Patrick Lawrence on The US Press, Spooks & the Church Committee

[Paul Rigby]

COLD WAR, COLUMN, COMMENTARY, CUBA, INDONESIA, IRAN, MEDIA, SECRECY, SURVEILLANCE, U.S., UNTIL THIS DAY--HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE NEWS

The US Press, Spooks & the Church Committee

July 25, 2023e

 

Nineteen fifty-three was a peculiar year for The Washington Post to question the C.I.A.’s drift into activist intrigues, writes Patrick Lawrence in this excerpt from his forthcoming book, Journalists and Their Shadows.

Indonesian President Achmed Sukarno and Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 1960, Havana. (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News

On Jan. 9, 1953, The Washington Post published an editorial we can read all these years later as a murmur amid silence. “Choice or Chance” was a blunt worry about what the C.I.A., 5 years old at this time, was getting up to. Was the agency to analyze information it gathered or that had come to it — a matter of chance — or was it actively and covertly to execute interventions of its own choosing?

The agency hardly invented clandestine operations, coups, assassinations, disinformation campaigns, election fixing, bribery in high places, false flags and the like. But it was elaborating and institutionalizing such intrigues, and they were coming to define America’s Cold War conduct.

The Washington Post stood with the objectors — at least it did on page 20 of that winter Friday’s editions. The agency’s activities were “incompatible with a democracy,” Washington’s local paper protested. They risked an unwanted war. Reform was in order. Once again to be noted: The conflict the Post aired concerned method. The Cold War’s taxonomy and Washington’s division of the world into adversarial blocs lay beyond question.

As interesting as the Post’s editorial was the dead quiet that followed. Nothing more was published on the topic. Eight months later, the Post obfuscated the C.I.A.’s role in the coup that toppled the Mossadegh government in Iran; a year after that came the coup that brought down the democratically elected government of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala, and the C.I.A.’s role in it was once again illegible. Operating with little inhibition, the agency would later plot to plant an exploding cigar in Castro’s humidor and make a pornographic film with a look-alike actor impersonating Sukarno, Indonesia’s too-independent president (later deposed in a C.I.A.–cultivated coup).

American readers and viewers knew next to nothing of all such operations, as intended. Nor did they seem to want to. Citizens were willingly transformed into consumers. A national somnambulance had set in.

CIA director Allen Dulles on the cover of Time magazine, 1953. (Boris Artzybasheff, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)

Nineteen fifty-three was a peculiar year for the Post to question the C.I.A.’s drift into activist intrigues. Allen Dulles took over as the agency’s director less than a month after the Post editorial appeared.

Dulles put Frank Wisner, a former OSS man, in charge of the agency’s “black operations.” [The Office of Strategic Services was the C.I.A.’s predecessor.] This included making maximum use of the press by compromising its ranks — not least its high command. Journalists were recruited to serve as agents, agents were trained sufficiently to pose as journalists, not infrequently with the blessings of publishers and network presidents. Wisner called his operation “my mighty Wurlitzer” after those turn-of-the-century contraptions that performed musical magic at the strike of a key.

The more alert reporters, correspondents, and editors had long suspected there were C.I.A. operatives in their midst. There was no evidence of this, and, then as now, one did not name a name without any. A silence worthy of a Catholic chapel prevailed for two decades after Wisner set his machine in motion. When this was finally broken, it was as a pebble tossed into a pond produces ever-larger ripples.

Jack Anderson, the iconoclastic columnist, revealed in the autumn of 1973, just as I was crossing the marble floor at The News [the New York Daily News, my first employer], that a Hearst Newspapers reporter had spied on Democratic presidential candidates in the service of the Nixon campaign. At the time Anderson published, Seymour Frieden was a Hearst correspondent in London. Not quite in passing but nearly, Anderson also reported that Frieden tacitly acknowledged working for the C.I.A.

The pebble was tossed. The ripples grew slowly at first.

Colby’s ‘Limited Hangout’

William Colby, the recently named director of the C.I.A., responded with a standard agency maneuver: When news is going to break against you, disclose the minimum, bury the rest, and maintain control of what we now call “the narrative.” Among the spooks this was and remains known as a “limited hangout.” Colby “leaked” to a Washington Star–News reporter named Oswald Johnston. Johnston’s piece was fronted on Nov. 30, 1973.

