Messages

This immediately reminded me of the description of projection in Franz Bardon's Hermetic system, where so much of one's consciousness is drawn out of body that it can lead to danger if the intention to keep the lungs breathing and the heart pumping is not imprinted on it.  

I'm not sure if Monroe's experience is exactly similar, but here's an article from Rawn Clark's site which goes into the subject.

http://www.abardoncompanion.com/Warning.html

Also here, in the section on astral training.

http://www.abardoncompanion.com/IIH-Step9.html

Here's a petition I found.  Sort of funny in a way, but I couldn't help but care.  

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/292110203

What is the point of transferring water from one cup to another when both cups are in a sink and the tap water is flowing?

Because many people and entities do not know how to access that tap, or simply do not care to learn.

Hmm.  There's something a little similar to this in various types of Bardo practice in Buddhism.  In it, one is supposed to recognize the clear light of awareness when they die, and thus pass over into enlightenment.  However, it requires quite a bit of preparation during the dying period, and generally a high level of spiritual attainment.  Just looking for a different color of light wouldn't work.  I don't know if the clear light of awareness is the same as the golden light, but I suppose the idea could be a distant echo.

If you guys like Yu Yu Hakusho, you should also check out the Bleach manga.  The series is similar, in it the main character becomes a soul reaper who saves lost souls and fights the ones who turn into demons.  The manga can be downloaded online.

It would be interesting if there was some sort gradual psychic shift in the world which begins around 2012.  Even if the collective psychic ability of everyone on the planet only rose by 2%, that could be enough to make sweeping changes in society.

If it does happen, I doubt that it will be anything like what some have described though.  Don't expect some sort of final salvation, or the aliens to save us for all time and the whole world to move into the astral plane.  And don't get your hopes up.  If society or the world did begin to change, it could in the beginning be puncuated by a very violent period of upheaval, which wouldn't be particularily fun.

One has to wonder just how the Bush administration is going to keep scrounging up the money to perpetuate their delusional war on terror.  If they try attacking Iran and Syria, the economy could end up getting worse than it already is.  If things continue this way for much longer, America will go the way of all other superpowers that eventually let their influence go to their head.

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts03012005.html

I hate to be a downer here, but while I like many of the things on Victor Zammit's website, some of his personal commentary just makes me cringe.

PRINCE CHARLES/CAMILLA MARRIAGE: a staggering 70% of the British people are against this marriage! True, no woman on earth will ever be in a position to take Princess Diana's place ("There were three of us in our marriage – too crowded.") – perhaps the most popular Princess ever. Two reasons why I support the marriage: there is a heart to heart connection (they've been together emotionally for the last 34 years) and secondly, Prince Charles genuinely supports the religion of Spiritualism – survival and acceptance of contacting those who crossed over.

Umm, what exactly does the prince's support of spiritualism have do with anything?  Then there are other times when he uses extremely long descriptions for skeptics such as "negatively entrenched materialist defeatist dream destroying debunking cynics of ignorance" that, IMO, take away from the professional presentation of the site.

And as much as I like seeing a counter million dollar challenge shoved in the face of the fundamentalist skeptics, to me its no much different than Randi's challange in that it comes across as a publicity stunt.

Don't get me wrong, he has alot of good information on scientists who support the paranormal and his afterlife book is excellent, but some of the personal commentary IMO could really use some tweaking.

Uh, all you'd really need to do is have someone moniter his health or take blood samples during the time.  It wouldn't be that hard.

And, while I agree about how any bum could come in and make such a claim, really, if he can't get together the resources to test all those who apply then maybe he and his fans need to quit shoving this million dollar publicity stunt test in people's faces.

Personally, this short article about sums up my opinion of his test and its scientific "validity".

http://www.skepticalinvestigations.org/controversies/Auerbach_Randi.htm

I might actually title this essay "Why I no longer care about Randi's One Million Dollar Challenge," but honestly "So What!" sums up my feelings these days.

Over the last several years, I've been somewhat outspoken about the specific details of the rules of Randi's challenge. But recently, when being harassed by yet another disbelieving type about the test, some kind of light - an epiphany of sorts - went on in my head. The individual made a statement, with a question, that I often hear in variations from self-described Skeptics (actually disbelievers):
"The Amazing Randi offers one million dollars for anyone who can demonstrate something paranormal. If psychic abilities are real, why has no one won the prize?"

Rather than responding as I have in the past with a discourse as to why I don't believe anyone will win that money, I spontaneously switched gears. [The following is an approximation of the conversation]

"What would that prove?" I asked.

"Huh?" said the Skeptic.

"Why is Randi offering the money?" I asked.

"For anyone who can prove something paranormal," said the Skeptic.

"If someone did win the million, what would that actually prove?" I asked.

"Huh?" said the Skeptic.

"I mean, if a psychic won the million dollars, other than the psychic walking away one million dollars richer, what would that prove to the skeptical community or to Science?" I asked.

"That someone could do something psychic," said the Skeptic with some confusion in his voice.

"Would it? If someone won Randi's million dollars, would YOU accept that psychic abilities are real? Or even just possible?" I asked.

"Huh?" said the Skeptic.

"Would mainstream Science accept the probability of psi, if not the reality, if some psychic won Randi's million?" I asked.

"Uh-uh-huh?" said the Skeptic.

"Would the organized Skeptics accept that psi is real, or would they be more likely to believe that Randi was simply fooled, scammed out of his million? Would you?" I asked.

I received a blank stare from the Skeptic, then saw confusion appearing on his face.
I continued to push at him. "The fact is that people who do not accept the laboratory and other evidence for psi that already exists are unlikely to change their minds or their beliefs simply because someone beats Randi's challenge and wins Randi's money. In the name of Science, many keep raising the issue of parsimony, of Occam's Razor where psi is concerned. In this case, wouldn't the simpler explanation as far as the Skeptics are concerned be that Randi was scammed out of the money? In the name of Science, many raise the issue of repeatability. If someone beat Randi's Challenge once, how does this meet the criteria of repeatability? What does this prove?"

The Skeptic was silent, confusion and frustration (and a little anger) continuing on his face.

I finished with "If you can honestly tell me - I mean look me in the eye and tell me honestly - that you would be open to psi's existence if a psychic won Randi's money, I'll give you 20 dollars right here and now. It's not a million, but to be honest, your opinion isn't worth that much to me."

He walked away (okay, he stormed off).

I've since used this argument on a few others, whenever Randi's Challenge is raised like a weapon against the field of Parapsychology, and against the existence (real or just potential) of psi.

To recap: If someone wins Randi's million, he/she will be one million dollars richer. However, as far as Science and the Skeptics are concerned, the simpler answer to this conundrum is that Randi (or his chosen panel of judges) was fooled.

In other words, So What if someone wins the money. It won't change the prevailing attitudes towards parapsychology, or the prevailing beliefs of most who waiver to the disbelieving side of the center where psi is concerned.

As this is the case (prove me wrong, somebody - please!), we waste our time even giving Randi's Challenge the time of day.

It's not a benchmark for Science, or even the Skeptics. Why should we care?

So What!

