So let’s jump right into it then with observation #1: When the likely outcome of an unwed pregnancy is death by stoning, people can be really creative liars.

Nothing in the least bit controversial about that … right? Let’s move on then to observation #2: It is fully understandable why the lie was told, and even why many people in that era might have believed it; what is more difficult to understand is why tens of millions of people around the world still believe it 2,000 years later.

I doubt that I’ve lost anyone yet, so let’s quickly move on to observation #3: Jesus was initially described as coming from a line of men who worked with their hands, which was later interpreted to mean that he was a carpenter. Given though that the primary building materials in the land of his birth were sand and rock, it is far more likely that Joseph and his sons were stone masons. Just saying …

Observation #4: Jesus of Nazareth’s real father was undoubtedly a Roman citizen. Some have speculated that he was the product of rape by one of the notoriously ruthless Roman storm-troopers, but his later actions suggest to this completely impartial observer that it was more likely a consensual coupling and that the father was someone of considerably more importance than a mere soldier.

Observation #5: Jesus was very likely a controlled Roman asset. Just as, nearly two thousand years later, the obviously controlled asset known as Jesse Jackson replaced the slain Martin Luther King, and the equally controlled asset known as Louis Farrakhan replaced the eliminated Malcolm X, so it was that Jesus was maneuvered into position to replace the executed John the Baptist, who had, I’m guessing, become a bit of a problem for the Roman overseers.

The message that the emergent messiah delivered to those living under the brutal hand of those Roman occupiers was, by any rational analysis, exactly the wrong one. It was a message brimming with advice about loving neighbors and turning cheeks … a message that constantly reinforced the notion that it was better to be poor and oppressed than wealthy and powerful, for the poor, you see, were going to spend all eternity in the glorious ‘Kingdom of Heaven,’ while the rich were going to burn in the fires of Hell (unless they were somehow able to steer their camels through the eye of a needle, or something like that).

It was, in other words, a belief system seemingly designed specifically to suppress any thoughts of rebellion amongst the unwashed masses. And the beauty of it was that no one would find out if the fabled Kingdom of Heaven actually existed until it was too late for them to get a refund.

I know what you’re thinking here: “But Dave, didn’t the Romans execute Jesus, and do so in a horrifically brutal and sadistic manner – you know, like in that Mel Gibson torture-porn flick?”

Maybe they did and maybe they didn’t. Even if they did, that would not necessarily prove that Jesus was not a covert Roman operative. Most all assets are expendable if they become more valuable dead than alive. And it’s pretty clear that for the last couple thousand years, Jesus has proven his value as a dead martyr. But was he crucified? I tend to doubt that he was.

Consider that Mr. Nazareth was alone by choice when apprehended. He had supposedly wandered into a garden to gather his thoughts, or some such thing, allowing Roman authorities to conveniently apprehend him quietly and without incident. It was almost as if he had turned himself in, knowing that he was in safe hands. The most likely scenario is that he was replaced with a look-alike at the private palace of Pontius Pilate, where he was taken to supposedly be tried and convicted (so to speak).

Bear in mind that whoever had the misfortune of resembling Jesus needn’t have been all that close of a double. By the time he was beaten, whipped and outfitted with a custom crown of thorns, the battered, bruised and bloody body would undoubtedly have been all but unrecognizable. And following the crucifixion, as we all know, the body, uhmm, disappeared. Because it was, you know, resurrected from the dead. Or because it had to be disposed of before anyone caught on that it wasn’t really Jesus.

Personally, I’m going with option #2, primarily because I am not familiar with any documented cases of bodies being resurrected from the dead and I’m not really into taking huge leaps of faith. But maybe that’s just me.

As previously noted, the tactics deployed by the Romans circa 32 AD bear many similarities to the psychological warfare operations carried out today. And why wouldn’t they? After all, not much has changed in the last 2,000 years, including the identities of our overlords. I’m not much sold, as it turns out, on the notion that great empires rise and fall. Since at least biblical times, as best I can determine, there has only been one empire, though the perceived center of power has shifted in what basically amounts to a shell game.

The Roman Empire, in other words, did not fall just as its offspring, the British Empire, began to rise, nor did the British Empire fall just as its offspring, the American Empire, began to rise. No, the Roman Empire quite obviously transformed itself into the British Empire, which in turn used smoke and mirrors to create the ‘new’ American empire by sending a bunch of wealthy Masons posing as ‘Pilgrims’ over to the ‘New World’ and then later staging a patently fake ‘Revolutionary War.’ I mean, really people, do you honestly believe that the mighty British Empire, at the height of its power and with a formidable navy at its disposal, was unable to suppress a ragtag rebellion that most colonists had little interest in participating in?

And is it, after all, just a coincidence that the British countryside is littered with Roman ruins? Or that the Eastern Roman Empire fell, according to historians, circa 1453 AD, while the British Empire began its rise, according to those same historians, around 1497 AD? And is it also a coincidence that the British Imperial Century (which followed the 1st British Empire [1583-1783] and the 2nd British Empire [1783-1815]) ended in 1914, while the rise of the American Empire (never actually referred to as such) is generally pegged to the United States’ entry into World War I circa 1917?

And is it just a coincidence that the overwhelming majority of American presidents have been descended from royal British bloodlines? Speaking of American presidents, this seems like a good time to segue into a discussion of who our next fearless leader will be.

For a good many months, I was fooled into believing that President Blackbush was going to walk away with an easy win. After all, it was perfectly obvious that the ‘opposing’ party had gathered together an impossibly weak field of contenders, none of whom appeared to have any shot at all of occupying the White House, and the president’s own party was giving him a free pass in the primaries, despite his ever-increasing unpopularity. There didn’t, and still don’t, appear to be any significant hurdles standing between Barry O and another four years in the West Wing.

Nevertheless, I am now convinced that the White House will soon be occupied by someone with an (R) affixed to his name. But which one will it be? Presumably none of the former frontrunners who peaked much too soon and burned out much too quickly, like Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann and Herman Cain. And obviously not the also-rans whose campaigns never seemed to gain any traction – people with forgotten names like Gary Johnson, Tim Pawlenty and Jon Huntsman.

Who then, of the four left standing, will it be? Newt Gingrich, the most recent of the temporary frontrunners to implode rather spectacularly almost immediately after attaining frontrunner status? Mitt Romney, the fallback frontrunner from the beginning of the race, though his support has always been tepid at best? The improbably resurgent Rick Santorum? Or Ron Paul, the guy who for many, many years has been hailed as a hero by a lot of people who should know better?

Obviously, Paul appears to have no chance of grabbing the nomination. But the dirty little secret is that neither do Romney, Santorum nor Gingrich. All four will ultimately fall by the wayside, as did many others before them in this lengthy campaign. As was obvious from the beginning, none of these miscreants has any chance of winning the general election, especially after taking a thorough beating throughout a tortuously long primary season, but that doesn’t mean that the GOP plans on throwing the election to Obama.

No, what the party plans to do is go ‘old school’ at the convention. The plan, as is becoming increasingly clear with each passing day, is for no one to arrive at the convention with the delegates necessary to clinch the nomination. Everything is in place for such an outcome, including the shuffling of the primary/caucus schedule, which was supposedly done to avoid a rush to judgment and allow more of the country to have a say in who the nominee will be. Our elected officials, however, don’t seem to care much about how democratic the candidate selection process is, so in retrospect it is unlikely that that was the real reason for the changes, which also included many states dropping a winner-take-all system in favor of a proportional allocation of delegates.

Notice, by the way, that a certain Barack Obama doesn’t have to navigate through a system that, with a similarly crowded field of Democratic contenders, could very well have denied him the delegates needed to clinch the nomination as well. Notice also the brazen manipulation in Iowa, which magically transformed Romney from being the clear frontrunner, 2-for-2 at the time and heavily favored to go 3-for-3, into being on equal footing with both Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.

In addition to changing the playing field, the newly-created ‘superPACs’ have, for the first time, enabled candidates who have no chance of winning to stay in the race long past their expiration date. Gingrich at this point is pretty much being financed by just a single extremely wealthy benefactor, who has pledged to fund Newt’s campaign all the way to the convention in August. The fact that all other sources of funding have dried up should have sent Gingrich a clear message that he wasn’t a real popular choice for president, but that’s really beside the point in this primary season.

Gingrich is a seasoned pro who knows the role he is playing, just as Santorum and Paul undoubtedly know that they are only remaining in the running to siphon off ‘Tea Party’ votes. Any one of them alone, alas, would be unable to deny Romney the nomination, so all four will likely slug it out until August, or until it is statistically impossible for Romney to clinch the nomination.

So what we have here, in reality, is a bit of cleverly crafted theater. The formula seems to be to take an unusually large field of candidates, all of whom have more negatives than positives, put them through a gruelingly long primary process, complete with a seemingly endless series of debates designed to constantly reinforce those negatives, mix in a newly engineered playing field and a bottomless pit of corporate cash, and what you end up with is a voting public completely disgusted with all of the choices offered to them.

And that, it appears, is by design. The plan is not just to arrive at the convention with no presumptive nominee, but to arrive there with rank-and-file voters thoroughly underwhelmed by all the remaining candidates. Why? Because, as I already indicated, the GOP plans to go ‘old school’ – with a brokered convention. What will likely happen is that there will be a few votes taken, which will, as planned, fail in anointing a candidate. Then the big boys will retire to one of those ‘smoke-filled rooms’ from days of yore, where they will ‘decide’ to bypass all the remaining candidates and bring in fresh blood.

“Wait just a minute there, Dave,” you’re probably thinking. “They may have gotten away with such things back in the days of Woodrow Wilson, but surely they couldn’t pull off such a thing in these more enlightened times!”

Ah, but they can and they will. And all the pundits on all the cable news channels will feign surprise, as though no one saw this coming. And all the people in the convention hall will stand up and cheer. Loudly. And the people watching on their television sets at home will stand up and cheer as well.

They will cheer despite the fact that the dumping of the entire field of candidates means that the entire primary campaign breathlessly covered by the media – the hundreds of millions of dollars spent, the unprecedented number of pointless debates, the endless barrage of campaign ads and robocalls, the ever-shifting field of candidates, the constant speculation over who the nominee would ultimately be – was all just smoke and mirrors. They will cheer despite the fact that it will represent yet another brazen attack on basic democratic rights.

I know this because I have run the brokered convention/throw-all-the-buns-out scenario past a few of my conservative friends and they have told me that nothing would make them happier. Their faces light up as if I had just told them that Santa had left a shiny new car for them in the driveway. And that is especially true when I tell them who I believe the nominee and his running-mate will be – Jeb Bush and Sarah Palin. That would be, I am told, a “dream ticket.”

Neither of the two, notably, has any real excuse for not having jumped into the race. Palin voluntarily walked away from a cushy government job, and Bush has declined to enter previous races that he could have easily won, leaving both of them plenty of free time to campaign. And it’s not as if the competition is very tough, in either the primary or the general election. Why then have both – particularly the usually high-profile Sarah Palin – remained unusually quiet through this raucous primary season? Most likely to avoid the bloodshed that has characterized this campaign and quietly await their late coronation.

Personally, I think the GOP should go the Fear Factor route. As some readers are probably aware, a recent episode of the series, which was to have featured contestants drinking donkey semen, was pulled by NBC shortly before it was to air. Rather than let that concept go to waste, and rather than staging yet another pointless debate, why not re-shoot the episode with the four remaining candidates filling in for the original four teams of contestants? Whoever can drink the most donkey semen in the allotted time – or perhaps, given that these are Republican candidates, it could be elephant semen – should be Obama’s challenger in the general election.

