Rigorous Intuition

What You Don't Know, Won't Hurt Them

Trine Day LLC

Trigger Mechanisms

That's the word, don't you know? From the guys that's running the show.

– Jarvis Cocker

Flight of Capital

June 17, 2006

They say I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy. She inherited a million bucks and when she died it came to me. I can't help it if I'm lucky.

— Bob Dylan

At least among those with a mind for such things, it's fairly well remembered that on September 10, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld made the shocking announcement that the Pentagon "couldn't track" $2.3 trillion of its transactions. Internet poster "Iroquois" observes, "What's interesting to me is that he made his press release on a Monday. In DC, I always see bad news given on a Friday, usually late in the afternoon on Friday. The exception, of course, would be when someone happens to know that there is a far bigger story coming out."

And we know that Flight 77, allegedly piloted by an incompetent, made an aerobatic, spiraling descent over Washington, effecting a 270-degree turn to strike the Pentagon from a western approach at ground level. The side struck was the only one with an exterior wall hardened against attack, and was relatively empty while renovation continued.

Relatively. The unfortunate construction workers perished outside, but who were the expendables within?

From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December 20, 2001:

"One Army office in the Pentagon lost 34 of its 65 employees in the attack. Most of those killed in the office, called Resource Services Washington, were civilian accountants, bookkeepers and budget analysts. They were at their desks when American Airlines Flight 77 struck." [emphasis added]

The Arlington County After-Action Report noted that the "impact area included both the Navy operations center and the office complex of the National Guard and Army Reserve. It was also the end of the fiscal year and important budget information was in the damaged area." And Insight magazine editorialized that "the Department of the Army, headed by former Enron executive Thomas White, had an excuse [for not making a full accounting]. In a shocking appeal to sentiment it says it didn't publish a "stand-alone" financial statement for 2001 because of "the loss of financial-management personnel sustained during the Sept. 11 terrorist attack."

High Crimes of State often come down to the movement of capital, and so the high criminals generally share the gray and black economics of common felons. Money is money; it's the magnitude of the heist that's different, and the means to effect and cover-up the crime. And part of the cover-up of the Pentagon heist has been the no-plane shell game, played smartly by Rumsfeld himself who "misspoke" that a "missile" had struck the Pentagon the same week Thierry Meyssan's original no-plane Web site was launched.

It's such disinformation that has drilled irrelevance and folly into a once potentially dangerous and angry army of authentic skeptics.

The Monolith Monsters

February 7, 2007

Let's be perfectly clear boys and girls:?

C*nts are still running the world.

— Jarvis Cocker

It's always fascinating, and important as well, when conspirators become "conspiracy theorists." Just not always for the same reason.

There are the career insiders who, in timely fashion, step up as "whistleblowers" to entrain the American Mind by mischief. Philip Corso, for instance. In 1997, only one year before his death from a heart attack at 83, the retired Lieutenant Colonel released The Day After Roswell. Corso claimed to have both viewed the remains of Roswell aliens and to have shepherded the reverse engineering of UFO crash artifacts by the private sector, which became products such as fiber optics and integrated circuit chips.

Corso had no evidence for this, and the names he named were all dead. All he had was his word, which he underscored a month before he died with a sworn oath, as well as his reputation and distinguished service. In his review of The Day After Roswell, Michael Lindemann drew attention to this:

What to make of Colonel Philip Corso and his book? If he were not a highly decorated, highly credible military officer, he would likely be passed off by most people as a blatant hoaxer. But why would this particular man tell such very tall tales at the end of his life, if the tales are simply untrue? That question will likely vex more than a few readers of "The Day After Roswell," a book that will probably push the Roswell controversy to new heights in this Roswell-happy year of 1997.

I should note that Roswell, as I regard it, is the paramount disinformation story of American UFOlogy. It has sent generations down the wrong path, chasing the presumption of "nuts and bolts" spacecraft and their ET occupants, and served to both suppress the true phenomenon's psi and occult components and to mask the U.S. military's deep black tech. Roswell is also responsible for the focus on passive "disclosure" — tell us the truth! — rather than on a citizens' investigation to learn the truth for themselves.

So he's not, as Lindemann noted, a blatant hoaxer, and I can't imagine a persuasive personal reason to fabricate such a fabulist narrative so close to his deaath. Still, I think it should be evident even to those who deny the existence of a genuine UFO phenomenon, that it means something that a man of Corso's stature signed off on The Day After Roswell. I suspect that the reason was service in furtherance of disinformation.

