Mike Ruppert’s Harrowing and Heroic Flight to Freedom (or Flight from Justice, or Reassignment, or Whatever the Case May Be)

A growing number of you have written to inquire whether I will be commenting on the dramatic ‘flight to freedom’ by the rather constipated looking gentleman to the left. (You can find Ruppert’s rant posted here http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/081606_burning_bridge.shtml, and re-posted at just about every fake dissident site on the ‘net, including:

http://vancouver.indymedia.org/?q=node/2235,http://www.federalobserver.com/archive.php?aid=10848, http://www.progressiveindependent.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=103&topic_id=22660&mesg_id=22660,http://www.fourwinds10.com/NewsServer/ArticleFunctions/ArticleDetails.php?ArticleID=10497, http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/printer_22797.shtml, http://www.radicalpress.com/?p=110,http://www.pscelebrities.com/alice/2006/08/by-light-of-burning-bridge-permanent.html, http://forums.ariannaonline.com/showthread.php?t=45794, http://plutonium-page.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/8/20/175819/646, http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103×229778, http://www.rense.com/general73/ces.htm,http://www.uncommonthought.com/mtblog/archives/2006/08/18/by_the_light_of.php, http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_22797.shtml, http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0608/S00201.htm,http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2006/08/344643.shtml, http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=2&contentid=3862, and http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1120.shtml,)

And the answer, of course, is how could I not comment on it? It’s obviously a huge story, threatening to eclipse even the Jon-Benet Ramsey/John Karr saga. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Karr was ultimately charged with the vandalism of the From the Bilderbergs offices. “But wait a minute,” you say, “Karr was in Thailand at the time of the alleged break-in at the From the Bilderbergs offices. I doubt if he could even find Ashland, Oregon on a map. They can’t possibly pin it on him. That would be ridiculous.”

Oh, dear readers, you have so much to learn. Anyway, as I started to say, Ruppert’s “Goodbye, cruel nation” rant is, without question, the funniest thing that he has ever written. In fact, it is the funniest thing I can remember reading for quite some time. I would add that it is also the most paranoid and delusional thing he has ever written, but I don’t believe for a second that Ruppert actually believes the bullshit that he feeds to his readers.

So the buzz on the streets is that the real reason for Ruppert’s sudden exodus from the country was not that staying here “would surely mean death,” but that he was being investigated on suspicion of having staged the ‘burglary’ at his new offices in Ashland and he was facing possible arrest and, with that arrest, full exposure as the complete asshat and fraud that he is now and has always been.

The word is that Ruppert’s From the Bilderbergs empire has not been faring so well of late: subscribers, no longer duped by Ruppert’s obvious lies, are dropping like flies; book and DVD sales are down; and the constant pleas for donations just aren’t bringing in the truckloads of cash like they used to. So the prevailing theory is that Ruppert, in a desperate attempt to keep his empire afloat, staged the ‘burglary’ of his offices to raise some cash, possibly through insurance payouts and, most obviously, by portraying Ruppert as a victim once again in yet another craven attempt to pry more money loose from his ever-shrinking base of followers. His next trick, I hear, will be to inform his readers that he needs to raise a million dollars by the end of the year or God will call him home.

In addition to generating sympathy (and therefore money) for Ruppert, the staged “burglary” also serves to further bolster his ‘street cred,’ so to speak. After all, if the government has been working so hard for so many years to silence this man, then what he has to say must surely be of supreme importance … right? That is what Ruppert would have you believe, which is precisely why he routinely rolls out a laundry list of sins allegedly committed against himself and his organization, and why he has, at various times, accused virtually everyone he has ever employed of being a government agent (that part, by the way, is probably true; it would hardly be surprising to find that a covert government operation that is currently housed in a government building is staffed by government agents).

Ruppert does not own the exclusive rights, by the way, to the tactic of fabricating instances of government harassment for the purpose of bolstering one’s credibility. It is an all too common phenomenon out here in the cyberworld, though I have to say that no one seems to play that card as frequently, or with as much panache, as our boy Mike.

