One Sucker's Saga, Part IV: Gold, Both White and Black
In Part III of this saga, I ended with a mention of Michael C. Ruppert and the CIA's connection to drugs. His story began December of 1975 when (as many stories begin) he met a woman:
"(I)t's not too often you meet a woman who is beautiful, intelligent, literate and witty siting in a bar with a bunch of police officers," Ruppert said. "She was definitely somebody I wanted to see more of."
Ruppert got Teddy's phone number at breakfast. They went to dinner the next weekend then spent most of the next 15 months together.
As their relationship grew, Ruppert grew suspicious of this woman, and not in the usual way, the story notes. She had unusual skills, like being able to field strip a gun in seconds, being as good a shot as him (an LAPD cop), being "vastly more versed in the vernacular of law enforcement than any police groupie Ruppert had ever encountered," and, perhaps most important, having no visible means of financial support.
Needless to say, the relationship did not last. She simply left one day without a note:
Five weeks after Teddy's disappearance, Ruppert received a post card from a small town outside Atlanta, Ga. - "Having a great time, wish you were here, Teddy."
One more month after that, 10 weeks after her disappearance, Teddy called Ruppert from New Orleans, where she was "working on something important," and gave him a phone number and an address in suburban Gretna, near the Belle Chase Naval Air Base.
The tale continued:
In July 1977 Ruppert took a weeks vacation and drove to New Orleans pulling Teddy's furniture behind him in a U-Haul trailer.
During his six days in New Orleans, Ruppert reported, he was shot at as he and Teddy stood outside a bar. He and Teddy were followed by car and on foot. In Teddy's apartment he discovered more than a half-dozen phone jacks, including one complicated electrical hookup unlike anything he had ever seen before. He called a friend, a naval and communications officer, described the phone and hookup, and was told it sounded like the KY3 model scrambler phone, which required top secret clearance.
Teddy was cold and stony. She would not sleep with him. She told Ruppert that the smartest thing he could do would be to forget that he had ever met her.
Teddy was visited at night by a friend who wore a 44-caliber Magnum pistol in his boot and talked about the work he was doing for Mafia don Carlos Marcello. During the day, Teddy was visited by an Air Force sergeant named Johnny who brought her Manila envelopes from Belle Chase Naval Air Base filled with what he described as "communiques."
Another friend who was employed by a company specializing in offshore oil rig communications systems said he was helping Teddy see that "some things got moved off the mainland."
Teddy and Johnny gobbled speed and smoked grass that they described in Ruppert's presence as "issued," laughed crazily at Ruppert's ardent, attentive expression.
And what happened when Mr. Ruppert reported these and other, less verifiable details of his visit to his superiors at the LAPD? They questioned his sanity. Indeed, as the linked newspaper story indicates, he became obsessed with his ex and her supposed connections with the government, major oil contractors and organized crime. A decorated and rising star in the Los Angeles Police Department was, just three years after his relationship with a mysterious woman ended, working at a 7-11 and relying upon his parents for financial support.
He kept researching.
This story was published in 1981, about the same time that the events later documented by Gary Webb were unfolding. Since that date, he has worked to gather as much information on the CIA as he can, information that was summarized and published in his previously mentioned book, Crossing the Rubicon. Before I read that book, I had never visited the From the Wilderness website. I encourage everyone to browse that site. Many of the connections Ruppert makes between the CIA and drug smuggling/distribution can be found in articles collected under the link C.I.A. & DRUGS.
Browse for a second on the list of articles at that link. Note the titles. Note what must be familiar names in those titles; AIG, Citibank, Citigroup. What are well-publicized financial organizations doing in discussions about drug running? Maybe everything.
Think about it this way. Every transaction in every market has two components, a buyer and a seller. When a stock is sold, most of the time real cash is used for the purchase, not necessarily in currency form, but cash nonetheless. I don't care how good a company's financial future might seem to any number of investors; if they don't have the money to invest, the transaction will not take place. If, as I've noted, a very large portion of our dollars in the United States recently evaporated in this housing meltdown, where are the buyers getting all this money to buy?
This article might shed some answers:
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result. (C'mon, who couldn't emphasize that?)
