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PROJECT ZIPPER
We Make Threats Not
Promises
(actual US military badge)
"Once a
perception is
created by
misinformation,
it is tough to
correct the wrongs." - Susanne M. Reyto
"When the mass media
in some foreign countries serve as megaphones for the
rhetoric of their government, the
result is ludicrous propaganda. When the mass media
in our country serve as megaphones for the rhetoric of the federal government, the
result is responsible journalism."
– Norman Solomon
"During a war, news should be given out for
instruction rather than information.
It would not be impossible to prove,
with sufficient repetition and a psychological
understanding of the
individuals concerned, that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere
words, and words can be molded until they clothe
ideas in disguise."
- Herman Hesse
"A
principle familiar to propagandists is
that the doctrine to be instilled in the
target
audience should not be
articulated: that would only expose them to
reflection, inquiry, and,
very likely, ridicule. The proper procedure is to drill them home by constantly
presupposing them, so that they become the very condition for discourse." -
Noam Chomsky
"If information is, by nature, completely honest,
unadorned, and clear, then propaganda, we know,
is falsehood, desire for power,
Machiavellianism, crooked in intent. All propaganda must be
eliminated if the public is to be truly educated. Wherever there is propaganda,
information, if it is to survive, must utilize the same weapons. It must engage
in a struggle against the inaccuracy of the facts proclaimed by propaganda. Any
kind of propaganda, therefore, forces the informant to engage in
counterpropaganda. " - Jacques Ellul
America is the most media saturated country on Earth. Americans are bombarded daily with thousands
upon thousands of images and sounds
designed to get our
and 'inform' us of everything from shoes to
political ideology. The average
American is exposed to more than 3000
advertisements every day.
"The corporate mainstream media is not
going to rock the boat.
Why do real
journalism when you can ensure
advertising dollars
to please your
shareholders through shallow,
infotainment pieces?
Real investigative reporting could threaten
the bottom line if you penetrate the corrosive corporatocracy of government and business these days. The media's AWOL performance in the lead-up to George W.
Bush's illegal and imperial invasion of
Iraq, for example, is a clear
window into the current mind-set of our Fourth
Estate. Freedom will wither in
America if the mainstream press continues to act as a propaganda arm
of the government." - Bob Teigan
A great deal of time, effort, and wealth is spent to guide
American
popular opinion
in a
predefined direction down particular avenues to the
'correct' opinion.
"Propaganda is most
effective when it is least noticeable. What the American people don't
know is that
American propaganda is hidden. In a closed
society, propaganda is obvious and reluctantly
tolerated for fear of the negative consequences. In an open
society, such as in
America, the hidden and integrated
characteristics of propaganda con-vinces
people that they are not being manipulated.
This is why the concept of
propaganda in
America is so problematic and painted in a
strictly negative light.
Propaganda is supposed to be something
that Adolf Hitler
mastered and that his film maker
Leni Riefenstahl made into a perverse art form.
It is not supposed to be
part of an open society. What could be more
propagandistic than
George W. Bush's message that
Americans
are do-gooders in a
global battle against evil?" - Nancy
Snow
Euphemisms such as misinformation,
disinformation, image consulting,
political consulting,
news consulting,
advertising, infomercials,
public relations, damage
control, and the art of spin have taken the place of the
word propaganda in the English lexicon.
The mass media
industrial concerns in both the
commercial and
governmental sectors that deal with
information control spend hundreds of
millions of dollars annually practicing the art
of propaganda.
Corporations as
well as the federal government of
America have spent many decades and
hundreds of billions of dollars
researching how best to effect the opinions
of the American people. Most of this
information is kept secret from
the public and what is known has only
recently come to light because of
work done by scholars –
research that is dramatically
under funded in comparison.
The information available to the ordinary
common American – including the
aforementioned academic scholars – is radically less than that which is
available to the producers of mass media or
'information' campaigns which use
advertising agencies, public
relations firms and
political consultants.
It is
known that the
human brain processes different
sensory mediums in different
ways.Written and spoken
words are put through a
symbol decoding process where the brain
deciphers the words and the sentence
structure in order to properly
interpret what the
mind is
reading or
hearing. In this process, both the
conscious and
subconscious
mind go through an internal debate comparing
and interpreting
new information with what is already known
to be true.
With a
graphic image the brain instantly processes the
graphic image as truth.
Information presented in a visual format has a much greater impact on the
subconscious. Over long periods of time,
recurring imagery has a built up effect
on the viewer which allows for subconsciously conceived notions of
truth to manifest. (See
thought image)
In studies subjects
claimed that television was a means of
relaxation. This has been confirmed by electroencephalograph (EEG)
readings of brain waves, skin
resistance and heart rates of
subjects watching television.
Part of the
human
attraction to
movies and
television has to do with our
biological orienting response. First described by Ivan Pavlov in 1927,
humans instinctivly respond to any
sudden or novel visual or auditory stimulus.
The
biological orienting response is a part of humans evolutionary heritage,
biological
sensitivity to movement and
potential predatory threats.
Typical orienting response reactions include dilation of the
blood vessels to the brain,
slowing of the heart, and
constriction of blood vessels to
major muscle groups. The brain focuses attention on gathering more information
while the rest of the body relaxes. Then in response to the stressor, the body
prepares either to "fight or flee." The body responds by releasing stored fuels
(sugar and fats) to provide quick energy; breathing rate increases to supply
more oxygen to the blood; muscle tension increases to prepare for action; blood
clotting mechanisms are activated to reduce bleeding from cuts; senses become
more acute (hearing becomes more sensitive, pupils dilate, smell becomes
sharper) so that one is more aware of your surroundings; heart rate and blood
pressure rise to provide more blood to the muscles. This protective posture
lets you cope with potential dangers. However, an individual cannot maintain
this level of alertness indefinitely - although some try with
stimulants.
In
1986 Byron Reeves of Stanford University,
Esther Thorson of the University of
Missouri and their colleagues began to study whether the simple formal
features of television – cuts,
edits, zooms, pans, sudden noises – activate the orienting response,
thereby keeping attention on the screen. By watching how brain waves were
affected by cuts, edits, zooms, pans, and sudden noises they concluded that
stylistic tricks can indeed trigger involuntary responses through the
evolutionary significance of detecting
movement. Their findings help explain the never ending action of broadcast
advertisements.
"Moving from one
stimulus to another, the mind develops a
higher and higher tolerance to stimulation. And so the dosage must increase:
video games that are even more exciting, television that is even faster-paced, more
dramatic. Thus, movies and
television programming have over the
last few decades become increasingly fast-paced, the editing faster, the scenes
shorter, the special effects more dramatic." -
Charles
Eisenstein
Research has also shown that
passivity and a lowered level of alertness also correlate. Once the
television is turned off, the
sense of relaxation dissipates rather quickly,
but the passivity and lowered alertness remain for a considerable
time.
The
relaxation occurs quickly, so humans
are conditioned to associate
viewing of television with rest and
lack of tension. The association is positively reinforced as viewers remain
relaxed throughout viewing, and it is negatively reinforced via the
stress and dysphoric rumination that
occurs once the television screen goes
blank again.
Habit forming drugs
work in similar ways. A tranquilizer that
leaves the body rapidly is much more likely to cause dependence than one that
leaves the body slowly, precisely because the user is more aware that the
effects of the drug are wearing off.
According to
a report published in the Archives of General Psychiatry in 2009 for each hour
of television viewed per day male teenagers had
a statistically significant greater
likelihood of developing depression in young adulthood.
Just as many theorists
develop a
working
hypothesis before collecting the data, many
journalists are used to formulating
the frame of a story before they
interview anyone, read a document, or
collect any other facts.
Traditional journalistic
news room
culture determines
the basic
nature of a
story before the facts are assembled.
"A young reporter writes an expose, but the editor says, "I
don't think we're going to run that."
The second time the reporter goes to her editor, the editor says, " I
don't think that's a good
idea."
She doesn't research and
write the story.
The third time
the reporter has an idea. But she doesn't
go to her editor.
The fourth time she doesn't get the
idea." - Nicholas Johnson, formerly FCC
commissioner
The changing
economic
structure of the
television networks has eroded newsroom
values. Where once a
culture committed to great
journalism flourished, a
culture dominated by MBAs and financial
accountability has taken its place.
Accountability to shareholders
has replaced accountability to democracy and
the citizens it serves.
"The realities of
journalism don't involve just facts, for
if they did, computers would replace journalists.
Journalism always involves choices –
choices among subjects, treatment, words. As a
result, the claim of objective reporting functions simply to camouflage what is
in fact a value laden activity. It is
not only the readers who are misled by
the claim. The journalists too can
be blinded by their own cover."
- Vladimir Vladimirovich Pozner, Soviet propagandist and son of Vladimir
Aleksandrovich Pozner*. (Vladimir
Aleksandrovich Pozner was chief engineer of the European branch of
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Paris in 1938 and in 1943 headed the Russian Section of
the film department of the United States War Department. Vladimir
Aleksandrovich Pozner was identified as a Soviet spy by the Venona Project and
corroborated by the Mitrokhin Archives after the fall of the Soviet
Union.)
"Freedom of the
press is guaranteed only to
those who own one." - A. J. Liebling As
America prepared in 1976 to celebrate the
bicentennial of the Declaration of
Independence, a group of intellectuals and
political
leaders from Japan,
America, and Western Europe, organized into
'The Trilateral Commission', issued a report entitled 'The
Governability of Democracies.'
Samuel Huntington, a
political
science professor at Harvard University
and a long time consultant to the White
House on the war in Vietnam, wrote the part of the report that dealt with
America. Samuel Huntington identified the
problem he was about to discuss: 'The 1960's witnessed a
democratic upsurge of
democratic fervor in
America.'
In
the sixties, Samuel Huntington wrote, there was a huge growth of
citizen participation 'in the forms of
marches, demonstrations, protest movements, and cause organizations,' 'markedly
higher levels of self-consciousness on the part of blacks,
Indians, Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students and women', 'marked expansion of
white-collar unionism,' and all this added up to 'a reassertion of
equality as a
goal in
social, economic and political life.'
Samuel Huntington was troubled by what he
percieved: 'The essence of the
democratic surge of the 1960's was a general
challenge to existing
systems of authority, public and
private. In one form or
another, this challenge manifested itself in
the family, the university, business, public
and private associations,
politics, the
governmental bureaucracy, and the
military
services. People no longer
felt the same obligation to
obey those whom they had previously
considered superior to themselves
in age, rank, status, expertise,
character, or talents.'
Samuel Huntington's attitude explodes the
myth of the classless society!!!
Samuel Huntington further said
that the president, to win the election,
needed the support of a broad coalition. However: 'the
day after his election, the size of his
majority is almost – if not
entirely – irrelevant to his ability to govern the country. What counts
then is the president's ability to mobilize support from the
leaders of key
institutions in a
society and government. This coalition must include key
individuals in Congress, the executive
branch, mass media and the
corporate
industrial sector.
At the forefront of White
House thinking is the
command and direction
of the
global economy
through information manipulation and
control.
American
films,
television programs, recorded music,
theme parks,
advertising and
news programs offer
American
perspectives.
News consultants, a major part of
American
news programs, have spread their
particular brand of program
structure to
television stations all over the
Earth, resulting in an
Americanized style which include shorter
news segments, a de-emphasis on
government and
politics, fewer talking
heads, more
graphic material, "warm and fuzzy"
stories and more
American content.
American mass media
and political establishments prefer not to
acknowledge
American
popular cultural
imagery
domination of the
global marketplace.
A skillful combination of information instrumentation with
philosophic
principle is in the mix that fuels the
push toward concentrated monocultural
power. Strategic planning underlies this
development. It has
succeeded well beyond the initial
expectations of its formulators.
One of the many byproducts of
news consultancy on the
news
industry
has been the decreased
time spent by
news programs on each
story.
This emphasis on condensation and brevity is a very subtle, but very
real form
of censorship in that
only accepted con-ventional wisdom will be
broadcast.
"The voluntary
press censorship regarding
government policies and
behavior is so blatant.
Voluntary censorship is just about as bad as state ordered censorship, because
the end results are the same." - Jean Gerad
"Modern censorship is
defined as the subtle yet constant and sophisticated manipulation of reality in
our mass media outlets. On a daily basis, censorship refers to the intentional
non-inclusion of a news story - or piece of a news story - based on anything
other than a desire to tell the truth. Such manipulation can take the form of
political pressure (from government officials and powerful individuals),
economic pressure (from advertisers and funders), and legal pressure (the
threat of lawsuits from deep-pocket individuals, corporations, and
institutions)."- Project Censored
When dissenters from
con-ventional wisdom appear
on 'news programs', they often appear
as radicals
because they aren't given the time necessary to adequately establish the
fundamental basis of their claims.
"Ripped from the headlines!" Although millions of
Americans watch the
evening
news, even more watch the
entertainment programming
that surrounds it.
The most popular programs are
fictionalized accounts of
real events. Reality is tainted with a blurring of fact
and fiction. Hollywood has been
skimming stories from headlines for
decades and television has followed
suit.
"People see the headline, see what the
story is supposedly about, and there's
already a built-in set of expectations from
the audience that when we write
the stories we can
play off of and play against those expectations." -
Rene Balcer,
executive producer of Law &
Order: Criminal Intent television
series.
After editing weeks of footage to fit the forty-five minute
remainder – after advertisements –
of a
sixty minute time-slot, what the viewer ultimately gets is a highly
sensationalized version of
reality.
On average,
individuals in
industrialized nations spend three
hours a day watching
television – roughly half their
leisure time; only to
work and sleep is more
time devoted.
To
assume that television is
free also assumes that the viewers'
time is not valuable.
