Listen to a reading of this article:
In the later years of an abusive relationship I was in, my abuser had become so confident in how mentally caged he had me that he’d start overtly telling me what he is and what he was doing. He flat-out told me he was a sociopath and a manipulator, trusting that I was so submitted to his will by that point that I’d gaslight myself into reframing those statements in a sympathetic light. Toward the end one time he told me “I am going to rape you,” and then he did, and then he talked about it to some friends trusting that I’d run perception management on it for him.
The better he got at psychologically twisting me up in knots and the more submitted I became, the more open he’d be about it. He seemed to enjoy doing this, taking a kind of exhibitionistic delight in showing off his accomplishments at crushing me as a person, both to others and to me. Like it was his art, and he wanted it to have an audience to appreciate it.
I was reminded of this while watching a recent Fox News appearance by Glenn Greenwald where he made an observation we’ve discussed here previously about the way the CIA used to have to infiltrate the media, but now just openly has US intelligence veterans in mainstream media punditry positions managing public perception.
“If you go and Google, and I hope your viewers do, Operation Mockingbird, what you will find is that during the Cold War these agencies used to plot how to clandestinely manipulate the news media to disseminate propaganda to the American population,” Greenwald said. “They used to try to do it secretly. They don’t even do it secretly anymore. They don’t need Operation Mockingbird. They literally put John Brennan who works for NBC and James Clapper who works for CNN and tons of FBI agents right on the payroll of these news organizations. They now shape the news openly to manipulate and to deceive the American population.”
In 1977 Carl Bernstein published an article titled “The CIA and the Media” reporting that the CIA had covertly infiltrated America’s most influential news outlets and had over 400 reporters who it considered assets in a program known as Operation Mockingbird. It was a major scandal, and rightly so. The news media are meant to report truthfully about what happens in the world, not manipulate public perception to suit the agendas of spooks and warmongers.
Nowadays the CIA collaboration happens right out in the open, and the public is too brainwashed and gaslit to even recognize this as scandalous. Immensely influential outlets like The New York Times uncritically pass on CIA disinfo which is then spun as fact by cable news pundits. The sole owner of The Washington Post is a CIA contractor, and WaPo has never once disclosed this conflict of interest when reporting on US intelligence agencies per standard journalistic protocol. Mass media outlets now openly employ intelligence agency veterans like John Brennan, James Clapper, Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall, Samantha Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano, Jeremy Bash, Susan Hennessey, Ned Price and Rick Francona, as are known CIA assets like NBC’s Ken Dilanian, as are CIA interns like Anderson Cooper and CIA applicants like Tucker Carlson.
They’re just rubbing it in our faces now. Like they’re showing off.
Bellingcat got funding from the US gov-funded NED. It acts like an unofficial NATO propagandist, obsessively focusing on Western enemies. pic.twitter.com/DDegClagkj
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) June 25, 2017
And that’s just the media. We also see this flaunting behavior exhibited in the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a propaganda operation geared at sabotaging foreign governments not aligned with the US which according to its own founding officials was set up to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly. The late author and commentator William Blum makes this clear:
[I]n 1983, the National Endowment for Democracy was set up to “support democratic institutions throughout the world through private, nongovernmental efforts”. Notice the “nongovernmental” – part of the image, part of the myth. In actuality, virtually every penny of its funding comes from the federal government, as is clearly indicated in the financial statement in each issue of its annual report. NED likes to refer to itself as an NGO (Non-governmental organization) because this helps to maintain a certain credibility abroad that an official US government agency might not have. But NGO is the wrong category. NED is a GO.
“We should not have to do this kind of work covertly,” said Carl Gershman in 1986, while he was president of the Endowment. “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the C.I.A. We saw that in the 60’s, and that’s why it has been discontinued. We have not had the capability of doing this, and that’s why the endowment was created.”
And Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, declared in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
In effect, the CIA has been laundering money through NED.
