Fortunately, the power and control of government and military elites is illusory in the 21st century. The world no longer works the way it did, and there is nothing to compel people to support failed, outdated systems any longer. This is an understanding that must be widely and quickly shared. The future of our children and the planet depends upon our changing our thinking about governments, and our support for them.
The future of our children and the planet
Truth Scale
Conspiracy Theories And The Truth Scale [157]
Anyone who speaks about the similarities between the War on Terror and the War on Witches can expect to encounter the charge of being a conspiracy theorist. Because of the way the label of "a conspiracy theory" has been positioned by the mainstream media - in the same category as outright lies and alien abduction stories - it is not helpful to one's credibility to be called a conspiracy theorist. It's equivalent to being tagged as a liar or a kook. However, the concept of a Truth Spectrum can help to understand the use of value labels, and how to counter media stereotyping of information.
Full information is the key to knowing whether any argument or theory is true or false. You would know whether a companion animal is named Spot, or not, if you named it. You would have complete information about the question of what the animal's name is, and how it came to be so called. But what about someone else who does not know you or your dog? Since they lack any relevant information they cannot be sure whether the name is Spot, of something else. If they are given a clue, say by the initial S on the animal's collar, a stranger can begin to move from a position of complete uncertainty, halfway between absolute truth and absolute falsity, to a position on a scale that is closer to the name Spot being true than to it being false. The diagram below shows such a Truth Scale, that can be used to reflect degrees of certainty or uncertainty about a statement, assertion, theory, or notion.
In the diagram, zero is absolute falsity and 8 is absolute truth. Only those in full possession of all the relevant facts and information can know whether an assertion, such as "The dog's name is Spot", fits at 0 or at 8. Everyone else has either to: (a) accept the truth of the statement, without any real basis for doing so, or (b) fit the statement into the scale that bridges the range of probabilities between 0 and 8. If there is no other information, the fit should be Step 4. There is an equal probability of the statement being true or false. The notion is "half authentic".
On June 6, 1944, a statement that, "The Allied forces will land on French beaches, in a large scale invasion", would have been at Step 8 on the Truth Scale. By then everyone was aware that the invasion was underway. However, if the same statement had been made on April 6, 1944, the situation would have been different. For Allied commanders the fit on the scale might have been 7. They knew that the invasion was on, but the weather would determine the actual date. For civilians in Britain, the fit would have been more like 5 or 6, depending on how much preparatory activity they might have observed. For those in France it could have been 4 on the scale. They would have lacked any further information to authenticate the notion of a forthcoming invasion.
The point about the above example is that one month before the June invasion the authenticity rating of as statement that forces would land in Normandy on June 6, would not have been a conspiracy theory. It could not have been rejected out of hand, as a fantasy produced by over imaginative or warped minds. In 1944, the British and Americans were not conspirators. What was involved in Normandy was a joint military operation, one that was kept secret, but one that was a normal and not unexpected event in the war with Germany.
Today things are different. When Saddam Hussein's sons were reportedly cornered and killed in a house in Mosul, a headline on the WWW read, "UDAY AND QUSAY ARE DEAD - AGAIN". The article, suggested that it was unlikely that Saddam's sons would have been hiding out in the home of the local tribal leader that had appeared on Yahoo News some time earlier, with Abrams tanks parked out front. Other articles on the WWW questioned the story of a lengthy firefight involving only the brothers and one bodyguard on one side, and a large, heavily armed, US force. The use of mortician's putty to "reconstruct" the faces of the two bodies before they were exhibited to the press, also raised questions. Was the delay to allow time for Hollywood-like special effects specialists to "recreate" likenesses of Uday and Qusey? And so on. All these notions were dismissed as conspiracy theories by the mainstream media, and not accorded any place in the coverage of the US invasion of Iraq.
The many articles raising questions about the official truth portrayed by the OWO-controlled media are no less credible than the official truth itself. Where can one place the official story about the 911 attacks on the Truth Scale? In the absence of any concrete evidence being provided to support the line that al Qaeda planned and carried out the atrocity, it is valid for citizens and independent journalists (there are a few remaining) to assess the level of authenticity of the story on such a basis. When they come up with a low number, say 1 or 2, it is entirely valid to posit alternative scenarios, and to explore and develop them. People who do this are not conspiracy theorists. They are simply attempting to fill the vacuum of information that exists around them.
Operation Northwoods [158]
In his book titled, Body of Secrets, investigative journalist, James Bamford, follows up an earlier, and controversial, study of the US National Security Agency (NSA). While his book is about the NSA, Bamford also uncovered some interesting, and unrelated, documents under Freedom Of Information (FOI) access. The US Congress had increased such access following a furore over the 1992 film JFK, about the possibility of CIA involvement in the assassination of President Kennedy. A tip off from a knowledgeable source enabled Bamford to get hold of documents held from the public gaze for some 40 years. They related to a US Military plan, called Operation Northwoods, to raise the anger of the American people against the regime in Cuba.
That seems typical enough, the US and many other governments are constantly attempting to shape and manipulate public opinion. It's an industry, and every type of information and event gets spun for all it's worth. But Northwoods was different. In 1962 the US Joint Chiefs of Staff actually proposed attacks on Cuban refugees, US property, and US citizens.
The US Feds were planning to attack, and presumably kill, some of their own citizens in order to have the American public support retaliation against the Cuba. They wanted regime change there. Sound familiar?
The Operation Northwoods document that is said to have been presented by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the Pentagon) to then Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, can be found on the WWW. Today, McNamara denies ever having seen the Northwoods plan. However, it is known that several days after March 13, when the document is said to have been presented to the Defense Secretary, President Kennedy directly told General Lyman Lemnitzer, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that deceptive action should never be used to heighten the Cuban issue.
Among the possibilities canvassed in the Operation Northwoods document were the following.
*"The suggested courses of action appended to Enclosure A are based on the premise that US military intervention will result from a period of heightened US-Cuban tensions which place the United States in the position of suffering justifiable grievances."
*"It is possible to create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner en route from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. ...The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight."
*"Harassment of civil air, attacks on surface shipping and destruction of US military drone aircraft by MIG type planes would be useful as complementary actions. An F-86 properly painted would convince air passengers that they saw a Cuban MIG, especially if the pilot of the transport were to announce such fact......reasonable copies of the MIG could be produced from US resources in about three months."
There were many more actions proposed, but the above sample illustrates the thinking coming from the Pentagon in 1962. What were they thinking in 2001?
Elements within the American Military Industrial Complex (AMIC) might seek to label James Bamford as a conspiracy theorist, but his work on Operation Northwoods provides much more factual material than the official truth about 911. Bamford's assertion that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were advocating attacks on US citizens in 1962 warrants a rating of 7 on the Truth Scale. We can't be absolutely certain of it, but there is considerable information to support the notion. On the other hand, the proposition that Muslim extremists were solely responsible for planning and carrying out the 911 attacks on the WTC towers, is largely unsupported by hard evidence. It can only be authenticated at steps 1 or 2 on the scale.
Three Possible Truths For 911 and 1012 [159]
Since mere citizens are denied access to the deep data held within government agencies, and have to glean what they can from crumbs of information that emerge after thirty or forty years, people are forced to speculate about the truth. All we citizens can ever have are notions of what might really have happened, covering steps 1 through 7 on the Truth Scale. We are never permitted to know the information that would enable us to confirm the 0 or 8 steps.
