"If Jesus Christ were to stand up today, he’d be gunned down cold by the CIA."
– The The, "Armageddon Days," Mind Bomb, Epic Records, 1991

A major strategic principle states that the success of most domestic rebellions, insurgencies or revolutionary movements is closely dependent upon the level of interest by or aid from an outside power. History has confirmed this principle — that, with few exceptions, any insurgency, regardless of its size and extent, cannot survive without the support of a wide spectrum of the native populace and some kind of sympathetic and influential external ally. Rebels cannot successfully undermine the state’s authority unless they possess the financial, logistical and political support of agents whose influence equals or surpasses the domestic government’s power. These agents may be internally based (like the French anti-Gaullist resistance), but, in general, they tend to be an external third power.

In the West, this hypothesis has always been used to explain the existence of Soviet-Chinese backed "left-wing" terrorism in the 1970s and Islamic-backed terrorism today and is a worldview still held by the US-based Center for International Affairs (a favorite home-away-from-home for Nixon national security adviser Henry Kissinger and Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski) an institution that endorsed Center member David Galula’s statement that "no revolutionary war can remain a purely internal affair." The Center for International Affairs (and its close cousin, Georgetown University’s Center for Strategic and International Studies — CSIS) employed this worldview to promote the perception the USSR (or in some cases, China) lay behind all incidents of international terrorism. The prestige and influence of CSIS disciples in the US intelligence community was so great that when the CIA’s own analysts couldn’t find documented proof of a global Soviet-led terrorist conspiracy, Reagan’s CIA director, William Casey, chose to rely solely on the information of journalist Claire Sterling in her sensationalistic 1981 book, The Terror Network, one which made the preposterous and unverified claim the KGB was somehow behind every terrorist act on the planet since at least 1968.

Director Casey once shouted to his analysts in fury, "I paid $13.95 for this (Sterling’s book) and it told me more than you bastards whom I pay $50,000 a year." The irony was that Sterling’s book had made extensive use of source material that was in fact already part of a long-running CIA disinformation scheme. The Agency’s "wise old men" also enthusiastically pushed the "Kremlin did it" assertion, one that soon morphed into the widely held belief that Iran and Libya (and in some cases, Iraq and Syria — both conveniently onetime Soviet Mideast client states) were solely responsible for the promotion of radical Islamic fundamentalism throughout the world.

However, while the mainstream media has been willing to exaggerate and even fabricate the truth of these claims, they have remained silent in regard to the US government’s deep involvement in the active promotion of that very terrorism they claim to bemoan. A deeper look into the issue clearly shows the key players in this terrorism originate from regions that are firmly in the Western sphere of influence. Although the Islamic Jihad has numerous Iranian and Iraqi members (and has used Iran, Iraq Syria and Libya as safe havens), its major influences (and leaders) come from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Algeria — nations where Western political and cultural influence is extensive. Moreover, in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, Islamic fundamentalism could not have bloomed without the CIA’s deliberate covert assistance — a fact that is apparent when one examines the recent history of the region.

Those who have employed religious faith to justify endless war are thus much closer to the White House, UN headquarters and 10 Downing Street than they are to Tehran, Baghdad, Damascus or Tripoli. However, it isn’t just among Islam’s minority that racism or arrogance is exploited. A huge global network of government intelligence agencies, a self-styled "anti-Communist" element in the Vatican, multinational corporations and banks, the underworld and powerful fugitive Nazis has been in place for over a half-century.

Since the earliest days of the Cold War, the new totalitarians have manipulated the world’s ethnic, political and religious tensions by using this huge clandestine network to surreptitiously gain more power for themselves. The influence of this network reaches Latin America, the USA and Western Europe, and, today, in Russia, China and in the conflict within the former Yugoslavia. There are even indicators that elements of this espionage monster have reached as far as Africa and Australasia. Through a combination of governments and their authorized enforcers, powerful individuals, corporations, banks and various secret societies, the liberty of the world’s peoples are being gradually destroyed. State-sponsored terrorism, direct or indirect, has become the new means by which the aspiring dictators’ old strategy of divide and conquer is being implemented on a global scale.

In July 1977, Pakistan’s prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was deposed (and later executed) in a CIA-backed coup led by Bhutto’s army chief of staff, General Mohammed Zia Al-Haq. Zulfikar’s daughter, Benazir, placed under house arrest by Zia, believed the motive behind this coup and her father’s subsequent death sentence was a reaction to his desire (with French technical assistance) to turn Pakistan into a nuclear power in response to neighboring India’s similar program inaugurated three years before, one in which he succeeded. Henry Kissinger warned that Bhutto’s nuclearization policy would result in Pakistan being turned into a "horrible example."

Once Zia had taken over, the CIA moved in, and its overseas station in Islamabad soon became its largest while Congress paradoxically imposed an arms embargo on the country. Carter Administration National Security Adviser Brzezinski wanted to use Pakistan as a base to help turn the nearby USSR’s Moslem provinces against the Kremlin and thus eventually destabilize the entire country. Thus, despite Congress’s arms embargo, the CIA and Pakistan’s secret service, the ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) launched the largest covert operation in CIA history, two years before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Radical Islamic fundamentalism was to be deliberately promoted to attain specific Cold War political objectives. In return, General Zia, banking on his image as the great Islamic crusader, built up a loyal following amongst the Pushwar people who inhabited the Pakistani-Afghani border and was quick to staff his military and security forces with numerous Pushwars.

When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, Brzezinski, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and CIA Director Stansfield Turner, via Pakistan’s ISI, included Afghans fighting the Soviets in their pro-Islamic/anti-Soviet policy as part of trying to transform the conflict into a large-scale holy war, an Islamic jihad. This action, it was believed would make this war the USSR’s Vietnam. In a way, it did, but Afghan conflict soon turned out to be much more than that. For the next decade, the CIA and the ISI recruited, armed, trained and funded almost 100,000 hardcore muhajedin from 40 different Islamic countries, commanded by a then-obscure Harvard educated civil engineer and Arab construction tycoon named Osama bin Laden, as crusaders for the USA’s proxy war. This Islamic Foreign Legion’s rank and file was largely unaware its jihad was actually being fought on behalf of and paid for by Uncle Sam. (The irony is that the Uncle Sam was equally unaware that it was foolishly financing a future jihad against itself.)

The arrival of Soviet glasnost and perestroika amid the bloody military stalemate in Afghanistan in the mid-1980s meant nothing to General Zia and he continued to publicly preach that he had secured his power as the world leader of militant anti-Communist Islam. Zia appeared not even to have had a glimmer of suspicion when in 1984 the Reagan Administration, via the CFR (another refuge for Kissinger, Brzezinski and their globalist allies), strenuously lobbied for Benazir Bhutto’s release from her seven-year-long house arrest. The three front men for this task were Democratic Senators Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Clairborne Pell of Rhode Island as well as State Department official Peter Galbraith (a onetime college classmate of Benazir’s). The Kennedy clout aside, it was an interesting selection. The former Sen. Pell had been a ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee while Galbraith later became US Ambassador to Croatia.

Benazir Bhutto’s release had proved useful in undermining the "increasingly uncooperative" General Zia, and in 1985 she won the seat of Chairman of the General Assembly. Zia contested the election results and remained a political threat to Bhutto (and an embarrassment to the USA) until his sudden death in a mysterious (and possibly deliberately caused) 1986 plane crash. It wasn’t until 1993 (after two dissolved governments and two assassination attempts later) that Benazir was able to wrest presidential power away from Zia’s sidekick and successor, President Ghulam Ishaq Kha (Chairman of the Senate under Zia’s administration). As time passed, her comparatively secure presidential position was attributed by many to be as a result of her belief in the extensive use of human intelligence (spies and informers) and her ruthless approach to geopolitics. Despite Benazir Bhutto’s assistance in unseating both Zia and Kha, she was clearly not the "puppet leader" the CFR and the CIA had in mind.

Meanwhile, in 1989, after being severely bloodied by 10 years of relentless, inconclusive warfare, the Red Army had withdrawn from Afghanistan, leaving behind a civilization reduced to rubble. The CIA continued to send funds and arms, but the expense had become astronomical, and more money was needed. In response, the muhajedin ordered local farmers to plant, harvest and process opium as a form of what they called a "revolutionary tax." Over the next six years, the ISI set up hundreds of small opium-processing plants across Afghanistan. The Pakistan-Afghanistan border had become the world’s biggest producer of heroin, and is now the single biggest source of the heroin on North American and European streets. The annual profits, estimated to be about $150 billion yearly, were invested in the continued training and arming of Islamic militants who eventually graduated into staffing radical Moslem insurgencies from the Middle East to the Balkans.

Benazir knew full well who was behind the promotion of Islamic terrorism. Just before her spring of 1995 visit to the USA she had held a news conference where she stated, "The question that arises is, who was the mastermind that saw that the World Trade Center should be bombed and that I should be eliminated from the [1993] elections…? I would think that it is those individuals who were involved in the Afghan jihad because they were then brainwashed to believe that it was the duty of any Moslem to spread Islam through terror."

Her remarks, in politicoese, translated as "I have a secret: shall I reveal it?," pinched a nerve in the world’s press. The 18-year-long US arms embargo that had been imposed upon Pakistan in the Carter administration in reaction to Islamabad’s refusal to halt nuclear weapons research was lifted shortly before her 1995 visit. The slim majority in Congress’s authorization to do so indicated the presence of intense lobbying on the issue. Pakistan then received the $368 million in military equipment originally purchased under the Zia administration, and the revival of tens of millions of dollars worth of economic aid and US loan guarantees. It also meant increased International Monetary Fund assistance. As far as Congress and the public knew, Pakistan wasn’t required to do or offer anything in return for this largesse.

The Clinton Administration’s sudden goodwill towards Pakistan at the time was evidence that all interested parties didn’t want the issue of the February 1993 New York Trade Center bombing to ever resurface — in particular, the CIA’s connection to the accused Egyptian and Pakistani bombers. Years before, in October 1981, following the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, the US and Egyptian governments had chosen to step up their infiltration of the Egyptian Islamic fundamentalist groups — a move that occurred partly in response to the CIA’s desire to avoid another Sadat assassination, and partly to use it as a propaganda weapon against Libya and Iran (and now Iraq). Thus, by 1990, the situation in Egypt was such that no Islamic militant could take a bath without the Egyptian or US intelligence services knowing about it.

The actual degree of this infiltration’s success is best demonstrated by the 1995 trial of the accused New York World Trade Center bombers. The prosecution evidence included videotape recorded by an FBI informant, a former Egyptian army officer who offered to defuse the planted truck bomb but was refused by the FBI. The witness denied that he was an Egyptian intelligence agent; however, US officials admitted at the time, "He’s no choirboy." The informer received over $2 million for his "assistance." This is an interesting contradiction of a US law that states that it is illegal to use American taxpayers’ money to pay a bribe to a convicted murderer.

In 1996, the Taliban — then one of many small marginal sects of dangerous, hardline Islamic fundamentalists supported by the US government — had shot and terrorized its way into absolute power in Afghanistan. It was funded by the ISI, that old friend of the CIA, and supported by many Pakistani political parties. The Taliban unleashed a reign of terror and its first victims were, unsurprisingly, their own people. The Taliban closed down girls’ schools, dismissed women from government jobs, and enforced sharia laws under which women deemed to be "immoral" are stoned to death, and widows guilty of being adulterous are buried alive. Given the Taliban government’s lousy human rights record, it seems unlikely that it will in any way be intimidated or swerved from its purpose by the prospect of war, or the threat to the lives of its subjects.

Afghanistan was not the only nation whose Islamic fundamentalists were deliberately aided by the West. In Algeria and France, powerful forces with ulterior motives have also long encouraged Islamic guerrillas. Algerian Moslem fundamentalists received intelligence data and logistical support from elements within France’s own government. In 1996, the Police Judiciae (the French version of the FBI) accused Jean Louis Dèbre, the French Interior Minister, of misdirecting the security forces for "political motives." Likewise, French police have been accused of cooperating with the Spanish secret service in the creation of the GAL (anti-terrorist liberation group) death squads in their war against Basque separatists. Witnesses have stated under oath French police, police informers and former OAS members assisted with GAL activities within France.

The OAS was a large French terrorist organization violently opposing attempts at Algerian independence during the 1950s and early ’60s, a group which counted numerous Corsican gangsters as members and its close links to Islamic Algerian radicals. As far back as 1961, Senior OAS Commander Jean-Jacques Sysini discussed with the CIA’s Paris station chief the possibility of a French-Algerian Moslem alliance. President Kennedy, though, quashed the CIA-OAS-Muslim Republic scheme on the advice of his political advisers before it could be implemented.

However, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963, a crime which some believe involved as a triggerman (among others) one Rene Soutre, a powerful Corsican mobster and OAS member who was killed by an unknown assailant in Mexico City nine years later. JFK was barely in his grave when the CIA’s use of covert operations increased dramatically. The CIA took advantage of Kennedy’s sudden and bloody death as well as Lyndon Johnson’s thorough disdain for the subtleties of foreign policy to increase aid to the OAS and other non-governmental Moslem groups in France and Algeria to ensure neither the French nor an "unfriendly" (read: Soviet-influenced) government would obtain control of the large Algerian oilfields. The exposure of OAS involvement puts another perspective upon the Algeria-related terrorist attacks within France and Algeria itself. The French have long accused Paris and US/British oil companies of collaborating in support of the OAS and Moslem rebels.

However, the OAS wasn’t the only government-backed underground goon squad of the era. During the 1954—62 Algerian crisis a similar but separate group gradually emerged from the shadows. Like the OAS, it was a large cabal comprised of many powerful individuals with apparent (if not necessarily real) staunch religious-based anti-Soviet beliefs and the OAS’s (and the CIA’s) desire to rid France of the nonaligned Charles de Gaulle, a group named Il Gladio ("The Sword"). In 1990, then-Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti briefed Parliament in open session on Il Gladio — a covert but influential network of an estimated 15,000 agents provocateurs that operated under various guises in many other European nations, not just in Italy. He explained Il Gladio had been originally set up as the CIA’s Operation Stay Behind in 1947 and, nine years later, was renamed "Operation Gladio."

