What On Earth Is the FBI Thinking?

Today marks the another Alternate Release Date for the Darren Wilson Non-Indictment from the St. Louis County Grand Jury. Other sources put the Alternate Date on Sunday or maybe the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, or maybe not till Christmas week, or... well, you get the picture.

Meanwhile, elaborate preparations and displays of force are under way to put down all the "riots" that will ensue. Everyone has bought a gun, it seems, and they've stockpiled food and water and have materials on hand to build barricades, the Apocalypse being nigh and all.

All of this was kind of ludicrous until the FBI leaked their assessment of the pre-festivities the other day. We can assume the leak came directly from the FBI and was intentional incitement to police rioting if not public riot.

The wording that I've read inadvertently indicates the FBI knows there are agents provocateur seeded among the protesters and they know just how those agents will behave; their leaked advisory could be read as a descriptive of what the agents provocateur are likely to do once the GJ decision not to indict Darren Wilson comes down.

In other words, it has little or nothing to do with the protesters and everything to do with inciting LEOs to react to the protests violently.

Unbelievable, or it would be if there hadn't been constant rumors of provocateurs and infiltrators from the beginning of the Ferguson protests. That combined with the failure of police to produce any evidence at all that they had been "firebombed" with Molotov cocktails or shot at by protesters -- despite their constant claims -- and the litany of lies coming out of the mouths of ostensibly responsible police supervisors (Belmar's woppers just the other day about "only teargassing criminals," for example, or not using "rubber bullets" beggared belief -- "You gonna believe me or your lying eyes?")  really tells us pretty much all we need to know about the expectations of violence and where they're coming from.

It's not the protesters.

It's the police themselves and their allied adjuncts like the resurgent KKK.

Insane.

But more and more people are seeing through the lies and the fabrications and the falsehoods and the provocations.

More and more people seem to see the situation for what it is. The police have been enabled by their sponsors to act as an army of occupation, and their wargames involve whatever mayhem and deception required to produce the desired result.

In this case, it seems the desired result is the provocation of "riots" -- or whatever mayhem can be stirred up and sustained -- so that the "riots" can be put down with displays of overwhelming force (with as little bloodshed as possible, no doubt) in pursuit of a higher objective: keeping the Rabble in fear and dread of what will happen to them if they so much as think of rising against their oppressors.

This has been the Israeli tactic applied to the Palestinians for decades.

Works well, right?

More About "Subversives"

Though I've now reached the Student Rebellion chapters of "Subversives," I'm still kind of gobsmacked at the information in the previous chapters, particularly about Ronald Reagan's long and intimate relationship with the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover. I can't say that I ever knew or even thought about it before.

Rosenfeld details Reagan's collaboration and cooperation with the FBI and Hoover in rooting out Communists and com-symps from Hollywood, not only in his role as President of the Screen Actors Guild, but -- apparently -- just because he was who he was and he wanted to do it. It's a tale I never really thought about before.

Of course everyone knew that he had been president of the Screen Actors Guild and had engaged in Red Baiting during that time, but what he had actually done on behalf of the FBI and Hoover's anti-Communist conspiracy/crusade, the names he had named, and the people whose careers or lives he'd destroyed had to my knowledge never been highlighted at all, certainly not to the extent that Rosenfeld does in "Subversives."

Of course, Rosenfeld has the documents, and he has interviewed many of those who were still alive during his writing of the book and were directly or indirectly involved in the conspiracy against presumed Communist infiltration of the movie industry. It is a story of gross deception and illegality on one level. On another, though -- and perhaps even worse -- it is a story of careerism and business as usual on the part of Reagan and many others who pretended one thing but who were doing something else.

I think most of us understand that J. Edgar Hoover's FBI was a lawless and criminal enterprise, particularly when going after those Hoover personally deemed suspect of disloyalty, communism, and/or communist "sympathy." Of course there were many other targets of his interest and ire, but that's another issue. The issue here is the incessant, indeed obsessive, targeting of Hollywood personalities for investigation (often enough through illegal breakins of homes and offices) and denunciation as "subversives" and "communists."

