Joe Vialls: Tsunami result of U.S. nuclear bomb?
From: richard-at-cyberjournal.org Date: 10 Jan 2005 Subject: Joe Vialls: Tsunami result of U.S. nuclear bomb? To: newslog-at-cyberjournal.org -------------------------------------------------------- http://newswire.indymedia.org/fr/newswire/2005/01/816749.shtml Tsunami nuclear blast, not earthquake? Copyright Joe Vialls, 5 January 2005 Was the tsunami the result of a U.S. nuclear bomb? With Afghanistan and Iraq already lost, the Wall Street bankers were all desperately looking for other ways to control our world, when suddenly and very conveniently, the Sumatran Trench exploded. Trick or Treat? http://www.vialls.com/subliminalsuggestion/tsunami.html "Others are engaging even in an eco type of terrorism, whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes or volcanos remotely, through the use of electromagnetic waves." American Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, April 1997. Big surprise! Presumably Cohen already knew that a nuclear weapon generates what he refers to obliquely as "electromagnetic waves". Despite having a huge number of tsunami victims in its own State of Tamil Nadu, India completely converted the survey ship INS Nirupak into a 50-bed floating hospital in less than 72 hours, then sent it unarmed to help the desperate people of Aceh in Indonesia. . By direct comparison, America sent combat ships and armed Marines. The US Navy has two 1,000 bed hospital ships, the 'Comfort' and the 'Mercy', but neither one was dispatched. Though the USNS Comfort was deployed to New York when 3,000 Americans died in September 2001, this current lack of action sends a strong signal that 150,000 (mostly Muslim) dead in South East Asia, and half a million injured, are of no concern whatever to the power brokers in New York. The Indian Government knew full well that this was not a "normal" earthquake. On 27 December India refused to join George Bush's planned exclusive 'club of four', which would have effectively pulled this Asian nuclear power out of its new coalition with Russia, China and Brazil. On 28 December the Indian Government politely warned the American military to stay clear of Indian sovereign territory, and on 29 December the India Daily Editorial publicly questioned the nature of the event: "Was this a showdown by a country to show the region what havoc can be created?" ... "Given the level of devastation and given the fact India is a regional power in South Asia, [the] Indian Navy has an obligation to investigate and tell the world what they found." Theoretically, the American 9 megaton W-53 thermonuclear warhead shown on the left, could easily be encased in a small 'lookalike' saturation diving chamber similar to that on the right, to protect it from the massive 10,000 pounds per square inch pressures at the bottom of the Sumatran Trench. The whole armored package would weigh less than five tons, allowing it to be slipped over the stern of any oil rig supply vessel, of which there are more than 300 in Asia alone. Who would even notice? Despite a natural human tendency to be shocked into silence by the sheer number of dead and injured across Asia on 26 December 2004, and despite also being slightly fearful of losing personal credibility because of the magnitude of the apparent crime, there are many provable irregularities in the official American tsunami story that simply have to be recorded now, or forever be lost in the sands of time. It is beyond any doubt that a giant tidal wave (tsunami) smashed its way through South and South East Asia, and still had enough legs to continue all the way across the Indian Ocean to Africa, where it killed and injured a few hundred more. So the only question we must ask, is whether this tsunami was a natural or man-made catastrophe? A natural event would be horrifying enough, but if the tsunami was man-made, then we are unquestionably looking at the biggest single war crime in global history. To make any sense at all of the irregularities, we must start at the very beginning, and then follow the course of events as they unfold, especially events in the immediate vicinity of the real tsunami epicenter, because the latter is quite different from the location being remorselessly peddled by the New York Times and CNN. At midday local Australian time I faithfully recorded the magnitude and position plotted by the Jakarta Geophysical Office in Indonesia. An earthquake measuring 6.4 on the Richter scale had hit the north of the Indonesian island of Sumatra. The Jakarta Geophysical Office meticulously noted that the epicenter of the event was located 155 miles south-southwest of Aceh Province. This location is approximately 250 miles south of the position later selected by the American NOAA, which plotted the epicenter to the north-west of Aceh, and initially claimed a Richter reading of 8.0. Alas, even that was not enough to cover the damage caused by this extraordinary event, so NOAA progressively upgraded the reading to 8.5, then to 8.9, and finally to 9.0 - at least for the present. So, the first proven irregularities were peddled by American officials at the NOAA, who suddenly invented a new 'flexible' peak seismic wave for the event, of far greater magnitude than Jakarta, when the Jakarta office was located much closer at almost point-blank range. Believe me when I tell you there is no such thing as the new 'flexible' peak claimed by NOAA. The first seismic peak you record is the only real peak, unless of course you later manually draw in a few more peaks of your own, to match a contrived agenda. Naturally there is also only one epicenter, which was faithfully recorded by dozens of Indonesian and Indian seismographs. Quite apart from the huge disparity in Richter values, the Indonesians and Indians were disturbed to find that the normal earthquake 'preamble' was missing from their seismograph charts. All this means is that the normal steadily increasing number of transverse shear "S" waves that always precede an earthquake were missing, as were later aftershocks, which likewise always accompany a naturally occurring or Tesla standing-wave generated earthquake. There were 'warnings' of aftershocks from the NOAA, but none actually eventuated. To simplify matters for non-technical readers, an earthquake is always triggered by a resonant electromagnetic