Letter to AG Holder Regarding Cele Castillo
Please note that my copyright notice is null and void for this post. Anyone who wishes to borrow the text of this letter to use on behalf of Cele Castillo is welcome - and even urged - to do so.
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The Honorable Eric Holder
United States Attorney General
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20530-0001
Re: Prosecutorial Misconduct
USA vs. Celerino Castillo, III
SA: 08-CR-00193 (1) - WRF
No. 08- 51144 USA vs. CASTILLO
Dear Attorney General Holder:
I have recently read in the news media about your unprecedented reversal of conviction in the corruption case concerning Senator Ted Stevens, and I applaud your action. It was very apparent that there was prosecutorial misconduct that did indeed take place in that case.
However, I have recently become cognizant of a similar - and quite possibly even a far worse - example of prosecutorial misconduct, and as an American citizen, I am urgently requesting your assistance in getting to the bottom of this ugly situation.
Mr. Celerino “Cele” Castillo, III, a resident of my own state of Texas, is best remembered for being a whistleblower during the Iran-Contra investigation. Mr. Castillo submitted his testimony to the House Select Committee for Intelligence and went before a federal grand jury in Washington D.C, to testify to CIA involvement in murder, torture, drug trafficking, and arms smuggling.
After his retirement from the DEA, Mr. Castillo became an educator and an activist for several civil rights organizations, such as People for Peace and Justice, Veterans for Peace, and Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.
On March 06, 2008, Mr. Castillo was arrested by ATF agents in San Antonio, Texas. The charges were filed by U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton for the Western District of Texas. After eight months, Mr. Castillo’s charges were dismissed under Poke v. U.S.
However, prior to Mr. Castillo’s charges being dismissed, he was told that he was required to plead guilty to new charges of “Selling Guns without a License and Aiding and Abetting.” ATF agents telephoned Mr. Castillo’s elderly mother on literally a daily basis, threatening this elderly lady with never seeing her son again, until Mr. Castillo pled guilty and was sentenced to 37 months of incarceration. Such tactics on the parts of the ATF agents in question were at best, disgusting - and at worst, even criminal. That is, said tactics certainly appear to be felony extortion in my personal view, and I cannot see any other interpretation at this time.
Mr. Castillo was initially ordered to surrender for his term of incarceration on March 05, 2009, but he discovered soon after his sentencing that his attorney, Robert “Eddie” de la Garza, had been under investigation by the state bar throughout his case - and Mr. de la Garza had failed to advise the court that he was in the process of being suspended. There was a massive issue of conflict of interest on the part of Mr. de la Garza also, because the same agents involved in Mr. Castillo’s case were also involved with another case involving Mr. de la Garza’s son, Andrew de la Garza, who had been arrested by ATF a short time prior on quite similar charges to Mr. Castillo’s.
The judge in Mr. Castillo’s case has extended Mr. Castillo’s required surrender date until July 20, 2009, so that he may have ample time to prepare this case with his new public defender.
On April 10, 2009, Mr. Castillo and his new public defender filed nine counts of Prosecutorial Misconduct and Outrageous Government Conduct related to his case. The complaints were filed with the Office of the Inspector General and the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, and therefore should be readily available for your review.
I do strongly believe that the prosecutorial misconduct involved in Mr. Castillo’s case was even more severe than that which was involved in Senator Ted Stevens’ case, as I do very strongly suspect that Mr. de la Garza’s son’s predicament was actually used by the ATF agents involved in both cases to blackmail Mr. de la Garza, Mr. Castillo’s defense attorney, into giving Mr. Castillo the worst possible legal advice - in other words, pressuring Mr. Castillo’s attorney to advise him in the strongest terms to plead guilty even though it was never in Mr. Castillo’s best interest to do so. Put still another way, this situation certainly does make it appear that this was felony extortion again, which I am sure you will agree is never acceptable conduct for anyone, let alone someone in the legal or law enforcement professions.
In light of these facts, I am respectfully requesting an immediate, thorough and very urgent inquiry into the manner in which Mr. Castillo’s case was prosecuted, and I also feel that time is of extremely crucial importance in this matter. Cele Castillo is one of the last surviving credible witnesses to the government agency abuses that took place during the Iran Contra years, and as a former deep cover DEA agent, the very unfortunate reality is that he will be placed in extremely grave personal danger from the moment he enters the U.S. prison system on July 20th, 2009.
I hope to hear from you concerning this matter at your very earliest convenience.
Respectfully yours,
Kathryn A. Graham
Hooks, Texas
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Domestic Enemies
If you are like most Americans, you’ve been scratching your head over the last decade or two asking yourself what the hell has happened to your country. After reading about the recent poll numbers showing that churchgoers approve far more often of torture than do their non-church-going friends, I started doing a little bit of serious research into this matter.
I stumbled into an absolute cess pool of “Dominionism” and “Christian Nationalism” that still has me wanting to bow down before the porcelain god and lose my supper. If you can stomach it, do some reading. You will discover that a group of Christian fanatics has deliberately hijacked your country and attempted (and is still attempting) to turn it into the most repressive of theocracies.
