Putting the 'Man' in Disaster Management

Recently, a new HBO series called Treme begun broadcasting in the US. From the creators of the epic political police show The Wire, Treme explores the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, showing the New Orleans locals struggle not only to re-establish their lives economically, but also to reinvigorate the city's world famous music scene. As such, the show moves beyond the analysis of failed institutions that comprised most of the content of The Wire, to the question of how to restore a cultural identity damaged by the same winds and water that flooded thousands of homes and businesses. While fans of The Wire will find familiar the rants of John Goodman's lecturer/novelist about the failings of FEMA and other disaster management agencies, Treme offers a more intimate spiritual journey to its audience. It is not aiming to merely garner sympathy for the victims of a natural disaster, indeed, an early episode includes a scene of a street musician laying into some young Christian whitebread do-gooders for their condescension and lack of realism. The intent appears to be to show the power of human resolve even in the face of the awesome power of nature, and horrific institutional incompetence.

By contrast, last year's epic disaster movie 2012 was a by-the-numbers film seeking to capitalise on a huge, and growing, alt-culture obsession with Mayan calendars and predictions of an apocalypse on December 21st, 2012. Director Roland Emmerich, who brought up the spectacular Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, alongside the less impressive Godzilla, took well over two hours to tell an extremely hackneyed and unoriginal story. The disaster scenario itself is relatively original - a huge solar flare heats up the earth's core, causes the crust to destabilise and ultimately displace. This causes huge landslides, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and, once the crust displacement stops, massive tidal waves a bit like when you move too quickly in the bath and a load of water slops over the end. This is all portrayed through exceptional CGI, including a wonderful 9/11-inspired shot where a plane carrying our protagonists flies in between two collapsing buildings.

However, the creativity ends there. The story itself has been almost entirely lifted from previous movies - a man somewhat estranged from his wife/family - see Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day or Dennis Quaid in The Day After Tomorrow - leads a small group of survivors against the odds and ultimately rescues them from ever-impending doom. This basic story goes back millenia, at least as far as the Jewish exodus from Egypt (the probable reference point given the pre-eminence of Jewish writers and directors in Hollywood) and before that when nomadic civilisations travelled and travailed the earth's surface. As a story structure it isn't bad, but in the disaster movie genre it is a staple to the point of being hackneyed and tedious.

However, it is the movie's sexist and racist subtext which is most telling, in terms of what this highly unrealistic film tells us about how humans truly respond to crises. John Cusack plays the protagonist, the estranged husband and father whose former wife has married a plastic surgeon who is usefully and utterly predictably killed off so as to enable the reunification of the family unit by the movie's end. Anyone with half a brain, or who has seen prior Emmerich films or others in the genre, sees this resolution coming at least an hour before it happens. The family themselves are a pissy, whining, patronising mess. Beyond occasionally screaming 'mommy' or 'daddy' the children do absolutely nothing, and aside from a couple of feeder lines to allow Cusack to deliver punchlines used in the trailer, the wife does much the same. Throughout the film the wife and kids are treated as a composite unit, a thing that needs to be rescued because it is so incapable of self-determination. This is the classic 'women and children first' mentality - save the weakest because they cannot save themselves.  This is particularly evident in all of the vehicle sequences. The protagonists initially escape a huge earthquake, which destroys California and sees it break up and fall into the Pacific ocean, by Cusack driving them to an airport in the limousine he uses for work. The sequence involves a dozen near-misses, a tactic repeated so often that by the end it fails to have any dramatic impact because you know the clean white middle class picket fence family will survive. In particular, one moment sees Cusack drive the limo through a collapsing building and out the other side. The implication is that his macho bravado at confronting the unknown (he can have no idea if the building will last long enough for the car to get through it) is rewarded, that it is brave men who do the saving of incapable women and children. After the family get to the airport, they acquire a small plane, and then later a larger plane with a few more passengers including a moderately entertaining Russian billionaire apparently based on oligarch Alisher Usmanov, part owner of Arsenal football club and a close friend of Vladimir Putin. In every section where the plane is in flight, the men are up front doing the piloting while the women and kids hide in the back/belly of the plane as they continue to contribute nothing to the rescue attempt. At one moment, where the pilots discover that Hawaii (where they intended to refuel) is on fire and seemingly sinking into the ocean, the men are called up to the cockpit and the women and children left downstairs with Russian oligarch's collection of automobiles, again implying the family is merely an object in need of being rescued rather than a group of autonomous humans.  

This prejudice extends beyond the principal group of characters. Among the geologists and other officials who predict and attempt to manage the crisis there is not a single female of any note. They are exclusively male, barking orders and engaging in egotistical battles over authority and jurisdiction. Just in case the implicit message (that only men are useful and capable) wasn't clear enough, the opening scene offers one more slap in the face to anyone seeking to question the established order of disaster management. We see the chief geologist visiting India and meeting up with another geologist who has discovered dramatically increasing temperatures under the earth's surface. Our principle initially says hello to the Indian geologist's wife, who informs him that she has (in her dutiful, subservient role as female) made 'that fish curry you love'. Once she is out of the way, the Indian geologist returns her to 'her place' saying 'her fish curry is still awful'. Even the one moment where a woman contributes something, albeit in her domesticated role as food-preparer, she is derogated and sidelined. Even the newsreaders who appear sporadically are all male, ensuring all authoritative voices are those of men. Every woman is a supplemental character to a male - the president's daughter, the protagonist's wife and so on. One has to wonder at the personal background of the screenwriter, Harald Kloser, that he is so aggressively against any sign that women actually have something to offer the world.

The bias also extends to racism. Though there is the occasional black or Chinese face in the film, it is almost exclusively a tale of global crisis affecting white people. While the president and the chief geologist are played by black men (the sight of Danny 'I'm getting too old for this shit' Glover as the president is an amusing highlight), they are both suave, clean, articulate black men, obviously inspired to some extent by Barack Obama. They are the acceptable face of black men, in that they are bourgeois whites in everything but the colour of their skin. Similarly, the Indian geologist who discovers the phenomena in the first place is killed in a giant tsunami after playing a very minor role, and the Chinese are portrayed almost exclusively as labourers. The governmental plan for surviving the disaster is to build gigantic ships - essentially ferries - in the Himalayas, so that they can ride out the tsunamis. Though financed by selling tickets to the Russian billionaire and the like, the construction is done by the Chinese. When the American party arrives in the Himalayas to begin boarding the ships, there is a wide shot showing several ships side by side, and the US crisis manager mutters 'leave it to the Chinese'. The implication is that the autocratic, collectivist Chinese state is actually something to be praised, due to it being useful to the world's elite. Only passing reference is made to the right of the workers who produced the ships to a ticket on board them.  

Almost completely ignored is Latin America, alluded to through images of Christ the Redeemer crumbling and falling down, and the whole Arab world. The former is a particularly gross oversight, given that the whole story is based on the predictions of Mayan Indians, the 'aboriginal' population of the Southern American continent. Without the Mayan 'long count' calendar there would be no 2012 subculture, and therefore no movie. Despite this, Roland Emmerich saw fit to only make a fleeting reference to the inspiration for his work, through a news story playing on John Cusack's TV about a group of (white) 2012 obsessives committing suicide at an ancient Mayan site in a South American jungle. The treatment of Arabs is even more laughable. Though Mecca appears in the movie's trailer, Arabs are only referred to in a disparaging way. One of the billionaires who is sold a ticket is an apparent oil sheikh, who aside from buying a ticket only appears elsewhere in the film towards the end when the black geologist is expressing his disgust at the selections of passengers for the 'arks'. Putting that clearly in an anti-Arab context, the Russian oligarch is shown as a hero, sacrificing his life to save those of his sons, as he falls to his death ensuring they get on board just in time. That screenwriter Harald Kloser and director Roland Emmerich maintain this racist bias was admitted by Emmerich in an interview. He discussed why the film shows the destruction of other religious sites, including Christ the Redeemer and the Sistine Chapel, but does not show any damage to the Kaaba (commonly known as 'the big square thing in Mecca'). He said:

Well, I wanted to do that, I have to admit," Emmerich says.
But my co-writer Harald said I will not have a fatwa on my head because of a
movie. And he was right. ... We have to all ... in the Western world ... think
about this. You can actually ... let ... Christian symbols fall apart, but if
you would do this with [an] Arab symbol, you would have ... a fatwa, and that
sounds a little bit like what the state of this world is. So it's just something
which I kind of didn't [think] was [an] important element, anyway, in the film,
so I kind of left it out. - SciFiWire

This logic has been criticised by some as cowing to Islam, but a semiotic study of the movie itself suggests the opposite. Rather than being intimidated by Muslims, Kloser and Emmerich show a clear racism towards Muslim and Arab peoples, assuming that the CGI destruction of the Kaaba would result in a fatwa. Nowhere is there any indication that they sought out the opinion of Muslim leaders to see how they would respond to the on-screen destruction of the Kaaba, they simply assumed that a fatwa would be the response. In the context of a movie which portrays everyone but white ruling class males (along with the occasional non-white useful pawn) as useless, this editorial decision, and the conversation Emmerich reports having with Kloser, is clearly motivated by racism rather than a rational or sincere fear of Islam or Muslims.

