In the modern age of democracy and volunteer armies, a pretense for war is required to rally the nation around the flag and motivate the public to fight. That is why every major conflict is now accompanied by its own particular bodyguard of lies. From false flag attacks to dehumanization of the “enemy,” here are all the examples you’ll need to help debunk a century of war lies.

Transcript:

When we remember the events of 9/11, we are often invited to reflect on how the attack came out of the clear, blue sky. Until the terror began to unfold in real time on everyone’s television screen, it was just another beautiful, blue sky day, a perfect day for aviation.

CNN ANCHOR: It is 8 AM in Salisbury, North Carolina, 7:00 a.m. in Chicago, 5:00 a.m. in Calaveras County, California, where the news is being made on this Tuesday, September 11th.

CNN ANCHOR 2: From CNN…

MATT LAUER: Anyway, that’s all coming up. 8:01 let’s get to the top news stories of the morning. For that we turn to Anne Curry.

ANN CURRY: Because now we have a camera. Katy, Matt and Al, thank you so much this morning. Good morning, everybody, again.

SARAH FERGUSON: …but isn’t in America, in politics, isn’t spinning…What is spinning, Charlie?

CHARLIE GIBSON: Well, spinning is getting out your point of view, trying to put your interpretation on something.

FERGUSON: So do you think there is a lot of spinning done in politics…

FOX ANCHOR: …Miss America pageant, but this year things are different. Contestants will be quizzed on current events, US history and government. 10 of the 51 contestants got a preview. Among the questions: Naming the current vice president, and knowing what happened December 7th, 1941. Two contestants didn’t know Dick Cheney was the vice president and four missed the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

EARLY SHOW: Miles and miles of sunshine. Miles Davis. Going to put Miles out there today. Nice as it could be across the Northeast. Rough seas still from from the chop from that hurricane, but other than that it’s kind of quiet around the country. We like quiet. It’s quiet. It’s too quiet.

SOURCE: “It’s Too Quiet” The Early Morning Television of 9/11/2001

But that was merely the public’s impression of the events from ground level. Little did we know at the time, 9/11 was not a normal day of blue sky aviation. On the contrary, it was one of the busiest days in the history of American aviation, a dense forest of live fly exercises, drills, simulations, fake radar injects and utter confusion. And that was before the attacks even began.

This is the story of 9/11 that you didn’t watch unfold on your TV that fateful day in 2001. This is the story of the 9/11 War Games.

PART ONE – WAR GAMES

It only stands to reason that government employees, armed forces and first responders spend a considerable amount of time every year training to respond to crises. A major, catastrophic event may only happen once in a lifetime, but if and when it does occur, the appropriate personnel need to know how to respond.

Not all military exercises and government drills are the same, however. These training events can range all the way from computer simulations and war games—where no personnel are deployed and no physical resources are committed—to live field exercises where real people use real equipment and even real munitions to practice responding to real-world emergencies or simulate real warfare.  And as these drills and exercises move from abstract models to real-life exercises, the line between reality and simulation can become blurry.

What does it mean, then, when a simulation of an emergency takes place at the exact same place and time as that real emergency is happening in real life?

PETER POWER: Today we were running an exercise for a company—bearing in mind I’m now in the private sector—and we sat everybody down in the City. A thousand people involved in the whole organization, but the crisis team. And the most peculiar thing was we based our scenario on the simultaneous attacks on that underground and mainline station so we had to suddenly switch an exercise from fictional to real.

[. . . ]

INTERVIEWER: Just to get this right, you were actually working today on an exercise that envisioned virtually this scenario?

POWER: Almost precisely.

SOURCE: Peter Power 7/7 Terror Rehearsal

In the hours after the July 7th, 2005 bombings in London, Peter Power gave a series of interviews to various outlets confirming that he had been running an exercise at the exact time of the attack. That exercise envisioned bombs going off at Liverpool Street, King’s Cross, and Russell Square at exactly the same time as real bombs were going off at those very locations.

PETER POWER: At half past 9 this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now.

HOST: To get this quite straight, you were running an exercise to see how you would cope with this and it happened while you were running the exercise?

POWER: Precisely.

SOURCE: Peter Power 7/7 Terror Rehearsal

What are we to make of this? Is this just a remarkable coincidence? Proof of the the keen insight of advisors like Peter Power in correctly predicting the locations and times of likely terror attacks? Or something altogether different? And, if this was set up by some intelligence agency or someone with advance knowledge of the real attack, what would be the point? Why would they bother to schedule a drill “rehearsing the event” at the same time as the event itself?

Just as there are various kinds of drills, war games and exercises, so, too, are there different ways that such simulations could be used to help facilitate an actual event. A drill could be used to distract security services and hinder responses, for example, thus helping an attack to succeed. Or the exercise could act as an alibi in case the plot is discovered before it can take place. Or, in an even more chilling scenario, a war game or training event could be used to recruit patsies who, believing they are only taking part in an exercise, unwittingly move people or equipment into place for a real attack.

KIMMY: Yes! I am the king! Numero uno, baby. Mmmm mmmm.
(The Gunmen walk over to Kimmy.)

BYERS: Find something?

KIMMY: Yep. I wound up in some government think-tank’s upload directory. Here’s your scenarios, ladies.

BYERS: It’s in clear. Counter-terrorism scenarios. War games developed for the Defense Department.

FROHIKE: What’s Scenario 12-D?
(Kimmy clicks on the file. A dialog box on the screen opens.)
FILE INFO
scenario_12D.txt
Domestic Airline In-Flight Terrorist Act

LANGLY: Airline terrorism? That doesn’t make sense. Your father was murdered over a war game?

BYERS: Download it.

SOURCE: 9/11 X-Files – The Lone Gunmen Pilot (Predictive Programming)

Incredibly, the plot of the pilot episode of “The Lone Gunmen,” a spin-off of the popular X-Files television program, aired in March 2001, depicted a scenario in which a group of government insiders piggy-backed on a military war game involving a hijacked airplane to remote control a civilian passenger jet into the World Trade Center.

BYERS SNR: What the hell are you doing? Why can’t you stay out of this. Leave me buried.

BYERS: What is scenario 12-D?
(BYERS SNR doesn’t respond.)

BYERS: We know it’s a war game scenario. That it has to do with airline counter-terrorism. Why is it important enough to kill for.

BYERS SNR: Because it’s no longer a game.

BYERS: But if some terrorist group wants to act out this scenario, then why target you for assassination?

BYERS SNR: Depends on who your terrorists are.

BYERS: The men who conceived of it the first place. You’re saying our government is planning to commit a terrorist act against a domestic airline?

BYERS SNR: There you go again. Blaming the entire government as usual. In fact, a small faction …

BYERS: For what possible gain?

BYERS SNR: The Cold War’s over, John. But with no clear enemy to stockpile against, the arms market’s flat. But bring down a fully loaded 727 into the middle of New York City and you’ll find a dozen tinpot dictators all over the world just clamoring to take responsibility, and begging to be smart-bombed.

But as outlandish as this idea seems to those not immersed in military history or strategy, the idea of a war game “going live” is not limited to the world of fiction. In fact, it is a real and openly-acknowledged secret among military planners that such exercises can be used as an operational cover for a real attack. Reflecting on lessons learned from his tenure as Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan, Casper Weinberger observed that “the difference between a realistic exercise or maneuver and what could be preparations for an attack, that line is sometimes quite blurred.”

And Weinberger should know. It was under his watch that a “fictional” war game scenario brought the world to the brink of a very real global thermonuclear war.

In 1983, at the height of Cold War tensions over the Reagan Administration’s moves to increase the US nuclear arsenal and his national security directive calling for the ability to win a nuclear war, NATO decided to simulate a first-strike nuclear attack on the Soviet Union in an exercise dubbed “Able Archer 83.” As recently declassified documents show, the exercise was unprecedented in its scale and scope, even involving a very real radio-silent air lift of 19,000 US troops to Europe. So realistic was the build up of forces and the preparations for nuclear strikes during these “war games” that, as we now know from these documents kept hidden from the public for 30 years, Able Archer 83 very nearly caused a real nuclear exchange.

But these concerns about war games going live did not end with the break up of the Soviet Union. On September 10, 2001, the Russian Air Force began a week-long training exercise over the North Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic Oceans. The exercise simulated a Russian bombing attack in response to NATO aggression. On September 9, 2001, NORAD announced they would be deploying additional fighter aircraft to Forward Operating Locations in Alaska and Northern Canada to monitor the exercise and “ensure that our air sovereignty is maintained.” The Russians called off their war game when the 9/11 attacks began to unfold.

Military planners know that simulations and war games can be used as cover for real attacks. But what about 9/11? Were there any exercises, simulations or drills that had a bearing on what was happening on that fateful day?

PART TWO – PREPARATIONS

In the wake of 9/11, the Bush Administration’s mantra became that no one could have imagined such an attack before it took place.

REPORTER: Why shouldn’t this be seen as an intelligence failure, that you were unable to predict something happening here?

CONDOLEEZZA RICE: Steve, I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.

SOURCE: Press Briefing by National Security Advisor Dr. Condoleezza Rice, May 16, 2002

DONALD RUMSFELD: First, I must say, I know of no intelligence during the roughly six plus months leading up to September 11 th that indicated terrorists intended to hijack commercial airliners and fly them into the Pentagon or the World Trade Towers. If we had had such information, we could have acted on it.

SOURCE: September 11 Commission: Defense

GEORGE W. BUSH: Nobody in our government, at least, and I don’t think the prior government, could envision flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive scale.
SOURCE: President Addresses the Nation in Prime Time Press Conference, April 13, 2004

But, like everything else the Bush Administration told the public about 9/11, this, too, was a lie. Not only had government officials “envisioned flying airplanes into buildings” or “using an airplane as a missile,” but multiple agencies trained for just such an event prior to 9/11. In fact, as General Richard Myers—Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2001 to 2005—went on to tell the 9/11 Commission, this precise scenario of a hijacked jet being flown into a high value target was drilled by NORAD not once or twice but five separate times in the run-up to September 11th.

On November 6th, 1999, they simulated an event in which terrorists hijacked a passenger jet flying out of JFK with the intention of crashing it into the United Nations building in New York.

