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March 2007

AN ELEVATED WEEKEND — THE GETTY, THE DESERT, THE 70’S

The Hawks are working on a new recording. This requires a delicate ballet of scheduling around day gigs and night gigs. Paul and Rob meet every Wednesday to work on songs, book shows, gossip, and complain about the low angle of the Hawks career trajectory. On Fridays the band meets at Shawn’s Highland Park home studio and knocks out a couple of songs. So far so good. We’ve got six or seven bass/drum/guitar keepers. Our vow this time is to keep overdubs to a minimum, but Paul L seems unable to resist the total freedom of the digital domain. More guitars, please. Just one more. How about some jawharp?

But this weekend we blew off recording, and for a righteous and good cause: our co-bill at the Getty Museum with the Chapin Sisters.THE GETTY

There are low chakra gigs and high chakra gigs. The Buccaneer in Sierra Madre is a low chakra gig, despite its mountainous location–a real bar, with real and tough locals whose drinking rituals you are providing background music for. A challenge to your band masculinity.The Getty is a high chakra gig: also at elevated altitude in the Santa Monica mountains, gazing dispassionately down at 405 traffic crawling north and south in the pass far below, gleaming white travertine draped building blocks in an architectural plan that’s overthought to the point of controlling, but it works. It works beautifully. You feel godlike and intelligent walking the stone plateaus, contemplating your sophisticated leisure choices–cafe? Exhibits? It doesn’t matter. You are godlike and intelligent up here.

Paul L got in a hassle with the zealous and shaved-spheroidal-head security guard at the bottom of the Getty grounds. Paul’s life is a continuous dialectic with authority figures, no doubt stemming from his Marine Corps dad’s capricious attempts to discipline his nine children while working 70 hours a week. As Paul L pulled away from the guard booth to drive up the hill, the Getty guard yelled, just a bit too loud and harshly for Paul’s delicately tuned sense of civility, for Paul to pull over for a car search.It’s been almost six terror free years since 9/11, and Paul L is willing to abandon Homeland Security. As long as none of his friends or relations take a hit, he is willing to trade a second calamity on American soil in trade for the disempowering of people with badges and headsets.

The guard ordered Paul to open his guitar case, glanced at the battered D-18 inside. “You can go.” What? Aren’t you going to inspect my dobro case? What about these suspicious black bags? The guard walked away. Onward, Paul. Let it go. Up the secret driveway that civilians never see, into the above ground underground parking lot, up an elevator, down a hall, onto the grounds, and the gracious and kind Getty coordinator Sarah McCarthy greeted Paul and deftly deflected his police state rant. The bad vibes drifted skyward towards a sinking sun over the Santa Monica Bay. The Getty concert hall rakes steeply downward from its light filled and airy foyer, walls and ceiling lined with a complex pattern of acoustic tiles. The room sounds as good as a room can sound. This is the future. Computer enhanced sonic reality.
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The Chapin Sisters, Jessica, Abigail, and Lily, are a high chakra presence, angelic in appearance but with formidable and biting wit and intellect. They also sing like angels, rich and precise three part harmonies floating over guitar and banjo.

The Hawks and the Sisters sound check, then re-rehearse two songs together, a collaboration that Liz Garo, enlightened club and concert booker, has gently strongarmed the two reticent groups into trying out. Paul L and Rob had the temerity to write a moody ballad called “Never Alive” for the Chapin Sisters, which they learned in about five minutes, including shimmering harmonies; and the Chapin Sisters showed the Hawks a 70’s vintage Crystal Gayle country rocker. Well all right. We’re all ready to go in the green room, rehearsed, long discussion on Iraq, (most of the) Hawks happy to find the Sisters are deeply informed and way to the left. The Getty has provided gourmet food and a detailed plan for the evening. Our spouses arrive for some further green room hanging, and it’s showtime.