Said idiots have even tried to rewrite history, claiming that our founding fathers were exclusively Christian. Off the top of my head, I can name three who weren’t. Two were Deists, and Ben Franklin, the old goat, was a member of the naughty Hellfire Club. Jefferson converted a time or two to a relatively mild brand of Episcopalianism, but he always came back to Deism. I think his flirtation with Christianity was probably just good for business. So the very idea that we were founded as an exclusively Christian nation is just ridiculous.
Personally, I have a difficult time believing that any woman buys into this Dominionist garbage. Submit to your husband? Sorry, gents, but I’ve yet to meet a male that could run his own life efficiently, let alone mine. These groups supposedly aren’t opposed to birth control - not like the Catholics are - but they don’t want to talk about it either, not even in countries where the birth rate is actually killing folks left and right. It certainly seems that keeping the little lady barefoot and pregnant is the only way they know to keep her under control. And spreading disease in poor countries is one way to keep them from ever becoming a “problem” for you.
Unfortunately, I’ve studied enough psychology to recognize a massive male inferiority complex when I see one. And that tracks on the torture issue as well - apart from clinical sadists, the only folks who would derive satisfaction from torturing a helpless prisoner would be those who were feeling awfully helpless themselves at the time. Torture must have been very empowering for a certain type of crippled personality.
Incidentally, John Ashcroft was an Assembly of God type, which means he was definitely a Dominionist. Assembly of God and Pentecostal churches were among the first to accept Dominionist philosophy right after the turn of the last century, and they were followed by most of the evangelical and charismatic churches. Personally, I am not surprised. Any group that calls falling down in the floor, foaming at the mouth and making unintelligible animal noises “speaking in tongues” is collectively fruitier than nutcakes in my admittedly biased view.
Back to Ashcroft, the poor SOB was so totally threatened by femininity that he spent $8,000 of taxpayer money to drape the bare breast of a classical statue of Lady Justice. You’ve really got to feel sorry for a heterosexual guy that goes through life worried that he might catch a glimpse of female skin.
Kind of reminds you of some Muslim fanatics you’ve read about, doesn’t it. Brand just doesn’t matter - a nut is a nut is a nut . . .
Fanatics have always been the most dangerous of human beings. Fanatics account for Muslim extremists blowing themselves up with disturbing regularity and trying to take a lot of folks with them. Fanatics recently bombed Gaza back into the stone age, creating even more Muslim extremists just itching to don high explosive fashion. Fanatics are the reason Steve Rosen, caught red-handed in espionage against the United States of America, has just walked free to do it again - by fanatics in this case, I refer to the “Amen” corner of Congress and the White House, those folks who believe that Israel can do no wrong at all, no matter what, not ever - it makes one wonder what sort of guilt is behind this blindness.
Fact: Of all our so-called allies, Israel has the most active and damaging espionage program against the United States. Fact, not fiction, and incontrovertible. But Israel can still do no wrong.
I don’t hate Jews at all. I don’t hate anybody at all these days, and Jews least of all. Hell, I literally grew up around the entertainment and apparel industries - kind of hard indeed to hate those folks when they helped raise you. But I never met a single individual who could do no wrong - and as for a whole nation, let’s not even go there.
The fanatics few want to talk about in this country are actually part and parcel of the “Amen” corner problem, because right along with Pat Robertson, those Dominionists and Christian Nationalists think we just have to prevent one single acre of the Holy Land from falling into Muslim hands, and they are cheerfully willing to shed many gallons of American blood to prevent it. Of course, they find it easy to ignore several million Palestinians who absolutely have to live somewhere, and given the xenophobia endemic to this sort of Christian, it is likely they have some sort of “final solution” in mind for those poor unfortunates even if the Israelis don’t.
How ironic, and how tragic.
And it is ironic indeed that this very hard right wing crew has just handed over western civilization to some of the most rabid socialists imaginable. Genuine conservatives and small government folks can’t stomach these religious wingnuts at all, and so the GOP has self-destructed messily from the inside - and it has done it almost overnight in historical terms. As a political party, the GOP is completely washed up. Finished. John McCain’s choice of fruitcake Sarah Palin for a running mate only drove a stake through the heart of an already rotting corpse.
No doubt the GOP is hoping that Obama’s socialist programs will worsen things economically in the United States to the point that the populace will accept anything else. Hell, Rush Limbaugh suicidally stated on national radio that he actually wanted Obama to fail. On the other hand, I do think this is a once in a lifetime opportunity for advocates of genuine freedom to fill a power vacuum at the very top of American politics, and I hope Ron Paul is listening.
If we libertarians can get our act together - and getting libertarians to work together has been compared to herding cats - but if we can get our act together in the next four years, we have a real chance now to change the landscape of American politics forever.
I, for one, simply will not live in a Christian theocracy. I am a practicing Pagan, and my life wouldn’t be worth two cents in such a regime, so I will fight these idiots to my dying breath - with words if I can, and with blood if necessary - and I absolutely guarantee I won’t die alone. Not all Pagans are pacifists. Not all Pagans are liberals. I might add that gentle martyrdom is just about the brain dead dumbest idea the Christians ever came up with - right up there with “turn the other cheek.”
