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.

Anthropogenesis

  

The only story in the news last week, that the Copenhagen Climate Conference Proceedings (CCCP) continued unabashed, illustrates just how the entire dialogue on environmentalism has been usurped for cold, calculating political purposes. Two weeks back, in an unprecedented move 56 of the world's newspapers, using 20 languages, published a common editorial.

The article states that 'humanity faces a profound emergency' and that unless we do what's already been decided we should do that 'climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security'. This is the same conclusive, didactic tone that dominates most major media coverage of such questions and issues, a tone that can never be supported by scientific evidence, largely because scientific evidence just doesn't work that way. That evidence can be used to support a theory and make predictions on the basis of that theory, but it can't tell you the future behaviour of complex systems with any guarantee of accuracy. This is commonly known as the butterfly effect. A butterfly flaps its wings in New York and ten hours later the weather in Peking changes.

So why did 56 of the world's newspapers do this? Newspapers are very much in competition with one another for readership and advertising revenue. This, rather than any sense of democratic responsibility, is the reason why the same story will be told differently by different outlets. Guardian readers will as a rule not touch the Daily Mail, and vice versa, though to someone with no affiliation they're both pretty poor. This latest move is only the culmination of a longstanding policy of unanimity amongst the mainstream media when it comes to discussing the possibility of an anthropogenic origin of climate change and therefore the need for widespread economic policies to counter the deadly climate change that will allegedly result. The epistemological basis for such claims doesn't exist, and the economics of running a newspaper would dictate that at least a token difference in content is a good idea, and yet some force was at play that overcame that.  

Some versions of the editorial made mention of the awfully-named 'climategate' scandal, where the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia university was hacked. Various e-mails and other files that were obtained by the hacker(s) are now widely available online, and despite the attempts to deny their significance they have given a boost to many of those people who are skeptical about whether global warming is taking place, or whether it has a human cause.  

The most obvious aspect of the e-mails is their vocabulary in discussing anyone who is even skeptical about the CRU's conclusions. While science is meant to proceed in an atmosphere of mutual skepticism and questionning, anyone deviating from the 'global warming is real and serious and caused by humans' belief is evidently seen as hostile, an opponent to be overcome. One e-mail from Phil Jones, the head of the CRU, describes the death of sceptic John Daly as 'cheering news'. Though this was said in a once-private email, it betrays an ugly attitude on the part of people whose professional obligation is towards careful questionning, not rejecting disagreement in all its forms.

The same attitude is seen in the emails discussing those who were using the Freedom of Information Act to get the data and models on which the CRU formed their conclusions, including the infamous hockey stick graph. In one, Phil Jones talks about how he'd rather delete the data than give it out (which is a crime), and about finding ways to hide behind the Data Protection Act. He also mentions an e-mail sent to him by former head of the CRU Tom Wigley, 'worried' that he'd have to give up the source code for his model. Wigley is now retired, and Jones suggests that this should be enough to protect him and his contribution. In another, Jones asks another member of CRU staff to delete emails that were also subject to FOIA requests.

The Canada Free Press recently published an article by Tim Ball, the man in the video above, profiling Jones and Wigley and how they'd been at the centre of the CRU and the IPCC throughout the period when climate science became so politicised. Indeed, one of the most recent e-mails of all is from Wigley to Jones, stating that land warming since 1980 is double the ocean warming, and that sceptics might use this to argue that the urban heat island effect is more influential than is accounted for in the models. Other e-mails from Wigley to Jones illustrate that despite his retirement, Wigley is very much still running the show at the CRU, including this e-mail in which he expresses concern at the 1940s warming 'blip' which they cannot explain. Ultimately, concern is at how to make the 'blip' disappear so as to not threaten the desired conclusion, rather than a genuine scientific concern that their conclusion might be wrong.

Another exchange from 2005 shows considerably more dissent and disagreement within the scientific community that the 'consensus' would have us believe. This gives credence to the over 30,000 scientists (including 9000 PhDs) who have signed a petition saying they are not part of the consensus. Going back to 1997 we find an email discussing how to manipulate media coverage to make it seem like the scientific community were far more unified that they were in reality:

Mike, Rob,

Sheikh, Rattle and Roll

In the build up to next month's UN-sponsored Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, President Obama is continuing a global tour which rivals anything the Rolling Stones have accomplished. With the president of the Maldives alleging that failure to negotiate an emissions reduction treaty constitutes a 'global suicide pact', the philosophy of making humans look like a planetary disease is becoming ever more firmly entrenched in the minds of global leaders. Climate Change hodbearer and UK Climate Secretary Ed Miliband has told us that a final treaty will probably not be signed at Copenhagen. Nonetheless, enhancements to the global governmental infrastructure are to be expected. Agreements will be made 'in principle' without any form of democratic representation, at a time when not even a bare majority believe that climate change is man-made. As detailed by former adviser to the PM Lord Monckton, a stern critic of climate change propaganda:

"I read that treaty. And what it says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word 'government' actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfaction of what is called, coyly, 'climate debt' - because we've been burning CO2 and they haven't. We've been screwing up the climate and they haven't. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement." - Christoper Monckton

The road to hell is paved with (seemingly) good intentions. It is unclear if Obama will attend the Copenhagen conference, as he's stated that he will only turn up if his presence will help clinch the deal. This betrays the true purpose of the Obama administration, to use an easily accepted figurehead to help grease the wheels of processes that go far beyond his authority. Nonetheless, he has been in China greeting the natives and criticising the nation for its censorship of the internet and poor human rights record. Just as the West wallows in hypocrisy over the issue of Chinese industrialisation and pollution, it makes frequent use of the portrayal of China as a totalitarian dictatorship while conveniently ignoring what's going on at home.

While Obama has been visiting Asia and saying he'll lend his pretty face to the advance of world government if required to do so the rebranded War on Terror is continuing on the home front. The alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM), along with four of his co-accused, will finally face a trial. The location? New York, which makes finding an impartial jury virtually impossible. Also significant is that according to the CIA torture memos released earlier in 2009 Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times. This will not only cause a legal problem for the prosecution, as Mohammed's confessions were given while he was being tortured, but is a grotesque human rights abuse on the part of the US government, as bad as anything China has done.