For the 911 atrocity, and also for the 1012 bombing in Bali, there are three possible truths.
1)Muslim extremists, who hate the West, were responsible, as told in the official truth. In the case of 1012 the official truth has been played out in an Indonesian court, with accused who have admitted their guilt. The latter touch considerably increases the authenticity of the official truth in the eyes of those who don't look too hard.
2)Elements within the US government staged 911 and framed Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. The CIA, as is widely believed in Asia, were behind the Bali bombing. (But how does that explain the admissions of Amrozi and the alleged involvement of Jemaah Islamiyah? See the segment on the Bali bombings below.)
3) Both 911 and 1012 were joint operations between governments, much like the Normandy landings. This is not a conspiracy theory, it is a possible line of citizens inquiry, and quite legitimate. Within this possibility, the US and Saudi governments colluded with regard to 911, and Osama bin Laden was part of the plot. The US had bought his loyalty long ago, in Afghanistan during the Russian occupation. In the case of 1012, the US, Indonesian and Australian governments colluded to spur public reaction and support for the War on Terror.
The second possible truth seems improbable to many people. This is particularly the case in respect of 1012, because there are people like Amrozi who have admitted guilt, and who face the death penalty. Although the third possible truth seems even more fanciful to most, it actually removes the issues around Osama bin Laden and Amrozi. If they were part of a joint operation by elements of the OWO, they could be expected to convey the impression that they were solely to blame, as Muslim terrorists, and that the CoW is, therefore, waging a just war on defenceless people in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries to come.
What needs to be remembered, when grappling with the enormity of the betrayal inherent in both of the second and third of the possible truths, is this. In the War on Witches, up to a million people were cruelly tortured and executed. But, as even a ten year old child could tell you today, just by basic reasoning, there were no witches in medieval Europe. None.
The Inquisition and the War on Witches were instruments used by the faltering Medieval World Order to contain change and maintain their power and control. The "witches" that the Roman church persecuted to further its own ends, were a fiction. The people who died during the terror of the Inquisition were real enough, but the threat they posed was conjured up to preserve an old, and unequal, way of life.
Today, the systems of government and state control are global. There is every reason to expect that government and industrial elites might mount another witch-hunt, to retain power for a little longer. There are already active secessionist movements in Indonesia, and the Australian government, as argued earlier, faces the same potential, as new technologies erode its relevance. While it is not yet possible for ordinary people in Indonesia and Australia to know definitely, that there is collusion between their central governments - step 8 on the Truth Scale - there are sound reasons to examine and discuss this possibility.
Some Indonesian History - Candidly Revealed [160]
John Pilger is an Australian, who now lives in London. He is an award winning investigative journalist, a documentary filmmaker, and a former war correspondent. In his book, The New Rulers of the World, Pilger draws on and expands his television film of the same name. With scrupulous research and chilling candour he reveals how, in the mid-1960s, Western corporations colluded with the new Suharto regime to impose a global economy on Indonesia and the rest of Asia.
Writing of the massacres that were a feature of the US backed coup that brought Suharto to power in 1965, Pilger says:
*"There was a deal, you see. In establishing the Suharto regime, the involvement of the IMF and the World Bank was part of it. Sukarno had kicked them out; now Suharto would bring them back. That was the deal."
*"The massacres were described by Time as 'The West's Best News in Asia'. A headline in US News and World Report read: 'Indonesia Hope ...where there was once none.' The renowned New York Times columnist James Reston celebrated 'A gleam of light in Asia' and wrote a kid-glove version that he had clearly been given. The Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt, who was visiting the US, offered a striking example of his sense of humour: 'With 500,000 to a million communist sympathisers knocked off,' he said approvingly, 'I think it's safe to assume a reorientation has taken place.'
*"Holt's remark was an accurate reflection of the complicity of the Australian foreign affairs and political establishment in the agony of its closest neighbour. The Australian embassy in Jakarta described the massacres as a 'cleansing operation.'
*"On the island of Bali, the 'reorientation' described by Prime Minister Holt meant the violent deaths of at least 80,000 people, although this is generally regarded as a conservative figure. The many western, mostly Australian, tourists who have since then taken advantage of cheap package holidays to the island might reflect that underneath the car parks of several of the major tourist hotels are buried countless bodies."
What happened once Suharto had power amounted to the 'capture' of the Indonesian economy by the West. Pilger observes that:
*"This is the story of how the 'global economy' in Asia was spawned in the bloodbath that bought General Suharto to power in Indonesia in 1965-66. It draws on recently released documents that describe a remarkable meeting in 1967 of the world's most powerful corporate figures, at which they carved up the Indonesian economy, sector by sector."
*"This was done in the most spectacular way,' Jeffrey Winters, professor at Northwestern University, Chicago, told me. 'They divided up into five different sections: mining in one room, services in another, light industry in another, banking and finance in another...You had these big corporate people going around the table, saying [to Suharto's people] this is what we need: this, this and this, and they basically designed the legal infrastructure for investment in Indonesia.' As a result, a mountain of copper and gold, nickel and bauxite, was handed out to American transnational companies. A group of American, Japanese and French companies got the tropical forests of Sumatra; and so on."
*"Under Sukarno. Indonesia had few debts; he had thrown out the World Bank, limited the power of the oil companies and publicly told the Americans to 'go to hell' with their loans. Now the big loans rolled in, mostly from the World Bank, which had the job of tutoring the 'model pupil' on behalf of the IGGI [Inter-Governmental Group on Indonesia] godfathers. 'Indonesia' said an official of the bank, 'is the best thing that's happened to Uncle Sam since World War Two."
*"I asked one of Suharto's representatives at the 1967 meeting, Emil Salim, if anyone had mentioned that up to a million people had died violently in bringing the new 'global economy' to Indonesia. 'No that was not on the agenda.' he replied. 'We didn't have television then."
*"In our universities, Indonesian scholars approved Suharto's big lie about a 'communist coup; being the cause of the killings, while western corporations anointed his regime's 'stability'. The silence lasted more than a quarter of a century, until is was broken by the cries of Suharto's victims in East Timor: a second genocide conducted with western military backing."
No one should imagine that the evil collaboration between the Indonesian military and the leaders and apparatchiks of the OWO, including those within the Australian government in Canberra, has ever waned. It continues to this day, and that is another good reason to suspect the official truth about the 1012 bombings in Bali.
Safe Havens For Terrorists [161]
People who rely on the mass media for their information are likely to imagine that terrorists spend their active lives, and their retirement, in caves such as those at Tora Bora in Afghanistan. They are thought of as living a precarious existence in difficult circumstances. However, as John Pilger and others point out, a great many monsters created by the West live comfortably in communities that have no idea who they are. Here are several excerpts from Pilger's book, The New Rulers of the World.
*"In 1998, President Clinton went before the United Nations to speak on terrorism. 'What are our global obligations?' he asked. 'To give terrorists no support, no sanctuary.' Following September 11, 2001, President George W Bush said almost the same words. 'In the war against terrorism,' he said, 'we're going to hunt down these evil-doers wherever they are, no matter how long it takes.'
Strictly speaking, it should not take long, as more terrorists are given 'training, support and sanctuary' in the United States than anywhere on earth. They include mass murderers, torturers, former and future tyrants and assorted international criminals who fit the President's description. This is virtually unknown by the American public."