As far as I can determine at this time, it has not been verified that Ruppert is the prime suspect in the staged “burglary” (unfortunately, the Ashland Police Department declined to comment on the case, citing a department policy that forbids commenting on ongoing investigations), but that seems to be a far more plausible explanation for his abrupt departure than Mikey’s breathless claim that he was facing an “imminent threat of death.” Indeed, a careful reading of Ruppert’s rambling, melodramatic diatribe yields clues that seem to support the theory that Sir Mike did indeed stage the scene at his offices.

For example, he writes that it “is almost certain that the burglary [Editor’s note: nothing was actually stolen, so it is unclear why Ruppert always refers to the incident as a burglary] was perpetrated, at minimum, based upon inside information provided by recently fired or resigned FTW staff members.” It doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to deduce that this is little more than an attempt, albeit a rather pathetic one, to preemptively spin the coming revelation that the staged “burglary” was in fact an inside job – but one committed by disgruntled former employees, of course, and not the boss himself.

In what appears to be a further effort to exonerate himself, Ruppert tries to sell the idea that this crime had to have been committed by multiple perpetrators. Amazingly enough, he actually lays out the following laughably absurd claims: “There are between eight and twelve screws that need to be removed to take the cover off of each of our computers. There were seven computers, and every one had their covers removed before being smashed. This was not a one-man job. Someone with computer savvy was involved.”

Damn, Mike, you are quite the cut-up, aren’t you? Someone with computer savvy was involved? I think that what was probably involved was one guy with a cordless screwdriver. Even if the FTB computers had covers held in place by eight to twelve screws, unlike any computers that I have ever seen (my current computer has exactly one screw holding on the cover, and it is a thumb screw that can be quickly removed without the use of tools), it would take one person with a cordless driver and no computer savvy approximately 15 seconds to open each machine. With a manual screwdriver, it might take as long as a full minute.

Ruppert goes on to make additional claims that are, if anything, even more preposterous: “Each computer had been disconnected from its monitor and peripherals. That was three to six connections per computer. This feat would have taken one person hours, and it would have been physically exhausting.”

Please stop it, Mike! You’ve almost got me in tears here! Do you write all your own material? Have you considered auditioning for “Last Comic Standing”? Seriously, dude, you should think about it because you are one funny motherfucker.

Speaking hypothetically, if I am a vandal bent on sabotaging the offices of FTB, I’m probably not going to bother with the niceties of properly disconnecting all the computer peripherals; I’m just going to grab a handful of cables and give them a good yank. It’s probably going to take about, oh, two seconds to disconnect each machine. And come to think of it, that’s kind of irrelevant anyway, because I’m not going to even take the time to disconnect the peripherals, nor am I going to then transport the machines to a vacant portion of the office, nor am I going to carefully remove the outer covers. No, what I am going to do is trash as much stuff as I can in the shortest amount of time. And I’m going to do that by just whaling on the computers and all their peripherals right where they sit, because in the time that it would take me to disconnect, relocate and open the machines, I can pretty much trash everything – including the desks they sit on. And it wouldn’t take very long at all. I don’t know that I’d even bother with the sledge hammer, to tell you the truth. I’m thinking I could just pour a little gas or something on the computers and light them up. Hell, I might as well burn up everything. But if I did go to all the trouble of disconnecting and removing all the machines, and I am, according to Ruppert, a methamphetamine addict, then I’m sure as hell not going to carry the machines into an empty room and (pretend to) destroy them No, I’m going to carry them right out to my car, along with anything else of value that I can find, and I’m going to sell everything for drug money. Vandalizing local businesses for no financial gain? That doesn’t do much for me. Stealing stuff to pawn for drug money is what I’m all about.

