Since Unknowncountry.com began its coverage of 911 and I
began reading my 'What I Love About America' statement on
the radio, hundreds of people have voted with their feet,
quitting my newsletter and abandoning the website.
It has been a hard, hard few weeks in our world, beginning
with 911 and ending now with the latest FBI warning that
Sunday could bring another terror attack. Anne and I have
spent a great deal more time on Unknowncountry.com than
ever before. The number of stories published by the site has
quadrupled.
At the same time, we have experienced a decline in the
number of people subscribing to our newsletter, the first time
we have ever seen a decline. Since it?s a free service, the
recession isn?t the answer. Between fifty and a hundred
people a day have been canceling their subscriptions since
we began our war coverage. Each newsletter transmitted has
resulted in a hundred or so cancellations. More telling, each
time I have read my What I Love About America statement on air, there has
been a flood of cancellations, and few to no new
subscriptions. When I read it on Coast-To-Coast last
Thursday night, the result was 280 cancellations and 6 new
subscriptions.
I received 4 e-mails from listeners saying that the liked the
statement, 73 from listeners who were angry about it for one
reason or another. The majority of these objected to my
referring to us as a ?gentle? people. ?We aren?t gentle, we
are greedy and cruel and indifferent to the suffering of
others,? is the gist of these responses.
Now, why would this be? How could it be that people would
vote with their feet when somebody expresses a patriotic
sentiment at a time like this?
Our e-mail, with a volume of about 500 messages a day, tell
a very different story than the media does about how some
people actually feel about what is happening in our country.
In general, people who choose to write me angry letters
believe the following:
George W. Bush engineered the terrorism in order to shore up
a failing administration.
It was failing because he stole the election.
He wants to become a dictator.
He and his father are both parts of a great international
conspiracy to take away our freedoms and subject us to
a ?new world order.?
The CIA is an oppressive, blood-soaked empire of monsters.
The government uses weather control to harm us and ruin our
health, and mind-control to make us indifferent to its attacks
on us.
Now, reading all of these crazy ideas, you might think that
my website has collected a large following of paranoids
because of the fact that I have expressed my own concerns
about cold-war mind control abuses, including my personal
experiences with this sort of abuse. However, I think it goes
deeper than that. A lot deeper.
There are a large number of Americans who do not believe
that the President won the election fairly. The New York
Times has published a careful indictment of the way the
Florida vote was handled. In fact, Mr. Bush lost the popular
vote, but was running his minority presidency as if he had
won by a landslide.
He was developing a foreign policy that was astonishingly
isolationist. He was planning to render the US military
incapable of fighting a war on two fronts at the same time. If
that were true now, when we are involved in both Kosovo
and Afghanistan, the world would at present be at flashpoint,
as both Iraq and North Korea saw that they had a chance to
become aggressors again. His middle east policy was so
extremely pro-Israel that his father had to call Saudi Crown
Prince Abdullah and reassure him that the President?s ?heart
was in the right place.?
The administration?s Israeli policy was so odd, when compared
to previous American policy, including that of the senior
George Bush, that some opinion suggested that it was
influenced from one of the darkest corners of right wing
thought: the desire to cause trouble in the middle east in
order to induce Armageddon and thus bring on the ?rapture,?
which supposedly involves the bodily removal of the devout
into heaven.
The idea that any administration could be influenced by
something so sick and crazy seems absurd, but the effects of
Bush?s policy in the middle east were indeed inflammatory.
The administration that is now calling for a Palestinian state
was so pro-Israel that American peace efforts had become a
pro-forma exercise.
At home, Bush had appointed a religious extremist as
attorney general, an act that was regarded as a mistake by
the majority of Americans.
The public had responded to all this by returning the Senate
to the control of the Democrats, and it appeared likely that
they would also win control of the House in November. We
were looking at a repeat of the first two years of the Clinton
administration: a president was about to lose control of
congress due to his own ideological over-zealousness.
Before September 11, George W. Bush was not a popular
president and not a trusted president, and it can be argued
that his policies were tailor-made to cause outrage among
Arabs.
Fertile ground for the conspiracy theorists, and a lot more
people than ever before are listening to their arguments.
I do not trust the conspiracy theorists, any more than I trust
anybody else who goes on faith alone. They offer arguments
in place of facts, and that is never a good way to get at the
truth. Their websites are full of undocumented statements
and incendiary retellings of history that are not founded in
fact. One of the leaders of the movement has published on
his website the fact that he believes that the British Royal
Family are giant lizards from another planet who are ?shape-
shifted? into human form. (Don?t believe me?
Click
here and see for yourself.)
