Category Archives: Psyops

Jesse Ventura Censored On Huff Po

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You don’t have to be a fan of Jesse Ventura to ask why Huffington Post, a liberal outlet, would be so illiberal as to prevent someone from even questioning the government’s version of what happened on 9-11.

Ventura didn’t say he subscribed to any “conspiracy theory” or alternative explanation. He didn’t claim he knew what happened.

He just questioned the government. That was enough to shut him down. And shut him down not in a conservative, pro-censorship venue, but on a leading “liberal” site. An online site, at that.

What does that say about “liberalism” today?

The Corporate Media: Suffering From Truth Emergency

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We have an elite that has a stranglehold on what gets heard through its grip on professional societies and the major print and TV news. Prizes, media attention, peer approval go to very few media outlets. It’s well- known that only reporters and columnists at a handful of papers get serious attention. That’s a truly dangerous state of affairs and we’re suffering the fall-out from it. What makes it even worse is that news itself is more and more swept aside by trashy, sensation-seeking reporting, which leaves the audience with misinformation or simply a great black hole of ignorance.

Mickey Huff and Peter Phillips analyze the “truth emergency” ravaging the corporate media in the West (and to a lesser degree, everywhere):

“Truth Emergency: Keeping the Facts at Bay

The truth comes as conqueror only because we have lost the art of receiving it as guest.
– Rabindranath Tagore

What are some of these truths, that not knowing them creates a literal state of emergency for human society? Here are two of many possible examples. A 2008 report from The World Bank admitted that in 2005, over three billion people lived on less than $2.50 a day and about forty-four percent of these people survive on less than $1.25. Complete and total wretchedness can be the only description for the circumstances faced by so many, especially those in urban areas of so-called developing nations. Simple items Americans take for granted like phone calls, nutritious food, vacations, television, dental care, and inoculations are beyond the possible for billions of people.6

In another ignored but related story, Starvation.net logged the increasing impacts of world hunger and starvation. Over 30,000 people a day (eighty-five percent of children under five) die of malnutrition, curable diseases, and starvation. The number of deaths has exceeded three hundred million people over the past forty years. These stories should be alarming headlines, certainly more significant than celebrity tripe and tabloid hype.7

Continuing on the theme of human poverty and its ramifications, farmers around the world grow more than enough food to feed the entire world adequately. Global grain production yielded a record 2.3 billion tons in 2007, up four percent from the year before, yet, billions of people go hungry every day. The website Grain.org describes the core reasons for continuing hunger in a recent article “Making a Killing from Hunger.” It turns out that while farmers grow enough food to feed the world, commodity speculators and huge grain traders like Cargill control the global food prices and distribution. Starvation is profitable for corporations when demands for food push the prices up. Cargill announced that profits for commodity trading for the first quarter of 2008 were eighty-six percent above 2007. World food prices grew twenty-two percent from June 2007 to June 2008 and a significant portion of the increase was propelled by the $175 billion invested in commodity futures that speculate on price instead of seeking to feed the hungry. This results in erratic food price spirals, both up and down, with food insecurity remaining widespread.“

My Comment:

Some of this commentary of course paints speculation with too broad a brush. Futures markets can, and do, provide efficient allocation of resources if they function as they should. The problem is not the futures market but the corruption of the market and the constant meddling in it by the state, which blunts the normal checks that the market would otherwise provide.

And again that goes back to public culture and professional standards that have become debased. The deeper question is how they became debased.

Which, of course, leads us to the government’s manipulation of the interest rate. That is where the problem lies.

But meanwhile, where is the media in all this? Providing the context so people can understand what’s going on?

No. It’s rooting around in John Edward’s trash can……

KGB Operations Against The US

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Last week, I blogged Douglas Valentine on the secret history of America’s Central Intelligence Agency, a long history that involved revolutions, coups, torture, assassinations, and subversion. Today, the CIA is probably far larger than any other spy agency, but until 1991, the Soviet Union’s KGB was a good match.  The excerpt that follows is from a face-off between former CIA counter-intelligence chief Paul J. Redmond and former major-general of the Soviet KGB, Oleg Danilov Kalugin, and was hosted by the University of Delaware on March 12, 2003.

(Note: The KGB was disbanded in 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It has been replaced by the Russia security force, the FSB).

