—

Imagine being a parent taking your 10-year-old daughter to the doctor where she gasps for air and suddenly dies in your arms. You are informed afterwards that a toxic dose of prescribed medication caused her death.

Imagine leaving your house to have lunch with friends, while your husband and 11-year-old daughter are happily cuddled together watching your daughter’s favourite TV show Animal Planet. You return home hours later, walk upstairs to her bedroom and find her hanging from the valence of her bed.

Imagine your teenage son is prescribed a medicine because a teacher said he needs it to curb his disruptive behaviour. Months later he is diagnosed with severe diabetes – a known but covered up side effect by the makers of the medicine. He dies shortly afterwards from complications.

These are not isolated incidents. They are representative of those thousands of children and adolescents who died while taking prescribed psychotropic (mind-altering) drugs in the United States. In the above cases, the drugs were prescribed to treat anxiety experienced while sitting for exams or for so-called “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder” (ADHD), the symptoms of which include fidgeting, losing your pencils, not sitting still, running about or excessively climbing, and butting into other’s conversations.

Australian Child Deaths

An estimated 1,900 Australians under the age of 19 have died while on antidepressants and antipsychotics. More than 30,700 under 18-year-olds were prescribed antidepressants in 2007-2008, including 550 aged 5 and under. Side effects include hallucinations, hostility, psychosis and suicide.

During the same period, more than 9,300 children under 18 – some as young as one – were prescribed antipsychotics, costing the government $3.4 million. Of the 477 deaths reported to the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) linked to antipsychotics, 15 were for ages 0 to 19, including intrauterine deaths. Experts estimate only 1 percent of Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs) are reported to the TGA, so deaths could be as high as 1,500.

Common side effects of antipsychotics include excessive weight gain, life-threatening diabetes, and an irreversible neurological effect called Tardive Dyskinesia that manifests in uncontrollable twitching of the muscles and extremities and tongue movements. Another adverse effect, Neuroleptic malignant syndrome (NMS) can cause sudden death.1 Statistics the Citizens Commission on Human Rights obtained from the TGA in 2009 revealed 14 incidents of 10 to 19 year olds experiencing NMS were reported to it.

The psychiatric drug abuse of young Australians prompted one Western Australian MP recently to call for a national inquiry into the use of psychotropic drugs in children. To date, the federal government has yet to act.

Instead, it has potentially exacerbated the situation, handing over more than one hundred million taxpayer dollars to Patrick McGorry, Professor of Youth Mental Health at the University of Melbourne, Executive Director of ORYGEN Research Centre, and founder of the youth mental health centre chain, headspace.

Psychosis Risk Syndrome Creates Harm

McGorry’s Australian of the Year Award hardly had time to settle on the mantelpiece before the psychiatrist demanded millions more for his brand of youth services.2 Established in 2006 and funded by the Commonwealth Government of Australia, McGorry’s headspace, the National Youth Mental Health Foundation, are one-stop-shops that have a range of health professionals covering in addition to general health, mental health and counselling, education, employment and alcohol and other drug services.3

It sounds reasonable. Some of the services are undoubtedly valuable. However, there is an ominous side. McGorry not only promotes youths being put on antipsychotics and antidepressants, he goes a giant step further: He promotes drugging them before they’ve even developed a “psychiatric” disorder.

It’s based on an invented disorder called “Psychosis Risk Syndrome” (PRS) – a subjective checklist of symptoms that psychiatrists claim to be predictors of early onset psychosis or schizophrenia, called prodormal (early symptoms). It’s speciously marketed as “preventive medicine” or “early intervention.” The upshot of it is that youths are drugged for mental disorders they don’t have.4

The US group Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs (AHRPP) likens this to “performing mastectomies on women who are at risk of – but do not have – breast cancer.”5

As Richard Gosden, Ph.D., a highly respected Australian author and academic pointed out in 1999, “Apart from the risks involved in the prophylactic [protective] use of neuroleptic drugs, so-called preventive medicine might be variously seen as an unnecessary expansion of social control, a threat to human diversity through the enforcement of hyper-normality, a violation of human rights, and a marketing ploy for the new generation of atypical [new] neuroleptic drugs.”6

PRS is proposed to be included the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). The American Psychiatric Association (APA) developed the DSM in 1952 and since then psychiatrists around the world have and continue to use it to obtain insurance reimbursement for treating patients. There are already 374 “disorders,” including, depression, ADHD, caffeine-related disorder, disorder of written expression, conduct disorder, mathematics disorder, nicotine use or withdrawal, sibling rivalry disorder and the all-encompassing “Phase of Life Problem.” Proposed new disorders include Internet addiction and compulsive shopping disorder. Psychiatrists refer to it as their “billing bible.”

The DSM is driven not by science, but instead caters to the pharmaceutical industry. Disorders are voted into existence, not discovered as in real medicine. Medical conditions can be substantiated with blood work, urine or other tests, x-rays and brain scans. There are no such tests for any psychiatric disorders. In fact, Andrew Witty the CEO of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) announced the company was dumping future antidepressant research as it was too hard to prove the drugs worked because “patient improvement is measured by subjective mood surveys” – based on DSM – “not by any blood or biological test” used to confirm medical diseases.7

A study published in the April 2006 edition of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics determined that 56 percent of the psychiatrists who decided which “mental disorders” were included in the DSM-IV edition had undisclosed financial ties to pharmaceutical companies. One hundred percent of those sitting on DSM-IV panels overseeing so-called “mood disorders” (including “depression,” “bipolar”) and “schizophrenia/psychotic disorders” were financially involved with drug companies.8 For the DSM-V, a study found that 18 of the 20 members overseeing the revision of clinical guidelines for treating three “mental disorders” alone had financial ties to drug companies.9

Dr. Irwin Savodnik, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, says: “The very vocabulary of psychiatry is now defined at all levels by the pharmaceutical industry.”10

Big Pharma & Australian Psychiatrists

The conflicts of interest between the APA and the pharmaceutical industry were the subject of a US Senate Finance Committee investigation in 2009, an action the Australian Federal Government would do well to follow.

McGorry has received unrestricted research grant support from Eli Lilly, Janssen-Cilag, Bristol Myers Squibb, Astra-Zeneca, Pfizer, and Novartis.11 He is a paid consultant for, and has received speaker’s fees from, most of these companies.12

His research arm, ORYGEN, with its Early Psychosis Prevention and Intervention Centre (EPPIC) and a “preventive” treatment clinic for young people called Personal Assessment and Crisis Evaluation (PACE), has received drug company funding from Janssen-Cilag, the maker of the antipsychotic drug Risperdal or risperidone.13

EPPIC assumed a leadership role in Australia in the 1990s after winning the government tender to establish the Australian Clinical Guidelines for Early Psychosis (NEPP). These guidelines extend the definition of psychosis to include “the period described as the prodrome.” The list was originally adopted without comment from a publication called the Early Psychosis Training Pack – attributed to McGorry and another colleague, the principal authors being the Director and Assistant Director of EPPIC. However, a British public relations company, Gardiner-Caldwell Communications that specialised in pharmaceutical marketing, produced the document. The training pack was funded by an “educational grant” from Janssen-Cilag.14

As Gosden stated: “This may have paid off handsomely for the company…. It may not be coincidental that a half page of the Clinical Guidelines is dedicated to dosage recommendations for using risperidone in first-episode psychosis. The Clinical Guidelines do not extend these dosage recommendations to include other schizophrenia drugs and the recommendations for risperidone give the appearance of an official endorsement of the drug.”15

In 1996, McGorry and fellow pharmaceutical company-funded researcher Alison Yung set up the clinic in Australia to monitor young people considered at a “high risk” for developing psychosis and McGorry conducted a world-first trial on “early intervention” for this.16 A follow up study was conducted in 2002, funded with an unrestricted grant from Janssen-Cilag and supported by US psychiatric-pharmaceutical front groups National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD) and the Stanley Foundation, as well as several Australian agencies. McGorry and colleagues found that Janssen’s risperidone reduced the risk of “transition to psychosis” in young people.17

The subjective 16-item list of “Prodromal Symptoms and Signs” of psychosis includes: Suspiciousness; Depression; Anxiety; Tension; Irritability; Mood swings; Anger; Sleep disturbances, Appetite changes; Loss of energy or motivation; Memory or concentration difficulties; Perception that things around them have changed; Belief that thoughts have speeded up or slowed down; Deterioration in work or study; Withdrawal and loss of interest in socialising; Emerging unusual beliefs.18

Summarising his paper “Pre-Psychotic Treatment for Schizophrenia: Preventive Medicine, Social Control, or Drug Marketing Strategy?” Gosden states: “A preventive medicine campaign based on the type of prodromal symptoms and risk factors specified in the Australian Clinical Guidelines for Early Psychosis potentially defines the whole generation of young people as being at risk and in need of treatment.”

McGorry’s Brave New World

The entire concept of pre-drugging children sounds like a page out of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel, Brave New World. In it, Huxley depicts a “utopian” but totalitarian society, one that is insane and bent on control using the “technique of suggestion – through infant conditioning and, later, with the aid of drugs.”19

Psychiatrists took this to heart in 1967 when a group of prominent psychiatrists and doctors met in Puerto Rico to discuss the plan for psychotropic drug use on “normal humans” in the year 2000. The report on that meeting stated that the “breadth of drug use may be trivial when we compare it to the possible numbers of chemical substances that will be available for the control of selective aspects of man’s life in the year 2000.”

Further: “Those of us who work in this field see a developing potential for nearly a total control of human emotional status, mental functioning, and will to act. These human phenomena can be started, stopped or eliminated by the use of various types of chemical substances. What we can produce with our science now will affect the entire society.”20

An online opinion written earlier this year by Melissa Raven, psychiatric epidemiologist and policy analyst, adjunct lecturer in Public Health at Flinders University, South Australia, and David Webb, board member of the World Network of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry, who works with the research/policy office of the Australia Federation of Disability Organisations, reflects this: “McGorry’s campaign is part of a wider push to promote the medicalisation of mental health (for which psychosocial wellbeing is a better term).”

“Further doubts must be raised about McGorry’s agenda when you see the substantial funding his organisation (Orygen Youth Health) receives from the pharmaceutical industry and also from the US Stanley Foundation, which is notorious for its particularly aggressive approach to the detention and mandatory treatment of people labelled with psychiatric disorders,” they continue. He has “personally received funding from many manufacturers of antipsychotics, frequently reports no conflicts of interest, particularly in his many recent Medical Journal of Australia articles, including a supplement on early intervention that repeatedly advocates the use of antipsychotics.”21

Adding controversy to this is the fact that McGorry credits PRS to Dr. Ewen Cameron, the Canadian psychiatrist famous for performing cruel and brain-damaging drug and electroshock experiments on his patients in the 1950s and 1960s with funding from the CIA.22 (Cameron’s victims sued and on October 5, 1988, the CIA settled with the plaintiffs for $750,000.)

The fact that McGorry and colleagues recommend antipsychotics to treat PRS should be raising alarm bells – not further research dollars – with Australian authorities. Even psychiatrists point out the harm of PRS.

Allen Frances, professor emeritus, former chairman of the department of psychiatry at Duke University and chair of the DSM-IV Task Force, wrote an opinion on PRS published in Psychiatric Times and Psychology Today in March. He said PRS “stands out as the most ill-conceived and potentially harmful.” The syndrome fails badly on all three counts: “1. It would misidentify many teenagers who are not really at risk for psychosis; 2. The treatment they would most often receive (atypical antipsychotic medication) has no proven efficacy; but, 3. It does have definite dangerous complications.”

Australian psychiatrist Niall McLaren says the diagnostic criteria for PRS “has no scientific validity whatsoever… it can never be reliable and… will have huge unforeseen consequences.” Essentially, it means “putting large numbers of teenagers and young adults under the long-term supervision and control of psychiatrists” and that “supervision” includes the “aggressive, indefinite prescription of antipsychotic drugs.” It is the “clearest example I know of pseudoscience. Not since [lobotomies] has psychiatry stumbled so far from the principle of Primum, non nocere. First, do no harm.”23

Adds Frances: “Drug company marketing would influence parents and clinicians to be especially alert to any strangeness in teenagers.” False positives could be as high as 70-90 percent. Moreover, “It has not yet been established that antipsychotic medications are effective in preventing psychotic episodes or in improving life course in those who would meet the criteria for ‘risk syndrome’.”24 “Misidentified youths,” Frances wrote in another article, “would receive medications that can cause enormous weight gain, diabetes and shortened life expectancy.”25

No one denies that people experience serious problems in life, that they can be mentally traumatised, even psychotic. But it violates the informed consent rights of all consumers when they are not informed that there is no science to diagnosing psychiatric disorders, that psychiatry’s diagnostic manual is more political than medical, and that even psychiatrists say is a “monster out of control.” Labelling someone with a mental disorder, even depression, can sometimes prevent their searching for non-invasive and workable medical solutions.

Allen Frances is, at least, candid in stating that the, “First draft of the next edition of DSM… is filled with suggestions that would multiply [psychiatrists’] mistakes and extend the reach of psychiatry dramatically into the ever-shrinking domain of normal…. The pharmaceutical industry would have a field day – despite a lack of solid evidence of any effective treatments for these newly proposed diagnoses” (PRS inclusive).

McGorry seems cautious about publicly endorsing the inclusion of PRS in DSM. In an online chat on Schizophrenia Research Forum in July 2009, he said caveats and warnings are needed if a more narrowly defined PRS is included in DSM, otherwise it could lead to “widespread over-treatment with medications which possess many harmful as well as beneficial effects.” It wouldn’t belong in a school or general population setting, he said, but “to those seeking help from an early intervention/early psychosis or youth mental health service.”26

In other words – those in contact with McGorry’s headspace/youth mental health foundation, to which millions of dollars are now being funnelled without, it seems, anyone questioning his Brave New World of pre-drugging kids.

Footnotes:

1. www.coreynahman.com/atypical-antipsychotic-lawsuits.html.

2. Mental Health Update, GetUp! Action for Australia, 21 Apr. 2010, www.getup.org.au/blogs/view.php?id=1936&dc=1086,21560,1

3. www.headspace.org.au/about/

4. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2632176/

5. www.ministryoflies.com/pdf-articles/Yale-Lilly.pdf.

6. Richard Gosden, Ph.D., “Pre-Psychotic Treatment for Schizophrenia: Preventive Medicine, Social Control, or Drug Marketing Strategy?,” Ethical Human Sciences and Services, Vol 1, No. 2, Summer 1999, 165-177, http://sites.google.com/site/richardgosden/ehss.

7. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704041504575044901266169316.html?mod=WSJ_business_MoreArticles

8. Lisa Cosgrove, Sheldon Krimsky, et al., “Financial Ties between DSM-IV Panel Members and the Pharmaceutical Industry,” Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, May 2006, Vol. 75, 154-160.

9. Kent Garber, “Who’s Behind the Bible of Mental Illness Critics say that touted efforts against conflicts fall short,” U.S. News, 20 Dec. 2007.

10. Judith Graham, “Experts involved in mental illness manual linked to drug companies,” Chicago Tribune, 19 Apr. 2006.

11. www.mhanet.ca/documents/2008/Research-Colloquium/0920%20-%20Keynote%20MCGORRY.pdf.

12. www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/aug04_1/a695.

13. Richard Gosden, Ph.D., op.cit., 165-177

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Arch Gen Psychiatry, Vol 59, Oct. 2002, www.meb.uni-bonn.de/psychiatrie/zebb/literatur/mcgorry.pdf.

18. Richard Gosden, Ph.D., op.cit., 165-177

19. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (Granada Publishing Ltd., 1977; first published in Great Britain by Ghatto and Windus Ltd., 1932), 13.

20. Wayne O. Evans, Ph.D. & Nathan S. Kline, M.D. (editors), Psychotropic Drugs in the Year 2000, Use by Normal Humans, (Charles C. Thomas, Publisher, Illinois, U.S.A., 1971)

21. David Webb, Melissa Raven, “McGorry’s ‘early intervention’ in mental health: a prescription for disaster,” Online Opinion, www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=10267.

22. Richard Gosden, Ph.D., op.cit., 165-177

23. Niall McLaren, M.D.,”Psychosis Risk Syndrome (PRS),” 14 May 2010 (soon to be published).

24. Allen Frances, M.D., “DSM5 ‘Psychosis Risk Syndrome’ – Far Too Risky,” Psychology Today, www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dsm5-in-distress/201003/dsm5-psychosis-risk-syndrome-far-too-risky.

25. Allen Frances, MD, “Let’s save normalcy from the psychiatrists,” Lacrosstribune.com, 5 Mar. 2010.

26. Patrick McGorry, Comment, Schizophrenia Research Forum, 22 July 2009.

.

JAN EASTGATE is the president of Citizens Commission on Human Rights International, a psychiatric watchdog group, established in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and Dr. Thomas Szasz, professor emeritus of psychiatry. She has more than 30-years experience investigating and exposing psychiatric violations of human rights and helped spearhead the campaign achieving a NSW Royal Commission Inquiry into deep sleep treatment because of its deadly effects. For the last 17 years, she has worked at CCHR’s international headquarters in the United States where she has extensively investigated conflicts of interest between psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry. CCHR has been responsible for the passage of more than 150 mental health reform laws and has been recognised by legislators, officials and United Nations Special Rapporteur.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 121 (July-August 2010).

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It’s 2154, and American Terrorism has been totally privatised. In fact, it has become the undisputed enforcement arm of the criminal plutocracy on Planet Earth. In other words, the future is just like today – except the terrorists have gone off-planet and expanded their field of prey.

In Avatar, the plutocracy of Planet Earth needs more resources, so American ex-military mercenaries are sent to rape-and-pillage a planet called Pandora for its so-called “unobtainium.”

By the way, “unobtainium” is a Real World term for valuable rare-earth metals like neodymium, terbium, dysprosium, lanthanum, yttrium and thulium. They are currently used for weapons, as well as digital cameras, computers, Priuses, and iPhones.

In fact, according to the UK’s Daily Mail, industries that rely on “unobtainium” are estimated to be worth an astonishing 3 trillion pounds (US$4.5 trillion), or 5% of global GDP. Thus, wars and invasions of other planets are completely plausible as a possible Real World future scenario.

Meanwhile, the movie shows that the use of ex-military burn-outs, the de facto storm troopers in Avatar, is a clear signal that the United States has finally become the “Evil Empire” of Star Wars fame, exporting its brand of terrorism to yet-unconquered worlds.

The movie also riffs on past colonial adventurism by the US, as well as British, Spanish, French and Belgian invaders, especially the exploitation of natural resources in Africa and South America and its attendant genocide of indigenous peoples. Avatar then is a realistic dramatisation of the ruthless behaviour of out-of-control sociopaths, hell-bent on destroying a civilisation they have judged to be “inferior” and the inhabitants they have decided are “subhuman.”

Thus, the predatory virus and the agenda of rape-and-pillage technology have been exported from Planet Earth to create more mischief in other parts of the universe.

The characters of Avatar are typically stock figures, bordering on caricature, and the plot is so simple that even a three-year old could follow it, says director, screenwriter and producer Jim Cameron, according to published reports. Cameron steals from himself, combining memes from Terminator, Dark Angel, etc. in a kind of recombinant mythology that has struck a powerful and resonant chord throughout the world.

The protagonist is Jake (Sam Worthington), a gung-ho disabled vet who gets his dead brother’s job. As an “avatar,” he has to navigate a custom-made 10-foot tall body in order to “live” with the indigenous blue-skinned race called the Na’avi. When the locals are called “blue monkeys” by the invaders, contemporary racist jargon gets catapulted off-planet and back to the future.

The word “avatar,” of course, implies an online persona that can navigate the virtual realities and cyberspace, as well as a religious messiah or saviour in Hindu theology.

(Can Jake – the All-American White-Bread Saviour – save the Na’avi from destruction? Of course he can. Where else could a Hollywood formula movie plot go?)

So in his Na’avi blue avatar-body, Jake meets a blue girl called Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) who just like Pocahontas – just imagine – teaches him about living in harmony with nature and the invisible forces that sustain Pandora. And Jake, just like Dances with Wolves, goes “native,” as he bonds with the blue people and falls in love with the blue girl.

Because his crippled body restricts his physical movement in his “waking” life, Jake loves to use his Na’avi body and begins to experience his virtual blue-body life as the “Real Thing,” instead of the other way around.

The question for Jake becomes – which world does he prefer to live in? Then it’s a choice for him – just like the gamers who are so obsessed with online “living” – which reality or virtual reality is better?

At the same time Jake makes a deal to be an informer for Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the head of the privatised military-security and the most zealous practitioner of the rape-and-pillage mindset. Quaritch is the embodiment of the evil corporate-military invader and a ruthless enforcer for the Ruling Corporate Empire which has gone off-planet to exploit other worlds.

In his naïveté, Jake believes he can “save” the Na’avi from the coming slaughter planned by the corporate killers, but finds out that he has been betrayed once again. Just as he was in the Marines. (Does that mean military guys have a slow learning curve?)

After all, the mining company just wants the valuable minerals and doesn’t care about a tribe of primitive “blue monkeys.” As always, brainwashing mind-control must convince its subjects (state-sanctioned military would-be killers) that the so-called “enemy” is “sub-human” and therefore open to slaughter. However, it’s too much for him to endure, so Jake goes “off the reservation,” as they say, switches sides, disobeys his orders and begins fighting on behalf of the Na’avi.

Other stock characters include Sigourney Weaver as a scientist who wants to “study” the Na’avi and communicate with them, but like the intellectual prostitutes who work for the Pentagon-NSA-ETC Complex, she remains just another pawn in their extra-planetary game.

Another character you love to hate is Jonathan Ribisi, who plays the heartless corporate honcho. He tackles his “task” of genocide and ecocide with a “missionary” zeal, just like the gofers (a.k.a. employees) of Blackwater, DynCorp, KBR and other Vulture Capitalist Corporations with government insider deals.

The final battle for Pandora, its natural resources and the metaphysical power-source of the planet centred in a primordial Tree of Life which is the embodiment of their ancestors’ wisdom, takes Avatar to a spectacular finish – and the obligatory third final battle sequence.

The fun continues as Jim-Cameron-as-god creates fantastic creatures like hammer-head buffalos, friendly reptilians and sentient jellyfish who help the local blue people defend their planet from the “alien” humans.

In an archetypal Hollywood happy ending, the local blue people survive and the humans are “the aliens [who] went back to their dying world.” That’s about as happy as it gets – when you’re dealing with real raw issues of genocide, nasty behaviour and other evil.

It should be noted that Jim Cameron’s innate ability to tap into the Deep Subconscious of the planet produced the pop culture remix version of the sinking of Atlantis, a.k.a. the movie Titanic.

The Deeper Significance of Avatar

More insights into this global phenomenon can be gleaned from astrologer Barbara Hand Clow, author of indispensable books like The Mayan Code: Time Acceleration and Awakening the World Mind and Alchemy of Nine Dimensions: Decoding the Vertical Axis, Crop Circles, and the Mayan Calendar.

Ms. Clow sees a deeper significance in the artistic and financial triumph of Avatar, writing, “… I said that spiritual transformations pushing us onto new evolutionary paths would be ‘drawing power from transcending our identity as warriors.’ I had no idea how we would see any of this until I saw Avatar soon after the Winter Solstice.” (www.handclow2010.com)

“This film is helping millions draw nurturing experiences from the past (Pandora as Eden), and it incites people, even militarists, to transcend warrior identity. I predict Avatar will continue to be shown again and again by popular demand because many people will see it two or three times…

“Consistently since last spring, spirituality and healing have been the central forces changing our lives under the influence of the potent Triple Conjunction-Jupiter/Chiron/Neptune in Aquarius. During this New Moon, finally Jupiter is moving past Chiron/ Neptune, the last pass of the Triple Conjunction.

“Under its influence, many of us have grown spiritually and faced a series of healing crises, and now we are like newborn beings. Avatar appeared during the culmination of the Triple Conjunction, which helps us see that our individual healing is actually a collective issue. Now that Jupiter is moving out of the Triple Conjunction, our individual initiations and healing crises will not be so monumental and overwhelming.”

