The Boiling Frogs Presents Richard Moore

This is Part 5 of our interview series on the New World Order. You can listen to the previous interviews in this series here: Part I, Part II, Part III , and Part IV.

Richard Moore shares with us his unique perspective on the working of the political world at the highest levels, the matrix of a fabricated collective illusion, how this matrix of unreality is formed for us, and his proposals for escaping it. He discusses consensus reality, as generated by official rhetoric and amplified by mass media, and how this perspective on the political process, and on the roles of left and right, bears very little relationship to actual reality, and remain as a fabricated collective illusion. Mr. Moore further discusses the new post World War II paradigm which was designed and planned in a series of meetings, by a handful of people selected from the Council on Foreign Relations, to specifically serve the interests of central bankers. He talks about the recent rise in collective activism energy such as the Arab Spring uprisings, the Occupy Movement, and various protests in Europe, the left and right as illusions foisted on us to keep us divided, the importance of localism and inclusiveness in pursuit of real changes, and more!

Richard K Moore, an expatriate from Silicon Valley, retired and moved to Ireland in 1994 to begin his ‘real work’ – trying to understand how the world works, and how we can make it better. Many years of researching and writing culminated in his widely acclaimed book Escaping the Matrix: How We the People Can Change the World (The Cyberjournal Project, 2005). His Cyberjournal email list has been going since 1994 (cyberjournal.org). The book’s website is http://escapingthematrix.org, and his website is http://cyberjournal.org. He can be contacted via email at rkm@quaylargo.com.

 

Here is our guest Richard Moore unplugged!

 

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The Boiling Frogs Presents Elizabeth Gould & Paul Fitzgerald This is Part IV of our interview series on the New World Order. You can listen to the previous interviews in this series here: Part I, Part II, and Part III

Authors and investigative journalists Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald join us to discuss their ground-breaking exclusive series ‘House of Mirrors’ on how America’s full blown surge into personal and private holy war caused the U.S. to slip into a crisis of identity. They explore the little-analyzed facts and mystical covert agendas that the United States continues to press on with into the 21st century, what those agendas may mean to America’s new role as the dark force that orders the universe, the prevailing motives that drive American national security policy today, and its de-evolution of rational defense policy and its immersion into the mystical. Gould-Fitzgerald talk about the top secret military operation known as the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) which views itself as a ‘dark force,’ Mystical Imperialism traced to both Britain and Russia’s 19th century efforts to establish dominion through a mix of imperialism and Christian zeal, and more!

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began their experience in Afghanistan when they were the first American journalists to acquire permission to enter behind Soviet lines in 1981 for CBS News and produced a documentary, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds, for PBS. In 1983 they returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher for ABC Nightline and contributed to the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. They continued to research, write and lecture about the long-term run-up that led to the US invasion of Afghanistan. They are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story , Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire and The Voice. Visit their website here.

 

Listen to the preview Here

 

Here are our guest Elizabeth Gould & Paul Fitzgerald unplugged!

 

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The Neoconized Just War Doctrine

By Paul Fitzgerald & Elizabeth Gould

More than one policy pundit has scratched their head at the strange, increasingly irrational nature of what guides American and European foreign policy. In November of 2010, commentator William Pfaff resorted to the term “medieval mysticism� to describe the “the cloud of unknowing� surrounding the run up to the all important NATO summit in Lisbon. He marveled that only by invoking the mystical past could one contemplate what was in store as the West pondered a dark future.

As odd as it may seem to modern audiences, medieval mysticism and its attendant priesthoods are not as far beneath the surface of present day policy as one might think. In fact following the crisis brought about by the failure of advanced technology to defeat Communism in Vietnam, America’s premier defense intellectuals were quick to fall back on the Middle Ages for answers to what seemed eternal and imponderable questions. 

