Sunday, May 10, 2009

About Extra-Judicial, State-Sponsored Terrorism

“Curiously, often a classic manifestation of people who are afflicted with certain psychotic disorders is the irrational fear that the CIA and FBI is [sic] conspiring to harm them. In this case, the CIA involvement is real and the covert nature of the involvement is not contested.”
Orlikow v. United States, 682 F. Supp. 77 (D.D.C. 1988)
(Ruling for plaintiff regarding Dr. Ewen Cameron’s MKUltra research for the CIA)

The world (and even some Americans) was horrified in December, 2003 when cell phone pictures of PFC Lynndie England surfaced showing her holding a leash tethered to a naked male Iraqi prisoner’s neck who was lying on the floor at Abu Ghraib prison in the midst of Operation Iraqi Liberation (“OIL”). A firestorm of outrage circled the world in both the mass and other media: text messages appended to copies of the pictures flew around the Middle East among dissenting and defecting soldiers and journalists; bloggers began covering the unfolding scandal and disseminating all its salacious details through RSS feeds; YouTube made available copies of the pictures to the world outside the blogosphere. New outlets such as Al Jazeera and the Associated Press distributed the pictures and stories to the UK’s Guardian and the U.S.’s New York Times. Jihadi had a field day. Activists were moved by the humiliating photos to mobilize and mount protests; America’s Congress was inundated with messages of outrage from constituents, who called for investigations. Bush assembled his legal team and charged them with crafting perversely immoral legal statutes in response to these calls for investigations which exonerated the practices and policies of U.S. torturers in Iraq and elsewhere. We quickly realized that these statutes simply memorialized what U.S. agencies such as the CIA have long been doing to anyone who opposes them, as anyone familiar with the work of the CIA torture school, The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formerly, the School of the Americas, has known: torture through systematic campaigns of terrorism.
The tactics described below are used by the FBI; the CIA; their subcontractors; federal, state and local agencies; and all military divisions, which are now charged with intelligence work against political dissidents and other law-abiding citizens within the government’s purview which it deems its enemies. These tactics include social extermination through discrediting campaigns of dissidents as either spies for the government, or psychologically unstable and, therefore, not worthy of your attention or assistance in fighting whatever particular oppression with which they may be struggling. People falsely labeled as psychotics and treated as such by mental and other health care professionals in order to remove them from American society, just as “inconvenient” women once were, are victims of extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism. These psychological torture tactics have been refined over decades of use by the CIA and FBI working in the community.
In his 1989 activists’ pamphlet, War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It, Attorney Brian Glick discovered the FBI waged extensive terrorism campaigns to undermine and dismantle the Women’ movement, the Black Panthers and the Anti-war movement in the 1960s. Their tactics included smear campaigns to discredit the leaders of these groups, who were pitted against one another in controversies contrived by undercover operatives long held in esteem within these groups as trusted members of their communities. Where a target was particularly difficult to discredit, the FBI’s operatives contrived campaigns to get their targets to discredit themselves, sometimes by planting a false rumor within the group and, when the target took up the rumor and promoted it, exposing the rumor as false and casting suspicion among members of the group as to the integrity of the target. This was the most effective way of creating a “snitch” jacket for the target, since regardless of what the rumor was, if it undermined or even deterred a little from the work of the group and caused the group to be viewed with suspicion, it was effective at alienating members of the group from the target. Once isolated, the target was effectively neutralized. This is what was done to American Indian Movement (AIM) activist AnnaMae Aquash, who was subsequently lured to an isolated area on the Pine Ridge Reservation one night and shot to death by the actual snitches in AIM.
These and many other illegal and inhumane terrorism practices were first developed in the CIA’s COINTELPRO program for use against political activists in the 1960s. When this program was exposed in the 1970s, Congress -- led by Sen. Ted Kennedy -- created a committee to investigate it. He appointed Sen. Nelson Rockefeller and Sen. Frank Church to lead the investigation. They held hearings and interviewed agency personnel and then wrote a report, effectively assuring the American people that COINTELPRO had been dismantled. Victims of COINTELPRO began suing the United States government -- and winning their cases. However, in 1981, Ronald Reagan codified the use of COINTELPRO against law-abiding Americans such as political activists (§2.9) in Executive Order No. 12333 (December 4, 1981). This order also grants to the FBI, CIA, Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines the right to use “counterintelligence activities . . . within the United States” (Glick, Brian: War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It, 1989, South End Press, p. 31). COINTELPRO is still in use today. Clearly, Congress lied. Political activists were routinely subjected to COINTELPRO throughout the 1980s when Reagan’s terrorists were supporting wars throughout central America and doing the same thing to Latinos. The American government tortures Americans just as it funds and promotes terrorism abroad. It has for a long, long time. Systematic torture is terrorism. To be more specific about the particular type of extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism practiced by the American government on American citizens who are dissidents of its political policies, consider this:
Torture, an illegal and immoral practice, is extrajudicial when used by government agents and their subcontractors since, when it is used, it is used in the place of judicially imposed measures intended to be rehabilitative against those who are found to be criminals. While they should never be used against anyone, they are particularly onerous when used against those merely alleged to be criminals. When applied systematically in multiple campaigns against a person or a group of people, torture is terrorism. Terrorism promoted by a government is state-sponsored terrorism.
