Danny's Weblog

2006 Feb 21 [ Tue ]

Was it even really possible for the towelheads to pilot the jets on 9/11?

Well, 9/11 is a long time ago now, and I guess we're never going to know the truth. I've considered posting links to new speculation probably fifty times, but what's the point? Most people have apparently decided it makes them too uncomfortable to think about the story the Feds put out – kinda like I gave up subscribing to "Reason" magazine because most of the stories made the veins stand out in my forehead.

Anyway. I had often wondered about what was *really* involved in getting three out of four planes to their targets (does anyone believe that the other one was *not* taken down by an inconvenient Air National Guard guy who *believed* the cover story?) – the *coordination* struck me as difficult (have you ever tried to fly someplace to meet someone flying there too?) – but this link has a lot of apparently knowledgeable arguments for why the reported level of flight training of the towelheads was *ludicrously* inadequate for their mission: www.propagandamatrix.com [http://www.propagandamatrix.com/articles/february2006/210206impossibility.htm]

This story about general 9/11 issues – why people ignore *basic* problems in the Feds' story – is also great: www.propagandamatrix.com [http://www.propagandamatrix.com/articles/february2006/200206questions.htm]

2005 Dec 04 [ Sun ]

Excellent summary for reasons why US Administration would fake 9/11

The article includes a great deal of well-attributed evidence for the argument that the USA was already planning to invade Afghanistan and Iraq long before 9/11, and that Rumsfeld and his buddies – you know, the whole "Project for a New American Century" thing – had specifically talked about a "New Pearl Harbor" as the opportunity to implement those plans.

www.globalresearch.ca [http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=GRI20051202&articleId=1391]

My own take on this is that the real players – the people we never see, unlike Rumsfeld – are playing a multiplex game. In order to attract Rumsfeld and big-money backers, the invasions were depicted as merely a cynical attempt to expand the US military and weaken Arabia. Rumsfeld may even still believe this.

But that's just one skin of the onion. If you had been trying to fight a war effectively, you would have let the experts handle things like low-intensity-conflict planning and the handling of suspects. Instead, I can only conclude that everything possible was done to shove a pointed stick in the eye of the Arab/Moslem public. We always knew that torturing suspects was not just ineffective, but counter-productive; worse (in my view) would be the corruption of the military. Remember, street cops were pulled off drug enforcement because practically all of them were corrupted, so vice departments were created so that only one branch of the police would be utterly corrupt. But the knowledge that one part of the army is torturing suspects destroys the morale of every soldier.

Likewise, the US Army was provisioned and set up in a way which surely was deliberately planned to maximize casualties and ensure that the Iraqi resistance would grow.

Still, the article makes it hard to continue to believe the *outer* skin of the onion.

2005 Nov 29 [ Tue ]

Was the invasion of Iraq stupid, or brilliantly successful?

As I've said before, there are two theories of history, either of which can explain anything: conspiracy, and stupidity.

For a long time, the liberal media have presented the actions of the USA as merely stupid: supporting tyrants, eliminating centrist politicians and movements, etc. I believed that too: at the time of the Vietnam War, I supported what I believed were the intentions of the USA, while opposing most of its actions as extremely unlikely to have the "desired" consequences.

I no longer believe it. I believe that the war in Iraq, and indeed the 9/11 disaster, were specifically planned to have all the results that have taken place: the utter destruction of the US Army, the isolation of the USA from the remaining members of the free world, the appallingly dangerous reliance of the economy on China's forbearance...

Here's someone who agrees with me: www.prisonplanet.com [http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/november2005/291105frogcooked.htm]

The police state in the USA is itself, I believe, just a means to an end: the destruction of the USA's economy and civil structure. Creating a torture-based army and a police state are intended to destroy the army and eliminate popular support for Congress. Hurricane Katrina was just an excuse to have foreign troops pointing guns at US citizens on US soil: it won't be the last time.

The same website as above has an article on the interesting 1980s movie "Red Dawn", in which the Soviets and Cubans (not I think Mexicans as the article suggests) invade part of the USA. The article stresses the analogy between the US resistance in the movie and the Iraqi resistance to the US today. I think the relevance of the movie to current events will soon beccome much more acute. www.prisonplanet.com [http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/november2005/281105reddawn.htm]

But *wny* does the USA's elite *want* to destroy the USA? I see it as another version of the Depression. In the Depression, the Federal Reserve encouraged banks to make unsafe loans, and then abruptly cut off the money supply. The result was that the American middle class, which had been watching its investments grow predictably, was suddenly faced with unemployment, and needed to cash in its investments when eveyrbody else was doing the same thing. The super-rich, easily able to ride out the storm, were able to buy up investments for pennies on the dollar. And the middle class – not to mention the ravaged, starving working class – were chastened by poverty and war, and were easily led away from their real enemy.

The same thing is going to happen, but it may well be that the super-rich have simply made some sort of deal with the Red Chinese (not so damned red any more), and there will just be a net transfer of all of the USA's wealth to Peking. (Then Thaksin's strategy of turning Thailand into a vacation resort area of China may pay off too.)

2005 Jul 08 [ Fri ]

The bombing attacks in London today

It reminds me of 9/11: once again, *someone* pulls off a propaganda coup, but somehow disdains to brag about it – there is a claim that it was carried out by a previously-unknown branch of Al Qaeda (and what is *that* really, anyway? More than a thoughtform?) but no evidence at all.

This guy is sure that Blair did it himself: www.propagandamatrix.com [http://www.propagandamatrix.com/articles/july2005/070705terrorcard.htm]

Both Tony Blair and George Bush in their speeches have tried to paint the attacks as an assault on globalization and the G8 itself. That means that if you're against the G8 and globalization, then you're with the terrorists! It's a tried and tested method that they've used time and time before.

2005 Apr 05 [ Tue ]

Was evidence to support FedGov's 9/11 theory manufactured?

My own theory is that the majority of conspiracy theories are created by FedGov in order to confuse and discredit.

Still, I've seen a lot of pages which make me wonder whether anyone has really verified even the most basic elements of the FedGov story. For instance, this page says that one engine stated in a Popular Mechanics article as having been found at the NYC crash site has never been fitted in the planes which "were involved": www.rense.com [http://www.rense.com/general63/wtcc.htm]

Of course, FedGov could make such conspiracy theories much more difficult to promote if it didn't have a habit of seizing all the evidence (along with cameras and cameramen) first, and finally admitting months later that the evidence has been lost or crushed or burned (eg Waco).

"You know, Mrs Maloney, you're the only person who says that there were two men renting that truck. The only person. We'd have to wonder why a person would say a thing like that, wouldn't we? We'd have to ask ourselves, is there anything strange about Mrs Maloney? Or someone in her family? Let's just correct that statement, before we all have to divert the course of the investigation for no reason."

2005 Jan 29 [ Sat ]

Someone agrees with me about the Star Wars/ Bush regime analogy

Some time ago I suggested that Lucas's strange preoccupation with murky conspiracy theories in his movies was an attempt to put his theories about the collapse of the US on the screen.

Someone agrees with me that the analogy is clear:

Since Palpatine is the Emperor, how can he be on both sides?

