The Occult Interpretation of the Movie “Black Swan”

From: The Vigilant Citizen...

“Black Swan” is an intense psychological thriller describing a ballet dancer’s metamorphosis into the “Black Swan”. Behind the movie’s freaky facade lies a profound commentary on the cost of fame, the sacrifice of artists and the hidden forces behind the shady world of high-stakes entertainment. We will look at the occult symbolism of the movie and its themes relating to the dark side of show business.

Directed by Darren Aronofsky, Black Swan follows shy ballet dancer Nina along her path to success in the demanding world of professional ballet. Black Swan can be considered a companion piece to the director’s previous movie, The Wrestler, which also describes the ups and downs of a troubled person working in a lesser-known field in the performing arts: professional wrestling. Although both movies explore similar themes (i.e. sacrificing one’s self for the good of the performance), the world in which Nina evolves and the obstacles she must endure are diametrically opposed to those of The Wrestler. Randy “The Ram” Robinson is a blue-collar guy living in a blue-collar town and must cope with the physical pain caused by his blue-collar lifestyle.  Nina, on the other hand, performs in the refined world of ballet and her struggles are psychological, emotional and even spiritual.

I often point out that great works of art can be interpreted in numerous ways, depending on the knowledge and experiences of each viewer. This movie is no exception … there are indeed numerous ways to interpret the plot of the movie. Through the use of meanings and symbols, however, the movie clearly alludes to many issues previously discussed on The Vigilant Citizen: the dark and occult side of fame, duality, trauma-based mind control, the forced creation of an alter persona and more. The main character, Nina, goes through a metaphysical change – by getting in touch with her “dark side” –  in order to become a better performer. This change is imposed on Nina by her “handler”, in this case, her ballet director. The movie uses subtle references to trauma-based mind control to explain the creation of an independent alter-person in Nina’s psyche.

Although Black Swan is fiction, it nevertheless explores hidden realities of high-stakes art and performance. There are numerous examples of artists who have embraced darker alter egos to take their art to “another level” … and many who ultimately are consumed by them. We will look at the occult and mind-control elements of Black Swanand see how they relate to some of the realities of the world of professional entertainment.

Warning: Major spoilers ahead!

Movie Summary

Black Swan is a modern retelling of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s classic ballet, Swan Lake. In the movie, the ballet director, Thomas Leroy (played by Vincent Cassel), describes to his dancers the basic plot of the ballet:

“We all know the story. Virginal girl, pure and sweet, trapped in the body of a swan. She desires freedom, but only true love can break the spell. Her wish is nearly granted in the form of a prince. But, before he can declare his love, the lustful twin, the Black Swan, tricks and seduces him. Devastated, the White Swan leaps off a cliff, killing herself and, in death, finds freedom”.

Nina, a shy and fragile young woman is chosen to play the role of the Swan Queen and must therefore embody both the pure White Swan and the evil Black Swan. Her quest for perfection as a ballet dancer leads her to experience, in her everyday life, the transformation experienced by the White Swan in the ballet’s story. The events of Nina’s daily life therefore mirror the story of the character she takes on as a ballet dancer, ultimately leading to confusion and, as the line between reality and fiction blurs, to apparent insanity.

The director’s use of mirrors and reflections in numerous scenes are a constant reminder of Nina’s altered perception of reality. Mirrors in the movie are often misleading and Nina’s reflections seem to have a “life of their own”. As Nina becomes haunted by the Black Swan, this alternate persona takes a life of its own and acts outside of Nina’s conscious control. We will explain later how this relates to trauma-based mind control.

If you have not read other articles on this site, trauma-based mind control – also known as Monarch Programming –  is the process in which an individual is subjected to intense trauma and dehumanization in order to cause a mental dissociation. This causes a fragmentation of the slave’s personality and enables the handler to create an alternate persona that can be programmed at will. Some researchers claim there are occult elements at work in this process.

“Project MONARCH could be best described as a form of structured dissociation and occultic integration, in order to compartmentalize the mind into multiple personalities within a systematic framework. During this process, a Satanic ritual, usually including Cabalistic mysticism, is performed with the purpose of attaching a particular demon or group of demons to the corresponding alter(s). Of course, most skeptics would view this as simply a means to enhance trauma within the victim,  negating any irrational belief that demonic possession actually occurs.”
- Ron Patton, Project Monarch

A promotional poster for Black Swan. Nina (played by Natalie Portman) is shown with a crack through her face, representing the fracturing of her personality, an important concept and symbol of mind control.

Let’s now look at some central themes of the movie.

Nina and her Trauma

Nina lives in a small New York apartment with her mother, Erica, about whom the least we can say is that she is overbearing. Many allusions to trauma-based mind control can be found in Nina’s living environment and her mother’s controlling behavior.

Nina’s bedroom. Notice the butterflies on the wall, a reference to Monarch programming. Next to the window is a big white rabbit, a symbol of mind control originating from Alice in Wonderland – a fairy tale used in the programming of MK slaves.  By following the White Rabbit, Alice went through the Looking Glass, which, in mind control terms, refers to a slave’s dissociative state.

Nina’s mother, a retired ballet dancer who failed to become a star, acts more as a mind-control handler than a mother. She obviously has boundary issues and keeps tight control over all aspects of Nina’s life. Real-life Monarch slaves often start their difficult lives as victims of ritual abuse in their own household. Symbols relating to mind control in Nina’s house probably reflect this sad reality, including her pink, childlike bedroom.

Every night, Erica Sayers winds up the music box next Nina in order to make the little ballerina dance. This is quite symbolic of Nina’s mind-controlled state.

Erica Sayers, Nina’s mother, forcibly undressing her adult daughter. This unsettling scene depicts to Nina’s total submission to her mother and also hints to the unhealthy sexual “familiarity” between the two.

Other people in Nina’s life, apparently preying on her weakness and “victim energy”, take advantage of her sexually.

An old pervert makes obscene gestures to Nina while riding the train. This disturbing scene tells a lot about Nina’s relation to sexuality. Sexual predators sometimes have the sick ability to sniff out and prey on sex-abuse victims.

Nina’s mother has, therefore, subjected her daughter to trauma-based mind control in order to make her a submissive woman who would realize her mother’s failed dreams. This has trained Nina to disassociate to make her existence bearable, which in turn makes Nina the perfect subject for the creation of a dark alter persona: the Black Swan.

Bringing out the Black Swan

Getting back to the storyline, Thomas, the ballet director, is looking for a new ballet star play the role of the Swan Queen. Nina’s meticulous dancing is perfect to play the role of the White Swan, but she must also be able to play the Black Swan, a role that requires the dancer to be twisted, sexual and dangerous. Nina’s frigid style is not suitable for the Black Swan, but Thomas chooses her as the Swan Queen anyway. He knows she has it in her, and he will bring it out.

Thomas bringing out the Black Swan in Nina

At one point, Thomas tells Nina:

“Perfection is not just about control. It is also about letting go. Surprise yourself so you can surprise the audience. Transcendence. Very few have it in them.”

Watching Nina dance, he later says:

“I knew the White Swan wouldn’t be a problem. The real work would be your metamorphosis into her evil twin.”

In order to obtain perfection, or in alchemical terms, to accomplish the Great Work, Nina must master both good and evil – light and darkness. The occult concept of duality becomes therefore extremely important (more on this later).

Thomas’ job is to create in Nina a new, agressive and sexual alter-ego. He therefore becomes Nina’s new mind-control handler. Whereas her mother “programmed” her daughter to be a submissive ballet dancer who never questions her mother/handler, Thomas requires her to embrace the exact opposite. He represents the “big league”, the next level of Monarch programming.

After her meeting with Thomas, Nina, dressed in white, crosses the path of another Nina, dressed in black. This symbolically represents the coming of Nina’s new, dark alter-ego.

In order to become a Black Swan, Nina must be able to be somewhat comfortable with sex, and even enjoy it. So Thomas gives Nina homework: to “touch herself”. Ready to do everything to become a better dancer, Nina tries to masturbate but her mother causes a blockage. Sexual pleasure becomes therefore a form of emancipation from her mother’s control and her initiation to the “big league”.

As the Black Swan grows in power, Nina starts hallucinating physical mutations on her body. The only other person that can see these mutations are Nina’s mother, who, as a handler, has the “key” to her psyche. She is aware of Nina’s gradual transformation and tries to repress it, knowing it will cause the lost of her “little girl”.

Nina hallucinates all kinds of strange mutations on her body. They represent the gradual coming out of the Black Swan in her.

This situation reflects the ugly truth behind real-life ritual abuse. Children, who are already dissociative due to their parent’s abuse, are handed over to “higher instances” who continue the programming process. In this case, Nina is handed over to the entertainment world (known to use Monarch programming on celebrities) to create in her an alter persona destined to be a world-renowned star.

Thomas presenting the new Swan Queen, Nina

In order for Nina to become the new Swan Queen, however, someone must step down.

Beth MacIntyre: The Ageing Star Who Was Pushed Aside

Beth MacIntyre at Nina’s crowning ceremony. She has just learned she is no longer the Swan Queen. She is obviously not happy.

Beth MacIntyre (played by Winona Ryder) is the previous star of the ballet company.  However, she is growing old and “losing her edge”. As a veteran, Beth already went through the “Black Swan process”, and, as some people might say, she “sold her soul to the devil”. Although this deal gave her years of great performances, in the end, the process completely destroyed her. She has become a bitter, conceited and hateful person who is incapable of existing without being the Black Swan.

There are many real life cases of celebrities suffering the same fate. After being recruited, programmed and primed by the industry to become a superstar, they are suddenly dropped and forgotten. Being psychologically damaged, not knowing who they really are, the fallen stars sink into depression, drugs, alcoholism and even suicide.

Thomas, who was Beth’s handler (he called her “my little princess”, a mind-control trigger) no longer needs the alter-ego he created in her. It is however impossible to “deprogram” her, so she completely loses her mind. The next day, the ballet company learns she got hit by a car. Thomas says:

“You know what, I’m also sure she did it on purpose. Everything Beth does comes from within, from some dark impulse. I guess that’s what makes her so thrilling to watch … so dangerous … even perfect at times. But also so damn destructive.”

So the “spirit”, the alter ego that consumed and destroyed Beth, was also the hidden force behind her great performances. The public has always been fascinated by intense and inspired performers who touch them on a primal and visceral level.  Depending on the performance, this source of artistic transcendence has been attributed to the divine or to the devil. Controversial and groundbreaking performers have often dwelt between brilliance and insanity – tapping into a mysterious force at the source of artistic greatness and, on the other hand, imminent self-destruction. Religious people might say this force is nothing less than spirit possession; scientists might say that psychological torment leads to creativity. No matter the term one uses for this “force”, it certainly exists and it is tapped into by some of the world’s most influential artists. Beth hosted this force and it completely destroyed her … and now it can move on to Nina.

The Black Swan Takes Over (Black Wings and Mirrors)

A symbolic movie poster. From the little ballerina rises, as a phoenix from its ashes, a gigantic and menacing Black Swan.

The Black Swan is the artistically brilliant yet spiritually destructive force Thomas wants to see born in Nina. He obviously knows about the Black Swan’s devastating powers, but he doesn’t care and never did: he is after the ultimate performance. Once Nina has been “used” up by the Swan, he will find another dancer to replace her. He is a representation of the entertainment industry, which manipulates artists into becoming Black Swans,  ultimately trashing them when the Swan’s effects have faded.

BLACK WINGS

The “force” of the Black Swan is symbolically represented by black wings at different stages of the movie.

Shortly after being crowned “Swan Queen”, Nina is fascinated by this creepy statue. Little does she know that it represents what she is about to become.

Black wings on the back of Lily (played by Mila Kunis) while she is “giving pleasure” to Nina. The black wings represent the “force” that is communing with Nina. It is penetrating her, giving her orgasm, but also taking over her life.

Nina at the end of her “perfect” performance as the Black Swan. She is briefly shown with black wings, symbolizing that she has become “one” with the Black Swan.

Another symbolic poster. The Black
Swan’s phallic beak is here shown
“penetrating” Nina’s psyche.

MIRRORS

Mirrors are used throughout the movie to symbolically reflect the true state of Nina’s psyche.

Creepy mirror reflection that has a mind of its own. As her metamorphosis advances, Nina realizes that a totally separate entity is living within her. It is completely acting outside of her control. In min-control symbolism, mirror reflections represent a slave’s alter-persona that is programmed and manipulated by a handler.

Right before her big performance as the Black Swan, Nina fights against herself in her dressing room. During the fight between Nina and the Black Swan, a mirror breaks, representing the collapse of the psychological boundary separating both entities. By shattering the mirror, Nina becomes the Black Swan.

The Magnum Opus and the Sacrifice

At the show’s premiere, Nina gives a stellar performance. She successfully plays the sweet and timid White Swan, and, when the time came, she was overtaken by the “force” to become the twisted, yet thrilling, Black Swan. By marrying the white and the black, the good and the evil, the light and the dark, Nina has accomplished the alchemical Great Work, the occult path to illumination.

The process, however,consumed her. By allowing the Black Swan to completely possess her, Nina gave the performance of a lifetime, but she has become a different person. Thomas and the audiences are in love with Nina as the Black Swan – the same way the prince of the ballet falls in love with the White Swan’s evil twin. But this is not the “real” Nina. The Black Swan is a destructive force she cannot live with: it is tormenting her on a physical and psychological level. Not able to go on, the only way Nina can free herself, is by killing herself. And this is what she does.

Nina dying at the end of her performance. Her last words to Thomas: “I was perfect”.

Does this remind you of anyone else’s self-sacrificing performance?

Lady Gaga “sacrificed” in her performance at the 2009 VMA’s.

Real Life Black Swans

Beyonce and Sasha Fierce, a pop-music equivalent of the White and Black Swan.

There are real (and tragic) examples of brilliant artists who have been consumed by an intense role. Either they self-destroyed or they HAD to die as a ritual sacrifice. Is Black Swan a commentary on this mysterious phenomena?

A recent example of a self-destructive role is Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight.

People close the Ledger claim his role as the Joker caused his demise.

Jack Nicholson warned Heath Ledger on ‘Joker’ role

Heath Ledger thought landing the demanding role of the Joker was a dream come true – but now some think it was a nightmare that led to his tragic death.

Jack Nicholson, who played the Joker in 1989 – and who was furious he wasn’t consulted about the creepy role – offered a cryptic comment when told Ledger was dead.

“Well,” Nicholson told reporters in London early Wednesday, “I warned him.”

Though the remark was ambiguous, there’s no question the role in the movie earmarked as this summer’s blockbuster took a frightening toll.

Ledger recently told reporters he “slept an average of two hours a night” while playing “a psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy …

“I couldn’t stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going.”

Prescription drugs didn’t help, he said.

– NY Daily News, Source

Another example of an actor dying in mysterious circumstances after playing the role of a devilish and twisted character is Brandon Lee as The Crow.

Brandon Lee mysteriously died DURING the filming of The Crow. The official story of his death is still widely disputed. The scene during which he died was highly symbolic.

In addition to those two extreme cases, there are many cases of artists who, after years of brilliance, mysteriously self-destroyed. Drugs and suicide are often blamed for the tragedies but who really knows what  happened with Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain and Jim Morrison, just to name a few?

In Conclusion

Black Swan is a profound movie that can be interpreted on many levels. We looked at the occult and mind-control elements of the movie and examined its messages on the shady world of show business. The movie’s commentary on the entertainment world’s marriage with occult forces is something that has been discussed numerous times on the Vigilant Citizen. Although the concept is rarely discussed or even noticed by the average person, insiders in the entertainment world often attest to strange forces of varying kinds at work in the industry.

Through Nina’s metamorphosis from a shy nobody to a possessed superstar, the viewers experience the dark side of entertainment. Mind control, manipulation and immorality collide with success and recognition. Dark impulses, addictions and self-destruction arise with artistic genius and creative brilliance. Those who are “running the show” know how to bring the Black Swan out of up-and-coming artists … and they know very well it will destroy them in the long run. And they are OK with that. The same way Beth was pushed aside to welcome a new Swan Queen, the public will always welcome the elite’s newest star with applause and acclaim. Because, as they say, the show must go on.

Walking Short: The Life and Lies of Sheriff Clarence Dupnik

The obvious villain in the Gabrielle Giffords tragedy is the man who caused it, the very disturbed Jared Lee Loughner.  Sadly, though, there have been villains in the response to it, too – many villains.  And while it’s hard to make a pick for this Black Hat Award, one man who has certainly distinguished himself is Pima County, Arizona, Sheriff Clarence Dupnik.

As you may know, Dupnik has been busy warning of how speech has consequences while in the same breath blaming conservatives for the actions of Loughner.  Now, I don’t blame the sheriff for asking why.  It is fine to look for reasons.  It is not fine to be reckless and wrong.  And it’s a sin when it’s born of indifference to Truth.

To be precise, Dupnik implicates right-wing talk radio – he mentioned Rush Limbaugh – and cable news in the Giffords shooting.  Yet a number of obvious things seem to have eluded this man, this supposed professional investigator.  For starters, if we’re actually going to analyze the politics of Loughner, we should note that one of his former classmates, Caitie Parker, describes him as a “left wing” “political radical” and “pot head”; moreover, Parker — who had been in a band with Loughner — states that he was a fan of the radical leftist punk-rock band Anti-Flag.  Note here that Loughner did, in fact, echo that band’s ideas on his YouTube page.  Also note that on that page Loughner as one of his favorite works The Communist Manifesto.

Now, question: How can one imply that an apparent leftist was provoked to violence by rightist prodding?  Aw, heck, I know – it’s Bush’s fault.

Yet there’s something even sillier here.  I’ve picked up the gauntlet the left threw down, but, really, examining Loughner’s political motivations is much like discussing a man who jumped off a roof because he thought he was a bird and pondering how his grasp of aeronautics might have influenced his decision.  Loughner’s above-linked video makes it painfully clear that he is clinically insane (he’ll probably be diagnosed with “bi-polar disorder” or “paranoid schizophrenia”) and that he was influenced not by his fellow man but by his inner demons.  Did this obvious fact also elude you, sheriff?  Columbo you’re not.

Now, Dupnik seems to be very troubled by inflammatory rhetoric; except, he only seems to thus define words when they inflame him.  I wonder, did Dupnik notice when militant atheist Christopher Hitchens said after Rev. Jerry Falwell’s death, “I think it’s a pity there isn’t a hell for him to go to” or when another of his leftist friends, Julianne Malveaux, hoped that Clarence Thomas’ wife would feed the justice a high-fat diet so he’d die of a heart attack?  Does Dupnik stay up at night worrying about Barack Obama’s statement, “If they [the Republicans] bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun” or about how the president referred to American political opponents as “enemies”?  Probably not.  After all, he seems to be of one mind and tongue with Obama, having opposed AZ’s original immigration law, calling it “racist,” “disgusting” and “stupid.”  And imagine, Dupnik’s Pima County abuts Maricopa County, home of “America’s Toughest Sheriff.”  Just cross a border and you go from Joe Arpaio to a jawing pie hole.

Although it’s clear that the left wins the inflammatory-rhetoric title hands down (although my last sentence just helped my side narrow the gap), it’s obvious that we all can be acid-tongued.  Having said this, guess what?  Dupnik is right.

Words do have consequences.

And we should watch what we say.

The problem is that Dupnik & Co. have no idea on what basis we should self-censor.  It’s not a matter of avoiding inflammatory rhetoric because, as with certain topical medications, what inflames some may soothe others.  Besides, is it really always wrong to inflame passions?  Let’s examine the matter.

We’ve all heard about that exception to First Amendment rights: We can’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded movie theater.  But there’s an exception to that exception.

When there really is a fire.

This brings us to the point.  When discussing what should and shouldn’t be said, everyone forgets the most important question.  It isn’t whether a statement is cruel or kind, controversial or conciliatory, inflammatory or soothing.

It is whether it’s true or untrue.

Propaganda Ocean

The Drowning of the Truth…

“Americans have a problem with the truth. They seem to be unable to accept it…Beliefs and lies somehow always overwhelm truth, even when they are so contradictory that any effective action becomes impossible. A kind of national, psychological paralysis occurs. Nothing can be done because one belief contradicts another, and for some unknown reason, the facts don’t matter.” John Kozy

“Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it. Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded ‘anti-American,’ ‘anti-semite’ or ‘conspiracy theorist.’ Truth is an inconvenience for government and for the interest groups whose campaign contributions control government. Truth is an inconvenience for prosecutors who want convictions, not the discovery of innocence or guilt.”  Paul Craig Roberts

“Isn’t it great to live in a society where the penalty for lying to a congressman can be up to 30 years in jail, but the penalty for a congressman lying to you is another two years in office.”   Baltimore sports writer’s comment on the indictment of Roger Clemens.

From my early years I have been interested in authenticity.  I hate affectations, hidden agendas, and false concerns.  Early in my business career I was involved with contractors who provided quality work at competitive prices.  You could depend on their candid reaction to your presence – they liked some and disliked others.  I preferred them.

Christianity brought a confrontation with truth; The Truth.  Though in my early Christian life emotion commanded truth as I matured I began to understand that God is Truth, His Word is Truth, and His Law is Truth.  He is the embodiment of Truth.  He and His Word are the scales under which humanity was created to live.  Obedience produces freedom, righteousness, and peace; disobedience produces anarchy and tyranny.

Authentic Christianity can be determining its foundation and its intent.  Is it Biblically based or does it teeter on the sands of human opinion.  Does it emphasize what God will do for His people or what His people will do for Him?  Is it aimed at securing an obedient Christian body or is it seeker friendly   If it fails to link salvation with obedience the church is in the hands of the Evil One.  John Kozy writes, “Beliefs and lies somehow always overwhelm truth, even when they are so contradictory that any effective action becomes impossible.”  Christianity is pregnant with erroneous beliefs that defy the Bible and trash the sterling theology our forefathers left us.  When Dr. Rushdoony wrote that law forms the religious base of society and all law is religious he expressed a foundational truth.  The idea that God’s Law does not apply to our time leaves human law as the only alternative. Human law requires society to obey the creature rather than the Creator.

There is a corollary between the deterioration of our government and the deterioration of the Christian church.  The government ignores the Constitution and the recommendations of the Founders while the Church ignores the wisdom of the Reformers and the large portions of God’s Word.   Both institutions seem to have become mired in a pubertious arrogance.

The Bible is a narrative it is not a series of dispensations.  It provides concrete examples of the results of obedience and disobedience and climaxes with the birth of the Savior, with forgiveness, and salvation. God gave us His Word that we might prosper in peace and righteousness by abiding by His Commandments.  We can decide not to do so but we will then be forced to endure the consequences.

Read John Kozy’s entire article here.

