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The Torture Report

Remember this guy? A year-and-a-half after 9/11, Pakistan ISI picked up Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and turned him over to the CIA, who renditioned him to Gitmo and proceeded to torture him for years, while also waterboarding him 183 times, “enhanced interrogation techniques” designed to break down his personality. Two weeks after Khalid was picked up, we invaded Iraq and destroyed the social fabric of that country, a campaign that resulted in nearly a half million casualties.

Gitmo torture would have been illegal on US soil, and “confessions” extracted under such duress have no more credibility than those extracted by Jesuit inquisitors during their crackdown on the Renaissance. So what is it about 9/11 that resulted in this two-decade delay in prosecuting the case, which is now scheduled to go before a military tribunal in 2021?

It’s amazing two psychologists with zero experience in interrogations or terrorism were paid $81 million dollars to administer torture to the Gitmo detainees, at least a quarter of whom were completely innocent and never should have been abducted and tortured in the first place. After the reality of what was going on leaked out to Congress, audio and video tapes of all torture sessions were swiftly destroyed by the CIA.

The Report is a film about the decade-long investigation conducted by Daniel Jones, a Senate staffer for Dianne Feinstein, vice chair of the Intelligence Committee. Jones was given access to millions of CIA documents and emails and spent seven years tracking every detainee through the system, discovering some painful truths along the way. Unfortunately, his report was suppressed and never made public.

But his conclusions are presented in this film, and they include that the CIA knew the torture sessions would not produce credible evidence, only fake confessions. Why would the CIA pay $81 million dollars to conduct worthless interrogations? Even more startling, the film exposes the lies of Zero Dark Thirty, a blatant propaganda film that attempted to justify Gitmo torture as essential to the capture and assassination of Osama Bin Laden, who was probably already long dead anyway.

But the film really stops short of examining the bigger questions, like who really planned 9/11, and who really was murdered in Pakistan?

So the reason the CIA snatched 775 people and tortured them for years was not to get to the real story of 9/11, but to create the false impression they had actually rounded up the perpetrators , while extracting confessions that could be touted in the media to justify the war on terror.

The film is certainly worth watching on Amazon, even though it does drag on while skirting around some obvious truths. Maybe if more Americans start putting two and two together, the scales may fall from their eyes. I know it’s difficult for many to confront the reality international terrorism is a tool of intelligence agencies and deployed to justify a fascist military state that inflicts the terror through secret operations.

The truth is the Gitmo torture sessions laid a foundation for a future wave of jihadist terrorism, because that’s exactly what’s going to happen. When you foment violence (especially upon innocent people), eventually that violence will come back at you in some form. In intelligence, it’s called “blowback,” and the CIA is well aware of the impact and implications.

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The Parameters of Reality

Four years ago, immediately after the White House announced Osama bin Laden had been killed by a Navy Seal Team, I wrote a column for High Times detailing how fishy the story was, but High Times declined to publish it, so my column ended up on this blog. (“No Truth to Osama Murder Story”). Strange every detail I brought into question has since been confirmed by award-winning investigative reporter Sy Hersh. Primary among my suspicions was the convenient death of the supposed Gitmo detainee who had supposedly led the Seals to the compound where Osama was hiding. Not only was this murder played to help reelect Obama, it was the trump card proving the years running Gitmo had not been a waste. So of course, the Gitmo element was a complete fabrication.

The world media is lining up on two sides: one continuing to believe the completely phony official story, and the other believing the one being told by Hersh. But there’s no reason to believe either is completely accurate simply because both depend upon sources inside the National Security Establishment and those people seldom reveal the entire truth. Political history is a carefully stage-managed affair.

Two people were likely killed in Pakistan during that Seal raid, but we don’t really know who. Was it Osama, or a lookalike stand-in being kept captive by ISI? And if we really wanted to get to the bottom of 9/11, wouldn’t an interrogation of the supposed mastermind be of invaluable assistance in the quest? So why was this mission designed as an assassination instead of a simple kidnapping? And who ordered this assassination, because it reeks of a cover-up. And why weren’t any of the Bin Laden family living in the compound allowed to talk to anyone before being hustled back to Saudi Arabia in secret?

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The wheels are coming off the 9/11 hoodwink

What passes for a “free press” these days in America is pretty sad. Recently Ron Paul incurred the displeasure of the Washington Post website Daily Beast by suggesting there might be more to 9/11 than the official story. For this insult to the accepted dogmas of the state propaganda machines Paul was branded a “truther.”

It is positively Orwellian how they’ve morphed “truth” into “lies.” I have to think some CIA-funded psychologist came up with this strategy.
After 14 years, it’s amazing how tight a lid the media keeps on this story.

After much study and meditation, I suspect a drone hit the Pentagon, mostly based on the limited video evidence released. But even if it was a bigger plane, there’s no explanation for the amount of damage done to that highly fortified structure.

