Recently (the last day or so), I wrote a comment on the "Truthout" website, that concerning what a lady named Greta had written concerning Israeli brutality toward Palestinian women and children. I said I didn't have a horse (maybe I said dog) in that race, but to complain about and compare being hit with Israeli bricks and stones, as Greta said the Palestinian women and children were, with being blown to bits by Palestinian suicide bombers wouldn't win a lot of support from the candid world. Or words to that effect.
I drew a few verbal brickbats for that, from just whom you would expect, were you me. No one in sympathy with the Israeli point of view commented (as far as I know). To another comment by Greta, I responded at follows:


"'Enemies.'
"In 1978, the United States destroyed my business, broke up and scattered my family, and took steps to assure I would never again be gainfully employed. In 1985, when I had recovered and remarried (wife #one made a deal whereby she could keep all our property), they did it all again. This time they drove my teenage son to three attempts at suicide. Fearful that I would testify at hearings against them, the government's thugs undertook to murder me. Hit three times by a federal sniper, I knew I had to fight or die.
"Unable to determine the identities of the individuals trying to kill me, I was obliged to direct my counter-attack(s) against the government and nation generally. I don't like to shoot into a crowd, but when I'm being shot at from there, I reason that the crowd ought to be doing something to stop the people shooting at me.
"Note that I didn't hate anybody here - not even the guys shooting. I knew they were sent to do that. Besides, hating wouldn't accomplish a single thing (except, perhaps, justify my actions and sooth my ego). I just wanted to stay alive.
"I found out how to defeat a nation. You defeat its government. I could show you how to do that with Israel, or any country you choose (don't forget, it worked for me - and that I'm alive is living proof). But you wouldn't do what I tell you. You and I and everyone who might read this know the reason - that's if they think deeply and well enough. I've written about my method, and my novel provides a disguised plan of action.
"For now, try something I learned to do during my own war with a nation: turn off your emotions for a day at a time, so that all you do is think and reason without them. It's like counting down in your mind thinking of absolutely nothing but the numbers. No other thoughts. Very difficult, because very few people ever do that. They are never taught. It will take you a considerable length of time to do that, but when you do, you will have cleared the way to being a really productive thinker.
"You may even discover what I did.
"All the best, Hal von Luebbert"

Greta wrote back (I'd like to meet this lady: I know tough courage and determination when I hear it):

I'm sorry about that Hal, I really am, but you're certainly not the only one that these things have happened to. The fact that you 'got even' is great, and I wish you all the best. As you said, hating people isn't worth it...getting even is.
"I'm sure that many of us, myself included, have horror stories about what has happened to us when they take up an unpopular cause. The US government, hell, any government, will do its best to destroy people that don't fall into line.
"However, with all that said, we all have different methods of standing up to the bullies and bastards who murder and maim. My choice, and it has always been my choice, is to go to the occupied territories, bear witness to the daily atrocities that Israel foists onto Palestinian civilians, then come back and write about it and speak out.
"Going there and facing the idiots in uniform, I have been shot with a rubber bullet, tear gassed more times than I care to count, threatened, and threatened once I return. It's worth it. Every single thug who comes out of the woodwork is testiment (sic) that I'm telling the truth and makes sure I will continue what I do... nonviolently protesting the most continuous, violent occupation in modern history.
"Greta"

In the thread of comments to the original essay entitled "Unbalanced Views on Israel," was a comment by "lwelsch":

"I agree with all that you said. Now pretend that you are almost God and tell me short of blowing everyone to hell how to bring about a resolution to the problem. Its the dam engineer in me. Practice tolerance, kindness and charity."


