Search For America's Hidden Enemy Continues With The Jesuits
SearchForAmerica'sHiddenEnemyContinuesWithTheJesuits
Opinion | America Kills Its Enemies in Our Name. And Then Keeps It Secret. - The New York Times
President George Bush Declares "Freedom at War with Fear"
Americans are the US Government's Greatest Enemy - Fair Observer
The Hidden Tribes of America
The price of America’s quest for an external enemy | Coronavirus pandemic | Al Jazeera
The History Of The FBI's Secret 'Enemies' List : NPR
Anonymous/Library of Congress
Proud Partners in Crime
UK's Lord David Cameron Congratulates Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu for successfully murdering over 20,000 Palestinian women and children and injuring over 70.000 Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank..
Lord David Cameron, the UK Foreign Secretary and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, are both facing criminal prosecutions in their own countries. A Criminal Contempt Application was filed in the High Court of London against Lord David Cameron, the UK Foreign Secretary by INLNewsTV undercover journalist Thomas Graham Allwood, however it was arranged for MI5/Mi6 to murder Thomas Graham Allwood in Broxburn Scotland a few weeks before the first Criminal Contempt Application Hearing in the London High Court. Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2019 has been Charged with fraud, bribery and breach of trust. Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can be sentenced to up to 10 years in jail if convicted on the bribery charge.
https://inltv.co.uk/index.php/thelawlord-amustseefilm
More Palestinians Tortured and Injured By Israel's IDF- Major Expansion of Israeli Illegal West Bank Settlements, with Israel's USA and UK Partners condoning all these war and international humanitarian crimes, which are illegal under international law by continuing to provide billions of dollars of more weapons to support the expansion of Israel's Gaza Palestinian War and Humanitarian Crimes in Gaza and the West Bank
Netanyahu Slaps U.S. in the Face with Spymaster Uzi Arad
March 6, 2009 (LPAC)--Israel's Prime Minister-designate Bibi Netanyahu brought the notorious spymaster Uzi Arad into the meetings with Hillary Clinton and George Mitchell, this week, reports the Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz. Uzi Arad, is persona non grata in the United States because of his involvement with Pentagon spy, Larry Franklin, an analyst with the Office of Special Plans (OSP), the Dick Cheney-neo-conservative unit in the Pentagon that manufactured false intelligence to justify the Iraq war. Franklin was convicted in January, 2006, in a plea bargain, of stealing classified documents on Iran and other subjects from the Pentagon, and passing them on to Israeli government officials, in meetings arranged by the two top officials of AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman). Arad, who is unable to come to the U.S. because of his involvement with Franklin, is reportedly going to be head of the Israeli National Security Council, Ha'aretz wrote
Not only did Bibi include Arad in his first meeting with the top U.S. officials, but he kicked the Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., Sallai Meridor out the meeting. Ha'aretz reported that this insult from Netanyahu was the reason that Meridor resigned today
Lyndon LaRouche said today that what Netanyahoo did was "a slap in the face to the U.S. And that if Netanyahoo breaks from the U.S., that represents Netanyahoo's plans for leaving earth."
And who is really behind Netanyahu? a group of fascists in London that put Dick Cheney into office.
http://intelligencenews. wordpress.com/2009/03/21/01- 107/
...
The other two are an authorized history (from 1909 to 1949) of MI6 by Professor Keith Jeffery, of Queen’s University, Belfast, and Gordon Thomas’ Secret Wars: One Hundred Years of British Intelligence, which intelNews has received and will be reviewing shortly. ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Gordon_Thomas
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2009
DO JEWS RUN THE SECURITY SERVICES?Britain's security service, MI6
According to ex-KGB Colonel 'F' and KGB officer Yuri Modin, Victor Rothschild was the key to most of the Cambridge ring's penetration of British Intelligence. According to Roland Perry, in his book The Fifth Man: "Burgess, at MI6 (and still on a retainer from Rothschild) recommended Philby for a job in Section D of MI6. "Rothschild, who had helped nudge Burgess into his position before the war, had been in turn recommended to MI5 by Burgess." "'Rothschild had the contacts,' Modin noted.
Soon after Israel was formed, Rothschild was allegedly involved with Chaim Weizmann in setting up a special nuclear physics department in a scientific institute in Rehovoth. In 1957, French engineers began building a nuclear reactor at Dimona on the edge of the Negev Desert. Perry believes that while "MI5 inventions and technical advances went on, Rothschild kept in contact with the key figures and digested the reports.
"This, coupled with his close contact with Dick White, other intelligence chiefs, Wright and the heads of the key research facilities in everything from weapons to radar, meant that Rothschild understood better than anyone in MI6 or MI5 every aspect of British Intelligence, from technical developments to their application in the field..."
In 1972, Rothschild played a major part in choosing the new head of MI5, Michael Hanley.According to the controversial Eustace Mullins (CHAPTER FIVE - The CIA - 3):
While CIA station chief in Rome, the CIA's Angleton "worked closely with the Zionist terrorists Teddy Kollek and Jacob Meridor, and later became chief of the Israeli desk at the CIA, helping Philby to set up the lavishly funded international Mossad espionage operation, all paid for by American taxpayers. "A senior CIA security official, C. Edward Petty, later reported that Angleton might be a Soviet penetration agent or mole, but President Gerald Ford suppressed the report.
Eustace Mullins - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia POSTED BY ANON AT 5:30 AM
United States Capitol Washington, D.C.
THE PRESIDENT: Mr. Speaker, Mr. President Pro Tempore, members of Congress, and fellow Americans:
In the normal course of events, Presidents come to this chamber to report on the state of the Union. Tonight, no such report is needed. It has already been delivered by the American people.
We have seen it in the courage of passengers, who rushed terrorists to save others on the ground -- passengers like an exceptional man named Todd Beamer. And would you please help me to welcome his wife, Lisa Beamer, here tonight. (Applause.)
We have seen the state of our Union in the endurance of rescuers, working past exhaustion. We have seen the unfurling of flags, the lighting of candles, the giving of blood, the saying of prayers -- in English, Hebrew, and Arabic. We have seen the decency of a loving and giving people who have made the grief of strangers their own.
My fellow citizens, for the last nine days, the entire world has seen for itself the state of our Union -- and it is strong. (Applause.)
Tonight we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom. Our grief has turned to anger, and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done. (Applause.)
I thank the Congress for its leadership at such an important time. All of America was touched on the evening of the tragedy to see Republicans and Democrats joined together on the steps of this Capitol, singing "God Bless America." And you did more than sing; you acted, by delivering $40 billion to rebuild our communities and meet the needs of our military.
Speaker Hastert, Minority Leader Gephardt, Majority Leader Daschle and Senator Lott, I thank you for your friendship, for your leadership and for your service to our country. (Applause.)
And on behalf of the American people, I thank the world for its outpouring of support. America will never forget the sounds of our National Anthem playing at Buckingham Palace, on the streets of Paris, and at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate.
We will not forget South Korean children gathering to pray outside our embassy in Seoul, or the prayers of sympathy offered at a mosque in Cairo. We will not forget moments of silence and days of mourning in Australia and Africa and Latin America.
Nor will we forget the citizens of 80 other nations who died with our own: dozens of Pakistanis; more than 130 Israelis; more than 250 citizens of India; men and women from El Salvador, Iran, Mexico and Japan; and hundreds of British citizens. America has no truer friend than Great Britain. (Applause.) Once again, we are joined together in a great cause -- so honored the British Prime Minister has crossed an ocean to show his unity of purpose with America. Thank you for coming, friend. (Applause.)
On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country. Americans have known wars -- but for the past 136 years, they have been wars on foreign soil, except for one Sunday in 1941. Americans have known the casualties of war -- but not at the center of a great city on a peaceful morning. Americans have known surprise attacks -- but never before on thousands of civilians. All of this was brought upon us in a single day -- and night fell on a different world, a world where freedom itself is under attack.
Americans have many questions tonight. Americans are asking: Who attacked our country? The evidence we have gathered all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations known as al Qaeda. They are the same murderers indicted for bombing American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and responsible for bombing the USS Cole.
Al Qaeda is to terror what the mafia is to crime. But its goal is not making money; its goal is remaking the world -- and imposing its radical beliefs on people everywhere.
The terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics -- a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam. The terrorists' directive commands them to kill Christians and Jews, to kill all Americans, and make no distinction among military and civilians, including women and children.
This group and its leader -- a person named Osama bin Laden -- are linked to many other organizations in different countries, including the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. There are thousands of these terrorists in more than 60 countries. They are recruited from their own nations and neighborhoods and brought to camps in places like Afghanistan, where they are trained in the tactics of terror. They are sent back to their homes or sent to hide in countries around the world to plot evil and destruction.
The leadership of al Qaeda has great influence in Afghanistan and supports the Taliban regime in controlling most of that country. In Afghanistan, we see al Qaeda's vision for the world.
Afghanistan's people have been brutalized -- many are starving and many have fled. Women are not allowed to attend school. You can be jailed for owning a television. Religion can be practiced only as their leaders dictate. A man can be jailed in Afghanistan if his beard is not long enough.
The United States respects the people of Afghanistan -- after all, we are currently its largest source of humanitarian aid -- but we condemn the Taliban regime. (Applause.) It is not only repressing its own people, it is threatening people everywhere by sponsoring and sheltering and supplying terrorists. By aiding and abetting murder, the Taliban regime is committing murder.
And tonight, the United States of America makes the following demands on the Taliban: Deliver to United States authorities all the leaders of al Qaeda who hide in your land. (Applause.) Release all foreign nationals, including American citizens, you have unjustly imprisoned. Protect foreign journalists, diplomats and aid workers in your country. Close immediately and permanently every terrorist training camp in Afghanistan, and hand over every terrorist, and every person in their support structure, to appropriate authorities. (Applause.)
These demands are not open to negotiation or discussion. (Applause.) The Taliban must act, and act immediately. They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate.
I also want to speak tonight directly to Muslims throughout the world. We respect your faith. It's practiced freely by many millions of Americans, and by millions more in countries that America counts as friends. Its teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah. (Applause.) The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack Islam itself. The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends; it is not our many Arab friends. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them. (Applause.)
Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated. (Applause.)
Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in this chamber -- a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms -- our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.
They want to overthrow existing governments in many Muslim countries, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. They want to drive Israel out of the Middle East. They want to drive Christians and Jews out of vast regions of Asia and Africa.
These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life. With every atrocity, they hope that America grows fearful, retreating from the world and forsaking our friends. They stand against us, because we stand in their way.
We are not deceived by their pretenses to piety. We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions -- by abandoning every value except the will to power -- they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies. (Applause.)
Americans are asking: How will we fight and win this war? We will direct every resource at our command -- every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war -- to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network.
This war will not be like the war against Iraq a decade ago, with a decisive liberation of territory and a swift conclusion. It will not look like the air war above Kosovo two years ago, where no ground troops were used and not a single American was lost in combat.
Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes. Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success. We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place, until there is no refuge or no rest. And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. (Applause.) From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.
Our nation has been put on notice: We are not immune from attack. We will take defensive measures against terrorism to protect Americans. Today, dozens of federal departments and agencies, as well as state and local governments, have responsibilities affecting homeland security. These efforts must be coordinated at the highest level. So tonight I announce the creation of a Cabinet-level position reporting directly to me -- the Office of Homeland Security.
And tonight I also announce a distinguished American to lead this effort, to strengthen American security: a military veteran, an effective governor, a true patriot, a trusted friend -- Pennsylvania's Tom Ridge. (Applause.) He will lead, oversee and coordinate a comprehensive national strategy to safeguard our country against terrorism, and respond to any attacks that may come.
These measures are essential. But the only way to defeat terrorism as a threat to our way of life is to stop it, eliminate it, and destroy it where it grows. (Applause.)
Many will be involved in this effort, from FBI agents to intelligence operatives to the reservists we have called to active duty. All deserve our thanks, and all have our prayers. And tonight, a few miles from the damaged Pentagon, I have a message for our military: Be ready. I've called the Armed Forces to alert, and there is a reason. The hour is coming when America will act, and you will make us proud. (Applause.)
This is not, however, just America's fight. And what is at stake is not just America's freedom. This is the world's fight. This is civilization's fight. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom.
We ask every nation to join us. We will ask, and we will need, the help of police forces, intelligence services, and banking systems around the world. The United States is grateful that many nations and many international organizations have already responded -- with sympathy and with support. Nations from Latin America, to Asia, to Africa, to Europe, to the Islamic world. Perhaps the NATO Charter reflects best the attitude of the world: An attack on one is an attack on all.
The civilized world is rallying to America's side. They understand that if this terror goes unpunished, their own cities, their own citizens may be next. Terror, unanswered, can not only bring down buildings, it can threaten the stability of legitimate governments. And you know what -- we're not going to allow it. (Applause.)
Americans are asking: What is expected of us? I ask you to live your lives, and hug your children. I know many citizens have fears tonight, and I ask you to be calm and resolute, even in the face of a continuing threat.
I ask you to uphold the values of America, and remember why so many have come here. We are in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them. No one should be singled out for unfair treatment or unkind words because of their ethnic background or religious faith. (Applause.)
I ask you to continue to support the victims of this tragedy with your contributions. Those who want to give can go to a central source of information, libertyunites.org, to find the names of groups providing direct help in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
The thousands of FBI agents who are now at work in this investigation may need your cooperation, and I ask you to give it.
I ask for your patience, with the delays and inconveniences that may accompany tighter security; and for your patience in what will be a long struggle.
I ask your continued participation and confidence in the American economy. Terrorists attacked a symbol of American prosperity. They did not touch its source. America is successful because of the hard work, and creativity, and enterprise of our people. These were the true strengths of our economy before September 11th, and they are our strengths today. (Applause.)
And, finally, please continue praying for the victims of terror and their families, for those in uniform, and for our great country. Prayer has comforted us in sorrow, and will help strengthen us for the journey ahead.
Tonight I thank my fellow Americans for what you have already done and for what you will do. And ladies and gentlemen of the Congress, I thank you, their representatives, for what you have already done and for what we will do together.
Tonight, we face new and sudden national challenges. We will come together to improve air safety, to dramatically expand the number of air marshals on domestic flights, and take new measures to prevent hijacking. We will come together to promote stability and keep our airlines flying, with direct assistance during this emergency. (Applause.)
We will come together to give law enforcement the additional tools it needs to track down terror here at home. (Applause.) We will come together to strengthen our intelligence capabilities to know the plans of terrorists before they act, and find them before they strike. (Applause.)
We will come together to take active steps that strengthen America's economy, and put our people back to work.
Tonight we welcome two leaders who embody the extraordinary spirit of all New Yorkers: Governor George Pataki, and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. (Applause.) As a symbol of America's resolve, my administration will work with Congress, and these two leaders, to show the world that we will rebuild New York City. (Applause.)
After all that has just passed -- all the lives taken, and all the possibilities and hopes that died with them -- it is natural to wonder if America's future is one of fear. Some speak of an age of terror. I know there are struggles ahead, and dangers to face. But this country will define our times, not be defined by them. As long as the United States of America is determined and strong, this will not be an age of terror; this will be an age of liberty, here and across the world. (Applause.)
Great harm has been done to us. We have suffered great loss. And in our grief and anger we have found our mission and our moment. Freedom and fear are at war. The advance of human freedom -- the great achievement of our time, and the great hope of every time -- now depends on us. Our nation -- this generation -- will lift a dark threat of violence from our people and our future. We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail. (Applause.)
It is my hope that in the months and years ahead, life will return almost to normal. We'll go back to our lives and routines, and that is good. Even grief recedes with time and grace. But our resolve must not pass. Each of us will remember what happened that day, and to whom it happened. We'll remember the moment the news came -- where we were and what we were doing. Some will remember an image of a fire, or a story of rescue. Some will carry memories of a face and a voice gone forever.
And I will carry this: It is the police shield of a man named George Howard, who died at the World Trade Center trying to save others. It was given to me by his mom, Arlene, as a proud memorial to her son. This is my reminder of lives that ended, and a task that does not end. (Applause.)
I will not forget this wound to our country or those who inflicted it. I will not yield; I will not rest; I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people.
The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them. (Applause.)
