Post by cavewall on Aug 31, 2006 20:29:25 GMT -5
The Silver Lining
MAD- www.nwowatcher.com
9/1/06
“It is easier to perceive error than to find truth, for the former lies on the surface and is easily seen, while the latter lies in the depth, where few are willing to search for it.”
~Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
“For love is ever the beginning of knowledge, as fire is of light.”
~Thomas Carlyle-Death of Goethe
“Truth is the property of no individual but the treasure of all men.”
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
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MAD: Thanks for agreeing to this interview H&H. I've been visiting www.unknownnews.org for a couple of years now, and there is always a tremendous amount of information and perspective at your website. People are sure to find many thought invoking articles from all the contributors at the site, and you update it often as news develops. Firstly, since I'm a bit ignorant on the subject myself, could you please give us some of your background as researchers, and what got you interested in starting such a invaluable resource like Unknown News?
HELEN: We're married and sitting in the same room when we work on the website, so we'll huddle around the machine and provide two answers to every question. We were off the air all day yesterday when our provider unplugged us, but we're back and raring to go.
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MAD: You have so much great information updated regularly; much of it really is "Unknown News" that you won’t find anywhere else. To get right to the point, what motivates you to keep involved with the website, and what are some of the topics you find most important or deserving of more attention?
HARRY: What motivates me is, I have to do something. I can't be silent as American democracy ... "almost said "falls apart," but that's wrong... as it is willfully dismantled by the criminals who have stolen the White House. There are so many things Bush & Cheney are screwing up, hard to pick anything as "most important." The most important thing, to me, is pointing out their criminality, in hopes of draining any popular support, crippling their agenda, and (cross my fingers) maybe having them impeached and imprisoned.
HELEN: My biggest motivators are 1. The amount of damage our current government is doing to average people around the world; and 2. The mainstream media's refusal to practice journalism, by which I mean presenting important information in an unbiased manner.
As to the most important stories we cover, I would say stories about little-known new policies or laws that are going to hurt millions of people but that receive no coverage -- or even get positive, misleading coverage -- in the mainstream press. I'm thinking of things like the estate tax repeal that would shift the tax burden from Paris Hilton to her maid; the Medicare drug coverage that forces people to keep paying a huge chunk of their own drug costs, plus pay premiums for lousy drug "coverage", and all the while forbidding the government to negotiate for cheaper drug prices. The latest one that chaps I disagree is the new rule that the elderly have to produce birth certificates to get Medicare, when many poor rural residents, especially black people, DIDN'T GET a birth certificate 80 years ago. This policy is supposed to prevent Medicare fraud by illegal immigrants, which even Medicare says is a non-existent problem.
These stories are not as exciting as things getting blown up or who said what about who on which Sunday TV show, but they are much more necessary in people's daily lives. Also, if enough people know about these issues, citizen outrage can actually bring about positive change, or at least stop things from getting worse. The GOP has wanted to destroy Social Security for decades, but we've stopped them from doing so even though they control the White House and both branches of Congress. I think that's a major victory for your average American, and I think the blogs had a lot to do with that.
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MAD: On many levels, America isn't what some people believe it to be. You've covered the topics at different times in the past, but could you share some of your thoughts on the corrupted electronic 'black box' voting system, as well as Bush and Kerry's involvement in the Yale Skull and Bones Society? It's pretty suspicious that both our Democratic and Republican candidates in the 2004 elections were members of the same secret society. Suspicious as well the manner in which Bush won the 2000 and 2004 elections, would you agree?
HELEN: I personally don't believe Bush won either election; 2000 was very obviously stolen, and Robert Kennedy's recent article in Rolling Stone removed any doubts I had that 2004 was stolen, too. That article's still online and it's fantastic; I highly recommend it. I think it's interesting that corrupt elections are widely protested in places like Ukraine and more recently, Mexico, while here anyone who brings it up is dismissed as a nut-job. I think that's one of the biggest triumphs of the mainstream media in recent years. The Yale thing doesn't bother me as much as the money thing. My understanding is that everyone at the income level that Kerry and Bush were born to is pretty much one big secret society.
HARRY: I try to keep my focus on the obvious problems everyone should agree are problems, and that certainly includes the overwhelming evidence that Republicans are using vote software to steal elections, time after time. It needs to be brought out into the open. Three cheers for bradblog, blackbox voting, and everyone standing up to expose the ongoing election fraud. We're trying to do our part. Skull and Bones interests me only as a curiosity. It's hard for me to get too worked up about alleged secret conspiracies when media and politicians seem so disinterested in all the criminality that's happening pretty much right out in the open.
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MAD: Do you trust any politicians these days? In your opinions, can we really have a valid president that is elected for the people and by the people, without corruption within the voting system or secret society interests?
