Got your deep paranoia suit on? Then proceed with caution. Updated 2/28/13Paranoia seems to us an absolute patriotic duty at the moment, and Rigorous Intuition is like the incredibly symbolically twisted and bizarre dream you wake up from to realize that the scenario thrown up from the unconscious is actually the expression of some very simple truth you had been desperate to avoid facing.
–Theresa Duncan, “The Swell Life: Homo Californius And The Return Of The Paranoia-Free Pastoral,” Wit of the Staircase/
Writer Robert Anton Wilson associated with some very interesting people with fascinating connections, among them his friend and sometimes collaborator Richard Bandler, a pioneer of Neural Linguistic Programming (NLP). Bnadler’s research into NLP led him to consult with PSYOPs experts at the Pentagon and Langley, according to a number of
crediblesources. Wilson also knew Bandler’s former tenet,
Gregory Bateson, an applied anthropology lecturer at the
Humanistic Psychology Institute, as well as a consultant for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during WWII, and later for other intelligence services.
The two associates Wilson mentioned in the quote cited previously used the rather obvious pseudonyms Malaclypse the Younger, and Ho Chi Zen. If you want to attach real names to these colorful figures, you might want to
start here, at the National Archives and Records Administration’s (NARA) official collection of JFK assassination documents. Malaclypse turned out to be
Gregory Hill, a rather obscure figure, about whom little is known. He nevertheless became a character in Wilson’s
Illuminatus! books. Ho Chi Zen was one of the numerous pen names used by Kerry W. Thornley,
Thornley’s involvement with the JFK assassination began in 1959 when he met Lee Oswald at El Toro Marine Base, located near Irvine, CA. In 1962, Thornley completed the first draft of
The Idle Warrior, the first of many books written about Oswald. Thornley subsequently
testified about Oswald for the Warren Commission.
Orleans Parrish District Attorney (later Louisiana Appellate Court Judge) Jim Garrison firmly believed that Thornley worked for the CIA as a contract agent. In his 1988 book
On the Trail of the Assassins,
Like a number of young men who have been identified as CIA employees, Thornley had a post office box in the federal building across from Banister's office. Such post office boxes are customarily used by federal employees with clandestine assignments as "message drops" as well as an acceptable excuse for regular visits into a federal building...Thornley actually lived across Lafayette Square from the old post office building and from the Newman Building, in which Oswald later was seen, prior to his moving into the French Quarter. At the time of the assassination Thornley was living on Dauphine Street a block and a half downtown from Esplanade. Shortly after the assassination he departed abruptly for the Washington, D.D. area, where he remained until after his testimony before the Warren Commission.*
Specifically, Thornley and his girlfriend, Jeanne Hack, lived at 1824 Dauphine Street with their landlord, John Spence. Spence was a friend of CIA contract agent Clary Shaw,
who had visited the house on occasion. Despite the fact that he had prepaid one month’s rent, Thornley left New Orleans immediately after the JFK assassination. Both the Secret Service and the FBI came looking for him in the twenty-four hour period after President Kennedy’s death.
One of Garrison’s investigators, Harold Weisberg,
interviewed attorney Tommy Baumler, a suspected associate of Thornley, and an employee of Guy Banister on 9 April 1968. Baumler told Weisberg that he recognized Thornley when shown a photograph of him, although he could not identify him in another pic published by the
Times-Picayune. According to Garrison and author Bill Davy, Baumler organized faux leftist groups and individuals for CIA for purposes of discrediting them.**
Thronley characterized Oswald as a rabid, possibly deranged, communist with loyalties to Cuba and the Soviet Union in his testimony before the Warren Commission. Years later, shortly after the release of Oliver Stone’s 1991 film
JFK, Thornley
appeared on A Current Affair to say that both he and Oswald wanted to kill Kennedy, and that he was upset because Oswald had beaten him to it–again painting Oswald (and this time himself) as a lone angry nut. While the interview does show Thornley saying at the end that he thought someone framed Oswald, his story seems so outlandish–Kerry said that he conspired with a mysterious man named “brother-in-law” to assassinate the President–that it seems to discredit a conspiracy hypothesis more than support one. The overall tenor of his interview, very likely due to the editing process, and the segment itself appear to endorse the single-shooter hypothesis.