Fellow citizens, we'll meet violence with patient justice -- assured of the rightness of our cause, and confident of the victories to come. In all that lies before us, may God grant us wisdom, and may He watch over the United States of America.
Thank you. (Applause.)
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Americans are the US Government's Greatest Enemy - Fair Observer
https://www.fairobserver.com/ politics/americans-are-the-us- governments-greatest-enemy/
Americans are the US Government’s Greatest Enemy
If you take a poll of American pundits and policymakers about the greatest threat facing the US government, they’d probably put China at the top of the list. Maybe a handful would opt for Russia. A few holdouts from the War on Terrorism era might point to Islamic extremism.
But the greatest threat to the US government is actually Junior Airman Jack Teixeira.
The 21-year-old behind the leak of US intelligence documents might seem like just a guy who wanted to win a few points with his buddies in an on-line discussion group. Sharing insider information to demonstrate his street cred was, of course, an extraordinarily stupid thing to do. But Teixeira was no whistleblower like Chelsea Manning or Reality Winner. He shared the documents in the belief that they wouldn’t go beyond the relatively small circle of gamers in his chat group Thug Shaker Central on the Discord platform.
So, how much of a threat could that be?
For all his youth and naivete, Teixeira represents a sizable government-skeptical force that works in or adjacent to the US government. Many of these right-wing and extreme libertarian individuals can be found in the military. Others are elected representatives—from school boards up to the US Congress—motivated to run for office by Donald Trump or his extremist predecessors. They would never characterize themselves as anti-American. But in their mind, the government is not really part of America—not their America, not the real America.
This version of nationalism stripped of any love of government is only part of the ideological picture.
Teixeira was embedded in the right-wing gamer culture that has taken aim at women, minorities, and the presumed “deep state” through “trolling” and “doxxing” (calling in false reports to police and SWAT teams). Right-wing recruitment takes place in the chat of first-person shooter games and on social media applications like Discord, a platform for gamers since 2015 and also a popular meeting place for extremists. The organizers of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, for instance, used Discord to plan the event, while the white supremacist behind the Buffalo mass shooting last year used Discord to communicate his thoughts through a personal diary.
Discord: what a perfect name for a communications platform that has divided the country even as it has united the right.
It’s not easy to figure out Teixeira’s actual views. According to The Washington Post,
[M]embers of Teixeira’s server have showed The Post video of Teixeira shouting racist and antisemitic slurs before firing a rifle and said he referenced government raids at Ruby Ridge in Idaho and in Waco, Tex.—events with deep resonance among right-wing, anti-government extremists.
Another piece by the paper provides more insight into Teixeira’s worldview:
[H]e spoke of the United States, and particularly law enforcement and the intelligence community, as a sinister force that sought to suppress its citizens and keep them in the dark. He ranted about “government overreach.” [He] told his online companions that the government hid horrible truths from the public. He claimed, according to the members, that the government knew in advance that a white supremacist intended to go on a shooting rampage at a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022… [He] said federal law enforcement officials let the killings proceed so they could argue for increased funding, a baseless notion that the member said he believes and considers an example of OG’s penetrating insights about the depth of government corruption.
The links between the US military and the far right go back many years, though it’s hard to know just how deep the relationship really is. Timothy McVeigh, the perpetrator of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, was a decorated veteran but developed his anti-government views largely outside the military. Between 2001 and 2013, , according to New America Foundation data, 21 veterans were involved in committing or planning far-right violence. A Florida National Guard member, who was the co-founder of the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division, was convicted in 2018 of possessing explosive materials (released from prison, he plotted to bomb a power station in Maryland and was re-arrested). Veterans were also overrepresented in the January 6 storming of the US Capitol.
According to an October 2020 Pentagon report on the inroads made by white supremacists in the military, “US military personnel and veterans are ‘highly prized’ recruits for supremacist groups, and leaders of those groups try to join the military themselves and get those already in their groups to enlist. Their goal is to obtain weapons and skills and to try to borrow the military’s bravado and cachet.”
In her 2020 congressional testimony, Heidi Beirich of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism reported that the
Armed Services’ own soldiers know that white supremacy in the ranks is a serious problem. A Military Times poll in 2017 found that nearly 25 percent of actively serving military personnel have encountered white nationalism and racism in the Armed Forces. Active duty troops were about 1.3 million at the time, meaning some 325,000 soldiers had encountered white nationalism in some form. Follow up surveys in 2018 and 2019 by the same publication found substantially the same troubling results.
Before the 1970s, such white nationalism and racism would have overlapped substantially with official US government policy. But now, in the wake of the civil rights, affirmative action, and #BlackLivesMatter movements, this extremism has acquired a distinctly anti-government character. Unlike in Germany or New Zealand, the US government has not made much of an effort to eliminate this potential fifth column from the military’s ranks.
Republicans to the Rescue
Given the ideological affinities, It’s no surprise that the far right has come to Teixeitra’s defense. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has supported Teixeira for being “white, male, christian and anti-war,” which “makes him an enemy to the Biden regime.” She goes on: “Ask yourself who is the real enemy. A young low level national guardsmen? Or the administration that is waging war in Ukraine, a non-NATO nation, against nuclear Russia without war powers?”
Fox’s Tucker Carlson, too, has sided with Teixeira and Russia against both Ukraine and the Biden administration:
Just two weeks ago, for example, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told the US Senate that Russian military power is “waning.” In other words, Russia is losing the war. That was a lie. He knew it was when he said it, but he repeated it in congressional testimony. That is a crime, but Lloyd Austin has not been arrested for committing that crime. Instead, the only man who has been taken into custody or likely ever will be is a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman who leaked the slides that showed that Lloyd Austin was lying. He revealed the crimes, therefore he’s the criminal.
The Pentagon has been consistently pessimistic about Ukraine’s ability to win the war outright, and some of that pessimism has even been expressed publicly. The leaks have only confirmed that less-than-sanguine viewpoint. But that doesn’t mean that Russia is winning the war. Quite the contrary. The Kremlin’s attempt this winter and early spring to seize the entire Donbas region resulted only in the acquisition of a few square miles of scorched earth.
Carlson, of course, is not interested in the truth, only in Biden-bashing and leading the charge against the US government more generally. Even when Trump was putatively in charge of the federal government, the extreme right and its media darlings managed to maintain their anti-government stance by transferring their animus to a “deep state” that they’d invented largely for that purpose. Look to Trump, indicted but still in the running, to exploit this extreme libertarianism in his campaign to be reelected in 2024.
What the Leaks Reveal
The essential contents of the documents that Teixeira leaked is yesterday’s news. Ukraine is running low on missiles to defend itself against Russian aerial attacks, it has limited resources that it can use in its long-awaited spring counter-offensive, and Russia is having an equally difficult time dealing with the loss of troops and dissension within its own ranks.
Make Sense of the World
The leaks don’t reveal anything about Ukraine’s upcoming counter-offensive because the government in Kyiv hasn’t shared that information with Washington—obviously a wise move given the porous nature of the US intelligence community. The documents don’t identify the specific sources of Russian intel. They don’t uncover any major behind-the-scenes funding of the Kremlin’s war efforts, though the Chinese promised to provide some military assistance disguised as civilian shipments and Egypt was planning to send 40,000 rockets on the sly.
Some revelations outside the Ukrainian front are indeed new—for instance, about China’s supersonic drone capabilities—but others have been relatively small bore. The allies have some Special Forces on the ground in Ukraine, including 14 from the United States. It’s hard to say what they’re doing, but given the Biden administration’s extreme caution around engaging Russian forces directly, they might be there only to facilitate a rapid evacuation of embassy personnel if things should suddenly go south. Israel might reverse its position on providing lethal aid to Ukraine—but then again, it might not. The United States has been spying on ally South Korea, but that’s not a surprise after the Snowden-era revelations about Washington listening in on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone.
What’s most surprising about the revelations is that a 21-year-old airman, a low-level computer tech at an Air National Guard base in Sandwich, Massachusetts, had access to these documents and could so easily bring them home to be copied. It’s a surprise to me, at least. But it’s apparently not so surprising to those familiar with the intelligence community who, according to The New York Times, “say untold thousands of troops and government civilians have access to top secret materials, including many young, inexperienced workers the military relies on to process the monumental amount of intelligence it collects.” They just log on to the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System and boom: secrets at their fingertips.
The sad truth is that the edifice of US intelligence is so huge that it must rely on the services of the young and the restless. It’s not just the intelligence community. Every administration must deal with loose lips. The Trump administration sprang leaks in every direction and went to great lengths to try to plug them. Given the sheer number of opportunities and motivations, it’s surprising that more sensitive materials aren’t floating around the Internet.
Anti-government sentiment—in the military, in the political realm, among the public—adds something new to the equation. It’s happening not so much on the left, where it was a feature of the 1960s, but on the far right. Once confined to the fringes of American life, this far right is now committed to gaining power through government institutions like school boards and the National Guard.
That’s why Jack Teixeira is such a threat. Leakers will come and go. But far-right groomers and their recruits are in it for the long haul. The next time that an extremist president tries to overturn an election or seize power through illegal means, a radicalized military might not stay in the barracks to defend the constitution while a Congress led by Greene and her ilk might just roll over and die.
[FPIF first published this piece.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
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Polarization
America has never felt so divided. Bitter debates that were once confined to Congressional hearings and cable TV have now found their way into every part of our lives, from our Facebook feeds to the family dinner table. But most Americans are tired of this "us-versus-them" mindset and are eager to find common ground. This is the message we’ve heard from more than 8,000 Americans in one of our country’s largest-ever studies of polarization: We hold dissimilar views on many issues. However, more than three in four Americans also believe that our differences aren’t so great that we can’t work together.
A Nation Divided
A range of major issues split the country
Our research concludes that we have become a set of tribes, with different codes, values, and even facts. In our public debates, it seems that we no longer just disagree. We reject each other’s premises and doubt each other’s motives. We question each other’s character. We block our ears to diverse perspectives. At home, polarization is souring personal relationships, ruining Thanksgiving dinners, and driving families apart.
We are experiencing these divisions in our workplaces, neighborhood groups, even our places of worship. In the media, pundits score points, mock opponents, and talk over each other. On the Internet, social media has become a hotbed of outrage, takedowns, and cruelty—often targeting total strangers.
But this can change. A majority of Americans, whom we’ve called the "Exhausted Majority," are fed up by America’s polarization. They know we have more in common than that which divides us: our belief in freedom, equality, and the pursuit of the American dream. They share a deep sense of gratitude that they are citizens of the United States. They want to move past our differences.
Turning the tide of tribalism is possible―but it won’t be easy. Americans have real differences and real disagreements with each other. We must be able to listen to each other to understand those differences and find common ground. That’s the focus of the Hidden Tribes project: to understand better what is pulling us apart, and find what can bring us back together.
The report that you can download here is the first part of More in Common's year-long Hidden Tribes project to understand our polarization and study what can reunite our fractured communities.
How we got here
Today's polarization reflects a perfect storm: Unsettling changes in our economy and society have left many Americans feeling like strangers in their own land. Old certainties are gone. The secure job, the growing wage, and the safety of neighborhood life where everyone knew each other—these all feel like relics of a bygone era. It feels as though hard work is no longer rewarded, and the gap between rich and poor widens every year.
Many Americans wonder who and what they can still trust. The institutions that once bound us are disappearing, and we no longer seem to have each other's backs. Everyone appears to have a varying version of world events, and it feels harder than ever to sort fact from fiction. Our news feeds seem to just echo our own views, and when people post alternative opinions they are often attacked by angry mobs. We don't seem to disagree anymore without perceiving another person's views as stupid, wrong or even evil. We're being played off each other; and told to see each other as threats and enemies, not Americans just like us but with separate experiences and views. The loudest and most extreme voices get heard, and others just feel like tuning out altogether.
Nobody wants simply to turn the clocks back, because there was a lot that wasn't right about the world of the past. Today, we seem more fractured and fragmented than anyone can remember. Instead of helping us find solutions to move us all forward, politics is driving us apart.
When people don't understand each other, they can't converse or find common ground. Yet somehow, if we could only press a "reset" button, it feels like things could be different and we could move forward together as a country.
Our Research Approach
The Hidden Tribes of America survey collected the views of more than 8,000 people, a group of US citizens statistically representative of the population based on census data. We also conducted six hour-long focus groups and 30 one-on-one interviews of at least one hour’s duration with people from across the seven population segments. Survey participants answered hundreds of questions about many of today’s most important issues and their hopes, fears and concerns for the future.
We also aimed to understand why people held the positions they did through a specially designed series of questions that helped us identify people’s core beliefs about the world―questions about their identity and the basic values and beliefs that influence the way people see the world. By focusing on core beliefs, we illuminated the hidden architecture that animates the lives and views of ordinary Americans.
We used an advanced statistical process called hierarchical clustering to identify groups of people with similar core beliefs. This revealed seven groups of Americans―what we call Hidden Tribes―with distinctive views and values. Our breakdown of Americans into groups is tied to how they express their core beliefs, which isn’t necessarily aligned with conventional demographic measures like age, gender, level of education, or ethnic background. The result is a unique portrait of the American public that we believe is both more revealing and more actionable than typical surveys.
Of course, public opinion research only tells a partial story. But the Hidden Tribes research is detailed, the sample is large, and our approach was open-ended. We were determined to let the data tell us about Americans organically, rather than proving pre-baked assumptions. The conclusion? A very different story than the tale of a deeply polarized America, split into two camps locked in a fight, determined to crush the other.
America's Hidden Tribes
America is not split into two tribes, as we're sometimes told. In fact, we've identified seven distinct groups of Americans. These are our Hidden Tribes of America: distinguished not by who they are or what they look like, but what they believe.
The Hidden Tribes of America
Here's a quick snapshot of each group:
Progressive Activists (8 percent of the population) are deeply concerned with issues concerning equity, fairness, and America's direction today. They tend to be more secular, cosmopolitan, and highly engaged with social media.
Traditional Liberals (11 percent of the population) tend to be cautious, rational, and idealistic. They value tolerance and compromise. They place great faith in institutions.
Passive Liberals (15 percent of the population) tend to feel isolated from their communities. They are insecure in their beliefs and try to avoid political conversations. They have a fatalistic view of politics and feel that the circumstances of their lives are beyond their control.
The Politically Disengaged (26 percent of the population) are untrusting, suspicious about external threats, conspiratorially minded, and pessimistic about progress. They tend to be patriotic yet detached from politics.
Moderates (15 percent of the population) are engaged in their communities, well informed, and civic-minded. Their faith is often an important part of their lives. They shy away from extremism of any sort.
Traditional Conservatives (19 percent of the population) tend to be religious, patriotic, and highly moralistic. They believe deeply in personal responsibility and self-reliance.
Devoted Conservatives (6 percent of the population) are deeply engaged with politics and hold strident, uncompromising views. They feel that America is embattled, and they perceive themselves as the last defenders of traditional values that are under threat.
Core Beliefs and Demographics
Tribe membership (pictured here: Progressive Activists and Devoted Conservatives) predicts how people think about political issues better than standard categories (such as "Liberal" or "Republican")
The Wings
Progressive Activists and Devoted Conservatives together comprise just 14 percent of the American population—yet it often feels as if our national conversation has become a shouting match between these two groups at the furthest ends of the spectrum. Together with Traditional Conservatives (who share values and tribalism like the Devoted Conservatives, just less intensely), they compose the 33 percent of people in the groups we label the Wings.
Combined, the members of these three tribes comprise just one-third of the population, but they often dominate our national conversation. Tribalism runs deep in their thinking. Their distrust and fear of the opposing side drives many of the people in these groups, and they have especially negative opinions of each other. When people today speak about how Americans seem to hate each other, they're usually talking about the opinions and behaviors of the Wings.
The Wings are also the most unified internally. On many of the most contentious issues—race, immigration, guns, LGBTQI+ rights—the people in these three tribes express high levels of unanimity. Often more than 90 percent of people in one of these groups holds the same view about a controversial issue, and typically, it will be the reverse of whatever the opposing wing believes. In contrast, the remaining two-thirds of Americans at the center show more diversity in their political views, express less certainty about them, and are more open to compromise and change—even on issues that we all tend to consider highly polarizing.
