hold itself up to the world as an ideal. I am ashamed for dozens of things I must not enumerate here, fearful again of my own rage and the retaliation of the torturers against – as they were once willing to do – those whom I love. As I said, this is the lowest of the low of whom we speak. What they will not stoop to is hard to imagine.

I am ashamed knowing full well that the firestorm of public outrage that should sweep a nation “so conceived and so dedicated” to “the proposition that all men are created equal” as this one is will not happen. We’ve slipped that far, and current events as well as those of the near past demonstrate how corrupt and despicable, how dangerous to anyone who earns their disfavor, is the general U.S. public.

If I were the religious or otherwise superstitious man that I am not, I would say, “God damn you, George W. Bush and your despicable corporate criminal class, god damn you to hell” – and I would lament that no worse future for you exists. You have committed in our names the lowest of the low of human behavior; and by so doing enlisted us in the ranks of the lowest of the low of humankind, the torturer.

But that is hateful, and I do not hate – not the person, anyway. But I hate behavior, and there is no act more worthy of hate than torture. More, torture is the act of a hater, and I will not be brought down to the contemptibly execrable level of a torturer, under any circumstance.

I will wait, moreover, to see what my country and countrymen do about this. If those who suborn this crime against humanity – the U.S. Congress who stand idly feckless, and/or cynically by, and the Supreme Court, who by their actions in the matter have attempted to look the other way, that is – are not thrown from office and imprisoned (subornation and misprision of crime is to commit the same crime), I will stop flying the U.S. flag. More, I will withdraw as publicly as possible what support I still give the U.S. government (they, of course, have long since declared themselves my enemy).

The public and any citizen of the U.S. who does not protest in the loudest and most effective means possible torture also commits the crime against humanity that is torture. I will not be a torturer and I will not number myself among torturers.

And for the Sean Hannitys, the Bill O’Reillys, the Rush Limbaughs and their sickeningly sycophant, toadying, Uriah Heap kind, who hurl their FoxNews “Do you want to see the United States lose in Iraq,” this: yes, you’re damned right I hope we lose. I hope anyone who commits the crime of torture fails at whatever he attempts.

You can’t, as I just said, support crime without making yourself a criminal.

At this point in our history, it is clear that America is in the final stages of fascism; oh, it hasn't yet metastasized into the outright jackbooted fascism of Nazi Germany, but it is poised like a boulder at the top of a slope, ready to roll into the abyss. In fact, it will take a miracle to keep this from happening. Consider the facts:

The collapse of the US dollar is accelerating. Under the almost incomprehensible weight of spending loosed by the new Cold War supplanted by the War on Terror, Iraq, Afghanistan, and others of which we are not yet informed, the subsequent and inevitable effects of the sub-prime loan swindle; soaring energy prices due the threat and certainty of peak oil; with catastrophic weather events caused by global warming; and, of course, the one thing that Bush's entire foreign policy guarantees will occur - another catastrophic terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

Any one of these could by itself usher in outright fascism. Put together any two of these, and fascism in the Land of the Free is dead certain.

In point of incontrovertible, by definition, fact, the full orchestration of outright fascism has already been accomplished. We have the SturmAbteilung, the infamous “Brownshirts’ of Nazi Germany. Or have you forgotten about so-called “private” security firms like Blackwater? Once known as “proprietary companies” of the CIA, they stand ready to serve in complete revocation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights under the new Patriot Act. When martial law is declared, they will do in the U.S. what they are doing in Iraq.

Neither is that all. The Pentagon has now established a new military command it calls Northcom, its purpose to organize military operations in the United States and Canada. The Posse Comitatus Act has in preparation been gutted in order to legalize National Guard service as police anywhere in the country. If that doesn’t convince you, consider the undeniable and published fact detention centers have been built across the land with plans having been made for internment of millions of U.S. citizens.

“Alea jacta est.” The die has been cast. As with the matter of torture, and just as experience tell us that once the individual has stooped to criminal behavior like rape, murder, or torture, he cannot be rehabilitated, history tells us that there is a point of no return in the evolution of fascism. There will be no going back now. The future will see destruction and death, death by the millions both inside and outside the U.S. Yes, I am angry as never before, and ashamed – ashamed of what we have done to me, to Khalid El-Masri, and to our children and their children.

