ADVENTURES IN WRITING! Operating from Northern Indiana, this blog will cover aspects of culture with a bent on humor and the relentless belittling of the mainstream media, politics, and the syphilitic GOP (both major parties). News analysis happens. Put on your adult diapers, this gwine'-a'-be a bourgeois hoot. Some much needed hilarity for working class North Americans and international readers. I'm the part of this human world that bites back. Let's roll.
Ed.--A recent spate of cyberattacks on Google's Gmail system (originating in China) reminded me of a some similar techniques employed against Deborah Jeane Palfrey (the DC Madam), perhaps by the United States Government or non-governmental actors--contractors of one variety or another. The Chinese attacks ensnared several hundred individuals, some of them high level American government officials, presumably some working for the State Department.
Some whose Gmail accounts were breached were American military personnel as well as a few Chinese dissidents, perhaps included as a diversion or as overlap from other hacking operations originating from the same actors. Whoever they were, they were looking for specific types of people doing specific types of work for the U.S. Government; specific individuals were targeted for hacking.
Do no evil?
Google routinely cooperates with the America national security state, so it's no surprise that they've been targeted by other nations using third party actors to provide a kind of plausible deniability. In the case of the recent attack on Google, it's safe to assume that the encouragement of non-governmental actors was formulated to prevent accountability being directed at the regime in Beijing, a fair assumption. Does the U.S. do this? Certainly--one could argue that we pioneered its use--and some of this echoes the very real world attacks on American soil on September 11, 2001, ushering in a newer form of mercenary where attacks by one state against another are done indirectly by proxy, "non-governmental" agents.
21st Century Brigands?
This is perhaps going to be the Golden Age of the mercenary, with further tech-enhancements.
Mercenary hackers aren't new, but the scale of their activities is growing rapidly. Information warfare itself is an old tactic of political entities, and nation states like the United States or even Turkey are engaged in it all of the time.
...Google said Wednesday that personal Gmail accounts of several hundred people, including senior U.S. government officials, military personnel and political activists, had been exposed. Google traced the origin of the attacks to Jinan, China, the home city of a military vocational school whose computers were linked to a more sophisticated assault 17 months ago on Google's systems." ... ("US says no... ," AP, June 2, 2011)
Most modern nation states are engaging in it at some stage, but like the use of drones in recent conflicts, it remains unofficial policy, often mislabeled as "conspiracy." Cyberwarfare isn't new, but the widening scope of its use by state and "rogue" (using the term without any value judgment) actors is.
The Palfrey defense was under surveillance, period, it's inarguable and I bore witness to it directly. Some will say that it was for legitimate purposes of the enforcement of the law, but how then would any defendant get a fair trial under such scrutiny? What's arguable is who it might have been which one could speculate on endlessly with such a muddied trail. That's how it goes with hacking and cyberattacks, but with enough persistence and even some luck the origins of a hit can sometimes be uncovered. The key is to erase as much of a trail leading to the originator of the attack as possible and it's not rocket science, but not so prevalent or as easy in the stone age days of the Internent back in the fall of 1998 when the madam's account was hacked.
Even at the time what they did wasn't especially sophisticated, but the average Internet user wouldn't have known how to do the breach and what followed from it.
Just shy of ten years later I had a productive exchange with a former attorney of the DC Madam's about the breaching of the her email account:
Jeane and I searched and searched and finally traced the insertion of a email forwarding address in her earthlink account to a Yahoo.uk email address. When I took it up with yahoo.uk, they had no answer how anyone had hacked into Jeane's account and could not identify the owner of the yahoo.uk email account as it was to a string of fictious email accounts.(Correspondence with the Editor, August 2008)
This was to be expected whether it was a state actor or not. It's a very good possibility that this was a former client of Pamela Martin & Associates, but that could just as well mean the arrow points to the state as well as contractors.
What raised a few flags this week for me came from this passage in an AP article on the recent breaches in Google's Gmail infrastructure that compromised some of the personal email accounts of a few high level American officials.
The modus operandi is similar if not identical to the breaches in the DC Madam's Sprynet email account back in 1998:
...While Google said last year's attack was aimed at its corporate infrastructure, the latest incident appears to have relied on tricking email users into revealing passwords, based on Google's description in its blog post.
It said the perpetrators changed the victims' email forwarding settings, presumably secretly sending the victims' personal emails to other recipients. ... ("Google reveals... ," Reuters, June 2, 2011 )
The final sentence is exactly what happened to the DC Madam's email account sometime in October 1998.
