army units on american soil for "civil unrest"

i really hate getting lumped in with the paranoid gun nut crowd, but this whole situation is pretty unbelievable

here are the quick & dirty bits:

An initial news report in the Army Times newspaper last month noted that in addition to emergency response the force “may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control.”

"Any military force has the inherent right to self-defense. And if the situation was inherently dangerous, then potentially the Secretary of Defense would allow them to carry their weapons, but it would only be for self- and unit-defense. This force has got no role in a civil disturbance or civil unrest, any of those kinds of things."

"Colonel Boatner talked about this unit, what it’s trained for. Well, let’s look at what it’s trained for. This is the 3rd Infantry, 1st Brigade Combat unit that has spent three of the last five years in Iraq in counterinsurgency."

"The whole question here about what the Pentagon is doing patrolling in the United States gets to the real heart of the matter, which is, do we have a democracy here? I mean, there is a law on the books called the Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act that says that the president of the United States, as commander-in-chief, cannot put the military on our streets. And this is a violation of that, it seems to me.

"President Bush tried to get around this act a couple years ago in the Defense Authorization Act.... the President isn’t supposed to be using the military in this fashion, and though the President, true to form, appended a signing statement to that saying he’s not going to be governed by that.

"National Security Presidential Directive 51, that he signed on May 9th of 2007, Amy, this gives the President enormous powers to declare a catastrophic emergency and to bypass our regular system of laws, essentially, to impose a form of martial law.

"And if you look at that National Security Presidential Directive, what it says, that in any incident where there is extraordinary disruption of a whole range of things, including our economy, the President can declare a catastrophic emergency. Well, we’re having these huge disturbances in our economy. President Bush could today pick up that National Security Directive 51 and say, 'We’re in a catastrophic emergency. I’m going to declare martial law, and I’m going to use this combat brigade to enforce it.'

"...Now the Pentagon is doing sweeps of areas before, you know, a political convention? That used to be law enforcement’s job. That used to be domestic civil law enforcement job. It’s now being taken over by the Pentagon. That should concern us."

the domestic spying is bad enough. the president just signing whatever he wants to bills passed by congress, saying "thats nice but i dont care" -- THATS bad enough. but i dont know if i can take the idea of "the army is just here for your own good if things get out of hand. and they have tanks and tons of ammo." if its just for training exercises, do we need the ammo? the tanks? the force multipliers? the non-lethal suppression shit like tasers and who knows what else? (i cant believe im saying this, but -- microwaves? ELF? anything???)

if all its about is preparation and training for coordination with a bunch of different agencies, you can run sims for that. you can dry run over and over. its not like we dont have tons of airbases and national guard units all around the country that can respond and also be trained. why add a bunch of ARMED COUNTERINSURGENCY TRAINED active duty soldiers??? it doesnt make sense for preparation. you can prepare in sims. the air force does it all the time

i think i might ignore all this if it wasnt for one thing. in a month, the hardcore conservative candidate might get totally waxed by a democrat. a black democrat. a black democrat the conservatives keep trying to call a secret muslim. and i think a lot of black people and a lot of unarmed liberals are going to vote for that black democratic candidate. and i think if he loses by some funny means, theres going to be serious shit happening on the streets. serious shit that cant fight back against a fucking army counterinsurgency force

i know, i know, i sound so fucking paranoid

i dont even know where i heard this before, maybe it was this blog, but i want you to think of something:

think of a country, like a banana republic somewhere

the son of the countrys old intelligence chief runs for presidente. only it looks like hes losing. then his brother who runs a province on the outside of the country makes sure that a bunch of votes dont get counted for the other candidate for presidente. then a bunch of judges who got appointed by their father and their father's bosses sign off on not counting the ballots. so youve got the former secret agency chief and his judge buddies signing off on his one son throwing out some ballots so his other son can win the presidency

only that's not a banana republic. that's florida. and the bushes. in 2000.

