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News

Rahm Emanuel on Sandy Hook: “Tap Peoples Emotion[:] Make it Simple Assault Weapon[s]”

May 24, 2018 MHB Admin Leave a comment

“You Never Want a Serious Crisis to Go to Waste”

Former Obama administration Chief of Staff and Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan discussed a scheme to take advantage of the country’s emotional response to the December 14, 2012 Sandy Hook School massacre. The conversation is documented in emails released to the Baltimore Post under a Freedom of Information Act request.

“During a roughly 10 minute period, the native Chicagoans exchanged seven messages two days following the massacre in which Mayor Emanuel, who had previously served as President Barrack Obama’s chief of staff, advised Secretary Duncan on what position he should take on the Sandy Hook shootings,” the Post reports.

At 6:57PM EST on December 16, 2012, Duncan wrote to Emanuel in a message titled “CT shootings.”

Duncan asked the Chicago mayor, “What are your thoughts?”

Five minutes later, Emanuel responded, “Go for a vote this week before it fades. Tap peoples emotion. Make it simple assault weapons.”

Duncan responded immediately, “Yup- thanks.”

“When I did brady bill and assault weapons for clinton we always made it simple. Criminals or war weapons,” Emanuel said in the email to Duncan.

“Gun show loophole?” Duncan responded. “Database? Cop-killer bullets? Too complicated?” he said.

“Cop killer maybe,” Emanuel responded. “The other no.”

The exchange ended when Duncan concluded with, “Got it.” (Emphases added.)

Emanuel was a central member of the Clinton White House from 1993 to 1998, helping to enact that administration’s Assault Weapons Ban. He has also been an Illinois congressional representative and central member of the Democratic Party. Emanuel presently serves as and Mayor of Chicago.

Neither Emanuel nor Duncan responded to the Post when asked for comment on the December 2012 exchange.

Despite the silence on the matter, in one of Duncan’s last Tweets, which quotes him from a recent interview in The Atlantic, the former education secretary coincidentally addresses the very tragedy discussed in the emails.

“‘We played by all the rules after Sandy Hook. We did a study, we did a report, we worked with Congress, and guess what we accomplished? Nothing.’ @arneduncan on a plan to boycott American schools.”

In the interview from which he is quoted, Duncan says that one of the most disappointing failures of his career has been deaths that have occurred under his watch due to gun violence.

Duncan is supportive of the current student protests and proposal for a nationwide school boycott sparked by the Parkland school shooting. He argues that lawmakers’ have been unsuccessful in their attempts to enact more severe gun control legislation.

Of the school boycott idea, Duncan said during the interview, “Nothing we have done to date has worked. We have absolutely failed. I have failed. We’ve all failed. But I am also more hopeful today than I have been at any time since the Sandy Hook massacre.”

News

Wolfgang Halbig, Alex Jones Sued For Defamation By Sandy Hook Families

May 23, 2018 MHB Admin 9 Comments

FBI Agent Joins as Plaintiff

Members of six victims’ families of the December 14, 2012 Sandy Hook massacre event in addition to FBI agent Bill Aldenberg have filed a defamation lawsuit in Connecticut Superior Court naming radio host Alex Jones and well-known Sandy Hook Truth activist Wolfgang Halbig as defendants. The suit seeks damages “in excess of $15,000.”

ABC News reports:

The lawsuit accuses Jones, a staunch gun rights advocate who operates Infowars, a website that routinely propagates conspiracies, of “a years-long campaign of abusive and outrageous false statements.”

“While the nation recoiled at the terrible reality of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Alex Jones saw an opportunity,” the families’ attorney Josh Koskoff said. “He went on a sustained attack that has lasted for years, accusing shattered family members of being actors, stating as fact that the shooting itself was a hoax and inciting others to act on these malicious lies.”