Many of us knew the FBI was doing this, not simply in Hollywood, but everywhere (my 5th grade teacher was targeted, for example), and we understood there were severe consequences for many, many people who were accused, but it simply never occurred to me that there were such deep personal connections between Ronald Reagan and the FBI in this conspiracy. Finding out about it now, for the first time, demonstrates to me how carefully and successfully these things were concealed.

 It was a conspiracy.

I won't go into the details here, but I urge you to get and read the book. It's an eye-opener both about Reagan and Hoover, and about what a very small world it can be when certain well-placed individuals join forces to destroy some designated "enemy."

They Were Never Caught and Until Now Nobody Knew Their Names

Slight Diversion: Nothing to See Here,"Moving On..." and At the Ballet

Let It Snow Let It Snow Let It Snow...

Yesterday, we attended the ballet and a Science Café in Albuquerque.

The ballet was a reprise of "The Nutcracker in the Land of Enchantment" presented by Festival Ballet Albuquerque that we'd attended last year. It was really a delight, and in many ways a distinct improvement over the previous years' presentation in that it appeared to be more "finished", more securely designed, more cleanly danced, and so on. It also seemed that the choreography had been refined throughout. The orchestra was stupendous. I cannot say enough in praise of the Figueroa Music and Arts Project orchestra  which accompanied the work and which appeared to have doubled in size over last year's orchestra. They were marvelous. All in all, it was a delightful Holiday outing that we will probably make into one of our ongoing traditions of the Season in New Mexico. 

Prior to the ballet, however, we attended the final New Mexico PBS Science Café for the year at Los Poblanos. We love Los Poblanos. So does practically everyone else in Albuquerque and the region. For the Science Cafés, attendees are arriving earlier and earlier, to the point where it is becoming almost silly, crack of dawn silly. The staff tries to prepare, but they're usually in the midst of getting ready when the first wave arrives, hungry for Los Poblanos' highly regarded pastries and breakfast treats, and desperately in need of coffee. Well, yesterday, they didn't have the coffee ready when the first onslaught arrived, and there was a continuing Coffee Crisis that actually delayed the presentation for a good fifteen minutes while all those who didn't get any coffee to begin with were served. Oh my! Some wag said, "Well, if you're going to come to these things, you really oughta stop at Starbucks first!" Fun-knee.

But Coffee Crisis aside, the presentation was about the "Amerithrax" case -- you remember? -- back in September-October-November of 2001. Right after the 9/11 attacks. Yes, that one. Sandia Labs in Albuquerque played a fundamental role in identifying the strain of anthrax that was used in the "Amerithrax" attacks (so dubbed by the FBI), and so one of the participants in the identification process, whose name unfortunately escapes me at the moment (NOTE: It was Paul Kotula, warning! warning! warning! 41 page pdf), was on hand to discuss how they did it.

It was fascinating. More and more, he said, The Labs are getting away from nuclear weapons science and technology and into forensics, diseases, and atomic physics and research. He said that less than 40% of their work now involves nuclear weapons, and he expects that proportion to continue to decline, while The Labs diversify their activities. The "Amerithrax" case was an important instance of The Labs' diversification which helped spur a continuing forensics operation.

As we recall, the anthrax attacks took place shortly after the 9/11 incidents, while Congress was considering the PATRIOT Act, which just happened to be sitting on the shelf ready to go when those planes were flying into buildings in New York and DC and into the ground in Pennsylvania. It was  period of high governmental hysteria, and the anthrax attacks seemed tailored to increasing that hysteria to the maximum by targeting media and Senators who were reluctant to agree to the sweeping law enforcement and intelligence sector legal changes encompassed in the act, changes we're still living under and (as in the case of the Snowden Thing) still learning the meaning of.

Interestingly, the FBI apparently say that the motivation for the anthrax attacks had to do with forcing increases in government science lab budgets, nothing directly to do with the PATRIOT Act at all. I haven't read the FBI report that was finally generated after the suicide of the (second) Prime Suspect, Bruce Ivins, a scientist at the Ft. Detrick Lab in Maryland whose work with anthrax was well known and very highly regarded in the field. Of course, he was a weirdo who dressed funny and eventually killed himself, and that was one reason it was easy and convenient to pin the crime on him, after getting nowhere except in trouble for unwisely fingering Stephen Hatfill as the culprit. Oh my.

