How Do They Manipulate Us?

By Lucien Cerise

• Summary:

1. What is Social Engineering ?
2. Human brain’s manipulation & computers’ system: formatting human brain.
3. From Management to Social Engineering: optimizing the control of the society.
4. Structuralism, French Theory, The Gender Theory & the Deconstruction of the Human dehumanization: Formatting the Human.
5. Dehumanization part two: future of the Human.
6. Frauds on the vote for the Taubira’s law in France ? Gay mariage law in France.

Vote All You Want, The Secret Government Won’t Change

ISTOCK/PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY LESLEY BECKER/GLOBE STAFF

The People We Elect Aren’t The Ones Calling The Shots 

[Tufts University’s Michael Glennon]

THE VOTERS WHO put Barack Obama in office expected some big changes. From the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping to Guantanamo Bay to the Patriot Act, candidate Obama was a defender of civil liberties and privacy, promising a dramatically different approach from his predecessor.

But six years into his administration, the Obama version of national security looks almost indistinguishable from the one he inherited. Guantanamo Bay remains open. The NSA has, if anything, become more aggressive in monitoring Americans. Drone strikes have escalated. Most recently it was reported that the same president who won a Nobel Prize in part for promoting nuclear disarmament is spending up to $1 trillion modernizing and revitalizing America’s nuclear weapons.

Why did the face in the Oval Office change but the policies remain the same? Critics tend to focus on Obama himself, a leader who perhaps has shifted with politics to take a harder line. But Tufts University political scientist Michael J. Glennon has a more pessimistic answer: Obama couldn’t have changed policies much even if he tried.

Though it’s a bedrock American principle that citizens can steer their own government by electing new officials, Glennon suggests that in practice, much of our government no longer works that way. 

In a new book, “National Security and Double Government,” he catalogs the ways that the defense and national security apparatus is effectively self-governing, with virtually no accountability, transparency, or checks and balances of any kind. He uses the term “Double Government”: 

There’s the one we elect, and then there’s the one behind it, steering huge swaths of policy almost unchecked. Elected officials end up serving as mere cover for the real decisions made by the bureaucracy.

Glennon cites the example of Obama and his team being shocked and angry to discover upon taking office that the military gave them only two options for the war in Afghanistan: The United States could add more troops, or the United States could add a lot more troops. Hemmed in, Obama added 30,000 more troops.

How exactly has double government taken hold? And what can be done about it? Glennon spoke with Ideas from his office at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. This interview has been condensed and edited.

IDEAS: Where does the term “double government” come from?

GLENNON:It comes from Walter Bagehot’s famous theory, unveiled in the 1860s. Bagehot was the scholar who presided over the birth of the Economist magazine—they still have a column named after him. Bagehot tried to explain in his book “The English Constitution” how the British government worked. He suggested that there are two sets of institutions. 

There are the “dignified institutions,” the monarchy and the House of Lords, which people erroneously believed ran the government. But he suggested that there was in reality a second set of institutions, which he referred to as the “efficient institutions,” that actually set governmental policy. And those were the House of Commons, the prime minister, and the British cabinet.

IDEAS: What evidence exists for saying America has a double government?

GLENNON:I was curious why a president such as Barack Obama would embrace the very same national security and counterterrorism policies that he campaigned eloquently against. Why would that president continue those same policies in case after case after case? I initially wrote it based on my own experience and personal knowledge and conversations with dozens of individuals in the military, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies of our government, as well as, of course, officeholders on Capitol Hill and in the courts. And the documented evidence in the book is substantial—there are 800 footnotes in the book.

IDEAS: Why would policy makers hand over the national-security keys to unelected officials?

GLENNON: It hasn’t been a conscious decision....Members of Congress are generalists and need to defer to experts within the national security realm, as elsewhere. They are particularly concerned about being caught out on a limb having made a wrong judgment about national security and tend, therefore, to defer to experts, who tend to exaggerate threats. The courts similarly tend to defer to the expertise of the network that defines national security policy.

