NSA Security running amok to plug leaks about 9/11

by Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer
July 7, 2009

(WMR) -- WMR has learned that the National Security “Q” Group, responsible for security, has grown to an immense security and counter-intelligence force, with an estimated one thousand government employees, contractors, and paid informants. NSA’s Security force is reportedly primarily tasked with plugging any leaks of classified or other information that points to U.S. government’s involvement with the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

NSA Security has doggedly pursued a number of NSA employees, some in “sting” operations, others in frequent polygraphs and repeated security interviews where threats are made by thuggish NSA security agents with and without the presence of FBI agents, and others in constant surveillance operations at their homes, churches, and other locations away from the Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters of the agency.

The most egregious NSA Security operation against an NSA employee was the 2004 arrest of NSA analyst Ken Ford, Jr. Ford became a target of opportunity for NSA Security and the FBI after Vice President Dick Cheney noted his name on an NSA signals intelligence report on Saddam Hussein’s government that stated that there was no proof from interceptions of Iraqi communications that Saddam Hussein possessed “weapons of mass destruction.”

Cheney and other neocons in the Bush White House arranged for a “sting” operation to be mounted as retribution against Ford. Ford was charged with taking classified papers home from NSA headquarters, something that is quite impossible considering the stringent security in place at one of the most-secured complexes in the world.

Ford was convicted by a tainted jury and sentenced to seven years in federal prison. Ford, who is African-American, originally had an African-American federal trial judge. However, the judge was replaced by a pro-Iraq war Jewish U.S. judge, Peter Messitte, who set out to ensure a guilty conviction of Ford in cahoots with Jewish U.S. Attorney for Maryland Rod Rosenstein, and Jewish Assistant U.S. Attorney for Southern Maryland David Salem, both Bush appointees. Nothing was done by the judge or prosecutors to dismiss from the jury a contractor whose company had major contracts with NSA. The trio of Messitte, Rosenstein, and Salem have also “rocket-docketed” a number of cases, resulting in slam-dunk convictions, against Arab- and Iranian-Americans in the southern district of Maryland.

NSA’s Security chief is Kemp Ensor III. Ensor has built up what amounts to a massive law enforcement and intelligence agency in Maryland that operates as a virtual independent operation that answers to no one. Maryland’s congressional delegation has shown little interest in oversight over the security operation.

In fact, WMR has learned that many NSA employees, aware of the political and other misuse of their agency by the Bush-Cheney administration, avidly backed Barack Obama for president hoping that the past era when NSA complied with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution would be restored. However, many NSA employees are bitterly disappointed that Obama has done nothing to curtail not only the widespread surveillance of the communications of law-abiding Americans but the constant “Stasi-like” harassment and surveillance conducted by Ensor’s team of agents and confidential informants.

WMR has also learned that NSA Security has been authorized to work directly with Washington area local police department intelligence divisions to carry out its surveillance of not only NSA employees and contractors, but journalists who report on the activities of NSA. Two police departments mentioned in this respect are the Alexandria, Virginia, and Anne Arundel County, Maryland, sheriff departments.

One senior level NSA official recently found himself sitting in front of NSA Security questioners asking why he gave his NSA business cards to some students at a university. It turns out the official was trying to recruit students for NSA employment. When the official asked why there was a problem in his handing out his business cards, the answer by NSA Security was that some of them, all American citizens, had “Russian last names.”

Even former NSA employees and contractors are being subjected to continual NSA Security surveillance and harassment at their work places and other locations, according to WMR’s sources. Some have lost their jobs as a result of pressure from NSA Security.

WMR has in the past reported on NSA surveillance of journalists. On December 28, 2005, we reported: “WMR has learned that the National Security Agency (NSA), on the orders of the Bush administration, eavesdropped on the private conversations and e-mail of its own employees, employees of other U.S. intelligence agencies -- including the CIA and DIA -- and their contacts in the media, Congress, and oversight agencies and offices. The journalist surveillance program, code named ‘FIRSTFRUITS,’ was part of a Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) program that was maintained at least until October 2004 and was authorized by then-DCI Porter Goss. FIRSTFRUITS was authorized as part of a DCI ‘Countering Denial and Deception’ program responsible to an entity known as the Foreign Denial and Deception Committee (FDDC). Since the intelligence community’s reorganization, the DCI has been replaced by the Director of National Intelligence headed by John Negroponte and his deputy, former NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden.”

Since the revelation of the NSA journalist monitoring database, which later added communications intercepts of journalists’ phone calls, emails, and faxes to its database, NSA Security has, according to information received by WMR, conducted physical surveillance of journalists it deems to be threats to the operations of the agency. The top targeted journalists, who make up a virtual “rogues’ gallery” at NSA Security, complete with photographs and other personal information, are: former Baltimore Sun and current Wall Street Journal reporter Siobhan Gorman, Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz, former Baltimore Sun and current New York Times reporter Scott Shane, Baltimore Sun reporter Phil McGowan, author James Bamford, New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, and this editor, Wayne Madsen.

In addition to the aforementioned, FIRSTFRUITS also contained the names of former Washington Post reporter Vernon Loeb, New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh, and UPI’s John C. K. Daly.

