HERO BEAT: TURNING A BLIND EYE ON THE BAGA MASSACRES

Between January 3^rd and January 7^th of 2015, the Jihadists known as Boko Haram tore through the Nigerian state of Borno. They overran the Multinational Joint Taskforce military base, and massacred over 2000 people in the town of Baga before Heroes without Borders managed to stop their rampage. While Heroes without Borders have never shied away from controversy in the pursuit of upholding human rights, earning them official condemnation from Russia, China, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia among others, this was the first time that HWB’s leader, N’Kondi, spoke before the United Nations about the tragedy. At the 70th Annual General Assembly in New York, she went into unflinching detail about the bloody fighting that included Boko Haram forcing children to wear suicide vests, but she didn’t stop there. She went on to condemn private precognitive firms as being as guilty of murdering the citizens of Baga as the Jihadists who committed the massacre.

“It is the continued privatization of actionable intelligence that has put a price tag on human life, or worse, undervalued it as completely worthless … Had prognostication firms like Sight Unseen or Watchtower Vigilance or Al’Fa Zreniye made public the findings of their visions and clairvoyant probes, they could have saved many innocent lives … But because there wasn’t profit in saving the lives of 2,000 Nigerians, these innocent men, women, and children were left to be butchered.”

Before N’Kondi’s speech, the general public knew little about the shadowy world of private precog firms, firms that used state-sanctioned psychics for the U.S., Russian, and Chinese governments. While the Supreme Court battle continues to rage over whether psychics can be admitted as remote witnesses, N’Kondi’s condemnation exposed the loophole and gray areas that allowed private intelligence services to emerge. It has also raised an even more heated debate over whether psychics can be held accountable for what they see and do not report.

It is that accusation that brings us to the tree-lined avenue in Washington, DC. If you’re driving down New Hampshire Ave NW,  heading southwest off DuPont Square, it’d be easy to miss the five-story building hidden behind the row of holly trees. The steel and reflective glass building houses a number of businesses, but none so intriguing as the secretive Watchtower Vigilance, one of the firms named by N’Kondi as culpable in the massacre.

Watchtower Vigilance is one of several international firms that offer its clients psychic services and protection. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry, and the price tag for their services are often steep. Their clients are a veritable who’s who of Fortune 500 CEOs, Federal agencies including the NSA, FBI, and Secret Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and various DAARPA think-tanks looking to protect themselves from foreign spies. If it sounds paranoid, it’s because Russia, China, and even France run so-called Deep Dive Units that employ metas with mental powers to spy on behalf of state-friendly companies. Forget the good old days when Cold War spies stole military secrets. Todays spies are after intellectual property and corning the market on inventions, capitalizing on mergers and acquisitions, gleaning formulas from biopharma and communication giants. You name it… if it’s a fortune maker, it’s up for grabs.

So how does one even start protecting a company against a clairvoyant’s attempt to read your computer screens, from telepaths plucking ideas from your heads, from precogs reverse engineering the visions they receive. Many of these precog firms start with the basics of teaching the companies how to protect themselves. They offer psychic conditioning classes and seminars, training clients how to recognize the telltale signs of mental intrusion, what the industry refers to as “the tickles,” and how to resist them. There is also a good deal of hard science involved. Reflective glass to block line-of-sight psychics, Faraday Cages to block electromagnetic psychics, and copper, steel, and zinc plating to mask against remote viewing. These aren’t even the top of the line solutions and many companies contract meta-inventors to develop cutting edge psychic intrusion countermeasures.

For these firms, it’s a competitive field and its stars draw seven-digit salaries. They’re rockstars in their profession, and it’s hardly surprising that for an industry that relies on learning information and blocking its theft, that intelligence costs. Is it fair, however?

“No,” David Karvanski, founder of Watchtower Vigilance says. “It’s not fair and it’s never going to be fair. If N’Kondi and Heroes without Borders want to paint on costumes and fight crime, let them. I’m not stopping them. But what I do is well above their paygrade and who I tell is way above their clearance. I don’t owe them an explanation.”

Mr. Karvanski’s blunt approach is legendary among those in his field, but few can argue with the results or his argument. Many companies reputedly do their due diligence by reporting what the industry calls lynchpin or “absolute” events to the proper authorities, but alerting foreign governments becomes a political quagmire when the State Department gets involved. Suddenly, lynchpin events can become about leveraging political favor, or withholding it. And the blowback can be even more difficult to manage. Before the Beslan School Hostage Crisis in 2004, the now defunct Paris firm Priorité Un, tried to warn the Russian Federation of an attack. They claim they were ignored and the Russians claimed there was no actionable intel. When Chechen separatists took 1,200 people hostage in the town of Beslan, murdering 334 civilians including 186 school children, the Russian Federation blamed Priorité Un, saying the precogs actually confused the situation and sent investigators in the wrong direction. The resulting blowback eventually closed Priorité Un’s offices for good when they lost the backing of the French government.

Then, of course, there’s always the danger that warning people about a crisis can cause it to evaporate, and rare is the time when a company can prove it was a threat in the first place. So, the question arises… are these companies actually trying to protect their own credibility by reporting on specific events? Are they reporting directly to the State Department and staying clear of political discourse? Are they too afraid to report on foreign events because the information isn’t clear cut? Are they merely as selfish and self-serving as N’Kondi claims? Or is it, like most things in life, a combination of all factors?

Unfortunately, there is another, more tantalizing explanation for why precog firms don’t offer information for free, one that is so far relegated to rumor and insider urban legend. I was having dinner with a source a short time ago and he related a story under the promise of anonymity. It was a story partially told by superpowered vets when it’s late at night and the whiskey bottle comes out. The story concerns the botched hunt for Bangarang, a costly manhunt for the dangerous and unhinged killer that involved a joint task force of FBI and Homeland agents as well as NYPD’s Armored Mobile Police exosquad, and trusted graduates of the War College. That part was a matter of public record, but the bit that my contact shared was new to me and has since been verified through other sources.

It concerned the psychic game of chess involved in trying to corner Bangarang. Precog firms had been hired to find and track Bangarang (an elusive meta who could turn invisible) only to discover that their target was in fact psychic as well. Every time precogs tried to predict his next course of action, he managed to evaporate in one potential future and went down a different path. When clairvoyants and telepaths tried to tag and follow him, he vanished from their mental scans and reappeared miles away in the blink of an eye. It’s for that reason Bangarang is listed as either a Baker or Alpha class meta, and why he has a list of presumed powers including precognition and teleportation… two powers that he’s never publicly exhibited.

Bangarang brings up the interesting possibility why psychics don’t report on certain events; it’s because there are mentats on both sides of equation, each contributing to an uncertain future where events become harder and harder to predict because both sides are playing chess and every move creates a new board in its wake.

Does any of this matter to the surviving family members of the Baga massacre victims? Probably not, but then did the Baga Massacre ever register as a lynchpin event, or was it the victim of corporate greed and, as N’Kondi put it, the privatization of actionable intelligence? Unfortunately, like many secrets of the precognitive industry, the truth may remain lost in the shadows.