And it's a gut check of what you believe - Anti-Flag

I don't have time this morning to post, but here's something to chew on.

Tomorrow, Rolling Stone tries to get its groove back by publishing a 10-page "damning and detailed feature article" by Robert F Kennedy Jr on the theft of the 2004 election. Bradblog, the electronic bulldog of voter fraud, is all over it. Kennedy will be promoting his story hard this month in a number of appearances, including a spot on The Colbert Report June 12.

I'm trying not to write something dithering, like time will tell whether America's peripatetic culture finally takes to this story. But it's tough. If it ever will, this is the window for it. With Bush's depressed numbers, editors who are neither backwash nor Mockingbirds may seize the moment, if for no more honourable reason than the consumers of their product are now more than ever likely to believe the worst of their government, and perhaps better of themselves. (We, the People, did not choose this man.)

The window won't remain open for long. Showdown: Iran looms, hastened by the hollow gesture of an offer of talks if Iran first abandons - well, just about everything. But it had to be done, so Washington can later shrug and say military action was, once more, the last choice. And when the next front opens in ernest, perhaps as soon as this month, don't be caught unaware in the stampede to "support the president in time of war."

Still, while the window's open a crack, it's encouraging to see pollster Lou Harris say that Ohio was "as dirty an election as America has ever seen." But what may come after that, I don't find so heartening. Do enough Americans really lack for knowledge of their government's crimes? Are there not already millions who, to the Bush laundry list of bloody obscenity, would wearily nod their heads, I know?

Maybe it's not awareness that needs raising, so much as American fists.

I can't forget but I don't remember what - Leonard Cohen

Weird didn't begin with America, though its been advantageous for some to presume otherwise. Still, America has been weird since before its beginnings.

Cabeza de Vaca's 1542 manuscript, Adventures in the Unknown Interior of the America, describes his conquestador voyage up the Mississppi. Near the Ozarks his party encountered the Avavares tribe, who warned de Vaca that the area is home to a little man with indistinct features whom they called "Badthing." Badthing, de Vaca was told, terrorized the people by entering their homes unbidden at night and performing various surgeries upon them:

He would thrust his hand through the gashes, draw out the entrails, cut a palm's length from one, and throw it on the embers. Then he would gash an arm three times, the second cut on the inside of the. elbow, and would sever the limb. A little later he would begin to rejoin it, and the touch of his hands would instantly heal the wounds.

De Vaca and his men laughed off the stories of "Mr Badthing," which caused some indignation in the tribe, who then produced for De Vaca's examination many subjects who had reputedly been seized and operated upon by the entity, and bore the corresponding scars. De Vaca then launched into a pitch for Christendom, explaining that Badthing was a demon, and "that if they would believe in God our Lord and become Christians like us they need never fear him, nor would he dare come and inflict those wounds." He promised that Badthing would not return while he was in the land, which "delighted them and they lost much of their dread."

Whatever the truth of "Badthing" - a rationalist editor has interpolated "self inflicted?" following the description of the wounds - the story shares much with modern-day abduction accounts. Well, that's America, and it always has been. But it's never been only America. With different cultural presupositions, Zanzibar's sodomizing demon "Popo Bawa" would likely be called an anal probing extraterrestrial. (The disingenuous skeptics of CSICOP explain him away with the same wave of the hand they reserve for abduction accounts: sleep paralysis.)

And yet some alleged cases of sleep paralysis also manifest themselves as waking nightmares. One such story is told by Nick Redfern in On the Trail of the Saucer Spies. "Tammy," a 57-year old grandmother and manager of a restaurant in El Paso, fell down a now-familar rabbit hole more than 30 years ago. And if she'd been sleepwalking at the time, she was wide-awake for the aftermath.

About two in the morning on March 6, 1973, Tammy was returning to her Waco apartment from her waitressing job at a diner 30 miles out of town. About halfway home she began to "feel strange" - dizzy, lightheaded and overcome with vertigo - as the car was engulfed in a bright glow, and the headlights and engine cut out. In a field maybe two hundred feet to Tammy's right she noticed a pale pink dome-shaped object, and from it, two small humanoids were approaching. Panicking, she meant to flee, but her arms and legs were unresponsive. "The next thing she knew," writes Redfern, "dawn was breaking, and she was sitting in the front passenger seat of her car."

After arriving home groggy and scared, and sleeping the entire day, Tammy chose to keep the imprecise though terrifying incident to herself. But she began having vivid dreams of surgical examinations on cold surfaces, conducted by small figures with "thin faces and cheeks," and a "deep, continuous, resonating hum" emanating from a large mechanical "eye" hoving over the examination table. She dreamt of being dressed and carried to her car, and placed in the passenger seat, and "a man in military uniform sitting in the driver's seat looking intently at her."

Over the next several weeks her dreams changed, becoming nightmarish and apocalyptic, resembling the "warning" transmissions contactees often report. Tammy saw "Earth in the near future reduced to ruins" from a combination of environment and military crises, including a manufactured virus that devastates the Middle East and was now "spiraling out of control." Most ominous, she saw visions of a "disturbing afterlife in which various gray-like entities of several types fed - vampire-style - on human souls."

Certainly a disturbing episode for Tammy, but if that was it then she probably should have sought a referral to a good sleep disorder clinic. But three weeks following there was a knock on her apartment door, and a man in a brown suit whom she said "could have passed for a marine - a big guy, very short hair" - announced he was conducting a police "survey." Standing in her doorway he began to fire off questions relating to vehicular crime, and when he asked "Are you concerned about being kidnapped from your car?" she slammed the door in his face and shouted she was going to call the police.

