Obama's Close Friend & Appointee Proposed Government Infiltration of Forums

[Guest Robert Morrow]

Here are the email addresses of Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, the 2 people who wrote that dreadful paper.

csunstei@law.harvard.edu

avermeule@law.harvard.edu

I suggest that people email them some of your best research on the 1963 Coup d'Etat, aka the JFK assassination.

I have. No need to send them hostile emails. Instead, ENLIGHTEN them with your best research or books to read or DVDs to watch.

[Bernice Moore]

Let's not forget;

DISPATCH CLASSIFICATION PROCESSING ACTION

TOP SECRET MARKED FOR INDEXING

TO Chiefs, Certain Stations and Bases X NO INDEXING REQUIRED

INFO ONLY QUALIFIED DESK

CAN JUDGE INDEXING

FROM The Director of Central Intelligence MICROFILM

SUBJECT Countering Criticism of the Warren Report

ACTION REQUIRED - REFERENCES PSYCH 1. Our Concern. From the day of President Kennedy's assassination on,

there has been speculation about the responsibility for his murder. Although

this was stemmed for a time by the Warren Commission report (which appeared at

the end of September 1964), various writers have now had time to scan the

Commission's published report and documents for new pretexts for questioning,

and there has been a new wave of books and articles criticizing the Commission's

findings. In most cases the critics have speculated as to the existence of some

kind of conspiracy, and often they have implied that the Commission itself was

involved. Presumably as a result of the increasing challenge to the Warren

Commission's Report, a public opinion poll recently indicated that 46% of the

American public did not think that Oswald acted alone, while more than half of

those polled thought that the Commission had left some questions unresolved.

Doubtless polls abroad would show similar, or possibly more adverse, results. 2. This trend of opinion is a matter of concern to the U.S. government,

including our organization. The members of the Warren Commission were naturally

chosen for their integrity, experience, and prominence. They represented both

major parties, and they and their staff were deliberately drawn from all sections

of the country. Just because of the standing of the Commissioners, efforts to

impugn their rectitude and wisdom tend to cast doubt on the whole leadership of

American society. Moreover, there seems to be an increasing tendency to hint

that President Johnson himself, as the one person who might be said to have

benefited, was in some way responsible for the assassination. Innuendo of

such seriousness affects not only the individual concerned, but also the whole

reputation of the American government. Our organization itself is directly

involved: among other facts, we contributed information to the investigation.

Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, for

example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us. The aim of

this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims

of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in

other countries. Background information is supplied in a classified section and

in a number of unclassified attachments. 3. Action. We do not recommend that discussion of the assassination ques-

tion be initiated where it is not already taking place. Where discussion is

active, however, addressees are requested:

DISPATCH SYMBOL AND NUMBER DATE

9 attachments h/w 4/1/67

1 - classified secret CLASSIFICATION HQS FILE NUMBER

8 - Unclassified TOP SECRET DESTROY WHEN NO LONGER

NEEDED

CONTINUATION OF CLASSIFICATION DISPATCH SYMBOL AND NUMBER

DISPATCH TOP SECRET a. To discuss the publicity problem with liaison and friendly elite contacts

(especially politicians and editors), pointing out that the Warren Commission

made as thorough an investigation as humanly possible, that the charges of the

critics are without serious foundation, and that further speculative discussion

only plays into the hands of the opposition. Point out also that parts of the

conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists.

Urge them to use their influence to discourage unfounded and irresponsible

speculation. b. To employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the

critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for

this purpose. The unclassified attachments to this guidance should provide

useful background material for passage to assets. Our play should point out,

as applicable, that the critics are (i) wedded to theories adopted before the

evidence was in, (ii) politically interested, (iii) financially interested, (iv)

hasty and inaccurate in their research, or (v) infatuated with their own theories.

In the course of discussions of the whole phenomenon of criticism, a useful

strategy may be to single out Epstein's theory for attack, using the attached

Fletcher Knebel article and Spectator piece for background. (Although Mark

Lane's book is much less convincing than Epstein's and comes off badly where

contested by knowledgeable critics, it is also much more difficult to answer

as a whole, as one becomes lost in a morass of unrelated details.) 4. In private to media discussions not directed at any particular writer, or

in attacking publications which may be yet forthcoming, the following arguments

should be useful: a. No significant new evidence has emerged which the Commission did not

consider. The assassination is sometimes compared (e.g., by Joachim Joesten

and Bertrand Russell) with the Dreyfus case; however, unlike that case, the

attacks on the Warren Commission have produced no new evidence, no new culprits

have been convincingly identified, and there is no agreement among the critics.

