CIA Out of Control

Russ Baker
Village Voice, Sept. 10, 1991

EXCERPT...

Dellums press secretary Max Miller says the representative from
Berkeley, together with majority whip David Bonior--another
outspoken liberal--made an agreement with Speaker Thomas Foley to
maintain a low profile in return for gaining seats on the committee.
After one full round of legislation and briefings, Miller says,
Dellums will be heard from. "They wanted to find out as much as
they could before speaking out." Meanwhile, the energetic Oliver
North, in his role as president of something called the Freedom
Alliance, has launched a campaign to collect a million Dump Dellums
signatures. He calls Dellums "a pro-Marxist, antidefense radical,"
who would be a threat on the "supersensitive" committee. Putting
Dellums on the panel, North says, was an "extremely reckless and
very dangerous appointment."

And those who make trouble get trouble. Reports and rumors that
the apparatus pokes into the personal lives of members of Congress
underlines the danger of investigating national security agencies.
"There's a little bit of fear that if you do go after the
intelligence community, your career is threatened," says McGehee,
author of "Deadly Deceits: My 25 years in the CIA." Even the
complacent Senate intelligence committee chair David Boren has
reason to worry. According to the "Voice"'s Doug Ireland (see Press
Clips, May 28), Boren faced a vicious primary battle in his first
senatorial campaign, during which his opponents accused him of being
a homosexual. At a press conference, Boren swore on a white Bible
that he was not. "It would therefore be utterly churlish," Ireland
wrote, "to speculate on whether or not the Company has a file on the
state of its tamed watchdog's libido." Since then, Boren has called
Robert Gates "one of the most candid people we've ever dealt with."

Leading congressional critics of the CIA have been defeated,
despite their long, distinguished careers in Washington and
Congress's nearly foolproof 98 per cent reelection rate. Both Otis
Pike and Frank Church were defeated soon after chairing their
precedent-setting '70s hearings. Pike's report had been so
incendiary that Congress voted not to release it before the White
House had a chance to censor the document. (It was ultimately
leaked to and published by the "Voice.&quot Pike's committee staff
director had been warned by the CIA special counsel, "Pike will pay
for this, you wait and see--we'll destroy him for this," according
to "The New York Times." Also defeated were outspoken senators Dick
Clark, Birch Bayh, and Harold Hughes. Foreign money--possibly South
African--is believed to have financed the defeat of Clark, a vocal
critic of the CIA and U.S. ties with South Africa.

Challenging the CIA also means trying to rein in dictatorial
tendencies that naturally accrue to the occupant of the Oval Office.
"Every president of the United States, no matter what he says before
he becomes president, about how he's going to clean things up," says
Marchetti, "once he gets in there and finds out that's *his* agency,
that's *his* intelligence community, hey, all bets are off."

One man who told the truth blew his chance to become CIA
director, thanks to "reformer" Jimmy Carter. Hank Knoche, acting
director following Bush's retirement, had been called down to a
Senate committee. "The chairman was complaining that `we just don't
know what's really going on,'" says Marchetti, who was privy to the
details of the incident. "They asked about covert action
operations: `Do we know all the stuff that's going on? Could you
tell us more about them?'" Asked to reveal the 10 largest ongoing
operations, Knoche offered to name a few of the lesser ones, despite
urgings from his aide that he keep his mouth shut. President Carter
reportedly heard about it, and was none too happy. Instead of
Knoche, the odds-on favorite for the slot, he named intelligence
novice and old Naval Academy chum Admiral Stansfield Turner. "Hank
learned his lesson that day," says Marchetti.

CONTINUED...

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/alt.conspiracy/G8CP9pwqjvU

The Propaganda System That Has Helped Create a Permanent Overclass Is Over a Century in the Making

Pulling back the curtain on how intent the wealthiest Americans have been on establishing a propaganda tool to subvert democracy.

Wednesday, 17 April 2013 00:00
By Andrew Gavin Marshall, AlterNet | News Analysis

Where there is the possibility of democracy, there is the inevitability of elite insecurity. All through its history, democracy has been under a sustained attack by elite interests, political, economic, and cultural. There is a simple reason for this: democracy – as in true democracy – places power with people. In such circumstances, the few who hold power become threatened. With technological changes in modern history, with literacy and education, mass communication, organization and activism, elites have had to react to the changing nature of society – locally and globally.

From the late 19th century on, the “threats” to elite interests from the possibility of true democracy mobilized institutions, ideologies, and individuals in support of power. What began was a massive social engineering project with one objective: control. Through educational institutions, the social sciences, philanthropic foundations, public relations and advertising agencies, corporations, banks, and states, powerful interests sought to reform and protect their power from the potential of popular democracy.

SNIP...

The development of psychology, psychoanalysis, and other disciplines increasingly portrayed the “public” and the population as irrational beings incapable of making their own decisions. The premise was simple: if the population was driven by dangerous, irrational emotions, they needed to be kept out of power and ruled over by those who were driven by reason and rationality, naturally, those who were already in power.

The Princeton Radio Project, which began in the 1930s with Rockefeller Foundation funding, brought together many psychologists, social scientists, and “experts” armed with an interest in social control, mass communication, and propaganda. The Princeton Radio Project had a profound influence upon the development of a modern "democratic propaganda" in the United States and elsewhere in the industrialized world. It helped in establishing and nurturing the ideas, institutions, and individuals who would come to shape America’s “democratic propaganda” throughout the Cold War, a program fostered between the private corporations which own the media, advertising, marketing, and public relations industries, and the state itself.