Why do the Wings dominate the conversation? A key reason is that polarization has become a business model. Media executives have realized that they can drive clicks, likes, and views, and make money for themselves and their shareholders, by providing people with the most strident opinions. This means that the most extreme voices―no matter how outlandish―often get the most airtime. In addition, people with the most extreme views are often the most certain of their positions. They are willing to argue with anyone and avoid moderating their opinions or conceding points to the other side. All this can make entertaining television and viral social media content. But it is distorting how we see each other, fracturing our society, and adding to distortions in our political system that give undue weight to the most extreme views.
Core Beliefs of the Wings Diverge Sharply
Devoted Conservatives emphasize traditional values and American identity, while Progressive Activists are defined by a rejection of traditional authority and a focus on rectifying historical injustices
The Exhausted Majority
While the story of the Wings may be one of division and conflict, a very different story is found in the rest of America. In fact, the largest group that we uncovered in our research has so far been largely overlooked. It is a group of Americans we call the Exhausted Majority―our collective term for the four tribes, representing a two-thirds majority of Americans, who aren’t part of the Wings. Although they appear in the middle of our charts and graphs, most members of the Exhausted Majority aren’t political centrists or moderates. On specific issues, their views range across the spectrum. But while they hold a variety of views, the members of the Exhausted Majority are also united in important ways:
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They are fed up with the polarization plaguing American government and society
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They are often forgotten in the public discourse, overlooked because their voices are seldom heard
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They are flexible in their views, willing to endorse different policies according to the precise situation rather than sticking ideologically to a single set of beliefs
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They believe we can find common ground
The distinction between the Wings and the Exhausted Majority takes us beyond a simple story of the left and the right. Based on their strong views and values, we believe both Traditional Conservatives and Devoted Conservatives belong in the Wings. On the other side, Progressive Activists belong in the Wings, but Traditional Liberals belong in the Exhausted Majority. They have clear liberal views, but unlike the three Wings tribes, they have a more diverse range of opinions, seem more concerned about the country’s divisions, and are more committed to compromise.
While partisans argue and score political points, members of the Exhausted Majority are so frustrated with the bitter polarization of our politics that many have checked out completely, ceding the floor to more strident voices. This is especially true of Politically Disengaged and Passive Liberals, while Traditional Liberals and Moderates remain engaged. Members of the Exhausted Majority tend to be open to finding middle ground. Furthermore, they aren’t ideologues who dismiss as evil or ignorant the people who don’t share their exact political views. They want to talk and to find a path forward.
The Majority of Americans Want Compromise
Desire for compromise split by Wings and Exhausted Majority
If we’re to reverse the tide of polarization, we need to listen once more to the Exhausted Majority. They feel discouraged by the country’s divisions, but they want to be heard and find a way out of them.
The Issues that Divide Us
The Hidden Tribes survey has collected over 200,000 pieces of information on the most pressing issues that frequently divide Americans, hence, it provides a new perspective on those issues. In short, we’re convinced that the Hidden Tribes and the powerful effect of tribalism can supply critical insights into public attitudes on many of our most controversial issues, like the following:
Immigration. Our research showed genuine tension between people’s desire for America to be open and inclusive and their desire for it to be safe and secure. One reason immigration provokes such heated debates is that opposing groups frame the issue in such dissimilar ways. For the two Conservative tribes, the Traditional Conservatives and the Devoted Conservatives, immigration is frequently framed as an issue of immigrants defying laws, the government losing control of borders, and doubts about immigrants’ loyalty to America. For the two liberal tribes (Progressive Activists and Traditional Liberals), the same immigration issues are perceived through the lens of racism, human rights, refugee protection, and the positive value of a diverse society. The views of the three remaining tribes diverge according to the issue at hand, but the Politically Disengaged are more suspicious of immigrants and more likely to support extreme measures to control borders than the other two tribes.
Racial justice and police brutality. The majority of all segments agree that race-related issues are at least somewhat serious and that racism is at least somewhat common. Furthermore, 60 percent of Americans believe that white supremacists are a growing threat in the United States. However, this broad agreement on the problem of racism does not extend to agreement on its symptoms or solution. For instance, 69 percent of Americans believe that we have become too sensitive to issues of race, and a near-unanimous 85 percent think that "race should not be a factor" in college admissions. Meaningful differences in viewpoint persist between white and black Americans on key questions, especially regarding police brutality towards African Americans. However, another crucially relevant factor is whether a person believes personal responsibility or circumstances are more relevant in shaping outcomes in life—a major fault line that divides conservatives from progressives. Those who attribute more importance to circumstance, a defining feature of Progressives Activists, are 30 percentage points more likely to believe that racism needs to be taken more seriously and that Black Lives Matter has brought attention to important issues.
Sex, gender, and morality. Gender identity, sexism, and sexual harassment are all controversial subjects in America today. While 69 percent of Americans consider sexism in the United States to be at least somewhat serious, nearly as many Americans—59 percent—also think people are too sensitive about matters relating to sexism and gender. The country is evenly divided between the progressive view that sexual harassment is still commonplace, and the conservative position that too many "ordinary behaviors" are now labelled as sexual harassment. And while both same-sex marriage and the acceptance of transgender people have the support of three in five Americans, this does not reflect an enthusiastic embrace of new norms towards sexuality. Indeed, more than half of Americans say that there is "pressure to think a certain way" about gay, lesbian and gender issues. More fundamentally, the country is evenly divided on whether our changes in attitudes towards sex and sexuality are making America "more accepting and tolerant" or whether they are simply causing "America to lose its moral foundation".
Terrorism and Islam. Americans' perceptions of the threat and causes of terrorism reflect the country's polarization. While 86 percent of Progressive Activists think Americans are too worried about terrorism, 84 percent of Devoted Conservatives believe Americans do not take terrorism seriously enough. In both instances, the wing segments are outliers. Progressive Activists are the only segment in which a majority thinks that the threat of terrorism is not that serious—a view they hold at three times the national average. Meanwhile, Devoted Conservatives are an outlier as the only group for whom a majority attributes terrorism to religion rather than to individuals: they are more than twice as likely to say that "some religions teach violence and extremism" rather than that "violent people use religion as a justification for their actions." Further, Devoted Conservatives are quite isolated in their particular fear of Islam: they are alone among the segments and twice as likely as the national average to believe that "Islam is the greatest threat to America".
Consistency Across Issues
Tribe membership shows strong reliability in predicting views across different political topics
The Hidden Architecture of Political Behavior
The Hidden Tribes shed light on our polarization by drawing on established scientific research to understand the basic motivations driving people’s behavior. Social scientists have long studied the underlying psychology of core beliefs and group identities― the fundamental ways we understand the world and align ourselves with others. Our core beliefs influence what we think, what we consider important, and how we act. The Hidden Tribes report is the first time this broad range of insights about core beliefs and tribalism have been the focus of a truly comprehensive national opinion survey. For this reason, we are confident it provides many new insights into the roots of our polarization.
The Hidden Tribes survey asked Americans about their underlying views and ways of seeing the world. The results help to explain why there is such a striking degree of coherence in how a person responds to seemingly unrelated issues: Core beliefs are the foundation of many of our views. Like a city building, our political outlook is built on a handful of pillars―our core beliefs and the groups we align with―that provide scaffolding for the rest of the structure.
Core Belief 1: Group Identity and Tribalism in America. Perhaps the most important aspect of the hidden architecture underlying political behavior is people's group identities. Social scientists have long recognized that people see their own groups as a strong source of self-esteem and a sense of belonging. Consequently, these tribal identities have significant influence over people’s views. This helps explain, for example, the popular social media post showing men in t-shirts that proudly proclaim “I’d rather be a Russian than Democrat.”
Through our questions, we measured several aspects of tribalism, including individuals’ pride in their group and the degree to which they believed their group members had a lot in common. Overall, we found the Wings showed far more tribalism than the middle groups. A strong relationship also exists between people’s pride in their racial group and certain other political opinions. For instance, white people with a strong racial identity are significantly more likely to believe that America needs a strong leader who is willing to break the rules or to decide that Confederate monuments are symbols of Southern pride.
Core Belief 2: Perceived Threat. People diverge in the amount of danger they perceive in the world. Some people see the world as a largely safe place with isolated pockets of violence. Others see the world as threatening, with isolated pockets of tranquility. To test people’s degree of perceived threat, the survey asked them how much they agree with the statement, "The world is becoming a more and more dangerous place." This basic sense of threat versus security is strongly correlated with people’s views on a wide variety of other issues, including immigration and terrorism. Progressive Activists also stand out from other groups as the most secure of any tribe by far. They view threats to their safety as fearmongering by their opponents, not a clear and present danger to their wellbeing. Simultaneously, Progressive Activists hold the most pessimistic views about the country's future.
Core Belief 3: Parenting Style and Authoritarianism. Recent research has found that people’s tendency towards authoritarianism―that is, their support for strong leaders and strict social hierarchy―is linked to their views on parenting style. For example, people who deem it more important for a child to be "well-behaved" than “creative” are more likely to endorse an authoritarian ethic. The Hidden Tribes report confirms those findings. How Americans view parenting closely tracks their views on many political issues. For example, people who endorsed a strict parenting style are more likely to oppose gay marriage, believe that America needs more faith and religion than reason and science, and worry about a decline in family values. These connections with parenting style are shown in the figure below.
Core Belief 4: Moral Foundations. Morality is about more than just equal treatment. The 2012 book The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, which provides important insights into the ways in which morality underlies political behavior, explains how morality is comprised of at least five pillars. These pillars, also called moral foundations, are:
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Fairness/Cheating: Relating to proportionality, equality, reciprocity, and rendering justice according to shared rules.
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Care/Harm: Protecting the vulnerable and helping those in need.
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Authority/Subversion: Submitting to tradition and legitimate authority.
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Purity/Disgust: Abhorrence for things that evoke disgust.
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Loyalty/Betrayal: Standing with one’s group, family or nation.
We asked subjects a series of questions designed to assess how concerned they were with each of the five moral foundations in their moral judgments. Our results showed strong distinctions according to the various tribes. Progressive Activists and Traditional and Passive Liberals tended to care more about Harm and Fairness than the other foundations, while right-leaning groups such as Traditional and Devoted Conservatives cared about all five foundations.
Subjects' concern about each of the foundations closely tracks their views on other issues. For example, the degree to which people prioritize Loyalty strongly predicts the view that the Confederate flag symbolizes Southern pride, and people who prioritize Authority are most likely to support the Trump administration’s decision to ban travel from several Muslim-majority countries.
Shifts in the moral bedrock
Tribes differ in their endorsement of the moral foundations
Core Belief 5: Personal Agency and Responsibility. People differ in whether they see life outcomes as being shaped more by individuals’ choices or social forces beyond their control. Conservatives tend to emphasize independence, responsibility and self-reliance, while liberals focus more on systemic injustices and collective responsibilities. Another way of conceptualizing this is that people tend to attribute life outcomes either to personal responsibility or to luck and circumstance. Some people believe that individuals should get credit for their successes because they were caused by factors within their control. Others believe that outcomes are mostly the result of external forces. These views have important implications. For example, the more people believe that luck played a role in life, the more likely they are to support Black Lives Matter activists. By contrast, people who believe that personal responsibility plays a bigger role are more than four times more likely to strongly approve of Donald Trump’s performance than those who believe that luck and circumstance did.
What Causes Success in Life?
Tribes differ in their views on the role of personal responsibility in life outcomes
Real Problems, Real Differences, But Real Common Ground
There is far more common ground among Americans than we might imagine, judging from the constant conflict among pundits, politicians, and social media users. This is true even on some of our most debated issues. The Hidden Tribes survey just scratched the surface on those issues.
For example, a full 81 percent of the population―including Devoted Conservatives, who tend to be the most skeptical when it comes to questions of race―agrees that racism continues to be an at least somewhat serious problem in the United States. The fact that the overwhelming majority of people acknowledge that racism is a real problem opens the door for continued conversations about how the country moves forward.
Another key area of agreement is the aspect of immigration policy regarding Dreamers: people brought to the United States illegally as children and given provisional legal status under the DACA program during the Obama administration. Three-quarters of all Americans believe there should be a pathway for these individuals to obtain citizenship through serving in the military or attending college. This exemplifies how the current polarization is leading to gridlock in American politics and preventing us from finding solutions supported by an overwhelming majority.
One issue that Americans from most tribes regularly discuss is how they feel that people have become too quick to take offense and criticize others’ use of language. Four out of five Americans believe "political correctness has gone too far in America"—a issue where most Americans with liberal views agree with Conservatives, again showing America is so much more than two tribes.
Our Shared Future
The Hidden Tribes study illuminates several new findings regarding America’s past, present, and future.
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The American electorate is more complex than the oversimplified story of polarization would make us believe
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The reason American society appears to be split 50/50 is that the loudest and most extreme viewpoints monopolize airtime and social media space
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The majority of Americans, the Exhausted Majority, are frustrated and fed up with tribalism. They want to return to the mutual good faith and collaborative spirit that characterize a healthy democracy
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Being able to discuss our genuine disagreements remains important. At the root of those disagreements are differences in core beliefs―the underlying psychological architecture that governs what we value and how we see the world
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While our differences are often rooted in divergent views, that does not mean we cannot find common ground
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By acknowledging and respecting the values that animate our beliefs, we can begin to restore a sense of respect and unity
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The vast majority of Americans―three out of four―believe our differences are not so great that we cannot come together. Let’s make that a reality.
The price of America’s quest for an external enemy
The US spent so much fighting phantom enemies and creating the myth of good versus evil that it ignored the real threat.
Published On 22 May 2020
I heard her sobs the moment before I saw the butcher knife. It bobbed up and down rhythmically in her hand as she cried, sitting in the driver’s seat of her car. I could not just walk by as if I had not seen anything. I leaned into her open passenger window and stupidly asked her if she was OK.
She gestured with the knife towards the cop cars lining the street. “They won’t even do their job and shoot me! I stood there waving this knife around, and the cops didn’t even notice. They just walked into the building. Now I have to wait for them to come back out.” Her words devolved into choking sobs.
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The Portland Police Bureau holds its martial arts training in a building next to a convenience store. Police SUVs can always be found parked along that street, officers chatting outside.
The woman had intended to commit suicide-by-cop. My first instinct was to call the police to save her, then I realised how absurd that would be. Unsure of what to say or do, I stood there awkwardly. She looked at me, annoyed by my presence. “Who are you?”
“Hi. My name is Morgan. I saw the knife, and you looked upset, so I wanted to check-in.”
She looked straight at me, her eyes so full of pain. “I came here to die and like everything else in my life; it didn’t even work.”
“Why do you want to die?” I asked her bluntly.
She leaned her head back against her headrest and the knife dropped to her lap. Tears streamed down her face. “It’s my daughter. It’s almost the anniversary of her death. I still can’t live without her. They said it would get easier, but it didn’t. She was a soldier."
The price of war
I know the military. My mother served 20 years in the Air Force. I tried to follow in her footsteps but was discharged out of basic training, deemed medically unfit for service. I was raised in a military culture with a deep respect for service members.
Her crying became softer. “But she didn’t die in Iraq. She lived through the war. She died later, in a drunk driving accident…”
I thought of the people I had known who had survived war but died after. There were many: a friend who was so drunk he drove his car into a concrete barrier, dying instantly; another who overdosed on heroin; one who shot himself.
“Deaths of despair” go hand-in-hand with modern military service. They are part of the price of war – a price I have seen paid by friends who returned home with PTSD, in the 21-gun salutes at the military funerals of those who could not bear the pain, in the psychologist’s waiting room at the VA, in the faces of the active-duty members at the drug treatment centre who preferred the deadening of chemical dependency to the flashbacks.
I looked at the woman’s face and thought of the mothers of all the friends I had lost, the end of their children’s suffering marking the beginning of theirs. Because, for those who fight it, war does not end in the war zone.
I made the woman laugh by telling her about how I had joined the Air Force but gotten discharged from basic training after getting an abscess on my butt. She told me about her only remaining child, a son, who is set to graduate from high school this year. She told me about all the other problems in her life and how she felt so terribly alone.
I connected with her through kindness. Eventually, I got her to put the knife away, tucked under her seat. After some prodding, she called a friend, and he came to pick her up. We said goodbye. I never got her name.