(A better parallel, though an imperfect one, might be with the Reichstag fire

of 1933, which some competent historians (Fritz Tobias, A.J.P. Taylor, D.C. Watt)

now believe was set by Van der Lubbe on his own initiative, without acting for

either Nazis or Communists; the Nazis tried to pin the blame on the Communists,

but the latter have been more successful in convincing the world that the

Nazis were to blame.) b. Critics usually overvalue particular items and ignore others. They tend

to place more emphasis on the recollections of individual eyewitnesses (which

are less reliable and more divergent -- and hence offer more hand-holds for

criticism) and less on ballistic, autopsy, and photographic evidence. A close

examination of the Commission's records will usually show that the conflicting

eyewitness accounts are quoted out of context, or were discarded by the Commis-

sion for good and sufficient reason. c. Conspiracy on the large scale often suggested would be impossible to con-

ceal in the United States, esp. since informants could expect to receive large

royalties, etc. Note that Robert Kennedy, Attorney General at the time and

John F. Kennedy's brother, would be the last man to overlook or conceal any

conspiracy. And as one reviewer pointed out, Congressman Gerald R. Ford would

hardly have held his tongue for the sake of the Democratic administration, and

Senator Russell would have had every political interest in exposing any misdeeds

on the part of Chief Justice Warren. A conspirator moreover would hardly choose

a location for a shooting where so much depended on conditions beyond his con-

trol: the route, the speed of the cars, the moving target, the risk that the

assassin would be discovered. A group of wealthy conspirators could have

arranged much more secure conditions. d. Critics have often been enticed by a form of intellectual pride: they

light on some theory and fall in love with it; they also scoff at the Commis-

sion because it did not always answer every question with a flat decision one

way or the other. Actually, the make-up of the Commission and its staff was

an excellent safeguard against over-commitment to any one theory, or against

the illicit transformation of probabilities into certainties. CLASSIFICATION PAGE NO.

FORM TOP SECRET TWO

8-64 53a USE PREVIOUS EDITION. X CONTINUED CONTINUATION OF CLASSIFICATION DISPATCH SYMBOL AND NUMBER

DISPATCH TOP SECRET e. Oswald would not have been any sensible person's choice for a co-

conspirator. He was a "loner," mixed up, of questionable reliability

and an unknown quantity to any professional intelligence service. f. As to charges that the Commission's report was a rush job, it emerged

three months after the deadline originally set. But to the degree that

the Commission tried to speed up its reporting, this was largely due to

the pressure of irresponsible speculation already appearing, in some cases

coming from the same critics who, refusing to admit their errors, are now

putting out new criticism. g. Such vague accusations as that "more than ten people have died mysteri-

ously" can always be explained in some more natural way: e.g., the indi-

viduals concerned have for the most part died of natural causes; the Com-

mission staff questioned 418 witnesses (the FBI interviewed far more

people, conducting 25,000 interviews and reinterviews), and in such a

large group, a certain number of deaths are to be expected. (When Penn

Jones, one of the originators of the "ten mysterious deaths" line, ap-

peared on television, it emerged that two of the deaths on his list were

from heart attacks, one from cancer, one was from a head-on collision on

a bridge, and one occurred when a driver drifted into a bridge abutment.) 5. Where possible, counter speculation by encouraging reference to the

Commission's Report itself. Open-minded foreign readers should still be

impressed by the care, thoroughness, objectivity and speed with which the Com-

mission worked. Reviewers of other books might be encouraged to add to their

account the idea that, checking back with the report itself, they found it far

superior to the work of its critics. CLASSIFICATION PAGE NO.

FORM TOP SECRET THREE

8-64 53a USE PREVIOUS EDITION. CONTINUED

(40)

Document Number 1035-960

for FOIA Review on SEP 1976

[Guest Robert Morrow]

Bernice, I think the odds are very good that Cord Meyer, who was running Operation Mockingbird for the CIA, wrote that.

Cord Meyer bio: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmeyerC.htm

Meyer formed the Committee to Frame a World Constitution with Robert Maynard Hutchins and Elizabeth Mann Borgese. As a result of this work Meyer made contact with the International Cooperative Alliance, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, the Indian Socialist Party and the Congress of Peoples Against Imperialism. It is almost certain that this had been done on behalf of the CIA.

