Category Archives: Psyops

If Pigs Flu……

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From Bill Engdahl via Financial Sense.com:

The Pew study notes, ‘That is where the real investigation ought to begin, with the health and sanitary dangers of the industrial factory pig farms like the one at Perote in Veracruz. The media spread of panic-mongering reports of every person in the world who happens to contract ‘symptoms’ which vaguely resemble flu or even Swine Flu and the statements to date of authorities such as WHO or CDC are far from conducive to a rational scientific investigation..

Tamiflu and Rummy

In October 2005 the Pentagon ordered vaccination of all US military personnel worldwide against what it called Avian Flu, H5N1. Scare stories filled world media. Then, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced he had budgeted more than $1 billion to stockpile the drug, Oseltamivir sold under the name, Tamiflu. President Bush called on Congress to appropriate another $2 billion for Tamiflu stocks.

What Rumsfeld neglected to report at the time was a colossal conflict of interest. Prior to coming to Washington in January 2001, Rumsfeld had been chairman of a California pharmaceutical company, Gilead Sciences. Gilead Sciences held exclusive world patent rights to Tamiflu, a drug had developed and whose world marketing rights were sold to the Swiss pharma giant, Roche. Rumsfeld was reportedly the largest stock holder in Gilead which got 10% of every Tamiflu dose Roche sold.14 When it leaked out, the Pentagon issued a curt statement to the effect that Secretary Rumsfeld had decided not to sell but to retain his stock in Gilead, claiming that to sell would have indicated something to hide.’ That agonizing decision won him reported added millions as the Gilead share price soared more than 700% in weeks.…….

….. Avian Flu was traced back to huge chicken factory farms in Thailand and other parts of Asia whose products were shipped across the world. Instead of a serious investigation into the sanitary conditions of those chicken factory farms, the Bush Administration and WHO blamed ‘free-roaming chickens’ on small family farms, a move that had devastating economic consequences to the farmers whose chickens were being raised in the most sanitary natural conditions. Tyson Foods of Arkansas and CG Group of Thailand reportedly smiled all the way to the bank.”

Swine-Flu is a Man-Made Panic..

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My new piece on swine-flu is up at Lew Rockwell.

Please note, I have it as Harold Varnus in the piece. It should be Varmus, as in my previous blog post on the subject. In my defense, I wrote it mostly in very dim light…

“The latest in the barrage of media reports on swine flu is a Bloomberg news report (August 25, 2009) that it might hospitalize 1.8 million patients in the US and over-burden hospital intensive care units.

This comes from a planning scenario released by the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology

The Bloomberg story cites some theatrical numbers:

  • Half of the US population infected (that is, over 150 million people)
  • 300,000 people in hospital intensive care units
  • 30–90,000 people dead
  • By-pass surgery emergency operations disrupted

But hidden in paragraph 5 of the Bloomberg piece is the most pertinent part:

These numbers are only “scenario projections” that were “developed from models put together for planning purposes only,” says a Centers for Disease Control spokesman.

So.

  • Statistical projections.
  • Projections from models of past pandemics. (And not the past, as in 1968 or 1957, but way back, as in 1918.)
  • Projections developed for planning purposes only.

That’s three stages removed from anything you could call reality.

But perish this tenuous link with facts, PCAST wants Obama to rush through vaccine production so that 40 million people can be infect – er – injected by mid-September.

And who should make that decision?

A doctor? The surgeon-general? A medical team?

Why, the homeland security adviser!

That’s John Brennan, a former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, deputy executive director of the CIA under George Tenet, and the director of the National Counterterrorism Center (CTC) from 2004 to 2005 during the exact period when the CIA became most heavily involved in torture practices in Iraq and elsewhere.”

Note:

I wanted to state here that my social views are quite liberal, and I do not have any objection to voluntary family planning and contraception. I’m also firmly pro-choice. And in terms of the environment, I support far greater consideration by each of us, as individuals and as communities, for animal life, nature, and conservation.

