The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

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21 Comments

  1. Curt Kastens

    I am essentially reprinting a comment that I made on a stale open thread some weeks ago and got no response to.

    Was there one real reason that the United States invaded Afghanistan? Or was it just a combination of of reasons that led the US to invade Afghanistan?

    The United States certainly did not invade Afghanistan to get Osama bin Laden. Though that provided a good excuse. Do I need to support that assertion? If so that could be a side discussion. It certainly did not invade Afghanistan to fight terrorism.
    Ditto. Nor did it invade Afghanistan to help the Afghan people. This assertion I think needs a bit of support.
    If the United States had invaded Afghanistan to help the Afghan people it would have used different tactics. It is not as if the United States and its allies have not faced and destroyed insurgencies before. The strategies and tactics necessary to do such a thing do not change just because the insurgency is Islamic in nature.
    Does anyone here have any thoughts about this question?

  2. Willy

    With most things sociopathic, there are public reasons and there are the real reasons.

    …whenever something’s being done in the public eye with some kind of permission required, of course.

  3. Cirze

    I understood it was to stop a future pipeline from being installed permanently through Afghanistan.

  4. Mark Level

    Curt, to answer, I would just quote the odious Michael Ledeen, one of the earliest NeoCons: Jonah Goldberg (right wing nut who only had a career coz his mommy was Lucian Goldberg, who secretly taped her “friend” M. Lewinski secretly sharing details of her torrid affair with Bill Clinton) 1st published Ledeen’s words as follows: “every now & again the United States has to pick up a crappy little country and throw it against the wall to prove we are serious.” (This was a little too much truth for TPTB to have shared, so some disputed the quote, but here is a link to a source saying its genuineness was admitted by Ledeen himself– https://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/6772 9/11 had happened & if the Military-Industrial Complex is a Hammer, and the entire World outside U$A is the Nail, the “logic” of picking one weak, backward place to murder a lot of indigenous people is clear. . . plus presidents’ approval ratings always go UP when they start wars, the political class well knows this. In the 2 Seymour Hersh interviews I shared a review of on an earlier thread he was careful to remind the audience of this!! “I’m only beating you to teach you not to complain when I kick you around” is the rationale, such as it is! (To extend “The beatings will continue until morale improves to post-PNAC Neocon doctrine.)

  5. Jason

    Curt Kastens

    The Bush regime, like the regimes that both immediately preceded and succeeded it, was almost entirely controlled by Zionists. The main point of the Afghanistan war, besides all the usual money in arms sales, reconstruction and security, was to secure the 1100-mile long TAPI pipeline which is intended to carry gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan and, most importantly, India. This gas is now “owned” by Israel and will bring billions of dollars annually to the Zionist regime.

    The Merhav Group – run by Israeli intelligence asset Yosef Maiman who leads a consortium of Mossad-controlled companies that serve Israeli interests – controls Turkmenistan’s resources, the second largest reserves after Russia. Israeli agents were in place to gain control of the now independent republics’ resources immediately after these republics were created and made available to Israel via the “shock therapy” privatization “reforms” of Harvard’s Larry Summers, David Lipton, and Jeffrey Sachs.

    Maiman’s key colleagues at Merhav at the time were the former head of the Mossad, Shabtai Shavit, and Nimrod Novik, chief adviser to Shimon Peres, the former president of Israel.

  6. anon y'mouse

    it invaded for geostrategic positioning for further meddling in China, Russia, the Stans, Iran, and the Middle East.

    everything else is just a side story or sweetener to get certain blocs on board with the pillage.

    including the heroin. and Raytheon’s et al’s profits.

  7. Jason

    For accuracy’s sake, my previous post should have read “Yosef Maiman who led…” – not “leads.” Maiman died in 2021.

  8. Curt Kastens

    Thank you for all your comments up above. There is a lot to think about.

