Dick Cheney Dead At Age 84

Comment: If ever there was a person that merited the world dancing on his gave - its Cheney. Roll out the brass bands in celebration. 

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Zero Hedge

Former U.S Vice President Dick Cheney died on Monday night at the age of 84, according to Punchbowl News reporter Jake Sherman.

Sherman posted on X what appears to be a statement from the family, in which it explained that Cheney "died due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease."

Here's the full statement:

"Richard B. Cheney, the 46th Vice President of the United States, died last night, November 3, 2025. He was 84 years old. His beloved wife of 61 years, Lynne, his daughters, Liz and Mary, and other family members were with him as he passed. The former Vice President died due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease.

"For decades, Dick Cheney served our nation, including as White House Chief of Staff, Wyoming's Congressman, Secretary of Defense, and Vice President of the United States.

"Dick Cheney was a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, and to live lives of courage, honor, love, kindness, and fly fishing. We are grateful beyond measure for all Dick Cheney did for our country. And we are blessed beyond measure to have loved and been loved by this noble giant of a man."

Comment: Creating millions of dead across the world is a close second to his hobby of fly-fishing. And Judging by these delusional statements it looks like the apples haven't fallen far from the tree.

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See: Darth Cheney: Pure Evil, or Just 99 Percent Evil? 

Ex-CIA Chief: Bush and Cheney Knew 9/11 Was Imminent, Concealed Intelligence

theantimedia.org

 

A new report from POLITICO corroborates a suspicion long held by critics of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. It affirms the former president and vice president not only had intelligence warning the terror attacks of 9/11 were imminent, but that they repeatedly ignored the CIA’s warnings. The most shocking assertion is that Bush and Cheney actively attempted to hide the paper trail documenting the fact that the evidence was presented to them.

The claim comes from none other than ex-CIA Chief George Tenet, who recounted with palpable frustration how Bush, Cheney, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice ignored multiple warnings from both him and then-counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black, during the late spring and summer of 2001.

Previously, the most salient proof the Bush administration had advanced warning of 9/11 was the infamous August 6th edition of the CIA Presidential Daily Brief given to George W. Bush. Titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” the document has often been cited by journalists and whistleblowers making a case of willful negligence against Bush and Cheney. The new information from Tenet and Black presents a considerably deeper timeline, showing there was a consistent stream of intelligence warnings starting at least four months prior to September 11th.

According to Black, by May of 2001 “it was very evident that we were going to be struck, we were gonna be struck hard and lots of Americans were going to die.”

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The Neocons “Grand Plan” and Obama’s Blundering Foreign Policy: “An Actor Playing the Role of a President”?

Prof. Rodrigue Tremblay
Global Research 

“I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being. But what makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it is our willingness to affirm them through our actions.” President Barack Obama, May 29, 2014 commencement speech at West Point.

“War is mankind’s most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men.”,  President Dwight Eisenhower, 1947 commencement speech at West Point.

“Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its own people is surrounded by “a world of enemies”, “one against all”, that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.” Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951

“…An empire is a despotism, and an emperor is a despot, bound by no law or limitation but his own will; it is a stretch of tyranny beyond absolute monarchy. For, although the will of an absolute monarch is law, yet his edicts must be registered by parliaments. Even this formality is not necessary in an empire.” John Adams (1735-1826), 2nd American President

Am I alone in having the uneasy feeling, while listening to Barack Obama’s speeches, that we are witnessing an actor playing the role of an American president and carefully reading the script he has been given? As time goes by, indeed, Barack Obama seems to be morphing more and more into a Democratic George W. Bush. Those who write his speeches seem to have the same warmongering mentality as those who wrote George W. Bush’s or Dick Cheney’s speeches, ten years ago.

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War Crimes and 9/11: Why Dick and Don Are Suspects

Washington's Blog 
Kevin Ryan

Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism official, has recently come out suggesting that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld should be charged with war crimes. Unfortunately, media outlets reporting this story have failed to examine Clarke’s long relationship to Cheney and Rumsfeld and his record of having prevented the capture of Osama bin Laden. These omissions highlight that, although Cheney and Rumsfeld undoubtedly are guilty of post-9/11 war crimes, suspicions that they helped create the pretext for those crimes go unreported.

Clarke’s history is regularly misrepresented in the media. It’s often said that he started in his counterterror position under Clinton when he was, in fact, appointed to it by George H.W. Bush in 1992. Clarke is a right wing hawk who had close ties to Cheney and Rumsfeld going back at least another decade with his selection for a secret Reagan Administration project. Clarke, Cheney and Rumsfeld were among a small group that spent nearly 30 years practicing to takeover the United States government in the Continuity of Government (COG) program. Their secretive COG plan was implemented only once—on the morning of 9/11.

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Eleven Years After US Invaded Iraq Bloodshed, Rape, Torture & Executions in the Country Are Ignored

 

Kevin Gosztola
The Dissenter

Kenneth Pollack, who has worked for the CIA and the National Security Council, was a prime advocate for the United States invasion and occupation of Iraq. He published a book called “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq” that was considered widely to be a very convincing case that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or was close to obtaining them. But Pollack, like many other war advocates who populated the airwaves of US media in the months prior to invasion, was wrong.

As bloody violence continues to erupt in Iraq, Pollack has not stopped being an advocate of greater US involvement or aid in Iraq, even though it has only helped to enable Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to further develop his brutal security forces.

A senior fellow for the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, he spoke before a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee in December 2013 and declared, “It is a great credit to this committee that at a time when the nation appears determined to forget our interests in Iraq, you refuse to do so. It is absolutely vital.”

“Since 2003, the United States has invested an enormous amount in Iraq, and the future of Iraq remains of great importance to the interests of the United States and our allies. Iraq has replaced Iran as the second leading oil exporter in OPEC, and projections of future low oil prices are highly contingent upon the continued growth of Iraqi oil exports. Remembering that virtually every postwar American recession was preceded by an increase in oil prices, Iraq and its oil production remain critical to the prosperity of the United States,” he added.

This was his first expressed concern: the future of oil production. He then proceeded to address the resurgence of al Qaeda and other issues in Iraq.

Pollack is emblematic of those who the world can quite clearly see were wrong. On the ten-year anniversary of the Iraq invasion, he still maintained, “Saddam didn’t have the capability we were ascribing to him — we were absolutely wrong about that — but he did have the motivation. He thought about nuclear weapons in a way most of the world does not. What we’re getting from the tapes of conversations among his inner circle is that he says they need to acquire nuclear weapons to wage war against Israel. There’s no sign this is bluster at all.”

Essentially, it may not have worked out as well as it could have, but, in the end, something had to be done.