For every
forty-five minutes of program, viewers 'see'
fifteen minutes of advertisements.
The Federal Communications Commission was
created by the Communications Act of 1934 to
regulate interstate communications that run over radio, television, wire, satellite, or
cable.
The Federal Communications
Commission was created for the
purpose of regulating
interstate and foreign commerce in communication by wire and
radio so as to make available to all the
people of America world-wide wire and
radio communication
service, for the
purpose of the national
defense, for the purpose
of promoting safety of life and property
through the use of wire and radio
communication.
It is the
purpose of the
Communications Act of 1934 to maintain government control over all the channels of
radio transmission; and to provide for the use
of such channels, but not the ownership thereof, by
individuals for limited periods of
time, under licenses granted by Federal
authority, and no such license shall be construed to
create any right, beyond the terms,
conditions, and periods of the license.
The
Communications Act of 1934 was designed to
spread mass media ownership over many competing
business entites to assure service, to
create
competition in the
marketplace and to support
democracy by insuring that many
points of view would be
heard.
In 1996, Congress passed the
Telecommunications Reform Act, which amended the Communications Act of 1934 and
drastically reduced the restrictions placed upon mass
media ownership.
The 1996 Telecom Act
was the product of the largest
corporate lobbies - the
National Association of Broadcasters,
News Corp and
Viacom(now
CBS Corporation). The public played
no role in its passage and it received virtually no
news coverage, except in the business
and trade papers where it was covered as an
issue of importance to owners and
investors, not citizens in a
democracy.
In 2002 a
federal appeals court demanded that the Federal
Communications Commission provide compelling and even
overwhelming evidence to
justify keeping current
mass media ownership rules intact.
The
Federal Communications Commission had conducted
biennial reviews of the mass media ownership rules
in 1998 and 2000, and determined the ownership rules should remain in place.The
Federal Communications Commission then
developed justification for
relaxing mass media ownership
rules and classified those justifications
as official
secrets.
As of May 8, 2003, nine thousand and sixty
five (9,065) statements on mass media ownership were
submitted to the Federal Communications
Commission by citizens
unaffiliated with a self-interested corporation or trade organization.
Eleven (11) of them supported the proposed changes. A little over one
thousandth of a percent supported the changes.
On June 2, 2003,
the Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2
to relax the rules on
mass media ownership. The changes were:
1.
revised the local television multiple
ownership rule;
2. modified the local
radio ownership
rule by revising the local
radio marketplace definition;
3. raised the
national television ownership limit
from 35% to 45%;
4. retained the dual network
rule; and
5.
developed a single set of cross
media limits to replace both the radio /
television cross-ownership
rule and the
newspaper /
broadcast cross-ownership
rule.
These new
rules are specifically
designed to concentrate
mass media ownership under the
control of a handful of
corporations!!!
On September
4, 2003 federal judges blocked Federal
Communications Commission mass media ownership
rules.
On June 24, 2004 a United States federal appeals court blocked
the implementation of new Federal Communications
Commission rules that would have allowed for
greater media consolidation.
October 22, 2007 Federal Communications
Commission Chair Kevin Martin proposed new rules to allow for
greater media
consolidation.
On December 18, 2007 the Federal Communications Commission adopted proposals
by Kevin Martin to loosen a 32-year-old restriction on
monopolizing news that has
prevented a corporation from
owning both a newspaper and a
television or
radio station in the same city.
In the 1950's, the majority of the
American mass
media (i.e. television stations,
radio stations,
film studios,
magazine
publishers,
newspaper
publishers,
book publishers,
advertising agencies, etc.) were
owned by more than 1,500 corporations.
By 1981,
media outlets were owned by less then fifty
corporations.
By 2005 six huge corporatemedia conglomerates controlled over 90 % of the
media outles in America.
"The corporate media in
America ignores many valid news stories, based on university level quality
research. It appears that certain topics are simply forbidden inside the
mainstream corporate media today. To openly cover these news stories would stir
up questions regarding "inconvenient truths" that many in the
US power structure want to avoid." - Peter
Phillips
"The continuously consolidated mainstream media has long since opted out of any
adversarial role with the powers that
be and has become little more than a caricature of
buffoons. What was a reliable
source of information and a
valuable educational
resource has degenerated into a
display of sycophants on parade parroting the party line so as not to offend
their sources of
disinformation." - Michael
Hagerty
"Time-Warner, Disney, Viacom-CBS, News
Corporation and Universal rule the
entertainment world in a way
that the old Hollywood studio chiefs only dreamed of. And, after all the deals
and buyouts, four of the five are run by Jews. We're back to where we started, bigger
than ever."- Jewish Week 1999
"The release of a few more of Nixon's
tapes reveals that the late president believed that
Jews dominated the
media. Well, if an ethnic group owns the New York Times, which owns
over thirty papers, including the Boston Globe. If that same group had
great influence on the Washington Post, which owns NewsWeek.
Again, if that same ethnic group also owns Time magazine along with
CNN, Warner Studios and AOL. If
Mortimer Zuckerman, the chairman of
the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations,
owns the third largest weekly magazine, United States World and News
Report and the New York Daily News. If Michael Eisner controls
Walt Disney which owns ABC. Then if Nixon was wrong in 1972, he
is certainly not wrong today. So why the fuss? Because the
mass media
domination by
Ashkenazi, many of them avowed
Yiddish supremacists, is
something no one is supposed to notice." - Ahmed Amr, March 2, 2002
Viacom was originally created
by CBS Broadcasting Inc., formerly the Columbia Broadcasting
System, in 1971 to get around a Federal
Communications Commission ruling that prohibited television networks from
owning cable systems and TV stations in the same market. Viacom then
began buying cable systems around the United States. In 1978 it formed
Showtime and in 1981 an all music station called Music
Television. In 1987 it was acquired by Sumner Murray Redstone's (Rothstein)
National Amusements Inc, one of the larger cinema operators with
theatres in the United States, Canada, South America and the EU. Viacom
then bought Paramount, a conglomerate based on one of Hollywood's
original movie studios which included the Simon & Schuster
publishing group, and Blockbuster Video. In 1999 Viacom ate its
parent, CBS.
"Centralization of the means of
communication."
- Point 6
Communist Manifesto,
Karl Heinrich Marx aka
Karl Heinrich Mordechai
In our
current electoral process reaching audiences has become the substitute for what
used to be called garnering constituencies. Just as
advertisers sell
products to audiences,
political consultants
market candidates to those same
audiences. In contemporary
mass media driven elections, programming,
advertising, and film
audiences become
targeted markets of voters.
Citizens are
transformed into
consumers,
emotionally connecting with a mass
media product instead of a
political platform.
According to
The Alliance for Better Campaigns, a non-profit co-chaired by
Walter Cronkite,
television
broadcasters earned around $771
million from political
advertising in
2000.
After World
War II, Allied forces restricted
media concentration in
occupied Germany and Japan because
Allied forces recognized that such
concentration promoted anti-democratic, fascist, political cultures.
"Most people in
America have no
idea what is happening even though our very
democracy is at stake."-
Federal Communications Commission commissioner
Jonathan Adelstein
"A confluence of government
policy and
corporate strategy is
poisoning the television business. In
1995 the Federal Communications Commission
allowed networks for the first time to own the
programs they broadcast. In the mid 1990s there were 40 independent production
companies. By 2007 were no independent production companies. Your
television may receive 200 channels,
but virtually every one is owned by one of the six conglomerates - NBC
Universal, Disney, Time Warner, Viacom/Paramount,
Sony and News Corp." - Marshall Herskovitz 11/07
{Laurence
Moskowitz* is the President,
Chief Executive and Chairman of the Board of Medialink Worldwide and
Director of the Jewish Community Federation. Medialink Worldwide
specializes in "news" releases. VNRs
(also referred to as fake television
"news") or ANR's (audio "news" releases) are video or audio
segments designed to be indistinguishable from independently-produced "news" reports.
Television stations incorporate VNRs into
their newscasts, rarely alerting viewers to the source of the footage. While
government-funded VNRs have been most controversial, most VNRs are paid for by
corporations. Laurence
Moskowitz worked closely with the Radio-Television News Directors
Association to establish a "code of ethics" based on full disclosure
relating to the production and distribution of VNRs - a "code of ethics" which
appears to have been compromised as VNRs orginations are rarely
disclosed!
ANRs may be simply the audio component of a video news
release, from a satellite media tour or can be tailor made. On its website, one
corporation outlines that it "will prepare a script, record the necessary
soundbites, and then have the script professionally voiced. We will then
produce and edit the ANR into a final mixed cut, and after approval from our
client, distribute it to radio stations
throughout the country."}
On February 25, 2009 the
Federal Communications Commission slapped more
than 660 small telecommunications companies with a total of $13.3 million in
fines for failing to certify that they're keeping their customer information
safe. It seems a little disingenuous for a federal government institution to
fine small telecommunications companies for failing to keep customer
information safe after helping shield behemoth telecommunications corporations
in the facilitation of the wiretapping of ALL telecommunications by the
National Security Agency (NSA).
{Comverse Infosys,
originally a subsidiary of an Israeli-run private telecommunications firm,
first gained continuing access to networked telecommunications computers
through a "back door" built into equipment permanently installed into the phone
system that allows instant eavesdropping by law enforcement agencies on any
phone in America. Comverse Infosys was authorized to do so by the 1994
Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA. Attorney General
John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller were both warned that the system
was seriously vulnerable to compromise and may have undermined the whole
wiretapping system.
"Investigators within the DEA, INS and FBI have all
told Fox News that to pursue or even suggest Israeli spying through Comverse is
considered career suicide. What troubles investigators most, particularly in
the counter terrorism investigation of the World Trade Center attack, is that
on a number of cases, suspects that they had sought to wiretap and survey
immediately changed their telecommunications processes. They started acting
much differently as soon as those supposedly secret wiretaps went into place."
- Carl Cameron
"Federal officials this year have arrested or detained
nearly 200 Israeli citizens suspected of belonging to an "organized
intelligence-gathering operation." The Bush administration has deported most of
those arrested after September 11, although some are in custody under the new
anti-terrorism law." - Tony Snow
Later Comverse Infosys became Verint
Multiple national governments including the U.S., U.K., and various European,
Asian, and Pacific nations have purchased millions of dollars in Verint
surveillance software and equipment. Every call that passes through these
nation's elaborate network of switchers and routers compromised by Verint
hardware or software can be intercepted, analyzed, recorded, and transmitted to
law enforcement or intelligence agencies worldwide.
On July 7, 2008 the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments (FISA) Act of 2008, H.R. 6304, was
signed into law by George W. Bush. This re-writing of the law granted
retroactive immunity to behemoth telecommunications corporations that had
participated in the warrantless wiretapping of ALL telecommunications for the
National Security Agency.}
Copyright
"Television has replaced traditional tales as well
as family stories and community stories. The old-fashioned storyteller, someone
who can spin a good yarn, is a rarity these days; rare too are the types of
venues and occasions where her stories might be heard. Instead, through our
consumption of television and movies, we pay remote specialists to produce our
stories for us. Significantly, the producers of these stories now own them, an
unprecedented development. For most of human history, no one imagined that you
could own a story. Stories were simply not conceivable objects of property, but
constituted in each culture a vast commonwealth. Today, corporations such as
Disney mine that commonwealth, wall off parts of it for themselves, and convert
it into money.
Recently there was a court case between Exxon and Kellogg
over the cartoon tigers used to market their brands: the Exxon gas tiger and
Tony the Tiger. The two look quite similar (and similar as well to "Tigger" of
Winnie the Pooh fame, and to "Hobbes" from the comic strip Calvin &
Hobbes). One of these two corporations claimed that the other infringed on its
trademark rights, in effect asserting property rights over a certain rendering
of an animal—the tiger—that has very deep cultural resonance. Tigers
may be part of nature, but the idea and image of a tiger, with all its
associations of strength, power, and beauty, is a kind of cultural capital.
Since there are really only a limited number of ways to draw a tiger and have
it still look like a tiger and carry these associations, the litigants were in
effect asserting private ownership over an item of cultural capital that was
once public, unowned.
"I'm lovin' it" is the property of the McDonalds
Corporation (it has the exclusive right to a certain use of that phrase). "Make
every drop count" is the property of Coca-cola. "Ideas for life" is the
property of Panasonic. "Always" is the property of Walmart. "Making life
better" is the property of Penn State. You can still use these words for most
purposes, but not as a slogan for your organization. Penn State has taken them.
Nike has taken "Just do it." Donald Trump has taken "You're fired!" These are
but a few of the tens of thousands of common phrases that have been
expropriated from the public language.
Corvette owns a certain shade of
red, UPS a certain shade of brown. These are parts of the electromagnetic
spectrum. Did these companies create these colors, or just enclose them, wall
them off and call them theirs?
In 2001 a Michigan jewelry merchant using
"Love your neighbor" sued a Florida charity named "Love thy neighbor" for
trademark infringement, claiming that the similar name confused customers and
resulted in lost profits" -
Charles
Eisenstein
Within the original body of the
Constitution of the United States of
America individuals were given all
rights, for a limited time, to their
creations.
Creative works originally held an intial
copyright period of 28 years from the date publication; a copyright could be
renewed for another 28 years for a total of 56 years.
The 1976 Copyright Act changed existing copyright. After January 1, 1978,
the copyright period was changed to life of the
author plus fifty years after the author's demise.
In June 26, 1992, the
1976 Copyright Act was amended to extend all copyrights still in existence to a
term of 75 years.