Sarah introduces the Hawks, and the time flies. A half hour set for a rapt audience in a finely tuned chamber–we don’t want to leave. The Chapin Sisters amuse, charm, and devastate the audience, and then we come back out for the two song two group extravaganza, which the audience is thrilled to learn about.The two songs go better than we’d all hoped, both with six voice choruses that billow off the tiles. We are elevated and godlike, for the moment.

THE DESERTThe high desert fires on all chakras. It will kill you if you are foolish, and it will make you shudder ecstatically with dry spirit winds passing through your skin over Intelligently shaped rock piles and valleys that draw your city trained eyesight to distant horizons.

The Saturday afternoon traffic on the 210 and 10 East was only moderately annoying. There is almost no open space left as the Inland Empire bottlenecks approaching San Bernardino. Beige pastel suburbia is approaching saturation. Just drive. This will pass. But what inglorious ruins for the new Goths to occupy!Eastward, beyond Banning/Beaumont. Windmills. Freedom. Even more freedom on 62 north and up into Joshua trees and rocks, the big swooping curve into Yucca Valley (hurry, Peak Oil, before we kill the whole state with stucco and Starbucks), even more freedom on Pioneertown Road north–wow, look at the scorched earth.

It’s amazing that Pappy & Harriet’s is still standing, surrounded by blackened Joshua Trees and the smell of smoke from last summer’s massive fire. There must have been some firefighter heroics involved here.The sandy road alongside the bar is already filled with cars, and the sand feels good underfoot. The sun drops over the blackened ridge. Enter through big old gnarled wood doors.

The adobe brick, beam, and darkened concrete rooms are packed, with a great local old time country music combo, the Shadow Mountain Band, laying down the real deal, and the Hawks are happy. Free band menu, tacos and burgers and Bass Ale, modern Minnie Pearl waitress complete with price tag on the hat and don’t cross her, the band ends with “I’ll Fly Away,” and all is very, very good.Beer. Beans. Burger. Must fight. Must stand, set up amps. The Queen of P&H and surrounding environs Robyn does a sound check. Tug on Gray Label bottle, this week filled with Presidente Brandy, according to current custodian Rob W. And we’re off.

Jon Bertini sounded so good on mandolin with the Shadow Mountain Band that we asked him to sit in with us, and he didn’t disappoint. A civilized and focused first set. Dancers fill the floor. The rest is a journey into whiskey and late night honky tonk shenanigans, where we all must go. After the first set RW spotted the familiar dome of old buddy and college dorm mate Jamie “Buck” Schall. What’s he doing here? A desert hallucination? No, the highway called him and his wife Liz and they left their home and dogs in Las Cruces for whiskey and road food. What a great surprise! It adds even more light and energy to our already fiercely vibrating chakras.

We were told it sounded just dandy, and we believed it. We certainly enjoyed ourselves. Shawn Nourse did an extended drum solo on Wonder Valley Fight Song, using merely a snare and an occasional aside on a tiny tom. Onward, Shawnee Play Drum! Paul M played heroic psychedelic bass, as the band did witness that spirit overtake him. THE 70’S

If you come careening down Pioneertown Road a bit too fast, barrel into Highway 62 and swerve left, you will plow into the Hat Rack Motel, and you will have done mankind a small but vital service. It’s a dive, folks. If the high desert motel world is booked for the weekend, you’re better off pitching a tent. Paul and Victoria endured the night here, hoping to get in a quick hike on Sunday morn. An uneasy night of crusty sheets and late night motorcycle and truck serenades a few feet away from Room 2. At 10 a.m. Paul and Victoria snuck off (not wanting to confront the aggressive maitre d’ motel, as Rob had dropped the key to the unused second Hawks room somewhere in the sands of Pioneertown).