Stay Behind’s/Gladio’s initial mission was to reduce the considerable influence of French and Italian Communists right after W.W.II via hefty cash payments to "cooperative" Italian and French politicians, diplomats and influential businessmen (later, this would include Belgian, Austrian, German, Spanish and Greek ones as well) and by employing what was called a "strategy of tension." This "strategy" made frequent use of scare tactics, media smear campaigns as well as the services of freelance mercenaries, government intelligence officers, hardened career criminals and Mafia hitmen to carry out bloody shootings and bombings where groups like the Italian "Red Brigade" and the German "Baader-Meinhof Gang" were either blamed directly or infiltrated and used as "fronts" for these activities.

These deadly attacks included the Mafia’s orchestration of the Red Brigade’s notorious 1978 kidnap and murder of staunchly anti-Mafia Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro. The strategy in these high-profile crimes was to manipulate citizens’ fear of "terrorism" to push for more government police power. Gladio employed many former Axis intelligence officers who, under former General Reinhard Gehlen and Eisenhower’s CIA director, Allen Dulles, had been recruited immediately after W.W.II to help create the CIA. One of these officers was the infamous Licio "The Puppetmaster" Gelli, a former high-ranking Italian Fascist "Blackshirt" and longtime head of the powerful Vatican-Mafia Masonic Lodge founded in 1895, called "Propaganda Due" or P2.

Gelli, who had served with Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War, helped organize the underground "ratlines" responsible for smuggling scores of powerful Nazis and their sympathizers out of Europe immediately after World War II. He was aided by Father Krunoslav Draganovich, a Croat Catholic priest and close friend of fascist (Ustasha) Croatia’s notorious wartime leader, Dr. Ante Pavelich. While Gelli worked with the respective intelligence agencies (which included those of the CIA, MI5 and fugitive Gestapo officials), Fr. Draganovich secured generous Vatican support for the ratline plan.

Gelli and Draganovich charged the fleeing fascists up to 40 per cent of their money that they split between themselves. Nazi SS Sturmbannfuehrer (Major) Klaus "The Butcher of Lyon" Barbie (a longtime member of the influential neo-pagan Thule Society) was also helped to flee in this manner, and US Army picked up the tab (via unwitting US taxpayers) as part of their recruitment of Barbie as an agent. In 1954, Gelli himself took advantage of his own creation, escaping from a Swiss prison and fleeing to Argentina where he resided as a friend of Argentine dictator Juan Peron. Another of Gelli’s longtime friends, Dr. Pavelich (who had arrived in Buenos Aires with Gelli’s help seven years before) served as Peron’s secret police chief until his death in 1957, while Klaus Barbie, who fled Europe a year after Gelli had, held a similar position in bordering Bolivia under the alias of Klaus Altmann.

During the 1970s, both Gelli and Barbie/Altmann (along with California investment swindler and CIA operative Ronald Rewald) were instrumental in helping Argentina secure large numbers of sophisticated French Exocet antiship missiles, one that sank the British frigate HMS Sheffield during Argentina’s 1982 war with Britain over the Falkland Islands (Islas de Malvinas). Funds for these missiles were obtained by Rewald from a bogus but cash-rich Napa, California real estate investment trust called Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham & Wong, simply known as BBRDW, a CIA front which laundered drug money and scammed scores of ordinary Napa and San Francisco Bay area homeowners and investors out of millions of dollars.

On July 17, 1980, Barbie/Altmann, commanding secret police and military officers loyal to the corrupt General Luis Garcia Meza, and aided by P2, the CIA, Colombian drug lords and Argentine military intelligence, prevented the inauguration of freely-elected incoming President Siles Zuazo and his Democratic Popular Unity Party in a bloody debacle that came to be popularly called "The Cocaine Coup." General Meza was installed as president while Barbie’s men hunted down and killed as many pro-Zuazo government officials, journalists, students and labor leaders as they could find, though Zuazo himself survived the purge. One Argentine intelligence officer who participated in the coup, Lt. Alfred Mario Mingolla, later described to German journalist Kai Hermann Barbie’s role in the matter:

"Before our departure [to Bolivia], we received a detailed dossier on [Barbie]," Mingolla said. "There it stated that he was of great use to Argentina because he played an important role in all of Latin America in the fight against Communism."

The Barbie-led "Cocaine Coup" gave Bolivian narcotics traffickers full run of the country and helped to consolidate the power of the rising Colombian Medellin cartel. Bolivian cocaine exports reportedly totaled an estimated $850 million in the two years after the "Cocaine Coup." In October 1982, angry voters weary of brutal military rule returned the redoubtable Siles Zuazo to the presidency. A few months later, Zuazo quickly approved the extradition of Barbie to France. In 1987, Barbie was tried and convicted of war crimes (chief among them his sadistic torture-murder of highest-ranking French Resistance member ever captured by the Nazis, Jean Moulin) and sentenced to life in prison where he died in September 1991.

As noted above in the Bolivian example, both Latin American and Caribbean nations have been badly harmed by the deeply corrosive effects of these odious CIA/P2/Vatican/Ratline exports, becoming homes to some of the worst cases of state-sponsored terror in existence — aided by corrupt governments in those nations, by groups like Alpha 66 and Omega 7 — both "anti-Castro" Cuban exile organizations based in south Florida, and by CIA goons like William Walker. Walker, who organized and led the bloodthirsty government "death squads" in El Salvador during the late 1970s, also fabricated the "Racak Massacre" hoax. This hoax (conclusively exposed as such by Finnish forensic physicians and French journalists) claimed heavily armed Serb police wantonly massacred hundreds of unarmed Albanian villagers in the Kosovo village of Racak in August 1998. Walker’s hoax was employed by the Clinton administration to smear the Serb government in the world press — a government that was fighting hardcore Albanian Moslem KLA insurgents trained and armed by the US government — as a "brutal ethnic cleanser."

Before the likes of Walker hit the scene, another of the Agency’s golden boys was the late Dan Mitrione, a former Richmond, Indiana police chief, graduate of the infamous International Police Academy in Washington DC (closed in 1974) and "interrogation" (torture) specialist. For ten years, the appallingly sadistic Mitrione, working undercover as a US Agency for International Development official, taught torture techniques to the Brazilian and Uruguayan secret police. In 1970, Mitrione, a lifelong close friend of the notorious Rev. Jim Jones, founder and head of the ill-fated "People’s Temple" religious cult, (which had been manipulated by the CIA in some form since at least the early 1970s) was kidnapped and then killed by Uruguayan Tupamaro guerrillas. Actor Yves Montand played the Mitrione character in Greek filmmaker Costa Gavras’ 1972 production, State of Siege.

Meanwhile, back in Italy, P2 had been for years suspected of clandestinely carrying out terrorist acts for which other groups were blamed and was also suspected of being behind the 1976 assassination of Italian judge Vittorio Occorsio. At the time, Judge Occorsio was investigating P2 links to neo-Nazi organizations. His death killed his P2 investigation but not before he had uncovered evidence that Operation Gladio and P2 operatives were instrumental in the 1969 Piazza Fontana and 1974 Bologna train station bombings (a total of 113 dead and some 185 injured.) In reaction, P2 officially "dissolved" itself — perhaps in name but not in substance.

Even so, however, the supposedly defunct P2 was dealt a severe blow in 1981 when Italian police, attempting to clarify Licio Gelli’s business connections to powerful Banco Ambrosiano (BA) officials and P2 members, financier Michele Sindona and bank president Roberto Calvi, discovered a P2 membership-roll document bearing 962 names. The list included over 50 Italian generals and admirals, two cabinet members, 36-plus senior Carabinieri (police officers) as well as numerous journalists, Catholic clergymen and entertainers.

These revelations toppled Prime Minister Arnaldo Forlani’s administration and sent shock waves through NATO headquarters in Brussels. Yet Tina Anselmi, director of the now disbanded Italian parliamentary commission investigating P2 and its activities, was quoted by David Yallop in his 1984 book, In God’s Name, as saying, "P2 is by no means dead. It still has power. It is working in the institutions. It is moving in society. It has money, means and instruments still at its disposal. It still has fully operative power centers in South America. It is also able to condition, at least in part, Italian political life." In turn, if events in France (whose secret service, the SDECE, prevented Gelli’s arrest in 1982 by the Italian secret service SIFAR) and Spain were any indicators, it would appear this colossal web of espionage and terror is far from untangled and is in fact growing exponentially.

If Gladio operatives were the front line troops in Gelli’s operation, then P2 was its "shadow government." It was expensive to operate all of this, however, and one insight into how Gelli was intimately connected with ruling circles is demonstrated in his secret 1974 meeting with Alexander Haig, retired Army general and former NATO Supreme Commander who had become Nixon’s White House chief of staff. Haig assured Gelli of continued funding for both P2 and his various black ops. This is where the doomed Roberto Calvi entered the picture. Both Calvi’s BA and the Vatican’s Instituto per de Riligione (IOR) became conduits for laundered money of all sorts from all over the planet. Under the direction of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus of Cicero, Ill., head of the IOR, money was flowing into the Holy See’s coffers from a number of sources, and included funds for Operation Gladio/P2 and drug money from organized crime figures.

There have been several published reports that Cardinal Albino Luciana, elected Pope John Paul I in July 1978, was intent on ending the crooked activities of the IOR as well as the tenure of Archbishop Marcinkus. Various hypotheses have been proposed to explain how 33 days after his election to the papacy, an otherwise healthy John Paul I had been found in his bed dead of an apparent and sudden heart attack. In any case, the new Pope — Cardinal Karel Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II — was elected as successor, and he continued the "business as usual" agenda. The failed May 1981 attempt on John Paul II’s life by one Mehmet Ali Agca, a member of the "radical Islamic" Turkish Gray Wolves organization, didn’t affect "business as usual" at the IOR either. American Enterprise Institute member and former Reagan administration aide (and Freeper) Dr. Michael Ledeen received $100,000 from the Italian military intelligence officer and P2 member Francesco Pazienza for deliberately creating and disseminating the widely accepted but patently false "Agca-Bulgarian/Soviet connection" to the failed papal assassination. Ledeen, who is also believed to be a P2 member along with Henry Kissinger and Alex Haig, had also helped convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard originally get his job in the Department of the Navy.

Meanwhile, BA was in dire financial straits. Calvi began skimming from illicit funds flowing through BA to prop up existing bad loans, and even agreed to "launder" drug money for gangsters. He reportedly sought financial aid from a Catholic organization called the Opus Dei ("God’s Work") a secretive but large and politically influential masochistic/self-flagellation cult of which John Paul II is a member (as is FBI Director Louis Freeh), and traveled to London to meet with group’s treasurer in hopes of selling it a minority stake in BA. But Calvi’s good luck had run out. He’d double-crossed too many powerful people for too long and his wholesale skimming operation threatened to set off a massive political scandal. On June 17, 1982, Calvi was found hanging by a rope around his neck from a bridge in Rome, dead. A decade later, a Mafia defector told investigators Calvi had been killed on the orders of a British drug dealer named Francesco DiCarlo.

Two years after Calvi’s death, in 1984, the Vatican received official diplomatic recognition from the U.S. government, and soon over $12 million in American covert ops funds were being funneled through the Vatican Bank to aid the underground Solidarity trade union in its battle against the tottering Communist regime in Poland, and to help ensure both the breakup of the USSR and solidify the Roman church’s position in a post-Soviet Eastern Europe.

Italian court documents made public in July 1998, four months before Licio Gelli’s death, traced the flow of illicit funds during the 1970s and 1980s from powerful Sicilian mobsters to investments in the Vatican Bank. In connection with the "spectacular failure" of BA, the London Daily Telegraph reported, "The Holy See resisted all attempts by magistrates investigating the crash to force the now-retired Marcinkus to submit to Italian justice over the crash." Another twist involved a new probe by Italian authorities into Calvi’s murder, and a Daily Telegraph story that a "Vatican finance figure" (possibly Bishop Marcinkus) was present at the meeting where the plan to kill Calvi was discussed.

Why does the Vatican’s involvement in the BA/Calvi affair, like CIA involvement in the Islamic Jihad, keep cropping up? The criminal organizations behind the scandal had links to the IOR and the Vatican hierarchy. In late August 1998, it was announced Michele Giordano, Archbishop of Naples, was under investigation for "usury, extortion and membership in a criminal group." Government prosecutors and members of Italy’s Finance Guards (tax agents) served the archbishop with a search warrant at his "palace." In reaction, Giordano threatened a diplomatic incident and claimed his residence, being an office of the papacy, enjoyed diplomatic immunity and extraterritorial status. Even so, investigators still seized a large number of paper documents and electronic files on floppy disks.

The Cardinal’s younger brother, Mario, had been arrested earlier that month in connection with Rome’s probe of the Bank of Naples. Two other Bank of Naples officials — including a former manager — were charged with extortion and running an illegal loan-sharking operation that charged interest rates as high as 400%. "Investigators have traced back to the cardinal and his administration cheques totaling more than 250,000 pounds cashed by his brother…" noted the Telegraph at the time.

P2 isn’t the only force of covert global totalitarianism that remains at large and in business. Similar groups are prevalent throughout Europe and the world as a whole. German, US, British and Austrian mercenaries served with Croat Ustasha and Bosnian Moslem troops in 1994—95 in their brutal campaign to kill or forcibly expel some 300,000 ethnic Serbs from their ancestral homes in Croatia and Bosnia. Yet again, the Balkans is serving its long-running historical role as a laboratory for "the great powers" to develop and test new methods of civil war, genocide and state-sponsored terror, with potentially deadly international consequences. The US and British governments denied the predominance of diehard Ustasha and radical Moslem elements within the respective Croat and Bosnian governments while, along with Germany and Israel, were both secretly supplying arms to those same elements from day one. Germany had sent nearly all of the Soviet-style arms used by the defunct East German forces (ranging from Kalashnikov assault rifles and 130mm field guns to SAMs and attack helicopters) to the Croats.

A great deal of weapons and funds also came from Pakistan, Indonesia and possibly even from Iran and Iraq. Logistical support was provided to the Croat and Bosnian armies by the USA, allied UN troops and, according to local rumors, members of the French Foreign Legion in Sarajevo. According to the relative of a high-ranking Indonesian military official, one such airlift took place in August 1994 when New Zealand UN troops brought, along with their own gear, Indonesian-made small arms earmarked for the Bosnian Moslem forces.

