Why are so many Israelis arrested over illegal arms deals worldwide?

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By Yossi Melman

The U.S. authorities' recent arrest of an Israeli for seeking to sell arms to Somalia raises disturbing questions and answers

At least seven Israeli arms dealers are currently in jail in four countries - the United States, Russia, France and Britain - on charges of illegal arms dealing. Some of them are also suspected of crimes such as forgery, bribery, money laundering and violating UN Security Council embargoes. Such arrests are briefly covered in Israel and then forgotten. But they have a cumulative effect that is very damaging to Israel's image, or what remains of it.

Even though it is doubtful whether those in jail know one another, they have quite a lot in common. All are men in their fifties or sixties. All are well to do (or were in the past ), having made most of their money in international arms dealing or in exporting security services and equipment from Israel. They served in the Israel Defense Forces and reached mid-level ranks (from captain to lieutenant colonel ), and when they were arrested, they denied the charges. Friends who came to their assistance described them, naturally, as "the salt of the earth."

All seven are familiar faces in the corridors of the defense establishment, and at one time received arms dealing permits from the Defense Ministry. All sought to "expedite procedures" in violation of local or international laws, and did so out of pure greed. Due to this covetousness, they also fell into traps and can expect to face many years in jail.

Shimon Naor-Hershkowitz is detained in France and will apparently be extradited to Romania, where he will serve an 11-year jail sentence. He was convicted of forging documents (end-user certificates ) that he used to purchase Romanian arms together with a Romanian partner (who later informed on him to the authorities ). The arms were ostensibly destined for Togo, but in reality were sent to rebels in Angola.

Yair Klein has been held for over a year in a Russian jail, after being arrested there at the behest of Colombia, which wants him on charges of training drug barons' bodyguards. Klein, almost 70, may be the Israeli who comes closest to being a "mercenary" of the ugliest sort. He has previously done jail time in Sierra Leone.

In a British jail sits Gidon Sarig, 58, who was sentenced several months ago to seven years in prison for selling arms and other combat gear to parties in Venezuela, Peru, Senegal, Nigeria, Gabon and, primarily, Sri Lanka.

And in January, Ofer Pazaf, 50, the president of a Kfar Sava company that works as an intermediary and represents security consultants and defense industries, was arrested in Las Vegas. Arrested with him were two other Israelis who have lived in the U.S. for several years: Yohanan Cohen, 47, the CEO of a San Francisco company that manufactures security gear, and Haim Gary, 50, the president of a Miami company that functions as a middleman for defense companies.

All three, along with 20 Americans and people of other nationalities, were arrested in a sting operation by the Federal Bureau of Investigations. One of the agents posed as a representative of the defense minister of an African country and pretended to be looking to purchase arms in return for a bribe - known in the professional lingo as a "commission."

The latest Israeli to find himself behind bars is Hanoch Miller, 53, who was arrested a few days ago in the United States. Together with his partner, retired U.S. Air Force colonel Joseph O'Toole, he is charged with attempts to obtain and sell thousands of AK-47 (Kalashnikov ) rifles to the "government" of Somaliland, a separatist region of northern Somalia. The arms were to have been purchased in the United States and to have been sent on cargo planes to Panama and Bosnia, and from there to Somaliland. But the plan fell through because the third partner, who was supposed to purchase the rifles for Miller and O'Toole, was actually an informer for the customs authorities.

European sources - security and insurance personnel working in Somalia, who are well acquainted with the area - told Haaretz that this story does not make sense, and that the official version put out by the U.S. authorities may conceal a different story. For instance, the indictment stated that the arms were to have been sent to a city called Bandera in northern Somalia. But a look at a map of Somalia reveals that this name is fictitious: No such place exists in Somalia.

Moreover, the shipping documents stated that the cargo was for "the Ministry of Defense of the Somali Republic." But the government of the separatist area known as Somaliland does not refer to itself as the "Somali Republic." Ever since the military coup in 1969 that sent the country down the sewer, its official name has been the Democratic Republic of Somalia.

And above all, there is the question of why the government of Somaliland would need to hire the services of Hanoch Miller, an Israeli arms dealer, when it could easily obtain the arms it needs from the United States or Ethiopia, which both support it. There are several possible answers.

One is that Miller, who initiated the deal, either intended to supply the arms to one of the armed groups operating in Somalia or was tricked into doing so. Somalia, it must be recalled, is also home to various training camps for global jihad operatives. Indeed, two of the Israeli Arabs arrested in the Galilee this week - on suspicion of murdering a taxi driver and seeking to set up a world jihad cell inspired by Osama Bin Laden's philosophy - flew to Ethiopia (where they were arrested ) in order to infiltrate into Somalia and undergo training in one of these camps.

The second and equally worrisome possibility is that the arms shipments were a camouflage to enable the planes to land in Somalia, where they would load up with other merchandise that fetches high prices on the streets of Europe. Either way, it is doubtful if we will ever know the truth about Hanoch Miller's exploits in Somalia.

The only consolation that those who care about Israel's reputation can find is that if in the past, the supposed creme de la creme of Israeli society would quickly receive high-profile assistance from government officials, ministers (like Ephraim Sneh on behalf of Naor-Hershkowitz ) and former comrades in arms, this time - apparently because of Israel's commitment to adopt the norms of the OECD, which it recently joined - the arms dealers are attracting only low-key interest and getting assistance from relatives and close friends alone.

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Iran Strikes Saudi Arabia as Oil Crisis Deepens

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"An Israeli attack on Iran would turn the Middle East into a "ball of fire." ElBaradei

By Blake Sifton

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) attacked vital Saudi Arabian oil infrastructure today in a move analysts fear will escalate the growing conflict in the Persian Gulf and further deepen the worldwide oil crisis.

Several Iranian surface-to-surface missiles struck the Saudi Arabian oil processing facility at Abqaiq at approximately 3:30 a.m. Iranian authorities claimed the strike was in retaliation for Saudi Arabia granting the Israeli Air Force (IAF) permission to cross through its airspace en route to bombing Iranian nuclear facilities two weeks ago.

“They committed an act of war in aiding the Zionist attack and we have responded,” said Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Israeli officials report that 11 civilians were killed and 42 injured after four more Iranian Shahab-3 missiles struck southern Israel in the hours following the attack on Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile, more details have emerged about the Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear sites that sparked the widening regional conflict.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has confirmed that he ordered the IAF strike against facilities in Arak, Natanz and Isfahan, claiming that “sanctions have proven ineffective and an Iranian bomb was within reach. We cannot wait for the international community to deal with this rogue nuclear state through diplomatic channels. Israel must defend herself.” It remains unclear whether President Obama supported the Israeli strike, or if the country acted without express US support.

Today’s missile strikes come one week after Mr. Ahmadinejad announced the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, fulfilling a long-held Iranian promise to employ oil as a weapon if attacked.

In response to what he called “American collusion with Israeli aggression,” Mr. Ahmadinejad ordered the IRGC to enforce a blockade of the narrow waterway where 90 percent of Gulf oil shipments must pass within 12 miles of the Persian coast.

On the command of US Naval authorities, a Kuwaiti oil tanker, the Tulkarem, attempted to break the blockade on February 22. Shortly after the ship entered the Strait, an IRGC surface-to-sea missile fired from the Iranian coast pierced the Tulkarem’s hull, releasing tens of thousands of barrels of crude oil and engulfing the tanker in flames. Kuwaiti officials have yet to release an official death toll.

Responding to the attack on the Tulkarem, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen called the situation “unacceptable,” adding “the United States will not allow Iran to hold the world’s oil supplies hostage.”

Following Admiral Mullen’s comments, the US Navy intervened and restored access to the vital passage after three days of intensive bombardment of the Iranian coast.

Security experts agree that today’s attack on Abqaiq represents a far more serious act than the blockade of Hormuz. Several analysts have predicted that the US and Israel will launch strikes against IRGC bases in Tehran, escalating the conflict and driving global oil prices to previously unseen levels. Crude prices began climbing rapidly following news of the Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear sites on February 13. And as word of today’s attack spread through global commodity markets, the price of oil shot to just under $300 a barrel.

Robert Baer, a former CIA case officer in the Middle East, predicts the rising price of oil will have immediate and disastrous effects throughout the developing world. “At $300 a barrel we will see true misery in the third world,” Mr. Baer said. While the price of basic goods has become high in the West, Baer fears that those goods will become unobtainable to hundreds of millions of the world’s poor.

“This is a very dangerous perfect storm,” he added.

Rioting has already been reported in parts of the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. Military officials have declared their intent to intervene if civilian governments fail to stem the unrest.

There are now fears that the stability of American-backed secular regimes across the Middle East may be at risk. The first fissures are appearing in Cairo where Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s security forces have begun firing on mass demonstrations initiated and led by the Muslim Brotherhood.

