How elites control your mind
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Richard Moore
Apr 22, 2008, 7:05:56 PM4/22/08
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http://www.burbankdigest.com/node/90
Posted April 22nd, 2008 by liz burbank
"It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but a matter of what is perceived to be true."
Henry Kissinger
"The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media"
former CIA Director William Colby (died suddenly after freak canoe accident) Bernstein's 1977 Oct. Rolling stone article.
1997 US Army War College: "WE HAVE ENTERED AN AGE OF CONSTANT CONFLICT..."
"We, the winners, are a minority......We live in an age of multiple truths. He who warns of the "clash of civilizations" is incontestably right.....One of the defining bifurcations of the future will be the conflict between information masters and information victims.......
Information destroys traditional jobs and traditional cultures; it seduces, betrays, yet remains invulnerable. How can you counterattack the information others have turned upon you? There is no effective option other than competitive performance. For those individuals and cultures that cannot join or compete with our information empire, there is only inevitable failure (of note, the internet is to the techno-capable disaffected what the United Nations is to marginal states: it offers the illusion of empowerment and community) ... The next century will indeed be American, but it will also be troubled. We will find ourselves in constant conflict, much of it violent. The United States Army is going to add a lot of battle streamers to its flag. We will wage information warfare, but we will fight with infantry. And we will always surprise those critics, domestic and foreign, who predict our decline..." [...]
http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/97summer/peters.htm
MESSAGE MACHINE
Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand
By DAVID BARSTOW
The Pentagon has cultivated "military analysts" in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the Bush administration's wartime performance.... These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated....“The strategic target remains our population,” General Conway said. “We can lose people day in and day out, but they’re never going to beat our military. What they can and will do if they can is strip away our support. And you guys can help us not let that happen.”...“I’m an old intel guy,” said one analyst. (The transcript omits speakers’ names.) “And I can sum all of this up, unfortunately, with one word. That is Psyops [....] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/washington/20generals.html?th&emc=th
NYT CONFESSION : COVER-UP & EXERCISE IN PSYWAR
The NYT is the considered the primo U.S. newspaper worldwide whose slogan, "all the news that's fit to print" acccurately states its role as #1 U.S. capitalist propaganda organ. Its 'big story' today, Behind Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand, by David Barstow, is an exercise in information warfare itself-- in the guise of genuine investigative and journalistic integrity:
A 'confession' covering up its own central role as state propagandist, with some of the biggest names, most read and respected neoliberal reporters and pundits -- like Nicholas Kristof recently band-leading the U.S. anti-China/'pro-Tibet' /'save Darfur' campaign [see below & previous digest issues].
A 'confession' covering-up pretending the psywar function of the capitalist media isn't its job but just began with Bush and Iraq, only involved some Pentagon analysts and a handful of reporters.
This rescue mission was critical -- the NYT and mainstream media creds generally are in dire need of help -- to continue the propaganda essential to the sinking ship of state's bipartisan global domination agenda.
WHERE ARE THESE ARTICLES?
"The CIA's 3-Decade Effort to Mold the World's Views" John M. Crewdson and Joseph B. Treaster, New York Times, 25 December 1977, pp. 1, 12; Terrence Smith, "CIA Contacts With Reporters," New York Times, p. 13; "Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the CIA", Crewdson and Treaster, New York Times, 26 December 1977, pp. 1, 37; "CIA Established Many Links to Journalists in U.S. and Abroad", Crewdson and Treaster,New York Times, 27 December 1977, pp. 1, 40-41.
The 1977 NYT article series cited above is not mentioned in Barstow article ... and is no longer available online in NYT archives: "Your search for crewdson, treaster, NYT, "cia's 3-decade effort to mold world's views", 12/25/77 returned 0 results
Truth from These Podia: Summary of a Study of Strategic Influence, Perception Management, Strategic Information Warfare and Strategic Psychological Operations in Gulf II,
by Sam Gardiner, Colonel, USAF (Retired)
www.indybay.org/news/2003/10/1653148.php
Mapping the Ministry of Propaganda, a historic merging of politics, militarism and public "perception management." The Coalition Information Center with offices in the London, Islamabad and the White House started work in mid-2002 (six months before it was officially authorized by an Executive Order). In 2003, the CIC morphed into the Office of Global Communications
PSYOPS -- The Darkest Face of Deception
"PSYOPS became a major part of the relationship between the governments of the US and the UK and the free press." The record reveals how the Pentagon, State Department and White House all relied on PSYOPS techniques to manipulate the media as a psychological weapon...
The system worked well ... using "embedded journalists" was quite successful and worked just as they hoped it would from tests they had run to gauge how reporters would perform once they bonded with the soldiers in their assigned units. One of the mistakes, Rendon said, was that while they had taken command of the story, they had "lost control of the context." The problem was the veteran newsmen in the networks: they had "too much control of context," Rendon complained. "That has to be fixed for the next war," ...
Captain Gerald Mauer, the Joint Staff Assistant Deputy Director for Information Operations, observed that public diplomacy and public affairs are slowly morphing into a single combined information operation...a Strategic Fusion Center that "brings everything together." The Pentagon is already hard at work crafting an Information Operations Roadmap. Mauer also told his fellow perception managers that "We hope to make more use of Hollywood and Madison Avenue in the future." The overall goal remains the same Mauer explained: to allow the men who now control Washington to "disrupt, corrupt or usurp adversarial... decision-making."[...]
http://www.earthisland.org/project/newsPage2.cfm?newsID=494&pageID=177&s...
Public relations preparations for 2003 invasion of Iraq
In late 2001, with the Pentagon's focus on information warfare as an integral facet of the American war doctrine increasing, the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence was formed. This office was created with a mandate to propagandize throughout the Middle East, Asia and Western Europe, with the help of the abovementioned Rendon Group. In February 2002, amid a backlash of public outcry resulting from a New York Times article, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed he lacked knowledge of the program and the OSI was closed down. [3]
In January of 2003, with the Office of Strategic Influence dismantled, President Bush formally announced "the creation of a White House "Office of Global Communications" to broadcast the United States' message worldwide ahead of possible war on Iraq," [4] which had been effectively operating for several months prior. [5] According to the White House, the office will disseminate the policies of the US Government to media sources, domestic and foreign, and send "teams of communicators to international hot spots, areas of media interest."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_relations_preparations_for_2003_inva...
ORCHESTRATED DECEPTION ON PATH TO TO WAR
The massive database at the heart of this project juxtaposes what President Bush and these seven top officials were saying for public consumption against what was known, or should have been known, on a day-to-day basis. This fully searchable database includes the public statements, drawn from both primary sources (such as official transcripts) and secondary sources (chiefly major news organizations) over the two years beginning on September 11, 2001. It also interlaces relevant information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches, and interviews....
http://www.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/Default.aspx?source=home&context=...
Crying Wolf: Media Disinformation and Death Squads in Occupied Iraq
by Max Fuller
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=FUL20051...
Abstract
The phenomenon of death squads operating in Iraq has become generally accepted over recent months. However, in its treatment of the issue, the mainstream media has zealously followed a line of attributing extrajudicial killings to unaccountable Shia militias who have risen to prominence with the electoral victory of Ibramhim Jafaari’s Shia-led government in January. The following article examines both the way in which the information has been widely presented and whether that presentation has any actual basis in fact. Concluding that the attribution to Shia militias is unsustainable, the article considers who the intellectual authors of these crimes against humanity are and what purpose they serve in the context of the ongoing occupation of the country....the purpose of stating or implying that unaccountable militias are behind the extrajudicial executions and/or that sectarian rivalries... is to distance the US from the almost unthinkable ongoing crimes against humanity. Comparable disinformation strategies have been employed in every counterinsurgency conflict with which the US has been involved... known as establishing ‘plausible deniability’ [...]
Full Spectrum Information Warfare Without Limits
Brent Jessop
http://www.knowledgedrivenrevolution.com/Articles/200711/20071105_IOR_1_...
Information Operation Roadmap Part 1: What Are Information Operations?
When the US military refers to full spectrum domination, they truly mean full spectrum. Information operations or information warfare is a key part of the military battlespace. Recently, a document entitled Information Operation Roadmap was declassified by the Pentagon because of a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Security Archive at George Washington University....
This document defined information operations as follows: "The integrated employment of the core capabilities of Electronic Warfare, Computer Network Operations, Psychological Operations, Military Deception and Operations Security, in concert with specified supporting and related capabilities, to influence, disrupt, corrupt or usurp adversarial human and automated decisions-making while protecting our own."
The following series of articles will examine the Pentagon's intention of gaining full spectrum dominance in information warfare. Including, dominating the electro-magnetic spectrum and fighting the internet. Also on the use of psychological operations or PSYOP as defined by the Information Operation Roadmap...
Information Operation Roadmap Part 2: Maximum Control of the Entire Electro-Magnetic Spectrum
Information Operation Roadmap Part 3: "We Must Fight the Net"
The 2003 Pentagon document entitled the Information Operation Roadmap was released after a Freedom of Information Request by the National Security Archive at George Washington University in 2006...
"To make a contented slave it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken the moral and mental vision and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason."
Fredrick Douglass
WHY TOTAL PROPAGANDA & SURVEILLANCE?
“Unless a way of intervening in the radicalization process can be found, we are condemned to stepping on cockroaches one at a time.”
Social Repression and Internet Surveillance
H. Res. 1695, 1955 & S.1959
By Nikki Alexander
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18998.htm
...Jane Harman (D-CA) sponsored H.Res.1955 her partner, Dave Reichert (R-WA), authored the original bill, H.Res.1695....establishes a National Commission and Center of so-called “Excellence” to censor and crush social concerns which are subjectively perceived to be “threats” by RAND spokesmen, who supplied the content for this bill. RAND coined the folksy epithets “homegrown terrorism,” “violent radicalization” and “ideologically based violence” to invalidate expressions of social conscience that conflict with corporate interests... it characterizes individuals who care deeply about international human rights, national sovereignty and ecological protection as “homegrown terrorists” who have been “violently radicalized” by “extremist belief systems.” This bill quotes RAND ideology verbatim.