Ruppert seems to realize that various parts of his story are inherently ridiculous, so he tosses out the claim that the computers were taken to a vacant portion of the building so that there would be “plenty of room to swing the hammers.” It is perfectly obvious, however, that you don’t need much room at all to swing a sledge hammer with enough force to destroy the delicate electronics of a computer. In fact, you don’t need a sledge hammer at all. You can achieve the same effect by just picking the thing up and hurling it down on the ground (try it at home with your own computer and then compare the end result with the photos on Ruppert’s site and you’ll see what I mean). The only reasonable explanation for the machines being carefully disconnected and transported to a vacant portion of the office was to avoid damage to the peripherals and the desks that they sat on, which seems to me to be a pretty clear indication that this “burglary” was not the work of outside actors.

Ruppert tosses out some more alleged facts that are clearly intended to direct suspicion away from himself. He claims, for example, while offering no supporting evidence, that he suspects “that a minimum of two sledge hammers were used.” He also claims that “one door to a storage area which held no computers at all was needlessly smashed,” the implication clearly being that he couldn’t possibly be the perpetrator since he would have obviously known that there was no point in breaking into that particular room. But so presumably would the ‘real’ perpetrators, since Ruppert has already told us that they were working with “insider information.”

Mikey also poses the question of “who could have missed my Blue and Gold, 1996 Ford Bronco? It stands out like a sore thumb. And I could hardly have walked a block or two with a sledge hammer over my shoulder without risking being noticed.” Now, I don’t know if Ruppert is really this stupid or if he just thinks that his readers are, but his rather bold proclamations are directly contradicted by what Mikey himself wrote in the very same paragraph, when he noted that his offices are in a “quiet business park that was always abandoned after sunset.” How then could Ruppert’s vehicle stand out like a sore thumb when, by his own account, there would have been no one there to see it?

There is so much more in Ruppert’s ten-page screed that is ripe for ridicule. For example, Iron Mike claims that three “mobile squatters” who regularly parked their mobile homes by his offices at night were potential witnesses to the crime. He further claims that, “About a week after the burglary, I noticed the Ashland Police Department towing away one of the mobile squatters.” But if Ruppert really believed this (fictional) person to be a potential witness, then why wouldn’t Mike himself have approached and questioned the potential witness during the week before he was allegedly towed away? Ruppert is, after all, a former police investigator himself, so he does have some experience with questioning witnesses.

Also begging for ridicule is Ruppert’s audacious and wildly inappropriate claim that the staged “burglary” represented his own personal Kristalnacht. And then there is perhaps his most hilarious claim of all: “There were many poignant moments in the way we put together and executed a plan to get me out of the country in just 18 days, even as I noticed renewed and ominous surveillance around the office.”

Gee, Mike, overdramatic much? There is, as it turns out, an expedited procedure for getting out of the country. Though little known, it involves driving to the nearest airport, walking up to a ticketing agent at the airline of your choice, purchasing a ticket to your desired destination, and then boarding an airplane (after, of course, disposing of any potentially explosive water bottles). Perhaps Ruppert should try that technique next time. I’ve tried it myself and I can vouch for the fact that it really works. And by the way, that “renewed and ominous surveillance” that Mike mentioned? I’m guessing that if that wasn’t a figment of his imagination then it was probably the Ashland Police Department keeping tabs on their prime suspect.

While there is no shortage of material in Ruppert’s rant to mock and ridicule, there is also, alas, an aspect of this story that is not so funny, and that aspect, despite this lengthy intro, is the real focus of this newsletter.

Let me begin by stating that, except in the minds of a devoted few, there is little reasonable doubt that Michael Ruppert is, and always has been, a government agent. Everything about the man – from his family and employment history to his stand on numerous issues – points unwaveringly in that direction. His assigned mission for the last several years has been to unrelentingly push the lie of ‘Peak Oil,’ while occasionally taking a break from that to do such things as sabotage the 9-11 movement and run interference for the government after Gary Webb’s ‘suicide.’