CONTINUED...

http://truth-out.org/news/item/15784-the-propaganda-system-that-has-helped-create-a-permanent-overclass-is-over-a-century-in-the-making

Alex Carey: Corporations and Propaganda
The Attack on Democracy

The 20th century, said Carey, is marked by three historic developments: the growth of democracy via the expansion of the franchise, the growth of corporations, and the growth of propaganda to protect corporations from democracy. Carey wrote that the people of the US have been subjected to an unparalleled, expensive, 3/4 century long propaganda effort designed to expand corporate rights by undermining democracy and destroying the unions. And, in his manuscript, unpublished during his life time, he described that history, going back to World War I and ending with the Reagan era. Carey covers the little known role of the US Chamber of Commerce in the McCarthy witch hunts of post WWII and shows how the continued campaign against "Big Government" plays an important role in bringing Reagan to power.

John Pilger called Carey "a second Orwell", Noam Chomsky dedicated his book, Manufacturing Consent, to him. And even though TUC Radio runs our documentary based on Carey's manuscript at least every two years and draws a huge response each time, Alex Carey is still unknown.

Given today's spotlight on corporations that may change. It is not only the Occupy movement that inspired me to present this program again at this time. By an amazing historic coincidence Bill Moyers and Charlie Cray of Greenpeace have just added the missing chapter to Carey's analysis. Carey's manuscript ends in 1988 when he committed suicide. Moyers and Cray begin with 1971 and bring the corporate propaganda project up to date.

This is a fairly complex production with many voices, historic sound clips, and source material. The program has been used by writers and students of history and propaganda. Alex Carey: Taking the Risk out of Democracy, Corporate Propaganda VS Freedom and Liberty with a foreword by Noam Chomsky was published by the University of Illinois Press in 1995.

SOURCE: http://tucradio.org/new.html

The AP Seizures and the Frightening Web They've Uncovered

The Government’s War on the Press

by ALFREDO LOPEZ
CounterPunch, MAY 16, 2013

EXCERPT...

There, in a nutshell, is the problem. For the corporate media, there is such still a thing as “no conceivable right to know”. Up to now, part of Obama’s information policy has been that mainstream media qualifies for First Amendment protection but “alternative” journalists and the news organizations they work for, as well as bloggers, activists, writers and others who work independently of major news organizations and who use the Internet as the free vehicle of communications it was invented to be have absolutely no protections. Since 2009, this government is known to have taken action against Internet activists and truth-tellers: seizing servers, email records and virtually all forms of on-line communications and then prosecuting people in over a dozen cases based on some of those seizures. There’s been very little action taken against the corporate press, which for its part has largely ignored or blacked out any reporting on the government attacks on its smaller media competitors.

This “favored status” commercial media has enjoyed has now been trashed. The “protected press” is as exposed as the rest of us. In answering Pruit’s letter, the Justice Department said as much. “We must notify the media organization in advance unless doing so would pose a substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation,” U.S. Attorney’s Machen spokesman William Miller explained, in a remark that went way beyond the traditional exemption for protecting lives. He added, “…we are always careful and deliberative in seeking to strike the right balance between the public interest in the free flow of information and the public interest in the fair and effective administration of our criminal laws.”

SNIP...

Where is the limit? Without a court hearing, there is none. If an AP reporter called your phone or emailed you from a targeted cell phone, the government now knows it and your phone number (and possibly email address) is now part of the investigation. That gathered information now includes your name, address, phone number, calls you received and calls you made. If they got to the email, all of that is theirs. No matter what those phone calls or email messages from your cell phone are about, they are a part of a government investigation into a major security leak.

SNIP...

Does the Obama Administration deserve that trust? Its stated position is that the government can collect and use any information of this type if there is a security reason to do so. The issue is what is a “security reason” and, since courts have been effectively removed from the process, that definition is completely in the hands of the Justice Department, Homeland Security, the FBI and the National Security Agency. If one of those agencies says you have no right to privacy, you don’t.

CONTINUED COINTELPRO...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/16/the-governments-war-on-the-press/

News from Post-Constitutional America

PROGRESSIVE REVIEW, 1996 - The issue arose again during the Iran-Contra affair, but even in the wake of all the copy on that scandal, the public got little sense of how far some America's soldiers of fortune were willing to go to achieve their ends. When the Iran-Contra hearings came close to the matter, chair Senator Inouye backed swiftly away. Here is an excerpt from those hearings. Oliver North is at the witness table:

REP BROOKS: Colonel North, in your work at the NSC, were you not assigned, at one time, to work on plans for the continuity of government in the event of a major disaster?

BRENDAN SULLIVAN: Mr. Chairman?

SEN INOUYE: I believe that question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area so may I request that you not touch on that.

REP BROOKS: I was particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman, because I read in Miami papers, and several others, that there had been a plan developed by that same agency, a contingency plan in the event of emergency, that would suspend the American constitution. And I was deeply concerned about it and wondered if that was the area in which he had worked. I believe that it was and I wanted to get his confirmation.

SEN INOUYE; May I most respectfully request that that matter not be touched upon at this stage. If we wish to get into this, I'm certain arrangements can be made for an executive session

With few exceptions, the media ignored what well could be the most startling revelation to have come out of the Iran/Contra affair, namely that high officials of the US government were planning a possible military/civilian coup. First among the exceptions was the Miami Herald, which on July 5, 1987, ran the story to which Jack Brooks referred. The article, by Alfonzo Chardy, revealed Oliver North's involvement in plans for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to take over federal, state and local functions during an ill-defined national emergency.

According to Chardy, the plan called for 'suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the government over to the Federal Management Agency, emergency appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments and declaration of martial law.' The proposal appears to have forgotten that Congress, legislatures and the judiciary even existed.

CONTINUED...

http://prorev.com/coup.htm