TerrorBall

On December 21st 1988 a bomb exploded aboard Pan Am 103, a transatlantic flight going over Scotland, headed for New York. The plane was destroyed in mid air, and sections of it rained down in and around the town of Lockerbie. 270 people were killed, including 11 on the ground, and as such it was, and remains, the most devastating act of terrorism to occur on British soil. Over a decade later in January 2001, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al-Megrahi was convicted of murder, though his co-accused was acquitted. Megrahi contested the conviction for years and numerous allegations arose of a corrupt investigation and a biased trial. There are good reasons to believe he is innocent.

One of the key pieces of evidence in the trial was a fragment of a circuit board from a timing device manufactured in Switzerland, a batch of which was said to have been sold to Libya. This turns out to be a complete fabrication. The owner of the Swiss company Mebo who manufactured the MST-13, Edwin Bollier, says that the FBI offered him $4 million in 1991 to testify that he had sold them to Libya. He refused, but one of his employees Ulrich Lumpert became a key witness at the trial. However, Lumpert now says that he lied in court, saying he stole a prototype MST-13 and gave it to someone investigating the Lockerbie bombing. Both a retired CIA officer and a former Scottish police chief have given statements that evidence was planted at the scene. Furthermore, the FBI investigator Thomas Thurman, who allegedly found the fragment on the ground, has been criticised for failing to properly oversee the forensic investigation of the 1993 WTC bombing, for routinely altering his scientific reports, and for lying in American murder trials.

Theories as to who really bombed Pan Am 103, and why, range far and wide, but unsurprisingly the name that keeps cropping up is the CIA. One story in particular is worth recounting. An attourney for the Pan Am airline hired Juval Aviv, president of a private intelligence firm called Interfor, to investigate the Lockerbie bombing. The airline was facing a lawsuit from victims families, alleging lax security, and needed to know whether to contest or settle. The Interfor report alleged that the bombing was carried out by the CIA against their own, to stop them from blowing the whistle.

The report says that Frankfurt was the centre for a CIA-protected Syrian heroin smuggling operation, whereby the CIA would ensure the Syrians could safely get their heroin into the US in exchange for the Syrians providing intelligence. Pan Am 103 was a regular scheduled flight through Frankfurt on the way to New York. This smuggling operation was run by probable triple agent Monzer al-Kassar and Mossad/PFLP-GC double agent Abu Nidal. At the same time (summer 1988) a separate CIA team went to Beirut to begin intelligence gathering for a possible hostage rescue.

Aviv goes on to say that Ahmed Jibril, founder of the PFLP-GC, a militant splinter group from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, knew about the Syrian-secured route through Frankfurt and decided to exploit it. He acquired a bomb and smuggled it through airport security by swapping it for luggage in the same manner as the Syrian heroin shipments. While this was in the works the second CIA team in Beirut discovered the protection their colleagues were giving to al-Kasser and Nidal's drug smuggling. They reported this to their superiors but received no word back.

According to the report, “The [McKee] team was outraged, believing that its rescue and their lives would be endangered by the double dealing.” - Lisa Pease, consortium news

By mid-December 1998, the Beirut team were planning to return to America to expose the smuggling operation. Around three weeks before the bombing Mossad warned the headquarters of the CIA and the German BKA (their equivalent of the FBI) that a major terrorist attack would happen at Frankfurt airport targeting a major US airline. Aviv's report says:

"Thereafter, the law enforcement presence, but not airline security, visibly increased around the other American carriers, but not Pan Am." - Interfor Report

Meanwhile, the CIA team in Frankfurt had learned of their being discovered by the group in Beirut through al-Kassar and around the same time both he and Nidal worked out Jibril's plan to bomb Pan Am 103. They wanted to protect their CIA-secured route so in the days prior to the bombing they tipped off the BKA about the danger to these flights, hoping Jibril would be intercepted and that they could carry on their smuggling. The BKA then told the CIA team in Frankfurt, who reported it to their superiors. CIA HQ then sent out warnings to various embassies and so on, but apparently not to Pan Am. By this time Al-Kassar's agents had discovered the Beirut team's plan to return to the US, including their travel plans which involved going through Frankfurt, and on Pan Am 103 to New York.

On the day of the bombing a BKA agent surveilling the baggage loading onto the plane noticed a bag very different to the ones normally used in the drug shipments. Concerned, he reported this to the CIA team on the job, who then reported it to their control.

Control replied: Don't worry about it. Don't stop it. Let it go. - Interfor Report

Among the dead at Lockerbie were five of the eight members of the Beirut team, on their way back to America. Also found was $500,000 in cash, an envelope marked '$547,000' containing travellers cheques, papers relating to the location of the hostages the team in Beirut were working to free and, according to local witnesses, large quantities of heroin. The Intefor Report concluded that the attack was enabled and allowed to happen by the CIA team in Frankfurt to prevent the exposure of the al-Kassar/Nidal drug smuggling. They considered the lives of their fellow CIA agents as worth less than the intelligence provided by the smugglers they were protecting. This and other stories are explored in Lockerbie and the CIA.



Libya is run by the military dictatorship of Col. Gaddafi, which recently celebrated 40 years in power. Despite, or in part due to the country's large oil and natural gas deposits, relations with this country are significant. In the early 1980s the US banned imports of oil from Libya, the start of a long period of economic sanctions by various White Houses. After Lockerbie, the UN and EU imposed their own set of sanctions. Gaddafi failed to cave. According to the model described by John Perkins, the economic hit men hadn't persuaded him to change his mind, so the jackals were sent in. In this case, MI6 funded Al Muqatila, a Libyan Islamic militant group, to carry out an assassination attempt in 1996. The attempt failed, killing civilians in the process.

However, Gaddafi does seem to have then changed his tactic and sought to reestablish relations with the West. In 1999 Libya handed over the two Lockerbie suspects for trial in Scotland. After Megrahi's conviction in 2001 they negotiated a compensation deal, formally accepting responsibility for Lockerbie and paying billions to the victims. ABC reported at the time:

Libya's Foreign Minister, Abdel Rahman Shalgham, has said that the Government will pay more than $16 million to each of the 270 victims after certain conditions are met.

He says Libya will pay the compensation in instalments after UN sanctions and then US sanctions against Libya are lifted. - ABC

The following year, in February 2004 then PM Tony Blair accepted a formal invitation to meet with Gaddafi, which he followed up in March with a visit to Tripoli. A further meeting took place in 2007.

The most recent chapter in these 'improved diplomatic relations' has seen Megrahi released from jail on 'compassionate grounds' after serving 8 years for the alleged murder of 270 people. Now, he is probably innocent, and so there's no problem with releasing an innocent man so he can live out his final months (he has cancer) in his homeland, but that isn't what has happened. Megrahi dropped his latest appeal against his conviction on August 18th, and two days later he was freed by Scotland's Justice Secretary.

This was a vastly unpopular decision among those who believe he is guilty - around two-thirds of Scots believe he shouldn't have been released. Likewise Ed Balls, the schools secretary who let the taxpayers foot the bill for his attendance at the 2007 Bilderberg club meeting, said that British ministers did not support the move. Most recently, details of a phonecall between president Obama and the unelected PM Gordon Brown were leaked, showing that contrary to the 'warm and substantive' conversation portrayed by Downing St. the president 'blasted' the prime minister.