World War 3 Scenario By Webster Tarpley



Jewish Puppets Obama, Sarkozy, and Brown on Iranian Nuclear Facility

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An Iran Attack Scenario - A Catastrophe

IRAN WAR SCENARIOS - INCLUDING WORLD NUCLEAR WAR

HOW AN ATTACK WOULD UNFOLD

Our Afghan War Is Crazy

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by Jack Hunter

When the so-called “Bin Laden Hunter,” Gary Faulkner was arrested in Pakistan and returned to the United States last week, the media had fun lampooning the Colorado resident with his heart set on taking out Al-Qaeda’s top man. But Faulkner’s foreign policy is far more sensible than anything Washington continues to promote, and if forced to choose between the colorful construction worker and Obama—it is the president who is acting crazy.

When the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, its alleged mission was not unlike Faulkner’s—to exact retribution against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban for 911, including capturing or killing terror mastermind Osama Bin Laden. For most Americans, and indeed most of the world, the reasons for going into Afghanistan made sense.

Today, that war doesn’t make any sense. While there might have been near unanimous support for a kick-ass-and-come-home approach in 2001, almost nine years later, good reasons as to why we are still in Afghanistan are in short supply. Are we there to fight Al-Qaeda? According to Gen. David Petraeus, Al-Qaeda is no longer in Afghanistan, a point reiterated last week by CIA Director Leon Panetta. Are we in Afghanistan to fight the Taliban? According to the Los Angeles Times in March, “The Afghan Taliban does not want to be seen as, or heard of, having the same relationship with AQ that they had in the past,’ said (a) senior official, who is familiar with the latest intelligence and used an abbreviation for Al Qaeda. Indications of Al Qaeda-Taliban strains are at odds with recent public statements by the Obama administration, which has stressed close connections among militant groups…”

Last week, after he announced the replacement of Gen. Stanley McChrystal with Petraeus, President Obama was asked by a reporter as he exited the Rose Garden, “Mr. President, can this war be won?” Of course, with a very serious war on his hands the president had no time for such an elementary inquiry. Neither does he have time or patience for, what he called on Sunday “a lot of obsession” about ending the war in Afghanistan, as he keeps getting nagged by the press and the entire world about when the US might finally withdraw some 100,000 troops from that nation.

Though the main focus of the controversial Rolling Stone article on McChrystal was the tension and disconnect between the now former Afghanistan commander and the Obama administration, the article was primarily about the utter futility of the war. Author Michael Hastings wrote “Even those who support McChrystal and his strategy of counterinsurgency know that whatever the general manages to accomplish in Afghanistan, it’s going to look more like Vietnam than Desert Storm. ‘It’s not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win’ says Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, who serves as chief of operations for McChrystal. ‘This is going to end in an argument.” Retired Col. Douglas MacGregor, an architect of Operation Desert Storm, was even more blunt about our prospects in Afghanistan, telling FOX News host Judge Andrew Napolitano, that our presence is a “hopeless endeavor” and a “bottomless pit.”

Today, it is almost considered impolite to bring up our original reason for going into Afghanistan, and such bothersome questions have obviously become annoying to the president. Yet, what is crazier—a man still so enraged by 911 that he insists on going after the top Al-Qaeda terrorist all by himself, or a government that has largely forgotten about Bin Laden and is far removed from its original, stated mission, yet still keeps fighting? Faulkner had a definite and clear cut goal that directly targeted our primary enemy. Our government’s commitment remains unclear and indefinite, yet it bizarrely still claims to be focused on enemies our top leaders admit are no longer in Afghanistan. If it is true that Faulkner embarked on a highly improbable mission, it is even more true that America foolishly continues on its mission impossible.

Our foreign policy is more like a foreign permanency, something columnist George Will breaks down well, “Those Americans who say Afghanistan is a test of America’s ‘staying power’ are saying we must stay there because we are there. This is steady work, but treats perseverance as a virtue regardless of context or consequences, and makes futility into a reason for persevering.”

If there was ever a good reason for going into Afghanistan, we can be certain our leaders have forgotten it at this point, and it’s amusing to see so many now laughing at the one man who insists on remembering—even if to a ridiculous fault. On June 13, Pakistan officials found Faulkner in the woods of northern Pakistan with a pistol, a sword and night vision equipment, trying to help fight the war on terror. The saddest part is that this isn’t even true, as although we are certainly at war and Islamic terrorists still exist—what one has to do with preventing the other is something this president and his officials still can’t make clear. And Faulkner’s approach might have been crazy but this government’s approach is damn near criminal—as we continue fighting the longest war in American history for no apparent reason at all.

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America's Identity Crisis Coming to terms with imperial decline. By Blake Sifton In the aftermath of the trauma suffered by the American psyche on 9/11, the United States lashed out blindly and irrationally in fear and anger, deploying its military to the corners of the world and weakening itself in the process. Now, over eight years later, with the economy in shambles and the military overstretched, the sun is setting on the American empire and experts say it’s time for the US public to accept their country’s declining prowess, pressure their government to reduce its global military footprint and prepare for a looming national identity crisis. Political psychologists believe that the shock and horror of the 9/11 attacks damaged the collective American consciousness, causing the country to stumble forward with a misguided and self-destructive foreign policy intended to destroy an exaggerated enemy. Dr. Deborah Larson, a political psychologist at UCLA, explains, “9/11 removed a sense of invulnerability that Americans had felt, and fear sprang from the uncertainty. We overreacted and tried to gain control of the world to eliminate even a small probability of being attacked. It was totally irrational.” Dr. Richard Hermann, Director of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at Ohio State University, says, “A weird combination of fear, panic, anger and crude patriotism made us obsessed with an exaggerated threat. The administration’s leadership watched this with excitement and believed it was their chance to shape the world.” Though the United States has maintained a massive military presence around the world since the end of World War II, the reach of US forces expanded quickly after 9/11. Besides the huge undertakings in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military also established US Africa Command, expanded its presence in Latin America, began launching constant drone attacks in Pakistan, recently approved the sale of over 13 billion dollars in arms to Taiwan and is currently setting up missile defense systems in Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait among other countries. With upwards of 800 bases in 120 countries, the United States continues to spend almost as much on its military as the rest of the world combined at a time when the economy is plummeting and many Americans are struggling. Wayne Madsen, an investigative journalist and former Navy intelligence officer, believes that military overreach is eroding American power rather than projecting it: “The extension of US influence abroad is unsustainable and unaffordable and it weakens us politically, militarily and financially. We’re trying to be the Roman Empire and we’re going the way of them.” Dr. Hermann worries that the money spent on military engagements will hurt America’s competitiveness in the future: “We’re spending 100 billion a year in Iraq alone. You could take the top 20 universities in America and fund them, make them free for everybody every year we’ve been there. It’s a terrible opportunity cost that we’ve paid.” A psychological shift is underway in the United States as the evidence mounts and there is growing public awareness of the detrimental costs of maintaining such a large military. Dr. Hermann explains that a public suffering through the recession is more concerned about its financial well-being than its physical safety: “If you’re unemployed and you’re getting foreclosed on, you’re a lot less worried about al Qaeda.” Nevertheless, political psychologists believe that guilt keeps the average person from speaking out against the economic effects of imperial overreach. “Only a small fraction of the public is willing to serve in the military and I think the rest of the people feel guilty that they aren’t enlisted and essentially get a free pass. They might not like it but they feel if they have to pay tax dollars its okay,” explains Dr. Hermann. It is perhaps ironic that the American public still fears terrorism despite being bled dry maintaining the strongest military in human history. “It’s absolutely ridiculous,” says Madsen, “These are ragtag people living in caves.” Hermann is frustrated by the contradiction in military spending and the threat faced: “There is a big disconnect here. There is huge spending on the military but at the same time an understanding that the military can’t protect us against the most likely attacks.” Guardian columnist and London School of Economics professor Martin Jacques is an expert on the rise of China. He feels that many Americans hold on to delusions of grandeur to keep their pride afloat, denying the reality of waning US power. “The decline of American power will entail the progressive reduction of American overseas military commitments,” he says. “But a nation in decline finds it extremely difficult to let go. It’s a reluctant process and a form of retreat.” Jacques watched his own country go through the painful ordeal. “Britain was very reluctant to let go, not just the political elite but also the people. They lived an imperial role and didn’t like losing it. It gave them status, it gave them power and the knowledge that it was our role and responsibility in the world.” “The military enjoys a very privileged position in the American mind, and the same experience will be had in the United States.” Military superiority is very closely tied to the American identity and many believe that continued public support for imperial overreach stems from a desire to maintain prestige rather than from pragmatic security concerns. “It’s very disorienting to lose your national identity. Part of being an American means knowing that you are part of the most powerful military state,” explains Dr. Larson, “If the US were to withdraw from various parts of the world, people would fear that we were declining and were no longer a hegemon. We would lose a lot of our national pride and prestige.” It is time for the US public to accept that the military cannot maintain a global monopoly on violence and that rather than protecting and enriching them, imperial endeavors invariably become costly, never-ending counterinsurgency campaigns against dedicated, dug-in enemies. In order for the American psyche to forge a new identity in the face of shifting realities, the US public must demand the change that their president promised, must urge leaders to scale back overseas military commitments, focus on education, technology and innovation and embrace a global leadership role rooted in soft power and diplomacy.

