Unknownnews by Underground Panther in the Sky

Have you noticed, after all these child abduction stories, we get videos of dogs and other animals being tortured for testing chemical weaponry? Normally this side of business is hidden from the public eye, but it has always been business as usual for chemical and biological weapons makers.

Why are these tapes out shocking the public now? And what do these tapes say about the average American's social relational skills? First of all, we need to realize that there is a deep public selective amnesia.

Forgotten by most are the photos and articles about Osama bin Laden and Bush brokering an oil deal that failed to happen before the "war on terror". Forgotten is the American government's habit of propping up dictatorial regimes, not for "democracy" but for the almighty profit. Forgotten are the obscene acts of animal cruelty done every day by American pharmaceutical companies, slaughterhouses, and make-up and shampoo manufacturers.

What makes you think these tapes were not created by our tax dollars — dollars we shovel unquestioningly to our exploiting government-corporate-military, that convinces us we are free when we never truly own what we buy? Would you write a check for half your income and give it away, saying "Do what you want with it, " to just anyone? No!! You would want to know what the money is for. You'd want an explanation, and you'd want to be shown what it was going to be spent on, and then you'd want proof it was spent for what they said it was.

Why then do we write a collective blank check for "Uncle Sam?" Why don't we expect the government we support to show us the numbers, and account for where the money goes — like we would expect from any other people we gave money to? The Bush administration will not even show Congress what it does with our money!!?? So then how do we loudly complain when we don't like what he does with our money, when we don't even know what is done? And we don't bother to find out?

Uncle Sam wants us all upset at seeing the dying pooches in a rush of emotion, so we fail to remember. Bush and Bin Laden were buddies and America funded them.

Of course they'd want evidence of work being done. These tapes might have been proof that al Qaeda was doing the job we paid them to do.

What might have led up to this? Ask yourself why. Is it because these so-called "powers that be" want our lives on the line so they may control the oil and grab land — and deepen the hatred the world has for the United States? Bush can hide underground when the world wrath comes, but we the people can't. We the people have let ourselves become expendable, and we will be expended if we go to war and invite the wrath of the world into a fight we citizens didn't provoke.

The "government" can already grab our homes or cars from us if we refuse to pay taxes on what we already paid for, or if we refuse to let them track our whereabouts by license plate numbers. We live in a culture of psychological coercion, and we will not even admit to ourselves we are not free. We think this is normal because we know nothing else and never have. Even abused kids in foster care want to go home to the familiar . . . even if Mommie and Daddy locked them in cages threatened and battered them.

To dare to ask, What was the date when these animal torture tapes were made? That question does not diminish the pain reaction, but it changes the entire propagandic goal the government had in showing us the dying puppies. Were the tapes made while America was funding bin Laden's guerrillas to beat the Russians to the oil in the Caspian Sea? Was America funding the gas tests so Bin Laden could kill more Russian soldiers? If the dates match up, then very possibly we are seeing our tax dollars at work in those videotapes.

Part of our irresponsibly generous unregulated money flow, all given away to government, entails unsavory things that are not in our interest. And it happens more when we are not interested. The money each of us must slave half the year to earn at jobs we hate — does it go to the gassing of dogs by our "friends" in business, fighting a war for us, who turned to enemies when they didn't agree with American business and corporations?

America didn't get to be the richest, most powerful country in the world by being "nice." It is a warlike, greedy country, and full of cutthroat competition. America has used biological weapons: Smallpox-infested blankets were used in the American genocide of the Indian nations, yet because the American people have developed National Alzheimer's disease, they never remember the historical proof of the boldfaced hypocrisies invading their living rooms on TV.

Bush spins away, reading prepared statements he didn't even write, and we nod like robots' heads on a spring.

Americans have been lied to over and over, and as long as it is comforting to our powerless, insecure, hopeless lives we will keep watching the shadows dance on the cave wall and call that reality — like good little citizens.

Sometimes the shadows mimic the truth. Through history the truth has been used as a tool of war, profit and control. That is why America looks powerful. It isn't for America's ability to share with others who are less fortunate. It isn't about freedom or "democracy". Even Norway outdoes the US in aid for altruistic purposes.

Look how atomized and intimidated Americans are. They don't care about themselves or this world enough to speak their minds in public, to question the boss, church, or schoolmaster. So forget speaking out on politics.

Sure, we are a disenfranchised people. And we the people created this, by our tolerance of lies, apathy, insecurity, forgetfulness, patriotism, all the things that money brings. It's unfashionable to have strong opinions when there's a war on or the economy is 'struggling'. When we believe that we are becoming all-day suckers for wannabe dictators, fainting lilies scared to offend, we duck low to avoid the anger of the household tyrant. Our household government.