Unless, of course, you realize all files regarding a missing trillion dollars were also destroyed that day, ending any attempts to track where that trillion went. But then there’s no accounting for the Twin Towers and building 7 collapsing at free-fall.

Unless you realize the towers were condemned and needed a billion dollar gut renovation to remove asbestos.

How much easier just to blow that asbestos into the air and blame it on 19 dudes with box-cutters commanded by two dudes in a cave in Afghanistan.
911coach2Pete Carroll got the “truther” treatment and was similarly admonished from coast to coast before he won the Super Bowl for suggesting there might be missing pieces to the story. Funny how not one major news outlet ever published anything substantial regarding revelations against the official version of 9/11, and none of them ever wasted any time doing any independent investigations of the crime, except for a superficial whitewash of the designated straw men by Popular Mechanics.

Meanwhile, like a scene out of The Bridge on the River Kwai, the muddy river is descending, and lines into Saudi Arabia are visible in spots. Funny how close allies to the Saudis inside America were installed at operational command points in the national security system prior to 9/11, and why was a head of the CIA spending so much time at the Saudi ambassador’s home? Evidence collected by the 9/11 Commission on the Saudis was so damning that 28 pages had to be blacked out of the report in the “interest of national security.” But many in Congress have read those excised pages, and want them released so everyone can have a deeper understanding of the event. Meanwhile, a suit regarding Saudi complicity in 9/11 has 6,000 plaintiffs and is winding its way through the courts of New York, propelled by massive Freedom of Information Act requests.

All this despite the fact we supposedly killed the primary suspect in his bedroom in front of his family and then dumped his corpse into the ocean. If the police ever gave you a story like that would you buy it? Bin Laden’s family was put into immediate seclusion and moved back to Saudi Arabia, while most of the Navy Seals who supposedly assassinated him mysteriously died shortly after that assassination. Recently the shirt worn by the assassin during the assassination was put on display at the 9/11 museum in NYC.

Then there’s suspect number two, who has been held incommunicado in a military prison in Cuba and tortured endlessly for over a decade with all the latest torture techniques. The FBI has already been discovered planting spooks and bugs on his defense team, while the judge discovered he’s not really in charge of the “mute” button when anything compromises national security. Does this sound like a fair trial in progress because it all reeks of corruption and hidden agendas to me.

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When it comes to JFK and 9/11, Oliver Stone blinks

 

I hate to keep picking on Oliver Stone since he’s got one of the few shows on TV worth watching. I mean, TV is a real wasteland these days. I sometimes find myself watching the BBC channel because nothing better is on. Even Chef Ramsey is better than most American TV shows and the BBC often has better movies than its American counterparts. But back to Stone. His series on American history has been fun to watch, even if there’s little in it that I didn’t know before. But it’s the parts being left out that really amaze me.

The best example so far is Stone’s retelling of the JFK assassination, a subject he covered in depth in a previous feature film, where the evidence of CIA involvement was marshaled. Even though that film was built around a great American hero, Judge Jim Garrison, the courageous judge is not even mentioned once in the series? Huh? Even more astounding, Stone never mentions any details of the plot. We know today that Johnny Roselli bragged to many people about being one of the shooters and was paid $50,000 by his boss Sam Giancana, although Giancana later told his brother the money came from the Texas oil crowd (Hunt, Murchison) via the CIA. Why does Stone back off the facts and not go after the CIA on JFK?

Even more mysterious is how Stone handles 9/11, backing up the fiction that Osama bin Laden was the mastermind behind the event. There’s so much evidence of a coverup in 9/11 it would take several books to cover all the mysteries, but none of the evidence even enters the picture as Stone buys into the fiction that the event took the Pentagon by surprise. Just detailing the Pentagon strike and how that plane did a curlicue in order to hit an office near the ground floor where financial corruption was being investigated, when that pilot could have much easier just made a direct hit on the offices of the Joint Chiefs, which was a straight-line target that didn’t involve any expert maneuvers.

But there are some really good things in the show. Like the detailing of the Bush family relationship with the Nazis. And the fact Standard Oil and other Rockefeller companies did business with the Nazis throughout the war, and sometimes even seemed to be giving them preferential treatment over the allies when it came to crucial war supplies. The German Luftwaffe depended on fuel made only by Standard Oil throughout the war.

The series has been fun to watch, but it also seems pretty rushed, like they wrote a voice-over script in a few days and then slapped a bunch of royalty-free video clips around it, and then stuck in some Hollywood movie clips to provide some color against the grainy black and white newsreels. But the series could have been a lot more informative had Stone just lifted a few more rocks. For example, he mentions the Trilateral Commission set-up by the Rockefellers, but never mentions their earlier and probably more important power center: The Council on Foreign Relations, where the center of energy on political power in America can often be found.