  9. Curt Kastens

    Jason,
    About the Zionist Angle. That the Israeli PAC controls US foreign policy entaglements. I believed myself for a long time. There is a good reason that people believe it. Because there is a lot of evidence to point to. But when I realized the why of the attack on the USS Liberty it was a piece of a puzzle that put everything in an entirely new light. Since then I have believed that the Zionist Angle is a cover story. It is a cover story that Zionist willingly go along with because they think that it will never come back to bite them in the ass.
    The Zionist Angle is a cover story developed in the late 1950s as a last ditch defense for those that are really behind US policy decisions. Should there actually ever have been a putsch by honest people against the rulers of the United States the Zionists would have served as scapeghosts, sacrificial lambs so to speak, to cover the asses of the most guilty parties.
    All of the public institutional relationships that seem to indicate that the Israelis run the show in Washington and the US MIC is indirectly subordinate to them have been cleverly created to give that impression.
    The only deeper secret is that the leaders of the Pentagon are subordinate to the civilian rulers of the United States.
    I can not say with direct experience if the President knows that he is subordinate to the Generals and Admirals or if they simply manipulate the President (and the Congress) based upon what information they give and withhold from him (them). But I suspect that the events of November 22nd 1963 make it pretty obvious that the top civilians know that they are the subordinates. Putting forward a person who appears to public as the ruler but is not really the ruler is a trick that goes all the way back to the late Roman Empire. I guess that the, “Oh but the Zionists made us do it”, is a variation of the same theme.

  10. multitude of poors

    Curt Kastens,

    Certainly the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) Cheney/Bush, et al pipeline, along with the strategic position in relationship to other powerful countries; but I’d add Lithium [batteries, and Big Pharma] and multiple other vast ‘rare earth’ reserves, known about by Soviet geologists (therefore no doubt, US spooks) since the very early seventies; and certainly, opium [opiates—Big Pharma/CIA, et al], as part of the equation.

    Hadn’t thought of it before, but it also provides a vast amount of formidable territory, far, far more vast than the US’ Mohave Desert (e.g. China Lake and Twentynine Palms) from which to carry out opaque War exercises.

    gotta really run …

  11. mago

    Doing some dalliance here and breaking from the thread and the comments rule to not discuss recent topics because I missed the opportunity to discuss the diagnostic statistic manual along with trauma and so forth.
    Delete me if you will, but I’m still going to comment whether the message receives readers or not.
    First, DSM has been thoroughly debunked by the cognoscenti as the bs that it is since it classifies almost all human behavior as deviant while the powers behind that tome in its tedious iterations (what are we up to now? Edition 5?) are state propagandists. The information is available. I don’t care about links.

    I’ve read it. My ex is a psychotherapist and had all the editions on the bookshelf, and I’ve been railing about it since the 90’s. Even wrote a short story or two, which is just to say I’ve done some delving.

    On the subject of trauma one can only note that it transcends class and culture and is universal. Maybe some white mainstream types are butt hurt by loss, and they surely are but chances are they’ve not experienced being bombed or shot or cut and stomped upon while watching their partner raped and their children brutalized and slowly murdered. This happens day by day along with being forced to flee your homeland with whatever you can carry including maybe one of your animals, everyone terrified and at the mercy of unknown institutions and agencies that are also overwhelmed and ultimately don’t give a shit about you.
    Of course it goes deeper than that. The instances, the individual and collective stories are universal.
    It’s called samsara.
    Trauma? Better look it in the face and deal with it.
    It’s hardly the sole province of white USAians.
    Can you hear the cries of sorrow carried on the wind?
    That is all.

  12. Jason

    Curt Kastens

    The imeptus for the invasion of Afghanistan and the all-out launch of the “war on terror” was 9/11. This was a false flag event. It cemented in the minds of the public the all-important enemy image of “Arab/Muslim terrorists” and “Islamofacism” that was necessary to carry out William Kristol and Robert Kagan’s “Project for the New American Century” (PNAC), which evolved from Israeli strategist Oded Yinon’s “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980’s” and was first published in the Hebrew journal Kivunim (“Directions”) in 1982. Three years earlier, in 1979, Binyamin Netanyahu’s Jonathan Institute held the seminal Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism (JCIT) which is where the “war on terror” was concieved.

