Exhuming Hegel

A few days ago the Daily Mail, one of the premier newspaper in the UK, posted a rather remarkable story about slain Beatle John Lennon. In this piece the Mail rather positively examined the possibility that Lennon was killed as part of a CIA-backed assassination scheme:

"If Chapman looked like a zombie, as he hung around after the killing and waited for the police, it was because that was exactly what he was.

"Chapman, he suggests, had been recruited by the CIA and trained by them during his travels round the world, when he mysteriously pitched up in unlikely places for a boy from Georgia.

"How strange, for example, that Chapman should visit Beirut at a time when the Lebanese capital was a hive of CIA activity — and was said to be home to one of the agency’s top-secret assassination training camps. Another camp was supposedly in Hawaii, where Chapman lived for a number of years.

"And who funded the penniless young man’s round-the-world trip in 1975, which took in Japan, the UK, India, Nepal, Korea, Vietnam and China?

"Money never seemed to be a problem for Chapman, but no one has ever explained where it came from. The distinct possibility remains, in Strongman’s opinion, that the secret service was his paymaster.

"And somewhere along the line his mind was infiltrated. With Chapman, the CIA could have drawn on its long experience of using mind-controlling drugs and techniques such as hypnosis to produce assassins who would eliminate trouble-makers, and ‘patsies’, the fall guys on whom such killings could be blamed."

To those of us that have studied the US intelligence community's obsession with creating a so-called 'Manchurian Candidate', these allegations are old news. Lennon's murderer, Mark David Chapman, had more than his fair share of red flags as did another assassin and fellow Catcher in the Rye enthusiast from the same era that Chapman will forever be linked with: John Hinckley Jr (who the Mail article oddly ignores). What's truly startling is how casually the Mail, an Establishment paper to the T, recounts these claims in a blatant Revelation of Method moment. It's especially insidious when considering the outrageous psy-op being played on the public at present with the whole WikiLeaks fiasco.

Many of you are of course aware of the scandal playing out in public around Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assanage, who was arrested today and denied bail. Already this seems to have triggered some kind of 'cyber war' between the Establishment and the hacker community:

"A group of Internet activists calling themselves Operation Payback have taken credit for shutting down the website of a bank that earlier Monday froze funds belonging to WikiLeaks.

"Announcing its successful hack on a Twitter account, the group declared, 'We will fire at anyone that tries to censor WikiLeaks.'"

This will likely be the first of many such attacks in the coming weeks:

"Hacker coalition Anonymous has launched a slew of cyber assaults against what it perceives to be enemies of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, including a DDoS attack on PayPal, which recently stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks in the wake of the release of U.S. embassy cables.

"Anonymous said it will 'offer Wikileaks an additional mirror and have it Googlebombed' and 'create counter-propaganda, organized attacks (DDoS) on various targets related to censorship.' The group also encourage its members and supporters to spread the cables freely: 'The end goal is a human DNS – something that can only be stopped by shutting off the entire internet,' the collective stated on a poster. "

 For those of us familiar with the Hegelian dialect this is an especially disturbing turn of events, especially in light of information about WikiLeaks that's been bouncing around the net for some time:

"WMR has learned from Asian intelligence sources that there is a strong belief in some Asian countries, particularly China and Thailand, that the website Wikileaks, which purports to publish classified and sensitive documents while guaranteeing anonymity to the providers, is linked to U.S. cyber-warfare and computer espionage operations, as well as to Mossad’s own cyber-warfare activities.

"Our Asian intelligence sources report the following: 'Wikileaks is running a disinformation campaign, crying persecution by U.S. intelligence- when it is U.S. intelligence itself. Its [Wikileaks'] activities in Iceland are totally suspect.' Wikileaks claims it is the victim of a new COINTELPRO [Counter Intelligence Program] operation directed by the Pentagon and various U.S. intelligence agencies. WMR’s sources believe that it is Wikileaks that is part and parcel of a cyber-COINTELPRO campaign, such as that proposed by President Obama’s 'information czar,' Dr. Cass Sunstein."

Many have begun to speculate that we're witnessing an 'Internet 9/11' in the making and for good reason. If there's another terror attack on US soil, or a major military disaster in Afghanistan, or yuppie America simply wakes up one morning to find that their bank accounts no longer exist, the cries for internet censorship will be deafening. That assorted 'hackers' have already declared war on behalf of WikiLeaks only lends further credence to this scenario.

But I'm not sure that the WikiLeaks psy-op is that simple.

9/11 was so effective because it was entirely unexpected to most Americans. Despite what the voting records may say, most Americans were rather apolitical prior to 9/11 -politics simply wasn't viewed as having a great effect on an individual's day-to-day life. That all changed with 9/11 and the following rise of the Truther movement which brought conspiracy theories into the mainstream. Of course, the ground work for the movement was already being laid prior to 9/11 in pop culture and the like, in films such as The Matrix and Fight Club which established the zeitgeist.

The point being, certain segments of the American public have been conditioned to be more skeptical of the party-line than at anytime since at least the 1960s. An internet 9/11 at this point would probably not spur the kind of passive acceptance of the Patriot Act we witnessed earlier in the decade so much as the wholesale anarchy the broke out in many Americans cities in the late 1960s and early 1970s following the collapse of the hippy movement. And that may be exactly the point.

Why settle for censoring the internet when full scale martial law may finally be possible?


UPDATE -12/08/10:

On the thirty year anniversary of the assassination of John Lennon another website goes down in honor of the disinformation campaign that is WikiLeaks. MSNBC notes:

"Hackers claimed Wednesday to have taken down MasterCard's website in retaliation for the company's decision to cut off services to WikiLeaks...

"Attempts to load the MasterCard site Wednesday morning were unsuccessful. A spokesman for the company told msnbc.com that the it did not have any information or comment at this stage.

"The group has also claimed responsibility for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on the website of the Swedish prosecutor's office that is seeking WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for alleged sex crimes, PayPal and the Swiss bank that froze Assange's assets, the BBC reported."

 If credit cards start going out amidst the consumer orgy that is the 'holiday season' things could get very ugly in the streets indeed.

UPDATE II:

The 30th anniversary of Lennon's death is now being described as the start of a 'cyber war' between pro and anti WikiLeaks factions by Secure Computing Magazine:

"The group leading the denial-of-service attacks on those who arrayed themselves against detained Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange has itself come under fire from US 'patriots', a Spanish information security researcher said.

"Assange's detention this morning in London on Swedish allegations of sexual molestation unleashed total cyberwar between factions opposed to and supporting his release of confidential and classified diplomatic despatches in what has come to be known as 'Cablegate'."

Cute.

UPDATE III:

Even Sarah Palin is getting in on the act:

"The website and personal credit card information of former Gov. Sarah Palin were cyber-attacked today by Wikileaks supporters, the 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate tells ABC News in an email.

"Hackers in London apparently affiliated with 'Operation Payback' – a group of supporters of Julian Assange and Wikileaks – have tried to shut down SarahPac and have disrupted Sarah and Todd Palin’s personal credit card accounts."

Visa's website was also taken down today as well.

Happy 30th, John.