The presidency itself is not a top-down institution, as many people in the public believe, headed by a president who gives orders and causes the bureaucracy to click its heels and salute. National security policy actually bubbles up from within the bureaucracy. Many of the more controversial policies, from the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors to the NSA surveillance program, originated within the bureaucracy. John Kerry was not exaggerating when he said that some of those programs are “on autopilot.”

IDEAS: Isn’t this just another way of saying that big bureaucracies are difficult to change?

GLENNON: It’s much more serious than that. These particular bureaucracies don’t set truck widths or determine railroad freight rates. They make nerve-center security decisions that in a democracy can be irreversible, that can close down the marketplace of ideas, and can result in some very dire consequences.

IDEAS: Couldn’t Obama’s national-security decisions just result from the difference in vantage point between being a campaigner and being the commander-in-chief, responsible for 320 million lives?

GLENNON: There is an element of what you described. There is not only one explanation or one cause for the amazing continuity of American national security policy. But obviously there is something else going on when policy after policy after policy all continue virtually the same way that they were in the George W. Bush administration.

IDEAS: This isn’t how we’re taught to think of the American political system.

GLENNON: I think the American people are deluded, as Bagehot explained about the British population, that the institutions that provide the public face actually set American national security policy. They believe that when they vote for a president or member of Congress or succeed in bringing a case before the courts, that policy is going to change. 

Now, there are many counter-examples in which these branches do affect policy, as Bagehot predicted there would be. But the larger picture is still true—policy by and large in the national security realm is made by the concealed institutions.

IDEAS: Do we have any hope of fixing the problem?

GLENNON: The ultimate problem is the pervasive political ignorance on the part of the American people. And indifference to the threat that is emerging from these concealed institutions. That is where the energy for reform has to come from: the American people. 

Not from government. Government is very much the problem here. The people have to take the bull by the horns. And that’s a very difficult thing to do, because the ignorance is in many ways rational. There is very little profit to be had in learning about, and being active about, problems that you can’t affect, policies that you can’t change.

Jordan Michael Smith is a contributing writer at Salon and The Christian Science Monitor.

Infiltration

There is ample evidence that the British State spies on Muslims under the excuse of countering terrorism. But has this covert infiltration been a success in winning the war on terror? Or has it made the general public lose its confidence in the British police and MI5 for gratuitously targeting the whole Muslim community rather than the extremist groups? 

In 2007 when the UK troops were bogged down in the quagmire of Iraq and Afghanistan, the government put into place the counter-terrorism strategy called Preventing Violent Extremism - Prevent in short. 

In 2010, the strategy gained momentum to aggressively confront Islamist ideology. This allowed the State to freely go around, intercept, investigate or scrutinize anybody they wish based on the fine grain of intelligence that they may pose a likely threat to the State national security. 

This way in today’s UK, the innocent people who have had no involvement in terrorism fall victim to intrusive surveillance, deportation or incarceration without charge or trial.

The Truth About 911

It's September of 2014, the world is caught up in a whirlwind of terraranoia while global leaders posture and position themselves in preparation for the final stages in the agenda for a New World Order...with the 13th anniversary of 911 coming up right around the corner it is imperative now more than ever that we expose this event for what it was...a false flag operation designed to advance the agenda of the global elite 

The biggest threat to our freedoms is the state itself!

Cops Are An Occupying Army and We Are The Enemy

The war on terror has essentially turned police into occupying armies in some American communities of color.

“I remember it being drilled into me as a police officer, as a sergeant and then as a lieutenant: partnership, problem-solving, and prevention – the three Ps,” 

“In the early 2000s, particularly after 9/11, we saw a paradigm shift from community policing and problem-oriented principles to the war on terror, and we became Homeland Security police.”

This shift toward “homeland security” had quickly destroyed the relationships police had worked nearly two decades to build.

“I think what has happened as a direct result of that, is that those relationships that we forged, and worked so hard to attain and to maintain in the late 1980s and early 1990s, began to erode because the police were seen, particularly in communities of color, as an army of occupation.”

“If you dress police officers up as soldiers and you put them in military vehicles and you give them military weapons, they adopt a warrior mentality.” 

