FALSE FLAG TERROR DRILL - PORTLAND OREGON - AUG 5 !!!!! "a perfect storm of terror, treason and totalitarianism."
菩薩
of terror, treason and totalitarianism."
This sounds VERY serious.
Please pass this information around to everyone you know
NOBLE RESOLVE - OPEN LETTER TO PETER DEFAZIO
author: fear no terror
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2007/07/362706.shtml
NOBLE RESOLVE is too dangerous to allow in Oregon. This exercise,
drilling War of Terror scenarios in Oregon, comes just as the media is
filling up with warnings of a new 9/11 and the recent Presidential
Executive Orders: NSPD 51, 5/10/07, "... allows the sitting president
to declare a "national emergency" without Congressional approval..."
It's looking more and more like "a perfect storm of terror, treason
and totalitarianism." Drills like these have a history of going live
(e.g. 09/11/01 & 07/07/05) and now we have NSPD 51 — the equivalent of
Hitler's Article 48.
NO NOBLE RESOLVE FOR OREGON
July 24, 2007
Rep. Peter DeFazio
2134 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515-3704
Eugene, OR 97401
Dear Congressman DeFazio:
The Oregonian recently reported on your investigation of President
Bush's "continuity of government" Executive Order, and on how the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) thwarted your request for
details. As I am sure you are aware, DHS will be leading two emergency
response drills in Portland over the next 3 months: "Noble Resolve" in
August and "Top Off" in October. Just as you rightly sought details on
the Bush Executive Order, Oregon citizens need and deserve information
about these military exercises.
We are concerned that federal, state and local agencies will not plan
and conduct these "terrorism drills" with sufficient transparency and
public oversight. To address this need for local awareness of,
agreement to, and participation in exercises ostensibly designed for
local security, safety and welfare, we propose the immediate formation
of a Portland Citizens' Oversight Committee to represent citizens'
interests.
We request your endorsement of this reasonable request and hope you
will assist us in establishing such an oversight committee. We hope
you will agree that when a Federal agency such as DHS seeks to conduct
exercises in Oregon, full transparency to the public and oversight by
Oregon citizens is essential.
Our initial research on the Top Off exercise revealed contradictory
statements and a disturbing lack of openness on the part of local
officials. We do know that Portland will receive $2 million for the
Top Off exercise alone. No such figure has been publicized regarding
Noble Resolve. The Top Off drill, which DHS calls a "terrorism
drill" (but local officials refer to as an "emergency preparedness
exercise") will begin on approximately 10/5/07, to last for 9 to 10
days. Though Noble Resolve is scheduled for August, no similar details
or schedule have been released. We therefore have a series of
immediate concerns about this exercise:
* what will be the precipitating event?
* will there be enhanced police presence?
* will the National Guard be involved?
* will there be contractors involved (e.g., Blackwater)?
* and will either or both drills involve rehearsals of local and
federal response to a "catastrophic emergency," as defined under NSPD
51, up to and including the declaration of martial law?
With the Bush track record on disaster response and media
manipulation, Oregonians are not naive enough to trust the Federal
government to adequately inform and interact with Portland residents
prior to these terrorism drills. Case in point, as of now, there has
not even been an announcement about Noble Resolve, and it is due to
take place in August, just days or weeks from now.
Another general concern is that the Mayor's office seemed almost
unaware of the recent Presidential Executive Orders: NSPD 51, 5/10/07,
"... allows the sitting president to declare a "national emergency"
without Congressional approval, leading to the de facto closing down
of the Legislature and the militarization of justice and law
enforcement"; and the amended International Emergency Economic Powers
Act, 7/17/07, "allowing the US regime to seize the property of anyone
found to be interfering with the reconstruction of Iraq." In
correspondence with both the Mayor's office and Commissioner Sam
Adams' office, I have provided material to round out their knowledge
of these Presidential directives.
We would be glad to discuss this matter with you or your staff
further, and/or supply resources in addition to those referenced
below, that will corroborate the concerns expressed in this letter. We
will copy this letter to other Congresspersons, Senators Wyden and
Smith, Governor Kulongowski, Mayor Potter, members of City Council,
and a variety of local press and online media, to raise awareness of
these drills and our urgent proposal for enhanced transparency and
public involvement, given the current political climate. We hope to
receive your response this week, given the exigency of the August
drill. Please inform your staff that we will make a follow up call on
this matter if we do not hear back from you.
Thank you and we look forward to talking with you or a representative.
Best regards,
Informed Dissent
CC:
Office of Mayor Tom Potter,
Sam Adams,
Erik Sten,
Dan Saltzman,
Randy Leonard,
Governor Ted Kulongoski,
Senator Ron Wyden,
Senator Gordon Smith
Representative Earl Blumenauer,
Representative Darlene Hooley,
Representative David Wu,
~~Media
Oregonian
Willamette Week
KBOO
KPOJ / Air America
REFERENCES:
NATIONAL SECURITY PRESIDENTIAL DIRECTIVE/NSPD 51 -
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/05/20070509-12.html
Message to the Congress of the United States Regarding International
Emergency Economic Powers Act - http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/07/20070717-4.html
USJFCOM gears up for Noble Resolve - http://www.jfcom.mil/newslink/storyarchive/2007/pa033007.html
JFCOM brings virtual world closer to home - http://www.fcw.com/article98147-04-04-07-Web
------------------------------------------------------
Bush Directive for a "Catastrophic Emergency...", Prof. Michel
Chossudovsky - http://www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=6134
The "Use of the Armed Forces" in America under a National Emergency...
- Prof. Michel Chossudovsky - http://www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=6169
Brzezinski Suggests False Flag Event Could Kick-Start Iran War -
http://www.nowpublic.com/brzezinski_suggests_false_flag_event_could_kick...