This report has not been positively verified. However, it is on record that in early September 1994, shortly after the arrival of New Zealand troops in that former Yugoslav republic, Bosnian Moslem forces launched a brutal counteroffensive against the Serbs using large stores of munitions and large numbers of new heavy weapons, previously noticeable only by their absence. How did they get so many of these arms so suddenly? Perhaps it is just coincidence that, a week later, Indonesia awarded New Zealand Telecom an NZ$600 million contract to develop Indonesia’s wireless communications network.

At the same time, New Zealand television had run an investigative report on the connection of a joint NZ-Israeli airline, Pacific Express, to the illegal arms trade. The documentary cited the airline’s flight routes and destinations that included Islamabad, Christchurch, Sarajevo and Somalia — flight paths closely matching the developing heroin trafficking routes running into North America at that time, echoing the messy Iran-Contra affair (and the nefarious activities of the CIA airline, Air America, in Southeast Asia and, later, in Latin America) where promotion of large-scale narcotics and weapons trafficking and terrorism and the pursuit of more political power were justified in "the interests of national security."

While Pope Bush declares a holy war on Islam after the calamitous Sept. 11th, 2001 attacks (oddly enough, for which no group, Moslem or otherwise has yet claimed responsibility and amid allegations US authorities ignored several warnings of just such an attack months ago) and continues business as usual with Moslem Syria and a nuclear-armed Moslem Pakistan, the US government still freely supports the murderous Albanian Moslem KLA in Kosovo and Macedonia, a US government which even terror-bombed Serbia in 1999 — the same Serbia that was being attacked and terrorized by that very KLA, a terrorist organization which controls a huge and rapidly growing regional prostitution, extortion and narcotics trafficking network — the heroin coming from those highly profitable Taliban-controlled opium poppy fields along the Afghan-Pakistani border — and is exporting it to the rest of Europe, all on the US taxpayer’s tab.

What does all of this mean? Well, it seems to mean that the USA today is the late Roman Empire. Oxford historian Arnold Toynbee once explained that Rome, after defeating the Carthaginians, Phoenicians and quelling Spartacus’s slave revolt (which destroyed the last vestiges of a republican Rome as well) became what he called "the universal state" — an imperial entity, much like China became after the "Era of Competing States." (480—222 BC.) The USA became the world’s latest "universal state" after the collapse of the USSR in 1991 — alias the "world’s sole superpower." A universal state is like a shark — it cannot stop swimming or eating or it will die — an empire needs constant expansion and plunder or it too will die, and guess what, in the case of empires — in a given era there’s only so much territory to go around and only so much plunder to be had.

In order to help keep this process of plunder in motion, foreign "straw man" enemies have to be constantly created, (Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Khomeini, the Chinese, etc.) even if out of thin air and then aggressively "pursued," but not necessarily destroyed. Police state methods then have to be used domestically to force "consensus" as to these "enemies" and what to be done or not done with them. Dissent is labeled "treason" because it resists "commonly agreed upon" imperial objectives. Ohio GOP Sen. Bob Taft said in August 1943 that interventionism abroad, no matter how well-intentioned, eventually leads to totalitarianism at home.

Moreover, those being conquered and plundered by this "universal state" soon get quite resentful and aggressive and by definition, over time, there are more and more resentful subjects — just like the barbarian "hordes" who eventually sacked an overextended and tottering Rome for the final time in the 400s and the subjugated Mexican Indian tribes who gleefully allied with the invading Spaniards to destroy the oppressive Aztec civilization in the 1520s. So, was Sept. 11, 2001 the first "sack" of the "New Rome?" It sure seems like it. Ruby Ridge and Waco were possibly the USA’s "failed 1905 Revolutions" — echoes of far bigger things to come?

We as a people are so comprehensively manipulated. Our leaders have had a lot of practice, since before the days of Ivan Pavlov and his dogs. The "hit" on World Trade Center and the Pentagon were, like it or not, brilliant examples of sophisticated unconventional warfare. From a psychological viewpoint — it was even more effective. In psychological warfare — a group or person maintaining or gaining control of or destroying widely recognized monuments, territories or buildings is vital to convincing the populace of that group’s or person’s effectiveness or legitimacy. It’s why Richard Nixon tried to hold on to the White House (Presidency) and it’s why Bill Clinton would not resign. It’s why the Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace, and why Gen. MacArthur returned with his troops to the Philippines in 1944, even though strategically it was not necessary for the US victory over Japan, and in fact may have prolonged the war in the Pacific. These and similar acts create solid psychological foundations supporting the legitimacy of and justifying anything that follows from these actions.

This leads me to believe the whole Sept. 11th disaster was some kind of elaborate psychological operation, that US government intelligence agencies were involved indirectly somehow. Thinking back to Germany’s actual "Operation Himmler" in August 1939 (where German troops in Polish army uniforms burned a German radio station in the German-Polish border town of Gleiwitz to justify invading Poland) and the CIA’s proposed "Operation Northwoods" in 1962 (where Cuban Communists would be blamed for the sudden bombing of a jetliner or hotel in Miami or for the failure of any US manned space mission) — I don’t hesitate to entertain the notion that power-hungry, out-of-control Medusa-like Moloch of the US government will employ as many "Reichstag Fires" and kill scores of innocent people as necessary to extend its own power. Since the days of the demonization of Spartacus by Crassus, Caesar and Pompey and Robespierre’s and Danton’s deliberate use of violent "agents provocateurs" in the French Revolution to advance their own autocratic power — the song remains the same.

Michael E. Kreca lived in San Diego and had been a financial reporter for Knight-Ridder, Business Week and the Financial Times of London. On February 11, 2006, he was shot to death by a government cop.

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The US Gun Control Act of 1968 was lifted nearly word for word from the German Weapons Control Law enacted exactly 30 years before. The supreme irony of GCA68 was that many US firearms manufacturers had supported it at the time — mainly because their market share was being cut into significantly by less expensive but equally high-quality imported firearms, especially small-caliber handguns (not to mention cut-price surplus US firearms being reimported back into the USA from several European and Latin American countries). Moreover, Ruger & Co. supported the Clinton Administration’s 1994 "assault weapons ban" and in exchange got its popular "Mini-14" rifle deleted from the BATF "hit list" of "prohibited assault rifles" while Colt Industries’ equally popular competing product, the similar "AR-15," stayed on the list.

Foolishly, the NRA supported GCA68 at the time (something it doesn’t like to discuss these days,) and was editorializing on and off for such a law for some six years, two justifications being the desire to preserve the domestic firearms industry in the interests of "national security" (how convenient those two words are!) and to presumably protect it from cheaper foreign imports (see the American Rifleman, Aug. 1962 edition). (So that’s how the auto industry got the idea for "domestic content legislation" in the early 1980s!) NRA membership took a massive hit in reaction to GCA68 and stayed flat for years afterward. JPFO founder Aaron Zelman has done a great deal of research in this area.

The 1937 Marijuana Tax Act was modeled after the 1934 National Firearms Act, the first federal gun control law in US history (actually, the NFA is a tax law, and that is why most pro-gun people have the wrong approach to getting it repealed). The NFA and MTA are both unconstitutional if one uses as a precedent a 1968 USSC decision called US vs. Grosso, when a 1950 federal law imposing a tax on gamblers was ruled unconstitutional on 4th and 5th Amendment grounds, accepting the plaintiff’s argument that those who complied with this law were being specially targeted by the government for surveillance, harassment and criminal investigations as "criminal suspects" (and many were), even if there was no evidence of any lawbreaking.

I recall reading long ago about one Merrill Jenkins, who, by the late 1950s was a renowned mechanical engineer at a St. Louis-based firm called National Rejectors Inc., a firm that designed and made mechanical coin acceptance devices for vending machines, pay phones and the like.

In 1959, Jenkins received a visit from some Treasury agents who were apparently concerned about the possibility of counterfeiters making large quantities of inexpensive phony slugs that could be easily used in machines that NR manufactured. Jenkins, believing he was helping protect the public from counterfeiters, told the T-men that a nickel-plated copper disk (costing only a few cents each to make) of the same size, shape and mass of each of the present silver coins in circulation could "fool" coin acceptance devices.

Six years later, under the auspices of the 1965 Coinage Act signed into law by LBJ, our silver coinage was replaced by the exact cupronickel disks described by Jenkins. Three years later, all remaining silver certificates in circulation were recalled and exchanged for Federal Reserve Notes (not silver as required by law). In reaction to what he believed was the further "fiatization" of US currency, Jenkins quit NR and self-published numerous books on money, two of the most notable being Treatise on Monetary Reform and Free Money.

Note: It is not known whether this work has ever been published. Thank you Aeryn-Sun for contributing this piece.

Michael E. Kreca lived in San Diego and had been a financial reporter for Knight-Ridder, Business Week and the Financial Times of London. On February 11, 2006, he was shot to death by a government cop.

The Best of Michael E. Kreca

Dr. Sidney Gottlieb
CIA Technical Services Staff director for the MK-ULTRA program

Eighteenth-century German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel long ago developed, among other things, what he called the principle of “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” to explain the process of deliberately enacted social disorder and change as a road to power. To achieve a desired result, one deliberately creates a situation (“thesis”), devises a “solution,” to solve the “problems” created by that situation (“antithesis”), with the final result being the ultimate goal of more power and control (“synthesis”). It is unsurprising Karl Marx and his disciples like Lenin and Trotsky, as well as the US government in its so-called War On Drugs, made this process a keystone of their drive for total control of all individual actions that, in their views, were not, in Mussolini’s terms, “inside the state” and thus controllable by the same.

In September 1942, OSS director and Army Maj. Gen. William "Wild Bill" Donovan began his search for an effective "truth serum" to be used on POWs and captured spies. Beginning with a budget of $5,000 and the blessing of President Franklin Roosevelt, he enlisted the aid of a few prominent physicians and psychiatrists like George Estabrooks and Harry Murray as well as former Prohibition agent and notorious Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) director Harry Anslinger.

The OSS/FBN team first tested a potent marijuana extract, tetrahydrocannabinol acetate (THCA), a colorless, odorless substance, lacing cigarettes or food items with it, and administering them to volunteer US Army and OSS personnel, all who eventually acquired the nickname "Donovan’s Dreamers." Testing was also conducted under the guise of treatment for shell shock.

Donovan’s team found that THCA, which they termed "TD," for "truth drug," induced "a great loquacity and hilarity," and even, in cases where the subject didn’t feel physically threatened, some useable "reefer madness." Peyote, morphine and scopolamine were judged too powerful to be used in effective interrogation. In light of all this, Donovan concluded, "The drug defies all but the most expert and search analysis, and for all practical purposes can be considered beyond analysis." The OSS did not, however, end the program. By that time, faced with the terrifying ship losses the USA was suffering from German U-boats, Donovan pressed on, hoping to find some effective chemical means to help interrogate captured U-boat sailors.

In May 1943, George Hunter White, an Army captain, OSS officer and former FBN agent, gave standard cigarettes laced with THCA to an unwitting August "Augie Dallas" Del Grazio, an influential New York City gangster. Del Grazio, who had by then had done prison stretches for assault and murder, had been one of the Mafia’s most notorious enforcers and narcotics smugglers. He operated an opium alkaloid factory in Turkey and was a key participant in the long-running Istanbul/Marseilles/NYC heroin pipeline commonly known as the "French Connection." Influenced by the THC, Del Grazio (who was also helping to smuggle spies and Mafiosi into German-occupied Italy) revealed volumes of vital information about underworld operations, including the names of several high-ranking city and state officials who took bribes from the Mob. Donovan was encouraged by the results of White’s tests when he wrote, "Cigarette experiments indicated that we had a mechanism offering promise in relaxing prisoners to be interrogated."

Unsurprisingly, the extensive wartime German experiments with various hallucinogenic drugs at the Dachau concentration camp, directed by one Dr. Hubertus Strughold, later honored as "the father of aviation medicine," aroused great interest in the USA especially after an October 1945 Navy technical mission to Dachau reported in detail on Strughold’s work. So great, in fact, that when the OSS and its successor, the CIA, imported 800 German scientists of various specialties under the auspices of the infamous "Project Paperclip" during 1945—55, it made sure to include Dr. Strughold.

Dr. Strughold’s barbaric “medical experiments,” for which his subordinates were tried and convicted as war criminals at Nuremburg, were nothing more than a series of bizarre and unspeakably brutal tortures. Even so, he learned a lot about human behavior and mescaline, a natural alkaloid present in the peyote cactus. Mescaline, long central to many Native American religious rituals and first chemically isolated in 1896, is a phenethylamine whose ergoline skeleton is also contained in lysergic acid (a tryptamine).

Sandoz Labs chemist Dr. Albert Hofmann also discovered a lysergic acid derivative called ergonovine, a medication used to retard excessive postpartum uterine bleeding. Based on his work with ergonovine, Dr. Hofmann first derived d-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate-25 (LSD, a refined alkaloidal liquid byproduct of a rye fungus, ergot) in a series of experiments in Zurich in 1938. He used the naturally occurring lysergic acid radical, the common item in all ergot alkaloids, as the major component of the substance. Further experiments in this vein yielded psilocybin, derived from the Mexican Psilocybe cubensis mushroom, hydergine, essential today in the improvement of cerebral circulation in geriatric patients, and dihydroergotamine, an important ingredient in blood pressure medication.

The well-read and broadly educated Dr. Hofmann knew ergot had a long natural and cultural history as both medicine and poison. Ancient Greek midwives used to give an ergot-based, gruel-like drink, called kykeon, to their patients about to give birth. Kykeon was also consumed during the autumn Eleusinia, the ancient Greek agricultural festival celebrated in honor of the goddess of agriculture, Demeter. Across the Atlantic, sacramental Maya morning glories, beautifully depicted at the ancient Mayan temple-palace complex at Teotihuacán, Mexico, dating to about 1450, also contain ergot-based alkaloids.

However, the mindset the CIA had in its drug research work was far different from that of Dr. Hofmann’s. To our Cold War spymasters, ex-Nazis like Dr. Strughold were definitely evil, but they were definitely useful as well. This pervasive amoral pragmatism led, of course, to the extensive and notorious MK-ULTRA experiments in which, for nearly 25 years, thousands of everyday Americans, both military and civilian, were heavily dosed with numerous very potent artificial psychoactive drugs, often without their knowledge or consent.