The clear mandates expressed by America’s imperialists to oppress and persecute innocents, as well as the stories of those Americans such as myself who are treated this way, is more than enough evidence to demonstrate we are still being -- and will continue to be -- persecuted.
The persecution liberals experience through social extermination of necessity extends to the workplace, where most individuals spend most of their time. Everyone’s heard of blacklisting. Famous writers, scientists and academics -- particularly, those who were Jewish -- were deemed dangerous, even communist, because of their often liberal beliefs and persecuted as such during the 1950s as “un-American.” The “Red Scare” started with Sen. Eugene McCarthy and his congressional investigations of famous liberals. Fear of liberal intellectuals propelled by ignorance of the difference between totalitarianism and various forms of communism, including socialism, spread throughout America. Any liberal who seemed in the least way stereotypical of those McCarthy was persecuting was fired and discriminated against in seeking employment. McCarthy’s witch hunts were eventually discredited, but not before many lives and careers were ruined. Later, anti-discrimination laws passed in the 1960s gave protections to some of those types of persons formerly persecuted by the prejudices McCarthy’s hearings created based on religious and ethnic characteristics. New opportunities became available for liberals protected by these class distinctions. But persecution of other liberals still continues.
Today, blacklisting has morphed into a practice called “workplace mobbing.” Often instituted by management against employees deemed as threats, it is practiced widely throughout the developed world, research suggests, against as much as 20% of any country’s employees, who include academics as well as others. Mobbing includes the same tactics used by gangstalkers: discrediting targets with their peers using false rumors or set-ups in which the employee discredits him- or herself; isolating the target in other ways such as minimizing his or her responsibility; humiliating the target through various means including group insubordination against targets who hold supervisory positions. The goal is to discredit the target not merely to force him or her out of a particular workplace but out of the entire workforce, thereby achieving the same goal as blacklisting. Research has shown that campaigns follow targets from employer to employer, often causing the target severe mental and physical health problems. Though countries in western Europe have laws expressly prohibiting these well-defined practices, the United States have no such laws. The only recourse an employee has against an employer who instigates workplace mobbing is through anti-discrimination laws or OSHA laws, which necessitate that the target be a member of one of the already protected classes of anti-discrimination laws by virtue of a disability, or his or her race.

This represents fascism.
In a particularly alarming case of extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism disguised as ‘excessive police force’ that demonstrates clearly the long-standing collusion between federal police forces such as the FBI and local law enforcement, environmental and peace activist, Robert Woodward was shot 7 times -- at least once in the back -- as he lay unarmed, face down, on the floor of All Souls Church in Brattleboro, Vermont, on Sunday, December 2nd, 2001, after seeking sanctuary there from the FBI. He died several hours later on an unnecessarily lengthy trip to the local hospital. The shooters -- all Brattleboro, Vermont, police -- were exonerated by then Gov. Howard Dean’s attorney general after a biased, closed investigation. When petitioned by Woodward’s family, Dean refused to censure his attorney general. Woodward’s very public, very unnecessary murder was no accident; any number of the “less-than-lethal” weapons the Brattleboro, Vermont, police had in their possession thanks to Janet Reno could have subdued this distraught, unarmed man, but the Brattleboro police were clearly working at the direction of a higher authority.
The city in which I live is very conscious about its reputation as a liberal one and it spends a lot of money to maintain the façade that it is. It has a city agency with the word “peace” in it’s name which holds peace “fairs” each spring; it has all types of commissions whose work is alleged to be ensuring the rights of the oppressed: women, minorities, immigrants, workers. That’s because the most powerful residents of the city are defense contractors who routinely torture and kill the helpless in pursuit of lucrative government research initiatives and who are just as routinely sued in civil court over these abuses. They are the academic institutions within it’s boundaries and their many private institutions and private corporations. These agencies are staffed by the same people who run local peace groups -- groups whose missions are peace and economic justice; peace and justice for women; peace for foreign countries, etc. Their ties are unmistakable in the form of both the personnel who hold multiple positions and play key roles in each and in the initiatives pursued -- or not -- by both municipal agencies and non-profits. Extra-judicial, state-sponsored terrorism is nowhere on the radars of either, just as human trafficking and its more seamy underside, sexual slavery, are not. But the willful ignorance practiced by these people in order to protect the fascists that control the city in which I live is not the only tell-tale sign of their usurpation by those in control of our closed society. Another sign that evinces their participation in the military campaigns designed by the CIA and orchestrated by the FBI here, in my so-called liberal city, is the fact that some of these alleged activists actually do the work of carrying out these discrediting campaigns.