And this impulse for genocide and ecocide – where did it come from?

It might sound like science fiction, but it’s considered to be the Gnostic understanding of the metaphysical realities of Planet Earth. Namely – an ideological off-planet virus morphed into the three ubiquitous religions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, which have been used to divide, conquer and rule Terra for thousands of years through fear, intimidation and all those other reptilian stimulus-response mechanisms. [See “New (Reptilian) World Order” by Uri Dowbenko, New Dawn Special Issue 7.]

The Gnostics, by the way, were the losers in a war with Roman Christianity, a long-term focus of religious terrorism ensconced in the Vatican. And what was the Gnostics’ biggest mistake – and crime – and why were they annihilated? Because they dared to speak the Unspeakable, namely that the Christian “father-god” was not only an imposter, but also quite insane.

You can call him Yahweh. You can call him Jehovah. But the Gnostics identified him with the demented Archon Yaldabaoth, which they taught was the Judeo-Christian false god. In other words, if this “god” is telling you to do wacky things like kill those who don’t share your religious Belief System (B.S.), then there’s a good chance those “Gods Must Be Crazy.” And they are…

Therefore, it was not a very smart or politically correct move on the part of the Gnostics to point this out to the Christians. Nevertheless the Gnostics’ perspective on life is still worth examining because of its relevance today – namely their unique world-view and their model for the metaphysical realities of Planet Earth.

Religion and the Seeding of Death Culture

According to John Lamb Lash, author of Not in His Name: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology and the Future of Belief, it was this Abrahamic legacy of religion which incorporates the fear of death that carries the virus.

Lash’s brilliant analysis of mythology, religion and power politics is at once self-empowering and enlightening. And just reading his interpretation of Gnostic cosmology and wisdom-science illuminates the heart and mind because it is the counter-program to the prevalent Death Culture on Earth.

Lash’s book is a must read for everyone who is interested in spiritual and metaphysical studies, and it remains the most important reinterpretation of history, mythology and religion from the Gnostic perspective.

So where did this human proclivity for “terrorism” come from? Lash writes that the Gnostics recognised its origin in the wacky philosophy of the apocalyptic cult called the Zaddikim.

“The Zaddikite sect of the Dead Sea presents the larval form of the global terrorist syndrome of today,” writes Lash, referring to the ancient scrolls found at Qumran as evidence, adding that, “the Zaddikite ideology found in the scrolls presents the ideological infrastructure of Christian religion.”

“That Qumran was an outpost for militants fighting to free Judea from Roman occupation and not a haven for hippie-like pacifists called Essenes, was information withheld from the public by a team of scrolls scholars controlled by the Vatican,” writes Lash.

In a story-line much stranger than science fiction, the “virus” would morph many more times until it became recognisable as present day “religion.”

“The core ideology of modern fundamentalist Christianity derives from the Zaddikim of the Dead Sea and not from mainstream Judaic religion,” Lash continues. “Resurrection in a physical form identical to the living body (contrasted to some kind of continuity of soul life), transport to heaven, intervention of God the Father in history, the battle against Cosmic Evil ending in Judgment Day, and divine retribution – all these beliefs reflect Zaddik, the superhuman standard.

“In the cult of righteousness led by Melchizedek, militant and mystical elements combined into a lethal explosive mix. The Zaddikim sect self-destructed by bringing down upon itself and the entire Jewish community the military might of the Roman Empire, but their program survived and mutated into what was to become Roman Christianity. The enemies of the system became the system.”

The irony of this history is deafening, while the apocalyptic theology and its dogma of final retribution rears its ugly head with every terrorist bombing or “preemptive” strike that kills, maims and tortures humanity on earth.

So why have “terrorism” and “religion” become so closely identified in contemporary life?

“In epidemiological terms, Christianity was the pandemic vector for the ideological virus of the Zaddikim belief system,” writes Lash. “…Over centuries patriarchy mutated into a religious system based on the four components of the redeemer complex. The sulfurous pathological core of the system is terror; terror before the father god who creates the world and commands its fate; terror for those who follow the Lord’s plan and those who do not; terror for the innocent victim tormented and dominated by the perpetrator; terror for the perpetrators who will be caught out and punished by God; …terror that drives human society to a final solution, the lethal madness of a species hell-bent on its own destruction… The belief that the world can be saved by destroying it exemplifies annihilation theology.”

The “religious” fervour of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan bespeak of this theology of death that rules and dominates the planet.

Alien Trickster ‘Gods‘

Adding a bit more science (fiction) into his analysis, Lash asks – “Who is willing to consider that salvationist religion is an ideological virus insinuated in the human psyche by an alien species?”

Through first-hand experience and close encounters with UFO-ET tricksters they called Archons, the Gnostics understood the off-planet origin of the three redemptive Abrahamic religions.

So was our “Father Abraham” himself duped by “alien” tricksters?

Gnostics allowed the transmundane origin of redemptive religion – ‘Yaldabaoth himself chose a certain man named Abraham and made a covenant with him’ – but proposed a different way to view it. Yaldabaoth is the Demiurge, a.k.a. Yahweh-Jehovah, a demented pseudo-deity who works against humanity. This is the Lord Archon head of the legion of cyborgs…

“Demiurge” is defined by Lash as the leader of the Archons “who claims to be the creator of the material world and demands slavish obedience from his creatures,” but is actually a demented pretender or impostor who “can originate nothing but must imitate what already exists.” This might be an apt description of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and its future manifestations.

And what is the result of this religious Belief System, most notably exemplified by Christianity which awaits an extraplanetary saviour, who will come from the sky and make everybody feel high, to quote the late Bob Marley? “Salvation by superhuman powers, rather than through the divine potential innate to humanity and aligned with Sophia, is the hallmark of extraterrestrial religion,” Lash writes.

“Gnostics explicitly warned that the Archons work through salvationist religion, not to destroy us, however but to deviate us from our proper course of evolution… They do this, Gnostics claimed because they envy us. Archons lack both ennoia (singular intentionality) and epinoia (moral-creative imagination) and they want to have this specific endowment of ours, to assimilate or steal it. The diagnosis of Archontic intrusion conforms in many respects to reports of people who have encountered alien entities, especially the Grays and the Reptilians.”

According to Lash, the Gnostics also taught, “if evil arises from error when error runs beyond the scale of correction, we can nip evil in the bud by deepening our awareness of error. The Gospel of Philip says ‘Ignorance is the mother of all evil.’ In a lucid passage on error theory, the Gnostic master says: ‘So long as the root of wickedness is hidden, it is strong. But when it is recognised, it is dissolved. When it is revealed it perishes… As for ourselves, let us dig down after the root of evil which is within each of us and produces its fruit in our hearts. It masters us. We are its slaves. It takes us captive to make us do what we do not want and what we do want we do not do. It is powerful because we have not recognised it’.”

Lash writes that “the root of evil is human error, the mind mistaking itself. To defeat evil, we must unmask it by seeing its origin in the erring operations of our own minds.”

Origins of the Illuminati

The Gnostics also had a very plausible explanation for the origin of the so-called Illuminati, those behind-the-scenes puppet-masters and obsessive control freaks of society, who have been the de facto Ruling Class for thousands of years.

Lash explains that the Gnostics – or telestai as they called themselves – were initiates endowed with special knowledge in cosmological issues, who were actually “sophisticated shamans, past masters of ‘archaic techniques of ecstasy’.”

“As initiates of the Mysteries, behavioural manipulation, psychological programming and mind control were utterly repugnant to the genuine telestai of the ancient Mysteries,” writes Lash.

“Such procedures represented to them a path leading away from consecration to Sophia and the Great Work of co-evolving with nature, toward social engineering and personal power games. The goal of the telestai was to foster a sane and balanced society by helping individuals reach their peak potential, and never to interfere directly in social management.

“Over the course of time some initiates did take the path of social engineering. Dissident members of the Gnostic movement, who came to be known as ‘Illuminati,’ chose to use initiatory knowledge to develop and implement various techniques of behaviour modification. Their predecessors were known as the Magian order, an ancient Persian lineage of shamanism from which the Gnostic movement was derived…”

“Around 4000 BCE, with the rise of urban civilisation in the Near East, some members of the Magian order chose to apply certain secrets of initiation to statecraft and social engineering. They became the advisors to the first theocrats of the patriarchal nation-states, but in fact the advisors were running the show. Their subjects were systematically programmed to believe they were descended from the gods. The Illuminati inaugurated elaborate rites of empowerment or kingship rituals. These rituals were in fact methods of mind control exercised on the general populace through the collective symbology and mystique of royal authority.

“The intention of the dissident Magians to run society by covert controls was based on their assumption that human beings are not innately good enough, or gifted enough to create a human world.”

Even the term Gnostic (gnostokos) is a pejorative term invented by the so-called Church Fathers who ridiculed their rivals by referring to them as “smart ass” and “know it all.” The Gnostics called themselves “The Children of Seth.”

Lash notes that “paradoxically [even the word] ‘Gnostic’ comes down to us tainted by the condemnation of the Roman Church and associated with the very members of the Magian order who were disowned by the guardians of the Mysteries.”

The Illuminati then are the former adepts of the Mystery Schools who perverted and abused the spiritual teachings they had received in order to acquire material wealth and power, subverting their raison d’etre of life on Earth.

“The Illuminati program was (and still is) essential to patriarchy and its covert perpetrator religion,” Lash continues. “While it cannot exactly be said that the deviant adepts known as Illuminati created patriarchy, they certainly controlled it. And still do. The abuse of initiatory knowledge to induce schizophrenic states (‘entrainment’), manipulate multiple personalities in the same person (‘platforming’) and command behaviour through posthypnotic suggestion (the ‘Manchurian Candidate’ technique) continues to this day, with truly evil consequences for the entire world… These behavioural modification tools of the Illuminati were strictly forbidden in the Mysteries overseen by Gnostics.”

Thus the Illuminati were spiritual renegades and deviants who became the dominant controllers of the planet through their manipulation of patriarchal salvationist religion and a theology of terror. These former initiates of the Mystery Schools had seemingly taken the so-called left-handed path of ego-glorification and power games, rather than consecration of their lives to the enlightenment of humanity, whose goal was and always has been spiritual evolution on Earth.

Not In His Image is itself a revelation in the best sense, a meditation and a remarkable work of prose that naturally flows like poetry. Likewise, in his book, Lash has created a remarkable affirmation of spirituality and the metaphysical realities of life on earth.

In addition to his book, there is a wonderful DVD documentary by filmmaker Sharron Rose called Sophia Returning (see review on page 80 of this issue of New Dawn), featuring an in-depth interview with Lash who tells the remarkable story of the Gnostics and their cosmology and metaphysics.

Lash, a compelling storyteller, goes into detail about the story of the Aeon (Goddess) Sophia who came to embody the living being which is our beautiful Planet Earth. It may be a prison planet for those who were sentenced to live here, but for the rest of us, it is the best opportunity for spiritual evolution: to express love, kindness and compassion to all sentient beings, while we are on the screen of life.

In Sophia Returning, Lash also talks about his website MetaHistory.org, which is a magnificent online repository of all things Gnostic and esoteric. Lash refers to the ET phenomenon and the issue of “alien abduction.” He talks about the so-called Gnostic Catechism, which is a survival manual that gives instruction on what to do if accosted by an Archon (ET/UFO/trickster) and how to defend yourself against them since the Gnostics believed that they “steal souls at night.”

In an online article called “Avatar: The Psychedelic Worldview and the 3D Experience,” Ido Hartogsohn writes about the perceived 3D effect of our consensus reality:

“…The Pulfrich Effect, used to create stereoscopic images, relies on the principle that the human eye processes information slower in darker conditions to cause one eye to see reality in delay, thus creating a 3D illusion when watching moving objects. It is as if your two eyes were watching the screen from two different points in time, or from two different points in space.

“Similarly, the new 3D wave allows us to view culture from two distinct points of perspective in space and time: one of a culture completely immersed in consumerist mania, the other of a culture which keeps a strong relation to its mythic roots in nature.

“This multi-dimensional effect, which allows us to view ourselves from two different perspectives at the same time, might hint at the transformations ahead.” (www.realitysandwich.com/avatar_psychedelic_worldview_3d)

Maybe – maybe not. However, not since The Matrix has a “science fiction” movie captured the imagination and enthusiasm of a worldwide audience. Coincidentally The Matrix, like Avatar, was also a dramatisation of many Gnostic concepts and ideas, which also had a transformative effect on its audience.

In one of the most salient appreciations of the movie, Barbara Hand Clow writes that, “Avatar is a great story of heroic change and conquering the dark side. This subtle shift into new hope rings true because the film is galactic and universal, not just solar and earthbound. It is a sign that Earth’s quarantine is lifting, and our hearts are reconnecting with the universe.
“Many individuals have made great strides in their personal work during the Triple Conjunction, and now the collective will be changing rapidly because universal wisdom is flowing into it,” Clow concludes. “Many of you must be doing very good work reaching subtle dimensions, making it possible for a creative work like Avatar to premiere on Earth.”

.

Writer and Artist URI DOWBENKO is the author of Bushwhacked: Inside Stories of True Conspiracy and Hoodwinked: Watching Movies with Eyes Wide Open. He is also the founder and publisher of www.ConspiracyPlanet.com, www.ConspiracyDigest.com, www.AlMartinRaw.com, and www.InsiderIntelligence.com, as well as the publisher of The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran Contra Insider by Al Martin. You can visit Uri at www.UriDowbenko.com and www.NewImprovedArt.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 120 (May-June 2010).

Read this article with its extensive full colour illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 120 (PDF version) for only US$5

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

—

A devastating earthquake hit Haiti on 12 January killing over 200,000 people and laying waste to large parts of the country. In the aftermath, reports emerged that an “earthquake weapon” was unleashed to cause this catastrophic event.

Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez was widely quoted as saying the US Navy initiated the Haiti earthquake with a tectonic weapon. The Venezuelan media reported that the earthquake “may be associated with the project called HAARP, a system that can generate violent and unexpected changes in climate,” Press TV reported on 21 January.

Venezuelan media “added that the US government’s HAARP program, an atmospheric research facility in Alaska, was also to blame for a Jan. 9 quake in Eureka, Calif., and may have been behind the 7.8-magnitude quake in China that killed nearly 90,000 people in 2008,” Fox News reported.

Chavez cited a report from Russia’s Northern Fleet. According to the report, the US Navy made a mistake with a secret “earthquake weapon” and the result was the Haitian earthquake.

Though the Russian Northern Fleets’ report was not confirmed by official sources, the comments attracted special attention in some US and Russian media outlets including Fox News and Russia Today. Russia Today’s report said that Moscow has also been accused of possessing and utilising such weapons.

“Speaking on his weekly television show, Chavez opined that the US mission in Haiti was a ruse to initiate military occupation,” the New York Daily News said. Information has also surfaced on the extent of oil fields recently discovered in Haiti (see sidebar ‘Haiti, Oil, and US Occupation’).

Other speculation contends that the cataclysmic “man-made” earthquake in Haiti is only a test run for the much bigger game: the coming showdown with Iran.

Trying to Trigger an Earthquake

In 1997, former US Defense Secretary William Cohen made the following statement:

Others [terrorists] are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves…

Cohen was talking about longitudinal EM wave interferometers (LWI) technology (also known as “Tesla howitzers”). LWI waves can effortlessly pass through the ocean and Earth. Experts claim LWI waves can in fact pass through the Earth and emerge on the other side. The United States and Russia have possessed this technology for decades.

In 1966, Professor Gordon J.F. MacDonald, associate director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the University of California, was a member of the President’s Science Advisory Committee. MacDonald published papers on the use of environmental-control technologies for military purposes, including “earthquake engineering” (he also wrote about weather manipulation, climate modification, polar ice cap melting or destabilisation, and ozone depletion techniques).

“The revealed secrets surprised legislators,” writes Dr. Nick Begich, author of the groundbreaking expose Angels Don’t Play This HAARP. “Would an inquiry into the state of the art of electromagnetic manipulation surprise lawmakers today? They may find out that technologies developed out of the HAARP experiments in Alaska could deliver on Gordon MacDonald’s vision because leading-edge scientists are describing global weather as not only air pressure and thermal systems, but also as an electrical system.”

HAARP is a military project conducting cutting-edge experiments in ionospheric measurement, communication, enhancement and, according to some “conspiracy theorists,” weaponisation.

HAARP critics explain that the facility is capable of manipulating the ionosphere, at best causing artificial light shows on par with Alaska’s aurora borealis and, at worst, flooding Earth with electromagnetic waves that can do everything from disrupting satellites and missiles to creating earthquakes and modifying weather patterns.

Of course, there is no direct evidence the Pentagon used HAARP to touch off the massive earthquake in Haiti.

In 1975, the Soviet Union embarked on new research in the field of Magnetohydrodynamics for the purpose of studying the Earth’s crust and be able to anticipate earthquakes. The Soviets examined the possibility of provoking small quakes in order to forestall a big one. This research was quickly militarised and resulted in the construction of Pamir, the ‘earthquake machine’.

French author Thierry Meyssan writes that in 1995, “when Russia was governed by Boris Yeltsin and oligarch Viktor Chernomyrdin, the US Air Force recruited the researchers working at their Nizhny Novgorod laboratory. They built a much more powerful machine, Pamir 3, that was tested successfully. At that point, the Pentagon bought the men together with the materiel and shipped them to the United States, where they were incorporated into the HAARP programme.”

“The Earthquake Machine,” a documentary that recently aired on French television, suggests a few instances where a seismic weapon may have been employed, especially in Algeria and Turkey.

The documentary focuses on the 12 May 2008 earthquake in Sichuan (China). During the 30 minutes that preceded the earthquake, inhabitants of the region observed atypical colours in the sky. The suggestion being that the same energy used to provoke the earthquake is also likely to have perturbed the ionosphere.

Tsunami Bombs

During the Second World War, a group of New Zealand researchers attempted to develop a device capable of provoking tsunamis that could be unleashed against Japan. The research work was conducted by Thomas Leech, an Australian national, at Auckland University behind the code name of “Project Seal.” Several small-scale test explosions were carried out successfully, between 1944 and 1945, at Whangaparaoa off the coast of Auckland.

The United States deemed this programme to be as equally promising as the “Manhattan Project,” involving the development of the atomic bomb.

At the time, Project Seal was a military secret and it was therefore not disclosed that Thomas Leech had in fact been awarded the rank of Knight of the British Empire for concocting the “tsunami bomb.”

Subsequently, the US intelligence services covered it up by claiming that the research had never really existed and that the whole thing had been an artifice to impress the Soviets. However, the authenticity of Leech’s tests was established in 1999 when the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs declassified part of the documentation.

It is not known whether the research continued during the 60’s, but it was resumed by force of circumstances when atmospheric nuclear tests were abandoned in favour of sub-marine tests. According to Meyssan, “the United States were afraid of provoking earthquakes and tsunamis unintentionally. They preferred to learn how to do it intentionally.”

Officially, at the end of the Vietnam War, the United States and the Soviet Union gave up environmental wars (earthquakes, tsunamis, environmental balance destabilisation, atmospheric modification of the climate, ocean currents, the ozone layer and the ionosphere) upon signing the 1976 “Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques.”

Natural vs Man-Made Earthquakes

The current scientific explanation for natural earthquakes is they are caused by the movement of tectonic plates over the Earth’s mantle. Sandwiched between Earth’s crust and molten outer core, the vast mantle accounts for 83 percent of the planet’s volume. It is filled with solid rock but, heated by the core and by its own radioactive decay, it circulates like a pot of impenetrable soup. That circulation is the driving force behind the surface motion of tectonic plates, which builds mountains and causes earthquakes.

The destructive power of an earthquake comes from the momentum gathered when two opposing “faults” or tectonic plates that may have been locked together for decades, suddenly move apart. The result is that solid rock which normally moves only with the passing of geological ages accelerates briefly to 8000 kmh, unleashing huge quantities of energy and creating a shaking movement of up to a metre a second.

Officially, there is an area of research devoted to man-made earthquakes. Geologists and seismologists agree earthquakes can be induced in five major ways: fluid injection into the Earth, fluid extraction from the Earth, mining or quarrying, nuclear testing, and through the construction of dams and reservoirs.

A New York Times report confirmed drilling for oil sets off earthquakes and detailed how a drilling project near San Francisco and a similar project in Basel, Switzerland were shut down over concerns they triggered damaging earthquakes. Both diggings involved fracturing hard rock more than two miles deep.

…large earthquakes tend to originate at great depths, breaking rock that far down carries more serious risk, seismologists say. Seismologists have long known that human activities can trigger quakes, but they say the science is not developed enough to say for certain what will or will not set off a major temblor [Spanish word meaning ‘a trembling, earthquake’].

To hypothetically create an earthquake on purpose (or defuse one), tunnels would be drilled underground and stress measurements taken of rock displacement. This could be achieved by robots. Combining geophysical theory and computer models, researchers theoretically could determine the position where plates are locked. It would then be a matter of detonating explosives on that spot to trigger the earthquake. Conversely, a quake could be defused by detonating a number of nearby spots in succession, to slowly release the stress while hopefully causing only minor quakes.

Nikola Tesla

The revolutionary accomplishments of visionary scientist Nikola Tesla in the fields of electricity and magnetism paved the way for everything from wireless communication and power to robotics, ballistics, nuclear physics and much more, including telegeodynamics.

An article from the 11 July 1935 issue of the New York American entitled ‘Tesla’s Controlled Earthquakes’, stated Tesla’s “experiments in transmitting mechanical vibrations through the Earth – called by him ‘the art of telegeodynamics’ – were roughly described by the scientists as a sort of controlled earthquake.”

“It becomes possible to convey mechanical effects to the greatest terrestrial distances and produce all kinds of unique effects of inestimable value to science, industry and the arts,” Tesla explained to reporters at his 79th birthday gathering in 1935 at the Hotel New Yorker.

The January 1978 edition of Specula magazine ran an article describing an incredibly profound phenomenon that could be produced within the Earth by what is called the ‘Tesla Effect’.

According to the article, electromagnetic signals of certain frequencies can be transmitted through the Earth to form standing waves in the Earth itself. In certain cases, coherence to this standing wave can be induced wherein a fraction of the vast, surging electromagnetic current of the Earth itself feeds into and augments the induced standing wave.

In other words, “much more energy is now present in the standing wave than the… amount being fed in from the Earth’s surface.” By interferometer techniques, giant standing waves can be combined to produce a focused beam of very great energy. This can then be used to produce earthquakes induced at distant aiming points.

Tesla expressed grave concerns about the effects of this technology because it is exactly the type of thing that could easily get out of control once it begins vibrating within the Earth – it could possibly cause the Earth to vibrate to pieces.

Two days after Tesla died in 1943, the US government confiscated all of his papers, and the FBI declared them classified until further notice. That notice still stands.

“Tesla was the mad genius, equal parts madness and genius,” says journalist and author Tom McNichol. “Whenever anyone comes up with a superweapon, they usually say it is inspired by him. And though he was interested in beam weapons, telegeodynamics, death rays and more, he died almost penniless. But never rule anything out. I bet you when one of these weapons comes to fruition, Tesla’s hand will be in there somewhere.”

The existence of an “earthquake weapon” remains in the domain of “conspiracy theory,” but it’s a story that won’t go away.

Technological breakthroughs are closely guarded military-industrial secrets. It is said the general populace has access to technology at least 10 years behind advancements made in secret laboratories around the world. Due to the power and money involved, governments and private corporations go to extraordinary lengths to maintain that veil of secrecy.

The emerging multipolar world is clearly a threat to those nations used to making the rules and wielding power. Are the same people who gave the world atomic weapons – and are now planning space wars – in possession of an earthquake weapon? A new weapon for continued dominance. Even the threat of its possible existence is a psychological weapon.

For now, the possibility resides in fringe science. But fringe science has a way of coming true – ask anyone who has experienced Raytheon’s pain ray (thanks, Tesla!) or worked alongside an armed robot in Iraq. If the 20th century has taught us anything, it’s that science is only limited by our imagination. Unfortunately, some segments of humanity like to imagine seriously deadly weapons.