 

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Guide to the Disinfo Matrix

I was on facebook the other day when one of my unknown friends posted a link to a book titled Big Oil by Dean Henderson. It didn’t have a single review on Amazon so I thought it was something new. In the promo material, some person from South America said it deserved the Pulitzer Prize. It was super expensive at $25, but often the most reliable books on deep politics cost money, so I thought I was ordering a real book and bought it without really looking into the author at all.

Unfortunately, when the book arrived yesterday, I quickly discovered it was filled with misinformation and quoted people like David Icke and William Cooper as if they were serious journalists, which they are not. I opened it at random and came to a quote saying Allen Dulles was a member of Skull & Bones, a secret society at Yale, when, in fact, Dulles had gone to Princeton. Soon, I realized Dean Henderson is either a knowing agent of disinfo or a brainwashed stooge of the disinfo matrix (more on that later).

Paul Krassner, the dean of underground journalism, began printing conspiracy research in the 1960s in his national magazine, The Realist, forging a trail few in journalism would ever follow. Pretty soon, researchers were crawling out of the woodwork and sending Paul stories. Even today, when he no longer publishes conspiracy research, these characters are still peppering him with their nutty theories. I know because Paul forwards the wackiest stuff to me, as if to say, “see how crazy your compatriots are?” Many of these people are undoubtedly plants. Of course, the most famous of these characters was Mae Brussell, whose research seemed authentic at first, but pretty soon Paul realized Mae was leading him down a rabbit hole and connecting dots that didn’t really connect, leading him on a wild goose chase to nowhere. That’s when Paul stopped trusting conspiracy researchers [Paul adds: I felt it necessary not to have predisposed perception, to distinguish coincidence from conspiracy, and not let what might be perceived as evidence be tainted by ego or agenda]. After most people get burned after falling in a rabbit hole, it becomes really difficult to get past the noise to the real info that noise is designed to conceal. The game is to sheep-deep all deep political research as crackpot nonsense by flooding the field with crack-pot nonsense. Unfortunately, this game has worked very well for over 50 years now.

I’m too old and too wise to fall for this crapola, although I can’t say the same for a lot of people I meet, who seem to gobble up the latest pronouncements by Icke, Rense, Jones and the rest of the captains of disinfo. Henderson’s book wasn’t just sourced through these dubious characters, though. He also quoted a number of more reliable conspiracy researchers, some of whom have suspicious axes to grind. In this list, I’d include anyone from the Lyndon LaRouche organization, Alex Constantine, and Mike Ruppert. These are probably disinfo agents, but at least they’re journalists who deal with verifiable facts and not baseless rumor and innuendo. The rabbit holes they lead you into (like Ruppert’s “Peak Oil” scam), are more credible than the shapeshifting aliens in Icke’s manifestos, although ultimately, I don’t think these sources can be trusted any more than their obviously crackpot counterparts.

After I got Henderson’s book, I learned he’s a regular on the Icke/Rense/Jones disinfo circuit. He also seems to be an activist in the Green movement. The environmental movement is heavily seeded with agents because the oil companies have to keep in eye on environmentalists to make sure they don’t do anything damaging to their bottom line, which is why they’ve installed an oligarchy insider like Al Gore as their chief lightening rod. It’s a dialectical game, just like almost everything else that goes on inside deep politics.

Once you get past those two levels of disinfo, you get to real journalists with no visible axes to grind, a list that includes Antony Sutton, Gary Webb, Steve Kangas, Daniel Hopsicker, Dick Russell, Alfred McCoy, Danny Casolaro, and Peter Dale Scott. These are the authors you have to read and if I find their names and books in a bibliography, then I know I’m dealing with a serious researcher. The more serious a researcher is, however, the more ignored they will become over time. Deep political research is a great way to “break your rice bowl,” which is how they put it to Antony Sutton when he veered off the designated rails. You can put me in this category too, as I once had a flourishing journalism career, but after I began publishing deep political research in High Times, I soon realized I no longer had a journalism career. My book, The Octopus Conspiracy, got exactly one review when it came out—in a local publication in Woodstock, New York.

Shortly after 9/11, Retired General Mirza Aslam Beg, former chief of staff of the Pakistani Army, said 9/11 was an operation of the American intelligence agencies. Beg also claimed Wikileaks is a tool of psy-war, and not a real whistle-blowing operation, and that Osama bin Laden died in 2009, and that the Seal Team killed a lookalike stand-in. Of course, researchers like me know Beg is probably telling the truth.

Oh, and by the way, I left my review of Big Oil on Amazon. It wasn’t very favorable.

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The Truth About Albert Pike

Albert Pike and Abraham Lincoln were both lawyers, and both played key roles in the Civil War, although on opposite sides and deploying much different tactics. Along with fellow Freemason John Brown (who was supported in his efforts to spark the Civil War by the founder of Skull & Bones), Pike was a terrorist leader, only instead of rallying blacks he rallied Native Americans to attack and plunder Union settlements. Lincoln may have won the war, but Pike won the peace.