As a result, the movie is at base one huge sexist, racist, macho, technocratic narrative, leaving no pejorative stereotype unused, no blind prejudiced stone unturned. Even the English member of the scientific investigation and advice team speaks in that accent that only exists in the minds of Hollywood directors, because I assure you no one in England actually talks like that. Characters are invariably killed off as their dramatic purpose comes to an end, and the survivors are only those who conform to the precepts and biases of the writer and director. Despite this, the Daily Star provided the 2012 movie DVD release with the ideal reviewer tagline, calling it 'the best disaster movie ever'. Thought the paper has a female editor, it is owned by superrich pornographer Richard Desmond, so perhaps praising a remarkably misanthropic film is to be expected. The Daily Mirror, a tabloid newspaper supposedly aimed at a left-leaning readership, reviewed the movie very positively. Completely betraying the standards they like to claim they stand for (the 2003 anti-Iraq War march in London was partly sponsored by the paper), they gave 2012 a glowing review, bizarrely even praising the abysmal script.

Ironically, though Emmerich also told SciFiWire that he is 'against organized religion' he chose major story elements - the apocalypse, using 'arks' to save people and animals from a flood, focusing on a small group battling against the odds, an everyman prophet (played by Woody Harrelson) - that are more than familiar to readers of the Bible. In particular, the flood/ark narrative dominates the entire second half of the film. In the alternate ending, a cruise ship carrying the chief geologist's father is found perched on top of a rocky outcrop in the sea. This is reminiscent of a common story in conspiracy/alt history folklore - that the remains of Noah's Ark can be found on Mt Ararat in Turkey, near the border with Iraq. Though this has been common knowledge among those who care to look (see, for example, this thread from 2004), British tabloid The Sun reported on the story as a new one as recently as last month. As ever, the fringe is years ahead of the mainstream.

More significant that Emmerich's personal hypocrisy, or Kloser's sexism and racism, is the philosophy underpinning the whole story portrayed in 2012, which is also the philosophy of real life disaster management. In the film, those that survive do so due to making it to a dam on the Chinese side of the Himalayas that contains the arks. It is a parable of technology as our saviour, rather than the resilience of the human spirit as in the grand narrative of Treme, or Robocop as discussed earlier on this blog. But this is not just a technocratic philosophy, as the semiotic prejudices of 2012 demonstrate, it is above all a masculine ideology. That is not to say it is a male ideology, though it is one that conforms to the roles men have historically dominated far more that women.

Particularly instructive on this front is the work of French-Algerian philosopher Helene Cixous, who followed on from Lyotard's critique of grand narratives and Derrida/Lacan's critiques of language. In Deconstruction: A Reader, a collection of essays on poststructuralist theory covering many topics, editor Martin McQuillan wrote about Cixous' attack on the binary opposition of masculine/feminine. In his introduction, 'five strategies for deconstruction', he outlined Cixous' analysis of how a great many values are placed into such oppositions, typically privileging the male over the female, and the masculine over the feminine. The entire section on Cixous is worth reading, so is reproduced here.

What Cixous' essay Sorties ultimately showed is that the masculine prejudice of the monetary/labour economy examined in detail by feminists, postcolonialists and people who don't fit an '-ist' description are continued in the economy of spoken and written language. Expanding on Derrida's assertion that speech is privileged over writing, Cixous developed a theory where the masculine (and hence the Western, the rational, the cultural, the scientific) is historically privileged over the feminine (and hence the Eastern, the irrational, the natural, the mystical).

This is an evolution of what Derrida dubbed 'the metaphysics of presence', the linguistic tradition of privileging speech over language due to spoken meaning allegedly being 'present' at the moment of expression, an aspect absent from written meaning. What Derrida demonstrated, in his typically convoluted and obscure way, is that all language involves a deferral of meaning, most simply that the words used (in speech or writing) are necessarily distinct from other words. One would have to know the meaning of the words not being used in order to be certain of the meaning of the words that are being used, and hence meaning is deferred onto words that are not part of the sentence being spoken or written. Rather than meaning being simply present or absent, a common binary opposition in Western philosophy, meaning is suspended, neither entirely present nor entirely absent, like a ghost or spectre. This is the reason why Derrida uses spectral metaphors in so much of his work, including in the title of perhaps his most politically themed work Spectres of Marx.

As Derrida deconstructed the binary opposition of meaning being present/absent, Cixous expanded this to the binary oppositions of masculine/feminine, rational/irrational and so on. Her work showed not only how such values are bound into binary oppositions with one privileged term and one subservient term, but that each opposition is supported by many others. Hence, man is Western, rational, scientific, ordered, in control and woman is Eastern, emotional, mystical, chaotic and needs to be controlled. A further opposition - convex/concave is of particular relevance to the issue of how humans manage catastrophe. The masculine is convex - protruding, penetrative, a 'presence' in the world. The feminine is concave - receeding, enveloping, an 'absence' from the world. Though these words most obvious describe the difference between male and female genitals (the shaft vs. the crevice, crudely put) it is also a question of roles within the world.

The masculine answer to a problem is to create something anew, typically a technology or feat of engineering. In 2012, the answer to the global crisis is gigantic boats designed to preserve human life, ironically acting like protective wombs for those lucky, or white and male, enough to make it to the Himalayas. Likewise, when faced with a security issue in a specific country the stock response is a military invasion (the contemporary euphemism being 'intervention'). Space in the world is defined by the masculine by building stuff on it, ownership is declared by planting a flag. The feminine response is subversion and adaptation, seeking to alter conceptions of the problem, to dissolve the intellectual limitations on how we see the issue so that there is the possibility of an unexpected solution rearing its head. Space is defined by the feminine by clearing it of obstruction in the hope that something new presents itself in time to deal with whatever the problem is. The former is a rational process, beginning with standard premises and with the explicit aim and assumption of working to a solution. The latter is an irrational process, beginning without premises to avoid the limitations they inevitably present, and hoping that removal of limitations will allow human ingenuity to come up with something that would otherwise appear counter-intuitive.  

In 2012, women (and likewise all non-Western races, ideas, cultures, traditions, contributions) are sidelined in favour of an entirely masculine, technocratic solution that willingly trades billions of people's lives for the security of the elite few. Rather than try to adapt to the crisis, they seek to rise above it and prove man's superiority over nature. In reality, this approach and pursuit often fails, as seen in the Iraq and Afghan wars, and the response to Hurricane Katrina. One moment in the coverage of the rescue efforts after the recent Haiti earthquake was particularly telling. A seven year old boy named Kiki was dug out of the rubble after being trapped for nearly eight days. The image of Kiki, arms outstretched, was broadcast around the world as a triumphant message that the US-led rescue efforts were succeeding, and portraying the aggressive giant rogue state as a benevolent patriarch. However, the video tells another story.

With the cameras already in place, Kiki was presented to the world by US firefighters. Though his mother stood nearby, the firemen cheered as they pulled the child away from her and handed him over to his father. Once again, the woman was sidelined in favour of the man. Once the boy had been placed in the arms of his father, one of the fireman can be seen explicitly directing the father to face the onlooking international media, so as to ensure that the PR value of the rescue was capitalised on fully. Only then was the boy handed over to medical officials to check him for injuries and other damage caused by his ordeal. This footage from Sky News shows the fuller picture.

