I Hate to Say, ‘I Told You So’ . . .

My mind is still reeling about last Saturday’s shooting in Tucson, in which 22 year-old Jared Lee Loughner took the lives of 6 people and wounded another 13.  Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is still in critical condition, we are told, though, thankfully, she continues to improve.  Today, part of me wants to say, “I told you so,” but another part of me just wants to crawl into a hole and hide.  Initial news reports Saturday afternoon were quick to tell us that Loughner, once he had been identified as a suspect, was a drug- and alcohol-abusing loner who published screeds about the treasonous American government, religion and mind control in his online social network accounts.  They were less forthcoming about the reasons why he did so, and without understanding these crucial facts, I fervently maintain that we are doomed to live with countless many more Jared Lee Loughners being groomed among us.  Therefore, with the sole interest in preventing more tragedies such as last Saturday’s, I boldly propose we look more carefully at the facts we have.

Loughner was troubled – of that, there can be no doubt.  But lost in the endless speculation about him – that he’s schizophrenic, that he’s a racist, that he hates the government, that he’s antisocial – is perhaps the most telling actual fact that has been discretely brushed aside by nearly every major and most minor news outlets regarding his motivation for acting as he did January 8th:  there are records in the possession of the police that demonstrate Loughner went to them for help after a former “friend” had posted an unflattering, fake profile of him on peekyou.com.  He was, obviously, ignored by them.  He was being terrorized, and police did nothing about it.  True – this news appears on the most mistrusted news station in the world, Fox news, but that should be enough to give anyone pause; perhaps our mistrust of Fox News is being manipulated so that we likewise doubt this fact as such.  We know for whose benefit Fox always acts; no thinking person trusts them for good reason, which makes it even more incredible that this station is the one that has broadcast the fact Loughner had gone to police for help because his identity had been stolen for nefarious reasons (to portray him as something other than that which he, himself, claimed to be).  In what imaginary parallel universe is Fox ever the sole distributor of facts?  You instantly want to dismiss it, but you ought not to, not least because police complaints are a matter of public record.  In those regarding Loughner, we see not only that he, himself, was the victim of a terror campaign, but that the rest of his family was as well.

For who knows how long Loughner’s identity had been co-opted, but it’s clear that, indeed, it was to some degree and for an as-yet unstated – though apparently nefarious – reason.  Should we take, then, at face value the reports that he was merely a drug- and alcohol- abusing bully?  At the very least, shouldn’t we consider that the all-too-familiar path to becoming a bully is the experience of having once been bullied?  Loughner’s father has allegedly said his son was out of control, but we don’t know if he understood what very well may have been happening to his son – whether or not he knew his son was merely reacting to being a target who was tortured and terrorized each and every day of his life for what appears to be quite some time.  In this covert war our government is still waging against liberals opposed to the military domination of other countries by it, it is highly unlikely it will ever be proved Loughner is the victim of government interference, and for someone unfamiliar with the covert warfare arsenal historically used by our military dictatorship against citizens of this country – among which is an arsenal of the most intrusively designed and insidiously deployed weapons, colloquially called, “mind control” weapons – it can be damned difficult for him or her to understand the malignant perversion which results from the deployment of these weapons against a target’s personality and personhood, the destruction of which is the end goal of them, even if that someone is a more than usually sympathetic parent.  (Turns out the New World Order is actually the same, old world order except with better – in the sense they are less detectable and therefore more indicative of our government’s guilt – weapons.)  If Loughner’s parents didn’t have a realistic understanding of what was happening to their son, why should we expect people who are paid to write scandalous stories to give us one?  Loughner wasn’t born a schizophrenic, or a government dissident, or a white supremacist.  Whether or not he actually became any of these things, has merely been repudiated as such, or was induced to do what he did last Saturday by insidious means of persuasion the average person has no idea our government has long had the ability to propagate in an individual’s mind is unclear at this point.  What I can tell you is that people interfered with by our government in this way are numerous, scared and hopeless.  They also tend to be one other thing:  naively brave.

I am speaking, of course, about the people who risk their lives trying to tell you about the heinous covert warfare your government has waged against you, one of whom may (or may not) actually be Jared Lee Loughner.  They don’t rant about the government because they hope to become famous (or infamous), or because they want to be regarded by you as crazy.  They are, generally speaking, thoughtful, passionate and – yes – distressed.  And they are increasingly children whose normal development has been corrupted.  In Loughner’s case, we heard about his arrest record, his bullying, his drug and alcohol abuse and his dropping out of community college, but we also heard very little about the aforementioned complaint to police.  That’s a shame because before Loughner was any of these things – if ever, indeed, he was the more reprehensible things – he was, himself, being bullied in the most treacherous way imaginable.  His trust had been elicited and then betrayed by someone who may never have had any intention of being his true friend, and, as a consequence, his reputation was crafted into that of the most repugnant and monstrous type of sociopath known – the white supremacist.  That reputation is what caused his alienation from (so-called) decent society – not the other way around – long before he ever thought of purchasing and using a gun against a member of the group of people that has given billions of dollars to defense contractors and security contractors to develop, distribute and use the type of weapons about which Loughner railed and of which he may very well have been a victim.  That this young man chose violence against others (as opposed to the self-inflicted violence which the young, bullied, gay men who killed themselves last fall chose) as a means to mitigate the threats he perceived around him is reprehensible and inexcusable; nevertheless, we must face the fact that normal people do not behave in these ways.  Troubled people behave in these ways.  Normal people must be driven to such desperate acts.  For as little as we know about Loughner, this is without doubt true of him, and this should be the first – and last – fact we hear about him until all other facts are known.  But it isn’t.  What we are hearing instead is the same tired mix of cliché and stereotype, which makes it extremely difficult for us to see that Jared Lee Loughner could very easily be any of our sons.  That’s because the one war you can never win is the one you don’t know that you’re in.

Rush Limbaugh, the most prolific user since Joseph Goebbels of ad hominem disparagements that can only be qualified as hate speech, blamed metal music, in predictably hypocritical fashion.  Mother Jones appears more sympathetic, merely condemning Loughner as mentally ill, a “schizophrenic,” the traditionally common and deliberate misdiagnosis made unprofessionally by health care contractors under the influence of the U.S. military, or untrained casual observers which are then, in cases of public outrage such as this, picked up by professional (that is to say, paid and not necessarily truthful) opinion makers.  TIME, CBS.com, The Atlantic and Forbes have done just that and offered very little critical thinking about the story being presented to the world regarding Loughner.  We are so anxious to take sides against one another in our debates about who the true Americans are and air our speculations over who are not true Americans, standing beside the bodies of the dead and wounded, we have not stopped to educate ourselves about the very real threats to all of us that the young man who foolishly went to police looking their help because he was aware that his identity had been taken over virtually for nefarious purposes was trying to tell us:  that he, like untold millions of Americans today was being interfered with by an entity with the power to destroy his (and through him, that of others) life.

If Loughner is yet another Manchurian candidate, he is but one of the many millions of actual Americans whose free will has been supplanted using one or more of the many, many weapons in the hands of the military, police and average Americans working with them that are designed to do just that.  As such, both his personality and behavior may very well have been corrupted by these people for their own ends for years and is in no way representative of Loughner’s true personality and behavior.  People such as Loughner are obviously the only ones who are intimately acquainted with how our military dictatorship oppresses its serfs using covert weapons, and I ask you now, to whom should we listen when they testify to their persecution, if we are not willing to listen to them?  Their testimony is all we have that can save us from becoming like them.  The people who wage covert war are not going to tell us this is what they are doing.  As a much-maligned target of this military dictatorship myself, I am inclined to give any first-hand witness of its godless misdeeds the benefit of the doubt because I, too, have been the victim of it.  It’s the least I can do for one who may very well be another tortured and terrorized soul, disturbed though Loughner without doubt is, because I know that people such as he have been robbed of the deepest, most fundamentally human parts of their psyches – the parts that make revelations such as this nearly impossible (I say “nearly impossible” because there is one way in which they are still possible; first commenter whose explanation of precisely how they still are that I receive gets a free copy of Eric Metaxas’s new biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Bonhoeffer:  Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. Here’s a hint.)