Loyd Auerback

Media Skeptics... James Randi
The Randi Prize
Current Controversies page

[American Gothic:Self-Portrait with Shackles for the Year 2005 ......... by Tom Engelhardt January 06, 2005 TomDispatch Printer Friendly VersionEMail Article to a Friend Here we are, because time has some of the qualities of a tsunami, deposited in 2005, whether we like it or not. As the year changed, nature trumped the Bush administration in an appropriately, if horrifyingly Biblical way, with a preemptive strike against shorelines jammed with rich tourists and poor peasants alike. And even in the midst of the collective horror, much of what the Bush administration is, much of whom we now are becoming, showed through unbecomingly. Only one small spot in the vast Indian Ocean basin "seems to have received full advanced warning of the waves to come -- the ostensibly British island of Diego Garcia, which is actually a sizeable U.S. military base, a stationary "aircraft carrier" for the war in Iraq. It also houses "Camp Justice," one of the secret little hideaway resorts the administration has set up, or contracted out for, on prime global real estate to hold "high value" prisoners in the war on terror. The camp, named by someone who must have had a yen for the Orwellian, is part of an offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice set up by the Bush administration -- two interlinked prison systems, in fact; one run by the Pentagon and the other by the CIA, both meant to keep prisoners and practices far from the prying eyes of the American public and its court system; both, as it now turns out, anchored in that jewel-in-the-crown, Guantanamo (or Gitmo to devotees) -- a grim prison camp set up on territory in Cuba that is close at hand, U.S.-controlled, and yet -- or so Bush officials hoped until the Supreme Court ruled otherwise last year -- beyond the reach of our courts. On military bases like Diego Garcia and in special military- or CIA-controlled prisons like Guantanamo, the "war on terrorism" was to be carried to its informational climax by whatever methods American intelligence officials felt might "break" whatever prisoners we had. Whether in Guantanamo, at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, on Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, on U.S. Navy ships at sea, or outsourced to the friendly jails of allied nations whose interrogators practice torture, this varied and ever developing mini-gulag was never meant to be a system of criminal imprisonment -- hence the lack of charges, no less trials of any sort, anywhere in the imperium. It was to be an eternal holding operation for "World War IV," the war after the Cold War and expected by neocon devotees to last at least as long. Now, according to the latest report from Dana Priest of the Washington Post (1/2/05), the administration is considering exactly how to turn forever into a series of post-penal establishments capable of coping with the realities of life imprisonment beyond all charges and to the end of time. Devil's Island, USA There's something, I suppose, that just hates a secret -- and so, as the year of Abu Ghraib ended, ever more of America's secret world of torture (generally called "abuse" in our press) has been tumbling out of the darkness and into the news -- thanks largely to leaks from anonymous but obviously angry sources inside the military and the intelligence "community." For instance, in December we learned from Dana Priest and Scott Higham of the Washington Post (12/17/04), which has been doing the best of this reporting in the mainstream, that deep in the heart of our Guantanamo prison camp was a super-secret CIA wing built in the last year for high-value prisoners previously being passed from place to place globally, "a detention facility for valuable al Qaeda captives that has never been mentioned in public." Consider it mentioned. And how were they being passed around the CIA's planetary holding areas? Well, as the year ended, Priest revealed (12/27) that the CIA had its own, possibly one-jet air arm for shuttling these peripatetic prisoners around the planet -- "a Gulfstream V turbojet, the sort favored by CEOs and celebrities [that]... since 2001... has been seen at military airports from Pakistan to Indonesia to Jordan, sometimes being boarded by hooded and handcuffed passengers." It's registered to a dummy corporation officered and directed by dummy humans and it has "permission to use U.S. military airfields worldwide." A list of where it's been spotted offers a suggestive, though hardly complete, little map of our shadowy system of secret imprisonment: "Since October 2001 the plane has landed in Islamabad; Karachi; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Dubai; Tashkent, Uzbekistan; Baghdad; Kuwait City; Baku, Azerbaijan; and Rabat, Morocco. It has stopped frequently at Dulles International Airport, at Jordan's military airport in Amman and at airports in Frankfurt, Germany; Glasgow, Scotland, and Larnaca, Cyprus." Egypt and Thailand, for example, are missing from the list, although it's believed that prisoners have been held by the CIA in the jails of both countries as part of the Agency's program of "extraordinary rendition" -- a tortured euphemism that stands in for a policy going back deep into the Clinton years but that really hit its stride after 9/11 in which we contract out the torture of our prisoners to countries previously better known for such practices. Meanwhile, by year's end, the American Civil Liberties Union, wielding the Freedom of Information Act (which the Bush administration has tried hard to limit), had pried loose a series of stunning emails and memorandums from disturbed and angry FBI agents who had observed interrogation sessions at Guantanamo. They were writing their bosses back on the mainland, complaining of the nature of the "humane" methods military interrogators were using at Guantanamo, not to speak of the fact that some of those military or intelligence interrogators were impersonating FBI agents. (By the way, isn't it curious that it was the ACLU and not the media that did the necessary work to spring these documents?) When it came to Guantanamo, what we had previously were largely the claims of former prisoners, most of which turned out to be all too accurate but were more easily dismissible; now the FBI has nailed the government on what's been happening, despite endless denials, in our own Devil's Island. These documents are a clear indication that torture, mistreatment, and abuse in American-controlled prisons, holding areas, military camps, and interrogation cells add up to stunning set of contraventions of the Geneva Conventions ("To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons: (a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; (b) taking of hostages; (c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment..."); that, in a phrase used for the first time recently in a recent headline on a Washington Post editorial, "war crimes" are being committed routinely out there in the imperium. Let's recall for a moment what our President had to say at a news conference about such accusation of torture last June: "Look, I'm going to say it one more time. Maybe I can be more clear. The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you. We're a nation of law. We adhere to laws. We have laws on the books. You might look at these laws. And that might provide comfort for you. And those were the instructions from me to the government." "A nation of law" and that should comfort us. The United States, of course, signed onto the Geneva Conventions and, as a signatory, is fully bound by them because, according to Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution, "[A]ll Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land." It doesn't get any higher, does it? And that remains true no matter how many times our attorney-general designee and former overseer of a series of tortured legal documents meant to give the administration the ability to torture more or less at will, refers to the Conventions as "quaint" documents. Throw in a slew of other recent torture revelations, including a claim by a British prisoner in Guantanamo, for instance, that "the 'strappado,' a technique common in Latin American dictatorships in which a prisoner is left suspended from a bar with handcuffs until they cut deeply into his wrists," was used on him, and you end up with a Grand Guignol menu of interrogation techniques. These, in turn, add up to something like a self-portrait for the rest of the world of Bush administration America in 2005. A partial list of methods of torture recently reported (or reported yet again) would include: detainees chained hand and foot to the floor in a fetal position for up to 24 hours without food or water and left to lie in their own fecal matter; detainees beaten and kicked while hooded; paraded naked around a courtyard while photos were being snapped; left in extreme hot or cold temperatures for extended periods; wrapped in an Israeli flag while loud rap music played and strobe lights flashed; or possibly even having fingernails torn out; placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees' ear openings; sleep deprivation; partial strangulation; death threats during interrogation; the use of dogs to force frightened prisoners to urinate; the holding of wires from an electric transformer to a detainee's shoulders, so that the man "danced as he was shocked"; mock drowning or "waterboarding"; mock executions of Iraqi juveniles; severely burning a detainee's hands by covering them in alcohol and igniting them; holding a pistol to the back of a detainee's head while another Marine takes a picture; fake (and real) acts of sexual assault and sodomy; being hit with rifle butts; suffering electric shocks and immersion in cold water; being beaten to death. These and other crimes against very specific humanity have taken place from Guantanamo to Iraq, from Afghanistan to the CIA's secret prisons around the world. Once you take certain kinds of restraints away, once you open up certain possibilities, these tend to be transformed into acts at a staggering speed and then to multiply like so many computer viruses. Offshore, torture as a way of life spreads, it seems, with a startling rapidity. It begins with a sense of impunity at the top and soon infects the most distant nooks and crannies, the farthest outposts, fire bases and holding cells of distant lands like Afghanistan. It moves like quicksilver all the way down to those "bad apples" manning the night shift and taking digital photos for future screen-savers in the Abu Ghraibs of our world. It has already become an American way of life and, having been initiated at home, it will certainly return to the Homeland. Take as just one tiny example of how widespread and commonplace such practices may be: During the recent assault on Falluja, American troops came upon Mohammad al-Jundi, the Syrian driver of two kidnapped French journalists (since released elsewhere). This was presented in our news as a tiny act of liberation of a prisoner held by terrorists. So what do you imagine was the first act of this former driver, when freed? According to Agence France-Presse, he's now suing his American liberators for torture and ill-treatment. His French lawyer Jacques Verges "said that after being found by American troops, al-Jundi was taken in handcuffs to a military base where he was beaten and kicked. Verges said al-Jundi claimed to have been thrice threatened with mock executions and tortured with electric shocks." Ho-hum. Life on the frontier. Militarism as Religion The question, of course, is responsibility. Where exactly does it rest? Among the more striking of the ACLU revelations (and the least dealt with in our press) was a single FBI e-mail sent from Guantanamo to senior FBI officials in the States which "makes 11 references to an Executive Order 'signed by President Bush' that authorized these abusive interrogation methods... that permitted military interrogators in Iraq to place detainees in painful stress positions, impose sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, intimidate them with military dogs and use other coercive methods." Other e-mails link the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to the extreme methods used in Guantanamo. (Note by the way that, while our press generally will not use the word "torture" when describing such acts at Guantanamo and elsewhere, the FBI agents don't hesitate to do so.) Whether there was such an order -- the White House denies it, but at this point that no longer means a thing -- there was certainly a powerful sense among the interrogators, torturers, and abusers at Guantanamo and elsewhere that their course had been set at the very top of the system, and in this they couldn't have been more right. But I get ahead of myself. I was talking about the extraordinarily rendited island of Diego Garcia when I wandered off into the imperial dark side. We only know what the military tells us -- no damage -- about the effects of the tsunami on that very low-lying island, only on average 4 feet above sea level, but that's not so odd. The island has been a blacked-out area, a zone of silence in the Indian Ocean ever since, to oblige us Yanks, the Brits shipped all the Diego Garcians off into misery and poverty on the island of Mauritius, clearing the decks for us. In normal Internet fashion, some on the Web quickly concluded that there was something deeply conspiratorial about Diego Garcia alone getting the tsunami news in a prompt fashion. But the reason was simple: Unlike the governments of South Asia, the Pentagon was keyed into scientific early warning networks, as it is now keyed into just about everything that matters on this planet. The Pentagon is increasingly like that famed creation of 1950s sci-fi, the Blob; an alien life form capable of absorbing anything that crosses its path. It has swallowed, for instance, many of the functions of the State Department and, having divided the globe into 5 commands (the latest being -- gulp -- Northcom, which means us) and with the heavens tossed in as well (Spacecom), its top commanders now travel the world like planetary plenipotentiaries. Here, for instance, is how Washington Post columnist David Ignatius described the global processional of our latest Centcom commander: "Gen. John Abizaid probably commands the most potent military force in history. The troops of his Central Command are arrayed across the jagged crescent of the Middle East, from Egypt to Pakistan, in an overwhelming projection of U.S. power. He travels with his own mini-government: a top State Department officer to manage diplomacy; a senior CIA officer to oversee intelligence; a retinue of generals and admirals to supervise operations and logistics. If there is a modern Imperium Americanum, Abizaid is its field general." Indeed. The military has become not just our war-fighting and occupying force, but our main "nation-building" force, our major diplomatic force (now that military-to-military relations have become the essence of foreign policy), our preponderant intelligence force, a major propaganda outfit (or call it public diplomacy, if you will), our central ministry for advanced R&D research and basic science, the only part of the government seriously preparing for a global-warming world, and our planetary rescue outfit as well -- to name just a few of its roles. With more clearly to come. Take, for instance, intelligence. That CIA jet may seem extravagant, but, in fact, it's a pale shadow of the airborne CIA of the Vietnam era when the Agency covertly operated a full-scale airline, Air America. The Pentagon now controls an estimated 80% of the nation's $40 billion-plus intelligence budget and it's clearly eager for more. Perhaps the most curious news report of the pre-holiday season was a front-page piece in the New York Times by Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt (Pentagon Seeks to Expand Role in Intelligence-Collecting). It focused on a plan being