The implication of this is that the firemen, far from being the brave, noble, beneficent rescue service solely concerned with other people's welfare that they were portrayed as being, were in fact primarily concerned with the public image, with reinforcing the US's international image. They appear to have waited for the media cameras to show up before completing the rescue operation, or at least to have ensured media presence for the moment when Kiki was actually removed from the rubble. They largely ignored his mother, and made sure of the friendly image of a father lifting his boy aloft before he was given medical treatment. Largely ignored by the trumpeting Western media is that while Kiki and his sister were rescued, three of their siblings died in the aftermath of the quake, and the family now lives in destitution in a shanty town on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. While Kiki's story has been widely presented as an example of the success of the masculine rescue efforts of the US-led services in Haiti, the reality is that the same failings that meant Haiti's infrastructure could not withstand the earthquake remain, and affect ever more people in one of the world's poorest countries.

A further example of this masculine logic was on display in the recent British General Election. While the result was a hung parliament, and ultimately a tenuous Conservative-Liberal coalition, the most notable feature of the voting results was the concern with race, nationality and immigration. The parties that gained the most votes compared to the last election were largely right-wing nationalists - the BNP, UKIP, the 'English Democrats' and the Conservative Party. With immigration being blamed for everything from economic problems (they take our jobs) to security issues (every immigrant is a potential suicide bomber), a racist obsession with immigration by the country's most popular newspapers just about achieved the desired result of a Tory government. With the government running a huge deficit, the Conservatives and nationalists promised to 'get tough' on the problem, exhibiting the same confrontational, domineering, masculine philosophy of 2012, FEMA and the rest. Only a matter of days before the election took place, one event in particular lent yet more weight to the narrative that demanded that 'someone do something' about the problems. On May 1st a car bomb was found and defused in Times Square, New York. The following day it was widely reported that another bomb had been found in Pittsburgh 'in a microwave, near a half marathon'. As far as terrorism goes, this is pretty surreal. However, like so many of these stories, it turned out to be nothing of the sort. After the microwave was largely destroyed in a controlled explosion by bomb disposal officers, it became abundantly clear that the early reports of it containing a pipe bomb were wide of the mark - the microwave actually contained a tin of ravioli. Some amusing pictures can be seen here. The 'bomb' in New York has been widely called 'amateurish', comprised of propane gas cylinders and low-grade fireworks.

The car had been left in Times Square, one of the busiest parts of perhaps the busiest city in the world, with its engine running and its hazard lights switched on. Either the man arrested, Faisal Shahzad, was a total incompetent, or he never had any intention of the car blowing up. The aim appears to have been to remind people once again of the great brown threat of Islamic terrorism, at a time when it would have maximum impact on the British election. Suggestive of this event being a provocation of intelligence services, a Pakistani Army Officer reported to be in contact with Faisal was arrested in connection with attempted bombing.

There are two further aspects to this story that provide indications of something more elaborate than one man with a poorly constructed car bomb. The accused, Faisal Shahzad, is Pakistani-American, though different reports have him as either Kashmiri or Pashtun. But the CCTV footage released of a man supposedly responsible for parking the car in Times Square is a middle aged white man. Also, another man named Sheikh Mohammed Rehan was arrested in Pakistan due to his connection with Faisal Shahzad. Rehan is reportedly a member of Jaish-e-Muhammad, one of numerous Pakistani militant groups with long-standing ties to the ISI, CIA and MI6. As noted by Paul Joseph Watson, the group was founded by Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, the man who gave $100,000 to alleged 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta at the behest of the ISI's General Mahmud Ahmed. At this stage, the indications are that this was either a thoroughly incompetent attempt at a car bombing, or a psychological operation sponsored by intelligence services. Either way, it helped reinforce the prejudices and misconceptions that influenced the British General Election result.

There are alternatives to this masculine ideology of tackling all threats and problems by 'getting tough' and declaring some sort of war on a range of collective and abstract nouns that cannot be targeted by bullets and missiles. A more mature, careful ideology would be to adapt to new threats and problems, using both the masculine approach of looking for innovations given the framework of knowledge we have and the feminine approach of avoiding the solution being a self-fulfilling prophecy of our precepts. Rather than try to destroy the problematic through the violence of a head-on confrontation (whether that violence be technological innovation, military invasion or something else) we should seek to reach accommodations with problems where it is possible to do so, and seek out the true causes of problems where an accommodation cannot be reached. Waiting for a natural disaster like the Haiti earthquake (or, if you're a raging conspiracist, creating them with HAARP) and then leaping in and showing our 'strong hand' via the rescue effort, we should have been helping Haiti develop the economy and education to build infrastructure that can withstand earthquakes. As the Kiki story shows, this has been completely ignored by mainstream politicians and press alike, in favour of cuddly pictures of a small black boy being rescued by noble white firemen. In that vein, to finish this time I have included one of my favourite videos regarding the 2012 phenomenon, showing Ian Xel Lengold explains some of the reasons why people are predicting not an apocalypse, but some kind of cosmic ontological-perceptual shift in a couple of years time. While I don't necessarily subscribe to Lengold's interpretations or conclusions, what I do subscribe to is that he offers a far more inspiring and multi-faceted view of human potential than Roland Emmerich's movie, etc.

History of a Hunter

Everette Howard Hunt was born in October 1918, in Hamburg, New York. He would go on to lead a life which perhaps more than any other represents the darker truths underpinning the history of the 20th Century. He would become known as E Howard Hunt, or just Howard Hunt, an author of spy novels, CIA agent, Watergate burglar and eventually John F Kennedy assassination accomplice. The true life legend that is his biography lives on, as do the debates about many of the events with which he was involved.

Hunt graduated from Brown University in 1940, and shortly afterwards joined the US military to fight in World War 2. He served in the navy and air force, before getting involved with the Office of Strategic Services. The OSS was a nascent proactive military counterintelligence agency, and was effectively reorganised after the war had finished to become the Central Intelligence Agency. The National Security Act of 1947 solidified a process that had been happening for some time in the United States. Ground was broken for the construction of the Pentagon on September 11th 1941, a symbol of the development of a permanent large scale military industrial complex in America. The National Security Act set up America's first peacetime intelligence agency - the CIA - and merged the Department of War and the Department of the Navy into one entity, the National Military Establishment. Two years later, this would become the Department of Defense. It also created the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and took effect on September 18th 1947, the same day that the first US Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, took office. It was signed by President Truman, a 33rd degree freemason, aboard the Presidential aircraft Sacred Cow, the prototype for Air Force One.

Forrestal's life and death proved highly controversial, and serve as a suitable introduction to the story of Hunt's life. Despite his military background, Forrestal lasted only 18 months in the job as Secretary of Defense. Truman lost faith in him and asked him to resign, and amid fears over his mental state the administration had him sectioned and incarcerated at Bethesda Naval hospital. The same Bethesda Naval hospital where a little over 10 years later the secret autopsy of John Kennedy was carried out. Within weeks Forrestal had died in mysterious circumstances, falling from a kitchen window across from his bedroom at the hospital, a bathrobe sash knotted tightly round his neck. Though it was quickly ruled a suicide, there are a number of theories claiming he was murdered. According to Henry Makow:

When he realized Masonic bankers controlled Communism as well as Capitalism, he couldn't keep quiet. He was deemed "insane" and thrown from the window of Bethesda Naval Hospital. He was a good guy. He lost. - Makow, Rense.com

This story appears to originate in conspiracy theory classic Pawns in the Game by William Guy Carr. Citing unspecified sections of Forrestal's diaries, Carr explains that:

In 1945 Forrestal had been convinced that the American Bankers were closely affiliated with the International Bankers who controlled the Banks of England, France and other countries. He was also convinced, according to his diaries, that the International Money-Barons were the Illuminati and directly responsible for the outbreak of World Wars One and Two. He tried to convince President Roosevelt, and other Top Level Government officials, of the truth. Either he failed, and committed suicide in a fit of depression, or he was murdered to shut his mouth for ever. - Pawns in the Game

However, this is profoundly contrasted by somewhat substantiated claims made during Forrestal's lifetime by journalists including Drew Pearson. Forrestal's background was in the same elite banking circles (he was also a corporate lawyer) as the stories above say he was warning Roosevelt against. During his time at Dillon, Read & Co the firmed loaned considerable money to Germany, which helped revive the industries that formed Hitler's war machine. Anthony Sutton's Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler details Dillon, Read & Co loans of over $70 million dollars to German industrial cartels and 'Participation in German industrial issues in [the] U.S. capital market' of around a quarter of a billion dollars. The firm were also a Big Oil banker, and during Forrestal's tenure in charge of procurement and production for the US Navy in World War 2, he vastly overpaid the Arabian-American Oil Company to fuel the ships. The same Arabian-American Oil Company that was controlled through the Rockefeller family's Standard Oil monopoly. Was he a genuine whistleblower, or a shill, or a depressive?