    The conferece is an extremely important meeting in the annals of the deep state. And while there were some Le Cercle members and other assorted pscyhopaths there, most attendees were from Israel, the US, and the UK. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, who was owned by Boeing and surrounded by Zion (Richard Perle, Elliot Abrams, and Richard Pipes), was one of many pressing for a future where any detente, anywhere in the world, would be made impossible. Jackson and these early “neocons” had formed an alliance with “Jewish activists” (according to Jewish Currents: “Henry Scoop Jackson and the Jewish Cold Warriors”) in 1972 to ruin the Nixon administration’s East-West Trade Act, which would have allowed Nixon tp waive restrictions on trade with communist countries – an attempt at detente with the Soviet Union.

    The conference called for staging “pre-emptive attacks on states that are alleged to support “terrorists”; an elaborate intelligence system apparatus; slashed civil liberties, particularly for Palestinians targeted as potential terrorists, including detention without charge, and torture; and propaganda to dehumanize “terrorists” in the eyes of the public.

    Interestingly, 1982 is the year that Steven Spielberg directed both E.T the Extra Terrestrial and Poltergeist, the latter of which he had to select someone else to give direcor’s credit, since he was contractractually obligated to E.T. The movies were released with much fanfare on June 4 (Poltergeist) and June 11 (E.T.). Israel invaded Lebanon on June 6, 1982, in its “Mivtsa Shlom HaGalil” – aka “Operation Peace for Galilee.” The operation (war crime) lasted all summer, into September.

    Steven Spielberg is a known participant in the “Mega group” of Israeil billionaires that convened beginning in 1991 at the behest of Leslie Wexner of Epstein/Maxwell fame and the Bronfman family. This was around the time Epstein et al ramped up their worldwide espionage and blackmail ring, ensnaring heads of state and very important peoples around the world on behalf of Zion. They had their final meeting in May 2001 (at Edgar Bronfman’s NYC mansion), a few months before Israeli operatives blew up the towers.

    “Mega” was alluded to in a 1997 Washington Post “leak” after the NSA intercepted a “secure” communication from a senior Israeli intel official and Danny Yatom, head of the Mossad at the time. The thought (on the part of US officials at the time) was that “Mega” was an individual spy operating at the highest echelons of the Clinton administration. The Post reported that the Israeli official asked Yatom if he could “go to mega” in order to obtain a copy of a confidential letter that had been sent by then-U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, Yatom angrily rejected the request and replied sternly: “This is not something we use Mega for.”

    Other Mega members, as reported by the WSJ in 1998, include hedge fund manager Michael Steinhardt, Harvey “Bud” Meyerhoff, an incredibly wealthy and powerful Baltimore real estate magnate; Laurence Tisch of Loews Corporation; Detroit oil magnate and Republican Party powerhouse Max Martin Fisher; the bagel magnate Max Lender; and Leonard Abramson, the founder of U.S. Healthcare. It was estimated to have about 50 members in all.

    I have to take a break now. When I return, we’ll look at the players involved in 9/11, being sure to name names and follow connections.

    This is basic detective work, though it’s often tarred as “conspiracy.”

  13. Jason

    There are interests that overlap, obviously, and there may well have been other involvement in 9/11. We hear Saudi most often, beginning with the “28 missing pages” of the report put out by the faux 9/11 Commission that Max Cleland and others quit because the fix was obviously in from the get-go. Philp Zelikow was the arch-Zionist gatekeeper of that fiasco, selected after huge public outcry at the initial selection of Henry Kissinger.

    I am going to quote Christopher Bollyn now, because his statement well elucidates the situation:

    “With all due respect for the Saudis, they’re kind of like useful idiots. They’ve been played. They may be willing to go along with some of these things, and they are supporting, as we know, ‘Islamic state, they are supporting these mercenaries and these rebels in Syria, and they are dead set against Iran and Hezbollah and the Shiites…

    But when they talk about Saudi involvement in 9/11, that is not consistent with all of the information that I have found.

    At the architectural level of this crime, at the managerial level of this crime: The people who ran it, thought about it, conceived it, and then managed it – they’re all Zionists.

    In such an atrocity, there are three levels that have to be controlled: You have to control the investigation, you have to control the interpretation, and you have to control the litigation.”

    So, with that in mind, we’ll continue.

