Trigger Mechanisms

That's the word, don't you know? From the guys that's running the show.

– Jarvis Cocker

Flight of Capital

June 17, 2006

They say I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy. She inherited a million bucks and when she died it came to me. I can't help it if I'm lucky.

— Bob Dylan

At least among those with a mind for such things, it's fairly well remembered that on September 10, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld made the shocking announcement that the Pentagon "couldn't track" $2.3 trillion of its transactions. Internet poster "Iroquois" observes, "What's interesting to me is that he made his press release on a Monday. In DC, I always see bad news given on a Friday, usually late in the afternoon on Friday. The exception, of course, would be when someone happens to know that there is a far bigger story coming out."

And we know that Flight 77, allegedly piloted by an incompetent, made an aerobatic, spiraling descent over Washington, effecting a 270-degree turn to strike the Pentagon from a western approach at ground level. The side struck was the only one with an exterior wall hardened against attack, and was relatively empty while renovation continued.

Relatively. The unfortunate construction workers perished outside, but who were the expendables within?

From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December 20, 2001:

"One Army office in the Pentagon lost 34 of its 65 employees in the attack. Most of those killed in the office, called Resource Services Washington, were civilian accountants, bookkeepers and budget analysts. They were at their desks when American Airlines Flight 77 struck." [emphasis added]

The Arlington County After-Action Report noted that the "impact area included both the Navy operations center and the office complex of the National Guard and Army Reserve. It was also the end of the fiscal year and important budget information was in the damaged area." And Insight magazine editorialized that "the Department of the Army, headed by former Enron executive Thomas White, had an excuse [for not making a full accounting]. In a shocking appeal to sentiment it says it didn't publish a "stand-alone" financial statement for 2001 because of "the loss of financial-management personnel sustained during the Sept. 11 terrorist attack."

High Crimes of State often come down to the movement of capital, and so the high criminals generally share the gray and black economics of common felons. Money is money; it's the magnitude of the heist that's different, and the means to effect and cover-up the crime. And part of the cover-up of the Pentagon heist has been the no-plane shell game, played smartly by Rumsfeld himself who "misspoke" that a "missile" had struck the Pentagon the same week Thierry Meyssan's original no-plane Web site was launched.

It's such disinformation that has drilled irrelevance and folly into a once potentially dangerous and angry army of authentic skeptics.

The Monolith Monsters

February 7, 2007

Let's be perfectly clear boys and girls:?

C*nts are still running the world.

— Jarvis Cocker

It's always fascinating, and important as well, when conspirators become "conspiracy theorists." Just not always for the same reason.

There are the career insiders who, in timely fashion, step up as "whistleblowers" to entrain the American Mind by mischief. Philip Corso, for instance. In 1997, only one year before his death from a heart attack at 83, the retired Lieutenant Colonel released The Day After Roswell. Corso claimed to have both viewed the remains of Roswell aliens and to have shepherded the reverse engineering of UFO crash artifacts by the private sector, which became products such as fiber optics and integrated circuit chips.

Corso had no evidence for this, and the names he named were all dead. All he had was his word, which he underscored a month before he died with a sworn oath, as well as his reputation and distinguished service. In his review of The Day After Roswell, Michael Lindemann drew attention to this:

What to make of Colonel Philip Corso and his book? If he were not a highly decorated, highly credible military officer, he would likely be passed off by most people as a blatant hoaxer. But why would this particular man tell such very tall tales at the end of his life, if the tales are simply untrue? That question will likely vex more than a few readers of "The Day After Roswell," a book that will probably push the Roswell controversy to new heights in this Roswell-happy year of 1997.

I should note that Roswell, as I regard it, is the paramount disinformation story of American UFOlogy. It has sent generations down the wrong path, chasing the presumption of "nuts and bolts" spacecraft and their ET occupants, and served to both suppress the true phenomenon's psi and occult components and to mask the U.S. military's deep black tech. Roswell is also responsible for the focus on passive "disclosure" — tell us the truth! — rather than on a citizens' investigation to learn the truth for themselves.

So he's not, as Lindemann noted, a blatant hoaxer, and I can't imagine a persuasive personal reason to fabricate such a fabulist narrative so close to his deaath. Still, I think it should be evident even to those who deny the existence of a genuine UFO phenomenon, that it means something that a man of Corso's stature signed off on The Day After Roswell. I suspect that the reason was service in furtherance of disinformation.

It's astonishing the rubbish we can swallow when we credulously open our mouths and say, "Feed me." Paul Hellyer became a brief blip on the media's radar a while back, when the former — as in 40-years-prior — Canadian Defense Minister went public with his late-life advocacy for UFO "disclosure." He was hailed as an "insider" and instantly graduated to keynote speaker at "Exopolitics" conferences. Unfortunately, Hellyer's insider knowledge didn't amount to much: "I finally concluded, especially after reading a book called The Day After Roswell written by Colonel Philip Corso, that unidentified flying objects are, in fact real," he told MSNBC. (Hellyer supports his case for the Corso book by adding that he heard, second hand, that an unnamed U.S. Air Force General said "Every word of it is true, and more." An unnamed General would say that.)

Now let's consider the conspirator-cum-conspiracy theorist Zbigniew Brzezinski. Last week, while excoriating Bush's Iraq policy before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he warned of "a plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran." He sees the scenario unfolding with:

Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks, followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure, then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran, culminating in a "defensive" [his own quotation marks] U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

On leaving the hearing, Brzezinski was pointedly asked by reporter Barry Grey whether he was "suggesting that the source of a possible provocation might be the U.S. government itself." He responded that he had "no idea. As I said, these things can never be predicted. It can be spontaneous." Grey followed up, "Are you...