For works created after January 1, 1978, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension
Act, signed into law on October 27, 1998,
amends the copyright protection term to
endure for the life of the author plus an
additional 70 years. For anonymous and pseudonymous works and works made for
hire, the term will be 95 years from the year of first publication or 120 years
from the year of creation. For pre-1978 works
still in their original or renewal term of copyright, the total term is
extended to 95 years.
"It was under Eisner's watch that Walt Disney was
the driving force behind the Sonny
Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Much of Walt Disney's success was
due to its widespread use of stories and concepts from the public domain." - by
Mike Masnick
Copyright periods have been more than
doubled recently.
This benefits the
corporate
elites in three ways:
first,
corporate
elites retain a revenue stream;
second, information known only by
the corporate
elite is retained by the
corporate
elite;
third,
important broad health knowledge,
economic and statistical
trend
knowledge,
psychological operations
knowledge, ecological and
environmental
knowledge and
other general
knowledge that concerns every
individual citizen is not available to
the general public because it lies deeply buried in a mass of separately
packaged and largely insignificant knowledge that must be purchased
separately, the accumulative cost of which is
exhorbinant to the individual but not to
the corporate
elites interests.
(Aside: This is
one of the reasons that America is no
longer competitive in the
global marketplace. If you keep the information
from those who could use it to create new
business models and methodologies you reduce the ability of the cutting edge
American entrepreneur to compete against
global corporate
elite
conglomerates.)
"We all know that our State Department, the
Pentagon, and the White
House have brazenly proclaimed that they have the right and the
power to manage the
news, to tell us not the
truth but what they want us to
believe." - Myron Fagan Although Americans have
a tremendous number of magazines,
newspapers, cable channels and
web sites available, most of them originate from 'highly centralized outlets' that
proffer a remarkably homogenized news.
News
services for dailies throughout
America are provided by the Associated
Press, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the
Washington Post wire services, and several foreign wire
services like Reuters. The
ideological viewpoint of these 'news' conduits are the same.
Fear is a powerful means
for establishing social control over a population.
Regular viewers of violent
films and/or
television programming often look upon
the Earth as being more
frightening, dangerous, and violent than those who view the same
mass media products in much less quantities or not at
all.
Psychiatrist Robert Coles writes that
children in some parts of
America are more
frightened than
children in Lebanon or Northern Ireland;
this may very well have to do with the fact that some of the most
violent programming on
television are cartoons aimed at very
young children.
The potential consequences to
this are staggering. A generation brought up on
fear may be willing to back the
commision of immoral acts in order to protect themselves from
imagined threats that do not
exist in reality.
The radio, the computer, and the
internet are all products
of the military.
The
radio was invented by Guglielmo Marconi in the
mid-1890's and his first sale was to the British
war office in 1896 during the Boer
war. Three years later, Guglielmo Marconi
made sales to the American
navy. During
World War I,
America put all
commercial, amateur, and
military (except for the
army's) radio equipment under the
control of the
navy, a
monopoly pursued immediately after
the war, as well. (Guglielmo Marconi was a
staunch supporter of the fascism which
dominated Italy beginning in the 1920's
and Benito Mussolini was the best
man at Guglielmo Marconi's 1927
wedding.)
The first operational electronic computer, Colossus, was
built as a part of the ULTRA project for the British department of
communication in the foreign office to
assist in the decoding of intercepted nazi transmissions encoded with the
German electromechanical devices known as the Enigma and the Geheimscheiber.
The first code-breaking machine, Colossus
or Mark I, was built at Bletchley Park, a government research center north of London,
and was operational, cracking German codes, by December 1943. It employed
approximately 1,800 vacuum tubes for computations.
The first electronic
computer designed to be capable of being
reprogrammed by rewiring to solve a full range of computing problems was
ENIAC, Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer.
Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer came out of a
relationship between the Moore School of
Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and the
Ballistics Research Lab operated
by the army ordinance department at the
Aberdeen Proving Ground in Aberdeen, Maryland. It was
designed expressly for the
solution of ballistics problems and for the
printing of range tables.
The grandparent of the internet is the
ARPAnet, which came about in 1969. The Defense Agency Research Projects
Administrations (DARPA) of the Department of Defense wished to
create a communications infrastructure for the
American
military that could
survive a
nuclear attack. "Many of the
best attributes of the internet – including its architecture,
technology, and gestalt – are
the children of this military
prototype.
With
World War I dragging on in Europe
Bernard Baruch and Edward Mandell House suggested to
Woodrow Wilson that there needed to be
a way to convince the American public to go to war.
The Committee of Public
Information(Creel
Commission) primed and greased the propaganda machine.
"The conscious and
intelligent manipulation of the organized
habits and opinions of the masses is an
important element in a
democratic society. Those who
manipulate this unseen mechanism of
society constitute
an invisible government
which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds
are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas
suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a
logical result of the way in which our
democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of
human
beings must
cooperate in this manner if they
are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our daily lives,
whether in the sphere of politics or
business, in our
social conduct or our
ethical thinking, we are dominated by the
relatively small number of
persons who understand the
mental processes and
social patterns of the masses. It is
they who pull the wires which control the
public mind." -
Edward Louis
Bernays
{Edward
Louis Bernays* combined the
ideas of Gustave Le Bon and Wilfred Trotter
on crowd psychology with the psychoanalytical ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud.
Edward Louis Bernays felt it
was necessary to manipulate the public
through propaganda to dampen down the "herd instinct".
Edward Louis Bernays, author
of Propaganda, was one of the first to attempt to
manipulate public
opinion using the psychology of the
subconscious.}
Walter
Lippmann* argued
propaganda was necessary to 'manufacture consent' and that 'the
common interests elude public
opinion entirely'. To this end
Walter Lippmann suggested
propaganda could only be understood and
managed by a 'specialized class' of 'responsible men' who are intelligent enough to
figure out what was best for Americans.
Edward Louis Bernays, the father
of the public relations industry, and
Walter Lippmann, the dean of
American
journalists, a major foreign and
domestic policy critic, and an important
theorist of
liberal
democracy were drafted along with a group of
cartoonists, writers, editors, publishers and
others whose profession was to
convey information to the populace.
As one of the most successful propaganda campaigns
within a year
Edward Louis Bernays,
Sigmund Freud's* nephew, and
Walter Lippmann were able to turn
the Americans from a population friendly to
Germans into a fervent anti-German populace.
"In the days before
radio and television,
public opinion was
controlled almost exclusively by
newspapers. There must have been
more deliberate lying in the world from 1914 to 1918 than in any other period
of the world's history." - Arthur
Ponsonby
"The Northcliffe (Jewish-owned) press did more before and
during the war to embitter and deliberately poison the English mind against
Germany than any other agency." - Clinton Hartley Grattan
{Media
psychology is an emerging field of study that uses the
theories, concepts and methods of psychology to study the impact of
mass media on individuals, groups, and cultures.
Media psychology is concerned with the social and psychological parameters of
communications between people that are mediated by some technology or conduit
other than simply air.
Many practitioners in the field of media
psychology apply and ply their various skills, training and expertise in a
variety of arenas including research on media issues, appearing in print and
electronic media as interviewees and columnists, advising various media
organizations including movie studios, independent filmmakers, television
networks, screenwriters, producers and directors, on the myriad aspects of
human behavior.
The field of media psychology has becoming increasingly
interested in how the various media can help in delivering medical and
psychological treatments and intervention strategies. The media of film and
television, by use of music, camera angles, editing, lighting, color and black
and white recording, image size, and all facets of sound and image production,
create impressions and facilitate our emersion in the pseudo-reality presented.
Media psychology attempts to understand the manner in which
subconscious messages are processed in an attempt to eliminate unforeseeable
effects and unintended consequences.
The field of media psychology has found the most effective means of
indoctrinating and conditioning people is to embed the message to be conveyed
into the storylines of fictional accounts. People are branded when the
prescribed message is able to bypass censors and the conscious attention of the
receiver. Social and political agendas can be set and the manner in which
reality is understood can be modified. It is easier to watch television than
read and thus the skill of reading is further retarded.
Media
manipulation is so complex an art form it is doubtful that, even with
government legislation and safeguards, the citizen-victim can ever entirely be
aware of the goal directed conditioning. Corporations spend thousands of hours
and millions of dollars devising ways to con-vince the public, the public
spends little time and little money designing counter strategies.
Media literacy, knowing how media affect us emotionally,
cognitively, and behaviorally, and how to defend against indoctrinating
messages, is vital for an informed, free society.}
The ease with which
the American public was
manipulated caught the attention of two
groups in particular.
One was the
intellectual community which
understood these new propaganda
techniques provided a general means to control
popular opinion on a
regular basis.
The other
group consisted of corporate interests,
who saw a window of opportunity
to increase sales by turning Americans into
corporately conditioned consumer
clones.
In order to adequately
control a
population an
emotional response must be conditioned into
the subconscious of the target
population, an
emotional response the target
population is consciously
unaware of.
German television in the early 1930's had been
conceived as primarily a tool of
propaganda rather than a means of
entertainment. A limited
number of cinemas were equipped with 180-line projector receivers so that Nazi
Party propaganda could be disseminated
easily, and cinema television was used
throughout the war for troop
entertainment.
"Violence is to a dictatorship, what
propaganda is to a
democracy."
On March 14, 1933
Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister for Public
Enlightenment and Propaganda, combined all mass media dissemination
vehicles - the press,
radio, film and theater - into a
collectivised institution he controlled. Joseph
Goebbels considered mass media "a piano…in
the hands of the
government" on which the
government could
play.
Joseph Goebbels realized monotony may set in if all
types of mass media reported the same information,
so he developed a
theory that the mass
media should be "uniform in principle" but "polyform in
nuances."
Joseph Goebbels
concepts were based on the observations of
Edward Louis Bernays and
Walter Lippmann and are used by
American mass
media to this day.
{Edward Louis Bernays led
the propaganda effort behind the 1954 CIA coup in Guatemala, framing it as a
"liberation from Communism" when in fact it was the imposition of a
decades-long dictatorship to protect the interests of the United Fruit Company,
who had hired Bernays to manage the media campaign against the democratic
socialist government of Guatemala. Among one of Edward Louis Bernays' more
infamous projects was the popularizing of smoking for American women, as he
hired beautiful women to walk up and down Madison Avenue while smoking
cigarettes, giving women the idea that smoking is synonymous with
beauty.
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized
habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic
society... Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an
invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. . . . In
almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or
business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by
the relatively small number of persons . . . who understand the mental
processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires
which control the public mind." - Edward Louis Bernays}
"If you were a kid in the late 1950's, there's a
good chance
your thinking was shaped by two
television programs, The Mickey
Mouse Club and Howdy Doody." -
Bill O'Reilly,The No Spin
Zone
"'Hey, kids, what time
is it?' some guy named Buffalo Bob yelled. A studio
audience packed with kids
screamed back, 'Howdy Doody time!'
I can still hear
Sis singing, 'M-I-C – see you real soon – K-E-Y – why? Because
we like you!' I was outraged! However, you will notice that
more than forty years after first hearing these lines, I still remember
them. That's the power of the
tube." - Bill O'Reilly,The No Spin
Zone
It is very difficult for
a human to kill another
human;
humans have to be
manipulated to do so. During
World War II, when left to their own
devices, only 15-20% of individual
riflemen would fire their weapon at an
exposed enemy
target.
"Despite all the
killing we've done, the human mind is not
designed to kill. Portions of us get sick when we kill. Killing is against
our nature." - Rachel
MacNair
This was blamed primarily upon the training they received in
which they would practice shooting at a bull's-eye. Bull's-eyes don't appear on
the battlefield and after the war, the
military switched to
human shaped
targets. By the Vietnam war, 95% of the
riflemen fired their
weapons at an exposed human
enemy target.
Today, the Marine Corps use a modified
version of the first individual action
game Doom (known as Marine
Doom) as a training device, along with the traditional live ammunition
range targets as a means of normalizing
killing among the soldiers. This has been so
successful that the Marine Corps Combat
and Development Command in Quantico, Virginia has evaluated more than
thirty commercially
available electronic games for their potential use as miltary training tools.
The American
military has acknowledged for decades
the success of using
human likeness
targets to enhance
killing ability. Is the effect of similar video
games the same on kids?
With this in mind, the rise of
school shootings should come as no
surprise.
Upon America's entry into
World War II, Hollywood
film makers,
John Huston,
John Ford,
Howard Hawks, and
Frank Capra, were hired by the
American government to make
propaganda
films for home and abroad.
(John Ford received a Presidential Medal of
Freedom.)
In England three of
Alfred Hitchcock's classics
Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, and Lifeboat were made as
propaganda films. After the
World War II,
Alfred Hitchcock directed
two short documentaries in England, filmed in French and shown in France after
the Liberation. Akira Kurosawa did the same for Japan with his film The Most Beautiful.
Laurence Olivier was a major
Hollywood presence when he made
the propaganda
films while enlisted, That Hamilton Woman, 49th Parallel, and The Demi-Paradise.
That Hamilton Woman
was made to gather pro-British support from the American people and was
Winston Churchill's favorite film.
In 1942, Alec
Guinness, an accomplished actor and enlisted man was given special leave to
make his New York stage debut in a propaganda play.
Alec Guinness had roles in Oliver Twist, The Bridge on the River Kwai,
Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago and as Obi-Wan "Ben"
Kenobi in Star
Wars.
During World War II,
Jimmy Stewart flew 20 missions
over Germany as a bomber
pilot, rising from a private to a
full colonel.
Jimmy Stewart retired in 1968 from
the Air Force Reserves as a brigadier general.
Jimmy Stewart was the
highest-ranking entertainer
in the American
military.
Jimmy Stewart received the
Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Neville Brand was discharged in
1946, after 10 years in the American army,
as the 4th most decorated soldier of World
War II .