“We conducted a clandestine war with assassination if necessary,” he [Kalugin] said. “Our mission was to do everything we could to have a war without the fighting. This was seen as amoral in America, but it was our ideology.”

Kalugin infiltrated the United States as a journalist, attending Columbia University in New York City as a Fulbright Scholar in 1958. From 1965-70, he served as deputy resident and acting chief of the residency at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., quickly becoming the youngest general in the history of the KGB. Eventually, he became the head of worldwide foreign counterintelligence, serving at the center of some of the most important espionage cases, including the Walker spy ring.

Finding that the KGB’s internal functions had little to do with the security of the state and everything to do with keeping corrupt Communist Party officials in power, Kalugin retired from the KGB in 1990 and became a public critic of the communist system. He currently teaches at the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies.

Kalugin said one of his most effective spying techniques was pitting American citizens against their own government.

“We appealed to pacifists and told them, ‘You cannot have peace unless you stop the internal situation of the U.S.,’” he said. “We got environmentalists and told them, ‘Capitalists spend any amount of money even if it does destroy your precious nature.’ Well, at the time, the Soviet Union was the most polluted country in the world,” he joked.

Kalugin listed several astonishing facts from a classified KGB report, proving just how much the organization is committed to counterintelligence. He said that in 1981 the KGB reported that they had funded or supported 70 books, 66 feature and documentary films, more than 100 television stations, 4,865 articles in magazines or newspapers, 300 conferences or exhibitions and 170,000 lectures around the world.

“Friendship, companionship—that is fine,” Kalugin said, “but national interests remain. Counterintelligence will never cease to exist. The U.S. remains priority number one.”

The Demonic Style: Valentine On Military Historians, Avatars, and the CIA

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Insight into why the revisionist media never ‘gets’ it:

“The extent to which this practice existed was revealed in 1975, when William Colby informed a congressional committee that more than 500 CIA officers were operating under cover as corporate executives and that 40 CIA officers were posing as journalists.

“When it comes to the CIA and the press, one hand washes the other. In order to have access to informed officials, reporters frequently suppress or distort stories. In return, officials leak stories to reporters to whom they owe favors. Continue reading →

Kingsford Capital And The Captured Media

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Mark Mitchell at Deep Capture has some interesting details about the extensive influence of hedge-funds, specifically Kingsford Capital, on the reporting of stories in the financial press:

“Another focus of my investigation at CJR was the appalling bear raid on a collectibles company called Escala. Not only was Escala the victim of massive amounts of illegal naked short selling, but a hedge fund convinced the Spanish government that Escala’s parent company, based in Madrid, was fleecing investors in philatelic collectibles. Continue reading →

Swine-Flu Vaccine Facts That Should Frighten You

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One of the best read articles in 2009 on Lew Rockwell was  one by Bill Sardi on eighteen reasons you shouldn´t take the swine flu vaccine.  Here´s an excerpt, but it´s worth reading the whole piece.

“4. The vaccines will be produced by no less than four different manufacturers, possibly with different additives (called adjuvants) and manufacturing methods. The two flu inoculations may be derived from a multi-dose vial and in a crisis, and in short supply, it will be diluted to provide more doses and then adjuvants must be added to trigger a stronger immune response. Adjuvants are added to vaccines to boost production of antibodies but may trigger autoimmune reactions. Some adjuvants are mercury (thimerosal), aluminum and squalene. Would you permit your children to be injected with lead? Lead is very harmful to the brain. Then why would you sign a consent form for your kids to be injected with mercury, which is even more brain-toxic than lead? Injecting mercury may fry the brains of American kids. Continue reading →

Wikipedia Scanner and Deletionpedia

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This Wired article by John Borland from August 2007 references a handy tool – the wikipedia scanner – for anyone interested in finding out what sorts of edits are being made at wikipedia. The author argues that while most edits, even from interested parties, seem relatively minor and informational, it´s also true that corporations like Diebold (the maker of the Diebold voting machine), Walmart (among many corporations), and the CIA have all been involved in altering information.

“Wikipedia Scanner — the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith — offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses……

The online encyclopedia allows anyone to make edits, but keeps detailed logs of all these changes. Users who are logged in are tracked only by their username, but anonymous changes leave a public record of their IP address.”

Though it´s nice to see a mainstream publication like Wired, take up this topic, I wonder if it´s only touching the tip of the iceberg.