There are other allegations. Forrestal opposed the partitioning of Palestine to create the Jewish State of Israel. Some consider this to also be a concession to the oil barons who had more to lose through alienating oil-rich Arab states through the creation of Israel than they did to gain from it. However, many of those same oil barons, and the bankers who form part of the same group, were and still are Jewish Zionists. Sometimes, religious conviction outweighs the desire for money and power. So it is hard to say whether Forrestal's opposition to the creation of Israel would have been seen as useful or problematic by those elite powers. It is thus a leap too far to isolate this as the reason for murdering him. The most esoteric of all the Forrestal murder-suicide theories is that he passionately opposed the secrecy of the MJ-12 group who were looking into UFOs and extraterrestrial life. William Cooper claims that this is the reason Forrestal was sectioned and imprisoned in a naval hospital, and notes that the day before his death his brother had notified authorities of his intention to remove James from Bethesda.

Whatever the truth, the end of Forrestal's life coincided with the rise of the permanent US military capacity, one able not just to defend the lands of the US but also able to launch offensive operations all over the world. This made possible the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation in 1949, and the permanent disabling of the German military industrial capacity and thus the necessity of a huge US military presence there. President Eisenhower, who was one of NATO's first Supreme Commanders, warned about this historical development in his farewell address some years later. He said:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

If Forrestal's comments to Roosevelt were blowing the whistle, then Eisenhower's farewell address was blowing a trumpet.

It was during the Eisenhower presidency that Howard Hunt participated in perhaps the textbook example of a CIA-sponsored coup. As the OSS became the CIA, its staff were almost entirely comprised of people who had fought counterintelligence battles during the war. Though the USSR and the Warsaw Pact presented a somewhat different challenge, the likes of Howard Hunt and Allen Dulles proved themselves capable Cold Warriors.

Guatemala in the years leading up to the 1950s was politically unstable, a succession of regimes had been quickly installed and removed and the weakness of the state apparatus had allowed the United Fruit Company to dominate the country. John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hit Man discusses the influence of the 'corporatocracy' on this part of the world in detail, as he worked there for years. The incremental colonisation of Guatemala by United Fruit definitely fits the profile he describes.

The company owned vast tracks of land in the essentially agrarian country, and also the railways by which the produce was moved about, and the ports by which it was exported. Guatemala was the epitome of a 'banana republic': The people were poorly educated, there was little by way of national independent media, but they tried to stand their ground in the face of an economic and political invasion by a US company. They elected Jacobo Arbenz, a middle class man of Swiss heritage who promised massive economic reform. He assumed control in March 1951.

Arbenz issued Decree 900, the land reform bill. It enabled the government to seize uncultivated land from large plantations and turning it over to peasant farmers. Even Arbenz gave up land himself. While this may sound like communism, Arbenz was only influenced by Marxism. He still believed in private property, and the peasants to whom the land were given were to be private farming landowners able to sell their goods for a profit and potentially buy more land or advance their lives in other ways. Arbenz wasn't a member of the Communist Party, he had no significant association with the USSR.

However, United Fruit were mightily angry because he took over 200,000 acres off them and paid approximately $600,000 for it, in 25 year government bonds. This sort of 'play you at your own game' economic strategy is very similar to what Hugo Chavez has been doing in Venezuela. Arbenz paid what the company declared the land was worth for tax purposes, though when the US State Department got involved they were throwing around the figure of $15 million. Given that United Fruit barely paid for the land in the first place as far as I am concerned they were lucky to get the $600,000. If Arbenz was a 'proper' communist he probably would have had them shot.

So, United Fruit enlisted the help of the US State Department and the CIA. There were obvious reasons why their pleas found receptive ears. Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA, was a former President of the company's board, and a stockholder. His brother John Foster Dulles, Sec. of State, had worked as the company's legal counsel. Walter Bedel Smith was on the company's board of directors throughout this period, during which he was director of the CIA up until February 1953, when he was replaced by Allen Dulles and took the job immediately under John Foster Dulles at the State Department. Smith also helped found the Bilderberg Group and the National Security Agency. Ambassador to the UN Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. was a stockholder, as was Assistant Sec. of State for Latin American Affairs, John Moors Cabot. Just in case that wasn't enough, Eisenhower's personal secretary Ann Whitman was married to United Fruit's chief of Public Relations.

A fuller story of the coup that overthrew Arbenz and replaced him with a military dictator called Castillo Armas is told by the CIA's declassified documents. Over 14,000 pages explain how they recruited Armas to lead a small band of rebels and mercenaries and used covert and overt propaganda to spread distrust of Arbenz within both Guatemala and the US. Hunt played a central role as Chief of Propaganda for the operation, codenamed PB/Fortune and later PB/Success. In his memoir American Spy, Hunt describes his unease at being United Fruit's 'lapdog' but says he says the issue of 'stopping the spread of Communism' motivated him to take up the role offered to him.

While still an embroyonic field at the time, psychological warfare was going to be one of the main ingredients of PB/Success. The foundation of the campaign would be guerrilla radio broadcasts blared over frequencies close to the Guatemalan national channel. Relatively few Guatemalans owned a radio at that time, but it was considered to be an authoritative source of information, and we knew that wherever interested ears tuned in, gossiping lips would soon follow, spreading the message...

...On D-Day, the station would direct a powerful blast directly at the Guatemalan government's radio beacon, overriding their transmitter with prerecorded fictional radio broadcasts in which non-existent Guatemalan military officers would spread terror by announcing that battalions of soldiers were streaming across the border. Additionally, we hired a group of Guatemalan newspaper reporters to bang out reams of anti-Communist articles for publication in Latin American countries. They wrote pamphlets that were passed out in the streets and leaflets that were airdropped to remote towns and villages in the mountains and jungles. Phillips also devised another interesting anti-Communist technique in Chile that we duplicated in Guatemala in which housewives were taught to riot in the streets banging pots and pans to protest Communist programs. - American Spy, p74-75

The operation was heavily leveraged - the army under the command of Armas numbered less than 400, and possibly even less than 200. If it had come to a direct military confrontation, Arbenz's army would definitely have won. However, the propaganda achieved two key purposes, enabling the coup attempt to succeed. Firstly, it focused on the rural population who had most benefited from Decree 900, portraying Arbenz as untrustworthy, a Soviet puppet, and a traitor. This was Arbenz's electoral base, but as the pots and pans tactic demonstrates, large numbers were turned against him. The propaganda also convinced Arbenz that the tiny army led by Armas was much larger and posed a realistic threat. On 'D-Day' this impression was exacerbated as ex-WW2 bombers piloted by CIA agents attacked Guatemala City. They dropped bombs, lumps of explosive attached to hand grenades, bottles filled with gasoline, and even empty Coca-Cola bottles. Anything that would make a noise and give the appearance of a much larger attacking force.

In the end, Arbenz resigned and fled the country while Armas's army sat about in a small village just inside the Guatemalan border with Honduras. They smoked cigarettes, told jokes, leered at the locals and showed off a Guy Fawkes-style effigy of Arbenz to the press. The crude dummy had a sign hanging around its neck saying 'go back to Russia'. This was a tiny part of what was an elaborate PR campaign designed just as much for the US population as it was for the Guatemalans. The faction leading the coup hired Tommy the Cork - Thomas Corcoran - a 'superlobbyist' who set about drumming up support in the US congress for the ousting of Arbenz. They also recruited Edward Bernays, who took a group of journalists to Guatemala to meet with anti-Arbenz officials who told them horror stories which they naively repeated in their articles.

Once Arbenz had been ousted the propaganda continued. Armas was invited to America, given a tickertape parade in New York City and awarded honorary degrees by US universities. Not long after, the US sent in Vice President Richard Nixon. Ironically, his role was effectively subservient to the program devised by Hunt, who as one of the Watergate burglars would also be partly responsible for the downfall of the Nixon presidency. Nixon flew into Guatemala and held a press conference with Armas, offering a public US endorsement of the new leader. They showed off Communist leaflets and books supposedly found in the Presidential palace, claiming this proved that the Arbenz 'regime' was 'controlled by foreigners' i.e. by the Soviets. Nixon praised Armas as a popular revolutionary and a democrat, though at the election which saw Armas returned as President, he was the only candidate. However, given some of Nixon's public statements he probably considered this a 'white lie'. In an amusing footnote, Hunt's CIA career took him to Uruguay some years later, where he lived just down the road from the exiled Arbenz, even meeting him occasionally at diplomatic functions.