Neville Brand had roles in the
television show Combat and the
movies, Stalag 17, Birdman of Alcatraz, That Darn Cat!, and Tora! Tora! Tora!.
Lee Marvin is
buried at Arlington National Cemetery alongside some of the highest ranking
soldiers in the
history of the
American armed
forces.
Lee Marvin's career spanned
more than forty years and included The Wild One, The Killers, The Dirty Dozen, The Iceman Cometh, The Big Red One, Gorky Park, and Delta Force.
Lee Marvin was awarded a
purple heart for being shot in
the ass.
In the 1940's,
John F. Kennedy hung out with
Spencer Tracy,
Clark Gable,
Lana Turner,
Gary Cooper,
Walter Huston,
Sonja Hennie,
Gene Tierney,
Peggy Cummins, and
Sam Spiegel.
At
this time Joseph P. Kennedy,
John F. Kennedy's father, was an
American ambassador, a confidant of
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a
friend of Winston Churchill.
(Note: Joseph P. Kennedy made his fortune importing liquor during prohibition.
John F. Kennedy was the son of
illegal drug smuggler!)
Robert Montgomery served as
president Dwight Eisenhower's
speech writer and advisor who later appointed him as a special consultant to
the president on television and public
communications.
In 1947,
Robert Montgomery headed the
Hollywood Republican Committee to elect
Thomas E. Dewey president and in the 1960's, served as a
communication consultant to
John D. Rockefeller, III.
Robert Montgomery was best
known for the
movies Riptide, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, They Were Expendable, The Gallant Hours
In April 1953, Cecil B.
DeMille, Paramount Studios, was appointed as a special consultant to the
government on cinema
propaganda.
Cecil B. DeMille
believed that the most effective use of
American
films was not to
design an entire
image to cope with a certain problem, but
rather to see to it that in a regular
film, the right line, aside,
inflection, or eyebrow movement was introduced to reflect
government
desired
American attitudes to whatever subject was
at hand.
Cecil B. DeMille once said to C.D.
Jackson, of Dwight Eisenhower's
Committee of International Information Activities - who also had ties to
the Central Intelligence Agency - that,
"anytime I could give him [Luigi Luraschi, a longtime senior
executive at Paramount Studios] a
simple problem for a country or an area, he would find a way of dealing with it
in a movie."
In 1956, the Joint Chiefs of Staff met
with John Ford,
John Wayne, and
Merian Cooper, to discuss how
Hollywood could promulgate the concept of
"militant liberty".
They agreed on the
imperative to produce films which
would "explain the 'true'
conditions existing under
communism … and to explain the
principles upon which the 'free world'
way of life is based.
Kirk Douglas was a Goodwill
Ambassador for the State Department and the United
States Information Agency beginning in 1963. In 1981,
Kirk Douglas was the recipient
of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, "the highest
honor bestowed on a
private
citizen."
George L. Murphy was a
Republican United States Senator for the
State of California from 1965-1971. George L. Murphy films include
The Navy
Comes Through, Battleground, and Border G-Man.
Audie L. Murphy was the most
decorated American combat soldier of World
War II. Audie L. Murphy
received every decoration for valor that this country had to offer, thirty
three awards and the Medal of Honor, plus 5 decorations presented to him by
France and Belgium.
Audie L.
Murphy suffered from
post traumatic stress disorder.
His first wife, Wanda Hendrix often talked of his struggle with his condition,
claiming he had at one time held her at gun point.
Audie L. Murphy was plagued by
insomnia and
depression. During the mid-1960s
he became dependent for a time on doctor prescribed sleeping
pills called Placidyl.
Audie L. Murphy
movies include Battle
at Bloody Beach, The Quiet
American, To Hell and
Back and Beyond
Glory
Don
Knotts, best known as the character
Barney Fife on the Andy Griffith Show, served in the Pacific in
World War II receiving the Victory
Medal, among other decorations.
(Andy Griffith was the recipient of the Presidential Medal of
Freedom.)
James Doohan ("Scotty" on Star Trek) landed in Normandy with
the United Sates Army on D-Day; Donald Pleasance (The Great Escape) was an R.
A. F. pilot who was shot down and held prisoner by the Germans; David Niven was
a Royal Military Academy Sandhurst graduate and Lt. Colonel of the British
Commandos in Normandy; Clark Gable, assigned to the UK at RAF Polebrook with
the 351st Bomb Group, flew five combat missions, including one to Germany, as
an observer-gunner in B-17 Flying Fortresses between May 4 and September 23,
1943, earning the Air Medal and the Distinguished Flying Cross for his efforts;
Charlton Heston served for two years as a B-25 radio operator and gunner
stationed in the Alaskan Aleutian Islands with the Eleventh Air Force; Ernest
Borgnine was a United States Navy Gunners Mate; Charles Durning was a United
States Army Ranger at Normandy earning a Silver Star and awarded the Purple
Heart; Charles Bronson was a B-29 tail gunner in the Army Air Corps in the 20th
Air Force out of Guam, Tinian, and Saipan; George C. Scott of the United States
Marine Corps was assigned to the prestigious 8th and I Barracks in Washington,
DC; Eddie Albert (Green Acres TV), a lieutenant in the United States Coast
Guard in the Pacific, was awarded a Bronze Star for his actions during the
Battle of Tarawa in the Pacific Novemeber 1943; Brian Keith served as a United
States Marine rear gunner in several actions against the Japanese on Rabal in
the Pacific; John Russell was a second lieutenant assigned to the 6th Marine
Regiment at Guadalcanal where he served as an assistant intelligence officer;
Robert Ryan was in the United States Marine Corps serving as a drill instructor
at Camp Pendleton, in San Diego, California; Tyrone Power was a second
lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps who flew cargo and wounded Marines
during the Battle of Iwo Jima and the Battle of Okinawa.
The Pentagon has always
understood that the film
industry as an important part of public
relations; according to a recently released memo, "military depictions have become more of an
advertisement for us,'" which
explains the Air Force's eagerness to be a part of the
short lived 2002 CBS 'reality' television series, American Fighter Pilots, which followed
three men as they trained to fly F-15s, and was
executive produced by
Tony Scott (director of Top Gun) and his
brother
Ridley Scott (director of Black Hawk Down).
Upon the release of Top
Gun, the American
navy set up recruiting booths in theaters
where the film was being shown to
capitalize on the pro-military fervor
the film encapsulated.
Due to the enormous expense of
military equipment, it makes financial
sense for a film
maker to get
military
cooperation. However, this often
entails the altering of scripts to fit the
desires of the
Pentagon (i.e.
military and
government personnel are to be depicted
in more positive and heroic ways, 'American' ideologies are reinforced and not criticized,
etc.).
For example:
In Goldeneye (1995), the original
script had a American
navy admiral betraying
state secrets, but this was
changed to make the traitor a member of the French
navy.
The Jackal (1997) received help
after the marines were given a better role. Major Nancy LaLuntas had objected that the
helicopter pilots had no "integral part in the action – they are
effectively taxi drivers." A letter from the film's director, Michael
Caton-Jones, stated: "I am certain that we can address the points that you
raised … and effect the appropriate changes in the screenplay that you
requested."
Cooperation had
been given to the production of Top Gun after the character
portrayed by Kelly McGillis had been changed from an enlisted
individual to someone outside the
military, as
relationships between
officers and enlisted personnel are
against the Uniform Code of Military
Justice.
Although Hearts in Atlantis had no
military in the
plot, the
film makers wanted to use land
belonging to the army. The
Pentagon suggested that
the film could include a shot of an
army recruiting booth in a carnival scene.
Despite having made changes to characters in Independence Day, the
Department of Defense refused help because, "the
military appears impotent and/or inept;
all advances in stopping alien
invaders are the result of actions by civilians."
Movies that receive assistance from
the Pentagon show the
military in a
glorious
light of mythic proportions and include Air Force One, A Few Good Men, Armageddon, The Hunt for Red October, Pearl Harbor, Patriot Games, Windtalkers, Hamburger Hill, The
American president, Behind
Enemy Lines, Apollo
13, Tomorrow Never
Dies, and A Time to
Kill.
Movies that
were denied assistance from the
Pentagon portray the
reality of war and include Apocalypse Now, Catch-22, Dr. Strangelove, Full Metal Jacket, The Last Detail, Lone Star, Platoon, and The Thin Red Line.
In August of 1999, the American
Army signed a five-year, $45 million deal
with the University of Southern
California, chosen because of its close proximity to Hollywood, to have the
school's
movie, special-effects and
other
technology
experts help with
troop training, including battle
scenarios, virtual-reality
combat, and large-scale simulations
creating settings similar to Operation Desert
Storm.
Jack Valenti said of the this partnership,
known as the Institute for Creative
Technologies, "The digital world, the world of
virtual reality … is going to
be part of the embrace of this great, new cooperative venture."
According to James Der
Derian, professor of international relations at
Brown University, "What we're witnessing
here today is perhaps not only the
announcement of a new sort of technological center, but the
creation of a
military-industrial-media-entertainment
complex."
In the early 1980's, the
American Army asked Atari to
create a special version of the game
Battle Zone as a training tool for drivers of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle.
J.W. "Wild Bill" Stealy, the chairman of
Interactive Magic, a North Carolina software company, is an
Air Force Academy graduate and retired
Air Force officer. His company produced Carrier
Strike Fighter, a flight and combat simulator of the iF/A-18E, a fighter
jet that had yet to be put into general operation.
MAK Technologies won
a 1997 Department of Defense contract to make
Marine Exed Unit 2000, an amphibious assault game intended for both
military and
commercial
markets.
Every year, the
American government hosts the Connections
Conference, which is intended to unite members of the
Department of Defense and video game makers.
Attendees include personnel of the Defense
Intelligence Agency and game companies like GT Interactive. Conference
agendas have included such topics as 'Wargaming
Design
Fundamentals' and 'Department
of Defense Wargaming 101'.
Col. Kenneth "Crash" Konwin, head of the
Defense Modeling and Simulation Office, and Larry Tuch, a writer and
designer with Paramount Digital
Entertainment detailed how their
organizations have adapted Hollywood multimedia
technology and blockbuster
movie
storytelling skills to
create realistic simulations that teach
military
officers how to make better decisions
during international crises."
In early 2003, ABC
aired a short lived 'reality' series entitled Profiles from the
Front Line executive produced by
Jerry Bruckheimer (Black Hawk Down) and Bertram van Munster (The
Amazing Race), it followed various members of the armed
forces as they took part in the
invasion of
Afghanistan during the summer of
2002.
It was made with the
cooperation with the
Pentagon which screened
the series before it was aired.
Vince Ogilvie, who was the
Pentagon's project
officer for the series, said the
interactions of the film crews and military personnel provided 'a prelude to
the process of embedding'
media representatives in
military units for
war coverage.
In February of 2000,
the Dutch newspaper Trouw and France's Intelligence Newsletter reported that
the American Army's Fourth Psychological
Operations (PSYOPS) Group at Ft. Bragg, NC, worked in
news at CNN's Atlanta headquarters
during the end of the 1999 Kosovo war. "In
the 1980's, officers from American Army's
Fourth Psychological Operations staffed the National
Security Council's Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD), a
shadowy
government
propaganda agency that planted stories in
the American media supporting the
Ronald Reagan administration's Central
America policies.
A senior
American
official described National Security Council's Office of Public
Diplomacy as a 'vast psychological warfare operation of the
category the
military conducts to
influence a
population in
enemy territory.' An investigation by the
congressional General Accounting Office found that National Security Council's Office of Public
Diplomacy had engaged in 'prohibited, covert
propaganda activities'.
"The readiness with which the
mass media and
intellectuals adapt to and serve
their leaders surprises many who don't
grasp the extent to which the corporate media are a part of the imperial enterprise
structure, and how
naturally the
intellectual community accepts and
works within the parameters
fixed by imperial needs." - Edward S. Herman, Professor Emeritus of Finance at
the Wharton School of the University of
Pennsylvania
J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, had a special liking for
celebrities and most of
'friends' were movie
stars;
Dorothy Lamour,
Greer Garson,
Ginger Rogers,
Shirley Temple and
Judy Garland.
J. Edgar Hoover's special correspondents
list included radio and
television network presidents William
S. Paley of CBS and David Sarnoff of NBC/RCA; celebrities
Lawrence Welk,
Billy Graham,
Norman Vincent Peale, as well as
executives of Ford, Sears, The United
States Chamber of Commerce, and Warner Brothers.
From
time to time during the 1920's to the 1950's, Walter Winchell, one of the most
influential newsmen in the country both in print and on the
radio, would be asked by
J. Edgar Hoover to withhold the release
of news
stories for a myriad of reasons.
When the Federal Bureau of
Investigation made an arrest in the Linbergh baby kidnapping Walter
Winchell learned of Bruno Richard Hauptmann's capture less than an hour after
it had occurred. J. Edgar Hoover
requested that he sit on the story for 24 hours and Walter Winchell agreed.
J. Edgar Hoover reciprocated the
favor by providing Walter Winchell with
information as to evidence the Federal Bureau of
Investigation had amassed against Hauptmann.
Hollywood gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and
Louella Parsons provided
J. Edgar Hoover with thousands of
confidential reports, from which he learned which
stars supposedly had marital,
drug or alcohol problems, venereal diseases, were
homosexual, or involved with under aged girls.
The
first known reference of
Ronald Reagan's name in an Federal Bureau of Investigation file is on
September 17, 1941, written by Hugh Clegg, the assistant special agent in
charge of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation's Los Angeles Bureau.
Ronald Reagan was given the code name of
T-10. Louis B. Mayer selected
Ronald Reagan as a member of a
committee - also headed by Louis B.