Wake-up Call: Watch for Another 911/WMD Experience, Paul C. Roberts -
http://www.vdare.com/roberts/070718_wakeup.htm
Impeach Bush and Cheney Now, Paul C. Roberts -
http://www.vdare.com/roberts/070715_impeach.htm
---------------------
MSNBC reported today that: Report: Al-Qaida nears ability to strike
U.S
Draft intelligence assessment says group seeks chemical, nuclear
weapons
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19730468/
------------------------
Noble Resolve 2007. What’s it all about.
Let me start by saying, because I am writing on this subject does not
mean I think a false flag operation will happen during these drills.
Every year the government run drills but not this relativistic. One of
the last drills that even came close was the Drills ran on September
11, 2001.
NORAD's 9/11 wargames
http://www.oilempire.us/norad.html
Noble Resolve is a set of drills that will simulate nuclear attacks,
starting in Europe and moving to the United States. The simulations
will test the reaction of 2 million people in the event of such an
attack.
The drills are being run by Joint Task Force Command (JTFCOM),
Northern Command (NORTHCOM), J9 Joint Innovation and Experimentation
Directorate, FEMA’s command bunker, the Department of Homeland
Security, and Virginia police.
The US Marines are also running “Emerald Express 07” in Virginia
on April 24 as part of their Urban Warrior 07 drill package.
Some of the data that will be looked at is;
1. Reaction to 2 million casualties.
2. Martial Law being invoked.
3. The resistance of people being rounded up and being put into camps.
4. Response time and coordination of Federal, State, and Local units.
A few things dealing with Noble Resolve 2007 are;
1. A Podcast at USJFCOM http://www.nowpublic.com/usjfcom_gears_up_for_noble_resolve_podcast
2. The news link, http://www.jfcom.mil/newslink/storyarchive/2007/pa033007.html
In an article by Global Research, it is stated that Vice President
Dick Cheney has been telling of how a threat like the one the drills
are patterned after are highly likely.
This week Dick Cheney has also been warning of the “very real”
threat of a nuclear attack on an American city. Could the Nobel
Resolve drills be used as a screen for a false-flag attack to be
blamed on Iran, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, or sheep-dipped Americans like
Adam Gadahn?
With the V.P running around using these scare tactics as he did before
the canceled drills in North Carolina, makes you leery of what this
government will do for a New World Order. The reason the test in North
Carolina was canceled was that it was leaked by a General that was
fearful of what might happen. He was immediately fired.
It is too late to try and stop it, but we can keep our eyes and ears
open for anything that might happen. It seems that the MSM is not
telling of these drills, so we must be the watchdogs.
---------------------------
Peter DeFazio and the Portland Nuke
By Captain Eric H. May
Military Correspondent
29 jul 2007
http://estrecho.indymedia.org/newswire/display/69726/index.php
"Maybe the people who think there's a conspiracy out there are right."
Congressman Peter DeFazio, 7/20/07
False Flags
About a quarter hour into my half hour interview with her Wednesday,
Penny Dodge, chief of staff for Oregon's Congressman Peter DeFazio,
asked me what a "false flag" attack was. I explained it in a few
words.
A false flag attack is one in which you attack your own people, then
blame it on a group of people you want to attack. It's a radical
stratagem for instantly creating hatred, and it's common, historically
speaking, all the way from ancient to modern times. For example:
* The Roman Emperor Nero burned Rome, then blamed it on emerging
Christianity.
* The German Fuhrer Hitler burned the Reichstag, then blamed it on
communist Jewry.
* The American President Bush demolished the World Trade Center, then
blamed it on radical Islam.
At present, "false flag" is a highly relevant term, as Ms. Dodge and
her boss Rep. DeFazio have learned from their constituents back home
in Oregon. Folks in the Pacific Northwest, especially around Portland,
believe that they may be the victims of a false flag attack by the
Bush Administration under cover of an upcoming government terror
exercise, Operation Noble Resolve.
Atomic August
As I pointed out in my column last week, Next 9/11, Summer 2007?,
Operation Noble Resolve, to be conducted in August, will involve
extensive mobilization of Homeland Security and U.S. military forces
to simulate a wide range of catastrophic terror events in Oregon. The
grand finale will be the simulation of a ten kiloton atomic bomb in
Portland.
But what if they decide to use a real bomb rather than simulate it?
No doubt 99 percent of the participants in Noble Resolve believe it is
a mere readiness exercise, but what if one percent -- inserted by Bush
cronies -- believe it is the perfect cover for setting off a real
nuke? This is, after all, what happened on 9/11/01, when U.S. military
commands were simulating terror airline strikes on U.S. skyscrapers --
which is exactly what happened. It's also what happened on 7/7/05,
when London police were simulating terror subway strikes -- which is
exactly what happened. The criminal one percent effectively hijacked
those exercises while the 99 percent of honest participants were as
shocked as the general public, and simply carried on with the scenario
they had been practicing, which had now become "live."
When the horrific events that government exercises are supposed to be
practicing against turn out to be the exact events that occur, then it
is insanity to continue to put blind faith in the motives of the
government. On the other hand, it is highest sanity to document,
organize, and protest against a possible false flag attack, as the
constituents and congressional folk of Oregon are now doing.
Prayers for Portland
An effective grassroots movement is growing in Oregon, and it has
pushed Congressman DeFazio in the right direction. Early summer
anxiety by his constituents concerned him little, as he then issued
assurances that all was on the level with pending federal terror
exercises, and the recently enacted National Security Presidential
Directive 51, which allows Bush to establish a dictatorship if there
is a catastrophic natural event or terror attack.
DeFazio's assurances didn't convince his constituents, though, and
soon they didn't even convince him. Just to make sure that everything
was on the level with NSPD-51, he asked to see the secret annexes of
the document. This was his right as a member of the House Homeland
Security Committee, and in his 20 years in Congress he had never been
refused access to classified documents.