In Rubicon, Ruppert starts by listing the vast number of Wall St. personalities who have at least casual connections with the intelligence community. Not explosives in the Twin Towers, not phony decoy airplanes without passengers, not faked moon landings: bankers who use their banks to, according to both Ruppert and more recently Mr. Costa, routinely launder drug money through the stock and bond markets.
From the early pages of Rubicon:
. . . (It) is not surprising that the US completed its invasion of Afghanistan in November 2001 in the middle of the opium planting season. Among the first things the US forces and CIA did was to liberate a number of known opium warlords who, they said, would assist US forces. Opuim farmers rejoiced and, amidst reports that they were being encouraged to do so, began planting massive opium crops. . . .
When the harvest of June 2002 came, Afghanistan had again become the world's largest producer of the opium poppy and the world's largest heroin supplier. . . .
When I learned in early 2001 that the Taliban had destroyed Afghanistan's opium crop, I wrote that it was a form of economic warfare that might take a whole lot of money out of the world's banking system and its cooked books. There is always a lag between planting, harvesting, and the cash flows that show up as the heroin moves from farm, to laboratory, through several layers of wholesaling to the streets. The positive cash flow generated by Afghanistan's first post-Taliban harvest would not have started to hit the banking system for maybe six to eight months after June of 2002. in the late summer and fall of 2002 the Dow Jones had sunk to nearly 7,200. As this book is being written (in 2004), and even as American jobs are disappearing, corporate profits and the so-called "non-job" recovery have seen the Dow again at 10,000. . . .
(Michael Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon, New Society Publishers, 2006, p. 68)
So here we have what I rejoiced to find in Ruppert's book: testable claims. One might very well be able to generally track poppy harvests as leading indicators of economic rises and crashes. The degree to which drug revenues can affect our economy depends, after all, on how rich or poor the harvest, processing and subsequent sale.
This suggests two sobering facts right away. First of all, it reflects what I have suspected for some time now, that our investment economy is propped up on shaky ground. Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying that an economy based on narcotics is a good or bad thing. I'm somewhat of a libertarian in that way. The shakiness as I see it comes from the deduction that a stock market so dramatically affected by the harvest of only one crop (or two, if you count coca) remains vulnerable to fluctuations outside investors' control. Anyone who has any money in the stock and bond markets should find this deduction a source of strong despair.
The second sobering moment comes when you dive a bit deeper into Rubicon. Ruppert notes that wherever one finds US oil contractors -- especially Halliburton and its subsidiary Brown and Root -- one finds those drugs moving.
I can remember back in 1979 when big news came from Alaska: the first scraper pig had arrived in Valdez from the North Slopes. These mobile torpedos flow with the oil, scraping accumulated crud from the sides of the pipe, crud that would otherwise plug the line.
When I first saw pictures of the pig leaving the pipe, I immediately had a few thoughts. First, the pipeline was not as I had pictured it. I was a bit destructive as a child, but not in ways that were completely unproductive. I once took apart a water pump and saw that most things that went through it that weren't fluid would be crushed by or caught in the impeller. This pig picture meant that oil was pumped in a manner that avoided, somehow, crushing solid bits but kept the fluid flowing. Which, I supposed at the time, would make sense.
This would also mean that other solid objects could enter the crude flows.
Really. Think about this. For years, cop shows have spoken of supply lines delivering drugs to illicit markets as "pipelines." What if actual pipelines delivered more than just the goo?
It's almost too perfect. Pipes that cross national boundaries, often boundaries between neighbors who don't trust each other but tolerate the pipes for mutual revenues, can move product both known and illicit without raising any eyebrows. All the smuggler would have to do would be to get a job operating the pipeline itself.
Ruppert touched on the reach of such a sweetheart deal in this October, 2000 article (which was excerpted in Rubicon). The myriad connections of Halliburton (of which Cheney was CEO and chief shareholder) and its subsidiaries Brown and Root and Dresser Industries are fascinating to behold.
