III. The looting of the explosive material.
We will begin our examination of the war timeline with the final prerequisite concept, and we can introduce ourselves to it by examining one of the very first “events” of the war.
This event, which will be our starting marker, is the looting of ammunition and explosive stores in 2003.
Why I start with this instead of the beginning of the invasion proper is because my goal is not to write a play-by-play military history of the war in Iraq but rather a summary of what I was able to research and understand. Oftentimes, this will be limited to simply coverage of the coverage of the war. It will not be complete, nor do I understand many of the more conventional military concerns. But I do believe for most readers it will be valuable.
Lets introduce the subject:
A note here, the figure of 20 pounds of high explosive is either artificially high or they chose to focus on an exceptional vehicle to elide that it would actually take far less to destroy almost anything – at least according to other coverage of this phenomenon.
Is an aircraft carrier a vehicle? Are we saying 20 pounds could destroy an aircraft carrier, or what? You can see how this sort of writing is actually very unclear if you look beneath the surface.
Elsewhere we will see a figure of just one pound – though not per se for the same criteria of destroying ‘any vehicle’. Why downplay the amounts here, and increase the base amount being discussed? Some people will get off of the train for a moment, and just write it off as lazy writing -- here we do not do this. By default, I will always take the position that this kind of mass-media production is highly controlled and deliberate down to the specific wording. If there are discrepancies or seeming errors, there is some purpose behind them.
But here, we have a total given of tens of thousands of tons and 20 pounds as the base unit. If we go with 20,000 tons and assume – due to the phrasing of the article – that this is all high explosives, that indicates the capability to destroy 2 million of ‘any army vehicle’.
If we had gone with a 1 pound base unit, as we will see in other articles, that would be a 40 million vehicle figure. I think that perhaps the judgment – here and elsewhere – is that a figure of 40 million was not as comprehensible as the lower figure.
Now – this is a 2007 article, rerunning a story that “broke” in 2004. Why? The looting of the ammunition stores is the narrative reason given for the specter of IEDs, and the specter of IEDs had to be constantly rewashed into the brains of invader sympathizers.
And IEDs, the looting of the ammunition stores, and the coverage produced regarding these phenomena, can teach what I would highlight as a ‘prerequisite’ to understanding the rest of the war while also occurring at the start of the occupation from our perspective.
The idea here is, splitting reality into multiple and irreconcilable fragments, contradictory narratives, as if through a prism.
I’ll share an additional thought on this phenomenon more generally: in the past I have said that I believe that “Project Monarch” is not a code name for a relatively small project of psychological study but rather the true codename for the “big” project but applied to a false object –
as for the plot to "take over the united states government", this is where we can firmly say that this presentation of things is wrong and suspicious, even if west lee genuinely believes it.
— 2young badazz (@2youngBadazz) June 19, 2021
and this is the obvious meaning of the name 'monarch', right? 'monarch' is a plot to subvert and 'take over' the "democratic" system. now interestingly, recall that unix is one of the operating systems analogous to the minds of pm victims -
— 2young badazz (@2youngBadazz) June 19, 2021
to achieve truly the full scope long term description of the overarching project. and i believe the real name for this project is project monarch. project monarch is the final and true project. thats why its called monarch. the
— 2young badazz (@2youngBadazz) July 21, 2021
hangout reveals the name but obscures the project.
As if the names of the various programs have been shuffled.
And then if we re-examine some observations about the movie The Shining, which keep coming up because they keep being relevant:
And, by the way, I also find these observations to be extremely vindicated in light of the analysis of the Roman adulteration of the Bible presented earlier in this thread!
beyond doubt, the film is in some sense coded to refer to project monarch. the signals are repeated reference to the number 237, and a ski poster with the word MONARCH, and the film's in-story location of the mountains of colorado - all of which point to the monarch ski lodge pic.twitter.com/uaN2ljUCFW
— 2young badazz (@2youngBadazz) June 21, 2021
this is the appearance of the poster in the actual movie pic.twitter.com/L4wRjEN3mH
— 2young badazz (@2youngBadazz) June 21, 2021
on the left side of the room in the image, there is one table and on the right side, on the other side of the twins, it has become two tables. on the left side of the wall containing the doorway, a single poster which becomes two posters on the other side of the twins.
— 2young badazz (@2youngBadazz) June 21, 2021
left, a single machine. right, two machines. outside the room, the minotaur - inside the room, the twins.
— 2young badazz (@2youngBadazz) June 21, 2021
one becoming two, as if representing the fracturing of a single human into multiple personalities.
— 2young badazz (@2youngBadazz) June 21, 2021
this is a partial but more complete answer to our puzzle - that the symbolic twinning of timesharing and project monarch is part of a grander symbolic scheme, inclusive of both the monarch fracturing as well as the joining together of twins
— 2young badazz (@2youngBadazz) June 21, 2021
What I am getting at is that, just as Project Monarch is a misnomer, a true name applied to a false object as if the names and their referents have been shuffled,
I think that the true name for both the program of splitting personalities and of splitting any sort of reality into incompatible fragments is probably Project Prism.
