Sludge Report #145 - The Awakening

Wednesday, 4 December 2002, 4:29 pm
Column: C.D. Sludge

In This Edition.... This Mad, Bad World - A New News Environment - But Does It Scan? - The Zeitgeist Is In Motion - The “Flooding” Of Global Consciousness

NOTE: Authors of this report will be anonymous and wide ranging, and occasionally finely balanced. Indeed you are invited to contribute: The format is as a reporters notebook. It will be published as and when material is available. C.D. Sludge can be contacted at sludge@scoop.co.nz. The Sludge Report is available as a free email service..Click HERE - http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/myscoop/ to subscribe...

Sludge Report #145

This Mad, Bad World

Sludge is starting to seriously wonder about the state of things. The email inbox has become in recent weeks a sort of daily Pandora’s box of horrifying revelations. And while Scoop’s bountiful array of columnists admittedly have been doing their best to bring the most exciting of these to everybody’s attention (the American Coup 2002, Paul Wellstone’s suspicious death, The Smallpox Controversy and the Homeland Insecurity Bill being but three recent example’s of the genre) this ain’t the half of it!

Today for example there is this on possible post-war Iraqi leaders from Foreign Policy In Focus (and noted in Sam Smith’s indispensable Undernews).

“The leading candidates are a chilling lot.

The front runner is Gen. Nizar Al-Khazaji, whom David Mack of the U.S. State Department describes as having "the right ingredients" for being a future leader. The Danish Ministry of Justice disagrees: it has placed Khazaji under partial house arrest while it investigates war crimes charges brought against him by 89 Kurdish and human rights organizations.

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Our "future leader" was the Iraqi Chief of Staff from 1980-1991, leading the invasion of Kuwait. He was also in charge of gassing 5,000 Kurds at Halabja in 1988. According to the Danes he personally chose the specific chemicals and their concentration levels. During his savage repression of the Kurds, some 4,000 villages were bulldozed, and as many as 100,000 people may have died. If we want a real hands-on guy, he's our man.

Another highly regarded fellow is Brigadier-General Najib Al-Salihi, who heads up the Free Officers Movement based in Virginia, and whom the British Foreign Office describes as a "rising star." During the invasion of Kuwait he commanded a Republican Guard armored division, and after the Gulf War was in charge of suppressing the revolts that generated 1.5 million refugees. He even wrote a book about his butchery titled Al-Zilzal (The Earthquake).

The guy the Defense Department is pushing is Ahmad Al-Chalabi, who fled Iraq in 1958 when the British-imposed monarchy was overthrown. The Financial Times says it was Chalabi who convinced the Bush administration to go for a "regime change" in Iraq. He has some problems, however. Like a 32-year prison sentence in Jordan for embezzling millions from the Petra Bank and fleeing to London. The State Department and the CIA don't like Chalabi much either, because they think he pilfered some $2 million from the Iraqi National Congress, which he created in 1992.

Lastly, Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz are pushing a seriously loopy proposal to unite Iraq with Jordan under a Hashemite monarchy, essentially obliterating Iraq as a country.” - http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2002/0211invasion.html

Also in Undernews today there is a view from The New Yorker on convicted felon (or should that be traitor – as he was after-all a spy who broke the law and facilitated an illegal activity that the Congress had specifically outlawed) John Poindexter’s new Information Awareness Office.

This organisation, the news aware will know by now, was given bucket loads of money in George Bush’s Homeland Insecurity Act to build what amounts to Big Brother’s computer:

The Office's main assignment is, basically, to turn everything in cyberspace about everybody—tax records, driver's-license applications, travel records, bank records, raw F.B.I. files, telephone records, credit-card records, shopping-mall security-camera videotapes, medical records, every e-mail anybody ever sent—into a single, humongous, multi-googolplexibyte database that electronic robots will mine for patterns of information suggestive of terrorist activity. Dr. Strangelove's vision—"a chikentic gomplex of gumbyuders"—is at last coming into its own. - http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?021209ta_talk_hertzberg

That Dr Strangelove’s vision received a lancing from one of the White House’s biggest cheerleaders the New York Time’s William Saffire indicates just how disturbing it must be.