Palpatine is creating a war situation to allow him to seize tighter control and disband the senate. This is a fairly unoriginal trick amongst politicians (see Margret Thatcher in the UK and George W. Bush in the US for real life examples - although they were both a bit less blatant about it). Palpatine's minions are running the separatist movement, under his orders.

slashdot.org [http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=137581&cid=11504479]

Another voice:

When I was growing up 20 years ago, the U. S. was the ultimate "good guy" nation. Now, none of us (outside the U. S.) know who the good guys really are anymore. Many of us expect the U. S. to turn on the rest of us merely out of its own self interest, even if it's against its own self-proclaimed principles to do so. Within the U. S., it seems like many people also worry about whether their own government will turn on them some day.

Movies tend to mirror the ideas and fears of the time when they are made. These movies are no exception.

slashdot.org [http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=137581&cid=11504676]

2005 Jan 23 [ Sun ]

H. G. Wells and the invasion of Iraq part deux

I previously posted an article which made the point that the current debacle in Iraq was well understood so long ago that it must have been deliberate: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Opinions/Politics/Attack911/thewarintheair01.html]

Since then I have realized that I should have made a few more points.

1. Wells, of course, was a genius. When he wrote "The War in the Air", probably nobody but him had ever wondered whether the blind force of technology would utterly change the dynamics of interstate conflicts, which previously had been largely self-limiting. When I make the point that the Bush administration *must* have *planned* for the current situation, I do not mean to suggest that they must therefore have read "The War in the Air". It simply happens to be (as far as I know) the first verifiable statement of the effect. There have been *many*, even more convincing, corollaries since.

2. Wells tended to believe that many bad things happen because of men's stupidity. The 20th century however warns us that there are plenty of people who are so evil that they will knowingly create a situation in which millions die a miserable death merely in order to create a temporary advantage for themselves. I included the lengthy musings about the German's girlfriend and his shattered hopes for the future not because I agree with Wells that the Bush administration is stupid, but because it depicts the supine acceptance of modern society that incredibly bad things happen but somehow nobody is responsible.

3. From that point of view, the following excerpt, which I quote again, is thus a warning:

"And it's always been so . it's the way of life. People are torn away from the people they care for; homes are smashed, creatures full of life, and memories, and little peculiar gifts are scalded and smashed, and torn to pieces, and starved, and spoilt. London! Berlin! San Francisco! Think of all the human histories we ended in New York!. And the others go on again as though such things weren't possible. As I went on! Like animals! Just like animals."

Like animals, we are supposed to fight and die for people and causes that we care nothing about: like an Apache's horse, we are expected to charge into a Gatling gun. And it seems, we continue to do so.

2005 Jan 19 [ Wed ]

H. G. Wells and the invasion of Iraq

One of Wells' most prophetic books was "The War in the Air". Published in 1907, it describes a world a few decades in the future, in which advances in aircraft technology combine with the nature of modern technology and societies to create a global war which shatters all civilization.

Some excerpts:

Chapter 6

The difficulty of the Germans in both these cases came from the impossibility of landing any efficient force or, indeed, any force at all from the air-fleet. The airships were quite unequal to the transport of any adequate landing parties; their complement of men was just sufficient to manoeuvre and fight them in the air. From above they could inflict immense damage; they could reduce any organised Government to a capitulation in the briefest space, but they could not disarm, much less could they occupy, the surrendered areas below. They had to trust to the pressure upon the authorities below of a threat to renew the bombardment. It was their sole resource. No doubt, with a highly organised and undamaged Government and a homogeneous and well-disciplined people that would have sufficed to keep the peace. But this was not the American case. Not only was the New York Government a weak one and insufficiently provided with police, but the destruction of the City Hall – and Post-Offide and other central ganglia had hopelessly disorganised the co-operation of part with part. The street cars and railways had ceased; the telephone service was out of gear and only worked intermittently. The Germans had struck at the head, and the head was conquered and stunned – only to release the body from its rule. New York had become a headless monster, no longer capable of collective submission. Everywhere it lifted itself rebelliously; everywhere authorities and officials left to their own imitative were joining in the arming and flag-hoisting and excitement of that afternoon.

Chapter 7

"And it's always been so – it's the way of life. People are torn away from the people they care for; homes are smashed, creatures full of life, and memories, and little peculiar gifts are scalded and smashed, and torn to pieces, and starved, and spoilt. London! Berlin! San Francisco! Think of all the human histories we ended in New York!... And the others go on again as though such things weren't possible. As I went on! Like animals! Just like animals."

...

"She was beautiful and daring and shy, Mein Gott! I can hardly hold myself for the desire to see her and hear her voice again before I die. Where is she?... Look here, Smallways, I shall write a sort of letter – And there's her portrait." He touched his breast pocket.

"You'll see 'er again all right," said Bert.

"No'! I shall never see her again.... I don't understand why people should meet just to be torn apart. But I know she and I will never meet again. That I know as surely as that the sun will rise, and that cascade come shining over the rocks after I am dead and done.... Oh! It's all foolishness and haste and violence and cruel folly, stupidity and blundering hate and selfish ambition – all the things that men have done – all the things they will ever do. Gott! Smallways, what a muddle and confusion life has always been – the battles and massacres and disasters, the hates and harsh acts, the murders and sweatings, the lynchings and cheatings. This morning I am tired of it all, as though I'd just found it out for the first time. I HAVE found it out. When a man is tired of life, I suppose it is time for him to die. I've lost heart, and death is over me. Death is close to me, and I know I have got to end. But think of all the hopes I had only a little time ago, the sense of fine beginnings!... It was all a sham. There were no beginnings.... We're just ants in ant-hill cities, in a world that doesn't matter; that goes on and rambles into nothingness. New York – New York doesn't even strike me as horrible. New York was nothing but an ant-hill kicked to pieces by a fool!"

...

The special peculiarities of aerial warfare were of such a nature as to trend, once it had begun, almost inevitably towards social disorganisation. The first of these peculiarities was brought home to the Germans in their attack upon New York; the immense power of destruction an airship has over the thing below, and its relative inability to occupy or police or guard or garrison a surrendered position. Necessarily, in the face of urban populations in a state of economic disorganisation and infuriated and starving, this led to violent and destructive collisions, and even where the air-fleet floated inactive above, there would be civil conflict and passionate disorder below. Nothing comparable to this state of affairs had been known in the previous history of warfare, unless we take such a case as that of a nineteenth century warship attacking some large savage or barbaric settlement, or one of those naval bombardments that disfigure the history of Great Britain in the late eighteenth century. Then, indeed, there had been cruelties and destruction that faintly foreshadowed the horrors of the aerial war. Moreover, before the twentieth century the world had had but one experience, and that a comparatively light one, in the Communist insurrection of Paris, 1871, of the possibilities of a modern urban population under warlike stresses.

My point here is that the current guerilla war in Iraq is nothing strange. It was foreseen by Wells in every detail, although amusingly the outraged invasion victims in his version are New Yorkers. In other words the people who set up the Iraq invasion plan would not have been just stupid to plan for anything different they would have had to be *imbecilic*.

In other words the Bush administration *wanted* what they now have – a forever war which they can use to destroy the United States.

2005 Jan 13 [ Thu ]

Did the Supreme Court really fight back against the Bush administration?