We see NED’s fingerprints all over pretty much any situation where the western power alliance needs to manage public perception about a CIA-targeted government, from Russia to Hong Kong to Xinjiang to the imperial propaganda operation known as Bellingcat.
"The U.S. had financed some of the protester groups through the CIA aligned National Endowment for Democracy and the Open Technology Fund. If the U.S. wants to continue instigating unrest in Hong Kong it must now move those programs to the CIA and distribute the money secretly." https://t.co/kpmcikpjb1
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) July 1, 2020
To further #humanrights & human dignity for all people in China, the National Endowment for Democracy has funded Uyghur groups since 2004. #NEDemocracy #HumanRightsDay https://t.co/C0LJEyWxq1 pic.twitter.com/OqZdehdxXN
— NEDemocracy (@NEDemocracy) December 10, 2020
Hell, intelligence insiders are just openly running for office now. In an article titled “The CIA Democrats in the 2020 elections“, World Socialist Website documented the many veterans of the US intelligence cartel who ran in elections across America in 2018 and 2020:
“In the course of the 2018 elections, a large group of former military-intelligence operatives entered capitalist politics as candidates seeking the Democratic Party nomination in 50 congressional seats—nearly half the seats where the Democrats were targeting Republican incumbents or open seats created by Republican retirements. Some 30 of these candidates won primary contests and became the Democratic candidates in the November 2018 election, and 11 of them won the general election, more than one quarter of the 40 previously Republican-held seats captured by the Democrats as they took control of the House of Representatives. In 2020, the intervention of the CIA Democrats continues on what is arguably an equally significant scale.”
So they’re just getting more and more brazen the more confident they feel about how propaganda-addled and submissive the population has become. They’re laying more and more of their cards on the table. Soon the CIA will just be openly selling narcotics door to door like Girl Scout cookies.
Or maybe not. I said my ex got more and more overt about his abuses in the later years of our relationship because those were the later years. I did eventually expand my own consciousness of my own inner workings enough to clear the fears and unexamined beliefs I had that he was using as hooks to manipulate me. Maybe, as humanity’s consciousness continues to expand, the same will happen for the people and their abusive relationship with the CIA.
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39 responses to “So Much Of What The CIA Used To Do Covertly It Now Does Overtly”
Sorry I’m so late with this comment. I hope he [the ex]’s sans external genitalia now.
Jacob Leon Rubenstein was the person who “whacked” Oswald.
“mobster”, “pimp”, “night club owner” – that was all part of the distraction from his true identity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ruby
The “modernization” of the Smith Mundt anti-propaganda Act in 2014 now allows the State Department and CIA to LEGALLY Spread propaganda domestically. The mainstream media is now State Media (think Gestapo, Stasi, KGB). There is One Narrative and alternative news sites are be censored and shut down.
We are a Police State.
The FIB were a bunch of crooks even before J Edgar put on his first dress..
the FBI’s creation was resisted by Congress,so the schemersa pulled it off during summer 1907 while most Congress members were home on summer recess. So they have been scammers from the beginning. And J. Edgar Hoover did more than wear dresses. Maybe someone will tell the whole story about his visits to LaJolla during Nixon’s presidency (hint – Hoover had his limo parked beneath the reservoir there, shielded by two other FBI limos. He had a network of gay adults in the area who recruited young surfer boys for Hoover’s pleasure. I don’t know how much he paid them or how many of them managed to grow up and stay alive).
“US law enforcement seized the websites of two Iranian state-controlled news groups, Press TV and Al-Alam, and of the Al-Masirah TV channel of Yemen’s Huthis, statements posted on the websites showed Tuesday.”
https://www.bangkokpost.com/world/2137007/us-seizes-iranian-state-news-websites
Mehr News and IRNA are still up as of now.
Sorry to hear your story Caitlin.
Gotta wonder how all these sociopaths and psychopaths navigate through their personal lives.
Without Love, Truth and beauty we are akin to alien parasites feeding on hate and violence.
The hollow people.