One vivid example came from future Reagan administration officials Colin S. Gray and Keith Payne in the summer 1980 edition of Foreign Policy magazine who declared in an article titled “Victory is Possible� that: “Nuclear War is possible. But unlike Armageddon, the apocalyptic war prophesied to end history, nuclear war can have a wide range of options… If American nuclear power is to support U.S. foreign policy objectives, the United States must possess the ability to wage nuclear war rationally.�

Having come of age at a time when the U.S. enjoyed an overwhelming nuclear advantage and unquestioned technological superiority, America’s plunge into military defeat in Vietnam and a rough nuclear parity with the USSR was cause for a deep philosophical reassessment. The “new rightâ€� embodied in groups like Team B, the Committee on the Present Danger and the American Security Council needed to undo the debilitating effects caused by their own failures and discrediting the strategic doctrine implemented by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara known as Mutual Assured Destruction or (MAD) topped a long list. Read more È

How Guilt, Innocence & Facts Are Made Irrelevant
By Paul Fitzgerald & Elizabeth Gould

As the U.S. becomes more and more the kind of country it has traditionally opposed, the answer to where we are headed may lie more in the arcane traditions of a dim past than in a bright future.

On the 10^th anniversary of 9/11, numerous commentators from across a broad spectrum of opinion focused their alarm not so much on the horror of events in lower Manhattan ten years before, but on what America has become in the aftermath of that horror. Ten years on, the United States desperately expands what appears to be an increasingly irrational, corrosive and ultimately self-destructive national security mandate around the globe and here at home.

In the darkening gloom of  the upcoming 2012 Presidential elections as the U.S. builds up its forces in the Middle East and returns its attention to Asia’s Pacific rim, the CIA’s focus is no longer on analyzing intelligence on terrorists, but simply killing those perceived as a threat to its existence or perhaps more cynically, its livelihood. In the hardened fortresses of endless war, American soldiers walled off from human society claim their own lives in record numbers while in beltway foreign policy circles “Peace� has become a dirty word. In the darkening gloom, robot Predator drones target those thought to be “terrorists� or those suspected of being terrorists. Those unfortunate enough to be standing nearby are targeted as well and will one day be the target of drones piloted by computer software and facial recognition, making the machine-killing completely autonomous.

In this house of mirrors where endless war has made guilt and innocence or even facts irrelevant, the U.S. has left the realm of science and empiricism and entered a realm more mystical than real. It is a realm where ideology dictates plans and programs and not logic and empirical evidence.  It is a realm where ideology dictates who dies and who lives and is populated by men and women who can neither be understood nor reasoned with outside the confines of their own internal and hermetically sealed logic. 

From its inception during World War II, America’s military/intelligence apparatus has acted more as a subculture of America’s ruling elite than a bureaucracy dedicated to the nation’s security. It was said of America’s first spy agency the OSS that its initials stood for Oh-So-Social because of its abundant staffing with New York’s high society blue bloods. Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks even titled their 1974 book on their life in the CIA and Foreign Service as The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. 

But over the last forty years and especially since the events of 9/11, that “Cult,� and its sister organizations in the military/intelligence community have emerged from behind the curtain to become a ubiquitous and forbidding presence.

In effect, 1974’s American “Cultâ€� of intelligence has grown to become in 2011 the dominant American “Cult-ure.â€� But what that culture really is and where it’s leading us remains a frightening proposition that each and every American needs to understand. Read more È

America’s New Role as the Dark Force

By Elizabeth Gould & Paul Fitzgerald

As the U.S. becomes more and more the kind of country it has traditionally opposed, the answer to where we are headed may lie more in the arcane traditions of a dim past than in a bright future.

“‘We’re the dark matter. We’re the force that orders the universe but can’t be seen,’ a strapping Navy SEAL, speaking on condition of anonymity, said in describing his unit.�

If anyone (correctly) thought that the war on terror and Washington’s response to it had taken on a fantastical otherworldly quality, this recent quote on the front page of the Washington Post seemed to confirm it.

