War Comic: Mainlandia Invaded in Exercise Southern Katipo

A spider that flies

Imagine that the Unites States’ main military operations organization, Strategic Command (or StratCom), is the head of a heavily armoured spider, whose habitat is global. Imagine also that its body is the US Department of Defense and its heart is the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. Then, imagine that the legs of this spider can fly and that it has landed in New Zealand.

Currently, a multi-country military exercise called Exercise Southern Katipo 2013 is taking place in the lower half of New Zealand’s South Island.

According to the New Zealand Defence Force, the training exercise will test its capability to deploy forces to a South West Pacific island or nation, with help from other countries, if required.

The training operation takes it name from the poisonous katipo spider, and featured troops landing on beaches of the South Canterbury coastline of the South Island in “Stage 1 – Force Projection” last week. Of the two kinds of katipo spider – red and black – which live in the sandy habitats of coastlines, the red katipo is the only katipo found in the South Island. Hence, the logo for the exercise features a red katipo spider.

Because spiders are famous for having eight legs, perhaps there is symbolic significance behind the supply of eight Lockheed C-130 Hercules military transport aircraft by the US military for the three week-long training exercise, which began on Monday November 4.

Southern Katipo: The comic-book world of a League of Goodmen vs Team Badistan

In Exercise Southern Katipo 2013, the Southern half of the South Island has become a country called Mainlandia. For the purposes of the exercise, the rest of the South Island does not exist. The North Island is New Zealand.

The scenario reads like a boy’s comic for the ‘War on Terror’ era. The corporate news media has reproduced the NZ Defence Force’s propaganda so uncritically that the Nazi’s Minister of Propaganda and evil genius, Joseph Goebbels, would surely have creamed his Hugo Boss manufactured pants if he were still alive to plot, be fanatical and cynical, and jerk stiff Hitler-esque goose-steps for kicks. Without a hint of joke-humour-mocking-fun at the NZ military, the few newspapers from the two trans-Tasman media conglomerates – Fairfax Media and APN News and Media – that have covered the war game exercise report that the NZ-led military coalition seeks to overcome the “bad guys”, “bad people”, “baddies” and even a local “Taliban”. Bless.

The Southern Katipo scenario envisaged escalating tensions wherein Mainlandia was “teetering on the brink of an ethnic-fuelled civil war” between the Bekarans and the Alpirians. According to the New Zealand Defence Force’s press release, the conflict had arisen following a recent election, because the prime minister of Mainlandia refused to step down (rather than either ethnicity actually using their enemies as fire accelerants in the “ethnic-fuelled civil war”).

It’s an easy mistake for Euro-American-centric military planners to make, since the Global Military Propaganda-Media Complex often describes conflicts in far-flung countries as merely hostilities between ethnic groups. These oversimplified descriptions draw on the lingering prejudices about fighting ‘savages’ from the colonial era. (These prejudices were termed a ‘European superiority complex’ in the documentary The Leech and the Earthworm).

Such propaganda omits to mention that the top suppliers of weapons are the world’s major governments, according to the New Internationalist’s No-Nonsense Guide to the Arms Trade. The news media also regularly fails to report America’s numerous client oligarchies around the world, who exploit the populations that they rule over, as described by US foreign policy critic Noam Chomsky in Deterring Democracy.

Back in the fictional world of Mainlandia, the recalcitrant government is supported by a militia, comprising the population situated in the fictional Bekaran region. The Timaru Herald reported in mid-October that the militia’s stronghold is located in the small city of Timaru, the capital of the Bekaran. Securing Timaru’s seaport and airport was the initial priority.

Ironically, Southern Katipo’s goal is to “restore law and order”, as worded in a New Zealand Defence Force media release, titled “Large Scale International Military Exercise Underway”. The NZ Defence Force seemed unaware that its major coalition partner, the United States, routinely practices subversion of genuine democracy when mass populaces choose leaders not fit for the term ‘client state’.

The New Zealand government has formed a coalition of forces to remove Mainlandia’s government, under the auspices of an organization called the International Stability Mission for Mainlandia (INSTAMM). Thus, the New Zealand coalition is comprised of the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, France, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Singapore, and Tonga.

Despite having a sizeable army, the island nation of Fiji, which is situated in the South West Pacific Ocean about 2000 kilometres north of New Zealand, is absent without invitation. In the real world, Fiji is famous for having coup d’états.

Notwithstanding the boy’s comic book scenario, the coalition of ‘defence’ forces will attempt to overcome a small militia of “bad people” located in a small rural township called Cave, which is Northwest of Timaru, according to The Timaru Herald‘s report of October 15. There is also “Waimate Taliban” in Waimate, a town south of Timaru that is to be suppressed, according to a November 7 report in the Oamaru Mail.