The killing of John F. Kennedy proved to the entire world that our Central Intelligence Agency can and will do whatever it damn well pleases and you had better not get in their way!! Our government is an ongoing criminal and subversive enterprise that preys upon everything and everyone on this planet!!
I doubt if the rest of the world would care much about the CIA if all it did was bump off the occasional US president.
That’s not all it has done. One of its highest priorities is interfering in foreign elections, including assassinating the winner if they’re the wrong one, or at least deposing them with in depth propaganda campaigns, including false flags.
FBI on the payroll, what’s new?
It is a police state and nobody cares. Done by claiming to keep America Safe the ruse worked and imperial domination is here to stay. Done to keep the black man down, the white man fat with a capitalist owner class firmly in control. American media became a willing patsy of the deep state over a decade ago.
Try to report something to the American News Media without sending an email first. Seriously, I dare you. A whistleblower CAN’T send such an email if you need help figuring this all out. A cyber eye in the sky watches everything we do.
It was over before anyone even knew a battle had begun and the American People lost.
Joseph Goebbels stated that “it would not be impossible to prove, with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned, that a square is in fact a circle”. Repetition is the key element of all psyops. You don’t need genius, you don’t even need credibility… Dull, stubborn, mechanical repetition, with time, will inevitably do the trick. That’s the most scary part – and particularly nerve-wracking when you object something in a presser, the person in charge of the mic takes it away from you to give it to somebody else – as is customary – and the speaker just repeats his lie as if you didn’t even exist, sometimes even staring you in the eyes just to show you how much he cares, being the government.
I haven’t watched TV for nearly twenty years but I assume they carry on showing every November 22 the same bit of the Zapruder film where JFK’s head jerks back and Jackie crawls off in her pink suit onto the car trunk. I still remember thinking at the time (I was 13): “WTF is she doing?” It’s only fifty years later that I happened to learn by chance that she saw a piece of her husband’s brain squirt out of his skull, crawled mechanically – in a state of mind we can easily imagine – onto the car trunk to retrieve it and clutched it all the way to the hospital where she gave it to a surgeon who reported it. So there’s no question whatsoever that JFK was shot from the front. Plus Oliver Stone had it pointed out repeatedly on the Zapruder film by Kevin Costner in his movie JFK in 1991.
Of course all the kings’ horses and all the kings’ men went for Stone’s jugular in the media but his film won several awards, including best director and has an approval rating of 84% on Rotten Tomatoes with “generally positive reviews”.
And yet year after year, I read in an article on November 22 that JFK was shot from the back by a lone sniper hunkering down in the Texas School Book Depository, himself subsequently whacked by a mobster, night club owner and pimp by trade, who put his life on the line to “spare Jackie Kennedy the ordeal to have to return to Dallas to testify at the murder trial of Oswald”. There I remember thinking again: “WTF?” To throw Lancelot and Guinevere into the mix with such a dubious character for the Lancelot part belonged to a Monty Python sketch but they didn’t exist at the time, so we had to have that stuff live instead.
This hoax has made its way into the history books and as less and less people are interested since more and more contemporaries are pushing up the daisies, it has become the historical truth (“Trust the SCIENCE!” :o) thanks to a little bullying by the secret services, a fortunate disposition of several witnesses to go and meet their maker earlier than generally expected, a meticulous government and media cover up, the sealing of a number of official documents but primarily dull, stubborn, mechanical repetition.
Jacob Leon Rubenstein was the person who “whacked” Oswald.
“mobster”, “pimp”, “night club owner” – that was all part of the distraction from his true identity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ruby
Don’t forget about the CIA/FBI “ influenced “ garbage Hollywood spews out.
“Drink this beverage, because you’re thirsty and we paid for this billboard”, “eating this snackfood is unhealthy….but who cares?” etc. It’s a disarming tactic.”
That’s a bit simplistic. It’s more like a rebranding campaign which especially intensified during the Orangeman’s reign. The intelligence agencies took on the role of a “knight in shining armour” protecting all Liberals from “boogieman fascist Trump.” As a result, they overtly and comfortably appeared as consultants on MSNBC and CNN.
