For
the most part, "progressive" and
"alternative" forums are full of preening, ignorant
bullshitters with little grasp of the evidence and no
appreciation for
parapolitics, who contentedly squeeze greasy farts in the faces of
researchers and activists who know
what time it is. (from Smirking Chimp, an anti-Bush site)
America's had
trouble with "normal" since the day it watched a police narcotics
informant silence a self-described patsy on live television.
(Oswald,Ruby)
"According
to the 1976 Church committee's
final report, approximately fifty U.S.
Journalists had covert relationships with the CIA, about half of which
involved money. Watergate investigative reporter Carl Bernstein charged
that the total number of U.S. journalists who worked for the CIA was
actually much higher." 400
was considered a low estimate.
SUBVERTING THE MEDIA (local copy)
As these stories hit the news, Senate investigators began to probe the
CIA sponsored manipulation of the media – the “Fourth Estate” that
supposedly was dedicated to acting as a check and balance on the
excesses of the executive.This
investigation was, however, curtailed at the insistence of Central
Intelligence Agency Directors, William Colby and George Bush – who
would later be elected US President.
“Let’s not pick on some reporters,” CIA Director William Colby
stated. “Let’s go to the managements.
They were witting.” ...
the two most bullish media outlets to co-operate were the New York Times and CBS Television. The New York
Times even went so far as to submit
stories to Allen Dulles and his replacement, John McCone, to vet
and approve before publication.
WHO sits
on the boards of the "Liberal Media"?
Surprising. IT'S ALL SPOOKS 24/7. War
propaganda is that branch of public
relations devoted to manipulating people's attitude toward a war or
war in general, rather than engaging in open dialogue.
RCA
Radio Corporation of America
(political friendster) The
WWII operation to
use corporate media to drive American support for war tied Wall Street
and the Corporate Military complex agendas and it is still
classified. Prescott
Bush was
a
director of CBS
when the FDR
government
"requested" GE
and Westinghouse /CBS partner to form RCA and "protect"
the American airways from enemy propaganda. Formed by GE and Westinghouse to promote
government propaganda, they are still on the job of
waving flags and spinning
facts to support wars and omit anti
corporate "news"
as NBC
and CBS.
War On Terror
Propaganda
amazing - "The
President has requested that all
members of his cabinet and sub-cabinet incorporate
message points on the Global War on Terror into speeches,
including specific
examples of what each agency is doing to aid the reconstruction of
Iraq," the May 2 e-mail from USDA speechwriter Heather Vaughn
began.
It's easy to see
parallels to exaggerated propaganda about communists, including the Bullwinkle cartoon with
Boris Badenov and Natasha. I saw a Sponge Bob cartoon
filled with anti-Labor propaganda for toddlers
who never worked a day in their lives.
All about the War on Terror and Iraq War by
Boondocks.
Much profanity, voice is the Samuel
Jackson, using lines from "Pulp Fiction" in new context, incl.
remarks by Donald Rumsfeld.
From Glen Yeadon's
"From the streets of Little Beirut" (2/28/03):
"CIA censorship and
media-propagandizing was supposed to have stopped in the
mid-1970s after the Church Committee investigated the CIA's Project Mockingbird. At the
time, every
major media outlet was
infected with Mockingbird. Coexisting with Project Mockingbird
was a FBI operation named COINTELPRO.
COINTELPRO
was successful in destroying not only leftist groups but
also more importantly the press of
the left. Ramparts Magazine was a major
target eliminated by COINTELPRO. In one short decade, the
alternative
press had been wiped out."
David
Horowitz (ex-Marxist) now has FrontPageMag.com, funding
grants, Sarah
Mellon Scaife Foundation -- This foundation is financed by the
Mellon industrial, oil and banking fortune. At one time, its largest
single holding was stock in Gulf Oil Corporation. Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman on COINTELPRO
in 2004.
NETWORKS
and OUTLETS
NPRCEO Kevin Klose (Biography)
National Public Radio is CIA
all the
way.
Prior to joining NPR in
December 1998, Klose served successively as director of U.S.
international broadcasting, overseeing the United
States
Government's global radio and television news services
(1997-98); and president of Radio
Free Europe/Radio
Liberty
(RFE/RL), broadcasting to Central Europe and the former Soviet Union
(1994-97). Klose first joined RFE/RL in 1992 as director of Radio
Liberty, broadcasting to the former
Soviet Union in its national
languages.
As RFE/RL president,
Klose radically downsized RFE/RL and moved it from Munich, Germany, to
Prague, the Czech Republic. He also helped devise and implement a strategy to
coordinate all U.S.-funded international broadcasting (Voice of
America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Radio/TV
Marti, Worldnet Television) to save money, refocus the mission,
and
modernize operations in the post-Cold War.
Mr. Klose is
a leader in psychological warfare (psywar, psyop) programming. That's why they do socially liberal pieces with hard core
Mil-Ind complex where it counts. He was also a "Moscow
correspondent and with the Washington Post, a known CIA front.
(below)
CNN
has the contract to
provide a special internal news broadcast to the National Security
Agency (NSA), per Bamford's book, Body of Secrets. CNN has been
dubbed the CIA News Network. The Return of PSYOPShttp://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1983
Military's media manipulation demands more investigation
In
March 2000, FAIR and international news organizations revealed that CNN
had allowed military propaganda specialists from an Army PSYOPS unit to
work as interns in the news division of its Atlanta headquarters.
Time
Magazine was run by Henry Luce, known to be a CIA
operative and close friends with the heads of CIA Cold Warriors, like
Richard Helms.
CNN-Time-Warner
CEO, prior to working for NY law firm (below), was counsel for Nelson
Rockefeller and a senior White House aide under President Gerald
Ford. Ford was on the JFK
coverupWarren Commission.
(Two
unusual prominent Americans served on the Warren Commission,
"investigating" the murder of JFK, and concluding it was a lone
gunman. One was former CIA Director Allen Dulles, who was fired
after he clashed with Kennedy on a full-scale invasion of Cuba.
Another was Congressman Gerald
Ford
(MUST SEE photorama local
copy), a close buddy of Nixon with far-right connections, with both
linked to the CIA.)
Chief Exec VP and Gen Counsel was Associate Deputy Attorney General at
the US Dept of Justice, and formerly law clerk for Scalia. CNN is
interwoven with the government and the most secretive of intelligence
agencies, CIA's cousin NSA ("no such agency", National Security
Administration).
Anderson
Cooper, CIA Operative? His background is very similar to many
CIA ops. CIA recruited him,
but he 'declined' and went on to CNN.
CBS/Viacom
is run by
Sumner M. Redstone, Harvard University School of Law in 1947, served in
the Military
Intelligence Division
during World War II, and apparent ties
to OSS/CIA figures. Prescott
Bush also
once held a controlling interest in CBS.
CBS is pretty obviously CIA.
ABC
was bought by Capital Cities
a firm created
to acquire media, associated with CIA and run by former CIA director Wm. Casey. Cap
Cities purchased ABC. Walt
Disney was a former Nazi symp. Yes children,
Mickey Mouse's daddy was a fascist. Disney
merged with Capital Cities/ABC on July 31, 1995, with Disney in nominal
control. ABC is CIA.
