Sunday, May 28, 2006

Addendum

The CIA Mind Control show that I appeared in on the Discovery Channel will be rebroadcast on June 3, and again on June 22. I hope you catch it. There's a lot of good information and a minimum of disinformation. I don't want to comment on it now - I just hope you catch it.

Meanwhile - I'm gathering stories like this one about how electronic voting is wreaking havoc in our primaries:
The current and future state of election reform depends on which expert or official you ask. Six years after the most controversial presidential election in modern history and a federally mandated overhaul of the voting process, a group of experts and election officials from around the country gathered in Washington to discuss reform efforts last month. The picture most of them painted wasn't very optimistic.

...Almost a dozen states that have already held primaries this year have experienced problems. In Pennsylvania's Allegheny County last week, officials found 750 uncounted absentee ballots. Apparently poll workers, using new equipment and procedures, mistakenly put the ballots in the wrong place.

In another Pennsylvania county, a local race was overturned because a worker's error while operating new machines resulted in a miscount. In Tuesday's Arkansas primary, officials in more than a dozen counties reported problems with new machines, necessitating a ballot count that stretched into the middle of the night. Election officials in some Arkansas counties told the Associated Press that the manufacturer of new electronic voting machines didn't provide programming equipment in time to adequately train poll workers.
I'm hoping to put together a longer piece about the state of the vote. But it will take time, and that's the thing I have least of these days. If you personally experienced a problem with voting in the last couple of years, I'd like to hear about it in the comments.

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

CIA Mind Control

I'm going to be one of the talking heads on the Discovery Channel program "Conspiracy Files: CIA Mind Control," which will air Thursday, May 25th, at 9pm Eastern and Western.

NOTE: Check your local listings - on the West Coast, it's airing at different times on different providers - 6pm, 10pm, someone said 11pm East Coast - so just check first.

I'm always amazed how many people don't know about the CIA's activities in this regard, even though they became part of the overall Church Committee's investigation of the CIA's illegal domestic activities. One of Richard Helms' last acts when Nixon removed him from the CIA (he made him Ambassador to Iran) was to see that the CIA's mind control files were destroyed. But a batch survived, and that's not a lot. Even so, John Marks, a former State Department employee who had co-written a book with Victor Marchetti, a former CIA employee, started following the story and wrote a very good, if, er, forgiving book on these programs, called The Search for the Manchurian Candidate.

I don't have a lot of time to get into this tonight, but here are some excellent resources online on this subject:


  • 1977 Senate Hearings on MKULTRA, the CIA's umbrella project for various mind control operations.
  • The Black Vault. The CIA released its MKULTRA files on CD-ROM, and the owner of this site got them all online. I recommend reading Marks' book as a start, then going to the index on this page to find the subproject file number cross-referenced, and then use that to the find the files in the vault. Most of the records are financial records. But some have very interesting program details. Something you will see often is that the institutions doing research for the CIA were in many cases "unwitting" of the fact that they were working for the CIA. Very interesting.

Here are a few good books on the subject of the CIA's programs, and mind control efforts in general:

There is a lot of more sensational material. I try to steer away from first-person accounts simply because I have not yet found a way to assess someone's personal credibility. Sadly, it's as difficult as finding out who is telling the truth in a rape accusation. When something happens between two people, with no witnesses, and both people tell very different stories, I tend to think the truth is NOT "somewhere in between", but that one is likely right and the other likely wrong. I have yet to meet anyone who can "just tell" who is telling the truth, and who gets it right 100% of the time.

We're told this is all past history. But if the programs were continuing, we would STILL be told this was past history so the present programs could continue in a hidden manner. It distresses me how little we can no for sure about what our government is, and has been, doing.

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Why Didn't the Pentagon Release the 9/11 Video Sooner?

After watching the Pentagon "video" which is really just a series of photos, I'm very disappointed. We are now not an inch closer to knowing the truth. I'm very much persuaded that a plane, not a missile, hit the pentagon, because of the wreckage and the eyewitness testimony, including ordinary people I met on the street when in DC last. But having seen the Pentagon's video, well, I can see where people who think a missile hit are going to feel vindicated.