The very same day of the attack, commentators on the wall of one of my more provocative FaceBook ‘friends’ were squaring off:  those defending Sarah Palin’s call to target (and reload as often as necessary) even nominal liberals such as Gabrielle Giffords, and those who were rightfully condemning her for her incitements to violence.  One fellow wrote, “If we could only get all of the bleeding heart liberals to rest their case the world would be a much more reasoned place to live. But no! Sadley (sic) we must all listen to and read constantly the moronic rantings (sic) and blatherings (sic) from a sad little group who just had their asses handed to them in the change of power in the House of Reps; this week. And if we the people will hold those we put in office accountable and vote even more of the liberal socialist out of office then maybe we can all breath (sic) a little easier knowing that morons and idiots that think the government (sic) owes them and those that think like them a higher standerd (sic) of living than they have earned off the hard working backs and out of the tax paying pockets of everyone else,” to which I responded, “I remember deciding when I was about 5 or 6 that it was stupid to waste ergs judging people I didn't know because, well, I didn't know them and what use were judgments about them, then? And since I couldn't meet every single person in the world, it was a supreme waste of energy that could be expended more profitably than forming baseless opinions about people, to make those baseless opinions in the first place.”  Now, I’ve had sporgery before on FaceBook, and perhaps the profile alleged to have posted this comment is not actually the author of them, but as any FaceBook user knows, despite its Rights and Responsibilities agreement that every FaceBook user is obliged to agree to when he or she creates an account, FaceBook sanctions threatening, obscene and disparaging right-wing opinion makers far, far, far less than its moderators (need to) delete comments from those who take more rational positions than, for example, the first in this example.  These are the types of comments being thrown around (and much worse) there, in this war against liberals, and they betray a mindset of domination that in no way represents the ideals of truth and freedom, common humanity, a Christian or other ethic, never mind a patriotic one.  This is the philosophy of the brute ‘social Darwinist’ who believes in nothing but his power to dominate others in the sturm and drang of life.  This is the mindset of the fascist; me against you, no such thing as community (again, Christian or other), or shared, public government.  Surely, the only person that ultimately matters is the one in front of you, but none of these alleged right- (and, sadly, many alleged left-)wing combatants seems to understand this.  Not surprisingly, this fellow’s response was to qualify my post as a rant, just as Loughner’s posts about our military dictatorship have been characterized.  I don’t know if the author of these comments is a fan of Rush Limbaugh’s, or not, but he seems to use the same thoughtless, paint-with-broad-black-brushstrokes tactics as the master manipulator does, who, in one fashion or another, leads all the talking heads with his vitriol.

We may never know truly who Jared Lee Loughner is, and that is the only certainty we should, by today, understand that we have because that certain uncertainty – like the fake white supremacist posing as Jared Lee Loughner on peekyou.com – is exactly the reason for which your government has designed these covert weapons:  to keep you ignorant of what more and more of the persecuted here in America know to be true about our military dictatorship.  Our sympathies today are with those who were shot, the only apparent victims of this tragic event, but I challenge you who claim to be people of faith to think very carefully about what happens to those of us who are persecuted by our government because of our willfully foreshortened scope of vision, and include in your prayers for the victims of last Saturday’s attack Jared Lee Loughner and his pained and confused family as well.

There’s really not much more that needs to be said than this - except, perhaps, that you can expect many, many, many more Sirhan Sirhans and Jared Lee Loughners in the days and weeks to come, unless you who believe you have a right to live free of military interference by your government on the most basic level of your existence stand with those of us who know we most certainly do not possess that right in America today, and you challenge this fascist dictatorship in which we all live.

Boy – do I hate to say, ‘I told you so.’  These essays just keep getting harder and harder to write despite their apparently necessary redundancy.

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May Day

It occurred to me Saturday that my blog was crying out for help – shouting its own mayday call. Much of its content has to do with my life as a targeted individual, but I realize only now that many of my readers may have no idea just what is a targeted individual, or “TI.”

The term comes from the military, not surprisingly. They’re the ones with the artillery, and they direct that artillery as anyone with it does: at targets. Most people think of artillery as bullets and bombs, but our military has been involved in the development of an array of non-ballistic weapons for almost the entire 20^th century. Stealth is the key feature of these weapons. Branches of our military involved in secret surveillance, such as the FBI and the CIA (now, indistinguishable from one another), developed a two-pronged approach to oppress legitimate political activists, such as peace and antinuclear weapons activists: cointelpro, which does the actual spying, and mk ultra, which employs a variety of techniques to discredit and socially exterminate targets who testify against the military about their repression.

The unconstitutional targeting by our military of non-combatant American citizens for surveillance and repression has a long history that continues today. “Special surveillance groups” consist of ordinary members of the community – students, housewives, retirees – and have been used in every decade since the 1960s to monitor law-abiding citizens who are in opposition to the empire-building missions carried out by America’s true government, its military. To keep the prime objective of stealth in play, our government has assiduously proffered colloquial definitions of SSGs as “gang stalkers,” or groups of politically disinterested individuals who target for harassment individuals whose lifestyle, religion, or political views disagree with those of the group. As we can easily see, these groups use the same techniques and technology that have been developed and are used by our military, which also uses NPR, America’s TASS, to convince Americans that SSGs are only deployed against terror suspects and mobsters. The previous link is to a story which, when it originally aired on July 5^th, 2008, featured a woman who was employed by the FBI during the 1960s to monitor peace activists in her community; needless to say, the story no longer features this woman.

Among the fictions these SSGs proffer community members about the targeted individual to discredit her or him is that the TI is paranoid and crazy – that the military wouldn’t waste its time and energy on the TI because he or she isn’t important. Like Frank Olson, many TIs such as me are walking around today with a lot of testimony about our military’s human and civil rights crimes – in our case, about the bioslavery it commits. Trillions of dollars have been spent to develop, using ordinary Americans and others, bioweapons such as AIDS. Who could be more critical to silence, with that kind of money at stake, not to mention the loss of the false façade of a free and just society that America’s government has patiently crafted?

Voilà! C'est tout.

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The Silence of Our Friends

"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)

It’s impossible for me not to think of Martin Luther King, Jr., at this time of year. I can’t help thinking that, were he alive today, he’d be as distressed about the enslavement of people now as he was in 1968, 105 years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. King knew the reason de facto slavery still existed via civil and human rights abuses wasn’t so much because there weren’t laws prohibiting them; he knew full well that a law is only as good as a person’s ability to enforce it, and poor people – whatever the color of their skin, but especially those who, at that time, were systematically oppressed and had no means to pursue the “American dream” that would give them the ability to enforce their rights, e.g., with disposable income – would never be free unless someone with the ability to make the laws stick did. Hence, then president John F. Kennedy, who had appointed his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, attorney general, asked his brother to call out the National Guard not to shoot protesters, as the Guard would do a mere seven years after King's assassination at Kent State, but to protect them. And to make sure that the 13^th amendment, which ended slavery only tacitly, was made more functional, he caved in to pressure to create additional anti-discrimination laws – in the form of the Civil Rights Act, passed after Kennedy's assassination – which is what the writers of the 13^th amendment intended (that is to say, they knew full well if slavery were to be prevented in the future further laws would need to be passed). That's why the brief, last paragraph of the very concise amendment states: "Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

We have a nation of working-class citizens getting poorer and sicker by the generation, thanks to the work of representatives in name only who fashion public health and monetary policy only to benefit an elite few, as Barack Obama’s transfer of public wealth to allegedly failing banks proves, just as does his failed attempt to fix “health care.” It’s hard to believe that King would have seen Obama’s presidential campaign as anything other than an attempt to pander to groups of people who need to believe in the fairy tale they’ve bought into – you know the one; that all is right with America and it’s “democracy” -- because he would have found it impossible to ignore the evolution of the business party that has put into office a puppet in the guise of every president since Carter. And that’s why he was murdered – because he was perceptive, influential and uncompromising. The government knew he’d never stop condemning what is most certainly its complete metamorphosis to fascism. You know who loves slavery more than anything? No one more than a fascist.