There was no need to be secretive any longer since the entire point was to brainwash the public into thinking “good CIA” fights “evil Trump.”
Now the CIA is using inane ads to recruit gays, women, minorities and an assortment of neurotics with sadistic tendencies who are particularly interested in surveilling the innocent and recruiting the vulnerable.
Sorry you were abused by a piece of shit; no doubt he never saw the jail time he so richly deserved along with being raped himself to see what it’s like.
The media are whores for the people that sell you stuff that ruins your health and even your kids health so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that they are a part of the ruling classes national security state. The schools and the churches are all part of the elite conspiracy to maintain the social order. The sky pilot’s are all officer’s, that should tell you something. Not that all teachers or priests understand what they are doing, they were indoctrinated too. Thankfully there are still a few aware and honest journalists still available but you have to look carefully. It’s nice to see a guy like Glen Greenwald leave an oligarch controlled outfit and make a lot more money on substack..
Thanks for your honesty. Reminds me of my childhood. And my government.
Trauma puts us in a state of arrested development which keeps us dependent upon our abusers. Time for us to consciously break free or we will cease to be…
http://freefall555.blogspot.com/2021/06/mastered-by-war.html
I recommend that all of your readers and supporters read “The Mighty Wurlitzer” by Hugh Wilford if they haven’t already. It describes the beginnings of the CIA and the beginning of the Cold War even before the dead of WWII were cold. And don’t forget tht Gloria Steinem was a CIA asset herself and she admits it, which confirms your article’s point about this being in the open.
Hi Carolyn haven’t seen any of your posts since WSWS shadowbanned all my comments.
Sort of lost interest in a political organization that morphed into the “Coronavirus Daily.”
Dear Caitlin,
***
SO sorry about your rape–and for any girl/woman who is forced to endure such savagery. “Vengeance is mine!” says The Lord, even when it eludes human justice. May the rats of hell gnaw the dicks off those who perpetrate this sacrilege against women!
***
Best,
***
Horror/thriller author S.A. Hogan
CIA director Dulles famously referred to the press as the “wurlitzer”. The CIA actually admitted under oath during a congressional hearing in the 1990’s that they smuggled drugs. The CIA typically sets up private companies to front for its activities and this was the case with the drug smuggling activities, which was conducted through a network of small airports. The drug smuggling allowed the CIA and White House to fund its activities without congressional scrutiny, since congress exercises its oversight through the appropriation of funds.
The bottom line for me is that the USG is basically a criminal entity.
You sound as though the CIA’s wars, coups and terrorism are of less concern than its breaking US laws.
It’s crimes are international, which is the intention. It’s all about empire and mind control.
Not at all; all of it is criminal.
Which makes one wonder, what evil monstrosities are they doing now that is STILL covert? It has become blatantly clear that the entire “intelligence community” including the FBI, is the epitome of evil, corruption, and psychosis. They are so blatantly opposed to anything even close to “good”, that its hard to imagine exactly what they are for. Unless one takes a dive into the psychotic evil that we all have inside us but being “civilized” we constantly suppress. Looks like the CIA et al live there.
I ask myself that question all the time. All hangouts are limited hangouts. That’s a term from Watergate, by the way.
Whoa. Astonishing writing … as per usual !!
Makes me grin to remember that old cliche; ‘the personal is political…’ only an abbreviated hint of the vast realityscape C.J. expertly depicts !
– J.Joslin ( electrician -Detroit, Michigan- near Canada )
The facts in this article are well known to me and to many of my friends. That’s why,to a man (and woman) none of us give the slightest damn regarding what any of the mainstream media have to say. anyone who doubts that Jeff Bezos, owner also of Amazon and Whole Foods, is a CIA contractor, must not have read how he paid $300 million to acquire ownership of WaPo, when it was only worth $200 million. We wondered about that for two weeks, after which he signed a contract for the CIA. It was all in the news, even in some of the MSM.
