In September, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Yaso Adiodi invited me to his home in the fashionable Fox Hall section of Washington DC. After being disarmed at the gates by bodyguards of the former Worldcom strongman, Bernard Ebbers, I was escorted blindfolded to Adiodi's mansion by several Kalashnikov toting employees of Wackenhut Security Services. There I was strip searched by Adiodi's butler, several maids, his wife and her bridge club, William Bennett who was staying in the guest house, and Adiodi's knife wielding chef. Then I was escorted to the great room to await my meeting with one of Western democracy's most illustrious journalistic lights. Out of the 25 foot windows of Adiodi's great room, through the trees to the right one can discern a beautiful home in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright owned by Manuel Noriega's former consiliare in Panama, the Mossad agent Mike Harari. On the left, beyond Adiodi's private 18 hole golf course, one catches a glimpse of the 30 room mansion occupied by Libyan Prime Minister Shukri Ghanem when he is in town to discuss the business of international oil with the likes of President Dick Cheney or Schwarzegger handler, George Schultz, CEO of Bechtel and former Secretary of State in the Bechtel administration of the 1980s. As my eyes drank in the tranquil beauty of Fox Hall, Adiodi appeared in a long royal blue robe which he flung aside to reveal gold silk bikini briefs barely concealing a package easily worthy of the Pulitzer Prize. We began our interview.
CP: Whom would you consider the most remarkable person you yourself have interviewed?
YA: Regis Philbin.
CP: Regis Philbin?
YA: Yes.
CP: Let me skip my next ten questions or so and begin-------here.
Media critic and defrocked Archbishop of Dublin, John Ahmad Foley, once remarked that "upon reading a piece by Yaso Adiodi, I laughed my wafer munchin' ass off, but then a couple of hours later, I felt like killing myself." I've heard your work described in these terms many times. To what do you attribute this?
YA: Heroin abuse among the Catholic clergy.
CP: Anything else?
YA: No.
CP: But what about your other critics, many of whom who are not Catholic clergy, yet also describe your work as a form 'terminal parody' or 'carcinogenic calumny.'
YA: Heroin abuse.
CP: But surely you're not saying that all of your critics are heroin abusers?
YA: Why not?
CP: Let me try a different tact.
As a print journalist, you have a long and checkered past. For instance, you claim to have been chief foreign correspondent for Karl Krauss's Die Fackel.
Then, its reported that you vanished for several months only to resurface as William Randolph Hearst's Havana stringer rabidly promoting War with Spain through fabricated dispatches.
Can you explain your abrupt ideological shift? How could you so precipitously abandon all your principles to become a cheerleader for, what now is understood by most historians as an unjust and avaricious, imperialist war?
YA: Money.
CP: 'Scuse me?
YA: Money.
CP: Are you saying....?
YA: I mean, I didn't plant the bomb on the Maine but Hearst said come and smell the sulfur. And you know what that means?
CP: No. What?
YA: MONEY!
CP: So far all we've talked about is money and heroin.
YA: What's your point? In our phone conversation, you said you wanted to focus on U.S. foreign policy. Drugs and money. I think we've about covered it.
CP: Hmmm. Whom would you consider the ideal Ass. Press reader?
YA: The ideal Ass. Press reader is somebody who knows a little sumpin' sumpin'. Not some moron who comes up with a phrase 'sumpin',' 'sumpin'' which confirms he knows 'nothin' 'nothin' and especially not the rubes who repeat such bullshit. But folks that try to learn what it's like to be on the wrong end of the Uncle Sam's big economic gun.
Most criticism of Ass. Press comes from idiots and liberals who know nothing about the persons, places and things; the when, where, and why that inform our pieces. Amiram Nir Who? Donald Gregg Who? 'Pops' Buell Who? Adnan Kashoggi Who? And they don't understand that a Kissinger or a Helms would pull the trigger if they didn't have so many proxies to do it for them.
CP: Why's that?
YA: Why's that? 'Cause people don't know their own fuckin' history even as its committed in their name. Especially, them post-modern, pop hillbillies.
CP: Yet, people who are involved in the felonious activities which you relate don't pay a mite's fart to Ass. Press.
YA: 'Cause we ain't all that. In that regard, we're like poetry except them folks, the liberals, the poets, the Miss Manners of Murder, just think we're rude.
I have this recurring dream....
CP: Go on.
YA: I'm in a big heart shaped bed with Gordon Liddy. The room is small with bars on the tiny window but we've obviously had a splendid meal and enjoyed a night of thrilling sex without a word spoken between us. There are empty champagne bottles everywhere. I snuggle with Gordon and realize I have to take a leak. I fling off the sheets and feel something wet.