For the love of God, THIS IS THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA?

Déjà Vu and the Dealers of Death

Déjà vu, all over again, Yogi.

“If we invade Iraq, it will be a very limited invasion, part of whatever is necessary to drive Saddam’s troops from Kuwait. The “war” will last a few days, something like the six day affair that resulted when the Arabs attacked Israel back in 1967. I’m sure you remember how that went: Egypt, after expelling a U.N. peace-keeping force, amassed something like a thousand tanks backed by a hundred thousand troops on the border, and when they had called for a joint attack by all the Arabs, attacked. Jordan and Syria joined in the assault and the Arabs got their asses kicked, big time. It all lasted, basically, about six days.

“At the war's end, Israel had gained control of eastern Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. The Arabs have been pissing and moaning about their losses, in that way of theirs so incomprehensible to the rest of the world, arguing somehow that they should be given back what they lost. Talk about Jews having “chutzpah!”

“For a tactician, two things are key here: first, that last. The Arab mind is very, very different. It never forgets. Its – that’s he, really, women have no role in Arab culture except to supply sex to the male and reproduce - world will sulk, and hate, forever. Allah wills it.

“That concerning the Arab female, parenthetically, is something to think about, too, but also generally beside my point here.

“The Arab’s culture is different (hence my comment concerning its women), like many cultures are, from ours in basically European society. Our new “celebrate diversity” demands not only that we pretend all human beings (the sexes, too) are alike, but that we bullshit ourselves concerning matters as critical to the world as those having to do with geo-political policy between nations.

“That last, too, is beside my point, however. My point is that no one who doesn’t want to turn what is basically – yeah, I know I use that word a lot, but this is basic stuff – a religious war between Judaism and Mohammedanism into one between the latter and Christianity would invade and occupy Iraq. No body is that stupid, not even the United States of America post feminism.

“The second point is the first here, that being that the Arab gets his ass kicked every time he goes up against even little Israel (my god, the country is what, two hundred, fifty miles long, something like ten miles wide at one point?). He is a miserable tactician, mostly because Allah can over-rule him any time Allah likes, and because anything the Arab does must be macho-spectacular. He will send kids carrying some kind of religious symbol into a mine field (the Iran-Iraq war, remember?). The kids clear the mines by exploding them with their bodies; they all go to heaven and the mines get cleared. What’s true for their kids is true for the rest of them – don’t forget that, it’s part of the discussion here.

“The U.S. firepower is impossible to describe to anyone outside the U.S. defense establishment. Even Soviet military planners and all the technology they possessed during the Cold War had real, strategic and tactical difficultly with that. The military industrial coup d’etat that took over here right after the Second World War has spent fifteen trillions of dollars on our war machine, building levels of redundancy dictated entirely by fiscal greed, not military or defense strategy. In a conventional war – something other than guerrilla, in other words – the U.S. could destroy the rest of the world’s military powers about seventy times (the world, too – but that’s again beside the point) over.

“The U.S. will destroy Saddam’s Army in about ten days. Since there’s no real need to do anything else, that’s all they’ll do. The “Mother of all Battles” will deliver a still-born baby, weighing about a pound. Anything else, moreover, would be f-ing nuts, the reason Israel didn’t go to Cairo or Damascus, or whatever the hell the capitol of Jordan is (Amman?). The Arab will take any ass-kicking he can explain away with that love of language and bullshit bluster talk he has, but he will not tolerate being held captive. Read your history book, for cripes sake.

“If we go all the way to Baghdad, or – god perish the horrendously ugly thought – try to occupy the country, it would be a disaster of proportions so damned big I get sick to my stomach, just thinking about it. Man, have you thought about what all the terrorism against the airlines, against the Jews, and other enemies of Allah is about? How long has that been going on? Fifty years? Since the partitioning of Israel, that’s for sure.

“In fact and essentially, Islam has been waging guerrilla war against Christendom – and, for that matter, all other religions – for six or seven centuries. Read the Koran (of course, being a westerner – especially a citizen of “I know it all because I watch TV” U.S – you probably haven’t even seen the book, much less read from it).

