October 2013

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shutdown sign

Community leaders have organized a protest against the government shutdown, happening today at 4pm at the entrance to Joshua Tree National Park. Local businesses have been losing income for weeks as campers and climbers have cancelled plans to come to the park. At the same time, CARPA is ostentatiously running a recruitment fair 7 miles from the park entrance. Come stand with the people of Joshua Tree and let the government know what you think!

For more information on how the shutdown is affecting local business, click here.

military craft complex

no war craft

This week, Carpaleaks are staging a community protest against the CARPA recruitment fair happening in Joshua Tree, CA. Stealth infiltrators have erected signage around Joshua Tree and led local protests that express our outrage at CARPA’s blatant efforts to conscript free craft Americans into military service. We urge you to show up and make your voice heard at this bureaucratic and state-run nightmare! Stop the militarisation of the peaceful handicraft heritage that shaped this great nation!

7-shirtCode6b

The government is seeking to protect itself from its own spy apparatus and stymie the public service done by agencies like CARPAleaks by conceiving ways to keep records that are ‘eyes-only.’ This move to physical record keeping is an effective stop to CARPAleaks’s ongoing requests for documents under the Freedom of Information Act.

CARPAleaks has discovered that Rob Mertens, a CARPA agent operating out of Eugene, OR, has been developing an encryption code based on pre-digital South American methods of record keeping. For centuries, Andean cultures relied on methods of tying knots or weaving information into cord or cloth. These fibrous codes confused the Spanish during colonial times and continue to prove difficult for contemporary translators.

The Quechua term khipu, which translates to English as ‘knot,’ is an example of this fiber code logic. Systems of knotted wool and cotton cords can represent numeric data as well as narrative information. The Andeans could represent quantities of food in storage for the dry season, calendar dates, or population tallies of local communities. Recently, it has been discovered that the knotted language included personal stories of the Capac Coya and cosmological myths. Although the Spanish imperialists could not translate the khipu, they understood that it was an information system ripe for use in subversive separatist activities and destroyed much of it. The Andean peoples also used textile design to represent personal or mythological information. Many of these records survived because they were dually concealed, first as functional/decorative objects and second as encrypted images.

Agent Mertens’s project, ‘Encryption Cloth,’ will be demonstrated during the CARPA recruitment event, Camp CARPA (to be held October 16-19 in Joshua Tree, CA). His presentation will display the process of weaving coded information into cloth. Demonstrating this technology for potential recruits, Agent Mertens emphasizes the innocuous uses of fiber code logic, such as weaving birthday dates and Facebook status updates. We must remember that the system has a dangerous flexibility that could also encompass data like bank account information, browser histories, and phone records. At Camp CARPA, agents and potential agents will learn to weave on light, collapsible backstrap looms that provide optimal field mobility for agents reconnoitering enemy territory.

Fiber codes are a return to an older definition of classified information, one that is controlled via a chain of custody. The craft insurgency, powered by services like CARPAleaks, cannot release information that is stored this way because, unlike digital documentation, corded and woven records cannot be infinitely replicated and released. The government co-opting of this kind of independent craft technology is cause for alarm.

To download the source files, click here: 7-plaidCode

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Image from First Earth Battalion Field Manual with the 1990 launch of "Artists in Action", what later became known as "Social Practice"

Image from First Earth Battalion Field Manual with the 1990 launch of “Artists in Action”, what later became known as “Social Practice”

The popular movie “The Men Who Stare at Goats” (2009) was to many a point of entry into obscure and quite unbelievable US military programs, in this case a partly true story of a “new age” military research track originated from the Department of Defence as part of their PSYWAR research. However, what the book and movie only hinted at, was that also other military agencies were involved, also CARPA. Yet, most of the media (and conspiracy) attention has fallen on the CIA-run Project MKUltra.

One of the main researchers behind the project on paranormal or psychic warriors, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon, who had served in Vietnam, leaked a substantial amount of information and even a sketch of a field manual for US new age super soldiers in the “First Earth Battalion”. These soldiers, Guerrilla Gurus or Warrior Monks, were in the filed manual also called “Artists in Action”, and were to be deployed in military campaigns. Parts of the training involved “soft tactics practice”, where the warrior, through manual action, is to create positive visions that will change the social fabrics and produce social change on high cultural magnitude: a change of values within the mind of the enemy. By gaining leverage in life and spiritual experience, the warrior monks would conquer the enemies and produce “personal and planetary evolution”.

Vaguely referenced in The Men Who Stare at Goats, in order to actually train this type of warriors, the United States Military Training Mission (USMTM) started a campaign with the CIA and CARPA to use the cultural industries for their agenda. With the support from the agencies of the CIA who already were deeply involved in artistic promotion of US values (mentioned earlier at CARPAleaks), the operational command of the First Earth Battalion infiltrated arts education and set up several programs across the US, using the writings of Nicolas Bourriaud and his “Relational Aesthetics” to introduce the curriculum of the Battalion and start to train undercover “Artists in Action”.

The use of artistic models of “social practice” became the tool by which “Artists in Action” were trained to move artistic practice beyond the aim of persona evolution towards “Cultural evolution”, that is, cultural change of the audience. The manual called this the use of active “cultural service” to change the “social architecture” of the adversary. Using the themes of “participation”, the audience of art would become involved in the artistic practice, let down their guard, and thus be an easier target for cultural change and deep infiltration of affect. As the manual makes clear, there were primarily two roles of these Artists in Action, the “systems integrator” or “weaver”, primarily engaged in making sure the values of the free west would be woven into the social fabric of the adversary, and the “imaginer”, chaining the radical imagination of the participants into accepting the ruling hegemony of western mental domination.

Manual page on "weavers" and "imaginers"

Manual page on “weavers” and “imaginers”

As the manual proposes, the “artists in action” were to be disguised and not reveal that they were actually on military orders. They would dress as artists. As the manual explains, soldiers “will be encouraged to represent themselves will in the dress”. Thus civil dress and the identity as an “artists” became the perfect infiltration tool, which actually broke the rules of engagement of the Geneva Convention.

 

Link to Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon’s field manual for First Earth Battalion

 

additional sources:
Bourriaud, N. (2002) Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Presses du Réel
Druckman, D., & Swets, J.A. (eds.) (1988) Enhancing Human Performance: Issues, Theories, and Techniques. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
McRae, R.F. (1984) Mind Wars: The True Story of Government Research into the Military Potential of Psychic Weapons. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Thomas, B. (2006) Immortal Combat: Portrait of a True Warrior. Berkeley, CA: Blue Snake Books.
Ronson, J. (2004) The Men Who Stare at Goats. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Manual page discussing the soldier's uniform

Manual page discussing the soldier’s uniform

QuiltMap of insurgent network in Khost region 2010

QuiltMap of insurgent network in Khost region 2010

Human Terrain and Relational Infiltration Teams (HuTRITs) use social craft techniques to infiltrate, classify and trace local loyalties and tribe constellations which are otherwise hard for military commanders to decipher. HuTRITs use local craft techniques to reach deeper into the social fabric of the afghan tribes, often trying to reach working women to help out mapping out local insurgent influence stratagems.

With the help of an established coded quilt system, maps of clan networks and links to insurgents are smuggled out to the NATO forces hidden in the layout of Afghan quilts. With US artisans trained in community quilt-making, a popular aesthetic amongst artists working with “social practice”, the HuTRITs teach women the codes and the secret quilts help unveil the enemy constellations for more surgical strikes and liquidations of adversaries by SEAL teams.

Leaked quilt code manual: 5MQ-2013×2