Pike was a great spook you see, and surely had deep connections into a secret society called “Knights of the Golden Circle,” of which John Wilkes Booth (a spook himself) may have been a member, as well as Jesse James. Pike was the most influential Freemason in the history of American Freemasonry, and designed 30 initiation rituals for the advanced degrees he created inside Freemasonry, investing great ceremonial magic into the culture, which he soon dominated as its American Grand Master. Here is how the indispensable Ten Thousand Famous Freemasons describes him (most entries are two or three sentences, while his is among the most extensive):

Albert Pike (1809-1891) Lawyer, poet, soldier, adventurer, author and 8th Grand Commander of the Southern Supreme Council, AASR. b. Dec. 29, 1809 in Boston, Mass. He entered Harvard in 1826, but financial problems prevented the completion of his education. Nevertheless, he became one of the leading intellectuals of that era by self-education.

After a time as principal of a school in Newburyport, Mass., he set out for the partially explored regions of the West, traveling by stage to Cincinnati; by steamer to Nashville; on foot to Paducah; by keel-boat down the Ohio; by steamer up the Mississippi; and in 1831 he left with a caravan of ten wagons as one of a party of 40 men under Capt. Charles Bent, q.v., en route from St. Louis to Santa Fe. He arrived at Taos on Nov. 10, 1831, having walked 500 miles from the Cimarron River, where his horse ran away. He remained at Santa Fe until Sept., 1832, and then started with a party down the Pecos River and into the Staked Plain, to the headwaters of the Brazos.

Pike, with four others, then made their way to Fort Smith, Ark. Here he again took up the teaching profession, and in 1833 became associate editor of the Arkansas Advocate, purchasing the paper a year later. He then took up the study of law, and being admitted to the bar, sold the paper. In 1839 he contributed to Blackwood’s Magazine, a poem, Hymns to the Gods, which established him as a poet of reputation.

As a lawyer, he was recognized throughout the Southwest. In the Mexican War, he was commissioned a captain of cavalry in Archibald Yell’s, q.v., regiment. After Yell’s death, Pike had several differences of opinion with the new commander, which resulted in a bloodless duel between them, but ended his cavalry career. For the next few years he divided his time between the law and his writing, and his residence between New Orleans and Little Rock.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, he cast his lot with the Confederacy, and was named Indian agent and brigadier general of the area, which included the Indian Territory. Once again he differed with his superiors, and when accused of insubordination, he resigned, serving the rest of the war period as a judge of the Arkansas superior court.

He practiced law in Memphis, Tenn. for two years before moving to Washington, D.C. at the beginning of his term as sovereign grand commander of the Southern Jurisdiction AASR. He was raised in Western Star Lodge No. 2, Little Rock, Ark in Aug., 1850, when he was 40. Two years later (Nov. 4, 1852), he became charter member and first master of Magnolia Lodge No. 60, Little Rock. On Oct. 4, 1880 he affiliated with Pentalpha Lodge No. 23, Washington, D.C. While in Arkansas he served on many grand lodge committees, including Masonic Law and Usage; Foreign Correspondence; Library; By-Laws, and was a trustee, and subsequently president, of St. John’s College, established by that grand lodge.

Exalted in Union Chapter No. 2, R.A.M. of Little Rock, Nov. 29, 1850, he became the first grand scribe of the Grand Chapter of Arkansas, and grand high priest in 1853-54. He was first commander of Hugh de Paynes Commandery No. 1, K.T. of Little Rock. Received the R. & S.M. degrees in Columbia Chapter, R.A.M., of Washington, D.C. On March 20, 1853 he received the AASR (SJ) degrees, 4°-32° at Charleston, S. Car, from Albert G. Mackey, q.v., and received the 33° in New Orleans in 1857. The following year he was elected an active member, and sovereign grand commander (Jan. 3, 1859). In this position he did much for that rite.

As one has said, “He found the Scottish Rite in a cabin and left it in a temple.” He rewrote the AASR ritual, as well as many Masonic books, including Morals and Dogma. d. April 2, 1891, and is buried in the House of the Temple, Washington, D.C.

Although Freemasonry began as a haven for the enlightenment, spreading the doctrine of liberty, equality and fraternity (while often secretly plotting an end to royalty and religion), it would appear that royalty and religion got their meat-hooks into Freemasonry fairly early in the game. The secret societies in Europe engaged in hidden vendettas and secret warfare for centuries, and almost none of this activity has ever surfaced in the mainstream. Many lodges began to wonder what hidden machinations might lurk in the minds of their Masonic masters, or which side they truly represented.

The major combatants in historical secret society warfare are supposed to be the Jesuits, the Rosicrucians, and the Freemasons, one influenced by the Vatican, one by Protestant, and one by the English House of Lords. But to tell the truth the Vatican had a slippery relationship with the Jesuits, just as the English Grand Masters always held a slippery grip on their affiliated lodges, many of which were packed with independent-minded businessmen, adventurers and intellectuals of their respective locales. And then, of course, France created its own form of masonry, as the English were never to be trusted. The Illuminati conspiracy was born at a Jesuit university in Bavaria and designed as a penetration of masonry and oppositional force to the Rosicrucians, who staged fake magic shows and invented a completely fake history.