Fearful that having a "radical" opinion might risk our little job, cost us money or public esteem, we are now cowards. Each one of us who are silent, obedient and timid are opening the door of corporate fascism. Instead of taking out our despair on those who cause it, for profit we take it out on each other — our outrage about injustice and our denied dreams — we take it out on each other, at home, in the street, or in the bar.

And that is just how the oligarchies who are in power like us — drunk, easily provoked and duped, divisive, abusive, inhibited, trusting of government and mistrusting of each other, obedient to authority in symbol, and loyal ... to the flag.

We are not going after the government's interests like we should, which would be in our interest. Nor are watching what they are doing, independent of the media they own, using the leash of public opinion to curb their injustices deposited here or abroad. That is our real patriotic duty. And we aren't using our brains and remembering what they did to us and others before, all in the name of greed.

So the corporate leaders feel safe torturing dogs in private with nerve gas — in America, at places like Ft. Detrich, as well as funding al Qaeda overseas with our tax dollars, to secure the oil field from Russian competition. They know we will forget about it all and not get involved. They know how to mobilize us, just by showing us something that tears open an old, deep childhood wound. Evoke memories of the death of a pet, long buried in the heart of a sad little boy that is now a frustrated unhappy man staggering under the burdens of being an adult/wage slave in this culture, and they've got us.

A person can't grow up in this culture without dying inside. They can't see themselves as autonomous, self-sufficient, empowered, free-thinking beings with many facets. To feel empowered reminds the citizen of the life being stolen from them hour by hour, of the tears penned up.

Know that the drums of war this time will march to the tune of a secret or minimized heartbreak of long ago that still cuts the heart like broken glass in a culture where boys don't cry and most abused children will not be allowed heal and will grow up to beat the love of country into their kids. We do not let ourselves feel pain and work out why we feel as we do emotionally, under penalty of looking "weak" or "hysterical," or being suspected of "asking for it," or just thinking outside the box — things your bigoted parents would accuse you of, as if it was a bad thing, when you were associating with those bad kids, those hippies, when you were having sex, dressing differently, getting tattoos, going down a road they judged "bad" ... to freedom and exploration, self empowerment, healing and relating as human beings.

What way can you provoke a nation of lonely, insecure, busy, atomized government-work-society-created, misanthropes stuck in cruel social conditioning of learned helplessness, excessive greed and consumer competition? How can you convince them to go to war and kill themselves and whoever they can kill?

Just show a tape over and over on the media, of Enemy X killing an innocent cute sentimental animal on TV.

Years ago it was women and children that provoked the visceral reaction — not any more. Our empathy for humans is dulled to the point that human deaths just can't provoke a war anymore. Many people think humanity is just a plague on the Earth anyway. The US government took a tip from the pedophiles — threaten their pets, to get them to do what you want!

To the observer, deep down, secretly ... animals (especially pets) are the last true friends we have in our American lives, still capable of unconditional love, who care when we cry out in pain. These things we need to live, that we never seem to find in other humans when we relate to them as valid, unique beings capable of love, in this dog-eat-dog society.

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Addendum: I researched more on the dog gassing tapes. Some say CNN bought those tapes from an undisclosed contact in Afganistan (uh huh) and they were made, they guessed, from 1998 and 2001.But funny who got those tapes from Al Queda? Was it really just found by some Afgan dude poking around a house bin Laden was at? And don't you think American agents, if they want bin Laden so damned bad, would have swarmed over that house looking for evidence? How could they ignore 30 or so video tapes with titles like munitions, kidnappping, etc.?

Some of these tapes may show Al -Queda doing some stupid militia crap, but can you ever be sure they aren't staged. Can you ever trust "undisclosed sources" in corporate media with an agenda of it's own that isn't about freedom for everyone, just freedom for themselves?

—Underground Panther in the Sky

© 2002, Underground Panther in the Sky.

Reproduced from:
http://upits.pitas.com/

By John Chuckman, YellowTimes.org

I have to confess I don't watch television. And if I did, CNN would not be a stop on the dial.

The subject of this column was raised by a friend. Details were obtained on the Internet where more information is to be had with a half hour's effort than from a week in front of a television.

CNN has broadcast some videotape, supposedly from a secret al Qaeda library in Afghanistan. Of course, like so many things touching Afghanistan, the use of the word library ever-so-slightly stretches the truth.

Journalists who have actually visited some of the caves in Afghanistan, said by the Pentagon to be the mountain redoubts of al Qaeda and the Taliban, have stressed how primitive and small they actually are. But from the American mainstream press and Pentagon press releases, you'd think Flash Gordon had discovered a stunning underground city on the planet Mongol. We've had secret laboratories, vast weapons caches, and now we have al Qaeda tape libraries.

Rarely emphasized in these reports are the details - the weapons caches, for example, having consisted of small piles of outdated arms, poorly stored, likely left over from the 1980s conflict with the Russians, and whose owners are unknown. The devil, as they say, is in the details.

