Transfer of Files on Psychological Operations

[Ed Jewett]

Air Force Releases ‘Counter-Blog’ Marching Orders

• By Noah Shachtman [email=] [/email]
  
• January 6, 2009 |
  
• 1:00 pm |
  
• Categories: Info War
  

Bloggers: If you suddenly find Air Force officers leaving barbed comments after one of your posts, don’t be surprised. They’re just following the service’s new "counter-blogging" flow chart. In a twelve-point plan, put together by the emerging technology division of the Air Force’s public affairs arm, airmen are given guidance on how to handle "trolls," "ragers" — and even well-informed online writers, too. It’s all part of an Air Force push to "counter the people out there in the blogosphere who have negative opinions about the U.S. government and the Air Force," Captain David Faggard says.
Over the last couple of years, the armed forces have tried, in fits and starts, to connect more with bloggers. The Army and the Office of the Secretary of Defense now hold regular "bloggers’ roundatbles" with generals, colonels, and key civilian leaders. The Navy invited a group of bloggers to embed with them on a humanitarian mission to Central and South America, last summer. Military blogger Michael Yon recently traveled to Afghanistan with Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
In contrast, the Air Force has largely kept the blogosphere at arms’ length. Most of the sites are banned from Air Force networks. And the service has mostly stayed away from the Pentagon’s blog outreach efforts. Captain Faggard, who’s become the Air Force Public Affairs Agency’s designated social media guru, has made strides in shifting that attitude. The air service now has a Twitter feed, a blog of its own — and marching orders, for how to comment on other sites. "We’re trying to get people to understand that they can do this," he tells Danger Room.

The flow chart lays out a range of possible responses to a blog post. Airmen can offer a "factual and well-cited response [that] is not factually erroneous, a rant or rage, bashing or negative in nature."
They can "let the post stand — no response." Or they cancan "fix the facts," offering up fresh perspective.
No matter what, the chart says, airmen should "disclose your Air Force connection," "respond in a tone that reflects high on the rich heritage of the Air Force," and "focus on the most-used sites related to the Air
Force."
Despite the chart’s sometimes-stiff language, former military spokesman Steven Field says he’s "a fan." Field, who’s been occasionally critical of the armed services’ blog outreach efforts, tells Danger Room: "I’ve always thought that a military-like process would be a good bridge to connect the services with the blogosphere. There’s a field manual for everything in the military, so this flow-chart presents online communications in a DoD [Department of Defense]
friendly format."

One stipulation — While it should be a guide of communications, it shouldn’t become a ball-and-chain. Online comms require some level of nimble, on-your-feet response. As long as the Air Force doesn’t use the
"evaluate" phase to get approval from every Tom, Dick and Harry in the
Pentagon, it should be a good tool.

"Now they just need to lift those damn IP [Internet Protocol] filters," Field adds, so airmen can actually read those blogs that they’re supposed to respond to.
ALSO:

• Air Force Blocks Access to Many Blogs
  
• Who Gets Through the Air Force’s Blog Block?
  
• Air Force Backtracks on Social Network Ban
  
• No More YouTube, MySpace for U.S. Troops
  
• Top General: Let Soldiers Blog
  
• If You’re Gonna Get Blocked by the Air Force…
  
• Army Audits: Official Sites, Not Blogs, Breach Security
  
• Army: Milblogging is "Therapy," Media is "Threat"
  
• New Army Rules Could Kill G.I. Blogs (Maybe E-mail, Too)
  

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/01/...z12eLD9RZO

[Ed Jewett]

Fusion Center Agents Working Public Forums?

by Carol Ingram

Global Research, March 29, 2009
usanewsthatmatters.spaces.live.com/blog


People continue to ask me, "what is a fusion center?" At first, I was perplexed by the term, but as I looked further.....it seems to be a coordinated effort by Homeland Security, through various state run agencies, to monitor websites and forums in their area. They monitor for illegal activities, including terrorism. However, there is a likely scenario that goes beyond law enforcement, but a potential brainwashing tactic, under the direction of the Obama administration.

What we're seeing on many forums, attached to radio talk shows, or to local counties that have general forums, allowing national/political input....we're seeing a growing trend of forum infiltration by persons that monitor those forums to quickly debunk, and/or provide disinformation, when the subject matter is about Barack Obama.

We saw a mirror image of those tactics with those employed by the Obama campaign to do just that, from their own website, as well as on other public websites. The effort paid-off, as voters (already) disenchanted with the McCain campaign and a very rough (prior) Bush administration, the Obama blogsters and website monitors went after anyone that spoke-out against Obama.

With the recent attacks on Rush Limbaugh, and the increase of callers, supporting Obama, the same trend can be seen on the Sean Hannity radio show. Never before has a president, or candidate ever put forth an effort to counter any and all statements on the radio, TV, and on forums, by using dedicated supporters. The Republican party could learn from Obama's strategies, however....the truth and promises of the Obama administration are seemingly tainted with lies and confusion.

But that doesn't stop the supporters that evidently are now being paid, to keep up Obama's image, going as far as to agree with every single thing he does and says. Much of what Obama is doing, is in-line with previous Bush policies, which these Obama supporters would the ones complaining the loudest (before).