In design and execution, the Freemasons and the Sicilian men-of-honor are not very far apart, although the masons have been celebrated for their good works, while adeptly hiding their evil intentions, while just the opposite is true for the Sicilians. In reality, however, many of those Sicilians got their inroads with local politicians and judges by becoming Freemasons, and masonic temples were the place where people of all faiths and walks of life can meet knowing all their conversations will remain secret. Masons, after all, are pledged to secrecy and to assist each other whenever possible, a bond of brotherhood as strong as any on earth.  It’s possible the Illuminati and House of Lords conspired to foment the bloody French Revolution.

Likewise, the separation of a recently-formed United States into two warring factions was quite possibly instigated by the same forces. London and the Vatican have employed spooks around the globe for just this purpose for centuries. The terrorist who helped spark the war, John Brown, was supported by William H. Russell, cousin to the heir to the Russell opium fortune and founder of Yale’s Order of Skull & Bones, and you can trace a line from Skull & Bones to Illuminati central in Bavaria.

John Brown (1800-1859) American abolitionist fanatic, regarded by some northern sympathizers as a martyr. Brown’s cause was glorified by the famous marching song, John Brown’s Body. He was a Freemason who later turned anti-Mason. b. May 9, 1800, he was executed on Dec. 2, 1859 in Charlestown, Va. From 1856 on, he was obsessed with the idea of abolishing slavery by force. When a pro-slavery massacre occurred at Lawrence, Kans., Brown killed five slavery adherents at Pottawatomie, Kans. in retaliation. He next made a heroic stand at Osawatomie, Kans. against a raid by pro-slavery forces from Missouri. He conceived a plan of establishing a new state as a refuge for negroes. With help from Massachusetts abolitionists, he seized the government arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Va. in 1859, intending the action as a signal for a general insurrection of slaves. Overpowered and convicted of treason, he was hanged Dec. 2, 1859. Brown was raised in Hudson Lodge No. 68, Hudson, Ohio, on May 11, 1824, serving as junior deacon in 1825-26. His uncle was the first master of the lodge. Shortly after 1826 he moved to Pennsylvania and with the anti-Masonic movement, he renounced Freemasonry and continued to do so on every possible occasion. His son, John Brown, Jr. became a Freemason and was buried with Masonic honors. His daughter, Sarah, once told a biographer that Brown had stated that “the forms of the initiatory ceremonies of the Masons struck him as silly,” and in a negro newspaper Brown wrote, “another of the few errors of my life is that I have joined the Freemasons, Oddfellows, Sons of Temperance, and a score of other secret societies instead of seeking the company of intelligent, wise and good men.”

Lincoln got to the Presidency by becoming the favorite lawyer of the railroads, many of whom were deeply indebted to the Rothschilds, although they would soon transform into The Robber Barons, so you have to wonder what did that transformation do for the European banks that bankrolled their operations. The Civil War assisted the rise of  J.P. Morgan, who dominated post-war banking, along with Jay Gould and seven or eight others, most of whom eventually co-invested in the American International Corporation, which soon created or invested in hundreds of companies to corral whatever resources were available worldwide. One of these companies was United Fruit Company.

Pike’s racism rivaled Hitler’s and he was a founding Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. He may have lynched a few unfortunate black men in his time, so deep was his hated of the darker races, although, strangely, he became a best friend to Native America, winning lawsuits for stolen lands, and bringing some tribes into the Civil War on the side of the South as their commanding General, although his meager military victories were eclipsed by his poetry (which was quite popular at the time and well-reviewed by many scholars). His nearly impenetrable book, Morals and Dogma, is filled with the most blatant thefts, lifting freely from a wide variety of sources without bothering to re-phrase a single word, all to create the illusion of his encyclopedic knowledge of the occult and Eastern spirituality.

Most of the stolen material came from one source, Eliphas Levi, who’d been initiated into ceremonial magic by the British Rosicrucians, a German secret society that began during the Reformation by claiming access to phony ancient secrets. A Frenchman, Levi was on his way to becoming a Catholic Priest when he got sidetracked by paganism and took the name of a Jew. His biggest legacy was the creation of our modern Tarot cards.

Far as I know, only one author has accused Pike of being a secret British agent, and that would be Anton Chaitkin of the Lyndon LaRouche organization. Anton paints Pike as a Satanist, glutton and human monster incarnate, ignoring the fact Pike was actually considered one of the most gracious and well-mannered gentlemen of his time by many of those who came into contact with him.