It´s not the suppression of so-called “conspiracy theory” type articles or their authors that I worry about. It´s the skewing of mainstream topics  and the tarring of perfectly respectable publications that are well-sourced and written by well-educated and informed people, and that have broken or explored important stories, often long before and far better than the mainstream media.  By removing those sources and sending researchers to so-called mainstream media sources the establishment keeps a tight control of whose voice gets heard, and more importantly, whose voices are annointed with authority.  Since many of the alternative voices are those of foreigners, working class or disenfranchised people, immigrants, or political dissidents, this skewing is both censorship as well as a form of cultural imperialism, with a distinct racial, religious, and linguistic bias, i.e. in effect,  the skewing tends to promote Anglo-European, state-centric, non-religious or anti-religious, English-language  perspectives over others.

If you want to search for articles that have been deleted that you think should be put back on wikipedia, check out deletionpedia. You need to look in the deletionpedia archive, and even then, not all deleted articles end up there.

Doug Valentine On The Empire of The Lie

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Douglas Valentine, author of several masterful books on national security and the CIA, talks to Susan Mazur about Tim Weiner´s new book on the CIA (“Legacy of Ashes”), the nexus of finance and espionage, and the propaganda campaign that lets Americans think the CIA is a force for good.

Here´s a snippet:

“Most of what Weiner writes about the CIA is already known. It’s a history book with a bias, not an expose, at least not for the Vietnam generation. He doesn’t even really get into the current Bush administration. He gives us a predictable treatment of William Casey and the Contras, when there was an incredible revival of the CIA under Casey.”

And that´s precisely what I´d say about exposes that appear in establishment outlets, even if they seem to be literary and anti-establishment (Vanity Fair, New York Times, even,  perhaps Rolling Stone, although much less so). They are less about exposing as about controlling the terms of the discourse, that is, the boundaries within which discussion can take place.

Another insight from Valentine:

“Angleton thought William Colby might be a mole. Angleton exposed the divisions within the CIA after 1966, the Colby vs. Helms factions. He also represented the literary sensibility the CIA once had, where finding secrets was like teasing the meaning out of a poem. Now we have sledgehammer spies.”

(Colby, by the way, died in a ‘boating accident’ in Maryland, on the day that a prosecutor got permission to set up a grand jury to probe the death of Frank Olson, who was involved in chemical warfare research and had been one of the subjects of the CIA´s mind control experiments. The CIA claimed Olson jumped to his death from a hotel window, although his injuries, according to the autopsy, could as well have been inflicted by a blunt instrument. I should note that at the time of his death in 1996 Colby´s name was being used on the letter head of Strategic Investments, a publication of Agora Inc. (co-owned by my co-author), according to several reports, although I can´t confirm to my satisfaction the exact status of that association. Several unconfirmed reports also link Colby to knowledge about the death (or killing, according to some) of White House deputy counsel, Vincent Foster, a preoccupation at the time, of Agora co-founder James Davidson)

More from Douglas Valentine:

“The CIA gets oodles of money from the arms business. Most of their income comes from criminal activity.

The Russian Mafia operates with a sort of impunity. And so does the Israeli Mafia. And one of the reasons they have this sort of impunity is that they’re sharing their profits with the CIA.

And I think a lot of CIA money is capital investments. They’re like movie producers. They want to overthrow the Iraqi government, they go to companies like Halliburton and others who are going to profit from the overthrow of Iraq. And like the executive producers of some movie, they get them to ante-up some cash. Telling them, don’t worry about it, the government contracts you get in return will cover your investment. Plus they have the old boy network – which now is so far flung.

Suzan Mazur: Plus some of the military contractors are organized crime and have had contracts since the 50s.

Doug Valentine: Exactly. Which bring us back to Barry Seal (Iran-Contra). Because in 1972, Barry Seal was to fly some arms and some explosives into Mexico. What the Brooklyn Drug Task Force found out is that this guy named Murray Kessler, who was involved with the Gambino family in Brooklyn, had an arms manufacturing company in New Jersey where the guns and the bombs came from.

Suzan Mazur: And some of these arms merchants also had security clearance during the McNamara and Clifford years of heading the Defense Department. They make weapons for the US government and some for whoever they feel like.

Doug Valentine: From my perspective, the spy industry and especially the arms industry, is the foundation on which the American empire is built. The United States has a military budget of I think $300 billion dollars and the CIA budget is like $50 billion – that’s a year. Together that’s bigger than the gross national product of any country in the world. And in the meantime we’re worried about 20 guys in Al-Qaeda.

