Bush/Cheney Torture: a very bad idea, done very badly, with real experts sidelined by religious zealots.

And in your closing comments I also think you’re onto something: how we need a new Left (as we clearly do), which can dare to imagine a new world …

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“One concerned possible attacks on banks or financial institutions in the Northeastern United States. That warning appears to fit with repeated statements by Al Qaeda leaders about the need to attack the U.S. economy, a mission that Osama bin Laden himself touted in a recently discovered home video. Another tip from Zubaydah warned that Al Qaeda operatives could be planning attacks on U.S. supermarkets and shopping malls,” Newsweek reported.”
http://pubrecord.org/torture/5086/cia-ig-zubaydahs-torture-preceded-john-yoos-torture-memo/

Plus the corroborated ‘dirty bomb’ plot mentioned by Agent Soufan:

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Some of the information that is cited in the memos — the revelation that Mr. Mohammed had been the mastermind of 9/11, for example, and the uncovering of Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber — was gained from another terrorism suspect, Abu Zubaydah, by “informed interrogation,” conducted by an F.B.I. colleague and me. The arrest of Walid bin Attash, one of Osama bin Laden’s most trusted messengers, which was also cited in the 2005 C.I.A. memo, was thanks to a quick-witted foreign law enforcement officer, and had nothing to do with harsh interrogation of anyone. The examples go on and on.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/opinion/06soufan.html

Bush/Cheney Torture: a very bad idea, done very badly, with real experts sidelined by religious zealots.

Listening to recordings, both Watts and Campbell startle me when they say things, as they often do, like “Nobody really believes in god anymore” or ‘the old time religion is of no use to us anymore.” I can’t help but wonder how much of the motivation of the notorious neocon crazies is reaction to overstatements such as those. In a lot of ways, it’s obvious, with hindsight, that reports of the death of god were highly exaggerated (although I do agree with Watts: the mechanistic god is dead; it’s amazing that he presaged the announcement made by Stephen Jay Gould in 2001, that reductionism has failed for biological systems. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/19/opinion/19GOUL.html?ex=1147147200&en=bd357bfe901a9fd5&ei=5070&pagewanted=all .)

It’s often said that the Left fails to talk about religion. Maybe we can talk about mythology, instead. One of the most hopeful things I remember Campbell saying is, it’s just a trick of the mind that evicts us from paradise and separates us from the Promised Land; a trick of the mind is all we need to return.

The myths are the story as the propagandists want it to be told and believed; the news is what actually happens when the latest generation of greedheads fail to learn the lessons of the myths they would weaponize.

I will be very surprised in Karl Rove has no familiarity with Campbell that can be documented. He’s a master myth-maker, now caught in his own webs.

But that’s not why I dropped by. I happened upon a clip from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart that features the sidelining of the only Arabic translators we had.

November 18, 2002

Don’t Ask, Don’t Translate

Firing gay linguists from the Army is something that Osama Bin Laden and George W. Bush can agree on.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-november-18-2002/don-t-ask–don-t-translate

Earlier, I found one mentioning the arrest of José Padilla, complete with ‘dirty bomb’ reference. Is it the same plot fabricated by Zubaydah under waterboarding?

I read about it at TPR
http://pubrecord.org/torture/5086/cia-ig-zubaydahs-torture-preceded-john-yoos-torture-memo/

Note the date: June 11, 2002.

Headlines – Dirty Something
The U.S. government announces a month-old arrest of an American citizen who was working with Al Qaeda to set off a dirty bomb on U.S. soil.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-june-11-2002/headlines—dirty-something

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Jose Padilla
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Padilla_%28prisoner%29

Padilla was arrested in Chicago on May 8, 2002, and was detained as a material witness until June 9, 2002, when President George W. Bush designated him an illegal enemy combatant and transferred him to a military prison, arguing that he was thereby not entitled to trial in civilian courts. Padilla was held for three-and-a-half years as an “enemy combatant” after his arrest in 2002 on suspicion of plotting a radioactive “dirty bomb” attack. That charge was dropped and his case was moved to a civilian court after pressure from civil liberties groups.