CP: Blood?
YA: No.
CP: Oil?
YA: No.
CP: Coffee.
YA: No. Dr. Pepper.
CP: I don't understand.
YA: It's a dream, silly. What's to understand? It's just a wonderful dream.
CP: Well then. How did The Assassinated Press come about?
YA: You read it?
CP: No.
YA: You little jive ass motherfucker. You don't read Ass. Press?
CP: I've tried.
YA: Tried! I have half a mind to come over there and try my foot up your ass. At this rate you'll never win a Pulitzer like me. You gotta learn to suck dick no matter what kind of Gordon Liddy obsessed dreams it gives you.
CP: Can we just try and get through this? How did this aberration called Ass. Press come about?
YA: Are you familiar with the name George White aka Morgan Hall?
CP: Yeah, sure. George White was an associate of CIA contract agent Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. White rented two row houses in Greenwich Village in the fifties posing as the artist, Morgan Hall. Then he and Gottlieb slipped hallucinogenic mickies to unsuspecting visitors as part of the CIA's MKULTRA program. They wanted to determine whether drugs such as LSD had any value as a so-called 'truth serum.'
YA: That's right sort of. Not row houses but apartments. But what's generally not known is that Gottlieb set up surveillance equipment, microphones, tape recorders and film cameras to record the sessions.
Its not known what happened to these recordings but a young agent on loan from the AFI(Air Force Intelligence) was given the day to day responsibility of monitoring the Greenwich Village mind control experiments. We only know him by his initials, J.B.
At that time the CIA's Gottlieb was into a million different things and they all didn't involve drugs.
For a time, he was performing reconstructive surgery on Korean War vets.
But instead of using the adhesives normally used to fuse facial bone fragments, he used an early form of C-4 plastic explosive.
He then rigged contacts in the victim's thyroid that he could trigger by remote control.
The vet could be playing with his kids or waxing his car and BOOM! His head would atomize. Others were wired up to blow during sex.
A tiny contact was implanted sending an electrical discharge with a specific energy quotient down the spinal cord into the penis and back. When the transmission cycled at a rate exceeding 4 billion millirems suggesting male orgasm, the plastique detonated.
Richard Helms and Gottlieb used to refer to this as a 'double header' or 'extreme spooge.'
CP: Yes, this is all very interesting but..."
YA: I feel like cuttin' you, you little motherfucker. Don't you want to know what happened to White and Gottlieb's recordings?
CP: OK. Sure.
YA: When Dr. Gottlieb died in 1999, his kids weren't interested in his shit. So his wife had a garage sale. Apparently, a grey haired man in his e
arly sixties purchased several boxes on which Dr. Gottlieb had scribbled. CIA-CD-TSS.
Its now thought that that man who bought the tapes and film was the notorious AFI agent on loan to White and Gottlieb in the fifties. Shortly after that The Assassinated Press made its debut.
CP: You mean the mysterious J.B.
YA: Yes.
CP: So what you're saying is, this J.B. who was responsible for monitoring the recording apparatus for White and Gottlieb's experiments went to the trouble of buying the recordings after Dr. Gottlieb's death. Why?
YA: Apparently J.B. spent most of his indenture under White and Gottlieb doing crossword puzzles and reading Lacan while the tape and film rolled.
But upon reflection and as information filtered out through FOIA requests and whatnot, he began to realize the potential in Gottlieb's research.
Its believed, and I'll tell you why I think this true in a moment, that J.B. after careful review of the recordings he supervised almost three decades earlier discovered a methodology for decoding lies. A method that eluded Gottlieb who thought the answer was in LSD, heroin, shrooms etc.
CP: A psychological Enigma machine! Hence, The Assassinated Press?
YA: You betcha.
CP: How does this relate to the Dalai Lama's comment that "Ass. Press's finds truth in its simplicity and quietude?"
YA: With all respect to the Dalai Lama like any power broker, he has an agenda of his own. What he says about Ass. Press is true only in the most egocentric, self-serving sense.
CP: How So?
YA: The Dalai Lama is imagining an ideal, absolutist Ass. Press.
This would begin with an article, say in the New York Times, consisting of an infinite number of words that told an infinite series of untruths which on first hearing doesn't sound entirely implausible. How could one counter this in an Ass. Press, which is forced to confront the lies in the Times article in a finite, mortal universe? The Dalai Lama's approach is ineffectual and impractical.
It may seem that the proxy lies told by the mainstream media are infinite but they are simply legion, ubiquitous.
For a person in my position that doesn't believe he'll come back as a wombat if he lives a good life must rely on the merely 'elegant.'
CP: Do you feel you are living a good life?