As described by the Associated Press, during "Iran-Contra" Congressman Dick Cheney of the House Intelligence Committee was a rabid supporter of Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North. This was in spite of the fact that North had lied to Cheney in a private 1986 White House briefing. Oliver North's own diaries and subsequent investigations by the CIA Inspector General have irrevocably tied him directly to cocaine smuggling during the 1980s and the opening of bank accounts for one firm moving four tons of cocaine a month. This, however, did not stop Cheney from actively supporting North's 1994 unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate from Virginia just a year before he took over the reins at Brown and Root's parent company, Dallas based Halliburton Inc. in 1995.
As the Bush Secretary of Defense during Desert Shield/Desert Storm (1990-91), Cheney also directed special operations involving Kurdish rebels in northern Iran. The Kurds' primary source of income for more than fifty years has been heroin smuggling from Afghanistan and Pakistan through Iran, Iraq and Turkey.
Speaking of Dresser Industries, I found this portion of the article fascinating:
Independent news service "newsmakingnews.com," also describes how in 1998, with Cheney as Chairman, Halliburton spent $8.1 billion to purchase oil industry equipment and drilling supplier Dresser Industries. This made Halliburton a corporation that will have a presence in almost any future oil drilling operation anywhere in the world. And it also brought back into the family fold the company that had once sent a plane - also in 1948 - to fetch the new Yale Graduate George H.W. Bush, to begin his career in the Texas oil business. Bush the elder's father, Prescott, served as a Managing Director for the firm that once owned Dresser, Brown Brothers Harriman. (Emphasis mine.)
Yes, Cheney bought the company who once hired both the first George Bush and his father, a man brought up on charges of conspiring with enemy during World War II (ah, but that's a long story). Remember the first George Bush and his 1980 treason? Maybe outdoing your father is a Bush tradition.
Though this post has gone on far too long, I haven't yet even scratched the surface. The connections Ruppert weaves -- with citations -- between the drug trade, Wall St., oil exploration and delivery companies and the covert intelligence agencies in the United States make a dizzying but compelling case for the reader. Many of these revelations were news to me. Some of these bore details I remember vaguely when they happened, but can't somehow remember how they were resolved. Ruppert shows that many of them weren't resolved, thanks to poor oversight by the media, by congress, by the executive branch.
Suffice to say, one must grasp the enormity of this web before one can start to appreciate how the web has any connection to 9/11. To do otherwise would be to try to solve a crime without determining a motive, something Ruppert knows more than a little. As he states in Rubicon's introduction, he learned investigation on the job as a detective for the LAPD. He opens the book:
One thing that no one can dispute is that the attacks of September 11, 2001, were a homicide. . . . While these attacks were arguably one of the most serious homicides ever committed, the investigation and "prosecution" of that case by means other than Dick Cheney's "war that will not end in our lifetimes" has never even approached the legal and logical standards governing all such investigations. No real case has ever been made that would pass first muster of even a junior assistant district attorney.
Without such a court process, we are forced to employ analogies and metaphors. But there remains to us the most successful, fundamental strategy for the prosecution of criminal behavior: demonstrating that a suspect did, or did not, have the means, motive, and opportunity to commit the crime.
(Ruppert, ibid., p. 1.)
The Peak Oil situation outlined in Part II presents an existential crisis for our collective future as not only a country but a civilization, and more than adequate motive; the monies I note in this post provide means. One can do a lot with even just a fraction of $300-600 billion a year in unchecked, unsupervised monies.
When I was a kid, our house and its acreage abutted a dairy farm. We were kids who knew no fence line applied to kids. Fences were but barbed-wire challenges. We wandered freely. And sometimes we had to. We were once assigned to walk the dog of a family friend, a big sloppy St. Bernard named Bernie. "Walking" is too loose a term for a country boy and his sister and their cousins. We walked and Bernie gamboled, jogged and frolicked unleashed in the rough vicinity. The bigger the territory, the more Bernie liked it.
We had wandered into the neighbor's fields, cow pastures currently damp with new rain. Ponds were common but scarce in that area; the ground is generally too porous to hold water for long. There was, however, a pond that day. Here we were debating to try what we had read in Twain was possible, to go swimming in a swimming hole. Here was water, without supervision. Could it be done?
