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Wednesday 30 March 2011

Once Upon a Time in Amerika...Part I



"I think we have more freedom now than we’ve ever had before and it’s increasing…the government is less powerful in our lives than it ever has been and it’s becoming less powerful in our lives." 1

So said Ms. Ranthum on the Jeff Rense radio program causing its host, and no doubt the listeners, to momentarily pause and wonder if they had slipped into some strange hyper-dimension of dark humour.

Ms. Ranthum professed to be an optimist, however, this brand of positivism was at the expense of the facts which lead us to believe that she may be an example of the rather dangerous fantasy world of denial or naiveté that many Americans seem to be living in. It is also starkly macabre coming from a former military war-gamer.

The cultivation of positive emotions DOES become a necessary antidote for the uncertainty, insecurity and extreme pace of change this chaotic world is experiencing. Perhaps though, if we really care about freedom, liberty and truth, we must be prepared to have our cherished illusions unceremoniously destroyed in order that truth does not become a casualty of our wishful thinking. I am a great believer in the creativity of the human spirit, the altruistic actions that DO take place, unreported, around the world.

However, let’s be realistic here.

The United States of America can be seen as an expanding democracy, seeking to bring the light of peace and stability to developing nations; allowing greater freedom of information and strengthening individual and collective autonomy. Or we can choose to acknowledge that something is extremely rotten in the States and is spreading through all domains of its society, eased and oiled by the apathy and inherited ignorance of the majority of American people. We can choose to SEE the objective reality of a bland monoculture sweeping the world with its own brand of “democracy”; an invasive globalisation where an aggressive “McWorld” is impacting a fundamentalist “Jihad” to produce a vast panoply of “divide and conquer” scenarios, created, tweaked and cranked by intelligence agencies. This stranglehold on novelty, independence and diversity is being replaced by a “fast food” consciousness where excess speed and sound-byte ambience is creating a vacuum to which younger generations are being drawn. Nothing permanent is allowed to take root, no qualitative, cooperative change can develop. Huge emotional “static” is the result, where true creativity is suppressed leading to depression and dis-ease, or released all at once as explosive violence. Purpose and a sense of belonging are fast disappearing.

This potent emotional energy is of course easy to manipulate.

What are some of the facts behind modern America’s so called legacy of freedom that it is busy dispensing to the rest of the world? We discover that:

·         A woman is sexually assaulted every 2 minutes.
·         Approximately one-third of all juvenile victims of sexual abuse are under the age of six years old.
·         3,500 youths between 15-19 are murdered and more than 150,000 arrests of adolescents for violent crimes occur each year and still increasing.
·         1 in 5 children are malnourished.
·         Up to one-fifth of America's food goes to waste each year, with an estimated 130 pounds of food per person ending up in landfills.
·         Some 400 super-rich Americans have an average income of $174 million each or a combined income of 69 Billion in 2000.
·         Microsoft chairman CEO Bill Gate’s net wealth - $51 Billion is greater than the combined net worth of the poorest 40% of Americans (106 million people).
·         At least 20 million people go hungry, 12 million of whom are children and a disproportionate percentage of these children are Black and Latino.
·         33 million people live below the poverty line, children and single mothers being the most likely to suffer.
·         Poverty is increasing each year where the bottom 40% of American households earn 10% of national income but own less than 1% of the wealth.
·         The FBI estimates 19,000 Americans are murdered every year.
·         The US recently topped the 2 million mark of incarcerated prisoners.
·         Men and women are shot, gassed, hanged, electrocuted, or lethally injected as part of its “democratic” system of law.
·         All but two countries signed the recent Convention of the Rights of the Child. One was Somalia, the other - The US.
·         The use of biotechnology including genetically modified foods exists under a corporate drive to continue and expand its patenting of nature, stripping farmers and indigenous peoples world-wide of their rights and livelihoods.
·         Corporate power dictates and directs policy at government level. (E.g. General Motors is now economically bigger than Denmark).
·   US Trade Representative’s Office openly state that their responsibility is to US industry rather than ordinary Americans affected by trade deals.
·     44 of the US top 200 corporations did not pay the full 35% corporation tax during the period 1996-1998 or avoided it entirely through fiscal loop-holes.
·         Hundreds of hospitals are dumping patients who cannot afford to pay for their healthcare.
·       The present government has ignored, violated or even un-signed international treaties such as the International Criminal Court, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Kyoto protocol on global warming. 2


The list could go on but you get the idea.

Perhaps I should have created a list of positive things regarding the US? It is  difficult to pin-point what is truly “positive” for we would have to define what that actually means, which in turn depends on our perceptions and our conditioning.  I could make a list containing many things that are founded on the negative root cause and which SEEM to be thoroughly positive in nature. This then makes us ponder the notion of free will. What we may discover if we dig very deep is that our notion of free will becomes null and void if it is merely a mask for external forces to do as they please with us as we are totally unaware of the fact.

We could say that Americans have greater material freedoms and fewer restrictions regarding their everyday lives compared to the Iraqi people under Saddam or those in Algeria or Burma for example, IF we disregard the fact the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) have been at the forefront of geo-political operations across the world using assassinations, blackmail, extortion, and massive COINTELPRO 3 strategies to further the cogency of the Military Industrial Complex; IF we disregard the institutionalized ritual abuse, paedophile rings and occult secret societies that underpin the fabric of the US.4 IF we disregard the rampant capitalism and appalling consumption at the cost of most of the natural world and the economic sustainability of developing countries, then yes, freedom in the US in its relatively short history, could be viewed as model worth emulating. Sadly, that is not the truth.

Many of us have enjoyed the material fruits of success that this nation has provided. Many have lived and died under the auspices of serving God and their country, worked hard and fulfilled the protestant ethic of the founding fathers. None of their ideals, sacrifices or integrity is altered or belittled in any way. However, now is time for us to wake up to the fact that the Bill of Rights and the American Constitution were hijacked and possibly drafted in such a way for this to take place at some future time. THIS is that time. Most of what we perceived to be true was and IS an elaborate illusion. That illusion is now coming to the fore in extremely obvious ways.

A secret government or Global “Elite”5 has been attacking its own people for decades via the normal methods of “dumbing down” within the socio-cultural systems already in place. Institutions and organizations are formed from a manufactured and inherently coercive mode of living that favours the predator and creates the prey. What’s more, further predation is the natural result as this dynamic is copied by generations in order to survive and to avoid becoming the constant source of emotional “food.” Societies are designed and maintained by the psychopath 6 that incorporates a constant social “dance” based around the lowest common denominator of human responses, i.e. negative emotions and the instincts of fear and sexual desire. This is exploited by the Global Elite intent on herding people towards specific vested interests.

For instance, we see the enormous rise of profits within the pornography industry via the internet and in video sales which are increasing at the rate of 20% annually.7 What better way to keep a population asleep by appealing to the lower instincts and base emotions of voyeurism and titillation? Add to this the obsession of entertainment and communication technology where children’s potential is being plugged into the matrix of mobiles, “game-boys” “Play-stations” and the ubiquity of television and internet mediocrity. Once again, other ways to keep us distracted and amused, so that any rise in independent thinking is by-passed into comfort zones and a fear of the unknown.

The mainstream media is one of the primary tools of this self-serving world-view, where obfuscation, disinformation, distortions and lies are channelled to an increasingly compliant and submissive population. Through the “hypodermic” approach to communication, ideas are “injected” into the minds of the masses, where information is woven together to create a huge blanket of propaganda vigorously maintained by Whitehouse representatives espousing inherently xenophobic and right wing ideals, where dialogue and exchange has long since been replaced with indoctrination.

The gradual de-sensitization to any idea of the sacred is, in part, sourced from a disconnection with nature and a deep collective isolation housed within an exclusively urban environment and the progressively dream-like emphasis on a “virtual” reality.
Children, in my view, become especially hypnotized by a fantasy reality divorced from any ethics or responsibility, founded on instant gratification and very often a designer violence as a “cure all” with no tangible consequences. In isolation and in balance this is harmless. However, tied together with all the powers of an emerging “technopia” it is creatively destructive and corrosive to the mind. We become literally immune to values and virtues and by extension, the suffering of our fellow man. We are the servants of machines rather than their masters.

Whether it be Post-Modern intellectualisations that spin us around a narcissistic hamster’s wheel that fuel inaction and mental masturbation; the stress and burn-out of the urban, western lifestyle and the accompanying loss of meaning that hurls us into an early grave, to the relentless plight of most of the planet’s population for whom the daily art of survival has become the norm – humanity is hanging by a thread that has been steadily pulled from a complex social tapestry,  rich with the potential of the human spirit. This period of our history represents choices to be herded and corralled into ever more restrictive modes of thought and action or to make a bid for freedom of the mind.

The central nexus of this propaganda machine is the United States of America - the new centre for a fascist regime the likes of which have not been since Nazi Germany. It is firmly mandated with the task of creating a reality where totalitarian control is implemented in real time. Pulling President George W. Bush’s strings are some very powerful men and women bound by an ideological blueprint which effectively re-designs the planet for their own ends where the “end times” may indeed be the harbinger of planetary crisis, but in their reality, a great opportunity for global control - a New World, or international Order.

Those who seek to establish these controls are seeking a widespread exacerbation of conflict and de-stabilisation with an aim to increase massive depopulation through their own means and ways prior to the possibility of an eventual environmental or planetary catastrophe.

Psychopaths, sociopaths and a variety of unsavoury characters seemed to seep from the collective psyche of Germany commensurate with the rise of the National Socialist Party of Adolf Hitler. The nation fell under the spell of ground-breaking propaganda provided by Goebbels and Speer as well as the hypnotic voice of the man himself. The German people were infected by a kind of demonized zeitgeist where repressed ideals of patriotism, romance and deep ecology led to a kind of inversion of the Gnostic ascent tradition.