The LaRouche organization has picked up where the John Birch Society left off, creating a wide swath of disifno all based on real conspiracy theory, but leading off into one rabbit hole or another. Just enough real info to make the disinfo go down the unsuspecting gullet. So I wouldn’t jump to any conclusions based on what a LaRouchite would have to say. Also, keep in mind LaRouche himself, is a Grand Master in French Freemasonry, a fact he never tries to conceal. Not to mention the John Birch Society was founded by Freemasons and members of the Council on Foreign Relations. In controlled dialectics, the fox is always put in charge of the hen house. Notice the Birch Society was organized similar to the masonic lodges, with 40-50 members in each cell, their identities kept completely secret. They are famous for having high-ranking masons and Mormons in their ranks.

If the Civil War was fomented to prevent Philadelphia from eclipsing London as the center of global finance, that feat has to be one of the greatest undercover mission impossibles of all time. And notice the American banking center shifted during the War to Wall Street.

If you want to read more about Pike, Robert Guffey has published an entertaining book, Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form (Trine Day.) Although an admittted 32nd Degree Mason, Duffey presents a balanced portrait and has a lot of interesting material in his book. The best thing about his work is he maintains a sense of humor through-out.

One tidbit I almost forgot to mention: Pike was charged with treason after the Civil War and because he’d used the Indian tribes to foment terror against the North, he might have even been hanged had Lincoln lived. Fortunately for Pike, as one of his first acts as President, Andrew Johnson awarded the Supreme Master Mason and Magus a complete pardon for all his war crimes. Pike went from hiding out in Canada in fear for his life, to being accorded full masonic ceremonies inside the White House, recognizing his prowess in the occult. The incoming President Andrew Johnson, was, after all, a devout Freemason, and, as such, he considered Albert Pike as his guiding authority in all things mystical.

 

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MacBird!: little-known masterpiece of counterculture literature

After JFK was assassinated, the country went into deep shock. Very few people wanted to dwell on the event, or even consider evidence of CIA involvement. In fact, the mood of the country was similar to the post 9/11 environment, which left many people unable and unwilling to consider alternative conspiracy theories other than Osama bin Laden did it.

In any major crime, however, the key is to examine who benefited, and nobody benefited more from the JFK assassination than Lyndon Baines Johnson, an intensely corrupt politician who knew about the event in advance, although he certainly lacked sufficient power to pull it off on his own. In fact, had JFK not been assassinated, Johnson would likely have been jailed due to an ongoing investigation into bribes he’d accepted, a story that wouldn’t fully surface until after his death.

Barbara Garson was a leader in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. In August of 1965, she was speaking at an anti-war rally in Berkeley, when she called the new First Lady: “Lady MacBird Johnson.” This slip-of-the-tongue inspired Garson to write a Shakespearean parody based around the Kennedy assassination and the first staged reading of this masterpiece of counterculture literature actually occurred at the Channing-Murray Foundation run by the Unitarian Church in Urbana, Illinois, an event that cemented that church as the beachhead for the blossoming anti-war movement in central Illinois.

The lead character of MacBird was played by none other than my cohort at the time, Brian Ravlin, who I’d first met when he appeared in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Urbana Junior High with my brother, Paul.  Brian had dropped out of high school and gone to San Francisco in search of Bugsy’s brother Don. When he reappeared in Urbana a year later, he seemed an entirely new person.

A few days before the show opened, Brian dropped by the high school to visit me and a cheerleader girl squirted him in the face with a squirt gun as a joke. Brian had a huge Afro-like haircut and immense, shaggy sideburns at the time (see picture above). In fact, he was probably the most wildly-flamboyant counterculture character in Champaign-Urbana at the time, although Carl Ellis (Old Carlo) would soon surpass Brian in that regard.

Anyway, Brian laughed and gave that girl a little spank on her rear with a spiral notebook he was holding, either his latest poetry or notes for his script. Smitty’s son might have been the girl’s boyfriend, they certainly ran with the same crowd, for when he saw Brian slap her butt, he just reared back and blindsided Brian with a sucker punch to the face that knocked Brian off his feet and landed him flat on his back. The teacher quickly rushed Smitty’s son into the classroom and started class as if nothing had happened. I don’t remember much of what followed, other than I went into a slow-boiling rage because nothing was being done since Smitty (the football coach) was the most powerful figure in school. Brian went home and his mom took him to the hospital to get him checked out.

Like most people at the time, I was also having trouble thinking about CIA involvement in the Kennedy assassination. A few others around me were already deep into the citizen research movement (which is the real reason we know the truth today; the government has done nothing but cover-up the trails). But I was stunned by this staged reading, and immediately accepted the transparent truth that life is a giant wheel and the same stories go round and round. Suddenly it was clear the Macbeth tragedy was obviously being played out with new characters in our own time. After watching the show, it became difficult not to become a citizen researcher and I started reading everything I could find on the assassination.