It's almost become a cliche that intelligence agencies (and similar institutions and groups) can and have used primitive forms of hacking as a cover for the activities against various actionable targets. Perhaps one day we'll find through declassifications that a government contractor created all of those phony email accounts when Palfrey began to become a "person of interest" to whoever hacked her account and changed her forwarding settings, intercepting all of her emails going in and out (I know from experience as I was receiving bouncebacks once the phony account had been closed). Most likely, she was beginning to become a liability to a privileged former client...but the truth of the case is elusive as ever.
WWW--We did? Who won it? It wasn't the average person. Considering the recent revelations about former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ("Iron Maggie," a beloved to neocons along with the Maoist veneration of Ronald Reagan) and her discussions with the final Soviet President Mikael Gorbachev--that Thatcher and the rest of the West including America--didn't want reunification of Germany under any circumstances, you'd think it would be everywhere in our media.
Fine, it came out on September 11th, our new sacred national day, but this is earth-shattering news, it downs many myths about the Cold War, including the legacy of President Ronald Reagan. The contention of "we won the Cold War" just doesn't float anymore, they wanted to keep it going, and it served many purposes for the power structures on both sides, and Thatcher's comments underscore what many have suspected all along: the Cold War was a lie, a big lie. I could have told you that, but now we have solid-proof.
As usual, the official line and rhetoric are just window dressing, a lie, cover. The Western powers wanted the Soviet Union to stay-in-place for the foreseeable future during Peristroika (the thaw of authoritarianism in the Warsaw Pact nations) and the collapse of the Berlin Wall. This exchange comes less than three months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it is extraordinary.
From the Times:
September 23 1989 : transcript
Thatcher: I wanted to raise some questions regarding the situation in the countries of Eastern Europe. I was deeply impressed by the courage of General Jaruzelski in Poland and by his patriotism. Of course, the future of Poland and its alliance with you are very important. I noticed that you reacted calmly to the results of the Polish elections and generally to processes taking part in this and other Eastern European countries. My understanding of your position is following: you welcome each country developing in its own way on the condition that Warsaw Pact stays. I understand this position perfectly.
Now I would like to say something in complete confidence and would ask you not to record this part of our conversation.
Gorbachev: I agree to your request.
(The following part of the conversation is reproduced from memory)
Thatcher: We are very concerned about the processes taking place in Eastern Germany. Some big changes could happen there, forced partly by the state of the society and partly by the illness of Erich Honecker. One example of this is the flight of thousands of people from the GDR to the FRG. All of this is on the surface, it is very important but even more important is something else.
In the same way, a destabilisation of Eastern Europe and breakdown of the Warsaw Pact are also not in our interests. Of course, internal changes are happening in all Eastern European countries, somewhere they are deeper than in others. However, we would prefer if those processes were entirely internal, we would not interfere in them or push the de-communisation of Eastern Europe. I can say that the President of the United States is of the same position. He sent me a telegram to Tokyo in which he asked me directly to tell you that the United States would not do anything that might put at risk the security of the Soviet Union or perceived by the Soviet society as danger. I am fulfilling his request.
Gorbachev: Thank you for this message. In broad terms, you have outlined our position correctly. We believe that socialist countries should solve their internal problems themselves, chose themselves the course and speed on the way of implementation of their socialist choice. We do not want and will not interfere but will, of course help our allies as we have always done.
As for the state of health of Erich Honecker, he is planning to take part in all events commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the GDR. I can tell you that I am planning to arrive to the GDR on 6-7th October to celebrate this anniversary.
In other words, Reagan was in total agreement with Thatcher and considering American might, could be presumed to have been pulling some of the strings here. And there is more, much more to establish the veracity and legitimacy of these documents. Where was it in the American press? The virtual "page eight," if it was there at all.
This is a stunning rebuttal to the mythology surrounding the Cold War, former Prime Minister Thatcher, and the late President Ronald Reagan. Former President Gorbachev comes off looking very good, even better than before. Western leaders of the time look like the lying, scrambling, unimaginative clowns that they were and are. "Conventional wisdom" is often misinformed, now we know. The real history tends to be unwritten for generations. We lucked-out on this one. What a "Man in the High Castle" moment.
It was in the winter of 1991-92 that I first listened to the music of Justin K. Broadrick, onetime drummer/founder of the legendary Napalm Death, and I've never looked back. The album was the extraordinary "Streetcleaner" (1989), and it was percolating its way through college campuses and neighborhoods across North America, seeping its way into the minds of incredibly angry, nihilistic youth.
Broadrick has had his ups-and-downs over the years with the decline of Godflesh, numerous side-projects, a series of personal crises, but has survived the crash of the conventional music industry and come back with a real vengeance since 2005 and the first release of Jesu on the Hydrahead label, run by the inimitable heavy rock group Isis.