Perhaps it is time for the worst domestic enemies of our Constitution that have crawled out from under slimy rocks at any time in the past two centuries to find that out.
State of Faith
A recent article I spied on the CNN news site made me start thinking, very hard, about the state of religion in the United States. According to a recent poll:
More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified. Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
Even though I am not personally a Christian, and I have not been since I was a child, I found those figures extremely shocking - until I began to think about my own experiences with American Protestant Christianity, especially during a recent and particularly difficult year I spent in southeastern Kansas.
Like anyone who lives in the United States, I cannot avoid having some friends who are of the Protestant Christian persuasion, and of those friends that I know very well, there are several that I do respect highly on the grounds of morality, kindness, compassion and charity - including, but not limited to, a specific couple living in southeastern Kansas and at least one man living and caring for his mother in Kansas City, Missouri - right in the heart of the American Midwest. However, in my experience, such individuals are sadly the exception and not at all the rule for Christians, and this does seem especially true of a particular type of self-styled Christian living in the American Midwest.
The overwhelmingly vocal majority of American Protestant Christians seem to be xenophobic to an absurd degree. In case you don’t speak English very well, xenophobic is a term that encompasses, among other traits, racism. If it doesn’t look like you, and if it doesn’t talk like you, it really isn’t fully human and doesn’t deserve the compassion or kindness we would show to one of “our own.”
The term xenophobic doesn’t only refer to race, however. It literally translates more or less as fear of difference, fear of outsiders or fear of that which is foreign or alien. Xenophobes are the folks who would love to see illegal immigrants - most of them starving and desperately looking for work - very badly treated or even killed. Sadly, they are mostly getting their wish these days.
My own personal experience has mostly been with those self-styled Christians who honestly believe that Pagans and/or Witches are devil-worshippers and would like to see all of us dead. My life and property have been threatened by this sort of Christian on numerous occasions over the last 35 years - and even the lives of my innocent pets. Knowing what I do know of the purported teachings of Jesus of Nazareth - and my childhood education certainly did not neglect Sunday School - it is more than clear to me that these self-styled Christians have absolutely no idea at all what their faith is even about.
In fact, the only sane response to their behavior toward me over the years can be summed up very succinctly in three one-syllable words, “Lock and load.”
Christianity, because it teaches that life is just a temporary phase on the way to eternal reward or punishment, has always been a faith that lends itself all too easily to cults. Christians take up monetary collections during their services - shaming even the very poor into giving what they cannot afford - and if you think that isn’t a lucrative practice, just visit your nearest Baptist church on Sunday morning and do the math. Christian leaders have extremely lucrative reasons to try to control every facet of their followers’ lives from bank accounts to sex lives - and that is the very definition of a cult. Yet because they call themselves Christian, we dare not say so.
The unfortunate truth is that Christian fanatics have been committing crimes (on this continent) in the name of their faith since the murdered women of Salem, Massachusetts, in the late 17th Century, and even before - they like to call these murdered Salem women Witches, and that somehow makes it all right. The women involved could not possibly have been modern Witches, as what we called Wicca or Witchcraft today did not even exist at the time. The play/movie, The Crucible, appears to show that a jealous wife used a slave’s Caribbean Voodoo and the town’s witchcraft hysteria to bring about the multiple murders of her perceived rivals - all in the name of devout Christianity. I don’t know how accurate the story is, but it certainly rings true.
Today, the Christian cults’ modus operandi seems to be more along the lines of blowing up abortion clinics and threatening President Obama because he is black and - oh, horrors - has the middle name of “Hussein.”
I don’t happen to think Obama is the new messiah as some American folks seem to think. In fact, I have some very serious issues with the man. My issues with our current president, however, are political in nature and have zero to do with Obama personally or with his race.
When a religion forfeits its moral compass - as any advocate of torture has surely done, whether the victim of torture is to be Muslim or not, even terrorist or not - and when said religion teaches fear and cruelty instead of faith and love, it no longer deserves the label - or the constitutional protections - of religion.
The Taliban do not deserve the label of Muslim, and neither do the hate-mongers of Al Qaeda. Why should these sick sects of Christians infesting our Midwest be any different? I have no more desire to live under a Christian Taliban than under a Muslim one, and in either case, I will defend my life and freedom with my blood. Nor will I ever allow torture to be done in my name. If it takes the rest of my life, I will not cease from advocating the trial and punishment of those who ordered, those who justified, and those who carried out torture in the last administration. If we do not punish them, it may happen again, and that is unthinkable.
I suspect that most Americans would still agree with me.
Missing The Effing Point!
I, as promised, have kept silent during the first days of our new President’s administration. I hoped, along with most of the rest of America, that we would see substantive change, even though I knew it would be far more socialist change that I personally would be able to stomach. Nevertheless, there were even deeper American issues that I really believed that President Obama would wish to address.
Of course, looting the American treasury and mortgaging the future of our grandchildren was not exactly a good start, but I still hoped that our new president would want to address issues in blatant violation of our Constitution and our national values - issues like torture and warrantless wiretapping.