What's especially disturbing is that we have this immense budget for Defense, yet our own command central is so unguarded that someone can fly a commercial plane into it? That just defies comprehension. Because that means we've been screwed. Royally screwed. For all those trillions spent on defense, a small team of pissed off people can hijack a plane and attack our very center of operations at moments notice. All that money spent building nuclear weapons and fancy battleships was money down the tubes, because someone could attack us from within, and we couldn't even see it coming.

OR.

And/or, really. And/Or, the reason no money has been spent to ensure a building like the Pentagon could not be attacked was because we know we are essentially safe. We're not worried about a single country in the world coming to our soil to attack us (note I said "country," not "terrorist"). So again, we've been had. Trillions spent on a defense that, except for a random terrorist, was not necessary.

OR.

Or we knew it was coming, maybe even aided the attack on some level. We did, provably, because we helped build Al Qaeda to help us fight the Soviets in Afghanistan years ago. We paid and trained Bin Laden. So we absolutely aided and abetted the attack on America, no matter how you slice it. We killed the butterfly, and painted a target on ourselves long ago.

But did we do more recent aiding and abetting? I leave that to those who are seriously pursuing that line of thought. I'm not talking about conspiracy theorists who trade on a certain brand of mythology. I'm talking about the serious researchers who believe, with some interesting evidence, that there is much more to the picture than we have been shown. History is too often told as a cropped photo. The full picture often tells a different story.

I don't know what happened on 9/11. But I don't buy that a guy who couldn't fly worth beans pulled off world class manuevers to dive-bomb the Pentagon. THAT I just don't buy.

Sunday, May 14, 2006

Sen. Edward Kennedy’s Plane Downed by Lightning?

I heard on the news last night that Sen. Edward Kennedy, brother of JFK and RFK, was alright after his plane was struck by lightning. According to the initial AP report, after the lightning struck,
The eight-seat Cessna Citation 550 plane lost all electrical power, including communications, and the pilot had to fly the plane manually, according to spokeswoman Melissa Wagoner.
This story didn’t make sense to me. Planes fly through lightning all the time. Planes get hit by lightning about once a year. Tony Blair has twice been in planes that were hit by lightning.

The last time a plane in the USA came down because of lightning was over 40 years ago, before President Kennedy was assassinated:
On December 8, 1962 lighting hit a Pan American Boeing 707 in a holding pattern over Elkton, Md. The lightning caused a spark that ignited fuel vapor in a tank, causing an explosion that brought the plane down, killing all 81 aboard.
Lightning has downed planes outside the United States, but I am having trouble finding a report of a plane that lost all its power. It’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility – few things in life are. But it would seem to be out of the range of probability.

Just last week, lightning struck a twin-engine Piper Seminole aircraft over Australia, and the plane had to make an emergency landing. But it only lost control of the landing gear. There was no catastrophic electrical failure.

Why isn't lighting more of an issue? According to this government site,
The key to a plane's protection is its aluminium skin which conducts the electricity away, says John Sherlock, of lightning protection company Furse.

"If the lightning goes in the front of the plane, it then travels along the outer aluminium skin and exits the other end," he says. "Quite a few planes get hit, but because they're made of aluminium, it goes in one end and out the other."

...Strikes usually hit on the extremities - the wing tips, the nose, fin or tailplane tips.
Typically, the electricity from lightning strikes is conducted across the skin of the plane, meaning, the electricity does not penetrate into the interior, which is why so often little to no damage occurs. It’s the same reason you’re safer in your car in a lightning storm than you are in open air. The metal shell conducts the electricity around, not into, your body.

Lightning can, of course, create electrical problems. According a goverment site called The Centennial of Flight,
Lightning does hit airplanes and when it does it can damage the electronic equipment needed to fly the plane. Lightning research done during the 1980s by NASA had an F-106B jet fly into 1,400 thunderstorms and lightning hit it over 700 times. The lightning did not damage the airplane but scientists found out that it could damage electronic systems on the plane. This led to requirements that all aircraft electrical and electronic systems have built-in lightning protection.
To reiterate - since electrical storms can cause damage, planes today are required to have built-in lightning protection. So why did the protection in Kennedy's plane fail?