Ironically, NSA Security allegedly has its own connections in the news media. A Washington Times source revealed that the paper’s writer of the “Inside the Beltway” column, John McCaslin, has a relative inside NSA Security -- Robert McCaslin, the chief of NSA Security counter-intelligence and the chief “sting” agent against Ford. Robert McCaslin, according to the Times source, is the brother of the paper’s columnist.

NSA Security is also able to utilize the agency’s most sophisticated electronic surveillance systems to monitor the activities of journalists. The cell phones of journalists are routinely used as listening devices, even when turned off. And what was considered a sure-fire method of avoiding having a cell phone used as a transmitter, removing the batteries in what has become known as “batteries out” conversations, is no longer safe. Even when the batteries are removed, the global positioning system (GPS) chip in cell phones continues to have enough residual power that two to three pings from satellites can give away a person’s location and what other uniquely identifiable cell phones are at the same location.

The bottom line is that a number of NSA personnel who were on duty in the months leading up to 9/11, the day of the attacks, and subsequent weeks and months, are aware of undeniable facts that point to a massive cover-up by the Bush-Cheney administration of the circumstances surrounding 9/11, including what actually befell United Airlines flight 93 and who was issuing direct military orders from the White House.

The Obama administration, rather than lessen the pressure on the NSA personnel, has turned up the heat and is resorting to even more draconian methods to ensure silence. The word from inside NSA is that a state of fear exists and the mission of the agency, to conduct surveillance of foreign communications to provide threat indications and warnings to U.S. troops and policy makers and protect sensitive U.S. government communications from unauthorized eavesdropping is suffering as a result.

Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.

Copyright © 2009 WayneMadenReport.com

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).

The waning power of truth

by Paul Craig Roberts
June 22, 2009

David Ray Griffin, the nemesis of the collection of disinformation known as the 9/11 Commission Report, has taken up the question of Osama Bin Laden, dead or alive?

On the basis of the available evidence, Griffin concludes that bin Laden died in December 2001, most likely of kidney failure. He has been kept alive in the media by US government PSYOPS as a useful bogyman to justify America’s illegal wars of aggression. The messages received from bin Laden since his death appear to be conveniently timed fabrications designed to advance US government purposes.

Osama bin Laden is likely to become a mythical person, like the Georgia Tech student, George P. Burdell, who will be sighted from time to time over a period that exceeds the length of a human life.

It was less than one year ago that Americans were subjected to PSYOPS disinformation from their government concerning the Russia-Georgia conflict over South Ossetia.

Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin incorporated South Ossetia, formerly a part of Russia, into his home province of Georgia. When the Soviet Union broke up, Georgia became independent and retained South Ossetia. Secession movements arose in South Ossetia and in Abkhazia. These secession movements were the reason European members of NATO rejected the US government’s attempt to make Georgia a NATO member in order to extend the US/NATO military presence on Russia’s borders in contravention of previous US government agreements with Russia.

To terminate the secession movement and, thereby, remove the barrier to Georgia becoming a NATO member, the US, with Israel’s help, trained and equipped the Georgian military and gave the American puppet ruler, installed in the aftermath of one of the US-orchestrated “color revolutions,” the green light to attack South Ossetia.

Under mutual agreement, Russia and Georgia both provided peace-keeping troops in South Ossetia to prevent violence by secessionists. On the night of August 7-8, 2008, Georgian troops attacked South Ossetia, destroying a town and killing many Russian Ossetians and some Russian soldiers who were part of the peace-keeping force. Large numbers of South Ossetians fled across the border to Russia.

The US government, in its hubris, assumed that Russia would accept the ethnic cleansing of Russians from South Ossetia. Instead, Russian troops arrived and quickly destroyed the American-trained and equipped Georgian army and could easily have taken control of Georgia, but refrained.

Defeated in its aim, the US government unleashed a PSYOPS disinformation war against the Russian government, claiming falsely that Russia had initiated the conflict by attacking Georgia. The US government’s blatant and transparent lies were force-fed to the American public by the US media.

British disinformation services cooperated with their American masters, but the rest of the world blew the whistle. The real facts emerged, and an American disinformation campaign experienced a rare failure.

Now 10 months later, US “black ops” is at it again, pumping out disinformation about the “stolen” Iranian election. The US media is again serving the government’s disinformation campaign. This despite the fact that on May 23, 2007, Brian Ross and Richard Esposito reported on ABC News: “The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert ‘black’ operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell . . . ABC News.”

On May 27, 2007, the London Telegraph independently reported: “Mr. Bush has signed an official document endorsing CIA plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilize, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs.”

A few days previously, the Telegraph reported on May 16, 2007, that Bush administration neocon warmonger John Bolton told the Telegraph that a US military attack on Iran would “be a ‘last option’ after economic sanctions and attempts to foment a popular revolution had failed.”

On June 29, 2008, Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker: “Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership.”

The Iranian election protests, essentially led by the westernized youth of Tehran who wish to be free of Islamic moral codes, have the hallmarks of orchestration. The protesters are color-coded with green wristbands. Their protest signs are in English and are obviously directed at the Western media. Their chants are propagandistic and bear no relation to facts known by every Iranian.

