Our Occulted History: Do the Global Elite Conceal Ancient Aliens? (35 page)
We all know that addressing acute social and economic issues here in the homeland was the road not taken. Since 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security alone has doled out somewhere between $30 billion and $40 billion in direct grants to state and local law enforcement, as well as other first responders. At the same time, defense contractors have proven endlessly inventive in adapting sales pitches originally honed for the military on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan to the desires of police on the streets of San Francisco and lower Manhattan.
But instead of rebuilding America’s infrastructure, tax money has been spent on armored vehicles, SWAT armor, machine guns, helicopters, tactical gear and equipment, and even surveillance drones like those used against enemies in the Middle East. “We needed local police to play a legitimate, continuing role in furthering homeland security back in 2001,” explained former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper, now a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a group of police and criminal-justice professionals advocating drug regulation rather than prohibition. “After all, the 9/11 terrorist attacks took place on specific police beats in specific police precincts. Instead, we got a 10-year campaign of increasing militarization, constitution-abusing tactics, needless violence and heartache as the police used federal funds, equipment, and training to ramp up the drug war. It’s just tragic.” Is it merely tragic or is this part of a plan by the elite to corral citizens and keep them under control even if it means using battlefield technology to do it?
In early 2012, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was tasked to develop regulations for the testing and licensing of drones, making it easier for police agencies and private companies to put unmanned craft in the air. The FAA predicted that by 2020, there could be as many as thirty thousand drones in the air over America, some equipped with weapons, including wireless Tasers, and infrared, RFID, and facial recognition scanners.
Some drones are already in use. In late 2011, the sheriff’s office of Montgomery County, north of Houston, announced that it was preparing to launch an unmanned Shadowhawk helicopter, which could potentially carry weapons. The $300,000 drone craft was acquired through a Department of Homeland Security grant. The craft will carry a powerful camera and a heat-seeking device. Sheriff Tommy Gage said the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) could be used in hunting criminals running from police as well as in drug investigations. Critics of drone technology warned that, privacy issues aside, unmanned drones might prove a hazard to both air traffic and the public on the ground. “We’re not going to use it to be invading somebody’s privacy. It’ll be used for situations we have with criminals,” assured Gage. In early 2012, critics’ worst fears were realized when attendees of a private police-only test in Montgomery County witnessed the drone lose control and crash into the sheriff’s SWAT team’s armored vehicle, called the Bearcat.
In 2007, Houston mayor Annise Parker canceled plans to use these drones after the public became aware that Houston Police had secretly tested one there. The revelation of secret testing sparked a national debate over such measures and attracted the attention of civil libertarians concerned over issues of police searches without a warrant, spying into backyards, and issuing routine traffic tickets by surveillance from above.
Two news stories in 2012 were more ominous. On June 11, a 25,600-pound Navy RQ-4A Global Hawk unmanned drone costing $176 million went out of control during a routine training exercise and crashed into a tributary of the Nanticoke River near Salisbury, Maryland. There were no reported injuries or property damage, but the accident intensified critics’ fears that a sky full of pilotless drones might represent a threat to the civilian population, as well as air traffic.
An even stranger story came out of the University of Texas at Austin, where a group of computer researchers, using $1,000 worth of computer parts, claimed they could hack into a government drone. Challenged by officials of the Homeland Security Department to prove their claim, a team under Professor Todd Humphreys did just that. By mimicking the drone’s control signal, they were able to take control of the craft, much to the chagrin of the DHS officials. “Spoofing a GPS [Global Positioning System] receiver on a UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] is just another way of hijacking a plane,” explained Humphreys. His demonstration lent significant support to those who have theorized that such computer takeovers were employed in the hijacking of the four airliners on September 11, 2001.
Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, said, “There are serious policy questions on the horizon about privacy and surveillance, by both government agencies and commercial entities. … It’s not all about surveillance.”
One would think with all this new high-tech, potentially lethal gadgetry for surveillance and control, local police forces would be hiring the most intelligent people available. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the case. In 2000, the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York upheld the city’s rejection of forty-nine-year-old Robert Jordan after he applied to be a police officer in New London, Connecticut. Jordan’s application was rejected because he scored too high on an intelligence test. He sued the city, alleging discrimination and claiming that he doesn’t have any more control over his basic intelligence than over his eye color, gender, or any other inherent attributes.
The average score nationally for police officers is 21 to 22, the equivalent of an IQ of 104, or just a little above average. New London police said they accepted only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and might soon leave the force after costly training. However, some believed that the lower IQ criterion was more about employing officers who would not question unconstitutional orders or policies than about losing the cost of training. Both the original court and the appeals court rejected Jordan’s claim, stating that there was no discrimination, because the same standards were applied to everyone who took the test.
Long gone are the days of government agents snapping alligator clips to a suspect’s phone lines. Today everything is electronics. Besides monitoring our daily activity outside the house, the government is monitoring what we say over phones, cell phones, and even online. According to the Associated Press, the CIA daily monitors more than five million tweets and Facebook messages from the agency’s Open Source Center, located in a nondescript Virginia industrial park. Within the center, a team of several hundred linguists and analysts, many with library science degrees and thus called “vengeful librarians,” pore over Facebook posts, newspapers, TV news channels, local radio stations, and Internet chat rooms around the world. Center director Doug Naquin said the group operates like the computer hacker heroine of the popular crime novel
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
, as they know “how to find stuff other people don’t know exists.”