There's a first time for everything, though. After initially granting
DeFazio permission to check into NSPD-51, the White House reversed
itself on 7/18/07, and refused to let him take a look. Friday,
DeFazio, along with House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bernie
Thompson and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Chris Carney, sent a
letter to the White House. In it, they demand the access so far denied
DeFazio -- or a written explanation as to why access has been refused
-- by Thursday. This is the day before Congress -- and Congressman
DeFazio -- recess and return to their home districts to answer
emphatic questions.
Portland has more than a prayer if it and the rest of Oregon keep up
the pressure on their local, state and national leaders. At this stage
of the Bush regime and its terror-driven global war, there's no shame
in conspiracy theory, since it's the only theory that offers
consistent, coherent answers to our growing secret government and its
terror policies.
* * *
Captain May is the leader of Ghost Troop, a cyber intelligence unit
comprised of military, police and government veterans, along with
citizen activists. His article last week, Next 9/11, Summer 2007?, is
at www.thepriceofliberty.org/may.htm His 7/24/07 interview on the
topic with Dr. Kevin Barrett is available on line at mp3.wtprn.com/
Barrett/0707/20070724_Tue_Barrett2.mp3
-----------------
Noble Resolve Press Release:
http://www.jfcom.mil/newslink/storyarchive/2007/pa053107.html
SUFFOLK, Va. - May 31, 2007) -- The initial experiment of U.S. Joint
Forces Command's (USJFCOM) Noble Resolve campaign designed to look at
ways of enhancing homeland defense and support in the event of a
natural or man-made disaster proved to yield promising results.
Designed with U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) as part of that
command's efforts to improve homeland security, this first experiment,
Noble Resolve 07-1, brought in more than 125 people from across the
United States and other countries to develop solutions for U.S.
agencies and organizations by providing the means to deter prevent,
and defeat threats and aggression aimed at the U.S., its territories,
and interests.
Navy Capt. John Kersh, Jr., who heads the Joint Innovation and
Experimentation Directorate's (J9) Joint Context and Homeland Defense
Department, said Noble Resolve gave participants an opportunity to
experiment with things and people they normally wouldn't have a chance
to work with.
"As we get together with different organizations, if they can identify
things that they're interested in working on, we'll put together the
vignettes and scenarios that allow them to get at the research
objectives and work with folks that a lot of times they might not have
the chance to work with," he said.
Participants teamed up throughout the experiment to use a number of
modeling and simulation (M&S) tools to get a read on what would happen
in two scenarios.
The first involved a hurricane, similar to Hurricane Katrina, coming
from western Africa hitting the Hampton Roads. The second dealt with a
terrorist attack coming from a ship that sailed from the western
African region.
The Virginia Fusion Center, located in Richmond, worked in conjunction
with Noble Resolve on the terrorist scenario. The center ran its own
annual exercise called the Virginia Emergency Response Team Exercise
at the same time. Noble Resolve personnel communicated with Virginia
officials and then shared information regarding a potential attack.
David Ozolek, executive director of the Joint Futures Laboratory in
Suffolk, Va., which held the experiment, said the sharing of
information amongst organizations proved to be critical throughout
both scenarios.
"I think what we got was a reasonable assessment of our information
flow and knowledge building in support of decision making capabilities
as it stands today," he said. "The next step now is to map out where
we need to make improvements."
Ozolek also said one area where he saw breakthrough production was in
the technical area of M&S support for planning, mission rehearsal,
training and experimentation.
"We did very effective demonstrations of some really powerful tools
that have emerged within the last two years that have great potential
to help us plan and respond to those types of situations," said
Ozolek.
He said Noble Resolve officials will meet with commonwealth of
Virginia officials including Governor Tim Kaine and mayors of the
cities in Hampton Roads over the next few weeks to discuss the
observations of the experiment in terms of information flow and
decision making.
Ozolek gave praise to the commonwealth saying they've agreed to help
out even more.
"What we actually learned working with Virginia is they've graciously
agreed to work with us as we work with Oregon in August for Noble
Resolve 07-2," he said.
Kersh said the overall lessons learned from Noble Resolve 07-1 will be
brought to Noble Resolve 07-2. That experiment will consist of two
more scenarios, the first involving an earthquake to the Portland area
and the second dealing with a series of vignettes dealing with the
Global War on Terror.
By the time the Noble Resolve 07 campaign comes to a close in August,
USJFCOM and NORTHCOM will have partnered with the U.S. Transportation
Command, and other federal agencies such as the Dept. of Homeland
Security, the FBI and Customs and Border Protection.
It also will have teamed with individual states such as the
commonwealth of Virginia and state of Oregon, as well as multinational
participants to include Canada, Germany, Singapore, Finland and
Sweden, amongst others.
---------------------
Noble Resolve 07: Four days of “simulated” nuclear terrorist scenarios
in the US & Europe
by DL Abrahamson
Global Research, April 20, 2007
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=ABR20070420&articleId=5444
It is important to note the “Nobel Resolve” drills are dominated by
NORTHCOM, the branch of “homeland defense” based in Colorado and
responsible for shutting down the United States under martial law, as
well as ushering in the merger of the US, Canada, and Mexico via the
SPP.
We must remember that CIA agent Philip Giraldi warned the American
Conservative magazine that STRATCOM would launch a nuclear attack on
Iran in the wake of a new WMD-style attack on American soil.
And the Russian media and former Russian military members continue to
warn that an American and Israeli strike on Iran is imminent.
While many drills are run every month, Nobel Resolve 07, with it’s
“realistic” scenarios, comes at a time of increased geopolitical
tension. It is reminiscent of the drills in 2005, where a ten-kiloton
nuclear weapon was “simulated” to explode in South Carolina. Some
speculated that four-star Gen. Kevin Byrnes, of the Fort Meade TRADOC
command, was fired due to his exposure of the drill.