Allen W. Dulles made contact with Cord Meyer in 1951. He accepted the invitation to join the CIA. Dulles told Meyer he wanted him to work on a project that was so secret that he could not be told about it until he officially joined the organization. Meyer was to work under Frank Wisner, director of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This became the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the CIA. Wisner was told to create an organization that concentrated on "propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world."

Meyer became part of what became known as Operation Mockingbird, a CIA program to influence the American media. According to Deborah Davis (Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington Post): Meyer was Mockingbird's "principal operative".

One of the most important journalists under the control of Operation Mockingbird was Joseph Alsop, whose articles appeared in over 300 different newspapers. Other journalists willing to promote the views of the Central Intelligence Agency included Stewart Alsop (New York Herald Tribune), Ben Bradlee (Newsweek), James Reston (New York Times), Charles Douglas Jackson (Time Magazine), Walter Pincus (Washington Post), William C. Baggs (Miami News), Herb Gold (Miami News) and Charles Bartlett (Chattanooga Times). These journalists sometimes wrote articles that were unofficially commissioned by Meyer was based on leaked classified information from the CIA.

Mary and the family now moved to Washington where they became members of the Georgetown Crowd. This group included Frank Wisner, George Kennan, Dean Acheson, Thomas Braden, Richard Bissell, Desmond FitzGerald, Joseph Alsop, Tracy Barnes, Philip Graham, Katharine Graham, David Bruce, James Reston, James Truitt, Alfred Friendly, Clark Clifford, Walt Rostow, Eugene Rostow, Chip Bohlen and Paul Nitze. The Meyers also socialized with other CIA officers or CIA assets including James Angleton (Cicely Angleton), Wistar Janney (Mary Wisnar), Ben Bradlee (Antoinette Bradlee) and James Truitt (Anne Truitt).

Meyer worked under Thomas Braden, the head of International Organizations Division (IOD). This Central Intelligence Agency unit helped established anti-Communist front groups in Western Europe.The IOD was dedicated to infiltrating academic, trade and political associations. The objective was to control potential radicals and to steer them to the right.

Meyer oversaw the funding of groups such as the National Student Association, the Congress of Cultural Freedom, Communications Workers of America, the American Newspaper Guild and the National Educational Association. He also provided the money for publishing the journal, Encounter. Meyer also worked closely with anti-Communist leaders of the trade union movement such as George Meany of the Congress for Industrial Organization and the American Federation of Labor.

In 1953 Frank Wisner and the CIA began having trouble with J. Edgar Hoover. He described the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) as "Wisner's gang of weirdos" and began carrying out investigations into their past. It did not take him long to discover that some of them had been active in left-wing politics in the 1930s. This information was passed to Joseph McCarthy who started making attacks on members of the OPC. Hoover also passed to McCarthy details of an affair that Wisner had with Princess Caradja in Romania during the war. Hoover, claimed that Caradja was a Soviet agent.

Joseph McCarthy also began accusing other members of the Georgetown Crowd as being security risks. McCarthy claimed that the CIA was a "sinkhole of communists" and claimed he intended to root out a hundred of them. His first targets were Chip Bohlen and Charles Thayer. Bohlen survived but Thayer was forced to resign.

In August, 1953, Richard Helms, Wisner's deputy at the OPC, told Meyer that Joseph McCarthy had accused him of being a communist. The Federal Bureau of Investigation added to the smear by announcing it was unwilling to give Meyer "security clearance". However, the FBI refused to explain what evidence they had against Meyer. Allen W. Dulles and both came to his defence and refused to permit a FBI interrogation of Meyer.

The FBI eventually revealed the charges against Meyer. Apparently he was a member of several liberal groups considered to be subversive by the Justice Department. This included being a member of the National Council on the Arts, where he associated with Norman Thomas, the leader of the Socialist Party and its presidential candidate in 1948. It was also pointed out that his wife, Mary Meyer, was a former member of the American Labor Party. Meyer was eventually cleared of these charges and was allowed to keep his job.

J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy did not realise what they were taking on. Wisner unleashed Operation Mockingbird on McCarthy. Drew Pearson, Joe Alsop, Jack Anderson, Walter Lippmann and Ed Murrow all went into attack mode and McCarthy was permanently damaged by the press coverage orchestrated by Wisner.

Meyer became disillusioned with life in the CIA and in January, 1954, he went to New York City and attempted to get a job in publishing. Although he saw contacts he had made during his covert work with the media (Operation Mockingbird) he was unable to obtain a job with any of the established book publishing firms.