Pollack is one of the few voices that can be found still writing about what they think the United States should be doing in Iraq. Like former Vice President Dick Cheney and others who served in President George W. Bush’s administration, he remains interested in the prize of oil in Iraq and how more of the country’s oil reserves could be liberated. But, to increase production, that requires a country that is not racked by violence.

He fantasized last year, “In an alternative universe, the United States might re-intervene in Iraq, redeploying tens of thousands of soldiers to restore everyone’s sense of safety and allowing the political process to heal again. In this universe, the United States is never going to intervene in Iraq again, nor will the Maliki government ever request that we do so.”

The result of the Bush administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq so the US government could make the country a client state and secure control of the country’s oil reserves has been horrific for Iraqis.

Dahr Jamail, one of the only American journalists still covering Iraq, reported this month for Truthout that Maliki’s forces had killed “at least 109 civilians” and wounded 632 people since they started to shell Fallujah in January. Doctors, residents and NGO workers, who he spoke with, accused the government of “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity.”

Maliki’s forces prevented medical supplies from entering Fallujah. A doctor said that many houses and a mosque were attacked. Shells hit a hospital. Tens of thousands of families have been displaced and have had very little food or water.

There are possibly a few US military trainers in Iraq and less than 10,000 military contractors, but, for the most part, Jamail said, the US has maintained power and control by selling “$20 billion worth of arms to the Maliki government in the forms of helicopters, tanks, missiles, ammunition, communications equipment and training.” And, when Fallujah erupted into violence in January, President Barack Obama’s “administration put a rush on shipping artillery equipment and missiles over to the Maliki government again to be used against the people of Fallujah.”

Human Rights Watch (HRW) produced a report on the abuse of women in Iraq’s criminal justice system. Thousands of Iraqi women are “imprisoned by a judicial system plagued by torture and rampant corruption.” Convictions are based on confessions “obtained under torture and ill-treatment.” Women are threatened and suffer beatings. Trial proceedings are unfair and “fall far short of international standards.”

An Iraqi woman interviewed by Human Rights Watch, “Israa Salah,” spoke to HRW in a death row facility. She had crutches, as she had suffered “nine days of beatings, electric shocks with an instrument known as ‘the donkey,’ and falaqa,” a form of torture where the victim is “hung upside down and beaten on their feet.” This happened in March 2012 and left her “permanently disabled.” She had a split nose, back scars and was burned on her breasts. She was executed in September 2013, even though lower courts had dismissed charges because she only confessed to a crime after being tortured.

Women are sexually assaulted or raped by prison guards. “Fatima Hussein,” who is a journalist accused of murdering a parliamentarian’s brother and of marrying an al Qaeda member, was physically and sexually tortured. Colonel Ghazi blindfolded her and tied her to a column. She was electrocuted with an electric baton. Her feet and back were hit with a cable. Her hair was pulled. She was tied naked to the column. Cigarettes were extinguished on her body. She was later handcuffed to a bed and forced to give oral sex. Then, with blood all over her, she was raped three times and Ghazi “would relax, have a cigarette and put it out” on her buttocks and then start violating her again.

The 2013 country report from the State Department on Iraq fully acknowledges the torture ongoing in the country. It concluded, “A culture of impunity largely protected members of the security services, as well as those elsewhere in the government, from investigation and successful prosecution for human rights violations. Corruption among officials across government agencies was widespread and contributed to significant human rights abuses.” However, this corruption has not stopped the sales of weapons to Maliki’s government. There have been few condemnations of Maliki or any public requests from the Obama administration for him to resign and be held accountable for crimes against humanity.

Iraqis suffer from grotesque and terrifying birth defects as a result of depleted uranium that was used by the US military. In Fallujah, a courageous woman, Dr. Samira Alani, has taken on the burden of dealing with newborns who have, as Jamail said, “massive multiple systemic defects, immune problems, massive central nervous system problems, massive heart problems, skeletal disorders, baby’s being born with two heads, babies being born with half of their internal organs outside of their bodies,” and “cyclops babies literally with one eye.”

Maliki’s government executed 169 people last year. The government refuses to acknowledge the dysfunction of the criminal justice system and stop executing a number of people who are innocent. Maliki even rebuked the United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon while standing next to him in a joint news conference because Ki-moon had urged the country to halt executions.

Birth defects, rape, torture, and executions—these are the residual effects of the US military occupation. Troops may have withdrawn, but in the aftermath, the country is being ruled by someone who some Iraqis refer to as a “Shia Saddam.”

Yet, in the United States, with the exception of MSNBC host Rachel Maddow’s documentary, “Why We Did It”, mentions of Iraq focus on whether the war was “worth” fighting, if gains of US troops are being lost in Fallujah and how America might overcome its “war-weariness.” Russia’s actions in Crimea have led pundits to wonder if Americans can pull themselves together and find a way to show “strength.”
On the anniversary of the invasion, The Atlantic announced that David Frum, a former speechwriter for Bush who wrote the “Axis of Evil” speech and war for oil, would be joining the media organization as a senior editor.

Any day of the year the organization could have made this announcement. But this is how Americans show contempt for the people of Iraq: by giving promotions to war advocates as we ignore the sheer scale of the injustice and horror we have wrought.

Over 1 million Iraqis died. Iraqis tortured cannot get the US to acknowledge what happened to them at the hands of US forces or contractors. Their suits are dismissed in courts. They struggle to heal. And US military veterans, who discover the reality of what they did, are offered little support. They suffer from homelessness, mental illness and commit suicide in record numbers.

There is no sense of responsibility among journalists in the US media to ensure that there is consistent coverage of Iraq, the least this country could do. Maybe that’s because these people helped fuel the climate that made it possible for the premeditated crime of invading Iraq to occur. Less coverage makes it possible to avoid having to further confront the role they played in a chain of events that now sees Iraq experiencing violence daily.

Why Is America in Decline? Chris Hedges on the U.S. Empire & Death of the Liberal Class (2012)

"We have undergone a slow-motion corporate coup-d'etat."

National Security is Where the Executive Branch Hides its Crimes Against Law

Paul Craig Roberts
 
“No legal issue arises when the United States responds to a challenge to its power, position, and prestige.” –Dean Acheson, 1962, speaking to the American Society of International Law

Dean Acheson declared 51 years ago that power, position, and prestige are the ingredients of national security and that national security trumps law. In the United States democracy takes a back seat to “national security,” a prerogative of the executive branch of government.

 

National security is where the executive branch hides its crimes against law, both domestic and international, its crimes against the Constitution, its crimes against innocent citizens both at home and abroad, and its secret agendas that it knows that the American public would never support.