On June 5th, 2000, they simulated two hijackings, one in which the terrorists intended to fly the plane into the Statue of Liberty, and the other in which the intended target was the White House.

An October 16th, 2000, NORAD drill saw a hijacker once again targeting the UN building, as did a nearly identical exercise on October 23rd of that year.

One of NORAD’s pre-9/11 hijack drills even saw the World Trade Center itself become the intended target.

Other exercises involved not just hijacked jets as weapons, but tested NORAD’s response to simultaneous hijackings being used in a coordinated attack on American airspace.

MR. BEN-VENISTE: Well, obviously it would be hard to imagine posturing for the exact scenario. But isn’t it a fact, sir, that prior to September 11th, 2001, NORAD had already in the works plans to simulate in an exercise a simultaneous hijacking of two planes in the United States?

GEN. MCKINLEY: Colonel Scott, do you have any data on that? I’m not aware of that, sir. I was not present at the time.

MR. BEN-VENISTE: That was Operation Amalgam Virgo.

SOURCE: Terrorist Attacks and Response

Amalgam Virgo is an annual NORAD field training exercise, meaning that real aircraft are deployed and actual personnel are used to “simulate” real-life situations.  The planning document for Amalgam Virgo 01, which took place in June 2001, featured a picture of Osama Bin Laden surrounded by airplanes. Amalgam Virgo 02, which was already in the planning stages on 9/11 and actually took place in June 2002, involved a simulated hijacking of a real Delta Airlines 757 by “military personnel acting as civilian passengers” and ran through multiple scenarios for stopping the plane from reaching its target, including a shoot down.

But as uncanny as these similarities are to real life events, declassified documents from the 9/11 Commission archive show that many other types of hijack scenarios were practiced in the three years before September 11th. These documents prove that many of the lies told about the “confused” response to the 9/11 attacks are just that: lies.

We have long been told, for instance, that NORAD wasn’t set up to deal with a domestic hijacking threat because the agency was solely focused on outward threats.

RICHARD MYERS: It’s the way that we were directed to posture, looking outward. Those were the orders that NORAD had and has had for — ever since the end of the Soviet Union when we had at that time I think it was 26 alert sites around the United States and we’d gone down to seven.

SOURCE: September 11 Commission Hearing, June 17, 2004

But time after time between 1999 and 2001, NORAD simulated so-called “inside-inside” events, where domestic airliners bound for domestic destinations were hijacked en route. General Myers simply lied when he said that NORAD’s defenses were only directed toward outside threats. As these documents show, NORAD was actively engaged in modeling domestic terror threats, not only domestic civilian airliner hijackings but even one scenario, dubbed “Fertile Rice,” in which Osama bin Laden directed an attack on Washington using a drone aircraft laden with explosives.

And these were not the only pre-9/11 “training” events that bore a striking resemblance to the actual attacks. The specific scenario of a plane crashing into the Pentagon was drilled not just once or twice, but at least three separate times in the year prior to September 11th.

In October 2000, a Pentagon mass casualty exercise, or “MASCAL,” envisioned a scenario in which a passenger jet hit the Pentagon. Army medics, the Arlington Fire Department and other emergency responders participated in the drill.

In May 2001, another Pentagon Mass Casualty Exercise tested responses to a passenger jet crashing into the Pentagon’s courtyard. This time, the tri-Service DiLorenzo Health Care Clinic and the Air Force Flight Medicine Clinic participated in the training. Lieutenant Colonel John Felicio, deputy commander for administration of the DiLorenzo Tricare Health Clinic, later remarked: “You know, it was kind of eerie. The scenario we had for these MASCALS was very similar to what actually happened. Our scenario for both MASCALS was a plane flying into the Pentagon courtyard.”

Then, in August 2001, just one month before 9/11, yet another Pentagon mass casualty exercise practiced building evacuation. As General Lance Lord, Commander of Air Force Space Command, later noted: “Purely a coincidence, the scenario for that exercise included a plane hitting the building.”

“Purely a coincidence.” Time after time after time after time after time in the months leading up to the attacks, military personnel and first responders were trained to respond to the very events that the public is asked to believe actually took place on the day of 9/11. Some of these training exercises even involved real aircraft being “pretend” hijacked by real military personnel “acting as civilian passengers.”

Purely a coincidence.

As we can see, the idea that no one could have predicted the attacks of September 11th is not just a lie, but an absurd lie. In fact, the sheer number of times those very scenarios were exercised before they took place by itself raises the question of what these war game planners knew about what was set to take place that day.

But as remarkable as all of these drills and exercises are, more remarkable still are the similarities between the events of 9/11 and the war games that we now know were taking place that very morning.

PART THREE – TRAINING DAY

Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawns temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States. A perfect day for aviation.

Meanwhile, all around the country, military personnel, first responders and government officials prepare for one of the busiest days of “simulated” terror in history.

In New York City, preparations continue for “Operation Tripod,” an exercise run by the New York City Office of Emergency Management involving hundreds of personnel from FEMA and other disaster response agencies. The exercise simulates a bioterrorist attack on New York, and on the morning of September 11th equipment is already in place at Pier 92—just four miles north-northwest of the Twin Towers—to treat the “victims” of this pretend attack.

RUDY GIULIANI: … on September 12th, Pier 92 was going to have a drill. It had hundreds of people here from FEMA, from the Federal Government, from the State Emergency Management Office and they were getting ready for a drill for a bio-chemical attack. So that was going to be the place they were going to have the drill, the equipment was already there.

SOURCE: 9/11 Commission Hearings May 19, 2004

And on the 97th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center, a team of technology consultants who have flown in from California for the occasion are running an emergency drill in the offices of Fiduciary Trust.

Meanwhile in Washington, members of the 12th Aviation Battalion, in charge of “aviation support for the White House, US government officials, Department of Defense, Department of the Army, and other government agencies” are two hours away from their base, participating in their annual weapons training.

12 miles south of the Pentagon, Fort Belvoir begins a garrison control exercise drilling the base on its response to a simulated terrorist attack.

Firefighters at Fort Myer, just 1.5 miles from the Pentagon, are sitting down for an “aircraft crash refresher class.”

Matthew Rosenberg—an Army medic at the DiLorenzo TRICARE Health Clinic—sits down in Corridor 8 of the Pentagon to “study a new medical emergency disaster plan based on the unlikely scenario of an airplane crashing into the place.”

And in Chantilly, Virginia—just four miles from the runway of Dulles Airport—the military and CIA personnel who staff the National Reconaissance Office are beginning an exercise in which a plane crashes into their building.

Members of the Joint Special Operations Command (the US military’s “top counterterrorism unit”) are in Hungary preparing for “Jackal Cave,” a highly-classified joint readiness exercise.

Fighter pilots deployed to monitor the Russian Air Force’s training exercise in the Arctic are readying themselves for a day of maneuvers in Alaska and Northern Canada.

And at NORAD’s combat operations center at the Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado, military commanders are preparing for one of the busiest days of war games and exercises in the history of the United States.

BARRIE ZWICKER: Michael Ruppert is standing by at his office in Sherman Oaks, California. Michael, thanks for this. What is the reason for the failure of US military jets to show up in a timely fashion on 9/11?

MICHAEL RUPPERT: Well, the simple fact is, Barrie, that they didn’t know where to go. The reason that they didn’t know where to go was because a number of conflicting and overlapping war game exercises were taking place, one of which, Northern Vigilance, had pulled a significant number of North American fighter aircraft into Canada and western Alaska and and northern Alaska in a mock Cold War hijack exercise. There was another drill, Vigilant Guardian, which was a hijack exercise, a command post exercise, but it involved the insertion of false radar blips on to radar screens in the NorthEast Air Defense Sector. In addition we have a confirmation thanks to General Richard Myers who was acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs who told Richard Clarke, as reported in Clarke’s book, that there was another exercise, Vigilant Warrior, which was, in fact, according to a NORAD source a live fly hijack drill being conducted at the same time.

With only eight available fighter aircraft, and they have to be dispatched in pairs, they were dealing with as many as 22 possible hijacks on the day of 9/11 and they couldn’t separate the war game exercises from the actual hijacks.

SOURCE: The Great Deception

Yes, on the morning of September 11, 2001, the stage was perfectly set for an unprecedented day of simulated terror throughout the northeastern United States.

And then it all happened for real.

PART FOUR – THIS IS NOT AN EXERCISE

08:37:52

BOSTON CENTER: Hi. Boston Center T.M.U. [Traffic Management Unit], we have a problem here. We have a hijacked aircraft headed towards New York, and we need you guys to, we need someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there, help us out.

POWELL: Is this real-world or exercise?

BOSTON CENTER: No, this is not an exercise, not a test.

SOURCE: Vanity Fair

Confusion.

08:52:40

NASYPANY: This is what I got. Possible news that a 737 just hit the World Trade Center. This is a real-world. And we’re trying to confirm this. Okay. Continue taking the fighters down to the New York City area, J.F.K. area, if you can. Make sure that the F.A.A. clears it— your route all the way through. Do what we gotta do, okay? Let’s press with this. It looks like this guy could have hit the World Trade Center.

SOURCE: Vanity Fair

Chaos.

09:49

HERNDON CENTER: Ah, do we wanna think about, ah, scrambling aircraft?

FAA HEADQUARTERS: Ah, (sighs) oh God, I don’t know.

HERNDON: Uh, that’s a decision someone is gonna have to make probably in the next 10 minutes.

FAA HQ: Uh, you know everybody just left the room.

SOURCE: Rutgers Law Review

Paralysis.

There are many ways to describe the FAA, DoD and NORAD response to the events of 9/11. But given that, according to the official 9/11 conspiracy theory, not a single fighter jet was able to intercept a single hijacked airliner between the first hijacking report at 8:20 AM and Flight 93’s downing nearly two hours later at 10:03 AM, the claim that the response to these events was actually enhanced by the war games and exercises taking place that morning is downright absurd.

REP. CYNTHIA MCKINNEY: The question was we had four war games going on on September 11th, and the question that I tried to pose before the secretary had to go to lunch was whether or not activities of the four war games going on on September 11th actually impaired our ability to respond to the attacks.

