Wednesday 24th of April 2024
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Reporters joke that the easiest job in Washington is CIA spokesman. You need only listen carefully to questions, say, “No comment,” and head to happy hour.

 

The joke, however, is on us. The reporters pretend to see only one side of the CIA, the passive hiding of information. They meanwhile profit from the other side of the equation, active information operations designed to influence events in America. It is 2021 and the CIA is running an op against the American people.

 

By

PETER VAN BUREN

 

Leon Panetta, once director of CIA, explained bluntly that the agency influenced foreign media outlets ahead of elections in order to “change attitudes within the country.” The method was to “acquire media within a country or within a region that could very well be used for being able to deliver a specific message or work to influence those that may own elements of the media to be able to cooperate, work with you in delivering that message.” The CIA has been running such ops to influence foreign elections continuously since the end of WWII.

 

The goal is to control information as a tool of influence. Sometimes the control is very direct, operating the media outlet yourself. The problem is this is easily exposed, destroying credibility.

A more effective strategy is to become a source for legitimate media such that your (dis)information inherits their credibility. Most effective is when one CIA plant is the initial source while a second CIA plant acts seemingly independently as a confirming source. You can push information to the mainstream media, who can then “independently” confirm it, sometimes unknowingly, through your secondary agents. You can basically write tomorrow’s headlines.

 

Other techniques include exclusive true information mixed with disinformation to establish credibility, using official sources like embassy spokesmen “inadvertently” confirm sub details, and covert funding of research and side gigs to promote academics and experts who can discredit counter-narratives.

From the end of WWII to the Church Committee in 1976, this was all dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Of course the U.S. would not use the CIA to influence elections, especially in fellow democracies. Except it did. Real-time reporting on intelligence is by nature based on limited information, albeit marked with the unambiguous fingerprints of established tradecraft. Always give time a chance to explain.

Through Operation Mockingbird the CIA ran over 400 American journalists as direct assets. Almost none have ever discussed their work publicly. Journalists performed these tasks for the CIA with the consent of America’s leading news organizations. The New York Times alone willingly provided cover for ten CIA officers over decades and kept quiet about it.

Long term relationships are a powerful tool, so feeding a true big story to a young reporter to get him promoted is part of the game. Don’t forget the anonymous source who drove the Watergate story was an FBI official who through his actions made the careers of cub reporters Woodward and Bernstein. Bernstein went on to champion Russiagate. Woodward became a Washington hagiographer. Ken Dilanian, formerly with the Associated Press and now working for NBC, still maintains a “collaborative relationship” with the CIA.

 

That’s the tradecraft. The problem for America is once again the tools of war abroad have come home, just the same as when post-9/11 the NSA turned its antennas inward. The intelligence community is currently operating against the American people using established media.

Some of it can’t be more obvious. The CIA always planted stories abroad for American outlets to pick up. To influence public opinion they lied to journalists in the run up to the 2003 Iraq war. The agency works directly with Hollywood to control movies about itself.

Turn on any of the advocacy media outlets and you see panels of former CIA officials. None however is more egregious than John Brennan, former director, who for years touted Russiagate when he knew from information gathered while he was still in office that it was all fake. Brennan probably leaked the foundational lie alleging Trump was dirty with Russia to the press in January of 2017 as the kickoff event to the info op still running today.

Brennan’s role is more than speculation. John Durham, the U.S. attorney leading the ongoing “how it happened” Russiagate investigation into the intelligence community, has requested Brennan’s emails and call logs from CIA. Durham is also examining whether Brennan changed his story between his public comments (not under oath: say anything) and his May 2017 testimony to Congress (under oath: watch out for perjury) about the dossier. Reporter Aaron Mate is less delicate, laying out the evidence Brennan was “a central architect and promoter of the conspiracy theory from its inception.” Even blunter is Senator Rand Paul, who directly accuses Brennan of trying “to bring down a sitting president.”

How that worked helps show how info ops intertwine with covert ops. Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report shows the FBI unleashed a full-spectrum spying campaign with the primary document of the information op, the Steele Dossier, as an excuse. Dossier author and ex-British intel officer Christopher Steele also created a textbook information loop to publicize his work, secretly becoming his own corroborating source.

The Horowitz report also shows it was a 5 Eyes team effort; Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, a man with ties to his nation’s intel services, arranged a meeting with Trump staffer George Papadopoulos to set in motion FISA surveillance. British GCHQ monitored Trump officials and passed info to the NSA. The op used CIA assets, shadowy academics Stefan Halper and Joseph Mifsud, as dangles. There was even a honey trap with a female FBI undercover agent inserted into Israeli-arranged social situations with a Trump staffer.