put together by the now infamous Christian fundamentalist Lieutenant General, William G. Boykin ("George Bush was not elected by a majority of the voters in the United States, he was appointed by God."), that gives a lovely twist to the concept of "intelligence gathering": "Among the ideas cited by Defense Department officials is the idea of 'fighting for intelligence,' or commencing combat operations chiefly to obtain intelligence. The proposal also calls for a major expansion of human intelligence, which is information gathered by spies rather than by technological means, both within the military services and the Defense Intelligence Agency, including more missions aimed at acquiring specific information sought by policy makers." Fighting for [you fill in the blank]. That sums up our present Bush moment. In fact, little that this country does from diplomacy to torture to foreign aid is any longer imaginable absent the military. We are a nation whose public face -- however we may still think of ourselves -- is no longer a civilian one, not just in Iraq but in the world at large. This is essentially because, if the Bush people could be said to have a religion, it would not perhaps be fundamentalist Christianity so much as a deep and abiding belief in the ability of a militarized superpower to impose its views and desires on the world through military strength alone. Militarism in America has long been a strange bird, since our society lacked most of the normal trappings of a militarized state. But it's an even stranger creature post-9/11. After all, the militarists driving policy are a group of men almost none of whom were ever in the military (no less saw service in a war) and many of their policies have been opposed by honorable (and horrified) military and intelligence officials who recognize madness, stupidity, and illegality when they see it and have little interest in having their names or services dragged through the imperial mud. (Hence all those leakers to the press.) The Bush administration had made its approach clear in the National Security Strategy of the United States, a key document released in 2002, as well as in various presidential speeches at the time which emphasized the administration's reliance not on preemptive but "preventive" war; its intense desire to go it alone internationally (no "global tests" long preceded John Kerry); the importance it placed on maintaining eternal American military dominance in an otherwise superpower-less world against any conceivable future combination of powers; and its insistence on putting forward force without constraints as a first principle -- a position from which torture, which is, after all, force without constraints in the context of an interrogation cell, flows so naturally. It was this collective stance that was put into practice on September 11, 2001 and that has determined just about every major act of the administration since. Note, for instance, the administration's response to the catastrophic Sumatran tsunami. Though from its early hours the event was visibly near apocalyptic and the body count bound to be astronomical, the President spent three days on vacation cutting brush at his ranch in Crawford in glorious silence (just as his junior partner Tony Blair would continue to vacation in sunny Egypt). After all, the losses weren't American; terrorism had played no role; and it hadn't happened in New York City, but in Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist countries. And so miniscule amounts of aid were announced by a minor administration figure at a moment when, as Juan Cole pointed out at his Informed Comment website, we were unsuccessfully spending a blinding $1 billion a week to impose our will on a recalcitrant Iraq. When the criticism and embarrassment became too much -- it turns out that even this President is subject to "global tests" -- George emerged from hibernation to praise American generosity ("we're a very generous, kindhearted nation") and to announce that we would indeed mount a mighty relief effort to be led by... don't be surprised now... the Pentagon. ("We're dispatching a Marine expeditionary unit, the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, and the Maritime pre-position squadron from Guam to the area to help with relief efforts."). The very concept of a civilian relief effort naturally never came to mind, except -- for an administration intent on stripping civil government of its role in society -- in terms of private charity for which two former presidents would later be mobilized. We then largely ignored the various global relief outfits (including the UN), civilian in nature, with extensive experience in such things, sent Hurricane Jeb and our increasingly pugnacious exiting secretary of state off to do an American assessment of Asian needs; declared our own coalition of the willing (Australia, Japan, India) willy-nilly, and generally rushed unilaterally into the breach. (The Bush administration, by the way, wasn't alone in sticking to character. As Bill Berkowitz, the thoughtful columnist at the Working for Change website commented, Christian fundamentalist organizations like the Family Research Council, the Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family, and Concerned Women for America, in the manner of the President, suffered from an instant "compassion deficit," their websites remaining for days tsunami-less; while Doug Ireland, whose provocative as well as entertaining blog should be a stop on anyone's passage through the Web, pointed out to me, that the Westboro Baptist Church website was already declaring the tsunami God's response to vacationing Swedish gays. "Thank God for the tsunamis -- and for 5,000 dead Swedes!!! God is laughing, mocking and taunting Swedes, and Sweden, even as they mourn & weep over their dead!") None of this is exactly surprising. When an administration committed to a form of armed imperial isolationism (a bizarre inversion of the old Party of Taft heartland isolationist tradition, now married to imperial dreams and driven deep into the heart of the world) and completely committed to the idea of dominating the planet by force acts, it's almost bound to do so in predictable ways. Taking off the Gloves While news story after news story -- and I can barely keep up with, no less adequately summarize them -- has driven torture ever deeper into the ordinary life of the imperium, we also know ever more about how and where this all began, about, you might say, the moment of creation. As with extraordinary rendition in the Clinton era, or neocon plans laid out in the 1990s to take down Saddam Hussein, or the establishment of a national security state in the early years of the Cold War, or (as former Latin American prisoners from the 1960s to the 1980s can attest) torture methods employed or taught by CIA or U.S. military interrogators, much of what's happened since September 11, 2001 has a good deal of history behind it. The Bush administration hardly created our American world from scratch. But it certainly accelerated the trend toward militarism, brought torture out of the closet -- making it something close to official state policy -- began to build a small-scale global gulag to go with it, melded extremes of American political and religious expression in new ways, and established what might be called a National Insecurity Homeland in the process. Each of us has a personality or character developed over a lifetime which asserts itself in reasonably expectable ways under pressure; so, it might be said, does an administration. The assaults of 9/11 were such a moment of pressure. You could look on that day and the few weeks that followed as a kind of administration Rorschach Test. What instantly floated to the surface of the Bush collective brain, under the pressure (and the developing possibilities) of that moment, would in fact define the years to come; and I would say that two things above all came to mind. The first was obviously Iraq -- the urge to take down Saddam Hussein's regime and forcibly reconstruct the Middle East along lines the neocons had long dreamed of; the second was, in the spirit of Janus, the two-faced Roman god of war, a two-sided urge: to elevate the President as a wartime leader, stripping him of all constraints and restraints, domestic or international, and to free him to order acts previously seen as heinous. The executive's freedom to order torture would, after all, be the ultimate proof of the administration's freedom to do anything. This helps explain, at least in part, what William Pfaff, columnist for the International Herald Tribune recently called "the most striking aspect of its war against terrorism," an "enthusiasm for torture" among the land's highest officials, for making it part of public policy. After all, while Guantanamo was meant to be beyond the reach of the law, and what went on there beyond all sight or oversight, it was also an intensely public creation in which the administration invested much pride. On Iraq, we know that, according to notes taken by his associates (as CBS reported a year later), "barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq," even though he was already certain that al-Qaeda had launched the attack. ("'Go massive,' the notes quote him as saying. 'Sweep it all up. Things related and not.'") At that moment, the Pentagon would still have been smoking. Later that same day, Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism expert who was in most of the key meetings, recalled, "'Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq... And we all said ... no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq." The President on returning to the White House later that day, "dragged me into a room," Clarke recalled, "with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this." In mid-2003, the reliable Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service reported: "It appears increasingly clear that key officials and their allies outside the administration intended to use the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks as a pretext for going to war against Iraq within hours of the attacks themselves. Within the administration, the principals appear to have included Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Vice Pres. willy Cheney, and his national security adviser, I. Lewis Libby, among others in key posts in the National Security Council and the State Department." Only 9 days after September 11, the number three man at Defense, Douglas Feith suggested "hitting terrorists outside the Middle East in the initial offensive, perhaps deliberately selecting a non-al Qaeda target like Iraq." And but two weeks after the attacks, Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was already implicitly fingering Saddam Hussein's Iraq before a meeting of NATO ministers and the game, as they say, was publicly afoot. In the meantime, as we've learned only recently thanks to Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, within two weeks of 9/11, then Justice Department lawyer John Yoo was already writing a secret memo to White House legal counsel Alberto Gonzalez's assistant, entitled "The President's Constitutional Authority to Conduct Military Operations against Terrorists and Nations Supporting Them," which suggested a staggering new interpretation of the reach of presidential power: "In the exercise of his power to use military force, 'the president's decisions are for him alone and are unreviewable.'" This memo, as Isikoff explains, "lays out a line of argument about broad presidential wartime powers that would be repeated time and again in a series of secret memos to the White House about controversial decisions in the war on terror. The arguments pushed by Yoo, a prolific conservative scholar who has since left the Justice Department, reached what many view as its apex nearly a year later when, in another memo written by a colleague Jay Bybee, the Office of Legal Counsel concluded that the president's powers were so expansive that he and his surrogates were not bound by congressional laws or international treaties proscribing torture during the interrogation of detainees." Torture's path was well paved by the time, in July 2002, Gonzalez and his colleagues convened in a White House office to consider CIA torture techniques and how to put a foundation of "legality" under them. By that time, Gonzalez had already created a whole new category, "enemy combatant," that was meant to do an end-run around the Geneva Conventions and had laid the "legal" foundations for taking those out-of-category combatants and putting them in Guantanamo where conventions of any kind could be suitably ignored. That July, according to Isikoff, his main worry was: "'Are we forward-leaning enough on this?'... 'Lean forward' had become a catchphrase for the administration's offensive approach to the war on terror." As Pfaff puts the matter succinctly: "Proposals to authorize torture were circulating even before there was anyone to torture. Days after the Sept. 11 attacks, the administration made it known that the United States was no longer bound by international treaties, or by American law and established U.S. military standards, concerning torture and the treatment of prisoners. By the end of 2001, the Justice Department had drafted memos on how to protect military and intelligence officers from eventual prosecution under existing U.S. law for their treatment of Afghan and other prisoners. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Bush administration is not torturing prisoners because it is useful but because of its symbolism. It originally was intended to be a form of what later, in the attack on Iraq, came to be called 'shock and awe.' It was meant as intimidation. We will do these terrible things to demonstrate that nothing will stop us from conquering our enemies. We are indifferent to world opinion. We will stop at nothing." Extraction of information was always secondary at the highest levels to the freeing of the President from all constraints. A confidant of the President, Gonzales was certainly in close touch with high administration officials, including evidently the vice president's office, over taking the legal restraints off torture. But he was, after all, only a lawyer. By then, top officials had already demonstrated their "enthusiasm" on the subject, their desire to be involved. Take Donald Rumsfeld. As Richard Serrano of the Los Angeles Times has written, "After American Taliban recruit John Walker Lindh was captured in Afghanistan, the office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld instructed military intelligence officers to 'take the gloves off' in interrogating him... In the early stages, his responses were cabled to Washington hourly, the new documents show... What happened to Lindh, who was stripped and humiliated by his captors, foreshadowed the type of abuse documented in photographs of American soldiers tormenting Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib." That was 2001. By December 2002, Rumsfeld had personally approved a list of extreme "interrogation techniques" for Guantanamo right down to the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners. It's a grim tale and one of the main figures who made it possible will, in the coming days, be given a pass by Democratic senators. Imagine that. Alberto Gonzales, the lawyer who sponsored a regime of torture for his President, will soon become the nation's attorney general. Perhaps it's fitting. Then the Justice Department can enter the same world of twisted names as Camp Justice, saved from the tsunami's surprise impact by a special Pentagon warning. When you think about it, we are still living in the ruins of the World Trade Center. Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), where this article first appeared, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the collapse of American triumphalism in the Cold War era as well as a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. Copyright C2004 Tom Engelhardt]