While we can assert with a high degree of confidence that Oswald actually knew Thornley–they lived near each other at El Toro–there’s very little evidence that the two men knew each other particularly well, or as well as Kerry claimed. And there’s considerable evidence indicating that others on the base knew Lee far better. These men characterized Oswald very differently as apolitical.***
This is purely speculation here, but given his willingness to be the only fellow US Marine to badmouth Oswald so that the Warren Commission could brand Lee a mentally ill commie in 1964, and to come out of the woodwork to confound the issue in 1992 so that a tabloid TV news show produced by
Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation could debunk Judge Garrison and Oliver Stone, Thornley comes across as a loyal cold warrior, who primarily served a public relations function. Of course, if Thornley were the type of paid PSYOP agent that Judge Garrison believed him to be, the question arises as to whether or not his assignments were limited to promoting the Warren Commission’s party line.
Discordianism was never monolithic or coherent enough where one could say that Discordianism did so-or-so at such-and-such and such a time. Yet, nothing would prevent someone like Thornley or more likely individuals within his circle of associates–especially those with intelligence connections–from cloaking an aggressive attack on the leftist influence of 1960s countercultural leftism in the guise of Eris.
Mae Brussel, for one, believed that Intel actively worked to undermine leftist dissidence on many different fronts–from infiltration of leftist groups to out-and-out smear campaigns. She noted how what she called “The California Violences" (Manson, Zodiac, SLA, etc.) seemed to always tie themselves to either the general “permissiveness” of the 1960s, or, in the case of the Symbionese Liberation Army, to faux leftist groups, whose membership backgrounds were either, military (e.g., Bill Harris, Joseph Remiro), intelligence (e.g., Colston Westbrook, Thero Wheeler), or ideologically far to the right (e.g., Nancy Ling Perry). These incidents not only discredited the New Left (as Intel called it), but gave the public reason to support police excesses and extra-legal efforts to suppress them.
Of course, as I said, the previous three paragraphs are highly speculative. But some things are not. In her 2001 book
The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, Frances Stonor Saunders gave a very comprehensive view of how Intel, the Central Intelligence Agency in particular, understood culture. She also demonstrated the importance the Agency attached to it. It’s one thing to control a population through force and intimidation. But from a strategic standpoint it’s better to have that population regulate itself to conform to the needs of power by providing said population a world view that’s consistent with said needs. The CIA, early in its mission, understood that conquest meant nothing if you could not win the “hearts and minds” of the subjected.****
While Americans generally think of subjective populations as those existing in other lands, we know–not from “conspiracy theory,” but rather history–that the same tactics applied to specific groups within the US. Another thing we don’t have to speculate about is Intel’s efforts to sabotage the New Left, due in significant part to its anti-war stance.
The Church Committee Final Report and Supplements extensively chronicled CIA, FBI, NSA and military intelligence efforts to squelch political dissidence through surveillance, criminal activity (e.g.,
black bag jobs). infiltration, and, well, pranks (e.g., false-flag operations;
snitch-jacketing; writing bogus anonymous letters to an activist’s family, professors, colleagues or employers so that those closest to the target turn on her, or him; and so on). While the rationalization had always been national security–the premise that the Soviet Union had sponsored and directed the New Left–the FBI conceded that they knew, as early as 1964, that this was not the case. The operations were really designed to foster domestic political security within the United States.
