Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape – the United States of America . . .

On my own website, I have been offering instruction concerning survival, both urban and wilderness – that in response to request from people who know of my own survival of the U.S. Government and find themselves now concerned about their own survival. Thinks are that bad. What follows is the latest edition:

"Of old, warriors first made themselves invincible, then waited for their enemy's moment of vulnerability." --Sun Tzu

We begin today with an excerpt from a book by a great guerrilla warrior, Che Guevara: “Many will call me an adventurer - and that I am, only one of a different sort - one of those who risks his skin to prove his platitudes.” Che Guevara, you will recall (unless you are the typical "American" like the White House Press Secretary who didn't know recently what the Cuban Missile Crisis was and certainly wouldn't be expected to know of Guevara's murder in Bolivia. She may not even know who Che Guevara was.

There is another excerpt, this one from my own book, the foreword:

"The fact is, my story is really written for the young people of the future who will one day reap the whirlwind you, their parents and grandparents, have sown. The continent you will leave them is already despoiled and poisoned, and will soon be the source of widespread, continentally endemic sickness and disease. Their once proud nation, whose profligate greed has already made it despised and hated over most of the world, will have become a pariah among nations.

"In their parents’ and grandparents’ self-indulgent drive for ease and degenerate pleasure, “America’s” young people will have been spent relentlessly into irretrievable bankruptcy. More, and perhaps worst of all, “Americans’” cowardly demand for security without responsibility – provided by government hirelings, that is – will have made their nation a vast sheep pen, a totalitarian virtual prison.

"That, my fellow “Americans” will be the legacy you leave to your children, and, to quote Benjamin Franklin, 'they will piss on your graves.'

"I want our children and their children to know that I fought every step of the way, with every cell and fiber of my being, to prevent what their faithless nation, their parents and grandparents, are doing to them.

"This book is the story of that struggle, and it is written in the hope that my grave will be one they leave flowers on."

I don't, of course, mean to compare or equate myself in any way the man I was once sent to kill (that story is also in my book, incidentally). But it is a fact that Che once wrote to me personally, a short note when I had written to Fidel Castro to warn him about CIA assassination plans, to thank me for my "humanity." It is also a fact that Che once said, “If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, am not a comrade of Che Guevara.

The United States of America is a nation whose corporate government lives on injustice (can anyone observing what is occurring on the border with Mexico and with illegal aliens vis-a-vis our own citizens see anything but the truth of corporate capitalism?). Corporate Capitalism and its "Pinto Rule" are by definition an ideology devoted to injustice. "To capitalize" has for centuries - since the term first came into use - meant "to colonialize" - to seize by force or trick the land of another and its bounty, and to impose upon him rule. The planet Earth and everything on it or in it is being "capitalized" by the U.S. and its corporate masters.

What we are "capitalizing" now is the lives of our children and grandchildren - and their children and grandchildren. The United States and its corrupt and decadent people are colonializing their own progeny – nothing less. There is no doubt about that, moreover. One needs only to look around him. During my lifetime alone, anyone reasonably alert has watched corporate capitalism and those who worship at its "apres moi le deluge" - after me, the flood - altar despoil and ruin the continent. Not satisfied with our own continent, we infest the rest of the planet, colonializing (including more than seven hundred fifty military bases and fleets both surface and submarine in all the oceans and seas - all polluting and spoiling as only they can) and ruining everywhere.

Oh, yes - I can hear the knee-jerk reaction of those behaviorally conditioned to do so. Like FoxNews at every new revelation of malfeasance by the White House and its execrable occupant, there are those "patriots" who will begin bellowing their mindless mantra. They can save it. I have known my enemy for a very long time now. I have listened to him, matter of fact, in what he thought was his privacy (he, too, thinks the U.S. public are idiots, a laughingstock; he holds the people who call themselves "Americans" and their country in more contempt than even I do).