The limited hangout, the one attributed to the NSA, called “Project Prism” has nothing to do with anything prism-like, in fact it is almost the opposite – it is a gathering as opposed to a refracting.
And furthermore – there is ever the touch of irony from the ruling class, as the revealed “Project Prism” and the so-called Snowden leaks are prototypical examples of actual “prism”, splitting the truth into fragments and mixing them with falsehood. This is a side point -
You can take or leave it, maybe it will be food for thought. But I do think that the shuffling of names and their referents is an interesting and recurrent phenomenon that will be observed by anybody digging deeply into the corrupted, refracted history of the current ruling class.
Back to the idea at hand, this ‘fragmenting’ for lack of a better word can be observed at multiple levels with regards to the war against Iraq – it characterizes the primary narrative for the occupation itself, it characterizes the specific phenomenon of IEDs, and it characterizes the more-specific episode of the looted ammunition.
At the primary level, there is the phenomenon of the real vs fake insurgency in Iraq: There was a genuine insurgency, obviously, across the entire country. There was the ‘false’ insurgency of Al Qaeda. A recurring narrative fragment is that of the false insurgency committing acts of genuine insurgency against the coalition. Another is the narrative fragment of the false insurgency committing acts of violence against the people of Iraq. These two fragments are incompatible, there is no way to make them both simultaneously make sense. As soon as one tries to believe in one of them, the other one will come up as a nagging contradiction.
At the level of IED warfare, a few of these contradictions are:
Obviously, the above ‘real vs fake’ insurgency aspect is expressed in IED attacks vs the coalition and vs Iraqi society.
I think the ‘suicide bombing’ narrative as well is inherently contradictory. I don’t think its really easy for people to believe, as brainwashed as they are, that people would carry out this act either vs the coalition or even less believably against their own society.
In Iraqi news coverage but occasionally in Western coverage, sometimes they will air quotes of people saying things like that people are doing hits for AQ because they're paid to do so or that they’re “selling their soul and religion for money” and so its pretty obvious that this contradicts the “ideological” narrative.
And honestly being fed the IED narrative that exclusively focuses on the troops while simultaneously being fed the narrative that 80% (as an example figure given) of IED victims are Iraqi, I think that introduces an unsettling contradictory feeling even in the typical brainwashed Western reader. They know that this framing is twisted, and I think they have to turn off part of their brain in order to get through coverage of IEDs that paints Americans or the coalition as big victims.
There is a little bit of conceptual play here as well – the “biggest killer” of coalition troops, so they say, are IEDs. But the “biggest group” killed by IEDs are not the coalition troops.
And this I point out just to highlight how they deliberately induce this kind of experience. They are not trying to minimize the second narrative, in fact they're trying to highlight it by the ‘hint phrase’, so that your brain goes through the exercise of:
“I will make a pie chart and I know the biggest slice of casualties of coalition troops is the IED slice”, and then I think a fairly natural extension of this thinking is to make the mental pie chart of the total victims from the perspective of IEDs and then realize even subconsciously that the coalition slice is very small.
Now, there is another interesting conceptual play here that is not about implanting contradiction per se – a “more traditional” elision by framing.
And this is that the framing of all of the above is in terms of, “the victims of IEDs”. But that’s actually not a very useful framing – who emplaced the IED? That’s what is the goal of this elision, and that leads back to the original contradiction which is that the actions attributed to the fake insurgency are actually committed by completely separate groups and that is the only way to resolve that contradiction. IEDs are used by the coalition/false insurgency against Iraqi society and occasionally against the “self”, and are also used by the real insurgency against the coalition.
This is a hard concept to pin down, so I will link to a few more general descriptions of this phenomenon and we will move on -
i think this is more about sending deliberately contradictory messages to induce imbalance and exhaustion. the central idea is 'trust', the article describes past-tense that this trust has been given but uses symbols that remind the readers why trust should never be given.
— 2young badazz (@2youngBadazz) December 7, 2020
this is a very common type of device that serves as a way to 1) bait the anti crowd into overstating, overbelieving in the united states' capabilities wrt environmental warfare, and citing this obvious ruling class-sourced evidence as the source for their bad intentions when
— 2young badazz (@2youngBadazz) December 15, 2021
explaining this to others and 2) force the pro crowd into subconsciously ingesting a contradiction - that this guy is both a well-meaning actor in the fight against climate change, and inexplicably a theoretician of how climate change could be used as a means of violence.