*"General Prosper Avril, the Haitian dictator, liked to display the bloodied victims of his torture on television. When he was overthrown, he was flown to Florida by the US government. The notorious Haitian death squad leader Emanuel Constant, whose thugs terrorised Haiti, mutilating people with machetes, lives in New York. Armando Fernandez Larios, a member of a Chilean military squad responsible for torture and executions following the overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973, lives in Miami. Argentine Admiral Jorge Enrico, who was associated with the infamous 'Dirty War' of torture and 'disappearances' in the 1970s, lives in Hawaii. Thiounn Prasith, Pol Pot's henchman and apologist at the United Nations, lives in Mount Vernon, New York."
*"In California, in the eighties, I met four Vietnamese who had been assassins in America's Operation Phoenix; one of them ran a fast food drive-in. He seemed a contented man. What all these people have in common, apart from their history of terrorism, is that they were either working directly for the US government or carrying out the dirty work of American policies. Operation Phoenix, for example, devised, funded and run by the CIA, was responsible for up to 50,000 murders."
*"Much was made of al-Qa'ida's training camps in Afghanistan, the target of American bombers. But these were kindergartens compared with the world's leading university of terrorism at Fort Benning in Georgia. Known until recently as the School of the Americas, it trained some 60,000 Latin American soldiers, policemen, paramilitaries and intelligence agents. Forty per cent of the Cabinet ministers who served in the genocidal regimes of Lucas Garcia, Rios Montt and Mejia Victores in Guatemala are graduates."
Although not on so large a scale, similar training arrangements have existed for many decades between Australia and Indonesia. Many of the senior officers in the Indonesian military, commanders of the special forces unit Kopassus, and other categories of police and intelligence personnel, have been educated and trained in Australia. And that practice continues.
Australia Sells Its Citizens Short [162]
Australian citizens, Mamdouth Habib and David Hicks have been illegally incarcerated in the Guantanamo Bay facility established by the US military as part of the War on Terror. GBay is the modern equivalent of the medieval dungeons used by the Inquisition in their War on Witches. Habib was picked up in Pakistan in October, 2001, where his family says he was looking for a new home for them. Despite having been cleared previously of any terrorist connections in Australia, he is still in prison in Cuba. Hicks is an admitted Taliban fighter who was active against the Northern Alliance. There is no evidence that he was a terrorist or that he fought against CoW forces. Despite this, Hicks has not been accorded the rights of a combatant under the Geneva Convention. He has been denied access to civilian lawyers of his choice, and contact with relatives. Hicks faces a US military court and the death penalty.
In typical fashion the Australian government has done nothing to help Habib and Hicks get a fair trial and access to legal and other support. The only Australian contact had in the early stages of their imprisonment ws with Australian Federal Police and operatives from ASIO (a covert agency somewhat similar to the CIA). The latter are unlikely to have been much help to Habib and Hicks, and might well have worsened their respective cases. The fact that just about any major power can seize, mistreat or execute Australian citizens, without as much as a 'boo' coming out of Canberra, should cause more people on that large island to think seriously about the option of secession. Two of the same ministers who issued the glib rebuttal of UN criticism of Australia's treatment of asylum seekers, and the conditions that so distressed Ian Chappell, are directly responsible for the shameful abandonment of Habib and Hicks.
As the War on Terror is ramped up around the globe, Australians must look after their own interests when travelling abroad. Because it is clear that their own government will desert them if they ever need help.
Canberra's Shameful Deceit On The Balibo Killings [163]
On October 16, 1975, five journalists filming the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, for Australian TV channels, were killed at a place called Balibo. This name seems set to become one of the rallying cries of 2nd Renaissance secession movements in Australia. The facts surrounding the Balibo killings are so damning of the central governments of Australia and Indonesia that the event will rank in Australian consciousness with the Eureka Stockade uprising of 1854.
The following excerpts from various reports and interviews related to Balibo give an outline of the facts, some of which have taken 25 years to emerge.
*"There's been no attack today, but the 60-man Fretilin garrison is pulling back to Maliana. They've been told that Indonesian soldiers are heading this way up the road from Batugade. At any rate, we look like being the last people left in the town, and we'll make a decision very shortly on whether we too should pull back.
In the meantime we've daubed our house with the word 'Australian' in red, and the Australian flag in the house where we spent the night. We're hoping it will afford us some protection."
..........Last report from Greg Shackleton, for Channel 7 Australia.
*"I heard the news of the killings on October 16, 1975. on ABC radio. Indonesia claimed that the journalists were killed in crossfire between warring Timorese factions. Soon after this I received a telegram signed by a Dr Will of the Australian Consulate in Jakarta stating that the remains sent to him for identification could only be described as possibly human. Dr Will subsequently denied sending me the telegram, but he confirmed that the words used were identical to those in his report.
An hour after the telegram arrived, a spokesman for the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs called to ask if I wanted the bodies brought home. If I insisted, he said, I would have to pay and it would be very expensive.
Trying not to cry, I read out the telegram and asked if we were talking about five coffins or a matchbox that could be flown home in the pilot's pocket. The remains must be minute, I cried, whatever they have in Jakarta, wasn't my husband. He was definitely human.
I should have realised this outburst would give the bureaucrat just what he was fishing for. A memo could be written claiming I had given permission to hold a funeral in Jakarta. Later I was asked if I wanted to send flowers. I refused.
Reports of a funeral followed. Sixteen years later an English activist sent me a glossy photograph of the funeral of the Balibo Five. It was a big affair. The mourners included the Ambassador to Indonesia, Richard Woollcott, his wife and embassy officials. None of the dead men's families were present. Some had not been invited. There was only one coffin."
..........Greg Shackleton's wife Shirley.
She subsequently became a fully committed activist for the freedom of the Timorese people.
*On April 28, 1976, Australian embassy officials flew from Jakarta to East Timor to interview witnesses to the killings. But a report submitted to the Australian parliament was inconclusive on how the journalists were killed.
"There's a much bigger disgrace to add to the killings of the journalists and this disgrace relates to the invasion of East Timor. The Australian government seems to be dishing out Indonesian propaganda and there are a lot of lies being told."
..........Shirley Shackleton
"I believe there is cogent evidence to support the notion that Australian and probably US military advisers were present in 1975 working to destabilise East Timor and present it to the Indonesians, and that some of these may have been filmed at Balibo by the journalists."
..........Rob Wesley-Smith.
Spokesperson of the Darwin-based Australians for a Free East Timor.
*"My visit this year was nothing like the first. Dili had swarmed with hard-eyed, heavily armed men in combat uniforms; now in the burnt-out city everyone smiled. On this visit I met Tomas Gonsalves. He had accompanied the attacking force of 100 red beret Kopassandha (secret warfare) troops into Balibo. Tomas admitted that Balibo was not defended. There was a lot of gunfire, but it all came from invading Indonesians.
Tomas described how four of the five died. Leading the attack was Mohammad Yunus Yosfiah, a Buginese from South Sulawesi known as an 'orang tempur', a fighting animal. He was promoted after his work in Balibo and served as Minister for Information in the Habibie government.
The journalists were looking out of the window as the troops approached their house. Four immediately exited by the front door. They were not armed or wearing anything that could be mistaken for a uniform. One stood in front with his hands raised and the other three stood in a row behind him. The fourth remained in the house. Yosfiah immediately fired a hail of bullets and his men followed his example. Tomas was told to go away and did not see how the fifth man was killed. The four bodies were soaked in petrol and set alight. We were unable to discover what happened to their remains."