Out of retirement, Paul Craig Roberts begins an essay entitled “The Collapse of Western Morality” with this paragraph: “In hopes that I will be permitted to make a point, permit me to acknowledge that the US dropped nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities, fire-bombed Tokyo, that Great Britain and the US fire-bombed Dresden and a number of other German cities, expending more destructive force, according to some historians, against the civilian German population than against the German armies, that President Grant and his Civil War were war criminals, Generals Sherman and Sheridan, committed genocide against the Plains Indians, that the US today enables Israel’s genocidal policies against the Palestinians, policies that one Israeli official has compared to 19th century US genocidal policies against the American Indians, that the US in the new 21st century invaded Iraq and Afghanistan on contrived pretenses, murdering countless numbers of civilians, and that British prime minister Tony Blair lent the British army to his American masters, as did other NATO countries, all of whom find themselves committing war crimes under the Nuremberg standard in lands in which they have no national interests, but for which they receive an American pay check.” Read the entire article here.

Not a noticeable Christian, Roberts puts on paper truth that should be coming from the Christian Church.  Though he does not list the Church’s vile distortion of the Christian Gospel or the scourges of abortion and homosexuality he does provide a list of national sins that the church should acknowledge.

Kozy points out that presenting both sides of an issue does not produce truth.  Two opposing sides produce neither truth nor righteousness; only conflict.  Two party politics precludes righteousness replacing sound government with vituperation and extraneous wrangling.  All the negative campaign rhetoric only produces a conclusion that neither candidate is suitable for office.  The same principle applies to our courts where two lawyers seeking victory do not produce justice.  Innocents are regularly convicted and the guilty go free.  Here, here and here.

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/10/03/2010-10-03_raped_by_judge_and_justice_system.html

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2010/09/22/20100922prosecutor-law-abuse-probe.html

http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Article/075858-2010-09-23-aafia-siddiqui-sentenced-a-grievous-miscarriage-of-justice.htm?From=News

The Novakeo Website http://novakeo.com/?p=8136 recently published a document that pinpointed one of the most distorted facts of our time.  While being vigorously denied in public conspiracy is, in fact, everywhere evident.  It is a universal human sin that plagues families, frightens schools children, is pandemic in churches, common in business, pervasive in social organizations, and everywhere in the halls of government.  There are several who properly rail against the travesties in our society but claim they do not believe in conspiracies.  Whatever their motive they are mislead.

Carroll Professor Quigley of Georgetown University, a mentor to former President Clinton, wrote in his book “Tragedy and Hope”, “There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the Radical right believes the Communists act…I know of the operation of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960’s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies… but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.”

In his book entitled “Propaganda” Edward Bernays  wrote, “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

David Rockefeller wrote in “Memoirs”, “Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure — one world, if you will. If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”

Although David Rockefeller was not one of the founders of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) he has devoted many of his considerable years using it to promote internationalism.  The CFR was founded by Colonel Edward House,  a close confidant of President Woodrow Wilson and a Marxist oriented totalitarian confirmed in the pages of his book “Philip Dru: Administrator”.  House was joined by Walter Lippman,  an intellectual writer and reporter who compared the “masses” to a “great beast” and “bewildered herd” requiring control by a governing class.

Dr. Dennis Cuddy and John Loeffler have provided a chronology of the New World Order at this site.

The outward manifestations of this conspiracy are difficult to overlook; the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg meetings, and the various international summits where elite leaders discuss the future of the world.  One need only consider the events that preceded the United States invasion of the Middle East and understand that the Muslim nations of the Middle East are the only part of the world that is not under the influential tentacles of the shadowy powers that are arranging the death of the United States.  Does anyone think for a minute that President George W. Bush independently conceived the invasion of Iraq?  Why has President Obama defied his own promises by continuing the Middle East War?  Why does congress vote for treaties that diminish our sovereignty when they have sworn an oath to support our Constitution?  Edward Bernays has given us the answer: “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”

Now, gentle reader, is you are a Christian consider the death of your Savior.  Jesus gave His life for our salvation but the vehicle that resulted in His murder was a conspiracy!

On the 13^th of September, by the Grace of God I completed my 81^st year.  I, as many of my fellow octogenarians, have accumulated a series of physical problems.  Arthritis struck early while I was still in my fifties and has now badly crippled one knee and is evident in the other as well as both ankles, neck, and hands.  Prostate problems began in my early sixties culminating in cancer in my early seventies.  A skin cancer was removed from my cheek, I have GERD, high blood pressure, and as a birthday present they found a small “density” in my left lung.  The CT scan revealed calcification in the arteries into the heart, cysts on the kidneys, and a swollen prostate.  The report listed my liver, spleen, pancreas, adrenal glands, bladder, and seminal vesicles as “unremarkable” – my wife laughed at the term, but, considering their age and the abuse they have endured, they are really quite “remarkable”.

My father died sixty years ago and my mother’s death twenty-five years ago seems like yesterday.  The time to pass the torch has come into view.  My life is in the hands of the King Who has seen fit to keep this unprofitable servant for all of these years!

The maladies are being treated and, in spite of an occasional momentary depression, I am living peacefully with them. I am healthy for my age.  The lung spot is very small, a little over a quarter of an inch in size.  Another scan in December will determine what will be done, if anything.

Who Owns The Media?

The 6 Monolithic Corporations That Control Almost Everything We Watch, Hear And Read

From: The Economic Collapse…

Back in 1983, approximately 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the United States.  Today, ownership of the news media has been concentrated in the hands of just six incredibly powerful media corporations.  These corporate behemoths control most of what we watch, hear and read every single day.  They own television networks, cable channels, movie studios, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, music labels and even many of our favorite websites. Sadly, most Americans don’t even stop to think about who is feeding them the endless hours of news and entertainment that they constantly ingest.  Most Americans don’t really seem to care about who owns the media.  But they should.  The truth is that each of us is deeply influenced by the messages that are constantly being pounded into our heads by the mainstream media.  The average American watches 153 hours of television a month.  In fact, most Americans begin to feel physically uncomfortable if they go too long without watching or listening to something.  Sadly, most Americans have become absolutely addicted to news and entertainment and the ownership of all that news and entertainment that we crave is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands each year.

The six corporations that collectively control U.S. media today are Time Warner, Walt Disney, Viacom, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., CBS Corporation and NBC Universal.  Together, the “big six” absolutely dominate news and entertainment in the United States.  But even those areas of the media that the “big six” do not completely control are becoming increasingly concentrated. For example, Clear Channel now owns over 1000 radio stations across the United States.  Companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are increasingly dominating the Internet.

But it is the “big six” that are the biggest concerns.  When you control what Americans watch, hear and read you gain a great deal of control over what they think.  They don’t call it “programming” for nothing.

Back in 1983 it was bad enough that about 50 corporations dominated U.S. media.  But since that time, power over the media has rapidly become concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people….

In 1983, fifty corporations dominated most of every mass medium and the biggest media merger in history was a $340 million deal. … [I]n 1987, the fifty companies had shrunk to twenty-nine. … [I]n 1990, the twenty-nine had shrunk to twenty three. … [I]n 1997, the biggest firms numbered ten and involved the $19 billion Disney-ABC deal, at the time the biggest media merger ever. … [In 2000] AOL Time Warner’s $350 billion merged corporation [was] more than 1,000 times larger [than the biggest deal of 1983].

–Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, Sixth Edition, (Beacon Press, 2000), pp. xx—xxi

Today, six colossal media giants tower over all the rest.  Much of the information in the chart below comes from mediaowners.com.  The chart below reveals only a small fraction of the media outlets that these six behemoths actually own….

Time Warner

Home Box Office (HBO)
Time Inc.
Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
CW Network (partial ownership)
TMZ
New Line Cinema
Time Warner Cable
Cinemax
Cartoon Network
TBS
TNT
America Online
MapQuest
Moviefone
Castle Rock
Sports Illustrated
Fortune
Marie Claire
People Magazine

Walt Disney

ABC Television Network
Disney Publishing
ESPN Inc.
Disney Channel
SOAPnet
A&E
Lifetime
Buena Vista Home Entertainment
Buena Vista Theatrical Productions
Buena Vista Records
Disney Records
Hollywood Records
Miramax Films
Touchstone Pictures
Walt Disney Pictures
Pixar Animation Studios
Buena Vista Games
Hyperion Books

Viacom

Paramount Pictures
Paramount Home Entertainment
Black Entertainment Television (BET)
Comedy Central
Country Music Television (CMT)
Logo
MTV
MTV Canada
MTV2
Nick Magazine
Nick at Nite
Nick Jr.
Nickelodeon
Noggin
Spike TV
The Movie Channel
TV Land
VH1

News Corporation

Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Fox Television Stations
The New York Post
Fox Searchlight Pictures
Beliefnet
Fox Business Network
Fox Kids Europe
Fox News Channel
Fox Sports Net
Fox Television Network
FX
My Network TV
MySpace
News Limited News
Phoenix InfoNews Channel
Phoenix Movies Channel
Sky PerfecTV
Speed Channel
STAR TV India
STAR TV Taiwan
STAR World
Times Higher Education Supplement Magazine
Times Literary Supplement Magazine
Times of London
20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
20th Century Fox International
20th Century Fox Studios
20th Century Fox Television
BSkyB
DIRECTV
The Wall Street Journal
Fox Broadcasting Company
Fox Interactive Media
FOXTEL
HarperCollins Publishers
The National Geographic Channel
National Rugby League
News Interactive
News Outdoor
Radio Veronica
ReganBooks
Sky Italia
Sky Radio Denmark
Sky Radio Germany
Sky Radio Netherlands
STAR
Zondervan

CBS Corporation

CBS News
CBS Sports
CBS Television Network
CNET
Showtime
TV.com
CBS Radio Inc. (130 stations)
CBS Consumer Products
CBS Outdoor
CW Network (50% ownership)
Infinity Broadcasting
Simon & Schuster (Pocket Books, Scribner)
Westwood One Radio Network

NBC Universal

Bravo
CNBC
NBC News
MSNBC
NBC Sports
NBC Television Network
Oxygen
SciFi Magazine
Syfy (Sci Fi Channel)
Telemundo
USA Network
Weather Channel
Focus Features
NBC Universal Television Distribution
NBC Universal Television Studio
Paxson Communications (partial ownership)
Trio
Universal Parks & Resorts
Universal Pictures
Universal Studio Home Video

These gigantic media corporations do not exist to objectively tell the truth to the American people.  Rather, the primary purpose of their existence is to make money.

These gigantic media corporations are not going to do anything to threaten their relationships with their biggest advertisers (such as the largest pharmaceutical companies that literally spend billions on advertising), and one way or another these gigantic media corporations are always going to express the ideological viewpoints of their owners.

Fortunately, an increasing number of Americans are starting to wake up and are realizing that the mainstream media should not be trusted.  According to a new poll just released by Gallup, the number of Americans that have little to no trust in the mainstream media (57%) is at an all-time high.

That is one reason why we have seen the alternative media experience such rapid growth over the past few years.  The mainstream media has been losing credibility at a staggering rate, and Americans are starting to look elsewhere for the truth about what is really going on.

Do you think that anyone in the mainstream news would actually tell you that the Federal Reserve is bad for America or that we are facing a horrific derivatives bubble that could destroy the entire world financial system?  Do you think that anyone in the mainstream media would actually tell you the truth about the deindustrialization of America or the truth about the voracious greed of Goldman Sachs?

Sure there are a few courageous reporters in the mainstream media that manage to slip a few stories past their corporate bosses from time to time, but in general there is a very clear understanding that there are simply certain things that you just do not say in the mainstream news.

But Americans are becoming increasingly hungry for the truth, and they are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the dumbed down pablum that is passing as “hard hitting news” these days.

What happens when Diversity replaces America’s Language and Culture

For the past 30 years, somebody, somewhere, or a group of people in high places decided to destroy the successful equation of “melting pot” within America. That ‘entity’ decided to pitch diversity and multiculturalism as the new monikers dismantling English as America’s common language. “It” decided to inject hundreds of incompatible cultures and languages into America while adding another 100 million people to stress the environment even further.

That same “It” worked its magic in France, Great Britain, Holland, Norway, France, Belgium and other countries—with devastating results: fragmenting, balkanizing and separated societies.

Like a group of chemistry students in a classroom where the teacher leaves for an emergency phone call—for kicks or giggles—the students start tossing multiple chemicals into a test tube to see what happens. Result: the mixture either melts the tube down or explodes. No one knows what kind of volatility may occur.

Today, our once “stable and sustainable” population suffered growth from a reasonable 194 million people in 1963 to a unsustainable 309 million in 2010. While we continue ‘celebrating’ our amazingly ‘diverse’ society with immigrants from over 150 countries, speaking 100 languages—in reality, the wheels fall off the ‘romantic’ pitch by newspapers such as the Denver Post and television networks across the USA. You will hear “racist confrontations” in dozens of media outlets weekly.

On the educational side, Brian Williams reported a 76 percent dropout/flunkout rate in Detroit, Michigan schools last spring. Why? They feature 50 different languages and unending diversity. Everyone speaks a slew of languages except English, they don’t know Thomas Jefferson, promote their own cultures and they call themselves hyphenated-Americans. Illiteracy rates exceed 50 percent according to an article in Time Magazine. (Source: Tragedy of Detroit, Time Magazine)

But hundreds of schools throughout the USA in major cities like LA, San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Miami, Denver and others suffer 50 to 60 percent dropout/flunkout rates. Denver vacillates between 52 to 67 percent dropout/flunkout rates. Brian Williams added, “About 1.2 million teens hit the streets every spring unable to read or write.”

What happens when this country finds itself without a common language, culture and national identity? What happens when enough immigrants do not, cannot or will not integrate into American society? What happens when their cultures and languages trump America’s culture and English language? Today, 42 million Americans cannot read or write. Another 50 million read at the fourth grade level. Name the one term that defines third world societies: illiteracy. America degrades with every illiterate citizen.

You can see it accelerating in Islamic Detroit, Michigan. Already, we hear calls for Sharia Law. For Americans that don’t understand Sharia—its runs counter to everything in Western law. It subjugates women, commits barbaric acts such as female genital mutilation and calls for honor killings of women for minor infractions. Mexican reconquista operates in the Southwest and children continue to fare poorly in schools after several generations because of their ‘poverty culture’ roots in Mexico. In Arizona last week, immigrants painted the American flag with Nazi swastikas and stomped on it at the capital in Phoenix.

Other examples:

In New York, February 16, 2009, FOX News, Joshua Rhett Miller reported, “The estranged wife of a Muslim television executive feared for her life after filing for divorce last month from her abusive husband,” her attorney said — and was found beheaded Thursday in his upstate New York television studio. Aasiya Z. Hassan, 37, was found dead on Thursday at the offices of Bridges TV in Orchard Park, N.Y., near Buffalo. Her husband, Muzzammil Hassan, 44, has reportedly been charged with second-degree murder.

Adam Gadahn: The California-born Muslim convert assists Shukrijumah and Osama bin Laden as al-Qaida’s chief propagandist. He tailors the group’s message to American Muslims. In 2006, Gadahn invoked U.S. Muslims to attack military bases. Three years later, U.S. Army Major Hasan shot 43, killing 13 at Fort Hood.

Anwar Awlaki: Articulate and media savvy, the American-born cleric is al-Qaida’s top recruiter of Western suicide cells. Awlaki has recruited or radicalized countless homegrown terrorists, including the Fort Hood shooter and the Times Square bomber, both English-speaking citizens. Authorities also believe he ordered the Christmas airliner attack. Thought to be bin Laden’s heir, Awlaki has called on American Muslims to turn against their government, “Jihad against America is binding on every other (American) Muslim,” he said.

For Americans that cherish the successful “melting pot” concept, at what point do they lose control of their culture, language and way of life—in favor of a polyglot of incompatible cultures, religions and languages?

At what point will all those countries ‘exhausting’ their excess population into America—take responsibility for their own fecundity and their own citizens—in their own countries?

At what point will Americans stand up for being Americans? On every level—unrelenting and accelerating immigration cannot be sustained environmentally, educationally, linguistically or culturally—if America hopes to survive the 21st century.

Latest figures show the USA adding 70 million immigrants within 25 years. Can we remain sustainable? Ask anyone in Bangladesh, Mexico or India!

DC Declares War On States

Among the limited duties of the US Government enumerated in the federal Constitution is Article. IV. Section. 4. “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion.” However, for several decades now, the federal government in Washington, D.C., has shown great ambition and propensity to engage in activities to which it was never authorized, and to ignore those responsibilities with which it is specifically charged. The responsibility of the federal government to protect each State against invasion is a classic example of the latter.

Can anyone deny that the states on the US southern border (California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas) are being invaded by an ongoing onslaught of illegal aliens (many of whom are violent and dangerous criminals)? Somewhere between 12 and 30 million illegals now reside in the US. The entire country is feeling the effects of this invasion, but the Border States are literally under siege. And not only does the federal government do nothing to protect the states against this invasion, it actively wars against states such as Arizona when they attempt to protect themselves. Yes, I am saying it: the Washington, D.C., lawsuit against the State of Arizona’s immigration laws should be regarded as an act of war against the State of Arizona in particular, and against the states general in principle.

Please consider what Arizona and the other Border States are dealing with. According to published reports:

*In Los Angeles, 95% of all outstanding warrants for homicide in the first half of 2004 (which totaled 1,200 to 1,500) targeted illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) were for illegal aliens.

*Some private reports state that 83% of warrants for murder in Phoenix and 86% of warrants for murder in Albuquerque, New Mexico, are for illegal aliens. These reports cannot be verified, of course, because the feds discourage law enforcement agencies from releasing such statistics.

*At any given time, up to 75% of those on the most wanted list in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Albuquerque are illegal aliens.

*23% of all inmates in LA County detention centers are “deportable.”

*LA police estimate that violent gangs, such as MS-13 and 18th Street Gang, are “overwhelmingly” composed of illegal aliens.

To read one very enlightening testimony given before Congress by an expert on illegal immigration containing some of the above information (and much more), go here:

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/mac_donald04-13-05.htm

In addition, the Pew Hispanic Center (an organization friendly to all things Hispanic) reports that by 2007, “nearly one-quarter (24%) of all federal convictions” involve illegal aliens. And “among those sentenced for immigration offenses in 2007, 80% were Hispanic.” The PHC went on to report that illegal Hispanics “represented 29% of all federal offenders.”

See the report at:

http://pewhispanic.org/reports/report.php?ReportID=104

Remember, too, that illegal aliens murder (on average) 12 American citizens EVERY DAY in the United States. That means illegals murder more Americans EVERY YEAR than in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan COMBINED, TO DATE. Plus, illegal aliens who drive drunk kill an additional 13 Americans EVERY DAY.

See the following report:

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53103

At this point, I will not again chronicle the financial costs and job losses exacted upon the American taxpayers by these invading illegals, but I encourage you to read a previous column I wrote on this subject. See it here:

http://chuckbaldwinlive.com/home/?p=1490

Plus, my web site contains an exhaustive page dealing with the problems and costs of the ongoing invasion by illegal aliens against this country. See it at:

http://chuckbaldwinlive.com/home/?page_id=123

Add to the above the blatant rhetoric and public statements of activists within radical Hispanic revolutionary groups such as La Raza that incessantly call for the “reconquista” of the southwestern United States, and one can easily discern that the invasion by (mostly) Mexicans in the US is much more than “poor people trying to find a better life.” There is some of that going on, of course, but the invasion also includes violent criminal gang members, drug dealers, human traffickers, rogue government troops, and covert provocateurs who are attempting to destabilize US cities and states, promote crime and violence, disrupt honest elections, and even facilitate revolution against the American citizenry.

And what does the Barack Obama administration do? Instead of obeying the Constitution and helping to protect the State of Arizona (and the other Border States), it sues the State of Arizona for trying to protect itself. Again, by this action, has not Washington, D.C., declared war against the State of Arizona (and, by implication, the other 49 independent, sovereign states)?

Please understand: Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and her allies in the Arizona legislature are not only defending their State, they are working to protect every State in the Union. Very obviously, the line is being drawn in the sand against a federal leviathan that increasingly shows blatant disregard for not only its own responsibilities and duties, but for the rights and freedoms of the individual sovereign states, and for the American citizenry as a whole.

And for those misguided Christians and pastors out there who are prone to defend and facilitate this invasion of illegal aliens in the name of Christian compassion, I would like to remind them of the words of our Lord, who said, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber.” (John 10:1 KJV) Thus, our Savior plainly categorizes illegal aliens (or anyone who refuses to enter through a door–or across a border–honestly) as thieves and robbers. Unfortunately, many are also rapists, murderers, violent drug dealers, and slave merchants.

If Barack Obama had even a smidgen of honesty and integrity, instead of attacking the people of the State of Arizona for simply trying to defend themselves against a very real and dangerous foreign invasion, he would take seriously his responsibility to help protect them against this invasion, which Article IV. Section. 4. of the US Constitution clearly requires him to do.

Is the Times Square Terrorist an Asset of Organized Crime?

Why is no one reporting that “Faisal the Fizzler” is tied to Israeli-American Leon Black and Israel-dominated organized crime syndicates dating back to the 1920s? Why is no one reporting the ties to junk bond king and Israeli-American Michael Milken? How can Americans make informed choices without access to the real facts?

Faisal Sharzad—AKA The Times Square Fizzler—reportedly was trained by the “Pakistan Taliban” for a deadly deed that went horribly wrong.

Not only did he lock his keys in the car, including his apartment key, his Rube Goldberg contraption of alarm clocks, Walmart propane tanks and firecrackers failed to explode.

Apparently he was also expertly trained to purchase fertilizer that could not possibly explode.

Happily, Pakistani Evil Doers did not train him to drive. He could have ended up in New Jersey.

Somehow he found his way to one of the busiest streets in midtown Manhattan just as the United Nations—in midtown Manhattan—was preparing to debate a treaty to create a Middle East free of nuclear weapons.

Was that part of the story missing from the Fox News coverage you saw of this incident? In truth, for non-coverage any mainstream source would suffice.

That U.N. treaty, first proposed in 1995, would force Israel to forfeit its nuclear weapons, a goal first sought by President John F. Kennedy in June 1963. We know how that worked out.

What’s become of this Muslim Evil Doer after he miraculously found his way to Times Square—after miraculously eluding airport security during his 16 trips abroad to train with the Pakistan Taliban? Did he come and go through the same airports where security was provided by ICTS, the Israeli firm that played host to the dreaded “Christmas Day Bomber“?

Though Faisal refreshed a flagging storyline—The Global War on Terrorism—the Fizzler’s storyline has since become problematic. Let’s take a closer look.

News You Can Trust

CNN briefly showed a photo of Apollo Management, Sharzad’s employer. That photo appeared on CNN for about a second. End of story and no mention since. Why?

Here’s the online Newsweek account of where the Fizzler worked from 2006-2009:

May 4 (Bloomberg) — Faisal Shahzad, charged with attempting to bomb New York’s Times Square, worked for three years at a company controlled by Leon Black’s private-equity firm, Apollo Management LP.