In the following weeks, she was visited on three occasions by two military men out of uniform. "They were real friendly with me," she tells Redfern, "and identified who they were and where they were from - Kirkland Air Force Base." Acknowledging Tammy's previous caller had been "with us," they apologized for his aggressiveness, then admitted that they knew about her abduction experience (though "they never mentioned the word abductions like you hear today - just kidnappings") and asked if she could discuss it with them, as it was a matter of national security.

The pair told Tammy that since 1971, such incidents were seeing an alarming increase in New Mexico, Texas and Arizona, and as a result, the military had established a project to monitor contactees. Once she consented to participate, the two "reeled off a number of truly strange questions":

Since the "kidnapping" had Tammy felt the urge to become vegetarian? Was she an adherent of Buddhist teachings? Did she believe in life after death, or had her views on the subject changed or been modified "since the kidnapping"? And most disturbing of all: Was she of the opinion that after death "we would all be judged by a higher power?"

Tammy then began to share with them her apocalyptic dreams, and the two "expressed deep concern" as they told her that other contactees were having similar dreams. They also confided that while some on the project believed the kidnappers to be extraterrestrials, others had concluded they were "demonic beings whose point of origin was somehow connected with the realm of the dead and the afterlife, and that the creatures derived sustenance from the human life force - namely, the soul."

The men asked Tammy if she would consent to a physical examination at Kirkland, and she agreed. And though they met twice more, probing her thoughts on "life after death, and - notably - her views on life after death in the animal kingdom," the examination never happened. (Or at least, not to a conscious Tammy.) After their visits stopped, she never heard from them again, though for several more weeks she experienced unnerving "countless interruptions" on her telephone line from "strange, rapid, and unintelligible voices."

What sense can we make of this? First, as Redfern also notes, Tammy's two men and their disturbing inquiries and revelations are quite similar to that of the two DoD scientists who approached theologian and Fortean researcher Ray Boeche 20 years later (discussed here). Boeche wrote that they informed him of an "obsessive effort" to contact and control non-human intelligences, and the methods "had grown to encompass the use of...satanic rituals/ritual magic along the lines of that espoused by Aleister Crowley, including human sacrifices." And though my hypothesis is virtually identical, it's always important to question the integrity of "whistleblowers," especially when they appear to blow your own whistle. "Since the best disinformation is mostly truth," I wrote last August, "if this communication were disinformative, could this addition [an unconvincing list of victims of psychotronic weapons experiments] have been the poison pill to misdirect a researcher already sniffing around the Military Occult Complex?"

Red flags should rise whenever a military official or contractor confides much more than someone needs to know. From Tammy's account, it seems at least as important to her two visitors that she hear them out as it was that they hear her. And could their anticipation of her apocalyptic dreams be due to her dreams having been imprinted upon her hypnotically during the abduction event?

While I'm persuaded UFOs represent a genuine phenomenon of occult provenance and are of critical interest to certain institutions of Earthly power, I also think their facsimile has been employed as a screen to pursue other work in the deep black under cover of absurdity and "alien" misdirection. I think it's significant that numerous abductees since the mid-sixties have reported being subjected to mind control devices similar to Skinner boxes and John Lilly's isolation tanks onboard "alien craft." Lilly claimed that, as his isolation tank research became known, he was approached by military personnel who sought to use it "to coerce a change in belief systems" (according to Dr Helmut Lammers' MILABS: Mind Control and Alien Abduction). Lilly's ethics forbade him from testing his tank on anyone but himself and colleague Craig Enright. But since immersion in the tank dramatically increased suggestibility, it's easy to imagine the military taking up the work covertly when reading the words of "Delora,"daughter of a career Naval officer, who's had flashbacks of what she takes to be an underground alien/human facility: "I saw steel doors of elevators leading to underground areas. I saw 'capsules' with people in them, in a suspended state, both vertical and horizontal, in gas and also in liquid" (from MILABS).

Redfern also describes the case of "Alison," a 36-year old native of Arizona, who was subjected to at least five abductions between 27 and 31. Each event began with her pet dogs acting distressed, a deep humming, loss of electricity and a bright light enveloping her room. Then, semiconscious, she would sense "small shadowy figures" carry her onto a small craft for a gynechological exam, before returning her to another part of the house.

The final event was a significant departure:

On what Alison believes to have been the fifth abduction, however, the mysterious humming sound abruptly came to a halt only a few seconds after her cosmic visitors had entered the room. At that point, Alison recalled - not in a later dream on this occasion but in real time - she began to slowly regain her senses and the feeling of disorientation eventually eased and finally vanished. And so did the aliens. In their place were not a group of frail-looking alien "Grays," but a number of large and burly men in what looked like black fatigues.

According to Alison, one of the men screamed into a microphone something like: "What's happened?" Suddenly, the men backed away slowly and, as Alison began to regain her senses, one of them held his hand up "as if to say 'stay where you are,'" and uttered the word "sorry" in her direction. Alison made her way to the window in time to see the men jump into not a state-of-the-art alien spacecraft but a very terrestrial-looking black unmarked helicopter. At a height of several hundred feet, a powerful lamp was suddenly turned on that lit up the dark sky around her property.

Some may happily seize upon stories like Alison's to contend that all UFO sightings and entity encounters must be similar masquerades. But to do so requires a disservice to the volume of cases around the world, most of which were recorded long before any of us had the means to effect such magic. And still, there's the matter of motive. "Mind control" isn't an answer; rather, it's another question: control of whom, and for what? What's the purpose of implanting apocalyptic visions in abductees, probing Tammy for her thoughts on the afterlife, and conducting invasive gynecological and genetic work?

Even when the close encounters are with covert American power, there's nothing happy here. Because the dead intelligence at work appears as alien to us as though it were in sunken R'lyeh, dreaming.

Or can they even know what they do, and why, walking like ghosts in the skin of Mr Badthing?