..........Shirley Shackleton's account of her 2000 visit to East Timor.
*Although the Australian government has always denied any knowledge of the circumstances of the deaths of the Balibo Five, a former officer in the top secret Defence Signals Directorate that monitors all communications in the Asia-Pacific, said otherwise, in 1995.
"The transmission telling the higher Indonesian headquarters about these murders was intercepted by an agency of the Defence Signals directorate which simply happened to be located in a naval unit in Darwin."
..........Michael Darby, speaking on Radio Australia's Network Asia program.
*In 2000 the Australian government released documents that confirmed that its embassy in Jakarta had three days warning of the attack, and that Australia was aware that the main thrust of the invasion would be through Balibo. The released information was incorporated in a book, but there was no light shed on the killing of the journalists who were in the way. Interviewed on ABC radio, Shirley Shackleton continued to demand full answers.
MARK WILLACY: "It is an 885 page book. What other documents do you think are out there that should have been included, in your opinion?"
SHIRLEY SHACKELTON: "Well this is what Hamish McDonald said in the Sydney morning Herald this morning. At the last minute insistence of defence officials, even the slightest reference to intelligence sources, such as intercepts of Indonesian military radio signals were deleted from the text of the published cables. So he's got people telling him what's really going on, and you just wonder at the gall of continuing to spend taxpayer's money on these pretend investigations... - see, I happen to believe things should be done in court. This is a matter of murder."
MARK WILLACY: "The Minister, Alexander Downer, says the only documents that were left out were left out because the editors of the book said they were not of sufficient interest."
SHIRLEY SHACKLETON:[LAUGHING] "I'm sorry, I can't take that seriously. Why not leave them there and let us decide what's interesting and what is not, It's not his place to withhold information, surely. Researchers need access to everything. It's time it was done, and I'm calling again for a full judicial inquiry. I think it's absolutely time for the Australian government to stop this farce at once and do the only practical and moral thing, and that is have a full judicial inquiry into the murders a Balibo."
Shirley Shackleton is a most courageous woman and there is no intention here of belittling her efforts to get at the truth about the death of her then 29 years old husband and his colleagues. However, the above episode raises profound questions about our continued support of central governments.
It is remarkable how people keep wanting the Feds to investigate themselves, when is obvious that they are not to be trusted. The matter of the Balibo Five demonstrates that Australia is no longer a free democracy, nor a society in which citizens can have any belief in the officials who are supposed to be acting in the national interest, but are instead acting in the interest of the AMIC and the OWO. There will never be a full and truthful account of the invasion of East Timor and the circumstances of the deaths of the Balibo Five. Governments don't operate like that anymore. The question this raises is; Why do ordinary people still look to governments to safeguard their interests and solve the problems in the failing system of industrial capitalism? As Paul and Cox said about beliefs that non-human intelligences will not arise in the near future: "Now there's nutty for you."
Fortunately, the power and control of government and military elites is illusory in the 21st century. The world no longer works the way it did, and there is nothing to compel people to support failed, outdated systems any longer. This is an understanding that must be widely and quickly shared. The future of our children and the planet depends upon our changing our thinking about governments, and our support for them.
Related:
2nd Renaissance -10
In the Afghanistan turkey shoot the CoW forces used vast numbers of hard target weapons and other munitions containing depleted uranium (DU). This substance is almost twice as dense as lead. When it punches through concrete bunkers, armour, or mud huts, DU disintegrates into a chemically toxic and radioactive dust. In contrast to the earlier DU weapons used in Gulf War I, the newer ordinance produced deaths and deformities within weeks of the start of military action by the CoW. Between 1990-91 and 2001 the US arms manufacturers are thought to have "improved" the DU technology by introducing milled uranium ore to their warheads. This non-depleted uranium (NDU) is - wait for it - cheaper to produce and far more potent than DU. It poses massive health risks to civilian populations exposed to it, and constitutes, in every sense of the word, a weapon of mass destruction, or WMD. "Hey they're hunting them in Iraq, aren't they?"
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/107216.php
2nd Renaissance -9
The Old World Order will not do anything to smooth the path to a Level 4 Civilization, and a better world. On the contrary, they will do whatever they can to make it difficult. The police, the military, the media, the financial system, the rule of law, and all the mechanisms of civil control and surveillance will be mobilised in defence of the status quo. But, once they understand their options, the people of the world will not engage in a battle with the forces of the OWO. They will simply abandon the old way of living under national rule, for a better, freer, life in new tribal societies. Kinship mechanisms will help people cope with the pressures of official opposition to radical changes that will finally enable them to escape the invisible prison that the OWO had fashioned around them.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/107047.php
2nd Renaissance -8
Ultimately the old order will lose the battle to preserve their privileged way of life, based on all prevailing scarcity, pseudo-democracy, and the rule of law. But in the interim, hundreds of millions of innocent people might lose their lives in bloody resistance to the changes being made by the Old World Order (OWO).. If such a terrible thing happens, it will all have been for nothing, because:
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/106816.php
Tales of Adam
Daniel Quinn*
http://ishmael.com/index1.cfm
2nd Renaissance -7
When coupled with the introduction of artificial scarcity and taker concepts of property ownership and legal tender, Western death-fearing religions played a significant role in subduing, otherwise independent, tribal peoples.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/106537.php
2nd Renaissance -6
The second route involves the setting up of entirely new living spaces on tribal lands that were previously seized by colonising governments that espoused and followed Taker philosophies. This route has greater credibility, in the sense of secession rights, where clear historical ownership of the land can be shown.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/106327.php
2nd Renaissance -5
Quinn contends that while governments can imagine a revolution they can't imagine abandonment. As he puts it, "..even if it could imagine abandonment , it couldn't defend against it, because abandonment isn't an attack, it's just a discontinuance of support."
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/106136.php
2nd Renaissance -4
In due course, there is one achievement of overriding significance that Caral might well provide. One great contribution or lesson that can be applied to the 2nd Renaissance. How to live in peace, with spiritual meaning, and without warfare, for a thousand years.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/105935.php
The New Renaissance
Daniel Quinn*
http://www.mnforsustain.org/quinn_d_new_renaissance.htm
2nd Renaissance -3
Plichta writes of this model as follows. "There was a time I used to make fun of the Apocalypse of St John and believed it to be a totally unreliable historical source. Today I am filled with deep humility, perhaps because I am now able to give a concrete description of the foundation of the world as seen by St John with my mathematical discoveries, and thus possibly open a new way to all of humanity which has now reached a dead end."
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/105799.php
2nd Renaissance -2
Georg Cantor (1845-1918), by his origination of modern set theory and his studies of the nature of infinity, left science a valuable legacy. Cantor was regularly admitted to a psychiatric clinic within the University of Halle, in Germany, where he lectured and worked as a Professor of Mathematics. On each occasion that he became ill he had been thinking about infinity and the continuum hypothesis. Such intense thought, at the boundaries of his comprehension, caused Cantor to suffer repeated mental breakdowns. Infinity drove him mad.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/105634.php
2nd Renaissance
This story was published in September 2004 and it was a big secret. I received it on disk but I think it should be public by now anyway. It is interesting to look back at it and in terms of today's world some two years on. I will link each chapter as I go along over the coming weeks.- The Old World Order - Happy reading!
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/105519.php
Fight Iemma - Debnam
All they can say is 'lock em up'
It seems we are in the thick of it again - the stupid, heartless "Law & Order" auction.