Your home can be invaded, your possessions vandalized and stolen, your life threatened and even taken by SSGs and gangstalkers working for the FBI, or by the FBI themselves, or any other military agency charged with counterintelligence such as local law enforcement and no matter which law enforcement agency from whom you’ve sought help is derelict in its duty to protect you, you -- or your survivors -- have no legal recourse against them -- because you and your possessions are not in their custody and therefore not subject to their protection. What free person lives in police custody? You are not free in this country when law enforcement can kill you with impunity. Even private police forces such as Blackwater operate with impunity to kill people. They just pay fines assessed in civil suits for the privilege of doing so. And this is how they get away with it -- by calling these incidents acts of private violence instead of what they actually are -- administrative murders at the hands of fascists.

Some local law enforcement officers are exposing and speaking out against the Pentagon’s usurpation of local law enforcement agencies, telling us they have been advised to ignore the pleas for help of FBI targets such as Robert Woodward. People like Robert Woodward are terrorized by Bureau subcontractors tracking their movements using cell control techniques, which have been designed and refined through decades of research. Targets such as Robert Woodward are driven crazy with psychological terror tactics which also have been developed by the Pentagon in order to insulate the state from culpability by making it seem the extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism targets experience are private violences. But it’s extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism and you aren’t hearing the stories of people like Robert Woodward in popular books flacked on The Colbert Report, such as Naomi Wolf’s The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (in which, curiously, she makes no mention of this well-documented practice by the FBI of implementing the terror campaigns devised by the CIA against American activists) (2007, Chelsea Publishing), or on the evening network news, for a reason. The same people with the power to conduct these terrorism campaigns also have the power to suppress the information you get about them and their anti-American practices. They exert their power everywhere they possibly can, from making corrupt legislation that permits them to terrorize, torture and kill their opponents, to maiming existing constitutional laws with specious case law that subverts the very letter and spirit of our constitutionally guaranteed rights.
As case law currently stands, local law enforcement agencies are not required to protect any of your civil or human rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness against these pseudo-private violences/acts of extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism. In Retained by the People: The “Silent” Ninth Amendment and the Constitutional Rights Americans Don’t Know They Have (2007, Basic Books), UC/Berkeley law school Professor Daniel A. Farber provides a history of the philosophical and political issues that prompted our nation’s Founding Fathers to create an amendment in the Constitution that had the utility of protecting those rights they realized future generations of Americans would need protected but which they could not foresee at the time they wrote the original Constitution. For these “unenumerated” rights, they conceived of the protections guaranteed in the Ninth Amendment. But the Ninth Amendment has never been used. Instead, the legal community has pursued the protections of those rights specifically enumerated in the Bill of Rights (the first five amendments of the Constitution) and later rights vis-a-vis their Privileges or Immunities clauses (most often, that of the 14th Amendment but also on occasion the P&I clause of the 5th Amendment). In the pursuit of justice when issues concerning these other, unenumerated rights have been brought to the bar -- such as the right to civil protection by one’s police force -- the Judiciary has refused to recognize any other legislation as controlling the legal arguments in such cases, though the Ninth Amendment was created specifically to do so.
The Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment was designed, most scholars agree, to protect the fundamental birth rights of all American citizens as they had been designated in the Declaration of Independence -- those rights which colonists viewed as “natural rights,” such as the right to freedom from oppression and to self-governance. Though less specific than the Bill of Rights, which protected individuals from the Federal government, the Privileges or Immunities clause of the 14th Amendment was designed to protect individuals from the actions of the state. But the federal and state government routinely abridge the most fundamental rights of Americans and, when pressed for redress, subvert the intention of founders of this country to protect natural rights by abuse of another clause, the due process clause. They have contended these clauses protect all the natural and other rights both the Ninth Amendment and the Privileges or Immunities clause do, but in reality, they do not. Industry has made full use of some peculiar interpretations of and gaps in the due process clause.
Farber writes, “. . . the Supreme Court primarily used the Due Process Clause to protect businesses from economic regulation.” (p. 77) The first such case where it did so was to strike down a law protecting bakers in New York from working excessive (more than 60) hours per week, saying it was a violation of the right of bakers to enter into contracts with their employers for whatever amount of work they chose to provide and was therefore oppressive.