“National security” is the cloak that the executive branch uses to make certain that the US government is unaccountable.

Without accountable government there is no civil liberty and no democracy except for the sham voting that existed in the Soviet Union and now exists in the US.

There have been periods in US history, such as President Lincoln’s war to prevent secession, World War I, and World War II, when accountable government was impaired. 

These were short episodes of the Constitution’s violation, and the Constitution was reinstated in the aftermath of the wars. However, since the Clinton regime, the accountability of government has been declining for more than two decades, longer than the three wars combined.

In law there is the concept of adverse possession, popularly known as “squatters’ rights.” A non-owner who succeeds in occupying a piece of property or some one else’s right for a certain time without being evicted enjoys the ownership title conveyed to him. The reasoning is that by not defending his rights, the owner showed his disinterest and in effect gave his rights away.

Americans have not defended their rights conveyed by the US Constitution for the duration of the terms of three presidents. The Clinton regime was not held accountable for its illegal attack on Serbia. The Bush regime was not held accountable for its illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The Obama regime was not held accountable for its renewed attack on Afghanistan and its illegal attacks on Libya, Pakistan, and Yemen, and by its proxies on Syria.

We also have other strictly illegal and unconstitutional acts of government for which the government has not been held accountable. The Bush regimes’ acts of torture, indefinite detention, and warrantless spying, and the Obama regime’s acts of indefinite detention, warrantless spying, and murder of US citizens without due process. As the Obama regime lies through its teeth, we have no way of knowing whether torture is still practiced.

If these numerous criminal acts of the US government spread over the terms of three presidents pass into history as unchallenged events, the US government will have acquired squatters’ rights in lawlessness. The US Constitution will be, as President George W. Bush is reported to have declared, “a scrap of paper.”

Lawlessness is the hallmark of tyranny enforced by the police state. In a police state law is not a protector of rights but a weapon in the hands of government. [see Roberts & Stratton, The Tyranny of Good Intentions] The accused has no recourse to the accusation, which does not require evidence presented to a court. The accused is guilty by accusation alone and can be shot in the back of the head, as under Stalin, or blown up by a drone missile, as under Obama.

As a person aware of the long struggle against the tyrannical state, I have been amazed and disheartened by the acceptance not only by the insouciant American public, but also by law schools, bar associations, media, Congress and the Supreme Court of the executive branch’s claim to be above both law and the US Constitution.

As Lawrence Stratton and I show in our book about how the law was lost, liberals and conservatives chasing after their favorite devils, such as child abusers and drug pushers, and prosecutors, judges, and police devoted to conviction and not to justice, have gradually eroded over time the concept of law as a protection of the innocent, With the atmosphere of threat created by 9/11, the final destruction of the protective features of law was quickly achieved in the name of making us safe from terrorists.

The fact that we are no longer safe from our own government did not register.

This is how liberty was lost, and America with it.

Can liberty be regained? Probably not, but there is a chance if Americans have the necessary strength of character. The chance comes from the now known fact that the neoconservative Bush/Cheney regime took America and its puppet states to war in Afghanistan and Iraq entirely on the basis of lies. As all evidence proves, these wars were not the results of mistaken intelligence. They were the products of intentional lies.

The weapons inspectors told the Bush regime that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Despite this known fact, the Bush regime sent Secretary of State Colin Powell to the UN with fabricated evidence to convince the world that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” and was a threat to the world. Even if such weapons had existed in Iraq, many countries have them, including the US and Israel, and the presence of weapons does not under the Nuremberg Laws justify unprovoked aggression against the possessor. Under the Nuremberg Laws, unprovoked military aggression is a war crime, not the possession of weapons that many countries have. The war crime was committed by the US and its “coalition of the willing,” not by Saddam Hussein.

As for the invasion of Afghanistan, we know from the last video of Osama bin Laden in October 2001, attested by experts to be the last appearance of a man dying of renal failure and other diseases, that he declared that he had no responsibility for 9/11 and that Americans should look to their own government. We know as a reported fact that the Afghan Taliban offered to turn over Osama bin Laden to Washington if the Bush regime would provide the evidence that indicated bin Laden was responsible. The Bush regime refused to hand over the (non-existent) evidence and, with support of the corrupt and cowardly Congress and the presstitute media, attacked Afghanistan without any legal justification. Remember, the FBI has stated publicly that it has no evidence that Osama bin Laden was responsible for 9/11 and that that is why the crimes for which the FBI wanted bin Laden did not include responsibility for the 9/11 attack.

The war propaganda campaign was well prepared. Yellow ribbon decals were handed out for cars proclaiming “support the troops.” In other words, anyone who raises the obvious questions is not supporting the troops. Still today insouciant Americans sport these decals on their cars unaware that what they are supporting are the murder of foreign women, children and village elders, the death and physical and mental maiming of American soldiers, and the worldwide destruction of the reputation of the United States, with America’s main rival, China, now calling for a “de-Americanized world.”

A country with a population as insouciant as Americans is a country in which the government can do as it pleases.

Now that we have complete proof that the criminal Bush regime took our country to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq solely on the basis of intentional lies, how can the legal institutions, the courts, the American people possibly tolerate the Obama regime’s ignoring of the obvious crimes? How can America simply accept Obama’s statement that we mustn’t look back, only move ahead? If the US government, which has committed the worst crimes of our generation, cannot be held accountable and punished, how can federal, state, and local courts fill up American prisons with people who smoked pot and with people who did not sufficiently grovel before the police state.

Doubtless, the Obama regime, should it obey the law and prosecute the Bush regime’s crimes, would have to worry about being prosecuted for its own crimes, which are just as terrible. Nevertheless, I believe that the Obama regime could survive if it put all the blame on the Bush regime, prosecuted the Bush criminals, and desisted from the illegal actions that it currently supports. This would save the Constitution and US civil liberty, but it would require the White House to take the risk that by enforcing US law, US law might be enforced against its own illegal and unconstitutional acts by a succeeding regime.

The Bush/Cheney/John Yoo neoconservative regime having got rid of US law, no doubt the Obama regime thinks it is best to leave the situation as it is, rid of law.

Without accountability, America is finished. Not only will Americans live in a police state with no civil liberties, but the rest of the world is already looking at America with a jaundiced eye. The US is being reconstituted as an authoritarian state. All it takes is one failure of accountability for the police state to become entrenched, and we have had numerous failures of accountability. Does anyone really believe that some future government is going to make restitution to persecuted truth-tellers, such as Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowdon, as was done for Japanese Americans?

Now that we know for a certain fact that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were based on propaganda and lies, Congress and the world media should demand to know what was the real secret agenda. What are the real reasons for which Afghanistan and Iraq were invaded?