I spent the rest of the day ruminating on the far-reaching consequences of America’s wars.
Veterans and villains
I got home that night, turned on the TV, and saw the breaking news: the US military had killed top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani. I was confronted with the possibility of yet another American war. Yet another generation of PTSD-stricken veterans, yet another wave of suicides, drunk driving accidents, addiction, and overdose.
Americans are uniquely adept at discounting the tragedies that occur outside America, even when those tragedies are a direct or indirect result of our actions. America determined which region was the villain of the hour and attacked accordingly. From the loss of precious human life on a scale which I find incomprehensible, to the horrors inflicted on the living, there is no end in sight for the suffering of the people that called those regions home. Millions of people – each one a human being with a story – have become refugees of war.
As the prospect of war devolved into partisan bickering in the days that followed, I often heard the “military” and “veterans” invoked as reasons for war with Iran.
I respect the military in the sense that I respect the service members within it, who joined to serve their country, or provide for their family, or for the only American chance at a free college education. A victory for them would be to protect them from unnecessary wars and all that comes with them.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stood on the floor of the senate and gave an impassioned speech supporting President Trump’s decision to kill a foreign military general. It sounded like a cry for war and included all the typical invocations that precede unilateral US invasion of a foreign country. “No man alive was more directly responsible for the death of more American service members than Qassem Soleimani,” he said.
Apparently, Soleimani, the villain of the hour, had posed an imminent threat and military action was taken – without congressional approval – to protect American lives. Initiating a military offensive was being touted as a way to protect us.
What we did not know at the time is that American lives were, in fact, in great danger. But the enemy was not a villain; acellular entities do not have personalities
Good versus evil
I was 12 years old on September 11, 2001. My mother took her flag out of her shadow box and proudly flew it on our front porch, weeping. I learned patriotism before I understood geopolitics. The enemy was swiftly and decisively identified: Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban that supported him. Obviously, it was a battle of good versus evil, which left no room for complexity or nuance. The US righteously invaded Afghanistan. The world was black and white. War was necessary to protect us.
I was a bit older during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. I watched the congressional hearings with uncritical curiosity, already having accepted that war was necessary to protect our country. I remember “weapons of mass destruction”. America had an external enemy that posed an imminent threat, again. I was still young, but I understood it was another righteous battle of good versus evil. Black and white. There was no subtlety, no complexity and no nuance.
There were also no weapons of mass destruction. There was no imminent threat. The black and white world view I learned from my military mother was infiltrated by shades of grey.
I read Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns and, for the first time, learned how the US had funded and trained the mujahideen, then abandoned the region. This historical detail seemed relevant to our ongoing struggle with Afghanistan, but it was never mentioned in polite company and especially not in history class at my public school. American history class, after all, is used to promulgate a particular and pre-approved world view.
The erasure of history is important for simplicity. History introduces nuance. It can help to explain the complex motives behind seemingly evil human behaviour. Understanding motives is antithetical to the “evil” label, though, so we do not attempt it. Over-simplification comes at the cost of truth. Eliminating complexity obscures reality.
Almost nothing in this world is black and white. As human beings, we are endlessly complex.
I detected a pattern – America is constantly questing for an external enemy, one which can be cast as pure evil. The legitimacy of it is baked into the American psyche with the help of good-versus-evil Hollywood action movies that omit shades of grey from their storylines. There is a villain and that villain is bad, simply because they were born that way. There is an omnipresent enemy, whose animosity is spontaneous and unfounded, and they must be destroyed. It is the way of the world.
A few months ago, the enemy was Iran. The history of US involvement there erased, as if Iranian sentiments towards America were spontaneous and born out of some innate disposition towards hating us. Most actions are actually reactions, though. Still, the US framed it as a fight of good-versus-evil, implied there was an imminent threat, and claimed hugely expensive military intervention would protect American lives.
Ambushed by a virus
But while some politicians rallied for war and others raged against it, a pandemic had already been unleashed on the world. Early warnings of the impending pandemic were largely ignored as we continued to squabble over the appropriateness of military action and diplomacy with foreign governments.
We have spent trillions on the military, on homeland security, on national defence. We were so busy hunting for a villainous external enemy against whom to wage our war of good-versus-evil, that we failed to defend ourselves and were ambushed – by a virus. We spent so much time and money preparing for a phantom enemy that we ignored the real threat.
That virus is sweeping across the US, leaving death and yet more partisan squabble in its wake. We were warned and yet did not prepare with widespread testing capacity or PPE stockpiling. Our superior military is useless. We are far more experienced at chasing boogiemen than we are at actually protecting American life.
We cannot feel safe while an invisible virus lurks in our community, killing tens of thousands. We cannot feel safe when any illness threatens to lead us to financial ruin. A feeling of safety requires a basic assurance of health and access to healthcare. There is no dichotomy between public health and public safety in reality, only in rhetoric.
Now that the virus has been accepted as real and as a public health threat, the presidential focus is shifting to “who can we punish” instead of “how do we heal.” The origin of the virus – though we know it originated in nature – is irrelevant to our current reality. Attempting to blame China and “hold them responsible” is yet another expression of our ceaseless quest for an enemy, at a time when we should be prioritising public health and collaborating with the international community to save lives. The American emphasis on punishment over healing comes at great cost.
We invested more in military presence missions that serve no tactical purpose than we did in PPE, and now healthcare workers are dying of COVID-19 when their infection should have been preventable.
The narrative that the enemy would be an external one was false. COVID-19 is literally living inside us, and we are utterly unprepared to respond because it is not something we can bomb or wage war against, despite our president framing it in such familiar terms. These are the consequences of decades of political choices and public attitudes.
Millions of citizens are losing their employment-based health insurance during a pandemic. Unemployment is skyrocketing, and food banks are struggling to keep up with demand. What the nation needs now is its health defended.
Our economic success is predicated upon our public’s health. This is now a visible fact; may we never take public health for granted again. We can use this as a catalyst for positive change. Instead of constantly searching for threats from without, this is an opportunity for introspection. Healing comes from within.
National defence was once imbued with literal meaning – to defend the nation. That meaning was lost, and we were left undefended in times of crisis. Let us reanalyse the phrases “national defence”, “public safety”, and “homeland security”, and return to their true meaning. Rhetoric will not save our lives nor our economy. Public health measures will.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
I heard her sobs the moment before I saw the butcher knife. It bobbed up and down rhythmically in her hand as she cried, sitting in the driver’s seat of her car. I could not just walk by as if I had not seen anything. I leaned into her open passenger window and stupidly asked her if she was OK.
She gestured with the knife towards the cop cars lining the street. “They won’t even do their job and shoot me! I stood there waving this knife around, and the cops didn’t even notice. They just walked into the building. Now I have to wait for them to come back out.” Her words devolved into choking sobs.
The Portland Police Bureau holds its martial arts training in a building next to a convenience store. Police SUVs can always be found parked along that street, officers chatting outside.
The woman had intended to commit suicide-by-cop. My first instinct was to call the police to save her, then I realised how absurd that would be. Unsure of what to say or do, I stood there awkwardly. She looked at me, annoyed by my presence. “Who are you?”
“Hi. My name is Morgan. I saw the knife, and you looked upset, so I wanted to check-in.”
She looked straight at me, her eyes so full of pain. “I came here to die and like everything else in my life; it didn’t even work.”
“Why do you want to die?” I asked her bluntly.
She leaned her head back against her headrest and the knife dropped to her lap. Tears streamed down her face. “It’s my daughter. It’s almost the anniversary of her death. I still can’t live without her. They said it would get easier, but it didn’t. She was a soldier.”
The price of war
I know the military. My mother served 20 years in the Air Force. I tried to follow in her footsteps but was discharged out of basic training, deemed medically unfit for service. I was raised in a military culture with a deep respect for service members.
Her crying became softer. “But she didn’t die in Iraq. She lived through the war. She died later, in a drunk driving accident…”
I thought of the people I had known who had survived war but died after. There were many: a friend who was so drunk he drove his car into a concrete barrier, dying instantly; another who overdosed on heroin; one who shot himself.
“Deaths of despair” go hand-in-hand with modern military service. They are part of the price of war – a price I have seen paid by friends who returned home with PTSD, in the 21-gun salutes at the military funerals of those who could not bear the pain, in the psychologist’s waiting room at the VA, in the faces of the active-duty members at the drug treatment centre who preferred the deadening of chemical dependency to the flashbacks.
I looked at the woman’s face and thought of the mothers of all the friends I had lost, the end of their children’s suffering marking the beginning of theirs. Because, for those who fight it, war does not end in the war zone.
I made the woman laugh by telling her about how I had joined the Air Force but gotten discharged from basic training after getting an abscess on my butt. She told me about her only remaining child, a son, who is set to graduate from high school this year. She told me about all the other problems in her life and how she felt so terribly alone.
I connected with her through kindness. Eventually, I got her to put the knife away, tucked under her seat. After some prodding, she called a friend, and he came to pick her up. We said goodbye. I never got her name.
Veterans and villains
I got home that night, turned on the TV, and saw the breaking news: the US military had killed top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani. I was confronted with the possibility of yet another American war. Yet another generation of PTSD-stricken veterans, yet another wave of suicides, drunk driving accidents, addiction, and overdose.
Americans are uniquely adept at discounting the tragedies that occur outside America, even when those tragedies are a direct or indirect result of our actions. America determined which region was the villain of the hour and attacked accordingly. From the loss of precious human life on a scale which I find incomprehensible, to the horrors inflicted on the living, there is no end in sight for the suffering of the people that called those regions home. Millions of people – each one a human being with a story – have become refugees of war.
As the prospect of war devolved into partisan bickering in the days that followed, I often heard the “military” and “veterans” invoked as reasons for war with Iran.
I respect the military in the sense that I respect the service members within it, who joined to serve their country, or provide for their family, or for the only American chance at a free college education. A victory for them would be to protect them from unnecessary wars and all that comes with them.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stood on the floor of the senate and gave an impassioned speech supporting President Trump’s decision to kill a foreign military general. It sounded like a cry for war and included all the typical invocations that precede unilateral US invasion of a foreign country. “No man alive was more directly responsible for the death of more American service members than Qassem Soleimani,” he said.
Apparently, Soleimani, the villain of the hour, had posed an imminent threat and military action was taken – without congressional approval – to protect American lives. Initiating a military offensive was being touted as a way to protect us.
What we did not know at the time is that American lives were, in fact, in great danger. But the enemy was not a villain; acellular entities do not have personalities.
Good versus evil
I was 12 years old on September 11, 2001. My mother took her flag out of her shadow box and proudly flew it on our front porch, weeping. I learned patriotism before I understood geopolitics. The enemy was swiftly and decisively identified: Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban that supported him. Obviously, it was a battle of good versus evil, which left no room for complexity or nuance. The US righteously invaded Afghanistan. The world was black and white. War was necessary to protect us.
I was a bit older during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. I watched the congressional hearings with uncritical curiosity, already having accepted that war was necessary to protect our country. I remember “weapons of mass destruction”. America had an external enemy that posed an imminent threat, again. I was still young, but I understood it was another righteous battle of good versus evil. Black and white. There was no subtlety, no complexity and no nuance.
There were also no weapons of mass destruction. There was no imminent threat. The black and white world view I learned from my military mother was infiltrated by shades of grey.
I read Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns and, for the first time, learned how the US had funded and trained the mujahideen, then abandoned the region. This historical detail seemed relevant to our ongoing struggle with Afghanistan, but it was never mentioned in polite company and especially not in history class at my public school. American history class, after all, is used to promulgate a particular and pre-approved world view.
The erasure of history is important for simplicity. History introduces nuance. It can help to explain the complex motives behind seemingly evil human behaviour. Understanding motives is antithetical to the “evil” label, though, so we do not attempt it. Over-simplification comes at the cost of truth. Eliminating complexity obscures reality.
Almost nothing in this world is black and white. As human beings, we are endlessly complex.
I detected a pattern – America is constantly questing for an external enemy, one which can be cast as pure evil. The legitimacy of it is baked into the American psyche with the help of good-versus-evil Hollywood action movies that omit shades of grey from their storylines. There is a villain and that villain is bad, simply because they were born that way. There is an omnipresent enemy, whose animosity is spontaneous and unfounded, and they must be destroyed. It is the way of the world.
A few months ago, the enemy was Iran. The history of US involvement there erased, as if Iranian sentiments towards America were spontaneous and born out of some innate disposition towards hating us. Most actions are actually reactions, though. Still, the US framed it as a fight of good-versus-evil, implied there was an imminent threat, and claimed hugely expensive military intervention would protect American lives.
Ambushed by a virus
But while some politicians rallied for war and others raged against it, a pandemic had already been unleashed on the world. Early warnings of the impending pandemic were largely ignored as we continued to squabble over the appropriateness of military action and diplomacy with foreign governments.
We have spent trillions on the military, on homeland security, on national defence. We were so busy hunting for a villainous external enemy against whom to wage our war of good-versus-evil, that we failed to defend ourselves and were ambushed – by a virus. We spent so much time and money preparing for a phantom enemy that we ignored the real threat.
That virus is sweeping across the US, leaving death and yet more partisan squabble in its wake. We were warned and yet did not prepare with widespread testing capacity or PPE stockpiling. Our superior military is useless. We are far more experienced at chasing boogiemen than we are at actually protecting American life.
We cannot feel safe while an invisible virus lurks in our community, killing tens of thousands. We cannot feel safe when any illness threatens to lead us to financial ruin. A feeling of safety requires a basic assurance of health and access to healthcare. There is no dichotomy between public health and public safety in reality, only in rhetoric.
Now that the virus has been accepted as real and as a public health threat, the presidential focus is shifting to “who can we punish” instead of “how do we heal.” The origin of the virus – though we know it originated in nature – is irrelevant to our current reality. Attempting to blame China and “hold them responsible” is yet another expression of our ceaseless quest for an enemy, at a time when we should be prioritising public health and collaborating with the international community to save lives. The American emphasis on punishment over healing comes at great cost.
We invested more in military presence missions that serve no tactical purpose than we did in PPE, and now healthcare workers are dying of COVID-19 when their infection should have been preventable.
The narrative that the enemy would be an external one was false. COVID-19 is literally living inside us, and we are utterly unprepared to respond because it is not something we can bomb or wage war against, despite our president framing it in such familiar terms. These are the consequences of decades of political choices and public attitudes.
Millions of citizens are losing their employment-based health insurance during a pandemic. Unemployment is skyrocketing, and food banks are struggling to keep up with demand. What the nation needs now is its health defended.
Our economic success is predicated upon our public’s health. This is now a visible fact; may we never take public health for granted again. We can use this as a catalyst for positive change. Instead of constantly searching for threats from without, this is an opportunity for introspection. Healing comes from within.
National defence was once imbued with literal meaning – to defend the nation. That meaning was lost, and we were left undefended in times of crisis. Let us reanalyse the phrases “national defence”, “public safety”, and “homeland security”, and return to their true meaning. Rhetoric will not save our lives nor our economy. Public health measures will.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 23, 2005
MI5 and MI6
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- Iraq - the unreported war
- IRAQ - Some just voted for food.
- Low turnout in Iraq Election?
- ACEH, THE INDONESIAN MILITARY AND THE US INTELLIGE...
- UK Press
- HOW TO BE HAPPY
- Quotes: baboons; vote rigging;
- IRAQ DEATHS
- HOLOCAUST
- 9 11
- GUARDIAN AND BBC
- 25% of UK teenagers are active criminals?
- $100,000 PRIZE IF YOU CAN PROVE THE WORLD TRADE CE...
- ECONOMIC DOOM - DOUBLE DIGIT INTEREST RATES?
- PLOT TO KILL MICROBIOLOGISTS?
- LEO STRAUSS
- MI5 and MI6
- OMAGH BOMBER WAS BRITISH AGENT?
- BRITISH CULTURE?
- MEDIALENS
- INTERESTING WORDS FROM LOWLAND SCOTLAND
- NEW MILITARY TERROR IN ACEH?
- THE BRITISH ARMY - LONG HISTORY OF USING TORTURE
- HOLOCAUST
- DUMP FASCIST NEW LABOUR
- UK SCHOOLS CONTROLLED BY DRUGGED LOUTS?