GEN. RICHARD MYERS: The answer to the question is no, it did not impair our response. In fact, General Eberhart, who was in the command of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, he testified in front of the 9/11 Commission, I believe—I believe—he told them that it enhanced our ability to respond, given that NORAD didn’t have the overall responsibility for responding to the attacks that day. That was an FAA responsibility.

SOURCE: Fiscal Year 2006 Defense Budget

MR. ROEMER: General Eberhart, a question about our training posture on the day of 9/11. On page five of our Staff Statement, the FAA says at 8:38 in the morning, “Hi, Boston Center, TMU, we have a problem here. We have a hijacked aircraft headed towards New York and we need you guys to — we need someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there. Help us out.” NEADS says, “Is this real world or an exercise?”

My question is, you were postured for an exercise against the former Soviet Union. Did that help or hurt? Did that help in terms of were more people prepared? Did you have more people ready? Were more fighters fueled with more fuel? Or did this hurt in terms of people thinking, “No, there’s no possibility that this is real world; we’re engaged in an exercise,” and delay things? Or did it have both impacts?

GEN. EBERHART: Sir, my belief is that it helped because of the manning, because of the focus, because the crews — they have to be airborne in 15 minutes. And that morning, because of the exercise, they were airborne in six or eight minutes. And so I believe that focus helped.

The situation that you’re referring to, I think, at most cost us 30 seconds — 30 seconds.

SOURCE: September 11 Commission Hearing, June 17, 2004

These lies have been carefully crafted over years and presented in such densely-packed soundbites that it is difficult to deconstruct them all.

General Myers’ assertion that it was not NORAD but the FAA that had the responsibility to respond to the attacks that morning is one such lie. In reality, NORAD is specifically tasked with dealing with such events itself, not waiting passively for FAA orders. NORAD’s own regulations for dealing with hijacked jets specifically state that “FAA Authorization for Interceptor Operations is not used for intercept and airborne surveillance of hijacked aircraft within the [continental United States].”

And General Eberhart’s assertion that the confusion over whether the events that were unfolding were real world events or merely exercises “cost us 30 seconds” is belied by the actual audio recordings of the FAA and NORAD response that morning. Time and time again throughout the entire morning, air traffic controllers and military operators are forced to clarify that the events being reported are not part of an exercise.

08:37:52

BOSTON CENTER: Hi. Boston Center T.M.U. [Traffic Management Unit], we have a problem here. We have a hijacked aircraft headed towards New York, and we need you guys to, we need someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there, help us out.

POWELL: Is this real-world or exercise?

BOSTON CENTER: No, this is not an exercise, not a test.

SOURCE: Vanity Fair

08:37:56

WATSON: What?

DOOLEY: Whoa!

WATSON: What was that?

ROUNTREE: Is that real-world?

DOOLEY: Real-world hijack.

WATSON: Cool!

SOURCE: Vanity Fair

08:42:59

NASYPANY: Fourteen forty three, look for it, right there, ok, mode three, fourteen forty three, last known. No, this is real world. Ok, we’re in the high chair.

SOURCE: Rutgers Law Review

08:43:06

FOX: I’ve never seen so much real-world stuff happen during an exercise.

SOURCE: Vanity Fair

08:57:11

NASYPANY: Think we put the exercise on the hold. What do you think? [Laughter.]

SOURCE: DRM1_DAT2_Channel2_MCC_Op [TRANSCRIPT]

This persistent confusion over the reality of what was happening that day is hardly surprising. Although the exact details are still shrouded under a cloud of official secrecy, on the morning of 9/11 NORAD was in the middle of a week-long war game that “coincidentally” included simulated hijackings of passenger jets.

“Vigilant Guardian” is an annual command post exercise involving all levels of NORAD command. Vigilant Guardian 01 was a week-long war game described as a “simulated air war,” and, just two days before 9/11, it had involved a simulated terrorist hijacking of a civilian passenger jet by terrorists intending to blow the plane up with explosives over New York City. Even more remarkably, on the very morning of September 11th, they were planning to simulate another passenger jet hijacking just one hour after the attacks began to unfold.

In 2006, Vanity Fair reporter Michael Bronner was the first journalist given access to the tapes of NORAD operations that morning. In his subsequent article on the subject, “9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes,” Bronner talked to Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Nasypany, the mission-crew commander on the “ops” floor at the Northeast Air Defense Sector on the morning of 9/11.

“When they told me there was a hijack, my first reaction was ‘Somebody started the exercise early,'” Nasypany later told me. The day’s exercise was designed to run a range of scenarios, including a “traditional” simulated hijack in which politically motivated perpetrators commandeer an aircraft, land on a Cuba-like island, and seek asylum. “I actually said out loud, ‘The hijack’s not supposed to be for another hour,'” Nasypany recalled.

As a command post exercise, Vigilant Guardian was not conducted with real airplanes but what’s known as “sim over live,” where simulated aircraft are injected into NORAD’s air traffic system. Although the official narrative holds that the simulated injects were cleared from NORAD’s radars as soon as they appeared, thus causing no confusion, the actual NORAD tapes tell a different story.

At 9:04 AM, directly after Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower, two officers monitoring the events at NORAD’s Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) can be heard to refer to the events as potential exercise “inputs.”

09:04:50

SPEAKER 1: Is this explosion part of that that we’re lookin’ at now on TV?

SPEAKER 2: Yes.

SPEAKER 1: Jesus …

SPEAKER 2: And there’s a possible second hijack also—a United Airlines …

SPEAKER 1: Two planes?…

SPEAKER 2: Get the fuck out …

SPEAKER 1: I think this is a damn input, to be honest.

SOURCE: Vanity Fair

At 9:09 AM, one NEADS technician complains about the exercises taking place and the confusion with real world events.

BACKGROUND MALE SPEAKER: Langley’s on battle stations.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Fuck.

FEMALE SPEAKER 2: What?

BACKGROUND MALE SPEAKER: Battle stations.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Langley.

FEMALE SPEAKER: LFI.

FEMALE SPEAKER: I know. I hope they cancel the exercise, because this is ridiculous.

SOURCE: DRM1_DAT2_Channel_4_ID_Op [TRANSCRIPT]

And at 9:15 AM, an off-duty NEADS technician calls in to ask about the day’s events and the ongoing exercise.

SGT. ZUBON: You guys watching the news?

NEADS TECHNICIAN: Yeah, they’ve got it on in the battlecab right now.

ZUBON: Oh, do they?

NEADS: Yeah.

ZUBON: Yeah, I’ve been watching it for about ten minutes, and I said “I wonder if they’re--did they suspend the exercise?”

NEADS: Not at this time, no.

ZUBON: Not yet?

NEADS: But I think they’re going to. I don’t know. (Laughing).

ZUBON: Yeah, I would imagine.

NEADS: Things look pretty horrific out there.

SOURCE: 0915 Not at this time

Remarkably, at 9:30 AM, a full hour and ten minutes into the attacks, simulated aircraft were still being injected into the radar screens at NEADS. One frustrated staff member directing the response on the NEADS operations floor had to order his coworkers to “turn their sim switches off,” stopping the fake simulations from confusing the radar operators.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: You know what, let’s get rid of this goddamn sim. Turn your sim switches off. Let’s get rid of that crap.

SOURCE: RM1_DAT2_Channel2_MCC_Op [TRANSCRIPT]

Even worse, at the same time as these false inputs were distracting the radar operators, real military aircraft that are taking part in the live-fly exercises that day are further complicating the response to the attacks.

MALE SPEAKER: Boston Center T.M.U., yeah, we’ve got a question for you.

BACKGROUND MALE: Yes, sir.

MALE SPEAKER 1: We’re wondering if we should tell them to return to Base if they’re just on training missions, or what you guys--

BACKGROUND MALE: No, no. They’re actually on the active air per the DO out there.

BACKGROUND MALE: Is this guy launched (inaudible)?

BACKGROUND MALE: Everybody’s who’s up, you want them up?

BACKGROUND MALE: Yes, we did send the ones home that were on the training mission.

BACKGROUND MALE: OK.

BACKGROUND MALE: They are sent home.

(Simultaneous background conversations)

BACKGROUND MALE: But the Pantas are out there from Otis.

MALE SPEAKER: Right. I understand that. I’m talking about— I think there’s somebody training up in the Falcon Acts area right now.

BACKGROUND MALE: No.

BACKGROUND MALE: Falcon. Stand by. Let me--

MALE SPEAKER: Just in general anybody that’s training.

BACKGROUND MALE: Anybody in training, send them home? Missions are Falcon send them home?

BACKGROUND MALE: Right.

BACKGROUND MALE: Yeah, go ahead and send them home.

MALE SPEAKER: OK, fine.

SOURCE: RM1_DAT2_Channel2_MCC_Op [TRANSCRIPT]

Even more incredibly, false radar injects continued to show up on radar screens at NORAD’s Operations Center in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, at 10:12 AM, a full nine minutes after the attacks had ended.

CAPT. BRIAN NAGEL: Sim…or, sorry, northeast weapons.

CAPT. TAYLOR: Hello, this is Captain Taylor calling from Cheyenne Mountain test control.

NAGEL: Yes.

TAYLOR: What we need you to do right now is to terminate all exercise inputs coming into Cheyenne Mountain.

NAGEL: Yes. Can you call 6180 extension for that, please?

TAYLOR: 6180?

NAGEL: You bet, he’ll give you that.

TAYLOR: I’ll do that.

NAGEL: OK, thank you.

SOURCE: DRM2_DAT1_Channel_20_SD2_TK.zip [TRANSCRIPT]

In the face of this overwhelming documentary evidence that the exercises taking place that morning were a persistent source of distraction that significantly complicated response efforts, the retort of the 9/11 Commission and its proponents that these false radar blips were a minor issue that “at most cost us 30 seconds” rings exceedingly hollow.

But that official story becomes even more implausible when it is learned that air traffic controllers and military personnel were not responding to four, clearly reported hijacked aircraft, as the public now imagines it, but as many as 29 potential hijackings.

MAJ. GEN. LARRY ARNOLD: We were in the process of launching aircraft all over the country during that timeframe. We had multiple aircraft called hijacked all over the country.

