Danger Room has an article posted fact checking the claims made in the new The Men Who Stare at Goats movie:
Hippie Army? True. Lt. Col. Jim Channon dove deep into the New Age movement, and came back to the military with a most alternative view of warfare — one in which troops would carry flowers and symbolic animals into battle. In the movie, Channon is played by Jeff Bridges. His First Earth Battalion is renamed the “New Earth Army.” But the ideas are the same. Much of the artwork from the New Earth manual is lifted straight from the Channon original.
Channon has been taking advantage of the publicity for his cause; this week he has a column in the Guardian newspaper, suggesting (among other things) that armies should be used for reforestation and navies to control over-fishing.
The military’s interest in Eastern and alternative practices is once again on the rise. “Warrior mind training“, apparently based on ancient Samurai techniques, is being taught at Camp Lejeune as a possible treatment for PTSD. Elsewhere the Army has a $4 million initiative exploring other approaches including Reiki, transcendental meditation and “bioenergy.” The Air Force is looking into acupuncture for battlefield pain relief.
Danger Room: Psychic Spies, Acid Guinea Pigs, New Age Soldiers: the True Men Who Stare at Goats
As pointed out at Danger Room, you can download the original First Earth Battalion Manual from Jim Channon’s web site
Previously:
Psychic Warfare from 1981-2008
Real life DHARMA Initiative # 1: SRI (Stanford Research Institute)
It’s worth noting (mainly because few have bothered to note it, or to understand and appreciate the significance of the matter) that one of the “Recommendations” of a lengthy Technical Report prepared by the Air Force’s flying saucer study, Project Grudge, way back in August 1949, states: “That Psychological Warfare Division and other governmental agencies interested in psychological warfare be informed of the results of this study.”
The Department of Defense’s official definition of psychological warfare is: “The planned use of propaganda and other psychological actions having the primary purpose of influencing the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of hostile foreign groups in such a way as to support the achievement of national objectives.”
As the above Grudge revelations show, way back when in the formative years of Ufology, certain players were looking to understand how the subject could be used psychologically.
UFO Mystic: Crashed UFOs? Probably Not…
(via Mac)
“Yuh. After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.
“Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. …
“Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.
“Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.
“It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.
“In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.
“I’ve had people say to me — five years ago, I had one say: ‘What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don’t get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee?’
“But they’re not gonna get before a committee.”
Full Story: Minneapolis Post
Kicked up a hornet’s nest that connects all my old research with my new food obsession. This is a story that involves food, covert operations, professional disinformation, and aliens.
Remember that sooper-paranoid article about HR 875 that got everyone so spooked in the first place? That was from the Natural Solutions Foundation, written by Linn Cohen-Cole, who may or may not be real.
Natural health advocates have been questioning the NSF for several years now, and the criticism is universally the same: Why does the NSF keep turning out factually inaccurate, hysterically grim articles? Just as important, and even more worrying, Why does the NSF refuse to correct ANY of the hundreds of errors in their record?
The answers start with the NSF founders: husband-wife team Albert Stubblebine and Rima Laibow. Now, when I accuse these people of being disinformation professionals, let me qualify that carefully. I’m not saying that they’re doing sloppy research, and I’m not saying that they’re being overzealous. I’m saying they are working, for pay, to spread false information and make their organization look like a legitimate activist group.
Full Story: Urban Evolution
That super paranoid article by Linn Cohen-Cole is here.
“Most of the real life DHARMA initiatives we cover here are, like the DHARMA Initiative, private organizations. But the high weirdness that the CIA’s Project MKULTRA got into is too important to ignore.”
Full Story: Hatch 23.
The closest Young comes to explaining to me why he created Cryptome is this: “I’m a pretty fucking angry guy.” He describes it as a public education project. But for every hard data point he offers, there’s the ever-present admonishment that secrecy corrupts everything. “We caution people, don’t believe anything we publish,” he says. “We’re totally untrustworthy. We may be a sting operation, we may be working for the Feds. If you trust us, you’re stupid.” It’s like a nihilist art project: Provide your readers with more than 40,000 files of data the government doesn’t want you to have, data that exposes the lies of the powerful, and then remind them that you can never, ever know for sure who is lying.
