Friends,
Perhaps you have already heard that the FBI seized Indymedia's severs.
Not only that, but Indymedia itself was not told directly of the action, and
the ISP is prohibited from commenting on the order it received.
Last month the US Federal Communications Commission shut down
community radio stations around the US.
Ever since Seattle we've known that the Right of Assembly has been
abrogated, and now we see that the Right of Free Speech is no better
protected. Anyone's website, or email list, or email address, could
be next to be de-activated. I hope this posting gets to you.
The scepter of a police state looms, and Kerry isn't saying a word
about it.
rkm
--------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 21:18:27 -0400
To: •••@••.•••
From: Paul Wolf <•••@••.•••>
Subject: FBI Blacks Out Independent Media Around the World
1. FBI Blacks Out Independent Media Around the World
2. Feds Seize Indymedia Servers
3. Horowitz's Campus Jihad
4. '60s Free Speech leader got caught in FBI web
5. Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Investigation
of American Anthropologists
6. A Q&A with Fred Whitehurst, the first FBI whistleblower to go public
7. The Great Allure
8. Bush-Hitler: Hypnotizing the Masses
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/10/08/1097089554894.html?oneclick=true
FBI Blacks Out Independent Media Around the World
The Sydney Morning Herald, Oct 8, 2004
The FBI has issued an order to hosting provider Rackspace in the US,
ordering it to turn over two of the servers hosting the Independent Media
Centre's websites in the UK, a statement from the group says. Rackspace has
offices in the US and the UK. Independent Media Center, which is better
known as Indymedia, was set up in 1999 to provide grassroots coverage of
the World Trade Organisation protests in Seattle.
Rackspace complied with the FBI order, without first notifying Indymedia,
and turned over Indymedia's server in the UK. This affects over 20 Indymedia
sites worldwide, the group said. Indymedia said it did not know why the
order had been issued as it was issued to Rackspace. Rackspace told some of
the group's volunteers "they cannot provide Indymedia with any information
regarding the order." ISPs have received gag orders in similar situations
which prevent them from updating the parties involved on what is happening.
In August the US Secret Service used a subpoena in an attempt to disrupt the
New York city Independent Media Center before the Republican National
Convention by trying to get IP logs from an ISP in the US and the
Netherlands. Last month the US Federal Communications Commission shut down
community radio stations around the US. Two weeks ago the FBI asked
Indymedia to remove a post on the Nantes IMC that had a photo of some
undercover Swiss police and IMC volunteers in Seattle were visited by the
FBI on the same issue.
Indymedia said the list of local media collectives affected included
Ambazonia, Uruguay, Andorra, Poland, Western Massachusetts, Nice, Nantes,
Lilles, Marseille (all France), Euskal Herria (Basque Country), Liege, East
and West Vlaanderen, Antwerpen (all Belgium), Belgrade, Portugal, Prague,
Galiza, Italy, Brazil, UK, part of the Germany site, and the global
Indymedia Radio site.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/08/fbi_indymedia_raids/
Feds Seize Indymedia Servers
By John Leyden, The Register U.K.,October 8, 2004
The FBI yesterday seized a pair of UK servers used by Indymedia , the
independent newsgathering collective, after serving a subpoena in the US
on Indymedia's hosting firm, Rackspace. Why or how remains unclear.
Rackspace UK complied with a legal order and handed over hard disks without
first notifying Indymedia. It's unclear if the raid was executed under
extraterritorial provisions of US legislation or the UK's Regulation of
Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). Provisions of RIPA make it a criminal
offence to discuss warrants, so Rackspace would not be able to discuss the
action with its customer Indymedia, or with the media.
Rackspace US has issued a statement which says that the investigation "did
not arise in the United States", but which sheds very little light on the
whys and the wherefores.
In the present matter regarding Indymedia, Rackspace Managed Hosting, a US
based company with offices in London, is acting in compliance with a court
order pursuant to a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT), which establishes
procedures for countries to assist each other in investigations such as
international terrorism, kidnapping and money laundering. Rackspace responded
to a Commissionerís subpoena, duly issued under Title 28, United States Code,
Section 1782 in an investigation that did not arise in the United States.
Rackspace is acting as a good corporate citizen and is cooperating with
international law enforcement authorities. The court prohibits Rackspace
from commenting further on this matter."
Dai Davis, an IT lawyer at London law firm Nabarro Nathanson, said
Rackspace's statement fails to clarify the legal basis of the raid. "If it
was a RIPA warrant, Rackspace can't refer to it. Most RIPA warrants can be
issued by the Home Secretary," he said. "The FBI has no jurisdiction in the
UK and would need to act in concert with UK authorities, such as the security
services or police," he added.
Net Effect
The seizure of Indymedia's servers affects more than 30 Indymedia sites
worldwide. The list of affected local media collectives includes Uruguay,
Andorra, Poland, Nice, several French groups, Euskal Herria (Basque Country),
multiple Belgian sites, Serbia, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Italy, Brazil,
the UK, part of the Germany site, and the global Indymedia Radio site. One
of the servers taken down at Rackspace provided streaming radio to several
radio stations and served files related to the Blag Linux distribution,
among other purposes.
While Indymedia is not exactly sure what prompted the action, the group does
have one strong idea. A French Indymedia site last month posted photos of
what it believed to be undercover Swiss police officers photographing
protesters at a French event. Indymedia received a request from the FBI to
pull those photos down, as they "revealed personal information" about the
undercover police, said Indymedia press officer Hep Sano.
Rackspace appeared to confirm that the photos were an issue with the FBI.
"I apologize for the delay in responding. I have been trying to get a hold
of the FBI agent I spoke with before, but haven't been able to at this time,"
wrote a Rackspace official to Indymedia earlier this week, according to Sano.
"As the request originated with the Swiss police, I can only speculate on
what they saw or what they were concerned about. However, at this time, I
have received no further communications from either the FBI or the Swiss
authorities, so I feel like we can close this this issue."
Still, Indymedia has never sorted out the matter with the FBI.
"They never clarified what they meant by personal information," she said.
"The photos were taken on a public street."
Indymedia believes the photos were eventually pulled, but ironically cannot
check on this as it no longer has access to the servers or hard disks. The
group has not been notified if the FBI is even involved in this seizure or
whether or not the servers or just hard disks were confiscated.
"We are still trying to work with the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
to figure out who is charging us and with what crime," said Sano. The EFF
did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
Indymedia said yesterday's raids were part of a wider pattern of "attacks"
against independent media outlets by the US Federal Government authorities
over recent months. Last month the Federal Communications Commission shut
down community radio stations around the US.
In addition, an article submitted through Indymedia's Open Newswire service
identifying the names of delegates to the Republican Convention and where
they were staying in New York reportedly led to an investigation by the FBI.
The Secret Service used a subpoena in an "attempt to disrupt" the New York
City's Independent Media Centre before last month's Republican National
Convention in the city. Speculation (on Slashdot) links yesterday's raids
with this investigation. This remains unconfirmed but Rackspace's comment
that this is to do with "an investigation that did not arise in the United
States" doesn't fit with this theory. Indymedia also believes that the
Republican Convention problems have passed and are not an issue in this
week's server raids.
Indymedia (AKA Independent Media Center) was set up in 1999 to provide
grassroots coverage of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) protests in
Seattle. It has continued to report on controversial subjects often under-
reported in the mainstream media since then; but this week has marked the
most controversial chapter in its operations.