And again, the US media and various experts, whose ambitions depend on government-related careers, are force-feeding the American public the disinformation designed to further isolate and weaken, if not overthrow, the Iranian government.

Until 1978 the US ruled Iran through the Shah. The US intends to again rule Iran through puppets. The only two remaining independent governments in the region are Iran and Syria. If the US doesn’t first bankrupt itself, both countries will fall to US black ops destabilization.

The limitless gullibility of the American people guarantees carte blanche to the US government’s schemes. Americans seemingly cannot put two and two together. They have already forgotten the lies about weapons of mass destruction that have resulted in the destruction of Iraq. They have forgotten Secretary of State Colin Powell’s publicly expressed remorse at the lies he told the UN. Americans blithely accept the conflation of Taliban with al Qaeda and terrorists and the new war that the Obama regime has started in Pakistan, a war that has already produced 2 million refugees.

It can fairly be said that there is not much difference between the American public and the fictional one under Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984. The few independent voices that do exist are simply drowned out by the constant flow of disinformation.

The US government’s success in spinning 9/11 guaranteed the government’s success in pursuing a hegemonic agenda under a cloak of lies. Although a large percentage of the US population does not believe the government’s account and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of experts and informed and well-connected people have challenged the government’s tale, the US media have shown no interest despite the official account of 9/11 bearing every known hallmark of a cover-up.

High-ranking fire marshals have complained that legally required forensic procedures were not followed by authorities entrusted with investigation.

The testimony of more than 100 policemen, firemen, and maintenance personnel who were in the towers at the time and report hearing and experiencing a series of explosions was ignored and withheld from the public until the government got its story in place.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology studiously avoided testing for evidence of explosives. The severed steel beams were quickly collected and sold abroad as scrap.

As a number of observers have complained, the crime scene was destroyed, not investigated.

The government’s story of the destruction of the towers is based on computer simulations that produce results in keeping with the assumptions.

The collapse of the third building is not even mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report.

No one abroad believes the US government’s story. Europeans have produced documentary films that laugh at the official explanation.

Recently, an international team of scientists reported on their two-year examination of dust samples from the debris. They report that they found nano-thermite in the samples. To my knowledge no mainstream US media reported the finding.

One would think that such a finding would lead to a real investigation. Instead, within the US the finding is dismissed by debunkers of “conspiracy theories” (except of course the government’s own conspiracy theory) with the charge that the dust samples have not been in controlled environments since collected and could have been contaminated by those who volunteered the samples. In other words, the nano-thermite, if actually in the samples, was planted.

One wonders how residents of lower Manhattan obtained nano-thermite with which to contaminate the dust. Indeed, who has access to nano-thermite other than government?

Why doesn’t the National Academy of Science choose a team to examine the samples? If the finding of nano-thermite is verified, the issue of contamination can be investigated. If it turns out that the people who volunteered the samples have no possible access to nano-thermite, the case for a real investigation is established.

There is little prospect of such a development in the US. American science and the careers of scientists are heavily dependent on US government funding. It would be a career-ending event for American scientists to get involved with this matter other than as a contributor to a cover-up. Professor Steven Jones, a physicist at BYU who first raised the issue of explosives being used to bring down the three WTC buildings, was terminated, despite his tenure, by BYU. Many believe Jones was terminated because of political threats to the university’s funding.

In the US truth is an ineffective means by which to hold government accountable. Consider, for example, the fate of whistleblowers. Daniel Ellsberg who leaked the Pentagon Papers was perhaps the last successful whistleblower and that was three decades ago. Since then the government has put in place many defenses against whistleblowers.

The American public has looked to government for its salvation since Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Government provides education, health care (Medicare, Medicaid), pensions (Social Security), food stamps, housing subsidies, child care and protects Americans from a long list of demonized villains ranging from spouse abusers and child molesters to terrorists. Americans see themselves and their government as the salt of the earth, an image supported by American generosity to other peoples who suffer natural calamities. Most Americans believe that their government does stupid things, but not evil things except perhaps by accident.

The right-wing believes that America was attacked on 9/11 because we are so good, hubris to which Bush successfully played with his statement that “they hate us for our freedom and democracy.”

The left wing finds emotional satisfaction in its belief that 9/11 was deserved blow-back from peoples oppressed by US foreign policy who rose up and struck back.

Truth is so impotent in America that the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty 42 years ago is still covered up by the US government despite the best efforts of Admiral Tom Moorer, who was Chief of Naval Operations and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and by decades of effort by the Liberty survivors.

This raises the question: Why do some people blow whistles? Why do those few write books and columns that challenge the lies and deceptions? There is probably more than one answer. For some, hope springs eternal. Others naively destroy their careers thinking that truth will be honored. Still others speak from a sense of responsibility to truth and not from a hope that anything will actually change.

In October 1987, John Stockwell, a former CIA cover operative who ran the CIA’s covert war in Angola, gave a lecture in which he said he abandoned his career when he realized that CIA covert operations resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people and were totally unconnected to any US national security interests. “I concluded that I just couldn’t see the point.”