— 2young badazz (@2youngBadazz) December 15, 2021
as stated, the model does not work if there are not two incorrect but contradictory messages, and so soon after a wave of critique was published regarding the hypothesis of nuclear winter and the work done by TTAPS pic.twitter.com/kF99wtuKCo
— 2young badazz (@2youngBadazz) November 24, 2021
they played this saga out with a few notable characters. on one side, you had edward teller and lowell wood. these were the guys saying Project Excalibur would work. on the other you had roy woodruff, earnestly trying to expose teller and wood to anyone who would listen. pic.twitter.com/mQSIeII4Km
— 2young badazz (@2youngBadazz) January 4, 2021
im not afraid to call it like it is, all of this was fake. the whole story of woodruff is fake. a whistleblowing exposure of the fraudulence underpinning the sdi was part of the psyop. two contradicting narratives, both controlled by the ruling class. pic.twitter.com/16ZzF6f0qq
— 2young badazz (@2youngBadazz) January 4, 2021
interestingly i think star wars also was meant as a primer for, of course, 'star wars'/SDI and in both of these cases is an early example of the now-ubiquitous approach to propaganda: shuffling reality and our logical units like a rubics cube, to unbalance and stun our minds:
— 2young badazz (@2youngBadazz) May 8, 2021
reagan positioned the ussr as 'the evil empire', but it was obvious that it was actually the usa who was building the death star - so there is now a conflict with the star wars messaging that creates a sense of imbalance i think in the audience
— 2young badazz (@2youngBadazz) May 8, 2021
the signaling is, "we are really the evil empire". from this perspective the audience is told to identify with the rebels. but many who cheered the destruction of the death star, would feel attacked when it 'came true' on 9/11 and now they identify with the evil empire.
— 2young badazz (@2youngBadazz) May 8, 2021
but surprise surprise - theyre actually both just the evil empire in the end. there is nobody virtuous to identify with.
— 2young badazz (@2youngBadazz) May 8, 2021
the observation about drawing from vampires and satanism but *inverting* the goodness/evilness of the entity i think gets to a deep and core 'tenet' of ruling class psychology, which is to take on multiple and opposite forms simultaneously as a dazzle mechanism -
— 2young badazz (@2youngBadazz) June 10, 2021
an iteration on the 'big lie' that i think is still underdiscussed and that actually makes the big lie even bigger. getting a little off track but i think relevant, consider how the ruling class constantly 'reveals' its own abuses ie epst**n, police and military brutality, etc...
— 2young badazz (@2youngBadazz) June 10, 2021
but then counter this with a separate line of media which poses the ruling class as benevolent and deeply necessary - two separate strands of reality, like oil and water, never integrated. its actually sickeningly abusive and i think they learned it from being abusers
— 2young badazz (@2youngBadazz) June 10, 2021
so i think this particular alien example is very broadly applicable. a perhaps early(from perspective of mass media?) example can be found in star wars which plays with a lot of these things when you put it into real world context https://t.co/2H0iAdLX78
— 2young badazz (@2youngBadazz) June 10, 2021
here as well https://t.co/6ZDVOirtYE
— 2young badazz (@2youngBadazz) June 10, 2021
and so alien as simultaneous satanic vampire/savior, abusive spook/secret helper, rescuer of humanity from its own ruin/depopulator (xenu), this is very much the same fingerprint we see all across society. really great points in your thread, ill think if i have any other thoughts
— 2young badazz (@2youngBadazz) June 10, 2021
Keep this sort of thinking in mind as we move forward because this sort of device underpins a lot of the material we will review.
As for the specific episode at hand, what we are really concerned with, to start our examination of the timeline, is the episode of the looted ammo dumps as told through the lens of a specific ammo dump -
The site called ‘Al Qaqaa’. This includes the initial action itself, the initial large scale revelation, and repetitive “teachings” of the narrative like highlighted previously.
Lets finally return to actual coverage -
Here is one of if not the first major article about the “incident” – and as far as I can tell the introduction of this concept to the public consciousness in general – in October of 2004.
Note here that this is the figure I referred to earlier – one pound or less, often its mentioned as a half pound, and here the object of destruction is a plane. A plane is a fairly delicate vehicle, and I think that this is used as allusion to 9/11 rather than a particularly valuable general object to compare against.
Furthermore, if the reader is imagining that ‘one pound can destroy one flight’ then I feel like there is a sense imparted that this could totally destroy the airline industry. And even this is riddled with contradictions -
The great size of material does not really change an equation limited by 1) willing participants and 2) the number of participants who “make it through”.
But, interestingly, neither airline flights nor ‘major bombing operations’ really describe the end result of the narrative here.
Eventually this narrative will become a very linear path from ‘looting’ to ‘IED’. Also in this first image, we are given one fragment of the narrative of “how” the looting occurred – the coalition was simply short-staffed against the amount of explosive/ammunition caches.