.

JASON JEFFREY holds an interest in a wide range of subjects including geopolitics, the ‘New World Order’, Big Brother, suppressed technology, psychic/spiritual development, ancient civilisations and esotericism. He can be contacted at jasonjeffrey88@gmail.com

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 119 (Mar-Apr 2010).

Read this article with its extensive full colour illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 119 (PDF version) for only US$5

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

—

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), headquartered in New York, is one of the key power centres pushing Globalism for All. As I’ve been writing for some time, medical programs are a clever and deceptive strategy for advancing this goal – the coagulation of Earth under one system of political management.

Global control is not a “right-wing” fantasy. It’s an objective much like the European Union, only writ much larger. Gradually, through attrition, sovereign nations decay under a super-bureaucracy that makes all the rules, issues the currency, and, over time, runs a tighter and tighter ship.

The outer shell of the CFR, founded 90 years ago as a Rockefeller plantation of control, is made up mostly of pundits and funded fellows and business leaders and politicians who look and sound like pompous blowhards. Which they are.But behind this mask, the inner CFR core designs schemes that could draw us all under the umbrella of de facto international control.

On October 16, 2009, the CFR held a symposium titled: Pandemic Influenza: Science, Economics, and Foreign Policy.

Much of the information in this symposium report is window dressing. However, it’s worth noting a few comments made by presenters:

“Laurie Garrett, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, said at the October 16, 2009 New York symposium that amid the array of unknowns surrounding the H1N1 virus, one certainty is that ‘this is a worldwide event and it is occurring in the dawn of our age of globalisation.’ Garrett added, ‘It’s a darn good thing we are dealing with a relatively mild flu this time, because clearly we are ill-prepared at this moment for a more virulent or more dangerous virus, either if this one takes on a more dangerous form… or if a second totally different virus does emerge.’ Helen Branswell of the Toronto-based Canadian Press agreed: ‘We thought we were preparing for a more serious (bird flu H5N1) issue, but we are in fact not prepared for a mild one.” (Pandemic Influenza: Science, Economics, and Foreign Policy, Symposium Rapporteur Report, October 16, 2009, www.cfr.org/content/publications/attachments/LG_Pandemic_Symposium_101609_rapporteur_report.pdf)

So two points were established early on: the Swine Flu is a mild disease, not a pandemic by any sensible definition; and leaders of “our age of globalisation” must be prepared for a more drastic disease event by taking worldwide measures now.

This latter issue is highlighted by another contributing CFR speaker:

“It was the overarching consensus of the symposium, first forwarded in the gathering by Financial Times correspondent Andrew Jack of London, that the current pandemic must serve as ‘a teachable moment’, focusing expert attention on the inherent contradictions in global governance of health issues, inequities in world access to vaccines and medical supplies, weaknesses in planning and management of epidemics with worldwide risks for economics and politics, and the public’s respect for science and public health.”

Andrew Jack thus punches up the notion that solutions to so-called global health problems can only be attained through international means.

Medical Crises and Global Governance

The report continues: “[Robert] Rubin [former US Secretary of the Treasury and Co-Chair of the CFR] noted that the increased global interdependency of the current economy has changed the game for pandemic responses in the United States, leaving only one option: ‘If the United States, and the world global economy, is going to be moderately well-prepared for this, there has to be an enormous amount of planning and agreed-upon processes and regimen decisions before the [pandemic] hits’.”

These speakers are talking about a vast system, a medical bureaucracy that can oversee planning and execution of “epidemic control” on a global scale.

Laurie Garrett then makes a pitch for equitable redistribution of wealth among nations:

“Moderator Garrett said: ‘We have globalised [epidemic] risk and threat today, but not globalised benefits. So the whole world shares the risk of pandemic influenza, but only a small percentage share vaccines, medicines and treatments’.”

Who would make those wealth-redistributing decisions from the top? Who would allocate money and drugs and vaccines and doctors from Greenland to Tierra Del Fuego? There is only one answer: an internationally organised body that could override the wishes of sovereign countries.

Then John Lange sounds a sour note of failure in this regard:

“In face of profound scientific and economic insecurities, important foreign policy decisions must be made by the United States to address the globalisation of pandemic protection and benefits, as well as threat. Ambassador John E. Lange, of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and former Special Representative on Avian and Pandemic Influenza for the State Department, said international coordination in response to the H5N1 pandemic [another mild flu season] of the 1990s paved the way for today’s response to H1N1. Nevertheless, Lange said, little has been done to move towards a more institutionalised global response, due as much to a lack of political will as to strained resources, in spite of high expectations.”

Lange thus draws the problem. The US has lagged behind. The US is not eager enough for “a more institutionalised global response.” The US doesn’t want to cede power to some agency like the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Another speaker takes off the mask and drives home Lange’s point harder:

“Canadian Press’ Branswell doubted how feasible it will be for countries such as the United States and Canada to deliver on these expectations. At the heart of the debate is the issue of sovereignty, which may prevent states from carrying through with their agreements in the face of pandemic pressure, instead choosing to nationalise local supplies of vaccines, masks, protective gear and other medical supplies. Conversely, sovereignty has been invoked as the basis for refusing to share samples of dangerous flu viruses with WHO and international scientists, and for declining outside inspections of local outbreaks.”

Surrendering National Sovereignty

Well, there it is. It doesn’t take a genius to read between the lines. The surrender of national sovereignty is necessary if the world is going to deal with encroaching waves of pandemics. Nations will have to give up their independent status in these situations – and you can be sure that the international body formed to govern epidemic disease will be permanent. No one is stupid enough to think that the enormous effort and time and money needed to establish such a bureaucracy would fade away after the latest and greatest pandemic. Control would transfer now and in the future.

Medical crises, in this way, translate into further steps along the way to global governance.

Before citing more statements from the CFR symposium, let me offer some numbers on these “waves of world illness” we have endured over the last 15 years or so. Keep in mind that epidemics are the primary justification for internationalisation of a medical monarchy.

Total cases and deaths:

SARS – 8,096 cases – 774 deaths.

WEST NILE – 27,836 cases – 1,088 deaths.

BIRD FLU – 262 deaths.

SWINE FLU – On April 26, 2009, with 20 cases of Swine Flu in the US and no deaths, the US Dept. of Health and Human Services declared a nationwide public health emergency.

The WHO changed its definition of pandemic so that “enormous numbers of deaths and illness” was removed from the definition. This happened in May 2009.

Thus far, WHO estimates about 8,200 deaths from Swine Flu, worldwide. That would average out to about 15,000 deaths for the year. But the CDC claims 36,000 people die every year from ordinary flu in the US alone.

So far, the global count of Swine Flu cases is 587,653.

Yet WHO states, “Every winter, tens of millions of people get the [ordinary] flu. Most are only ill and out of work for a week, yet the elderly are at a higher risk of death from the illness. We know the worldwide death toll exceeds a few hundred thousand people a year…”

Fear Mongering New Diseases

So why is Swine Flu a pandemic, and why is ordinary flu not a pandemic?

Fear mongering is about NEW diseases. That’s why.

It gets worse.

In early November, an explosive report by Sharyl Attkisson hit the CBS News website: Of all the probable or suspected swine flu cases in California actually tested by state labs since July 2009, based on 13,704 tests, only 2% of the patients had Swine Flu. 12% had some other kind of flu. And a whopping 86% didn’t have flu at all.

In Florida, based on 8,853 tests for suspected/probable Swine Flu, only 17% had Swine Flu. 83% were negative for other flu. So 83% didn’t have ANY kind of flu.

In Alaska, based on 722 tests for suspected/probable Swine Flu, only 11% had Swine Flu. In Georgia, based on 3,117 tests, only 2% had Swine Flu.

My point here is this: All these recent “epidemics” have been outright fakes. The numbers of cases and deaths are miniscule compared with older traditional illnesses – for which no pandemic emergencies have been declared.

Therefore, when the CFR is talking about globalising pandemic responses, and nations surrendering their sovereignty, it’s all based on an epidemic cover story that is patently false. It’s like saying, “The sky is falling. You have to lend all your support to the construction of a dome that will shield us from the lethal debris. A global ‘health czar’ will be in charge of building and maintaining the dome, and all governments must bow to his orders, which are given to protect everyone.”

Continuing now, with the CFR symposium report: We come to the toxic portion of the issue. In many nations, there has been vigorous debate over the use of so-called adjuvants in flu vaccines. One such substance, squalene, has been banned in several countries, because it can have dangerous effects. But the CFR would apparently like to override this question and promote universal use of squalene in vaccines, despite the glaring fact that Swine Flu itself is so mild the risks of the vaccine far outweigh its need.

“While recently the Obama administration brokered a deal among eleven wealthy nations to donate 10 percent of their vaccine supply of H1N1 to WHO for use in developing countries, Canada has not signed on, in an uncharacteristic decision… On the other hand, the Obama administration has refused the use of adjuvants, which are used in Europe, Canada and Japan to stretch out the antigen supply for wider global use, causing Lange to question the role of the United States as a true ‘global player’. Adjuvants help trigger the immune response, allowing dilution of precious flu antigens so that upwards of ten times as many people can be immunised with the same antigen supply. If the US were using adjuvant in its H1N1 vaccines, the country could be in a position to offer sufficient surplus product to WHO to bring the agency’s supply for poor countries up by hundreds of millions of doses.”

Not “a true global player.” That epithet carries considerable weight in CFR and allied circles. It means, “Let’s watch this person. If he wants our support, he’s going to have to change his tune. Let him understand that.”

Combating “anti-vaccine hype”

Finally, the CFR report takes a swipe at people who are educating themselves on the historical toxicity of vaccines. And here, it does:

“The public perception of swine flu has further complicated the issue, causing both public doubt and panic at the same time. Branswell fears that ‘the WHO has lost control of the message’, allowing misinformed threats, such as the current anti-vaccine hype, to resonate around the world as the scientific community races to catch up with the facts.

“The last great flu pandemic of 1968 occurred in a deeply divided world, where entire regions of the planet were no-travel zones for billions of people. It was an era of telephones and posted mail, evening newscasts, and morning newspapers. Both viruses and information spread comparatively slowly.

“Though today the vaccine methods of production and distribution mirror those practiced a half-century ago, the age of globalisation has ushered in rapid human and animal travel, leading to worldwide spread of viruses. The internet has similarly opened the door to viral spread of disease truths, half-truths and outright lies. Thankfully, the mild H1N1 has offered the world community an opportunity to see these 21st Century challenges without simultaneously experiencing worst-case outcomes. It is a teachable moment, but it remains to be seen whether – on both global and local scales – governments, companies and individuals are learning.”

Twenty years ago, when I was writing my first book, AIDS INC., I realised that medical propaganda could be used as a pre-eminent tool in controlling populations, because doctors and public health bureaucrats exude an air of political neutrality.

These esteemed figures appear to have no agenda of a political or economic nature. They speak as minor saints. They always “care and share.” When they say citizens must take certain actions to protect themselves and their loved ones, they speak with great authority.

Under that flag, much destruction can be wrought. For example, in certain areas of Africa, people have been dying from the same causes for hundreds of years: protein-calorie malnutrition; outright starvation; gross lack of sanitation; overcrowding; contaminated water supplies; abject poverty; no hope; and more recently, vaccines and medical drugs which, administered to people whose immune systems are already devastatingly compromised, can be lethal.

At the root of these causes is stolen land. Colonisation by governments and then mega-corporations, and brutal repression by local dictators – such controllers want to conceal their own naked actions, and they also want to keep hidden the actual immediate causes of death in Africa – the causes they, the controllers, invoke and maintain.

What better way to reframe this incriminating picture than to claim that a few politically neutral germs are the agents of death. Then, you can build a few showplace hospitals, bring in a bevy of doctors, set up a lab or two and demand that pharmaceutical companies donate medicines for the suffering. Meanwhile, no one cleans up the water, no one restores good land to the dispossessed, and no one alleviates the massively overcrowded living conditions.

Isolate any germ under the sun, give any medicine, as long as the fundamental horrendous facts of life remain the same, people will die in great numbers, and those in control will remain in control.

WHO & CFR: Globalise “humanitarian solutions”

The CFR is part of a sophisticated operation to globalise “humanitarian solutions” under the rubric of medical care. Its main ally is the World Health Organisation, an agency of the UN. Near the close of World War II, members of the CFR were, in fact, tapped to write the basic outline of the soon-to-be created UN.

The WHO is on the march. It is trying to insert itself and its rulings and demands into the governments of many nations. In 2003, it won its biggest one-shot victory. Through fraudulent travel advisories, based on non-science, it raised fears about SARS (at best, a tiny illness) and managed to effectively shut down air travel in and out of Toronto. Toronto lost several billion dollars in the process. I was a peripheral part of a budding effort to convince local business owners to file a lawsuit. At first, there was some enthusiasm, but then it faded out. The people of Toronto knuckled under, some of them lost their shirts, and they plowed on.

The WHO is, by far, the most successful agency of the UN. It has emerged as the rising star of that moribund organisation. It has delivered victories because it is flying under the banner of medical power. The modern priesthood.

CFR, its inner core, is well aware that medical control is a trump card it can play to great advantage. The October Symposium was an event with such an edge.

This is no one-time takeover by force. This is no crashing coup. In intelligence-agency parlance, it’s a step-operation. A little progress here, a little progress there. Speakers at the Symposium called Swine Flu “a teaching moment.” By this they meant two things. This mild flu gives CFR and its allies a chance to expand their global influence, through the expansion of public-health agencies, most notably WHO and the American CDC. And the population of the planet is “taught” to respect so-called epidemics and the resulting missives that come down from their leaders.

The pace of these fake epidemics and the accompanying media propaganda is quickening. There is an ultimate vision here that at least a few major power players entertain: subsume every citizen of planet Earth under a network of authoritarian medical control – as part of a global-management political system.

Cradle to grave, every person is diagnosed with at least several diseases or mental disorders and falls under the continuing treatment of doctors. These treatments are, for the most part, toxic. That is to say, they weaken the immune system and scramble neurotransmitter systems of the brain. People become less able to take effective action in any direction. People everywhere become fixated on their diseases. They become less able to maintain their freedom. They view themselves as lifelong patients.

In case you think this is pure fantasy, let me recite a few facts about the US medical-care system. These numbers are based in part, but not wholly, on a landmark paper published on July 26, 2000, in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The paper was titled, “Is US Health Really the Best in the World?” The author was Barbara Starfield, who was then associated with the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. In other words, this was a mainstream piece of work all the way.

Each year in the US there are:

12,000 deaths from unnecessary surgeries;

7,000 deaths from medication error in hospitals;

20,000 deaths from other errors in hospitals;

80,000 deaths from infections acquired in hospitals;

106,000 deaths from FDA-approved correctly prescribed medicines.

The total of medically-caused deaths in the US every year is 225,000.

This makes the medical system the third leading cause of death in the US, behind heart disease and cancer.

Then if you multiply these numbers by all the people who are emotionally involved in, and temporarily paralysed by, the deaths of these 225,000 Americans, you begin to see the fuller picture of the effects on every level. And all this is just in America.

In, say, Africa, the diversion of attention, by medical propaganda and cover stories, from the real causes of millions of annual deaths? How can one even begin to calculate those effects?

If, over the next 10 or 20 years, CFR and its allies, with direct intent or even blind do-good hope, make large strides toward globalising a medical bureaucracy that would oversee the “health of the planet,” consider what that will do, what consequences that will have.

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JON RAPPOPORT has worked as an independent investigative reporter since 1982. The LA Weekly nominated him for a Pulitzer Prize, for an interview he did with the president of El Salvador University, where the military had taken over the campus and was disappearing students and burning books. He has written for In These Times, Village Voice, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, CBS Healthwatch, Stern. He is the author of AIDS INC., The Secret Behind Secret Societies, and Oklahoma Bombing: The Suppressed Truth. You can find his work at www.insolutions.info.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 118 (Jan-Feb 2010).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 118 (PDF version) for only US$5

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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The new “swine flu” virus was first detected in Mexico on April 23, 2009. A few days later, the US Department of Homeland Security and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) claimed the so-called “Mexican flu” had infected more than 1,000 people with 60 deaths. The novel infectious agent was reported as a hybrid of pig, bird and human flu viruses, including genetic elements from European and Asian swine viruses.

The official name of the virus is Influenza A: subtype H1N1. Most puzzling about this new swine virus is that it has not been detected in pigs or in pig farmers. By May 9, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared that up to 2 billion people could be infected worldwide if the current epidemic continued to expand with repeated outbreaks. By the end of May, more than 13,500 cases were reported from 48 countries, with 110 deaths, most from the US and Mexico. And flu experts were still arguing whether it was a pandemic or an epidemic.

On April 29, Indonesian Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari, who had previously accused Western governments of making and spreading viruses to boost pharmaceutical profits, said: “I’m not sure whether the virus was genetically engineered but it’s a possibility.”

Two weeks later, Adrian Gibbs, an Australian evolutionary virologist with impeccable academic credentials, shocked the scientific world by suggesting the new strain of swine flu was created in a laboratory using eggs to grow viruses for vaccines, and could have been “accidentally” leaked to the general public. Gibbs, who was on the team behind the development of Tamiflu, came to this conclusion by analysing the genetic blueprint of the virus. Not surprisingly, WHO and the CDC were quick to note there was no evidence for this assertion.

According to a source known to former US National Security Agency official Wayne Madsen, “A top scientist for the United Nations, who has examined the outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in Africa, as well as HIV/AIDS victims, concluded that H1N1 possesses certain transmission ‘vectors’ that suggest that the new flu strain has been genetically-manufactured as a military biological warfare weapon.”

Madsen claims that his source, and another in Indonesia, “Are convinced that the current outbreak of a new strain of swine flu in Mexico and some parts of the United States is the result of the introduction of a human-engineered pathogen that could result in a widespread global pandemic, with potentially catastrophic consequences for domestic and international travel and commerce.”

When AIDS first appeared, rumours abounded as to whether the disease was man-made. These rumours were quickly squelched by the “experts” and the media as conspiracy theory and paranoia. Similar arguments are now used against the idea of a man-made flu epidemic. An Internet blogger wrote a typical response: “The number one thing that we all should strive to do is refrain from being suckered into conspiracy theories. Whether the US government, or any government or group, concocted this virus and were responsible for it getting out in the wild (whether on purpose or by accident) isn’t really the important issue right now. The important issue lies in handling the situation properly and trying to stop the outbreak before it gets worse – if we can.”

Emerging Viruses: Accident of Nature or Man-Made Creations?

In the early 1970s doctors believed that many infectious diseases had been banished from the industrialised world. But, remarkably, over the last three decades more than 30 new “emerging diseases” appeared in various places. Some of the better-known diseases include AIDS, SARS, Legionnaire’s disease, toxic shock syndrome, Lyme disease, hepatitis C, mad cow disease, hanta virus, various new encephalitis and hemorrhagic viruses, Lassa fever, West Nile virus, and Ebola virus.

Controversial diseases like chronic fatigue syndrome and Gulf War Illness are not included in the US government’s list of emerging diseases. In addition, older diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, and cholera, have re-emerged in more virulent and drug-resistant forms.

Could this outbreak of a new swine flu virus be some sort of covert biological “test” (like the anthrax mailings in the US in 2001) to wake people up to the dangers of bioterrorism? Are all these new emerging diseases and viruses merely continuing (and unprecedented) cruel acts of Mother Nature? Or could “the hand of man” in the form of genetic engineers and/or biological warfare terrorists be involved in these new outbreaks? Is it just a coincidence that all these weird bugs and illnesses have erupted in the past three decades? Or is all this just “paranoid” thinking?

Health officials have never implicated the biological warfare establishments of any country for the manifestation of these new diseases. Instead, the blame has been placed on increased global travel and globalisation, population growth and movements, deforestation and reforestation programs, human sexuality (in the case of HIV), and increased human contact with tropical mini-forests and other wilderness habitats that are reservoirs for insects and animals that harbour unknown infectious agents.

Several days after the “swine flu” outbreak was detected in Mexico, health officials declared that “Patient Zero” was a 5 year-old boy from La Gloria, a small town in the State of Veracruz, four hours away from Mexico City. By the end of the week, other officials uncovered that earlier proven cases had occurred in the border area between California and Mexico, thus raising speculation that the disease originated in the US. Although there was no indication the pandemic was caused by pigs, many people were fearful of eating pork, and pork farmers were facing financial ruin.

Ever since AIDS, epidemiologists tend to routinely blame many emerging diseases on animals and the transfer of their viruses to humans via “species jumping.” Scientists never mention the fact that for many decades millions of animals and innumerable vials of infectious animal tissue material have been shipped around the world for commercial and biological warfare purposes.

This world trade in deadly agents, coupled with advanced gene-splicing technology and species-jumping experiments beginning in the 1970s, has paralleled the increase in emerging diseases. In countless laboratories around the world many newly engineered viruses have been seeded into various species of animals. Some of these viruses have been adapted to human tissue.

The biological warfare implications of all these scientific “advances” have led some conspiracy-minded people to suspect out-of-control scientists as the source of one or more outbreaks of these newly emerging diseases.

A few researchers, such as Dr. Leonard Horowitz, suspects this is all part of “a conspiracy to commit genocide” by an “Anglo-American network of [government and pharmaceutical company] genetic engineers” who produced “genetically-modified recombinants of the avian, swine, and Spanish flu viruses, H5N1 and H1N1, nearly identical to the unprecedented Mexican virus that has now spread to the United States.”

Generating Fear for a Hidden Agenda?

Former US State Department insider Fred Burks, writing for www.opednews.com, asks “How much of the swine flu scare is real and how much is fear mongering? Could it be that certain members of the power elite profit handsomely when fear is spread around the globe through exaggerated alerts such as the avian flu and swine flu scares? Could there actually be deadly man-made viruses… which if released could cause a true pandemic killing millions around the globe? These are important questions worth exploring.”

Burks mentions the previous swine flu outbreak in the US in 1976 when only one person actually died, yet fear-mongering by the government led to massive vaccinations, which in turn caused at least 30 deaths as a direct result of contaminated vaccines.

More than half a dozen pharmaceutical companies, including Gilead Sciences Inc., Roche, GlaxoSmithKline and other companies with a stake in flu treatments and detection, saw a rise in their shares in a matter of days, and will likely see revenue boosts if the swine flu outbreak continues to spread.

The fear generated by the mainstream media and government over recent flu outbreaks has made some individuals very wealthy. Former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld alone added $5 million to his investment portfolio thanks to massive sales of Tamiflu during the avian flu “pandemic,” which never materialised. Tamiflu was shown numerous times to be ineffective against avian flu, however it’s also being recommended for swine flu.

The Financial Times on May 12 reported that governments around the world have previously stockpiled 220 million doses of Tamiflu in preparation for a “pandemic” that has yet to appear. The cost of this preparation is $7 billion dollars.

Bestselling author and health activist Dr. Joseph Mercola makes the following point: “It is important to note that nearly all suspected new [swine flu] cases have been reported as mild. Preliminary scientific evidence is also pointing out that this virus is NOT as potent as initially thought… Personally, I am highly skeptical. It simply doesn’t add up to a real pandemic.”

Mercola suspects a hidden agenda: “[The swine flu] has a noticeable subplot – preparing you for draconian measures to combat a future pandemic as well as forcing you to accept the idea of mandatory vaccinations.”

At the time of this article’s publication, extra powers granted by the NSW government in Australia can be applied to force into quarantine anyone who has been in contact with a suspected swine flu “case.” Will the next step be mandatory vaccinations?

Secret biowarfare experimentation on human populations

It is surprising that US Homeland Security and the CDC immediately eliminated bioterrorism as a possible source of the new swine flu outbreak, particularly when the US government has a long and well-documented history of biowarfare experimentation using unsuspecting citizens.

During the 1950s and 60s secret military biowarfare attacks took place in many parts of America. The most notorious was a six-day attack on San Francisco in which clouds of potentially harmful bacteria were sprayed over the city. Twelve people developed pneumonia due to the infectious bacteria, and one elderly man died from the attack. This attack was not revealed to the public until years later when classified documents were finally released.