Conspiracies and conspiracism

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By Jim Fetzer


A new study from Political Research Associates. entitled Toxic To Democracy: Conspiracy Theories, Demonization, & Scapegoating, by Chip Berlet now proclaims that conspiracy theories are “toxic to democracy” because they share some portion of moral responsibility for irresponsible acts, such as the shooting of the abortion provider, Dr. George Tiller, which some have associated with Rush Limbaugh and other pro-life zealots. By adopting a sweeping stance that does not discriminate between different cases on the basis of logic and evidence, Berlet discredits himself. Since conspiracies only require collaboration between two or more individuals in illegal acts, they are as American as apple pie.

Perhaps Berlet didn’t get the memo, but according to the government, the US was attacked on 9/11 by 19 Islamic fundamentalists who used box cutters to hijack four airplanes, outfox the most sophisticated air defense system in the world, and commit multiple atrocities under the control of a guy in a cave in Afghanistan. When I published a critique of the “official account,” which suggests the facts contradict it, I used the title, THE 9/11 CONSPIRACY, in the knowledge that either way a conspiracy was involved -- either one told by the government using THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT, or something far more sinister, which involved key members of the Bush administration with a little help from their friends. (See, e.g., “9/11 and the Neo-Con Agenda” and the PowerPoint presentation, “Was 9/11 an ‘inside job’?,” which is archived at 911scholars.org.)

According to Berlet, belief in a conspiracy turns out to be the manifestation of a “belief system” that violates the principles of logic. Having taught logic, critical thinking, and scientific reasoning for 35 years, however, the violations of logic seem to be committed by the author. Berlet commits many fallacies in the course of his study, including some stunning, easily disprovable generalizations about reasoning:

“Conspiracism is neither a healthy expression of skepticism nor a valid form of criticism; rather it is a belief system that refuses to obey the rules of logic. These theories operate from a pre-existing premise of a conspiracy based upon careless collection of facts and flawed assumptions. What constitutes ‘proof’ for a conspiracist is often more accurately described as circumstance, rumor, and hearsay; and the allegations often use the tools of fear -- dualism, demonization, scapegoating, and aggressively apocalyptic stories -- which all too often are commandeered by demagogues.” (Toxic to Democracy)

No one would deny that a certain proportion of the American public may be vulnerable to “conspiracism” in this sense, which represents the modus operandi of Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing zealots, who find conspiracies to be a ubiquitous part of public life, from left-wing efforts to spend the country into oblivion to encouraging illegal immigrants to flow into the country unabated to questioning whether Barack Obama has the qualification for office of being “native born.” These are the kinds of “conspiracy theories” that are dime a dozen, which find gullible followers across the country by the bushel basket.

But so what? If conspiracy theories like these are supposed to be “toxic to democracy,” then democracy needs to be made of sterner stuff. Circumstance, rumor, and hearsay, after all, tend to be the starting point for more serious studies of specific events. The BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is a case in point. Who has not heard swirling rumors about Halliburton having cut corners, the BP practice of putting profits before safety, and the further catastrophes that await those who reside along the coast of the states that are most directly affected? Puzzlement over phenomena that do not readily fit into our background knowledge and preliminary understanding is the point of departure for scientific investigations that may better reveal the truth.

Suppose we were prohibited from speculation and rumor in relation to the events that have made the most difference to American history in recent time? The most important aspect of reasoning is comparisons between different theories to measure which best explains the data. Indeed, Jesse Ventura’s AMERICAN CONSPIRACES advances no less that 14 illustrations of the collaboration between two or more individuals to bring about illegal ends, from the assassination of Abraham Lincoln (where four co-conspirators were hanged from the same gallows at the very same time), to the big-money conspiracy to overthrow the government in 1934 on to Watergate, the Jonestown Massacre, the Iran-scam that gave the presidency to Ronald Reagan, drug-dealing by the CIA, and many more -- a list that can be readily expanded by the assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK, and Malcolm X (see, for example, , JFK and RFK: The Plots that Killed Them, The Patsies that Didn’t).

Berlet claims (what he calls) conspiracism “must be confronted as a flawed analytical model, rather than a legitimate mode of criticism of inequitable systems, structures, and institutions of power.” He claims it suffers from four debilitating features as “metaframes” of the model:

* dualism, according to which the world is -- presumably simplistically -- divided into the forces of good and the forces of evil;

* scapegoating, according to which an individual or group of people is wrongly stereotyped with negative characteristics;

* demonization, according to which an individual or a group is taken to be the personification of evil; and,

* apocalyptic aggression, which occurs when scapegoats are targeted as enemies of the “common good” and may be subjected to violence.

What is fascinating about these categories is how well they fit many of the government’s own campaigns to convince the American people to support an unpopular course of action. After 9/11, for example, the world was divided into the forces of good (the Americans) and those of evil (the Mulsims). Members of the Muslim community were said to be fanatical and violent, contrary to the principles of the Koran. Nineteen alleged hijackers and al Qaeda were scapegoated as responsible for those atrocities. And wars of aggression would be launched against Iraq and Afghanistan, which continue to this day.

Berlet tells us that what “conspiracy theorists lack is the desire or ability to follow the basic rules of logic and investigative research.” We can all remember being told Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, but eventually even George W. Bush acknowledged that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. We were told that Iraq was in cahoots with al Qaeda, but investigations by the Senate and the Pentagon showed that that was not the case. And when Ed Haas of “The Muckraker Report” questioned Tex Tomb of the FBI about why 9/11 received no mention on a “wanted poster” for Osama bid Laden, he was told the reason was the FBI had “no hard evidence” connecting Osama bin Laden to the events of 9/11. But if Saddam was not responsible and if Osama was not responsible, then who was responsible for 9/11?

Indeed, according to THE 9/11 COMMISSION, 15 of the 19 alleged hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. The number from Iraq was zero. So why did we attack Iraq instead of Saudi Arabia? That looks like a stunning illustration of the failure to follow basic rules of logic or investigative research. As Ron Suskind, THE PRICE OF LOYALTY, reported, George W. Bush’s first secretary of the Treasury, Paul O’Neil, was astonished that war with Iraq was discussed at the first meeting of the cabinet, nearly nine months before the events of 9/11. Which means 9/11 was used as a fabricated rationale to support a predetermined conclusion, which appears to have been a policy that was adopted by Bush and Cheney before their formal inauguration.

While Berlet insists that “conspiracism” fails to follow the basic rules of logic and investigative journalism, he should have explained that rumor and conjecture represent the second stage of scientific modes of reasoning, where it is crucial to elaborate all possible alternative explanations to insure that the true hypothesis is not excluded from scratch. Thus, the first stages of puzzlement and of speculation are followed by those of adaptation (of hypothesis to evidence, using likelihood measures of evidential support) and of explanation (when the evidence has “settled down” and the best supported hypothesis is entitled to acceptance in the tentative and fallible fashion distinctive of science (see “Thinking about ‘Conspiracy Theories: 9/11 and JFK”).

The essence of Berlet’s book, however, is that he believes conspiracy theories come out of psychological needs of prejudiced people, which makes them INTERNAL FANTASIES. He is thereby throwing the crime baby out with the conspiracy bath water. Conspiracies really do happen in the EXTERNAL WORLD. They are not merely internal figments of the imagination. It is true that some people embrace conspiracy theories and reveal themselves by the inability to improve or adjust their views in light of new evidence or new hypotheses. If they are scapegoating, then the internal origin of their conspiracy need is manifest. However, conspiracy crimes are commonplace and external to us. When they are the subjects of objective investigations, those who study them are governed by logic and evidence, which are basic to rationality.

Ultimately, Berlet has defined a belief system called “conspiracism” that has only tenuous connections with conspiracies. While some gullible persons may satisfy its constraints, there are vastly more conspiracies than there are examples of conspiracism. Ask what Shakespeare would have had to write about if not for plots against the kings and queens of England. How many victims of conspiracies have died in the 20th century alone? In his brilliant study, “The Silence of the Historians,” for example, David W. Mantik, M.D., Ph.D., lists the names of more than two dozen prominent political figures -- from Franz Ferdinand and Czar Nicholas II to Salvadore Allende and Fidel Castro -- who were targeted for assassination by multiple conspirators on a single page of MURDER IN DEALEY PLAZA (page 402).

The ultimate failure of Berlet’s study is that it succumbs to the kind of simplistic thinking that he condemns. The world is divided into forces of good (the rational thinkers) and evil (the conspiracy theorists). The evil conspiracy theorists are stereotyped as trading in circumstance, rumor, and hearsay, while the rational thinkers follow the rules of logic and investigative journalism. Their careless collections of facts and flawed assumptions are often commandeered by demagogues. And of course they can be used to incite unjustified violence against innocent parties. But this presumes knowledge of which claims are true and which assumptions are flawed. Simplistic thinking of Berlet’s kind does not advance understanding. As Michael Moore said, when asked if he was into conspiracy theories, ”Only those that are true.” Each case must be evaluated on its merits using logic and evidence.