The selection of posts (by Mike) from a local county forum in the southeast area, is a typical example of what we refer to as, "hijacking a forum."

"Mike" as he likes to be called, is likely a "Fusion Agent" working for the Obama administration, completely prepared with copy/paste Obama articles and some personal comments, but it is quite apparent that "Mike" is on a full time mission to counter any and all statements involving Obama. This type of tactic on a small community of those that voted for Obama and now dissatisfied with his performance, he finds it necessary to keep those folks interested and not informed about the true political climate. When an opposing statement against Obama is posted, he quickly jumps on them to the point of embarrassment. If "Mike" cannot counter the post effectively enough, he ignores the post and creates five to six new Obama posts to quickly push the truth to the bottom of the page. This is referred to as reverse bumping.

Below are examples of a potential "Fusion Agent" (Mike) at work on a small community that cannot effectively respond to his constant pushing, in-order to assure Obama a second term. If you read all his posts and notice the times, you can easily see that he does this, not as a concerned citizen for Obama, but as a paid person to harass the community of Benton County.

The more that we learn about "Fusion Centers" and their involvement with psyops, and the potential danger they cause to this nation, the free thinking individual will continue to be classified and stigmatized, through brain washing tactics, much the same way it was done by lumping everyone together as a potential militia member, if you support Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin, and/or display an anti-Obama sticker on your vehicle. (See MIAC Report)

The propaganda is coming at us from all directions. It is extremely important that Americans begin to do their own research to validate anything and everything they hear in media, or on forums, such as below. Relying (only) on mainstream media, is no longer a reliable source of truth, because they are all controlled by the Obama administration, as are the "Fusion Centers" located in a every state in America. If you would like to give "Mike" your two cents, you can log-on the Benton County Issues.Com without signing-in. Just pick a name and post under "National/Political" section where "Mike" likes to wait patiently for you.

[Ed Jewett]

Mockingbird agenda at Daily Kos

Submitted by DonnyBrook on Sun, 06/07/2009 - 7:50pm

• Daily Kos
  
• Moulitsas
  
• operation mockingbird
  

Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Net's leading liberal website in terms of traffic and political influence, Daily Kos, has a rather curious and odd background for a leader of the Left—one that might explain his official policy of banning any Diarist who posts information or opinion dissenting from the 9/11 Commission's unraveling myth about the attacks.
Markos served in the U.S. Army from 1989 to 1992, where he was a staunch Reagan Republican, campaigning for George H.W. Bush. It was the "near miss" of being sent to Gulf War I that sparked his political conversion, he says. He hails from a wealthy El Salvadorian family, one of whose members was Minister of Education with the notorious junta during the civil war.
In a speech to the Commonwealth Club in 2006, Kos admitted to interviewing with the CIA for a 6-month period after a time of "underemployment." His statements there betray either a stunning ignorance, or sneaking sympathy with the CIA's long history of democratic subversion and support of rightist dictatorships abroad, including the one that sponsored death squads in his former homeland:

"This is a very liberal institution. And in a lot of ways, it really does attract people who want to make a better, you know, want to make the world a better place . . . Of course, they've got their Dirty Ops and this and that, right but as an institution itself the CIA is really interested in stable world. That's what they're interested in. And stable worlds aren't created by destabilizing regimes and creating wars. Their done so by other means. Assassination labor leaders . . . I'm kidding!... And even if you're protecting American interests, I mean that can get ugly at times, but generally speaking I think their hearts in the right place. As an organization their heart is in the right place. I've never had any problem with the CIA. I'd have no problem working for them . ."

Links to the Commonwealth Club audio, and other biographical documents on Moulitsasa can be found here.
Moulitsas began working for the Howard Dean campaign, and simultaneously launching Daily Kos, in 2002, shortly after his romance with the CIA. One may speculate that perhaps the romance never fully ended—and wonder if the CIA's IT venture capital subsidiary, In-Q-Tel, may have provided development and/or funding assistance to spark the meteoric rise of Daily Kos, now a virtual kingmaker in the Democratic party. The site endorses and directly raises funds for certain Democratic candidates and PACs, amassing over $2 million in the last two election cycles. Markos and his business partner, Jerome Armstrong, have also hired themselves out as political consultants to certain candidates—a stark conflict of interest for journalists. Markos answers that he is not so much a journalist, but an "activist."
The CIA has also been accused of providing seed money for both Facebook, and Google, according to former CIA clandestine officer Robert David Steele. As one critic has noted: "The CIA does not merely look into social media—they appear to own it."
If Moulitsas is a digital-age Mockingbird (the CIA's Cold War program of infiltrating and co-opting the American media; ), perhaps he is exercising a role similar to that of Rahm Emmanuel, who as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the 2006 elections, steered party funds to pro-war Democrats while starving anti-war candidates. If that is the agenda of Daily Kos—to maintain the Democratic party's inertia as co-dependent enablers of the military-industrial complex and it's boondoggle War on Terror—it seems to be succeeding wildly. Suppressing any alternative narrative of 9/11, the foundational keystone of this war, would be a crucial element of such a strategy.