Instead, President Obama chose to keep and expand the warrantless wiretapping program, which has led to my recent work on a book soon to be released, intended to teach the average computer and cell phone user how to avoid said wiretapping. Watch for Naked in the Cyber Winds: A Survival Guide for the Surveillance Age.
As reprehensible as I find said wiretapping, particularly after learning of the tap on Senator Harman (although I do believe the lady should be jailed for treason - as I am sure there is ample other evidence that could be found in more traditional and acceptable ways), I find torture even more morally repugnant, as I think would any sane human being.
I was all in favor of President Obama’s declassification and release of the torture memos, and I believe there are many more still to be released. I was, however, stunned and disgusted by his initial stance that there would be no torture prosecutions, even though torture clearly violates both U.S. and international law. After considerable pressure from Congress, he seems to have modified his stance to the extent that those at the top who may have ordered torture might be prosecuted if his Attorney General chooses to move forward. After all, it isn’t up to him. He is only the President of the United States. This is actually quite true, but most presidents seem to honor it only when it serves their purposes.
Meanwhile, Dick Cheney is trying to twist the debate by calling for the release of still classified material that supposedly proves what incredibly valuable information was gained from torture. This disgusting and creepy excuse for a human being just won’t go away.
To begin with, I believe that no information of value is ever gained from torture, as the victim will simply admit to anything whatsoever to get the torture to stop. You would, and I would, and any ordinary human being would. The only persons throughout history who have even attempted to resist torture were extreme idealogues, both good and bad - and guess what our so-called “high value” detainees were?
Second, in several of these “high value” cases, torture was the desperate attempt of a madman to justify an illegal war. According to reports this very morning, enormous pressure was put on interrogators to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. Can you spell obsession?
Furthermore, in trying to shield the foot soldiers who actually carried out such interrogations, President Obama has aligned himself with every disgusting tyrant throughout history. “Just following orders” is not an excuse for torture. It never has been, and it never will be. I would be interested in seeing an actual count of how many times that defense was used during the Nazi trials at Nuremberg.
So let me be very clear here. Dick Cheney says the point was the high value information obtained, but that is missing the point altogether. These men and women may well have believed that they were using torture to protect me, the American citizen, from death at the hands of terrorists, but I vehemently reject that relationship. Not in my name! Not ever!
I believe that I am an average citizen of my country, perfectly normal in every way, not unusually brave at all, but let me put this in words of one syllable so that I cannot possibly be misunderstood: I would rather die horribly at the hands of terrorists than have torture and abuse committed in my name! How hard is that to understand?
How can anyone tolerate this type of moral degenerate? How can their wives share their beds? How can husbands even look at their wives? How can their children ever respect them? How can their neighbors live near them? Frankly, I’d rather have Jeffrey Dahmer for a neighbor than anyone who has committed this sort of crime. And I don’t give a tinker’s damn who ordered it in the first place. All are equally guilty.
Those who committed, and those who ordered, the crime of torture should be unemployable, even to scrub toilets and clean sewers. They should be shunned by every decent human being on the planet. By their actions, they have seceded from the human race. They are not welcome in my home, my city, my state or in my country. They should be tried at once for the nastiest and ugliest crime one human being can ever commit against another, and if convicted in a court of law, they should be imprisoned for the rest of their miserable lives - not in Club Fed type prisons, but in maximum security prisons that have guards with nasty attitudes. They should immediately be assigned large and sexually active cellmates.
And when, as will inevitably happen, they find their new circumstances too horrible to endure, we should be more merciful than they were to their victims - and allow them to take their own lives.
You can call me naive. I will wear that badge with pride. But I do believe that nothing less will cleanse this stain upon the honor and the decency of the American people.
A New Day
The last 24 hours have truly been historic, and for many reasons.
To begin with, the idea that you can judge a person based on the melanin content of their skin is, hands down, the brain dead dumbest idea ever spawned by the human race. To go from Jim Crow to an African-American in the White House in fifty years - actually within a single human lifetime - is an achievement we can all be proud of.
Is Barack Obama, this brilliant and highly educated man with the calm and discipline to run such an incredible campaign, qualified to be president? Of course he is! The last two years have tested him in countless ways and demonstrated that he not only has the smarts and the cool to be president, but he has considerable steel in his spine as well. He is altogether an admirable man.
Unfortunately, Democrats historically have been promoters of the nanny state and protectionism. Democrats are not the champions of the Constitution they would have us believe either. They did bring us Waco, after all.
I am afraid this morning for free trade - real free trade, not the farce of NAFTA.
I am afraid this morning for our economic future.
I am afraid this morning for my civil rights, including my right to own and carry firearms.
Still, this is a new day, and until our new president has had time to get his feet on the ground in the Oval Office and make some policy decisions we can evaluate, it is time to get behind him and encourage him in every way that we can.
Maybe he will be the voice of change that we need.
Maybe.
None Dare Call It Murder
What happens when a law enforcement officer - especially a good one - goes to prison?
According to one anonymous prison nurse in Texas, the guards may not like everything that happens, but for the sake of peace, they will all look the other way. There is an unwritten rule in all prisons that any cop is fair game.