My senses have been stripped, my hands can't feel to grip - Bob Dylan

Something went seriously weird in 1954. France, and not just France, saw hundreds of UFO sightings and encounters with bizarre entities in cases of high quality reported almost exclusively by local media - there was no national "contageon" of hysteria - told by multiple witnesses of impressive character. Jacques Vallee notes that all incidents consisted of "strange happenings...reported by normal people, who had normal occupations at the time of the sighting, were generally not known, had no interest in flying saucers and were seeking no publicity."

In Vallee's close analysis of some 200 of these cases, published in Charles Bowen's The Humanoids, he notes how four separate groups of witnesses who had never heard of each other made independent reports to different newspapers of a sighting on October 14 of a low-flying, reddish disc that caused cars to stall and headlights to fail. Celeste Simonutti reported encountering a luminous sphere on the evening of September 30, 12 metres in diameter and hovering a meter above the ground, which shifted through red and blue hues before accelerating vertically at extreme speed. Friends told Simonutti he must have seen a "flying saucer," and then had to explain to him what they meant. He'd never heard of them before. On the night of November 4, fisherman Jose Alves saw a bright object land near his position and three small, dark entities emerge and gather leaves, grass and water. They then re-entered the craft and it flew away. Alves too was told he'd seen aliens, but maintained he'd witnessed only "ordinary devils."

Several more examples from the French flap of 1954, all from October, as noted by Vallee, and by Richard Dolan in the first volume of his UFOs and the National Security State:

October 2: At 8pm, in Croix d'Epine, a man on his motor scooter saw a bright, oval object land off the road fifty feet from him. He saw short, dark shapes "like potato bags" moving around the object, which was the size of a small bus. It quickly took off, changing from orange to blue, then grayish-blue. The man fainted while telling his story. Two people in nearby villages independently reported seeing the object. (Dolan)

October 3: At dawn in Bresseuir, a fifty-five year old stockyard employee was going to work when he saw a small being wearing a diving suit standing near a circular craft about ten feet in diameter. The object swiftly took off. Shortly after noon, a man saw a circular craft between the towns of Montmoreau and Villebois-Lavalette. It seemed to be gliding on or near the ground, had luminous spots, and became illuminated when it took off. The man found flattened and scorched grass over an area 25-feet across. At around 7:30 pm, a crowd at a fair in Chereng saw a fast luminous object in the sky suddenly stop, give off sparks, and descend to ground level. As people ran to the spot, the object took off again. (Dolan)

October 5: In Loctudy a baker was drawing water from the well in the middle of the night when he noticed, some distance awa, an object about 3 metres in diameter from which emerged a dwarf who had an oval face covered with hair and eyes which were "as large as the eggs of a raven." The unknown individual touched the witness on the shoulder and spoke to him in a language he could not understand. As the young man called his boss, the dwarf went back into the craft and flew away. (Vallee)

October 9: A man on a bicycle in Lavoix saw a figure in a diving suit with very bright eyes aiming a double beam of light at him, which paralyzed him. The being then walked into the forest. In Carcassone, a man saw a metallic sphere in the road. The top half of the object was transparent, and he saw two human-shaped figures standing inside. The craft soon left at high speed. (Dolan) The individual seemed to have "boots without heels" and very bright eyes.... The entity had a very hairy chest and carried two "headlights" placed one below the other on his chest. (Vallee)

October 9: From the report of four children living in Pournoy-la-Chetive: "We were roller-skating, about 18:30, when all of a sudden we saw something luminous near the cemetary. It was a round machine, about 2.5 metres in diameter, which was standing on three legs. Soon a man came out. He was holding a lighted flashlight in his hand and it blinded us. But we could see that he had large eyes, a face covered with hair and that he was very small, about 1.20 metres. He was dressed in a sort of black sack like the cassock M. le Cure wears. He looked at us and said something we did not understand. He turned off the flashlight. We became afraid and ran away. When we looked back we saw something in the sky: it was very high, very bright and flew fast." (Vallee)

And as mentioned, it wasn't just France. In a populated neighbourhood of Tehran on October 12, a disc-shaped object was observed by multiple witnesses to descend close to the ground. Witness Chasim Faili "screamed when he thought he was going to be kidnapped." The operator of the craft was said to be "small and dressed in black." In Northern Italy on November 14, a farmer saw a bright cigar-shaped craft land, and three dwarfs in "diving suits" emerge and collect several of the farmer's caged rabbits. The farmer attempted to shoot but his rifle became so heavy he had to drop it and then found himself unable to move or speak as the entities went about their work and departed. Two young Venezuelans reported having been attacked on December 10 by four hairy dwarfs near a bright object which had landed near the Trans-Andean Highway. On December 19, also in Venezuela, a jockey saw six small entities loading stones into a disc-shaped object. He tried to run but was parlysed by a violet beam of light aimed by one, who then entered the object with the others and took off.

The details are often bizarre, and bizarrely shared: the boots without heels; the seeming demonstration of elemental collection (rocks, water, rabbits); the paralysing "flashlights" worn on the chest; sack-like apparel or "diving suits"; and strong and very hairy dwarves with large, bright eyes, speaking an unknown language (strikingly similar to the "extremely hairy" dwarves with round eyes "larger than is the norm with us," reported by Brazilian policeman and abductee/initiate Jose Antonio Da Silva in 1969).

Significantly, Dolan notes: "none of the sightings included descriptions of what are now called 'Grays.'" It wasn't until the 1960s, and only in the United States, that identifiably "gray aliens" began appearing in encounter records. In the years since, their image and their associate disinformation fables (Roswell and Dulce, for instance) have come to so dominate the subverted consciousness that some ufologists simply remove the ongoing and troublingly bizarre "non-gray" encounters from their ET equation. Debunkers also. Susan Clancy can make her shallow arguments for sleep paralysis and the archetypal simplicity of the gray's minimalist face, but has nothing to say about bug-eyed hairy dwarves dressed like monks, because the troubling variety has been excised by those who mean to exploit a phenomenon beyond their control and massage its perception.