What really galled King, though, was how little those who claimed righteous beliefs in God, Christianity and American freedom cared to change the unjust status quo. He must have thought he was truly in the presence of evil incarnate whenever he looked around at the vast majority of his fellow white clergy members, who had stood idly by as ordinary people were routinely lynched for more than 80 years after the civil war, while voting irregularities were anything but irregular, and while churches were being bombed – whenever he saw them doing nothing. It’s harder, though, to know what he would think about the complete closing of American society that we have today – about the secret prisons right here, on American soil, that surround certain political activists whose work threatens the very foundation of the fascist regime that runs our nation, or about that fascist regime – and even more difficult to know what he would have done if he had to work under the circumstances political activists must work under today. Forty-two years ago King’s biggest problem was an FBI whose technologies and strategies for socially exterminating political activists were in their infancy. Today, a Martin Luther King, Jr., would simply not be possible. There can be no doubt that that is precisely what our nation’s government intended because the same human and civil rights abuses that were used on African-Americans to keep them “in their places” are now used on all political activists, regardless of their skin color, and have been enhanced in ways by which Hitler would be awed. I don’t think King would be pleased with that type of equality, not even in a country with an African-American president. I think he would be deeply aggrieved and ashamed.

We may no longer see postcards being sold of “strange fruit,” to use the heart-breaking yet poetic metaphor immortalized by Billie Holiday to refer to the victims of lynching, but when we have political activists who’ve been subjected to political repression by the FBI and the CIA and who are then gunned down in churches on Sunday mornings by local law enforcement, and when members of alleged human rights groups remain silent about such atrocities, though they’ve been apprised of them (and have laughed in the face of this particular political activist when she observed the fact that this act, in particular, represents fascism pure and simple), we know we’re facing the same type of opposition that King faced, multiplied exponentially -- opposition that forced him to the conclusion quoted above. The worst thing about this refusal to acknowledge the beast in our midst is that it spawns a dangerous capitulation by which no one is served.

In her 1963 articles for the New York Times, which were later turned into the book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, philosopher and investigative journalist Hannah Arendt gives us the history of the extent to which Hungarian Jews, in particular, colluded with the Nazis. In, “Chapter XII: Deportations from Central Europe – Hungary and Slovakia” Arendt writes: “On the very evening of their arrival, Eichmann and his men invited the Jewish leaders to a conference, to persuade them to form a Jewish Council, through which they could issue their orders and to which they would give, in return, absolute jurisdiction over all Jews in Hungary. . . . The president of the Jewish community, Hofrat Samuel Stern, a member of [Hungary’s de facto regent, Admiral] Horthy’s Privy Council, was treated with exquisite courtesy and agreed to be head of the Jewish Council. . . . And corruption, first simulated as a trick, soon turned out to be real enough, though it did not take the form the Jews had hoped. Nowhere else did Jews spend so much money without any results whatsoever. . . . and Wislicency [of Budapest local government] brought up again the so-called Europe Plan, which he had proposed in vain in 1942 and according to which Himmler supposedly would be prepared to spare all Jews except those in Poland for a ransom of two or three million dollars. On the strength of this proposal . . . the Jews now started paying installments to Wislicency. . . . The prosecution [Eichmann’s, in Israel, after he was kidnapped from Argentina by Israel’s secret police] could not prove that Eichmann had profited financially while on the job, stressed rightly his high standard of living in Budapest . . . “ And the result of this capitulation? Not the sparing of Hungarian Jews for which the Privy Council had hoped “. . . the number of death commandos manning the gas chambers was increased from 224 to 860, so that everything was ready for killing between six thousand and twelve thousand people a day. . . . The whole operation in Hungary lasted less than two months and came to a sudden stop at the beginning of July. Thanks chiefly to the Zionists, it had been better publicized than any other phase of the Jewish catastrophe, and Horthy had been deluged with protests from neutral countries and from the Vatican. . . . Of an original population of eight hundred thousand, some hundred and sixty thousand must still have remained in the Budapest ghetto – the countryside was judenrein [expunged of Jews] – and of these, tens of thousands became victims of spontaneous pogroms.” When the so-called opposition is controlled by the fascists in power, as it is here, in America, no one is safe – because fascists are liars, as well as murderers, and your turn to be marched off to the gas chamber (well, today’s gas chamber is AIDS) will come eventually.

So today, as I think about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy, and as I wish that it were the legacy he would want it to be, one that inspires others to do the work for justice and equality that he did, I hope for the impossible: I hope, since Martin can’t be raised from the dead, that his true message of justice, equality and freedom for all, finds voice in all those of you who genuinely wish to honor him, and that those of you who collude with the fascists in power here – if there be any among you who do – will stop to think about what it is you are creating with your collusion.

David Gilmore wrote this song about his wife, but if you read the words, they have an eerie poignancy today, on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day. You can hear the song at the link on the left. It’s really beautiful.

"Coming Back To Life"

Where were you when I was burned and I was broken

While the days slipped by from my window, watching

Where were you when I was hurt and I was helpless

Because the things you say and the things you do surround me

While you were hanging yourself on someone else's words

Dying to believe in what you heard

I was staring straight into the shining sun

Lost in thought and lost in time

While the seeds of life and the seeds of change were planted

Outside the rain fell dark and slow

While I pondered on this dangerous but irresistible pastime

I took a heavenly ride through our silence

I knew the moment had arrived

For killing the past and coming back to life

[beautiful bridge]

I took a heavenly ride through our silence

I knew the waiting had begun

And I headed straight

into the shining sun

Which way are you heading?

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A Message of Possibility in the Season of Perpetual Hope

I hadn’t thought this blog would be the most difficult one I’d have to write since beginning dontfearyourfreedom last Easter, but it’s stumped me for days. In October, a year-and-a-half after I lost my beloved Huckleberry to advanced kidney disease secondary to thread worm infestation and feline AIDS for which he had no risk factor (other than repeated vaccination) that, curiously, no veterinarian would diagnose properly, I lost another beautiful little soul to very similar diseases under the exact same circumstance. Huck’s little brother was repeatedly bioassaulted, just as was Huck, even after I treated him for roundworm when his vet refused to acknowledge his moth-eaten coat was abnormal, telling me his bald patches were because of his bristle tongue, which prompted me to wonder why all cats weren’t bald. A gang of veterinarians aided in the murder of these darling spirits, as unique as any individual person – and more so. It’s been a difficult few months, to say the least, and I find little reason to anticipate a different type of holiday, or 2010. But perhaps I am mistaken.

As is my yearly Christmas custom, I’ve been re-reading and thinking about the Sermon on the Mount, the most famous of Jesus’ homilies – the one in which he gave us a prescription for creating the Kingdom of G_d – and I realized once again that the magic of Christmas is that each of us can redeem ourselves by following his instruction to love G_d with all our minds, hearts and bodies (so we have maximum opportunity to realize that G_d is most assuredly not some paternalistic idol in the sky whose domain is outer space, or the afterlife, but actually, right here, right now) and to treat each other as we, ourselves, each wish to be treated. So the theme of my blog today, Christmas eve, is this: instead of forcing your, what is by nature, limited understanding of God down the throats of others and denigrating them because they don’t belong to the same religious gang that you do; instead of padding your Christmas savings club with graft you receive by informing on your neighbors like a Third Reich SS; instead of coveting your new Andersen windows and aluminum siding more than the freedom and dignity of neighbors about whom you concoct slander that makes her the subject of the FBI’s TIPS investigation and surveillance by your so-called neighborhood watch; instead of treating other human beings as a means to your ends, remember that it is these very sins for which Jesus died – the slander, contempt and dispassion in which the general public then held the prophet and for which they said, when Pontius Pilate asked them which prisoner would receive amnesty from crucifixion, ‘not Jesus.’