SOURCE: September 11 Commission Hearing, June 17, 2004

GEN. MYERS: In fact, as General Arnold said, we fought many phantoms that day. […] We got many aircraft calls inbound that morning that turned out to be phantoms.

SOURCE: September 11 Commission Hearing, June 17, 2004

These false reports included:

• United Airlines Flight 177, which was inexplicably reported as hijacked at 9:25 AM despite still being on the ground at Boston’s Logan International Airport.
• Delta 1989, a 767 flying from Boston to Los Angeles that was repeatedly identified as suspicious on the morning of 9/11 and ordered to land at a secure, remote area of Cleveland Hopkins Airport, where the pilot signalled “all clear” to the SWAT team outside the plane with blood running down his face.
• Continental Airlines Flight 321, which had inexplicably “squawked” the hijack code from the plane’s transponder three times before being safely brought down in Peoria.
• KAL 85, en route from Seoul, South Korea to New York, which inexplicably sent “five separate and ongoing indicators of a hijacking situation” before being intercepted by NORAD fighters over Alaska and directed to land at Whitehorse in northern Canada or be shot down.
• And literally dozens of other suspicious aircraft, inexplicable hijack indicators, false reports of planes that “never existed,” and other bizarre incidents, some of which have still never been explained to the public to this day.
  

But the most baffling of all of these reports involved American Airlines Flight 11, the Boeing 767 en route from Boston to Los Angeles that, according to the official government conspiracy theory, was hijacked by Mohamed Atta and flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

Incredibly, air traffic controllers and military fighter jets spent much of the crucial time in the midst of the 9/11 attacks dealing with a completely false report that Flight 11 had not crashed into the World Trade Center at all, but was instead still airborn and heading towards Washington.

COLIN SCOGGINS: Scoggins, (FAA) military (operations specialist), Boston Center. I just had a report that American 11 is still in the air and it’s on its way towards — heading towards Washington.

NEADS TECHNICIAN: American 11 is still in the air--

SCOGGINS: Yes.

NEADS: —on its way towards Washington?

SCOGGINS: It was another aircraft that hit the tower. That’s the latest report we have.

NEADS: Okay.

SCOGGINS: I’m going to try to confirm an ID for you, but I would assume he’s somewhere over either New Jersey or somewhere further south.

NEADS: Okay. So American 11 isn’t a hijack at all, then, right?

SCOGGINS: No, he is a hijack.

NEADS: American 11 is a hijack?

SCOGGINS: Yes.

NEADS: And he’s going into Washington.

SCOGGINS: This could be a third aircraft.

SOURCE: NEADS Tapes: The “Phantom Flight 11 Call” on 9/11

This completely false report, phoned in by FAA military operations specialist Colin Scoggins, further confused the already overwhelmed NEADS technicians. In response, NEADS Mission Crew Commander Kevin Nasypany scrambled some of the only fighters in the entire defense sector to chase after this phantom flight.

09:21:50

NASYPANY: O.K. American Airlines is still airborne—11, the first guy. He’s heading towards Washington. O.K., I think we need to scramble Langley right now. And I’m—I’m gonna take the fighters from Otis and try to chase this guy down if I can find him.

SOURCE: Vanity Fair

So confusing was this series of events that even years later at the 9/11 Commission hearings, both commissioners and military commanders struggled to even communicate about the problem itself, let alone determine how such a false report persisted for so long.

MR. KEAN: Commissioner Gorelick.

MS. GORELICK: A couple of follow-up questions. First, for General Arnold, you testified before us before that the jets were scrambled in response to Flight 93, not American 11, and when you were asked about--

GEN. ARNOLD: I was wrong. I was wrong.

MS. GORELICK: Yeah. But—but the question about that is, and I want to be fair to you and give you an opportunity to respond, you said that the reason that you were wrong was that you hadn’t had an opportunity to listen to the tapes, or the tapes were not accessible. But, I mean, we have—I’m just holding four of them — different headquarters and CONR logs that are—that clearly reflect that the scrambling was done in response to this phantom American 11, which didn’t exist anymore. And it was responsibility, as I recall, to do the after-action report, or to lead it, or to be in part responsible for it. Did you not look at the logs in that process?

GEN. ARNOLD: Well, you refer to an after-action report that I was—that we didn’t do. I mean, I don’t recall doing an after- action report--

SOURCE: September 11 Commission Hearing, June 17, 2004

MR. BEN-VENISTE: Why did no one mention the false report received from FAA that Flight 11 was heading south during your initial appearance before the 9/11 Commission back in May of last year? And why was there no report to us that contrary to the statements made at the time, that there had been no notification to NORAD that Flight 77 was a hijack?

GEN. LARRY ARNOLD: Well, the first part of your question—Mr. Commissioner, first of all, I would like to say that a lot of the information that you have found out in your study of this of this 9/11, the things that happened on that day, helped us reconstruct what was going on.

And if you’re talking about the American 11, in particular, the call of American 11, is that what you are referring to?

MR. BEN-VENISTE: Yes.

GEN. ARNOLD: The American 11, that was—call after it had impacted, is that what you’re referring to?

MR. BEN-VENISTE: No. I’m talking about the fact that there was miscommunication that Flight 11 was still heading south instead of having impacted--

GEN. ARNOLD: That’s what I’m referring to. That’s correct.

[…]

MR. BEN-VENISTE: General, is it not a fact that the failure to call our attention to the miscommunication and the notion of a phantom Flight 11 continuing from New York City south in fact skewed the whole reporting of 9/11, it skewed the official Air Force report, which is contained in a book called “The Air War Over America,” which does not contain any information about the fact that you were following, or thinking of a continuation of Flight 11, and that you had not received notification that Flight 77 had been hijacked?

GEN. ARNOLD: Well, as I recall, first of all, I didn’t know the call signs of the airplanes when these things happened. When the call came that American 11 was possible hijacked aircraft, that aircraft just led me to come to the conclusion that there were other aircraft in the system that were a threat to the United States.

SOURCE: September 11 Commission Hearing, June 17, 2004

PHILIP ZELIKOW: In their testimony, and in other public statements, NORAD officials also stated that the Langley fighters were scrambled to respond to the notifications about American 77 and/or United 93. These statements were incorrect as well. The report of American 11 heading south as the cause of the Langley scramble is reflected not just in taped conversations at NEADS, but in taped conversations in FAA centers, on chat logs compiled at NEADS, continental region headquarters, and NORAD, and in other records. Yet this response to a phantom aircraft, American 11, is not recounted in a single public timeline or statement issued by FAA or DOD. Instead, since 9/11, the scramble of the Langley fighters has been described as a response to the reported hijacking of American 77, or United 93, or some combination of the two. This inaccurate account created the appearance that the Langley scramble was a logical response to an actual hijacked aircraft.

SOURCE: September 11 Commission Hearing, June 17, 2004

False radar inputs. Military aircraft participating in exercises in the middle of a crisis. Civilian aircraft squawking false hijack reports. Fighter jets chasing phantom planes.

Which of these reports were merely the “fog of war” so often referred to by promoters of the official 9/11 story, and which were part of the exercise themselves? Were there field exercises of hijackings taking place that morning that were then mistaken for the real thing? What part did these war games and exercises play in hampering the response of the many military officers who had spent their whole careers training to protect American airspace?

Did the war games help the perpetrators of 9/11 in their attack?

The answers to these questions, like so many other questions about the events of September 11th, remain shrouded under a veil of official government secrecy.

PART FIVE: BEYOND COINCIDENCE

“Purely a coincidence.”

According to the official story of 9/11 itself, we are told that simulated hijackings were taking place at the same time as real-life hijackings. That an airplane-into-building drill was occurring at the same time as airplanes were flying into buildings. That false radar blips and fake hijack reports were competing for the military’s attention with real-world radar blips and hijack reports. And throughout it all, technicians, operators, military personnel and air traffic controllers were constantly seeking reassurance that what they were seeing was not part of an exercise.

Purely a coincidence? Or part of a pre-meditated plan?

And if this unprecedented tangle of exercises, drills and simulations was part of a pre-meditated plan, what was that plan? What would be the point of simulating the attacks even as the attacks themselves were taking place?

MICHAEL RUPPERT: For me, the pivotal evidence absolutely demonstrating direct government complicity in and management of the attacks was found in a number of undisputed yet virtually unaddressed war games that I have shown were being conducted, coordinated, and/or controlled by Vice President Dick Cheney or his immediate staff on the morning of September the 11th.

The names of those wargames are known to include: Vigilant Guardian, Vigilant Warrior, Northern Guardian, Northern Vigilance, and Tripod. There is a possibility that Northern Guardian is a duplicate name, but the remaining exercises are indisputably separate events with different objectives. All have been reported by major press organizations relying on undisputed quotes from participating military and FAA personnel. They have also been confirmed by NORAD press releases. All, except for Northern Vigilance and Tripod II, had to do with hijacked airliners inside the continental United States, specifically within the northeast air defense sector or NEADS, where all four 9/11 hijackings occurred.

According to a clear record, some of these exercises involve commercial airline hijackings. In some cases, false blips or “injects” were deliberately inserted into FAA and military radar screens, and they were present during at least the first attacks. This effectively paralyzed fighter response because with only eight fighters available in the region, there were as many as 22 possible hijackings taking place.

Other exercises, specifically Northern Vigilance, had pulled significant fighter resources away from the northeast US just before 9/11 into northern Canada and Alaska. In addition, a close reading of key news stories published in the spring of 2004 revealed for the first time that some of these drills were live-fly exercises, where actual aircraft—likely flown by remote control—were simulating the behavior of hijacked airliners in real life. All of this as the real attacks began.

The fact that these exercises have never been systematically and thoroughly explored in the mainstream press or publicly by Congress—or at least publicly in any detail whatsoever by this so-called “independent” 911 Commission—made me think that they might be the holy grail of 9/11. And that’s exactly what they turned out to be.

Only one war game exercise, Vigilant Guardian, was mentioned in a footnote to the Kean Commission report, and then it was deliberately mislabeled as an exercise intended to intercept Russian bombers instead of a hijack exercise in the northeast sector. Even then a deliberate lie was told to the American people as NORAD commander General Ralph Eberhart testified to the Commission that the exercise actually expedited US Air Force response during the attacks.

