GROWL!

No, this isn't about Operation Mockingbird, whereby the CIA put journalists and news personnel on its payroll in order to lie to the American people. This is about a more recent disgrace -- how the military has been able to spread its psyops and propaganda to a more-than-willing "press". It has been argued that shadowy intelligence agencies are pumping out black propaganda to manipulate public opinion…and that the media simply swallow it wholesale.

I came across an article from the Guardian (UK) and pull excerpts from it…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/feb/04/comment.pressandpublishing

*For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it. The sheer ease with which this machinery has been able to do its work reflects a creeping structural weakness which now afflicts the production of our news. I've spent the last two years researching a book about falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media. The "Zarqawi letter" which made it on to the front page of The New York Times in February 2004 was one of a sequence of highly suspect documents which were said to have been written either by or to Zarqawi and which were fed into news media.This material is being generated, in part, by intelligence agencies who continue to work without effective oversight; and also by a new and essentially benign structure of "strategic communications" which was originally designed by doves in the Pentagon and Nato who wanted to use subtle and non-violent tactics to deal with Islamist terrorism but whose efforts are poorly regulated and badly supervised with the result that some of its practitioners are breaking loose and engaging in the black arts of propaganda.*

We are now victims of our own government. In so many ways.

And how many "news" stories are we fed which read, somewhere in them, "a military spokesperson said ..." or "the Pentagon reports ...."

*The Pentagon has now designated "information operations" as its fifth "core competency" alongside land, sea, air and special forces. Since October 2006, every brigade, division and corps in the US military has had its own "psyop" element producing output for local media. This military activity is linked to the State Department's campaign of "public diplomacy" which includes funding radio stations and news websites.*

And psyops is now such a big part of the government's operations that they're starting to farm it out to civilian corporations, I mean, those other than CNN and here’s a great example from CNN…

* No safe way for the U.S. to leave Iraq, experts warn*

Uh, whose experts, exactly? Why, CNN's very own:

*A rapid withdrawal of all U.S. troops would hurt America's image and hand al Qaeda and other terror groups a propaganda victory that the United States is only a "paper tiger," CNN terrorism analyst Peter Bergen said. *

And in light of the recent FISA embarrassment, there's this:

*Republicans pushed "bogus" terror threat to expand FISA*

Nice...we can depend on our Democrats to keep the checks and balances in order! Wait .... oh right. We've been betrayed by all of them, Repub and Dem alike. What country is this again? I guess the Democrats who voted to protect the corporations figured we'd have a short memory.

I suppose the real question is this: Seeing as how Operation Mockingbird was the real deal…why is anyone assuming that's ancient history and is somehow over with? Why would anyone assume, in an era when evil little henchmen like Rove, Cheney and Rumsfeld finally indeed managed to take over the American government, that such programs would have been eliminated? Our experience shows that these jokers only improve their techniques and consolidate their holds on power.

And now this, where it seems they don't even have to pay the members of the press anymore, the press simply reports whatever the Pentagon tells them to report. Maybe they're all on the payroll now, maybe it's that insidious. Maybe it's just that all the cool kids are stenographers for the military psyops divisions. Who knows? What matters is that we're being lied to every day, and there's nobody to report on THAT. Except us.

Peace-DAG!