The Internet... is being systematically strangled by surveillance devices that police the flow of information; filtering web servers, search engines, web sites, email content and keystrokes...The Open Net Initiative reports, “With respect to online surveillance, the United States may be among the most aggressive states in the world in terms of listening to online conversations.” ...
Packaged as a pretext for “preventing terrorism”, the authors of this bill claim that, “The Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens.”..
The Baltimore Sun reported In November that George Bush requested $154 million in preliminary funding to “prevent cyberspace attacks”...expected to become a seven-year, multibillion-dollar program to “track threats” in cyberspace on both government and private networks... These Government crimes would be permanently institutionalized through the National Security Agency CAEIAE program, the Center of so-called “Excellence” designated by this bill... What Harman describes as “vertical information sharing from the Intelligence Community to the local level and from local sources to State and Federal agencies” is equivalent to The Third Reich’s Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda which terrorized German citizens from Party Headquarters through a chain of command that reached all the way down into local communities. With modern telecommunications technology this terror campaign of “intelligence sharing” will persecute citizens in the privacy of their homes, monitoring their online conversations and reporting dissidents to the Gestapo... Inventing a special “Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Officer” embedded in this unlawful operation to create rules for handling the Constitutional rights of US citizens should raise a red flag....Assigning one individual to tailor those rules to an illegal Cointelpro operation...
Masquerading as an “academic” assembly, the political appointees to this Commission will have “relevant expertise” in Information Technology, Juvenile Justice, Corrections, Counterterrorism, Intelligence and Local Law Enforcement. All members of the group will be endowed with sweeping investigative powers and unlimited access to classified files in all branches of government ~ A McCarthy Inquisition with a mandate to hold hearings, administer oaths, take testimony and propose “initiatives to intercede” in the so-called “radicalization process,” a RAND euphemism for crushing social dissent.... The bill requires only that the Commission produce a public “version” of its findings before disbanding, permitting secret versions to permanently remain at the Center of so-called “Excellence” as a catalyst for Government abuse by Federal, State and local law enforcement agents trained to believe that their targets deserve persecution...
RAND spokesman, Brian Jenkins whose personal ideology is fully incorporated into this bill said to Jane Harman’s Committee: “Unless a way of intervening in the radicalization process can be found, we are condemned to stepping on cockroaches one at a time.” ... the precise terminology used by Nazis to justify exterminating Jews.
Current example of info-warfare served up by media propaganda soup-kitchens, NYT #1
The Hypocrisy and Danger of Anti-China Demonstrations
by Floyd Rudmin
CommonDreams.org
We hear that Tibetans suffer “demographic aggression” and “cultural genocide”. But we do not hear those terms applied to Spanish and French policies toward the Basque minority. We do not hear those terms applied to the US annexation of the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1898. And Diego Garcia? In 1973, not so long ago, the UK forcibly deported the entire native Chagossian population from the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. People were allowed one suitcase of clothing. Nothing else. Family pets were gassed, then cremated. Complete ethnic cleansing. Complete cultural destruction. Why? In order to build a big US air base. It has been used to bomb Afghanistan and Iraq, and soon maybe to bomb Iran and Pakistan. Diego Garcia, with nobody there but Brits and Americans, is also a perfect place for rendition, torture and other illegal actions....
The height of hypocrisy is this moral posturing about 100 dead in race riots in Lhasa, while the USA, UK and more than 40 nations in the Coalition of the Willing wage a war of aggression against Iraq. This is not “demographic aggression” but raw shock-and-awe aggression. A war crime. A war on civilians, including the intentional destruction of the water and sewage systems, and the electrical grid. More than one million Iraqis are now dead; five million made into refugees. The Western invaders may not be doing “cultural genocide” but they are doing cultural destruction on an immense scale, in the very cradle of Western Civilization. Why is the news filled with demonstrators about Tibet but not about Iraq And as everyone knows but few dare say, “demographic aggression” and “cultural genocide” can be applied most accurately to Israel’s settlement policies and systematic destruction of Palestinian communities. On this, the Dalai Lama seems silent. Demonstrators don’t wave flags for bulldozed homes, destroyed orchards, or dead Palestinian children.
The Chinese government is responsible for the well-being and security of one-fourth of humanity. Race riots and rebellion cannot be tolerated, not even when done by Buddhist monks....Chinese Civilization was already old when the Egyptians began building pyramids....
China’s treatment of its minorities has been exemplary compared to what the Western world has done to its minorities. After thousands of years of Chinese dominance, there still are more than 50 minorities in China. After a few hundred years of European dominance in North and South America, the original minority cultures have been exterminated, damaged, or diminished.[...]
"You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month." - CIA operative discussing with Philip Graham, editor Washington Post, on the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories. "Katherine The Great," by Deborah Davis (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991)
www.wrhstore.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/MOCK/mockingbird.html
The Crimes of Mena
The Suppressed Article
This is the article which had been scheduled to appear in the Washington Post. After having cleared the legal department for all possible questions of inaccurate statements, the article was scheduled for publication when just as the presses were set to roll, Washington Post Managing Editor Bob Kaiser (Like George Bush, a member of the infamous "Skull & Bones Fraternity), killed the article without explanation. According to the sidebar which appeared with the Penthouse Magazine version of this story, Bob Kaiser refused to even meet with Sally Denton and Roger Morris, hiding in his office while his secretary made excuses.
This is the story that couldn't be suppressed. An investigative report into a scandal that haunts the reputations of three presidents - Reagan, Bush, and Clinton.
http://www.wrhstore.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/ARCHIVE/CRIMES_OF_MENA.html
OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmockingbird.htm
brief excerpt from an amazing, scary past & present history...
In 1948 Frank Wisner was appointed director of the Office of Special Projects. Soon afterwards it was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This became the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. Wisner was told to create an organization that concentrated on "propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world."
Later that year Wisner established Mockingbird, a program to influence the domestic American media. Wisner recruited Philip Graham (Washington Post) to run the project within the industry. Graham himself recruited others who had worked for military intelligence during the war. This included James Truitt, Russell Wiggins, Phil Geyelin, John Hayes and Alan Barth. Others like Stewart Alsop, Joseph Alsop and James Reston, were recruited from within the Georgetown Set. According to Deborah Davis (Katharine the Great): "By the early 1950s, Wisner 'owned' respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles."
In 1951 Allen W. Dulles persuaded Cord Meyer to join the CIA. However, there is evidence that he was recruited several years earlier and had been spying on the liberal organizations he had been a member of in the later 1940s. According to Deborah Davis, Meyer became Mockingbird's "principal operative".
One of the most important journalists under the control of Operation Mockingbird was Joseph Alsop, whose articles appeared in over 300 different newspapers. Other journalists willing to promote the views of the CIA included Stewart Alsop (New York Herald Tribune), Ben Bradlee (Newsweek), James Reston (New York Times), Charles Douglas Jackson (Time Magazine), Walter Pincus (Washington Post), William C. Baggs (Miami News), Herb Gold (Miami News) and Charles Bartlett (Chattanooga Times). According to Nina Burleigh (A Very Private Woman) these journalists sometimes wrote articles that were commissioned by Frank Wisner. The CIA also provided them with classified information to help them with their work.
After 1953 the network was overseen by Allen W. Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency. By this time Operation Mockingbird had a major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. These organizations were run by people with well-known right-wing views such as William Paley (CBS), Henry Luce (Time Magazine and Life Magazine), Arthur Hays Sulzberger (New York Times), Alfred Friendly (managing editor of the Washington Post), Jerry O'Leary (Washington Star), Hal Hendrix (Miami News), Barry Bingham Sr., (Louisville Courier-Journal), James Copley (Copley News Services) and Joseph Harrison (Christian Science Monitor). [...]
THE CIA AND THE MEDIA
How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up
BY CARL BERNSTEIN
After leaving The Washington Post in 1977, Carl Bernstein spent six months looking at the relationship of the CIA and the press during the Cold War years. [Excerpts from] His 25,000-word cover story, published in Rolling Stone on October 20, 1977, reprinted below.
...Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald‑Tribune. By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc....MURKY DETAILS OF CIA RELATIONSHIPS WITH INDIVIDUALS and news organizations began trickling out in 1973 when it was first disclosed that the CIA had, on occasion, employed journalists. Those reports, combined with new information, serve as casebook studies of the Agency’s use of journalists for intelligence purposes. They include:
■ The New York Times. The Agency’s relationship with the Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials. From 1950 to 1966, about ten CIA employees were provided Times cover under arrangements approved by the newspaper’s late publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. The cover arrangements were part of a general Times policy—set by Sulzberger—to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible. Sulzberger was especially close to Allen Dulles. “At that level of contact it was the mighty talking to the mighty,” said a high‑level CIA official who was present at some of the discussions. “There was an agreement in principle that, yes indeed, we would help each other. The question of cover came up on several occasions. It was agreed that the actual arrangements would be handled by subordinates.... The mighty didn’t want to know the specifics; they wanted plausible deniability....
CIA officials cite two reasons why the Agency’s working relationship with the Times was closer and more extensive than with any other paper: the fact that the Times maintained the largest foreign news operation in American daily journalism; and the close personal ties between the men who ran both institutions. Sulzberger informed a number of reporters and editors of his general policy of cooperation with the Agency..... Arthur Hays Sulzberger signed a secrecy agreement with the CIA in the 1950s, according to CIA officials—a fact confirmed by his nephew, C.L. Sulzberger[....] http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
...Senate Bill the Senate's version of the intelligence authorization act, contained no language on the issue of the CIA's use of journalists as spies. The conference committee, however, rolled in the House amendment virtually verbatim, but with one critical change: Not just the president, but the CIA director as well, could waive the ban on the use of journalists in covert operations by writing to the House and Senate intelligence oversight committees. This is the version of the bill that became law on Oct. 11, 1996, with President Clinton's signing of the 1997 Intelligence Authorization Act.... http://www.cpj.org/attacks96/sreports/cia.html
Journalism and the CIA: The Mighty Wurlitzer
by Daniel Brandt
From NameBase NewsLine, No. 17, April-June 1997
http://www.namebase.org/news17.htm
... The Office of Strategic Services, the CIA's predecessor, had jurisdiction over wartime covert operations and propaganda.... OSS chief William Donovan recruited heavily among social and academic elites.... OSS veteran Frank Wisner ran most of the early peacetime covert operations as head of the Office of Policy Coordination. Although funded by the CIA, OPC wasn't integrated into the CIA's Directorate of Plans until 1952, under OSS veteran Allen Dulles. Both Wisner and Dulles were enthusiastic about covert operations. By mid-1953 the department was operating with 7,200 personnel and 74 percent of the CIA's total budget.