We wisely decided to test the waters. We threw a big fetching stick into the middle of the pond.
Remember that we were visiting a neighbor's dairy field. Here's the story: Dairy farmers in our area routinely flush the effluent from their barns and milking facilities into large holding areas, dilute it, then pump the mix on the fields to fertilize the grass. It's the circle of life. Since it's hilly, the runoff from this industrial-strength sprinkling (one sprinkler sprays over a hundred feet) gets caught in the rain's rivulets and settles in the most convenient depressions. Later rain, we learned, glazes over that pool of crap and looks oh, so inviting.
Bernie charged into the pond to fetch, churning the once crystal clear surface waters into mostly yellow-green cow shit. He didn't swim, not once, but only waded as he bounded, thoroughly soaking his long doggy fur with the filth lying below the glaze.
Then he brought us the stick, and happily shook himself dry.
Mom was not happy.
I'll be honest: I'm not sure I can finish this series. Delving into this content is like taking a header into a cesspool, taking a stick-fetching run at a crap pond. It's one thing to know whodunnit: it's quite another thing to realize how intrinsically woven into our society this whole pond of crap has become, so much so that to shake the powers that be, the forces responsible for the death of so many not just in the initial attacks but in the invasions and executions and "questionable" deaths that followed would be to systemically alter the very fabric of our society for one yet unproven, and to do so at a time that exposes all of us to dangerous changes regardless of those we choose for ourselves.
Nobody likes being covered in shaken shit, especially when the pond seemed so clean on a calm day.
I don't want to be that guy, the one who points too strongly and hits the chair's arm when he relates and rants, the one who slops his drink on the host and other guests with the violent and overpowering gestures he can't seem to control, the one who insists everyone around him is misguided and wrong for believing nothing stinky and vile lies beneath our assumptions on how our world works . . . I don't want to be that guy even if he might be correct. I do want to share what I've learned, but I certainly don't want to ruin a good thing I call my life and my sanity simply because I felt People Should Know.
So I'm going to tread lightly (if I finish at all), simply because Michael Ruppert has done the research, knows the research, and can relate his research far better than I. I do have thoughts to add that Michael doesn't touch, thoughts I might be able to finish.
We'll see.
"(I)t's not too often you meet a woman who is beautiful, intelligent, literate and witty siting in a bar with a bunch of police officers," Ruppert said. "She was definitely somebody I wanted to see more of."
Ruppert got Teddy's phone number at breakfast. They went to dinner the next weekend then spent most of the next 15 months together.
As their relationship grew, Ruppert grew suspicious of this woman, and not in the usual way, the story notes. She had unusual skills, like being able to field strip a gun in seconds, being as good a shot as him (an LAPD cop), being "vastly more versed in the vernacular of law enforcement than any police groupie Ruppert had ever encountered," and, perhaps most important, having no visible means of financial support.
Needless to say, the relationship did not last. She simply left one day without a note:
Five weeks after Teddy's disappearance, Ruppert received a post card from a small town outside Atlanta, Ga. - "Having a great time, wish you were here, Teddy."
One more month after that, 10 weeks after her disappearance, Teddy called Ruppert from New Orleans, where she was "working on something important," and gave him a phone number and an address in suburban Gretna, near the Belle Chase Naval Air Base.
The tale continued:
In July 1977 Ruppert took a weeks vacation and drove to New Orleans pulling Teddy's furniture behind him in a U-Haul trailer.
During his six days in New Orleans, Ruppert reported, he was shot at as he and Teddy stood outside a bar. He and Teddy were followed by car and on foot. In Teddy's apartment he discovered more than a half-dozen phone jacks, including one complicated electrical hookup unlike anything he had ever seen before. He called a friend, a naval and communications officer, described the phone and hookup, and was told it sounded like the KY3 model scrambler phone, which required top secret clearance.
Teddy was cold and stony. She would not sleep with him. She told Ruppert that the smartest thing he could do would be to forget that he had ever met her.
Teddy was visited at night by a friend who wore a 44-caliber Magnum pistol in his boot and talked about the work he was doing for Mafia don Carlos Marcello. During the day, Teddy was visited by an Air Force sergeant named Johnny who brought her Manila envelopes from Belle Chase Naval Air Base filled with what he described as "communiques."