It's astonishing the rubbish we can swallow when we credulously open our mouths and say, "Feed me." Paul Hellyer became a brief blip on the media's radar a while back, when the former — as in 40-years-prior — Canadian Defense Minister went public with his late-life advocacy for UFO "disclosure." He was hailed as an "insider" and instantly graduated to keynote speaker at "Exopolitics" conferences. Unfortunately, Hellyer's insider knowledge didn't amount to much: "I finally concluded, especially after reading a book called The Day After Roswell written by Colonel Philip Corso, that unidentified flying objects are, in fact real," he told MSNBC. (Hellyer supports his case for the Corso book by adding that he heard, second hand, that an unnamed U.S. Air Force General said "Every word of it is true, and more." An unnamed General would say that.)

Now let's consider the conspirator-cum-conspiracy theorist Zbigniew Brzezinski. Last week, while excoriating Bush's Iraq policy before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he warned of "a plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran." He sees the scenario unfolding with:

Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks, followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure, then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran, culminating in a "defensive" [his own quotation marks] U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

On leaving the hearing, Brzezinski was pointedly asked by reporter Barry Grey whether he was "suggesting that the source of a possible provocation might be the U.S. government itself." He responded that he had "no idea. As I said, these things can never be predicted. It can be spontaneous." Grey followed up, "Are you suggesting there is a possibility it could originate within the U.S. government itself?" To which Brzezinski replied, "I'm saying the whole situation can get out of hand and all sorts of calculations can produce a circumstance that would be very difficult to trace."

This is the same Brzezinski, of course, who when asked about rhetorically answered, of his early sponsorship of Islamic radicals as U.S. proxies, "What was more important in the world view of history? The possible creation of an armed, radical Islamic movement, or the fall of the Soviet Empire? A few fired-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?" (And note, Brzezinski's policy of instigation was launched in Afghanistan against it's pro-Soviet government in order to goad the USSR into its own bloody quagmire.) His book The Grand Chessboard (published, I realize with a slight frisson of synchronicity, the same year as Corso's) was cited early in the days following 9/11 as America's road-map of geopolitical ambition in the 21st Century. He knows better than most the reach of the hidden hand. Now, he's dropping broad hints that the U.S. may manufacture a provocation in Iraq, blame it upon Iran and catastrophically broaden the war. So what do we do when they begin to sound like us?

On the one hand we should always be cautious about blithely accepting the word of deep-power embeds, but I also think it helps our understanding along if we admit that their world is neither static nor monolithic. It may appear from a distance that they're all in it together — and at our distance the differences between factions of the global elite may be too nuanced and rarefied to hold much meaning for us — but I believe there's a dynamism among conspirators that often seems lost on their theorists, some of whom like to project a virtual hive-mind upon the powerful. Rather than an undifferentiated block of them, I imagine an inter-penetrating Venn diagram of rival interests, means and analyses, and while Brzezinski is certainly in the thick of it, that doesn't mean his opposition to the White House's adventurism is a sham intended only for public consumption. Though his reasons are certainly not the same as mine. (Brzezinski, interested in the efficient projection of American power, can foresee its ruin by the Cheney/Bush model, but he seems to regard it as the accident of bad policy rather than an intentional controlled collapse.)

One further example of insider "tinfoil:"

On the evening of November 23, 1963, a man named Garrett Underhill showed up, anxious and unexpected, at the New York City residence of his friends Robert and Charlene Fitzsimmons. Underhill had driven up from Washington DC, where he worked as a military and intelligence expert for Fortune magazine. He was also a longtime CIA asset with particular expertise and interest in both the covert arms trade and Cuba.

When he arrived at the Fitzsimmons' home it was late, and Robert was already asleep. Charlene was preparing for their trip to Europe, and Underhill unburdened himself while she packed.

Larry Hancock, in Someone Would Have Talked:

Underhill's concern was that he had become aware of a "clique" within the CIA — a clique dealing with weapons and gun running and making money. These individuals had Far Eastern connections, narcotics was mentioned, supposedly the clique was manipulating political intrigues to serve their own ends. Underhill believed that these individuals had been involved with JFK's murder; he felt that JFK had become aware of their dealings and was about to move against them in some fashion. He also believed that members of the clique knew that Underhill was aware of their dealings and that his own life could well be in jeopardy. Underhill had fled Washington in fear of his life, avoiding his normal haunts at the Harvard Club in DC to seek refuge with his friends.?

Robert Fitzsimmons later told Jim Garrison that they couldn't take Underhill seriously because "we couldn't believe that the CIA could contain a corrupt element every bit as ruthless, and much more efficient, than the Mafia." Their friend couldn't tell Garrison anything. In May 1964 the body of the right-handed Underhill was found in his unlocked apartment, shot behind his left ear. Death was ruled a suicide.