More later.

I looked way up my chimney hole,
I even looked deep inside my toilet bowl.
They got away. - Bob Dylan

In 1917 the posthumous, final volume of Charles Taze Russell's Studies in the Scriptures appeared, entitled - promisingly - The Finished Mystery. The book was published without the blessing of the board of his Watchtower Society, and would become one of its curses. Because the final revelation from the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses included the breaking news that the Christian church would be destroyed in 1918 and the world would end in 1920. When neither happened, a new edition of the book was released with what-he-really-meant-to-say revisions to the text.

Russell's early years were influenced by Nelson Barbour, an evangelist who had prophesied that Jesus Christ was destined to return bodily to Earth in 1873. When he failed to appear, Barbour issued a revised due date of 1874. After that too passed he smartly announced that Christ had, indeed, returned, but invisibly.

And maybe Karl Rove really has been indicted, invisibly, and Bad Santa Patrick Fitzgerald is filling our stockings out of season, and Jason Leopold and TruthOut haven't been suckered or compromised as artfully this year as Tom Flocco was flamboyantly last year, when he was serving up increasingly fabulist accounts - his and Sherman Skolnick's poetry slam conspiracy theories - of the Grand Jury expanding the scope of its investigation to include 9/11 and the indictments of Bush and Cheney. (It would appear that Barbara Olson is soon to begin her second year in custody somewhere on the "Polish-Austrian" border. Where's the mainstream media?)

Fitzmas, if it ever comes, is a religious holiday, because those whose heads make fine dance floors for its sugar plum fairies live by the faith that Fitzgerald will serve up more than failed pornographer Scooter Libby. Fitzianity demands nothing from its adherents except patience and wants nothing more than their speculation. God forbid that they should do something.

And the sham promise of this slave religion is nothing more than a few yellow cards to offenders long after the game has already been called in their favour. What kind of basket is that to carry all the rotton eggs of this wrecking crew? If Rove ever is indicted, so what? The Bush-by-proxy Reagan White House saw the most indictments in US history, and yet it's remembered fondly as a late golden age. Of course, this Bush White House won't be remembered that way, but it no longer matter who remembers what anymore. After all, American politics isn't exactly a popularity contest.

Chomsky's critique of "conspiracy theory" - at least those which pertain to conspiracies that hold no interest for him, such as JFK's assassination - is that their focus is personalities rather than structures of society. That's so wrong it's almost backwards, particularly here. Either those with big hopes for Fitzgerald's efforts believe certain heads must roll to set America right again, or they're just looking for the therapeutic benefit of striking back. And personalities are all we can touch through institutional justice. The deep politics embedded in the structures of power are removed from discussion and correction, and will, if left alone - as they usually are - continually renew themselves. It can spare a few heads for a Fitzmas because it's not a real guillotine.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet's The City of Lost Children opens with a young boy watching with wonder as Santa Claus climbs out of the fireplace, brushes soot from his coat and kindly offers him a toy. A sweet scene. But then the boy's gaze returns to the fireplace, as another Santa, and more behind, enter the room, and the charm suddenly becomes a horror.

Beware of Santas bearing gifts.

Just a brief note to say I'll be away this week, disentangling my mind for a while without electronic stimuli. (Or rather, none to which I'm consenting.) It seems a long time since that's happened, and I feel like it needs to happen now.

Please consider this an open thread. Have a good week, and I'll see you next Monday.

"The leading actor hurried by in the costume of a monk." - Bob Dylan

Continuing on.

Satanic Ritual Abuse and occult crime negate themselves for many progressives who might otherwise now be inclined to believe the worst of Earthly Powers. This is because the charges are a challenge to secularist and reductionist assumptions, and come cloaked in layers of ridicule and the seeming superstitions of the reactionary right, against which they have struggling all their political lives.

Or let me break it down this way. As a youth I had a fundamentalist conversion experience from which I spent the next ten years recovering. (It's told, as a lie, in my novel Anxious Gravity.) I was already of the left, and a conservative faith was not an easy graft, with presumptions of ideology always in my face. But the inner tensions were worse, and eventually things just blew apart. Recovery for me meant jettisoning much of the conceptual and cultural ballast of my faith in order to save its largely ineffable core.

Before I knew any better, "Satanic Ritual Abuse" sounded like a scratchy record from my past that I'd left in my parents' basement when I moved out. It was the ghost of an abandoned paradigm: the fear of a backward-masked planet. But I kept reading, until finally I knew something worse. Worse than the devil I'd known, who had sensational publicists in "anti-cult crusader" Bob Larson and "former high priest" Mike Warnke.

On his ministry broadcasts Larson regularly works up a nice head of froth over satanism, but privately he's on friendly terms with frequent guests, including satanist and esoteric fascist Boyd Rice. There's a fascinating interview with Rice here that presents a window on their relationship. Asked whether he thinks Larson is a "repressed Satanist" Rice replies enthusiastically "That's what I'm always telling him! I'm always saying, 'Bob, you're Satanic, you're just presenting it in a convoluted way, because you're going on the air and taking advantage of these weak, confused people, and they're giving you their money.'" Meanwhile, Warnke is a manic preacher and "America's number one Christian Comedian" who claims to have led a murderous Satanic cult of 1,500 members in the mid-60s, yet is almost certainly an abusive and pathological fraud.