Thanks to Mike Sparks for inviting my attention to Berlet’s study and more.

James H. Fetzer is the editor of assassinationscience.com and co-editor of assassinationresearch.com. He has a blog at jamesfetzer.blogspot.com. His academic web site is found at www.d.umn.edu/~jfetzer.

Copyright © 1998-2007 Online Journal

Iceland Volcano Causes McChrystal Eruptions

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By Tom Nagorski


History provides a seemingly limitless collections of "What Ifs," musings about roads not taken.

What if Al Gore had won in 2000? If John Wilkes Booth had not made it to the state box at Ford's Theater? What if German Army officers had succeeded in their attempt to kill Adolf Hitler? Or – a lighter example – what if Bill Buckner hadn't bungled Mookie Wilson's grounder in the 1986 World Series?

This week's news offered a particularly odd "What If?" – and a strange conflation of two major news stories. What did Eyjafjallajökull have to do with the firing of Gen. Stanley McChrystal?

Put differently – as a great "what if" for 2010: What if that oddly-named volcano had never blown, and never wreaked its havoc on international travel? Might the general still have his job? Might Gen. David Petraeus still be at the helm of Central Command? Might Barack Obama have been spared another rough week in his prosecution of a difficult war?

Here's how it goes:

In April, freelance reporter Michael Hastings was granted access to McChrystal and his team for a Rolling Stone profile. Under the arrangement, Hastings was to have a day or two with McChrystal and his men in Paris . Later the piece would be filled out with a reporting visit to Afghanistan.

But by mid-April, Eyjafjallajökull was rumbling, its ash rocketing skyward. Airplanes across Europe idled, leaving millions of passengers either delayed or stranded. It would prove the worst disruption of air travel since the Second World War.

Military aircraft were not immune, even the ones that carry four-star generals. As a result, the man in charge of the Afghan War languished, 3,500 miles from the battlefield. Hastings' quick visit with McChrystal's team became a reportorial odyssey, a mother lode of access to the top commander.

They waited in Paris for a bus ride to Berlin , then passed nearly a week at Berlin's Ritz-Carlton Hotel, a total of 10 days divided between the two capitals before they even left for Afghanistan. This period in Europe was, by Hastings' account, an alcohol-soaked time, when the Bud Light Limes flowed. It was also the time during which McChrystal and his aides made most of the disparaging comments that so infuriated the president and his top aides.

So – "What If?" What if Iceland's volcano had remained quiet?

Well, the skies would have been clear, and the planes would have flown. There would have been no long layover for Stanley McChrystal, and far less access for Michael Hastings. The booze wouldn't have flowed (or at least, there would have been less of it). Less booze, fewer loose lips. You get the idea.

When the moment came this week, General McChrystal fell on his sword, laying blame unequivocally upon himself for a lapse in tact and judgment. But one can certainly understand if the general, back home at the end of such a humbling week, stripped so publicly of his command, holds a harsh thought or two for Mother Nature, and her child called Eyjafjallajökull.

"The Machine"

By Kim Sengupta


They called it the "Death Star" because according to one source who worked inside it, "you could just reach out with a finger and eliminate" somebody.

On the walls were television screens, known by the special forces boys as "Kill TV", where footage from image-intensifier cameras of the enemy being blown up by air strikes, or being gunned down by undercover hit teams was shown.

This place was "the Machine", a state-of-the-art military command centre hidden away in an airbase in Balad, a desolate stretch of land north of Baghdad.

It was created by Major General Stanley McChrystal, the chief of United States Special Forces, the most secretive force in the American military.

Here, in the permanently darkened communications cockpit, dozens of US and British (SAS) personnel would gather around as nightly raids took place against al Qaeda and their insurgent allies.

Sometimes McChrystal would lead the raids himself, his squad of elite undercover combat troops, known as Delta Force, being told at the last minute that the commander was coming along for the ride.

No one was quite sure what the Pentagon policy was on two star generals going on such dangerous missions, but then very few people in the US Department of Defence, and even fewer outside it in Washington, were even aware of these shadowy operations going on in Iraq.

This was the secret and violent world which shaped Stanley McChrystal, who three days ago was sacked from his job as commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan.

The irony, as his colleagues were pointing out yesterday, was that his spectacular downfall was not due to some illicit military action, but because of a magazine article his aides had arranged in order to publicise his most recent high-profile public career.

Nevertheless, the seeds of what was to bring him down may have been planted at his time running "black ops" [operations], the head of a close-knit team answerable to very few, where decisions were made about life and death on a daily basis.

The autonomy was not just military.

McChrystal and his men would go into the badlands - at that time most of Iraq - to make deals with local tribal leaders, pay out money, organise allies and informants. There was no question of practical civilian oversight as no diplomat, American or British, would venture into these areas.

Thus McChrystal and the group around him, many of whom would follow him to Kabul, would have little to do with US or British civilian leaders.

Their mistrust of what one of them described to Rolling Stone magazine as, "the wimps in the White House" was almost inevitable because of the shadowy nature of their work.

When they did meet the civilians, the men did not have much to say to them, because so much of what they knew was classified, and thus could not be imparted.

One American officer recalled for example how much McChrystal disliked entering the Green Zone, the heavily fortified conurbation in Baghdad where Western administrative officials were based.

"Stan always looked uncomfortable, he hated all the red tape. I guess, if anything, he was happier talking to the Iraqis than to most of our own people from State [the State department]; he wasn't a networker."

The General's preference for cultivating local leaders rather than Western officials continued in Afghanistan, where the President, Hamid Karzai, and others would speak of their regret at his departure.

But friends of McChrystal's say his time in Iraq should be put in context. It was the most ferocious period in the conflict following the US-led invasion, with Sunni and Shia militias killing each other and Iraqi and foreign troops. Armed criminal gangs were on the rampage, kidnapping and extorting money from an unprotected population.

McChrystal had been told, goes the lore: "The gates of hell had been opened and you have got to help to shut them". The US forces, stuck behind their heavily guarded bases, only able to move around in heavy armoured convoys, were not the answer: the war would have to be taken to the insurgents.

Over cups of coffee at the main US base, Camp Victory, McChrystal described to fellow officers, like the British Lieutenant Colonel Richard Williams, then leading an SAS unit in Baghdad, his plans to carry out relentless rounds of night raids, killing or capturing insurgents, especially their commanders, and break the cycle of the militant groups "organically" reproducing themselves.

There were many figures among the coalition forces who questioned the approach. One senior British officer dismissed the notion that such "industrial counter-insurgency" could work. But the targeted attacks began, and along with prisoners came intelligence vital in the programme of "decapitation" against al Qaeda.

McChrystal was in his element, eating just one meal a day, sleeping no more than four hours a night, constantly demanding more information on the militant networks.

Among the few "artefacts" in his spartan accommodation was a prosthetic limb, belonging to a Sunni sheikh his men had gone to hunt but failed to find. The false arm had been abandoned during the man's hurried getaway.

However, questions were being asked about how information was being obtained. There was an unofficial inquiry into the treatment of detainees at Balad. McChrystal was absolved because he was not there when the alleged abuses had taken place.

But then came information from a captured suspect which vindicated the commander's approach in the eyes of the US military. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, had been blamed for hundreds of bombings.

It is highly unlikely that all of them were his group's handiwork, but the publicity helped create a myth of a master terrorist and Washington was demanding he must be stopped.

Intelligence agents working with McChrystal spent weeks winning the confidence of a suspect captured in the "Sunni Triangle" south of Baghdad. They eventually got a location where Zarqawi was staying, enabling the Americans to carry out an attack mortally wounding the al Qaeda leader.

There were other successful operations, with the British SAS taking part in some of them, like the freeing of the missionary Norman Kember and Shia sheikhs supplying arms to be used against UK forces in Basra. Like their American boss, the SAS reported the bare minimum back to London.

In Afghanistan, McChrystal initiated policies which may have been an attempt to curb the lethal violence of his past. He brought in the doctrine of "courageous restraint" to minimise civilian casualties. He ordered air strikes, which had killed hundreds, to be significantly reduced in scale.

But he demanded control of the special forces operations, which had been run by a separate command under his predecessor, General David McKiernan. Iraq-style night raids dramatically increased, causing outcry from human rights groups, which complained that innocent civilians were often being killed by masked assailants.

It was only in recent days that General McChrystal ordered them to halt, saying the killings of insurgents could not justify the local alienation. It was one of his last actions as commander before he was ordered back to face the wrath of his Commander in Chief.

9/11 Smoking Gun: US Want to Steal $2 Trillion from Afghanistan

The Dark Apocalypto Show

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by Truth Excavator


I find it impossible to take an anti-war critic seriously if he does not support an independent investigation into the 9/11 attacks.