»

• DonnyBrook's blog
  

[Ed Jewett]

Google censors article on censorship
June 3, 6:40 PM

Google for the first time has censored one of my examiner.com articles on its main search engine. Most intriguing is that this case of censorship originates in a very inspiring news event.

My censored article, published on examiner.com one week ago today, told about the wonderfully refreshing story of Stanford professor Ronald Levy being the first ever Jewish recipient of the Arab equivalent of the Nobel Peace Prize. It's a very encouraging development which you think would be widely reported. Yet as pointed out in my article, there was practically no media coverage of this heartening news.

A careful Google search showed that the only major U.S. or English-language European media to report this landmark event was Reuters. Yet even the Reuters article completely failed to mention Levy's Jewish heritage and the incredible significance of a Jew being awarded the prestigious $200,000 prize for the very first time.

It's quite interesting that the only major media source I found anywhere which reported this wonderful peace overture from Saudi Arabia was Israel's respected daily Haaretz, which posted a detailed and optimistic article titled "U.S. professor becomes first Jew to win 'Arab Nobel Prize'".

This media censorship in itself was astonishing, but I was even more astounded when the day after I published this article, I could not find it in a Google search. I often check Google after I publish articles to see how each article is listed, and to check its ranking. Every article I have ever checked usually shows up on the main Google search page within 12 hours, and always within 24 hours. Why on Earth did Google censor this particular article for the first time?

You can verify this for yourself. It's now been over a week and Google still has not indexed the article. Go to my article at this link. Take any string of 10 words or so in length (other than the quote from Haaretz and the first paragraph). Copy the string of words into the search box at http://www.google.com and put quotation marks at the beginning and end of the string of words. When you then click the search button, you will likely find no results, and certainly no results with that article. (Example here)

You can do this with any other article I've written for examiner.com before that one, and it will show up in the search. Note that if you do a search on the title or first paragraph of my article, you will find that a number of other websites reported the article, giving only the title and an introduction, and were listed on Google.

Since I posted that article, I've written three other, non-related articles. Two of those posted normally to Google, but the one on CIA mind control programs is now the second article ever not to be listed. So it appears I may now have someone monitoring which of my articles get indexed and which don't. On Google's specialized search for news, this kind of censorship of some of my more sensitive articles has been going on for a long time, but now it is happening on their regular searches, too.

[Update June 4th: Not long after I posted this message at 4:40 PM PDT yesterday, the article on the CIA was indexed on Google. On checking this morning, the nobel prize censorship article still had not been indexed. I checked again at 1 PM and it was indexed! Yea!!! Thanks to all who contacted Google. I also sent a call-to-action message on this to our WantToKnow.info emial list of over 6,000 subscribers this morning, so that may have played a role, too. Together, we make a difference!]

Why all the censorship?

Why did Google censor this article? Many people are not aware that the military and intelligence services have embedded key agents in all major media organizations (including Google and Yahoo) to monitor what is reported. Often, these agents work under cover. They are hired on as regular staff, yet secretly they are working for the military, FBI, or CIA to influence news selection and content. I highly suspect that these agents somehow censored my article at Google (and Yahoo) and may even have had a role in the original inspiring article not being published.

For one clear example of this, read the Project Censored news article titled "Embedded in media, U.S. Army’s Psychological Operations Personnel Worked at CNN." Here's a quote from that article:


"Psyops personnel, soldiers, and officers, have been working in CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta through our program ‘Training With Industry,’" Major Thomas Collins of the U.S. Army Information Service said in a telephone interview. Collins asserted, "They worked as regular employees of CNN. They helped in the production of news." The military/CNN personnel belonged to the airmobile Fourth Psychological Operations Group stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. One of the main tasks of this group of almost 1,200 soldiers and officers is to spread “selected information."


Two New York Times articles also reveal infiltration of the media. The first describes "an extensive and largely hidden Pentagon campaign to transform network military analysts into 'surrogates' and 'message force multipliers'". The second, titled "Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand," states:


"Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity ... is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance. Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air."


To read key excerpts of these two revealing New York Times articles with links to the full originals on the Times website, click here and here.

In my work as a top language interpreter at the U.S. Department of State, I worked with a number of FBI agents and military officers of all ranks. I probably encountered a number of CIA agents, as well, though they are careful never to admit it. I learned from a few of these insiders first-hand how politics is sometimes manipulated in big ways to profit those in power at the expense of the public.

Though I think there is a need for organizations like our military and intelligence services to protect the public and prevent violent groups from endangering public safety, I find the excessive secrecy and blatant manipulation of public perception in which these agencies engage to actually work against the public interest. Too often, they end up supporting the interests and war agenda of the power elite, while neglecting the interests of the general public. Why do you think they might want to censor inspiring articles on Jewish-Arab relations? Could such articles defeat their war agenda?

Katharine Graham, former owner of the Washington Post, once commented, "We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows." For more on this, click here. Thankfully blossoming citizen-based Internet news websites like examiner.com and articles like this are increasingly breaking through this blatant media and Internet censorship.