    I excerpted Chris Bollyn’s words from the video below, which is worth watching in its entirety. The host is a bit anoying at times, but Bollyn stays on point. He begins by stating that it was clear to him on 9/11 (he was in NYC at the time) and the days immediately following that the media had decided to intentionally ignore two huge pieces of information that had in fact gotten out, but weren’t being pursued: the fact that explosions had been heard in the buildings prior to the planes’ impact, and the fact that five Israelis had been seen filming and celebrating the attacks.

    I have cued the video to begin towards the end, where he talks about judge Alvin Hellerstein and the fact that all 3000 9/11 cases were settled out of court, even the 100 families who initially held out. This means there will never be a trial, and thus no legal discovery. Israeli national Michael Chertoff allowed this non-prosecution to happen, in his capacity as head of the USDOJ’s Criminal Division at the time.

    Chertoff was also the second Secretary of Homeland Security, and the lead author of the Patriot Act. He is the son of Rabbi Gershon Baruch Chertoff, the final rabbinical scholar in a long line from Russia, and Livia Eisen, the protege of Mossad founder Isser Harel*, and the first hostess of El Al and founding female operative of Mossad. Harel (Halperin) masterminded the operation with his old students Avraham Bendor and Peter Zvi Malkin, as well as ‘Israeli’ tycoon and Mossad-connected arms peddler Shaul Eisenberg, to obtain the blueprints for the WTC in an exchange facilitated by Port Authority Executive Director Stephen Berger.

    Chertoff orchestrated the capture of more than 1,100 Muslim citizens, tourists and immigrants, falsely labeling them as suspects connected to the September 11th attacks, while blocking the efforts of the FBI to investigate the hundreds of Mossad spies detained in relation to the event, specifically FBI agent Michael Dick who was digging into ‘Israeli’-owned ZIM, an Israeli company that vacated its office (10,000 square feet) in the North WTC tower a week before 9/11, breaking its lease. 49% of this company is owned by the Israeli government. The lease ran till the end of 2001, and it cost the company $50,000 to break it early.

    Chertoff supervised the destruction and confiscation of evidence that would have linked ‘Israel’ and the US to the attacks like videotapes, eyewitness accounts, written testimonies and debris from “Ground Zero,” and he quietly killied every last charge against all of the ‘Israelis’ in custody before sending them back to Zioland.

    Michael Chertoff would go on to found the Chertoff Group and lead consulting efforts for a company called Rapiscan, ultimately making boatloads of money from ‘Israeli’-occupation-style, unhealthy, irradiating body scanning at US airports.

    *In a September 23, 1979 interview with fellow Zionist Michael D Evans, Isser Harel – “father of Israeli intelligence” – gave a rather chilling, prescient account of a ghastly plot of ‘Islamic terrorists’ blamed for 9/11 almost as if the script was laid out before him… and he was the author. On September 30th, 2001 a few weeks after 9/11, in an editorial published in the Jerusalem Post titled, “America the Target”, Evans recalled the interview:

    “I sat with former Mossad chief Isser Harel for a conversation about Arab terrorism. As he handed me a cup of hot tea and a plate of cookies, I asked him, ‘Do you think terrorism will come to America, and if so, where and why?’

    Harel looked at his American visitor and replied, “I fear it will come to you in America. America has the power, but not the will, to fight terrorism. The terrorists have the will, but not the power, to fight America – but all that could change with time. Arab oil money buys more than tents.”

    As to the where, Harel continued, “New York City is the symbol of freedom and capitalism. It’s likely they will strike the Empire State Building, your tallest building (he mistakenly thought, perhaps) and a symbol of your power.”

    Elsewhere in an editorial raging against Jimmy Carter, often a target of Zionists, Evans related a slightly different version what Harel had told him:

    “My last question was would terrorism ever come to America. ‘You have the power to fight it,’ he said, ‘but not the will. They have the will, but not the power. All of that will change in time. Yes, I fear it will come to New York and your tallest building, which is a symbol of your fertility.'”

    https://youtu.be/Kc1lGqIGYSA?t=1748

    [9/11, Israel & the Mossad Investigated with Christopher Bollyn on TheLipTV, March 13, 2015]