More than 3205 agonizing days have passed since the 9/11 attacks, the most vicious crime of our lifetime. On that day, a great deception was perpetrated against humanity. A deadly myth was sown into grieving and shaken minds; innocent human beings were sacrificed; a scapegoat was targeted, and continues to be targeted to this day. The world was struck by terror from authority like never before. In the wake of that tragedy, the real masterminds of the crime have went unpunished; and their version of events remains virtually undisputed in the public discourse.

Apart from the 2,998 people that died on 9/11, over a million people have met their graves because of the madness that was purposely unleashed by the ultimate terrorists through their original act of terror. In response to the 9/11 attacks, the United States government criminally invaded two innocent countries, poured hundreds of billions of dollars into the Pentagon's treasury, and destroyed the American people's liberties.

The fabric of society is tearing apart with the passing of every day. Good is declared as evil; and evil, as good. Reality was fractured on 9/11 because of the evil lie that was told by the Bush administration to the people of the world. The sense of a broken bond between the elite and the people, and the total betrayal of democracy by the U.S. government since WWII is deeply felt by a lot of people.

The corporate-government propaganda has tried to deaden our minds and our spirits, but our sense of justice is still alive, and our desire for truth instead of illusions has never been greater. What is holding many of us back from fully confronting the hidden monstrosity in our various "democratic" governments is our delusion that we live in a post-9/11 world. We don't; we live in a "9/11 world." The National Security thugs and government "intelligence" spies run things.


The people of the world cannot say goodbye to that day, and live as free human beings, until the truth about who committed and supported the attacks is known, and that they be severely punished. Facing the truth about 9/11 is the greatest task of our generation. Since the truth was the first victim in the "War on Terror" it must also be the first to recover. And facing the truth without deep historical reflection is impossible.

The 24/7 corporate media is the biggest barriers against historical reflection. Since 9/11, it has maintained the central myths in the "War on Terror," and in the Israel/Palestine conflict all day long for every day of the week; all week long for every week of the month; all month long for every month of the year.

Professor David Ray Griffin writes in his article ""9/11: The Myth and the Reality" " that the official 9/11 story has become a "Sacred Story." The story's inception began before the planes ever hit the towers. It was a pure fictional invention. Professor Griffin explains the significance of the myth in the public mind, and why it must be deconstructed at its core:

According to the official story about 9/11, America, because of its goodness, was attacked by fanatical Arab Muslims who hate our freedoms. This story has functioned as a Sacred Myth for the United States since that fateful day. And this function appears to have been carefully orchestrated. The very next day, President Bush announced his intention to lead "a monumental struggle of Good versus Evil."1 Then on September 13, he declared that the following day would be a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance for the Victims of the Terrorist Attacks. And on that next day, the president himself, surrounded by Billy Graham, a cardinal, a rabbi, and an imam, delivered a sermon in the national cathedral, saying:

Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of Evil. War has been waged against us by stealth and deceit and murder. This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger. . . . In every generation, the world has produced enemies of human freedom. They have attacked America, because we are freedom's home and defender. And the commitment of our fathers is now the calling of our time. . . . [W]e ask almighty God to watch over our nation, and grant us patience and resolve in all that is to come. . . . And may He always guide our country. God bless America.2

Through this unprecedented event, in which the president of the United States issued a declaration of war from a cathedral, French author Thierry Meyssan observed in 2002, "the American government consecrated . . . its version of events. From then on, any questioning of the official truth would be seen as sacrilege."3

That attitude has remained dominant in the public sphere until this day, as the official account has continued to serve as a Sacred Story. When people raise questions about this story, they are either ignored, ridiculed as conspiracy theorists, or---as Charlie Sheen has recently experienced---attacked personally. When anyone asks what right the administration has to invade and occupy other countries, to imprison people indefinitely without due process, or even to ignore various laws, the answer is always the same: "9/11." Those who believe that US law and international law should be respected are dismissed as having "a pre-9/11 mind-set."

Given the role the official account of 9/11 has played and continues to play, the most important question before our country today is whether this account, besides being a Myth in the religious sense, is also a myth in the pejorative sense---that is, whether it is simply false.

I find it impossible to take an anti-war critic seriously if he does not support an independent investigation into the 9/11 attacks. By accepting the false premise that non-state violence was committed against the American State on 9/11 means that you believe in the mythic narrative that is defended by the imperialists, Zionists, and neocons.

Separating peace from war can't be done without first separating the truth from the lies. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will never end unless the mission against terrorism is seen as intellectually bankrupt.

Many people still believe in the government version of 9/11 because acknowledging that you were fooled triggers feelings of shame and guilt. And our memories of how we were, and why we blindly supported a criminal system, will never be forgotten. Two innocent populations, and the religion of Islam was vehemently targeted to avenge the 9/11 attacks by America's criminal empire. The injustice that the people of Iraq and Afghanistan have suffered is incomprehensible. Imagine all the innocent detainees, tortured and killed; all the people that have lost their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, children. Arthur Silber notes that the mass killing in Iraq amounts to "a 9/11 every day for ten and a half years."

And the war crimes against Iraq and Afghanistan can't be explained away as the work of evil forces alone. Evil has been allowed to operate in the open because good people have either kept silent, or decided to remain willfully ignorant. Accepting collective responsibility for the murder of a million people in Iraq, and thousands of people in Afghanistan is hard because the leaders in authority in America and the West have cast a hypnotizing historical spell on the people. It is much harder than simply assigning blame to the war criminals and the paid propagandists, and punishing them for their deeds. The latter simply requires evidence, and the rule of law; but the first requires wide-spread knowledge, political will, collective moral conscience, and psychological understanding of how people can be tamed and trained like sheep.

Arabs and Muslims are the biggest victims in the "War on Terror" because of an age-old mass phenomenon, scapegoating. Ignorant, and brainwashed societies throughout history have targeted, persecuted, and killed innocent people in the aftermath of a mass trauma, or a violent event. Jews were victims of German scapegoating. Japanese-Americans and Japanese-Canadians were of North American scapegoating. If we want to end the "War on Terror," and achieve peace and freedom for everybody, then we must get to the root of this psychological crime, and refuse to scapegoat any group of people for whatever problem that ails us.

René Girard, a French literary critic and philosopher, has important insights on mass scapegoating. He says:

"One of our favorite ways of dealing with scapegoating is to see it as a plot of government leaders, whereas the rest of us have not participated in it. But scapegoating is a collective phenomenon. It would not work if it were not. Of course, leaders can manipulate it, but there must be something to manipulate, which is the belief of the crowd, our own belief."(The Girard Reader, pg. 266).

Girard's work also focuses on revelation, truth, and self-discovery. The films Dark City, Apocalypto, and The Truman Show, deal with these themes, too.

II. Lost In the Dark

In Alex Proyas's Dark City, a dying underworld alien species called The Strangers are in control of a walled planet that is unwittingly inhabited by human beings somewhere in the dark corners of space. The people's basic instincts, and memories are manipulated by The Strangers. Their minds inhabit a slave consciousness as their bodies inhabit a slave system. And the planet is always dark. At midnight the people fall into an automatic sleep, and then wake up as if nothing strange happened to them. In their sleep, The Strangers engineer their memories in a quest to obtain the secrets to the human soul.

The film centers on a protagonist named John Murdoch that wakes up one day without any memory of himself or his past, and is falsely accused of a crime that he didn't commit. Without an identity, and without a home, he runs from the authorities, and searches for the truth of his past, and of his strange society. Along the way, he is drawn to a Utopian place called Shell Beach, believing it exists, but he painfully discovers that there is no escape from the prison planet that he lives on, and that Shell Beach is an illusion.

It is scary how many parallels there are between early 21st century society and Dark City. The corporate-globalist elite that have so much contempt for the mass of humanity are The Strangers. Their social engineering and mass brainwashing through the corporate media, and public schools is just as diabolical as the aliens' manipulation of the people's memories in the film. And they want to establish a system of control that ensures their power for generations to come. But, like The Strangers, they are also a dying species. A mass global political awakening is happening, as CFR strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in December 2008 in a New York Times article called "The global political awakening":

For the first time in history almost all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive. Global activism is generating a surge in the quest for cultural respect and economic opportunity in a world scarred by memories of colonial or imperial domination.

The global political awakening is a positive development in human affairs, but let's not fool ourselves: a dying elite is even more dangerous than a powerful and dynamic elite. It is very alarming that depopulation of the majority of the planet is an idea that is openly discussed by leading elitist under the cover of "environmental conservation." Judging by the United States government's atrocities in Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, nothing is out of the question: not even genocide.

The National Security State in America that is controlled by international financiers is one of the most evil government forces that has ever existed in all of human history. And it is dominated by corporate fascism, not free-market economics. Since 9/11, it hasn't even bothered to hide its crimes against humanity. It tortures innocent detainees, spies on American citizens, suppresses legitimate political debate, and continues to illegal occupy two sovereign countries.