Broadrick is a real gadfly in the music world, crossing genre boundaries and conventions while pushing the envelope and creating new styles and approaches that are rapidly imitated (think the band Korn, a group whose style he doesn't want credit for) poorly, such as the hybridization of hip-hop and intensely heavy rock-stylings. But if there's a thread running through his music, it's the psychedelic, the ponderous, a gazing into the abyss of our common era, and that shines through more brightly in this new project than ever before. If you're a real aficionado of unforgivably heavy rock, layered, dense, and brutal, this is going to be your new fix for a very long time to come. It's projects like this that keep rock--barely living--alive in a microcosmic sense, and that's fine by me.
What's so shocking and exciting about this release, however, is that Broadrick has returned to playing drums once again, and it's been a long-time-coming. Other than possibly some playing on the "Sweet Tooth" project, I don't believe he's played drums on a recording in such a direct way since his time in Napalm Death in the 1980s, so this is a real historic occasion, and he's great on it. Reenlisting Dave Cochrane of God and Head of David was going to be a logical move as was the bass and electronics of the great Diarmuid ("Dermot") Dalton of Cable Regime and Jesu, while the inclusion of Isis guitarist and visual artist Aaron Turner compliments the general wash of sound you'd expect from a Broadrick-fronted project.
Layered doesn't even begin to describe the sound, this is a real feat of music engineering here where noise, heaviness, and the psychedelic create a very satisfying admixture that recalls Ornette Coleman's "harmolodics" theory. "Vultures Descend" is one of the more interesting and exciting tracks, but if I were to pick a favorite, it would have to be the destroying "Sweatshop," a cut that's going to please the most purist of Godflesh fans who've been wondering if Broadrick lost it after 2005. He hasn't, this was well worth the wait. It's strange, but in a way, he's cycled back to his Napalm Death days, the days of the legendary "SCUM" LP (1986), a heavily-layered affair awash in noise, now with the inclusion of discreet electronics, sampling, and few vocals at all. We got a taste of what was to come in 2003's final Techno Animal project, "Curse of the Golden Vampire," a project that was also reminiscent of ND in several areas and a good taste of how close drum and bass sounds to speed metal rhythmically!
Like the very best of JB's output, this album is going to be impossible to define. Every member but one rooks-in electronics, looping, sampling, and even the occasional synthesized sound that creates quite an onslaught. Imagine the layering and looping approach of electric period Miles (think "Bitches Brew") applied to a rock band and you're getting closer; guitars are subsumed by drums; drums are subsumed by the roar of the overall sound, fighting their way to the top; vocals occasionally fight their way up; synths and samples cut their way through the mix, while the bass keeps chugging. If it sounds like war, that's because it is, this, our common era. Disconnected couldn't be more timely or timeless.
WWW--Grey Machine is Justin K. Broadrick (Godflesh, Final, Techno Animal, Napalm Death, ICE, etc.), Dave Cochrane (Head of David), Aaron Turner (Isis), Diarmuid Dalton (Godflesh, Cable Regime, Final), and their first release together that came out earlier this month promises to conquer, especially old school Godflesh fans like myself.
After the 2002 demise of that band, Broadrick moved on to form Jesu, his new rock project, and the first releases were pretty heavy, not that I haven't liked the Eno and postpunk inflections along the way, but...
Let's be honest: the last wide-release album of Jesu ("Conqueror") wasn't very good at all, it had a couple good tunes and lacked any real dynamic and fell pretty flat creatively. The singles, small-run releases on Broadrick's Avalanche imprint, and EPs since then have been a significant improvement even without the heft, the heaviness. If you don't like really heavy experimental music that eschews the rules of genre you won't like this, not that I care.
Apparently Justin was feeling a little wounded by the criticisms coming from old fans like myself and decided to show everyone that he's just as capable of apocalypse rock as he ever was and the first reviews are confirming that Grey Machine's "Disconnected" is that very thing, so it's time to breathe a sigh of relief. A review is forthcoming at this site, but have an ear-bleeding, soul-destroying listen of some song samples here in-the-meantime: http://www.last.fm/music/GREYMACHINE .
"Vultures Descend" is absolutely stunning in itself and also reminiscent of some of the best output by the Swans. Someone has to do the soundtrack to the apocalypse, and that man is Justin K. Broadrick along with his numerous collaborators. Projects like this transcend the boundaries of mere rock music. Enjoy (or don't).
Site Meter--Their snuffling about from "old blighty" again. Could it be Mosleyite David Irving, former closet queen of Holocaust deniers? Who gives these assholes the money to do their non-Harlem globetrotting anyway? Sure, they actually sell a few books to squareheads like themselves, but that doesn't explain it all. They have some very wealthy backers, I'd wager. Still, they get to schtupp some fine, goyische punim.
