Articles written by Freydis

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The Path of Deduction and the Development of Functional Technology

04.04.10 The Guinea worm is a horrifying parasite that lives in hot regions of the world and only infects humans – it’s a three-foot long worm that grows inside the body and burrows out a year later. The worm releases an acid that sears through the skin, creating intense pain and compelling the human victim to seek water for relief, but there the worm releases thousands of larvae that eventually find water fleas, infect them, and then perpetuate an evolutionarily-derived carefully-timed seasonal cycle when unsuspecting people drink water polluted with the fleas during times when stagnant water predominates the area.

But this isn’t a story for nightmares; the tale of the guinea worm reveals many of the key forces involved in human existence and our development as a species.

The presence of the guinea worm doesn’t assist human development, there’s no evolutionary benefit to its presence in the environment as an opposing force. There’s no immunity gained from a guinea worm infection and it doesn’t ‘weed out’ the weak and leave the strong, it is, like most all negative forces in our environment, something that only hinders development, sickens us, causes us to become less productive and able to participate in society for the benefit of ourselves and others. Like most harm that resides in the biological environment, it doesn’t kill the victim; it only maims and debilitates because the parasite needs the host to live at least long enough to spread the sickness. The only valid option we have is to suffer in ignorance or wise up, develop an effective solution, and overcome.

For centuries people have been trying to treat the symptoms, but without ever learning the cause all anyone has been able to do is try and pull the parasite out once it emerges. But with as many as 60 worms infecting the victim at once, this is far from ideal treatment!

Yet through centuries of witchcraft and superstition the solution has always been remarkably simple. All that’s required to eradicate the guinea worm is the continual consumption of clean drinking water, thereby eliminating the water fleas that carry the infection; a simple cloth filter will suffice.

Once again, this demonstrates that the only way to overcome negative forces, like the guinea worm, is through the application of a methodology of reason and science. You can’t get there through belief and religion, you can’t eliminate horrific health hazards through superstition, fear. Only through the process of observation, deduction, analysis of cause and effect, and crafting an appropriate and effective solution to the problem. Even though scientists and researches use this methodology every day and we’ve built all the functional structures that sustain us with it, it's remarkable that many, if not most people, either take it for granted or ignore it in favor of reassuring superstitions!

Part of the problem is persuading people that guinea worms come from water, says Makoy [Samuel Yibi of the south Sudan government]. "They believe it comes from God or eating certain animals or witchcraft. They do not see the point of filtering water," he says. But once some families try it, the effects are so dramatic that the rest soon follow. [1]

That’s the characteristic of a successful methodology – effective results that can be repeated.

Other benefits emerge as well. Eradicating totally harmful parasites, like the guinea worm, creates space in the environment for symbiotic life to grow that cooperates rather than steals. This is a potent pattern of existence, similarly, you are not a single being but rather your body is literally an ecosystem of billions of micro-organisms functioning together for the mutual benefit (or at least under the rule of cause-no-harm) when all is in balance.

Science is such a radical departure from ingrained habit and past assumptions that it practically represents a new mind, if not a break and the beginning development of a whole new human species. Intelligent men and women arrived at this stage by rejecting the imprimatur of authority and belief, by the persistent and often rebellious search for facts and ideas that can stand up on their own, seeking to understand the nature of forces and events beyond prejudice and precedent. Rejecting thought-conformity, leaping beyond the narrowly proscribed boundaries of cultural convention to explore new places and ideas while considering alternative views and perceptions.

Nihilism – seeking answers without the use of belief

In order to solve a problem, any problem, you have to approach it with an open mind because the facts don’t care what your opinion is, they don’t care what you believe in or who you worship, or which political party you vote for. You can’t determine a valid answer and develop a sustainable solution by having more guns than the rest, more gold, or more friends. Even problems within the seemingly nebulous realm of human events are really no different. You have to reduce the situation and the problem into fundamental components, see now it functions, identify cause and effect, and proceed to develop an appropriate solution. Even more profound, this is true of everything in the known universe – the methodology for success is fundamentally the same everywhere.

1. Parasite lost: Exterminating Africa's horror worms, by Debora MacKenzie, New Scientist, 16 March 2010.

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What will happen in the future when only the ‘poor’ die?

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Archive files reveal that the government of WWII Britain bought into and exploited the convenient myth that Hitler believed in astrology. The British did this to manipulate public opinion in the United States to support war with Germany on the assumption that victory would be quickly achieved.

A charlatan astrologer duped some of the most senior members of British Intelligence into believing that the secret to defeating Adolf Hitler lay in the stars, according to a declassified MI5 file released yesterday. Louis de Wohl, a bogus Hungarian nobleman, convinced the intelligence community that Hitler was obsessed with astrology and made no decisions before consulting his horoscope. ...

De Wohl became a key part of Churchill’s black propaganda attempt, masterminded by William Stephenson in America, to woo the United States into joining the Allies against Hitler before the Japanese made it inevitable by bombing Pearl Harbor. He went on a lecture tour of the United States to try to convince the American public that horoscope-mad Hitler could be defeated. It proved a success. The New York Sun ran a report in which the astrologer forecast that Hitler was “doomed” and would be “done away with within a year”. ...

However, Christopher Andrew, a Cambridge professor and intelligence historian who is writing the official history of MI5, said: “Actually, Hitler regarded astrology as complete nonsense, but the belief that he paid attention to horoscopes entered the corporate mind of the JIC.” From: Spies duped by stargazer who foresaw Hitler’s end, The Times, March 4, 2008.

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The New York Times? They Haven't Learned a Thing!

21.020.08 Anymore there’s so much false-information and spurious material spewing out of the mass-media mouthpieces that trying to demolish the myths and propaganda would make for a full-time job to an army of honest and competent organizations, so not surprisingly most of it goes unanswered. But every so often I see an example so outrageous I personally can’t ignore it.

Winning the award for the most egregious example of mass-media propaganda-journalism is the October 26, 2007 New York Times article with the loaded title, ‘Photos Show Cleansing of Suspect Syrian Site’, referring to a supposed explanation for Israel’s air-strike inside Syria that was purportedly conducted back in early September to destroy a nuclear reactor in Syria being built with parts and assistance form North Korea.