Speaking of Fear Factor, did anyone else notice how NBC really dodged a bullet by pulling that curiously timed episode? After all, it wasn’t long after that decision was made that news began to break of the arrest of LAUSD teacher Mark Berndt on multiple charges of having spoon-fed, you guessed it, semen to his blindfolded elementary school students, sparking justified outrage from parents across the city and across the country. In the wake of the disturbing revelations, it certainly would not have cast the network in a very positive light to air footage of fame-whores ingesting semen for entertainment.

And why, one wonders, did they make such a curiously timed decision? The episode was undoubtedly tasteless (no pun intended), but no one at the network seems to have been concerned when the semen-eating challenge was conceived, filmed, put through post-production, put on the television schedule, etc. So why did it suddenly become a problem, almost as if someone at NBC had advance knowledge of the soon-to-break story?

Such weirdness is, of course, par for the course whenever a big pedophile case breaks into the news. And this one is shaping up to be a big one, with a second male teacher, Martin Springer, under arrest and a female teacher’s aide identified in news reports as yet another perpetrator. Parents have been loudly screaming “cover-up,” as well they should, with media reports claiming the cases are unrelated despite the fact that Berndt and Phillips were friends who took their classes on joint field trips, while Berndt and the aide had adjoining classrooms with a common door through which they frequently communicated.

As has been widely reported, LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy took the unusual step of replacing the entire staff at the school, a move widely denounced by parents but fully supported, naturally enough, by the local media, who have not been shy about invoking the name “McMartin,” as though planting the seeds for what may yet be cast as another ‘witch hunt.’

At least no one involved in the case, as of yet, has turned up dead, which can’t be said of former Penn State coach Joe Paterno. I’m certainly not suggesting, of course, that there was anything suspicious about the curiously timed death. I mean, sure, he seemed to be pretty healthy for a man of his age, right up until he was fired a couple months ago for his role in the Jerry Sandusky pedophile scandal, after which we almost immediately learned that he had cancer. But it was, we were told, treatable, so it was a little strange that he dropped dead just weeks later, but shit happens.

And sometimes when shit happens, it gets reported before it happens. Like when it was reported in Australia that John Kennedy was assassinated hours before he actually was. Or like when it was reported on British television that the tower known as WTC7 had collapsed not long before it actually did. Or like when a number of media outlets reported Joe Paterno’s death some twelve hours before he actually died.

Things like that seem to arouse suspicion in some people, though I’m not sure why. It seems to me that such incidents represent the very best of journalistic achievements. That kind of aggressive reporting, which takes the notion of ‘getting the scoop’ to a whole new level, should be applauded. In fact, it should be rewarded with Pulitzer Prizes.

In this particular case, the premature reports were said to be traced back to what was dubbed a ‘hoax’ e-mail sent by a Penn State athletic director. Can something really be considered a hoax though if it proves to be true just twelve hours later?

When the Penn State story first broke, a few scattered reports held that the case ran far deeper than Jerry Sandusky – that there were indications that Sandusky had in fact been pimping out the kids under his control to wealthy donors. What appeared to have been uncovered, in other words, was not the depraved acts of a lone pedophile, but rather another Larry King/Franklin-type case involving wealthy and powerful pedophiles preying on the most vulnerable of children.

And there were, to be sure, impressive political connections. The recently departed Paterno, for instance, had such names as President Gerald R. Ford and President George H.W. Bush in his personal Rolodex (that would be, needless to say, the same George H.W. Bush who has himself been accused multiple times of being a sadistic pedophile, though the media naturally looks away from such unpleasantness when it occasionally surfaces). And then there is the Rick Santorum connection, the former Pennsylvania senator having been the guy who bestowed a congressional award upon Sandusky, a fact that his mudslinging adversaries have predictably opted not to use against him.

Another sign that the Sandusky case runs far deeper than the media would have us believe can be found in the curious story of Ray Frank Gricar, the longtime Pennsylvania District Attorney who opted not to prosecute Sandusky back in 1998. On April 15, 2005, just months before his scheduled retirement, Gricar went missing and has never been heard from since. While his abandoned car was found, his keys, wallet and other personal effects, including his laptop computer, went missing as well. His laptop was ultimately found, but without the hard drive, which was later found destroyed.

Gricar was declared legally dead on July 25, 2011, just a few months before the Sandusky case broke into the news. To make the Gricar story just a little more bizarre, Roy Gricar, Ray’s older brother, had gone missing under remarkably similar circumstances back in May 1996. The elder Gricar’s body was recovered from a river and his death was ruled a suicide. Until shortly before his death, Ray Gricar had been working as a private contractor at Wright Patterson Air Force Base.

Probably the clearest sign that there is far more to the Sandusky case than has generally been reported was the assignment of former FBI director Louis Freeh to oversee the investigation, which immediately brought to mind the assignment of former CIA director William Colby to investigate the death of Franklin investigator Gary Carradori. Since Freeh’s assignment, predictably enough, the media have largely turned away from the case. But that’s okay – I’m sure it was all just a witch-hunt anyway.

So said the Los Angeles Times on March 22, 2002. The timing of this report was rather curious, to say the least, though that fact wouldn’t become apparent until a few days later – when a man named Richard Durn paid a visit to the city council chambers of Nanterre, France.

The Times article was intended to be an exposé on the rampant levels of lawlessness and lack of respect for law enforcement that are allegedly sweeping the nation of France, leading to what reporter Sebastian Rotella called “a time of discontent for French police. Crime was up 7.6% in 2001, continuing a trend marked by what police union officials say was a fourfold increase in physical and verbal assaults on officers in the last five years. Last year, more than 600 officers were attacked while on duty.” (2)

The blame for this state of affairs was laid, naturally enough, squarely on the shoulders of the politicians of various left-wing persuasions who populate the French political structure. Where else to place the blame but on those criminal-coddling politicians who – according to the Times – “seem out of touch with the street”? (3)

Fueling this crime wave, alluded the newspaper, is a law enforcement reform measure passed last year aimed at guaranteeing suspects “immediate access to a lawyer and other Miranda-type safeguards,” to combat what the Times described as “an inquisitorial justice culture that had created one of Europe’s largest populations of suspects jailed while awaiting trial or indictment.” (4)

The reform measure actually went beyond the safeguards established here in the U.S. by the Miranda decision (which is currently slated for review by the same people who appointed the president). It includes, for example, provisions for webcams to be used to monitor the interrogation of juveniles, and for medical doctors to be brought in to determine if a suspect has been physically abused while in custody.

This purportedly ‘soft-on-crime’ reform measure, the Times would have us believe, has led to an unprecedented level of brazenness among France’s ‘criminal element.’

The “most outrageous case” cited as an example by the Times “was the ambush slaying in October of two officers responding to a home invasion. Suspect Jean-Claude Bonnal, an ex-convict accused of killing four civilians two weeks earlier in a holdup, had been released on bail the previous December–even though he was awaiting trial for a department store robbery that left nine wounded.” (5)

Bonnal was free to roam the streets, implied the Times, because of the restrictions placed on law enforcement by the legal reforms. A cynic might ponder whether he wasn’t deliberately unleashed upon society in order to teach the people a lesson about the consequences of ‘coddling’ criminals. In any event, the double slaying of the officers brought to eight the number of law enforcement personnel killed last year in France.

It also proved to be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back: “Resentment in the ranks boiled over in November. National police officers held demonstrations across the country. Then came the turn of the gendarmerie, the force that patrols the rural areas.” (6) The demonstrations were said to be spawned by spiraling crime rates, police resentment of the law enforcement reform measure, and the political establishment’s alleged lack of support for the law enforcement community.

What the police demonstrations appear to actually have been though is an integral part of a campaign in which fear of supposedly rampant criminality is being manufactured and manipulated to push a law-and-order agenda that is clearly intended to push the French electorate in the direction of the most right-wing elements of the French political structure – precisely mirroring, in every detail, the psychological warfare campaign that has been waged here in the States for the last several decades.

Crime in France has, no doubt, been on the rise in recent years. The Guardian has reported that: “France’s crime rate surged by a record 8% last year, exceeding 4m offences for the first time in the country’s history. Violent crimes, particularly armed robberies, increased by 9.8%, while the number of rapes rose by 13.2% and there was a sharp rise in offences carried out by under-13s.” (7)

The Independent, however, offered a different take on France’s recent rise in criminality: “Never mind the statistics, which show that the French murder rate has been falling steadily (as has the American murder rate) … Never mind the fact that, despite an undoubted surge in the last few years, most violent crime in France remains far below the levels in Britain or Germany.” (8)

And never mind that the levels of violent crime in the UK and Germany remain but a pale shadow of the violent crime levels here in the United States – the largely undisputed world-heavyweight-champion of violent crime. In the year 2000, the entire nation of France (population 60 million) recorded 1,051 homicides; by way of comparison, Los Angeles County alone (population 9.5 million) recorded a nearly identical number of murders. (9)

Missing from virtually all press accounts of the supposed crimewave sweeping France has been any sort of analysis of the underlying social causes of the relatively mild levels of rising criminality. The World Socialist Web Site provided some of the missing context:

“For some years now, successive French governments have been reducing the cost to the state and to employers of unemployment insurance and other social benefits. There are now 2,200,000 unemployed in France, 9 percent of the population. In some areas, youth unemployment approaches 50 percent. An estimated 4 million people live in poverty, including many who have jobs, and France has the highest youth suicide rate in Europe.” (10)

The WSWS also reproduced a letter written to the editor of the French daily Liberation which reflected the levels of despair and frustration felt by many French youth. The letter read, in part: “We are the first generation since the Second World War to earn less than our parents. Our future is uncertain.” (11) Indeed it is, as is the future of all inhabitants of planet Earth.

The erosion of social services, needless to say, is an idea imported from America, so it is hardly surprising that it would be coupled with what the L.A. Times described as an eruption of “U.S.-style street violence.” (12) Facilitating the rise in high-profile violent crime has been “the increased presence of assault rifles and other heavy weapons smuggled from the Balkans.” (13) “Once smugglers enter the European Union, the absence of borders makes for booming business.” (14)

It should go without saying that the increased presence of military-style weaponry, particularly in what we like to refer to as the ‘inner cities,’ has also fueled the rise in “U.S.-style street violence” right here in the U.S.. It should also go without saying that most of those weapons currently flowing through the Balkans into Europe originate right here in the munitions factories of U.S. ‘defense’ contractors.

While the erosion of the social safety net and the infusion of guns have certainly led to higher rates of crime, the perception being generated  – of violent crime running rampant through the streets of France – is largely an illusion. This illusion is being created by both an unprecedented rise in the occurrence of ultra-violent rampage killings, and a media fixation on crime that is wildly out of proportion to the problem.

That is, alas, the script that has been followed here in America to incrementally push the people to support a right-wing ‘law-and-order’ agenda that has resulted in a wholesale stripping away of civil rights, due process rights and privacy rights. Accompanying that has been a pronounced race-baiting that has led to rising racial tensions in this country and a prison population composed largely of African-Americans and Hispanics.

It is notable then that the Los Angeles Times has commented that among the “most worrisome trends” in France has been “a spreading drug-and-thug culture, especially among the young men of North African descent.” (15) Ahhh, yes … if it wasn’t for the inherent criminality of those ‘inferior races,’ with their penchant for ‘gang-banging,’ we could lick this crime problem once and for all.