While it wasn't really a topic of discussion, as the presentation was essentially about how The Labs and a cadre of scientists were able to positively identify the strain of anthrax used in the attack down to the lab and the very flask it came from (Ivins' flask as it happens). But there are still significant mysteries, ones that likely will never be resolved, in part because the FBI has closed the case, and many of the loose ends have been left dangling.

For example, how did the anthrax used in the attacks acquire the molecular signatures of iron and tin between the time it was removed from the Ivins flask at Ft. Detrick and its use to cause injury, death and chaos during the period immediately after 9/11? Why was there no sign of anthrax contamination at Ivins' house, despite the fact that there had been a number of incidents of contamination at the lab where he worked? What was his motivation for the crime -- assuming he committed it? Was there anyone else who had access to the flask?

We were told with absolute certainty, however, that the anthrax used in the attacks was not weaponized, contrary to many of the media reports about it, reports mostly generated by a fundamental misunderstanding of what The Labs had actually found. Yes, well. That's often how it goes with media and science, but it seemed to me that the "weaponization" aspect of the anthrax was being promoted by the FBI right along with a number of their other (convenient) errors.

There are lots and lots of unanswered questions about the "Amerithrax" attacks, and we will probably not learn the truth of what happened in our lifetimes if ever. The key understanding, however, is that whoever perpetrated the attacks, and there are reasons to believe Ivins wasn't the one,  it most certainly was an inside job, a classic incident of domestic terrorism, used for perfectly political purposes, which increased hysteria within the government at a time of crisis and panic. These attacks -- which conveniently went on throughout the period of PATRIOT Act debate in the congress and media -- were almost immediately "forgotten" after the passage of the PATRIOT Act, and the FBI seemed to be dragging its feet investigating the matter. The FBI report referenced at the meeting yesterday -- people with questions about the attacks were referred to it repeatedly by Our Scientist -- was produced in 2009 or 2010 if I recall correctly, and it was subject to a good deal of questioning and ridicule at the time for its obvious gaps and misdirection.

As Our Scientist pointed out, the anthrax attack was a very ineffective way to commit terrorism, at least if you want to create maximum terror, death and damage among the public. He described in fairly graphic detail how he would have done it, were he to have been responsible for the attack. I thought this was a bit odd until I realized that the man who stands accused -- and posthumously convicted without trial -- was a peer and colleague of Our Scientist, though they were at different labs. Of course the attacks were obviously not intended to affect the public as much as they were intended to stampede the government and media into accepting the draconian measures in the PATRIOT Act, and these attacks were stunningly effective in accomplishing that end.

We're still living under the consequences... consequences we may never free ourselves from.

The Amerithrax attacks worked perfectly in that regard, could not have been better...

When Words Have No Meaning -- the Continuing Threat of DomesticTerrorist Outfits Like Occupy

Freedom of Information Act requests by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund have led to the release of a trove of FBI documents related to the surveillance and violent suppression of Occupy and related groups during this year and last, including not-surprising references to them as potential "criminal" and "domestic terrorist" groups, despite the fact that Occupy organizers professed nonviolence and called for peaceful protest.

Wouldn't you know.

It's no surprise. Those of us who were involved with Occupy, even peripherally, during the heady days of occupation and demonstration were well aware of the constant surveillance by various representatives of authority -- some of whom were pleased and proud enough of their duties to introduce themselves to us.

Furthermore, as soon as the police actions began the appearance of squadrons of police in full riot gear was something of a sure indication that the Occupy demonstrations were officially considered primary threats to civic order and domestic peace. Once the official "snatch and grab" actions began (ie: targeting, kidnapping, and arresting seemingly random Occupy participants) it was clear that the police considered the Occupy activities per se to be criminal.

Nevertheless, the use of terms like "criminal" and "domestic terrorist" to describe or define Occupy and the activities and demonstrations in any official context shows how debased our language has become, and that in turn helps us understand how debased our government and its official representatives have become.

"Crime" and "terrorism" have become meaningless terms, bandied about to describe any activity at all.

Here's a link to the PCJF report: http://www.justiceonline.org/commentary/fbi-files-ows.html

And here's a link to a really great interview with Scott Noble: http://www.filmsforaction.org/news/the_power_principle_an_interview_with_filmmaker_scott_noble/

Merry Christmas!