On January 3, 2006, he was transferred to a Miami, Florida, jail to face criminal conspiracy charges. On August 16, 2007, José Padilla was found guilty, by a federal jury, of charges against him that he conspired to kill people in an overseas jihad and to fund and support overseas terrorism. He was widely described in media as a suspect of planning to build and explode a “dirty bomb” in the United States, but he was not convicted on this charge.
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If someone wasn’t reading straight outta Campbell, they sure had done their homework. The whole regime, of manufacturing evidence to order by torture, to prop up a usurper, sure recapitulates ancient history, if not flat out imitating it verbatim.

Another important background element, is the overwhelming mechanization of the Western mind. If the cosmos is a construct of a cosmic tyrant, then it’s his property, and he can kinetic it around however he likes, including forcing or beating his subjects into order. That’s the archetype for the scarecrow with which one can herd Americans like cattle (I have a license to mix metaphors).

I posted a lot of excerpts from my favorite expat British philospher: Alan Watts, concerning this topic: the Western model of the cosmos is political. But we’re learning that reductionism has failed for biological systems. So we need an organic political philosophy, or we’ll keep recapping the same horror stories generated under runaway mechanism.

If we want to keep pretending that we are mechanisms, then we have to accept being machined into order by “kinetic activity,” as the colonel put it in part one. Machines can’t be citizens of a democratic republic.

I think only beings, natural born persons, can be citizens, since only human beings have this marvelous ability right here: to shape our world from within, to be aware of our own role in our own becoming. I don’t have to tell you how much different are royal subjects.

Here’s a Watts quote I found especially germane:

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But it isn’t only a matter of moral strength. It’s a matter of being asked to believe what most people feel is nonsense: that the world is run on the lines of a state. How, for example, can you be a citizen of the United States, having taken an oath that a republican form of government is the best form of government, and believe that the universe is a monarchy?

Now what has happened is, uh intelligent people have always realized that this political model for the cosmos just won’t do.
http://www.examiner.com/x-8313-Seattle-Buddhism-Examiner~y2009m9d13-Alan-Watts-Democracy-in-the-Kingdom-12-part7-How-can-citizens-of-a-republic-worship-a-monarch

How did we get jacked to war? It’s the mythology!

Cheney, Addington, Yoo et al. had been committed for years to breaking the balance of powers in the United States, to subvert the will of the Founding Fathers by ensuring that the President could act without any constraints from either politicians or the judiciary.

9/11 presented them with this opportunity, and it was combined with their new-found, paranoia-spurred obsession with inflicting violence on anyone who, in their opinion, might have any sort of involvement with 9/11, al-Qaeda, or any other international terrorist movement (including, of course, the spurious connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that were required to justify their long-cherished dream of invading Iraq), because they believed, in spite of the evidence provided by the FBI’s working methods, that these men could only be compelled to yield their secrets through brutality or torture.

And so an unanswerable Executive kidnapped, tortured and/or illegally imprisoned tens of thousands of men, and those responsible convinced themselves that, once the legal opinions were in place, they were entirely justified because, no matter what proof to the contrary was supplied, the prisoners were either all devious terrorists trained to lie by al-Qaeda, or (a la The One Percent Doctrine) had to have their rights sacrificed in pursuit of the one percent who would supply the pieces of the “mosaic” that would enable them to crush the terrorists who opposed them.

Its slightly less grand, I admit, and I may indeed have overlooked an overarching mythological template, but it contains all the elements of colossal incompetence, cruelty, paranoia, an obsession with dictatorship and senseless military ambition that I’ve come to recognize over the last three and a half years of immersing myself in this whole disreputable story.

Did you know that Joseph Campbell lectured for decades, on the power of myth to shape the world in which we enact the theater of life, at State’s Foreign Service Institute, beginning in 1956?