Before the Commission’s final hearing I undertook a direct investigation in an attempt to learn more details about each of the exercises and specifically who was controlling them or had planned them to take place on September the 11th, where it’s abundantly clear based upon the record of statements made by the US Air Force and FAA personnel that the games had effectively paralyzed fighter response during the attacks.

SOURCE: 9/11 Omission Hearings – Michael Ruppert On Dick Cheney – 9/9/2004

The exercises taking place on 9/11 could only be to the benefit of the attackers. No stand down order would have kept any dedicated fighter pilot worth his salt grounded during the only attack on his country’s air space in his lifetime. But if those fighter pilots and their commanders had no idea what was real and what was fake, what was an actual threat and what was just a phantom blip, then their response could be effectively contained.

And it was. The utter “failure” of the air response that morning is proof of that.

But if the simulations and war games on the morning of 9/11 were part of a pre-meditated plan on the part of the attackers, then the obvious question is who were the attackers? Are we to believe that the dastardly Al Qaeda masterminds not only perpetrated the simultaneous hijacking of four civilian airliners, turning off the plane’s transponders and putting them through a series of maneuvers that even advanced pilots could not replicate to hit their targets with pinpoint accuracy, but also penetrated the command structure of the US military and NORAD itself to direct the planning and scheduling of simultaneous war games mirroring their own plot to confuse the air response to the attacks?

Because if that sounds like outlandish comic book fantasy, then there is only one other possible conclusion: That members of the National Command Authority, the US military and NORAD in a position to plan and schedule such exercises were the attackers themselves.

BYERS: What is scenario 12-D?

(BYERS SNR doesn’t respond.)

BYERS: We know it’s a war game scenario. That it has to do with airline counter-terrorism. Why is it important enough to kill for.

BYERS SNR: Because it’s no longer a game.

BYERS: But if some terrorist group wants to act out this scenario, then why target you for assassination?

BYERS SNR: Depends on who your terrorists are.

BYERS: The men who conceived of it the first place. You’re saying our government is planning to commit a terrorist act against a domestic airline?

BYERS SNR: There you go again. Blaming the entire government as usual. In fact, a small faction …

BYERS: For what possible gain?

BYERS SNR: The Cold War’s over, John. But with no clear enemy to stockpile against, the arms market’s flat. But bring down a fully loaded 727 into the middle of New York City and you’ll find a dozen tinpot dictators all over the world just clamoring to take responsibility, and begging to be smart-bombed.

But that’s “just fiction” and the fact that it all happened in real life a few months later is just another “pure coincidence.”

The truth of what happened that morning would be remarkably easy to come to if those involved in the planning and execution of the day’s training events were to open the records and allow independent examination of the precise situations that were being trained that day, how those scenarios were arrived at, who planned them, who was in charge of them, what radar injects and false reports and live-fly simulations were taking place, how these exercise inputs were relayed to technicians and air traffic controllers, and what steps were taken at what times to allow those events to continue even as the attacks they were supposed to be simulating were actually happening in real life.

But we shouldn’t expect the guilty parties to indict themselves, and so it is no surprise at all that the official government investigation into 9/11 studiously avoided facing any of these issues head on.

VOICE FROM AUDIENCE: Ask about the war games that were planned for 9-11.

MR. KEAN: Commissioner Gorelick.

MS. GORELICK: Um.

VOICE FROM AUDIENCE: Tell us about the 9-11 war games.

MS. GORELICK: Could you please be quiet, we only have a few minutes with General Myers, and I would like to ask a question.

VOICE FROM AUDIENCE: Tell us about the war games.

MS. GORELICK: I’m sorry.

MR. KEAN: I would ask please for the people in the audience to be quiet if you want to stay here.

SOURCE: 9/11 Commission hearing June 17, 2004

So what does it mean when a simulation of a catastrophic and catalyzing event takes place at the exact same place and time as that event is happening in real life?

This is one of the many crucial questions of 9/11 that have been swept under the rug over the past 17 years. But it is not a rhetorical question. It is a very real question with a very real answer. And until that question is answered, we will never find justice for the victims of 9/11.

FOX: I’ve never seen so much real-world stuff happen during an exercise.

Transcript:

WERNER BAUMANN: Hello. Today I’m happy to announce that this Thursday Bayer will complete the acquisition of Monsanto. This is good news for several reasons…

SOURCE: Statement by Werner Baumann on the expected closing of the acquisition of Monsanto

If you had told someone two decades ago that by 2018 the company that commercialized chemical warfare and the company that commercialized Agent Orange were going to team up to control a quarter of the world’s food supply, chances are you would have been labeled a loony.

Unless your name was Robert B. Shapiro. He was CEO of Monsanto from 1995 to 2000, and in 1999 he told Business Week that the company’s goal was to wed “three of the largest industries in the world—agriculture, food and health—that now operate as separate businesses. But there are a set of changes that will lead to their integration.”

With this month’s announcement that Bayer has completed its $63 billion acquisition of Monsanto, it is hard to deny that Shapiro’s vision has been realized. Too bad for all of us that vision is a nightmare.

Because, contrary to the feel-good corporate propaganda being churned out by the company’s PR department—propaganda that would have you believe that this merger will be good for the environment, for farmers, for ending global hunger, and, incidentally, for lining the pockets of shareholders—these two corporate giants are in fact committed to the consolidation and transformation of the world’s food supply in the hands of the genetic engineers.

Monsanto and Bayer are a match made in hell. This is The Corbett Report.

It is hardly surprising that the first thing Bayer did after completing their takeover of Monsanto earlier this month was to announce that they were dropping the Monsanto name, merging the two companies’ agrichemical divisions under the “Bayer Crop Science” name. After all, as everyone knows, Monsanto is one of the most hated corporations in the world.

HOST: In the film Food Evolution, Neil Degrasse Tyson notes that Monsanto is one of the most hated companies in the world. Why do people have such strong feelings toward Monsanto?

SOURCE: Why is Monsanto Hated?

MARINA PORTNAYA: The worldwide March Against Monsanto has drawn hundreds out onto the streets here in New York City, with people seizing the opportunity to voice their concerns and opposition to GMO foods.

SOURCE: March against Monsanto: World rallies to protest GMO in 38 countries, 428 cities

LUKE RUDKOWSKI: Why are you here?

PROTESTER: I am here because I have a loathing hatred for the company Monsanto, which a lot of people don’t know that Monsanto is actually just a chemical company and they have no business basically dictating our food supply.

SOURCE: Why Are People Protesting GMO’s [sic] and Monsanto

ANCHOR: New at noon: The City of Seattle is suing biotech giant Monsanto to make it pay for removing cancer-causing chemicals in the water. The city says the company knowingly dumped the compounds in the city’s drainage system and the Duwamish River for years. Seattle needs to build a storm water treatment plant to clean the system that will cost about 27 million dollars. Six other major municipalities sued Monsanto as well.

SOURCE: Seattle Sues Monsanto For KNOWINGLY Dumping Cancer Causing Chemicals Into City’s Drainage System

MIKE PAPANTONIO: Environmental lawyers have begun filing lawsuits against Monsanto for cancer deaths related to their product Roundup. What these lawsuits are showing is an effort—both on the part of Monsanto and the US government—to minimize the message about the dangers of Roundup in relationship to human cancer.

SOURCE: Lawsuits Helping To Expose Monsanto’s Deadly Roundup Cover-up

BILL MOYERS: Now your bullseye is on Monsanto. Why is Monsanto so crucial to this fight over seeds?

VANDANA SHIVA: Monsanto is crucial to this fight because they are the biggest seed company now. Monsanto is privatizing the seed. They control 95% of the cotton in India, 90% of the soy in this country. They’ve taken over most of the seed companies in the world.

SOURCE: Vandana Shiva on the Problem with Genetically-Modified Seeds

This hatred of Monsanto is not unreasonable. It is, after all, difficult to think of a company that has ruined the lives of more people around the world, either directly through its coercive and litigious practices against small farmers the world over, or indirectly through the pollution of the food supply with their genetically modified crops.

Many are familiar with the company’s sordid past, including its role in the development of Agent Orange and its contribution to the epidemic of farmer suicides in India. But in recent years Monsanto has gained special notoriety for its attempts to push the boundaries of patent law in a self-admitted effort to gain a monopoly over the world’s food supply.

Even worse, Monsanto has, thanks to a revolving door with the highest levels of the US government, been not just evil, but extraordinarily effective in spreading its evil seed around the world.  That revolving door has seen literally dozens of top Monsanto executives drift in and out of the US government agencies that, laughably, are said to “regulate” the agrichemical business, including Dennis DeConcini, the former US Senator who now acts as legislative consultant for Monsanto; Mickey Kantor, the Commerce Secretary under President Clinton who also served on Monsanto’s board of directors; Michael Taylor, Obama’s Deputy FDA Commissioner who had previously served as Monsanto’s Vice-President for Public Policy; Linda Fisher, who was appointed Deputy Administrator of the EPA in 2001 fresh off a five-year stint as Monsanto’s Vice- President of Government and Public Affairs; and US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who served as a corporate lawyer for Monsanto in the 1970s.

These officials have helped smooth the way for Monsanto to achieve a number of key corporate objectives, including the passage of the infamous “Monsanto Protection Act” in 2013.

TABETHA WALLACE: First off, President Barack Obama recently signed into law what many are calling the “Monsanto Protection Act.” Monsanto, the world’s leading producer of genetically modified food, will benefit greatly from the bill, since the legislation gives companies dealing in modified organisms and genetically engineered seeds immunity from federal courts. (Nothing creepy about that.) The bill states that even if future research shows that GMOs or GE seeds cause significant health problems, cancer, etc, anything, that the federal courts no longer have any power to stop their spread, use, or sale.

Interesting to note the bill carrying the Monsanto rider has virtually nothing to do with food, agriculture, or consumer health. It was inserted into a spending bill through lobbying efforts and the good work of freshman Senator Roy Blunt.

TYREL VENTURA: Well, congratulations Mr. Blunt!

WALLACE: Well done!

VENTURA: Very good.

WALLACE: Maybe write him a letter.