How about a top DEA agent who put a lot of drug lords away and who subsequently has to spend some time at Club Fed? Especially one who is not so young anymore and is in physically poor health? How long will he live? Five minutes? Maybe ten minutes, if he’s very, very lucky?
Make no mistake - whatever they may call Cele Castillo’s sentence for buying and selling guns without a license at a Texas gun show (which, folks, happens to be completely legal), any prison sentence at all for this man is a sentence of death just as surely as if the judge had sentenced Castillo to the needle.
So what is Castillo’s real crime? He has the goods - documentary evidence - to put the sitting president’s father away for a long, long time for his illegal smuggling activities during Iran Contra. Unfortunately, Castillo also has a sense of honor - he just won’t keep his mouth shut.
Wow, some hardened criminal, huh? Our streets surely will be safer when this guy is gone.
Worse, his aging mother is afraid he will go away for long enough that she won’t see him again before she passes on. Clearly, she does not even understand that if Castillo even enters Club Fed, he is highly unlikely to be coming out at all. It might be worthwhile to pull that sweet lady’s phone records. Has she been getting pushy and scary phone calls lately? She’d never tell her son, of course, but I surely wouldn’t bet against it.
Once Castillo chose to plead this case out, he was discredited in the eyes of the public. Joe Q. Six-Pack and Jane Q. Soccer-Mom are so damned scared of firearms they won’t even bother to check the law. The information Castillo has no longer has any value at all, unfortunately, but any of us with mothers are forced to understand why he has done this.
Who is Cele Castillo? His full name is Celerino Castillo III, and he is an American hero and the descendant of other heroes from other wars. Cele fought in Viet Nam. He was on the front lines during the Drug War of the 1980s. And as his web site says, his third and final war is proving to be the most dangerous - his war against his own government.
During the 1980s, Castillo was involved in DEA operations in Central and South America. During this time, he became especially interested in the activities at Ilopango Air Force Base in El Salvador. Drugs were moving one way, to the United States, and money and guns were moving the other way, to the Nicaraguan Contras, all under the direct supervision of Lt. Col. Oliver North. When Castillo tried to press his investigation, he was ordered to back off, as this was a black operation emanating from the White House.
Castillo became interested in Poppy Bush, then Reagan’s Vice President, after meeting him at a function in Guatemala and trying to tell him what he had seen - and Bush just walked away from him, looking for another hand to shake. Castillo may have been barred from pressing the case further, but he could observe happenings at the airport, and he kept a daily journal of those years. Do you understand the significance of this? Who is the one man, probably the man who was ultimately most responsible for Iran Contra, who was never prosecuted? I’ll give you a huge hint. On the night of Barry Seal’s murder near New Orleans, whose top secret phone number was found in Seals’ wallet?
None other than that of George H. W. Bush. And there is only one way Seals could have acquired that number - and that is if Bush himself gave it to him.
Barry Seals was the most prolific and the most successful drug smuggler in all of history. And he was about to testify about Iran Contra when he met his death.
Cele Castillo is certainly talented when it comes to choosing his enemies, but maybe that’s why I admire him so much.
It’s too late to try to get Cele Castillo off completely. For his mother’s sake, he has already been forced to admit his utterly non-existent guilt, and a judge will pass sentence on him this very afternoon. If Castillo is to survive this experience, however, we must make his plight so public that he will become toxic to touch.
Please spread this article far and wide. Visit his web site at Powderburns. Let your friends and lawmakers know that if harm comes to Cele Castillo, you will know beyond the slightest doubt who is responsible.
I am waiting to learn Castillo’s sentence as I write this. Maybe this judge will be smart enough to give him only probation. Somehow, though, I doubt it. Compassion in a police state? Who are we kidding?
Can The United States Recover?
Is this the same country that I grew up in?
When I was twelve years old, my father gave me a battered paperback copy of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and told me to read it. Please don’t confuse Heinlein’s original book with the dreadful movie made from it decades later - there is simply no comparison, and apart from a character name or two, almost no resemblance. When I returned the book to my father, I told him I was going to enlist in the U.S. military on my 18th birthday. Dad, who was a lifelong patriot and the Major who had been in charge of all the A/V material sent back to the U.S. from the European theater in World War II, laughed very heartily at the daughter he loved - but he was not at all displeased.
I had the last laugh. The only change in my plan was from the U.S. Army to the U.S. Air Force. I raised my right hand and took the enlistment oath on my 18th birthday. It might be a good idea to review that oath once in awhile:
“I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.”
I was proud to serve my country, and I humbly submit that I understood one portion of that oath as completely as any adolescent can only because I was well taught during Basic Training. “…according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice” is not in the least ambiguous. No military member has an obligation to obey an unlawful order, and no military member should ever do so. Many classroom and lecture hours were spent on teaching us what to do about an unlawful order, and sure enough, I had reason to exercise that training in my first year of service when my NCOIC gave me an instruction that clearly stepped over that very intangible line between appropriate military leadership and fraternizing with a subordinate. A simple and civil request for said instruction to be presented in writing resulted in an instant about-face - and in the long term, a much better relationship with said supervisor, a professional one based upon respect. It was an important lesson.
