List of known CIA front companies

[Jan Klimkowski]

It is important to make a distinction between an organization that has done work for an intelligence agency, and an organization that has little meaningful existence other than as an intelligence agency front.

Noam Chomsky has spent most of his academic career at MIT, but I am most definitely not amongst those who regard him an intelligence agency asset or as a "left gatekeeper".

Whereas Nugan Hand appears to have had no meaningful existence other than as a money laundering and financing company for deep black intelligence operations.

With MSM, the situation is complex. I know of several MSM correspondents who are intelligence agency assets and yet have produced good work on subjects that are of no interest to the spooks. I know of other MSM correspondents whose work has been altered on the orders of their editorial managers who were almost certainly intelligence agency assets.

The biggest problems with MSM occur when senior managers are either "owned" by governments, are "bribable" or "blackmailable"- usually by multinationals, or have simply lost the blazing fire in the belly that is Life or Death to proper journalists.

Michael Mann's excellent movie about Big Tobacco, The Insider, explores the reality of MSM journalistic life very accurately.

In addition, the chronic inability of MSM to ask hard and probing questions of the powerful during crises such as the runup to the second Iraq War or the current global financial catastrophe, reveals a structural failure in big network television in particular. For instance, in Britain, the government imposes a legal duty of "balanced" reporting on the major networks, and refuses to allow them an independent editorial voice. The hugely knowedgeable Robert Fisk could not be employed by the BBC or ITV as a Middle Eastern correspondent because he would refuse to "balance" his pieces as the current incumbents are obliged to.

As the Pacino character discovers in The Insider, moral and honest investigative journalists find their scoops destroyed by management. And such honest journalists, because they have a moral conscience, have their souls crushed by learning that:

i) they cannot get the truth on air - even when lawyers have OK-ed the story;

ii) they cannot honour the promises they made to key sources to persuade them to speak out;

iii) they cannot protect their sources.

There are many many ways in which the truth can be destroyed before it is published, and not all of these necessarily involve the direct intervention of an intelligence agency asset or front company.