“We fight wars against enemies, and the enemies are the people who live in our cities – particularly in communities of color.”

“We weren’t included in the discussion, we didn’t know anything about it, and I think Ferguson has brought that into the glare of the public spotlight.”

“I see the police conducting themselves in a highly militaristic fashion on routine patrol activities — and I know that’s what they’re doing because I come from that world.” 

“What I experience and what people on the street experience is a palpable, tangible sense of fear, and that is that we are unsafe if police need semiautomatic rifles to protect us and to keep us safe.”

“What we saw in that aftermath was the unilateral suspension of the United States Constitution, and particularly the Fourth Amendment.”

“We saw for the first time that I can recall in the United States of America house-to-house searches.”

“and what I said to some colleagues of mine, who work in the news media, that when we fail to object to what’s going on now, and we did, we forfeited our right to do so in the future — and we have.”

Stick Your New World Order Up Your Arse

DazNez (search Google to find out more) performing at Anon Demo at BBC Salford Quays 16th Nov 2013. 

Over a 100 Demonstrators under the banner of Anonymous Protested at the BBC to rebuke them over their lack of coverage of protests. They barely even mentioned 60,000 protesters at the recent Tory Party Conference in Manchester.

Free People Claim Their Rights

Your rights are yours by the very nature of your birth. You have them whether a document or a government says so or not. And while governments at every level will always work to limit or destroy your rights, it’s up to you – and others – to defend them.

How to do that? Thomas Jefferson had what I believe to be the most important advice on this front:

“A free people claim their rights, as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.”

Secret Insignias From The ‘Black Ops’ World

Like A Space-Phoenix From Hell

The Latin phrase below the Phoenix translates to "The Devil You Know." That's the rationale behind the spy-satellite operators at the National Reconnaissance Office, who peer into the workings of foreign military arsenals from hundreds of miles into space.

This patch, from National Reconnaissance Office Launch 49, puts a bold face on a failure: the Future Imagery Architecture, a $10-billion disaster in the guise of a satellite able to peer through heavy cloud cover.

The end of Future Imagery Architecture meant that NRO had to continue with its KH "Keyhole" satellite family, many of which the United States uses to spy on Russian nukes. Launch 49 of the KH-11 series supposedly used spare parts from Future Imagery Architecture -- hence the Phoenix design.

Image: Courtesy Trevor Paglen

• Special Projects Flight Test Squadron

  No one patch may cobble together as many symbols as this one does. "Rat 55" is the call sign for pilots flying theT-43A, a radar testbed ("Rat," get it?) with an Air Force serial number ending in 55.
  The rat's holding a pair of radar devices, one stretched outward and one near its butt, "both of which recall the radome configuration" of the plane. Other flight-test operators for classified aircraft wear patches with wizardy features, so presumably that's what's up with the rat's hat.
  Image: Courtesy Trevor Paglen

 

• Confirmed: The Air Force Totally Hides Aliens From Us

  You don't know how many Freedom of Information Act requests we've filed in the hope of finding the Alien Technology Exploitation Division, the intrepid souls who'll soon announce a sources-sought contract to develop the Hyperspace Blaster. Alas, they don't exist.
  A former officer at Air Force Space Command tells Paglen that he and his friends had the patches made at their own expense after getting endlessly ribbed for working in a secure vault "where they kept the alien bodies." They wore them on their flight suits for months before a one-star general asked where he could get one of his own.
  Oh, and the barely-decipherable legend on the bottom? It's Klingon for "Don't Ask." Paglen got it in the mail from its creator after mentioning that he knew about its existence on the Colbert Report.
  Image: Courtesy Trevor Paglen
• 

• Special Projects Flight-Test Squadron

  Welcome to Area 51.
  Out in the Nevada desert, in a place called Groom Lake, the Air Force's most secretive organization tests its advanced prototypes. Supposedly, Lockheed's F-117A Nighthawk stealth plane went through Groom Lake's test facilities -- one of many flown by the Special Projects Flight Test Squadron, whose patch this is.
  The diamond shape in the center of the undated patch "may refer to early designs of stealth aircraft," Paglen writes. Those planes are parked next to the dismembered Martians.
  Image: Courtesy Trevor Paglen
• 