Wisner created the first "information superhighway." But this was the age of vacuum tubes, not computers, so he called it his "Mighty Wurlitzer." The CIA's global network funded the Italian elections in 1948, sent paramilitary teams into Albania, trained Nationalist Chinese on Taiwan, and pumped money into the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the National Student Association, and the Center for International Studies at MIT. Key leaders and labor unions in western Europe received subsidies, and Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were launched. The Wurlitzer, an organ designed for film productions, could imitate sounds such as rain, thunder, or an auto horn. Wisner and Dulles were at the keyboard, directing history.
The ethos of the fight against fascism carried over into the fight against godless communism; for these warriors, the Cold War was still a war. OSS highbrows had already embraced psychological warfare as a new social science: propaganda, for example, was divided into "black" propaganda (stories that are unattributed, or attributed to nonexistent sources, or false stories attributed to a real source), "gray" propaganda (stories from the government where the source is attributed to others), and "white" propaganda (stories from the government where the source is acknowledged as such).[1] After World War II, these psywar techniques continued. C.D. Jackson, a major figure in U.S. psywar efforts before and after the war, was simultaneously a top executive at Time-Life. Psywar was also used with success during the 1950s by Edward Lansdale, first in the Philippines and then in South Vietnam. In Guatemala, the Dulles brothers worked with their friends at United Fruit, in particular the "father of public relations," Edward Bernays, who for years had been lobbying the press on behalf of United. When CIA puppets finally took over in 1954, only applause was heard from the media, commencing forty years of CIA-approved horrors in that unlucky country.[2] Bernays' achievement apparently impressed Allen Dulles, who immediately began using U.S. public relations experts and front groups to promote the image of Ngo Dinh Diem as South Vietnam's savior.[3]...
The counterculture burned out once the war wound down, but it had already dented the lemming-like consensus that typified an earlier period. For roughly ten years, between 1967 and 1977, Americans learned something of their secret history. From the perspective of twenty additional years, the results were mixed and much remains secret....The first shoe was dropped by Jack Anderson in late August, 1973, when he revealed that Seymour Freidin, head of the Hearst bureau in London, was a CIA agent....
It is believed that if the correct number of all media and propaganda projects could be determined, it would exceed Election Support as the largest single category of covert action projects undertaken by the CIA.[7] ...One enterprising researcher took this 29 percent figure, and extrapolating from figures on CIA expenditures for covert operations, found that the cost of propaganda in 1978 was around $265 million and involved 2,000 personnel. Comparing this to figures for other news agencies, he concluded that the CIA "uses far more resources in its propaganda operations than any single news agency.... In fact, the CIA propaganda budget is as large as the combined budgets of Reuters, United Press International and the Associated Press."[8]...
CBS took Daniel Schorr off the air after he leaked the Pike committee report. This was most likely a convenient opportunity for William Paley, chairman of CBS, who didn't approve of Schorr's interest in the network's own CIA connection. Former CBS News president Sig Mickelson, who by 1976 was president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, said that in October 1954, Paley called him into his office for a friendly discussion with two CIA officials. Schorr mentioned this on Walter Cronkite's show, and in an op-ed piece for the New York Times (Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the late publisher of the Times, had been cozy with the CIA also). "There are executives and retired executives," Schorr wrote, "who could help dispel the cloud hanging over the press by coming forward to tell the arrangements they made with the CIA."[9]...
In 1976 the CIA began cranking up their Wurlitzer on the matter of Richard Welch, a station chief in Athens who was assassinated by urban guerrillas at the end of 1975. The CIA's exploitation of this timely tragedy had both an immediate target and a general target. Ostensibly the CIA was complaining about an obscure Washington magazine called CounterSpy, which had been printing CIA names. In the same spirit, Philip Agee's just-published diary of CIA tricks in Latin America was loaded with names, and was already an international sensation.
But the general target of this campaign was more important -- the CIA managed to change the nature of the debate. Suddenly it was no longer a question of what dirty work the CIA might be doing, but rather a question of what happens when the press recklessly endangers the lives of our brave boys overseas....
The final months of 1977 produced three significant pieces of journalism on the CIA and the media, just before the issue was abandoned altogether. The first, by Joe Trento and Dave Roman, reported the connections between Copley Press and the CIA. Owner James S. Copley cooperated with the CIA for three decades. A subsidiary, Copley News Service, was used as a CIA front in Latin America, while reporters at the Copley-owned San Diego Union and Evening News were instructed to spy on antiwar protesters for the FBI. No less than 23 news service employees were simultaneously working for the CIA. James Copley, who died in 1973, was also a leading figure behind the CIA-funded Inter-American Press Association.[13]
The next article was by Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame. In a long piece in Rolling Stone, he came up with the figure of 400 American journalists over the past 25 years, based primarily on interviews with Church committee staffers. This figure included stringers and freelancers who had an understanding that they were expected to help the CIA, as well as a small number of full-time CIA employees using journalism as a cover. It did not include foreigners, nor did it include numerous Americans who traded favors with the CIA in the normal give-and-take between a journalist and his sources. In addition to some of the names already mentioned above, Bernstein supplied details on Stewart and Joseph Alsop, Henry Luce, Barry Bingham Sr. of the Louisville Courier-Journal, Hal Hendrix of the Miami News, columnist C.L. Sulzberger, Richard Salant of CBS, and Philip Graham and John Hayes of the Washington Post....over the last twenty years, the CIA owned or subsidized more than fifty newspapers, news services, radio stations, periodicals and other communications facilities, most of them overseas. These were used for propaganda efforts, or even as cover for operations. Another dozen foreign news organizations were infiltrated by paid CIA agents. At least 22 American news organizations had employed American journalists who were also working for the CIA, and nearly a dozen American publishing houses printed some of the more than 1,000 books that had been produced or subsidized by the CIA. When asked in a 1976 interview whether the CIA had ever told its media agents what to write, William Colby replied, "Oh, sure, all the time."....The Times series concluded that at its peak, the CIA's network "embraced more than 800 news and public information organizations and individuals."[15]...
The inability of Congress to address the CIA-media problem in the 1970s meant that more powerful forces were at work. In fact, while Congress was wringing its left hand over illegal CIA activities, its right hand was helping the CIA overhaul its Wurlitzer. Ever since 1967, when the Katzenbach committee was tasked by Lyndon Johnson to study the problem of the CIA's use of domestic organizations, the agenda at the highest levels had been to remove such activities from the CIA's payroll and continue them under a new umbrella. In the unclassified portion of their report, this committee recommended giving money openly through a "public-private mechanism." "The CIA's big mistake was not supplanting itself with private funds fast enough," observed Gloria Steinem, who had been part of the CIA's global network.[18]
The Asia Foundation was given a large "severance payment" so that they could find private funding,[19] and the Congress for Cultural Freedom got over $4 million from the Ford Foundation.[20] In 1971, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe were spun off and funded separately by new legislation. While this hardly diminished the CIA's control of these radio stations, it did help public relations by facilitating "deniability."[21] Then in 1983, Congress created the National Endowment for Democracy, with funding to carry on many of the activities that the CIA once carried out covertly within its own budget.
Bits and pieces of the old Wurlitzer were still evident everywhere: John Richardson, Jr., the new chairman of NED, had been president and CEO of Radio Free Europe during the 1960s, and some of the NED's dozens of grants were issued to groups that solicited aid for the contras.[22] "It is not necessary to turn to the covert approach," commented Colby in regard to the NED program. "Many of the programs which ... were conducted as covert operations [can now be] conducted quite openly, and consequentially, without controversy."[23] As if to prove his point, Colby's wife was soon a member of NED's board of directors.
Two major changes since the 1980s -- the collapse of socialism and the centralization of domestic and transnational media, suggest that the CIA now has everything well in hand.... A blue-ribbon panel of the Council on Foreign Relations suggested last year that the CIA be freed from some policy constraints on covert operations, such as the use of journalists and clergy as cover. This is alarming. Unlike the typical corporate-funded think tank, filled with pro-Pentagon pundits, the folks at CFR are either running the world or they know who does. For 70 years they've rarely recommended anything that has not become policy. Furthermore, they've thoroughly co-opted the major media (see sidebar).
There have been official announcements the CIA is mission-creeping into economic intelligence and computer-age information warfare.[...]
Sidebar from NameBase NewsLine, No. 17, April-June 1997:
Journalists at Work: Who's Watching the Watchdogs?
In the handful of self-critical articles about the media that appeared twenty years ago, the matter of CIA connections with executives, editors, and reporters was emphasized. While this makes for good copy and is certainly worth repeating, it also fails to challenge American journalism at it weakest point: the corrupting influence of fame and fortune. Someone who has looked at this issue recently is James Fallows, formerly of Atlantic Monthly. Fallows argues in his recent book, Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy, that his profession is becoming seriously compromised.
The name recognition that comes from flaccid punditry can be lucrative on the lecture circuit. Or if you have a name already, perhaps by doing something useless or naughty at the White House, you can acquire pundit status by writing a kiss-and-tell book. Big stars such as Cokie Roberts can collect five figures simply by offering up flattering platitudes at a corporate convention.
Another problem is the revolving door between the media and government. It's considered a badge of honor for a journalist to have spent time working for the White House, whereas it should be seen as a conflict of interest. Some suggest that it's okay to make the switch once -- Bill Moyers can call himself a journalist after working for Lyndon Johnson, but David Gergen has been spinning through the door so often that it makes the rest of us dizzy. Gergen flacked for Nixon, Ford, Reagan and finally Clinton, and between administrations he was an editor at U.S. News & World Report and a commentator for PBS. Come to think of it, James Fallows himself, the new editor at U.S. News & World Report, was the chief speech writer for Jimmy Carter.