When you have a people economically and spiritually impoverished and yearning for certainty and self-esteem the first port of call is through a seemingly new ideal of redemption and the belief in fictitious claims of superiority to buffer unresolved insecurities. The new redemption of the Germanic peoples was flawed from the beginning as it was based on lies and an unwillingness to recognize those imbalances. All became worth sacrificing for the Fatherland. Conquest and the murder of those standing against the Fuhrer was not only morally just, it was in response to a divine providence. The German people were the chosen ones to lead the world to God and Hitler was their Messiah.

It does not take a huge leap of imagination to witness the same process occurring in the US. Hitler was permitted to take power to create Nazi Germany. Bush was permitted to take power to create the first stage in the American Empire.

In the 1930s and 1940s a large scale ritual slaughter was enacted with the Jews as the primary focus. Though let it be clear that many Christians, academics and minorities were also persecuted. 61 million people died as a result of the Second World War. This time, in the early 21st century and beyond, ALL of us may be targets, where ritual may yet prove to be a significant factor within the echelons of the Global Elite. Due to the ease in which this global agenda has been allowed to manifest, it is not difficult to presume that the world itself has become the driest tinder imaginable for fascism, with many backstabbers and back-scratchers vying for a stake in the coming “global superstorm.”

We humans will continue to buffer ourselves from painful truths concerning the state of our community, town, city, society and nation and more importantly, to neglect the ecology of our internal landscape that so often mirrors that of the external environment. Within those mirrors lie some very dark demons indeed; they thrive on illusion and fantasy, whispering in our ears that we should wrap ourselves in the soft quilts of comfort-zones.

The Bush administration is the present personification of those demons which have come home to roost in a grand cycle of change. The organ grinders picked a suitable monkey to do their dirty work aided and abetted by George Bush Sr. and a legion of aligned interests. Make no mistake, the President has a mission to fulfil and one in which only a psychopath could carry out, the symptoms of which are evident through his speech and actions of the past and present. One need only take a cursory look at the resume of the hugely influential American statesman Henry Kissinger to realise that the destiny of the US has been largely navigated by psychopathic personalities. Whether overthrowing the Guatemalan government, training Nicaraguan rebels in sabotage and terrorist operations to invading Grenada and Panama – the predatorial groove is well worn and very deep.

This could be why Prime Minister and Tony Blair – accused of being a psychopath in the New Statesman magazine recently – seems to get on so well with George. Though one wonders if his politically suicidal conduct is due to information he was exposed to, whereby his only action was to tow the line. Perhaps it was a mission he was hand-picked to carry out dating back to his first 1993 Bilderberg Group  meeting before his subsequent election to Number 10. 8 We may never know. We CAN know however that he is an effective apologist for the US and acts as a virtual ambassador.

The Anglo-American hegemony rearing its head through a long history of at best, unethical and at worst, utterly immoral politics is designed by the carefully nurtured “special relationship” of Whitehall and the Whitehouse. Indeed, it seems Britain has spawned the United States as its imperial successor having established a rich history of aggression employing moral pretexts as and when required. It is a former colonial empire that shaped many of the present social structures that fuel injustice and poverty while making huge profits from its arms industry that continually supports oppressive regimes as a greedy economic “necessity.”  For example, Britain’s MI6 played a decisive role in backing Saddam Hussein’s regime in the 1980s by establishing contacts between former SAS officers and Saddam’s intelligence chiefs. Training of Iraqi special forces began in earnest.9

While the British Government happily buttressed Saddam’s appalling oppression of his people and the long-suffering Kurds, more hypocrisy was personified through the Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, known as “Darth Vader” in certain circles, and particularly influential during the Nixon administrations.

As presidential envoy to Ronald Reagan, he met Saddam Hussein in 1980 as part of a general drive to preserve and extend access to oil and consolidate military authority in the region. Then a director for the pharmaceutical multinational G.D. Searle & Co., he can be seen happily shaking hands with the dictator.10 By 1984 the seal on negotiations regarding the sale of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons had been finalized, continuing the tradition of cooperation that began in the 1960s when the CIA helped Hussein and his Ba’ath party to power. Perhaps we need to remember this salient fact when Donald begins lecturing us on the evils of Saddam.

This total absence moral standards has been apparent through a succession of administrations and a general degeneration of world politics. A further example, (from an alarmingly varied assortment) gives a snapshot into the lack of conscience within US foreign policy, shared with us by Madeline Albright, then US Ambassador to the United Nations. In 1996 a T.V. journalist from CBS posed a question regarding the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children as reported by UNICEF, due directly to US sanctions on Iraq. Her response: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price…we think the price is worth it.”11 It takes some nerve to think that ½ a million children are worth the price for American hegemony let alone to actually voice this on prime-time television. And if she did not believe her own words one would think she is hardly the most suitable choice as ambassador to the United Nations, let alone to sit on the Council for Foreign Relations.12 Yet sadly, she is precisely the type of individual that will thrive at both institutions.

The UN has now shown itself to be embarrassingly obsequious towards successive US governments, reaching a zenith of complicity and weakness during the Iraq war. As the US machine accelerated its military build up the UN was brushed aside as an irrelevance by White house chief of staff Andrew Card when he calmly commented in September 2002: “the UN can meet and discuss but we don’t need their permission.”13 This is due to the simple fact that the UN has long been bought and sold by US interests. Similarly, the British and US governments are still seen as a force for good, a belief stubbornly enforced by the media on each side of The Atlantic, even though the facts state the exact opposite.

If you have had your head in the sand or you believe what the mainstream media tell you (both amount to the same thing) then you may be wondering what is so alarming about this US expansionism led by such a fine upstanding, God-fearing Christian as dear old Dubya?

George Bush Jr. has a history of perpetual lying. He lies unconvincingly and with impunity due to the power of his Father and a family that thrives on links to the Mafia and crimes of an infinite variety, the profits of which lie in over 25 secret bank accounts around the world.14

The frequently foul-mouthed Dubya was convicted of drink driving in 1976 and lied to cover it up. He also lied at press conferences regarding his subsequent arrest and continued to fib in court, committing perjury under oath in order to avoid a damaging lawsuit.15

Considering his cocaine use, excessive drinking, womanizing and arrest for theft and vandalism at college, one would think that such a person would be a questionable candidate for many job applications let alone President of the United States. One may also be forgiven for thinking that Bush would resist the temptation to moralize the young Americans he clearly has contempt for, but no. He continually lectures students to lead a good clean Christian life where sobriety – including celibacy – leads to salvation.16 Frankly, Bush’s only relationship to Christianity is by how much he can crucify the rest of us.

Without the intelligence or business acumen to make a success on his own, the only real work George seems to do is rush around silencing his critics using inherited money and the power that goes with it. There is no shortage of websites revealing the true “nature of the beast” and being the sensitive petal that he is, Junior uses the best lawyers Daddy and the tax payer can buy to shut down those who criticize, or rather, tell the truth.17

He has also made an enormous amount of cash from regular back-handers and insider dealing with the help of business colleagues who offer their services for money laundering and other nefarious activities.18 Huge sums of money have been injected into political campaigning, for his own candidacy and for related interests and indeed relations – Jeb Bush being the most recent beneficiary of electoral and financial nepotism - most of the money being state allocated funds. Even his claim to have served in Uncle Sam’s Air force is further gilding the lily if one considers that he bypassed Officer Candidate School and effectively bought his rank of Lieutenant. He also had his flight status revoked after he ignored all the medical exams when drugs tests were introduced.19 Strange “coincidence.”

His associations with Harken oil during the late 80s and early 90s resulted in close ties with Bahrain and Arab businesses. A member of the board of directors was eventually invited to top level US foreign policy meetings and more Arab meetings were conducted within days of the invasion of Kuwait. This is sinister enough in light of the September 11 attacks and the war in Iraq over a decade later, but more grotesque is the fact that George Bush made a fat profit just before the invasion by selling much of his stocks in Harken oil.20 No different to many in a speculative market that thrives on the rumour-mill of a select few. The problem is, he is now the President of the US.

George Bush Sr. a grand statesman of deception  happened to head the CIA from 1975-1977 and was also a member of the Order of the Skull & Crossbones, a secret society formed at Yale University and with a distinguished membership dating back 170 years.21 (Dubya joined back in ’68). Many “bonesman” hold key positions within government, commerce and the military. It is more than probable that George Sr. uses this network of bonesman and his contacts within the CIA to further the family’s innumerable shady interests which include gold smuggling, dope trafficking and weapons shipments.22

Jeb Bush, Governor of Florida, (also “arranged”) has allegedly been the most active in frauds of an infinite variety. Jeb’s main claim to fame outside the US was to call Spain a republic while on a visit to apply official back-scratching to Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, one of the four countries which supported the Iraq invasion. It did not go down so well with the Spanish people, already highly suspicious of American politics and contributed further to some of the biggest demonstrations ever seen in Spain.

Another key figure in the Bush family’s laundering process is allegedly Katherine Harris, Florida Secretary of State, also accused of being at the forefront of obstructing a recount during the fiasco that passed for an election. She apparently controlled the filing and data concealment during certain unlawful transactions and as such, held hot a little power over the family. There may be a deeper explanation as to why she was “killed” in a plane crash and suddenly resurrected with claims from some that she is now a “different person” both physically and in terms of her character.23

Senator Paul Wellstone, a fierce critic of Bush Jr. and his policies died mysteriously in another plane crash last year along with his family. He was an outspoken critic of the “Plan Colombia” aid program due to his concerns regarding human rights abuses committed by the military. “Aid” is a word that has recently come under considerable scrutiny within foreign policy directives and for good reason.