VENTURA: I love Mr. Blunt because Monsanto’s such a wonderfully healthy, nutritious company.

WALLACE: Really looking out. It’s amazing. And the Center for Responsive Politics notes that Senator Blunt received $64,250 from Monsanto for his campaign committee between 2008 and--

VENTURA: Nothing to do with him making a protection bill or anything like that. That was just purely good citizenry at work.

WALLACE: Of course. Mr. Blunt has been the largest Republican recipient of Monsanto funding as of late.

VENTURA: Oh, lovely. So basically Mr. Blunt gave him an out clause. We don’t know what these GMO seeds and all that crazy shit that they do does. Sorry for the sailor talk. But you know we don’t know what these cats do. They basically are poisoning the plants to kill bugs and--

WALLACE: Their pesticides are actually killing the bee population. There’s research to prove it, and now because of this law technically we can’t do anything.

VENTURA: Yeah, we can’t go back as citizens. The government can’t go back and sue them or hold them accountable for any of the actions that they’ve done. This is beautiful. This is wonderful politics as usual. You know, the old pay-to-play kind of technique of “we’ll give you X amount of dollars, get you elected, and then help us out here.”

SOURCE: Obama and the Monsanto Protection Act

But, ironically, of all the corporations in the world, Bayer is one of the few that could compete with Monsanto for its position as the world’s most evil company.

MIKE PAPANTONIO: There are two huge issues with this Bayer Monsanto merger. The first is, that it’s going to raise food prices all across the United States and even beyond our borders. Farmers have already experienced a 300% price increase in recent years, on everything from seeds to fertilizer, all of which are controlled by Monsanto. And every forecaster is predicting that these prices are going to climb even higher because of this merger. So we’re going to have this massive price hike at a time when 14 million Americans have already been unable to provide food for their families, and then we’re going to have this ethical problem that’s plagued both of these corporations for decades.

Let’s start with Monsanto. This is a company that produced Agent Orange, which resulted in one of the largest human-induced health epidemics in modern history. They made dioxin, they created and distributed PCBs across the planet, and now, pending litigation against them for Roundup is right there. Looking at their rap sheet would scare the heck out of anybody with a brain. They’re in the business … Actually, really, when you drill down to it, it looks more like a cancer business than anything. They’ve been hit for false advertising and bribing public officials.

Then, move to Bayer. We’ve got Bayer and we’ve got Monsanto. Move to Bayer. This is a company that’s joined at the hip with the Nazis, during World War II. They produced a clotting agent for hemophiliacs, in the 1980s, called Factor VIII. This blood-clotting agent was tainted with HIV, and then, after the government told them they couldn’t sell it here, they shipped it all over the world, infecting people all over the world. That’s just part of the Bayer story. Right now, they’re facing lawsuits over products like Yaz, Xarelto, Essure, Cipro. In fact, the company, in 2014 annual report, listed 32 different liability lawsuits that the company’s now facing.

So now you have the worst of the worst joining with the worst of the worst, and we have this magnificent experience of greed with these two huge corporations. This is a merger of evil, probably second only to the kind of merger that we’d see with DuPont and Dow Chemical. It’s an ugly story.

Again, the media is missing the point. They’re not looking at all behind what these people are … They’re people. These corporations are regarded as people. If these are people on a witness stand, it’s going to be a very ugly cross examination. These are people who should probably be in prison, rather than engaging in mergers.

SOURCE: Nazi Ties & Agent Orange: The Real Bayer-Monsanto Merger Story – The Ring Of Fire

Although less well-known by the general public, Bayer’s shameful history is, like Monsanto’s, a case study in corporate psychopathy.

Founded in 1863 by Friedrich Bayer and Johann Friedrich Weskott, it wasn’t until 1899 that the company trademarked its most well-known product: aspirin. Less well-remembered is the fact that Bayer was the first company to trademark heroin, which they marketed as a “non-addictive” alternative to morphine and a “cough suppressant.”

But it was under the stewardship of Carl Duisberg at the turn of the 20th century that the company began to develop its psychopathic character. In 1914 the German Ministry of War appointed Duisberg as one of the co-directors of a commission into the use of dangerous byproducts from the chemical industry. Unsurprisingly, Duisberg and his fellow directors jumped at the opportunity to turn their waste into profit by recommending the development of chlorine gas for use on the battlefield, a direct contravention of the Hague Convention Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, which Germany had signed just seven years earlier.

Bayer, under Duisberg’s command, did not just participate in the development and use of poison gas in warfare; they spearheaded it. Duisberg personally oversaw the earliest tests of poison gas and bragged about its lethal capabilities: “The enemy won’t even know when an area has been sprayed with it and will remain quietly in place until the consequences occur.” Setting up a School for Chemical Warfare at Bayer headquarters in Leverkusen, Duisberg also oversaw the development of phosgene and mustard gas, which he urged the German government to use: “This phosgene is the meanest weapon I know. I strongly recommend that we not let the opportunity of this war pass without also testing gas grenades.”

On April 22, 1915, Duisberg got his wish. On that day 170 tons of chlorine gas was used against French troops at Ypres, Belgium, killing 1,000 and injuring a further 4,000. Attacks on the British followed days later. In all, some 60,000 people died as the result of the chemical warfare perfected by Bayer and urged on by Duisberg, one of the great, largely-forgotten atrocities of the First World War.

Most galling of all, Duisberg was not ashamed of his accomplishments. On the contrary, he was immensely proud of them. He even commissioned famed artist Otto Bollhagen to paint the scene of the earliest poison gas test at Cologne. Duisberg so enjoyed the finished result that he had it hung in his breakfast room at Bayer headquarters in Leverkusen.

Later, Duisberg—inspired by a tour of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in the US—wedded Bayer to the IG Farben chemical cartel. As I explained in “How Big Oil Conquered the World,” IG Farben was a key player in the burgeoning oiligarchy of the early 20th century, boasting key oiligarchs like Royal Dutch Shell’s Prince Bernhard and Standard Oil’s Walter Teagle on the boards of its various branches. Bayer’s Duisberg served as the head of its supervisory board.

Joining Duisberg on the board was Fritz ter Meer, who oversaw the construction of the IG Farben factory at Auschwitz, which ran on slave labor and participated in human experimentation. After the war, ter Meer was sentenced to seven years in prison for his participation in looting and enslavement of the camp prisoners, but was released in 1950 for “good behaviour,” and, in 1956 became chairman of Bayer AG, newly resurrected from the ashes of IG Farben.

But this legacy of death is not some ancient relic of Bayer’s distant past. Decade after decade, the company continues to be involved in scandal after scandal, involving wanton environmental destruction, injury, and even mass murder.

JAMES EVAN PILATO: “Bayer Accidentally Funds Study Showing Its Pesticide is Killing Bees, Promptly Denies Conclusions”

A large-scale study on neonicotinoid pesticides is adding to the growing body of evidence that these agricultural chemicals are indeed harming bee populations (to say the very least). Carried out at 33 sites in the United Kingdom, Germany and Hungary, the study found that exposure to neonicotinoids “left honeybee hives less likely to survive over winter, while bumblebees and solitary bees produced fewer queens.”

SOURCE: Interview 1283 – New World Next Week with James Evan Pilato

FARRON COUSINS: Mirena is a chemical-coated soft plastic IUD that proved to be a huge moneymaker for Bayer. But part of the reason that this particular contraceptive was so profitable was because Bayer was deliberately overstating the benefits of their device and not disclosing some of the rare but dangerous side effects.

For example, in April of 2009 the FDA had to issue a warning letter to Bayer HealthCare because its website for Mirena made a number of claims that were simply untrue or unproven. Bayer was so busy making claims that the IUD was a perfect solution for busy moms and would increase women’s sex lives while making them look and feel great that it forgot to mention that the device is recommended for women who have already had at least one child. The company also declined to state that the Mirena IUD increases the risk of ectopic pregnancies, which is when a fertilized egg attaches to an area other than the uterus.

SOURCE: Lawsuit Claims Bayer Birth Control Device Linked to False Brain Tumors

ANA KASPARIAN: So the CEO was actually speaking to Bloomberg Businessweek, and he is trying to appeal the Indian court’s decision to allow this patent for another company. He said the following: “We did not develop this medicine for Indians. We developed it for Western patients who can afford it.”

CENK UYGUR: Uhhhh. Uhhhh. Look at that face. That’s the kind of face that would say a thing like that. Doesn’t he look so smiley? “Oh, please. We didn’t develop this for Indians! We developed it for Westerners who are rich!”

SOURCE: ‘Our Cancer Drug Is For Rich Westerners, Not Poor Indians’

MIKE PAPANTONIO: In the 1980s Bayer Corporation produced a medicine that was supposed to improve the lives of hemophiliacs. Bayer didn’t tell those hemophiliacs that their product was infected with HIV. Because of that, entire families of hemophiliacs died with AIDS as the virus spread within households.

When Bayer was ordered to stop selling their drug in America, they dumped their AIDS-laden product in Asia and killed Asian families. No one with Bayer management was arrested. No one who made these psychopathic-quality decisions went to prison. They claimed the protection of their status as a corporation. That corporate status gave management the ability to kill people for profit and not go to prison.

SOURCE: Bayer Corporation Infected Hemophiliacs With HIV

Indeed, it is not difficult to see why these two companies—each one a titan of its respective industry, each one guilty of the most atrocious crimes against humanity and the destruction of the environment—would feel an affinity for each other. But why merge? What does a pharmaceutical giant have to gain from buying out and merging with an agrichemical giant, especially one that carries as much baggage as Monsanto?

If the connection between these corporate behemoths seems tenuous, then perhaps the key to understanding it is presented in that 1995 quote from former Monsanto CEO Robert Shapiro: “We’re talking about three of the largest industries in the world—agriculture, food and health—that now operate as separate businesses. But there are a set of changes that will lead to their integration.”

Integration of agriculture, food and “health” is the goal, and once that goal is reached the entire life support system of the human population, including all of our food and “medicine,” will be in the hands of a few mega-corporations. Indeed, the history of the production of food and pharmaceuticals has always followed the same trajectory: away from natural, abundant, locally-produced organic materials and toward artificial, scarce, factory-produced synthetic alternatives.