It must have sounded strange to early-Sixties ears to hear such things said of the CIA. Particularly those odd and seemingly incongruous mentions of narcotics and "Far Eastern Connections" (like Yale's old "China hands"?) Yet today, more than 40 years after his murder, and 15 since Danny Casolaro's, it makes such awful sense that we can say that despite his intelligence pedigree, at least Garrett Underhill was speaking the truth.

Outside the Box

March 14, 2007

Can you please crawl out your window Use your arms and legs it won't ruin you

— Bob Dylan

Though it's hard to think outside the box, once you do, you may need to think outside that box as well.

The box of Gerry Irwin

On February 28, 1959, Private First Class Gerry Irwin was en route from Nampa, Idaho back to Fort Bliss, Texas, where he served as a Nike missile technician. Late that evening, as he was turning southeast on Route 14 around Cedar City, Utah, the sky was illuminated by a brilliant object crossing the sky in front of him. He pulled to the side of the road, got out of his car and watched it disappear behind a nearby ridge. Irwin thought he had witnessed an aircraft in trouble. Writing "Stop" on the side of his car with shoe polish he left a note attached to the steering wheel: "Have gone to investigate possible plane crash. Please call law enforcement officers."

On March 2, Irwin awoke in Cedar City Hospital, with no idea of what had happened to him, or how he had gotten there. He had been unconscious since shortly after he was found, only an hour and a half after leaving his car, occasionally mumbling about a "jacket on the bush." His temperature and respiration were normal; it was simply as though Irwin were asleep and couldn't be woken. At last when he did wake up, he felt fine; though his first words upon sitting up in bed were, "Were there any survivors?"

Irwin was informed he had been found alone, jacketless, and there was no sign of a crash. He was diagnosed with "hysteria" and flown to Fort Bliss, where he was placed under medical observation for four days, after which he returned to active duty, but with his security clearance revoked. Several days later he fainted, though quickly recovered, and did so again a few days later in El Paso, and was taken to hospital. Early the next morning he woke up and again said, "Were there any survivors?" He could not believe it was March 16; he thought it was still February 28.

Once more he returned to base, this time in psychiatric care for a month. He was discharged from care April 17, with test results showing "normal," but the next day he gave in to an uncontrollable impulse to depart the base without leave, and caught a bus in El Paso for Cedar City, from where he walked to the spot of his sighting, left the road and went straight to a branch upon which his jacket still hung. And something was on his jacket. A pencil was stuck in a buttonhole, and a piece of paper was wound tightly around it. Irwin took the paper and burned it, and then seemingly snapped out of his entrancement. He had difficulty finding the road again, and not knowing what he was doing there, turned himself in to the local sheriff, who told him the story of his earlier episode.

Back at Fort Bliss he again underwent psychiatric examination, with identical results. Upon being released from camp hospital, he failed to report for duty August 1. He hasn't been heard of since. Irwin's story has been called "one of the strangest, most baffling cases in UFO folklore," but I disagree. Not only have I read stranger, I don't think this is even a UFO story.

Every UFOlogical account I've read of Irwin's case treats the military backstory to it as incidental. But Irwin was a missile technician on the base which, post-war and Cold War, was a hub for Operation Paperclip scientists, including Werner Von Braun, who integrated Nazi innovations into U.S. military technologies. There's a class picture of the Fort Bliss's German rocket team, which initially was restricted to base without military escort, and we know, as well as rocketry, the Nazi scientists also brought to American proving grounds their advanced work in mind control.

Irwin "snapped out of it" after burning the paper, as though releasing himself from a hypnotic suggestion that had driven him to return to Cedar City (where, for what it's worth, an alleged mind control survivor "Mauri" claims her abuse by a privileged cult of Satanic Nazis began). The only tenuous UFO connection is Irwin's claim to have seen a bright object traversing the sky, though it looked to him no stranger than an aircraft in trouble. And given the tricks his mind was playing, or the tricks someone was playing on his mind, perhaps we shouldn't assume there was anything to see at all. There were no other witnesses, and no evidence of a landing.

Was Irwin the unwitting subject of an experiment in mind control? Could be. Even though I'm persuaded of a UFOlogical reality that transcends hoaxes and cover stories, I think the confluence of military research and psychological trauma in the Irwin case are far more suggestive of a fairly sinister and secretive human agency. UFO researchers are probably guilty of confirmation bias by counting this story as legitimately one of theirs, and it may be hard to let it go, but I think the Irwin episode more likely belongs to a different, though often parallel, narrative.