We find that Bush and Harken oil benefited directly by supporting right wing paramilitary groups (or death squads) that forced those off coveted land while protecting the oil pipelines. George Bush Sr. was well aware of these double standards as the CIA helped train and fund those same paramilitary groups in order to keep the leftist guerrillas at bay and at the same time, to subsume their creation into their burgeoning intelligence network.24 Now we find Bush’s present $98 million grant package to allow the Colombian government to protect the pipelines from any further guerrilla attacks.25] Not a whisper of suspicion arose from the media concerning Wellstone’s death and that of his family. Yet when supposed “terrorist attacks” are “imminent” the mainstream media becomes hysterical. How many others have died due to the Bush crime family covering their tracks and silencing their critics? I suspect we have barely scratched the surface.

Similar to George’s ego, the inflated cost of military expenditure, totals, as I write: 72,979,341,850 and rising, literally every second.26 If 15% of military spending were cut $12 billion could be provided for basic healthcare and food for the world’s poor; $12 billion to rebuild America’s public schools; $10 billion to reduce debts for developing nations; provide health insurance for all uninsured young Americans; increase federal funding by $6 billion for clean energy and energy efficiency.27 However, this is merely an exercise in wishful thinking, as it would never be implemented under the present government or indeed past administrations. Their visions are diametrically opposed to such moves and are expressed through an extortionate military expenditure totalling $396.1 billion for this fiscal year, $16.8 billion of which will go towards extending nuclear weapons. More shocking still, is the administration’s wish to spend $2.1 TRILLION over the next five years on the so called defence of the American people against the threat of terrorism. Expenditure on missile defence will rise to over $11 billion annually by 2007.28 Let me just repeat that obscenity:

$2.1 TRILLION.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism but everything to do with an expansionism based around a totalitarian New International World Order. And they are pushing ahead to a definite timescale. Hundreds of military programs funded by Congress which is not included in official requests by the administration, total $6 billion. Keeping in mind the unaccountability of factions within the CIA and its infiltration and links to Congress this will come as no surprise. The Global Elite uses this agency and many others as powerful “crow-bars” to leverage its objectives into place and there is no question that they have considerable funds to do it. In point of fact, the US military budget actually exceeds the “allies” capability which prompted France’s Premier Jacque Chirac to suggest creating a Europe to rival the strength of America, which in turn causes speculation as to whether eventually something more than a trade war is in the offing.

Quite apart from the fact that I would not remain in the same room as the man let alone elect him to the most powerful position on earth, one could ask how it is possible that such people are able to reach the Whitehouse and effectively channel power for their own ends? When the very structures and institutions of society are biased towards a specific world-view that favours greed, and individualism as the dominant paradigm, it follows a natural pattern of consumption, economic, political, social and spiritual. This includes the electoral system.

During the 2000 election debacle in Tennessee some 65,000 vote ballots “disappeared.”  Various reports state or allude to the possibility that the CIA once again had their sticky fingers all over the “mishap” that saw Al Gore’s lead for the Presidency stolen from him. It seems election fraud has never been easier thanks to a particular software system that is asking to be manipulated. It was a minority vote forced into a clumsily orchestrated election fraud that allowed George Bush to enter the Whitehouse and for the reality of a New World Order to become that much closer. Right under our very noses. 29

There are good, honest people in the States working for truth and/or simply working to survive. For the sake of those people and for others around the world, and if we value freedom, perhaps an important question to ask ourselves is what role do we play in maintaining the status quo? Are we active in our will to resist however small, or do we acquiesce and return to the safe slumber of our conditioned beliefs? All our choices will have an effect, and as to what those effects will be depends entirely on our focus and orientation born from a realisation to wake up and SEE or to continue to sleep through the facts. You can be sure that the latter will serve the controllers very nicely thank you.

And they always say you get great service in the States.



PART II



Wednesday 16 March 2011

The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD


by Alex Constantine

Who Controls the Media?
Soulless corporations do, of course. Corporations with grinning, double-breasted executives, interlocking directorates, labor squabbles and flying capital. Dow. General Electric. Coca-Cola. Disney. Newspapers should have mastheads that mirror the world: The Westinghouse Evening Scimitar, The Atlantic-Richfield Intelligentser . It is beginning to dawn on a growing number of armchair ombudsmen that the public print reports news from a parallel universe - one that has never heard of politically-motivated assassinations, CIA-Mafia banking thefts, mind control, death squads or even federal agencies with secret budgets fattened by cocaine sales - a place overrun by lone gunmen, where the CIA and Mafia are usually on their best behavior. In this idyllic land, the most serious infraction an official can commit is the employment of a domestic servant with (shudder) no residency status.
This unlikely land of enchantment is the creation of MOCKINGBIRD.
It was conceived in the late 1940s, the most frigid period of the cold war, when the CIA began a systematic infiltration of the corporate media, a process that often included direct takeover of major news outlets.
In this period, the American intelligence services competed with communist activists abroad to influence European labor unions. With or without the cooperation of local governments, Frank Wisner, an undercover State Department official assigned to the Foreign Service, rounded up students abroad to enter the cold war underground of covert operations on behalf of his Office of Policy Coordination. Philip Graham, a graduate of the Army Intelligence School in Harrisburg, PA, then publisher of the Washington Post., was taken under Wisner's wing to direct the program code-named Operation MOCKINGBIRD.
"By the early 1950s," writes former Village Voice reporter Deborah Davis in Katharine the Great, "Wisner 'owned' respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles, plus stringers, four to six hundred in all, according to a former CIA analyst." The network was overseen by Allen Dulles, a templar for German and American corporations who wanted their points of view represented in the public print. Early MOCKINGBIRD influenced 25 newspapers and wire agencies consenting to act as organs of CIA propaganda. Many of these were already run by men with reactionary views, among them William Paley (CBS), C.D. Jackson (Fortune), Henry Luce (Time) and Arthur Hays Sulzberger (N.Y. Times).
Activists curious about the workings of MOCKINGBIRD have since been appalled to find in FOIA documents that agents boasting in CIA office memos of their pride in having placed "important assets" inside every major news publication in the country. It was not until 1982 that the Agency openly admitted that reporters on the CIA payroll have acted as case officers to agents in the field.
"World War III has begun," Henry's Luce's Life declared in March, 1947. "It is in the opening skirmish stage already." The issue featured an excerpt of a book by James Burnham, who called for the creation of an "American Empire," "world-dominating in political power, set up at least in part through coercion (probably including war, but certainly the threat of war) and in which one group of people ... would hold more than its equal share of power."
George Seldes, the famed anti-fascist media critic, drew down on Luce in 1947, explaining that "although avoiding typical Hitlerian phrases, the same doctrine of a superior people taking over the world and ruling it, began to appear in the press, whereas the organs of Wall Street were much more honest in favoring a doctrine inevitably leading to war if it brought greater commercial markets under the American flag."
On the domestic front, an abiding relationship was struck between the CIA and William Paley, a wartime colonel and the founder of CBS. A firm believer in "all forms of propaganda" to foster loyalty to the Pentagon, Paley hired CIA agents to work undercover at the behest of his close friend, the busy grey eminence of the nation's media, Allen Dulles. Paley's designated go-between in his dealings with the CIA was Sig Mickelson, president of CBS News from 1954 to 1961.
The CIA's assimilation of old guard fascists was overseen by the Operations Coordination Board, directed by C.D. Jackson, formerly an executive of Time magazine and Eisenhower's Special Assistant for Cold War Strategy. In 1954 he was succeeded by Nelson Rockefeller, who quit a year later, disgusted at the administration's political infighting. Vice President Nixon succeeded Rockefeller as the key cold war strategist.
"Nixon," writes John Loftus, a former attorney for the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, took "a small boy's delight in the arcane tools of the intelligence craft - the hidden microphones, the 'black' propaganda." Nixon especially enjoyed his visit to a Virginia training camp to observe Nazis in the "special forces" drilling at covert operations.
One of the fugitives recruited by the American intelligence underground was heroin smuggler Hubert von Blücher, the son of a German ambassador. Hubert often bragged that that he was trained by the Abwehr, the German military intelligence division, while still a civilian in his twenties. He served in a recon unit of the German Army until forced out for medical reasons in 1944, according to his wartime records. He worked briefly as an assistant director for Berlin-Film on a movie entitled One Day ..., and finished out the war flying with the Luftwaffe, but not to engage the enemy - his mission was the smuggling of Nazi loot out of the country. His exploits were, in part, the subject of Sayer and Botting's Nazi Gold, an account of the knockover of the Reichsbank at the end of the war.
In 1948 he flew the coop to Argentina. Posing as a photographer named Huberto von Bleucher Corell, he immediately paid court to Eva Peron, presenting her with an invaluable Gobelin tapestry (a selection from the wealth of artifacts confiscated by the SS from Europe's Jews?). Hubert then met with Martin Bormann at the Hotel Plaza to deliver German marks worth $80 million. The loot financed the birth of the National Socialist Party in Argentina, among other forms of Nazi revival.
In 1951, Hubert migrated northward and took a job at the Color Corporation of America in Hollywood. He eked out a living writing scripts for the booming movie industry. His voice can be heard on a film set in the Amazon, produced by Walt Disney. Nine years later he returned to Buenos Aires, then Düsseldorf, West Germany, and established a firm that developed not movie scripts, but anti-chemical warfare agents for the government. At the Industrie Club in Düsseldorf in 1982, von Blücher boasted to journalists, "I am chief shareholder of Pan American Airways. I am the best friend of Howard Hughes. The Beach Hotel in Las Vegas is 45 percent financed by me. I am thus the biggest financier ever to appear in the Arabian Nights tales dreamed up by these people over their second bottle of brandy."
Not really. Two the biggest financiers to stumble from the drunken dreams of world-moving affluence were, in their time, Moses Annenberg, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and his son Walter , the CIA/mob-anchored publisher of the TV Guide. Like most American high-rollers, Annenberg lived a double life. Moses, his father, was a scion of the Capone mob. Both Moses and Walter were indicted in 1939 for tax evasions totalling many millions of dollars - the biggest case in the history of the Justice Department. Moses pled guilty and agreed to pay the government $8 million and settle $9 million in assorted tax claims, penalties and interest debts. Moses received a three-year sentence. He died in Lewisburg Penitentiary.
Walter Annenbeg, the TV Guide magnate, was a lofty Republican. On the campaign trail in April, 1988, George Bush flew into Los Angeles to woo Reagan's kitchen cabinet. "This is the topping on the cake," Bush's regional campaign director told the Los Angeles Times. The Bush team met at Annenberg's plush Rancho Mirage estate at Sunnylands, California. It was at the Annenberg mansion that Nixon's cabinet was chosen, and the state's social and contributor registers built over a quarter-century of state political dominance by Ronald Reagan, whose acting career was launched by Operation MOCKINGBIRD.

