Re: Remote viewing a mobius strip club
Posted: Mon Nov 14, 2016 1:33 am
Link du jour
https://www.nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/
http://registremblay.com/
http://vfpmaine.org/events/bangortrial.asp
NOT GUILTY!!!
Left to right: Doug Rawlings, Henry Braun, Jim Freeman, Dud Hendrick, Rob Shetterly and Jon Kreps. (Photo used with permission. © V. Kelly Bellis)
Six members of Maine's Civil Disobedience and Occupation Project went on trial at 9:00, Tuesday, April 29, 2008, at Penobscot Superior Court on Hammond Avenue in Bangor, Maine. The six people were charged with "criminal trespass" for refusing to leave the office of U.S. Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) and the Margaret Chase Smith Federal Building on Harlow Street, in Bangor, on March 7, 2007, four years after the U.S. led invasion of Iraq.
FBI Octopus
Mental Health and Safe Schools
Education Week (subscription) (blog)-
Those doing the analysis included Michigan State University psychiatrist Dr. Frank Ochberg and Supervisory Special Agent Dwayne Fuselier, the FBI's lead ...
Local briefs
Lewiston Morning Tribune
Robinson joined Kootenai Health in September 2015 after a 23-year career as a supervisory special agent in the FBI. Free legal aid clinic for veterans set in ...
Brian Fitzpatrick rides Trump wave to Washington
Bucks County Courier Times-
Former FBI agent Brian Fitzpatrick, 42, had barely finished unpacking his bags in January before he announced his candidacy for the 8th Congressional District ..
Trump's transition team signals return to GOP establishment
The Japan Times
The former Michigan congressman chaired the House intelligence committee. Rogers is a former U.S. Army officer and FBI special agent. He is a board member ...
Trump hasn't decided future of FBI's Comey
KBZK Bozeman News-
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President-elect Donald Trump says he's still deciding whether to ask FBI Director James Comey for his resignation. In an interview with ...
http://dissidentvoice.org/2016/11/e-pluribus-unum/
A note on the contours of the US elite
by T.P. Wilkinson / November 13th, 2016
We have heard and read for what could be mistaken for an eternity that the United States of America (may the god– no sane person would worship– bless her) is exceptional and the “greatest nation on Earth” (something even the Soviet Union could never bring itself to proclaim).
Since the unofficial victory of Donald Trump in the general election for the office of President of that “exceptional” country, the “losing” side has enhanced its exceptionally curious behaviour.
Before we attempt to think any further, let’s return to another curious election to that same office. Sixteen years ago the Democratic Vice President of the United States was declared the loser in a presidential election rife with fraud– especially in Cuban-American Miami. Bill Clinton’s supposed heir-apparent was dismissed by the Supreme Court (which has no constitutional authority in the elections whatsoever) and there was not a whimper from either the penile or vaginal Clinton. Now we find Hillary’s army rallying the retilin Republic to petition against the very anti-majoritarian institution the slave-holding Founding Fathers created to prevent the ordinary people from winning elections. That is a constitutional curiosity worthy of note.
There are two fundamental problems with the electoral (in terms of the US Constitution’s oligarchic principles) victory for Trump. One ought to be obvious but since the Outer Party and the media that controls it ideologically (NYT, Washington Post and its overseas mockingbirds1 and that is that no matter what one would like to believe, real estate mogul Mr Trump is on record challenging both the 9-11 lies, the Saudi Arabian manipulations, and the export of US capital (and hence jobs) to low/no wage countries. These are issues which the entire Establishment has successfully suppressed (with the help of the CIA-owned AFL-CIO) and its five world class propaganda monopolists (aka corporate media + PBS). No matter what one may think of Trump — son of a typical NYC corrupt real estate family — he has restored the language of the assassinated Franklin D Roosevelt rival Huey P. Long. Long of Louisiana was a national “socialist”. For those who are historically challenged, national “socialism” was the integration of socialist ideas of economic and social equality with an absolute animosity to internationalism of any kind.