“The Arabs have been fighting a guerrilla war against Israel because they believe the Jews are occupying their land. If we try to conquer – occupy Iraq – they will do exactly the same thing. And it won’t be just the Iraqis who wage guerrilla war; it will be every Islamic Arab on the planet. Moslems who live in this country will start here what Moslems in Israel started. It will also be Afghanistan and the Soviets all over again – in spades. Remember what happened to the Soviet Union, now only Russia?

“But there’s another possibility. And, now that I think of it, your question has really made me sick. The military industrial complex – to use President Eisenhower’s expression as he left office – is about making war, the bigger the better. I was always afraid during the Cold War – especially Cuba that time (are you old enough to remember that?) – that these goddamned (I use the term advisedly) maniacs would start a nuclear war, just so they could profit by it. Of course, the one, great reason they didn’t do that was the fact that they would suffer enormously, too. All their profits; and you can damned well bet that’s how they saw it. Remember when they were trying to make a bomb – cobalt, as I remember – that wouldn’t destroy anything, just people?

“We – and, more importantly, they – might even lose. Besides, they had going on the sweetest game in the world – a secret war. With the public having no way to know what was going on, who was winning and who losing, the military industrialists (and, don’t forget, their CIA with unlimited power to spend without even keeping books) could build weapons unimpeded by anything so conventional as having to claim the need to replace materielle destroyed in conventional war. The only war being fought could be the war called the Arms Race – everything was “destroyed” by virtue of having the other guy build a better one than we had.

“Meaning, supposedly, that we had to build another weapon - the better one. Even that could be faked, the reason for Operation Mockingbird and CIA control of the news media. If the evening news said the Soviets had a new weapon and we had to build a better one – well, what the hell? At the same time, we could foment a little “Communist takeover” brouhaha here, then there, and the folks would all be convinced there was another world-wide war going on. We were “making the world safe for freedom,” remember?

“The fact that none of the countries that “fell” to Communism ever actually attacked us was somehow lost on everyone. We needed desperately to “free all those oppressed people;” that we seldom did was also lost on everyone. Strange.

“Hell, even little “Communist attempts at takeover” like the Philippines and such weren’t enough; when Vietnam came along . . . Shit – perfect! Billions to spend on munitions, pull out after a while . . . Ken, you really don’t relate Vietnam with what would happen in Iraq? Damn!

“And if we should invade Iraq like we did Vietnam . . .? Holy crap! Did I say perfect? With Korea, the Philippines, and all the other places, there was always the threat of the Soviet Union and Red China and their nuclear arsenals. But with the Arabs . . .? Oh, shit! You don’t suppose?

“God, this could go on forever! If we invade Iraq, Saddam’s troops could just fade away, then start guerrilla warfare. AK-47s, RPG’s, mines, and booby-traps everywhere. The rest of Islam would feed sacrificial martyrs like those little kids in the Iranian minefields into the fight forever. Even that raises another specter. Pakistan has the bomb, and sooner or later, so will somebody else Arab. Egypt, maybe. Iran.

“And those demented loons will use it. Never doubt that. Our friend minister is always loathe to depreciate religions other than his own Christianity. Well, sorry, amigo – I call ‘em like I see ‘em. Remember those “children into the minefield?” I just looked it up, and it’s worth digressing for: During the Iran-Iraq War, the Ayatollah Khomeini (remember that nut case?) declared something called the Basiji Mustaphan – “the mobilization of the oppressed” (you should be thinking about jihad – “holy war”). Khomeini sent Iranian children, some as young as twelve years old, to march in formation across minefields and clear a path with their bodies.

“The kids were given a plastic key to wear around their necks, in order that they could open the gates of paradise when they got there.

“Think that’s insane? Well try this: The kids not only went, sent by their parents, but they went in droves, by the tens of thousands. A German newspaper I read all the time, the Frankfurter Zeitung, reported that sometimes the enlistments for the mine-clearing “became a race – even without orders, everyone wanted to be first.” What the hell (pardon the expression) - this is about paradise.