PBS
is a little more
problematic to state clearly. Not directly Intelligence but it's
former CEO Pat
Mitchell is a member of the
Council on Foreign Relations(which is a
privately-held business entity that acts like a staffing house for all
three branches of govt and intelligence, as well as media), she
was on the White House Project Advisory Board
under Clinton, and a special
correspondent, past president of CNN Productions
and Time, Inc., exec for Ted Turner, worked for ABC, CBS, NBC, all
the major media, was on the boards of Bank
of America(tied
to BCCI scandal, Pakistani BCCI was set to illegally purchase Bank of
America), and Sun Microsystems (supplier
to CIA, NSA, DoD). She resigned in March 2006 and was replaced by
the current CEO, Paula Kerger. Al
Jazeera: The Rupert
Murdoch Fox
News Of The Middle East? It is probably no coincidence that a
useless video of old Osama bin Laden reruns mysteriously appeared on Al
Jazeera ... my basic perception of Al Jazeera as yet another right wing
mega media corporation controlled by the opinions and interests of
international right wing rulling
elite as well as the Emir of Qatar
with his ties to the Bush Regime
remains. (HO!!! The Emir of Qatar
also gladly hosted Osama when he "fled" from Sudan to Afghanistan on a
C-130 with a huge entourage of friends.)
Fox
-- no need to say -- "After
this embarrassment (public exposure of the CIA and Right Wing media
control), it was necessary for the Right
to use its own
private network to replace Operation
Mockingbird. As a result, there is now the Cato Institute, with
Media Mogul Rupert Murdoch
(Fox, NY Post, TV Guide) on the Board with
ATT/TCI's Malone. Fox may not
be CIA directly, but close enough. Fox emerged from
multi-millionaire
right wing Foundation
Grants and "investments". Fox
was thereby guaranteed to succeed, could not fail, regardless of
circumstances, and was able to hire the best PR specialists to meet
these goals and take on the role of an authorative source.
This
is just from a mainstream NYT
Blue/Red rant: Fox News
is a rising profit center within his
News Corporation, and each red-state dollar that it makes can be plowed
back into the rest of Fox's very blue
entertainment portfolio. The Murdoch
cultural stable
includes recent books like Jenna
Jameson's "How
to Make Love Like a Porn Star" and the Vivid Girls' "How to Have a XXX
Sex Life," which have both been synergistically, even joyously,
promoted on Fox News by willing hosts like Rita Cosby and, needless to
say, Mr. O'Reilly. There are "real fun
parts and exciting parts," gushed Ms. Cosby to Ms. Jameson on
Fox News's "Big Story Weekend," ...
Thomas
Frank, the author of "What's the
Matter With Kansas?," by common
consent the year's most prescient political book. "Values," Mr. Frank
writes, "always take a backseat to the
needs of money once the
elections are won." Under this perennial "trick," as he calls
it,
Republican politicians promise to stop abortion and force the culture
industry "to clean up its act" - until the votes are counted. Then they return to their higher
priorities, like cutting capital gains and estate taxes. Mr.
Murdoch and his fellow cultural barons - from Sumner Redstone, the Bush-endorsing C.E.O.
of Viacom, to Richard
Parsons, the Republican C.E.O. of Time Warner, to Jeffrey Immelt, the Bush-contributing
C.E.O. of G.E. (NBC Universal) - are about to be rewarded not
just with more tax breaks but
also with deregulatory goodies
increasing
their power to market salacious
entertainment. It's they, not Susan
Sarandon and Bruce Springsteen, who actually set the cultural agenda
Gary Bauer and company say they despise.
USA
Today and Navy
Times are both part of the Gannett family of news outlets.
... Gannett also publishes Air
Force
Times, Army
Times, Marine
Corp Times, Armed
Forces Journal,
Military
Market, Military
City, and Defense
News. In other words, it's
just your typical independent, civilian media organization.
Bonesman/CIA hand William
F. Buckley, Jr. is the
Editor of the arch-conservative National Review. The National Review's
President
and Chairman is none other than Thomas Rhodes, who was recently a HeritageFoundation
board member.
Nothing here
except interlocking conflict-of-interest with
govt and big business when it comes to informing the public.
AT&T- AT&T provided NSA
eavesdroppers with full access to its customers' phone calls, and
shunted its customers' internet traffic to data-mining equipment
installed in a secret room in its San Francisco switching center,
according to a former AT&T worker cooperating in the Electronic
Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against the company.
The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone
call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by
AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the
arrangement told USA TODAY. May 11, 2006
June 30
(Bloomberg) -- The U.S.
National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to help it set up a
domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001
attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in court papers filed in New York
federal court.
The NSA initiative, code-named ``Pioneer
Groundbreaker,'' asked AT&T unit AT&T Solutions to build
exclusively for NSA use a network operations center which duplicated
AT&T's Bedminster, New Jersey facility, the court papers claimed.
That plan was abandoned in favor of the NSA acquiring the monitoring
technology itself, plaintiffs' lawyers Bruce Afran said.
John M. Forbes -
Investing in Bell's invention, Forbes became the
founder and President of Bell's successful venture.
John
Rendon and his public relations firm, The
Rendon Group, specialize
in making images, manipulating scenes and managing news. He is
currently under a $100,000
per month
contract
with the White House to
track foreign news reports and offer
advice on media
strategy. Rendon
consulted with the
Pentagon
when it created the Office
of Strategic Influence, i.e. Office of Disseminating
Lies.
Supposedly this office was snuffed after
publicity leaked that the Pentagon planned to use it to spread
disinformation. But, whether it is gone or just gone underground is a
legitimate question. (Don Rumsfeld quietly said it is NOT gone,
but continues surreptitiously, quietly.)
"Persuasion works best when
it's invisible. The most effective marketing worms its way
into
our consciousness, leaving intact the perception
that we have reached
our opinion and made our choices independently." (George
Monbiot, The
Guardian, UK 5/14/02). This is what Beers and Rendon do best and it is
why Mr. Bush's administration hired them.
This just makes it easier and cheaper.
This
phase of the BBB's "Operation: Shock & Awe" (pie-ing a reporter)
is
meant to address not an individual telling lies, but rather, an entire
corporate-industrial complex. The directors governing
the media
conglomerates also sit on the boards of the military weapons
manufacturers and all of the other industries in an interlocking
directorate of power. So, it is not
really accurate or enough to just
say, "the corporate media is biased." In point of fact, the corporate
media IS the war, is the military, is the destruction of the
environment, is the gentrification of our cities, is the
criminalization of the poor and non-aryan and foreign-born...it
is
everything that we loath about this society.
1.
J. Edgar Hoover Declares War on the New Left
2. CIA Document: How to Co-opt
Academia
3. CIA Employs Propaganda Assets to Refute Warren Commission Critics
4. Report from CIA's 1970 Anti-Allende Task Force
5. FBI Report on Chile's DINA
6.