Who is Leon Black? What is Apollo? And why isn’t his three years of employment there newsworthy?

Remember Major Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood Shooter? His job history provided key clues to his bizarre behavior. Is that why Hasan too has disappeared from the news?

Are the Clues Hidden in Plain Sight?

Imagine this: what if the intelligence that induced the U.S. to war in Iraq was “fixed” around a preset goal. What if the common source of that treachery is poised to become transparent?

If you were complicit in a deception of that magnitude—a clear act of treason—how would you obscure the facts? What measures would you take to sustain the storyline?

If you are the Evil Doer, how would you maintain a Muslim Evil Doer narrative? What would be required to advance a storyline built on a belief in the threat of Islamo fascism?

What happens to the storyline if the pre-war intelligence is proven a fiction traceable to a common source? What then for the storytellers?

For those marketing The Clash of Civilizations, Major Hasan’s psychotic break at Fort Hood in Texas was a well-timed blessing. Likewise for the Christmas Day Bomber and the Times Square Terrorist.

See if you can detect a common thread in this marketing of the Hasan threat by Family Security Matters:

• President Carol Taber described this incident as “the Ft. Hood terrorist attack” by an “Islamist gunman.”
• Editor Pam Meister promoted “the shocking TRUTH (sic) behind these attacks so that we might ward off those yet to come.”
• Executive Vice-President Linda Cohen, a trustee of the Anti-Defamation League, offered this advice: “No one is safe now. Not you, not the military, not your children, not office workers nor subway riders, nor anyone who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Why was the Times Square Fizzler at just the right place at just the right time?

Advancing the Narrative

Is there a precedent for combining aberrant personal behavior and “terrorism” to advance a preset agenda? Do you recall the sniper attacks around Washington, D.C. in October 2002?

That murder spree began one day before debate commenced on Senate Resolution 46 proposed by Senator Joe Lieberman to authorize the use of U.S. forces in Iraq.

In the immediate aftermath of 911, Lieberman and Arizona Senator John McCain urged that the U.S. focus its forces not on Al Qaeda in Afghanistan but on regime change in Iraq.

Meanwhile the nation’s capital became a city under siege as those random attacks created widespread insecurity and heightened anxiety as serial murders left ten dead and three wounded over a 10-day period.

Those murders quickly transformed the emotionally wrenching terror of 911 into a personal reality for Washington residents, including U.S. lawmakers pondering whether to invade Iraq.

Meanwhile Lieberman and McCain—citing phony intelligence—promoted a U.S. military invasion of a nation that had no hand in that mass murder.

Assets and Transnational Treason

Was Faisal Sharzad a Pakistani patsy? In the psy-ops parlance, was he an “asset”?

An asset is term from psy-ops used to describe someone whose personality has been profiled in great depth. A reliable asset can be catalyzed to act out known personality traits in ways that advance an agenda based on the time, place and circumstances of that catalyst. While an asset’s behavior is never 100% foreseeable, it is reliable within an acceptable range of probabilities.

Walk Monica Lewinsky in front of Bill Clinton, what was the probability of his response. If a U.S. official orders that an American Muslim be held for 18 months in solitary confinement in a jail in Yemen, what’s the probability that Anwar al-Aswlaki would emerge radicalized and bearing a grudge against the U.S.?

The facts suggest that Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan was such an asset. Don’t expect to find this analysis on the Rupert Murdoch-controlled Fox News or in his many newspapers. Or on CNN despite its branding as “News You Can Trust.”

Assets are typically profiled and developed over lengthy periods of time. Their potential to act out a known personality disorder is held in reserve in much the same way that a military commander holds troops in reserve for deployment at an opportune time.

How is an asset developed in plain sight and “tasked” at the opportune time? Only a careful investigation can identify those influences particular to Dr. Hasan. Or to Faisal Sharzad. A good faith investigation would includes the decisions that led to Dr. Hasan’s transfer to Ft. Hood and the circumstances there that triggered his behavior.

That’s also true for The Times Square Fizzler. While obviously not the brightest light in the shed, he was sufficiently competent to drive a car. And apparently he was bright enough to do financial analysis for Leon Black even though he apparently bought the wrong fertilizer at Walmart.

God only knows where he bought the fireworks. Perhaps in New Jersey.

A similar history of befuddled behavior surrounds the comically inept Christmas Day Bomber, a young Nigerian whose failed “terrorist incident” mirrors that of Sharzad. An unidentified Indian gentleman led The Crotch Bomber through Amsterdam airport security without a passport where he board a flight to the U.S.

Here’s an experiment. Try entering Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport without a passport. Then try boarding an international flight. Did it help that airport security was managed by ICTS, an Israeli firm. What’s the common component in each of these well-timed “incidents?”

Who had the means, motive, opportunity and insider intelligence to perpetrate this “terrorist” act in midtown Manhattan? What role was played by Leon Black and Apollo management?

Is The New York Times correct in its May 22^nd editorial: “As the aborted Times Square and Christmas Day bombings proved, militant groups are determined to strike here again.” Is that what these incidents “proved”? Really?

Is it sufficient to report that this latest incident is traceable to the “Pakistan Taliban”? Does that alone—and in isolation—explain how such operations are pre-staged and orchestrated?

As a combat-stress psychiatrist, Dr. Hasan dealt daily with injured and mentally troubled veterans at Walter Reed Hospital where the most grievously wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan are sent for treatment. Many of them are amputees, burned, disfigured, brain-damaged or otherwise handicapped for life. Their care—or lack thereof—is a national scandal.

While coping with that vicarious trauma, Dr. Hasan was taunted for his Muslim beliefs. He was also harassed and ridiculed for his Middle Eastern heritage even though he was born, raised and educated in the U.S.

What happened to Faisal Sharzad during his three years at Apollo? Did he encounter an experience similar to Hasan? Is that why the Leon Black connection disappeared so quickly?

To answer that question required a look at the curious history of Mr. Black, his investment banking firm and a deeper inquiry into the question of what is “proven” by this latest in a series of well-timed, high profile ‘terrorist incidents.’

The Mental Environment

The National Crime Syndicate convened its first nationwide conference in Atlantic City in 1929. That’s where the U.S. component of transnational organized crime divided the U.S. into 24 exclusive markets in order to put an end to the political problems that accompanied murderous disputes over territory.

Those territories were finalized in 1931 at a Jews-only conclave at the Franconia Hotel in Manhattan. Five of the 24 markets were established in and around New York City.

The Outfit has long been a source of pop culture narratives, including The Godfather movies starring Marlon Brando and Al Pacino and The Sopranos, a popular television series. Those storylines branded organized crime as Italian or Sicilian with Jews playing only a minor role.

This is Hollywood after all, home of the skilled storyteller and the master myth-maker.

To say Sicilian or Italian organized crime will not unleash the hounds. To say “Jewish” organized crime assures a snarling charge of anti-Semitism—unless you’re Jewish. In that case, the offense is downgraded to “self-hating Jew.” Those remain the only two alternatives for anyone willing speaking candidly—and factually—about organized crime.

Estonian Kalle Lasn saw firsthand how myth could displace facts in plain sight by psy-ops specialists skilled at targeting the mental environment. In March 2004, he published an article inAdbusters, a Vancouver-based magazine that he founded. First he cited key facts: less than three percent of Americans are Jewish (1.7% according to most sources). Yet when you examine a list of the top 50 neoconservatives advocating war in Iraq, 26 are are Jewish (52%).

Noting the wildly disproportionate numbers, he titled the article: “Why Won’t Anyone Say They’re Jewish?” He soon found out. He was attacked as an “anti-Semite” for asking the question.

Don’t ask. Don’t tell.

Yet the facts remain indisputable—both for the Neocons and for those who dominate transnational organized crime. The bulk of those who “fixed” U.S. intelligence to invade Iraq were either Jewish or “assets” whose careers were nurtured by pro-Israelis.

Lasn’s subtitle for Adbusters: The Journal of the Mental Environment. Could that environment be the target of this series of well-timed “terrorist” incidents? Were these incidents stage to advance reinvigorate a faltering storyline with “incidents” that could plausibly be blamed on Muslim Evil Doers? Is Faisal the Fizzler part of an ongoing psy-ops? What about Fox News? CNN?

Only a good faith investigation can answer that question. The answer may require a closer look at Leon Black and a glimpse into the “fields within fields…within fields” of relationships through which organized crime operates across time and distance.

Discrediting and Disabling the U.S.

Leon Black first appeared on the national scene in 1975 when his father “fell” to his death from the 44^th floor of Manhattan’s Pan Am Building. Two years later, the son emerged as head of mergers and acquisitions and co-head of corporate finance at Drexel Burnham Lambert where he worked closely with Michael Milken, the firm’s “junk bond” specialist in Beverly Hills.

In the 1970s, Cincinnati’s Carl Lindner and his American Financial Group began investing in United Fruit. To escape the firm’s notorious past, its name was changed to United Brands and then Chiquita Brands International. After the death of CEO Eli Black, Lindner assumed control.

United Fruit became a key conduit for moving Israeli arms into covert wars throughout Latin America, culminating in the Iran-Contra scandal of 1987. That scandal discredited the presidency of Ronald Reagan when he was forced to concede that his administration sold arms to Iran, an avowed enemy, and used the funds to arm Nicaraguan rebels despite a Congressional ban.

The term “Banana Republic” traces to the corrupting influence of United Fruit. The U.S. was discredited throughout Latin America and the Caribbean by the firm’s multi-decade bribery of foreign officials and its use of force to control and impoverish indigenous peoples.

Lindner’s American Financial Group was an early investor in Drexel’s high-yield (“junk”) securities packaged by Milken in deals coordinated with Leon Black in midtown Manhattan. Other early junk bond investors included insurance firms owned by Saul Steinberg and Meshulam Riklis.

Riklis’ Rapid-American Corp. became an acquisition vehicle for Lerner Shops, Playtex and RKO film studios, previously owned in part by bootlegger and stock swindler Joseph P. Kennedy, the politically ambitious father of John F. Kennedy. JFK was murdered five months after he sought to end Israel’s nuclear weapons program to preclude a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.

In 1967, in one of the first junk bond-financed leveraged buyouts (Michael Milken was still an undergraduate at the University of California Berkeley) Riklis acquired Lewis Rosenstiel’s shares in Schenley Industries based in Cincinnati, Lindner’s hometown.

The Istanbul-born Riklis paid for Schenley with junk bonds issued by Rapid-American, a firm partly owned by Lindner. Under Lindner’s leadership, United Fruit’s purchase of 40% of Rapid-American reportedly provided majority owner Riklis and his colleagues with resources to purchase for Israeli General Ariel Sharon his ranch in Israel’s Negev Desert where the Jewish state’s nuclear arsenal was developed at the Dimona reactor facility.

Fields within Fields

Rosenstiel’s wife, Leonore, left him to marry Walter Annenberg, Ronald Reagan’s “best friend for 50 years” according to Nancy Reagan. Annenberg also served as Richard Nixon’s ambassador to Great Britain. Son of Chicago mobster Moses “Moe” Annenberg, Walter laundered profits from the family’s racing-wire service through Triangle Publications, publisher of T.V. Guide andSeventeen.

As the National Crime Syndicate was being formed, 1929-31, the Annenberg-inspired racing wire service provided the sinew that bound together organized crime’s gambling operations dispersed across the U.S. and Canada and into Mexico and Cuba. As Walter Annenberg steadily distanced himself from organized crime beginning in the late 1940s, he steadily gained legitimacy and influence in Republican Party politics through his ownership of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Leonore Annenberg was raised by her uncle, Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures. First married to Belden Kattleman, a Las Vegas businessman, she then married Rosenstiel. During Prohibition, Rosenstiel bootlegged liquor from England, Europe, and Canada via Saint Pierre and then by truck into Cincinnati, building what became Schenley Distillers.

One of Rosenstiel’s closest colleagues (and competitors) was Canadian Sam Bronfman whose Distillers Corporation made a fortune in bootlegging during Prohibition in collaboration with organized crime, including Chicago’s fabled Al “Scarface” Capone. Bronfman (Yiddish for “liquor man”) acquired in 1928 what became Seagram Co. Ltd. From that fortune emerged the World Jewish Congress.

Prohibition and gambling capitalized organized crime. The combination of the Annenberg racing wire and high-profit bootlegging created a nationwide distribution network with those 24 territories still operating as key nodes in this network. The political corruption from that era identified pliable and reliable assets whose careers could be nurtured along with their successors, a key role assume by the Israel lobby as the syndicate became more sophisticated and its operations moved more deeply into government operations.

Johnny Lazio was a key participant in the 1929 Atlantic City conference as the representative of the Pendergast political machined in Kansas City that was then nurturing the political career of Harry Truman. Two decades later, this asset was persuaded to extend state recognition to this syndicate when its operatives established a post-WWII beachhead in the oil-rich Middle East.

Enabling the Networks

In 1989, Annenberg liquidated $3 billion of his wealth, including The Racing Form, in a sale to Rupert Murdoch. With those proceeds, he donated $150 million to Annenberg communication schools at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California.

Annenberg’s friend Ronald Reagan traces his political career to Chicago when Annenberg, Chicagoan Jules Stein and Cleveland’s Lew Wasserman helped “brand” him in the early days of television as the friendly face of General Electric Theater. It was during his presidency of the Screen Actor’s Guild (and with Nancy on the board) that the Guild extended a “special exemption” toe the Stein/Wasserman-run Music Corporation of America, providing MCA a competitive advantage that gained them disproportionate influence in music, television and film-making.

While president, Ronnie and Nancy routinely spent their New Year’s vacation at Sunnylands, Annenberg’s extensive estate in Rancho Mirage, California near Palm Springs. Walter’s father also gravitated to sunnier climes. After double-crossing a partner in Chicago, Moe fled to south Florida to seek the protection of National Crime Syndicate “Chairman” Meyer Lansky until he and his son relocated to Pennsylvania.

The Annenberg political savvy found its way back to Chicago to nurture the political prospects of an articulate young political activist whose work there with the Annenberg Education Challenge gained him statewide and then nationwide political exposure. When elected president in 2008, Barack Obama appointed as Eric Holder as his Attorney General, former counsel to Carl Lindner.

As the Holder-led Department of Justice began to brand Faisal the Fizzler as evidence of Pakistani Evil Doing, Senator Kit Bond, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee complained that Holder had “executed a hostile takeover of the intelligence community.”

Fields Within Fields…within Fields

Why take you down this circuitous route in an account of the “Times Square Terrorist”? Read on to close the circle.

In the mid-1950s, former Phoenix mobster Gus Greenbaum managed and then sold the Riviera Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, one of the premier properties controlled by the Chicago Outfit. The buyer was Cincinnatian Riklis, a former member of the Haganah, a paramilitary outfit active in terrorizing Palestinians from 1920 to 1948 when it became the Israel Defense Forces.

Riklis tutored Milken, then a young bond broker, and reportedly was Milken’s first customer as Milken morphed into a major figure in the boom of leveraged buyouts that emerged during the Reagan era. Fellow Cincinnatian Carl Lindner emerged as a father figure to Milken who oversaw a massive  “control fraud” at Lincoln Savings and Loan in Phoenix, Arizona.

The face on this fraud was Charles Keating who previously served as general counsel to the Linder-controlled, Cincinnati-based American Financial Group.

Arizona Senator John McCain led a group of five Senators known as “the Keating Five” whose delay of needed reforms raised the taxpayer cost of that nationwide fraud by an additional $50 billion, to exceed $150 billion.

Lindner boasts on the firm’s website that he is the “largest non-Jewish contributor to Jewish causes in the U.S.” Alan Greenspan, then working for J.P. Morgan, was retained by Keating to help recruit the Keating Five.

To succeed with that task, Greenspan deployed the goodwill and political capital he amassed as chairman of a the Social Security Commission (“the Greenspan Commission”). Its 1983 recommendation: Americans should work longer and pay higher payroll taxes.

A confidante of radical free market theorist Ayn Rand (Russian Alisa Rosenbaum), Greenspan reemerged as the Reagan-appointed Chairman of the Federal Reserve where over the next 18 years he enabled the subprime mortgage fraud with sustained low interest rates and enthusiastic support for what this Rand disciple described as “financial innovation.”

John McCain wrote to Keating in 1983 after his first Congressional victory: “Of the many things to be grateful for in this world, the friendship of the Keating family is certainly among the most meaningful.” McCain’s top supporters included Keating and father-in-law Jim Hensley.

Here begins the closing of the circle connecting the savings and loan fraud of the 1980s and the subprime mortgage fraud two decades later. And, the facts suggest, the role of misdirection aided by this latest in an ongoing series of well-timed “terrorist” incidents by Muslim Evil Doers.

Murder Inc.

Notorious mobster Bugsy Siegel is widely credited with founding Las Vegas as a National Crime Syndicate haven for gambling and prostitution when he built The Flamingo, an early casino named after Virginia Hill, his mob courier girlfriend from Alabama who used Flamingo as her showgirl name.

The syndicate maintained discipline through Murder, Inc., a cadre of hit men. When Siegel was discovered stealing from the mob, his murder in 1947 required that the syndicate relocate Gus Greenbaum to Las Vegas from Phoenix, leaving Kemper Marley in charge of statewide corruption in Arizona. Marley hired Jim and Gene Hensley.

After two close scrapes with federal liquor violations for which the Hensley brothers reportedly took the heat, Jim Hensley emerged with a beer distributorship that has since grown to the fifth largest in the nation—owned by Cindy Hensley McCain. Hensley’s Arizona lawyer, William Rehnquist, was appointed by Reagan as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

McCain met Hensley, then 24, when he was the married 42-year old U.S. Navy liaison to the U.S. Senate. Soon divorced, remarried and relocated to Arizona, he worked on public relations for his father-in-law while the Marley machine positioned this classic asset for election to the Congress—four years before Arizonan Barry Goldwater’s pending retirement from the Senate

After 911, Republican Senator McCain emerged alongside Democrat Joe Lieberman as the most insistent high-profile voices for the invasion of Iraq—selling that war with intelligence now known to be false. Lieberman soon chair of the Senate Committee handling Homeland Security. In that position, he collaborated with Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, a former governor of Pennsylvania and a product of the Annenberg political machine.

Ridge stepped in when New York Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik, the initial appointee of G.W. Bush, withdrew after reports were leaked of his close ties to organized crime. Ridge was succeeded by Michael Chertoff, a rabbi’s son and a former senior official in the Criminal Division of the Justice Department on 911. With the election of Chicagoan Obama, who former Clinton White House counsel Abner Mikva described as our “first Jewish president,” the Secretary of Homeland Security became Janet Napolitano, a former governor from mobbed-up Arizona.

Are these complex webs of relationships coincidental? Or is this typical of the overlapping links common to syndicate operations? Is this how organized crime is sustained through fields-within-fields of relationships that stretch across time, distance and, as here, both major political parties?

What does this have to do with the Fort Hood Shooter, the Crotch Bomb Sizzler and the Faisal the Fizzler? Are such “terrorist incidents” typical of how war is waged in the mental environment by creating—and constantly refreshing—a narrative? If so, who would have the motivation to do so?

Does a renewed fear of terrorism help divert attention away from the latest massive financial fraud? And from the need for reforms that are not yet forthcoming—from either party? Meanwhile our financial institutions remain “too big to fail.”

Are these insecurity-inducing “incidents” a form of marketing? Are they akin to selling us a product?

Do they ensure defense spending is sustained while social services are sliced? Is it coincidental that Israel is the world’s third largest arms exporter?

Are these “incidents” clues to how we are persuaded to assume more debt to wage more wars with no end in sight? Are these incidents just business-as-usual for transnational organized crime?

Was the same criminal syndicate involved in the S&L fraud also active in the Enron fraud? The Dotcom crash? The subprime fraud? The half-a-loaf “financial reform” legislation?

Did these massive financial “incidents” just happen? Or were they stage-managed from the shadows in an alliance between policy-making assets and transnational organized crime?

As counsel to the Senate Finance Committee (1980-87), I witnessed firsthand the embrace of debt-financed “supply-side economics” during the first year of the Reagan presidency. Its primary financial result was to dramatically increase the “free cash flow” essential to LBOs (leverage buyouts). At a time when the securitized debt of the U.S. hovered around $900 billion, this “fiscal conservative” championed a bill that authorized us to borrow $872 billion.

While those deficit-funded subsidies were cut back slightly in future years, their impact was certain to concentrate wealth and income and thereby undermine both democracy and markets—all in the name of enhancing our freedom. As a colleague rightly concluded, we got the mortgage (the deficits) while they got the house, the assets financed with that “free cash flow.”

Is it coincidence that private equity/LBO firms most enriched by this debt-financed change in policy are also best positioned to recapitalize the banks most devastated by this latest round of debt-financed excess? Throughout history, debt has always been the prize for those adept at inducing nations to war. Is this all too familiar? Are these firms our Wall Street Dons?

Whose Agenda?

In 1948, the Joint Chiefs of Staff cautioned Harry Truman against granting sovereign recognition to an extremist enclave that was already using ethnic cleansing to terrorize the indigenous population and occupy lands adjoining the Muslim-dominant Middle East.

Their rationale: Palestinian land was rightly theirs as The Chosen because it was long ago given to them—by a God of their own choosing.

Truman was warned by U.S. military leaders about the “fanatical concepts of the Jewish leaders” and their plans for “Jewish military and economic hegemony over the entire Middle East.” Truman chose not to follow their advice nor that of his Secretary of State, former WWII General George C. Marshall who viewed recognition as a geopolitical disaster.

Did our military leaders fail to grasp the scope and scale of the threat posed by these extremists? Did these “fanatical concepts” include a plan to deceive the U.S. so that we would deploy ourmilitary to pursue their agenda for dominance in the region? Is that why a Democratic president’s policy in the Middle East is little changed from that of Republican G.W. Bush?

Working as a transnational criminal syndicate, did these extremists collaborate to damage the U.S. economy with disabling debt and discredit the U.S. abroad with an endless war? Could the presence of this syndicate help explain why the U.S. continues to dig itself deeper into debt regardless which political party is in power?

Could the criminal roots of this operation explain why we hear nothing about Leon Black’s employment of the Times Square Fizzler?

Is the sound of silence speaking to us with an eloquence we do not yet understand?

State by State: We’re Taking our Country Back

With Arizona’s new Law — The Worm Turns…

U.S. attorney Eric Holder doesn’t like Arizona’s SB 1070 that addresses illegal aliens in that state. Unfortunately, he failed to read it! It mirrors federal statutes voted into law in 1986. President Barack Obama thinks it’s misguided, but again, he didn’t read it. Our U.S. Congress continues its indolent dance through the corridors of power while doing next to nothing—while citizens in fifty states celebrate with a 73 percent approval rating supporting Arizona’s right to secure its borders. Arizona expects to eject 460,000 illegal aliens—creating financial, criminal, medical, educational and incarceration havoc in that state. Ten other states enjoy legislators expecting to introduce SB 1070 in their own states.