Mayer - whose purpose
was to "purge" the movie industry of
Communist party members.
Ronald Reagan and
Louis B. Mayer , along with
Dick Powell,
Ray Milland and
Adolphe Menjou, were also
involved with the Hollywood Committee for the Re-Election of Joe
McCarthy.
From 1940 until his
death in 1966,
Walt Disney worked with the special agent
in charge of the Los Angles office of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation and was known
as a "SAC contact".
On October 24, 1947,
Walt Disney testified before the
House Un-American Activities Committee that
films could be used
successfully as a tool of
propaganda and admitted his studios had
already made several that dealt with subjects such as the Treasury Department,
the use of air power and
Adolph Hitler.
J. Edgar Hoover said in a letter dated
November 9, 1956 to Walt Disney, "Your
work in the past has been a credit not only to
the movie
industry but to the entire
Nation."
In
another letter dated March 1, 1957 to
J. Edgar Hoover mentions "the "atom bomb"
film which was
designed with an 'educational slant' in
order to 'enlighten' the
public."
unsealed
FBI document
Walt Disney's
fervent anti-communism stance helped him
develop a very friendly
relationship with J. Edgar Hoover, even
going so far as to allow J. Edgar Hoover
to censor and modify scripts, including Moon Pilot and That Darn Cat!
Those who advocated the blacklisting
practice in Hollywood did so on the grounds that Communist and pro-Communist
infiltration of the entertainment
industries represented a serious
peril to American
values, to the
American cult of
materialistic consumerism and to
the beneficiaries of that cult, the American
plutocracy.
In the 1950's, ABC, CBS, and NBC
offered Joseph McCarthy hours of
free air time on television and the
radio.
Both the
government and Hollywood insiders
consider the entertainment
industry a powerful means of effectively
communicating
political ideology and manipulating public
opinion.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete
when everything the American public believes is false." - William Casey, CIA
Director
When
the Central Intelligence Agency was founded,
originally as the Office of Strategic Services, wealthy individuals were
approached and asked to spy for America. The elite were asked to do so because
they traveled and socialized with the wealthy individuals of other countries.
From the very beginning the Central Intelligence
Agency has been more concerned with the welfare of an
elite wealthy class reflecting
the biases of that class. The
Central Intelligence Agency never has been
concerned with individuals and has mainly been concerned with not getting
caught breaking the law. The Central
Intelligence Agency should be abolished as the information that has leaked
out over the years has painted a picture of a rogue operation beholden to a
wealthy elite concerned only with
corporate
profits.
In the
early 1950's, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were organized
by the Central Intelligence Agency as
outlets of propaganda.
Headed by General Rodney C.
Smith of the American
army, Radio Free
Europe's intent was to broadcast into the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe "to keep hope
alive among our friends…to
confuse,
divide and undermine our
enemies…" and, "…to encourage
uprisings against their governments."
Bing Crosby,
Henry Fonda,
Ronald Reagan,
Rock Hudson, and
Barbara Stanwyck all made
propaganda
films or
radio
broadcasts in support of Radio Free
Europe.
William
J. Casey, Ronald Reagan's Central Intelligence Agency director and
one of Capital Cities' "founders, long-time counsel, board member and largest
stock holders," put pressure on ABC and all of the major
America
news organizations to be more
supportive of the Ronald Reagan
administration's conservative agenda.
In November 1984,
William J. Casey asked the Federal Communications Commission to revoke all
of ABC's television and
radio licenses in retaliation for the
network's airing of an ABC News report suggesting that the Central Intelligence Agency had attempted
to assassinate an American citizen. Four
months later, Capital Cities bought ABC for $19.2 billion, while
William J. Casey owned 34,000 shares of
Capital Cities stock worth about $7 million.
Antonio Mendez, a retired member of the
Central Intelligence Agency Office
of Technical Services(OTS), wrote an article in the Winter 1999/2000 issue
of the Central Intelligence Agency
journal Studies in Intelligence, where he documents his involvement in
the rescuing of six Americans trapped in
Iran during the 1979-1981
hostage crisis.
Antonio
Mendez and other operatives
posed as a Canadian film crew
scouting locations near Tehran. Although posing as Canadians, the establishment
of their false identities was done with the
complete cooperation of Hollywood,
including the use of Columbia Studios for their "production offices" and, as part of their
disguise team, an award
winning makeup artist given the pseudonym of
"Jerome Calloway", who was recently awarded the Central Intelligence Agency's
Intelligence Medal of Merit.
In
Antonio Mendez twenty page article there
is no mention of the uniqueness of either the situation or of Hollywood
government
cooperation and, in fact, he even
mentions that his relationship with "Jerome"
at the time was already ten years in the
making.
Upon a search of the webpage
for the Hollywood trade paper Variety, the name Tony Mendez came up as a
technical advisor for the CBS drama about the Central Intelligence Agency, The
Agency.
In October of 1999, the Central Intelligence Agency held a lavish
gala film premier for In the Company
of Spies, the first spy thriller ever to bear the Central Intelligence Agency's stamp of
approval even allowing the director to shoot inside the Central Intelligence Agency's Langley
headquarters and provided 60 off duty
employees to serve as extras.
Bill Harlow, the Central Intelligence Agency's director of
public affairs, said "senior Central
Intelligence Agency officials
realized several years back that assisting sympathetic
film makers and authors was one way the Central Intelligence Agency could be more
open and accountable to the tax paying
public without divulging
operational secrets. They even
persuaded Chase Brandon, a veteran
paramilitary
officer who has jumped out of airplanes
for the Central Intelligence Agency
all over the world, to take a job in the public
affairs office as the Central Intelligence
Agency's liaison to Hollywood in 1996."
This has proven most
effective, with scriptwriters even rewriting history to present an upbeat portrait of the
agency. In 2001, three new television
series The Agency, Alias, and 24 and seven
films including Bad Company, The Bourne Identity, and The Sum of All Fears were made
with the Central Intelligence
Agency's approval.
It is almost impossible to know which
corporations are owned and operated by the Central Intelligence Agency. For example
Air America was a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The Central Intelligence Agency
of the United States of America helped Carlos Castillo overthrow the
democratically elected Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in
Operation PBSUCCESS, Augusto Pinochet overthrow the democratically
elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende with the September Plan
and $6.8 million+, Saddam Hussein overthrow the democratically elected Iraqi
government of Abdul Rahman Arif and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi overthrow the
democratically elected Iranian government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Operation
Ajax which included a massive covert propaganda campaign.
In
1977, Richard Helms, the executive director of the CIA who authorized the
September Plan, was convicted of perjury for lying to a Senate committee
about the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Chile and the
murder of Salvador Allende.
Patrice Émery
Lumumba the first legally elected Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of
the Congo was deposed in competing coup d'état sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency
and the KGB during the Congo Crisis.
The Central Intelligence Agency
provided assistance to the Afghani
mujahideen in a program called Operation Cyclone. Somewhere between
$3 - $20 billion in American funds were funneled into
Afghanistan to train and equip
mujahideen, which included
Osama bin Laden, with
weapons, including
Stinger surface-to-air missiles and
training in the latest terrorist
tactics.
"In 1953, the United
States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran's
popular prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. The Eisenhower administration
believed its actions were justified for
strategic reasons, but the coup was clearly a setback for Iran's
political development and it is easy to see
now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by
America in their internal affairs." -
Madeleine Albright
In 1963 General Abdel Karim Kassem was disposed by
the Baath Party. The Central Intelligence Agency
helped the new Baath Party
government in ridding the country of suspected leftists and Communists. In a
Baathist bloodbath lists of
suspected Communists and other leftists provided by the
Central Intelligence Agency,
were used to systematically murder untold numbers of
Iraq's
educated including hundreds of doctors,
teachers, technicians, lawyers and other professionals as well as
military and
political figures.
The Central Intelligence Agency
directed the exile revolution, Contras, which planted harbor mines and sank
civilan ships in attempts to overthrow the democratically-elected Sandinista
government of Nicaragua. After the Boland Amendment was enacted, it became
illegal under American
law to fund the Contras (Bleeding heart liberals
at work again!); National Security Adviser Robert MacFarlan, Deputy National
Security Adviser Admiral Poindexter, National Security Council staffer Oliver
North and others continued an illegal operation to fund the Contras which lead
to the Iran-Contra scandal.
The Central Intelligence Agency
has been accused since the year 2000 of attempting regime change in Zimbabwe,
Venezuela, Libya, Equatorial Guinea, the Palestinian Authority, Somalia and
Iran.
CIA Heroin
Trafficking in Southeast Asia
Gary Webb on
C.I.A. Trafficking of Cocaine
Psychological and paramilitary, known as PP or KUCAGE, operations
differ from those of PI or CI because they are action rather than collection
activities. Collection operations should be invisible so that the target will
be unaware of them. Action operations, on the other hand, always produce a
visible effect.
PP operations are, of course, risky because they nearly
always mean intervention in the affairs of another country with whom the US
enjoys normal diplomatic relations. If their true sponsorship were found out
the diplomatic consequences could be serious. This is in contrast to collection
operations, for if these are discovered foreign politicians are often prepared
to turn a blind eye - they are a traditional part of every nation's
intelligence activity.
Thus the cardinal rule in planning all PP
operations is 'plausible denial', only possible if care has been taken in the
first place to ensure that someone other than the US government can be made to
take the blame.
PP programs are to be found in almost every CIA station
and emphasis on the kinds of PP operations will depend very much on local
conditions. Psychological warfare includes propaganda (also known simply as
'media'), work in youth and student organizations, work in labor organizations
(trade unions, etc.), work in professional and cultural groups and in political
parties. Paramilitary operations include infiltration into denied areas,
sabotage, economic warfare, personal harassment, air and maritime support,
weaponry, training and support for small armies.
The vehicles for grey
and black propaganda may be unaware of their CIA or US government sponsorship.
This is partly so that it can be more effective and partly to keep down the
number of people who know what is going on and thus to reduce the danger of
exposing true sponsorship.
Editorialists, politicians, businessmen and
others may produce propaganda without necessarily knowing who their masters
are. Some among them obviously will and so, in agency terminology, there is a
distinction between 'witting' and 'unwitting' agents.
In propaganda
operations, as in all other PP activities, standard agency security procedure
forbids payment for services rendered to be made by a CIA officer working under
official cover (one posing as an official of the Department of State, for
instance). This is in order to maintain 'plausible denial' and to minimize the
danger of embarrassment to the local embassy if anything is discovered by the
local government. However, payment is made by CTA officers under non-official
cover, e.g. posing as businessmen, students or as retired people; such officers
are said to be working under non-official cover.
Officers working under
non-official cover may also handle most of the contacts with the recruited
agents in order to keep the officer under official cover as protected as
possible. Equally, meetings between the two kinds of officer will be as secret
as may be. The object of all this is to protect the embassy and sometimes to
make the propaganda agents believe that they are being paid by private
businesses.
Problems of communist influence in one country can be made
to appear of international concern in others under the rubric of 'a threat to
one is a threat to all'. For example, the CIA station in Caracas can cable
information on a secret communist plot in Venezuela to the Bogota station which
can 'surface' through a local propaganda agent with attribution to an
unidentified Venezuelan government official. The information can then be picked
up from the Colombian press and relayed to CTA stations in Quito, Lima, La Paz,
Santiago and, perhaps, Brazil. A few days later editorials begin to appear in
the newspapers of these places and pressure mounts on the Venezuelan government
to take repressive action against its communists.
There are obviously
hosts of other uses to which propaganda, both black and grey, can be put, using
books, magazines, radio, television, wall-painting, handbills, decals,
religious sermons and political speeches as well as the daily press. In
countries where handbills or wall-painting are important media, stations are
expected to maintain clandestine printing and distribution facilities as well
as teams of agents who paint slogans on walls.
In order to obtain
political intelligence as well as to develop relationships with potential
political-action agents, most stations have continuing programs for cultivating
local politicians from opposition as well as from government parties. Making
acquaintances in local politics is not usually difficult because CTA officers
under diplomatic cover in embassies have natural access to their targets
through cocktail parties, receptions, clubs and other mechanisms that bring
them together with people of interest. Regular State Department Foreign Service
Officers and Ambassadors as well may also facilitate the expansion of station
political contacts through arranging introductions.
When a local
political contact is assessed favorably for station goals, security clearance
and operational approval is obtained from headquarters, and the station officer
in contact with the target begins to provide financial support for political
campaigns or for the promotion of the target's political group or party. The
target will use some of the money for personal expenses thereby developing a
dependency on the station as a source of income. Eventually, if all goes well,
the local politician will report confidential information on his own party and
on his government, if he has a government post, and he will respond to
reasonable station direction regarding the communist question.
As final
arbiters of political conflicts in so many countries, military leaders are
major targets for recruitment. They are contacted by station officers in a
variety of ways, sometimes simply through straightforward introduction by US
military attaches or the personnel of US Military Assistance Missions.
Sometimes the liaison developed between the Agency and local intelligence
services can be used for making these contacts. Again CTA officers can make
contact with those military officers of other countries who come to the US for
training. As in the case of politicians, most Agency stations have a continual
program for the development of local military leaders, both for the collection
of intelligence and for possible use in political action.
Politicians
working for the Agency are expected to take an active part in working for
expulsion of 'undesirables'. Similarly, where the Soviet Union tries to extend
its diplomatic or commercial activities, our politicians are expected to use
their influence to oppose such moves. They are also expected to take a hard
line against their own nationals engaged in left-wing or communist activities.
In the last of these instances success means the proscription of the parties,
the arrest or exile of their leaders, the closure of their offices,
publications and bookstores, the prohibition of their demonstrators, etc. Such
large-scale programs call for action both by anticommunist movements and by
national governments - where possible the Agency likes to use the same
political action agents for both purposes.