The evil forces that control the U.S. government are pushing for a "New World Order" global revolution so that people don't rise up collectively to bring justice to the criminals behind the fraudulent "War on Terror" and Wall Street's heist of America and the world.

A new corporate order behind the veil of a responsible global government is evil genius mixed in with great PR. What better way is there to stopping a revolution than by starting your own? The world's revolutionary oligarchs are seizing even more power by destabilizing global society through manufactured social, and economic crises. Their control of the private Federal Reserve Bank represents their grip of America, but their appetite for power is the whole planet. In the elite's game plan, killing the people may be the final solution.

John Bart Gerald writes in "Essay on State Terrorism" that there is a serious threat of "genocide under US emergency management." Gerald writes:

If society moves ahead as it is, without radically reforming corporate capitalism, without distribution of wealth, without jobs with rights, then the result will be a continued genocide of the poor. That is happening now. It is a continuum, a corollary of capitalism, yet always disguised in other perspectives. Capitalism is simply legalized abuse of humanity at its best, and mass murder/genocide at its worst. As wealth becomes increasingly isolated in a smaller percent of the population, the means of protecting this wealth will become brutal and more and more criminal. If its acquisition is criminal, its maintenance will not suddenly go to church.

Active depopulation of a major percentage of the planet seems crazy and conspiratorial, but the elite's vision for a post-humanist technocratic society is actually very clear headed. But it is a dark vision. The global diabolical elite believe that in a brave new world, the people don't deserve to live. For years, they've described people as "useless eaters", and planet Earth is too precious for such people. Gerald says that conditions exist in the Third World for a genocidal program, and it can be accomplished under the cover of plagues, food crises, and wars. Gerald:

What historical example suggests for the future is that the distillation of extreme wealth will be accomplished - 1. by diminishing the actual numbers of people, particularly in the Third World countries; historically that has been accomplished by war, plague, deprival of local production of food; 2. by driving more people into poverty as a prelude to existence without human rights; 3. by increasingly isolating people from each other so they/we can't work toward or protect common interests; 4. by increasingly isolating government from the people; this is done partly by high government salaries, "buying" elected officials into representing the interests of the wealthy rather than constituent poor, and encouraging control of the people for the benefit of trade; 5. by increasing control of information so the sensibilities of the wealthy don't suffer from the effects of their policies.

The threat of depopulation is only a threat, and if we are vigilant and brave, it won't ever be a reality, but we can't be idle anymore. The admission by some of the world's top oligarchs that a majority of people should be wiped out to "save the planet" should stir us to immediately reclaim power of our democratic governments, and prosecute the criminals who are involved in the conspiracy.

III. An Epoch of Mass Graves

Our civilization, like the Maya civilization as depicted in Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, is ruled by fear, greed, and oppression. Instead of a priestly class to cast future fortunes that existed in Mayan society, there is a criminal banking class that secretly manipulates the global market, but wants everybody else to view them as workers of God.

It is not a new revelation that modern Western society is controlled by a monetary system that is owned by international banking houses for the enrichment of a connected few, but their power was never expressed as directly as it is today. The oligarchical system works like a cartel, and usury is its hallmark. And the banksters power over Western countries is bizarrely real. The analogy between this elite and the elite in Mayan civilization is not perfect, but there are scary resemblances within their systems of control. Corporate raiders on Wall Street, similar to Mayan raiders, have pillaged Third World countries for the past sixty years through the IMF/World Bank/WTO, and now they're pillaging American cities, and European nations.

Also, America's needless killing of a million people in the name of fighting a "War on Terror" is just as insane as what the Mayas did in the name of ritual sacrifice to their gods.

IV. The Show Must Go On For The System To Function

In Peter Weir's The Truman Show, the protagonist Truman Burbank is deceived about his world, and who he is from birth. He is a reality T.V. character that lives in a false reality, and everybody around him is complicit in his conditioning and slavery. Truman eventually realizes his fake surrounding, but he is too afraid to escape, partly because of his own psychological limitations, and partly because of the traps set up by the billionaire owner of the show and T.V. set. Ultimately, however, the powers of reality pulls Truman away from the powers of illusion, and he exits the manufactured world.

We each have to be like Truman and escape our own illusions about the "War on Terror," modern democracy, and the fraudulent banking system. The media machine will never get rid of these illusions for us, we have to take the steps towards reality for ourselves. Controllers of the media will present endless illusions and inventions as our world collapses because without their fiction and lies the current system can't survive.

V. Journey To Freedom

All three protagonists in the films, Jaguar Paw, John Murdoch, and Truman Burbank, go on a journey to freedom, and a new reality. And in their journey, they discover their own strength, and new revelations about their world. Their emancipation from mental, physical, and spiritual slavery is also our destiny. We all must emulate these three heroes because the world needs millions of heroes right now. Individually and collectively, we must ignore the mainstream media, and not be afraid to deconstruct the myths about 9/11, end the insane, monstrous and fictitious "War on Terror," terminate the National Security State, and destroy the usurious monetary system. After that, we can begin thinking about a new reality, a new way of life, and a new civilization.

The internet: Everything you ever need to know

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In spite of all the answers the internet has given us, its full potential to transform our lives remains the great unknown. Here are the nine key steps to understanding the most powerful tool of our age – and where it's taking us


By John Naughton


A funny thing happened to us on the way to the future. The internet went from being something exotic to being boring utility, like mains electricity or running water – and we never really noticed. So we wound up being totally dependent on a system about which we are terminally incurious. You think I exaggerate about the dependence? Well, just ask Estonia, one of the most internet-dependent countries on the planet, which in 2007 was more or less shut down for two weeks by a sustained attack on its network infrastructure. Or imagine what it would be like if, one day, you suddenly found yourself unable to book flights, transfer funds from your bank account, check bus timetables, send email, search Google, call your family using Skype, buy music from Apple or books from Amazon, buy or sell stuff on eBay, watch clips on YouTube or BBC programmes on the iPlayer – or do the 1,001 other things that have become as natural as breathing.

The internet has quietly infiltrated our lives, and yet we seem to be remarkably unreflective about it. That's not because we're short of information about the network; on the contrary, we're awash with the stuff. It's just that we don't know what it all means. We're in the state once described by that great scholar of cyberspace, Manuel Castells, as "informed bewilderment".

Mainstream media don't exactly help here, because much – if not most – media coverage of the net is negative. It may be essential for our kids' education, they concede, but it's riddled with online predators, seeking children to "groom" for abuse. Google is supposedly "making us stupid" and shattering our concentration into the bargain. It's also allegedly leading to an epidemic of plagiarism. File sharing is destroying music, online news is killing newspapers, and Amazon is killing bookshops. The network is making a mockery of legal injunctions and the web is full of lies, distortions and half-truths. Social networking fuels the growth of vindictive "flash mobs" which ambush innocent columnists such as Jan Moir. And so on.

All of which might lead a detached observer to ask: if the internet is such a disaster, how come 27% of the world's population (or about 1.8 billion people) use it happily every day, while billions more are desperate to get access to it?

So how might we go about getting a more balanced view of the net ? What would you really need to know to understand the internet phenomenon? Having thought about it for a while, my conclusion is that all you need is a smallish number of big ideas, which, taken together, sharply reduce the bewilderment of which Castells writes so eloquently.

But how many ideas? In 1956, the psychologist George Miller published a famous paper in the journal Psychological Review. Its title was "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information" and in it Miller set out to summarise some earlier experiments which attempted to measure the limits of people's short-term memory. In each case he reported that the effective "channel capacity" lay between five and nine choices. Miller did not draw any firm conclusions from this, however, and contented himself by merely conjecturing that "the recurring sevens might represent something deep and profound or be just coincidence". And that, he probably thought, was that.

But Miller had underestimated the appetite of popular culture for anything with the word "magical' in the title. Instead of being known as a mere aggregator of research results, Miller found himself identified as a kind of sage — a discoverer of a profound truth about human nature. "My problem," he wrote, "is that I have been persecuted by an integer. For seven years this number has followed me around, has intruded in my most private data, and has assaulted me from the pages of our most public journals… Either there really is something unusual about the number or else I am suffering from delusions of persecution."

But in fact, the basic idea that emerges from Miller's 1956 paper seems to have stood the test of time. The idea is that our short-term memory can only hold between five and nine "chunks" of information at any given moment (here a chunk is defined as a "meaningful unit"). So, when trying to decide how many big ideas about the internet would be meaningful for most readers, it seemed sensible to settle for a magical total of nine. So here they are.

1 TAKE THE LONG VIEW

The strange thing about living through a revolution is that it's very difficult to see what's going on. Imagine what it must have been like being a resident of St Petersburg in 1917, in the months before Lenin and the Bolsheviks finally seized power. It's clear that momentous events are afoot; there are all kinds of conflicting rumours and theories, but nobody knows how things will pan out. Only with the benefit of hindsight will we get a clear idea of what was going on. But the clarity that hindsight bestows is also misleading, because it understates how confusing things appeared to people at the time.

