Michael Ruppert

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 This article or section needs sources or references that appear in reliable, third-party publications.
Primary sources and sources affiliated with the subject of the article are generally not sufficient for a Wikipedia article. Please include more appropriate citations from reliable sources, or discuss the issue on the talk page.
This article has been tagged since November 2006.


Part of a series on the:
9/11 Truth Movement
Articles
Participants
Organizations
Films
Books
This box: view • talk • edit

Michael Ruppert is the founder and editor of From The Wilderness, a newsletter and website dedicated to investigating political cover-ups. On August 16, 2006 Ruppert announced that he was leaving the United States permanently, citing years of harassment for his ongoing dissident activities.[1]

Contents

[edit] From The Wilderness

From The Wilderness was a newsletter published by the media company From The Wilderness Publications, which claimed to be ahead of the mainstream media by as much as one year. The newsletter covered a range of political and governmental issues. It was published eleven times per year but featured weekly updates online. It was started by Michael Ruppert in 1998. Critics such as David Corn[2] and Norman Solomon argued that Ruppert on occasion veered off into making unsubstantiated conspiracy theory claims. Ruppert himself said he documented his sources, and is a trained police detective. (ex-LAPD narcotics officer.)

Their website says that the newsletter was about "the publication of documented truth and the letting go of fear through education" and claimed to distribute to "16,000 subscribers in 40 countries including 35 members of the United States Congress and professors at 30 universities around the world" before being shut down. It is however known that Ruppert also counted free copies that he sent out to political leaders, members of congress and other non-subscription based peoples.

[edit] History

Michael Craig Ruppert was born in Washington, D.C. His father was an Air Force officer and later an aerospace executive who worked on projects which included the Titan III. His father's cousin, Barbara Burges and her husband Sam, are both retired from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Mr. Ruppert's mother was a cryptographer for Army Intelligence at Fort Myer, VA, during the Second World War.

Ruppert was raised a Republican. He has jokingly said that from 1969 to 1973, he was one of two "living" Republicans on the UCLA campus. During that time, Ruppert was chosen, as an honors student in political science, to intern for Chief Edward M. Davis of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD).

After graduation from UCLA, he was assigned to Wilshire Division patrol, and excelled at patrol work and was subsequently sent on detective assignments, including burglary and homicide. He was later recommended by the narcotics officer-in-charge to attend a two-week DEA training school held in Las Vegas, Nevada. Narcotics was Ruppert's chosen specialty, and has given expert court testimony on the subject 27 times.

In 1977, Ruppert discovered an extensive drug trafficking operation run by the Central Intelligence Agency and went on record about this on-going criminal activity. He resigned from the LAPD in 1978 despite earning the highest rating reports possible, over the tolerance of continued CIA drug dealing activities.[3] Ruppert's personal experience with death threats, 3 shooting attempts on him, aggressive intimidation over his attempted exposure of these illegal drug activities within Los Angeles, and his ethical conflict with tolerance of these activities, was the catalyst for the resignation.[4]

Ruppert filed an official complaint with FBI Special Agent Stan Curry of the L.A. Field Office on December 4, 1978. This was after Ruppert was forced out of LAPD on November 30, 1978.

In 1996 Ruppert achieved some justice through his comments at a televised visit of then Director of Central Intelligence John Deutch to South Central Los Angeles. Deutch had made the trip to Los Angeles to dispel rumors in the black community that followed the publication of Gary Webb's series in the San Jose Mercury News revealing evidence of CIA connections to cocaine dealers in the city, and evidence of CIA and Contra's cocaine trafficking in the US. Webb was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American investigative journalist, best known for his 1996 Dark Alliance investigative report.[5] In Webb's three-part series (later published as a book titled Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion), Webb investigated Nicaraguans linked to the CIA-backed Contras who had allegedly distributed crack cocaine into Los Angeles and funneled profits to the Contras. Webb also proved that this influx of Nicaraguan supplied cocaine sparked and significantly fueled the widespread crack epidemic that swept through urban areas.