La Raza, Maldef, Lulac and other open borders advocates hate the law—because it works!

Much like the wisdom of our third president Mr.Thomas Jefferson, he said that ultimate power must be administered by the states in the Union because they best could handle their own problems. For the past 30 years, the Federal Government under five presidents and Congresses—failed on every level to enforce immigration laws throughout the country, whether at the border or internally. The Congress winked, nodded, curtsied and blinked while 20 million illegal aliens walked, danced, lied, cheated, stole, forged and overstayed their visas into America.

Corporations like McDonald’s, Tyson Chicken, Hormel, Swift, Armor, Marriott and dozens of others lied, cheated and displaced American workers out of jobs—all in the name of profits and undermining American workers. In every state, roofing companies, construction firms, landscapers, contract painters and hotel-restaurant chains lied (still lie) through their teeth to hire illegals. Ski resorts and summer camps lied, cheated and hired incredible numbers of illegal aliens—for obscene profits.

Every time any citizens attempted to inject the ‘rule of law’ into the equation, they suffered names like ‘racist’, ‘xenophobe’, ‘nativist’ and ‘hate-monger’. In reality, they demanded nothing more than the rule of law applied against those that broke the law!

While illegals rioted in the streets of Phoenix, Arizona when Governor Jan Brewer signed SB 1070, Americans from sea to shining sea said, “It’s about time!”

Today, ten other states including Pennsylvania, Minnesota, South Carolina and Texas stand in line to enact similar laws using the Arizona template.

As the worm turns, and as said so often in history, when the people lead, the leaders will follow. Fancy that!

During the days before Brewer’s signing the bill, U.S. Senator John McCain, perhaps the most ineffectual senator as to border security for over 30 years, stepped up to the microphone to urge Governor Brewer to sign the bill. Why? He’s about to lose his senate seat that he cherishes more than life itself! Why would anyone hang onto the seat of power well beyond his useful years? Hubris! False pride and ego gratification! He’s been an ineffective senator for three decades.

Note that Thomas Jefferson urged ‘term limits’ back in 1776! He knew that old men hate to give up their power—just like the ‘royals’ of Europe—whom he hated!

This past week, former vice-presidential candidate and ‘former’ open-borders and amnesty proponent Sarah Palin joined Brewer in voicing support for the state’s immigration law.

Both Brewer and Palin blamed Obama for the state law, saying the measure is Arizona’s attempt to enforce immigration laws because the federal government won’t do it.

“It’s time for Americans across this great country to stand up and say, “‘We’re all Arizonans now,’” said Palin. “And in clear unison we say, ‘Mr. President: do your job! Secure our borders!’”

At that, I slap my jeans; roll my eyes, and wonder, “What took you so long Sarah?”

Why does it take millions of disgruntled Americans to join the Tea Party Movement before our U.S. Congress moves toward the task of securing our borders? They all placed their hand on the Bible, save two that placed their hands on the Koran, and swore to uphold the laws of this country. I wouldn’t expect anyone that swore on the Koran to do anything but destroy this country, but I DO expect Americans that swore on the Bible—to uphold our Constitution.

Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion….”

It’s about time you Barack Obama learn to lead or get out of the way. It’s about time you senators and House reps lead, or step out of the way—the bell tolls and it tolls for all of you hopeless Congress critters.

Arizona’s Courage in the Face of Hysterical Balderdash

On April 23, 2010, Arizona’s citizens made the strongest statement yet in their quest for survival as to an invasion of 460,000 illegal aliens turning their state into a war zone. Governor Jan Brewer signed SB 1070, which mirrors federal statutes as to arrest and prosecution of anyone hiring illegal aliens or illegal aliens living within that state.

An intense amount of hysteria and caustic hyperbole attended the new law. None of it holds any water. Illegal immigration advocates called the law akin to Nazi Germany’s war on Jews. The New York Times said, “The statute requires police to stop and question anyone who looks like an illegal immigrant.”

It does nothing of the sort. As with federal statues, a person must break the law in order to be stopped for inspection by police. The same holds true with any citizen of any country. Anyone visiting a foreign country must carry his or her passport and visa identification.

WAR ZONE IN ARIZONA?

The law only affects those persons residing within Arizona illegally. No one else need be concerned.

Those that favor illegal immigration for their own pockets, created hysteria on multiple levels. The Phoenix Suns basketball team sympathized with illegals by renaming the team jersey “Los Suns”, but you cannot “break” into their games illegally. You must buy a ticket and walk in lawfully. If you do break in illegally, guards will throw you out. Thus, while Suns managers support illegal aliens, they won’t allow such behavior in their own ‘house’.

Phil Jackson of the world champion Los Angeles Lakers said, “I don’t think teams should get involved in the political stuff. If I heard it right, the American people are really for stronger immigration laws.”

Jackson, who normally leans left, said he favors Arizona’s new law and he criticized “Los Suns” for meddling in politics where they don’t belong.

Outside the hoopla, a harsh reality faces Arizonans daily. They face a war zone unprecedented in modern history. President Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress refuse to secure the border—thus 460,000 illegal aliens reside in Arizona as well as 20 million throughout the USA. Arizona’s border represents a war zone of trash, abandoned vehicles and thousands crossing nightly. They cost U.S. taxpayers $436 billion annually. (Source: www.thesocialcontract.com with Edwin Rubenstein)

In Arizona, illegal aliens steal 50,000 to 57,000 vehicles in the Phoenix area annually to feed their people and drug smuggling operations. (Source: DMV AZ) According to Chris Kobach of the New York Times, Arizona now boasts the kidnapping capital of the United States. Tens of thousands of illegal alien children birthed in area hospitals—- bankrupt social services, schools and later, prisons. In April, illegal alien drug smugglers executed Arizona Rancher Rob Krentz, but illegals regularly drive drunk as they kill Arizona citizens as well as shoot police officers at traffic stops as one illegal killed Officer Nick Erfle last year in Phoenix.

In Colorado, the Denver Public School system, in sympathy with illegal aliens, dictated that none of its employees could travel to Arizona because of the law. Once again, political balderdash as Denver’s own predicament bubbles to the surface. They suffer a 50 to 67 percent dropout rates in their high schools, which illegal alien children dominate. In Detroit, Michigan, high school dropout rates reached 76 percent according to NBC’s Brian Williams.

Former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan told a round table, “With 460,000 illegal aliens, there are more illegal aliens in Arizona than Americans serving in the United States Army. That’s an invasion.”

Ironically, ABC interviewed an illegal alien mother boasting 10 children born in America as she and her husband packed up their van to move to Colorado. Each of those kids enjoys food stamps, free breakfasts and lunches, free medical care and assisted housing allowances—all on taxpayer dollars. Colorado will become the new state that pays for those 10 kids.

Arizona spoke up for its citizens and the rule of law, but more so, as a last ditch effort to restore the rule of law and fiscal balance for its own citizens.

The question remains: when will the U.S. Congress and President Obama honor their oaths of office by enforcing federal immigration laws already on the books?

Immigration: The Rule of Law Awakens in Arizona

After 30 years of the U.S. Congress and four presidents failing to enforce our immigration laws– Arizona, led by State Senator Russell Pearce and a brave band of lawmakers—passed SB 1070, the most diligent and forceful immigration law in the nation.

In excess of 460,000 criminal illegal aliens find themselves facing, for the first time in 30 years, the rule of law.

“We’re tired of tens of thousands of stolen vehicles,” said Arizona resident Michelle Dallacroce. “We’re the kidnapping capital of America. Arizonans fear for their lives daily. Illegals have destroyed our schools, hospitals and communities. They fill our prisons. They kill our cops, ranchers and ordinary citizens. We’re tired of it.”

On Friday, April 23, 2010, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed the bill into law.

State Senator Russell Pearce said, “States have the inherent right to enforce the laws of our country. Arizona will set the pace. We are a nation of laws. We will lead the charge in Arizona to defend the U.S. Constitution. Arizona will do away with sanctuary cities and the sanctuary state. We want to let law enforcement do its job. We can’t continue with weak-kneed politicians.”

Having failed as a U.S. Senator to uphold the Constitution for the past 30 years, John McCain endorsed and encouraged Governor Brewer to sign the bill. Why? He’s running scared in this next election against opponent J.D. Hayworth.

When you enforce the law, criminals begin to understand their condition. One business in Phoenix pink-slipped 300 employees, presumably illegal aliens, on Thursday in anticipation of the bill being signed by Brewer.

Pearce assured me, “Our attorney Chris Kobach made the bill iron-clad and it follows the precepts of the U.S. Constitution.”

President Barack Obama, unwilling for the past year to secure the U.S./Mexican border, said the bill, “Is misguided.” Over 70 percent of Arizona registered voters favored the bill, both whites and American Hispanics.

Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (www.FAIRUS.org ), the nation’s leading immigration reform organization, issued the following statement in response to Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signing S.B. 1070: “FAIR applauds Gov. Jan Brewer, Sen. Russell Pearce and other Arizona leaders for acting decisively to protect Arizonans as they cope with a crisis brought on by mass illegal immigration. Once again, Arizona is showing the rest of the nation that in the face of federal indifference to border security, state and local governments have the ability to protect their citizens and public resources.

“Faced with mounting costs, lost jobs and violent crime resulting from mass illegal immigration, Gov. Brewer has acted responsibly to protect Arizonans. In signing S.B. 1070, Gov. Brewer has responded to the will of the people and risen above the incendiary rhetoric of those who are maliciously attempting to divide Arizonans along ethnic lines.

“We hope that enactment of S.B. 1070 will result in renewed interest on the part of Washington to secure the border and enforce our laws throughout the nation. The vast majority of Americans simply want the government to enforce our laws, and Gov. Brewer and the Arizona legislature are proving it can be done.”

Having stood on the border for three of the past five years, I am acutely aware of the anarchy, rapes, killings and drug traffic. I witnessed thousands of tons of trash and debris left by illegals. Because our former and current U.S. presidents failed to secure the borders as to the drug trade, 17,000 Mexicans lost their lives in shootouts along the border. Thousands of American citizens lost their lives to illegals throughout the interior of the United States.

Can you ‘get’ your arms around THAT many deaths? None of them would have happened if Bush and Obama would secure the borders with 30,000 U.S. Marines. By the way, 35,000 U.S. Army and Marines secured the South Korean border for the past 50 years. Not one single illegal North Korean ever crossed the border! Fancy that!

Today, 460,000 illegal aliens and their children in Arizona face imminent job losses from SB 1070. It will prosecute, fine and jail anyone that hires an illegal alien. Without jobs, those illegals will flee to California, Nevada, New Mexico and other states—thus creating major work, housing, school, medical and prison crises.

Finally, someone stood up for Arizona, for Americans! Every state may use the Arizona law for a template to bring the long ordeal of illegal immigration to an end. No country can remain a country without its secured borders no more than any home can be a safe haven for its family without a secured front and back door.

Mr. Obama: you are misguided and we will let you know about it in November. This nation tires of your equivocating, your lack of respect for our rights as citizens, your lack of enforcing our laws, lack of respect for our borders and your pandering to illegal aliens.

Arizona Has It Right

Open borders advocates are livid that the State of Arizona has enacted a new law authorizing State law enforcement personnel to arrest illegal aliens. The Reverend Al Sharpton is threatening to march. The mayor of San Francisco has declared Arizona off limits as a travel destination. The national government of Mexico has issued travel warnings. President Barack Obama is contemplating bringing a federal lawsuit against the State. Some are calling for a boycott of the State.

So, why all the fuss?

The State of Arizona is rightly sick and tired of the federal government’s refusal to protect our nation (and the State of Arizona specifically) from this foreign invasion that is commonly referred to as “illegal immigration.” In other words, the State of Arizona has said, “If the federal government won’t enforce the law, we will.” I say, good for them! Now, the other border states (Texas, New Mexico, and California) should do the same thing. Arizona has it right, and the vast majority of the American people know it.

As an aside, if you are considering a visit to the American Southwest this summer, why not support the brave legislators and governor of Arizona, and make a point to spend your leisure dollars in Arizona? And when you do, write a letter to the State capitol and tell them. Even more importantly, I suggest that everyone contact their own State representatives, senators, and governors, and urge them to enact a similar law–to the one Arizona passed–in your State.

And since the national news media refuses to set the record straight on the subject of illegal immigration (one could even say that the national news media is deliberately covering up the record), let’s do that right here and now.

First, let’s talk about numbers. Even though the Census Bureau (CB) estimates 11 million illegal aliens live in America, the real numbers are much higher. Even CB officials admit that many illegal aliens purposely avoid the census count. A more reliable count is provided by Bear Stearns. It puts the number of illegal aliens at around 20 million. Former US Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO), who was Chairman of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus, puts the number at over 18 million.

According to Tennesseans for Responsible Immigration Policies (TNRIP), 6,000 immigrants arrive in America EVERY DAY. That equates to more than 2 million EVERY YEAR. In many communities in the Southwest, including Los Angeles, California, and Houston, Texas, Hispanics now comprise a majority of the population. But numbers of illegal aliens are quickly beginning to mount in cities throughout the United States.

For example, TNRIP documents the fact that the Hispanic population grew in three Tennessee counties by more than 70% between 2000 and 2004. In one of those counties (Robertson) it grew over 95% during that time. In seven Tennessee counties, the Hispanic population grew by more than 40%. Now, Tennessee can hardly be considered a “border state.” The fact is, what is happening in Tennessee is happening all over the United States. And lest you think this is all harmless, think again.

According to TNRIP, the financial cost of this foreign invasion to U.S. taxpayers is staggering! Here is a breakdown of the annual costs:

Education: $22.5 billion
Bi-lingual Education: $3.3 billion
AFDC: $2.4 billion
SSI: $2.9 billion
Social Security: $24.8 billion
Housing Assistance: $2.6 billion
Criminal Justice: $2.6 billion
Jobs Lost by Americans: $10.8 billion
Other Programs: $51.4 billion
Food Stamps: $7 billion
Health Care: $1.4 billion

The first study of the net cost of illegal immigration to American taxpayers was conducted in 1997 by Dr. Donald Huddle, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Rice University. This study concluded that from 1970 to 1997, illegal immigration had cost taxpayers over $69 billion. Obviously, the financial numbers have exploded since then.

Furthermore, during 1996 alone, more than 2.3 million American workers were displaced by (mostly) illegal aliens. Harvard Professor George Borjas estimates that today American workers lose $133 billion per year in wage depression and job loss.

Back in 2007 it was reported, “LA County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich announced that a new report shows illegal aliens and their families collected over $35 million in welfare and food stamp allocations in July.

“In the report, illegals are said to have collected nearly $20 million in welfare assistance for July 2007 and an additional $15 million in monthly food stamp allocations for an estimated annual cost of $440 million.

“‘Illegal immigration continues to have a devastating impact on Los Angeles County taxpayers,’ said Antonovich. ‘In addition to $220 million for public safety and $400 million for healthcare, the $440 million in welfare allocations bring the total cost to County taxpayers that exceeds $1 billion a year–this does not include the skyrocketing cost of education.’”

Consider, too, this recent report by Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector. According to Byron York at National Review, “Rector found that in 2004, the most recent year for which figures are available, low-skill households received an average of $32,138 per household–the great majority in the form of means-tested aid and direct benefits. (Rector excluded from that figure the cost of public goods and interest; with those included, he says, each low-skill household receives an average of $43,084.) Against that, Rector found that low-skill households paid an average of $9,689 in taxes. (The biggest chunk of that was the Social Security tax–$2,509–followed by state and local taxes, consumption taxes, property taxes, and federal income taxes, but Rector counted everything, including highway levies and lottery purchases.) In the final calculation, he found, the average low-skill household received $22,449 more in benefits than it paid in taxes–the $32,138 in benefits, excluding public goods, minus the $9,689 in taxes.

“Taking that $22,449, and multiplying it by the 17.7 million low-skill households, Rector found that the total deficit for such households was $397 billion in 2004. ‘Over the next ten years the total cost of low-skill households to the taxpayer (immediate benefits minus taxes paid) is likely to be at least $3.9 trillion,’ Rector writes. ‘This number would go up significantly if changes in immigration policy lead to substantial increases in the number of low-skill immigrants entering the country and receiving services.’”

See York’s column at:

http://tinyurl.com/illegal-imm-cost

It has been noted that 75% of people on LA’s most-wanted list are illegal aliens. Nearly 25% of all inmates in California detention centers are here illegally, and roughly 30% of inmates in the federal prisons are illegal aliens.

In addition, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reports half of all gang members in Los Angeles are most likely illegals from south of the border. According to Tancredo, gang membership by illegal aliens in many states is 50%, and in Phoenix, Arizona, illegal aliens constitute 34% of child-molestation and 40% of auto theft cases.

Furthermore, illegal aliens murder (on average) 12 Americans EVERY DAY, according to Congressman Steve King (R-Iowa). Plus, illegals that drive drunk kill another 13 Americans EVERY DAY. That means illegal aliens kill more Americans EVERY YEAR than have been killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in total.

See the report at:

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53103

Of course, Arizonans are still reeling from the recent high profile murder of a fellow citizen on his own property by an illegal.

Law enforcement agencies are very much cognizant of a surge in Latin American “ultra-violent” gangs that have sprung up in more than 40 US states. According to the FBI, one gang called MS-13 has been identified in 42 states. Another group called the 18th Street Gang is in 37 states. According to FBI MS-13 National Gang Task Force director Brian Truchon, “When the gang migrates throughout the U.S., there is always a road back to L.A. From L.A., there is always a road back to Central America.”

Retired lawman Jim Kouri wrote, “According to Lt. Steve Rogers, a decorated cop and award-winning writer, there are tens of thousands of murderers, rapists, child predators, robbers and drug dealers who are illegally in the United States. One study shows over 200,000 criminal aliens are preying on U.S. citizens.”

What the Arizona law does is authorize its law enforcement personnel to ENFORCE THE LAW. No one in Arizona is talking about racial profiling or violating citizens’ constitutional rights. In fact, the new Arizona law actually mirrors already established federal law. But the federal government has hamstrung State and local police agencies in their attempts to arrest illegals for decades. Now, Arizona policemen can arrest illegals for being in the State of Arizona illegally, and have them deported: something they should have been doing (and have every right to do) all along. No wonder the vast majority of the American people (not to mention the citizens of Arizona) supports the Arizona law.

But there is a greater issue here: the right of the State of Arizona to protect, defend, and govern itself. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the State sovereignty movement is growing like a wildfire. Whether it is Arizona, Montana, Idaho, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Georgia, Texas, Florida, Alaska, or a couple dozen other states, legislators are beginning to awaken to the constitutional and moral responsibility of each State to govern itself. And when the central government in Washington, D.C., abridges or impedes that responsibility, it is the right and duty of states to resist.

This is why I tell people everywhere I speak, What is going on in [Your State] is infinitely more important than anything that goes on in Washington, D.C. Without the approbation of the State, DC’s actions and attitudes are irrelevant. This is why we need county sheriffs, State legislators, State judges, State attorneys general, and governors who–along with their State’s citizenry–understand the Constitution and are willing to courageously hold the line for freedom and constitutional government in their respective states. And by passing this anti-illegal alien bill, the State of Arizona did just that–the chagrin and consternation of open borders advocates notwithstanding.

Arizona Illegal Aliens Fighting New Law Tooth and Nail

On April 23, 2010, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed SB 1070 to bring sweeping change to the illegal immigration crisis in that desert state. At the same time, because the bill proves very effective, illegal aliens and their advocates condemned it with much name calling.

Barack Obama called the Arizona bill “misguided.”

Unfortunately, much like his predecessor George W. Bush, Obama, after one year in office, failed to secure the Mexican/US border. Thousands of illegal continue crossing nightly.

Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon said, “It’s a hateful attempt to see whether Russell Pearce or Joe Arpaio can be the toughest person in the world.”

“There’s going to be political consequences, there will be economical consequences,” said Latino activist Carlos. “There will be a lot of consequences on the part of our community.”

However, Arizona citizens said they cannot continue living in a lawless state where citizens must fend for their lives every day. Illegal aliens disrupt schools, overwhelm hospitals and spill out of Arizona prisons. Over a week ago, an illegal alien migrant shot Arizona rancher Rob Krentz to death in a brutal execution. In the last few years, Arizona police officers, like Nick Erfle, suffer death at the hands of illegals.

“I’ve heard your concerns about immigration reform, I understand what the issues are and how important they are to all of us,” said Governor Brewer.

On Thursday, Brewer again called for more troops along the state’s border with Mexico.

“The Republican governor ordered a re-allocation of state National Guard and law enforcement resources and called on the federal government to deploy National Guard troops as hundreds of Hispanics protested the bill at the State Capitol complex,” said journalist Jim Cross.

“The responsibility to ensure that we have an orderly, secure border – not just some imaginary line or a rickety fence – belongs to the federal government, and they have failed,” Brewer said, who asked five times for President Barack Obama to deploy troops.

Arizona with 460,000 illegal immigrants provides the nation’s busiest illegal border crossing point. Thousands of illegals cross every night and pickup points provide them with instant transfers around the United States. On average, illegal migrants drop eight pounds of trash and clothing as they exit the desert. Pickup points resemble city landfills loaded with garbage. Additionally, they leave tons of human waste, plastic, backpacks, bottles, cans, food and drugs. They break into Arizona ranchers’ homes and vandalize property.

“This bill was introduced many months ago, any additional delay is unacceptable. Failure to act exposes Arizona law enforcement officers, citizens, and their property to further harm,” said State Treasurer Dean Martin.

State Senator Russell Pearce said, “Our attorney Chris Kobach made this bill bullet proof. Even Senator John McCain urged Governor Brewer to sign it. We need to bring back the rule of law and respect for the U.S. Constitution in Arizona. This law will do the job.”

Day laborers “are not criminals,” said the Rev. Gerald Kicanas, bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tucson. “These are human beings who want to provide for their families and contribute to our society.”

Unfortunately, day laborers steal jobs from Arizona citizens, while, at the same time, they undercut wages for lawful citizens. Additionally, illegal aliens do not pay taxes as they enjoy payment under the table. Their children overwhelm Arizona schools, and anchor babies by Mexican mothers force U.S. taxpayers to pay K-12 for education, ESL courses, medical care and ‘free’ breakfast and lunch programs. Over 57,000 vehicles suffer theft annually in the Phoenix area—virtually all by illegal aliens.

Finally, the underground economy includes ID theft, ID forgeries, income tax evasion, fraudulent Earned Income Tax Credits applications, drunken driving, no licenses, no insurance and total chaos within police departments in Arizona.

“Pearce’s bill will create sweeping change and restore the rule of law,” said one Arizona citizen. “We’re tired of the lawlessness across our state.”

