Transfer of Files on Psychological Operations

[Ed Jewett]

How Reagan’s Propaganda Succeeded

By Robert Parry (A Special Report)
March 8, 2010

In the 1980s, CIA propaganda experts and military psy-war specialists oversaw the creation of special programs aimed at managing public perceptions in targeted foreign countries as well as inside the United States, according to declassified documents at Ronald Reagan’s Presidential Library.

These recently discovered documents buttress previously disclosed evidence that Reagan’s CIA Director William J. Casey played a key behind-the-scenes role in pushing this political action initiative, which recruited well-heeled private-sector conservatives to subsidize the secretive government operations.

The documents show that Casey used a senior CIA propaganda and disinformation specialist named Walter Raymond Jr., who was placed inside the National Security Council in 1982, to oversee the project and to circumvent legal prohibitions against the CIA engaging in propaganda that might influence U.S. public opinion or politics.

Though Raymond formally quit the CIA after going to the NSC, documents from Raymond’s personal NSC files reveal that he often passed on recommendations regarding the propaganda initiative after meetings at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, or after conversations with Casey himself.

In one Nov. 4, 1982, “secret” memo, Raymond described Casey reaching out to right-wing mogul Richard Mellon Scaife, who was already working with other conservative foundation executives to fund right-wing publications, think tanks and activist groups seeking to shift U.S. politics to the Right.

Raymond told then NSC advisor William P. Clark that “Bill Casey asked me to pass on the following thought concerning your [scheduled] meeting with Dick Scaife, Dave Abshire [then a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board], and Co.

“Casey had lunch with them today and discussed the need to get moving in the general area of supporting our friends around the world.”

Besides a desire to “invigorate international media programs,” Casey wanted to help U.S.-based organizations, such as Freedom House, that could influence American attitudes about foreign challenges, Raymond said.

“The DCI [Director of Central Intelligence] is also concerned about strengthening public information organizations in the United States such as Freedom House,” Raymond told Clark. “To do this we have identified three overt tracks:

“–enhanced federal funding;

“–the Democracy Project study (although publicly funded this will be independently managed);

“–private funds.”

“A critical piece of the puzzle is a serious effort to raise private funds to generate momentum. Casey’s talk with Scaife and Co. suggests they would be very willing to cooperate.”

(In the following years, Freedom House emerged as a major critic of Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government, which Reagan and Casey were seeking to overthrow by covertly supporting contra rebels.)

Returning from Langley

A Dec. 2 note addressed to “Bud,” apparently senior NSC official Robert “Bud” McFarlane, described a request from Raymond for a brief meeting. “When he [Raymond] returned from Langley, he had a proposed draft letter … re $100 M democ[racy] proj[ect],” the note said.

While Raymond passed on Casey’s instructions, the CIA director told White House officials to play down or conceal the CIA’s role.

“Obviously we here [at CIA] should not get out front in the development of such an organization, nor should we appear to be a sponsor or advocate,” Casey said in one undated letter to then-White House counselor Edwin Meese III, urging creation of a “National Endowment” that would support “free institutions throughout the world.”

On Jan. 21, 1983, Raymond updated Clark about the project, which also was reaching out to representatives from other conservative foundations, including Les Lenkowsky of Smith-Richardson, Michael Joyce of Olin and Dan McMichael of Mellon-Scaife.

“This is designed to develop a broader group of people who will support parallel initiatives consistent with Administration needs and desires,” Raymond wrote.

In the late 1970s and through the 1980s, those and other conservative foundations poured millions of dollars into right-wing think tanks, media outlets and anti-journalism attack groups that targeted American reporters who challenged the Reagan administration’s propaganda.

The early planning papers also indicated a desire to use this relatively overt system to funnel money to pro-U.S. trade unions in Asia, Africa and Latin America in support of a variety of political operations, including setting up television stations and funding print publications.

Some examples were $150,000 to a Bolivian trade union; $50,000 to Peru as a “direct counter to Soviet funding”; $50,000 to Grenada “to the only organized opposition to the Marxist government of Maurice Bishop (The Seaman and Waterfront Workers Union). A supplemental to support free TV activity outside Grenada”; $750,000 to Nicaragua “to support an array of independent trade union activity, agricultural cooperatives”; and $500,000 for “Central America labor publishing house and distribution center for printed materials – TV materials, cooperatives, land reform, etc. – to counter Marxist literature.”

The document’s reference to money being spent to counter Bishop’s government in Grenada adds weight to long-held suspicions that the Reagan administration engaged in propaganda and destabilization campaigns against Bishop, who was ousted by internal rivals and killed in October 1983, setting the stage for the U.S. invasion of the tiny Caribbean island.

The invasion of Grenada, though condemned by much of the world as an act of U.S. aggression, proved popular in the United States, an important step in readying the American people for larger military adventures ahead.

Taking Shape

Eventually, Casey’s concept of a global initiative led to the founding of the National Endowment for Democracy in 1983 ostensibly for the purpose of promoting foreign democratic institutions. But the NED also created a cover for the United States to funnel money to pro-U.S. groups in hostile countries. And it subsidized Washington’s growing community of neoconservatives who wrote op-ed articles in leading newspapers and went on TV news shows advocating an aggressive U.S. foreign policy.

Since 1983, NED has been involved in numerous controversies, including allegations that it helped buy the Nicaraguan election in 1990 by spending some $9 million, including $4 million poured into the campaign of U.S.-backed candidate Violeta Chamorro.

NED’s hand also has been detected in “velvet revolutions” staged in Ukraine, Georgia and other eastern European nations. NED has been active, too, in Iran, fueling government suspicions there that its opposition, which took to the streets after last June’s presidential election, represented another U.S.-backed scheme to achieve regime change.

Though many of Raymond’s documents at Reagan’s Library in Simi Valley, California, remain secret, the recently discovered material – and some of the previously released documents – offer a panorama of how the administration’s perception management campaigns evolved, from the early days of Casey prodding the process forward to later years when Raymond’s apparatus grew increasingly powerful and even paranoid.

According to a secret action proposal that Raymond submitted on Dec. 20, 1984, to then national security adviser McFarlane, Raymond wanted an even greater commitment of manpower.

“I have attempted to proceed forward with a whole range of political and information activities,” Raymond wrote. “There are a raft of ties to private organizations which are working in tandem with the government in a number of areas ranging from the American Security Council to the Atlantic Council, to the nascent idea of a ‘Peace Institute.’”

Among the examples of his “specific activities,” Raymond listed “significant expansion of our ability to utilize book publication and distribution as a public diplomacy tool. (This is based on an integrated public-private strategy). … The development of an active PSYOP strategy. … Meetings (ad hoc) with selected CIA operational people to coordinate and clarify lines between overt/covert political operations on key areas. Examples: Afghanistan, Central America, USSR-EE [Eastern Europe] and Grenada.”

‘Active Measures’

Another part of Raymond’s domain was “the Soviet Political Action Working Group.” This group discussed what it regarded as “Soviet active measures” and worked on “themes” that soon resonated through Washington, such as the argument regarding “moral equivalents.”

Raymond reported that the “moral equivalents” theme was discussed at the working group’s Dec. 15, 1983, meeting. The idea of “moral equivalents” involved U.S. government officials upbraiding journalists and opinion leaders who tried to apply common moral standards to pro- and anti-U.S. groups.

Reagan administration officials would insist that human rights crimes by the pro-U.S. side of a conflict should not be criticized as severely as similar crimes by the anti-U.S. side because that would apply a “false moral equivalence,” suggesting that the United States was no better than its enemies. To take such a position was regarded as unpatriotic or disloyal.