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=17838
Horowitz's Campus Jihad
With liberal professors in his crosshairs, David Horowitz is engaging in
some good old-fashioned campus cleansing
Bill Berkowitz, WorkingForChange, October 8, 2004
At Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, "WANTED" posters with a
headshot of Professor Abel Alves appeared on campus a few weeks back; a
student who took Associate professor David Gibbs' "What is Politics?" class
at the University of Arizona claimed that Gibbs "is an anti-American
communist who hates America and is trying to brainwash young people into
thinking America sucks"; a political-science professor at Metropolitan
State College of Denver in Colorado says she has been the target of death
threats and hate e-mail in the wake of the recent debate in the state over
an Academic Bill of Rights; a University of Georgia professor is being
investigated after allegations he bullied a conservative student. Revenge
of the Nerds? Twenty-first century Gipper brigades? No, and No. It's the
Horowistas -- a small, hearty and growing band of followers of right wing
provocateur David Horowitz and his Students for Academic Freedom.
Since 9/11, spying in the name of homeland security has become as American
as baseball, cherry pie and listening to a Cat Stevens record. According to
a recent report in the San Francisco Chronicle, a relatively unknown branch
of the Defense Department called the National Geospatial-Intelligence
Agency is employing its state-of-the-art aerial imaging equipment in
service of homeland security. Closer to home, David Horowitz and the
Independent Women's Forum are scanning the nation's college campuses in the
name of homeland security.
Horowitz, the head of the Los Angeles-based Center for the Study of Popular
Culture, and the conservative women at the Washington, DC-based Independent
Women's Forum are focusing their homeland security spying on a much more
specific target, liberal academics. Together Horowitz and the IWF have been
cranking out advertisements and placing them in a number of student
newspapers across the country encouraging conservative students to scan
their campuses for so-called anti-American academics.
According to Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now!, the advertisements running in
student newspapers charge universities with being dominated by liberal or
left-wing professors. The ads "are paid for by well-funded groups like
Students for Academic Freedom -- a Horowitz group -- and the Independent
Women's Forum," Democracy Now! reported.
Two of the campaign's first victims are Ball State's Professor Alves and
David Gibbs, an Associate professor of History and Sociology at the
University of Arizona, who last spring taught a course entitled "What is
Politics?"
On the Ball State University campus, posters "announcing that history
professor Abel Alves was 'WANTED'" was put up by Amanda Carpenter, a
senior, who said she put up the posters in order to attract attention to
her website, the Muncie, Indiana Star Press reported. The professor's
"alleged offenses include indoctrinating freshmen with liberal books, such
as Fast Food Nation, and guest lectures by the Humane Society."
According to the newspaper, another Professor, George Wolfe, who teaches
peace and conflict resolution, was recently the target of a profile in
Horowitz's online publication, FrontPage Magazine. The story "accused Wolfe
of giving students extra credit for going to Washington to protest the war
in Iraq and lowering the grade of a student who argued in favor of a
military response to the Sept. 11 attacks." The university denied that any
credit had been given for merely attending an anti-war demonstration.
On September 27, David Gibbs told Amy Goodman, the host of Democracy Now!
that his largely freshmen class "focuses on propaganda and deception," and
he "emphasize[s] incidents of the government lying and things like that."
When he taught the class last spring, "the Independent Women's Forum... put
into the local student newspaper, an advertisement that basically argued
that there's a kind of left wing domination of the universities and
students should fight that with the strong implication they should monitor
their professors and report them, at least that's how I read it."
When Gibbs received student evaluations, "a student who said I'm
anti-American communist who hates America and is trying to brainwash young
people into thinking that America sucks," said that "I should be
investigated by the FBI, and the FBI has been contacted."
Later on, "another student on a web log during the summer said he took my
class and also said that he didn't like my politics and suggests that
students shouldn't take my class but should drop by and try to disrupt it.
There have been a number of instances like that which I hadn't had before."
Although Gibbs said that he wasn't sure or worried about whether the FBI
was contacted, he acknowledged that he thought it was "indicative of a
larger national trend, which is conservative activist groups with lots of
money and connections to the Republican Party trying to encourage and even
to some extent orchestrate students and local conservative groups like
those at the University of Arizona to go and basically harass faculty if
they don't like their politics."
Goodman pointed out that the full-page ads, similar to ones placed in other
college student newspapers, says: "Top ten things your professors do to
skew you. They push their political views, liberal opinions dominate, they
don't present both sides of the debate, conservative viewpoints practically
non-existent. Classrooms are for learning, not brainwashing. They force you
to check your intellectual honesty at the door. They make you uncomfortable
if you disagree. Grading should be based on facts not opinion. Education?
More like indoctrination."
Horowitz's mission
Refresher: David Horowitz, and his writing partner Peter Collier, were
well-known lefties in the 60s. Horowitz was a Black Panther supporter and
editor of Ramparts magazine, the premier left-wing publication of the
period. He and Collier, a co-founder of the Los Angeles-based Center for
the Study of Popular Culture, came out as Reagan Republicans in a highly
controversial 1985 Washington Post article called "Lefties for Reagan."
Since then, Horowitz has blended Dr. Laura-like pomposity with an
extraordinary ability to fund raise and self-promote.
In one of his first campus-wide advertising campaigns, Horowitz launched an
anti-reparations campaign aimed both at thwarting what was becoming a hot
button issue -- reparations for African Americans -- and drawing attention
to his activities. His effort was highlighted by attempts to place
full-page advertisements headlined "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery
is a Bad Idea--and Racist Too," in college newspapers across the country.
What started at the University of California, Berkeley, on the last day of
Black History Month, evolved into a full-blown promotional and fundraising
project for his organization.
Since 9/11, Horowitz has been a dynamic organizer. In the immediate
aftermath of the terrorist attacks, he lambasted California Congresswoman
Barbara Lee for having the temerity to be the only congressperson to vote
against giving President Bush a blank check for his war against terrorism.
In a column called "The Enemy Within," Horowitz branded Lee an
"anti-American communist who supports America's enemies and has actively
collaborated with them in their war against America."
In late October 2001, Horowitz spent three hours on the radio program of
Dr. Laura Schlessinger -- America's erstwhile pop psychologist before Dr.
Phil took the reins -- denouncing the "so-called Peace Movement." As part
of the "National Call to SUPPORT the WAR," Horowitz told Dr. Laura's
audience that "campus leftists hate America more than the terrorists." The
reason for this, said Horowitz, is campus radicals view "The enemy of my
enemy is my friend. They are thrilled that the symbols of America were
destroyed."
Horowitz then launched another advertising effort, the "Think Twice"
campaign -- a name seemingly derived from his "Second Thoughts" project of
the 1980s -- which was aimed at convincing students on college campuses not
to protest against Bush's war on terrorism. In "An Open Letter to the
"Anti-War" Demonstrators: Think Twice Before You Bring The War Home,"
Horowitz urged students to "think again and not to join an 'anti-war'
effort against America's coming battle with international terrorism."
In 2002 he launched the National Campaign to Take Back Our Campuses, and in
a booklet titled "Political Bias in America's Universities," Horowitz
described "what's wrong in academics today," and the "steps you and I can
take to restore sanity to our colleges and universities."
Horowitz's campus jihads could not take place without well-stuffed coffers.
His first post-conversion project, which he co-directed with Peter Collier,
was called "Second Thoughts." Between January 1986 and January 1990, this
project raised $950,000. As president of the Center for the Study of
Popular Culture, he has profited even more handsomely: According to
mediatranparency.org, between 1989 and 2002, Horowitz's outfits received
115 grants accounting for more than $12,700,000. Right-wing philanthropic
partners include the Allegheny Foundation, Castle Rock Foundation (the
Coors Family), the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Scaife Family
Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Olin Foundation (for more on
Horowitz's financial pipeline, click here).
Independent women?