In other classified experiments, the military sprayed bacteria in New York City subways, in a Washington DC airport, and on highways in Pennsylvania. Biowarfare testing also took place in military bases in Virginia, in Key West (Florida), and off the coasts of Southern California and Hawaii.

The Army also experimented on its own soldiers. Secret biowarfare experiments were performed at Fort Detrick between 1954 and 1973, exposing 2,300 Seventh-Day Adventist volunteers to germs causing tularemia, malaria, anthrax, Queensland fever, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, encephalitis, and a host of other exotic diseases.

The experiments were aimed at preventing, diagnosing, and treating these diseases, as well as the development of vaccines. No one died in the experiments, but critics contend that the men were essentially coerced into participating in research that, despite military assurances to the contrary, could have been used to produce biowarfare weapons.

During the Cold War years following World War Two, thousands of US citizens were used as unsuspecting guinea pigs in over 4,000 secret and classified radiation experiments conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission and other government agencies.

Not only is the public kept ignorant of biowarfare research, but biowarfare “accidents” are officially covered-up, downplayed, or simply blamed on animals. The full extent of the US government’s experiments on unsuspecting people will probably never be known because many documents remain Top Secret or classified. Other documents are often declared as missing, destroyed, or “unavailable,” in an attempt to hide the truth from the public.

Genetic engineering and species transfer of new killer viruses

As the 1970s began, the US Army’s biowarfare program intensified, particularly in the area of genetic engineering research. This genetic manipulation of cells and infectious agents, and the mixing and transferring of viruses between various animals (including monkeys, chimps and other primates) resulted in the creation of many laboratory (i.e. “man-made”) infectious agents for research, commercial and biowarfare purposes.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon transferred a major part of the Army’s Biological Warfare Unit at Ft. Detrick over to the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Thereafter, secret biowarfare experimentation continued under the cover of bona-fide cancer research.

In November 1973 at a high-level conference entitled “Biohazards in Biological Research,” virologists freely admitted there was no foolproof way to prevent the escape of highly dangerous laboratory viruses into the community. Robert Miller of the NCI warned that “laboratory workers have not only heavy exposures to known viruses, but also to the viruses that they invent.”

Utilising the latest genetic engineering techniques, virologists forced cancer-causing viruses to “jump” from one species of animal to another. In the hazardous transfer of dangerous infectious agents, scientists developed new forms of cancer in animals, as well as AIDS-like immunodeficiency diseases in cats, primates, and other lab animals. In 1981, a decade later, a new and mysterious immunodeficiency disease called AIDS suddenly appeared exclusively in gay men, the most hated minority in America.

AIDS: A designer disease with a genetically-altered laboratory virus?

During the 1970s the NCI’s Special Virus Cancer Program brought together leading national and international medical scientists in a unified attempt to uncover cancer-causing viruses. In the process human and animal viruses were adapted for commercial and biowarfare purposes. By the end of the decade new “emerging viruses” began to appear.

Some AIDS researchers believe the “war on cancer” and the concomitant Special Virus Cancer Program with its connections to biowarfare research spawned HIV. The AIDS outbreak in America clearly traces back to the government-sponsored experimental hepatitis B vaccine programs (1978-1981). These experiments in Manhattan, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, utilised highly promiscuous, healthy white gay and bisexual men as guinea pigs. Shortly after this experiment began in Manhattan in 1978, the first cases of “gay-related immune deficiency disease” appeared in New York City.

The danger of unrecognised animal viruses contaminating commercial vaccines has been known for a half-century. The AIDS epidemic was not the first time a monkey virus “jumped species” – via contaminated vaccines – to the human population. The polio vaccine of the 1950s was contaminated with a monkey virus called “simian virus-40” and was injected into half the US population of that era. The details of this horrific event and its aftermath can be found in The Virus and the Vaccine: The True Story of a Cancer-Causing Monkey Virus, Contaminated Polio Vaccine, and the Millions of Americans Exposed by Debbie Bookchin and Jim Schumacher.

The idea of AIDS as a man-made virus (and seeded through vaccines) is considered by most scientists to be a joke and is trashed as paranoid “conspiracy theory.” However, as already noted, previous biowarfare experiments against civilians have all been clouded in secrecy and covered-up at the highest levels of government. Scientific “facts” surrounding these unethical programs are often tainted with government disinformation, propaganda, and outright lies.

Scientists pooh-pooh the idea of a “man-made” virus, even though the laboratory transfer of viruses from one species to another always results in a “man-made virus.” When a lab virus is transferred to another species its molecular structure is altered. This occurs because the transferred virus picks up new genetic material from the cells of the new species that it infects.

More than 30 years after AIDS there are still unanswered questions. How is it biologically possible for a supposedly black, heterosexually-transmitted disease “out-of-Africa” to suddenly (with no incubation period) transform itself into a “gay disease” in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco? Why are there no proven AIDS cases in Africa in the 1960s and 70s? Why only young healthy white gay men in the US? Why no blacks, women, old people, immuno-suppressed people, children, heterosexuals, among the first cases? Surely with all the sexual activity of heterosexuals in America, one would expect some early cases to appear in straight people as well.

The evidence pointing to AIDS as a man-made disease can be found in my two books: AIDS and the Doctors of Death and Queer Blood. One can also google “man-made AIDS” for hundreds of Internet websites in which the subject is discussed rationally and intelligently. One Internet article entitled “WHO murdered Africa,” written by William Campbell Douglas, has been posted for two decades. The physician accuses the World Health Organisation of deliberately seeding HIV via contaminated African vaccine experiments. Douglas says there is no question mark after the title because the title is not a question: it’s a declarative statement. It is interesting to note that there has never been any serious scientific challenge to this research.

After 30 years, man-made AIDS is still a taboo subject for scientists and the media. As proof, witness the demonisation of Reverend Jeremiah Wright (Barack Obama’s pastor) whose public accusations of man-made AIDS threatened to bring down Obama’s bid for the presidential nomination. Not one journalist had the temerity to ask the Reverend why he held such an extreme view, and what was the evidence for it.

Pig parts for people

In a pandemic flu article appearing in the New York Times on May 5, 2009, (“10 (virus) genes furiously evolving”), Carl Zimmer reports: “Viruses are diverse because they can mutate very fast and can mix genes. They sometimes pick up genes from their hosts, and they can swap genes with other viruses. Some viruses, including flu viruses, carry out a kind of mixing known as reassortment. If two different flu viruses infect the same cell, the new copies of their genes get jumbled up as new viruses are assembled.”

So why do scientists want to use pig tissue for transplantation into humans? Particularly when pig viruses could “swap genes” with human viruses? Could the current “new” swine flu virus, which is a mix of human, pig and bird viruses, have its origin in gene-swapping viral lab experiments and/or vaccine experiments that have been conducted over the past half-century?

Writing about pig parts for TIME (January 14, 2002), Michael Lemonick is aware of the danger arising “because animals carry viruses that are harmless to their hosts but can turn deadly in another species. If such a virus hitchhiked aboard transplanted tissue, it could not only infect its new host but also spread to other humans – much as HIV did when it jumped from monkeys to man.”

Nevertheless, he concludes, “Interspecies transplantation is so promising that researchers are determined to tackle each hurdle as it comes. It could be a decade or more before clinical trials become routine and even longer for transplants. But they seem to be on their way.”

The Madness of Virus Research

How many more wake up calls with the appearance of mysterious viruses and epidemics will be required before health officials stop blaming animals as the source? When will we begin to reevaluate the world trade in deadly infectious and biowarfare agents, the insanities of out-of-control vaccine experimentation, and the needless seeding of viruses into countless laboratory animals? Surely these factors are possible reasons for our current and predicted new plagues.

Laboratory infectious creations and biowarfare agents are designed solely to kill. Any government or scientist or terrorist that is willing to deploy these agents should be fully aware that – ‘What Goes Around, Comes Around’.

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Dr. ALAN CANTWELL is the author of two books on the man-made AIDS epidemic: AIDS and the Doctors of Death and Queer Blood, both available from www.amazon.com and Book Clearing House in the US @ 1-800-431-1579. Email: alanrcan@aol.com Website: www.ariesrisingpress.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 115 (Sept-Oct 2009).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 115 (PDF version) for only US$5

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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Following the 2009 G20 summit, plans were announced for implementing the creation of a new global currency to replace the US dollar’s role as the world reserve currency. Point 19 of the communiqué released by the G20 at the end of the Summit stated, “We have agreed to support a general SDR allocation which will inject $250 billion into the world economy and increase global liquidity.” SDRs, or Special Drawing Rights, are “a synthetic paper currency issued by the International Monetary Fund.”

As the Telegraph reported, “the G20 leaders have activated the IMF’s power to create money and begin global ‘quantitative easing’. In doing so, they are putting a de facto world currency into play. It is outside the control of any sovereign body. Conspiracy theorists will love it.”1

The article continued in stating that, “there is now a world currency in waiting. In time, SDRs are likely to evolve into a parking place for the foreign holdings of central banks, led by the People’s Bank of China.” Further, “the creation of a Financial Stability Board looks like the first step towards a global financial regulator,” or, in other words, a global central bank.It is important to take a closer look at these “solutions” being proposed and implemented in the midst of the current global financial crisis. These are not new suggestions, as they have been in the plans of the global elite for a long time. However, in the midst of the current crisis, the elite have fast-tracked their agenda of forging a New World Order in finance. It is important to address the background to these proposed and imposed “solutions” and what effects they will have on the International Monetary System (IMS) and the global political economy as a whole.

A New Bretton-Woods

In October of 2008, Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of the UK, said that we “must have a new Bretton Woods – building a new international financial architecture for the years ahead.” He continued in saying that, “we must now reform the international financial system,” and that he would want “to see the IMF reformed to become a ‘global central bank’ closely monitoring the international economy and financial system.”2

On October 17, 2008, Gordon Brown wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post in which he said that this ‘new Bretton-Woods’ should work towards “global governance,” and implementing “shared global standards for accounting and regulation,” and “the renewal of our international institutions to make them effective early-warning systems for the world economy.”3

In early October 2008, it was reported that, “as the world’s central bankers gather this week in Washington DC for an IMF-World Bank conference to discuss the crisis, the big question they face is whether it is time to establish a global economic ‘policeman’ to ensure the crash of 2008 can never be repeated.” Further, “any organisation with the power to police the global economy would have to include representatives of every major country – a United Nations of economic regulation.” A former governor of the Bank of England suggested that, “the answer might already be staring us in the face, in the form of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS),” however, “the problem is that it has no teeth. The IMF tends to couch its warnings about economic problems in very diplomatic language, but the BIS is more independent and much better placed to deal with this if it is given the power to do so.”4

Emergence of Regional Currencies

On January 1, 1999, the European Union established the Euro as its regional currency. The Euro has grown in prominence over the past several years. However, it is not to be the only regional currency in the world. There are moves and calls for other regional currencies throughout the world.

In 2007, Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, ran an article titled, ‘The End of National Currency’, in which it began by discussing the volatility of international currency markets, and that very few “real” solutions have been proposed to address successive currency crises.

The author poses the question, “Will restoring lost sovereignty to governments put an end to financial instability?” He answers by stating that, “this is a dangerous misdiagnosis,” and that, “the right course is not to return to a mythical past of monetary sovereignty, with governments controlling local interest and exchange rates in blissful ignorance of the rest of the world. Governments must let go of the fatal notion that nationhood requires them to make and control the money used in their territory. National currencies and global markets simply do not mix; together they make a deadly brew of currency crises and geopolitical tension and create ready pretexts for damaging protectionism. In order to globalise safely, countries should abandon monetary nationalism and abolish unwanted currencies, the source of much of today’s instability.”

The author explains that, “monetary nationalism is simply incompatible with globalisation. It has always been, even if this has only become apparent since the 1970s, when all the world’s governments rendered their currencies intrinsically worthless.” The author states that, “since economic development outside the process of globalisation is no longer possible, countries should abandon monetary nationalism. Governments should replace national currencies with the dollar or the euro or, in the case of Asia, collaborate to produce a new multinational currency over a comparably large and economically diversified area.” Essentially, according to the author, the solution lies in regional currencies.5

In October of 2008, “European Central Bank council member Ewald Nowotny said a ‘tri-polar’ global currency system is developing between Asia, Europe and the US and that he’s skeptical the US dollar’s centrality can be revived.”6

In South America, there are moves to create a regional currency and central bank under the Union of South American Nations, which was established in May of 2008.7,8 The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), a regional trade bloc of Arabic Gulf nations, has also been making moves towards creating a regional central bank and common currency for its member nations, following the example of Europe, and even being advised by the European Central Bank.9-12

From the time of the East Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, there have been calls for the creation of a regional currency for East Asia among the ten member nations of the ASEAN bloc, as well as China, Japan and South Korea. In 2008, ASEAN central bank officials and financial ministers met to discuss monetary integration in the region.13-19

Within Africa, there are already certain regional monetary unions, and within the framework of the African Union, there are moves being implemented to create an African currency under the control of an African Central Bank (ACB), which is to be located in Nigeria.20-24

In North America, there are moves, coinciding with the deepening economic and political integration of the continent under NAFTA and the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP), to create a regional currency for North America, aptly given the current designation as the Amero, and even the then-Governor of the Central Bank of Canada, David Dodge, in 2007, said that a regional currency was “possible.”25-33

A Global Currency

In 1988, The Economist ran an article titled, ‘Get Ready for the Phoenix’, in which they wrote, “thirty years from now, Americans, Japanese, Europeans, and people in many other rich countries and some relatively poor ones will probably be paying for their shopping with the same currency. Prices will be quoted not in dollars, yen or D-marks but in, let’s say, the phoenix. The phoenix will be favoured by companies and shoppers because it will be more convenient than today’s national currencies, which by then will seem a quaint cause of much disruption to economic life in the late twentieth century.”

The article stated that, “The market crash [of 1987] taught [governments] that the pretence of policy cooperation can be worse than nothing, and that until real co-operation is feasible (ie, until governments surrender some economic sovereignty) further attempts to peg currencies will flounder.”

Amazingly the author of the article adds that, “Several more big exchange-rate upsets, a few more stockmarket crashes and probably a slump or two will be needed before politicians are willing to face squarely up to that choice. This points to a muddled sequence of emergency followed by patch-up followed by emergency, stretching out far beyond 2018 – except for two things. As time passes, the damage caused by currency instability is gradually going to mount; and the very trends that will make it mount are making the utopia of monetary union feasible.”

The article advocated the formation of a global central bank, perhaps through the IMF, and “this means a big loss of economic sovereignty, but the trends that make the phoenix so appealing are taking that sovereignty away in any case.”

The article concludes in stating that, “The phoenix would probably start as a cocktail of national currencies, just as the Special Drawing Right is today. In time, though, its value against national currencies would cease to matter, because people would choose it for its convenience and the stability of its purchasing power.” The last sentence says, “Pencil in the phoenix for around 2018, and welcome it when it comes.”34

Former US Federal Reserve Governor Paul Volcker has said that, “if we are to have a truly global economy, a single world currency makes sense.” A European Central Bank executive stated that, “we might one day have a single world currency,” in “a step towards the ideal situation of a fully integrated world.”35

The IMF held a conference in 2000 discussing how the world was segmenting into regional currency blocs and that a single world currency was possible, and that it is, in fact, preferable.36 Nobel Prize winning economist Robert Mundell has long advocated the creation of a global currency, and that it “would restore a needed coherence to the international monetary system, give the International Monetary Fund a function that would help it to promote stability, and be a catalyst for international harmony.”37

In March 2009, Russia suggested that the G20 meeting in April should “consider the possibility of creating a supra-national reserve currency or a ‘super-reserve currency’,” and to consider the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) in this capacity.38 A week later, China’s central bank governor proposed the creation of a global currency controlled by the IMF, replacing the US dollar as the world reserve currency, also using the IMF’s SDRs as the reserve currency basket against which all other currencies would be fixed.39

Days after this proposal, the US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, former President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, told the Council on Foreign Relations that, in response to a question about the Chinese proposal, “we’re actually quite open to that suggestion. But you should think of it as rather evolutionary, building on the current architectures, than – rather than – rather than moving us to global monetary union.”40

In late March a UN panel of economists recommended the creation of a new global currency reserve that would replace the US dollar, and that it would be an “independently administered reserve currency.”41

Creating a World Central Bank

In 1998, Jeffrey Garten wrote an article for the New York Times advocating a “global Fed.” Garten was former Dean of the Yale School of Management, former Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade in the Clinton administration, previously served on the White House Council on International Economic Policy under the Nixon administration and on the policy planning staffs of Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Cyrus Vance of the Ford and Carter administrations, former Managing Director at Lehman Brothers, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

In his article written in 1998, he stated that, “over time the United States set up crucial central institutions – the Securities and Exchange Commission (1933), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (1934) and, most important, the Federal Reserve (1913). In so doing, America became a managed national economy. These organisations were created to make capitalism work, to prevent destructive business cycles and to moderate the harsh, invisible hand of Adam Smith.” He stated that, “this is what now must occur on a global scale. The world needs an institution that has a hand on the economic rudder when the seas become stormy. It needs a global central bank.”

Interestingly, Garten states that, “one thing that would not be acceptable would be for the bank to be at the mercy of short-term-oriented legislatures.” In essence, it is not to be accountable to the people of the world. So, he asks the question, “To whom would a global central bank be accountable? It would have too much power to be governed only by technocrats, although it must be led by the best of them. One possibility would be to link the new bank to an enlarged Group of Seven – perhaps a ‘G-15’ [or in today’s context, the G20] that would include the G-7 plus rotating members like Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Poland, India, China and South Korea.” He further states that, “There would have to be very close collaboration” between the global bank and the Fed.42

In September of 2008, Jeffrey Garten wrote an article for the Financial Times in which he stated that, “Even if the US’s massive financial rescue operation succeeds, it should be followed by something even more far-reaching – the establishment of a Global Monetary Authority to oversee markets that have become borderless.”

In late October of 2008, Garten wrote an article for Newsweek in which he stated that, “leaders should begin laying the groundwork for establishing a global central bank.” He explained that, “there was a time when the US Federal Reserve played this role [as governing financial authority of the world], as the prime financial institution of the world’s most powerful economy, overseeing the one global currency. But with the growth of capital markets, the rise of currencies like the euro and the emergence of powerful players such as China, the shift of wealth to Asia and the Persian Gulf and, of course, the deep-seated problems in the American economy itself, the Fed no longer has the capability to lead single-handedly.”43

In January of 2009, it was reported that, “one clear solution to avoid a repeat of the problems would be the establishment of a ‘global central bank’ – with the IMF and World Bank being unable to prevent the financial meltdown.” Dr. William Overholt, senior research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, formerly with the Rand Institute, gave a speech in Dubai in which he said that, “To avoid another crisis, we need an ability to manage global liquidity. Theoretically that could be achieved through some kind of global central bank, or through the creation of a global currency, or through global acceptance of a set of rules with sanctions and a dispute settlement mechanism.”44

A “New World Order” in Banking

In June of 2008, before he was Treasury Secretary in the Obama administration, Timothy Geithner, as head of the New York Federal Reserve, wrote an article for the Financial Times following his attendance at the 2008 Bilderberg conference, in which he said that, “banks and investment banks whose health is crucial to the global financial system should operate under a unified regulatory framework,” and that, “the US Federal Reserve should play a ‘central role’ in the new regulatory framework, working closely with supervisors in the US and around the world.”45

In November of 2008, The National, a prominent United Arab Emirates newspaper, reported on Baron David de Rothschild accompanying UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown on a visit to the Middle East, although not as a “part of the official party” accompanying Brown. Following an interview with the Baron, it was reported that, “Rothschild shares most people’s view that there is a new world order. In his opinion, banks will deleverage and there will be a new form of global governance.”46

In February of 2009, the Times Online reported that a “new world order in banking [is] necessary,” and that, “it is increasingly evident that the world needs a new banking system and that it should not bear much resemblance to the one that has failed so spectacularly.”47

But of course, the elites that are shaping this new banking system are the champions of the previous banking system. The solutions that will follow are simply the extensions of the current system, only sped up through the necessity posed by the current crisis.

An Emerging Global Government

An April 3, 2009 article in the Toronto Star, reported that the G20 “confab constitutes the first great get-together of the new world order. This geopolitical order may follow a number of directions, by no means all of them pleasant. But its defining characteristic is already unchangeable.” Further, “An uncomfortable characteristic of the new world order may well turn out to be that global income gaps will widen because the rising powers, such as China, India and Brazil, regard those below them on the ladder as potential rivals.” The author further states that, “The new world order thus won’t necessarily be any better than the old one,” and that, “what is certain, though, is that global affairs are going to be considerably different from now on.”48

David Rothkopf, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, former Deputy Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade in the Clinton administration, and former managing director of Kissinger and Associates, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, recently wrote a book titled, Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They are Making, of which he is certainly a member. When discussing the role and agenda of the global “superclass,” he states that, “in a world of global movements and threats that don’t present their passports at national borders, it is no longer possible for a nation-state acting alone to fulfil its portion of the social contract.”49

He writes that “the international organisations and alliances we have today,” are evolving and achieving great things, despite certain flaws, and that he is “optimistic that progress will continue to be made,” but it will be difficult, because it “undercuts many national and local power structures and cultural concepts that have foundations deep in the bedrock of human civilisation, namely the notion of sovereignty.”⁵⁰ He further notes that, “mechanisms of global governance are more achievable in today’s environment,” and that these mechanisms “are often creative with temporary solutions to urgent problems that cannot wait for the world to embrace a bigger and more controversial idea like real global government.”51

In December of 2008, the Financial Times ran an article written by Gideon Rachman, a past Bilderberg attendee, who wrote that, “for the first time in my life, I think the formation of some sort of world government is plausible,” and that, “a ‘world government’ would involve much more than co-operation between nations. It would be an entity with state-like characteristics, backed by a body of laws. The European Union has already set up a continental government for 27 countries, which could be a model. The EU has a supreme court, a currency, thousands of pages of law, a large civil service and the ability to deploy military force.” Asking if the European model could “go global,” he states that it can, and that this is made possible through an awakening “change in the political atmosphere,” as “the financial crisis and climate change are pushing national governments towards global solutions, even in countries such as China and the US that are traditionally fierce guardians of national sovereignty.”

He quoted an adviser to French President Nicolas Sarkozy as saying, “global governance is just a euphemism for global government,” and that the “core of the international financial crisis is that we have global financial markets and no global rule of law.” However, Rachman states that any push towards a global government “will be a painful, slow process.” He then states that a key problem in this push can be explained with an example from the EU, which “has suffered a series of humiliating defeats in referendums, when plans for ‘ever closer union’ have been referred to the voters. In general, the Union has progressed fastest when far-reaching deals have been agreed by technocrats and politicians – and then pushed through without direct reference to the voters. International governance tends to be effective, only when it is anti-democratic. [Emphasis added]”52

In November of 2008, the United States National Intelligence Council (NIC), the US intelligence community’s “centre for midterm and long-term strategic thinking,” released a report that it produced in collaboration with numerous think tanks, consulting firms, academic institutions and hundreds of other experts, among them are the Atlantic Council of the United States, the Wilson Center, RAND Corporation, the Brookings Institution, American Enterprise Institute, Texas A&M University, the Council on Foreign Relations and Chatham House in London.53

The report, titled Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, outlines the current global political and economic trends that the world may be going through by the year 2025. In terms of the financial crisis, it states that solving this “will require long-term efforts to establish a new international system.”54 It suggests that as the “China-model” for development becomes increasingly attractive, there may be a “decline in democratisation” for emerging economies, authoritarian regimes, and “weak democracies frustrated by years of economic underperformance.” Further, the dollar will cease to be the global reserve currency, as there would likely be a “move away from the dollar.”55

It states that the dollar will become “something of a first among equals in a basket of currencies by 2025. This could occur suddenly in the wake of a crisis, or gradually with global rebalancing.”56 The report elaborates on the construction of a new international system, stating that, “by 2025, nation-states will no longer be the only – and often not the most important – actors on the world stage and the ‘international system’ will have morphed to accommodate the new reality. But the transformation will be incomplete and uneven.” It also notes that, “most of the pressing transnational problems – including climate change, regulation of globalised financial markets, migration, failing states, crime networks, etc. – are unlikely to be effectively resolved by the actions of individual nation-states. The need for effective global governance will increase faster than existing mechanisms can respond.”57

The report discusses the topic of regionalism, stating that, “Asian regionalism would have global implications, possibly sparking or reinforcing a trend toward three trade and financial clusters that could become quasi-blocs (North America, Europe, and East Asia).” These blocs “would have implications for the ability to achieve future global World Trade Organisation agreements and regional clusters could compete in the setting of trans-regional product standards for IT, biotech, nanotech, intellectual property rights, and other ‘new economy’ products.”58

Reflecting similar assumptions made by Rachman in his article advocating a world government is the topic of democratisation, on which the report says, “advances are likely to slow and globalisation will subject many recently democratised countries to increasing social and economic pressures that could undermine liberal institutions.” This is largely because “the better economic performance of many authoritarian governments could sow doubts among some about democracy as the best form of government. The surveys we consulted indicated that many East Asians put greater emphasis on good management, including increasing standards of livings, than democracy.” Further, “even in many well-established democracies, surveys show growing frustration with the current workings of democratic government and questioning among elites over the ability of democratic governments to take the bold actions necessary to deal rapidly and effectively with the growing number of transnational challenges.”59

The Creation of a New World Order

Ultimately, what this implies is that the future of the global political economy is one of increasing moves toward a global system of governance, or a world government, with a world central bank and global currency; and that, concurrently, these developments are likely to materialise in the face of and as a result of a decline in democracy around the world, and thus, a rise in authoritarianism. What we are witnessing is the creation of a New World Order, controlled by a totalitarian global government structure.