What do Teddy Kennedy, Palin and McCain Enjoy in Common?

History will show the late Senator Teddy Kennedy authored the destruction of the United States of America with his 1965 Immigration Reform Act. That single bill, his most famous and just about the only thing he accomplished in his 40 indolent years in Congress—created America’s decline and fall. Whereas George Washington became the “Father of our country”, Teddy Kennedy will be known as the “Father of the destruction of our country.”

Kennedy’s bill started a deluge of humanity from around the world that pours into our civilization at an astounding 1.5 million annually. That single Kennedy bill added 100 million people to the USA within 40 years. That same bill drives America to add another 100 million people within the next 25 years. If allowed to continue unabated, Kennedy’s bill will swamp our civilization with another 300 million people within sixty years.

A personal note: Teddy Kennedy matched Jack Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Elliot Spitzer, Governor Mark Sanford and Tiger Woods any day when it came to cheating, lying and skullduggery. The connection shows unethical behavior that seeps into everything—especially their behavior in the public sector. A fraudulent golf pro can only hurt himself, but a corrupt public official can destroy our civilization. Notice how George W. Bush fraudulently thrust us into the Iraq War—at a cost of thousands of lives and horrific consequences on multiple levels.

Teddy’s bill made America the dumping ground for multiple languages, multiple incompatible cultures, incompatible religions and a new sub-class of poverty heretofore unknown within the United States. They pour into this country so fast; their numbers overwhelm our schools, medical systems and prisons. Kennedy’s favorite term, “multiculturalism”, will be defined in the history books, as the mechanism that destroyed and displaced a successful American civilization and left it in ruins. Examples abound: France, United Kingdom, Holland, Sweden, Belgium, Norway and others overrun by immigration.

Examples explode across America: 76 percent dropout rate in Detroit, Michigan high schools. Entrenched poverty. An astounding $35 million in goods shoplifted every day in America, honor killings of women now in America, mosques growing like flies in a barnyard, Muslim shootouts with FBI agents, first call for Sharia Law to be implemented in Detroit, Islamic calls to worship sounding over the once all American city. Another city, Los Angeles slowly returns to Mexican authority, language and culture. Every girl past 15 features a baby and most of those mothers cannot read past the fourth grade or work simple math. The Mexican “18th Street Gang” of 20,000 illegal aliens controls the drug trade in much of LA and police will not venture into their ghettos. MS-13 drug gangs now in 40 American states. Millions of pounds of trash must be picked up as it is tossed all over LA. Chicago, Miami and Houston feature gangs, drugs and worse—all caused by mass immigration. Phoenix, Arizona features an astounding annual car theft rate of 57,000 vehicles to become the new “Car Theft Capital of the World.” That state also features 460,000 illegal aliens.

In all of this devolving mix lurks two other famous names factoring into this nation’s demise: Sarah Palin and John McCain. Both famous and both out to lunch. Neither has served America with any distinction. Both enjoy notoriety on many fronts. Both feature million dollar bank accounts. They will not be touched by the crime, degraded schools or crushed communities as they live in their gated castles. But we must fight the traffic, breathe polluted air and endure the problems created by their irresponsibilities.

During the ensuing years of the Kennedy bill, neither Kennedy or McCain said a word as millions of illegal aliens crossed into U.S. territory. Because of their blind eyes to the problem, McCain and Kennedy in 1986 authored and pushed for the “Total Amnesty Act” that allowed a purported 1.3 illegal aliens complete amnesty. Result: a total of 4.3 million accepted amnesty and their legacy added another 10 million aliens to tap into the U.S. treasure chest of taxpayer amenities.

A short 24 years later, as Kennedy and McCain stood by to let 20 million illegal aliens to take up residence in this country, today, McCain endorses a full amnesty for that 20 million. But, he doesn’t know if it’s 20 million or 25 million and more. Palin, riding a wild horse of ‘stupid Americans’ drunk on her good looks and sassy rhetoric—endorses McCain’s amnesty to give all of them complete citizenship after breaking our laws and destroying jobs for Americans.

Amazingly, and astoundingly, 20 million Americans remain unemployed. Another 35 million subsist on food stamps. Congress, led by McCain, imports another 150,000 to 180,000 legal immigrants every 30 days. But, as Katie Couric said last week, the U.S. generates ONLY 95,000 new jobs per month in this ‘jobless’ recovery.

Hey folks! Do the math! We can never catch up to employing Americans while we import 150,000 plus immigrants every month. And, as McCain and Congress make certain—our borders remain wide open to allow countless tens of thousands of illegal aliens each month.

So, how stupid is Palin? How dumb is McCain? How completely drunk was Kennedy? How dumb are Americans? They keep electing guys like Kennedy and McCain—therefore, pretty dumb!

Finally, if this amnesty passes, this country will find itself unable to continue as a viable, sustainable and cohesive civilization. If you think ‘gridlock’ in Congress today wrecks any chance of compromise for the betterment of all of us—just wait until enough Muslims and Mexicans and Somalians and Cubans and Brazilians and Palestinians and Chinese and Ethiopians and Iraqis and Sunnis and El Salvadorans and Bangladeshis and Hmongs start demanding their due and their culture and their language and their religion.

To think that it all began with a drunk, lying, cheating and immoral U.S. Senator from Massachusetts named Teddy Kennedy.

SPLC Publishes Patriot Hit List

In a report on its web site dated April 2010, entitled “Meet The Patriots,” the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) profiled “36 individuals at the heart of the resurgent [patriot] movement.” (In reading the list, I counted only 35 “patriots” and 5 “enablers” for a total of 40. I’m not really sure how the SPLC came up with “36.” Perhaps their ability to count is commensurate with their ability to appreciate patriotism and liberty.) The SPLC (founded by Morris Dees) sees itself as America’s guardian against “right wing militias” and loves to label conservatives and libertarians that it doesn’t like as “extremists.” The SPLC is one of the most ultra-liberal organizations in the country and should be dismissed as a group of paranoid leftists, not worthy of thought or mention.

The sad truth is, however, our federal government has chosen to exalt the SPLC to the position of being its “go to” source for information regarding “potential domestic terrorists” and similar characterizations. As a result, the information and reports disseminated by SPLC wind up in police reports and bulletins all over the United States. As an example, the SPLC had its fingerprints all over the infamous MIAC report. One could even question whether the SPLC is merely a front organization for Big Brother.

Therefore, it is highly likely that the report negatively profiling 40 American patriots will find its way into Department of Homeland Security (DHS) fusion centers and be distributed to police agencies all across the country. So, should the 40 people who find themselves targeted by SPLC expect some kind of government/police attention? Are we really that close to Nazi-style persecution in America? If the SPLC has its way, the answer seems to be a definite yes.

I remind readers that in the book, Nazi Justiz: Law of the Holocaust (page 3), there were five steps to Hitler’s plans for the destruction of European Jews. Step 1: Identification/registration of the targeted group as a public menace. Step 2: Ostracism of the targeted persons. Step 3: property confiscation. Step 4: Concentration of members into geographical locations. Step 5: Annihilation. In this latest report, SPLC seems quite willing to accomplish steps 1 and 2.

Here are the 40 names that are targeted in the SPLC report (and guess who is listed at the very top? Yours truly):

1. Chuck Baldwin, Pastor, Radio Broadcaster, Syndicated Columnist, 2008 Constitution Party Presidential nominee.
2. Joe Banister, former IRS special agent, tax protester.
3. Martin “Red” Beckman, tax protester
4. Catherine Bleish, head of the Liberty Restoration Project.
5. Chris Broughton, Second Amendment advocate, member of “We The People” group.
6. Bob Campbell, head of American Grand Jury.
7. Robert Crooks, Army veteran, retired commercial fisherman, anti-illegal immigration proponent.
8. Joseph Farah, CEO of World Net Daily
9. Gary Franchi, producer of “Camp FEMA: American Lockdown,” national director of RestoreTheRepublic.com.
10. Al Garza, head of the Patriot’s Coalition, an anti-illegal immigration group.
11. Ted Gunderson, retired FBI agent.
12. John Hassey, “The public face of Alabama’s militia movement in the late 1990s,” says SPLC.
13. Alex Jones, Radio Talk Show host.
14. Devvy Kidd, “prolific columnist, blogger, and public speaker.”
15. Larry Kilgore, telecommunications consultant, former US Senate candidate from Texas, pro-secession advocate.
16. Cliff Kincaid, syndicated columnist and author, editor of AIM Report (Accuracy in Media’s publication), founder and president of America’s Survival, Inc., a UN watchdog group.
17. Mark Koernke, associated with the now-defunct Michigan Militia.
18. Richard Mack, former Graham County, Arizona, Sheriff, author, and public speaker.
19. Jack McLamb, former Phoenix, Arizona, police officer, author, and public speaker.
20. John McManus, former member of the US Marine Corps, president of the John Birch Society.
21. Daniel New, father of Michael New (the Army medic who refused to wear a UN uniform), author, public speaker.
22. Norm Olson, founder of the now-defunct Michigan Militia.
23. Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America.
24. Stewart Rhodes, Army veteran and Yale Law School graduate, founder of Oath Keepers.
25. Jon Roland, computer specialist, founder of the Constitution Society.
26. Luke Rudkowski, founder We Are Change.
27. Robert “Bob” Schultz, founder of We The People.
28. Joel Skousen, editor, World Affairs Brief.
29. Jim Stachowiak, Radio Talk Show host, “Longtime militia organizer,” claims SPLC.
30. John Stadtmiller, founder, Republic Broadcasting Network.
31. Orly Taitz, California attorney, a leader in the push to make President Obama disclose his US birth certificate.
32. Amanda Teegarden, executive director of Oklahomans for Sovereignty and Free Enterprise.
33. Mike Vanderboegh, anti-Obama health care activist.
34. Paul Venable, former candidate for the Idaho House of Representatives.
35. Edwin Vieira, Jr., attorney, author, proponent of constitutional State militias, lecturer.
36. Michele Bachmann, US Representative from Minnesota.
37. Glenn Beck, Fox News Channel TV host.
38. Paul Broun, medical doctor, US Representative from Georgia.
39. Andrew Napolitano, attorney, former State judge in New Jersey, Fox News Channel legal analyist, lecturer.
40. Ron Paul, former member of the US Air Force, medical doctor, US Representative from Texas, 2008 Republican candidate for President.

See the SPLC report here.

The SPLC, no doubt, sees each person on the above list as being a leader of the “radical right,” a “conspiracist,” and “antigovernment.” But understand, the SPLC makes its living off of big-government, leftist ideology. To say it is a shill for Big Government Liberalism is an understatement. The SPLC is so radical it makes the ACLU look conservative!

Again, this SPLC report would not even merit a mention (much less an entire column) except for the fact that the SPLC has become a source of information fuelling anti-freedom hysteria for countless bureaucrats at the DHS. Add this to the previously exposed MIAC and DHS reports, and the Army major’s report blaming “millennialist” Christians for much of the ills of the world, and a disturbing trend is quickly developing: so-called right-wing ANYTHING is being targeted and demonized as a “public menace.”

But the lists that you and I are not seeing are even more disturbing.

Joel Skousen quotes (Radar Magazine’s) Christopher Ketcham’s The Last Roundup as asking if the federal government is “compiling a secret enemies list of citizens who could face detention?” He goes on to say, “A number of former government employees and intelligence sources with independent knowledge of domestic surveillance operations claim the program that caused the flap between [former assistant attorney general under John Ashcroft, James] Comey and the White House was related to a database of Americans who might be considered potential threats in the event of a national emergency. Sources familiar with the program say that the government’s data gathering has been overzealous and probably conducted in violation of federal law and the protection from unreasonable search and seizure guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.

“A veteran CIA intelligence analyst who maintains active high-level clearances and serves as an advisor to the Department of Defense in the field of emerging technology tells Radar that during the 2004 hospital room drama [between former Chief of Staff Andrew Card and Attorney General Ashcroft, in an attempt by Card to coerce a very ill Ashcroft to authorize President Bush's secretive domestic spying programs as his assistant--and acting--attorney general had refused to do so], James Comey expressed concern over how this secret database was being used ‘to accumulate otherwise private data on non-targeted U.S. citizens for use at a future time.'”

The report further states, “According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, ‘There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived “enemies of the state” almost instantaneously.'” At this point, Skousen noted, “And that is precisely why the census bureau took a GPS coordinate on every front door in America, secretly linking this to dissidents and their known addresses.”

This database of Americans who are perceived to be potential “enemies of the state” goes by the code name “Main Core.” And according to the report, “One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

“Officials at the Department of Homeland Security begin actively scrutinizing people who–for a tremendously broad set of reasons–have been flagged in Main Core as potential domestic threats [sound familiar?]. Some of these individuals might receive a letter or a phone call, others a request to register with local authorities. Still others might hear a knock on the door and find police or armed soldiers outside. In some instances, the authorities might just ask a few questions. Other suspects might be arrested and escorted to federal holding facilities, where they could be detained without counsel until the state of emergency is no longer in effect.”

The report also noted that former Assistant Attorney General James Comey “had concluded that the use of that ‘Main Core’ database compromised the legality of the overall NSA domestic surveillance project. ‘If Main Core does exist,’ says Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counterterrorism officer and an outspoken critic of the agency, ‘the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is its likely home. If a master list is being compiled, it would have to be in a place where there are no legal issues–the CIA and FBI would be restricted by oversight and accountability laws–so I suspect it is at DHS, which as far as I know operates with no such restraints.’ Giraldi notes that DHS already maintains a central list of suspected terrorists and has been freely adding people who pose no reasonable threat to domestic security.”

So, is there a secret list of 8 million “unfriendly” Americans kept by DHS (if there is, dear reader, you are probably on it!)? Does anyone reading this column doubt that our federal government is more than willing and capable of doing such a thing? All of us are quite familiar with the government’s “no fly” or “flagged” airline passenger list. I can personally attest to the authenticity of this list, as airport officials in San Antonio, Texas, told me that I’m on it. I also made it to the “list of three” that were named in the MIAC report (the other two were Ron Paul and Bob Barr). And now I am on the SPLC list of “patriots” (not a compliment in the SPLC lexicon). Wow! I never realize how popular I was! (With the exception of Ron Paul, I’m probably on more lists than anyone in America.)

Who would ever have thought that the day would come in America when to speak up for freedom, constitutional government, and the principles expressed by our Founding Fathers would land one on a government watch list? Well, that day is here, my friend! No doubt, the major media and federal government–in order to further ostracize patriotic, God-fearing Americans–will use the SPLC patriot hit list as a vehicle to carry our country further down the road of oppression.

But what the radical left fearmongers at the Southern Poverty Law Center fail to realize is that the more they try to marginalize and ostracize American patriots such as you and me, the more they isolate themselves from America’s future, because millions and millions of hard-working, God-fearing, liberty-loving Americans are not going to sit back and let Morris Dees and his cabal of Big Government elitists destroy the principles of freedom in our land.

So, people such as Morris Dees can put us on as many lists as they like; we will never let liberty die! And the more they try to demonize us, the more people will want to join with us. You see, freedom burns deep and strong in the hearts of real Americans. And that’s something the SPLC can’t extinguish–no matter how many lists it makes!

Al Qaeda’s Top Gun

An examination of the documentary record reveals a clear pattern of willful deception on the part of the 9/11 Commission with regard to alleged hijacker Hani Hanjour in an apparent effort to manipulate the facts to suit the official theory.

Hani Hanjour is the hijacker who flew Ameri can Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon on the morning of September 11, 2001, according to the official account of terrorist attacks. “The lengthy and extensive flight training obtained by Hani Hanjour throughout his years in the United States makes it reasonable to believe that he was the pilot of Flight 77 on September 11″, concluded FBI Director Robert S. Mueller.[1] The story is that while Hanjour had difficulties learning to fly at first, he persevered, overcame his obstacles, and became an extraordinary enough pilot to be able to precisely hit his target after performing a difficult flight maneuver.

The New York Times, for instance, asserted that “Mr. Hanjour overcame the mediocrity of his talents as a pilot and gained enough expertise to fly a Boeing 757 into the Pentagon.”[2] The Washington Post similarly suggested Hanjour had the requisite skills, reporting that “Federal records show that a Hani Hanjoor obtained a commercial pilot’s license in April 1999 with a rating to fly commercial jets.”[3]

The 9/11 Commission expanded upon this narrative in its final report. It noted that Hanjour first came to the United States in 1991 to study English, then again in 1996 “to pursue flight training, after being rejected by a Saudi flight school. He checked out flight schools in Florida, California, and Arizona; and he briefly started at a couple of them before returning to Saudi Arabia.” In 1997, after returning to Arizona, he “began his flight training there in earnest. After about three months, Hanjour was able to obtain his private pilot’s license. Several more months of training yielded him a commercial pilot certificate, issued by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in April 1999.”[4]

Subsequently, “Hanjour reportedly applied to the civil aviation school in Jeddah after returning home, but was rejected.” By the end of 2000, Hanjour was back in the U.S. and “began refresher training at his old school, Arizona Aviation. He wanted to train on multi-engine planes, but had difficulties because his English was not good enough. The instructor advised him to discontinue but Hanjour said he could not go home without completing the training. In early 2001, he started training on a Boeing 737 simulator at Pan Am International Flight Academy in Mesa. An instructor there found his work well below standard and discouraged him from continuing. Again, Hanjour persevered; he completed the initial training by the end of March 2001.”[5] A footnote in the report asserts that Hanjour was chosen specifically for targeting the Pentagon because he was “the operation’s most experienced pilot.”[6]

John Ashcroft told reporters early in the investigation, “It is our belief and the evidence indicates that flight training was received in the United States and that their capacity to operate the aircraft was substantial. It’s very clear that these orchestrated coordinated assaults on our country were well-conducted and conducted in a technically proficient way. It is not that easy to land these kinds of aircraft at very specific locations with accuracy or to direct them with the kind of accuracy, which was deadly in this case.”[7]

A pilot with a major carrier for over 30 years told CNN that “the hijackers must have been extremely knowledgeable and capable aviators”.[8] An air traffic controller from Dulles International Airport told ABC News, “The speed, the maneuverability, the way that he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane. You don’t fly a 757 in that manner. It’s unsafe.”[9]

CBS News suggested that according to its sources, Flight 77, “flying at more than 400 mph, was too fast and too high when it neared the Pentagon at 9:35. The hijacker-pilots were then forced to execute a difficult high-speed descending turn. Radar shows Flight 77 did a downward spiral, turning almost a complete circle and dropping the last 7,000 feet in two-and-a-half minutes. The steep turn was so smooth, the sources say, it’s clear there was no fight for control going on. And the complex maneuver suggests the hijackers had better flying skills than many investigators first believed. The jetliner disappeared from radar at 9:37 and less than a minute later it clipped the tops of street lights and plowed into the Pentagon at 460 mph.”[10]

The Washington Post similarly noted that the plane “was flown with extraordinary skill, making it highly likely that a trained pilot was at the helm”. Hanjour was so skilled, in fact, that “just as the plane seemed to be on a suicide mission into the White House, the unidentified pilot” – later identified as Hanjour – “executed a pivot so tight it reminded observers of a fighter jet maneuver.”[11] The Post reported in another article that “After the attacks … aviation experts concluded that the final maneuvers of American Airlines Flight 77 – a tight turn followed by a steep, accurate descent into the Pentagon – was the work of ‘a great talent … virtually a textbook turn and landing,’”.[12]

According to the report of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) cited by the 9/11 Commission, information from the flight data recorder recovered from the Pentagon crash site and radar data from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) show that the autopilot was disengaged “as the aircraft leveled near 7000 feet. Slight course changes were initiated, during which variations in altitude between 6800 and 8000 feet were noted. At 9:34 AM, the aircraft was positioned about 3.5 miles west-southwest of the Pentagon, and started a right 330-degree descending turn to the right. At the end of the turn, the aircraft was at about 2000 feet altitude and 4 miles southwest of the Pentagon. Over the next 30 seconds, power was increased to near maximum and the nose was pitched down in response to control column movements. The airplane accelerated to approximately 460 knots (530 miles per hour) at impact with the Pentagon. The time of impact was 9:37:45 AM.”[13]

The NTSB created a computer simulation of the flight from the flight data recorder information showing that the plane was actually at more than 8,100 feet and doing about 330 mph when it began its banking turn at 9:34 am.[14] At that point, the alleged pilot Hanjour could have simply decreased thrust, nosed down, and guided the plane into what would have been 29 acres, or 1,263,240 square feet of target area – the equivalent of about 22 football fields.[15] From this angle, proverbially speaking, it would have been like trying to hit the side of a barn. Hanjour could have guided the plane into the enormous roof of the building, including the side of the building where the office of the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was located, and where he happened to be that morning.[16]

Instead, the plane began a steep banking descent, circling downward in a 330-degree turn while dropping more than 5,600 feet in three minutes before re-aligning with the Pentagon and increasing to maximum thrust towards the building. The nose was kept down despite the increased lift from the acceleration, while flying so close to the ground that it clipped lamp posts along the interstate highway before plowing into the building at more than 530 mph, precisely hitting a target only 71 feet high, or just 26.5 feet taller than the Boeing 757 itself.[17]

In other words, by performing this maneuver, Hanjour reduced his vertical target area from a size comparable to the height of the Empire State Building to an area just 5 stories high. Instead of descending at an angle and plowing through the roof and floors of the building to cause the greatest possible number of casualties, including possibly taking out the Secretary of Defense, Hanjour hit wedge 1 of the Pentagon, opposite to Rumsfeld’s office, which happened to be under construction, and where the plane, travelling horizontally, had to penetrate through the steel- and kevlar-reinforced outer wall of the building’s southwest E-ring in addition to the numerous additional walls of the inner rings of the building.[18]

But even more problematic than the question of why Hanjour would perform this maneuver is the question of how he performed it. Perhaps the most incredible thing about this, the official account of what happened to Flight 77, is that Hani Hanjour was in reality such a horrible pilot that he had trouble handling a light single-engine aircraft and even just one month before the attacks was rejected at two different schools because he was judged too incompetent to rent a plane and fly solo.