The next major operation in which Hunt was involved was the notoriously scandal-ridden Bay of Pigs affair. In 1959 Fidel and Raul Castro overthrow the dictator Fulgencio Batista after two years of guerilla warfare fought from the Sierra Maestra mountain range. The CIA even provided some funding to Castro's rebels, among them Che Guevara, to try to get intelligence on the progress of the struggle. After the coup, Richard Nixon went to visit Fidel in Havana, and they had an apparently intelligent, peaceful exchange. However, as Castro later mentioned in an interview with highly respectable journalist Bill Moyers, Nixon wrote a memo to Eisenhower as soon as he returned to Washington. According to Castro the memo said that he was 'a Communist' who 'had to be eliminated'. Nixon's memo summarising his meeting with Castro, available courtesy of the National Security Archives, doesn't say this explicitly. However, it does liken Castro to Sukarno, the popular quasi-socialist leader of Indonesia who was overthrown in a CIA coup in 1965. It says Castro is 'naive' about Communism or 'under Communist discipline' and that he showed no concern about Communism coming to power in China. Nixon's concern is clear, and he went on to be a 'strong supporter' of the CIA's attempt to oust Castro.

The CIA recruited Castro's sister to inform on how the nascent government was developing. However, it appears Cuban machismo may have kept her in the dark about Cuban counterintelligence, which functioned very well. Thousands of Cuban citizens had fled the country not long after the regime, including many who had supported Castro and felt betrayed by him as he sought to take wealth and power from the middle class. They became exiles in Miami and this is where Howard Hunt came in. As the CIA trained a couple of thousand men in a camp in Guatemala to conduct the paramilitary operation, Hunt was in Miami in charge of the political operation. His job was to find a way to unify the hundreds of disparate Cuban exile groups, some consisting of only one or two people, under one leader. He chose Manuel Artime, a well educated man in his 20s, who would help lead the new government once Castro was toppled. However, the coup attempts failed for a dozen different reasons. Though the CIA had recruited Castro's sister, they had very little by way of reliable intelligence on the domestic opposition to the Cuban government. The exiles in Miami boasted of having far more contacts and support on the island than they actually had, as the more important they made themselves out to be the more money the CIA threw at them.

Hunt developed strong relations with the Cubans, and when the invasion at the Bay of Pigs failed he sympathised with the Cuban sense of betrayal by President Kennedy. In particular several of his close friends, including Artime, were captured and imprisoned by Castro. When the Americans finally paid a ransom for the release of the prisoners, Artime called up Hunt to tell him the good news.

"Feliz Navidad, amigo," said Artime. "I'm at Miami airport."

It felt so good to hear his voice that I cried...

...A few day later, President Kennedy visited Miami where he met the survivors of the 2506 [the exile brigade] at a televised ceremony at the Orange Bowl. There, Pepe San Roman gave JFK the brigade's flag to hold for 'safekeeping'.

Kennedy responded with the faulty promise, 'I can assure you that this flag will be returned to the brigade in a free Havana.'

Manolo visited me in Washington shortly after the beginning of 1963...

... He confided in me that the flag was a replica and that the presentation nearly didn't take place because of the animosity of the brigade members toward JFK. - American Spy, p122

Why did the Cubans, and by extension the CIA, hate Kennedy so much? He had made support for the Cuban exiles a major part of his electoral platform in the election of 1960, where he narrowly defeated Nixon. He made it virtually impossible for the CIA to conduct the covert operation (codenamed Zapata) by insisting on iron-clad deniability. When they launched an air raid against Castro airfields in the run up to the invasion, using planes painted to look like Cuban air force bombers, the cover was blown. The planes landed back in Miami, but one of the pilots was quickly identified as a member of the exile brigade, and the plane had nose guns demonstrating that it was in fact an American B-26, not a Cuban one. Kennedy called off the second air raid, which could have completely destroyed what was left of the Cuban air force. As it was, they still had three Mig fighters.

When the invasion came the exile-piloted B-26s circled over the beach where the brigade landed. This made it impossible for Castro to bring up tanks, heavy artillery, and large numbers of troops in case they were bombed en route to the battle. The handful of remaining fighters were launched shortly after dawn, and took on the sluggish and large targets that the B-26s presented. Five were shot down and the rest so badly damaged that they had to retreat. The brigade's communcations ship and supply ship were sunk, leaving them desperately short of supplies. Kennedy refused to send in the US armed forces, nestled a few miles away for a 'training exercise' in the Carribean. The Cubans, the CIA and the US military all had grudges to bear with Kennedy, blaming him for the brigade's failure and subsequent surrender. Any one, or possibly all of them, may be to blame for Kennedy's assassination two and half years later.

Kennedy forced the resignations of or just fired the top three men at the CIA - Allen Dulles, Richard Bissel and Charles Cabel. Cabel's brother was the mayor of Dallas at the time of the Kennedy assassination, and Dulles went on to serve on the Warren Commission. Many of those still in the CIA who were somehow responsible for the failure, including Hunt, were moved to the newly created domestic operations division. This included the interception of phonecalls within the US, which is illegal. The responsibility for domestic law enforcement resides with the Department of Justice, the FBI and the police agencies, and a judge decides whether or not they can monitor phonecalls, at least until the Patriot Act was brought in. The domestic operations division were also involved in domestic propaganda, using journalists and publishers both to gather information and to try to manipulate public opinion. According to the 1975 Church Committee, which investigated the 'dirty laundry' of US intelligence agencies, Operation Mockingbird cost $265 million a year. According to a 1977 article by Carl Bernstein the operations included Joseph Alsop, Williarn Paley, Henry Luce, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Barry Bingham Sr. and James Copley. Luce, most notably, was also a member of Skull n Bones and according to Hunt a 'good friend' of Allen Dulles. The media organs in some way used by the CIA included ABC, the NBC, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System and the Miami Herald. According to the CIA's Family Jewels the operations also involved bugging journalists' telephones. It is interesting that the kinds of activities that would bring down the Nixon presidency began under JFK.

Hunt retired from the CIA in 1970 and the following year was approached by Charles Colson, special counsel to President Nixon. They asked him to join the President's Special Investigation Unit, now more commonly known as the White House Plumbers, so called because they were there to stop the leaks. Of particular concern was the Pentagon Papers, a classified history of US political and military involvement in Vietnam prepared by the Department of Defense. It had been leaked to the New York Times by one of its contributing authors, Daniel Ellsberg, who made copies of the classified documents and the study based on them and handed them to reporter Neil Sheehan. The Times prepared a series of articles of extracts from the papers and commentaries on what they indicated, but Nixon got a court order to prevent them from publishing. Ellsberg then leaked the documents to over a dozen other newspapers, and the Supreme Court overruled the White House and allowed the Times to publish their work.

The Plumbers hit back. They investigated Ellsberg and found he was educated at Cambridge University, historically a prime location for Soviet recruitment of spies, and had visited Sweden, which was a key entry point for Soviet agents looking to infiltrate Western Europe, and was a prolific womaniser. All this made Colson and Hunt suspect that Ellsberg was a Soviet spy and had leaked the full Pentagon Papers to the USSR. Keen to find confirmation of this, they broke into his psychiatrist's office with the intention of photographing his medical files. Hunt teamed up with Gordon Liddy, a Nazi-sympathising nutter who had worked for the FBI. They two donned disguises and cased the office of the psychiatrist, named Lewis Fielding. They wore wigs and inserted insoles in their shoes to alter the way they walked, and managed to gain entry to the office to take pictures of the interior using a camera disguised as a tobacco pouch. However, the mission was not without it's problems, as Hunt described:

All in all, everything went as planned, except for an amusing event in the park. Liddy told me that he had been sitting on a park bench when he was cruised by a gay 'seven-foot Navajo' who apparently found Liddy so inviting in his longish wig that Liddy almost had to fight off the large, amorous suitor. - American Spy, p185

For the burglary itself Hunt recruited Bernard Barker, and two Cubans named Felipe De Diego - a Bay of Pigs veteran - and Rolando Martinez - who had run sabotage operations inside Cuba as part of Operation Mongoose. Ultimately, the mission failed because though they successfully broke into the office, Barker and the Cubans were unable to find any files relating to Ellsberg. The burglary crew opened medicine cabinets and had strewn materials all over the floor and a few days later the local police arrested a drug addict who conveniently confessed to the Plumbers' crime.