So it is with us now. We're living through a radical transformation of our communications environment. Since we don't have the benefit of hindsight, we don't really know where it's taking us. And one thing we've learned from the history of communications technology is that people tend to overestimate the short-term impact of new technologies — and to underestimate their long-term implications.

We see this all around us at the moment, as would-be savants, commentators, writers, consultants and visionaries tout their personal interpretations of what the internet means for business, publishing, retailing, education, politics and the future of civilisation as we know it. Often, these interpretations are compressed into vivid slogans, memes or aphorisms: information "wants to be free"; the "long tail" is the future of retailing; "Facebook just seized control of the internet", and so on. These kinds of slogans are really just short-term extrapolations from yesterday's or today's experience. They tell us little about where the revolution we're currently living through is heading. The question is: can we do any better — without falling into the trap of feigning omniscience?

Here's a radical idea: why not see if there's anything to be learned from history? Because mankind has lived through an earlier transformation in its communications environment, brought about by the invention of printing by movable type. This technology changed the world — indeed, it shaped the cultural environment in which most of us grew up. And the great thing about it, from the point of view of this essay, is that we can view it with the benefit of hindsight. We know what happened.

A thought experiment

So let's conduct what the Germans call a Gedankenexperiment — a thought experiment. Imagine that the net represents a similar kind of transformation in our communications environment to that wrought by printing. What would we learn from such an experiment?

The first printed bibles emerged in 1455 from the press created by Johannes Gutenberg in the German city of Mainz. Now, imagine that the year is 1472 — ie 17 years after 1455. Imagine, further, that you're the medieval equivalent of a Mori pollster, standing on the bridge in Mainz with a clipboard in your hand and asking pedestrians a few questions. Here's question four: On a scale of one to five, where one indicates "Not at all likely" and five indicates "Very likely", how likely do you think it is that Herr Gutenberg's invention will:

(a) Undermine the authority of the Catholic church?

(b) Power the Reformation?

(c) Enable the rise of modern science?

(d) Create entirely new social classes and professions?

(e) Change our conceptions of "childhood" as a protected early period in a person's life?

On a scale of one to five! You have only to ask the questions to realise the fatuity of the idea. Printing did indeed have all of these effects, but there was no way that anyone in 1472, in Mainz (or anywhere else for that matter) could have known how profound its impact would be.

I'm writing this in 2010, which is 17 years since the web went mainstream. If I'm right about the net effecting a transformation in our communications environment comparable to that wrought by Gutenberg, then it's patently absurd for me (or anyone else) to pretend to know what its long-term impact will be. The honest answer is that we simply don't know.

The trouble is, though, that everybody affected by the net is demanding an answer right now. Print journalists and their employers want to know what's going to happen to their industry. Likewise the music business, publishers, television networks, radio stations, government departments, travel agents, universities, telcos, airlines, libraries and lots of others. The sad truth is that they will all have to learn to be patient. And, for some of them, by the time we know the answers to their questions, it will be too late.

2 THE WEB ISN'T THE NET

The most common — and still surprisingly widespread — misconception is that the internet and the web are the same thing. They're not. A good way to understand this is via a railway analogy. Think of the internet as the tracks and signalling, the infrastructure on which everything runs. In a railway network, different kinds of traffic run on the infrastructure — high-speed express trains, slow stopping trains, commuter trains, freight trains and (sometimes) specialist maintenance and repair trains.

On the internet, web pages are only one of the many kinds of traffic that run on its virtual tracks. Other types of traffic include music files being exchanged via peer-to-peer networking, or from the iTunes store; movie files travelling via BitTorrent; software updates; email; instant messages; phone conversations via Skype and other VoIP (internet telephony) services; streaming video and audio; and other stuff too arcane to mention.

And (here's the important bit) there will undoubtedly be other kinds of traffic, stuff we can't possibly have dreamed of yet, running on the internet in 10 years' time.

So the thing to remember is this: the web is huge and very important, but it's just one of the many things that run on the internet. The net is much bigger and far more important than anything that travels on it.

Understand this simple distinction and you're halfway to wisdom.

3 DISRUPTION IS A FEATURE, NOT A BUG

One of the things that most baffles (and troubles) people about the net is its capacity for disruption. One moment you've got a stable, profitable business – say, as the CEO of a music label; the next minute your industry is struggling for survival, and you're paying a king's ransom to intellectual property lawyers in a losing struggle to stem the tide. Or you're a newspaper group, wondering how a solid revenue stream from classified ads could suddenly have vaporised; or a university librarian wondering why students use only Google nowadays. How can this stuff happen? And how does it happen so fast?

The answer lies deep in the network's architecture. When it was being created in the 1970s, Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, the lead designers, were faced with two difficult tasks: how to design a system that seamlessly links lots of other networks, and how to design a network that is future-proof. The answer they came up with was breathtakingly simple. It was based on two axioms. Firstly, there should be no central ownership or control – no institution which would decide who could join or what the network could be used for. Secondly, the network should not be optimised for any particular application. This led to the idea of a "simple" network that did only one thing – take in data packets at one end and do its best to deliver them to their destinations. The network would be neutral as to the content of those packets – they could be fragments of email, porn videos, phone conversations, images… The network didn't care, and would treat them all equally.

By implementing these twin protocols, Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn created what was essentially a global machine for springing surprises. The implication of their design was that if you had an idea that could be implemented using data packets, then the internet would do it for you, no questions asked. And you didn't have to ask anyone's permission.

The explosion of creativity – in the form of disruptive applications – that the world has seen since the network emerged in the 1980s may have taken a lot of institutions and industries by surprise, but it was predictable, given the architecture. There are a lot of smart programmers in the world, and the net provided them with a perfect launch pad for springing surprises. What kinds of surprises? Well, the web itself. It was largely the creation of a single individual – Tim Berners-Lee, who in 1991 put the code on an internet server without having to ask anyone's permission.

Ten years after Berners-Lee started work, a disaffected, music-loving teenager named Shawn Fanning spent six months writing software for sharing music files and, in 1999, put his little surprise on an internet server. He called it Napster and it acquired over 60 million delighted users before the music industry managed to shut it down. But by that time the file-sharing genie was out of the bottle.

While all this was going on, plenty of equally smart programmers were incubating more sinister surprises, in the shape of a plague of spam, viruses, worms and other security "exploits" which they have been able to unleash over a network which doesn't care what's in your data packets. The potential dangers of this "malware" explosion are alarming. For example, mysterious groups have assembled "botnets" (made up of millions of covertly compromised, networked PCs) which could be used to launch massive, co-ordinated attacks that could conceivably bring down the network infrastructure of entire industries, or perhaps even countries. So far, with the exception of Estonia in 2007, we haven't seen such an attack, but the fear is that it will eventually come, and it will be the net's own version of 9/11.

The internet's disruptiveness is a consequence of its technical DNA. In programmers' parlance, it's a feature, not a bug – ie an intentional facility, not a mistake. And it's difficult to see how we could disable the network's facility for generating unpleasant surprises without also disabling the other forms of creativity it engenders.

4 THINK ECOLOGY, NOT ECONOMICS

As an analytical framework, economics can come unstuck when dealing with the net. Because while economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources, the online world is distinguished by abundance. Similarly, ecology (the study of natural systems) specialises in abundance, and it can be useful to look at what's happening in the media through the eyes of an ecologist.

Since the web went mainstream in 1993, our media "ecosystem", if you like, has become immeasurably more complex. The old, industrialised, mass-media ecosystem was characterised by declining rates of growth; relatively small numbers of powerful, profitable, slow-moving publishers and broadcasters; mass audiences consisting mainly of passive consumers of centrally produced content; relatively few communication channels, and a slow pace of change. The new ecosystem is expanding rapidly: it has millions of publishers; billions of active, web-savvy, highly informed readers, listeners and viewers; innumerable communication channels, and a dizzying rate of change.

To an ecologist, this looks like an ecosystem whose biodiversity has expanded radically. It's as if a world in which large organisms like dinosaurs (think Time Warner, Encyclopaedia Britannica) had trudged slowly across the landscape exchanging information in large, discrete units, but life was now morphing into an ecosystem in which billions of smaller species consume, transform, aggregate or break down and exchange information goods in much smaller units – and in which new gigantic life-forms (think Google, Facebook) are emerging. In the natural world, increased biodiversity is closely correlated with higher whole-system productivity – ie the rate at which energy and material inputs are translated into growth. Could it be that this is also happening in the information sphere? And if it is, who will benefit in the long term?