And who do you think played the character of Ken O’Dunc? Why, none other than Eric Swenson, founder of the Finchley Boys, who helped spark the local garage rock movement and then had drifted into acting. In fact, Eric was probably the best actor in the production and was playing the Kennedy role because he could do a perfect JFK imitation, Boston accent and all. Eric had always worshiped Kennedy and no one was more depressed about the assassination than he. Eric even had a portrait of JFK on the wall in his house. I’d already started my own underground newspaper after getting kicked out of the Knight Riders for taking LSD (only a few months later, my former band members turned into huge pot-heads and acid freaks…they even offered to let me back into the band, but I’d already moved on).

“The performance was directed by Iva Martirano,” recalls Judith Lewis, who played one of the witches. “She founded the Roundhouse Players and staged a number of other avant-gardish productions using Urbana High and U of I students. She was the wife of Salvatore Martirano who was a composer of electronic music on the faculty with John Cage.”

I recently went back to take a look at MacBird and rediscovered its brilliance. I think it’d be a popular play today if not for the ending: Bobby Kennedy avenges his brother’s death. In the script, Ted Kennedy appears with a cast on his arm and Garson makes it clear the Kennedy’s believe Johnson is trying to have them killed as well. Little did we know Bobby would go down within a few years.

For the most part, the script is written in Shakespearean couplets and many of the longer speeches are modern adaptations of Shakespeare’s most famous soliloquies. The characters dress in modern suits, except for a colorful plume in their fedoras and tiny toy swords affixed to their waists. Eventually, MacBird became a huge hit on Broadway, launching the career of Stacy Keach.

I kinda wish Garson would revisit this project and update the script with the latest revelations. Certainly the trio of James Angleton, Bill Harvey and Johnny Roselli would make a wonderful addition as primary instigators and eventual assassins. The trio should be forced to keep killing more and more people, and eventually even Roselli, to keep a lid on the conspiracy.

Allen Dulles and J Edgar Hoover would be the masters of the coverup. Kennedy’s conflict with the Texas oil cowboys as well as the Eastern Federal Reserve need to be spelled out. And, of course, Johnson must voluntarily give up the throne (and then watch Bobby Kennedy get killed by a Dulles-Angleton goon anyway). In the end, MacBird goes back to the ranch in a deep depression and dies relatively young while tremendously unhappy.

Our local production of MacBird was a transforming event in central Illinois and one I still think about. We already had John Cage producing his greatest happenings in our town, I was running the biggest counterculture publication in downstate Illinois at the age of 17, and the Finchley Boys were rapidly becoming one of the most famous garage bands in the State.

But we also had some leaders on the other side of the fence, including the mysterious Professor Revilo P. Oliver, whose name spells the same both ways, and who was the leading pundit of the John Birch Society at the time, the first person to announce a conspiracy coverup in the JFK assassination within days of the event, and a person who probably should have been fired from the University for anti-Jewish rantings, but never was. In Revilo’s world view, the Jews were behind the Communists, who were behind everything else, including the shadow government. Today, I view the John Birch Society as an intelligence operation, not a legitimate citizen’s group, just based on their controversial history and heavy involvement in obvious disinfo. Revilo would eventually split from the Birch Society and join the violent White Power movement, undoubtedly another intelligence op.

In another weird twist, Johnny Roselli, one of JFK’s assassins, was passing through town frequently at the time to visit his lover, owner of the Champaign-Urbana News Gazette, a newspaper I worked for on week-ends to make pocket money.

I just wish Garson (or someone else) would come up with a play like MacBird only about 9/11 because we sure need something to break down the walls of resistance to truth that have been erected to protect the guilty.

(Excerpted from Magic, Religion and Cannabis.)

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Was Osama Senile?

Completely forgotten in all the hoopla over the release of the heavily edited and redacted documents known as “The bin Laden Papers,” is the uncomfortable fact that immediately after 9/11, bin Laden went on Al Jazeera to announce he was innocent. In fact, zero actual evidence has been produced linking bin Laden to 9/11—other than some transparently manipulated audio and video clips of dubious origins. We have faked confessions, no doubt, but no forensic evidence for a crime that involved tremendous resources and intense planning? After all the Gitmo waterboarding that’s gone on, you’d think something concrete would have emerged. In fact, the FBI never even accused bin Laden of being a suspect in 9/11, as his wanted poster mentioned only two embassy bombing incidents. The patsy being put on trial (after over a decade of torture and isolation) will be judged and sentenced based solely on the testimony of another terror suspect put in a cell with him, a man whose testimony was extracted under torture and promise of an easier sentence? This is not a trial but a national disgrace.

We do know, however, bin Laden began his career as an Islamic jihadist at the request of the CIA and the organization he built was designed to repel Russian invaders in Afghanistan. It was only after the anti-Russian campaign ended that bin Laden came into conflict with Israel, England and the United States. Prior to our invasion of Afghanistan, he likely could have been easily captured. When troops encircled his Tora Bora command post (built by our CIA) they strangely left the back door escape route to Pakistan wide open. Clearly, this “escape” was nothing but a carefully orchestrated withdrawal.