The 1930s were not only a conflict between communism and fascism but between international socialism and national socialism. Ideologically and politically it is quite difficult to distinguish the various movements that emerged a century ago after the West collapsed.
I mention this here because a century after the Armistice — “celebrated” last week — the collapse of the West has continued, despite the reactionary efforts of the Anglo-American empire.
I think it is safe to say — for those who like astronomical or astrophysical metaphors — that the US has been a “black hole” (especially if one is, in fact, black) and now has become a “white dwarf”.
With the collapse of Europe and the pretense of the US to world (white) supremacy, ejaculated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — in 1918, the first national security (political) police was established in the form of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. One must recall that “investigation” is a bureaucratic euphemism for persecution. Prohibition (the Volstead Act), ostensibly an act against alcohol abuse — was actually a political war by the WASP elite against European immigrants, especially those from Southern Europe who were then subjected to more intense entry regulations too. (This is the real meaning of the remark in di Niro’s The Good Shepherd by Matt Damon to Joe Pesci.) The FBI and its brothers in the Treasury were the SA of the nativist white elite — the “America First” folks.
When white shoe lawyer and investment banker William Donovan persuaded Franklin Roosevelt to authorise the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, another euphemism) and the forerunner of the CIA, he was representing the non-nativist and internationalist faction in the US elite. The conflict that emerged between the FBI and this new state police/terror apparatus led to an agreement that the OSS was only allowed to work outside the Western hemisphere. Spying and terrorism in the Western hemisphere was declared the exclusive province of the FBI.2
When the CIA was formed after WWII the FBI was apparently at its weakest. Latin America was disciplined but it was the OSS which was about to control police/terror markets from the Ural to the Yangtzee. The first time this conflict became violent, however, was when the OSS/ CIA seized control over Chinese and Southeast Asian opium in the course of the Korean and Vietnam Wars. The enormous financial and political capital gained by the “internationalist faction” threatened to occlude FBI power entirely. Then John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The deck was being reshuffled. Allen Dulles did his best to cut the cards in favour of the Company. In some ways the Warren Commission succeeded — not in explaining Kennedy’s murder but in discrediting the FBI and concealing the CIA.
Fast forward:
The foregoing should just insinuate. The reader should do the thinking — after all that ought to be the purpose of writing.
Julian Assange said in a recent interview with John Pilger that he believes the FBI was proving a point (about its power) when it intervened with investigations of one aspect of Hillary Clinton’s generally criminal behavior. He argued that the FBI wanted to prove (punish) Clinton for flagrant disrespect of the Bureau.
In the greater historical bureaucratic context we should be wary of personalization. Translated this means that the FBI — representative of the elite faction that secretly supports Trump — wanted to show the Clinton — representative of the elite faction that manages through Langley — that US political power cannot be monopolised by the “international fascists” but also has to be duly shared with the “national fascists” as well.
Ronald Reagan was not just the poster boy for neo-conservatism/liberalism (having been nominally both). He was canonised as the patron saint of post-war US fascism; as such he has had to serve both the national and international fascists. The Bush dynasty, the CIA faction, has employed the Clinton/Obama troops as mercenaries to defend their oil and opium-soaked swampland. It remains to be seen whether the national fascists in the FBI with Trump as their champion will prevail against the international fascists led by Clinton.
On 30 June 1934, the international (corporate) fascists deployed Hitler’s SS to murder the national (populist) fascists under Röhm’s SA.
Maybe the internationalists will consider the value of flames (literally or metaphorically) before the Electoral College convenes. In any case, the war has just begun.