We should not live in a constant state of panic and fear, or make any
irresponsible predictions about Noble Resolve 07. But in the coming
days, we can email this information to blogs, media outlets, friends
and family. Congressmen, and others to help inoculate against any
possibility that rogue “red teams” inside the drills may be
activated.
Today is the deadline for DeFazio's response...call the #'s below and
pressure!! 27.Jul.2007 07:49
No word from DeFazio's office yet, but people, Oregonians or not,
might call the pols listed on the cc: list, to push for adoption of
the idea of a Portland Citizens' Oversight Committee on Terrorism
Drills.
I believe that Alex Ansary made this list of phone numbers available
on his "Outside-the-Box" show last night, but for your dialing
convenience/pleasure, here it is==>>
Representative DeFazio, (541) 465-6732
Representative Blumenauer, (503) 231-2300
Representative Hooley, (503) 588-9100
Representative Wu, (503) 326-2901
Senator Wyden, (503) 326-7525
Senator Smith, (503) 326-3386
Governor Kulongoski - (503) 373-3111, 373-1565
Mayor Potter, 503-823-4120
~~or email City Council and follow-up with a call!!
Sam Adams, commiss...@ci.portland.or.us - 503-823-1120
Erik Sten, in...@erikforportland.com - 503-823-3589
Dan Saltzman, dsal...@ci.portland.or.us - 503-823-4151
Randy Leonard, ra...@ci.portland.or.us - 503-823-3001
---------------
namaste;
bodhi
http://psychedelictourist.blogspot.com
Immortalist
> FALSE FLAG TERROR DRILL PORTLAND OREGON - AUG 5 !!!!! "a perfect storm
> of terror, treason and totalitarianism."
>
> This sounds VERY serious.
> Please pass this information around to everyone you know
>
> NOBLE RESOLVE - OPEN LETTER TO PETER DEFAZIO
>
> NOBLE RESOLVE is too dangerous to allow in Oregon. This exercise,
> drilling War of Terror scenarios in Oregon, comes just as the media is
> filling up with warnings of a new 9/11 and the recent Presidential
> Executive Orders: NSPD 51, 5/10/07, "... allows the sitting president
> to declare a "national emergency" without Congressional approval..."
>
> It's looking more and more like "a perfect storm of terror, treason
> and totalitarianism." Drills like these have a history of going live
> (e.g. 09/11/01 & 07/07/05) and now we have NSPD 51 — the equivalent of
> Hitler's Article 48.
>
These might be "lynch mobbing" instincts that will terrorize if not
counter-acted with some learning;
- Preemptive Strike, Hobbsian Trap, Ethnicity, Toolmaking/Weapons,
Bluff, Self Deception
SECONDLY, DIFFIDENCE, IN its original sense of "distrust." Hobbes had
translated Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War and was struck
by his observation that "what made war inevitable was the growth of
Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta." If you have
neighbors, they may covet what you have, in which case you have become
an obstacle to their desires. Therefore you must be prepared to defend
yourself. Defense is an iffy matter even with technologies such as
castle walls, the Maginot Line, or antiballistic missile defenses, and
it is even iffier without them. The only option for self-protection
may be to wipe out potentially hostile neighbors first in a preemptive
strike. As Yogi Berra advised, "The best defense is a good offense and
vice versa."
Tragically, you might arrive at this conclusion even if you didn't
have an aggressive bone in your body. All it would take is the
realization that others might covet what you have and a strong desire
not to be massacred. Even more tragically, your neighbors have every
reason to be cranking through the same deduction, and if they are, it
makes your fears all the more compelling, which makes a preemptive
strike all the more tempting, which makes a preemptive strike by them
all the more tempting, and so on.
This "Hobbesian trap," as it is now called, is a ubiquitous cause of
violent conflict. The political scientist Thomas Schelling offered the
analogy of an armed homeowner who surprises an armed burglar. Each
might be tempted to shoot first to avoid being shot, even if neither
wanted to kill the other. A Hobbesian trap pitting one man against
another is a recurring theme in fiction, such as the desperado in
Hollywood westerns, spy-versus-spy plots in cold-war thrillers, and
the lyrics to Bob Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff."
But because we are a social species, Hobbesian traps more commonly pit
groups against groups. There is safety in numbers, so humans, bound by
shared genes or reciprocal promises, form coalitions for protection.
Unfortunately, the logic of the Hobbesian trap means there is also
danger in numbers, because neighbors may fear they are becoming
outnumbered and form alliances in their turn to contain the growing
menace. Since one man's containment is another man's encirclement,
this can send the spiral of danger upward. Human sociality is the
original "entangling alliance," in which two parties with no prior
animus can find themselves at war when the ally of one attacks the
ally of the other. It is the reason I discuss homicide and war in a
single chapter. In a species whose members form bonds of loyalty, the
first can easily turn into the second.
The danger is particularly acute for humans because, unlike most
mammals, we tend to be patrilocal, with related males living together
instead of dispersing from the group when they become sexually mature.
(Among chimpanzees and dolphins, related males also live together, and
they too form aggressive coalitions.) What we call "ethnic groups" are
very large extended families, and though in a modern ethnic group the
family ties are too distant for kin-based altruism to be significant,
this was not true of the smaller coalitions in which we evolved. Even
today ethnic groups often perceive themselves as large families, and
the role of ethnic loyalties in group-against-group violence is all
too obvious.
The other distinctive feature of Homo sapiens as a species is, of
course, toolmaking. Competitiveness can channel toolmaking into
weaponry, and diffidence can channel weaponry into an arms race. An
arms race, like an alliance, can make war more likely by accelerating
the spiral of fear and distrust. Our species' vaunted ability to make
tools is one of the reasons we are so good at killing one another.