That nightmare moment, several years ago now, when I first saw the disgusting torture and abuse photographs released from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, I knew that the training I had received was no longer a part of basic military training. I believed, and still believe, that the decision to remove that training was dangerous, and I predict that in the long term, it will do far more harm to this country than good.
The problem is that this segment of our training did not produce the sort of little robots that our Decider-in-Chief has decided we need in this modern world.
I am sorry to say that I did not fully understand that portion of that oath where I swore to “uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” until many years after I took the oath. Nor could I have imagined in September of 1972 that the worst domestic enemies our Constitution would ever face would one day inhabit Capitol Hill and the White House, not even with the example of Richard Nixon staring me right in the face.
I do understand it now, with absolutely chilling clarity. And like many of my contemporaries who also served their country, I do know that my discharge did not absolve me of that oath. Nothing this side of death can do that. I am no longer in the United States military, but I took that oath freely and without coercion, and I remain obligated to its terms until I take up residence six feet below ground.
This morning, I woke up to read in the Washington Post that the CIA, after receiving orders to torture suspects soon after September 11, 2001, had some very understandable concerns about the legality of these orders. It isn’t my intention to disparage the service of the few remaining decent men and women in the intelligence services, but I do want to stress how weird and unusual it is for the CIA to have concerns about anything at all short of what would gag any self-respecting maggot.
There were several meetings held at the White House over these concerns. Please imagine this, if you can. The Director of Central Intelligence - George Tenet, by the way, at the time - is concerned about the torture of suspects. Condi Rice is there, and I am sure that Dick Cheney and President Bush were there. Who was it that actually said it was okay?
And how could anyone in the room agree with them?
What shocks me is not that the United States has used torture. We’ve done that for years. We taught half of South America how to do it even better at a certain infamous school in Georgia.
What stuns me is that we are no longer ashamed of it. In the past, any time even a hint of this found the light of day, we backpedaled like crazy.
Not this time. This time, when George Tenet asked for a memo to cover his patootie . . .
Someone actually wrote the memo. Someone actually said that torture was okay, and put it into writing. 35 years ago, my first NCOIC wouldn’t even commit to writing his mildly excessive pressure in asking me for a date. But waterboarding is okay, and that’s in black and white on a piece of White House stationery.
John McCain, the man who publicly fought against torture, later quietly voted for it. He is one of the two nominees for President we must vote on in about three weeks. How could this have happened?
Can we come back from this? Can we ever again be the country that I loved and served with pride and honor?
I don’t know. You tell me.
I am sick at heart tonight.
What Is The Matter With You People?
Or what is the matter with me?
A few days ago, I was having a brainstorming session with a young neighbor of mine (from my perspective, 40s is young) about how to survive this coming economic depression and exit better off than we are as we enter it. He asked me if there was something terribly wrong with him, because despite the fact that he genuinely felt terrible for those people who were losing everything, he was actually enjoying himself.
I didn’t hesitate to tell him that he was perfectly sane. It seemed totally obvious and self-evident to me. We are facing a huge challenge, yes. We are also watching history in the making. Those of us who always felt just a little bit cheated that we missed World War II or Viet Nam or fill-in-the-blank are finally getting our chance at the big adventure. Depressions do not ruin everyone. Those who can keep their heads on straight, avoid panic and develop a plan can actually find enormous opportunities in an economic downturn.
Reading the news today, I am seeing suicides on every hand. Now, despite what the shrinks want you to believe, nobody can get to my age without entertaining a few final thoughts now and then. The cause, however, is usually loneliness or sheer boredom, not an outside challenge such as this. Why would economic depression translate into clinical depression so easily?
The only answer I can find is that an awful lot of people really believed they could retire and do nothing at 65 years of age - and now they’ve lost their savings. That is very sad, but that sort of retirement is usually a fast track to six feet under anyway. Now we have something real to live for!! There is a fight looming that is actually worthy of our brains and our experience. I have never, ever - not in my entire life - been farther from suicide than I am right now.
So what kind of American are you? Are you going to fold and whine and off yourself because things didn’t work out so well for your 401K? Or are you the kind of American who is going to beat this thing and go from zero to rich before this so-called “Depression” is over with?
If you are the latter, I want to meet you. You are my kind of people.
If you are the former, go away. I haven’t got time to listen to a whiner.
Why Economic Recovery Just Now Spells Disaster
I owe Mike Ruppert of From The Wilderness and Catherine Austin Fitts of Solari everything for my understanding of what follows. Both are geniuses. Many years ago, Fitts began to use something she called the Solari Index to measure the health of our society. Put simply, the Solari Index is the percentage of ordinary people in our cities who actually believe that a child can walk from his/her home to the nearest place to buy a popsicle and come home alone, unharmed and unmolested. When Fitts first started using the Solari Index, the Dow Jones was at about 500 and the Solari was 100. Before this current economic crisis occurred, the Dow was at 14,000+ and the Solari was effectively zero. They have an obvious inverse relationship.
If you think about it, this doesn’t really make sense. Wouldn’t you expect that the more prosperous a society becomes, the lower the crime rate falls? Shouldn’t the Dow Jones and the Solari Index be friends? Indeed, yes!
