Verrrry Interesting. Pay attention, Viet Vets, Iraq Vets, Afghanistan Vets

Here's a nifty little writeup from January 2000 Volume 69, Number 1, of the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, by Gary J. Rohen M.S., of "Exercise 'Baseline,' Training for Terrorism."

Drawing upon composite profiles of likely domestic terrorists, the the group developed characters of four disgruntled Vietnam War veterans. The characters possessed a military background in special operations or health service and supposedly had met and formed friendships at veterans events and shared their views on the failure of the government to acknowledge and provide medical care for veterans exposed to Agent Orange and Gulf War Syndrome (GWS). Additionally, they each had children who suffered from GWS symptoms. Because of their backgrounds and beliefs, the characters [those "four disgruntled Vietnam War veterans] demanded immediate government acknowledgment of GWS and paid medical treatment for veterans and their families. (I'm wondering why the four Viet vets have "children who suffered from GWS symptoms"--unless they followed their patriotic fathers into the military and were old enough for Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL)--or was it "Iraqi Mistaken Military Operation w/ Ridiculous Acronyms, Like" (or IMMORAL)?

Does this remind anyone of the memo from the Denver, CO office of the FBI shortly after 9/11/2001, I think it was, that gave tips to people about what to watch out for in spotting "terrorists" in our midst? A couple of the tips were about "people who keep referring to the US Constitution," and "people who keep demanding their rights" or "insisting that they have rights" or "insisting that they have constitutional rights." And of course we know from real live history that the Pentagon and the Veterans Administration waffled, denied, stonewalled for YEARS on Agent Orange, and ditto Gulf War Syndrome (and a little bit less on Traumatic Brain Injury and Battle Fatigue, Shell-shocked (now known as Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome--could also be called the SSBDADOFCAOIPALFUBIP--pronounced "Ess-bee-dad, off-ca-oipal-foobip", or the Shell-Shocked By Death And Destruction Of Friends, Children And Other Indigenous Persons And Lastingly F****d Up By It Problem).

Here They Go Again, the FBI, using the fact that someone has:

1) Fought in an illegal war or two, (i.e., is a veteran who did not dodge the draft, who actually enlisted and "served their country")

2) Returned home injured, poisoned, sick,

3) And is asserting this or her enumerated right to

a) Speak

b) Peaceably assemble, and even (gasp!)

c) Petition his/her government employees for a redress of grievances. (Remember, we're the boss of them, not them of us. Or we could put it like my kids used to, around bedtime, "You're not the boss of me, Meng!!!" Seems like the appropriate Constitutional response to those claiming to be "the authorities," is actually built into our genes. Like the bumper sticker has it: Question Authority.

For reference: First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

(Don't forget to remember, as older we grow and newer forget, that because of our insufficient number of troops and/or incompetent leadership (or a combo of both) in the March 19, 2003 invasion of Iraq, from the Unitary Liar-In-Chief on down, we allowed the looting of something like 1,000 ammo dumps in Iraq, by caravans of pickup trucks, etc., which provided an arsenal of enough conventional explosives to make enough roadside bombs, land-mines, booby-traps and other "improvised explosive devices" to last the "insurgents" for thirty or forty years, I'd estimate. And it's these bombs, artillery shells, mortar rounds, small arms ammo, detonation chord, blasting caps, plastic explosive (etc.)—just plain old conventional ordnance (Weapons of Group Destruction), that have been doing 75% of the work of killing or maiming our troops. Troops who’re forced to ride around in glorified tin-can death-traps (Humvees, even “up-armored” Humvees — are still vertically flat-sided and flat-bottomed horizontally death traps, because they take the FULL force of blasts from below and rifle-propelled grenade blasts from the sides), because there still aren't enough "MRAPs" (V-hulled, bomb-deflecting armored personnel carriers) so that NO soldier ever has to leave base in the glorified thin-skinned boxy jeeps called Humvees.)

I'm almost afraid to note that the Preamble to the Constitution sets up the relationship between “We the People” and our government this way: “We the People of the United States…do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

The deal was that, the people in the aggregate, have all the power and, to form a federal republic (not a democracy, guys ’n’ gals--never was and never will be a “democracy”), We the People of the States United delegated just some of our power to that new government (or gummint).  By the way, the late Howard Zinn, both in person and in his A People's History of the United States, suggested that both the Preamble and the Bill of Rights were just window dressing, to prettify the formation of a government large enough and decentralized enough to put down any further Shays’ or Whiskey Rebellions. On the other hand, hey, the words are right there in plain sight, so  we might as well try to make the best of them, while they're still there.

Anyway, we are a  r e p u b l i c.   Period. Not a democracy. The closest we get to living in a “democracy” is in the direct election of Representatives and Senators to the House of Representatives & Senate, or generally, “Congress.” The gerrymandered election districts, of course, essentially nullify any given voter's impact. And the rigged voting machines, the illegally purged registered voters' lists, etc., further reduce voter choice.

