The Terrorism Industry

[Octafish]

Way back in 1990, many of us celebrated the end of the Cold War because we thought,
at long last and after 46 years, we would focus the nation's resources -- the Peace Dividend --
on ways of making life better for ALL Americans, from new industries and jobs to improved public education and universal healthcare.



But, no. We got, instead, a never-ending War on Terror.

You know who that benefits? The same class who benefitted from the Cold War -- the Military Industrial Washington-Wall Street Insider Complex.
They're the ones who've seen their net worth skyrocket at the expense of the middle-classes and poor under Reaganomix and everything else "conservative" government has done to kill the New Deal and Great Society.

We were warned -- back in 1990:

Book Review:

The Terrorism Industry

By Jane Hunter
Covert Action Quarterly
#35, Fall, 1990

The "Terrorism" Industry: The Experts and Institutions That Shape Our View of Terror by Edward Herman and Gerry O'Sullivan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990).

EXCERPT...

The terror industry's aim is not statistical or semantic accuracy. Launched in the late 1970s, it was all about fostering a climate; manufacturing a consensus that would permit the West to kill with even greater abandon.

The authors explain how the terrorologists are subsidized by institutions established to promote their own interests, among them: the RAND Corporation, sustained by military contracts; the Center for Strategic and International Studies, funded by corporations and rightwing foundations; the International Security Council, a front for the Unification Church (the Moonies); the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, which is attached to Tel Aviv University, but (as this reviewer learned when it was revealed during a Canadian immigration court hearing) gets consulting contracts from the Israeli government.

These quasi‑academic settings confer a patina of respectability on the terrorologists, who come not from academe but from intelligence agencies, the military, and the fringes of the far Right. The fancy imprimaturs on their publications help to conceal the fact that they are largely buttressed with citations of work by fellow terrorologists ‑which is often fraudulent.

SNIP...

The national media outlets that the terrorologists attack as "liberal" receive them as academics, allowing them to make their outrageous assertions without facing challengers. This access to the corporate media, contend the authors, has enabled the terrorologists, to "validate themselves by echoing one another in an information market which they dominate."

Not only do the terrorologists sell fear, many of them also sell its putative antidotes. Herman and O'Sullivan cite examples of some who run consultancies providing "risk assessment" and others with links to the private "security" firms which specialize in protective services and union busting. Thus, these exemplars of the private sector have a vested interest in "menace inflation."

CONTINUED...

http://covertaction.org//content/view/153/75 /

With their ownership overlapping the MIComplex, it's really no wonder why Corporate McPravda failed to cover that story.

Who knows what the future holds? Perhaps 2010 will mark when the United States of America set course on a new direction.
Going from history, we're going to need a lot more than lots o' luck and megatons of hard work.
We're going to need everybody who gives a damn to stand up, state their piece, and do all they can to bring real change.
That's what it's going to take for a really Happy New Year!

[leftstreet]

1. Yeah but...we can still play the 9/11 Drinking Game during SOTU speeches

which is cool

:beer:

K&R

[Octafish]

3. Skol! Poppy's Inside Track to Power...

Vice President Bush’s Inside Track to Power

Karen Branan
Covert Action Quarterly
#42, Fall 1992

Bush's pale image ‑ as a traditional vice president who attended foreign funerals ‑ served him well. Behind this bland facade, the former head of the CIA, was a hands‑on VP. He actively headed a powerful, little‑known institution which was key in shaping U.S. policy. While others around him were called to testify in the Iran‑Contra scandal, and some were tried and indicted, Bush walked easily into the White House on a pathway of unchallenged denials. "I was not aware of and I oppose any diversion of funds, any ransom payments, or any circumvention of the will of Congress," he said.

"The evidence that was before the Committee," wrote Maine Senators George Mitchell and William Cohen, "gave no indication that the Vice President was aware of the diversion of funds."

Most efforts to link Bush to the Iran‑Contra affair failed because they focused on Bush as adviser to the President ("What did he tell Reagan?"). They ignored this particular vice president's unique and central position within the National Security Council and, in particular, his relationship to Adm. John Poindexter, Lt. Col. Oliver North, and the cabal of special operations officers who carried out the activities that became known as Iran‑Contra. Unlike many of the others, Bush never testified under oath, and therefore remained invulnerable to perjury and cover up charges.

Given Bush's institutional role, that omission, his own denials, and the whitewash investigations, are incredible. Bush was not only one of four statutory members of the National Security Council where foreign policy was formulated; he chaired a little known back channel called the crisis management system.

In November 1984 Robert McFarlane, then National Security Adviser, explained the two‑track system at the NSC. First there was Track 1, called SIG/IG (Senior Interagency/Interagency Group), providing for careful study and thoughtful debate. Then there was Track 2, the crisis management system, strongly resembling an intelligence unit.

Track 2 had two major elements: the Special Situations Group (SSG), chaired by George Bush; and the Crisis Pre‑Planning Group (CPPG), led by the Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. The CPPG provided "to the SSG, recommended security, cover and media plans that will enhance the likelihood of successful execution."

CONTINUED...

http://covertaction.org//content/view/146/75/

Thanks, leftstreet. You've been on your feet a long time...

