Ex-CIA Chief James Woolsey handed down gag-order to 9/11 firefighters

This tale begins during and shortly after 9/11/2001, when a writer named Randy Lavello published a story at Prison Planet, Bombs in the Building: World Trade Center 'Conspiracy Theory' is a Conspiracy Fact. Among the many tales in this article, a number of which were picked up in Mike Rivero's web site, what really happened, is a conversation between Lavello and Lieutenant Fireman and former Auxiliary Police Officer, Paul Isaac Jr. It's a head-spinner…

The Woolsey gag order created an Omerta-like mob silence that Firefighters and Police Officers have had to deal with to this day.

“[Lieutenant Fireman and former Auxiliary Police Officer, Paul Isaac Jr.] explained to me [Lavello] that, 'many other firemen know there were bombs in the buildings, but they're afraid for their jobs to admit it because the 'higher-ups' forbid discussion of this fact.” Paul further elaborated that former CIA director Robert Woolsey, as the Fire Department's Anti-terrorism Consultant, is sending a gag order down the ranks. 'There were definitely bombs in those buildings,' he told me.”

Isaac also addressed the FBI gag order in an article by Greg Syzmanski, saying “It's amazing how many people are afraid to talk for fear or retaliation or losing their jobs.” He mentions that the FBI gag order placed on law enforcement and fire department officials prevented them from openly talking about any inside knowledge of 9/11. Syzmansky praised Isaacs in a highly interesting article titled One-Man Investigative Team.

Syzmansky wrote that “When he [Isaacs] worked as an auxiliary fireman specializing in emergency and disaster communications response, Isaac said after 9/11 he began monitoring all emergency units to see if any patterns or information about the perpetrators could be learned.

“Over the last four years he's compiled information and names of civilians and firefighters, whose identities he keeps anonymous for their safety, who all claim to have either witnessed explosions in the towers or have information that a controlled demolition took place.” Isaacs is quoted as saying, “It's just amazing how many people are afraid to talk for fear of retaliation or losing their jobs,” again regarding Woolsey's FBI gag order placed on law enforcement and fire department officials, preventing them from openly talking about any inside knowledge of 9/11.

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The new face of psychiatry

By Beverly K. Eakman, New American

To ensure that psychiatry “permeate every educational activity of national life” and “infiltrate the professional and social activities of [all] people” was a global goal that originated with British Brigadier General Dr. John Rawlings Rees in a 1940 speech to the National Council for Mental Hygiene. He ended on an ominous note: “Though our knowledge be incomplete … I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity.”

Canadian colleague Dr. Brock Chisholm chimed in with sinister comments of his own at the close of the war in 1946, in a speech to the World Federation of Mental Health. He argued for “freedom from morality” and the “eventual eradication of right and wrong.” Such traditional upbringing was making children ill, he insisted. “If the race is to be freed of its crippling burden of good and evil it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility.”

Rees and Chisholm had company — in political, educational, journalistic, marketing, and military circles, most ensconced within interconnected foundations, associations, and “research centers” (foreign and domestic). They became Rees' and Chisholm's enablers. Together, they created Rees' dream: “a controlled psychological environment.”

Today, the Department of Defense has a new name for it: “perception management” (or “PM”), and the psychopharmaceutical industry has hit the jackpot.

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The 64-million-dollar question is: How, given what the World War II generation went through — the sacrifice, patriotism, and ideals like duty and honor — could a relatively small cast of radicals snooker an entire population?

Well, first of all, it wasn't called “perception management” right away. It came in a kinder and gentler package about “changing attitudes.”

The true believers — colleagues of Rees and Chisholm — first seized upon Russian Ivan Pavlov's “classic conditioning.” They followed that up with German psychologist Kurt Lewin's “group dynamics,” Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria's “disorganization of behavior,” and U.S. psychologist B. F. Skinner's deprivation-based “operant conditioning.” U.S. social psychologist Elliot Aronson added “cognitive dissonance.” By the 1990s, Rees' vision of a controlled psychological environment had been raised to the level of an art form.