Along those lines, one of Raymond’s sub-groups, “the Active Measures Working Group,” met “to develop an action plan to turn Soviet active measures back onto the Soviets, i.e. take the offensive.”

Attendees included Raymond and another CIA operations veteran, Ray Warren, a Casey favorite who was placed inside the Pentagon; Herb Romerstein, a former investigator for the House Committee on Un-American Activities; and Robert Kagan, a prominent neoconservative who was an aide to Elliott Abrams at the State Department and later led the Office of Public Diplomacy on Latin America.

The Active Measures Working Group brought in from the Office of the Secretary of Defense and U.S. Special Forces, personnel who specialized in psychological operations, such as a “Col. Paddock (OSD/PSYOP),” a “Mr. Hunter (1st PSYOP Bn)”; a “Colonel Dunbar (1st PYSOP Bn),” and “Lieutenant Colonel Jacobowitz (DOD/PSYOP).”

In previously disclosed documents, Lt. Col. Daniel “Jake” Jacobowitz was listed as the executive officer inside the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy on Latin America, where the White House also placed five psychological warfare specialists from the 4th Psychological Operations Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

The main job of these psy-ops specialists was to pick out incidents in Central America that would rile the U.S. public. In a memo dated May 30, 1985, Jacobowitz explained that the military men were scouring embassy cables “looking for exploitable themes and trends, and [would] inform us of possible areas for our exploitation.”

The June 19, 1986, minutes of the working group stated that “Colonel Paddock reported that OSD/PSYOP has been working on some unclassified publications, mainly on Central American issues, in cooperation with State’s Office of Latin American Public Diplomacy.”

At the working group meeting on July 31, 1986, Col. Paddock passed out copies of a joint Pentagon/State Department publication, “The Challenge to Democracy in Central America,” which was then being disseminated to members of Congress, the Washington press corps and the American public.

The publication sought to portray Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government as a state sponsor of terrorism, a major propaganda theme that the Reagan administration was using to justify its covert support of the contra rebels, who themselves were infamous for acts of terrorism, including extra-judicial executions and attacks on civilian targets.

Chastising the Enemy

Despite the evidence that it was the Reagan administration that was knee-deep in propaganda, the psyop official, “Mr. Hunter” – whose fuller identity remained classified in the meeting’s minutes – briefed the group on what he described as anti-U.S. “disinformation campaigns,” including “charges of immoral conduct by US troops in Honduras.”

In the world of Raymond’s psyop meetings, nearly every negative piece of news about U.S. activities in the world was dismissed as “Soviet active measures,” presumably even the fact that some U.S. troops operating in Honduras engaged in what surely could be called “immoral conduct.”

Bureaucratic deception was also part of the secret operations inside the NSC. In the mid-1980s, I was told by one senior NSC official that a key early document laying the groundwork for raising money for the contra war in defiance of a congressional prohibition was marked as a “non-paper,” so it would not be regarded as an official document (even though it clearly was).

Similarly, Raymond sent one Nov. 28, 1986, memo to an unnamed CIA officer reminding him to attend what Raymond called “the next non-group meeting.” So it appears that Reagan’s NSC sought to get around requirements for safeguarding historical records by circulating “non-papers” and meeting in “non-groups.”

Raymond’s domestic propaganda activities were explored by congressional Iran-Contra investigators in 1987. However, their findings faced fierce internal opposition from House and Senate Republicans.

In a bid for bipartisanship, House Democratic committee chairman Lee Hamilton agreed to a compromise in which a chapter on Raymond’s operation was dropped while a few segments were inserted elsewhere in the final report.

That meant, however, that the American people never got to read the chapter’s stunning conclusion: that the Reagan administration had built a domestic covert propaganda apparatus managed by a CIA disinformation specialist working out of the National Security Council.

“One of the CIA’s most senior covert action operators was sent to the NSC in 1983 by CIA Director [William] Casey where he participated in the creation of an inter-agency public diplomacy mechanism that included the use of seasoned intelligence specialists,” the chapter’s conclusion stated.

“This public/private network set out to accomplish what a covert CIA operation in a foreign country might attempt – to sway the media, the Congress, and American public opinion in the direction of the Reagan administration’s policies.”

Tracing the Origins

The 84-page “lost” chapter, entitled “Launching the Private Network,” traced the origins of the propaganda network to President Reagan’s “National Security Decision Directive 77” in January 1983 as his administration sought to promote its foreign policy, especially its desire to oust Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government. [There appear to have been several versions of this “lost chapter.” This one I found in congressional files.]

The chapter also cited a Jan. 13, 1983, memo by then-NSC Advisor Clark regarding the need for non-governmental money to advance the cause. “We will develop a scenario for obtaining private funding,” Clark wrote.

However, what the newly discovered documents from Raymond’s files make clear is that the initiative dated back to 1982 and was pushed more by Casey and his CIA associates than by the NSC advisor.

The “lost chapter” does explain how Reagan administration officials soon began crossing lines that separated an overseas propaganda program from a domestic propaganda operation aimed at U.S. public opinion, the American press and congressional Democrats who opposed contra funding.

“An elaborate system of inter-agency committees was eventually formed and charged with the task of working closely with private groups and individuals involved in fundraising, lobbying campaigns and propagandistic activities aimed at influencing public opinion and governmental action,” the draft chapter said.

The draft chapter doesn’t initially use Raymond’s name – presumably because his work at the CIA remained classified – but its description of the CIA officer in charge of the NSC-run propaganda operation clearly refers to Raymond.

According to the draft report, the CIA officer [Raymond] had served as Director of the Covert Action Staff at the CIA from 1978 to 1982 and was a “specialist in propaganda and disinformation.”

“The CIA official discussed the transfer with [CIA Director] Casey and NSC Advisor William Clark that he be assigned to the NSC [in June 1982] and received approval for his involvement in setting up the public diplomacy program along with his intelligence responsibilities,” the chapter said.

“In the early part of 1983, documents obtained by the Select [Iran-Contra] Committees indicate that the Director of the Intelligence Staff of the NSC [Raymond] successfully recommended the establishment of an inter-governmental network to promote and manage a public diplomacy plan designed to create support for Reagan Administration policies at home and abroad.”

Raymond “helped to set up an elaborate system of inter-agency committees,” the draft chapter said, adding:

“In the Spring of 1983, the network began to turn its attention toward beefing up the Administration’s capacity to promote American support for the Democratic Resistance in Nicaragua [the contras] and the fledgling democracy in El Salvador.

“This effort resulted in the creation of the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean in the Department of State (S/LPD), headed by Otto Reich,” a right-wing Cuban exile from Miami.

Stiffing Shultz

Though Secretary of State George Shultz wanted the office under his control, President Reagan insisted that Reich “report directly to the NSC,” where Raymond oversaw the operations as a special assistant to the President and the NSC’s director of international communications, the chapter said.

“At least for several months after he assumed this position, Raymond also worked on intelligence matters at the NSC, including drafting a Presidential Finding for Covert Action in Nicaragua in mid-September” 1983, the chapter said.

In other words, although Raymond was shifted to the NSC staff in part to evade prohibitions on the CIA influencing U.S. public opinion, his intelligence and propaganda duties overlapped for a time as he was in the process of retiring from the spy agency.

And despite Raymond’s formal separation from the CIA, he acted toward the U.S. public much like a CIA officer would in directing a propaganda operation in a hostile foreign country. He was the go-to guy to keep this political action operation on track.