For awhile this rather far-fetched story didn’t really go anywhere, mostly for lack of official comments, but now an obscure group called the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) has brought the rumors to life with their in-house research and the New York Times, among others, has used their megaphone to broadcast this ‘research’ to the world. This article is such a glorious piece of work you have to read it to see just how easy it is for gullible and/or dishonest journalists, William J. Broad and Mark Mazzetti in this case, to take a kernel of wild speculation and turn it into an absolute matter of truth.

Keep in mind that the only source of information used for this speculation is from the ISIS. The ISIS website is decidedly low-budget and the staff consists of only eight people, including the intern! Paul Brannan is the only staff member credited with analyzing “high-resolution commercial satellite imagery” yet he has no experience or credentials listed under his biography to justify legitimate performance of this task; he graduated from college in 2004, joined ISIS the same year, and he's the “senior analyst”. The huckster behind all of this is David Albright, founder of the ISIS and also a former International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspector in Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In the past he has expressed some skepticism of Iran’s wildly inflated nuclear research accomplishments so he doesn’t seem to be the gullible type, but apparently self-promotion is another matter.

What’s most stunning to me upon reading the ISIS research is that they operate from the assumption that everything that has leaked out is absolutely true, that Israel flew in bombers and struck a site in Syria and that is was a nuclear reactor, etc. Just read their report and try not to laugh!

Indeed this is absolutely appalling analysis from every way you can look at it. Not only do they not question the initial assumptions but they intentionally search for information to substantiate it! So they scour commercial imagery of Syria, find this non-descript building, and conclude that it must be the nuclear reactor everyone is talking about because it has a similar size as the one in North Korea! I mean, that’s basically it. But just stop for a moment and compare a real nuclear site with this place. The three graphics below are all from Google Earth, you can look it up yourself, the left is the Syrian suspect nuclear reactor, the middle is North Korea's Yongbyon (a real reactor), and on the right is Israel's Dimona (real) nuclear reactor.

The most obvious problem with this story from an imagery standpoint is the lack of security. What kind of a nuclear facility doesn’t at least have a fence and a guard post?! Nothing like that is mentioned in ISIS reporting. The original rectangular building can be seen on Google Earth but that imagery predates the ISIS reporting; no security is evident on that either. You can tell that this construction is next to the river and close to farming; it’s hardly an isolated area to be setting up something as important and covert as a nuclear reactor.

There’s no credible reason to treat this site as anything related to nuclear research. Even if it really was intended as a nuclear reactor it’s far from having even the basic elements of functionality. In fact Syria’s explanation, that this was a warehouse for storing missile parts, makes far more sense than Israel’s. If we're going to speculate then why not consider that Syria built this shack in the desert and intentionally fed the nuclear story to Israeli spies just to make the Zionist war machine jump and flush out a nest of secret agents at the same time?

Contrary to ISIS the fact that the (supposed) wreckage was bulldozed away is not suspicious at all, what else would you do with building ruins?! Even if Syria invited inspectors to scan the site when they find nothing Syria will just be under more suspicion than before! No matter what Syria does they are under suspicion.

As execrable as the analysis is behind this story and as unlikely and circumstantial as all the information is behind it, every major mass-media outlet picks it up and runs with it, treating it like absolute fact. As many times as they have been burned by liars and conned by fraudulent stories the New York Times, like their competition, doesn’t even flinch before they swallow another one whole; they just don’t want to learn. They run this outrageous stuff because it supports their own agenda and their own bogus assumptions. Everyone else plays it up big and voila, you’ve got the justification for a war. Doesn’t anyone remember Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction: biological warfare trucks, nuclear research, it was all there, really, government stooges and hired ‘experts’ never lie, honest!

Now we’re expected to believe without question that Syria, a member of the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) with ‘full-scope IAEA safeguards’, a country straining under the burden of nearly 2 million refugees fleeing the carnage of the U.S. created civil war in neighboring Iraq, a poor country under sanctions, was building a nuclear reactor right out in plain sight with parts and assistance shipped in from North Korea, and that nobody knew about this except Israel with their notoriously sloppy military intelligence, most recently put on display in their disastrous war against Lebanon in 2006.

What is this really about?

In fact this event in Syria is actually about two things. Israel is trying to send a message to Iran that they're willing and able to conduct a long-range air-strike to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities; Syria is being used as a demonstration. The second objective is for the neo-cons back in Washington, they want to ruin the diplomatic deal with North Korea that has successfully negotiated to shut down their nuclear reactor. Diplomacy with a nuclear state defies everything the neo-cons have been doing in the Middle East and, in their warped view, must be expunged at any cost, hence the concocted connections between Syria and North Korea.

Equally important to realize is that this kind of propaganda is particularly pernicious precisely because it arrives in the packaging of a large and fairly respectable institution like the New York Times. The Times, like most major newspapers, do have decent and credible journalism on a variety of topics, you can’t just completely discount everything they produce. But at the same time they have plenty of misleading stories that are just propagandistic trash. ‘Photos Show Cleansing of Suspect Syrian Site’ is the kind of material that blatantly reiterates the imperative need to consume journalism, and especially all mass-media journalism, with a very critical attitude.

As obnoxious as this jingoistic Times article is, and as pathetic as the pseudo-analysis supporting it, it’s actually a perfect example of what’s produced when the naïve and the dishonest conspire to substantiate the establishment’s myths and official explanations - all you end up with is absurdity and flimsy aspersions that fall apart under the lightest touch of scrutiny and objective criticism. The New York Times is an integral part of a wholly corrupt establishment built on a pile of lies and bogus myths that only support authority as long as no one criticizes or questions the critical assumptions.