It was all based on nothing but disinformation and the American press swallowed every bit of it to falsely convince a vast number of citizens their nation was run by a Russian asset. Robert Mueller, whose investigation was supposed to propel all this nothing into impeachment, ended up exercising one of the last bits of political courage Americans will ever see in walking right to the edge of essentially a coup and refusing to go one step more.

The CIA is a learning institution, and it recovered well from Russiagate. Details can be investigated. That’s where the old story fell apart. The Steele Dossier wasn’t true. But the a-ha discovery was the realization that since you’ll never formally prosecute anyone, you don’t need to bother with evidence when you can just throw out accusations. The new paradigm let the nature of the source—the brave lads of the intelligence agencies—legitimize the accusations. Go overt and let the unexpected prestige of the CIA as progressive heroes substantiate things. It worked.

So in December 2017 CNN reported Donald Trump, Jr., had advance access to the WikiLeaks archive. Within an hour, NBC’s Ken Dilanian and CBS both claimed independent confirmation. It was a complete lie. How do you confirm a lie? Ask another liar.

In February 2020, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) briefed the House Intelligence Committee the Russians were election meddling again to favor Trump. A few weeks earlier, the ODNI briefed Bernie Sanders the Russians were also meddling in the Democratic primaries in his favor. Both briefings were leaked, the former to the New York Times to smear Trump for replacing his DNI, the latter to the Washington Post ahead of the Nevada caucuses to damage Sanders. Who benefits is always a good question. The answer was Joe Biden.

In June 2020 the New York Times stated the CIA concluded the Russians “secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops.”  The story ran near another claiming Trump had spoken disrespectfully about fallen soldiers. Neither was true. But they broke around Trump’s announcement about withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and were aimed at discouraging pro-military voters.

Earlier this month the Washington Post, citing anonymous sources, claimed the FBI gave a defensive briefing to Rudy Giuliani in 2019, before he traveled to Ukraine. Giuliani supposedly ignored the warning. The story was “independently confirmed” by both NBC and the New York Times. It was totally false.

We are left to wonder how all these media outlets keep making the same mistakes with sources and only in disfavor to Trump, et al., and never the other way. They have become a machine as trustworthy as the spies they rely on.

The American system always envisioned an adversarial role for the media. One of the earliest challenges to freedom of the press was the colonial-era Peter Zenger case, which established the right of the press to criticize politicians free from libel charges. At times when things really mattered, men like Edward R. Murrow worked their craft to preserve democracy. Same for Walter Cronkite reaching his opposition to the Vietnam War, and the New York Times reporters weighing imprisonment to publish the Pentagon Papers.

In each of those instances the handful of reporters who risked everything to tell the truth were held up as heroes. Seeing the Times fighting for its life, the Washington Post co-published the Pentagon Papers to force the government to make its case not just against a rival newspaper, but the 1A itself.

Not today. Journalism is devoted to eliminating practitioners unwilling to play the game. Few have been targeted more than Glenn Greenwald (with Matt Taibbi as runner up.)

Greenwald exploded into a journalistic superhero for his reporting on Edward Snowden’s NSA archive, founding the Intercept to serve as a platform for that work. Then something very, very odd made it appear the Intercept outed one of its own whistleblower sources. Evidence suggests the source was a patsy, set up by the intel community, and exposed via Matt Cole, one of the Intercept journalists on this story. Cole was also involved in outing CIA officer John Kiriakou as a source on torture. Whistleblowers were made to think twice before turning to the Intercept.

Greenwald’s later criticism of the media for accepting Deep State lies as truth, particularly concerning Russiagate, turned him into a villain for progressives. MSNBC banned him, and other media outlets ran smear stories. He recently quit the Intercept after it refused to publish his article on Hunter Biden’s ties to China unless he deleted portions critical of Joe Biden.

Greenwald wrote

the most significant Trump-era alliance is between corporate outlets and security state agencies, whose evidence-free claims they unquestioningly disseminate… Every journalist, even the most honest and careful, will get things wrong sometimes, and trustworthy journalists issue prompt corrections when they do. That behavior should be trust-building…

But when media outlets continue to use the same reckless and deceitful tactics — such as claiming to have “independently confirmed” one another’s false stories when they have merely served as stenographers for the same anonymous security state agents while “confirming” nothing — that strongly suggests a complete indifference to the truth and, even more so, a willingness to serve as disinformation agents.

 

After decades of success abroad with info ops, the CIA and others turned those weapons on us. We are seeing the Deep State meddle in presidential politics, simultaneously destroying (albeit mostly with their cooperation) the adversarial media while crushing faith in both our leaders and in the process of electing them. Democracy has no meaning here.