With that, I think we're back to the present, and I'll write a note on the "Unbalanced Views" page to advise "lwelsch" that in view of space constraints over there, I will reply here, attempting to "kill two birds with one stone" - you should pardon the expression. I started to refer to "lwelsch" as the damn engineer, incidentally; damn! -I'm glad I noticed that "n" in time. I have two partially paralyzed fingers on my left hand - that due bullet wounds inflicted by a federal sniper one night in October, 1986. Anyway, it was dam engineer.
Firstly, Greta, you NEVER "get even." The price of freedom and justice is always more than anyone will - I didn't say "can" - pay. No one cares that much, the reason no one ever stays free for very long. "People," essayist Michel de Montaigne said, "always have the government they deserve." If the unjust injury or death of any one of us brought irresistible and relentless retribution from all the rest of us, history wouldn't be what it is. Neither would government.
Swell. And that will do where truth become platitude is concerned, because human beings seldom care enough to make it anything but that. Point? The point is that where such things are concerned, you have to DO something, and something effective.
"Effective," for instance, is not to tell a candid world how your enemy throws bricks while you throw bombs. That subjects, and makes you vulnerable to one of governments' most powerful tactics with those only casually interested - most of the public, in other words. The tactic is one I've come to call "the credibility game," and it was pioneered by men like Vladimir Lenin and, most notably and effectively, Adolf Hitler's Propaganda Minister, Josef Goebbels. The version of the tactic you are up against now is state of the art, and the most powerful opinion-shaping and mind-control technique and instrumentation ever conceived. The United States - and Israel, the U.S. and Europe's bastard step child - have mastered it. With it, they have hypnotized, subdued and made docile what was once the toughest, most rebellious, rambunctious, and stubbornly independent and self-determining society in history, the people of the United States.
To be effective in the Middle East, one must know history. That means the truth about the history of the region, and he will succeed in his purpose just about to the degree that he has learned the truth. "There," said Hamlet, "is the rub." Neither of the principals here will do that. Why? Damned if I know for sure, but as a completely disinterested observer, I can tell you that the amount of truth told by either side in that respect wouldn't make you blink if you got it in your eye (that, by the way, was the reason for my remark about records written by German General Limon von Sanders and his World War One opponent, General, later Field Marshall, Edmund Allenby).
History suggests that the principle reason for that is religion. The Judeo and Judeo-Christian religions tell of an Armageddon, and the followers of those religions are trying to make it happen the way their scriptures say it will. It's a psychological and sociological thing I haven't time or space to elucidate here, but if you read history carefully and in depth, I think you'll agree. Most prophesy is fulfilled because somebody WANTS it that way.
That brings up another point, one requiring that I use the expression that goes, "with all due respect." The trouble nowadays with "Americans" - there are thirty-four other nations in the Western Hemisphere - is that they talk and deliberate on matters they know really very little about. I know that, and have the temerity to say that, because I've done extensive and assiduous research concerning it. As entitled to their opinion as everyone here is, each betrays critical and crippling lack of sufficient information on the subject and things related to it to be valuable for anything but "getting it off your chest." Or venting the spleen (ugly damned expression, what?). Maybe, on the other, hand, that's all everyone is trying to do, but as Thomas Jefferson said, "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." That may be what Montaigne was referring to in the quote I cited earlier, huh?
There's only one conclusion possible from that, and it's that the people of the U.S. are simply too stupid, and unwilling to learn, to remain free much longer. But, even though I do so for effect, I digress.
To defeat a nation, Greta, you must above all be effective. You believe, as do so very, very many, that the truth is a weapon, and an irresistible one. That is perhaps the most pernicious myth ever birthed and nurtured. People who believe that truth has some kind of magic in it, and that it always succeeds, are simply wrong, and the roar of history drowns out anyone who says differently. When I was a kid still in high school, a teacher - and a Catholic nun, at that - upbraided me one day. "Harland (my given name), you have the most terrible lust for the truth." She held up the crucifix hanging around her neck. "Do you know why he's there? He's there because he dared speak the truth. Harland, they'll hang you some day!" Telling the story in my book, I remarked by speaking to her as though she were still alive that she had been right and that "they" had certainly tried.
Yet we believe in the Myth of Truth's Power. Religion is a mind-paralyzing thing, as I said a minute ago. To make truth effective you must use it as a basis for actions, not speech. There is nothing more easily defeated by a government, any government, than spoken truth. But there's another use for the truth, the one I used. Governments, especially democratic ones, are always infested with the most vicious, corrupt people the society can find. When the society is capitalistic, it's even worse. Anyone living in the real world (knowing history, again) should know that. I defeated the government (I haven't paid taxes since 1977, and they don't dare do anything about it) because I infiltrated it, to find its nerve centers - all the things that would dissolve their political power almost overnight. I found everything I needed - rape, extortion to commit rape, murder, embezzlement; you name it - fifteen hundred instances in a single year (and a senator's office admitted that publicly; do you wonder why you didn't hear?).
That's the Achilles Heel of any government, simple, but not easy to exploit. I had to travel the country for almost two decades, organizing people to do what I needed for them to do, but in the end, we dealt the IRS some fearsome blows - blows in the form of three pieces of legislation. All, off course, were and are being ignored - governments do not obey the law, whenever it suits them not to (and I won't bore you by mentioning what's going on daily these days with our President). But the legislation is law, for the federal government thorns in the side swiftly becoming cancerous. Why? How?
Well, the fact is - and I'm talking about the U.S. only, and for the dam engineer, now - that any citizen with the courage to organize a number of citizens sufficient to back up - that's enforce - his citizen's arrest (you need to look up the law of citizen's arrest and arrest generally) could wreak havoc in Washington. In 1978 - long before the dawn of all the tattling video cameras catching corrupt cops in their nefarious actions - things like beating hell out of unresisting old men like the one in New Orleans recently - I outfitted any willing person with a Super-8mm movie camera and instructions to begin filming government with its pompous purity down. The idea grew like wildfire, and the fire was the weapon that drove government away the first time it attacked me. In 1986, when the federals attacked again, I held a press conference on the capitol steps in Denver, to make very clear to federal (FBI and IRS) agents in attendance that I intended to repeat my tactic, and having evidence to warrant citizen's arrest, I would enlist the aid of as many citizens as necessary to enforce my arrest.
Inasmuch as I was at that time also engaged in helping form what was to become the Colorado Militia, the threat I posed was not lost on the government. As I've related here several times, the U.S. District Court for Colorado quashed a suit I filed that year under the Freedom of Information Act, ruling that "to do otherwise would irreparably damage the tax collection of the United States." The courts ruling was in response to a Department of Justice argument that my records were exempt under the National Security Exclusion of the law. It was the first, and only, time that income tax was raised jurisprudentially to the level of a matter of national security. The government was scared, all right. In the aftermath of the press conference and ruling, I was run down by motor vehicles six times, had my car rammed by another twice, subjected to several attempts at mugging, and poisoned twice. During a chase near Fort Collins, Colorado, I survived a gunfight by killing at least two of six or more men in two vehicles. There's more, it's in my book, and too voluminous for this venue.