But those are my personal views. Putting the legal and physical force of the corporate- state behind those preferences, in the form that Holdren apparently thinks will work, is, in my view, completely misguided.

Scientists Who Developed Vaccine Won’t Take It Themselves? (Correction added)

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— Wayne Madsen on Guillain-Barre syndrome and the swine flu vaccine

My Comment:
I’m hearing that I misunderstood this and it’s the makers of the small-pox vaccine who are baulking.
I’ll try to track that down.

Meanwhile, why would you trust a government that sends secretive letters to neurologists admitting fears it won’t admit to the public that’s getting the vaccinations?

“Shooter” Conspiracy Theory is a Form of Anti-Sinitism

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My post today is from Canadian trader and blogger, Bill Cara (a critic of the “shooter” theory).

[NOTE: “Shooter,” gentle reader, is my derogatory name for those who believe in the government’s “fringe” conspiracy theory that “green shoots” are popping up all over the economy. This theory, I believe, is premised on “hatred” and “mean-spiritedness” toward creditors, savers, and dollar-holders. In fact, if you are a “green-shooter,” I’d say you are a racist and an anti-Sinite (since the Chinese are the biggest creditors of the US)]

Bill Cara Quote:

“When I started blogging over five years ago, I noted my concern that in America, everything is for sale and everybody a salesman. The problem, of course, is that a salesman believes his own stories because he has to believe. Facts are perverted, history changed, and truth misrepresented. In five years, America has gotten worse in this regard.

The nation has actually become a parody of itself where the most accurate news now comes from sources like Saturday Night Live, Jay Leno, David Letterman and Jon Stewart.”

My Comment:

There’s the truth from an objective observer. And I’m here to second it. If there’s one thing that’s a problem in America, it’s not “crime,” or “violence,” or “drugs,” or “porn.”
All of these are just secondary manifestations of the underlying problem. That problem is – unreality.
In Language of Empire, I referred to the plastic, virtual world in which the country lives.

That’s the rub.

We leave in a world of phony perceptions, phony reality, phony problems, phony solutions, phony political divisions, phony theories, phony experts…

All other problems America shares with other nations.

But this one problem is more unique to her than to any other country – almost because of her virtues, rather than on account of her vices.

Other people don’t have governments that are nearly as efficient, thorough-going, or as clever at spin as ours.

That’s their good fortune.

The Neurolinguistic Programming of Reality

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“An excellent example of globalist
redefinition of a common term
is the use of the word “state” in place of “country”
. When the media and leaders
refer to a country like Iran as a “state”
this has the same or similar effect as the
British globalists referring to the United States
as “the colonies”, which is off-handed at best.
This type of redefinition of terms is
designed to belittle the conception of a
supposed and/or perceived enemy by making
them appear less important and smaller in perspective
to the aggressors. Most soldiers would be
more willing to attack a “rogue state” than an “enemy
country”. The actual usage of this type of
terminology actually creates a mass perception
that the said country has already been assimilated
into the globalist empire and is simply acting out of
turn and is deserving of punitive damage whether
compensatory or offensive or both.
However, the true modus operandi
of the globalists is essentially Hegelian
in nature. Time and time again as a
species we can observe the workings of “thesis,
antitheses and synthesis”.

An excellent example would be the attacks on
the World Trade Center of 2001.
Thesis: “terrorists are a continual threat
to our liberty”. Antitheses: the
attack on the World Trade Center. Synthesis:
the Patriot Acts and Office of Homeland
Security, also known as: the loss of liberty
in the name of security…….

There are many conclusions to be drawn when
looking at the cycle of empires, but one
stands clearly: ruling is a science, and it
involves coercion whether via induced
suffering, psychological
torture and/or destabilization….”

— Max Mitchell, “Foundations of War:
Terminology of the New World.”