frequency in the range 0.5 to 12 Hertz, but it is not an instant process, because the resonant frequency must be precise. Thus as true resonance approaches, the fault line starts to tremble like a piece of rope under tension, and sends out warnings to the seismographs in the form of steadily increasing transverse shear waves. If all you get is a cluster of "P" compression waves, then you are almost certainly looking at an underground or sub sea explosion. These were in fact the only copious seismic signals that the Indonesians and Indians received, and they looked curiously similar to those generated many years ago by large underground nuclear weapons in Nevada. We will return later to the relatively simple task of delivering a multi-megaton thermonuclear weapon to the bottom of the Sumatran Trench, and then detonating it with awesome effect, but right now we need to return to our initial task of following the trail of events and inexplicable irregularities. First we must travel south to the distant desert island of Australia, currently ruled by an obsequious Wall Street toady known as Little Johnny Howard. To the intense displeasure of many of his Australian "subjects", Little Johnny never makes a move outside Australia unless he first receives explicit instructions from one of his New York minders. Remember this reality, because it is extremely important in terms of what Australia did next. On the morning of 27 December, the Australian (New York owned) media was making it very clear that the most badly hit nation in the region was Sri Lanka, an island at the southern tip of India, which like Australia is a member nation of the British Commonwealth. Accordingly, Tim Costello, head of one of Australia's largest charities, made immediate plans to fly to the area and assess the need for aid. But that same morning, Little Johnny was dancing to a very different tune, which, based on his known subservience, must have been playing down his secure telephone line from Wall Street. In true covert manner, Little Johnny secretly dispatched two RAAF Hercules transport planes packed with supplies to Malaysia on "Stand By", and directed two more to Darwin in Australia's north. Please note that if Little Johnny had any humanitarian concerns at all, all four Hercules could have flown directly to Commonwealth partner Sri Lanka, where every other Australian had already been told by the media that aid was needed. But no, it wasn't to be, and Little Johnny waited patiently for orders from New York. The waiting period was short, and after a high-flying reconnaissance jet confirmed that the runway was clear at Medan in eastern Sumatra, all four Australian Hercules complete with troops, guns and other tackle, invaded Sumatra just south of the devastated province of Aceh. In turn, with 90% of its population killed by the tsunami, Aceh might perhaps one day soon become Indonesia's very own Guantanamo Bay, crawling with hundreds of heavily armed Australians and Americans. Remember carefully though, at the time these four Hercules touched down in Medan, the ordinary Australian public still had no idea that Sumatra was badly hit. Only Little Johnny knew, and of course his trusty crystal ball in New York. To hell with Sri Lanka, his bosses wanted a main base for the huge reconstruction contracts in Asia, designed to replace the failed oil theft and reconstruction in Iraq, and keep poor old Zion on its tottering New York legs for a few more weeks or months. In the end, what the hell did it matter how many Goyim had to die? And, hey, on the credit side they'd already managed to kill more than 100,00 Muslims in Sumatra with a single tidal wave, which was partial payback for their own resounding defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq. Needless to say the Australians were merely the advance party, soon to be joined by a curiously well prepared and equipped U.S. Military, though it is doubtful that any of the officers and men involved really comprehend what is going on. Only a handful thought to question why they had been spending a whole year training for a "Humanitarian Mission", when the whole point of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps is normally to kill people in very large numbers. Just look at Fallujah, people, look at Fallujah. As if by magic, the Pentagon managed to have two battle groups ready to sail at an instant's notice from Hong Kong and Guam during the normally chaotic Christmas to New Year period. Crikey! Military discipline has come a hell of a long way since my day, when everyone including the ship's cat was sleeping it off at some highly questionably hostelry or another. Not these 10,000+ Americans though, who must have been standing rigidly to attention beside their hammocks day and night, tugging furiously at their forelocks whenever an officer of NCO came in sight. The next bit was superbly orchestrated, because it took place at sea, far away from the prying eyes of dock spies or imaginary KGB agents. But oops, first you have to know who was involved. Out of Hong Kong rushed team one, comprised of the nuclear-powered USS Abraham Lincoln and her escort vessels, while the far more interesting team two rushed out of Guam, led by the USS Bonhomme Richard, a marine amphibious assault carrier crammed to the gunwales with gun-toting wooden tops. And that is not all, believe me, because the Bonhomme Richard is in fact leading a veritable armada known as "Expeditionary Strike Group 5". Flagship USS Bonhomme Richard is accompanied by the U.S.S. Duluth, an amphibious transport dock vessel; the USS Rushmore, a landing ship dock; the guided missile cruiser USS Bunker Hill, guided missile destroyer USS Milius, and the guided missile frigate USS Thach. To take care of the underwater side of things they are joined by the nuclear hunter-killer submarine USS Pasadena, while the U.S. Coast Guard's high-endurance cutter Munro is also tagging along, presumably to deal with Asian Customs and Excise. Now then, though 'Strike Group 5' may be toting enough nuclear weapons to destroy half of the known world, and the title is perhaps lacking when viewed from a strictly humanitarian perspective, engineer chief Staff Sgt. Julio C. Dominguez says otherwise: "The Marine Service Support Group has been preparing for a humanitarian mission of this type for about 12 months