Operation Mockingbird et al.) was the CIA program by which foreign media were spiked with news and other articles for publication to be echoed in the US media as if they had, in fact, foreign origins. Before CIA director William Colby retired both professionally and mortally he testified that the CIA had significant assets throughout the Media — without elaborating. This writer could see that throughout Europe the Press was pro-Clinton or at best anti-Trump. No doubt foreign press assets sought to promote Ms Clinton’s position in a Mockingbird way in addition to garnering support for her as the successor to Mr Obama. Not surprisingly this writer was told by a Portuguese observer that Ms Clinton was responsible for Europe’s refugee problem because she murdered Qaddafi. Perhaps that is also a testimony to the failures of her faction’s campaign with people who have a sense of history. []
The author is indebted here to Douglas Valentine’s extensive research into FBI-CIA rivalry. See The Strength of the Wolf, The Strength of the Pack, The Phoenix Program and his coming book on the CIA. []
Dr T.P. Wilkinson writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket in Heinrich Heine's birthplace, Düsseldorf. He is also the author of Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa (Maisonneuve Press, 2003). Read other articles by T.P..
Demand clemency for Leonard Peltier
Liberation-
Peltier has been imprisoned for 41 years, related to an unjust conviction for killing two FBI agents during a firefight at Pine Ridge Reservation. Learn more about
Michael Moore Wants 'Special Prosecutor' Over Comey, FBI Letter
Newsmax-
A special prosecutor should be appointed to examine the actions of FBI Director James Comey in the weeks leading up to the general election, documentary ..
UWI vice chancellor urges US president to exonerate Marcus Garvey
Jamaica Observer-
... trumped up charges orchestrated by the late J Edgar Hoover, the famously anti-black director of the US's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),” said Sir Hilary .
http://www.globalresearch.ca/janet-reno ... al/5556679
Janet Reno: Bill Clinton's Attorney General
Center for Research on Globalization-
In 1999, it surfaced that the FBI had made good its part in starting the conflagration ... Her response was to send marshals to FBI headquarters to seize a tape ...
“Outspoken, outrageous and absolutely indifferent to others’ opinions, Janet Reno was truly one of a kind.” Paul Anderson
She was the first woman to hold the job of US Attorney General, and on getting that position, held it for the duration of the Clinton administration, the longest tenure than any in the previous 150 years. Unfortunately for her, Janet Reno will be remembered for much that was wrong with that same administration.
It began with her being President Bill Clinton’s third choice, a very typical state of affairs. Both corporate lawyer Zoë Baird and federal judge Kimba Wood had been found wanting using undocumented immigrants as nannies.
Reno’s two terms in office provided a foretaste of what would happen with the US National Security State in the twenty-first century. The World Trade Centre received attention in 1993 in a terrorist attack, supplying law enforcement officials with an ominous warning. In 1995, with the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, the divisions in Clinton’s America, with its violence, its post-Cold War illnesses, came to the fore.
What Reno will most be remembered for will be less her anti-trust suit against Microsoft, or using the federal law to safeguard clinics providing abortion services, and protecting women seeking those services. More in point, the dark, bloody episode of the assault on the Branch Dravidian complex in Waco, Texas in 1993 will remain a marked stain in institutional hysteria, cruelty and massacre.
The spectacle did much to bring in collision, with lethal consequences, the world of centralised law enforcement, and another America, one wishing to be left quirkily if bizarrely alone. The assault on the compound gave the sect of Vernon Howell, better known as David Koresh, a sense that Satan had made a cruel decision and had arrived to stake a claim.
The siege initially began on February 28, 1993 with agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. On April 19, the FBI got involved. There were a dozen tanks, accompanying 900 military and law-enforcement officials. Eighty-nine people, including Koresh and several federal agents, had perished by the end of this gruesome affair. A third of the fatalities were children.
In the course of the Waco siege, and subsequent raid, Renopresided over a shoddy enterprise that saw the use of CS gas, psychological warfare, mendacity on the part of the FBI on the presence of fragmentation grenades at the scene, and the trigger happy antics of the BATF.
The line Reno took was that children had been endangered in the Waco compound, though to be fair, it was a point insisted upon by the FBI. They had been sexually abused. The women of the compound were shared with Koresh in accordance with a reading of Biblical scripture. In short, the Koresh experiment had to be eliminated. It was with little surprise that subsequent, government backed investigations found the BATF and FBI faultless.