 

Peter Van Buren is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99 Percent.

 

READ MORE:

 

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/spies-journalists-and-i...

exposed since 2005

The CIA tricks above have been exposed on this site since 2005 and well-known to Gus since the 1960s... Of course the ops are complex, adaptive but always manipulative. Recalcitrants get pushed out of windows as a recorded suicide. Just ask questions about Epstein and Le Mesurier... Pleae don't ask, just read the articles on this site, including the witch of the West...

 

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assassinologists...

 

by: 

 

We have all been born and raised under a government that wields the power of assassination. State-sponsored assassinations at the hands of the U.S. government — and specifically the Pentagon and the CIA — have become a rather ho-hum affair. They have become fully accepted as part and parcel of American life. 

Yet, when we stop to reflect on this phenomenon, we can’t help but come to the realization that this is truly an extraordinary power. It is an omnipotent power that enables the federal government to snuff out a person’s life simply on a determination that he is a communist, a terrorist, a threat to “national security,” or whatever other designation the government establishes.

The Framers and the American people in 1789 were totally opposed to living under a government that wielded the power of assassination. Don’t forget, after all, that after the break from England, Americans had lived under the Articles of Confederation for some ten years. Under the Articles, the federal government’s powers were so weak that it didn’t even have the power to tax, much less the power to assassinate.

That’s the way our American ancestors wanted it. They believed that the biggest threat to their freedom and well-being lay not with some foreign regime but rather from their very own government. That’s why they chose to live under a government with very few and very limited powers. In doing so, they felt safer and more secure.

When the delegates met in Philadelphia in what became known as the Constitutional Convention, it was with the purpose of simple amending the Articles to make the system work more efficiently. Instead, they came up with a proposal for a different type of governmental system — a limited-government republic — which would replace the Articles.

 

The American people were leery because the federal government under this new system would have more powers, including the power to tax. They were concerned that this new government would end up destroying their freedom and their well-being.

But proponents of the Constitution assured Americans that this would not be a government that wielded general powers — that is, powers that would enable federal officials to do whatever they wanted in the best interests of the nation. Instead, its powers would be limited to the few powers enumerated in the Constitution itself.

The American people were especially concerned about the power of assassination. The last thing they wanted was to live under a government that wielded the power to snuff out people’s lives for arbitrary reasons. In fact, if Americans had been told that this new federal government would wield the power of assassination, they never would have approved the deal. They would instead have continued operating under the Articles of Confederation.

Americans ended up approving the deal and accepting the new government under the assumption that its powers would be limited to those enumerated in the Constitution, which did not include the power of assassination.

To ensure that federal officials got the message, however, Americans demanded the enactment of the Bill of Rights, which included an express prohibition against assassination within the Fifth Amendment, which reads in part: “No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law.”

Due process of law is a term that stretches all the way back to Magna Carta in the year 1215. Over many centuries of resistance by British subjects against their own kings, due process came to encompass two principles: notice and trial. 

Thus, under the Fifth Amendment before the federal government could assassinate someone, it would be required to provide him with formal notice of the offense for which they wish to assassinate him and then guarantee him a trial to determine whether he in fact was guilty of committing the offense. 

Notice something important about the Fifth Amendment: Its protections apply to everyone, not just American citizens.

With the Sixth Amendment, the accused could elect to have a jury of ordinary citizens, rather than a judge or tribunal, determine his guilt or innocence. Our American ancestors simply didn’t trust judges or tribunals to make that decision. 

Since a jury’s verdict of acquittal was final and non-appealable, juries were also empowered with the ability to judge the law itself in criminal cases. If they found the purported offense unconscionable, they could elect to acquit even if the accused had actually committed it, in which case there was nothing the judge or the government could do about it. The accused would walk out of the courtroom a free person.

After World War II, the federal government was converted into a third type of governmental system — a national-security state. Under this type of government, the federal government — specifically the CIA and the Pentagon — acquired the omnipotent power of assassination. 

The conversion to a national-security state was justified under the rubric of the Cold War. The idea was that since the Soviet Union and the communist world were able to operate with omnipotent powers, including the power of assassination, the only way to prevent America from being conquered by the communists would be to adopt their same type of governmental structure — a national-security state, which came with the omnipotent power of assassination. 

The conversion to a national-security state was done through legislation, not through constitutional amendment. Nonetheless, owing to the overwhelming and ever-growing power of the national-security establishment — i.e., the military, the CIA, and the NSA — the legislative conversion to a national-security state was held to operate as a nullification of the Fifth Amendment. 