Pundits and superstars aside, the larger problem is that the media is owned by the ruling class. With the increased media centralization of the last twenty years, their lock on the masses is now so complete that when they maintain an appearance of objectivity, it's only out of habit. (Sentences containing the words "ruling class" are scribbled self- consciously these days -- a measure of how well they have cornered the market on perception, and perverted what class consciousness we once had into a mass-consumer consciousness.)
How can one distinguish between news and propaganda when the overlaps and interlocks are so pervasive? John Chancellor was with NBC, then with Voice of America, and then again with NBC. John Scali was with ABC, and then with Nixon, and then again with ABC. Ben Bradlee, of Watergate and Washington Post fame, was once a propagandist in Paris, taking orders from the CIA station chief, and was friends with James Angleton. Bradley's sister-in-law was Mary Meyer, divorced from Cord Meyer. She was JFK's lover, and her 1964 murder was never solved. Robert John Myers was in the CIA for twenty years, at one time as an assistant to William Colby, and became publisher of the New Republic in 1968. Generoso Paul Pope, Jr. was in the CIA the year before he bought the National Enquirer in 1952. Laughlin Phillips, co-founder of the Washingtonian, was in the CIA for fifteen years. Former top CIA officials Cord Meyer, Jr. and Tom Braden became columnists (unlike Braden, Meyer rarely talks about his CIA career). George R. Packard and L. Bruce van Voorst were with the CIA before they joined Newsweek, and Philip Geyelin worked for the CIA while on leave from the Wall Street Journal. There's always Katharine Graham, one of the world's richest women, now recognized as a victim of the male-dominated culture because her new autobiography says it's so. In a 1988 speech at CIA headquarters, Graham warmed to her audience: "We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets, and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows."
Over 100 pundits, news anchors, columnists, commentators, reporters, editors, executives, owners, and publishers can be found by scanning the 1995 membership roster of the Council on Foreign Relations -- the same CFR that issued a report in early 1996 bemoaning the constraints on our poor, beleaguered CIA. By the way, first William Bundy and then William G. Hyland edited CFR's flagship journal Foreign Affairs between the years 1972-1992. Bundy was with the CIA from 1951-1961, and Hyland from 1954-1969.
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) have altered policies to indicate they're taking blogs seriously, and a growing number of public offices are actively reaching out to the blogosphere... The CIA recently updated its policies on Freedom of Information Act requests.... granting bloggers a waiver on fees for copying the documents it releases to requesters once available only to traditional media.... And last August, the NSA issued a directive to its employees to report leaks of classified information to the media -- "including blogs,"...
CIA Claims the Right to Decide What is News
Washington D.C., 14 June 2006 - The National Security Archive today filed suit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia against the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
The CIA demanded that the National Security Archive show that its requests for records meet several criteria that are not found in the FOIA itself, specifically, that the requests "concern current events," "interest the general public," and "enhance the public understanding of the operations and activities of the U.S. government." Among the requests that the CIA determined did not concern "current events" were[...]
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20060614/index.htm
The Power of Nightmares: Rise of the Politics of Fear
2004 BBC documentary film series, written and produced by Adam Curtis
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=%22power+of+nightmares%22&hl=en
This highly revealing BBC documentary digs deep into the roots of the war on terror, only to find that much of the widespread fear in the post-9/11 world has been fabricated by those in power for their own interests. The intrepid BBC team presents highly informative interviews with experts and top officials in combating terrorism who raise serious questions about who is behind all of the fear-mongering. These experts and riveting footage also show how the media have been manipulated to support secret power agendas. This eye-opening documentary shows that, especially after 9/11, fear has been used widely in the media to manipulate the public into giving up civil liberties and turning over power to elite groups with their own hidden agendas. The Power of Nightmares clearly demonstrates that the nightmare vision of a powerful, united terrorist organization waiting to strike our societies is largely an illusion. Wherever the BBC team looked for al-Qaeda, from the mountains of Afghanistan to the sleeper cells in America, they found that we are chasing a phantom enemy. For all citizens who care about the future of our world, this is a must-watch video.
View Free
Each episode is one hour. If you have time for only one, Part 3 is the most revealing.
Power of Nightmares Part 1 - The Making of the Terror Myth:
Power of Nightmares Part 2 - The Phantom Victory Myth:
Power of Nightmares Part 3 - The Shadows in the Cave:
"The CIA’s “mighty Wurlitzer” has never been more deafening, and the masses are dancing to its tune."
CIA behind China-bashing Olympics protests
by Larry Chin
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8656
Around the world, Beijing’s hosting of the 2008 Olympic Games has become the target of unprecedented, well-orchestrated and extremely hostile mass protests. Meanwhile, geostrategic realities, historical and current parapolitical fact, suggest that the protesters and passionate activists (in time-honored form) have once again become the willing dupes, propaganda shills, and street bullies for “causes” created, fronted, and pushed by Anglo-American intelligence agencies that continue to target a government (this time Beijing), in a host of long-term subversion and sabotage plans. Behind the powerful din created by the popular and celebrity-embraced “Save Tibet,” campaign is the fact that the CIA is behind the Tibet independence movement. See The Role of the CIA behind the Dalai Lama's holy cloak and The Tibet Card. The legions of pro-Tibet activists also seem largely unaware of the historical fact that the “holy land of compassion” has been a CIA pawn since the end of World War II. The infamous Tolstoi Mission sent CIA operatives into Tibet, with plans to establish it as a US military base, from which the US could control the entire Asian region. This activity flourished under the US-supported, opium-banked Nationalist Kuomintang regime of Chiang Kai-Shek. When the Communists rose to power, the CIA trained Tibetans in guerrilla tactics to use against the regime in Peking, and thousands of Tibetans lost their lives in these battles. Who benefited? Who really gave the orders then -- and who is driving the agenda now?
On the surface, and to uncritical eyes, practitioners of the practice of Falun Gong, a school of Chinese qi gong, are the innocent victims of horrific suppression by Beijing. In a situation parallel to the crackdowns in Tibet, it is also a fact that Falun Gong has been the recipient of years of vicious crackdowns and human rights atrocities across China. But just as is the case with Tibet, there is more to the Falun Gong case than simple persecution. Outside political forces and corporate interests can be found pushing Falun Gong into increasingly political activities, including well-funded, well-organized, and ubiquitous worldwide protests against the Chinese...Among the foreign (predominantly Western) Friends of Falun Gong, we find the likes of Mark Palmer of Freedom House. Freedom House is a quasi-intelligence front created by the CIA-connected Open Society Institute [OSI] of George Soros. In addition to Palmer, Freedom House has counted among its top management the former CIA Director James Woolsey, neocons Bernie Aronson and Diana Negroponte, super elite Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Clinton National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, Clinton Commerce Secretary Stuart Eizenstat, and the late Congressman Tom Lantos and his wife. Freedom House is backed by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which former CIA agent Philip Agee, and many others have amply documented, is a US intelligence apparatus that has been a driving force behind opposition forces (“democracy revolutions”) in many countries.
As pointed out by William Blum in his book, Rogue State, the CIA has created a host of “Trojan horses” such as the NED specifically to subvert foreign countries, under the guise of humanitarianism:“The NED was set up in the early 1980s under President Reagan in the wake of the negative revelations about the CIA, in the second half of the 1970s . . . The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities. “It was a masterpiece. Of politics, of public relations and of cynicism...“In a multitude of ways, the NED meddles in the internal affairs of foreign countries . . . In short, NED’s programs are in sync with the basic needs and objectives of the New World Order’s economic globalization, just as the programs have for years been on the same wavelength as US foreign policy. “The NED, like the CIA before it, calls what it does supporting democracy. The governments and movements whom the NED targets call it destabilization.”...
Similar to the “Save Tibet” movement, the “Save Darfur”/“Stop Darfur Genocide” movement has become a worldwide cause celebre, embraced and trumpeted by a host of Hollywood celebrities and headline-loving political bigwigs, and aggressive activists. While this cause is continuously promoted by propaganda, and one-sided “Hotel Rwanda” type fare, the real geostrategic game being played in Africa is being largely ignored....Western oil companies have engaged in far more aggressive activities, for many years... Darfur is brimming with covert operations, and Anglo-American military-intelligence involvement behind tribal warfare, elections, cross-border military skirmishes, and massacres.... there is a “great game” being played in Africa, just as there is...around Tibet. Through propaganda, China is being made arch-villain.... to... protest China, based on human rights “causes” created, manipulated, and co-opted by Anglo-American intelligence propaganda is to fall directly into the hands of the exponentially greater violators of human rights all over the world: the United States and its allies.
Indeed, activists and protesters all over the world must ask themselves whose side they are really on, and to whose orders are they marching... activists are being guided into deepening the suffering; assisting the Anglo-American empire’s own plans to destabilize and conquer (energy-rich and strategically situated) Africa and (energy-rich and strategically situated) Tibet, and politically hamper Beijing.... China is being simultaneously used as the labor engine for the world’s capitalist economy, while being geostrategically and militarily encircled. China is also in the process of being financially seized and gutted by the World Trade Organization. Every move made by the Beijing government, particularly for its own stakes in oil and gas, have been violently contested by the Western powers.
China’s attempted rise to the [digest: the geopolitical point is that now too successfully capitalist China 'threatens' U.S.global domination] world stage is headed off by rapacious US-led machinations. Today’s anti-Chinese Olympics protests are simply the latest manifestation. It is no surprise that US presidential aspirants Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have jumped on the anti-Chinese Olympic boycott bandwagon, joining the worldwide anti-China propaganda noise...The “Save Tibet,” “Save Darfur,” and “Help Falun Gong” movements are as deceptive as the “war on terrorism.” The “causes” are controlled by Anglo-American intelligence apparatuses and/or co-opted by them, in order to provide the masses with the propaganda justification for wars and intervention, and resource conquest. The CIA’s “mighty Wurlitzer” has never been more deafening, and the masses are dancing to its tune.
OLD AMERICAN VALUES
"We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated. The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective. Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electronically control the brain. Someday armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain."
Dr José Delgado. Director of Neuropsychiatry, Yale University Medical School Congressional Record, No. 26, Vol. 118 February 24, 1974.