The fight for justice which recognizes the unenumerated rights of individuals continues on the basis that rights must be defined as essential and fundamental -- not an easy thing to do when one is fighting a criminal charge of “sodomy,” for example, by consenting adults who happen to be homosexual, or trying to retain one’s house in an eminent domain case where it’s seized by the government for use by a private development company, as more than 5,700 cases of eminent domain did in 2006 alone. The rights to express oneself freely sexually and to a home -- and even the right to procreate -- are not viewed by today’s guardians of our Constitution as basic rights. But even the enumerated rights -- specifically, the right to life -- has been trampled on by the misuse of the due process clause to the point where the state is now exempt from protecting its most vulnerable citizens.
Farber outlines the case of Joshua DeShaney, who was repeatedly beaten and abused by his father from the time he was three until he was five, when his father succeeded in putting him into a coma which, together with the accumulated head injuries Joshua had sustained, made him profoundly mentally retarded, thereby robbing him of autonomy and freedom. During this time, Joshua’s father was monitored by local child protection officers. These officers had every reason to suspect Joshua’s father continued to beat him since neighbors reported to them that Joshua’s father was abusing him and they were denied access to Joshua on several occasions because, they were told, he was too sick to be interviewed. But they nevertheless left Joshua in his father’s care. In a civil lawsuit against the negligent Department of Social services in which the Supreme Court exonerated the actions of the child protection officers, they wrote in their final ruling, “A State’s failure to protect an individual against a private violence simply does not constitute a violation of the Due Process Clause.” (p. 156) The case hinged on the issue of privacy; in other words, if Joshua had been in the state’s care -- for example, in the foster home in which he should have been placed -- and had been injured or killed there, then, the court ruling implies, he would have been entitled to protection. What does this mean?
In such a situation as exists today in America, where police are excused from performing their basic functions “to protect and serve,” and where they have been legislatively recruited as terrorists no different than Augusto Pinochet’s, when so often their crimes are exonerated by the highest law enforcement officials in the country, the attorneys generals of our states and country, how can we fail to see the obvious -- that America is a closed, military dictatorship run by fascists? The arms’ length covert operations they run are transparent lies evincing their culpability.
Indeed, research has shown that civil and human rights have been gradually disappearing in America. It’s most commonly referred to as violence against women, or racism, but it is a loss that is at least sanctioned -- if not promoted -- by law enforcement. This disappearance of civil and human rights has been parallel to the increase in the use by the state of psychological terrorism -- so-called “mind control” technologies, such as MKUltra and COINTELPRO and directed energy weapons (DEW) technologies. This represents the state application of mass behavior modification technologies. If the state can’t socially exterminate you, they’ll exterminate you in any way they can -- even technologically, if they must, because they can.
How Did This Happen?
Fear motivates. Propaganda works. “The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion,” Edmund Burke once wrote. But the propaganda is far more intense, pernicious and insidious than that used in other countries. For example, our country has experienced numerous coups d’ètat in my life -- one, far from bloodless; another, a so-called “gentleman’s coup” -- and yet, we still don’t speak of them as such. They’re “conspiracy theories” (which by definition can’t be resolved, forever keeping alive the notion that what can be known, can’t), or “voter fraud,” but not what they actually are: coups d’ètat by persons in league with the fascists in control of our country.
Dr. José Delgado, a state-sponsored pioneer of the technology of Electrical Stimulation of the Brain (ESB), memorialized his career-long work developing psychological technologies to remotely control masses of human beings in his 1969 book, Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society. We have an astonishing record of the esteem with which Dr. Delgado’s work was held by the American congress in 1972 that evinces their support of the fascist closing of American society through the mass enslavement of American citizens with what was once called “brain washing” but is now called “mind control” techniques pioneered by Dr. Delgado and proponents of his work. The targets on which Dr. Delgado proposed to use his technologies even he qualified as “normal” people who believe in and work for “liberty,” or liberals. (U.S. Doc. 506, Congressional Record Vol. 118, Part 5, pages 5111 to 6496, 92d. Congress 2d. session, February 23, 1972 to March 1, 1972, deposited by the U.S. government February 11, 1974, in federal depositories. A record of this particular congressional session is contained in pages 5567-5577 of the afore-mentioned Congressional Records, submitted by the “Hon.” Cornelius E. Gallagher, D. NJ.)