Full Story: Radar
(via My Heart’s in Accra)
But as it turns out, the HFCS industry has been hiding some major skeletons in its closet — according to the IATP study (pdf), over 30% of products containing the substance tested positive for mercury.
What makes this news truly shocking is not just that the manufacturers of high fructose corn syrup would put consumers’ health at risk, but that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) knew about the mercury in the syrup, and has been sitting on this information since 2005.
Here’s the connection, according to the IATP press release (pdf): The IATP study comes on the heels of another study, conducted in 2005 but only recently published by the scientific journal, Environmental Health, which revealed that nearly 50 percent of commercial HFCS samples tested positive for the heavy metal. Renee Dufault, who was working for the FDA at the time, was among the 2005 study’s authors. In spite of Dufault’s involvement in the study, the FDA sat silent on this one for three years, and in fact last August, allowed manufacturers to call the sweetener “natural.”
Full Story: Huffington Post
(Thanks Biohabit)
Update: a representative from the corn syrup lobby has weighed in with a response (As far as I can tell the comment from “FT” is real).
In January 2001, the security branch of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency began to receive a number of peculiar reports from DEA field offices across the country. According to the reports, young Israelis claiming to be art students and offering artwork for sale had been attempting to penetrate DEA offices for over a year. The Israelis had also attempted to penetrate the offices of other law enforcement and Department of Defense agencies. Strangest of all, the “students” had visited the homes of numerous DEA officers and other senior federal officials.
As a pattern slowly emerged, the DEA appeared to have been targeted in what it called an “organized intelligence gathering activity.” But to what end, and for whom, no one knew.
Full Story: Salon
(via Honky Tonk Dragon)
It’s a long story, but here’s the take-away: no one knows what was going. There’s various speculation, and this sounds most likely to me (for what little my opinion is worth):
Theory No. 3, the Art Student as Agent as Art Student Smoke Screen. It has major problems, but let’s roll with it for a moment. This theory contends that the art student ring was a smoke screen intended to create confusion and allow actual spies — who were also posing as art students — to be lumped together with the rest and escape detection. In other words, the operation is an elaborate double fake-out, a hiding-in-plain-sight scam. Whoever dreamed it up thought ahead to the endgame and knew that the DEA-stakeout aspect was so bizarre that it would throw off American intelligence. According to this theory — Stability’s “Victor/Victoria” scenario — Israeli agents wanted, let’s say, to monitor al-Qaida members in Florida and other states. But they feared detection. So to provide cover, and also to create a dizzyingly Byzantine story that would confuse the situation, Israeli intel flooded areas of real operations with these bumbling “art students” — who were told to deliberately stake out DEA agents.
Here’s another possibility: they were part of some sort of well organized, well funded prank. (Or, like Honky Tonk Dragon said – “Life imitates Illuminatus”)
Journalist and occult expert Tracy Twyman discussed the shocking stories from her new book, Mind Controlled Sex Slaves and the CIA. She covered a number of infamous accounts within this realm, such as the story of Cathy O’Brien, the Franklin Cover-Up, and the disappearance of Johnny Gosch. Reflecting on the more credible stories she has researched, Twyman said, “They don’t seem like they’re seeking attention. They don’t even seem like people who have read Internet conspiracy theories. They seem like they’re talking about the experiences they had.”
Full Story: Coast to Coast
Behind the powerful din created by the popular and celebrity-embraced “Save Tibet,” campaign is the fact that the CIA is behind the Tibet independence movement.
According to many reports, the Dalai Lama himself may be a long-time CIA asset. See The Role of the CIA behind the Dalai Lama’s holy cloak and The Tibet Card.
In addition to being geostrategically situated, Tibet is also rich with oil and gas, and minerals — and this is just part of the larger superpower warfare between the US and China. See Tibet, the "great game", and the CIA.
The legions of pro-Tibet activists also seem largely unaware of the historical fact that the “holy land of compassion” has been a CIA pawn since the end of World War II. The infamous Tolstoi Mission sent CIA operatives into Tibet, with plans to establish it as a US military base, from which the US could control the entire Asian region. This activity flourished under the US-supported, opium-banked Nationalist Kuomintang regime of Chiang Kai-Shek.