• Space Spies Are Ready to Breach Your Borders

  Paglen won't be able to find the origins of every patch he comes across. But rarely is a mystery more appropriate than in the case of the Sensor Hunters, whoever they are. Illustrated by one of MAD Magazine's spies, their brief(cases) include spying on the entire world, with swaggering disregard for nations' claims to control their own internal affairs.
  The twinkling stars probably suggest these guys have something to do with space, but all Paglen writes is that they "devoted to reconnaissance and intelligence operations."
  Image: Courtesy Trevor Paglen
• 

• • Drone Strikes From Space?

    The PAN satellite is so secretive that people joke it stands for "Pick a Name," rather than "Palladium at Night." Launched into geostationary orbit in September 2009, no military or intelligence agency claims to operate the communications device.
    Paglen reports that's led space-watchers to suspect it's a rare CIA-controlled satellite, used as a "communications relay for armed CIA Predator and Reaper drones operating in Pakistan and Afghanistan."
    Image: Courtesy Trevor Paglen
  • 
  • • The Only Thing Falling To Earth Is Your Secrets

      This one belongs to the Hawaii-based 6594th Test Group, the wide receivers of military intelligence. In the early days of photo-reconnaissance satellites, back in the 1960s, the images taken by satellites printed to actual film. That meant anything the satellite observed had to be physically transported back to Earth for analysis.
      Those were the "Falling Stars" in this patch: Film canisters ejected from the satellites fell to earth over the Pacific. The 6594th Test Group "had to go out in airplanes and try to catch them as they fell from the heavens," Paglen says. This patch is one of his favorites.
      Image: Courtesy Trevor Paglen
    • 
    • • I Want To Believe (In The Navy's Communications Network)

        The Navy uses a system of Boeing-designed space satellites to keep mariners connected with each other and home base while they're out at sea. The system is known as the Ultra-High Frequency Follow-On program.
        If you squint enough, that kinda-sorta-maybe abbreviates to UFO. Naturally, some wise-cracking sailor -- Paglen doesn't specify whom -- had the idea to make this X-Files-inspired patch.
        Image: Courtesy Trevor Paglen
      • 
      • • The More Secretive The Drone, The More Psychedelic The Patch

          Groom Lake doesn't just house cutting-edge piloted planes. It's also home to the Desert Prowler, a Lockheed-designed drone shrouded in mystery since its 2005 launch -- and, perhaps, related to a different secret drone, the RQ-170 Sentinel aloft over Kandahar.
          And since its remote pilots and crew can't exactly flaunt their involvement with the program, their patches will have to suffice. The Roman numerals for 9 and 11 partially bound the badge -- subtle! -- and the rainbow-emanating eye has a lightning bolt through it, suggesting that the drone is armed and ready to rain vengeance for 9/11 on presumed Kandahari insurgents. Wild guess: The lightning-bolted Omega in the thought balloon indicates the drone is dreaming of a violent end to its targets.
          Image: Courtesy Trevor Paglen
        • 

        • The Dragon Is In Ur Base, Killing Ur Dudes

          You're an imagery analyst, so naturally you see yourself as a Tolkein-esque flying serpent, dispensing destruction from the heavens. That's the apparent animating impulse behind what Paglen can only call the Unknown Dragon Patch. Dragons typically stand in for signals-intelligence satellite launches; their wing patterns on patches "symbolize the massive gold-foil dish antennae" of SIGINT spacecraft.
          Better still, the Latin translates to "All Your Base Are Belong To Us," which we remember as the earliest and most bizarre of all memes. Maybe the crew operating the "largest satellite in the world," which the National Reconnaissance Office launched into space on Friday, will have a Double Rainbow patch someday.
          Image: Courtesy Trevor Paglen
        • Source: Wired

Manufacturing The Terrorist Threat

From The 1970s To The Obama Era

Virtually absent in the media circus around ISIS is an honest discussion of how the US War on Terror, rather than halting the growth of violent Islamist groups, actually fosters fundamentalism.