The plaintiffs are the parents of four children killed at Sandy Hook — Jacqueline and Mark Barden, parents of Daniel; Nicole and Ian Hockley, parents of Dylan; Francine and David Wheeler, parents of Ben; and Jennifer Hensel and Jeremy Richman, parents of Avielle — as well as Donna Soto, Carlee Soto-Parisi, Carlos Soto and Jillian Soto, the mother and siblings of first-grade teacher Victoria Leigh Soto; and Erica Lafferty-Garbatini, the daughter of Sandy Hook Elementary School Principal Dawn Hochsprung. FBI agent Bill Aldenberg is also a plaintiff.

“As a result of Jones’ campaign,” the families and Aldenberg said they have been “forced to endure malicious and cruel abuse at the hands of ruthless unscrupulous people.”

Their lawsuit also names Wolfgang Halbig, a Florida man who founded the now-defunct website SandyHookJustice, his associate Cory Sklanka and Infowars itself.

The lawsuit, filed in Superior Court in Bridgeport, cites Jones’ public assertions, including one from Sept. 25, 2014, in which he said video from the day of the shooting showed that the same children were cycled in and out of the school and that no emergency helicopters were sent to the school, and were “clearly staged.”

The lawsuit quotes Jones as saying on Jan. 13, 2015, “Yeah, so, Sandy Hook is a synthetic completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured.”

The plaintiffs called such statements, among others, “outrageous, deeply painful and defamatory.”

Connecticut allows for libel and defamation actions to be brought “within two years of the date of the act complained of.” The lawsuit cites statements made by Jones in 2014 and 2015, suggesting the suit may in fact be dead on arrival. It will nevertheless generate substantial news coverage for the parties bringing the action.

Jones and his broadcast enterprises were named as defendants in another lawsuit filed by two other sets of Sandy Hook parents last month in Texas.

Documents

The Deep State’s Message to the Trump Administration

May 23, 2018 MHB Admin 3 Comments

“Connecting the Dots”
Coincidence … or Something More?

(Notes from a reader who requests anonymity)

Editor’s Note: Some observers argue that deep state forces enmeshed in US federal and state governance are sending a message to President Donald Trump through a series of seemingly unrelated occurrences over the past several months beginning in earnest with the mass shooting event at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida, which took place just 30 miles from Trump’s “White House South” at the Mara Lago resort. The Parkland high school’s namesake was known for a staunch opposition to “draining the Florida Everglades (swamp),” and thus as a pioneer of environmental activism.

Following this non-coincidence theory line of reasoning, there is also the veiled threat of “Parkland,” the well-known hospital where President Kennedy was taken following his 1963 assassination If this is even partially the case, consider the hubris behind the message. The theory of course also assumes that Trump is in fact concertedly seeking to “draw the swamp,” since many of his cabinet appointments and approaches toward Israel and other foreign policy concerns suggest otherwise. Yet as the preposterous Mueller investigation and corporate news treatment suggest, Trump is generally regarded as persona non grata among Washington’s parasitic bureaucracy.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas (April 7, 1890 – May 14, 1998) was an American journalist, author, women’s suffrage advocate, and conservationist known for her staunch defense of the Everglades against efforts to drain it and reclaim land for development. Moving to Miami as a young woman to work for The Miami Herald, she became a freelance writer, producing over a hundred short stories that were published in popular magazines. Her most influential work was the book The Everglades: River of Grass (1947), which redefined the popular conception of the Everglades as a treasured river instead of a worthless swamp. Its impact has been compared to that of Rachel Carson‘s influential book Silent Spring (1962). Her books, stories, and journalism career brought her influence in Miami, enabling her to advance her causes.

The lives lost in the
Parkland school shooting

By The Washington Post

Updated Feb. 19 at 12:50 p.m.

Seventeen students and teachers were killed on Wednesday at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in the second-deadliest shooting at a U.S. public school. Here are the stories of those who died …

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Image result for hinckley bush connection

Parkland Memorial Hospital

JFK assassination

The John F. Kennedy plaque in Parkland’s Radiology Department marks the location of the Trauma Room I bed in 1963.