When the Communists rose to power, the CIA trained Tibetans in guerrilla tactics to use against the regime in Peking, and thousands of Tibetans lost their lives in these battles. Who benefited? Who really gave the orders then — and who is driving the agenda now?
There is little doubt that Anglo-American interests continue to use Tibet, exploit the image of Tibet as a holy place under siege, and bamboozle naïve (and well-heeled) outside activists with slick marketing, in order to undermine Beijing.
Denunciations of Beijing’s brutal crackdowns do not take into account the covert operations and outside infiltrations that triggered the crackdowns in the first place.
Read the whole article via Online Journal
As Scott Atran points out, these kids dream of fighting for some meaningful cause that will make them heroes in their communities. Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri-and Arab satellite television and in some cases their own experiences-have convinced them that fighting against the most powerful country in the world and its allies is the most heroic thing they can do.
No, “The 99″ comic books are not going to solve that problem. Their circulation is in the tens of thousands at this point, while bin Laden’s violent message gets out to billions. But comic books are “likely to be a lot more helpful than our bullets and bombs in attracting young people away from jihadi cool,” says Atran. They might even help convince Washington that “knowledge is the true base of power.” But maybe that’s hoping for too much.
Full Story: Newsweek.
(via Lupa)
What sort of message does this comic book send?
(Update/clarification The image above is not from The 99, it’s from Chuck Dixon’s aborted American Power series. I presented it along with the question of what message it for sarcastic rather illustrative purposes.)
A new U.N. Human Rights Council official assigned to monitor Israel is calling for an official commission to study the role neoconservatives may have played in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
On March 26, Richard Falk, Milbank professor of international law emeritus at Princeton University, was named by unanimous vote to a newly created position to report on human rights in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. While Mr. Falk’s specialty is human rights and international law, since the attacks in 2001, he has devoted some of his time to challenging what he calls the ‘9-11 official version.’
Full Story: New York Sun.
(via Robot Wisdom).
Better propaganda (and more informative) than Fitna. Some valid points brought up at Wikipedia: there is no discussion of business interests ir the Israel-Palestine conflict, and Leo Strauss’s influence is overblown.
Other two videos below the fold. Read the rest of this entry »
He walked to the National Geographic map of the world mounted on the wall. “You guys know about Genghis Khan?” he asked. “Genghis was a man with a vision. He conquered” – David stood on the couch under the map, tracing, with his hand, half the northern hemisphere-”nearly everything. He devastated nearly everything. His enemies? He beheaded them.” David swiped a finger across his throat. “Dop, dop, dop, dop.”
David explained that when Genghis entered a defeated city he would call in the local headman and have him stuffed into a crate. Over the crate would be spread a tablecloth, and on the tablecloth would be spread a wonderful meal. “And then, while the man suffocated, Genghis ate, and he didn’t even hear the man’s screams.” David still stood on the couch, a finger in the air. “Do you know what that means?” He was thinking of Christ’s parable of the wineskins. “You can’t pour new into old,” David said, returning to his chair. “We elect our leaders. Jesus elects his.”
He reached over and squeezed the arm of a brother. “Isn’t that great?” David said. “That’s the way everything in life happens. If you’re a person known to be around Jesus, you can go and do anything. And that’s who you guys are. When you leave here, you’re not only going to know the value of Jesus, you’re going to know the people who rule the world. It’s about vision. ‘Get your vision straight, then relate.’ Talk to the people who rule the world, and help them obey. Obey Him. If I obey Him myself, I help others do the same. You know why? Because I become a warning. We become a warning. We warn everybody that the future king is coming. Not just of this country or that, but of the world.” Then he pointed at the map, toward the Khan’s vast, reclaimable empire.
Full Story: Harpers.
Previous coverage of The Family.
(thanks Gabbo!)
It’s no surprise that Medvedev won the Russian “election”.