Following 9/11the elected government of the United States of America delivered the country to a whole department (of Homeland Security) dedicated to expanding the government’s fear of darkness into everybody’s life (remember the 2003 duct tape and plastic sheeting craze?) Now we also have a top secret military operation known as the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) that thinks it is the dark.

Begun as a modest hostage rescue team, JSOC has morphed into a veritable heart of darkness, with the power to murder at will and with immunity from American legal jurisdiction (which apparently still maintains that such assassinations are illegal).

Even within the military, JSOC operates as a “Stovepipe,� operation, meaning that it operates completely in the black, reports to no one and continues to employ rogue ex-CIA professionals such as indicted Iran Contra operative Dewey Clarridge.  The Navy Seal Team that took out Osama bin Laden operated under JSOC. Retired military personnel refer to JSOC as “Murder, Incorporated� and the “most dangerous people on the face of the earth.�  

But if JSOC’s reputation for secrecy, vengeance and death from above can’t be explained from within the context of traditional U.S. military operations or U.S. law, then what set of rules is it operating from? Or is it simply that the traditions of rationalism and law that most Americans took for granted about the United States are subject to deeper, religious, or perhaps even mystical rules, whose anachronistic logic has found a renewed acceptance in an irrational world of  personal, private and holy war?

No one less than the legendary Cold Warrior, Time Magazine’s Henry Luce understood that his passion for defeating Communism constituted “a declaration of private war,� which, in citing the example of  the privateer Sir Francis Drake made it not only “unlawful,� but “probably mad.�  As the child of American missionaries, Luce was committed to the militant spread of Christian Capitalism while viewing its ultimate triumph over the world as an inevitable consequence of God’s will.

Known to its 19^th century advocates as mystical imperialism, the term can be traced to both Britain and Russia’s 19^th century efforts to establish dominion through a mix of imperialism and Christian zeal. The competition came to a dead stop in Afghanistan with the end of the Great Game in 1907. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 complicated matters by infusing a heavy dose of socialist realism. But with the advent of the Cold War and the mysterious and intoxicating god-like qualities inherent in nuclear weapons, a new iteration of mystical imperialism came into being. Read more È

Group Calls for Annulment of the APA’s Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics & National Security (PENS) Report

Leading scholars and human rights groups from a range of fields – including psychology, medicine, law, military, and intelligence – have joined together in spearheading a broad-based effort to annul and delegitimize the American Psychological Association’s deeply flawed 2005 Report of the Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (the PENS Report). In a joint declaration the coalition states:

Despite evidence that psychologists were involved in abusive interrogations, the PENS Task Force concluded that psychologists play a critical role in keeping interrogations “safe, legal, ethical and effective.� With this stance, the APA, the largest association of psychologists worldwide, became the sole major professional healthcare organization to support practices contrary to the international human rights standards that ought to be the benchmark against which professional codes of ethics are judged- the “do no Harm� standard.

Further, the coalition points out the inherent bias in the Presidential Task Force membership, where six of the nine voting members were on the payroll of the U.S. military and/or intelligence agencies, and five having served in chains of command accused of prisoner abuses. The group cites other significant conflicts of interest by the Task Force’s unacknowledged participants, such as the spouse of a Guantánamo intelligence psychologist and several high-level lobbyists for the Department of Defense, and direct funding for psychologists by the CIA.

Professor Stephen Soldz, clinical psychologist and one of the coalition’s active leaders, had the following statement in an exclusive interview with Boiling Frogs Post:

“We now know that psychologists played a central role in design and implementation of the US torture program and the PENS Report was the crucial document that protected this involvement. Without the involvement of psychologists the torture program as we know it could not have gone forward. The PENS Report was a black mark for the profession of psychology and a devastating blow against human rights worldwide. We are calling on people from around the world – psychologists, other professionals, and ordinary citizens concerned with human rights – to join us in calling for the Report to be annulled as a step to ending torture everywhere.�

Professor Soldz is also one of the contributing authors in the recently released book -The CIA on Campus: Essays on Academic Freedom and the National Security State, edited by Dr. Philip Zwerling.