[Quantess]

6. People who played the 9-11 drinking game during Rudy Giuliani's speeches

were on the floor passed out before he even quit talking.

[Echo In Light]

2. K&R Thanks for posting. For your consideration: Society of Control, by Gilles Deleuze

We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure--prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an "interior," in crisis like all other interiors--scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It's only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies. "Control" is the name Burroughs proposes as a term for the new monster, one that Foucault recognizes as our immediate future. Paul Virilio also is continually analyzing the ultrarapid forms of free-floating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system. There is no need to invoke the extraordinary pharmaceutical productions, the molecular engineering, the genetic manipulations, although these are slated to enter the new process. There is no need to ask which is the toughest regime, for it's within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another. For example, in the crisis of the hospital as environment of enclosure, neighborhood clinics, hospices, and day care could at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.

II. Logic

The different internments of spaces of enclosure through which the individual passes are independent variables: each time one us supposed to start from zero, and although a common language for all these places exists, it is analogical. One the other hand, the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry the language of which is numerical (which doesn't necessarily mean binary). Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.

This is obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that contained its internal forces at the level of equilibrium, the highest possible in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages; but in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas. Of course the factory was already familiar with the system of bonuses, but the corporation works more deeply to impose a modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual metastability that operate through challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions. If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it's because they express the corporate situation with great precision. The factory constituted individuals as a single body to the double advantage of the boss who surveyed each element within the mass and the unions who mobilized a mass resistance; but the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within. The modulating principle of "salary according to merit" has not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation.

In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything--the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation. In The Trial, Kafka, who had already placed himself at the pivotal point between two types of social formation, described the most fearsome of judicial forms. The apparent acquittal of the disciplinary societies (between two incarcerations); and the limitless postponements of the societies of control (in continuous variation) are two very different modes of juridicial life, and if our law is hesitant, itself in crisis, it's because we are leaving one in order to enter the other. The disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates the individual, and the number or administrative numeration that indicates his or her position within a mass. This is because the disciplines never saw any incompatibility between these two, and because at the same time power individualizes and masses together, that is, constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of each member of that body. (Foucault saw the origin of this double charge in the pastoral power of the priest--the flock and each of its animals--but civil power moves in turn and by other means to make itself lay "priest.") In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become "dividuals," and masses, samples, data, markets, or "banks." Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold as numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies. The old monetary mole is the animal of the space of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network. Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports.

Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society--not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them. The old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines--levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses. This technological evolution must be, even more profoundly, a mutation of capitalism, an already well-known or familiar mutation that can be summed up as follows: nineteenth-century capitalism is a capitalism of concentration, for production and for property. It therefore erects a factory as a space of enclosure, the capitalist being the owner of the means of production but also, progressively, the owner of other spaces conceived through analogy (the worker's familial house, the school). As for markets, they are conquered sometimes by specialization, sometimes by colonization, sometimes by lowering the costs of production. But in the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in production, which it often relegates to the Third World, even for the complex forms of textiles, metallurgy, or oil production. It's a capitalism of higher-order production. It no-longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services but what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus is essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the corporation. The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner--state or private power--but coded figures--deformable and transformable--of a single corporation that now has only stockholders. Even art has left the spaces of enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the bank. The conquests of the market are made by grabbing control and no longer by disciplinary training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than by lowering costs, by transformation of the product more than by specialization of production. Corruption thereby gains a new power. Marketing has become the center or the "soul" of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true that capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos.

III. Program

The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's neighborhood, thanks to one's (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position--licit or illicit--and effects a universal modulation.

The socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control, grasped at their inception, would have to be categorical and to describe what is already in the process of substitution for the disciplinary sites of enclosure, whose crisis is everywhere proclaimed. It may be that older methods, borrowed from the former societies of sovereignty, will return to the fore, but with the necessary modifications. What counts is that we are at the beginning of something. In the prison system: the attempt to find penalties of "substitution," at least for petty crimes, and the use of electronic collars that force the convicted person to stay at home during certain hours. For the school system: continuous forms of control, and the effect on the school of perpetual training, the corresponding abandonment of all university research, the introduction of the "corporation" at all levels of schooling. For the hospital system: the new medicine "without doctor or patient" that singles out potential sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to individuation--as they say--but substitutes for the individual or numerical body the code of a "dividual" material to be controlled. In the corporate system: new ways of handling money, profits, and humans that no longer pass through the old factory form. These are very small examples, but ones that will allow for better understanding of what is meant by the crisis of the institutions, which is to say, the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination. One of the most important questions will concern the ineptitude of the unions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle against the disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against the societies of control? Can we already grasp the rough outlines of the coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of marketing? Many young people strangely boast of being "motivated"; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It's up to them to discover what they're being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex that the burrows of a molehill.

L'autre journal, Nr. I, Mai 1990.

[MisterP]

4. "not only do the terrorologists sell fear, many of them also sell its putative antidotes"

witness the Mitrokhin "Archive," Ion Pacepa running straight to the FrontPage and National Review, and Ken Alibek's more fanciful GMed diseases

they also emulate the progressives' use of whistleblowers with frauds like Brigitte Gabriel and Ayaan Hirsi Ali "telling their tales from the inside"

[Hannah Bell]

5. k/r