In 1999, it surfaced that the FBI had made good its part in starting the conflagration that ultimately took so many lives at Waco. Her response was to send marshals to FBI headquarters to seize a tape featuring the communications that took place on the day of the assault.
Reno found herself with hot water again over the 2000 custody battle of Elián González. Having been the sole survivor of an effort on the part of his mother and 10 others to cross to Floridafrom Cuba, the six-year old became a bone of contention for Cuban exiles in the state. Never should González be yielded and returned to Castro’s Cuba, where he could be united with his father.
It was not to be, and in signature fashion, an incident that might have been handled with kid-glove minimal fuss became scandalously forceful. Agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, in bursting into the Miami home of the child’s relatives, were captured in terrifying spectacle. Again, the federal government appeared as supreme, meddlesome bullyboy.
A persistent nightmare during Reno’s time in office was the rather lax, and even sociopathic approach Clinton had towards the law, a point she struggled to negotiate with. Claiming a trust in her legal instinct, she tended to refer matters of suggested impropriety on the President’s part to special counsel, though even there, she dithered.
Clinton’s supporters thought her too hasty in wading into investigating Clinton’s relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. In permitting an independent inquiry into the Arkansas failed land deal that came to be called the Whitewater investigation to expand, its tentacles moving into the notorious Lewinsky affair, Reno made few friends in the inner circle.
Nor was she always consistent on that score. At stages she provided insulation to Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, shielding them from the eye of an independent counsel in investigating suggestions of fund-raising irregularities that had potentially been broken in 1996. House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah were vocal in questioning her independence; FBI director Louis J. Freeh had also favoured a special counsel.
Having now passed into history, Reno’s period in office is a reminder about Clinton’s torn America, with its at times deadly contradictions, seedy establishment behaviour and riddling corruption. He oversaw a country at war with itself, where groups were demonised as fringe worthy devotees of a lunatic world and Washington grandees could misbehave. Now it is time for those nutty devotees to have a say in the White House.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at SelwynCollege, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
https://www.nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/
http://registremblay.com/
http://vfpmaine.org/events/bangortrial.asp
NOT GUILTY!!!
Left to right: Doug Rawlings, Henry Braun, Jim Freeman, Dud Hendrick, Rob Shetterly and Jon Kreps. (Photo used with permission. © V. Kelly Bellis)
Six members of Maine's Civil Disobedience and Occupation Project went on trial at 9:00, Tuesday, April 29, 2008, at Penobscot Superior Court on Hammond Avenue in Bangor, Maine. The six people were charged with "criminal trespass" for refusing to leave the office of U.S. Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) and the Margaret Chase Smith Federal Building on Harlow Street, in Bangor, on March 7, 2007, four years after the U.S. led invasion of Iraq.
FBI Octopus
Mental Health and Safe Schools
Education Week (subscription) (blog)-
Those doing the analysis included Michigan State University psychiatrist Dr. Frank Ochberg and Supervisory Special Agent Dwayne Fuselier, the FBI's lead ...
Local briefs
Lewiston Morning Tribune
Robinson joined Kootenai Health in September 2015 after a 23-year career as a supervisory special agent in the FBI. Free legal aid clinic for veterans set in ...
Brian Fitzpatrick rides Trump wave to Washington
Bucks County Courier Times-
Former FBI agent Brian Fitzpatrick, 42, had barely finished unpacking his bags in January before he announced his candidacy for the 8th Congressional District ..
Trump's transition team signals return to GOP establishment
The Japan Times
The former Michigan congressman chaired the House intelligence committee. Rogers is a former U.S. Army officer and FBI special agent. He is a board member ...
Trump hasn't decided future of FBI's Comey
KBZK Bozeman News-
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President-elect Donald Trump says he's still deciding whether to ask FBI Director James Comey for his resignation. In an interview with ...
http://dissidentvoice.org/2016/11/e-pluribus-unum/
A note on the contours of the US elite
by T.P. Wilkinson / November 13th, 2016
We have heard and read for what could be mistaken for an eternity that the United States of America (may the god– no sane person would worship– bless her) is exceptional and the “greatest nation on Earth” (something even the Soviet Union could never bring itself to proclaim).