No truthful explanation for these wars exists.

 


Paul O’Neill, the Bush regime’s first Treasury Secretary, is on public record stating that at the very first cabinet meeting, long prior to 9/11, the agenda was a US attack on Iraq.

In other words, the Bush regime’s attack on Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11.

What was the Bush regime’s secret agenda, kept secret by the Obama regime, that required an illegal, war criminal, attack on a sovereign country, an action for which officials of Hitler’s government were executed? What is the real purpose of Washington’s wars?

It is totally and completely obvious that the wars have nothing to do with protecting Americans from terrorism. If anything, the wars stir up and create terrorists. The wars create hatred of America that never previously existed. Despite this, America is free of terrorists attacks except for the ones orchestrated by the FBI. What the fabricated “terror threat” has done is to create a thorough-going domestic police state that is unaccountable.

Americans need to understand that they have lost their country. The rest of the world needs to recognize that Washington is not merely the most complete police state since Stalinism, but also a threat to the entire world. The hubris and arrogance of Washington, combined with Washington’s huge supply of weapons of mass destruction, make Washington the greatest threat that has ever existed to all life on the planet. Washington is the enemy of all humanity.

Cheney Considered Killing American Servicemen Dressed as Iran to Start World3

Sex, Oil, Chaos & Corruption at American U. of Iraq

Students at the American University of Iraq-Sulaimaniya - photo by Chris De Bruyn

Who What Why

Anyone who still wonders why the Bush administration invaded Iraq would do well to become familiar with an institution whose existence few Americans are aware of: the American University of Iraq-Sulaimaniya.

Located in Kurdistan, at the nexus of northern Iraq’s border with Iran and Turkey, AUI-S opened its doors in 2007. At the time, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times wrote about it with the sort of wide-eyed enthusiasm that had generally accompanied the invasion itself four years before. “Imagine for a moment if one outcome of the U.S. invasion of Iraq had been the creation of an American University of Iraq…Imagine if we had created an island of decency in Iraq…Well, stop imagining.”

You don’t have to imagine, though, when history provides enough clues. For more than one hundred years, American business leaders (usually with the cooperation of local potentates) have funded Christian missionaries to set up universities in foreign countries with valuable resources to exploit. This collaboration has served to create a more friendly environment for establishing a business foothold while simultaneously fulfilling the missionaries’ desire to spread the Word around the globe.

In the Middle East—where the business has primarily been oil—the Rockefellers and others generously funded such institutions as the American University of Beirut, which was established on the bedrock of conservative Christian values more than one hundred years ago. It began modestly, with one class of sixteen students in 1863. Over time, it became a venerable academic oasis, characterized by values that could be accurately described as cosmopolitan and liberal.

With AUI-S in contemporary Kurdistan, however, it was back to square one, ideologically speaking. Oil—or “The Prize” as it is often called—was once again the business at hand. This time, access to The Prize was given to George W. Bush’s good friend and contributor, the Texan Ray Hunt, whose Kurdish oil concession is potentially worth billions of dollars. And from the beginning, the academic component of this particular foreign foothold has been plagued by problems far worse than the usual disarray that attends any new university venture. That’s because the people setting it up were missionaries of a uniquely postmodern variety.

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Supreme Court to Consider the Arrest of a Cheney Critic

New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide whether Secret Service agents protecting Vice President Dick Cheney may be sued for violating the free speech rights of a member of the public who made critical remarks about the Bush administration’s war policies. 

 

Kevin Moloney for The New York Times

 

Steven Howards said his arrest in 2006 was in retaliation for his views opposing Vice President Dick Cheney.

The case arose from an episode in 2006 at a mall in Beaver Creek, Colo. A Secret Service agent said he heard Steven Howards say into a cellphone that he planned to ask Mr. Cheney “how many kids he’s killed today.” Mr. Howards later approached Mr. Cheney and said the administration’s “policies in Iraq are disgusting.” Mr. Howards then touched Mr. Cheney on the shoulder in a gesture variously described as an open-handed pat, a slap and a strike that caused the vice president’s shoulder to dip. 

Confronted by the Secret Service, Mr. Howards denied touching Mr. Cheney and said, “If you don’t want other people sharing their opinions, you should have him avoid public places.” Agents arrested Mr. Howards for assault and turned him over to local authorities. He was charged with harassment under state law, but those charges were later dropped. 

Mr. Howards sued several Secret Service agents, saying his arrest was unlawful. He said the agents had violated the Fourth Amendment, which bars unreasonable searches and seizures, by arresting him without probable cause. He added that the arrest had violated his First Amendment rights because, he said, it was made in retaliation for exercising his right to free speech. 

A federal district court judge in Denver allowed the case to proceed.

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Major Wars and Suppression of American Freedoms Planned BEFORE 9/11

Washington’s Blog

Iran War Threats, Militarization of American Police and Spying on Americans All Started BEFORE 9/11

Many things which we’ve been told have only happened recently actually started a long time ago.

For example, the mainstream media claims that Iran is close to building a nuclear weapon. But the Christian Science Monitor notes that the U.S. has been claiming for more than 30 years that Iran was on the verge of nuclear capability.

And the decision to threaten to bomb Iran was made before 9/11.

As another example, journalists from across the spectrum have documented the militarization of police forces in the United States, including, CNN, Huffington Post, Forbes, Esquire, The Atlantic, Salon, and theCato Institute.

Indeed, police shooting peaceful “occupy” protesters with rubber bullets, tear gas and other projectiles and brutally beating them has brought this issue to the attention of the American public. See this, thisand this.

But the militarization of police started long before 9/11 … in the 1980s. As Radley Balko testified before the House Subcommittee on Crime:

Militarization [of police forces is] a troubling trend that’s been on the rise in America’s police departments over the last 25 years.

***

Since the late 1980s, Mr. Chairman, thanks to acts passed by the U.S. Congress, millions of pieces of surplus military equipment have been given to local police departments across the country.
We’re not talking just about computers and office equipment. Military-grade semi-automatic weapons, armored personnel vehicles, tanks, helicopters, airplanes, and all manner of other equipment designed for use on the battlefield is now being used on American streets, against American citizens.
Academic criminologists credit these transfers with the dramatic rise in paramilitary SWAT teams over the last quarter century.
SWAT teams were originally designed to be used in violent, emergency situations like hostage takings, acts of terrorism, or bank robberies. From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, that’s primarily how they were used, and they performed marvelously.
But beginning in the early 1980s, they’ve been increasingly used for routine warrant service in drug cases and other nonviolent crimes. And thanks to the Pentagon transfer programs, there are now a lot more of them.