• liz burbank's blog
Posted April 22nd, 2008 by liz burbank
"It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but a matter of what is perceived to be true."
Henry Kissinger
"The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media"
former CIA Director William Colby (died suddenly after freak canoe accident) Bernstein's 1977 Oct. Rolling stone article.
1997 US Army War College: "WE HAVE ENTERED AN AGE OF CONSTANT CONFLICT..."
"We, the winners, are a minority......We live in an age of multiple truths. He who warns of the "clash of civilizations" is incontestably right.....One of the defining bifurcations of the future will be the conflict between information masters and information victims.......
Information destroys traditional jobs and traditional cultures; it seduces, betrays, yet remains invulnerable. How can you counterattack the information others have turned upon you? There is no effective option other than competitive performance. For those individuals and cultures that cannot join or compete with our information empire, there is only inevitable failure (of note, the internet is to the techno-capable disaffected what the United Nations is to marginal states: it offers the illusion of empowerment and community) ... The next century will indeed be American, but it will also be troubled. We will find ourselves in constant conflict, much of it violent. The United States Army is going to add a lot of battle streamers to its flag. We will wage information warfare, but we will fight with infantry. And we will always surprise those critics, domestic and foreign, who predict our decline..." [...]
http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/97summer/peters.htm
MESSAGE MACHINE
Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand
By DAVID BARSTOW
The Pentagon has cultivated "military analysts" in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the Bush administration's wartime performance.... These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated....“The strategic target remains our population,” General Conway said. “We can lose people day in and day out, but they’re never going to beat our military. What they can and will do if they can is strip away our support. And you guys can help us not let that happen.”...“I’m an old intel guy,” said one analyst. (The transcript omits speakers’ names.) “And I can sum all of this up, unfortunately, with one word. That is Psyops [....] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/washington/20generals.html?th&emc=th
NYT CONFESSION : COVER-UP & EXERCISE IN PSYWAR
The NYT is the considered the primo U.S. newspaper worldwide whose slogan, "all the news that's fit to print" acccurately states its role as #1 U.S. capitalist propaganda organ. Its 'big story' today, Behind Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand, by David Barstow, is an exercise in information warfare itself-- in the guise of genuine investigative and journalistic integrity:
A 'confession' covering up its own central role as state propagandist, with some of the biggest names, most read and respected neoliberal reporters and pundits -- like Nicholas Kristof recently band-leading the U.S. anti-China/'pro-Tibet' /'save Darfur' campaign [see below & previous digest issues].
A 'confession' covering-up pretending the psywar function of the capitalist media isn't its job but just began with Bush and Iraq, only involved some Pentagon analysts and a handful of reporters.
This rescue mission was critical -- the NYT and mainstream media creds generally are in dire need of help -- to continue the propaganda essential to the sinking ship of state's bipartisan global domination agenda.
WHERE ARE THESE ARTICLES?
"The CIA's 3-Decade Effort to Mold the World's Views" John M. Crewdson and Joseph B. Treaster, New York Times, 25 December 1977, pp. 1, 12; Terrence Smith, "CIA Contacts With Reporters," New York Times, p. 13; "Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the CIA", Crewdson and Treaster, New York Times, 26 December 1977, pp. 1, 37; "CIA Established Many Links to Journalists in U.S. and Abroad", Crewdson and Treaster,New York Times, 27 December 1977, pp. 1, 40-41.
The 1977 NYT article series cited above is not mentioned in Barstow article ... and is no longer available online in NYT archives: "Your search for crewdson, treaster, NYT, "cia's 3-decade effort to mold world's views", 12/25/77 returned 0 results
Truth from These Podia: Summary of a Study of Strategic Influence, Perception Management, Strategic Information Warfare and Strategic Psychological Operations in Gulf II,
by Sam Gardiner, Colonel, USAF (Retired)
www.indybay.org/news/2003/10/1653148.php
Mapping the Ministry of Propaganda, a historic merging of politics, militarism and public "perception management." The Coalition Information Center with offices in the London, Islamabad and the White House started work in mid-2002 (six months before it was officially authorized by an Executive Order). In 2003, the CIC morphed into the Office of Global Communications
PSYOPS -- The Darkest Face of Deception
"PSYOPS became a major part of the relationship between the governments of the US and the UK and the free press." The record reveals how the Pentagon, State Department and White House all relied on PSYOPS techniques to manipulate the media as a psychological weapon...
The system worked well ... using "embedded journalists" was quite successful and worked just as they hoped it would from tests they had run to gauge how reporters would perform once they bonded with the soldiers in their assigned units. One of the mistakes, Rendon said, was that while they had taken command of the story, they had "lost control of the context." The problem was the veteran newsmen in the networks: they had "too much control of context," Rendon complained. "That has to be fixed for the next war," ...
Captain Gerald Mauer, the Joint Staff Assistant Deputy Director for Information Operations, observed that public diplomacy and public affairs are slowly morphing into a single combined information operation...a Strategic Fusion Center that "brings everything together." The Pentagon is already hard at work crafting an Information Operations Roadmap. Mauer also told his fellow perception managers that "We hope to make more use of Hollywood and Madison Avenue in the future." The overall goal remains the same Mauer explained: to allow the men who now control Washington to "disrupt, corrupt or usurp adversarial... decision-making."[...]
http://www.earthisland.org/project/newsPage2.cfm?newsID=494&pageID=177&s...
Public relations preparations for 2003 invasion of Iraq
In late 2001, with the Pentagon's focus on information warfare as an integral facet of the American war doctrine increasing, the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence was formed. This office was created with a mandate to propagandize throughout the Middle East, Asia and Western Europe, with the help of the abovementioned Rendon Group. In February 2002, amid a backlash of public outcry resulting from a New York Times article, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed he lacked knowledge of the program and the OSI was closed down. [3]
In January of 2003, with the Office of Strategic Influence dismantled, President Bush formally announced "the creation of a White House "Office of Global Communications" to broadcast the United States' message worldwide ahead of possible war on Iraq," [4] which had been effectively operating for several months prior. [5] According to the White House, the office will disseminate the policies of the US Government to media sources, domestic and foreign, and send "teams of communicators to international hot spots, areas of media interest."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_relations_preparations_for_2003_inva...
ORCHESTRATED DECEPTION ON PATH TO TO WAR
The massive database at the heart of this project juxtaposes what President Bush and these seven top officials were saying for public consumption against what was known, or should have been known, on a day-to-day basis. This fully searchable database includes the public statements, drawn from both primary sources (such as official transcripts) and secondary sources (chiefly major news organizations) over the two years beginning on September 11, 2001. It also interlaces relevant information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches, and interviews....
http://www.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/Default.aspx?source=home&context=...
Crying Wolf: Media Disinformation and Death Squads in Occupied Iraq
by Max Fuller
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=FUL20051...
Abstract
The phenomenon of death squads operating in Iraq has become generally accepted over recent months. However, in its treatment of the issue, the mainstream media has zealously followed a line of attributing extrajudicial killings to unaccountable Shia militias who have risen to prominence with the electoral victory of Ibramhim Jafaari’s Shia-led government in January. The following article examines both the way in which the information has been widely presented and whether that presentation has any actual basis in fact. Concluding that the attribution to Shia militias is unsustainable, the article considers who the intellectual authors of these crimes against humanity are and what purpose they serve in the context of the ongoing occupation of the country....the purpose of stating or implying that unaccountable militias are behind the extrajudicial executions and/or that sectarian rivalries... is to distance the US from the almost unthinkable ongoing crimes against humanity. Comparable disinformation strategies have been employed in every counterinsurgency conflict with which the US has been involved... known as establishing ‘plausible deniability’ [...]
Full Spectrum Information Warfare Without Limits
Brent Jessop
http://www.knowledgedrivenrevolution.com/Articles/200711/20071105_IOR_1_...
Information Operation Roadmap Part 1: What Are Information Operations?
When the US military refers to full spectrum domination, they truly mean full spectrum. Information operations or information warfare is a key part of the military battlespace. Recently, a document entitled Information Operation Roadmap was declassified by the Pentagon because of a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Security Archive at George Washington University....
This document defined information operations as follows: "The integrated employment of the core capabilities of Electronic Warfare, Computer Network Operations, Psychological Operations, Military Deception and Operations Security, in concert with specified supporting and related capabilities, to influence, disrupt, corrupt or usurp adversarial human and automated decisions-making while protecting our own."
The following series of articles will examine the Pentagon's intention of gaining full spectrum dominance in information warfare. Including, dominating the electro-magnetic spectrum and fighting the internet. Also on the use of psychological operations or PSYOP as defined by the Information Operation Roadmap...
Information Operation Roadmap Part 2: Maximum Control of the Entire Electro-Magnetic Spectrum
Information Operation Roadmap Part 3: "We Must Fight the Net"
The 2003 Pentagon document entitled the Information Operation Roadmap was released after a Freedom of Information Request by the National Security Archive at George Washington University in 2006...
"To make a contented slave it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken the moral and mental vision and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason."
Fredrick Douglass
WHY TOTAL PROPAGANDA & SURVEILLANCE?
“Unless a way of intervening in the radicalization process can be found, we are condemned to stepping on cockroaches one at a time.”
Social Repression and Internet Surveillance
H. Res. 1695, 1955 & S.1959
By Nikki Alexander
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18998.htm
...Jane Harman (D-CA) sponsored H.Res.1955 her partner, Dave Reichert (R-WA), authored the original bill, H.Res.1695....establishes a National Commission and Center of so-called “Excellence” to censor and crush social concerns which are subjectively perceived to be “threats” by RAND spokesmen, who supplied the content for this bill. RAND coined the folksy epithets “homegrown terrorism,” “violent radicalization” and “ideologically based violence” to invalidate expressions of social conscience that conflict with corporate interests... it characterizes individuals who care deeply about international human rights, national sovereignty and ecological protection as “homegrown terrorists” who have been “violently radicalized” by “extremist belief systems.” This bill quotes RAND ideology verbatim.