I highlight this clipping from the same article because Mars and Moon references are I think a fairly typical ‘tell’ if you will, a kind of wink. This has come up ad nauseam but perhaps the examples from the nuclear study are the most relevant -
laurence called los alamos 'atomland-on-mars', pic.twitter.com/Po0qm3l7mZ
— 2young badazz (@2youngBadazz) October 22, 2021
'war will have become unthinkable' (an iteration on end war before war ends us). and i have to note that he brings up the 'flight to mars or to the moon' as an object of comparison for nuclear power. pic.twitter.com/yxKFGM7fZc
— 2young badazz (@2youngBadazz) October 22, 2021
sagan had speculated that mars oscillated between 'two climates', one with abundant water and the various conditions necessary for life and one - the present - an ice age with no atmospheric moisture outside of ice caps pic.twitter.com/10cf3BL47l
— 2young badazz (@2youngBadazz) November 24, 2021
Personally I think its a bit of a stretch to call ‘abandoned bunker’ Mars-like. The other thing I will note about this clipping, though again this is low hanging fruit – its called part of a “secret military complex” yet it has been known and inspected by the IAEA since the 1990s.
Here we see more time spent on the nuclear aspect of the missing explosive material, even by emphasizing ‘nuclear or non nuclear uses’. We are also given a timestamp for the initial “looting” – April 2003. As well, we have the introduction of the idea that this template -
What happened at Qaqaa – could be multiplied by a figure that caps out at around 500. I note this just to get a sense of the mental math being imparted on the reader.
If we just rough it out – like anyone’s subconscious would do – its, roughly a million pounds gone from this specific installation times lets call it 250 (500 total, but even higher priority installations were not secured).
250 million ‘flight destroying’ units. At the very least you could imagine 20 million, if 20 similarly sized sites were not secured. That is the point of mentioning that ‘higher priority’ sites were not secured – to make you feel like this may represent the average.
I am not saying this so that we can try to determine reality – I am saying this so we can see the reality they are trying to impart.
Here we have the introduction of the narrative device of the IAEA seal. According to this narrative, troops examined the bunkers (at Qaqaa? It is unclear) and did not see any material under seal.
10 bunkers of HMX were supposedly destroyed, but what is the point of mentioning this? This is not factored into the estimate of missing explosives given earlier in October.
Now, note in the fourth paragraph – if the explosives were moved before the invasion, the IAEA seals on bunker doors would be broken. So one strand is, ‘early removal, pre-invasion, broken seals, stashed more or less openly in nearby fields and thus easily stolen’.
Here we see a reiteration of the idea that this stockpile was ‘special’ because of its nuclear nature and that it represents one of many sites where this may have occurred. Also noteworthy – supposedly HMX and RDX are very safe to transport and store, requiring a detonator.
And finally, at the end of this image, we see the idea that these can be used by insurgents in small devices. So to summarize the view so far of the missing explosives themselves:
a fraction of a pound could blow up a normal vehicle, presumably the volume of this amount of material is very small. Before analyzing the practical implications of this, lets clarify that:
We are studying the coverage of the “missing stockpiles”, and the contradictory strands of narrative and the manufactured facts and evidence behind them, not in order to determine the truth by resolving the various contradictions. That is not the point of this exercise.
It’s not possible – there is no “hidden reality” buried in the tangles, and if we untangle all the tangles we will not find the truth. Rather we are studying the production of psychological operations -
How reality is mechanically broken down into these multiple conflicting strands, how it is then delivered to the target audience by various instruments, who the instruments are and how they work together.
I am spending time on this not because Western perception is materially important to the liberation of Iraq but because it is important in general to understand these processes and because misunderstanding, simplifying, underestimating the complexities of these processes leads to an incorrect and broken worldview. And that, after all, is the scope of my mission – to correct what is incorrect by writing about it.
The ‘fact producer’ entities like military spokespeople, political figures, the IAEA, “soldiers on the ground”, the large and small newspapers, all precisely coordinate multiple streams of contradicting information. They are not, contrary to the weak popular opinion imparted on so-called “dissidents”, independent actors individually motivated by self interest. They will say, the Democrats were trying to gain a political advantage, the Republicans were trying to cover up their incompetence. We will get to that part and you will see what I mean.
Try to ask yourself, what is your instinct when reading the coverage before i analyze it? If you find yourself justifying the character roles of whoever you are reading, your worldview is incorrect and broken and this exercise is doubly important for you.
Back to the explosives – a very small amount, this much is a believable fact in my opinion, can cause a great deal of destruction. Shortly we will become more concerned with practical coverage of the occupation. This sort of “narrative” analysis will become secondary to the physical history and themes of the occupation. But here we do come across important information with regards to the actual physical reality of the occupation. A very small amount of material means that explosives could be hidden in almost anything.
I am not an expert on this subject but regardless of the attendant casing and electronics and detonating material etc you can imagine that the size could be very small. This extremely undermines the premise of ‘suicide’ bombing – if it could be that small, why a showy vest?
Why a vest at all? Rather, it would be easy to find ways to hide the device in a left behind object or plant it in almost anything in a very small amount of time.