Combining the speculative with the stipulated, one must concede the fact that political and other authorities have (A) historically viewed cultural and ideological dissidence as a threat, and (B) spent considerable effort and resources trying to thwart it. Discordianism’s possible role in this would constitute unsubstantiated conjecture, for the most part. Nevertheless, one could see its potential effectiveness in such activities were it used that way. It’s highly cellularized, so plausible deniability isn’t a problem. Because of its humor, it is highly charismatic and persuasive. Moreover, the practical application of its philosophy is consistent with the maintenance of the status quo. Added bonus: its founder (Thornley) and what would become its public face (Wilson) had associates who worked for Intel, thus making them accessible. And the beauty part, from this perspective, is that there need be no formal declaration of intention or motive, or any conspiratorial action requiring a highly organized effort. Instead, a simple utterance of disdain, or derision (mild or vehement) of the target by influential priests could have triggered the desired effect. The impetus towards one political direction or another could just as easily come from outsiders, who bought their papacies and networked successfully enough. Thus, those actively throwing rocks at the counterculture in the 1970s would have acted completely under their own volition, for they were not ordered, but instead influenced. This type of subtlety–which Intel can be really good at, sometimes–would leave no trace of a conspiracy. That’s because there would have been no conspiracy. And given the severity of threat that Intel perceived, throwing everything they had to solve the problem makes sense, even if it entails nonsense.
As Shakespeare would say, the past is prologue. After all, the counterculture of the 1960s has come and gone. But that’s not to say that dissidence vanished in the new millennium. In fact, dissidents the world over, from
India to
Egypt, have utilized cyberspace in ways unimaginable to their mid-twentieth-century counterparts. In the case of India, the dissidence centered around what you’re doing right now: blogging, a medium that allows anyone to express herself in any way she deems appropriate, unfettered by commercial or cultural gatekeepers, and often (
although not always) without government censorship.
The US government defines censorship as “prior constraint,” which means that authorities cannot technically stop you from saying what you want, under most conditions, but can penalize you after the fact for saying it. The exceptions to this include defamation, possible infringement of other constitutionally protected rights,***** threats to public and individual safety, and, of course, national security items.
It has been under the rubric of national security that military/intelligence personnel have openly voiced grave concerns about the “free and open” nature of Internet communication. Just as often, they have looked at the ‘Net as a fortuitous platform for psychological operations. In their respective papers for the Naval War College,
Maj. Angela Lungu and Gary Whitley argued that Congress should eliminate the legal restrictions that prohibit the conduct of domestic online PSYOPs, specifically those contained in the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948. At the same time, Lungu and Whiteley argued that someone else could use those very same channels of cybercommunication to counter content they deem detrimental to foreign and domestic PSYOPs campaigns.
Like the “communist threat” of the 1960s, the heightened specter of terrorism provides the current rationale for official concerns about political and cultural dissidence. True, we don’t typically see such things as so-called “conspiracy theory” as dissidence. We usually think of dissidents in a glamorous way, for example such august figures as
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or those behind the Iron Curtain writing and propagating
Samizdat publications criticizing the USSR. Conspiracy research, on the other hand, is often ugly, often
bigoted and obtuse. Yet it is dissidence all the same. Like anything else labeled as dissidence, “conspiracy theory,” on the whole, criticizes apparent abuses of government and industrial power. The degree to which a particular theory is accurate or in accurate wouldn’t really matter to authorities. Either way, they’re at best annoying, and at worst could undo carefully crafted public relations: a critical element in the battle for hearts and minds.
Lest you think that we’re really off the deep end here, the truth is that we are only in shallow water. Government officials have targeted Internet conspiracy researchers. As far as we can prove, they have engaged in surveillance against them. But one government official has gone further in proposing more drastic actions that might have already taken place.
Between 2003 and 2007, The US Department of Homeland Security set up some seventy-odd
Fusion Centers, domestic intelligence networks often subsumed under the aegis of local law enforcement agencies encompassing each of the fifty states. Their ostensive purpose is to provide the FBI, CIA, DHS and other spy apparatuses with timely intelligence on potential domestic terrorist threats in meatspace and online. The open sharing across jurisdictions allows information that cannot be lawfully obtained in one state to be gathered in another state where the collection is legal. And since the Internet doesn’t really have borders, an investigator in one state can just as easily access materials written somewhere else.
Problem is, Fusion Centers haven’t as yet produced anything that would effectively prevent domestic terrorist attacks, despite estimated budgets ranging
from $189 million to $1.4 billion dollars annually. And seeing that the information that they receive from data mining and other methods focuses primarily on American citizens and nationals, the possibility exists that they, like the infamous COINTELPRO, are simply monitoring those critical of US policy.