The Coalition has launched a petition calling for the annulment of the APA’s PENS Report as part of their joint effort to remove psychologists from torture and abusive interrogations. So far the list of prominent signatories includes more than 300 scholars, intelligence experts and activists. Here are a few names from the petition’s signatory list:

Philip Zimbardo, President, American Psychological Association (2002); Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychology, Stanford University

Leonard Rubenstein, Senior Scholar, Center for Public Health and Human Rights, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health

Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor (ret.), Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Michael Wessells, PhD, APA PENS Task Force Member, Professor of Clinical Population and Family Health, Columbia University

Steven Reisner, PhD, Candidate for APA President; Clinical Assistant Professor, NYU Medical School; Faculty and Supervisor, International Trauma Studies Program, New York City

David DeBatto, former US Army Counterintelligence Special Agent and Iraq war veteran

Michael Ratner, President Emeritus, Center for Constitutional Rights

Manfred Nowak, Professor for International Law and Human Rights, University of Vienna; Director, Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights

David Remes, Appeal for Justice; Guantánamo habeas attorney since 2004

Nora Sveaass, UN Committee Against Torture; Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, Norway

Sibel Edmonds, Founder & Director, National Security Whistleblowers Coalition

Coleen Rowley, retired FBI agent and former Minneapolis FBI Legal Counsel

The petition is now open to the public. People are encouraged to visit the coalition’s website for more information and background, and sign the petition here.

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*We just recorded an in depth interview with Professor Soldz. The interview will be published in two weeks as part of our new series on ‘CIA on Campus,’ based on a recently released book -The CIA on Campus: Essays on Academic Freedom and the National Security State, edited by Dr. Philip Zwerling. Here is a brief preview of our interview:

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Selective Coverage, Cyclical Reporting & Conditional Journalism

A few months ago I wrote a brief commentary questioning the long-absence of Super-Journalist Seymour Hersh despite the continuation and expansion of our wars, scandals involving the Pentagon, ongoing simultaneous black ops and covert wars, and the numerous violations of human rights laws internationally and domestically. I began by comparing Mr. Hersh’s record in authoring articles during the previous administration to those written under the present administration. I checked Hersh-New Yorker coverage of the Bush administration abuses during its first three years:

13 articles. Thirteen hard-hitting well-written, thoroughly investigated, and unabashedly presented articles. Thirteen articles on abuses involving war(s), military, ‘generals’ games, prison and torture … You want to check it for yourself:Here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here.

Then, I searched for Hersh’s article written during the current administration:

3 articles. Three articles. Only three articles since Mr. Obama’s presidential victory. That’s it. None of them on the scandals, issues and abuses of the Obama administration. None of them on Obama’s drone-mania. None of them on bombing and killing civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan. None of them on the dubious brief assault in Yemen. None of them on Bagram torture-abuse-secret imprisonment. None of them on Libya. None of them on jailing Manning-DOD whistleblower or bringing criminal charges against other government whistleblowers. Instead of listing the long list of ‘Nones,’ I’ll give you the only three articles written by Hersh at the New Yorker:

Syria Calling: The Obama Administration’s Chance to Engage in a Middle East Peace- Published in April 2009.

Defending the Arsenal: In an Unstable Pakistan, can Nuclear Warheads be Kept Safe? – Published in November 2009.

The Online Threat: Should we be Worry about a Cyber War? - Published in November 2010.

You’d think the Obama administration’s incredible expansion of US covert wars would be right up Hersh’s alley, no?  How about the current covert war in Yemen with the silent mainstream? Do I need to mention the latest reports on US Drone-Bombing of Somalia?! Or maybe our latest shenanigans and inside-out/outside-in Pakistan relations and our nonstop drone attacks over there? I am sure you can come up with dozens of macro cases and scandals involving the current administration, the Pentagon and the CIA that ordinarily would be Hersh’s reporting territory. No? Read more È