Crime Rates and Propaganda

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Here’s an odd article in The Brunei Times, June 3, 2008 that lists India as the country with the highest numbers of murders.The caption reads India records highest number of murders in world. Now, what would the average reader take that to mean? The highest murder rate…

But that’s not the case at all.  Here’s the piece, with my comments:

“INDIA has recorded the highest number of murders in the world, a latest study by a government agency shows, news reports said yesterday. Data put together by the National Crime Records Bureau, a department of the Federal Home Ministry, showed that the number of murders in India, was three times that of Pakistan and double of the United States.“

Lila: Anyone glancing at this would immediately come away with the impression that the murder RATE in India was higher than anywhere else. When we say there are more murders in Gary, Indiana, than elsewhere in the US, or when we assess a city for its safety, we look at murder or crime stats in relation to the population.

“There were more than 32,000 incidents of murder recorded in India over 2007-2008, whereas there were nearly 16,700 murders in the US and about 9,700 in Pakistan, the NDTV network reported.”

Lila: This is clearly misleading.  Raw numbers placed next to each other suggest implicitly that the crime levels are comparable. They are not, because the population size varies.

“However, the survey clarified that the rate per population of murder and other crimes in India was much less compared to other countries.”

Lila: The figures for the rates of murder are tucked inside the body of the piece, where the casual reader isn’t immediately going to spot them.  Most people read the headline, the first two paragraphs and the last paragraph.

So, what’s the last paragraph here?

“Indian crime rate has been increasing every year.”

Lila: Well, India’s population has been increasing every year too. But is that mentioned?

This piece was in the Brunei Times last year. A casual reader might assume from this that India had more murders and rapes than South Africa. It actually has twenty and thirty times fewer, despite much greater population, population density, and poverty. Even in absolute terms, the US has more than four times the number of rapes than India, and South Africa has almost double.The US population is over 300 million, which is nearly a quarter of the Indian population of over 1.1 billion. So this really means the rape rate per capita in the US is sixteen times that in India.

This is the second article I’ve seen recently, which seems to be trying to give a misleading impression of India as a very violent country – more violent than Pakistan. There is violence in India – from terrorism. And a lot of that is fomented by rebels, secessionists of various kinds, and yes, by jihadists – many of whom are trained in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Swine Flu Hysteria Feeds Drug Cartels

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Confirmation from Bill Engdahl that indeed swine flu is being hyped, with the WHO leading the hyping.  The public has such a short memory. Doesn’t it remember that Tamiflu was the drug Rumsfeld was touting for avian flu a few years ago?

Engdahl point out that even the term “swine flu” is being dropped in favor of Influenza 2, in response to lobbying from pork manufacturers, even though  toxic (that is, faeces-filled) factory farms, like Smithfields’ are said to be the probably source of the outbreak.

Engdahl:

“The Drug Cartel comes in

Rather than order a full-scale independent investigation into the pathogen-generation in the toxic waste of Smithfield Foods’ Veracruz CAFO pig operations or other similar pig CAFOs around the world for production of deadly toxics and various possible pathogens, the CDC and increasingly the WHO seem to be more concerned with creating a climate for mass distribution of what have been documented to be dangerous, and in some cases deadly, influenza drugs such as Tamiflu.

On April 14, almost two weeks before the panic over Mexico’s cases of Swine Flu or as CDC now prefers, Influenza A H1N1, the US pharmaceutical company, Novavax announced a pre-clinical study allegedly showing, ‘an investigational H1N1 virus-like particle (VLP) vaccine based on the 1918 Spanish influenza strain protected against both the Spanish flu and a highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza strain.’ The genetically-manipulated vaccine of Novavax, the company claimed, ‘protected Mice and Ferrets Against the Spanish Flu and Highly Pathogenic H5N1 Bird Flu,’ and also conveniently ‘provided protection against highly pathogenic H1N1 and H5N1 Influenza strains.’[16]

On April 24, the WHO issued a press release stating that ‘The Swine Influenza A/H1N1 viruses characterized in this outbreak have not been previously detected in pigs or humans. The viruses so far characterized have been sensitive to oseltamivir…’ Osteltamivir is the technical name for Tamiflu, the drug invented by Donald Rumsfeld’s Gilead Sciences and licensed to Roche Inc. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a convenient Emergency Authorization on April 27 that allows US health officials and others to administer Tamiflu even to infants under one year of age. The FDA statement added it had decided, ‘to authorize the use of unapproved or uncleared medical products or unapproved or uncleared uses of approved or cleared medical products following a determination and declaration of emergency.’[17]

That suggests that the US Government has or is about to release experimental drugs on a panicked population such as the VLP-based Influenza vaccine of Novavax, as well as the vast stockpiles of Tamiflu and influenza drugs sold by giants like GlaxoSmithKline’s Relenza (zanamivir).