On November 15, 1996, Ruppert stood at the town hall meeting at Locke High School in Los Angeles and said to Director of Central Intelligence John Deutch, "I am a former Los Angeles Police narcotics detective. I worked South Central Los Angeles and I can tell you, Director Deutch, emphatically and without equivocation, that the Agency has dealt drugs in this country for a long time."[6] He then referred Deutch to three specific CIA agency operations known as Amadeus, Pegasus and Watchtower. At the meeting, Ruppert publicly confronted Deutch, saying that in his experience as an LAPD narcotics officer he has seen evidence of CIA complicity in drug dealing for a long time.[7]

Michael Ruppert quoted one entry from Oliver North's diary dated July 5, 1985, which said that $14 million to buy weapons for the Contras, "came from drugs." and he wouldn't need to mention the two hundred and fifty other such entries in his diary, which refer to narcotics.[8]

On October 1, 1997, Ruppert submitted documents to the Select Intelligence Committees of both Houses. To date, it remains only a document submitted in advance of testimony and has not been placed in the Congressional Record.[6]

Ruppert went on to become an aggressive investigator and Journalist,[9] as well as establishing the publication From The Wilderness, a watch dog group that exposes governmental corruption, including his experience with CIA drug dealing activities.[10] From The Wilderness, was read, before being shut down,[11] in more than 50 countries around the world. Its subscribers include 60-plus members of the US Congress, professors at more than 40 universities around the world, and major business and economic leaders. Since 9/11 Ruppert has been in demand as a university lecturer and has spoken on Peak Oil and 9/11 in nine countries. Recently, at the request of Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, he served as an official questioner during a Congressional briefing looking into unanswered questions and the unaddressed flaws of the Keane 9/11 Commission report.

[edit] Crossing The Rubicon

Ruppert is author of Crossing The Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil.[12] Published in September 2004, it is one of the three best-selling books globally and in the US about the attacks of 9/11.[citation needed] Crossing The Rubicon claims that Vice President Dick Cheney, the US government, and Wall Street had a well-developed awareness, and had direct collusion with the tragic events of 9/11; as well as awareness of the looming Peak Oil crisis well before the 9/11 attacks. In May 2006, Crossing the Rubicon was added to the Harvard School of Business library.

The back jacket cover of Crossing the Rubicon reads, "The attacks of September 11, 2001 were accomplished through an amazing orchestration of logistics and personnel. Crossing the Rubicon discovers and identifies key suspects - finding some of them in the highest echelons of American government - by showing how they acted in concert to guarantee that the attacks produced the desired result."

Ruppert appears prominently in the documentary films Peak Oil - Imposed by Nature [13] and The End of Suburbia.

[edit] Controversies and conflicts

In the spring of 2006, Ruppert had false allegations of sexual harassment filed against him by a former employee days after she was fired. She is also suspected to have vandalized his home, but has yet to be charged with this offense. The original story provided by the local Police of Ashland, Oregon was that Ruppert had destroyed his own office, however, no explanation for this claim was ever provided.

In the summer of 2006, Ruppert abruptly left the United States for Venezuela.[14] He flew to Canada on November 18, 2006, for medical treatment in Toronto, for what may have been poisoning (this was never proven or suggested by a medical professional).[11] Finally these problems became too much to bear and he threw in the towel giving the following message to his fans:

"Over the past four months many of you have touched me with your generous and loving offers of support and encouragement. You have kept me alive. I have also understood, probably for the first time, how deeply FTW has impacted your lives and the lives of a new and younger generation. As my health and my access to your letters improves I will be writing personally to as many of you as I possibly can.

"I want to repeat something I have been saying in private emails over the last month. Personally, I am through forever with investigative journalism and public lecturing. I am leaving public life. It is my hope that by continuing to repeat this sincere position that many of the inexplicable difficulties which have dominated my life over the past months will ease.

"It is time to move on. I spent twenty-seven years as a dedicated public activist and that is something which I am no longer able or inclined to do. The price was ultimately too great."[15]

Amongst the reasons given to end From The Wilderness, Ruppert states:

"There were more problems of human origin. Some were definitely malicious ... I am the one who left knowing that I couldn’t continue any longer after our offices were burglarized and our computers were smashed this June. There had been one-too-many battles and, looking back, I knew my health was failing then even though I didn’t want to admit it."[2]

On December 4, 2006, as reported by the Ashland Daily Tidings, Ruppert and From the Wilderness were sued by their landlord, Aro Partners, for back rent owed on the Ashland office space. In the same article it was confirmed that Ruppert is, in fact, an official suspect in the burglary of said office space.[16] On August 13, 2007 a post was made on the unofficial From The Wilderness blog stating that Ruppert had been cleared of any involvement in the break in by the Ashland Police Department because it would be absolutely moronic for anyone to vandalize their own office. However, he remains the only lead the Ashland Police Department has officially investigated.

The latest posting about him on the FTW website says Ruppert is back in New York, receiving treatment from "sympathetic physicians." "It has been learned that his adrenal system is severely damaged and there may be toxicity of the liver. He has lost more than 20 pounds in the last ten weeks. Many of you have written suggesting possible poisoning as cause for his known symptoms. We are not pursuing that at the moment because the treatment for the symptoms would not change in either case."[11]

Ruppert has announced that he will be moving back to Ashland, Oregon in the next year.