“Dmitry Medvedev, the next face of Russian power and rebirth, is by no means a carbon copy of his mentor, Vladimir Putin. As he strides into a conference room here in one of Russia’s industrial hubs, his boyish looks and rounded shoulders contrast starkly with the icy persona and judo athlete’s physique of the country’s current president. But Putin’s Russia will stay Putin’s Russia for the foreseeable future, most observers believe, so Medvedev strains to look and sound like his longtime overseer.
At a meeting of Russian sports officials and educators in Kazan, he firmly castigates a deputy minister with sharp words and a steely gaze, much as Putin would. Later at a campaign rally thinly disguised as a celebration of youth and sports, Medvedev strides to the stage wearing a black turtleneck underneath a sports jacket, a trademark combination of Putin’s. Russians want Putin to stay on as their czar. But he cannot constitutionally serve a third consecutive term, so someone who emulates Putin-and exalts him-will have to do.
[..] The election won’t be an exercise in democracy, most observers say; liberal opponents such as former chess champion Garry Kasparov and former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov were forced out of the race. Medvedev’s three remaining opponents have been virtually ignored by state-owned national television networks.”
(via The Chicago Tribune)
(Related: “Russia: An Echo of Moscow” via Global Voices Online)
The Kremlin is planning to falsify the results of this Sunday’s presidential election in Russia by compelling millions of public sector workers to vote and by fraudulently boosting the official turnout after polls close, the Guardian has learned.
Governors, regional officials, and even headteachers have been instructed to deliver a landslide majority for Dmitry Medvedev – Russia’s first deputy prime minister, whom President Vladimir Putin has endorsed to be his successor.
Officials have been told they need to secure a 68% to 70% turnout in this weekend’s poll – with around 72% casting votes for Medvedev. However, independent analysts believe the real turnout will be much lower – with between 25% and 50% of the electorate taking part.
The Kremlin is planning to bridge the gap by the use of widespread fraud, diplomats and other independent sources have told the Guardian. Local election officials are preparing to stuff ballot boxes once the polls have closed with unused ballots, they believe, with regional officials also giving inflated tallies to Russia’s central election commission.
Full Story: The Guardian.
We’ve been covering conspiracy theory and paranoia a lot lately, so I thought it would be fun to revisit the daddy of ‘em all (the granddaddy has to be Protocols of the Elders of Zion). These aren’t necessarily the most plausible, or the weirdest. Just the best.
5. The Federal Reserve did it: The dweebs behind everyone’s favorite boogy man got their bow ties in a wad over Executive Order 11110 and had JFK assassinated. More info.
4. Joe DiMaggio did it: JFK put the the United States on a decadent path (and had Marilyn Monroe killed), and our nation turned its lonely eyes to Jumpin’ Joe to restore righteousness to our country by killing a man in cold blood. DiMaggio stepped up the plate and, using his extraordinary gift of hand-eye coordination, put a bullet through Kennedy’s brain. More info.
3. Homosexual Thrill Kill: In the words of Jim Garrison (played by Kevin Costiner in Oliver Stone’s JFK): “It was a homosexual thrill-killing, plus the excitement of getting away with a perfect crime. John Kennedy was everything that Dave Ferrie was not – a successful, handsome, popular, wealthy, virile man. You can just picture the charge Ferrie got out of plotting his death.” Yeah, that makes sense. More info.
4. The CIA meant to miss but hit: One of the most plausible theories here comes from the Don DeLillo novel Libra: disgruntled former CIA agents meant to stage an assassination attempt to guide the government to war with Cuba. But they missed and blew the president’s brains out. More info.
5. JFK had himself assassinated: I can’t find a web site dedicated to this theory, but here’s the jist of it: dying of Addison’s disease, Kennedy decided to go out like a martyr and had himself assassinated.
(Much thanks to Nick Pell for his help with this article).
The tone of this article is annoying (tin foil hat jokes? how original), but I liked reading what the editors had to say:
Hidell and D’Arc represent different wings of the conspiracy theories movement. “She’s more into the speculative paranormal end of things,” he said. “I’m more of a meat-and-potatoes politics, international relations and secret societies kind of guy.”
Together, they attempt to publish a “provocative, unpredictable mix” of conspiracy theories. “We try not to have a house conspiracy style,” he said.