With the evidence to date of the scale of the ‘confirmed’ cases of Swine Flu H1N1 variety worldwide, 985 cases of influenza A (H1N1) or Swine Flu infection, there is hardly grounds to subject the human population to drugs whose side effects have included death or severe complications and typically flu-like symptoms and, as in the case of Tamiflu, never even claim to ‘prevent or cure’ the influenza. The entire drama of the past weeks is reading more and more like a bad remake of Crichton’s Andromeda Strain.

Adding a note of the bizarre to the entire drama, in November 2004, amid the early days of the then-world panic over alleged Avian Flu, when Tamiflu was first promoted as a wonder drug by Donald Rumsfeld and others, the WHO published an extraordinary fantasy scenario. In a UN agency normally given to issuing dull scientific notices to world health professionals, the 2004 report was extraordinarily ‘prescient’ of the current scenario with Swine Flu panic……….

…..If one changed the name from Influenza A (H6N1) to Influenza A (H1N1) we could be talking about the current situation.”

Lila: Notice that Mexico now plans to implement a $1.3 billion economic stimulus package to counter the effects of the outbreak on the economy. Presumably this will help increase government spending, government control and global coordination – all long-term goals of the globalists.

Psy-Op Central: Financial War Games In DC

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In the news today, via Politico, this:

 “The Pentagon sponsored a first-of-its-kind war game last month focused not on bullets and bombs — but on how hostile nations might seek to cripple the U.S. economy, a scenario made all the more real by the global financial crisis.

The two-day event near Ft. Meade, Maryland, had all the earmarks of a regular war game. Participants sat along a V-shaped set of desks beneath an enormous wall of video monitors displaying economic data, according to the accounts of three participants.

“It felt a little bit like Dr. Strangelove,” one person who was at the previously undisclosed exercise told POLITICO.

But instead of military brass plotting America’s defense, it was hedge-fund managers, professors and executives from at least one investment bank, UBS – all invited by the Pentagon to play out global scenarios that could shift the balance of power between the world’s leading economies….”

Thanks to the excellent Justin Raimondo, one of the real heavy-weights of  anti-spin commentary, for the lead.

Chinese and Russian espionage? (Updated)

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In the news today,  intelligence officials seem to have found evidence of Chinese/Russians mapping US infrastructure:

“The Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid,” a senior intelligence official told the Journal. “So have the Russians.”

The espionage appeared pervasive across the United States and does not target a particular company or region, said a former Department of Homeland Security official.

“There are intrusions, and they are growing,” the former official told the paper, referring to electrical systems. “There were a lot last year.”

The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama was not immediately available for comment on the newspaper report.

Authorities investigating the intrusions have found software tools left behind that could be used to destroy infrastructure components, the senior intelligence official said. He added, “If we go to war with them, they will try to turn them on.”

Officials said water, sewage and other infrastructure systems also were at risk.

Protecting the electrical grid and other infrastructure is a key part of the Obama administration’s cybersecurity review, which is to be completed next week.

The sophistication of the U.S. intrusions, which extend beyond electric to other key infrastructure systems, suggests that China and Russia are mainly responsible, according to intelligence officials and cybersecurity specialists…..”

More here at Reuters.

My Comment

I am not sure what these “software tools” left behind  were……and where they were left behind.

Since Homeland Security is a pervasive umbrella bureaucracy, it could refer to any part of government at any level.

Now, which companies are responsible for Homeland Security software and intelligence gathering?  See below for information on CACI.

