May Day

It occurred to me Saturday that my blog was crying out for help – shouting its own mayday call. Much of its content has to do with my life as a targeted individual, but I realize only now that many of my readers may have no idea just what is a targeted individual, or “TI.”

The term comes from the military, not surprisingly. They’re the ones with the artillery, and they direct that artillery as anyone with it does: at targets. Most people think of artillery as bullets and bombs, but our military has been involved in the development of an array of non-ballistic weapons for almost the entire 20^th century. Stealth is the key feature of these weapons. Branches of our military involved in secret surveillance, such as the FBI and the CIA (now, indistinguishable from one another), developed a two-pronged approach to oppress legitimate political activists, such as peace and antinuclear weapons activists: cointelpro, which does the actual spying, and mk ultra, which employs a variety of techniques to discredit and socially exterminate targets who testify against the military about their repression.

The unconstitutional targeting by our military of non-combatant American citizens for surveillance and repression has a long history that continues today. “Special surveillance groups” consist of ordinary members of the community – students, housewives, retirees – and have been used in every decade since the 1960s to monitor law-abiding citizens who are in opposition to the empire-building missions carried out by America’s true government, its military. To keep the prime objective of stealth in play, our government has assiduously proffered colloquial definitions of SSGs as “gang stalkers,” or groups of politically disinterested individuals who target for harassment individuals whose lifestyle, religion, or political views disagree with those of the group. As we can easily see, these groups use the same techniques and technology that have been developed and are used by our military, which also uses NPR, America’s TASS, to convince Americans that SSGs are only deployed against terror suspects and mobsters. The previous link is to a story which, when it originally aired on July 5^th, 2008, featured a woman who was employed by the FBI during the 1960s to monitor peace activists in her community; needless to say, the story no longer features this woman.

Among the fictions these SSGs proffer community members about the targeted individual to discredit her or him is that the TI is paranoid and crazy – that the military wouldn’t waste its time and energy on the TI because he or she isn’t important. Like Frank Olson, many TIs such as me are walking around today with a lot of testimony about our military’s human and civil rights crimes – in our case, about the bioslavery it commits. Trillions of dollars have been spent to develop, using ordinary Americans and others, bioweapons such as AIDS. Who could be more critical to silence, with that kind of money at stake, not to mention the loss of the false façade of a free and just society that America’s government has patiently crafted?

Voilà! C'est tout.

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