Not only is the government listening to what we say; it’s also storing our communications as well. Although some have accused Facebook of being a CIA-backed operation, they have failed to notice that the National Security Agency (NSA) is three times larger than the CIA and has been constructing a $2 billion compound in the desert of Utah one third larger than the U.S. Capitol to store all forms of communication among citizens—a yottabyte’s worth.
A yottabyte? You might already be familiar with gigabytes, the most commonly used unit for computer hard disk storage space. A thousand gigabytes equal a terabyte. A thousand terabytes equal a petabyte. A thousand petabytes equal an exabyte. A thousand exabytes equal a zettabyte, and a thousand zettabytes equal a yottabyte. In other words, a yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000 (one quadrillion) gigabytes. The average household computer holds about 200 gigabytes.
Devin Coldewey, writing on the computer site TechCrunch.com, asked,
What are they storing that, by some estimates, is going to take up thousands of times more space than all the world’s known computers combined? Don’t think they’re going to say; they didn’t grow to their current level of shadowy omniscience by disclosing things like that to the public. However, speculation isn’t too hard on this topic. Now more than ever, surveillance is a data game. What with millions of phones being tapped and all data duplicated, constant recording of all radio traffic, 24-hour high definition video surveillance by satellite, there’s terabytes at least of data coming in every day. And who knows when you’ll have to sift through August 2007’s overhead footage of Baghdad for heat signatures in order to confirm some other intelligence? Storage capacity of this magnitude implies a truly unprecedented amount of subjects for monitoring.
James Bamford, author of
The Puzzle Palace
, an exposé of the NSA, has noted,
Unlike the British government, which, to its great credit, allowed public debate on the idea of a central data bank, the NSA obtained the full cooperation of much of the American telecom industry in utmost secrecy after September 11 [2001]. For example, the agency built secret rooms in AT&T’s major switching facilities where duplicate copies of all data are diverted, screened for key names and words by computers, and then transmitted on to the agency for analysis. Thus, these new centers in Utah, Texas, and possibly elsewhere will likely become the centralized repositories for the data intercepted by the NSA in America’s version of the “big brother database” rejected by the British.
Even with ubiquitous surveillance, there could be no real control of populations without top-down media control. After all, we define our democracy as rule by the majority, and the majority is manipulated by the corporate mass media, which by 2012 had devolved down to a mere five predominant international corporations.
At a Bilderberg meeting held in 1991 at Baden-Baden, Germany, David Rockefeller reportedly summed up the cozy relationship between the wealthy elite and the corporate news media when he told participants, “We are grateful to the
Washington Post
, the
New York Times
,
Time
magazine, and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. … It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during these years. But, the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto determination practiced in the past centuries.”
The control of these elites over the mass media has led to a degradation of our nation’s news. Many stories of great importance to a free society are dropped or lost among trivial accounts of sports figures, celebrities, and inconsequential political blathering.
For example, with air, water, and food pollution causing an unprecedented rise in cancer rates and considering the billions of dollars that have been thrown at finding a cure, one would think that the media would have given more attention to new cancer treatments being developed. However, when one prodigious young girl possibly discovered an amazing cure, her work was only covered briefly by CBS News in early 2012.
Seventeen-year-old Angela Zhang, the daughter of Chinese immigrants living in Cupertino, California, received a check for $100,000 after winning the national Siemens science contest for her research paper detailing no less than a cure for cancer. As a high school freshman, Zhang began reading doctorate-level papers on bioengineering. In her sophomore year, she talked her way into a Stanford University laboratory and was conducting her own research. Her concept was to mix cancer medicine in a polymer that would attach to nanoparticles. The nanoparticles then would attach to cancer cells and show up in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Doctors could see exactly where the tumors were located. Zhang then determined that an infrared light aimed at the tumors would melt the polymer and release the medicine, killing the cancer cells while leaving healthy cells completely unharmed.
CBS reporter Steve Hartman noted, “It’ll take years to know if it works in humans—but in mice—the tumors almost completely disappeared.” Some questioned why this technique, which appears to successfully cure cancers, would take years to develop for humans when there is already so much money in cancer research. Others wondered if this hopeful story would even get repeated in corporate-controlled media addicted to pharmaceutical advertising.
There are also concerns over what’s not in the news. Censorship works as well by omission as by commission. Many people are concerned over the fact that so many websites and pages of information on the Internet seem to disappear at an increasing rate, creating a nightmare for journalists and researchers, who suddenly find their sources changed or missing.
Is it simply irresponsibility, or is there method in the madness of corporate media control? Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a nonprofit media watchdog group, reported that media corporations share board members with directors of a variety of other large corporations, including banks, investment companies, oil companies, health-care and pharmaceutical companies, and technology companies. The FAIR list showed interlocking board members in major media interests, including ABC/Disney, NBC/GE, CBS/Viacom, CNN/Time Warner, Fox/News Corporation, New York Times Co., Washington Post/Newsweek, Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones, Tribune Co., Gannett, and Knight-Ridder.
FAIR’s findings were supported by a 2005 study by Project Censored, an organization that examines news to find out what is left out of the national conversation because of political, economic, or legal pressure. The study determined that within ten large media corporations, there were 118 individuals who sat on 288 different national and international corporate boards. Project Censored reported a revolving-door relationship between big media and U.S. government agencies, as well as a close ongoing interlock between big media and corporate America. “We found media directors who also were former Senators or Representatives in the House such as Sam Nunn (Disney) and William Cohen (Viacom). Board members served at the FCC such as William Kennard (
New York Times
) and Dennis FitzSimmons (Tribune Company).”