The commercialization of television, coinciding with Reagan's recruitment by the Crusade for Freedom, a CIA front, presented the intelligence world with unprecedented potential for sowing propaganda and even prying in the age of Big Brother. George Orwell glimpsed the possibilities when he installed omniscient video surveillance technology in 1948, a novel rechristened 1984 for the first edition published in the U.S. by Harcourt, Brace. Operation Octopus, according to federal files, was in full swing by 1948, a surveillance program that turned any television set with tubes into a broadcast transmitter. Agents of Octopus could pick up audio and visual images with the equipment as far as 25 miles away.
Hale Boggs was investigating Operation Octopus at the time of his disappearance in the midst of the Watergate probe.
In 1952, at MCA, Actors' Guild president Ronald Reagan - a screen idol recruited by MOCKINGBIRD's Crusade for Freedom to raise funds for the resettlement of Nazis in the U.S., according to Loftus - signed a secret waiver of the conflict-of-interest rule with the mob-controlled studio, in effect granting it a labor monopoly on early television programming. In exchange, MCA made Reagan a part owner. Furthermore, historian C. Vann Woodward, writing in the New York Times, in 1987, reported that Reagan had "fed the names of suspect people in his organization to the FBI secretly and regularly enough to be assigned 'an informer's code number, T-10.' His FBI file indicates intense collaboration with producers to 'purge' the industry of subversives."

No one ever turned a suspicious eye on Walter Cronkite, a former intelligence officer and in the immediate postwar period UPI's Moscow correspondent. Cronkite was lured to CBS by Operation MOCKINGBIRD's Phil Graham, according to Deborah Davis.
Another television conglomerate, Cap Cities, rose like a horror-film simian from CIA and Mafia heroin operations. Among other organized-crime Republicans, Thomas Dewey and his neighbor Lowell Thomas threw in to launch the infamous Resorts International, the corporate front for Lansky's branch of the federally-sponsored mob family and the corporate precursor to Cap Cities. Another of the investors was James Crosby, a Cap Cities executive who donated $100,000 to Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign. This was the year that Resorts bought into Atlantic City casino interests. Police in New jersey attempted, with no success, to spike the issuance of a gambling license to the company, citing Mafia ties.

In 1954, this same circle of investors, all Catholics, founded the broadcasting company notorious for overt propagandizing and general spookiness. The company's chief counsel was OSS veteran William Casey, who clung to his shares by concealing them in a blind trust even after he was appointed CIA director by Ronald Reagan in 1981.

"Black radio" was the phrase CIA critic David Wise coined in The Invisible Government to describe the agency's intertwining interests in the emergence of the transistor radio with the entrepreneurs who took to the airwaves. "Daily, East and West beam hundreds of propaganda broadcasts at each other in an unrelenting babble of competition for the minds of their listeners. The low-price transistor has given the hidden war a new importance," enthused one foreign correspondent.
A Hydra of private foundations sprang up to finance the propaganda push. One of them, Operations and Policy Research, Inc. (OPR), received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the CIA through private foundations and trusts. OPR research was the basis of a television series that aired in New York and Washington, D.C. in 1964, Of People and Politics, a "study" of the American political system in 21 weekly installments.
In Hollywood, the visual cortex of The Beast, the same CIA/Mafia combination that formed Cap Cities sank its claws into the film studios and labor unions. Johnny Rosselli was pulled out of the Army during the war by a criminal investigation of Chicago mobsters in the film industry. Rosselli, a CIA asset probably assassinated by the CIA, played sidekick to Harry Cohn, the Columbia Pictures mogul who visited Italy's Benito Mussolini in 1933, and upon his return to Hollywood remodeled his office after the dictator's. The only honest job Rosselli ever had was assistant purchasing agent (and a secret investor) at Eagle Lion Productions, run by Bryan Foy, a former producer for 20th Century Fox. Rosselli, Capone's representative on the West Coast, passed a small fortune in mafia investments to Cohn. Bugsy Seigel pooled gambling investments with Billy Wilkerson, publisher of the Hollywood Reporter.
In the 1950s, outlays for global propaganda climbed to a full third of the CIA's covert operations budget. Some 3, 000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts. The cost of disinforming the world cost American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year by 1978, a budget larger than the combined expenditures of Reuters, UPI and the AP news syndicates.
In 1977, the Copely News Service admitted that it worked closely with the intelligence services - in fact, 23 employees were full-time employees of the Agency.
Most consumers of the corporate media were - and are - unaware of the effect that the salting of public opinion has on their own beliefs. A network anchorman in time of national crisis is an instrument of psychological warfare in the MOCKINGBIRD media. He is a creature from the national security sector's chamber of horrors. For this reason consumers of the corporate press have reason to examine their basic beliefs about government and life in the parallel universe of these United States.

Monday 14 March 2011

THE EUROPEAN UNION - Whatever happened to democracy?


By Richard Greaves, October 2001
 


The E.U. has seven major institutions.... yet only one has its members directly elected, and even its role is secondary to the most powerful of the unelected institutions. Now read on.....


COUNCIL OF MINISTERS - meets behind closed doors.

Although its individual members are generally, as in the case of Britain, elected members of national parliaments, as a body, it is not answerable to any elected institution.

It is the policy making institution of the EU, backed by the powerful and influential Committee of Permanent Representatives - a body of appointed paid EU civil servants. The make up of the Council depends on what is being discussed – foreign ministers discuss foreign policy, agriculture ministers farming, the Common Agricultural Policy etc. Decisions are made unanimously, or by "qualified majority", which has been extended to new areas in place of unanimity by the Maastricht Treaty and the Amsterdam Treaty, thus removing the power of national veto, and is being extended still further by the Nice Treaty. 

The Maastricht Treaty introduced and made mandatory, co-operation between member states in criminal and civil justice and home affairs. Common positions and joint actions in this area are implemented by the Council acting alone, the other institutions at best are "associated" with the work as in the case of the Commission, or just make recommendations, as in the case of the European Parliament.
(This process of reaching agreements at meetings, and then what has been agreed being implemented by legislation or otherwise across the EU by governments of member states, is a very important method of developing the EU and its policy. It is also employed at the six monthly EU summits attended by the heads of governments of member states.) 

EUROPEAN COMMISSION - meets behind closed doors.
Appointed - 20 members, 1 to 2 per state.
It alone initiates legislation by turning the policy decisions of the Council of Ministers into legislative "proposals" which eventually become "Community acts" binding on member states. It is backed by about 13000 appointed paid civil servants (excluding translators). Commissioners are forbidden by the Treaty of Rome to represent their national interests – they must promote and represent the interests of the Union. 
(whatever they may be – their own and those of big business perhaps which in practice has easy access to the Commission, not readily granted to anyone else.) 

EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT
626 elected members of which Britain returns 87.
It is an assembly rather than a parliament, because it cannot initiate legislation, (it can only "ask" the Commission to do so) and it has no control over money supply or taxation.

It gives opinions on some matters, can be "consulted" on others but only in certain cases can it amend or reject a legislative proposal with the "co-decision procedure", a very complex procedure involving strict time limits which favours legislative proposals going through unchallenged, especially in view of the very large numbers of proposals that are put forward. The Amsterdam Treaty extended the areas in which the "co-decision" procedure applies, but it did not simplify the procedure itself or affect the Commission’s sole power to initiate legislation.

In fact the number of legislative proposals in the form of regulations and directives is so enormous that MEPs have to vote on large numbers of them at a time with little or no knowledge as to what the proposals involve. Furthermore, for those few proposals which do get debated, strict time limits of just a few minutes are imposed on how long an individual MEP can speak. The parliament is thus often regarded as no more than a rubber stamp. 

Democracy also requires accessibility – originally, each constituency has an electorate of about half a million people, but these have been replaced now by larger regions having a set number of MEPs, making these people even more distant than they were before. The Parliament sitting in Brussels and Strasbourg is very remote as far as the electors are concerned. Lobbying is much easier for big corporate interests through organisations such as the European Round Table of Industrialists and almost impossible for individuals and small interest groups.

EUROPEAN CENTRAL BANK – meets behind closed doors. 

Members of the Executive Board are appointed from private banking circles, by agreement of heads of government of member states after "consultation" with the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament.

This is the most powerful institution in the E.U. It has total and independent control over the amount of money and credit in circulation, and thus the general level of economic activity, at a given time throughout those member states who sign up for monetary union. It will also fix interest rates.