In a previous posting I expressed some relief at recent decisions by the Supreme Court (etc) re the Bush administration's Soviet-style tactics: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Opinions/Politics/Attack911/guantanamo03.html]

I have now found the following article on Reason's website which takes the view that the Supreme Court exaggerated the effect of its rulings, and in fact provided a blank check to Bush's goons: www.reason.com [http://www.reason.com/0501/fe.hs.civil.shtml]

2004 Nov 23 [ Tue ]

A little less hope for the USA

Apparently the US has secretly embedded functions in laser printers for 20 years to ensure that documents can be tracked back to the printer: yro.slashdot.org [http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/04/11/22/2327254.shtml]

After much discussion of the similarity to the situation in the Soviet Union, where typewriters had to be registered so that samizdat could be tracked, I liked the following:

Re:In the old Soviet Union (Score:5, Insightful) by mdielmann (514750) on Monday November 22, @07:33PM (#10893766) (slashdot.org [http://slashdot.org/)] yro.slashdot.org [http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=130542&cid=10893766]

No.

The USSR was doing this 30+ years ago. They collapsed 13 years ago (1991). Total span of 17+ years.

The U. S started doing this 20 years ago. We only found out now. So, by the USSR model, it should be collapsing anytime now. Now take a look around and ask yourself, "Is this the America I grew up reading about?"

In some ways, the US has already collapsed. Only Fedgov remains.

A little hope for the USA

One of the most horrible things about what has happened in the USA since 9/11 is the utterly supine response of the media and other branches of the government to the ghastly Stalinist abuses by the Bush administration. It reminds me of the old joke: "If I say a sheep has wings, and you see a sheep with no wings, what would it be? ...It would still be a goddam sheep because I just said a goddam stupid thing". Why does the magic phrase "enemy combatants" suddenly mean the US can ignore the Geneva convention, not to mention its own traditions of fairness and humanity?

So I was very relieved to hear that a federal judge had decided to halt the trial of a Guantanomo Bay prisoner because he had been denied a fair hearing: washingtontimes.com [http://washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20041121-105704-1644r.htm]

I actually delayed posting this for several days (the decision was on 2004-11-08) because I was afraid that the Bush administration would wave a magic wand (Shazam! Patriot! Terrorists! Gah! Boo!) and the Supreme Court would roll over. Well, it hasn't happened yet.

Incidentally, my link is to the Washington Times, generally a very right-wing paper. Left-wing opponents to the Bush administration should understand that there are plenty of *right*-wingers who don't want a police state, either. (You remember how right-wing nuts used to say the US was going to be occupied by the UN? I thought that could never happen, but that was before the US became a rogue state.)

2004 Sep 26 [ Sun ]

The hostage murders in Iraq, and the Star Wars Deathstar

In the following discussion on Slashdot, people argue about the morality of what happened to the *contract building workers* aboard the *second* Deathstar when it got blown up: slashdot.org [http://slashdot.org/articles/04/09/24/2221203.shtml]

Apparently this issue is not new: it seems to have been first referred to in a scene from "Clerks". But I hadn't thought about it before, and clearly it now has resonance with the plight of the kidnapped contract workers in Iraq. People who think "Star Wars" is kid stuff may be right, but this issue is very illuminating about the way "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter".

One Slashdot poster seems to think there is an absolute definition of the word "terrorist" which everyone can rely on. That is hardly the case. Even if there were such a definition, it can hardly be the one which most people follow.

The best example of this comes from WW2. The Allies repeatedly sent materials and assistance to "resistance" fighters all over occupied Europe. In the cases where local communists did not immediately identify them to the Nazis, they committed many assaults which the Nazis certainly deemed to be terrorism, eg the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. www.brainyencyclopedia.com [http://www.brainyencyclopedia.com/encyclopedia/r/re/reinhard_heydrich.html]

You probably smile when you read that because you have been programmed to believe that everything the Nazis said was per se evil. Personally, I smiled when I read a news report about attacks on Iraqis lined up to apply for jobs with the police, which suggested that this was terrorism. What would we have said about the Polish resistance attacking a line of Jews applying for jobs working for the SS?

The result was that the Wehrmacht viewed Allied servicemen captured while working with resistance groups to be "unlawful combatants", without the support of the Geneva convention. Again you laugh, because you think the Nazis were always as evil as they could possibly be, but I think that if you were an Allied serviceman captured during WW2 under normal circumstances you would be very glad of the distinction between your treatment and the treatment meted out to captured commandos. In other words, the Nazis certainly believed in the distinction themselves. One can hardly argue that their grasp of the distinction was any less secure than that displayed by Bomber Harris.

The really interesting thing is that Hitler had very good legal justification for this: the Geneva convention specifically requires fighting men to follow certain rules, not only rules to protect others, but also rules which allow them to be *defined* as legal combatants. In particular they are required to wear uniform at all times. In addition however, they are required not to encourage civilians to act as combatants – for the obvious reason that doing so makes the other power forced to regard civilians as at least potential combatants. So almost any soldier taking part in a joint operation with the "resistance" was per se breaking the terms of the Geneva Convention.

One Slashdot poster quoted the following definition of terrorism from the US State Dept, in response to someone who posted "The whole concept of "terrorism" is being used now a magical incantation invoked against convenient targets."

I really don't know where you get that idea. It's simply not true. I quote from the State Department's annual "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report:

"The term terrorism means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.

"The term international terrorism means terrorism involving citizens or the territory of more than one country.

"The term terrorist group means any group practicing, or that has significant subgroups that practice, international terrorism.

"The US Government has employed this definition of terrorism for statistical and analytical purposes since 1983."

Personally, I wonder about the significance of the clause "subnational groups or clandestine agents". Does that mean that national groups (like the USA or Russia) using non-clandestine agents (the FBI and the FSB) by definition cannot commit terrorism? The courts who let the BATF and FBI walk away from Waco seemed to think so.

2004 Sep 12 [ Sun ]

Osama Bin Laden is Emmanuel Goldstein

Last night it occurred to me that Osama neatly corresponds to Emmanuel Goldstein – the reviled anti-government leader and thinker in Orwell's "1984", who turns out to have been invented by the government itself.

Irritatingly, when I Googled today, it turns out that this occurred to a number of people way before it occurred to me:

www.investigatemagazine.com [http://www.investigatemagazine.com/_NEWSTALK/000008d9.htm]

Of course, Osama does seem to have been an actual person who existed at one time. However his current significance is as a thoughtform.

2004 Sep 01 [ Wed ]

Suicide bombers and their advantages

Maybe I'm naive, but I can't remember thinking until now that the great advantage of suicide bombers is that nobody can ever interview them to find out what they thought they were trying to achieve. Or who they thought they were working for.

I'm pretty sure it's occurred to the FSB though. "Blow yourself up or watch us beat your family to death." Hmmm, I'm thinking, I'm thinking.

I do remember wondering why terrorists seem to have stopped claiming responsibility – or if they do it's an organization with no identifiable platform or following. In the case of the Chechens, for instance, they routinely *deny* responsibility, but the world ignores that. In the old days you had to infiltrate an anti-government organization with agents provocateurs, who had to invest months of effort into making the organization do something stupid. Now you can cut out the middleman: another example of the 20th century's advances in political technology.