But the darker side became known as “scientific coercion,” a term coined in 1994 by author Christopher Simpson in his watershed historical masterpiece on psychological warfare (Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare 1945-1960, Oxford University Press). By then, the whole sorry business had morphed into the “engineering of consent” for “populations at home and abroad.” It was institutionalized in the education system as “behavior modification”; in journalistic circles as “molding public opinion”; and in commercial advertising as “psychographics.”

If you “google” the Department of Defense definition, you will find PM characterized as “actions to convey and/or deny selected information …, to influence … emotions, motives, and objective reasoning ... ultimately resulting in foreign behaviors and official actions favorable to the originator's objectives. Perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover and deception, and psychological operations.”

The Wikipedia definition adds the “imposition of falsehoods and deceptions,” seen as important to getting “the other side to believe what one wishes it to believe.”

So, PM functions, in effect, as a euphemism for information warfare.

But what is necessary to survival in wartime may not be so helpful to a peacetime civilian population, especially children.

Tax-exempt, foundation-subsidized bigwigs like G. Stanley Hall, Abraham Flexner, John Gardiner, Theodore Sizer, Ronald Havelock, John Goodlad, Benjamin Bloom, and Ralph Tyler — viewing life's dilemmas through the prism of the World Federation of Mental Health — saw it differently. For openers, they worked to ensure that school curriculum and testing ditched the traditional focus on excellence and academics to concentrate on a subjective socialization (i.e., socialist) agenda that targeted the child's “belief system.”

To illustrate the radical nature of this step, one need only quote from the “father of modern education,” John Dewey. In his acclaimed book School and Society he wrote: “There is no obvious social motive for the acquiring of learning [and] … no clear social gain at success thereat.” Fast-forward to 1981 and to the “father of outcome-based education,” Benjamin Bloom. In All Our Children Learning, Bloom averred that “the purpose of education is to change the thoughts, feelings and actions of students … by [challenging] the student's fixed beliefs.”

You get the picture. By indoctrinating postwar Boomers early on, perception management morphed into a psychological force of such magnitude that best-selling author Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park, etc.), was moved to comment before his recent death: “The greatest challenge facing mankind is … distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda.... In the information age (or … the disinformation age) … we must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real.”

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Joel Achenbach: Gary Smith and the endangerment of detailed, long-form stories

From The vestigial tale :

... "A story curls you back into yourself," he says, "and you need a special time and place and setting and mode for that. If it becomes all one smear with your work life and checking your e-mail, your Facebook, it's lost all its reason for being."

Smith is saying all this by phone from his screened-in back porch in Charleston, S.C. This is where he writes, on a laptop resting on a teak picnic table, with a view of a small back yard with fruit trees -- orange, lemon, loquat. The loquat, he says, has a few pieces of fruit clinging to its lower branches. Yeah, an irrelevant detail, but notice how your brain reflexively inserts other details, like the humidity and the lizard scampering across the back walk and the languid cat on the fence post. Stories are collaborative; the listener paints the backdrop.

Smith is 55 years old, and his work has been heavily anthologized. His heroes know failure as surely as they know triumph. His favorite story, "Damned Yankee," was about a baseball player who might have been the next Yogi Berra but for all the guilt he felt from having accidentally thrown a javelin through his uncle's head. (Now that's a story!)

There's endless talk in the news media about the next killer app. Maybe Twitter really will change the world. Maybe the next big thing will be just an algorithm, like Google's citation-ranking equation. But Smith is betting that there will still be a market, somehow, for what he does. Narrative isn't merely a technique for communicating; it's how we make sense of the world. The storytellers know this.

They know that the story is the original killer app.


Media makeover

To understand the magic of narrative, you have to ponder the rise in Japan of "mobile phone novels." These are novels written on a cellphone keypad. The reader uploads the novel one cellphone screen at a time. The Japanese, always technophiles, find themselves reading their phones the way Westerners used to read the daily newspaper.

There are two ways to look at this situation: One is to make the electronic gadget the star of a heroic tale called The Changing Media. New gadgets can do anything! They can not only put you in touch with friends, they can store your photo album, tell you your longitude and latitude, and write fabulous novels. But another way of describing the situation is to say that you can't keep a good story down. The story, not the gadget, is what's irrepressible. So powerful is the story as a way of communicating that it will even sprout in a cellphone.