Parkland is best known as the hospital where three individuals associated with the assassination of John F. Kennedy either died or were pronounced dead: John F. Kennedy himself, his assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, and Jack Ruby, who killed Oswald. The 2013 film Parkland dramatizes the deaths of Kennedy and Oswald in the hospital.

After he was shot on November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was rushed to Parkland, where he was pronounced dead at 1 p.m. in Trauma Room 1. At the same time, Texas Governor John Connally, wounded in the same shooting, was treated in Trauma Room 2, and survived.

Military Helicopter Drops Ammo over School, Busts Hole in Roof

A U.S. Army Reserve soldier reaches the last few yards of a 6-mile road march event at the Best Warrior Competition on Fort Bliss, Texas, Jan. 6, 2017. (U.S. Army Reserve photo/Amabilia G. Payen)

Fox News
18 May 2018
By Benjamin Brown

A military helicopter accidentally dropped a box full of ammunition over a Texas elementary school Thursday mid-afternoon, leaving a gaping hole in the roof, according to officials.

The incident caused a portion of Parkland Elementary School to be without power, the Ysleta Independent School District said in a statement.

A fire tore through a school bus garage early Friday, destroying more than two dozen buses as tires exploded off their rims, and forcing an Eastern Pennsylvania school district to cancel classes.

Parkland School District Superintendent Rich Sniscak said approximately 25 buses were destroyed early Friday morning after a fire broke out in the east garage of the bus depot on in South Whitehall in Eastern Pennsylvania.

Fire destroys 25 school buses; Parkland School District in Eastern Pa. cancels classes

The fast-moving blaze at a Parkland School District garage in South Whitehall near Allentown, Pa. in Lehigh County was reported around 3 a.m. by neighbors who said they also heard explosions.

When firefighters showed up a few minutes later, “there were flames coming out of all four sides plus the roof,” said Jeff Johnson, chief of the Tri-Clover Fire Co.

Firefighters had to retreat as tires exploded off their rims and flew through the walls of the building, taking metal siding with them, Johnson said. It took about an hour to put out the fire.

Johnson said 16 buses inside the building were destroyed, and a dozen outside the building received damage that ranged from blistered paint to broken windshields.

The 25 destroyed or damaged buses represent about 25 percent of the district’s fleet. No injuries were reported, and the cause of the fire remained under investigation.

Some of the burned-out buses were still smoking hours later as firefighters dragged away metal siding.

As firefighters worked to bring the fire under control, Parkland School District Superintendent Rich Sniscak sent email and text alerts to parents and students saying classes were canceled for the day.

Sniscak said the fire destroyed approximately 16 buses parked in the east garage, which was a total loss. He said 9 or 10 buses adjacent to the garage were also heavily damaged.

“I’m hopeful that we’ll have school Monday. We talked to our vendor already and a lot of my colleagues and superintendents in other districts have offered to check their fleet to see what buses they can come up with,” Sniscak said. “I’m hopeful that we can patch something together for Monday.”

North Whitehall resident Chrissi Kent, who lives on Route 309 told The Morning Call she heard “popping” from the scene for at least 45 minutes.

“Around 3 a.m. or a few minutes after, I heard a loud bang,” Kent said. “Then it was quiet for a few minutes. Then I heard another bang. Shortly afterwards, I heard sirens. Then repeatedly bangs or popping sounds.”

“I went outside around 3:30 a.m. to see what was happening and could see the heavy smoke and orange glow from my driveway,” Kent continued. “My daughter sent me a text from inside the house and asked me what was going on. I told her she had to come out and see this. When we walked to the bottom of our driveway we could see high flames above the trees.”

It wasn’t clear Friday if district schools would reopen Monday.