This whole story with Israel as the cowboy hero and Syria as the evil villain is so incredibly stupid that it would be a waste of time to even try and counteract it with reason and logic except for the gravity of the situation. Inflated suspicion is going to be used to justify killing thousands of innocent people, destroy diplomacy and what little is left of American credibility, send the price of fuel to unheard of levels, endanger American’s around the world, probably destroy the Dollar economy, and that’s just for starters. Do you think it costs a fortune to gas up your car and heat your home this winter? Just wait until next year! So, basically yeah it’s a brilliant idea, why not blast Syria and Iran into rubble, and convert two state regimes that can be diplomatically engaged into a galaxy of new, moving, and radical enemies just so Israel can feel safer from Syria’s SCUD missiles and Iran’s non-existent nuclear bomb. What could possibly go wrong with this plan?

It should be obvious by now that the same moron’s pushing this war plan against Iran and Syria are just as stupid today as they were back in 2003 when they made up lies about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction to justify attacking and occupying Iraq. There’s nothing that Syria and Iran can do to stop any of this just like there was absolutely nothing that Saddam could have done to convince the Bush/Cheney clique that they didn't have something that weapons inspectors couldn’t find after years of searching, and that every legitimate expert said didn’t exist. The dice in this game are loaded, and don’t forget it. 26.10.07

One event is an anomaly, three is a pattern

Since the execrable news story ‘Photos Show Cleansing of Suspect Syrian Site’ was injected into the brains of the American public by the New York Times back in October 2007 at least two other major U.S. newspapers have published news articles with the same message but written by different authors. The Los Angeles Times published 'West Says N. Korea, Syria Had Nuclear Link' by Paul Richter on January 17, 2008. Then the Wall Street Journal printed 'U.S. Pact With North Korea May Hinge on Syria' by Jay Solomon on February 8. The titles imply a difference but the message in both is the same as the NYT article last year—North Korea aided Syria with nuclear materials and technology and therefore all diplomatic talks with North Korea should be immediately frozen and Syria should be sanctioned and punished for having a secret nuclear program. Since this message is straight out of the neo-con script the obvious conclusion is that this is a concerted neo-con propaganda campaign, indicating either a conspiracy within the mass-media or, at minimum, widespread sympathy with neo-con goals and beliefs amongst the managers and editors of the mass-media in the United States (the people making the decisions).

All three articles make the same implied assertions without any evidence, all three quote officials making bold claims without ever providing names or sources to corroborate their statements or to determine any bias. Here’s an example from the Los Angeles Times:

The diplomat said that after a review of available intelligence, Western governments have reached "some sort of common ground . . . that there seems to have been cooperation between Syria and North Korea" at the site. The official's remarks were made on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject [sic: no period in original article]

Western diplomat, could they be any more vague? For all we know that could be an Israeli government mouthpiece! But the authors and publishers don’t care. Propaganda like this isn’t meant to be tested for accuracy, it’s meant to create an atmosphere of suspicion and to link unconnected events together in the minds of the public, perception over facts, illusion over substance, and every major newspaper in the United States is taking orders from the same script.

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Israel and Apartheid South Africa Closely Linked

16.08.07 Although apartheid South Africa is gone and mostly forgotten the connections between Israel and that government should not be, because in many ways the racially-segregated state of Israel today closely resembles the old South Africa.

The use of the term "Bantustan" in this context has nothing to do with an anti-semitic slur: when former South African premier and Nazi sympathizer John Vorster visited Israel in 1976, Shimon Peres, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, Yitzhak Shamir , et al, lauded the South African system of racial separation as a role model for dealing with "their kushims" ("niggers"). And the conservative part of the German political class (especially in Bavaria, where the rather incestuous relationship between German intelligence and the Christian Social Union had sired its own foreign policy priorities) was deeply involved in the strategic cooperation between Israel and South Africa. Examples include support for the Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo) - also dubbed the "Khmer Noir" for starting the African plague of recruiting small children by traumatization - to WMD research, to the illegal transfer of blueprints for a new class of cruise-missile capable submarines. In the 1990s, by the way, Germany donated several of these submarines to Israel.

During the 1970s and 1980s Israel and South Africa were joined at the hips in their common fight against the kushims (and against the still numerous Jewish communists, hated by the Israeli political class more than the remaining German Nazis). And from some German conservative nooks and crannies, there was always facilitation, scientific support, or co-financing available. From: GERMANY, THE RE-ENGINEERED ALLY, Part 2: Everything is broken, by Axel Brot, ATOL, August 9, 2007.

Joint South African and Israeli research was used to develop nuclear weapons for both states. Israel is a fully nuclear armed state today with rough estimates putting the number of their nuclear warheads at 100-200, or more. South Africa renounced its nuclear weapons program but many mysteries remain, largely due to the highly classified nature of nuclear weapons research and the full extent of the Israel-South African relationship. One of the enduring mysteries about Israel's nuclear weapons program has been that although everyone knows, despite official denials, that they have nuclear weapons, Israel unlike every other nuclear power has not tested a nuclear device.

In fact an atomic device was tested on an island off the coast of South Africa in 1979 and it was their joint research that very likely provided the critical data needed to verify a successful nuclear weapons test. For more information on this fascinating event read Nuclear Weapons Testing.

Trail of State Terrorism - From Israel to Guantánamo

19&20.08.07 Nuclear weapons research isn't the only thing the two countries have learned from each other. Israel prides itself as an expert in population control. Who learned what from who may be open to debate but one thing is clear: Israel has extensive experience in identifying, capturing, interrogating, and even executing, portions of the population deemed threatening by government authorities or otherwise considered dangerous to the established powers. Israel has been practicing and perfecting various means of population control over the Palestinian people in the occupied territories for decades. These techniques have re-emerged throughout the world, most notably in the U.S. concentration camp in Guantánamo Bay Cuba and the systemic abuse that occurred in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. This is because within the corridors U.S. power Israel is seen as the ideal model for dealing with Arab and Islamic populations, consequently U.S. officials have been quick to adopt the tactics and techniques employed by Israeli police and military forces.

B. Krongard, who was the executive director of the C.I.A., the No. 3 post at the agency, from 2001 to 2004, agreed with that assessment but acknowledged that the agency had to create an interrogation program from scratch in 2002.