“Reich relied heavily on Raymond to secure personnel transfers from other government agencies to beef up the limited resources made available to S/LPD by the Department of State,” the chapter said.

“Personnel made available to the new office included intelligence specialists from the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Army. On one occasion, five intelligence experts from the Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, were assigned to work with Reich’s fast-growing operation. …

“White House documents also indicate that CIA Director Casey had more than a passing interest in the Central American public diplomacy campaign.”

The chapter cited an Aug. 9, 1983, memo written by Raymond describing Casey’s participation in a meeting with public relations specialists to brainstorm how “to sell a ‘new product’ – Central America – by generating interest across-the-spectrum.”

In an Aug. 29, 1983, memo, Raymond recounted a call from Casey pushing his P.R. ideas. Alarmed at a CIA director participating so brazenly in domestic propaganda, Raymond wrote that “I philosophized a bit with Bill Casey (in an effort to get him out of the loop)” but with little success.

The chapter added: “Casey’s involvement in the public diplomacy effort apparently continued throughout the period under investigation by the Committees,” including a 1985 role in pressuring Congress to renew contra aid and a 1986 hand in further shielding S/LPD from the oversight of Shultz.

Casey even monitored personnel changes. A Raymond-authored memo to Casey in August 1986 described the shift of S/LPD – then run by neoconservative theorist Kagan who had replaced Reich – to the control of the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs, which was headed by Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, another prominent neoconservative.

Oliver North and Friends

Another important figure in the pro-contra propaganda was NSC staffer Oliver North, who spent a great deal of his time on the Nicaraguan public diplomacy operation even though he is better known for arranging secret arms shipments to the contras and to Iran’s radical Islamic government, leading to the Iran-Contra scandal.

The draft chapter cited a March 10, 1985, memo from North describing his assistance to CIA Director Casey in timing the disclosures of pro-contra news “aimed at securing Congressional approval for renewed support to the Nicaraguan Resistance Forces.”

However, the discarding of the draft chapter and the ultimate failure of the Iran-Contra report to fully explain the danger of CIA-style propaganda intruding into the U.S. political process had profound future consequences. Indeed, the evidence suggests that the Casey-Raymond media operations of the 1980s helped bring the Washington press corps to its knees, where it has remained most of the time through today.

To soften up the Washington press corps, Reich’s S/LPD targeted U.S. journalists who reported information that undermined the administration’s propaganda themes. Reich sent his teams out to lobby news executives to remove or punish out-of-step reporters – with a disturbing degree of success.

In March 1986, Reich reported that his office was taking “a very aggressive posture vis-à-vis a sometimes hostile press” and “did not give the critics of the policy any quarter in the debate.” [For details, see Parry’s Lost History.]

Though Casey died in 1987 and Raymond in 2003, some U.S. officials implicated in the propaganda operations remain important Washington figures, bringing the lessons of the 1980s into the new century.

For instance, Elliott Abrams – though convicted of misleading Congress in the Iran-Contra Affair and later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush – returned as deputy advisor to George W. Bush’s NSC, where Abrams oversaw U.S.-Middle East policy.

Today, Kagan writes influential op-eds for the Washington Post and is a senior associate at the Carnegie Institute for International Peace. Oliver North landed a show on Fox News. Otto Reich was an adviser to John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008.

Beyond the individuals, the manipulative techniques that were refined in the 1980s – especially the skill of exaggerating foreign threats – have proved durable. Such scare tactics brought large segments of the American population into line behind the Iraq War in 2002-03.

It took years and many thousands of deaths before Americans realized they had been manipulated by deceptive propaganda, that their perceptions had been managed.

In his book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, Bush’s former White House press secretary Scott McClellan described Iraq War propaganda tactics that would have been familiar to Casey and Raymond.

From his insider vantage point, McClellan cited the White House’s “carefully orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval” – and he called the Washington press corps “complicit enablers.”

The newly discovered documents in Raymond’s files at the Reagan Library offer a glimpse at how these manipulative techniques took root.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

[Ed Jewett]

Here's what really goes on in the news departments of TV stations.

Brian Springer's "Spin' - pirated news footage (also known as "wild feeds") which show how the news makers talk and act when they think we're not looking.

Fascinating.

Video:

http://brasschecktv.com/page/43.html

It's an hour long, so make preparations as necessary.

[size=12]Artist Brian Springer spent a year scouring the airwaves with a satellite dish grabbing back channel news feeds not intended for public consumption. The result of his research is SPIN, one of the most insightful films ever made about the mechanics of how television is used as a tool of social control to distort and limit the American public's perception of reality.

Take the time to watch it from beginning to end and you'll never look at TV reporting the same again. Tell your friends about it. This extraordinary film released in the early 1990s is almost completely unknown. Hopefully, the Internet will change that.

Note: We have posted excerpts of this film. You can find these excerpts by going to the "Spin" section of Brasscheck TV. [/SIZE]

[Ed Jewett]

Inside the Air Force’s Secret PsyOps Plane
· By Nathan Hodge
· May 27, 2010 |
11:31 am

OFF THE EASTERN SEABOARD — Name a recent U.S. military operation, and you can pretty much guarantee that a specially modified Air Force plane was somewhere in the vicinity, trying to influencing the minds of the people below. It’s called the Commando Solo. Ordinarily, civilians are not allowed on board.

The 193rd Special Operations Wing operates a fleet of three of these EC-130J aircraft, cargo haulers that have been converted into flying radio and television stations. These “psychological operations” aircraft can broadcast their own signal over AM and FM radio, UHF and VHF television bands — or override broadcast stations on the ground, something they apparently did during operations in Bosnia and Iraq.

I recently accompanied a Commando Solo crew on a training mission. It was an unusual opportunity to see the crew at work testing their radio and television equipment at full power.

The crew calls it “200-mile work”: In order to avoid interference with domestic frequencies — the aircraft can crank up to 1,000 watts of effective radiated power — the aircraft flies more than 200 miles off the East Coast.

Once we’re safely out over the Atlantic, says Weapons Systems Officer Lt. Col. Mike Rice, “it’s game on.”

As Weapon Systems Officer, Rice is responsible for aircraft defensive systems and data links. He also backs up the pilots during all phases of flight. The Weapons Systems Officer is also something like a station manager: He creates the broadcast plan, ensures it is broadcast to the highest level of fidelity possible and oversees a five-man mission crew.

These aircraft play a crucial role in reaching — and persuading — vulnerable civilian populations. During the recent Haiti earthquake-relief mission, Commando Solo aircraft based out of Puerto Rico relayed live broadcasts of Voice of America call-in shows in Creole, Haiti’s national language. During breaks in the programming, the plane broadcast public service announcements, giving earthquake victims information on everything from emergency sanitation to food-distribution points.
But Commando Solo also has a key mission in combat zones. As Danger Room reported in 2001, these aircraft played a crucial role in post-September 11 operations, reinforcing anti-Taliban messages, and helping persuade Afghans that U.S. intentions were good. Commando Solo radio broadcasts helped fill an important information gap in a country where a large part of the population was illiterate, and where television reception can be extremely spotty.

In other words, the aircraft needs to be able to operate anywhere globally; the broadcasting systems have to compatible with worldwide broadcasting formats and television encoding systems.

This training mission is straightforward: They set up different orbits and drop out different antennas. The EC-130J crews also practice aerial refueling, and occasionally perform some high-speed training missions with special operations forces.