Nothing has changed. What was the point of the US invasion of Iraq? Even President Bush eventually conceded that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

What was the point of the US invasion of Afghanistan and what is the point of Obama’s escalation of the war there? The Taliban is not al Qaeda and was totally focused on unifying Afghanistan under an Islamic government. The US was not on the Taliban’s radar screen.

What is the point of the war that the US has started in Pakistan?

What is the point of the destabilization of the Iranian government? After the stolen elections of the Karl Rove/Bush era, why does the US think it must overthrow the Iranian government because of allegations that Ahmadinejad stole an election?

If the answer is that these wars and interventions serve the interest of US hegemony, the obvious reply is that US hegemony is more likely to be lost from the massive red ink in the government’s budget that is likely to be monetized, thus destroying the dollar as reserve currency, the main source of US hegemony.

If the US wants to have an empire in the Middle East or elsewhere, the government should come out and say so. At least then Americans could revel in the glories of empire. As it is, the pleasure must be gained surreptitiously under the table, pretending that we are protecting the world from evildoers while we do evil ourselves.

Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider’s Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.

Project Censored Modern Media Censorship - September 11, 2008

Stephen Lendman and Connie Fogal, "The Security and Prosperity Partnership", Modern Media Censorship, Lecture 2. Only part of Lendman's lecture is included, within the first 7 or so minutes, after which Fogal's topnotch lecture begins. Click here for the Project Censored webpage which introduces these two lectures, and which includes an .mp3 link for Lendman's full lecture.

I, Thomas Paine, Two Hundred Years Hence*

It is Monday, 8 June 2009, two hundred years to the day since my miserable death, though I should add that while death was, indeed, miserable it was a swim in the sea compared with my life as it finally turned out. However, I have been dead for too long to want to harp on those wretched final years of my life—the assassination of my character, of my person, the unspeakable hypocrisy of it all, my freefall from grace and renown, the poverty, ill health, my seeking refuge in a bottle. But if there remains even one son or daughter of Liberty and Democracy in this present day—that is, the person to and for whom I write, as opposed to those who celebrate the cartoon Tom Paine, never thinking to read my works or to carry forth the struggle—then I should think that such a son or daughter of Liberty is unlikely to protest my assuming the privilege of penning this brief posthumous account. If not a single such person remains who is, in word and deed, committed to Liberty and Democracy—the only fit state for a human being who wishes to live as a whole person and who refuses to be infantilised—then rather than to assume the privilege, if there’s none worthy to grant it, I shall steal it back as rightfully my own.

I can quite quickly sum up what befell me and what has befallen countless other revolutionaries over the course of history; however, I do so not out of a desire or need to explain myself, but rather as a word of warning to those whom I consider my rightful progeny. My task is made easier by the fact that my rightful progeny, by the nature of the task which lies before them, shall already have apprised themselves of the historical accounts of revolutions, failed and successful, if in fact there has ever been an example of the latter. In brief, revolutionaries with integrity—those who hold, still, to the original stated aims of the revolution, the aims of Liberty and Democracy—are, at the point of the revolution’s failure (as opposed to the success touted in history books), quickly stripped of their honours, hollowed out, and hung safely out to die so that the ‘revolutionaries’ who were merely playing a part can usurp The Powers That Were to become those That Be. This perverted outcome must be avoided, and it shall not be avoided unless those who are in the struggle forever keep this near-inevitable outcome in mind, day in and day out, and for ever more, as the innumerable false actors lie constantly in wait.

My good friend Benjamin Franklin did his best to warn us. In response to being asked at the close of the Constitutional Convention, ‘Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?’, Dr. Franklin said, simply, ‘A Republic, if you can keep it.’ A prescient warning, indeed. And it is clear even, or perhaps particularly so, in this post-Obamamania, post-Democratic-controlled-Congress present day that the Republic has been lost, for the Republic cannot coexist with an undermined Constitution. The Republic is dead when the State itself no longer abides by the rule of law, no matter what pseudo-legislation is ushered through Congress, usually unread, in an attempt to provide a cover of legitimacy which no one is fooled by, certainly not the politicians nor their corporate paymasters.

The situation is at least as bad in Britain—Closed Circuit TV capital of the world—but in both the U.S. and the UK, the rule of law, any protection against the State, has been wilfully obliterated under the false pretext of National Security, which rightfully understood covers anything which might threaten not the well-being of the people, the mock citizenry, but the powers of the State. And, so, blatant lies which have been proven to be lies have enabled myriad murderous and treasonous crimes to be committed by the State, including the supreme international crime of wars of aggression, the murder of one-million-plus innocent civilians, numerous political assassinations, international kidnappings, torture, widespread domestic surveillance, and other intrusions into our civil liberties. And those persons who repeatedly and blatantly lied to the public and who committed the crimes which followed from those lies stand not in prison but remain protected by the full powers of the State under the pretext of National Security.