The vicious circle of a Hobbesian trap can help us understand why the
escalation from friction to war (and occasionally, the de-escalation
to detente) can happen so suddenly. Mathematicians and computer
simulators have devised models in which several players acquire arms
or form alliances in response to what the other players are doing. The
models often display chaotic behavior, in which small differences in
the values of the parameters can have large and unpredictable
consequences.
As we can infer from Hobbes's allusion to the Peloponnesian War,
Hobbesian traps among groups are far from hypothetical. Chagnon
describes how Yanomamo villages obsess over the danger of being
massacred by other villages (with good reason) and occasionally engage
in preemptive assaults, giving other villages good reason to engage in
their own preemptive assaults, and prompting groups of villages to
form alliances that make their neighbors ever more nervous. Street
gangs and Mafia families engage in similar machinations. In the past
century, World War I, the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War, and the
Yugoslavian wars in the 1990s arose in part from Hobbesian traps.
The political scientist John Vasquez has made the point
quantitatively. Using a database of hundreds of conflicts from the
past two centuries, he concludes that the ingredients of a Hobbesian
trap-concern with security, entangling alliances, and arms races-can
statistically predict the escalation of friction into war. The most
conscious playing-out of the logic of Hobbesian traps took place among
nuclear strategists during the cold war, when the fate of the world
literally hinged on it. The logic produced some of the maddening
paradoxes of nuclear strategy: why it is extraordinarily dangerous to
have enough missiles to destroy an enemy but not enough to destroy him
after he has attacked those missiles (because the enemy would have a
strong incentive to strike preemptively), and why erecting an
impregnable defense against enemy missiles could make the world a more
dangerous place (because the enemy has an incentive to launch a
preemptive strike before the completed defense turns him into a
sitting duck).
When a stronger group overpowers a weaker one in a surprise raid, it
should come as no surprise to a Hobbesian cynic. But when one side
defeats another in a battle that both have joined, the logic is not so
clear. Given that both the victor and the vanquished have much to lose
in a battle, one would expect each side to assess the strength of the
other and the weaker to cede the contested resource without useless
bloodshed that would only lead to the same outcome. Most behavioral
ecologists believe that rituals of appeasement and surrender among
animals evolved for this reason (and not for the good of the species,
as Lorenz had supposed). Sometimes the two sides are so well matched,
and the stakes of a battle are so high, that they engage in a battle
because it is the only way to find out who is stronger.
But at other times a leader will march-or march his men-into the
valley of death without any reasonable hope of prevailing. Military
incompetence has long puzzled historians, and the primatologist
Richard Wrangham suggests that it might grow out of the logic of bluff
and self-deception. Convincing an adversary to avoid a battle does not
depend on being stronger but on appearing stronger, and that creates
an incentive to bluff and to be good at detecting bluffs. Since the
most effective bluffer is the one who believes his own bluff, a
limited degree of self-deception in hostile escalations can evolve. It
has to be limited, because having one's bluff called can be worse than
folding on the first round, but when the limits are miscalibrated and
both sides go to the brink, the result can be a human disaster. The
historian Barbara Tuchman has highlighted the role of self-deception
in calamitous wars throughout history in her books The Guns of August
(about World War I) and The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam.
- Law of Retaliation, Fullfilling Threat, Mutual Assured Destruction,
Vengence Instinct
A READINESS TO inflict a preemptive strike is a double-edged sword,
because it makes one an inviting target for a preemptive strike. So
people have invented, and perhaps evolved, an alternative defense: the
advertised deterrence policy known as lex talionis, the law of
retaliation, familiar from the biblical injunction "An eye for an eye,
a tooth for a tooth." If you can credibly say to potential
adversaries, "We won't attack first, but if we are attacked, we will
survive and strike back," you remove Hobbes's first two incentives for
quarrel, gain and mistrust. The policy that you will inflict as much
harm on others as they inflicted on you cancels their incentive to
raid for gain, and the policy that you will not strike first cancels
their incentive to raid for mistrust. This is reinforced by the policy
to retaliate with no more harm than they inflicted on you, because it
allays the fear that you will use a flimsy pretext to justify a
massive opportunistic raid.
The nuclear strategy of "Mutual Assured Destruction" is the most
obvious contemporary example of the law of retaliation. But it is an
explicit version of an ancient impulse, the emotion of vengeance, that
may have been installed in our brains by natural selection. Daly and
Wilson observe, "In societies from every corner of the world, we can
read of vows to avenge a slain father or brother, and of rituals that
sanctify those vows-of a mother raising her son to avenge a father who
died in the avenger's infancy, of graveside vows, of drinking the
deceased kinsman's blood as a covenant, or keeping his bloody garment
as a relic." Modern states often find themselves at odds with their
citizens' craving for revenge. They prosecute vigilantes-people who
"take the law into their own hands"-and, with a few recent exceptions,
ignore the clamoring of crime victims and their relatives for a say in
decisions to prosecute, plea-bargain, or punish.
As we saw in Chapter 10, for revenge to work as a deterrent it has to
be implacable. Exacting revenge is a risky business, because if an
adversary was dangerous enough to have hurt you in the first place, he
is not likely to take punishment lying down. Since the damage has
already been done, a coolly rational victim may not see it in his
interests to retaliate. And since the aggressor can anticipate this,
he could call the victim's bluff and abuse him with impunity. If, on
the other hand, potential victims and their kin would be so consumed
with the lust for retribution as to raise a son to avenge a slain
father, drink the kinsman's blood as a covenant, and so on, an
aggressor might think twice before aggressing.