Numerous defences of the CIA rendition and interrogation (torture) program have been offered, including one from former head of the CIA and the NSA Michael Hayden:

If you want an intelligence service to work for you, they always work on the edge. That's just where they work," - Hayden, BBC

Apparently buying into this view, Obama granted immunity to all CIA staff involved, in effect endorsing the very security policy from which his administration claims to be a departure. However, the treatment of KSM (and others) does not constitute merely 'working on the edge'. Even the report of the Inspector General of the CIA states that after 'several applications' such 'enhanced interrogation techniques' are ineffective. One can only assume that the interrogators continued to torture Mohammed for fun, or out of a sense of professional responsibility. Either way, it is sadistic.

If the investigations and trial of the previous major terrorist attack on New York are anything to go by, the KSM and co. trial should provide some fireworks for those examining the 'intelligence failures that led to 9/11'. Shortly after midday on February 26th, 1993, an explosion rocked the basement of the North Tower of the WTC. Initially thought to be an electrical transformer explosion, it killed six people and injured over 1000. It is now widely considered to be the first stateless international terrorist attack on the US, carried out by Islamic fundamentalists. However, various details have emerged which cast quite a different light on what happened.

The NY 'cell' were based in the Al Kifah refugee centre at the Al Farooq mosque in Brooklyn. This building was one of dozens of worldwide branches of the Maktab al-Khidamat, a network of charitable and religious organisations which serve as recruiting and fundraising hubs for the mujahideen. Founded by Abdullah Azzam in the mid 1980s, this network was a vital part of the CIA's misadventures in the Soviet-Afghan war as it provided many wild-eyed young men to fight to the death against the Commies. Assets of the CIA took it over at the end of the Afghan war when Azzam was killed in a car-bombing in Afghanistan, followed by the assassination of the Imam of the Al Farooq mosque, Mustafa Shalabi, in 1991. Bin Laden and Zawahiri came to dominate the mujahideen and a new Imam was installed in the NY mosque.

That man was Omar Abdul Rahman, commonly known as the Blind Sheikh. He was the leader of Al Gama'a al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Group of Egypt. The Islamic Group was one of two main terrorist splinter organisations from the Muslim Brotherhood, the other being Zawahiri's Islamic Jihad. The Blind Sheikh came to the USA several times throughout the late 1980s on visas arranged for him by the CIA, with whom he was working as a recruiter and 'spiritual leader' for the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Despite being on the State Department's terrorist watchlist he entered the USA on a new visa in July 1990 and gained permanent residence status within two years. Despite his conviction for his role in a 'seditious conspiracy' in 1995 his visas were not revoked until five years after that. After Shalabi's death he took over the Al Kifah centre, and became notorious in New York for his rabid fundamentalist preachings. He is considered to be the ideological leader of the group initially convicted of the WTC bombing.

By the time of the 1993 bombing two significant events happened that strongly indicate ongoing protection for the Blind Sheikh from within the US security services, and their culpability in the attack. The first was the murder of racist Rabbi Meir Kahane by El Sayyid Nosair, a protege of the Blind Sheikh. In November 1990 Kahane was giving a speech at the Marriot Hotel in New York when Nosair shot him twice, fatally wounding the Rabbi. Kahane was leader of the militant Jewish Defence League, in effect the Zionist equivalent of the Blind Sheikh's Islamic Group. Two other members of the Al Kifah 'cell' were waiting in a taxi outside the hotel but were moved along shortly before Nosair came running out. Nosair set off down the road but was halted by an armed postal worker who took a bullet in the shoulder before shooting Nosair in the neck. Doctor's saved the Egyptian's life and he was remanded in custody. Though his two cohorts Mahmud Abouhalima and Mohammed Salameh were arrested, they were quickly released and the FBI ignored all evidence of a wider plot and pursued Nosair as a lone gunman. While Nosair was acquitted of murder (no witness had actually seen him pull the trigger, and there were others in the room who were armed) he was convicted on gun charges and sentenced. However, the FBI's investigation didn't sprawl into the role of the Blind Sheikh, who used Al Kifah money to contribute to Nosair's legal defence, or Abouhalima and Salameh, who would go on to be convicted for the 1993 WTC bombing.

Also ignored was Ali Mohamed, an Egyptian army officer who had been thrown out because of he was a member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. He then worked for the CIA as an informant, though officially they fired him because his mistakes ruined the operation. However, he then went to the US in 1985 on a similar CIA-sponsored visa as the Blind Sheikh. In 1986 he joined the US Army and was posted to the JFK Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where the US Special Forces are trained. Given the rank of Supply Sergeant he was also responsible for running a series of lectures explaining MIddle Eastern history and politics. In 1988 he told his superiors, including Lt.Col. Robert Anderson, that he was planning to use his vacation time to go and fight in Afghanistan. He returned after a month claiming to have killed two Spetsnaz Russian special forces soldiers, and showed off two army uniform belts he claimed to have taken from them. This should have caused great controversy as officially no American-enlisted soldier fought in the Soviet-Afghan war. Mohamed's superior Anderson wrote reports to try to get him investigated by Army intelligence and potentially court-martialed, but they were ignored.

Anderson said all this convinced him that Mohamed was "sponsored" by a U.S. intelligence service. "I assumed the CIA," he said. - San Francisco Chronicle

Ali Mohamed completed his term of service in 1989 but remained part of the US Army reserve for a further five years. In 1990 he became an FBI informant and remained one until his eventual arrest in 1998 after the African Embassy bombings. Though he then confessed to his role as an 'Al Qaeda operative' who was so close to Bin Laden that he trained the 'emir's' personal security men, Ali Mohamed has apparently never been sentenced and full details of his plea bargain are sealed.

