>http://www.archive.org/details/snowshoefilms_MikeRuppert_911PeakOilan >dtheWindowofOpportunity >
http://www.prwatch.org/forum/showpost.php?p=2230&postcount=4 December 13th, 2002, 03:13 AM #4 Sheldon Rampton PR Watch Editor If you haven't heard about Michael Ruppert, maybe I shouldn't have mentioned him ...but then again, you would have probably come across him eventually anyway. Some of the information that he circulates is valid, but the valid information is stuff that Ruppert has merely borrowed from someone else, and it's mixed with so much absolute bullshit that it's not worth trying to sort out which is which. Here, for example, is the URL to a statement from Michael Ruppert which he describes as his "Opening Remarks ... for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence": http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ciadrugs/ssci.html Actually, Ruppert's remarks were never presented to the Senate Select Committee, because the committee wasn't interested in having him testify, but I've seen web sites where Ruppert's admirers manage to miss this point. His testimony is long and rambling, but if you read it you'll get some sense of what a whack job he is. If you believe his story, he must be the Zelig of sinister global conspiracies. He pops up everywhere. He claims that he was working in LAPD when he got involved with a woman named Teddy who was also a CIA agent, a friend of a niece of the Shah of Iran, and an acquaintance of people ranging from narcotics investigators to members of different crime families. Through his on-again, off-again relationship with Teddy, he became aware that the CIA had long-term assets planted as deep cover agents within the LAPD, where they were busily engaged in nefarious arms-and-drugs transactions. Ruppert's woman friend dished all sorts of dirt about this to him and he got promoted to work as some kind of inside collaborator in their schemes. There was also some sort of $45 million dollar real estate deal involving Ruppert and his mother. Then, for reasons that Ruppert doesn't bother to explain, the cabal turned against him, subjecting him to "five months of surveillance, harassing phone calls and ultimately 'black bag' burglaries of my home and car in which photographs of Teddy and my off duty weapon were taken." He doesn't explain why anyone would want to take photographs of his woman and his weapon, and it's hard to understand why they would want to harass him, since according to his own account, at that point he was happily working as a collaborator in their alleged conspiracy. At about this point, also for no particular reason, Teddy moves to New Orleans and Ruppert follows her there, where he encounters still more nefarious dealings of an equally vague nature. Teddy is apparently involved in the Iran/Contra conspiracy, and Ruppert finds himself examining strange James Bond-like surveillance and encryption technologies and hanging out in bars with members of the CIA. Once again, they switch suddenly and mysteriously from chatting him up over beers to harassing him. "Outside a bar in Terrytown, shots were fired as Teddy and I walked to my car," Ruppert writes. "The shots struck the pavement a few feet from us. This was the first time I was shot at." (Mysterious gunfire is a recurring theme in his story. The global conspirators may be sinister, but evidently they are not very good shots.) Ruppert then breaks up with Teddy and moves back to Los Angeles, where he simultaneously gets high marks for his police work and incurs further persecutions, including a "second round of burglaries, harassments and surveillance" that "culminated in a death threat." He resigns from his job and is "labeled crazy by both the LAPD and the FBI. ... Desperate for money I took a job as a 7-11 store clerk. Two hours into my second shift I was arrested for selling liquor to a minor in what I am sure, to this day, was a set-up. Under enormous stress I got drunk one night and collapsed on my front lawn. A shot barked in the distance and stuck the grass inches from my head. This was the second time I was shot at. ... My car was repossessed shortly thereafter. I filed bankruptcy in December, 1980." Shortly thereafter Ruppert has a conversation in the West Wing of the White House with his old buddy Craig Fuller, assistant to President Reagan, in which Ruppert tells Fuller that the CIA is dealing drugs, and Fuller casually admits it, as does a UCLA professor of political science who is also a CIA and State Department consultant. Other people also tell him the same thing: unnamed members of the Kerry Committee, Ross Perot, insurance executives, and "more than a dozen former U.S. Army Special Forces troops, Navy Seals, a half dozen former CIA officers and many DEA agents and former federal law enforcement officers who have confirmed that CIA deals drugs." For covert operatives, these guys sure turn into blabbermouths whenever they bump into Michael