The evangelists found a perfect foil in Anton LaVey, who could pass the bucket with the best of them, and obligingly inhabited the caricature of the devil-on-earth right down to the plastic horns and cat suit. But better the devil you know, because this devil whom both sides pimped was little more than a Halloween spook, and a figure of titilation at a safe distance for sheltered Christians who liked to receive their vicarious kicks under cover of "testimony."

I expect, for many, Satanic Ritual Abuse is not a serious subject because the devil they know is not a serious figure. Unlike the devil they don't.

There are at least 2,635 place names in America sharing the words Devil, Diablo or Diabla. Loren Coleman writes that "Europeans coming to America were quite taken with the sinister experiences they had or they would hear about from the Native Americans already here, and these colonists started giving the name Devil to all the locations that were tied to unexplainable phenomena." Places like South Dakota's Hill of the Little Devils, about which Lewis and Clark were told by plains Indians was inhabited by "midgets" who would kill anyone who approached their "spirit mound." (Clark wrote that the Omahas, Otoes, and Sioux were so afraid that "no Consideration is Suffecient to induce them to apporach the hill"); Oklahoma's Devil's Promenade, where generations of glowing, orange orbs have been observed; the barren circle of North Carolina's Devil's Tramping Ground; and the Devil's Highway, Route 666, which links skinwalker accounts to more modern American mytholgies of Roswell and the Trinity atomic blast.

An American folly has always been the thought that the nation resides in a "New World." Large numbers of immigrants were drawn to the novelty of America by the prospect of shedding the superstitions of the Old, but Europeans also found ancient wild things of spirit that had not yet been domesticated by generations of dogma and forgetfulness. And because we are also spirit and not altogether perfect and wise, they found perfect and ignorant hosts.

It's been said that Bush's backwash base would still support him even if he ate a baby on television. But he does effectively just that everytime he praises the bloody course of his war which has already claimed a quarter million innocent lives. He's feeding something older than America, a parasitical demon which is also devouring the host, whether he knows it or not.

There is a Satanic criminal underground, trading in flesh and guns and drugs, but there is another network underlying it and unconcious of itself. The ritual child abuse of Ponchatoula's Hosannah Church appears unconnected to a broader conspiracy, so how did these seemingly unsophisticated, small-town parishioners come to adopt an ancient, secret tradition of sex magick? Ritual abuse happens in churches in part because that's where ritual happens, and like it or not, humanity appears hardwired for ritual.

When Prescott Bush robbed Geronimo's grave and carried his skull home to Yale as a trophy, was he fully conscious of partaking in a universal warrior cult that finds power in the remains of the worthy dead?

"America is a nation of prayer," said Prescott's grandson last Thursday, asking Americans to "humbly recognize our continued dependence on divine Providence." Someone better acquainted with America said "that god you been prayin' to is gonna give ya back what you're wishin' on someone else."

It's five in the morning, the post I've been drafting still isn't ready and I can't keep my eyes open any longer. So here's something else, while I get my act together:

2 Murders and Missing Cash in Iraq

The killing of Fern Holland, a young human rights worker from Oklahoma, remains as unsolved and mysterious as it was when her body was found riddled with bullets on a desolate stretch of road near one of Iraq's southern holy cities in March 2004.

Now, federal investigators in the United States are grappling with a second mystery: what happened to hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash issued by U.S. government authorities to Holland and Robert Zangas, a press officer who died in the same incident, in the days before their deaths?

Financial records from the American- run compound in Hilla, the south-central Iraqi city where Holland and Zangas were based, have disclosed that much or all of that money - issued for things like programs to train Iraqis in the workings of democratic governance and the building of women's rights centers that Holland was establishing in Iraq - was either missing or improperly accounted for immediately after their deaths.

Investigators are trying to determine whether that money was stolen as part of the web of bribery, kickbacks, theft and conspiracy that they have laid out in a series of indictments and court papers describing corruption by U.S. officials in Hilla in 2003 and 2004, according to officials involved in the inquiry. That corruption case, centered on reconstruction efforts, has led to four arrests, and more are expected.

Holland was the first US civilian to be murdered in Iraq. Two months later, the second was Nick Berg. For what it's worth, which may not be much, both were alumnists of Oklahoma University, where Berg's email account found it's way to Zacharias Moussaoui.

Berg was allegedly in Iraq on the business of repairing communication facilities, notably a radio tower near Abu Ghraib, and had as a business partner Aziz al-Taee, an Iraqi-emigre linked to Russian mafia. One of Berg's killers is heard to say "Do it quickly" in Russian.

I'm rambling, but here's the thing: Iraq has meant a massive transfer of wealth, much of it "lost" on the grey market. It's what pirates do, and they honour flags only for their convenience. Every last death in Iraq can be attributed to the profit-taking, though some, like Holland's and maybe Berg's, more directly than others.


By the way, if you saw the AP story on the weekend claiming Hugo Chavez seeks a referendum for a 25-year term and thought What the hell?, it was a hell of AP's design. Here's the truth.

Oh when there's too much of nothing,
No one has control - Bob Dylan

I'll need to finish my thoughts from Thursday's post over the next day or two, because there seem to be some wheels coming off as some stars come right that, for however long, may shine light again upon some of Washington's most secret dark places.

First, as DailyKos convincingly argues, the true scandal of the Duke Cunningham hooker story is likely the gender of the hookers. There are some very carefully parsed statements regarding Brent Wilkes' Watergate "hospitality suites," such as the claim of the lawyer for Shirlington Limo's Chris Baker that his client was "never in attendance in any party where any women were being used for prostitution purposes."