As the Los Angeles Times ironically put it, “For someone suspected of steering a jetliner into the Pentagon, the 29-year-old man who used the name Hani Hanjour sure convinced a lot of people he barely knew how to fly.”[19]

The Legend Unraveled

According to an FBI chronology for Hani Hanjour cited by the 9/11 Commission, Hanjour first travelled to the U.S. in 1991 on a visa issued in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia under the name “Hani Saleh Hanjoor”, in order to attend the University of Arizona’s Center for English as a Second Language. After returning to Saudi Arabia, he was again issued a visa at Jeddah in March, 1996. Back in the U.S., he attended classes at the ELS Language Center in Oakland, California from May until August. For a week in September, he took ground training lessons at the Sierra Aeronautical Academy Airline Training Center (SAAATC). From the end of September until mid-October, he purchased flight instruction from Cockpit Resources Management (CRM) in Scottsdale, Arizona. He then returned to Saudi Arabia once more.[20] The Washington Post reported that according to Hanjour’s brother, Yasser, “Hanjour applied for a job at the state-owned Saudi Arabian Airlines but was told that he lacked sufficient grades…. He said the company told him it would reconsider his application only if he acquired a commercial pilot’s license in the United States.”[21] Yasser characterized Hanjour “as a frustrated young Saudi who wanted desperately – but never succeeded – to become a pilot for the Saudi national airline.”[22]

Hanjour made plans to return to the U.S. and was issued a third visa in Jeddah in November 1997. His visa application contained red flags that should have resulted in his visa being denied. He failed to write in the name and address of the school he would be attending and provided no proof, as required by law, that he could furnish financial support for himself.[23] With that application accepted, he reentered the U.S. and took pilot training from CRM again in December.[24]

It was at this time that, according the 9/11 Commission, Hanjour began his training “in earnest”. But in reality, while at CRM, Hanjour never finished coursework required to get his certificate to be able to fly a single-engine aircraft.[25] The New York Times reported that “he was a lackadaisical student who often cut class and never displayed the passion so common among budding commercial airline pilots”.[26] ABC News reported that when he returned to CRM that December, “He was trying for his private pilot’s license”, but according to one of his instructor’s, he “was a very poor student who skipped homework and missed flights.”[27] The school’s attorney said that when Hanjour reapplied again later in 2000, “We declined to provide training to him because we didn’t think he was a good enough student when he was there in 1996 and 1997.”[28] The school’s owner described him as a “weak student” who “was wasting our resources”.[29] He said “One of the first accomplishments of someone in flight school is to fly a plane without an instructor. It is a confidence-building procedure. He managed to do that. That is like being able to pull a car out and drive down the street. It is not driving on the freeway.” Although it normally took three months for students to earn their private pilot’s certificate, Hanjour “did not accomplish that at my school.” He added that “We didn’t want him back at our school because he was not serious about becoming a good pilot.”[30] The Chicago Tribune reported that at CRM, “A flight instructor said Hanjour left an impression by being unimpressive. ‘He was making weak progress,’ said Duncan Hastie, president of CRM.”[31]

Hanjour switched schools, and from the end of December 1997 until April 1999, took flight lessons from Arizona Aviation in Mesa, Arizona.[32] There, too, the 9/11 Commission’s own evidence contradicts the characterization that Hanjour was training “in earnest”. An FBI document cited by the Commission stated that “Hanjour often participated in flying lessons for a one to two weeks [sic] and then would disappear for weeks or months at a time.” The school “often had to call Hanjour in an effort to get Hanjour to pay his bill.”[33]

Buried in the footnote for the paragraph suggesting Hanjour began training “in earnest”, the 9/11 Commission report acknowledged that “Hanjour initially was nervous if not fearful in flight training” and that “His instructor described him as a terrible pilot.”[34] FBI documents cited by the Commission reveal that witnesses from the school told investigators that “Hanjour was a terrible pilot. Hanjour had difficulty understanding air traffic control, the methods for determining fuel management and had poor navigational skills.” The FBI was told by one witness that “the only flying skill Hanjour could perform was flying the plane straight”, and that “he did not believe Hanjour’s poor flying skills were due to a language barrier.” He was “a very poor pilot who did not react to criticism very well. Hanjour was very, very nervous inside the cockpit to the point where Hanjour was almost fearful.”[35]

In April 1998, Hanjour applied for his private pilot certificate with a single-engine rating, but he failed his test. One of the tasks documents show he would need to be reexamined for was “coordinated turns to headings” [36] He tried again later that same month and this time received his private pilot certificate under the name “Hani Saleh Hanjoor”, with an “Airplane Single Engine Land” rating.

In an apparent attempt to bolster the misleading characterization that Hanjour began training “in earnest”, the 9/11 also stated that it took only “Several more months” to obtain his commercial pilot certificate. In fact, it took Hanjour another year of training before he managed to obtain that second certificate. On April 15, 1999, the FAA issued a commercial pilot certificate to him under the name “Hani Saleh Hanjoor”.[37] The certificate was issued by Daryl M. Strong, an independent contractor for the FAA, with an “Airplane Multiengine Land” rating. To obtain the certificate, Hanjour’s records show he flew his check ride in a Piper PA 23-150 “Apache”, a four-seat twin-engine plane, which Hanjour was in command of for 14.8 hours of the 27 hours completed for the test.[38]

Contrary to the Washington Post’s assertion that this certificate allowed him “to fly commercial jets”, in fact it only allowed him to begin passenger jet training. Hanjour did so, only to fail the class.[39] As the Associated Press reported, the “certification allowed him to begin passenger jet training at an Arizona flight school despite having what instructors later described as limited flying skills and an even more limited command of English.”[40]

Furthermore, there remains an open question about whether Hanjour was actually qualified to receive that certificate in the first place. According to Heather Awsumb, a spokeswoman for Professional Airways Systems Specialists (PASS), a union that represents FAA employees, “The real problem is that regular oversight is handed over to private industry”, since private contractors “receive between $200 and $300 for each check flight. If they get a reputation for being tough, they won’t get any business.”[41]

To obtain a commercial pilot license, the applicant must “Be able to read, speak, write, and understand the English language.” It seems highly dubious that Hanjour met that qualification, as the 9/11 Commission itself acknowledges that his English skills were inadequate. The certificate does not allow its holder to fly any commercial aircraft, but is issued for “the aircraft category and class rating sought”. Hanjour only trained in light propeller planes like the single-engine Cessna and twin-engine Piper, and had never flown a jet aircraft.[42]

Additionally, commercial pilot certification is different from the Airline Transport Pilot certification held by airline captains. To obtain a commercial certificate with a multi-engine rating, Hanjour only needed to log in 250 hours of flight time, whereas to obtain an Airline Transport Pilot certificate, pilots are required to log 1,500 hours.[43] Needless to say, having the ability to control a Cessna 172 or Piper Apache propeller plane does not translate into the ability to handle a Boeing 757 jetliner – and Hanjour could barely do the former.

Anyone unfamiliar with pilot certification could easily make the mistake of thinking a “commercial pilot license” meant Hanjour was qualified to fly a jet airliner, a conclusion reinforced by the Washington Post’s false assertion that his certificate allowed him “to fly commercial jets”. The 9/11 Commission report reinforced that false impression, only vaguely hinting at the truth six paragraphs later by saying that Hanjour subsequently “wanted to train on multi-engine planes”. But the Commission then further obfuscated that truth by asserting that this was merely “refresher” training (a matter to which we will return).

Hanjour again left the country on April 28, 1999. [44] As the 9/11 Commission report observed, when he returned to Saudi Arabia to apply in the civil aviation school in Jeddah, he was rejected.[45] He subsequently began making preparations to return to the U.S. once again.[46] In September 2000, Hanjour was denied a student visa after indicating that he wanted to remain in the U.S. for three years, and yet listed no address for where he intended to stay in Arizona.[47] But he tried again for a student visa under the name “Hani Hanjour” later that same month. This time, he wrote that he wanted to stay for one year instead of three, and listed a specific address in California, not Arizona, where he said he was going on his first application. Despite these obvious red flags, he was issued the visa. [48]

He entered the U.S. in December and took more flight lessons that month at Arizona Aviation. From February until mid-March, he attended Pan Am International Flight Academy, also known as Jet Tech International, in Mesa, Arizona.[49]

It was upon his return to Arizona Aviation in 2000 that the 9/11 Commission stated he wanted “refresher” training on multi-engine planes but was advised to discontinue “because his English was not good enough.” The implications are that Hanjour was merely brushing up on skills he had already achieved through previous flight training, and that the only reason he was advised not to continue was because of his poor language skills. But turning to the report’s footnote, it reads: “For his desire to train on multi-engine planes, his language difficulties, the instructor’s advice, and his reaction, see FBI report of investigation, interview of Rodney McAlear, Apr. 10, 2002.”[50] That document reveals that McAlear worked not for Arizona Aviation, but rather “instructed Hani Hanjour in ground school flight training at Jet Tech in the early 2001.”[51] The 9/11 Commission, by misleadingly suggesting that this occurred at Arizona Aviation, apparently intended to bolster the claim that this was “refresher” training by making it sound as though this occurred at Hanjour’s old school, when the truth is that it occurred when he was at a different school he’d never been to before.

The 9/11 Commission was also deceiving the public suggesting that the sole reason Hanjour was not able to complete his training on multi-engine planes was because his English wasn’t good enough. As already noted, an instructor at Arizona Aviation thought his earlier failings there were due primarily to his poor flight skills, and not because of his language inadequacies. More importantly, again, this training actually occurred at Jet Tech. Turning to the documentary record, an article in the New York Times entitled “A Trainee Noted for Incompetence” noted, his instructors there “found his piloting skills so shoddy and his grasp of English so inadequate that they questioned whether his pilot’s license was genuine”. As a result, they actually reported him to the FAA and requested confirmation that his certificate was legitimate. The staff there “feared that his skills were so weak that he could pose a safety hazard if he flew a commercial airliner.” Marilyn Ladner, a vice president at the academy, told the Times, “There was no suspicion as far as evildoing. It was more of a very typical instructional concern that ‘you really shouldn’t be in the air.’” [52]

As already discussed, it remains an open question whether Hanjour was actually qualified to hold his commercial pilot certificate. It was at this time, as the Associated Press reported, that “Federal aviation authorities were alerted in early 2001 that an Arizona flight school believed one of the eventual Sept. 11 hijackers lacked the English and flying skills necessary for the commercial pilot’s license he already held, flight school and government officials say.”[53] The manager of JetTech said, “I couldn’t believe he had a commercial license of any kind with the skills that he had.”[54]

Whereas the 9/11 Commission suggested that, because he “persevered”, Hanjour “completed the initial training”, thus leading the public to the conclusion that his skills had advanced accordingly, the Times offered a very different account:  ”Ultimately administrators at the school told Mr. Hanjour that he would not qualify for the advanced certificate. But the ex-employee said Mr. Hanjour continued to pay to train on a simulator for Boeing 737 jets. ‘He didn’t care about the fact that he couldn’t get through the course,’ the ex-employee said. Staff members characterized Mr. Hanjour as polite, meek and very quiet. But most of all, the former employee said, they considered him a very bad pilot. ‘I’m still to this day amazed that he could have flown into the Pentagon,’ the former employee said. ‘He could not fly at all.’”[55]

Another Times article similarly noted that when Hanjour enrolled in February 2001 “at a Phoenix flight school for advanced simulator training to learn how to fly an airliner, a far more complicated task than he had faced in earning a commercial license”, his “instructors thought he was so bad a pilot and spoke such poor English that they contacted the Federal Aviation Administration to verify that his license was not a fake”.[56]

According to FAA inspector Michael Gonzales, when Pan Am International Flight Academy contacted the FAA to verify that Hanjour’s license was valid, “There should have been a stop right then and there.” The Associated Press reported that Gonzales “said Hanjour should have been re-examined as a commercial pilot, as required by federal law.”[57] But that was not done. Instead, the FAA inspector who “even sat next to the hijacker, Hani Hanjour, in one of the Arizona classes” and “checked records to ensure Hanjour’s 1999 pilot’s license was legitimate” concluded that “no other action was warranted” and actually suggested that Hanjour get a translator to help him complete his class. “He offered a translator,” said the school’s manager, who “was surprised” by the suggestion. “Of course, I brought up the fact that went against the rules that require a pilot to be able to write and speak English fluently before they even get their license.”[58]

As with the fact that multiple visa applications from Hanjour should have been denied, the 9/11 Commission made no mention of any of this. One would think that a commission tasked with investigating the events of 9/11 with the goal of assessing what went wrong and fixing the system to prevent any loss of life in the future would have looked into who issued Hanjour visas in Jeddah and why the red flags were ignored. One would think that misconduct from FAA officials and contractors that allowed a terrorist to improperly obtain certification to fly a plane would also not be outside of the purview of the investigation – yet the Commission’s report is absolutely silent on this.

Turning to the footnote for the claim that Hanjour “completed” training at Jet Tech, one can read (emphasis added): “For his training at Pan Am International Flight Academy and completion by March 2001, see FBI report ‘Hijackers Timeline,’ Dec. 5, 2003 (Feb. 8, 2001, entries…)”. But turning to that source, the FBI timeline does not state that Hanjour “completed” the training, only that he “ended” the course on March 16.[59] The truth is that, as the Washington Post reported, “Hanjour flunked out after a month” at Jet Tech.[60] Offering corroboration for that account, the Associated Press similarly reported that “Hanjour did not finish his studies at JetTech and left the school.”[61]

The 9/11 Commission additionally noted that Hanjour had later gone to Air Fleet Training Systems in New Jersey and “requested to fly the Hudson Corridor” along the Hudson River, which passed the World Trade Center. He was permitted to fly the route once, “but his instructor declined a second request because of what he considered Hanjour’s poor piloting skills”, the Commission admits. However, the report continues, “Shortly thereafter, Hanjour switched to Caldwell Flight Academy in Fairfield, New Jersey, where he rented small aircraft on several occasions during June and July. In one such instance on July 20, Hanjour – likely accompanied by Hazmi – rented a plane from Caldwell and took a practice flight from Fairfield to Gaithersburg, Maryland, a route that would have allowed them to fly near Washington, D.C. Other evidence suggests Hanjour may even have returned to Arizona for flight simulator training earlier in June.”[62]

But here, the pattern of deception continues by omission of other relevant facts. The report does not explain that when Hanjour was permitted to fly the Hudson Corridor in May of 2001, unlike his subsequent rental flights, it was with an instructor on a check ride, and not a solo flight.[63] By saying his instructor there “considered” Hanjour’s skills to be poor, the 9/11 Commission implied this was merely a subjective judgment, but that others considered him perfectly capable. Although it would have been a standard practice, there’s no indication from FBI records that Caldwell actually required him to go on a check ride before renting the plane. Even more significantly, the 9/11 Commission omitted altogether the fact that, while Hanjour was allowed to rent from Caldwell Flight Academy, he was rejected yet again by yet another school shortly thereafter that the record shows did require a check ride.

In August 2001, less than one month before 9/11, Hanjour took flight lessons at Freeway Airport in Bowie, Maryland.[64] As the New York Times observed, Hanjour “still seemed to lack proficiency at flying”. When he showed up “asking to rent a single-engine plane”, he attempted three flights with two different instructors, and yet “was unable to prove that he had the necessary skills” to be allowed to rent the plane. “He seemed rusty at everything,” said Marcel Bernard, the chief flight instructor at the school.[65] The Washington Post similarly reported that to “the flight instructors at Freeway Airport in Bowie”, Hanjour “was just a bad pilot.” And “after supervising Hanjour on a series of oblong circles above the airport and Chesapeake Bay, the instructors refused to pass him because his skills were so poor, Bernard said. ‘I feel darn lucky it went the way it did,’ Bernard said, crediting his instructors for their good judgment and high standards.”[66] The London Telegraph also reported that Hanjour claimed to have 600 hours of flight time, “but performed so poorly on test flights that instructors would not let him fly alone.”[67] Newsday reported that when flight instructors Sheri Baxter and Ben Conner took Hanjour on three check rides, “they found he had trouble controlling and landing the single-engine Cessna 172.”[68] The Los Angeles Times reported, “‘We have a level of standards that we hold all our pilots to, and he couldn’t meet it,” said the manager of the flight school. Hanjour could not handle basic air maneuvers, the manager said.”[69]

The deception does not end with this rather egregious omission. As noted, the 9/11 Commission also suggested that Hanjour obtained further training in a flight simulator, again, in an apparent attempt to exaggerate his training. But a review of the records shows that the preponderance of evidence indicates Hanjour was actually in New Jersey throughout the time period in question in June. FBI records show that on May 31, 2001, after having been rejected at Air Fleet Training Systems, Hanjour rented a Cessna 172 at Caldwell Flight Academy, where he “made an error taxing [sic] the airplane upon his return.” On June 6, he rented a single-engine aircraft. The FBI placed him in Paterson, New Jersey, on June 10. Then he rented a plane again on June 11, 18, and 19. The FBI has Hanjour (along with Nawaf Al-Hazmi) obtaining a mailbox at Mailboxes, Etc. in Fort Lee, New Jersey, on June 26, and opening a bank account and making an ATM withdrawal in New Jersey on June 27.[70]

Somewhere in there, the 9/11 Commission would have the public believe that “evidence suggests” Hanjour again trained on a simulator in Arizona. To begin with, the simulator at the Sawyer School of Aviation in Phoenix was for small aircraft and was nothing like the cockpit of a Boeing 757 – another fact omitted by the Commission.[71] But this perhaps becomes a moot point when one realizes that the evidence shows Hanjour never left New Jersey. Turning to the footnote for this claim, the Commission stated that documents from Sawyer “show Hanjour joining the flight simulator club on June 23, 2001″. But, the footnote acknowledges, “the documents are inconclusive, as there are no invoices or payment records for Hanjour, while such documents do exist for the other three” who joined the club at that time. The actual evidence thus demonstrates clearly that while Hanjour may have signed up (something which may have been possible over the phone or via the internet), he did not actually attend. The footnote further acknowledges that “Documentary evidence for Hanjour, however, shows that he was in New Jersey for most of June, and no travel records have been recovered showing that he returned to Arizona after leaving with Hazmi in March.”[72]

The second piece of “evidence” that “suggests” Hanjour took further flight simulator training is a Sawyer employee who “identified Hanjour as being there during that time period, though she was less than 100 percent sure.” The FBI document cited in the footnote for that claim was obtained by Intelwire.com, but it is almost entirely redacted, so it’s impossible to verify the actual nature of this eyewitness testimony.[73] But another document cited further into the same footnote also refers to the eyewitness from Sawyer, who described the four men who had joined the club. The first “UNSUB” (unidentified subject) was “short and stocky”. The second was 5’9″-5’10″, 170 pounds, and “medium build”. The third was 5’8″, 170 pounds, and “medium build”. And the fourth was 5’6″-5’7″ with a beard and mustache. Other eyewitness descriptions for Hanjour offered in the same FBI document have him as being no more than 5’6″ (one witness from Arizona Aviation, the document notes, “confirmed that he was only about 5’0″ tall”), 140-150 pounds, and very slight and thin, with short, curly hair. This clearly rules out the first three subjects, leaving only the detail-lacking fourth description as being the only one possibly matching Hanjour’s description. But the details given are far too vague to suggest a positive identification, particularly given the witness’s own admission that she wasn’t sure if it was Hanjour.[74]

Even more significantly, that same FBI document reveals that it was not during the FBI’s initial interview with the witness that she identified that fourth “unsub” as Hanjour, as the 9/11 Commission report implies by citing the report from the FBI’s initial interview for that claim in the footnote. Rather, it was later, during a second interview that occurred after the names and images of the hijackers had been shown repeatedly in the media that she picked Hanjour’s out of a photo lineup. The FBI summary of that later interview states that according to the witness, Hanjour “has the same general characteristics and is very similar appearing as the person she saw at Sawyer…. However, she could not be 100% sure.”[75]

The third and final piece of “evidence” is another witness who identified Hanjour as being “in the Phoenix area during the summer of 2001″, citing the FBI document just discussed, which is redacted enough that this claim cannot be readily verified. But the document does show additionally that Hanjour’s membership was good only from June 23 until August 8, at which time it expired.[76]

Thus, the 9/11 Commission would have the public believe that sometime after June 19, Hanjour went from the east coast to Arizona without leaving any paper trail (i.e. airline or car rental records, ATM withdrawals, etc.), signed up for a two-week flight simulator club on June 23 without leaving any record he ever actually paid or even showed up (whereas records did exist for other members), only to change his mind and return again to be back in New Jersey with Nawaf Al-Hazmi three days later. In other words, what the evidence actually suggests is that the eyewitness testimony is unreliable and that, contrary to the Commission’s assertion, Hanjour never left New Jersey during that time.

There is a clear pattern of misleading and untruthful statements in the 9/11 Commission’s final report that cannot be dismissed as mere error. Rather, the evidence is incontrovertible that the Commission willfully and deliberately sought to present a falsified story of the alleged hijacker Hani Hanjour; not to relate the facts to the public, but rather to cement a legend in the public mind; not to investigate and draw conclusions based on the facts, but to start with a conclusion – the official account of 9/11 – and manipulate the facts to suit the government’s own conspiracy theory.

The Fiction Perpetuated

The mainstream media has dealt with the problematic nature of the official story in a number of ways. As already seen, one method has simply been to exaggerate characterizations of Hanjour’s competence. The official story as related by the New York Times that Hanjour “overcame the mediocrity of his talents” is not merely unsupportable by the evidence, but stands in stark contrast to the available known facts. The legend is also maintained by the mainstream media through false claims, such as the Washington Post’s assertion that Hanjour’s pilot certificate allowed him to fly commercial jets. While the Los Angeles Times suggested Hanjour “convinced a lot of people he barely knew how to fly”, the underlying assumption of the article was that, despite his apparent ineptitude in the cockpit, he really did know how to fly. The public is apparently supposed to believe that he was merely pretending to be an incompetent pilot even though he was actually quite skillful. The mainstream media have a tendency to mock and ridicule anyone who dares even to just question the official narrative, all the while putting forth such utter absurdities as this.

As the evidence surfaced that Hanjour was not the pilot extraordinaire the public was initially told he must have been in order to carry out the attack on the Pentagon, another narrative began to emerge. While most of the mainstream media simply ignored the evidence, or, as in the case of the New York Times, drew conclusions that were contradicted by some of their own reporting. In no small part due to the 9/11 Commission report’s findings, the fiction remained firmly embedded in the minds of the public that Hanjour, through determination and perseverance, overcame all obstacles in order to acquire the skills necessary to pilot Flight 77 into the Pentagon.

There was, however, at least some acknowledgment of the major hole in that theory. A few media reports did acknowledge that Hanjour was a horrible pilot and that all evidence demonstrated that he never “overcame his mediocrity”. But rather than calling the official theory into question in doing so, these accounts simply offered a revisionist account in order to maintain the legend.

Gone was the story that the hijackers’ “capacity to operate the aircraft was substantial”, that the attacks were “conducted in a technically proficient way”, that “It is not that easy to land these kinds of aircraft at very specific locations with accuracy or to direct them with the kind of accuracy, which was deadly in this case”. No more was the expert opinion that “the hijackers must have been extremely knowledgeable and capable aviators”, that Flight 77’s final maneuver was “a difficult high-speed descending turn”. Vanished was the view that Flight 77 “was flown with extraordinary skill”, even so that it “reminded observers of a fighter jet maneuver”, that this was evidence of “a great talent” in the cockpit.