In 2008, one such Fusion Center, the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC), reported that it had, in fact,
investigated “conspiracy theoristgs” (along with Tea Party members and third party political candidates–other local Fusion Centers conducted similar intelligence ops against
students at historically black colleges, Muslims and anti-war activists). The rationale: suspected ties to unnamed militia groups whom they deemed potential threats.
Although some might say that these activities only occurred on a local level, and others might point out that the MIAC quickly retracted the report in the face of scathing public criticism, note several things. First of all, Fusion Centers openly shared information across jurisdictions. So if Missouri law enforcement officials had it, everyone else in that loop had it. And we’re not talking about the monitoring of materials produced solely in the Show-Me State, but rather anywhere in cyberspace that local officers could access–which is everywhere. Second, the MIAC might have retracted the report as a public document, but one would be hard pressed to believe that such a document, or more important the very data it alluded to, simply vanished into thin air. Third, the fact that some official body thought “conspiracy theory” as a potential security threat is in itself interesting. After all, even many who abhor them would agree that the expression of conspiracy hypotheses result from cherished principles of free speech, and see nothing terroristic in them unless they advocated violence.
Also in 2008, law professor Adam Vermule (Harvard) and Cass Sunstein, future-Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) under the Obama Administration (formerly of Harvard and University of Chicago), wrote a paper titled “
Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures” (
The Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 17, issue 2). The paper itself is so rife with factual error and distorted reasoning that it is quite tempting to take it apart line-by-line here and now. It’s a flat 85 mph fastball with no movement hanging dead-center in the strike zone.****** But in the interest of (ahem!) brevity, let’s save that deconstruction for later, and focus on the most troubling aspect of it: namely, Vermule and Sunstein’s advocacy for the secret infiltration of online conspiracy research communities, preferably through third party sources:
Hearing only conspiratorial accounts of government behavior, their members become ever more prone to believe and generate such accounts. Informational and reputational cascades, group polarization, and selection effects suggest that the generation of ever-more-extreme views within these groups can be dampened or reversed by the introduction of cognitive diversity. We suggest a role for government efforts, and agents, in introducing such diversity. Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action.
Never mind the fact that the authors are calling for the US government to engage in conspiratorial action in order to disprove the existence of government conspiracies. What’s important here is that as OIRA chief, Prof. Sunstein had responsibility for implementing a number of regulatory policies. According to the White House Office of Management and Budget Circular 130, the OIRA is also responsible for the implementation of policies governing information technologies.
Profs. Sunstein and Vermule debated whether it would be better to infiltrate conspiracy communities openly–i.e., government officials going online, announcing who they were, along with their real positions, and “correcting” information as it came in–or surreptitiously, using sock puppets to plant information that would counter assertions made in forums, blogs, and so forth. Out of the two, they felt that secret infiltration would work better, because of a possible knee-jerk negative response to any informant acting in an official capacity. They also felt it would also be better to hire third-party contractors for the work, so that there would be distance from the government.
Thus, we would have no way of knowing if this policy came into effect or not, since it could have been done secretly, or not at all. But we would still have to note that Prof. Sunstein proposed a policy. One year later, the President appointed, and Congress confirmed, him to a position where implementation of that policy fell within his purview.