The location of Cave and the Waimate Taliban have symbolic meaning because the scenario references the myth of the Al Qaeda masterminds directing the 9/11 terrorist attacks from caves in Afghanistan. This myth has been thoroughly discredited by scholars that feature in the book The 9/11 Conspiracy: The Scamming of America, edited by James Fetzer.

The South Canterbury region was chosen because, according to Commander Kempster, “we wanted our international guests to appreciate how beautiful New Zealand is. It’s got everything we need – Timaru has a really good port, infrastructure and Tekapo has the training areas up the valley. It’s an area where the people are very supportive of the Defence Force”, Kempster told the Oamaru Mail.

The C-130’s, along with two Boeing C17 Globemasters, will provide troop mobility and airlift “hardware”. Because C130 Hercules can be equipped with surveillance gathering technology, Exercise Southern Katipo seems to be a means to extend the web of the StratCom’s surveillance reach. StratCom’s base at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska integrates into an entire global network the strike capability of the nine regional combatant commands, including U.S. Pacific Command (or PACOM). Based in Oahu, Hawaii, PACOM not only oversees the Pacific. Its watch includes China, India and the rest of South East Asia.

Dr Strangeadmire or: How the Media Learned to Stop Investigating and Admire the Empire

It is also curious that this joint military exercise between nine other countries has received hardly any media coverage, despite the fact that it is the largest ever multi-force exercise in New Zealand, with over 2500 soldiers, sailors and airmen, 20 aircraft including 10 helicopters, three ships and five NZ civil agencies.

Much of the miniscule media coverage to date is unintentionally peppered with gems that could easily be cut-and-pasted into the satirical online New Zealand news-site, The Civilian, without much of a twist.

On November 11, The Timaru Herald reported in an article headlined, “Troops liberate Mainlandia”, that “[t]he enemy is based in Waimate, with a small pocket of baddies in Cave.”

In the New Zealand Herald’s first report of Southern Katipo 2013, published on the evening of November 11, it quoted Commander of the coalition forces Colonel John Howard saying that local farmers were playing the “bad guy”. Howard had stuck to the NZ Defence Force’s talking points earlier in the day in an interview for Maori Television’s Te Kaea news, when he stated the exercise would test the capability of NZ’s Defence Forces to work with its “coalition partners”.

In his interview with The New Zealand Herald, Howard successfully downplayed the presence of forces and “assets” from the world’s global military empire, the United States of America. Howard enthused that the war game was just “role playing, like kids do in the backyard at weekends, only a little bigger.”

Southern Katipo’s chief of staff Commander Peter Kempster was also ready with bite-sized folksy analogies fit for print news audiences with a reading age of 12. Those with stunted mental and emotional development hinder themselves from wanting to seek out books, article and documentaries that critique why exactly the world is still at war 95 years after the end of ‘the war to end all wars’, such as the documentary Why We Fight, by Eugene Jarecki. Kempster helpfully explained to the Oamaru Mail on November 7 that the military exercise is “a bit like a treasure hunt, they go from place to place getting information and intelligence.”

Commander Kempster, who sounded more like an interim political governor puppet appointed by George W. Bush’s regime, added positively, “The people of Mainlandia have welcomed us as liberators. We’ve been treated to some great southern hospitality.”

Kempster evidently missed the news that even war propaganda can seriously backfire sometimes, especially when the world subsequently learns that the reasons used to promote an invasion turn out to be proven as lies, as Eugene Jarecki deftly shows in his documentary, Why We Fight.

Then there are the reports published by wire-feed news services ForeignAffairs.co.nz and LiveNews.co.nz on November 7 2013 that relayed a media release from the NZ Defence Force. The media release extensively quotes Southern Katipo’s Chief of Joint Operations, a Lieutenant General with a name that would surely give the Bekaran baddies a foreboding feeling if the ridiculous war game script were taken to the nth degree. Lieutenant General Ash Power stated that the war exercise, “allows us to train together to maximize interoperability for regional operations.”

Such operations would help the so-called “League of Pacific Nations” overcome a real world military commander, such as Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama who has ruled Fiji since 2006. The countries training together in Southern Katipo have been referred to as a “League of Pacific Nations” in the two wire news services that relayed the New Zealand Defence Force media release (as mentioned earlier).

Partnering with terrorist states: The French and American Connections

Evidently, for a good invasion with some surprises, you need some US and French generals too, who are part of a top brass contingent attending Exercise Southern Katipo.

But, what’s missing from the NZ Defence Force’s press release titled, “10-Nation War Games Test NZDF’s Core Skills” and its YouTube video imaginatively titled “Trailer: Exercise Southern Katipo”, are any acknowledgements that the French government conducted an act of terrorism in New Zealand waters on July 10, 1985.

Two French saboteurs, Jacques Camurier and Alain Tonel, who were among 13 secret agents sent to New Zealand, attached two bombs to Greenpeace’s Pacific Ocean flagship, the Rainbow Warrior.