Mohamed had various connections with the Blind Sheikh's group in New York, having met with them regularly at the Al Kifah centre during his time at Fort Bragg. He brought with him training materials - manuals, documents and videos - and taught the recruits the essence of guerilla warfare. Nosair was only one of his trainees, others included virtually the entire group responsible for the 1993 WTC bombing. However, Ali never faced any investigation for his involvement with the NY 'cell'. When Nosair, the Blind Sheikh and others were prosecuted for a 'seditious conspiracy' including the 1993 bombing and the assassination of Kahane, Ali was subpoenaed as a witness for the defence by Nosair's lawyer Roger Stavis, but couldn't be found.

As if those military and intelligence service connections weren't enough, the second major event on the road to the WTC bombing was the recruitment by the FBI of an informant called Emad Salem. Like Ali Mohamed he had been in the Egyptian army, though he had no affiliations with the Muslim Brotherhood. He was first recruited in the late 1980s, though the FBI didn't entirely trust him as they suspected he was working as a double agent for Egyptian intelligence so soon stopped using him as an asset. Eventually he came to work under a Texan agent, Nancy Floyd, initially providing information on KGB and Russian Mafia activities in New York. Salem then convinced Floyd that the greater danger came from the Blind Sheikh and his followers, and was transferred over to two members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, a multi-agency group in New York.

According to Peter Lance's lengthy accounts of this story Salem never got along too well with John Anticev and Lou Napoli, his two handlers, and was often debriefed by Floyd even though she was not officially responsible for him and worked in a different department. He successfully penetrated the Sheikh's group but he refused to wear a wire and insisted on not having to testify in court. Throughout this second period, from his first contact with Floyd in August 1991 to July 1992, when the FBI formally ended contact with him, Salem was largely unsupervised and the information he provided unconfirmed. He was let go by the FBI in the summer of 1992, apparently due to the new head of the JTTF not approving of Nancy Floyd's involvement in the case. Salem was recruited a third time to inform on the Blind Sheikh after the bombing in February 1993. Floyd, however, was hit with an internal investigation by the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility, and accused of various charges including having an affair with Salem and cooking the books on her expenses.

During his third period working for the FBI, Salem was paid over a million dollars and agreed to wear a microphone to record his conversations with the Blind Sheikh and his merry band of mujahideen. However, he also covertly recorded many of his conversations with his FBI handlers, and openly discussed just how involved he was with the WTC bombing plot. One particular dialogue between Salem and Anticev caused tremendous controversy.

Anticev: But, uh, basically nothing has changed. I'm just telling you for my own sake that nothing, that this isn't a salary, that it's—you know. But you got paid regularly for good information. I mean the expenses were a little bit out of the ordinary and it was really questioned. Don't tell Nancy I told you this.
Salem: Well, I have to tell her of course.
Anticev: Well then, if you have to, you have to.
Salem: Yeah, I mean because the lady was being honest and I was being honest and everything was submitted with a receipt and now it's questionable.
Anticev: It's not questionable, it's like a little out of the ordinary.
Salem: Okay. Alright. I don't think it was. If that's what you think guys, fine, but I don't think that because we was start already building the bomb which is went off in the World Trade Center. It was built by supervising supervision from the Bureau and the D.A. and we was all informed about it and we know that the bomb start to be built. By who? By your confidential informant. What a wonderful, great case!
Anticev: Well.
Salem: And then he put his head in the sand and said "Oh, no, no, that's not true, he is son of a bitch." [Deep breath.] Okay. It's built with a different way in another place and that's it.
Anticev: No, don't make any rash decisions. I'm just trying to be as honest with you as I can.
Salem: Of course, I appreciate that.

You can listen to the except here. Note that not only does Salem state that he started the building of the bomb that went off in the World Trade Center, but his FBI handler does not contradict him. Not only is Salem, and therefore the FBI, implicated in helping produce the bomb, but other tapes indicate he was also the origin of the New York Landmarks plot, of which the Blind Sheikh and several others were eventually convicted. In a 1993 interview with William Kunstler, a defence lawyer for members of the NY 'cell', he told WBAI's Paul DeRienzo:

He [Salem] is the only real conspirator in this case...

...I’ve read a lot of the tapes by now–transcriptions of the tapes, which were just furnished to me today. Before I came here, I read some of them, and they are things like… having him [Salem] say:
"Well, I think we ought to bomb the George Washington Bridge. That’s a very good target. It would make the commuters raise hell with this Government of ours."
And so then Siddig Ali says:
"Yeah?"
[Salem]: "And I think" so and so…
[Ali]: "Yeah?"
…. and so on. That’s the way it goes, virtually throughout these hundreds of pages of transcriptions. - WBAI interview with William Kunstler

However, the man apparently responsible for finishing the job of building the WTC bomb was freelancing international terrorist and all round ladies man Ramzi Yousef. Educated in electrical engineering in the UK, Yousef apparently finished his training as a bomb maker in Afghanistan in between semesters at college. The nephew of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, he was perhaps the most 'successful' terrorist of the 1990s and now resides in a maximum security prison serving a 240 year sentence.

Ramzi came to New York in September 1992, a couple of months after Salem's second FBI-sponsored involvement with the Blind Sheikh came to an end. He flew in with Ahmed Ajaj, a Palestinian, who was holding a blatantly forged Swedish passport in the name of Khurram Khan. Ramzi's passport identified him as Azan Mohammed. When asked for further identification by the INS official, he produced an ID card in the name of Khurram Khan, the same nom de guerre as in Ajaj's passport. When asked his full true name he said it was 'Ramzi Ahmed Yousef', itself a pseudonym for a man born Abdul Basit Mahmoud Abdul Karim. He stated his intention to claim political asylum and after a brief detention and filling in a form he was turned loose. According to Peter Lance's narrative in 1000 Years for revenge, this is because Ajaj's arrest had taken up the last available bed in the INS detention facility. However, according to Simon Reeve's version in The New Jackals, it was because Yousef had help from the Pakistani ISI.