Many other things which we’ve been told happened after 9/11 actually occurred beforehand as well.

For example:

• The Afghanistan war was planned before 9/11 (see this and this)
• The decision to launch the Iraq war was made before 9/11. Indeed, former CIA director George Tenet said that the White House wanted to invade Iraq long before 9/11, and inserted “crap” in its justifications for invading Iraq. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill – who sat on the National Security Council – also says that Bush planned the Iraq war before 9/11. Top British officials say that the U.S. discussed Iraq regime change even before Bush took office. And in 2000, Cheney said a Bush administration might “have to take military action to forcibly remove Saddam from power.”
• Cheney apparently even made Iraqi’s oil fields a national security priority before 9/11. And the Sunday Herald reported: “Five months before September 11, the US advocated using force against Iraq … to secure control of its oil.” (remember that Alan Greenspan, John McCain, George W. Bush,Sarah Palin, a high-level National Security Council officer and others all say that the Iraq war wasreally about oil.)
• The Patriot Act was planned before 9/11. Indeed, former Counter Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke told Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig:
  

  After 9/11 the government drew up the Patriot Act within 20 days and it was passed.
  The Patriot Act is huge and I remember someone asking a Justice Department official how did they write such a large statute so quickly, and of course the answer was thatit has been sitting in the drawers of the Justice Department for the last 20 years waiting for the event where they would pull it out.

  (4:30 into this video)
• Cheney dreamed of giving the White House the powers of a monarch long before 9/11
• Cheney and Rumsfeld actively generated fake intelligence which exaggerated the threat from an enemy in order to justify huge amounts of military spending long before 9/11. And see this
• The government’s spying on Americans began before 9/11 (confirmed here and here. And see this)
• It was known long before 9/11 that torture doesn’t work to produce accurate intelligence … but is aneffective way to terrorize people
• And – sadly – America played dirty games to justify and win wars before 9/11

Note: 9/11 itself is beyond the scope of this essay, although the Co-Chair of the Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 – and former head of the Senate Intelligence Committee – calls for a new 9/11 investigation,Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg says that the government has ordered the media not to cover 9/11, and high-level officials are eager to spill the beans about what happened on 9/11 … but no one in Washington or the media wants to hear.

Cheney's `Spoon-Benders' Pushing Nuclear Armageddon

by Jeffrey Steinberg

 www.larouchepub.com/.../04-10_33_feat.pdf 

Sometime in late 1980, then-Col. Paul E. Vallely, the Commander of the 7th Psychological Operations Group, United States Army Reserve, Presidio of San Francisco, Ca., co-authored a discussion paper, which received wide and controversial attention within the U.S. military, particularly within the Special Operations community. The paper was titled "From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory," and it presented a Nietzschean scheme for waging perpetual psychological warfare against friend and enemy populations alike, and even against the American people.

The "MindWar" paper was provoked by an article by Lt. Col. John Alexander, which appeared in the December 1980 edition of Military Review, advocating the introduction of ESP (extra-sensory perception), "tele-pathetic behavior modification," para-psychology, psychokinesis ("mind over matter"), remote viewing, out of body experiences, and other New Age and occult practices into U.S. military intelligence. Alexander's paper was titled "The New Mental Battlefield: Beam Me Up, Spock."

But the subsequent paper co-authored by Vallely went way beyond ESP and the other paranormal techniques advocated by Alexander: "Strategic MindWar must begin the moment war is considered to be inevitable," the document stated. "It must seek out the attention of the enemy nation through every available medium, and it must strike at the nation's potential soldiers before they put on their uniforms. It is in their homes and their communities that they are most vulnerable to MindWar....

"To this end," Vallely and co-author continued, "MindWar must be strategic in emphasis, with tactical applications playing a reinforcing, supplementary role. In its strategic context, MindWar must reach out to friends, enemies, and neutrals alike across the globe—neither through primitive 'battlefield' leaflets and loudspeakers of PSYOP nor through the weak, imprecise, and narrow effort of psychotronics—but through the media possessed by the United States which have the capabilities to reach virtually all people on the face of the Earth. These media are, of course the electronic media—television and radio. State of the art developments in satellite communication, video recording techniques, and laser and optical transmission of broadcasts make possible a penetration of the minds of the world such as would have been inconceivable just a few years ago. Like the sword Excalibur [King Arthur's magical sword—ed.], we have but to reach out and seize this tool; and it can transform the world for us if we have the courage and the integrity to enhance civilization with it. If we do not accept Excalibur, then we relinquish our ability to inspire foreign cultures with our morality. If they can then desire moralities unsatisfactory to us, we have no choice but to fight them on a more brutish level.

"MindWar must target all participants to be effective. It must not only weaken the enemy; it must strengthen the United States. It strengthens the United States by denying enemy propaganda access to our people, and by explaining and emphasizing to our people the rationale for our national interest in a specific war."

Leaving nothing to the imagination, the document concluded by emphasizing that MindWar should employ subliminal brainwashing technologies, and weapons that directly attack the targetted population's central nervous system and brain functioning: "There are some purely natural conditions under which minds may become more or less receptive to ideas, and MindWar should take full advantage of such phenomena as atmospheric electromagnetic activity, air ionization, and extremely low frequency waves," the paper concluded.

The "MindWar" paper was disturbing, for reasons beyond its fascistic and occultist content. For one thing, Colonel Vallely's co-author was a PSYOP Research & Analysis Team Leader named Maj. Michael A. Aquino. Five years before the circulation of the MindWar paper, Special Forces Reserve officer Aquino had founded the Temple of Set, a Satanic organization which was the successor to Anton Szandor LeVay's Church of Satan. Aquino would soon be grabbing headlines, which persisted throughout the 1980s, as a leading suspect in a nationwide Satanic pedophile ring, that particularly targetted daycare centers on such military bases as Fort Bragg and the Presidio (see article, p. 21).

Furthermore, Vallely and Aquino's MindWar scheme is remarkably similar to the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program launched by the Donald Rumsfeld Pentagon, under the direction of Irangate figure Adm. John Poindexter. Ostensibly, the Total Information Awareness global propaganda and mega-data-mining plan was scrapped after a series of negative news stories, but Pentagon sources have reported that the program was merely "taken into a black box."

Indeed, on Aug. 16, 2005, The New York Times' Philip Shenon revealed that a super-secret Pentagon "special action program" called Able Danger had tracked Mohammed Atta and three of the other Sept. 11, 2001 hijackers a year prior to the attacks; but Pentagon lawyers with the Special Operations Command refused to allow the information to be shared with the FBI, for fear of exposing the data-mining program to any public scrutiny. The Times learned of Able Danger from Lt. Col. Anthony Schaffer, who was the program's liaison to the Defense Intelligence Agency at the time.