Here's a rather eye-opening article I found.

http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm

American Gothic:
Self-Portrait with Shackles for the Year 2005
 
     
.........  by Tom Engelhardt  January 06, 2005  
 TomDispatch Printer Friendly Version
EMail Article to a Friend    
 
 Here we are, because time has some of the qualities of a tsunami, deposited in 2005, whether we like it or not. As the year changed, nature trumped the Bush administration in an appropriately, if horrifyingly Biblical way, with a preemptive strike against shorelines jammed with rich tourists and poor peasants alike. And even in the midst of the collective horror, much of what the Bush administration is, much of whom we now are becoming, showed through unbecomingly.



Only one small spot in the vast Indian Ocean basin "seems to have received full advanced warning of the waves to come -- the ostensibly British island of Diego Garcia, which is actually a sizeable U.S. military base, a stationary "aircraft carrier" for the war in Iraq. It also houses "Camp Justice," one of the secret little hideaway resorts the administration has set up, or contracted out for, on prime global real estate to hold "high value" prisoners in the war on terror. The camp, named by someone who must have had a yen for the Orwellian, is part of an offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice set up by the Bush administration -- two interlinked prison systems, in fact; one run by the Pentagon and the other by the CIA, both meant to keep prisoners and practices far from the prying eyes of the American public and its court system; both, as it now turns out, anchored in that jewel-in-the-crown, Guantanamo (or Gitmo to devotees) -- a grim prison camp set up on territory in Cuba that is close at hand, U.S.-controlled, and yet -- or so Bush officials hoped until the Supreme Court ruled otherwise last year -- beyond the reach of our courts.



On military bases like Diego Garcia and in special military- or CIA-controlled prisons like Guantanamo, the "war on terrorism" was to be carried to its informational climax by whatever methods American intelligence officials felt might "break" whatever prisoners we had. Whether in Guantanamo, at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, on Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, on U.S. Navy ships at sea, or outsourced to the friendly jails of allied nations whose interrogators practice torture, this varied and ever developing mini-gulag was never meant to be a system of criminal imprisonment -- hence the lack of charges, no less trials of any sort, anywhere in the imperium. It was to be an eternal holding operation for "World War IV," the war after the Cold War and expected by neocon devotees to last at least as long. Now, according to the latest report from Dana Priest of the Washington Post (1/2/05), the administration is considering exactly how to turn forever into a series of post-penal establishments capable of coping with the realities of life imprisonment beyond all charges and to the end of time.



Devil's Island, USA



There's something, I suppose, that just hates a secret -- and so, as the year of Abu Ghraib ended, ever more of America's secret world of torture (generally called "abuse" in our press) has been tumbling out of the darkness and into the news -- thanks largely to leaks from anonymous but obviously angry sources inside the military and the intelligence "community." For instance, in December we learned from Dana Priest and Scott Higham of the Washington Post (12/17/04), which has been doing the best of this reporting in the mainstream, that deep in the heart of our Guantanamo prison camp was a super-secret CIA wing built in the last year for high-value prisoners previously being passed from place to place globally, "a detention facility for valuable al Qaeda captives that has never been mentioned in public."



Consider it mentioned. And how were they being passed around the CIA's planetary holding areas? Well, as the year ended, Priest revealed (12/27) that the CIA had its own, possibly one-jet air arm for shuttling these peripatetic prisoners around the planet -- "a Gulfstream V turbojet, the sort favored by CEOs and celebrities [that]... since 2001... has been seen at military airports from Pakistan to Indonesia to Jordan, sometimes being boarded by hooded and handcuffed passengers." It's registered to a dummy corporation officered and directed by dummy humans and it has "permission to use U.S. military airfields worldwide." A list of where it's been spotted offers a suggestive, though hardly complete, little map of our shadowy system of secret imprisonment: "Since October 2001 the plane has landed in Islamabad; Karachi; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Dubai; Tashkent, Uzbekistan; Baghdad; Kuwait City; Baku, Azerbaijan; and Rabat, Morocco. It has stopped frequently at Dulles International Airport, at Jordan's military airport in Amman and at airports in Frankfurt, Germany; Glasgow, Scotland, and Larnaca, Cyprus."



Egypt and Thailand, for example, are missing from the list, although it's believed that prisoners have been held by the CIA in the jails of both countries as part of the Agency's program of "extraordinary rendition" -- a tortured euphemism that stands in for a policy going back deep into the Clinton years but that really hit its stride after 9/11 in which we contract out the torture of our prisoners to countries previously better known for such practices.



Meanwhile, by year's end, the American Civil Liberties Union, wielding the Freedom of Information Act (which the Bush administration has tried hard to limit), had pried loose a series of stunning emails and memorandums from disturbed and angry FBI agents who had observed interrogation sessions at Guantanamo. They were writing their bosses back on the mainland, complaining of the nature of the "humane" methods military interrogators were using at Guantanamo, not to speak of the fact that some of those military or intelligence interrogators were impersonating FBI agents. (By the way, isn't it curious that it was the ACLU and not the media that did the necessary work to spring these documents?)



When it came to Guantanamo, what we had previously were largely the claims of former prisoners, most of which turned out to be all too accurate but were more easily dismissible; now the FBI has nailed the government on what's been happening, despite endless denials, in our own Devil's Island. These documents are a clear indication that torture, mistreatment, and abuse in American-controlled prisons, holding areas, military camps, and interrogation cells add up to stunning set of contraventions of the Geneva Conventions ("To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons: (a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; (b) taking of hostages; (c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment..."); that, in a phrase used for the first time recently in a recent headline on a Washington Post editorial, "war crimes" are being committed routinely out there in the imperium.



Let's recall for a moment what our President had to say at a news conference about such accusation of torture last June: "Look, I'm going to say it one more time. Maybe I can be more clear. The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you. We're a nation of law. We adhere to laws. We have laws on the books. You might look at these laws. And that might provide comfort for you. And those were the instructions from me to the government."



"A nation of law" and that should comfort us. The United States, of course, signed onto the Geneva Conventions and, as a signatory, is fully bound by them because, according to Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution, "[A]ll Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land." It doesn't get any higher, does it? And that remains true no matter how many times our attorney-general designee and former overseer of a series of tortured legal documents meant to give the administration the ability to torture more or less at will, refers to the Conventions as "quaint" documents.



Throw in a slew of other recent torture revelations, including a claim by a British prisoner in Guantanamo, for instance, that "the 'strappado,' a technique common in Latin American dictatorships in which a prisoner is left suspended from a bar with handcuffs until they cut deeply into his wrists," was used on him, and you end up with a Grand Guignol menu of interrogation techniques. These, in turn, add up to something like a self-portrait for the rest of the world of Bush administration America in 2005.



A partial list of methods of torture recently reported (or reported yet again) would include: detainees chained hand and foot to the floor in a fetal position for up to 24 hours without food or water and left to lie in their own fecal matter; detainees beaten and kicked while hooded; paraded naked around a courtyard while photos were being snapped; left in extreme hot or cold temperatures for extended periods; wrapped in an Israeli flag while loud rap music played and strobe lights flashed; or possibly even having fingernails torn out; placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees' ear openings; sleep deprivation; partial strangulation; death threats during interrogation; the use of dogs to force frightened prisoners to urinate; the holding of wires from an electric transformer to a detainee's shoulders, so that the man "danced as he was shocked"; mock drowning or "waterboarding"; mock executions of Iraqi juveniles; severely burning a detainee's hands by covering them in alcohol and igniting them; holding a pistol to the back of a detainee's head while another Marine takes a picture; fake (and real) acts of sexual assault and sodomy; being hit with rifle butts; suffering electric shocks and immersion in cold water; being beaten to death. These and other crimes against very specific humanity have taken place from Guantanamo to Iraq, from Afghanistan to the CIA's secret prisons around the world.



Once you take certain kinds of restraints away, once you open up certain possibilities, these tend to be transformed into acts at a staggering speed and then to multiply like so many computer viruses. Offshore, torture as a way of life spreads, it seems, with a startling rapidity. It begins with a sense of impunity at the top and soon infects the most distant nooks and crannies, the farthest outposts, fire bases and holding cells of distant lands like Afghanistan. It moves like quicksilver all the way down to those "bad apples" manning the night shift and taking digital photos for future screen-savers in the Abu Ghraibs of our world. It has already become an American way of life and, having been initiated at home, it will certainly return to the Homeland.