- Indonesian army 'extorting money' in Aceh.
- A blog worth reading
- BLAIR PARTY BEATEN IN BY-ELECTION
- US ECONOMY
- Top people and child sex
- INDONESIAN ARMY MILITIA
- 9 11 INSIDE JOB
- ISRAEL TARGETS THE SUDAN?
- MURDER, TORTURE AND RAPE IN ACEH
- MAN MADE EARTHQUAKES AND TSUNAMIS
- U.S. ELECTION FRAUD
- Sex traffickers and military brothels
- CRIME IN SCOTLAND - DRINK, DRUGS, KNIVES & NEGLECT...
- CRIME IN BRITAIN
- LIFE AFTER DEATH
- GOD
- THOMAS MANN - DEATH IN VENICE - PAEDOPHILES
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On Saturday night's program, Gordon Thomas, author of Secret Wars and Gideon's Spies, joined Ian for a discussion on international intelligence matters.
Thomas shared breaking news from Britain's MI5 and MI6 intelligence agencies about the possibility of attacks by terrorists during the upcoming G20 summit. Thomas said the threats against the UK are at the "top end of severe," which means an "attack is coming." According to Thomas, Britain is home to the largest number of homegrown jihadists in the world, trained and ready to launch Mumbai-style attacks when the G20 nations meet on April 2 in London. Preventing the attack may prove difficult, Thomas explained, as MI5 officials have been bogged down by spies from France and Germany sent into the country to bribe key workers in sensitive jobs who are having financial troubles.
Thomas reported on a ruthless group of government assassins known as Company 14, who he said are hunting down members of the IRA responsible for killing two British soldiers and a policeman in Northern Ireland. He also commented on the death of Dr. David Kelly. The position of his body, suspicious phone calls, and other puzzling details surrounding his apparent suicide suggest the weapons expert may have been murdered for his assessment of Iraq's WMD program, Thomas noted.
Nor did he cover the spying and continuing attempts of the U.K. for over 100 years to control and subjugate the U.S.A.
Evidence points to breakdown in US / UK Relations
Related Link on the history of the "Special Relationship"
Webster G. Tarpley Debunks Pearl Harbor Myths (Amongst Other Things)
Something interesting : British Security Coordination (Propaganda) Spy Ring in the U.S. prior to Pearl Harbor
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/ 2006/aug/19/military. secondworldwar
It was 1940, the Nazis were in the ascendant, the Blitz at its deadliest, and Britain's last hope was to bring a reluctant United States into the war. So it was that the largest covert operation in UK history was launched. William Boyd sheds light on a forgotten spy ring.
William Boyd
The Guardian, Saturday 19 August 2006
"British Security Coordination". The phrase is bland, almost defiantly ordinary, depicting perhaps some sub-committee of a minor department in a lowly Whitehall ministry. In fact BSC, as it was generally known, represented one of the largest covert operations in British spying history; a covert operation, moreover, that was run not in Occupied France, nor in the Soviet Union during the cold war, but in the US, our putative ally, during 1940 and 1941, before Pearl Harbor and the US's eventual participation in the war in Europe against Nazi Germany.
...
One easily forgets this, in the era of our much-vaunted, so-called "special relationship", but at the nadir of Britain's fortunes, polls in the US still showed that 80% of Americans were against joining the war in Europe. Anglophobia was widespread and the US Congress was violently opposed to any form of intervention.
.... read the rest..
This article appears in the August 12, 2005 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
America Kills Its Enemies in Our Name. And Then Keeps It Secret.
By Phil Klay
Mr. Klay is a Marine Corps veteran and an author.
Death came via teddy bear. Specifically, a six-foot-tall plush panda bear, special ordered in 2017 by a Colombian gang leader known as Inglaterra. His girlfriend’s birthday was coming up; perhaps he wanted to surprise her with it. But the Colombian military got word of the order and tracked the bear to a luxurious farm near the Venezuelan border.
Inglaterra had been traveling by mule, draped in jewels and gold, wearing designer watches, rarely staying anywhere for more than a single night. When he arrived at the farm, 40 Colombian commandos quickly followed. Surprise.
I’d first heard the story when I was researching a novel about America’s long-running assistance with targeted killings in Colombia and a friend sent me a Colombian newspaper link. He asked me if I detected the hidden hand of America anywhere in Inglaterra’s death.
I thought of that story again this month, first when it was reported that the United States was helping Ukraine kill Russian generals, and again when The Times reported that the troops President Biden had ordered back into Somalia would help maintain an assassination program targeting a small cadre of Somali leaders. In both cases many details remain unclear, with much of the public knowledge coming from anonymous officials feeding information to newspapers rather than a public rollout of a new U.S. foreign policy.
One of the many strange things about being an American citizen these days is that there’s a whole lot of killing done in our name that our government deliberately keeps secret. Friends of mine, back from Iraq or Afghanistan, used to respond to people asking the inappropriate question veterans always get, “Did you kill anyone?” with the sharp-elbowed response, “If I did, you paid me to do it” — a rough reminder of the link between the military and the citizens they represent. But back then, the actions of our military were much more visible. What does it mean to be a citizen of a state that kills for you but that doesn’t tell you about it? Are you still responsible?
When I was a public affairs officer in the Marine Corps from 2005 to 2009, back during the era of massive antiwar protests, an activist group taking out a full-page ad in The New York Times to attack the credibility of a U.S. general led to spirited debates about everything from the morality of the war to the wisdom of its strategy. The main efforts of the American military in this period were conducted in the open, and my job entailed courting journalists to embed with our units to see what they were doing.
This relative openness meant the war provoked messy debate, political grandstanding, lies and hypocrisy and ill-informed analysis on cable news, and other byproducts of democracy. It also meant that the George W. Bush administration had to explain and defend its policies, which meant that I knew what we were supposed to be fighting for, what success was meant to look like, and why we were there. It meant political pressure brought to bear on U.S. policymaking to keep it tethered to the will of the American people.
But the nature of war shifted, for political and military reasons. One way of describing the change is to look at the pace of American Special Operations. In the spring of 2004 the Joint Special Operations Command was conducting about six operations a month in Iraq. By the summer of 2006 it was doing 300. This didn’t happen by sending the Navy SEALs to the gym to work on their run time, but by rehauling the whole process of finding targets, fixing them in place, finishing them, exploiting and analyzing the intelligence collected, and then disseminating that intelligence to the agencies and commands able to most rapidly act on it. It was this capability that former Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates claimed in 2011 fused “intelligence and operations in a way that just, I think, is unique in anybody’s history.”
When Americans think about the killing we do overseas, we often think about the mechanism. A drone delivering a bomb strikes us as a bit creepy. A member of the Navy SEALs bursting into a bad guy’s compound strikes us as heroic. But the SEALs and the drone are just tools — the flat head or Phillips head screwdriver at the end of the targeting system. And the initial parts of that system can be offered to other countries, like Ukraine, which do the killing themselves. (In a press briefing on May 5, the Pentagon press secretary, John Kirby, distanced the United States only slightly from the killing of Russian generals: “We do not provide intelligence on the location of senior military leaders on the battlefield or participate in the targeting decisions of the Ukrainian military,” he said, but he freely admitted we provide Ukraine with relevant intelligence.)
What does this look like in practice? Thanks in part to reporting by Dana Priest of The Washington Post, we can look to Colombia for several examples. Starting in 2007 we helped kill dozens of guerrilla commanders in Colombia’s long-running civil war. The C.I.A. trained Colombian close air support teams to use lasers to guide smart bombs to their targets, and trained interrogators to more effectively question subjects so that their information could be fed into an evolving database of information. The National Security Agency worked round the clock feeding data intercepts to ground forces.
In one instance, the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration helped trace a satellite phone call between Hugo Chávez and a senior guerrilla leader. This intelligence was checked against information from a Colombian informant. The leader was located in a camp inside Ecuador. U.S. national security lawyers ruled the strike permissible as an act of self-defense. The United States provided the Colombians with smart bombs and the Colombians flew three light attack aircraft loaded with those smart bombs, followed by five planes loaded with conventional bombs. The bombs’ guidance system was turned on once they closed in on their target, and Colombians dropped first the smart bombs, and then the conventional bombs to cover their tracks. The decision to provide U.S. support, made and justified by officials and lawyers whose names we still don’t know, in a complex conflict most Americans have no idea the United States has been heavily involved in, set off a diplomatic crisis between Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia.
And since lethal precedents can outlast the causes for which they were enlisted, the aid to Colombia didn’t stop once the official war did. After the rebels signed a peace treaty in 2016, U.S. foreign aid continued to grow, and it is now approaching half a billion dollars a year. Instead of targeting guerrilla fighters as part of a continuing war, the Colombian military took over a police action against a large drug gang of which Inglaterra was a member, and at points the United States has provided real-time intelligence.
This style of warfare has always been secretive, involving as it does intelligence services and Special Operations units. But as America shifted from large deployments to more reliance on drones and airstrikes and special operators, that secretive side of warfare became a larger share of our global military presence. Then Donald Trump took office and, responding to a nation skeptical of our wars but still thrilled by the idea of targeted killings, he expanded the already ballooning Special Operations Command at a pace its former commander described as “frantic” — training forces in countries on Russia’s borders, policing weapons of mass destruction, combating the Taliban, Al Shabab, ISIS, and Al Qaeda while also rolling back transparency. Trump’s Department of Defense wouldn’t disclose troop numbers, details of airstrikes, or even give regular press briefings at the Pentagon. And as yet the Biden administration has not offered much more clarity on their counterterrorism policies either.
The rationale for keeping us in the dark is always national security concerns, and there are real risks. Revelations about targeting Russian generals might invite retaliation. Exposing granular detail on operations puts sources and methods in jeopardy. But secrecy also hides issues of public concern from public scrutiny.
As for President Biden’s plans for American forces in Somalia, it’s not clear why the administration thinks Al Shabab, which doesn’t operate much outside the Horn of Africa, represents a threat to the United States. It’s not clear how this operation fits into our larger counterterrorism strategy, what the legal rationale is for conducting targeted killings, and what rules will govern the strikes.
This last piece is particularly important. The recent Pulitzer Prizing-winning journalism led by Azmat Khan has shown that U.S. government reports on our strikes routinely failed to detect civilian casualties, investigate on the ground, identify causes of errors in targeting, or discipline anyone for wrongdoing. These failures have consequences: a father watching the headless corpse of his 14-month-old daughter, nestled in her dead mother’s arms, lifted from the ruins of his home. An extended family of 21 people turned into “just pieces of meat.” The current level of secrecy practiced by the U.S. military demands a level of trust that is unearned. The victims of these strikes demand our skepticism.
When our president declares, as Mr. Biden did to the United Nations in September, “I stand here today for the first time in 20 years with the United States not at war,” it’s not just a pleasant falsehood it’d be pretty to believe. It’s something more corrosive.
War — the killing of other people on our behalf, as citizens — is the most morally consequential thing a nation can do. As Americans, we should take that responsibility seriously. Congress should debate it, and Americans should as well. None of that can happen if year after year, lethal strike after lethal strike, the needs of national security are invoked to hide it from view.
Every April we pay our taxes, and if there are men and women out there who we’re paying to kill people, we should know.
Phil Klay, a Marine Corps veteran and professor at Fairfield University, is the author of “Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War.”
Edgar Hoover was the first director of the FBI. He introduced fingerprinting and forensic techniques to the crime-fighting agency, and pushed for stronger federal laws to punish criminals who strayed across state lines. He also kept secret files on more than 20,000 Americans he deemed "subversive."
Four years after Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Tim Weiner published Legacy of Ashes, his detailed history of the CIA, he received a call from a lawyer in Washington, D.C.
"He said, 'I've just gotten my hands on a Freedom of Information Act request that's 26 years old for [FBI Director] J. Edgar Hoover's intelligence files. Would you like them?' " Weiner tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "And after a stunned silence, I said, 'Yes, yes.' "
Weiner went to the lawyer's office and collected four boxes containing Hoover's personal files on intelligence operations between 1945 and 1972.
"Reading them is like looking over [Hoover's] shoulder and listening to him talk out loud about the threats America faced, how the FBI was going to confront them," he says. "Hoover had a terrible premonition after World War II that America was going to be attacked — that New York or Washington was going to be attacked by suicidal, kamikaze airplanes, by dirty bombs ... and he never lost this fear."
Enemies
Secrecy And The Red Raids
Weiner details how Hoover became increasingly worried about communist threats against the United States. Even before he became director of the FBI, Hoover was conducting secret intelligence operations against U.S. citizens he suspected were anarchists, radical leftists or communists. After a series of anarchist bombings went off across the United States in 1919, Hoover sent five agents to infiltrate the newly formed Communist Party.
"From that day forward, he planned a nationwide dragnet of mass arrests to round up subversives, round up communists, round up Russian aliens — as if he were quarantining carriers of typhoid," Weiner says.
On Jan. 1, 1920, Hoover sent out the arrest orders, and at least 6,000 people were arrested and detained throughout the country.
"When the dust cleared, maybe 1 in 10 was found guilty of a deportable offense," says Weiner. "Hoover denied — at the time and until his death — that he had been the intellectual author of the Red Raids."
Hoover, Attorney General Mitchell Palmer and Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt all came under attack for their role in the raids.
"It left a lifelong imprint on Hoover," says Weiner. "If he was going to attack the enemies of the United States, better that it be done in secret and not under law. Because to convict people in court, you have to [reveal] your evidence, [but] when you're doing secret intelligence operations, you just have to sabotage and subvert them and steal their secrets — you don't have to produce evidence capable of discovery by the other side. That could embarrass you or get the case thrown out — because you had gone outside the law to enforce the law."
Hoover started amassing secret intelligence on "enemies of the United States" — a list that included terrorists, communists, spies — or anyone Hoover or the FBI had deemed subversive.
Hoover saw Martin Luther King Jr. as an "enemy of the state," says author Tim Weiner.
The Civil Rights Movement
Later on, anti-war protesters and civil rights leaders were added to Hoover's list.
"Hoover saw the civil rights movement from the 1950s onward and the anti-war movement from the 1960s onward, as presenting the greatest threats to the stability of the American government since the Civil War," he says. "These people were enemies of the state, and in particular Martin Luther King [Jr.] was an enemy of the state. And Hoover aimed to watch over them. If they twitched in the wrong direction, the hammer would come down."
Hoover was intent on planting bugs around civil rights leaders — including King — because he thought communists had infiltrated the civil rights movement, says Weiner. Hoover had his intelligence chief bug King's bedroom, and then sent the civil rights leader a copy of the sex recordings his intelligence chief had taken of King — along with an anonymous letter from the FBI.
"It was a poison pen letter, it was a hate letter; it wasn't from anyone in particular, but Martin Luther King and his wife would certainly know the source of the tapes, that it had to be the FBI," says Weiner. "And the poison pen letter read: 'King, look into your heart. The American people would know you for what you are — an evil, abnormal beast. There is only one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.' "
Weiner says King ignored the letter, even as the FBI tried diligently to defame him.
"They were trying to get King knocked off from his perch as the Nobel Peace Prize recipient," he says. "They sent [the tapes] to colleges to keep him off campus, they sent it around Washington."
It was Hoover, says Weiner, who decided that bugging King's bedroom was necessary.
"When it came down to bugging bedrooms, you had to be careful not to get caught, but there wasn't anything to stop him," says Weiner. "He decided up to a point ... where the boundaries of the law [were] when it came to black bag jobs, break-ins, bugging, surveillance, the constitutionality of gathering secret intelligence on America's enemies — both real and imagined."
"Hoover is the inventor of the modern American national security state. Every fingerprint file, every DNA record, every iris recorded through biometrics, every government dossier on every citizen and alien in this country owes its life to him. We live in his shadow, though he's been gone for 40 years. As they always told the agents at the FBI academy when they were training, 'An institution is the length and shadow of a man.' "
On Robert Kennedy authorizing Hoover's plan to bug Martin Luther King Jr.
"Hoover had come to Bobby Kennedy and President Kennedy and said, 'Look, Stanley Levinson — King's adviser — is a communist. He's a secret communist, he's an underground communist, and he's using Martin Luther King as a cat's paw.' Well, when you put it that way, you weren't gainsaying Hoover if you were John or Bobby Kennedy. So they said yes."