Cunningham staked out ground in Congress as a particularly gross character, describing his 1998 prostate operation as "just not natural, unless maybe you’re Barney Frank.” Frank noted that Cunningham "tends to frequently blurt out stuff on gay issues. He seems to be more interested in discussing homosexuality than most homosexuals." Two years earlier Cunningham had baited Frank on the Massachusetts Democrat's own hooker scandal, cutting him off in debate with "Would you like to talk about prostitutes and basements?" (Interestingly, it was only the Barney Frank angle that found any traction in the press and with the general public following The Washington Times' flap of child hookers on the Hill stories in 1989.)

But Cunningham is himself deeply and unhappily closeted, according to Chris Crain of The Washington Blade:

Cunningham, who is married with grown children, has admitted to romantic, loving relationships with men, both during his Vietnam military service and as a civilian. That was the remarkable story that this publication reported two years ago, when Elizabeth Birch, the former Human Rights Campaign leader, inadvertently outed Cunningham at a gay rights forum.

Birch never mentioned Cunningham’s name, but she talked about a rabidly anti-gay congressman who asked to meet privately with her in the midst of a controversy over his use in a speech on the floor of the House the term "homos" to describe gays who have served in the military. Alone with Birch and an HRC staffer, the unnamed congressman shared that he had loved men during his life. In telling the story, Birch offered up a few too many details about the closeted congressman.

As for Porter Goss, Cannonfire does an excellent job of linking his abrupt resignation to an ongoing investigation of the Cunningham fiasco through CIA Executive Director Kyle "Dusty" Foggo's ties to Brent Wilkes.

The CIA, of course, is the genuine Mac Daddy of Capitol Hill prostitution. If Craig Spence could talk, he would, and so he can't. The Agency's interest in prostitution as a tool of blackmail and political leverage happened before at the Watergate, and may have even be closer to the truth of Nixon's fall than the "second-rate burglary." So to the degree Goss and Foggo may be involved, I think it's safe to assume it wasn't for their own personal "stress management."

Also, coincidentally or not, Jeff Gannon chose this of all weeks to acknowledge publically for the first time that yes, in fact, he is a gay man. The admission came during the panel session of the Equality Forum, and was apparently so difficult for him he had trouble forming the words, even before a largely gay audience.

Gannon was asked where he slept during his White House overnights, but he was saved from responding by the moderators. It was the decent thing to do.

They're whispering his name
through this disappearing land
But hidden in his coat
is a red right hand - Nick Cave

Nineteen-year old Italian Benjamino Evangelista emigrated to the US in 1904 and changed his name to Benny Evangelist. Two years later he began having ecstatic visions - "my own views and signs," he said, "that I see from 12 to 3 AM" - and they lasted for 20 years. He wrote it down in one of America's many "received" books, which he titled The Oldest History of the World Discovered by Occult Science in Detroit, Michigan. The first volume, self-published in 1926 and out-of-print until September, 2001, left the history at the time of Noah.

It was the only volume Evangelist lived to complete. On the morning of July 3, 1929, he was discovered slumped in the chair of his home office, his severed head at his feet and the floor littered with copies of The Oldest History in the World. Upstairs, his wife Santina was found hanging across the bed, only sinews connecting her head and neck, and clutching in one hand their murdered 18-month old son Mario. In another room lay the butchered remains of their three other children, Angelina, Margaret and Eugenis, ages seven, five and four.

The Detroit Free Press of July 5, 1929 ran a story headlined "Massacre of 6 in Cult Family Baffles Police":

Evangelist was a man of mystifying history on the religious side of his life. More than 20 years ago he founded the "Union Federation of America," a weird religious theory in his own somewhat warped mind, and, having been "appointed by God," he wrote the "bible" of that faith.

...

Several pieces of women's undergarments, each tagged with the name of its owner, police point out, reveal that the so-called mystic indulged in practices of "voodoosim," or devil worship. Such garments, "voodooism" has it, can lead to the finding of a missing person, when they are properly handled by one versed in the mystic arts of that belief.

...

"Evangelist, no doubt, was insane," Father [Francis] Beccheniu said [who was to bury the family the following Saturday], "Of that I am sure, although he was shrewd and seemed to have quite a lot of intelligence in other matters. Mrs. Evangelist was more of a fanatic than her husband on the subject of religion, and she did not display the intelligence revealed by him. "I do not believe Evangelist was sincere in practicing the creed he had established. Rather, I believe he founded the mysterious cult with all of its weird props and practices, with the sole idea of making money."

The previous day's breaking story of the murders adds colour regarding Evangelist's cult:

Eight or ten wax figures, each hideous and grotesque to the extreme, and each presumably representing one of the "celestial planets," were suspended on the altar in a circle by wires from the ceiling. Among them was a huge eye, electrically lighted from the inside, which Evangelist referred to in his bible as "the sun."

The walls and ceiling of this "religious sanctum" were lined with light green cloth, which bulged out in places like the walls of a padded cell. In a window of the basement, which was on a line with and visible from St. Aubin avenue, a large card bore the words: "Great Celestial Planet Exhibition."

Evangelist and his family undoubtedly were killed while the "prophet" was in his office after having "read the signs" from the celestial bodies, for his bible states that he "saw them from 12 to 3 a. m."

It was the worst mass murder in Detroit's history. Theft was not a motive; valuables were untouched. And it remains unsolved today.

What's the point of rehashing such a tragic though long-cold case? The trance-like authorship of the text, the occult aspect of the crime, the media's inadequacies, the singular brutality, "baffled" police and the impotence of justice: it's America. It always has been America.

Another cold case, this from Sonoma California, but only 20 months old: "Tantalizing clues in pair's slaying" read the headline in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle. Sheriffs have released evidence - a sign of some desperation - from the murder scene of a young engaged couple killed camping on a beach in hope of comparing "our evidence to people's suspicions," says Lt. Dave Edmonds. The evidence includes pictures of devil faces carved or burned in nearby driftwood and enigmatic journal pages in several different hands mentioning leprechauns and the toothfairy and containing text like, "At the Driftwood Inn, alone again, outside of myself and placid as hell."