Premier Morris Iemma and Opposition leader Peter Debnam are trying to outdo each other with idiotic "tough on crime" policies.
Original Article
http://sydney.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=64701&group=webcast
Anyone who speaks about the similarities between the War on Terror and the War on Witches can expect to encounter the charge of being a conspiracy theorist. Because of the way the label of "a conspiracy theory" has been positioned by the mainstream media - in the same category as outright lies and alien abduction stories - it is not helpful to one's credibility to be called a conspiracy theorist. It's equivalent to being tagged as a liar or a kook. However, the concept of a Truth Spectrum can help to understand the use of value labels, and how to counter media stereotyping of information.
Full information is the key to knowing whether any argument or theory is true or false. You would know whether a companion animal is named Spot, or not, if you named it. You would have complete information about the question of what the animal's name is, and how it came to be so called. But what about someone else who does not know you or your dog? Since they lack any relevant information they cannot be sure whether the name is Spot, of something else. If they are given a clue, say by the initial S on the animal's collar, a stranger can begin to move from a position of complete uncertainty, halfway between absolute truth and absolute falsity, to a position on a scale that is closer to the name Spot being true than to it being false. The diagram below shows such a Truth Scale, that can be used to reflect degrees of certainty or uncertainty about a statement, assertion, theory, or notion.
In the diagram, zero is absolute falsity and 8 is absolute truth. Only those in full possession of all the relevant facts and information can know whether an assertion, such as "The dog's name is Spot", fits at 0 or at 8. Everyone else has either to: (a) accept the truth of the statement, without any real basis for doing so, or (b) fit the statement into the scale that bridges the range of probabilities between 0 and 8. If there is no other information, the fit should be Step 4. There is an equal probability of the statement being true or false. The notion is "half authentic".
On June 6, 1944, a statement that, "The Allied forces will land on French beaches, in a large scale invasion", would have been at Step 8 on the Truth Scale. By then everyone was aware that the invasion was underway. However, if the same statement had been made on April 6, 1944, the situation would have been different. For Allied commanders the fit on the scale might have been 7. They knew that the invasion was on, but the weather would determine the actual date. For civilians in Britain, the fit would have been more like 5 or 6, depending on how much preparatory activity they might have observed. For those in France it could have been 4 on the scale. They would have lacked any further information to authenticate the notion of a forthcoming invasion.
The point about the above example is that one month before the June invasion the authenticity rating of as statement that forces would land in Normandy on June 6, would not have been a conspiracy theory. It could not have been rejected out of hand, as a fantasy produced by over imaginative or warped minds. In 1944, the British and Americans were not conspirators. What was involved in Normandy was a joint military operation, one that was kept secret, but one that was a normal and not unexpected event in the war with Germany.
Today things are different. When Saddam Hussein's sons were reportedly cornered and killed in a house in Mosul, a headline on the WWW read, "UDAY AND QUSAY ARE DEAD - AGAIN". The article, suggested that it was unlikely that Saddam's sons would have been hiding out in the home of the local tribal leader that had appeared on Yahoo News some time earlier, with Abrams tanks parked out front. Other articles on the WWW questioned the story of a lengthy firefight involving only the brothers and one bodyguard on one side, and a large, heavily armed, US force. The use of mortician's putty to "reconstruct" the faces of the two bodies before they were exhibited to the press, also raised questions. Was the delay to allow time for Hollywood-like special effects specialists to "recreate" likenesses of Uday and Qusey? And so on. All these notions were dismissed as conspiracy theories by the mainstream media, and not accorded any place in the coverage of the US invasion of Iraq.
The many articles raising questions about the official truth portrayed by the OWO-controlled media are no less credible than the official truth itself. Where can one place the official story about the 911 attacks on the Truth Scale? In the absence of any concrete evidence being provided to support the line that al Qaeda planned and carried out the atrocity, it is valid for citizens and independent journalists (there are a few remaining) to assess the level of authenticity of the story on such a basis. When they come up with a low number, say 1 or 2, it is entirely valid to posit alternative scenarios, and to explore and develop them. People who do this are not conspiracy theorists. They are simply attempting to fill the vacuum of information that exists around them.
Operation Northwoods [158]
In his book titled, Body of Secrets, investigative journalist, James Bamford, follows up an earlier, and controversial, study of the US National Security Agency (NSA). While his book is about the NSA, Bamford also uncovered some interesting, and unrelated, documents under Freedom Of Information (FOI) access. The US Congress had increased such access following a furore over the 1992 film JFK, about the possibility of CIA involvement in the assassination of President Kennedy. A tip off from a knowledgeable source enabled Bamford to get hold of documents held from the public gaze for some 40 years. They related to a US Military plan, called Operation Northwoods, to raise the anger of the American people against the regime in Cuba.
That seems typical enough, the US and many other governments are constantly attempting to shape and manipulate public opinion. It's an industry, and every type of information and event gets spun for all it's worth. But Northwoods was different. In 1962 the US Joint Chiefs of Staff actually proposed attacks on Cuban refugees, US property, and US citizens.
The US Feds were planning to attack, and presumably kill, some of their own citizens in order to have the American public support retaliation against the Cuba. They wanted regime change there. Sound familiar?
The Operation Northwoods document that is said to have been presented by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the Pentagon) to then Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, can be found on the WWW. Today, McNamara denies ever having seen the Northwoods plan. However, it is known that several days after March 13, when the document is said to have been presented to the Defense Secretary, President Kennedy directly told General Lyman Lemnitzer, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that deceptive action should never be used to heighten the Cuban issue.
Among the possibilities canvassed in the Operation Northwoods document were the following.
*"The suggested courses of action appended to Enclosure A are based on the premise that US military intervention will result from a period of heightened US-Cuban tensions which place the United States in the position of suffering justifiable grievances."
*"It is possible to create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner en route from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. ...The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight."
*"Harassment of civil air, attacks on surface shipping and destruction of US military drone aircraft by MIG type planes would be useful as complementary actions. An F-86 properly painted would convince air passengers that they saw a Cuban MIG, especially if the pilot of the transport were to announce such fact......reasonable copies of the MIG could be produced from US resources in about three months."
There were many more actions proposed, but the above sample illustrates the thinking coming from the Pentagon in 1962. What were they thinking in 2001?
Elements within the American Military Industrial Complex (AMIC) might seek to label James Bamford as a conspiracy theorist, but his work on Operation Northwoods provides much more factual material than the official truth about 911. Bamford's assertion that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were advocating attacks on US citizens in 1962 warrants a rating of 7 on the Truth Scale. We can't be absolutely certain of it, but there is considerable information to support the notion. On the other hand, the proposition that Muslim extremists were solely responsible for planning and carrying out the 911 attacks on the WTC towers, is largely unsupported by hard evidence. It can only be authenticated at steps 1 or 2 on the scale.
Three Possible Truths For 911 and 1012 [159]
Since mere citizens are denied access to the deep data held within government agencies, and have to glean what they can from crumbs of information that emerge after thirty or forty years, people are forced to speculate about the truth. All we citizens can ever have are notions of what might really have happened, covering steps 1 through 7 on the Truth Scale. We are never permitted to know the information that would enable us to confirm the 0 or 8 steps.
For the 911 atrocity, and also for the 1012 bombing in Bali, there are three possible truths.