Take as just one tiny example of how widespread and commonplace such practices may be: During the recent assault on Falluja, American troops came upon Mohammad al-Jundi, the Syrian driver of two kidnapped French journalists (since released elsewhere). This was presented in our news as a tiny act of liberation of a prisoner held by terrorists. So what do you imagine was the first act of this former driver, when freed? According to Agence France-Presse, he's now suing his American liberators for torture and ill-treatment. His French lawyer Jacques Verges "said that after being found by American troops, al-Jundi was taken in handcuffs to a military base where he was beaten and kicked. Verges said al-Jundi claimed to have been thrice threatened with mock executions and tortured with electric shocks." Ho-hum. Life on the frontier.



Militarism as Religion



The question, of course, is responsibility. Where exactly does it rest? Among the more striking of the ACLU revelations (and the least dealt with in our press) was a single FBI e-mail sent from Guantanamo to senior FBI officials in the States which "makes 11 references to an Executive Order 'signed by President Bush' that authorized these abusive interrogation methods... that permitted military interrogators in Iraq to place detainees in painful stress positions, impose sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, intimidate them with military dogs and use other coercive methods." Other e-mails link the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to the extreme methods used in Guantanamo. (Note by the way that, while our press generally will not use the word "torture" when describing such acts at Guantanamo and elsewhere, the FBI agents don't hesitate to do so.)



Whether there was such an order -- the White House denies it, but at this point that no longer means a thing -- there was certainly a powerful sense among the interrogators, torturers, and abusers at Guantanamo and elsewhere that their course had been set at the very top of the system, and in this they couldn't have been more right.



But I get ahead of myself. I was talking about the extraordinarily rendited island of Diego Garcia when I wandered off into the imperial dark side. We only know what the military tells us -- no damage -- about the effects of the tsunami on that very low-lying island, only on average 4 feet above sea level, but that's not so odd. The island has been a blacked-out area, a zone of silence in the Indian Ocean ever since, to oblige us Yanks, the Brits shipped all the Diego Garcians off into misery and poverty on the island of Mauritius, clearing the decks for us.



In normal Internet fashion, some on the Web quickly concluded that there was something deeply conspiratorial about Diego Garcia alone getting the tsunami news in a prompt fashion. But the reason was simple: Unlike the governments of South Asia, the Pentagon was keyed into scientific early warning networks, as it is now keyed into just about everything that matters on this planet. The Pentagon is increasingly like that famed creation of 1950s sci-fi, the Blob; an alien life form capable of absorbing anything that crosses its path. It has swallowed, for instance, many of the functions of the State Department and, having divided the globe into 5 commands (the latest being -- gulp -- Northcom, which means us) and with the heavens tossed in as well (Spacecom), its top commanders now travel the world like planetary plenipotentiaries.



Here, for instance, is how Washington Post columnist David Ignatius described the global processional of our latest Centcom commander:



"Gen. John Abizaid probably commands the most potent military force in history. The troops of his Central Command are arrayed across the jagged crescent of the Middle East, from Egypt to Pakistan, in an overwhelming projection of U.S. power. He travels with his own mini-government: a top State Department officer to manage diplomacy; a senior CIA officer to oversee intelligence; a retinue of generals and admirals to supervise operations and logistics. If there is a modern Imperium Americanum, Abizaid is its field general."



Indeed. The military has become not just our war-fighting and occupying force, but our main "nation-building" force, our major diplomatic force (now that military-to-military relations have become the essence of foreign policy), our preponderant intelligence force, a major propaganda outfit (or call it public diplomacy, if you will), our central ministry for advanced R&D research and basic science, the only part of the government seriously preparing for a global-warming world, and our planetary rescue outfit as well -- to name just a few of its roles. With more clearly to come.



Take, for instance, intelligence. That CIA jet may seem extravagant, but, in fact, it's a pale shadow of the airborne CIA of the Vietnam era when the Agency covertly operated a full-scale airline, Air America. The Pentagon now controls an estimated 80% of the nation's $40 billion-plus intelligence budget and it's clearly eager for more. Perhaps the most curious news report of the pre-holiday season was a front-page piece in the New York Times by Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt (Pentagon Seeks to Expand Role in Intelligence-Collecting). It focused on a plan being put together by the now infamous Christian fundamentalist Lieutenant General, William G. Boykin ("George Bush was not elected by a majority of the voters in the United States, he was appointed by God."), that gives a lovely twist to the concept of "intelligence gathering":



"Among the ideas cited by Defense Department officials is the idea of 'fighting for intelligence,' or commencing combat operations chiefly to obtain intelligence. The proposal also calls for a major expansion of human intelligence, which is information gathered by spies rather than by technological means, both within the military services and the Defense Intelligence Agency, including more missions aimed at acquiring specific information sought by policy makers."



Fighting for [you fill in the blank]. That sums up our present Bush moment. In fact, little that this country does from diplomacy to torture to foreign aid is any longer imaginable absent the military. We are a nation whose public face -- however we may still think of ourselves -- is no longer a civilian one, not just in Iraq but in the world at large. This is essentially because, if the Bush people could be said to have a religion, it would not perhaps be fundamentalist Christianity so much as a deep and abiding belief in the ability of a militarized superpower to impose its views and desires on the world through military strength alone.



Militarism in America has long been a strange bird, since our society lacked most of the normal trappings of a militarized state. But it's an even stranger creature post-9/11. After all, the militarists driving policy are a group of men almost none of whom were ever in the military (no less saw service in a war) and many of their policies have been opposed by honorable (and horrified) military and intelligence officials who recognize madness, stupidity, and illegality when they see it and have little interest in having their names or services dragged through the imperial mud. (Hence all those leakers to the press.)



The Bush administration had made its approach clear in the National Security Strategy of the United States, a key document released in 2002, as well as in various presidential speeches at the time which emphasized the administration's reliance not on preemptive but "preventive" war; its intense desire to go it alone internationally (no "global tests" long preceded John Kerry); the importance it placed on maintaining eternal American military dominance in an otherwise superpower-less world against any conceivable future combination of powers; and its insistence on putting forward force without constraints as a first principle -- a position from which torture, which is, after all, force without constraints in the context of an interrogation cell, flows so naturally. It was this collective stance that was put into practice on September 11, 2001 and that has determined just about every major act of the administration since.



Note, for instance, the administration's response to the catastrophic Sumatran tsunami. Though from its early hours the event was visibly near apocalyptic and the body count bound to be astronomical, the President spent three days on vacation cutting brush at his ranch in Crawford in glorious silence (just as his junior partner Tony Blair would continue to vacation in sunny Egypt). After all, the losses weren't American; terrorism had played no role; and it hadn't happened in New York City, but in Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist countries. And so miniscule amounts of aid were announced by a minor administration figure at a moment when, as Juan Cole pointed out at his Informed Comment website, we were unsuccessfully spending a blinding $1 billion a week to impose our will on a recalcitrant Iraq.



When the criticism and embarrassment became too much -- it turns out that even this President is subject to "global tests" -- George emerged from hibernation to praise American generosity ("we're a very generous, kindhearted nation") and to announce that we would indeed mount a mighty relief effort to be led by... don't be surprised now... the Pentagon. ("We're dispatching a Marine expeditionary unit, the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, and the Maritime pre-position squadron from Guam to the area to help with relief efforts."). The very concept of a civilian relief effort naturally never came to mind, except -- for an administration intent on stripping civil government of its role in society -- in terms of private charity for which two former presidents would later be mobilized. We then largely ignored the various global relief outfits (including the UN), civilian in nature, with extensive experience in such things, sent Hurricane Jeb and our increasingly pugnacious exiting secretary of state off to do an American assessment of Asian needs; declared our own coalition of the willing (Australia, Japan, India) willy-nilly, and generally rushed unilaterally into the breach.



(The Bush administration, by the way, wasn't alone in sticking to character. As Bill Berkowitz, the thoughtful columnist at the Working for Change website commented, Christian fundamentalist organizations like the Family Research Council, the Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family, and Concerned Women for America, in the manner of the President, suffered from an instant "compassion deficit," their websites remaining for days tsunami-less; while Doug Ireland, whose provocative as well as entertaining blog should be a stop on anyone's passage through the Web, pointed out to me, that the Westboro Baptist Church website was already declaring the tsunami God's response to vacationing Swedish gays. "Thank God for the tsunamis -- and for 5,000 dead Swedes!!! God is laughing, mocking and taunting Swedes, and Sweden, even as they mourn & weep over their dead!")



None of this is exactly surprising. When an administration committed to a form of armed imperial isolationism (a bizarre inversion of the old Party of Taft heartland isolationist tradition, now married to imperial dreams and driven deep into the heart of the world) and completely committed to the idea of dominating the planet by force acts, it's almost bound to do so in predictable ways.



Taking off the Gloves



While news story after news story -- and I can barely keep up with, no less adequately summarize them -- has driven torture ever deeper into the ordinary life of the imperium, we also know ever more about how and where this all began, about, you might say, the moment of creation. As with extraordinary rendition in the Clinton era, or neocon plans laid out in the 1990s to take down Saddam Hussein, or the establishment of a national security state in the early years of the Cold War, or (as former Latin American prisoners from the 1960s to the 1980s can attest) torture methods employed or taught by CIA or U.S. military interrogators, much of what's happened since September 11, 2001 has a good deal of history behind it. The Bush administration hardly created our American world from scratch. But it certainly accelerated the trend toward militarism, brought torture out of the closet -- making it something close to official state policy -- began to build a small-scale global gulag to go with it, melded extremes of American political and religious expression in new ways, and established what might be called a National Insecurity Homeland in the process.



Each of us has a personality or character developed over a lifetime which asserts itself in reasonably expectable ways under pressure; so, it might be said, does an administration. The assaults of 9/11 were such a moment of pressure. You could look on that day and the few weeks that followed as a kind of administration Rorschach Test. What instantly floated to the surface of the Bush collective brain, under the pressure (and the developing possibilities) of that moment, would in fact define the years to come; and I would say that two things above all came to mind. The first was obviously Iraq -- the urge to take down Saddam Hussein's regime and forcibly reconstruct the Middle East along lines the neocons had long dreamed of; the second was, in the spirit of Janus, the two-faced Roman god of war, a two-sided urge: to elevate the President as a wartime leader, stripping him of all constraints and restraints, domestic or international, and to free him to order acts previously seen as heinous. The executive's freedom to order torture would, after all, be the ultimate proof of the administration's freedom to do anything.