Back to the FBI Terror Theater Script: Notice the characterization of the so-called malefactors, evil-doers, the roles of the “terrorists” who are to be cast for these "war games." Who are they? Guys who have served in the military. Or veterans, as we are sometimes called. [This characterization, or rather, demonization, of veterans seems to fit with the overall effort to disarm the American populace, with extra attention given to men (and women) who have actually been trained to use, and have practiced using, said firearms.

So, as in that Denver pamphlet, “You can tell a terrorist if he insists that citizens have rights” (when I find it, I'll post it here), we see the FBI working up a mock “exercise” (but they've REALLY built little bombs to distribute rabies, ’cuz we FEAR it), with FEMA, local hospitals, police, fire-emergency crews, local ambulance folks--built around Veterans who are petitioning their government for a redress of grievances--that is, characterizing as “terrorists” people who assert their constitutional rights against those in their own government who wish to abridge those rights.

Whoa, Nelly!!! What is wrong with this picture? Who is it that's attempting to ABRIDGE the constitutional rights of a veteran? Who is it that's using, in a public exercise involving governmental and quasi-governmental personnel a cast of “fictional” Vietnam Veterans who replicate all the NON-fictional veterans who were FOBARed-over, in real life, real people, real Pentagon, real Vets' Administration, by these NON-fictional Agent Orange poisonings, Gulf War I poisonings (maybe chemical agents, undoubtedly depleted uranium in artillery shells that were stored in the Gulf soldiers' tanks, that burst into radioactive dust for the soldiers to breathe when they inspected each enemy tank, howitzer, truck, jeep that had been hit by our depleted-uranium ammunition to make certain their job was done.

Imagine the gall it would take on the part of a government official (in this case, our author, our Mr. Gary J. Rohan, M.S.) to use a situation in which "our" government has provably wronged our own veterans, to label those wronged veterans, even in a "fictional" exercise, as Terrorists.  

[As an aside, this is nothing particularly new. I read in The Medusa File, by Craig Roberts, © 1997 (in Part III, "The Boys We Left Behind"—about 80 pages'-worth), that our military left behind, knowingly, some 25,000 soldiers in WWII, held by the Russians, similar numbers, held by Russia, from the Korean "UN peace-keeping exercise," US pilots shot down during the cold war, pilots shot down over North Vietnam (sightings as late as 1992), in Laos & the Soviet Union. There was an episode of the BBC's "Foyle's War" on the forced repatriation of Russian POWs, held in the UK, in exchange for Allied POWs. Roberts reports on a a bit of the prisoner exchange in Reisa, May 25, 1945, of 3,000 Allied POWs for 3,000 Russian POWs. After the newsreel cameras were stopped and as the Allied POWs were boarding their trucks, the Russian POWs were marched a little way to a quarry and machine-gunned to death.

Is it that our FBI/Gov't officials know that the wars they start are wrong? And that people who die in them, or return alive but maimed from them, or poisoned, or their reproductive system damaged, will be really pissed off? And is it that they know the returning veterans will be EVEN MORE PISSED OFF if their grievances go ignored, stonewalled, unanswered? Are they just itching for these angry citizen soldiers to "go off" like the Bonus Marchers did during the Depression, peaceably assembled in Washington to demand their promised WWI bonuses--so they can call them all "terrorists" and mow 'em down with machine guns?
Why wouldn't our "law enforcement" (or is it "law avoidance" and "law-breaking"?) officials use "radical Muslims" as their fictional terrorists? Already, before 2000 when this exercise was prepared (at least according to the pub date above), there had been the embassy bombings in Africa, the hostage-takings in Iran, the bombing attempt on one of the three WTC buildings that were taken down on 9/11/2001. Why use as "examples" or "characters," the very soldiers who were being denied care for their war-induced maladys? Should they have never served in the military? Should all of our soldiers just get up and go home if they're characterized as "terrorists" because of the way their own government responds to them, treats them? Remember the Walter Reed Army Hospital scandals?

Remember that Rumsfeld, Cheney & Bush were trying to do these wars "on the cheap" (except for hiring Halliburton and their other Military-Industrial-Legislative Complex buddies to do, for four and five times the cost of having our own soldiers do it)?

Are they creating situations that WILL piss us all off, so that they can call us "terrorists" for saying so out loud, for writing about it, for petitioning for a redress of the conditions our own government is causing that are making us pissed off? Smells like a set-up to me. Howzabout to you?