Delgado’s research is contained within an exposition and criticism of an alleged world-wide increase in psychosurgery and is presented with a curious absence of the same type of criticism that Rep. Gallagher expresses about that trend, creating the impression of his whole-hearted endorsement of Dr. Delgado’s mass mind control programs. Delgado writes,
‘The individual may think that the most important fact of reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view, a relative frame of reference which is not shared by the rest of the living world. This self-importance also lacks historical perspective, for the brief existence of one person should be considered in the terms of the world population, mankind, and the whole universe.’ p. 236
Delgado dismisses completely the dual subjective-objective nature imbued in all people -- the very nature to which the founding fathers referred as “God-given” -- and evinces not merely the ignorance of his own unexamined life, but of the true nature of humanity: that it is a construct built on morality, which, itself, is built on the individual’s ability to empathize with his or her fellow human beings. People are just objects to Delgado. Not a surprising attitude to find in a fascist, just a shocking one to find in a man of esteemed positions at Yale University and within the psychiatric community. Yet, this criminally stupid and morally decrepit man has had his ideas vetted everywhere in circles of influence, even in Congress. More disturbing still is the fact that what Delgado is justifying is simply Maoist communism -- a complete subversion of the individual for the good of the state, the “psycho-civilized society.” Pretty un-American, especially when one considers on whom Delgado proposes his methods be used: liberals.

Dr. Peter R. Breggin, author of the article that Rep. Gallagher has presented for inclusion in the Congressional Records which reports on Delgado’s work, writes of Delgado,
“He then goes on to attack the notion that man has “the right to develop his own mind,” to develop his own unique potential “while remaining independent and self sufficient.” As he concludes:
‘This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal, but unfortunately its assumptions are not supported by neurophysiological and psychological students of intracerebral mechanisms.’ p. 239’”
What’s new about the U.S. government’s interest in Dr. Delgado’s research (as demonstrated by Rep. Gallagher’s uncritical presentation of it) is Delgado’s proposal for a nation-wide implementation of control measures such as those he has developed in his research. Breggin writes,
“He advocates a complete educational program, from infancy and nursery through adulthood and mass education for the indoctrination of the people into a respect for physical control of the mind:
After pages of documentation about what has already been done by a few investigators working with very little funds, he then proposes a giant billion dollar government investment in mind control:
‘National agencies should be created in order to coordinate plans, budgets, and actions just a NASA in the United States has directed public interest and technology, launching the country into the adventures and accomplishments of outer space.’ p. 259
Along with this evaporation of civil and human rights in America has come a cleverly crafted perception management campaign to make both the citizens of America and the citizens of the world believe that America is still an open and free society when it most certainly is not.
Why Extra-Judicial, State-Sponsored Terrorism Should Matter to You
You’re next.
Or maybe not. Maybe, it’s your turn now. We are all susceptible to the overwhelming influence of popular cultural artifacts, many of which are representations of Dr. Delgado’s work. The popular so-called reality show, Survivor, (http://www.cbs.com/primetime/survivor/) is exactly the type of popular entertainment Delgado suggested be developed to inculcate the masses with an acceptance of social engineering practices. Survivor’s premise -- to get followers to depose a leader, just as his monkeys did in his experiments -- can be seen as the praxis of his once only dreamed-of social theories. The Sci-Fi Channel’s Mind Control with Derren Brown is yet another example of the type of program he suggested be developed to condition the masses to accept as normal mass control -- in this case, of the mind -- just as The History Channel’s Gangland series has been developed to condition the masses to accept the idea that gangs are an inevitable, eventual, irremedial part of society. After all, if we’re busy fighting each other, we’re not fighting them. But the propaganda factory that has been developed to influence the entire nation has also developed tools to influence and control discrete sectors of the masses, too, and where those tools of propaganda fail, gangstalkers step in to exterminate those who are resistant to their messages.
In 1996, persons with deliberately-misdiagnosed leukemia-cum-Chronic Fatigue Syndrome-cum-Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome learned they actually had a “less virulent form of AIDS” with the publication of Osler’s Web: Inside the Labyrinth of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic, (1996, Crown). The book is a monument to propaganda, creating the false controversy that the research which proves this fact, Nancy Klimas’s study of immune system markers, was outside orthodox research initatives (that is to say, government research initiatives), when, in fact, Dr. Klimas is a university researcher who receives government funding. Other high-profile CFIDS/non-HIV/AIDS researchers are characterized as being outside the mainstream medicoresearch industry, too, like Dr. Paul Cheney, who routinely makes his patients’ blood and other samples available to university researchers funded by the government, most notably, Dr. Anthony Komaroff. I posted a comment in an internet chat room run by an alleged patient advocacy group asking why, then, our doctors continued to tell us that there were no tests available to tell us with what we were sick, or that we weren’t sick at all but crazy (just as the first AIDS victims and the victims of America’s atomic radiation experiments were labeled), and therefore we still couldn’t get appropriate medical care. The next day, I received an email back-channel to the account that I had opened to join this group. It contained the threat that unless I stopped asking such questions the FBI would be investigating me for “hate speech.” I may still have an electronic copy of the email secreted away somewhere, but all my hard copies have been removed from my home, just as has most all of the evidence of my persecution, such as medical records which verify the history I have recounted in these pages. That’s when the campaign to discredit me began.