For the following five months Ramzi Yousef, Mahmud Abouhalima, Mohammed Salameh, Nidal Ayyad and Abdel Yasin obtained the ingredients for and built a Urea Nitrate Fuel Oil bomb, enhanced by large gas cylinders packed around the main charge. However, this US prosecution story is far from conclusive. In 1995 the Department of Justice, of which the FBI is a part, began investigating their crime laboratory amid allegations that forensic investigations had been manipulated to support desired prosecution cases. After an eighteen month investigation the DOJ concluded that the problems were 'extremely serious and significant', and that in the WTC bombing investigation the investigator David Williams:

"gave inaccurate and incomplete testimony and testified to invalid opinions that appeared tailored to the most incriminating result." - NY Times

You can read the DOJ's Office of the Inspector General's report here. At the 1994 WTC bombing trial of four conspirators (Salameh et al.) the most specific allegations came from Special Agent Frederic Whitehurst:

Q: "During your examination of the bomb residue materials and the chemicals associated with the defendants, you became aware that the FBI agents investigating the case had developed a preliminary theory that the bomb that blew up the World Trade Center was a urea nitrate bomb?"
A: "Yes, that is correct."
Q: "Did there come a time when you began to experience pressure from within the FBI to reach certain conclusions that supported that theory of the investigation?"
A: "Yes, that is correct."
Q: "In other words, you began to experience pressure on you to say that the explosion was caused by a urea nitrate bomb?"
A: "Yes, that is correct."
Q: "And you were aware that such a finding would strengthen the prosecution of the defendants who were on trial, who were going on trial in that case, correct?"
A: "Absolutely." - Testimony of Frederic Whitehurst

As such, any conclusion about exactly who built the bomb that was used to attack the World Trade Center in 1993 is questionable. In May 1994 Salameh, Ayyad, Abouhalima and Ajaj were convicted of carrying out the attack. In October 1995 the Blind Sheikh was convicted of masterminding a 'seditious conspiracy' including the 1993 bombing and the Kahane murder. Ramzi Yousef remained at large until February 1995, and was convicted in January 1998. It was at this time that KSM was first announced as a 'major Al Qaeda operative'.

While Yousef was on the run from US authorities investigating the WTC bombing, one of his various activities was to develop 'Project Bojinka'. This included the creation of an improvised explosive device that could be smuggled past airport security. It used a Casio watch as the trigger so the alarm could be set hours or even days in advance, and a nitroglycerine main explosive charge designed to rupture the fuel tanks of an airliner and thus destroy the whole craft. This was 'successfully' tested in December 1994 on Philipines Airline flight 434. The aircraft wasn't destroyed, probably due to the bomb being put under the wrong seat, but a Japanese businessman was killed by the explosion. Another element of Bojinka, the plan to crash a small plane laden with explosives into the CIA headquarters at Langley is identified by some as a smaller version of the eventual 9/11 plot several years later.

Bojinka became known to US authorities after a fire in the block that Ramzi and his partner in crime Hakim Murad were using as a 'bomb factory'. After they fled the apartment block, Ramzi sent Murad back into the building to retrieve his laptop, and in the course of doing so Murad was arrested. During his interrogation he explained both a plan to destroy up to 11 Asian-Pacific airliners simultaneously using the Casio-Nitroclycerine bomb, as well as a plot to steal or hijack a plane and crash it into the CIA headquarters. All of this information was passed to the FBI by the Philippines National Police, including details suggesting an expansion of the latter plot to include targeting the Sears Tower, the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

One of Ramzi's co-conspirators in Bojinka was his uncle, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. KSM was initially indicted in 1996 but the indictment remained sealed until 1998, when Yousef was convicted. Despite the then $2 million bounty on his head an arrest warrant for KSM wasn't issued until over two and a half years later, in November 2000. In the summer of 2001, at the same time as the CIA was continuing to keep the FBI in the dark about Nawaf Al-Hamzi and Khalid Al-Mihdhar, the NSA intercepted communications between KSM and alleged lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta but didn't bother to tell the FBI. Given the past history of protecting the Blind Sheikh as long as he remained useful it is a fair bet that similar treatment was being extended to Mohammed.

The 9/11 Commission largely ignored Bojinka and identified the genesis of the 9/11 plot as taking place around the time of the African embassy bombings in August 1998. Indeed, the Commission concluded that the attacks happened due to a failure of imagination, which along with their portrayal of KSM as the mastermind of the plot presumably means we're supposed to think that Mohammed's imagination was greater than that of the entire Western military and intelligence infrastructure. In the Executive Summary the report states:

By late 1998 or early 1999, Bin Ladin and his advisers had agreed on an idea brought to them by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) called the "planes operation". It would eventually culminate in the 9/11 attacks. - 9/11 Commission Report

On the basis of reports of interrogations with KSM, the Commission did briefly acknowledge Yousef but tells an elaborate tale of Mohammed's plan for a 'new kind of hijacking', including the following comment:

Beyond KSM's rationalizations about targeting the U.S. economy, this vision gives a better glimpse of his true ambitions. This is theater, a spectacle of destruction with KSM as the self-cast star-the superterrorist. - 9/11 Commission Report, ch5

This is not just KSM's apparent 'true ambition', but one shared by the Bush and Obama administrations. However, in making the 'superterrorist' the focus of all the blame the 9/11 Commission did not only skip over Bojinka. Prior to Murad's arrest in January 1995 there were a series of events which may have, directly or indirectly, inspired what happened on 9/11.

In February 1993, while Ramzi Yousef was still in New York apparently building the UNFO bomb for the WTC attack, Lufthansa Flight 592 was hijacked. The perpetrator was initially identified as 31 year old Somalian Shuriye Farah Siyad, though this was a mistake. The actual hijacker was 20 year old Ethiopian Nebiu Zewolde Demeke, who was apparently seeking asylum and US intervention in Bosnia. The young man clearly didn't know that via the likes of the Blind Sheikh that the US was already deeply involved in Bosnia. Demeke had smuggled a starting pistol on board by putting the gun in an Indiana Jones-style hat on a table as he walked through the metal detectors. After he ordered the plane to 'the West' it flew to JFK airport in New York, where after a long negotiation Demeke surrendered. At the time both passengers on the plane and officials were concerned that the plane would be crashed into Manhattan. It is highly likely that Ramzi Yousef was aware of this event. Perhaps in response, an expert panel was commissioned by the Pentagon in 1993 which discussed the possibility of airplanes being used to bomb national landmarks. Though a report was issued to Congress, the State Department and FEMA in June 1994, it was never made public, partly in fear of inspiring terrorists.