The box immediately below provides several ideas on what you can do to further educate yourself on these important matters and work to stop the censorship. Note that though it is very difficult to contact Google directly, you can leave messages on their "Help Forum" at this link or this one, asking them to reinstate my original article and stop censoring others. I also invite you to comment below and let me know what you think. Should the military and intelligence services be able to censor our news? Why do you think they censored the inspiring article on a Jewish professor winning a major Arab prize?


What you can do:

* Inform your media and political representatives of this important information. To contact those close to you, click here. Urge them to discuss news censorship by military and intelligence agencies and to work to stop this disempowering behavior.
* Contact Google and Yahoo and insist that they not censor news articles from reliable news sources, and that they keep the military and intelligence services out of the process.
* Learn more about media censorship in this powerful lesson from the free Insight Course.
* Read concise summaries of revealing media reports revealing censorship available here.
* Visit our Media Information Center at http://www.WantToKnow.info/mediainformation.
* Spread this news to your friends and colleagues, and bookmark this article on key news websites using the icons listed below so that we can fill the role at which the major media is sadly failing. Together, we can make a difference.


Fred Burks served as personal language interpreter to Clinton, Bush, Cheney, Gore, and other top dignitaries in secret meetings. As part of an international network of researchers and news analysts, Fred obtains and disseminates key, reliable information about powerful, yet little-known forces which shape our world.

[Ed Jewett]

Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land

U.S. Media & the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

How Israel manipulates and distorts American public perceptions

"Through the voices of scholars, media critics, peace activists, religious figures, and Middle East experts, Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land carefully analyzes and explains how--through the use of language, framing and context--the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza remains hidden in the news media, and Israeli colonization of the occupied terrorities appears to be a defensive move rather than an offensive one."

79-minute video

downloadable PDF transcript

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info...e14055.htm

[Ed Jewett]

A "separatist" journalism grows in Bolivia

The new attacks on Walter Chávez confirm that the CIA is rolling out a Psychological Operations plan in the country

By Wilson García Mérida
August 3, 2009
Spanish original here: http://www.bolpress.com/art.php?Cod=2009073108
Translated by Scott Campbell

(Datos & Análisis).- The Psychological Operations Command of the Pentagon, which operates in Venezuela through a mercenary communications firm tied to the CIA, is expanding its actions in Bolivia. Proofs of this are the recent media attacks suffered by libertarian journalist Walter Chávez, whose presence in the last meeting of Evo Morales’ cabinet caused an insipid national scandal. With the same bad intentions, this emerging separatist journalism continues making apologies for the frustrated attempts at Balkanization by mercenary Eduardo Rozsa and cynically spreading misinformation about the undeniable advances of the agrarian revolution in Pando.

-------

Annually, and in a very selective manner, the U.S. government’s information service, more well known by its initials in English, BBG, “invites” journalists who in general work for large media companies, preferably editors-in-chief, columnists, TV anchors or “star” reporters, with the goal of formatting not just the style but also, above all, the subject matter, these reporters, “privileged” by the attentions of the U.S. embassy, will convey in their daily work.

With rare exceptions, practically all the Bolivian journalists who today occupy “decisive” positions in the conglomerates and networks of the communications business, have been favored with at least a trip to U.S. cities, at the invitation of the BGG, from which they return convinced that the Indian who governs Bolivia is a terrorist. These are pleasure trips with stays in five-star hotels in order to participate in “seminars” and “guided visits” to important U.S. media outlets. Once they return from these trips, these colleagues put themselves at the service of fascist politicians directly connected with the media outlet owners.

This form of “cooptation” which is part of the CIA’s strategy to exercise control over information systems in Latin America, has voraciously intensified and widened since the attacks that felled the twin towers in 2001. And today it is intensifying in Bolivia.

Soldiers of fallacy

After the Persian Gulf crisis, the war against Iraq and the attacks of September 11, the United States discovered that control of information and all of the technological apparatus inherent in it were the most efficient weapons of war. The journalist is conceived of as a key part of these invisible, yet lethal, social battles called “Psychological Operations” (PsyOps), whose objective is to prevent “the enemy” (in this case the government of Evo Morales) from having favorable public opinion for their actions. The modern warlike design of the United States opts for shooting lies, prior to bullets or together with them, producing equally devastating effects.

Federico Montanari, quoted by Joám Evans, affirms that today, “It is communication itself that can be turned into a continuation of war by other means,” through a “reversible continuum of politics and war, between which war and politics meld through communication.” And this brings us psychological war as such, understood as, “The planned use of propaganda and other actions oriented to generate opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of foreign groups, be they enemies, neutral, or friends, in such a way as to support the achievement of national objectives [of the U.S.].” (Daugherty)

And the professionals called upon to carry out these “Psychological Operations” are not exactly psychologists, but above all journalists, reporters and publicists.

Latin America is today, as the Persian Gulf, the Middle East and the Balkans were in their time, the stage where an information war is being unleashed with complete vehemence, and it is such that the Pentagon, in its fervor to relieve itself of the uncomfortable presence of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez on the world stage, has reinforced its “Psychological Operations Unit,” based in Fort Bragg, where 1,200 specialists work, charged with creating “reliable messages” to support the interventionist politics of the United States. And coating these deeds is the shiny gloss of the CIA.