Gloria Steinem
Spies on Students for the CIA
(Women's lib or doubling the workforce)
7. Task Force on Greater CIA Openness
Q: How does CIA draw
the line between "greater openness" and an increase in illegal domestic propaganda?
A: With invisible ink.
8. DoD +
DOJ = Big, Big Brother 9. CIA
Documents from the Tehran Embassy 10. CIA HQ
to Santiago station: Overthrow Allende 11. Ben Bradlee: Dispatched by
the CIA(Washington Post, of course.
Bradlee went to high school or college with at least one guy who was
top CIA, Helms or Wisner, i think. So did his boss, Phillip
Graham.)
12. Richard Helms and BCCI
13. U.S. Intelligence Fingered Charles Horman
14. Operation Condor Documents
15. Indonesia 1965: CIA death lists
From this document, dated 20 December 1991, and released 1
April 1992, to the Director of
Central Intelligence from the Task Force on Greater CIA
Openness, on page 6: "PAO [the Public Affairs
Office] now has relationships with
reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly, and
television network in the nation. This has helped us turn some
intelligence failure stories into intelligence success stories...In
many instances, we have persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold
or even scrap stories..."
"No such
beast as a free press exists. Long ago it fell under the control
of the CIA and corporate wealth."
We know that
the official government story of 9-11, can only be called "absolutely
ludicrous".
The govt and private corporations
pays professional bloggers, with OUR tax dollars, to create
propaganda to "sell"
their war to us. They expect us to
email their military-industry propaganda about "supporting our troops"
to our closest friends. We comply.
Just like any old con artist with some skills, behavioral psychologists
and PR consultants seize upon
our deepest desires, our
highest moral, ethical,
and religious values, and our noble
love of America, because they know they can twist us
around, confuse us, and screw
us with the very best values we possess, and
USE us for their benefit.
They have to spin it,
because dropping bombs on people, destroying property essential for
life, and destroying homes that people have worked their whole lives
for, raiding someone's private home and lining up wives, mothers, and
children and tying them up and shooting them, has nothing whatsover to
do with love of America, but they know enough Americans are
stupid enough to fall for the lies if they spread them thick.
They know, because it's
a predictable pattern throughout history, and because they do surveys
on the
'effectiveness' of varous propaganda vehicles, just like Neilsen
surveys on TV shows and other consumer surveys.
"I admit it --
the liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was
often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures."
William Kristol, editor of Weekly
Standard, head of Project for a New
American Century (PNAC),
The New
Yorker, 5/22/95
Kristol
was the cofounder (along with another neocon scion, Robert Kagan)
of the Project
for the New American Century (PNAC), a pressure group created in the late
1990s by a passel of prominent neoconservatives and foreign policy
hawks.
During the lead up to the Iraq War,
PNAC was one of several so-called letterhead
groups led by neoconservatives—others included the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq,
for which Kristol served on the advisory board, and Americans for Victory over Terrorism—that
helped promote public and official
acceptance of an aggressive "war on terror" aimed at reshaping
the Middle East.
In his 1993 book Pandaemonium:
Ethnicity in International Politics, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (hawk himself, once
close friends with Irving Kristol and the young William Kristol)
wrote of the neocons:
"They wished for a military posture
approaching mobilization; they would create
or invent whatever crises were required to bring this about."
Bad News The Decline of
Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger to All
of Us
...
debates over Iraq ... are aberrations. Most of the time, in truth, most
of the media take their cues from the government in deciding which
foreign stories to cover.
... politicians
and
the media have conspired to infantilize, to dumb down, the American
public. At heart, politicians don't believe that Americans can handle
complex truths, and the news media, especially television news,
basically agrees.
Vladimir Putin: "The press is not an institution, it's an
instrument."'
The Saudis have ... acted for
years as clandestine proxy financiers for U.S. foreign policy
objectives. In the 1980s, they helped President Reagan dodge
Congressional interference by
supplying funds directly to the Nicaraguan Contras. From the
1970s onward, they helped the U.S.
counter communist ideas by funding madrassas around the Muslim world
at a time when it made sense, when pro-Soviet propaganda dominated the
region-and that was even before the Afghans' ideological gearing up
against the Soviets. Remember the BCCI
bank scandal in the early 1990s? Gulf and Saudi money
underpinned the bank, which funneled
funds to Islamic groups fighting the Soviets, all of which was
allowed to unravel once the Soviets withdrew.
... today's regimes - such as China or the Arab countries, or indeed
most halfway-developed countries manipulate their public more
effectively, using lessons they learned from America. Since they can no
longer stop it, these nations now allow TV news competition. On one
hand, it gives the illusion of variety; on the other, it generates
bottom-line fever-which in turn leads to more entertainment, more
gossip and scandal, and less real news. In that thin intellectual
atmosphere, television news barely has the will or wherewithal to
resist spin, to make a complex case for or against anything-and
certainly not against strident patriotism or religion. News
independence gets especially weak if corporate owners have higher
business agendas. Indeed, these days governments deliberately allow
corporate owners of news channels to prosper in other businesses.
intellectual prostitutes
One
night, probably in 1880,
John
Swinton,
then the preeminent New York
journalist, was the guest of honour at a banquet given him by the
leaders
of his craft. Someone who knew neither the press nor Swinton offered a
toast
to the independent press. Swinton outraged his colleagues by replying:
" There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job.
If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell the country for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press. We are the tools and vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes. "
John Swinton (1829-1901)
Washington Post Conspiracy-Phobia
How the Washington Post Censors
the
News (1992)
http://www.copi.com/articles/holmes1.htm Recall how
the
Post saved us from the truth about Iran-Contra
Though the Post does its best to guide our thinking away from
conspiracy theories, it is difficult to avoid the fact that so much
wrongdoing involves government or corporate conspiracies
(list
of
dozens of real conspiracies
that the Post has discredited) The Post's crusade against
exposing conspiracies is blatantly dishonest
And it's not as if the Post were
new to conspiracy work.Former
Washington Post publisher Philip Graham "believing that the function of
the press was more often than not to mobilize
consent for the policies
of the government, was one of the architects of what became a
widespread practice: the use and
manipulation of journalists by the
CIA". Today, the Post and its world of big business are
apparently
terrified that our elite and our high-level public officials may be
exposed as conspirators behind Contra drug-smuggling, October Surprise,
or the assassination of President Kennedy.
"A
Reporter
Looks Back in Anger
-- Why the Media Cover Up Corporate
Crime" What is more
important, however, than speculating about how the Post communicates
within its own corporate structure and with other members of the cartel, is to document and publicize
what the Post does in public, namely, how it shapes and censors the
news.
"According
to the Church committee's final report, approximately fifty U.S.
Journalists had covert relationships with the CIA, about half of which
involved money. Watergate investigative reporter Carl Bernstein charged
that the total number of U.S. journalists who worked for the CIA was
actually much higher."
“We'll
know our disinformation
program is complete
when
everything the American public believes is false.” -- William Casey, CIA Director (from first staff
meeting, 1981)
-------------------------
(hmm,
how does a Mafia pursuade
an
honest reporter or rather newspaper editor?
give him bags of money? convince him that he might feel suicidal
if he doesn't play ball?)