The premise of SB is already unbelievable but this I think gives a material confirmation of the alternative – pre-planted devices by the coalition or their allies. And harkening back to the Roman methodology the truth is embedded in the unbelievable falsehood.
This concludes analysis of the initial New York times article. As an ‘opener’ should, it leaves much up in the air – what exactly happened, how did it happen, what could have been done to prevent it, what are the consequences.
In tandem more or less with the NYT article, John Kerry “made” the missing explosives a “campaign issue” -
I understand that we have already conducted a lot of analysis up front, but this is where the real ‘splitting’ of the narrative begins. A fact – that explosives are missing – has begun to be fragmented into strands with additional and incorrect sentiments and assertions and evidences attached, gradually taking the audience further and further away from the actual reality.
Once again they use the ‘nuclear’ angle, though I don’t personally understand what this means and I suspect most average readers will be with me on this. ‘Strong enough to detonate a nuclear bomb’ – what does that really mean? Unless its actually detonating a nuclear bomb, should I care?
I'm honestly not sure.
But paragraph three introduces the primary split – the camp of John F Kerry and the camp of George W Bush. The election is used as a splitting *mechanism*.
Furthermore with regards to the timing, the use of a late-election-season controversy as the delivery mechanism for the story gives it more mindspace.
The story itself, as will be evidenced by the repeated emphasis on IEDs and the “missing” explosives’ presence in IEDs and thus the repetition of this individual story, this was something they wanted to lodge in the American mind firmly.
By revealing this as a late-stage election controversy, the initial “splash” would be bigger and likely the overall retention would also be improved.
And this very obvious construction with a clear goal of implanting the IED narrative renders the worldview of two conflicting or even simply uncoordinated political parties to be laughable.
For the sake of completeness, I’ll highlight in paragraph four and five the strand of “keeping the country safe”. This goes back to the point I mentioned awhile ago about IEDs in general.
Surely this leaves unsettled thoughts in the brains of even the most washed invader sympathizers. Very obviously that the sheer volume of missing material doesn’t particularly represent a threat to the “homeland” of America.
It might represent a threat to the invader troops – but that’s not exactly how it is presented either, really.
For the reasons mentioned earlier, an increase of available material doesn’t necessarily increase the threat to say commercial flights even if you indulge in the fantasy that “terror” attacks are not planned by the West.
And the last three paragraphs finally introduce the second strand of narrative – that the material was gone before the coalition forces arrived in April 2003. This is where we truly have the contradiction forced upon us and we know that one of the two narratives has to be a lie.
Either the “removal” occurred before the troops arrived, or after. If it is after, Kerry’s claim of “negligence” is “valid” – see how silly this gets trying to indulge these things, but its a useful exercise.
Where it gets truly absurd is the final paragraph – so, ‘doubt is cast’ on the claim that the weapons were removed prior to the invasion because it is a large cache and it would have been detected by US spy satellites which were monitoring these weapons caches.
But – why would it be any less likely to have been detected after the invasion? Is the implication that – it would still be detected after invasion but they are deliberately hiding it?
That’s the only way I could make this part make sense but that’s not how this idea is presented here or elsewhere.
At any rate – here, the “Pentagon” says the materials disappeared before US troops arrived and the IAEA says they disappeared after US troops arrived. We cannot reconcile these two statements, and simply have to believe one.
But remember this assertion specifically – that it would have been difficult to detect before the invasion because satellites were monitoring the sites. Before the invasion.
Later in this article we see them finally explicitly connect the dots between the missing explosives and the insurgency. This is the big idea that they are trying to seed with this entire scandal, one of the pillars of their false narrative of the war. And this is really a textbook “proof” of the coordination between the two so-called political parties, etc.
We see the repetition of the half pound figure, the Lockerbie reference.
Midway through this section of the article we see a strange error, saying that the canonical NYT article we examined “accelerated” the IAEA’s disclosures. That, does not seem to be a phrase that means something.
They, amplified the effect of its disclosures? Accelerated the public response? But they didn’t accelerate the disclosures, they followed and reported on the disclosures.
And towards the end we see another important device to be aware of – now, the Pentagon correctly asserts that the missing explosives are not a nuclear threat. That is true.
They could be used as a detonator to a nuclear device, but no nuclear material was stolen. The “administration”????????, had already taken a stance that directly contradicts the IAEA by asserting the weapons went missing before the arrival of US troops in April of 2003.
Disregarding certain biases readers may have, I think this would produce a measure of skepticism in just about anybody – it directly contradicts the “first word”, the IAEA statement got there “first” in the minds of readers and so there is a measure of “free” credibility there.
But to any rational reader, they will admit that the “administration” here makes some points – its not a nuclear risk, and it would be “impossible” to provide 100% security for 100% of sites. So here the administration builds back some credibility.