  14. Curt Kastens

    Jason,
    You try to figure out what is going on in the world by going into a very detailed approach.
    Figuratively speaking you use a microscope. I do not have access to a microscope. Figuratively speaking I use a telescope. For me trying to understand what is going on in the minds of rulers is all about indirect observations.
    We both know that things do not work as advertised. We are not supposed to know. A great deal of effort is put in to make sure that the citizens could not figure it out if they tried. On top of that most are to busy trying to survive to even try.
    There is no doubt that Israelis (zionists) are deeply embedded in what has been going on in the world since the end of WW2. As long as a revolt let alone a revolution can not be mounted who is pulling the strings of who can not really be proven.
    I would only like to throw out one caution. Just because there was some conference that was attended by 90% or even 100% Zionists does not mean that what is reported to have come out of the conference was their product. The conference could have been a sub-contract operation to fill in certain details, and or to provide cover as to who really came up with the plan.
    I do not think that when the rulers make policies that the decisions they make to implement those policies are going to be written down anywhere at all. If they are written down they will certainly not be seen by more than a limited group of people.
    My viewpoint would imply that even the release of the New American Century to the public is designed to have some kind of psychological impact on the public.
    But your comments did have an impact on me. I have to now consider the possibility that the deliberate attack by the Israeli military on the USS Liberty was a triple bluff.
    In other words the attack was designed to make it appear to some people anyways that Israel is in charge because it is not really in charge. But the devious truth is that Israel really is in charge. There was exactly such a scene in my 2nd favorite movie, Little Big Man, with Dustin Hoffman. The scene was near the end of the movie.

  15. Trinity

    This discussion on 9/11 etc., illustrates very well how complex the world is, and how complex is human behavior. Reductive thinking cannot be applied successfully. Or to put it another way, you are all probably correct.

    But I do want to add that based on this discussion, our elite’s ability to think strategically (successfully) seems to be waning in comparison. Even psychopaths need to be competent to be successful.

  16. Ché Pasa

    When was this invasion of Afghanistan? The US/Nato backed a violent and corrupt faction which enabled them to overthrow the Taliban who dispersed into the countryside from which most of them came. The US/Nato then garrisoned Kabul and a few other sites a la Saigon and a few other sites in Vietnam from which they conducted search and destroy missions via remote control drones and military and mercenary wet workers.

    They celebrated pink misting tall men in white robes and farmers in their fields but they et the Devil Osama have relative freedom including setting up a household in Pakistan. In other words, Osama, devil that he was, was of no interest to those who proclaimed the War on Terra.

    And in the fullness of time, US/Nato turned the country back over to the Taliban — who assured the world that they were nothing like the Old Taliban but had modernized and reformed. Yes, well. They’re still a Wahhabist sect, aren’t they? And their rule is little different than that of the Saudis, right? And our government has no problem with the Saudi ruler(s), does it?

    There was no invasion or occupation of Afghanistan, and all the “reasons” for what didn’t happen are no mystery. The Bush/Cheney regime was eager to start a war with Iraq. 9/11 and the Afghanistan Thing got in the way, put it on hold for over a year. Afghanistan, pipelines, resources and all that were not uppermost in the minds of those who made a mess of it. All they wanted was to suppress the ability of Wahhabist Taliban in Afghanistan and elsewhere to rule. They did it through means and methods that should shock the conscience, but really very few people care. And now it’s over.

    What I wonder now is what’s going to happen to the depopulated and largely ruined Ukraine. The rationale for what’s going on is bonkers. Nothing is better because either Russia or the Nazi-Ukraine prevails. Neither seem able to do it, and the US/Nato interest appears to be keeping the conflict going indefinitely. And the Kremlin seems to be happy to go along. It’s beyond contemptible.

    Is the whole world ruled by psychopaths?

  17. Jason

    Figuratively speaking you use a microscope. I do not have access to a microscope. Figuratively speaking I use a telescope.

    We are not operating figuratively. We are looking, quite literally, at the key players involved in a massive crime and international conspiracy.

    I imagine anyone who has attempted to solve a crime of any nature is rolling their eyes at this.

    For me trying to understand what is going on in the minds of rulers is all about indirect observations.