As part of their coverage of the story the Daily Mail included a cartoon depicting a man rolling a barrel, Guy Fawkes-like, up to the door of 10 Downing Street. The suggestion seems to be that releasing a terrorist from jail is such a terrible decision that the Mail wants people to bomb the Prime Minister's house in protest. Truly ridiculous, even for doublethink.

On August 30th Jack Straw denied that Megrahi's release had anything to do with an oil deal, though leaked letters published the same day indicated the opposite was true. By September 5th, Straw had admitted the connection. Similarly, Gordon Brown initially refused to support the claims for compensation from victims of alleged Libya-assisted IRA bombings, but rapidly changed his mind and has now pledged his support. Royal Dutch Shell signed a deal with Libya at the time of Blair second visit in 2007, as did BP, largely to the exclusion of American Big Oil. The Megrahi release is one of Libya's pay-offs for that deal, reportedly also agreed at the time of Blair's 2007 visit. It will also help put an end to the 'conspiracy theories' about Lockerbie, as Megrahi is no longer appealing against his conviction.

There is another benefit, almost entirely overlooked in mainstream coverage of the case. Megrahi's release coincided with the culmination of the retrial of seven men accused of the airline liquid bomb plot. The Times, however, threw off some of the shackles and made the association.

The guilty verdicts returned against the key figures in the airline plot trial at Woolwich Crown Court were greeted with relief in Whitehall yesterday.

This had become the court case that could not be allowed to fail. The courts had to show that juries could handle complex terrorism cases and vindication was needed for stringent security at airports.

The Government also required a public declaration — more than ever now, given the damage done by the release of the Lockerbie bomber — that Britain was not soft on terrorism.

Questions persist, however, about why it has taken three years and more than £50 million to bring Abdulla Ahmed Ali and the other bombers to justice.

Their first trial ended inconclusively a year ago with a jury acquitting one man portrayed by the Crown as a significant terrorist and failing to agree on whether or not the plan to blow up airliners had ever existed.

That state of affairs could not be allowed to stand and a retrial began in March under a new judge who fired off repeated warnings to the media to report the case with great care. - The Times

While the Times sees the Megrahi release as a political reason why the trial had to produce guilty verdicts, there is potentially another influence. Megrahi's release may have helped induce the jury to return guilty verdicts, as the obvious backlash against the 'soft' decision to release Megrahi gave the jurors a clear message as to the spirit of the nation. After all, Megrahi was convicted of putting a bomb on a plane. If indeed the Megrahi deal was struck back in 2007, around the time of the oil deals and the Blair visit, then his release happening just as the jury in a terrorism trial retired to consider their verdict is very convenient for those playing Terrorball. The end of the trial also coincided with the run-up to the 8th anniversary of 9/11. This provided yet more context in which the jury were supposedly remaining impartial.

Perhaps it is therefore unsurprising that they ended up convicting three of the eight re-accused of the liquid airline bomb plot, and one further on the charge of conspiring to murder persons unknown. Ali, Sarwar and Hussain were all found guilty of this mysterious murder conspiracy with an undeclared, undefined target at the first trial, where the jury couldn't come to a verdict on the main charge of targeting airliners. At the second trial they were found guilty of the airline plot, though how just the three of them could have accomplished such an elaborate scheme isn't clear. The jury was hung on the issue of Umar Islam's involvement in the airline plot, but convicted him for the magical mystical murder conspiracy.

Savant, Khan and Zaman were all found not guilty of the airline plot, after the original trial's jury couldn't come to a verdict, but they may all face yet another trial for the unknown murder conspiracy after the jury in effect repeated the indecision of their predecessors. In off the bench for possible provocateur Mohammed Gulzar, found innocent of everything at the first trial, was Donald Stewart-Whyte. Like many substitutions, it seems he was just there to make up the numbers, and possibly so people would forget about Gulzar. Whyte was also exonerated on all counts and it isn't clear why he wasn't prosecuted at the first trial but was at the second. Indeed, it isn't clear why he was prosecuted at all.

The so-called 'martyrdom' videos of the accused played a strange role in this trial. The defendants said they were for a protest documentary, but according to John McDowall, head of the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command:

“They claimed the videos were threats designed to influence the Government and intimidate the public. The jury rejected this, instead accepting the clear evidence that they were a pre-cursor to their attempted martyrdom." - metpolice

However, Savant, Khan and Zaman all made 'martyrdom' videos and they were found not guilty of the airline plot by the same jury. Khan is of particular interest because he was approached by MI5 who apparently tried and failed to recruit him as an informant. Whether this was Khan or someone else, the Times reported during the original arrests in August 2006 that MI5 may have had a mole within the group. This is supported by the allegation made by Andy Hayman (former assistant commissioner of the met police) that the US-led arrest of the original alleged mastermind Rashid Rauf nearly bungled the ongoing surveillance of the alleged liquid bomb plotters. This chimes with reports from the time of the arrests saying they were hurried by pressure from Washington, and that the authorities wanted to monitor the men for longer.

Despite this extensive monitoring it is still uncertain where the plot originated, if indeed there was a plot. Evidence introduced at the second trial but not the first was used by the prosecution to intimate that shadowy forces in Pakistan were behind it all. A series of truly bizarre e-mails were presented as 'coded messages' between Ali and Sarwar in Britain and apparent Al Qaeda ringleaders in Pakistan. They were published by the BBC, who said:

One of Ahmed Ali's contacts is thought to have been a British man, Rashid Rauf, who helped plan plots for al-Qaeda. It's unclear whether he received any of these e-mails directly. - BBC

Rashid Rauf was the original alleged mastermind of the plot and seems to disappear, reappear, die and resurrect at the behest of the security services, as previously discussed here. He is now once again being reported as alive, and allegedly plotting a new wave of attacks on Britain involving airliners. Similarly, though he was acquitted at the original trial Mohammed Gulzar was used by the prosecution as part of their argument in the retrial.

From late July the cell's activities intensified, following the arrival of Mohammed Gulzar, a man the police said was the "superintendent" for the plot. He flew into the UK on 18 July on a false passport under the name of Altaf Ravat. At the first trial last year he was cleared of all charges, but the prosecution still maintained in court that he played a key role.

Gulzar, originally from Birmingham and a friend of Rauf, was wanted for questioning over a murder in the UK and had previously fled to Pakistan and later South Africa. He arrived at Heathrow airport with a new wife he had met at Islamabad airport just a few months before, which the crown said was part of his cover. The couple had spent a short holiday in Mauritius as part of their honeymoon. The court heard that in the days following Gulzar's arrival, cell members purchased equipment from stores such as Ikea and Tesco, including beakers, syringes, storage jars and suitcases to store materials in the woods near Sarwar's home. - Guardian

Exactly what has now happened to Gulzar isn't certain, but that the prosecution were still portraying a vindicated man as the 'superintendent' of the plot during the retrial not only adds weight to the suggestion that he was a provocateur, it also speaks volumes for the ludicrous nature of the retrial. If a man has been found innocent of the charges then the prosecution should not be able to continue to make such allegations. Indeed, the allegations should be classed not only as inadmissable evidence, but potentially as defamation. Gulzar could sue them, though obviously that won't happen if he's working for the same masters as the state prosecution lawyers.