He said officers quickly consulted counterparts in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel and other countries to compile a “catalog” of techniques said to be effective against Arab and Muslim prisoners. They added other methods drawn from those that American troops were trained to withstand in case of capture. [1]

Israel has its own secret prisons where detainees are held for interrogation and torture, both physical and psychological. The existence of one Israeli site dubbed Israel's Guantánamo, Facility 1391, has become known despite intense secrecy. Facility 1391 is not controlled by Shin Bet (Israel’s secret police) but by the Israeli military just as Guantánamo is controlled by the U.S. military using military intelligence agents to extract information from detainees.

The prison is part of a military camp that is home to an army intelligence group, Unit 504, which specialises in interrogation. The unit has a hard reputation, and some of its members have badly blemished records. One has been accused of murder, another of spying. Unit 504's glory days were during Israel's 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon, interrogating captured Hezbollah fighters and running an extensive network of collaborators … Facility 1391 remained a secret for two decades or more because those delivered to its clutches could be made to disappear. [2]

Facility 1391 is not an aberration. Torture of Palestinians in Israeli prisons is systemic and ongoing and Shin Bet, not to mention the military, acts with impunity.

The Centre for the Defence of the Individual and B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, compiled the report after interviewing 73 Palestinians who had been arrested in 2005 and 2006.

The report found that almost 50% of detainees who were arrested in raids or at random were beaten by the army or police before they were handed over to the Shin Bet security agency for interrogation. The prisoners were interrogated for an average of 35 days and spent most of their time in tiny cells in solitary confinement. They were interrogated from five to 10 hours a day. [3]

Many of the methods of psychological abuse are exactly like those used in the Bush/Cheney War on Terrorism, particularly sensory deprivation:

Sameer Jadala was detained at his home in Nablus last year at 3 o'clock on a December morning. For three days, the 33-year-old Palestinian was moved from one prison cell to another. On the fourth day, he was blindfolded, handcuffed and his feet manacled. Blacked-out glasses were pushed over his eyes as he was forced into the back of a car and on to the floor. [2]

A particularly bizarre aspect of the interrogation techniques used in Abu Ghraib prison and Guantánamo include the use of sexual humiliation. These techniques go back to Israeli experience exploiting aspects of Middle Eastern culture, and what they consider the Arab mindset, in order to degrade and breakdown captives.

Even if any of these tactics really worked to get captives to reveal critical information the price being paid by the national reputation far exceeds any near-term gains that can be acquired from a detainee. And in fact abusive interrogation tactics don’t work, as legitimate interrogators well know, so it’s not just short-sighted and hypocritical to abuse and degrade captives, it’s just plain stupid and self-defeating!

Beyond question of human rights violations, recent reports have also raised doubt over whether any form of torture produces reliable information, he adds.

"Torture generates extremely bad intelligence data" and is "enormously counterproductive", according to bioethicist Steven Miles at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, US. He gives the example that some of the information linking Iraq to Al-Qaeda, which later proved wrong, came from a man named Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi during CIA interrogations in Egypt that involved torture. [4]

There is almost no scientific evidence to back up the U.S. intelligence community's use of controversial interrogation techniques in the fight against terrorism, and experts believe some painful and coercive approaches could hinder the ability to get good information, according to a new report from an intelligence advisory group.

The 374-page report from the Intelligence Science Board examines several aspects of broad interrogation methods and approaches, and it finds that no significant scientific research has been conducted in more than four decades about the effectiveness of many techniques the U.S. military and intelligence groups use regularly. Intelligence experts wrote that a lack of research could explain why abuse has been alleged at U.S. facilities in Afghanistan, Cuba and Iraq.

… experts find that popular culture and ad hoc experimentation have fueled the use of aggressive and sometimes physical interrogation techniques to get those captured on the battlefields to talk, even if there is no evidence to support the tactics' effectiveness. The board, which advises the director of national intelligence, recommends studying the matter. [5]

Every hostile interrogation begins from the unverifiable assumption that the captive actually knows something to reveal. And if the captive really doesn’t have any information there's nothing they can do except tell the interrogators what they want to hear! This is why harsh interrogation almost always produces false information and bogus results, and why Western culture, over 1,000 years of trial and error, has developed a carefully constructed legal system that always operates from the assumption of innocence, not from guilt, while providing the defendant with legal defense in an open forum. But Bush/Cheney threw the entire western legal system out of the window because torture works on TV shows and because some Israeli con-artists convinced them that (Arab) terrorists aren’t fully human because they're all crazy and homicidal maniacs that can’t be reasoned with except through violence. This is the absurdity, the insanity, of 21st century America under the Bush-Cheney regime.

"I find the interrogation scenes in the television show '24' repulsive, absurd and even idiotic," said Katherine Sherwood, a civilian interrogator for the Department of Defense who spoke at the convention. "If I am talking to a bombmaker, I am not trying to get him to tell me he is a bombmaker. I want him to tell me what students he trained, what their nationalities are, what materials he used and who was funding the project."

Such Hollywood scenarios, Sherwood said, fail to recognize that the central utility of interrogations is in building a lattice of interconnections that can inform military and civilian policymakers.

"Interrogations are about gathering breadth or depth of information," Sherwood said. "It is not about getting to a single moment of a confession." [7]

If brutality and violence are useless as techniques of interrogation then why keep doing it? The only reason left is fear. By making places like Facility 1391 or Guantánamo legendary nightmares they become part of a psychological warfare campaign being waged against targeted elements within the population – with the intent that they will be too afraid of the big powerful machine to try and resist. Yet again facts do not support the use of state terrorism as an effective deterrent because fear can’t address the source of the problem that is the continual perpetration of injustice upon oppressed populations generating a rising tide of anger and a burning need for retribution. For a state like Israel or the U.S.A. to complain about terrorism is the height of hypocrisy – when it comes to terror the resources of a state regime are far greater than anything a non-state actor can ever possess.

Terrorism Protection: Making Money by Making Terror

Israeli entrepreneurs have successfully leveraged their inflated reputation on security, containment, and population control to grow an industry based on selling military and police weapons and training to governments and private companies throughout the world. Israel is the largest cash recipient of U.S. government aid, collecting billions of dollars every year. Much of that money is then used to expand Israel’s own police and military industries that then directly compete against America’s police and defense industries in world markets. In other words, the U.S. government subsidies overseas business competition from Israel, using taxpayer funds to make finding employment for some Americans even more challenging than it already would be.