According to Rodrigo Guevara, the Pentagon’s PsyOps Command is charged with “packaging” together “pre-fabricated” speeches and writings for the “consumption” of the objective-population. During the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, according to reporting from the Times, USAID (the U.S. cooperation agency on which the BGG relies), developed and distributed tens of thousands of iPod-style audio devices (digital music players with hard drives or flash memory) which transmitted packaged civic messages, “but they did it through a contractor to assure that the ‘fingerprints’ of the Pentagon or the U.S. government weren’t on them.”

Rodrigo Guevara explains that along with hiring mercenary communications firms, the Pentagon also turns to bribing journalists in occupied or besieged countries. Or they co-opt them through the pleasant trips organized by the BGG.

In its war against Hugo Chávez and the Venezuelan people, the PsyOps Command of the Pentagon hired a mercenary communications firm, the Rendon Group, which is charged with “packaging” the spin that guides the Venezuelan journalists subordinated to this bellicose form of distorting information. Such methods are now in Bolivia.

Anything goes against the Peruvian

The informational thuggery foisted on Bolivia by the CIA and Pentagon is causing the growth of a separatist, prejudiced, and openly racist journalism which seeks to emphasize the weaknesses of President Evo Morales. In Bolivia, the famed “journalistic objectivity,” ethics, and impartiality in the handling of the facts are relics of the past. Today it is more important to be able to convince people that the enemy is in the other lane, that he is an Indian and a terrorist, even though in doing so one has to defame and misinform to the detriment of the people’s right to know the truth.

Examples abound; but the recent case of Peruvian journalist Walter Chávez, who was “surprised” by the cameras entering a meeting of Evo Morales’ cabinet during an event held in the municipality of Huajchilla, which was cause for scandalous front-page headlines, plainly shows the way in which Bolivian journalism, dominated by large media companies, has turned itself into a shameful appendage of the separatist and racist strategies still underway. “Accused terrorist turns up at Evo’s cabinet,” is one of the lie-filled headlines which seek to intimidate public opinion into a fervor, encouraged by the CIA, to undercut the citizenry’s confidence in the indigenous government.

Walter Chávez, as we all know in our country, is an intellectual educated at San Marcos University, Peru, and has been in Bolivia since 1992 as a political refugee after being persecuted by the Fujimori dictatorship.

He has worked as a journalist for more than 10 years, founding at the beginning of the 2000s the independent weekly “El Juguete Rabioso” [The Mad Toy], which helped clear the way for Evo’s path to the presidency.

In the middle of 2008, this fascism dug up Fujimori’s old smear over Chávez’s supposed links, never proven, with the MRTA and pushed for his “extradition” to Peru with the unique urge to discredit the Bolivian government.

Chávez was a journalist with La Razón and other traditional media during the neoliberal governments of Paz Zamora, Sánchez de Lozada, Banzer, Tuto Quiroga and Carlos Mesa, and was considered “a good journalist” and it didn’t occur to any of them to extradite him to Peru when they were in power.

But when he was seen next to Evo Morales, he turned out to be a “dangerous terrorist” who had to be expelled from the country, without considering that along with enjoying the rights as a refugee under the aegis of the UN, Walter Chávez created a home in Bolivia, has a daughter born in La Paz, and in many aspects is more of and a better Bolivian than the many politicians and local overlords who seek to Balkanize their country by hiring true terrorists such as the Hungarian-Croat mercenary Rozsa.

In May of 2008, the Supreme Court made a binding ruling that Walter Chávez can not be thrown out of Bolivia in any way, let alone extradited, and that he enjoys the status of a political refugee with all the prerogatives honored by the UN.

And although they achieved the dismissal of Chávez as an advisor to the president, he didn’t lose his ties with Evo Morales nor does he have cause to work in secret.

As such, his “appearance” in the cabinet at Huajchilla was not secret. Walter regularly enters the Palace to meet with Evo Morales, Álvaro García Linera or Juan Ramón Quintana, coordinating a series of investigative works such as the one, for example, he is carrying out together with the Datos & Análisis Information Service in relation to the Rozsa case.

Walter Chávez versus Rozsa Flores

“Opposition worriedly eyes the return of Chávez to Evo’s side,” reads a clearly insidious headline, within the framework of the “psychological operation” to undermine the governability of the regime. Walter Chávez is the scapegoat that the CIA is using so that the separatist journalism can achieve its ends.

They lied with similar malicious intent and perversely manipulative capability when they tried to turn the agrarian revolution in Pando into a simple electoral dirty trick, and they seek to impede the migration of landless peasants from the Andes to the Amazon, stigmatizing this historical event as a “genocide in the making.”

This same separatist journalism which makes a mockery of the right of freedom of movement that helped Walter Chávez as a political refugee, is trying to turn Eduardo Rozsa Flores, the Balkanizer hired by the wealthy landowners in the east, into an innocent victim of Evo Morales’ “terrorist regime.”

It was immoral the way these journalists were able scare off and discredit Spanish colleague Julio César Alonso, who arrived in the country in order to report on Rozsa’s background as a war criminal investigated by the UN.