Why didn't I bring down the U.S. Government? I could have. On a radio talk show from Denver, Colorado, several attorneys who called admitted that. There are two reasons I didn't. First, I got eventually what I wanted - to be left alone. Secondly, and most effective, was the fact that no one of the public my fight benefited had the intelligence, courage, or honor to back me when I proposed to make the arrests that would all but certainly have ended IRS, the FBI, and the ATF. The IRS is the beating heart of federal government. Without is ruthless chicanery, the purpose of which is too keep wealth - especially the nation's fiat money - where government wants it - the government would fall. We have the word of the Department of Justice and the ruling of a U.S. District Court on that. The public didn't care enough to do what must one day be done. They didn't even care enough to learn about it.
In a video tape made for the American Lyceum in 1986, I observed to my cowardly "American" fellows that they would have to fight one day because it's never been any way else. Greed and the lust for power that inevitably infects every individual desirous of a government job only grows greater and greater. "You'll fight, all right," I said. "You'll fight because you won't be given any choice. "But because you are cowards, you will fight only when you have little chance of success or survival."
The nation that is the United States today wasn't worth any more effort on my part. I'm seventy, and having been deserted by my family (they're "Americans," too, you know), why should I care? Remove this government, another will take its place - one just as self-serving and rotten. "People have the government they deserve." They get the justice they deserve, too.
But tactics like mine - not exactly, but similar - would work in Israel, too. Or Palestine. These are hyper-religious people, whose religions make impossible demands. Catch an official incontrovertibly - on video, for instance - doing any number of dozens of certain things human being have been doing since the beginning of the race, he will fall from power almost overnight. In an Islamic society, he might be executed, besides. That's how to create chaos sufficient to bring down a government. And there's more, much more. "Guerrilla Law," it's called, and a reporter in Colorado once referred to me as "the Guerrilla Lawyer."
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know - "impractical." That's utter nonsense. It's also an excuse. What the Palestinian people want, as I suspect does Greta, is to merely emote, to find catharsis. That means to hate. If, for instance, I were to go to Israel and succeed in tearing government to pieces by black-mail and other behavioral means, and to obtain for her everything she wants, my most prominent and biggest enemy would be Greta and her Palestinian friends. They would supplant their enemy, Israel, with me. If I did the same with the government of Palestine, the Jews would likewise fear and hate me - forever.
This isn't after all, about right and wrong, heroism and atrocity, human rights and slavery - none of that. It's about hatred, hatred written into and demanded by "holy" scriptures, practiced and preserved for centuries. Don't forget, Islam teaches (never mind, I've read the Koran and many more of the sufi writings) that to bring peace - to even speak of it - between believer and "infidel" will cost a Moslem heaven. And his life. If I were god, as the dam engineer averred, and I wanted peace between Arab and Jew, I would simply eradicate and end religion, and blot all memory of it from the mind of man.
So, Greta, you're sorry for me. Just out of curiosity (I've been a student of human nature since boyhood, and it utterly fascinates me, tell me, why are you more sorry for the Palestinians than you are for me? Few of the people you write about are being hunted personally by a government intent upon their murder. I lost my family. I also lost all my possessions. I have less of material possessions than most of the people you so empathize with - you can't have less than nothing. Until recently, I lived off the fields and streams of the country - and for more than ten years. Isn't injustice anywhere injustice everywhere? Or were Gandhi, Nehru, and Dr. Martin Luther King wrong?
Why travel all the way to Palestine to face the tear gas and rubber bullets? If I understand your opinion and that of so many who have written on the Truthout site, if you bring down the U.S. Government, you will have brought down the Israeli government, too. Had we done that in 1978 or 1986, think what might have happened.
WHY are you "telling the truth?" What, specifically, do you think that does? If you really think that reciting a list of atrocities that becomes a litany accomplishes anything, you haven't read much history. The Jews, you know, do the same thing. The world isn't fair - mostly because we can't even agree on what "fair" is. I have told my own story across the nation, to thousands - ten thousands - of people. Do you know what effect it had, has? Lenin is famous, among other things, for having said that a lie told often enough becomes the truth. He also said, "So what?" Truth means nothing where people love a lie well enough to tell it until it "becomes the truth," and when you tell your truth often enough most liars - just about every human being - begin to wonder which is which.
Anyone who says "we all have different methods of standing up to the bullies and bastards who murder and maim" will have a hard time convincing me. I've been there, and I know you're kidding yourself. That's the classic cop-out, as a matter of fact. In the first place, there is all but always just one thing in any instance that is an effective solution or answer. People trying to win don't keep doing what doesn't work again and again. You're kidding yourself either because, otherwise, you'd have to actually DO what it takes to be effective and you don't really want to; or, it makes you feel good to think that everyone BELIEVES you're doing something. Doing something ineffective, of course, insures you'll be able to go on doing it indefinitely. But if you REALLY care, think about what you're doing.
Do you really think that "standing up to" accomplishes anything? It does - it justifies everything your enemy is doing, and gives him an excuse the world will accept for more of the same. You're providing him the bugaboo he needs to satisfy opinion everywhere that he's justified in his actions. Rubber bullets against stones and bricks, remember? You slap his face, he blasts you aside the head with a club. But you've "stood up to him. Sheesh - good for you! The Israeli government - just like all governments - LOVES it that way! It's the same here in the Land of the Free. The mafia used to call it a "protection racket." Every time a group of people gets out in the streets to raise hell, the government appropriates another ten billion dollars worth of riot control equipment and hires more cops or soldiers. "The people" need protection, and the government is glad to provide it. Does anybody remember what the protestors were "protesting" a month later? Sure, SAME, OLD, THING with "those people."
You know, Greta, I wish I were thirty, even twenty, years younger. I hate bullies, a pathological thing that came from the time when I was recovering from childhood poliomyelitis and took a beating from somebody every time I left the shelter of home. Had you read my book, you'd know the truth - and the sincerity - of what I say when I say I'd go to Israel and do what I did here in the U.S. After my war with the government had begun to go well, I traveled, calling myself "Knight Errant," and helping drive the U.S. government bully away from its victims here in the U.S.. There are many, you know - women being raped by officials who have something to use for extortion (illegal alien, for instance - or dependent kids), people losing everything to IRS malfeasance and wrongful conversion; the works. For almost ten years, I beat up on the bullies (nothing they could do: take me to court, I have subpoena power and the "jig is up"). I'd help.
I'd help, but I can't help wondering why, with all those kind of people needing help here - same question - why do you go to Israel? Why is injustice there more deserving of annihilation here? What's special there, and why do your most passionate loyalties reside in Palestine?
I'd help but for the same reason I didn't take down this government. That's because I don't think this is about what you're telling me it's about. I think it's about hate and hating. The last thing Jew and Palestinian want is peace with one another. War, all of it, of any kind, is a racket. It's done because it's profitable, and profitable in some way for the majority of people involved.
Peace, like freedom, is a lot scarier than war. THEN the only enemy left to fight is oneself. REALLY, really scary. I've been there, too.