The law of retaliation requires that the vengeance have a moralistic
pretext to distinguish it from a raw assault. The avenger must have
been provoked by a prior act of aggression or other injustice. Studies
of feuds, wars, and ethnic violence show that the perpetrators are
almost always inflamed by some grievance against their targets. The
danger inherent in this psychology is obvious: two sides may disagree
over whether an initial act of violence was justified (perhaps as an
act of self-defense, the recovery of ill-gotten gains, or retribution
for an earlier offense) or was an act of unprovoked aggression. One
side may count an even number of reprisals and feel that the scales of
justice have been balanced, while the other side counts an odd number
and feels that they still have a score to settle. Self-deception may
embolden each side's belief in the rectitude of its cause and make
reconciliation almost impossible.
Also necessary for vengeance to work as a deterrent is that the
willingness to pursue it be made public, because the whole point of
deterrence is to give would-be attackers second thoughts beforehand.
And this brings us to Hohbes's final reason for quarrel.
- Fighting For Honor, Herding/Agricultural Societies, North/South US,
Inner City Drug Wars
THIRDLY, GLORY-THOUGH a more accurate word would be "honor." Hobbes's
observation that men fight over "a word, a smile, a different opinion,
and any other sign of undervalue" is as true now as it was in the
seventeenth century. For as long as urban crime statistics have been
recorded, the most frequent cause of homicide has been "argument"-what
police blotters classify as "altercation of relatively trivial origin;
insult, curse, jostling, etc." A Dallas homicide detective recalls,
"Murders result from little ol' arguments over nothing at all. Tempers
flare. A fight starts, and somebody gets stabbed or shot. I've worked
on cases where the principals had been arguing over a 10 cent record
on a juke box, or over a one dollar gambling debt from a dice game."
Wars between nation-states are often fought over national honor, even
when the material stakes are small. In the late 1960s and early 1970s,
most Americans had become disenchanted over their country's
involvement in the war in Vietnam, which they thought was immoral or
unwinnable or both. But rather than agreeing to withdraw American
forces unconditionally, as the peace movement had advocated, a
majority supported Richard Nixon and his slogan "Peace with Honor." In
practice this turned into a slow withdrawal of American troops that
prolonged the military presence until 1973 at a cost of twenty
thousand American lives and the lives of many more Vietnamese-and with
the same outcome, defeat of the South Vietnamese government. A defense
of national honor was behind other recent wars, such as the British
retaking of the Falkland Islands in 1982 and the American invasion of
Grenada in 1983. A ruinous 1969 war between El Salvador and Honduras
began with a disputed game between their national soccer teams.
Because of the logic of deterrence, fights over personal or national
honor are not as idiotic as they seem. In a hostile milieu, people and
countries must advertise their willingness to retaliate against anyone
who would profit at their expense, and that means maintaining a
reputation for avenging any slight or trespass, no matter how small.
They must make it known that, in the words of the Jim Croce song, "You
don't tug on Superman's cape; you don't spit into the wind; you don't
pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger; and you don't mess around with
Jim."
The mentality is foreign to those of us who can get Leviathan to show
up by dialing 911, but that option is not always available. It was not
available to people in pre-state societies, or on the frontier in the
Appalachians or the Wild West, or in the remote highlands of Scotland,
the Balkans, or Indochina. It is not available to people who are
unwilling to bring in the police because of the nature of their work,
such as Prohibition rum-runners, inner-city drug dealers, and Mafia
wise guys. And it is not available to nation-states in their dealings
with one another. Daly and Wilson comment on the mentality that
applies in all these arenas:
In chronically feuding and warring societies, an essential manly
virtue is the capacity for violence; head-hunting and coup counting
may then become prestigious, and the commission of a homicide may even
be an obligatory rite of passage. To turn the other cheek is not
saintly but stupid. Or contemptibly weak.
So the social constructionists I cited earlier are not wrong in
pointing to a culture of combative masculinity as a major cause of
violence. But they are wrong in thinking that it is peculiarly
American, that it is caused by separation from one's mother or an
unwillingness to express one's emotions, and that it is an arbitrary
social construction that can be "deconstructed" by verbal commentary.
And fans of the public health approach are correct that rates of
violence vary with social conditions, but they are wrong in thinking
that violence is a pathology in anything like the medical sense.
Cultures of honor spring up all over the world because they amplify
universal human emotions like pride, anger, revenge, and the love of
kith and kin, and because they appear at the time to be sensible
responses to local conditions. Indeed, the emotions themselves are
thoroughly familiar even when they don't erupt in violence, such as in
road rage, office politics, political mudslinging, academic
backstabbing, and email flame wars.
In Culture of Honor, the social psychologists Richard Nisbett and Dov
Cohen show that violent cultures arise in societies that are beyond
the reach of the law and in which precious assets are easily stolen.
Societies that herd animals meet both conditions. Herders tend to live
in territories that are unsuitable for growing crops and thus far from
the centers of government. And their major asset, livestock, is easier
to steal than the major asset of farmers, land. In herding societies a
man can be stripped of his wealth (and of his ability to acquire
wealth) in an eyeblink. Men in that milieu cultivate a hair trigger
for violent retaliation, not just against rustlers, but against anyone
who would test their resolve by signs of disrespect that could reveal
them to be easy pickings for rustlers. Scottish highlanders,
Appalachian mountain men, Western cowboys, Masai warriors, Sioux
Indians, Druze and Bedouin tribesmen, Balkan clansmen, and Indochinese
Montagnards are familiar examples.
A man's honor is a kind of "social reality" in John Searle's sense: it
exists because everyone agrees it exists, but it is no less real for
that, since it resides in a shared granting of power. When the
lifestyle of a people changes, their culture of honor can stay with
them for a long time, because it is difficult for anyone to be the
first to renounce the culture. The very act of renouncing it can be a
concession of weakness and low status even when the sheep and
mountains are a distant memory.