Critics have reason to contend that the Bush administration
has not been the best of presidencies. But that has been
true of every single American presidency since George
Washington first took office. Liberals point to the Roosevelt
administration as the best of presidencies. But the Roosevelt
administration was filled with communist fellow-travelers, and
its policies toward the Soviet Union, especially toward the
end of World War II, created the geopolitical foundation from
which the USSR fought the cold war for seventy long and
dangerous years. Franklin Roosevelt gave up the freedom of a
billion human beings at Yalta, when he and Stalin and an
appalled Winston Churchill divided the world into spheres of
influence. The man who had rescued us from the Depression
and won World War II left us with a legacy of suffering and
terror that was to last for seventy years.
Likewise, conservatives point to the Reagan administration as
the paragon. But what it did in Central America was appalling.
Blatant criminal acts were engaged in to defeat the will of the
US Congress. The CIA ran rampant in the world, assassinating
leaders and destroying governments almost at will. However,
Reagan?s military policy caused the USSR to bankrupt itself in
order to keep up with the arms race.
In other words, they were typical of most presidencies in
troubled times: they did some things right and some things
wrong, but their efforts were sincere and, in crucial ways,
supportive of our nation?s welfare.
There is no such thing as a perfect presidency, and the Bush
presidency will be just the same. We saw an uneasy and
poorly focused president rise to one of the most terrible
occasions in the history of our country, and inspire a deeply
shaken nation in just the way that a president must at such
a moment. We have seen him graduate from timid isolationist
to forceful internationalist in just a few weeks. We have
witnessed the creation of an extraordinary coalition of
nations and a brilliant military strategy to fight and win a
very
new kind of war.
But it hasn?t made any difference to the conspiracy theorists
and their camp-followers. They really believe that the
president is responsible for the attack on America, not just
because of policy missteps?which would in itself be a hard
case to make?but directly.
They have voted with their feet and left my
website because they believe that I am being ?soft? on a
president who personally ordered 911. I know that this will
sound completely incredible to the normal people who flock to
this website in the hundreds of thousands, but it?s exactly
what they DO think. I know, I have read the outraged e-
mails. And many of them were core supporters of my work, as
witness that they took my newsletter in such numbers.
There is a reason that they looked to me as a leader. I have
often spoken out against excessive government secrecy. I do
not like the existing system of classification. It is too
accessible to misuse and abuse. But I have reasons for my
concern. It is not simply emotional or imaginary. For example,
throughout the late seventies and into the eighties, there
was a budget item in the Air Force budget for an aircraft
called the Aurora. A few years ago, the prestigious Janes All
the World?s Aircraft even published information about the
plane. The project was incredibly expensive. It was also
incredibly unsuccessful. Some analysts believe that it was
the most expensive R&D project ever undertaken by the
military. But the plane failed, at some point in the past few
years. And what does the Air Force have to say? It never
existed.
This is an outrage. It could only happen in a deeply flawed
system. The public deserves to know how it is money is
spent. The classification system exists as much to conceal
things from us as it does from our enemies, and that is
wrong. It needs careful reform, so that it cannot be used to
conceal failures, and thus also the incompetent and possibly
corrupt people responsible.
But I have reason to believe that the classification process is
flawed. I can make a case based on facts. It is not simply
imagination.
I have also expressed my concern that the great untold story
of CIA cold war abuse involves the use of children in the
same sorts of ghastly medical experiments that characterized
MK-ULTRA and the Plutonium program.
But I have good reason for this, also, documented reason. It
is not some kind of crazy imaginary conspiracy theory that
suggests bizarre and impossible things, such as that our
current president is evil on a Hitlerian scale, which is what
one must conclude if we are to maintain that he intentionally
induced the attack on America.
There is a great deal of difference between substituting
imagination, belief and theory for facts, and adhering to the
facts. Theories and facts are not the same, and the people
who are buying into these conspiracy websites need to
recognize the difference.
I believe that the CIA?s cold war experiments included the
abuse of children, and that this process may still be ongoing.
Now, how is that different from believing that Queen
Elizabeth is a giant lizard from another planet, and that
George W. Bush intentionally caused the attack on America?
The difference is not enormous, but it is very, very
crucial. It
is why I do not buy indiscriminately into all conspiracy
theories. The difference is twofold: witness testimony and
documentation.
Nobody has ever seen the Queen in her lizard form. Nobody
has ever reported the least whiff of a suggestion that the
president knew about or caused the attack on America.
MK-ULTRA, wherein the CIA, among other things, fed LSD to
the mentally ill without telling them, is a matter of public
record, its documentation in the national archives. It was the
subject of congressional hearings and extensive news
coverage. And the author of the Plutonium Files, who I have
been privileged to interview on Dreamland, won the Pulitzer
Prize for her work.
There are many witnesses claiming that they were abused as
children in something very like MK-ULTRA. Because of the
way it relates to the known abuses of that program, this
witness testimony is important, and deserving of much more
careful scrutiny than it has so far received from journalists.