now, and is more prepared for an actual mission". Well, OK chief, but didn't you ask why you were being trained for a mysterious humanitarian mission a year before it actually happened, especially when your day job is normally shooting Muslims full of holes? The really sneaky (inexplicable) bit came as both battle groups entered the Indian Ocean. The USS Abraham Lincoln looked about as innocent as a carrier with 70 attack planes can look, but was already carrying 2,000 marines instead of her normal complement of around 500. That is a huge amount of grunt firepower to put on the deserted streets of Banda Aceh, especially when Wall Street normally expects these marines to die quietly for Zion in Iraq. Now then, how did they know the extra marines would be needed before team one left Hong Kong, because the surplus 1,500 marines were certainly not just standing around on Kowloon dock waiting to hitch a ride. Then while the two battle groups (apparently) headed in two different directions across the deserted Indian Ocean, an even stranger event took place. Though Expeditionary Strike Group 5 (Humanitarian) was supposed to help the folks in Sri Lanka, the combat marines aboard the USS Bonhomme Richard transferred to amphibious transport dock vessel U.S.S. Duluth, which then split from ESG-5 and headed towards team one. So without the Indonesians really being aware of it, the (relatively) harmless and Bulky aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln has been used to screen the arrival of at least 3,500 heavily-armed US Marines in tiny Aceh Province. That more or less brings us up to date on known military activity, though yesterday an Australian television cameraman did accidentally film some of these heavily-armed US Marines (who tried to shoo him away), searching a devastated Indonesian military base for any remaining weapons. Now call me old-fashioned, but if these guys and their bosses are straight, that particular job should be left to the Indonesian Army... I will be circumspect as to exactly how a large American thermonuclear weapon managed to arrive at the bottom of the Sumatran Trench, though all of the seismic evidence and preparedness for the resulting mission indicates strongly that this is the case. After all, we are back to the age-old question of "who benefits?", and in this particular case, "Who is insane enough to kill more than 150,000 civilians just to hang on to power?' Based on their past performance in Iraq and other luckless countries, it would seem that the only realistic candidates are Wolfowitz and company, striving as always to create a "One World Government". Certainly no other nuclear powers including Russia and China stand to gain anything at all from such an outrageous mass murder, so, as always in the end, we come back to Sherlock Holmes via the pen of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: "When you have ruled out the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, is the truth." For the Zionist Cabal, obtaining a thermonuclear weapon in America is no great trick, especially when we have the precedent of 100 small 'decommissioned' air-to-air atomic warheads being smuggled out the Pentagon's (civilian) back door, to form the core of the Jewish State's current nuclear arsenal. Once a weapon system is out date and out of service, loyal uniformed US military personnel can no longer track it. Those who wish to understand how such a seemingly small weapon could rattle a 20,000 feet-deep oceanic trench, and then force a giant tsunami right across the Indian Ocean, would do well to look at the diagram of the famous 'Dambusters' attacking the German dam below, most of which is self-explanatory. The designer of the RAF's bouncing bomb (actually called "Highball") was a scientist called Barnes Wallace, who had already gained a formidable reputation with his Wellington bomber, which he constructed geodetically, thus enabling it to absorb enormous punishment before actually being shot out of the sky. Many Wellington returned to base literally in tatters, while many luckless cousins like the Stirling and Halifax were all too often consigned to the murky deep of the North Sea. Wallace knew that bombing the dams vertically was a complete waste of time, and the only possibility of success lay in placing a mine hard up against the dam wall at its base. You see, water cannot be compressed, meaning that if the mine was pressed against the dam wall at the moment of detonation, part of its energy would automatically be expended on the wall itself. Too far away in the relatively shallow water, and most of the blast energy would be lost to atmosphere, in a huge exploding cloud of water of course. Though it was obvious that the dam wall could not be destroyed by a single bomb from a single Lancaster bomber (it would weight far too much for the aircraft to get off the ground), Wallace pinned his hopes on the scientific fact that cumulative stress should do the job, and he was proved right. Though officially three of the bombs, each containing 6,500 pounds of TNT, were considered to be direct hits, one of these veered off slightly, meaning that the giant Mohne Dam was completely breached by a total of 13,000 pounds of tri-nitro toluene. It is the incompressibility of water in particular that matters deep down in the Sumatran Trench. At the bottom you already have 10,000 pounds of pressure per square inch pressing down on your weapon of choice, and above that weapon there is a column of water 20,000 feet tall, which is what caused the pressure in the first place. Not only that. The trench narrows at the bottom, meaning that the weapon is 'hemmed-in', with a very real chance of moving a tectonic plate if sufficient tonnage is used. In this particular case there was no real need to shift a tectonic plate, and science suggests that if this blast had caused such an effect, several very powerful aftershocks would have occurred, as has happened with every other major earthquake in the past. But, as previously stated, and setting aside the seemingly deliberate provocative though false warnings from the American NOAA, there has not been a single aftershock. To force subservience on Asia, and ensure the lion's share of incredibly lucrative reconstruction contracts, all that was needed was a very large tsunami targeted on the selected nations, which