None of Alonso’s detractors bothered to check the UN files relating to the Balkans, where Rozsa is effectively accused of several murders. Here is what was reported to the Commission on Human Rights in February 1994, in a document titled “Letter dated 10 February 1994 from the Permanent Mission of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to the United Nations Office at Geneva addressed to the Chairman of the fiftieth session of the Commission on Human Rights,” where an explicit allusion is made to Rozsa’s pillaging, with a slight error in his last name:

“At the end of 1991, the Osijek operations zone of the Croatian Army had an international brigade established by Eduardo Rosses Flores [sic], the Zagreb-based correspondent of the Catalonian paper “La vanguardia.” The brigade was composed of former French Legion combatants and mercenaries from the wars in the Middle East and Latin America. It often operated on its own in the region of Eastern Slavonia and committed massacres against Serbian civilians in the villages of Divos, Ernestinovo, Tenjski Antunovac and others.”

The United Nations rapporteur charged that the Croatian government protected Rozsa Flores in order to prevent his prosecution at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. According to its report to the UN responding to Yugoslavia’s charges, the Croatian government protected him with the argument that since he was a Croatian citizen, he was not a mercenary:

“In respect of the eighth allegation about ’an international brigade’, in fact it concerns the volunteers. There are no data to support the claim that they committed massacres. Their commanding officer, Mr. Eduardo Jorge Roses Flores, born in 1960, is a Croatian citizen.”

In spite of the weight of this historical fact which we are aware of thanks to JC Alonso, for those confused Bolivian journalists who command large audiences, our Spanish colleague was the evil one just for telling us that Rozsa was a chemically pure mercenary and well-deserving of a place in hell.

The most well-perfected model of this mercenary and separatist journalism that is taking shape in Bolivia is the dealings in Santa Cruz of former socialist Cayetano Llobet, an employee of Croatian businessman Branco Marinkovic, who a few days ago bought all the stocks of the newspaper El Día, whose frivolity-filled pages are now covered with the packaged powder of the Pentagon’s PsyOps Command.

And La Razón is not far behind. Nor are the large television stations whose owners are those eastern landowners who believe that draining the land and distributing it to the country’s dispossessed is a “terrorist act.”

The basic strategy of the genuine terrorist consists of accusing his victims of being terrorists. It was a basic scheme during the dark days of Plan Cóndor. And when journalism lends itself to this ignoble game, it means that something is faltering in the consciences of those colleagues who should be expecting, anxiously, the next BGG invitation to travel to the U.S.

http://angrywhitekid.blogs.com/weblo...n-bolivia.html

[Ed Jewett]

Journalists' recent work examined before embeds
By Charlie Reed, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Monday, August 24, 2009

As more journalists seek permission to accompany U.S. forces engaged in escalating military operations in Afghanistan, many of them could be screened by a controversial Washington-based public relations firm contracted by the Pentagon to determine whether their past coverage has portrayed the U.S. military in a positive light.

U.S. public affairs officials in Afghanistan acknowledged to Stars and Stripes that any reporter seeking to embed with U.S. forces is subject to a background profile by The Rendon Group, which gained notoriety in the run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq for its work helping to create the Iraqi National Congress. That opposition group, reportedly funded by the CIA, furnished much of the false information about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction used by the Bush administration to justify the invasion.

Rendon examines individual reporters’ recent work and determines whether the coverage was “positive,” “negative” or “neutral” compared to mission objectives, according to Rendon officials. It conducts similar analysis of general reporting trends about the war for the military and has been contracted for such work since 2005, according to the company.

“We have not denied access to anyone because of what may or may not come out of their biography,” said Air Force Capt. Elizabeth Mathias, a public affairs officer with U.S. Forces Afghanistan in Kabul. “It’s so we know with whom we’re working.”

U.S. Army officials in Iraq engaged in a similar vetting practice two months ago, when they barred a Stars and Stripes reporter from embedding with a unit of the 1st Cavalry Division because the reporter “refused to highlight” good news that military commanders wanted to emphasize.

Professional groups representing journalists are decrying the Pentagon’s screening of reporters.

“That’s the government doing things to put out the message they want to hear and that’s not the way journalism is meant to work in this country,” said Amy Mitchell, deputy director for Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

“The whole concept of doing profiles on reporters who are going to embed with the military is alarming,” said Ron Martz, president of the Military Reporters and Editors association.

“It speaks to this whole issue of trying to shape the message and that’s not something the military should be involved with,” he said.

Mathias said the Rendon reports are generated only after a reporter has been assigned to cover a unit and are done on an ad hoc basis, typically for lesser-known journalists and those new to covering the war in Afghanistan.

The reports are useful for familiarizing commanders with topics the journalists could address and for facilitating coverage specific to a journalist’s interests, she said.

Mathias also contended that the Pentagon has begun shifting away from the positive-negative-neutral scale and is now evaluating news coverage more for its accuracy.

“If it’s accurate, that’s a successful news story, whether good or bad,” she said.

The recent merger of U.S. and NATO public affairs outfits in Kabul has resulted in a one-stop shop for media information and embed requests. It also gives more public affairs officers access to the background reports and other services provided by The Rendon Group.

The backgrounders are part of a wide scope of work Rendon does for the Defense Department under its current $1.5 million “news analysis and media assessment” contract, according to military and company officials.