Founded in 1992, as a direct response to the Clarence Thomas hearings, the
Independent Women's Forum Mission Statement aims "to affirm women's
participation in and contributions to a free, self-governing society."
In a May 2002 piece for the Chicago Tribune, Chris Black wrote: "The
conservative women at the Independent Women's Forum are cheering the return
of the guy. From their standpoint, the terrorist attacks on the United
States turned the feminist tide and brought back traditional values, a
retreat to home and hearth, and an appreciation for the manly man."
Between 1994 and 2002, the Independent Women's Forum received more than 70
grants worth more than $5 million dollars from the Randolph, Castle Rock,
JM, Sarah Scaife, the John M. Olin Foundation and others, according to
mediatransparency.org.
David Horowitz told the Muncie Star Press that he "completely deplore[d]"
the "WANTED" poster, and that he doesn't "demonize these professors. I want
them (professors) to do the right thing. I've never called for the firing
of a professor and wouldn't." And in a bit of Rumsfeld-speak, Horowitz
added that "When you deal with students, you're dealing with students."
In lieu of "WANTED" posters, Horowitz's Students for Academic Freedom
provides students with a manual that gives an example of a poster asking,
"Is Your Professor Using the Classroom as a Political Soapbox?" The manual
also provides "advice on how to create Web sites, get publicity, file
complaints, and spot abuses of academic freedom, such as using university
funds to hold one-sided, partisan conferences, and inviting speakers to
campus from one side of the political spectrum," the Muncie Star Press
reported.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/10/10/MNG0996S3P1.DTL
'60s Free Speech leader got caught in FBI web
By Seth Rosenfeld, •••@••.•••
The San Francisco Chronicle, October 10, 2004
The FBI trailed Mario Savio for more than a decade after he led the 1964
Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, and bureau officials plotted to
"neutralize" him politically -- even though there was no evidence he broke
any federal law, according to FBI records obtained by The Chronicle.
J. Edgar Hoover's FBI targeted Savio because he was the nation's first
prominent student leader of the '60s, and top FBI officials feared protests
would spread from Berkeley to other schools, the records show.
The bureau used tactics against Savio that Congress in 1976 found were
improper -- including some similar to investigative methods that agents
may now use against suspected terrorists under the Patriot Act and under
loosened FBI guidelines, experts said.
According to hundreds of pages of FBI files -- and, on the occasion of
the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, as reported in today's
Chronicle Magazine -- the bureau:
-- Collected, without court order, personal information about Savio from
schools, telephone companies, utility firms and banks and compiled
information about his marriage and divorce.
-- Monitored his day-to-day activities by using informants planted in
political groups, covertly contacting his neighbors, landlords and
employers, and having agents pose as professors, journalists and activists
to interview him and his wife.
-- Obtained his tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service in violation
of federal rules, mischaracterized him as a threat to the president and
arranged for the CIA and foreign intelligence agencies to investigate him
when he and his family traveled in Europe.
-- Put him on an unauthorized list of people to be detained without
judicial warrant in event of a national emergency, and designated him as
a "Key Activist" whose political activities should be "disrupted" and
"neutralized" under the bureau's extralegal counterintelligence program
known as COINTELPRO.
The bureau took these actions against Savio even after San Francisco FBI
agents repeatedly told bureau headquarters that he was not connected with,
or influenced by, any subversive political group or foreign power.
A 1968 memo from the San Francisco FBI office said Savio was one of several
Bay Area activists who were "independent free thinkers and do not appear to
be answerable to any one person or any group or organization."
LaRae Quy, an FBI spokeswoman in San Francisco, declined to comment on Savio's
case but said the FBI now operates with a greater concern for First Amendment
activities and more oversight from the U.S. Department of Justice, Congress
and the press.
Savio died at 53 of a heart attack in 1996 at his home in Sebastopol.
Lynne Hollander, a former Free Speech Movement activist and Savio's widow,
said the FBI made the mistake of believing he threatened national security
because he protested government policy.
"That's outrageous. These are all constitutionally protected activities, and
the FBI had no business spending time and money taking note of them," said
Hollander, a retired librarian who lives in Sonoma County.
Suzanne Goldberg, a Free Speech Movement leader who was married to Savio
in the '60s and was also under surveillance, called the FBI's activities
disturbing. "The whole thing is an invasion of privacy," said Goldberg, now
a psychotherapist in Washington, D.C.
Savio was a brilliant, 21-year-old philosophy student who had helped register
black voters in Mississippi the previous summer when he joined in protesting
UC Berkeley's enforcement of a ban against political activity on campus in
the fall of 1964.
Students from across the political spectrum formed the Free Speech Movement
and used nonviolent civil disobedience such as pickets and sit-ins.
Savio quickly emerged as the movement's most eloquent spokesman and attracted
international media attention, urging students to "put your bodies upon the
gears and upon the wheels" to stop the university "machine." In response,
students occupied the campus' Sproul Hall on Dec. 2, 1964, in an overnight
sit-in that led to almost 800 arrests, the largest mass arrest of students
in U.S. history.
Hoover soon ordered agents to focus on the student leader, and though Savio
became less active politically in the following years as he dealt with
sometimes overwhelming depression, the FBI continued to gather information
on him into 1975, three years after Hoover's death.
The records obtained by The Chronicle provide the most complete account to
date of the FBI's activities concerning Savio. The bureau targeted him during
the Cold War, when Hoover was deeply concerned about growing dissent at UC,
the nation's largest public university and operator of top-secret federal
nuclear laboratories. As The Chronicle previously disclosed, Hoover was
secretly campaigning at the same time to oust UC President Clark Kerr -- whom
the movement saw as its enemy -- because bureau officials blamed him for not
cracking down on student protesters.
David Sobel, general counsel with the Electronic Privacy Information Center,
a Washington, D.C., group that has challenged some of the government's
efforts to expand the collection of personal information, said many of the
tactics used against Savio -- such as putting his name on "watch lists" and
collecting personal financial data and school records -- are "ancestors" of
current surveillance systems. He said Savio's case was a "cautionary tale"
about how the combination of power and secrecy can lead to intelligence
abuses.
California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, who was involved in the Free
Speech Movement as a UC Berkeley political science student, called the FBI's
treatment of Savio "outrageous."
Lockyer said the excesses of the Hoover era have been "reined in, in very
substantial and significant ways, and the J. Edgar Hoover culture has been
replaced by a significantly more law-abiding ... environment."
But he said it is necessary to be sensitive to constitutional rights in the
war on terrorism and that U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft's call to
expand the Patriot Act "raises very serious questions about federal authority
being used to step on people's personal liberties."
"The idea that the FBI would continue its surveillance of Mario Savio years
after the FSM and put him on watch lists is absurd," said Lockyer, who, as
the top state law enforcement official, heads California's anti-terrorism
effort.
Savio was no threat to national security, he said. "He was somebody who
believed deeply in the Bill of Rights and believed the university and the
state were stepping on our civil liberties. And he was right."
<http://homepages.stmartin.edu/fac_staff/dprice/CW-PUB.htm>Threatening
Anthropology:
McCarthyism and the FBI's Investigation of American Anthropologists
By David Price, •••@••.•••, Duke University Press, 2004
Book Jacket Propaganda: Threatening Anthropology offers a meticulously
detailed account of how U.S. Cold War surveillance damaged the field of
anthropology. David Price reveals how dozens of activist anthropologists
were publicly and privately persecuted during the Red Scares of the 1940s
and 1950s. He shows that it was not Communist Party membership or Marxist
beliefs that attracted the most intense scrutiny from the FBI and
congressional committees but rather social activism, particularly for
racial justice. Price draws on extensive archival research -- including
correspondence, oral histories, published sources, court hearings, and
more than 30,000 pages of FBI and government memorandums released to him
under the Freedom of Information Act. Today the "war on terror" is invoked
to license the government's renewed monitoring of academic work, and it is
increasingly difficult for researchers to access government documents, as
Price's appendix describing his wrangling with Freedom of Information Act
requests reveals. A disquieting chronicle of censorship and its
consequences in the past, Threatening Anthropology is an impassioned
cautionary tale for the present.