So what news gets changed? Just reports of wars, or assassinations or
disease threats or just national security stories? According to CIA Director Casey's
statement, what gets changed is “everything.”Americans have been receiving the CIA view of the world
since 1950's at least, regardless if it's NPR, Pacifica, New York
Times, or Fox.
WHOA: Sen. Bob Graham
(brother of Phillip Graham see below) was eating a "power breakfast" on
9-11 with his good ol' buddy Porter Goss (Goss standing in the 'warmup box' for CIA
director, later picked by Bush) with other Intelligence
members AND
with a Pakistani General who FBI confirmed had sent money to the alleged
Sept
11 hijackers
in
Florida just days earlier. When it was revealed, Goss said
it was no big deal and amounted to 'finger-pointing'. I
learned about that from Dr. Michel Chossudovsky who found it buried in
national and international media. Condi bypassed questions about
this by an Indian reporter. India broke the story first.
Sen Graham is brother
of the late Phillip Graham, who was publisher of
the Washington Post before his
1963 suicide, along
with his wife Katherine. Phil Graham was very close to the CIA,
and WaPo is a newspaper at the core of Operation
Mockingbird,
the propaganda
program of the CIA started by Frank Wisner of the CIA, control and
manage public thought particularly on the Left. WaPo helped to
squelch serious crimes like Iran-Contra, Gary Webb's
stories on CIA-Drugs, and the Bush
election fraud in Florida in 2000 and 2004, as well as countless
other spins.
Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee's
brother-in-law is Cord Meyer
of
the CIA (he
married Toni Bradlee's sister),
his close friend is Richard Ober of the CIA, Bradlee's childhood friend
is
the infamous Richard Helms of
the CIA who was fired by Kennedy along
with Allen Dulles around the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Helms wrote
portions of the National Security Act
of 1947, a set of laws creating a Central Intelligence Agency and the
National Security Agency, etc.
At higher
levels, informal
cooperation between the CIA and corporate media executives
was
often instrumental in censoringthe publication of information
that the CIA found objectionable. This informal cooperation was made
easier by the fact that, in addition to the cozy relationship shared
between the CIA and reporters, the executives
at many of the nation’s largest press outlets such as CBS,
the New
York Times, the
Washington
Post, U.S.
News and World
Report, Time, Newsweek and Life
magazines were intimate friends
with individuals at the highest levels of management at the CIA.
The New York Times summarized in 1977 that “most
C.I.A. directors, especially Richard Helms and the late Allen Dulles,
have been close friends with the chief executives of some of the
nation’s most influential news organizations.” Kathryn Olmsted, who did
her Ph.D. thesis on the subject of the relationship between the
intelligence community and the press, was more specific with respect to
the ties between the CIA elite and the elite that owned and managed
establishment papers such as the Washington Post and
the New York Times:
For example, Wa
Post
editor Ben Bradlee’s brother-in-law
was [CIA] covert operations chief
Cord Meyer; Post publisher Phil Graham was
probably the closest friend
of Frank Wisner, the man who directed the
Agency’s propaganda machine(the "Mighty
Wurlitzer"); and the Times publishing
family, the Sulzbergers, socialized
with CIA chiefs Allen Dulles, John
McCone, and Richard Helms. (sure glad they cleared up those conflicts
of interest ... NOT!!!)
This could have something to do with WHY THE
MEDIA IS NOT EXPOSING 9-11 facts. (and NEVER WILL,
unless it's to "tame" the issue or blame it on a dead guy)NO SHIT!!!more on Bob Graham and CIA and Sept 11
...the point here is
that the Washington Post is really (like many other newspapers in this
country) inextricable
from the U.S. intelligence establishment. And that very
relationship was indispensable in helping the Washington Post to grow
as an institution.
I have serious doubts
about this entire webpage
on the illuminati and David Icke links and whatnot, but I think this section is factual and
corroborated:
Mockingbird - This
unlikely land of enchantment is the creation of MOCKINGBIRD. It was
conceived in the late 1940s, the most frigid period of the cold war,
when the CIA began a systematic
infiltration of the corporate media, a process that often
included direct takeover of major news outlets.
In this period, the American intelligence services competed
with communist activists abroad to influence European labor unions.
With or without the cooperation of local governments, Frank Wisner, an undercover State
Department official assigned to the Foreign Service, rounded up
students abroad to enter the cold war underground of covert operations
on behalf of his Office of Policy Coordination. Philip Graham, __a graduate of the Army Intelligence
School in Harrisburg, PA, then publisher of the Washington Post.,
was taken under Wisner's wing to direct the program code-named
Operation MOCKINGBIRD.
Operation MOCKINGBIRD — The CIA begins recruiting American
news organizations and journalists to become spies and disseminators of
propaganda. The effort is headed by Frank
Wisner, Allen
Dulles, Richard Helms and Philip Graham. Graham is publisher
of The Washington Post, which becomes a major CIA player. Eventually,
the CIA’s media assets will include ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek,
Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst
Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Serviceand more. By the CIA’s
own admission, at least 25 organizations and 400 journalists will
become CIA assets.
as well as the other paragraphs on other more individualized
experiments with mind control, some used on random people in the
general public, some tested overseas:
For
research purposes, here is a list of
mind control projects that have been exposed over the years:
Project CHAPTER, 1951 Project CHATTER, 1950 Project BLUEBIRD
rechristened ARTICHOKE in 1951, 1952 Project CASTIGATE, MKNAOMI - 1952,
1953 MKULTRA, MKDELTA, 1964 MKULTRA, 1968 Project OFTEN/CHICKWIT, I991
operations Bug, Third Chance, Derby Hat and MKUltra continued, Project
MONARCH - Mind control is absolute.
Hoover the Director at FBI was having a
pissing match with CIA, a power struggle. Hoover called up his
buddy, Joe McCarthy, to smear some CIA guys Hoover called "Wisner's
Weirdos". Wisner was a Wall
Street lawyer or banker,
before he became CIA. Cord Meyer and others in
the Frank Wisner Group were accused of being COMMUNISTS by
McCarthy. Some lost their jobs, on innuendo.
FBI yanked Cord Meyer's security
clearance and ordered him in for questioning. Allen Dulles refused FBI's request to allow Meyer to be
questioned. Well!
I can just imagine all the ways Dulles told
Hoover to fuck off.
Instead, Wisner
unleashed Operation
Mockingbird on McCarthy (but I think not on Hoover).
Do
you remember reading/watching about when the tide turned on McCarthy,
when the Washington
Post, and Edward
Murrow at CBS and
others started piling it
on McCarthy and his commie witchhunt, justifiably calling HIM anti-American? Joe
McCarthy settled into full-time alcoholism and died. However McCarthy's
cohort, Richard M. Nixon, ran
for President, losing to JFK in 1960, winning in
1968. http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/54/54_35.pdf
Nixon was a protégé also of
Allen Dulles, and
he was a
protégé of Dulles' protégé, Prescott Bush. The Presidency was
the reward Nixon got for helping keep the CIA-Nazi connection away from
McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee. In turn, Nixon allowed the CIA's wishes
in Vietnam and the coup run on Chile's
President on Sept. 11, 1973
(what's up with that date?) (Pentagon broke ground on Sept 11, 1941)
Meyer,
a fanatic anti-communist agent, who ran all sorts of illegal and
terrorist operations against communists and leftist groups in Europe,
probably involved in Operation Gladio
terrorism,
but with a liberal stance on domestic policy (like JFK),
Meyer was finally cleared.