In April 1994 a disgruntled Federal Express employee hijacked a plane, apparently aiming to crash it into a company building in Memphis. In August 1994 Tom Clancy published Debt of Honor. In that story a Japanese airline pilot, angry at the deaths of his son and brother in a fictional war between Japan and the US, crashed his Boeing 747 into the US Capitol building. Though Clancy's novel had a much wider readership than any Pentagon-commissioned report in history he apparently had no trouble getting this content published. On September 11th 1994 an alcoholic cocaine user and depressed US Army veteran Frank Corder stole a tiny Cessna 150 aircraft from Churchville, Maryland. After flying it around for a couple of hours he ended up crashing it into a tree on the White House lawn at about 2 a.m., killing himself in the process.

Then in December 1994 members of Algeria Armed Islamic Group hijacked an Air France airliner and demanded it be taken to Marseille. There, they demanded it be heavily fuelled and while this was taking place the plane was stormed by French special forces who killed the hijackers. French authorities later said that the hijackers' intention was to either blow up the plane in midair, or to crash it into the Eiffel Tower. However, by this time the GIA were heavily infiltrated and manipulated by the Algerian intelligence services, and their leader Djamel Zitouni was a double agent.

As such, even prior to the Bojinka plot being uncovered in the Philippines there were several examples of the sort of planes-as-weapons attack that occurred on 9/11, mostly involving people connected to military or intelligence institutions. Indeed, Tom Clancy's novel was obliquely referred to during CNN's live coverage of the 9/11 attacks. From novelists to state-sponsored terrorists, if indeed Ramzi Yousef was the true origins of the planes-as-weapons plot of 9/11 then he had more than enough inspiration. The above examples also demonstrate how the 9/11 Commission's version of events, where the plot was purely the brainchild of KSM, is at best an incredibly partial explanation, and at worst a total fabrication.

So what can we learn from the WTC bombing in 1993 in terms of how this trial is likely to proceed? Most obviously, the butchering and bastardisation of science. It is unlikely that the government will seek to build a strong forensic case against KSM and his co-accused, after all, if the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11 then the Department of Justice probably has no hard evidence connecting KSM to 9/11. They will be aware that his apparent confession under torture might not even be admitted as evidence, so it is likely that they'll trot out a few so-called experts to try to provide an intellectual basis for a prejudice (towards conviction) already present in the jury. This will likely consist of the same tired nonsense about how the planes caused the towers to collapse and the discovery of passports belonging to the alleged hijackers. The primary role of such experts is not to maintain standards of investigation and proof, but to give credence to a desired narrative.

This was displayed once again with the convenient pre-Copenhagen publication of a report speculating that global temperatures could rise by six degrees centrigrade by the end of the century. Initially published by the Guardian under the headline 'Global Temperatures will rise by 6C by end of century, say scientists' they modified the online version so it now reads 'could rise by 6C'. Nonetheless, the 'scientists' who are saying this aren't identified until the fifth paragraph, by which time the paper in which this speculation was made has been categorised as 'a major new study' and 'the most comprehensive analysis to date'. Before any explanation of who these scientists are and what they've done the reader is set up not only to accept them as an authority, but by extension accept the narrative that there's a need for 'for urgent action by leaders at the UN climate talks in Copenhagen to agree drastic emissions cuts in order to avoid dangerous climate change.' However, the Guardian does quote one of the scientists as saying:

"The global trends we are on with CO2 emissions from fossil fuels suggest that we're heading towards 6C of global warming. This is very different to the trend we need to be on to limit global climate change to 2C." - Corinne Le Quéré, Guardian

Someone should tell this scientist that centigrade is a unit for measuring temperature, and at best temperature change, but not climate change. Moreover, the Climate Research Unit where the scientist works has become embroiled in a major scandal after a hacker obtained e-mails and other material. The files, which are widely available to download, apparently show that in private the scientists are deeply concerned by the difference between their data and models and the actual temperature in recent months and years, and have colluded to delete and manipulate information, and corrupt the peer-review process on which the 'consensus' is built. So far only the Telegraph have managed anything like adequate coverage of this story, with many outlets' coverage being truly embarassing.

Back to the KSM trial, if the comments of various officials are anything to go by, the trial will also proceed on the assumption of guilt, rather than of innocence. This is despite there being no straightforward account of what happened on 9/11, let alone who was responsible, just as with the 1993 WTC bombing. Though the BBC reported there being a 'row' about whether the 9/11 attacks constitute a crime or an act of war, the underlying assumption was that the accused will be found guilty, and presumably sentenced to death.

Senator John McCain: 'They are war criminals, who committed acts of war against our citizens and those of dozens of other nations.'

John Boehner, House of Representatives Republic Leader: "The possibility that Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his co-conspirators could be found not guilty due to some legal technicality just blocks from Ground Zero should give every American pause [for thought]."

Howard McKeon, Senior Republic on the House Armed Services Committee: "The president's decision to bring 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to the United States for trial in the United States federal courts will once again delay bringing justice to the victims and their families."

Carolyn Maloney, NY Democratic Representative: "I thank President Obama for his leadership and for taking this important step to hold these terrorists accountable for their despicable actions." - BBC

The comments of Debra Burlingame, sister of the pilot of American Airlines Flight 77 which allegedly hit the Pentagon, illustrate how the grief of relatives has been turned into a vicious hatred by those seeking to capitalise on it:

"We have a president who doesn't know we're at war"...
...She told AP news agency she was sickened by "the prospect of these barbarians being turned into victims by their attorneys" if the trial focused on torture allegations. - BBC

I'm sure that she has suffered immensely because of what happened on 9/11, but in turning that pain into a disregard for someone that a propaganda campaign has convinced her was responsible she has become a megaphone for those selling the Commission's story.

