The CIA just put a spotlight on a conspiracy theory classic that was found on the bookshelf of Osama bin Laden.

Let me explain: After the death of Osama bin Laden was announced the news was followed by revelations including dispatches about the volumes the world’s most wanted man kept on his bookshelf. Here’s the New York Times from 2015…

But it was the list of books found in Bin Laden’s compound that garnered the most interest Wednesday. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which managed the release, seized on Bin Laden’s reading list to promote it, titling the web page listing all the now-public material “Bin Laden’s Bookshelf.”

Some of the books would be familiar to anyone interested in global affairs, such as “Obama’s Wars,” by Bob Woodward; “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,” by Paul Kennedy; and “Imperial Hubris,” by Michael Scheuer, the former official who once ran the Central Intelligence Agency’s Bin Laden desk.

Other titles hinted at a paranoid worldview fostered by conspiracy theory classics such as “Bloodlines of the Illuminati,” by Fritz Springmeier, and “The Secrets of the Federal Reserve,” by Eustace Mullins, a Holocaust denier.

On July 30 the fringiest fringes of my alt news network started to buzz with the news that the CIA had actually uploaded Springmeier’s book which claims that the cultural elites in every powerful position in the world are blood relations, and that the age of monarchy never ended. We can’t ask OBL for a book review, but the conspirosphere is counting the upload as confirmation of the bloodlines theory by the agency.

Read Springmeier’s book or download it at the CIA site. Check out the rest of that NYT article here.

Stories like this fascinate me for a lot of reasons. Conspiracy theories are often proven true, and all expression that doesn’t harm or threaten anyone else should always be championed in a democracy. Conspiracy theories are also part of our cultural mythology and they often say a lot more about who we actually are than the commercially weaponized images reflected to us in the mainstream media.

Springmeier is as earnest as he is scattered and self righteous in this video from the Global Science Conference in Tampa, FL back in 1997. Springmeier’s lecture is entitled The Biggest Story – Undetectable Mind Control. Enjoy…

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George Clooney made a remarkable directorial debut fifteen years ago when he helmed the biopic of Gong Show creator Chuck Barris. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is based on Barris’ autobiography of the same name. The film is remarkable for Sam Rockwell’s portrayal of Barris, Clooney’s use of in-camera effects that mirror the kind of lo-fi tech of TV programs of the 1970′s, its use of documentary techniques in a narrative feature, and for its seamless and sidesplitting weaving-together of Barris’ entertainment career story and his outrageous claims that he was also a CIA assassin at the time that he was hosting The Gong Show.

Here are some words about the film from a 2002 article in Time…

There are a lot of ways to tell the truth, and Chuck Barris has avoided most of them. His 1984 book Confessions of a Dangerous Mind was subtitled An Unauthorized Autobiography, and it claimed that while he was creating game shows like The Newlywed Game and The Dating Game and hosting The Gong Show, he was a contract CIA assassin — a claim he still refuses to say was untrue. The movie version, directed by George Clooney and written by Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation), which opens nationwide on Jan. 24, has tales the book never even imagined. “He wrote stuff out of nowhere,” Barris says. “My mother never dressed me like a girl. I was never on drugs. The part about my father being a serial killer? That’s Charlie. He writes such good stuff.”

Barris, 73, wrote the book partly because he’s a huckster: he faked a resume for NBC, peddled game shows even though he didn’t like them, and God knows what he has told his three wives. But he also fabricated his life because it might have been the best way of getting at the truth. The truth was that back when he was the Jerry Springer of his day, he couldn’t stomach being attacked for doing something he considered harmless. So Barris wrote a book in which his first assignment purportedly was to collect intel on Martin Luther King Jr. “People forget the point of the book,” he says. “Here I was, getting crucified by critics for entertaining people and getting medals for killing them. That just didn’t seem logical.”

Chuck Barris died on Tuesday.

Here’s an episode of The CIA and Hollywood that dives behind the scenes of the film, and between the pages in Barris’ book to find the truth beyond the gong…

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I’ve blogged about Leonard Cohen’s use of LSD on this illuminated scroll before. Today as I was sorting stories for the Remnants Flipboard when I came across this bizarre report from Abel Danger about Leonard Cohen’s involvement with early CIA LSD experiments in the 1950′s. Here’s the word…

The man in the photo, taken at McGill University in 1951, is 17-year-old Leonard Cohen. He’s wearing a blindfold, and his ears, fingers and hands are encased in padded restraints which prevent movement and cut off all sensory stimulation. This is one of Dr. Donald Hebb’s famous/notorious sensory isolation experiments, for which student volunteers were paid the then-princely sum of $20 a day. Some of the volunteers were unable to stand this torture for more than a few hours. Some tore off the bandages and banged on the door of the isolation chamber, screaming and crying to be released.

Back in the 1980s, when I lived next door to him, Leonard Cohen once told me he enjoyed these experiments. He said he learned to dissociate, leave his body, and go on long voyages through the universe. The experience was so pleasant that later he volunteered to be placed in a flotation tank while on LSD. He enjoyed that, too.

We now know that D.O. Hebb’s sensory isolation experiments became the foundation for torture techniques used by the CIA etc. in its secret prisons around the planet. Hebb, a neurologist, had CIA clearance, and also allegedly experimented on small children, mainly orphans and aboriginal children who arrived in his laboratory courtesy of McGill and the RCMP. Having access to human guinea pigs made Hebb’s research that much more impressive. He also, of course, worked with rats and monkeys. It seems quite likely that his famous “rat” study on the effects of sensory isolation on IQ, would have been based on his experiments with children. McGill, at the time, was controlled by a network that included many British-trained, mind-controlled pedophiles with an interest in eugenics – and probably still is today.

I don’t have any proof that any of this is true or false, but it’s interesting to note that Cohen may be counted among early countercultural revolutionaries like Ken Kesey who were part of similar LSD experiments and went on to create groundbreaking works of art. Here’s the man himself speaking on the poetic mind…

Stay Awake!

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