Never mind that the modern-day “drug-and-thug culture” is largely a product of CIA covert operations that dumped a toxic mixture of guns and crack cocaine into the country’s ‘inner cities’ in the 1980s. That is not to say that gangs and gang violence didn’t exist before that time. Certainly they did. But just as certain is that the Iran/Contra operations fundamentally changed the nature of crime in America’s impoverished neighborhoods, which then became the justification for the complete militarization of ‘big city’ police departments.

The same Times report noted that “the French have been shocked by acts of unprecedented viciousness. Headlines speak of brazen cop-killers, gang rapists prowling housing projects, and schoolyard extortionists.” (18) The Guardian added that: “Near blanket media coverage of incidents of youth crime has helped to keep the issue firmly in the public eye.” (19)

Such sensationalized crime reporting, including the demonizing of youth (20), has been a staple of the American print and broadcast media for quite some time, and has aided immeasurably in rallying public support for the rolling back of constitutional protections. As the National Criminal Justice Commission noted in a February 1996 report: “When national news wants to excite viewers, it scours the nation for the day’s most titillating crime, and broadcasts it everywhere. The result is a popular sense that rare and extreme crimes happen around every corner.” (21)

Vincent Schiraldi, the director of the Justice Policy Institute, explained to the Christian Science Monitor in November 1997 how such reporting skews public perception of crime: “For example, since 1993, the homicide rate nationwide dropped by 20%. Yet since 1993, coverage of murders on the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news increased by an astonishing 721%. As a result, in 1993 alone, the number of Americans ranking crime as the number one problem increased six fold.” (22)

And so it is in France as the country heads into a presidential election in which “the leading candidates [and the press] have made law-and-order issues and juvenile delinquency a major theme of their campaigns.” (23) Assisting in keeping the people’s attention focused on law-and-order issues and the looming menace of violent crime has been a steady stream of those once uniquely American creations – rampage killers.

And just as in America, France’s versions of rampage/spree/mass murderers have followed a time-honored script, as though they have all attended the same Rampage Killer Training Academy. With a few minor variations, that script generally reads something like this: a man described as a loner (though the facts frequently contradict that description) suddenly explodes in an orgy of violence, gunning down – in a coldly professional, emotionless manner – as many people as possible, before turning his guns on himself – thereby preempting any sort of a meaningful investigation of the crime and ensuring that the ‘evidence’ in the case will never be aired in open court.

Richard Durn apparently had read a copy of that script. At 1:15 AM the morning of March 27 – after sitting in the public gallery of Nanterre’s city council chambers through some six hours of tedious local political wrangling, and after waiting until all other visitors had cleared out – Durn approached the gathered group of forty or so elected officials without saying a word and opened fire with a dizzying barrage of semi-automatic handgun fire, shooting his initial victims in the back. (24) “The attack was,” according to the BBC’s Paris correspondent, “clearly prepared in advance.” (25)

When it was all over, eight local councillors lay dead and another nineteen were wounded (early reports claimed that as many as 30 were wounded). The council chambers were littered with dozens of spent shell casings and, according to a Paris fire brigade spokesman, Captain Laurent Vibert, “There are at least 50 bullet impacts in the council chamber. According to our first reports, he used at least five ammunition clips.” (26)

The mass murder was – according to the local mayor, who survived the rampage – “conducted with clinical precision.” (27) Press reports were littered with descriptions of a preternaturally calm, emotionally-detached killer.

The Irish Times commented that: “Eyewitnesses were struck by Mr Durn’s calm, methodical manner.” (28) The BBC reported that: “The gunman who opened fire on a council meeting in Paris acted methodically and calmly, working his way around the room as he shot his victims, witnesses say.” (29) One councillor/witness told the Guardian that: “He was shooting at anything that moved … but he was completely calm.” (30)

Other witnesses noted that “Mr Durn did not utter a word while spraying the room with bullets.” (31) One unidentified official told the BBC that Durn “was very calm. He didn’t look like a crazy person at all.” (32) Christian Brunet, a councillor/witness, told the Independent: “He didn’t say a word. He must have used three or four magazines. He had a second pistol in his belt. It was like being in a horror film. He shot the councillors in the front row, coldly, one by one.” (33)

It was a performance that seemed to borrow heavily from The Terminator: “Witnesses say the man had two or three guns, and was shooting with both hands at once … Others described how he calmly reloaded his weapons before carrying on.” (34) Two of those guns, which Durn was apparently firing simultaneously, were Glock 9mm semi-automatics.

Durn was eventually overpowered – but not without considerable effort. He seemed to be oblivious to attempts by witnesses/victims to stop his rampage: “At least one councillor reportedly threw a chair at the gunman to try to knock him to the ground. Another person tried to wrestle him to the floor. But witnesses said the man never stopped shooting.” (35)

One can almost picture Ahhnuld calmly reloading and robotically firing with both hands even as chairs and would-be attackers bounce off of him.

Several councillors ultimately braved the barrage of bullets to disarm and contain Durn. As they did so, the well-armed Durn pulled out yet a third gun, “a .357 magnum handgun which he fired at those trying to overpower him.” (36)

Had he not been stopped, Durn’s performance was apparently scheduled to include his own suicide as the final act – most likely to be performed with the .357 he had tucked in his belt and which he produced as soon as he realized that the show was drawing to a close. After being overpowered, he reportedly screamed “kill me, kill me.” (37) It was later reported that: “Police said Durn admitted during questioning that he planned to kill himself after gunning down the councillors.” (38)

Most press accounts portrayed Durn as the proverbial ‘deranged loner’ – noting that he was unemployed, unmarried and still living with his mother, and that he had a long history of mental illness. LeMonde, for instance, reported that: “He did not have friends, nor a known girlfriend, and he lived with his mother.” (39) But Durn did in fact have political connections, and was well-known within the council chambers where the shootings took place.

One witness told the BBC that: “He comes to all the council meetings and had no motive to do this.” (40) Other witnesses reported that “some councillors had chatted with him before the debate on the local budget.” (41) The Irish Times held that not only did Durn speak “to several of the men and women he was about to murder … he joked with some of them.” (42) Some of the councillors in the room that night had served alongside of Durn in the local chapter of the League of Human Rights, an organization for which Durn had at one time served as treasurer. (43)

Most media accounts also presented the mass murder as a motiveless, random act of violence. Police referred to it as “motiveless dementia,” (44) while prime minister Lionel Jospin spoke of “a case of furious dementia.” (45) The Independent though talked to some eyewitnesses who said that “Durn selected his targets. They said he seemed to know precisely which councillors he wanted to kill, starting with the Greens and Communists.” (46) A later report by Reutersclaimed that Durn had “intended to kill only the Communist mayor, according to a confession published by LeParisien newspaper yesterday.” (47)

If Durn’s intent was to kill leftists, then he certainly chose the right place to launch his attack. There is certainly no shortage of “Greens and Communists” in Nanterre, which has been described as a “staunchly communist blue-collar suburb” (48) located in “the so-called ‘Red Belt’ of left-wing municipalities surrounding the capital.” (49) The Independent offered a bleak description of Nanterre as “a neat, soulless, working-class enclave.” (50)

Durn himself was described in most press reports as a leftist, though at least one journalist commented on the fact that his supposed leftist leanings were contradicted by his well-documented fascination with guns. Nevertheless, he apparently registered with the Socialist Party in 1995 before switching to the Green Party in 2001; that same year, he joined the League of Human Rights. (51)

Beyond that, the details of Durn’s life remain rather murky. He was the son of an immigrant mother whom he lived with. The identity of his father, interestingly, is said to be unknown. Durn was reportedly highly intelligent and very well educated, with a “history degree and a masters in political sciences.” (52) LeMonde reported that, at school, “he was exceptionally gifted, so much so that he was bored in class.” (53) The Guardian concurred, noting that he was: “Considered brilliant at school.” (54)

Despite his intelligence and academic prowess, Durn appears to have an almost non-existent employment history and he was unemployed at the time of the shootings. For the past four years, he has spent part of his time going on what were described as “humanitarian” missions to Bosnia and Kosovo. (55) Bosnia and Kosovo, it should be noted, are the focus of an array of Western intelligence-run covert operations, as well as being the source for the military-style guns flooding into Europe – guns not unlike the ones wielded by Richard Durn.

How Durn maintained possession of those guns in a country known for having tough gun control laws remains very much a mystery. As Time’s European edition noted: “Legally possessing such a weapon is difficult in France,” though the magazine purports that: “Durn qualified because he was an active member of a shooting club in a nearby town.” (56)

Many press reports echo the claim that Durn was allowed a license for his guns because he was a sport shooter with a membership in a shooting club. Unmentioned in these reports is the fact that the guns owned by Durn were hardly of the sort used by sport shooters. As the Independent correctly noted, the “Glock is a lightweight, hi-tech, automatic pistol used by bodyguards and assassins.” (57)

Even if one accepts that these decidedly non-sporting guns were owned for sport shooting, there is still the question of why the guns were not confiscated two years ago, when Durn allowed his license to expire. As Adam Sage wrote in the UK’s The Times: “Durn had been allowed to keep the guns that he used in the shootings despite the expiry of his three-year firearms licence in 2000.” (58)

The expiration of the license alone should have resulted in the confiscation of the weapons. In addition to that, Durn had exhibited what the L.A. Times described as “a history of ominous behavior.” (59) The Times was referring to the fact that, in 1998, Durn had “threatened a psychiatrist with a handgun.” (60) And yet, even with this threat to the doctor “at a social security office,” his guns still were not confiscated. (61)

There is also the question of why Durn’s psychiatric history did not disqualify him from gun ownership. As The Irish Times recounted: “He had been under psychiatric care since 1990, and took the anti-depressant drug Prozac.” (62) This is, alas, yet another element of the script that they apparently teach at the Rampage Killer Training Academy; the overwhelming majority of America’s spree killers have had a fondness for ingesting so-called ‘anti-depressant’ drugs.

During his twelve years of psychiatric treatment, Durn had reportedly made two suicide attempts and had on at least one occasion been confined to a mental hospital. France’s LeFigaro marveled at how it was that a man with a lengthy psychiatric history, who had already shown himself to be a danger both to himself and to others, and who was knowingly in illegal possession of three weapons which had been unregistered for over two years, had somehow managed to avoid having those weapons seized. (63)

Durn was, notably, never charged with any crime in connection with his armed threat at a government office. It would seem almost as though someone wanted him roaming the streets of France with his mini-arsenal.

Shortly after 10:00 AM on the morning of March 28 – 33 hours after Durn unleashed a barrage of bullets inside a building described as an ultra-modern, concrete and glass pyramid – the 33-year-old gunman allegedly committed suicide while being questioned in the Quai des Orfevres, described as “the French equivalent of Scotland Yard.” (66)

As the Associated Press described it: “Durn was being interrogated in a locked fifth-floor room when he bolted to a closed window, according to [an official police] statement. It said he opened the window and began climbing out.” (67) At the time, Durn “was being questioned by two senior officers, a captain and a brigadier, when he was asked to stand up and sign a statement.” (68)

According to the official police account: “The two officials tried to stop him by grabbing his legs, but the determination of the suspect, whose body was already mostly out of the window, thwarted that attempt.” (69) The police statement also claimed that: “One officer injured his hand trying to haul [Durn] back in.” (70) Once out the window, Durn allegedly scurried across the roof and then plunged to his death.