... it is US actions in the Middle East that have created the conditions for the rise of a group like ISIS. 

Al Qaeda did not exist in Iraq until after the US invasion. Al Qaeda in Iraq was formed in 2004, and was the precursor organization to the current ISIS. 

It is US and various dictatorships’ support of counter-revolutionary forces opposed to the Arab Spring of 2011 that allowed reactionary groups to grow while thwarting progressive ones. 

It is the US’s destruction of Iraq and its support for the Shia government that excluded and oppressed the Sunni that allowed ISIS to take control of such large parts of that country.

In short, it is the US’s War on Terror, and the part played by various regional actors that have fostered the rise of this virulent form of fundamentalism. 

ISIS also represents a dream in terms of US propaganda. It serves to bolster the aims of the Global War on Terror and to justify a vastly expanded national security state. 

Since the Snowden revelations there has been growing concern among Americans of the gigantic surveillance apparatus of the NSA. There has been a greater skepticism of drone wars. 

The box office success of Dirty Wars and its Oscar nomination is an indication of a growing war weariness among the American public. It is this war fatigue that scuttled the intervention into Syria that was proposed last year.

What better to marshal collective anger than a horrendous group like ISIS that cold bloodedly kills Americans, that ruthlessly destroys anyone who disagrees with it, that persecutes religious minorities and is the very prototype of the evil terrorist threat? 

This threat has justified air strikes in Iraq, increased surveillance in Syria as well as a greater escalation including airstrikes by the US, and regional and international involvement in both countries over the coming weeks and years. 

In short, the very thing that causes ire among Jihadis (Osama bin Laden was particularly incensed by US troops in Saudi Arabia), and that allows them recruit, is what the US proposes to do.

People in the establishment who realize that, and who understand that the US can’t win a conventional war, are proposing instead that the US amp up JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) the shady underground outfit of trained killers that is unaccountable even to Congress. This is the very organization that is the subject of extensive critique in Scahill’s book Dirty Wars.

Also, what better to justify the ten-fold increase in the number of people on the no-fly list in the Obama era than the threat of the “homegrown terrorist” like Douglas McCain of Minnesota who it is believed traveled to Syria to fight for ISIS? US officials have emphasized again and again that about 100 Americans are part of ISIS and therefore represent a grave threat to the homeland. 

This bolsters domestic counter-terrorism strategies from arbitrary arrests, to deportation, mass surveillance, and entrapment.

Here is an interview I did with the KPFA radio station’s nationally syndicated radio program Letters and Politics on ISIS, terrorism and the media: https://soundcloud.com/kpfa-fm-94-1-berkeley/isis-terrorism-and-the-media

Some of the themes I discuss in this interview are dealt with in more depth in my talk. I lay out how the terrorist threat was constructed in the US in the 1970s and how this threat was racialized in the 1980s and 1990s in the political sphere, as well in the news and by Hollywood. Finally, I discuss the banalization of the terrorist threat in the 2000s and the Obama era.

Back in 2001 some commentators suggested that the attacks on the twin towers be treated as a criminal act. In other words, they stated that Osama bin Laden and others in al Qaeda who were responsible for the deaths of 3,000 Americans should have been tried in the World Court and brought to justice. 

Yet, this is not the course of action that the US government pursued. Instead it launched a Global War on Terror that would go on indefinitely. The Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists, passed by Congress three days after 9/11, established the War on Terror as an open-ended, perpetual, global war.

The reason for this is strategic. In a nutshell, it provided the Bush administration and the neoconservatives with the “pearl harbor” moment that they had articulated in a report the previous year that would enable them to realize their vision of a new Middle East. It was about advancing empire; a project that the Obama administration continued in new and old ways.

But what allowed the War on Terror brand to succeed was the decades of work in the political, news media and cultural spheres that had primed the American public to accept war as the appropriate response to 9/11 (as outlined in my talk). And here we are again in 2014.

[Deepa Kumar]