Faced with just these two examples of the growing insanity a fellow Scoop traveller remarked to Sludge today, “the jigsaw is of a very large tapestry isn't it.”

In fact the jigsaw is imploding.

A New News Environment

We are living in an entirely new news environment, one unlike anything ever seen before by this news observer.

The ridiculous has become routine.

Things that in the past would have been thought either unthinkable allegations, or fanciful satirical musings, have become reality. Another example this recent report from the UN Observer and International Report which was also carried on Scoop.

In a November 20, 2002 letter from the Office of the Secretary of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, AIDS origin researcher, Boyd E. Graves, J.D. has been given sixty days to file suit in the U.S. federal court of his choosing.

"The people have forced the right to sue the United States over their "creation", "production" and "proliferation" of HIV/AIDS through the secret, federal virus development program, the U.S. Special (AIDS) Virus program (1948 - 1978)." said Graves.

"The yearly progress reports of the secret program provide the irrefutable narrative proof of the linkage of experiment to the flowchart, "research logic" of the African Holocaust. This best explains how Black people account for 13% of the population and 50% of all new AIDS cases." - http://www.unobserver.com/index.php?pagina=layout4.php&id=559&blz=1

In an earlier time such a report would have probably just received loud guffaws in response. But today it is a top rating story on Scoop and from the cut and thrust on this conservative leaning news forum (click through) it would appear to be being taken seriously by some deep thinkers at least.

Then again, to the news aware this is not probably quite as surprising a revelation as it once would have been.

Over the past two months the US DoD has spent considerable effort making public the fact that they have been experimenting with biological weapons in the open air for years ( See… DoD Releases Project 112 Chem Weapons Fact Sheets and Official Project SHAD Website). And then there is the Tuskegee syphilis experiment in Alabama for which President Clinton apologised in May 1997.

“For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. Informed that they were being treated for “bad blood,”1 their doctors had no intention of curing them of syphilis at all. The data for the experiment was to be collected from autopsies of the men, and they were thus deliberately left to degenerate under the ravages of tertiary syphilis—which can include tumors, heart disease, paralysis, blindness, insanity, and death. “As I see it,” one of the doctors involved explained, “we have no further interest in these patients until they die.

You might be forgiven for thinking Sludge is making this stuff up. Or that it is coming from unreliable sources. Not so. And like so much of this material flooding into Sludge’s inbox daily, the background has been thoroughly researched online already. Have a look for yourself on Google for numerous references.

From another sphere of endeavour entirely, but equally unbelievable, there is the subject of the last Sludge Report. Namely, “Barking” Ben Bernanke’s speech on Helicopter economics and “unconventional” monetary policy options.

“But the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.”

Sludge did not make this up either. Bernanke said this in a speech which was clearly expected to be seriously studied around the world. And it is being, even if down here at the bottom of the South Pacific people are not getting overly excited.

When all the verbiage is stripped away, Bernanke is effectively admitting that the IMF austerity regimes that have been imposed on developing countries for the past three decades were unnecessary.

Some may consider Sludge’s reaction to this media melee to be a bit hot-headed.

But before rejecting this thesis please consider the following:

- The Homeland Insecurity Act (The implications of which are beautifully dealt with by Jennifer van Bergen in Homeland Security Act: The Rise of the American Police State ;
- Henry Kissinger’s NSSM-200 (U.S. Plan to Address Overpopulation) – a now declassified document, from 1974 and still official U.S. Strategic policy,which outlines a strategic plan to drive down birthrates in developing countries in order to reduce competition for United States exploitation of mineral resources;
- and, the latest readings on the present demeanour of Bush cartel insiders. For which we can turn to a nice little piece from Dana Milbank and the Washington Post:

“Both the Bush administration and moderate governments in arab and muslim nations are struggling to prevent War On Terrorism from becoming what Osama bin Laden wants: a clash of civilizations, between the judeo-christian West and a resentful impoverished muslim world.