But we will see that later there is a deliberate move to discredit the Pentagon and the administration by explicitly falsifying their earlier narrative, and this kind of shuffling between saying rational and irrational things is the same sort of contradiction – observed at a more macroscopic level with the narrative – applied to an individual actor in the overall episode. So that – no matter who you support – if you as a reader are invested in any of these narratives, you are attaching yourself to a sandcastle that will be washed away into nothingness.
More of that credibility building occurs here:
But it is carried out in the reverse. It discredits the IAEA sympathizers. Right after the “Pentagon” makes the argument that there are 1) too many sites, 2) its not a nuclear proliferation risk, and in the NYT article we had also seen the point that this site is just one among many and that from a conventional explosives standpoint it does not represent anything special, we see a quote saying:
“This isn’t some stash no one knew about, they knew about it and warned the administration”. But – who cares? If they had secured this site, which was known because of its *nuclear proliferation risk*, other sites that were untracked and unknown would not be immune.
This quote specializes the Al Qaqaa site right after the “military” makes a strong argument against this. this undermines the credibility of the pro-IAEA standpoint. And then finally, we see the same narrative from Kerry -
That the risk is to the troops planes and buildings, that George W Bush is responsible for the failure, and on and on.
This is silly and hyperbolic in the usual way of partisan theater, but we note here simply because we are diving into how each strand of the narrative undermines itself so that readers who embrace or ingest it wind up with nothing concrete or meaningful in the end.
Okay, so a lot of narratives and speculation is emerging – how about some facts? This article introduces some of the “facts” revealed after the initial narrative release:
Interestingly – this is dated as October 24th 2004, that is impossible I think. I had to double check that the NYT article really was the initial revelation, and yes as far as I can tell there is no way the date here is accurate.
It has to be at least a few days later as far as I can tell based on the reference in this article to John Kerry’s campaign statements. At any rate, here we have a very interesting set of “facts” revealed:
The army did remove 250 tons of material from Al Qaqaa in April and destroyed it, and some of it was of the same type as [one of] the materials listed as missing. But – the 250 tons were not under the seal of the IAEA, which the explosives considered “missing” had been.
So... this means absolutely nothing.
It explains nothing about the missing material, it cannot be the missing material because the missing material was the material under seal. So this is a contradiction condensed into a single paragraph and just rudely slapped straight into the mind of the reader.
They have the nerve to say, a defense spokesman “could not definitely say” whether they were part of the missing material. The poor people who want to believe any of this must be on the verge of tears at this point because of how baldly it is trying to break them down.
The missing explosives were under seal. These were not. Therefore, they are not part of the missing explosives. To slightly walk this back, another military actor says that they did not “see” any seals because they were not looking for them.
This psychic whiplash on the reader is the intent of the construction of this entire saga. This new statement now creates maybe just a fragment of doubt enough to go back to the original statement in the first two paragraphs and try to make it work -
“They weren’t located under seal, maybe they used to be under seal? Maybe they didn’t notice?” Again you can almost hear the hum of the minds of the people who don’t want to admit what is going on here.
And then more whiplash, Di Rita says the comments are evidence that “some RDX” “might have been removed”, but that he “can’t say the missing RDX is what was pulled out”, but that “some of the things pulled out were RDX”. Further study needed, indeed.
The next part frames the timeline as critical – the timeline of the removal of the explosives from this one particular site. But by the third paragraph, this is deliberately undermined -
It is reiterated that actually NONE OF THIS MATTERS because the site is not unique. It is a drop in a bucket. And then it continues to go on as if it does, somehow, matter. Straight back into detailed timeline analysis and presentation of evidence.
Whats more now the timeline is presented as – there was a window between March 15th and late May. Lets indulge the stream of facts presented -
Fresh seals were placed in January 2003. By March 15th the seals were not broken – but hold on to this, because this is misleading. Next, a supposed photograph shows two vehicles near the site, but not near the bunkers accounted for in the IAEA statement.
From April 3rd to 6th, the site was in the hands of the coalition. Now – notice the Donald Rumsfeld quote. He says, the looting would have had to occur before the arrival of US troops because a large scale theft would have been *detected*.
But remember earlier – earlier, I said to note that the narrative presented in the LA times article was that a large-scale theft would be unlikely to have occurred before the arrival because it would have likely been detected -
So the prior claim is that: USA spy satellites were monitoring the site before the invasion so it would have been hard to relocate the material without being detected.
Now the claim is: it would have had to occur prior to the invasion because after the invasion it would have been hard to relocate the material without being detected.
Back to this current article -
Four days later, around April 10th, the 101st Airborne – who are certainly one of the ‘main characters’ of the united states coalition, as we will see as the invasion progresses – shows up and ‘did not search Al Qaqaa’. Then the 250 tons were removed and destroyed.
On April 18th, a Minnesota TV crew embedded with the 101st video taped the troops opening the bunkers at Al Qaqaa.
What is not explicitly stated in this article but what we will see in other articles is, this means: they opened the bunkers and broke the IAEA seals which were still present. So this means definitively that IAEA seals were not broken until April 18th.