Amazing how much control
the CIA
has over the media, and WaPo
was one of the main conduits, but they all are now. Also reveals
some of the myths about Edward R. Murrow, depicted in the movie Good
Night and Good Luck.
Mainstream
Media
is
belligerently resistant to talking to anyone with solid facts
and
evidence about September 11, let
alone
reporting it, even when contacted directly by people who have written detailed books in small print,
preferring
to continually refute "wild
conspiracy theories" and recycle the "Terror" myths.
SEE
BELOW: who sits on Board of
Directors of major media outlets
what media jocks sit on the Board of the
Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)
Meet The Man Who Sold the War
Could
that be because Big Media
is
run by the same investor groups that also
run the Federal Reserve, Defense contractors, banks, Oil and Energy,
and the Fortune 100 in general.
The nickname for PBS is Petroleum
Broadcast Network. CNN = CIA News Network, or Cocaine News
Network.
Could that be because
of all the CIA agents, subcontractors, and bought people placed high up
in news media, calledOperation
Mockingbird?
The
"alternative
Left" --- including Amy
Goodman, David Corn,
and others -- goes out of their way
to "debunk" the facts, throwing
up
"anti-Conspiracy experts" and ad hominem attacks.
Could
that be because the
"alternative Left" is funded by
"liberal" tax-free
foundations like Rockefeller spun off of
defense contractors and oil
barons??www.leftgatekeepers.com
The so-called
alternative Left media is even worse in a sense, because it feigns in-depth,
even "anti-American", coverage of news and facts which others ignore,
but
then slickly provides a 2nd coat of
paint on critical issues.
First off, let's just
use a few examples to burst the myth of "Liberal Media":
Boards of
Directors Viacom, CBS Sumner M. Redstone Executive
Chairman of the Board and Founder Harvard
University School of Law in 1947 served
in the Military
Intelligence Division
during World War II.
Robert K. Kraft He
is (or was) Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of The Kraft Group,
which includes the New England Patriots, New England Revolution,
Gillette Stadium, Rand-Whitney Group and International
Forest
Products
Corporation, owner of the New England
Patriots, Chairman of the NFL’s
Finance Committee since 1998,
director of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the Federal
Reserve Bank
of Boston and The New England Patriots Charitable Foundation.
other Board Member's positions: with Morgan
Stanley's
Institutional Securities Division director
of Oracle
Corporation (connected
to the CIA and NSA) Co-Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of
DND Capital Partners, L.L.C., a private equity firm serves
on the boards of American International Group, Inc., Consolidated
Edison, Inc. and JPMorgan
Chase &
Co. Vice
Chairman, Finance and Business Development, of NYNEX,
which is the
"world oil exchange" director
of Akamai Technologies, Inc., The
Bear Stearns Companies Inc.,
Consolidated Edison, Inc. Vice
President for Academic Affairs (the chief academic officer) of Yeshiva
University Dean
of the Boston University School of Law chairman
of the Boston
Mayor’s Special
Commission on Police Procedures member
of the Legal
Advisory Board of the
New York Stock Exchange
(also CIA)
CNN-Time
Warner
- CEO was managing
partner of the New York law firm
Patterson, Belknap,
Webb & Tyler.
Prior to that, he was counsel for Nelson Rockefeller and a senior White House
aide under President Gerald Ford
who was on the JFK coverup Warren
Commission. Chief
Exec VP and Gen Counsel was Associate Deputy Attorney General at the
United States Department of Justice, and formerly law clerk for Scalia.
The Board
of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) includes Tom
Brokow and Fareed Zakaria
the CEO of Newsweek, and the Vice Chairman of Citigroup, as well as Madeline Albright and Richard N.
Haass, principal
Middle East advisor to President George H.W. Bush.
Not
what one would call a "liberal crowd", except in the most obtuse sense
of the word. Board of the Council
on Foreign Relations (CFR)
And
the media is not about to challenge these folk.
One good reason may be found in a 1995 membership roster of the Council
on Foreign Relations as reported by Public Information Research. Here are just a
few of the media CFRers: (many of them from the NYT)
Roone
Arledge, Sidney Blumenthal, David Brinkley, Tom
Brokaw, William F. Buckley Jr. ("new"
conservative), Hodding Carter III, John Chancellor, Arnaud de
Borchgave, Joan Didion, Leonard Downie Jr., Elizabeth Drew, Rowland
Evans Jr., James Fallows, Leslie Gelb, David Gergen, Katharine
Graham, Meg Greenfield, Jim Hoagland, Warren Hoge, David
Ignatius, Robert Kaiser, Marvin Kalb, Joe Klein, Morton Kondrake, Charles
Krauthammer, Irving Kristol (father Wm.
Kristol and of Bush's PNAC), Jim
Lehrer, Anthony Lewis, Michael Lind,
Jessica Matthews, Jack Nelson, Walter Pincus, Norman Podhoretz, Dan
Rather, Stephen Rosenfeld, A. M. Rosenthal, Diane
Sawyer, Hederick Smith, Laurence Tish, Garrick Utley, Katrina
vander Heuval (editor of the "liberal" Nation Magazine),
Milton Viorst, Ben Wattenberg, Lally Weymouth, Roger Wilkins, and Mort Zuckerman.
Council on
Foreign Relations
Col. House was (allegedly) a Marxist whose
goal was to socialize the United States. (J.T. Gatto described this as
"socializing" society for people to be more obedient and compliant when
working for Corporate America's capitalists. Little to do with any
normal concepts of socialism, social democracy, human rights.) In 1912,
House wrote the book
"Philip Dru: Administrator" in which he stated that he was working for "Socialism
as dreamed of by Karl Marx." In this book, House laid out a plan
for the conquest
of America, telling how both the Democratic and
Republican Parties would be controlled, and be used
as instruments in the creation of a socialistic government.(House
meant being a Global Manager, but not in any sense for "the people".
This is what John Birch type people call "socialism" --
hyper-capitalist rule, with government backing, as per usual --
ignoring that socialism involves seizure or control over of the means
of production, away from private control by a tiny investor class
consisting of a few thousand people.)
Pentagon enlists Sesame Street to help war
families Just when
you think it cannot get any more bizarre! Among
the new initiatives is laughter therapy. James Scott, a retired army
colonel, is touring the country urging the families of national
guardsmen to walk like penguins and
laugh like lions. The return of "Duck and Cover" In
the
heyday of "Duck and Cover" and "Burt the Turtle", it was already known
that the techniques being taught to children (such as trying to protect
yourself from a nuclear bomb by hiding under a picnic cloth) were worthless.