What a Christmas miracle it would be if those of you who’ve been running around spending your bribes on mind-numbing, soul-killing, violent video games for your kids -- to anesthetize them to the horror that is the fascism in which our country now exists and delude them into believing that distraction is better than conscious action that changes the status quo so that some day they may not be the slaves we all are today – stopped and reflected on the fact that Jesus’ message was truly the antithesis of, and cure for, fascism. That you do so on more than just one day a year – which is something Jesus himself believed was truly within the power of each of us to do – is my sincerest wish today. May the light of a thousand blessed stars of Bethlehem inspire in you the courage to act as that babe in the manger would wish you to act each and every day for the rest of your life.

Merry Christmas.

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About Extra-Judicial, State-Sponsored Terrorism

“Curiously, often a classic manifestation of people who are afflicted with certain psychotic disorders is the irrational fear that the CIA and FBI is [sic] conspiring to harm them. In this case, the CIA involvement is real and the covert nature of the involvement is not contested.”

Orlikow v. United States, 682 F. Supp. 77 (D.D.C. 1988)

(Ruling for plaintiff regarding Dr. Ewen Cameron’s MKUltra research for the CIA)

The world (and even some Americans) was horrified in December, 2003 when cell phone pictures of PFC Lynndie England surfaced showing her holding a leash tethered to a naked male Iraqi prisoner’s neck who was lying on the floor at Abu Ghraib prison in the midst of Operation Iraqi Liberation (“OIL”). A firestorm of outrage circled the world in both the mass and other media: text messages appended to copies of the pictures flew around the Middle East among dissenting and defecting soldiers and journalists; bloggers began covering the unfolding scandal and disseminating all its salacious details through RSS feeds; YouTube made available copies of the pictures to the world outside the blogosphere. New outlets such as Al Jazeera and the Associated Press distributed the pictures and stories to the UK’s Guardian and the U.S.’s New York Times. Jihadi had a field day. Activists were moved by the humiliating photos to mobilize and mount protests; America’s Congress was inundated with messages of outrage from constituents, who called for investigations. Bush assembled his legal team and charged them with crafting perversely immoral legal statutes in response to these calls for investigations which exonerated the practices and policies of U.S. torturers in Iraq and elsewhere. We quickly realized that these statutes simply memorialized what U.S. agencies such as the CIA have long been doing to anyone who opposes them, as anyone familiar with the work of the CIA torture school, The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formerly, the School of the Americas, has known: torture through systematic campaigns of terrorism.

The tactics described below are used by the FBI; the CIA; their subcontractors; federal, state and local agencies; and all military divisions, which are now charged with intelligence work against political dissidents and other law-abiding citizens within the government’s purview which it deems its enemies. These tactics include social extermination through discrediting campaigns of dissidents as either spies for the government, or psychologically unstable and, therefore, not worthy of your attention or assistance in fighting whatever particular oppression with which they may be struggling. People falsely labeled as psychotics and treated as such by mental and other health care professionals in order to remove them from American society, just as “inconvenient” women once were, are victims of extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism. These psychological torture tactics have been refined over decades of use by the CIA and FBI working in the community.

In his 1989 activists’ pamphlet, War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It, Attorney Brian Glick discovered the FBI waged extensive terrorism campaigns to undermine and dismantle the Women’ movement, the Black Panthers and the Anti-war movement in the 1960s. Their tactics included smear campaigns to discredit the leaders of these groups, who were pitted against one another in controversies contrived by undercover operatives long held in esteem within these groups as trusted members of their communities. Where a target was particularly difficult to discredit, the FBI’s operatives contrived campaigns to get their targets to discredit themselves, sometimes by planting a false rumor within the group and, when the target took up the rumor and promoted it, exposing the rumor as false and casting suspicion among members of the group as to the integrity of the target. This was the most effective way of creating a “snitch” jacket for the target, since regardless of what the rumor was, if it undermined or even deterred a little from the work of the group and caused the group to be viewed with suspicion, it was effective at alienating members of the group from the target. Once isolated, the target was effectively neutralized. This is what was done to American Indian Movement (AIM) activist AnnaMae Aquash, who was subsequently lured to an isolated area on the Pine Ridge Reservation one night and shot to death by the actual snitches in AIM.

These and many other illegal and inhumane terrorism practices were first developed in the CIA’s COINTELPRO program for use against political activists in the 1960s. When this program was exposed in the 1970s, Congress -- led by Sen. Ted Kennedy -- created a committee to investigate it. He appointed Sen. Nelson Rockefeller and Sen. Frank Church to lead the investigation. They held hearings and interviewed agency personnel and then wrote a report, effectively assuring the American people that COINTELPRO had been dismantled. Victims of COINTELPRO began suing the United States government -- and winning their cases. However, in 1981, Ronald Reagan codified the use of COINTELPRO against law-abiding Americans such as political activists (§2.9) in Executive Order No. 12333 (December 4, 1981). This order also grants to the FBI, CIA, Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines the right to use “counterintelligence activities . . . within the United States” (Glick, Brian: War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It, 1989, South End Press, p. 31). COINTELPRO is still in use today. Clearly, Congress lied. Political activists were routinely subjected to COINTELPRO throughout the 1980s when Reagan’s terrorists were supporting wars throughout central America and doing the same thing to Latinos. The American government tortures Americans just as it funds and promotes terrorism abroad. It has for a long, long time. Systematic torture is terrorism. To be more specific about the particular type of extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism practiced by the American government on American citizens who are dissidents of its political policies, consider this:

Torture, an illegal and immoral practice, is extrajudicial when used by government agents and their subcontractors since, when it is used, it is used in the place of judicially imposed measures intended to be rehabilitative against those who are found to be criminals. While they should never be used against anyone, they are particularly onerous when used against those merely alleged to be criminals. When applied systematically in multiple campaigns against a person or a group of people, torture is terrorism. Terrorism promoted by a government is state-sponsored terrorism.

The clear mandates expressed by America’s imperialists to oppress and persecute innocents, as well as the stories of those Americans such as myself who are treated this way, is more than enough evidence to demonstrate we are still being -- and will continue to be -- persecuted.

The persecution liberals experience through social extermination of necessity extends to the workplace, where most individuals spend most of their time. Everyone’s heard of blacklisting. Famous writers, scientists and academics -- particularly, those who were Jewish -- were deemed dangerous, even communist, because of their often liberal beliefs and persecuted as such during the 1950s as “un-American.” The “Red Scare” started with Sen. Eugene McCarthy and his congressional investigations of famous liberals. Fear of liberal intellectuals propelled by ignorance of the difference between totalitarianism and various forms of communism, including socialism, spread throughout America. Any liberal who seemed in the least way stereotypical of those McCarthy was persecuting was fired and discriminated against in seeking employment. McCarthy’s witch hunts were eventually discredited, but not before many lives and careers were ruined. Later, anti-discrimination laws passed in the 1960s gave protections to some of those types of persons formerly persecuted by the prejudices McCarthy’s hearings created based on religious and ethnic characteristics. New opportunities became available for liberals protected by these class distinctions. But persecution of other liberals still continues.