Let me state now that revolutions never end, and that it is not a fixed state which we are shooting for but, rather, an asymptotic ideal which requires a never-ending commitment to process rather than an end, for the ideal end is hogwash if the process does not remain. Democracy—very far, indeed, from what nauseatingly passes for it today, as I write—cannot be institutionalised, it cannot be spoken of as an objective achieved, it cannot reside, ever, in the State, and it can never be brought to bear upon a people by a foreign occupier, the very idea of which is absurd and oxymoronic. Democracy and its sacred sister, Liberty, reside within the individual, and such an individual who is committed to protecting these innate ideals from those who would usurp them from without must pursue, always, an anti-authoritarian way of life, a mode of being, which requires that we be adults, not overgrown children.

We shall no longer look to the State as provider, as head of the family, or as Big Brother, but shall, instead, seek to govern ourselves, the very act of which shall nullify in an instant any presumed pretensions of the State as our benefactor. We shall act in our own best interests, for we have all witnessed everywhere around us what happens when the State purports to so provide—the law is used against us to empower and enrich the State and those within its favour, and we, the people, pay the price. We must also—if we are to become and remain free—disassemble the myriad mechanisms by way of which the rotten State derives and attempts to maintain its rotten powers, as opposed to the only legitimate source of government—that is, through the will of the people, fully realised.

Such mechanisms which must be abolished include, but are not limited to, the various agencies and machinations of the secret State, the State (and the corporate-State) media as its controlled propaganda arm—the primary means by which, in conjunction with the ‘education’ system, the mock citizenry is kept under heel, ignorant, and wholly uneducated irrespective of the attainment of virtually meaningless university degrees—the corrupted courts of justice, the torture centres, the criminalised military, and the militarised police forces which do far more to tyrannise than to protect the people.

For those who might wonder, still, whether they are free, whether this account seems too strong, too reactionary—as no doubt many in America, England and Europe thought my words too strong, too reactionary more than two centuries ago—then there exists a simple litmus test which tells us immediately whether we are, in fact, a free people or enslaved. If the majority finds itself in the demeaning position of having to ask the State, to beg of it, to plead with it, to protest against it, then we are no longer free, but in chains and fetters. This is true even when the State obliges us and fulfils our request, which it should be noted typically permits the transfer of power from us to the State, a dynamic which is unfortunately lost on so many, who think they’re getting something for nothing. But, if a majority of the people finds itself asking the State to serve it or to abide by the rule of law, and it either refuses outright or deliberates and finally fails to deliver, then we live not in a democracy but under the dictates of a despotic and authoritarian regime which has no rightful place amongst us but which has over the years, decades and centuries slowly stolen our Liberty because we ceded it, in exact measure.

If we are to live as adults rather than as children, each and every one of my rightful progeny must hold a truth within their innermost selves which must always be kept alive, for in dark times such as those presently upon us the flame of Liberty shall surely flicker, waver, and without a steady stream of fresh air, fresh energy and fresh commitment it shall die, first, within you, and then as surely as we ourselves are mortal, Liberty herself shall be frog-marched to her death. That aforementioned truth is this: The State is not and shall never be your friend, its intentions are not yours. You are its enemy.

In authoritarian regimes like the ones which I see have befallen all of you, the State, of course, spares no horses in co-opting the terms of Democracy, of Liberty, of Freedom, but those words have been drained of life, of meaning; worse, they’ve been inverted just as George Orwell prophesied—Freedom is Slavery, War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength. They’ve become, in short, tools of oppression which, while some of us might more readily accept the truth that these emptied-out concepts are being used to justify unjust wars against the peoples of lands outside our own—Iraq and Afghanistan come readily to mind; however, this is but the tip of the iceberg, for there’s nary a land beyond which the State and the State of its Ally-in-Arms is not overtly or covertly oppressing, tyrannising at this very moment—while there are, I know, quite a few of you who might more readily accept this truth, there are unfortunately many more of you who might find it more difficult to recognise that these same emptied-out concepts are being deployed against the State’s more foundational enemy—those of you who live within its borders.

Do you really think that those CCTV cameras which are multiplying more quickly than springtime bunnies are there to protect you? Do you think the War OF Terror is being fought to protect you? Do you think that the news which you watch, which you listen to, which you read, exists to inform you? Did the State protect you on 9/11, or did it, in fact, commit the crimes? Did the State protect you during the 7/7 London bombings, or did it, in fact, commit the crimes? Did the State prove to you beyond any reasonable doubt who actually perpetrated those acts? Were independent investigations forthcoming, or were they precluded and the facts buried by those guilty of or complicit in the crimes? Were the politicians readily forthcoming, or did they, too, seek to bury the facts? And were such facts buried in large part by the State’s media-propaganda-arm? With CCTV cameras ubiquitous in airports and Tube stations even in 2001-2005, there would be video footage which demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt who committed these inhuman crimes. But why have we not seen such critical footage? Why has it been kept from you—the public—the bedrock upon which any good government gains its legitimacy?

These are just a few of the many questions you must ask yourself, if you are to carry on the struggle which I gave my life and my creative energies to more than two centuries ago, and if you are to remain amongst my rightful progeny who desire Liberty and Democracy not only in word but in deed as well. I shall leave off with something I said a long time ago: ‘Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.’ And, lastly, a corollary quip from Henry David Thoreau: ‘That government is best which governs least.’ Is this, rightful progeny, what you have, here, in this moment?