He is now living in Los Angeles, CA.[17]

[edit] Critics

Columnist Norman Solomon has argued that Ruppert has a flawed analytical model. "Some of the problem is in how he characterizes news reports. These citations can be narrowly factual yet presented in a misleading way. Yes, such-and-such newspaper reported that thus-and-so claim was made by so-and-so. The paper reported on the claim, but that doesn't mean the claim is true."[18]

Ruppert's reply to Solomon's criticism, "Most of our critics, notably David Corn of The Nation and self-anointed media critic Norman Solomon, have gone silent as both our reporting and predictions have been completely validated by events."[19]

Columnist David Corn has also criticized Ruppert's methodology, and dismisses the idea that conspiracy theorizing is useful: "In fact, out-there conspiracy theorizing serves the interests of the powers-that-be by making their real transgressions seem tame in comparison."[20] Ruppert responded with an open public letter to Corn.[21]

Many supporters of Ruppert's take issue with the use of phrases like 'conspiracy theories,' as they instigate immediate connotations and denote falsehoods that portray the 'conspiracy theorist' as a member of a paranoid fringe-dwelling underclass. As Ruppert correctly points out about several of his major (documented) sources - Dr Alfred McCoy and Peter Dale Scott (both highly decorated academics) ; "why is it that these books have never been sued? There is an old saying amongst legal circles: the truth is the perfect defence against libel." [22]

[edit] Bibliography

  • Ruppert, Michael C., Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil, New Society Publishers, 2004. ISBN 0-86571-540-8

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Supportive

[edit] Critical

[edit] References

  1. ^ Michael C. Ruppert (2006-08-16). BY THE LIGHT OF A BURNING BRIDGE/A Permanent Goodbye to the United States. Retrieved on 2007-02-27.
  2. ^ Corn, David (2002). The September 11 X-Files. Blog: Capital Games. The Nation. Retrieved on 2006-05-28.
  3. ^ FULL DISCLOSURE - THE LAPD RECORDS/OF MICHAEL C. RUPPERT (2006). Retrieved on 2007-02-27.
  4. ^ NOTE: This document appears exactly as submitted to the Select Intelligence Committees of both Houses. http://www.fromthewilderness.com/ssci.shtml
  5. ^ http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=1996+%22Dark+Alliance%22+investigative+report.+&hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&hs=U8H&oi=scholart
  6. ^ a b OPENING REMARKS OF/MICHAEL C. RUPPERT/for the/Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (1997-10-01). Retrieved on 2007-02-27.
  7. ^ Steve Lowery, "A CIA Infomercial," New Times Los Angeles (21 November 1996) p. 6.
  8. ^ [1]
  9. ^ WHO IS MICHAEL C. RUPPERT? (2005). Retrieved on 2007-02-27.
  10. ^ C.I.A. & Drugs
  11. ^ a b c MIKE RUPPERT IN CANADA/RECOVERING - LEGAL NOTICE (2006-11-26). Retrieved on 2007-02-27.
  12. ^ Michael Ruppert; New Society Publishers (2004). Crossing The Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil. New Society Publishers. ISBN 0865715408. 
  13. ^ Peak Oil - Imposed by Nature, Tropos Dokumentar website
  14. ^ Michael Ruppert (2006-08-19). By the light of a burning bridge. From the Wilderness. Retrieved on 2006-08-19.
  15. ^ MIKE RUPPERT IN CANADA. From the Wilderness (2006-11-26). Retrieved on 2006-11-26.
  16. ^ Robert Plain (2006-12-04). From the Wilderness taken to court. Ashland Daily Tidings. Retrieved on 2007-02-27.
  17. ^ http://fromthewilderness.com/retrospective2008.shtml
  18. ^ Norman Solomon (2002-03-07). Letter From: Norman Solomon. Retrieved on 2007-02-27.
  19. ^ Mike Ruppert, Lead Essay, From The Wilderness, 2002-10-01.
  20. ^ David Corn (2002-03-01). When 9/11 Conspiracy Theories Go Bad. Retrieved on 2007-02-27.
  21. ^ Michael C. Ruppert (2002-03-01). NATION editor David Corn attacks Mike Ruppert with bad information./Read Mike's reply to corn.. Retrieved on 2007-02-27.
  22. ^ {{cite web http://video.google.com.au/videoplay?docid=-7009998324250484369}}
v • d • e
9/11 conspiracy theories
Major theories
Notable proponents
and supporters
Groups
Films
Books