Today, blacklisting has morphed into a practice called “workplace mobbing.” Often instituted by management against employees deemed as threats, it is practiced widely throughout the developed world, research suggests, against as much as 20% of any country’s employees, who include academics as well as others. Mobbing includes the same tactics used by gangstalkers: discrediting targets with their peers using false rumors or set-ups in which the employee discredits him- or herself; isolating the target in other ways such as minimizing his or her responsibility; humiliating the target through various means including group insubordination against targets who hold supervisory positions. The goal is to discredit the target not merely to force him or her out of a particular workplace but out of the entire workforce, thereby achieving the same goal as blacklisting. Research has shown that campaigns follow targets from employer to employer, often causing the target severe mental and physical health problems. Though countries in western Europe have laws expressly prohibiting these well-defined practices, the United States have no such laws. The only recourse an employee has against an employer who instigates workplace mobbing is through anti-discrimination laws or OSHA laws, which necessitate that the target be a member of one of the already protected classes of anti-discrimination laws by virtue of a disability, or his or her race.

This represents fascism.

In a particularly alarming case of extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism disguised as ‘excessive police force’ that demonstrates clearly the long-standing collusion between federal police forces such as the FBI and local law enforcement, environmental and peace activist, Robert Woodward was shot 7 times -- at least once in the back -- as he lay unarmed, face down, on the floor of All Souls Church in Brattleboro, Vermont, on Sunday, December 2nd, 2001, after seeking sanctuary there from the FBI. He died several hours later on an unnecessarily lengthy trip to the local hospital. The shooters -- all Brattleboro, Vermont, police -- were exonerated by then Gov. Howard Dean’s attorney general after a biased, closed investigation. When petitioned by Woodward’s family, Dean refused to censure his attorney general. Woodward’s very public, very unnecessary murder was no accident; any number of the “less-than-lethal” weapons the Brattleboro, Vermont, police had in their possession thanks to Janet Reno could have subdued this distraught, unarmed man, but the Brattleboro police were clearly working at the direction of a higher authority.

The city in which I live is very conscious about its reputation as a liberal one and it spends a lot of money to maintain the façade that it is. It has a city agency with the word “peace” in it’s name which holds peace “fairs” each spring; it has all types of commissions whose work is alleged to be ensuring the rights of the oppressed: women, minorities, immigrants, workers. That’s because the most powerful residents of the city are defense contractors who routinely torture and kill the helpless in pursuit of lucrative government research initiatives and who are just as routinely sued in civil court over these abuses. They are the academic institutions within it’s boundaries and their many private institutions and private corporations. These agencies are staffed by the same people who run local peace groups -- groups whose missions are peace and economic justice; peace and justice for women; peace for foreign countries, etc. Their ties are unmistakable in the form of both the personnel who hold multiple positions and play key roles in each and in the initiatives pursued -- or not -- by both municipal agencies and non-profits. Extra-judicial, state-sponsored terrorism is nowhere on the radars of either, just as human trafficking and its more seamy underside, sexual slavery, are not. But the willful ignorance practiced by these people in order to protect the fascists that control the city in which I live is not the only tell-tale sign of their usurpation by those in control of our closed society. Another sign that evinces their participation in the military campaigns designed by the CIA and orchestrated by the FBI here, in my so-called liberal city, is the fact that some of these alleged activists actually do the work of carrying out these discrediting campaigns.

Your home can be invaded, your possessions vandalized and stolen, your life threatened and even taken by SSGs and gangstalkers working for the FBI, or by the FBI themselves, or any other military agency charged with counterintelligence such as local law enforcement and no matter which law enforcement agency from whom you’ve sought help is derelict in its duty to protect you, you -- or your survivors -- have no legal recourse against them -- because you and your possessions are not in their custody and therefore not subject to their protection. What free person lives in police custody? You are not free in this country when law enforcement can kill you with impunity. Even private police forces such as Blackwater operate with impunity to kill people. They just pay fines assessed in civil suits for the privilege of doing so. And this is how they get away with it -- by calling these incidents acts of private violence instead of what they actually are -- administrative murders at the hands of fascists.

Some local law enforcement officers are exposing and speaking out against the Pentagon’s usurpation of local law enforcement agencies, telling us they have been advised to ignore the pleas for help of FBI targets such as Robert Woodward. People like Robert Woodward are terrorized by Bureau subcontractors tracking their movements using cell control techniques, which have been designed and refined through decades of research. Targets such as Robert Woodward are driven crazy with psychological terror tactics which also have been developed by the Pentagon in order to insulate the state from culpability by making it seem the extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism targets experience are private violences. But it’s extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism and you aren’t hearing the stories of people like Robert Woodward in popular books flacked on The Colbert Report, such as Naomi Wolf’s The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (in which, curiously, she makes no mention of this well-documented practice by the FBI of implementing the terror campaigns devised by the CIA against American activists) (2007, Chelsea Publishing), or on the evening network news, for a reason. The same people with the power to conduct these terrorism campaigns also have the power to suppress the information you get about them and their anti-American practices. They exert their power everywhere they possibly can, from making corrupt legislation that permits them to terrorize, torture and kill their opponents, to maiming existing constitutional laws with specious case law that subverts the very letter and spirit of our constitutionally guaranteed rights.

As case law currently stands, local law enforcement agencies are not required to protect any of your civil or human rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness against these pseudo-private violences/acts of extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism. In Retained by the People: The “Silent” Ninth Amendment and the Constitutional Rights Americans Don’t Know They Have (2007, Basic Books), UC/Berkeley law school Professor Daniel A. Farber provides a history of the philosophical and political issues that prompted our nation’s Founding Fathers to create an amendment in the Constitution that had the utility of protecting those rights they realized future generations of Americans would need protected but which they could not foresee at the time they wrote the original Constitution. For these “unenumerated” rights, they conceived of the protections guaranteed in the Ninth Amendment. But the Ninth Amendment has never been used. Instead, the legal community has pursued the protections of those rights specifically enumerated in the Bill of Rights (the first five amendments of the Constitution) and later rights vis-a-vis their Privileges or Immunities clauses (most often, that of the 14th Amendment but also on occasion the P&I clause of the 5th Amendment). In the pursuit of justice when issues concerning these other, unenumerated rights have been brought to the bar -- such as the right to civil protection by one’s police force -- the Judiciary has refused to recognize any other legislation as controlling the legal arguments in such cases, though the Ninth Amendment was created specifically to do so.

The Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment was designed, most scholars agree, to protect the fundamental birth rights of all American citizens as they had been designated in the Declaration of Independence -- those rights which colonists viewed as “natural rights,” such as the right to freedom from oppression and to self-governance. Though less specific than the Bill of Rights, which protected individuals from the Federal government, the Privileges or Immunities clause of the 14th Amendment was designed to protect individuals from the actions of the state. But the federal and state government routinely abridge the most fundamental rights of Americans and, when pressed for redress, subvert the intention of founders of this country to protect natural rights by abuse of another clause, the due process clause. They have contended these clauses protect all the natural and other rights both the Ninth Amendment and the Privileges or Immunities clause do, but in reality, they do not. Industry has made full use of some peculiar interpretations of and gaps in the due process clause.

Farber writes, “. . . the Supreme Court primarily used the Due Process Clause to protect businesses from economic regulation.” (p. 77) The first such case where it did so was to strike down a law protecting bakers in New York from working excessive (more than 60) hours per week, saying it was a violation of the right of bakers to enter into contracts with their employers for whatever amount of work they chose to provide and was therefore oppressive.

The fight for justice which recognizes the unenumerated rights of individuals continues on the basis that rights must be defined as essential and fundamental -- not an easy thing to do when one is fighting a criminal charge of “sodomy,” for example, by consenting adults who happen to be homosexual, or trying to retain one’s house in an eminent domain case where it’s seized by the government for use by a private development company, as more than 5,700 cases of eminent domain did in 2006 alone. The rights to express oneself freely sexually and to a home -- and even the right to procreate -- are not viewed by today’s guardians of our Constitution as basic rights. But even the enumerated rights -- specifically, the right to life -- has been trampled on by the misuse of the due process clause to the point where the state is now exempt from protecting its most vulnerable citizens.