[Note: David Price has authored numerous papers on the CIA's influence in
the field of anthropology, which you will find linked above.]
http://www.citypages.com/databank/25/1244/article12539.asp
A Q&A with Fred Whitehurst, the first FBI whistleblower to go public
The City Pages, Vol 25 #1244, Oct. 6, 2004
For Whitehurst's bio, see "FBI Whistleblowers: A Short List"
http://www.citypages.com/databank/25/1244/article12541.asp
City Pages: When did you begin voicing criticisms of the way things were
done, and at what point did FBI management begin to retaliate against you?
Frederic Whitehurst: When I went to the field, I saw things like voucher
fraud and banging the books--which means time and attendance fraud--and
some of us were bitterly disappointed about that. But we rationalized that
we were fighting a bigger enemy and every [organization] has fraud.
I'm a professional scientist. I've got a doctorate in chemistry. And when
I got to the lab, I realized that the place was a pigsty. That was in June
of 1986, and I started talking to some of my colleagues. I asked questions
of people right above me, the next level. I just about wasn't allowed to
be qualified as an examiner in the lab, not because I wasn't technically
qualified, but because, as they said, of all the damned ethics questions
I was asking.
I guess it was 1989 when I was faced with put up or shut up. I was at a
trial out in San Francisco when a colleague of mine was not being up-front.
I said the heck with it, nobody's ever listened to me before, I'll just
tell the defense experts. That caused a big uproar and I ended up suspended
from duty for a week and on probation for six months and docked a week's
pay. I felt that the work product of this fellow was bad, and I wanted it
reviewed. I went back to headquarters and said so.
I found out one day that another colleague had been altering my reports
for five years without my knowledge or authorization. I went forward with
that. I'm a Ph.D.-level chemist; he was a guy with a degree in political
science. Most of the reports he altered were altered significantly. When
I tried to get him to stop, it didn't matter to him. When I talked to
management, one of my managers said, Wait a minute, there doesn't need to
be a big fight about it.
[During the investigation of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing], I began
to see my reports were being altered by more than one person, people were
rendering opinions in courts of law that they weren't qualified to render,
we weren't following protocols--the list just expanded. I went to each
level of my management. I wasn't a bad guy about it. I said, here's an
issue I've got. And I went through those levels for four, five, six months,
and invariably someone would say, Yes, there's an issue, Fred. But get back
to work.
I was a law enforcement officer watching civil rights violations. I found
that to be inappropriate. I carried my complaints then from one level of
management to the next, until I got to the president, the Senate Judiciary
Committee, the director of the FBI. But if you tell somebody something's
wrong and he doesn't do anything about it, and six months later you go to
his boss and say, this guy hasn't done anything, you start to get some
animosity directed toward you.
It sort of built to a crescendo. I hired counsel in 1993 and began
interaction with top management of the FBI trying to get something to
happen. And their response was to try and destroy me. That went on until
'97, when the Inspector General [issued a report that] said, Fred
Whitehurst lacks common sense and good judgment. However, he is right on
some of these major issues. The day that the report came out, or within
a couple of days, I was put on administrative leave. We won in mediation.
I won my salary and my retirement at a GS14 level, but I agreed to retire
early. The government also agreed to pay the rest of my bills. I spent
$124,000 on legal bills. They dropped the third criminal investigation
they had thrown against me. And I retired.
If you win, if you're right, they tell you to go away. It's a good old
boy network, and everybody's covering for everybody.
CP: What sorts of things did they do to push you out? Jane Turner says
that practically every critic who's come along has been subjected to a
Fitness For Duty psychiatric evaluation.
Whitehurst: When they sent me to the shrink [for an FFD evaluation] and
said I had no choice, I knew I'd better get counsel, because it was going
to get dirty. That was 1993. They also do what a colleague of mine
referred to as internal marketing. The good old boy network will start
passing the word. I walked into a restaurant during the [1993] World
Trade Center bombing investigation and overheard one guy explaining to
another that I had lost my mind. There was some concern management had
about my mental stability. Also, I had a window office, and pretty soon
I'm sitting in the closet of a closet and the meaningful cases are being
taken away from me. My employees can tell me to kiss their ass, and if I
grade them down, management says, No, no, no, you've got to work with
them, Fred.
Whatever you do, wherever you turn, there's something you've done wrong.
Travel, holding classes--they stuck a trainee at my desk and moved me to
the other side of the building. Foolish little stuff. It gets to be sharks
after shark bait. The shrink, opening OPR investigations against you--it's
all there simply as a good old boy thing to quell dissension.
If someone launches an Equal Employment Opportunity complaint at the FBI,
that's the end of their career. Bam, they're gone. They'll never get
anywhere. If they speak up and have issues about management problems at
the FBI, if they don't go along with the groupthink in a case--there's
so many things. It's like walking on thin ice.
CP: Why hadn't any FBI whistleblowers emerged before you did in the late
'90s?
Whitehurst: Because people are terrified. They're absolutely terrified.
There's a culture of fear. Coleen Rowley spoke of it. But actually those
were Jane Turner's original words. As I wrote to the Inspector General,
I'm working with the bravest people I've ever worked with, and they're
absolutely terrified out of their wits. Absolute terror. That [FBI HQ]
building is close, uptight--it's like something out of an old movie about
the Soviet Union. Everybody's terrified to breathe in and out if they
aren't breathing in and out at the same time as the old man.
Everybody right now is covering, covering, covering.
http://english.pravda.ru/mailbox/22/101/399/14285_Allure.html
The Great Allure
By David R. Hoffman, Pravda, 09/22/2004
Hitler's Germany arose when the perfect combination of anger, bellicosity,
fear and hatred coalesced to make the masses receptive to the "allure of
fascism." Flash forward to the year 2004, and the machinations of George
W. Bush, and it is not difficult to perceive how this same allure is now
engulfing America.
If there is one compelling question in modern history, that question is:
"How, during the last century, could the nation of Germany, with a rich
history that produced some of the world's most renowned philosophers,
scholars, artists, inventors and musicians, have succumbed so readily to
the machinations of a madman like Adolf Hitler?"
Germany, after all, was not an isolated culture susceptible to superstition,
nor was it plagued by a poor educational system or lack of contact with the
outside world. Yet, despite all of these positives, many well-meaning
people entrusted their families, their futures, their nation and even their
lives to a man whose maniacal lust for power brought them nothing but
suffering, warfare, torture, and injustice.
While there may be several answers to the above question, one reality is
clear: Hitler's Germany arose when the perfect combination of anger,
bellicosity, fear and hatred coalesced to make the masses receptive to the
"allure of fascism."
Flash forward to the year 2004, and the machinations of George W. Bush,
and it is not difficult to perceive how this same allure is now engulfing
America. As I stated in previous PRAVDA articles, two fundamental tactics
of fascism -- scapegoating and the repetition of "great lies" -- have been
openly utilized by both Bush and the deceitful, venal, hypocritical war
criminals that personify his corruptly appointed dictatorship.
