Tag: special operations

I like Alex Jones but I don’t trust him. He’s sly but he’s also courageous and he’s unique as a commentator but, above all, he is a salesman. He is one of the only people who predicted 9/11 a few months before it happened–mind you he predicts a lot of things that don’t happen but his prediction of 9/11, nonetheless was uncanny–did he just hit a lucky number? Did he get some inside information–he claims to be privy to insider gossip and certainly the people that populate his shows are interesting. Mind you, I don’t like a lot of the crazy right-wingers he seems to agree with on his show (he tries to agree with everyone) but I think these ideas need airing and I don’t have to agree with people to consider what they are saying.

He has people I like on his show guys I would like hanging out with or who remind me of guys I liked hanging out with–Gerald Celente with his highly articulate ability to insult everyone in the best Italo-American tradition (I’ve hung out a lot with people like him), the Yale-educated intellectual and lover of Liebnitz (how endearing to listen to someone like that) Webster Tarpley, the grand southern gentleman Paul Craig Roberts and one of the most unique people in this country (who now lives in Mexico) Jesse Ventura. Because he keeps company with these highly interesting (btw, I don’t necessarily go along with everything these guys say but they base what they say on something real which is more than I can say about the MSM which is, in my view, consists entirely of edicts from the Central Committee. I have almost stopped listening to NPR unless it is a non- “news” show.

After the alleged assassination of OBL I got on the Alex Jones channel. I can’t listen to him for too long since he is, shall we say, somewhat erratic in his articulateness and “truthiness.” One of the figures who came out of the woodwork exclusively on the Alex Jones Show is Dr. Steve R. Pieczenik, a collaborator on several Tom Clancy books as well as long-time government operative and Assistant Secretary of State–the guy seems to be a real person but since he’s basically a spook and the model Clancy used to create the character of Jack Ryan there’s little real info on him. Having heard the guy on Alex’s show what he said not only about the OBL hoax (I think that is pretty obvious–the governments is so pathetic you have to be stupid not to think something is funny about it) but about the general situation. To me these interview are so explosive, particularly, when he explicitly warned Obama and his people that there would be a revolution if he attempted another false-flag operation which sounded a lot like a threat yet there’s virtually nothing on this interview in the MSM. You would think that they’d try to debunk Dr. Pieczenik or note his very real threat to Obama. If the guy is real they should note it if the guy is a fraud they should debunk it. All I’ve seen is that his Wikipedia entry which suddenly got a note that it is a candidate for deletion.

So what is going on? Is Jones really on to something? Has he become a focal point for dissenters? How much of what he says can be believed? He’s constantly drumming up fear that some terrible things are about to happen most of which, eventually, turn out to be false. Can we support someone who’s on the right as far as immigration policy, about “socialism” and about climate-change, yet is with us (those of us who are highly skeptical of the the official 9/11 story and the weird OBL execution and burial at sea) as well as being an anti-imperialist, anti-globalist and anti-police-state activist. The guy does stand up relentlessly for these things. So what do you think?  

Originally posted at The Public Record and Truthout

A number of new articles have been published recently that have highlighted evidence of illegal human experimentation on U.S.-held “terrorism” prisoners undergoing torture. These articles followed the release of a “white paper” by Physicians for Human Rights [PHR], Aiding Torture: Health Professionals’ Ethics and Human Rights Violations Demonstrated in the May 2004 Inspector General’s Report.

This report looks at those recent charges, and reveals that experiments by a CIA researcher on human subjects undergoing SERE training went unreported in the legal memos the Bush administration drafted to approve their torture program. It will also connect major military and intelligence figures to the SERE experiments, and tie some of them to major science and “experimental” directorates at the CIA and Special Operations Command.

Originally posted at Firedoglake

The great novelist William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

With all the controversy over the use of Survival, Evasion, Escape, Resistance, or SERE, psychologists in the interrogation of “high-value detainees” — most recently detailed in a fascinating melange of an article in last Sunday’s Washington Post —  everyone seems to assume that terrible chapter is a thing of the past. Recent documentation that has come to my attention suggests otherwise.

The reasons no one until now has noticed the current activities of SERE psychologists in offensive military operations are that, one, no one has cared to look, and two, a specious narrative ending in the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC)  report, “Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody,” released last April, that appeared to conclude the episode was over. In its Executive Summary, the SASC concluded that, in September 2004, “JFCOM [U.S. Joint Forces Command] issued a formal policy stating that support to offensive interrogation operations was outside JPRA’s charter.” And that, presumably, was that.