Today Israeli security consultants devise new methods of population control that are then marketed and employed throughout the authoritarian portions of the world, the United States included. These tactics and techniques of coercion, subtle and not so subtle, are not reserved just for those outside the border of the United States. Within the U.S.A. amidst the panic and rampant fear of terrorism being intentionally exaggerated by unscrupulous people and special interest groups, the latest TSA program, imported from Israel, is to monitor facial expressions for subtle clues to identify terrorists in airports.

Specially trained security personnel are watching body language and facial cues of passengers for signs of bad intentions. The watcher could be the attendant who hands you the tray for your laptop or the one standing behind the ticket-checker. Or the one next to the curbside baggage attendant. …

Jay M. Cohen, undersecretary of Homeland Security for Science and Technology, said in May that he wants to automate passenger screening by using videocams and computers to measure and analyze heart rate, respiration, body temperature and verbal responses as well as facial micro-expressions. [6]

Israel has benefited enormously from revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib and the continued operation of the Guantánamo concentration camp. Although they're loathe to state it publicly, from now on any criticism of Israel on its terrible record of human rights abuses, torture, racism, and rampant military aggression can be deflected by pointing to the fact that the United States, the beacon of freedom, hope, and civil rights, practices the same things on captives both foreign and domestic. If the United States can capture and brutally interrogate anyone deemed a threat to the government, then why can’t a small state surrounded by angry neighbors, like Israel, do the same? On a larger scale Bush/Cheney policy now renders ineffective U.S. government criticism of human rights violations in other countries because the U.S. is preaching from a bar stool! This is practically a green light to authoritarian regimes across the globe to increase oppression of internal political and social dissent.

Israel has gained enormously from the ‘War on Terrorism’ launched by the Bush-Cheney administration because Israel’s enemies are now America’s enemies. Israel, mostly through concerted, prolonged, and intense lobbying, has very effectively turned the U.S. political establishment into a parallel copy of itself. Political candidates in the U.S. regularly compete against each other in their displays of devotion to Israel. In the current Presidential campaign for the 2008 elections Rudy Giuliani has stated that "America's commitment to Israel's security is a permanent feature of our foreign policy," and that the creation of a Palestinian state would endanger United States security! Even more over-the-top, Colorado’s Tom Tancredo likes the idea of nuclear attacks on Islamic holy sites Mecca and Medina as a collective punishment on the Islamic world. With this kind of an election environment it’s no surprise that each new Presidential administration prides itself as being more Israel friendly than the last one, all of this for a relationship that continues to expand yet has produced no discernable benefits for the United States. And each successive administration that’s more Israel friendly than the one before it is a greater disaster for America than the prior one. Clinton was terrible, Bush is appalling, and the next one will be even worse regardless whether a Democrat or Republican wins the White House.

Not even American citizens with Constitutional guarantees against ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ are safe from exploitation, abuse, and torture by despotic authorities because torture is now whatever the party in power say it is, or isn’t. U.S. citizen Jose Padilla, now convicted of murder conspiracy and terrorism material support based only on the testimony of another suspect and questionable fingerprint evidence, suffers from permanent and severe psychological impairment and brain damage as a result of three and a half years of imprisonment, severe sensory deprivation, and harsh interrogation all without trial or legal defense, or anything else guaranteed in the Constitution, solely because of a Presidential order declaring him a threat to the state.

1. Interrogation Methods Are Criticized, by Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, May 30, 2007.

2. Facility 1391: Israel's secret prison, by Chris McGreal, The Guardian, November 14, 2003.

3. Palestinians 'routinely tortured' in Israeli jails, by Conal Urquhart, Guardian, May 7, 2007.

4. Psychological torture 'as bad as physical torture' , by Roxanne Khamsi, NewScientist, March 5, 2007.

5. Interrogation Research Is Lacking, Report Says Few Studies Have Examined U.S. Methods, by Josh White, Washington Post, January 16, 2007.

6. New airport agents check for danger in fliers' facial expressions, by Kaitlin Dirrig, McClatchy Newspapers, August 14, 2007.

7. APA Rules on Interrogation Abuse, by Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post, August 20, 2007.

Captain [Bryce] Lefever [Navy psychologist] says it is unfair to compare US antiterror interrogations with Soviet interrogation techniques. "Their abuse was a systematic practice to conceal the truth," he says. "If Padilla was abused, then it was for a righteous purpose – to reveal the truth." - US Gov't broke Padilla through intense isolation, say experts, August 14, 2007.

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Mysterious Israeli commandos linked to terror raids in Fallujah Iraq and Tyre Lebanon

06.08.06 “A resident said he saw the commando force attack the building. "They all had beards. I thought maybe they were Hezbollah," 18-year-old Qassem Aad said of the Israelis.” From: Warfare intensifies in southern Lebanon, by Sam F. Ghattas, AP, August 6, 2006. That hyperlink is to a local saved copy of the original article because the page was subsequently changed and the above quote and details on the raid removed.

"This force is not totally unknown to us here in Fallujah," Ahmed, who witnessed the incident from a nearby house told Inter Press Service (IPS). "They are a special force of Americans that assassinates more people than it arrests."

Ahmed described the force from the helicopters as "big men with long hair and beards, some wearing earrings, and others with little black caps on the top of their heads at the back". From: Merchants of death in Iraq, by Dahr Jamail and Ali Fadhil, July 13, 2006.

Who are these mysterious commandos? Does this confirm suspicions that Israeli forces have been assisting the United States in their occupation of Iraq?

Update 20.08.06 - Were the raids in Iraq conducted by Shayetet-13 of the Israeli Navy?