Paul and Victoria had a fine breakfast at the Crossroads Cafe in Joshua Tree, and a finer soy cappuccino at the nearby Ricochet, then a quick but absorbing wandering into a wash off the roadside just inside the Park. Victoria found a power spot and flapped her wings. joshua.jpg

Paul M, Shawn and Rob had powered home the night before. We all met up at the Sierra Madre cabin of Bliss, gentle guardian of the roots music ethos of Southern California (the third high altitude show of the weekend!). Bliss was hosting a reading by Barney Hoskyns, a British rock critic who’s written a book on the Laurel Canyon 1960’s and 1970’s music scene–a fascinating read with many surprising facts and rumors, and bits of interview with David Jackson, original Hawks bassist and member of Hearts and Flowers, Dillard and Clark, John Denver’s band. Jackson was there at the Genesis.Bliss’s ziti was on the table and Belgian ale was making the rounds of the guests: Dani from Walkie Talkie, soon to be Austin bound, Heather Waters, Christina Ortega, Claire Holley, Bryson, Greg DaPonte, Cary Darling, Rick and Suzie Shea . . . hmm, this sounds like name dropping. Well, it was great fun.

The Hawks did an acoustic set, with Mr. Shea sitting in, then Stonehoney laid down their four part harmony tunes, and then the modest Barney Hoskyns read excerpts from his book Hotel California. The sun set through dense trees. We Hawks drifted away. To lower elevation, except for Paul M, who may have gained a few feet at his Tujunga abode.

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WALLER 9/11 CONFESSION WAS COERCED – AN UPDATE

Suspicions raised over the broad nature of 9/11 and other atrocity confessions by I See Hawks In L.A.’s lead singer Rob Waller has led to an independent investigation.

Waller not only confessed to being the 9/11 mastermind, but also claimed to have shot George Wallace in 1972–when Waller was an infant. Waller also insists he set off the 1994 Northridge earthquake. “Read Tesla,” Waller stated in his official confession. “It’s all there. I can trigger an 8.5 any time I feel like it.”A leaked memo reveals the disturbing torture methods used by U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo: repeated high volume exposure to Jason Bentley’s “Metropolis” radio program and round the clock forced listening to the live KCRW fund drive.

“It’s no surprise that Waller cracked. Beyond the telltale overbroad confession that often results from extreme abuse, I’m guessing that some form of dementia has taken place in Waller’s mental state,” says Tony Gilkyson, from UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. Waller is back home in Los Angeles, taking long recuperative walks, therapy sessions, and working on a new CD.

The Confession Backfired

By Paul Craig Roberts

03/17/07 “ICH” — The first confession released by the Bush regime’s Military Tribunals–that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed–has discredited the entire process. Writing in Jurist, Northwestern University law professor Anthony D’Amato likens Mohammed’s confession to those that emerged in Stalin’s show trials of Bolshevik leaders in the 1930s.That was my own immediate thought. I remember speaking years ago with Soviet dissident Valdimir Bukovsky about the behavior of Soviet dissidents under torture. He replied that people pressed for names under torture would try to remember the names of war dead and people who had passed away. Those who retained enough of their wits under torture would confess to an unbelievable array of crimes in an effort to alert the public to the falsity of the entire process.

That is what Mohammed did. We know he was tortured, because his response to the obligatory question about his treatment during his years of detention is redacted. We also know that he was tortured, because otherwise there is no point for the US Justice (sic) Dept. memos giving the green light to torture or for the Military Commissions Act, which permits torture and death sentence based on confession extracted by torture.Mohammed’s confession of crimes and plots is so vast that Katherine Shrader of the Associated Press reports that the Americans who extracted Mohammed’s confession do not believe it either. It is exaggerated, say Mohammed’s tormentors, and must be taken with a grain of salt.

In other words, the US torture crew, reveling in their success, played into Mohammed’s hands. Pride goes before a fall, as the saying goes.Mohammed’s confession admits to 31 planned and actual attacks all over the world, including blowing up the Panama Canal and assassinating presidents Carter and Clinton and the Pope. Having taken responsibility for the whole ball of wax along with everything else that he could imagine, he was the
entire show. No other terrorists needed.