The two murder victims were shot in the head, likely at close range while they slept. There was no sign of a robbery: "None of the couple's belongings, including Christian literature and camping gear, had been disturbed." Reverend Chris Cutshall, father of victim Lindsay, age 22, says "We have no idea at this stage whether these drawings have anything to do with the case. But we believe their deaths were satanically motivated anyway. These were great kids who were serving the Lord, and they didn't have any enemies other than the evil one."

It's easy to discount such remarks as simply a grieving father finding consolation and meaning in setting his religious template upon his daughter's mysterious death. American evangelicals seem to invite such discounting. And that so many seem to want there to be a vast satanic conspiracy, as though one provides an inverted confirmation of the sureity of their own faith, makes it easy for those who wish to do so to dismiss allegations of ritual abuse and occult crime as the product of religious hysteria, confusion and ignorance. But the unsolved murders in Sonoma remind me of the still unsolved 1974 murder of student Arlis Perry, found stabbed in a Stanford sanctuary with a tall candle in her vagina and another between her breasts, which in turn recalls the 1980 killing of Sister Margaret Ann Pahl in a hospital chapel, an inverted cross stabbed into her torso, for which Father Gerald Robinson is at last standing trial. (In an interview with the prosecution, "Robinson said he was stunned when he walked into the sacristy and [fellow hospital chaplain Rev. Jerome] Swiatecki turned around and said, 'Why did you do this?' Robinson said he did not know why the other priest pointed the finger at him.") Also, the Sonoma murders were cited by Richard Hamlin in his recent trial, referring to the satanic rituals he claims wife Susan described to him. Many took place, he said, on Goat Rock, close to the murder scene.


It's very late and I haven't actually reached the point of this post. But I'm too tired to make much sense to carry on right now, so I'm afraid I'll need to wrap this up later.

Oh if there's an original thought out there, I could use it right now - Bob Dylan

One thing this blog has taught me is the fallacy of original thought. Or I suppose, to sharpen the point and turn it on myself, I mean the fallacy that my own thought might be original. A comment to Friday's post, for instance:

In one of Colin Wilson's works...he speaks of certain cases of people with brains that are largely fluid, covered over with a thin layer of cortex. While most people with this condition are severely retarded, there are known instances of such people showing normal or above normal intelligence. Wilson goes on to speculate on the idea of the brain not as an organ of thought, but as some sort of receiver for thought that arises outside of the body. The idea's an odd one, yet in many ways attractive for the number of loose ends it ties up.

I haven't read that from Wilson but I'm familiar with the study he cites, and it's been helping to inform for me a concept of the brain as a receiver of non-localized consciousness. It seems conducive to a holographic model, and it could contribute to an understanding of a number of psychic and even religious phenomena such as mind reading, possession and reincarnation. (For example, perhaps rather than evidence for rebirth, a child's memories of a past life are the result of ego confusion brought about by signal error. Or, to use the radio jargon that's appropriately spooky for this metaphor, when a "strong signal [is] in the proximity on the low bands, it will cause crossmodulation and create a 'ghost' signal.")

I still think it's still a good idea, though I no longer think it's my own. And a good thing, too. Because perhaps the actual fallacy here is not original thought, but independent thought.

I was just thinking that. Maybe we don't need to put our heads together. Maybe instead, we need to imagine our skulls as durable cabinets protecting the circuitry that receives the signals pulsing all around us.

When ideas come of age they're simply in the air. Inventors and great minds, suddenly and seemingly independent of each other, appear to tap into the same ineffable thoughtstream. Great artists are often recognized by the clarity of their manifestations of universality. In Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home, singer Liam Clancy says about Bob Dylan that "it wasn’t necessary for him to be a definitive person – he was a receiver – he was possessed," while producer Bob Johnson says Dylan's work isn't to Dylan's fault or credit: "He’s got the holy spirit about him – you can look at him and see that."

If we're potentially co-authors and participants in ideas that are "out there," then perhaps we can also intuit and anticipate the bad ideas that come of age to work mischief. Because it doesn't always take a secret lodge or a Grove cabin for dark elements to conspire together; it only requires a compatability of unspoken means and motive, up and down the chain of unaccountability. Once the pieces are in place, the commands needn't be explicit and top-heavy and the conspiracy needn't even be self-conscious. For instance, I don't think for a moment that Tony Blair "gave the order" for the murder of David Kelly, though I can well imagine that, on hearing the news, Blair immediately recognized the hand of statecraft and perhaps even his own numb complicity.

Maybe this is what accounts for the 9/11 synchronicities of The Lone Gunman pilot. Rather than Chris Carter being tipped off, perhaps he tapped in.

Many of us have been intuiting spoilers to the story arc of the Iraq War for years: The death squads and black ops creating untenable chaos, sectarian strife and intentional failure to the bogus "mission" of democracy, with the objective of generating the "regretable inevitability" of partition. "Civil War" was talked up, because the End Game for Iraq was always division into impotent colonial Bantusans. We just knew it.

It seems like the End Game has arrived, because suddenly partition, which "just months ago was largely dismissed as a fringe thought," is now being described by the usual suspects in the Pravdas of this empire as being the "surest - and perhaps now the only - way to bring stability to Iraq." And just as The Washington Post chimes in, Joe Biden shows up in The New York Times with an editorial contending that Iraq should be split into three separate ethnographic regions.

If we lack independent thought, then so do they. And if we can see it coming, then maybe we can do something about it before it arrives.

Apologies for the posting lag, it's taking me longer than expected to wrap my head around the next entry. Please use this space as an open thread, and I'll be updating tomorrow.