Aside from Rauf and Gulzar, the press have now tried to introduce a third apparent Al Qaeda mastermind - Abu Ubaida al-Masri. He is another curious character. The Daily Mail published an article about him on September 8th, saying that the end of the liquid bomb (re)trial meant they could 'reveal his role' in orchestrating not only that plot, but apparently also 7/7, the 21/7 'bombings' where there were no bombs and the fertiliser plot. There is very little evidence for this, and al-Masri is conveniently dead as of April 2008, though like Rashid 'Lazarus' Rauf that status may be revised as time goes on.

However, it is worth noting that al-Masri fought in the West's dirty wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Chechnya, linking him to the long history of involvement of mujahideen in black operations. He turned up in Munich in 1995 seeking asylum, and though he associated with various local 'Al Qaeda' members he lived there apparently without any problems for four years. In 1999 his claim for asylum was finally rejected and he was jailed pending deportation, but then released for no obvious reason. During the same period he also lived in Britain. Strangely, while the Daily Mail claims that they could only talk about his role after the end of the trial, American news outlets such as Foxnews and the LA Times have been banging on about him for over a year.

In sum, an investigation and prosecution lasting three years, costing over £100 million, called the 'biggest in British history', using two trials and four juries (two juries in the retrial were dismissed due to disagreements and fallings out, though the media widely report the fourth jury as the second), still required the 'coincidence' of the 8th anniversary of the world's most famous terrorist attack, and the 'coincidence' of the release of a man accused of blowing up an airliner, to convict three guys of plotting to blow up airliners.

A final 'coincidence' in this recent game of Terrorball is the release of a picture of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Having been imprisoned, and frequently tortured, in Guantanamo Bay for several years the new image is somewhat different from the old one, and may not even show the same person. KSM was the basis for much of the 9/11 Commission's version of events, or at least statements attributed to him by the CIA. He confessed to his involvement in the attacks, and some other stuff he wasn't even accused of, and dismissed his military-appointed lawyer in the hope of speeding up his 'trial' and execution.

He wants to be a suicide defendant if you like, as opposed to a suicide bomber. - Daily Mail

In keeping with this very convenient persona the new image shows him dressed like Osama Bin Laden, with an extraordinarily long beard. Also, the pictures have been doing the rounds on the internet for some weeks it was only on the day prior to the anniversary of 9/11 that the mainstream media started publishing the one of his looking like Bin Laden. Just in case you are in any doubt what reaction you are meant to have, the BBC quoted a 'terrorism researcher':

What's problematic for me is it really humanises the guy - BBC

The last thing the Terrorballers want is for us to see someone like KSM as a human being, because it might undermine the years of effort they've put into treating them like vermin and convincing us that that any concession to human rights for suspected terrorists is 'crazy'.

Normalising Conspiracy

The International, released this year, is a conspiracy thriller very much in the American cinematic tradition. Conspiracy thrillers first became part of the popular mainstream in the 1970s, probably due to the Watergate scandal which took down the Nixon presidency and paved the way for the neoconservatives and their puppet Gerald Ford, but herein lies a tacit but significant distinction - Hitchcock's movies were 'horror' movies, not 'conspiracy thriller' movies, a distinction of genre classification but a telling one. The 'conspiracy thriller' as a genre was invented in the 1970s.

While most of Hitchcock's movies contain some sort of conspiracy they aren't referred to as such. The Trouble With Harry is a farcical story where a body discovered on a hill is buried, dug up and reburied several times over and all the characters who (falsely) believe themselves to be responsible for the man's death persuade others not to tell the authorities, which would make them accessories to murder or at least manslaughter. The film is of course a comedy, but this sort of 'domestic conspiracy' is a common theme in virtually every movie Hitch made, and they are some of the most popular and critically acclaimed films of all time.

When the conspiracy genre began identifying itself as such the influence of Watergate, and probably the assassinations in the 1960s, meant that the majority of such films and TV shows portrayed governmental conspiracies. There were exceptions, such as Chinatown and some other film noir, but All the President's Men, Capricorn One, The ODESSA File and the rest mostly overlooked the role of corporate interests. The International is somewhat different, in that the organisation being investigated is an international bank, mostly based on BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, who had connections to everyone from the Triads to Al Qaeda to the Iran Contra affair, though some plot elements appear to be adapted from the Banco Ambrosiano scandal. However, the presence of conspiratorial storylines in films beyond the explicitly named genre is widespread.

IMDB's top 250 films include in the upper echelon of the list the first two Godfather films, the mafia being the most widely portrayed conspiracy in film and TV history (though never referred to as such); Pulp Fiction, which is also about organised crime; The Dark Knight, a film where a terrorist conspires to blackmail not only organised criminals but also the hi-tech vigilante fighting them; several Star Wars films, a saga in which two groups of religious fundamentalists wage holy war against each other across an entire galaxy; Goodfellas; Fight Club; The Usual Suspects; Se7en; Leon and so on. We love conspiracy in our entertainment, that much is in no doubt.

A glance at the top rated movies for the 1990s compared the 2000s does show that while the immediate post Cold War period was riddled with conspiratainment, the new century is less so. This is in part down to the popularity of 'independent' media producers like Alex Jones, who provide conspiratainment for as many people as vote on IMDB, but aren't recognised by such populist websites. People are still getting their fill of conspiracy, just not so much through Hollywood movies. Nonetheless, the James Bond film franchise (the longest running in western cinema) remains commercially and critically successful.

One might argue that this is because these stories are fictional, but a great many of them were inspired by real life events. Capricorn One sought to capitalise on very real scepticism about the reality of the Apollo program, Executive Order is about the JFK assassination, 'Jedi' is clearly derived from 'mujahideen' and so on. Beyond that, real life news is full of conspiracies, they just aren't called that. Pop music legend Michael Jackson died around six weeks ago, and the press is still writing almost daily stories alleging some sort of plot or conspiratorial deception. Secret lovechildren, allegations by close relatives that he was murdered for his money, or by his doctors, or because he was going to make a public stand on Iran, and any number of other suggestions have found their way into the reporting on this. Even a relatively minor celebrity, David Carradine, couldn't die without allegations that he'd been murdered by an organised crime syndicate.

More recently a Brazilian TV show host and state legislator has been accused of ordering several murders so he could break the story on his show and boost his ratingsVirtually every major media organ has run this story in the last few days, and not a single one has questioned the plausibility of such a plot, and none have referred to it as a conspiracy. This is typical of the coverage of major crimes, see the equally recent UK jewel heist for example, and betrays a prejudice in how we commonly use the word and react to such events.

As noted, when applied to films the word is less problematic. This is partly due to the association between 'conspiracy' and 'theory', the ultimate implication being that conspiracies are only ever theoretical. This is nonsense, obviously, but that's the association most commonly driven into people through repetition. As such, fictional stories in films can happily be called conspiracies because they are theoretical, whether applied to governments or corporations. 'It is just a story' is an easy and often repeated response to anyone suggesting the themes of such films might be true.

However, 'domestic' conspiracy stories aren't referred to as such whether in the fictional realm of horror movies or the real life realm of crime reporting. People lie, cheat, steal, defraud on a virtually daily basis. Not all people, obviously, and not as a constant behaviour, but nonetheless pretty much everyone has planned in secret to do something bad, or forbidden, or illegal along with other people. As such, we're all conspirators, but conspirators unwilling to confront the reality of our behaviour.