This helps explain, at least in part, what William Pfaff, columnist for the International Herald Tribune recently called "the most striking aspect of its war against terrorism," an "enthusiasm for torture" among the land's highest officials, for making it part of public policy. After all, while Guantanamo was meant to be beyond the reach of the law, and what went on there beyond all sight or oversight, it was also an intensely public creation in which the administration invested much pride.



On Iraq, we know that, according to notes taken by his associates (as CBS reported a year later), "barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq," even though he was already certain that al-Qaeda had launched the attack. ("'Go massive,' the notes quote him as saying. 'Sweep it all up. Things related and not.'") At that moment, the Pentagon would still have been smoking. Later that same day, Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism expert who was in most of the key meetings, recalled, "'Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq... And we all said ... no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq." The President on returning to the White House later that day, "dragged me into a room," Clarke recalled, "with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this."



In mid-2003, the reliable Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service reported:



"It appears increasingly clear that key officials and their allies outside the administration intended to use the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks as a pretext for going to war against Iraq within hours of the attacks themselves. Within the administration, the principals appear to have included Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Vice Pres. willy Cheney, and his national security adviser, I. Lewis Libby, among others in key posts in the National Security Council and the State Department."



Only 9 days after September 11, the number three man at Defense, Douglas Feith suggested "hitting terrorists outside the Middle East in the initial offensive, perhaps deliberately selecting a non-al Qaeda target like Iraq." And but two weeks after the attacks, Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was already implicitly fingering Saddam Hussein's Iraq before a meeting of NATO ministers and the game, as they say, was publicly afoot.



In the meantime, as we've learned only recently thanks to Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, within two weeks of 9/11, then Justice Department lawyer John Yoo was already writing a secret memo to White House legal counsel Alberto Gonzalez's assistant, entitled "The President's Constitutional Authority to Conduct Military Operations against Terrorists and Nations Supporting Them," which suggested a staggering new interpretation of the reach of presidential power: "In the exercise of his power to use military force, 'the president's decisions are for him alone and are unreviewable.'" This memo, as Isikoff explains,



"lays out a line of argument about broad presidential wartime powers that would be repeated time and again in a series of secret memos to the White House about controversial decisions in the war on terror. The arguments pushed by Yoo, a prolific conservative scholar who has since left the Justice Department, reached what many view as its apex nearly a year later when, in another memo written by a colleague Jay Bybee, the Office of Legal Counsel concluded that the president's powers were so expansive that he and his surrogates were not bound by congressional laws or international treaties proscribing torture during the interrogation of detainees."



Torture's path was well paved by the time, in July 2002, Gonzalez and his colleagues convened in a White House office to consider CIA torture techniques and how to put a foundation of "legality" under them. By that time, Gonzalez had already created a whole new category, "enemy combatant," that was meant to do an end-run around the Geneva Conventions and had laid the "legal" foundations for taking those out-of-category combatants and putting them in Guantanamo where conventions of any kind could be suitably ignored. That July, according to Isikoff, his main worry was: "'Are we forward-leaning enough on this?'... 'Lean forward' had become a catchphrase for the administration's offensive approach to the war on terror."



As Pfaff puts the matter succinctly:



"Proposals to authorize torture were circulating even before there was anyone to torture. Days after the Sept. 11 attacks, the administration made it known that the United States was no longer bound by international treaties, or by American law and established U.S. military standards, concerning torture and the treatment of prisoners. By the end of 2001, the Justice Department had drafted memos on how to protect military and intelligence officers from eventual prosecution under existing U.S. law for their treatment of Afghan and other prisoners. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Bush administration is not torturing prisoners because it is useful but because of its symbolism. It originally was intended to be a form of what later, in the attack on Iraq, came to be called 'shock and awe.' It was meant as intimidation. We will do these terrible things to demonstrate that nothing will stop us from conquering our enemies. We are indifferent to world opinion. We will stop at nothing."



Extraction of information was always secondary at the highest levels to the freeing of the President from all constraints. A confidant of the President, Gonzales was certainly in close touch with high administration officials, including evidently the vice president's office, over taking the legal restraints off torture. But he was, after all, only a lawyer. By then, top officials had already demonstrated their "enthusiasm" on the subject, their desire to be involved. Take Donald Rumsfeld. As Richard Serrano of the Los Angeles Times has written, "After American Taliban recruit John Walker Lindh was captured in Afghanistan, the office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld instructed military intelligence officers to 'take the gloves off' in interrogating him... In the early stages, his responses were cabled to Washington hourly, the new documents show... What happened to Lindh, who was stripped and humiliated by his captors, foreshadowed the type of abuse documented in photographs of American soldiers tormenting Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib." That was 2001. By December 2002, Rumsfeld had personally approved a list of extreme "interrogation techniques" for Guantanamo right down to the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners.



It's a grim tale and one of the main figures who made it possible will, in the coming days, be given a pass by Democratic senators. Imagine that. Alberto Gonzales, the lawyer who sponsored a regime of torture for his President, will soon become the nation's attorney general. Perhaps it's fitting. Then the Justice Department can enter the same world of twisted names as Camp Justice, saved from the tsunami's surprise impact by a special Pentagon warning. When you think about it, we are still living in the ruins of the World Trade Center.



Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), where this article first appeared, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the collapse of American triumphalism in the Cold War era as well as a novel, The Last Days of Publishing.



Copyright C2004 Tom Engelhardt

Don't know if my experience sheds any light on this, but here goes.

My animal totem is that of any owl, which I believe makes sense for me.  I have a great desire to move on into the unknown to gain knowledge and understanding (though oftentimes not enough will or discipline to accomplish it, don't know if this is any owl trait or not...)  

Anyway, I had a number of dreams where I was flying around as an owl, I even loved owls when growing up.  Eventually, I learned how to bring out the feel of being an owl, I can even send it out as a weak form of mental projection.  I was told by someone to try talking to the owl next time I projected it.  I did this, and much to my surprise the owl talked back.  It turned out that the owl was also my guide.  She now usually takes the form of a young girl with blue hair, who it would seem is a lover of mine from a past life.  However, the owl is still in a sense us and not us, greater than us.  When she is in the form of a girl we are separate individuals, but when both of us assume the atmosphere of the owl, I feel as if we are partly the same being.

If possible, I would suggest visualizing the owl, bringing out its essence in your mind and trying to speak with it.  Perhaps something will happen.

Having a sanctuary sounds like an interesting and adventorous idea to me as well, however I would suggest that it also be made with other interests in mind in case these prophecies don't pan out.  If the events in 2012 don't happen, it should have other functions so as not to put its makers in debt.

[Too Bush Killing IraqisA Shameful Response to DisasterBy DAVE LINDORFFWord that the U.S. government is offering a paltry $10 million in aid to those countries whose coasts were devastated by tidal waves from the largest earthquake in 40 years should be a national embarrassment. That a nation which can talk casually about $400-$500 billion annual deficits, and about spending upwards of $100 billion a year in sowing destruction in Iraq can't come up with more than pocket change for disaster relief in an event that has displaced over a million people and rocked the earth in its orbit is mind-boggling.But then, it's important to remember that there are disasters both natural and unnatural, and the American public and its chosen political system have markedly different responses to the two. There is also a different scale of concern for the deaths of Americans and the deaths of foreigners with brown skins.There is national grief expressed for example, for the 15 Americans killed while serving themselves spaghetti in a military mess tent, while Iraqi men, women and children are being blown away, unremarked, at their dining tables on a daily basis by U.S. bombs and cannon fire.There is untoward concern about 100 missing Americans in resorts like Phuket, but little anguish over the 45,000 locals swept away by the same sudden flood.For that matter, such concern as has been expressed in America over the tragic loss of life around the rim of the Indian Ocean this past weekend as a result of a natural disaster stands in marked contrast to the complete lack of concern (much less guilt) expressed about the lost of more than twice that many lives at the hands of American troops in Iraq, where an estimated 100,000 civilians have thus far paid the ultimate price for their country's "liberation."Surely the world's richest nation could spare a few thousand rescue troops and medical teams and a billion dollars or so to help prevent the inevitable epidemics and starvation that will follow this latest natural catastrophe in one of the world's poorest regions. But then, where would those troops and medics come from? They're busy killing Iraqis and patching up the American wounded in the latest U.S. imperial adventure, and can't be spared for humanitarian gestures.And where would that $1 billion come from? Wealthy Americans would have to either forgo a few dollars in tax relief next year, or the military in Iraq would have to do without a couple of F-16 fighters.And yet, if America really wanted to show that it cared about the Third World, and indeed the Muslim world, for that matter, here would be an excellent opportunity to prove it, by providing real , instead of just token assistance to the hard-hit Muslim communities in Bangladesh and Somalia, Indonesia and southern Thailand.On Christmas Day, President Bush offered up a maudlin, sugar-coated "message of compassion" to the nation, urging the American public to consider the less fortunate. That same day, he offered up the national equivalent of a few surplus soup cans to the victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami.His words would have seemed more sincere and heartfelt had he offered to apply even some of the tens of millions of dollars that corporations and the wealthy are offering in legal bribes to help pay for his inauguration festivities to relief efforts instead.We should all be ashamed.]

These articles from this site about sum up my opinion of the matter.

www.counterpunch.org

Too Bush Killing Iraqis
A Shameful Response to Disaster
By DAVE LINDORFF

Word that the U.S. government is offering a paltry $10 million in aid to those countries whose coasts were devastated by tidal waves from the largest earthquake in 40 years should be a national embarrassment. That a nation which can talk casually about $400-$500 billion annual deficits, and about spending upwards of $100 billion a year in sowing destruction in Iraq can't come up with more than pocket change for disaster relief in an event that has displaced over a million people and rocked the earth in its orbit is mind-boggling.