Would the embrace of Campbell’s comparative mythology by Rightists as the method for regime change explain the rise of the notorious “crazies?” Is that what Col. Wilkerson is referring to in this paragraph:

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Lawrence Wilkerson: But it was something this administration almost made a cult of doing — not just on interrogation, but on almost everything, whether it was Iraq, whether it was the Middle East in general, whether it was North Korea. The attitude was: Don’t talk to me from a position of expertise, talk to me from a position of fixed religious adamancy, you know.
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I think the following Campbell excerpt speaks directly to the method by which whole nations are being jacked to hell and back, stuck with the bill both ways:

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JOSEPH CAMPBELL: And so we are now to recognize in the history of our subject a secondary stage of mythic seizure: not mythic identification, ego absorbed and lost in God, but its opposite, mythic inflation, the god absorbed and lost in ego. The first, I would suggest, characterized the actual holiness of the sacrificed kings of the early hieratic city states, and the second, the mock holiness of the worshiped kings of the subsequent dynastic states. For these supposed that it was in their temporal character that they were god. That is to say, they were mad men.

Moreover, they were supported in this belief, taught, flattered, and encouraged, by their clergy, parents, wives, advisers, folk, and all, who also thought that they were god. That is to say, the whole society was mad.

Yet out of that madness sprang the great thing that we call Egyptian civilization. Its counterpart in Mesopotamia produced the dynastic states of that area; and we have adequate evidence, besides, of its force in India, the Far East, and Europe as well. In other words, a large part of the subject-matter of our science must be read as evidence of a psychological crisis of inflation. . . .

The pharaohs in their cult were no longer simply imitating the holy past, “so that the scripture might be fulfilled.” They and their priests were creating something of and for themselves. We are in the presence here of a line of grandiose, highly self-interested, prodigiously inflated egos.

On the Narmer palette [above], which was worked on two sides, two crowns appeared, one on each face; and they represented the two Egypts, which again were represented by the interlaced necks of two symbolic beasts. On one side of the palette the pharaonic principle was represented in the bird form of the falcon Horus, on the other as a mighty bull. . . .

Moreover, the ceremonial name of the Will, the final symbolic warrant of pharaonic rule, is the “Secret of the Two Partners.” What are we to think of that?

The answer appears beneath the sands of Abydos, in the tombs of the pharaohs of Dynasty II, which are enormous and exhibit every evidence of a lavish display of suttee. . . . [T]he two antagonists, Horus the hero and Seth the villain of the piece, stand side by side, together and co-equal (Figure 12), while the monarch himself is termed “the appearing of the dual power in which the two gods are at peace.” 88

The name of the Will, then, “the Secret of the Two Partners,” was a reference to the hidden understanding of the two gods, who, though they appear to be implacable enemies, are of one mind behind the scenes. . . .

Mythologically representing the inevitable dialectic of temporality, where all things appear in pairs, Horus and Seth are forever in conflict; whereas in the sphere of eternity, beyond the veil of time and space, where there is no duality, they are at one; death and life are at one; all is peace. And there it is known, also, that that same transcendent peace abides even in the cruelties of war. So

82 ORIENTAL MYTHOLOGY

that in the Narmer palette, where the pharaoh, with the lifted arm of Horus, slays the chieftain of the harpoon folk, together with six thousand enemies, who are here in the role of Seth, the scene is one of peace. And of this peace, which is the inhabiting reality of all things, all history and sorrow, the living god Pharaoh is the

Figure 12. The Dual Power: Egypt, c. 2650 B.C.

pivot. He is an epitome of the field—the universe itself—in which the pairs-of-opposites play. Hence, to follow him in death is to remain in life, there being in fact no death in the royal pasture beyond time, where the two gods are at one and the shepherd crook gives assurance.

(Campbell, 1962). The masks of god: oriental mythology, pp. 77-84. NY, NY: Penguin. http://www.examiner.com/x-8313-Seattle-Buddhism-Examiner~y2009m8d12-The-C-Street-Cult-a-Buddhist-perspective
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I agree with the colonel: Cheney is power mad.