The final thing we should expect from this trial is that no matter what evidence is brought forward, no matter what connections are demonstrated between the accused and the accusers, no matter how obvious the participation of US authorities in what happened, and continues to happen, there will be a steadfast refusal to acknowledge it. The purpose of this trial is not justice. The purpose of this trial is not to find out the truth. The purpose of this trial is not to hold responsible the truly guilty. The purpose of this trial is to reinforce the telling of a story, a version of events, which continues to be conducive to the political, economic and social forces dominating America. 

Trans Human Express

Robocop was released in 1987, at the tail-end of the Reagan years. Directed by Paul Verhoeven, it adopts a similar aesthetic and themes to two of his other dystopian action movies - Total Recall and Starship Troopers. The story centres around a futuristic Detroit, a city where a privatised police force fight against sadistic organised criminals for control of the streets. Into this context comes Murphy, a cop who transfers in from another district to Old Detroit, a particularly violent and crime-ridden area due to be torn down and replaced by newly built skyscrapers. One firm, Omni Consumer Products, are in charge of the policing and the construction of the new 'Delta City'.  As such, the movie is probably Verhoeven's most prescient, foreseeing the kind of corporate monopoly over entire cities which is now the norm in America and the militarisation and privitisation of domestic security which is becoming the norm the world over. 

Early on in the movie, Murphy and his partner pursue a group of bankrobbers in a disused factory, a setting used numerous times in the course of the film and presumably a reference to Detroit's gradually dying heavy industry. He is caught by the gang and slain in the graphic manner that has become typical of Verhoeven's movies, though it passes over into humour in some of the 'bug battles' in Starship Troopers. Meanwhile, Omni Consumer Products test out their ED-209, a fully automated policing robot not at all unlike those being deployed in Iraq. More up to date images bear an even more uncanny resemblance. Indeed, contemporary robot soldiers can even be fuelled by biomass, leading to the company's CEO stating:

“We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission.” - Harry Schoell

The ED-209 test goes horribly wrong, leading to the slaughter of a corporate executive (yay) in a manner very similar to Murphy's death. Subsequently, the dead Murphy's body is then used as the basis for a cyborg, an organism comprising both artificial and organic elements, supposedly the 'best of both worlds' in terms of robotic policing. He becomes the eponymous Robocop, created by a corporation to serve its interests. Although Murphy's memory is supposedly erased and replaced by four directives he rapidly starts showing residual signs of humanity, dreams and memories in particular. After a flashback to being killed he sets out to wreak revenge on the criminal gang.

Around halfway through the film it emerges that a senior executive at OCP is in cahoots with the leader of the gang, when he hires him to kill to the young upstart executive (yay) who masterminded the Robocop product which rivalled the senior executive's ED-209. As such the movie is not only a tale of privatisation, media and corporate monopolies and transhumanism, it is also contains elements of the conspiracy thriller. It resists easy generic classification, which is in my view very much part of its charm. It culminates in the OCP boardroom, with Murphy unable to arrest the senior executive due to a directive in his programming. Murphy presents his recorded memory of the executive admitting his guilt, so the executive takes the chair of the board hostage. The chair then fires the executive, allowing Murphy to summarily execute him (yay) by shooting him through a window.

Of all the themes the one this movie speaks about most is transhumanism, the development of artificial intelligence and the like which will enhance or replace human functions. In Robocop the principal message is that technology can spin out of control, not just in terms of the protagonist turning against his masters in the form of OCP. Interjecting at various points in the film are brief news bulletins which tend to feature three stories - an ongoing foreign war, domestic crime, and the constant problems with an earth-orbiting space station. One of these bulletins features a story of a misfiring laser aboard the space station which killed over a hundred people on the ground, including two former presidents. While Murphy is ostensibly the hero of the piece it is his humanity which ultimately wins, not just his technology. In one sequence towards the end he fights against an ED-209, which has no organic parts, and is mostly beaten by its superior weaponry until it tries, and fails, to follow him down a flight of stairs. Robocop is later seen easily destroying an ED-209, firmly placing the partly organic and human over the purely robotic and inhuman. Indeed, the apparent aim of the movie is to warn against the potential dangers of technological advancement, particularly in terms of military cyborgs and the automising of domestic security i.e. policing.

The year after Robocop's release postmodern philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard published The Inhuman, a series of essays on what he terms 'development' through 'techno-science', or the the collaboration between elite technological and capitalistic interests and institutions. The opening chapter queries how human thought could continue beyond the lifespan of the sun, estimated at 4.5 billion years. Lyotard was being literal in describing this quandary as to him it represents the only logistical barrier to the unfettered progress and expansion of this 'development' if we humans do not provide resistance to it. However, for most people not only is this development largely free from criticism, it is often seen as an achievement. As described by Stuart Sim in the Postmodern Encounters book on this subject:

"Development has become an end in itself in this reading...

...Nor will development ever be satisfied: it will always want to push on to a higher level than the one it has already attained. If left unchecked, development will lead to a culture based on inhuman principles - hence Lyotard's call for mass resistance to its plans." - Stuart Sim, Lyotard and the Inhuman, p28

This call for resistance is somewhat out of character given the 'type' of philosopher Lyotard is recognised as being. In much of postmodern and poststructuralist philosophy, of which Lyotard is firmly a part, humanism is largely torn to shreds. Subject to particular criticism was the secular humanism of the 19th and 20th centuries, whereby belief in metaphysical destiny (heaven, the afterlife) was replaced by belief in scientific fate, that the human purpose is not to worship a god or gods, but worship future technological development as a manifestation of our own greatness, our own virtue. However, a running theme in Lyotard's work, made explicit in The Inhuman, is the failure of this 'grand narrative' of humanism, that rather than these narratives explaining why we believe what we do, they seek only to legitimise it. In The Postmodern Condition (1979), Lyotard explained how the narrative of the spirit (science, discovery, revelation) is legitimised not through a logical explanation of what empirical evidence can provide, but through the institutionalising of such beliefs through a consensus of people taken to be experts.