This official story is, needless to say, not without its problems. Questions have been raised about why the suspect was not handcuffed or otherwise restrained, as well as why he wasn’t being held in a secure mental facility rather than a jail (strangely enough, the French apparently recognize that the mentally ill should be treated differently than other suspects).

Perhaps the most obvious question raised is exactly how a man being closely monitored by at least two experienced officers had time to get to a window, open it, and then climb through it before anyone had a chance to restrain him. This is an especially troubling question in light of the fact that the window, variously described as a “fanlight” or a “skylight,” was quite small and was located 1.6 meters off the floor (slightly more than five feet). (71)

As a leading Parisian lawyer, Jean-Louis Pelletier, commented to The Times: “It is perfectly obvious to everyone that you need time to climb through a skylight.” (72) Lucien Batard, the deputy mayor of Nanterre, asked pointedly: “How can you kill yourself at police headquarters? I didn’t think that someone at criminal police headquarters would have so much liberty of movement that he could jump out of a window.” (73)

Apparently a number of French citizens didn’t think so either. Agence France-Presses reported that the alleged suicide “caused sharp protests, particularly on behalf of the mayor of Nanterre, Jacqueline Fraysse.” (74)

There were obvious signs that a struggle had preceded Durn’s ‘suicide.’ The Guardian reported that Durn’s body was “missing one shoe and a sock, perhaps as a result of the struggle.” (75) LeMonde added that the “clothing of Richard Durn was, moreover, drawn backwards.” (76) These signs of struggle were universally attributed to the officers’ alleged efforts to thwart Durn’s suicide, though they could just as easily have been the result of Durn’s captors’ efforts to assist in his ‘suicide.’

John Lichfield wrote in the Independent that Durn’s timely suicide assured that “the massacre in the suburban council chamber may never be fully explained.” (77) Just as, one might note, the death while in police custody of that most famous of ‘deranged loners,’ Lee Harvey Oswald, assured that the shootings in Dallas would never be fully explained.

Mayor Fraysse observed that “there will be no trial. The families will not know. They had a right to know.” (78) Indeed they did, as did the families of the victims of so many of America’s rampage killers who have self-destructed before their stories could be told.

John Lichfield wrote in the Independent that Durn “joins a long list of mass killers, including … Mark Barton, a day trader in Atlanta who killed his family and then nine others at his office in 1999, James Huberty who killed 21 people in a McDonald’s restaurant in San Diego in 1984, and Charles Whitman who shot dead 16 people from a tower at the University of Texas in 1966.” (79)

None of these men, who were notably all Americans, survived to stand trial. The families of their victims are still waiting to hear what really motivated their murderous rampages. There is some indication that at least one of these legendary mass murderers, Charles Whitman, had received intelligence training while serving as a Marine. (80)

It doesn’t seem entirely out of line to ponder whether Richard Durn was a covert intelligence operative. While hard evidence is lacking, there is a circumstantial case to be made: his murky family history, sketchy employment records, documented political connections, questionable leftist credentials, inexplicably lax treatment by law enforcement officials, and mysterious sojourns to the Balkans all point in that direction.

Time proclaimed that: “Last week’s mass murder of eight city councilors in a Paris suburb … set France searching for political meaning in a fundamentally senseless act.” (81) But was it a senseless act, or was it an overtly political act? Aren’t all ‘rampage’ killings, in the final analysis, political acts? They certainly, at the very least, are exploited for political gain.

Durn’s shooting rampage is expected to have very specific political consequences, which were spelled out in an April 3 report from the BBC. Even while claiming that in “normal circumstances, of course, a massacre by a disturbed individual would play no part in a general debate on crime” (a dubious claim at best), reporter Sheila Bartner wrote that: “But when Richard Durn carried out his murderous attack, he may have inadvertently done more than unleash grief and tragedy in this pleasant Paris suburb. It is just possible he has intervened decisively in the French presidential election … Mr Chirac may have two trump cards after Nanterre – his stronger image on law and order, and his traditional role as a man of the people … The tragedy of Nanterre allows Mr Chirac to play both cards. If Mr Chirac can avoid over-playing it, then Richard Durn may just have dealt him a winning hand.” (82)

A winning hand that he wouldn’t otherwise have held. Prior to the Durn affair, Chirac was trailing in the polls behind the country’s Socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin – despite persistent attacks from the right on Jospin’s alleged “poor record on crime.” (83) Chirac has been, notably, “campaigning on a ‘zero-tolerance’ law and order stance similar to that of New York.” (84)

Similar, that is, to the agenda implemented by Mayor Rudolf Giuliani – widely viewed as an overtly fascist agenda before Rudy was resurrected by the media as ‘America’s Mayor’ in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

Numerous prominent voices of the right in France quickly seized upon the Nanterre massacre. Presidential candidiate Alain Madelin, for example, said “the killing spree exemplified French society’s dangerous drift toward ‘American-style violence.'” (85) How better to remedy that then than through the implementation of American-style fascism?

Bruno Megret of the National Movement, described by the Independent as one of France’s more “extreme right-wing voices,” insisted that “Durn’s actions were part of a ‘collapse of traditional values, a descent into barbarism.'” (86) Such language has been a staple of far-right opinion shapers here in the United States for quite some time.

If these voices of the right carry the day in France, then Richard Durn will do for Jacques Chirac what Willie Horton did for George H.W. Bush.

As for Jospin, he has, “like many French leftwingers … long tried to play down the law-and-order issue as a rightwing, or even far-right, scare tactic.” For that reason, according to the Guardian, “as he seeks to stop Mr Chirac from running away with the election’s crunch issue, he remains more or less stuck with the left’s traditional view that crime is partly the fault of society, whereas the right sees the offender as wholly responsible.” (87)

It can be quite a burden to be “stuck” with promoting the truth when one is embroiled in a political campaign based on lies, smears, and disinformation aimed at discrediting those voices that do attempt to speak the truth about such issues as the causes of crime. Fortunately for our politicians here in America, such burdens don’t exist since nobody even pretends to want to tell the truth. That, of course, doesn’t stop the ‘right’ from relentlessly attacking what passes for the ‘left’ for being ‘soft on crime.’

The attacks of last September 11, probably the most highly-publicized mass murder of all time, have been used by the illegitimate Bush administration to solidify support among the American people for a decidedly reactionary agenda, and to cast the previous – purportedly ‘leftist’ – administration as ‘soft on terrorism.’ In the same way, the attack in Nanterre is being used to push the French electorate to the right.

Perhaps it is appropriate then that among the “scores of police and firefighters” who were brought in to assist with tending to the victims in the Nanterre council chambers was a “contingent of New York City firemen currently visiting the Paris area.” (88) It always helps to have people on-hand with experience in dealing with the aftermath of choreographed tragedies.

REFERENCES
1. Sebastian Rotella “In France, Police Morale Sinks Amid Sea Change,” Los Angeles Times, March 22, 2002
2. ibid.
3. ibid.
4. ibid.
5. ibid.
6. ibid.
7. Jon Henley “Killings put violent crime on top of agenda for French election,” The Guardian, March 28, 2002
8. John Lichfield “Eight councillors die in Paris massacre,” Independent, March 28, 2002
9. Sebastian Rotella “In France, Police Morale Sinks Amid Sea Change,” Los Angeles Times, March 22, 2002
10. Therese LeClere “Shootings in France reveal explosive social tensions,” World Socialist Web Site, April 3, 2002
11. ibid.
12. Sebastian Rotella “French Shooting Suspect Plunges to His Death,” Los Angeles Times, March 29, 2002
13. Sebastian Rotella “In France, Police Morale Sinks Amid Sea Change,” Los Angeles Times, March 22, 2002
14. Sebastian Rotella “French Shooting Suspect Plunges to His Death,” Los Angeles Times, March 29, 2002
15. Sebastian Rotella “In France, Police Morale Sinks Amid Sea Change,” Los Angeles Times, March 22, 2002
16. Therese LeClere “Shootings in France reveal explosive social tensions,” World Socialist Web Site, April 3, 2002
17. Sebastian Rotella “Massacre in France Stokes Debate,” Los Angeles Times, March 28, 2002
18. ibid.
19. Jon Henley “Killings put violent crime on top of agenda for French election,” The Guardian, March 28, 2002
20. David McGowan Derailing Democracy: The America the Media Don’t Want You to See, Common Courage Press, 2000
21. ibid.
22. ibid.
23. Therese LeClere “Shootings in France reveal explosive social tensions,” World Socialist Web Site, April 3, 2002
24. John Lichfield “French gunman leaps to his death from police HQ,” Independent, March 29, 2002
25. “Eight dead in Paris shooting,” BBC News, March 27, 2002
26. “Gunman kills eight, wounds 30 in Paris suburb town hall rampage,” Agence France-Presses, March 27, 2002
27. Adam Sage “Gun spree killer leaps to his death in custody,” The Times, March 29, 2002
28. Lara Marlowe “France in shock following slaughter in council chamber,” The Irish Times, March 28, 2002
29. “Witnesses describe calm killer,” BBC News, March 27, 2002
30.  Jon Henley “Eight die in council chamber massacre,” The Guardian, March 28, 2002
31. ibid.
32. “Eight dead in Paris shooting,” BBC News, March 27, 2002
33. John Lichfield “Eight councillors die in Paris massacre,” Independent, March 28, 2002
34. “Witnesses describe calm killer,” BBC News, March 27, 2002
35. ibid.
36. “Eight dead in Paris shooting,” BBC News, March 27, 2002
37. John Lichfield “Eight councillors die in Paris massacre,” Independent, March 28, 2002
38. “French Mass Murder Suspect Leaps to Death From Cell,” Reuters, March 28, 2002
39.  “Richard Durn expressed desire in three letters ‘to kill a lot of people,’” LeMonde, March 29, 2002
40. “Witnesses describe calm killer,” BBC News, March 27, 2002
41. “Paris gunman ‘often talked of killing,’” BBC News, March 27, 2002
42. Lara Marlowe “France in shock following slaughter in council chamber,” The Irish Times, March 28, 2002
43. John Lichfield “Eight councillors die in Paris massacre,” Independent, March 28, 2002 and “Richard Durn expressed desire in three letters ‘to kill a lot of people,’” LeMonde, March 29, 2002
44. John Lichfield “Eight councillors die in Paris massacre,” Independent, March 28, 2002
45. “Paris gunman jumps to his death,” The Guardian, March 28, 2002
46. John Lichfield “Eight councillors die in Paris massacre,” Independent, March 28, 2002
47. “Paris gunman’s target revealed,” Reuters, April 4, 2002
48. Jon Henley “Eight die in council chamber massacre,” The Guardian, March 28, 2002
49. “French Town Mourns Gun Victims, Wants Answers,” Reuters, April 2, 2002
50. John Lichfield “Eight councillors die in Paris massacre,” Independent, March 28, 2002
51. “Richard Durn expressed desire in three letters ‘to kill a lot of people,’” LeMonde, March 29, 2002
52. Jon Henley “Town hall killer leaps to death at police HQ,” The Guardian, March 29, 2002
53. “Richard Durn expressed desire in three letters ‘to kill a lot of people,’” LeMonde, March 29, 2002
54. Jon Henley “Town hall killer leaps to death at police HQ,” The Guardian, March 29, 2002
55. John Lichfield “Gunman has the classic profile of mass murderer,” Independent, March 28, 2002 and “Richard Durn expressed desire in three letters ‘to kill a lot of people,’” LeMonde, March 29, 2002
56. James Graff “Politics Under the Gun,” TIME Europe Magazine, April 8, 2002
57. John Lichfield “Eight councillors die in Paris massacre,” Independent, March 28, 2002
58. Adam Sage “Gun spree killer leaps to his death in custody,” The Times, March 29, 2002
59. Sebastian Rotella “French Shooting Suspect Plunges to His Death,” Los Angeles Times, March 29, 2002
60. James Graff “Politics Under the Gun,” TIME Europe Magazine, April 8, 2002
61. Adam Sage “Gun spree killer leaps to his death in custody,” The Times, March 29, 2002
62. Lara Marlowe “France in shock following slaughter in council chamber,” The Irish Times, March 28, 2002
63. Delphine Chayet “The Durn Affair: review of a remarkable series of failures,” LeFigaro, March 30, 2002
64. “Paris gunman ‘often talked of killing,’” BBC News, March 27, 2002
65. John Lichfield “Gunman has the classic profile of mass murderer,” Independent, March 28, 2002
66. Adam Sage “Gun spree killer leaps to his death in custody,” The Times, March 29, 2002
67. Elaine Ganley “French Shooting Suspect Kills Self,” Associated Press, March 28, 2002
68. Adam Sage “Gun spree killer leaps to his death in custody,” The Times, March 29, 2002
69. Sebastian Rotella “French Shooting Suspect Plunges to His Death,” Los Angeles Times, March 29, 2002
70. Jon Henley “Town hall killer leaps to death at police HQ,” The Guardian, March 29, 2002
71. “Richard Durn committed suicide: police officer’s account confirmed,” LeMonde, March 29, 2002
72. Adam Sage “Gun spree killer leaps to his death in custody,” The Times, March 29, 2002
73. John Lichfield “French gunman leaps to his death from police HQ,” Independent, March 29, 2002
74. “Investigation continues into the circumstances of the suicide of the Nanterre killer,” Agence France-Presses, March 30, 2002
75. Jon Henley “Town hall killer leaps to death at police HQ,” The Guardian, March 29, 2002
76. Richard Durn committed suicide: police officers account confirmed,” LeMonde, March 29, 2002
77. John Lichfield “French gunman leaps to his death from police HQ,” Independent, March 29, 2002
78. Sebastian Rotella “French Shooting Suspect Plunges to His Death,” Los Angeles Times, March 29, 2002
79. John Lichfield “Gunman has the classic profile of mass murderer,” Independent, March 28, 2002
80. Marlee McLeod “Charles Whitman: The Texas Tower Sniper,” The Crime Library, www.crimelibrary.com
81. James Graff “Politics Under the Gun,” TIME Europe Magazine, April 8, 2002
82. Sheila Barter “Nanterre murders become an election issue,” BBC News, April 3, 2002
83. John Lichfield “Eight councillors die in Paris massacre,” Independent, March 28, 2002
84. “French Town Mourns Gun Victims, Wants Answers,” Reuters, April 2, 2002
85. Sebastian Rotella “Massacre in France Stokes Debate,” Los Angeles Times, March 28, 2002
86. John Lichfield “Eight councillors die in Paris massacre,” Independent, March 28, 2002
87. Jon Henley “Killings put violent crime on top of agenda for French election,” The Guardian, March 28, 2002
88. “Eight die in Paris suburb shooting,” CNN.com, March 27, 2002