The Associated Press contributed

The CIA and the Media

The CIA and the Media: Historical Fact #96

May 21, 2018 MHB Admin 5 Comments

Douglas Valentine has critiqued the progressive-left’s uncritical stance toward public luminaries, such as longtime CIA operative Daniel Ellseberg, or the functioning deity of American liberals, the New York Times itself. According to Valentine, political progressives demonstrate crucial blindspots in their adoration of such figures and institutions. Works and authors that shed light on the contradictory nature of this adoration are either ignored or derogated by what CIA official Cord Meyer termed “the Compatible Left,” notes Valentine.

Upon The Phoenix Program‘s publication in 1990 “the word went out to ignore the book, not just because it revealed CIA secrets,” observes Valentine,

but because it identified the media, and the Times in particular, as the reason why the public can’t see the CIA clearly for what it is: a criminal conspiracy on behalf of wealthy capitalists.

I had also noted that the release of the Pentagon Papers distracted attention from Congressional hearings into Phoenix. In subsequent books I added that it distracted attention from reports on CIA drug trafficking as well.

Indeed, Valentine argues that he was effectively “neutralize[d]” by CIA media assets, and even his allies responded in chorus that he’d “crossed the line and would never get another book published in the United States. So I learned the hard way,” he continues, “that the CIA has a strategic intelligence network of management level people in the information industry who know, through instruments like the Times Book Review section, what books and authors to marginalize.”

Valentine explains how author Peter Dale Scott was similarly marginalized as a result of his landmark books, The War Conspiracy (1972) and Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993). “Peter supported me,” Valentine recalls,

and a few years after the Phoenix book was published, I mentioned to him that I was writing an article based on my interviews with [CIA officers Frank] Scotton and [Lucien] Conein, about Ellseberg’s deep state political association with the CIA. Peter is Ellsberg’s friend, and even though the article had the potential to embarrass Ellsberg, he arranged for me to interview him. Peter gave me Ellsberg’s number and I called at a pre-arranged time. And the first thing Ellsberg said to me was, “You can’t possibly understand me because you’re not a celebrity.”

CIA Operative and Progressive-Left Darling, Daniel Ellsberg. Image Credit: Huffington Post

If you want to understand the critical role celebrities play in determining what society accepts as real and valuable, read Guy Debord’s books The Society of the Spectacle and its sequel, Comments. Debord explains the symbolic role celebrities play (at times inadvertently) in maintaining the illusions we confuse with reality.

Debord cites the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who famously said: “But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence… illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.”

When Ellsberg told me he was a celebrity, he was saying that he underwent a symbolic transformation the moment he leaked the Pentagon Papers, and landed in a social realm that alienated him from non-celebrities like me. He became an icon, and nobody on the left is about to say, “Oh, my god! Valentine had this revelation about Ellsberg. Let’s rethink everything we believe is true.”

Like its doppelgängers on the right, the management class on the left is invested in celebrity heroes who represent their business interests. they focus on the symbol and ignore any contradictory but essential facts, the way [journalists Glenn] Greenwald and [Jeremy] Scahill] ignore Pierre Omidyar’s funding of the Center for the United Action in Kiev, which was a Phoenix-style coordination center for covert political action.

Douglas Valentine, “How William Colby Gave Me the Keys to the CIA Kingdom (based on interview with James Tracy),” in The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World, Atlanta GA: Clarity Press, 2017, 31-32.

Guest Posts

Fixing the News: Blockchain-Powered Solutions for Media in Crisis

May 21, 2018 MHB Admin 5 Comments

Editor’s Note: Does blockchain technology offer a potential solution to often misleading, censorial, and even fraudulent corporate news media that plagues the Western world? As the author notes in his conclusion, such projects may seem far-fetched at present, yet it was not that long ago that few believed Wikipedia would ever gain traction. Today’s real news and analyses are coming from citizen journalists who remain vulnerable to YouTube, Google, and social media gatekeepers. What if they were given the means to form their own “ecosystems” for news and commentary?