YA: Fuck no! The ideal, if it can be called that, that we strive for in an Ass. Press piece is one whereby the substitution of a single word, one letter, one diacritical mark, one piece of punctuation would rearrange all the lies in the NYT. And by this mental anagram a set of truths, historical and otherwise, produce an epiphany, a clarity and the kind of joy we at Ass. Press are always eager to share with our readers.
The Dalai Lama, as he has stated publicly on a number of occasions, feels that the ideal Ass. Press piece would change nothing from, say, an original Times piece and this inaction reveals the truth. To my mind, this reminds me of the quantum axiom that says if you hurl yourself into a stone wall an infinite number of times sooner or later, but most certainly later. You'll pass right through the wall and fall on your ass on the other side. Buddhism and quantum. What a couple of mothaloads of crap.
CP: Apropo of quantum, let's talk about the controversial dissertation that you wrote in 1954. Would you list for our readers the members of your dissertation committee?
YA: Yes. Edward Teller, William Shockley, Joseph Mengele, John von Neumann and Werner von Braun.
CP: And what was the topic of your paper?
YA: I established for time immemorial statistico/mathematico/quantificational criteria for journalism that were as objective, universal, immaculate and infallible as those in the hard sciences.
CP: Hmmm.
YA: These principles that I laid out as a young, tanned, buff Ph.D. candidate are universally accepted today and form the foundation for the entire journalistic enterprise.
CP: So you feel today's journalism is as objective as any science? How does this square with the mystical quest for truth in Ass. Press.
YA: It fits perfectly as long as you realize that the pursuit of 'objectivity', the epistemology of the 'object' in both the hard sciences and journalism is a load of crap. When news men and women follow the principles I've laid out, as they inevitably do, they never fail to report the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help them Edward R. Murrow, but only as 'truth' is recognized as borrowed from the sciences.
CP: Could you sum up your technique for us?
YA: In layman's terms, the overriding principle of my technique is whatever the lies are that the powers that be are hustling, the situation is always infinitely worse. This can be confirmed by taking the number of murders, for example, and multiplying by a hundred thousand. The number of lost jobs and multiplying by a million. Or the amount of money being stolen by the elites and multiplying by a billion. For example, call Lies L and murders M. Your solution can then be derived from L x M(exponent100,000). Therefore, if you count 1000 lies in an article by the Washington Post, say on how much money Dick Cheney, Halliburton and their cronies expect to make off the rape of Iraq, mathematically it would look like this:
1000L x x$ (where the x stands for publicly stated total backsheesh) to the exponent 1 billion
and you get your figure. In this instance, it is 36 trillion dollars. Cheney, Halliburton and their handlers stand to make $36 trillion dollars.
CP: Hmmm. Interesting. But what about time? For instance, if Cheney and the kleptocracy stand to make $36 trillion over say a 10 year period, that's not so bad. That's only $3.6 trillion a year.
YA: Like the sciences, I developed methods in my dissertation for quantifying time. The formulae are simply too complicated for the FlashPoint audience. They're mostly liberals? Right?
The readers can rest assured that with my method just as in the sciences, if need be, a good journalist can move backward as well as forward in time. And as in the sciences such time travel is accepted as 'real' because my mathematical formulae have never been shown to be wrong except in actual practice.
CP: How did your method aid you as a young cub reporter in Southeast Asia?
YA: Oh, all anyone had to do was run the numbers on Ho Chih Minh to see he was a bad guy. MACV let me use their computers. I really enjoyed the air conditioning. And Robert McNamara, of course, had demonstrated to a mathematical certainty that if every man, woman and child in Vietnam were killed 100 times over, the U.S. would win the war. The numbers don't lie.
CP: So you had Uncle Ho pinned from the start?
YA: Yes, he did very poorly when I ran the 6 variables that determine virtue in all human beings through my phreno-logical quadratics. I think, he might have suffered brain damage when U.S. Marines shoved him down the steps at the League of Nations in 1919. He wanted America to help Vietnam shake free of their enslavement to the French. He even proposed adopting the U.S. Constitution for a free Vietnam. Lucky we didn't fall for that one.
CP: Well, you seem to contradict yourself on several key points.
YA: So? In the immortal words of that great huckster of American letters, Walt Whitman, let me say, "If I contradict myself, then I contradict myself."
CP: Brilliant. You and some of your colleagues at Ass. Press most notably Jeffey Lube, Rubbert Merdeduck and John Lumpylip have been accused of diluting the efficacy of the Ass. Press method, its code, by introducing hundreds of historical and cultural asides in your pieces.
How do you answer your critics?
YA: Bite me.
CP: Thank you, Doctor Adiodi.
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