But then, it's important to remember that there are disasters both natural and unnatural, and the American public and its chosen political system have markedly different responses to the two. There is also a different scale of concern for the deaths of Americans and the deaths of foreigners with brown skins.

There is national grief expressed for example, for the 15 Americans killed while serving themselves spaghetti in a military mess tent, while Iraqi men, women and children are being blown away, unremarked, at their dining tables on a daily basis by U.S. bombs and cannon fire.

There is untoward concern about 100 missing Americans in resorts like Phuket, but little anguish over the 45,000 locals swept away by the same sudden flood.

For that matter, such concern as has been expressed in America over the tragic loss of life around the rim of the Indian Ocean this past weekend as a result of a natural disaster stands in marked contrast to the complete lack of concern (much less guilt) expressed about the lost of more than twice that many lives at the hands of American troops in Iraq, where an estimated 100,000 civilians have thus far paid the ultimate price for their country's "liberation."

Surely the world's richest nation could spare a few thousand rescue troops and medical teams and a billion dollars or so to help prevent the inevitable epidemics and starvation that will follow this latest natural catastrophe in one of the world's poorest regions. But then, where would those troops and medics come from? They're busy killing Iraqis and patching up the American wounded in the latest U.S. imperial adventure, and can't be spared for humanitarian gestures.

And where would that $1 billion come from? Wealthy Americans would have to either forgo a few dollars in tax relief next year, or the military in Iraq would have to do without a couple of F-16 fighters.

And yet, if America really wanted to show that it cared about the Third World, and indeed the Muslim world, for that matter, here would be an excellent opportunity to prove it, by providing real , instead of just token assistance to the hard-hit Muslim communities in Bangladesh and Somalia, Indonesia and southern Thailand.

On Christmas Day, President Bush offered up a maudlin, sugar-coated "message of compassion" to the nation, urging the American public to consider the less fortunate. That same day, he offered up the national equivalent of a few surplus soup cans to the victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami.

His words would have seemed more sincere and heartfelt had he offered to apply even some of the tens of millions of dollars that corporations and the wealthy are offering in legal bribes to help pay for his inauguration festivities to relief efforts instead.

We should all be ashamed.


Heartless in Crawford
Bush and Tsunamis
By WALTER BRASCH

On Sunday, Dec. 26, an earthquake-triggered tsunami with an effect of 1,000 miles from its epicenter in the Indian Ocean near Sumatra devastated 12 countries. Within hours, numerous countries and private social service agencies had begun massive relief operations. President George W. Bush, vacationing on his ranch in Crawford, Texas, made no public statements. His press office, however, released a 121-word press expressing the President's "condolences," and that the Bush Administration would provide all "appropriate assistance" to the affected nations. The statement did not directly quote the President. In contrast, German chancellor Gerhard Schröder cut short his vacation to return to Berlin.

On Monday, Bush's deputy press secretary indicated that Bush "received a special briefing" about the tragedy," that the administration's "thoughts and prayers are with all those who are suffering," and that the U.S. "will be a leading partner" in relief operations.

On Tuesday, the President bicycled and continued to clear brush from his ranch. He said nothing to the American public, to the media, or to the international community. However, the deputy press secretary did say that the President was "saddened and has extended his condolences for this terrible tragedy." When challenged as to why the public silence, a White House official bluntly stated, "The President wanted to be fully briefed on our efforts. He didn't want to make a symbolic statement about, 'We feel your pain.'" It was an excuse for why the man who believes he is a "compassionate conservative" once again failed to speak out during yet another extended vacation. More important, it was a disgusting attack upon Bill Clinton who did speak out shortly after the devastation and, when president, was quick to let world leaders know that the United States would provide understanding, sympathy, and supplies for humanitarian relief-not unlike world leaders who were quick to express their outrage and assistance following 9/11, a year into Bush's first term.

That second day after the 9.0 underwater earthquake unleashed more than 30-foot waves of destruction, Jan Egeland, United Nations emergency relief coordinator, bluntly stated that the world's rich nations were normally "stingy" in their response to humanitarian aid. Of the world's 30 richest countries, the United States ranks near the bottom with contributions of 0.14 percent of its gross national product, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. (Norway, with 0.92 percent, is the highest.)

"The United States is not stingy," pouted Colin Powell, the outgoing secretary of state. There was no mention that the Bush Administration a week earlier proposed cutting back its contribution to the World Food Bank. Nevertheless, following Egeland's challenge, the United States announced it would donate another $20 million in aid, for a total of $35 million.

By then, Canada, with a population of about 11 percent that of the U.S. and a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) about 6 percent that of the U.S., pledged $33 million. Spain, with a population of about one-seventh that of the U.S. and a GDP about 6 percent that of the U.S., quickly pledged more than $68 million in relief, twice that initially committed by the U.S. Australia, with a population about 7 percent and a GDP about 4 percent of that of the United States, pledged $20 million. Japan, with a population about two-fifths and a GDP about half that of the U.S., pledged at least $40 million; the United Kingdom, with a population of one-fifth and a GDP of about 13 percent of that of the U.S. also pledged at least $40 million. France, with a population about one-fifth that of the U.S. and a GDP about one-tenth that of the U.S., quickly pledged $27 million. Also responding quickly, with statements by their leaders coupled with financial and humanitarian assistance, were dozens of other countries. Israel contributed millions and pledged a 150-member medical team; other countries had already been shipping thousands of tons of relief supplies. International aid organizations believe more than $14 billion will be needed for humanitarian assistance, much of it donated by individuals and corporations.

On Wednesday, the third day after the earthquake and resulting tsunami, with the death toll approaching 70,000, and expected to rise to more than 100,000, with more than two million expected to be homeless, with substantial health and sanitation problems for those who lived, and with millions now questioning why America's president hadn't spoken out or committed more resources, George W. Bush finally held a news conference on his ranch.

"Laura and I, and the American people, are shocked and we are saddened," said the President at the beginning of a 327-word statement that took only about three minutes to deliver. He said that earlier that morning he spoke with the leaders of India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Indonesia, four of the countries hit hardest by the disaster. He then announced American disaster experts were in the affected areas, that he had ordered an aircraft carrier group to divert to the Indian Ocean, a hospital ship, seven water-producing ships, a Marine expeditionary unit and several aircraft to assist relief operations.

With more than 125,000 uniformed military personnel in Iraq, perhaps another 15,000 in Afghanistan, and the Reserves and National Guard stretched so thin that tours of duty in Iraq have been irrevocably extended, the possibility of a massive American presence in the affected countries by anyone other than civilians working for social service agencies is minimal. "We will prevail over this destruction," announced the commander-in-chief who believes he is a wartime president.

The previous year, the U.S. Agency for International Development provided about $2.4 billion for humanitarian relief, much of it for work in Afghanistan and Iraq, the largest contribution of any country in the world. President Bush believes the United States might provide as much as $ 1 billion in cash and in-kind donations (the cost of maintaining the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in the Indian Ocean is figured into the totals) to assist the nations hit by the worst natural disaster in more than four decades. That $1 billion, if all of it is sent to the affected nations, would be about one-half of one percent of what is planned for the war in Iraq. It was what the President decided would be "appropriate."

Also this one:

Us, Stingy?
It's All Relative
By DAVE LINDORFF

Cost of one F-22 Raptor tactical fighter jet -- $225 million

Cost of the ongoing U.S. war in Iraq--$228 million/day

Amount spent by Kerry and Bush campaigns -- $400 million

U.S. aid to Yushenko camp in recent Ukrainian conflict -- $30+ million

Estimated cost of Bush's Second Inauguration and Ball -- $ 40+ million

Amount of U.S. tax cuts under Bush -- $1 trillion

Cost of the U.S. Iraq War in 2004 -- $147 billion

U.S. reconstruction aid budgeted for Iraq (though never spent!) -- $18 billion

Amount the U.S. initially in aid to Indian Ocean tsunami victims -- $ 10 million

Amount U.S. offered in tsunami aid after being chastised by UN official -- $35 million

I think a large source of the arguements here in the psychic self defense forum is partly due to sometimes not realizing how our posts come across to others.  Also, a differentiation needs to be made between run of the mill neg attacks and attacks which are the equivalent of mental rape.

Tayesin, I'm certain that your are trying to help, and its sounds like the Golden Light method you describe has been succesful.   However, I wish to show how your post might come across to Kaili and others.  I an going to change certain words slightly in order to demonstrate this:

This person is right on the money ! He has worked out for himself that healing and preventing mental rape is about working at strengthening your Self. During the process Mc Arthur will find that he is much more powerful than he previously thought and will also remember the tool for the most effective way of dealing with rapists.

This ably illustrates what I have been saying here for the past 18 months or so.... about helping yourself instead of being totally reliant upon others to do it all for you. Which seems to be the problem with many victims of mental rape, who seek assistance but refuse to do anything to actually help them self.

Lastly, there are a small number of rape victims who post in the psychic self-defense section who are extremely arrogant, downright abusive at times, and always appear as if they are suffering through no cause of their own.... and, usually become very agitated when informed that it was themselves who allowed and arranged to experience the mental rape they write about here. How long before these rape victims stop shooting down the real helpers and actually get off their own bums and do something positive for themselves ?

A few months ago I wrote about how I most effectively deal with Attacks in the physical, astral and soul levels. Some rape victims just threw crap on me and what I was offering them... you know who you are... so there is no need to name names. Some people are starting to use this advice and finding out for themselves just how powerful a tool it really is.

For example, daem0n has recently been working in realms far beyond anything most of you will ever experience... I know this as fact because I have helped out when the occasion was needed in higher realms than I had opened up to prior to that.

Last night he was attacked by an entity that we could call an ancient god, and since this being was extremely powerful, as a god would be, daem0n used the golden light of the Love vibration to stun and work on the Entity before severing it's cord/connection to the hosts. Today he is successful in that confrontation.