This seems to completely render the interpretations of a pre-invasion removal incorrect. And again, the 250 tons that were removed and destroyed are also irrelevant.
Finally the ‘end’ of the timeline seems to be that by may a thorough search was conducted and the material was already missing. That’s how I interpret the final ‘fact’ here.
A couple of things -
for one, the 101st Airborne Division is frequently at the center of the very significant ‘controversies’ or operations like this one. Possibly because the actual division (a very large one) is tasked with important elements of the “counterinsurgency” or possibly because there is a media-facing component of the division that serves as a lightning rod for controversies that may be committed by any other grouping.
I put “counterinsurgency” in quotes because its not the correct word for the paradigm of the war – its not a counterinsurgency. There is an insurgency but the Iraq war is not simply an occupation-plus-counterinsurgency, it is a pre-emptive war against the social fabric of Iraq.
The nature of this paradigm of war will be discussed later. Also, as presented – there is really zero evidence or reason to doubt the IAEA claim thus far. As presented.
But hilariously this is undermined by the fact that arguing about this one specific site is absolutely pointless. So the whole timeline, evidence, set of facts and personalities, its all pointless.
Regardless, this all helps to cement the episode in the memory, and it helps to undermine any sense of reality the audience is trying to hold onto.
Lastly, it should be very obvious that – none of this is true. None of this is geared at communicating the truth.
This is all geared at confusing and manipulating and abusing the mind of the reader. I'm going through the exercise of explaining this in detail because it seems to be an analytical deficit overall, that people can’t understand on a mechanical level how this type of media works.
They can't grasp that people put effort into things, or that works produced by teams of people are complex to the degree that individual analysis is actually difficult.
If you read the material so far and conclude that the Pentagon, the Bush administration, etc, are just trying to ‘cover their mistake’ and shift blame you are totally, absurdly, miserably incorrect.
If you can't see the real goal of this entire debacle, that this theater is constructed for another purpose and that no side is genuinely committed to its position, then you will fail to grasp anything in the modern media era.
I will get to concrete analysis of the war itself, but I said I wouldn't rush this – so we will not shortchange this issue either before continuing.
Now we will get deeper into the video of the 101st Airborne from April 18th.
Here we have more details about the April 18th video referenced in the timeline we had seen in the previous article. And at the time of this video, the IAEA seals on the doors of the bunker appeared to be intact.
Furthermore, the video appeared to show HMX – the specific HMX in question, the HMX that was part of the 377 missing tons – present in the bunker.
Then once again this is instantaneously undermined – its only one bunker. Not only that, the cache is just a fraction. So at the end of the day, the debate itself is truly pointless. This is another contradictory aspect of the entire story.
We get more of the statement from Donald Rumsfeld here, more detail on the same statement that was the “flip” from the beginning argument. He asserts that after the invasion they had total air control and would have seen it. He’s presented as so innocent here!
The very unspoken aspect of this is that, air control or not – the “Pentagon” could just be lying that they didn’t see it occur after. That this is unstated but is intuitively obvious and thus another tiny contradiction woven in.
Here the colonel who controlled the area before the 101st reiterates the ‘unlikely to have been taken after’ narrative and adds the dimension of limited roads in and out. And that the only road was – pay attention - packed for weeks with US convoys supplying troops heading toward Baghdad.
Here is actually an interesting fact for the discerning reader. Perhaps I was wrong to say earlire that, there is no way to read in the true narrative from these contradicting strands -
Rather, maybe they are trying to “reveal” to the reader that if they resolve all of the contradictions, solve the logic puzzle, they can determine the truth: which is that the US troops themselves were the ones who stole and transported the explosives.
At this point that is the only logical conclusion given the facts. There is video evidence belying the premise the looting occurred before April 18th. Nobody could have taken it without being seen. The only road was full of American convoys… Therefore, the Americans took the explosives! But at any rate, whether or not the solution is presented the fundamental point about the method of ‘splitting reality’ remains, even if it is a slightly more ‘collapsible’ delivery of this device.
Collapsible meaning you could derive a single truth, or ‘solve’ the puzzle. Oftentimes this wont be the case, its at the discretion of the operator.
Referring back to Atwill’s analysis of the Romans -
For the sake of completeness I’ll briefly mention the controversy in the final paragraphs – whether or not the timing of the revelation of missing weapons was picked in order to ‘oppose’ the Bush administration. The Bush camp accuses the IAEA, the IAEA punts and says the report came from the Iraqi government – the reality is that it was designed to appear in the last weeks of the election but that the reason for this was maximum exposure of this idea that would underpin the mythology of the occupation. The partisan controversy serves as ‘plausible deniability’ in a sense.
It is the reason for the timing, but not because the actors involved in this mediological operation are actually at any sort of odds. All of these entities – the Bush admin, Kerry campaign, IAEA, Iraqi government, the newspapers -
Are in lockstep coordination to pump out this material according to a central plan. It’s both funny and deeply upsetting to my stomach that there is such an allergy to this kind of thinking among the people.
