ATS History: COINTELPRO and "WhispersInTheDark", page 2

Originally posted by Shoktek
So, is ATS cointelpro or not?

And, whatever happened to Colonel? That guy was entertaining to say the least..

Ahhhhhhhhh, Colonel. He got banned, but for entirely different reasons. I miss him too.

How I remember the insuing chaos from WITD. I had been gone from the board for a a while and returned two days after all hell broke loose. I was very confused, then I began asking people about it. After listening to various people, I was definitely on the side of WITD being for real.

Dragon Rider was a good buddy of mine. I was sad to see him banned, and I feel it was somewhat my fault in some respects, because I sort of restarted the kindling that got him banned. I still feel bad about it.

As for WITD now, Ive pretty much forgotten about the whole incident. I remember his "prophecies" or what have you were on the 4th of August, 2003. Does anyone remember what happened in August of 2003, later in the month? If you were in the northeast, you should. That great blackout, where Boston, New York, and damn near all of New England and the Great Lakes lost power in the dead of summer. Needless to say, right on the heels of WITDs threads, there was MAJOR activity and speculation on the board about possible connections. That really piqued my interest in WITD. It was curious in its own right. I became VERY interested in him after that. But now, well, I am not convinced. For starters, nothing more has come of it. Second, now that I have a little bit more knowledge of some things geeky, I have come to understand that the old board was indeed easy to exploit if you knew something about administrative functions and a bit of script. These were things I was not aware of back then, though, so even I didnt believe SO's original explaination.

Dragonrider was not an idiot. He had his reasons for believing that WITD was legit. He had some friends in the military who were the ones who traced WITD IP number back to a DOD place in Virginia (Langley, maybe? I forgot). He also asked some very detailed questions of WITD and was convinced of his legitimacy. There were other factors.

Anyway, Dragonrider's issue was he did not believe that WITDs actions could have been the result of board exploits. He was not satisfied with William (SO)'s explaination. First, he believed that William had been intimidated and threatened by the FBI to keep his mouth shut. Then he became convinced that Skeptic was indeed working for them, as well as several other mods.

Then the thread one day was quietly deleted by admin, in hopes that now that the main fevor of WITD had died down, there was no point in keeping a known hoaxed thread around that was causing divisions and paranoia on the board. Thats where my blame comes in.

Dragonrider was a mod during this time. One night, I was going through a few threads and some offboard pages about 9/11 foreknowledge. I decided to have a look at the WITD thread again because I had remembered something curious in it. It was then I discovered it no longer was there. Dragonrider was a good friend of mine, and he was a mod and online at the time, and I u2ud him and asked him what happened. he was unaware it was deleted, and when he checked, he said that it was totally gone, so he went into Cosmic and began asking where it was. Thats what started his inevitible downfall and banning, because things began to get ugly from there. Accusations, suspicons, ect ect ect. Dragonrider would not let it rest, being how he was, and it eventually got out of hand. When Dragonrider was banned, there was a signifigant exodus of ATSers that went with him. Some voluntarily left in protest to DR's banning, others got banned because they began to get a bit beligerant or were starting their own campaigns of harrassment. One ATSer, Blade Runner, got banned, but he opened up an alternative site, The Shadow Confederacy, where alot of ATS exiles went. There was a bit of a war between the two boards for a while, too. It was VERY ugly.

In fact, it was the worst time in ATS history as far as I was concerned. We lost a huge chunk of our best posters, and it took a while before they were replaced with new blood, so I must admit, for a few months, I thought ATS really went downhill and sucked. But it survived and bounced back from the catastrophy, and here we are today.

I thought Id give this long, drawn out personal recollection in hopes that it might shed light on anything not covered so far. Weve moved well beyond WITD, and now we can bring his posts up again and wax in twisted nostalgia without fear of backlashs. There was a time, however, when it was basically forbidden to mention WITD at all, because of the massive trouble it stirred up.

And the whole "ATS is COINTELLIPRO" tripe has been around since I joined, and long before. Im sure there are government spooks and disinfo people on this board. Hell, Im sure they are on alot of boards. I just dont think the CIA or whoever is running this board.

If you are secure enough in the truth and wise enough to tell when someone is feeding you BS, then you have nothing to worry about from the government spooks. They can try and sell you their lies, but if you have really done your homework, youll know it for what it is.