The point of the propaganda was to convince people that
nuclear wars were survivable and winnable, to reduce public opposition
to the nuclear agenda.
You
should not waste energy
being shocked about
media
coverup and complicity over 9-11.
Fortune
500 media doesserve it's clients and theirinterests ... not
YOU! You don't pay the
bills. THEY DON'T WORK FOR YOU! THE
JOB Mainstream Media corps are PAID FOR
IS NOT
TO INFORM THE PUBLIC! Mostly, it's to disinform the public.
Media IS mass
marketing ... of messages,
ideas, attitudes,
and behaviors.
It's
behavioral
programming.
Per
William Blum: Q. Why
do you put down the establishment 'media so much when you cite them so
often as your source?
A. The main shortcoming of the establishment media lies
in errors of omission, much more than errors of commission. It's not
that they tell bald lies so much as it is that they leave out parts of
stories or entire stories, or historical reminders, which if included
might put the issue in a whole new light, in a way not compatible with
their political biases.
Or they may include
all the facts, leading to an obvious interpretation, but leave out
suggesting an alternative interpretation of the same facts which stands
the first interpretation on its head. But the information
they do report is often quite usable for my purposes.
to
sell capitalism, complacency, and unthinking
obedience,
to
sell "plausible explanations" and
"official conspiracy theories",
to
sell FEAR, guilt, insecurity, and
confusion ... and their solutions,
to
sell disinformation and distractions
like "minor scandals" and
"outrage",
to
sell humor, titillation, and
perversion ... and prudery ... and
to
sell contempt for both prudery and
morals, which they confuse,
to
generally sell support for the
establishment (or for "regime
change" in the establishment),
sometimes even to channel and
marketineffective
dissent,
to
trust business to be more efficient
than "bad guy" government and
to
trust government to effectively
police business and crime ... when
government IS
business and crime ... and
to
sell the idea that the corporate
media is working in our
interests, and things are not that bad, that things can be reformed as
needed ... if we just sit back
and trust the experts.
"Objective
reporting" means "quoting only official
sources". The
mainstream
media does it's job of exercising positive spin or negative spin, fake
"damage
control" criticism, changing the subject,
or use neutral (neutered) "objective" reporting to avoid obvious
conclusions.
Why do we know ALL
about the "runaway bride" and nothing that was well-known about the
"runaway terrorists" in
Florida who were doing flight training with an obvious CIA
cutout? Runaway bride and Janet Jackson's nipple and Paris
Hilton's drug problem. That's the ticket. It's an insult to
our intelligence ... but people seem to like it.
The
fact
that truth or half-truth sometimes emerges may
be due to the problem that it
gets
increasingly expensive to cover-up and maintain effective credibility,
the further they diverge from reality.
Notice how more recently SATIRE in The Onion and on The Daily Show had
a hard time diverging from the SATIRE emerging from
Washington?
A few decades ago, could anyone imagine a Presidential advisor stating "Wecreatereality"?
Enormous funds have
been spent by corporate America to demonize Labor in the public mind, tens of millions were
spent convincing Americans of the need to defend
Kuwait from Iraq, including surveys and custom creation of Video News
Releases, as well as staging "events" before Congress, and staging
"fake" grassroots movements.
Loss of credibility leads to loss of
control of the public mind. There should be as much reasonable
congruence as possible, and it takes creative writing and acting to lie
while appearing to tell the truth, and especially to appear to be
muckraking while actually doing coverup (exposing minor scandals to
hide big crimes) ... but as you see, mass media can be nearly
impermeable when they really want to cover up something.
News about American politics that Europe reads can be completely absent
--- or even banned --- in the USA, yet only
a small minority becomes aware of these.
(For example, with all the news about
the attempted assassination of Reagan, very few people know that the
family of John Hinckley had been oil
associates of Bush for decades,
and that Neil had a dinner meeting
scheduled with Hinckley's brother
the next day.
What that means ... who knows. But
the fact that nobody knows
this significant fact definitely
means something.)
Also, some
truthtellers may get threatened, family threatened, and/or
subverted, i.e. bought off, killed.
The
truth sometimes
accidentally slips out windows of opportunity, even in mainstream
media, albeit often too late to matter.
Only independent
investigators are covering 9-11 instead of covering it up
--- other than an
isolated story here and there in the mainstream which is not tied in to
the other parts
of the big picture ... but do be cautious of DISINFO ... some of
the independents differ from each other on 'theories' about what did happen,
which can only be deduced from other stuff ... like some say a plane could not have caused that damage
at the Pentagon
(I wrote this
part before developing an understanding that Intelligence had
anticipated the media issue on Sept 11, and had circumvented that by
creating, funding, taking over leading Internet outlets for
"Patriotism" etc., which spew out facts and information mixed with heady disinformation and rightwingnut ideology
of the John Birch Society. JBS itself
has longstanding links to CIA.)
With crimes of this magnitude such as the Kennedy
assassination, it has
been found to be obvious that
the CIA has the power to mix evidence in
with fantasy in the media, and to "create" "fake dissidents" who can
then be
discredited and knocked down as straw men.
This seems obvious in
that that the media has ignored or
severely downplayed ALL legitimate 9-11 evidence ... EXCEPT
highlighting and ridiculing some of the theories about planes carrying
pods and the idea of the attacks being done by holographic laser.
The Pentagon
itself cannot account
for $3.3 trillion dollars of
defense allocations, nor missing
nuclear
weapons, despite functioning computers and no lack of
electricity.
Iraq's "lack of compliance" included very minor
issues -- a brief delay in
opening up a closed office building at 5pm on a Friday, and daring to object and
question why it
was
necessary to interrogate undergrad college science students.
Originally published in Rolling Stone, October
20, 1977. This
story
is EXPLOSIVE, but
nevertheless, with all the denials, consider it an understatement
of reality. Also consider that although the USSR did have nukes and a
large
military, fear of direct USSR aggression against the USA was largely hype for the USA military
industry and entrenched Defense bureaucracy. It was an excuse for
power abuse. The USSR was not that advanced compared to
the USA, 15 years behind in computers according to CIA, and in any case
did not seek a direct military tussle, but rather repelling US
aggression. They needed to spend money on their domestic
infrastructure, but the seven decades of US threats and belligerence
predictably bled to death the much younger (1913 peasant farmers vs.
1700's for America) Soviet economy. No secret conspiracy, outspending
the Soviets and forcing them to waste resources was explicitly
planned
by Washington. This means that while any large power can pose a rival threat,
the justifications for this CIA criminality was mostly bullshit, and
largely aimed at terrorizing Americans.
WITH ALL THIS KNOWN SINCE 1977, HOW CAN WE ASSUME THAT ANYTHING THE
MEDIA TELLS US CAN BE TAKEN AT FACE VALUE? -gg
excerpts (not
necessarily in original order): THE
AGENCY’S DEALINGS WITH THE PRESS BEGAN during the earliest stages of
the Cold War.
"One journalist is worth
twenty agents. He
has access, the ability to ask questions without arousing suspicion."