A four-hour training flight is much more “event-intensive” than a real-world mission, where the main goal is to get on station and start broadcasting. I listen to some of the back-and-forth radio chatter, as the crew spools out various antennas: A vertically-polarized broadcasting antenna is lowered by a cable attached to a 500-pound weight. A horizontal trailing wire antenna is unreeled out of the back, sort of like casting a fishing line. This is a view of an antenna being reeled in, as seen through a periscope in the floor of the aft cargo compartment.
During the training mission, the crew also monitors a bank of receivers, to listen to and test a broadcast that’s being pumped out by the aircraft.

It’s not your father’s Vietnam-era C-130. The Commando Solo planes are built around the modern C-130J, which has a fully glass cockpit and modern avionics.
And of course, there’s a microwave in the cockpit, which makes life for the crew a bit easier on a long mission. This is the first flight as aircraft commander for Lt. Matthew Plasterer. During the pre-flight brief, he asks Technical Sgt. Jeremy Smith a crucial maintenance question: “Is the microwave working?”
Smith answers in the affirmative.

“Yeah, that’s almost a red ‘X’ [major maintenance issue] if it isn’t,” Plasterer grins.
Much of the crew are part-timers: Officially, the wing is part of the Pennsylvania Air National Guard, although most of its missions are for Air Force Special Operations Command. The vice wing commander, Col. Jerry Otterbein, pictured here, is a commercial pilot for American Airlines in civilian life.

The day’s broadcast? Well, this is a training flight, so the crew is not playing a special, pre-packaged broadcast. Today’s broadcast during the four-hour flight is a double feature: First, a DVD of Transformers, followed by a screening of Hancock.
Not that the crew is enjoying the in-flight movie. Because this is a training exercise with lots of different events — Weapons Systems Officer Rice describs his checklist as a “sushi menu” of different procedures — the crew stays quite busy during the flight. Conditions in the back of the aircraft are quite cramped, and the aircraft has a pretty substantial cooling system to keep all the electronics from overheating.
Television broadcasts are limited to one analog channel; depending on where they are broadcasting, the crew has to re-tune the system, relying on international frequency guides. In the future, however, the system might eventually need an upgrade.

“With the world going to a digital format, we don’t have the capability,” Rice says. “It’s purely analog.”

Measuring the effectiveness of a bomber or a strike fighter is fairly straightforward: The art of bomb damage assessment, measuring the size of a bomb crater or effective blast radius of airdropped weapons. What about when your weapon is a television or radio signal, and your goal is the somewhat more nebulous aim of “influencing” a target?

“The biggest challenge is measuring our effectiveness,” said Rice. “We don’t have a way to look at it — we don’t have BDA.

In Haiti, however, “it was pretty evident that we were making a difference,” Rice adds. Many Haitian broadcasters were knocked out, and the military airdropped hand-cranked radios so Haitians could get timely information on relief efforts and food distribution. For example, Rice says they might change a delivery point for a delivery of humanitarian packages; a Commando Solo plane would broadcast the information; and within hours, Haitians would start forming queues at the new distribution point. “Haiti was one of the few times where we got clear feedback,” he said.

With operations like Iraq, the results are a bit more intangible. Rice says many of the Commando Solo broadcasts during early phase of Operation Iraq Freedom were simple rebroadcasts of the BBC: It was perceived as a more neutral, and therefore more trusted, outlet, by Iraqis. In Afghanistan, lots of the broadcasts post-9/11 were simple Afghan pop music. After years of rule by the Taliban, which forbade pop music, Afghans were eager to tune in.

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/05/in.../#ixzz0pAyw0Uic

[Ed Jewett]

From http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2010/07/2010..._spike_act.html


Did you know that awesome PSYOPS website PsyWar is now on Twitter as @psywarorg?

http://www.psywar.org/

http://twitter.com/psywarorg

[Ed Jewett]

Managed News: Inside The US/NATO Military Industrial Media Empire
By Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff
Submitted by Joe on Sat, 07/03/2010 - 7:12pm

http://www.mediafreedominternational.org/

Managed News: Inside The US/NATO Military Industrial Media Empire

By Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff

“There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.”
–– Charles Dickens

We face what appears to be a military industrial media empire so powerful and complex that truth is mostly absent or reported in disconnected segments with little historical context. A case in point: The London Times reported on June 5, 2010, that American troops are now operating in 75 countries. Has President Obama secretly sanctioned a huge increase in the number of US Special Forces carrying out search-and-destroy missions against al-Qaeda around the world? If so, this increase is far in excess of special-forces operations under the Bush administration and reflects how aggressively Obama is pursuing al-Qaeda behind his public rhetoric of global engagement and diplomacy. Somehow this information didn’t make it into the US media.

The US, in cooperation with NATO, is building global occupation forces for the control of international resources in support of Trilaterialist—US, Europe, Japan— corporate profits. A New York Times report on the availability of a trillion dollars in mineral wealth in Afghanistan, on top of the need for an oil/gas pipeline from the Caspian Sea, suggests other reasons for U.S objectives in the region.

Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service writes on June 15, 2010, “The timing of the publication of a major New York Times story on the vast untapped mineral wealth that lies beneath Afghanistan's soil is raising major questions about the intent of the Pentagon…Blake Hounshell, managing editor at Foreign Policy magazine, says that the US Geological Service (USGS) already published a comprehensive inventory of Afghanistan's non-oil mineral resources on the Internet in 2007, as did the British Geological Survey. Much of their work was based on explorations and surveys undertaken by the Soviet Union during its occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s.”

Given the previous reports, there is nothing new about resources in Afghanistan that the Pentagon and US multinational corporations didn’t already know. On the contrary, the public should consider whether the surfacing of this resource story is a managed-news press release being done at a time of sensitive concerns regarding NATO’s mission in Afghanistan. A deliberate news insertion such as the mineral wealth story is designed to create support for a US/NATO global empire agenda.

Managed news includes both the release of specific stories intended to build public support as well as the deliberate non-coverage of news stories that may undermine US goals. Have you been told about the continuing privatization of this global war? Independent journalist Jeremy Scahill, wrote in The Nation magazine November 23, 2009, how Blackwater (Xe) operatives in the Pakistani port city of Karachi are gathering intelligence and helping to direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign in that country.

There has not been much coverage of the report in Global Research, May 27, 2010, regarding new US capabilities for cyber warfare, announced recently by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as the activation of the Pentagon's first computer command and the world's first comprehensive, multi-service military cyber operation. CYBERCOM is based at Fort Meade, Maryland, which also is home to the National Security Agency (NSA).

The US’s Israeli partner in the Middle East demonstrated a skilled manipulation of the global media’s coverage of the May 31 attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. Israel controlled the news and images that emerged from the attack on the ships, asserting that the invading Israeli paratroopers were viciously attacked by crewmembers—resulting in the killing of several in “self defense.” Israel sought to divert the focus of public discussion away from the illegitimate use of excessive force against a group of humanitarians– of diverse religious and national affiliations– to the blaming of the victims for causing their own deaths.

Managed news creates a Truth Emergency for the public inside the US/NATO Military Industrial Media Empire. Deliberate news management undermines the freedom of information on the doings of the powerful military/corporate entities though overt censorship, mass distractions, and artificial news— including stories timed for release to influence public opinion (i.e., propaganda).

A Truth Emergency is the lack of purity in news brought about by this propaganda and distraction. It is the state in which people, despite potentially being awash in a sea of information, lack the power of discernment resulting in a knowinglessness about what is going on in the world. In short, we are living in a time where people do not know whom to trust for accurate information and yearn for the truth.