Hidell admitted that he doesn’t believe all the conspiracy theories advanced in the pages of Paranoia. For instance, he’s a little skeptical of Icke’s theory that the queen of England and the Rockefellers are really shape-shifting Satanic reptiles from outer space. But then he adds this about Icke: “For all we know, he’s putting all that in purposely so people think he’s just a nut and he can keep publishing.”
Full Story: Paranoia Magazine.
(via Adam Gorightly).
As I point out in Fooled Again, that sort of ferocious cunning has, throughout the centuries, marked paranoid crusades of every kind. Certainly we see it in Bush/Cheney’s movement, which includes radical theocrats, neocon extremists, dedicated neo-Confederates, and other types who tend to see themselves as victims and their struggle, therefore, as defensive. In their eyes, the very people whom they’re trying to destroy are ruthless and relentless, full of hate and fury, while they themselves are innocent, outnumbered, ‘fighting back.’ In short, Bush/Cheney’s movement is projective, lividly imputing their own darkest impulses to everybody else.
Such projectivity, I argue, drove the Crusaders of the Middle Ages, and the Western efforts to annihilate the ’savages’ on the American frontiers. Nazism also was essentially projective, as Hitler and his men consistently imputed their own wrath and vengefulness and lust for power to ‘world Jewry’-against which they were fighting, they believed, in self-defense. We see the same mentality in the Islamist, Christianist and ultra-Zionist movements; and, overwhelmingly, among the Bush Republicans, whose program, I believe, is ultimately pathological. The Bushevik is fatally obsessed with wiping out the ‘terrorist’ within himself-and, no less, the homosexual within. How many of those ranting homophobes have turned out to be cruisers in the dark? Bush/Cheney’s G.O.P. is, above all, the Party of the Closet; and therefore suicidally engaged in trying to straighten out, or murder, all those other ‘perverts’ the world over.
Full Story: Harper’s.
See also: Miller’s 2005 Harper’s article None Dare Call it Stolen.
(Thanks Gavin!)
Given how many minds, young and otherwise, he’s shaped with his gospel-kids like Luke Rudkowski who’ve adopted this worldview and shaped their lives to answer its call to noble resistance-does Jones ever worry that maybe, just maybe, he’s got it wrong? That maybe the buildings did fall because they were hit by planes? That maybe
it was Osama bin Laden who masterminded the attack? “Sure,” he says, sounding deeply annoyed at the premise of the question. “But the evidence is just too strong.” (Which calls to mind the famous Upton Sinclair quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”)
For Jones, the layers of conspiracy are so thick that they almost eclipse the possibility of any large-scale event occurring naturally. When the Cold War comes up in conversation, he interjects: “Yeah, and it turns out the whole thing was staged!” As were Pearl Harbor, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, the AIDS epidemic, the Civil War, global warming, and so on, and on-all have been orchestrated and preplanned by our secret rulers. Asked to name a major historical event that was not a conspiracy, Jones thinks for a long time, narrowing his eyes and pursing his lips. “Little Bighorn,” he growls at last. “I don’t think anyone was planning to see Custer get killed that day.”
Full Story: Radar.
The Jones Report has a response:
The magazine opted instead to include some of the truth movement’s least represented and most implausible ideas, including kooky sounding notions like “energy beams from outer space, holographic jets and mini-nuclear bombs” (though Radar also includes more likely suspicions of government crime and complicity that Reed acknowledges some 40% of the U.S. population shares in regards to 9/11).
Radar also managed to colorize its language as it played up the paranoia and presented the extreme. Alex Jones is outright portrayed as the commanding general of a dank conspiracy bunker “fighting an all-encompassing battle” against “the globalists and their myriad schemes.” His focus on serious issues such as depopulation are ill-explained and presented in poor context seemingly meant to heighten the sensation of wild word-play and hyperbole in which Jones is meant to be viewed.
Full Story: Jones Report.
In Radar’s defense, the article was meant to be about the more fringe elements of the 9/11 truth movement, so omitting the saner elements of the movement makes sense. I also thought the portrayal of Jones was pretty fair – they had several quotes defending him.
My column on truthers as alt culture is here.
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