Consider, if you will, that we have a vice-president (and I use that term rather loosely) who has all but disappeared from public view without any kind of credible explanation having been given to the American people. It appeared at first as though Cheney’s vanishing act was a temporary and cynical ploy that would allow George the Younger to appear as though he were actually running the show.

But six months have now passed and Dick has only been whipped out for a few passing photo-ops (and to do some arm-twisting in the Middle-East). Never before, even during times of World or Civil War, has such secrecy and security ever been deemed necessary. What possible explanation can there be for this? What credible threats is the vice-president facing?

The only possible danger that Cheney could find himself in would be facing impeachment proceedings for, among other things, his involvement in the Enron scandal and his questionable dealings with Iraq. (1) But that of course could only happen if we had a Congress that wasn’t as fully corrupt as the White House team that they are supposed to provide checks and balances on.

Consider also that we have a president (and I use that term even more loosely) who is so intellectually challenged that before even losing the election he had already issued enough verbal gaffes to fill a book or two. He seemingly cannot open his mouth to utter an unscripted response without lapsing into almost complete incoherence, as though he received his English instruction via home-schooling by his dad.

On top of that, he has appeared in public no fewer than three times now with noticeably large bruises/contusions on his face. First there was the enormous bandage he sported in the dark days of the ‘hanging chads.’ Then there were the obvious contusions late in the year that would have gone without mention were it not for a reporter’s question; only then did the White House hurriedly issue a claim that Bush had had lesions removed from his face.

And then we were treated to the sublimely comical story that our fearless leader lost consciousness while snacking on a pretzel and fell face-first into a coffee table (I could make a cheap joke here about the ‘leader of the free world’ being unable to watch TV and chew pretzels at the same time, but will refrain from doing so). And we were told that this is actually a very common occurrence.

Say what? In what parallel universe is this a common occurrence? What exactly is going on behind closed doors on Pennsylvania Avenue?

Is Poppy Bush trying to slap some sense into his brain-addled youngster? Is George hitting the bottle a little too hard … just before hitting the floor? Is Stepford-wife Laura a closet dominatrix who sometimes gets a little carried away (“Goddamnit, Laura! How many times do I have to tell you? … stay away from the face!”)? Something is obviously not quite right here.

The media though doesn’t seem to find anything unusual about the George and Dick Show. Nary a question has been raised about what exactly Cheney is doing in his ‘secure’ location. Bush’s incoherent mumblings, brain-deadening jingoism, and stunning lack of knowledge about any issue of any significance are somehow presented as though the man has magically assumed presidential stature unequaled in U.S. history.

What the hell is going on here?

For the most part, just business-as-usual as the media performs its time-honored role of covering-up for the inadequacies and crimes of our ‘elected’ leaders. Yet it has become bizarrely surreal as the press struggles mightily to continue performing that function even while faced with an administration both arrogant and criminal almost beyond human comprehension.

How are we to digest the events of the last year? — the wholesale theft of a presidential election, the massive give-aways to the largest and most corrupt corporations in the country, the largely unexplained and completely uninvestigated September 11 attacks, the declaration of open-ended war on much of the world, the rapidly escalating attacks on civil liberties and privacy rights ….

Millions are surely struggling to make sense of their world as the full extent of the corruption of the American political, economic and legal systems is increasingly laid bare. Denial is a fierce weapon, but it does have its limits — even when aided and abetted by a ‘mental health’ community that hands out MK-ULTRA-derived anti-anxiety and anti-depressant drugs like Halloween candy.

How are we to make sense of a vast sea of media outlets all shouting the same lies and all failing to ask the most obvious of questions? How are we to account for an allegedly thriving ‘alternative’ press that takes at face value the official version of the events of September 11 — pretending not to notice the gaping holes in the story? And how are we to make sense of the fact that the leading voices of the supposed ‘left’ have questioned the events of 9-11 only in terms of so-called ‘blowback,’ carefully avoiding questioning the underlying assumption that “Osama did it?”

And how long can we cling to the futile hope that the Democratic Party is somehow going to ride to the rescue and get us out of this mess? The party whose two standard-bearers, “Animatronic Al” Gore and Joe “Jews for Fascism” Lieberman, have openly cheered the ‘War on Terrorism,’ all but demanded its expansion into Iraq, endorsed the preposterous notion of an ‘Axis of Evil,’ and given favorable reviews to America’s new nuclear ‘Posture’? The party whose congressional members, in both houses, have embraced nearly every reactionary appointment by the Bush regime, signed on to every openly fascistic ‘security’ measure that has come their way, given a huge thumbs-up to virtually unlimited military spending, and failed completely to voice even the tiniest protest over the flagrant theft of the election or to launch any sort of an investigation into the events of September 11?

And those are just a few of the Democratic Party’s recent sins. Of course, our learned opinion-shapers insist that the Democrats’ hands are tied — hampered by the massive public support behind the Bush agenda. Opinion polls, brought to you by the very same media to whom lying is an art form, keep insisting that to be the case. And I have a couple of towers in New York that I can let you have for a real good price ….

The truth is that the Democratic Party, quite frankly, offers no resistance to the Bush juggernaut because they differ from their Republican counterparts only in that they give slightly more lip-service to social issues. And that, of course, is only posturing for public consumption.

Changing the party in charge of the White House and/or Congress isn’t going to significantly alter the agenda. Everyone of any importance in Washington is on-board the war train for the long haul. And the notion that the war is being prolonged just to gain a Republican advantage in the 2002 and 2004 elections, propagated by many a pseudo-dissident journalist, is pure fantasy.

As has been made quite clear by a steady stream of official statements, this is a ‘war’ without end — a war with the goal of wiping out any and all pockets of resistance throughout the world, including here on the home front, to the corporate and military elite’s vision of a system of global fascism, and with the parallel goal of identifying false enemies to keep the American people too frightened, disoriented and disjointed to fight back against the encroaching police state. Doesn’t anybody read Orwell anymore?

But I know how comforting it is to believe in the American ship of state. To believe in the two-party system. To believe in the Democratic Party as the party of the people. To believe that things will be OK again just as soon as the next election rolls around and we can get ‘our’ party back in charge. To believe that our obviously free press isn’t really lying to us. To believe that ‘this too shall pass,’ and that we’ll be back to ‘normal’ soon.

It wasn’t that long ago that I was a believer.

But that was before I joined the ranks of those who inhabit a strange, hallucinatory world that is roughly akin to waking up every morning finding yourself trapped in a cheesy sci-fi film. Clicking on the TV, you find that the same lies that you just heard the day before are still spewing out. Turning the channel, you discover that everyone is telling the same lies, in the same way, using the same catch-phrases as though if everyone repeats them they somehow acquire some kind of inherent meaning.

No matter how many times you change the channel, all you hear is “war on terrorism … axis of evil … rule of law … evil-doers … weapons of mass destruction … enduring freedom … 9-11 … 9-11 … 9-11 …”

You briefly ponder whether you might be a victim of some kind of practical joke — an unwitting participant in some kind of new ‘reality show.’ But then you find that everyone else seems to believe the lies, or at least they pretend to. Could they all be in on the joke? And if this isn’t a joke, then how come you seem to be the only one who can see so clearly that the emperor has no clothes?

You hear on the news that the key witness in the biggest financial scandal in the nation’s history has been found shot to death in his car not long before he is to begin delivering his testimony. “Holy shit!” you say, “they’re killing off witnesses in broad daylight.” But no, the somber newscasters all intone, it was an unfortunate suicide.

“Ha!” you say, “nobody’s going to believe that one. The shit is really going to fly now.” You remember back to when Vince Foster supposedly committed suicide, and how the ‘liberal’ media had a field day with the story. “Payback’s a bitch,” you say to yourself. “The Dumbocrats are going to get some mileage out of this one.”

But nobody says a word. No one on Capitol Hill, no one in the press corps. You mention to some co-workers that the suicide story sounds a little suspect, and they look at you as though you are wearing an “I Love Osama” button on your lapel as they robotically ask you if you’ve been to see Black Hawk Down yet. Realizing that you’ve blown your cover, you start nervously watching out of the corner of your eye for the goon squad to arrive and send you happily on your way to Guantánamo.