You see, my story -- the story of my bioslavery -- is relevant not simply to other victims of non-HIV/AIDS, but also to all persons with AIDS: gays, African-Americans, Africans, Asians. The people who have reified me don’t want me anywhere near these groups of people, and they’ve done some pretty incredible things to discredit me within these communities. They know that if these groups of people hear how a former employee of a defense subcontractor admitted to me that they were involved in many contracts to develop the components of AIDS -- even as that person was involved in targeting me for some of the bioassaults that gave me AIDS and the subsequent research that cured it -- people would start to take me seriously because research contracts can be traced -- even those done with “black budgets.” I’m a dangerous threat to the fascists who created and deployed AIDS. That’s why campaigns such as those recalled here are instigated against me -- to discredit me as unlikely to be a champion of the people most affected by AIDS. Here are two anecdotes relating such incidences.
Anecdote No. 1: My Local Garden Center
I like to garden. I don’t have much opportunity to do so because I live in a concrete-and-brick apartment complex, but there are several common areas where my neighbors and I can bring the beauty of nature into our lives with containers of annuals and other plants. Luckily, there’s a garden center just a few blocks away from where we live.
I recently visited my local garden center just as the pansies arrived. I selected seven flats, a 15-quart bag of soil and some other gardening implements I needed to spruce up the courtyard area of my apartment complex. Then I asked the owner of the store if he had a list of taxis service phone numbers that I could use, as is typical of area stores. He rattled off the number of a local service as well as the garden center’s address. He repeated it, waited for me to repeat it, and repeated it again, offering to make the call himself. I held up my cell phone to let him know that wasn’t necessary before I dialed. He smiled. I’ve been shopping at his store for at least a decade and though we’re not on a first-name basis, I’m pleased he greets me with recognition when I come in. He accommodates his customers with red Radio Flyer™ wagons to ease the burden of transporting their sometimes cumbersome purchases to their cars. One day, when I had spent all of my money at his store and had none left to call a taxi, the owner let me borrow a wagon to take my purchases home. He’s very accommodating and I’m pleased to patronize his store. That is, I was pleased when he used to do things like this; lately, he hasn’t, and although I cannot be certain of the reason why -- since I’ve done nothing to offend him -- I suspect he’s been given a reason to shun me.
You see, the last time I was in his store, I needed help to find hangers for plant containers. I was told to ask the owner for his help and directed to his check-out stand in the garden center’s out-door store. I greeted the owner in the same friendly manner I always use, but he didn’t reciprocate, as he usually does. This day, he wouldn’t even look at me. I craned my neck as I made my inquiry, hoping to catch his eye. He turned away as he gave me directions to the product I inquired about. After I retrieved the product, I paid for it at the garden center’s in-store check out stand, manned by the taciturn clerk who had refused to help me except by directing me to the owner for his help, and left, uneasy in the extreme about the cold and rude treatment I was given. I obsessed about it for days, going over everything I had said and done that could have possibly given rise to offense, until I realized that I had done nothing. That’s when I remembered a peculiar thing that had happened on my previous visit to the garden center, the day I had bought my pansies.
After I had made my purchase that day I went to the sidewalk at the front of the store to wait for the taxi I had called. Ten minutes or so had passed when two women walking dogs approached the entrance to the store, the first of whom to reach it bent down and stowed a wadded up bundle of trash behind the flower planter next to which I stood. She handed her dog’s lead to her friend and proceeded into the garden center’s store. I was starting to get angry since I knew the store had wastebaskets, but I couldn’t decide what to do. My taxi would arrive any minute, so I couldn’t pick up after her unless I wanted to take whatever she had disposed of with me. I wanted to say something like, “they have wastebaskets in the store,” to the woman but she had dashed into the store too quickly. I tried to engage her friend in a conversation so I could mention this fact, first talking about her dogs, but she, too, was taciturn and turned her attention to others leaving the store who had stopped to admire their dogs. My taxi arrived and I left -- feeling very uneasy, but not because of any paranoid suspicion. Their arrogance just made me very angry. “I guess they think the world is their trash can,” I ruminated. It wasn’t until after my next visit to the garden center that I thought there may have been a purpose to their behavior that wasn’t simply borne of arrogance.
"Could they have set me up to slander me as an antisocial litterbug to my once-friendly neighborhood merchant,” I wondered? He’s seemed indifferent to me in the past, but on the rare occasion when he has it’s been because he’s been busy. “Everybody has an off day,” I’ve told myself at these times. He’s never treated me as though my patronage were an inconvenience to him. For him to do that, I would imagine I’d have to have given him some offense. Since I hadn’t stolen anything from him, or been rude to him in any way, or given him any cause to be rude to me, the logical explanation for his behavior is that he was turned against me -- just as those who perpetrate character assassination of activists such as myself have been proven to do.