We all know that it hasn’t happened that way, but most of us do not fully understand why.
We’ve read for years about the Central Intelligence Agency importing drugs into the United States, everything from heroin at the time of the Viet Nam war to cocaine, crack and meth in subsequent years. Mike Ruppert has been telling us about this since the 1970s. Most Americans do not believe the stories they have heard because they have - as I once did - a small problem with motive. Profit is always a good motive, but when you are talking about a significant portion of a major governmental entity, most of us feel we need just a little more motive than straight profit.
How about misguided patriotism? How about concern for the value of your 401K and those of millions of other Americans? Is that motive enough? Regardless of their actual motive, the CIA is importing illegal drugs into the United States of America - at least a portion of the Agency is - and there is no doubt whatsoever in my mind about that today.
Let’s say you are a South American drug lord and you have $1 billion in drug money. You earned this money in a fairly traditional way - by producing a scarce and dangerous commodity and selling it on the open market. Of course, this commodity is only worth so much because it is illegal and the rest of the world is paying you a premium for the risks you took. Now you need to look at another risk. You can’t let anyone know you have this money. You can’t just put it in a bank, not without the U.S. Army special forces using you for target practice and the U.S. Government seizing your funds. If you try to hide the money, there is always the chance that it will be found - $1 billion in cash takes up a lot of space, too, so forget burying it in mason jars. Besides, you need the funds - the liquidity - to keep operating your agricultural, processing and smuggling businesses.
Please make no mistake, no matter what you think of their morals, these drug lords are - first, last and always - very clever businessmen. And as Mike Ruppert told us years ago - and proved beyond question if anyone was smart enough to check - 90 percent of the CIA leadership over the last 50 years has been drawn from Wall Street lawyers and bankers. That is the final piece of the puzzle.
So if you are that drug lord, what you must do to gain access to your $1 billion is launder it. In other words, you need to provide the rest of the world with an innocent explanation for how you acquired this money. So what do you do?
You can do any one of countless things. You can contact an auto manufacturer, order several thousand cars and open the newest answer to CarMax in Bogota. You can contact a computer manufacturer and buy thousands of computers to open Lima’s newest answer to Comp USA. And so on. The profit that you earn on the sale of the products you purchase becomes clean money. You can tell anyone where this money came from. The same is true for a stock or a derivatives purchase that becomes profitable. Once you have that innocent explanation to give the rest of the world, and it’s good enough to fly, you have access to your money and your murderous business can go on. Murderous? Yes, indeed! If a street thug is willing to kill for the $20 bill in someone’s wallet, what will these men do to protect their billions?
Current estimates run anywhere from $500 billion to $1.5 trillion in drug money laundered through Wall Street each year. I believe the larger estimate is the more accurate one, and it may be even larger. Remember that the whole intent behind this enterprise is to keep the source of the money a secret. There is no doubt at all that Wall Street, and our current banking system, are utterly addicted to drug profits.
Horrible? Yes, it most certainly is. Unfortunately, millions of 401K savings plans losing 3/4 of their value overnight is also a nightmare scenario, which is literally what would have happened if we had really decided to get serious about the drug trade and shut it down.
The result is where we have been sitting since the early 1980s and Reagan’s escalation of The Drug War. Billions of dollars spent on drug enforcement through the DEA, and those few DEA agents who are good enough to figure out what is really happening find themselves investigating the CIA - and soon thereafter, they either find themselves dead, or ruined like Celerino Castillo. Despite all of this money and sacrifice, the only things our streets have less of are safety and freedom. Nobody, but nobody, wants to admit that the only way to take the cartels down once and for always is to legalize their product - which will also flush the life savings of millions of Americans. After all, what is the real value of a few plants? It certainly isn’t what the streets are paying for these products today! That is the only way you can end the drug trade. You never need to spend another dime on enforcement - just remove the profit from the transaction. It is all about the money. A few kids might still get stupid, but nobody will be pushing the stuff at your local Junior High. Why would they do that if there were no real profit in it?
Now we come back to the basic problem. Years ago, Catherine Austin Fitts asked an audience what they would do if there was a big red button, and pressing it would end the drug trade (and cause Wall Street to collapse). She asked for anyone willing to press that button to raise their hands. No one did.
We now have a golden opportunity. Our financial system is already collapsing, and that nightmare 401K scenario I talked about earlier is already taking place. The painful part has already happened, or most of it has. This is a once in a lifetime priceless opportunity to rebuild our system in such a way that the Dow Jones and Solari indices can actually be friends. We’re past the worst pain of breaking an addiction - now the only question is will we go back to the drug profits? Or will we end those profits forever?
A few hundred points of recovery on the Dow at this point will only mean more of the same. You might get some of your retirement savings back in the short term, but it means we have learned nothing at all, and this stupidly criminal system will continue just as before. The only change will be that the federal government will assist even more than before in laundering these drug funds because the government will own large chunks of the banks that do it.
Is that what you really want, America?