“If we were to invade Iraq and go to Baghdad, and/or try to occupy the place, that’s what we’d be starting.

“Nobody’s that stupid? No, but lots of people are that greedy. What Islam is to the Arab – those kids in the minefields – money and power are to the corporate capitalist. Thanks for your damned question, Jeff – now I am really, really scared.”

I wrote that in November, 1991 - letter to a friend at the old National Judo Institute. I found it yesterday, looking for this in my old files (when we moved a year ago, things got more than a little disarrayed – even worse than I knew when I started digging). I wrote this in March, 2005, concerning the Terri Schiavo matter (she was the brain-dead girl whose husband wanted to take her off life support, and her family didn’t).

“Oooh—did I stick some people right in their old (and obviously debilitated) consciences! Let’s see if I can help all you righteous (I am not being cynical) moralists with your moral dilemma:

“Suppose you are up on a mountainside and you suddenly hear the heart-rending sound of a child screaming in agony. Looking down you see her. A thousand yards from you, separated from you by extremely difficult terrain, she is being attacked and eaten alive by a wild dog. You have a rifle, a high-powered one, and you are an excellent shot. You have only four rounds. You shoot the dog in the head—you’re that good—three times, only to learn that for some reason you can’t kill it. It goes on eating the little girl as if nothing has happened. The child also goes on - screaming in mortal agony. You have one round left, and it will take you at least an hour to get to her rescue. One round left.

“What do you do? The Bible all of you cited to me says god's grace - the good sense and free will he gave you all – ‘is sufficient unto all.’ You are, in short, never given a problem, ethical or otherwise, you can't deal with to his satisfaction. . .

“Still, if you’re the United States of America, I wouldn’t want to be that child.

“Notice, incidentally, that I didn’t propose that the child could by some form of telepathy beg you to end her suffering. I assume, obviously, that—being like her—you know what she wants. Maybe I assume too much . . .?”

Now, I wrote the piece about the child being eaten by the wild dog in order to make a point about a nation so confused in its morality that it could have a furious argument about what GOD wants. I’ve written here, too, about the furious argument that ensues every time subjects like sex come up – again, what does GOD want? I’ve also, and finally, commented time and again, that I wish we could stop listening to god. For all of our wondrous, high-tech communication – hell, we can communicate with other star systems – we seem to get that one garbled every time.

GOD told the Ayatollah Khomeini he should drive little kids into a minefield? If Iranian parents put a plastic key made in Taiwan around a kid’s neck, the child could get into paradise after the mines vaporized (the kids also wrapped themselves in blankets, then rolled into the mines; the blankets would assure that the parents had pieces to honor with burial) him?

GOD decrees that a guy who straps on an explosive vest, sits down in a crowded restaurant or gets on an airliner and blows himself up will go to heaven? High-jacking an airliner, then diving it into a skyscraper with thousands of people in it and knocking it down, is “holy war?”

Crazy, nutcase, fanatics – right?

Well, now. I admit that I see the world and creation as an endless string of analogies. I relate things and affairs, one to the other. It’s the reason I am a history buff. But as Ricky Ricardo used to say, “’Splain dat to me, Luci.” How do those Moslem fanatics whose confidante GOD tells them to use “keys to heaven” children as minesweepers differ from confidantes of God like President George W. Bush? Invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan isn’t walking into a minefield that is Islam?

Isn’t that, in light of history, the societal and national equivalent of wearing an explosive vest? How about firing your pistol into a backpack you’re standing over in order to see if it contains a bomb. How about a suitcase “nuke?”

Of course, I hasten to point out, the average “American” (think about the implications here of one society among two hundred, thirty-four in the Americas calling their country alone “America”) doesn’t know enough about the Arab world to so much as be able to spell or pronounce any of their names, let alone anything of their religion or how GOD speaks to them. What the average “American” – all those people who keep voting for “American” George Bushes about as bright as they are – knows about their prospective enemy and what GOD is telling him you could get in your eye and it wouldn’t make you blink. You’ll shoot without having any idea where the bullet is going or what it will do, just like your dumdum vice president once did with his hunting partner (oh, boy – is that an analogy for Iraq?). You don’t know what’s in that damned backpack, but GOD, it seems – nothing else explains any behavior as stupid – tells you shooting into it will be okay.