In the summer of 1954 the Meyer family's golden retriever was hit by a car on the curve of highway near their house and killed. The dog's death worried Cord. He told colleagues at the CIA he was afraid the same thing might happen to one of his children.

In the summer of 1954 the Meyers got new neighbours. John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie Kennedy purchased Hickory Hill, a house several hundred yards from where the Meyers lived. Mary became good friends with Jackie and they went on walks together.

In November, 1954, Meyer replaced Thomas Braden as head of International Organizations Division. Meyer began spending a lot of time in Europe. One of Meyer's tasks was to supervise Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, the United States government broadcasts to Eastern Europe. According to Nina Burleigh (A Very Private Woman) Meyer was "overseeing a vast 'black' budget of millions of dollars channeled through phony foundation of a global network of associations and labor groups that on their surface appeared to be progressive".

On 18th December, 1956, Cord's nine-year-old son, Michael, was hit by a car on the curve of highway near their house and killed. It was the same spot where the family's golden retriever had been killed two years earlier. The tragedy briefly brought the couple together. However, in 1958, Mary filed for divorce. In her divorce petition she alleged "extreme cruelty, mental in nature, which seriously injured her health, destroyed her happiness, rendered further cohabitation unendurable and compelled the parties to separate."

Meyer's career continued to prosper and was now high enough in the CIA hierarchy to be involved in covert operations. This included working with people like Richard Bissell, Frank Wisner, Tracy Barnes, Jake Esterline, David Atlee Phillips, William (Rip) Robertson and E. Howard Hunt. Bissell, who was now head of the OPC, described Meyer as the "creative genius behind covert operations".

As chief of the CIA's International Organizations Division, Meyer met with President John F. Kennedy and his staff. On 18th October, 1961, Kennedy consulted Meyer about the possibility of replacing Allen W. Dulles with John McCone. In his journal he reported that Kennedy was "much more serious and less arrogant than I'd known him before." He added that Kennedy "still yearns for a respect that eludes him from such as myself."

It is assumed that Cord was involved in the plot to assassinate Fidel Castro but so far no documents have been released to confirm this. Cord also met Robert Kennedy several times after the failed Bay of Pigs operation.

In 1961 James Jesus Angleton asked Ben Bradlee to suggest to John F. Kennedy that Meyer should become ambassador to Guatemala. Bradlee, who disliked Meyer, refused. Bradlee later claimed that he did not respond to this request because he knew that Kennedy would reject the idea. Meyer also asked Charles L. Bartlett, another journalist friend of Kennedy to suggest he should be given a political appointment. Bartlett did as requested but reported back that "due to some incident that occured at the U.N. conference in San Francisco in 1945 there was no possibility".

On 12th October, 1964, Mary Pinchot Meyer was shot dead as she walked along the Chesapeake and Ohio towpath in Georgetown. Henry Wiggins, a car mechanic, was working on a vehicle on Canal Road, when he heard a woman shout out: "Someone help me, someone help me". He then heard two gunshots. Wiggins ran to the edge of the wall overlooking the towpath. He later told police he saw "a black man in a light jacket, dark slacks, and a dark cap standing over the body of a white woman."

Soon afterwards Raymond Crump, a black man, was found not far from the murder scene. He was arrested and charged with Mary's murder. The towpath and the river were searched but no murder weapon was ever found.

Edited December 11, 2010 by Robert Morrow

[Guest Robert Morrow]

Here is the same CIA Instructions to Media Assets, perhaps a little more legible

http://mtracy9.tripod.com/cia_instructions.htm

CIA Instructions to Media Assets

This document caused quite a stir when it was discovered in 1977. Dated 4/1/67, and marked "DESTROY WHEN NO LONGER NEEDED", this document is a stunning testimony to how concerned the CIA was over investigations into the Kennedy assassination. Emphasis has been added to facilitate scanning.

________________________________________

CIA Document #1035-960, marked "PSYCH" for presumably Psychological Warfare Operations, in the division "CS", the Clandestine Services, sometimes known as the "dirty tricks" department.

RE: Concerning Criticism of the Warren Report

1. Our Concern. From the day of President Kennedy's assassination on, there has been speculation about the responsibility for his murder. Although this was stemmed for a time by the Warren Commission report, (which appeared at the end of September 1964), various writers have now had time to scan the Commission's published report and documents for new pretexts for questioning, and there has been a new wave of books and articles criticizing the Commission's findings. In most cases the critics have speculated as to the existence of some kind of conspiracy, and often they have implied that the Commission itself was involved. Presumably as a result of the increasing challenge to the Warren Commission's report, a public opinion poll recently indicated that 46% of the American public did not think that Oswald acted alone, while more than half of those polled thought that the Commission had left some questions unresolved. Doubtless polls abroad would show similar, or possibly more adverse results.