The "American" - there are thirty-four other nations in the hemisphere, you know - public is a society awash in an ocean of lies. Most, of course, are lies perpetrated by the society on itself. The way of all flesh. Then there are lies by the government - far, far more dangerous. The following essay asks how democracy - rule of the people - is possible where the government does not have to tell the truth about its actions. If the people we elect are free to lie, what is to protect us from, for instance, electing an ally of an enemy foreign, power?

But what is even more critical, perhaps, is a news media and press complicit in the deception. If the media, with its ability to create virtual reality and vast powers of persuasion so derived, deliberately lies and deceives the voters, is that not a crime?

Cal Thomas, "nationally syndicated columnist," writes this morning that Mary McCarthy, the CIA "officer" who allegedly "leaked" secrets and was fired for so doing should be shot. "They shoot traitors in wartime, don't they?" he asks, the proceeds to quote the dictionary definition of traitor, and points out that in time of war, traitors are by law executed. Interesting. Interesting most, I mean, as a vehicle by which to assess the value of our nation's media as information services and intelligence concerning how we might - as a republic - control our government and nation. There is hardly a line here that can be taken at face value, something one finds in just about every word "reported" by the "American" press.

First, the secret that McCarthy "leaked" was the fact known to half the civilized world - citizens of the United States not included, for some reason (and, yes, I did say that the way I intended) - knew that we were running illegal prisons, where we likewise torture prisoners, in Europe (and elsewhere). Next, we learn (that apparently while Mr. Thomas was writing his latest prevarication by dissimulation) that when McCarthy's lawyer asseverated that his client had no part in the Washington Post story by one Dana Priest, the CIA was forced to admit that was true. If I wonder what it was, then, that it was that resulted in her being fired, I shouldn't be alone. Mr. Thomas doesn't mention any of this, of course - too busy preparing the rope for the lynching.

Next, to get back to the gentlemen's column and the related story, there is the indisputable fact that to know a crime is being committed - and torture of prisoners, no matter who they are, is a crime - and do nothing is a crime known to lawyers and such as misprision. Working for the U.S. Government since the big war (Two, not Vietnam) is a bitch kitty, I can tell you - always caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of being imprisoned for committing international war crimes or being shot as a traitor to your government.

Shouldn't we consider somewhere in this blizzard of bullshit, and now that we're talking about treason, that we AREN'T actually at war (that's a matter of law, and an act of Congress, let us remember), and that the only war is a politician's rhetorical device, one designed to further the lie that brought us to killing the citizens of a foreign nation?

Then we have a fact that the tunnel-visioned Thomas seems to overlook completely. If we substitute the name and title "President George W. Bush" for "CIA Officer Mary McCarthy," we have the same story - and legal reasoning - with only the further need to substitute "leaks" related to another CIA Officer, Valerie Plame. Mr. Thomas, therefore, suggests that we shoot for treason the nation's chief executive. I agree. Obviously, though, treason by the President is far more "severe to our capabilities of carrying out our mission," to quote the CIA's inimitable director, Porter Goss. Porter, of course, is our latest super-patriot and knight in shining armor.


Porter, parenthetically, you know, was among the "Operation 40" that grew out of the gay little band I was recruited for way back then, the "Executive Action Group" - "Executive Action" was synonymous to insiders with "assassination" - who planned the international crime of assassinating the head of a foreign government, one Fidel Castro. The same band of swashbuckling heroes blew up the Belgian freighter La Coubre in Havana Bay, killing 75 and injuring more than 200 innocent noncombatants ("collateral damage," you understand). When a guy named "Puerco" ("Pig") said later that this was Op 40's first operation, he termed it "successful." Porter would have agreed with that. If you think aberrations the CIA torture camps in Europe - or the School of the Americas here at Fort Benning, for that matter - you're not paying attention.

"Operation 40" wasn't just involved in sabotage operations. In fact, it was intended from the beginning to be a team of assassins. Not only was I a member of the group it was spun off from, one member, a guy named Frank Fiorini (whether his name was Rank Angelo Fiorini - the name I knew him by - or Frank Anthony Sturgis I was never sure) claimed: "this assassination group (Operation 40) would upon orders, naturally, assassinate either members of the military or the political parties of the foreign country that you were going to infiltrate, and if necessary some of your own members who were suspected of being foreign agents... We were concentrating strictly in Cuba at that particular time. During the Church Hearings - remember (no, I don't suppose)? - everybody CIA denied the whole thing. Richard Helms, convicted later of perjury in the hearings, said, "We don't do that sort of thing." That was interesting for a guy like me.

Anyway, back to our story:

It's also interesting, always, to hear one of these warrior wannabees get to bloviating about shooting people for treason, "leaking secrets" and all that. Mr. Thomas, those who read here will recall, is among those who "did not serve." Let's consider for a moment who the real threat to our nation is. Our "leaders" - congressional representatives, senators, presidents and all the rest - are beyond any reasonable doubt the biggest collection of the biggest liars on earth. Or in its history. Now who is a bigger traitor - let us recall Mr. Thomas' definition: "One who betrays another's trust or is false to an obligation or duty" - the CIA "Officer" who leaks to the press (who else would she tell that would listen or do anything about it?) evidence of actions which are crimes both here and internationally, or the "representative" who lies in order to get into office, or to stay there? How about a President of the United States who lies in order to get us to go to war and/or to further his own, personal agenda? HMMMMM?!

How do we have a democracy or republic when the prospective voting public is completely mislead? How do we know that the individual being sent to Congress, the White House, and the other seats of government is not a traitor, an ally of a foreign enemy? What if he's a rapist (we were pretty close to that here lately, you know; and he lied, too - under oath), or other kind of criminal conspirator. Of course, we know they all are, but that's a matter of more definitions and not my object here. Tell me, Mr. Thomas, why isn't lying to the public by an elected official a far bigger crime than leaking evidence of malfeasance in office? Tell us about that.

Tell us why a national media - guys like you, stud - who keep the voting public bewildered and lost in a fog of cynically deceitful propaganda from both right and left, all of it designed to further the agenda of this or that special interest - shouldn't be shot when it takes off after some tabloid tale like the latest instance of rape somewhere.

Isn't that like a guard during time of war deserting his post for a roll in the hay with some chippie?

Who's a traitor nowadays seems a question mostly of whose ox is being gored - DOESN'T it?! Or is it whose palm is being greased?