On why Hoover asked Roosevelt for "unlimited powers"
"Hoover did not want any limits. He wanted no charter, no rules. He wanted the FBI to investigate the so-and-so's. And he believed that the Soviet Union was trying to steal America's atomic secrets, to burrow into the State Department, the Pentagon, the FBI and the White House — and he was right."
On Hoover's list of gays in government
"Hoover's war on gays in the government dates back to 1937 and lasted all his life. He conflated — and he was not alone — communism with homosexuality. Both communists and homosexuals had secret coded language that they spoke to each other, and they had clandestine lives, they met in clandestine places, they had secrets. And in certain cases, such as the British spy ring that penetrated the Pentagon in the 1940s and early 1950s, they were both communists and homosexuals. Hoover didn't see a dime's worth of difference there. They were one and the same. This was hammered into him when the FBI dealt with one of the most famous informants — Whittaker Chambers — who helped bring down secret Soviet espionage rings in this country. He was a well-known writer at Time magazine. Chambers was a secret homosexual and a secret communist. Hoover saw a nexus there, and he never let that thought go."
On Hoover's relationship with President Nixon
"It was deep. It was based on mutual respect and dependency. And then it broke down during the last year and a half of Hoover's life — around the time that Nixon turns on the White House tapes and starts bugging himself. Nixon wants his enemies destroyed — all of them. Hoover is no longer willing to do his dirty work for him — his black bag jobs, his breaking and entering, his bugging. Nixon becomes increasingly frustrated with this and he sets up his own bucket shop — the plumbers. Six weeks after Hoover dies, they get caught breaking into the Watergate."
Confession No. 6: The Search For America's Hidden Enemy Continues With The Jesuits
by Greg Szymanski, May 28, 2006
SUNDAY, JANUARY 23, 2005
MI5 and MI6
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- Iraq - the unreported war
- IRAQ - Some just voted for food.
- Low turnout in Iraq Election?
- ACEH, THE INDONESIAN MILITARY AND THE US INTELLIGE...
- UK Press
- HOW TO BE HAPPY
- Quotes: baboons; vote rigging;
- IRAQ DEATHS
- HOLOCAUST
- 9 11
- GUARDIAN AND BBC
- 25% of UK teenagers are active criminals?
- $100,000 PRIZE IF YOU CAN PROVE THE WORLD TRADE CE...
- ECONOMIC DOOM - DOUBLE DIGIT INTEREST RATES?
- PLOT TO KILL MICROBIOLOGISTS?
- LEO STRAUSS
- MI5 and MI6
- OMAGH BOMBER WAS BRITISH AGENT?
- BRITISH CULTURE?
- MEDIALENS
- INTERESTING WORDS FROM LOWLAND SCOTLAND
- NEW MILITARY TERROR IN ACEH?
- THE BRITISH ARMY - LONG HISTORY OF USING TORTURE
- HOLOCAUST
- DUMP FASCIST NEW LABOUR
- UK SCHOOLS CONTROLLED BY DRUGGED LOUTS?
- Indonesian army 'extorting money' in Aceh.
- A blog worth reading
- BLAIR PARTY BEATEN IN BY-ELECTION
- US ECONOMY
- Top people and child sex
- INDONESIAN ARMY MILITIA
- 9 11 INSIDE JOB
- ISRAEL TARGETS THE SUDAN?
- MURDER, TORTURE AND RAPE IN ACEH
- MAN MADE EARTHQUAKES AND TSUNAMIS
- U.S. ELECTION FRAUD
- Sex traffickers and military brothels
- CRIME IN SCOTLAND - DRINK, DRUGS, KNIVES & NEGLECT...
- CRIME IN BRITAIN
- LIFE AFTER DEATH
- GOD
- THOMAS MANN - DEATH IN VENICE - PAEDOPHILES
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On Saturday night's program, Gordon Thomas, author of Secret Wars and Gideon's Spies, joined Ian for a discussion on international intelligence matters.
Thomas shared breaking news from Britain's MI5 and MI6 intelligence agencies about the possibility of attacks by terrorists during the upcoming G20 summit. Thomas said the threats against the UK are at the "top end of severe," which means an "attack is coming." According to Thomas, Britain is home to the largest number of homegrown jihadists in the world, trained and ready to launch Mumbai-style attacks when the G20 nations meet on April 2 in London. Preventing the attack may prove difficult, Thomas explained, as MI5 officials have been bogged down by spies from France and Germany sent into the country to bribe key workers in sensitive jobs who are having financial troubles.
Thomas reported on a ruthless group of government assassins known as Company 14, who he said are hunting down members of the IRA responsible for killing two British soldiers and a policeman in Northern Ireland. He also commented on the death of Dr. David Kelly. The position of his body, suspicious phone calls, and other puzzling details surrounding his apparent suicide suggest the weapons expert may have been murdered for his assessment of Iraq's WMD program, Thomas noted.
Nor did he cover the spying and continuing attempts of the U.K. for over 100 years to control and subjugate the U.S.A.
Evidence points to breakdown in US / UK Relations
Related Link on the history of the "Special Relationship"
Webster G. Tarpley Debunks Pearl Harbor Myths (Amongst Other Things)
Something interesting : British Security Coordination (Propaganda) Spy Ring in the U.S. prior to Pearl Harbor
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/ 2006/aug/19/military. secondworldwar
It was 1940, the Nazis were in the ascendant, the Blitz at its deadliest, and Britain's last hope was to bring a reluctant United States into the war. So it was that the largest covert operation in UK history was launched. William Boyd sheds light on a forgotten spy ring.
William Boyd
The Guardian, Saturday 19 August 2006
"British Security Coordination". The phrase is bland, almost defiantly ordinary, depicting perhaps some sub-committee of a minor department in a lowly Whitehall ministry. In fact BSC, as it was generally known, represented one of the largest covert operations in British spying history; a covert operation, moreover, that was run not in Occupied France, nor in the Soviet Union during the cold war, but in the US, our putative ally, during 1940 and 1941, before Pearl Harbor and the US's eventual participation in the war in Europe against Nazi Germany.
...
One easily forgets this, in the era of our much-vaunted, so-called "special relationship", but at the nadir of Britain's fortunes, polls in the US still showed that 80% of Americans were against joining the war in Europe. Anglophobia was widespread and the US Congress was violently opposed to any form of intervention.
.... read the rest..
This article appears in the August 12, 2005 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Larry Franklin Case: AIPAC Leaders Snared
by Jeffrey Steinberg
On Aug. 4, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Paul McNulty, announced the indictment of two former top officials of AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), on charges of "conspiracy to communicate national defense information to persons not entitled to receive it." The same indictment included new espionage charges against Pentagon desk officer and Air Force Reserve Colonel Lawrence Franklin, who has already been indicted in the Eastern District, as well as in West Virginia.
The two "ex"-AIPAC officials are Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman. Since 1982, Rosen has been AIPAC's Director of Foreign Policy Issues. Since 1993, Weissman has been Senior Middle East Analyst at AIPAC.
Before coming to work for AIPAC, Rosen had been employed from 1978-82 at the RAND Corporation. During that period, he worked on contract projects for the Central Intelligence Agency, and had top-level security clearances. Thus, Rosen signed written secrecy agreements with the U.S. government that remained binding after he went to work for AIPAC.
Far-Flung Espionage Network
The new indictments, which have been anticipated for several months, unveil an Israeli espionage network that has been functioning since at least April 1999, involving a number of Pentagon officials beyond Franklin, as well as at least three officials of the Israeli Embassy and a former senior Mossad officer, Uzi Arad, who now heads Israel's premier national security think-tank, the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center.[/color]
U.S. intelligence officials have told EIR that the AIPAC/Franklin case reveals a new modus operandi, adopted by Israel intelligence, in the aftermath of the disastrous Jonathan Pollard spy scandal of the mid-1980s. Pollard, a Naval intelligence analyst, was caught pilfering thousands of classified Pentagon and CIA documents and passing them on to an Israeli intelligence unit headed by former Mossad European operations director Rafi Eytan, a close ally of current Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
As the result of the blowback from the Pollard affair, according to the U.S. intelligence sources, Israel shifted its espionage operations targetted at the United States to think-tanks and lobbying organizations like AIPAC, which have ongoing "legitimate" contacts with American government officials.
What the Israelis and the AIPAC spooks did not anticipate was that their operations would be closely scrutinized by the FBI and other U.S. agencies, for at least the past six years, revealing numerous instances where the "legitimate" contacts crossed over into hard espionage.
The 26-page indictment is, in fact, a catalogue of scores of instances of classified information being passed from Pentagon officials to the two AIPAC men, on to Israeli Embassy personnel.
Franklin apparently walked into an ongoing FBI counterintelligence surveillance of Rosen and Weissman, when he held his first meeting with the two men on Feb. 12, 2003. According to the indictment, phone conversations that Rosen had en route to the first meeting with Franklin, were monitored by the FBI. From Feb. 12, 2003 until July 9, 2004, Franklin had dozens of phone discussions and meetings with the two AIPAC officials, and on at least one occasion, faxed a document from his Pentagon office to Rosen's home.
In June 2004, FBI agents confronted Franklin with evidence of his espionage activities, and Franklin agreed to cooperate with the government. His subsequent meetings with the two AIPAC officials were all controlled by the FBI, until Aug. 3, when the FBI visited both Rosen and Weissman. According to the indictment, even after the FBI visits, Rosen and Weissman continued to pass classified data provided by Franklin to select U.S. journalists and even to Israeli embassy officials.
Franklin's Network
Lawrence Franklin had his own problems with his dealings with Israeli intelligence officials, even before his assignment to the Pentagon in early 2001 as Iran desk officer at the Near East South Asia policy office, under Assistant Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith and Deputy Assistant Secretary William Luti, a transplant from the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney.
Back in the late 1990s, as an Air Force Reserve officer, Franklin had done two tours of duty at the U.S. Embassy in Israel, in the Air Attaché's Office. On his second tour, Franklin was kicked out of the country by the Air Attaché after a few months, after repeated incidents in which he held unauthorized meetings with Israeli intelligence officials.
It may have been these Israeli connections that landed Franklin his job at NESA—or perhaps his ties to then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who was Dean of Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. when Franklin was a graduate student there.
Whatever his pathway to the Pentagon, Franklin, according to eyewitness sources, became a fixture at regular "brown bag lunches" at the private office of Doug Feith attended by leading Pentagon neo-cons, including Harold Rhode, Luti, Abraham Shulsky, Richard Perle, and occasionally Wolfowitz. Franklin's NESA boss, Luti, boasted frequently that he was working for "Scooter," a reference to Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff, Lewis Libby. (Libby, when he was not working for the government, was the personal attorney for Mossad frontman and international swindler Marc Rich. Well-informed U.S. intelligence officials believe that Rich, a Zug, Switzerland-based metal trader, was set up in business with Mossad funds.)
Franklin was also a traveling companion of Iran-Contra figure and self-professed "universal fascist" Michael Ledeen, in December 2001. Ledeen, Franklin, and Harold Rhode travelled to Rome for secret meetings with Iranian con-artist Manucher Ghorbanifar, another prominent Iran-Contra scandal figure who brokered Israeli missile sales to Iran in exchange for efforts to free American hostages in Lebanon.The scheme led to criminal indictments against a number of Reagan-Bush Administration officials and CIA officers, including Elliott Abrams and Duane Claridge.
The latest Franklin indictment threatens to snare some of these other leading neo-cons. The court papers filed in the Eastern District of Virginia identify several other Pentagon officials, along with at least three Israeli Embassy officials and Uzi Arad, as players in the extended Franklin spy operation.
The indictment of "Mr. AIPAC," Steven Rosen, also raises serious questions about the future of "America's Pro-Israel Lobby," as AIPAC's website describes the group. According to sources close to the Franklin probe, AIPAC may be forced, as a result of the Franklin case, to register as a foreign agent organization, thus losing its tax-exempt status and forcing much closer accounting of its finances and activities.
The Franklin case has not even come close to fully unraveling. And many leading Pentagon neo-cons are losing sleep over where this case will go next.
What makes matters even worse, the same basic cast of characters is tied up in the Valerie Plame Wilson leak probe, headed by independent counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, and a separate probe, headed by U.S. Attorney McNulty, into who was behind the forging of Niger government documents which purported to show that Iraq sought to buy "yellowcake" uranium from the African state to build nuclear weapons. The forged documents were used by Vice President Cheney and other Administration war hawks to win Congressional and public support for the invasion of Iraq. Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, was dispatched to Niger in 2002 to assess the validity of the Niger yellowcake charge, and returned to report that it was a hoax. His report was covered up, and the train of events was set into motion which led to his wife's "outing" as a covert CIA operative, by top Administration officials—a criminal offense.
There are allegations that the Ledeen-Rhode-Franklin trip to Rome in 2001 may have played a role in the circulation of the forged documents
Netanyahu Slaps U.S. in the Face with Spymaster Uzi Arad
March 6, 2009 (LPAC)--Israel's Prime Minister-designate Bibi Netanyahu brought the notorious spymaster Uzi Arad into the meetings with Hillary Clinton and George Mitchell, this week, reports the Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz. Uzi Arad, is persona non grata in the United States because of his involvement with Pentagon spy, Larry Franklin, an analyst with the Office of Special Plans (OSP), the Dick Cheney-neo-conservative unit in the Pentagon that manufactured false intelligence to justify the Iraq war. Franklin was convicted in January, 2006, in a plea bargain, of stealing classified documents on Iran and other subjects from the Pentagon, and passing them on to Israeli government officials, in meetings arranged by the two top officials of AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman). Arad, who is unable to come to the U.S. because of his involvement with Franklin, is reportedly going to be head of the Israeli National Security Council, Ha'aretz wrote.
Not only did Bibi include Arad in his first meeting with the top U.S. officials, but he kicked the Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., Sallai Meridor out the meeting. Ha'aretz reported that this insult from Netanyahu was the reason that Meridor resigned today.
Lyndon LaRouche said today that what Netanyahoo did was "a slap in the face to the U.S. And that if Netanyahoo breaks from the U.S., that represents Netanyahoo's plans for leaving earth."
And who is really behind Netanyahu? a group of fascists in London that put Dick Cheney into office.
http://intelligencenews. wordpress.com/2009/03/21/01- 107/
...
The other two are an authorized history (from 1909 to 1949) of MI6 by Professor Keith Jeffery, of Queen’s University, Belfast, and Gordon Thomas’ Secret Wars: One Hundred Years of British Intelligence, which intelNews has received and will be reviewing shortly. ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Gordon_Thomas
Thomas was born in Wales, in a cemetery keeper’s cottage where his grandmother lived. He had his first story published at nine years old in a Boys Own Paper competition. With his father in the RAF, he travelled widely and was educated at the Cairo High School, the Maritz Brothers in Port Elizabeth and, finally, at Bedford Modern.
His first book, completed at the age of seventeen, is the story of a British spy in Russia during World War Two, titled Descent Into Danger.He turned down the offer of a place at university in order to accompany a travelling fair for a year: those experiences became Bed of Nails. Since then his books have been published worldwide. He has been a foreign correspondent beginning with the Suez Crisis and ending with the first Gulf War. He was a BBC writer/producer for three flagship BBC programmes: Man Alive, Tomorrows World and Horizon. He is a regular contributor to Facta, the respected monthly Japanese news magazine, and he lectures widely on the secret world of intelligence. He also provides expert analysis on intelligence for US and European television and radio shows.[1]
His Gideon’s Spies: Mossad’s Secret Warriors became a major documentary for Channel Four that he wrote and narrated: The Spy Machine. It followed three years of research during which he was given unprecedented access to Mossad’s key personnel. The documentary was co-produced by Open Media and Israfilm[2].
Gideon’s Spies: Mossad’s Secret Warriors has so far been published in 16 languages. The main source for this book is Ari Ben-Menashe, a self-described former Mossad agent. According to Charles Foster in Contemporary Review: "Writers who know their place are few and far between: fortunately Mr Thomas is one of them. By keeping to his place as a tremendous storyteller without a preacher's pretensions, he has put his book amongst the important chronicles of the state of Israel." [2]
So he highlights what Mossad really did, but neglects to highlight the relationship of the Crown, MI6 and Mossad, and their potential Moles in the United States.