That was in 1971, and the following year was a presidential election year. Nixon had taken the White House at the second attempt. Having been beaten by JFK in 1960 he also he failed in a 1962 attempt to become governor of his home state of California, then announced his retirement from politics, before staging a comeback to take the big job. However, he had steadily become intensely paranoid, and though he retained a large amount of the support that had seen him elected President, he believed there were dark forces working against him. The Plumbers were enlisted to try to help Nixon, and were largely funded by the Committee to Re-Elect the President, also known as CREEP. Project Gemstone was born - a multi-facted covert operation designed to not only gather intelligence on what the Democratic party were up to, but also to try to influence public opinion and therefore the election result. This included various subprojects named after precious stones.

Our highest priority, 'Diamond', was the counterdemonstration plan for San Diego, where the Republican convention was scheduled to take place. 'Garnet' was abother counterdemonstration program, in which we planned to hire various distasteful people to demonstrate against the Republicans, with the hopefull fallout that the American public would find their antics so repulsive that they would vote for Nixon, just to thumb their nose at the demonstrators (much like how today's American Idol television audiences often seem to vote for contestants whom Simon Cowell ridicules). - American Spy, p195

Gemstone culminated in the break-ins at the Watergate hotel and office complex in Washington DC, where the Democratic Party's National Committee (DNC) had its headquarters. The team comprised Hunt, Barker and Liddy, two anti-Castro Cubans named Virgilio Gonzalez and Eugenio Martinez, a former CIA security specialist Jim McCord, and former CIA agent Frank Sturgis. Hunt, Barker, the Cubans and Sturgis all went back to Operation 40 and the Bay of Pigs invasion. The aim of the break-in was to photograph documents detailing Democratic campaign contributions in the hope of finding a connection to Castro or the Soviets, and to bug the office and phone of Larry O'Brien, the chairman of the DNC. The first attempt failed because Gonzalez, a locksmith by trade, didn't have the right tool to pick the locks and allow access to the DNC offices. The second attempt largely succeeded, but the entry team photographed the wrong documents and McCord cocked up the bugging part of the operation.

The third attempt was the big one. Not only were the entry team arrested, the entire White House covert operations team was uncovered, eventually forcing Nixon to resign and precipitating a series of inquiries into the actions of the US intelligence services. The team broke in on the night of 17th June 1972 and were discovered due to a sloppy mistake. The technique developed during the earlier break-ins was to have McCord sneak into the Watergate complex through the garage doors, and tape open the locks on doors allowing the others access to a staircase and thus the floor containing the DNC's offices. This was common practice among cleaners and maintenance crews, but a security guard found the doors taped open, removed the tape and then found them re-taped again hours later. He alerted the police, who located and arrested the entry team. Liddy and Hunt escaped that evening but phone numbers and the money trail led the FBI to both of them. Though Nixon was allowed to retire and his successor, Gerald Ford, gave him a full pardon the Watergate burglars were imprisoned. Hunt served 33 months, by which time his wife had died in a plane accident and he had essentially been bankrupted. Also imprisoned were several White House staffers, including White House counsels John Dean and John Ehrlichman, Nixon's Chief of Staff HR Haldemann, deputy director of CREEP Jeb MacGruder and Attorney General John Mitchell.

The Watergate scandal not only brought down a presidential administration and virtually ruined Hunt's life, it was also the basis for the Church Committee's investigation into illegal activities by US intelligence services and the Rockefeller's Commission's investigation into CIA activities within the US, both in 1975. President Ford reacted to the discoveries of these inquiries by enacting Executive Order 11905, which amended the National Security Act of 1947 by providing greater oversight of intelligence agency activities and banning political assassinations. Whether the CIA and the rest of the US 'intelligence community' really paid any attention is a matter of some dispute. The public pressure arising from the information reported by the two inquiries, particularly the Church Committee, led to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), formed in 1976 and lasting until 1979. The HSCA looked into the killings of President John F Kennedy in Dallas in November 1963, and Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis in April 1968.

Hunt testified before the Rockefeller Commission and the HSCA about his alleged role in the Kennedy assassination. Writers, in particular Tad Szulc, had written about infamous photographs taken in Dealey Plaza of three men that were arrested shortly after the shooting of JFK. The photos of these tramps have been the subject of tremendous debate.

Howard Hunt is allegedly the third man (L-R), the one wearing a hat. The first two men have been widely identified, perhaps correctly, as Frank Sturgis and Daniel Carswell (Carswell was also CIA). Sceptics, including Oliver Stone in his movie JFK, have pointed out that two of the men look quite young to be homeless in 1960s America, that all three men are clean shaven and the two whose hair can be seen shows it to be well kept. They appear to be wearing mostly new clothes with little or no sign of dirt, wear or fraying, and that if you were not told they were vagrants they wouldn't stand out as such. That they were arrested, questioned, and then released has caused some to suspect they were protected assets of the intelligence services involved in the assassination.

Hunt denied that he was in Dallas that day, affirming to both the Rockefeller Commission and the HSCA that he was at home in Washington on the day in question. He tells a tale of being out shopping for groceries when he and his wife heard about the shooting. They then collected their son from school, went home and watched the rolling TV coverage as events unfolded into the evening. However, this now appears not to be true. Though Hunt re-affirmed this version of events in his autobiography, published shortly after his death in January 2007, he sent his son St John Hunt a tape recording in 2004 making an extensive confession, and telling his son to release the recording after his death. Howard Hunt claims that he was in fact in Dallas that day, as a 'benchwarmer' rather than a key player in the assassination. He named then vice-President Lyndon Johnson as one of the main men behind the plot, and identified Cord Meyer and William King Harvey of the CIA as its progenitors. Harvey in particular played a key role in Operation Mongoose, the Pentagon-CIA plan to kill Castro (among other things). As picked up by Oliver Stone's movie Nixon, there is a suspicion that Mongoose 'got turned around' and became the vehicle for the Kennedy assassination, a suspicion held by Richard Nixon himself.

The story of Hunt's confession was first picked up by Prisonplanet and then by Coast to Coast radio. However, it has not gained any notable coverage in mainstream news media. His son St John offered his opinion on the tramp photographs, saying that the third man looked much like his father did in the early 1960s. But people quite often confess to crimes they haven't committed, such at the LA drug addict who said he broke into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. There is also the issue of why Hunt went to such lengths in his 2007 book to deny his involvement in the assassination when he knew he was dying and therefore that soon after his son would make his recorded confession a matter of public knowledge (at least to those who bother to look for such things). Most publishers would jump at the chance to publish an irrefutable posthumous confession by a CIA agent. It's ideal from a legal point of view because it can't be proven true or false because the guy making the confession is dead, the publisher doesn't even have to claim the confession as true in order to get people interested. Kennedy assassination theories are the most commonly believed type of conspiracy theory, with the possible exception of those concerning 9/11, so it is a guaranteed money maker, a very rare thing in publishing.

However, put against that Hunt knew of the CIA's infiltration of the publishing industry, and so if he had told his book publisher what he told his son then there was a reasonable chance of the CIA finding out his intentions. In any case, his book was edited by the CIA before publication, and so is perhaps not an authentic representation of Hunt's view of his own life. Hopefully some of these issues will be discussed in Alex Jones's forthcoming Kennedy assassination movie, which features St John Hunt in extensive interviews, alongside long-term investigator Jim Marrs. Though there is no release date available yet the preview indicates that it expands on the theories put forth in the mainstream films Executive Action and JFK.

The Fabrication of Crisis

The dramatic failure of the Copenhagen Climate Conference Proceedings was succeeded by a significant 'cold air mass'. The Northern hemisphere winter was already looking cold while the conference was taking place, and temperatures rapidly plummeted once the delegates had flown home.  Record snowfall hit locations as far South as Beijing and Seoul, while sunny Florida was struggling to reach positive temperatures.