* Transcribed by Sean M. Madden on 8 June 2009. Thomas Paine also transferred the copyright to Sean M. Madden, 2009.

Thomas Paine (January 29, 1737 – June 8, 1809) was a British pamphleteer, revolutionary, radical, inventor, intellectual, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.^[1] He lived and worked in Britain until age 37, when he emigrated to the British American colonies, in time to participate in the American Revolution. His principal contributions were the powerful, widely-read pamphlet Common Sense (1776), advocating colonial America's independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain, and The American Crisis (1776–1783), a pro-revolutionary pamphlet series.

Later, Paine greatly influenced the French Revolution. He wrote the Rights of Man (1791), a guide to Enlightenment ideas. Despite not speaking French, he was elected to the French National Convention in 1792. The Girondists regarded him as an ally, so, the Montagnards, especially Robespierre, regarded him as an enemy. In December of 1793, he was arrested and imprisoned in Paris, then released in 1794. He became notorious because of The Age of Reason (1793–94), the book advocating deism and arguing against institutionalized religion, Christian doctrines, and promoted reason and freethinking, for which he would become derided in America.^[2]

In France, he also wrote the pamphlet Agrarian Justice (1795), discussing the origins of property, and introduced the concept of a guaranteed minimum income.

Paine remained in France during the early Napoleonic era, but condemned Napoleon's dictatorship, calling him "the completest charlatan that ever existed".^[3] At President Jefferson's invitation, in 1802 he returned to America.

Thomas Paine died at 59 Grove Street, Greenwich Village, New York City on June 8, 1809 at the age of 72. Alienated by his religious views, only six people attended his funeral.^[4] He was buried at what is now called the Thomas Paine Cottage in New Rochelle, New York, where he had lived after returning to America in 1802. His remains were later disinterred by an admirer, William Cobbett, who sought to return them to England and give him a heroic reburial on his native soil. The bones were, however, later lost and his final resting place today is unknown.

(Source: Wikipedia, “Thomas Paine” entry.)

Sean M. Madden is an American writer-educator living in East Sussex, England. His articles have been headlined by a wide range of online media outlets, including Information Clearing House, United Press International’s ReligionAndSpirituality.com, After Downing Street, Guerrilla News Network, Online Journal, Atlantic Free Press, Scoop, OpEdNews.com, Thomas Paine’s Corner, Carolyn Baker’s popular website and the Populist Party of America’s website. Sean also edits and writes for his iNoodle.com and MindfulLivingGuide.com blogs, and welcomes correspondence from readers. His email address is sean@inoodle.com.

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A Family of Heroes

The End of the 19th Century
A novel by Eric Larsen
The Progressive Press, 2008

Eric Larsen has not written a conventional novel, beginning with a murder, because he’s too much of a scholar to find himself at home in the company of more popular writers. Instead, he has written a family history, beginning with his great grandfather, whom in the book he calls Dr. Reiner. In reality, Dr. Reiner is Peder Laurentius Larsen, the founder of Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. Laur. Larsen, the name he preferred, was a brilliant classical scholar, born in Kristiansand, Norway, on Aug. 10, 1833. When he entered the University in Christiania, (Oslo), he was a classmate of Henrik Ibsen. There were too many trained pastors in Norway, so Laur. listened to the call to serve the Norwegians who were thinly scattered on farms in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota. He single-handedly went out with missionary zeal to begin new Lutheran congregations throughout the region. He swam swollen rivers and got stuck in the bogs and tramped through The Big Woods to answer the call from these isolated Norwegian farmers.

When the Norwegians wanted their own college to train Americans for the ministry, so they wouldn’t be dependent on the German-American institutions, they called on Laur. Larsen to organize their project from top to bottom, and he held the position of the first President of Luther College for forty-one years. In his great-grandson Eric Larsen’s new novel, the author modestly writes that his great grandfather, Dr. Reiner, established an academy in a fictional Archer, Nebraska.

In the story, one of Dr. Reiner’s children, Marie, takes a position as professor of history at the fictional Old College, which is modeled on St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. This character, Marie, is obviously derived from Karen Larsen, author of A History of Norway, (Princeton, 1948) and her warm, sensitive, and inspiring biography of her father entitled Laur. Larsen: Pioneer College President (NAHA, 1936).

Eric Larsen should have pulled out all the stops and written a story about the many Norwegian-American heroes in his family. There were multiple stars in Laur.’s family, with two of his sons becoming classical scholars, one teaching at the University of Chicago and another becoming provost of the University of Illinois after serving as chairman of the Department of English at the University of Iowa. Eric, instead of bragging about his ancestors, chooses to brood like a true Norwegian-American scholar; he earned a BA from Carleton College and a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. Instead of telling a story on a grand scale, Larsen chooses to write what appears to be a documentary, including lists of names and dates of the members of his fictional Reiner family, omitting their elite status in the world of scholarship and the Lutheran Church.