jeb bush, the son of a former president and CIA chief, had his secretary of state katherine harris purge thousands of people from the voter rolls and prevented a recount of thousands of ballots. there were reportedly also lots of police in poor areas of miami stopping blacks and hispanics and putting them through security checks and keeping them from getting to the polls before they closed. (minorities vote democrat in much higher numers). then a supreme court that was stacked with republican appointees signed off on it. we lived through it, so it doesnt seem so weird. its america, right? we're not really crooked. but if that happened in even MEXICO, wed think that was the most corrupt fucked up shit wed ever heard

but we were okay with it. and maybe wed be okay again. maybe it would sound totally natural for the polls to get fucked up in LA and THE ARMY come in and reestablish order and OOPS the black guy lost in a last minute SHOCKER

i dont know anymore. i feel like fucking crying aabout being worried like this. we know how much those buzzwords from the bush admin meant. compassionate conservatism meant "FUCK YOU" to people who werent conservative and "FUNDING CUTS" to anyone who wasnt. "youre either with us or against us" stopped being about the rest of the world in about 10 seconds, and suddenly it was about anyone who didnt buy their shit 100% and dared to ask questions. "enhanced interrogation" is FUCKING TORTURE

so i guess when i hear "civil unrest and crowd control" you have to just give me a pass for a second for thinking "occupation force" because its not like they havent given me example after example after example to believe that theyd be that ballsy and cynical and fucking evil

Why MKUltra?

This is something I've been thinking about off and on since I wrote up my little breakdown on MKUltra: why that? Our government has done so much evil to us in the name of good and has crossed the lines of civil liberties more times than I can count. It's doing it right now in Guantanamo, arguably with Echelon, likely with other forms of wiretapping and data-mining. So if something this bad is still going on, why do fringe groups — especially right-wing ones — get so upset about things like MKUltra instead of something like Cointelpro?

Wikipedia actually has a pretty decent write-up about it, but here are the five things you need to know about Cointelpro:
1. It lasted for roughly the same period as MKUltra, from the mid fifties to early seventies, was conducted by the FBI, and it was meant to keep the existing socio-political order intact by pretty much any means necessary.
2. FBI agents were permitted to conduct raids and beatings, destroy property and act like Vikings in black suits.
3. FBI agents planted fake news stories and flyers, wrote up fake subversive literature, all to scare Mom and Pop to death. They used the media to demonize even peaceful groups.
4. Agents infiltrated protest groups. Sometimes they did so to push the groups over the edge into doing something wrong, so they could be prosecuted. Sometimes they were just there to obviously BE plants, so other members would get scared off, refuse to do anything or distrust everyone else.
5. Massive civil rights violations and perversions of the legal system were carried out to bankrupt, jail and terrorize protest groups.
But for the last 20 years or so, the big parts of anti-government fringe groups have been right-wing, and in that time people seem to have gotten lots more worried about MKUltra than Cointelpro, despite the second one having a ton more effect. It's been bugging me, but I think I know why.

Independent Instead of Collectivist
A lot of right-wing fringe puts a premium on individuality. It's why so many are libertarian. There's this attitude that you might want to do the same things, but mainly you go home to Fortress Your House. The biggest thing you worry about is Martial Law from the government, and you don't need to be best buddies with other people to fight back. But a lot of leftist organizations in the 60s, even if they weren't Marxist, were collectivist. Collective action, collective effort. It's a lot easier to poison a group than a bunch of individuals. You get members turning on each other. If you're all sharing together and sacrificing together, all it takes is one fake bank account slip showing that a guy in the group is sitting on tons of cash, and you've just torn the whole thing apart. So I think rightist groups don't care, because they don't think it's their problem. Even though it is.

Personal Subversion Instead of Violence and Intimidation
I think MKUltra spooks rightists more because it's about subverting the individual by using invisible forces. Ultra-Low-Frequency, LSD, something else in the water, hypnosis. If you're an individualist, you only have to rely on yourself. But what if the government can get to you and get YOU to betray YOU? MKUltra's the unseen enemy, making an enemy of you. Compare that to violence and intimidation. Those? Big deal. If the government comes for us, we'll shoot the bastards. The seen enemy you can arm against is less scary.

Cointelpro Targeted the Left
Mainly though, I think it's politics. Cointelpro spent over 80% of its effort on leftist organizations. Socialist, communist, pro-black, pro-hispanic, pro-women and pro-gay groups. Let's be honest, a lot of right-wing anti-government types hate socialism, communism, blacks, hispanics, homosexuals and women's liberation. It doesn't mean they're wrong about the government, but they're wrong about all that other stuff (except communism). Even if these groups had the same distrust they did, those on the right said, "Fuck 'em!" and were happy to see the feds do their work for them. It was against their self-interest, but on the surface it looked like it served their interests. They bought the FBI propaganda: these are all violent blacks and man-raping queers who want to be just like RUSSIA.

MKUlta must have just been scarier. It came for individuals, turned them against themselves. It came after anybody, not just the queers and the darkies and the commies. For an individual who needs a clear enemy, it must still be really spooky. And it is! It still is!