There is undoubtely an answer to that question. There is also probably an honest answer to that question. My belief in whether the two are the same will depend on the rigor of the investigation, or lack thereof, that comes next.

Putting on my most skeptical hat, I am pondering an alternate scenario. Now that Wellstone is gone, Ted Kennedy is one of most liberal/progressive Senators in Congress. He’s been a strong advocate of investigating the details of the NSA spying activities. Just two days ago, he issued this strong, unequivocal statement :
Today's shocking disclosures make it more important than ever for the Republican Congress to end its complicity in the White House cover up of its massive domestic surveillance program. When three major telephone companies are supplying the administration with records of all Americans regardless of any hint of wrongdoing, Congress can't look the other way. The Senate and House Judiciary Committees have a constitutional responsibility to get answers. If the telephone companies and individuals in the administration with knowledge of this abusive surveillance refuse to testify voluntarily, they should be subpoenaed and required to testify under oath.

It's time for the White House to come clean. The American people deserve to know what's being done to them. They deserve a Congress that's not AWOL on basic issues like this.
Would it not be convenient for the Republican Power Cabal if Kennedy were to die in a small plane crash, like Senators Wellstone and Mel Carnahan before him? Now don’t get me wrong – I hope and pray this would never happen. But had Wellstone lived, the Republicans would not have had control of the Senate. Had Carnahan lost, John Ashcroft would have been the Senator from Mississippi. As it was, “the dead guy won” – it was too late to take Carnahan’s name off the ballot, and his wife stepped in and served in his place when the dead Carnahan bested Ashcroft in the Senate race.

With the strongest leader on the left in the party out of the picture, how much simpler it would be to make the NSA scandal disappear?

I was struck by the fact that the plane lost ALL electrical power. That sounded to me like an electromagnetic pulse (EMP). I wondered if a particle beam weapon could cause an EMP. According to this military site, it can:
A tertiary effect from the beam would be the generation of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) by the electric current pulse of the beam. This EMP would be very disruptive to any electronic components of a target.
This site also describes how particle beam weapons can fry electrical circuits at a distance:
In the case of a particle beam traveling through an atmosphere, the air is the conductor and the charged beam is the current. This ‘current’ produces a magnetic field perpendicular to the beam, which acts like a tunnel keeping the beam from diverging. A very useful byproduct is also produced when a beam of charged particles is fired through the atmosphere at very high velocity in a very short pulse; it’s called an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP. The EMP is actually created by the magnetic field created by the ‘current’ through the air. An EMP destroys electrical circuits by passing a magnetic field by them in one direction, and then back in the other direction in a very short period of time. Since the beam is only present for a few nanoseconds, the magnetic field is produced and then collapses within that timer period creating a focused EMP. This EMP would render anything powered by a computer or any other electrical circuit useless within a couple meters of impact.
So I wondered, could such a beam get past the skin of the aircraft to affect the internal components? According to this military source, it can:
The subatomic particles that constitute a beam have great penetrating power. Thus, interaction with the target is not restricted to surface effects, as it is with a laser. When impinging upon a target, a laser creates a blow-off of target material that tends to enshroud the target and shield it from the laser beam. Such beam/target interaction problems would not exist for the particle beam with its penetrating nature. Particle beams would be quite effective in damaging internal components….
So what I want to know is this? Was Kennedy’s plane truly fried by lightning, was that the true cause of this unusual event, or was that a lie to cover up a much more sinister scenario? I truly don’t know. And I'd like to be able to know. Please don’t get me wrong. I am not saying anything other than lightning brought down Kennedy’s plane. I’m not. Read and repeat until comprehension occurs. The latter is just a wild speculation.