I also live in a dirty little town in South Texas, among the filthiest in which I have ever resided. It is like living in a landfill. The relentless wind here stirs up and blows a blizzard of flying paper and plastic, such that each morning on my daily walk, a distance of perhaps three hundred yards both ways, I pick up two or more plastic shopping bags full of trash. Living as I do a hundred fifty yards from a Wal-Mart (show me a bigger corporate capitalist), I rise nearly every morning to find Wal-Mart plastic shopping bags hanging in my trees, and my garden littered with Wal-Mart receipts discarded - thrown out the window - by passing motorists and their passengers. People leaving the Prosperity Bank down the street a few hundred feet daily throw scores of deposit slips and ATM receipts out the window. Each morning, the street's gutters are littered with beer cans and intact or broken beer bottles.

Neither is this behavior unique to Port Lavaca: In Kingsville where I resided before coming here two years ago, my morning walks in the apartment complex where I lived took me past dumpster after dumpster overflowing with - in fact buried in - garbage (I wrote an essay on this webpage concerning the matter and what it suggested for the future, matter of fact). Even when a dumpster a little over a hundred feet away was empty, the residents of Hawk's Landing would not deign to walk the little distance to dispose of their garbage in a sanitary manner. Upon opening the door to our apartment each Monday Morning, I was greeted with the stench of rotting garbage strewn across the parking lots by stray cats who had torn into the plastic garbage bags thrown carelessly outside, or piled atop, the dumpsters.

South Texas not only has the social character of nearby Mexico, it smells like it. Worse yet, and owing to the fact that the State of Texas and its legislatures and courts have long since sold out to Corporate America, the air stinks of and is poisoned by emissions from oil refineries, and area aquifers and streams have been made radioactive by unregulated (oh, like everywhere else in Corporate America, there are regulations; it's just that no one pays any attention to them - they're enacted only to make the public feel secure) uranium leach-mining. The soil, long saturated by arsenic used by corporate farming to defoliate cotton, is likewise poisonous.

Thus far, a scenario much reminiscent of my earlier efforts to stop criminal conduct and malfeasance by IRS and other federal bureaucracies, I have striven without success in so much as getting local newspapers and media to warn residents of the radioactive water. There is little doubt - provided that information dispensed by federal government agencies like OSHA and the Atomic Energy Commission are factual - that residents of Port Lavaca are being exposed daily, and perhaps lethally, to hazardous radiation (the fifty Roentgens being registered by dosimeters near faucets and shower heads monthly is a hell of a dose, should anyone remain in contact with the water for any time longer than a couple of minutes). It appears that I will have to print up handbills and distribute them, and/or post warning signs.

The situation here is a microcosm of the macrocosm that is the U.S. - and the world upon which the U.S. inflicted itself. Like Kingsville and Port Lavaca, the people of the U.S. refuse to restrain themselves. Driving gas-guzzler SUVs and huge pickups at ninety miles an hour on the highway (highway fatalities in the immediate area are a weekly occurrence and "descanso" memorials to the dead placed at accident scenes by Latino residents are everywhere) and at least ten miles an hour above the posted speed limit everywhere else, they throw garbage everywhere, polluting and spoiling the environment at will.

And that all the while bellowing their contempt for scientists expressing concerns that evidence of global warming is due human pollution of the atmosphere.

There is your enemy (as cartoonist Walt Kelly's Pogo said, "We have met the enemy and his is us!"). Know him or suffer the consequences (he doesn't care - even when those suffering are his own children [more and more of whom are being found discarded in dumpsters and the trash generally - or hadn't you noticed?]).

Know him if you will survive him, and learn to do what the rest of the nations and people of the planet are doing. For reasons I have already given here, you the private citizen - like the rest of the nations and peoples of the planet - can't fight him by conventional means. He has capitalized so much of what was yours and your forebears', colonialized so much of his fellow nations and peoples that he is invincible. Uh-uh. To survive him, to defeat him, you will have to learn the tactics and life of the guerrilla (a good start would be to read the books I have shown above here).

First, of course - and as I have already noted - today's urban guerrilla must make himself invisible, or un-findable. I should think the oppressor's relentless efforts to provide for identification and surveillance of every, single citizen (except illegal aliens who can easily be capitalized) - things like "social security" (whooo - sometimes the cynical hypocrisy of such things is stupefying!) numbers for every new-born - would make the capitalists' intentions thunderously obvious. So should legislation like the Patriot Act and its precursor, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and all the electronic eavesdropping it has loosed upon each and every household in the Land of the Free. Anyone remember George Orwell? The book "1984?"