Nathan Myhrvold, the former Microsoft executive who now runs an investment fund for innovative technologies, says by e-mail: "iPhones and Blackberries give us new formats -- like Twitter -- which is a type of story telling. Somebody will write a novel told as text messages."

Been done. It was in Finland, a novel called "The Last Messages," complete with typos.

There's a furious adapt-or-die mentality among media organizations. Researchers say we're becoming a "society of scanners." They say the Internet is a "link medium." We find ourselves abandoning stories in mid-sentence. Newspaper executives have embraced a new format known as "charticles," which are, in the words of the American Journalism Review, "combinations of text, images and graphics that take the place of a full article." The Orlando Sentinel, for example, now has a front page crammed with graphics, columnist head-shots, bulletins, story keys, headlines, bumpers, tags, indexes, an advertisement -- a cartoon! -- and lots of pleas to check the Web site. ...

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Noam Chomsky: No change in US 'Mafia principle'

By Mamoon Alabbasi, Middle East Online

As civilised people across the world breathed a sigh of relief to see the back of former US president George W. Bush, top American intellectual Noam Chomsky warned against assuming or expecting significant changes in the basis of Washington's foreign policy under President Barack Obama.

During two lectures organised by the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, Chomsky cited numerous examples of the driving doctrines behind US foreign policy since the end of World War II.

"As Obama came into office, Condoleezza Rice predicted that he would follow the policies of Bush's second term, and that is pretty much what happened, apart from a different rhetorical style," said

"But it is wise to attend to deeds, not rhetoric. Deeds commonly tell a different story," he added.

"There is basically no significant change in the fundamental traditional conception that we if can control Middle East energy resources, then we can control the world," explained Chomsky.

Chomsky said that a leading doctrine of US foreign policy during the period of its global dominance is what he termed as "the Mafia principle."

"The Godfather does not tolerate 'successful defiance'. It is too dangerous. It must therefore be stamped out so that others understand that disobedience is not an option," said Chomsky.

The US sees "successful defiance" of Washington as a "virus" that will "spread contagion," he explained.

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Whatever happened to the 100th monkey phenomenon?

From The Hundredth Monkey Revisited by Elaine Myers:

"...Instead of an example of the spontaneous transmission of ideas, I think the story of the Japanese monkeys is a good example of the propagation of a paradigm shift, as in Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The truly innovative points of view tend to come from those on the edge between youth and adulthood. The older generation continues to cling to the world view they grew up with. The new idea does not become universal until the older generation withdraws from power, and a younger generation matures within the new point of view.

It is also an example of the way that simple innovations can lead to extensive cultural change. By using the water in connection with their food, the Koshima monkeys began to exploit the sea as a resource in their environment. Sweet potato washing led to wheat washing, and then to bathing behavior and swimming, and the utilization of sea plants and animals for food. "Therefore, provisioned monkeys suffered changes in their attitude and value system and were given foundations on which pre-cultural phenomena developed." (M Kawai, Primates, Vol 6, #1, 1965).

What does this say about morphogenetic fields, and the collective unconscious? Not very much, but the "ideological breakthrough" idea is not what Sheldrake's theory of morphogenetic fields would predict anyway. That theory would recognize that the behavior of the older monkeys (not washing) also is a well-established pattern. There may well be a "critical mass" required to shift a new behavior from being a fragile personal idiosyncrasy to being a well-established alternative, but creating a new alternative does not automatically displace older alternatives. It just provides more choices. It is possible that the washing alternative established by the monkeys on Koshima Island did create a morphogenetic field that made it easier for monkeys on other islands to "discover" the same technique, but the actual research neither supports nor denies that idea. It remains for other cultural experiments and experiences to illuminate this question.

What the research does suggest, however, is that holding positive ideas (as important a step as this is) is not sufficient by itself to change the world. We still need direct communication between individuals, we need to translate our ideas into action, and we need to recognize the freedom of choice of those who choose alternatives different from our own..."

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