An article in Sunday's UK Guardian newspaper tells the story of Observer reporter Farzad Bazoft, an Iranian who was hanged in Iraq as a spy 20 years ago by Saddam Hussein.

In penning the article, the author Donald Trelford, who was editor of the Observer when Bazoft was arrested, seeks to "remember a friend and colleague whose death served as a warning to the world about Saddam Hussein".

The official story goes like this:

In September 1989, Bazoft went to Iraq to cover elections in Kurdistan. On the day his press party arrived in Baghdad, a massive explosion occurred at a military complex in the city.

Farzad met the deputy foreign minister, Nizam Hamdoun, and asked to visit the site. He enlisted the help of Daphne Parish, a British nurse he had met on a previous visit. They went on successive days to take photographs and collect soil samples, though they always stayed on public roads.

While waiting for an Iraq Airways flight to London on the 15 September, he was picked up at Baghdad airport and taken for interrogation by Saddam Hussein's Mukhabarat secret police.

On November 1st, the Iraqis issued a tape showing him "confessing" to being a spy for Israel. Earlier the Iraqis had claimed he was spying for Britain. On March 15th 1990 he was hanged.

As a veteran journalist, it is appalling that Trelford is content to limit his analysis of the case of Bazoft to the official story. With the US and Israel winding up the world's press to prepare the public for the first Gulf "war", there was good reason to be suspicious of any reports that demonized Saddam in the 1989-1990 period. With everything we know now about how willing Western politicians are to fabricate rationale for war, it is nothing short of yellow journalism to hold fast to the official story. Worse still is the fact that a much more plausible account of the case of Farzad Bazoft, from a truly reliable source - ex-Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky - has been available to Trelford for 15 years.

Some days ago we received the following letter from a reader. We decided to publish it with a few observations of our own to illustrate the amount of disinformation the average seeker of truth needs to face.

© The Christian Science Monitor / Bennett

Reader: [...] I attended the Alternative Research Community (Arc) Convention at Bath over the weekend, and I'd like to make a brief report. It was simultaneously good to be talking to people who were looking for answers, but at the same time, for me, it was also depressing. It seems the level of discernment out there is just... low, to the point of non-existent. There are many who seem to be basically nice people, including the organisers, genuinely looking for a path to knowledge and trying to navigate all the information that floods the alternative scene, but it was really hard work dealing with the simply huge problem of both disinfo and naivete. It is like they live in a whole different imaginary universe. The road to hell is paved with good intentions indeed.

People just assume that because they are on the 'alternative' side, they have the Truth and it won't be taken from them. This is a pity because quite a few of them do seem sincere, but they are like sheep under the guidance of wolves. Listening to so much crap from some of the speakers - while others were just too superficial and speculative - and seeing how much is uncritically accepted by the audience made me want to go have a shower by the end.

Beginning immediately after World War II and continuing in the decades after the imposition of Soviet dictatorship on the countries of Eastern Europe, a group of scientists - primarily Polish, Czech, and Hungarian - secretly collaborated on a scientific study of the nature of totalitarianism. Blocked by the State Security Services from contact with the West, their work remained secret, even while American researchers like Hervey Cleckley and Gustave Gilbert were struggling with the same questions.¹ The last known living member of this group, a Polish psychologist and expert on psychopathy named Andrzej Łobaczewski (1921-2007), would eventually name their new science - a synthesis of psychological, psychiatric, sociological, and historical studies - "ponerology", a term he borrowed from the priests of the Benedictine Abbey in the historic Polish village of Tyniec. Derived from poneros in New Testament Greek, the word suggests an inborn evil with a corrupting influence, a fitting description of psychopathy and its social effects.

Most of what we know about this research comes from precious few sources. Łobaczewski's sole contact with the researchers was through Stefan Szuman (1889 - 1972), a retired professor who passed along anonymous summaries of research between members of the group. The consequences for being discovered doing this type of forbidden research were severe; scientists faced arrest, torture, and even death, so strict conspiracy amongst their little group was essential. They safeguarded themselves and their work by sharing their work anonymously. This way, if any were arrested and tortured, they could not reveal names and locations of others, a very real threat to their personal safety and the completion of the work. Łobaczewski only shared the names of two Polish professors of the previous generation who were involved in the early stages of the work - Stefan Błachowski (1889 - 1962) and Kazimierz Dąbrowski (1902 - 1980).² Błachowski died under suspicious circumstances and Łobaczewski speculates that he was murdered by the State police for his part in the research. Dąbrowski emigrated and, unable to find work in the States, took a position at the University of Alberta in Canada. A close reading of Dąbrowski's published works in English shows the theoretical roots of what would become ponerology.³

It's been a year since Obama swept to power on a wave of euphoria many hoped would bring relief from these traumatic times. He has indeed brought hope to some, but not to humanity. He has indeed brought change, alas it is change for the worse. Behind the carefully groomed image of a man of peace, beneath the thinly veiled disguise of benevolent intentions, dark forces wield the US machinery of government as a Weapon of Mass Destruction.

In this month's Connecting the Dots we witness how, at one fell swoop, the Evil Empire decimated and invaded yet another country. Environmental warfare and cyberwarfare have come to the fore and joined forces with the drone Reapers in the frontline of the Pentagon's quest for full-spectrum domination. Al Qaeda's Christmas Day Special was followed up with a wave of hysterical aftershocks in January that have sinister implications at many levels.

Against a backdrop of freezing weather all across the northern hemisphere the tower of global warming is crumbling. The collusion of big government and big pharma to inoculate us against a non-existent pandemic masks the one true pandemic confronting humanity: the psychopaths that bring us targeted assassinations, wars, torture, toxic vaccines... then blame humanity for their consequences. No vaccine can protect conscience, only awareness of the predators in our midst. "Swine Flu" appears to have receded, but the swine are still with us.

If events in 2010 keep up this pace, then humanity is in for a rough ride. Hang on as we navigate the month that was January.

To those who have grown up in countries considered "free", the vision of George Orwell's 1984 strikes us as a threatening nightmare, a warning of a not-so-distant future where freedom is but a word. Like seed perpetually scorched before it even has a chance to take root, all that it means to be human is actively degraded, denied, and punished at even the smallest display.

The vision of the Party's rule, its inhumanity and utter ruthlessness and mendacity frighten us and we hope it will never come to pass here. But we have no clue how to prevent it, and just like the people in Orwell's fictional world, we are perpetually caught off guard when it comes to pass in our own lives. One day we wake up and realize we are living in a nightmare, and we have been for a long time. "It'll never happen here" and "We've taken every precaution" become "When did it happen" and "How did we get to this point?" This perennial sickness takes hold of a nation and we are at its mercy.