“Creating comprehensive community-powered marketplaces for production, distribution, and verification of news”

Kirill Bryanov
CoinTelegraph
(May 19, 2018)

In the US and around the world, quality journalism is going through difficult times. Against the backdrop of steadily declining trust in the mainstream press, systemic issues like the ever-intensifying political polarization of the media, proliferation of fake news, and asymmetric power relations between platforms and publishers, among others, stand in the way of the press striving to fulfill its crucial societal functions. The central role of the media in the society is, at least normatively, to provide the public with essential knowledge of the state of the world that would enable people to make informed choices. In a democracy, both institutional and social media are also supposed to facilitate an open arena for public discussion and deliberation where the wide array of voices and ideas are represented. However, the reality seems to be drifting away from this ideal in dramatic ways.

A longstanding critical tradition has an extensive list of claims to lay to the US media system’s structural deficiencies. Even in the pre-digital era, some scholars of communication were uneasy with the growing concentration of corporate ownership in media industries, seeing this trend as threatening the democratic process. Proponents of this intellectual current advocated for as wide a distribution of communication power as possible as a safeguard against power abuse at the hands of big corporate and state actors. The advent of digital news has seen yet another wave of similar criticisms, as it had soon become apparent that, contrary to early internet enthusiasts’ expectations, the new media ecosystem does not quite eliminate the disparities in communication power. Instead, it seemed to be reproducing the old patterns of power concentration, as well as giving rise to some new problematic trends.

Most of the contemporary media criticisms converge around one point: the digital news economy. The ad-based online business model often proves to be inadequate for sustaining certain forms of journalism that rely on specific and narrow audiences for financial backing. These forms happen to be the ones of social importance, like local news or investigative and issue reporting. Labelled the “attention economy,” the incentive system that social media news feeds have engendered rewards content that attracts eyeballs and generates clicks. Facebook and Google, which derive the bulk of their profits from selling targeted ads, have apparent reasons to stimulate as long user engagement with content as possible. Here’s where algorithmic newsfeeds come in handy, facilitating users’ selective exposure to content they will likely enjoy. Extrapolated to the political arena, this logic results in people getting locked up in ideological information bubbles, where partisan views become amplified and biases get confirmed. These bubbles also provide fertile soil for the spread of politically charged misinformation.

Aspiring media reformers have proposed multiple cures to these maladies. Among alternative models are philanthropic foundation-supported nonprofits, issue-specific donation-funded media outlets, and various forms of collaborative citizen journalism. Albeit sustainable in certain contexts, such solutions have so far failed to demonstrate flexibility and scalability needed to achieve any degree of mainstream adoption. Besides, these models mainly rely on goodwill of those people whose motivations are purely altruistic, which makes it difficult to ensure a steady flow of contributions.

A handful of blockchain-driven media startups that aspire to revolutionize the news economy are different in this important sense. They hope to not just draw in people longing for good journalism, but also provide them with economic incentives to contribute their efforts to sustaining the ecosystem for substantive news. Using the versatile incentive-building tools made available by crypto economy, combined with game-theoretic behavioral modelling and principles of decentralized governance, these projects aim at nothing less than creating comprehensive community-powered marketplaces for production, distribution, and verification of news.

A defining feature of each of these platforms is that they are all powered by the principles of the token economy. Unlike traditional fiat currencies or even a general-purpose cryptocurrency that could be used for any manner of transaction, crypto tokens are usually designed in a way that programmatically restricts the range of their uses to a certain set of roles and functions within a given system. Tokens therefore reflect the purposes and values of a certain platform, and can be used in order to align the economic interests of its individual users with the interests of the community at large. As a vehicle for transactions, such tokens are no longer a content-neutral instrument that simply enables transmission of information or value; rather, they entail the shared interests and values of those who subscribed to use them within a specific economic ecosystem.

Within the broader ecosystem of emerging blockchain-powered media startups, there is a wealth of platforms that use crypto-economic models to redefine the system of monetary exchanges between creators and consumers of information goods. The most common focus is on user-generated content and the ways in which regular folks in social media contexts are rewarded for their work: some examples include Steemit, Sapien, or Po.et, to name a few. The following review, however, focuses on a more specific set of projects, which explicitly address some problematic institutional aspects of the current news media system. As such, the projects in the list recognize the independent social value of news, and offer fixes that are designed to produce a better informed public.