“… the special-forces raids on Baalbek in eastern Lebanon and the one carried out in Tyre by the elite naval commandos of Shayetet-13 (S-13).” (Italics added)

“Feig oversaw an operation in Tyre on Aug. 5 in which members of the navy's elite unit, Shayetet 13, killed 10 militants who the Israeli military says had been firing long-range rockets into Israel.” [1]

Also note:

Each military branch has its own special forces unit:

The army has Sayeret Matkal, or the General Command Reconnaissance Unit.
The navy has Shayetet 13, Hebrew for Flotilla 13.

The air force has the Shaldag Unit. In Lebanon, its commandos have used lasers to mark targets, such as rocket launchers, for fighter-bombers that then destroy the targets with laser-guided missiles.

The military also has the Duvdevan Unit, a special operations force that operates mostly in the Palestinian territories. Its members conduct arrest raids. [1]

1. Israeli commando missions come out of shadows, by Yaakov Katz, August 13, 2006, USA Today.

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How to lose the ‘War on Terrorism’

24&30.07.05 How do we lose the ‘War on Terrorism’? It’s simple, “stay the course”. Right? If we keep doing the same thing and keep seeing the same unpleasant results then what is the logical course of action? Expanding police powers of intrusion into private life? Allow for shoot-to-kill policies? Throwing more money into building and deploying new hi-tech weapons systems to kill ‘bad guys’ and ‘terrorists’ Sure! If you want more of the same…

One critical (and fairly legitimate) element in the process of preventing terrorist attacks in the late stages is counter-terrorism intelligence (CT). CT is a very arduous task that involves finding, collecting and analyzing varied and numerous pieces of information to try and identify and predict near-term events and key persons. Yet it’s increasingly clear that as terror attacks continue throughout the world, London for instance, counter-terrorism may not be sufficient to deter and prevent terrorism.

The irony that should not be missed here is that England, and London especially, is easily one of the most heavily policed and surveilled locations in the world with a security camera on practically every street corner. It would not be much of an exaggeration to claim that modern London is George Orwell’s 1984 dystopia come to life. If multiple bombings can be planned and executed right under the noses of the police and intelligence authorities in London, authorities who claim to have had no prior knowledge of any of it, then what police powers and surveillance technology do they need to do the job?! How can a loquacious fool like Tony Blair stand up in front of the cameras and audaciously claim that a further erosion of personal privacy and civil liberties is necessary to prevent more terrorist attacks?!

British special police, the London Metropolitan police's elite unit SO19 to be exact, and Tony Blair’s government are feeling the heat from the shooting of an innocent Brazilian man because he looked and acted suspicious, suicide bomber suspicious. … and that’s how you deal with terrorists, immediately and decisively! That’s called leadership and courage. So what if he was Brazilian. So what if the guy had never done anything illegal at all. England is safer now because he’s dead. Yeah right. Police tactics based on fear, just like counter-terrorism based on fear, are completely self-defeating.

And from whom did the British special police learn all about how to shoot-to-kill-first and deal with the law later? Israel of course! Israel knows all about how to handle ‘terrorists’, or so they think, so Israeli police and military advisors travel around the world earning a nice chunk of change peddling their advice to naïve police and military agencies eager for advice on how to kill bad guys, act tough and play with expensive firearms. Lawsuits, escalating violence and a very dangerous long-term polarization of conflict and loss of public trust in the military, and especially the police who’s very job it is to protect life, are the consequences of the use of Israeli, or any, anti-terrorism techniques that are based on countering violence with greater violence.

So, it may not be a failure of police powers, it may not be a failure of surveillance, it may not be a failure of public and legislative awareness of the issue, and it may not even be an intelligence failure. For instance, if a terror attack can be conceived, planned and executed in a week, then counter-intelligence is not going to have enough time for the data to be collected let alone to be analyzed and the proper authorities informed in time to stop it. If the terrorist can conduct their operations in electronic silence and with only a few people ever informed of their plans, modern technological tools will be useless in spotting and preventing the attack. This is already occurring right now in the concept of ‘self-service jihad’.

The economic and political elite seek the protection of a powerful police-state in order to insulate themselves from the consequences¹ of their foolish and unpopular policies.

This form of do-it-yourself terrorism is nearly unstoppable and it doesn’t just draw supporters and terrorists from the ignorant and uneducated classes in troubled and impoverished regions of the developing world, it draws from the very people that have lived and learned in western nations. Why? Because regardless of education level the fundamental grievances are the same – hypocrisy in the foreign policy of the United States and England through the support of corrupt and compliant regimes in the Middle East and the violent occupation of Arab homelands, most all of which revolves around the slavish support for the segregationist state of Israel.

The bottom line is that as soon as social, political and economic problems become so intractable that armed violence ensues, the issue cannot be rectified with repression or armed counter-violence. Indeed, by the time terrorists are blowing things up the state has already lost the ‘war’ because no viable military means exists to decisively defeat the weaker side in an asymmetrical conflict. And the more the state tries the more it dies; witness the tenacity and astronomical costs associated with the counter-insurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The only way to defeat terrorism when bombs are blowing up, as is now the case in our ‘war on terrorism’, is to defeat the root sources that drive people to conduct acts of violence in order to achieve recognition and rectification of their grievances. This involves an immediate, decisive, and radical rethink of state policies and actions both domestically and internationally.

Immigration and the Second-Generation Problem

One of the factors that should really be noticed is the fact that, in London for instance, the bombers (suicide or just tricked), were not completely uneducated or unfamiliar with Western culture. On the contrary they had lived in a modern country, England, yet still chose to carry out their attacks. This indicates that fundamentalist Islamic terrorism is not simply motivated by injustices in the developing world but also by a failure to integrate into the developed world. The terrorist arm of Islamic fundamentalism is as much a reaction against an encroaching Western culture and secularity as it is to social and political injustice.

The London bombers are from a class of second generation immigrants, the sons of the parents that came to England seeking employment opportunities that they could not find back home in the slums of Lahore or Peshawar. These people are allowed into countries like England or the United States because the economic elite define the primary social values under the rubric of ‘free market’ economies and they place the accumulation of financial capital in complete primacy, therefore they exploit the cheapest labor possible by exporting domestic jobs whenever they can get away with it and importing underpaid labor when necessary or just convenient. Americans use Mexicans and the British use Pakistanis. The difference is that Mexico is not wracked by internecine conflict while Pakistan is.