In the place of that conventional wisdom, the new narrative that began to emerge in some accounts was that it really wasn’t that difficult a maneuver after all, and even a novice pilot like Hani Hanjour – or anyone who’s ever flown a small aircraft and perhaps spent some time playing a flight simulator game, for that matter – could have, with just a bit of luck, pulled it off.

The New American presented this new narrative by quoting Ronald D. Bull, a retired United Airlines pilot, as saying, “It’s not that difficult, and certainly not impossible.” But Bull was apparently not speaking specifically with regard to the Pentagon, as he then added, “If you’re doing a suicide run, like these guys were doing, you’d just keep the nose down and push like the devil.” In this case, Bull seems to have had the attacks on the World Trade Center, and not the Pentagon, in mind. Moreover, even if Bull also had the Pentagon in mind, he was obviously only considering a situation where the pilot was flying in a straight line towards his target. Thus, if he was also speaking with regard to the Pentagon, he was quite apparently uninformed as to the actual flight path the plane took.

Similarly quoted was George Williams, a pilot for Northwest Airlines for 38 years, who said, “I don’t see any merit to those arguments [that Hanjour couldn’t have flown Flight 77 into the Pentagon]. The Pentagon is a pretty big target and I’d say hitting it was a fairly easy thing to do.” [77] It’s true that the Pentagon was a very big target. But Williams was apparently similarly aware, when he was asked to comment, of the plane’s final descending maneuver; or of the fact that this maneuver put the plane on a path that reduced the margin to a mere 26.5 feet (a few feet lower, the plane crashes into the ground; a few feet higher, the plane overshoots the target); or that the plane wasn’t flying at a constant airspeed, but was rather accelerating rapidly, thus creating more lift that needed compensating for with subtle precision in order to stay within that margin for error; or that the plane wasn’t just ambling along at something near landing speed, but was screaming along at an incredible 530 mph. To put that into perspective, cruising speed for airliners is about 600 mph at 30,000 feet of altitude, where the air is less dense. At sea-level that would be equivalent to about 300 mph hour, about double safe landing speed. A velocity of 530 mph at sea-level would be supersonic speed if it were possible to maintain at cruising altitude.[78]

In both cases, the expert pilots seem to assume that Hanjour simply lined up the hijacked plane and flew a straight line into the building at a speed at which an aircraft could more easily be controlled by an inexperienced pilot. Needless to say, neither pilot’s statements accurately reflect the actual situation with regard to Flight 77. There is no indication that the New American bothered to fill either Bull or Williams in on the specifics of what Flight 77 actually did when it sought them out to “debunk” the assertion that Hanjour wasn’t a capable enough pilot to have pulled it off.

Offering a similar revisionist account, airline pilot Patrick Smith, writing for Salon, said that it was one of “the more commonly heard myths that pertain to the airplanes and their pilots” that “the terrorist pilots lacked the skill and training to fly jetliners into their targets. This is an extremely popular topic with respect to American 77. Skyjacker Hani Hanjour, a notoriously untalented flier who never piloted anything larger than a four-seater, seemed to pull off a remarkable series of aerobatic maneuvers before slamming into the Pentagon.” Smith’s answer to this was simply to flip conventional wisdom on its head. He opined that “If anything, his loops and turns and spirals above the nation’s capital revealed him to be exactly the shitty pilot he by all accounts was. To hit the Pentagon squarely he needed only a bit of luck, and he got it, possibly with the help from the 757’s autopilot. Striking a stationary object – even a large one like the Pentagon – at high speed and from a steep angle is very difficult. To make the job easier, he came in obliquely, tearing down light poles as he roared across the Pentagon’s lawn.” Hanjour had all the skill that was required, Smith suggested, adding “You can learn it at home.”[79]

So, according to this narrative, Hanjour’s “textbook” “fighter jet maneuver” in a Boeing 757 is evidence that he was a “shitty pilot” and any pilot wannabe with some rudimentary training and maybe just a little bit of luck could have done it. It was easier to hit a target merely 5 stories high at a nearly horizontal angle (“obliquely” as Smith misleadingly claims), than to simply point the nose down to hit a target the size of 22 football fields. These remarks are perhaps not so much the result of an attempt to challenge conventional wisdom as they were simply demonstrative that Smith made very little effort to actually understand the actual nature of Flight 77’s final flight path before writing that it is a “myth” that Hanjour was not a pilot capable of having performed that maneuver. His characterization of Hanjour’s final maneuver as “loops and turns and spirals” indicates that Smith was generalizing without having any real concept of what Flight 77 actually did in its final minutes. A further indication that Smith really just didn’t know what he was talking about was his suggestion that Hanjour “possibly” had “help from the 757’s autopilot” in pulling off those final maneuvers, which is both patently ridiculous and demonstrably false.

The German magazine Der Spiegel also made the rare attempt to actually address this issue, but found it sufficient enough merely to opine that “This is not difficult to accomplish” and similarly suggesting practically anyone could do it since it was “a maneuver that can be practiced with any flight simulator software.”[80] End of discussion.

The public was originally told that attack on the Pentagon obviously required a fairly high level of sophistication in the cockpit. It was conventional wisdom that being able to maneuver a large jetliner required a certain level of training, a certain level of skill. The public was then told that Hanjour was the pilot among the 19 hijackers who had the most training and the greatest piloting skill. As the facts emerged and it became evident that Hanjour did not have the requisite level of skill, the government chose to manipulate the evidence in order to maintain its theory. The 9/11 Commission served to cement the legend of Hani Hanjour into history, and the mainstream media, for the most part, accepted and maintained that legend even when much of their own reporting revealed facts that contradicted it. In a few cases, there was acknowledgment that Hanjour was a “shitty” pilot after all, but in such cases the official account was still maintained by throwing common sense out the window and reversing the original consensus that it must have taken a skilled pilot to have performed that final, fatal maneuver.

Perhaps this revisionist retelling of the official story is the correct one. Perhaps the conventional wisdom that it would actually take a skilled pilot to competently control a large jetliner is really wrong. Perhaps it’s true that any second-rate pilot who has trouble controlling even a Cessna-172 could get into the cockpit of a Boeing 757 and do what Hani Hanjour is said to have done. Or, on the other hand, perhaps the revisionist account is just as much nonsense as the story that Hanjour “persevered” and “overcame his mediocrity”.

Whichever the case, many questions about the events of 9/11 remain to this day unanswered, despite the appointment of the 9/11 Commission ostensibly to investigate and provide answers to those questions. And whichever the case, the conclusion is inescapable that the 9/11 Commission deliberately attempted to deceive the public about the piloting capabilities of Hani Hanjour.

Why?

---

[1] Statement for the Record FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry, September 26, 2002 <http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2002_hr/092602mueller.html>.

[2] Jim Yardley and Jo Thomas, “For Agent in Phoenix, the Cause of Many Frustrations Extended to His Own Office”, New York Times, June 19, 2002 <http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/19/national/19ARIZ.html?pagewanted=all>.

[3] “FBI Names 19 Men as Hijackers”, Washington Post, September 15, 2001; Page A01 <http://old.911digitalarchive.org/crr/documents/1127.pdf>.

[4] “Working Draft Chronology of Events for Hijackers and Associates”, FBI, November 14, 2003 (hereafter “FBI Hijackers Timeline”), p. 41. The complete FBI timeline is available for download online. See: “Newly Released FBI Timeline Reveals New Information about 9/11 Hijackers that Was Ignored by 9/11 Commission”, HistoryCommons.org, February 14, 2008 <http://www.historycommons.org/news.jsp?oid=140393703-423>. The timeline reads: “FAA issued Commercial Pilot certificate #2576802 to [redacted] [sic].” The “[sic]” is in the original. Why the name “Hani Saleh Hanjoor” is redacted is unclear.

[5] The Final Report of the National commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, pp. 225-227 (hereafter “9/11 Commission Report”).

[6] 9/11 Commission Report, p. 530 (see footnote 147).

[7] Global Security, September 14, 2001.

[8] “Hijackers ‘knew what they were doing’”, CNN, September 12, 2001 <http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/09/12/hijackers.skills/>. The quote is CNN’s paraphrase of what the flight expert told them.

[9] “‘Get These Planes on the Ground’: Air Traffic Controllers Recall Sept. 11″, ABC News, October 24, 2001 <http://web.archive.org/web/20011025074733/http://abcnews.go.com/sections/2020/2020/2020_011024_atc_feature.html>.

[10] “Primary Target: 189 Dead Or Missing From Pentagon Attack”, CBS News, September 21, 2001 <http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/09/11/national/main310721.shtml>.

[11] Marc Fisher and Don Phillips, “On Flight 77: ‘Our Plane is Being Hijacked’”, Washington Post, September 12, 2001; Page A01 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14365-2001Sep11>.

[12] Steve Fainaru and Alia Ibrahim, “Mysterious Trip to Flight 77 Cockpit”, Washington Post, September 10, 2002 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/13/AR2007081300752_pf.html>.

[13] “Flight Path Study – American Airlines Flight 77”, NTSB, February 19, 2002 <http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB196/index.htm>.

[14] A copy of the NTSB video was obtained by the group Pilots for 9/11 Truth <http://pilotsfor911truth.org/>. It is available for viewing on YouTube <> (accessed April 8, 2010).

[15] “The Pentagon”, GlobalSecurity.org <http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/pentagon.htm> (accessed April 8, 2010).

[16] Don Van Natta and Lizette Alvarez, “A Hijacked Boeing 757 Slams Into the Pentagon, Halting the Government”, New York Times, September 12, 2001 <http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/12/us/day-terror-attack-military-hijacked-boeing-757-slams-into-pentagon-halting.html>.

[17] “The Pentagon”, Great Buildings Online <http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/The_Pentagon.html> (accessed March 27, 2010). Boeing 757 Technical Specifications from Boeing.com <http://www.boeing.com/commercial/757family/technical.html> (accessed Marcy 27, 2010).

[18] “DoD News Briefing on Pentagon Renovation”, Department of Defense, September 15, 2001 <http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=1636>.

[19] Los Angeles Times, September 27, 2001.

[20] “FBI Summary about Alleged Flight 77 Hijacker Hani Hanjour”, Scribd.com <http://www.scribd.com/doc/13120414/-FBI-Summary-about-Alleged-Flight-77-Hijacker-Hani-Hanjour> (accessed April 6, 2010; herafter “FBI Timeline for Hani Hanjour”). This document was cited by the 9/11 Commission. The National Archives  and Records Administration (NARA) possesses the Commission’s records and has released many documents to the public. See: “9/11 Commission Records”, NARA <http://www.archives.gov/legislative/research/9-11/index.html> (accessed March 28, 2010). Many of the released records are available online at Scribd.com. See: “9/11 Document Archive”, Scribd.com <http://www.scribd.com/911DocumentArchive> (accessed March 28, 2010).

[21] Washington Post, September 10, 2002.

[22] Charles M. Sennott, “Why bin Laden plot relied on Saudi hijackers”, Boston Globe, March 3, 2002 <http://www.boston.com/news/packages/underattack/news/driving_a_wedge/part1.shtml>.

[23] Joel Mowbray, “Visas that Should Have Been Denied”, National Review Online, October 9, 2002 <http://old.nationalreview.com/mowbray/mowbray100902.asp>.

[24] FBI Timeline for Hani Hanjour.

[25] Thomas Frank, “Tracing Trail of Hijackers”, Newsday, September 23, 2001 <http://web.archive.org/web/20050314224950/911research.wtc7.net/cache/disinfo/deceptions/nynewsday_sep23.html>

[26] David W. Chen, “Man Traveled Across U.S. In His Quest to Be a Pilot”, New York Times, September 18, 2001 <http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/18/us/nation-challenged-suspect-man-traveled-across-us-his-quest-be-pilot.html>.

[27] “Who Did It? FBI Links Names to Terror Attacks”, ABC News, October 4, 2001 <http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/540045/posts>

[28] Newsday, September 23, 2001.

[29] “Hanjour an unlikely terrorist”, Cape Cod Times, October 21, 2001.

[30] Carol J. Williams, John-Thor Dahlburg, and H.G. Reza, “Mainly, They Just Waited”, Los Angeles Times, September 27, 2001 <http://web.archive.org/web/20010927120728/http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-092701atta.story>.

[31] V. Dion Haynes, “Algerian man didn’t try to hide, neighbors say”, Chicago Tribune, October 2, 2001 <>.

[32] FBI Timeline for Hani Hanjour.

[33] “FBI Summary of Information, Lofti Raissi”, January 4, 2004 <http://intelfiles.egoplex.com/2004-01-04-FBI-summary-Lofti-Raissi.pdf>.

[34] 9/11 Commission Report p. 520.

[35] FBI Summary of Information, Lofti Raissi.

[36] Hanjour’s FAA airman documentation from the 9/11 Commission records released by NARA are available online at Scribd <http://www.scribd.com/doc/13120915/Airman-Records-for-Alleged-911-Hijacker-Hani-Hanjour> (accessed March 28, 2010).

[37] “FBI Summary about Alleged Flight 77 Hijacker Hani Hanjour”, Scribd.com <http://www.scribd.com/doc/13120414/-FBI-Summary-about-Alleged-Flight-77-Hijacker-Hani-Hanjour> (accessed April 6, 2010; herafter “FBI Timeline for Hani Hanjour”). This document was cited by the 9/11 Commission. The National Archives  and Records Administration (NARA) possesses the Commission’s records and has released many documents to the public. See: “9/11 Commission Records”, NARA <http://www.archives.gov/legislative/research/9-11/index.html> (accessed March 28, 2010). Many of the released records are available online at Scribd.com. See: “9/11 Document Archive”, Scribd.com <http://www.scribd.com/911DocumentArchive> (accessed March 28, 2010).

[38] Hanjour’s FAA airman records are available online at Scribd <http://www.scribd.com/doc/13120915/Airman-Records-for-Alleged-911-Hijacker-Hani-Hanjour> (accessed March 28, 2010).

[39] Kellie Lunney, “FAA contractors approved flight licenses for Sept. 11 suspect”, Government Executive, June 13, 2002 <http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0602/061302m1.htm>.

[40] “Report: 9/11 Hijacker Bypassed FAA”, Associated Press, September 30, 2004 <http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=91553&page=1>.

[41] Government Executive, June 13, 2002.

[42] The 9/11 Commission Report, p. 12. The report notes that “To our knowledge none of them [the hijackers] had ever flown an actual airliner before.”

[43] Code of Federal Regulations, Title 14, Sections 61.123, 61.129. Present requirements in these regards are the same as they were when Hanjour obtained his certificate. See the version revised as of January 1, 1999: <http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/waisidx_99/14cfr61_99.html>.

[44] FBI Timeline for Hani Hanjour.

[45] See also: FBI Hijackers Timeline,

[46] FBI Timeline for Hani Hanjour.

[47] National Review Online, October 9, 2002.

[48] National Review Online, October 9, 2002.

[49] FBI Timeline for Hani Hanjour.

[50] 9/11 Commission Report, p. 521-522.

[51] “FBI FD-302, James Charles McRae”, April 10, 2001 <http://intelfiles.egoplex.com/2001-09-17-FBI-FD302-james-charles-mcrae.pdf>.

[52] Jim Yardley, “A Trainee Noted for Incompetence”, New York Times, May 4, 2002 <http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/04/us/a-trainee-noted-for-incompetence.html>.

[53] “FAA Probed, Cleared Sept. 11 Hijacker in Early 2001”, Associated Press, May 10, 2002 <http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,52408,00.html>.

[54] David Hancock, “FAA Was Alerted To Sept. 11 Hijacker”, CBS News, May 10, 2002 <http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/10/attack/main508656.shtml>.

[55] New York Times, May 4, 2002.

[56] Jim Yardley and Jo Thomas, “For Agent in Phoenix, the Cause of Many Frustrations Extended to His Own Office”, New York Times, June 19, 2001 <http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/19/us/traces-terror-fbi-for-agent-phoenix-cause-many-frustrations-extended-his-own.html>.

[57] Associated Press, September 30, 2004.

[58] Associated Press, May 10, 2002.

[59] FBI Hijacker’s Timeline, p.123.

[60] Washington Post, September 10, 2002.

[61] Associated Press, May 10, 2002.

[62] 9/11 Commission Report, p. 242.

[63] FBI Timeline for Hani Hanjour.

[64] FBI Timeline for Hani Hanjour.

[65] New York Times, September 18, 2001.

[66] Brooke A. Masters, Leef Smith, and Michael D. Shear, “Dulles Hijackers Made Maryland Their Base”, Washington Post, September 19, 2001; Page A01 <http://old.911digitalarchive.org/crr/documents/1124.pdf>.

[67] “Piecing together the shadowy lives of the hijackers”, Telegraph, September 20, 2001  <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1341136/Piecing-together-the-shadowy-lives-of-the-hijackers.html>.

[68] Thomas Frank, “Tracing Trail of Hijackers”, Newsday, November 24, 2004 <http://web.archive.org/web/20050314224950/911research.wtc7.net/cache/disinfo/deceptions/nynewsday_sep23.html>

[69] Los Angeles Times, September 27, 2001.

[70] FBI Hijackers Timeline, pp. 150, 154, 156-157, 161-162, 166-167.

[71] Jacques Billeaud, “More Arizona ties to terror suspect”, Associated Press, September 20, 2001.

[72] 9/11 Comission Report, p. 529. The document cited by the 9/11 Commission was obtained by Intelwire.com. “FBI Memorandum, Sawyer Aviation records”, October 12, 2001 <http://intelfiles.egoplex.com/2001-10-12-FBI-memo-sawyer-aviation.pdf>.

[73] “FBI FD-302, Interrogation of Tina Beth Arnold (Sawyer Aviation)”, FBI, October 17, 2001 <http://intelfiles.egoplex.com/2001-10-17-FBI-FD302-tina-beth-arnold.pdf>.

[74] “FBI Summary of Information, Lotfi Raissi”, FBI, January 4, 2004 <http://intelfiles.egoplex.com/2004-01-04-FBI-summary-Lofti-Raissi.pdf>.

[75] FBI Summary of Information, Lotfi Raissi.

[76] FBI Summary of Information, Lotfi Raissi.

[77] William F. Jasper, “9-11 Conspiracy Fact & Fiction”, The New American, May 2, 2005.

[78] “Airplane Flight: How High? How Fast?”, NASA <http://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/Sflight2.htm> (accessed April 17, 2010). Relative airspeed is calculated by the equation B d v² = W, where factor B depends on the profile of a given set of wings (larger wings produce more lift), d is air density, v is velocity, and W is the airplane’s weight. At 30,000 feet, air density is about ¼ that at sea level, allowing an airliner to double its speed to produce the same amount of lift.

[79] Patrick Smith, “Ask the pilot”, Salon, May 19, 2006. <http://www.salon.com/technology/ask_the_pilot/2006/05/19/askthepilot186>.

[80] “What Really Happened: The 9/11 Fact File”, Der Spiegel, December 20, 2006 <http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,451741,00.html>.

Question All Authority (Except Mine)

Or why decentralized forms of human organization will displace top – down hierarchies.

What I learned from 43 years of activism. Why I wrote this memoir.

When I originally became active politically I assumed others agreed with me on a common goal. For me it was very clear. Get government out of our lives. Affirm the Mission of the Declaration of Independence.

I was naïve, I confess it openly.

I assumed once freedom was firmly established we would fold up the then empty tents called political parties and go home to do something more productive. I was wrong. I discovered most people in the Movement did not connect words to reality. As time went on other alarming realizations came to light.

Disturbingly, few saw the LP as a strategic tool to be used to return power to individuals and then discarded. They had bought into the false assumptions shared by those who believe government is more than a means for a free people to handle a few commonly useful services. Many expressed the idea government, and not people, was sovereign.

To my horror, I confronted the expectation of loyalty to the organization. It was clearly the equivalent to pledging fealty to your plumber’s helper, a touchy subject.

Other individuals focused on single issues. Gaining easier access to guns, pot, ending cultural standards for sexual behavior, all of these motivations were present. All other issues were irrelevant to these individuals, to be deep sixed if they proved bothersome.

“Freedom” for many involved perpetuating some benefit accrued through use of government. An example of this is the nearly universal hostility to ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment. Affirming previous injustice as “freedom” was all too common. This was not limited to the Libertarian Party.

As time went on the understanding of a term previously heard but dismissed finally sunk in. Psychopathy. It eventually dawned on me some people were more different than they appeared on the surface.

It was a clear case of Arrested Paradigm.

When this became clear to me I left and joined the Republicans. I began researching how a ‘real’ political or community organization looked from the inside. It was instructive.

This is a brief outline of what I discovered and finally my conclusions with suggestions on how to achieve the goal of freedom.

In September of 1955 I received my first political qua philosophical input a friend/cousin who was then 24. He and I were sitting in the back yard when he told me the story of Howard Roark from the Fountain Head. He did not tell me the names, or I did not remember. He told me about the integrity of living your life for your own purposes. It was, he said, a work of art which should reflect all you want to say about yourself. It should be lived, he said, with integrity. “Yours to live, yours to give.” His name was James Dean. It was the last time I saw him but everything he said stuck with me.

The history of the Freedom Movement as it exists today.

The wave of activism which resulted in the Goldwater Campaign began with folks, mostly women, going door to door selling cheap paperback books. Pausing on the doorstep, these foot soldiers for freedom provided information to ordinary Americans which resulted in the grass roots activism which became the modern Conservative Movement.

The Goldwater Movement was, arguably, the first spontaneous grass roots moment.

Women, active in politics, was a radical concept in the Western world. Alice Paul, following in the footsteps of Lucretia Mott, Quaker, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony and a host of others, finally achieved for women the right to vote in America with the passage of the 19th Amendment, ratified on August 18, 1920.
Women went on to reshape American politics from every political viewpoint. The Republican Party, which had sponsored suffrage, was a natural haven for women and in 1938 the growing number of Republican Women’s Clubs were gathered in to become the National Federation of Republican Women, still the largest political organization in the world. Women were very much involved in the growing Conservative Movement forged by Goldwater, but the meaning of Conservative was about to change sharply under the influence of two men whose names today are synonymous with the word.

Neither Ronald Reagan or William F. Buckley, Jr., were Conservatives. Instead they rebranded the word to mean Big Government, corporate-friendly, make war for profit, and love your friendly, fascist state. While using the rhetoric both men associated the word, by usage, with a very different agenda

Reference: Rise of Big Oil, Rockefeller Group, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, by Daniel H. Yergin, War is a Racket by Lt. General Smedley Butler

When the first grass roots revolution was taking place I was sneaking books from my parents cache and then into Goldwater Headquarters and continuing my own efforts to get people to read Conscience of a Conservative – or at least a piece of literature. No one takes you seriously when you are under 10 years old. I did collect some candy bars, however.