It is not just a matter of
financing and guiding local politicians. In situations regarded as dangerous to
the US, the Agency will conduct national election operations though the medium
of an entire political party. It will finance candidates who are both 'witting'
and 'unwitting'. Such multi-million-dollar operations may begin a year or more
before an election is due and will include massive propaganda and
public-relations campaigns, the building of numerous front organizations and
funding mechanisms (often resident US businessmen), regular polls of voters,
the formation of 'goon-squads' to intimidate the opposition, and the staging of
provocations and the circulation of rumors designed to discredit undesirable
candidates. Funds are also available for buying votes and vote counters as
well.
If a situation can be more effectively retrieved for US interests
by unconstitutional methods or by coup d'etat, that too may be attempted.
Although the Agency usually plays the anti-communist card in order to foster a
coup, gold bars and sacks of currency are often equally effective. In some
cases a timely bombing by a station agent, followed by mass demonstrations and
finally by intervention by military leaders in the name of the restoration of
order and national unity, is a useful course. Agency political operations were
largely responsible for coups after this
pattern in Iran in 1953 and in the Sudan in 1958.
An infiltration
team may perform sabotage through the placing of incendiary devices or
explosives at a target-site timed to go off days, weeks or even months later.
Sabotage weapons include oil and gasoline contaminates for stopping vehicles,
contaminates for jamming printing-presses, limpets for sinking ships, explosive
and incendiary compounds that can be molded and painted to look like bread,
lamps, dolls or stones. The sabotage instructors, or 'burn and blow boys', have
staged impressive demonstrations of their capabilities, some of which are
ingeniously designed so as to leave little trace of a cause.
The
Economic Warfare Section of the PP staff is a sub-section under Paramilitary
Operations because its mission includes the sabotage of key economic activities
in a target country and the denial of critical imports, e.g. petroleum.
Contamination of an export agricultural product or associated material (such as
sacks destined for the export of Cuban sugar), or fouling the bearings of
tractors, trucks or buses destined for a target country may be undertaken if
other efforts to impede undesired trade fail. As Economic Warfare is undertaken
in order to aggravate economic conditions in a target country, these operations
include in addition to sabotage, the use of propaganda, labour, youth, student
and other mass organizations under CIA control to restrict trade by a friendly
country of items needed in the target economy US companies can also be called
upon to restrict supply of selected products voluntarily, but local station
political-action assets are usually more effective for this purpose.
Although the Air and Maritime Support section of the staff supervises
standing Agency operations to supply insurgents (Air America and Civil Air
Transport in the Far East, for example) additional resources such as aircraft
can be obtained from the Defense Department. These operations included the
Guatemalan invasion in 1954 (aptly given the cryptonyrn LCSUCCESS); Tibetan
resistance against the Chinese in 1958-9 and the rebellion against the Sukarno
government in Indonesia in 1957-8; current training and support of irregular
forces in South Vietnam and Laos; and increasing sabotage and paramilitary
operations against the Castro government in Cuba. Leaflet drops as part of the
propaganda aspect of paramilitary operations are also arranged through the Air
and Maritime Support section.
Closely related to paramilitary
operations are the disruptive activities known as militant action. Through
organization and support of 'goon squads' sometimes composed of off-duty
policemen, for example, or the militant sections of friendly political parties,
stations attempt to intimidate communists and other extreme leftists by
breaking up their meetings and demonstrations. The Technical Services staff of
the DDP makes a variety of weapons and devices for these purposes. Horrible
smelling liquids in small glass vials can be hurled into meeting halls. A fine
clear powder can be sprinkled in a meeting-place becoming invisible after
settling but having the effect of tear-gas when stirred up by the later
movement of people. An incendiary powder can be moulded around prepared tablets
and when ignited the combination produces ample quantities of smoke that
attacks the eyes and respiratory system much more strongly than ordinary
tear-gas. A tasteless substance can be introduced to food that causes
exaggerated body colour. And a few small drops of a clear liquid stimulates the
target to relaxed, uninhibited talk. Invisible itching powder can be placed on
steering wheels or toilet seats, and a slight smear of invisible ointment
causes a serious burn to skin on contact. Chemically processed tobacco can be
added to cigarettes and cigars to produce respiratory ailments.
When
cover foundations or companies are used for funding they may be chartered in
the US or in countries such as Lichtenstein, the Bahamas and Panama, where
commercial secrecy is protected and governmental controls are minimal.
Secret CIA operations constitute the usually unseen efforts to shore up
unjust, unpopular, minority governments, always with the hope that overt
military intervention (as in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic) will not be
necessary. The more successful CIA operations are, the more remote overt
intervention becomes - and the more remote become reforms." - Philip Burnett
Franklin Agee
the broadcasting board of
governors, with an annual budget of $544.5 million, was
developed to oversee all
civilian, non-military international
broadcasting funded by the American
government.
This includes
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Voice of
America, and the Office of Cuba
Broadcasting. The mission statement spells out their
purpose very clearly: "to
promote and sustain
freedom and democracy by
broadcasting accurate and
objective news and information about America and the world to audiences overseas," with an ultimate
goal of
creating a "Worldwide United States
International Broadcasting System."
Some of their current projects
include: Voice of America, with programming in 53
languages to more than 90
million listeners and television and
internet viewers around the world, "broadcasts daily editorials
reflecting the views of the American
government", with a recent
creation of programs for North Koreans,
"including North Korean Periscope and North Korean Defectors'
Odyssey to provide a forum for defectors"; Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty "continued
its emphasis on regions in the front line of the
American led 'war on terror'. The
Office of Cuba Broadcasting, which oversees
Radio and
Television Marti, "is to emphasize
American Cuban
relations, the state of the Cuban
economy, international
human rights and the dissident
movement on the island."
More than
half the languages
broadcast by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty are aimed at
areas where the majority
populations are
Muslim.
Among the board of directors
for the broadcasting board
of governors are Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, appointed director of Voice of
America by Ronald Reagan in 1982;
Joaquin F. Blaya, a former CEO of the
Telemundo Group, Inc.; D. Jeffrey Hirschberg, a former special attorney of the
United States Justice department and deputy chief of the criminal special
litigation section; Norman J. Pattiz, founder and
chairman of Westwood One which supplies
radio and television stations with
information services
and programming.; Steven J. Simmons, chairman and CEO of Patriot Media and Communications, LCC, a
new company formed to purchase cable companies in
America; and as an ex-officio member of the
broadcasting board of
governors, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.
58,249 young American men and eight young American
women killed.
2,000,000 to 3,000,000 Vietnamese killed.
"The Government of Vietnam (GVN) lacked legitimacy
with the rural peasantry, the largest segment of the population. The peasantry
perceived the GVN to be aloof, corrupt, and inefficient. South Vietnam's urban
elite possessed the outward manifestations of a foreign culture. This small
group held most of the wealth and power in a poor nation, and the attitude of
the ruling elite toward the rural population was, at best, paternalistic and,
at worst, predatory." - Eric Bergerud
"As I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within
myself for ways to understand and respond to
compassion my mind goes constantly to the people of that
peninsula.
I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the junta in
Saigon, but simply of the people who have been
living under the curse of
war for almost three continuous decades now.
They must see Americans as strange
liberators.
The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in
1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation, and before the Communist
revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the
American Declaration of
Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them.
Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former
colony.
Our government felt then that
the Vietnamese people were not "ready" for independence, and
we again fell victim to the deadly
Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so
long.
With that tragic decision we rejected a
revolutionary government seeking
self-determination, and a
government that had been established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have
no great love) but by clearly indigenous forces
that included some Communists.
For the peasants this new government
meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.
For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam
the right of independence.
For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive
effort to recolonize Vietnam. Before the end of the
war we were meeting eighty percent of the
French war costs. Even before the French
were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to
despair of the reckless action, but
we did not. We encouraged them with our huge
financial and
military supplies to continue the
war even after they had lost the will. Soon
we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at
recolonization.
After the French were defeated it looked as if
independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements.
But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify
the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported
one of the most vicious modern dictators
-- our chosen man, Premier Diem.
The peasants watched and cringed as
Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist
landlords and refused even to discuss reunification with the north. The
peasants watched as all this was presided over by
American
influence and then by
increasing numbers of American troops who
came to help quell the insurgency
that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been
happy, but the long line of
military
dictatorships seemed to offer no real
change - especially in terms of their need for land and
peace.
The only change came from
America as we increased our troop
commitments in support of governments which were singularly
corrupt, inept and without popular support.
All the while the people read our leaflets and received regular
promises of peace and
democracy - and land reform.
Now they
languish under our bombs and consider us -
not their fellow Vietnamese - the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as
we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where
minimal social needs are rarely met.
They know they must move or be
destroyed by our
bombs.
So they go - primarily women
and children and the aged.
They
watch as we poison their water, as we
kill a million acres of their crops. They must
weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to
destroy the precious
trees. They wander into the
hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one "Vietcong"
inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a
million of them - mostly children. They
wander into the towns and see thousands of the
children,
homeless, without
clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals.
They see the
children, degraded by our
soldiers as they beg for
food.
They see the
children
selling their sisters to our
soldiers,
soliciting for their mothers.
What do the peasants think as we
ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our
many words concerning land reform?
What
do they think as we test our latest
weapons on them, just as the Germans
tested out new medicine and new
tortures in the concentration camps of
Europe?
Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be
building?
Is it among these voiceless ones?
We have
destroyed their two most cherished
institutions: the
family and the village.
We have
destroyed their land and their crops.
We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only non-Communist
revolutionary
political force -- the unified
Buddhist church.
We have
supported the enemies of the peasants of
Saigon.
We have corrupted their
women and children and
killed their men.
Liberators?
Now there is little left to build on - save bitterness.
Soon the only solid
physical foundations remaining will be found at our
military bases and in the concrete of
the concentration camps we call fortified hamlets.
The peasants may
well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as
these?
Could we blame them for such thoughts?
We must speak for them and
raise the questions they cannot raise.
For these too are our brothers.
At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these
last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless on Vietnam and to
understand the arguments
of those who are called enemy, I am as
deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me
that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the
brutalizing process that goes on in any
war where armies face each other and seek to
destroy. We are adding cynicism to the
process of death, for they must
know after a short period there that none
of the things we claim to be
fighting for are really involved. Before
long they must know that their government
has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated
surely realize that we are on the side of the
wealthy and the secure while we
create hell for the poor.
The war in
Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the
American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering
reality we will find ourselves organizing
clergy - and laymen - concerned committees for the next generation. They will
be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand
and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will
be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end
unless there is a significant and profound change in
American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not
beyond our calling as sons
of the living God. "
- Martin Luther
King Jr., Presidential Medal of Freedom
recipient
Jack Valenti,
co-founder of the advertising
and political consulting agency Weekly &
Valenti, was in charge of the press coverage when
John F. Kennedy was
assassinated on Friday, November 22, 1963, in Dallas,
Texas.
Jack Valenti was born in Houston, Texas and began
work as an office boy for the Humble Oil Co.,
now ExxonMobil. After
the assassination, Jack Valenti flew on Air Force One back to Washington as the
Special Assistant to Lyndon Johnson. Jack Valenti became a close aid to Lyndon
Johnson and lived in the White
House.
"I sat in on every Vietnam meeting in which Lyndon Johnson was
engaged, from the day of
John F. Kennedy's assassination to
the day I left the
White House in mid-1966. I
think I know as well as anyone the ebb and flow of
the Vietnam tides inside the
White House." - Jack
Valenti
"In early August 1964, Lyndon Johnson used a murky
set of events in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the coast of North
Vietnam, to launch full-scale
war on Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson and secretary of
defense Robert McNamara told the American
public there was an attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on
American destroyers. It later turned out
that the Gulf of Tonkin episode was a fake, that the highest
American
officials had
lied to the public." - Howard
Zinn
This manipulative
lie, with melodrama straight out of
Hollywood, was paid for by the lives of 55,000 Americans, while the
weapons suppliers raked in the
money so the "dominoes would not
fall!"
And the marriage between Hollywood and the military-industrial
complex resulted birthing the now existent military-industrial-entertainment
complex. Former president and CEO of the
Motion Picture Association of America,
Jack Valenti guarantee the
cooperation
government agencies required – and
still require - from Hollywood.
"Jack Valenti
knows the players, he's got a sense of the issues, he
knows his way around town, he
knows how to use the glitter of the motion
picture industry in a city that loves that sort
of stuff." - Stephen Hess committing on Jack Valenti's position in Washington.
In January of 2007 Jack Valenti was in the process of writing a book
about his relationships with eight
presidents.
In a 1975 lecture in Hong Kong, Barry
Zorthian - the head of Joint United States Public Affairs Office which
ran the propaganda of the Vietnam
war – "complained that some of the 'embedded'
journalists of that
time were so dumb that they could not take
signals."
Barry Zorthian gave up his position and went back to
his old job as vice-president of Time Magazine.
PROJECT 100,000
"PROJECT 100,000, a
program to salvage the poverty-scarred youth of our society at the rate of
100,000 men each year - first for two years of military service, and then for a
lifetime of productive activity in civilian society.
Poverty in America
pockmarks its victims inwardly. If unchecked and unreversed, that inner ghetto
of the poverty-scarred personality of these men can fester into explosive
frustrations of bitterness and violence. Chronic failure in school throughout
their childhood, they are destined to a downward spiral of defeat and decay in
a skill-oriented nation that requires from its manpower tool an increasing
index of competence, discipline, and self-confidence.