One antidote to the ongoing Truth Emergency is the creation of validated independent news by colleges and universities around the globe where students and professors use research skills and databases to fact check and verify information that is reported to the public. For more about this, and what we can all do to counter managed news, see Project Censored International's new website at http//:mediafreedominternational.org. Together, we can build accountability in our media and breathe life back into our withering republic.
_______________________
Peter Phillips is professor of sociology at Sonoma State University, President of Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored, former director of Project Censored, and co-editor of Censored 2010.

Mickey Huff is associate professor of history at Diablo Valley College, Director of Project Censored/Media Freedom Foundation, and co-editor of Censored 2010.

[URL="http://911blogger.com/news/2010-07-03/managed-news-inside-usnato-military-industrial-media-empire-peter-phillips-and-mickey-huff"]
[/URL]

[Ed Jewett]

Judge Rules CIA Can Suppress Information About Torture Tapes and Memos --Ruling Allows CIA to Conceal Evidence of Its Own Illegal Conduct, Says ACLU

15 Jul 2010

A federal judge [Alvin K. Hellerstein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York] today ruled that the government can withhold information from the public about intelligence sources and methods, even if those sources and methods were illegal. The ruling came in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation filed by the American Civil Liberties Union for Justice Department memos that authorized torture, and for records relating to the contents of destroyed videotapes depicting the brutal interrogation of detainees at CIA black sites. The government continues to withhold key information, such as the names of detainees who were subjected to the abusive interrogation methods as well as information about the application of the interrogation techniques.

http://www.aclu.org/national-security/judg...tapes-and-memos

http://www.legitgov.org/Judge-Rules-CIA-Ca...Tapes-and-Memos

[What else has he been involved in?!]

[Ed Jewett]

Psywar
Submitted by Danse on Mon, 08/23/2010 - 9:08pm

* Consumerism
* democracy
* Propaganda
* psyops

"If it is your desire to understand how we are manipulated into believing the things we do -- watch this film. Every American should see it...for the sake of our future."
- Timothy Gatto, fmr Chairman, Liberal Party of America



I'm pleased to present the first feature in my documentary series, entitled Psywar ("The real battlefield is the mind"). It premiered on Global Research and should be appearing on some other alternative news websites in the coming days.

The film explores the evolution of propaganda and public relations in the United States, with an emphasis on the “elitist theory of democracy” and the relationship between war, propaganda and class.

This is not a high budget affair, but was financed via a blue collar job, and is being released online for free. The interviews contained within are original and were conducted by proxy.

Some quotes in support of the film by figures such as William Blum are available on the Acclaim page of the website. A few also appear in the trailer:

View on ExposureRoom [embedded at original link below]

Here is the full feature:
View on ExposureRoom [also embedded at original link below]

Although Psywar does not explore 911 or false flag operations, it is certainly relevant to these issues, as 911 was perhaps the greatest exercise in psychological warfare ever conceived. I intend to deal with the 911 and the war on terror in subsequent entries. A few notable 911 truth scholars do appear discussing related subjects, including Peter Phillips and Graeme MacQueen.

This film is designed both as an introduction to the concept of psychological warfare by governments against their citizens, and as an exploration of certain dominant themes in American propaganda. Significant time is also devoted to different conceptions of "democracy" as theorized by figures like Walter Lippmann, Edward Bernays and ultimately the founding fathers of the United States itself.

The film was embedded at this link:
http://911blogger.com/news/2010-08-23/psywar

and the comments below include links, references to downloading, torrent/streaming, et al.

This link in particular: http://www.megavideo.com/?v=0EG7PZEW

It's 109 minutes... bring popcorn etc.

[Ed Jewett]

From http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/02/info...entag.html#more

Info Wars: Pentagon Could Learn From Obama, Israel
By Noah Shachtman February 25, 2009 | 9:00:00 AMCategories: Info War

Yesterday, I spoke to the Phoenix Challenge, the information operations symposium put on by the Defense Department. Most of the conference was highly classified. I had to surrender my BlackBerry before I was escorted in. And when my session was through, I was promptly escorted out.

But just because the event was secret squirrel doesn't mean you guys should miss the chance to check out my talk. So here are my notes.

On a second pass, I'd probably be more nuanced, covering what the Pentagon might learn from "the two most significant information operations of recent memory. I'm speaking, of course, about Israel's war against Hamas – and Barack Obama's war against Hillary Clinton and John McCain."

But this was my first take. Have a read, after the jump.

- I'm not going to presume to tell you how to do your jobs. Instead, I figured I'd share some general principles about how information tends to spread online. Then I'll look at the two most significant information campaigns of recent memory. I'm speaking, of course, about Israel's war against Hamas – and Barack Obama's war against Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

- I'll skip the part where I tell you that just about the whole world is connected these days. Bottom line: When everybody's connected, word spreads fast.

- How long did it take for that rumor to spread that al Qaeda has caught the bubonic plague? Or the zinger about the terror group using gay rape as an initiation rite? (By the way: Whoever in this room came up with that one – kudos to you, sir.)

- Rule # 2: With that many people connected, keeping control of information is just about impossible. Especially when you combine new media's connectivity with old media's resources to investigate. How long did it take for one sentence from Senator Feinstein's testimony about U.S. drones on Pakistani soil to become worldwide news? 24 hours? How long did it take to find Google Earth images, confirming that sentence? Another 48?

- With that many people talking at once, it's really hard to get a handle on which are important, which aren't. In military circles especially, I've noticed a tendency to want to "check the box" of cyberspace. Yes, I've left a message in the comment thread of a blog. Therefore, I've "engaged the blogosphere! Check! Next assignment!" Well, no.

- Online, people tend to form cocoons of conversation. Conservatives talk to conservatives, liberals to liberals. Science fiction fans gather in one corner. Basketball fans, another. That can trick you into thinking you're spreading your message, when you're really just talking to yourself. Take the bloggers' roundtables, run by the Defense Department's public affairs shop. Great resource. But they tend to talk mostly to bloggers who already support them. Which means the influence is minimal.

- To cut through the noise – and to penetrate all those little echo chambers -- you need a message that's sharp, and simple. Bland statements-by-committee just don't work. In fact, the more you vet and control your statements, the less effective it is. Which is why the military has so often done a lousy job. Every statement has to be approved, ten rungs up the chain. Many of the smartest things are said in secret. What's said in public is often wrapped in a an impenetrable field of jargon and acronym.

------

- Now, if you want to look at an information campaign run right, look no further than our new president. Listen to the chatters on cable TV every night during the campaign, and you'd think he was getting his butt handed to him. And it's true, he suffered all kinds of tactical losses.

- But in cyberspace, something very different was happening. He was building a strategic victory. His campaign enforced a clear, simple brand – and then let others take it from there.

- Online, a zillion web sites, blogs, Youtube videos, Facebook and MySpace groups, and Twitter feeds popped up. Some were done with campaign approval. Many were not. But even the ones built with campaign money weren't tightly controlled. In fact, some even openly contradicted the campaign. When Obama came out in favor of immunity for the telecom companies who had helped the government in its domestic surveillance efforts, groups of Obama supporters, on his own website, organized to oppose him. The campaign just let it happen.

- Next, the campaign recognized that there's a huge desire out there right now to contribute to causes they believe in. Whether it's correcting answers on Wikipedia or becoming a cyber-soldier in the online war between Russia and Georgia, people now have a sense that they possess a small part of a much greater puzzle. And they want to connect their piece.