HARRY: Do we trust any politicians? There are a few, but very few. It's flabbergasting to me what Bush-Cheney are getting away with. I've never seen anything like it, and I've been following politics for a loooong time. I certainly hold no illusions that "honest government" can be brough to power. "Government," it seems to me from past experience, is a synonym for "crooked," but I would like to see the standards of crooked government rolled back to good old-fashioned Reagan-Clinton crookedness. Sure, it's possible to have relatively valid leadership and actually-elected leaders. I never had much reason to doubt election results until 1998. Melt the voting machines to a pile of molten metal, count the ballots by hand as they do in Canada. The politicians will still be owned by big money, but they'll be substantially "less owned." "Honest government" is an oxymoron, so the goal is "better government," and we can do a lot better than the government we've got.
HELEN: There are politicians I trust these days. They are few and far between, but they exist. I love my Senator, Russ Feingold, and I'm also a fan of my Rep, Tammy Baldwin. Both good, honest progressives. There are others. A lot of the black caucus: John Conyers, Maxine Waters, Barbara Lee. I like John Edwards' recent work on poverty issues, the things Howard Dean's been doing for the DNC, even though I don't agree with either of them on some issues. The bigger question: I don't believe a clean election is possible these days. I think the left is going to have to win by an enormous margin to overcome the fraud in our increasingly corrupt elections. That's the bad news. The good news is that the GOP approval ratings are in the 20s, so maybe we can get a wide enough margin of victory to overcome the voting fraud. I'm very encouraged by Ned Lamont's victory in Connecticut, by John Tester's victory in Montana, etc.
On the other hand, those weren't national elections. Maybe a clean election is still possible at the state and local level more so than at the national level. But if the Dems take back Congress in '06, we could start to see some clean-up of the presidential elections ahead of '08. I try to stay as optimistic as possible, maybe more so than conditions actually warrant. If you take the point of view, which I admit is not completely unreasonable, that U.S. elections are pretty much a formality; it's hard to get out of bed in the morning.
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MAD: The escalating situation in the Middle East is very troubling to say the least, and anxiety levels are rising around the world (as well as the temperatures). Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Iran and Syria, would you care to make any predictions on where you think this situation might be heading, and what do you see as the real agenda behind this whole "theatre of war"?
HARRY: My take on most news is cynical, and I'm cynical about the Middle East. As awful as Israel's wildly out-of-scale response to Hezbollah was, only a few hundred people died -- a sliver of a fraction of the corpse count in Iraq. Yet it effectively pushed the American-made and American-paid slaughter in Iraq off the front page for a month. I see a handful of leaders who want more power -- American leaders who want oil, Israeli leaders who want to be seen as fierce, Arab leaders who want to be seen as justified, all of whom are seeking to aggravate the situation every which way they can. There are no good guys among the leaders, just charlatans and criminals, happy to make ordinary people the victims and play their deaths for more sympathy and more power.
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MAD: Aside from the religious implications, what do you feel are some of the motivating factors on a political and economic basis for why the United States is standing in such extreme support of Israel?
HARRY: People tend to go nuts when discussing Israel, but either Israel doesn't make me nuts or I'm already too nuts to be driven nuttier. I see it all pretty simply.
It's more complicated than this, of course, but the essence of it is easy to grasp. American leaders like wealth, and take care of moneyed concerns. Israel has wealth, lots of it, and leaders of both countries believe in the same kind of concentration of wealth in a few hands. The general Israeli mindset is all the way part of the western world, along with the US and the UK, while the Arab perspective is seen as 'different' and scary. Ipso facto peopto bismo, American leaders see Israel as "us" and everyone else in the Middle East as "them".
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MAD: Do you believe that much of what we are reading in the news on a daily basis regarding the Middle East, the United States, China and the Vatican, are all part of this push for a "New World Order"; and how long do you think this NWO plot has been in existence? Hundreds of years, thousands?
HARRY: Sorry, I don't think you and I have the New World Order in common. With no disrespect intended, I just don't give shadowy plots and conspiracies much thought, but it's not because I don't believe such plots are concocted and pulled off. I really have little doubt about that. But wealthy, powerful people who want to keep their presence and influence secret are able to do exactly that.
I just don't think people who aren't "on the inside" of such plots and mechanisms are going to come close to unraveling the plots and mechanisms, and people who think they've got some of the secrets unraveled are virtually always wrong.
It's like sitting in my apartment and putting together the truth about 9/11. Ain't gonna happen. If I spend all my waking hours assembling every 9/11 clue into a complex scenario that makes sense to me, it'll still be wrong, cuz I'm just a guy in my apartment. There hasn't been an honest and open investigation, and until there is, all the theories are just cigar smoke on a foggy morning -- nothing is cleared up, everything just gets hazier.
I concern myself with the evil and misguided men who are out in the open -- Bush, Cheney, Blair, Putin, the list goes on -- and the evil acts that are out in the open -- unjustified wars, obvious cover-ups (like 9/11), growing tyranny, etc. These undeniable, identifiable bastards and atrocities are terrifying enough. I work against the evil I can see, and hope, perhaps when that these men are exposed and stopped, we'll have a slight chance of pulling back the veil of secrecy and going after the leaders who lead our leaders.