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Santa Fe Student Miraculously Survives .38 Cal Neck Wound

May 20, 2018 MHB Admin 32 Comments

Santa Fe High School baseball player Rome Shubert claims he was “shot in the head” at the mass shooting at his school on May 18. Shubert only spent a short time in hospital before requesting the nurse call his mom, presumably so he could go home.

The New Nationalist provides a helpful overview of Shubert’s improbable wound:

At Santa Fe High School, we have a young man. Rome Shubert who unknowingly sustained a shot in the head and emerged unfazed. To quote CNN: “A bullet sliced clean through the back of the Santa Fe High School sophomore’s head … Remarkably, he walked away with just bandages, and said on Twitter he was “completely okay and stable.”

Acting on pure adrenaline, he said, he sprinted to a rear exit in the room and bounded over a 7-foot wall. That’s when Mr. Shubert realized he was covered in blood and he had been shot.

The young man’s mother, Sheri Shubert, chimed in, saying, “The doctors told me it went in clean and came out clean.” She added, “We have to do something. We have to take a stand. America has to take a stand for our kids.”

Yes, those special black-magic bullets again. No contusions or bruising, no swelling, no real effect on hearing except “ears ringing.”

Continue reading Santa Fe Student Miraculously Survives .38 Cal Neck Wound →

The CIA and the Media

The CIA and the Media: Historical Fact #95

May 19, 2018 MHB Admin 6 Comments

The famous Senate committee led by Idaho Senator Frank Church tasked to review the CIA’s internal affairs and relationships with mass media was in fact overseen by former CIA officer and Ford Foundation staffer William B. Bader. Bader proceeded to effectively censor a multitude of the committee’s most damning revelations concerning Agency-media liaisons. After his service in this regard he became an upper-echelon intelligence official at the Department of Defense and chief of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Later in his career Bader was appointed by President Clinton to be Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs.

Bader’s assistant in the Senate committee investigation was David Aaron, who previously served in Henry Kissinger’s National Security Council and went on to become a career diplomat after being deputy to President Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. In the 1990s Aaron was appointed ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development by Clinton.

Former CIA official and Senate Committee censor William B. Bader

One CIA official who sought to convince committee members that the Agency’s relationship with journalists was insignificant argued that the files under examination were “filled with puffing’ by case officers,” according to investigative reporter Carl Bernstein.

“You can’t establish what is puff and what isn’t,” he claimed. Many reporters, he added, “were recruited for finite [specific] undertakings and would be appalled to find that they were listed [in Agency files] as CIA operatives.”

The same CIA officer suggested that these files included descriptions of several “‘famous'” reporters and correspondents. “The files show,'” according to this official, “‘that the CIA goes to the press for and just as often that the press comes to the CIA …There is a tacit agreement in many of these cases that there is going to be a quid pro quo’” which means the reporter in question can expect to receive important stories and information from the Agency and in exchange the CIA will obtain helpful services from the reporter.

The upshot was that the Senate committee’s inquest on the Agency’s use of journalists were purposefully suppressed “from the full membership of the committee, from the Senate and from the public,” Bernstein notes.

“There was a difference of opinion on how to treat the subject,” explained one source. “Some [senators] thought these were abuses which should be exorcized and there were those who said, ‘We don’t know if this is bad or not.’”

In fact, former CIA officer Bader’s findings on the CIA’s relationship with the media were withheld froth committee, even behind closed doors in executive session because the senators were afraid that, “[a]t the slightest sign of a leak the CIA might cut off the flow of sensitive information as it did, several times in other areas), claiming that the committee could not be trusted with secrets.” As one committee staff member pointed out, “’It was as if we were on trial—not the CIA.’”