To the several people who wrote concerning my 1986 (I wrote one similar for the Department of the Army in 1978) paper concerning a counter-attack by an individual against a United States intending to destroy him, here is a reprise in précis:
Parenthetically, and by way of elucidation, I was at that time recovering from bullet wounds inflicted by a federal sniper intent upon stopping my meetings or association with Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa and prospective testimony at hearings having to do with new legislation, legislation styled by the senator “Omnibus Taxpayers Bill of Rights.” A photo of my leg wound is here and on my website - and in my book “Letters to Aaron,” the Hal Luebbert Story.
I was, frankly, considering at the time ways to destroy you, and something I remembered from John Stuart Mill, was very important. “If mankind minus one were of one opinion, then mankind is no more justified in silencing the one than the one - if he had the power - would be justified in silencing mankind.” If my country felt justified and meant to destroy me, why should I not be justified in destroying my country?
I decided to try a threat. Maybe they would search those records they were do damned intent upon keeping from you, the public, record of what they had taught me to do and now might use on you and them, and relent. It was worth a try, so I wrote and sent it to numbers of senators, congressmen, and news media. Didn’t hear about it did you? Think about that.
A relatively simple concoction of chemicals, placed in the appropriate containers and strewed across the mountain forests of the west by plane, could be configured to trigger when trees and vegetation reached tinder dryness. The result could be made to be and become a conflagration unlike any ever witnessed on the planet. Smoke would create to a degree the “nuclear winter” much spoken of during the Cold War, blocking out the sun. I had already decided then on a design for the pyrotechnic devices, and the one I have now is roughly ten times better.
As many as fifty chemical preparations might be compounded, then deposited in the nation’s rivers, killing not only everything in the river, but everything that bathed or drank from it. Were one to attack the Mississippi River system alone, a large part of the nation would die of resulting thirst and pestilence. If the preparation were radioactive – and it would not have to be anything as exotic and hard to come by as weapons grade uranium or plutonium; a physicist could find a dozen or more sources of such radioactivity – the effect would be even worse.
Several poisons, ones capable of preparation at home, are so toxic that a tiny amount deposited on one’s skin will kill him swiftly. One of these chemicals placed in the water system of a city would kill most of the people there before warnings could save them. After having visited several of the nation’s defense installations, I realized that most of them could be attacked that way, and neutralized.
(Try to remember that you and your government were trying to kill and destroy me. You were doing that utterly without cause except what you believe to be your brute power to do that; and, by the significant way, you will note that you were wrong).
A well conceived, prepared, and determined attack on the IRS would destroy your economy. The IRS is the beating heart of the system that enslaves millions, and critical to the corporations and military industrial complex that rules the nation. When individual members of the one hundred and fifty thousand man IRS complement began to be murdered and disappear, news of such would spread inevitably, inducing terror and ending their complicity in the wealth distribution control racket being run by the federal conspiracy of criminals. When large numbers of employees stopped coming to work, the system would die.
The Computer Age began for the IRS with the 1961 dedication of the National Computer Center at Martinsburg, West Virginia. I have been there many times, such that I know how destruction of the enormous computer employees there call “The Martinsburg Monster” (funny, the name – huh?) would also bring the nation’s tax collection system to its knees. With more than three hundred auxiliary computers slaved to it, the Monster is the brains and nervous system of the U.S. Government economic extortion racket. Destruction of the center, or sickness and/or death of all its employees would do likewise.
Incidentally, a dry run I ran on the place in 1985 made it very clear that my operations plan for an attack would be eminently and lethally successful. All that was necessary for penetration of the place’s vaunted security was compromise of one female employee. Both were a pleasure . . . (I could have used that word – penetration, I mean – twice there, couldn’t I?)
Anyone now aware of the power of a fully fueled jumbo-jet airliner knows how the nation’s economic life could be ended, besides. Al Qa’ida terrorist Mohammed Atta and his cohort were long on hatred, but short on tactical savvy. Maybe they’ll be smarter, next time.
Finally among the “Mongoose Trick” operations I am willing to discuss here – I’m still deciding whether I will take what my country did to me lying down – there is the nation’s helter-skelter cyber-technology system. Anyone observing the possibilities suggested by the Y2K scare of 1999 will realize what I mean. The possibility that computers might shut down when confused by the last two digests of the year 2000 demonstrated to anybody with half a brain what might happen, were a skilled cyber-expert to become angry enough to do what the protagonist and heroine of my novel, “Jonatha’s Truth” did there. Fortunately for the nation that was the U.S. in the book, Baron Han von Paulus was a knight, one bent only on bringing the mega corporations (like the oil companies whose lobbyist-legalized swindle of the public goes on at this very moment) to heel and restoring economic equity to the nation and its people.
There were, as I’ve already said, more than a dozen “U.S. American Freedom” ops. You don’t want to know them, because the government destroys people who know things like that. They tried with me, remember?
The fact is, it’s inevitable that one of these will happen. More, anyone observing either the callous disregard for the public’s safety as evidenced by deliberate refusal to stop illegal immigration from Mexico, or the brutal abandonment of the victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, should realize that the government simply doesn’t care. Their interest is power, not public service, not the public’s protection, and certainly not sympathy or pity.
The dog guarding the World Trade Center Silver Blaze didn’t bark, remember?
The government conspiracy of criminals in Washington knows full well that any day now – maybe already, as a matter of fact - Al Qa’ida or operatives for another of the dozen nations who hate us with good reason will slip across our southern border or into our equally unguarded seaports to conduct an operation like those I’ve discussed here. Or worse – one of the ops plans I haven’t discussed. Millions will die, while the criminals complicit with the perpetrators remain safe in billion dollar redoubts like those I also discussed in my novel.
One last thing that ought, as Bill Cosby says “shake up your spine”: during operations against the government, I infiltrated one supposedly secure federal installation after another. Often, I left my calling card in the center of desk belonging to the highest security official there. Guess how many of these “public servants” reported their lapse? That’s right, none.
In the Land of the Fee, where job is important above all else – including your safety, obviously – no one dares admit a mistake. It can end a career, as the saying heard everywhere in corporate business and government goes. If you are vulnerable - and you are, terribly - it is because you are hopelessly dependent on things artificial and unreal, upon wealth and technological life support.
It may end a nation, too.

Soon now, the United States will kill itself, victim of its own overweening lust for power and the greed that feeds. That the nation, like so many of its citizens, may die of over-consumption, simply having eaten itself to death, is singularly poetic justice. The natural end of capitalism - its logical conclusion, after all - is to consume everything and by so doing, die of either starvation or its own obesity.

But the Nation of Laws may also die of its own lawlessness. One day someone like myself, abused beyond human endurance - a man unjustly convicted of rape, for instance - may choose to retaliate. Always before, the shear numbers represented by nationhood has made the nation safe from its individual citizen. No more. I know because I can destroy the United States of America, or anyone else who tries to destroy me. Our government knows that, and it knows there is nothing it can do about it. In that, it is again victim to its own character and nature.