No one mentions Sykes - Picot EITHER, which is the main force behind the destabalization of the middle east right now and was the primary reason for World War I;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_ depth/middle_east/2001/israel_ and_the_palestinians/key_ documents/1681362.stm
The Sykes-Picot agreement is a secret understanding concluded in May 1916, during World War I, between Great Britain and France, with the assent of Russia, for the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire.
The agreement led to the division of Turkish-held Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine into various French and British-administered areas. The agreement took its name from its negotiators, Sir Mark Sykes of Britain and Georges Picot of France.
Some historians have pointed out that the agreement conflicted with pledges already given by the British to the Hashimite leader Husayn ibn Ali, Sharif of Mecca, who was about to lead an Arab revolt in the Hejaz against the Ottoman rulers on the understanding that the Arabs would eventually receive a much more important share of the territory won.
US history is an interesting thing, and no one really highlights the REASON many intelligent souls traveled to the U.S.
The Reason was, Europe was infested with feudalist corruption and the idea was, the United States would be built up as a nation to keep Europe from destroying itself. Read about Benjamin Franklin, these people wanted to create a Nation free of Oligarchs and the European monetary system (Which in reality is dependence on Royal Gold Supplies for economic expansion). The European monetary system was controlled by the various royalties until the 1600's when the British Empire began to dominate more and more of Eurasia.
With the British ability to contract and limit Gold supplies, they had the ability to limit world wide growth hence, the ability to CONTROL the WORLD, by preventing any (NAVAL) force to grow stronger then theirs. Remember, in the 1700's there were no railways, NAVAL power was supreme...... So we can fastfoward to the mid 1800's when Lincoln took office, revived the Greenback and built the intercontintental railway......... what did this accomplish? it DESTROYED British control over US Trade routes by nullfying their NAVAL POWER. This lead to the industrialization of the United States into a power that even the British Empire could not tackle via conventional warfare.
The Continental Congress issued fiat currency for that exact reason as well, because the European Royalty could strangle the Nation of Currency if we were to use Gold as a currency.
Ian p. asked no hard questions that I could discern and the callers were almost praising MI5 and the UK as being our beast friends...
With this guy some of his lies are true.
http://snardfarker.ning.com/ profiles/blog/show?id=2649739% 3ABlogPost%3A37858&page=2# comment-2649739_Comment_37912
GREAT BRITAIN ON HIGHEST TERRORIST ALERT POSSIBLE!!!!
3-22-09 Critical Red Alert in Great Britain
Talk show Host Ian Punnett of Coast to Coast announced that sources have revealed that Britain is on highest-ever terror alert! This information was confirmed by Gordon Thomas who checked with his sources in the British Intelligence who spoke of information of a mumbi attacks.He was on the air speaking with Author Gordon Thomas who was discussing the history of the British Intelligence Services when this information came in as who has ties to British MI5 agents.
Gordon Thomas wrote the book: Secret Wars: One Hundred Years of British Intelligence inside MI5 and MI6 (US Edition) Inside British Intelligence: 100 Years of MI5 and MI6 (UK Edition) These agencies rank as two of the oldest and most powerful in the world, and Thomas’s recounts the roles that British intelligence played with insider information more startling than anything out of James Bond.
Gordon Thomas also wrote the book: Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of The Mossad
which was republished to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Updating the data on events leading to the 9/11 Attacks and the aftermath.
In this book Gordon Thomas claims that; Bibi, Netanyahu's first wife, actually spied on Bill Clinton, and that Mossad had wire tapped the White House. Also that Princess Diana's driver Henry Paul was a Mossad agent.
More information to come with updates....
http://www.gordonthomas- author.com/
http://www.nlpwessex.org/docs/ gordonthomas.htm
The report below was published 21 May 2002 by the GLOBE-INTEL web site run by Gordon Thomas.
http://www.canadafreepress. com/writers/gordon-thomas.htm
Thomas is a recognised authority on the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, to which he is considered to have had exceptional journalistic access over the years. Thomas is the author of the book 'Gideon's Spies - The Secret History of the Mossad', which susequently became a major documentary for the UK's Channel 4 TV station. Thomas writes on intelligence subjects for the Sunday Express.
The URL of the 21 May 2002 report below by GLOBE-INTEL was http://www.gordonthomas. ie/104.html at the time of publication. The report is, however, no longer available at that address on the GLOBE-INTEL site. A mhtl copy dowloaded from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (archive date Jun 15, 2007) is available here.
The Israeli spy-ring within the United States referred to by Thomas has been separately reported on by Fox News and the intelligence journal Jane's Security News (further references are available from the Antiwar.com web site and History Commons, 'The Complete 9/11 Timeline').
The Daily Telegraph has separately reported that Israeli intelligence had visited the CIA in August 2001 to warn of imminent terrorist attacks on America. An extract of this report is provided at the bottom of this page. A full copy of the GLOBE-INTEL report is also provided below
More information about the warnings the CIA received from the Israelis and Russians is available here.
http://www.btinternet.com/~ nlpwessex/Documents/ WATTenetsilence.htm
***NEWS*****ANALYSIS**** COMMENTARY
EDITORS: GORDON THOMAS ***MARTIN DILLON***KEVIN DOWLING
------------------------------ ------------------------------ --------------------
NUMBER :- 104 DATE :- 21/05/02
BUSH: THE IGNORED WARNING THAT WILL COME TO HAUNT HIM
By Gordon Thomas.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon authorised the leak of sensitive documents which reveal America's spy agencies were warned about a terrorist strike weeks before September 11. The controversial move has now directly embroiled President George Bush in the 'how-much-did-he-know?' debate over the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Sharon's reaction is a calculated response to growing claims that Mossad has been running spy operations within the United States and also reveals a split in the special relationship between the two leaders.
Mossad chiefs insist the Israeli spy agency was tracking Osama Bin-Laden's terrorists in America before September 11 and that that the information was passed on to the CIA on Five separate occasions before the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon. As late asAugust 24, less than two weeks before the attacks, a Mossad warning, confirmed by German intelligence, BND, said that "terrorists plan to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture." The warning alert was passed to the CIA.
The warning was also passed to MI6. The agency made its own checks and also informed the CIA. Frustrated by its inability to alert the CIA to an impending attack, Mossad arranged on September 1, according to Tel Aviv sources last week, for Russian intelligence to warn Washington "in the strongest possible terms of imminent assaults on airports and government buildings." Mossad's fury at the failure of the US intelligence community to act has been compounded by the revelation that the Bush administration had ordered the FBI Only a Week Before the September attacks to curtail investigations on two of Osama Bin-Laden's close relatives living in the US
state of Virginia at the time.
Sharon's decision to allow the story of Bush's prior knowledge of the attack to be leaked comes at a time when Israel is smarting over what Sharon sees as Bush pressurising the Jewish state into an accommodation with Arafat.
The feeling in Tel Aviv is that Bush's much hyped war on terrorism does not actually fit into the aggressive policy Israel wants to pursue.
Sharon has already suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of his archrival, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as the central committee of their Likud Party ruled out the establishment of a Palestinian state last Sunday.
The party's decision, formalized in a resolution backed by Netanyahu, directly contradicted Sharon's own stated acceptance of a Palestinian state as the eventual conclusion of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. It came as Sharon faces mounting domestic and international pressure to find a way to stop more than 19 months of bloodshed and launch talks with the Palestinians.
The support he was expecting from America failed to materialise, said a source close to Mossad. "Ariel Sharon is furious because he thinks Bush has not supported him as fully as he could. His coalition is falling apart, Netanyahu has sneaked ahead of him and the Israelis are generally fed up of living in fear. Sharon is quite clear where the blame lies - in the White House. "Now he has really stirred things up byputting Bush right at the centre of this storm by actively allowing these sensitive documents to be leaked to the world. He feels he needs to teach Bush a lesson and this will certainly complicate America's peace efforts in the region," he said.
According to similar documents shown to the Sunday Express, Mossad was running a round-the-clock surveillance operation on some of the September 11 hijackers.
The details, contained in classified papers, reveal that a senior Mossad agent tipped off his counterpart in America's Central Intelligence Agency that a massive terrorist hit was being planned in the US. A handful of the spies had infiltrated the Al-Qaeda organisation while a staggering 120 others, posing as overseas art students, launched massive undercover operations throughout America.
Other documents leaked to the Sunday Express from several intelligence agencies including the Drugs Enforcement Agency show that two Mossad cells of six Egyptian and Yemeni born Jews, trained at a secret base in Israel's Negev Desert on how to penetrate Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network.
One team flew to Amsterdam and were under the control of Mossad's Europe Station. This is based at Schipol Airport within the El Al complex. They later made contact in Hamburg with Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker on September 11.
The second group flew directly to New York. From there they travelled South to Florida and infiltrated the Bin laden organisation.
In August last year, the Mossad team in Europe flew with some of the Hamburg terrorists into Boston, a month before the attack on the twin towers.
By then the Mossad team had established an attack on the US was "imminent". It reported this to its Tel Aviv controller through the Israeli Embassy in Washington using a system of secure communications. In early September Mossad Chief Efraim Halevy sent a warning to the CIA of the possibility of such an attack. The warning was noted and acknowledged. But CIA chief George Tenet is understood to have described it as "too non-specific." The FBI was also informed.
Halevy sent a second alert to the CIA that reached Washington on or around September 7.
A spokesman for the FBI refused to discuss specific details of the Mossad operation but said: "There are Congressional hearings with regard to possible intelligence failures arising from September 11. We can't verify your information because it is part of an ongoing investigation."
Neither the DEA or the CIA would comment on the record, but a senior US intelligence source said: "Anyone can be wise after the event but it was extremely difficult to act on a non specific threat given in a couple of tips from Israeli intelligence. It would be interesting to know if they could have been more specific with their information.
''Their surveillance teams must have observed Atta and his accomplices going to flying schools. I guess we might never know the real truth."
The spying operations first came to the attention of the DEA in January 2001 according to a classified 90-page dossier which has been seen by the Sunday Express. The names, passport details and other personal records of some of the Israeli-born spies are also detailed in the dossier.
(ends)
they were trying to help us right? by organizing a film crew to watch the towers collapse and cheering?.
The above article is a dynamite example of how foreign intelligence agencies insert moles into US Government power seats and use them to carry out operations.
Arron Russo speak about his conversation with Nick Rockefella Bilderberg Plans World Population Reduction Of 80%
//www.youtube.com/watch? v=o8ztmhONi4k&feature=related
Confession of a CIA Agent about FEMA - Important !!!!!!!
Martial Law over America.
Leave America as fast as you
can!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!
Antichrist Illuminati Obama New World Order Agenda 2012 Exposed
//www.youtube.com/watch? v=Xld4P4nz5hA&feature=fvw
FEMA Trailer Workers Speak Out
//www.youtube.com/watch? v=UQQcT0Tgpp4&feature=related
New World Order Plans to Kill 90% of the Worlds Population
Proof that Prince Charles is the Antichrist
Bilderberg Group NWO Will Kill 80% Of Humans
//www.youtube.com/watch? v=TttU7u5iFyk&feature=related
Bilderberg Plans World Population Reduction Of 80%
Arron Russo speak about his conversation with Nick Rockefella Bilderberg Plans World Population Reduction Of 80%
//www.youtube.com/watch? v=o8ztmhONi4k&feature=related
The Rockefeller crime syndicate
http://www.rockefeller.edu/ research/a...
A Chilling Proposal by Barack Obama
The shocking comment Barack Obama does not want you to hear!
Audacity Hope Media Fox Jeremiah Wright Democrat Republican Vote 2008 Controversy Controversial Church Pastor Commentary Political Commercial Politics Analysis Grassroots Gotcha! Outreach News Change Primary Primaries Pennsylvania Guam Indiana North Carolina West Virginia Kentucky Oregon Puerto Rico Montana South Dakota Convention DNC November Guns Faith Bitter Cling
Zbigniew Brzezinski - Easier to kill a million people than to control them.
//www.youtube.com/watch? v=lkOOBo45TZU&feature=player_ embedded#Zbigniew Brzezinski Obama's Top Foreign Policy Advisers, Professor of American Foreign PolicyStrategic Analysis and Foreign Policy National
Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, worked for Ronald Regan as Intelligence advisor, founder and trustee of the Trilateral Commission, a member of the Council For Foreign Relations (CFR) and Council for Strategic and International Studies, analysis, mastermind behind the creation of Ben Ladin and the terrorist Al Quieda organisation, international advisor for a number of major corporations, an associate of Henry Kissinger, co-chairman of the Bush Advisory Security Task Force in 1988 ...what a guy...
states the following belief, conviction and effective advice to Barrack Obama and to Barrach Oboma and
Zbigniew Brzezinski's employers and bosses...Jacob and Evilyn Rothchold and the rest Rothschild International Banking Family and their other evil and criminally insane International Baking Partners and Business associates and elite families
Rupert says, " Now if you want to get really.... really ...really angry .... go buy this book.. it's called the Grand Chess Board .... American Primacy and it's Neo Stratigic Objectives... written by Zbigniew Brzezingski in 1997 ...I am going to read you some quotes from that book ...
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Glen Kealy speaks on the Farm about the history and future of Planet Earth_Video One
Glen Kealy speaks on the Farm about the history and future of Planet Earth_Video Two
Glen Kealy speaks on the Farm about the history and future of Planet Earth_Video Three
Glen Kealy speaks on the Farm about the history and future of Planet Earth_Video Four
Glen Kealy speaks on the Farm about the history and future of Planet Earth_Video Five
Glen Kealy speaks on the Farm about the history and future of Planet Earth_Video Six
Glen Kealy speaks on the Farm about the history and future of Planet Earth_Video seven
Glen Kealy speaks on the Farm about the history and future of Planet Earth_Video Eight
Glen Kealy speaks on the Farm about the history and future of Planet Earth_Video Nine
Glen Kealy speaks on the Farm about the history and future of Planet Earth_Video Ten
Glen Kealy speaks on the Farm about the history and future of Planet Earth_Video Eleven
Glen Kealy speaks on the Farm about the history and future of Planet Earth_Video Twelve
Glen Kealy speaks on the Farm about the history and future of Planet Earth_Video Thirteen
To Be Continued....
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When I finally woke up I took a look around. I saw city halls, courthouses, houses of government, churches, schools, and universities by the hundreds and thousands. I saw systems systems for managing the land, the air, and the water; systems for managing human behavior; systems for managing religion; systems for managing learning; systems for managing food, shelter, clothing; systems for managing love and procreation: a vast complex of carefully engineered systems. I saw millions of people working, not for themselves, but for someone else. I saw millions of people doing, not what they themselves want to do, but what someone else wants them to do. I saw the depressing evidence of a people who have externalized and institu- tionalized-in fact, have tried to standardize-the very nature of humanity. I saw a whole people whove lost the way of life and in its place have built a technological monster which does most of their hard work, carries their water, delivers their food, raises their kids, makes their decisions, says their prayers, transports them, informs them, entertains them, and controls the people it serves, absolutely. I also saw that the monster, seemingly unable to manage itself, was running wild, totally out of visible control, ripping the land to pieces, spreading poisons, filling the air with filth, dumping garbage and shit in the rivers and lakes and oceans. I saw all that, and I saw the people, millions of them, crowded together in cities, living side by side in towns, villages, rural areas. But I didnt see a single community. Is someone doing all of this on purpose ?
Educated : by the SYSTEM 1942 to 1987 - First wife, 1 girl & 3 boys
Awakening : 1987 to 1998 - Second wife 1994/98, (divorced 2002)
Self-educated : 1995 to 2002
SculPTor/Teacher : of Ultimate Reality : 2000 to Present
53rd parallel north
Glen_Kealy_the Sculptor
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This site may harm your computer.20 posts - 7 authors - Last post: 31 Dec 2008This is Glen Kealey's website. There has been alot of talk on my forum about how Alan Watt supposedly stole Kealey's work and is trying to ...www.outlawjournalism.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2701 - Similar 10000 BC Alan Watt and Glen Kealey? - 8 posts - 5 Feb 2010Glen Kealey's Superslave (SS)? - 20 posts - 18 Feb 2009 -
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22 posts - 1 author - Last post: 16 Dec 2008Discussion about Who is Glen Kealey?? at the GodlikeProductions Conspiracy Forum . Our topics include Conspiracy Theory, Secret Societies, ...www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message686157/pg1 - Cached - Similar The Case of Alan Watt and Glen Kealey? - 31 posts - 30 Mar 2010Glen Kealey and Alan Watt? - 31 posts - 14 Jan 2009
Educated : by the SYSTEM 1942 to 1987 - First wife, 1 girl & 3 boys
Awakening : 1987 to 1998 - Second wife 1994/98, (divorced 2002)
Self-educated : 1995 to 2002
SculPTor/Teacher : of Ultimate Reality : 2000 to Present
When I Woke Up !