This phenomenon of the obsessive "interests of national security" expediency combined with our celebrity-obsessed pop culture that gleefully raises and shamelessly promotes snake oil hustlers as well as the pharmaceutical industry’s pricey "pill for every ill" philosophy, was a form of incompetence and arrogance far more hazardous than any synthetic alkaloid ever developed and came as no surprise to those like Dr. Hofmann. LSD, invaluable in psychiatric treatment — actor Cary Grant was cured of alcoholism by carefully administered doses of the drug under close medical supervision — is thousands of times more potent than the traditional herbal mixtures. In fact, it is thousands of times more potent than the milder of the entheogenic alkaloids. It is effective at doses of as little as a ten-millionth of a gram, which makes it 5,000 times more potent than mescaline. It should not be taken without training or supervision.

The Navy tested mescaline as part of its 1947—53 Project CHATTER. MK-ULTRA was first organized in 1949 by Richard Helms under the direction of Allen Dulles as Project BLUEBIRD. Two years later, it was renamed ARTICHOKE (after one of Dulles’s favorite foods) then termed MK-ULTRA in 1953, finally becoming MK-SEARCH in 1965 until the program’s “official termination” eight years later. MK-ULTRA was directly responsible for the wide underground availability of LSD, phencyclidine (PCP — also called “angel dust”), dimethyltryptamine (DMT), 2,5-dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine (STP) and other powerful synthetic psychoactive drugs in the 1960s. In the early 1950s, the CIA and the Army had contacted Sandoz requesting several kilograms of LSD for use in the test program. Dr. Hofmann and Sandoz refused this request, so Director Dulles persuaded the Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical luminary Eli Lilly (later the pioneers of and chief cheerleaders for the widely prescribed antidepressant Prozac) to synthesize the drug contrary to existing international patent accords — making the US government and Lilly the first illegal domestic manufacturers and distributors of LSD.

These were distributed via the agency’s sometime allies in organized crime and through the FBI’s counterintelligence programs (COINTELPROs) directed against various activist groups of the period. The actual definition of the term MK-ULTRA remains unclear but a former Army Special Forces captain, John McCarthy, who ran the CIA’s Saigon-based Operation Cherry which targeted the Cambodian ruler Prince Sihanouk for assassination, claimed that MK-ULTRA stood for "Manufacturing Killers Utilizing Lethal Tradecraft Requiring Assassination."

On April 10, 1953, in a speech at Princeton University, CIA director Allen Dulles (further feeding the already widespread but misguided fear about the high effectiveness of the alleged Chinese "brainwashing" of US POWs in the Korean conflict) warned that the human mind was a "malleable tool," and that the "brain perversion techniques" of the Reds were "so subtle and so abhorrent" that "the brain becomes a phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside genius over which it has no control."

Propaganda, in its simplest form, is condemning one’s opponent publicly for doing what one is already doing privately. Dulles, of course, was that very "outside genius." Three days after warning assembled Princetonians of the disturbing ramifications of these techniques, he had directed MK-ULTRA researchers to perfect them. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA’s expert on lethal poisons, (who reputedly was the inspiration for director Stanley Kubrick’s bizarre Dr. Strangelove character played by Peter Sellers in the 1964 film of the same title) headed up the operation as director of the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff and, via a front organization called "The Society For Human Ecology," distributed $25 million in drug research grants to Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley and other institutions.

Meanwhile, George Hunter White, of THCA-laced "Lucky Strikes" fame, had returned to the FBN (now the DEA) at war’s end and continued to research behavior modifying drugs. In 1955, when MK-ULTRA was running full throttle, he was a high-ranking FBN administrator who helped the Agency develop and implement a similar operation called Midnight Climax. In this infamous scheme, "safehouses" staffed with prostitutes were established in San Francisco. The hookers lured men from local taverns back to these safehouses after their drinks had been previously spiked with LSD. White’s team secretly filmed the subsequent events in each house. The purpose of these so-called "national security brothels" was to enable the CIA to experiment with the use of sex and mind altering drugs to extract information from test subjects, and it was planned, from spies, POWs, defectors and saboteurs.

Midnight Climax was terminated after eight years when CIA Inspector General John Earman charged that "the concepts involved in manipulating human behavior are found by many people within and outside the Agency to be distasteful and unethical." He stated that "the rights and interest of U.S. citizens were placed in jeopardy." Earman further noted LSD "had been tested on individuals at all social levels, high and low, native American and foreign." Richard Helms, MK-ULTRA’s bureaucratic godfather, summarily rebuffed Earman’s charges, claiming that "positive operational capacity to use drugs is diminishing owing to a lack of realistic testing. Tests," Helms continued, "were necessary to keep up with the Soviets." However, Helms reversed himself a year later when testifying before the Warren Commission investigating the JFK assassination, claiming that "Soviet research has consistently lagged five years behind Western research."

Upon retirement from civil service in 1966, White wrote a startling farewell letter to Dr. Gottlieb. He reminisced about his Midnight Climax work. His comments were frightening:

"I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest?"

Where else indeed, but as a member of what would later become the hypocritical War on (Some) Drugs?

By the end of the 1950s the CIA was funding just about every qualified LSD researcher and psychologist it could find, through such contractors as the Society for the Study of Human Ecology, the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, and the Geschichter Fund for Medical Research. Author John Marks, in his 1975 book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, identified the CIA’s LSD research pioneers as:

• Dr. Robert Hyde at Boston Psychopathic Hospital
• Dr. Harold Abramson at Mt. Sinai Hospital and Columbia University in New York City
• Dr. Carl Pfeiffer at the University of Illinois Medical School, Champaign-Urbana
• Dr. Harris Isbell of the NIMH-sponsored Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Ky.
• Dr. Louis Jolyon West at the University of Oklahoma, Stillwater
• Dr. Harold Hodge at the University of Rochester (N.Y.)

However, there were prominent critics of the US government’s activities, the earliest among them being Aldous Huxley, the famed author of the chillingly prescient 1932 novel Brave New World (which described a totalitarian society whose population was completely controlled by forcible administration of a government-mandated "happiness drug" called "soma.") While taking mescaline supplied by famed English surgeon Dr. Humphrey Osmond (who discovered the close similarities between the molecular structures of adrenaline and mescaline), Huxley completed another work entitled The Doors of Perception in 1954. In that book, the novelist described his intensely personal vision of the world around him:

"I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing — but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like u2018grace’ and u2018transfiguration’ came to my mind&Those idiots (MK-ULTRAns) want to be Pavlovians; Pavlov never saw an animal in its natural state, only under duress. The u2018scientific’ LSD boys do the same with their subjects. No wonder they report psychotics."

Obviously, this isn’t a typical CIA spook writing, and, given Huxley’s incredible mind, creative vision and compassion, we’re not talking about a moron or a mental case either. Which means that giving someone mescaline while they’re being tortured or lobotomized or electrocuted at Dachau will only tell you a lot about torture, lobotomies and electrocution, not about mescaline.

As author Marks noted:

"It would become supreme irony that the CIA’s enormous search for weapons among drugs — fueled by the hope that spies could control life with genius and machines — would wind up helping to create the wandering, uncontrollable minds of the counterculture."

Admiral’s son and musician Jim Morrison led The Doors, [of Perception] a quartet of Liverpudlians sang of "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds," while the Rolling Stones dropped transparent hints about "Mother’s Little Helper." To take a lesson from Orwell, what is more important about the 1960s, indeed, about any period in history, is not so much what really happened as how that period is remembered publicly decades later.

The public memories of that particular era were carefully manipulated in great part by the deliberate creation and promotion (via television and the recording industry) of the phony and in reality quite small "drug/rock/hippie subculture." The first underground LSD labs were actually set up by the FBI in 1963 in both New York City and San Francisco. Many began to incorrectly confuse the ancient medical art of herbalism with the shenanigans of amateur basement "flower-power" and "biker" chemists. Overenthusiastic pitchmen like social psychologist Dr. Timothy Leary and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg sadly failed to sufficiently stress that key difference, although the technically competent Leary clearly understood the artificially high potency of LSD.

Leary (and his longtime associate, psychologist Richard Alpert) matured professionally in a CIA-funded research world. In 1948, Leary, then a UC Berkeley graduate student, attended the yearly convention of the left-wing American Veterans’ Council in Milwaukee. There he met CIA officer Cord Meyer. Meyer’s professional specialty was infiltrating and discrediting various organizations deemed "un-American" or "disloyal." Meyer persuaded Leary to help him. Leary acknowledged Meyer’s influence, crediting him with "helping me understand my political-cultural role more clearly."

During 1954—59 Leary was the director of clinical research and psychology at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland, Calif. The personality test that made him famous, "The Leary," was actually used by the CIA to test prospective employees. A grad school classmate of Leary’s, CIA contractor Frank Barron, worked with the Berkeley Institute for Personality Assessment and Research, which was funded and staffed by CIA psychologists. In 1960 Barron, with government funding, founded the Harvard Psychedelic Drug Research Center. Leary followed Barron to Harvard, becoming a lecturer in psychology where he remained for three years. Leary’s Harvard associates included former chief OSS psychologist Harry Murray, who had monitored the early OSS "truth serum" experiments, and numerous other knowing CIA contractors. One of Dr. Murray’s many test subjects was a Harvard undergraduate math major named Theodore Kaczynski.

In the spring of 1963, Leary and Alpert left Harvard and founded the International Foundation for Internal Freedom (IFIF) — later renamed the Castalia Foundation — on a 2,500-acre estate in the small upstate New York community of Millbrook. There, the pair of psychologists continued their hallucinogenic drug research and soon became the chief investigative target of an ambitious Dutchess County district attorney named G. Gordon Liddy. Multimillionaire William Mellon Hitchcock generously bankrolled the founding and operation of IFIF/Castalia and later financed a huge black-market LSD manufacturing operation.

Even so, Leary carefully stressed proper mindset, setting and dosages in a book he coauthored with Alpert and Ralph Metzner, The Psychedelic Experience. It was based on an ancient Tibetan shamanic manual, The Book of the Dead. The latter work referred to an herbal tea similar in content to but far less powerful than LSD, and insisted on mental discipline as an inherent part of the process. The Incans of Andean South America, for instance, were an invaluable source of medical knowledge, and used whole herbs like ayahuasca and the coca leaf, not their artificially refined alkaloids, and spiritual technique was also taught as a key part of the process.

However, much like the crusading "drys" before and during Prohibition, the MK-ULTRA inquisitors with their police state mentality in concert with misinformed and emotionally distressed LSD users, had found their "devil drug," (the term used by the Harrison Tax Act advocates in the 1910s and Marijuana Tax Act backers in the 1930s) replete with tragic tales of already emotionally distressed and lonely young people quite unprepared for such an artificially powerful entheogen. It was also well within CIA policy to randomly distribute LSD laced with the lethal poison strychnine so as to create "horror stories" useful as propaganda. Dr. Hofmann himself chemically confirmed the presence of pure strychnine in several random street samples of LSD.

Consistent with its policy of deliberately confusing the beneficial ancient herbs with extremely dangerous synthetic alkaloid derivatives, the CIA surreptitiously distributed of these synthetic compounds, termed "psychedelics," to the public. One of them was STP, originally developed as an incapacitating agent for the Army in 1964 at Dow Chemical. Dow even made the STP formula public information three years later. This potent synthetic put many unsuspecting people on a three-day trip, and sent many, hysterical with anxiety, to the emergency room. That, of course, was the purpose of its distribution.

During 1955—75, the Army tested LSD (termed EA-1729) and PCP on several of its enlisted men at what was then the headquarters of its Chemical Corps, Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, something described in detail by Bill Kurtis in a televised 1995 A&E Investigative Reports segment titled "Bad Trip to Edgewood." The CIA also tested PCP (in conjunction with electroshock "therapy" and sleep deprivation) at Allain Memorial Institute in Montreal under the direction of the notorious Canadian psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Cameron. The Chemical Corps (whose commander in the 1950s, Lt. General William Creasy, advocated a new military strategy of LSD-based "nonkill warfare") then stockpiled PCP for use as a "nonlethal incapacitant." Excess doses of PCP, reported the CIA, could "lead to convulsions and death." Soon, PCP was flooding the streets.

Edgewood also received an average of 400 product "rejects" a month from major US pharmaceutical firms. These "rejects" were actually drugs found to be commercially useless because of their demonstrated hazards and numerous undesirable side effects. In 1958, Edgewood obtained its first sample of a "reject" called phenylbenzeneacetic acid (BZ) developed by pharmaceutical giant Hoffmann-LaRoche, later known by its street nickname as "brown acid."

BZ (some 10,000 times as powerful as LSD) inhibits the production of hormones which aid the brain’s transfer of messages and instructions across nerve endings (synapses), thereby severely disrupting normal human perceptual, behavioral and sensory patterns. Its effects generally last about three days, although symptoms—migraine headaches, giddiness, disorientation, auditory and visual hallucinations, and erratic if not maniacal behavior — could persist for as long as six weeks. "During the period of acute effects," noted an Army physician, "the person is completely out of touch with his environment." The Army also developed artillery shells and rockets with warheads able to deliver large dosages of BZ to selected targets.

In the summer of 1964, Beat novelist Ken Kesey (the author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and who had been an MK-ULTRA test subject at Stanford along with Allen Ginsberg and Grateful Dead musician Bob Hunter) launched a yearlong cross-country trip in a Day-Glo painted school bus filled with friends called "Merry Pranksters." The Merry Pranksters distributed thousands of doses of LSD along the way (a phenomenon colorfully described in author Tom Wolfe’s 1968 book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) supplied by one Ronald Hadley Stark. Stark (who died in 1984) was a CIA operative fluent in five languages with access to unlimited public funds and numerous high-level contacts in business and government throughout the world.

For instance, when the underground manufacture and distribution of LSD was suddenly derailed in 1969 due to the scarcity of its key ingredient, ergotamine tartrate, and increasing federal law enforcement pressure, Stark, via the Laguna Beach, Calif.-based Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a small group of local surfers led by chemist Nicholas Sand, got it quickly back on track. For five years, Stark, aided by the Castle Bank of the Bahamas (which pioneered the art of money laundering for the Mob) and his contacts in a French pharmaceutical firm, facilitated the mass production and distribution (via the Brotherhood and other groups) of an even more powerful strain of LSD nicknamed "orange sunshine." This firm also manufactured BZ. Stark (who operated LSD labs in Brussels and Paris as well) claimed he was going to supply orange sunshine as an offensive weapon to CIA-backed Tibetan rebels fighting the Chinese occupation.