Today, the Pentagon’s and the CIA’s power of assassination is omnipotent. They are the final determiners of whether any particular person is going to have his life snuffed out. Their power of assassination is non-reviewable by any court in the land, including the nation’s highest court, the U.S. Supreme Court.

And that’s how we have come to live under omnipotent government, a type of governmental structure that wields the power to assassinate anyone it wants with impunity, simply by designating a person a communist, a terrorist, a threat to “national security,” or whatever.

 

Read more:

https://www.fff.org/2021/05/20/how-we-got-omnipotent-government/

 

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See also: https://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33845

 

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Just as it emerged that the Joe Biden administration shut down a State Department probe into the coronavirus origins, the White House ordered the US intelligence community to “redouble” its efforts on the matter. How convenient. 

In a statement released on Wednesday, President Biden said he had ordered the US spies in March to give him a report on the origins of the virus, and gave them 90 days to provide a “definitive conclusion.” 

 

Within minutes, the compliant corporate media acknowledged their marching orders, putting “redouble their efforts” into every headline. In a sense, the statement wasn’t so much an order to the spies, but a set of instructions to the Narrative managers.

That’s because the development of the Narrative on the coronavirus over the past several weeks has been, how shall we say, problematic for the current administration. For over a year, the corporate media and Big Tech have insisted that the virus evolved naturally, declaring anything else a “debunked conspiracy theory” and banning everyone who dared mention it.

That’s until former New York Times reporter Nicholas Wade penned an article questioning this, and it escaped the Memory Hole. Within weeks, the press had executed a dizzying U-turn, quietly retracted or stealth-edited both their stories and “fact checks,” and tried pretending they’d always believed the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab escape theory was at least possible. Nice try, but no.

Some US researchers, British tabloids, and even former President Donald Trump noticed this and pointed it out. Then, on Tuesday, CNN – that stalwart bastion of Our Democracy – lobbed another hand grenade into Biden’s back yard: his administration had actually shut down a State Department-led probe into the origins of the virus, right around the time he claimed to have asked the spies to get on the case.

The old inquiry was run out of the State Department’s Arms Control and Verification Bureau, and the decision to terminate it was made “after Biden officials were briefed on the team's draft findings in February and March of this year,” CNN reported citing a State Department spokesperson. 

So Biden had shut down a State Department probe as either too politicized or a waste of resources – CNN’s sources allege both – but then turned it over to the same spies that had generated the infamous “Intelligence Community Assessment” about the “Russian meddling” in 2016 that fed the Democrats’ “Russiagate” frenzy for the next four years. Let’s just say their methodology leaves something to be desired.

 

Another part of Biden’s statement that jumps out is his insistence that the spy agencies “include work by our National Labs and other agencies of our government to augment” their efforts. Did he mean the Department of Energy’s 17 facilities around the US – and if so, why? Or was this a reference to the National Institutes of Health and its division for infectious diseases, headed by Biden’s Covid Czar Dr. Anthony ‘Infallible’ Fauci? We can only guess.

Thing is, having Fauci anywhere near the probe into Covid-19’s origins would be entirely disqualifying, due to a conflict of interest. His National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases – through the NIH – has funded research into “understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence.” The recipient of their grant has been EcoHealth Alliance, a New York nonprofit run by Peter Daszak. This is the same group that “partners with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China,” for its research, as Nature magazine reported in August 2020, citing Daszak himself fulminating about the NIH cutting off his funding.

When confronted with this by Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) earlier this month, Fauci denied such research was involved, or that NIH ever funded the Wuhan lab. Later, speaking with friendly fact-checkers, Fauci argued it would “almost be irresponsible” to not collaborate with China given the 2003 SARS outbreak there, and called the EcoHealth funding “a very minor collaboration as part of a subcontract of a grant.”

So he never funded the research except he did and it was very minor and it would have been irresponsible not to but “a ridiculous leap” (in Fauci’s own words) to suggest this had anything to do with the very family of viruses they were supposed to be studying? Enough to make your head spin.

Given the previous record of everyone involved, it’s safe to conclude that Biden’s probe is going to be a politicized effort to craft a Narrative absolving Fauci – as well as Biden himself, for shutting down the State Department probe. It’s possible the White House could also use it as ammunition against China – giving the Republicans something to buy into.

Meanwhile, the axis of corporate media and Big Tech will declare the “science is settled” and proceed to deal with far more important issues – such as whether the fur color of the future First Cat will promote equity.

 

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/524909-biden-wuhan-covid-probe-fauci/

 

Read from top.

 

See also:

https://www.rt.com/news/524916-china-probe-secretive-biolabs/

 

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