A small glimpse of sunshine on a dark, dark day, and then the clouds roll back in. Milbank continues:

“But foreign policy hawks with advisory roles in the Bush administration have joined religious conservatives in taking issue with Bush's characterizations. They say the claim is dishonest and destined to fail.

Kenneth Adelman, a former Reagan official who serves on the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, says: "The more you examine the religion, the more militaristic it seems. After all, its founder, Mohammed, was a warrior, not a peace advocate like Jesus."

Another member of the Pentagon advisory board, Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins School Of Advanced International Studies, wrote an article on Wall Street Journal’s editorial page arguing that the enemy of the US is not terrorism but militant Islam: "The enemy has an ideology and an hour spent surfing the web will give the average citizen at least the kind of insights that he or she might have found during World Wars II and III by reading Mein Kampf or the writings of Lenin, Stalin or Mao. Nobody would like to think that a major world religion has a deeply aggressive and dangerous strain in it: a strain often excused or misrepresented in the name of good feelings. But uttering uncomfortable unpleasant truths is one of the things that defines leadership."

And so it seems that the front paws and most of the torso of this particular cat – the now almost naked obsession of Washington hawks and the evangelical rump of the GOP to wage war on Islam - is now out of the bag.

And finally, if you really want to start feeling spooky again, go have a look at the logo on Poindexter’s (remember this is part of the U.S. Government) website. ( See.. http://www.darpa.mil/iao/TIASystems.htm)

But Does It Scan?

So how does this sort of news environment act upon the hearts and minds of the public.

It doesn’t, it reacts. It engenders panic, fear and anxiety. It makes people question their deepest convictions. And it makes them wake up.

What follows is an example of the sort of reasoning that a combination of Bernanke’s pronouncements from the throne and the recent passage of the Homeland Security Act, has generated from a financial analyst in recent days.

Please note, Sludge is not endorsing the inferential leap in economic analysis on display here, but at the same time the conclusions made should not be thought completely unreasonable. And yes they do have implications for your retirement.

From - Karen-lee Bixman's November 2002 "Investigative Update" concerning her views about the economy.

"The only reason the Dow-Jones is rising is because the Plunge Protection team continues to pump money into the market each day. For those of you on the Internet, you can view the website of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and check daily to see how much money is being funneled into the system to continue the game of smoke and mirrors. The web url is:

http://app.ny.frb.org/dmm/mkt.cfm

"I have not changed my mind, nor reversed my positions concerning a market collapse whatsoever. Thus, to those who have reentered the market I can only say, "a fool and his money are soon parted". When this market collapses, it will do so, so suddenly, that sell orders will not be able to be processed; billions of dollars will be lost in the course of one day."

"In reference to the other warnings I have given regarding the war in Iraq and another terrorist attack, I hold firm on those predictions as well. I believe these final two events could not come to pass until the Homeland Security Act had been ratified into law. This has now taken place."

"Though few now realize it, this act makes the Constitution null and void. Americans have now lost all their privacy and legal protections once granted under the Constitution. If one needs a preview of what 21 st Century America will be like, grab a history book and review the Nazi take-over of Germany in the 1930s. The horror finally ended when the American Army liberated Germany. History does repeat itself, only this time, there will be no liberation force marching down the streets of American cities."

And Karen-lee is not alone in saying and thinking such things.

The Zeitgeist Is In Motion

While we thought the Millennium was pretty crazy, what is happening now is much, much, more crazy.

Then we had the threat of Valdimir Putin flattening Grozny, now the Australian Prime Minister is talking about pre-emptive strikes against terrorists in South East Asia, and receiving a big thumbs up from the self-proclaimed leader of the free world who is already summarily executing people in other people’s countries with remote control planes.