To describe in the committee’s final report the true dimensions of the Agency’s use of journalists would cause a furor in the press and on the Senate floor. And it would result in heavy pressure on the CIA to end its use of journalists altogether. “We just weren’t ready to take that step,” said a senator.

The committee also decided “to conceal the results of the staff’s inquiry into the use of academics,” and Bader himself wrote those portions of the committee’s final report. Pages 191 to 201 of that document were entitled, “Covert Relationships with the United States Media.” “’It hardly reflects what we found,’” Senator Gary Hart stated. “’There was a prolonged and elaborate negotiation [with the CIA] over what would be said.’”

Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media,” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977.

Guest Posts

Trump Served Legal Notice Warning of Israel False Flag Operation

May 18, 2018 MHB Admin 32 Comments

Editor’s Note: MHB has repeatedly explained how false flag terror plays a foremost role in contemporary history (e.g. here, here, and here). Unfortunately this very real phenomenon has been systematically unaddressed by Western governmental, educational and news media institutions. As a result the public is unable to consider or recognize the broader significance of seemingly spontaneous public events.

The most significant false flag incident in recent history has been the the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, since these provided the basis and multiple rationales for the forfeiture of civil liberties amidst a broader “strategy of tension” at home and and a perpetual “war on terror” abroad.

Via Middle East Monitor
(May 15, 2018)

US President Donald Trump has been served with a legal notice [full text of document below] reminding him of his Constitutional duties with regard to the situation in the Middle East, especially his decision to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, and warning him of an impending Israeli false flag operation likely to threaten the lives of US citizens. America’s responsibilities as a permanent member of the UN Security Council are also pointed out by the signatories to the notice, who are British journalist Sarah Jane (Lauren) Booth; former CIA Operations Officer Philip Giraldi; ex-Pentagon official Michael Maloof; Scott Bennett, a former US Army Officer and State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism; ex-US Diplomat and Attorney J. Michael Springmann; and Edward C Corrigan, a Canadian Barrister and Solicitor.

Continue reading Trump Served Legal Notice Warning of Israel False Flag Operation →

The CIA and the Media

The CIA and the Media: Historical Fact #94

May 18, 2018 MHB Admin 3 Comments

A lengthy prosecution of teachers and owners of the Manhattan Beach California-based Virginia McMartin Preschool for allegations of sexually abusing their students dominated news headlines and broadcasts throughout the 1980s. An initial investigation involving interviews with hundreds of McMartin students by an experienced child therapist found a majority of students affirming such abuse.

Despite abundant evidence and blanket media coverage the defendants were acquitted in 1990 after six years of trial proceedings costing $15 million. Defendant Raymond Buckey was retried shortly thereafter and again exonerated.

The observations of students included a number of tunnels existing underneath McMartin classrooms and bathrooms connecting to external exits, through which students passed to be taken to other locations where they attended and partook in occult rituals. Following the McMartin students’ allegations reports of similar abuse began to emerge at preschools throughout the US.

Despite abundant evidence gathered by prosecutors supporting the allegations the defense attorneys eventually turned the tables and put the children and their families on trial, arguing that anxious parents and the appointed child therapist used “leading questions” to instill and capture children’s “false memories” that contributed to unreliable if not wholly erroneous testimony.

Several nationally-recognized psychologists, journalists and news outlets took this cue to label the students’ claims as groundless and absurd, and condemned the parents of creating a “Satanic panic” out of their children’s fertile imaginations. It was further contended by the defense and its supporters that ritual abuse of children was not a genuine social phenomenon. The McMartin defendants’ storyline explaining away the accusations has been echoed in recent years by such CIA-linked news outlets as the august New York Times (here and here.

“The hysteria thesis, promoted by a small group of pedophile defense psychologists, mostly, has appeared in publications of stature including the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Wall Street Journal, Village Voice, Harper’s, New Yorker and Newsweek,” notes author Alex Constantine, who contends that CIA infiltration of news media played a key role in mitigating public belief and concern over McMartin and similar events involving such potential ritual abuse.

