It wasn't that long ago that I was a believer.
But that was before I joined the ranks of those who inhabit a strange, hallucinatory world that is roughly akin to waking up every morning finding yourself trapped in a cheesy sci-fi film. Clicking on the TV, you find that the same lies that you just heard the day before are still spewing out. Turning the channel, you discover that everyone is telling the same lies, in the same way, using the same catch-phrases as though if everyone repeats them they somehow acquire some kind of inherent meaning.

A campaign designed to make you feel, in other words, precisely as you now do: alone, isolated, frustrated, powerless, frightened and confused. A part of that campaign seems to involve, amazingly enough, efforts to taunt you -- to rub in your face your utter powerlessness -- by dropping tantalizing hints along the way, as though you are being dared to do something about it.
Wasn't it, after all, France's Le Figaro that dropped that little bombshell about bin Laden meeting a CIA operative in a Dubai hospital room shortly before September 11? And isn't Le Figaro owned by the Carlyle Group, whose investors and principals include the Bushes, the bin Ladens, and various ranking members of the national security infrastructure?

And wasn't it that mouthpiece of the far-right, the Wall Street Journal, that dropped the story about the stock market manipulations that occurred in the days immediately preceding the September 11 attacks?

And wasn't it a vice-president of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, itself a fully-integrated part of the military/intelligence complex, who initially identified the collapse of the World Trade Center towers as controlled implosions?

And wasn't it James Bamford (a man with uncomfortably close connections to numerous NSA operatives), working with Doubleday (a publisher not known for bringing the work of dissident authors to light), whose book -- released just five months before 9-11 -- revealed the details of 'Operation Northwoods' -- a purported anti-Cuban operation involving a staged provocation with marked similarities to the events of September 11?

And what of the obviously deliberate, and curiously well-publicized, leaks of the so-called Nuclear Posture Review, of the existence of Dick's 'shadow' government, and of the proposed Ministry of Propaganda?* Why leave all these crumbs scattered along the evidence trail?

It's a little something the spooks like to call 'Mind War' -- more commonly known on the streets as 'fucking with your head.' They want you to feel as though you are stuck in the Twilight Zone. I believe Mr. Orwell referred to it as a state of "controlled insanity."