The Internet... is being systematically strangled by surveillance devices that police the flow of information; filtering web servers, search engines, web sites, email content and keystrokes...The Open Net Initiative reports, “With respect to online surveillance, the United States may be among the most aggressive states in the world in terms of listening to online conversations.” ...
Packaged as a pretext for “preventing terrorism”, the authors of this bill claim that, “The Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens.”..
The Baltimore Sun reported In November that George Bush requested $154 million in preliminary funding to “prevent cyberspace attacks”...expected to become a seven-year, multibillion-dollar program to “track threats” in cyberspace on both government and private networks... These Government crimes would be permanently institutionalized through the National Security Agency CAEIAE program, the Center of so-called “Excellence” designated by this bill... What Harman describes as “vertical information sharing from the Intelligence Community to the local level and from local sources to State and Federal agencies” is equivalent to The Third Reich’s Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda which terrorized German citizens from Party Headquarters through a chain of command that reached all the way down into local communities. With modern telecommunications technology this terror campaign of “intelligence sharing” will persecute citizens in the privacy of their homes, monitoring their online conversations and reporting dissidents to the Gestapo... Inventing a special “Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Officer” embedded in this unlawful operation to create rules for handling the Constitutional rights of US citizens should raise a red flag....Assigning one individual to tailor those rules to an illegal Cointelpro operation...
Masquerading as an “academic” assembly, the political appointees to this Commission will have “relevant expertise” in Information Technology, Juvenile Justice, Corrections, Counterterrorism, Intelligence and Local Law Enforcement. All members of the group will be endowed with sweeping investigative powers and unlimited access to classified files in all branches of government ~ A McCarthy Inquisition with a mandate to hold hearings, administer oaths, take testimony and propose “initiatives to intercede” in the so-called “radicalization process,” a RAND euphemism for crushing social dissent.... The bill requires only that the Commission produce a public “version” of its findings before disbanding, permitting secret versions to permanently remain at the Center of so-called “Excellence” as a catalyst for Government abuse by Federal, State and local law enforcement agents trained to believe that their targets deserve persecution...
RAND spokesman, Brian Jenkins whose personal ideology is fully incorporated into this bill said to Jane Harman’s Committee: “Unless a way of intervening in the radicalization process can be found, we are condemned to stepping on cockroaches one at a time.” ... the precise terminology used by Nazis to justify exterminating Jews.
Current example of info-warfare served up by media propaganda soup-kitchens, NYT #1
The Hypocrisy and Danger of Anti-China Demonstrations
by Floyd Rudmin
CommonDreams.org
We hear that Tibetans suffer “demographic aggression” and “cultural genocide”. But we do not hear those terms applied to Spanish and French policies toward the Basque minority. We do not hear those terms applied to the US annexation of the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1898. And Diego Garcia? In 1973, not so long ago, the UK forcibly deported the entire native Chagossian population from the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. People were allowed one suitcase of clothing. Nothing else. Family pets were gassed, then cremated. Complete ethnic cleansing. Complete cultural destruction. Why? In order to build a big US air base. It has been used to bomb Afghanistan and Iraq, and soon maybe to bomb Iran and Pakistan. Diego Garcia, with nobody there but Brits and Americans, is also a perfect place for rendition, torture and other illegal actions....
The height of hypocrisy is this moral posturing about 100 dead in race riots in Lhasa, while the USA, UK and more than 40 nations in the Coalition of the Willing wage a war of aggression against Iraq. This is not “demographic aggression” but raw shock-and-awe aggression. A war crime. A war on civilians, including the intentional destruction of the water and sewage systems, and the electrical grid. More than one million Iraqis are now dead; five million made into refugees. The Western invaders may not be doing “cultural genocide” but they are doing cultural destruction on an immense scale, in the very cradle of Western Civilization. Why is the news filled with demonstrators about Tibet but not about Iraq And as everyone knows but few dare say, “demographic aggression” and “cultural genocide” can be applied most accurately to Israel’s settlement policies and systematic destruction of Palestinian communities. On this, the Dalai Lama seems silent. Demonstrators don’t wave flags for bulldozed homes, destroyed orchards, or dead Palestinian children.
The Chinese government is responsible for the well-being and security of one-fourth of humanity. Race riots and rebellion cannot be tolerated, not even when done by Buddhist monks....Chinese Civilization was already old when the Egyptians began building pyramids....
China’s treatment of its minorities has been exemplary compared to what the Western world has done to its minorities. After thousands of years of Chinese dominance, there still are more than 50 minorities in China. After a few hundred years of European dominance in North and South America, the original minority cultures have been exterminated, damaged, or diminished.[...]
"You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month." - CIA operative discussing with Philip Graham, editor Washington Post, on the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories. "Katherine The Great," by Deborah Davis (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991)
www.wrhstore.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/MOCK/mockingbird.html
The Crimes of Mena
The Suppressed Article
This is the article which had been scheduled to appear in the Washington Post. After having cleared the legal department for all possible questions of inaccurate statements, the article was scheduled for publication when just as the presses were set to roll, Washington Post Managing Editor Bob Kaiser (Like George Bush, a member of the infamous "Skull & Bones Fraternity), killed the article without explanation. According to the sidebar which appeared with the Penthouse Magazine version of this story, Bob Kaiser refused to even meet with Sally Denton and Roger Morris, hiding in his office while his secretary made excuses.
This is the story that couldn't be suppressed. An investigative report into a scandal that haunts the reputations of three presidents - Reagan, Bush, and Clinton.
http://www.wrhstore.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/ARCHIVE/CRIMES_OF_MENA.html
OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmockingbird.htm
brief excerpt from an amazing, scary past & present history...
In 1948 Frank Wisner was appointed director of the Office of Special Projects. Soon afterwards it was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This became the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. Wisner was told to create an organization that concentrated on "propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world."
Later that year Wisner established Mockingbird, a program to influence the domestic American media. Wisner recruited Philip Graham (Washington Post) to run the project within the industry. Graham himself recruited others who had worked for military intelligence during the war. This included James Truitt, Russell Wiggins, Phil Geyelin, John Hayes and Alan Barth. Others like Stewart Alsop, Joseph Alsop and James Reston, were recruited from within the Georgetown Set. According to Deborah Davis (Katharine the Great): "By the early 1950s, Wisner 'owned' respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles."
In 1951 Allen W. Dulles persuaded Cord Meyer to join the CIA. However, there is evidence that he was recruited several years earlier and had been spying on the liberal organizations he had been a member of in the later 1940s. According to Deborah Davis, Meyer became Mockingbird's "principal operative".
One of the most important journalists under the control of Operation Mockingbird was Joseph Alsop, whose articles appeared in over 300 different newspapers. Other journalists willing to promote the views of the CIA included Stewart Alsop (New York Herald Tribune), Ben Bradlee (Newsweek), James Reston (New York Times), Charles Douglas Jackson (Time Magazine), Walter Pincus (Washington Post), William C. Baggs (Miami News), Herb Gold (Miami News) and Charles Bartlett (Chattanooga Times). According to Nina Burleigh (A Very Private Woman) these journalists sometimes wrote articles that were commissioned by Frank Wisner. The CIA also provided them with classified information to help them with their work.
After 1953 the network was overseen by Allen W. Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency. By this time Operation Mockingbird had a major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. These organizations were run by people with well-known right-wing views such as William Paley (CBS), Henry Luce (Time Magazine and Life Magazine), Arthur Hays Sulzberger (New York Times), Alfred Friendly (managing editor of the Washington Post), Jerry O'Leary (Washington Star), Hal Hendrix (Miami News), Barry Bingham Sr., (Louisville Courier-Journal), James Copley (Copley News Services) and Joseph Harrison (Christian Science Monitor). [...]
THE CIA AND THE MEDIA
How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up
BY CARL BERNSTEIN
After leaving The Washington Post in 1977, Carl Bernstein spent six months looking at the relationship of the CIA and the press during the Cold War years. [Excerpts from] His 25,000-word cover story, published in Rolling Stone on October 20, 1977, reprinted below.
...Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald‑Tribune. By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc....MURKY DETAILS OF CIA RELATIONSHIPS WITH INDIVIDUALS and news organizations began trickling out in 1973 when it was first disclosed that the CIA had, on occasion, employed journalists. Those reports, combined with new information, serve as casebook studies of the Agency’s use of journalists for intelligence purposes. They include:
■ The New York Times. The Agency’s relationship with the Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials. From 1950 to 1966, about ten CIA employees were provided Times cover under arrangements approved by the newspaper’s late publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. The cover arrangements were part of a general Times policy—set by Sulzberger—to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible. Sulzberger was especially close to Allen Dulles. “At that level of contact it was the mighty talking to the mighty,” said a high‑level CIA official who was present at some of the discussions. “There was an agreement in principle that, yes indeed, we would help each other. The question of cover came up on several occasions. It was agreed that the actual arrangements would be handled by subordinates.... The mighty didn’t want to know the specifics; they wanted plausible deniability....
CIA officials cite two reasons why the Agency’s working relationship with the Times was closer and more extensive than with any other paper: the fact that the Times maintained the largest foreign news operation in American daily journalism; and the close personal ties between the men who ran both institutions. Sulzberger informed a number of reporters and editors of his general policy of cooperation with the Agency..... Arthur Hays Sulzberger signed a secrecy agreement with the CIA in the 1950s, according to CIA officials—a fact confirmed by his nephew, C.L. Sulzberger[....] http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
...Senate Bill the Senate's version of the intelligence authorization act, contained no language on the issue of the CIA's use of journalists as spies. The conference committee, however, rolled in the House amendment virtually verbatim, but with one critical change: Not just the president, but the CIA director as well, could waive the ban on the use of journalists in covert operations by writing to the House and Senate intelligence oversight committees. This is the version of the bill that became law on Oct. 11, 1996, with President Clinton's signing of the 1997 Intelligence Authorization Act.... http://www.cpj.org/attacks96/sreports/cia.html
Journalism and the CIA: The Mighty Wurlitzer
by Daniel Brandt
From NameBase NewsLine, No. 17, April-June 1997
http://www.namebase.org/news17.htm
... The Office of Strategic Services, the CIA's predecessor, had jurisdiction over wartime covert operations and propaganda.... OSS chief William Donovan recruited heavily among social and academic elites.... OSS veteran Frank Wisner ran most of the early peacetime covert operations as head of the Office of Policy Coordination. Although funded by the CIA, OPC wasn't integrated into the CIA's Directorate of Plans until 1952, under OSS veteran Allen Dulles. Both Wisner and Dulles were enthusiastic about covert operations. By mid-1953 the department was operating with 7,200 personnel and 74 percent of the CIA's total budget.