That's the thing I think that bugs me the most. Both of these programs were inexcusable. Horrible. Exactly the opposite of what I want my country to be. But elements of the right have demonized the left so much that they almost seem to compliment Cointelpro. In the meantime, their crazy conspiracies about continuing MKUltra and GOVERNMENT MIND CONTROL (which goes against the basic science) have made MKUltra kind of a joke. They also make you sound like a joke if you condemn it or even really talk about it. You also make people think you're like one of those righist groups.

Now that I think about it, I'm pissed off. I'm pissed off to get lumped in with that crowd just because I think history proves I should distrust my government. And I'm pissed off that these same people seem to just write off one of the most important reasons FOR that distrust.

I don't know where I was going with this. Sorry.

Okay, So Let's Talk MKUltra

Since this has come up in a few of the most recent posts, let's talk about it. Created in the early 1950s and lasting (allegedly) up until about 1973, the CIA's MKUltra program sought to develop new technologies in mind control, hypnosis, behavioral modification, etc.

Some say the narrative begins with Operation Paperclip, the American intelligence community's program to harvest as many Nazi scientists, doctors and engineers as possible (and cynically capitalize on knowledge gleaned from their atrocities-disguised-as-experiments, while also keeping these men out of the hands of the Soviets). Others say it was inspired by POWs from the Korean Conflict, who'd been broken and distorted by the Chinese, Russians and North Koreans.

Here's all you really need to know:

1. It was real.
2. It was still bullshit anyway.

Yes, MKUltra probably killed people via accident or deliberate acts. Yes, it violated people's civil liberties. Yes, it may have poisoned their bodies and minds with chemicals administered without consent. Yes, it was part of a cover-up by Director Richard Helms (who destroyed almost all the files on it). It doesn't mean any of this shit works. It doesn't. Here's why:

1. It Relied on Agents for Science
A lot of time you had field men administering this junk, often doing it in the field, often without any control group, often within social settings where you've got a billion variables going on. Most of what we know about MKUltra was ultra-unscientific. You can put protons in a linear accelerator and fire them at each other, but if you've got the two dudes from Bartles & Jaymes watching the dials, they're going to thank you for your support and tell you something useless. MKUltra was morally and socially disgusting in a society of law and liberty, but it also managed to be an appalling demonstration of Bad Science.

2. It Relied on Belief in Hypnotism
Hynotism is bullshit. If it weren't, you'd see it all the time. Since you don't, what does that tell you? There'd by hypnosis rape cases, hypnosis burglaries, hypnosis-forced-suicides. It wouldn't just be a Vegas show or on the Sci-Fi channel. When a huge wing of your science boils down to "things from the carnival are real!" then you're not learning anything. The only way you can believe that hypnosis as it related to MKUltra meant anything is if you can believe there's a secret society of people who have this ability and who are kept out of public light by the government or hypnotize their way out of detection. Since almost every hypnotist you're ever going to meet is a grifter or a flake, you can either bury your head in conspiracy or wake up to this being another demonstration of BAD SCIENCE.

3. It Relied on Shoddy Psychology
At the time, what we knew about personality disorders and other forms of abnormal psych was about a tenth as much as we know today. Considering we know slightly more than jack about that now, again, NOT something to base all your science on. Unless you like (you guessed it) BAD SCIENCE.

4. It Relied on LSD and MDA for Behavioral Sabotage and Control
Have you ever tried controlling someone on acid? Seriously? Come on. MDA (related to MDMA) was used to make people feel euphoric and blab or lose inhibitions, but like booze and other drugs, it basically worked on people who were the type of people to talk and not on the type of people who didn't. Meaning that it did nothing significant. With acid, they could induce panic in some people, not in others. Again, it's an unpredictable and unproductive effect that usually depends on the person.

In summary, any time your big conspiracy against the American people is being run by guys without training, using Vegas act techniques for their science, going off pop-psych about MULTIPLE PERSONALITIES and powered by LSD, you're going to come up with a bunch of bullshit.

That video LS linked plays right into all this stuff. People believe it counts as science because they want to believe it does, just as much as the CIA did. And to prove it that guy who made the video has a bunch of popular movie clips and pop-psych explanations and then puts in some SPOOOOOOKY images, but it doesn't tell you anything you couldn't dream up after sticking a fork in half your brain.

MKUltra is significant because of what it says about our government — not because of what its results said at all.