What it decides determines levels of direct and indirect taxation, spending in every area of economic and social activity, wage deals, government borrowing, the budgets to be allocated to the newly created regional assemblies etc. National Central Banks become an integral part of the European System of Central Banks and must act in accordance with its instructions. It therefore controls cycles of "boom" and "bust". Its regulations and directives do not require the approval or consent of any of the other institutions, which are obliged to recognise its "independence", by not seeking to influence it. The only control is a judicial one exercised by the European Court of Justice which is limited to deciding whether or not it has acted in accordance with its very wide powers. Any changes to those powers would require a new treaty.

The economies of the various member states of the EU are as diverse and different as the states themselves. Such centralised and uniform control will be totally lacking in flexibility to suit local conditions. There will be winners - probably big corporate interests who seek to locate and sell across the entire EU. There will also be losers – probably smaller businesses who, in total provide many more jobs than big corporations, but who do most of their trade within their home state. They will be burdened with the cost of the changeover and suffer most when centralised policy creates adverse local conditions. In the meantime for states not yet enrolled in monetary union, their economies must always be run in readiness for entry regardless as to when if at all this occurs. In practice this means tight controls on public spending so health and education tend to suffer.

The granting of full independence, and control of monetary policy to the Bank of England by the Labour Government immediately after it was elected in 1997, was done to prepare for the handing over of power to the ECB and the incorporation of the Bank of England into the European System of Central Banks.

EUROPEAN COURT OF JUSTICE

NOT to be confused with the European Court of Human Rights which is quite separate and not an EU institution.

It interprets the rules of the treaties and all community legislative acts, regulations and directives made under them. The courts of member states have no jurisdiction in these areas. The only law it applies is that contained in the treaties which is designed to further European integration, thus it is often more of a political court whose decisions and interpretations are designed to assist in that process. It can fine member states, companies and individuals for non compliance.

ECONOMIC & SOCIAL COMMITTEE (ECOSOC)
222 members (of which Britain has 24) appointed by the Council of Ministers from the ranks of producers, manufacturers, farmers, the professions etc. It has to consulted on legislative proposals in certain areas, but its recommendations are not binding.

COMMITTEE of the REGIONS (COR)
222 members (of which Britain has 24) appointed by the Council of Ministers from the ranks of local government.

It has to be consulted on legislative proposals in certain very limited areas, but its recommendations are not binding.

Devolution, Subsidiarity and the Committee of the Regions 

Under the COR, the EU is divided up into 111 regions, of which the U.K. accounts for 12. Eventually each region is to have an assembly. The assemblies set up for Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland are therefore a vital part of this political process, as Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have each been designated a region under this plan. England has been divided into 9 regions, making up the total of 12. The first English region to have an assembly is Greater London – the rest are presently represented by regional development agencies, with assemblies planned to follow in due course. Under the principle of subsidiarity referred to in the Maastricht Treaty, the heads of governments of the member states will agree basically what powers will be devolved to the regions. Although elected, the assemblies play no part in the EU legislative process - they simply decide how a budget (presently allocated to them by national governments) will be spent in areas such as health and education and certain aspects of economic development. Their voice in the EU is confined to the COR - to which each region sends 2 members - and just lobbying the other EU institutions and national representatives in the Council of Ministers.

FINAL REMARKS

Tory MEP Roger Helmer elected in 1999 was told by a fellow MEP that in 10 years Westminster would be gone, and by then, the U.K. would be 12 regions governed from Brussels. This objective was confirmed at an European Movement meeting in Bristol on 16/3/01 by Tory MEP Caroline Jackson. With major constitutional and law making powers being transferred to EU institutions, and limited spending powers being devolved to the regions, elected national parliaments are already becoming just "clearing houses" for passing on EU made policy, rules and regulations – part of a global trend of depriving democratic structures of any real power and substance. The fact that appointments systems are used for many of the EU institutions ensures that only those who support the centralised EU state are appointed. Throughout Europe successive heads of state, prime ministers and other senior ministers have secretly pursued the creation of a single centralised European state. In Britain, the rest of Europe is presented as being united, with dissent very rarely reported in the media. Our 3 major parties have all supported the European Treaties that have led us to where we are now. No real choice has ever been offered to the electorate. Do we get out or try to reform from within? At the moment, the power to change the treaties or even rewrite them completely still rests with national governments. Presently, the European Parliament by a two thirds majority can dismiss the entire European Commission, and nearly did so in 1999 – the Commission did resign, although several Commissioners were re-appointed, and it is now very much a case of "business as usual". However what happened suggests that the rigorous use of such powers as the Parliament has by a majority of MEPs truly committed to representing ordinary people and democratic principles would send shock waves throughout the most powerful institutions. However the greatest difficulty would be to break existing party lines. Generally the major parties throughout the EU select their candidates on the basis of their support for the EU. Once elected, an MEP’s role is to promote the EU, for which they are well paid with lavish expenses. However, the new system of proportional representation does enable small parties to get members elected, but will this be enough to mount a challenge to the power of the other institutions and the corruption and cronyism that we now discovering pervades every EU institution including the Parliament itself?

POSTSCRIPT - FURTHER EU PROPOSALS 

1) The Abolition of the Council of Ministers has been proposed by German Foreign Minster Joschka Fisher to be replaced by a President who should have the power to appoint a cabinet. 2) A Written Constitution for the European state incorporating the existing treaties. These would mean member states’ governments no longer having any involvement in any EU policy making, or being able to amend the treaties or a future constitution of the EU.
Richard Greaves - "The Old Stables", Cusop, Herefordshire, HR3 5RQ E-mail: rgreaves@supanet.com   Updated: October 2001.
YOU ARE WELCOME TO COPY AND CIRCULATE THIS INFORMATION SHEET

Sunday 13 March 2011

Militarizing the Social Sciences

Global Research, August 6, 2008
 


Since World War II's Manhattan Project, the above-top secret program that built the atomic bomb subsequently dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. national security state has transformed scientific research into a branch of weapons development.

The quest for atomic arms and chemical/biological warfare agents led physicists, engineers, biologists, chemists and physicians ever-deeper into the dark heart of a secretive and far-flung U.S. weapons complex. Indeed, many of these dubious programs were hidden in plain sight at prestigious American universities and corporate laboratories.

This trend accelerated during the Cold War when many psychologists and social scientists became witting and unwitting partners in the CIA and Army's illegal and ethically-challenged MKULTRA program.

Under the cover of "national security," CIA and Army researchers sought to create magic bullets they hoped would provide Cold Warriors a leg up over their Soviet rivals in the development of "mind control" technologies.

While that quixotic mission ended in failure, other discoveries in behavioral psychology and psychiatry--such as illicit experiments in sensory deprivation and conditioning--led to the development of today's "enhanced interrogation" techniques (torture) at Guantánamo Bay, Afghanistan, Iraq and the CIA's transnational network of secret prisons.

Recent articles in Antifascist Calling have explored the militarization of biological, cognitive, and information sciences as constituent elements of the Bush administration's "war on terror." We now turn to Pentagon schemes to militarize the social sciences, both as a tactical necessity under battlefield conditions and as a strategic instrument to further military/media psychological operations (PSYOPS), particularly within societies under threat of imperialist attack.

While the utilization of social scientists as reliable, off-the-shelf intelligence assets is not a new phenomenon, various "dirty tricks" offices of the CIA freely employed the services of media and social science operatives either during the run-up to U.S.-sponsored coups (Congo [1961], Brazil [1964], Indonesia [1965], Greece [1967], Chile [1973]) or as embedded counterinsurgency specialists (Vietnam [1950-1973] ), what is new are current plans by the Department of Defense to formalize these ad hoc relationships within specific programs under a Pentagon command structure.

Unlike the complicitous relationships amongst physical scientists as state-sponsored weaponeers, chained to research funding by the DoD or by giant multinational corporate grifters, these plans have been met by widespread--and growing opposition--amongst social scientists themselves. This is certainly a healthy--and welcome--development.

But as anthropologist David H. Price points out, similar funding trends now threaten to undermine and subvert the sensitive work--and academic freedom--of social scientists. Price avers,
As non-directed independent funding for American social scientists decreases, there are steady increases in new directed funding programs such as the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program, the National Security Education Program, Intelligence Community Scholars Program; these programs leave our universities increasingly ready to produce knowledge and scholars aligned with the ideological assumptions of the Defense Department. ("Inside the Minerva Consortium: Social Science in Harness," CounterPunch, June 24, 2008)
The latest move towards militarizing academia came April 14, when Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced the formation of the Minerva Research Institute.
The Minerva Research Institute: Counterinsurgency with a Human Face
The Washington Post revealed that the Pentagon is funding a $50 million initiative that would fund social science research deemed vital to "national security."

The Minerva Research Initiative is a scheme to help the military "unravel questions" about how terrorists are recruited, translate and analyze captured Iraqi documents, the allure for Afghans of a resurgent Taliban, the collation of open-source documents that pertain to Chinese military policy, or what makes Iraqi insurgents tick.

But the program as described by the Post, would have immediate ramifications for societies already designated enemies of the American corporatist empire such as Venezuela, other socialist outposts of alternative development such as Cuba, not to mention geopolitical rivals Russia, China and Iran.

The danger of course, is to transform anthropologists under the watchful eye of Pentagon commissars into counterinsurgency "mission specialists." Many knowledgeable observers fear that social science as conceived by the Minerva Research Institute, will become yet another front in the "war on terror."

Such fears are hardly misplaced. During the 1960s for example, Project Camelot, an Army-sponsored program "to study political change and unrest in Latin America, was canceled abruptly after the program was revealed in the Chilean press," the Post reports.