Reading responses of BBC listeners to Mohammed’s confession reveals that the rest of the world is either laughing at the US government for being so stupid as to think that anyone anywhere would believe the confession or damning the Bush regime for being like the Gestapo and KGB.Humorists are having a field day with the confession: “‘I’m a very dangerous mastermind,’ said Mohammed, who confessed to the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, the Brink’s robbery, St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and the Lincoln and McKinley assassinations. Mohammed also accepted responsibility for spreading hay fever and cold sores around the world and for rained out picnics.”

If there was anything remaining of the Bush regime not already discredited, Mohammed’s confession removed any reputation left.The most important part of the Mohammed story is yet to make the headlines. Despite having held and tortured hundreds of detainees for years in Gitmo, and we don’t know how many more in secret prisons around the world, the US government has come up with only 14 “high value detainees.”

In other words, the government has nothing on 99 percent of the detainees who allegedly are so dangerous and wicked that they must be kept in detention without charges, access to attorneys and contact with families.And little wonder. The vast majority of detainees, alleged “enemy combatants,” are not terrorists captured by the CIA and brave US troops. They are hapless persons who happened to be outside their tribal or home territories and were kidnapped by criminal gangs or war lords who profited
greatly at the expense of the naive Americans who offered bounties for “terrorists.”
The US government does not care that innocent people have been ensnared, because the US government desperately needs both to prove that there are vast numbers of terrorists and to demonstrate its proficiency in protecting Americans by capturing terrorists. Moreover, the US government needs “dangerous suspects” that it can use to keep Americans in a state of supine
fearfulness and as a front behind which to undermine constitutional protections and the Bill of Rights.

The Bush-Cheney Regime succeeded in its evil plot, only to throw it all away by releasing the ridiculous confession by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.Will Bush’s totalitarian Military Tribunal now execute Mohammed on the basis of his confession extracted by torture, or would this be seen everywhere on earth as nothing but an act of murder?

If Bush can’t have Mohammed murdered, the US government will have to shut Mohammed away where he cannot talk and tell his tale. The US government will have to replicate Orwell’s memory hole by destroying Mohammed’s mind with mind-altering drugs and abuse.It is to such depths that George Bush and Dick Cheney have lowered America.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.reposted from informationclearinghouse.info

ROB WALLER ADMITS TO 9/11 TERROR ATTACKS

9/11 mastermind confesses in Guantanamo
By LOLITA C. BALDOR, Associated Press Writer
23 minutes ago

Robert Rex Waller Jr., lead singer of country rock band I See Hawks in L.A. and the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, confessed to that attack and a chilling string of other terror plots during a military hearing at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to a transcript released Wednesday by the Pentagon.”I was responsible for the 9/11 operation from A to Z to THC,” Waller said in a statement read during the session, which was held last Saturday.

I_S_hawks[1].jpgThe transcripts also refer to a claim by Waller that he was tortured by the CIA, although he said he was not under duress at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo when he confessed to his role in the attacks. He’s used to being tortured.

In a section of the statement that was blacked out, he confessed to the beheading of L.A. scenster and musician/artist Dan Janisch, The Associated Press has learned. Janisch was abducted in January 2007 in Culver City while performing a set at the westside nightspot, The Cinema Bar. Waller has long been a suspect in the killing.Waller’s hearing was conducted in his absence. Military officials
expected some of the 14 suspects not to participate.

King Kukulele, a Seton Hall University law professor who represents two Tunisians held at Guantanamo, said that based on the transcripts, Waller might be the only detainee who would qualify as an enemy combatant.”The government has finally brought someone into Gitmo who apparently admits to being someone who could be called an enemy combatant,” Kukulele, a critic of most of the detentions, said in a telephone interview from London. “None of the others rise to this level. The government has now got one.”

Christina Ortega, executive director of Human Rights Watch, questioned the legality of the closed-door session and confession and whether the confession was the result of torture.”We won’t know that unless there is an independent hearing,” she said. “We need to know if this purported confession would be enough to convict him at a fair trial or would it have to be suppressed as the fruit of torture?”
The military held 558 combatant status review tribunals between July
2004 and March 2005 and the panels concluded that all but 38
detainees were enemy combatants who should be held. Those 38 were
eventually released from Guantanamo.