Notice also that intelligence is no longer afraid of any terrorists being behind this threat. They wouldn’t have the sophistication, say officials.

Oh really? But we’ve been orange and red-alerted for the past eight years about just that threat, haven’t we? And somehow, these same not competent terrorists managed to pull off 9-11, didn’t they? And elude  the mighty forces of the US for years….despite our  dominance in global electronic surveillance technology…

But now, suddenly, officials know right off the bat that terrorist couldn’t be behind this.  Anyone else find that reasoning a bit suspect?

Please note, the officials who gave this information are not named in the piece.  Would help if we could find out who these unnamed intelligence people and cyber-security experts are.

 Update:

One of the most important, if not the most important, company involved in Homeland Security is CACI, a company I wrote about in LOE (it’s in the section that was cut out).

CACI’s chairman, Jack London, recently (March 24, 2009) addressed a symposium on asymmetric threats to US and Global Security in Arlington Virginia. His remarks included the following useful reference:

“Harvard professor, Joseph Nye, the man behind the term “soft power,” along with former deputy Secretary of State – and former CACI board member – Richard Armitage, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last year: “Smart Power is a framework for guiding the development of an integrated strategy, resource base and tool kit to achieve U.S. objectives, drawing on both hard and soft power.”

From the section cut out of LOE (this part completed around early 2005)

“We can monitor the entire globe,” says CACI’s CEO Jack London (21)

The depth of this penetration of government is not limited to telecommunications and intelligence. CACI also handles the Federal Aviation Administration’s global administrative-data network and runs a system for the Justice Department that lets lawyers pick through millions of documents for what they need. In July 2004 Transportation Services Administration, the villain of the pat-down searches abuse and an agency of Homeland Security, also became a new client. CACI’s  “Knowledge Management” systems capture and convert data to digital format, publish on the internet, manage the Freedom of Information Act process and declassification, electronic information distribution, and related services for the entire Department of Justice (including the FBI, Tax, Drug Enforcement, and Immigration & Naturalization) Defense, Transportation, DHS Customs and Border Protection, and the Environmental Protection Agency, computer and interrogation services to the Defense Department, and other agencies. (22)

CACI is thus at the heart not only of military intelligence, but of internal security, internet technology, air transportation, and law enforcement at home. It encompasses the most vital powers of the state in an octopus-like penetration of populations abroad and at home.

The nerve center of this octopus coincides with power centers and power brokers in Tel Aviv and Washington….”

See also, this piece from December 2005, on CACI’s involvement in disinformation and what’s been called Defense Support for Public Diplomacy, a blending of diplomacy, information ops and psyops.

Now, from my previous posts, you know I believe that our dear leaders are cornered and that the end game is about to roll out. What could that be? Keep temporizing while grabbing more power, use the power to hide how much has been lost and by whom, whistle cheerfully and twist as many arms as possible to keep the vaudeville act going, meanwhile start fanning public anger against everyone possible, from random rich people, CEO’s, bonus recipients, immigrants, China, Russia, terrorists, socialists, communists, anyone in fact other than the specific group of financiers, regulators and politicians whose finger prints are on this mess.  At some point, should things get bad enough, war  will be declared. For further support for this take, check Jake Towne’s very detailed analysis of why the stimulus money just isn’t enough to do anything (with which I agree, in the sense that this isn’t a problem that can be fixed…however, I disagree that it won’t cause inflation – it will, eventually) and why war might be the avenue out.

Seymour Hersh – A History of Complicity in State Propaganda?

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“On September 25, 1997, ABC used its news magazine program 20/20 to take an unusual journalistic step. In the first segment of the program, Peter Jennings took pains to discredit documents that had been about to be used by its own contracted reporter for an upcoming show scheduled for broadcast. The contracted reporter was Seymour Hersh. The documents purported to show a secret deal involving Marilyn Monroe, Sam Giancana, and President John F. Kennedy. They were to be the cornerstone of Hersh’s upcoming Little, Brown book, The Dark Side of Camelot. In fact, published reports indicate that it was these documents that caused the publisher to increase Hersh’s advance and provoke three networks to compete for a television special to hype the book. It is not surprising to any informed observer that the documents imploded. What is a bit surprising is that Hersh and ABC could have been so naive for so long. And it is ironic that ABC should use 20/20 to expose a phenomenon that it itself fueled twelve years ago.