2. This trend of opinion is a matter of concern to the U.S. government, including our organization. The members of the Warren Commission were naturally chosen for their integrity, experience and prominence. They represented both major parties, and they and their staff were deliberately drawn from all sections of the country. Just because of the standing of the Commissioners, efforts to impugn their rectitude and wisdom tend to cast doubt on the whole leadership of American society. Moreover, there seems to be an increasing tendency to hint that President Johnson himself, as the one person who might be said to have benefited, was in some way responsible for the assassination. Innuendo of such seriousness affects not only the individual concerned, but also the whole reputation of the American government. Our organization itself is directly involved: among other facts, we contributed information to the investigation. Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us. The aim of this dispatch is to provide material countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries. Background information is supplied in a classified section and in a number of unclassified attachments.

3. Action. We do not recommend that discussion of the assassination question be initiated where it is not already taking place. Where discussion is active [business] addresses are requested:

a. To discuss the publicity problem with [?] and friendly elite contacts (especially politicians and editors), pointing out that the Warren Commission made as thorough an investigation as humanly possible, that the charges of the critics are without serious foundation, and that further speculative discussion only plays into the hands of the opposition. Point out also that parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists. Urge them to use their influence to discourage unfounded and irresponsible speculation.

b. To employ propaganda assets to [negate] and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. The unclassified attachments to this guidance should provide useful background material for passing to assets. Our ploy should point out, as applicable, that the critics are (I) wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in, (II) politically interested, (III) financially interested, (IV) hasty and inaccurate in their research, or (V) infatuated with their own theories. In the course of discussions of the whole phenomenon of criticism, a useful strategy may be to single out Epstein's theory for attack, using the attached Fletcher [?] article and Spectator piece for background. (Although Mark Lane's book is much less convincing that Epstein's and comes off badly where confronted by knowledgeable critics, it is also much more difficult to answer as a whole, as one becomes lost in a morass of unrelated details.)

4. In private to media discussions not directed at any particular writer, or in attacking publications which may be yet forthcoming, the following arguments should be useful:

a. No significant new evidence has emerged which the Commission did not consider. The assassination is sometimes compared (e.g., by Joachim Joesten and Bertrand Russell) with the Dreyfus case; however, unlike that case, the attack on the Warren Commission have produced no new evidence, no new culprits have been convincingly identified, and there is no agreement among the critics. (A better parallel, though an imperfect one, might be with the Reichstag fire of 1933, which some competent historians (Fritz Tobias, AJ.P. Taylor, D.C. Watt) now believe was set by Vander Lubbe on his own initiative, without acting for either Nazis or Communists; the Nazis tried to pin the blame on the Communists, but the latter have been more successful in convincing the world that the Nazis were to blame.)

b. Critics usually overvalue particular items and ignore others. They tend to place more emphasis on the recollections of individual witnesses (which are less reliable and more divergent--and hence offer more hand-holds for criticism) and less on ballistics, autopsy, and photographic evidence. A close examination of the Commission's records will usually show that the conflicting eyewitness accounts are quoted out of context, or were discarded by the Commission for good and sufficient reason.

c. Conspiracy on the large scale often suggested would be impossible to conceal in the United States, esp. since informants could expect to receive large royalties, etc. Note that Robert Kennedy, Attorney General at the time and John F. Kennedy's brother, would be the last man to overlook or conceal any conspiracy. And as one reviewer pointed out, Congressman Gerald R. Ford would hardly have held his tongue for the sake of the Democratic administration, and Senator Russell would have had every political interest in exposing any misdeeds on the part of Chief Justice Warren. A conspirator moreover would hardly choose a location for a shooting where so much depended on conditions beyond his control: the route, the speed of the cars, the moving target, the risk that the assassin would be discovered. A group of wealthy conspirators could have arranged much more secure conditions.

d. Critics have often been enticed by a form of intellectual pride: they light on some theory and fall in love with it; they also scoff at the Commission because it did not always answer every question with a flat decision one way or the other. Actually, the make-up of the Commission and its staff was an excellent safeguard against over-commitment to any one theory, or against the illicit transformation of probabilities into certainties.