However, as Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett describe in their definitive history, Thy Will Be Done: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil, (New York: Harper Collins, 1995) Project Camelot was conceived first and foremost as a counterinsurgency program in oil-rich Latin American nations:
The social sciences were the brains, what a computerized guidance system is to a deadly missile. In July 1964, the U.S. Army gave the Special Operations Research Office (SORO) at American University in Washington, D.C., the largest single grant ever awarded a social science project. The project's targets for "field research" in Latin America were Peru, Ecuador, Paraguay, Venezuela, and Colombia. ...
Project Camelot was to be a broad sweep for local data collection, including everything from the language, social structure, and history of peoples to labor strikes, peasants' seizure of haciendas, and violence. Anthropologists, linguists, psychologists, sociologists, and economists would be joined by political scientists, mathematicians, and the military to produce a deliberate political objective of social control. (p. 479)
As Price points out, "because of the narrowness of scope and assumptions about the causes of problems facing America, Gates' Minerva plan ... will inevitably fund scholars willing to think in the narrow ways already acceptable to the Defense Department."

While the DoD has largely abandoned the demonizing and shallow rhetoric of the Bush regime, ("they hate us because of our freedoms") will subtler, yet potentially more lethal approaches that propose to "get inside people's heads," solve the real world problems created by the systemic economic/ideological biases of our corporate masters? I think not.

In other words, will a cultural knowledge skill-set, particularly during a period characterized by economic melt-down and preemptive wars of imperial conquest and resource extraction, do anything to actually ameliorate the "root causes" of terrorism?
Will rampant poverty, exploitation, repression in the form of the "political genocide" of left alternatives, state-sponsored religious fundamentalism, often in concert with Western intelligence agencies, not to mention the environmental crises brought on by widespread habitat destruction for profit, be mitigated by such schemes? Or will universities, already dependent on DoD and corporate research dollars become ideologically-biased outposts tied ever-closer to the military-industrial-surveillance complex?

As the Network of Concerned Anthropologists (NCA) point out,
The US university system is already highly militarized, that is, many universities take in a large proportion of their research funding from military sources. This is problematic...
The fields so supported are distorted by focus on issues of utility to warmaking. Whole fields of study hypertrophy and others shrink or are never developed as researchers are drawn from one field into the other, Pentagon-desired ones. Nuclear and other weapons research related areas grow, at the expense of environmental research, for example. Moreover, theory, methodology, and research goals in such fields as physics, computer science, and engineering after decades of military funding now operate on assumptions that knowledge about force is paramount. ...
The University becomes an instrument rather than a critic of war-making, and spaces for critical discussion of militarism within the university shrink. ("Some Concerns about the Minerva Consortia Project," Network of Concerned Anthropologists, May 28, 2008)
Unfortunately, this process is well-underway.

Militarizing the "Cultural Front"

The Human Terrain System (HTS) is a project administered by the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. The unit is commanded by Col. Steve Fondacero, who says the project's purpose is to "non-kinetically neutralize enemies" through knowledge of "what's going on culturally."
HTS units are currently comprised of five-person teams of social scientists and intelligence specialists deployed to forward-operating combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan.

According to a 2007 article in In These Times (ITT), "The 'human terrain' is defined as the social, ethnographic, cultural, economic and political characteristics of the people who live in the region occupied by the brigade, a force of 3,000 to 5,000 troops under the command of a colonel."

Fondacero told ITT investigative journalist Lindsay Beyerstein last year "he isn't at liberty to talk about [the program] in detail, lest the enemy learn about successful programs and target them accordingly."

Two HTS specialists have been killed this year. Nicole Suveges was killed in June in Sadr City, Iraq while Michael Bhatia was killed in May in Afghanistan. Suveges was a social scientist and Army reservist previously deployed in Bosnia-Herzegovina where she was assigned to the Combined Joint Psychological Operations Task Force. Bhatia was a political scientist who was a research fellow at Brown University's The Watson Institute for International Studies.

While their deaths are tragic, what broader ethical issues are raised by embedding anthropologists or other social scientists in military units where the mission involves extracting cultural knowledge from local sources as a tactical modality for their subjugation?
As George Mason University anthropology professor Hugh Gusterson writes,
We engage in what one anthropologist has called "deep hanging out" with people, passing the time with them, often day after day for months, painstakingly earning their trust and getting them to tell us about their worlds. What distinguishes anthropology from espionage ... is that we seek the consent of our subjects, and we follow an injunction to do no harm to those we study. According to the anthropological code of ethics, our obligations to those we study trump all others--to colleagues, funders, and nation. (It's for this reason that Franz Boas, the father of American anthropology, famously condemned four colleagues for using anthropological research as cover for spying during World War I.) ("The U.S. military's quest to weaponize culture," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 20 June 2008)
The HTS program is administered by corporate giants intimately connected to the military-industrial-surveillance complex. The scandal-plagued, British defense firm BAE Systems is the prime contractor currently administering HTS, while CACI International and the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) are subcontractors handling recruitment. Newsweek reported that BAE Systems "was handed" the contract "without a bidding process."

According to Washington Technology's Top 100 List of "Federal Prime Contractors: 2008," No. 12 BAE Systems Inc., derived $2,019,931,520 of its earnings from defense and civilian federal government contracts; No. 5 Science Applications International Corp., earned $4,919,829,998 from similar sources; and No. 17 CACI International Inc., received $1,337,472,153 for work related to the Defense Department. While the $40 million price tag for the entire program is a mere pittance compared to other DoD projects, it raises serious issues as to the independence of social scientists recruited to the program.
As Roberto Gonzalez and David Price wrote in a 2007 piece for CounterPunch, SAIC "has begun describing anthropology as a counter-insurgency related field in its job advertisements." As a job description it doesn't get any more explicit!

Problems have plagued the program since its inception. Newsweek reported,
Of 19 Human Terrain members operating in five teams in Iraq, fewer than a handful can be described loosely as Middle East experts, and only three speak Arabic. The rest are social scientists or former GIs who...are transposing research skills from their unrelated fields at home. ...
Recruitment appears to have been mishandled from the start, with administrators offering positions to even marginally qualified applicants. The pool of academics across the country who speak Arabic and focus on Iraq, or even more broadly on the Middle East, is not large to begin with. ... Several team members say they were accepted after brief phone interviews and that their language skills were never tested. As a result, instead of top regional experts, the anthropologists sent to Iraq include a Latin America specialist and an authority on Native Americans. One is writing his Ph.D. dissertation on America's goth, punk and rave subcultures. (Dan Ephron and Silvia Spring, "A Gun in One Hand, A Pen in the Other," Newsweek, April 21, 2008)
But more problematic than the poor administration of the program by the Army and outsourced contractors, is the nature of HTS and the proposed Minerva Research Initiative itself.

As the NCA document, Assistant Under Secretary of Defense John Wilcox, has described Human Terrain Mapping, a constitute element of the program, as one that "enables the entire kill chain across the Global War on Terror." Indeed, in a 2006 article in Military Review, Pentagon analysts describe HTS as "a CORDS for the 21st Century." Such analogies are troubling to say the least.

The Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) was the operational element of the CIA's Phoenix Program during the Vietnam war. Launched in 1967, Phoenix was a high-tech computer operation aimed at "neutralizing"--through assassination, kidnapping and systematic torture--the civilian infrastructure that supported the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front.

From its inception, the program was rife with corruption. Those who failed to pay bribes to South Vietnamese military personnel assigned to CORDS, found themselves at the tender mercies of CIA-Phoenix operatives. More than 25,000 people were murdered. CORDS, among other things, in a eerie echo of today's "war on terror" ran interrogation centers that were little more than dungeons where "suspects" were cruelly tortured and then "disappeared." (For more on CORDS see: Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program, New York: The William Morrow Company, 1990)

More disturbing still, are recent developments. In keeping with the "global war on terror" paradigm that opposition = subversion = terrorism, the Network of Concerned Anthropologists reported that at a November 30 panel discussion which featured three of their members during the American Anthropological Association annual meeting, "witnesses saw two U.S. Army personnel affiliated with the human terrain program writing down the names and institutional affiliations of anthropologists who had signed copies of the NCA pledge circulating during the panel."

In a subsequent letter to HTS commander Colonel Fondacero, Hugh Gusterson wrote:
I'm writing to you in the hope you might shed light on an incident that concerns me. A former US intelligence officer who now works with the Network of Concerned Anthropologists saw Laurie Adler of TRADOC and Jessica Lawrence of the US army writing down the names and institutional affiliations of anthropologists who had signed the pledge of non-participation in counter-insurgency work as the pledge was passed around a session at the meetings. This raises a number of questions:
Whose orders were Adler and Lawrence following when they engaged in this behavior? How many names of signatories to the pledge has the US military collected How and where are those named being stored? Who will have access to these names? What is the US military's purpose in collecting the names of people who have signed the pledge?
Surveillance of ethical social scientists who have taken a stand against militarizing their discipline is a clear harbinger of what awaits those who heed the Pentagon's siren song. With annual salaries exceeding $300,000 according to Newsweek, will anthropologists and social scientists become the academic equivalent of the armed gangs of mercenaries already employed by dozens of private military contractors?

Social scientists, as David Price forcefully argues "cannot ignore the political context in which their knowledge will be used." Minerva and the Human Terrain System, like earlier counterinsurgency programs funded by the Defense Department and the CIA seek to increase of the efficiency of the Bush Doctrine across "the entire kill chain," not question it.

Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly, Love & Rage and Antifa Forum, he is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press.



Saturday 12 March 2011

The Mind Has No Firewall

TIMOTHY L. THOMAS



From Parameters, Spring 1998, pp. 84-92. 


