30-04-2018, 10:12 AM (This post was last modified: 30-04-2018, 05:49 PM by Peter Lemkin.)
Of those who might be considered ordinary citizens, I was one of the first I know of to have been told by someone 'in the know' that 'Terrorism' and the War on Terrorism was the next 'big thing'. I was told this in my own home [parent's home] in the NYC area summer of 1976. My parents and relatives [and myself even then] were very far left and progressives - political activists; however my mother was a friendly type and had some friends in the neighborhood she knew who were not politically progressive. One of these type of friends had a son I saw rarely, but enough to know him. I saw his mother more at our home ocassionally. I can't remember exactly the reason why I had contacted the son, but his mother had just told me had had returned to the USA. I knew he has been working for the intelligence community and/or military as a mathematician if I remember correctly - and doing top secret work in Kwajalein. He was [or said he was] a theoretical electronics & math expert - but I think he was more than that, or involved in something much broader. Anyway, he came to our house and only I was home. We talked uncomfortably for a few hours, as his political views and my view of how the USA and the World should be were diametrically opposite. That my family had some relationship over the decades with his mother was the only 'glue' and basis for discussion. I was beginning my research work on the Secret Governmental structures, actions, crimes, modalities, etc. He was, it seemed to me, working within that Secret structure. I remember him telling me in a way that reminded me of the scene in the Graduate where some family friend tells Benjamin that the next big thing was plastics, that he told me [at a time when the term terrorism was rarely used and NOT in the news, at all], that Terrorism and fighting terrorism in a total and endless War on it was the next big thing the USG was going to be involved in. How prescient he was - or perhaps he knew they were going to cook up the very terrorism we would fight. He is still an expert on the matter [or so he is regarded]. His name is Robert Kupperman. How correct he was long ago. I asked him what he did on Kwajalein, but he said he couldn't tell me, as it was classified. I remember feeling some very strange darkness come over me when he left - he sort of implied 'just you wait and you'll see how right I am in what I said'. I have NO way of knowing how he knew this, or his role in anything specific. But he was on the mark. Since then his views and mine, while always oceans apart, have moved even further apart. He has always claimed just to be a private contractor, and maybe that is all he ever was - but the circles he moved/moves in are those I fear most vis-a-vis the War OF terror.
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
This issue may not be all that debateable. If you read "Self-Destruct" by Judge Robert Morris, (who spent his life in intelligence) he clearly and unambiguously states that "terrorism" will be replacing "anti-Communism" as the new boogie-man for the Intel Community from 1979 on. We was writing this in 1979. In fact that was almost the entire theme of his "Self-Destruct" book.
Just before I got out of the Marine Corps in 1984, one of my commanding officers told me that the cold war was winding down and that the next big thing would be the war against radical Islam. Obviously all these wars are planned out decades before they happen.
Rolf Zaeschmar Wrote:Just before I got out of the Marine Corps in 1984, one of my commanding officers told me that the cold war was winding down and that the next big thing would be the war against radical Islam. Obviously all these wars are planned out decades before they happen.
What rank was that officer, if I can ask?
"We'll know our disinformation campaign is complete when everything the American public believes is false." --William J. Casey, D.C.I
"We will lead every revolution against us." --Theodore Herzl
I remember hearing an interview on the radio some yars ago now 25 or 30. The person interviewed whose name I do not recall but I do recall he was an academic in geography, was discussing the 'surplus' males on the planet and what was going to happen to them. This was as a result of mechanisation of so many industries in which males would work. Especially the unskilled work. So what was the solution? Increased leisure time? Job sharing? Reskilling? Training for new jobs? Funding for work that needs to be done but is currently done by unpaid people? No. The answer was it would be likely these 'surplus men' (aka humans) would be used for wars. Manufactured wars to use up the surplus males. A business model because there are more profits and better outcomes, for some, in war.
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Karl Marx
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.
Magda Hassan Wrote:I remember hearing an interview on the radio some yars ago now 25 or 30. The person interviewed whose name I do not recall but I do recall he was an academic in geography, was discussing the 'surplus' males on the planet and what was going to happen to them. This was as a result of mechanisation of so many industries in which males would work. Especially the unskilled work. So what was the solution? Increased leisure time? Job sharing? Reskilling? Training for new jobs? Funding for work that needs to be done but is currently done by unpaid people? No. The answer was it would be likely these 'surplus men' (aka humans) would be used for wars. Manufactured wars to use up the surplus males. A business model because there are more profits and better outcomes, for some, in war.
Gawd, it's so depressing isn't it. On the one hand war keeps the defence (actually offence) industries, the banks who finance them, the intelligence and security sectors and the rest of the greed crowd in clover. On the other hand war is excellent for getting rid of the world's "useless eater's" as Kissinger (I believe?) once stated.
Both dovetail with each other in a Mephistophelean pact of utter evil.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
I've been going back and forth over the 1970's (and later) activities of the neocons and their various predecessors for a while now, and still have a lot of further reading to do. There's close to a hundred online theses in PDF that are pertinent to the subject. Yesterday I found a 400+ page essay about Carter's clashes with the defence establishment during his Presidency.