Saddam Hussein became the scapegoat for the September 11th, 2001 attacks on
the World Trade Center and Pentagon, even though there was no evidence to
link him to these attacks. Great lies were then disseminated about Hussein's
alleged "weapons of mass destruction" and his capability to use them. This,
in turn, ignited in the majority of Americans, and in the profit-driven,
corporate-controlled media, the jingoistic spirit that ultimately led to the
"preemptive" invasion of Iraq--an invasion that United Nations (UN) Secretary
Kofi Annan recently denounced as illegal.
But perhaps the "greatest lie ever told" by the Bush dictatorship is that
its megalomaniacal, bloodthirsty, cowardly, thieving, deceitful, hypocritical
leader is somehow a "Christian." Even a cursory examination of Bush's legacy
demonstrates that he has more in common with Pontius Pilate, the executioner
of Jesus Christ, than with the gentle soul from Nazareth.
Pilate zealously exploited the death penalty to increase his grip on power.
Bush, while governor of Texas, executed over one hundred and fifty people to
bolster his political career. Pilate, as demonstrated by Christ's crucifixion,
had little regard for whether those condemned to death were guilty or innocent.
Bush routinely denied requests from death-row inmates for independent DNA
testing that could have established their innocence, then boasted about the
"infallibility" of the Texas criminal justice system and how "no innocent
person" had been executed "under his watch."
Yet in August of 2003, thirty-five defendants, primarily African-American
and all tried under Texas "law," were pardoned after it was discovered that
perjured testimony had been used to convict them. More recently, a report
in USA TODAY (8/6/04) revealed that the DNA unit of the crime lab in Harris
County, Texas, where the City of Houston is located, had to be closed down
in 2002 because of "irregularities in the way technicians were trained,
handled evidence, interpreted tests and kept records." And in Angelina
County, Texas, on August 20, 2004, after more than forty-one years in
prison, Robert Carroll Coney was released after it was revealed that his
confession had been extracted by torture.
Pilate, through his minions, avidly used torture. Bush, through his minions,
avidly used torture at places like Abu Ghraib prison, while the CIA concealed
dozens of "ghost detainees" from Red Cross monitors. Pilate committed
atrocities against an occupied people. Bush continues to commit atrocities
against an occupied people, having murdered, at last count, over ten thousand
Iraqi civilians around Baghdad alone.
Furthermore, the Bush dictatorship's policies and practices bear no
resemblance to the teachings of the Christian faith. Jesus said, "Blessed
are the peacemakers." Bush brags about being a "wartime president." Jesus
was willing to suffer and die for his beliefs. Bush causes the suffering
and death of others, yet during the Vietnam era was too cowardly to risk
his own life, choosing instead to use his family's wealth and influence to
perform some nebulous National Guard "duties."
Many of the disciples who followed Jesus also suffered and died. Bush
surrounds himself with cowards like Dick (five deferments) Cheney, Paul
Wolfowitz, John Ashcroft and Karl Rove, all of whom avoided military service
through deferments or other schemes, yet all of whom are willing to callously
sacrifice the lives of others. Jesus proclaimed it is as difficult for the
rich to get into Heaven as it is for a camel to travel through the eye of a
needle.
Bush gives tax breaks to the rich, and calls them his "support base," while
Cheney gorges himself on war profits through links with corporations where
he has financial interests. Jesus healed the sick and raised the dead.
Bush's policies caused over one million Americans to lose their health
insurance last year alone. The inevitable result will undoubtedly be more
sickness and premature death. Jesus consistently rejected the reins of
mortal power. Bush used his cronies on the United States Supreme Court to
steal such power. In fact the only link Bush has to Christ's teachings is
that he personifies the very hypocrisy, corruption, counterfeit piety and
self-serving exploitation of religion that Jesus so openly condemned. There
is no doubt that America, and the world, would be a much better place
without so-called "Christians" like George W. Bush.
But even if one does not subscribe to the notion that religious hypocrisy
is enough to disqualify Bush from office, the so-called "successes" he boasts
of are not successes at all.
Bush blusters incessantly about his ability to wage the "war against
terrorism." Yet fighting terrorism was given low priority during the early
months of his dictatorship. He also ignored warnings about the potential for
terrorist attacks on American soil, and rumors still persist that Bush and
his minions actually welcomed the September 11th, 2001 attacks, since they
could be exploited as an excuse to invade Iraq, something the Bush
dictatorship had planned on doing immediately after the coup of 2000.
And Bush's so-called "war on terror" has actually resulted in more injustice
than justice, ranging from the torture of those detained shortly after the
September 11th attacks, to the wrongful arrest of an Oregon attorney, and
the trials of four Detroit-area men whose convictions were overturned after
it was discovered that the prosecution had withheld evidence that tended to
support the men's claim of innocence.
Yet America's woefully inept Attorney General, John Ashcroft, continues to
exaggerate and even lie about the extent of terrorist threats and the
reasons behind indictments for terrorism, while the FBI, armed with police
powers unheard of since its COINTELPRO days, when political activists were
spied upon, falsely imprisoned and even murdered, continues to lack the
decency to face its corruption or admit its mistakes. In the Detroit case,
Special FBI Agent in Charge Daniel Roberts went so far as to congratulate
his staff for their "excellent investigative work," even as other government
officials questioned the accuracy of the trial testimony provided by FBI
agents.
In addition, as long as Bush remains in office, the precedent of "unilateral
preemption" will continue to exist. Precedents, as those who work in the
legal system know, are designed to be followed, and poor precedents can open
a proverbial Pandora's box of suffering and injustice.
When the Bush dictatorship launched its "preemptive" invasion of Iraq,
it made the use of war a first response instead of a final option. In
addition, by acting in defiance of international law and opinion, by
ignoring negotiations and diplomacy, by lying to the world, by failing to
give United Nations inspectors sufficient time to complete their work, the
Bush dictatorship demonstrated not only its myopia and arrogance, but also
its contempt for people in other nations.
Now that myopia, arrogance and contempt may arise to haunt the Bush
dictatorship, as other nations are seizing upon the precedent of unilateral
preemption. Russian President Vladimir Putin has expressed a willingness
to employ this strategy in response to the tragic school siege at Beslan,
where scores of children were killed. Not surprisingly Putin has denounced
the hypocrisy of the Bush dictatorship for wanting him to engage in
"negotiations" instead.
Thanks to the Bush dictatorship, "unilateral preemption" is now a living,
breathing reality in today's world, ready to be seized upon not only by
nations with legitimate security issues or concerns, but by any nation that
is willing, like the Bush dictatorship, to lie and manufacture artificial
"threats" to justify preemptive strikes.
Logic would dictate that the only way this Pandora's box can be closed is
with a new leader in Washington, who can renounce the myopia, recklessness
and arrogance of the Bush dictatorship and make it clear that without UN
approval and/or a strong international coalition, the United States will
never again engage in preemptive wars.
One argument currently being forwarded to rationalize Bush's election (not
reelection, because Bush was never elected in the first place) is the adage,
"You don't change horses in the middle of a stream." With troops bogged
down in a quagmire in Iraq, many Americans are contending that the nation
should not change leaders as long as the quagmire persists.
The illogic of this argument is obvious. It was the Bush dictatorship's
incompetence, ignorance, arrogance, unilateralism and myopia that caused
this quagmire. Do Americans want a system where all one has to do to get
elected is start an illegal war and then drag it on until elections are
over?
Clearly if Bush were the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of a publicly-
held corporation, and the shareholders were seeing that his policies
and practices were driving the firm into bankruptcy, there would be no
hesitation in demanding his ouster. If ignorance and incompetence are not
tolerated in the private financial sector, where only money is at stake,
why should it be tolerated in the public sector when thousands of lives
are at risk?
With all of these reasons to cast off the shackles of the Bush dictatorship,
one must ask, "Why are the polls regarding the presidential election so
close?" Logic would seem to dictate that Bush's character, dishonesty and
hypocrisy make him unfit to be the leader of arguably the most powerful
nation on earth.
