Do you think that McCain/Palin is not an ongoing Intel Op? Please.

9 Comments

1. 

   Arthur Gilroy on September 8, 2008 at 12:29 pm

   We are in the midst of a pys-ops media operation that not only rivals the runup to the Iraq invasion but actually surpasses it.

   Compared to the subtlety of THIS one, the Iraq thing was a clomp-clomp-clomping, primitive mess.

   Read my other post on the subject after this one.

   As The World Turns. As The TIDE Turns. Watch.

   Deep.

   REALLY deep.

   The deep, deep fix.

   “LORD what fools these mortal’s be!!!”

   Ol’ Will knew.

   Puck was just an agent.

   AG

   P.S. All tips and recs gratefully accepted.

   Spread the counter-info.

   It’s all we have to fight with.

   • 

     idredit on September 8, 2008 at 5:28 pm

     Reminder

     Why CIA Veterans Are Scared of McCain

     • 

       martini on September 8, 2008 at 6:12 pm

       on Obama? They mention it, but looking for Laura Rozen articles, or “obama intelligence” doesn’t seem to turn up the matching item…

2. 

   AliceDem on September 8, 2008 at 5:04 pm

   What is this conspiracy theory doing on the rec list????

   • 

     AliceDem on September 8, 2008 at 5:07 pm

     the intelligence community hates Bush 43.

     • 

       BooMan on September 8, 2008 at 5:17 pm

       that’s true.  They really liked and trusted the father, but they hate the neo-cons.

   • 

     martini on September 8, 2008 at 6:03 pm

     Oliver North isn’t dead?  Or silent?

   • 

     Arthur Gilroy on September 8, 2008 at 6:51 pm

     Granny No No says that “conspiracy theories” should not be recced up. Or, I presume, discussed.

     conspiracy: a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful. (Compact Oxford English Dictionary of Current English)

     What?

     You think Cheney and his boys don’t fit the bill?

     Just for starters!!!???

     Go read your mainstream media.

     There are no conspiracies. You’re right. The media told you so.

     “LORD what fiools these mortals be!!! Nyuck nyuck nyuck!!”‘ Charles Colby and Frank Wisner. Bet on it.

     Journalism and the CIA: The Mighty Wurlitzer

     —snip—

      The Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s predecessor, had jurisdiction over wartime covert operations and propaganda in the fight against fascism. OSS chief William Donovan recruited heavily among social and academic elites. When the CIA was launched in 1947 at the beginning of the Cold War, these pioneers felt that they had both the right and the duty to secretly manipulate the masses for the greater good.

     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]

     —snip—

     Troublesome notes were heard from the Wurlitzer in the 1960s — but not from American journalism, which had already sold its soul to the empire. Instead, the announcement that the emperor had no clothes was made by a new generation. Much that was dear to this counterculture was stylistic and superficial, and there were many within this culture itself, and certainly within the straight media, who mistook this excess baggage for its essence. Nevertheless, the youth culture’s rumpled opposition was sufficient to slow down the machine and let in some light.

     During the last half of those ten years, sandwiched between Watergate coverage on one end, and Congressional investigations of the CIA on the other, the media showed some interest in examining their own intelligence connections. 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. Freidin, already in the news because the Republicans paid him $10,000 in 1972 to spy on the Democrats, confirmed Anderson’s story. At that point William Colby, the new CIA director, was asked by the New York Times and the Washington Star-News if any of their staff were on the CIA payroll.

     James (Scotty) Reston of the NYT was satisfied with an evasive answer, but when the Star-News editorial board met with Colby, they made some progress. The other shoe dropped with an article by Oswald Johnston on November 30: the Star-News learned from an “authoritative source” (Colby) that the CIA had some three dozen American journalists on its payroll. Johnston named only one — Jeremiah O’Leary — who was one of their own diplomatic correspondents. (The Star-News stopped publishing in 1981, at which point O’Leary joined Reagan’s national security staff. From 1982 until his death in 1993, he was with the Washington Times.)

     That was the first and last time that Colby was helpful on this topic. Some believe that the new director was under pressure from the “young Turks” (junior staffers) at the Agency, who were granted a mandate by Colby’s predecessor to cough up the “family jewels” — a list of illegal exploits that could be culled from the CIA’s files. Already there were rumors that the CIA was guilty of illegal spying on the antiwar movement — rumors that were confirmed a year later by Seymour Hersh, whose sources were some of these same “young Turks.”

     —snip—

     Colby’s stonewalling continued for the remainder of his tenure, even as a Senate committee led by Frank Church desperately tried to squeeze more names out of him. George Bush [see Skull and Bones on this site, download Bush’s Unauthorized Biography from a Swiss site–risephoenix] replaced Colby in January, 1976, and eventually agreed to a one-paragraph summary of each file of a CIA journalist, with names deleted. When the CIA said it was finished, the Church committee had over 400 summaries.