When the son-of-a-bitch blows up, we’ll all go to heaven.

P.S. Why did I mention the Terri Schiavo matter, and the child with the wild dog on the mountain?

The U.S. Media and a Blackwater Kind of Fantasy . . .

“Steve” writes to say that my theory concerning the “pro wrestling” character of political debate and politics generally becomes more and more incontrovertible. As usual with letters like his, I replied that unless he could show a more reasonable explanation for everything we see having to do with elections, my theory must stand.

Steve also sends me the latest revelations having to do with U.S. torture of prisoners:

“When,” the article says, “the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.
But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency

Sometimes, I feel as though I’m the only one awake in my country. My reply was:

Steve,

Yes, but it's a mistake to believe this only began occurring under Bush. The CIA and U.S. intelligence services in general - Army, Navy, Marines - have tortured prisoners from the CIA's inception. Check what was done to Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko, for instance That was 1964..
Then, there was a guy named Luebbert. For more than twenty years, he was subjected to relentlessly continual burglary, attacks by muggers, motor vehicles, and snipers (three wounds); hounded relentlessly, he was stopped on the nation's streets and highways more than a hundred times in a few years, by cops who approached with pistol holsters un-snapped or the weapon actually in hand. Twice, he was poisoned by something put surreptitiously in his toothpicks and vitamins. His family was informed repeatedly by official sources that he was suspected of all manner of depraved crime, including child-beating, murder, and treason. His credit and police records were continually falsified, in order to incite not only law enforcement and others in government against him, but his own children.
And more (MUCH more).
Why is it - how has it been done - that people in the U.S. believe their government is better - more moral and respectful of one another - than THEY are individually? Why have these same people said nothing all these years, even after the Church Hearings in 1967 (68?) revealed things like MKULTRA, MKCHAOS - more than a hundred hideous medical and scientific experiments secretly conducted against the government's own people - and the like?
Better yet - why do these same, pious citizens do little or nothing about the atrocity that is the war in Iraq generally? Steve, for the right price, these sanctimonious citizens of the most sanctimonious society ever would torture their own children (some actually do that now, you know). You can make anyone whose god tells him what to do, do anything. "God" to the U.S.A. is money. When the money god speaks, its disciples obey.

Hal

Of course, my readers on TagWorld, MySpace, Truthout, and elsewhere know that there are many, many “Steves” in the U.S. “My country, right or wrong,” is the mantra-ized slogan. Even watching the other night the episode of Tom Hanks' televised history of One Hundred First Airborne Easy Company (my old outfit, by the way) entitled “Band of Brothers” probably wouldn’t help. The episode to which I refer, of course, is that having to do with the Screaming Eagles’ discovery of a Nazi Work Camp, together with the attitude of German civilians who lived near it.

Nazi Germany wasn’t the only place there are “good Germans.”

But the subject disgusts me as much as does that particular episode of ‘Band of Brothers” – I’m full-blooded German, with relatives still in Germany, you know – and I’d rather talk about something else. For now, at least; disgust is just as poor an excuse for doing and saying nothing as the “German Excuse” (“I didn’t know anything about it,” in case you’ve forgotten your history of the war [which is another reason these things . . . oh, never mind!]).

Part of the hypocritical hand-wringing going on today among the oh-so wondrously pious among us has to do with Blackwater Security and its civilian military soldiers. Today’s paper, for instance, has a cartoon (immediately above my own “Guest Column,” incidentally) depicting the Disney character Yosemite Sam, firing two six-shooters into the air while applying for employment with Blackwater. “I hear you’re looking fer reckless, trigger-happy employees,” Sam says – to which a supposed Blackwater executive replies, “When can you start?”

Writing in my own column on another matter, that having to do with a recent column by Walter Williams on the subject of global warming, I pointed out that Argument by Ridicule is logically fallacious. And, therefore, worthless as commentary. So is the Yosemite Sam cartoon.