When I add this to my own success rate with using this Loving method, anything these detractors can think up is paled into insignificance! So much for too many OBE's makes Johnny an air head ....thanks K !

So for those of you who seek real help with your problems, I suggest you steer away from those victims of mental rape who do nothing for themselves except complain and abuse/attack others because they themselves have no real understanding of their own problems nor their own Self...especially when it is most probably the rapists who are in control of them.

Please do not take this as an attack, I simply wish to show you how this post might come across to others.  Also:

Lastly, there are a small number of people who post in the psychic self-defense section who are extremely arrogant, downright abusive at times, and always appear as if they are suffering through no cause of their own.... and, usually become very agitated when informed that it was themselves who allowed and arranged to experience the attacks they write about here.

Many of those who have experienced the worst attacks cannot astral project, or have been spiritually blocked, and as such, have no present means of proving to themselves whether or not this is true.  Do you have another means of providing irrefutable proof that they have indeed choosen/pre-destined every painful detail of their lives beforehand?  If not, then I think using this as a guideline is unfair to the victims.  I feel that even when helping others, it is good to always keep the counter-arguements for our experiences in mind, no matter how much we may have proven it to ourselves.

Also, as I pointed out above, consider for a moment what would be said when trying to help someone who was raped against their will.  Are we REALLY going to tell them that they choose this before birth, and that they thus partly caused it?  Of course not.  Only if they were well on their way to projecting and had healed themselves of their pain would I mention such.

I think it needs to be communicated to those suffering from neg attacks that when it is said they need to work on balancing their elements, developing love as a shield, getting rid of emotional hooks, etc. is that we are not making a personal judgment on their spirituality or love for others.  

All of us have imperfections or emotional baggage that can be used against us.  Furthermore, being spiritual and loving does not necessarily mean we are adept at utilizing these things to shield ourselves from neg attacks.  Based on what I have seen thus far, it may very well be the case that negs tend to go after people who are MORE spiritual and balanced, more psychically attuned than the average person.  Not only does it provide them with more energy, but a means of manipulating an individuals talents or qualities to their own advantage and self-evolution. So to those suffering from neg attacks, the fact negs found emotional hooks or chinks in their psychic armor does not mean you were any more flawed than the rest of us.  Indeed, the very opposite might have been the case.

I can well understand why this would be perceived as a judgment though, considering as how in the past on here some fluff bunny miscreants have basically scoffed at the victims, taking up a "Well, you must just not be loving enough or had bad karma, thats why they got in" attitude, or worse yet, assuming that victims of neg attack must be either delusional or lying since according to their belief system, negs cannot possibly exist.  Interestingly enough, I notice that many of these types live a fairly comfortable existence in industrialized countries, and have not had to suffer from the same horrors as the victims.  They seem to think that sitting back from a distance and offering Mcdonalds crap spirituality new age advice is the same as sitting down and listening to someone, and sticking with them in their suffering through thick and thin.  However, I didn't see any of this attitude in Nita's posts.

Those who have suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, or have been raped or abused, need much help and understanding to get them through their pain and ordeal.  However, only the victim themselves can fully make amends with their pain and move on, others can only help so far.  So, as McArthur and Nita mentioned, daily personal effort is an absolute must.  Assistance from others can only help you so far.  It may take years, and there may be many ups and downs, and you will need people to be your friends and listen along the way, but there is a way out.

Hi Dan.  

My experiences were similar to yours, I too was raised a Jehovahs Witness until I looked more into the religions history and ethics .  That was a little over a year ago.

At first I wasn't sure quite what to think.  I felt lost and still very attached to my former beliefs, and it seemed to me as if was those small beliefs versus thousands of other beliefs which, on the surface, seemed contradictary.  In particular, I couldn't stand the thought that good people wouldn't be able to live forever in a paradise earth as the Jehovah's Witnesses taught.  However, it gets better over time, and you began to see how it really wasn't a matter of this belief is wrong and this one is right, but that all are part of a greater whole.  For instance, through research I found the things people have seen and experienced through astral projection and near death experiences point to a post-mordem existance far more wondrous and awe-inspiring than what I had formerly believed.  Some good sites you might want to check are these:

www.near-death.com

www.afterlife-knowledge.com

While I have yet to experience many of these things myself, seeing evidence that people would indeed continue on after death and have a chance at happiness did much to release some of my anxiety.  I would suggest doing research over a number of different areas, look into every philosophy that interests you and crossreference and compare the information.  Also, strive to establish a consistent program of meditation and character/psychic development, as personal experiences will ultimately be far more powerful than just research alone.

Who is God and his wife? How do I communicate to them?

I look upon God in various ways.  Here, in our universe from which we were born, there are various essences and attributes which have been relfected down into us.  The Hermetic axiom of "As above, so below"  illustrates how we are inseparate from the world around us, and how the qualites we embody also exist, in some form, within the greater energies from which we emerged.  And, because we are not separate from the rest of the universe, our heavenly parents are, in a sense, right here in our very hearts.  As to communicating with them, think of it in this way.  They are communicating with us each and every moment, just that we don't notice.  While I'm not particularily good at my meditation, I've found that if I take the time to still my thoughts and simply observe the world around you, that it speaks back to us in subtle ways, even conveys a sense of peace and belonging as you get better at listening to it.


[/quote]
What is the point of human existence?
Does Magic, in any form, exist?

The point of existence is something which, I believe, we all have to answer for ourselves.  IMO, I feel that in a sense, existence is its own point.

Based on the evidence I have seen, yes, magic does exist.  However, its best not merely to think of magic in terms of utilizing various powers, but rather, as the very fabric of creation itself.  Every act is a magical act, just some seem more magical than others from our point of view.  

I you're interested in magic and the Kaballah, some good books I've enjoyed and learned from are Initiation into Hermetics by Franz Bardon, various books by Israeli Regardie, as well as other books on ceremonial magic.  Books on the Kaballah and Gnosticism were especially interesting for me, as I could see traces of the earlier beliefs from which Christianity arose.

Anyway, if you want to continue talking to me, send me an email or PM.  Good luck in your search.  

Well, I don't know if this is what you were referring too, but for the best book on scientific evidence of ESP and the paranormal I would suggest "The Conscious Universe" by Dean Radin.

Its not a matter of casting off or suppressing emotions, more so a matter of balancing them.  For instance, if I have lots of deep seated anger or insecurities from the past I haven't worked out, it can interfere with my ability to discern things accurately in day to day life.  And based on what I've read, its even worse in the astral plane since it responds to emotion so readily.

Its probably a difference of degrees.  When you first start projecting, it might only be 20% real, with 80% emotional illusion, but gradually improve as times goes by and you get better.

Based on what I have seen, Randi is a dogmaticist, and his 1 million dollar challenge, despite all the media it gets, is a load of rubbish. There's plenty of evidence for it on the internet if you're interested.

www.alternativescience.com/james-randi.org

www.sheldrake.org/controversies/randi.html

http://www.victorzammit.com/articles/montague.html

If I was ever to develop abilities that merited undergoing a test with scientists, it would be with open-minded scientists who don't care about going against the materialist grain, not with any of CSICOPs hit men.

Hi Nita, sorry it took me awhile to reply.

I've read through both IIH and the Kybalion, and started doing some of the exercises a bit.  The thing is, at the moment I'm not entirely sure how to go about with my magic practice.  At first I was just trying to astral project, then I started doing Golden Dawn rituals, then I got IIH, and then a book on Tattwa cards.  I'm not certain how to organize everything.  Although so far IIH seems like the best bet, for some reason I don't want to stop doing the GD rituals.  I still want to astral project as well.  Could some of the GD rituals act as a supplement to Franz Bardon's system, or are there elements of the two that would tend to interfere with each other? Should I just do everything together whenever I can find the time?

Hi Nita.

I've read in a number of places that one should not attempt Goetic evocations until they've established contact with their Holy Guardian Angel.  Is this true?  Also, other than things like knowledge or magical services, are there really any reasons for which anyone would need for summoning a demon?  I'm wondering because I've also read that working with Goetic demons helps a magician bring under control those aspects of his mind that the demons relate too.

This method, also called Astral Transference, is discussed on pages 414-419 of Robert's new book Mastering Astral Projection.  What I find interesting is the image on page 417, as it looks like a Tattwa card.  In some of the magical traditions, tattwa cards are used to train concentration and mental project by imagining oneself going through the card.  Is this anything similar?

Also, I've noticed that this site discusses something similar to mental projection as well.  www.afterlife-knowledge.com

6) In qigong a person is supposedly increasing their amount of yang energy. How does someone increase their yin energy?

6)Physical Work, less mental work.

Not to be nitpicky or anything, but except for some rare styles, in most qigong philosophy yin is classified as sitting mediation and more mental work, while its the qi exercises that are more yang.  Are you sure this wans't what Michael meant?

Cube's alarm method did get me to dream some this morning, though it was more-so my snooze botton.

In one dream, I was the incredible Hulk, making mile-long leaps over a series of mountains just like he did in that movie. Then there was another me, which came to an ancient, slightly worn stone sign which seemed to be a former marker for a high school.

Then next dream was amazingly vivid, almost real. In it, I was visiting a computer store in New York, and they mentioned software was being slipped through the walls and sold by another backalley distributer. I headed out of the building, and went down a side alley, coming to an underground maze-complex made with walls of cement blocks painted in bluish-gray. There were a number of people down there taking care of various odds and ends, some of them with those shopping carts. It was a strange place. I came back to an area less populated than the others, and rounded the bend. After being checked by two guards, the escorted to an area with hundreds of lockers set in the wall. People were working in small alcoves on their computers, software being slipped through the walls to be distributed to the poor. They mentioned something to me about the ups and donws of the stocks taking a heavy toll on the businesses, but the products were distributed to the poor nonetheless.

This dream might sound rather ordinary, but the interesting thing about it was how clear and vivid it appeared, almost like real life. I also sensed that there were other darker areas to the underground complex, leading down to mysterious areas within the bowels of the city.