In fact, the very concept of a global currency and global central bank is authoritarian in its very nature, as it removes any vestiges of oversight and accountability away from the people of the world, and toward a small, increasingly interconnected group of international elites.

As Carroll Quigley explained in his monumental book, Tragedy and Hope, “[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.”60

Indeed, the current “solutions” being proposed to the global financial crisis benefit those that caused the crisis over those that are poised to suffer the most as a result of the crisis: the disappearing middle classes, the world’s dispossessed, poor, indebted people. The proposed solutions to this crisis represent the manifestations and actualisation of the ultimate generational goals of the global elite; and thus, represent the least favourable conditions for the vast majority of the world’s people.

It is imperative that the world’s people throw their weight against these “solutions” and usher in a new era of world order, one of the People’s World Order; with the solution lying in local governance and local economies, so that the people have greater roles in determining the future and structure of their own political-economy, and thus, their own society. With this alternative of localised political economies, in conjunction with an unprecedented global population and international democratisation of communication through the internet, we have the means and possibility before us to forge the most diverse manifestation of cultures and societies that humanity has ever known.

The answer lies in the individual’s internalisation of human power and destination, and a rejection of the externalisation of power and human destiny to a global authority of which all but a select few people have access to. To internalise human power and destiny is to realise the gift of a human mind, which has the ability to engage in thought beyond the material, such as food and shelter, and venture into the realm of the conceptual. Each individual possesses – within themselves – the ability to think critically about themselves and their own life; now is the time to utilise this ability with the aim of internalising the concepts and questions of human power and destiny: Why are we here? Where are we going? Where should we be going? How do we get there?

The supposed answers to these questions are offered to us by a tiny global elite who fear the repercussions of what would take place if the people of the world were to begin to answer these questions themselves. I do not know the answers to these questions, but I do know that the answers lie in the human mind and spirit, that which has overcome and will continue to overcome the greatest of challenges to humanity, and will, without doubt, triumph over the New World Order.

Footnotes:

1. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, ‘The G20 moves the world a step closer to a global currency’, The Telegraph, April 3, 2009, www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/5096524/The-G20-moves-the-world-a-step-closer-to-a-global-currency.html

2. Robert Winnett, ‘Financial Crisis: Gordon Brown calls for “new Bretton Woods”,’ The Telegraph, October 13, 2008, www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/3189517/Financial-Crisis-Gordon-Brown-calls-for-new-Bretton-Woods.html

3. Gordon Brown, ‘Out of the Ashes’, The Washington Post, October 17, 2008, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/16/AR2008101603179.html

4. Gordon Rayner, ‘Global financial crisis: does the world need a new banking “policeman”?’, The Telegraph, October 8, 2008, www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/3155563/Global-financial-crisis-does-the-world-need-a-new-banking-policeman.html

5. Benn Steil, ‘The End of National Currency’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 86, Issue 3, May/June 2007, pp.83-96

6. Jonathan Tirone, ‘ECB’s Nowotny Sees Global “Tri-Polar” Currency System Evolving’, Bloomberg, October 19, 2008, www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=apjqJKKQvfDc&refer=home

7. BBC, ‘South America nations found union’, BBC News, May 23, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7417896.stm

8. CNews, ‘South American nations to seek common currency’, China View, May 26, 2008, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-05/27/content_8260847.htm

9. AME Info, ‘GCC: Full steam ahead to monetary union’, September 19, 2005, www.ameinfo.com/67925.html

10. John Irish, ‘GCC Agrees on Monetary Union but Signals Delay in Common Currency’, Reuters, June 10, 2008, www.arabnews.com/?page=6&section=0&article=110727&d=10&m=6&y=2008

11. ‘TIMELINE-Gulf single currency deadline delayed beyond 2010’, Forbes, March 23, 2009, www.forbes.com/feeds/afx/2009/03/24/afx6204462.html

12. Agencies, ‘GCC need not rush to form single currency’, Business 24/7, March 26, 2009, www.business24-7.ae/articles/2009/3/pages/25032009/03262009_4e19de908b174f04bfb3c37aec2f17b3.aspx

13. Barry Eichengreen, ‘International Monetary Arrangements: Is There a Monetary Union in Asia’s Future?’, The Brookings Institution, Spring 1997, www.brookings.edu/articles/1997/spring_globaleconomics_eichengreen.aspx

14. ‘After European now Asian Monetary Union?’, Asia Times Online, September 8, 2001, www.atimes.com/editor/CI08Ba01.html

15. ‘ASEAN Makes Moves for Asian Monetary Fund’, Association of Southeast Asian Nations, May 6, 2005, www.aseansec.org/afp/115.htm

16. Reuven Glick, ‘Does Europe’s Path to Monetary Union Provide Lessons for East Asia?’, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, August 12, 2005, www.frbsf.org/publications/economics/letter/2005/el2005-19.html

17. AFP, ‘Asian Monetary Fund may be needed to deal with future shocks’, Channel News Asia, July 2, 2007, www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_world_business/view/285700/1/.html

18. AFX News Limited, ‘East Asia monetary union “feasible” but political will lacking – ADB’, Forbes, September 19, 2007, www.forbes.com/feeds/afx/2007/09/19/afx4133743.html

19. Lin Li, ‘ASEAN discusses financial, monetary integration’, China View, April 2, 2008, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-04/02/content_7906391.htm

20. Paul De Grauwe, Economics of Monetary Union, Oxford University Press, 2007, pp.109-110

21. Heather Milkiewicz & Paul R. Masson, ‘Africa’s Economic Morass—Will a Common Currency Help?’, The Brookings Institution, July 2003, www.brookings.edu/papers/2003/07africa_masson.aspx

22. John Gahamanyi, ‘Rwanda: African Central Bank Governors Discuss AU Financial Institutions’, The New Times, August 23, 2008, http://allafrica.com/stories/200808230124.html

23. Eric Ombok, ‘African Union, Nigeria Plan Accord on Central Bank’, Bloomberg, March 2, 2009, www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601116&sid=afoY1vOnEMLA&refer=africa

24. Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘Africa in the Quest for a Common Currency’, Republic of Kenya, March 2009, www.mfa.go.ke/mfacms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=346&Itemid=62

25. Herbert Grubel, ‘The Case for the Amero’, The Fraser Institute, September 1, 1999, p.4, www.fraserinstitute.org/Commerce.Web/publication_details.aspx?pubID=2512

26. Ibid, p.17

27. Thomas Courchene & Richard Harris, ‘From Fixing to Monetary Union: Options for North American Currency Integration’, C.D. Howe Institute, June 1999, p.22, www.cdhowe.org/display.cfm?page=research-fiscal&year=1999

28. Ibid, p.23

29. Barrie McKenna, ‘Dodge Says Single Currency “Possible”‘, The Globe and Mail, May 21, 2007

30. ‘Consider a Continental Currency, Jarislowsky Says’, The Globe and Mail, November 23, 2007, www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20071123.RDOLLAR23/TPStory/?query=%22Steven%2BChase%22b

31. CNN, Larry King Live, Transcripts, October 8, 2007, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0710/08/lkl.01.html

32. Herbert Grubel, ‘Fix the Loonie’, The Financial Post, January 18, 2008, www.nationalpost.com/opinion/story.html?id=245165

33. Todd Harrison, ‘How realistic is a North American currency?’, Market Watch, January 28, 2009, www.marketwatch.com/news/story/Do-we-need-a-North/story.aspx?guid={D10536AF-F929-4AF9-AD10-250B4057A907}

34. ‘Get ready for the phoenix’, The Economist, Vol. 306, January 9, 1988, pp.9-10

35. ECB, ‘The euro and the dollar – new imperatives for policy co-ordination’, Speeches and Interviews, September 18, 2000, www.ecb.int/press/key/date/2000/html/sp000918.en.html

36. IMF, ‘One World, One Currency: Destination or Delusion?’, Economic Forums and International Seminars, November 8, 2000, www.imf.org/external/np/exr/ecforums/110800.htm

37. Robert A. Mundell, ‘World Currency’, The Works of Robert A. Mundell, www.robertmundell.net/Menu/Main.asp?Type=5&Cat=09&ThemeName=World%20Currency

38. Itar-Tass, ‘Russia proposes creation of global super-reserve currency’, ITAR-TASS News Agency, March 16, 2009, www.itar-tass.com/eng/level2.html?NewsID=13682035&PageNum=0

39. Jamil Anderlini, ‘China calls for new reserve currency’, The Financial Times, March 23, 2009, www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7851925a-17a2-11de-8c9d-0000779fd2ac.html

40. CFR, A Conversation with Timothy F. Geithner, Council on Foreign Relations Transcripts, March 25, 2009, www.cfr.org/publication/18925/

41. ‘UN backs new global currency reserve’, The Sunday Telegraph, March 29, 2009, www.news.com.au/business/story/0,27753,25255091-462,00.html

42. Jeffrey E. Garten, ‘Needed: A Fed for the World’, The New York Times, September 23, 1998, www.nytimes.com/1998/09/23/opinion/needed-a-fed-for-the-world.html

43. Jeffrey Garten, ‘We Need a Bank Of the World’, Newsweek, October 25, 2008, www.newsweek.com/id/165772

44. Sean Davidson, ‘Global central bank could prevent future crisis’, Business 24/7, January 10, 2009, www.business24-7.ae/articles/2009/1/pages/01102009_350bc822e4ee4508b724e55b0f1393df.aspx

45. James Politi & Gillian Tett, ‘NY Fed chief in push for global bank framework’, The Financial Times, June 8, 2008, http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto060820081850443845

46. Rupert Wright, ‘The first barons of banking’, The National, November 6, 2008, www.thenational.ae/article/20081106/BUSINESS/167536298/1005

47. Michael Lafferty, ‘New world order in banking necessary after abject failure of present model’, The Times Online, February 24, 2009, http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/management/article5792585.ece

48. Richard Gwyn, ‘Change not necessarily for the better’, The Toronto Star, April 3, 2009, www.thestar.com/comment/article/612822

49. David Rothkopf, Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They are Making, Toronto: Penguin Books, 2008, p.315

50. Ibid, pp.315-316

51. Ibid, p.316

52. Gideon Rachman, ‘And now for a world government’, The Financial Times, December 8, 2008, www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7a03e5b6-c541-11dd-b516-000077b07658.html

53. NIC, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, The National Intelligence Council’s 2025 Project, November, 2008, www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_2025_project.html

54. Ibid, p.11

55. Ibid, pp.11-12

56. Ibid, p.94

57. Ibid, p.81

58. Ibid, p.83

59. Ibid, p.87

60. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, New York: Macmillan Company, 1966, p.324

.

ANDREW MARSHALL is a Research Associate with the Centre for Research on Globalization based out of Montreal, Canada (www.globalresearch.ca). He has written extensively on issues imperialism in the Middle East and Africa, the environment, Homeland Security, war, terrorism and the global economy. He is currently studying Global Political Economy and the History of the Middle East and Africa at Simon Fraser University (Canada).

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 115 (Jul-Aug 2009).

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—

I remember John Perkins. He was a real jerk. A gold-plated, super-slick lying little butthole shill for corporate gangsters; a snake-oil salesman with a movie-star grin, shiny loafers, a crooked calculator and a tooled leather briefcase full of high-blown bullshit.
– Greg Palast (www.gregpalast.com)

Despite Greg Palast’s spleenish dismissal from an earlier time, John Perkins has emerged as a spiritual, intellectual and political authority. He is an important leader of contemporary neo-shamanism, one of today’s most effective critics of American corporate culture, and a story teller capable of overshadowing the legendary Ian Fleming, who created James Bond, when it comes a tales of imperial adventure and conquest.

He is working to offer a vision, or a ‘dream change’ as he calls it, designed to rescue America, and the world it dominates, from the destruction of rampant corporate energy. He works to achieve these ends by recounting in a disarmingly honest and sensitive way the personal adventures and dilemmas he has experienced in diverse and exotic parts of the world.

Perkins first gained a reputation in the 1990s for a series of books on shamanic cultures amongst remote tribes and peoples. Around a decade later and prompted by the events of 9/11, he published Confessions of an Economic Hit Man in 2005. This describes life as part of an elite group trained to “utilise international financial organisations to foment conditions that make other nations subservient to the corporatocracy running our biggest corporations, our government, and our banks.”

After twenty-seven publishers turned it down, the book came out of nowhere to be an international best seller, and is about to be made into a Hollywood movie. It went to number four on Amazon during its first week and was quickly on all best-seller lists. This was achieved without receiving any mainstream media attention.

Most importantly, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man has provided credibility, authority and celebrity in opening up new areas of thought. These range across corporate power, American empire, shaman spirituality and environmental consciousness.

Perkins has become a rallying figure for critics of the American ‘corporatocracy’. The harm it inflicts with casual neglect on the environment and local tradition is identified wherever there is the potential to seize cheap resources or some other commercial windfall. A second book has now been published in this genre. The Secret History of the American Empire again recounts wild, troubling conspiracies to grab resources from vulnerable third world leaders through the peddling of unserviceable loans. This is what makes it tempting, even if it is an injustice, to say that its author is becoming America’s Ian Fleming, with conscience.

Intriguingly, the American hit man is a much more sophisticated and reflective operator than the British secret agent. He never dirties his own hands with an actual act of execution or termination. That is left to the jackal, a scavenger that cleans up after others and a figure much closer to the persona of James Bond. Yet both Fleming and Perkins leave the feeling that they have witnessed a time of transition, as the challenges of empire begin to outweigh its rewards. Each captures his readers through the exposure of perversely heroic excesses.

John Perkins both writes and plays the story of the economic hit man, as he reveals an institutionalised imperial strategy of which few had previously been aware. This exposure may well make a contribution to constraining the role of laissez faire corporate plundering in maintaining empire. It may also help construct a vision for an American future more in tune with the values of its founding fathers and its constitution.

It is a comment on the paradoxical character of the contemporary world that the legacy from time as an economic hit man is now committed to opposing and constraining such activity. Rarely have the costs and destruction that go with exercising power over vast areas of the world and the enormous demands of imperial authority on energy, talent and resources been rendered more transparent.

Perkins sketches a highly complex world, both at the personal and imperial level. His own heroic personality reflects a messy, if robust, form of schizophrenia. Simultaneously, he confesses to ghastly deeds as an economic hit man, articulates a rare sensitivity to diverse indigenous forms of spirituality, uses his experience of malevolent deeds to awaken readers to the destructive power of corporations and comments on the complex feelings and questionings that accompany his actions and reflections.

A simple, powerful and authoritative style makes it easy to follow these stories of endless exotic adventure. It is also easy to follow the author’s feelings as he learns and grows through personal involvement in a world of calculated intrigue and exploitation that no one had ever explained to him.

The experience of many bright, inexperienced young men is captured with rare honesty. These innocents are recruited to maintain and extend the reach of empire by means that it would be politically unacceptable to explain in an academic text or a university course. Such stories are a powerful means of mocking much of the economic doctrine taught at Western universities and wielded like a weapon by the minions of the IMF and World Bank as self-serving theoretical nonsense.

Greg Palast, in a piece titled John Perkins: Jerk, Conman, Shill posted on his website www.gregpalast.com, captures the profound ambiguity in the author’s character in the following colourful language:

To steal millions, you need a top team of armed robbers. But to steal billions, you need PhD’s with colour charts and economic projections made of fairy dust and eye of newt. Perkins had it all – including a magical thing called a computer-generated spreadsheet (this was well before Excel)…..

But, as in every moral tale, Perkins, the modern Dr. Faust, found redemption in confession…..

And in his writings today, Perkins’ heart goes out to the Third World targets of this new empire ruled by shock troops and spread sheets. His empathy extends to those in the occupied territory known as the USA. Because, says Perkins, when the wretchedly ripped-off of the Earth rise in rebellion, the lash of the backlash is felt by the children of the lobstermen of New Hampshire, shivering under Humvees in Falluja, and never the EHM’s clients’ fortunate sons, frolicking in their Ferraris.

While Perkins is best known today for his Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, he is best understood in the context of his earlier writing. This explores the wisdom and understanding of shamans in contrasting parts of the world. These revelations can be even more startling than his hit man stories. They raise serious questions about most readers’ perceptions of reality and can leave an elated sense of new possibilities and enhanced insight into the nature of life. It is even possible to read in an exchange with an Amazonian shaman an early contribution to the idea of carbon trading.

Stories of the profound practical wisdom mobilised by forms of shamanic spirituality make this unfamiliar world surprisingly accessible. The struggle for survival in a world threatened with destruction by economic hit men adds further credibility.

Stories of spiritual discovery amongst native shamans are built around a deep but shifting sensitivity. Initial days as a wide-eyed Peace Corps volunteer are followed by subsequent hit man travels surrounded by privilege, sycophantic attendants and murky conspiracies, and then by a role as guide and leader of small groups of spiritual explorers venturing into the Amazon and other threatened environments. A capacity to recognise the mundane daily imperatives of human life in many contrasting environments is a basic strength of these stories. Readers are introduced in a most convincing manner to the surprisingly practical uses to which native spiritual powers are put. These range from the power to track down and destroy a rogue tiger in the jungle to the capacity to navigate vast distances at sea without charts or other recorded knowledge.

Pychonavigation: Techniques for Travel Beyond Time in 1990 displayed a writer and activist deeply concerned with the preservation of native traditions, the understanding of shamanic spirituality and the protection of the environment. It also highlighted the manner in which the contemporary world offers unprecedented opportunities to those with wealth, interest, understanding and accidental opportunity. Such individuals are able to explore and identify with diverse forms of spirituality amongst peoples from many different traditions of belief and behaviour.

The world of shamans may be under threat, but there is also a sense in which the advanced and scientific West needs to turn increasingly to these influences. Christian and scientific dogmas have destroyed essential human qualities in the rush of spread sheets and bottom line calculations.

These discoveries have been followed up and explored further in other books, such as Shapeshifting: Techniques for Global and Personal Transformation. This 1997 book gives readers an almost tactile sense of experience in uncovering new wonders. This powerfully encourages an opening of the mind and spirit to new possibilities. Not only is the reader’s preparedness to explore the seemingly unbelievable tested, but penetrating reflections on the contemporary world challenge many familiar certainties.

The assertion of a sympathetic mentor, a Norwegian engineer and corporate power-broker, that capitalism is here to stay provides the basis for reflections on the future. It is essential to understand as deeply as possible the nature of the corporation, which need not necessarily be predatory and destructive. This gives context and balance to devastating comments about corporate fostering of consumerism and emasculation of education. These products of the European Enlightenment, and the way they have diminished the spiritual qualities and understanding of people in the developed world, are rarely exposed so aptly.

Concern with corporate realities leads to discussion with a Mayan shaman about the need to distinguish dreams from fantasy. While dreams can nourish fulfilment in life and a deep sense of spiritual reality, fantasies only encourage illusion and can be very harmful. This distinction has great practical usefulness because we all vacillate between dreams and fantasies. Yet we rarely pause to recognise the need to distinguish between them, nourish our dreams and discipline our fantasies.

Explorations with the Mayan shaman suggest that critical to realising the potential of dreams is an understanding at the most fundamental level that energy is everything, that spirit is energy and that the sighting of spirits is synonymous with the sighting of energy. From this it follows that the aura that surrounds organic life and that some healers can use to restore well-being is an emanation of spirit and energy. In bold reflections such as these, Perkins offers himself with a genuine sense of humility – attributing his insights to ‘primitive’ shamans – as a serious and profound commentator on the ills of Western progress and development.

Books such as Pychonavigation and Shapeshifting in the 1990s reveal the depth of Perkins experience, reflection and spirituality. While they won him a substantial readership and group of followers, it was the political and corporate expose of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man that catapulted him into the ranks of bestsellers and made him a celebrity leader with a potential to transform many of the spiritual ailments that trouble the contemporary American imperial character.

John Perkins was born in New Hampshire in 1945. He attended Tilton Boys High School, and later Middlebury College and Boston University, before joining the Peace Corps and working in Ecuador in the Amazon. He claims he was vetted by the National Security Agency before being recruited by the Boston strategic consulting firm, Chas T Main, where he rose to the position of chief economist. Not surprisingly, his claims have been disputed by the US State Department.

Then followed some years of internal struggle over the role of persuading third world governments to accept large, unserviceable loans for infrastructure projects contracted to major US corporations. This anguish deepened as understanding grew about subsequent joint US government and international aid agency action, designed to control these governments and dispose of their oil and other resources to serve US interests. Being a witness to such activities all over the world – in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East – led to a decision to quit. Little doubt is left, however, that those who desired silence about earlier work assisted in the success of a subsequent independent energy company.

After the sale of the energy company in the late 1980s Perkins became involved with non-profit work around the world. In addition to his writing, he became active in shifting consciousness and promoting sustainable lifestyles for the individual and global community.

It is possible to question the veracity of accounts of American skulduggery. But there is much evidence to support them and they are rarely subjected to serious critical cross-examination. To the contrary, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man has been followed by books like A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption, a collection of chapters by a variety of writers, edited by Steven Hiatt, which explores the range of such activity.

Even more important, perhaps, unrelated writers such as the German-American William Engdahl have shown in books like A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order that Anglo-American power-brokers have long made devastating use of discreet partnerships between corporate and governmental interests. When the record of the English East India Company is put together with the work of contemporary writers, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Anglo-American empire has largely been the product of the corporation.

These organisations have been effective fronts for imperial expansion. They have been characterised by a remarkable capacity to mobilise adventurous, risk-taking individuals, by skilful, discreet control and manipulation of financial and commodity resources and by the ability to shroud their activities in high-sounding rhetoric about progress and universal values.

The impact of Perkins in exposing this reality has been enhanced by several factors. First, he tells a great story from the perspective of personal involvement and personal anguish. Second, his earlier writings on indigenous spirituality in scattered parts of the world provided him with an established reputation amongst informed and reflective readers in the decade before the appearance of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Third, there is apparent coherence linking his stories of spiritual adventure and discovery and his stories of political adventure and discovery. Finally, 9/11 has created a world, with its enhanced electronic communications and troubled questioning of what has gone wrong, that is disposed to explore the issues raised by corporate excess and economic hit men.

In one sense, the linkage of spiritual and financial adventure and discovery has created a 21st century everyman or icon. Educated and reflective members of economically advanced communities will find it increasingly difficult to avoid the type of issues and questions that are central to these themes.