This question can be answered by looking at the third, and perhaps
most effective, tactic of fascism, and one the Bush dictatorship has
consistently exploited: Hitler's hypothesis that "[t]he driving force of
the most important changes in the world have been found less in scientific
knowledge animating the masses but rather in a fanaticism dominating them
and in a hysteria which drives them forward." Stated another way, emotion
is more powerful than logic in motivating the masses, and appeals to human
nature's basest instincts are the most powerful motivators of all.
Bush has used America's perfect combination of anger, bellicosity, fear
and hatred, fueled by the September 11th attacks, to blind Americans to
the depths of his evil. He and those in his dictatorship are some of the
most depraved human beings on the face of the earth, and they may, either
directly or indirectly, be the biggest threat to world peace and stability
since Adolf Hitler.
What makes this threat even more imminent is the prospect of the lone
voice of reason in the Bush dictatorship, Secretary of State Colin Powell,
not retaining his position if Bush wins (or steals) the upcoming election.
While Powell has always publicly shuffled obediently behind "Massa Bush,"
privately he has been a voice of restraint, and possesses the military
experience and expertise that most in the Bush dictatorship lack. With his
voice silenced, who knows what other evils will spring forth from this
newly opened Pandora's box.
Edmund Burke is quoted as saying, "The only thing necessary for the triumph
of evil is for good people to do nothing." Evil has triumphed in America,
and if it continues on its apocalyptic course, soon there will be nothing
that good people can do.
David Hoffman is the legal editor for Pravda. See also:
<http://english.pravda.ru/cgi-bin/co.pl?action=out&from=http://english.pravda.ru&to=http://english.pravda.ru/accidents/21/96/383/11003_Hoffman.html>David<http://english.pravda.ru/cgi-bin/co.pl?action=out&from=http://english.pravda.ru&to=http://english.pravda.ru/accidents/21/96/383/11003_Hoffman.html>Hoffman
: Politics of Assassination - PRAVDA.Ru
<http://english.pravda.ru/cgi-bin/co.pl?action=out&from=http://english.pravda.ru&to=http://english.pravda.ru/science/19/95/381/11027_Hoffman.html>David<http://english.pravda.ru/cgi-bin/co.pl?action=out&from=http://english.pravda.ru&to=http://english.pravda.ru/science/19/95/381/11027_Hoffman.html>R.
Hoffman : The Essence of History - PRAVDA.Ru
<http://english.pravda.ru/cgi-bin/co.pl?action=out&from=http://english.pravda.ru&to=http://english.pravda.ru/mailbox/22/98/387/11693_bush.html>Bush
vs. Hitler - PRAVDA.Ru
http://www.duckdaotsu.org/07212004-bushhitler.html
Bush-Hitler: Hypnotizing the Masses
By Russell M. Drake, July 21, 20
Said by some to be more dangerous than Osama bin-Laden, he has been
condemned as a "war maniac," called a "moron" by the Canadian prime
minister's chief spokeswoman, ridiculed as "The English Patient" for his
struggles with language, and likened to Adolf Hitler.
Of all the labels hung on George W. Bush, the hardest to shake may be
the comparison with Hitler.
Perhaps the clearest likeness between the two men lies in their use of
emotionally induced hypnosis to plant in the mass consciousness an image
of themselves as protectors of their subjects from threats to national
survival both inside and outside the fatherland.
In a June, 2003 article written for /The Nation/ about Bush's "mastery
of emotional language, especially negatively charged emotional
language," clinical psychologist Reanna Brooks observed that "Bush
creates and maintains negative frameworks in his listeners' minds with a
number of linguistic techniques borrowed from hypnosis and advertising
to instill the image of a dark and evil world around us."
His subliminal messages to justify religious war against "evildoers" are
right out of Madison Avenue. Writing in /The New Yorker/ of July 12 &
19, David Greenberg tells how Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, "himself
an evangelical, laces the President's addresses with seemingly innocuous
terms that the devout recognize as laden with meaning: 'whirlwind,'
'work of mercy,' 'safely home,' 'wonderworking power.'"
Aspiring political hypnotists would do well to study Hitler as an
introduction to Bush.
"Without in any way straining language we can truthfully say that he
(Hitler) was one of the great hypnotists of all time," says George H.
Estabrooks in /Hypnotism/, the ne plus ultra of Hitler hypnosis books.
Dr. Estabrooks was chairman of Colgate University's psychology
department, and taught at the school from 1927 to 1964.
Demonizing Saddam
"The efficiency of the truly national leader consists primarily in
preventing the division of the attention of the people, and always in
concentrating it on a single enemy." Hitler said that, in /Mein Kampf/.
Bush could just as easily have said it. Having lost public focus on
Osama bin Laden by his inability to capture the wily 9/11 bomber, he
found it not just convenient, but necessary, to replace bin Laden with
Saddam Hussein as the new "single enemy," a stratagem inherited from the
first President Bush who damned Hussein as "worse than Hitler" in the
run-up to Desert Storm, the first Iraq war. On the eve of war in early
October, 1990, ex-president Ronald Reagan picked up the beat before a
crowd of Houston Republicans, denouncing his former Iraqi ally as "the
reincarnation of Hitler."
"Depicting Saddam Hussein as an evil man made it easier to justify U. S.
involvement in the Persian Gulf War. Psychology is an important part of
any war strategy." from Introduction to Psychology, a textbook by Mark
Garrison, Kentucky State University. If demonizing Saddam was effective
strategy in the first Gulf war, the current administration worked
wonders with it, with a little help from people like 60 Minutes' Andy
Rooney and Bill Clinton who, on the David Letterman show, September 11,
2002, called Saddam "a threat, a murderer and thug..." while endorsing
his removal.
Fear Hypnosis
In search of support for shaky WMD charges against Saddam, Bush found
the torture issue and put it on the front burner in his January 2003
State of the Union address: "This dictator who is assembling the world's
most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving
thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured. Iraqi refugees
tell us how forced confessions are obtained by torturing children while
their parents are made to watch. International human rights groups have
catalogued other methods used in the torture chambers of Iraq: electric
shock, burning with hot irons, dripping acid on the skin, mutilation
with electric drills, cutting out tongues and rape."
Bush went on to urge Americans to come together in an orgy of fear
induced self hypnosis by mentally imaging the dreadful prospect of Iraqi
sponsored terrorists attacking the U. S., and tried again to link the
Iraqi leader to the 9/11 attack on the twin towers: "Imagine those 19
hijackers with other weapons and other plans - this time armed by
Saddam....We will do everything in our power to make sure that that day
never comes." If Saddam had not existed, Bush would have invented him.
Press Supports War on Iraq
With skillful use of fear hypnosis, Bush not only gulled the public, but
played a credulous press like a Steinway baby grand.
The establishment press fell in behind Bush almost to a man in endorsing
his war aims against Iraq. This blind procession is amply documented by
reporter Chris Mooney in the March/April 2004 issue of the /Columbia
Journalism Review/. /The Los Angeles Times/ and the /New York Times/
weakly dissented from war without UN approval but rolled over when Bush
went ahead anyway. Even the usually skeptical /The New Yorker/ saw merit
in Bush's war plans, warning that absent "Saddam's abdication, or a
military coup...a return to a hollow pursuit of containment will be the
most dangerous option of all."
Hypnosis Contagion
The demonization of Saddam spread like germs.
"The mob leader will count on emotional contagion....Emotions are far
more contagious than the measles. This fact of emotional contagion was
very important to Hitler," says Estabrooks. Emotional statements by a
hypnotic leader, he avers, are "burned" into receptive subconscious
minds with the permanence of an image engraved on a photographic negative.