The Enron scandal, you quickly realize, is not going to be seriously investigated — just as the coup-like nature of the election wasn’t investigated, and just as the ‘terrorist’ attacks on Washington and New York aren’t being investigated, and just like the anthrax attacks, so obviously timed to ratchet up the level of fear and outrage among the American people, aren’t being investigated.

You absent-mindedly take note of the ‘terrorist alert’ warning color for the day as you ponder when this extended acid trip began and if and when it is going to end. What will it take to wake the American people up to the fact that there is something seriously wrong with this picture?

The mounting of a coup d’état in that diseased appendage known as Florida didn’t do it. (2) Nor did the Supreme Court arrogantly ruling that the American people have no right to have their votes counted in apresidential election. (3) Nor the revelation that the Bush regime — itself a shamelessly illegal, unconstitutionally-assembled government — has established an even more illegal, secret and unaccountable ‘shadow’ government. And neither did the fact that military tribunals have been proscribed that have the authority to hand down anonymous death sentences based on secret evidence presented by government-appointed lawyers.

The indefinite detention of ‘suspects,’ held without charges in undisclosed locations and largely deprived of legal counsel, didn’t do it. Nor the open talk of torturing these same ‘suspects.’ Nor the open admissions of an emerging surveillance infrastructure that goes far beyond anything Orwell ever envisioned. Nor even the deliberate leaking of the country’s sociopathic ‘Nuclear Posture Review.’ And, as we have seen repeatedly in the past, mercilessly bombing yet another civilian population in yet another oil-driven military venture certainly didn’t do it.

Is the control too complete — control not just of information, but of thought? Are we so blinded by propaganda, and so desperately clinging to the basic human desire to view ourselves as the good guys, that we are fundamentally incapable of taking an objective look at the world we live in? Can the government get away with literally any lie, no matter how brazen? Is there no hope?

Or is the script of this particular Roger Corman flick somewhat different than what it appears to be?

What if you’re not the only sane person left in a world gone mad? What if there are millions of others out there, all harboring serious doubts about the increasingly unpalatable servings of ‘news’ we are being dished-up? And what if the number of such individuals is growing every day?

What if the constant touting of Bush’s alleged popularity is all part of a well-orchestrated psy-war campaign aimed at stifling dissent by intimidating doubters in the crowd into keeping their opinions to themselves, lest they be viewed as clinically insane for failing to interpret reality in the same way that everyone else purportedly does?

A campaign designed to make you feel, in other words, precisely as you now do: alone, isolated, frustrated, powerless, frightened and confused. A part of that campaign seems to involve, amazingly enough, efforts to taunt you — to rub in your face your utter powerlessness — by dropping tantalizing hints along the way, as though you are being dared to do something about it.

Wasn’t it, after all, France’s Le Figaro that dropped that little bombshell about bin Laden meeting a CIA operative in a Dubai hospital room shortly before September 11? And isn’t Le Figaro owned by the Carlyle Group, whose investors and principals include the Bushes, the bin Ladens, and various ranking members of the national security infrastructure?

And wasn’t it that mouthpiece of the far-right, the Wall Street Journal, that dropped the story about the stock market manipulations that occurred in the days immediately preceding the September 11 attacks?

And wasn’t it a vice-president of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, itself a fully-integrated part of the military/intelligence complex, who initially identified the collapse of the World Trade Center towers as controlled implosions?

And wasn’t it James Bamford (a man with uncomfortably close connections to numerous NSA operatives), working with Doubleday (a publisher not known for bringing the work of dissident authors to light), whose book — released just five months before 9-11 — revealed the details of ‘Operation Northwoods’ — a purported anti-Cuban operation involving a staged provocation with marked similarities to the events of September 11?

And what of the obviously deliberate, and curiously well-publicized, leaks of the so-called Nuclear Posture Review, of the existence of Dick’s ‘shadow’ government, and of the proposed Ministry of Propaganda?* Why leave all these crumbs scattered along the evidence trail?

It’s a little something the spooks like to call ‘Mind War’ — more commonly known on the streets as ‘fucking with your head.’ They want you to feel as though you are stuck in the Twilight Zone. I believe Mr. Orwell referred to it as a state of “controlled insanity.”

But even with the endless blizzard of propaganda — coming straight at you from all directions, including from virtually every avenue of the media, ‘news’ and ‘entertainment’ alike — there are clear indications emerging that there is considerably more dissent out there, considerably more questions being raised, than we are being led to believe.

As just one indication, several commentators have noted that Michael Moore’s new book, Stupid White Men, is selling like hotcakes, despite the fact that conventional wisdom holds that there is currently no market for what is reportedly a fairly harsh assessment of America under a Bush.

Perhaps a more significant measure of the level of discontent and frustration among the American people was reflected in the shockingly low turnout for the recent California gubernatorial primary. As the Los Angeles Times reported:

“After the terrorists struck and the buildings fell, Americans united in a surge of patriotism not seen in a generation. On Tuesday in California, citizens were asked to join in what may be the most patriotic ritual of all, the celebration of democracy known as voting. Two out of three registered voters were no-shows.” (4)

The article also noted that many eligible voters didn’t even bother to register. The net result was that nearly four out of five eligible California voters opted not to cast a vote in the March primary. The Times further noted that the California election was a continuation of a post-September 11 trend:

“In Washington, for instance, turnout for the November general election — which featured two ballot initiatives on taxes — was 13 percentage points below the 1999 figure. Virginia and New Jersey elected governors in November, and turnout was down about 3% and 7%, respectively, from the previous governor’s races in 1997.

“In Georgia, meanwhile, a special election to fill a state Senate seat was decided by just 3% of the electorate: ‘It’s always low in specials, but we usually get 15%,’ lamented Georgia’s director of elections, Linda Beazley. ‘This is dismal. What’s wrong with our voters?'” (4)

A concerted effort is made by the Times reporter to offer up any number of excuses for the dismal voter turnout. But three words in the article, uttered by a small-business owner in Fresno, pretty much said it all: “Politics are crooked.” Or, to elaborate just a bit — a large majority of citizens recognize that voting — when presented with hand-picked, interchangeable candidates — is not a true exercise of democracy, but rather an exercise in futility.

Perhaps one of the clearest indications that large sectors of the American electorate aren’t buying the mainstream-media line is the fact that the decades-long effort to discredit and marginalize those dissidents derisively referred to as ‘conspiracy theorists’ has been stepped-up dramatically in recent months, by both the corporate media and the self-proclaimed ‘alternative’ press.

Prominent among those heaping derision on ‘conspiracy theories’ is The Nation’s David Corn. Among other inanities, a piece penned by Corn makes the rather remarkable claim that: “Simply put, the spies and special agents are not good enough, evil enough, or gutsy enough to mount this operation … Such an operation — to execute the simultaneous destruction of the two towers, a piece of the Pentagon, and four airplanes and make it appear as if it all was done by another party — is far beyond the skill level of U.S. intelligence.” (5)

No … an operation of that sort would clearly require a loosely-organized band of poorly-equipped cave-dwellers.

There’s no way that the largest and most well-funded intelligence network the world has ever seen could pull off something like that. They may be capable of rigging foreign elections, routinely plotting and carrying out assassinations and coups, and ‘destabilizing’ the economies and political structures of various hapless nations, but it clearly strains credulity to posit that they could hijack a few planes.

They may have an enormous, secret and unaccountable budget, ‘front’ companies and organizations set up in every corner of the globe, and prominent mouthpieces installed throughout academia, the media, the legal community, the mental health community, the entertainment community, the medical community, and pretty much every other community that is in a position to influence public opinion; and they may control proxy armies and fascist (though certainly not ‘terrorist’) cells around the world, and they may have their very own private air force, but certainly no one would ever seriously suggest that such a vast intelligence network could pull off something of the magnitude of what the world saw on September 11.

As yet another reason why alternative explanations of 9-11 are, in Corn’s words, “absurd,” “tripe,” and “crap,” he makes the bold claim that: “in the spy-world some things [are] beyond the pale.” One of those things, insists Corn, is “kill[ing] an American citizen.” (5) That would certainly take the wind out of the sails of many a ‘conspiracy theory’ — if it weren’t a statement totally unsupported by the historical record.

Corn has already been challenged in print by such writers as Stephen Gowans, Alex Constantine, and Michael Ruppert, who is identified in the Corn article as one of those who are promoting conspiracy theories “too silly to address.” Corn has also, apparently, been challenged by many of his readers. In an L.A. Times opinion piece, he complains of the response to his missive: “I was besieged by people accusing me of being a CIA disinformation agent.” (6) Imagine that.

Corn ends his diatribe on an interesting note: “Perhaps there’s a Pentagon or CIA office that churns out this material. It’s mission: distract people from the real wrongdoing.” (5) There is little doubt that at least some of the conspiracy theories seeking to explain the events of September 11 have been put out as deliberate disinformation to muddy the waters. But when it comes to distracting people from the “real wrongdoing,” few allegedly progressive publications do as good a job at that as does the one that Corn is associated with.

The L.A. Times piece, written by Gale Holland a few weeks after the Corn article was posted, is a particularly offensive attack on ‘conspiracy theorists.’ The article, entitled “Have You Heard About Osama’s Cheez-It Stash?,” is illustrated with oversized, side-by-side photos of Osama bin Laden and, naturally enough, Elvis Presley. The obvious and rather heavy-handed intent is to equate alternative explanations for the September 11 attacks with Elvis sightings.

Apparently the newspaper didn’t have any stock photos of any ‘alien grays’ to accompany the article.

Holland refers dismissively to what he calls a “conspiracy lobby, a tiny but persistent subgroup spawned by the John F. Kennedy assassination” that is obsessed with “shadowy government agencies with Maxwell Smartish-sounding acronyms.” (6)

As for how this “persistent subgroup” views September 11, Holland writes that: “In the misty climes where the far left meets the far right, conspiracy theories have begun to dominate the 9/11 rumor mill. The basic premise is that President Bush/ the CIA/ Big Oil either planned the attacks or let them happen to secure a U.S. oil pipeline/ take over the Middle East/ launch a one-world government.” (6)

Well … let’s see now. Is it ‘conspiracy theorizing’ to posit that Bush, the CIA and “Big Oil” would work together towards a common cause? Is there any political family in the country with closer and more extensive ties to both the CIA and the oil industry than the Bush family? Isn’t it only stating the obvious to note that this triumvirate shares common interests and goals — goals that were in fact advanced as a result of the ‘terrorist’ attacks?

As for the pipeline, it is a well-documented fact that the U.S. has long harbored plans to build both oil and natural gas pipelines through the nation of Afghanistan. (7) It is also an established fact that the oil companies have long coveted having a ‘stable regime’ (which is to say, a regime under the direct control of the U.S.) in place before committing to constructing those pipelines. (7) And it has already been reported that those pipeline plans, which have languished in recent years, have now been put on the fast track. (8)

As for the Middle East, it certainly appears as though there is a major effort underway to destabilize the entire region — currently being spearheaded by the U.S.-armed proxy known as Israel, but likely soon to be coupled with a U.S. invasion of Iraq, accompanied by general mayhem in the area. It should also be noted that oil-rich Central Asia is quite obviously slated to be brought under the control of the U.S. as well, with troop deployments and the building of military bases in the region accelerating rapidly. (9)

And as for the notion of a one-world government, what exactly does Holland think is the goal of all those “Maxwell Smartish-sounding acronyms” — the IMF, the WTO, the CFR, the TLC — if not to turn the planet into one global marketplace governed only by corporate spreadsheets — a global marketplace that can be exploited and pillaged to consolidate all of the world’s wealth into the hands of the few?