“The Central Intelligence Agency,” it began, “has some three dozen American journalists working abroad on its payroll as undercover informants, some of them full-time agents, the Star-News has learned.” Johnston followed this four-square lead just as Colby had wished. “Colby is understood to have ordered the termination of this handful of journalist-agents,” he wrote further down in his report, adding — and this is the truly delightful part —

“on the full realization that C.I.A. employment of reporters in a nation which prides itself on an independent press is a subject fraught with controversy.”

Johnston broke a big story, Johnston was a patsy. This was the agency’s “tradecraft” in action.

Once again, the rest of the press let Johnston’s revelations sink without further investigation. But Colby’s gambit was on the way to failing, as was the press’s see-no-evil pose.

C.I.A. Director William Colby, at left, briefing President Gerald Ford and his senior advisers. (David Hume Kennerly, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Public domain)

A year after the Johnston piece appeared, Stuart Loory, a former Los Angeles Times correspondent and then a journalism professor at The Ohio State University, published a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review that stands as the first extensive exploration of relations between the C.I.A. and the press. Another year later, the C.I.A. found itself where it never wanted to be: in the public eye, visible.

Even before it was over, 1975 was known as “the Year of Intelligence.” In January, President Gerald Ford commissioned a committee to investigate the C.I.A.’s illegal breaches. Soon after Ford named his experts, among them none other than Ronald Reagan, the Senate and House convened their own committees to look into the C.I.A.’s doings abroad and at home. The Church Committee, so named for Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat who headed the Senate inquiry, was the committee that mattered. Its final report arrived in six volumes in April 1976, the Year of Intelligence proving a long one.

This was a critical moment for America’s Cold War edifice — or it could have been, I had better put it. The Church Committee was to be the first concerted attempt to exert political control over an agency that had long since, as we say now, “gone rogue.”

In this, Church and his investigative staff held the making of history in their hands. They could have deprived those asserting America’s global hegemony one of their most essential institutions, and they would have decisively cut media’s ties with it. As things turned out, the Church Committee’s failure is wherein the history resides. In the breach, those directing the undertaking elected to obfuscate the obfuscators.

Ties of all sorts to journalists of all sorts were among the programs the C.I.A. was most vigorously determined to keep in the shadows. The agency’s elisions, untruths, and arms-folded refusals to cooperate with Senate investigators must count as a model for all aspiring stonewallers. In due course, the Church Committee found itself drawn into prolonged negotiations with Colby and other senior C.I.A. officials it never should have entered upon.

There were other indicators that failure was on the way. The committee had spent too much time on assassination plots and agency exotica to give the question of press complicity the attention it warranted. Church, who for a time nursed dreams of a run for the presidency, did not want his name on an investigation that would make a faux-patriotic agency protecting national security look as objectionable as it was.

The final “findings” found little to find. No one from the press was called to testify — no correspondents, no editors, none of those at the top of the major dailies or the broadcasters. A year after the committee released its six volumes, Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame elicited in eight words all that needed saying about the 16 months of Capitol Hill drama. Faced with the prospect of forcing the C.I.A. to sever all covert ties with the press, a senator Bernstein did not name remarked, “We just weren’t ready to take that step.”

Bernstein Reveals Press Penetration

Carl Bernstein, 2007.
(Larry D. Moore, CC BY-SA 3.0)

It was Bernstein who unwrapped the story. In a 25,000–word piece published in Rolling Stone on October 10, 1977, the ex–Post reporter led readers into a vast universe of connections, co-optation, and collusion. It wasn’t “some three dozen journalists operating as agents.” It was more than 400. All the names were there: the Times, The Post, CBS, ABC, NBC, Newsweek, TIME, the wires.

Those cooperating ran to the top: William Paley (CBS), Arthur Hays and C. L. Sulzberger (the Times), the Alsop brothers (the New York Herald Tribune, later The Washington Post). Arthur Hays Sulzberger, The Times’ publisher, had a signed a secrecy agreement with the C.I.A. and gave his tacit approval to correspondents who wanted to work for the agency.

Seymour Hersh and I. F. Stone, two exemplary independent journalists at this time, had also reported on the C.I.A.’s numerous illegal programs, known in-house as “the family jewels.”