     The committee staff was shocked at the extent of the CIA’s activity in this area, and felt that they still didn’t have the story. But they were running out of time, and expected that the Senate’s new permanent oversight committee would continue their work. The Church committee’s final report contained only a handful of vague and misleading pages on the CIA and the media. “It hardly reflects what was found,” stated Senator Gary Hart. “There was a prolonged and elaborate negotiation [with the CIA] over what would be said.”[5]

     The House investigation of the CIA, under Otis Pike, had more problems than the Senate investigation. The full House voted to suppress its committee’s final report under pressure from the executive branch, at which point Daniel Schorr [CFR-risephoenix] of CBS leaked a copy to the Village Voice. This report contained just twelve paragraphs on the topic of the CIA and the media, including the tidbit about the CIA’s “frequent manipulation of Reuters wire service dispatches.”[6] Another paragraph gave some idea of the scope of the CIA’s efforts in this area:

     Some 29 percent of Forty Committee-approved covert actions were for media and propaganda projects. This number is probably not representative. Staff has determined the existence of a large number of CIA internally-approved operations of this type, apparently deemed not politically sensitive. 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]

     —snip—

     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.

     Bernstein concentrated more on the owners, executives, and editors of news organizations than on individual reporters. “Lets’s not pick on some poor reporters, for God’s sake,” William Colby said at one point to the Church committee’s investigators. “Let’s go to the management. They were witting.” Bernstein noted that Colby had specific definitions for words such as “contract employee,” “agent,” “asset,” “accredited correspondent,” “editorial employee,” “freelance,” “stringer,” and even “reporter,” and through careful use of these words, the CIA “managed to obscure the most elemental fact about the relationships detailed in its files: i.e., that there was recognition by all parties involved that the cooperating journalists were working for the CIA — whether or not they were paid or had signed employment contracts.”[14]

     The reaction to Bernstein’s piece among mainstream media was to ignore it, or to suggest that it was sloppy and exaggerated. Then two months later, the New York Times published the results of their “three- month inquiry by a team of Times reporters and researchers.” This three-part series not only confirmed Bernstein, but added a wealth of far-ranging details and contained twice as many names. Now almost everyone pretended not to notice.

     The Times reported that 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.”

     Since domestic propaganda was a violation of the their charter, the CIA defined the predictable effects of their foreign publications as “blowback” or “domestic fallout,” which they considered to be “inevitable and consequently permissible.” But former CIA employees told the Times that apart from this unintended blowback, “some CIA propaganda efforts, especially during the Vietnam War, had been carried out with a view toward their eventual impact in the United States.” The Times series concluded that at its peak, the CIA’s network “embraced more than 800 news and public information organizations and individuals.”[15]

     By the time the Times series appeared, Congress was looking for a way out of the issue. Obligingly, Stansfield Turner promised that the CIA would avoid journalists “accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station.” There were at least three problems with this that most press coverage overlooked: many stringers and freelancers are not accredited; it didn’t cover any foreign-owned media; and as Gary Hart complained at the time, the new policy included a provision that allowed the CIA to unilaterally make exceptions whenever it wished.[16]

     Within several years of this alleged policy, the new Reagan administration ignored it in favor of a shooting war in Central America, one component of which was an illegal CIA-administered propaganda war at home. Edgar Chamorro, a contra sympathizer in Miami with a background in public relations, was recruited by the CIA in late 1982. After two years of following the CIA’s instructions regarding the manipulation of U.S. journalists and even members of Congress, Chamorro went public with his story.[17] By now Congress was clearly out-maneuvered, even though it alone held the purse strings that controlled funding for the war.

     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]

     —snip—

     Bits and pieces of the old Wurlitzer were still evident everywhere: John Richardson, Jr. [CFR-see Coucil on Foreign Relations and Trilateral Commision on this site–risephoenix], 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.

     —snip—

     Then again, stay tuned — the credibility gap is back. A recent poll shows that Americans are fed up with mainstream news media. “Very favorable” ratings for television network news fell from 30 percent in 1985 to just 15 percent this year, and for large national newspapers it dropped 12 percent. A majority now believe that news stories are often inaccurate.[24]

     After factoring in the new global economics and recalculating the prospects for the middle class, all bets are off. The poor performance of Congress and the press on the issue of journalists and the CIA may mean that the next time around, the elites will lack even the credibility to stage another co-opting charade of “oversight.” That could prove beneficial, particularly if next the time threatens to be as inconsequential and diversionary as the last time.

     Wake the fuck up.

     AG

3. 

   Arthur Gilroy on September 8, 2008 at 6:24 pm

   meme has to do with the misconception that said group is a monolithic organization.

   It is not.

   Bet on it.

   There is a war going on underneath, too.

   The whole  outing of  Valerie Plame and the Spy/Counterspy bullshit that preceded it  (Whose set of lies was going to be delivered to the ignorant, ranting Preznit?) was a COMPETITION.

   Spy vs. Spy

   

   Mad Magazine was SO ahead of its time.

   Why…they made Butch their mascot before he was even old enough to know how to fondle his ego-instrument.

   

   Yup.

   What?

   Me WORRIED!!!

   Later…

   AG