was easily within the capabilities of a large thermonuke. There is nothing new about "Sea Bursts" as they are called, and more than 30 years ago plans existed in both America and Russia to wipe out each other's coastal cities using exactly this technique. The tidal wave from a deep sea burst is relatively clean, allowing the aggressor to take over both land and remaining buildings etc. with the minimum of delay. If everything had gone to plan, then Indonesia, Sri Lanka and India would have been in hock to the IMF and World Bank for thirty or more years - time enough to wait for the price of oil to come down again after the lethal fiasco in Iraq. At the same time, if the Indian Government had taken the bait, the deadly Russian-Chinese-Indian-Brazilian coalition would have been dead in the water. Not a bad day's work for a single thermonuclear weapon discreetly removed from the decommissioning process. There are those who may claim that I have 'left out' the giant ExxonMobil gas fields in Aceh, but that is not the case. Certainly they are very productive sub-surface fields, and will unquestionably produce lots of gas again once the surface equipment has been repaired, but in isolation they are completely incapable of saving the New Zion from collapse. Wall Street needs giant reconstruction contracts, and plenty of them. If I remember correctly, shortly before Christmas I received a large number of emails from various people about some "German Guy", who apparently claimed that Wolfowitz had got hold of a critical weapon and was going to nuke Houston on either the 26 or 27 of December. I never did read the whole email, but it seems very likely that it was initially circulated by Wolfowitz or one of his ilk, as a classic disinformation distraction. Try something along the lines of "You suckers all watch Houston very carefully on 26 December, while I nuke Asia behind your backs... " [article.addcomment] Sounds feasible susanscully 05.Jan.2005 08:47 A quick comment. Right from the start, I did not just assume it was a natural disaster. Thanks for the article. I hope you're wrong about this, but I have this creepy feeling...I hope others will catch on and at least give it some thought. Radiation? Queer Planet 05.Jan.2005 15:43 While it wouldn't surprise me if Bush and company nuked Europe so that they could start a cattle ranch, I have to wonder about your scenario. Nuclear weapons cause radiation. The water would have been irradiated and thousands of fish would be floating around the Indian Ocean right now, not to mention sea plants. The radiation would spread and eventually reach land if it were that close to shore as you say. There would now be thousands of people dying from radiation exposure. Now maybe they used a non radioactive device. I don't know. But what would be good for your article is if you could present the actual records of the varying seismac readings, proof that there were no aftershocks, and all else. Bush and company are capable of all many of atrocity as we can see in Iraq, but let's not stray into fiction when the truth is bad enough. Spurious Peter Bevan 05.Jan.2005 17:52 I'm sure many of us would dep down love this to be true, but I have to say it strikes me as fairly contencious. 1) Any atomic blast would have to be enormous (several thousand Hiroshimas).. not impossible but expensive and obvious. 2) There *WERE* aftershocks.. even one as sceptical as myself about mainstream news media finds it hard to belive that so many news agencies (and first hand accounts) are wrong on this one. 3) This idea that P-Waves have a wavelength of 0.5-12Hz would mean surely waves between 15,000 and 30,000 miles... far to large to be discernable on such a tiny object as earth. 4) There are a number of pretty tenusous political links here.. Does the disharmony between the US and India really explain all this? Hardly... It does raise some interesting questions to be sure.. primarily; Why did the US send so many armed combatents? There is however a world of difference between oppurtunism and mass murder. -- ======================If you find this material useful, you might want to check out our website (http://cyberjournal.org) or try out our low-traffic, moderated email list by sending a message to: cj-subscribe-at-cyberjournal.org You are encouraged to forward any material from the lists or the website, provided it is for non-commercial use and you include the source and this disclaimer. Richard Moore (rkm) Wexford, Ireland "Escaping The Matrix - Global Transformation: WHY WE NEED IT, AND HOW WE CAN ACHIEVE IT ", current draft: http://www.ratical.org/co-globalize/rkmGlblTrans.html _____________________________ "...the Patriot Act followed 9-11 as smoothly as the suspension of the Weimar constitution followed the Reichstag fire." - Srdja Trifkovic There is not a problem with the system. The system is the problem. Faith in ourselves - not gods, ideologies, leaders, or programs. _____________________________ "Zen of Global Transformation" home page: http://www.QuayLargo.com/Transformation/ QuayLargo discussion forum: http://www.QuayLargo.com/Transformation/ShowChat/?ScreenName=ShowThreads cj list archives: http://cyberjournal.org/cj/show_archives/?lists=cj newslog list archives: http://cyberjournal.org/cj/show_archives/?lists=newslog _____________________________ Informative links: http://www.indymedia.org/ http://www.globalresearch.ca/ http://www.MiddleEast.org http://www.rachel.org http://www.truthout.org http://www.williambowles.info/monthly_index/ http://www.zmag.org http://www.co-intelligence.org |
Illustration by Paul Rogers
Conspiracy theorizing has flourished as a virtual art form in all nations and across all political persuasions. But the American radical right has to be considered a strong contender for the title of modern conspiracy champion. A vast body of academic literature exists exploring this history, of which Richard Hofstadter's 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" is the most famous. Hundreds of books and articles have chronicled the rise (and fall) of an unceasing march of disparate conspiracy-based movements that, at different points in American history, have trembled before and warned against imaginary threats posed by Catholics, Mormons, Jews, American Communists, Freemasons, bankers, and U.S. government officials and agencies.