Since the unofficial victory of Donald Trump in the general election for the office of President of that “exceptional” country, the “losing” side has enhanced its exceptionally curious behaviour.
Before we attempt to think any further, let’s return to another curious election to that same office. Sixteen years ago the Democratic Vice President of the United States was declared the loser in a presidential election rife with fraud– especially in Cuban-American Miami. Bill Clinton’s supposed heir-apparent was dismissed by the Supreme Court (which has no constitutional authority in the elections whatsoever) and there was not a whimper from either the penile or vaginal Clinton. Now we find Hillary’s army rallying the retilin Republic to petition against the very anti-majoritarian institution the slave-holding Founding Fathers created to prevent the ordinary people from winning elections. That is a constitutional curiosity worthy of note.
There are two fundamental problems with the electoral (in terms of the US Constitution’s oligarchic principles) victory for Trump. One ought to be obvious but since the Outer Party and the media that controls it ideologically (NYT, Washington Post and its overseas mockingbirds1 and that is that no matter what one would like to believe, real estate mogul Mr Trump is on record challenging both the 9-11 lies, the Saudi Arabian manipulations, and the export of US capital (and hence jobs) to low/no wage countries. These are issues which the entire Establishment has successfully suppressed (with the help of the CIA-owned AFL-CIO) and its five world class propaganda monopolists (aka corporate media + PBS). No matter what one may think of Trump — son of a typical NYC corrupt real estate family — he has restored the language of the assassinated Franklin D Roosevelt rival Huey P. Long. Long of Louisiana was a national “socialist”. For those who are historically challenged, national “socialism” was the integration of socialist ideas of economic and social equality with an absolute animosity to internationalism of any kind.
The 1930s were not only a conflict between communism and fascism but between international socialism and national socialism. Ideologically and politically it is quite difficult to distinguish the various movements that emerged a century ago after the West collapsed.
I mention this here because a century after the Armistice — “celebrated” last week — the collapse of the West has continued, despite the reactionary efforts of the Anglo-American empire.
I think it is safe to say — for those who like astronomical or astrophysical metaphors — that the US has been a “black hole” (especially if one is, in fact, black) and now has become a “white dwarf”.
With the collapse of Europe and the pretense of the US to world (white) supremacy, ejaculated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — in 1918, the first national security (political) police was established in the form of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. One must recall that “investigation” is a bureaucratic euphemism for persecution. Prohibition (the Volstead Act), ostensibly an act against alcohol abuse — was actually a political war by the WASP elite against European immigrants, especially those from Southern Europe who were then subjected to more intense entry regulations too. (This is the real meaning of the remark in di Niro’s The Good Shepherd by Matt Damon to Joe Pesci.) The FBI and its brothers in the Treasury were the SA of the nativist white elite — the “America First” folks.
When white shoe lawyer and investment banker William Donovan persuaded Franklin Roosevelt to authorise the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, another euphemism) and the forerunner of the CIA, he was representing the non-nativist and internationalist faction in the US elite. The conflict that emerged between the FBI and this new state police/terror apparatus led to an agreement that the OSS was only allowed to work outside the Western hemisphere. Spying and terrorism in the Western hemisphere was declared the exclusive province of the FBI.2
When the CIA was formed after WWII the FBI was apparently at its weakest. Latin America was disciplined but it was the OSS which was about to control police/terror markets from the Ural to the Yangtzee. The first time this conflict became violent, however, was when the OSS/ CIA seized control over Chinese and Southeast Asian opium in the course of the Korean and Vietnam Wars. The enormous financial and political capital gained by the “internationalist faction” threatened to occlude FBI power entirely. Then John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The deck was being reshuffled. Allen Dulles did his best to cut the cards in favour of the Company. In some ways the Warren Commission succeeded — not in explaining Kennedy’s murder but in discrediting the FBI and concealing the CIA.