"A house divided against itself cannot long stand." Look around - are you not that house?

Last evening, watching television news and marveling at what must be either the really incredible stupidity or dissimulating dishonest of “analysts” and pundits there, I was about continue here with examples of the ominous gullibility of “Americans” in the face of their rapidly devolving and decaying governmental systems when my wife brought in the mail. One envelope contained a check for $1.08 cents, that from my car insurance company. That’s the same company who suddenly cancelled my insurance for reasons I have yet to discover or divine, inasmuch as I simply went to my insurance agent’s office and had them put me with another insurer. I do not suffer fools gladly.

But I wondered. Having suffered through seventeen years of IRS harassment by tampering using every conceivable kind of electronic chicanery and “Nixonian dirty trick,” I wondered. From a few minutes ago, and my conversation with Oscar at Ford Credit, I’m still wondering. But I’m looking forward to the morning (I called The Border Federal Credit Union before calling Ford Credit, only to find the credit union closed for the day) with really delighted anticipation. I’ll call the bank. Oscar tells me the checks, which I have copies of, were returned because “no such account numbers exist.”

Now, that’s the same account I’ve always had – six years, now - with the Credit Union, and the check in question was the twelfth from the pad of checks those in question came from. I write only checks for payment of car insurance and car loan from that pad. So something is afoot, and I have a good idea what it is. When I finally file my lawsuit against the government, the evidence they have given me will come into court by the truckload.

The mental duel with the federal government is always entertaining, too, especially in that it serves as a measure by which to keep track of that same government’s decay. That I watch with relish. I can hardly wait for them to collapse. But there’s more. Let’s go back to that phone call to Ford Credit. The first voice - a recording, of course – instructs me if I want to speak English, I should press one. Now WHAT THE HELL COUNTRY IS THIS? Do want to speak English? Hell, no, I take option two – Spanish. When the guy answers, it’s Oscar, and he’s speaking English – sort of. I should have insisted on Spanish, because Oscar is obviously not one of us. It turns out he’s Hispanic, but I guess he didn’t like my Cuban accent.

That’s the way it is, isn’t it? When I purchased my last cell phone at the local radio shack, the counter guy attempted to make the call necessary to initiate service, only to scowl and look puzzled, then hand me the phone. “Can you tell what she’s saying”” he asked. Taking the phone and recognizing the woman’s accent, I spoke to her in my then fluent Japanese. “Nippongo o hanasu koto ga dekimasu ka?” Do you speak Japanese? Hoshii no desu ga? Would you like to?

The young woman was much relieved, and the transaction completed quickly. But you wonder. Japanese! Sometime ago, during one of the federal attacks that are launched on my website continually – none, thankfully, with any more efficacy or competence than our attack on Iraq – I was obliged to speak first with Bombay, India, then London, England. Another foray into international commerce and diplomacy required my Japanese again, plus an exchanged of e-mails with Frankfurt, Germany (I speak German, too).

And then, of course, there’s the fact that each time I’m mugged while hiking and camping or bicycling here in South Texas, I have to speak Spanish.


The girls who have mucked up my bank account and car payment will have been “Hispanic,” like the girls at the insurance company. The space between my last names is too much for them, and with the wonders of a nation incapable of thought without computerized assistance . . . . well, you know. My last trip to the doctor’s office, for another instance of same, has resulted in a brouhaha of bungling. This one, though, was not un-anticipated and prepared for, inasmuch as Medicare and Medicaid are federal matters, and when has any of our governments ever done anything even remotely efficient or well? Personnel at the Social Security Administration have already bungled the matter so badly that all hope of straightening it out – in any of seven languages I still have some command of – is hopeless. I’ll just pay the cash. Why we call as system whereby the doctor and hospital are assured of payment, but the “insured” still gets a huge bill “insurance” is still beyond me, anyway. More federal FemSpeak, I suppose.

If perhaps anyone is so astute as to notice, and wonders why my bank account is still in Del Rio, Texas while I live in Kingsville four hours away, what I’ve already said here ought be a hint. When I moved from Corpus Christi to Del Rio some years ago, it took the U.S. Mail seven months to get my mail to me, and until I was willing to open an account at the Border Federal Credit Union in Del Rio and accept direct deposit of Social Security monies owed me, I was kept completely devoid of funds. Fortunately, I do have a number of marketable skills, and know how to live off the land. When I had camped by the Rio Grande for a year, I simply decided to stay there. Meanwhile, my driver’s license, concealed handgun license, college credit transcripts, and a number of additional missives of similar importance could not be gotten to me. Too much for “the greatest nation in history.”

An attempt to do something as monumentally complex and difficult as transfer my checking account from one bank to another, and to notify the Social Security Administration, would result in a hassle at least as frustrating and annoying - not me, them; and they get mean and vindictive right away (it’s my fault, of course) – as that which I’ve already been through and described.

In my book “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story,” I detail some of my travail with federal record and communication tampering, exacerbated by the spastic stupidity and incompetence of culturally mix-mastered “America.” No one need dispute with me concerning what now deceased comedian Steven Allen called the “dumbing-down of America.” I could, from my own experiences, make an open and shut case, even without Jay Leno’s Jay-Walking segment as an exhibit in evidence. In Germany, we are the equivalent of the “dumb Pollack” joke. Small wonder.

But the media’s analysts are something else again. Six months ago, when one retired general pontificating on FoxNews said something particularly stupid, I started reviewing the fustian pronouncements of people like Col. Oliver North, Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr., Lt. Col. Robert Maginnis, Col. David Hunt, and Major Robert S. Bevelacqua, all FoxNews “analysts.” It would have been a bit of a coup to review the record of their tactical brilliance and related prognostications, but Media Matters has beaten me to the punch this morning (damn!).

http://mediamatters.org/items/200604240005 is the URL for the article, and it reports just what I learned with my own digging. If these guys are analysts, it must be by way of analyzing the entrails of an owl. Wrong! Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong! For god’s sake – with this kind of expert advice, is there any wonder why we can’t even accomplish something as dirt simple as stopping illegal immigration?
It’s got me wondering (to say nothing of being fearful of leaving the house). During my formative years, there was an expression, “common sense.” Most people built their lives with it, and they were successful enough to have built everything our children are now busily intent on squandering. Way of all flesh, I guess. But common sense has fallen into disrepute these days, sneered into silence by wondrous things like technology, “higher” education, the information highway (reminds me of a grandfather’s observation that a local college boy “knows a helluva lot, all right – it’s just that everything he knows is wrong”), and “Fox Reality.”