"It is completely clear that the state which is first to create such weapons will achieve incomparable superiority." -- Major I. Chernishev, Russian army[1]


The human body, much like a computer, contains myriad data processors. They include, but are not limited to, the chemical-electrical activity of the brain, heart, and peripheral nervous system, the signals sent from the cortex region of the brain to other parts of our body, the tiny hair cells in the inner ear that process auditory signals, and the light-sensitive retina and cornea of the eye that process visual activity.[2] We are on the threshold of an era in which these data processors of the human body may be manipulated or debilitated. Examples of unplanned attacks on the body's data-processing capability are well-documented. Strobe lights have been known to cause epileptic seizures. Not long ago in Japan, children watching television cartoons were subjected to pulsating lights that caused seizures in some and made others very sick. 

Defending friendly and targeting adversary data-processing capabilities of the body appears to be an area of weakness in the US approach to information warfare theory, a theory oriented heavily toward systems data-processing and designed to attain information dominance on the battlefield. Or so it would appear from information in the open, unclassified press. This US shortcoming may be a serious one, since the capabilities to alter the data- processing systems of the body already exist. A recent edition of U.S. News and World Report highlighted several of these "wonder weapons" (acoustics, microwaves, lasers) and noted that scientists are "searching the electromagnetic and sonic spectrums for wavelengths that can affect human behavior."[3] A recent Russian military article offered a slightly different slant to the problem, declaring that "humanity stands on the brink of a psychotronic war" with the mind and body as the focus. That article discussed Russian and international attempts to control the psycho-physical condition of man and his decisionmaking processes by the use of VHF-generators, "noiseless cassettes," and other technologies. 

An entirely new arsenal of weapons, based on devices designed to introduce subliminal messages or to alter the body's psychological and data-processing capabilities, might be used to incapacitate individuals. These weapons aim to control or alter the psyche, or to attack the various sensory and data-processing systems of the human organism. In both cases, the goal is to confuse or destroy the signals that normally keep the body in equilibrium.
This article examines energy-based weapons, psychotronic weapons, and other developments designed to alter the ability of the human body to process stimuli. One consequence of this assessment is that the way we commonly use the term "information warfare" falls short when the individual soldier, not his equipment, becomes the target of attack. 

Information Warfare Theory and the Data-Processing Element of Humans
 
In the United States the common conception of information warfare focuses primarily on the capabilities of hardware systems such as computers, satellites, and military equipment which process data in its various forms. According to Department of Defense Directive S-3600.1 of 9 December 1996, information warfare is defined as "an information operation conducted during time of crisis or conflict to achieve or promote specific objectives over a specific adversary or adversaries." An information operation is defined in the same directive as "actions taken to affect adversary information and information systems while defending one's own information and information systems." These "information systems" lie at the heart of the modernization effort of the US armed forces and other countries, and manifest themselves as hardware, software, communications capabilities, and highly trained individuals. Recently, the US Army conducted a mock battle that tested these systems under simulated combat conditions. 

US Army Field Manual 101-5-1, Operational Terms and Graphics (released 30 September 1997), defines information warfare as "actions taken to achieve information superiority by affecting a hostile's information, information based-processes, and information systems, while defending one's own information, information processes, and information systems." The same manual defines information operations as a "continuous military operation within the military information environment that enables, enhances, and protects friendly forces' ability to collect, process, and act on information to achieve an advantage across the full range of military operations. [Information operations include] interacting with the Global Information Environment . . . and exploiting or denying an adversary's information and decision capabilities."[4] 

This "systems" approach to the study of information warfare emphasizes the use of data, referred to as information, to penetrate an adversary's physical defenses that protect data (information) in order to obtain operational or strategic advantage. It has tended to ignore the role of the human body as an information- or data-processor in this quest for dominance except in those cases where an individual's logic or rational thought may be upset via disinformation or deception. As a consequence little attention is directed toward protecting the mind and body with a firewall as we have done with hardware systems. Nor have any techniques for doing so been prescribed. Yet the body is capable not only of being deceived, manipulated, or misinformed but also shut down or destroyed--just as any other data-processing system. The "data" the body receives from external sources--such as electromagnetic, vortex, or acoustic energy waves--or creates through its own electrical or chemical stimuli can be manipulated or changed just as the data (information) in any hardware system can be altered. 

The only body-related information warfare element considered by the United States is psychological operations (PSYOP). In Joint Publication 3-13.1, for example, PSYOP is listed as one of the elements of command and control warfare. The publication notes that "the ultimate target of [information warfare] is the information dependent process, whether human or automated . . . . Command and control warfare (C2W) is an application of information warfare in military operations. . . . C2W is the integrated use of PSYOP, military deception, operations security, electronic warfare and physical destruction."[5] 

One source defines information as a "nonaccidental signal used as an input to a computer or communications system."[6] The human body is a complex communication system constantly receiving nonaccidental and accidental signal inputs, both external and internal. If the ultimate target of information warfare is the information-dependent process, "whether human or automated," then the definition in the joint publication implies that human data-processing of internal and external signals can clearly be considered an aspect of information warfare. Foreign researchers have noted the link between humans as data processors and the conduct of information warfare. While some study only the PSYOP link, others go beyond it. As an example of the former, one recent Russian article described offensive information warfare as designed to "use the Internet channels for the purpose of organizing PSYOP as well as for `early political warning' of threats to American interests."[7] The author's assertion was based on the fact that "all mass media are used for PSYOP . . . [and] today this must include the Internet." The author asserted that the Pentagon wanted to use the Internet to "reinforce psychological influences" during special operations conducted outside of US borders to enlist sympathizers, who would accomplish many of the tasks previously entrusted to special units of the US armed forces. 

Others, however, look beyond simple PSYOP ties to consider other aspects of the body's data-processing capability. One of the principal open source researchers on the relationship of information warfare to the body's data-processing capability is Russian Dr. Victor Solntsev of the Baumann Technical Institute in Moscow. Solntsev is a young, well-intentioned researcher striving to point out to the world the potential dangers of the computer operator interface. Supported by a network of institutes and academies, Solntsev has produced some interesting concepts.[8] He insists that man must be viewed as an open system instead of simply as an organism or closed system. As an open system, man communicates with his environment through information flows and communications media. One's physical environment, whether through electromagnetic, gravitational, acoustic, or other effects, can cause a change in the psycho-physiological condition of an organism, in Solntsev's opinion. Change of this sort could directly affect the mental state and consciousness of a computer operator. This would not be electronic war or information warfare in the traditional sense, but rather in a nontraditional and non-US sense. It might encompass, for example, a computer modified to become a weapon by using its energy output to emit acoustics that debilitate the operator. It also might encompass, as indicated below, futuristic weapons aimed against man's "open system." 

Solntsev also examined the problem of "information noise," which creates a dense shield between a person and external reality. This noise may manifest itself in the form of signals, messages, images, or other items of information. The main target of this noise would be the consciousness of a person or a group of people. Behavior modification could be one objective of information noise; another could be to upset an individual's mental capacity to such an extent as to prevent reaction to any stimulus. Solntsev concludes that all levels of a person's psyche (subconscious, conscious, and "superconscious") are potential targets for destabilization.
According to Solntsev, one computer virus capable of affecting a person's psyche is Russian Virus 666. It manifests itself in every 25th frame of a visual display, where it produces a combination of colors that allegedly put computer operators into a trance. The subconscious perception of the new pattern eventually results in arrhythmia of the heart. Other Russian computer specialists, not just Solntsev, talk openly about this "25th frame effect" and its ability to subtly manage a computer user's perceptions. The purpose of this technique is to inject a thought into the viewer's subconscious. It may remind some of the subliminal advertising controversy in the United States in the late 1950s. 

US Views on "Wonder Weapons": Altering the Data-Processing Ability of the Body
 
What technologies have been examined by the United States that possess the potential to disrupt the data-processing capabilities of the human organism? The 7 July 1997 issue of U.S. News and World Report described several of them designed, among other things, to vibrate the insides of humans, stun or nauseate them, put them to sleep, heat them up, or knock them down with a shock wave.[9] The technologies include dazzling lasers that can force the pupils to close; acoustic or sonic frequencies that cause the hair cells in the inner ear to vibrate and cause motion sickness, vertigo, and nausea, or frequencies that resonate the internal organs causing pain and spasms; and shock waves with the potential to knock down humans or airplanes and which can be mixed with pepper spray or chemicals.[10] 

With modification, these technological applications can have many uses. Acoustic weapons, for example, could be adapted for use as acoustic rifles or as acoustic fields that, once established, might protect facilities, assist in hostage rescues, control riots, or clear paths for convoys. These waves, which can penetrate buildings, offer a host of opportunities for military and law enforcement officials. Microwave weapons, by stimulating the peripheral nervous system, can heat up the body, induce epileptic-like seizures, or cause cardiac arrest. Low-frequency radiation affects the electrical activity of the brain and can cause flu-like symptoms and nausea. Other projects sought to induce or prevent sleep, or to affect the signal from the motor cortex portion of the brain, overriding voluntary muscle movements. The latter are referred to as pulse wave weapons, and the Russian government has reportedly bought over 100,000 copies of the "Black Widow" version of them.[11] 

However, this view of "wonder weapons" was contested by someone who should understand them. Brigadier General Larry Dodgen, Deputy Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Policy and Missions, wrote a letter to the editor about the "numerous inaccuracies" in the U.S. News and World Report article that "misrepresent the Department of Defense's views."[12] Dodgen's primary complaint seemed to have been that the magazine misrepresented the use of these technologies and their value to the armed forces. He also underscored the US intent to work within the scope of any international treaty concerning their application, as well as plans to abandon (or at least redesign) any weapon for which countermeasures are known. One is left with the feeling, however, that research in this area is intense. A concern not mentioned by Dodgen is that other countries or non-state actors may not be bound by the same constraints. It is hard to imagine someone with a greater desire than terrorists to get their hands on these technologies. "Psycho-terrorism" could be the next buzzword. 