Their average
reading score is a bare sixth-grade level; and 14 percent of them read at a
third-grade level or less. Many are poorly motivated when they reach us. They
lack initiative. They lack pride. They lack ambition. If nothing were done to
give them a strong sense of their own worth and potential, they, their wives
and their children would almost inevitably be the unproductive recipients of
some form of the dole 10 years from now.
Men who would have formerly
been draft rejectees are termed New Standards men. But the men
themselves are never informed that they are in this category. Hundreds of
thousands of men can be salvaged from the blight of poverty, and the Defense
Department — with no detriment whatever to its primary role — is
particularly well equipped to salvage them." - Robert McNamara November 7, 1967
"Beginning in 1965 and for nearly three years McNamara each year
drafted into the military 100,000 young boys whose scores in the mental
qualification and aptitude tests were in the lowest quarter - so-called
Category IV's. Men with IQ's of 65 or even lower. They were, to put it bluntly,
mentally deficient. Illiterate. The young men of Project 100,000 couldn't read,
so training manual comic books were created for them. They had to be taught to
tie their boots. The cold, hard statistics say that these almost helpless young
men died in action in the jungles at a rate three times higher than the average
draftee." - Joseph L. Galloway
"McNamara pointing out how a key element
in a U.S. decision seriously to escalate the war had been the 1965 Vietnamese
attack on the U.S. Pleiku Air Base the day a senior U.S. official arrived in
Saigon. The United States was determined it could not be humiliated in this
way." - Gregory Clark
The Phoenix
Program
The Phoenix Program was the collection of intelligence
information identifying officials of National Liberation Front which had within
each village cell a secretary; a finance and supply unit; as well as
information and culture, social welfare, and proselytizing sections to gain
recruits from among the civilian population..Between 1968 and 1972 the Phoenix
Program neutralized 81,740 National Liberation Front members, of whom 26,369
were assaniated.
" The problem was, how do you find the people on the
blacklist? It's not like you had their address and telephone number. The normal
procedure would be to go into a village and just grab someone and say, 'Where's
Nguyen so-and-so?' Half the time the people were so afraid they would say
anything. Then a Phoenix team would take the informant, put a sandbag over his
head, poke out two holes so he could see, put commo wire around his neck like a
long leash, and walk him through the village and say, 'When we go by Nguyen's
house scratch your head.' Then that night Phoenix would come back, knock on the
door, and say, 'April Fool, motherfucker.' Whoever answered the door would get
wasted. As far as they were concerned whoever answered was a Communist,
including family members. Sometimes they'd come back to camp with ears to prove
that they killed people." - Lieutenant Vincent Okamoto, intelligence-liaison
officer for the Phoenix Program, recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross.
Wounded 3 times.
the Gulf war
Upon the
invasion of Kuwait by
Iraq on August 2, 1991, the
Kuwaiti government hired at least twenty
law and lobby firms to help shape the
opinion of the
American humans.
Hill & Knowlton, at the time the
largest PR firm on Earth, sponsored "Kuwaiti
Liberation Day" passing out tens of thousands of T-shirts for more than eleven
million dollars. Thomas Ross, senior
vice-president, was a Pentagon
spokesman during the Carter
administration; vice chairman Frank
Mankiewicz was a former press
secretary and advisor to Robert F.
Kennedy and served as president of National Public
Radio; Robert Gray, the
chairman of Hill & Knowlton's United States
offices had leading role Ronald
Reagan's presidential campaign;
Lauri J. Fitz-Pegado, supervisor of the Kuwait account, was a former Foreign
Service Officer at the United States
Information Agency; Lew Allison, producer of Hill & Knowlton's video
news releases – distributed to
news channels and often
broadcast unedited as "news" – was a former producer at
both CBS and NBC news. Craig Fuller,
the president of Hill &
Knowlton , was Ronald Reagan's
Chief of Staff, handled George H. W.
Bush's presidential campaign public
relations during the 1988 elections and later became Phillip Morris' top public
relations executive.
{"The International
Monetary Fund (IMF) has
retained the major public relations firm Hill & Knowlton for one year, to
boost the international financial
institution's "global outreach." Hill
& Knowlton's press release quotes CEO Paul Taaffe as saying, "The
IMF plays a crucial role
around the world working to stabilize financial markets.
H&K's regional expertise and
global network means the firm is ideally suited to support the
IMF." The firm will also
design "customized contact programs with
key opinion formers,
influencers and
the wider financial and economic
community." - Hill & Knowlton
press release, September 22, 2008}
Through its network of
international offices and strategic
alliances The Rendon Group provides communication
services to clients in more
than 78 countries and maintains contact with government
officials, decision-makers, and news
media around the globe. The Rendon Group was hired "to run a covert
anti-Saddam propaganda
campaign. A February 1998 report by
Peter Jennings cited records obtained by ABC News which showed that The
Rendon Group spent more than $23 million dollars in the first year of its
contract with the Central
Intelligence Agency. The Rendon Group has been involved with
information manipulation,
propaganda, for years.
"I am not a
national-security strategist or a
military tactician. I am a
politician, a person who uses
communication to meet public-policy or corporate-policy objectives. In fact, I am an
information warrior and a perception manager. We've
worked in ninety-one countries. Going all the way back to Panama, we've been
involved in every war, with the exception of
Somalia."- John Rendon
The Rendon Group hires individuals with
experience in both
government and mass media. John Rendon, the firm's creator and senior
partner, "previously served as a Public Information
Officer for the Secretary of the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts and as a member of president Jimmy Carter's
national political staff. Phil Angellis, the
Director of Operations, spent 22 years working in the Massachusetts State
Senate and 11 years as Assistant Clerk and Parliamentarian; Jeff Schmidt,
The Rendon Group Productions
producer/editor/videographer, was on staff at ESPN; and Tara Haggett, The
Rendon Group's production manager, has
coordinated various levels of marketing
campaigns and post
production for over 40 movies.
"Our
clients are government agencies,
private sector
enterprises, and non-governmental organizations that face the challenge of
achieving information superiority in order to impact public opinion and
outcomes." - statement on The Rendon Group's website.
A
completely separate campaign headed by
Charlotte Beers, "a former Madison Avenue
advertising
executive who was recently named the
State Department's Undersecretary of State for 'public diplomacy', the
official
government euphemism for 'public
relations', was reported by The New York Times as "planning a
television and
advertising
campaign to try to
influence Islamic
opinion."
On
Thursday, May 15, 2003, French officials formally complained in letters
to the White House, State
Department, and Congress, that their country was the
victim of a
campaign of 'repeated disinformation,' which they say is
being fed to the press by
George W. Bush administration
officials.
One of the
false claims was that France and Germany supplied
Iraq with precision switches that
could be used in nuclear
weapons, that French companies sold
Iraq spare parts for warplanes
and military helicopters, that France
possessed prohibited strains of human
smallpox, and that France most recently helped
Iraqi
leaders escape to Europe by providing
them with travel papers.
During the first Gulf
war, each of the big three networks had
profound financial ties to the war.
ABC was owned by Capitol Cities, now owned by
Disney. The chairman of the board of
directors was on the board of directors of Texaco Oil.
CBS, at the time owned by Westinghouse, now owned by
Viacom, also owned the RAND
corporation and the Honeywell
corporation, both of which are major
defense contractors.
NBC is owned by
General Electric, which had a $2
billion weapons contract with the United
States military, making both the
Tomahawk and the Patriot missiles. The
Kuwaiti royal family were major
General Electric stockholders.
Jack F. Welch, CEO of
General Electric, insists that NBC
News had no greater responsibility
for public service than any of
General Electric's traditional lines of
business.
During the Gulf
war, according to Pulitzer Prize
winning
journalist Patrick J. Sloyan, The
Associated Press, which benefited most from a system that turned all
journalists into wire
service reporters, sent
photographer Scott Applewhite to cover victims of a SCUD missile attack near
Dhahran.
The warhead had hit an American tent, killing 25 Army reservists and
wounding 70. Scott Applewhite, an accredited
pool member, was stopped by United States Army military police. When he objected, they punched and
hand cuffed him while ripping the film
from his cameras.
Dick Cheney, quoted in America's
Team: Media and the
Military, was honest after the Gulf
war about his treatment of the
mass media. 'Frankly, I looked on it as a problem to
be managed. The information function was extraordinarily important. I did not
have a lot of confidence that I could leave that to the
press.'"
{"During the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91, the HW Bush administration
paid Binladen Brothers Construction - later the Saudi Binladen Group - to help
build airfields for U.S. aircraft and later to construct an American air base
in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Prince Waleed bin Talal employed Carlyle as investment
banker in his purchase of 10 percent of Citicorp's preferred stock. The Carlyle
Group, a huge international investment and defense firm, directors at various
times have included H.W. Bush, Frank Carlucci, James Baker, Richard Darman and
GW Bush was a director of a Carlyle subsidiary. HW Bush visited the bin Laden
family in Saudi Arabia on Carlyle's behalf. The Saudi royal family was a key
investor in Carlyle as well. BCCI, a Pakistani-operated institution with
connections to the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, was used
by US Central Intelligence (CIA) agents to funnel money to Osama bin Laden and
the Mujahideen in Afghanistan as they fought against the Soviet-backed
government in the 1980s. Through BCCI, later closed by federal investigators
after $10 billion disappeared, HW Bush was loaned the funds to form Arbusto
Energy which later merged with Harken Energy. Harken Energy had first been
incorporated as an unprofitable collection of Texas oil wells for investors
seeking tax write-offs. George W. Bush's investment in Harken Energy was
enhanced by Sheik Abdullah Bakhsh, a Saudi billionaire, and by the Emirate of
Bahrain, who granted Harken Energy an extraordinary off-shore oil concession,
choosing it over Amoco Oil. George W. Bush sold two-thirds of his stock in
Harken Energy two months before Saddam Hussein sent Iraqi troops into Kuwait
netting $1 million in profit before Harken Energy stock crashed." - adapted
from Jackson Thoreau}
911 responseIn November, 2001,
George W. Bush's top
political
strategist, Karl Rove, met with many
entertainment
executives to discuss the
war on terror and
ways that Hollywood
stars and filmmakers might
work together with the administration's
communications
strategy.
Aimed directly at
Americans this was an attempt to unify the
American people behind a
strategy that would cement
American aristocracies hold over the
American people while appearing to be bold
and broad initiative to end terrorist acts.
The meeting was
spearheaded by Karl Rove and
Jack Valenti, and organized by
Sherry Lansing of Paramount
Pictures. Among those represented at the
meeting were CBS, Viacom, Showtime, Dreamworks, HBO, and MGM.
Jack Valenti is a periodic
visitor to the White House for
briefings on major issues and
initiatives.
To assist in the preparedness of possible
future terrorist
attacks, the
Pentagon put out a mayday
call to film
makers skilled at
imagining potential
terrorist acts, including writers Steven
E. DeSouza, David Engelbach, and directors Joseph Zito, David Fincher, Spike
Jonze, Mary Lambert, and Randal Kleiser.
They were asked "to engage
in apocalyptic brainstorming of the
category that has yielded acts
of cinematic terrorism." The group, a
part of the Institute for Creative Technologies, was assembled by
Army Brigadier General Kenneth
Bergquist.
On February 19, 2002, the
New York Times reported that the
Pentagon's
Office of Strategic Influence was
developing plans to provide 'news' items, even
false ones, to foreign mass
media organizations in an effort to
influence public
sentiment and policy
makers in both friendly and unfriendly
countries.
The Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence was
created just after 911 to publicize the
federal government's
perspective in
Islamic countries and to generate support
for the America's 'war on terror.'
The government is barred by
law from propagandizing
within
America (although this has never stopped
it), but the Pentagon's
Office of Strategic Influence new
plan has lead to disinformation planted in a foreign
news reports being picked up by
American
news outlets.
Soon after the September 11th attacks, Bill Maher, in response to the
labeling of the hijackers as cowards, said on his late
night ABC program Politically
Incorrect, "We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000
miles away. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you
want about it, it's not cowardly." Less than a week later, his show was
cancelled by ABC.
AOL Time Warner CEO
Gerald Levin told MSNBC that his internet company had already helped terror
investigators, " providing access to e-mail traffic."
"There's an
implicit quid pro quo here…the
industry seems to be saying to the
administration, 'we're patriotic, we're
supporting the war…now
free us from constraints'." - Jeff Chester,
executive director of the Center
for Digital Democracy
The invasion
of Afghanistan was just the beginning step in the drive to regain physical
control of the oil in Iraq and Iran. By tying the Taliban in with Osama Bin
Laden there became a national enemy that the federal government could go to war
with. The Taliban forces in Afghanistan would be no match for American air
power.
On October 7, 2001 United States Air Force general Richard
Myers, chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated that
approximately 50 Tomahawk cruise missiles, launched by British and United
States submarines and ships, 25 strike aircraft from United States aircraft
carriers, USS Carl Vinson and USS Enterprise and 15 United States Air Force
bombers - B-1 Lancer, B-2 Spirit, B-52 Stratofortress were involved in the
first wave, launched from Diego Garcia.
During the
Afghanistan
war, the
Pentagon found a very
direct way to "gain control" – it
simply bought up all commercial satellite
images of Afghanistan, in order to prevent anyone
from accessing them.
With the passage and signing into law of the USA
Patriot Act (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools
Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) on October 26, 2001 any nation,
group or individual could be declared a terrorist supporter.
With the
whirlwind destruction of the Taliban and the occupation of Afghanistan
Americans showed they were willing to go to war against those evil doers - the
wily murdering al-Qaeda terrorists. No Americans questioned the need to crush
the ruthless al-Qaeda terrorists who numbered between 1200 to 2500 men or their
purported Taliban supporters who numbered between 10 to 30 thousand men with
hundreds of tons of high explosives.