[Lila: This statement is inaccurate, as both GDP and GNP in most developed countries were near or over a trillion in 2007. See current figures here. I think the author might have been misquoted on this and might have meant “many countries,”  for example, in the developing world. However, projections for 2010 place US military spending in excess of 1 trillion, if all military-related expenditures are included).

Continuing with the interview:

“Suzan Mazur: Which exploits of the agency do you consider the most diabolical – aside from the fact that one of its founding fathers molested two of his own children – and a reason why the CIA should have been dismantled years ago?

Doug Valentine: Your readers don’t want to know that answer. The most dastardly thing that the CIA has done is to wage this campaign of psychological warfare against the American people. Where the American people don’t see the CIA for a bunch of basically American KGB agents who are conducting criminal activities around the world. There’s a movie called The Usual Suspects with a much feared criminal named Keyser Soze. And Keyser is talking to a cop and he says the greatest trick that the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he doesn’t exist.

And this is what people like Weiner are doing with books about the CIA that don’t explain it for what it really is. They’re part of a propaganda machine that’s making the American people see the CIA in mythological terms as good guys, crusaders, as Lawrence of Arabia – when, in fact, they’re criminals. They’re part of THE GRAND LIE.”

My Comment

The piece is long and, for an intelligence aficionado, packed with illuminating detail. Among other things, Valentine touches on James Jesus Angleton, the most compelling of the spy masters (since he was chief of counter intelligence, I should call him chief spy hunter), the extensive role of private intelligence (which I touched on in my Abu Ghraib book), as well as the manipulation of Wikipedia, which Valentine regards as considerably influenced by the CIA.  This confirms my own long-standing observations about Wikipedia.  On crucial topics, it stays within the bounds of  debate allowed by  Western establishment interests and is very far from being an objective or quasi-scholarly affair. (I use the term Western because despite a substantial component of foreigners, the predominant interests served are the interests of the state and the military-industrial and financial industries), the most influential and powerful of which are Western. I do not use the terms capitalist, because I see the establishment as essentially a technocrat or money-managing class, working against capital formation in many respects.

And a final word, from the lips of Bill Colby himself:

“The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media.” [Researching the sources of this phrase, I find several sites like this claiming that it is “fake” and to be found unsourced only in a 2000 book by David McGowan, from whence it’s been repeated endlessly on the web. I’ll check up on this but for now am leaving the quote up.]

Was this tongue-in-cheek, or meant to be taken literally? You decide..

Swine Flu Cover-Up

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From Dr. Mercola, via Lew Rockwell:

In fact, worldwide, according to CDC and WHO data, far fewer people have died form H1N1 than any seasonal flu in the past.

Dr. Mercola also points out the following:

“Insurance companies in Australia would not insure doctors who gave the vaccine because it was a fast tracked vaccine and therefore experimental. They felt that the danger of complications was far too high to risk insuring the doctors. Unlike doctors in America, they did not have a special law that Congress would pass to insulate them from liability should severe complications arise from the vaccine.

It is also of special interest to note that tens of millions of babies were vaccinated with the Hepatitis B vaccine (providing no protection to the babies) only to learn later that it is linked to a 310% increased risk of developing multiple sclerosis. One has to ask — What else do they not know about this vaccine? …….

…Now we are being told that this new fast tracked, poorly tested vaccine is very safe and effective. The results of the testing on this vaccine were reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.39 It is instructive to learn that the tests for safety and to assess complications lasted only 7 days after the vaccine, an incredibly short period of follow-up. Gullian Barre paralysis can occur even months after a vaccine as can seizures, behavioral problems and neurodevelopmental disorders in children. It is interesting to note that the authors of the safety study for our swine flu vaccine were all employees of the maker of the vaccine CSL Biotherapeutics and eight held equity interest in the company. This admission is part of the disclosure policy of the New England Journal of Medicine.”

White Hats Telling White Lies

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My piece on Team Obama’s propaganda effort on behalf of its economic interventions,
“Green Shoots and White Lies,” is up at Lew Rockwell this morning.

I’m posting the part that sums up a few of the biggest whoppers the administration is pushing to get those old animal spirits juiced up again. Will the PR work? Well, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the public. Tell a lie big enough and tell it often enough and people will buy it.