2004 Jul 23 [ Fri ]

Doubts about the recently-released video showing 9-11 hijackers

I have heard about this video but have not actually seen it. I would assume that even if it had been faked it would probably have been well faked and nothing could be deduced from it.

whatreallyhappened.com however points out that the tape shows no date/time, nor a code identifying the camera (usually a security tv installation monitors multiple cameras, so you need a code to be sure which camera you're viewing). Also, they think the big white things you can see in these shots are bomb detection units, which "were not in use on 9-11". Hmmm.

www.whatreallyhappened.com [http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/hijackers_video.html]

2004 Jun 26 [ Sat ]

The name "Al Qaeda" chosen by someone not native Arab speaker?

According to the following link, the word "Al Qaeda", coming from a base word meaning "sit", is commonly used to refer to a toilet: prisonplanet.tv [http://prisonplanet.tv/articles/june2004/062504manufacturedfront.htm]

So that writer argues that the person who picked that name was not a native speaker of Arabic, which seems a reasonable conclusion to me. (Although I must admit many have derided Bill Gates for naming his company after the state of his organ.)

2004 May 07 [ Fri ]

Interesting paranoid take on Al Qaeda

This is why Osama looked so much like just a fundraiser up until recently.

slashdot.org [http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=106695&cid=9080221]

On the other hand, 9/11 COULD have been prevented.

slashdot.org [http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=106695&cid=9080966]

Oh heck, the enire thread's not bad – although depressing, of course. Anything about the %#$&! Patriot Act is depressing. Whole thread: slashdot.org [http://slashdot.org/articles/04/05/06/2247206.shtml]

Another quote:

Re:What's the problem here? (Score:5, Funny)) by petabyte (238821) on Thursday May 06, @09:07PM slashdot.org [http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=106695&cid=9079392]

Actually, the best quote of that I saw (I believe I saw it as someone's sig here) was:

Welcome to America, Land of the Free*

*Some restrictions apply, void where prohibited.

And finally, too long, too Christian, but what the hey.

If I were king... (Score:5, Interesting) by rice_burners_suck (243660) on Thursday May 06, @09:51PM (#9079679) slashdot.org [http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=106695&cid=9079679] (slashdot.org [http://slashdot.org/] | Last Journal: Thursday December 04, @10:24PM)

If I were the king of my own country, I would set things up as follows: First of all, my government's power would not be the product of my people, but rather would be the product of myself. Freedom would be a priveledge extended by the state, not by the Almighty Creator. In fact, if any religious propaganda, such as a plaque of the Ten Commandments, be found anywhere, said propaganda would immediately be removed.

Second, everybody would be my slave. Nobody would be allowed to do anything without government approval in the form of licenses (from driver licenses to business permits to rental unit occupation permits), because otherwise they would be considered terrorists and would have all of their property seized for my use.

Third, a tax system would be put into effect to steal half of everybody's income, from a numeric standpoint. I would pass legislation to make it extremely difficult to purchase and own property, and renters would be affected by high prices because their landlords would similarly have to make ends meet. Thus, with this tax system and property ownership legislation, both parents would have to work very hard to feed their children, and would be so concerned with making ends meet that they would ignore the above, because there are more pressing matters (food) to worry about. (The same tax system would further benefit me by providing detailed information, down to the finest detail, of everybody's business, because they would need to detail the source of every penny of income, and back it up with evidence. Failure to do this would constitute a felony, and would be selectively enforced to strike fear into peoples' hearts.) To steal the other half of everybody's money, the money itself would not be backed by anything of value. Thus it would be easy to continuously print money, thereby constantly increasing the total amount in circulation. This way, my government would steal the peoples' money, without reducing the amount they have from a numeric standpoint, by stealing the value of their money.

Fourth, the educational system would basically turn out people who can barely read, so they won't be smart enough to figure out what I'm doing to them.

Fifth, there would be propaganda all over the place telling people how free they are, etc.

That's how I'd run a government, if I were the king of my own country.

2004 Apr 30 [ Fri ]

The ACLU fights in a secret court

Thanks to the Patriot Act, the ACLU had to file a lawsuit in secret.

Slashdot discussion: yro.slashdot.org [http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/04/04/29/204201.shtml]

I liked a lot of the comments.I particularly liked some comments about the ACLU's selective support for the Bill of Rights: the ACLU leaves out the 2nd amendment (freedom to bear arms) and the 9th amendment (rights not explicitly...).

I also liked an exchange where one poster said the new laws were reminiscent of Nazi Germany and the USSR, and another poster said "well youre still free to say that, right?" and someone else responded:

[He] pointed out that we no longer have 4 freedoms that are arguably essential to keeping this country free, but you pointed out we still have one, so we shouldn't be worried at all? Did I understand your argument correctly?

It is absolutely amazing to me that the US media doesn't make more of this story. On the one hand, it makes me think that the ACLU really is fighting the good fight. On the other hand, it is truly frightening.

2004 Apr 25 [ Sun ]

Ted Koppel on the dangers of the Patriot Act

I had been under the impression that the US media – certainly including the New York Times – had completely rolled over when it was faced with the Bush administration's elimination of civil liberties. It seems from the following page that Ted Koppel at least tried to ask some hard questions: www.onlisareinsradar.com [http://www.onlisareinsradar.com/archives/001699.php]

I have no particular love for Ted Koppel. I don't think he's a very effective interviewer: he reminds me of the English phrase "like being savaged by a dead sheep" (not a reference to undead mutant flesh-eating sheep, btw, although it would make Koppel much more worth watching). Still, it seems at least he tried.

2004 Apr 15 [ Thu ]

The proceedings of the 9/11 commission

I have not been paying much attention to what happens in the 9/11 hearings because I assumed that any real revelations would have been decided on in advance in backroom deals. It reminds me of the controversy about the Bush "election": it was repeatedly suggested that in order to achieve fairness in eg Supreme Court deliberations, it was necessary to ensure that the committees had equal numbers of Dems and Reps – but who was there to defend the interests of anyone *but* the two Tweedledum and Tweedledee parties?

Still, it just amazes me that anyone can observe the format without laughing. (It's like watching a Soviet show trial, except you're still allowed to laugh. For another couple of years.) Bush demands to know the questions in advance. Rice stonewalls and answers no questions, at inordinate length. People sit there and read speeches which nobody listens to.

The worst thing is the absolute refusal to take responsibility: "yes, it was my job to keep Americans safe. They died so I did a bad job. It was my fault and I'm sorry". Instead, they say "we increased our counterterrorism budget by 19 per cent over the last Clinton budget, so of course we did our job. Now of course we need much more money. And now you know how important it is to eliminate civil liberties, or else the terrorists have won".

There is absolutely nobody in the Bush administration, the Justice Dept, the Pentagon or Congress who is protecting the American people. A couple of times I've heard the idea that the US military are the men who stand watch at night so that we can sleep, and it's actually moved me. But now they are part of the problem.

2004 Mar 10 [ Wed ]

The movie "The Long Kiss Goodnight"

Made in 1996 this is a competent enjoyable action flick about a housewife who discovers that before she lost her memory she was a trained assassin.

When I watched it again on cable last night I was struck by some dialog that had meant nothing to me when I originally saw it.

"Rogue" CIA honcho planning a conspiracy: "Unfortunately I have no idea how to fake killing 4000 people". (Ie for the conspiracy they have to kill 4000 Americans for real.)