Stark also was a close friend of the Los Angeles founders of a small breakaway Scientology sect called "The Process Church of the Final Judgement," English expatriates Robert DeGrimston Moore and Mary Ann McClean.

Regular attendees of the Process Church included members of the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones and other prominent pop performers as well as an ex-convict and wannabe rock musician named Charles Manson. Manson and his followers became heavy users of orange sunshine — the trademark "bad acid" of the day — which they were all on when, on Manson’s orders, they carried out the brutal August 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders. When Stark (who is believed to have distributed an estimated 50 million doses of LSD during his Agency career) was arrested for drug trafficking in Bologna in 1975, Italian magistrate Giorgio Floridia ordered his release on the grounds that he had been a CIA agent since 1960. Judge Floridia documented and justified this using a list of Stark’s numerous intelligence contacts.

These were and are all classic government COINTELPRO-style tricks — this is how natural herbs and their mild, pharmaceutical-grade derivatives were quickly and easily made lethal and consequently demonized. How was this done? First, foolish claims were made that there was no difference between safe whole herbs and their potentially deadly ultra-refined alkaloids; next, the best of the traditional herbs and the milder of the pharmaceutical-grade alkaloid derivatives were made unavailable, and finally, the streets were flooded with potentially deadly synthetics. Deliberate perversions of science like angel dust continue to be a great propaganda tool for our diehard drug warriors, and the worn catchall excuse of “the interest of national security” is used to justify appalling covert drug capers ranging from CIA-sponsored heroin production and trafficking in Southeast Asia in the 1960s to the Bush/Clinton/Mena/Nicaragua cocaine-for-arms smuggling schemes in the 1980s.

These Constitution-shredding police state methods were adapted from the Nazis and the Soviets by and large and were applied by the CIA, NSA, DEA, BATF, IRS and FBI against us. Scores of groups, ranging from the American Indian Movement and Black Panthers to militias and religious organizations like the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas (which the government first falsely charged as illegal methamphetamine dealers in order to get a Posse Comitatus Act waiver to use military force against them) were either disrupted by agents provocateur-style riots, bombings and armed standoffs, smeared in the mainstream news media through the "Reichstag Fire" approach, or, in the case of the Davidians, physically exterminated. The War on Some Drugs is merely a horrible extension and intensification of these tried-and-true Hegelian methods, a "war" in which we all lose.

Short Bibliography

• Bowart, Walter; Operation Mind Control, Dell Publishing, 1978.
• Delgado, Jose, Physical Control of the Mind, Harper, NYC, 1969.
• Huxley, Aldous, The Doors of Perception, Harper, NYC, 1954.
• Lee, Martin; Shalin, Bruce, Acid Dreams, 1986.
• Marchetti, Victor, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, New York, 1974.
• Marks, John, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, New York, 1975.
• Masters, Robert & Houston, Jean, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience: The Classic Guide to the Effects of LSD on the Human Psyche, 2000.
• McCoy, Alfred, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Lawrence Hill, 1972, rev. 1991.
• Meerloo, Joost, The Rape of the Mind, Crowell, NYC, 1956.
• Skinner, B.F., Beyond Freedom and Dignity," Knopf, NYC, 1971
• Smith, Harris R. OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency, Berkeley, 1972.
• Stevens, Jay, Storming Heaven — LSD and the American Dream, 1998.

Michael E. Kreca lived in San Diego and had been a financial reporter for Knight-Ridder, Business Week and the Financial Times of London. On February 11, 2006, he was shot to death by a government cop.

Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

~ Sir John Harrington (1561-1612)

War is the health of the State.

~ Randolph Bourne (1886-1918)

Q: Why did the USA intervene in what became World War II?

A.: Because if we didn't, we'd now all speak German or Japanese.

Q. Who benefited the most from the defeat of Germany and Japan in WWII?

A. The USA.

This, with variations, has been the standard Q&A about the history of and the events surrounding our entry into that war and usually ends further discussion. But the standard answers, on closer examination, are just plain wrong.

Why?

The first question first, since it takes a bit of detailed explanation.

The German General Staff, which had codenamed contingency invasion/occupation plans for dozens of nations (even one for the never-tried conquest of Switzerland called "Operation Christmas") had none for the USA. Neither did the Japanese High Command. Neither nation's economy was ever fully mobilized for total war to the extent the USA's and Great Britain's had been. An invasion of North America would have required a major and early commitment by Berlin and Tokyo of financial, human and material resources to two forms of warfare, the first being large, long-range strategic bomber, transport and fighter escort aircraft, something neither Germany nor Japan had done. Both nations had superb short and medium range fighter/interceptors and medium bombers, but no bombers like the four-engine US B-17 or, later, the British Lancaster.

The second major and early commitment would have to have been to a sizable "blue water" naval "long-range power projection" force. Germany (unlike Japan) didn't have this and did not seriously plan on acquiring it—something requiring numerous aircraft carriers, auxiliary and amphibious ships, carrier-based combat and reconnaissance aircraft, plus a sizable force of marines. There were minor proposals made early in the war to build an aircraft carrier to be christened "Frederick the Great" along with two large cruisers, all of which "land animal" Hitler soon nixed.

The German submarine threat, although still quite dire in W.W. II (thanks in great part to FDR's long and controversial delay in ordering the Navy to conduct aggressive antisubmarine warfare operations off the U.S. East Coast), was not nearly as potent as it was in W.W. I. This was in large part due to defensive seagoing escort and convoy tactics developed in 1917-18 and improved submarine detection techniques, like active sonar, created in the interwar years. Submarines alone could not effectively project broad-based, large-scale offensive naval power great distances (something demonstrated brilliantly by Admirals Nimitz, Mitscher and Halsey and the aircraft carrier-based "task force" concept in the Pacific war against Japan).

The goal of the German U-boat campaign remained much the same as that in W.W.I, chiefly defensive "commerce raiding;" attempts to cut off the flow of needed supplies to Great Britain and, this time, to the USSR as well. Its surface navy, consisting mainly of smaller sized "pocket" battleships as well as cruisers and some destroyers and patrol boats, operated in much the same commerce raider fashion – voyaging about individually attacking and sinking tankers and freighters in the North and South Atlantic.

Germany's navy had not fought a major set-piece surface battle since Jutland in 1916, in which it was tactically victorious against but strategically defeated by the British. The Royal Navy forced the scuttling of one of the war’s earliest effective German surface commerce raiders, the pocket battleship “Graf Spee,” off the Uruguayan coast at the end of 1939. The German Navy was thrashed by the British in the smaller 1940 naval battle at Narvik, Norway, the former losing several destroyers and patrol craft in that engagement. By the time the battleship “Bismarck” was sent to the bottom by two British warships, the HMS Rodney and King George, in May 1941, the German surface fleet threat was all but eliminated.

This was the illustrious naval record of a nation supposedly planning to and capable of invading and conquering the USA?

Hitler failed to subdue Great Britain in 1940 (in good part due to the moral strength of the Brits, a great deal of US aid, and because conquering Britain was not part of the Fuehrer's eastern living space plan), so he would have had little chance of succeeding against the much more distant, much larger, more populous, and better-armed USA. Even Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (the chief planner of the Pearl Harbor attack) spoke warningly of "a rifle behind every blade of grass" when discussions of invading the USA came up.

A successful invasion of North America by both Nazi Germany and Japan would have also required a high degree of interservice and binational coordination and cooperation, something that even in the best of forces and times is difficult to achieve and maintain. The Germans and Japanese, despite appearances, were notorious for the utter lack of that, and given their respective highly xenophobic beliefs in their own complete racial superiority to any other group, there would have been little basis for any significant long-term cooperation between them. Both Hitler and Tojo would have also needed reliable and broad-based intelligence gathering and interpretation assets, and a sizable "fifth-column" of active native sympathizers here, something neither had in sufficient quality or quantity. German military intelligence, the Abwehr, was already long compromised by British spies – its longtime director, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, was an active British sympathizer since the 1930s, while Japan's military and diplomatic ciphers were quickly and easily broken.

Both nations' forces featured the glaring absence of sophisticated and secure large-scale supply support and sizable long-range air, sea, and ground transport capable of logistically sustaining a long offensive war which was vital to any attacking force operating over long distances in hostile territory. This major weakness of the Wehrmacht was first confirmed on the Eastern Front in the fall of 1941 and by Japan early on in its war of attrition in China and later in the Pacific campaigns against the Americans. Authors Meirion and Sue Harries disclosed in their 1992 book "Soldiers of The Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Japanese Army" that for each US GI there was an average of four tons of material produced, for the Japanese counterpart, an average of two pounds.

Furthermore, Germany (given the Fuehrer's erratic nature, disdain for the daily tasks of governing and administration, and fixation on short-term solutions for every problem) never pursued an advanced weapons project (assault rifles, cruise and ballistic missiles, jet warplanes, atomic bombs) for any sufficient length of time to make a real difference in combat. The German "Atomic Association" was a quite pale and poorly funded and staffed version of our Manhattan Project (due in large part to the previous "brain drain" of numerous talented physicists out of Germany and into the USA and Great Britain throughout the 1930s), and even that was directed more toward development of a workable nuclear reactor for submarine propulsion, not an atomic bomb. Japanese advanced weapons research was practically nonexistent. Japan, whose government and military was long riddled with fierce, often-bloody factional political intrigue, was at first glance better prepared to mount an invasion of the USA given its large long-range carrier-based navy. However, Tokyo would have been badly hampered in such an attempt by its key strategic focus on a quickly completed regional land/island war and its unwillingness or inability to exploit large-scale submarine warfare.

Like Germany in the East, resource-poor Japan, via its "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere," was only interested in securing and consolidating economic and territorial gains in a certain area of its own region (the Asian mainland and the far Western Pacific islands), a politico-economic relationship that Premier Tojo Hideki pointedly referred to as similar to that of the USA's in regard to Latin America. There was the lack of sufficient training, resources, and tactics to wage a long, decisive, large-scale continental ground war that an invasion of North America would have required—a lack reflected in Japan's costly and ultimately fatal 1937-45 stalemate in China. There was also Japan's stunning and bloody defeat by the Red Army's large combined force of tanks, motorized infantry, and long-range artillery at the pivotal but little-known Battle of Nomonhan (on the Soviet-Manchurian border) in the summer of 1939. This battle exposed several glaring, never-to-be-resolved weaknesses in the quality of Japanese artillery, ground transport, tactics, and logistics and eventually led to a Soviet-Japanese nonaggression pact that lasted until the final days of the war.

Even Japan's raid on Pearl Harbor ended up more a fatally botched propaganda stunt than a decisive strategic blow to mortally wound the US Pacific Fleet and keep the USA from presumably getting in the way of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. It just got Japan in a war with an angry United States that many in Tokyo knew couldn't be won; Admiral Yamamoto predicting at the time Japan would exhaust its existing petroleum and fuel reserves by 1944. For instance, despite the terrible images of death and destruction, many of the ships sunk at their piers in the attack on Oahu were raised and refitted. Most piers, drydocks, repair facilities, fuel bunkers and supply depots were untouched or only slightly damaged by Japanese bombs.

And lastly, both Germany and Japan were notorious for consistently and severely underestimating their adversaries and for quickly alienating and then oppressing the vast majorities of the native populations of any country they invaded, even ones that may have been initially sympathetic to the invaders.

Worst of all, much of the above was already well known by the Roosevelt administration before Pearl Harbor.

Neither Germany nor Japan planned for or could have launched a successful invasion and occupation of the USA. It’s that simple. Even the legions of King George III nearly 200 years before, quite benign in contrast to those of Berlin and Tokyo, were eventually worn down and booted out of what soon became the USA.

But, again, why did we really intervene in what became World War II and who benefited the most from the defeat of Germany and Japan?

By 1937-38, FDR’s New Deal welfare state was an expensive, widely unpopular and abject failure and was in serious danger of being all but thoroughly dismantled by a hostile public and Supreme Court (which FDR openly and foolishly tried to “pack” at the time, alienating many of his staunchest supporters) and an increasingly combative Congress, many of its bitterest critics being among Roosevelt’s own ruling Democrats. So Franklin tried another form of domestic socialism, a “warfare state” inaugurated under the auspices of a pricey pork-barrel caper called “Lend-Lease,” and he and his successors had hit the jackpot for decades to come. Germany and Japan were the perfect and convenient excuses for both FDR and Stalin to flex their muscles on a global scale in a way that Marx and Lenin would have envied (and, as Winston Churchill desired, to keep both of those nations from emerging as major world players in their own right).

The conduct of the war all but guaranteed that. The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, as expected, quickly flattened a strong and influential US noninterventionist movement that the Roosevelt administration (which probably knew of Tokyo’s plans well in advance and did everything it could, legally and illegally, to provoke Tokyo into that “sneak attack”) was already viciously and unfairly trying to destroy, smear and discredit. Our enemy was then presumably Japan, a nation to whom we had long sold large subsidized amounts of our iron ore, scrap metal, and petroleum, all under the provisions of a 1911 trade treaty that FDR had personally and suddenly abrogated two years before.

While our GIs fought fiercely and died en masse in the Philippines and on Guam and Wake Island in the face of the invading Japanese, FDR blatantly wrote them off and pursued a "Europe First" policy. A key feature of this policy included the immediate transfer of huge amounts of financial and material aid to the recently-former German ally, Stalin's USSR, a nation whose leaders, like those of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, openly cared little for the supposed "democratic spirit" of the Atlantic Charter, and to which FDR (with the traitorous Alger Hiss in tow) made an all but open invitation at Yalta in February 1945 for it to occupy Eastern Europe.

Despite FDR's "Europe First," no US troops set foot in the subjugated portions of the continent in any strategically significant numbers until Operation Overlord in June 1944, by which time the Soviets were midway through their massive broad-front push westward toward conquest of most of Eastern Europe and a sizable portion of eastern Germany. The latter was literally handed to the Soviets while our GIs were ordered to pull back and let the Red Army grab Berlin and the surrounding areas, actions which publicly infuriated Gen. George S. Patton and others. The notorious "Operation Keelhaul," which forcibly sent millions of by then fiercely anti-Communist Soviet POWs back to certain death in the USSR, was next put into play.