White Hats Telling White Lies:

Fudge One:

Goldman Sachs had a great quarter, making a profit of $3.5 billion and the government made $1.4 billion on its investment in Goldman Sachs. The government also got a 15% return on its investment in the eight biggest banks.

Truth:

Goldman had a great quarter only because it moved its reporting calendar to cut out December 2008, when it had a loss. And the government only made a profit on the TARP money it gave to Goldman because

* It funneled more money via the bailout of insurance giant AIG to AIGs counterparties, including Goldman (which took in $13 billion of the AIG money).
* Warren Buffett made a pre-TARP financial investment in Goldman.
* Goldman got the benefit of exceptionally low interest rates from the government at the expense of savers and to the benefit of borrowers.
* Goldman was issued FDIC-guaranteed bonds.

Without that extra welfare thrown at it, Goldman would actually be broke, not showing a profit. Ditto for the other banks.

Fudge Two:

The labor market is getting better because jobs are growing. The unemployment rate fell from 9.5% in June to 9.4% in July.

Truth:

That number only shows a slowing in the growth of unemployment. And even that small improvement has been offset by other aspects of the labor market that are worsening quite sharply:

* The duration of unemployment is increasing
* Temporary jobs are declining.
* The percentage of the eligible population receiving unemployment insurance has increased (0.1 percentage point to 4.7%. by September).
* The four-week moving average of initial claims has moved to its highest level in a month.

(Reuters, September 3, 2009)

Even when jobs have been added, they’ve been created by government spending and they’ve been in areas like education, health, and government. In the purely private economy, in manufacturing, construction and retail, job losses have been huge. (“Brown manure not green shoots,” Nouriel Roubini, Forbes, July 9, 2009.)

Note: Recent improvement in the ISM (Institute of Supply Management) Index that signals expansion of production (and thus hiring) also needs to be discounted against the huge price inflation an increasingly pressured dollar will entail. That’s beside the effects of a hike in the Federal Funds rate that’s bound to follow a dollar-crashing scenario.

Note: The ISM is a leading indicator of executive expectations for future productions, orders, inventories, hiring, and deliveries.

Fudge Three:

Increases in real personal income in April and May will increase consumer spending.

Truth:

The increases were caused by tax-rebates and unemployment benefits kicking in, and most of it was saved, not spent (80 cents on the dollars). There was a temporary lift in consumer spending, but it petered out quickly. And as unemployment rises, benefits decline, and credit tightens in the future, consumption will decline even further

Fudge Four:

The bank stress tests came out better than expected.

The bank stress tests led Ben Bernanke to conclude that nearly all of the banks had enough capital to absorb higher losses should the economy worsen, and that the Treasury stood ready to provide more.

(AFP, “Hope is alive for green shoots,” May 11, 2009)

Truth:

The bank stress tests used an unemployment figure of 10.3% (the most adverse case). But unemployment is likely to be 11% and above by next year. If you take into account discouraged and partially employed workers, some economists suggest the figure is more likely to be 16%.
 Another point. The stress tests overlooked all the other ways in which the government was paying for the banks, through FDIC guarantees and cheaper loans, for instance.

Fudge Five:

The housing market is improving.

In July, the Pending Home Sales Index was up 3.2%. Another improvement was in the value of U.S. homes. In the second quarter that number fell year-on-year (the 10th consecutive quarterly decline), but it fell by a smaller amount than in the previous quarter, for the first time since 2007.

Truth:

The improvement in home sales has been mostly in the lower end of the market and it largely reflects foreclosure sales and government credit, not real improvement in the market.

The slowdown in price decline has been offset by negatives in other areas:

* 23% of all homeowners owe more on their mortgages than their houses are worth.
* 22% of all home sales nationwide in June were foreclosure resales.
* 29.2 percent of all homes sold in June were sold for less than the owners originally paid.

(Portfolio.com August 11, 2009)

Loan problems aren’t confined to subprime. Prime mortgages are going underwater too.

Meanwhile, the market also has to deal with the decline in commercial real estate, which is undergoing one of the greatest contractions in retail in decades. Rents, even in the best urban shopping districts, have been declining.

(Colliers International Spring 2009 Retail Report, May 14, 2009).

Beyond commercial real estate, there are also all the other plagues about to visit us, when personal loans, auto loans, and student loans tighten over the coming years.

Bottom line?
There is no real basis for sustained optimism about the economy yet.