"It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug into your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live - did live - from habit that became instinct, in the assumption that every wound you made was overheard, and except in darkness, every movement scrutinized"

That was 1984. This is 2008; every sound you make IS overheard, and darkness no longer prevents scrutiny (you do know about the seventies program called "Control Zones That See," don't you . . .?). Maybe you should read "1984," too.

Learning to defeat electronic and electricity-powered surveillance and security equipment, however, is almost ridiculously easy. As always, you have to do the study and practice required. Freedom, someone once said, isn't free. Study locks and security systems, then learn how to defeat them. Simply being able to pick locks is an invaluable skill, inasmuch as a large part of all security still depends upon simple "tumbler" locks. Video camera security is often rendered useless simply by the device of disguise or covering one's face and learning through practice to disguise one's movement and walk.

To elude the government's relentless harassment, I not only studied intensely the way of the ninja, I learned from Che Guevara. So skillful did I become at a tactic I came to refer to as "hide in plain sight" that on one occasion I baffled members of the U.S. National Judo Team I was then coaching. Appearing one night at Cowboy's, a dance club in Colorado Springs, the site of the National Judo Institute, I ate supper in the team's midst, observed goings and comings, and listened to conversation, all in such manner that the next day all agreed that I had not been there - until I related what they had discussed, what they had worn, what the had done, and more. I'm sure all of the team will still remember the incident.

My ability to penetrate the inner sanctums of government at all levels, to obtain documents, observe and listen, and leave proof of my having penetrated security came to infuriate - if also serve notice and teach respect - my enemy (I had a lot of fun, too). Unsure of what I had learned by my infiltration, protective of their positions and likewise unsure of the effect disclosure of my successes on their careers, I was able to use certain evidence again and again to escape federal and federally-instigated state harassment.

To learn "hide in plain sight" is training that requires years, more, having to do with understanding such things as peripheral vision, use of lighting conditions, and more the like, I'm not sure it can be successful learned without first-hand, personal instruction by one who has mastered it; but obtaining damning and therefore effective evidence against today's bureaucrat or politician (same thing, actually, and understanding how the political-bureaucratic hierarchy and social pecking order works is crucial) is a matter as simple as use of electronic equipment in the form of video cameras, tape (voice and sound activated) recorders, and listening devices like the parabolic and "shotgun" microphone. Here again, training and practice is crucial to success. I used friends, unwitting and otherwise (as I related in my book, I practiced technique with women friends, once recording surreptitiously the conversation of female college students who frequented poolside at my apartment complex's swimming pool). With acquired skill in "planting" listening devices and video cameras, I first graduated to the local police department, then the court house and city hall. Already then, I learned a great deal about the way government actually functions. It was a revelation that shook me to my core.

When making covert entry into a building (or anywhere, for that matter) be aware that surveillance cameras are everywhere these days. Be likewise aware at all times when planting “bugs” or video cameras, by whatever means. Be aware, too, that surveillance and monitoring equipment now has, all but invariably, its own, self-contained power supply (more about detecting surveillance and monitoring equipment).

I learned about courts, judges, and lawyers, too. That wasn't pretty, either. From my own experience - investigation including covert surveillance - at least forty percent of all courts are compromised by bribery or threat. While I was never put upon so successfully (a fact that in the land of government as corrupt as that of the U.S. speaks to my success with other defensive methods) that compromise of a judge was required, it is obvious to anyone who studies our legal system that it can be done, and is being done, successfully (the sudden - precipitously so - change of rulings in my F.O.I. case before the U.S. District Court of Colorado in 1988, the court ruling that the U.S. did not have to turn over records on the grounds of national security, is an example; in this case, of course, the decisive threat came from the U.S. Government).

Bribery and threat (threat is the only way for people of the limited means of most persons opposing government - as I've pointed out, they TAKE all your money by way of their opening gambit) are another example of things made practical only by careful and exhaustive study of the tactic and its subject and/or objective. I have done that, and used the tactic a number of times after having begun "Knight Errant," my effort to both assist persons in trouble with the criminal component of government and piss my enemy off while serving notice that I was still potentially lethal to the latter.