Fear and Faith
Most commonly, the period of history that we call the Dark Ages refers to the years between 476 AD (when the Roman Empire fell) and the year 1000 AD, or about 95 years before The First Crusade. Some writers, including myself, prefer to carry the “Dark Ages” forward to the beginning of the Renaissance in the 14th Century, viewing the Crusades and the various witch hunts of the intervening centuries as an extension of the Dark Ages. Although there were certainly witch hunts after the Renaissance began, there is no doubt that the beginning of the Renaissance marks the beginning of a return to reason.
The one overwelming characteristic of the Dark Ages was intolerance. The Roman church and Protestantism were intolerant of each other and later of Islam. Most of all, they were extremely intolerant of science - particularly where it appeared to conflict with their narrowly religious view of the Universe - and therefore progress was brought almost completely to a standstill for hundreds of years. Oddly, during its earliest centuries, Islam was very tolerant of science. Later, that pendulum would swing the other way. Now, it is swinging back again - just listen to the creationism / evolution debate if you doubt that. Nothing is forever.
Of course, for an extremely religious person, perhaps the historical (or coming) Dark Ages do not seem so dark after all, but most of us would have found such a life, or will find it - in the words Thomas Hobbes originally used to describe anarchy - nasty, brutish and short. This is because no religious fanatic ever meets anyone appearing to them to be as perfectly religious as said fanatic knows he/she is, and it is unfortunately true that fanatical religious groups often teach conversion by the sword. Which, if you think about it, leads to a lot of swordplay - and also a lot of blood.
Religion - all religion, and I am not an atheist myself - is rooted in fear, usually fear of the unknown. We are conscious, self-aware creatures, and we simply cannot imagine an eternity of nothing after this life. Answering that question of what comes after death has been a preoccupation of human beings since the dawn of thought and spoken language.
But how can you tell the difference between genuine belief and an ugly - and dangerous - cult? It really isn’t all that difficult. A person with genuine faith is no longer afraid. True or not, their religion is working for them as it was meant to work, and it has taken away their fear. Such individuals can face life, and even death, with happy serenity, and they feel no baseless ill will toward anyone.
On the other hand, the hate-filled fanatics that are coming out of the woodwork everywhere we look today, even in politics, are all afraid. They are terrified. That is why they are desperate to at least appear more religious than their neighbors. Somehow they have to claw and fight their way into this Heaven that folks talk about, because the alternative is not even to be contemplated. This drives them to hate. They hate Obama because he’s black and has an Arabic middle name. Meanwhile, the Catholics hate the Protestants, and the Protestants hate the Catholics, and the Apocalyptic cults hate both, and everybody hates the Muslims - and let’s don’t even mention Pagans and Witches and those dreadful, dreadful folk. It seems like that is all we are hearing out of everybody these days. Hate, hate, hate. This isn’t religion at all. It’s mental illness, exacerbated by the need to find a scapegoat you can blame for difficult times.
Fear of death is natural and human. It is man’s earliest fear, even if not a thinking man’s deepest fear. However, any reasoning being knows that fear of death does us no good at all. We are all dying from the moment of our individual births, and nothing and no one can ever change that in even the smallest way. Only when we can finally accept the fact that death is natural and comes to all of us without preference can we begin to grow spiritually and find a belief system that actually works for us. That’s all it takes - just that tiny bit of courage needed to say that death is unavoidable, and therefore wasting fear on it is pointless. On the day you can say that - and believe it - life changes forever. Until then, however, every moment of every day is filled with fear. And fear breeds hatred.
The crowds surrounding John McCain and Sarah Palin lately have been vicious in their hatred - which means they are truly terrified. Real leaders, ready and able to lead our nation, would calm the fears of those who follow them - and in fairness to Senator McCain, he has recently begun to try. Unfortunately, he cannot get past his own fears, and the stink of his fear infects the crowds that surround him.
Sarah Palin, who frequently accuses Obama of terrorism, and who loves to refer to his multi-racial heritage and name, is a daughter of an Apocalyptic cult that makes David Koresh look like a mainstream Baptist. The hilarious irony is that Palin recently allowed a Kenyan witch hunter to bless her in a way that was designed to protect her from witches. The video is all over YouTube, so I’ll paste it here.
Since Obama is half Kenyan himself - a heritage that Palin herself says makes him unfit to lead - the video afforded me some much needed laughter. Poor Sarah! If you only knew, honey - we Witches, the real thing, always were the least of your worries.
Sarah is a soldier in Joel’s Army - and I’ve been reading about them a lot recently. These folks don’t just hate. They intend to fight for their God in a real and physical sense, driving those of us who don’t believe “rightly” either into their twisted idea of righteous faith or into our graves. Well, at least they plan to give us that much of a choice. Joel’s Army are taught from childhood that every time they stop praying for even a few moments, they are subject to demonic possession. Charming bunch of folks, without a doubt. I suspect that most of them need medication to function in the real world.
What triggered the early medieval period known as the Dark Ages? The fall of Rome. Are we headed into another Dark Ages triggered by the fall of another empire? I don’t know, although I am growing uneasy about the possibility. I do know, however, that I don’t want frightened people for leaders, and especially not now.
McCain and Palin need psychiatric help, not votes.
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