That people bend over backwards and work exhaustively to try to believe one or more of the narratives produced in these operations, these ruling class fairy tales, is disappointing.
Framing this operation as anything less than a coordination between all of the supposedly opposing actors is to embrace one of the lurking contradictions and undermine your own ability to collapse to a single reality.
This is really the key to interfacing with any sort of similar material – you have to be willing to sidestep the web of contradictions and reject conclusions that violate the principles of reality you know to be true.
But they were not content to stop there, no -
Yes! Did you happen to catch that?
Read it! This is it. That’s a real quote. This story ran in multiple outlets, it’s not a typographical error. They “obtained the explosives”, with the “help of officers of American intelligence”, in order to “use them against the occupation forces”.
Go ahead – try to rationalize that one. I’ve seen this quote in who knows how many articles and it is completely uninterrogated in any of them. I tried to find any shred of commentary on this and found precisely one instance on an old web forum -
That this user is intending sarcasm in dismissing a prolonged occupation, in 2004, I think precisely highlights the brain damage intended by this quote and the broader operation.
Again, being that I want to provide a fairly complete view of this operation I will add that they eventually expanded the narrative to other sites -
This is the sort of “rational” fallback that people with infected brains love to latch onto – that there simply weren't enough troops to do the guarding. Their beloved invaders tried so hard, but it wasn't their fault.
That’s “rational” – that’s more rational, to them, than that the explosives were taken by the invaders and used against the Iraqi society.
Over time as we continue with coverage and analysis of the invasion, the case of the invader-lovers will grow increasingly desperate and absurd and their brains will be forced to swallow ever greater punishment in order to justify their broken vision of reality. Such is how the ruling class threats their weak ones.
This is more of a curiosity but is again one of those “are you paying attention?” tests for the reader – as the NYT engages in a character building exercise, we the reader are supposed to believe that the fearsome enemy of the occupation is spending their time jealously guarding... an empty weapons site. Setting up checkpoints, conducting surveillance, of... nothing.
Of a “moonscape”! A year and a half later they’re harvesting rebar under armed guard? What on earth is any rational person supposed to think about this?
The last paragraph is another reminder of how hard they are trying to surface this absurdity to their credulous readers - “the mujaheddin never said why Al Qaqaa was still so important to them”. What were they cooking with this one? I truly can't figure it out.
As the narrative progressed, “interviews” with soldiers in the area “confirmed” the reports of looting –
Here we find a “confirmation” of one narrative strand, but also violations of others – we can ignore the Scooby Doo imagery, but how are we supposed to believe that the missing material that supposedly would have taken a fleet of large trucks was smuggled out by Toyota pickups?
And how can we reconcile that with the limited road access? And this is par for the course but – in a single paragraph, we have:
“The soldiers could not confirm HMX was among the looted”.
In the absolute subsequent paragraph, “one soldier said they watched as bags labeled hexamine, which they later found out was HMX, was being driven away by looters”. Fool me once indeed.
I think this is more than enough of more than enough, so to conclude I will simply add the ‘payoff’ –
This is the main purpose of the operation we have examined.
To drive home the narrative that this is the source of the material used to build IEDs that target the coalition. The nature of actual IED usage, etc, will require additional analysis and examination as the timeline progresses.
But this narrative is one of the pillars of the invasion, and the method of its revelation and delivery to the reader is indicative of the broader paradigm of the entire war on terror – a destruction of reality, the revelation of facts and sub-narratives and “pieces of evidence” -
Only for the sake of their immediate undermining and contradiction by others, so that nothing remains of fact to grasp hold of.
I will not spend so much time on any single operation, probably, as this – but I did so because it illustrates several important operational methods and axioms of the invaders.
From here on out, we will focus more on moving forward in time rather than branching out in a single moment because otherwise we will never finish. I understand people may be losing patience to move forward, and I will try to keep things more brief and practical.
If we were to condense this genre of operation to a single phrase, I would call it a ‘forbidden truth’ operation – it begins with the truth: that the Americans confiscated the explosives in order to wage war against Iraqi society with them.
Then this is passed through a kaleidoscope until it becomes a ‘logical puzzle’ for the readers which can only be resolved at by arriving at this truth – just like in the Atwill screenshots!
But to accept the truth means to violate their commitment to the orthodoxy of supporting the invaders and believing in their goodness. Therefore, they will invest in the various contradictory alternatives even if it means undermining their own sense of logic and reality.
As I alluded to, this all takes heavy influence from the Roman operation described earlier in this thread and this is not in any sense an accident. That itself is one of the key takeaways here – that there is indeed a history and a historical understanding at play here.
With this out of the way, we will finally move on and begin examining the invasion and what its true intents and methods were revealed to be in the absence of the alleged ‘enemy’ of Saddam Hussein.