With the fresh success of American
military power in Afghanistan the neo-cons suggested that Iraq be invaded as
well because the Baath regime of Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with al-Qaeda,
the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. From the inception of the invasion of Iraq the
George W. Bush administration with the help of the neo-cons attempted to
control the news about, and from Iraq. Hundreds of millions of dollars were
spent on an assortment of media projects that were specifically designed to
sell "good" news about the invasion and occupation.
The Lincoln Group
initially worked with the Rendon Group, who helped Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi
National Congress supply false information to the American people. The Lincoln
Group acted as an intermediary between the United States military and media
outlets. Stories were authored by United States military information
operations' troops, translated into
Arabic and covertly placed in Baghdad newspapers. American commanders in Iraq
created the Baghdad Press Club were Iraqi journalists were paid to cover and
produce stories about American reconstruction efforts, such as openings of
schools and sewage plants. The Lincoln Group managed to place more than 1,000
stories in the Iraqi and Arab press.
"The war in Iraq has spawned a new
industry in Washington that could be called Psy-ops Journalism. The new breed
of journalists are following the money trail to the
Pentagon. Some $400
million in media consulting contracts has been awarded during the past few
years by the Pentagon.
Psy-ops journalism is a cross between what is accepted as the mainstream
journalism and what is known psychological operations, those engaged in mind
control warfare, to gain military advantage by fooling the enemy." - Alvin
Snyder, a former Executive of the United States Information Agency (USIA) and a
Senior Fellow at the USC Center for Public Diplomacy
The Lincoln Group,
once located on K Street, moved to larger quarters in the Pennsylvania Avenue
building that housed Jack Abramoff's famous restaurant, Signatures.
"Lincoln has also turned to American scholars and political consultants
for advice on the content of the propaganda campaign in Iraq. Michael Rubin, a
Middle East scholar at the American Enterprise Institute ... said he had
reviewed materials produced by the company." - New York Times, January 2, 2006
Michael Rubin was political adviser for the Coalition Provisional
Authority (Baghdad), 2003-2004, following two years (2002-2004) as staff
assistant on Iran and Iraq in the Office of Special Plans in the Office of the
Secretary of Defense.
In an impressive collection of
news reports, Fairness & Accuracy
in Reporting (FAIR) showed that in 1998, ABC World News This
Morning, NBC's Today,
The Associated Press, The
Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio, CNN, USA Today, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and
Newsday all reported the fact that the United Nations weapons inspection
teams were removed from Iraq by
order of the United Nations.
Four years later, every one of those
sources - ABC World News This
Morning, NBC's Today,
The Associated Press, The
Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio, CNN, USA Today, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and
Newsday - reported that Saddam Hussein had
forced the inspectors out effectively
re-writing history with
propaganda. The Ministry of Truth
in George Orwell's 1984 could not have done a
better job.
Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) conducted a
quantitative study from January 30, 2003, to February 12, 2003, concerning
ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly
News, and The News Hour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. They concluded that
of the 393 on-camera sources who appeared in
nightly
news
stories about
Iraq, more than two-thirds (267)
of the guests were from the United States and 75% of those (199) were either
current or former government or
military
officials with only one
expressing
skepticism or
opposition to the
war.
In an early
attempt to stamp out dissenting opinions the District of Columbia police force
arrested 120 protestors protesting the war in Iraq in 2002. In a legal
settlement reached in the summer of 2007 the District of Columbia agreed to pay
the protestors illegally detained $1 million. 14 other demonstrators illegally
arrested were paid $640,000.
The Geneva Conventions forbid the
targeting of
civilian installations – whether
state-owned or not – unless they are being used for
military
purposes. The
broadcasting of
propaganda is not considered
military use under the Geneva
Conventions. "The coalition of the willing" launched missiles at the
Iraqi
television offices on March 25, 2003.
Despite this violation of the Geneva Conventions, United States
media applauded the action
without a single reference to
its illegality.
Marine Lt. Col.
Oliver North, who was once Ronald
Reagan's point man for crisis management and coordinator of United States
counter-terrorism efforts in the 1980's, a staff member of
Ronald Reagan's National Security
Council, and one of the main players of what has become
known as the
Iran-Contra scandal, which
involved the illegal selling of weapons
to the government of
Iran, was a frontline "embedded" war correspondent for FoxNews during the 2003
war on
Iraq.
Pulitzer Prize
winning
journalist Peter Arnett, an NBC and
National Geographic correspondent in Baghdad, was fired at the end of March,
2003, for granting an interview with state controlled
Iraqi
television. In his short interview, he
stated, in part, that "the first war plan
has failed because of Iraqi
resistance. Now they are trying to write another war
plan. Clearly the war planners misjudged
the determination of the Iraqi
forces …George W. Bush says he is concerned
about the Iraqis. But if
Iraqis are dying in numbers, then
American policy will be challenged very strongly."
In The Daily Mirror, his new employer, Arnett wrote, "My NBC
reporting career was turned to ashes because I stated the
obvious to
Iraq
television; that the United States
war timetable has fallen by the
wayside… I don't want to give aid and comfort to the
enemy – I just want to be able to
tell the truth."
The current George W. Bush
administration has taken their communications department very seriously,
utilizing the skills of several television professionals.
Scott
Sforza was a former ABC producer. Sfozra created "the
White House 'message of the
day' backdrops and helped
design the $250,000 set at the United
States Central Command forward headquarters in Doha, Qatar."
Bob
DeServi, a former NBC cameraman has the title of associate director of
communications for
production.
Greg Jenkins a former
FoxNews television producer in
Washington is now the director of presidential advance. Greg Jenkins manages a
small army of staff and volunteers who move days ahead of
George W. Bush and his entourage
to set up the staging of all White
House events.
"We pay particular attention to not only what the
president says but what the American people
see." - Dan Bartlett.
When George W. Bush gave a speech in
Indianapolis regarding his economic
policy,
White House aides had the people
in the background remove their ties so they'd look more like ordinary folks. At
a speech given at Mt. Rushmore during the summer of 2002, the platform set up
for the television cameras was on
George W. Bush right, rather than
directly in front, as had been done with
other presidents.
George W. Bush was captured in
profile with his face alongside those on the mountain.
After
George W. Bush landed on the
U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln the stage was set for a declaration of
victory. Lincoln crew members are arrayed in
coordinated shirt colors over George
W. Bush's right shoulder with the 'Mission Accomplished' banner. The speech
was timed for what image makers call the 'magic light hour' which cast a golden glow on
George W. Bush.
'If you
looked at the television
image, you saw there was flattering
light on his left cheek and a slight
shadowing on his right ... It
looked great,' said Joshua King, director of production of presidential events in the
Clinton administration." George W.
Bush's communications department
"understands the visual as well as anybody ever has," commented Michael Deaver,
Ronald Reagan's chief
image maker, who was convicted of perjury in
1987 under the then newly-signed Ethics Act. "They watched what we did, they
watched the mistakes of George H. W.
Bush they watched how Clinton stumbled into it, and they've taken it to an
art form."
"The recent poll (summer 2006) that has 43% of
Americans continuing to
believe that
Saddam Hussein was
personally involved in 911 should not be surprising. The
White House misinformation
campaign has been the cornerstone of
George W. Bush's
political
survival. In speech after speech,
George W. Bush and
Dick Cheney have done their best to
deceive
Americans. The uncourageous
media has gone with the flow." - Bill
Rolfing
Proctor & Gamble, one of television's largest
advertisers, had a
policy for many years that stated, in part,
"There will be no material that may give offense either directly or by
inference to any commercial
organization of any sort. There will be no material on any of our programs
which could in any way further the concept
of business as cold, ruthless and lacking in all sentimental or
spiritual
motivations. If there is any attack on
American customs, it must be rebutted
completely on the same show."
In 1990, Neighbor
to Neighbor, a peace organization, asked actor Ed Asner to do a public
service spot calling for a
boycott of Folgers Coffee for buying its coffee beans from
El Salvador, which was
ruled by a brutal
military regime at the
time. Proctor & Gamble, owners of Folgers,
threatened to pull its sponsorship from any station airing it. Boston
television station WHDH ran the ad and
lost about $1 million in advertising revenues.
The Fox network was sued by two veteran
journalists under Florida's
whistleblower
law. Steve Wilson and Jane Akre uncovered an
important story "critical of Monsanto, the world's largest agrochemicals
company, second largest seed company, fourth largest
pharmaceutical company, and a main
advertiser on Fox television
nationally.
In his 1995 autobiography,
Lawrence Grossman, former president of PBS and
NBC wrote, "The corporate
culture came to dominate the
news business, treating
news as a commodity or
service no different from
'toasters, light bulbs, or jet engines.'
Bill O'Reilly, in an
interview with CBS News anchor Dan
Rather, stated that news on the
corporate owned networks refused
to challenge "persons of power" because "the
corporation have to do business with
the powerful and they don't want to make enemies" to which Dan Rather
responded, "You're absolutely
accurate about that."
the revolving
door
"The revolving door between Washington government
offices and lobbying firms is so lucrative and so established that anyone
pointing out that it is institutionalized
corruption is seen as
baying at the moon." - Fareed
Zakaria
"The same revolving door that exists between the
military establishment and defense contractors is also observed to exist
between the Washington-based think tanks and U.S. government departments." -
Rodrigue Tremblay Wendy Gramm, Texas Senator
Phil Gramm's wife, headed the Commodity Futures Exchange Commission. At
Enron's request
Enron became exempt from Commodity
Futures Exchange Commission regulations in January 1993. Wendy Gramm
resigned her position and 6 weeks later was appointed to the
Enron board of directors.
In
December 2000 Bill Clinton signed a bill with an amendment sponsered by Phil
Gramm to entirely exempt Enron from
oversight thus creating the
private trading floor that
lead to the Enron trading schemes -
Fat Boy,
Death Star,
Get Shorty - leading to the
California energy debacle which
eventualy, with the help of Arnold
Schwarzenegger, lead to quite a nice profit for the
Wall Street
bond brokers. Wall Steet took
Californians on this one twice!
Richard
Perle , a former assistant defense secretary in the
Ronald Reagan administration and a
chairman of the Defense Policy Board, advisors to Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld, was
also employed as an advisor to Global
Crossing, a major telecommunications company with strong financial interest
in lobbying the Defense Department.
Richard Perle was being paid
$750,000 by Global Crossing,
including $600,000 if the government
would approve the sale of Global
Crossing to Hutchison Whampoa and Singapore Technologies Telemedia Pte.
Once Richard Perle's
involvement with Global Crossing
was exposed by The New York Times on March 21, 2003,
Richard Perle resigned his position.
Of the major corporate melt
downs at the turn of the millennium Gary
Winnick of Global Crossing
alone remained unscathed.
Franklin Raines, Bill Clinton's
White House budget director
became the chief operations officer of Fannie Mae. Franklin Raines is
accused by The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), the
regulating body of Fannie Mae, of
abetting widespread accounting errors based on the overstated earnings
estimated at $6.3 billion. The OFHEO announced a suit against Franklin Raines
in order to recover some or all of the $50 million in payments made to Franklin
Raines.
Andrew H. Card Jr. was General Motors vice president of
government-relations. Andrew H. Card Jr.represented GM on
matters of public policy before Congress.
Andrew H. Card Jr. became George W.
Bush's White House chief of
staff.
Jacqueline Glassman was a senior regulatory counsel at
Daimler-Chrysler. She became acting head of the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration.
Jeffrey A. Rosen was a senior partner at Kirkland &
Ellis, a law firm that has defended GM in numerous
product liability suits. Jeffrey A. Rosen
became general counsel at the department of transportation.
-adapted
from David B. Deserano, e-mail fortytwoent@yahoo.com
"We need to be
using all the means available in the war of
ideas:
public diplomacy,
psychological operations,
influence agents,
disinformation and computer information warfare - from open and overt to
clandestine and covert, from public explanation of
policy to
secret subversion of
enemies. All of these must be
well-orchestrated.
In 1953, the
Central Intelligence Agency's celebrated
cold war information and disinformation arm
- centered in the "Mighty Wurlitzer" propaganda offices of OSS veteran
Frank Wisner - was an enormous operation, with thousands of employees adept at
planting press and
radio stories, engaging with labor unions,
applying economic pressure, offering direct
monetary payments and waging political and
cultural warfare.
According to a
1977 New York Times investigative series, the
Central Intelligence Agency owned or
subsidized, at various times, more than
50 newspapers,
news
services,
radio stations, periodicals and
other
communications facilities.
Paid Central Intelligence
Agency agents infiltrated a dozen foreign
news organizations, and at least 22
American
news organizations employed
American
journalists who were also
working for the
Central Intelligence Agency. Nearly a dozen
American
publishing houses printed some of
the more than 1,000 books that had been produced or
subsidized by the
Central Intelligence Agency.
A
permanent leadership is needed in the
form of a new Cabinet department that can knock together heads to
force integrated
influence activities - a
Ministry of
Propaganda."- Walter Jajko, retired brigadier general Air Force currently
of Institute of World Politics, November 2005.
(FactCheck.org, run by
Annenberg Public Policy Center,
which purports to honestly report the facts uses this disclaimer:
FactCheck.org publishes
links to Web sites maintained by third
parties on an as-is basis and without warranties either express
or implied. The existence of these
links does not mean FactCheck.org, the
Annenberg Public Policy Center or
the University of Pennsylvania approves or endorses the content on these web
pages to which we link. In other words FactCheck.org links to web pages that the facts have not been
checked on!!)
See
Ellsworth M. Toohey's missive on how to
rule the Earth.
heads of
state, celebrity |
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This website defines a new religious
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of reality outside personal experience has created a populace unable to discern
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American social mores and values have declined precipitously over
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