Russian Views on "Psychotronic War"
 
The term "psycho-terrorism" was coined by Russian writer N. Anisimov of the Moscow Anti-Psychotronic Center. According to Anisimov, psychotronic weapons are those that act to "take away a part of the information which is stored in a man's brain. It is sent to a computer, which reworks it to the level needed for those who need to control the man, and the modified information is then reinserted into the brain." These weapons are used against the mind to induce hallucinations, sickness, mutations in human cells, "zombification," or even death. Included in the arsenal are VHF generators, X-rays, ultrasound, and radio waves. Russian army Major I. Chernishev, writing in the military journal Orienteer in February 1997, asserted that "psy" weapons are under development all over the globe. Specific types of weapons noted by Chernishev (not all of which have prototypes) were:
  • A psychotronic generator, which produces a powerful electromagnetic emanation capable of being sent through telephone lines, TV, radio networks, supply pipes, and incandescent lamps.
  • An autonomous generator, a device that operates in the 10-150 Hertz band, which at the 10-20 Hertz band forms an infrasonic oscillation that is destructive to all living creatures.
  • A nervous system generator, designed to paralyze the central nervous systems of insects, which could have the same applicability to humans.
  • Ultrasound emanations, which one institute claims to have developed. Devices using ultrasound emanations are supposedly capable of carrying out bloodless internal operations without leaving a mark on the skin. They can also, according to Chernishev, be used to kill.
  • Noiseless cassettes. Chernishev claims that the Japanese have developed the ability to place infra-low frequency voice patterns over music, patterns that are detected by the subconscious. Russians claim to be using similar "bombardments" with computer programming to treat alcoholism or smoking.
  • The 25th-frame effect, alluded to above, a technique wherein each 25th frame of a movie reel or film footage contains a message that is picked up by the subconscious. This technique, if it works, could possibly be used to curb smoking and alcoholism, but it has wider, more sinister applications if used on a TV audience or a computer operator.
  • Psychotropics, defined as medical preparations used to induce a trance, euphoria, or depression. Referred to as "slow-acting mines," they could be slipped into the food of a politician or into the water supply of an entire city. Symptoms include headaches, noises, voices or commands in the brain, dizziness, pain in the abdominal cavities, cardiac arrhythmia, or even the destruction of the cardiovascular system.
There is confirmation from US researchers that this type of study is going on. Dr. Janet Morris, coauthor of The Warrior's Edge, reportedly went to the Moscow Institute of Psychocorrelations in 1991. There she was shown a technique pioneered by the Russian Department of Psycho-Correction at Moscow Medical Academy in which researchers electronically analyze the human mind in order to influence it. They input subliminal command messages, using key words transmitted in "white noise" or music. Using an infra-sound, very low frequency transmission, the acoustic psycho-correction message is transmitted via bone conduction.[13] 

In summary, Chernishev noted that some of the militarily significant aspects of the "psy" weaponry deserve closer research, including the following nontraditional methods for disrupting the psyche of an individual:
  • ESP research: determining the properties and condition of objects without ever making contact with them and "reading" peoples' thoughts
  • Clairvoyance research: observing objects that are located just beyond the world of the visible--used for intelligence purposes
  • Telepathy research: transmitting thoughts over a distance--used for covert operations
  • Telekinesis research: actions involving the manipulation of physical objects using thought power, causing them to move or break apart--used against command and control systems, or to disrupt the functioning of weapons of mass destruction
  • Psychokinesis research: interfering with the thoughts of individuals, on either the strategic or tactical level
While many US scientists undoubtedly question this research, it receives strong support in Moscow. The point to underscore is that individuals in Russia (and other countries as well) believe these means can be used to attack or steal from the data-processing unit of the human body. 

Solntsev's research, mentioned above, differs slightly from that of Chernishev. For example, Solntsev is more interested in hardware capabilities, specifically the study of the information-energy source associated with the computer-operator interface. He stresses that if these energy sources can be captured and integrated into the modern computer, the result will be a network worth more than "a simple sum of its components." Other researchers are studying high-frequency generators (those designed to stun the psyche with high frequency waves such as electromagnetic, acoustic, and gravitational); the manipulation or reconstruction of someone's thinking through planned measures such as reflexive control processes; the use of psychotronics, parapsychology, bioenergy, bio fields, and psychoenergy;[14] and unspecified "special operations" or anti-ESP training. 

The last item is of particular interest. According to a Russian TV broadcast, the strategic rocket forces have begun anti-ESP training to ensure that no outside force can take over command and control functions of the force. That is, they are trying to construct a firewall around the heads of the operators. 

Conclusions
 
At the end of July 1997, planners for Joint Warrior Interoperability Demonstration '97 "focused on technologies that enhance real-time collaborative planning in a multinational task force of the type used in Bosnia and in Operation Desert Storm. The JWID '97 network, called the Coalition Wide-Area Network (CWAN), is the first military network that allows allied nations to participate as full and equal partners."[15] The demonstration in effect was a trade fair for private companies to demonstrate their goods; defense ministries got to decide where and how to spend their money wiser, in many cases without incurring the cost of prototypes. It is a good example of doing business better with less. Technologies demonstrated included:[16]
  • Soldiers using laptop computers to drag cross-hairs over maps to call in airstrikes
  • Soldiers carrying beepers and mobile phones rather than guns
  • Generals tracking movements of every unit, counting the precise number of shells fired around the globe, and inspecting real-time damage inflicted on an enemy, all with multicolored graphics[17]
Every account of this exercise emphasized the ability of systems to process data and provide information feedback via the power invested in their microprocessors. The ability to affect or defend the data-processing capability of the human operators of these systems was never mentioned during the exercise; it has received only slight attention during countless exercises over the past several years. The time has come to ask why we appear to be ignoring the operators of our systems. Clearly the information operator, exposed before a vast array of potentially immobilizing weapons, is the weak spot in any nation's military assets. There are few international agreements protecting the individual soldier, and these rely on the good will of the combatants. Some nations, and terrorists of every stripe, don't care about such agreements. 

This article has used the term data-processing to demonstrate its importance to ascertaining what so-called information warfare and information operations are all about. Data-processing is the action this nation and others need to protect. Information is nothing more than the output of this activity. As a result, the emphasis on information-related warfare terminology ("information dominance," "information carousel") that has proliferated for a decade does not seem to fit the situation before us. In some cases the battle to affect or protect data-processing elements pits one mechanical system against another. In other cases, mechanical systems may be confronted by the human organism, or vice versa, since humans can usually shut down any mechanical system with the flip of a switch. In reality, the game is about protecting or affecting signals, waves, and impulses that can influence the data-processing elements of systems, computers, or people. We are potentially the biggest victims of information warfare, because we have neglected to protect ourselves. 

Our obsession with a "system of systems," "information dominance," and other such terminology is most likely a leading cause of our neglect of the human factor in our theories of information warfare. It is time to change our terminology and our conceptual paradigm. Our terminology is confusing us and sending us in directions that deal primarily with the hardware, software, and communications components of the data-processing spectrum. We need to spend more time researching how to protect the humans in our data management structures. Nothing in those structures can be sustained if our operators have been debilitated by potential adversaries or terrorists who--right now--may be designing the means to disrupt the human component of our carefully constructed notion of a system of systems. 



NOTES
1. I. Chernishev, "Can Rulers Make `Zombies' and Control the World?" Orienteer, February 1997, pp. 58-62.
2. Douglas Pasternak, "Wonder Weapons," U.S. News and World Report, 7 July 1997, pp. 38-46.
3. Ibid., p. 38.
4. FM 101-5-1, Operational Terms and Graphics, 30 September 1997, p. 1-82.
5. Joint Pub 3-13.1, Joint Doctrine for Command and Control Warfare (C2W), 7 February 1996, p. v.
6. The American Heritage Dictionary (2d College Ed.; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), p. 660, definition 4.
7. Denis Snezhnyy, "Cybernetic Battlefield & National Security," Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye, No. 10, 15-21 March 1997, p. 2.
8. Victor I. Solntsev, "Information War and Some Aspects of a Computer Operator's Defense," talk given at an Infowar Conference in Washington, D.C., September 1996, sponsored by the National Computer Security Association. Information in this section is based on notes from Dr. Solntsev's talk.
9. Pasternak, p. 40.
10. Ibid., pp. 40-46.
11. Ibid.
12. Larry Dodgen, "Nonlethal Weapons," U.S. News and World Report, 4 August 1997, p. 5.
13. "Background on the Aviary," Nexus Magazine, downloaded from the Internet on 13 July 1997 from www.execpc.com/vjentpr/nexusavi.html, p.7.
14. Aleksandr Cherkasov, "The Front Where Shots Aren't Fired," Orienteer, May 1995, p. 45. This article was based on information in the foreign and Russian press, according to the author, making it impossible to pinpoint what his source was for this reference.
15. Bob Brewin, "DOD looks for IT `golden nuggets,'" Federal Computer Week, 28 July 1997, p. 31, as taken from the Earlybird Supplement, 4 August 1997, p. B 17.
16. Oliver August, "Zap! Hard day at the office for NATO's laptop warriors," The Times, 28 July 1997, as taken from the Earlybird Supplement, 4 August 1997, p. B 16.
17. Ibid.

Lieutenant Colonel Timothy L. Thomas (USA Ret.) is an analyst at the Foreign Military Studies Office, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Recently he has written extensively on the Russian view of information operations and on current Russian military-political issues. During his military career he served in the 82d Airborne Division and was the Department Head of Soviet Military-Political Affairs at the US Army's Russian Institute in Garmisch, Germany.

Reviewed 25 February 1998. Please send comments or corrections to carl_Parameters@conus.army.mil


 
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