1)Muslim extremists, who hate the West, were responsible, as told in the official truth. In the case of 1012 the official truth has been played out in an Indonesian court, with accused who have admitted their guilt. The latter touch considerably increases the authenticity of the official truth in the eyes of those who don't look too hard.
2)Elements within the US government staged 911 and framed Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. The CIA, as is widely believed in Asia, were behind the Bali bombing. (But how does that explain the admissions of Amrozi and the alleged involvement of Jemaah Islamiyah? See the segment on the Bali bombings below.)
3) Both 911 and 1012 were joint operations between governments, much like the Normandy landings. This is not a conspiracy theory, it is a possible line of citizens inquiry, and quite legitimate. Within this possibility, the US and Saudi governments colluded with regard to 911, and Osama bin Laden was part of the plot. The US had bought his loyalty long ago, in Afghanistan during the Russian occupation. In the case of 1012, the US, Indonesian and Australian governments colluded to spur public reaction and support for the War on Terror.
The second possible truth seems improbable to many people. This is particularly the case in respect of 1012, because there are people like Amrozi who have admitted guilt, and who face the death penalty. Although the third possible truth seems even more fanciful to most, it actually removes the issues around Osama bin Laden and Amrozi. If they were part of a joint operation by elements of the OWO, they could be expected to convey the impression that they were solely to blame, as Muslim terrorists, and that the CoW is, therefore, waging a just war on defenceless people in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries to come.
What needs to be remembered, when grappling with the enormity of the betrayal inherent in both of the second and third of the possible truths, is this. In the War on Witches, up to a million people were cruelly tortured and executed. But, as even a ten year old child could tell you today, just by basic reasoning, there were no witches in medieval Europe. None.
The Inquisition and the War on Witches were instruments used by the faltering Medieval World Order to contain change and maintain their power and control. The "witches" that the Roman church persecuted to further its own ends, were a fiction. The people who died during the terror of the Inquisition were real enough, but the threat they posed was conjured up to preserve an old, and unequal, way of life.
Today, the systems of government and state control are global. There is every reason to expect that government and industrial elites might mount another witch-hunt, to retain power for a little longer. There are already active secessionist movements in Indonesia, and the Australian government, as argued earlier, faces the same potential, as new technologies erode its relevance. While it is not yet possible for ordinary people in Indonesia and Australia to know definitely, that there is collusion between their central governments - step 8 on the Truth Scale - there are sound reasons to examine and discuss this possibility.
Some Indonesian History - Candidly Revealed [160]
John Pilger is an Australian, who now lives in London. He is an award winning investigative journalist, a documentary filmmaker, and a former war correspondent. In his book, The New Rulers of the World, Pilger draws on and expands his television film of the same name. With scrupulous research and chilling candour he reveals how, in the mid-1960s, Western corporations colluded with the new Suharto regime to impose a global economy on Indonesia and the rest of Asia.
Writing of the massacres that were a feature of the US backed coup that brought Suharto to power in 1965, Pilger says:
*"There was a deal, you see. In establishing the Suharto regime, the involvement of the IMF and the World Bank was part of it. Sukarno had kicked them out; now Suharto would bring them back. That was the deal."
*"The massacres were described by Time as 'The West's Best News in Asia'. A headline in US News and World Report read: 'Indonesia Hope ...where there was once none.' The renowned New York Times columnist James Reston celebrated 'A gleam of light in Asia' and wrote a kid-glove version that he had clearly been given. The Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt, who was visiting the US, offered a striking example of his sense of humour: 'With 500,000 to a million communist sympathisers knocked off,' he said approvingly, 'I think it's safe to assume a reorientation has taken place.'
*"Holt's remark was an accurate reflection of the complicity of the Australian foreign affairs and political establishment in the agony of its closest neighbour. The Australian embassy in Jakarta described the massacres as a 'cleansing operation.'
*"On the island of Bali, the 'reorientation' described by Prime Minister Holt meant the violent deaths of at least 80,000 people, although this is generally regarded as a conservative figure. The many western, mostly Australian, tourists who have since then taken advantage of cheap package holidays to the island might reflect that underneath the car parks of several of the major tourist hotels are buried countless bodies."
What happened once Suharto had power amounted to the 'capture' of the Indonesian economy by the West. Pilger observes that:
*"This is the story of how the 'global economy' in Asia was spawned in the bloodbath that bought General Suharto to power in Indonesia in 1965-66. It draws on recently released documents that describe a remarkable meeting in 1967 of the world's most powerful corporate figures, at which they carved up the Indonesian economy, sector by sector."
*"This was done in the most spectacular way,' Jeffrey Winters, professor at Northwestern University, Chicago, told me. 'They divided up into five different sections: mining in one room, services in another, light industry in another, banking and finance in another...You had these big corporate people going around the table, saying [to Suharto's people] this is what we need: this, this and this, and they basically designed the legal infrastructure for investment in Indonesia.' As a result, a mountain of copper and gold, nickel and bauxite, was handed out to American transnational companies. A group of American, Japanese and French companies got the tropical forests of Sumatra; and so on."
*"Under Sukarno. Indonesia had few debts; he had thrown out the World Bank, limited the power of the oil companies and publicly told the Americans to 'go to hell' with their loans. Now the big loans rolled in, mostly from the World Bank, which had the job of tutoring the 'model pupil' on behalf of the IGGI [Inter-Governmental Group on Indonesia] godfathers. 'Indonesia' said an official of the bank, 'is the best thing that's happened to Uncle Sam since World War Two."
*"I asked one of Suharto's representatives at the 1967 meeting, Emil Salim, if anyone had mentioned that up to a million people had died violently in bringing the new 'global economy' to Indonesia. 'No that was not on the agenda.' he replied. 'We didn't have television then."
*"In our universities, Indonesian scholars approved Suharto's big lie about a 'communist coup; being the cause of the killings, while western corporations anointed his regime's 'stability'. The silence lasted more than a quarter of a century, until is was broken by the cries of Suharto's victims in East Timor: a second genocide conducted with western military backing."
No one should imagine that the evil collaboration between the Indonesian military and the leaders and apparatchiks of the OWO, including those within the Australian government in Canberra, has ever waned. It continues to this day, and that is another good reason to suspect the official truth about the 1012 bombings in Bali.
Safe Havens For Terrorists [161]
People who rely on the mass media for their information are likely to imagine that terrorists spend their active lives, and their retirement, in caves such as those at Tora Bora in Afghanistan. They are thought of as living a precarious existence in difficult circumstances. However, as John Pilger and others point out, a great many monsters created by the West live comfortably in communities that have no idea who they are. Here are several excerpts from Pilger's book, The New Rulers of the World.
*"In 1998, President Clinton went before the United Nations to speak on terrorism. 'What are our global obligations?' he asked. 'To give terrorists no support, no sanctuary.' Following September 11, 2001, President George W Bush said almost the same words. 'In the war against terrorism,' he said, 'we're going to hunt down these evil-doers wherever they are, no matter how long it takes.'
Strictly speaking, it should not take long, as more terrorists are given 'training, support and sanctuary' in the United States than anywhere on earth. They include mass murderers, torturers, former and future tyrants and assorted international criminals who fit the President's description. This is virtually unknown by the American public."