Control of the global food supply is, needless to say, along with control of money and oil, one of the pillars upon which the globalist oligarchs seek to construct their system of total control. Although there is no proof whatsoever that he said it, the dubious quote sometimes attributed to Henry Kissinger is nonetheless quite true: “Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.”

The process of consolidating these industries is of course nothing new. In fact, it started long ago. As I explained in “How Big Oil Conquered the World,” even the current agrichemical industry has to be seen in its historical context as a fusion of the petrochemical fertilizer giants (Dupont, Dow, Hercules Powder and other businesses in the Standard Oil orbit) with the “ABCD” seed cartel of Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus. These previously separate fields were gradually consolidated under the flag of “agribusiness,” itself developed at Harvard Business School in the 1950s with the help of research conducted by Wassily Leontief for the Rockefeller Foundation.

And as I also explained in “How Big Oil Conquered the World,” Big Pharma, too, was a creation of the same drive toward consolidation, and spearheaded by the same people. From the Carnegie and Rockefeller-funded institutionalization of the medical profession to Standard Oil’s role in supplying the petrochemicals for the burgeoning pharmaceutical industry to the role of Rockefeller Institute researchers like Cornelius Rhoads, who developed chemotherapy from the mustard gas pioneered by Bayer, the overlap of the oligarchical interests in cementing global control has been abundantly clear.

Then, with the advancement of GMO technology in the 1980s and 1990s (again, with considerable help from the Rockefellers and other oiligarchical interests), new opportunities for consolidation presented themselves. Seeds used to be sold by seed companies, and fertilizers and herbicides used to be sold by chemical companies. But then the GMO “revolution” came along and all of these companies spun off “biotech” branches to genetically engineer seeds. That, in turn, opened up opportunities to create GMO seed strains that are tailored to work with patented herbicides and fertilizers. The combination of GMO seeds and specially tailored agrichemicals has been especially lucrative for Monsanto, which was the first to capitalize on those synergies when it won regulatory approval for its first Roundup Ready soybeans in 1994. Roundup, aka glyphosate, has gone on to become the most-used agricultural chemical in the history of the world.

Monsanto and Bayer—not to mention their cohorts in the agrichemical, pharmaceutical, and euphemistically-named “life sciences” industries—are ultimately seeking the same thing: complete control over the population, from the genetic engineering of its food supply to the control of its “medicines” and chemicals. It is a race toward complete centralization, and with this acquisition, Bayer and Monsanto are getting a head start.
Particularly frightening, then (though hardly surprising), that this latest round of consolidation is being spearheaded by two corporations as thoroughly deplorable as Bayer and Monsanto.

Bayer: One of the pieces of I.G. Farben’s grim (and oiligarchical) legacy; supplier of chemicals for the poison gas attacks of WWI; knowing seller of HIV-contaminated vaccines; mass murderer of bees; seller of tainted GMO crops.

And Monsanto: Dumper of toxic chemicals; proud seller of carcinogens; suer of farmers; cause of farmer suicides; suppressor of scientific dissent.

Are you feeling safe, knowing that a quarter of the world’s food supply will soon be in their combined hands?

If not, then all of the efforts that have been made in recent years to “March Against Monsanto” must be translated into a “Boycott Against Bayer” and all of their friends in the burgeoning biotech/big agra/seed cartel GMO franken-industry. It is only by increasing our support for locally sourced, organic, heirloom seed-grown produce that we can hope to supplant this new mega-giant and consign it to the dustbin of history where it belongs.

Transcript:

Greed is not a fundamental aspect of human nature. Greed is a consequence of scarcity.

If you and I are living in incredible abundance such as used to exist 200 years ago the fish were so thick on the water that looked like you could walk across the rivers under those conditions, greed is ridiculous. If we're sitting among piles apples that have fallen on the ground, it would be ridiculous for me to like gather them all to myself and they're going to get my pile when there's other piles sitting all over the place. If you do not have a perception of scarcity, then greed is a foreign emotion.

What we've done is we've created scarcity. The money system creates artificial scarcity where there need be none. It's an abstraction, it's bits and computers, but we use it to exchange things that do come from nature. So if you use something that's unnatural to buy and sell things that are natural then you're going to have a problem. If the unnatural part expands exponentially and forces the natural part to expand exponentially too.

The healthy economy shouldn't be thought of as a separate entity, [you know] from the natural ecology but as an extension of the ecology and so what do we have to do to make an economy operate according to ecological principles. The main principle is waste is food. There's no externalities. We don't start with raw materials and end up with toxic waste, but everything that's produced, [you know, like] the manure of a cow is food
for the worms, and the manure of the worms is food for the soil organisms, and that's food for the grass, and that's food for the cows - it's a closed loop.

The decaying currencies' obey nature's law of return. They decay, and then can be reborn into a different form. [The] sacred economy is an economy in which everybody is an artist, and in which everybody's gifts are applied to a beautiful purpose - a purpose that's beautiful to them. 

In the future, career counselors, [they], won't say "ok, so you have these gifts. How can you use these to make a living? How can you commercialize these? How can you make money from these?" The career counselor will say, "what would you like to give to the world? What do you do that feels good?" And, collectively we will reorient our thinking to, what can we as human beings create that's beautiful to us.

Beauty will become the new motivating program. Instead of security, or survival, or domination. That's what our divine gifts are for. We're supposed to look upon our works and say, "that's good."

The presence of former military and intelligence officials in newsrooms was once thought controversial. In 2008, the New York Times wrote an investigative analysis outlining the George W. Bush administration’s use of military analysts to shape terrorism coverage.

Internal Pentagon documents referred to them as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.”

The largest contingent of analysts were affiliated with Fox News, followed by NBC and CNN, the investigation found.

A design flaw, more accurately described as an exploit, affecting owners of Windows PCs with Intel processors has been discovered.

A software update has been released by Microsoft that fixes the security flaw but could cause the performance of the Intel chips to slow down by as much as 30%. 

The Intel processor flaw is related to software "kernels" - the core of an operating system. At the most basic level, the kernel handles the interactions between the operating system and the processor.

In this case, the issue apparently is linked to an exploitable security flaw in the way that the kernel of the Microsoft Windows operating system interacts with Intel processors. In theory, a hacker could exploit this undesirable interaction, using malware, and bypass normal security measures, enabling hackers to "observe" passwords, encryption keys, and other sensitive personal data on computers. The underlying root of the issue has to do with Intel's own processors.

Intel-based PCs running the Linux operating system suffer from the same problem. This could have big implications for cloud computing, given that Linux is popular in datacenters. 

Additionally, Apple Mac computers are also reportedly affected and will require an update to fix, as the flaw is primarily based in the physical Intel chip design. It is currently unclear how the flaw and any update fixes will affect Apple computers.

Initial reports indicated that the security flaw was limited to Intel processors, but chipmaker ARM has since said that chips based on its technology are also affected.

Intel, AMD, ARM, original equipment manufacturers, and operating system vendors, have been collaborating to come up with fixes and mitigations for the issue since the discovery of the exploit. Repairs will involve software and firmware updates on both the hardware and the software sides.

According to Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, the widespread microprocessor flaw was discovered by Google months ago, in June of 2017.

Even more alarming is the discovery of $24 million worth shares sold by Mr. Krzanich, months after he had been informed of the security vulnerability — but before the problem was publicly known.

The stock sale left Krzanich with just 250,000 shares of Intel stock — the minimum the company requires him to hold under his employment agreement.

The sell-off could draw even more scrutiny now, given the news about the security vulnerability and the timing of when Intel knew about it.

Intel claims Krzanich's sale was preplanned and had nothing to do with the newly disclosed chip vulnerability— but that plan was put in place months after it learned of the chip vulnerability.

From Corbettreport.com:

When WWII ended and the American deep state welded the national security establishment into place with the National Security Act, the world entered into a new era: the era of the military-industrial complex. But when the Cold War ended and the “Clash of Civilizations” became the new existential threat, the deep state found an opening for another paradigm shift. As the all-pervasive threat of terrorism became the carte blanche for total surveillance, the powers-that-shouldn’t-be found the organizing principal of our age would not be military hardware, but data itself. Welcome to the age of the information-industrial complex.

This is The Corbett Report.

Of all the things that President Dwight D. Eisenhower did during his years in office, it is for a single phrase from his farewell address that he is best remembered today: “the military-industrial complex.”

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

It is not difficult to see why these words passed so quickly into the political lexicon. Think of their explanatory power.

Why did the US use inflated estimates of Russian missile capabilities to justify stockpiling a nuclear arsenal that was more than sufficient to destroy the planet several times over?
The military-industrial complex.

Why did America send 50,000 of its own to fight and die in the jungles of Vietnam, killing untold millions of Vietnamese (not to mention Cambodians)?

The military-industrial complex.

Why did the US use the public’s fear and anger over 9/11 and a phony panic over non-existent weapons of mass destruction to justify the illegal invasion and trillion dollar occupation of Iraq?

The military-industrial complex.

Why did Nobel Peace Prize laureate Obama expand the fictitious “war on terror” into Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia, refuse to close Guantanamo despite his earlier promises to the contrary, commit US forces to “kinetic military action” in Libya without so much as seeking Congressional approval, and launch a new era of covert drone warfare?

The military-industrial complex.

Why has Trump not only continued but further expanded the US military presence in Africa, increased US aid to Israel and Saudi Arabia, actively enabled the war crimes in Yemen that have led to the largest cholera outbreak in human history, and killed more civilians in his first 9 months in office than former drone-king Obama killed in his entire 8 year presidency?

The military-industrial complex.

When you think about it, it’s rather remarkable that such a phrase was ever uttered by a President of the United States, much less a former five-star general. Could you imagine any modern-day President talking about something like the “military-industrial complex” and its attempted “acquisition of unwarranted influence” without immediately dismissing the idea as a conspiracy theory? Over the decades there has been much speculation about Eisenhower’s use of the phrase, and what precisely he was warning against. Some have argued that the phrase was prompted by Eisenhower’s discovery that the Rand Corporation was grossly misrepresenting the Soviet’s military capabilities to John F. Kennedy, who ended up using the Rand invented (and completely fictitious) “missile gap” threat as a cornerstone of his 1960 presidential election campaign.