I often read about the influence of the Republican Party at the highest levels of the CIA and intel community, esp. with regard to our “project of direct ideological transfer” described by Naomi Klein. Campbell himself showed nothing but disdain for the Democratic Party. Recall Nixon’s treasonous back-channel negotiations with Vietnam. And of course Reagan’s deal with the Iranians. And Rove’s masterful theft of national elections.

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JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I’ve been um connected, in one way or another, in a kind of, you know, talking way, with the State Department for a few years now, and the uh people down there tell me that one of their great problems is, not to do the things that the ambassador, and president and Cabinet, tell them to do.

I can tell you, my dear friends [he chuckles], the State Department is a department of very learn-ed gentlemen, they *know* what to do. But they’re only agents. The directions come from these people who you know poured money into the Democratic Party for the election, and so become ambassador to this, ambassador to that, and they’re telling these people what to do, and I’ve heard it from many of them: “Our main problem is to achieve the work as slowly as possible in order to bring about as little damage as possible.”

These are the authorities, the old people. We haven’t learned how to handle them, but in the old traditional societies, they had learned, and the reason they’d learned was that nothing much changed anyhow, things were in the times of the old people about as they had been in the times when they were young. That’s not true anymore.
Joseph Campbell Audio Collection Volume 4 Man and Myth Disc 4 The Necessity of Rites
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Dick Cheney had just suffered the Ford defeat when Campbell said that.

So here’s my unusual hypothesis: I seriously think someone took Campbell’s powerful lessons to heart, and has been using the power of myth to power weapons-grade domestic propaganda, and that’s how we find ourselves in this god-forsaken Waste Land. It’s the curse of usurpers, the lesson of the Grail legends: people who steal the insignia of office make the Truth into public enemy #1, and so can’t discern our true way forward to our true destiny.

Would that help explain Cheney’s insane secrecy? How long has that poor bastard been living within cover stories within cover stories within cover stories? Does he have any idea at all what the real world is like these days?

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So, this plan was cooked up—it was between the head of USAID’s Chile office and the head of the University of Chicago’s Economics Department—to try to change the debate in Latin America, starting in Chile, because that’s where developmentalism had gained its deepest roots. And the idea was to bring a group of Chilean students to the University of Chicago to study under a group of economists who were considered so extreme that they were on the margins of the discussion in the United States, which, of course, at the time, in the 1950s, was fully in the grips of Keynesianism. But the idea was that there would be—this would be a battle to the—a counterbalance to the emergence of left-wing ideas in Latin America, that they would go home and counterbalance the pink economists.

And so, the Chicago Boys were born. And it was considered a success, and the Ford Foundation got in on the funding. And hundreds and hundreds of Latin American students, on full scholarships, came to the University of Chicago in the 1950s and ’60s to study here to try to engage in what Juan Gabriel Valdes, Chile’s foreign minister after the dictatorship finally ended, described as a project of deliberate ideological transfer, taking these extreme-right ideas, that were seen as marginal even in the United States, and transplanting them to Latin America. That was his phrase—that is his phrase.

But today, we see that these ideas are reemerging in Latin America. They were suppressed with force, overthrown with military coups, and then Chile and Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil all became, to varying degrees, laboratories for the ideas that were taught in the classrooms of the University of Chicago.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/6/naomi_klein
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As a poet, I’ve been calling this ideological transference method *myth-jacking.*

Did you know that Rove calls himself by the names of three different mythical monsters?

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He calls *himself* “Grendel,” “Moby Dick,” and “Lord Voldemort.” He is the man ever behind the scenes, manipulating and driving the events on the surface without being seen. His hand is behind the hiring and firing of U.S. attorneys and his manipulations were a conscious effort to put federal prosecutors to work for partisan political purposes. . . . [Emphasis original.] Rove’s Monday Whoppers http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/02/hbc-90002498
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In the Secret of the Two Partners, I hear a perfect method for stealing elections. Has this been the strategy of Cheney and Rove? Are they the evil wonder twins: Cheney on the military side, Rove on the civil?