Farber outlines the case of Joshua DeShaney, who was repeatedly beaten and abused by his father from the time he was three until he was five, when his father succeeded in putting him into a coma which, together with the accumulated head injuries Joshua had sustained, made him profoundly mentally retarded, thereby robbing him of autonomy and freedom. During this time, Joshua’s father was monitored by local child protection officers. These officers had every reason to suspect Joshua’s father continued to beat him since neighbors reported to them that Joshua’s father was abusing him and they were denied access to Joshua on several occasions because, they were told, he was too sick to be interviewed. But they nevertheless left Joshua in his father’s care. In a civil lawsuit against the negligent Department of Social services in which the Supreme Court exonerated the actions of the child protection officers, they wrote in their final ruling, “A State’s failure to protect an individual against a private violence simply does not constitute a violation of the Due Process Clause.” (p. 156) The case hinged on the issue of privacy; in other words, if Joshua had been in the state’s care -- for example, in the foster home in which he should have been placed -- and had been injured or killed there, then, the court ruling implies, he would have been entitled to protection. What does this mean?

In such a situation as exists today in America, where police are excused from performing their basic functions “to protect and serve,” and where they have been legislatively recruited as terrorists no different than Augusto Pinochet’s, when so often their crimes are exonerated by the highest law enforcement officials in the country, the attorneys generals of our states and country, how can we fail to see the obvious -- that America is a closed, military dictatorship run by fascists? The arms’ length covert operations they run are transparent lies evincing their culpability.

Indeed, research has shown that civil and human rights have been gradually disappearing in America. It’s most commonly referred to as violence against women, or racism, but it is a loss that is at least sanctioned -- if not promoted -- by law enforcement. This disappearance of civil and human rights has been parallel to the increase in the use by the state of psychological terrorism -- so-called “mind control” technologies, such as MKUltra and COINTELPRO and directed energy weapons (DEW) technologies. This represents the state application of mass behavior modification technologies. If the state can’t socially exterminate you, they’ll exterminate you in any way they can -- even technologically, if they must, because they can.

How Did This Happen?

Fear motivates. Propaganda works. “The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion,” Edmund Burke once wrote. But the propaganda is far more intense, pernicious and insidious than that used in other countries. For example, our country has experienced numerous coups d’ètat in my life -- one, far from bloodless; another, a so-called “gentleman’s coup” -- and yet, we still don’t speak of them as such. They’re “conspiracy theories” (which by definition can’t be resolved, forever keeping alive the notion that what can be known, can’t), or “voter fraud,” but not what they actually are: coups d’ètat by persons in league with the fascists in control of our country.

Dr. José Delgado, a state-sponsored pioneer of the technology of Electrical Stimulation of the Brain (ESB), memorialized his career-long work developing psychological technologies to remotely control masses of human beings in his 1969 book, Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society. We have an astonishing record of the esteem with which Dr. Delgado’s work was held by the American congress in 1972 that evinces their support of the fascist closing of American society through the mass enslavement of American citizens with what was once called “brain washing” but is now called “mind control” techniques pioneered by Dr. Delgado and proponents of his work. The targets on which Dr. Delgado proposed to use his technologies even he qualified as “normal” people who believe in and work for “liberty,” or liberals. (U.S. Doc. 506, Congressional Record Vol. 118, Part 5, pages 5111 to 6496, 92d. Congress 2d. session, February 23, 1972 to March 1, 1972, deposited by the U.S. government February 11, 1974, in federal depositories. A record of this particular congressional session is contained in pages 5567-5577 of the afore-mentioned Congressional Records, submitted by the “Hon.” Cornelius E. Gallagher, D. NJ.)

Delgado’s research is contained within an exposition and criticism of an alleged world-wide increase in psychosurgery and is presented with a curious absence of the same type of criticism that Rep. Gallagher expresses about that trend, creating the impression of his whole-hearted endorsement of Dr. Delgado’s mass mind control programs. Delgado writes,

‘The individual may think that the most important fact of reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view, a relative frame of reference which is not shared by the rest of the living world. This self-importance also lacks historical perspective, for the brief existence of one person should be considered in the terms of the world population, mankind, and the whole universe.’ p. 236

Delgado dismisses completely the dual subjective-objective nature imbued in all people -- the very nature to which the founding fathers referred as “God-given” -- and evinces not merely the ignorance of his own unexamined life, but of the true nature of humanity: that it is a construct built on morality, which, itself, is built on the individual’s ability to empathize with his or her fellow human beings. People are just objects to Delgado. Not a surprising attitude to find in a fascist, just a shocking one to find in a man of esteemed positions at Yale University and within the psychiatric community. Yet, this criminally stupid and morally decrepit man has had his ideas vetted everywhere in circles of influence, even in Congress. More disturbing still is the fact that what Delgado is justifying is simply Maoist communism -- a complete subversion of the individual for the good of the state, the “psycho-civilized society.” Pretty un-American, especially when one considers on whom Delgado proposes his methods be used: liberals.

Dr. Peter R. Breggin, author of the article that Rep. Gallagher has presented for inclusion in the Congressional Records which reports on Delgado’s work, writes of Delgado,

“He then goes on to attack the notion that man has “the right to develop his own mind,” to develop his own unique potential “while remaining independent and self sufficient.” As he concludes:

‘This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal, but unfortunately its assumptions are not supported by neurophysiological and psychological students of intracerebral mechanisms.’ p. 239’”

What’s new about the U.S. government’s interest in Dr. Delgado’s research (as demonstrated by Rep. Gallagher’s uncritical presentation of it) is Delgado’s proposal for a nation-wide implementation of control measures such as those he has developed in his research. Breggin writes,

“He advocates a complete educational program, from infancy and nursery through adulthood and mass education for the indoctrination of the people into a respect for physical control of the mind:

After pages of documentation about what has already been done by a few investigators working with very little funds, he then proposes a giant billion dollar government investment in mind control:

‘National agencies should be created in order to coordinate plans, budgets, and actions just a NASA in the United States has directed public interest and technology, launching the country into the adventures and accomplishments of outer space.’ p. 259

Along with this evaporation of civil and human rights in America has come a cleverly crafted perception management campaign to make both the citizens of America and the citizens of the world believe that America is still an open and free society when it most certainly is not.

Why Extra-Judicial, State-Sponsored Terrorism Should Matter to You

You’re next.

Or maybe not. Maybe, it’s your turn now. We are all susceptible to the overwhelming influence of popular cultural artifacts, many of which are representations of Dr. Delgado’s work. The popular so-called reality show, Survivor, (http://www.cbs.com/primetime/survivor/) is exactly the type of popular entertainment Delgado suggested be developed to inculcate the masses with an acceptance of social engineering practices. Survivor’s premise -- to get followers to depose a leader, just as his monkeys did in his experiments -- can be seen as the praxis of his once only dreamed-of social theories. The Sci-Fi Channel’s Mind Control with Derren Brown is yet another example of the type of program he suggested be developed to condition the masses to accept as normal mass control -- in this case, of the mind -- just as The History Channel’s Gangland series has been developed to condition the masses to accept the idea that gangs are an inevitable, eventual, irremedial part of society. After all, if we’re busy fighting each other, we’re not fighting them. But the propaganda factory that has been developed to influence the entire nation has also developed tools to influence and control discrete sectors of the masses, too, and where those tools of propaganda fail, gangstalkers step in to exterminate those who are resistant to their messages.