A second or two later he says "Then blame it on the Moslems, naturally".

This certainly has a different ring after 9/11, doesn't it?

It could have been just a wacky scriptwriter. He certainly managed some more good lines. I really like this one from a wounded bad guy to his boss on the cellphone: "Sir, I'm hurt real bad. I think I'm dying". Head bad guy considers optimum response and says "Continue dying. Out".

Here's a link to a standard synopsis: movies2.nytimes.com [http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=136811]

Here's a link to a review which points out the 9/11 connection: www.threemoviebuffs.com [http://www.threemoviebuffs.com/reviews/longkissgoodnight.php]

Here's an explicit conspiracy theorist: www.mhvf.net [http://www.mhvf.net/forum/cult/posts/20150.html]

In general, I have always thought that the 9/11 plan was *ludicrously* over-elaborate. Look at what the Moslems *actually* do: they strap explosives on fools and send them to a checkpoint. 9/11 always seemed much more like an episode of "Mission Impossible" to me, than like anything practical. As I've said before it would need East Germans to make that ridiculous plot work. The acme of Moslem civilization is selling you a carpet.

It's like the way weapons systems end up after the Pentagon scrutinizes them for 15 years: with tailfins, power steering, whitewalls and the full underseal package. You need about a hundred majors working late nights at the Pentagon for months to pull off 9/11.

Plus one "think tank" guy who catches a movie on cable.

2004 Mar 06 [ Sat ]

Bizarro cartoon about the "War Against Terrorism"

There's a regular single-panel cartoon by the artist "Bizarro" in my newspaper.

The one dated "3-6-04" (ie 2004-03-06) shows a political rally for cavemen, and the candidate's speech ballon is "My opponent doesn't even BELIEVE in the BOGEYMAN! How is he going to protect you from him?" The caption is "TIME TESTED CAMPAIGN TACTICS".

I think the Nazis were famous for using the "fear of the bogeyman". One reason I thought the USA was better than the Nazis was they didn't use Nazi tactics. What a sap I was.

2004 Feb 25 [ Wed ]

What did Osama bin Laden actually *say* his motives were?

Television, Time and Newsweek have shown us ten thousand times images of Osama gravely sitting next to his AK74, and Bush telling us Osama is out to destroy our liberties (pot calling the kettle black there George?). But it's interesting: I don't remember seeing Osama's actual words anywhere.

Somebody on Slashdot has posted a link:

Al Qaida has won... ARGH!!! (Score:5, Informative) by afxgrin (208686) on Tuesday February 24, @10:27PM (#8382200) (www.geocities.com [http://www.geocities.com/afxgrin/)] They never said they hate the idea of a free, tolerant, pluralistic society - they hate the result brought to them because of it....

Did ANYONE EVER read the letter from Bin Laden to the "United States".

Here's an article observer.guardian.co.uk [http://observer.guardian.co.uk/worldview/story/0,11581,845725,00.html] from the Observer containing the full translated text.

Here's some key pieces of the text for those who are too lazy to click on the link:

Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:

(1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.

a) You attacked us in Palestine:

(i) Palestine, which has sunk under military occupation for more than 80 years. The British handed over Palestine, with your help and your support, to the Jews, who have occupied it for more than 50 years; years overflowing with oppression, tyranny, crimes, killing, expulsion, destruction and devastation. The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals. And of course there is no need to explain and prove the degree of American support for Israel. The creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased. Each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution towards this crime must pay its*price, and pay for it heavily.

And here's a part regarding liberty and freedom...

(3) You may then dispute that all the above does not justify aggression against civilians, for crimes they did not commit and offenses in which they did not partake:

(a) This argument contradicts your continuous repetition that America is the land of freedom, and its leaders in this world. Therefore, the American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their own free will; a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies. Thus the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment and expulsion of the Palestinians. The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their Government and even to change it if they want.

Again, it's out of context, you need to read the letter to understand the point he's making. I don't necessarily agree with what he's saying, but let's get the facts straight. It's not that they hate a free society, but they hate the fact that this free society allowed the oppression they've supposedly felt.

I have a feeling that if history occured differently, there would be a bit more acceptance for the things he argues against later in the letter (such as gambling, drug use, ... things he considers sins against Allah). If you read the whole letter you'll notice a lot of it has to do with Palestine....

Actually, of course, I'm far too paranoid to believe that American liberties are really getting restricted because of these quoted beliefs at all. Instead, I imagine some drone deep in an unmarked building in Virginia carefully assembling a list of Arabist arguments which might sound semi-plausible if the US ever needs to invent a foe. Every couple of years the dust gets blown off the plans, and the current references are updated. Eventually someone calls for document 2015-3-4298 (rev. 87)...

2004 Jan 27 [ Tue ]

US Federal judge rules some parts of Patriot Act unconstitutional

Slashdot discussion: developers.slashdot.org [http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/04/01/26/135241.shtml]

Good quote:

it's been interesting to see (Score:4, Insightful) by my sig is bigger tha (682562) on Monday January 26, @06:01PM (#8093744)

all the hoopla go from fighting drugs, and the laws getting passed be about controlling drugs, to now being about terrorism...

the laws continue to be about controlling us, only the rationale changes.

Many people have made the point that these new laws actually wouldn't have prevented even what's supposed to have happened on 9/11, much less anything more clever. But they are highly effective in controlling ordinary US citizens.

2004 Jan 24 [ Sat ]

9/11 passenger jets had fly-by-wire?

I remember reading that the 9/11 jets were unusual in having full fly-by-wire capability, but could not find a reference. Clearly, the option of piloting the planes by remote control opens up a lot of possibilities.

Here's an article which refers to this issue: www.propagandamatrix.com [http://www.propagandamatrix.com/planes_of_911_exceeded_their_software_limits]

He also claims that since the manual controls limit maneouvres to 1.5 g, and we can calculate the final turn of the Pentagon attack plane at between 5 and 7 gs, we can be sure that that plane at least *was* running fly-by-wire. (Hmm... later he abandons that argument.)

The link includes many very interesting responses, some of which say he doesn't know what he's talking about, and some of which tend to confirm his points.

In particular, it seems to be very implausible that cellphone communication can work reliably from a plane: one of the calls was reported to have lasted 20 mins.

2004 Jan 21 [ Wed ]

We'll never come in your mouth

When amazon.com started to get popular, I was wary. Only after several years did I set up an account and order a couple of things. I checked their privacy policy and it seemed OK.

Shortly after I did so Amazon changed its privacy policy, with no fanfare. I happened to find out, although probably 95% of its customers never did. I found their explanation of the change: their policy specifically allowed them to change the policy at any time without notification.

Strangely enough, the government too has all-purpose escape clauses. It turns out now they just have to write "national security" on a piece of paper and put it in one of their files. *You* never find out. It's *illegal* to report it. If you try to oppose it you are harrassed every time you go through a secret-police checkpoint.