Now we have videotapes of experiments with "possible weapons of mass destruction" consisting of three dogs dying after being administered an unknown substance at an unknown location by some unknown people. This is film we might obtain on any given day at hundreds of humane societies and city dog-pounds across North America. Truly terrifying stuff.

The tape undoubtedly provides proof positive, if any were needed, of the wisdom of America's spending tens of billions of dollars to blow up anyone in sandals and the wrong-colored headdress standing on a mountain in Afghanistan. First three dead dogs, tomorrow thermonuclear weapons. Now, on to Iraq.

One is tempted to ask why the American government didn't have CNN's remarkable staff handle all searches for al Qaeda information? Why bother with costly, inept lugs from the Special Forces and CIA when a couple of reporters from CNN can tuck into Afghanistan and come away with an intelligence coup?

But who ever expected truth in war? Much less in something so dimly defined as the War on Terror, whose sole accomplishment so far is the overthrow of a fairly stable, unpleasant government and its replacement with an unstable, unpleasant government that busies itself assassinating its own members and murdering prisoners of war.

I suppose, from the perspective of the kind of people who brought napalmed villages, tens of thousands of midnight throat-cuttings, and barb-wired pacification centers to Vietnam, this may be viewed as a kind of progress.

All I can remember from having seen CNN years ago was "journalism" that consisted of reporters making life miserable for an innocent man, Richard Jewell, after the Atlanta Olympics bomb by shoving microphones at his face everywhere he went and broadcasting remarkably-informative footage of his car driving away. This network, of course, has distinguished itself since on a number of occasions, including the fiasco of the Operation Tailwind investigation.

They also specialize in that most American of television institutions, the meaningless argument show that provides loud, cheap talk from two sides in pancake make-up and blow-dried hair-dos. No scholarship, no experts worthy of the name, just glib, Washington-hugging journalists eager for an extra pay check and professional think-tankers peddling views from their latest pamphlets. Very informative.

The videotape shows us three appealing dogs, animals that might almost have been groomed by a CNN makeup expert for one of the network's pathetic argument shows. The improbability of this originating from a cave or shack in a part of the world where poverty allows few people to keep pets and where the ones they do keep often resemble hungry coyotes is not discussed. As I wrote above, these dogs are killed by an unknown substance by some unknown people in some unknown location. Sandals are seen scurrying.

It is truly unpleasant to see dogs die. There are, unfortunately, a limited number of people in the world who take satisfaction in such things. But there are such people, and the viewers of CNN likely never gave a thought to the ones who have killed countless thousands of animals in U.S. Army weapons laboratories over the last five or six decades using everything from nerve gases and blister agents to botulism and radioactive isotopes.

And let's not forget the human experiments. There were the CIA's experiments with LSD and other drugs on unwitting subjects that resulted in suicides. There were the Pentagon's many experiments with the effects of atomic radiation in the 1950s, including deliberately exposing tens of thousands of "the boyz" to atomic-test blasts. There were also secret, controlled releases of radiation into the atmosphere over the United States to see how it would travel and where it might be deposited.

One might include the Americans exposed to massive amounts of Agent Orange and the hideous inoculations of unproven substances given troops in Desert Storm. How about all the thousands of depleted-uranium shells tested at proving ranges? Or are those only tested in places like Afghan villages? Did those thousands of sheep who suddenly died in Colorado near an Army chemical-weapons facility some years ago represent a unique event?

Just how does anyone think those clean-cut, pressed-shirt boys at the Pentagon managed to build a hellish arsenal of poison gases, putrid chemicals, engineered disease germs and viruses, plus nuclear and thermonuclear weapons? In fact, the number of Americans killed by air and groundwater contamination alone from nuclear-weapons processing facilities likely equals the toll for a small war.

Ah, but that's our side, the good guys. What counts is that the bad guys, whoever they are on that video, killed three dogs.

The most interesting aspect of CNN's propaganda video, uncritically passed off as a startling revelation, is that it doesn't make any difference whether it is authentic or not.

As I've written before, the most effective propaganda is always based on truth. So, maybe someone somewhere in Afghanistan once did poison three dogs. This tells us precisely nothing that can be dignified as information.

But broadcasting the video will have sickened a lot of people watching the news over dinner. And that gut-form of argument without content is almost impossible to counteract. With one blow, men in sandals are reduced to dog-hating fiends, the suggestion is planted that they were doing horrifying experiments, and the implicit argument is made that only the kind of violent, stupid action taken in Afghanistan will preserve us from future horrors.

(For unfamiliar readers, Mondo Cane - "world of dogs" - was a documentary film in the early 1960s that shocked audiences with exotic scenes of human cruelty and primitive behavior.)

(John Chuckman is former chief economist for a large Canadian oil company.)