The fact that Perkins does not claim great erudition but simply recounts a story and a succession of dilemmas enhances the accessibility of the work. The sense of surprised discovery of hidden realities is one that is shared by increasing numbers in a world where even advanced levels of education tend to be narrow and excessively functional. It is easy for even the best intentioned and most responsible of workers to become jerk, con-man, and shill as they toil to fit in, accommodate peer group pressure, win the favour of superiors and build the reputation and wealth needed to support a family.

The modern corporation (or government) demands a certain ignorance and naïvetè of its employees if they are to serve its purpose of maximising profit (or voter support). Only a few are privileged to have the opportunity to see through illusions, opt out and warn others. It is a role where success is improbable.

The title chosen for Perkins’ second book on American financial strategies, The Secret History of the American Empire, invites the reader to revisit and reconsider events like the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis and ponder on it as the product of a team of economic hit men. It also raises daunting questions about the longer-term viability of major global institutions like the World Bank and IMF.

There is one story of carrying a book by Joseph Stiglitz during travels to Tibet and of reflections about closely related concerns. Globalization and Its Discontents explains spreading discontent and criticism about the international financial institutions. It does this from the perspective of one who served on President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors, was Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank and was the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Economics. Yet, it is important to understand why it is John Perkins and not Joseph Stiglitz who will have the greater impact on the popular American consciousness.

However much the authority of the American State Department may dispute them, Perkins’ stories take the reader directly into the action and personalities of events that have shaped the latter half of the 20th century. They involve the reader in the excitement, the fulfilments and the angst of such action and make the most implausible of conspiracies seem commonplace and mundane, even as they unfold in exotic and alien environments. Ultimately, they intensify many dilemmas by focusing on discoveries of the shamanic spirituality and wisdom of peoples whose cultural survival in the contemporary world seems condemned – limited to decades.

Unfortunately, there is little about Japan and China, two large nations that have preserved ancient forms of spirituality while building robust and vibrant modern economies. A chapter on geishas in Secret History hints at great subtlety in Japanese traditions. It recounts a platonic, hungering and fleeting relationship with two geishas who are revealed to be mixed blood daughters of Taiwanese mothers abandoned by American fathers and rescued and raised by a shrewd but kindly Japanese businessman. These, in a single forthright conversation, educate a still naïve American in the way their charms are used to advance Japanese corporate interests. One suspects these are rarely matched by American finesse. Sadly, apart from this early chapter in the latest book nothing more is said about Japan.

Another chapter, The Quiet Giant, reflects in passing, and not unsympathetically, on China in the context of a visit to Tibet. There are no insights of particular interest, however, and China is not addressed again.

Both Japan and China have sheltered and preserved shamanic traditions, generally in the form of Shintoism and Daoism, but also in Zen and Chan Buddhism and other forms. Despite the fact that both Japan and China have been remarkably successful in exporting products of this shamanism in the form of martial arts, physical therapy and spiritual disciplines, it is not popular to recognise such successes in the West.

While this issue is not explored directly by Perkins, exploration of less imposing shamanic traditions invites the thoughtful reader to reflect further on the costs inherent in the West’s ‘intellectual apartheid’. Deployed as a means of advancing the West’s civilising mission and imperial ambitions, ‘intellectual apartheid’ blinded most observers to the power of Japanese and Chinese shamanic spirituality. East Asian nations have shown that educated, disciplined and organised communities can defend themselves against Anglo-American economic hit men, whether it is through the use of geishas or other aspects of traditional practice.

Ultimately, one may question whether Perkins offers serious readers any realistic way forward. He cannot be faulted for his criticism of economic hit men and their plundering corporations and one cannot but applaud his revelations about endangered shamanic cultures. But does he address these issues strategically?

The 21st century world of rapid global communications is ruthless in exposing the vulnerability of communities that are not organised to advance their own interests. Perkins’ Anglo-American world is one that has used the corporation to great effect as an empire-building tool but is one that has neither the disciplined subtlety of the Japanese geisha nor the strategic wisdom inherent in Chinese tradition. These are the areas where Asian shamans have displayed their power but they are not areas where Perkins is well equipped to comment.

It would be misguided to criticise Perkins on these grounds. He is modest in his claims to expertise. Yet his writing covers such a broad spectrum and is so authoritative in speaking of hope derived from tribal shaman traditions that it becomes necessary to probe broader issues. It is a reflection of his value that he gives grounds to address weighty matters and encourages recognition of the growing frailties in aggressive contemporary corporate culture.

Unquestionably, John Perkins is a figure with convincing and disarming talent, with spiritual and moral depth and with political and economic discernment. Men with these qualities who are prepared to speak clearly are rare in America.

Should the continuation of economic hit man stories lead to a series of adventure films that recall James Bond, this is only likely to increase Perkins’ influence and importance. It will be hard for such films not to be educational in terms of the way the world works and sobering in terms of exposing the strategies that have constructed Anglo-American Empire. They may also begin to open the popular imagination to long neglected spiritual realities that challenge false certainties. Perhaps no greater service could be rendered in these days of imperial strain and insecurity.

.

REG LITTLE was an Australian diplomat for over 25 years in Japan, Laos, Bangladesh, the United Nations, Ireland, Hong Kong, China, Switzerland, and the Caribbean, obtaining advanced language qualifications in Japanese and Chinese. Deputy or Head of Mission in five overseas posts, he served in Canberra as Director of North Asia, International Economic Organisations, Policy Planning and the Australia-China Council. He has participated in Conferences in Asia since 1987, has been a Founding Director of the Beijing based International Confucian Association since 1994 and has co-authored two books, The Confucian Renaissance (1989) in English, Japanese and Chinese, and The Tyranny of Fortune: Australia’s Asian Destiny (1997). His latest book is A Confucian-Daoist Millennium? Reg Little’s website is www.confucian-daoist-millennium.net and he can be contacted via email at reglittle@yahoo.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 104 (Sept-Oct 2007).

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There is no more esteemed debunker and denouncer of all things religious than British intellectual Richard Dawkins. In his latest book, The God Delusion, Dawkins makes a frontal assault on not just religious fundamentalism, but religion in general. To quote the name of the accompanying television series, Dawkins appears to see it as “the root of all evil.”

There is much truth in Dawkins’ criticism. One only has to look at human tragedies occurring around the world to see the effects of unquestioning faith and religious righteousness. And not just in recent years; consider the Albigensian Crusade, the witch-hunts of the Middle Ages, right up to the troubles in Northern Ireland. Belief in a dogma, without doubting the actions that arise out of that faith, can be the foundation upon which horrors grow. Millions have died fighting for, and against, particular religious ideas.

Dawkins is a gifted thinker, and some of his questions and insights about religion are certainly worthy of contemplation. For instance, Dawkins queries the righteousness of any particular religion in the following passage:

If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely different, and largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place.

Also insightful is his concern for political representation. In The God Delusion, Dawkins points out that religious groups can form powerful lobbies, able to effect large-scale changes in government policy which rule all of our lives. One of the more prominent examples is the Bush administration’s stance on stem cell research, a strand of science which perhaps offers the most profound steps forward in medicine for decades (suggested as a possible treatment for spinal injury paralysis, Parkinson’s Disease and Alzheimer’s).

Current US leaders rely far too heavily on ‘heartland’ support by the large Christian voting blocks to allow research into stem cells – even if the arguments against seem to be at best scare campaigns based on faulty logic. This situation, in which non-believers like Dawkins are at the ‘democratic’ mercy of religious groups able to exert political pressure, must be a particularly troubling one for him – and I must confess, it is to me as well.

The Most Dangerous Delusion

However, in his attacks on all religions, regardless of individual philosophies, as being the source of all ills in the world, Dawkins goes too far – and it is astounding that someone of his obvious intellect could err so badly. Religious writer John Cornwell summed up the major problem with Dawkins’ vitriolic stance towards religion in these words:

If there is a dangerous delusion in the world, it is not so much moderate religion, as Dawkins would have it, but fundamentalism in all its forms – ideological, scientific and religious – as the imposition of dogma that brooks neither doubt nor respect for disagreement.

Cornwell’s comment is incisive. Dawkins’ attack singles out the very worst elements of religion – fundamentalist, non-thinking faith, and intolerance of others outside the ‘flock’ – while ignoring the large-scale charity work carried out by many religions, both large and small, as well as the profound morality teachings found in each, from the parables of Jesus Christ through to the Buddhist doctrine of protecting all life.

Professor of English Literature Terry Eagleton, himself no defender of fundamentalist religion, was quick to point out this massive flaw in The God Delusion.

“In a book of almost 400 pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false,” Eagleton wrote. “The countless millions who have devoted their lives selflessly to the service of others in the name of Christ or Buddha or Allah are wiped from human history – and this by a self-appointed crusader against bigotry.”

So too, in characterising religious believers as “faith-heads” (his words), gullible believers of nonsensical stories, does Dawkins paint with a broad and superficial brush. While it is true that most believers grow within their religion of birth, many eventually connect with a more universal sense of deity, rather than continuing with a blind faith in the particular godly identity defined by their religion. Dawkins also does not delve into the worldwide mystical traditions closely tied to each religion, such as the Jewish Kabbalah, Islamic Sufism, and Hindu teachings of yoga, all of which speak more to a personal, wondrous gnosis than the blind worship of an autocratic, vengeful god that Richard Dawkins appears to take umbrage with.

Dawkins, in his inimitable style, once eloquently asked, “If there is only one Creator who made the tiger and the lamb, the cheetah and the gazelle, what is He playing at? Is he a sadist who enjoys spectator blood sports?… Is He manoeuvring to maximise David Attenborough’s television ratings?” While on the surface it is a humorous and insightful quote, it also betrays the lack of depth to Dawkins’ own conception of deity. In Eagleton’s words, “He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms.”

Indeed, the ‘God’ that Dawkins argues against is actually the ‘non-God’ of the unintelligent “faith-heads” he so despises – and one can only be struck by the ridiculous realisation that the acerbic Oxford professor, one of the intellectual giants of our time, is engaging religion on the same philosophical level as ‘Bubba’ from the deep South of the United States of America. Dawkins is directing his antipathy toward the white-bearded grandfather figure sitting in the sky, patiently listening to all our prayers on his intercessory answering machine – the same ‘God’ that many of us left behind with our childhood. And yet the most profound teachings of the mystics through the ages are consigned to the same dark definitions that Dawkins foists upon all religious beliefs, universally.

Returning to Cornwell’s comments, it is worth pointing out that as many atrocities have been carried out in the name of religious disbelief as in blind faith. Stalin was an atheist who brutally attacked priests under his regime, let alone the horrors he visited upon the general populace. Fundamentalism isn’t the exclusive domain of religion it seems. Indeed, as the evolutionary biologist H. Allen Orr said, atheism must be held to the same standards as religions when judging their comparative flaws and benefits. And, to quote Orr directly:

Dawkins has a difficult time facing up to the dual fact that (1) the 20th century was an experiment in secularism; and (2) the result was secular evil, an evil that, if anything, was more spectacularly virulent than that which came before.

In political ideology, this fundamentalism has mixed with an ugly dualism to create overly simplistic and ultimately useless categories – liberal or conservative, commie or capitalist – with a complete disregard for the true spectrum of political ideas. In the words of George W. Bush: “You’re either with us or against us.” It is therefore the polarising elements of ‘ideology’ which we need to be fearing, far more than any particular religious belief. Especially the ideology of ‘us’ being somehow better, more intelligent, more moral, than ‘them’ – ironically, a trait which Dawkins describes as a particular Darwinian adaptive trait known as the “kin-selection principle.” Again, the Oxford professor seems not eager to find the quite obvious “evils” of science, technology and Darwinism.

Fundamentalist Scientists

Dawkins would be apoplectic at the suggestion that science is as close-minded and vicious as the religions he despises so much. But one doesn’t have to travel far to find examples of true fundamentalism.

Last September, at the British Association for the Advancement of Science conference, there was uproar after ‘fringe’ scientists Rupert Sheldrake, Peter Fenwick and Deborah Delanoy were allowed to present their research into ideas such as telepathy and after-death states. The apostate scientists were not welcome in this church of science – “it’s quite inappropriate to have a session like that without putting forward a more convincing view,” said geneticist Sir Walter Bodmer. “I know of no serious, properly done studies which make me feel that this is anything other than nonsense,” said media darling Lord Winston. Perhaps Lord Winston had the same level of knowledge as Dr. Peter Atkins, whose interview (with Rupert Sheldrake) spoke volumes about whether the uproar was based in science or belief:

Dr. Atkins: Well, you can’t rely on any of these experiments… there is no serious work done in this field. The samples that people use are very tiny, the effects are statistically insignificant, the controls are not done in a scientific way.

Dr. Sheldrake: Well I’d like to ask him if he’s actually read the evidence? May I ask you Professor Atkins if you’ve actually studied any of this evidence or any other evidence?

Dr. Atkins: No, but I would be very suspicious of it.

And then there’s the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (recently renamed – in what can only be seen as a blatant marketing move – to ‘CSI’), the supposed guardians of the paradigm, an organisation that Robert Anton Wilson described as “one of the most dogmatic, fanatical, and crusading of the atheistic religions around now.” One has only to read through the writings of James Randi or Michael Shermer to see through the veneer of their ‘science delusion’, and glimpse the zealot within.

To be fair to Richard Dawkins – in contrast to his polemics against religion – he does not seem to be overeager to vilify parapsychology. He has warned James Randi of his belief that Randi’s infamous million dollar prize for exhibition of a paranormal ability may one day be claimed, due to the existence of what he described as the ‘perinormal’. The term is scientific legalese to allow Dawkins to mention the possibility of the paranormal, without being accountable for it, but all the same it is worth noting to Dawkins’ credit that he believes we are not at ‘the end of science’ just yet.

Further, Dawkins has gone on record as saying “the popularity of the paranormal, oddly enough, might even be grounds for encouragement… I think that the appetite for mystery, the enthusiasm for that which we do not understand, is healthy and to be fostered. It is the same appetite which drives the best of true science, and it is an appetite which true science is best qualified to satisfy.”

In contrast, most materialists and Darwinists warn of the outright danger of studying anything but physical, orthodox science. In a now infamous hit job, the BBC’s flagship science program Horizon dedicated a feature to the theories of alternative historian Graham Hancock (titled “Atlantis Uncovered”), in which they portrayed ‘fringe’ thinking as a descent into irrational thought, and ultimately (of course!) National Socialism.

Similarly Michael Shermer, in Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of our Time, states “today’s paranormal beliefs probably seem relatively harmless. They are not. The reason is that if someone is willing to accept such claims on nonexistent evidence, what else are they willing to believe?”

This sort of thinking is nonsensical, as similar outcomes can be assigned to nearly any type of human endeavour. As the physicist Henry Stapp has argued, physicalist science on its own is also dangerous, because it leaves “no rational basis for anything but self-interest… the collapse of moral philosophy is inevitable.”

Indeed, while Dawkins warns us of the dangers that religion poses, we might ask whether it is worth being concerned about a world with no religion. Are large populations truly capable of living without a moral compass? It is easy enough to pronounce from a nice office at Oxford University that morality comes from within, not from religion. But for those on the breadline, fighting for their very survival, is it as easy to not transgress moral guidelines if one feels they are arbitrary, rather than rules set in stone? On that arbitrariness – where is the line drawn; who, in effect, sets the morals? Oxford professors, politicians, perhaps corporate leaders? Certainly, there is an arbitrariness to religious morals as well, depending on where you were born, and the problem of morality does not rebut Dawkins’ queries against religion – but if he wishes to change a flawed system, he must also be able to propose a working alternative.

Challenging Science

While Dawkins can be credited with being open to a ‘widening’ of science via inclusion of the ‘perinormal’, the same cannot be said of his faith-like defence of Darwinian evolution. In recent years, he and others have attacked the “Intelligent Design” movement vociferously – sometimes on very good grounds. However, orthodox science appears to have constructed their own dualism in the evolutionary debate, with the new strawman of “Intelligent Design” being a helpful tool in their fight. By this, I mean there seems to be a conscious over-looking of the ‘intelligent design’ propounded by individuals of the standing of Francis Crick (co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, and a physicalist himself).

Instead, in terms of debating the theory of evolution, these days you’re either for Darwin, or you are labelled a religious nutter. No mention of Crick’s idea of intelligent design, or mathematician Charles Muse’s suggestion of hints of conscious evolution (in which our consciousness is guiding our evolution), or even the disapproval of a number of high-profile scientists to the core tenets of neo-Darwinism. In the words of Deepak Chopra, who has joined in the debate over Dawkin’s assault against religion, “To say that Nature displays intelligence doesn’t make you a Christian fundamentalist.”

Witness the recent book Biocosm, by complexity theorist James Gardner, which proposes that life and intelligence have not emerged in a series of Darwinian accidents but are essentially hardwired into the cycle of cosmic creation, evolution, death, and rebirth. Why is there not more debate and discussion of these theories by Dawkins, rather than taking on the easy target of evangelical leader (and sometimes indulger in gay prostitute sex) Ted Haggard?

Instead of the Biocosm ideas of James Gardner, or of Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose’s intriguing theory of quantum mechanical processes in the brain, and numerous other truly scientific discoveries and theories pointing at some sort of transcendent ‘other’ aspect to our reality, Dawkins instead wants the debate to be between physicalist Darwinism, and dogmatic faith in the childish notion of ‘God the bearded grandfather figure’.

There is no doubt a need for concern about the dangers of fundamentalist religion. There is a rising tide of violent conflict around the world growing from irrational faith, so Dawkins is correct in raising the alarm and should not be faulted or pilloried for doing so. The only problem is that he is throwing a baby out with that bathwater.

Orthodox science is a wonderful tool for understanding the physical aspects of our existence. But we should doubt it as well. Not just guarding against dogmatic belief in the current scientific paradigm, but also any moves to enshrine physicalism and logical thought as the only way to frame the world. Metaphor, art, and emotion are all part of the human experience which should not be denied, and there is an argument that religious experience should be included in there as well.

Philosopher Thomas Nagel, who describes himself as an ‘outsider’ to religion, eloquently mirrored these thoughts in his critique of The God Delusion: “The fear of religion leads too many scientifically minded atheists to cling to a defensive, world-flattening reductionism,” he said. “We have more than one form of understanding… the great achievements of physical science do not make it capable of encompassing everything, from mathematics to ethics to the experiences of a living animal. We have no reason to dismiss moral reasoning, introspection or conceptual analysis as ways of discovering the truth just because they are not physics.”

Richard Dawkins once argued against a quote by John Keats: “Do not all charms fly at the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: we know her woof, her texture; she is given in the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings, conquer all mysteries by rule and line, empty the haunted air, and… unweave a rainbow.”

Dawkins thought that the scientific truth behind the rainbow was even more beautiful – a worthy comment, but one that disregarded all the other various ways of seeing and knowing due to a belief that his way was the only way – and that is the very definition of Fundamentalism. It is an ideology which seeks to replace all other thoughts and philosophies, and if Dawkins thought with a clear mind on the topic he would see that this is exactly his real concern.

Let us attempt to understand the rainbow in all its beauty – physical, emotional and spiritual – without dogma and prejudice, and allow all others to find their own way freely.

.

GREG TAYLOR is the owner-editor of the alternative news portal The Daily Grail. He is the author of Da Vinci in America (known in the US as The Guide to Dan Brown’s The Solomon Key). Greg resides in Brisbane and can be contacted via his web site www.dailygrail.com..

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 102 (May-June 2007).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 102 (PDF version) for only US$5

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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So one day Jesus Christ (Our Lord and Saviour) and Leo Strauss stroll into the Oval Office…. It could be the beginning of a joke. Instead it represents the beginning of the systematic massacre of the First Amendment, the rollback of civil rights, and the violent rape of the high ideals of the signers of the U.S. Constitution. Blues.

We all know Jesus Christ (if not personally, then by reputation), but much fewer of you know the name Leo Strauss. Strauss’s influence on recent United States foreign policy is slowly coming to light. A number of neoconservatives, who have been molding U.S. foreign policy since 2001 to apocalyptic effect, are either former students of Strauss or devotees of his philosophy. Foremost among these “neocons” are Paul Wolfowitz, the President of the World Bank and the former Deputy Secretary of Defense, Richard Perle, former Chairman of George W. Bush’s Defense Policy Board, Vice-President Dick Cheney, Irving Kristol, who popularised the term “Neoconservative” in his 1983 book Reflections of a Neoconservative, and Irving’s son William, founder of the influential think tank Project for a New American Century.

During a recent interview on CNN, Alexander Haig, the former Secretary of State for the Reagan administration, accused the neocons of having “hijacked” the Republican Party. Of the Iraq War he said, “This is a conflict that’s essentially political. It’s not just purely military. It’s political and religious and ideological. And it was driven by the so-called neocons that hijacked my party, the Republican Party.”1 The “hijackers” Haig named specifically were Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Pearle. These three men have in common an adherence to the teachings of Leo Strauss.

When discussing Strauss’s influence on their way of thinking, the neocons inexplicably revert to a kind of rhapsodic enthusiasm, near-orgasmic joy rarely seen in their writing even when they’re speaking of subjects close to their heart, like killing thousands of innocent people in the Middle East. Irving Kristol writes, “Encountering Strauss’s work produced the kind of intellectual shock that is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. He turned one’s intellectual universe upside down.”2 Kristol elaborates:

[I]n the United States… the writings of Leo Strauss have been extraordinarily influential. Strauss’ critique of the destructive elements within modern liberalism, an analysis that was popularised by his students… has altered the very tone of public discourse in the United States…. To bring contemporary liberalism into disrepute… is no small achievement.3

Strauss’s central beliefs are crucial to understand if one wishes to penetrate to the heartmeat core of the neocon’s duplicitous policies. Essentially, Strauss believed the vast majority of the human race was so unequipped to handle the disturbing truths of the universe that they needed to be spoonfed pretty lies in order to endure their inferior existences. On the other hand, what he called “the philosophers” (i.e., Strauss and his academic cronies) represent that rare breed of individual who can face the truth “that there is no God, that the universe cares nothing for men or mankind, and that all of human history is nothing more than an insignificant speck in the cosmos, which no sooner began, than it will vanish forever without a trace. There is no morality, no good or evil…”4

According to Strauss these philosophers must feed the ignorant with the “religious, moral and other beliefs they require” in order to survive. But they do this not out of benevolence. No, Strauss is clear on this point: the duty of the “philosopher” is to use his superior intellect to manufacture falsehoods “to shape society in the interest of [the] ‘philosophers’ themselves.”5 This is the only route to take, Strauss believed, if truth was to survive.

Irving Kristol comments on this facet of Strauss’s philosophy:

What made him so controversial with the academic community was his disbelief in the Enlightenment dogma that ‘the truth will make men free’. He was an intellectual aristocrat who thought that the truth could make some minds free, but he was convinced that there was an inherent conflict between philosophic truth and the political order, and that the popularisation and vulgarisation of these truths might import unease, turmoil and the release of popular passions hitherto held in check by tradition and religion.6

Allow me to translate. What Kristol is really saying is this: “If us rulers were to openly admit to the masses, ‘You’re all a bunch of sheep and you’re here to serve us, because we’re better than you, so kiss my butt,’ the masses might get a bit riled by such a comment and actually rise up and hang all of us assholes from lampposts.” Needless to say, the neocons don’t wish this to happen. In order to prevent it, therefore, dissimulation is absolutely necessary.

Strauss believed the philosopher must write his books in such a dense, esoteric style that its true secrets would be clear only to the initiated. Since the truth is so dangerous, it can’t be put in the hands of the naïve and the profane. The style of the book must be doubly-coded in such a way that the few novices who even attempt to understand it would merely come away from the book shaking his head in bewilderment and bored dismay. As Strauss himself once wrote, in a rare and paradoxical moment of clarity, “[A]n author who wishes to address only thoughtful men has but to write in such a way that only a very careful reader can detect the meaning of his book.”7

Strauss believed government policies should be designed in this manner. Just as Strauss’s texts were doubly-coded, the executive branch must operate in a similarly kabbalistic fashion if it is to do what is necessary for the stability of political life. While the masses are treated to the amusing and mundane caperings of an exoteric dog-and-pony show, beneath the surface operates the esoteric centres of power: the philosophers themselves. These “wise men” represent government’s esoteric underside. The exoteric side, meanwhile, is represented by what he called “the gentlemen.”