In 1996, persons with deliberately-misdiagnosed leukemia-cum-Chronic Fatigue Syndrome-cum-Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome learned they actually had a “less virulent form of AIDS” with the publication of Osler’s Web: Inside the Labyrinth of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic, (1996, Crown). The book is a monument to propaganda, creating the false controversy that the research which proves this fact, Nancy Klimas’s study of immune system markers, was outside orthodox research initatives (that is to say, government research initiatives), when, in fact, Dr. Klimas is a university researcher who receives government funding. Other high-profile CFIDS/non-HIV/AIDS researchers are characterized as being outside the mainstream medicoresearch industry, too, like Dr. Paul Cheney, who routinely makes his patients’ blood and other samples available to university researchers funded by the government, most notably, Dr. Anthony Komaroff. I posted a comment in an internet chat room run by an alleged patient advocacy group asking why, then, our doctors continued to tell us that there were no tests available to tell us with what we were sick, or that we weren’t sick at all but crazy (just as the first AIDS victims and the victims of America’s atomic radiation experiments were labeled), and therefore we still couldn’t get appropriate medical care. The next day, I received an email back-channel to the account that I had opened to join this group. It contained the threat that unless I stopped asking such questions the FBI would be investigating me for “hate speech.” I may still have an electronic copy of the email secreted away somewhere, but all my hard copies have been removed from my home, just as has most all of the evidence of my persecution, such as medical records which verify the history I have recounted in these pages. That’s when the campaign to discredit me began.

You see, my story -- the story of my bioslavery -- is relevant not simply to other victims of non-HIV/AIDS, but also to all persons with AIDS: gays, African-Americans, Africans, Asians. The people who have reified me don’t want me anywhere near these groups of people, and they’ve done some pretty incredible things to discredit me within these communities. They know that if these groups of people hear how a former employee of a defense subcontractor admitted to me that they were involved in many contracts to develop the components of AIDS -- even as that person was involved in targeting me for some of the bioassaults that gave me AIDS and the subsequent research that cured it -- people would start to take me seriously because research contracts can be traced -- even those done with “black budgets.” I’m a dangerous threat to the fascists who created and deployed AIDS. That’s why campaigns such as those recalled here are instigated against me -- to discredit me as unlikely to be a champion of the people most affected by AIDS. Here are two anecdotes relating such incidences.

Anecdote No. 1: My Local Garden Center

I like to garden. I don’t have much opportunity to do so because I live in a concrete-and-brick apartment complex, but there are several common areas where my neighbors and I can bring the beauty of nature into our lives with containers of annuals and other plants. Luckily, there’s a garden center just a few blocks away from where we live.

I recently visited my local garden center just as the pansies arrived. I selected seven flats, a 15-quart bag of soil and some other gardening implements I needed to spruce up the courtyard area of my apartment complex. Then I asked the owner of the store if he had a list of taxis service phone numbers that I could use, as is typical of area stores. He rattled off the number of a local service as well as the garden center’s address. He repeated it, waited for me to repeat it, and repeated it again, offering to make the call himself. I held up my cell phone to let him know that wasn’t necessary before I dialed. He smiled. I’ve been shopping at his store for at least a decade and though we’re not on a first-name basis, I’m pleased he greets me with recognition when I come in. He accommodates his customers with red Radio Flyer™ wagons to ease the burden of transporting their sometimes cumbersome purchases to their cars. One day, when I had spent all of my money at his store and had none left to call a taxi, the owner let me borrow a wagon to take my purchases home. He’s very accommodating and I’m pleased to patronize his store. That is, I was pleased when he used to do things like this; lately, he hasn’t, and although I cannot be certain of the reason why -- since I’ve done nothing to offend him -- I suspect he’s been given a reason to shun me.

You see, the last time I was in his store, I needed help to find hangers for plant containers. I was told to ask the owner for his help and directed to his check-out stand in the garden center’s out-door store. I greeted the owner in the same friendly manner I always use, but he didn’t reciprocate, as he usually does. This day, he wouldn’t even look at me. I craned my neck as I made my inquiry, hoping to catch his eye. He turned away as he gave me directions to the product I inquired about. After I retrieved the product, I paid for it at the garden center’s in-store check out stand, manned by the taciturn clerk who had refused to help me except by directing me to the owner for his help, and left, uneasy in the extreme about the cold and rude treatment I was given. I obsessed about it for days, going over everything I had said and done that could have possibly given rise to offense, until I realized that I had done nothing. That’s when I remembered a peculiar thing that had happened on my previous visit to the garden center, the day I had bought my pansies.

After I had made my purchase that day I went to the sidewalk at the front of the store to wait for the taxi I had called. Ten minutes or so had passed when two women walking dogs approached the entrance to the store, the first of whom to reach it bent down and stowed a wadded up bundle of trash behind the flower planter next to which I stood. She handed her dog’s lead to her friend and proceeded into the garden center’s store. I was starting to get angry since I knew the store had wastebaskets, but I couldn’t decide what to do. My taxi would arrive any minute, so I couldn’t pick up after her unless I wanted to take whatever she had disposed of with me. I wanted to say something like, “they have wastebaskets in the store,” to the woman but she had dashed into the store too quickly. I tried to engage her friend in a conversation so I could mention this fact, first talking about her dogs, but she, too, was taciturn and turned her attention to others leaving the store who had stopped to admire their dogs. My taxi arrived and I left -- feeling very uneasy, but not because of any paranoid suspicion. Their arrogance just made me very angry. “I guess they think the world is their trash can,” I ruminated. It wasn’t until after my next visit to the garden center that I thought there may have been a purpose to their behavior that wasn’t simply borne of arrogance.

"Could they have set me up to slander me as an antisocial litterbug to my once-friendly neighborhood merchant,” I wondered? He’s seemed indifferent to me in the past, but on the rare occasion when he has it’s been because he’s been busy. “Everybody has an off day,” I’ve told myself at these times. He’s never treated me as though my patronage were an inconvenience to him. For him to do that, I would imagine I’d have to have given him some offense. Since I hadn’t stolen anything from him, or been rude to him in any way, or given him any cause to be rude to me, the logical explanation for his behavior is that he was turned against me -- just as those who perpetrate character assassination of activists such as myself have been proven to do.

This is what that attack was about: making me appear to those in my neighborhood that I am not only an antisocial litterbug, but I’m also not the environmentalist I claim to be. Would you pay any attention to a self-proclaimed environmentalist who was alleged to litter? Probably not. I’ve been working hard to understand environmental issues and clean energy technologies and initiatives because I’d like to go back to work and to work in a field where I believe my work has intrinsic as well as extrinsic value. That’s going to be hard to do if my potential employer receives character references that make me appear antisocial and callous to the degradation of the environment.

Anecdote No. 2: My Local Thrift Shop

Easter is my favorite time of year. I’m usually melancholy on Maundy Thursday and edgy on Good Friday, but by the next day, I begin to cheer up. Even on a cloudy, rainy Easter weekend, I find the beauty of the flowers that are beginning to bloom and, indeed, the hopefulness expressed in the volume of new life around me, overwhelming and gratifying. Robins become as ubiquitous as pigeons where I live. Toddlers waddling around their yards and church grounds in their little suits and frilly dresses make my heart dance -- I’ll admit it. They’re adorable. And what could be better than being able to experience all this -- plus chocolate?! The day after Good Friday, 2009, I decided to shop at one of my favorite stores, the local thrift shop, to look for kitchen curtains. The ones I had were 25 years old and, basically, rags. New life suggested new kitchen curtains.

I donate to my local thrift shop because they provide a valuable service to people of limited means, like me. They make it affordable for me to have a DVD player, or a window fan in my early 20th century fourth-floor walkup. I’m happy to recycle the serviceable things I have so someone else can use them.