But the most intriguing bit of information I’ve come across was a reference on a Middle-Eastern website to a suspected decline in bin Laden’s mental facilities after 2003. Did you even know two of his wives had PhD’s? Wouldn’t it be nice to hear their perspective on the raid and death of their beloved husband? Was an unarmed man suffering from dementia actually executed in front of his unarmed family? Clearly, this was no fire-fight. Do you ever wonder why the body was disposed of in the ocean, why the compound was quickly turned to dust, why the witnesses have disappeared from press and public scrutiny? And a year after the execution, we get treated to the release of “incriminating” papers, which actually reveal nothing of any substance about who bin Laden actually was and who he was working for. The strangest thing in these papers is a long diatribe on why jihadists should not attack oil company installations or refineries. I wonder who’s agenda that might be? After seizing every computer and scrap of paper in that compound, it is astonishing how little is revealed in the 17 fragments released, many of which have no attribution, author or context.

When we really want to get to the bottom of 9/11, it will be necessary to interrogate Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Armitage, Frank Carlucci and George Bush Senior, who was meeting with Osama’s brother Shafig in the Ritz-Carleton in Washington that day. Meanwhile, the only forensic evidence we have is a $100,000 money transfer from an ISI operative in Pakistan. Is it worth noting ISI chief Mahmoud Ahmad was meeting with Bob Graham and Porter Goss on the morning of 9/11?

But even Bob Graham (who sat and signed off on the whitewash commission) called for a new investigation last fall when it was revealed that all the Saudi links to 9/11 had been concealed rather than investigated. You can bet neither the ISI nor Saudi nor Mossad links will be touched upon in the upcoming trial.

And finally, is it worth mentioning another suspicious detail in this case: the deaths last August of the Seal Team that assassinated bin Laden?

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No Truth to Osama Murder Story

How come a fake photo of Osama Bin Laden (complete with possible entry wound near left eye) was immediately circulated to the global press? And why did initial stories claim there was a 40-minute “firefight,” when, in fact, the SEAL team met with zero resistance? And why was Bin Laden immediately killed and the body dropped at sea with no further identification possible? And why is the global media acting like Bin Laden has already been proven guilty?

Maybe you’ve noticed by now Bin Laden’s compound was in one of most secure areas in Pakistan, around the corner from their version of West Point. It would be absurd to think the Pakistan military had zero knowledge of Bin Laden’s whereabouts in such an highly-guarded zone. Also absurd is the idea a SEAL team would land in the area without prior approval of Pakistan’s military command.

But the fishiest aspect of this unfortunate operation, which reminds me greatly of Lee Harvey Oswald, is that the most important witness will never take the stand to tell his side of the story.

I believe Al Qaeda is basically an opium-smuggling ring created when the ISI and CIA set up a proxy mercenary army to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. After the Soviet withdrawal, this CIA-trained army, of which Osama was a member, was deployed to the Balkans, the pipeline where opium enters Europe. Opium is the most profit-intensive commodity on the planet, so anyone who gets involved in a large scale will become fantastically rich in a short time. After we invaded Afghanistan, we set-up a relative of the biggest opium war lord into power, and there’s evidence the CIA was providing arms and assistance to this opium war lord. Meanwhile, opium production has sky-rocketed since we took command. The real story is that the corrupt opium distribution system cannot exist without the money getting washed through our global banking institutions. And if we ever get serious about ending the opium cartels who are running this system, all we have to do is follow the money into the banks.

Immediately after Bin Laden was pronounced dead, a 9/11 family member personally asked Obama to drop the Gitmo investigation. Obama reportedly walked away without answering.

Pundits began using Osama’s death as a reason to end the torture investigations to no avail. Seems to me many 9/11 families ought to be smart enough to figure out the government’s been lying from day one about 9/11, and they could have brought back the most important witness alive but instead murdered him in cold blood in his bedroom in front of his family.

And now we’re supposed to be happy about this? And here’s the real rub: the person sheep-dipped as “the courier,” the Gitmo detainee, whose waterboarding supposedly made this operation possible, is the only other person besides Osama killed at the scene!

Very convenient he won’t be offering any views on this situation in a pubic court room. I saw some potential benefits to this operation:

1) Obama’s approval record was sinking, and the release of a birth certificate and now death of Osama are just what he needed;

2) The NSA/CIA may be close to a virtual monopoly on raw opium, along with whatever other crime syndicates they are working with;

3) Arab extremists will be forced to respond, insuring the cycle of death for profit continues (we are, after all, a “war” economy);

4) The 9/11 Truth Movement just lost a lot of credibility and will continue to erode as much of it is a controlled operation;  and, possibly most important:

5) The Gitmo torture investigation can now eventually be closed without public protest; and the “softening-up” process to make this possible has already begun in the media, thus insuring a former president and vice-president are not found guilty of war crimes.