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And just as a little desert, a "lagniappe," for you, if you will, there's this paragraph from the "exercise":

…From a psychological perspective, the general public almost universally recognizes and fears rabies, adding to the scenario’s reality. In addition, a technician working with bomb experts devised, produced, and tested a realistic, practical delivery system at the FBI Academy. Each delivery device contained liquid rabies, placed in 20-ounce soda bottles and separated by a contoured freezer pack containing plastic explosives, all of which was packed inside a soft, six-pack-size beverage cooler. The device used a blasting cap and a standard antipersonnel mine to generate a charge. Upon command detonation, the device would release an aerosol mist of the deadly rabies virus.

So, the FBI Academy has plastic explosives ready to hand? Has “standard antipersonnel mines” ready to hand? Has “devised, produced and tested [this] realistic, practical delivery system at the FBI Academy?”

I sure as hell don't have such things ready to hand. Do you? And I was trained in ammunition storage, although, because I could type, I spent all my time as a clerk, and actually never saw an ammo dump in all my months of service.

Which makes me wonder, just who are the folks we should be labeling as "terrorists" here? Engaging in "exercises" which use devices that "the general public almost universally recognizes and fears"? (This would include all the participants in the exercises, we can safely assert.)

So, really: Who are the terrorists here? Seems like our government. Once again. And this was BEFORE all the "color alert status," the long-after-the-fact announcements of "terrorists arrested, their really, really, really scary terrorist plot short-circuited."

(Remember how Cheney and Bush, Ashcroft and Gonzales and Rice insisted that all the torture bore fruit, that "ticking time-bombs" were discovered. But they can't prove it to us because the documents are "classified," and would "harm national security" if revealed.)

Seems to me this is all horse pucky, barnyard animal product. Or, to use a shorter word: Lies. Once again.

Seems to me that these boys (and a girl or two--Rice and Christine Todd "Ground Zero Air is Safe To Breathe" Whitman) need to be put on trial for their lies, for the illegal wars they started.

And at the same time, we need to begin the public federal trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, or KSM, the survivor of 166 almost-fatal drownings. To convict KSM, the prosecution, our government, will have to prove just who is behind the 9/11/2001 attacks; who planted the explosives in World Trade Center Tower #7, #2 and #1, at the very, very least.

Does anyone think these events are NOT linked? This is double-plus un-good. I'm just sayin'.

A Campaign Platform: Restore the Balance

Restore the Balance 

1) Restore the Balance between We the People and the government, including: the Executive Branch, Congress and the courts. We must demand that our "elected" officials honor their oath of office--it's the only oath they take — which is to Support & Defend the Constitution. By Impeaching Cheney/Bush. 

This is not optional, by the way, even though Members of Congress have had the bejesus scared out of them by having been sent letters laced with Fort Devins Anthrax, probably by the Administration. We've now reached the point again, as we did with JFK, RFK, MLK, Jr. , probably Malcolm X, where standing up for office, on your hind legs, can get you killed. That happened in 1775 and onward. It happened during the Civil War. It happened during the 1960s. And at least the threat of it has happened during the past years of the incomparably lawless Cheney/Bush administration.

2) Restore the Balance between our foreign policy and our "National Interests--(OIL and Projecting American Military Might Throughout the World" — as in ProjectILES coming from the barrels of our guns and guns/ and guns and guns, teroooo, terooo, (repeat)/ Oh Johnny, I hardly knew you) and 

a) Get Out of Iraq — give Iraq back to the Iraqis; give Embassy City back to Baghdad; return the 14 "enduring" bases, and provide the where-with-all to let the Iraqis build back their country from the rubble we've reduced it to with unprecedented and cruel bombing under Poppy Bush and Baby Bush, and the criminal, unconscionable decade-long embargo, blockade, "sanctions" and "designations" by the Unitary Liar-In-Chief imposed on the people of Iraq as "collective punishment" for their failure to overthrow our ally, enemy, ally, then enemy again, Saddam Hussein. As they say at the home of the "trigger mug," Bennington Pottery, and at the Pottery Barn, "You break it, you bought it." As I recall, the going rate our military is paying in reparations for a dead Iraqi civilian is $1,000. (They should sue in Texas; their surviving families would get millions from those frivolous wrongful death lawsuits)

b) Reign in the WIA (War Department Intel Admin, formerly known as the Defense Department Intel Admin), the CIA, NSA, FBI, and the rest of what we're told are 15 distinct "intelligence" agencies (remember, they're the ones who don't have enough, if any, native speakers of the Afghani dialects, speakers of Arabic, Farsi, etc. I vaguely recall some one of our CIA or other intel "operatives" having been quoted as saying "We don't do countries where you get diarrhea from the drinking water."

 

2a) Restore the Balance of  honesty and trust between citizens and their government concerning the events leading up to, during and after 9/11 with a full-scale, independent investigation.

 By my back-of-the-envelop calculations, about 43,000 individual explosive and thermate shape-charges (and three or more MOATBs — Mothers of All Thermate Bombs) were required  to bring down the three World Trade Center buildings 1, 2 and 7. Just let your mind begin to grasp just how long it would take even a small army of experts to install and rig all of those explosives. 