In July 1945, at Potsdam, FDR/Churchill successors Harry Truman and Clement Attlee respectively certified Stalin's hold on Eastern Europe as originally proposed at Yalta. They also permitted him to break his 1941 nonaggression pact with Tokyo and sweep into Manchuria, northern Korea, and Sakhalin Island in the final days of the war against an all-but-beaten Japan. This final act ensured Moscow an easily obtained, major role in the carving up of the Far East into various spheres of influence. Japan's eventual self-defeat in China (predicted by then-President Herbert Hoover in 1931 as part of his refusal to ask Congress for US troops to aid the Chinese against Japanese encroachment) and its collapse in the western Pacific opened up a large power vacuum in Asia. In less than five years, this vacuum was quickly filled in large part by Stalin's brutal trio of Asian Communist proteges – Mao Tse-tung, Kim Il-Sung, and Ho Chi Minh – all with the prior blessings of FDR and his Red-riddled "brain trust."

The winner of W.W. II, tragically, was in reality not the Allies but instead the theory and practice of the large-scale coercive collectivist state, be it in the form of Communism or the large-scale welfare/warfare states of various types and the consequent rise of a violent, unstable, impoverished Third World addicted to the benefits of the same as cavalierly dispensed by the meddlesome mandarins of the First World. True, since 1945 we've been speaking a different language, and it's not German, Japanese, or even Russian or Chinese. Rather, it's the language of socialism couched in perpetual, petulant demands for ever-more forced, taxpayer-supported "fairness and social justice" on a global scale (commonly called "humanitarian intervention") at the heavy expense of true peace, prosperity, and individual liberty. And the price, as usual in the imposition and maintenance of socialism, was and still is the untold millions of dead, impoverished, miserable, and imprisoned.

Michael E. Kreca [send him mail] lives in San Diego and has been a financial reporter for Knight-Ridder, Business Week and the Financial Times of London.

Dr.
Sidney Gottlieb
CIA Technical Services Staff director for the MK-ULTRA program

Eighteenth-century
German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel long ago developed, among
other things, what he called the principle of “thesis, antithesis,
synthesis” to explain the process of deliberately enacted social
disorder and change as a road to power. To achieve a desired result,
one deliberately creates a situation (“thesis,”) devises a “solution,”
to solve the “problems” created by that situation (“antithesis,”)
with the final result being the ultimate goal of more power and
control (“synthesis.”) It is unsurprising Karl Marx and his disciples
like Lenin and Trotsky, as well as the US government in its so-called
War On Drugs, made this process a keystone of their drive for total
control of all individual actions that, in their views, were not,
in Mussolini s terms, “inside the state” and thus controllable by
the same.

In
September 1942, OSS director and Army Maj. Gen. William "Wild
Bill" Donovan began his search for an effective "truth
serum" to be used on POWs and captured spies. Beginning with
a budget of $5,000 and the blessing of President Franklin Roosevelt,
he enlisted the aid of a few prominent physicians and psychiatrists
like George Estabrooks and Harry Murray as well as former Prohibition
agent and notorious Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) director Harry
Anslinger.

The
OSS/FBN team first tested a potent marijuana extract, tetrahydrocannabinol
acetate (THCA), a colorless, odorless substance, lacing cigarettes
or food items with it, and administering them to volunteer US Army
and OSS personnel, all who eventually acquired the nickname "Donovan's
Dreamers." Testing was also conducted under the guise of treatment
for shell shock.

Donovan's
team found that THCA, which they termed "TD," for "truth
drug," induced "a great loquacity and hilarity,"
and even, in cases where the subject didn't feel physically threatened,
some useable "reefer madness." Peyote, morphine and scopolamine
were judged too powerful to be used in effective interrogation.
In light of all this, Donovan concluded, "The drug defies all
but the most expert and search analysis, and for all practical purposes
can be considered beyond analysis." The OSS did not, however,
end the program. By that time, faced with the terrifying ship losses
the USA was suffering from German U-boats, Donovan pressed on, hoping
to find some effective chemical means to help interrogate captured
U-boat sailors.

In
May 1943, George Hunter White, an Army captain, OSS officer and
former FBN agent, gave standard cigarettes laced with THCA to an
unwitting August "Augie Dallas" Del Grazio, an influential
New York City gangster. Del Grazio, who had by then had done prison
stretches for assault and murder, had been one of the Mafia's most
notorious enforcers and narcotics smugglers. He operated an opium
alkaloid factory in Turkey and was a key participant in the long-running
Istanbul/Marsellies/NYC heroin pipeline commonly known as the "French
Connection." Influenced by the THC, Del Grazio (who was also
helping to smuggle spies and Mafiosi into German-occupied Italy)
revealed volumes of vital information about underworld operations,
including the names of several high ranking city and state officials
who took bribes from the Mob. Donovan was encouraged by the results
of White's tests when he wrote, "Cigarette experiments indicated
that we had a mechanism offering promise in relaxing prisoners to
be interrogated."

Unsurprisingly,
the extensive wartime German experiments with various hallucinogenic
drugs at the Dachau concentration camp, directed by one Dr. Hubertus
Strughold, later honored as "the father of aviation medicine,"
aroused great interest in the USA especially after an October 1945
Navy technical mission to Dachau reported in detail on Strughold's
work. So great, in fact, that when the OSS and its successor, the
CIA, imported 800 German scientists of various specialties under
the auspices of the infamous "Project Paperclip" during
1945-55, it made sure to include Dr. Strughold.

Dr.
Strughold's barbaric “medical experiments,” for which his subordinates
were tried and convicted as war criminals at Nuremburg, were nothing
more than a series of bizarre and unspeakably brutal tortures. Even
so, he learned a lot about human behavior and mescaline, a natural
alkaloid present in the peyote cactus. Mescaline, long central to
many Native American religious rituals and first chemically isolated
in 1896, is a phenethylamine whose ergoline skeleton is also contained
in lysergic acid (a tryptamine.)

Sandoz
Labs chemist Dr. Albert Hofmann also discovered a lysergic acid
derivative called ergonovine, a medication used to retard excessive
postpartum uterine bleeding. Based on his work with ergonovine,
Dr. Hofmann first derived d-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate-25
(LSD, a refined alkaloidal liquid byproduct of a rye fungus, ergot)
in a series of experiments in Zurich in 1938. He used the naturally
occurring lysergic acid radical, the common item in all ergot alkaloids,
as the major component of the substance. Further experiments in
this vein yielded psilocybin, derived from the Mexican Psilocybe
cubensis mushroom, hydergine, essential today in the improvement
of cerebral circulation in geriatric patients, and dihydroergotamine,
an important ingredient in blood pressure medication.

The
well-read and broadly educated Dr. Hofmann knew ergot had a long
natural and cultural history as both medicine and poison. Ancient
Greek midwives used to give an ergot-based, gruel-like drink, called
kykeon, to their patients about to give birth. Kykeon was also consumed
during the autumn Eleusinia, the ancient Greek agricultural festival
celebrated in honor of the goddess of agriculture, Demeter. Across
the Atlantic, sacramental Maya morning glories, beautifully depicted
at the ancient Mayan temple-palace complex at Teotihuacán,
Mexico, dating to about 1450, also contain ergot-based alkaloids.

However,
the mindset the CIA had in its drug research work was far different
from that of Dr. Hofmann's. To our Cold War spymasters, ex-Nazis
like Dr. Strughold were definitely evil, but they were definitely
useful as well. This pervasive amoral pragmatism led, of course,
to the extensive and notorious MK-ULTRA experiments in which, for
nearly 25 years, thousands of everyday Americans, both military
and civilian, were heavily dosed with numerous very potent artificial
psychoactive drugs, often without their knowledge or consent.

This
phenomenon of the obsessive "interests of national security"
expediency combined with our celebrity-obsessed pop culture that
gleefully raises and shamelessly promotes snake oil hustlers as
well as the pharmaceutical industry's pricey "pill for every
ill" philosophy, was a form of incompetence and arrogance far
more hazardous than any synthetic alkaloid ever developed and came
as no surprise to those like Dr. Hofmann. LSD, invaluable in psychiatric
treatment – actor Cary Grant was cured of alcoholism by carefully
administered doses of the drug under close medical supervision –
is thousands of times more potent than the traditional herbal mixtures.
In fact, it is thousands of times more potent than the milder of
the entheogenic alkaloids. It is effective at doses of as little
as a ten-millionth of a gram, which makes it 5,000 times more potent
than mescaline. It should not be taken without training or supervision.

The
Navy tested mescaline as part of its 1947-53 Project CHATTER. MK-ULTRA
was first organized in 1949 by Richard Helms under the direction
of Allen Dulles as Project BLUEBIRD. Two years later, it was renamed
ARTICHOKE (after one of Dulles's favorite foods) then termed MK-ULTRA
in 1953, finally becoming MK-SEARCH in 1965 until the program’s
“official termination” eight years later. MK-ULTRA was directly
responsible for the wide underground availability of LSD, phencyclidine
(PCP — also called “angel dust”), dimethyltryptamine (DMT), 2,5-dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine
(STP) and other powerful synthetic psychoactive drugs in the 1960s.
In the early 1950s, the CIA and the Army had contacted Sandoz requesting
several kilograms of LSD for use in the test program. Dr. Hofmann
and Sandoz refused this request, so Director Dulles persuaded the
Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical luminary Eli Lilly (later the
pioneers of and chief cheerleaders for the widely prescribed antidepressant
Prozac) to synthesize the drug contrary to existing international
patent accords–making the US government and Lilly the first illegal
domestic manufacturers and distributors of LSD.

These
were distributed via the agency's sometime allies in organized crime
and through the FBI's counterintelligence programs (COINTELPROs)
directed against various activist groups of the period. The actual
definition of the term MK-ULTRA remains unclear but a former Army
Special Forces captain, John McCarthy, who ran the CIA's Saigon-based
Operation Cherry which targeted the Cambodian ruler Prince Sihanouk
for assassination, claimed that MK-ULTRA stood for "Manufacturing
Killers Utilizing Lethal Tradecraft Requiring Assassination."

On
April 10, 1953, in a speech at Princeton University, CIA director
Allen Dulles (further feeding the already widespread but misguided
fear about the high effectiveness of the alleged Chinese "brainwashing"
of US POWs in the Korean conflict) warned that the human mind was
a "malleable tool," and that the "brain perversion
techniques" of the Reds were "so subtle and so abhorrent"
that "the brain&becomes a phonograph playing a disc put
on its spindle by an outside genius over which it has no control."

Propaganda,
in its simplest form, is condemning one's opponent publicly for
doing what one is already doing privately. Dulles, of course, was
that very "outside genius." Three days after warning assembled
Princetonians of the disturbing ramifications of these techniques,
he had directed MK-ULTRA researchers to perfect them. Dr. Sidney
Gottlieb, the CIA's expert on lethal poisons, (who reputedly was
the inspiration for director Stanley Kubrick's bizarre "Dr.
Strangelove" character played by Peter Sellers in the 1964
film of the same title) headed up the operation as director of the
Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff and, via a front
organization called "The Society For Human Ecology," distributed
$25 million in drug research grants to Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley
and other institutions.

Meanwhile,
George Hunter White, of THCA-laced "Lucky Strikes" fame,
had returned to the FBN (now the DEA) at war's end and continued
to research behavior modifying drugs. In 1955, when MK-ULTRA was
running full throttle, he was a high ranking FBN administrator who
helped the Agency develop and implement a similar operation called
Midnight Climax. In this infamous scheme, "safehouses"
staffed with prostitutes were established in San Francisco. The
hookers lured men from local taverns back to these safehouses after
their drinks had been previously spiked with LSD. White's team secretly
filmed the subsequent events in each house. The purpose of these
so-called "national security brothels" was to enable the
CIA to experiment with the use of sex and mind altering drugs to
extract information from test subjects, and it was planned, from
spies, POWs, defectors and saboteurs.

Midnight
Climax was terminated after eight years when CIA Inspector General
John Earman charged that "the concepts involved in manipulating
human behavior are found by many people within and outside the Agency
to be distasteful and unethical." He stated that "the
rights and interest of U.S. citizens were placed in jeopardy."
Earman further noted LSD "had been tested on individuals at
all social levels, high and low, native American and foreign."
Richard Helms, MK-ULTRA's bureaucratic godfather, summarily rebuffed
Earman's charges, claiming that "positive operational capacity
to use drugs is diminishing owing to a lack of realistic testing.
Tests," Helms continued, "were necessary to keep up with
the Soviets." However, Helms reversed himself a year later
when testifying before the Warren Commission investigating the JFK
assassination, claiming that "Soviet research has consistently
lagged five years behind Western research."

Upon
retirement from civil service in 1966, White wrote a startling farewell
letter to Dr. Gottlieb. He reminisced about his Midnight Climax
work. His comments were frightening:

"I
was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly
in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could
a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage
with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest?"

Where
else indeed, but as a member of what would later become the hypocritical
War on (Some) Drugs?

By
the end of the 1950s the CIA was funding just about every qualified
LSD researcher and psychologist it could find, through such contractors
as the Society for the Study of Human Ecology, the Josiah Macy,
Jr. Foundation, and the Geschichter Fund for Medical Research. Author
John Marks, in his 1975 book, The
Search for the Manchurian Candidate, identified the CIA's
LSD research pioneers as:

• Dr.
  Robert Hyde at Boston Psychopathic Hospital
• Dr.
  Harold Abramson at Mt. Sinai Hospital and Columbia University
  in New York City
• Dr.
  Carl Pfeiffer at the University of Illinois Medical School,
  Champaign-Urbana
• Dr.
  Harris Isbell of the NIMH-sponsored Addiction Research Center
  in Lexington, Ky.
• Dr.
  Louis Jolyon West at the University of Oklahoma, Stillwater
• Dr.
  Harold Hodge at the University of Rochester (N.Y.)

However,
there were prominent critics of the US government's activities,
the earliest among them being Aldous Huxley, the famed author of
the chillingly prescient 1932 novel Brave
New World (which described a totalitarian society whose
population was completely controlled by forcible administration
of a government-mandated "happiness drug" called "soma.")
While taking mescaline supplied by famed English surgeon Dr. Humphrey
Osmond (who discovered the close similarities between the molecular
structures of adrenaline and mescaline), Huxley completed another
novel entitled The
Doors of Perception in 1954. In that book, the novelist
described his intensely personal vision of the world around him:

"I
continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed
to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing – but of
a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent
ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty,
from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like u2018grace' and u2018transfiguration'
came to my mind&Those idiots (MK-ULTRAns) want to be Pavlovians;
Pavlov never saw an animal in its natural state, only under duress.
The u2018scientific' LSD boys do the same with their subjects. No wonder
they report psychotics."