Ed.--Could this be from white hate central? I'm hoping it's MI5, but they and the UK's intelligence community (MI6, SIS, etc.) have a sordid (and storied--that's for Alex Constantine, touche!) past of cooperation with fascist and Mosleyite groups for purposes of social control. One just never knows what they're up to at the HO and FO. Boris, we must deny Moose and Squirrel were ever liquidated...da!
WWW--On April 25th, I'll be going to see industrial pioneers, Throbbing Gristle in Chicago. Not everyone knows who they are, but they are essentially the creators of "industrial culture" and beyond. For years-and-years all I've been able to do is read about them and lament that I never got to see them perform live since their last show was in San Francisco in May 1981.
But several years ago, they finally decided to put things from the past aside--all the slights, issues, and arguments--and regrouped, doing a few shows in London, then throughout most of Europe and parts of the rest of the globe.
It's hard to describe the sound of TG, but an old college acquaintance put it best when he wrote, "TG is like a drug...you either like it or you don't." I don't just like TG, I love them. Having seen PTV3 in 2004, this is going to be part of a surprisingly fulfilled wish list.
When TG broke-up in May 1981, the Reagan revolution was in its infancy. England was suffering under the same kind of marketplace fascism, and as they've been a virtual economic satellite of the United States ("51st State"!) since the late-1970s, we've had a shared fate as cultures. Groups like TG have been that much needed antidote to obsolete conventional wisdom and thinking, a genuine part of our Western counterculture.
TG ended where Reaganism began. Now TG begins anew as Reaganism ends, dies. As above, so below, so mote it be. The final show in Chicago will be in a Presbyterian church, it couldn't be more fitting. Welcome back.
Ed.--It never ends, and what a bunch of scared turds there are out there. She committed suicide. A jackape named "Sarah" points-out that I made an observation last May that Palfrey's suicide notes were legitimate and that some wild speculator named "J.J. Raymond" was completely wrong in his analysis of the handwriting.
As any fool knows--and aren't we all fools these days--handwriting analysis is entirely speculative and not a science but an art. Not that this little man was working from originals at any point, nor is likely to ever do so. He and the "she were suicided" crew have nothing.
Raymond and these morons know this, and they know that that's all they have regarding the death of Jeane Palfrey: speculations, and wild ones with wild leaps of logic found among those with just enough knowledge to be a problem to others. That's right, stupid people who can read a little. Below is my reply to "Sarah," I assume a fake identity of someone without a shred of credibility when it comes to the last year of Deborah Jeane Palfrey.
"The problem with your contention is that I'm saying the suicide notes were not forged, they were real. Therefore--based on my own ten month correspondence with her, my general defense research for her--I say none of you have a clue what you're talking/writing about here in any respect. I could care less about Mr. Raymond's opinions on the matter, or those found in the rest of the comments.
You were not part of the story, I was, and so were others. Ask Larisa Alexandrovna, go ask any of the journalists who interviewed her and they will tell you that she was unbalanced throughout the entire ordeal. That you cannot ascertain the obvious from the whole catastrophe is a mark of how unintelligent and irrational you all are.
Let me make it clear: she killed herself by her own hand. She was offered excellent plea deals that she refused again and again, she put out numerous suicidal cues throughout the affair, she had made similar threats/statements back in 1992, she emailed me, a co-researcher, and noted journalist Jason Leopold (hiding it, presumably) from her then-counsel, and she even expressed it to her civil counsel, Montgomery Blair Sibley. This is why he was removed from the case by her. There is more, and it is coming from me and from others who I assume are writing their own accounts for the record.
But again, I could really care less about the opinions of those who have no idea what they're talking about in this whole story. Why you wish to believe this--and it is a desire, obviously--is a matter of scared little people. Go ahead, believe the world is flat, there is a divine Jesus, there are aliens abducting rednecks (who else would they want to communicate with?), and that everything is under totalitarian rule. Believe the fiction, I don't really care, and neither do most intelligent adults with a clue."
I would also add that pointing-out earlier comments when the news was fresh is the oldest trick in the book on the part of the huckster conspiracy salesperson. Want fries with your book and conspiracy mug? I know, I know: t'was the gub'ment, even before there was one.
That's an arch-conservative argument, incidentally (not-so-incidentally, or coincidentally), part of the redneck problem. Congratulations Sarah, you learned how to cut-and-paste, you're a genius. Mr. Raymond? A funny little man with very little company on this topic.
Los Angeles, the City of Raymond Chandler--It took Michael C. Moynihan (who's he?) just four-months to discover my article "English Accents and American Advertising," a piece primarily about the proliferation of the UK-accent in American advertising, and my take on why it's occurring. But instead, to Moynihan, it's about "how enraged" I am about my "intellectual isolation," and how Brits are invading the United States to buy things and misbehave...or something along-those-lines. Maybe. Thanks, Mike, you read my mind, and you know everything about my life and Indiana. Thanks.