When I finally woke up I took a look around. I saw city halls, courthouses, houses of government, churches, schools, and universities by the hundreds and thousands. I saw systems systems for managing the land, the air, and the water; systems for managing human behavior; systems for managing religion; systems for managing learning; systems for managing food, shelter, clothing; systems for managing love and procreation: a vast complex of carefully engineered systems. I saw millions of people working, not for themselves, but for someone else. I saw millions of people doing, not what they themselves want to do, but what someone else wants them to do. I saw the depressing evidence of a people who have externalized and institu- tionalized-in fact, have tried to standardize-the very nature of humanity. I saw a whole people whove lost the way of life and in its place have built a technological monster which does most of their hard work, carries their water, delivers their food, raises their kids, makes their decisions, says their prayers, transports them, informs them, entertains them, and controls the people it serves, absolutely. I also saw that the monster, seemingly unable to manage itself, was running wild, totally out of visible control, ripping the land to pieces, spreading poisons, filling the air with filth, dumping garbage and shit in the rivers and lakes and oceans. I saw all that, and I saw the people, millions of them, crowded together in cities, living side by side in towns, villages, rural areas. But I didnt see a single community. Is someone doing all of this on purpose ?
Yes, Persian Zoro-Astrian/Zoro-Babel Freemasonry is doing it on purpose!
The SculPTor
Adapted for CIPI from a text by Wilfred Pelletier and Ted Poole
One Forester's view on "How we got into the mess we're in".
A linguistic archaeologist digs for the very roots of our languages, many millennia before writing was invented. He or she considers all the different possibilities of language development and has to be suspicious of anything taught as "fact" in our universities. This person must be free to bring totally new ideas forward about languages origins, unaffected by dogma or tradition. It is a rather lonely position to take but it has its advantages. Having no formal education in linguistics turned out to be both very helpful and also a big drawback. It was helpful because I avoided what is described as:
"It is customary for students to be introduced to their fields of study gradually, as slowly unfolding mysteries, so that by the time they can see their subject as a whole they have been so thoroughly imbued with conventional preconceptions and patterns of thought that they are extremely unlikely to be able to question its basic premises. This incapacity is particularly evident in disciplines concerned with ancient history. Their study is dominated by the learning of difficult languages, a process which is inevitably authoritarian: one may not question the logic of an irregular verb or the function of a particle.
At the same time as the instructors lay down their liguistic rules, however, they provide other social and historical information that tends to be given and received in a similar spirit. While this facilitates learning and gives the scholar thus trained an incomparable feel for Greek or Hebrew, such men and women tend to accept a concept, word or form as typically Greek or Hebrew without requiring an explanation as to its specific function or origin"
In other words, linguistic students tend to be brainwashed in our Universities and are trained to reject other ways of looking at a subject, because other views are inherently inconsistent with their training.
Now the whole world spoke one language (Gen. 11:1)
Every time new research results are made available about the activities and thinking of our distant ancestors, these results remind us that we have acquired the habit of grossly underestimating, even denigrating our ancestors' knowledge and abilities in many fields of endeavour. One such field is linguistics. Almost all academics working in this "science" have unquestioningly adopted, and religiously defended, the family tree model for linguistic change, the so-called standard model. Any other approaches to the development of languages are being brushed aside saying that they are not scientifically provable because they are incompatible with the model and the comparative method.
As a result of this thinking many, if not most of our university linguists, have become the guardians of the status quo and are disdainful of anybody embarking upon a relentless search for academic truth. They refuse to admit that many of the very early scholars may have been able to do things which are now considered impossible, such as language invention of major languages and their introduction. My work shows that, instead of staunchly defending the genetic model of naturally evolving languages, very early scholars are likely to have been responsible for inventing all major languages existing on earth, without exception. It appears that highly skilled professional linguists have been busy over a period of 4,000 years developing a large number of artificial languages. If this is correct, then the immediate result is that the standard model must be relegated to the study of primitive, natural languages and the comparative method is to be drastically overhauled or scrapped entirely. This of course means that our modern linguists will have to also re-examine everything they know more critically.
Edo Nyland
The SculPTor
Genetic 'Adam never met Eve'
The study confirms the Out of Africa hypothesis
The most recent ancestor of all males living today was a man who lived in Africa around 59,000 years ago, according to an international team of researchers.The scientists from eight countries have drawn up a genetic family tree of mankind by studying variations in the Y chromosome of more than a thousand men from different communities around the world. The Y chromosome is one of the two sex chromosomes (X and Y) which only men carry (women carry two X chromosomes).
The new research confirms the Out of Africa theory that modern humans originated in Africa before slowly spreading across the world. But the finding raises new questions, not least because our most recent paternal ancestor would have been about 84,000 years younger than our maternal one. The team believes there is an explanation. They propose that the human genetic blueprint evolved as a mosaic, with different pieces of modern DNA emerging and spreading throughout the human population at different times.
Origins of man
Evidence from the fossil record suggests that modern man originated in Africa about 150,000 years ago, before moving steadily across the globe.
This Out of Africa hypothesis has been confirmed by studies of mitochondrial DNA, the segment of genetic material that is inherited exclusively from the mother.
Based on these studies, our most recent common ancestor is thought to be a woman who lived in Africa some 143,000 years ago, the so-called Mitochondrial Eve.
To find the common paternal ancestor, the team drew up a genetic family tree of mankind. They mapped small variations in the Y chromosomes of 1,062 men in 22 geographical areas, including Pakistan, India, Cambodia, Laos, Australia, New Guinea, America, Mali, Sudan, Ethiopia and Japan.
The new genetic family tree supports the Out of Africa scenario. But it suggests that our most recent paternal ancestor would have been about 84,000 years younger than our maternal one.
Regions of the genome
"You can ultimately trace every female lineage back to a single Mitochondrial Eve who lived in Africa about 150,000 years ago," said Dr Spencer Wells of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics in Oxford, UK, who was part of the team.
"The Y chromosome we trace again back to Africa but the date is about 80,000 years ago.
He told BBC News Online that the two studies could be reconciled. "There's a different evolutionary history for each region of the genome but they all are consistent in placing the ancestor of all modern humans alive today in Africa."
The research, published in the journal Nature Genetics, gives an intriguing insight into the journey of our ancestors across the planet, from eastern Africa into the Middle East, then to southeast and southern Asia, then New Guinea and Australia, and finally to Europe and Central Asia.
Some modern-day men living in what is now Sudan, Ethiopia and southern Africa are believed to be the closest living descendants of the first humans to set out on that great journey tens of thousands of years ago.
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VOLCANOE AND LOVE BOAT
On the way to Ottawa (Owl Story)
OTTOMAN TOLLGATERS AND ISLAMIC TAX COLLECTORS (AMIS/SIMA)
by: Sam Vaknin
...In accordance with this [right to act], whenever some one of the infidel parents or some other should oppose the giving up of his son for the Janissaries, he is immediately hanged from his doorsill, his bloodbeing deemed unworthy.
- Turkish firman, 1601
...The Turks have built several fortresses in my kingdom and are very kind to the country folk. They promise freedom to every peasant who converts to Islam.
- Bosnian King Stefan Tomas*evic´ to Pope Pius II
...The Porte (door) treated him (the Patriarch) as part of the Ottoman political apparatus. As a result, he had certain legally protected privileges. The Patriarch traveled in "great splendor" and police protection was provided by the Janissaries. His horse and saddle were fittingly embroidered, and at the saddle hung a small sword as a symbol of the powers bestowed on him by the Sultan.
-Dusan Kasic´, The Serbian Church under the Turks, Belgrade, 1969
The rise of Islam
Coming to a CHURCH near you,
Within the space of 500 years, Southeast Europe has undergone two paradigmatic shifts. First, from Christian independence to Islamic subjugation (a gradual process which consumed two centuries) and then, in the 19th century, from self-determination through religious affiliation to nationalism.
The Christians of the Balkans were easy prey. They were dispirited peasantry, fragmented, prone to internecine backstabbing and oppressive regimes. The new Ottoman rulers treated both people and land as their property. They enslaved some of their prisoners of war (under the infamous pencik clause), exiled thousands and confiscated their lands and liquidated the secular political elites in Thrace, Bulgaria, Serbia and Albania.
The resulting vacuum of leadership was filled by the Church. Thus, paradoxically, it was Islam and its excesses that made the Church the undisputed shepherd of the peoples of the Balkans, a position it did not enjoy before. The new rulers did not encourage conversions to their faith for fear of reducing their tax base - non-Muslim zimmis (the Qur'an's "People of the Book") paid special (and heavy) taxes to the treasury and often had to bribe corrupt officials to survive.
A bureaucratic conquest
Still, compared to other Ottoman exploits (in Anatolia, in modern Turkey for instance), the conquest of the Balkan was a benign affair. Cities remained intact, the lands were not depopulated and the indiscriminately ferocious nomadic tribesmen that usually accompanied the Turkish forces largely stayed at home.
The Ottoman bureaucracy took over most aspects of daily life soon after the military victories, bringing with it the leaden stability that was its hallmark. Indeed, populations were dislocated and resettled as a matter of policy called sorgun. Yet such measures were intended mainly to quell plangent rebelliousness and were applied mainly to the urban minority (for instance, in Constantinople).
The Church was an accomplice of the Turkish occupiers. It was a part of the Ottoman system of governance and enjoyed both its protection and its funding. It was leveraged by the Turkish sultans in their quest to pacify their subjects. Mehmet II bestowed upon the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, its bishops and clergy great powers. The trade-off was made explicit in Mehmet's edicts: the Church accepted the earthly sovereignty of the sultan - and he, in turn, granted them tolerance, protection and even friendship.
The Ottoman religious-legal code, the Seriat, recognized the Christians' right to form their own religiously self-governing communities. These communities were not confined to the orderly provision of worship services. They managed communal property as well. Mehmet's benevolence towards the indigents was so legendary that people wrongly attributed to him the official declaration of a "Millet i Rum" (Roman, or Greek, nation) and the appointment of Gennadios as Patriarch of the Orthodox Church (which only an Episcopal synod could do).
The forgotten multiculturalism
The Ottoman Empire was an amazing hybrid. Contrary to popular opinion, it was not a religious entity. The ruling elite included members of all religions. Thus, one could find Christian askeri (military or civil officials) and Muslim reaya ("flock" of taxpayers).
It is true that Christians paid the arbitrarily set haraç (or, less commonly, cizye) in lieu of military service. Even the clergy were not exempt (they even assisted in tax collection). But both Christians and Muslims paid the land tax, for instance. And, as the fairness, transparency and predictability of the local taxmen deteriorated - both Muslims and Christians complained.
The main problem of the Ottoman Empire was devolution - not centralization. Local governors and tax collectors had too much power and the sultan was too remote and disinterested or too weak and ineffective. The population tried to get Istanbul more involved - not less so.
The population was financially fleeced as much by the Orthodox Church as it was by the sultan. A special church-tax was levied on the Christian reaya and its proceeds served to secure the lavish lifestyles of the bishops and the Patriarch. In true mob style, church functionaries divided the loot with Ottoman officials in an arrangement known as peskes.
Foreign powers contributed to the war chests of various candidates, thus mobilizing them to support pro-Catholic or pro-Protestant political stances and demands. The Church was a thoroughly corrupt, usurious and politicized body which contributed greatly to the ever increasing misery of its flock. It was a collaborator in the worst sense of the word.
But the behaviour of the Church was one part of the common betrayal by the elite of the Balkan lands. Christian landowners volunteered to serve in the Ottoman cavalry (sipahis) in order to preserve their ownership. The Ottoman rulers conveniently ignored the laws prohibiting zimmis to carry weapons.
Upholding the law
Until 1500, the sipahis constituted the bulk of the Ottoman forces in the Balkans and their mass conversion to Islam was a natural continuation of their complicity. Other Christians guarded bridges or mountain passes for a tax exemption (derbentci).
Local, Turkish-trained militias (armatôles) fought mountain-based robber gangs (Serbian hajduks, Bulgarian haiduts, Greek klephts). The robbers attacked Turkish caravans with the same frequency and zeal that they sacked Christian settlements. The armatôles resisted them by day and joined them by night. But it was perfectly acceptable to join Turkish initiatives such as this.
The Balkans remained overwhelmingly Christian throughout the Ottoman period. Muslim life was an urban phenomenon, both for reasons of safety and because only the cities provided basic amenities. Even in the cities, though, the communities lived segregated in mahalles (quarters).
Everyone collaborated in public life, but the mahalles were self-sufficient affairs with the gamut of services - from hot baths to prayer services - available "in-quarter". Gradually, the major cities, situated along the trade routes, became Muslim. Skopje, Sarajevo and Sofia all had sizeable Muslim minorities.
Unenlightened rule
Thus, at the beginning of the 16th century, the picture that emerges is one of an uneasy co-habitation in the cities and a Christian rural landscape. The elites of the Balkans - Church, noblemen, warriors - all defected and collaborated with the former "enemy".
The local populace was the victim of usurious taxes, coercively applied. The central administration shared the loot with its local representatives and with the indigenous elites (ROMA) - the Church and the feudal landed gentry. It was a cosy and pragmatic arrangement that lasted for centuries.
Yet, the seeds of Ottoman bestiality and future rebellion were sown from the very inception of this empire-extending conquest. The devs¸irme tax was an example of the fragility of the Turkish veneer of humanity and enlightened rule. Christian sons were kidnapped, forcibly converted to Islam and trained as fighters in the fearsome Janissary Corps (the palace guards).
They were never to see their families and friends again. Exemptions from this barbarous practice were offered only to select communities which somehow contributed to Ottoman rule in the Balkan. Christian women were often abducted by local Ottoman dignitaries. And the custom of the kepin, allowed Muslims to "buy" a Christian daughter from her husband on a "temporary" basis. The results of such a union were raised as Muslims.
Conversion of convenience
And then there were the mass conversions of Christians to Islam. These conversions were very rarely the results of coercion or barbarous conduct. On the contrary, by shrinking the tax base and the recruitment pool, conversions were unwelcome and closely scrutinized by the Turks. But to convert was such an advantageous and appealing act that the movement bordered on mass hysteria.
Landowners converted to preserve their title to the land. Sipahis converted to advance in the ranks of the military. Christian officials converted to maintain their officialdom. Ordinary folk converted to avoid onerous taxes. Christian traders converted to Islam to be able to testify in court in case of commercial litigation.
Converted Muslims were allowed to speak Arabic or their own language, rather than the cumbersome and elaborate formal Turkish. Christians willingly traded eternal salvation for earthly benefits. And, of course, death awaited those who recanted (like the Orthodox "New Martyrs", who discovered their Christian origins, having been raised as Muslims).
Perhaps this was because, in large swathes of the Balkan, Christianity never really took hold. It was adopted by the peasantry as a folk religion - as was Islam later. In Bosnia, for instance, Muslims and Christians were virtually indistinguishable. They prayed at each other's shrines, celebrated each other's holidays and adopted the same customs.
Muslim mysticism (the Sufi orders, ie Freemasonry) appealed to many so-called sophisticated urban Christians. Heretic cults (like the Bogomils) converted en masse. Intermarriage flourished, mainly between Muslim men (who could not afford the dowry payable to a Muslim woman) and Christian women (who had to pay a dowry to her Muslim husband's family). Marrying a Christian woman was a lucrative business proposition.
And, then, of course, there was the Muslim birth rate. With four women and a pecuniary Asian preference for large families - Muslims out-bred Christians at all times. This trend is most pronounced today, but it was always a prominent demographic fact.
See 1000 years of peace