Scholars continue to debate the psychological and sociological origins of conspiracy theories, but there is no arguing that these theories have seen a revival on the extreme right in recent years. Over the last two decades, a far-right conspiracy culture of self-proclaimed "Patriots" has emerged in which the United States government itself is viewed as a mortal threat to everything from constitutional democracy to the survival of the human race. This conspiracy revival — which has been accompanied by the explosive growth of Patriot groups over the last year and a half — kicked into overdrive with the 2008 election of President Barack Obama, who is seen by Patriots as a foreign-born Manchurian candidate sent by forces of the so-called "New World Order" to destroy American sovereignty and institute one-world socialist government.
Since Obama's election, the constituent theories within the overarching narrative of the New World Order have increasingly made inroads into the mainstream national discourse. Thanks to conservative cable news hosts like Glenn Beck (of Fox News) and Lou Dobbs (formerly of CNN), conspiratorial rants about FEMA concentration camps and the "North American Union" have been beamed directly into the living rooms of millions of Americans. Websites popular with Tea Party conservatives, meanwhile, have further stoked fears of a socialistic one-world government takeover by "un-American" forces. Joseph Farah's WorldNetDaily.com, for example, has grown its influence by peddling paranoia about the president's birth certificate and AmeriCorps' "domestic armies." Earlier this year, the John Birch Society, a group with a long history of hatching and promoting wild conspiracy theories (including the idea that President Eisenhower was a communist agent), co-sponsored the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual powwow of leading conservatives and Republican Party figures. Speakers at this year's conference included such mainstream names as Washington Post columnist George Will, former GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner.
Here is a compilation of 10 of the most popular conspiracy theories currently circulating on the radical right and, increasingly, on points of the political spectrum much too close to the center for comfort.
01 Chemtrails
In the world of Patriot antigovernment paranoia, New World Order forces attempt to manipulate and control the unwitting population from every conceivable source and direction — from the images on your television screen to the very water that comes out of your kitchen tap. In recent years, the New World Order has been meddling most nefariously from above, high among the clouds.
Few Internet-age antigovernment conspiracies have spread as quickly or as widely as the idea of "chemtrails": the belief that air and water vapor contrails that form in the wake of high-altitude aircraft are really clouds of toxic soup being deliberately sprayed by hundreds, if not thousands, of secret government planes executing the designs of the New World Order. What is the insidious purpose of the chemtrails program? It depends which paranoid Patriot you ask. The most popular theories include population control, weather manipulation, and outright human extermination. If, as some cultural historians suggest, the UFO sightings of the 1940s and 50s were the skyward projection of early atomic-age fears, chemtrails are the climate-change-age corollary, with cultural panic over pollution and strange weather mixing with deeper traditions of Patriot antigovernment animus.
Hundreds of websites currently peddle chemtrails theories, along with books, DVDs and all manner of survivalist gear. They maintain that toxic clouds in the sky are easily distinguished from normal contrails by their longer duration and expansive dissipation patterns. Most of the spraying is believed to take place at night over the population centers of the NATO countries, especially the United States.
Who, exactly, is responsible for the program? There are conflicting schools of thought here as well. But among Patriot groups it is generally agreed that some alignment of New World Order lords — sometimes referred to as the Illuminati — is busy spraying cities and towns with pathogens. In the grimmest of the scenarios, the spraying represents the first of a two-stage depopulation program. Stage one involves spreading pathogens to weaken humanity's collective immune system; once general T-cell weakness is attained, goes the theory, we can expect aerial dispersal of smallpox or anthrax to finish us off.
Fear over chemtrails long ago spread beyond the Patriot fringe. Twenty years ago, the buzz surrounding chemtrails had grown to the extent that the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration felt compelled to issue a joint "Aircraft Contrails Factsheet." The six-page illustrated report patiently explained the science of contrails, such as the role humidity plays in the variance between how long contrails linger and spread, sometimes forming cirrus cloud cover, and pointed out that they have zero impact on human health.
But as these things go, official efforts to confront the conspiracy only fueled its growth. It is today bigger than ever, commanding adherents across the globe.
02 Martial Law
If Patriot groups fear anything more than the water vapor in the sky, it is the imminent imposition of martial law. A longstanding and central plank of the Patriot catechism is the belief that one day — very soon! — federal forces, in league with the states, will suspend constitutional government and institute a police state.
During the first few years after the 9/11 attacks, this fear was also discussed on the left. But what was a temporary concern there has long been an absolute certainty on the far right. Today, hundreds of Patriot groups around the country are actively preparing for the declaration of martial law, some of them by mapping wilderness areas, learning how to set booby traps, studying and practicing guerrilla warfare tactics, and setting up short-wave radio communications systems. The question is not if, but when, the New World Order will come crashing down.
Patriot groups believe the legal groundwork for the inevitable imposition of martial law is being laid in Washington, within the pages of a steady stream of classified National Security documents and directives. At the local level, meanwhile, they suspect town and city governments are also in on the plan, as evidenced by their passing of emergency powers ordinances.
Once the legal mechanisms are in place, all that's needed is a "crisis trigger," for which Patriots are constantly on the lookout. Whether this trigger is real or manufactured matters less than the fact that it will succeed in frightening the population into submission and be used to justify suspension of the Constitution. This crisis trigger could take any form. Common scenarios suggested on Patriot discussion boards include economic collapse, followed by massive social unrest; a global (and likely government-created) pandemic; multiple acts of mega-terrorism (again, featuring government collusion); or possibly a fraudulent presidential election, resulting in rioting in major cities around the country.