Fast forward:
The foregoing should just insinuate. The reader should do the thinking — after all that ought to be the purpose of writing.
Julian Assange said in a recent interview with John Pilger that he believes the FBI was proving a point (about its power) when it intervened with investigations of one aspect of Hillary Clinton’s generally criminal behavior. He argued that the FBI wanted to prove (punish) Clinton for flagrant disrespect of the Bureau.
In the greater historical bureaucratic context we should be wary of personalization. Translated this means that the FBI — representative of the elite faction that secretly supports Trump — wanted to show the Clinton — representative of the elite faction that manages through Langley — that US political power cannot be monopolised by the “international fascists” but also has to be duly shared with the “national fascists” as well.
Ronald Reagan was not just the poster boy for neo-conservatism/liberalism (having been nominally both). He was canonised as the patron saint of post-war US fascism; as such he has had to serve both the national and international fascists. The Bush dynasty, the CIA faction, has employed the Clinton/Obama troops as mercenaries to defend their oil and opium-soaked swampland. It remains to be seen whether the national fascists in the FBI with Trump as their champion will prevail against the international fascists led by Clinton.
On 30 June 1934, the international (corporate) fascists deployed Hitler’s SS to murder the national (populist) fascists under Röhm’s SA.
Maybe the internationalists will consider the value of flames (literally or metaphorically) before the Electoral College convenes. In any case, the war has just begun.
Operation Mockingbird et al.) was the CIA program by which foreign media were spiked with news and other articles for publication to be echoed in the US media as if they had, in fact, foreign origins. Before CIA director William Colby retired both professionally and mortally he testified that the CIA had significant assets throughout the Media — without elaborating. This writer could see that throughout Europe the Press was pro-Clinton or at best anti-Trump. No doubt foreign press assets sought to promote Ms Clinton’s position in a Mockingbird way in addition to garnering support for her as the successor to Mr Obama. Not surprisingly this writer was told by a Portuguese observer that Ms Clinton was responsible for Europe’s refugee problem because she murdered Qaddafi. Perhaps that is also a testimony to the failures of her faction’s campaign with people who have a sense of history. []
The author is indebted here to Douglas Valentine’s extensive research into FBI-CIA rivalry. See The Strength of the Wolf, The Strength of the Pack, The Phoenix Program and his coming book on the CIA. []
Dr T.P. Wilkinson writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket in Heinrich Heine's birthplace, Düsseldorf. He is also the author of Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa (Maisonneuve Press, 2003). Read other articles by T.P..
Demand clemency for Leonard Peltier
Liberation-
Peltier has been imprisoned for 41 years, related to an unjust conviction for killing two FBI agents during a firefight at Pine Ridge Reservation. Learn more about
Michael Moore Wants 'Special Prosecutor' Over Comey, FBI Letter
Newsmax-
A special prosecutor should be appointed to examine the actions of FBI Director James Comey in the weeks leading up to the general election, documentary ..
UWI vice chancellor urges US president to exonerate Marcus Garvey
Jamaica Observer-
... trumped up charges orchestrated by the late J Edgar Hoover, the famously anti-black director of the US's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),” said Sir Hilary .
http://www.globalresearch.ca/janet-reno ... al/5556679
Janet Reno: Bill Clinton's Attorney General
Center for Research on Globalization-
In 1999, it surfaced that the FBI had made good its part in starting the conflagration ... Her response was to send marshals to FBI headquarters to seize a tape ...
“Outspoken, outrageous and absolutely indifferent to others’ opinions, Janet Reno was truly one of a kind.” Paul Anderson
She was the first woman to hold the job of US Attorney General, and on getting that position, held it for the duration of the Clinton administration, the longest tenure than any in the previous 150 years. Unfortunately for her, Janet Reno will be remembered for much that was wrong with that same administration.