Another friend who was employed by a company specializing in offshore oil rig communications systems said he was helping Teddy see that "some things got moved off the mainland."
Teddy and Johnny gobbled speed and smoked grass that they described in Ruppert's presence as "issued," laughed crazily at Ruppert's ardent, attentive expression.
And what happened when Mr. Ruppert reported these and other, less verifiable details of his visit to his superiors at the LAPD? They questioned his sanity. Indeed, as the linked newspaper story indicates, he became obsessed with his ex and her supposed connections with the government, major oil contractors and organized crime. A decorated and rising star in the Los Angeles Police Department was, just three years after his relationship with a mysterious woman ended, working at a 7-11 and relying upon his parents for financial support.
He kept researching.
This story was published in 1981, about the same time that the events later documented by Gary Webb were unfolding. Since that date, he has worked to gather as much information on the CIA as he can, information that was summarized and published in his previously mentioned book, Crossing the Rubicon. Before I read that book, I had never visited the From the Wilderness website. I encourage everyone to browse that site. Many of the connections Ruppert makes between the CIA and drug smuggling/distribution can be found in articles collected under the link C.I.A. & DRUGS.
Browse for a second on the list of articles at that link. Note the titles. Note what must be familiar names in those titles; AIG, Citibank, Citigroup. What are well-publicized financial organizations doing in discussions about drug running? Maybe everything.
Think about it this way. Every transaction in every market has two components, a buyer and a seller. When a stock is sold, most of the time real cash is used for the purchase, not necessarily in currency form, but cash nonetheless. I don't care how good a company's financial future might seem to any number of investors; if they don't have the money to invest, the transaction will not take place. If, as I've noted, a very large portion of our dollars in the United States recently evaporated in this housing meltdown, where are the buyers getting all this money to buy?
This article might shed some answers:
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result. (C'mon, who couldn't emphasize that?)
In Rubicon, Ruppert starts by listing the vast number of Wall St. personalities who have at least casual connections with the intelligence community. Not explosives in the Twin Towers, not phony decoy airplanes without passengers, not faked moon landings: bankers who use their banks to, according to both Ruppert and more recently Mr. Costa, routinely launder drug money through the stock and bond markets.
From the early pages of Rubicon:
. . . (It) is not surprising that the US completed its invasion of Afghanistan in November 2001 in the middle of the opium planting season. Among the first things the US forces and CIA did was to liberate a number of known opium warlords who, they said, would assist US forces. Opuim farmers rejoiced and, amidst reports that they were being encouraged to do so, began planting massive opium crops. . . .
When the harvest of June 2002 came, Afghanistan had again become the world's largest producer of the opium poppy and the world's largest heroin supplier. . . .
When I learned in early 2001 that the Taliban had destroyed Afghanistan's opium crop, I wrote that it was a form of economic warfare that might take a whole lot of money out of the world's banking system and its cooked books. There is always a lag between planting, harvesting, and the cash flows that show up as the heroin moves from farm, to laboratory, through several layers of wholesaling to the streets. The positive cash flow generated by Afghanistan's first post-Taliban harvest would not have started to hit the banking system for maybe six to eight months after June of 2002. in the late summer and fall of 2002 the Dow Jones had sunk to nearly 7,200. As this book is being written (in 2004), and even as American jobs are disappearing, corporate profits and the so-called "non-job" recovery have seen the Dow again at 10,000. . . .
(Michael Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon, New Society Publishers, 2006, p. 68)
So here we have what I rejoiced to find in Ruppert's book: testable claims. One might very well be able to generally track poppy harvests as leading indicators of economic rises and crashes. The degree to which drug revenues can affect our economy depends, after all, on how rich or poor the harvest, processing and subsequent sale.
This suggests two sobering facts right away. First of all, it reflects what I have suspected for some time now, that our investment economy is propped up on shaky ground. Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying that an economy based on narcotics is a good or bad thing. I'm somewhat of a libertarian in that way. The shakiness as I see it comes from the deduction that a stock market so dramatically affected by the harvest of only one crop (or two, if you count coca) remains vulnerable to fluctuations outside investors' control. Anyone who has any money in the stock and bond markets should find this deduction a source of strong despair.