Patriot groups often refer to the unelected junta that will rule the coming police state as a "metropolitan government." This language, like the martial law scenario, has a long pedigree. As Patriot/survivalist Don Harkin explains in the Idaho Observer, a conspiracy rag popular among militia groups: "Metropolitan government was exposed in the late 1950s by Jo Hindman. … [Today] this unconstitutional form of government is being implemented all over the country — particularly in the nation's more densely populated areas such as Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle."
Once the "metropolitan government" is instituted, most Patriots are certain they will immediately be rounded up and sent to internment camps — which takes us to our next conspiracy.
03 FEMA Concentration Camps
Following the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Domestic Terrorism held hearings on the Patriot/militia subculture that bred and nurtured the bombers. Throughout the hearings, a running theme expressed by Patriots was a fear that "urban gangs," directed by Washington and possibly acting in concert with U.N. and foreign troops, would sweep in from the coasts, confiscate their guns, and round them up. This home-invasion force would hold down the streets during the imposition of martial law, then send the members of Patriot militias to internment camps run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which most Patriot groups consider to be "the executive arm of the coming police state."
This conspiracy has recently surged in popularity, especially after the Senate in March 2009 passed the Serve America Act, the meat of which was a multi-billion-dollar expansion of AmeriCorps, a federal program that employs many inner-city youths in community service jobs. For the Patriot fringe (and media enablers like Glenn Beck), the thought of billions of dollars going to employ inner-city youth evoked images of "domestic armies." Soon, the far-right media was full of warnings about "Obama's brown shirts" and "slavery."
The renewed chatter about "FEMA concentration camps" took many forms. Glenn Beck promised to "look into it." Films such as "Camp FEMA: American Lockdown," featuring conspiracy-monger Alex Jones, have been wildly popular on conspiracy-driven websites like martiallawsurvival.com, outselling all previous conspiracy-driven pseudo-documentaries. Aerial photographs, each supposedly showing secret government holding facilities, went viral on the Web.
Of course, the photos showed nothing of the sort. A careful review of some of the photographs carried out by Popular Mechanics editor James Meigs made clear that the visual "evidence" was bogus in every instance. For example, a photograph of an alleged secret prison was actually a North Korean work camp. Other photographs showed nothing more sinister than well-known National Guard training centers and Amtrak rail yards.
Just as the agencies responsible for air travel and air quality have tried to respond to the chemtrails conspiracy allegations, so, too, has FEMA gone on record reassuring Americans that it has no intention of abrogating the Constitution or rounding up citizens. An internal FEMA memo, however, made clear that agency brass understands the losing-battle nature of trying to quell the conspiracies. "Most people know us as the agency that responds to natural disasters," the memo read. "Others believe we have a somewhat sinister role. For the latter, it is not realistic to think that we can convince them otherwise and it is advisable not to enter into debate on the subject."
04 Foreign Troops on U.S. Soil
While "urban gangs" are considered a leading candidate to enforce a New World Order (NWO) lockdown, they are not the only threatening force clouding the Patriot mind. There is also a belief on the radical right that treasonous government officials are colluding with other governments to suppress Americans with the use of foreign troops. Patriots believe this foreign assistance will be necessary due to the patriotism of America's own troops. As explained on the Patriot website libertyforlife.com, many U.S. active military personnel and veterans would likely refuse orders to suppress the rights of their fellow citizens, and so "the US/NWO/UN government is importing foreign troops into the USA to do what US soldiers did to Iraq." Among the many Patriot groups dedicated to resisting this is the Oath Keepers, made up of veteran and active-duty U.S. military personnel.
Whose troops, exactly, would be deployed here? Those of whichever allies the U.S. is partnering with at any given moment. For example, Patriot sites were atwitter with news that, in July 2009, FEMA organized a terrorist-response exercise in conjunction with troops from 14 allied countries, including Australia, Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom.
After the 2009 exercise, the Web burst with YouTube clips attempting to alert people to the sinister presence of foreign troops. Like other popular conspiracies to see a revival in recent years, this one is hardly new. In 1997, one Patriot blogger warned that Red Chinese troops would be allowed to take over America. The fevered language of this Clinton-era theorist nicely captures the frantic energy that has always defined Patriot conspiracy culture, as well as the racial dimension never far from the surface of so many conspiracies:
"During the 1950's, the elitists planning for world government made plans to use occupation forces in every country that did not submit to their greedy, arrogant ambitions. Their plan called for using Chinese troops in America… . Now that American soldiers have been used in Kuwait, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, a precedent has been set to bring the red Chinese troops here. The UN could justify such an action if the Black Muslims instigate a race war. I expect this scenario if the Democrats loose [sic] the White House and Congress in the 2000 elections. Comrade Clinton could not be slicker in making himself Commandant of Gulag America."