Regardless, the war on terror does seem to have been conceived through this period. Team B, American Security Council members, Nitze and Wolhstetter and others all meeting time and again to discuss what could and should be done. Both of those latter guys also had a pivotal meeting with John Singlaub just prior to his retirement in 1978 to discuss their unhappiness with the direction of Carter's defence policy. The following year, they all head off overseas to the July 1979 Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism - an event that has been slightly misread, in my opinion - to set various propaganda wheels in motion, remembering that the target of choice following that event was the Soviet Union.
But that was a propaganda initiative with people giving speeches that had been prepared long earlier, to serve an agenda that had been cooking for a while, and which simply opened doors. I wrote the below elsewhere a week ago. Just excerpting it here, with some documentation.
New to me this week - Larry Potts, a colleague and friend of Louis Freeh, worked on Zelikow's Harvard Study Group into Catastrophic Terrorism. Terry Lynn Nichols once made a declaration stating that Timothy McVeigh had participated in the Oklahoma event under instructions from Larry Potts. Matthew Meselson, the anthrax expert Zelikow hired for the group, had 'served as a resident consultant to the CIA'. From a recent piece I wrote below
The right-wing think tank The Institute for Contemporary Studies (ICS) held a couple of seminars in the late 70's. One in 1976, the other in 1979. The results of both are gathered in a couple of books, the 1976 volume DEFENDING AMERICA, and the 1980 volume FROM WEAKNESS TO STRENGTH: NATIONAL SECURITY IN THE 1980's.
The 'institute' that put both books together was 'founded in 1972 by Edwin Meese and Caspar Weinberger as a think tank dedicated to promoting Ronald Reagan's presidential candidacy'. Meese and Weinburger both later appeared throughout the Iran Contra scandal, and Weinberger joined a group of PNAC neocons to sign the 1998 letter drafted by the 'Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf', urging Clinton to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The ICS was later headed by Robert B. Hawkins Jr. Donald Rumsfeld served as the CEO of ICS in the late 1980s.
Various anti-detente folk crop up in the first ICS volume. Robert Conquest, Theodore Draper, Gregory Grossman, Walter Z. Laqueur, Edward N. Luttwak, Charles Burton Marshall, Rumsfeld's good buddy Paul Nitze, Norman Polmar, Eugene Rostow, Leonard Shapiro, Paul Seabury, W. Scott Thompson, Albert Wohlstetter. The group announced their first volume was intended to address 'growing public concern about the drift in present policy' and to 'recommend alternate courses'.
A few years later, in the intro to the ICS volume FROM WEAKNESS TO STRENGTH, the editors note that their efforts throughout the Carter admin had been unable to 'change the underlying situation', and so while their first volume was a critique, the new volume - workshopped by the participants at a gathering at Belmont House in Baltimore, Maryland in late 1979 - was organised to set forth a positive agenda to act on for policy change. Back come some of the anti-detente right wingers - "...A number of authors who had contributed to the earlier book were recruited: Edward Luttwak, Charles Burton Marshall, Paul Nitze and Albert Wolhstetter... The new project was designed to recommend a whole range of policy options, from short-term quick fixes to longer-term military strategies." Joining the group were William R Van Cleave, a member of the Committee on the Present Danger. Van Cleave's Rightweb bio notes that "..at Missouri State University, Van Cleave has been part of a circle of like-minded hawks, many of whom were part of the 1970s-era CPD and who later championed an aggressive war on terror in the wake of the 9/11 attacks." Van Cleave was later part of the group that produced the Clean Break document supported by Wolfowitz in the 90's. Also joining that Maryland group in 1979, and listed in the contents as an attendee in the FROM WEAKNESS TO STRENGTH volume - Kenneth Adelman, Donald Rumsfeld's personal assistant during the Ford administration, who would later co-write two books with Lockheed head Norm Augustine.
As part of their examination of long-term military strategies during the conference, Fred Ikle - who had worked alongside Wolfowitz and Richard Perle - presented a paper - PREPARING FOR INDUSTRIAL MOBILIZATION: THE FIRST STEP TOWARDS FULL STRENGTH, and Ikle's talk is reprinted in full through pages 55-69 of the book. In his 1979 talk, Ikle noted that a renewed military buildup would be crucial for the United States to achieve its various goals in the years ahead, but that a renewed effort towards military mobilisation would be difficult to achieve without a 'dramatic external event'. Luttwak, present at both earlier conferences, had previously written a volume on how conspirators could carry out a Coup d'Etat - COUP D'ETAT - A PRACTICAL HANDBOOK. Listed as 'wicked, truthful and entertaining', it's a non-fiction analysis of how a secretive group could carry out an internal coup against the government of their own country.
The first three pages ago are discussion among the defence establishment folk at the December 1979 Belmont House conference talking about using a 'triggering event'. Final page - Ikle's lecture, excerpted, where he explains that a dramatic external event will be required to boost military spending.
Ikle's speech excerpted below. See the paragraph at bottom.
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