This is particularly obvious in the use of the 'collapse' metaphor, most common when discussing finance and economics. The value of assets, the markets, confidence in financial institutions, and even the financial institutions themselves have been described as 'collapsing' or 'collapsed' in the last couple of years. Along with describing near-worthless assets as 'toxic' the vocabulary for describing the meltdown of the last few years is all organic analogies, all descriptions that imply the economic problems are either accidental, or incidental. No one is to blame, 'shit happens', don't bother trying to hold anyone responsible - that is the message of this vocabulary, adopted by economists, journalists and officials alike. Needless to say, virtually no one uses the word 'conspiracy'.

A useful parallel can be drawn with what happened to the twin towers of the WTC on 9/11. Their destruction is almost invariably described as 'collapses', even by those who advocate the theory that it was a controlled demolition. This is an example of doublespeak, from the mouths of those claiming to be concerned with the truth. Either the buildings collapsed, or they were demolished. Either it was incidental (the unpredictable result of planes flying into them) or it was deliberate. Not just in language, but practically speaking too due to the time necessary to set up such large buildings to be demolished. It would be more accurate to refer to them as demolitions if that is what you believe happened, or 'disintegrations' because 'demolition' implies the use of conventional high explosives, which may not have been the case.

What this vocabulary conveniently ignores, particularly when talking of a collapse in confidence, is the role of propaganda. It was in August 2007 that it became clear that the US sub-prime mortgage market 'collapse' was going to affect the global financial system when it was announced that securities back by these mortgages were found in the coffers of everyone from BNP Paribas to the Bank of China. Officially it took until October 2008, well over a year later, for the UK and US economies to enter a recession. Note also the doublespeak of describing a 'system' as suffering a 'collapse'. Why do systems collapse? Sabotage. For months and months the words 'meltdown' and 'crisis' appeared in every news outlet on a daily basis, financial analysts were given free reign to make catastrophic predictions. Then we saw the destruction of Lehman which was directly caused by the same banking cartel who have subsequently profited from buying up Lehman's assets for pennies.

The Goldman Sachs/Fox News response to suggestions that the bank may be deliberately manipulating markets for profit was to label such claims as 'conspiracy theories'. Back in January 2003, shortly before the UK helped invade Iraq, Bilderberg member Tony Blair likewise said that claims that the war was about oil were a 'conspiracy theory'. The phrase is used as a defence by the very people involved in making such plans that should legally and historically be termed conspiracies. If we refer to the Goldman directors, Rupert Murdoch, Blair and so on as a covert aristocracy (or agents thereof) they would sound ridiculous if they responded saying that was just an 'aristocracy theory', yet 'conspiracy' and 'aristocracy' are words of near identical origins. The suffix '-cracy' or '-cracies' from Greek simply refers to a structure of power or system of governance, hence autocracy, democracy, meritocracy and so on. 'Conspire' from Latin means 'to breath with' (con spire) and 'aristo' from Greek means the 'best' or 'most qualified' hence Aristotle.

Nonetheless, it doesn't matter how much banks, insurance and energy companies defraud their customers, their actions will not be referred to in the mainstream as a conspiracy, and people rightly calling them such will be labeled as conspiracy theorists. Destructions will be called collapses, carefully maintained systems will be described using organic metaphors and despite having abundant legal machinery with which to attack the criminal cabal, very few people will approach it realistically, because they lack the vocabulary with which to do so.

Despite this, conspiracy theories are quite widely held beliefs, particularly regarding 9/11. A Time magazine article from September 2006 noted:

A Scripps-Howard poll of 1,010 adults last month found that 36% of Americans consider it "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that government officials either allowed the attacks to be carried out or carried out the attacks themselves. Thirty-six percent adds up to a lot of people. This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a mainstream political reality. - Time

The very fact that Time was reporting on this issue without screaming 'conspiracy theory' is a sign of some progress, that regardless of the truth or falsity of any given allegation or interpretation of events, there is room to discuss them as competing possibilities. The Time article does present it as a binary issue, referring to two worlds, one where people belief the 9/11 Commission's version, and another where they believe in a Bush administration conspiracy, which is fallacious. Within the 9/11 Truth movement there is tremendous variety, both in terms of claims as to what really happened and in terms of the quality of the investigation. However, there being room for discussion and debate does not by itself explain the popularity of conspiracy theories, and associated political/historical viewpoints which are incorrectly labeled as conspiracy theories. As with the arrival of the 'conspiracy thriller' genre in the 1970s, there are reasons why this happened.

For one, the end of the Cold War circa 1990 was also the end of a certain political paradigm, of duelling superpowers with apparently opposed ideologies. What became abundantly clear was that the notion that the USSR (Communism) had lost and the US (Capitalism) had won was at best simplistic and at worst untrue. The promises of the 'free world' turned hollow, and much of the hatred and paranoia whipped up against the great 'Communist conspiracy' by free world propagandists became introspective, was refocussed on our own society.

Alongside this was the coming of age of various rules on declassifying papers. The thirty year rule in the UK, for example, meant that papers from the early days of the Cold War in the 1950s and 60s became available in the 80s and 90s. For earnest researchers this provided abundant confirmation of official deceptions, felonious plots at high levels of governments and so on. Gladio is a good example of this, as people had long suspected governmental/military involvement in various terrorist acts in the Cold War period. This was confirmed by Giulio Andreotti in August 1990, less than a year after the 'collapse' of the Berlin Wall.

A faction within the aristocracy responded with a new official conspiracy to replace communism - Islamofascism, and new conspirators to replace the USSR - Al Qaeda. That both are horrendous misnomers, if not outright lies, isn't necessarily important. What is important is that people believe in them in huge numbers. They might quibble over quite what Al Qaeda is and quite what the Islamofascists believe but their existence is mostly undisputed. It has the key facets of a conspiracy theory - a secretive band with agents of influence in dozens of countries is trying to take over the world, and yet you will struggle to find a single mainstream article naming it as such.

So not only is being involved in (domestic) conspiracy perfectly normal, so is believing in some or other conspiracy theory. Regardless of what you believe about 7/7 or 9/11 or 3/11 or Mumbai, chances are you believe in a conspiracy of some sort. A quick glance at the most commonly searched terms for the CIA's online reading room shows that UFOs by far outstrip any other topic. Alien conspiracies are also very popular, particularly in 1990s hit show The X-Files. The release of yet further British Ministry of Defence files this week only adds to the conviction, and the number of people who believe in them.

However, much of the dispute will revolve around the content of the files, whether or not the witnesses actually saw what they claim, what might cause the phenomena seen in the photos and so on. Very little attention will be paid to the fact that the MOD clearly has thousands if not tens of thousands of previously classified files relating to UFOs, dating from the period when the evidence for such entities (particularly extraterrestrial life) was officially denied and ridiculed. Consider this - if it was so ridiculous and scant, why did they classify it in the first place?

Consider also the testimony presented in this video, from a presentation by The Disclosure Project at the National Press Club in Washington DC in 2001. Think not only about whether the witnesses are reliable and telling the truth, but also whether such a meeting would have been possible a few decades earlier.

Manufacturing Counterculture

Manufacturing Consent is a documentary supposedly about Noam Chomsky's work of the same name, though ironically it functions as little more than an advert for Chomsky, essentially ignoring the book's other author Edward Herman. This is clear from comparing the subtitles of the book (published 1988) and the film (released 1992). The book's subtitle is 'The political economy of the mass media', the film's is 'Noam Chomsky and the mass media'. The man himself is introduced by the description 'the most important intellectual alive' and it continues in a similar vein.