The reader, at first, sees only the surface, but not the depth of the Reiner family conflicts. The safest way for Eric Larsen to tell the story of his own life is to make it a documentary created by the boy-narrator, Malcolm. For example, Malcolm’s father is horribly conflicted by his distinguished ancestry and by his boring life in a small town. The result is that he drowns his anger in alcohol, and this more than anything affects his only son, who is a victim of the pressure his father feels to follow in the footsteps of his own distinguished father and grandfather. Malcolm, the youngest male in the Reiner family line, has to deal with a history that he sees as disintegrating on the same prairies where his great-grandfather had been a pioneer pastor. Larsen tells his story in part through pictorial diagrams of, for example, Malcolm’s great aunts Marie and Lutie’s house and other important houses and locations. Larsen does not want to sound his own horn about the real Larsens who populated Northfield, but he uses what is in effect a self-effacing and innovative diary form. It is left up to the reader to connect the dots, which should be fun for alumni of Luther and St. Olaf Colleges, and the many other Norwegian-Americans who are interested in their ancestry and survival in America.

It is personal survival that is at stake in this story. If a young boy is the last in a chain of distinguished scholars and ministers, and if his father has crashed because of his family history and religious pressure, how can this young boy find himself? In the novel, he runs like the wind to escape his father’s wrath. He does strange things because his father does strange things, and he knows that because his great aunt Marie is still a staunch, conservative Norwegian scholar, his own survival is going to be conflicted because of his unorthodox behaviors.

The form of Larsen’s latest book is innovative, and it appears to be a series of unconnected scenes and memories. But if you remember the tremendous social pressure that this young narrator is living under, you will appreciate his various humiliations, at Emerson School, for example, as he watches his world collapse. Finally, his town disappears from the map, a disappearance that can be understood as a symbolic disappearance caused by the idealistic narrator’s repression of his own family history.

Eric Larsen is, also, the author of the prize-winning, must-read novel An American Memory (Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize, 1988), a dramatic companion novel about the troubles of the Reiner family. His second novel, I Am Zoe Handke, is based on the girlhood and Carleton College experiences of his spouse, Anne. His third major work is a scholarly analysis of the sorry state of college education today entitled: A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit.

You can order The End of The 19th Century at Amazon.com or at your local bookstore.

­-Kenneth Nels Hokeness


Notice: This publicity release may be reprinted entirely or in part, or duplicated and distributed in any way its recipient may choose, so long as no substantive changes are made­-aside from deletions for reasons of space-­and so long as the correct attribution of its authorship is included. To request review copies of The End of the 19th Century, to arrange for author interviews, or to make other publicity inquiries, contact

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Ron Paul: What If?

Speech before the US House of Representatives, Feb 12, 2009

by Rep. Ron Paul
PopulistAmerica.com
February 12, 2009

Madam Speaker,

I have a few questions for my colleagues.

What if our foreign policy of the past century is deeply flawed and has not served our national security interests?

What if we wake up one day and realize that the terrorist threat is a predictable consequence of our meddling in the affairs of others and has nothing to do with us being free and prosperous?

What if propping up repressive regimes in the Middle East endangers both the United States and Israel?

What if occupying countries like Iraq and Afghanistan - and bombing Pakistan - is directly related to the hatred directed toward us?

What if someday it dawns on us that losing over 5,000 American military personnel in the Middle East since 9/11 is not a fair trade-off for the loss of nearly 3,000 American citizens, no matter how many Iraqi, Pakistani, and Afghan people are killed or displaced?

What if we finally decide that torture, even if called "enhanced interrogation techniques," is self-destructive and produces no useful information - and that contracting it out to a third world nation is just as evil?

What if it is finally realized that war and military spending is always destructive to the economy?

What if all wartime spending is paid for through the deceitful and evil process of inflating and borrowing?

What if we finally see that wartime conditions always undermine personal liberty?

What if conservatives, who preach small government, wake up and realize that our interventionist foreign policy provides the greatest incentive to expand the government?

What if conservatives understood once again that their only logical position is to reject military intervention and managing an empire throughout the world?

What if the American people woke up and understood that the official reasons for going to war are almost always based on lies and promoted by war propaganda in order to serve special interests?

What if we as a nation came to realize that the quest for empire eventually destroys all great nations?

What if Obama has no intention of leaving Iraq?

What if a military draft is being planned for the wars that will spread if our foreign policy is not changed?

What if the American people learn the truth: that our foreign policy has nothing to do with national security and that it never changes from one administration to the next?

What if war and preparation for war is a racket serving the special interests?

What if President Obama is completely wrong about Afghanistan and it turns out worse than Iraq and Vietnam put together?

What if Christianity actually teaches peace and not preventive wars of aggression?

What if diplomacy is found to be superior to bombs and bribes in protecting America?

What happens if my concerns are completely unfounded - nothing!

What happens if my concerns are justified and ignored - nothing good!

Ron Paul is a republican member of congress from Texas.