Do you remember how they said "everyone has to provide census data, and you can't claim it's an invasion of privacy because we will never release individual records". Well, they did, and not for a Clancy-style emergency mission to find nuclear terrorists, but just to trawl through the data. A quote:

Security officials estimate the error rate at 4 percent to 8 percent, which Mr. Steinhardt said "means 4 [million] to 8 million Americans will mistakenly be labeled as terrorists."

www.washtimes.com [http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040118-114335-2930r.htm]

2004 Jan 14 [ Wed ]

New US Passenger Risk Database

Slashdot discussion: yro.slashdot.org [http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/04/01/13/1951210.shtml]

Good posting about your rights and the effectiveness of mass screening: yro.slashdot.org [http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=92703&cid=7968010]

The only shortcoming of the above posting is that the poster seems to seriously believe that the aim of the system is atually to protect the public.

Funny parody of how an automated terrorist-threat-assessment system might actually work: yro.slashdot.org [http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=92703&cid=7967406]

2003 Dec 08 [ Mon ]

"What's puzzlin' you is the nature of my game"

In the sixties the term "fascist" was heavily overused, much as the term "liberal" had been in the fifties. If you wanted to cut funding to schools you were a fascist. If you wanted to restrict immigration you were a fascist. If you wanted standardized exams you were a fascist... and so on and on.

Perhaps that's why you don't hear it very much any more. It became associated with so much kneejerk namecalling that using it labelled the user more damningly than the usee.

The problem is, fascism is not ipso facto dead just because the term has fallen from currency. What are the actual requirements for using this term correctly?

I think anyone would agree that the two clearest exponents of fascism were Mussolini's Italy, where the word itself was coined, and Hitler's Germany. Mussolini's Italy these days is almost forgotten, or viewed as a trivial comic-opera beta version of Nazism, but as the movement grew it absorbed major elements of cultural trends which were important all over Europe for decades: certainly futurism, but also socialism and eugenics. For many years Mussolini's Italy was viewed as the real threat, and Hitler's National Socialism as a bunch of twits in silly uniforms.

Mussolini's Italy, indeed, was the first to channel patriotism into a drive for Lebensraum. His adventure in Abyssinia is forgotten today except to the Ethiopians and to lonely scriveners such as myself, but estimates of the Abyssinians wiped out in his campaigns of bombing and gassing civilians have ranged as high as ten million. The benefits of the campaign to the Italian people always seemed a little murky; the goal was more to convince the Italian people that they fitted into the nationalistic image presented to them of a dynamic, aggressive nation united in projecting its power against lesser peoples... and those peoples must be lesser because they were getting wiped out. And this was being done through the twenties, when the world had seemingly decided that the War to End War had ended satisfactorily, and there was *no reason whatsoever* for the Italian people to go to war except by choice.

Much later, after Italy had made such a piffling attempt to withstand the Allies, we have forgotten those fascists. What we remember now is the Nazis, and their uniforms, which have somehow transmuted into the essence of cool. Actually, the Nazis had plenty of uniforms which still look pretty silly today, but for some reason the mass media doesn't concentrate on them. The Nazis also had plenty of cool uniforms which don't get shown at all because they look much too much like our current uniforms. So when we think "fascism" we've been trained to think "can't say the word unless it really fits" and "gotta have jackboots and peaked caps".

So we blank out that word when we look at *almost anybody today*. And we don't think about the real dangers of fascism, how it actually worked and became successful.

It became successful by blaming an enemy for individual problems, and then became powerful by demanding more and more power to overcome the enemy, which by fighting back revealed itself as clearly more and more dangerous: and which showed that only the fascists were powerful enough, and determined enough, to keep us safe. In Nazi Germany, of course, the enemy was bolshevism, and the Germans had excellent reasons to believe that it was a genuine threat.

At the very beginning of Nazism, there was considerable disorder in Germany. But the Nazis took care to *foster* that disorder, in a weird sort of alliance with the bolshevists, whose own theory suggested that they would never gain power until the power of capitalism had been destroyed. The two of them ensured that any political meeting for any purpose would rapidly disintegrate into brickbats and smashed heads. That, and the inflation of the Mark, were sufficient to convince the German people that a strong man was necessary to save them.

Today, we really have no such excuse. There is no terrorist threat and never has been. When Putin says that a terrorist attack has taken place just before the election in order to disrupt it, who is stupid enough to believe him? The KGB he used to work for used to specialize in this sort of disinformation campaign, but he seems to have realized that logic is no longer necessary: there is now sufficient fear and hatred that people have only to hear the word terrorism and they respond appropriately. Really, who has the incentive to blow people up right before an election? The Chechens... or Putin's allies?

And murdering scum like Putin and the Chicoms are our allies, and have to have sweetheart deals from the US Congress.

And we support ramshackle autocracies like Saudi Arabia, which exists as a nation because of a stroke of the pen and hates everything the West used to stand for. Exactly why have we been doing this? "If they did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them."

I used to think it was strange that the USA, which is supposed to be Britain's closest ally, has provided so much firepower, logistics and intelligence support to the IRA. Well, I got fooled by the cover story... like the people who believe that the war in Iraq was about oil.

And Bush tells us that the war against terrorism will never end.

"What's my name... baby, what's my name (whoo whoo)..."

Suzanne Vega's "Night Vision"

Same as the old boss

Caesar's famous quote is "Gallia in tres partes divisa est" – "Gaul is divided into three parts". Another famous quote is "divide and conquer". If you can make the fools fight each other, you can control them with less expenditure.

This idea was a large part of the worldview depicted in Orwell's 1984. Despite the seeming omnipotence of Big Brother's state apparatus, it still took the trouble to present a somewhat plausible view of reality which required the citizen to owe allegiance to the state. Wars were manufactured, hopefully in far-away places, but perhaps you too might be sent to fight; the atrocities of the enemy were terrifying; the might of Big Brother was your only bulwark.

The state, indeed, took care to make it impossible for the citizen to examine the logic of the propaganda. Citizens were specifically required to forget that last week's enemy was this week's ally.

Orwell knew that process from the inside in more ways than one. He had volunteered to fight fascism in Spain and fought with the Communists; the Communists happily took advantage of the fighting to wipe out "class enemies". A little later the Ribbentrop/Molotov pact was (secretly) signed, and Communists were ordered to sabotage the Allies' war effort against the Nazis. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, alliances shifted again; this time England embraced the Soviets, and sent airplane and tank engines to help them, across the U-Boats swarming around Murmansk. All the manouvering, of course, was meaningless. Stalin, Hitler and Roosevelt were the same ruthless murderers they were before the fighting started. Churchill, and many of the hapless, shabby-suited intellectuals like Orwell who were caught up in his megalomania, cared nothing about England or its ideals, or its simple genius of well-lit streets and cosy pubs and Boy's Own Paper, that Orwell knew and loved (and despaired for). Years of war for Poland... and finally Poland is handed over as an afterthought to a more ghastly murderer than the original one. Orwell saw how Communist sympathizers and fellow travelers were able to accept their orders and put the total inversion of logic out of their minds.

I once believed a recommendation to read Anthony Powell's "Put Out More Flags", and put it aside halfway through in a fury. This might have been partly because I was currently serving in a unit similar to the one which Powell so mercilessly satirized, but also because I was perceiving the essentially collectivist slant of the analysis. Powell could not help but believe that only a mass movement could be effectual. The war, for him, would be wasted if the population was not regimented into a single mass, every man woman and child wearing khaki; that was their real aim, those socialist intellectuals. But it can only be achieved by stirring up hatred and war. And this century is going to be worse than the last one. (Powell is not normally counted as a socialist, but he was certainly collectivist: what they used to call a "right deviationist".)