The point here is that Chomsky is arguably the most important intellectual alive, because he's probably the most famous, the most widely read, and therefore the most influential. Not because he's got the best ideas and arguments, but because films such as this one have propelled him as close to rock star status as an MIT professor could hope to be. However, this means we should treat his work with the utmost caution, not with fawning praise and uncritical coverage, yet the latter is mostly what happens. However, from his philosophical bases to his advocacy of global government Chomsky appears at best a misguided and outmoded fool and at worst a shill of titanic proportions. Whether knowingly or otherwise, Chomsky is part of a dynamic of deception that affects everything from the shoes people wear to which country gets invaded this year.

Old Noam's background is in linguistics, and he belongs to a school of thought stretching back through the fraud Rene Descartes all the way back to the first writer of the dialectical method, Plato. This is significant, because Descartes willingly suppressed his own work at the behest of the Church during the Copernican revolution, and Plato was part of an aristocratic culture of knowledge where intelligent young teenage boys were sodomised by older men as part of their apprenticeship. Neither were men of great fidelity or credibility.

Descartes committed what I consider the greatest intellectual hoax of all time, and it has become the most quoted bit of philosophy of all time. This is 'cogito ergo sum', in essence 'I think therefore I am'. The argument in Rene's Meditations is essentially that one can doubt pretty much anything, except that oneself much exist, in order to be doubting the other stuff. 'I think, therefore I am', because I must exist in order to think. At first glance it seems a plausible argument, but it is an ideological confidence trick that makes Fukuyama seem like a parlour game. The most straightforward fallacy is that the argument is circular: 'I think, therefore I am'. Naturally, if you assume from the off that it is 'I' that is thinking, or that there has to be a 'I' that thinks at all, then you're going to conclude that this thing exists, because without it you're left with a tautology 'If I exist then I exist'.

Friedrich Nietzsche put forth essentially this sort of criticism in his most famous text Beyond Good and Evil, which is now the name of a popular computer game franchise.

There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are "immediate certainties"; for instance, "I think," or as the superstition of Schopenhauer puts it, "I will"; as though cognition here got hold of its object purely and simply as "the thing in itself," without any falsification taking place either on the part of the subject or the object. I would repeat it, however, a hundred times, that "immediate certainty," as well as "absolute knowledge" and the "thing in itself," involve a CONTRADICTIO IN ADJECTO; we really ought to free ourselves from the misleading significance of words! The people on their part may think that cognition is knowing all about things, but the philosopher must say to himself: "When I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence, 'I think,' I find a whole series of daring assertions, the argumentative proof of which would be difficult, perhaps impossible: for instance, that it is _I_ who think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an 'ego,' and finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking--that I KNOW what thinking is. For if I had not already decided within myself what it is, by what standard could I determine whether that which is just happening is not perhaps 'willing' or 'feeling'? In short, the assertion 'I think,' assumes that I COMPARE my state at the present moment with other states of myself which I know, in order to determine what it is; on account of this retrospective connection with further 'knowledge,' it has, at any rate, no immediate certainty for me."--In place of the "immediate certainty" in which the people may believe in the special case, the philosopher thus finds a series of metaphysical questions presented to him, veritable conscience questions of the intellect, to wit: "Whence did I get the notion of 'thinking'? Why do I believe in cause and effect? What gives me the right to speak of an 'ego,' and even of an 'ego' as cause, and finally of an 'ego' as cause of thought?" He who ventures to answer these metaphysical questions at once by an appeal to a sort of INTUITIVE perception. - Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

While Nietzsche calls believers in such Cartesian horseshit 'harmless observers' it has become clear that he's being too kind (or sarcastic). The assumption of one's own existence, of individual ego as the origin of thought, will, desire has become the dominating belief of the Western world in the 20th century, and on into the 21st. While conformity has in some ways never been more prevalent, the grand irony is that the thing to which the greatest number of people conform is this particular conception of individuality as origin. People cling to their mass produced cultural identities claiming to have chosen them for themselves. If this genuinely were true then the advertising industry would not be worth nearly 20 billion pounds in the UK alone.

So why is this such a tremendous hoax? For two reasons: firstly, because in allowing this fallacious presumptuous ideology to become dogma philosophy has become about the analysis of internal experience, about chipping away at words and creating ever complex ways of trying to describe the indescribable. All this time we should have been focussing on our role in the world, how we interact and develop as a result of that interaction, instead of some stupid reinvention of the notion of the eternal soul. Secondly, by taking this idea as the explanation for human behaviour people become intensely selfish, introspective and thus spiritually stagnant. The rise of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy has contributed to this immensely, as Cartesianism spread throughout the academy and spawned its own discipline. A sense of isolation followed, with people increasingly seeing others as competitors, or as means to an end for an aim they see as theirs alone. Frightened, distrustful, needy - the perfect citizen.

Chomsky does nothing to alleviate this, because as part of the same academy he cannot challenge what is so inherent to the intellectual system. In the video above he talks of a Cartesian 'common sense', saying that people just talking to each other demonstrates an inherent creativity that separates us from all other animals. As a critical writer on the left old Noam should be familiar with the work of George Orwell, in particular his essay Politics and the English Language, since Noam is a political writer with a background in linguistics. There, Orwell explains how imprecise use of language encourages imprecise thought, so instead of being masters of language, using it in the way most useful to our needs, it is a means of encouraging anodyne, repetitive thinking and using people's mouths as just another means of spreading propaganda.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. - Orwell, Politics and the English Language

Noam is someone who should, and probably does, know better. However, his answer of praising 'common people' is more about cultivating popularity than it is about a realistic explanation of the philosophical and political relevance of language.

The film briefly explains Chomsky's contribution to linguistics, and while it flatteringly tries to portray the notion of Universal Grammar as revolutionary it is little more than a reworking of Plato's notion of innate ideas, that the mind has inherent structures common to all people which enable them to learn language. As Noam argues, 'if you took a Japanese child and brought it up in Boston it would grow up speaking Boston English, if you took my child and brought it up in Japan it would grow up speaking Japanese' and therefore it 'logically follows' that there is a structure common to all languages that 'flows from' an inherent structure in all human minds. Of course, Chimpsky is assuming that one can treat languages (and for that matter human minds) as distinct, fixed entities, because otherwise one literally couldn't make the argument that he's making. As such, there are implicit proposition in his argument and his claim that it 'logically follows' is nothing more than arrogant bluster. Put another way, if one defines language as an activity rather than a structured entity then there's no need to confine oneself to a discussion about inherent structures in the mind. Besides which there are rather obvious structural difference between alphabetic languages such as modern (or 'Boston') English and idiogrammatic languages like Chinese, as Derrida discussed in detail.

This particular intellectual debate reached something of a pinnacle in 1971 in a recorded live debate between Noam Chomsky and poststructuralist Michel Foucault, a man well versed in the work of anti-Cartesians such as Nietzsche. Foucault consistently pointed out the assumptions Chomsky was making and rephrased a number of his arguments more accurately and acutely. The whole debate was broadcast on Dutch TV, and you can watch a telling extract below:

Foucault explains how Chomsky's narrative of liberation is based in the very social mechanisms that he says he is seeking to overthrow, and that he is using concepts derived from a particular philosophical tradition which itself has much to answer for in the formation of the institutions that should be overthrown, or at least radically altered. As radical as Chomsky might seem in the stuffy corridors of MIT, or in what remains of the progressive Left in America, sat alongside Foucault he comes across as conservative. In terms of being able to critically respond to the models of progressives like Chomsky, a lot depends on one's awareness of other possible ways of looking at the world. Despite being a self-proclaimed anarchist Noam goes on in Manufacturing Consent to state that the 'totalitarian society' that existed in the US during World War 2 'was justifiable due to the wartime conditions'. For all his discussion about inalienable rights, an inherent human need for creative work and the merits of libertarianism when it comes down to it Noam is happy to see fascism fighting against fascism.