…the philosophers require various sorts of people to serve them, including the ‘gentlemen’….  Rather than the ‘esoteric,’ or secret teachings, the future ‘gentlemen’ are indoctrinated in the ‘exoteric,’ or public teachings. They are taught to believe in religion, morality, patriotism, and public service, and some go into government…. Of course, along with these traditional virtues, they also believe in the ‘philosophers’ who have taught them all these good things.

Those ‘gentlemen’ who become statesmen… continue to take the advice of the philosophers. This rule of the philosophers through their front-men in government, is what Strauss calls ‘the secret kingdom’ of the philosophers, a ‘secret kingdom’ which is the life’s objective of many of Strauss’s esoteric students.8

Which, of course, brings us to George W. Bush, and to Jesus Christ.

According to Strauss, philosophy has disproved the tenets of Christianity and all other religions. Nonetheless, he recognised these religions had many uses. “[C]ivil government,” he wrote, “is not in itself sufficient for orderly corporate life within society. Religion is a regulator of order in social life.… It is… a code of law prescribed for the many by higher intelligences.”9 The “gentleman” would have to be someone schooled in the basic tenets of religious teachings, someone with the ability to rattle off dogma for rhetorical purposes while functioning as the mouth piece of the wise men.

Professor Hugh Urban of Ohio State University has recently published a brilliant analysis of Strauss’s influence on the Bush regime titled “Religion and Secrecy in the Bush Administration: The Gentleman, the Prince, and the Simulacrum” in which he offers a concise summary of the overlapping ideologies of Strauss and the current neocon movement:

His appeal [for the neocons], I think, centres around four main ideas: 1) his sense that the modern Western world is in a state of intense ‘crisis,’ which is due in large part to the dangerous weaknesses within modern liberal democracy; 2) his emphasis on secrecy and esotericism, or the art of writing and reading between the lines; 3) his belief that religion is necessary for the coherence and stability of society, even though the philosopher or wise man has transcended such ‘noble lies;’ and 4) his description of the ‘gentleman,’ the public figure or politician who embodies the ideals of religious faith and virtue, and so serves as the liaison between the wise men and the common populace.10

Urban suggests that George W. Bush was tapped by the neocons for the express purpose of serving as this “liaison.” Bush, himself, need not understand a single word of Strauss to function in this specialised capacity, and Bush knows this. Bush is well aware of his severe intellectual limitations and never even believed he could win public office. His good friend and Yale classmate, Roland Betts, once quoted Bush as saying: “You know, I could run for governor but I’m basically a media creation. I’ve never done anything. I’ve worked for my dad. I worked in the oil business. But that’s not the kind of profile you have to have to get elected to public office.”11

What Bush saw as a limitation became his strength in the eyes of the Straussian neocons. When Strauss defines his conception of the “gentleman,” he’s essentially talking about a media creation: “The gentleman… is the political reflection or imitation of the wise man”12 – an imitation that is easily manipulated from behind the scenes.

Of course, numerous commentators have accused Vice-President Cheney of being the prime manipulator of the President’s actions since before Bush was even elected. When directly asked about this by a reporter from USA Today, Cheney replied, “Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole? It’s a nice way to operate, actually.”13 Apparently, the Straussians are well aware of the simple fact that sometimes telling the truth can be far more effective than prevaricating.

If the administration’s collaboration with the evangelical Christian movement is merely a false front, is it then logical to assume that these religious leaders are having little or no effect on Bush’s actual policies? Absolutely not, for the neocons are skilfully manipulating the evangelical community to accomplish a very specific goal – and vice versa. The evangelicals have always had a perverse desire to witness Christ’s return to the Holy Land in their lifetime, preferably in the form of an apocalyptic showdown between the forces of God and Satan (or Good and Evil, concepts the Straussians claim don’t even exist) in the cradle of civilisation. The neocons certainly know this, and have manipulated the religious obsessions of these evangelicals to push their selected “gentleman” into the Oval Office, a “gentleman” with the power to conjure forth an insane foreign policy in the “Holy Land” for the express purpose of extracting what the neocons want most out of the Middle East: total domination over the region’s oil. As per Leo Strauss’s dictums set forth decades ago, they have utilised the religious delusions of the masses to attain the secret desires of the “philosophers” – the hermetic goals of the so-called “wise men” lurking just behind the throne.

Recently, more and more Christians are waking up to the fact that President Bush is an impostor dragging the name of their Saviour through the mud. A number of books written by Christians have taken Bush to task for his egregious duplicity, one of the latest being Christian Words, Unchristian Actions by John Stoddard Klar. If you know any Christians in desperate need of the truth, you might want to give them a copy of this book which is filled with any number of cogent analyses of Bush’s foreign policy from a genuinely Christian perspective. Here’s an example:

The War in Iraq desecrates Jesus Christ because it has been undertaken by a president and nation who call themselves Christian, while the violence and injustice of that war are akin to the actions of Christ’s oppressors – Jesus abhorred violence, and never endorsed its use, even in his own defense. The doctrine of just war is also violated by our country’s actions in Iraq. President Bush’s Iraq War smacks strongly of unchristian vengeance, was planned from before Bush came into office (the evidence is overwhelming to the willfully-informed), and had no supportable connection to 9/11, weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, or humanitarian liberation. This tremendous waste of life, resources, opportunity (to actually combat terrorism rather than incite it), and American goodwill is demonstrably unchristian, and need not await an outcome in Iraq to be judged accordingly. For under Christ’s and God’s law, the end does not justify the means. If things deteriorate completely out of control in Iraq, that would not make Christian effort sinful: neither does ‘success’ (however that is measured) bestow God’s blessings on an unchristian action.14

To hear reasoned criticism such as this coming from the mouth of a Christian is refreshing… but also a little shocking these days, for just as the Republican Party has been “hijacked” by the neocons, the entire Christian religion has been hijacked by the fundamentalist evangelicals who believe they have the God-given right to steamroll over any viewpoint not shared by Pat Robertson’s myopic interpretation of the Old Testament.

So loud, so obnoxious, so authoritarian are these little crypto-Christian martinets that they have now come to represent the entire religion in many people’s minds. And when one dares suggests this to a Christian acquaintance, said individual will invariably reply, “I despise those fundamentalists as much as you do. I think they’re embarrassing.” And yet said individuals hardly ever speak up in public about their feelings, never refute the hate-mongering words of such philistines as Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney… the same Dick Cheney who, in December of 2003, mailed out a personalised Christmas card to close friends and colleagues that read, “If a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?”15

Of course, the honourable Mr. Cheney does not stop to consider the slippery slope of his analogy, the fact that the term “empire” does not only pertain to the twenty-first century American empire, but to all empires of the past including the Roman empire, the same very one that Jesus and his disciples resisted with all the resources at their disposal.

Cheney’s perverse definition of Christianity, one he has carefully molded to fit his imperialist agenda, should be a source of disgust for all Christians, and yet only a few of them have stood up to voice their outrage. Since it’s their religion that’s being manipulated and desecrated, it is their job above all others to stand up against these authoritarian warmongers.

David Ray Griffin, professor emeritus at the Claremont School of Theology and author of the 2006 book Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11, has recently called for his fellow Christians to ban together and resist the christo-fascist Bush regime, just as genuine Christians were forced to do in Nazi Germany when Hitler justified his worst actions by claiming he was fighting to restore what he called “positive Christianity” to his homeland.16

The number of such Christian resisters grows every day as the fragile lies of the Bush administration deteriorate further and further, the outrageous cover stories and propaganda techniques growing so brazen that even the most naïve, flag-waving patriot in Orange County, California is beginning to see through the scam. But these numbers are not enough. They need to evolve, as swiftly as possible, into a mass resistance strong enough to overcome these philosopher-manqués, these High Priests of chaos, who would sacrifice thousands of innocent lives in the pursuit of some misguided notion of attaining godhood here on Earth in the form of unlimited wealth and power.

Though such a dramatic revolution cannot occur overnight, nonetheless there are other, more modest, ways of combating this wave of christo-fascist terrorism being committed against us continually on the home front. The answer is to stand up to it whenever you encounter it. Don’t be afraid of these people. What is there to fear? After all, their own god isn’t even on their side.

Footnotes:

1. The full transcript of this interview can be found at http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0610/22/le.01.html

2. Kristol, Irving. Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea. New York: Free Press, 1995.

3. Ibid., pp 379-80.

4. Papert, Tony. “The Secret Kingdom of Leo Strauss.” Children of Satan. Ed. Lyndon LaRouche PAC. Leesburg, Virginia: Lyndon LaRouche PAC, 2004, p. 52.

5. Ibid.

6. Kristol, Irving. Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea. New York: Free Press, 1995.

7. Strauss, Leo. Persecution and the Art of Writing. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1973, p.25.

8. Papert, Tony. “The Secret Kingdom of Leo Strauss.” Children of Satan. Ed. Lyndon LaRouche PAC. Leesburg, Virginia: Lyndon LaRouche PAC, 2004, pp. 52-53.

9. Strauss, Leo. Spinoza’s Critique of Religion. New York: Schocken Books, 1965, p.47.

10. Urban, Hugh. “Religion and Secrecy in the Bush Administration: The Gentleman, the Prince, and the Simulacrum,” www.esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeVII/Secrecy.htm.

11. Hatfield, J.H. Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2001, p.95.

12. Strauss, Leo. Natural Rights and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953, p.142.

13. Engelhardt, Tom. “Flushing Cheney.” 2 February 2004. www.motherjones.com/news/dailymojo/2004/02/02_500.html.

14. Klar, John Stoddard. Christian Words, Unchristian Actions. Irasburg, Vermont: RevElation Press, 2006, pp.304-5.

15. Urban, Hugh. “Religion and Secrecy in the Bush Administration: The Gentleman, the Prince, and the Simulacrum,” www.esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeVII/Secrecy.htm.

16. Shirer, William. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960, p.234.

.

ROBERT GUFFEY is a graduate of the Master of Fine Arts Program at California State University at Long Beach, USA. He is also a graduate of the Clarion writer’s workshop in Seattle, WA. His first published short story “The Infant Kiss” received an Honorable Mention in the 2001 edition of The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror (Vol. #14). His short stories, articles and interviews have appeared in such magazines and anthologies as After Shocks, The Chiron Review, Like Water Burning, Mysteries, New Dawn, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Paranoia, The Pedestal, Riprap, Steamshovel Press, and The Third Alternative. He is currently teaching English at CSU Long Beach. He can be contacted at rguffey@hotmail.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 100 (Jan-Feb 2007).

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—

It has been half a decade since the United States came under an unprecedented coordinated terrorist attack on some of its most prominent symbols of power. First the North, then the South, Towers of the World Trade Centre (WTC) in New York were hit by civilian airplanes. Then even the heart of the US military, the Pentagon, was struck, and finally a civilian plane, apparently destined for the White House, ended up crashing in Pennsylvania.

Most of us remember watching the TV screens in absolute shock and horror, as first one, then the other, WTC towers collapsed in on themselves in a cloud of smoke and debris. Some of us experienced unbearable grief as we witnessed or later learned that our own loved ones were among those thousands of people who were brutally, gruesomely slain.

Since then, there have been many other terrorist attacks on Western targets in Indonesia, Turkey, Spain, Britain, and elsewhere. And, we are told, there have been countless other attempted terrorist attacks foiled by the authorities. The enemy is not always easy to identify – but their broad contours, our leaders say, are well-known.

“The evidence we have gathered all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organisations known as al Qaeda,” declared US President George W. Bush after the September 11, 2001 attacks…

Al Qaeda is to terror what the mafia is to crime. But its goal is not making money; its goal is remaking the world – and imposing its radical beliefs on people everywhere… This group and its leader – a person named Osama bin Laden – are linked to many other organisations in different countries… There are thousands of these terrorists in more than 60 countries. They are recruited from their own nations and neighbourhoods and brought to camps in places like Afghanistan, where they are trained in the tactics of terror. They are sent back to their homes or sent to hide in countries around the world to plot evil and destruction.

And thereafter was officially launched the “War on Terror,” an unlimited war against an amorphous network of Islamist extremists who could strike out at any time, in any place, without warning, and without mercy, in order to pursue their ultimate goal of global domination.

Cold War Pentagon Memo Confirms State-Sponsored Self Terrorism

For those well-versed in the history of Western covert operations, the official narrative of 9/11 could not simply be accepted at face value. Questions were perfectly legitimate. But the 9/11 truth movement has largely missed the value of one of the biggest “covert operation smoking guns” of 20th century history: Operation Gladio, perhaps the only instance of successfully completed state-sponsored self-terrorism that is fully and directly confirmed by declassified secret documents, European Parliamentary inquiries, and confessions from intelligence operatives.

The most authoritative study of this ‘Strategy of Tension’, NATO’s Secret Armies, was released last year, and authored by Dr. Daniele Ganser, Senior Researcher at the Centre for Security Studies in the Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich.

His groundbreaking book shows that it is now a matter of historical record that during the Cold War, high-level sections of the American, British and western European secret services participated in a sophisticated NATO-backed operation to engineer domestic terrorist attacks to be blamed on the Soviet Union. The objective was to mobilise drastic anti-Communist policies at home and abroad, and to legitimise interventionism against nationalist independence movements throughout the “Third World.”1

In July 1940, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered the establishment of a secret army to “set Europe ablaze by assisting resistance movements and carrying out subversive operations in enemy held territory.”2 By 4 October 1945, the British Chiefs of Staff and the Special Operations branch of MI6 directed the creation of a “skeleton network” capable of expansion either in war or to service clandestine operations abroad.3

In the ensuing years, Col. Gubbins’ Special Operations branch of MI6 cooperated closely with Frank Wisner’s CIA covert action department Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) on White House orders, and in turn coordinated US and UK Special Forces, to establish stay-behind secret armies across western Europe.4

The programme soon developed into a dangerous conglomerate of unaccountable covert operations controlled by clandestine structures operating as parallel sub-sections of the main intelligence services. Dr. Ganser does us the greatest service in unearthing the only smoking gun Pentagon memo which proves that state-sponsored self-terrorism is standard strategy for elements of Western military-intelligence services: classified Field Manual 30-31, with appendices FM 30-31A and FM 30-31B, authored by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

As Ganser observes: “FM 30-31 instructs the secret soldiers to carry out acts of violence in times of peace and then blame them on the Communist enemy in order to create a situation of fear and alertness. Alternatively, the secret soldiers are instructed to infiltrate the left-wing movements and then urge them to use violence.” In the manual’s own words:

There may be times when Host Country Governments show passivity or indecision in the face of Communist subversion and according to the interpretation of the US secret services do not react with sufficient effectiveness… US army intelligence must have the means of launching special operations which will convince Host Country Governments and public opinion of the reality of the insurgent danger. To reach this aim US army intelligence should seek to penetrate the insurgency by means of agents on special assignment, with the task of forming special action groups among the most radical elements of the insurgency… In case it has not been possible to successfully infiltrate such agents into the leadership of the rebels it can be useful to instrumentalise extreme leftist organisations for one’s own ends in order to achieve the above described targets… These special operations must remain strictly secret.5

In this way, US and UK intelligence services orchestrated devastating waves of terrorist attacks blamed on the Soviet Union, not only in Italy, but also in Spain, Germany, France, Turkey, Greece, and throughout western Europe.

Reasonable Doubt…

But why suspect that the same thing is happening now in the new “War on Terror”? The answer lies in what almost amounts to a signed confession in the form of the “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” document published one year prior to 9/11 by the neo-conservative think-tank, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). The document was sponsored by all the leading lights of the Bush Cabinet, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, John Bolton, among many others.6 It advocates a “blueprint for maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.”

The US military is described as “the cavalry on the new American frontier,” whose “core mission” is to “fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars” to preserve what is candidly portrayed as a “global Pax Americana.” But the most significant revelation is on pages 62-63, stating that:

Any serious effort at transformation must occur within the larger framework of US national security strategy, military missions and defense budgets.… Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalysing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.7

The PNAC blueprint echoed the strategic concerns about legitimising US military expansionism expressed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser to President Carter, made three years earlier:

The attitude of the American public toward the external projection of American power has been much more ambivalent. The public supported America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor… As America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.8

Immediately, it becomes clear that interrogating the US government’s relationship to 9/11 is absolutely essential. It seems that in the preceding years, senior US policymakers had seriously contemplated the usefulness of a Pearl Harbor-scale attack to mobilise domestic populations in support of US military power projection. As Daniel Ellsberg, Special Assistant to the Assistant Defense Secretary of the United States during the Vietnam War, who famously leaked the Pentagon Papers, asked in June this year:

Is this administration capable, humanly and psychologically of engineering such a provocation [as 9/11]? Yes, I would say that, I worked for such an administration myself, Johnson, ah, President Johnson put destroyers in harm’s way in the Tonkin Gulf not only once, but several times, with the, with a lot of his people hoping that it would lead to a confrontation and claiming that it had. And could have resulted in the loss of many lives in the course of it.9

9/11 Commission: Denounced by the 9/11 Families

Thankfully, not everyone bought into the official narrative of 9/11 so easily. Least of all the bereaved families of the 9/11 victims, many of whom struggled and lobbied despite their own mourning for an independent public inquiry into the terrorist attacks, an inquiry that might resolve the numerous questions that hung over almost every single dimension of the government’s explanation for what had happened that Tuesday morning.

The 9/11 families’ courageous struggle, supported by a loose association of researchers, organisations and activists around the United States and the world, forced the US government to hold first the Joint Inquiry by the House and Senate, and finally to instate the National Commission to Investigate the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, in Washington DC. But despite both processes making public some valuable new information about the attacks and raising a few important questions, they were ultimately pitiful failures in the task of genuinely, impartially interrogating the 9/11 attacks.

Last year on 22 July, I had the honour of testifying as an expert at a special all-day Congressional hearing in Washington sponsored by Hon. Rep. Cynthia McKinney and Hon. Rep. Raul Grijalva, “The 9/11 Commission Report One Year Later: A Citizen’s Response – Did They Get it Right?”

I was joined by a host of academic experts, journalists, and former senior US intelligence officers, all of them questioning the official 9/11 narrative from their own perspectives. But by far the most powerful address was from the 9/11 families who came to support and inform the meeting, including Robert McIlvaine, father of 9/11 victim and member of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows; Marilyn Rosenthal, mother of 9/11 victim, and professor at University of Michigan; and especially Lauri von Auken, Mindy Kleinberg and Monica Gabrielle representing the 911 Family Steering Committee.

“This report was supposed to provide the definitive account of what had transpired on September 11, 2001,” said von Auken in her opening address at the hearing. “We hoped that our thousands of unanswered questions would be addressed and answered. Yet, incredibly, we have found that the Commission’s definitive final report has actually yielded more questions than answers.” She indicted the 9/11 Commission Report as just “some statements that truly insulted the intelligence of the American people, violated our loved ones’ memories, and might end up hurting us one day soon.”10

Her characterisation of the Commission Report was the most damning condemnation that the 9/11 Families Steering Committee had ever made about the official inquiry process. Yet it was met with resounding silence from the American media, which refused to report the hearing in general, and ignored von Auken’s heart-rending testimony on behalf of the 9/11 families.

Whither the Movement?

Five years on from 9/11, the “truth movement” that has emerged in the vacuum of legitimate answers to the countless questions about the terrorist attacks remains in a state of internal disarray, despite significant progress and achievements. The movement is plagued with accusations and counter-accusations between researchers based on their theoretical preferences about what happened on 9/11.

With an almost religious zeal, activists hurl outraged condemnations and paranoid allegations at each other. Splits in the movement are innumerable, mutual suspicions that other parties are “disinformation agents” are rife, and fruitless regressive arguments and counter-arguments continue on the most speculative minutiae of the attacks, without any clear resolution in sight.

Perhaps one of the most obvious splits worth noting here is the apparent gulf between “physical evidence” theorists, who emphasise discrepancies in official accounts of the collapse of the WTC buildings, the movements of the planes that hit the buildings, and the Pentagon crash, among other things; and “covert operations” theorists, who emphasise the role of intelligence operations in liaising with terrorist networks, the extent of prior advanced warnings of the attacks, and the manipulation of “terrorist threats” to justify the pursuit of US geostrategic interests on the pretext of fighting the “War on Terror.”

Even within these particular “schools,” there are vitriolic disputes between “9/11-truthers,” some advocating that there were no planes on 9/11, others that the planes were military aircraft, some that there were no hijackers, others that the hijackers were patsies, and so on and so forth. Most of these quite specific disagreements about how to interpret the available data remain unresolved on the whole, despite individual opinions.

To some extent, the disputes have manifested in the form of seemingly hostile exchanges between various camps, such as the recent observations made by Michael C. Ruppert to the effect that the 9/11 movement has virtually killed itself by getting obsessed with physical evidence, and the responses that followed suggesting physical evidence provides the most convincing case.

As readers familiar with my work will know, I myself prefer to engage in the kind of research loosely categorised here as belonging to the “covert operations” camp, but this has nothing to do with my view of the value of the evidence at hand. On the contrary, it is largely to do with my own expertise in international relations and conflict analysis, and my lack of familiarity with the relevant scientific disciplines.

Having said that, the overemphasis on particular kinds of 9/11 research at the expense of others, for the movement as a whole, must be dropped. The fact of the matter is that both kinds of research are essential to develop a full and accurate understanding of what happened on 9/11, how and why. An impartial inspection of the relevant data in these two seemingly opposed areas of analysis firstly shows that there is a great deal we do know about what happened, and secondly opens up new avenues of inquiry about what we still don’t know.

The World Trade Centre: Demolishing Conventional Collapse Theories

Thankfully, there are non-scientists unlike myself who despite a lack of specifically relevant qualifications, do feel confident about addressing some of the physical and scientific issues concerning 9/11.

Some of the best work on this subject has, indeed, been done by David Ray Griffin, a professor emeritus at the Claremont School of Theology, who applies his well-honed academic methods of analytical analysis to the questions surrounding the collapse of the World Trade Centre buildings.

Griffin is perhaps best known in the movement for his New Pearl Harbor (2004), which attempted to summarise the best evidence about 9/11 produced by other researchers, including apart from myself, Paul Thompson at the Centre for Cooperative Research and author of The Terror Timeline; Michel Chossudovsky, a professor of economics at the University of Ottawa; and Michael Ruppert, former LAPD narcotics investigator who uncovered CIA narco-trafficking and author of Crossing the Rubicon.

But Griffin went further in using the works of researchers like Eric Hufschmidt, a non-scientist who collected together serious discrepancies in the government’s claims about the WTC collapses, and Jim Hoffman, who specialises in applying scientific visualisations of mathematics. Griffin also tackled the anomalies in official accounts about the Pentagon crash.

Griffin’s best work in this area was published earlier this year in what is arguably the best collection of academic 9/11 research to date. The collection, “Hidden History of 9-11-2001”, was published in the peer-reviewed annual volume Research in Political Economy (REP), edited by Paul Zarembka, professor of economics at New York State University.

Griffin’s contribution systematically deconstructs the various official explanations for why the WTC buildings collapsed, and finds them hopelessly inadequate.11 Once again, he relies heavily on the research of other scientists, particularly Hoffman’s. He notes the basic claim, also endorsed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) report, that the towers collapsed due to fires, and points out that scientific studies carried out by NIST itself “found no evidence that any of the core columns were exposed to temperatures greater than 482˚F (250˚C).” The problem is that steel “does not even begin to melt until it reaches almost 2800° Fahrenheit. And yet open fires fueled by hydrocarbons, such as kerosene – which is what jet fuel is – can at most rise to 1700°F, which is almost 1100 degrees below the melting point of steel.” In other words, the fires were nowhere near hot enough to cause the steel to either buckle, or melt.