- The Obama campaign made it *ridiculously* easy to do so – whether it was donate money, recruiting volunteers, or spreading the word. Back when I worked for the Clinton campaign, if I wanted to get people to call their neighbors to remind them to vote, I'd corral everyone into a union basement, give them scripts, and closely monitor what they said. During last year's campaign, all it took was a few clicks for an Obama volunteer to start make those same calls, on her own. Except this time, she'd do it on her own phone, in her own phone. With nobody watching over her shoulder.

Don't get me wrong: The campaign's inner circle showed a Mafia-like omerta, when it came to preventing leaks. It was the most leak-free political team in recent memory. But the wider campaign was a different story. The Obama crowd showed that you don't need to control those supporters much at all. You just need a strong brand, and a strong architecture – and let your supporters do the rest.

------

Over the New Year's holiday, however, it looked like a second – and very different – model for information warfare was emerging. It came from Israel, and its battle against Hamas. And rather than ease back on the control, Israel tried to exert it more tightly than any military in a long time.

The battle started with a classic piece of military deception – Defense Minister Ehud Barak feigning a peace initiative, and then launching a massive set of airstrikes. From there, the strategy seemed simple: Lock the traditional media out of Gaza, and spread its own messages, through YouTube, Twitter, and the like.

- But when I went to Israel in January, it became pretty clear that this wasn't the strategy at all. In fact, there was no coherent information strategy – other than, to hell with what the rest of the world thinks.

- Israeli generals told me that one of the big mistakes they made in their 2006 war with Hezbollah was worrying to much about global opinion. It inhibited their operations, and got people on both side killed. This time, they'd do the exact opposite. And not care a bit about what anyone else thought.

- The online piece was no strategy either. I met the kid who ran Israel's YouTube site. He's a young guy named Lee -- born in a small town in Hawaii, converted to Judaism at Yale, and moved to Israel last year. He thought it'd be kinda cool to share some videos online. So up went the site.

- The architecture wasn't the only thing that was slap-dash. The branding was awfully confused, too. You have foreign ministry telling the Arab world that Israel is a crazed animal that needs to be kept in check – or else. Then you've also got officials trying to convince the world that every one of its strikes was taken with the utmost care. That they're dropping flowers, instead of bombs.

- In text messages and hacked TV broadcasts, the Israelis told the people of Gaza that Hamas' leaders were a bunch of cowards. But then would tell outside reporters that Hamas was much smarter, tougher, etc than Fatah. It all was a mishmosh. It made no sense.

- This wasn't an information strategy. It was, at best, a series of tactics. An information holding campaign, designed to keep the world at bay for a couple of weeks. And when those couple of weeks ended – and reports of mass casualties started seeping out, and western reporters managed to find their way in – the whole thing collapsed. World opinion swung wildly against Israel. In Gaza and in the West Bank, many opinion polls say Hamas is now more popular than its rivals in Fatah. Which makes you wonder exactly how much was accomplished by this war.

- But I did find one spokesman for the Israeli cause who was remarkably articulate, and moving. He was a UAV remote pilot named Gil. He was a young father of three, and he spoke with incredible passion about the absolutely brutal moral choices he had to make in this war. How he'd see a rocket being launched from a Gaza school, and have to choose between hurting Palestinian kids if he attacked – and risking Israeli children if he didn't. He talked about all the times he held back from giving the order to attack – even when his own troops were under fire. The care and the compassion he displayed put him in marked contrast with the indiscriminate killing carried out by Hamas, firing rockets by thousands into Israeli schoolyards.

- I thought: How much better off would Israel have done in the information war, if they had equipped this guy to fight it?

- And then I thought: Would the United States have done things any differently?

[Ed Jewett]