This is what that attack was about: making me appear to those in my neighborhood that I am not only an antisocial litterbug, but I’m also not the environmentalist I claim to be. Would you pay any attention to a self-proclaimed environmentalist who was alleged to litter? Probably not. I’ve been working hard to understand environmental issues and clean energy technologies and initiatives because I’d like to go back to work and to work in a field where I believe my work has intrinsic as well as extrinsic value. That’s going to be hard to do if my potential employer receives character references that make me appear antisocial and callous to the degradation of the environment.
Anecdote No. 2: My Local Thrift Shop
Easter is my favorite time of year. I’m usually melancholy on Maundy Thursday and edgy on Good Friday, but by the next day, I begin to cheer up. Even on a cloudy, rainy Easter weekend, I find the beauty of the flowers that are beginning to bloom and, indeed, the hopefulness expressed in the volume of new life around me, overwhelming and gratifying. Robins become as ubiquitous as pigeons where I live. Toddlers waddling around their yards and church grounds in their little suits and frilly dresses make my heart dance -- I’ll admit it. They’re adorable. And what could be better than being able to experience all this -- plus chocolate?! The day after Good Friday, 2009, I decided to shop at one of my favorite stores, the local thrift shop, to look for kitchen curtains. The ones I had were 25 years old and, basically, rags. New life suggested new kitchen curtains.
I donate to my local thrift shop because they provide a valuable service to people of limited means, like me. They make it affordable for me to have a DVD player, or a window fan in my early 20th century fourth-floor walkup. I’m happy to recycle the serviceable things I have so someone else can use them.
I was in the area of the store’s basement where linens and furniture were stored for ten minutes or so when another woman came into this area at the back of the store. I had made two piles of items: one, items I was considering purchasing; the other, items I intended to purchase. I put one on a side table that was for sale and the other pile on the end of a chaise lounge. As I picked through the items in one bin, the woman picked up a shopping bag of linens that was lying on the floor next to the other bin and dumped it out. Then she took some of the contents of the bag and began spreading them over the two piles of items I was considering purchasing. “Excuse me, I said. “I’m thinking of buying those.” I pointed to the side table. She approached the bin I was sorting through and began picking through it, piling still more things on top of the things I had placed on the side table. “Um -- could I have the things I put there, I sheepishly asked this provocateur, pointing to the side table. She pulled out the bottom two items and, with the greatest disdain, held them in front of me by two fingers as though they were as toxic as nuclear waste and dropped them on the floor. I picked them up. She continued throwing things out of the bin onto the floor.
I turned to the side table and began picking through the pile she had made, looking for the other items I had first placed there. I pulled them from the bottom and put them on the other pile I had made on the chaise lounge. “What is going on here?,” I wondered to myself, turning back to the bin to search for pot holders. “They’re mine,” she screeched, snatching them off the pile on the chaise lounge. “Excuse me, but those were things I placed on that side table myself,” I said. Those are mine, she screamed. “You had nothing there.” I was incredulous. She had made such a show of removing some of the items I had placed on the side table, her blatant lying that I had nothing on the side table when she put stuff on it was the last straw. I flew into a rage.
“You are a fucking liar,” I yelled. And she beamed. It was clear in an instant by her smile that she had wanted to provoke me. Just then, I realized the half dozen middle-aged men swarming around us -- men who had not been there when I first began sifting through the store’s linen items. Men with their cell phones out. “You’re making the world a despicable place, you know,” I chided her. “You think you’re doing ‘God’s work,’ or behaving like everyone else because so many of us persecute others for benefits, but you’re just a pawn,” I observed. She laughed. “No, I’m not.” I should have walked away, but I felt I had to let her know that I knew perfectly well who -- and what -- she was. And then she let me know that, in fact, I was correct. She declared herself to be the wickedly false Christian she was. “I’m sorry,” she feigned, as she put her hand on my arm. “Do you forgive me?”
This is what that attack was about: to provoke me to violence so I don’t look like the peace activist I claim to be, to make me look antisocial, unstable and violent (and, contrary to my behavior, a racist; did I mention this woman was Haitian?) and to make me appear to be the worst thing an American can be these days -- not Christian because I didn’t forgive her. Would you give any of your attention to a self-proclaimed peace and justice activist who flew off the handle and argued with and cursed at a[nother seemingly] poor woman who happened to be a dark-skinned immigrant? Probably not.
Why PSYOP Works
When you’re under siege, your senses are heightened. Primordial survival instincts kick in and you become hyper-alert. You notice everything -- because everything has the potential to harm. The terror created from being under siege modifies your behavior in this way --you become distrustful and withdrawn, not knowing who is trustworthy, or when the next attack will occur. You, yourself, begin to build walls that imprison you. It also makes you paranoid. You begin to see every other person whom you encounter as a player in a psychological terrorism operation. An innocent nudge in the line at the grocery store takes on a sinister meaning after you’ve experienced a nudge in every line you’ve ever filed into for the past six months.