To be hypnotized by one such as Bush is to be branded with his ideology
and to bend to his will as he so directs. This is true of anyone drawn
uncritically to any leader or dominant figure. Be it Bush or Clinton,
Hitler or Churchill, Reagan or FDR, the difference in the degree of
hypnotically induced allegiance depends on the skill of the hypnotist
and the suggestibility of the subject.
In /The Group Mind/, first published in 1920 by Putnam, author William
McDougall says, "It is well recognized that almost any emotional
excitement increases the suggestibility of the individual, though the
explanation of the fact remains obscure."
By putting the horror mask on Saddam, by petrifying U. S. citizens with
tales of Saddam's gases and torture chambers and terrorist connections,
Bush dusted off and refined an old Hitler trick.
"The one means that wins the easiest victory over reason: terror and
force." Hitler, /Mein Kampf./
Putting his own spin on Hitler's formula, Bush induced fear-of-Saddam
hypnosis in Americans to set them up for repetition hypnosis, to deepen
and fix the fear. "Axis of evil" - "weapons of mass destruction" -
"torture chambers" - "Iraqi terrorists" - "grave and gathering danger,"
all gained dominance in the thought patterns of Americans to lure them
to Bush's side against the evil Saddam.
"The influence of repetition on crowds is comprehensible when the power
is seen which it exercises on the most enlightened minds. This power is
due to the fact that the repeated statement is embedded in the long run
in those profound regions of our unconscious selves in which the motives
of our actions are forged." So said Gustave Le Bon in/ The Crowd/, his
seminal study of political hypnosis, published in 1897.
Bush Power Hypnosis
Why did Bush thus goad Americans to war by hypnotizing them? The answer
seems to be that from day one, he intended the chaos of crisis and war
to put in place a domestic agenda that he knew stood little chance of
succeeding in peace.
He gambled that the electorate would be reluctant to change leaders in
the crisis of war just as crewmen would hesitate to pull the captain
from the bridge of their ship even as he sailed into a field of icebergs.
Bush's incendiary bluster on taking office would seem to support this
scenario. In turn, he dissed North Korean and Iranian leaders, sat by
while the intafada exploded into the bloodiest, most enduring sequel of
suicide bombings and Israeli retaliation in the history of the war,
trashed the Kyoto treaty to reduce global air pollution, unilaterally
revoked the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty with Russia, and vetoed U. S.
support of a world court to try war crimes.
The Republican 'Pearl Harbor'
His actions appeared designed to escalate seething world resentment of
America's imperial transgressions to flash point, provoking an outbreak
of hostilities that would draw the nation into armed conflict.
While Bush and his handlers may not have expected a reaction to their
warmongering so costly as 9/11, when it came may well have regarded it
as God-sent. The twin towers disaster has been called "the Republicans'
Pearl Harbor," because of the opportunity it presented to rally the
electorate around Bush and continue him in power, as Pearl Harbor did
for FDR.
In /Bush's Brain/, by James Moore and Wayne Slater, Bush advisor Karl
Rove is seen as agitating for the Iraq invasion to keep war fever alive
when the hunt for bin Laden faltered and as 9/11 receded in the public
consciousness. Other administration figures stepped forward to beat the
war drums.
A March 5, 2004 article in the /New York Times/ said, "Mr. Bush and his
aides have planned for more than a year to make the president's response
to terrorist attacks the centerpiece of his re-election effort."
"We are fighting a global war on terrorism," said National Security
Advisor Condoleezza Rice, on "Meet the Press," Sunday, March 14, 2004.
In early February on "Meet the Press," Bush referred to himself as a
"war president" and said he had "war on my mind" when he made decisions
in the Oval Office.
Verbal Confusion Hypnosis
While Bush may have led the nation into war with Hitler hypnosis he has
kept it there with hypnosis of his own making, a technological tour de
force of classical, textbook hypnosis that eclipses anything Hitler used
and sets Bush apart as a political hypnosis stylist in his own right.
When it became apparent as time passed that Weapons of Mass Destruction
in Iraq was an illusion, Bush segued smoothly into verbal confusion
hypnosis, which is discussed at some length in /Handbook of Clinical and
Experimental Hypnosis/, by Jesse E. Gordon:
"The verbal confusion technique, which is quite difficult to
administer, involves an approximation of double-talk in which
instructions of a somewhat contradictory kind are given in rapid
succession making it impossible for the attentive subject either to
quite comprehend or quite acquiesce to any of them. Finally, he
simply gives up all attempts and more or less collapses into a
hypnotic state."
Exactly. A review of the Bush hocus-pocus in his 2004 State of the Union
address, for example, shows how nimbly he skipped through a maze of
issues such as WMD - deftly changed to "weapons of mass
destruction-related program activities" - no child left behind, "the
sanctity of marriage," senior drug discount cards, invading Iraq in the
interests of national survival and world peace, "foreign terrorists,"
permanent tax relief, jobs, and much, much more. Holding up one theme
card after another for public review, before they could "quite
comprehend or quite acquiesce to any of them," Bush fanned the deck and
flashed yet another card at his bewildered audience.
A "GOP strategist" complained to the /Los Angeles Times/, "He's all over
the map now, sending a lot of confused messages to the voters." Of course.
Many now openly wonder how so obvious a lie as WMD could have passed
muster with such a large majority of Americans.
One answer is provided by Hitler in /Mein Kampf/: "In the size of the
lie there is always contained a certain factor of credibility, since the
great masses of the people....will more easily fall victim to a great
lie than to a small one." Thus was born the concept of the "Big Lie,"
yet another Hitler crowd manipulation tool co-opted by Bush.
Even the most skeptical may succumb to hypnotic contagion but later find
the resources to cast off the devil spell, says William McDougall. Among
the most fervent Bush supporters have been people now coming forward to
say that they are "uncomfortable" with reports that the reasons given
for going to war may have been nothing more than a pack of Bush lies.
Call them recovering Bush dupes.
War is Peace
Perhaps the biggest challenge he has given the public is asking them to
think of his war making as, actually, peace making. Think of the
Pentagon as the "Ministry of Peace," charged with making perpetual war
in George Orwell's /Nineteen Eighty-Four/.
Bush has been almost studious in application of the hypnotic word
"peace" to sugarcoat his designs for war.
"Peace" has become his slogan.
"Slogans are both exciting and comforting, but they are also powerful
opiates for the conscience....Some of mankind's most terrible misdeeds
have been committed under the spell of certain magic words or phrases,"
said Harvard University president James Bryant Conant in the
Baccalaureate Address to Harvard College, June 17, 1934.
"How many people in the confusion of a defeat or crisis have been
reassured by one word? Peace. Independence. Reconstruction. Without
taking a closer look, they adopt the leader in whose name this ideal
has been proposed. It is the ideal that unites them and leads them
into the venture. If necessary, technicians will be responsible for
conducting it from the inside so long as the figurehead maintains
his prestige."
- Jean Dauven, /The Powers of Hypnosis./
Nixon national security advisor Henry Kissinger intoned "Peace is at
hand" as voters prepared to go to the polls in November, 1972 to choose
between George McGovern and Richard Nixon as the candidate most likely
to end the Vietnam War. In one of the most cynical betrayals of public
trust on record, Kissinger the technician lied to a desperate nation
about the prospects of peace in order to get the figurehead reelected.
After Nixon was safely reinstalled in the White House, saturation
bombing to coerce North Vietnam to U. S. peace terms started again, with
the unspeakable Christmas bombing of Hanoi as the main attraction.