There's a black Mercedes rollin' through the combat zone - Bob Dylan

There aren't many small countries with greater geostrategic heft than Azerbaijan. Wedged between Russia and Iran, it's a major port of entry to the West for the region's oil and heroin, much of the latter being routed through the distribution hub of Kosovo, secured in the Balkans wars of the last decade.

Another commodity in Azerbaijan's pipeline subject to fantastic mark-up is the flesh of young women. Anar Orujov, in his report "Azerbaijani slaves of the 21st century" for the Caucasus Media Investigations Center, writes that "in our country a prostitute can make a profit from $7,000 up to $100,000 depending on the 'exploitation conditions.' No doubt that such a profitable business paves the way to spend a lot of money to 'hunt' the people, and establishment of a large mafia network which sometimes even the high-ranking officials are involved."

The composition of the US-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce certainly suggests another large mafia network hasn't neglected Baku. The "Honorary Council of Advisors" includes James Baker, Lloyd Bentson, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Dick Cheney (resigned after the Nov 2000 election), Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and John Sununu. Richard Perle is a Trustee, and Richard Armitage was on the Board until his State Department appointment. Turkish and Azerbaijani were Sibel Edmonds' two languages in the FBI's translation department, where she discovered the intersections of drugs, arms and oil.

So it's with some interest I read that the US State Department has today announced the recall of Ambassador Reno Harnish, former Chief of Mission, Pristina (capital of the aforementioned hub of Kosovo) and late of the American Enterprise Institute. Why, is of particular interest.

From UPI:

The Azerbaijani media is rife with speculation that Harnish is being recalled because of a burgeoning human smuggling scandal which came to the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The Moscow newspaper Trud newspaper reported on Thursday that FBI agents began interviews with embassy officials about the smuggling of Azerbaijani prostitutes into the United States and the issuing of visas.

As the investigation proceeded, Zarifa Dzhabieva, a former translator for the American embassy was found knifed to death in her own home. Whoever killed Dzhabieva ransacked her dwelling looking for something, even though none of the victim's valuables had been touched. Dzhabieva was under investigation for aiding and abetting the issuing of visas and forged documents to girls destined for the U.S. sex trade.

Tales of prostitution, visa fraud, human trafficking and the murder of an embassy translator prompted the bizarre comment from public relations official Jonathan Henick that "The uncovering of the crime linked to the sale of Azerbaijani girls to the USA, and the punishment of the guilty parties merely shows the high level of American-Azerbaijani relations."

A translation of the Trud story, reproduced in Pravda, can be read here. Trud adds that "It is known for certain that the enlistment and transfer of young people from sunny Azerbaijan to no less sunny Florida were organized on a truly American scale and brought large profits."

Reno seems destined to land on his feet, reputation unsmudged. His next assignment appears already lined up. According to "diplomatic sources", he will find an environmental posting engaged in the "fight against bird flu."

Everybody wears a halo, never saw nothing at all
So who put that bullet hole in Peggy's kitchen wall? - Bruce Cockburn

I was in the middle of writing something else when I saw this. Read it fast, while it lasts, because it's the kind of discomforting story that disappears quickly with little follow-up and no national attention.

Two Houston men driving a tractor-trailer pulled up to the gate of Pennsylvania's Beaver Valley nuclear power station Tuesday afternoon. They said they'd arrived from Chicago with an empty flatbed to pick up a large tool container bound for Youngstown, Ohio.

There are at least a couple of accounts of what happened next. In one, the men drove away as soon as they were informed their vehicle would be subject to routine inspection, prompting the security guards to become suspicious and call police, "who pulled the truck over about a mile from the plant." In the sleeping compartment, more than half a million dollars in ten bundles of small bills wrapped in plastic and duct tape was found stuffed in a locked duffel bag. In another version the bag is found by security before the truckers drive off and the search warrant is executed. In both, the truckers claim they had no idea what was in the bag, and offer no persuasive explanation for how it got there. One trucker claimed it was for a truck his boss hoped to purchase, "but when the security workers called the truckers' boss in Houston, he also said he knew nothing about the money." In this account, it was the boss who instructed the drivers to back away from the plant and return to the road.

Three more things: A police dog sensed drug residue on the bills (Not necessarily exceptional, that: "The probability that every single person in the United States is carrying drug-tainted money is almost certain.") Though the truckers were said to be polite and cooperative, one of them wasn't carrying identification, and told the dog-ate-my-homework tale of it having been stolen from the truck the night before. (While a duffel bag of cash was left behind?) And the "truckers worked for a company hired by San Francisco-based Bechtel Corp., which is performing construction work and replacing equipment at the plant."

The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force was summoned and quickly sized up the situation. The truckers were released, the money seized and, as seen in this video, it was the reporters who were detained. The truckers were allowed to leave because authorities claimed there was no indication they had committed a crime. How quaint, and how selective the presumption of innocence. That the men were from Houston rather than, say, Bangla Desh, meant they didn't look like terrorists to the security guards, even though Michael Meiring also lived in Houston for a time.

So what is going on here? Because something just had its cover blown.

Could the intention have been to purchase nuclear material, perhaps for a dirty bomb to trigger the Iran war and make a US nuclear assault less objectionable? Could be, but I'd also say this scene appears too sloppy for such a task, and Bechtel wouldn't risk showing its hand so close to such action.

It strikes me, rather, as aspects of a covert drug routine so familiar that the players got lazy. Caught out, all they have to do is forfeit the money back to the government from which it probably came. In this old racket, Bechtel risks nothing.

On the other hand, terror and drugs are simply different manifestations of the same Will to Control. So whatever was intended will still endeavour to find its way, and the media will be looking somewhere else, comprehending nothing.