The second-generation immigrants are always torn between the traditions and values of their homeland and parents and those of the new culture and society that they are now a part of. When the two cultures are significantly different, such as between Islamic Pakistan and mostly secular England, the second-generation immigrant faces a major choice in deciding which culture to use as the source of their identity. They can either go backwards, trying to preserve their cultural past, or they can go forwards and become something culturally alien. If they go back to become whatever the current conception is defining their traditional culture then they are at odds with their surroundings in a foreign country.

1. Iraq 'made UK a terror target', claims report, By Simon Freeman, Times Online, July 18, 2005.

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We lived together in the arms of an insane culture, fragmented in business deals and passions, blasting through glittering intersections and subway tunnels, surrounded in cafés by mirrored brilliance; the streets ribbons of coloured light, the bars packed with shimmering liquors, conference tables and dernier cri; every hour something new, every day a problem solved, every week a sensation. - Ernst Jünger, Germany, circa 1914.

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Project: Perle Vision

03.09.04, 10.10.04 Recent news headlines have proclaimed the existence of a (potential) American spy busy transferring classified information about Iran to Israel and the subsequent FBI investigation that has actually been ongoing for over two years. A spy case in itself is not that original but the location of this one is having originating from a special office deep inside the Pentagon. The alleged ‘mole’ is named Larry Franklin who works in the Office of Special Plans (OSP) under the authority of the Neo-Conservative Douglas Feith. [6] Apparently Franklin is Christian not Jewish but nonetheless he is supposed to have connected with Steven Rosen of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the second in command Israeli diplomat stationed in Washington D.C. named Naor Gilon, and offered to share classified information concerning Federal policy on Iran.

Meanwhile Israeli officials loudly insist these scurrilous accusations are completely unfounded, as Israel has no need for spying inside America since they can already get all the information they want simply by asking. "I think the ties between Israel and the United States are intimate. The cooperation and levels of information are so close, so intimate, that the information that is exchanged is much more classified that any conversation or another," said Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom of Israel [7]. Official statements portray Israel is a gallant ally of America, a democracy in the Middle East that consistently upholds American values in the face of Arab Islamic fundamentalism. In reality the notion of Israel as an ally is viewed with trepidation at best by objective officials and at worst as a very dangerous leak. Basically whatever information Israel can get they will either use for their own purposes independent of American interests or simply to further their own multi-billion dollar weapons industry, China and India being major customers. Yet at the same time Israel wields enormous political influence through multiple legal organizations such as AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and many others too numerous to mention (see Glossary below).  Thus even when the depth of espionage is known, outing the spies and naming names is fraught with peril for the authorities – especially when the investigation becomes public knowledge. This is why the simultaneous worldwide release of the alleged mole throughout world newspapers seems suspicious to me, but regardless it brings up a very important issue: the disproportionate influence Israel and its sympathizers exert upon American policy-making and even intelligence collection.

The kind of influence that Israel has is hardly something that appears over-night but rather is a system built over decades of planned and coordinated effort. The covert nature of this system has been the key to its successful implementation, and especially with the current disastrous invasion of Iraq, ignoring Israeli influence in American policy is like trying to ignore a flatulent 800-pound gorilla in the room with everyone else. Presently many intelligent authors and analysts have finally started to openly examine and publish research into Israeli influence of American policy both in alternative and even mainstream outlets. These endeavors have been made easier by the increasingly ineffectual insults and code-words traditionally employed to stifle dissent and criticism like “anti-Semitism”. Regardless of the vindictive name-calling, espionage is still spying and stealing secrets or technology is still theft of a very high-order.

The Neo-Conservative cabal that has wielded enormous influence in the present Bush administration is in practice the external arm of Ariel Sharon’s Likud Party of Israel in all but name. The Neo-Cons have single-handedly dragged America into an incredibly foolish war of invasion against Iraq that benefited no one except Israel by toppling their primary regional threat. This extraordinary influence has reached the current levels largely due to the confluence of interests between Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians in America and the militant, conservative factions inside Israel as well as many Zionist sympathizers in both countries. Douglas Feith runs the OSP, a specially created office for pushing the Neo-Con agenda of invading Iraq among other things, and has responsibility over the alleged mole Larry Franklin, hence the severity of the current allegations.

It’s important to remember that these people, specifically the Neo-Cons in this case, get their jobs not from public choice but through appointments. They could never withstand public scrutiny to acquire their power but rely on inside connections and selection behind closed-doors. Because of this they are not accountable to the American public nor to the taxpayer in general, and in fact unless they do something flagrantly illegal and the news media picks up on it their names are rarely known outside of their offices!

The current news leak on its own is especially intriguing because events such as this that negatively reflect upon Israel or AIPAC very rarely reach the mainstream news avenues. Even now the panic is intensely palpable even as it is thinly veiled throughout the Israeli newspapers because they know the damage this kind of story can do. It only takes one loose pebble to start an avalanche. Especially given the election season timing, I attribute this calculated leak to the fact that the Neo-Cons are running out of allies which just goes to show that when you make war on the world you suddenly find yourself surrounded by enemies.

For up to date tracking of the Neo-Conservatives and the Neo-CONnections graphic chart visit the Neo-Con page by the Department of Research.

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Do Not Duplicate

March 2005

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On the Need for Media Reform

12.02.04 Big fish eat the little fish, Disney bought ABC then AOL took over Time Warner, now Disney/ABC may get gobbled up … no fish left to eat.

Modern media needs two elements in order to reach mass audiences: it must have content and it must have a delivery vehicle. Disney for instance has a huge library of original content they have bought or created themselves over decades such as animation, action, romance, licensed characters, Michael Eisner, etc. Comcast on the other side is primarily in the business of delivering the content since they own the 'pipes' and switches that carry digital data into the office and home. This is why the proposed merger of Comcast and Disney/ABC is especially insidious because it would give one corporate entity control of both. So when the two are put together, you’ve got a killer monopoly on your hands; no wonder the business world is chattering away at the possibilities.