That last one, hot off the presses as it were, tickles me. Fox reality. Sounds like the diagnosis for a guy on LSD, doesn’t it? Try to think of something more oxymoronic than that one. Military intelligence? How about government organization or reasonable woman?

But I digress. Couldn’t help it – some things just blow your train of thought off the tracks. Common sense used to be the result of rationality confronted by reality – getting along in the real world. What now passes for common sense is the result of rationality confronted with rhetoric and rationalization. Everything the mind deals with now is in some major degree some kind of virtual reality (talk about oxymorons!). Where once an error in reasoning was quickly apparent, like making a mistake in a fight, it is now sometimes never apparent, or subject to more of the detached rationalization that caused it in the first place. Somebody else pays the price, too.

The historically biggest, loudest example of that the future will find is feminism. Remember all its basic tenets? Its results? Only a few will do to illustrate. The one parent – meaning mom raised the kids – family? Kids didn’t need a male parent. That, of course, quickly expanded to both parents women, or men.

“A woman needs a man like a fish need a bicycle!” Remember that little intellectual dandy? How about “All men are rapists!”? I read a whole lot of it, all mental meandering by women living in an environment – one provided by the very gender they were excoriating – that would never suffer their theorizations to be tested, that of all but total societal protection. Outside that only virtually real realm – the future then, for instance – only others would pay the price. Even when the resulting Dodo mentality resulted in turn with, for instance, the continual rape and murder of their sisters, they went on with their brainless blabber and psycho-babble.

Women in military combat, like women in police uniform and a host of similar nonsense (I use the word literally; i.e., non sense - not of the senses) are not common sense. Neither is female nudity or semi-nudity in public.

Note that if I re-phrase that to say “to invite rape,” I have, of course, committed the ultimate sin against feminism. But I have also illustrated the difference between common sense born of interface between mind and reality and interface between mind and reality that is only language and rhetoric. Reality and experience with it do not have a problem with equating or differentiating the two statements; rationalization and reality made only of words do.

“The great tragedy of science,” Thomas Huxley observed, “is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”

On the "truthout" website forum a few minutes ago, I promised to discuss here more concerning what I've learned about "why we're never told the truth" by the government and the news media. WHY? This was my answer:

"Come on, folks - ask yourselves what you do when you make a mistake at work. Do you run to the boss to tell him? Put it up on the bulletin board? During my war with the feds and the IRS, I infiltrated dozens of government offices, leaving "bugs" and, sometimes - just to taunt an enemy - my calling card. Most of these places were high-security areas (and if you knew about a couple, it would scare hell out of you). How many people do you think reported having found my card? If I had made a monkey out of you, proved that the job you were doing was crappy, what would YOU have done? My website is www.judoknighterrant.com and I'll talk about this subject (I hate the feminism engendered term "issue") more there. Ciao! Hal von Luebbert."

Smartass, huh? But it's rooted in the tactics I used to make myself a successful detective, and, once upon a time, tactician for none other than our blessed federal government. I always started operations against an opponent by putting myself in his place, to imagine what I might do if I were he. I like to think, even, that it made me a better person. Kind of humbling. You see, from high school age, and things like catching the local priest mounted up on the wife of the town's leading citizen, I've always been fascinated with human behavior. Not what they tell; what they DO. My serendipity encounter with the lovers that day occurred after I myself had become "involved" (we hide behind words, too, you know) with another local lady. Inasmuch as I was fourteen, she in her forties, both trystings were closely kept secrets. That wasn't on my account, actually - I wanted to tell everybody.

Of course, as my paramour had made very clear, you just don't DO that! When I had begun investigating on my own newspaper stories and those things "everybody knows," I came gradually to understand why it is that human beings demand privacy. It's always to cover their mistakes and sins. Oh, there ARE things like being too fat, having warts, and petty twaddle like that, but in every instance I can think of, "privacy" means hiding something. Otherwise, like an adolescent stud who's screwing the most beautiful woman in town, who also happens to be three times his age, you'd broadcast it to the wide world.

Once out of the Army, and in business as a PI and insurance company investigator, I learned just how right my boyhood suspicions had been. Peyton Place is in the heart and head of anybody who isn't brain-dead, and that means it's in every corner and crevice of society, and at all levels of business and government. More, society here in the Land of the Free has come to make appearance of absolute perfection - meaning, in this case, infallibility - the sine qua non of existence. In capitalist "America," where virtually nothing is more important than one's job, one does not admit - or permit to be discovered - an error. You lose either any chance of promotion or the job.

And that answers most of the "tvnewslies'" question. Washington - the U.S. Congress, the White House, and the bureaucracy that surrounds both - is a super-heated place, the "heat" coming from the fire of greed and lust for power burning in each member. George W. Bush, our ne'er-do well raised to the highest office in the nation, has already earned his place in history as the President who would not admit a mistake.

"REPORTER: 'Thank you, Mr. President. In the last campaign, you were asked a question about the biggest mistake you'd made in your life, and you used to like to joke that it was trading Sammy Sosa. You've looked back before 9-11 for what mistakes might have been made. After 9-11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have you learned from it?'

"BUSH: 'I wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time, so I could plan for it. [Laughter.] John, I'm sure historians will look back and say, gosh, he could have done it better this way, or that way. You know, I just -- I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn't yet.'

"'I would have gone into Afghanistan the way we went into Afghanistan. Even knowing what I know today about the stockpiles of weapons, I still would have called upon the world to deal with Saddam Hussein. See, I happen to believe that we'll find out the truth on the weapons. That's why we've sent up the independent commission. I look forward to hearing the truth, exactly where they are. They could still be there. They could be hidden, like the 50 tons of mustard gas in a turkey farm.'"