'Nuke Iran!'

 

Colonel Vallely's association with Aquino did little to stall the former's military career advancement. A West Point graduate, Vallely retired in 1991 as deputy commanding general of the U.S. Army of the Pacific. From 1982-86, he headed the 351st Civil Affairs Command, placing him in charge of all Special Forces, Psychological Warfare, and Civil Affairs Military units in the Western United States and Hawaii.

Today, he is practicing what he and Satanist Aquino preached in the MindWar paper, and is one of the leading propaganda assets in Vice President Dick Cheney's push for military confrontation with Iran—one that could see the United States carry out the first pre-emptive nuclear attack in history.

General Vallely, now retired from the military, is a senior military commentator for Rupert Murdoch's shrill Fox TV News; is a "client" of Benador Associates, the premier public relations firm for the neo-conservative cabal in Washington; is the Military Committee chairman for Frank Gaffney's neo-conned Center for Strategic Policy; and is the co-founder, along with Gen. Thomas McInerney (USAF-ret.), another Benador client, of the Iran Policy Committee. IPC is yet another neo-con front group that: 1) promotes the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), a group on the State Department's list of International Terrorist Organizations (for assassinating a number of U.S. military officers in Iran); and 2) demands U.S. military action to impose "regime change" 1n Tehran, through such measures as a massive bombing campaign against Iran's purported secret nuclear weapons labs, and a U.S. Naval blockade of the Straits of Hormuz. Recently General Vallely co-authored a book with General McInerney, titled Endgame—Blueprint for Victory for Winning the War on Terror, which borrows, philosophically, from his and Aquino's original MindWar rant (see interview with Vallely on p. 13).

The 'Jedi Warriors'

 

General Vallely, Colonel Alexander, and Lt. Colonel Aquino (ret.) are but three leading figures within the Special Operations community, who have promoted the application of New Age and outright Satanic practices to the art of war, conducting experimental programs aimed at creating a Nietzschean "Übermensch warrior."

In preparation for this article, EIR has interviewed a number of senior retired military and intelligence officers, who have identified, from their own personal experiences, a number of other leading military officers who promoted these efforts and funnelled massive amounts of Pentagon money into "black programs," testing the military applications of a whole range of bizarre "non-lethal" techniques and technologies. Some of the top-secret programs funded by taxpayer dollars over the past 25 years betray a significant degree of outright "spoon-bending" lunacy. Others lead directly to the doorsteps of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib military detention centers, where prisoners have been turned into human guinea pigs for experimental torture techniques, drawn from the same New Age bag of tricks.

And The New Yorker magazine investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, in a Jan. 24-31, 2005 article on "The Coming Wars," mooted that the Special Forces "black programs" may now have ventured into the field of "pseudo-gang warfare," in which counterinsurgency methods blur with insurgency.

Quoting from a September 2003 San Francisco Chronicle article by Naval Postgraduate School defense analyst and Pentagon counterinsurgency advisor John Arquilla, Hersh hinted that U.S. Special Forces units were being unleashed to create their own terrorist "pseudo gangs" to more easily infiltrate terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. Arquilla wrote: "When conventional military operations and bombing failed to defeat the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya in the 1950s, the British formed teams of friendly Kikuyu tribesmen who went about pretending to be terrorists. These 'pseudo gangs,' as they were called, swiftly threw the Mau Mau on the defensive, either by befriending and then ambushing bands of fighters or by guiding bombers to the terrorists' camps. What worked in Kenya a half-century ago has a wonderful chance of undermining trust and recruitment among today's terror networks. Forming new pseudo gangs should not be difficult."

Arquilla added, for good measure: "If a confused young man from Marin County can join up with al-Qaeda [a reference to John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Talibani—ed.], think what professional operatives might do."

The 'Gang of Four'

 

Four of the names most often cited as promoters of programs like the "Goat Lab," the "Jedi Warriors," "Grill Flame," "Task Force Delta," and the "First Earth Battalion," have held top posts within the military intelligence and Special Operations commands:

Gen. Albert Stubblebine III was the head of U.S. Army Intelligence, INSCOM (Intelligence and Security Command), from 1981-84, during which time he launched a series of secret projects at Fort Meade, Md., involving remote viewing and other occult practices. General Stubblebine was, perhaps, the U.S. Army's most senior and loudest advocate of the full gamut of New Age warfare.

Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the current U.S. Army Chief of Staff, was Commanding General of the Joint Special Operations Command (1994-96), Commander of the United States Army Special Operations Command (1996-97), and Commander in Chief of the United States Special Operations Command (1997-2000). According to a well-researched book exposing the New Age penetration of the U.S. military, The Men Who Stare at Goats, by Jon Ronson (Simon & Schuster, New York, 2004), General Schoomaker has created a think-tank, under the sponsorship of the SOC office, to expand the application of these bizarre occult and para-normal operations throughout the U.S. Army, as his contribution to President George W. Bush's Global War on Terrorism (GWOT).

Gen. Wayne Downing also was the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Special Operations Command, and earlier directed all special operations during the December 1989 invasion of Panama, when some of the MindWar techniques were used, during the siege of the Vatican compound where Gen. Manuel Noriega had taken refuge. Following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Downing was named National Director and Deputy National Security Advisor for Combatting Terrorism in the Bush-Cheney White House, a post he held until June 2002.

According to military sources, General Downing left the White House as the result of a conflict with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, over plans for the invasion of Iraq. Downing had argued that Saddam Hussein could be overthrown by a massive "shock and awe" bombing campaign, followed by an invasion by a force of no more than 25,000 Special Forces troops. The "Downing Plan" was rejected by the Chiefs as "sheer madness," according to one senior military source familiar with the events.

Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin was the Commanding General of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command (Airborne) at Fort Bragg, N.C., from 1998-2000. Prior to that, he was the Commander of the elite counter-terror unit, Delta Force, from 1992-95. He was, in that capacity, in charge of the Special Forces units in Mogadishu, Somalia, during the famous 1993 "Black Hawk Down" incident, in which a number of Special Forces soldiers were beaten to death by warlords, and dragged through the streets of the city. Here, some of Lt. Col. John Alexander's non-lethal systems, including "Sticky Foam," were directly put to the combat test—and failed. From March 2000 until June 2003, General Boykin headed the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center. He was then named Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, a post he still holds. According to The New Yorker piece by Hersh, Boykin and his immediate boss, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone, are directly in charge of the Special Operations search-and-kill squads touted by John Arquilla in his pseudo-gang promo.