It was Hersh who, in December 1974, broke the story of the agency’s extravagant spying operations focused on antiwar activists and other dissidents — a 7,000–word piece that prefigured the Church Committee by a month and five days. But Bernstein’s mastery of detail on the agency’s penetration of the press — too profuse to recount but briefly — remains nonpareil. Most of it derived from C.I.A. files and interviews with agency offiC.I.A.ls and the journalists the Church Committee never asked to testify.

In what coverage there was of the decades of deceit, the press did its best to convey the impression it was the unscrupulously sullied innocent. Most of those involved professed to know nothing about all the consensual compromises. Some were proudly patriotic. “I’ve done things for them when I thought they were the right thing to do,” Joe Alsop told Bernstein. “I call it doing my duty as a citizen.”

But lapsed memories, lies, and blurred lines were the prevalent responses. While a C.I.A. officer described C. L. Sulzberger as “very eager” to cooperate with the agency, Cy told Bernstein he “would never get caught near the spook business.” Working for the agency and never getting caught working for it seem to have been two different things in Cy’s mind.

The Church Committee left various marks on the record. Some relationships between Langley and the media were broken off as the committee shut up shop. Things were not so openly and incautiously corrupt as they had been pre–Church. This was also the beginning of a long decline in mainstream media’s credibility, which, to be honest, I consider a healthy thing.

The Wurlitzer Plays On

But the Senate investigation stands in hindsight as an early example of that political event we now know too well: It was spectacle. This was how all sides wished it to be. The Wurlitzer’s volume was turned down. But as that anonymous senator said so simply, nobody ever intended to unplug it.

It would be supremely naïve to assume the Wurlitzer does not play in our time, leaving us to live with the Church Committee’s purposeful failing, as we must count it. The agency’s immunity from all oversight is now inviolable. What Capitol Hill committee now would dare to hold hearings such as those that gave the Year of Intelligence its name? Langley’s ties to the press are a closed book. Wikipedia, the alternative encyclopedia with its own objectionable relations with intelligence, as we speak carries this sentence in its entry on the Cold War programs: “By the time the Church Committee Report was completed, all C.I.A. contacts with accredited journalists had been dropped.” This is patently, demonstrably false.

I recount very briefly the evil that supposedly passed. This is the foundation on which many American myths rest. The press and broadcasters still crouch behind this one.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author of the forthcoming Journalists and Their Shadows.   Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.  His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site. 

This article is an extract from Lawrence’s Journalists and Their Shadows, forthcoming from Clarity Press.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

[Benjamin Cole]

PR--

Thanks for posting. Must reading.

The spectacle of 50 former US intel guys signing a letter and stating the Hunter Biden laptop was a Russian disinformation campaign...and then the media parroting that, and then social-media censoring discussion about the Biden laptop...is indefensible, but the new norm. 

Think about that: The new norm. An intel-state Donk alliance. 

Remember, covid-19 did not leak from a lab!

Near the conclusion of the video, which presents a relatively easy to understand narrative of the false zoonotic origins of C19, Sachs makes an interesting statement: "The Democratic Party has disintegrated." 

For modern-day Donks, controlling the narrative is far more important than the truth, even on C19. 

Probably, the 'Phants are no better. 

You wonder why someone would vote for RFK Jr.? 

And why Biden did a snuff job on the JFK Records? 

[Tom Gram]

5 hours ago, Paul Rigby said:

 Washington Star–News reporter named Oswald Johnston. Johnston’s piece was fronted on Nov. 30, 1973…

…Johnston broke a big story, Johnston was a patsy.

Heh. 

[James DiEugenio]

The CIA greatly resisted giving up Mockingbird with Bush in charge.

Hersh was fed that story by Colby in order to get rid of Angleton.

[Pat Speer]

The beginning of this piece makes it seem like the public was oblivious to the actions of the CIA for decades and decades. When I first got sucked down the assassination rabbit hole, I sought out background materials in the form of old paperbacks...then sold at a local used book store for 10 for 2.00, if I recall. In any event, I picked up a number of early books on the CIA, from the late 50's/early 60's. And these mentioned Iran, Guatemala, the Bay of Pigs, etc. 

At the time, moreover, I suspect most Americans thought the CIA's actions were a good thing. The American people did not want to get dragged into another world war. If we could shape the world and steer the third world away from communism without direct military involvement, well, that would be spiffy. 