The work includes statistical analysis of reporting trends inside and outside of the country and coverage of specific topics such as counternarcotics operations. It also analyzes how effectively the military is communicating its message.

“This allows them to measure the strategic effect of U.S. and allied activities as reflected in the local and international media,” according to an e-mailed statement from Rendon.

As of Friday, there were 60 media outlets — excluding Afghan media — on the ground with U.S. and NATO forces, a significant increase compared to just a few months ago, said Mathias.

http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?secti...icle=64348

[Ed Jewett]

Big Brass Bull: Pentagon Deceit on Media Manipulation Confirmed

Written by Chris Floyd
Friday, 28 August 2009 16:27

From S&S:
Contrary to the insistence of Pentagon officials this week that they are not rating the work of reporters covering U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Stars and Stripes has obtained documents that prove that reporters’ coverage is being graded as “positive,” “neutral” or “negative.”

Moreover, the documents — recent confidential profiles of the work of individual reporters prepared by a Pentagon contractor — indicate that the ratings are intended to help Pentagon image-makers manipulate the types of stories that reporters produce while they are embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/conte...-confirmed.html

[Ed Jewett]

Pentagon Propaganda Gets a Pass

Submitted by Diane Farsetta on July 23, 2009 - 8:25am.

• propaganda
  
• pundits
  
• third party technique
  
• U.S. government
  
• war/peace
  

Is there a difference between covert propaganda and secretive campaigns to shape public opinion on controversial issues? The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) apparently thinks that there is.
The GAO recently ruled that the Pentagon pundit program did not break the law against taxpayer-funded domestic propaganda. The program involved some 75 retired military officers who serve as frequent media commentators. From 2002 to 2008, the Pentagon set up meetings between the pundits and high-level Department of Defense (DOD) officials. The Pentagon's PR staff not only gave the pundits talking points, but helped them draft opinion columns and gave them feedback on their media appearances. The Pentagon also paid for the pundits to travel overseas, following carefully-scripted itineraries designed to highlight successes in Iraq and humane measures at the Guantanamo Bay detention center.
"There is no doubt," the GAO ruling states, "that DOD attempted to favorably influence public opinion with respect to the Administration's war policies in Iraq and Afghanistan through the [pundits] with conference calls, meetings, travel, and access to senior DOD officials." However, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress concluded that the Pentagon pundit program wasn't covert propaganda, for two reasons: the Pentagon didn't pay the pundits for their favorable commentary, or conceal the program from the public.
However, the New York Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning reports on the program, along with the available internal Pentagon documents, reveal major holes in the GAO's reasoning.
All that glitters is not gold

In finding that the pundits "clearly were not paid by DOD," the GAO ignores well-documented evidence -- including statements from some of the pundits themselves -- that the Pentagon access and information they received was as good as gold.
Many of the pundits are lobbyists, executives or consultants for military contractors. In these roles, their ability to attract clients and the rates they're able to charge are directly related to the number of influential Pentagon contacts they have and their ability to learn privileged information. The Pentagon pundit program provided both in spades. "Some Pentagon officials said they were well aware that some analysts viewed their special access as a business advantage," reported the New York Times' David Barstow. Brent Krueger, a former Pentagon aide involved in the pundit program, told Barstow, "Of course we realized that. ... We weren't naive."
The Pentagon program even provided financial benefits to pundits without military industry ties. "Many analysts were being paid by the 'hit,' the number of times they appeared on TV," explained the Times. "The more an analyst could boast of fresh inside information from high-level Pentagon 'sources,' the more hits he could expect."
Further proof of the program's worth to the pundits can be found in their willingness to repeat talking points they questioned or disagreed with, simply to remain on the Pentagon's good side. Pundit and Blackbird Technologies vice president Timur J. Eads admitted that "he had at times held his tongue on television for fear that 'some four-star could call up and say, "Kill that contract."'" Fellow pundit Robert S. Bevelacqua, who works for the military contractor WVC3 Group, Inc., questioned the case for war with Iraq presented at the Pentagon meetings, but kept his concerns to himself. "There's no way I was going to go down that road and get completely torn apart," he told the Times.
To back up its assertion that the Pentagon didn't conceal the existence of its pundit program, the GAO cites a New York Times article from April 2006. At the time, pressure was mounting on then-Defense Secretary Rumsfeld to resign. To push back, Rumsfeld called an emergency meeting of the Pentagon pundits. Word of Rumsfeld's efforts leaked, and the Times obtained a memo sent to the pundits. Its 2006 article reported that the memo had been sent to "retired generals who appear regularly on television" and who Pentagon officials "consider to be influential in shaping public opinion."
That oblique reference to a massive -- and, at the time, growing -- Pentagon attempt to shape public opinion on many controversial issues falls far short of any realistic standard of meaningful disclosure. Moreover, the GAO fails to acknowledge that the 2006 Times report and others like it were prompted by a leak, which the Pentagon scrambled to cover. "This is very, very sensitive now," a Pentagon official warned others about the pundit program at the time, according to the Times' April 2008 report. That article also reported that program "participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon."
Lastly, if the Pentagon was so forthcoming, why did the New York Times and its lawyers have to engage in a two-year-long legal battle, to have the Pentagon respond to its Freedom of Information Act request for documents about the pundit program?
What happened to the GAO?