Moynihan either forgot or willfully misrepresented the real message--the subtext--of my original article: that Americans have allowed themselves to be dumbed-down, and that even our politicians sound stupid when they talk. Listen to our current president and tell me with a straight-face that I'm wrong. For that matter, listen to almost any current incumbent holding office in these here U-ni-ted States attempting speech.
To Michael Moynihan, the run-up to the war in Iraq never happened, and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld never called the EU "Old Europe," or that most of our diplomats have such bad diction that they're unable to effectively form the right words required to negotiate with their peers from other nations.
Look, I know that "I'm just jealous," and that someone who can barely write (Moynihan) probably draws more money from his so-called "writing" than I've ever made (or ever will), or that who his exact audience is is beyond my lowly working-class comprehension. But enough about his connections, or his ability to kiss executive/foundation asses. Mike should do the thinking for us. Never mind that the subtext of his piece, "Rant: Take Them Back to Dear Old Blighty-The ugliest byproduct of the sagging dollar," supports the thesis of my original piece in-spades, and please-please, do step over the victims of America--you might get those expensive Italian shoes soiled.
Who are you talking to Mike? Who is your audience? My uneducated guess would be well-off professionals like you, the trust fund kids and the silver spoon crowd whose job is to tell the rest of us how to think and how wonderful you all are. Shame, but at least your article is utterly incomprehensible.
One might assume--making an ass of you and me--that his piece angered me, but that would be wrong. I'm loving the irony, and the tiny bit of exposure it's brought to my humble little blog, "J to the Power of 7" (http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com), and the fact that it at least got him thinking for a few milliseconds. Cognitive dissonance hurts, I know. So, while all the comfortable people watch in horror as the economy they said shouldn't be regulated collapses for that very same reason, we can feel safe in the knowledge that Michael C. Moynihan...what does he feel?
I couldn't tell from his article, and couldn't locate a thesis. Maybe it's: "The British are coming! The British are coming!" Considering Moynihan's Irish-American, that might be measure of concern. Thanks for the laughs and the exposure, Mike, it felt good being quoted in the same paragraph as actor Val Kilmer (Brother Val, I agree!). And Mike, you're arch-neoconservative whether you know it or not. Go buy a tie, it looks better. But Mike and I have something in- common: nobody knows who we are, nor do they care.
“Litvinenko became an agent who left the control of (British) special services and was killed. ...If not by the (British) intelligence services themselves, then under their control or with their connivance."--Former FSB operative Andrei Lugovoy, accused of poisoning former FSB-operative Alexander Litvinenko in November of 2006.
London,The United Kingdom--Even casual observers of this whole international incident have had ample reason to suspect that Alexander Litvinenko was working for British Intelligence, but the UK's Daily Mailhas come forward with this possibility now as being a solid assertion.
It's hardly a stretch: in 2000, Litvinenko and his family were rapidly given political asylum after fleeing Vladimir Putin's government and a number of charges relating to what could best be described as treason against Russia. Were his FSB handlers suspicious or aware that he might have switched sides? By all appearances, this seems likely. Did he ever really defect? His UK recruiter? It could have been the man in the photo above, Sir John Scarlettwho now heads MI6.
Reports today suggest he was recruited to the Secret Intelligence Service. Lugovoy reportedly claims that Mr Litvinenko tried to recruit him to supply information to MI6. The apparent revelation could provide the key to the 43-year-old's killing. Lugovoy claims Britain’s MI6 was behind the killing. (The Sun, 10.27.2007,http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article397108.ece)
Lugovoy (a millionaire owner of a private security firm, soon expected to run for a seat in the Russian Parliament which will grant him immunity from extradition) has made this assertion almost from the start of this affair, beginning with the charges made against him by Scotland Yard, and underscoring the fact that this has always been a political case.
It seems that SIS/MI6have been very busy these last-few-years. Just ask Paul Wolfowitz and Shaha Ali Riza, the former World Bank President's lover. Why would an unknown British subject like Ali Riza have a Pentagon security clearance? While it's uncertain whether Ali Riza is an operative for a Middle Eastern entity (or entities), it's even money that she's MI6. The issue of citizenship is often the most telling sign. In the case of Litvinenko, he was granted his UK citizenship status just a few weeks before his assassination by elements still essentially unknown. This doesn't make the Home or Foreign Offices look very good. In both the case of Ali Riza and Litvinenko, British citizenship was granted, but what the State got in return is a mystery. A Sun story appears to be heading towards what that was exactly. Surely, we know some of this meant spying for MI6, providing information that only these particular individuals had access to. Lugovoy's assertions of a set-up are now apparently being fleshed-out, and now being 'corroborated' by the recent story in The Daily Mail and The Sun:
It is understood that Sir John Scarlett, now the head of MI6 and once based in Moscow, was involved in recruiting him to the Secret Intelligence Service. The fact that the 43-year-old ex-Russian spy was actually working for Britain when he died could provide the key to his extraordinary killing. (thisislondon.co.uk, 10.27.2007)
We know Litvinenko's story has an air of desperation to it, but what of Ali Riza? A number players within the world's intelligence community would certainly like to know--if they don't already. Remember that most operatives work more than one side, almost as a rule.