You may tell yourself that you are too smart to “give in” to these primitive instincts, that you are too refined, or too clever, to allow yourself to be controlled by the manipulation of them. You see the pattern, you tell yourself, and you assure yourself you can ignore it. You have free will, right? But these are instincts we all have; they’re instincts that have ensured the survival of the species for millions of years, and you your ability to protect yourself is key to your survival, too. You wouldn’t want it any other way.
Strategies of retreat and retrenchment work when you wish to avoid conflict, and avoiding conflict, you realize, ensures your survival. So you simply stop going out. But these strategies are not good long-term strategies. Isolation is not a normal state in which a human being can exist for very long. That’s why prisons punish inmates with solitary confinement; it drives sane people insane. You steel your nerve and tell yourself you’ll be even more alert -- even more aware -- the next time you go out, which, of course, makes you more wound up than ever and more easily provoked. You successfully negotiate the next setup and the next and the next and all the while, you’re getting more worked up, more anxious waiting for the shoe to drop. You tell yourself you’ve mastered their game, not realizing that simply engaging you in their game, they’ve mastered you; all your energies become consumed with thwarting their tactics and you lose sight of what’s meaningful to you. Defeating them -- defending yourself -- becomes your entire mission, your whole identity. You forget that the waiting for the other shoe to drop is the other shoe dropping. Then, like a windup toy that’s been set to play for as long as possible, you spring into action without thinking the next time you’re provoked. You’ve disgraced yourself by losing control the one time out of 100 you’ve been provoked to do so and it’s out there for the world to see -- that one time (especially if it’s videotaped by “bystanders”). The world doesn’t care about the 99 other times you were in control. It only judges you by he one time it saw you lose it.
You are always at your most vulnerable when the attack occurs -- when you’ve been lulled into a false sense of security -- when the campaign of attacks suddenly stops and you begin to relax. The next time you walk into a trap, you fall apart, you lose control and you discredit yourself by doing so. Then you decide to withdraw. It’s a vicious cycle -- one over which you have no control.
“Lay not wait, O wicked man, against the dwelling of the righteous; spoil not his resting place: for a just man falleth seven times and riseth up again, but the wicked shall fall into mischief.”
Proverbs 24:15-16
Character assassination and mobbing are as old as time, as we can see from prohibitions against them such as the Ninth Commandment. The people who killed Jesus were not the civil authorities in power in ancient Judea; it was the mob who had the choice of crucifying either Jesus or the thief, Barrabbas. Jesus’s community chose to kill him. Today, I routinely return to my apartment to find my furnishings vandalized, my pets made ill and/or dying, my food contaminated, my clothes strategically altered and ruined. When I leave my house, I am subjected to well-known gangstalking surveillance activities. These tactics are used to harass and terrorize targets to force them to seek professional help from, for example, psychologists and law enforcement, who are tasked with documenting targets’ alleged mental instability. Each time I've asked for help from my local law enforcement agency, I've been told there's nothing they can do since my apartment is not broken into; someone who has a key to the apartment must be doing these things (and it's always implied that these things may not be happening) and no investigation is done. These are "private violences" for which the police are not responsible. But my phone calls and letters are documented and this documentation is precisely the type of "evidence" police use to incarcerate targets in institutions under the ruse of “protective custody.” Telling others about our persecution -- particularly, professionals who are supposed to help targets -- only ensures our continued torture. The mob exists as much today as it ever did, even in ancient Judea, and today’s targets are the same type of targets who have always been persecuted -- political activists who seek to change the status quo.
If you are an outsourced bioresearch subject of the United States government -- a bioslave -- (and if you are, you will be prevented at every turn from learning your status; that’s one way you’ll know that you are) you, too, will be subjected to the same extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism when you speak out against your enslavement.
If you have been outraged by the extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism that has taken place at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, where is your outrage for the extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism your law-abiding, patriotic fellow Americans experience at the hands of their government right here in America? Where is the outrage for the systematic, extrajudicial, state-sponsored terrorism that has been visited for decades upon untold numbers of average, law-abiding American citizens, such as the plaintiff in the above-referenced case and myself, by multiple agencies of the U.S. government, now including our local law enforcement, local municipal agencies and local non-profits? Where is your outrage for my bioenslavement -- and yours?

If you think your life is guaranteed by not speaking out and fighting against my oppression, think again.
“First they came for the socialists and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.”
Former Moabit prison inmate and (Lutheran) Pastor Martin Niemöller
Post-war Lectures on the Work of Germany’s Pastors’ Emergency League during WWII
1945
THIS IS FASCISM -- IN A CLOSED, MILITARILY RUN, AUTHORITARIAN SOCIETY. No one in America is free today.
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