Wisner created the first "information superhighway." But this was the age of vacuum tubes, not computers, so he called it his "Mighty Wurlitzer." The CIA's global network funded the Italian elections in 1948, sent paramilitary teams into Albania, trained Nationalist Chinese on Taiwan, and pumped money into the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the National Student Association, and the Center for International Studies at MIT. Key leaders and labor unions in western Europe received subsidies, and Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were launched. The Wurlitzer, an organ designed for film productions, could imitate sounds such as rain, thunder, or an auto horn. Wisner and Dulles were at the keyboard, directing history.
The ethos of the fight against fascism carried over into the fight against godless communism; for these warriors, the Cold War was still a war. OSS highbrows had already embraced psychological warfare as a new social science: propaganda, for example, was divided into "black" propaganda (stories that are unattributed, or attributed to nonexistent sources, or false stories attributed to a real source), "gray" propaganda (stories from the government where the source is attributed to others), and "white" propaganda (stories from the government where the source is acknowledged as such).[1] After World War II, these psywar techniques continued. C.D. Jackson, a major figure in U.S. psywar efforts before and after the war, was simultaneously a top executive at Time-Life. Psywar was also used with success during the 1950s by Edward Lansdale, first in the Philippines and then in South Vietnam. In Guatemala, the Dulles brothers worked with their friends at United Fruit, in particular the "father of public relations," Edward Bernays, who for years had been lobbying the press on behalf of United. When CIA puppets finally took over in 1954, only applause was heard from the media, commencing forty years of CIA-approved horrors in that unlucky country.[2] Bernays' achievement apparently impressed Allen Dulles, who immediately began using U.S. public relations experts and front groups to promote the image of Ngo Dinh Diem as South Vietnam's savior.[3]...
The counterculture burned out once the war wound down, but it had already dented the lemming-like consensus that typified an earlier period. For roughly ten years, between 1967 and 1977, Americans learned something of their secret history. From the perspective of twenty additional years, the results were mixed and much remains secret....The first shoe was dropped by Jack Anderson in late August, 1973, when he revealed that Seymour Freidin, head of the Hearst bureau in London, was a CIA agent....
It is believed that if the correct number of all media and propaganda projects could be determined, it would exceed Election Support as the largest single category of covert action projects undertaken by the CIA.[7] ...One enterprising researcher took this 29 percent figure, and extrapolating from figures on CIA expenditures for covert operations, found that the cost of propaganda in 1978 was around $265 million and involved 2,000 personnel. Comparing this to figures for other news agencies, he concluded that the CIA "uses far more resources in its propaganda operations than any single news agency.... In fact, the CIA propaganda budget is as large as the combined budgets of Reuters, United Press International and the Associated Press."[8]...
CBS took Daniel Schorr off the air after he leaked the Pike committee report. This was most likely a convenient opportunity for William Paley, chairman of CBS, who didn't approve of Schorr's interest in the network's own CIA connection. Former CBS News president Sig Mickelson, who by 1976 was president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, said that in October 1954, Paley called him into his office for a friendly discussion with two CIA officials. Schorr mentioned this on Walter Cronkite's show, and in an op-ed piece for the New York Times (Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the late publisher of the Times, had been cozy with the CIA also). "There are executives and retired executives," Schorr wrote, "who could help dispel the cloud hanging over the press by coming forward to tell the arrangements they made with the CIA."[9]...
In 1976 the CIA began cranking up their Wurlitzer on the matter of Richard Welch, a station chief in Athens who was assassinated by urban guerrillas at the end of 1975. The CIA's exploitation of this timely tragedy had both an immediate target and a general target. Ostensibly the CIA was complaining about an obscure Washington magazine called CounterSpy, which had been printing CIA names. In the same spirit, Philip Agee's just-published diary of CIA tricks in Latin America was loaded with names, and was already an international sensation.
But the general target of this campaign was more important -- the CIA managed to change the nature of the debate. Suddenly it was no longer a question of what dirty work the CIA might be doing, but rather a question of what happens when the press recklessly endangers the lives of our brave boys overseas....
The final months of 1977 produced three significant pieces of journalism on the CIA and the media, just before the issue was abandoned altogether. The first, by Joe Trento and Dave Roman, reported the connections between Copley Press and the CIA. Owner James S. Copley cooperated with the CIA for three decades. A subsidiary, Copley News Service, was used as a CIA front in Latin America, while reporters at the Copley-owned San Diego Union and Evening News were instructed to spy on antiwar protesters for the FBI. No less than 23 news service employees were simultaneously working for the CIA. James Copley, who died in 1973, was also a leading figure behind the CIA-funded Inter-American Press Association.[13]
The next article was by Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame. In a long piece in Rolling Stone, he came up with the figure of 400 American journalists over the past 25 years, based primarily on interviews with Church committee staffers. This figure included stringers and freelancers who had an understanding that they were expected to help the CIA, as well as a small number of full-time CIA employees using journalism as a cover. It did not include foreigners, nor did it include numerous Americans who traded favors with the CIA in the normal give-and-take between a journalist and his sources. In addition to some of the names already mentioned above, Bernstein supplied details on Stewart and Joseph Alsop, Henry Luce, Barry Bingham Sr. of the Louisville Courier-Journal, Hal Hendrix of the Miami News, columnist C.L. Sulzberger, Richard Salant of CBS, and Philip Graham and John Hayes of the Washington Post....over the last twenty years, the CIA owned or subsidized more than fifty newspapers, news services, radio stations, periodicals and other communications facilities, most of them overseas. These were used for propaganda efforts, or even as cover for operations. Another dozen foreign news organizations were infiltrated by paid CIA agents. At least 22 American news organizations had employed American journalists who were also working for the CIA, and nearly a dozen American publishing houses printed some of the more than 1,000 books that had been produced or subsidized by the CIA. When asked in a 1976 interview whether the CIA had ever told its media agents what to write, William Colby replied, "Oh, sure, all the time."....The Times series concluded that at its peak, the CIA's network "embraced more than 800 news and public information organizations and individuals."[15]...
The inability of Congress to address the CIA-media problem in the 1970s meant that more powerful forces were at work. In fact, while Congress was wringing its left hand over illegal CIA activities, its right hand was helping the CIA overhaul its Wurlitzer. Ever since 1967, when the Katzenbach committee was tasked by Lyndon Johnson to study the problem of the CIA's use of domestic organizations, the agenda at the highest levels had been to remove such activities from the CIA's payroll and continue them under a new umbrella. In the unclassified portion of their report, this committee recommended giving money openly through a "public-private mechanism." "The CIA's big mistake was not supplanting itself with private funds fast enough," observed Gloria Steinem, who had been part of the CIA's global network.[18]
The Asia Foundation was given a large "severance payment" so that they could find private funding,[19] and the Congress for Cultural Freedom got over $4 million from the Ford Foundation.[20] In 1971, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe were spun off and funded separately by new legislation. While this hardly diminished the CIA's control of these radio stations, it did help public relations by facilitating "deniability."[21] Then in 1983, Congress created the National Endowment for Democracy, with funding to carry on many of the activities that the CIA once carried out covertly within its own budget.
Bits and pieces of the old Wurlitzer were still evident everywhere: John Richardson, Jr., the new chairman of NED, had been president and CEO of Radio Free Europe during the 1960s, and some of the NED's dozens of grants were issued to groups that solicited aid for the contras.[22] "It is not necessary to turn to the covert approach," commented Colby in regard to the NED program. "Many of the programs which ... were conducted as covert operations [can now be] conducted quite openly, and consequentially, without controversy."[23] As if to prove his point, Colby's wife was soon a member of NED's board of directors.
Two major changes since the 1980s -- the collapse of socialism and the centralization of domestic and transnational media, suggest that the CIA now has everything well in hand.... A blue-ribbon panel of the Council on Foreign Relations suggested last year that the CIA be freed from some policy constraints on covert operations, such as the use of journalists and clergy as cover. This is alarming. Unlike the typical corporate-funded think tank, filled with pro-Pentagon pundits, the folks at CFR are either running the world or they know who does. For 70 years they've rarely recommended anything that has not become policy. Furthermore, they've thoroughly co-opted the major media (see sidebar).
There have been official announcements the CIA is mission-creeping into economic intelligence and computer-age information warfare.[...]
Sidebar from NameBase NewsLine, No. 17, April-June 1997:
Journalists at Work: Who's Watching the Watchdogs?
In the handful of self-critical articles about the media that appeared twenty years ago, the matter of CIA connections with executives, editors, and reporters was emphasized. While this makes for good copy and is certainly worth repeating, it also fails to challenge American journalism at it weakest point: the corrupting influence of fame and fortune. Someone who has looked at this issue recently is James Fallows, formerly of Atlantic Monthly. Fallows argues in his recent book, Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy, that his profession is becoming seriously compromised.
The name recognition that comes from flaccid punditry can be lucrative on the lecture circuit. Or if you have a name already, perhaps by doing something useless or naughty at the White House, you can acquire pundit status by writing a kiss-and-tell book. Big stars such as Cokie Roberts can collect five figures simply by offering up flattering platitudes at a corporate convention.
Another problem is the revolving door between the media and government. It's considered a badge of honor for a journalist to have spent time working for the White House, whereas it should be seen as a conflict of interest. Some suggest that it's okay to make the switch once -- Bill Moyers can call himself a journalist after working for Lyndon Johnson, but David Gergen has been spinning through the door so often that it makes the rest of us dizzy. Gergen flacked for Nixon, Ford, Reagan and finally Clinton, and between administrations he was an editor at U.S. News & World Report and a commentator for PBS. Come to think of it, James Fallows himself, the new editor at U.S. News & World Report, was the chief speech writer for Jimmy Carter.