05 'Door-to-Door' Gun Confiscations
One of the defining features of Patriot/militia subculture is an obsession with firearms. Patriot groups stockpile them, train using them, and, perhaps most of all, worry about losing them. Any attempt to restrain their gun rights is viewed as the thin-edge-wedge of a New World Order crackdown. Patriots believe it inevitable that NWO forces in black masks and jackboots — and possibly UN blue helmets — will one day be sent door to door to take away their weapons by force. This fear is also stoked by mainstream figures within the conservative movement. Wayne LaPierre, the president of the National Rifle Association, a major player in the Republican Party coalition, is the author of a book entitled, The Global War on Your Guns: Inside the UN Plan To Destroy the Bill of Rights. In 2006, Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter attached an amendment to a domestic-security spending bill that prohibited the confiscation of legally owned guns during an emergency. The measure passed by a vote of 84-16.
Within Patriot subculture, the gun-confiscation fear sometimes dovetails with other conspiracies of an anti-Semitic flavor. Proponents of gun control in these instances are seen as representing a New World Order cabal run by Jews. At the website Real Zionist News, for example, a New York State gun control law aimed at protecting police officers was described as "the first step toward confiscation." According to the site, "The real agenda is to disarm law-abiding GENTILES, whom Zionist Jews fear will soon discover Jewry's anti-American, freedom-hating mission."
06 9/11 as Government Plot
The Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., were seen by both the far left and far right as fitting the bill for an intentional "crisis trigger." In the weeks and months after the attacks, a subculture of "9/11 Truthism" emerged in which the attacks were seen as anything but a simple case of well-trained Al Qaeda operatives flying planes into landmark buildings. Instead, "truthers" argued that the World Trade Center buildings were destroyed by controlled demolitions, that a missile brought down United Airlines 93, and that a missile — and not an airliner at all — struck the Pentagon. Who was responsible? The U.S. government, of course. On the far left, the reason seen for attacking the American people was to justify a perpetual state of war; on the far right, it provided an excuse for the government to, at long last, institute a police state.
On both extremes, a distinct current of anti-Semitism runs through 9/11 conspiracies. Especially in the right-wing variants associated with Patriot groups — and in a number of radical-right black separatist group as well — the central agents are often very pointedly described as either high officials of Jewish descent or outright Israeli agents. Another feature of anti-Semitic 9/11 conspiracies is the popular claim that 4,000 Israelis and Jews did not show up for work at the World Trade Center on the morning of the attacks. The origins of that conspiracy theory appear to have come from a statement by the Israeli Foreign Ministry that some "4,000 Israelis" were in the New York and Washington areas the day of the attacks. Here again, we see how a misread or misconstrued fact can be distorted through paranoia and multiplied by the power of the Internet, allowing totally unfounded rumors to travel the globe at warp speed.
For many Patriot groups dedicated to the fight against the New World Order — often referred to as "American Revolution II" — the American people have been denied the truth about the 2001 attacks by "the New World Order-controlled corporatist-Jewish media."
Of course, when this media does mention 9/11 truther claims, this, too, is seen as evidence of a conspiracy within a conspiracy. For example, when former White House official Van Jones was found to have signed a petition calling for an investigation into truther-related allegations, Patriots saw the subsequent media attention as a ruse. "Our patriot movements are totally being hijacked," said Jeffrey Grupp of the popular conspiracy website AntiMatterRadio.com, "not by infiltrators, but by a takeover of our patriot discussions."
That's typical of most conspiracies in the Patriot pantheon: When the mainstream media does not address the conspiracists' allegations, it is proof of their propaganda role. And when they do, it is a sign of an even more sophisticated and perfidious manipulation.
07 Population Control
For the conspiracy-minded, there is no such thing as an accidental tragedy or historical caprice. Each epidemic, mass industrial poisoning and medical advance (vaccinations, in particular) is just another highly suspicious example of the latest technologies being employed to further the agenda of hidden New World Order forces.
When the fluoridation of the U.S. water supply began in the middle of the last century, proto-Patriot groups screamed of a poisonous plot by communists in high places. A half century later, when the Food and Drug Administration approved aspartame as an ingredient in numerous food items, the descendents of the anti-fluoride conspiracists sounded yet another poison-ingredient alarm. But even aspartame paled in comparison to the threat supposedly posed by the avian flu virus, which many Patriots, from the late 1990s to the present, believe to be the result of research conducted at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Maryland's Fort Detrick.
In the Patriot mind, population control is often intimately linked to gun rights. After all, they say, it was gun control that led to large-scale slaughters in nations as diverse at Idi Amin's Uganda, Josef Stalin's Russia, Adolf Hitler's Germany and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's Turkey. American citizens, they believe, once deprived of their guns, will be next in line for a slaughter worthy of the history books.
What is the point of limiting — or even intentionally decimating — the U.S. population? One Patriot theory says the United Nations wants to create a "biosphere" out of most of the United States, and that eliminating the humans who put pressure on the environment will be a necessary first step.
Increasingly, devastating weather events are considered the result of government-engineered efforts to depopulate the country. In Patriot circles, Hurricane Katrina was not only seen as a pretext to begin confiscating guns, but is sometimes viewed as a man-made disaster orchestrated in secret government command centers where sophisticated high-altitude weapons control both the weather and the minds of men.
Chief among these weapons is one allegedly operating high above the earth, appropriately enough named after the instrument traditionally favored by mythological angels.
08 HAARP
This is the "Death Star" of the Patriot conspiracy galaxy, around which so many other conspiracies orbit and often intersect.