Of course, that’s assuming that someone, anywhere in government, might not have embarked upon such a strategy already. Even if the contracted source gave accurate information, it could be incomplete or so out of context as to be misleading. Although half-truths are often as deceptive as an out-and-out hoax, they might still satisfy the legal requirements of Smith-Mundt, which basically forbids public officials from openly lying to the public. So if someone wanted to do that, they could argue they had legal grounds for doing so. Speculating further, one can note instances that certainly raise awareness, if not suspicion, that something along these lines might be going on. In his 23 August 2008 interview with S. Miles Lewis, dreamsend gave a tantalizing example when describing someone he had begun interacting with online:
He goes by different user names on any forum he goes on...and he had all these posts already there, before I got there, about alternate reality games. He had two really long threads that were primarily his data dump about alternate reality games. And it was just there. It was like a tutorial. There it was just waiting for me. And, you know, this guy could be a whistleblower from inside the beast. I really don’t know. But I was going back over all the old comments on my blog. He also posted on my blog. And I looked at his IP. And he’s so careful about his anonymity. But I looked up the IP and tracked it back to a company called Crane Aerospace. And I looked them up, and dammit if what they do is not defense contracting, intelligence (specifically they mention intelligence contracting) and primarily what they do is they make little microwave devices
A defense contractor, especially one that already had clearance for intelligence work, might be an ideal third-party source for the type of policy that Profs. Sunstein and Vermule proposed. Speculating more deeply, one could wonder if someone like a Joseph Matheny, who has a connection to a Discordian milieu that could boast of redundant ties to intelligence personnel, might also be a suitable third-party contractor, as some have rumored. Matheny's mocking derision of such communities as cults certainly wouldn't help allay fears that he might have somehow participated in what they perceived as attacks against them.
To be clear, I have no proof that Matheny, Thornley, Hill or anyone else participated in some sort of government program to neutralize political dissidence, either in 1960s meatspace, or the buzz of twenty-first-century cyberspace. My reasons for bringing Thornley, Wilson, Matheny, Discordianism, Sunstein et al to this discussion are threefold.
First, someone writing to my inbox floated an idea, that I had already kicked around. Imagine, if you will, a cabal of tricksters, or as someone else characterized them cyberbullies, who have little or nothing better to do than to mess with people’s heads online through various shenanigans, and merrily lead them down the garden path to what amounts to a colossal waste of time. That would be similar to the infamous Discordian Project Jake, the goal of which was to target a civil servant, hit him up with a boatload of letters describing a bizarre problem, and ask for help in “some complicated political matter that passes all rational understanding.” Perhaps there are other pranksters there–related to the first group, maybe not–who make the gag more interesting by introducing something ominous, something threatening. Then imagine that the target for the Jake isn’t a civil servant, but say someone who writes about conspiracies.
The idea floated to me was that Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan might have come across such a band of such cyberbullies, or were perhaps victims of a Jake targeting people who could be regarded as conspiracy theorists–not that the couple saw themselves that way, but others (e.g., Dr. Reza Aslan) did. If so, Blake and Duncan might have seen such pranks not as gags, but threats somehow connected to the problems they concurrently had with the Church of Scientology. These would have added more stress to an already stressful situation. While I cannot rule out this hypothesis completely–after all, Wit of the Staircase moderated comments, and as mentioned earlier Duncan did have some heated online discussions--I am not aware of anything like that going on, or of any concrete allusions to it on Duncan’s blog.
The second reason is because of the nature of discord that resulted in the wake of the Theremy phenomenon. Things like the “UR Doin It Wrong” thread seem particularly consistent with a prank . A lot of ill will and accusations are flung about, with no clear starting point, although such items as
The Last Statue and dreamsend’s research became lightening rods. This is such an obvious reminder of the golden apple story from Greek mythology, that when reading the thread with that in mind one can actually see humor in it. It’s not that the consequences were funny, especially to those who had to pay them. But the cadence and reactionary statements reminds one of the old practical joke where someone privately disparages person A to person B, then backbites person B to person A, and then sits back and enjoys the sparks as they fly when A and B finally confront each other.
The third reason is because the historical parallels are so striking as to be worth noting. In the 1960s, government agencies engaged on a strategy of infiltration in order to discredit political dissent that, among other things, countered the political will to wage offensive war abroad, and questioned numerous official policies in the US, starting with Jim Crow. Over the past decade, various government actors proposed the manipulation of Internet communication and “cognitive infiltration” of conspiracy researchers in order to neutralize whatever influence they might be able to wield–especially if it ran counter to official PR/PSYOPS efforts. The general public knew nothing of such things as COINTELPRO, MERRIMAC or CHAOS until years after they had commenced operations. One could safely surmise that the FBI, CIA and other acronyms would have probably denied these activities were they asked about them point-blank during the time they were operational. Likewise, the current researcher won't likely find official conformation as to whether or not some government body targeted them. Nevertheless, because of such things as the 2008 MIAC report, we know that some of them were. It’s possible that Wit of the Staircase, Rigorous Intuition, or for that matter The X-Spot–all three of which were up-and-running during the investigation in question–might have gotten a looksee from such agencies. Yet, finding evidence of that would be a Herculean challenge.