In 1953, Joseph Alsop, then one of America’s leading syndicated
columnists, went to the Philippines to cover an election. He did not go
because he was asked to do so by his syndicate. He did not go because
he was asked to do so by the newspapers that printed his column. He went at the request of the CIA.
(CIA
has
been described as "Wall Street's own paramilitary police force".
In the hyper-capitalist USA, where founding democratic principles take
a back seat to profit and power, this view of CIA is accurate.)
Alsop is one of more
than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty‑five years
have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence
Agency, according
to documents on
file at CIA headquarters. (Those officials most knowledgeable
about the subject say that a figure of 400 American journalists
is on
the low side of the actual number who maintained covert
relationships
and undertook clandestine tasks.) Some of these
journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were
explicit. There was cooperation,
accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of
clandestine services—from simple intelligence gathering to serving as
go‑betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the
CIA. Editors shared
their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners,
distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors
without‑portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign
correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped
their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the
derring‑do of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest
category, full‑time CIA employees masquerading
as journalists abroad.
In many instances, CIA documents
show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with
the
consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.
The history of the CIA’s
involvement with the American press continues
to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception for
the following principal reasons: ■ The use of
journalists has been among the most productive means of
intelligence‑gathering employed by the CIA. Although the Agency has cut
back sharply (really?)
on the use of reporters since 1973 (primarily as a
result of pressure from the media), some journalist‑operatives are
still posted abroad. (see below, they
were ramped up again by the
90's) ■ Further
investigation into the matter, CIA officials say, would inevitably
reveal a series of embarrassing relationships in the 1950s and 1960s
with some of the most powerful organizations and individuals in
American journalism.
Among
the
executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were Williarn Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of
the LouisviIle Courier‑Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News
Service(cited
by Birch wingnut Gary
Allen as a source). 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.
(also, Readers' Digest, Ladies Home Journal, and a host of other family
publications)
By far the most
valuable of
these associations, according
to CIA officials, have been with the New
York Times, CBS and Time Inc.
In most instances, Agency files show, officials
at the highest levels of the CIA (usually director or deputy
director) dealt personally with a single designated individual in the top management of the cooperating news
organization.
Time and Newsweek magazines.
According to CIA and Senate sources, Agency files contain written agreements with former
foreign correspondents and stringers for both the weekly news
magazines. The same sources refused to say whether the CIA has
ended all its associations with individuals who work for the two
publications. Allen Dulles often
interceded with his good friend, the late Henry Luce, founder of
Time and Life magazines, who readily allowed
certain members of his staff to work for the Agency and agreed to
provide jobs and credentials for other CIA operatives who lacked
journalistic experience.
During the 1976 investigation
of the CIA by the Senate Intelligence
Committee, chaired by Senator Frank Church, the dimensions of
the Agency’s involvement with the press became apparent to several
members of the panel, as well as to two or three investigators on the
staff. But top officials of the CIA,
including former directors William
Colby and George Bush,
persuaded the committee to restrict its inquiry into the matter and to deliberately
misrepresent
the actual
scope of the activities in its final report.
... contrary to the notion that the CIA insidiously infiltrated the
journalistic community, there is ample evidence that America’s leading
publishers and news executives allowed themselves and their
organizations to become handmaidens
to the intelligence services. “Let’s not pick on some poor
reporters, for God’s sake,” (fmr CIA Director) William Colby exclaimed at one point
to the Church committee’s investigators. “Let’s go to the managements. They were
witting.”
James Angleton, who
was
recently removed as the Agency’s head of counterintelligence
operations, ran a completely
independent group of journalist‑operatives who performed sensitive and frequently dangerous
assignments; little is known about this group for the simple
reason that Angleton deliberately kept only the vaguest of files.
Columnists and commentators.
There are perhaps a dozen well known columnists and broadcast
commentators whose relationships with the CIA go far beyond those
normally maintained between reporters and their sources. They are
referred to at the Agency as “known
assets” and can be counted on to perform a variety of undercover tasks; they are
considered receptive to the Agency’s point of view on various
subjects. "The Founding Fathers [of the CIA] were close personal friends of ours.
Dick
Bissell [former CIA deputy director] was my oldest friend, from
childhood."
... at least twenty‑three
Copley News Service employees performed work for the CIA ...
Copley
owns nine newspapers in California and Illinois—among them the San
Diego Union and Evening Tribune.
Paley’s (CBS)
designated
contact for the Agency was Sig Mickelson, president of CBS News between
1954 and 1961. Mickelson is now president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty,
both of which were associated with the CIA for many years.
"It was widely known that Phil Graham
(owner of the Washington Post,
brother of Sen. Bob Graham of
Florida) was somebody you could get help from," said a former deputy
director of the Agency. "Frank Wisner
dealt with him." Wisner, deputy
director of the CIA from 1950 until shortly before his suicide
in 1965, was the Agency's premier orchestrator of "black" operations, including many
in which journalists were involved. Wisner
liked to boast of his "mighty Wurlitzer," a wondrous propaganda
instrument he built, and played, with help from the press.
Phil Graham was probably Wisner's closest friend.
(After
Graham's suicide, his wife Katherine took over operations. At
some point, she held conferences with a CIA audience, where she told
them that keeping the public in the
dark was a good
thing
for America. Katherine Graham also provided financial and PR
assistance to arch-feminist Gloria
Steinem and Ms. Magazine.
Gloria Steinem was later outed
by a legitimate feminist
group called "Red Stockings" as a CIA operative in Europe. CIA reports with Steinem's
name on top later surfaced.)
In 1964 and 1965, Salant served on a super-secret CIA task force which
explored methods of beaming American
propaganda broadcasts to the People's Republic of China. The
other members of the four‑man study team were Zbigniew Brzezinski, then a
professor at Columbia University; William Griffith, then professor of
political science at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, and John Haves, then vice‑president of
the Washington Post Company
for radio‑TV5. The principal government officials associated with the
project were Cord Meyer of the CIA;
McGeorge Bundy,
then
special assistant to the president for national security (later head of
the "liberal" Ford Foundation);
Leonard Marks, then director of the USIA; and Bill Moyers, then special assistant
to President Lyndon Johnson and now a CBS correspondent.
Like many CIA sources, this official said that the only way to end the
uncertainties about aid furnished the Agency by journalists is to disclose the contents of the CIA files—a
course opposed by almost all of the
thirty‑five present and former CIA officials interviewed over
the course of a year. According to an unpublished report by the House Select Committee on Intelligence,
chaired by Representative Otis Pike,
at least fifteen news
organizations were still providing cover for CIA operatives as of 1976.
After Colby left the Agency on January 28th, 1976, and was succeeded by
George Bush, the
CIA
announced a new policy: “Effective
immediately, the CIA will not enter into any paid or contractual
relationship with any full‑time or part‑time news correspondent
accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or
television network or station” At the time of the announcement,
the Agency acknowledged that the policy would result in termination of
less than half of the relationships with the 50 U.S. journalists it
said were still affiliated with the Agency. The text of the
announcement noted that the CIA would
continue to “welcome” the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of journalists.