The weaknesses in the GAO's Pentagon pundit findings is surprising, given the agency's strong track record of interpreting the "publicity or propaganda" restrictions. In 2004 and 2005, the agency repeatedly ruled that government-funded fake TV news segments, or video news releases (VNRs), were illegal covert propaganda.
"While agencies generally have the right to disseminate information about their policies and activities," the GAO explained, "agencies may not use appropriated funds to produce or distribute [VNRs] intended to be viewed by television audiences that conceal or do not clearly identify for the television viewing audience that the agency was the source of those materials." It is not sufficient, the GAO added, "for an agency to identify itself to the broadcasting organization as the source."
In 2005, the GAO ruled that work done for the U.S. Department of Education by the PR firm Ketchum also constituted illegal covert propaganda. The problematic activities included VNRs and commentaries by Ketchum subcontractor Armstrong Williams, a PR executive and conservative pundit, that promoted the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). "The Department violated the publicity or propaganda prohibition when it issued task orders to Ketchum directing it to arrange for Mr. Williams to regularly comment on the NCLB Act without requiring Ketchum to ensure that Mr. Williams disclosed to his audiences his relationship with the Department," the GAO concluded.
There are obvious parallels between undisclosed VNRs, Williams' payola punditry and the Pentagon pundit program. All three employ a standard PR tactic -- the third party technique -- to promote a government agenda via seemingly-independent news or commentary.
In setting up the Pentagon pundit program, then-Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Torie Clarke (a former PR executive) argued that "opinion is swayed most by voices perceived as authoritative and utterly independent," according to the New York Times. Internal Pentagon documents that refer to the pundits as "surrogates" and "message force multipliers" further suggest that Defense Department officials were quite deliberately obscuring their role in shaping media commentaries by "key influentials."
It's unclear why the GAO would fail to take the most damning information into consideration, when ruling on the legality of the Pentagon pundit program. I fear that by giving a pass to a nefarious PR tactic that undermines transparency and democratic values, the GAO has helped pave the way for similar deceptive campaigns in the future.
Diane Farsetta is the Center for Media and Democracy's senior researcher.
An earlier version of this article identified Timur Eads as a "Blackbird Technologies lobbyist," based on his title of "vice president of government relations," as described in the April 2008 New York Times article and other reports at the time. Blackbird's website does not list any of the military contractor's personnel.

• Diane Farsetta's blog
  

[Ed Jewett]

The Siege

Submitted by Michael Young on Thu, 09/03/2009 - 5:02pm

• Lawrence Wright
  
• The Siege
  

3 september 2009
Recently I saw the motion picture The Siege (1998), starring Denzel Washington and Bruce Willis. For those who haven’t seen it. The movie is about a wave of terror attacks in New York by Islamic fundamentalist, and is lead by a Sheik called Ahmed Bin Talal. As the terror attacks continue, the US government responds by declaring martial law, sending US troops, into the streets of New York City.
Terror attacks, Islamic fundamentalist, New York and a Sheik with ‘Bin’ in the name. One can’t help start thinking about the tragic events of 9/11. So during the movie I began to wonder… who wrote the script of the movie? So I visited the Internet Movie Database website to find out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HLNawUg_3s
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133952/
Lawrence Wright it states on IMDB. Is this the same guy from The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11? Popped into my mind.
Well, I got that quickly confirmed with a big YES, after the visit of the website: www.lawrencewright.com
When I was looking at the Filmography of Lawrence Wright Internet Movie Database I noticed two things. One that he isn’t really into screenplay writing. Secondly his credits appear for the writing of “Noriega: God’s Favorite”. A movie that has a serious political undertone. One can’t deny that there’s some serious interest from the political realm that the public is pushed into a certain view when it comes to Latin and South America. See what’s happening these days over there with Honduras and Venezuela and all.
An interesting fact is that there were plans by Oliver Stone to make a motion picture of the novel, starring Al Pacino. Stone eventually cancelled it, cause after doing his own inquiries he found out that the novel was a complete false presentation, of the real events around the life of Noriega.
So far so good.
Time to do a search for Lawrence Wright on youtube:
1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRppZ_rco-s
2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjo2PC5OPc4
3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfQtqdS-ll4
4. part1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuTQ6ystWrw
part2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7EB1FxENxQ
5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmFExhvIqRM
Well, what can I say. I almost fell of my chair by what I found out by watching the footage. For example. It appears that Lawrence Wright is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR). He also knew the head of security of the Twin Towers.
In the video “Conversations with History: Lawrence Wright” on youtube Lawrence tells that Lynda Obst approached him for writing the script of “The Siege”. On the website of Lynda Obst you can read that during the production of The Siege she was based at FOX. And as we all know FOX is one big propaganda machine.
http://www.lyndaobst.com/aboutus.html
All coincidence? Personally, I don’t think so.
To me the movie “The Siege” is a clear example of psychological warfare. Planting a seed in the (subconscious) minds of public/audience.
What do you think?

»

• Michael Young's blog