[Paul Rigby]

18 hours ago, Pat Speer said:

The beginning of this piece makes it seem like the public was oblivious to the actions of the CIA for decades and decades. When I first got sucked down the assassination rabbit hole, I sought out background materials in the form of old paperbacks...then sold at a local used book store for 10 for 2.00, if I recall. In any event, I picked up a number of early books on the CIA, from the late 50's/early 60's. And these mentioned Iran, Guatemala, the Bay of Pigs, etc. 

At the time, moreover, I suspect most Americans thought the CIA's actions were a good thing. The American people did not want to get dragged into another world war. If we could shape the world and steer the third world away from communism without direct military involvement, well, that would be spiffy. 

David Atlee Phillips would doubtless endorse your answer:

https://youtu.be/5Ocfr2VdcpU?t=357

And the fictional CIA senior figure who gets the final word in Three Days of the Condor:

https://youtu.be/vZNnDiDSUiI?t=165

Were the American people informed of the reality of the CIA's operations in the late 1940s and throughout the decade that followed? I'd love to see your list of the literature on that subject up to the Bay of Pigs. 

[Pat Speer]

4 hours ago, Paul Rigby said:

David Atlee Phillips would doubtless endorse your answer:

https://youtu.be/5Ocfr2VdcpU?t=357

And the fictional CIA senior figure who gets the final word in Three Days of the Condor:

https://youtu.be/vZNnDiDSUiI?t=165

Were the American people informed of the reality of the CIA's operations in the late 1940s and throughout the decade that followed? I'd love to see your list of the literature on that subject up to the Bay of Pigs. 

I am not defending the CIA, which was prone to over-reach, and not above murdering people they thought were communists, or even supportive of communists. I am just pointing out that the thinking was that the world was at war, a Cold War, and that blood would be spilled, just not in the numbers of WWII or Korea. 

As far as early books on the CIA, one of the ones that got a lot of stuff right that pre-dated the Church Committee's investigations by a dozen years or so was CIA: the Inside Story by Andrew Tully. This came out in January 1962. I wouldn't be surprised if Truman had read this and that this had helped inspire him to make his anti-CIA comments the next year. In any event, my point was that many of the CIA's activities were not as hush-hush as people now seem to think, and that the American people largely knew what the CIA was doing. They just didn't care. 

[James DiEugenio]

No one in the public knew the reach and scope of the CIA before the Pike and Church committees.

To give just one example, the Church Committee actually had the CIA IG Report on the plots to kill Castro.

They actually did studies on the murder of Lumumba, and the overthrow of Diem.  In addition to their work on COINTELPRO.

The Schweiker Hart study was the first governmental exploration of just how bad the Warren Commission was. No senator was more outspoken on this than Schweiker: The Warren Report was crumpled like a house of cards.  This is why we had him in the film.

The Church Committee was featured night after night on the evening news. At times the lead story.

It was so incendiary they canned Colby and brought in Bush.  Then, Ford, Bush and Phillips combined to shut it down over the death of a spy in Greece which they blamed on Phil Agee.  They gave this guy a funeral rivaling a head of state.  And the media went along with it.  And that was more or less finis for Frank Church.

The Pike Committee, they could not even get their report published.  They leaked it to Daniel Schorr and he gave it to the Village Voice which published it using one whole issue to do so. Then it had to be published in book form in England.

Marchetti told me that the reason it fell to Bernstein to fully expose Mockingbird was because that was the one issue the CIA would not allow them to publish.  They really drew a line in the sand at that one.  They then targeted certain members of both committees for defeat.  They succeeded in large part. 

One reason I think Bernstein did what he did, was perhaps, he realized who Woodward was finally, and how their reporting let the CIA role in Watergate get away.

The Church Committee and the PIke Committee, how they came about, what they unearthed, and how they ended, this was really the story of a generation.

Edited July 29, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[Benjamin Cole]

6 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

No one in the public knew the reach and scope of the CIA before the Pike and Church committees.

To give just one example, the Church Committee actually had the CIA IG Report on the plots to kill Castro.

They actually did studies on the murder of Lumumba, and the overthrow of Diem.  In addition to their work on COINTELPRO.

The Schweiker Hart study was the first governmental exploration of just how bad the Warren Commission was. No senator was more outspoken on this than Schweiker: The Warren Report was crumpled like a house of cards.  This is why we had him in the film.

The Church Committee was featured night after night on the evening news. At times the lead story.