Once again, the Met Office's predictions were wrong, and not just wrong in the sense of being inaccurate, wrong in the sense of identifying a trend that clearly wasn't really there. This is a common failing of statistical methods. Despite this the pro-AGW scientists are still trying to sell global warming theory. The World Meteorological Organisation have denied that the cold weather in any way questions the AGW theory of climate change. Secretary General Michel Jarraud said:

"We cannot explain any single phenomenon by one single cause." - VOA News

Except, presumably, for explaining climate change by human activity. The Met Office followed suit, finding a way to argue that the cold weather is in fact a result of global warming, demonstrating how the entire investigation of the climate is led by a desired conclusion. Stephen Dorling of the disgraced University of East Anglia gave interviews to two newspapers, both of which came out with astoundingly unscientific nonsense as a result:

But Stephen Dorling, of the scandal-hit University of East Anglia’s school of environmental sciences, remained adamant that the weather should not be used as evidence against climate change. - Daily Express

But he said it was wrong to focus on single events - whether they were cold snaps or heat waves - which were the product of natural variability. - Telegraph

The former betrays the hoax that underpins this sort of science, that empirical evidence is discounted in favour of 'value added' statistics, though the process which produced those statistics is kept secret. The latter is genuinely bizarre because it seems to imply that single events are naturally occurring but longer trends are the result of some 'unnatural' activity, presumably by humans. The global warming in the mind of that article's author is truly anthropogenic or 'man made', in that it an invention of the imagination, not the conclusion of an investigative process.

It should also be noted that single events, in particular heat waves, are often used to advance the vision of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change. When a very hot summer struck Europe in 2003, killing Parisian pensioners, it was consistently used as evidence for global warming. Two years afterwards the Guardian ran an article saying the knock-on effect of this 'single event' could contribute to global warming on a large scale. Continuing their beautifully contradictory coverage the Telegraph published an article suggesting the cold weather might signal a 'pause' to global warming, and that we may see a cooling period. A very similar piece appeared in the BBC's coverage in April 2008 after a particularly cold winter.

For those advancing the global warming theory any argument will do. Weather that might support the desired conclusion is cited as evidence that the theory is correct. Weather that doesn't support the desired conclusion is dismissed as 'single events' that are part of natural fluctuations. These single events aren't significant compared to the long term trend, except when they can find a reason to suggest the single events have helped cause the long term trend that is the desired conclusion. Any concessions to a short term trend is always contrasted with a reference to the long term trend that is the desired conclusion. This is political logic.

These contradictions are typified in this Discover Magazine blog, which predictably features a Greenpeace banner advert at the top of the page with a picture of a polar bear stating 'give £3 a month to stop climate change'. Given that 'single events' can naturally occur which then add up to a short term trend, which can turn into a long term trend, it's probably fair to say that regardless of what humans do there will always be some climate change happening.

Perhaps because of the failure of Copenhagen, and the failure of this mishmash of causality myths and ideology to convince the desired number of people, the crisis-salesmen have resorted to somewhat cruder methods. On the evening of Christmas day Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a passenger on Flight 253 from Schipol to Detroit, set fire to his trousers, allegedly trying to detonate plastic explosives in his underwear. Though the precise nature of the device is unclear, it is variously reported to have involved unmixed PETN powder and some form of Acetone Peroxide, along with a syringe full of acid. This is allegedly the same mixture of explosive compounds used by so-called 'shoe bomber' Richard Reid. In both cases, whether they constituted a viable explosive device is not apparent. Whether young Mutallab could have actually downed the plane over the city, and hence deserve the already appointed titled of the 'Detroit Bomber' or would have just blown off his balls, is yet to be established.

The incident was initially reported as a passenger trying to light fireworks on the plane, but soon after the story evolved to include another passenger, a Dutchman named Japser Schuringa, who subdued Mutallab when he tried to do whatever it was he was trying to do.

Mr Schuringa said Abdulmutallab seemed “out of it” and was “staring into nothing”. - The Telegraph

In the following days and weeks there were a series of other 'security scares' on similar flights. Two days after Christmas the same flight (Northwest Airlines flight 253) was 'involved in an emergency incident' coming into Detroit. The cause was that a Nigerian passenger had apparently become sick and had spent a long time in the plane's bathroom. The day after it was reported that Mutallab had bragged to the FBI that there were more willing plane bombers waiting in the wings. Indeed, the young man was apparently very keen to talk about terrorism until his government-appointed lawyer 'reduced' his 'co-operation'.

Another plane out of Amsterdam, this one going to Aruba, was diverted after an unruly passenger made bomb threats, about two weeks into the New Year. However, the prize goes to Meadows Field Airport in California which was closed after yet another security scare in the wake of the Flight 253 incident. Two baggage handlers were taken to hospital complaining of feeling nauseous after opening bottles they believed contained a suspicious liquid. The bottles tested positive for traces of explosive, both TNT and TATP, so the airport was evacuated and shut down. The only problem was that they contained honey. Not explosives, not acid, not underwear, not misguided Nigerians. Honey. Similarly, Minneapolis St Paul airport was closed after a 'suspicious' bag was identified by a bomb-sniffing dog. It turned out to be the bag the handlers put on the carousel to indicate the end of a batch, that all of the luggage from a particular flight has been unloaded. Likewise the comic Joan Rivers was kept off a flight from Costa Rica to Newark after a gate inspector was concerned about her passport containing both her married and professional names.

Perhaps in response to bottles of honey or the use of stage names, MI5 took the decision to raise the UK threat level from 'substantial' to 'severe'. The non-specific, unconfirmable international terrorist threat strikes again, leading Sky News to begin their piece on the story saying:

It is the threat that won't go away. The chance of an international terrorist attack on the UK has increased again. - Sky News

However, it is the threat level (supposedly an assessment derived from the available intelligence) that has been raised, not the chance of an attack. Heightened security and 'vigilance' on the part of the public as a result of publicly raising the threat level should, if anything, make an attack less likely, not more likely. But Sky News know what they're doing, and know that it butters a lot of bread to keep making out that at any moment a confused young man from Africa might set fire to his underpants. Accompanying the hiking of the threat level came Home Secretary Alan Johnson, who assured us that we still face a 'real and serious' threat from terrorism. 'Real and serious' is the same phrase used by Johnson's half a dozen predecessors in the job of primary domestic propagandist for the War on Terror, which indicates the threat is manufactured and farcical.

Indeed, as far as bombers go, Mutallab was pretty poor, down there with those who set fire to themselves in a jeep and then drove into a bollard at Glasgow airport a couple of years ago. However, these aren't particularly isolated incidents in the history of Islamic terrorism. Ramzi Yousef, the designer of the bomb used to attack the WTC in 1993, was known for a series of accidents. One in particular saw him accidentally drink sulphuric acid from a bottle thinking it was a soft drink he'd poured into the same kind of bottle. Soft drinks were also to blame for the closure of New York's Penn station in 2005 after a 'suspicious' soda can had to be investigated by National Guardsmen and HAZMAT teams.

Another story from 1993 is telling, when Osama Bin Laden purchased an aircraft to help him ship weapons from Afghanistan to Sudan, where he was based at the time. A former mujahid who had fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets, was enlisted to help. Essam al-Ridi lived in Texas and acquired an ageing ex-US military plane from the Tucson 'Boneyard'.

The saga of the T-39 is a rare amusement in the Bin Laden chronicle. Because of a shortage of cash, the Saudi insisted on spending no more than $250,000. What he got was a 1960s vintage aircraft with a range of about 1500 miles. To get the plane from the southwestern US to Khartoum, Al-Ridi had to make a seven-leg journey, beginning in Dallas-Forth Worth and flying via Sault Sainte Marie in Ontario to an airstrip in Frobisher bay, just below the Arctic Circle, then to Iceland, next to a couple of stops in Europe, on to Caire, and finally to its destination. Al-Ridi expected the journey to take a couple of days. When he go to Frobisher Bay, -65 degree weather cracked a window and the plane lost its hydraulic system, forcing a stopover. After a week in Canada's frozen north, Air Mujahid was up and running again, and Al-Ridi delivered the plane...