My own personal memories suggest that I was a victim of
cold war experiments on ?bright? children, and I have
interviewed other people who believe that they were similarly
victimized. There exists documentation to suggest that this
may have been going on as recently as the early 1990s, and
could still be going on. The documentation is not conclusive,
but along with the witness testimony of people like
Cheryl
Hersha, who has also been on Dreamland, it is very, very
troubling.
The documentation I am referring to consists of articles that
appeared in the Washington Post on February 7, 1987 and in
US News and World Report on December 23, 1993 and
January 4, 1994. The Post article discusses a child abuse
case involving a group called ?The Finders,? a group that
allegedly conducted brainwashing of children and used them
in rituals. The investigation grew out of a situation in
Tallahassee, Florida where two well-dressed men were
discovered with six disheveled children in a park. The children
had been let out of a van for exercise.
The two men told police that they were transporting the
children to Mexico, where they would be placed in a school
for brilliant children. This concerned me greatly, because of
my own personal memories of the existence of such a school.
I also recalled it being in Mexico, the city of Monterrey.
At first, it appeared that the Tallahassee situation was a
police case involving child abuse and possible kidnapping.
However, in its articles in 1993 and 1994, US News revealed
some very disturbing facts. Charges against the two men had
been dropped. None of the allegations were ever proved. The
children were eventually returned to their mothers. In 1993,
the Justice Department began an investigation into whether
or not the case had been dropped improperly. There were
allegations that the Finders was somehow linked to the CIA.
When the Customs Service sought to examine the evidence
gathered by the Washington DC police, they found that the
police report on the case had been classified as secret and
that the investigation had ?become an internal matter.?
This makes no sense. It also makes no sense that, even after
the case got attention from Rep. Charlie Rose (D-NC) and Rep
Tom Lewis (R-FL), no progress was made. Marion David
Pettie, the head of the Finders, denied all the charges. He
claimed that the small organization does research and
competitor intelligence for mostly foreign clients. The CIA
claims that the only connection between it and the Finders
was the fact that a firm that provided computer training to
CIA officers also employed some members of the Finders
organization.
Nobody ever explained what the children were doing in
Tallahassee in a van, or why, if the Finders were not
concerned with children in some way, the organization had
been identified as being involved during the investigation into
this matter.
And nothing more was ever done. What appears to be a
possibly atrocious, and certainly very unsatisfactorily
explained, case of child abuse simply evaporated. It is
difficult to believe that this investigation, given that both
congressmen and the Justice Department were demanding
answers that they did not get, was not suppressed by some
very powerful people.
So, there it stands: an incomplete investigation. But my
concern about it is different from what is on the conspiracy
theorist websites. I have not only witness testimony, but
documentation that suggests that competent and careful
people thought that there was a level of CIA involvement,
and further evidence that their investigations were thwarted.
Before Eileen Welsome began her research into the
Plutonium Files that eventually led not only to a
Pulitzer Prize but to a presidential apology to the victims,
she
actually had a little less of a smoking gun.
My point is this: in supporting the American people and our
government during this crisis, I have not changed my position
one iota. I am just as concerned as ever that the CIA and
FBI are failed institutions, and that the classification
process
is routinely used to cover up their failures. I think that
it was
probably used to conceal something quite awful in the case I
have discussed here. I don?t know that, but I do know that
the investigation was not resolved in manner that satisfies
me.
My concerns are very different from those of the conspiracy
theorists. They do not arise out of free-floating hatred for
America. They arise out of the deep patriotism and love that
I expressed in the ?I Love America? speech that has caused all
those defections from my newsletter. I do love America. It is
an incredible human experiment that has worked. For the
most part, we human beings are actually learning to live
together and to recognize the wonderful richness of the
whole human tapestry, in America.
I love America too much to see elements of its government
use our laws to conceal corruption and secret evil.
Personally, I think that George W. Bush has risen to the most
terrible challenge faced by an American president since World
War II. Will he succeed in his response? Nobody can know
such a thing, but his effort so far suggests that he has a
very, very good chance.
I think that people who are promoting baseless conspiracy
theories and government-hating at a time like this are, at the
least, highly unpatriotic. At worst, they are working for, or
showing sympathy with, our enemies.
If we are to listen to their claims, they need to provide us
not just with the rhetoric and ?logic? of their cases, but
with
their documentation. If you have no facts on which to base
your case?and remember that a theory is not a fact?this is
a time when you should be silent and let the patriots do their
work of making our nation safe again.
Related Entries:
28-Oct-2001: Bin Laden's Objective
27-Sep-2001: The Terrorism Problem--How We Can Solve It
10-Feb-2003: Official Terror Worse than 'Night and Fog'
12-Sep-2001: What Next?