The surge of support for Goldwater, enthusiasm for the writing of Ayn Rand, fractured on the frustrations of Vietnam. Older efforts continued their work, the Liberty Amendment, the brain child of Willis Stone, promised hope of ending the Income tax, the Foundation for Economic Education, 1946 by Leonard E. Read, provided education on the free market. The work of Rose Wilder Lane and the Reverend James W. Fifield of the First Congregationalist Church of Los Angeles, continued to impact minds.

I picked up a copy of Atlas Shrugged and read it, riveted, around 1962. My mother later said she seriously considered forbidding my reading – but this would have conflicted with the family principle on self education, a principle in place since at least the early 1800s.

The John Birch Society withstood a serious take over attempt from Buckley in the 60s at the same time Reagan was beginning the run up to his campaign for the Governorship of California.

Soon Andrew J. Galambos was teaching his brand of individual property rights and volunteerism. A recent graduate from MIT who had been a leader in Students for Goldwater and Young Americans for Freedom married and moved to Denver Colorado.

ARTICLE NOW BEING WRITTEN – Take over of the Environmental Movement by elements including George H. W. Bush.

On August 15, 1971 President Richard Nixon went on live television and announced to the Nation his intention to institute Wage and Price Controls.

At that moment people across the country dropped their registration as Republicans. David Nolan, the former YAF member, MIT graduate, and Goldwater supporter, had just written an article, “The Case for a Libertarian Political Party,”for the Individualist, a libertarian oriented magazine.

In New York an attorney named Ed Clark called his wife, Alicia Cabo Clark, to vent his rage. Alicia, the daughter of a former Mexican Senator and the CEO of a multinational corporation, sympathized. One of the things that had brought them together was their shared belief in the ideas of freedom. The Clarks also left the Republican Party. Clark would become the third Libertarian candidate for President and Alicia would eventually serve as National Chairman.

Ron Paul heard the announcement at the same time, changing his own life course.

The Libertarian Party was founded in David and Susan Nolan’s living room in Denver, Colorado on December 11th, 1971.

The article written by Nolan had called for the creation of a political party, not primarily to elect candidates, but to become a voice for the unadulterated ideas of individual freedom. Stated this way, starting a political party seemed like a good idea.

Wage and Price Controls would prove to be an absolute failure. The controls did not stem inflation and yet, with the logic of other government programs, continued to be used as a tool until 1980.

For those who had hoped to move toward individual freedom it was a time of devastation. I, for one, had not heard of the Libertarian Party until after I read, “How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World,” by Harry Brown, published in 1973. I was pregnant with my third child and worried about the world I would leave them. The growth of government, the steady losses of our rights, were hard to contemplate. The LP came like a shock of new hope.

Similar scenes played out all over America as young people who had worked feverishly for Goldwater and burned their draft cards as members of the Libertarian Caucus of Young Americans for Freedom, began to coalesce into a group.

This was the second incidence of spontaneous grass roots action resulting in a wave of political action in opposition to the Corporate Group.

As Nixon settled into a grumpy retirement in Yorba Linda, California on August 8, 1974, the newly fledged Libertarian Party was experiencing a surge of growth and excitement along with internecine warfare. About that time I heard Toni Nathan on the radio. I sat there, crying and holding my baby daughter. Later that day I joined the LP.

The LP began as an organization that looked to individuals to take action themselves in accordance with their inherent, natural, rights, which pre-exist all government. This was the mission statement of the Declaration of Independence. As the structure of the organization congealed a conflict of visions began, pitting the top down style of traditional American political parties with the spontaneous, local organizing which characterized its first several years. The lack of formal structure and innovation fired ever more activism, a reprise of the Goldwater Movement.

Into this mix came a recent graduate of UC Berkeley, back in his hometown of Los Angeles and making his way as a financial adviser.

His name was Edward H. Crane, III. Crane was elected Southern California Vice-Chairman for the Libertarian Party of California. While doing research for this memoir I could find not one instance of local organizing or activism carried out by Ed Crane while serving in that capacity.

Crane was intent on moving up in the hierarchy of the Libertarian Party. To do that he needed to ensure one happened. A newly fledged financial planner, he came out of the office of Southern California Vice Chairman of the Libertarian Party of California and with the help of the man acknowledged to be the best floor manager for campaigns in recent history, John Hix, took the office of Chairman of the Libertarian Party at the Dallas Convention in 1974.

Crane’s personal habits say a lot about who he is.

I was sitting on the floor with my daughters, Dawn and Ayn, ages 2 and 1, celebrating our success in qualifying Roger MacBride as the LP nominee for President in 1975 and fell into conversation with a woman sitting next to me. Her name was Maureen, as I remember. Maureen told me about her experiences in working for the LP and with Ed Crane. She said women were scheduled to come over to the ‘office’ every hour. The first half hour was spent typing. The second half hour in bed with Ed. As she left, the next woman was arriving. Nothing I later observed about Crane from that date to this caused me to doubt her honesty.

Beware those ambitious for fame, glory and sex and willing to deceive to achieve. They may be psychopaths.
Over the next years, under the direct management of Ed Crane, the Libertarian Party was converted into a top down organization, losing the networking, initiative, and innovation at the local level, which had provided its power. It would still retain its ‘name brand power,’ however, a value worth controlling.

One of the early respected leaders of the Libertarian Party was Roger MacBride. MacBride was the Elector from Vermont who bolted the GOP to cast his electoral vote for John Hospers in December of 1972. Roger, the adopted grandson and heir of Rose Wilder Lane, was well to do.

At first Crane sucked up shamelessly to Roger MacBride, according to those who were positioned to observe them. Then, after Roger introduced him to Charles and David Koch he transferred his allegiance. Talk of a think tank began almost immediately, rolling rapidly into fruition. Control of the formal structure of the Libertarian Party became the focus where before it had been local activism.

Roger’s presidential campaign in 1976 had been very good for local activism.

William Hunscher, a successful entrepreneur and close friend of Roger MacBride’s declared as a candidate for the Libertarian presidential nomination in 1978. Hunscher eventually spent a sizable chunk of money seeking the nomination, pledging to run a campaign focusing on encouraging local activism. Crane persuaded Ed Clark, Chief Legal Counsel for Arco, to run against Hunscher. Ed, highly respected for his good character, was a popular choice for those who had known and worked with him.

Hunscher was new to the LP and was far from being a perfect candidate. But he pledged to run full time for 18 months, a promise which weighed with activists.

To say it was a campaign of dirty tricks and payoffs understates the case. Crane, as Chairman of the LP used the resources of the LP for Clark, treating it as his personal property. In every way possible power was centralized under Crane.

The National organization, states and local groups, had a working arrangement whereby inquiries and donors were shared. The list of donors and inquiries were sent to National. National was to do the same. It soon became obvious this was not happening.

I had been elected Southern California Vice Chairman and noticed the names of large donors did not seem to be included on lists coming from the Headquarters in DC. I had a longish conversation with one woman, very well to do, who had lived nearby my family home while she and her husband were at UCLA. She had been told by the HQ, “there is no active organization in Los Angeles,” so she and other big donors, the names helpfully supplied to them by National, began organizing their own events. She was delighted to find us, but puzzled. For me the meeting was very illuminating.

Los Angeles was one of the largest local organizations, comprising seven local groups. This was not an oversight and explained many things which previously puzzled me.

Deviousness, I discovered, was the stock and trade of what we came to call the Crane Machine. To a person they reflected an attitude of arrogance, entitlement, and superiority entirely unsupported by their performance.
The Crane Group also issued White Papers for the Clark Campaign which repositioned Clark as a “Low Tax Liberal” while Ronald Reagan was explicitly using the rhetoric of freedom, rhetoric which Americans were hungry to hear, eager to believe. Using the rhetoric of freedom which originated in the Libertarian Movement, Ronald Reagan won the presidency, beginning the ongoing process of converting America to a fascist state while the Libertarian Party’s Presidential Campaign said nothing much worth remembering.

Crane was responsible for the positioning of the Clark Campaign. He has never explained himself.
Reagan was personally charming, kind, charismatic. I first became aware of him through comments from my Father in 1962. I believe they met through the Republican discussion group my father ran at UCLA for many years. Father was asked to go to Sacramento with Reagan as governor and again to Washington when Ronnie was elected President. Father refused.

Reagan was not a Conservative. What happened to America happened to California during Reagan’s two terms there as Governor. In 1975 United Republicans of California, UROC, had begged Americans not to support Ronnie if he ran for president or vice-president. No one listened. Here is the UROC Resolution. I rekeyed the last copy so you can get it online.
The Clark White Papers were issued to the media. Their message went along with the ‘low tax liberal’ positioning adopted by Ed Crane. Activists found it impossible to obtain copies. My own efforts to read them myself continued until 1984. I later learned from Bob Hunt, a long time Libertarian who lived and lives in DC, that piles of White Papers were still in their store room as late as 1999.

Even with David Koch on the ticket, Koch personally contributed millions, the ‘big win’ in votes or respect for the ideas of freedom promised by the Crane Machine died an ugly death, leaving the Clark Campaign in debt. Crane then abandoned the candidate leaving Ed and Alicia Clark to pay off the debt themselves.

The Kochs were not pleased either. Millions had been expended in large salaries, media, and for fundraising efforts which failed to break even. “Alternative 80,” a ‘fundraiser’ held which was to be, in effect, an early Money Bomb, both raising money and exciting mainstream interest, fizzled. The event linked events across the country which viewed the entertainment taking place at the Century City Hotel in the late summer, 1980. Phones were ready to receive the calls of eager donors. Calls did come in – but not enough for the event to break even.
I learned that even billionaires have limits in the elevator after the event. The doors opened and as I got in I recognized Ed Crane being quiet as Charles Koch expressed his unhappiness with the money spent, his commentary unimpeded by my rapt attention.

A subset of the Craniacs, organizing under Howie Rich, would become active in another deceptive and covert enterprise in the early 90s aimed at suborning the electoral process.

The names of contributors would be recycled into the Cato Institute. The only thing that surprised me was the cooperation Crane was receiving from Murray Rothbard, who was named to the Cato Board of Directors.
Rothbard was the only real Libertarian involved in Cato from my perspective. However, Murray was fey the way only a Jewish academic can be. He adored the mock danger of political battles but for the most part lived in the cerebral world of economic theory. After Ludwig von Mises Murray was The Free Market economist, clearly enunciating, despite his love of argument, the verities of a real free market.

About that time I sent a button to Crane at the Cato HQ in DC.On it was “Question All Authority (Except Mine)
I believed then, and now, when government is involved there is no free market. A free market defends our inherent rights as individuals by allowing each a ‘Yes’ to what we want and a ‘No’ to unacceptable choices. Where individuals are denied the exercise of their right to choose no free market can respond to provide the desired choices and there is no freedom, only privilege.

It was Rothbard’s insistence on this position which, it was generally believed, caused him to be ousted from the Cato Board of Directors in early 1981. In the public eye he was replaced, as a spokesman for the “Free Market’ by Milton Friedman. Friedman was no proponent of the free market, but a monetarist. Aaron Director, known for his integration of law and economics, married to Milton’s sister, referred to Milton as, “his New Deal brother-in-law,” according to Butler Shaffer who knew Director well. Asked his opinion of Friedman on the free market Butler agreed, “as you cannot be a little bit pregnant so you cannot suggest withholding tax and call yourself an advocate of the free market.”

The Koch brothers were the major funders of Cato from its founding on. It was at the insistence of Charles Koch that Rothbard was thrown off the Board of Directors and denied compensation. By so doing the best defender of the free market was marginalized. The rebranding of the word, “Free Market,” followed.
Koch Industries advocated not free markets but markets manipulated to disallow choices which would not profit them and enforce choices which would. Koch Industries today profits from the Corporate War in Iraq with Halliburton as it did in Vietnam with Halliburton during the Vietnam Conflict.

One of the first acts of the Bush Administration in 2001 was to quash the nearly 400 major EPA violations enforced against Koch Industries.

Along with Phillips and TRW, Koch Industries shares a history of repeatedly violating workplace and environmental laws while being numbered among the nation’s largest government contractors, according to Holding Corporations Accountable. The article on the Holding site originally appeared as US: Unjust Rewards, by Ken Silverstein, in Mother Jones, May 1st, 2002. According to the article, “the three corporations received a combined total of $10.4 billion in federal business-at the same time that regulatory agencies and federal courts were citing the companies for jeopardizing the safety of their employees, polluting the nation’s air and water, and even defrauding the government.”

In August of 1996 two teenagers, Danielle Smalley and Jason Stone, both 17, were burned nearly beyond recognition in an explosion caused by the petroleum giant. “Koch officials conceded in court that corrosion control had been inadequate and that the company had not effectively distributed information to the public on how to recognize and respond to a pipeline leak,” the statement appearing on the site of the attorney who represented the grieving family, Jim Arnold Associates.

The deaths resulted in an award of “$296 million, the largest award for actual damages in a wrongful-death case in the nation’s history. Koch appealed, then settled with Smalley.” The sum collected was between 25 and 30 million, which the family used to set up a foundation in their daughter’s memory.

Rebranding is an obvious ploy once it is pointed out. The question must be posed to old timers in the movement as to why they did not speak out when the process was going on. Two other examples of rebranding which still haunt us are ‘privatization’ and ‘deregulation.’

To privatize, used correctly, would be to return control to individuals. The correct word in this context is ‘corporatize,’ or ‘converting the rights of individuals into commodified units, allowing these rights to be sold by government to corporations. This was true of garbage pickup, where your garbage became such a commodity in the 1970s. It is true of the toll roads in Texas today.

Deregulation removed limitations on the actions of entities who had abused the power they accrued through prior relations with government and in violation of both statute and common law. An example of this is Standard Oil, which profited from outright violent criminal behavior in establishing an effective lock on the market of oil. Other examples include power companies which received government subsidies in producing power generation or had those resources transferred to them and were classified by statute as ‘semi-governmental entities’ and excused from responsibility for their actions. The cancellation or limitation of liability is an intolerable interference with the market. Any limitation of liability makes a free market impossible.
Instead of regulating industries the solution was to ensure the legal system could assert accountability. In allowing corporations to exist the problem created with unequal parties in disputes was bound to occur, and did.

The 80’s saw the continued conversion the ideas of Libertarianism to the use of ever bigger government and ever fatter corporations. The redefinitions of words, including ‘free market, now installed in NeoConservatism as well, took place through the coordinated work of Ed Crane, Cato, and an array of think tanks and journalists who consistently used, and use, the words in their converted form.

Since most people pick up definitions by usage much of this would have been accidental.

Cato’s assault on the Libertarian Party began when Alicia Clark was elected National Chairman in 1981. Alicia was a woman and had just experienced the ugliness of Crane’s manipulations during her husband’s campaign. The Crane Machine found a candidate for Chairman to oppose Alicia. He lost.

The Crane Machine immediately went into overdrive. The then Executive Director was ignoring orders from Alicia and spending hours on the phone with Crane, who was still in San Francisco at the time. Alicia fired him and changed the locks on the office, always a woman of decision.

At the moment Crane did not control the LP the Crane Machine began an overt drive to take Alicia out of office. It failed.

At the next presidential nominating convention the abrupt withdrawal of unopposed candidate Gene Burns, well known talk show host, just months before the nominating convention brought two candidates into the field. David Bergland had been the VP candidate for Roger MacBride in 1976. Earl Ravanel, the candidate fielded by Crane, was viewed as Crane’s bid to rerun the Clark Campaign with Crane in control.

Crane and Ravenal lost. Crane and his cohort walked out, despite their promises to heal previous disagreements and work for the winning candidate. Immediately afterward attempts to destroy the LP began. Calls were made to valuable activists across the country urging them to leave the LP and re-register Republican. I received several such calls from John Fund who I had known since 1980.

After nearly a full decade the cadre of people around Crane, which was pretty much unchanged since their exit from the New York Convention in 1983, acquired a new toy. That was an organization the Koch Brothers had not been able to use effectively, the Citizens for Congressional Reform.

Acquiring this not for profit spawned an incredible proliferation of identical not-for-profit organizations, each dedicated to doing pretty much the same thing. Visually, their sites appeared to have been created by the same web designers. Each used a stealth approach to electoral politics, employing lavish rhetoric to justify using the initiative process to change the laws in states where this was allowed. This fit in exactly with the original game plan of the Crane Machine. Crane had always viewed local activists as an obstacle to action within the LP unless those acting locally were directly under his control.

In employing this growing collection of nonprofits Howie extended this approach to Americans as a whole. The first of these organizations, U. S. Term Limits, focused on limiting the number of terms for any elected legislator. It was followed by initiatives promoting an end to eminent domain, school choice, and spending caps by government and eventually measures such as legislation relating to end of life issues raised by the Terry Schrivo Case.

Many individuals in various states had worked for this kind of measure; the problem was not the use of the initiative process. The initiative was introduced by the Populists to allow local people to change government, making it responsive to their needs. The problem was who was using the tool.

The initiatives themselves did not reflect the will of those who had to live with the resulting law. Even more egregiously, the initiatives were deceptively run as ‘grass roots’ efforts to potential donors outside the state when they lacked support within the state. No minds were changed. No freedom happened. No body of local expertise or enhanced organization remained in Howie Group’s wake.

It was a reprise of the Crane – Clark Campaign, this time run at a profit. Unused funds were, according to investigative journalists, transferred into the accounts of those who Crane and Howie had known and worked with since the 70s. At best the strategy came with the underscore, “Fool them into freedom.” But there was worse.

Worse than the misuse of the Initiative process was use of this tool for the profit of corporate outsiders to diminish control by local people.

In the original vision of American government the Founders had assumed that local towns and the people who lived in them would make their own rules in how they structured their lives. This could be seen as a multitude of small experiments in living, allowing for a learning curve, helping a free people to reduce conflict as they learned to live outside of a traditional hierarchy imposed from the outside.

In some cases the Howie Machine would outspend local activists six to one to get their measures passed into law. Eventually the left noticed through the research done by Hart Williams. William’s work spawned a nonprofit which followed Howie’s Group to some extent, focusing on the Ballot Fraud issue.

Howie’s Group learned some things from their encounter with Williams and transparency. They now all blog.
During the time, 1990 – 2007, the Howie Business Plan was revving up there was another eruption of frustration which would reprise the early days of both the Goldwater Movement and the Libertarian Party. It started on Larry King Live with an interview of Ross Perot.

On February 20, 1992 H. Ross Perot said he was willing to run as an independent if his supporters could get his name on the ballot in all fifty states. Listeners liked what they heard. With a list of declared policies including balancing the federal budget, firm pro-choice stance, expansion of the war on drugs, ending outsourcing of jobs, support for gun control, belief in protectionism on trade, advocating the Environmental Protection Agency and enacting electronic direct democracy via “electronic town halls,” he became a potential candidate overnight, soon polling well with the two major party candidates. The people wanted ‘someone else.’ Perot was someone else.

The next day people were opening campaign headquarters across the country. The leading expert in third party ballot drives, a Libertarian named Richard Winger, who runs Ballot Access News, was found and flown into the brand new Perot HQ in Texas. It could have been a revolution – but at the very least the people were flexing their muscles, finding ways to cooperate in pursuit of a common goal.

The Perot Movement was the third spontaneous political grass roots moment in the 20th Century. It resulted in the Reform Party.

Which brings us to the very unexpected outcome of Ron Paul’s decision to run for president again and the eruption of the Ron Paul R3VOLution, the first grass roots action of the 21st Century.

Congressman and physician, Ron Paul had been around the Freedom Movement since the 1970s. His run for president as the LP candidate in 1988 was largely ignored by the public. After the 1988 campaign Paul returned to the Republican Party and again ran for Congress successfully. His campaign manager, Penny Langford, continued to run the Paul reelection efforts. As she describes it, these are highly decentralized and grass roots driven themselves. Ron, according to Penny, was never very involved in campaigning.

When Paul announced his candidacy at the Free State Project most old time activists doubted he would do more than use the opportunity to speak out on the standard Libertarian issues. They were half right. Ron was talking about the same issues. But now people were listening because of the Desperation Factor.

In any population 5% of the people will try new things, ideas, products, tools, with little resistance. These are first adopters. 15% will adopt a new approach, technology, idea, tool, if they are desperate for a solution to their immediate problem. 60% of the population will adopt as soon as it looks like everyone else is doing it or if someone they perceive as high status is using the new thing. We call them Ballast. The last 20% will die before they adopt something new. We call them Dead Men Walking.

From the first debate on the divergence between the official Ron Paul Campaign and the Ron Paul R3VOLution, so named by Ernie Hancock, owner of Freedom’s Phoenix and a long time Libertarian, was palpable. Ernie began putting up bill boards promoting Ron’s candidacy in February, 2007, even before the official declaration took place.

As in the early days of the Goldwater Movement, the Libertarian Party, and the Perot Campaign, the ones moving the action were volunteers. It was volunteers who hammered the Ron Paul HQ, insisting a check be cut so Ron could participate in the GOP debate in South Carolina. The fuel in the engine was always volunteers.
Many became active for the first time in their lives, leaving their jobs to work full time and unpaid for the candidacy of Ron Paul.

The Internet became the nexus point, allowing individual initiative and innovation to be multiplied many times over. Adoption of strategies became seemingly instantaneous, allowing a group of people who had never met to change outcomes which previously would have been impossible to achieve.

Media, unwilling to cover Paul experienced reports from their advertisers, concerned over the calls coming in to them from Ron Paul supporters threatening to boycott their products. Market pressures worked.

The power of the Ron Paul R3VOLution continued to build until Paul stopped campaigning. Looking for an outlet for frustrated energy other projects came into form. One of these was the Tea Parties, which may have been planned as a means for redirecting the energies of the grass roots into the GOP. If that was the intention it has not worked.

The Tea Party Movement was produced by the Ron Paul R3VOLution and the frustration all of us experience when no clear goals can be identified and we are facing disaster. But while the activities taken up were similar to those of the campaign they were, in effect, an after school program with rhetoric and signs and a tee-shirt. The people, hungry for real goals, are now again frustrated.

Electing Ron Paul was never really the goal. He only symbolizes the real destination which has always been a world where our individual rights are lived out peacefully, without war. Where prosperity follows honesty and hard work. Where we tolerate differences and build community.

This was and remains the vision of America which drew millions to a New World.

Which brings us to the series of articles now being written for Integrity, the newsletter for several related websites and organizations. Build a business for yourself putting the Grid out of business.

Declaration of Independence – America’s Mission Statement
Constitution – First try.
Problem: Ignored the Mission Statement.

Other Terms:
Free Market – Exchange taking place when recognition of the inherent rights of all individuals allow their choices to drive market response.

Privatize – The act of selling off small slices of the rights of individuals to corporations. Properly: Corporatize
Deregulate – Ignoring prevailing conditions of injustice masked by statutes previously passed into law and removing statutes passed to mask the original problem.

« Previous Page — Next Page »