“Former CIA director John Brennan has become the latest member of the NBC News and MSNBC family, officially signing with the network as a contributor,” chirps a recent article by The Wrap, as though that’s a perfectly normal thing to have to write and not a ghastly symptom of an Orwellian dystopia. NBC reports that the former head of the depraved, lying, torturing, propagandizing, drug trafficking, coup-staging, warmongering Central Intelligence Agency “is now a senior national security and intelligence analyst.”
Brennan, who played a key role in the construction of the establishment Russia narrative that has been used to manufacture public consent for world-threatening new cold war escalations, is just the latest addition in an ongoing trend of trusted mainstream media outlets being packed to the gills with establishment stalwarts from the US intelligence community. Brennan joins CIA and DoD Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash on the NBC/MSNBC lineup, who is serving there as a national security analyst, as well as NBC intelligence/national security reporter and known CIA collaborator Ken Dilanian. Former Director of National Intelligence, Russiagate architect, and known Russophobic racist James Clapper was welcomed to the CNN “family” last year by Chris “it’s illegal to read WikiLeaks” Cuomo and now routinely appears as an expert analyst for the network. Last year CNN also hired a new national security analyst in Michael Hayden, who has served as CIA Director, NSA Director, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and an Air Force general.
Former CIA analyst and now paid CNN analyst Phil Mudd, who last year caused Cuomo’s show to have to issue a retraction and apology for a completely baseless claim he made on national television asserting that WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange is “a pedophile”, is once again making headlines for suggesting that the FBI is entering into a showdown with the current administration over Trump’s decision to declassify the controversial Nunes memo.
More and more of the outlets from which Americans get their information are being filled not just with garden variety establishment loyalists, but with longstanding members of the US intelligence community. These men got to their positions of power within these deeply sociopathic institutions for their willingness to facilitate any depravity in order to advance the secret agendas of the US power establishment, and now they’re being paraded in front of mainstream Americans on cable news on a daily basis. The words of these “experts” are consistently taken and reported on by smaller news outlets in print and online media in a way that seeds their authoritative assertions throughout public consciousness.
As we discussed recently, the term “deep state” does not refer to a conspiracy theory but to a simple concept in political analysis which points to the undeniable reality that (A) plutocrats, (B) intelligence agencies, (C) defense agencies, and (D) the mainstream media hold large amounts of power in America despite their not being part of its elected government. You don’t need to look far to see how these separate groups overlap and collaborate to advance their own agendas in various ways. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, for example, is deeply involved in all of the aforementioned groups: (A) as arguably the wealthiest person ever he is clearly a plutocrat, with a company that is trying to control the underlying infrastructure of the economy, (B) he is a CIA contractor, (C) he is part of a Pentagon advisory board, and (D) his purchase of the Washington Post in 2013 gave him total control over a major mainstream media outlet.
Jeff Bezos did not purchase the Washington Post because his avaricious brain predicted that newspapers were about to make a profitable resurgence, he purchased it for the same reason he has inserted himself so very deeply into America’s unelected power infrastructure: he wants to ensure a solid foundation for the empire he is building. He needs a potent propaganda outlet to manufacture support for the power establishment that he is weaving his plutocratic tentacles through. This is precisely the same reason other mass media-controlling plutocrats are stocking their propaganda machines with intelligence community insiders.
Time and time and time again you see connections between the plutocratic class which effectively owns America’s elected government, the intelligence and defense agencies which operate behind thick veils of secrecy in the name of “national security” to advance agendas which have nothing to do with the wishes of the electorate, and the mass media machine which is used to manufacture the consent of the people to be governed by this exploitative power structure.
America is ruled by an elite class which has slowly created a system where money increasingly translates directly into political power, and which is therefore motivated to maintain economic injustice in order to rule over the masses more completely. The greater the economic inequality, the greater their power. Nobody would willingly consent to such an oppressive system where wealth inequality keeps growing as expensive bombs from expensive drones are showered upon strangers on the other side of the planet, so a robust propaganda machine is needed.
And that’s where John Brennan’s new job comes in. Expect a consistent fountain of lies to pour from his mouth on NBC, and expect them to all prop up this exploitative power establishment and advance its geopolitical agendas. And expect clear-eyed rebels everywhere to keep calling it all what it is.
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12 responses to “Mainstream Media Outlets Keep Hiring CIA/Intel Veterans, And It’s Gross”
[…] publications, but now veterans of the US intelligence community like John Brennan and James Clapper openly fill out the line-up of talking heads on MSNBC and CNN. Just recently the Guardian published a lie-filled smear piece on […]
[…] publications, but now veterans of the US intelligence community like John Brennan and James Clapper openly fill out the line-up of talking heads on MSNBC and CNN. Just recently the Guardian published a lie-filled smear piece on […]
[…] put to the likes of Eric Schmidt or Robert Work by members of the corporate media. As Lee Camp and Caitlin Johnstone have often reported, establishment press is now openly affiliated with the CIA and military […]
Caitlin,
You capture such profound concepts in a concise and readable manner, and you do it consistently. You’re unusually talented, to say the least, and what you’re doing is extremely important. Please keep it up.
Loving the CJ take! 🙂
The phrase ” . . . trusted media outlets . . .” may be a bit of a stretch nowadays, except among those who don’t get but 12 minutes of news from these outlets daily. It has been apparent to anyone who looks beyond the surface that the MSM is nearly completely controlled by the intel community; many of its full-time pundits are on the CIA payroll, I hear. Excellent article, as always, Caitlin. Thank you.
Readers may appreciate the views of this retired US air force officer, William Astore, as an antidote:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176381/tomgram%3A_william_astore%2C_taking_war_off_its_pedestal/#more
Hoping to share an article with you in total relation to Controlled Narratives, Caitlin. I will put the link in the website section.
Kudos and more kudos to Caitlin for uncanny ability to sniff out and focus on what really matters in the war against the miasma of plutocratic disinformation. She’s one of the best—if not the best outright—media tactician on the (real) left. No wonder she has so many enemies, including among the faux left. Here’s how this piece appears on The Greanville Post (TGP), one of the publications that support her:
http://www.greanvillepost.com/2018/02/05/mainstream-media-outlets-keep-hiring-cia-intel-veterans-and-its-gross/
I completely believe only about 2% of what I can research myself and 0% of the nonsense regurgitated by the mainstream media. And, sometimes, many independent media outlets appear to have been duped along with the majority of the U.S. citizenry.
Much love and gratitude from across the Pond, Caity. Please…can you get with MeWe? Or…if not…please tell me your objections?
Oh I have no objections, I just haven’t gotten around to MeWe yet. Why, is it good? What’s your experience with it?