What happened on September 25th was the most tangible manifestation of three distinct yet overlapping journalistic threads that have been furrowing into our culture since the Church Committee disbanded in 1976. Hersh’s book would have been the apotheosis of all three threads converged into one book. In the strictest sense, the convergent movements did not actually begin after Frank Church’s investigation ended. But it was at that point that what had been a right-wing, eccentric, easily dismissed undercurrent, picked up a second wind—so much so that today it is not an eccentric undercurrent at all. It is accepted by a large amount of people. And, most surprisingly, some of its purveyors are even accepted within the confines of the research community.

The three threads are these: 1) That the Kennedys ordered Castro’s assassination, despite the verdict of the Church Committee on the CIA’s assassination plots. As I noted last issue, the committee report could find no evidence indicating that JFK and RFK authorized the plots on Fidel Castro, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, or Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. 2) That the Kennedys were really “bad boys,” in some ways as bad as Chicago mobsters or the “gentleman killers” of the CIA. Although neither JFK nor RFK was lionized by the main centers of the media while they were alive, because of their early murders, many books and articles were written afterward that presented them in a sympathetic light, usually as liberal icons. This was tolerated by the media establishment as sentimental sop until the revelations of both Watergate and the Church Committee. This “good guy” image then needed to be altered since both those crises seemed to reveal that the Kennedys were actually different than what came before them (Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers) and what came after (Nixon). Thus began a series of anti-Kennedy biographies. 3) That Marilyn Monroe’s death was somehow ordained by her “involvement” with the Kennedy “bad boys.” Again, this was at first a rather peculiar cottage industry. But around the time of Watergate and the Church Committee it was given a lift, and going back to a 1964 paradigm, it combined elements of the first two movements into a Gothic (some would say grotesque) right-wing propaganda tract which is both humorous and depressing in its slanderous implications, and almost frightening in its political and cultural overtones. Egged on by advocates of Judith Exner (e.g. Liz Smith and Tony Summers), this political and cultural time bomb landed in Sy Hersh’s and ABC’s lap. When it blew up, all parties went into a damage control mode, pointing their fingers at each other. As we examine the sorry history of all three industries, we shall see that there is plenty of blame (and shame) to be shared. And not just in 1997….”

James di Eugenio on possible media (in this case, Seymour Hersh) complicity in promoting propaganda on JFK.

Comment

In Language of Empire  (2005) I came to a similar conclusion about Hersh, but given his status and the fact that I was an outsider and novice in comparison to such a veteran and well respected figure, I contented myself with this observation. (my editor cut out a lengthy chapter on media ownership, and the word length requirements also posed insuperable problems to exploring this angle properly):

” Or were the torture photos leaked intentionally in a calculated damage-control effort as some have suggested? There is a documented history of ties between the CIA and the major media – from CBS  to Newsweek and the New York Times. Reaching far back to the Cold War, this record makes it impossible to discount the possibility of a damage-control campaign.” (The Torture Trompe L’Oeil, p. 162)

My footnote to this passage includes the following references, which I add here for the benefit of anyone who wants to look up more information:

“The CIA and the Media: How America’s Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central  Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up,” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977.

“America’s Secret Power: the CIA in a Democratic Society,” Loch K. Johnson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989)

“CIA in America,” Counter Spy, Spring 1980

“The CIA’s use of the Press: A ‘mighty Wurlitzer,'” Columbia Journalism Review, Sept/Oct 1974, p. 9-18.

[There are many more leads in my book. 25 pages out of 225 pages, that is, more than 10% of the book is devoted to footnotes].

The place where the CIA, torture, and propaganda meet is of course the place where all three emanate from – Wall Street.