Obviously,
this isn't a typical CIA spook writing, and, given Huxley's incredible
mind, creative vision and compassion, we're not talking about a
moron or a mental case either. Which means that giving someone mescaline
while they're being tortured or lobotomized or electrocuted at Dachau
will only tell you a lot about torture, lobotomies and electrocution,
not about mescaline.

As
author Marks noted:

It
would become supreme irony that the CIA's enormous search for weapons
among drugs – fueled by the hope that spies could control life
with genius and machines – would wind up helping to create
the wandering, uncontrollable minds of the counterculture."

Admiral's
son and musician Jim Morrison led The Doors, [of Perception] a quartet
of Liverpudlians sang of "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds,"
while the Rolling Stones dropped transparent hints about "Mother's
Little Helper." To take a lesson from Orwell, what is more
important about the 1960s, indeed, about any period in history,
is not so much what really happened as how that period is remembered
publicly decades later.

The
public memories of that particular era were carefully manipulated
in great part by the deliberate creation and promotion (via television
and the recording industry) of the phony and in reality quite small
"drug/rock/hippie subculture." The first underground LSD
labs were actually set up by the FBI in 1963 in both New York City
and San Francisco. Many began to incorrectly confuse the ancient
medical art of herbalism with the shenanigans of amateur basement
"flower-power" and "biker" chemists. Overenthusiastic
pitchmen like social psychologist Dr. Timothy Leary and Beat poet
Allen Ginsberg sadly failed to sufficiently stress that key difference,
although the technically competent Leary clearly understood the
artificially high potency of LSD.

Leary
(and his longtime associate, psychologist Richard Alpert) matured
professionally in a CIA-funded research world. In 1948, Leary, then
a UC Berkeley graduate student, attended the yearly convention of
the left-wing American Veterans' Council in Milwaukee. There he
met CIA officer Cord Meyer. Meyer's professional specialty was infiltrating
and discrediting various organizations deemed "un-American"
or "disloyal." Meyer persuaded Leary to help him. Leary
acknowledged Meyer's influence, crediting him with "helping
me understand my political-cultural role more clearly."

During
1954-59 Leary was the director of clinical research and psychology
at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland, Calif. The personality
test that made him famous, "The Leary," was actually used
by the CIA to test prospective employees. A grad school classmate
of Leary's, CIA contractor Frank Barron, worked with the Berkeley
Institute for Personality Assessment and Research, which was funded
and staffed by CIA psychologists. In 1960 Barron, with government
funding, founded the Harvard Psychedelic Drug Research Center. Leary
followed Barron to Harvard, becoming a lecturer in psychology where
he remained for three years. Leary's Harvard associates included
former chief OSS psychologist Harry Murray, who had monitored the
early OSS "truth serum" experiments, and numerous other
knowing CIA contractors. One of Dr. Murray's many test subjects
was a Harvard undergraduate math major named Theodore Kaczynski.

In
the spring of 1963, Leary and Alpert left Harvard and founded the
International Foundation for Internal Freedom (IFIF) – later
renamed the Castalia Foundation – on a 2,500-acre estate in
the small upstate New York community of Millbrook. There, the pair
of psychologists continued their hallucinogenic drug research and
soon became the chief investigative target of an ambitious Dutchess
County district attorney named G. Gordon Liddy. Multimillionaire
William Mellon Hitchcock generously bankrolled the founding and
operation of IFIF/Castalia and later financed a huge black-market
LSD manufacturing operation.

Even
so, Leary carefully stressed proper mindset, setting and dosages
in a book he coauthored with Alpert and Ralph Metzner, The
Psychedelic Experience. It was based on an ancient Tibetan
shamanic manual,
The Book of the Dead. The latter work referred to an
herbal tea similar in content to but far less powerful than LSD,
and insisted on mental discipline as an inherent part of the process.
The Incans of Andean South America, for instance, were an invaluable
source of medical knowledge, and used whole herbs like ayahuasca
and the coca leaf, not their artificially refined alkaloids, and
spiritual technique was also taught as an key part of the process.

However,
much like the crusading "drys" before and during Prohibition,
the MK-ULTRA inquisitors with their police state mentality in concert
with misinformed and emotionally distressed LSD users, had found
their "devil drug," (the term used by the Harrison Tax
Act advocates in the 1910s and Marijuana Tax Act backers in the
1930s) replete with tragic tales of already emotionally distressed
and lonely young people quite unprepared for such an artificially
powerful entheogen. It was also well within CIA policy to randomly
distribute LSD laced with the lethal poison strychnine so as to
create "horror stories" useful as propaganda. Dr. Hofmann
himself chemically confirmed the presence of pure strychnine in
several random street samples of LSD.

Consistent
with its policy of deliberately confusing the beneficial ancient
herbs with extremely dangerous synthetic alkaloid derivatives, the
CIA surreptitiously distributed of these synthetic compounds, termed
"psychedelics," to the public. One of them was STP, originally
developed as an incapacitating agent for the Army in 1964 at Dow
Chemical. Dow even made the STP formula public information three
years later. This potent synthetic put many unsuspecting people
on a three-day trip, and sent many, hysterical with anxiety, to
the emergency room. That, of course, was the purpose of its distribution.

During
1955-75, the Army tested LSD (termed EA-1729) and PCP on several
of its enlisted men at what was then the headquarters of its Chemical
Corps, Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, something described in detail
by Bill Kurtis in a televised 1995 A&E Investigative Reports
segment titled "Bad Trip to Edgewood." The CIA also tested
PCP (in conjunction with electroshock "therapy" and sleep
deprivation) at Allain Memorial Institute in Montreal under the
direction of the notorious Canadian psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Cameron.
The Chemical Corps (whose commander in the 1950s, Lt. General William
Creasy, advocated a new military strategy of LSD-based "nonkill
warfare") then stockpiled PCP for use as a "nonlethal
incapacitant." Excess doses of PCP, reported the CIA, could
"lead to convulsions and death." Soon, PCP was flooding
the streets.

Edgewood
also received an average of 400 product "rejects" a month
from major US pharmaceutical firms. These "rejects" were
actually drugs found to be commercially useless because of their
demonstrated hazards and numerous undesirable side effects. In 1958,
Edgewood obtained its first sample of a "reject" called
phenylbenzeneacetic acid (BZ) developed by pharmaceutical giant
Hoffmann-LaRoche, later known by its street nickname as "brown
acid."

BZ
(some 10,000 times as powerful as LSD) inhibits the production of
hormones which aid the brain's transfer of messages and instructions
across nerve endings (synapses), thereby severely disrupting normal
human perceptual, behavioral and sensory patterns. Its effects generally
last about three days, although symptoms-migraine headaches, giddiness,
disorientation, auditory and visual hallucinations, and erratic
if not maniacal behavior – could persist for as long as six
weeks. "During the period of acute effects," noted an
Army physician, "the person is completely out of touch with
his environment." The Army also developed artillery shells
and rockets with warheads able to deliver large dosages of BZ to
selected targets.

In
the summer of 1964, Beat novelist Ken Kesey (the author of One
Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and who had been an MK-ULTRA
test subject at Stanford along with Allen Ginsberg and Grateful
Dead musician Bob Hunter) launched a yearlong cross-country trip
in a Day-Glo painted school bus filled with friends called "Merry
Pranksters." The Merry Pranksters distributed thousands of
doses of LSD along the way (a phenomenon colorfully described in
author Tom Wolfe's 1969 novel, The
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) supplied by one Ronald Hadley
Stark. Stark (who died in 1984) was a CIA operative fluent in five
languages with access to unlimited public funds and numerous high-level
contacts in business and government throughout the world.

For
instance, when the underground manufacture and distribution of LSD
was suddenly derailed in 1969 due to the scarcity of its key ingredient,
ergotamine tartrate, and increasing federal law enforcement pressure,
Stark, via the Laguna Beach, Calif.-based Brotherhood of Eternal
Love, a small group of local surfers led by chemist Nicholas Sand,
got it quickly back on track. For five years, Stark, aided by the
Castle Bank of the Bahamas (which pioneered the art of money laundering
for the Mob) and his contacts in a French pharmaceutical firm, facilitated
the mass production and distribution (via the Brotherhood and other
groups) an even more powerful strain of LSD nicknamed "orange
sunshine." This firm also manufactured BZ. Stark (who operated
LSD labs in Brussels and Paris as well) claimed he was going to
supply orange sunshine as an offensive weapon to CIA-backed Tibetan
rebels fighting the Chinese occupation.

Stark
also was a close friend of the Los Angeles founders of a small breakaway
Scientology sect called "The Process Church of the Final Judgement,"
English expatriates Robert DeGrimston Moore and Mary Ann McClean.

Regular
attendees of the Process Church included members of the Beach Boys,
the Rolling Stones and other prominent pop performers as well as
an ex-convict and wannabe rock musician named Charles Manson. Manson
and his followers became heavy users of orange sunshine – the
trademark "bad acid" of the day – which they were
all on when, on Manson's orders, they carried out the brutal August
1969 Tate-LaBianca murders. When Stark (who is believed to have
distributed an estimated 50 million doses of LSD during his Agency
career) was arrested for drug trafficking in Bologna in 1975, Italian
magistrate Giorgio Floridia ordered his release on the grounds that
he had been a CIA agent since 1960. Judge Floridia documented and
justified this using a list of Stark's numerous intelligence contacts.

These
were and are all classic government COINTELPRO-style tricks — this
is how natural herbs and their mild, pharmaceutical-grade derivatives
were quickly and easily made lethal and consequently demonized.
How was this done? First, foolish claims were made that there was
no difference between safe whole herbs and their potentially deadly
ultra-refined alkaloids, next, the best of the traditional herbs
and the milder of the pharmaceutical-grade alkaloid derivatives
were made unavailable, and finally, the streets were flooded with
potentially deadly synthetics. Deliberate perversions of science
like angel dust continue to be a great propaganda tool for our diehard
drug warriors, and the worn catchall excuse of “the interest of
national security” is used to justify appalling covert drug capers
ranging from CIA-sponsored heroin production and trafficking in
Southeast Asia in the 1960s to the Bush/Clinton/Mena/Nicaragua cocaine-for-arms
smuggling schemes in the 1980s.

These
Constitution-shredding police state methods were adapted from the
Nazis and the Soviets by and large and were applied by the CIA,
NSA, DEA, BATF, IRS and FBI against us. Scores of groups, ranging
from the American Indian Movement and Black Panthers to militias
and religious organizations like the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas
(in which the government first falsely charged as illegal methamphetamine
dealers in order to get a Posse Comitatus Act waiver to use military
force against them) were either disrupted by agents provocateur-style
riots, bombings and armed standoffs, smeared in the mainstream news
media through the "Reichstag Fire" approach, or, in the
case of the Davidians, physically exterminated. The War on Some
Drugs is merely a horrible extension and intensification of these
tried-and-true Hegelian methods, a "war" in which we all
lose.

Short
Bibliography

• Bowart,
  Walter; Operation
  Mind Control, Dell Publishing, 1978.
• Delgado,
  Jose, Physical
  Control of the Mind, Harper, NYC, 1969.
• Huxley,
  Aldous, The
  Doors of Perception, Harper, NYC, 1954.
• Lee,
  Martin; Shalin, Bruce, Acid
  Dreams, 1986.
• Marchetti,
  Victor, The
  CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, New York, 1974.
• Marks,
  John, The
  Search for the Manchurian Candidate, New York, 1975.
• Masters,
  Robert & Houston, Jean, The
  Varieties of Psychedelic Experience: The Classic Guide to the
  Effects of LSD on the Human Psyche, 2000.
• McCoy,
  Alfred, The
  Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade,
  Lawrence Hill, 1972, rev. 1991.
• Meerloo,
  Joost, The
  Rape of the Mind, Crowell, NYC, 1956.
• Skinner,
  B.F., Beyond
  Freedom and Dignity," Knopf, NYC, 1971
• Smith,
  Harris R. OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central
  Intelligence Agency, Berkeley, 1972.
• Stevens,
  Jay, Storming
  Heaven – LSD and the American Dream, 1998.

April
19, 2001

Michael
E. Kreca lives in San Diego and has been a financial reporter for
Knight-Ridder, Business Week and the Financial Times
of London.

"East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet…" ~ Rudyard Kipling

When Kipling penned those immortal words during the height of Pax Britannia in the 19th century, he believed East and West were so different in their respective civilizations and outlook that there would be no basis for any real understanding between the two hemispheres. True or untrue, at the times they each have met, it has often sadly been in the cauldron of warfare, and at least in the case of the United States, has consequently been expensive and largely fruitless.

Officially, the reason an expansionist, resource-poor Japan attacked the headquarters of the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii without warning on Sunday, Dec. 7th, 1941, was to quickly forestall any US potential interference in Tokyo’s drive to seize and retain the resource-rich possessions of the USA, Britain, Holland and France in the south Pacific Ocean. On surface, this is true. But to paraphrase famed British statesman Benjamin Disraeli, what lay "behind the scenes?"

Since the 1920s, the Soviets planned and hoped for a USA-Japan war because they believed such a conflict (one that they knew the USA would likely win) would help create a large Asian power vacuum which could then be quickly filled by Communism. The elimination of significant Japanese military, diplomatic and economic influence in the region, which dated back to the 1880s and was expanded by Japan’s humiliating and conclusive military defeat of Russia in 1905, would give the Reds the opportunity they wanted. And thanks to FDR and Stalin, they got it.