Shortly after his appointment to the Deputy Undersecretary position, General Boykin drew fire, for remarks he delivered—in uniform—at a fundamentalist Christian church, in which he smeared Islam as a "Satanic" religion, and characterized the U.S. invasion of Iraq as a religious "crusade." He also said that "God had placed George W. Bush" into the Presidency, provoking serious debates about his own sanity and a Pentagon Inspector General's Office probe.

First Earth Battalion—Where It All Began

 

According to author Jon Ronson, in 1977, Lt. Col. Jim Channon, a Vietnam War combat veteran, wrote a letter to Lt. Gen. Walter Kerwin, then the U.S. Army Deputy Chief of Staff, proposing a fact-finding mission to unearth ways for the U.S. military to become more "cunning." Channon was given an open-ended assignment, a small Pentagon budget, and spent the next two years, by his own accounts, exploring the depths of the New Age movement, seeking military applications. Channon visited over 150 New Age facilities during his travels, with such countercultural names as: Gentle Wind, Integral Chuan Institute, Dayspring, Inc., The Center of Release and Integration, Postural Integration Reichian Rebirthing, the New Age Awareness Fair, Beyond Jogging, Aikido with Ki, the Biofeedback Center of Berkeley, and the Esalen Institute.

Channon particularly spent a good deal of time training under Michael Murphy, the co-founder of Esalen, which was the leading West Coast New Age psychological experimentation center, testing a wide array of mind-control methods, many involving the use of psychotropic drugs. Cultist mass murderer Charles Manson spent Aug. 5, 1969 at Esalen, just four days before he unleashed the "Helter Skelter" murder spree, for which he is still serving a lifetime jail sentence. Manson had been tracked, from his years in state prison, by military psychologists, who were studying behavioral patterns of what they dubbed the "pathologically violent five percent."

In 1979, Lt. Colonel Channon presented his findings to the Army brass in a 125-page document, complete with slides, called "The First Earth Battalion." While the document was laced with New Age vocabulary ("The First Earth is not mission oriented, it is potential oriented. That means we shall continue to look everywhere to find non-destructive methods of control."), Channon did propose an array of non-lethal techniques that would be soon adopted by the military, including the use of atonal noises as a form of combat psychological warfare, oriental martial arts and spiritualist instruction, and widespread experimentation with psychoelectronics and other means of debilitating enemy forces.

Channon's First Earth Battalion slide show was brought to General Stubblebine, the head of INSCOM, by Colonel Alexander, the author of the Military Review article on "The New Mental Battlefield," and, by 1981, Stubblebine established a secret "psychic spies unit" at Fort Meade, to test out such dubious techniques as remote viewing.

Two years later, General Stubblebine traveled to Fort Bragg, to pitch the Channon/Alexander program to the top leadership of the Special Operations community. By now, Stubblebine was convinced that, with the application of the right "mind over matter" techniques, he could personally walk through walls. As of this writing, he has not yet apparently succeeded. The Fort Bragg session, as he would later recount it to author Ronson, was a fiasco, and no action was taken to implement his program—or so Stubblebine thought.

In reality, Fort Bragg, by 1978, was already a hotbed of mind-war experimentation. Among the programs carried out at remote corners of the sprawling special operations base: the Goat Lab, where a team of New Age-trained Special Forces soldiers attempted to burst the hearts of goats, in an adjacent holding pen, through the power of psychic concentration. Veterinarians working on the base were horrified that Special Forces planes were airlifting goats up from Central America, without going through the normal Customs inspections. The goats were used in the training of combat medics. The goats would be shot, their limbs would be amputated, and, on some occasions, they were "de-bleated" by having their tongues cut out or their throats slashed. Then, they were subjected to the Goat Lab psychic warfare tests.

Keying off of Channon's blueprint, a Special Operations experimental team, dubbed "Jedi Warriors," after the Star Wars craze, were trained in a wide array of Eastern oriental martial arts and meditation techniques, combined with super-strenuous physical training programs. Outside "experts" like Dr. Jim Hardt, were brought in to train the "Jedi Warriors" to heighten their mental telepathy skills through Zen. Following Jim Channon's First Earth Battalion recipe, Stuart Heller, a New Age psychologist, who gave classes in stress control to corporate executives and officials at NASA, was brought in to provide similar schooling to the commandos. Channon had been introduced to Heller by Marilyn Ferguson, the author of the 1980 book The Aquarian Conspiracy, which peddled a New Age version of H.G. Wells' original Open Conspiracy concept of mass social control and cultural paradigm-shifts.

Not all the instructors of the "Jedi Warriors" were counterculture psychologists. Michael Echanis, a Green Beret who was badly wounded in Vietnam, but later developed advanced martial art skills, was brought in to train the "Jedi" in Hwa Rang Do, a combat technique that emphasized "invisibility." Echanis would be killed in 1978 in Nicaragua, while working as a mercenary for the regime of Anastasio Somoza. He had been the martial arts editor of Soldier of Fortune magazine, a well-known hiring hall for ex-soldiers and wanna-be's, seeking their fortunes as mercenaries.

By 1983, between the INSCOM program and the black box efforts at Fort Bragg, a fairly extensive network of military "spoon-benders" had been assembled, to the point that Task Force Delta was created, to stage quarterly meetings of as many as 300 military occult practitioners, at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Col. Frank Burns launched Meta Network, one of the first "chat rooms" run through DARPA's (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) computer networking system, that would ultimately evolve into the internet.

The scheme to create a breed of Nietzschean "super soldiers" employed some very far-out characters, like the Israeli "spoon-bender" Uri Geller, a one-time stage magician, who was brought into the U.S. intelligence community under the original patronage of Dr. Andrija Puharich, a doctor who had been conducting work on parapsychology and telepathy for the U.S. Army's Psychological Warfare Division, since the 1950s. Dr. Puharich ran the Round Table Foundation of Electrobiology, which experimented with the manipulation of brain waves. He worked closely with Warren S. McCulloch, one of the founders of Cybernetics, and with the British intelligence counterculture guru, Aldous Huxley.

Wolfowitz Peddles Non-Lethal Warfare

 

According to author Ronson, in an October 2001 interview in London, Uri Geller confided to him that he had been "called back" to work for the U.S. government, immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. It seems that the Bush Administration decided that the "psychic spies" could play a productive role in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and in efforts to prevent a replay of the terror attacks on New York and Washington.