I was in the area of the store’s basement where linens and furniture were stored for ten minutes or so when another woman came into this area at the back of the store. I had made two piles of items: one, items I was considering purchasing; the other, items I intended to purchase. I put one on a side table that was for sale and the other pile on the end of a chaise lounge. As I picked through the items in one bin, the woman picked up a shopping bag of linens that was lying on the floor next to the other bin and dumped it out. Then she took some of the contents of the bag and began spreading them over the two piles of items I was considering purchasing. “Excuse me, I said. “I’m thinking of buying those.” I pointed to the side table. She approached the bin I was sorting through and began picking through it, piling still more things on top of the things I had placed on the side table. “Um -- could I have the things I put there, I sheepishly asked this provocateur, pointing to the side table. She pulled out the bottom two items and, with the greatest disdain, held them in front of me by two fingers as though they were as toxic as nuclear waste and dropped them on the floor. I picked them up. She continued throwing things out of the bin onto the floor.

I turned to the side table and began picking through the pile she had made, looking for the other items I had first placed there. I pulled them from the bottom and put them on the other pile I had made on the chaise lounge. “What is going on here?,” I wondered to myself, turning back to the bin to search for pot holders. “They’re mine,” she screeched, snatching them off the pile on the chaise lounge. “Excuse me, but those were things I placed on that side table myself,” I said. Those are mine, she screamed. “You had nothing there.” I was incredulous. She had made such a show of removing some of the items I had placed on the side table, her blatant lying that I had nothing on the side table when she put stuff on it was the last straw. I flew into a rage.

“You are a fucking liar,” I yelled. And she beamed. It was clear in an instant by her smile that she had wanted to provoke me. Just then, I realized the half dozen middle-aged men swarming around us -- men who had not been there when I first began sifting through the store’s linen items. Men with their cell phones out. “You’re making the world a despicable place, you know,” I chided her. “You think you’re doing ‘God’s work,’ or behaving like everyone else because so many of us persecute others for benefits, but you’re just a pawn,” I observed. She laughed. “No, I’m not.” I should have walked away, but I felt I had to let her know that I knew perfectly well who -- and what -- she was. And then she let me know that, in fact, I was correct. She declared herself to be the wickedly false Christian she was. “I’m sorry,” she feigned, as she put her hand on my arm. “Do you forgive me?”

This is what that attack was about: to provoke me to violence so I don’t look like the peace activist I claim to be, to make me look antisocial, unstable and violent (and, contrary to my behavior, a racist; did I mention this woman was Haitian?) and to make me appear to be the worst thing an American can be these days -- not Christian because I didn’t forgive her. Would you give any of your attention to a self-proclaimed peace and justice activist who flew off the handle and argued with and cursed at a[nother seemingly] poor woman who happened to be a dark-skinned immigrant? Probably not.

Why PSYOP Works

When you’re under siege, your senses are heightened. Primordial survival instincts kick in and you become hyper-alert. You notice everything -- because everything has the potential to harm. The terror created from being under siege modifies your behavior in this way --you become distrustful and withdrawn, not knowing who is trustworthy, or when the next attack will occur. You, yourself, begin to build walls that imprison you. It also makes you paranoid. You begin to see every other person whom you encounter as a player in a psychological terrorism operation. An innocent nudge in the line at the grocery store takes on a sinister meaning after you’ve experienced a nudge in every line you’ve ever filed into for the past six months.

You may tell yourself that you are too smart to “give in” to these primitive instincts, that you are too refined, or too clever, to allow yourself to be controlled by the manipulation of them. You see the pattern, you tell yourself, and you assure yourself you can ignore it. You have free will, right? But these are instincts we all have; they’re instincts that have ensured the survival of the species for millions of years, and you your ability to protect yourself is key to your survival, too. You wouldn’t want it any other way.

Strategies of retreat and retrenchment work when you wish to avoid conflict, and avoiding conflict, you realize, ensures your survival. So you simply stop going out. But these strategies are not good long-term strategies. Isolation is not a normal state in which a human being can exist for very long. That’s why prisons punish inmates with solitary confinement; it drives sane people insane. You steel your nerve and tell yourself you’ll be even more alert -- even more aware -- the next time you go out, which, of course, makes you more wound up than ever and more easily provoked. You successfully negotiate the next setup and the next and the next and all the while, you’re getting more worked up, more anxious waiting for the shoe to drop. You tell yourself you’ve mastered their game, not realizing that simply engaging you in their game, they’ve mastered you; all your energies become consumed with thwarting their tactics and you lose sight of what’s meaningful to you. Defeating them -- defending yourself -- becomes your entire mission, your whole identity. You forget that the waiting for the other shoe to drop is the other shoe dropping. Then, like a windup toy that’s been set to play for as long as possible, you spring into action without thinking the next time you’re provoked. You’ve disgraced yourself by losing control the one time out of 100 you’ve been provoked to do so and it’s out there for the world to see -- that one time (especially if it’s videotaped by “bystanders”). The world doesn’t care about the 99 other times you were in control. It only judges you by he one time it saw you lose it.

You are always at your most vulnerable when the attack occurs -- when you’ve been lulled into a false sense of security -- when the campaign of attacks suddenly stops and you begin to relax. The next time you walk into a trap, you fall apart, you lose control and you discredit yourself by doing so. Then you decide to withdraw. It’s a vicious cycle -- one over which you have no control.

“Lay not wait, O wicked man, against the dwelling of the righteous; spoil not his resting place: for a just man falleth seven times and riseth up again, but the wicked shall fall into mischief.”

Proverbs 24:15-16

Character assassination and mobbing are as old as time, as we can see from prohibitions against them such as the Ninth Commandment. The people who killed Jesus were not the civil authorities in power in ancient Judea; it was the mob who had the choice of crucifying either Jesus or the thief, Barrabbas. Jesus’s community chose to kill him. Today, I routinely return to my apartment to find my furnishings vandalized, my pets made ill and/or dying, my food contaminated, my clothes strategically altered and ruined. When I leave my house, I am subjected to well-known gangstalking surveillance activities. These tactics are used to harass and terrorize targets to force them to seek professional help from, for example, psychologists and law enforcement, who are tasked with documenting targets’ alleged mental instability. Each time I've asked for help from my local law enforcement agency, I've been told there's nothing they can do since my apartment is not broken into; someone who has a key to the apartment must be doing these things (and it's always implied that these things may not be happening) and no investigation is done. These are "private violences" for which the police are not responsible. But my phone calls and letters are documented and this documentation is precisely the type of "evidence" police use to incarcerate targets in institutions under the ruse of “protective custody.” Telling others about our persecution -- particularly, professionals who are supposed to help targets -- only ensures our continued torture. The mob exists as much today as it ever did, even in ancient Judea, and today’s targets are the same type of targets who have always been persecuted -- political activists who seek to change the status quo.

If you are an outsourced bioresearch subject of the United States government -- a bioslave -- (and if you are, you will be prevented at every turn from learning your status; that’s one way you’ll know that you are) you, too, will be subjected to the same extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism when you speak out against your enslavement.

If you have been outraged by the extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism that has taken place at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, where is your outrage for the extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism your law-abiding, patriotic fellow Americans experience at the hands of their government right here in America? Where is the outrage for the systematic, extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism that has been visited for decades upon untold numbers of average, law-abiding American citizens, such as the plaintiff in the above-referenced case and myself, by multiple agencies of the U.S. government, now including our local law enforcement, local municipal agencies and local non-profits? Where is your outrage for my bioenslavement -- and yours?

If you think your life is guaranteed by not speaking out and fighting against my oppression, think again.

“First they came for the socialists and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Former Moabit prison inmate and (Lutheran) Pastor Martin Niemöller

Post-war Lectures on the Work of Germany’s Pastors’ Emergency League during WWII

1945

THIS IS FASCISM -- IN A CLOSED, MILITARILY RUN, AUTHORITARIAN SOCIETY. No one in America is free today.

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