Media boosters of the defense neglect to acknowledge the most damning evidence in the McMartin case. Instead, they explain away superficial, carefully sifted pieces of the case. In preparation for the trial, 380 toddlers were interviewed–nearly all of them described abuse at the preschool, and do to this day. Some 80 percent had physical symptoms, including blunt force trauma of sexual areas, scarring, rectal bleeding and sexual diseases …

Ritual abuse “skeptics” with CIA connections are covering up the latest phase in Agency-sponsored mind control experimentation. For thirty years Agency scientists have collaborated with cults (many of them founded by the government) to conceal the development of mind control technology. Jim Jones and the People’s Temple were one product of the alliance. McMartin was another. Both episodes have been buried in disinformation. The campaign to mislead the public about ritual abuse is ambitious, rivaling the campaign to conceal facts in the murder of John F. Kennedy.

In 1993, as the second trial of Raymond Buckey proceeded, McMartin parents and former FBI officer Ted Gunderson oversaw an excavation of the McMartin School grounds conducted by a team of geologists and archaeologists from LA area universities accompanied by a professional photographer and carbon-dating specialist. After several weeks the group discovered and carefully documented the very tunnels described in the toddler-students’ numerous testimonies, in addition to various occult objects. The prosecutor in Buckey’s second trial appeared at the excavation site refused to acknowledge this crucial find.

“Until the tunnels were found,” notes Constantine,

the L.A. Times covered the dig–with a smirk. The parents and scientists involved were portrayed as crack pots until the existence of the tunnels was substantiated by experts, at which time the newspaper abruptly stopped reporting the story. The public was left with the false impression that the search had failed.

Alex Constantine, Psychic Dictatorship in the USA, Los Angeles: Feral House, 1995, 77, 81, 84.

Guest Posts, Videos

Arlington Road

May 17, 2018 MHB Admin 4 Comments

1999 Film Portending Today’s “Conspiracy-Fueled Climate”

Editor’s Note: Arlington Road was surely an uncommon Hollywood production in that it addressed “conspiratorial” subject matter, including false flag terror, blackmail by government agencies, the Patriot movement, and pedophilia, all in a not-so-thinly-veiled fashion. The film was developed in the shadow of Ruby Ridge, the Waco massacre, and the Murrah federal building bombing while also eerily anticipating the events of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent culture of paranoia and conspiracy the government response to those events helped shape. Arlington Road was also an artifact examined in James Tracy’s infamous Culture of Conspiracy class, which he taught as a tenured faculty member at Florida Atlantic University prior to being terminated for not reporting his protected speech to school officials posted on this personal blog .

Mike D’Angelo
A.V. Club
(May 15, 2018)

Calling Arlington Road an unsung summer blockbuster admittedly stretches that category’s definition. A political thriller in the Parallax View mold, the film did get a wide release (in July 1999), but it was made for a relatively low budget and boasted decidedly mid-level stars: Jeff Bridges, Tim Robbins, Joan Cusack, and Hope Davis.

Nobody likely expected a box-office bonanza. Still, it underperformed even by that metric, finishing sixth on its opening weekend (even though the only other studio film to bow that week was American Pie), and received largely mixed reviews. In today’s conspiracy-fueled climate, the commercial and critical fate of a movie as deftly engineered and deeply cynical as this one might well be very different.

Bridges plays Michael Faraday, a history professor still mourning his late wife, who’d worked for the FBI and been killed in a Waco-style standoff. Seeking a playmate for his young son, Faraday is happy to meet new neighbors Oliver and Cheryl Lang (Robbins and Cusack), as they have a boy around the same age.

Soon, however, Faraday begins to suspect that this seemingly ordinary, exceedingly friendly couple is harboring some sort of dark secret. Some of the personal information they impart doesn’t check out, and as Faraday starts snooping around and keeping tabs, he discovers more and more discrepancies and inexplicable behavior. Eventually, he concludes that the Langs are homegrown terrorists plotting an attack.

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