Whatever the case, it is perhaps time to revisit Eisenhower’s most famous speech. What Eisenhower is ultimately describing is the rise of American fascism; the merger of government and corporate power. What term can better capture the nature of early 21st century American political life? Is there any longer any doubt that the military-industrial complex has reached its ultimate expression in firms like Blackwater (aka “Xe” aka “Academi”) and its military contractor brethren? Is there any other word but ‘fascism’ to describe a state of affairs when a Secretary of Defense can commission a study from a private contractor to examine whether the US military should be using more private contractors, only for that same Secretary of Defense to leave office and become president of the company that conducted the study, only to leave that company to become Vice President of the US and begin waging a war that relies heavily on no-bid contracts awarded to that same company based on the recommendation that it made in its original study? Yet this is precisely the case of Dick Cheney and Halliburton. It would be difficult to think of a more blatant example of the military-industrial complex fascism that Eisenhower was warning of.

But as it turns out, there was another warning about fascism embedded in that farewell address that has received far less attention than the ‘military-industrial complex’ formulation, perhaps because there is no catchphrase hook to describe it:

“Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.”

Given that this warning came in 1961, before the age of communications satellites or personal computers or the internet, it was a remarkably prescient observation. If scientific research half a century ago was dominated by federal grants and expensive computer equipment, how much more true is that for us today, half a century later?

So what is the problem with this? As Ike explained:

“Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Here again the warning is of fascism. But instead of the military-industrial fascism that dominated so much of the 20th century, he was describing here a new fascistic paradigm that was but barely visible at the time that he gave his address: a scientific-technological one. Once again, the threat is that the industry that grows up around this government-sponsored activity will, just like the military-industrial complex, begin to take over and shape the actions of that same government. In this case, the warning is not one of bombs and bullets but bits and bytes, not tanks and fighter jets but hard drives and routers. Today we know this new fascism by its innocuous sounding title “Big Data,” but in keeping with the spirit of Eisenhower’s remarks, perhaps it would be more fitting to call it the “information-industrial complex.”

The concept of an information-industrial complex holds equally explanatory power for our current day and age as the military-industrial complex hypothesis held in Eisenhower’s time.

Why is a company like Google going to such lengths to capture, track and database all information on the planet?

The information-industrial complex.

Why were all major telecom providers and internet service providers mandated by federal law to hardwire in back door access to American intelligence agencies for the purpose of spying on all electronic communications?

The information-industrial complex.

Why would government after government around the world target encryption as a key threat to their national security, and why would banker after banker call for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to be banned even as they plan to set up their own, central bank-administered digital currencies?

The information-industrial complex.

The effects of this synthesis are more and more felt in our everyday lives. Every single day hundreds of millions of people around the world are interfacing with Microsoft software or Apple hardware or Amazon cloud services running on chips and processors supplied by Intel or other Silicon Valley stalwarts. Google has become so ubiquitous that its very name has become a verb meaning “to search for something on the internet.” The 21st century version of the American dream is encapsulated in the story of Mark Zuckerberg, a typical Harvard whizkid whose atypical rise to the status of multi-billionaire was enabled by a social networking tool by the name of “Facebook” that he developed.

But how many people know the flip side of this coin, the one that demonstrates the pervasive government influence in shaping and directing these companies’ rise to success, and the companies’ efforts to aid the government in collecting data on its own citizens? How many know, for instance, that Google has a publicly acknowledged relationship with the NSA? Or that a federal judge has ruled that the public does not have the right to know the details of that relationship? Or that Google Earth was originally the brainchild of Keyhole Inc., a company that was set up by the CIA’s own venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, using satellite data harvested from government “Keyhole” class reconnaissance satellites? Or that the former CEO of In-Q-Tel, Gilman Louie, sat on the board of the National Venture Capital Association with Jim Breyer, head of Accel Partners, who provided 12 million dollars of seed money for Facebook? Or that in 1999, a back door for NSA access was discovered in Microsoft’s Windows operating system source code? Or that Apple founder Steve Jobs was granted security clearance by the Department of Defense for still-undisclosed reasons while heading Pixar in 1988, as was the former head of AT&T and numerous others in the tech industry?

The connections between the IT world and the government’s military and intelligence apparatus run deep. In fact, the development of the IT industry is intimately intertwined with the US Air Force, the Department of Defense and its various branches (including, famously, DARPA), and, of course, the CIA. A cursory glance at the history of the rise of companies like Mitre Corporation, Oracle, and other household electronics and software firms should suffice to expose the extent of these relations, and the existence of what we might dub an “information-industrial complex.”

But what does this mean? What are the ramifications of such a relationship?

Although the signs have been there for decades, perhaps the most startling example of what lies at the heart of this relationship has been revealed by the whistleblowers at the heart of the National Security Agency, one of the most secretive arms of the American intelligence apparatus. While Edward Snowden has received the most attention with his “revelation” of the PRISM program, much of the information about the NSA’s ability to surveil all electronic communications has been revealed over the past decade by NSA whistleblowers like Russ Tice, William Binney, Thomas Drake and J. Kirk Wiebe, third-party contractors like Snowden and AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein, and independent journalists like James Bamford. Together, the story they tell is of a truly Orwellian society in which all communications are being captured and analyzed by the NSA, and, with the advent of facilities like the new data center in Utah, presumably stored indefinitely for use at any future time in any future investigation for any pretense by anyone with authorization to access that data. According to Snowden, this includes lowly third-party contractors like himself operating at NSA subcontractors like Booz Allen Hamilton in the vast (and expanding) private intelligence industry that has grown up around the information-industrial complex in the exact same way as private military contractors like Blackwater formed around the military-industrial complex.

In some ways, this information-industrial complex is even more insidious than its military-industrial counterpart. For all of the ills caused by the military-industrial complex (and there are many), at the very least it required some sort of excuse to drain the American people’s resources, and its failures (like the Vietnam quagmire or the debacle in Iraq) happened in the clear light of day. In the information-industrial complex, where vast spying programs happen in the shadows and under the cover of “national security” it takes whistleblowers and insiders willing to risk it all even to find out what is being done by these shadowy agencies and their private sector contractors. Even worse, the entire Orwellian spy grid is being run on the flimsiest of pretenses (the “war on terror”) that has no defined end point, and “justifies” turning that spy grid inward, on the American people themselves.

Surely Eisenhower never envisaged the monstrosity that this information-industrial complex has become, but the foresight he saw in identifying its early stages over half a century ago is remarkable. The problem is that we are even further away from heeding the warning that he delivered in that 1961 address than we were at that time:

“It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system – ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.”

If only this was the rhetoric that was shaping today’s debate on the issue, instead of the well-worn canard that we must “strike a balance” between freedom and security. Sadly, until such time that the National Security Act of 1947 is repealed and the cover of national security is lifted from the dark actors that populate this sector, the information-industrial complex is unlikely to be quashed-or even hampered-anytime soon.

The Paradise Papers is a global investigation into the offshore activities of some of the world’s most powerful people and companies. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and 95 media partners explored 13.4 million leaked files from a combination of offshore service providers and the company registries of some of the world’s most secretive countries.

The files were obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. The Paradise Papers documents include nearly 7 million loan agreements, financial statements, emails, trust deeds and other paperwork from nearly 50 years at Appleby, a leading offshore law firm with offices in Bermuda and beyond. The documents also include files from a smaller, family-owned trust company, Asiaciti, and from company registries in 19 secrecy jurisdictions.

The records range from complex, 100-page corporate transaction sheets and dollar-by-dollar payment ledgers to simple corporate registries of countries, such as Antigua & Barbuda, that do not publicly list names of company shareholders or directors.

As a whole, the 1.4 terabyte data leak exposes offshore holdings of political leaders and their financiers as well as household-name companies that slash taxes through transactions conducted in secret. Financial deals of billionaires and celebrities are also revealed in the documents.

The Paradise Papers files include far more information about U.S. citizens, residents and companies than previous ICIJ investigations – at least 31,000 of them. ICIJ collaborated with more than 380 journalists working on six continents in 30 languages. Many team members spent a year using online platforms to communicate and to share documents. Journalists tracked down court records, obtained financial disclosures of politicians in Africa, Europe, and Latin and North America, filed freedom of information requests and conducted hundreds of interviews with tax experts, policymakers and industry insiders.

Corrupt governments & corporations can't hide in the information age; transparency & accountability is the only solution.

ICIJ. (2017). Paradise Papers Exposes Donald Trump Russia Links and Piggy Banks of the Wealthiest 1 percent. [online] International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Available at: https://www.icij.org/investigations/paradise-papers/paradise-papers-exposes-donald-trump-russia-links-and-piggy-banks-of-the-wealthiest-1-percent/ [Accessed 6 Nov. 2017].

Main, L., Wilkinson, M. & Koloff. S. (2017).  Paradise Papers: What is the leak and who is behind the firm Appleby?. [online] Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Available at:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-06/what-are-the-paradise-papers-and-what-is-the-firm-appleby/9075640 [Accessed 6 Nov. 2017].

Chapman University completed its fourth annual Chapman University Survey of American Fears (CSAF). In May of 2017, a random sample of 1,207 adults from across the United States were asked their level of fear about eighty different fears across a huge variety of topics ranging from crime, the government, the environment, disasters, personal anxieties, technology and many others.

The goal of the CSAF is to collect annual data on the fears, worries and concerns of Americans, the personal, behavioral and attitudinal characteristics related to those fears, and how those fears are associated with other attitudes and behaviors. The results, perhaps, are not very surprising.

Below is a list of the 10 fears for which the highest percentage of Americans reported being “Afraid,” or “Very Afraid.”

Americans are more afraid than they use to be. In every wave of the survey before 2017, there was only one item where a majority of Americans said they were "afraid" or "very afraid", and that was corruption of government officials. In this years survey, there were five items where a majority of Americans said they were afraid. Corruption of government officials still topped the list and it increased nearly 14%. 

Chapman University. 2017. The Chapman University Survey of American Fears, Wave 4. Orange, CA: Earl Babbie Research Center [producer]. https://blogs.chapman.edu/wilkinson/2017/10/11/americas-top-fears-2017/