Now, you may be one of those who believe the folks who say "Oooh, that big an undertaking could NEVER be kept secret! Of course, you probably weren't around when an even bigger undertaking, the building of the world's first atomic bombs, was kept secret. It was called The Manhattan Project, and parts of it were conducted on the East Coast, and other parts of it were conducted in New Mexico, at Los Alamos National Laboratory. I heard tell (not Teller), from the daughter of the guy who ran the cafeteria there, that after every meal, even the paper tablecloths had to be burned, because the scientists there would invariably be discussing their work and doodling on the place-mats or tablecloths.

And most non-New Yorkers STILL don't realize that three, not two, buildings were demolished on 9/11. They wouldn't learn about it from Phil Zelikow's infamous novel, The 9/11 Commission Report, either, because there is not one word about the collapse of the 47-story Salomon Brothers building, or WTC 7, in that work of fiction. And when there's a lapse about something as big as that, you just know the report is probably a complete white-wash, creating a legendary conspiracy theory that the attacks on and collapse of the three WTC buildings was inevitable and the facts were being fixed around that conspiracy theory by Zelikow, his henchmen, and his water-carriers Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton. 

3) Restore the Balance between election challengers and the Incumbent Party's advantage: Eliminate cost of campaign advertising (require FCC to serve the public necessity--which is its mandate--and set aside five or so channels for campaign/political advertising 24 hrs a day, 365 days a year. (Commercial channels can carry such advertising, but they can't charge for it, and they must air, back to back, commercials for ALL the other candidates for that office. The order of broadcast to be determined by lot (or rock, paper, scissors--my favorite). And the stations have to cut their own content/revenue ads to make the time available to run all those ads back-to-back. 

4a) Restore the Balance between Federal and State Government by capturing more taxes at the state level and, wherever possible, short-circuiting the taxpayer-to-Washington-to-States route, which always wastes money, as Washington seems to take a pretty big cut.d

4b) Restore the Balance between citizens and corporations by turning every family (and person) into a corporation. Then it'll be, "What's good for business is good for business"--because EVERYONE will be "a business," whether in business to raise children, re-acculturate, retrain themselves for their new economic poverty, etc. All family units intend to make a profit, and it's high time we gave them their proper appellation. What family do you know that wants to sink further into poverty with each passing year? Or doesn't want to put away savings, or invest in their own and their children's education? If that's not a profit-making intent, I don't know what profit or intent mean.

5). Restore the Balance between what we take out of the planet and what we give back to it.

6). Restore the Balance between the creators of wealth and the users of wealth (e.g., Hedge fund thieves get to put up maybe 10% of their own money and use 90% of the peoples' money — from banks— to make their SWAGs — scientific wild-ass gambles — on such things as: Four-wheel-drive Satyrs'  Investment Vehicles which are little more than bets on promises to pay on bets on promises to pay on bets on promises to pay— or, in reverse order, bottom to top: Mortgagee to Mortgagor to Bank Gamblers to Investment Bank Gamblers to Foreign Investment Bank Gamblers to Hedge Fund Gamblers, to Central Bank Bailouts with taxpayers' money.

7). Restore the Balance between what children learn and what they need to learn.

 8). Restore the balance between the citizens, their Constitution, and their government.

a). Require students and public officials to recite the preamble to the Constitution every day. And provide every school kid with his or her own pocket copy of the Constitution.

b). Wrest documents out of the cold living hands of Bush, Clinton, Cheney, Poppy Bush and the cold dead hands of Reagan. It is time to wean the Executive Branch from suckling on secrecy at the teats of Cerberus, the three-headed hound of Hell.

c). Wrest documents out of the hands of governmental agencies, quickly (no more than 30 days turnaround), and with penalties for non-compliance and wretched excess in censoring said documents. It's yet one more abuse of a rogue government run amok. 

d). Pay attention to the {Preamble and the 9th amendment. (unenumerated individual rights)}, as well as the rest of the Constitution. I would assert that one of the UNenumerated rights we the people did NOT delegate to our government was the right to impeach the whole operation, sweep the Augean Capitol and White House clean of the horse manure they've been filled with for lo these past many seasons, and start over again. When, ever in our history, has there been a government so complicit in criminal conduct? I oscillate between livid anger and despondent lachrymation. 

e) Last but not least, in all other matters governmental, return our government to a Constitutional footing.

Email address:  wilt4congress@comcast.net

website: www.wilt4congress.com

Most discouraging thing so far? People who conflate permitting someone to RUN for office by signing "nominating petitions" with signifying their assent to his/her positions by signing the petitions. Two separate matters. When people begin to learn about their own Constitution, starting with the recitation of the Preamble in every public forum, we might do a bit better.