*"General Prosper Avril, the Haitian dictator, liked to display the bloodied victims of his torture on television. When he was overthrown, he was flown to Florida by the US government. The notorious Haitian death squad leader Emanuel Constant, whose thugs terrorised Haiti, mutilating people with machetes, lives in New York. Armando Fernandez Larios, a member of a Chilean military squad responsible for torture and executions following the overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973, lives in Miami. Argentine Admiral Jorge Enrico, who was associated with the infamous 'Dirty War' of torture and 'disappearances' in the 1970s, lives in Hawaii. Thiounn Prasith, Pol Pot's henchman and apologist at the United Nations, lives in Mount Vernon, New York."
*"In California, in the eighties, I met four Vietnamese who had been assassins in America's Operation Phoenix; one of them ran a fast food drive-in. He seemed a contented man. What all these people have in common, apart from their history of terrorism, is that they were either working directly for the US government or carrying out the dirty work of American policies. Operation Phoenix, for example, devised, funded and run by the CIA, was responsible for up to 50,000 murders."
*"Much was made of al-Qa'ida's training camps in Afghanistan, the target of American bombers. But these were kindergartens compared with the world's leading university of terrorism at Fort Benning in Georgia. Known until recently as the School of the Americas, it trained some 60,000 Latin American soldiers, policemen, paramilitaries and intelligence agents. Forty per cent of the Cabinet ministers who served in the genocidal regimes of Lucas Garcia, Rios Montt and Mejia Victores in Guatemala are graduates."
Although not on so large a scale, similar training arrangements have existed for many decades between Australia and Indonesia. Many of the senior officers in the Indonesian military, commanders of the special forces unit Kopassus, and other categories of police and intelligence personnel, have been educated and trained in Australia. And that practice continues.
Australia Sells Its Citizens Short [162]
Australian citizens, Mamdouth Habib and David Hicks have been illegally incarcerated in the Guantanamo Bay facility established by the US military as part of the War on Terror. GBay is the modern equivalent of the medieval dungeons used by the Inquisition in their War on Witches. Habib was picked up in Pakistan in October, 2001, where his family says he was looking for a new home for them. Despite having been cleared previously of any terrorist connections in Australia, he is still in prison in Cuba. Hicks is an admitted Taliban fighter who was active against the Northern Alliance. There is no evidence that he was a terrorist or that he fought against CoW forces. Despite this, Hicks has not been accorded the rights of a combatant under the Geneva Convention. He has been denied access to civilian lawyers of his choice, and contact with relatives. Hicks faces a US military court and the death penalty.
In typical fashion the Australian government has done nothing to help Habib and Hicks get a fair trial and access to legal and other support. The only Australian contact had in the early stages of their imprisonment ws with Australian Federal Police and operatives from ASIO (a covert agency somewhat similar to the CIA). The latter are unlikely to have been much help to Habib and Hicks, and might well have worsened their respective cases. The fact that just about any major power can seize, mistreat or execute Australian citizens, without as much as a 'boo' coming out of Canberra, should cause more people on that large island to think seriously about the option of secession. Two of the same ministers who issued the glib rebuttal of UN criticism of Australia's treatment of asylum seekers, and the conditions that so distressed Ian Chappell, are directly responsible for the shameful abandonment of Habib and Hicks.
As the War on Terror is ramped up around the globe, Australians must look after their own interests when travelling abroad. Because it is clear that their own government will desert them if they ever need help.
Canberra's Shameful Deceit On The Balibo Killings [163]
On October 16, 1975, five journalists filming the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, for Australian TV channels, were killed at a place called Balibo. This name seems set to become one of the rallying cries of 2nd Renaissance secession movements in Australia. The facts surrounding the Balibo killings are so damning of the central governments of Australia and Indonesia that the event will rank in Australian consciousness with the Eureka Stockade uprising of 1854.
The following excerpts from various reports and interviews related to Balibo give an outline of the facts, some of which have taken 25 years to emerge.
*"There's been no attack today, but the 60-man Fretilin garrison is pulling back to Maliana. They've been told that Indonesian soldiers are heading this way up the road from Batugade. At any rate, we look like being the last people left in the town, and we'll make a decision very shortly on whether we too should pull back.
In the meantime we've daubed our house with the word 'Australian' in red, and the Australian flag in the house where we spent the night. We're hoping it will afford us some protection."
..........Last report from Greg Shackleton, for Channel 7 Australia.
*"I heard the news of the killings on October 16, 1975. on ABC radio. Indonesia claimed that the journalists were killed in crossfire between warring Timorese factions. Soon after this I received a telegram signed by a Dr Will of the Australian Consulate in Jakarta stating that the remains sent to him for identification could only be described as possibly human. Dr Will subsequently denied sending me the telegram, but he confirmed that the words used were identical to those in his report.
An hour after the telegram arrived, a spokesman for the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs called to ask if I wanted the bodies brought home. If I insisted, he said, I would have to pay and it would be very expensive.
Trying not to cry, I read out the telegram and asked if we were talking about five coffins or a matchbox that could be flown home in the pilot's pocket. The remains must be minute, I cried, whatever they have in Jakarta, wasn't my husband. He was definitely human.
I should have realised this outburst would give the bureaucrat just what he was fishing for. A memo could be written claiming I had given permission to hold a funeral in Jakarta. Later I was asked if I wanted to send flowers. I refused.
Reports of a funeral followed. Sixteen years later an English activist sent me a glossy photograph of the funeral of the Balibo Five. It was a big affair. The mourners included the Ambassador to Indonesia, Richard Woollcott, his wife and embassy officials. None of the dead men's families were present. Some had not been invited. There was only one coffin."
..........Greg Shackleton's wife Shirley.
She subsequently became a fully committed activist for the freedom of the Timorese people.
*On April 28, 1976, Australian embassy officials flew from Jakarta to East Timor to interview witnesses to the killings. But a report submitted to the Australian parliament was inconclusive on how the journalists were killed.
"There's a much bigger disgrace to add to the killings of the journalists and this disgrace relates to the invasion of East Timor. The Australian government seems to be dishing out Indonesian propaganda and there are a lot of lies being told."
..........Shirley Shackleton
"I believe there is cogent evidence to support the notion that Australian and probably US military advisers were present in 1975 working to destabilise East Timor and present it to the Indonesians, and that some of these may have been filmed at Balibo by the journalists."
..........Rob Wesley-Smith.
Spokesperson of the Darwin-based Australians for a Free East Timor.
*"My visit this year was nothing like the first. Dili had swarmed with hard-eyed, heavily armed men in combat uniforms; now in the burnt-out city everyone smiled. On this visit I met Tomas Gonsalves. He had accompanied the attacking force of 100 red beret Kopassandha (secret warfare) troops into Balibo. Tomas admitted that Balibo was not defended. There was a lot of gunfire, but it all came from invading Indonesians.
Tomas described how four of the five died. Leading the attack was Mohammad Yunus Yosfiah, a Buginese from South Sulawesi known as an 'orang tempur', a fighting animal. He was promoted after his work in Balibo and served as Minister for Information in the Habibie government.
The journalists were looking out of the window as the troops approached their house. Four immediately exited by the front door. They were not armed or wearing anything that could be mistaken for a uniform. One stood in front with his hands raised and the other three stood in a row behind him. The fourth remained in the house. Yosfiah immediately fired a hail of bullets and his men followed his example. Tomas was told to go away and did not see how the fifth man was killed. The four bodies were soaked in petrol and set alight. We were unable to discover what happened to their remains."
..........Shirley Shackleton's account of her 2000 visit to East Timor.
