Truth vs Falsehood (48 page)

Below 200:

Although the above results are what reasonable people would expect, protest may arise from people influenced by distorted media and emotionalities of acrimonious debate that exploit the intrinsic innocence and limitations of the human mind. Like the hardware of a computer, the mind has no choice as to its software programming. The concepts and wisdom of triage and pre-emptive war are not comprehensible to minds that calibrate below 360. Again, as in prior wars, U. S. intelligence is at an inept calibration level of 190.

Calibrations also reflect the input of elements unknown at the time by the general public, e.g., recent revelations regarding “food for oil” profits siphoned off by members of the United Nations.

Further Calibrations - The Iraqi War (Late)

Media Coverage of the Iraqi War

The first chart above reveals the levels of integrity and its focus on the questions of 9/11 in which more Americans were killed than at Pearl Harbor. Not only were three thousand innocent civilians killed, but also the Pentagon itself was attacked and thus defined the attack as an act of war. (War against the United States was formally declared by bin Laden in 1998.) The plane that crashed was intended for the White House itself. (Calibrates as ‘true’.)

The public’s comprehension of the true meaning and impact of the 9/11 attacks was impaired by the relentless repetition of the images of the burning Twin Towers. They were dramatic and thus became the focus of public interest, which detracted from the more important and significant attack on the Pentagon and the attempt to bomb the White House. (This is analogous to bombing Number 10 Downing Street in London, the House of Parliament, or even the Kremlin.)

The attack was thereby formally an “act of war” by definition, declaration, and intention. (Calibrates as ‘true’.) Osama bin Laden formally declared war prior to the Pentagon attack, which fulfilled the warning of Jihad, a Holy War. It obviously was not just a ‘criminal act’ anymore than was the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Lack of clarity about the correct definition of the event resulted in the later confusion about whether detentions were to be legally classified as criminals, prisoners of war, combatants, noncombatants, saboteurs, etc. As a precedent, in World War II, a Nazi submarine delivered five saboteurs (plus bombs) to the coast of Long Island. All were caught and subsequently executed.

The disinclination of former Allies to join in the endeavor was understandable within the context of their independent cultures and social realities such as sizable Arab populations. In addition, a difference was that in World War II, the countries of Europe were themselves direct targets, whereas they were exempt from identifying with the calamity of 9/11 and, in their best judgment, concluded that a response was not their responsibility. There was also the implied but unstated perception that America had sufficient strength and resources to handle the emergency on its own. As was later revealed (Duelfer, 2004), officials at the United Nations had been bribed by Hussein and were on his payroll for many billions of dollars of “food for oil” money from which the U. N. itself was also profiting (Brooks, 2004).

The presidential decisions that followed were dictated by the preceding events, plus his sworn oath of office to defend the country against aggressors. Actions at the time were based on available intelligence sources (U. S., Russia, and Britain). The U.S. Intelligence persisted at calibration level 190.

Partisan Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s 2002 purported investigative report alleged that Iraq had not sought access to Niger uranium, when, in fact, Iraq actually did do so (later confirmed by Commissioner of Inquiry Lord Robin Butler). Wilson committed other serious errors (including false reports to the Washington Post in 2003 regarding the CIA and Niger uranium).

The attacks on “Bush’s famous 16 words” in his 2003 State of the Union Address (“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa”) were based on spurious misinformation that he had misled the public. The retraction of errors was belated and relegated to the back pages. Whereas the New York Times calibrated overall in the year 2000 at 250, by 2004, its calibration level had dropped to 195, and its coverage of the Iraqi war to 190.

The unpreparedness of the government (cal. 190) represented the ‘culture’ of the preceding decades, as well as restrictive legislation and lack of integration of the CIA, FBI, and other intelligence-gathering agencies. The overall climate of lack of preparedness and denial was very similar to the situation prior to Pearl Harbor. As events turned out, the primary threat was not specifically Iraq itself but Pan-Arabic Wahhabism as expressed by violent al-Qaeda extremists. Thus, the real enemy was not really a specific country but a militant ideology that had actually begun in Saudi Arabia and spread to Iran and across the entire Middle East. It then became politicized and favored by the Iraqi ruling party. Thus, the true identity of the aggressor became clouded. This confusion was abetted by Sadam Hussein’s repudiation of the United Nations’ mandate on fourteen occasions, which was the real trigger of overt war.

Over time, further information will surface, as it does after all wars. The future always affords the benefits of hindsight and thus, hopefully, wisdom rather than regret or blame. The road of the evolution of human consciousness is bumpy. The lesson is recurrently “Be vigilant for truth.” Until the present time, that was not an actual possibility, but a new era has dawned that calibrates above 200, indicating that integrity may prevail.

The Iraqi War stopped the killing of fellow Iraqis by Saddam Hussein, who routinely killed more of his countrymen than did the Gulf and Iraqi wars combined (thirty thousand mass graves). Subsequent to the war, the Iraqi insurgents continued to kill other Iraqis, despite the occupation troops. All in all, more Iraqis have been killed by fellow Iraqis than by the invasion forces in their preemptive military strike, and no end is in sight.

Some of the political response that ensued thereafter is an example of a peculiarity of the human ego in which perpetrator and victim become confused and the roles are reversed. Paradoxically, those with a naïve or unevolved consciousness rushed to embrace the nonintegrous, almost criminal perpetrator and vilify that which was integrous. The posture of the United States’ response calibrates at 460, the 9/11 attack itself at 35, and its perpetrators at 50-70. The inability to discriminate between severe depravity and integrity is indeed a major limitation to understanding and a source of error.

Freud first noticed this strange proclivity of the unconscious to symbolize things in terms of their opposite (Freud, 1900), e.g., the current fad of identifying victims as perpetrators and vice versa. It is a primitive mechanism of the lower elements of the ego in its struggle to control and suppress the Id—that reservoir of raw animal instincts and violence. Therefore, hating war does not bring peace anymore than hating sin brings purity or holiness. A virtue is achieved by choosing it rather than by vilifying its opposite.

Because of continued focus on the Iraqi war, more calibrations will complete the picture. We can then go on to do more basic research about the real roots of war.

Additional Calibrations at the Time of Iraqi War (Late)

Calibrations Subsequent to Iraqi War

For reasons pointed out elsewhere, the dualistic nature of the ego and its perpetrator/victim projection onto world events leads to the search for the “bad guys,” the “cause” of 9/11, in accord with the ego’s proclivity to project blame. In actuality, phenomena are the consequence of an overall field or ‘climate’ that indirectly and unintentionally facilitates the emergence of selectively observed phenomena, such as the 9/11 catastrophe. The ‘climate’ prior to 9/11, as previously noted, was almost identical to the one that preceded the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. In psychological terms, it would be described as naïvetè and denial, but that is an insufficient explanation in and of itself. The elements of the actual climate calibrate as follows:

9/11 Calibrations

The calibrations underscore the extreme importance of the dictum that truth (cal. over 200) brings peace, and falsehood (cal. under 200) favors war. The pre-9/11 situation was almost identical to that exhibited by Secretary of War Stimson prior to the Japanese attack in 1941. He refused to heed daily intelligence briefings with the comment that “Gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail”—in this case, the dire forewarnings of Japanese explosive militants and Hitler’s overall war strategy, all of which is like ignoring bin Laden’s ‘declaration of war’ on the United States in 1998. In contrast, North Korea’s nuclear threats were not taken as lightly.