...About a year and a half after his epic journey, Al-Ridi was summoned to Sudan to fly the plane again. It had been poorly maintained, he arrived at the airport to find that the tires had melted on the runway, the engines were filled with sand and the keys were missing. After repairs by an airport mechanic, Al-Ridi took the plane up for a brief test. He made several circuits around the airport, performed a touch-and-go, and then brought the plane in for a landing. While it was hurtling down the tarmac, all the brake systems failed. Al-Ridi shut off the engines but with the plane still plowing forward at sixty knots, the runway ran out, and the plane slammed into a sand pile. Al-Ridi, an Egyptian who worked for Bin Laden as a business matter, not out of ideological conviction, was fearful of being identified with the Saudi's plane. He sprinted from the runway and caught a flight out of Sudan as fast as he could. - The Age of Sacred Terror

Nonetheless, that the young Nigerian posed a 'real and serious' threat to the security of our way of life doesn't seem to be in question by any officials. Instead the authorities have been having a dispute over 'intelligence failures', in essence the same dispute that took place after 9/11 and 7/7, and after Richard Reid's attempt to set fire to his shoes. Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab came from a wealthy family, his father is a banker and former government official. He was educated at an international school in Togo, and studied engineering and business finance in London. He broke off ties with his family and apparently moved around, living in Yemen, Egypt and/or Dubai.

In May 2008 he applied for a student visa to enter the UK putting bogus course details on his application. It was denied, and he was added to the British terrorist watch list. Despite this in June 2008 he applied for and received a US entry visa through the US embassy in London. In August he attended a course held by an Islamic centre in Texas, though his movements between then and the following summer are not known. Umar then turned up in Yemen, and by November 2009 his father was appealing to the US embassy in Abuja telling them to retrieve his son. Mutallab's father also warned the CIA station in Abuja that his son had got involved with Islamic extremists and might do something stupid.

At this point the US added his name to the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) list, but not the no-fly list. The entry visa issued in June 2008 was not revoked. Between then and a month later, when Mutallab boarded a plane in Lagos, Nigeria on its way to Holland, no effort was made to track Umar or find out what he was doing. According to this version of events the relevant agencies didn't share information or ensure it was investigated. Even Obama got in on the act, criticising 'intelligence failures' and apparently threatening to fire the chiefs of various agencies. While Downing St. claimed they had shared a file on Mutallab with the CIA in 2008 the Americans reacted furiously to any suggestion that they had intelligence indicating he was a terrorist. The UK government went into reverse gear, giving a wonderfully contradictory press conference:

During a briefing to journalists on Tuesday, Prime Minister's spokesman said: "There is no suggestion that the UK passed intelligence to the US that they did not act on."

Sky's political correspondent Joey Jones said it had been an "awful" briefing.

"He tried to clear things up but only succeeded in muddying the waters still further," Jones said.

"After he read Downing Street's statement, the spokesman said there would be no further comment on intelligence issues.

"However, he continued to answer questions from journalists on the subject even saying: 'Whatever information was passed to the US, they did what they needed to do with it.'

"When I pointed out the contradiction, the spokesman said: 'It's not for me to comment on what the US should do with intelligence.'" - Sky News

Assuming the truth of this interpretation, whereby intelligence agencies failed in their role to act on information given to them to deter threats to the public they supposedly protect, it is an act of truly horrific doublethink for officials to react by insisting on tighter security at airports. In particular the use of full-body scanners, which are in no way a solution to the apparent failure of intelligence bureaucracies.

The images produced by these machines are so lifelike that there is already an outcry over the invasion of privacy, and concerns that they break child pornography laws in making images of nude children. In all likelihood making nude images of anyone without their permission is illegal, child or adult. However, given that the FBI has recently been accused by its parent Department of Justice of 'fabricating terror emergencies' to obtain phone records, it remains a real possibility that such invasive and explicit scanners could become the norm at Western airports.

If this happens, it will be another blow to the already struggling airline industry. Japan Airlines recently filed for bankruptcy despite a state bailout, capping a very bad couple of years for the travel business. In particular, oil prices and the impact on budget airlines of a drop in demand due to the recession have caused greater problems to carriers than 9/11. As discussed by Bilderberg report Daniel Estulin, this may have its origins in the peak oil scenario. This may also explain why the West is so keen to get involved in Haiti, though the US Geological Survey recently stated that Venezuela is now estimated to have the largest recoverable reserves in the world.

Back to the PG-13 terrorism, it is strange that while Mutallab himself is pleading not guilty that a recording allegedly made by Osama Bin Laden takes credit for the operation. For one, Mutallab is opening himself up to cross-examination by entering a not-guilty plea and is contradicting the 'willing martyr' ideology supposedly subscribed to by Islamikaze terrorist. Secondly, why is Bin Laden taking credit for what, if one presumes the whole narrative and mythology behind Osama, was a failed attack? In terms of psychological impact, a key concern of the 'Al Qaeda Manual', Osama taking credit for it only really suits the Americans (etc.) in bolstering the enemy image. It makes Al Qaeda look ridiculous if this is their best attempt against an airliner.

However, were the 'intelligence failures' in fact intelligence successes? The allegation has been made by several publications, most obviously Alex Jones's Infowars but also the Russian Pravda. In particular, Infowars picked up on three issues which indicate that Mutallab is something other than what he's cracked up to be. Firstly, when Mutallab tried to board in Amsterdam he apparently had no passport, but was allowed to board due to a 'well dressed Indian man' getting involved and apparently helping Mutallab to bypass security. This is based on eye-witness testimony from lawyer Kurt Haskell and his wife.

Further allegations of a cameraman filming the entire flight including the attempt by Mutallab to do whatever he was trying to do let infowars to conclude that the event was staged, that Mutallab is a patsy and that there may even have been two different Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab's. The reason given for this is so that the War on Terror can be expanded to include Yemen, itself a potential staging base for forays into East Africa. Either diplomatic pressure or the threat of military force will enable the US to treat the Yemeni territory as their own, and given the Chinese investment in East Africa the aim could be to destabilise the threat of progress for a region of the world that has been starving for a long time.

Running alongside the Mutallab story has been the saga of the delightfully named Islam4UK (phones4U). Anjem Choudary, spokesman for the organisation, is a long term associate of Omar Bakri and helped found Al-Muhajiroun, of which Islam4UK is a splinter group. Shortly after Mutallab's adventure a story hit the national British press that the group were planning a march in honour of the Muslims who have died in Afghanistan. The location chosen for the march was Wootton Bassett in Wiltshire, which has become a centre for British mourning of dead due to its proximity to RAF Lyneham. The British reaction was predictably xenophobic, with facebook pages being set up to demand the group be banned. For the most part the fact that the British were among the invaders and instigators of the war has been conveniently ignored, with the proposed march being dismissed as a 'stunt'.

By January 10th the media coverage led Islam4UK to announce that they were cancelling plans for the march. They also stated that the much-publicised detail that they were intending on carrying 500 coffins to represent the dead Muslims in Afghanistan was a fabrication, a conflation of details about the number intending to join the march and a comment made by Choudary. However, two days later the government decided 'if in doubt, ban al-muhajiroun', which is becoming the default policy for dealing with Muslim-oriented dissent. This ludicrous decision was rightly criticised by Liberal Democrat shadow home secretary Chris Huhne:

“There is a real risk they will paint themselves as martyrs while simply changing their name and carrying on, or going underground.” - Libdems.org.uk

There is more than a 'real risk' - if history is anything to go by then the group will reform under a new name while gaining support and credibility. While precisely what Choudary is remains unclear (he may not be a fundamentalist of any kind) the role of such organisations is to exploit the quite justified and reasonable outrage of ordinary Muslims at their treatment both by governments in the West and our military forces in the Middle East. However, just as banning the organisation plays into the hands of the organisation's leader, their exploitation of this outrage plays into the hands of the UK government who are trying to regain the support of the white working class. Oposition to immigration, multiculturalism and the right of religious peoples to believe different things is a frequent theme amongst poorer white British people, with Muslims a convenient scapegoat. By looking like they are 'cracking down on the extremists', the government gets a welcome boost from the conservatives and casual racists.

Crisis is often fabricated, whether it is through the semantic manipulation of the difference between single events, short term trends and overall patterns, or through incompetence dressed up as catastrophe, or through success being reported as failure. In all cases authorities not only fail to hold themselves to account, but seek to gain further power for themselves in the name of 'solving the problem'. The institutions of power not only provide a means for protecting their own, and scapegoating the odd rebel where necessary, but also for turning their own corruption and conspiracy into a reason to enhance, rather than disband, them. The real problems (pollution, postcolonialism and so on) remain because the policies being employed are never designed to tackle the real problems. Whether by accident or by design, they are designed to solve imaginary or misconceived problems, and so create new problems of their own which will in years to come have the public clamouring for a solution.