Griffin’s analysis is also the first attempt to review testimony about explosions from fire fighters and emergency medical workers in the over 500 9/11 oral histories recorded by the New York Fire Department. These were only publicly released in August 2005 under pressure from the 9/11 families and the New York Times. In conclusion of his review, Griffin quotes Auxiliary Lieutenant Fireman Paul Isaac saying that “there were definitely bombs in those buildings,” and that “many other firemen know there were bombs in the buildings, but they’re afraid for their jobs to admit it because the ‘higher-ups’ forbid discussion of this fact.”

Unknown to many, however, is the debacle behind the publication of Griffin’s article in Research in Political Economy. The piece was only submitted after another article on the WTC collapses, authored by Steve Jones, professor of physics at Brigham Young University (BYU), was banned from publication in the journal by his own physics department.

Jones’ groundbreaking analysis – the first peer-reviewed deconstruction of the official account of the WTC collapses from an American physicist – was eventually posted on Jones’ website at the BYU physics department, which also permitted him to publish it in a separate prospective volume edited by Griffin, for which the paper went through yet another peer review process. Jones’ contribution is the first peer-reviewed refutation of the official account of the WTC collapses by a qualified physicist.12

One of his most explosive arguments concerned discoveries of molten metal in the basements of the two WTC towers, which were hit by planes, as well as in the third building, WTC 7 – a building which symmetrically collapsed despite not being hit by a plane. In all cases, the official account blames intense fires, made hotter due to jet (or in WTC 7’s case diesel) fuel. Jones points out that all scientific investigations by NIST, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and independent experts establish that the fires were simply not hot enough to melt the steel. In that context, the deposits of molten metal found after the collapses constitute “direct evidence for the use of high-temperature explosives, such as thermite, which produces molten iron as an end product.”13

Long before Jones’ devastating conclusions – only 3 months after 9/11 – the inadequacy of the official account had been flagged up by fire protection engineering experts. Editor Bill Manning wrote in Fire Engineering that:

Fire Engineering has good reason to believe that the ‘official Investigation’ blessed by FEMA… is a half-baked farce that may already have been commandeered by political forces whose primary interests, to put it mildly, lie far afield of full disclosure… Respected members of the fire protection engineering community are beginning to raise red flags, and a resonating [result] has emerged: The structural damage from the planes and the explosive ignition of jet fuel in themselves were not enough to bring down the towers….14

And late last year, similar reservations were aired by structural engineers, concerned that: “World Trade Center disaster investigators [at NIST] are refusing to show computer visualisations of the collapse of the Twin Towers despite calls from leading structural and fire engineers.” The visualisations are needed to iron out the many “simplifications, extrapolations and judgment calls” made in the investigation.15

Pentagon Disinformation: Concealing the Nuclear Device

Unlike the growing scientific literature critiquing the government’s account of the WTC collapses, there remains considerable ambiguity over what happened at the Pentagon on 9/11. There are no scientific peer-reviewed analyses of the subject either for or against the official account. It is therefore difficult for a layperson to assess the strength of the evidence on either side.

For instance, Griffin, using the work of French journalist Thierry Meyssan, has argued that the Pentagon could not have been hit by a Boeing 757. Mathematics professor A. K. Dewdney has also supported this thesis. The main grounds for the argument are, 1. The photovisual evidence of the crash scene, where no debris from a Boeing jet can be seen anywhere, and where the entry-point in the west wing wall is a small hole with no damage on either side of it; 2. Photovisual evidence showing that whatever entered the Pentagon had the power to penetrate six reinforced walls; 3. The systematic concealing of evidence relevant to the crash, including debris, camera footage, etc.; among some other issues.

But the Pentagon crash debate illustrates precisely the kinds of ambiguities that can arise when non-scientists try to assess physical evidence without the qualifications to do so.

Perhaps the best critique of the sort of analysis done by Meyssan and Griffin, is by the French engineering professor, Jean-Pierre Desmoulins, who also holds a private pilot’s license. Desmoulins notes that it is often wrongly assumed that the famous AP “hunt the boeing” photo was taken only a few minutes after the crash: “Examined more carefully the photo reveals that this E-Ring zone had already collapsed.” Desmoulins notes that the photo, taken from afar, shows very little detail, and therefore chastises those who assume that the photo provides proof that there is no damage above or on either side of the hole. Indeed, he argues that although “there’s no damage above the central (fuselage) hole, there is extensive damage extending on both the left and right sides of this hole.”16

Desmoulins assessment is corroborated by Joe R.’s so far undisputed calculation of the actual size of the hole, based on examining the photovisual evidence in relation to the known sizes of the clearly visible windows in the damaged Pentagon wall, the known size of the wall itself, etc. Joe concludes that the total width of the primary hole is 20ft, compared to the fuselage width of a 757 at 12.5 ft – ample size for a 757 to pass through.17

The photo is also selective. Although fuselage debris “are not visible on the area shown by this photo, i.e. south-west of the impact point,” Desmoulins points out with photovisual evidence that “there were a lot of small (and some middle size) aluminium pieces on the north-west side of the impact point. This is normal, as the impact occurred with an angle of 55° from the plane of the facade. The parts of the aircraft which didn’t enter the building bounced away, like confetti, in a sector comprised, approximately, between 0° and 55° from the planular facade on the NORTH side.”18

Crash studies suggest that the over-300-mph impact of a jetliner with the Pentagon’s reinforced wall would have reduced the entire aircraft – and certainly its relatively light wings and tail – to confetti.19

Desmoulins also notes the role of the “Owen Effect,” whereby the temperature was likely to reach higher than the melting point of aluminium, a phenomena commonly recorded in tunnel fires in Europe (e.g. in the channel tunnel, in the Mont Blanc tunnel, in a funicular fire in Austria where aluminium was completely melted and iron partly melted). As there was a sprinkler system recently installed in the zone of the crash, the input of water “on a mix of fuel and molten aluminium at high temperature creates a chemical reaction between aluminium and water, producing alumina (a white powder) and hydrogen.” The reaction would have “disintegrated most of the parts of the plane which were placed in this inferno condition… Any engineer in an aluminium production plant knows the dangers created by the encounter of water and melted aluminium.”

Desmoulins then forwards an alternative explanation, consistent with the findings of a growing number of credible 9/11 researchers like Jim Hoffman, Eric Bart, Joe R., among others, that the Pentagon was indeed hit by a Boeing 757. This is consistent with the overwhelming bulk of the eyewitness evidence compiled by Bart,20 as well with the physical evidence assessed by Hoffman. But the large-scale impact of the crash inside the Pentagon can only be explained by the hypothesis that the airliner carried a military load. Indeed, professor Desmoulis argues that the scale of the explosion and its effects on the building structures is consistent only with the impact of a depleted uranium warhead.21

The use of DU on 9/11 at the Pentagon crash has been corroborated by radiation scientist Leuren Moret, who worked on radiation issues at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory. Moret and another radiation expert Dr. Janette Sherman took Geiger counter readings showing over eight to ten times higher than normal, 12 miles from the Pentagon.

According to Moret, they alerted radiation experts from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the FBI who later confirmed high radiation levels at the Pentagon crash site.22 For Desmoulins, the high levels of radiation that would have penetrated the crash scene debris account for the authorities’ refusals to release the Pentagon evidence, which would confirm the planting of an advanced DU warhead in the nose of the Boeing.

Remote Hijacking of Hijackers?

In any case, the Pentagon debate appears less easy to resolve than another line of inquiry, the role of the alleged 9/11 hijackers. The best research on the subject is by Jay Kolar, in yet another stellar contribution to the “Hidden History” REP volume.

Reviewing credible reports from the BBC, CNN, and other mainstream sources around the world, he concludes that “at least ten of those named on the FBI’s second and final list of 19 have turned up and been verified to be alive, with proof positive that at least one other ‘hijacker’, Ziad Jarrah, had his identity doubled, and therefore fabricated.” Kolar, who has expertise in film analysis, examines the visual evidence furnished by the government to support its narrative – including alleged footage of the hijackers at Dulles Airport and the infamous Osama bin Laden confession tape. He finds them to be riddled with impossibilities and anomalies, and concludes that they are utterly unreliable at best, and downright forgeries at worst.23

This leaves us, however, with another problem. If there were no hijackers, then what happened on 9/11? In the same volume, professor Paul Zarembka notes that the available evidence from the FAA and elsewhere tends to support the conclusion that there were hijackings of the four flights that morning.24 So if the planes were hijacked, who did it?

In my view, this is where Kolar’s ‘doubles’ theory comes in. Kolar argues that as many of the alleged hijackers are now alive, they must have had ‘doubles’ who were using their identities as aliases. In my own research, I’ve noted that the alleged hijackers had trained in US military installations in the 1990s, had connections to the CIA and DEA, and worse still, displayed patently non-Islamic behaviour in the form of drinking alcohol, snorting cocaine, and frolicking with women at lap-dancing clubs and illicit parties – behaviour not commensurate with that of normal practising Muslims, let alone Islamist al-Qaeda fanatics about to conduct the most spectacular martyrdom operation in history. At the forefront of this line of inquiry is former PBS and NBC journalist Daniel Hopsicker.

Kolar’s ‘doubles’ theory can perhaps begin to explain how the 9/11 cell was in fact made up of double agents who could have gone on to carry out the hijacking operations on the morning of 9/11.

But questions still remain. Nila Sagedevan, an aeronautical engineer and pilot, explores how it is a matter of record that the vast majority of these individuals were notoriously incapable of flying properly according to their own flight instructors. Mohammed Atta, Khalid al-Mihdhar, Marwan al-Shehhi and Hani Hanjour, were all described by their trainers as utterly incompetent. Hanjour’s instructer proclaimed incredulously: “His English was horrible, and his mechanical skills were even worse. It was like he had hardly even ever driven a car. I’m still to this day amazed that he could have flown into the Pentagon. He could not fly at all.”25

But the flight into the Pentagon, as is well-known, was described by pilots as one of the most sophisticated flying operations they had ever seen. Consider the observation of retired US Army Special Forces Master Sergeant Stan Goff about Hanjour:

A pilot they want us to believe was trained at a Florida puddle-jumper school for Piper Cubs and Cessnas, conducts a well-controlled downward spiral, descending the last 7,000 feet in two-and-a-half minutes, brings the plane in so low and flat that it clips the electrical wires across the street from the Pentagon, and flies it with pinpoint accuracy into the side of this building at 460 nauts. When the theory about learning to fly this well at the puddle-jumper school began to lose ground, it was added that they received further training on a flight simulator. This is like saying you prepared your teenager for her first drive on I-40 at rush.26

Thus, while it may be necessary to factor in the hijackers as involved in the initial part of the operation to takeover the civilian airliners, a fuller explanation would suggest that they were not aware of the wider ramifications of the operation as a suicide mission; and that new methods for the control of hijacked aircraft using remote technologies were implemented that morning to take the operation to its final, terrible conclusion. These technologies did exist prior to 9/11, as reported by the New Scientist, the Economist, ITN News, and many other sources.

For example: “Most modern aircraft have some form of autopilot that could be re-programmed to ignore commands from a hijacker and instead take direction from the ground,” said Jeff Gosling of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.27

This of course highlights the failure of the US air defence system to do anything for about one and a half hours, as recently acknowledged by experts such as Lt. Col. (ret.) Robert Bowman, director of the Star Wars programmes under Presidents Ford and Carter. Not only were standard operating procedures systematically violated, such that no military jets were implemented in a timely fashion to the right targets; the technology in place to remotely direct the hijacked aircraft was not used to take them to safety. Given that the conventionally identified hijackers could not have flown the planes either, we are left with an unavoidable, if startling scenario of an “al-Qaeda” operation that was itself “remotely hijacked” by elements within the US national security establishment itself.

There is, indeed, significant circumstantial evidence consistent with the possibility that remote control technologies were being used on the morning of 9/11. It is no longer disputable that there were over half a dozen war-games in operation on the morning of 9/11, including Vigilant Warrior, “a joint, live-fly, hijack Field Training Exercise (FTX) which involved at least one (and almost certainly many more) aircraft under US control that was posing as a hijacked airliner,” being run by NORAD and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.28

A further exercise whose special significance has been relatively unnoticed by most 9/11 researchers was run by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), a secretive US intelligence agency which “designs, builds and operates the nation’s reconnaissance satellites” in order to “help plan military operations” and “monitor the environment” for the “Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Department of Defense (DoD).”29 According to the Associated Press:

…one US intelligence agency was planning an exercise last Sept. 11 in which an errant aircraft would crash into one of its buildings… National Reconnaissance Office had scheduled an exercise that morning in which a small corporate jet would crash into one of the four towers at the agency’s headquarters building after experiencing a mechanical failure. The agency is about four miles from the runways of Washington Dulles International Airport.

The exercise was first publicly revealed in an announcement for a homeland security conference in Chicago, which noted that CIA officer John Fulton, also Chief of the Strategic War Gaming Division of the National Reconnaissance Office, was on the very morning of 9/11 “running a pre-planned simulation to explore the emergency response issues that would be created if a plane were to strike a building…”30

NRO officials promptly denied that the simulation was a counterterrorism and/or security exercise, claiming that it was to simulate a mere accident – and insisted that the simulation was cancelled when “real world events” began. But this is hard to believe given Fulton’s specific credentials – not only the CIA/NRO chief war gamer, but also a member of the US Joint Forces Command’s Project Alpha, and an adviser on counterterrorism and homeland defense to the Director Central Intelligence Staff.31 Fulton’s expertise as chief NRO war gamer is therefore fundamentally concerned with exploring scenarios related to security and terrorism.

And what of Fulton’s Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM)? It describes itself as the Pentagon’s “transformation laboratory,” tasked among other things to develop concepts, test these concepts through live experimentation, and implement joint training exercises involving the “choreographing” of multiple military commands.32 In particular USJFCOM’s Project Alpha, in which Fulton is specifically involved, pursues programmes concerned with utilising advanced space-based satellite, surveillance, and communication technologies for military operations. Intriguingly, many of these programs have significant aerial connotations, including the use of remote control technologies using “unmanned, autonomous airborne vehicles” in war.33 Project Alpha – which is subordinate to the Department of Defense – also conducts military experiments that bring live field exercises and computer simulations together.34

Fulton’s job, in other words, is not to simulate accidents – it is to wargame complex joint military operations involving space-based and aerial technologies. Whatever the “plane into building” simulation that Fulton was exercising on the morning of 9/11, it was almost certainly a highly complex wargame. Given Project Alpha’s function, Fulton’s NRO exercise could have provided the mechanism for joint coordination of the live-fly hijack exercise, war game simulations, and remote control operations on 9/11 – remotely hijacking an al-Qaeda hijacking.

“Al-Qaeda”: A CIA Database

Indeed, much of my own latest research in The War on Truth (2005), The London Bombings (2006), and my own contribution to the “Hidden History” RPE volume, has focused on examining this entity “al-Qaeda.” Does it exist? If so, what is it?

The late former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook wrote in The Guardian one day after the 7/7 terrorist attacks in London that the term “al-Qaeda” was invented by the CIA to designate a computer database of CIA-trained mujahideen recruits around the world, administered by Osama bin Laden.35

Overwhelming evidence in the public record confirms that groups identified as being affiliated to al-Qaeda in the Middle East, Central Asia, the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Asia-Pacific, have been penetrated, subverted and manipulated by Western intelligence services. But why? Largely to destabilise regional environments to pave the way for new “security” policies that serve to protect not people, but foreign investors taking over regional markets – especially markets with significant oil and gas deposits.36

Indeed, one CIA analyst described the covert strategy in plain words to the mainstream Swiss television journalist Richard Labeviere (currently chief editor at Radio France International): “The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries worked marvellously well in Afghanistan against the Red Army. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilise what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia.”

It should not be a surprise then (although it was at first to me!), to discover that al-Qaeda operatives as senior as Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s own right-hand man, are in fact CIA informants. The latter was confirmed by none other than Yousef Bodansky, former Director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism, reporting in Defense & Foreign Affairs: Strategic Policy that the al-Qaeda deputy leader was approached by a CIA emissary in November 1997, and essentially offered $50 million to protect US interests in the Balkans.37

It should not be lost on us that the same al-Zawahiri appears on the recently released al-Qaeda videos claiming responsibility for the London bombings. The implication is dire, but it is one supported by other academics such as University of Ottawa professor Michel Chossudovsky and University of California (Berkeley) professor Peter Dale Scott: that “al-Qaeda” has continued to function throughout the post-Cold War period as an instrument of Western statecraft, a covert operations tool. This, and everything else discussed here, renders the whole “War on Terror” narrative meaningless, and exposes it as an ideological framework engineered to legitimise a state of unlimited war for power and profit.

Looking Ahead

Five years on, the way forward for the 9/11 truth movement is to put an end to the obsessive infighting, forge bonds with all activists sceptical of the official 9/11 story regardless of whether they are LIHOP (Let It Happen On Purpose), MIHOP (Made It Happen On Purpose), or even neither, and unite on a common platform based on asking hard questions. We don’t have all the answers, but we do know that the official account is wrong on all counts. Interpreting the often complex (and sometimes technical) data is difficult enough; overcoming the reflexive psychological barriers that most people are socialised into putting up as soon as they hear of the possibility of state-sponsored self-terrorism is even more difficult.

9/11 truth needs to be understood and advocated in the context of clarifying the long tradition of state-sponsored self-terrorism that is so deeply embedded in our societies, as well as in relation to the wider dynamics of an increasingly unstable and indeed crumbling global imperial system, which the powers-that-be are desperately attempting to rehabilitate under the mantle of fighting the “War on Terror.”

In this context, a strategy of compassion and persuasion is urgently required, one which looks ahead to the possibility of a new social model that is ecologically sound, politically free, economically just and spiritually awake to the ethical values that make us human. In keeping that vision at the heart of our movement, perhaps we will be able to magnify the successes made so far and reach out to people everywhere.

Footnotes:

1. Apart from having his Gladio research – which was part of his PhD thesis – published by the reputable British academic press Frank Cass, Ganser also published a summary of his findings in the peer-reviewed Whitehead Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations, (Winter/Spring 2005), pp. 69-95, www.isn.ethz.ch/php/documents/collection_gladio/Terrorism_Western_Europe.pdf.

2. Cited in Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (London: Frank Cass, 2005) p. 40.

3. Ibid., p. 41.

4. Ibid., p. 42.

5. Ibid., p. 234, 297. The field manual was published in the 1987 parliamentary report of the Italian parliamentary investigation into the terrorist activities of P2, the CIA-MI6 sponsored Italian anti-communist network. See Commissione parlamentare d’inchiesta sulla loggia massonica P2. Allegati alla Relazione Doc. XXIII, n. 2-quarter/7/1 Serie II, Vol. VII, Tomo I, Roma 1987, p. 287-298.

6. Neil Mackay, “Bush planned Iraq ‘regime change’ before becoming President”, Sunday Herald (15 September 2002) www.sundayherald.com/27735.

7. PNAC Report, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century”, Project for the New American Century, Washington D.C., (September 2000), p. 62-63, www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf.

8. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives, Basic Books, 1997, pp. 24-25, 211.

9. Enviromentalists Against War, “Daniel Ellsberg Calls for 9/11 Investigation”, 21 July 2006, www.envirosagainstwar.org/know/read.php?itemid=4402.

10. Transcript of opening address by Lorie von Auken, “Unanswered Questions and the Call for Accountability”, The 9/11 Commission Report One Year Later: A Citizen’s Response – Did the Commission Get it Right?, Complete record of transcripts and written submissions, House of Representatives (Washington DC: Cannon House Office Building, 22 July 2005), pp. 11, 18.

11. David Ray Griffin, “The Destruction of the World Trade Center: Why the Official Account Cannot Be True”, in Paul Zarembka (ed.) The Hidden History of 9-11-2001, Research in Political Economy, Volume 23, Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2006, pp. 79-122.

12. Steven E. Jones, “Why Indeed Did the World Trade Center Buildings Completely Collapse on 9-11-2001?” Brigham Young University (2005) www.physics.byu.edu/research/energy/htm7.html.

13. Steve Jones interviewed by Carlson Tucker, “Questioning what happened on 9/11”, MSNBC, 16 November 2005, www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10053445/.

14. Bill Manning, “Burning Questions Need Answers”, Fire Engineering (January 2002) http://fe.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cfm?Section=OnlineArticles&SubSe%20ction=Display&PUBLICATION_ID=25&ARTICLE_ID=131225. 15. New Civil Engineer (6 October 2005)

16. Pentagon 2001/9/11: the fraud!, www.earth-citizens.net/pages-en/npp-griffin.html

17. Joe R., “Why the No-757 Crowd is Making an Ass of Itself”, http://home.planet.nl/~reijd050/JoeR/pentahole_dimensions_est.htm.

18. Pentagon 2001/9/11: the fraud!, www.earth-citizens.net/pages-en/npp-griffin.html.

19. Noted by Jim Hoffman here, http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/pentagontrap.html#physical. Studies reviewed here, http://911review.com/errors/pentagon/crashdebris.html.

20. Voluminous compilation of verifiable eyewitness accounts of a Boeing 757 available in the public record, http://911research.wtc7.net/pentagon/evidence/witnesses/bart.html.

21. Pentagon 2001/9/11: the fraud!, www.earth-citizens.net/pages-en/npp-griffin.html.

22. Greg Szymanski, “High-Ranking Army Officer: Missile Hit Pentagon”, 19 August 2005, www.rense.com/general67/radfdf.htm.

23. Jay Kolar, “What We Know About the Alleged 9/11 Hijackers”, in Zarembka (ed.), op. cit., pp. 3-45.

24. Paul Zarembka, “Initiation of the 9-11 Operation, with Evidence of Insider Trading Beforehand”, in Zarembka (ed.), op. cit., pp. 49-77.

25. Nila Sagadevan, “The Impossibility of Flying Heavy Aircraft Without Training”, www.physics911.net/sagadevan.htm.

26. Stan Goff, “The So-Called Evidence is a Farce”, Narco News, 10 October 2001, www.narconews.com/goff1.html.

27. Sources linked and reviewed here www.911blogger.com/2006/07/wheres-remote-control.html.

28. Michael C. Ruppert, ‘TRIPOD II and FEMA: Lack of NORAD Response on 9/11 Explained’, From The Wilderness, 5 June 2004, www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/060704_tripod_fema.html. Also confirmed by former White House counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke in his Against All Enemies, p. 4-5.

29. National Reconnaissance Office website, www.nro.gov.

30. Lumpkin, John J., ‘Agency planned exercise on Sept. 11 built around a plane crashing into a building’, Associated Press, 21 August 2002, www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2002/08/21/national1518EDT0686.DTL.

31. National Law Enforcement and Security Institute announcement, ‘Homeland Security: America’s Leadership Challenge’, www.nlsi.net/hs-alc-info.htm.

32. United States Joint Forces Command website, (viewed 30 June 2004), www.jfcom.mil/about/about1.htm.

33. USFJCOM Project Alpha website, (viewed 30 June 2004), www.jfcom.mil/about/fact_alpha.htm.

34. See for example USFJCOM Project Alpha, Millenium Challenge website, (viewed 30 June 2004), www.jfcom.mil/about/experiments/mc02.htm.

35. Robin Cook, “The struggle against terrorism cannot be won by military means”, The Guardian, 8 July 2005, www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0%2c12780%2c1523838%2c00.html.

36. See my “Terrorism and Statecraft: Al-Qaeda and Western Covert Operations after the Cold War”, in Zarembka (ed.), op. cit., pp. 140-188.

37. See my The War on Truth (Olive Branch, 2005) and The London Bombings (Duckworth, 2006).

.

NAFEEZ AHMED is the author of The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry (Duckworth, 2006 [www.independentinquiry.co.uk]) and The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism (Olive Branch, 2005). He teaches political theory, international relations, and contemporary history at the University of Sussex, Brighton. His first book, The War on Freedom: How & Why America was Attacked, September 11, 2001, was written to critique the official account of 9/11, winning him the Naples Prize, Italy’s most prestigious literary award. After that, he wrote a comprehensive deconstruction of Western imperialism in Iraq and the wider Middle East since the collapse of the Ottoman empire, Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq (New Society, 2003). His blog is at http://nafeez.blogspot.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 98 (Sept-Oct 2006).

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