According to the U.S. government, the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program is a joint scientific research project of the Air Force and Navy, based in Gakona, Ala., whose stated purpose is "studying the properties and behavior of the ionosphere, with particular emphasis on being able to understand and use it to enhance communications and surveillance systems for both civilian and defense purposes."
Few true-blue Patriots believe that — and they aren't alone in their skepticism. Earlier this year, former Minnesota governor and tele-conspiracist Jesse Ventura visited the HAARP site for his TV show in an attempt to probe the official claims and find out "what's really going on." For those enthralled to a Patriot view of the world, the government's description of HAARP only scratches the surface. To the conspiracy-minded, HAARP is a government program tasked with creating secret directed-energy weapons, instruments for weather and mind control, and even potent new methods to cause earthquakes. Predictably, after January's devastating earthquake in Haiti, some Patriot sites noted that the neighboring Dominican Republic was undamaged, leading them to speculate that the U.S. government was responsible and had targeted Haiti alone — ignoring the more relevant explanation that the Republic's capital and major population center, Santo Domingo, was 160 miles from the quake's epicenter.
Discussions of HAARP often overlap with the chemtrails conspiracy. Many Patriot sites argue that NATO aircraft are spraying the toxic soup as part of a top-secret HAARP-related weather-modification program, or are refining a new-generation of high-frequency atmospheric weapons developed at the HAARP research center. Any number of wild-eyed (and self-published) introductions to the subject of HAARP are circulating on the web; one example is HAARP: The Ultimate Weapon of the Conspiracy, by Jerry E. Smith.
09 The Federal Reserve Conspiracy
It wasn't long after its creation under Woodrow Wilson that the Federal Reserve System became a central fixture in the world of right-wing conspiracy. It was seen, rightly, as introducing European-style central banking into the United States. It was also seen, this time wrongly, as the latest form of spreading Jewish and banker control over every aspect of American life. No one did more to promote anti-Fed hysteria in the early years than automobile magnate Henry Ford, who in the 1920s penned a multi-volume, anti-Semitic conspiracy opus called The International Jew, in which the Fed plays a starring role.
Ford's modern-day ideological descendants in the Patriot movement continue to view the Fed — without question, an opaque institution to most — through a lens colored by deep suspicion, paranoia, and hatred. For many, it remains the ultimate symbol of New Word Order power, in both Jewish and non-Jewish variants. Nor is anti-Fed paranoia limited to the Patriot fringe. Both the Idaho-based neo-Nazi group Aryan Nations and the black separatist Nation of Islam have claimed significance for the fact that the Federal Reserve System and the Anti-Defamation League both were founded in 1913.
In May 2009, a group of leading radical rightists convened on the South Georgia key known as Jekyll Island, where 100 years earlier bankers and government officials first hashed out plans for what became the Federal Reserve System. This meeting played a key role in launching the current resurgence of militias. Less than five months into the Obama Administration, the Jekyll Island conclave warned of "increasing national instability," worried about the coming New World Order, denounced secret schemes to merge Canada, Mexico and the United States, and furiously attacked the President Barack Obama's "socialized" policies.
Which leads, appropriately, to our final top conspiracy.
10 The North American Union
Since the passage of NAFTA in 1993, fears of economic dislocation and loss of sovereignty have animated both sides of the political spectrum. On the left, these fears are centered on the growth of transnational corporate power at the expense of U.S. labor and national policy. In some circles on the right, the trade bill is seen as the beginning of the so-called "North American Union" (NAU), the goal of a secret plan to merge the United States with Mexico and Canada and, in the process, eliminate sovereign government for each country. It is also a dominant conspiracy theory animating the hard-line anti-immigration movement, which overlaps heavily with Patriot territory.
As proof of the NAU plot, left- and right-wing conspiracy theorists typically point to the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), a series of working groups between the countries of North America to study regulatory cooperation in transportation, energy, aviation, the environment and more. To many adherents, participants at these meetings plot how best to send millions of Mexico's citizens to the United States, erect international courts designed to overrule and undermine American law, and pass continental hate crime laws that will send anti-gay Christian preachers to prison, and more.
In recent years, the paranoia about the SPP process has become so intense that a proposed highway project linking Canada, Mexico and the United States — the NAFTA-inspired Canamex Corridor concept which has managed only 85% completion after 15 years of planning — is seen as part of an evil design that will end with the Mexican government seizing control of Kansas City's Missouri River port. Other conspiracy theorists fear that a new currency, the "Amero," will displace American dollars — though no U.S. official of even marginal influence has ever proposed such a thing. (This last fear is odd coming from Patriot circles that otherwise have no love for Federal Reserve-issued greenbacks.)
As with so many conspiracies, the NAU plot is often inflamed by real news items that are seen as vastly more significant than they really are. This is especially true when the news items involve traditional New World Order bogeymen. In 2005, for example, when the Council on Foreign Relations released a document entitled "Building a North American Community" — calling for exploring the idea of further integration of Canada, the United States and Mexico — Patriot sites responded as if the report were a New World Order directive, spelling the imminent end of national sovereignty.
Alexander Zaitchik is a former Intelligence Report staff writer and free-lance journalist based in New York. His first book, Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance, has just been published by John Wiley & Sons Inc.