Propagandizing the Masses
David Martin
Ralph McGehee <rmcg...@igc.org> wrote in message
news:37ADDB0C...@igc.org...
>
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> Propagandizing the Masses
>
> The new International Public Information Group (IPI) whose birth
> obviously originated in the intelligence community, creates a
> government-wide propaganda mechanism.
>
> An ad says: CIA is looking for a few good "perception management"
> analysts. Perception management is the study "of how foreign entities
> attempt to mislead U.S. intelligence and policymakers on critical
> national security issues." (A bait and switch ad).
>
> The new IPI charter says: "The intelligence community will play
> a crucial role...for identifying hostile foreign propaganda
> and deception that targets the US...The IPI core group is ordered
> to "assist [U.S. government] efforts in defeating adversaries."
>
> The similarity of goals cited between the CIA want ad and the
> language of the IPI charter suggest that IPI is the brain child of the
> CIA -- just as an earlier near identical (and illegal) operation in
> the Reagan Administration was guided and directed by the CIA.
>
> Since the CIA's covert operations rely on lying in all its
> forms and since the intelligence community will play a crucial
> role in IPI operations, we must conclude that the CIA will
> direct this propaganda juggernaut.
>
> The IPI charter orders its core group to arrange "training
> exercises at the National Defense University, National Foreign Affairs
> Training Center, the Service War Colleges and other institutions."
> Thus, propaganda -- domestic and foreign -- replaces the importance
> of the "Counterinsurgency" training of another era.
>
> We are at war on reality with ourselves.
>
> Ralph McGehee
> http://come.to/CIABASE
>
Apropos:
One of my favorite Hollywood villains is veteran character actor, G. D.
Spradlin. You might remember him as the rotten basketball coach in "One on
One" or the military college commandant protecting a homicidal secret
society in "Lords of Discipline." When someone is needed who just oozes
shallow, sanctimonious, corrupt authority, now that Fred Thompson has gone
back to Washington to play himself, the chances are better than even that
the call will go out to Spradlin.
It was with considerable anticipation and excitement, then, that I saw his
name go up in the opening credits in the new Watergate spoof called "Dick."
My guess was that he had to be playing Attorney General John Mitchell. I
really didn't think he would be on the side conventionally portrayed as the
"good guys," but there he was as the boss of Bob Woodward and Carl
Bernstein, Washington Post editor, Ben Bradlee. It's true that the lampoon
didn't portray anyone on the Post team as exactly an appealing character,
but they still stood cinematically, as we have been given to believe in real
life, for truth and justice against official criminality.
One would like to believe that the producers of "Dick" are really clued in
to political reality instead of to the fiction that has been spun out by our
presstitutes, and the Spradlin casting was actually a hidden message to that
effect. For all indications are that Ben Bradlee is the archetypical
character that Spradlin usually portrays. The introduction to the third
edition of Deborah Davis' book "Katharine the Great" is entitled "How This
Book Was Censored." Here is an excerpt:
In researching the context of Katharine Graham's power, I found that both
her late husband Philip, from whom she inherited the newspaper in 1963, and
Benjamin Bradlee, whom she hired as executive editor in 1965, had been part
of a group of men who worked with strategic information during the Second
World War. These men had gone on to use their skills in propaganda or
intelligence to create and reinforce peacetime definitions of patriotism.
Their careers in this way coincided with the formation of the modern news
industry; and it was not simply their access to the instruments of mass
communication, but also their style of political thinking, their
identification with the values of the state, which gave them and others of
their background a disproportionate influence on American political culture.
The relation of such careers to Katharine Graham's ability to destroy
Richard Nixon is discussed in the book in detail.
Benjamin Bradlee as a young journalist was at the very heart of the
government's effort to order political thinking after the war. He spent
forty wartime months handling classified cables and codes on a naval
destroyer, then three years at the Washington Post in the late 1940's under
Philip Graham, who as a "liberal anti-Communist" supported the search for
traitors in government. In 1951, Bradlee went, with Graham's assistance, to
the American Embassy in Paris, where as a press attache he became part of a
covert operation integral to America's foreign policy: the production of
propaganda against Communism. One purpose of the operation was to cast doubt
on the patriotism of western European Communists, many of whom had fought in
the resistance and were therefore trusted figures in post-war politics. They
were discredited as instruments of Stalin. The propaganda was disseminated
throughout Europe by the CIA, mainly in the form of newspaper stories
appearing under the bylines of pro-American foreign journalists.
In the original edition of this book, Bradlee was described as a State
Department appointee who, while at the embassy, produced CIA material
occasionally, before returning permanently to journalism. Those few lines,
and other references to his past, Bradlee denied vehemently. Rather than
join the company of other prominent journalists who now freely say they
worked with the CIA in the 1950s because times were different then, it was
the patriotic thing to do, Bradlee set about to discredit the book, and ruin
me as a writer, by having friends produce negative press stories. (end of
excerpt)
We might add, for what it is worth, that the subordinate he married in 1978
(for whom he left his wife of long standing), the blond and much younger
Sally Quinn, is the daughter of one of the founders of the CIA.
---------
DC Dave
Author of "America's Dreyfus Affair, the Case of the Death of Vincent
Foster"
http://thebird.org/host/dcdave
news:alt.thebird