It happens that I know something of high risk security work: It was I, as a matter of fact, who wrote the first Special Operations And Tactics tactical doctrine and Table of Operations and Equipment; SWAT tactics having to do with personal protection were my idea, and I still instruct high-ticket and known-threat operatives in that line of endeavor. So, while I do not have sufficient information – the U.S. media, being dedicated to the contrary, is the last place to get anything useful where determination of fact or truth is concerned – I have some thoughts and questions.

First, one method of tactical learning, intelligence, and planning having to do with protecting someone of something from a lethal or totally destructive attack is that of mental experiment. Let’s try it:

You are protecting someone or something – yourself, for instance. Walking toward the local Wal-Mart, for further instance, you are surrounded by people and vehicles, some moving, some stationary. All are nondescript – there is nothing to call your attention to anyone or anything.

Oh, there are plenty of distractions. That gorgeously built woman over there in the white short shorts, the one with the big bazoomas. Damn, shorts and high heels – here, this time of day? What’s that about?

That’s when the first shot is fired. It takes your hat off – that close.

But momentarily, you can’t be sure concerning where, or whom, it came from. You’re quick, though, and superbly trained (with me personally, it’s been almost daily for more than fifty years); you pick him up in less than a fifth of a second, so fast that he hasn’t had time to trigger the second shot from the automatic pistol he is aiming in your direction. And the finger on that trigger is tightening as you look . . .

I digress here momentarily, but with purpose. As some of my readers and most of my friends and associates know, it is all but impossible to surprise me. Even wife Rita is tempted to try me continually, reaching suddenly – for instance – for my “package.” No matter how sneaky she is, her hand never reaches its target, always being intercepted and held. Recently, an Airline Flight Deck officer I have trained demonstrated to a friend my “gift” by repeatedly, as swiftly and from as many varied directions as possible, trying to strike or touch me. Repeatedly, he found both his hands caught in a grip he could not resist or overcome to repeat his attack.

I trust I have made a point. Back at Wal-Mart, I see that trigger finger tightening, about to hurl terrible injury or death. No problem – I’m that fast, and that accurate. He’ll be stone dead before his falling body reaches the ground.

No problem? Not quite: among the first things I was taught as a four year old learning to use a firearm was to know what was behind my target. Actually, my parental and family teachers demanded that I know everything of the environment surrounding the trajectory of my prospective shot. Bullets, I was told again and again have no brain and no eyes. They damage, wound, or kill whatever they hit, whether you’ve aimed them and intended that or not. Bullets are all about responsibility.

What’s behind the guy with the finger tightening on that Glock automatic?

I’m good, as I said – very good. I will shoot just once to end this (let’s for the moment assume one assailant; and if you’re ahead of me there, good for you). When my full metal jacketed, .45 caliber slug goes – as I know it will - through the head and brain stem of the would-be killer, what will it hit next? The baby in the arms of the woman behind him? Maybe it will strike the concrete block wall behind him, then ricochet. What will it hit then?

And so on.

That finger is tightening on that trigger, and I am looking right down the barrel of that pistol . . .

Five decades of training have resulted in my deciding whether and what to do in situations like this in less than two-fifths of a second (yes, you’re damned right I’m already too late, but this is fantasy - for drill, remember?). WHAT DO I DO?

No, not in an armchair in air-conditioned or climate-controlled hearing or conference room listening to witness, or even watching the ubiquitous video tape of it all, not in your likewise comfortable living room before a television set listening to the inevitable panel of media pundits doing their inevitably ill-informed and/or biased post mortem of it all; you are in that damned parking lot and looking down the barrel of a firearm about to kill you. You are a split second from eternity.

NOW tell me. What do you do?

I’ll tell you what you do. You kill him. You put a bullet right under his nose, and through the brain stem. He never so much as sees the drawing of the gun with which you kill him. And that, right there – no matter what society and all its investigators, pundits, and commentators say - is as far as your moral responsibility goes. Period!