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MAD: You've had various articles regarding this subject in the past at www.unknownnews.org , but would you share your thoughts on the reports and evidence of concentration camps being set up across the United States? By some estimations we're talking thousands of facilities that are empty and awaiting occupation by American citizens in the event of a major disaster.
Do you believe these concentration camps will be implemented in the event of Martial Law, and that the United States military has the man-power (and desire) to successfully "police" the citizens of America? Ultimately, what do you feel to be the real purpose behind concentration camps on U.S. soil? Of course we used similar concentration camps to round up some 120,000 Japanese in America, many of which were U.S. citizens, during WWII when Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066.
HARRY: One day in the not-too-distant future, you and I will be arrested for what we've written, what we've said, what we believe. That's probably what the camps are being constructed for. I can see no other reason that bears the slightest scrutiny -- can you? As recently as five years ago I might have thought anyone saying such a thing was nuts, but I have seen Bush-Cheney in action. We have never had a President who was NOT corrupt, but we have never had leadership a fraction as monstrous as these bastards. So I work I disagree off trying to sound the alarm, but I know that if we ever have any success at all, if anyone in the White House considers you or I to be even the slightest real-world annoyance, we'll be arrested, and they'll need plenty of jail space.
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MAD: We've seen Bush flashing the 'Satanic' hand symbol on many occasions in the past, which he claims is the "Hook Em, Horns" sign of the Texas Longhorns football team.
Yet, we've had many other prominent people showing this symbol as well who aren't connected to Texas sports; including Bill Clinton, Yassar Arafat, Dan Quayle, Pat Robertson, the Queen of England and different influential figures of authority. Do you think that some form of 'Satanism' or 'Luciferianism' is behind many of the political and religious structures of our world, and if so, how do you believe we can defeat it?
HARRY: Sorry, no, I don't believe there's anything more to it than Bush being a rather dim 60-year-old man who still has a college boy mentality. I'm agnostic, or a believer in Occam's Razor -- I don't think we need a great God above us to explain why we're here, and I don't think we need to imagine a Satan to explain evil. The bastards are just evil, that's all. They don't worship Satan, they just worship power.
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MAD: Can information and non-violent compassion (even forgiveness) conquer the vast 'evils' of our planet, or are we doomed to a repetitive cycle of history? I know it's not an easy or short answer, and rather hypothetical, but do you believe that educated goodness can and will prevail in the end? Is there still time?
HARRY: Big question. Tough question. And my answer is probably depressing — I don't see victory or defeat, just an endless battle for freedom and against tyranny. It's the battle that has raged throughout history, and we've made great progress in America — we're so much free-er than Americans were 100 years ago. But the battle goes on.
Is there still time? Yeah... but not much. Time to get off our asses and get to work trying to rescue this country from the people who hate us for our freedoms. And those people are not Al-Qaeda, they're thingy Cheney et al.
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MAD: There are so many good books and documentaries out there about 911 and deeper 'conspiracies', do you have any recommendations for those looking for some good resources of invaluable information?
HARRY: For newcomers, people just starting to question what happened, I'd recommend The War on Freedom by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed. For skeptics who've been at this a long time, I'd recommend whatreallyhappened.com — they've got a good sense of skepticism, and they're wisely skeptical about some of the skeptics too.
I'm more a reader than a watcher, and I haven't yet seen a video on the subject that I'd recommend.
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MAD: Helen and Harry, I give you much thanks and respect for doing what you do and granting us this interview. You have an excellent resource of information at your site, and a terrific archive for updated information on political 'conspiracy' and evidence that a 'New World Order' is being manufactured before our very eyes. Best of luck to you both in the future of the site and your lives, and a big shout to all the great CONTRIBUTORS who help to keep Unknown News active as well. Hope to do this again sometime! Are there any final comments you would like to leave the readers with today in coping with our troubling and insane times?
HARRY: I'm not much good at soapbox speeches, but I'd say this:
It is time to defend your country and defend your freedom from those who would rob you of both. If you give a d**n about notions like liberty and justice for all, democracy, or America, it is time to stand up and speak out. All these great ideals are in grave peril, not from any foreign power but from home-grown enemies who have occupied the seat of power in America.
thingy Cheney & George Bush and their cohorts are not typical "bad politicians" of the sort America has grown accustomed to. These are not your ordinary Clintons or Reagans, Tafts or Nixons. These men have hearts so empty, so cold, if we don't defeat the things they're trying to do to America and the world, America as we know it will cease to exist.
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MAD is an Administrator at www.nwowatcher.com and co-host of it’s regular Revolution Radio program, the archives can be found at www.revradio.org . Recent articles and interviews by MAD can be found HERE.
Helen and Harry Highwater are the purveyors of www.unknownnews.org which is one of the leading resources for alternative information on the Internet. Commentary and news articles can be found regularly updated at the site.
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“If it keep on rainin', the levee gonna break -If it keep on rainin', the levee gonna break -Some people still sleepin', some people are wide awake.”
~Bob Dylan- The Levee’s Gonna Break