Ruppert. But wait, it gets better. Here's the URL to another Ruppert article, co-authored with Michael Davidson, regarding the allegedly suspicious deaths of a number of microbiologists: http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/02_14_02_microbio.html According to Ruppert, the deaths of these microbiologists (none of whom worked together, and whose deaths occurred in places as diverse as Miami, Moscow, Memphis, Denver, Australia and England) "adds credibility" to the idea that "legitimate scientists and academics" are having "serious discussions ... on the possible necessity of reducing the world's population by more than four billion people." Evidently we are supposed to believe that these scientists (whose causes of death included stroke, suicide, homicide, a car crash, a plane crash and a lab accident) were murdered to cover up some sort of X Files conspiracy to eliminate more than half the world's population. Maybe it's just me, but I find this all rather implausible, especially since the criminal masterminds who engineered all these assassinations have previously proven themselves incapable of aiming a gun well enough to kill Ruppert while he lay passed out drunk on his front lawn. To thicken the plot still further, Ruppert insinuates that the scientists were targeted for assassination using PROMIS software, which allegedly (1) was stolen and sold on the black market to Osama Bin Laden, giving him the ability to tap into FBI databases; and (2) "has reportedly been mated in recent years with artificial intelligence. PROMIS has long been known to have been modified by intelligence agencies with a back door that allows for surreptitious retrieval of stored data. ... It is a possibility that the software, by tapping into databases used by each of the victims, could have identified any lines of research that threatened to compromise a larger, and as yet unidentified, more sinister covert operation." Ruppert passes on this stuff without bothering to explain how any of the pieces fit together. He doesn't explain how PROMIS works, let alone how we know it has been "mated with artificial intelligence." (How do computer programs "mate" anyway? Is there a courtship period, or do they just get drunk and screw?) What basis is there, other than Ruppert's fertile imagination, for suggesting that this software might have tapped into databases used by the "victims"? And if the "covert operation" is "as yet unidentified," how do we know that it is "sinister," or even that it exists at all? Ruppert also draws some of his material from the website of Jeff Rense (http://www.rense.com), which explores topics including UFOs, the paranormal, secret weapons, spies, crop circles, and something I hadn't heard of previously called a "chupacabra" -- a half-man, half-beast that roams the Puerto Rican countryside, sucking the blood of farm animals. (I swear I'm not making this up.) My take on Ruppert is that he's some kind of mentally unstable opportunist who has managed to become rather successful at intertwining his personal paranoid fantasies with legitimate concerns that other people have raised about the motives and actions of the U.S. government. I can understand why some of his writings seem interesting on first reading, and when I first came across one of his pieces I took it seriously enough to try and independently verify its accuracy. When I did so, however, I found that Ruppert's "facts" fall into two categories: (1) facts that are not original to Ruppert, because they come from journalistic investigations performed by other people (such as Gary Webb, who did some first-rate reporting into contra-CIA-cocaine links) (2) facts that cannot be verified at all, because they are simply false or they consist of wild leaps of conjecture for which there is no independent supporting evidence The unfortunate thing is that there are people out there who take Ruppert seriously, including progressive activists. I think this is a shame and can't help but discredit and further marginalize activists. I'm not alone in this opinion, and it's rather interesting to see how Ruppert's followers (who tend to like some of my own writing, because it seems to confirm their paranoia) instantly turn hostile when I say that I'm not buying his schtick. I'm not the only progressive who gets this kind of treatment. Here, for example, is the URL to a web site (recommended by Ruppert), alleging that "The Nation, FAIR, Pacifica, Z Magazine, Noam Chomsky and many other 'liberal' icons are influenced and/or controlled by big business and intelligence interests": http://www.questionsquestions.net/gatekeepers.html For some further comments on Ruppert and the dangers of buying into conspiracy theories, here are a couple of other web pages that you might want to check out: http://www.publiceye.org/b_conspi.html http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12536 _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