Benjamin Gitlow was a founding and prominent member of the US Communist Party but was permanently expelled from the organization in 1933 for daring to openly criticize the crimes of Josef Stalin. He soon became a staunch anti-Communist and died at age 74 in 1965. Gitlow wrote in his revealing 1940 book entitled I Confess: The Truth About American Communism:

"As far back as 1927 when I was in Moscow, the attitude toward the United States in the event of war was discussed. Privately, it was the opinion of all the Soviet leaders to whom I spoke that the rivalry between the United States and Japan must actually break out into war between these two. The Russians were hopeful that the war would break out soon, because that would greatly secure the safety of Russian-Siberian borders and would so weaken Japan that Russia would no longer have to fear an attack from her in the East. Stalin’s hopes, through the activities of the US Communist Party, to create a public opinion in the United States that would favor a war, presumably in defense of democracy against the encroachment of fascism, but actually one against Japan. Stalin is perfectly willing to let Americans die in defense of the Soviet Union even if they are not members of the Communist Party…"

Roosevelt’s predecessor Herbert Hoover had successfully resisted pressure to send US troops and military aid to China (other than maintaining the small contingent of US Navy river gunboats present there off and on since the mid-1850s to guard US economic assets) when the Japanese first occupied Manchuria in 1931. His reason was that the Chinese would eventually wear down Japan, just as they had eventually worn down every other invader throughout their history.

The Japanese premier during most of the crucial 1940—41 period was a member of the royal family, Prince Konoye Fuminaro. Konoye — whose power base lay with big business that was suffering under the burdensome costs of the inconclusive land war in China and US economic sanctions — proposed a meeting with FDR in Honolulu in August 1941 (breaking centuries of Japanese tradition and rigid protocol by meeting with a foreigner outside of Japan) in order to get the US to lift its embargo on longtime petroleum, iron ore and scrap metal exports to Japan. In exchange, Konoye was willing to withdraw Japanese troops from Indochina and sharply reduce its military presence in China.

The US and British ambassadors to Japan, Joseph C. Grew (a Herbert Hoover appointee) and Sir Robert Craigie, respectively both urged FDR to confer with Konoye and to agree to his terms. Grew especially was trying to avoid war with Japan and did everything he could to do so. Grew wrote:

"It seems to me highly unlikely that this chance will come again or that any Japanese statesman other than Prince Konoye could succeed in controlling the military extremists in carrying through a policy which they, in their ignorance of international affairs and economic laws, resent and oppose. The alternative to reaching a settlement now would be the greatly increased probability of war and while we would undoubtedly win in the end, I question whether it is in our own interest to see an impoverished Japan reduced to the position of a third-rate power."

Craigie agreed with Grew, stating tersely in a dispatch to London, "Time suitable for real peace with Japan. Hope this time American cynicism will not be allowed to interfere with realistic statesmanship." Churchill (whose own Foreign Office was riddled with Soviet spies, among them the notorious "Kim" Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess) was incensed with Craigie’s conciliatory stance toward Tokyo. He told Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden:

"He (Craigie) should surely be told forthwith that the entry of the United States into war either with Germany and Italy or with Japan is fully conformable with British interests. Nothing in the munitions sphere can compare with the importance of the British Empire and the United States being co-belligerent."

Moreover, there were four close Roosevelt advisers who, according to the US Army’s 1940—48 communications surveillance of the Soviet Embassy in Washington (a operation commonly known as "Venona"), were Soviet spies or sympathizers. These four spearheaded the ultimately successful attempt to frustrate Grew’s and Craigie’s negotiating efforts. They were top White House aide and Canadian-born economist Lauchlin Currie, Assistant Treasury Secretary Harry Dexter White (who essentially was Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr.’s puppetmaster), New Deal tax-and-spend fanatic Harry Hopkins and the notorious State Department official Alger Hiss. Hiss had tapped Johns Hopkins University Asia specialist and "adviser" to Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang-Kai-shek, Owen Lattimore, as FDR’s "China expert" — one whom Mao Tse-tung’s sidekick Chou En-lai warmly regarded as "quite sympathetic to the Chinese Communists."

All of these men, White and Currie especially, actively pressured FDR into waging a war with Japan. They eloquently masked their staunch Soviet sympathies behind facile appeals to the territorial integrity of China under Chiang (a weak, greedy and corrupt leader who was uneasily allied with Mao and would later be overwhelmed by him) and in the interests of a "united front against fascism." FDR thus flatly disregarded the advice of Grew and Craigie and refused any meeting with Konoye.

Meanwhile, German Communist Richard Sorge’s high-level Soviet spy ring in Tokyo, which had substantial influence on ranking Japanese military officers and numerous cabinet officials as well as close contacts with several German diplomats, helped steer Japanese strategy toward its existing Navy-based "Strike South" approach — conquest of the fruitful Pacific possessions of the West and away from the Army-based "Strike North" approach which targeted Siberia and Soviet Central Asia.

The "Strike North" strategy had already largely fallen from favor after Japan’s massive defeat by the Red Army at Nomonhan, Mongolia in August 1939. This defeat led to a Soviet-Japanese nonaggression pact which ensured the security of the Soviet-Chinese border until the final days of W.W.II and enabled the Kremlin to later immediately transfer some 250,000 seasoned troops from the Far East westward to battle the invading Germans.

Soon, Konoye, the victim of a near-fatal assassination attempt, was forced out as premier in the early fall of 1941 and replaced by the pro-German, openly aggressive General Tojo Hideki. The Japanese militarists were now fully in control of events and cared little about negotiating with the USA or anyone else. The stage was being set in Washington, Moscow and Tokyo for the US-Japan war that Moscow had wanted since the 1920s. All that remained was to drag the USA into World War II, which FDR, Churchill and friends failed to do with Germany after numerous provocations but successfully did with Japan at Pearl Harbor.

On Nov. 18, 1941, Secretary Morgenthau sent to Secretary of State Cordell Hull a long memorandum drafted by Assistant Secretary White describing US terms for peace with Japan. These terms were so severe that White and Currie knew Japan would never accept them. Japanese Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori, one of the most moderate members of the Japanese government, recalled after receiving the Morgenthau-White-Hull memo, "I was utterly disheartened, and felt like one groping in darkness. The uncompromising tone was no more than I had looked for; but I was greatly astonished at the extreme nature of the contents."

An aide to Navy Secretary Frank Knox, Vice Admiral Francis Beatty, revealed in 1954:

"Prior to December 7th, it was evident even to me… that we were pushing Japan into a corner. I believed that it was the desire of both President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill that we get into the war, as they thought the Allies could not win without us and our efforts to cause the Germans to declare war on us failed. The conditions we imposed upon Japan — to get out of China, for example — were so severe that we knew that that nation could not accept them. We were forcing her so severely that we could have known that she would react toward the United States. All her preparations in a military way — and we knew their overall import — pointed that way."

Exactly a week after this memo was issued, FDR’s Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, wrote in his diary some two weeks before Pearl Harbor, recalling a cabinet meeting discussing the problems with Japan. He wrote:

"There the President…brought up entirely the relations with the Japanese. He brought up the event that we were likely to be attacked, perhaps [as soon as] next Monday, for the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without warning and the question was what should we do. The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves."

Sir Oliver Lylleton, Churchill’s war production minister, knew all of Churchill’s and FDR’s plans and decisions to force the USA into the war. In a June 20, 1944 speech to members of the American Chamber of Commerce in London, he stated:

"America provoked Japan to such an extent that the Japanese were forced to attack Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty on history, even to say that America was forced into the war."

Moreover, there was a persistent undercurrent of fear in the Kremlin that Great Britain would make a separate peace with Germany. These fears were intensified after Deputy Fhrer Rudolf Hess’s mysterious May 1941 solo flight to Scotland supposedly to meet secretly with the Duke of Hamilton, (six weeks before the German invasion of the USSR) but Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor seven months after Hess’s inexplicable odyssey, among other things, helped scuttle any chances of a separate Berlin-London peace treaty, another major benefit to Moscow.

Even after Pearl Harbor, Joseph Grew, by then Undersecretary of State for Asian Affairs, still hoped for some kind of negotiated settlement:

"At the same time I believe that it is important that we bear in mind that the defeat of Japanese aggression does not necessarily entail, as many Chinese think, our crushing Japan militarily. The complete elimination of Japan as a force in the Far East would not be conducive either to order or prosperity in this area."

Well, we certainly crushed Japan militarily, finally finishing the job with two atomic bombs in August 1945. What did we get for it all? Scores of GIs killed from Oahu to Okinawa, billions of postwar taxpayer dollars spent rebuilding a completely wrecked and humiliated Japan, keeping it militarily weak in the face of an appallingly genocidal and increasingly assertive Red China with both nations eventually becoming the USA’s fiercest foreign economic competitors.

Barely eight years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the USA wound up with some 33,000 US dead in a still divided and tense Korea, and some two decades after that, 58,000 troops killed in a still Communist Indochina — the last courtesy of a fruitless eight-year conflict (which some have called the US version of the Boer War) that severely damaged US social, economic and political institutions. We then were treated to Pol Pot’s notoriously barbaric Cambodian "Killing Fields," scads of desperate Vietnamese "boat people," thousands of US troops and a string of warships permanently deployed in the Far East, and, finally, Chinese Long March ICBMs aimed at the US West Coast.

All to avenge the loathsome FDR and his pro-Soviet disciples’ self-serving and cleverly premeditated "day of infamy" and to fulfill the bloodthirsty Josef Stalin’s totalitarian fantasies. Well, hey, winning is everything, right, sports fans?

But what did we win?

Originally posted at EnterStageRight.com.

Michael E. Kreca lived in San Diego and had been a financial reporter for Knight-Ridder, Business Week and the Financial Times of London. On February 11, 2006, he was shot to death by a government cop.

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"The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to permit the conquered Eastern peoples to have arms. History teaches that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by doing so. Indeed I would go so far as to say that the underdog is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let’s not have any native militia or police. German troops alone will bear the sole responsibility for the maintenance of law and order."

~ Adolf Hitler, April 11, 1942, in “Hitler’s Table-Talk at the Fhrer’s Headquarters 1941—1942,” Dr. Henry Picker, ed. (Athenaeum Verlag, Bonn, 1951)

Twenty-seven words first published in 1790 are now the source of the bitterest controversy the USA has seen since the 1960s if not since the War Between the States a century before that. They are central to an issue that splits left and right, male and female, white and nonwhite, North and South, East and West, wealthy and not-so wealthy.

They are:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Let’s get this straight right away. First of all, the inalienable right of individuals to keep and bear arms as a check on a tyrannical government predates our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. This, among other things, was clearly and eloquently expressed in Sir William Blackstone’s 1768 "Commentaries On The Laws of England.” Hence, the Founders were operating within a long historical tradition based upon English common law.

Secondly, the term “well-regulated” meant something quite different two centuries ago. It is not today’s definition of “controlled,” “limited,” or “restricted” but was instead defined as “having proper kit and provisions” or in the case of objects or machinery, “properly maintained and kept in good repair.” The next is the Constitutional definition of the “militia,” and this what requires detailed explanation. The militia issue was extensively debated during the 1787—89 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and today has sadly been ignored by both sides in this issue.

Founder George Mason explicitly wished to have it clearly spelled out that the militia was “of the whole people," in effect, a “general militia” that was affirmed in the Second Amendment and the 1792 Militia Act. Mason and his supporters feared the development of "special militias" — ones much like the Puritan "Roundheads" led by Oliver Cromwell and their opponents, the “Cavaliers,” in the English Civil War of 1642—57. Special militias are nothing more than state-sanctioned paramilitary groups — witness the German Nazi SA and its successor the SS as well as the Italian Fascist "Blackshirts." In those cases, Nazi/Fascist Party membership was strictly required to join them as well as to legally own a firearm of any kind in either of those countries at the time.

These two groups were little different than standing armies. The difference is that they were created and used by the German and Italian governments to bypass any laws against using the military domestically against the people (or in the absence of such laws, to forestall the military’s unwillingness to do so) — in order to crush dissent and terrorize opponents. (Sound familiar?) Cromwell used his Roundheads to do much the same thing, even having King Charles I beheaded after a bogus trial, later closing Parliament and then invading Ireland with plans to wipe out the Catholic population, killing those of his comrades and anyone else who refused to comply.

Distressingly, we now have a lot of special militias in the USA — the Secret Service, FBI, BATF, DEA, IRS, the National Guard and today’s "near federalized" status of most state and local police departments — to name but a few. And they are all unconstitutional, if the plain meaning of the 2nd Amendment and the 1792 Militia Act is correct. George Mason’s fears about them were well placed and have come tragically true. All these alphabet-soup special militias can do and have done (other than freely lapping up taxpayer money in ever-increasing amounts) is be responsible for numerous cruel and meaningless tragedies. These range from spying on, harassing and ruining the lives of anyone deemed an “enemy of the state,” to brutally breaking strikes, violently disrupting demonstrations and killing innocent people in places ranging from Kent State to Ruby Ridge and Waco.

Even the courts are beginning to revive this long forgotten but crucial “general vs. special” militia distinction. The 1990 Supreme Court case Perpich vs. Department of Defense is a case in point. Then Minnesota Gov. Rudy Perpich claimed the DoD violated the Constitution when it ordered the Minnesota National Guard (which he claimed was the ‘state militia’) to duty outside the state without his consent or that of the state legislature.

The Supreme Court ruled against Perpich. It held the National Guard is an integral component of the US Army Reserve system (it has been since 1916). It further supported its ruling by specifying the difference between the “special militia” (in this case the Minnesota Guard) instead of the “general militia” (citizens with privately procured and owned arms) as expressed in the 2nd Amendment. Also in 1990 the Court in another case affirmed the definition of “the people” expressed in the Bill of Rights as meaning individual persons, not a group.

So the statist left has its “militia” and the rest of us have ours. No wonder so many of them can’t free themselves from the false but mesmerizing aura of the “Militia = National Guard” equation. The statist left doesn’t want to because it’s interested not in the right of individuals to protect their lives and liberty against a tyrannical federal government, but in giving that tyrannical federal government a blank check, figuratively and literally, to indulge in state-sponsored terror under the tautological trinity of “crime prevention," "anti-terrorism" and "national security.” And Clinton Defense Secretary William Cohen has all but told us to “get used to the idea.”

So there it is. General militia versus special militia.

Which are you?

Think about that question the next time you are cajoled by otherwise-idle Million Mom March mavens to support “sensible gun laws” or are exhorted by the denizens of the pseudo-patriotic “law-and-order” crowd to “back the badge.”

Published in the May 26, 2000 issue of Ether Zone.

Michael E. Kreca lived in San Diego and had been a financial reporter for Knight-Ridder, Business Week and the Financial Times of London. On February 11, 2006, he was shot to death by a government cop.

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