I’m not going to digest the list of names, because I never find any of them to be factually forthcoming, nor with any truth that benefits the U.S. populace. =Given a choice between listening to them and cleaning latrines, I’ll choose the latrines every time. They never claim to be anything but what they are.
It was all in the news, even in some of the MSM.
“In 1977 Carl Bernstein published an article titled ‘The CIA and the Media’ reporting that the CIA had covertly infiltrated America’s most influential news outlets and had over 400 reporters who it considered assets in a program known as Operation Mockingbird.” 2010 (regarding 2008): Obama Confidant’s Spine-Chilling Proposal: Cass Sunstein Wants the Government to “Cognitively Infiltrate” Anti-Government Groups https://www.salon.com/2010/01/15/sunstein_2/ In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-“independent” advocates to “cognitively infiltrate” online groups and websites – as well as other activist groups – which advocate views that Sunstein deems “false conspiracy theories” about the Government. “[Now,] [t]hey’re just rubbing it in our faces.” https://seaclearly.com/2021/05/01/a-final-warning
The ability for the CIA to operate so brazenly disproves your previous hypothesis regarding the “high level” of political consciousness found in today’s generation. If young people were politically aware the intelligence agencies would not conduct so many overt activities. All their actions would be insidiously clandestine.
You do not need everyone to be conscious, just enough to awaken others. In 1840 it is estimated that only 4% of Americans agreed with abolitionists. By 1865, except in jails, slavery was no longer government sanctioned in any state. Evil never rests so we did have Jim Crow, wage slavery and so on after that, but a big stride that only a small percentage of the population had been in favor of had won.
Evil never rests
Yep, Nailed it
That’s because spelt backward, “evil” is “live” :o)
Well you screwed the pooch on that one. In 1865 there was slavery in Delaware and at least one other state.
On the contrary, it is actually perfectly consistent. It is akin to modern advertising; modern consumers are more aware of and are savvy to classical advertising methods and manipulative tactics, which immediately trigger suspicion or derision and ridicule when encountered. Because of that, contemporary advertising has adopted a more direct “anti-advertising” subversive approach: “Drink this beverage, because you’re thirsty and we paid for this billboard”, “eating this snackfood is unhealthy….but who cares?” etc. It’s a disarming tactic. People subconsciously think “well at least they’re being honest about it, I have to respect that”, or they are entertained by the abandonment of manipulation in favor of straight unabashed product endorsement. This then opens people back up once again to manipulative tactics because they believe the manipulation has been dropped, or that they’re clever enough not to be manipulated.
It’s the reason social media influencers are utilized so much for modern advertising. The influencer says “I’m using this product, because they sent it to me for free, and I’m being paid for it sure, but I actually really do love using it”. People want to believe because the person is being honest about their financial incentive to plug the product, and their “honest” portrayal of their role as someone pushing products, that the product plug itself is also honest. Or even if they don’t have that thought, the product is still getting exposure on a wide platform, with nobody questioning the integrity of that product being pushed into their view. “Obviously that person is getting paid to showcase this product, so I’m not questioning or inquiring why that product is being showcased.
Undoubtedly the intelligence community is privy to this same psychology and are utilizing those same tactics. With the open channel of communication and information that the internet provides, it would be impossible to “control” that information dispersal via their historical methods, so instead they straight up have CIA operatives “telling it like it is” to disarm the public into trusting the audacity of the action as honest, even though they know the source has traditionally been dishonest.
Anyone who has lived through the Kennedy assassination and Watergate is familiar with this tactic. At the age of 72, I have lived through most of the CIA bullshit and haven’t believed/trusted the government since I was 15 in 1963.
Amen Carolyn,the bullshit and lies never end. Might as well add 911 and corona.
“Dishonest” is rather mild. How about “There’s nothing you can imagine that is so evil that they will not engage in if it serves their interests.” Which is pretty much true of government across the board. In pretty much every nation.