Why is this important? Primarily because Noam is so famous and so widely read, and to a great many people he represents the alternative political perspective. In talking about propaganda in the way he does (five filters and all) he encourages a specific view of it and way of analysing it. The things Chomsky doesn't talk about (false flag terrorism, the creation of money as debt, secret societies and so forth) are widely ignored, or even ridiculed, by those who consider themselves radical and alternative. Control of the mainstream is a given in any system of political propaganda, but control of the fringe is if anything more important, because it enables the distraction and diversion of decent, intelligent people who might otherwise prove difficult for the ruling class.

One of the more notorious examples of this is the FBI's COINTELPRO program, formally run from 1956 to 1971. They targeted and infiltrated radical groups and either sought to destroy or discredit them or if necessary take out their leadership. Nearly a year before the much-disputed assassination of Martin Luther King FBI director J Edgar Hoover wrote:

The purpose of this new counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder. - Hoover memo, August 1967

Likewise, according to Vincenzo Vinciguerra supposed neo-nazi terrorist group Ordine Nuovo had no political ideology, and were nothing more than an instrument of 'parallel' networks maintained by the intelligence and security services. during the Mossadegh coup in Iran in 1953 the CIA paid protestors to cause trouble on the streets, adding to the tension and making it appear like a popular insurrection from within. The following year during operation PB/Fortune, the CIA's plan to get rid of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala veteran covert operative and Watergate burglar E Howard Hunt was the head of propaganda for the mission. Echoing what Orwell said about language, in his memoir he wrote that the mainstay of the psychological warfare part of the operation was a guerilla radio broadcast. Hunt wrote:

Relatively few Guatemalans owned a radio at the 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. - Hunt, American Spy p74

Thousands of anti-communist pamphlets were dropped in towns, an Archbishop was persuaded to write a letter urging the people to rise up against the allegedly communist leadership, housewives were even taught to riot in the street, banging pots and pans in protest. Students were coerced into a widespread graffiti campaign, and fake death notices about the president were sent out to local newspapers to disrupt the agrarian community from which Arbenz was given so much support. Under the guise once again of an internal revolution, the CIA ousted a leader who was trying to help peasants, and radical students groups aided the rise to power of the military dictator Castillo Armas.

One man fighting in Guatemala on Arbenz's side was Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, a communist revolutionary who would lead the CIA on a chase halfway around the world until his assassination in 1967. Hunt commented that letting Che leave Guatemala after Arbenz had been ousted was the greatest regret of his professional career, however the image of Guevara's face, typically reproduced black on red, dominates a huge range of mass produced products, initially in the counterculture but now in the mainstream.

Along near identical lines, when punk first because popular in the mid to late 70s certain groups explicitly identified themselves with the symbols of communism, notably lead singer of The Clash Joe Strummer, pictured wearing a Brigade Rosse/Red Army Faction t-shirt.

These symbols, though typically of the Soviet Union rather than militant groups, became mainstream fashion in the 1990s, with even sportswear giant Addidas getting in on the action. Much like grunge, then into goth/metal, at least in the UK these were the accepted symbols of the youth who wants to look their best while sticking it to 'the system'. What this illustrates is not just how the fringe often becomes the mainstream, but how the very symbols of the old enemy are now the carefully branded, pre-packaged alternative for those who want to conform to non-conformity.

What it also illustrates is just how easily people can be made to see the very images and emblems of totalitarian regimes as a fashion choice, and therefore an expression of their ego. So much for Chomsky's common sense when you see 'freethinking' adolescents volunteering their bodies as adverts for the symbology of control, in short, when they are so carefully indoctrinated that they see wearing a communist uniform as their own choice. My advice is to get ahead of the game - get a Kosovo Liberation Army uniform and t-shirt with Bin Laden's face on.

Curiously, when Prince Harry wore a Nazi armband to a friend's party there was enough controversy that an official apology was issued. However, while Nazism is still a little too close to home, Stalin and Mao appear on t-shirts in much the same way Barack Obama does, as is wonderfully satirised at the start of an episode of Peep Show. One particular tale sums up just how easily capitalism and communism, the corporate and state machinery, combine and how their symbols have become 'superbrands', in the sense used by Naomi Klein in No Logo.

As documented by Anthony Sutton, the Caterpillar Tractor Company was critically involved in a transfer of technology to the Soviet Union which enabled them to develop their tanks. They were involved in the first five year plan in 1930 and the Chelyabinsk plant was started in the same year. It would end up producing tractors that were virtually identical to Caterpillar models, and from there adapted the technology for use in tanks. In 1980 they were still involved, through the Russia No. 6 project which built a huge pipeline to get Siberian gas to the Western European market. In 1986 the company changed its name to Caterpillar Inc. and by the 1990s had developed into a fashion label brand. Though they initially broke into the market with rugged-looking footwear, presumably so middle class suburbanites could pretend they worked on oil rigs, they have expanded into a huge range of shoes aimed at an array of markets. They even have their own fashion shows.

The Rolling Stones, fronted by middle class boys from Kent, with a lead singer who studied business courses at the LSE, were identified as devilish, rebellious and thus icons of 60s counterculture. However, the most satanic thing Mick Jagger ever did was draw a crude image of a goat on his chest which he revealed while performing 'Sympathy for the Devil' at the Rock and Roll Circus in 1968. The Stones have appeared on movie soundtracks for decades, even having a film named after one of their songs, and were the first band to embark on a corporate sponsored stadium rock tour in the 1980s. By 1997 Tommy Hilfiger had taken over from Jovan (a perfume company) and had the rights to clothe not only Mick Jagger but also the support act Sheryl Crow.

From protest movements to pop music the inside (the mainstream) and the outside (the fringe) are largely defined, mediated and regulated by the same people and institutions. Though corporate branding has taken over much of the propagandist role previously adopted by intelligence services the outcoe is much the same. Whether intentionally or not, Chomsky participates in this by defining the alternative to mainstream political discussion, but when the alternative to arch-globalists is a man who advocates global government it's not surprising to see a backlash of sincere criticism.

A study of Chomsky's stands on particularly dreadful actions such as JFK's assassination, 9/11, and with regard to the roles of the CIA and FBI, shows Chomsky to be a de facto defender of the status quo's most egregious outrages and their covert agency engines. He conducts his de facto defence of the Empire he appears to oppose through applying the very propaganda methods against which he has warned, including use of the derogatory phrase "conspiracy theorist," which in one context he has characterized as "something people say when they don't want you to think about what's really going on."