The two French secret agents, travelled two kilometres in a Zodiac inflatable dinghy from Mechanics Bay to Marsden Wharf in Auckland’s Waitemata Harbour, where the Rainbow Warrior was berthed. On board was the payload of two limpet mines.

In the aftermath, the New Zealand government capitulated to the terror-sponsoring French state when, in July 1986, prime minister David Lange released the only two apprehended French DGSE (Secret Service) agents, Captain Dominique Prieur and Major Alain Mafart, for their part in the Rainbow Warrior bomb plot. Under French coercion, the two terrorists were sent to Hao Atoll, a French military base in French Polynesia to finish out their sentences, and were released within two years.

The Lange government’s capitulation to coercion from France’s government, and the United Nation’s lack of resolve to pursue justice with the French state and its spy apparatus meant, in effect, that the world community tacitly endorsed state-sponsored terrorism.

It was, therefore, truly ironic that New Zealand’s hard-fought stance against nuclear terror, that provoked prime minister David Lange to ban nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed vessels from New Zealand waters in 1984, resulted in the buying-out of its government with a ‘compensation’ sum of $13 million for the French state’s terrorist attack. In essence, this face-saving exercise for the Lange Labour government amounted to furtherance of conspiracy, since the core of the criminal French group responsible for Operation Satanique (Satanic) were left at-large.

Also missing from the NZ Defence Force’s media release and YouTube video is an acknowledgement of the implausibility of the United States government’s version of the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11 2001.

Numerous scholars, journalists and professionals contest the official 9/11 terrorism narrative. Their investigations vary according to expertise, such as technical studies of: the near-free fall speed collapses of the three towers that imploded at the World Trade Centre; tracking the four hijacked flights; and presenting the more likely suspects.

Among this group of 9/11 investigators, are individuals such as Kevin Ryan, Ian Henshall, Rowland Morgan, Mike Ruppert and Webster Tarpley, who posit that ‘deep state criminal actors’ occupied key leadership, technical and planning positions within the United States corporate world and state apparatus, and orchestrated the terrorism of September 11, 2001. Furthermore, author of 9/11 Synthetic Terror Webster Tarpley, has found that there were up to 46 terror drills and war games that occurred on September 11 2001. These exercises provided the necessary cover for criminal actors within the state-corporate nexus to make the terror drills and war games go live.

In other words, this citizen’s initiated 9/11 investigation presents evidence that is much more credible than the success attributed to the box-cutter-totting patsies that are alleged to have taken over four air-liners.

Because every state in the world failed in its duty to test the official 9/11 story, the Bush regime was able to launch a ‘Global War on Terror’.

Yet, it needs to be remembered that when the mainstream media could no longer ignore the Bush regime’s justifications for America’s second War on Iraq were false, major news outlets everywhere, however, also failed to seriously question whether the reasons for the broader war – the Global War of Terror – were also false.

Cheesily narrated Hollywood movie trailer and a twist ending

In a world where … terrorists in caves in Afghanistan with satellite phones, swizzy laptops, and poor quality video cameras orchestrated the 9/11 attacks; where the news media can be relied on to repeat childish analogies about the systematic planning of permanent war in their own metaphorical back yard; and where democratically unelected bad governments won’t take a hike, America’s Spidery Empire has a mission to bomb the world into … Freedom. One exercise will prepare these Liberating War-fighters for the task of keeping the South West Pacific Ocean free, on our permanent watch, of military leaders that we can’t dictate our democratic values to: Exercise Southern Katipo.

It must be hard for the world’s military rank and file to question the validity of the scenarios being scripted. After all, Exercise Southern Katipo lacks a historically-grounded back-story and New Zealand’s news media merely rely on: the Global Military Propaganda-Media Complex’s news stories, movies like Pearl Harbor, History Channel’s battle-focused documentaries and their dad’s and granddad’s sanitized coffee table books on war battles to inform them.

Reading the mediocre media coverage on Exercise Southern Katipo, thus far, provokes us all in the Snoopman News room to wonder if the French are supplying any Zodiacs, or if the Americans brought any box-cutters?

Since the NZ Defence Force are a coalition partner now, we also wonder if the Atlantic French and the USA Americans representing their respective empires will symbolically signal the phenomena known as false flag operations. False flag operations can involve fictional scenarios such as war games and terror drills, or their spin-offs that go live intentionally. The goal is a propagandist one, wherein an enemy can be blamed for a military attack or other act of terror.

Maybe the echelon of the NZ Defence Force has already signaled this to advance the game, given that the katipo spider is poisonous, hides in driftwood and beach grass and the colouration varies with latitude.

By day, Snoopman works undercover as an ordinary mortal, editing news at a television station. By night, Snoopman researches the wicked deeds of the economically, politically, militarily and religiously powerful, and does everything at Snoopman News.

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