Their handlers generally assume this, so what you have is an ocean of double and triple agents running-amok throughout the globe, a criminal class in the service of the State. This is very much like a picture of intelligence between Russia and Britain exactly a century ago.
All this aside, Lugovoy is still claiming that Litvinenko attempted to recruit him into supplying MI6 with information, probably against Putin's FSB, as well as other remaining Russian energy 'oligarchs' (the poisoned 'ex-spy' was working for exiled energy oligarch, Boris Berezovsky) still residing in the country.
Oddly, all of this appears to be headed towards oil interests in the Caucasus region, and who controls the flow and ownership. Litvinenko appears to have been paid reasonably well for his ongoing activities, according to The Daily Mail, and one could imagine there were bonuses for specific-jobs being expedited:
The Daily Mail published an article Saturday saying Litvinenko who died in London in November 2006 "was receiving a retainer of around ? 2,000 [$4,000] a month from the British security services at the time he was murdered." ..."British secret services know the names of those who ordered and committed this crime," he said, adding that Litvinenko had repeatedly told him about his patrons in British secret services. (RIA Novosti, 10.28.2007,http://en.rian.ru/world/20071027/85680757.html)
$4,000 USD doesn't sound like much, until one looks at their own paycheck. Alexander was paid a very good stipend, so he must have been a useful asset. What he may not have known was that that meant being poisoned with polonium-210 just weeks after being granted British citizenship to create an international event meant to weaken Russia's standing in the world community for purposes of obtaining control of the oil fields of Baku, and pipeline-routes throughout the region by British oil interests.
Was Litvinenko a double-agent, still really serving FSB or other multifarious interests? It's even money, and in various currencies and denominations. His widow's comments should be met with suspicion.
"Well, you speak better English than I do."--Byron de la Beckwith, deceased convicted murderer of civil rights activist Medgar Evers, from the HBO/BBC documentary 'Southern Justice: The Murder of Medgar Evers,' 1994 . Beckwith was convicted the same year of the broadcast of the documentary of Evers' murder. He mercifully croaked in 2001.
USAHHHHHHH, Fuck It...--Say what you will, but for a developed nation, we're the red-headed stepchild of the Western world. We've always been a dowdy, poorly-dressed lot of malcontents, but it's getting embarrassing. Compared to the average slob in most other 'modern' nations, we're incredibly fucking stupid and boorish.
Thanks to our lousy miseducational system and corporate owned mainstream media, many Americans have an pathetically low vocabulary and are not very well-spoken. Nonetheless, it's the fault of the individual, and it takes two to tango.
You have to have someone willing to be a poverty beforehand. But just look at interviews with average individuals in the U.K.--the differences are stunning, we sound like the cavemen that many around the world (rightly) think we are. Ignorance is hip, sounding 'smart' is out, and it's well known we're a decidedly anti-intellectual anti-culture. Enter the usage of voice-talent from the U.K. .
If you even watch television casually in the United States, it's inescapable that you'll see and/or hear an actor or actress from Great Britain doing the voice-over for any number of ads. Why? Because of the aforementioned: their voices sound 'authoritative,' while ours...like apes. Watch a young American woman speak: it's like seeing a baboon's ass pulsating from being in heat, which is pretty nauseating, I can tell you. Cockney flower girls in Victorian England were more well-spoken, while most of us are simply ignorant bores (well, not me...).
It's not just the American South either, it's everywhere in this country. This is about rednecks entirely, or even about machismo--it's about willful ignorance and mental laziness. There's no excuse for it in the modern world, none whatsoever. But it's not just about inherent intelligence--it's an attitude that being and sounding smart is somehow threatening. Well, yes, if one is stupid and lazy, and materialistic. Some of us never needed to be corrupted by the outlying society, we already were that way.
As a result of how incredibly stupid we are as a culture, we get the vocal-talents from another English-speaking country because they sound smarter than most of us, so therefore, they must know better (my targets cannot read this article--isn't this thrilling?!!). The most glaring example are these retarded ads on gold investments with the British woman (who could be an Aussie or a New Zealander, but I detect a British accent here).