His recommendation that people practice "intellectual self-defence" is well taken. But how many could dream the person warning you is one of the most perilous against whom you'll need to defend yourself? That he is the fire marshal who wires your house to burn down, the lifeguard who drowns you, the doctor with the disarming bedside manner who administers a fatal injection? If Noam Chomsky did not exist, the diaboligarchy would have to invent him. To the New World Order he is worth 50 armoured division. - Barrie Zwicker, Towers of Deception

Zwicker, a Canadian journalist and media critic, has written extensively on 'conspiracy theories' and the role of not only mainstream but also more fringe, progressive media in refusing to discuss matters of critical importance. To finish this time here's one example of his work that is widely referenced and admired - The Great Conspiracy: The 9/11 News Special You Never Saw.

Please sir, I want some more

Charles Dickens' novel Oliver Twist, published in the late 1830s, has been adapted for the screen and TV several times, the above comes from the 1960s musical 'Oliver'. It tells the story of a young boy living in poverty in industrial Britain. The eponymous hero was born into a workhouse, a provision of the 1834 Poor Law (Amendment) Act. The 1830s was supposedly a time of progressive reform by the British Whig government, but that is as misleading as viewing today's liberal reforms in the same light.

1832 saw the 'Great' Reform Act which promised to extend voting rights and clean up the electoral system. In truth the franchise was extended to over 600,000 (from a population of around 14 million) and they cleaned out the 'rotten boroughs' of the old system. The rotten boroughs were truly incredible: at the time England and Wales were divided in counties and boroughs, both of which returned (elected) members to parliament. However, there was tremendous inconsistency in the number eligible to vote in each constituency - Yorkshire (a county) had more than 20,000 voters, Westminster (a borough) more than 12,000 but they elected two members to the House of Commons just as did Dunwich (population 232, voting population of around 30) and Gatton (population 146, voting population 7). As such, the local baron would tend to in effect elect himself to one of the two seats available, and sell the other to another rich bastard. Just as it is only fair to say it was a step forward for democracy to eliminate these rotten boroughs it is only fair to point out it was ridiculous that it took until the 1830s to do this.

The reality of 'Great' Reform Act was that it did little to amend the functioning of Parliament. This was shown by the persistence over the following decade and a half of a movement known as Chartism, which originated in the London Working Men's Association. They came up with six points of reform, most of which were eventually adopted in later legislation:

THE SIX POINTS OF THE CHARTER
1. A vote for every man twenty one years of age, of sound mind, and not undergoing punishment for crime.
2. The ballot —To protect the elector in the exercise of his vote.
3. No property qualification for members of Parliament—thus enabling the constituencies to return the man of their choice, be he rich or poor.
4. Payment of members, thus enabling an honest tradesman, working man, or other person, to serve a constituency, when taken from his business to attend to the interests of the country.
5. Equal constituencies securing the same amount of representation for the same number of electors,--instead of allowing small constituencies to swamp the votes of larger ones.
6. Annual Parliaments, thus presenting the most effectual check to bribery and intimidation, since though a constituency might be bought once in seven years (even with the ballot), no purse could buy a constituency (under a system of universal suffrage) in each ensuing twelvemonth; and since members, when elected for a year only, would not be able to defy and betray their constituents as now. - Chartists.net

Interestingly, not even the Chartists advocated female suffrage and it took almost a century after the 'Great' Reform Act for women to be granted the right to vote, just as it took decades to legislate for the tenuous masquerade of democracy we enjoy in Britain today.

1833 saw the passing of a long overdue piece of legislation - the Slavery Abolition Act. While the trade in slaves had technically been abolished by the 1807 Act, slavery itself was allowed to continue perfectly legally. This 'anomaly' was cleared up by the 1833 Act, but only freed slaves under the age of six. Older slaves were redesignated 'apprentices' and had to work a given term to gain their freedom. Compensation to around 40,000 slave owners ran to £20 million, a hell of a lot of money in those days, when the total government budget for the year was only £51 million. Public debt was over £780 million, the country effectively bankrupted by the Rothschild influence on the Bank of England.

This presented a significant economic problem for the British government, and therefore the British Empire. To keep costs down, they exempted from the Abolition Act all territories under control of the East India company, a true prototype for the corporatocracy. Much like Halliburton in today's Iraq, the East India Company was an elite conglomerate of commercial interests who monopolised monopolised the bounty offered by what we now just call India. Locals were colonised, authorities bribed and coerced, tax revenues siphened out of the country, private armies hired to quell those who dared oppose corporate rule: it really hasn't changed that much in two centuries.

However, at the same time as allowing slavery to continue in India, the UK government divested the East India Company of its commercial operations when they renewed its charter in 1833. The governmental operations (military provision and so on) continued, retaining colonial control but trade with India was now open to any merchant with the capacity to get ships halfway round the world. This allowed for a greater regulation of Home Charges, whereby the Indians paid for the colonial authority which allowed the continuation of slavery. By centralising the authority responsible for governing India it became easier to levy these charges. As commercial exploitation increased, so did the power of the colonial government.

While this did enable an increase in trade which no doubt contributed to the sustained economic growth of industrial Britain this didn't solve the government's economic problems. In 1834 they passed the Poor Law (Amendment) Act, which reduced expenditure on the domestic poor. Under prior schemes such as the Speenhamland system, labourers suffering from spiking food prices would have their wages topped up based on current bread prices. According to the Royal Commission this undermined the wages of slightly wealthier workers who didn't qualify for relief, and encouraged employers to pay low wages. Similarly, Malthusians on the Commission argued that such relief only encouraged poor families to have more children, thus exarcerbating the problem.

So the Act established a National Commission who oversaw the running of workhouses, essentially labour camps for the poor. Families were separated, often as soon as they entered the workhouse. The workhouses themselves were designed on the principle of 'less eligibility', where conditions for those inside were worse than that of the lowest paid labourer on the outside. This aimed to discourage any but the most desperate of people from entering the workhouse. One notable man who spent some of his youth in such an institution was Charles Chaplin and Oliver Twist was in part written as a rejection and protest against the Poor Law system.

One somewhat-overlooked aspect to both the recommendations of the Royal Commission set up to study the operation of the Poor Laws, and the 1834 Act itself, is the principle of segregating 'different types of paupers'. The old would be separated from the young, able bodied men separated from able bodied women, the infirm and disabled somewhere else. Indeed, while the Poor Law Commission had no authority to build new workhouses it did have far-reaching powers to strictly control conditions within existing ones. What people ate and wore, as well as moral standards (unmarried mothers were treated particularly badly) were all be dictated by the Commission. While the British are credited with creating concentration camps in South Africa at the end of the 19th century the philosophy that brought them about was clearly popular some 70 years prior when dealing with the domestic poor.

Aside from Malthus and utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham, who has propagated such ideas? According to conspiratorial histories of Freemasonry, very similar ideas are to be found among the Illuminati, a Bavarian cult founded by Adam Weishaupt, an agent of Amschel Mayer Rothschild, which took control of the international freemasonic movement in the late 18th century. Detailed in the highly controversial book Pawns in the Game by William Guy Carr is an alleged meeting in Frankfurt in 1773 attended by AM Rothschild and a dozen other wealthy and powerful men. Rothschild apparently outlined a 25 point plan by which they could take over the world.

14. He next explained the necessity of having their ‘Agentur’ always come out into the open, and appear on the scene, when conditions had reached their lowest ebb, and the masses had been subjugated by means of want and terror. He pointed out that when it was time to restore order they should do it in such a way that the victims would believe they had been the prey of criminals and irresponsibles. He said “By executing the criminals and lunatics after they have carried out our preconceived ‘reign of terror’, we can make ourselves appear as the saviours of the oppressed, and the champions of the workers.” The speaker then added “We are interested in just the opposite ... in the diminution, the killing out of the Goyim."