I described several instances of judicious (you should pardon the pun) use of threat and intimidation in my book, "Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story, but another example had to do with the way certain persons from Arab countries are given carte blanche in this country. The woman in question had two children by her Arab husband before their divorce and his repatriation to his home state. Having learned that her ex-husband was back in town, she was certain he had come to take his children from her. After having overheard the story, then checked sufficiently to know that the woman was right, I decided to intervene covertly. Dueling with the U.S. Government wasn't enough adventure, I guess.

When I had located the Arab, I watched for a time and listened (the Arab spoke Arabic or Persian with the two men who accompanied him everywhere, but English with several others). There was no doubt: Ishmael (not his name, but the one I'll use for reference here) intended to seize his daughters at the first opportune time, take them to the local airport and the Gulfstream jet waiting there and leave the country. Safe passage had been arranged, he said (exactly what one should have expected, relations between the U.S. State Department and the nation in question being what they are).

Neither “Ishmael” nor his friends had ever seen me, and there was little or no chance they would have known that I had learned of their plot, or how. More, it wouldn't have made any difference if they had. As they dined the next evening at a hotel restaurant in Corpus Christi, I had a tape recorder and its recording delivered to their table by a waitress who, in turn, had been given it by another waiter. The latter had been told that I had seen one of the Arabs lose it outside. On the recorder was the following message (the voice, incidentally, was that of a young man picked at random from passersby at a shopping mall and paid twenty dollars to read a prepared script): "I know that you are here to kidnap your daughters - I gave their names - from your former wife." I said her name, too. "I represent a security group not known to anyone in this country or elsewhere; neither does your wife - I used her name again - know who we are. We have you under continuous observation. This is what you will do in order to continue alive. You will leave the United States as quickly as possible and having gone directly from this building to the airport. Any deviation from that route, any deviation in behavior, will result in your head being blown off by a high-powered rifle or by the silenced handgun being aimed at you right now. If when you have left the U.S. you return, the same thing will happen - no further contact and no questions asked. If you give me any reason whatever to believe that you intend to do anything but what I am demanding, I - it happens that I am the one watching you at the moment and it will be I who watches you until you leave for the airport - will kill you instantly, anyway. If you do not follow these instructions exactly - your fault, someone else's fault, nobody's fault - your head will be blown off. As I am sure you and your friends will realize once you have discussed it, there is no way for you to know whether this is real or not - except to experiment. If you do that, you will never know that you shouldn't have. Oh, and by the way, my company and I do this for fun, not pay. Frankly, I for one hope you decide to experiment."

The Arab's conversation when they had heard the recording was extremely excited, if soto voce. To the waitress' puzzlement, they did not order, preferring to have one drink, whiskey, then leave. The Gulfstream left Corpus Christi two hours later, never to return (I have my methods, there, too). I see my "client" - who has never had any idea of what happened - occasionally, by the way. She and her kids are doing very well more than a decade since the time in question, and she has remarried.

Obviously, there are several actions the Arabs could have taken in order to safely learn whether the recorder's message was truthful. They didn't, just as I was sure they wouldn't. KNOW YOUR ENEMY! The mass of men are much less than courageous, and this man's reasons for what he wanted to do were typical of his culture, his kind, and his gender. Arabs do not hold female children in high esteem, you know. In this case, however, I doubt that “Ishmael” would have done anything differently, even had his intended quarry been two horses - or something REALLY valuable.

Fighting to survive the U.S. Government, for its own citizens as for foreign nations and their citizens, is complicated, demanding, and exhausting - something akin to escaping from a prison like Alcatraz or Devil's Island. More demanding, perhaps, than even U.S. Air Force S.E.R.E - Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape - training. Not something for the sunshine soldier or the typically overfed and surfeited, Marie Antoinette "American."

You do, of course, also have a choice - slavery. I use this quote often - I recited it over and over during the years I fought the U.S. and its government by criminal - one from Winston Churchill: "If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival. There may even be a worse case: you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves."

The only way to fight the corporate oligarchy that rules the United States is as a guerrilla seeking to inflict "the death of a thousand cuts," and recent history demonstrates it is the one war the U.S. is not good at (and, as a matter of fact, I predicted as early as 1956 that enemies of the U.S. would choose to use similar guerrilla tactics against her; one learns a great deal from the study of history alone, it would seem).