2003 Dec 07 [ Sun ]

Inconsistencies in the accounts of Bush's actions on 9/11

The writer of the following article points out various inconsistencies in the reports of what Bush thought and did on 9/11: www.commondreams.org [http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0919-13.htm]

He mostly leaves unaddressed the question of what Bush, it would seem, actually did.

The result of the invasion of Afghanistan

It's certainly possible to argue that if a country A attacks another country B, and after the resulting war country A is left in ruins, them's the breaks. However, we weren't sold that proposition before the invasion of Afghanistan: we were told that the US invasion would relieve the citizens of a burdensome theocentric totalitarian state.

Well, John Pilger thinks the results are unimpressive: www.guardian.co.uk [http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,1044925,00.html]

2003 Nov 01 [ Sat ]

The dream of Ashcroft

From a Slashdot discussion about the detention by the Chicoms of a dissident: slashdot.org [http://slashdot.org/articles/03/10/31/1727201.shtml?tid=126&tid=153&tid=95&tid=99]

.."administrate and maintain order".. (Score:2, Funny) by burgburgburg (574866) on Friday October 31, @04:18PM (#7362536)

Can't you just see Ashcroft drooling at the possibilities? As he sits in a darkened room illuminated only by 1000 little monitors constantly shifting back and forth with the views of tens of thousands of video surveillance cameras around the country, as the muted audio from hundreds of roving wiretaps fills the air, can't you just see him leaping to his feet from his crouched position on the cold marble floor and screaming YES!.

Well, I can. I've got a secret surveillance camera watching him right now.

(Why did this posting only get rated "2"?)

2003 Oct 18 [ Sat ]

Guantanamo article in International Herald Tribune

On 2003-10-15, the IHT published an op-ed article by Charles Levendosky about the situation of the "detainees" at Guantanamo. He makes many points I agree with; he quotes third-hand reports of actual torture.

I just did a websearch and Levendosky has written a lot of Bush-bashing articles. I thought for a minute that that made the effect of such an article weaker, but on second thought it seems quite reasonable that most journalists, most people, have a threshold below which they cannot believe that their government is actually evil. Once that threshold has been crossed, you either continue to keep quiet (on the very reasonable assumption that speaking out will be bad for your health) or you start to see that same evil again and again in other actions by that government.

I've been noticing more and more anti-war articles in the IHT and Newsweek, but of course what I'm seeing is the American media directed at either cosmopolitan Americans or foreigners. (The Newsweek Asian edition is nothing like even the European edition, for instance.) For a grasp of whether the concerns over Bush administration policies are starting to affect the "heartland", I am reduced to doing a sort of traffic analysis on the Fox News channel. I figure that if they simply state the news in Bush administration terms, the heartland is quiescent. If they run opinion pieces attacking their opponents as traitors, the heartland is starting to ask inconvenient questions and Fox is running scared.

And Fox is running scared.

Still, I'm running considerably more scared than Fox! When I left the US, I felt like the Jew who left Germany after they smashed up *someone else's* storefront. Now a lot of people are looking at smashed storefronts.

2003 Oct 16 [ Thu ]

Can the US feel proud of Guantanamo Bay?

I don't think the American people have really woken up to how much world opinion has shifted against them since the invasion of Iraq.

But even back when Guantanamo was set up, the Bush regime already showed that it cared nothing about what naive people like me believed to be the American people's ideals of fairness and decency. Recently, the courts have ruled that since Guantanamo is not on what it narrowly likes to define as US territory, it is not subject to constitional protections of detainees.

That "defense" probably struck the current administration as a nifty plan. It struck me as a deliberate attempt to evade the law, in every significant way a far more damning admission of malicious intent than any individual beating death. We remember Clinton, not so much because he got a blowjob in the Oval Ofice (who wouldn't?) but because he blackguarded witnesses and said "I did *not* have *sex* with that woman". It was clear he had a deliberate plan to mislead – which for many people who are not obsessed with sex is something far worse than infidelity. (Clearly his infidelity made no apparent difference to his relationship with his wife.)

Here's a link to a TV interview on the BBC's regular "Hardtalk" program. Lyse Doucet interviews Clive Stafford Smyth, a campaigner for death-row inmates who has turned his attention to Guantanamo.

news.bbc.co.uk [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/hardtalk/3193650.stm]

Normally "Hardtalk" involves aggressive questioning intended to fluster the interviewee: conspiracy theorists (like myself) may wonder why Lyse Doucet treated Smyth so gently – but my impression is that Doucet is generally far less aggressive than Hardtalk's usual interviewer Tim Sebastian. He's profiled here:

news.bbc.co.uk [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/hardtalk/2000692.stm]

2003 Sep 27 [ Sat ]

Is "Total Information Awareness" really dead?

According to a Slashdot thread, the TIA program is offically dead.

However one poster found the following interesting quote from Rumsfeld in a previous incarnation:

Like the Office of Strategic Influence? (Score:5, Insightful) by I am Jack's username (528712) on Friday September 26, @08:47AM (#7062726) (jack.p5.org.uk [http://jack.p5.org.uk/index.en.html] | Last Journal: Wednesday February 20, @05:02PM)

"And then there was the office of strategic influence. [...] I went down that next day and said fine, if you want to savage this thing fine I'll give you the corpse. There's the name. You can have the name, but I'm gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have." - Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 2002-11-18, www.defenselink.mil [http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Nov2002/t11212002_t1118sd2.html] [defenselink.mil]

2003 Sep 26 [ Fri ]

What rationale could President Bush possibly have for 9/11?

Of course, most of the people who look at my website will think I'm completely nuts to consider this possibility. Still, the scenario is hardly new. The movie "Wag the Dog", for instance, is very similar, although the plan in the movie did not require the deaths of 3000 people.

But *why* did he do it?

One answer is contained in the quote below.

Re:Electronic Voting... (Score:1) by sl0ppy (454532) on Thursday September 25, @09:39AM (#7054189)

"... But they can rule by fraud, and by fraud eventually require access to the tools they need to finish the job of killing off the Constitution."

"What sort of tools?"

"More stringent security measures. Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood tests, and urinalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with a crime. A law making it unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest. Laws establishing detention camps for potential subversives. Gun control laws. Restrictions on travel. The assassinations, you see, establish the need for such laws in the public mind. Instead of realizing that there is a conspiracy, conducted by a handful of men, the people reason – or are manipulated into reasoning – that the entire populace must have its freedom restricted in order to protect the leaders. ..."

- Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson - The Eye in the Pyramid

"The Eye in the Pyramid" is a famous pseudofactual pastiche of every known conspiracy theory up the date it was written (pub. 1975). At the time, people had become aware of Cointelpro, the bombing of Cambodia and so forth, and were not afraid to criticize the feds. The above program to eliminate civil liberties was a straighforward extrapolation of then-current trends, applying the cynical ruthlessness of bolshevism to the US context. Except for substituting "terrorism" for "assassinations", isn't there a perfect match with the plight of the US today?

2003 Sep 17 [ Wed ]

What happened on September 11?

Most conspiracy theories remain just that – theories – and the guilty are never exposed and punished. I would be surprised if the guilty are ever brought to justice for most crimes, even those as spectacular and horrible as September 11.