5 COMPLEXITY IS THE NEW REALITY

Even if you don't accept the ecological metaphor, there's no doubt that our emerging information environment is more complex – in terms of numbers of participants, the density of interactions between them, and the pace of change – than anything that has gone before. This complexity is not an aberration or something to be wished away: it's the new reality, and one that we have to address. This is a challenge, for several reasons. First, the behaviour of complex systems is often difficult to understand and even harder to predict. Second, and more importantly, our collective mindsets in industry and government are not well adapted for dealing with complexity. Traditionally, organisations have tried to deal with the problem by reducing complexity – acquiring competitors, locking in customers, producing standardised products and services, etc. These strategies are unlikely to work in our emerging environment, where intelligence, agility, responsiveness and a willingness to experiment (and fail) provide better strategies for dealing with what the networked environment will throw at you.

6 THE NETWORK IS NOW THE COMPUTER

For baby-boomers, a computer was a standalone PC running Microsoft software. Eventually, these devices were networked, first locally (via office networks) and then globally (via the internet). But as broadband connections to the net became commonplace, something strange happened: if you had a fast enough connection to the network, you became less concerned about the precise location of either your stored data or the processor that was performing computational tasks for you. And these tasks became easier to do. First, the companies (Yahoo, Google, Microsoft) who provided search also began to offer "webmail" – email provided via programs that ran not on your PC but on servers in the internet "cloud". Then Google offered word-processing, spreadsheets, slide-making and other "office"-type services over the network. And so on.

Here was a transition from a world in which the PC really was the computer, to one in which the network is effectively the computer. It has led to the emergence of "cloud computing" – a technology in which we use simple devices (mobile phones, low-power laptops or tablets) to access computing services that are provided by powerful servers somewhere on the net. This switch to computing as a utility rather than a service that you provide with your own equipment has profound implications for privacy, security and economic development – and public perceptions are lagging way behind the pace of development. What happens to your family's photo collection if it's held in the cloud and your password goes to the grave with you? And what about your documents and emails – all likewise stored in the cloud on someone else's server? Or your "reputation" on eBay? Everywhere one looks, the transition to cloud computing has profound implications, because it makes us more and more dependent on the net. And yet we're sleepwalking into this brave new world.

7 THE WEB IS CHANGING

Once upon a time, the web was merely a publication medium, in which publishers (professional or amateur) uploaded passive web pages to servers. For many people in the media business, that's still their mental model of the web. But in fact, the web has gone through at least three phases of evolution – from the original web 1.0, to the web 2.0 of "small pieces, loosely joined" (social networking, mashups, webmail, and so on) and is now heading towards some kind of web 3.0 – a global platform based on Tim Berners-Lee's idea of the 'semantic web' in which web pages will contain enough metadata about their content to enable software to make informed judgements about their relevance and function. If we are to understand the web as it is, rather than as it once was, we need more realistic mental models of it. Above all, we need to remember that it's no longer just a publication medium.

8 HUXLEY AND ORWELL ARE THE BOOKENDS OF OUR FUTURE

Many years ago, the cultural critic Neil Postman, one of the 20th century's most perceptive critics of technology, predicted that the insights of two writers would, like a pair of bookends, bracket our future. Aldous Huxley believed that we would be destroyed by the things we love, while George Orwell thought we would be destroyed by the things we fear.

Postman was writing before the internet became such a force in our societies, but I believe he got it right. On the one (Huxleyan) hand, the net has been a profoundly liberating influence in our lives – creating endless opportunities for information, entertainment, pleasure, delight, communication, and apparently effortless consumption, to the point where it has acquired quasi-addictive power, especially over younger generations. One can calibrate the extent of the impact by the growing levels of concern among teachers, governments and politicians. "Is Google making us stupid?" was the title of one of the most cited articles in Atlantic magazine in 2008. It was written by Nicholas Carr, a prominent blogger and author, and raised the question of whether permanent access to networked information (not just Google) is turning us into restless, shallow thinkers with shorter attention spans. (According to Nielsen, a market research firm, the average time spent viewing a web page is 56 seconds.) Other critics are worried that incessant internet use is actually rewiring our brains.

On the other (Orwellian) hand, the internet is the nearest thing to a perfect surveillance machine the world has ever seen. Everything you do on the net is logged – every email you send, every website you visit, every file you download, every search you conduct is recorded and filed somewhere, either on the servers of your internet service provider or of the cloud services that you access. As a tool for a totalitarian government interested in the behaviour, social activities and thought-process of its subjects, the internet is just about perfect.

9 OUR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY REGIME IS NO LONGER FIT FOR PURPOSE

In the analogue world, copying was difficult and degenerative (ie copies of copies became progressively worse than the original). In the digital world, copying is effortless and perfect. In fact, copying is to computers as breathing is to living organisms, inasmuch as all computational operations involve it. When you view a web page, for example, a copy of the page is loaded into the video memory of your computer (or phone, or iPad) before the device can display it on the screen. So you can't even look at something on the web without (unknowingly) making a copy of it.

Since our current intellectual property regime was conceived in an era when copying was difficult and imperfect, it's not surprising that it seems increasingly out of sync with the networked world. To make matters worse (or better, depending on your point of view), digital technology has provided internet users with software tools which make it trivially easy to copy, edit, remix and publish anything that is available in digital form – which means nearly everything, nowadays. As a result, millions of people have become "publishers" in the sense that their creations are globally published on platforms such as Blogger, Flickr and YouTube. So everywhere one looks, one finds things that infringe copyright in one way or another.

This is a disagreeable but inescapable fact – as inescapable in its way as the fact that young adults tend to drink too much alcohol. The only way to stop copying is to shut down the net. There's nothing wrong with intellectual property (or alcohol), per se, but our copyright laws are now so laughably out of touch with reality that they are falling into disrepute. They urgently need reforming to make them relevant to digital circumstances. The problem is that none of our legislators seems to understand this, so it won't happen any time soon.

Postscript

It would be ridiculous to pretend that these nine ideas encapsulate everything that there is to be known about the net. But they do provide a framework for seeing the phenomenon "in the round", as it were, and might even serve as an antidote to the fevered extrapolation that often passes for commentary on developments in cyberspace. The sad fact is that if there is a "truth" about the internet, it's rather prosaic: to almost every big question about the network's long-term implications the only rational answer is the one famously given by Mao Zedong's foreign minister, Zhou Enlai, when asked about the significance of the French Revolution: "It's too early to say." It is.

John Naughton is professor of the public understanding of technology at the Open University. He is currently working on a book about the internet phenomenon.

The Fate of the Internet, Decided in a Back Room

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By Tim Karr

The Wall Street Journal just reported that the Federal Communications Commission is holding "closed-door meetings"with industry to broker a deal on Net Neutrality – the rule that lets users determine their own Internet experience.

Given that the corporations at the table all profit from gaining control over information, the outcome won't be pretty.

The meetings include a small group of industry lobbyists representing the likes of AT&T, Verizon, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, and Google. They reportedly met for two-and-a-half hours on Monday morning and will convene another meeting today. The goal according to insiders is to "reach consensus" on rules of the road for the Internet.

This is what a failed democracy looks like: After years of avid public support for Net Neutrality – involving millions of people from across the political spectrum – the federal regulator quietly huddles with industry lobbyists to eliminate basic protections and serve Wall Street’s bottom line.

We’ve seen government cater to big business in the same ways, prior to the BP oil disaster and the subprime mortgage meltdown.

The Industry's regulatory capture of the Internet is now almost complete. The one agency tasked with oversight of communications now thinks it can wriggle free of its obligation to protect the open Internet, if only it can get industry to agree on a solution.

Congress is holding its own series of "closed-door" meetings and, while they’ve been ambiguous on the details, many remain skeptical on whether the process will lead to an outcome that serves the public interest. After all, this is the same Congress that is bankrolled by the phone and cable lobby in excess of $100 million.

Why is this so startling even for the more cynical among us? The Obama administration promised to embrace a new era of government transparency. It’s the tool we were supposed to use to pry open policymaking and expose it to the light of public scrutiny.

In that spirit, President Obama pledged to "take a backseat to no one" in his support for Net Neutrality. He appointed Julius Genachowski to head the FCC -- the man who crafted his pro-Net Neutrality platform in 2008.

But the mere existence of these private meetings reveals to us a chairman who has fallen far short of expectations. Instead Genachowski is shying from the need to fortify the Internet’s open architecture in favor of deals made between DC power brokers.

These deals will determine who ultimately controls Internet content and innovation. Will phone and cable companies succeed in their decade-long push to take ownership of both the infrastructure of the Internet and the information that flows across its pipes? Will they cut in a few giant companies like Google and the recording industry to get their way?

Whatever the outcome, the public – including the tens of millions of Americans who use the Internet every day and in every way – are not being given a seat at the table.

Genachowski’s closed-door sessions come after six months of public comments on whether the agency should proceed with a rule to protect Net Neutrality.

During that period, more than 85 percent of comments received by the agency called for a strong Net Neutrality rule. Look at it this way: If a candidate received more than 85 percent of the vote, wouldn’t she have a mandate to decide on the public’s behalf?

In Chairman Genachowski’s alternative view of reality, though, the public is immaterial, and industry consensus supreme.