It began with her being President Bill Clinton’s third choice, a very typical state of affairs. Both corporate lawyer Zoë Baird and federal judge Kimba Wood had been found wanting using undocumented immigrants as nannies.
Reno’s two terms in office provided a foretaste of what would happen with the US National Security State in the twenty-first century. The World Trade Centre received attention in 1993 in a terrorist attack, supplying law enforcement officials with an ominous warning. In 1995, with the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, the divisions in Clinton’s America, with its violence, its post-Cold War illnesses, came to the fore.
What Reno will most be remembered for will be less her anti-trust suit against Microsoft, or using the federal law to safeguard clinics providing abortion services, and protecting women seeking those services. More in point, the dark, bloody episode of the assault on the Branch Dravidian complex in Waco, Texas in 1993 will remain a marked stain in institutional hysteria, cruelty and massacre.
The spectacle did much to bring in collision, with lethal consequences, the world of centralised law enforcement, and another America, one wishing to be left quirkily if bizarrely alone. The assault on the compound gave the sect of Vernon Howell, better known as David Koresh, a sense that Satan had made a cruel decision and had arrived to stake a claim.
The siege initially began on February 28, 1993 with agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. On April 19, the FBI got involved. There were a dozen tanks, accompanying 900 military and law-enforcement officials. Eighty-nine people, including Koresh and several federal agents, had perished by the end of this gruesome affair. A third of the fatalities were children.
In the course of the Waco siege, and subsequent raid, Renopresided over a shoddy enterprise that saw the use of CS gas, psychological warfare, mendacity on the part of the FBI on the presence of fragmentation grenades at the scene, and the trigger happy antics of the BATF.
The line Reno took was that children had been endangered in the Waco compound, though to be fair, it was a point insisted upon by the FBI. They had been sexually abused. The women of the compound were shared with Koresh in accordance with a reading of Biblical scripture. In short, the Koresh experiment had to be eliminated. It was with little surprise that subsequent, government backed investigations found the BATF and FBI faultless.
In 1999, it surfaced that the FBI had made good its part in starting the conflagration that ultimately took so many lives at Waco. Her response was to send marshals to FBI headquarters to seize a tape featuring the communications that took place on the day of the assault.
Reno found herself with hot water again over the 2000 custody battle of Elián González. Having been the sole survivor of an effort on the part of his mother and 10 others to cross to Floridafrom Cuba, the six-year old became a bone of contention for Cuban exiles in the state. Never should González be yielded and returned to Castro’s Cuba, where he could be united with his father.
It was not to be, and in signature fashion, an incident that might have been handled with kid-glove minimal fuss became scandalously forceful. Agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, in bursting into the Miami home of the child’s relatives, were captured in terrifying spectacle. Again, the federal government appeared as supreme, meddlesome bullyboy.
A persistent nightmare during Reno’s time in office was the rather lax, and even sociopathic approach Clinton had towards the law, a point she struggled to negotiate with. Claiming a trust in her legal instinct, she tended to refer matters of suggested impropriety on the President’s part to special counsel, though even there, she dithered.
Clinton’s supporters thought her too hasty in wading into investigating Clinton’s relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. In permitting an independent inquiry into the Arkansas failed land deal that came to be called the Whitewater investigation to expand, its tentacles moving into the notorious Lewinsky affair, Reno made few friends in the inner circle.
Nor was she always consistent on that score. At stages she provided insulation to Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, shielding them from the eye of an independent counsel in investigating suggestions of fund-raising irregularities that had potentially been broken in 1996. House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah were vocal in questioning her independence; FBI director Louis J. Freeh had also favoured a special counsel.
Having now passed into history, Reno’s period in office is a reminder about Clinton’s torn America, with its at times deadly contradictions, seedy establishment behaviour and riddling corruption. He oversaw a country at war with itself, where groups were demonised as fringe worthy devotees of a lunatic world and Washington grandees could misbehave. Now it is time for those nutty devotees to have a say in the White House.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at SelwynCollege, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com