15. He next explained how industrial depressions and financial panics could be brought about and used to serve their purpose saying “Enforced unemployment and hunger, imposed on the masses because of the power we have to create shortages of food, will create the right of Capital to rule more surely than it was given to the real aristocracy, and by the legal authority of Kings.” He claimed that by having their agentur control the ‘Mob’, the ‘Mob’ could then be used to wipe out all who dared to stand in their way. - Pawns in the Game

Regardless of whether Amschel Rothschild every actually called this meeting and said these things, it is an apt explanation of how such ideas can be part of a framework of control. Despite much vaunted progress for democracy and the poor, it appears the same philosophy is applied to the poor of numerous countries in the world.

Appropriately, this overarching policy comes with a crisis attached, the food crisis. In some respects, it is very real, far more so than terrorism or single motherhood or global warming. An average of 24,000 people die every day from hunger or hunger related diseases and the UN reported in December 2008 that around a billion people now suffer from starvation. These numbers had been heading in the right direction (slowly) until the 'global financial crisis'. As this peopleandplanet article notes, this isn't about the amount of food available - while population doubled over the last half century, food production tripled and life expectancy increased significantly. It is a political and economic decision to let these people starve.

The World Bank, run by a member of the Bilderberg Group, is doing its best to appear to be the 'saviour of the oppressed'.

"In London, Washington, and Paris people talk of bonuses or no bonuses. In parts of Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, the struggle is for food or no food," Zoellick said...

..."If leaders are serious about creating new global responsibilities or governance, let them start by modernising multilateralism to empower the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank Group to monitor national policies," Zoellick said. "Bringing sunlight to national decision-making would contribute to transparency, accountability, and consistency across national policies." - Financial Express

So what have the UN and World Bank done to alleviate the food crisis? So far, absolutely nothing to prevent or regulate the speculation driving the spikes in prices. Derivatives traders can make fortunes betting on the price of wheat or sugar and in doing so can drive prices up to the point that tens of millions more people can no longer afford to eat enough. The UN launched a National Basic Food Prices Data and Analysis tool. A self-styled 'early warning system' it aims to make information on food prices and markets more accessible, which will only encourage speculation.

The World Bank have seen this as business as usual, making $2 billion available to countries trying to battle the crisis. The countries in question:

GFRP is disbursing funds to Afghanistan ($8 million), Bangladesh ($130 million), Benin ($9 million), Burundi ($10 million), Central African Republic ($7 million), Djibouti ($5 million), Ethiopia ($275 million), Guinea ($10 million), Guinea-Bissau ($5 million), Haiti ($10 million), Honduras ($10 million), Kenya ($50 million, $5 million), Kyrgyz ($10 million), Laos ($3 million), Liberia ($10 million), Madagascar ($10 million, $12 million), Mali ($5 million), Moldova ($7 million), Mozambique ($20 million), Nicaragua ($7 million), Nepal ($36 million), Niger ($7 million), Philippines ($200 million), Rwanda ($10 million), Sierra Leone ($7 million), Somalia ($7 million), Southern Sudan ($5 million), Tajikistan ($9 million), Togo ($7 million), Yemen ($10 million), and West Bank and Gaza ($5 million). - World Bank

Though there are other countries borrowing money from this scheme, this list should show you that these are places which despite an awful history with debt have no choice, other than watching their people starve and having to explain why they didn't take the money. However, by creating this money as debt we perpetuate the inflation which means these countries can never even catch up with the prices of today, let alone get ahead of the prices tomorrow. We also keep these countries beholden to a system which has no intention of letting them develop economic independence, as Zoellick's comments make clear. By making debt and aid a policy we ensure continued control over the colonies and a monopoly on their resources, just as the East India Company did in centuries past.

Then there's genetically modified crops, a subject where much of the controversy surrounds a giant company, Monsanto, apparently owned by the Rockefellers. It's former Chairman and CEO Robert Shapiro attended the 1999 Bilderberg meeting. In the months prior to the club meeting in November, Monsanto and the Rockefeller Foundation staged a PR exercise to deflect attention away from a potentially devastating technology - so called 'terminator' seeds. In June 1999, Dr Gordon Conway, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, gave a speech to the Monsanto directors urging them not to take up terminator technology. By October, Shapiro had publically announced that Monsanto would not 'commercialise' the seeds.

However, this didn't stop Monsanto from making third world farmers sign contracts promising not to save seeds from their GM crops, effectively ensuring the same economic effect - that farmers have to buy new seeds every year. This sort of policy has the backing of the US Congress, who in 2007 endorsed a deal by the USDA where they are using public money to subsidise the agricultural insurance of farmers who plant GM crops.

The brutal impact of these policies is already being seen, and India is again one of the battlegrounds. In autumn 2008 it was widely reported that up to 200,000 farmers in India had committed suicide due to crop failure. The GM companies like Monsanto had moved in and convinced the farmers that if they bought the seeds they'd see harvests like never before, prompting the farmers to take out large loans to purchase the technology. When the crops failed the farmers were not only left with little or nothing to sell, but huge unrepayable debts. The farmers weren't even told that the GM seeds required twice as much water. Perhaps the most brutal aspect of this is that even the UN said in October that organic farming is probably the best option for farmers in developing countries.

It seems that scarcity (both real and artificial) has been generated so that the masses, the food producers in the developing world, are forced into accepting economic and technological systems of control. If they haven't planned this then it's gone remarkably well, shoring up an elite system where 2% of the population own half of the world's wealth. Howevever, they haven't stopped there. In Svalbard, a desolate rock in the Arctic Ocean, there is a 'doomsday seed vault' supposedly set up to preserve as many seed varieties as possible against threats to biodiversity. Behind blast-proof steel reinforced concrete walls sit genebanks containing millions of seed varieties. Essentially unmanned, it is nothing other than a private military installation.

Who has largely funded this project? The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, known depopulation enthusiasts, the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto, and European biotech giant Syngenta whose Chairman (who used to work for Barclays) attended the recent Bilderberg meeting.

Now is it simply philosophical sloppiness? What leads the Gates and Rockefeller foundations to at one and the same time to back proliferation of patented and soon-to-be Terminator patented seeds across Africa, a process which, as it has in every other place on earth, destroys the plant seed varieties as monoculture industrialized agribusiness is introduced? At the same time they invest tens of millions of dollars to preserve every seed variety known in a bomb-proof doomsday vault near the remote Arctic Circle ‘so that crop diversity can be conserved for the future’ to restate their official release? - globalresearch

The potential for a group of companies and foundations who both monopolise existing seed stocks and possess the technology to render any crop sterile are enormous. If they so chose they could wipe out pretty much the entire harvest of the world and make every food producer in the world pay to access the seed stocks in Svalbard. As globalist and depopulationist Henry Kissinger once said:

"If you control the oil you control the country; if you control food, you control the population." - Kissinger

To finish off, this documentary 'Controlling our Food' details the history and policies of Monsanto. For those with doubts that these companies and foundations could be capable of such horrific plans this uncompromising depiction will probably dispell such feelings as they tell the story of Monsanto product Roundup, a cancer-causing, non-selective herbicide that can kill just about any plantlife imaginaginable, and the technology produced by Monsanto which makes their plants resistant to its effects.