It was so incendiary they canned Colby and brought in Bush.  Then, Ford, Bush and Phillips combined to shut it down over the death of a spy in Greece which they blamed on Phil Agee.  They gave this guy a funeral rivaling a head of state.  And the media went along with it.  And that was more or less finis for Frank Church.

The Pike Committee, they could not even get their report published.  They leaked it do Daniel Schorr and he gave it to the Village Voice which published it using one whole issue to do so. Then it had to be published in book form in England.

Marchetti told me that the reason it fell to Bernstein to fully expose Mockingbird was because that was the one issue the CIA would not allow them to publish.  They really drew a line in the sand at that one.  They then targeted certain members of both committees for defeat.  They succeeded in large part. 

One reason I think Bernstein did what he did, was perhaps, he realized who Woodward was finally, and how their reporting let the CIA role in Watergate get away.

The Church Committee and the PIke Committee, how they came about, what they unearthed, and how they ended, this was really the story of a generation.

Amen. 

And Op Mock is bigger than ever, and globalist commercial entities (and the guard services they demand from the US military) more powerful than ever. 

 

[James DiEugenio]

Mockingbird is probably bigger now than ever.

There was a CIA memo on this that Lisa Pease has from the nineties.

Mockingbird operates out of the PAO, I think, the Public Affairs Office.  They admitted at the time that they had relationships with every single significant news organization and this had helped them turn some adverse stories into positive ones.

I mean look at what they did to Gary Webb.

Edited July 29, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[Paul Brancato]

Thanks for setting the record straight. 
Pat - the centerpiece of the article Mr Rigby posted was Bernstein’s bombshell about Operation Mockingbird. My father, who was a very well and knew all about the CIA shenanigans and overthrows, could only guess how infiltrated the msm was. He complained that the ‘liberal’ arm of media was only marginally better than the rest. 
It is naive to think things are different now. 
Ben - start a thread in the political discussions about Hunter Biden and his laptop. When I read coverage I’m struck by how far apart the left right versions are. 

[James DiEugenio]

PB: He complained that the ‘liberal’ arm of media was only marginally better than the rest. 

 

Boy how true that is.  And telling.

[Paul Rigby]

8 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Mockingbird is probably bigger now than ever.

A recent example, this one with reference to Japan's fascists:

July 28, 2023

Washington Post Still Covers Up U.S. War Crimes And Use Of Biological Weapons

The Washington Post is still covering up U.S. war crimes.

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/07/washington-post-still-covers-up-us-war-crimes-and-use-of-biological-weapons.html#more

Seiichi Morimura, who exposed Japanese atrocities in WWII, dies at 90
His book about Unit 731, a secret biological warfare branch of the Imperial Army, helped force Japan to confront its wartime past

The obituary says:

Seiichi Morimura, a Japanese writer who helped force a reckoning upon his country with his 1981 exposé of Unit 731, a secret biological warfare branch of the Imperial Army that subjected thousands of people in occupied China to sadistic medical experiments during World War II, died July 24 at a hospital in Tokyo. He was 90.

Morimura's book sold astonishingly well even when it was unusual to confronted people in Japan with the imperial crimes of their nation.

Unit 731 was at its time only comparable to some Nazi doctors who widely experimented on humans:

At a time when Japanese textbooks often minimized atrocities committed by Japan during the war, Mr. Morimura interviewed dozens of veterans of Unit 731 and documented in harrowing detail the conduct of the operation, which was established in 1938 near the Chinese city of Harbin by Japanese medical officer Shiro Ishii.

Disguised as an epidemic prevention and water purification department, the unit functioned through the end of the war as a testing ground for agents of biological warfare. Mr. Morimura’s work helped prompt more investigations in the 1980s and 1990s, which in turn led to a court case that further revealed the extent of the atrocities.

The perpetrators included many respected Japanese physicians. Thousands of people — mainly Chinese, but also Koreans, Russians and prisoners of eight total nationalities, according to Mr. Morimura — endured medical experiments that have been compared to those of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.

Victims, referred to in Japanese as “marutas,” or wooden logs, were infected with typhus, typhoid, cholera, anthrax and the plague with the goal of perfecting biological weapons. Some prisoners were then vivisected without anesthetic so that researchers could observe the effects of the disease on the human body.

“I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped,” one unnamed member of the unit told the New York Times in 1995, recalling a victim who had been infected with the plague. “This was all in a day’s work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time.”

Several thousand people, and maybe many more, were experimented to death by the unit.