But it occurs to me if something other than lightning was responsible, we might never know. So far as I can tell, the media accepted without question the explanation provided. Maybe that was appropriate. But where an office-holding Kennedy is concerned, perhaps a little thinking outside of the box might be a useful endeavor for the mainstream media. If you won't consider an alternative scenario, you can’t ask the questions that could rule that out.

Is it wrong to wonder? It’s certainly sad that I have come to so deeply mistrust all reporting on the Kennedys by the media. But I have good reason. I’ve spent over 14 years studying the assassinations of the John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. And then there aas John Kennedy, Jr.

On July 16, 1999, I awoke early, turned on CNN, and saw a news report saying John Kennedy Jr.’s plane was “missing.” No one knew at that point if he was alive or dead or where the plane was. I sat up and felt my jaw drop to the pain my stomach. Nooooo. Not another Kennedy gone. I watched, trying to memorize every word, knowing it could matter in the hours and weeks and years that followed. Because his plane was only missing, the tone of the broadcast was cautious, and it wasn’t the sole story on the air. The news story was followed by the weather report. The weather person made a special point of talking about the weather in the area of the plane’s disappearance, noting how clear it was that night and morning, and the weatherwoman said words to the effect, that, whatever else had happened, “we can definitely rule out weather as the cause” of the plane’s disappearance.

So you can imagine my dismay when, hours later, I heard the story morph, based on a single report from a pilot who was never named that it had been foggy out, and that JFK Jr. must have lost his way. I was so angry. The fact that someone felt the need to lie about that gave me the most sinister, horrible, feeling. I bawled that morning. Truly sobbed. It had happened again. Another Kennedy taken from us.

Maybe it really was some horrible accident. But why change the weather if it was just an accident? Those are the kinds of things that keep me up at night.

And what about the “flash in the sky” report? Here’s the relevant section from the original UPI story:
A reporter for the Vineyard Gazette newspaper told WCVB-TV in Boston that he was out walking Friday night about the time of the crash and saw [a]"big white flash in the sky" off Philbin Beach.
At the time, I had just finished writing an article about a CIA operative who told the Church Committee that he was the guy who shot UN Secretary Dag Hammerskjold’s plane out of the sky for the CIA. He was asked to list six executive actions (E.A.’s), and this one was the one that bothered him the most. (Hammarskjold was backing Patrice Lumumba at the time the CIA was trying to kill Lumumba. The CIA viewed Hammarskjold as standing in the way of their, i.e. the business interests of America’s, control of the mineral-rich regions in the Congo.) In a letter to the Church Committee (source: Church Committee files, not online), Culligan wrote:
The E.A. involving Hammarskjold was a bad one. I did not want the job. Damn it, I did not want the job.... I intercepted D.H’s trip at Ndola, No. Rhodesia (now Zaire). Flew from Tripoli to Abidjian to Brazzaville to Ndola, shot the airplane, it crashed, and I flew back, same way.... I went to confession after Nasser and I swore I would never again do this work. And I never will.
I don't know whether Culligan was telling the truth or not. I only know that the notion of a plane being shot down was very much on my mind at the time John Kennedy Jr.’s plane went down.

It was also nearly three years to the day when TWA Flight 800 had gone down in nearly the same area on July 17, 1996. Many researchers who have looked into that case have concluded that the official story is a lie, and that a missile brought the plane down.

So what should we make of the incident with Ted Kennedy? There are three possibilities: 1)the official story is 100% true; or 2) the official story is partly true, but incomplete - lightning did the damage, but only because the lightning protection had been compromised; or 3) The official story is false, and something other than lightning caused the total power failure.

I’m not trying to inject a wild conspiracy theory here. I’m trying to show that there are other possible explanations, and we should be able to rule them out satisfactorily before we simply accept the first explanation given. If journalists thought more like conspiracy theorists, they would do a better job. They’d ask the questions necessary to confirm or dispel forever such notions.

I heard at one point an unconfirmed report that Ted Kennedy was supposed to be on Paul Wellstone’s plane when it crashed, but that Kennedy, for whatever reason, had chosen to fly separately. (Kennedy was in the state campaigning for Wellstone, and early reports indicated that Kennedy may have been on the plane. Fortunately, he wasn’t.)