    We’re not wasting time trying to understand what is going on in the minds of rulers. I believe that’s why Ian started this site. In short: they’re all batshit insane, and cannot be believed at even a cursory level anymore.

    Just out of curiosity, using your approach of “indirect observation” what specifically have you personally come to understand is going on in the minds of rulers, and how has that information helped you and your community?

  18. different clue

    About 9/11, Jeff Wells of Rigorous Intuition 2.0 wrote a series of posts when he was still blogging. Recently , somebody took steps to make the complete posts of Rigorous Intuition 2.0 very difficult to find. I can only guess that Jeff Wells was threatened into making them hard to find because he would not all-the-way acquiesce to erasing them altogether.

    Searching-engine the words Rigorous Intuition 2.0 brings one several clickable links. All the obvious links lead to the bowdlerised key-posts-missing versions of Rigorous Intuition 2.0. I would never have found the complete version from search engining. Someone else brought here the link to Rigorous Intiution’s “chatboard” and said the blog was findable there. And so it was . . . from the tiniest most-nearly-invisible word “R I blog” at the top right of the “chatboard” page. So the complete blog will all its postings has been very well hidden in “plain sight”.

    Here is the link to the “chatboard”.
    http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/

    And here is the link to the complete blog which the chatboard ever so quietly whispers about . . . http://rigint.blogspot.com/

    If you click on that blog-link itself, the page opens up. On the right side of the page is a running list of all the posts by “category” running down the right side of the page. The very first category, going down from the top, is the ” 9/11 ” category. Here is a link to the very first post in that category.
    http://rigint.blogspot.com/2007/03/its-real-thing.html

  19. Curt Kastens

    Another one of my favorite themes to wonder about is the failed putsch against the Turkish President Erdogan in 2016. Was it a real attempt by the US to overthrow Erdogan? Or, was it a fake attempt by the US to overthrow Erdogan? Related to this question is whether or not the fall out between Erdogan and Fethullah Gulen was genuine or caked. Both these questions are related to the question of whether or not the Turkish leadership is really trying to set a policy course independent of Washington and if it is will it be able to do so.
    I am not at all convinced that the war in the Ukraine is going badly for the US. My only basis for such a view is that the war is not over yet. I agree that one can not trust European or American reports about the war. But one can not trust Russian or Chinese or Iranian reports either.
    In my view European elites have completely discredited themselves by censoring information about the war in the Ukraine and about the attack on the Nord Stream pipeline. Wait, European elites were discredited before 2022 but the latest events bring things to the point that it is clear that they have no redeeming qualities what so ever.
    I am still not sure if European elites collaborate with the US empire out of fear or greed. But one thing is clear I can not understand how a Major or a Colonel in the German Military can put on his uniform with a straight face in the morning. I tried for more than a decade to wake the German mind up to the idea that the US government was not the friend of the German people and it is clear that my efforts amounted to absolutely nothing.
    It was the most massive defeat in European History. I lost 89 to 0. Does that say something about my character or about the character of German Field Grade Officers? It looks to me now that they should be taken about as seriously as those toy soldiers that get sold at Christmas time in the Christmas markets. I have to wonder if they are any more real than a Höllegram. They can’t punch above much more than a 1 gramma weight class.
    The US will not go in to decline as long as it controls Europe. The US can continue to provide the muscle for this partnership while the Europeans continue to do the rear echelon work. Hmmm that could be why the Europeans do not revolt. They are happy just as long as they do not have to get sent to the front let alone operate behind enemy lines.

  20. Curt Kastens

    Looking back, my foolish behavior leading to my crunching defeat might have been the wurst in European History. But it is not the worst defeat that I know of. In 2017 the Benedictine school of St. John’s University Johnnies of central Minnesota defeated the Benedictine school of The College of St. Scholastica Saints by the score of 98-0 in the first game of the season.
    The Johnnies Coach said after the game that the Saints were not nearly as bad as the score would seem to indicate. Everything that could have gone wrong for them did.
    Perhaps I had the bad luck to be born in to an experiment that has gone terribly wrong.

  21. Z

    Eighty year-old amphetamine freaks and pimps …

    https://twitter.com/TheCajunLibert1/status/1629895492090961920

    Z

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