How about that? Is there any rational human being who has paid any attention since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom who believes that our Malapropping and mumbling Chief hasn't made any mistakes? How about "Mission Accomplished" on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln (on the other hand, maybe we don't know what the "mission" he was talking about was)? Uh-uh. "American" "leaders" don't admit mistakes. During the lead-up to the war - during U.S. interdiction of air traffic in "no-fly zones" over Iraq - we shot down one of our own helicopters, but no one made a mistake. With as many as twenty million aliens having come across our border with Mexico, all of whom claim to be here to do hard work and pay taxes, no one has made a mistake (how do you file a w-2 form as an illegal alien and not get caught, if no one has made a mistake?).

Among the most familiar expressions to be associated with government in the Land of the Free and the Nation of Laws (a proposition demanding that we swear - or affirm - to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth), is "damage control." "Damage Control," like "plausible denial," and "we can find no record that . . .," is or means a lie and/or lying. You do not admit a mistake. During the seventeen years that I operated intensively against the United States Government in order to obtain evidence I could use to defend myself, I infiltrated government installation and offices across the nation, and dozens of times. My duel with federal security systems was one so challenging and entertaining that I made a game of it. At length, I began to leave my "Knight Errant" business card at the place that was the heart - or the private parts - of the fortress. Not once did any of these loyal "Americans," those paragon guardians of our nation's secrets and security, report their having been penetrated and compromised.

When you're looking for explanations for what happened, and how it could have happened, on 9-11, there's another one for you to consider, huh? And how many people got fired after those much-ballyhooed hearings into the debacle? Of course not - NOBODY MADE ANY MISTAKES!

Now that I get to thinking, I wrote about it all a while ago, right here on the Mongoose Trick page.

"Recently," I wrote, "FoxNews military analyst Colonel David Hunt commented on a recent demonstration of how poorly a Homeland Security Agency exercise had gone. Asked by the host why the agency - and by obvious implication, I thought, the federal government in general - fails so miserably, the colonel said, 'Nobody gets fired.'
"Bingo! And nobody gets fired because a public mostly dead between the ears doesn't demand it. That's due a number of things, none more effective than the relentless mind-control and behavioral conditioning science wielded by a fourth estate that has been co-opted by the very government it is supposed to oversee. There are hundreds of recent examples, but the latest revelation of crime by Emperor Bush, that of ignoring the Fourth Amendment, is easily the most revealing and probative. This is, in fact, probably the most concerted damage-control effort ever brought to bear in U.S. History. In my six decades of watching the news, I have never seen or heard more downright asinine and bizarre defenses raised by White House supporters, nor commentary by supposed opponents as inept and feckless. This is so obvious that as proof of theories having to do with the "dumbing down" of nation it is absolutely conclusive. Anyone who doesn't see this as the forensic and polemic equivalent of pro wrestling is braindead.

"The media assault on the public's right to know and sanity reached its zenith last night (or the night before - like I said, I've been out of it for days) with Fox Business (anybody who takes this guy's financial advice doesn't have both oars in the water, that's sure) Analyst Stuart Varney's belligerent and bewildered insistence that persons who reported that the President had committed a crime should be prosecuted for having done so.

"That, my dear sir, turns the concept of law and order on its head. A crime to report a crime! Good grief! How Uriah Heepian can you get? How un-American?'

"'Nobody gets fired.' There you have it. No matter what people in government do, they are never held accountable. That's either criminally or civilly - meaning you can't sue them, either. Even for murder. See: http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0303d.asp Or see my book, where there are dozens more like that one. This kind of lawsuit is frequently referred to by lawyers as a "Bivens Action," after a guy who somehow managed to successfully sue "Six agents of the Federal Narcotics Bureau" after the latter brutalized without warrant or even reasonable suspicion Webster Bivens, his wife, and family. The Super Court was evidently having a fleeting flash of wisdom - or common decency, even - that day, because in 12,000 subsequent such suits, just four resulted in success for the plaintiff. Nobody in government ever pays for their wrongs, either. ISN'T IT ODD THAT YOU DON'T KNOW THAT?

"Operate any other organization, any business, or group endeavor like this and you will have what we have in Washington, D.C. Spastic confusion. Remember this?

“'At Ruby Ridge, federal agents shot in the back and killed a child’s dog, shot in the back and killed the fleeing child as well, and then blew off the head of that child’s mother . . . even after a cover-up was discovered, the federal government refused to prosecute the killers. At Waco, the government . . . roasted twenty-two children like wieners on a spit and cremated more than fifty adults in the same inferno. Yet no federal officers were prosecuted.” Gerry Spence, Esq. –'Give me Liberty.'

"Of course, that's a quote from "Letters," my book, and it represents only a small sample of what I'm talking about. And FoxNews' White House toady Varney is a microcosm of the public that has brought us to this sorry state. More about that tomorrow. I'm bushed, still not over this cold (I hope). Oh, before I quit, here's a quote from Mark Twain that comes to mind having listened to the pundits lately: 'There never was a just war, never an honorable one, on the part of the instigator of the war. Statesman will invent cheap lies, putting the blame on the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities . . ., and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.'"

Nobody gets fired. Nobody admits a mistake. There's you answer to why we never know the truth.

Oh, but there's one more thing. We never know the truth for another reason, that being that persons like the fellow who wanted to know why there was "absolutely" (I think he said) no airplane wreckage at the Pentagon after the 757 "supposedly" hit it. The fact is, and he would have known, had he taken even a little care to learn it - or if he had no hidden agenda, intended to deceive his fellows - that there was wreckage all over the place. Here's the first thing I came upon when I clicked it up on Google:
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/pages/911_pentagon_757_plane_evidence.html
We don't get the truth because we don't really want it that badly. If we knew the truth, there would be an obligation - among honorable people, and real patriots, that is - to DO something. Bertrand Russell, the great mathematician and philosopher put it eminently well, "If," he observed, "a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way."

Truth is like winning, victory. If you want it badly enough to go for it, you'll get it a lot more often than not; and you'll get it pretty much in proportion to how badly you want it. There's a corollary to that, and it's just as true: if you wait for somebody to bring the truth to you, you'll get it just about as often as you would anything else you want so badly.

I try to make people think. I hope I've done that here.