What is it with Ted Kennedy and planes?

Ted Kennedy nearly lost his life in a plane crash in 1964, less than a year after his brother had been assassinated. (Two others on the plane did die, and Kennedy’s back was broken.) The famous Senator has also been detained at the airport when his name turned up, inexplicably, on a Homeland Security terrorist watchlist. Even as a United States Senator, and an extremely famous one at that, it took Kennedy several weeks to get the matter straightened out. (He feared for the rest of us, who are not as famous or powerful.) And ironically, Ted's oldest brother Joe died when his plane exploded due to electrical emissions.

The peril of combining politics with small planes was not lost on Rep. Sherrod Brown’s wife:

When Rep. Sherrod Brown proposed to Connie Schultz, she accepted with one condition: If the Ohio Democrat ever ran for statewide office, he must vow never to fly on small private planes.

"I said, 'I'm not going to marry you and have you go down on one of those planes,' " Schultz said.
Planes and politics are unfortunate bedfellows. Given that flying in small ones is a necessary part of politics, we should always press for complete and honest investigations of any incident that robs us, or could have robbed us, of our vote.

That's what happens when a politician is killed in the line of duty. Our vote becomes negated.

We should care. We must care. We must ask the difficult questions and try to get honest answers as to what happened in such cases. I'm not convinced that's been done in this case yet.

Why illegal NSA taps on Americans must be opposed

I'm shocked to hear that 2/3 of Americans don't mind if their phones are tapped illegally in the fight against terrorism. Let me give you some reasons why you should absolutely care.

1. Any time we say the law doesn't matter, we slide towards dictatorship.

2. There are legal ways for the government to obtain permission to tap anyone's phone. That legal method, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). FISA came about in the wake of the Church and Pike Committee investigations of the intelligence agencies in the 1970s, where the CIA and FBI were found to be spying on Americans because they represented a political threat to their interests, not a physical threat to Americans. We can't go back to the pre-FISA lack of oversight, as that led to egregious abuses to people's privacy.

3. Your phone calls can and will be used against you. If you think that, just because you are a law-abiding citizen you have nothing to fear, think again. If your politics don't exactly match those of the president, you could be targeted for harassment, or have your vote selectively erased, or have your taxes selectively audited because when you allow unmonitored, unpermissioned surveillance, you're basically unlocking the door to the henhouse in front of the fox.

4. What would you say if you found out the White House had monitored Kerry's phone conversations in order to best defeat him in the last election? That's what this is about. I don't know if that happened. I simply know it could have happened. No one would have given Bush the legal authority to tap a political opponent. But since the Bush administration claims the law doesn't apply to them, what's to stop them? Absolutely power corrupts absolutely.

5. See the film V for Vendetta to understand the type of society we are becoming when we allow the party in power to break the law in the name of protecting our security.

6. The parallels between the acts of the Bush administration and Nazi Germany are frightening. People there were persuaded to give up their freedoms for security, protection against their version of the war on terror, which became a war on Communism. When more and more labor was needed to support the machine of perpetual war, the Jews became the sacrifice that Germany was willing to pay to support its empire. Jews were imprisoned and used as slave labor in concentration camps. In V for Vendetta, homosexuals and Muslims were the sacrificial lambs. What would it be in America? Aren't liberals the most undersirable people to the ruling elite? You have more to fear from your own government than you have to fear from terrorists when the government is given unaccountable power. In the film, V takes over the emergency broadcast system to invite the people of London to wake up:
...the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance, and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, think, and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillence coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic you turned to the [ruling leader]. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent.
We don't have a V. But we have a nearly parallel society to the one that created him (see the film for the reference.)

That's what Bush wants of you now. Your silent consent. In return, he offers you peace. But what kind of peace? A prison cell offers peace, safety, and security. But is that where you'd want to live?

Wake up, people.

As the wise Benjamin Franklin warned us, "Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both."