And listening to the recent news broadcasts, it is easy to imagine yourself back in WWII Britain

Yesterday UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw’s “dossier” on how bad Saddam was released. Last night the BBC reported this blatant piece of provocation (which followed hot on the heels of the bombing of an oil facility in Basra) not as a piece of “propaganda”, but rather as a blow in the, “battle for hearts and minds”.

Put that way the dossier sounds like part of the battle an angel engages in to save a person’s soul, when in fact it can be baldly seen as an attempt to rouse public support for an orgy of killing.

And this is an orgy - which as we discovered above - is not only being conducted for entirely self-serving reasons, but after which - according to the informed - the leading candidate for the new Iraqi dictator is the very same person who carried out some of the worst war crimes detailed in Jack Straw’s dossier.

It is as if the managers of our media think that we are all stupid.

As if they think that if we are told so, then we will happily believe that Henry Kissinger intends to leave no stone unturned in his inquiry into 911.

There is a failure to connect going on here. And the result is a loss of trust and a search for alternative truths. Which is where we discover what may really be going on.

The “Flooding” Of Global Consciousness

In psychological theory when the subconscious starts to throw random pieces of the past, emotions, revelations and memories into the foreground of consciousness it is termed “flooding”.

The term comes from the idea of the subconscious as a sea of memories which, when stressed, can start to spill over the dams put in place of rational thought.

This is what is happening to society’s psyche as a whole. We are experiencing a mass realisation - in the West - of the existence of a sinister side to our society that's always been there. We are being forced to acknowledge a side to reality which we have till now been content to remain willfully blind to.

And this process is not unlike an awakening.

This process was certainly already underway at the time the 21st century began driven in large part by the Internet’s ever growing power to remember and dissemble reality.

The flooding started as a result of the stress of 9/11, and it has subsequently been boosted hugely by the utter contempt displayed for traditions and norms of behaviour shown by the Bush Administration.

The rules have all been broken now. The constitution of the United States has been trashed. The Vice-President openly flouts judicial instructions to be accountable and the house and the Senate have rolled over.

In the wake of this failure by the institutions of state to defend the interests of the public, the public have started to defend themselves. As individuals, members of the media, spooks, diplomats, statesmen and politicians have been set free to discuss matters that previously they would have not considered comprehensible.

Hence we see unheard of actions like the lawsuit taken by the European Union against tobacco giant RJ Reynolds for organised crime money-laundering. In a managed system such things are not supposed to happen.

And the public have been freed to think about, discuss and discover truths about realities that have till now imprisoned them. Even Time Magazine has featured major articles critical of Bush conduct of the war on terror, and the leading columnists in the New York Times and Washington Post have been pummelling the administration for months.

And in this disjoint between the reportage and the commentary C.D. Sludge discovers hope.

As chaos and madness reign, the key components of our oppression have been left in the open, vulnerable.

The Bush Administration may still think it is going to get its war in Iraq, a victory in 2004 and thereby consolidate its absolute control over the greatest military power in human history.

But things are not tracking as the powers that be would have them track. In this environment anything is possible.

In all likelihood Saddam Hussein and the United Nations Security Council will hold their nerve and there will not be a war this winter.

It is as if the driver remains at the wheel, and while the car may still be careering for the cliff, the steering mechanism and the brakes are no longer responding to the driver’s instructions.

So where are we going? Sludge cannot claim to know, but expect the unexpected.

Anti©opyright Sludge 2002

© Scoop Media

Alastair Thompson

Scoop Publisher

Alastair Thompson is the co-founder of Scoop. He is of Scottish and Irish extraction and from Wellington, New Zealand. Alastair has 24 years experience in the media, at the Dominion, National Business Review, North & South magazine, Straight Furrow newspaper and online since 1997. He is the winner of several journalism awards for business and investigative work.

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