To see this in action one only has to look at how anthropogenic global warming theory advocates such as George Monbiot treat those experts who disagree. Renowned botanist David Bellamy, also a long-serving broadcaster, is a perfect example. In March 2009, Monbiot wrote a hit piece on Bellamy that sought to attack him personally and involved very little by way of describing and presenting evidence. Numerous references to Bellamy as the 'bearded bungler' and as a 'climate change denier' in the article's URL, betray the accuracy of Lyotard's analysis. If Monbiot's aim were driven by a desire to investigate and explain then he would have made more effort to present the evidence. However, his article is littered with comments like:

Fact:
The evidence suggests that global average temperatures between 900 and 1100AD were warmer than in subsequent centuries but cooler than today's. Most of the recent hockey stick graphs do in fact show a medieval warm period, but the temperature anomaly was smaller than that of the past 30 years - see the IPPC and this graph. - Monbiot, The Guardian

Note firstly that Monbiot labels what he's about to say a 'fact' yet opens with 'the evidence suggests', when what the evidence suggests depends on how it is interpreted, and a 'suggestion' has a very different status to a 'fact'. He goes on to cite two authorities, the IPCC (which he mistakenly calls the IPPC) and a graph courtesy of globalwarmingart.com. Ultimately, he defers his argument not to the evidence, but to interpretations of the evidence by the IPCC and others. Thus, his narrative is one of granting authority to those experts who say what Monbiot wants to hear, and using such experts to decry others who say what he doesn't want to hear. The evidence is mere detail to be subjected to human authority.

Despite Lyotard's near-rejection of humanism as one grand narrative that had been shown to have failed, in The Inhuman he turns from the past to the future, where humankind's present indicates we are going, and how the failings of the past might be repeated.

Inhumanism calls for a reassessment of the significance of the human, and a realignment of our relationship to technology. It is just such a process that Lyotard, for all his post-humanist bias, was so afraid of, and which he was repeatedly warning us against in his late career. - Sim, Lyotard and the Inhuman p12

Technology as it is presented in the mainstream is almost entirely shown to be an enabler and liberator, something that benefits humankind. Only a couple of weeks ago renowned scientist and futurologist Ray Kurzweil predicted that immortality was only 20 years away via to developments in nanotechnology. However, it is not just our medical condition that Kurzweil thinks will improve:

"Nanotechnology will extend our mental capacities to such an extent we will be able to write books within minutes.

"If we want to go into virtual-reality mode, nanobots will shut down brain signals and take us wherever we want to go. Virtual sex will become commonplace. And in our daily lives, hologram like figures will pop in our brain to explain what is happening.

"So we can look forward to a world where humans become cyborgs, with artificial limbs and organs." - The Telegraph

Kurzweil is another example of the narrative of the spirit described and criticised by Lyotard, in that he sees such potential developments as a good thing, and only a good thing. However, the possibilities for social control and indoctrination are clearly advanced by such technologies, making it more possible to predict and dictate to the population. As noted by Edward Bernays:

Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man's rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. - Bernays, Propaganda

While the Telegraph's article on Kurzweil contains an image from the popular Terminator films a more responsible comparison would be to 1974 film The Terminal Man, adapted from an early Michael Crichton novel. In that story, an epileptic psychotic is given brain implants which are designed to prevent violent seizures by detecting their early stages and stimulating pleasure centres in the nervous system to prevent the seizures from taking hold. In reality the patient becomes gradually more and more prone to seizures as his body becomes addicted to the stimulation of the pleasure centres. This sort of foreseeable consequence is typically not discussed by those whose authority derives almost entirely from technological 'progress'.

A technology that is supposedly a progressive move can end up regressive - allowing greater dominion by the ruling class while exacerbating instead of solving social problems. Through the 20th century the masses have not become better educated, more rational beings more capable of participating in a peaceful and democratic society. They have become ever easier to manipulate, to set upon each other in often violent ways and to subject to ideological and psychological conditioning.

In spite of this, or probably because of it, humans still widely believe in the grand narratives, though the narratives have undergone something of a shift. Modernity would have it that technology is an example of human ingenuity and achievement, that progress is a good thing because it demonstrates that humans are virtuous. The postmodern shift on this story is that technology is the means for liberation, combing the narratives of spirit and emancipation into one. Under modernity, humans are the origin of technology, its master and creator and they are largely given the god-image of the pre-Enlightenment period. Technology is merely the means to an end defined by humans. Under postmodernity, technology is our master, as it is capable of much more than we are alone, and we are a means to developing it as far as possible, potentially even to the extent where AI becomes capable of developing itself (the singularity).

Lyotard broached this question in The Inhuman, outlining his two main concerns in the introduction:

What if human beings, in humanism's sense, were in the process of, constrained into, becoming inhuman? And, what if what is 'proper' to humankind were to be inhabited by the inhuman? - Lyotard, The Inhuman, p2

Before going on to ask:

What else remains as 'politics' except resistance to this inhuman? - Lyotard, The Inhuman, p7

The tale told in Robocop in part answers these questions. Murphy is classed as legally dead and so what remains of his mind and body is converted by OCP into a tool for their political machinations and desires. When he starts showing signs of residual humanity it is seen as a crisis because he cannot be controlled, is no longer subject to OCP's whims. The more reliant we become on technology, the more subservient we are to it and to who ultimately control it. As such, resistance to the imposition of technology has become of paramount importance.