The second sobering moment comes when you dive a bit deeper into Rubicon. Ruppert notes that wherever one finds US oil contractors -- especially Halliburton and its subsidiary Brown and Root -- one finds those drugs moving.
I can remember back in 1979 when big news came from Alaska: the first scraper pig had arrived in Valdez from the North Slopes. These mobile torpedos flow with the oil, scraping accumulated crud from the sides of the pipe, crud that would otherwise plug the line.
When I first saw pictures of the pig leaving the pipe, I immediately had a few thoughts. First, the pipeline was not as I had pictured it. I was a bit destructive as a child, but not in ways that were completely unproductive. I once took apart a water pump and saw that most things that went through it that weren't fluid would be crushed by or caught in the impeller. This pig picture meant that oil was pumped in a manner that avoided, somehow, crushing solid bits but kept the fluid flowing. Which, I supposed at the time, would make sense.
This would also mean that other solid objects could enter the crude flows.
Really. Think about this. For years, cop shows have spoken of supply lines delivering drugs to illicit markets as "pipelines." What if actual pipelines delivered more than just the goo?
It's almost too perfect. Pipes that cross national boundaries, often boundaries between neighbors who don't trust each other but tolerate the pipes for mutual revenues, can move product both known and illicit without raising any eyebrows. All the smuggler would have to do would be to get a job operating the pipeline itself.
Ruppert touched on the reach of such a sweetheart deal in this October, 2000 article (which was excerpted in Rubicon). The myriad connections of Halliburton (of which Cheney was CEO and chief shareholder) and its subsidiaries Brown and Root and Dresser Industries are fascinating to behold.
As described by the Associated Press, during "Iran-Contra" Congressman Dick Cheney of the House Intelligence Committee was a rabid supporter of Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North. This was in spite of the fact that North had lied to Cheney in a private 1986 White House briefing. Oliver North's own diaries and subsequent investigations by the CIA Inspector General have irrevocably tied him directly to cocaine smuggling during the 1980s and the opening of bank accounts for one firm moving four tons of cocaine a month. This, however, did not stop Cheney from actively supporting North's 1994 unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate from Virginia just a year before he took over the reins at Brown and Root's parent company, Dallas based Halliburton Inc. in 1995.
As the Bush Secretary of Defense during Desert Shield/Desert Storm (1990-91), Cheney also directed special operations involving Kurdish rebels in northern Iran. The Kurds' primary source of income for more than fifty years has been heroin smuggling from Afghanistan and Pakistan through Iran, Iraq and Turkey.
Speaking of Dresser Industries, I found this portion of the article fascinating:
Independent news service "newsmakingnews.com," also describes how in 1998, with Cheney as Chairman, Halliburton spent $8.1 billion to purchase oil industry equipment and drilling supplier Dresser Industries. This made Halliburton a corporation that will have a presence in almost any future oil drilling operation anywhere in the world. And it also brought back into the family fold the company that had once sent a plane - also in 1948 - to fetch the new Yale Graduate George H.W. Bush, to begin his career in the Texas oil business. Bush the elder's father, Prescott, served as a Managing Director for the firm that once owned Dresser, Brown Brothers Harriman. (Emphasis mine.)
Yes, Cheney bought the company who once hired both the first George Bush and his father, a man brought up on charges of conspiring with enemy during World War II (ah, but that's a long story). Remember the first George Bush and his 1980 treason? Maybe outdoing your father is a Bush tradition.
Though this post has gone on far too long, I haven't yet even scratched the surface. The connections Ruppert weaves -- with citations -- between the drug trade, Wall St., oil exploration and delivery companies and the covert intelligence agencies in the United States make a dizzying but compelling case for the reader. Many of these revelations were news to me. Some of these bore details I remember vaguely when they happened, but can't somehow remember how they were resolved. Ruppert shows that many of them weren't resolved, thanks to poor oversight by the media, by congress, by the executive branch.