Even while dismissing ‘conspiracy theories,’ Holland obliquely acknowledges the implausibility of the official 9-11 story: “Faced with the inexplicable, we seem to take comfort in irrational pseudo-explanations.” (6) Or perhaps, when faced with the irrational pseudo-explanations offered by the state, we take comfort in searching for a more rational, logical explanation. Or, as Gowans has written for Swans: “Where the official conspiracy theory is so bad, other conspiracy theories rush in to fill the void.” (10)

Also jumping into the conspiracy-bashing fray, the very same week that the L.A. Times opinion piece was published, was the allegedly progressive L.A. Weekly. A report by Ella Taylor purported to shed light on the KPFK controversy — by declaring the “jewel in [the station’s] crown” (11) to be Marc Cooper, the ‘left’s’ leading cheerleader for the ‘War on Terror’ and an unapologetic supporter of the Warren Report.

Throughout the article, Taylor refers to anyone whose politics fall to the left of hers — which is to say, anyone who is even vaguely progressive — as “hard-line Marxists,” the “Marxist left,” the “far left” which spouts “vulgar Marxist doctrine,” and finally as the “loony left.” Exemplifying the “far left,” according to Taylor, is “Amy Goodman’s popular Democracy Now” — easily the most honest offering the station serves up.

Singled out for derision in Taylor’s tirade, as he was by both Corn and Holland, is Michael Ruppert, a former LAPD investigator who runs the From the Wilderness website (www.copvcia.com) and newsletter. In theWeekly piece, he is described as a “defrocked cop” and a “nutball conspiracy theorist.” That title is bestowed upon him for the sin of having compiled a timeline of occurrences in the months leading up to September 11, drawn from respectable media sources, that all raise serious questions about the official version of events.

As for Taylor’s hero — Marc Cooper, one of Corn’s fellow scribes at The Nation — she notes that he “has received hundreds of e-mails insinuating that he survived the coup in Chile because he’s a CIA agent who plotted the murder of his boss, Salvador Allende.” (11) Imagine that.

The conspiracy debunkers are striking on other fronts as well. A website billing itself as the Urban Legends Reference Pages (www.snopes2.com) has skyrocketed in popularity in the post-9-11 world, largely due to numerous citations in the print and broadcast media (Holland’s L.A. Times piece references the site twice). Along with purportedly debunking so-called ‘urban legends,’ the site has focused its attention of late on various September 11 ‘conspiracy theories.’

On television, cable’s TNN premiered its new Conspiracy Zone in January 2002. The primary purpose of the show appears to be to make ‘conspiracy theorists’ the butt of jokes by the show’s marginally talented host, Kevin Nealon, and by the show’s almost entirely untalented celebrity guests, such as Gabe “Welcome Back, Kotter” Kaplan and Adam “The Man Show” Carrolla.

The most recent airing of the show, on March 31, 2002, featured an appearance by, of all people, Mike Ruppert — to discuss the 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy. Every effort was made to discredit the facts brought to the table by Ruppert (who came very well prepared), but the ringer brought in for the job, Ann Coulter, was clearly outclassed and reduced to repeatedly making the asinine assertion that “million-to-one coincidences” actually occur millions of times every day, and so we should expect to find numerous oddities and discrepancies littered throughout the RFK evidence.

Coulter is, by the way, the very same reprehensible individual who recently wrote in the National Review that America’s response to the perpetrators of September 11 should be to “invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” More recently, princess Ann has been quoted as saying: “In contemplating college liberals, you really regret, once again, that John Walker is not getting the death penalty. We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals by making them realize that they could be killed, too. Otherwise they will turn out into outright traitors.” (12) Talk about your “nutballs” …

The question that needs to be raised here is: why is all this energy being expended to discredit ‘conspiracy theorists’? If we’re just talking here about a few “nutballs” preaching to a “tiny subgroup,” then why all the fuss? What possible threat to the purportedly rock-solid American system could such a marginalized group pose?

As anyone who has ever published material in this country that falls outside of the boundaries of acceptable dissent can tell you, the first response of the power structure is not to attack the messenger — it is to ignore the messenger. If the publication receives no mention by the media, if it garners no reviews and — as is virtually always the case — the publisher lacks the resources and/or the opportunities to market the work, then for all intents and purposes the published material does not exist.

It is only if and when the information manages to find an audience despite the obstacles erected, despite being ignored in the hopes that it would just go away, that the second line of defense kicks in: destroy, by any means necessary, the credibility of the source.

We can only conclude from this then that ‘conspiracy theories’ are beginning to reach a much wider, and much more receptive, audience than the boys in Washington are comfortable with. And that which can’t be ignored must be destroyed. Coupled with the depressed voter turnouts and the apparent hunger by the American people for books critical of the current agenda, it begins to look as though there may be a considerable amount of dissent bubbling just beneath America’s tranquil surface.

That simmering anger and frustration can be gauged in another way as well — by perusing the e-mails that are pouring in to websites that offer alternative 9-11 scenarios. The confusion, anger and fear is palpable in such mailings. They frequently begin something like this: “I have never considered myself to be a conspiracy theorist, but ….”

The desperation evident in such mailings is striking, as respondents struggle mightily to find answers to questions they never thought they would be asking. One such letter, drawn from my own mailbag, captures quite eloquently the spirit of such letter writers. It is reproduced here just as it was received:

“I am 52 years old, an Episcopal nun (formerly a professional musician and, before quitting my day job, a math teacher) and the executive director of a small non-profit organization — an interfaith meditation center. I’m a pretty mainstream sort of person — liberal on most issues and conservative on a few. I’m moderately well educated (master’s degree), reasonably well read, and considerably well traveled — having studied some in England and worked for years in both Ireland and South Africa as well as various parts of the United States. Until quite recently I considered ‘conspiracy theorists’ to be, at best, pathetically misguided and, more likely, suffering from paranoid delusions. I don’t know what was the wake up call for me after September 11. Maybe it was Dan Rather prostituting himself on the Dave Letterman show. Maybe it was Time Magazine’s photograph of Osama Bin Laden in evil red. Maybe it was watching unprecedented war powers handed to the executive branch with only one congressperson daring to utter a lone plea for moderation that hardly qualifies as dissent. Maybe it was that implosion of the towers that looked suspect from the get-go. I’m the only person I know who has actually read huge chunks of that so-called ‘Patriot’s Act’ and it makes my blood run cold. I knew then that I was watching a coup inexorably unfold and I’m sick at heart.

“I’ve only talked about any of this with one trusted colleague who warned me that I was starting to sound like those crackpots who think the moon landings were faked. I don’t dare tell him that I’m actually having my serious doubts about that too. (Why haven’t we gone back in 30 years? Why has no other nation duplicated the feat?)

“I’m wondering if I’m losing it or finally seeing clearly. The magnitude of it all is devastating. The ‘cognitive dissonance’ is horribly painful. I understand why people turn off their faculties for critical thought and inquiry; they want to be able to sleep in their beds in reasonable peace.

“What do you propose that ordinary people like me actually do? I currently live in a very conservative part of the country where the flag-waving jingoism is nauseating.”

E-mails such as this pile up in my in-box day after day, week after week — awaiting answers that are difficult to come by. What, indeed, can ordinary people do to reverse the course we are on? How are we to begin to fight back against a system that few seem to even recognize as an enemy of the people?

The best advice that I can offer at this time to all those who currently inhabit The Twilight Zone is to let your voices be heard. Stop biting your tongues and begging off from engaging in political debates. You just may find that there are other non-believers around you who are just waiting for someone else to break the ice.

As much as appearances may suggest otherwise, you are not alone. There are many other non-believers out there, but they too are intimidated into silence. You will only find them if you have the courage to speak up — if you refuse to be cowed by the propaganda war. Only then can grass-roots organizing begin to take shape.

Alone, you are powerless. But you don’t have to be alone.

Gale Holland concluded his L.A. Times opinion piece with the following words: “Getting at the truth is tough, accepting it can be harder still. Paranoia is a lot easier.” (6) Getting at the truth is indeed tough. And accepting it may be one of the hardest things that you ever do. But it is not paranoia that is easier; it is complacent acceptance of the inexplicable.

The unfortunate reality though is that there isn’t time for complacent acceptance. We don’t have the luxury of taking the easy route. And maybe, just maybe, there are enough quiet dissenters out there to make a difference. And maybe, just maybe, our fearless leaders have overstepped this time — overestimated the level of lies and corruption that they can get away with.

Those are, alas, very big ‘maybes.’ But now is certainly not the time to throw in the towel by standing mute. The stakes are far too high. Our children and grandchildren have to grow up in this world that is being created for them. They deserve far better. For their sake, it is time for all the non-believers to stand up and be counted. And to refuse to sit back down until our voices are heard. The clock is ticking ….

^*  All of these leaks were, notably, disinformational. The premise of the Nuclear Posture Review, for instance, was that America’s eagerness to unleash nuclear weapons came about in response to the September 11 attacks. Earlier documents reveal, however, that the United States has been itching to cross the nuclear threshold since long before last September. The reports of the establishment of a ‘shadow’ government implied that America hasn’t long been run from behind the curtain. And the uproar over the proposed establishment of a disinformation ministry served to cloak the fact that the overwhelming majority of the news we already get is government approved disinformation/propaganda.  (back)

References

^1.  Martin Lee, “Reality Bites: The Campaign Issue That Wasn’t,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, November 13, 2000  (back)

^2.  David McGowan, “The Unelectable Son: Parts I, II, and III,” The Center for an Informed America, November 10, 15, and 28, 2000  (back)

^3.  David McGowan, “A Supreme Injustice: Parts I, II, and III,” The Center for an Informed America, December 4, 12, and 13, 2000  (back)

^4.  Jenifer Warren, “Election Turnout Hit a New Low,” Los Angeles Times, March 8, 2002  (back)

^5.  David Corn, “When 9/11 Conspiracy Theories Go Bad,” ZNet, March 1, 2002  (back)

^6.  Gale Holland, “Have You Heard About Osama’s Cheez-It Stash?,” Los Angeles Times, March 24, 2002  (back)

^7.  “Testimony by John J. Maresca, Vice President, International Relations, Unocal Corporation to House Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific,” February 12, 1998, Washington, D.C.  (back)

^8.  Daniel Fisher, “Afghanistan: Oil Execs Revive Pipeline From Hell,” Forbes.Com, February 4, 2002  (back)

^9.  Patrick Martin, “US bases pave the way for long-term intervention in Central Asia,” World Socialist Web Site, (wsws.org) January 11, 2002  (back)

^10.  Stephen Gowans, “Conspiracy Theory as Received Wisdom,” Swans, March 25, 2002  (back)

^11.  Ella Taylor, “Family Feud: The Left Eats Its Own at KPFK,” L.A. Weekly, March 22-28, 2002

^12.  Patrick Martin, “Conference of US right-wingers hears call to execute John Walker,” World Socialist Web Site, (wsws.org) February 27, 2002

So said America’s national newspaper, USA Today, in the aftermath of the events of September 11.

Now maybe I’m all alone here, but I’m still looking at police officers in much the same way that I was before. Which is to say that, somehow, I’m having a real hard time viewing the troops of the New York City Police Department as heroes.

This is, after all, the very same NYPD that was, prior to September 11, best known for employing anal rape with a toilet plunger as an interrogation technique, and for sending out a civilian-clad goon squad to pump nineteen rounds into a man for the crime of standing on his own front porch, preparing to enter his home.