The rise of abortion is one of the best examples of how these shifts and tensions are playing out, and hint at the possible dangers to come if we fail to heed the warning of Lyotard and others. Abortion was 'sold' to women as a liberating technology, as was the contraceptive pill and ultimately the abortion pill too. Instead of having to be bound by biologically determined (but very human) processes of gestation and childbirth, women could now have as much sex as they liked, thanks to the new technology. However, as medical technology has got 'better' it is now possible not only to keep alive a child born below 24 weeks of age, but also to perform abortions later and later in pregnancy, thus getting ever closer to the naked, systematic slaughter of babies.

In defence of this is the essentially humanist notion of 'the woman's right to choose', and the debate is phrased in terms of largely Christian/other religious 'pro-life' groups versus largely secular 'pro-choice' groups, as though one can either be in favour of human life or in favour of human choice, but not both, never both. In a return to a modernist philosophy, 'freedom' is the end aim of the grand narrative of emancipation, and if that means life is less important than choice then so be it. It is precisely this sort of logic that, without hyperbole, led to the Nazi holocaust, as the self-determination of Germany rendered the lives of Jews, homosexuals, blacks, the homeless and so on less important than the Nazi's state's 'right to choose'. Even the humanist concept of individual choice is subjugated to the pressures of the advance of the inhuman, though by a twisted logic it is largely humanists who are acting as apologists for this.

Why should we have to 'choose' between 'choice' and 'life'? There is a third option, as indicated by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. In that story children are produced artificially, in wombs outside of the body. If no one gets pregnant, there is no need for abortion, thus allowing for the potential reconciliation of the tensions in the combined postmodern narrative of technology as liberator. However, it would be the ultimate invasion by the inhuman of the human, particularly for women who are distinguishable from men largely in the sense that they have the capacity to carry children in their bodies. No doubt if such a technology did become the norm, this would be accomplished by convincing women that it was setting them free from the trammels of having to bear children. However, what would then remain of female identity to distinguish it from male?

The difference between genders is crucial in many ways to a healthy society, it helps provide for dispute and disagreement and ultimately helps people to accept that not everyone is the same nor should be the same. We can have equality (of sorts) while being different to one another. But some feminists don't see it that way. Donna Haraway is a philosopher with a predominantly scientific, evolution-based background so perhaps it is unsurprising to find her seeing cyborg technology as a useful tool for feminism.

'The cyborg is created in a post-gender world', Haraway declares, leading her to conclude 'I would rather by a cyborg than a goddess.' - Stuart Sim, Lyotard and the Inhuman, p46

To Haraway, quoted from her tract Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, cybernetic organisms would be a way for women to overcome their biologically determined roles. However, she does concede that in many ways the cyborg is already here, with bionic limbs and organs. As such her contention that the cyborg is 'created in a post-gender world' is simply not true, if we create a cyborg now or in the near future it will very much be in a gendered world, where the differences between men and women are used to subjugate one, the other, or both. Just because a cyborg is conceptually genderless does not mean the world it inhabits will be too, and this is a recurring flaw in Haraway's otherwise compelling arguments.

So, what does it mean that we are willing to place human life and identity in a binary opposition to the techno-liberation imperatives? What does it mean not only to place them in a binary opposition but to rank the latter as the preferred of the two? As we become more accustomed to technological involvement in our everyday lives, we become ever more like the technology we use. We think in modes taught to us by television broadcasts, we run our businesses according to spreadsheets, we converse with one another only within the limitations dictated by our communications devices.

Consider as a final example that of mobile phones and other near-instant messaging technology. In the past a friend, or partner, or parent could not expect someone to be available to them on a minute by minute basis, and so if a child came home after curfew or a boyfriend was unavailable it was mostly accepted as going to happen, though obviously lots of arguments did take place. However, we now have the same expectation of our friends and relatives that a computer has of its processors - that they will simply act as required, when required. Instead of bollocking their kids when they come home late with the typical 'you could have called', the parent sits and calls their child's mobile, getting increasingly worried and frustrated each time the kid fails to answer because they're up to whatever it is they're doing. Likewise, the inconsiderate boyfriend who doesn't call his girl to tell her he's going to be home late has been replaced by the near constant suspicion of cheating. Again, 'you could have called' turns into 'he isn't answering his phone, he must be with that slut' or 'he isn't answering his phone, he must be on match.com'.

One question largely not answered by the postmodernists, whether it be apparent neo-humanists like Lyotard or ardent transhumanists like Haraway, is why this 'invasion of the inhuman' is taking place, precisely what it is behind it. According to the story in Robocop the technology can spin out of control, whether automated or cyborganic, but this is accidental and unintended. In Haraway's narrative the use of technology is very deliberate, as a means of creating a less gendered, more equal society. In Lyotard's view, technology is subservient to capitalist motives in what he calls 'development'. Each involves its own understanding of cause and effect, and in reality none are full explanations of what is happening. As the 'most conspiratorial' end of the scale is Aldous Huxley, who explicitly outlined the transhumanist movement's motives in a 1962 lecture at Berkeley.

A number of techniques about which I talked seem to be here already. And there seems to be a general movement in the direction of this kind of ultimate revolution, a method of control by which a people can be made to enjoy a state of affairs by which any decent standard they ought not to enjoy. This, the enjoyment of servitude. - Huxley, The Ultimate Revolution

In Huxley's analysis the sort of scientific dictatorship envisioned in Brave New World (contrasted with Orwell's 1984 where people are motivated by fear rather than pleasure) occurs as means by which a ruling class can placate those it limits and enslaves, that this is intended, even premeditated. He went on to explain that the scientific dictatorship is in his opinion more likely to follow the Brave New World model than the 1984 model:

[N]ot because of any humanitarian qualms of the scientific dictators but simply because the BNW pattern is probably a good deal more efficient than the other. - Huxley, The Ultimate Revolution

He concluded, in a statement similar to the concerns outlined in Lyotard's The Inhuman:

Our business is to be aware of what is happening, and then to use our imagination to see what might happen, how this might be abused, and then if possible to see that the enormous powers which we now possess thanks to these scientific and technological advances be used for the benefit of human beings and not for their degradation. - Huxley, The Ultimate Revolution

You can download the entire lecture via archive.org, or listen to it below.