The American South has long had higher rates of violence than the
North, including a tradition of dueling among "men of honor" such as
Andrew Jackson. Nisbett and Cohen note that much of the South was
originally settled by Scottish and Irish herdsman, whereas the North
was settled by English farmers. Also, for much of its history the
mountainous frontier of the South was beyond the reach of the law. The
resulting Southern culture of honor is, remarkably, alive at the turn
of the twenty-first century in laws and social attitudes. Southern
states place fewer restrictions on gun ownership, allow people to
shoot an assailant or burglar without having to retreat first, are
tolerant of spanking by parents and corporal punishment by schools,
are more hawkish on issues of national defense, and execute more of
their criminals.
These attitudes do not float in a cloud called "culture" but are
visible in the psychology of individual Southerners. Nisbett and Cohen
advertised a fake psychology experiment at the liberal University of
Michigan. To get to the lab, respondents had to squeeze by a stooge
who was filing papers in a hallway. As a respondent brushed past him,
the stooge slammed the drawer shut and muttered, "Asshole." Students
from Northern states laughed him off, but students from Southern
states were visibly upset. The Southerners had elevated levels of
testosterone and cortisol (a stress hormone) and reported lower levels
of self-esteem. They compensated by giving a firmer handshake and
acting more dominant toward the experimenter, and on the way out of
the lab they refused to back down when another stooge approached in a
narrow hallway and one of the two had to step aside. It's not that
Southerners walk around chronically fuming: a control group who had
not been insulted were as cool and collected as the Northerners. And
Southerners do not approve of violence in the abstract, only of
violence provoked by an insult or trespass.
African American inner-city neighborhoods are among the more
conspicuously violent environments in Western democracies, and they
too have an entrenched culture of honor. In his insightful essay "The
Code of the Streets," the sociologist Elijah Anderson describes the
young men's obsession with respect, their cultivation of a reputation
for toughness, their willingness to engage in violent retaliation for
any slight, and their universal acknowledgment of the rules of this
code. Were it not for giveaways in their dialect, such as "If someone
disses you, you got to straighten them out," Anderson's description of
the code would be indistinguishable from accounts of the culture of
honor among white Southerners.
Inner-city African Americans were never goatherds, so why did they
develop a culture of honor? One possibility is that they brought it
with them from the South when they migrated to large cities after the
two world wars-a nice irony for Southern racists who would blame inner-
city violence on something distinctively African American. Another
factor is that the young men's wealth is easily stealable, since it is
often in the form of cash or drugs. A third is that the ghettos are a
kind of frontier in which police protection is unreliable-the gangsta
rap group Public Enemy has a recording called "911 Is a Joke." A
fourth is that poor people, especially young men, cannot take pride in
a prestigious job, a nice house, or professional accomplishments, and
this may be doubly true for African Americans after centuries of
slavery and discrimination. Their reputation on the streets is their
only claim to status. Finally, Anderson points out that the code of
the streets is self-perpetuating. A majority of African American
families in the inner city subscribe to peaceable middle-class values
they refer to as "decent." But that is not enough to end the culture
of honor:
Everybody knows that if the rules are violated, there are penalties.
Knowledge of the code is thus largely defensive; it is literally
necessary for operating in public. Therefore, even though families
with a decency orientation are usually opposed to the values of the
code, they often reluctantly encourage their children's familiarity
with it to enable them to negotiate the inner-city environment.
Studies of the dynamics of ghetto violence are consistent with
Anderson's analysis. The jump in American urban crime rates between
1985 and 1993 can be tied in part to the appearance of crack cocaine
and the underground economy it spawned. As the economist Jeff Grogger
points out, "Violence is a way to enforce property rights in the
absence of legal recourse." The emergence of violence within the new
drug economy then set off the expected Hobbesian trap. As the
criminologist Jeffrey Fagan noted, gun use spread contagiously as
"young people who otherwise wouldn't carry guns felt that they had to
in order to avoid being victimized by their armed peers." And as we
saw in the chapter on politics, conspicuous economic inequality is a
good predictor of violence (better than poverty itself), presumably
because men deprived of legitimate means of acquiring status compete
for status on the streets instead. It is not surprising, then, that
when African American teenagers are taken out of underclass
neighborhoods they are no more violent or delinquent than white
teenagers.
- Criminal Justice System vs Anarchy, Defusing Hobbsian Trap,
Regulating Central Authority
HOBBES'S ANALYSIS OF the causes of violence, borne out by modern data
on crime and war, shows that violence is not a primitive, irrational
urge, nor is it a "pathology" except in the metaphorical sense of a
condition that everyone would like to eliminate. Instead, it is a near-
inevitable outcome of the dynamics of self-interested, rational social
organisms.
But Hobbes is famous for presenting not just the causes of violence
but a means of preventing it: "a common power to keep them all in
awe." His commonwealth was a means of implementing the principle "that
a man be willing, when others are so too ... to lay down this right to
all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men,
as he would allow other men against himself." People vest authority in
a sovereign person or assembly who can use the collective force of the
contractors to hold each one to the agreement, because "covenants,
without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man
at all."
A governing body that has been granted a monopoly on the legitimate
use of violence can neutralize each of Hobbes's reasons for quarrel.
By inflicting penalties on aggressors, the governing body eliminates
the profitability of invading for gain. That in turn defuses the
Hobbesian trap in which mutually distrustful peoples are each tempted
to inflict a preemptive strike to avoid being invaded for gain. And a
system of laws that defines infractions and penalties and metes them
out disinterestedly can obviate the need for a hair trigger for
retaliation and the accompanying culture of honor. People can rest
assured that someone else will impose disincentives on their enemies,
making it unnecessary for them to maintain a belligerent stance to
prove they are not punching bags. And having a third party measure the
infractions and the punishments circumvents the hazard of self-
deception, which ordinarily convinces those on each side that they
have suffered the greater number of offenses. These advantages of
third-party intercession can also come from nongovernmental methods of
conflict resolution, in which mediators try to help the hostile
parties negotiate an agreement or arbitrators render a verdict but
cannot enforce it. The problem with these toothless measures is that
the parties can always walk away when the outcome doesn't come out the
way they want.