When the second world war was over Unit 731 members were supposed to be put on trial for the war crimes they had committed. The U.S. military stopped that as it had planned to use what Unit 731 had learned for its own wars:

The same year that Mr. Morimura’s book was released, an American journalist, John W. Powell, wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that the U.S. government had granted immunity to members of Unit 731 in exchange for the laboratory records from their research. Mr. Morimura alleged the same. For years, the United States dismissed reports of the unit’s experiments as Cold War propaganda.

There is no further mentioning of this in the rest of the Washington Post obit.

The reader is left hanging without learning if those U.S. government claims of 'Cold War propaganda' were true or false.

The U.S. did of course do what had been alleged. Documents were released that proved it. The U.S. had done much more.

The Post also repeats false U.S. claims that the Japanese government had hindered war crime trials against the units members:

However, according to U.S. officials, the Japanese government continued to decline to assist American efforts to place perpetrators on a list of war criminals prohibited from entering the United States. Ishii lived in freedom until he died of throat cancer in 1959. The Times reported that other Unit 731 veterans became governor of Tokyo, president of the Japan Medical Association and chief of the Japanese Olympic Committee.

It was the U.S. government, not the Japanese one, which gave immunity to Unit 731 members. It even paid them high amounts for their knowledge:

The US government offered full political immunity to high-ranking officials who were instrumental in perpetrating crimes against humanity, in exchange of the data about their experiments. Among those was Shiro Ishii, the commander of Unit 731. During the cover-up operation, the U.S. government paid money to obtain data on human experiments conducted in China, according to two declassified U.S. government documents.

The total amount paid to unnamed former members of the infamous unit was somewhere between 150,000 yen to 200,000 yen. An amount of 200,000 yen at that time is the equivalent of 20 million yen to 40 million yen today.

40 million yen today are the equivalent of $284,000. Nicer to have than not to have ...

The U.S. military used the knowledge gained from Unit 731 to developed a number of biological weapons and to test them, allegedly also on humans. It even used those weapons, like Unit 731, during the war against North Korea and China.

As Jeffrey Kaye, who has long studied the case, writes:

A preponderance of the evidence over the past couple of years has established that the U.S. used biological weapons in its war with North Korea and China in the early 1950s. This is based on CIA, Department of Defense and other government documents, as well as a close reading of the confessions of twenty-five U.S. airmen. It is time now to move on to an examination of how the U.S. pulled off the operation.

The story that follows documents what seems like an unsuccessful attempt by Air Force flyers to tip off the press and government officials to the secret U.S germ warfare campaign then underway in Korea and Northeast China. This attempt at military whistleblowing allows for a wider consideration today of the evidence surrounding the germ warfare charges, especially how the bioattacks were organized.

By repeating the U.S. government false claims of 'Cold War propaganda', by not correcting it and by repeating false U.S. statements which accuse the Japanese government of hindering the war crime trials, the Washington Post is covering up the U.S. war crimes that were based on the experiments Unit 731 had made.

[Paul Rigby]

7 hours ago, Paul Brancato said:

Ben - start a thread in the political discussions about Hunter Biden and his laptop. When I read coverage I’m struck by how far apart the left right versions are. 

There's already a thread there, Paul, in the form of an exhaustive book-length analysis of its contents. I'm just about to add to it.

[Benjamin Cole]

10 hours ago, Paul Brancato said:

Thanks for setting the record straight. 
Pat - the centerpiece of the article Mr Rigby posted was Bernstein’s bombshell about Operation Mockingbird. My father, who was a very well and knew all about the CIA shenanigans and overthrows, could only guess how infiltrated the msm was. He complained that the ‘liberal’ arm of media was only marginally better than the rest. 
It is naive to think things are different now. 
Ben - start a thread in the political discussions about Hunter Biden and his laptop. When I read coverage I’m struck by how far apart the left right versions are. 

PB-

Ach. I spent too much time here already. 50 CIA'ers, led by former Director Michael Morell, said the laptop is a Russian disinfo campaign, and social media outfits in collusion with the feds censor "incorrect" comments about the laptop (that is, it was real, like the Wuhan lab leak).  

The Biden Administration is fighting for the right to censor social media as we speak. You can't make this stuff up. 

And our option to the Puppet-Dictator-in-Chief is Trump? 

How bad can it get? 

If RFK Jr. does not win the D nomination, I hope he runs indy. We need a change badly.