The primary idea behind media freedom is to provide equal opportunity for ideas and opinions to be expressed. And this it the beauty and revolutionary value of the Internet because for the first time it actually DOES allow this – anyone can have access to anything. Although the American model of media regulation is aware of this need, in practice it is the worst of both worlds for it poses as a regulated system but in effect achieves neither fairness nor corporate balance.  European governments, for instance, generally control their media through the government even in many cases outright public ownership, such as Britain’s venerable BBC. This model has many advantages because by making media content a public asset it allows for democratic input on the creation of that content. Unfortunately, this democratic process can be extremely contentious and often riven by ideological divisions. Witness the latest crisis in the BBC over Tony Blair’s Weapons of Mass Destruction claims for invading Iraq. Publicly owned media fulfills the public good but it doesn’t turn a profit – a value decision that is mostly overlooked in the nearsighted, business oriented culture of the United States but wisely recognized, at least in rhetoric, in more socially progressive countries.

The opposite extreme is completely unregulated media, and off hand I can’t think of any examples. No national government willingly gives away such potent power to private interests, although America comes closer than about anywhere else.

Obviously, dictatorships have a very simple model of media control: the despot in power controls the radio stations and the TV towers so his message is all the people hear and see. Castro’s Cuban dictatorship is a prime example of extensive media control to serve the agenda of the leadership clique. Even the Internet is off-limits to Cubans, although tourists are allowed to use it!

Singapore and Malaysia are two alternate examples of media control because they use licenses to regulate corporate freedom of expression. Grant a license and keep it if you stay within the accepted boundaries of discussion, say things we don’t like and lose your license; it’s all very authoritarian, nice and simple. The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) is basically built along these lines of control; that being the granting of broadcast licenses. The FCC can theoretically deny broadcasters a license to operate either if they violate the community standards or if the public sends in enough protest complaints during their periodic license renewal review. But election year politics can have a noticeable impact upon government whim. Rubber-stamper FCC Chairman Powell (son of General Colin Powell) is making frowny faces and threatening to fine or even, gasp!, revoke a license over the flap at the latest Super Bowl halftime show, ‘nuff said. But it's very rare to find any serious consequences hitting American broadcasters that violate the standards; Murray Rothstein (AKA Sumner Redstone) has built his Viacom/CBS empire of trash on this very fact. The FCC is mostly a hollow threat because they're so deeply integrated into the private influence of corporate forces; the technical term for this is corruption, or fascism.

Media rules can be a hassle for a typical home viewer as well. Satellite television subscribers are often in the absurd situation of having to resort to a 'rabbit ears' antenna just to get local or even national TV stations (NBC, ABC, CBS), and then using their advanced digital system for everything else! Many of the rules regulating American media may have a rational basis in theory, but in practice it's rarely apparent.

Limiting monopoly control of the media is only common sense, yet in practice the media corporations spend an inordinate amount of effort trying to subvert these rules; and we all know it doesn’t even achieve the desired result! When’s the last time you saw any original or politically controversial content on the mass-media channels? And the truth is they can’t do anything too extreme because then they lose advertisers; why do you think Michael Moore’s popular show ‘TV Nation’ died young? So, even apart from any agenda a media owner has, censorship is literally woven into the capitalist structure of commercial media content.

Given the context and history of American media regulations probably the most common-sense solution would be to do away with limitations on media ownership, since it only breeds corruption anyway, and allow free investment like every other business. Content should not be regulated, indeed the First Amendment explicitly states such, but the delivery mechanism is the choke point and the means with which opinions and ideas have been stifled, and censored, both in the past and continuing into the present.

The media controllers have already put a finger to the wind and realized the direction it’s blowing. Anymore almost anyone can make a hit movie, like the Blair Witch Project, and practically anyone can make a hit music album or even a popular news portal like the Drudge Report. Content isn’t ‘king’ anymore, the dictatorship of that monarchy has already been overthrown and replaced with a vast array of democratic opportunities. Consequently media control by an elite group cannot continue if it maintains an obsession with content production, instead the conduits for the content are the logical chokepoint that must be dominated in order to limit alternative viewpoints and opinions from reaching mass audiences.

Conversely if we are to have free expression that matters and not just in rhetoric the public must act to reclaim their collective ownership of the mediums of communication. The electromagnetic airwaves have always been considered public property and should be stringently protected as such; but instead of protecting them the FCC auctioned them off! Fiber optic cables which will carry the digital information of the 21^st century have been mostly put in place by private companies, featuring the mega-bankruptcies of Worldcom and Global Crossings. If America and indeed the world is not careful we will all end up ‘railroaded’ and at the mercy of a new railroad monopoly, only instead of travel and commodities being price-gouged and restricted by narrow-minded and greedy private interests, it will be information that is restricted.

Indeed this is an intriguing parallel because the 19^th century railroad barons were a source of terrible public exploitation, and not until the advent of the internal combustion engine and then the highway was the railroad’s stranglehold finally broken. The roads and highways are almost always built by the government and thus become public property. This allowed anyone to use the roads and created fantastic new opportunities that couldn’t have existed if only private interests controlled them. Today, some towns and cities in America are exploring the possibility of using already existing fiber-optic capacity to deliver content or other data themselves, bypassing conglomerates like Comcast or Verizon entirely; this is a very forward-thinking potential.

The point is that by fixating upon the content debate – is it offensive? Should someone be allowed to say that on national TV? It all just works as a smokescreen to the critical issue which is: who controls the communications mediums be they the electromagnetic spectrum, coaxial or fiber optic cables underground or any other ‘pipe’ for delivering content to the public? If the answer is a private, probably commercial interest then we’ve got a big problem because they have no interest in seeing free and diverse expression using their communications mediums. If the answer is the public owns the communications ‘pipes’ then we are all much safer. As an absolute minimum, competition between private interests can act as a brake upon the censorship and stifling of free-expression, but as we’ve already seen with the frenetic merger of media conglomerates, in a capitalist system competition often doesn’t last very long.

For more on the issue of media control read the Holology special report:
The Mass Media Pyramid

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