Author, foreign correspondent and broadcaster William L. Shirer, who
witnessed Hitler's rise to power, commented in /The Rise and Fall of the
Third Reich/ on Hitler's masterful use of the peace card.
"On the evening of May 21 (1935), he delivered another
'peace'speech....one of the cleverest and most misleading of his
Reichstag orations.....He rejected the very idea of war, it was
senseless, it was useless, as well as a horror."
But while the world was lulled by his peace offensive, the master of the
Thousand Year Reich plotted the war he said he abhorred.
George W. Bush misses no chance to reaffirm his dedication to peace and
to denounce those who he says threaten peace.
He mounted the pulpit of the United Nations, September 17, 2002 to bully
the international body with his peace message: "The United Nations must
act. It's time to determine whether or not they'll be a force for good
and peace or an ineffective debating society."
He stood before Congress and the press, sent an emissary to the
Orwellian sounding United States Institute of Peace, went on the radio,
appeared at factories and military bases, hawking his peace message
while putting U. S. forces in place to invade Iraq.
Sometimes, to justify keeping the country in a state of war, he combines
"peace" with "freedom" and "security" as in his commencement address to
the students of Concordia University, May 14 this year when he said,
"America works for peace and freedom....For the sake of peace, for the
sake of security, we stand for freedom." Administration spokespersons,
notably Condoleezza Rice, repeat these buzz words in their own speeches.
Bush Radio Hypnosis
With his regular Saturday radio addresses, Bush works heroically on
turning Americans into automatons of subservience to his goals. John
Kerry, refusing to concede the airwaves to Bush, is using the medium to
respond to Bush attack ads and launch attacks of his own, giving every
indication that he will continue the tradition of Saturday presidential
radio if elected.
Radio is the most hypnotic of the media as, in the words of Jean Dauven,
"It is through the spoken word that the hypnotist exercises his power."
The audio nature of broadcast fosters an illusion of privacy that allows
the hypnotist to flatter the listener that he/she is being addressed
exclusively, enhancing the listener's suggestibility.
Hate-Talk Radio Hypnosis
Estabrooks witnessed the birth of political radio hypnosis and the
advent of the craft's earliest stars, FDR, Churchill, and Hitler. He
predated Rush Limbaugh's lobotomized rabble by decades, but was in on
the beginnings of hate-talk radio when Father Charles Coughlin and the
Rev. Gerald L. K. Smith poisoned the airwaves in the 1930s.
Estabrooks would have been fascinated with the emergence of Ronald
Reagan, radio hypnotism's modern master. With his banal gipperisms,
deeply imbedded fear of communism and Soviet nuclear threat
obsessive-compulsive anxiety disorder, all delivered in the polished
tones of a professional broadcaster, Reagan robbed a generation of
Americans of their capacity to think critically, a condition perpetuated
by his disciples as witnessed in the transcontinental state funeral of
early June, 2004, a seven-day binge of national hypnosis. Brain dead
from Alzheimer's for 10 years, Reagan was resurrected from the public
media files to extend his hypnotic hold on Americans, all part of the
Republican power keeping machinery which includes putting Reagan's
picture on money and carving his likeness either on Mt. Rushmore, or
"our own mountain," as one of his adherents puts it.
Men of Action Don't Apologize
The president, by the very nature of his position at the pinnacle of
power, is hypnotic. Probably no president, with the possible exceptions
of Nixon and Reagan, has marshaled so powerful an arsenal of hypnosis,
or exercised it so energetically and effectively as George W. Bush.
Successful hypnosis of the electorate satisfies a demagogue's dream -
uncritical acceptance of the man and his policies by a majority. Bush
has been good enough at it to acquire an aura of invincibility that
predictably has led to an excess of hubris in his conduct.
As Reagan and the elder Bush did not apologize for Iran-Contra, do not
expect George W. Bush to ever forswear his actions in Iraq. It is not in
his nature to admit mistakes or reflect on his misdeeds, nor apparently
is it in the nature of his closest aides and subordinates to do so
either. Gustave Le Bon described the type in /The Crowd/.
"The leaders we speak of are more frequently men of action than
thinkers. They are not gifted with keen foresight, nor could they
be, as this quality generally conduces to doubt and inactivity. They
are especially recruited from the ranks of those morbidly nervous,
excitable, half-deranged persons who are bordering on
madness...their convictions are so strong that all reasoning is lost
on them. Contempt and persecution do not affect them, or only serve
to excite them more."
George Estabrooks spoke of such men possessing ".....an uncanny drive, a
restless energy, as they push forward toward their own self-centered
ideal, and they will be utterly ruthless in attaining their ends. The
rights of others, even the lives of others, are simply of no consequence
if they stand between the dictator and his determined goal....
The dictator really believes that he is God's chosen instrument - or
society's chosen instrument if he does not believe in God - to lead his
group, or possibly the entire world, into the promised land."
Bush apparently has long held the notion that God wants him to be
president. On the occasion of his second inauguration as Texas governor,
he "gathered a few trusted colleagues in his office to announce, 'God
wants me to be president,'" according to Southern Baptist leader Richard
Land as quoted in online Slate magazine, April 29, 2004.
Bush's Hypnotized Supporters
Bush spinmeisters will continue to place their candidate in front of
unsuspecting NASCAR dads, right wing religious fundamentalists, teenage
soldiers, home owners, sports fans, snow mobilers and dirt bikers,
loggers and roughnecks, teamsters and hard-hats, 2nd Amendment zealots,
high school dropouts, Orange County developers, and field hands, where
the president can work his inspirational way into their hearts and
minds. This has been called targeting "the lowest common denominator,"
but Nazi propaganda chief Paul Joseph Goebbels had a better description,
revealed in his diaries discovered in the rubble of the Propaganda
Ministry at the end of World War II:
".....the rank and file are usually much more primitive than we
imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and
repetitious. In the long run only he will achieve basic results
influencing public opinion who is able to reduce problems to the
simplest terms and who has the courage to keep forever repeating
them in this simplified form despite the objections of the
intellectuals."
Bush, the Elected Dictator
Will all of this lead to a New Thousand Year Reich in America?
George Estabrooks warned that such an outcome, while not inevitable, is
not impossible.
"How can we guarantee that our choice at the polls will be a wise
one?......on this matter of electing a potential dictator, you will
make that mistake once only. From then on, he will take care that
your mistakes are always in his favor......
"Sit down and think over that last spellbinder you heard on the
platform, over the radio or on television.....Were you listening to
a man of reason or to a hypnotist who aimed to limit your field of
consciousness? You say you cannot be hypnotized against your will.
Perhaps you were hypnotized last night as you listened to that
political address over your TV.....The most dangerous hypnotist may
be the man you listened to last week over the radio. You were his
subject....As a matter of fact, you were a very excellent subject.
Think it over....."
Hitler aide Albert Speer and newscaster William L. Shirer commented on a
recent moment in history when a great people became the eager followers
of a hypnotic leader who led them to ruin.
".....as I see it today, these politicians in particular were in
fact molded by the mob itself, guided by its yearnings and
daydreams...Certainly the masses roared to the beat set by Hitler's
and Goebbel's baton, yet they were not the true conductors. The mob
determined the theme."
- Albert Speer, /Inside the Third Reich/.
"The Germans imposed the Nazi tyranny on themselves."
- William L. Shirer, /The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich/.
--
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"Global Transformation: Whey We Need It And How We Can Achieve It", current
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_____________________________
"...the Patriot Act followed 9-11 as smoothly as the
suspension of the Weimar constitution followed the
Reichstag fire."
- Srdja Trifkovic
There is not a problem with the system.
The system is the problem.
Faith in ourselves - not gods, ideologies, leaders, or programs.
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