*Although the Australian government has always denied any knowledge of the circumstances of the deaths of the Balibo Five, a former officer in the top secret Defence Signals Directorate that monitors all communications in the Asia-Pacific, said otherwise, in 1995.
"The transmission telling the higher Indonesian headquarters about these murders was intercepted by an agency of the Defence Signals directorate which simply happened to be located in a naval unit in Darwin."
..........Michael Darby, speaking on Radio Australia's Network Asia program.
*In 2000 the Australian government released documents that confirmed that its embassy in Jakarta had three days warning of the attack, and that Australia was aware that the main thrust of the invasion would be through Balibo. The released information was incorporated in a book, but there was no light shed on the killing of the journalists who were in the way. Interviewed on ABC radio, Shirley Shackleton continued to demand full answers.
MARK WILLACY: "It is an 885 page book. What other documents do you think are out there that should have been included, in your opinion?"
SHIRLEY SHACKELTON: "Well this is what Hamish McDonald said in the Sydney morning Herald this morning. At the last minute insistence of defence officials, even the slightest reference to intelligence sources, such as intercepts of Indonesian military radio signals were deleted from the text of the published cables. So he's got people telling him what's really going on, and you just wonder at the gall of continuing to spend taxpayer's money on these pretend investigations... - see, I happen to believe things should be done in court. This is a matter of murder."
MARK WILLACY: "The Minister, Alexander Downer, says the only documents that were left out were left out because the editors of the book said they were not of sufficient interest."
SHIRLEY SHACKLETON:[LAUGHING] "I'm sorry, I can't take that seriously. Why not leave them there and let us decide what's interesting and what is not, It's not his place to withhold information, surely. Researchers need access to everything. It's time it was done, and I'm calling again for a full judicial inquiry. I think it's absolutely time for the Australian government to stop this farce at once and do the only practical and moral thing, and that is have a full judicial inquiry into the murders a Balibo."
Shirley Shackleton is a most courageous woman and there is no intention here of belittling her efforts to get at the truth about the death of her then 29 years old husband and his colleagues. However, the above episode raises profound questions about our continued support of central governments.
It is remarkable how people keep wanting the Feds to investigate themselves, when is obvious that they are not to be trusted. The matter of the Balibo Five demonstrates that Australia is no longer a free democracy, nor a society in which citizens can have any belief in the officials who are supposed to be acting in the national interest, but are instead acting in the interest of the AMIC and the OWO. There will never be a full and truthful account of the invasion of East Timor and the circumstances of the deaths of the Balibo Five. Governments don't operate like that anymore. The question this raises is; Why do ordinary people still look to governments to safeguard their interests and solve the problems in the failing system of industrial capitalism? As Paul and Cox said about beliefs that non-human intelligences will not arise in the near future: "Now there's nutty for you."
Fortunately, the power and control of government and military elites is illusory in the 21st century. The world no longer works the way it did, and there is nothing to compel people to support failed, outdated systems any longer. This is an understanding that must be widely and quickly shared. The future of our children and the planet depends upon our changing our thinking about governments, and our support for them.
Related:
2nd Renaissance -10
In the Afghanistan turkey shoot the CoW forces used vast numbers of hard target weapons and other munitions containing depleted uranium (DU). This substance is almost twice as dense as lead. When it punches through concrete bunkers, armour, or mud huts, DU disintegrates into a chemically toxic and radioactive dust. In contrast to the earlier DU weapons used in Gulf War I, the newer ordinance produced deaths and deformities within weeks of the start of military action by the CoW. Between 1990-91 and 2001 the US arms manufacturers are thought to have "improved" the DU technology by introducing milled uranium ore to their warheads. This non-depleted uranium (NDU) is - wait for it - cheaper to produce and far more potent than DU. It poses massive health risks to civilian populations exposed to it, and constitutes, in every sense of the word, a weapon of mass destruction, or WMD. "Hey they're hunting them in Iraq, aren't they?"
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/107216.php 2nd Renaissance -9
The Old World Order will not do anything to smooth the path to a Level 4 Civilization, and a better world. On the contrary, they will do whatever they can to make it difficult. The police, the military, the media, the financial system, the rule of law, and all the mechanisms of civil control and surveillance will be mobilised in defence of the status quo. But, once they understand their options, the people of the world will not engage in a battle with the forces of the OWO. They will simply abandon the old way of living under national rule, for a better, freer, life in new tribal societies. Kinship mechanisms will help people cope with the pressures of official opposition to radical changes that will finally enable them to escape the invisible prison that the OWO had fashioned around them.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/107047.php 2nd Renaissance -8
Ultimately the old order will lose the battle to preserve their privileged way of life, based on all prevailing scarcity, pseudo-democracy, and the rule of law. But in the interim, hundreds of millions of innocent people might lose their lives in bloody resistance to the changes being made by the Old World Order (OWO).. If such a terrible thing happens, it will all have been for nothing, because:
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/106816.php Tales of Adam
Daniel Quinn*
http://ishmael.com/index1.cfm 2nd Renaissance -7
When coupled with the introduction of artificial scarcity and taker concepts of property ownership and legal tender, Western death-fearing religions played a significant role in subduing, otherwise independent, tribal peoples.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/106537.php 2nd Renaissance -6
The second route involves the setting up of entirely new living spaces on tribal lands that were previously seized by colonising governments that espoused and followed Taker philosophies. This route has greater credibility, in the sense of secession rights, where clear historical ownership of the land can be shown.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/106327.php 2nd Renaissance -5
Quinn contends that while governments can imagine a revolution they can't imagine abandonment. As he puts it, "..even if it could imagine abandonment , it couldn't defend against it, because abandonment isn't an attack, it's just a discontinuance of support."
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/106136.php 2nd Renaissance -4
In due course, there is one achievement of overriding significance that Caral might well provide. One great contribution or lesson that can be applied to the 2nd Renaissance. How to live in peace, with spiritual meaning, and without warfare, for a thousand years.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/105935.php The New Renaissance
Daniel Quinn*
http://www.mnforsustain.org/quinn_d_new_renaissance.htm 2nd Renaissance -3
Plichta writes of this model as follows. "There was a time I used to make fun of the Apocalypse of St John and believed it to be a totally unreliable historical source. Today I am filled with deep humility, perhaps because I am now able to give a concrete description of the foundation of the world as seen by St John with my mathematical discoveries, and thus possibly open a new way to all of humanity which has now reached a dead end."
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/105799.php 2nd Renaissance -2
Georg Cantor (1845-1918), by his origination of modern set theory and his studies of the nature of infinity, left science a valuable legacy. Cantor was regularly admitted to a psychiatric clinic within the University of Halle, in Germany, where he lectured and worked as a Professor of Mathematics. On each occasion that he became ill he had been thinking about infinity and the continuum hypothesis. Such intense thought, at the boundaries of his comprehension, caused Cantor to suffer repeated mental breakdowns. Infinity drove him mad.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/105634.php 2nd Renaissance
This story was published in September 2004 and it was a big secret. I received it on disk but I think it should be public by now anyway. It is interesting to look back at it and in terms of today's world some two years on. I will link each chapter as I go along over the coming weeks.- The Old World Order - Happy reading!
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/105519.php Fight Iemma - Debnam
All they can say is 'lock em up'
It seems we are in the thick of it again - the stupid, heartless "Law & Order" auction.
Premier Morris Iemma and Opposition leader Peter Debnam are trying to outdo each other with idiotic "tough on crime" policies.
Original Article
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