Americans Want Torture Inquiry, Obama Doesn’t

by Thomas R. Eddlem
New American
February 13, 2009

A Gallup Poll released February 12 revealed that 62 percent of Americans want to investigate or criminally prosecute Bush administration officials who authorized torture in the so-called “war on terror.” But even though President Obama has said numerous times that “nobody's above the law,” on February 10 he used the Bush administration’s “state secrets” gambit to quash a lawsuit attempting to penalize some of those involved in renditioning torture subjects.

That lawsuit sought damages against a private airline used by the CIA to rendition low-value suspects for torture by dictatorial regimes abroad. One of the five plaintiffs, Benyam Muhammed (a British and Ethiopian citizen), alleged he was renditioned to Morocco where torturers made razor cuts on his penis. The lawsuit alleges that San Jose-based Jeppesen DataPlan Inc. should have known that its planes were being used to ferry suspects for torture and is therefore liable for damages.

But because the Obama administration invoked the “state secrets” policy at the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, the lawsuit’s likelihood of revealing felony torture on the part of Bush officials is now remote.

“This is not change,” ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero correctly told the Associated Press. “Candidate Obama ran on a platform that would reform the abuse of state secrets, but President Obama's Justice Department has disappointingly reneged on that important civil liberties issue.”

The Obama policy in San Francisco also drew a rare condemnation of a Democrat from the New York Times editorial page.

The Gallup Poll came just two weeks after it was revealed that the Obama administration’s Justice Department has dispatched several government lawyers to defend Bush-era Justice Department official John Yoo from a lawsuit by torture victim Jose Padilla.

Jordan Paust of the University of Houston Law Center calls giving Justice Department lawyers to alleged international war criminals “an outrage and constitute an embarrassing embrace of international criminal conduct that the international community has demanded must result in absolutely no form of impunity.” Paust says that alleged criminals should bear the costs of their own defense, and notes there is a long historical case for this. At “a 1781 Resolution of the Continental Congress, the Founders expected that 'the author of ... injuries [that are “offenses against the law of nations”] should compensate the damage out of his private fortune.'”

President Obama’s actions are fast diverging from his public rhetoric.

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Literature? What's in it?

photo by sean, © 2009

Introduction by Sean@iNoodle.com:

The below popped into my inbox this morning from Eric Larsen, prize-winning novelist, non-fiction author, critic, retired English professor, and topnotch friend and correspondent.

And here's a related post which Rebecca published on our Mindful Living Guide site earlier today. The topic and the post itself are inspired by Anne Frank: Why writing ( ... and literature) matters!

*****

by Eric Larsen
February 13, 2009

Dear Readers, Reviewers, Editors, Publicists, Fellow Writers, Patriots, Friends,

Here for your perusal is a piece that will doubtless seem purely literary, lacking any element, content, or implication whatsoever that might touch on today's politics. In short, by clicking here, you'll find a short story that I published in 1971, again in 1975, and that then, I thought, had for the next thirty-five years slept in the same unmarked grave where it would surely fade away to dust.

But if you do decide to go inside and have a look, you'll find that the story has been resurrected. A Professor of English by the name of Elizabeth Hodges has given it new life by introducing it to her students who, in turn, have sent me questions, twenty-one in all, that they found themselves interested in hearing the answers to.

Inside, you'll find everything: The story, the questions, the answers – and then something more.

The "something more" will be my "conclusion," in which I announce that I'm signing off on political writing – for now, maybe, maybe for good. I'm returning to literary writing. But I'm doing it with a very, very serious project in mind.

I'm proposing that this piece – containing the little story "Feast" along with Elizabeth Hodges' students' questions and my answers – I'm proposing that it take its place as the first in a series. This series will make a strenuous effort to answer this question: "Can the Literary Life Still Exist in a Post-1984 Nation?"

Our own poor and dying nation is without the least hint of any doubt whatsoever a "post-1984" nation. I've spent the last two and a half years or more hammering at the door of 9/11 truth, thinking all along that exposure of the truth of what really happened on that day would be a powerful tonic in helping set the U.S. back, say, to 1948 instead of 1984, at least insofar as truth versus lies in the governance and freedoms of its people might be concerned. Now, I'm not so sure. I myself know more than perfectly well what really happened on 9/11, as do many, many others. And yet, not even on the basis of that knowledge will the nation act. Even with the truth evident and obvious and plainly placed in front of it, the nation either will not or can not act in meaningful response to that truth.

So I'm not going to bang on that door any longer, at least not for now, but I'm going to propose another approach. As I've said elsewhere many more times than once, any nation that lacks a genuine, living cultural life is by default and by necessity a dead nation. The question now is whether ours is dead or not dead. If it is in actuality dead, then we, too, are all dead along with it, every one of us, looking forward to a future of noting more than hollowness and ruin.

On the other hand, do you think it's remotely conceivable that I could prove that there still is – say – a LITERARY LIFE inside the United States, a life that a person could LIVE and that many, many others could live WITHIN?

My proposal is this: I'm going to set about, however vastly against the odds, trying to prove exactly that. If I can do it, maybe there's hope for us, for our children, for our nation, for our future. If I can't? If I can't, we're goners, all of us.

Stay tuned. Pray fervently, daily, hourly.

With my hopes and every best wish,

Eric Larsen