In fact, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz had been a big advocate of some of Alexander and Channon's ideas, while serving as the chief policy advisor to then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in the George Herbert Walker Bush Pentagon. On March 10, 1991, Wolfowitz wrote a memo to Cheney, "Do We Need a Non-Lethal Defense Initiative?" in which he wrote, "A U.S. lead in non-lethal technologies will increase our options and reinforce our position in the post-Cold War world." While Wolfowitz apparently made no mention of the more bizarre practices promoted by Colonel Alexander, the guru of the non-lethal weaponry campaign, at the time of Wolfowitz's memo, Alexander had retired from active duty, and had been named head of the Non-Lethal Weapons Program at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

In 1990, Colonel Alexander had also come out with a book, The Warrior's Edge, in which he promoted a variety of unconventional methods to promote "human excellence and optimum performance" among soldiers, based on a course he taught in 1983 called Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). Among the students in that course were then-Senator and later Vice President Albert Gore, Gen. Max Thurman, and General Stubblebine. By his own accounts, Alexander and Gore became close friends in 1983, and remain so today.

Colonel Alexander wrote that the goal of The Warrior's Edge was to "unlock the door to the extraordinary human potentials inherent in each of us. To do this, we, like governments around the world, must take a fresh look at non-traditional methods of affecting reality. We must raise human consciousness of the potential power of the individual body/mind system—the power to manipulate reality. We must be willing to retake control of our past, present, and ultimately, our future."

Uri Geller was not the only "psychic warrior" called back to government service after 9/11. Jim Channon, the original First Earth Battalion New Age super-soldier, according to author Ronson, began holding a series of meetings in early 2004 with the new Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Pete Schoomaker. Schoomaker had been commander of Special Forces at Fort Bragg when the "Goat Lab" and "Jedi Warrior" programs were under way. Ronson wrote that "The rumor was that General Schoomaker was considering bringing Jim back from retirement to create, or contribute to, a new and secret think-tank, designed to encourage the army to take their minds further and further outside the mainstream." Ronson described it as a revival of Task Force Delta. Ronson soon received an e-mail from Channon, confirming the rumor, and explaining that the think-tank idea had been floated "because Rumsfeld has now openly asked for creative input on the war on terrorism ... mmmm." Channon elaborated:

"The Army has requested my services to teach the most highly selected Majors. The First Earth Battalion is the teaching exemplar of choice. I have done that in the presence of General Pete Schoomaker.... I am in contact with players who are or have recently been in Afghanistan and Iraq. I have sent in exit strategy plans based on Earth Battalion ideas. I talk weekly with a member of a stress control battalion in Iraq who carries the manual and uses it to inform his teammates of their potential service contributions...."

Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib ... and al-Qa-im

 

The International Committee of the Red Cross has published a series of studies and sponsored several international conventions, to evaluate just how "non-lethal" the non-lethal technologies are that have been promoted by Alexander, Channon, and their ilk. According to a 1998 ICRC presentation before the European Parliament, non-lethal weapons are simply defined as weapons with a less-than 25% fatality rate. Such now widely used non-lethal weapons as lasers, extremely low frequency (ELF) weapons, and various chemical, biological, and audio stun weapons, can cause permanent damage, such as blindness, deafness, and destruction of gastrointestinal systems, which, the ICRC insists, require serious study and a new set of international treaties and conventions.

Indeed, according to both Ronson and The New Yorker writer Jane Mayer, many of the torture techniques employed at Guantanamo Bay, at Abu Ghraib, and at such less-well-known locales as al-Qa-im near the Syrian border in Iraq, are based on Channon and Alexander's non-lethal schemes, but with lethal consequences in some cases.

Ronson confirmed that a facility at al-Qa-im was conducting "interrogations" of captured Iraqi insurgents, after playing, non-stop, for days at a time, the theme song from Barney the Purple Dinosaur, "I Love You." Ronson is convinced that the music was a cover for subliminal frequencies, very high- or very low-frequency sounds that affect brain functioning, to break prisoners' resistance. The prisoners were kept in metal shipping containers in the scorching sun, blindfolded and in crouching positions, surrounded by barbed wire, with the music (and subliminals) blaring.

In an article published in the July 11-18, 2005 issue of The New Yorker, Mayer revealed that Special Forces psychologists from the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program at the JFK Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg had been brought to Guantanamo Bay, to oversee interrogation strategies. The SERE psychologists formed a core of the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCT, or "Biscuits") that "reverse engineered" the techniques that were used on Special Forces soldiers, to train them to survive enemy torture/interrogations, as part of the advanced special warfare program at Fort Bragg.

Jim Channon confirmed, in another e-mail exchange with author Ronson, that many of the ideas adopted by the Army Intelligence interrogators at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and al-Qa-im came right out of his First Earth Battalion blueprint.

'Living Embodiment' of First Earth Battalion

 

 

At one point in his probe of the military's spoon-benders, author Jon Ronson asked Stuart Heller, the friend of Marilyn Ferguson and Jim Channon, if he could name one soldier who was "the living embodiment" of the First Earth Battalion. Without a second thought, Heller replied: "Bert Rodriguez." "Bert's one of the most spiritual guys I've ever met," Heller told Ronson. "No. Spiritual is the wrong word. He's occultic. He's like a walking embodiment of death. He can stop you at a distance. He can influence physical events just with his mind. If he catches your attention he can stop you without touching you."

As Jon Ronson reported, "In April 2001, Bert Rodriguez took on a new student. His name was Ziad Jarrah. Ziad just turned up at the US 1 Fitness Center one day and said he had heard that Bert was good. Why Ziad chose Bert, of all the martial arts instructors scattered around the Florida shoreline, is a matter of speculation. Maybe Bert's uniquely occultic reputation preceded him, or perhaps it was Bert's military connections. Plus, Bert had once taught the head of security for a Saudi prince. Maybe that was it."

Ziad Jarrah presented himself as a Lebanese businessman, who traveled a great deal and wanted to protect himself. "I liked Ziad a lot," Rodriguez later told Ronson. "He was very humble, very quiet. He was in good shape. Very diligent." Rodriguez taught Jarrah "the choke hold and the kamikaze spirit. You need a code you'd die for, a do-or-die desire." Rodriguez added, "Ziad was like Luke Skywalker. You know when Luke walks the invisible path? You have to believe it's there. And if you do believe it it is there. Yeah, Ziad believed it. He was like Luke Skywalker."

Rodriguez trained Ziad Jarrah for six months, and gave him copies of several knife-fighting books he had written. Jarrah shared them with a friend, Marwan al-Shehhi, who boarded with him at the Panther Motel and Apartments in Deerfield Beach, Fla.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Ziad Jarrah took control of United Airlines flight 93, and crashed it in a field in Pennsylvania. Marwan al-Shehhi commandeered United Airlines flight 175 and crashed it into the South Tower of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.