It occurs to me, however, that Ruppert has lately become far more of a liability than an asset in his role of disinformation peddler. His own personal credibility is at such a low point that it seems very likely that a decision was made that the ‘Peak Oil’ scam was far too important a mission to be compromised by allowing a buffoon like Ruppert to continue to serve as the most vocal and visible spokesman. In other words, the staged burglary was really just the straw that broke the camel’s back; even before that, it was becoming clear that Ruppert needed to be shuffled off the stage and reassigned so that more credible spokesmen could take up the ‘Peak Oil’ battle cry.

Mikey claims that he doesn’t know where he will eventually take up residence, but for now he will be cooling his heels in Venezuela. This hardly seems a random choice. As readers are no doubt aware, Venezuela has been a hotbed of covert intelligence operations for many years now – election rigging, media manipulation, coup plotting, assassinations … all the usual “boys will be boys” kind of stuff. Funny then that a guy like Mike Ruppert would show up there, of all places, and at the very time that the CIA has announced the creation of a “new special CIA mission to oversee intelligence activities” in that particular country.  (http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=GOL20060820&articleId=3015)

If your primary goal, by the way, is to escape from CIA threats, harassment and intimidation, is it really a good idea to flee to a place that is absolutely teeming with CIA operatives? I’m not sure that would be my choice, but maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, I am reminded here of another time, some three-and-a-half decades ago, that a fake dissident journalist arrived in a South American country that was being targeted by the CIA. The last time I mentioned this gentleman’s name, several years ago on a radio show, I found my in-box filled with threats of legal action, so I will be using pseudonyms here that, unfortunately, will make it virtually impossible for readers to figure out who I am talking about.

So this other fake dissident, let’s call him “Marcooper,” arrived circa 1971 in a country that we will here refer to as “Chilly.” At that time, Chilly was being run by a democratically elected government that was at peace with its neighbors and working for the betterment of the country’s have-nots. As such, the decidedly left-leaning administration was widely admired throughout Latin America. But in North America? Not so much.

Providing a better life for the Chillyan people, you see, came at the expense of the profit margins of the American corporations that run the economies of our Latin American neighbors. So the CIA, as is its custom, sent in a whole bunch of operatives to stir up trouble, eventually culminating in a bloody coup that overthrew the democratically minded government and replaced it with a brutal military dictatorship that was more to Washington’s liking.

While the stage was being set for the coup, along came our dissident journalist to cozy up to the doomed administration. By posing as a harsh critic of US foreign policy, he was able to infiltrate the inner circles of the Chillyan government. Needless to say, this provided him with an ideal position from which to facilitate the coup, and then walk away unscathed, unlike some of the legitimate dissident Americans who were in the country at the time.

If someone were to attempt to play the role of Marcooper down in Venezuela, one of the first things they would probably want to do is firmly establish their status as a critic of US foreign policy and, more specifically, as a friend of Venezuela. And how would they do that? One way would be to show a sudden interest, some four years after the fact, in posting information about the US-backed coup that briefly toppled Chavez. And that, by sheer coincidence, is exactly what Michael Ruppert did, just three days after posting his farewell to America (http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/082106_proof_documents_summary.shtml). Another thing an aspiring Marcooper might want to do, upon arrival in Venezuela, is appeal for political asylum so as to get the attention of the Chavez government. And that, again purely by coincidence, appears to be exactly what Ruppert did (which would explain why he took a roundabout route to Venezuela to make it appear as though he was forced to sneak out of the US).

Only time will tell if Michael Ruppert is indeed in Venezuela as a man on a mission. It is possible, I suppose, that he simply needed to get the hell out of Dodge – due to the staged “burglary” incident, his ongoing financial woes, and the sexual harassment suit that he has responded to, from the safety of Venezuela, by viciously slandering and snitch-jacketing the complainant – and so he picked a place that is filled with friends from the intelligence community who can help him get reestablished.

All that can be said with certainty is that, as Richard Nixon once said, we won’t have Mike Ruppert to kick around anymore. But have no fear; there is no shortage of fake dissident writers waiting to fill the void.