Thus, many relationships were permitted to remain intact.
DESPITE THE EVIDENCE OF WIDESPREAD CIA USE OF journalists, the Senate
Intelligence Committee and its staff decided against questioning any of
the reporters, editors, publishers or broadcast executives whose
relationships with the Agency are detailed in CIA files.
According to sources in the Senate and the Agency, the use of
journalists was one of two areas of inquiry
which the CIA went to extraordinary lengths to curtail. The other
was the Agency’s continuing and
extensive use of academics for recruitment
and information gathering
purposes.
Some members of the Church committee and staff feared that Agency
officials had gained control of the inquiry and that they were being
hoodwinked. “The Agency was
extremely clever about it and the committee played right into its
hands,” said one congressional source familiar with all aspects of the
inquiry. “Church and some of the other members were much more interested in making headlines
than in doing serious, tough investigating. The Agency pretended to be giving up a
lot whenever it was asked about the flashy
stuff — assassinations and
secret weapons and James Bond operations. Then, when it came to things that they didn’t want to give away,
that were much more important to the Agency,
Colby in particular called in his chits. And the committee bought
it.” The Senate
committee’s investigation into the use of
journalists was supervised by William
B. Bader, a former CIA intelligence officer who returned briefly
to the Agency this year as deputy to
CIA director Stansfield Turner and is now a high‑level intelligence official at the
Defense Department. Bader was assisted by David Aaron, who now
serves as the deputy to Zbigniew Brzezinski,
President Carter’s national security adviser.
(CIA Director) Bush agreed to
order a search of the files and have those records pulled which deals
with operations where journalists had been used. But the raw files could not he made available
to Bader or the committee, Bush
insisted. Instead, the director decided, his deputies would condense the material into one‑paragraph
summaries describing in the most general terms the
activities of each individual journalist. Most important, Bush decreed, the names of journalists and of the news
organizations with which they were affiliated would be omitted
from the summaries.
Bader and others to whom he described the contents of the summaries
immediately reached some general conclusions: the sheer number of covert relationships
with journalists was far greater than the CIA had ever hinted;
and the Agency’s use of reporters and news executives was an
intelligence asset of the first magnitude. Reporters had been involved in almost every
conceivable kind of operation. Of the 400‑plus individuals whose
activities were summarized, between 200 and 250 were “working
journalists” in the usual sense of the term—reporters, editors, correspondents,
photographers; the rest were employed at least nominally) by
book publishers, trade publications and newsletters.
Still, the summaries were just that: compressed,
vague, sketchy, incomplete. They could be subject to ambiguous interpretation. And they
contained no suggestion that the CIA
had abused its authority by manipulating the editorial content of
American newspapers or broadcast reports.
...attempted to get more information from the CIA, particularly about
the Agency’s current relationships with journalists. He encountered a stone wall. “Bush has done nothing to date,”
Bader told associates. “None of the important operations are affected
in even a marginal way.” The CIA also refused
the staffs requests for more information on the use of
academics. Bush began to urge
members of the committee to curtail
its inquiries in both areas and conceal its findings in the
final report. “He kept saying, ‘Don’t fuck these guys in the press and
on the campuses,’ pleading that they were the only areas of public life
with any credibility left,” reported a Senate source. “The danger
of exposure is not the other side,” explained one CIA expert in covert
operations. “This is not stuff the other side doesn’t know about. The concern of the Agency is that another
area of cover will be denied.”
A senator who was the object of the Agency’s lobbying later said: “From
the CIA point of view this was the highest, most sensitive covert
program of all.... It was a much larger part of the operational system
than has been indicated.” He added, “I had a great compulsion to press
the point but it was late .... If we had demanded, they would have gone
the legal route to fight it.”
... reached a decision not to pursue the matter further. No journalists
would be interviewed about their dealings with the Agency—either by the
staff or by the senators, in secret or in open session.
“gray area” in which there were no
moral absolutes. Had the CIA “manipulated” the press in the
classic sense of the term? Probably not, (ex-CIA) Bader concluded; the
major news organizations and their executives had willingly lent their resources to
the Agency; foreign correspondents had regarded work for the CIA as a
national service and a way of getting better stories and climbing to
the top of their profession. Had the
CIA abused its authority? It had dealt with the press almost exactly as it had dealt with other
institutions from which it sought cover — the diplomatic
service, academia, corporations. There was nothing in the CIA’s charter which declared
any of these institutions off‑limits to America’s intelligence service.
And, in the case of the press, the Agency had exercised more care in
its dealings than with many other institutions; it had gone to
considerable lengths to restrict its role to information‑gathering and
cover.
... concerned that his knowledge was so heavily based on information furnished by
the CIA; he hadn’t gotten the other side of the story from those
journalists who had associated with the Agency. He could be seeing only “the lantern show,” he told
associates. [...] “It was smart of the Agency to cooperate to the
extent of showing the material to Bader,” observed a committee source.
“That way, if one fine day a file popped up, the Agency would be
covered. They could say they had already informed the Congress.” [...]
It was possible that CIA case officers had written self‑serving memos for the files
about their dealings with journalists, that the CIA was just as subject
to common bureaucratic
“cover‑your‑ass” paperwork as any other agency of government.
Bader’s findings on the
subject
were never discussed with the full committee, even in executive session.
[...] At the slightest sign of a leak the CIA might cut off the flow of
sensitive information as it did, several times in other areas), claiming that the committee could not be
trusted with secrets. “It was
as if we were on trial—not the CIA,” [...] would result in
heavy pressure on the CIA to end its use of journalists altogether. “We
just weren’t ready to take that step,” said a senator. A similar
decision was made to conceal the
results of the staff’s inquiry into the use of academics.
“It hardly reflects what we found,” stated Senator Gary Hart. “There
was a prolonged and elaborate
negotiation [with the CIA] over what would be said.”
Obscuring
the facts was relatively simple. No mention was made of the 400
summaries or what they showed. Instead the report noted blandly that
some fifty recent contacts with journalists had been studied by the
committee staff—thus conveying the
impression that the Agency’s dealings with the press had been
limited to those instances. The Agency files, the report noted,
contained little evidence that the editorial
content of American news reports had been affected by the CIA’s
dealings with journalists. Colby’s misleading public statements about the use
of journalists were repeated without serious contradiction or
elaboration. The role of cooperating
news executives was given short shrift. The fact that the Agency
had concentrated its relationships in the most prominent sectors of the
press went unmentioned. That
the CIA continued to regard the press as up for grabs was not even
suggested.
WITH
ALL THIS KNOWN SINCE 1977, HOW
CAN WE ASSUME THAT ANYTHING
THE MEDIA TELLS US
ABOUT WAR OR SEPTEMBER 11 OR ANYTHING ELSE CAN BE TAKEN AT FACE
VALUE? THOSE REPORTERS AND EXECUTIVES, WHO
FORMERLY WHORED THEMSELVES AND THEIR BUSINESSES FOR THE CIA AND IT'S
DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGNS, HAVE REFORMED THEMSELVES??!! (See the
CIA's Public Affairs Office1991 report below.)
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