Suffice to say, one must grasp the enormity of this web before one can start to appreciate how the web has any connection to 9/11. To do otherwise would be to try to solve a crime without determining a motive, something Ruppert knows more than a little. As he states in Rubicon's introduction, he learned investigation on the job as a detective for the LAPD. He opens the book:
One thing that no one can dispute is that the attacks of September 11, 2001, were a homicide. . . . While these attacks were arguably one of the most serious homicides ever committed, the investigation and "prosecution" of that case by means other than Dick Cheney's "war that will not end in our lifetimes" has never even approached the legal and logical standards governing all such investigations. No real case has ever been made that would pass first muster of even a junior assistant district attorney.
Without such a court process, we are forced to employ analogies and metaphors. But there remains to us the most successful, fundamental strategy for the prosecution of criminal behavior: demonstrating that a suspect did, or did not, have the means, motive, and opportunity to commit the crime.
(Ruppert, ibid., p. 1.)
The Peak Oil situation outlined in Part II presents an existential crisis for our collective future as not only a country but a civilization, and more than adequate motive; the monies I note in this post provide means. One can do a lot with even just a fraction of $300-600 billion a year in unchecked, unsupervised monies.
When I was a kid, our house and its acreage abutted a dairy farm. We were kids who knew no fence line applied to kids. Fences were but barbed-wire challenges. We wandered freely. And sometimes we had to. We were once assigned to walk the dog of a family friend, a big sloppy St. Bernard named Bernie. "Walking" is too loose a term for a country boy and his sister and their cousins. We walked and Bernie gamboled, jogged and frolicked unleashed in the rough vicinity. The bigger the territory, the more Bernie liked it.
We had wandered into the neighbor's fields, cow pastures currently damp with new rain. Ponds were common but scarce in that area; the ground is generally too porous to hold water for long. There was, however, a pond that day. Here we were debating to try what we had read in Twain was possible, to go swimming in a swimming hole. Here was water, without supervision. Could it be done?
We wisely decided to test the waters. We threw a big fetching stick into the middle of the pond.
Remember that we were visiting a neighbor's dairy field. Here's the story: Dairy farmers in our area routinely flush the effluent from their barns and milking facilities into large holding areas, dilute it, then pump the mix on the fields to fertilize the grass. It's the circle of life. Since it's hilly, the runoff from this industrial-strength sprinkling (one sprinkler sprays over a hundred feet) gets caught in the rain's rivulets and settles in the most convenient depressions. Later rain, we learned, glazes over that pool of crap and looks oh, so inviting.
Bernie charged into the pond to fetch, churning the once crystal clear surface waters into mostly yellow-green cow shit. He didn't swim, not once, but only waded as he bounded, thoroughly soaking his long doggy fur with the filth lying below the glaze.
Then he brought us the stick, and happily shook himself dry.
Mom was not happy.
I'll be honest: I'm not sure I can finish this series. Delving into this content is like taking a header into a cesspool, taking a stick-fetching run at a crap pond. It's one thing to know whodunnit: it's quite another thing to realize how intrinsically woven into our society this whole pond of crap has become, so much so that to shake the powers that be, the forces responsible for the death of so many not just in the initial attacks but in the invasions and executions and "questionable" deaths that followed would be to systemically alter the very fabric of our society for one yet unproven, and to do so at a time that exposes all of us to dangerous changes regardless of those we choose for ourselves.
Nobody likes being covered in shaken shit, especially when the pond seemed so clean on a calm day.
I don't want to be that guy, the one who points too strongly and hits the chair's arm when he relates and rants, the one who slops his drink on the host and other guests with the violent and overpowering gestures he can't seem to control, the one who insists everyone around him is misguided and wrong for believing nothing stinky and vile lies beneath our assumptions on how our world works . . . I don't want to be that guy even if he might be correct. I do want to share what I've learned, but I certainly don't want to ruin a good thing I call my life and my sanity simply because I felt People Should Know.
So I'm going to tread lightly (if I finish at all), simply because Michael Ruppert has done the research, knows the research, and can relate his research far better than I. I do have thoughts to add that Michael doesn't touch, thoughts I might be able to finish.
We'll see.