But now, as evidenced by the fact that the convictions of three of the officers convicted of complicity in the torture of Abner Louima were just overturned by an appellate court, all such incidents are to be forgiven. And not just in New York. No, the reflected glow of the supposed heroics of New York’s finest have washed away the sins of all the nation’s police forces.

Take, for example, the scandal-plagued LAPD – perhaps the most openly fascistic big city police department in the country. On October 23, 2001, just six weeks after the fall of the WTC towers, the venerable Los Angeles Times reported, in a brief story buried in the ‘B’ section of the paper, that the shooting of actor Anthony Dwain Lee by officer Tarriel Hopper was “in policy” and that no disciplinary action would be taken.

For those who may have missed the story of Lee’s death, he was gunned down while attending a party on Halloween night of 2000. Officer Hopper, called to the house to investigate a disturbance, illegally entered the property and spied Lee through a closed window standing in a well-lit room within the house and proceeded to, for no apparent reason and without warning, summarily execute him.

That, at any rate, is the only way that I can think of to describe what happened.

The officer claimed, rather disingenuously, that the shooting was in self-defense. Lee reportedly was in possession of a replica gun, which the officer claimed was pointed in his direction. The facts of the case though indicate that Lee was not even aware of the presence of the officer, who was standing in darkness and would not have been visible to those inside the house. There is no indication that any of the revelers were aware of Hopper’s presence until bullets suddenly began blasting through the window. Lee was hit four times – in the back.

Lee’s gun was a non-working replica – a part of his Halloween costume. There is nothing to indicate that he was acting in anything approaching a threatening manner. He was in fact standing amid a crowd of fellow partiers, none of whom reported feeling that Lee was posing a threat to any of them, or to the unseen officer.

None of that though matters now. We are trying, it must be remembered, to fight a war on terrorism here. We certainly can’t tie the hands of our law enforcement officers by preventing them from summarily executing the occasional domestic ‘evildoer,’ or from planting evidence and framing innocent ‘suspects,’ as the LAPD’s CRASH unit was fond of doing.

All of that is also now forgiven and forgotten. Just two weeks after the Times reported that the killing of Lee was a “good” shooting, it reported that the city’s new DA, who took office amid strident claims of being a reformer, had announced that the Rampart/CRASH probe was essentially being shut down:

“Los Angeles County prosecutors plan to close their investigation of the LAPD’s Rampart scandal without bringing charges against any more officers, Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley said Wednesday. One former member of the district attorneys’ Rampart investigation task force said Cooley failed to solicit or accept help from any prosecutors who were on the task force before Cooley took over.”

In the post 9-11 world that we are now living in, the police can do no wrong. If you are standing in your home one night, minding your own business, and bullets suddenly rip into your body from out of nowhere … well, that’s just too damn bad. Sacrifices have to be made in time of war.

If an overzealous band of jack-booted thugs decide that kicking your door down, beating the shit out of you, planting evidence and then openly perjuring themselves in court is necessary to ‘keep the peace’ … well, that’s also just too damn bad. Some curtailment of civil liberties is to be expected in time of war.

Exactly one month after the Times carried the report of the aborting of the ridiculously incomplete Rampart investigation, another story carried by the paper began: “Finally, a gift for the person who has everything: an LAPD doll.”

It seems the Los Angeles Police Protective League is now marketing a 12″ ‘action figure,’ complete with LAPD uniform, gun, baton, pepper spray, handcuffs, and – as the Times noted approvingly – “enough attitude to keep the peace from Rampart to West L.A.”

And to think that I didn’t even know that “attitude” was what was needed to “keep the peace.” Kudos to the Times for clearing that up.

When I was a young boy, at the height of the Vietnam War, we had “G.I. Joe” to play with – the male counterpart of the ubiquitous Barbie. Little did I know that my generation was being conditioned, practically from birth, to be good little soldiers. As it turned out, of course, the war ended and our services were not needed

Now we have a new psychological warfare device masquerading as a toy, to condition a new generation of American boys for a slightly different role: domestic law enforcement officer – though the line between domestic law enforcement and overt military operations is an increasingly fine one indeed.

The training, equipment, apparel and tactics of today’s police forces are virtually indistinguishable from those employed by the military. On a regular basis, Angelenos are treated to scenes on local newscasts of small armies of LAPD officers occupying a residential neighborhood in search of a suspect. These types of arrests used to be accomplished, not too many years ago, with a handful of officers and a couple of squad cars.

But not anymore. Now what we see are scores of nameless and faceless officers, outfitted with automatic weaponry and flak jackets, ferried about in armored vehicles, and with the inevitable squadron of military-style helicopters hovering overhead. It is easy to forget that these are ‘civilian’ police actions we are witnessing, occurring just miles from our homes.

And now your kids can recreate these exciting scenes right there in the comfort of your home. Coming soon to join ‘Officer West,’ the first of the LAPD action figures to be released, will be: a K-9 officer, complete with his own dog; a motorcycle officer with, naturally, his own motorcycle; an air support officer, with his own really cool helicopter; and a SWAT team member, who will of course be outfitted in full SWAT regalia.

But my own personal favorite has to be the “riot control officer,” which a league spokesman gushingly told the Times is “just like you saw during the [Democratic National Convention].” It sounds too good to be true, but you can now own a scale model of the very same officers who beat you senseless with batons, trampled you with horses, shot you with rubber bullets and bean bags, sprayed you with pepper spray and noxious gasses, and arrested you for exercising your alleged constitutional right to peacefully assemble to address legitimate grievances.

And you’re not going to want to buy just one of these. No, you’re going to want to buy a whole bunch of them. Enough to line up along every wall of your home at least four or five deep. They’ll feel much more at home that way, as that is their natural environment. They’re not really designed to function well alone. They have been stripped of their ability to think independently and are only capable of a sort of mob mentality.

If, God forbid, one of your dolls should happen to die ‘in the line of duty,’ then you’ve really got a problem. In order to give them a proper send-off, you’re going to have to take out a second on your house so that you can buy thousands of dolls. Then you can give the departed officer a proper funeral befitting a member of the British royal family, just like the ones we see on TV.

And why, you may ask, are our law enforcement personnel deserving of such a pompous display? Is it because the job they perform is of so much more value to society than are the jobs performed by the rest of us? I hardly think so. Educators perform a far more valuable service than do the police, and yet I can’t recall ever seeing a teacher laid to rest in a ceremony rivaling the inauguration of a president.

Is it then because the police perform a job so dangerous – laying their lives on the line daily to protect the rest of us – that they are deserving of special consideration? Not really. There are any number of occupations that are far more dangerous than that performed by the police. Crab fishing in the Bering Straights is said to be the most dangerous job in the world, and yet the rather routine deaths of these brave souls are mourned by almost no one.

The case could be made that dissident writers perform a more dangerous task than do our domestic police. Just ask the surviving family and friends of such scribes as the ‘suicided’ Danny Casolaro and James Hatfield.

You may remember Hatfield as the author of the book Fortunate Son, released by St. Martin’s Press as the 2000 presidential election campaign was taking shape and then quickly pulled from shelves and mulched under pressure from the Bush family. Hatfield turned up dead in a hotel room just weeks before September 11. His last published piece was a story in the Online Journal entitled “Why Would Osama bin Laden Want to Kill Dubya, His Former Business Partner?”

Or ask the survivors of ‘former’ Naval Intelligence asset William Milton Cooper, the iconoclastic author of the overrated conspiracy tome Behold a Pale Horse. Cooper was gunned down by local Sheriff’s deputies (possibly at the instigation of federal authorities, according to some accounts) not long after he began devoting his radio broadcasts to promoting the idea that the September 11 attacks were an inside job.
Neither of these men, or the legions of others who came before them, were paid their final respects in ceremonies befitting the coronation of a king.

Why then this hero-worship of our nation’s law enforcement personnel? Why this adulation of men who are frequently little more than criminals themselves – men who differ from those they arrest only by the fact that they are protected from the consequences of their actions by virtue of the uniforms that they wear?

This hero-worship has escalated considerably since September 11. It is instructive then to look back upon the events of that fateful day to see exactly what it was that the police did to earn their enhanced status as American heroes. Towards that end, it is always interesting, when trying to make sense of any big media story, to look back upon some of the initial press reports to emerge, before the all-consuming official spin sets in.

The UK’s The Guardian, one of the world’s most respected English language newspapers, ran a lengthy report from ground zero by a trio of its reporters the day after the alleged ‘terrorist’ attacks. Here is how they described situation on the ground just after the first tower collapsed – well over an hour after the ordeal had begun:

“First a stampede; flying glass cutting into flesh and ripping the clothes of those who fled – and no sign whatsoever of the authorities, only a police officer running about like a headless chicken (in the wrong direction) shouting: ‘Get outta here!'” Later in the report it was added that: “The full rescue operation was slow to arrive.”

Still further along in the report, we find a representative of the NYPD treating the traumatized victims of the tower collapses exactly as a cynic might expect them to: “Even the smallest unrelated incident created conflict. A man who left his briefcase in the street was accosted by a cop. ‘What you doing? Hey, just keep walking.'”

Such actions, apparently, are the makings of great American heroes.

A number of other interesting details emerged in the report from The Guardian – details that to this day have not been addressed by the media, including the so-called alternative/progressive media. These details beg rather obvious questions that have gone completely unasked by our gloriously ‘free’ American press.

For instance, there is the rather interesting fact that: “People were trying desperately to get through on cell phones that were no longer functioning.” Very few accounts of the events of that day have noted that cell phones throughout the affected area suddenly stopped working. Why would this be so? Why should a building fire and collapse cause widespread cell phone failure?

Another interesting tidbit of information to emerge from The Guardian was that: “At a junction where the traffic lights had stuck on red a man in a flak jacket and combat trousers took it upon himself to direct the sparse traffic.” Who was this rather curiously attired man and what was he doing at ground zero?

And consider this rather curious factoid: “One stockbroker, Alan Redmond, said he had arrived for work at the Nasdaq exchange to be told that there was a delay in opening, and to wait.” Why was there a delay in opening the Nasdaq that morning, and how many prominent lives were spared due to this ‘delay’?

Lastly, consider that “a 47-storey building which was part of the trade centre complex also collapsed, brought down by flying debris and fire.” How is it possible that a third high-rise, and one which was not struck by a plane and doused with jet fuel, collapsed in identical fashion to the two towers? If it was due to a weakening of the structure caused by falling debris, then how is it that a building which lay between the twin towers and the third fallen structure remains standing?

These, alas, are but a few of the nagging questions that remain unasked, and certainly unanswered, in the months since “everything changed.”
Sadly, one thing that definitely hasn’t changed is the unfathomable cravenness of the U.S. media.

REFERENCES:
“Court Overturns NY Police Torture Convictions,” Associated Press, February 28, 2002
Scott Glover and Matt Lait “Slaying by Officer Is Ruled Justified,” Los Angeles Times, October 23, 2001
Matt Lait and Scott Glover “2nd Panel Says Police Slaying Was Justified,” Los Angeles Times, October 24, 2001
Steve Berry, Scott Glover and Matt Lait “D.A. Says No New Charges Expected in Rampart Probe,” Los Angeles Times, November 8, 2001
Carla Hall “Move Over Barbie, Here’s Officer West,” Los Angeles Times, December 8, 2001
Michael Ellison, Ed Vulliamy and Jane Martinson “We Got Down to the Outside and it Was Like an Apocalypse,” The Guardian, September 12, 2001