Adjudication by an armed authority appears to be the most effective
general violence-reduction technique ever invented. Though we debate
whether tweaks in criminal policy, such as executing murderers versus
locking them up for life, can reduce violence by a few percentage
points, there can be no debate on the massive effects of having a
criminal justice system as opposed to living in anarchy. The
shockingly high homicide rates of pre-state societies, with 10 to 60
percent of the men dying at the hands of other men, provide one kind
of evidence. Another is the emergence of a violent culture of honor in
just about any corner of the world that is beyond the reach of the
law. Many historians argue that people acquiesced to centralized
authorities during the Middle Ages and other periods to relieve
themselves of the burden of having to retaliate against those who
would harm them and their kin. And the growth of those authorities may
explain the hundredfold decline in homicide rates in European
societies since the Middle Ages. The United States saw a dramatic
reduction in urban crime rates from the first half of the nineteenth
century to the second half, which coincided with the formation of
professional police forces in the cities. The causes of the decline in
American crime in the 1990s arc controversial and probably
multifarious, but many criminologists trace it in part to more
intensive community policing and higher incarceration rates of violent
criminals.
The inverse is true as well. When law enforcement vanishes, all manner
of violence breaks out: looting, settling old scores, ethnic
cleansing, and petty warfare among gangs, warlords, and mafias. This
was obvious in the remnants of Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and parts
of Africa in the 1990s, but can also happen in countries with a long
tradition of civility. As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada
during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's
anarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if the government
ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing
predictions were put to the test at 8:00 A.M. on October 17, 1969,
when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 A.M. the first bank
was robbed. By noon most downtown stores had closed because of
looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage
of a limousine service that had competed with them for airport
customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer,
rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a
burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had
been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been
set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three
million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city
authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to
restore order. This decisive empirical test left my politics in
tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist).
The generalization that anarchy in the sense of a lack of government
leads to anarchy in the sense of violent chaos may seem banal, but it
is often overlooked in today's still-romantic climate. Government in
general is anathema to many conservatives, and the police and prison
system are anathema to many liberals. Many people on the left, citing
uncertainty about the deterrent value of capital punishment compared
to life imprisonment, maintain that deterrence is not effective in
general. And many oppose more effective policing of inner-city
neighborhoods, even though it may be the most effective way for their
decent inhabitants to abjure the code of the streets. Certainly we
must combat the racial inequities that put too many African American
men in prison, but as the legal scholar Randall Kennedy has argued, we
must also combat the racial inequities that leave too many African
Americans exposed to criminals. Many on the right oppose
decriminalizing drugs, prostitution, and gambling without factoring in
the costs of the zones of anarchy that, by their own free-market
logic, are inevitably spawned by prohibition policies. When demand for
a commodity is high, suppliers will materialize, and if they cannot
protect their property rights by calling the police, they will do so
with a violent culture of honor. (This is distinct from the moral
argument that our current drug policies incarcerate multitudes of
nonviolent people.) Schoolchildren are currently fed the
disinformation that Native Americans and other peoples in pre-state
societies were inherently peaceable, leaving them uncomprehending,
indeed contemptuous, of one of our species' greatest inventions,
democratic government and the rule of law.
Where Hobbes fell short was in dealing with the problem of policing
the police. In his view, civil war was such a calamity that any
government-monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy-was preferable to it.
He did not seem to appreciate that in practice a leviathan would not
be an otherworldly sea monster but a human being or group of them,
complete with the deadly sins of greed, mistrust, and honor. (As we
saw in the preceding chapter, this became the obsession of the heirs
of Hobbes who framed the American Constitution.) Armed men are always
a menace, so police who are not under tight democratic control can be
a far worse calamity than the crime and feuding that go on without
them. In the twentieth century, according to the political scientist
R. J. Rummel in Death by Government, 170 million people were killed by
their own governments. Nor is murder-by-government a relic of the
tyrannies of the middle of the century. The World Conflict List for
the year 2000 reported:
The stupidest conflict in this year's count is Cameroon. Early in the
year, Cameroon was experiencing widespread problems with violent
crime. The government responded to this crisis by creating and arming
militias and paramilitary groups to stamp out the crime
extrajudicially. Now, while violent crime has fallen, the militias and
paramilitaries have created far more chaos and death than crime ever
would have. Indeed, as the year wore on mass graves were discovered
that were tied to the paramilitary groups.
The pattern is familiar from other regions of the world (including our
own) and shows that civil libertarians' concern about abusive police
practices is an indispensable counterweight to the monopoly on
violence we grant the state.
The Blank Slate - The Modern Denial of Human Nature
Steven Pinker
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670031518/qid=1086630363/
http://www.mit.edu/~pinker/slate.html
POSTER
"??" <The_Psyched...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1185960110.0...@l70g2000hse.googlegroups.com...
FALSE FLAG TERROR DRILL PORTLAND OREGON - AUG 5 !!!!! "a perfect storm
of terror, treason and totalitarianism."
This sounds VERY serious.
Please pass this information around to everyone you know
NOBLE RESOLVE - OPEN LETTER TO PETER DEFAZIO
author: fear no terror
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2007/07/362706.shtml
NOBLE RESOLVE is too dangerous to allow in Oregon. This exercise,
drilling War of Terror scenarios in Oregon, comes just as the media is
filling up with warnings of a new 9/11 and the recent Presidential
Executive Orders: NSPD 51, 5/10/07, "... allows the sitting president
to declare a "national emergency" without Congressional approval..."
It's looking more and more like "a perfect storm of terror, treason
and totalitarianism." Drills like these have a history of going live
(e.g. 09/11/01 & 07/07/05) and now we have NSPD 51 - the equivalent of