e. Oswald would not have been any sensible person's choice for a co-conspirator. He was a "loner," mixed up, of questionable reliability and an unknown quantity to any professional intelligence service. [Note: This claim is demonstrably untrue with the latest file releases. The CIA had an operational interest in Oswald less than a month before the assassination. Source: Oswald and the CIA, John Newman and newly released files from the National Archives.]

f. As to charges that the Commission's report was a rush job, it emerged three months after the deadline originally set. But to the degree that the Commission tried to speed up its reporting, this was largely due to the pressure of irresponsible speculation already appearing, in some cases coming from the same critics who, refusing to admit their errors, are now putting out new criticisms.

g. Such vague accusations as that "more than ten people have died mysteriously" can always be explained in some natural way e.g.: the individuals concerned have for the most part died of natural causes; the Commission staff questioned 418 witnesses (the FBI interviewed far more people, conduction 25,000 interviews and re interviews), and in such a large group, a certain number of deaths are to be expected. (When Penn Jones, one of the originators of the "ten mysterious deaths" line, appeared on television, it emerged that two of the deaths on his list were from heart attacks, one from cancer, one was from a head-on collision on a bridge, and one occurred when a driver drifted into a bridge abutment.)

5. Where possible, counter speculation by encouraging reference to the Commission's Report itself. Open-minded foreign readers should still be impressed by the care, thoroughness, objectivity and speed with which the Commission worked. Reviewers of other books might be encouraged to add to their account the idea that, checking back with the report itself, they found it far superior to the work of its critics.

________________________________________

Other commentary:

"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media."

--William Colby, former CIA Director, quoted by Dave Mcgowan, Derailing Democracy

"You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month."

--CIA operative, discussing the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories. Katherine the Great, by Deborah Davis

"There is quite an incredible spread of relationships. You don’t need to manipulate Time magazine, for example, because there are [Central Intelligence] Agency people at the management level."

--William B. Bader, former CIA intelligence officer, briefing members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, The CIA and the Media, by Carl Bernstein

"The Agency's relationship with [The New York] Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials. [it was] general Times policy ... to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible."

--The CIA and the Media, by Carl Bernstein

"Senator William Proxmire has pegged the number of employees of the federal intelligence community at 148,000 ... though Proxmire's number is itself a conservative one. The "intelligence community" is officially defined as including only those organizations that are members of the U.S. Intelligence Board (USIB); a dozen other agencies, charged with both foreign and domestic intelligence chores, are not encompassed by the term.... The number of intelligence workers employed by the federal government is not 148,000, but some undetermined multiple of that number."

--Jim Hougan, Spooks

"For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government.... I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations."

--former President Harry Truman, 22 December 1963, one month after the JFK assassination, op-ed section of the Washington Post, early edition

"The CIA is made up of boys whose families sent them to Princeton but wouldn't let them into the family brokerage business."

- Lyndon B. Johnson

[Guest Tom Scully]

They're never gonna let up, nosiree!

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/01/04/burns/index.html

Tuesday, Jan 4, 2011 07:05 ET

John Burns' "ministering angels" and "liberators"

By Glenn Greenwald

..The reason there's so little government censorship of the press in America is because it's totally unnecessary; why would the government even want to censor a media this compliant and subservient? Recall the derision heaped upon the media even by Bush's own former Press Secretary, Scott McClellan, for being "too deferential" to administration propaganda. As soon as an entity emerges that provides genuinely adversarial coverage of the U.S. Government -- such as WikiLeaks, whistleblowers,or isolated articles exposing its malfeasance -- the repressive measures come fast and furious. But in general, it's no more necessary for the U.S. Government to censor the American media than it would be for Barack Obama to try to silence Robert Gibbs..

...Quite related to all of this: The New York Times' Stanley Fish reviews a new book to be released shortly by a variety of law professors -- including Cass Sunstein and Martha Nussbaum -- arguing that more legal restraints on the Internet are needed to prevent and punish misinformation enabled by online anonymity. Right: unlike for our establishment media outlets, which are Beacons of Informed, Accountable and Objective Truth.

Along those lines, Newsweek today has a darkly and unintentionally hilarious article purporting to explain why most American journalists refuse to defend WikiLeaks and the government's assault on its press freedoms. It contains this line: "American journalists, unlike many of their foreign counterparts, have a strong commitment to objectivity and nonpartisanship." The level of self-delusion necessary to produce such a claim is unfathomable.