My first reaction was that we were living in an unlikely timeline. Like many people, that day seemed more like a movie than humdrum fact. We watched TV obsessively because "the mirror crack'd from side to side": anything could happen. There were humvees with squads in battledress with .50 machine guns stationed on the corner of L and 18th in DC, guarding to the secret police building and clutching coffee from Borders Books.

As more details of the events came out the impression of implausibility lingered. At the time I was unaware of how routinely planes which deviate from their flight plan are intercepted, but it seemed far more likely that the plane which did not reach its target had been shot down than that the passengers had caused it to crash. At the time I was only a little cynical, and assumed that the feds had decided to shoot it down without clear legal authority and without being completely sure of the situation, and had then closed ranks (understandably) to support the peon who'd made the decision.

Many other things just seemed strange. A story appeared saying that several of the accused hijackers were listed as having entered the US on a previous occasion to train with the CIA; that rapidly morphed into the suggestion that Al Qaeda had cunningly stolen those identities. (Although since then I have never seen a story listing the *real* identities of the hijackers concerned.)

I'm too lazy to list every detail, and scrupulously list the arguments and counter-arguments. As I said before, I think it's unlikely that the truth will ever be known, or at least conceded. Even when the truth of such a crime is finally admitted, people never seem to take the time to draw conclusions: "waitaminute, if they said that then, what about the other things they said? What about the other things they're saying?" People like that should search for "tonkin gulf resolution". If people are left-leaning, they should search for "katyn massacre" (and maybe "aucun ennemi a la gauche").

So let me just say what I think happened.

Ever since the war in Afghanistan the CIA has maintained contacts with islamist militants. Bush and his supporters (or controllers) wanted an excuse to expand military spending, extend their control of Middle East oil, and eliminate human rights in the US. They came up with a cockamamie scheme to carry out a terrorist outrage to mainpulate public opinion in the US to allow them to achieve these goals.

I wonder about the Oklahoma City bombing, and the early reports that "Middle East" terrorists were involved. I also wonder about "John Doe number 1". I think Oklahoma City was either a failed attempt or a trial run.

The CIA arranged a bunch of Arabs to be on those planes. I don't know what the Arabs were told. Maybe they were told to be ready for action. There were several reports that they "partied" before the attack; strange behavior for men about to meet Allah, more plausible for men about to spend a month doing retraining at Quantico.

Maybe some of them really did plan to pilot the planes. These days, many commercial planes *already* have the technology to take off, complete the trip and land without human intervention. Who knows what the pilots were told? Perhaps they were told "take this floppy and load it into the flight computer".

The feds took pains to suppress suspicion about the Arabs before the event. The media has already carried reports that FBI field operatives passed specific urgent suspicions to their superiors and were ordered to take no action. More amazingly, one of the few actions the feds admit to taking was at 0926 they banned *all* flights – including military ones! This order was not lifted until after flight 93 impacted.

The planes hit their targets with amazingly precise execution. I hope I don't sound too racist when I say that I simply do not think the towelheads can organize something like that. If they could, their culture would have created some achievements in the last 500 years.

What about the phonecalls? Well, what phonecalls? As far as I'm aware, we still don't have access to actual recordings. Many supposed calls rest on testimony, and there are peculiar inconsistencies: for instance, one wife (Denna Burnett) has testified that her husband reported guns on board. Likewise, sounds of scuffles were apparently recorded several minutes *after* the FAA reported that the flight had been hijacked.

We also don't have very consistent testimony about the crash itself. Eyewitnesses reported a plane, but it did not seem to be a passenger jet plunging into the ground.

My guess is that some National Guard flyer ignored orders and splashed 93 in the countryside somewhere. Shortly after that, the military sent another jet to a different field in the middle of nowhere to create a crater. (I don't have a link to it, but one report that I saw stressed the reporter's surprise that so few fragments of the plane were recognizable.) Shortly after that, the FBI sent around a horde of goons to grab evidence and intimidate witnesses. "Now this is very important Mrs Wojtla. You can't possibly have seen that, can you, now you've had a chance to think about it?" "No..."

Then all that was left was "wag the dog".

2003 Sep 04 [ Thu ]

US government suspends constitutional rights

Recently, Mike Hawash, former Intel engineer, was convicted of aiding the Taliban. In order to achieve the conviction, the feds used various provisions of the Patriot Act allowing them to hold Hawash without access to a lawyer, and indeed without even informing his family, indefinitely. Hawash, threatened by many decades of imprisonment, accepted a plea bargain which would put him in a normal prison for a period of at least seven years.

The Slashdot discussion: slashdot.org [http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/06/2252246&tid=

] 2003 Aug 03 [ Sun ]

Airport security scheme -- CAPPS II guidelines released

CAPPS is the semi-secret organization/set of procedures which handles the so-called security system which hapless passengers are subjected to for the crime of wanting to take a trip on an airplane.

Here's a Slashdot discussion of the latest proposals; it includes several iluminating postings: for instance, someone says 30% of hold baggage is *not inspected at all*.

slashdot.org [http://slashdot.org/articles/03/08/01/2012239.shtml?tid=103&tid=158&tid=99]

2003 Jul 20 [ Sun ]

The 9/11 thing

Now that the Iraq war has been shown to be a farrago of nonsense and bluster we can reasonably review 9/11 with a jaundiced eye.

Here's an analysis of the cellphone calls made from flight 93 (the one that supposedly was brought down after a counterattack by the passengers: feralnews.com [http://feralnews.com/issues/911/dewdney/ghost_riders_1-4_2.html]

Here's a discussion of the strange absence of interceptor planes on September 11: feralnews.com [http://feralnews.com/issues/911/dewdney/talkboards/democratic_underground_discussion_5_0103.html] and a good review of the offical procedure documents relative to intercepts: www.rense.com [http://www.rense.com/general18/atcd.htm]

Do you know what the Reichstag Fire was? Do you know one when you see one? www.commondreams.org [http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0913-03.htm]

You think I'm nuts, right? Is ABC News a bunch of white supremacists? Take a look at their outline of Operation Northwoods: abcnews.go.com [http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/jointchiefs_010501.html] See if you can find any similarities.

Then you might want to check out the more wild-eyed speculations here: www.public-action.com [http://www.public-action.com/911/northwds.html]

2003 Jul 12 [ Sat ]

Cringely article details US CALEA program for wiretaps without warrants

www.pbs.org [http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030710.html]

A standard wiretap requires a warrant obtained before a judge.

In the late 1990s the Los Angeles Police Department conducted illegal wiretaps with CALEA technology involving thousands of phone lines and potentially hundreds of thousands of people at a time when the official annual report on wiretaps compiled by the Department of Justice said L. A. was conducting an average of around 100 wiretaps per year. Illegal convictions were obtained, property was illegally confiscated, civilian careers and lives were ruined, yet nobody was punished.

In addition to the obvious loss of privacy to the feds, a laerge part of the problem is that the feds have inadequate security on the system, so *anybody else* could hack into your phone recordings.

The Slashdot discussion on this issue: yro.slashdot.org [http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/03/07/11/1423206.shtml?tid=158&tid=99]

A link from the Slashdot article to a page about Israelis putting bugged hardware int