Oh, if the bullet kills that baby in the arms of the woman just behind him, you may never get over it. You may never have a full and undisturbed night again. Society will do everything in its power to assure that, too. You will be arrested. Depending upon what witnesses say – there is always a witness who for some reason, ideology, religion, race, or the like - is totally out of touch with reality – you may be released. There will be weeks of Nancy Grace, Greta Van Susteren, Kimberly Guilfoyle and the sisterhood of PMS hate pillorying (that may depend on the babies gender, of course). You will be sued – and only god knows by whom beside the child’s family.

But the person morally (I wish I could say legally, too, but this is no longer that kind of society) responsible for everything that happened after that bullet killed your assailant is the assailant. Any other reasoning is insane, chaotic in its result – and the reason for the societal metastasis occurring today in our sickened and dying nation.

There’s even more. When one is a sworn member of the Fifth Profession – samurai, knight paladin, bodyguard, or the like – he has no longer the right to decide even on the basis of saving his own life. Not if he holds inviolable – as do I – his honor. He has given his word to the retainer – the person he is protecting – that no harm from any human assailant will come to him. His word. His honor. That simple.

At the risk of redundancy and/or over-complicating my argument, even weakening it with proof irrelevant and beside the point, there is also the responsibility of those surrounding our imaginary shoot-out, the public’s responsibility for its own safety.

Oh, they are of course “in the same boat” with me, the samurai. The imaginary attack today has been so sudden as to be controlling morally and even otherwise. No time for choices means morally no responsibility for outcomes. But we, the public, know about these things. Incidents of this kind are daily fare nowadays. How does one justify his going about in what the late Colonel Jeff Cooper called “Condition White” – fat, dumb, and happy? Has he no responsibility to do at least some part of the mental experiment I described a moment ago here? Does his choice of pretending that everyone else is responsible for his own safety bear responsibility nonetheless?

What is the responsibility of those who would not only see to it that everyone in the Wal-Mart parking lot was actually and physically disarmed, but would have spread the ideology that has it that a good citizen is one who will quietly submit to violence – even rape or murder – rather than “take the law into their own hands?”

What is the responsibility for what happened of the people who equate my actions in that parking lot today with “shoot first and ask questions later?”

Let me put it another way, for those moral types who always intervene at about this point in any discussion like this one. Let me, for an instant, play god (after all, that is akin to what all the humanist liberals and their like profess to be doing) on Judgment Day. Remember the eschatology? “I was hungry,” etc.?

“I was beaten, terrorized, raped, and murdered while you stood and watched – justifying yourself with “Christian Principles.” I was helpless against my assailants, because you disarmed me. I was beaten, terrorized, raped, and murdered because you not only deluded me into believing that there was no danger or that I could protect myself, but insisted that to do anything else was to “take the law in to my own hands.” Alone against my enemies, I was permitted by you and the government you did nothing to change only to call the police miles away. You were instrumental in convincing your society and nation that to give in to evil being done to your neighbor was my idea. You twisted and tortured the writings you insisted I dictated – the “Bible,” as you call it - until it made me my own victim.”

The judge might go on, but you get the idea.

As everyone who reads what I write, or knows me otherwise, knows, too, that I am no apologist for CIA, Steven Canyon, proprietary company soldiers. But two and two is four even if Hitler says so. Go back with me to that Wal-Mart parking lot for a minute. Make it a Wal-Mart in Baghdad (well, this is imaginary, so you can do that easily – right?).

Need I add that the threat of sudden death is now literally everywhere? A car starts suddenly; tires screaming, it heads right for you and your family. Fifty yards away, you know instantly that if that car contains a suicide martyr for Islam and enough explosives, you must stop it NOW!

So – same question – what do you do? Play with it (this is a fantasy, remember?): you shoot, the car explodes, and with six months in the hospital you and yours escape – only deafened, disfigured, and what-have-you – but alive. Or, the driver is only one who lost control of his car momentarily when the accelerator stuck. You killed him, and all that happened was that the car hit a light pole and knocked it over. Or . . .

While you’re fantasizing, imagine that when your city becomes Baghdad (as it most certainly will, should you persist in accepting what’s being done concerning the Blackwater samurai team), the judge in my eschatology a minutes ago has decided that you will live and do everything according to how you have judged my actions today in that Wal-Mart parking lot.

Be it done unto you according to your own word . . .?