Pundits and superstars aside, the larger problem is that the media is owned by the ruling class. With the increased media centralization of the last twenty years, their lock on the masses is now so complete that when they maintain an appearance of objectivity, it's only out of habit. (Sentences containing the words "ruling class" are scribbled self- consciously these days -- a measure of how well they have cornered the market on perception, and perverted what class consciousness we once had into a mass-consumer consciousness.)
How can one distinguish between news and propaganda when the overlaps and interlocks are so pervasive? John Chancellor was with NBC, then with Voice of America, and then again with NBC. John Scali was with ABC, and then with Nixon, and then again with ABC. Ben Bradlee, of Watergate and Washington Post fame, was once a propagandist in Paris, taking orders from the CIA station chief, and was friends with James Angleton. Bradley's sister-in-law was Mary Meyer, divorced from Cord Meyer. She was JFK's lover, and her 1964 murder was never solved. Robert John Myers was in the CIA for twenty years, at one time as an assistant to William Colby, and became publisher of the New Republic in 1968. Generoso Paul Pope, Jr. was in the CIA the year before he bought the National Enquirer in 1952. Laughlin Phillips, co-founder of the Washingtonian, was in the CIA for fifteen years. Former top CIA officials Cord Meyer, Jr. and Tom Braden became columnists (unlike Braden, Meyer rarely talks about his CIA career). George R. Packard and L. Bruce van Voorst were with the CIA before they joined Newsweek, and Philip Geyelin worked for the CIA while on leave from the Wall Street Journal. There's always Katharine Graham, one of the world's richest women, now recognized as a victim of the male-dominated culture because her new autobiography says it's so. In a 1988 speech at CIA headquarters, Graham warmed to her audience: "We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets, and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows."
Over 100 pundits, news anchors, columnists, commentators, reporters, editors, executives, owners, and publishers can be found by scanning the 1995 membership roster of the Council on Foreign Relations -- the same CFR that issued a report in early 1996 bemoaning the constraints on our poor, beleaguered CIA. By the way, first William Bundy and then William G. Hyland edited CFR's flagship journal Foreign Affairs between the years 1972-1992. Bundy was with the CIA from 1951-1961, and Hyland from 1954-1969.
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) have altered policies to indicate they're taking blogs seriously, and a growing number of public offices are actively reaching out to the blogosphere... The CIA recently updated its policies on Freedom of Information Act requests.... granting bloggers a waiver on fees for copying the documents it releases to requesters once available only to traditional media.... And last August, the NSA issued a directive to its employees to report leaks of classified information to the media -- "including blogs,"...
CIA Claims the Right to Decide What is News
Washington D.C., 14 June 2006 - The National Security Archive today filed suit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia against the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
The CIA demanded that the National Security Archive show that its requests for records meet several criteria that are not found in the FOIA itself, specifically, that the requests "concern current events," "interest the general public," and "enhance the public understanding of the operations and activities of the U.S. government." Among the requests that the CIA determined did not concern "current events" were[...]
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20060614/index.htm
The Power of Nightmares: Rise of the Politics of Fear
2004 BBC documentary film series, written and produced by Adam Curtis
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=%22power+of+nightmares%22&hl=en
This highly revealing BBC documentary digs deep into the roots of the war on terror, only to find that much of the widespread fear in the post-9/11 world has been fabricated by those in power for their own interests. The intrepid BBC team presents highly informative interviews with experts and top officials in combating terrorism who raise serious questions about who is behind all of the fear-mongering. These experts and riveting footage also show how the media have been manipulated to support secret power agendas. This eye-opening documentary shows that, especially after 9/11, fear has been used widely in the media to manipulate the public into giving up civil liberties and turning over power to elite groups with their own hidden agendas. The Power of Nightmares clearly demonstrates that the nightmare vision of a powerful, united terrorist organization waiting to strike our societies is largely an illusion. Wherever the BBC team looked for al-Qaeda, from the mountains of Afghanistan to the sleeper cells in America, they found that we are chasing a phantom enemy. For all citizens who care about the future of our world, this is a must-watch video.
View Free
Each episode is one hour. If you have time for only one, Part 3 is the most revealing.
Power of Nightmares Part 1 - The Making of the Terror Myth:
Power of Nightmares Part 2 - The Phantom Victory Myth:
Power of Nightmares Part 3 - The Shadows in the Cave:
"The CIA’s “mighty Wurlitzer” has never been more deafening, and the masses are dancing to its tune."
CIA behind China-bashing Olympics protests
by Larry Chin
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8656
Around the world, Beijing’s hosting of the 2008 Olympic Games has become the target of unprecedented, well-orchestrated and extremely hostile mass protests. Meanwhile, geostrategic realities, historical and current parapolitical fact, suggest that the protesters and passionate activists (in time-honored form) have once again become the willing dupes, propaganda shills, and street bullies for “causes” created, fronted, and pushed by Anglo-American intelligence agencies that continue to target a government (this time Beijing), in a host of long-term subversion and sabotage plans. Behind the powerful din created by the popular and celebrity-embraced “Save Tibet,” campaign is the fact that the CIA is behind the Tibet independence movement. See The Role of the CIA behind the Dalai Lama's holy cloak and The Tibet Card. The legions of pro-Tibet activists also seem largely unaware of the historical fact that the “holy land of compassion” has been a CIA pawn since the end of World War II. The infamous Tolstoi Mission sent CIA operatives into Tibet, with plans to establish it as a US military base, from which the US could control the entire Asian region. This activity flourished under the US-supported, opium-banked Nationalist Kuomintang regime of Chiang Kai-Shek. When the Communists rose to power, the CIA trained Tibetans in guerrilla tactics to use against the regime in Peking, and thousands of Tibetans lost their lives in these battles. Who benefited? Who really gave the orders then -- and who is driving the agenda now?
On the surface, and to uncritical eyes, practitioners of the practice of Falun Gong, a school of Chinese qi gong, are the innocent victims of horrific suppression by Beijing. In a situation parallel to the crackdowns in Tibet, it is also a fact that Falun Gong has been the recipient of years of vicious crackdowns and human rights atrocities across China. But just as is the case with Tibet, there is more to the Falun Gong case than simple persecution. Outside political forces and corporate interests can be found pushing Falun Gong into increasingly political activities, including well-funded, well-organized, and ubiquitous worldwide protests against the Chinese...Among the foreign (predominantly Western) Friends of Falun Gong, we find the likes of Mark Palmer of Freedom House. Freedom House is a quasi-intelligence front created by the CIA-connected Open Society Institute [OSI] of George Soros. In addition to Palmer, Freedom House has counted among its top management the former CIA Director James Woolsey, neocons Bernie Aronson and Diana Negroponte, super elite Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Clinton National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, Clinton Commerce Secretary Stuart Eizenstat, and the late Congressman Tom Lantos and his wife. Freedom House is backed by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which former CIA agent Philip Agee, and many others have amply documented, is a US intelligence apparatus that has been a driving force behind opposition forces (“democracy revolutions”) in many countries.
As pointed out by William Blum in his book, Rogue State, the CIA has created a host of “Trojan horses” such as the NED specifically to subvert foreign countries, under the guise of humanitarianism:“The NED was set up in the early 1980s under President Reagan in the wake of the negative revelations about the CIA, in the second half of the 1970s . . . The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities. “It was a masterpiece. Of politics, of public relations and of cynicism...“In a multitude of ways, the NED meddles in the internal affairs of foreign countries . . . In short, NED’s programs are in sync with the basic needs and objectives of the New World Order’s economic globalization, just as the programs have for years been on the same wavelength as US foreign policy. “The NED, like the CIA before it, calls what it does supporting democracy. The governments and movements whom the NED targets call it destabilization.”...
Similar to the “Save Tibet” movement, the “Save Darfur”/“Stop Darfur Genocide” movement has become a worldwide cause celebre, embraced and trumpeted by a host of Hollywood celebrities and headline-loving political bigwigs, and aggressive activists. While this cause is continuously promoted by propaganda, and one-sided “Hotel Rwanda” type fare, the real geostrategic game being played in Africa is being largely ignored....Western oil companies have engaged in far more aggressive activities, for many years... Darfur is brimming with covert operations, and Anglo-American military-intelligence involvement behind tribal warfare, elections, cross-border military skirmishes, and massacres.... there is a “great game” being played in Africa, just as there is...around Tibet. Through propaganda, China is being made arch-villain.... to... protest China, based on human rights “causes” created, manipulated, and co-opted by Anglo-American intelligence propaganda is to fall directly into the hands of the exponentially greater violators of human rights all over the world: the United States and its allies.
Indeed, activists and protesters all over the world must ask themselves whose side they are really on, and to whose orders are they marching... activists are being guided into deepening the suffering; assisting the Anglo-American empire’s own plans to destabilize and conquer (energy-rich and strategically situated) Africa and (energy-rich and strategically situated) Tibet, and politically hamper Beijing.... China is being simultaneously used as the labor engine for the world’s capitalist economy, while being geostrategically and militarily encircled. China is also in the process of being financially seized and gutted by the World Trade Organization. Every move made by the Beijing government, particularly for its own stakes in oil and gas, have been violently contested by the Western powers.
China’s attempted rise to the [digest: the geopolitical point is that now too successfully capitalist China 'threatens' U.S.global domination] world stage is headed off by rapacious US-led machinations. Today’s anti-Chinese Olympics protests are simply the latest manifestation. It is no surprise that US presidential aspirants Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have jumped on the anti-Chinese Olympic boycott bandwagon, joining the worldwide anti-China propaganda noise...The “Save Tibet,” “Save Darfur,” and “Help Falun Gong” movements are as deceptive as the “war on terrorism.” The “causes” are controlled by Anglo-American intelligence apparatuses and/or co-opted by them, in order to provide the masses with the propaganda justification for wars and intervention, and resource conquest. The CIA’s “mighty Wurlitzer” has never been more deafening, and the masses are dancing to its tune.
OLD AMERICAN VALUES
"We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated. The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective. Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electronically control the brain. Someday armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain."
Dr José Delgado. Director of Neuropsychiatry, Yale University Medical School Congressional Record, No. 26, Vol. 118 February 24, 1974.
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