The ad is definitely aimed at the perpetually frightened elderly reactionary who has some money to be deprived-of by the company paying for the advertisements. Or there's the one with the silly poof in the pond with the laptop, showing us how wireless works. Great. Recently, a LOCAL ad attacking a Republican mayor in Michiana had an English woman's voice-over. Bully for you. Face it: an English schoolgirl sounds more authoritative than the voice of most American politicians.
When will it end? When we (mainly you) aren't so fucking stupid. Probably when all of us are dead and buried. The very little kids will wisely grow-up and reject our ways...at least, that's my hope. As the "greatest generation that ever lived" croaks-off, we're going to see some very rapid change. We already are. It will become even more rapid with the baby boomers--particularly the male demographic in America--since they were a larger generation.
Whoever said mortality was a bad thing was assuredly wrong, it's natural and (thankfully) inevitable. I'm looking forward to my well earned rest, you can take immortality and shove it. Would you want George W. Bush to live forever? Would you want to be around all these pseudo-Christians forever? Right, you're nuts, but I'll welcome oblivion when I'm at its door (Never Mind the Bollocks).
Reading Kenneth D. Ackerman's book, one has to wonder why the "Palmer Raids" weren't called the "Hoover-Caminetti Raids." It's unlikely that there will be a better telling of the Palmer Raids--and by his almost central role in them--the early-years and rise of J. Edgar Hoover within the bureaucracy of the Department of Justice. Few have ever achieved the power that Hoover did at such a tender age (a mere 24 when Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer tapped him to run the new Radical Division in that fateful year of 1919), and Mr. Ackerman's keen eye for important anecdotes, social scope, personal details, and the importance of key-documents serves this book well.
It's more than just important historiography, it's an accessible treatment on our history, and is required reading for those of us who value our liberties and eschew the politics of the "strong man" and frontier justice.
Most of the book covers the Palmer Raids (late-1919-to-late-1920) themselves, but we learn a number of things about J. Edgar Hoover's early-years that appear to have escaped some authors: his mother's stern authoritarianism and emotional coldness, the emphasis on punishment in Hoover's psychology and behavior that emerges early in his youth (Hoover loved attending lurid trials), a possible African-American ancestor, the effects of his father's mental illness on his behavior at home, the demographics of Washington D.C. and his own neighborhood (Hoover's own during the early-part of the 20th century was populated with Blacks and Whites), the racism of the times towards immigrants (especially Russian, thanks to the October revolution in 1917), the working-class, and Blacks. Hoover--and most of his contemporaries in government--held these xenophobic views. They were very common in America at that time.
Like Hitler, Hoover's father was a government clerk, a functionary, and Hoover modeled himself as the ultimate apolitical bureaucrat over time. Ackerman brings the era Hoover grew-up in with a storyteller's skill and a historiographer's discipline. The years covering the Palmer Raids are brought to breathtaking life, and the parallels with our own war on terror are inescapable without any need on the author's part in citing them.
This serves the text well, as it never lapses into the pedantic or the fantastical, as many Hoover biographies tend towards. What we get is what we really know about the Palmer Raids--the attorneys and government bureaucrats who fought the illegal nature of the raids and subsequent detentions, their effects on people and their liberties, Hoover's role in them (a central one), the major events of 1919 that contributed to their creation, and their enduring legacy.
Was the threat as great as people thought at the time? One gets the feeling that some in the federal bureaucracy were still fighting WWI, a period replete with its own abuses of civil liberties and crackdowns under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, as well as the Immigration Act of 1918 that gave the Palmer Raids some of their dubious legal foundation. As with most postwar periods, a deep recession occurred, and labor violence was prevalent. So was fear of the American left and immigrant communities. Ackerman makes a good case that it certainly appeared revolution and chaos were nigh, and notes that the issues are the same now as they were then.
Context is everything. In January of 1919, Seattle was in a general strike that lasted around a week, while in March, the Third International was declaring an international revolution with communists (Bolshevism directed by Lenin) at its vanguard. Then, there were the "May Day" bombings that targeted J.P. Morgan, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Rockefeller, four cabinet members, and a commissioner of immigration. And there was more-to-come. A police strike in Boston, a national coal and steel strike (imagine the effect of 1 million going-on-strike in a crucial industry today), and more bombings throughout the nation, even as late as September of 1920 when the hysteria had already died down.