New York Times Complicit in FBI Anthrax Coverup

by Sheila Casey / February 26th, 2009
Back in 2001, just months after the anthrax attacks that killed five people, several articles came out in mainstream newspapers that pointed clearly to the CIA and Army as the most likely sources of the weaponized anthrax. Articles in The Baltimore Sun, Miami Herald, Washington Post and New York Times laid out the facts that incriminated Battelle Memorial Labs in West Jefferson, Ohio, and the Army’s lab at the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah as the only logical sources for the anthrax. These facts, as reported in 2001, include:
1. For over a decade, Army scientists at Dugway have been making weapons-grade anthrax that is “virtually identical” to the anthrax used in the attacks.
2. The anthrax used in the 2001 attacks was extremely concentrated, with a trillion spores per gram. The Dugway anthrax had a similar concentration.
3. The FBI was increasingly focused on US government bioweapons research programs as the source of the deadly anthrax.
4. Both the lab in Utah and the lab in Ohio received anthrax samples from the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, although USAMRIID deals only with wet anthrax and ships it wet.
5. The investigation was focused on the Dugway anthrax, and Dugway was described as the only facility that was known to be weaponizing anthrax.
6. One FBI official said that the CIA’s anthrax was “the best lead we have at this point.”
7. Army officials said that Fort Detrick did not have the equipment for weaponizing anthrax.
The FBI has never explained what became of this initial focus on the labs in Utah and Ohio. Instead, after the death of Fort Detrick anthrax researcher Bruce Ivins in July 2008, the FBI attempted to make the case that Ivins was the murderer and all other suspects had been cleared of suspicion.
Since Ivins’ death, the media have, with very few exceptions, passively swallowed the line dispensed by the FBI, and have acted as little more than stenographers in parroting the hollow arguments presented by the FBI that Ivins is guilty.
On December 12, 2001, The Baltimore Sun published a seminal article by Scott Shane that clearly laid out just how strong the evidence was against the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Subtitled “Organisms made at a military laboratory in Utah are genetically identical to those mailed to members of Congress,” Shane’s article also includes this eyebrow-raising line: “Scientists familiar with the anthrax program at Dugway described it to The Sun on the condition that they not be named.”
Apparently Shane has forgotten all that he reported seven years ago. Now with The New York Times, Shane’s latest piece, published January 4, 2009, raises troubling questions about the independence of The Times, and the memory hole that Shane must have used to shunt away all that he once knew about the case the FBI code-named Amerithrax.
Shane calls his 5,200-word article “the deepest look so far at the investigation.” Titled “Portrait Emerges of Anthrax Suspect’s Troubled Life,” it is primarily a hatchet job on Bruce Ivins. Filled with innuendo and unsubstantiated allegations, the purpose of the article is clearly to solidify the perception that Ivins was the killer, and to pooh-pooh the widely held belief that the anthrax came from a CIA or military lab in Utah or Ohio.
Shane dismisses these beliefs breezily, stating: “The Times review found that the FBI had disproved the assertion, widespread among scientists who believe Dr. Ivins was innocent, that the anthrax might have come from military and intelligence research programs in Utah or Ohio.” Not a single piece of evidence is presented to back up this sweeping claim.
Halfway through his article, Shane springs another shocker on us. “By early 2004, FBI scientists had discovered that out of 60 domestic and foreign water samples, only water from Frederick, Maryland, had the same chemical signature as the water used to grow the mailed anthrax.”
Really? Do FBI scientists think that anthrax researchers go to the kitchen sink for the water they use to grow the anthrax? According to Wikipedia, biochemistry labs use only highly purified water, such as double-distilled. Distilled water is created by boiling water and collecting the steam. To obtain double-distilled water, the process is done twice, so that all impurities and minerals are removed. Distilled water has the same chemical signature, namely none, no matter where in the world it originates.
It is unprecedented to have a major development in a high profile case go unreported for a full five years. Not only has the FBI never before mentioned this so-called discovery about the signature of the water, but when they were specifically asked if anything could be learned from the water, they said no.
The question came up on August 18, 2008, when the FBI held a science briefing to follow up on the highly publicized August 6 press conference by DOJ attorney Jeff Taylor. The science briefing was hosted by Dr. Vahid Majidi, Assistant Director of the FBI Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate.
Dr. Majidi was asked: “In your looking at the elemental and chemical properties, could you tell anything about the water that was used to filter this anthrax, and did that do you any good?”
Dr. Majidi replied: “No. No.”
Yet here we are, five months later, with Scott Shane telling us that the FBI has known since 2004 that the anthrax was grown near Fort Detrick, because of the chemical signature of the water.
Beyond these outrageous claims, Shane’s article is busy assassinating Bruce Ivins’ character. We have Nancy Haigwood saying of Ivins “he did it,” for no apparent reason other than she doesn’t like him and thinks he’s odd. She also thinks Ivins vandalized her house 27 years ago and impersonated her. No reason is given for why she believes these things.
Shane editorializes heavily. He charges that Ivins was “chipper” even as five people were dead or dying of anthrax inhalation, and was relishing his moment in the spotlight. No evidence is presented for how Shane reached these conclusions about Ivins.
Words Shane uses to describe Ivins (including quotes from others) are: corny, dour, scary, provocative, emotionally laden, thin-skinned, aggressive, goody two shoes, very sensitive, creepy, possessing an unnerving hubris, stressed, depressed, rude, sarcastic, nasty, devious, jumpy and agitated.
We find out that Ivins had been a nerdy, awkward teenager, was not popular in high school, and was still bitter about this.
He liked to eat a mixture of peas, yogurt and tuna for lunch and wore outdated bell-bottoms, practices that, according to Shane, got him labeled an “oddball.” The words odd, oddball or oddities appear five times in Shane’s article.
The final reference, regarding “a man whose oddities, for many people, made the FBI’s anthrax accusation more plausible,” tips Shane’s hand. His constant harping on Ivins oddness betrays the poverty of the FBI’s case, which Shane acknowledges has “yielded nothing more persuasive than a strong hunch” that Ivins was the killer.
Fortunately for many of us, being odd is not a crime.
But was Ivins odd? The Frederick News Post published a letter from Amanda Lane on August 10, 2008 that includes: “I want to shout from the mountain tops that Bruce was the kind of man we look up to . . . He was a decorated scientist and the humblest of men who didn’t use his title as a status symbol. He picked up a mop or emptied the trash without a moment’s hesitation. If he thought you were having a bad day he would offer candy or a catchy tune to cheer you up. If someone had to stay late to accomplish a task, Bruce would work with you so that the task would get completed faster.
“He was not the greatest athlete, but he was the best cheerleader present at every game to support his friends. I will truly miss his good humor, as there are few people in life who measure up to this man. I hope that he knew how much joy he brought to my life and others around him. If I learned anything from Bruce, it was to enjoy life and to always smile. His friendship brightened so many lives. I hope that Americans will remember Bruce for the funny and compassionate person that he was, because that is all Bruce knew how to be.”
Although Shane does mention that Ivins’ colleagues cherished him, the implication is that they didn’t really know him, as “he hid from them a shadow side of mental illness, alcoholism, secret obsessions and hints of violence.”
The New York Times has published a hit piece, devoid of incriminating facts, more gossip than journalism. Shane’s article raises disturbing questions about the relationship between The New York Times and the US government. What happened to the FBI’s original focus on the CIA and Army labs? Who is behind the drive to pin the attacks on a dead man who possessed neither the means nor the motive to carry them out? And why is The Times acting as a PR arm for those with an agenda that has nothing to do with journalism?
Sheila Casey is a DC-based journalist. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, Reuters, The Denver Post, Buzz Flash, Common Dreams and the Rock Creek Free Press. She blogs at blog. Read other articles by Sheila, or visit Sheila's website.
This article was posted on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 at 7:42am and is filed under Disinformation, Media, Military/Militarism, Terrorism.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/02/new-yo...x-coverup/

[Ed Jewett]

US Domestic Covert Operations

From the Archive: WAR AT HOME

From: yibgle@cts.com (Gary Lee)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 1995 14:21:22 GMT
Organization: The Gloons of Tharf
Newsgroups: alt.society.anarchy

/** pn.publiceye: 23.5 **/ ** Written 7:12 pm Jan 25, 1991 by nlgclc in cdp:pn.publiceye **
Path: crash!usc!cs.utexas.edu!news.sprintlink.net!news.bluesky.net!solaris.cc.vt.edu! news.duke.edu!zombie.ncsc.mil!news.missouri.edu!pencil.cs.missouri.edu!rich From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel) Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive Subject: From the Archive: WAR AT HOME (4/5) Followup-To: alt.activism.d Date: 11 Mar 1995 19:09:20 GMT Organization: ? Lines: 617 Approved: map@pencil.cs.missouri.edu Message-ID: <3jssh0$11fr@news.missouri.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: pencil.cs.missouri.edu Resent-From: rich Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu Harassment Through
Psychological Warfare