*******In each case, the ostensible target was some bugbear that compelled the public to a fear response--sometimes acute, sometimes just a lingering anxiety. In the Sixties, it was communism. Now, it’s terrorism. And in each case, the actions taken or proposed did not, nor would not, result in the deterrence of a violent threat, but would at best compromise civil liberties, and at worse actively silence criticism of official policy–however righteous or wrongheaded that criticism might be.
And in each case, there loomed the real or perceived presence of a merry group of pranksters who have curious historical ties to intelligence personnel, and could possibly be used by anyone–even outsiders–to discredit dissidence by making the activist or the researcher or the group look foolish.
While this (admittedly long-winded) post has been highly speculative, there’s one thing that’s certain. Some participants of a specific conspiracy community became entrapped and suffered hurtful (some would describe them as traumatic) consequences when they looked into the deaths of Blake and Duncan. Colleagues lost confidence in themselves and each other. One participant put it to me quite succinctly in an IM dated 18 December 2012 (slightly edited for format purposes, and quoted with his permission):
Before TD [Theresa Duncan], we all were much more than we are now. We were strong in our research, even if it was paved out to us by intel; we followed the leads and dug up the dirt and the dead. It subverted EVERYTHING. It compromised great minds, blurred dots that once connected devoured focus, devoured interest, devoured energy. In place of a greater understanding of parapolitics and who/what the bad guys really are, was only this great ambiguity where nothing that is said can be trusted by anyone those who have not reached that reckoning haven't taken the path to its logical destination. In a word, the bad guys get to stay the bad guys, and none of us made a difference at all.
Did Intel have a hand in creating confusion in this case? Hell if I know.
But here’s one thing I do know: if PYSOPs personnel wanted to neutralize the potential political effects of online conspiracy research, they couldn’t find a better model to work from than Theremy.
____________________
*Garrison suspected that Thornley was also one of the “second Oswalds” running around New Orleans and Dallas during the summer of 1963.
**Thornley publicly depicted himself as a far-right extremist during his Marine Corps days, who turned to the left during the 1960s, or in other words after his residence in New Orleans.
***For example, in his Warren Commission testimony, Nelson Delgado said, “He [Oswald] would discuss his ideas, but not anything against our Government or--nothing Socialist, mind you.”
"Although I generally regarded Oswald as an intelligent person, I did not observe him to be particularly interested in politics or international affairs," said John Heindel to the Commission. Donald Camarata, Peter Connor, Mack Osborne and others made similar statements. So it’s kinda interesting that Thornley’s depiction was the one that stuck.
****Industry also deliberately acted to subvert the anti-materialist aspect of 1960s youth culture. In the early-1970s thirty-nine unnamed corporations funded research conducted by Arnold Mitchell of the Stanford Research Institute, which eventually led to VALS typology, a marketing strategy designed to win the hearts and minds of a younger generation of consumers.
*****For example, judges can issue gag orders if they think that sensationalistic press coverage might prevent a defense or prosecution’s Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial by, among other things, influencing non-sequestered juries, as happened in the case of
Dr. Sam Sheppard.
******Not unexpectedly, Sunstein, and by association President Obama, have received their share of flak over this paper, which online has come to haunt the former. Interestingly, Sunstein appears to have backed away from discussing it,
claiming that he doesn’t really recall much about the paper’s content.
*******Our friend Ray found an example of the Army Corps of Engineers' effort to go after criticism of its handling of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 that you can find on YouTube. There's another YouTube video of a Canadian news report of online government trolling that you can find here.