It's a minor-quibble, but another aspect of the raids (including those of the Lusk committee in New York City) and bombings could have been stimulated by real espionage, some of it by Russian operatives, double-agents, as well as informants and provocateurs working for Great Britain's SIS office. It's a little-known sidebar, and Ackerman does include American Military Intelligence in the picture, so he has some of it covered. Hoover was probably aware of this angle, and had files from Military Intelligence on one of the possible players in the September, 1920 bombing of Wall Street:Kurt Jahnke. Hoover may even have known from existing-files from his friends at Military Intelligence of the possible involvement of Sidney Reilly (and many other players) in wartime profiteering, espionage, and the bombing of munitions dumps at the Black Tom Terminal in New Jersey, 1916. He might have been aware of Reilly's possible connections to some of the bombings of 1919 in the United States. New York City was a hub for international commerce and espionage--frequently the same thing--during the era, and most of the players were double and triple-agents. This is the lot of the informant/provocateur and secret agent. Jahnke also worked for Sidney Reilly. Again, a minor-quibble, and easily a subject for another book. This absence does nothing to impair "Young J. Edgar."
Jahnke is directly-linked to both Black Tom and the Wall Street bombings, as well as Reilly and various spy agencies at that time. The Black Tom bombing is usually ascribed to "German" saboteurs, but the event was also useful as one more action that pushed America into siding with Great Britain in WWI. The seizing of a Sinn Fein activist during the raids also tends towards these possibilities. British intelligence had been working overtime towards getting Americans involved in the Great War. With the war over, and Russia in a revolutionary stasis, British interests were eying the Baku oil fields, and wanted to dominate Russia economically.
They were hardly alone: so did the American State Department and sundry other business interests. One of them was J.P. Morgan. The 1920 bombing of Wall Street came at a propitious moment for Britain--it likely sealed the deportation of Ludwig Martens, then trying to gain recognition for the Soviet regime in America. Major banking and business interests were interested. The Red Scare killed any possibility for recognition for at least a decade. Then there's the war we almost had between Great Britain and Japan during the early-1920s...
In March of 1919, Hoover was made A. Mitchell Palmer's assistant at the Department of Justice, and would shortly head the Bureau of Investigation's Radical Division after June of that year. It's just one of several fateful mistakes made by appointed politicians in our nation's history, and one-of-many that would propel J. Edgar Hoover into a position of unchallenged power and authority for nearly fifty years. Much of this was dumb luck. Even a good number of Hoover's challengers during the legal fight against the raids seemed to underestimate his role, and he did as much as he could over the years to hide it. The truth is, he was practically the architect of the Palmer Raids, and his subsequent career almost plays like a rerun of them, even decades later.
Ackerman asks us an important question as citizens of a democracy: how do we balance public safety and civil liberties in a time of upheaval and unrest? We should be wary of those in public office who feel they know all the answers to these questions in the immediate aftermath of any terrorist attack or bombing. One has to wonder if the raids would have happened at all had a bomber not tripped on his way to Palmer's front-door the night of June 2nd, 1919. Attorney General Palmer wasn't the only person on the list of the terrorists. Nearly all were prominent politicians or businessmen. To most, it appeared that Bolshevik revolution was spreading throughout the globe and onto American shores in the form of immigration.
Today, we don't really know what the threat even constitutes, but the reactions have been not only similar to those during the years 1919-1920, they have gone much further. At the time of this writing, habeas corpus is still in-suspension by the Military Commissions Act of 2006, a piece of legislation that Mr. Ackerman astutely lists in his notes. With the Senate Judiciary hearings into the U.S. Attorney firing scandal (that's now being connected by committee chair Sen. Patrick Leahy to the warrantless wiretapping programs of the Bush administration), we're finding that people of the same age as Hoover circa-1919 are being given unparalleled power at the Department of Justice and other sectors of the federal bureaucracy. We're only beginning to discover what they've done in the name of fighting terrorism, now that our current national hysteria has begun to abate.
Monica Goodling and several other appointees at Justice were being consciously culled from Regents School of Law in-the-aftermath of September 11th, 2001. We should be asking ourselves why. "Are we creating new Hoovers?" asks Kenneth Ackerman. We very well could be. Were it not for legal scholars and attorneys like Felix Frankfurter, Clarence Darrow, as well as men like Secretary of Labor William Wilson, or assistant Sec. of Labor Louis F. Post, the precedents of the Palmer Raids would have stood. Were it not for them--as Mr. Ackerman notes--our very concepts and legal traditions surrounding civil liberties would be as impoverished as they were in 1919. As in Hoover's day, the key to curing unaccountable power will be in finding the incriminating files.
5,000-10,000 human beings were shunted into detention centers in various locations throughout the country without access to legal representation, or even a working-toilet under the Palmer Raids. Hundreds of "radical aliens" were deported from Ellis Island in a horrible inversion of the American dream. Can it happen again? In various-forms under the war on terror, it already has.
J-7 would like to thank Mr. Ackerman and publicist Gene Taft for allowing us the honor of reviewing this very important book. "Young J. Edgar-Hoover, The Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties," is available now from Carroll & Graf, at $28.95. Ignore its message at your own peril.