While boring from within, the FBI and police also attack dissident movements from the outside. They openly mount propaganda campaigns through public addresses, news releases, books, pamphlets, magazine articles, radio, and television. They also use covert deception and manipulation. Documented tactics of this kind include: False Media Stories: COINTELPRO documents expose frequent collusion between news media personnel and the FBI to publish false and distorted material at the Bureau's behest. The FBI routinely leaked derogatory information to its collaborators in the news media. It also created newspaper and magazine articles and television "documentaries" which the media knowingly or unknowingly carried as their own. Copies were sent anonymously or under bogus letterhead to activists' financial backers, employers, business associates, families, neighbors, church officials, school administrators, landlords, and whomever else might cause them trouble.
One FBI media fabrication claimed that Jean Seberg, a white film star active in anti-racist causes, was pregnant by a prominent Black leader. The Bureau leaked the story anonymously to columnist Joyce Haber and also had it passed to her by a "friendly" source in the Los Angeles Times editorial staff. The item appeared without attribution in Haber's nationally syndicated column of May 19, 1970. Seberg's husband has sued the FBI as responsible for her resulting stillbirth, nervous breakdown, and suicide.
Bogus Leaflets, Pamphlets, and Other Publications: COINTELPRO documents show that the FBI routinely put out phony leaflets, posters, pamphlets, newspapers, and other publications in the name of movement groups. The purpose was to discredit the groups and turn them against one another.
FBI cartoon leaflets were used to divide and disrupt the main national anti-war coalition of the late 1960s. Similar fliers were circulated in 1968 and 1969 in the name of the Black Panthers and the United Slaves (US), a rival Black nationalist group based in Southern California. The phony Panther/US leaflets, together with other covert operations, were credited with subverting a fragile truce between the two groups and igniting an explosion of internecine violence that left four Panthers dead, many more wounded, and a once-flourishing regional Black movement decimated.
Another major COINTELPRO operation involved a children's coloring book which the Black Panther Party had rejected as anti-white and gratuitously violent. The FBI revised the coloring book to make it even more offensive. Its field offices then distributed thousands of copies anonymously or under phony organizational letterheads. Many backers of the Party's program of free breakfasts for children withdrew their support after the FBI conned them into believing that the bogus coloring book was being used in the program.
Forged Correspondence: Former employees have confirmed that the FBI has the capacity to produce state-of-the-art forgery. This capacity was used under COINTELPRO to create snitch jackets and bogus communications that exacerbated differences among activists and disrupted their work.
One such forgery intimidated civil rights worker Muhammed Kenyatta (Donald Jackson), causing him to abandon promising projects in Jackson, Mississippi. Kenyatta had foundation grants to form Black economic cooperatives and open a "Black and Proud School" for dropouts. He was also a student organizer at nearby Tougaloo College. In the winter of 1969, after an extended campaign of FBI and police harassment, Kenyatta received a letter, purportedly from the Tougaloo College Defense Committee, which "directed" that he cease his political activities immediately. If he did not "heed our diplomatic and well-thought-out warning," the committee would consider taking measures "which would have a more direct effect and which would not be as cordial as this note." Kenyatta and his wife left. Only years later did they learn it was not Tougaloo students, but FBI covert operators who had driven them out.
Later in 1969, FBI agents fabricated a letter to the mainly white organizers of a proposed Washington, D.C. anti-war rally demanding that they pay the local Black community a $20,000 "security bond." This attempted extortion was composed in the name of the local Black United Front (BUF) and signed with the forged signature of its leader. FBI informers inside the BUF then tried to get the group to back such a demand, and Bureau contacts in the media made sure the story received wide publicity.
The Senate Intelligence Committee uncovered a series of FBI letters sent to top Panther leaders throughout 1970 in the name of Connie Mathews, an intermediary between the Black Panther Party's national office and Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, in exile in Algeria. These exquisite forgeries were prepared on pilfered stationery in Panther vernacular expertly simulated by the FBI's Washington, D.C. laboratory. Each was forwarded to an FBI Legal Attache at a U.S. Embassy in a foreign country that Mathews was due to travel through and then posted at just the right time "in such a manner that it cannot be traced to the Bureau." The FBI enhanced the eerie authenticity of these fabrications by lacing them with esoteric personal tidbits culled from electronic surveillance of Panther homes and offices. Combined with other forgeries, anonymous letters and phone calls, and the covert intervention of FBI and police infiltrators, the Mathews correspondence succeeded in inflaming intra-party mistrust and rivalry until it erupted into the bitter public split that shattered the organization in the winter of 1971.
Anonymous Letters and Telephone Calls: During the 1960s, activists received a steady flow of anonymous letters and phone calls which turn out to have been from the FBI. Some were unsigned, while others bore bogus names or purported to come from unidentified activists in phony or actual organizations.
Many of these bogus communications promoted racial divisions and fears, often by exploiting and exacerbating tensions between Jewish and Black activists. One such FBI-concocted letter went to SDS members who had joined Black students protesting New York University's discharge of a Black teacher in 1969. The supposed author, an unnamed "SDS member," urged whites to break ranks and abandon the Black students because of alleged anti-Semitic slurs by the fired teacher and his supporters.
Other anonymous letters and phone calls falsely accused movement leaders of collaboration with the authorities, corruption, or sexual affairs with other activists' mates. The letter on the next page was used to provoke "a lasting distrust" between a Black civil rights leader and his wife. Its FBI authors hoped that his "concern over what to do about it" would "detract from his time spent in the plots and plans of his organization." As in the Seberg incident, inter-racial sex was a persistent theme. The husband of one white woman active in civil rights and anti-war work filed for divorce soon after receiving the FBI-authored letter reproduced on page 50.
Still other anonymous FBI communications were designed to intimidate dissidents, disrupt coalitions, and provoke violence. Calls to Stokely Carmichael's mother warning of a fictitious Black Panther murder plot drove him to leave the country in September 1968. Similar anonymous FBI telephone threats to SNCC leader James Forman were instrumental in thwarting efforts to bring the two groups together.
The Chicago FBI made effective use of anonymous letters to sabotage the Panthers efforts to build alliances with previously apolitical Black street gangs. The most extensive of these operations involved the Black P. Stone Nation, or "Blackstone Rangers," a powerful confederation of several thousand local Black youth. Early in 1969, as FBI and police infiltrators in the Rangers spread rumors of an impending Panther attack, the Bureau sent Ranger chief Jeff Fort an incendiary note signed "a black brother you don't know." Fort's supposed friend warned that "The brothers that run the Panthers blame you for blocking their thing and there's supposed to be a hit out for you." Another FBI-concocted anonymous "black man" then informed Chicago Panther leader Fred Hampton of a Ranger plot "to get you out of the way." These fabrications squelched promising talks between the two groups and enabled Chicago Panther security chief William O'Neal, an FBI-paid provocateur, to instigate a series of armed confrontations from which the Panthers barely managed to escape without serious casualties.
Pressure Through Employers, Landlords, and Others: FBI records reveal repeated maneuvers to generate pressure on dissidents from their parents, children, spouses, landlords, employers, college administrators, church superiors, welfare agencies, credit bureaus, and the like. Anonymous letters and telephone calls were often used to this end. Confidential official communications were effective in bringing to bear the Bureau's immense power and authority.
Agents' reports indicate that such FBI intervention denied Martin Luther King, Jr., and other 1960s activists any number of foundation grants and public speaking engagements. It also deprived alternative newspapers of their printers, suppliers, and distributors and cost them crucial advertising revenues when major record companies were persuaded to take their business elsewhere. Similar government manipulation may underlie steps recently taken by some insurance companies to cancel policies held by churches giving sanctuary to refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala.
Tampering With Mail and Telephone Service: The FBI and CIA routinely used mail covers (the recording of names and addresses) and electronic surveillance in order to spy on 1960s movements. The CIA alone admitted to photographing the outside of 2.7 million pieces of first-class mail during the 1960s and to opening almost 215,000. Government agencies also tampered with mail, altering, delaying, or "disappearing" it. Activists were quick to blame one another, and infiltrators easily exploited the situation to exacerbate their tensions.
Dissidents' telephone communications often were similarly obstructed. The SDS Regional Office in Washington, D.C., for instance, mysteriously lost its phone service the week preceding virtually every national anti-war demonstration in the late 1960s.
Disinformation to Prevent or Disrupt Movement Meetings and Activities: A favorite COINTELPRO tactic uncovered by Senate investigators was to advertise a non-existent political event, or to misinform people of the time and place of an actual one. They reported a variety of disruptive FBI "dirty tricks" designed to cast blame on the organizers of movement events.
In one "disinformation" case, the [FBI's] Chicago Field Office duplicated blank forms prepared by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam ("NMC") soliciting housing for demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention. Chicago filled out 217 of these forms with fictitious names and addresses and sent them to the NMC, which provided them to demonstrators who made "long and useless journeys to locate these addresses." The NMC then decided to discard all replies received on the housing forms rather than have out-of-town demonstrators try to locate nonexistent addresses. (The same program was carried out when the Washington Mobilization Committee distributed housing forms for demonstrators coming to Washington for the 1969 Presidential inaugural ceremonies.)
In another case, during the demonstrations accompanying inauguration ceremonies, the Washington Field Office discovered that NMC marshals were using walkie-talkies to coordinate their movements and activities. WFO used the same citizen band to supply the marshals with misinformation and, pretending to be an NMC unit, countermanded NMC orders.
In a third case, a [Bureau] midwest field office disrupted arrangements for state university students to attend the 1969 inaugural demonstrations by making a series of anonymous telephone calls to the transportation company. The calls were designed to confuse both the transportation company and the SDS leaders as to the cost of transportation and the time and place for leaving and returning. This office also placed confusing leaflets around the campus to show different times and places for demonstration-planning meetings, as well as conflicting times and dates for traveling to Washington.
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