CIA, Search-Engines and JFK Assassination

[John Simkin]

This article is also well worth reading.

http://www.aim.org/media_monitor/A737_0_2_0_C/

I am very keen to share my research with Daniel Brandt.

However, you can't contact him by email via his website. Would anyone based in America be willing to give him a phonecall:

Daniel Brandt operates Public Information Research, PO Box 680635, San Antonio TX 78268-0635.

Nonprofit publisher of NameBase, http://www.yahoo-watch.org, and http://www.google-watch.org/

Tel: 210-509-3160

[John Simkin]

Other search-engines such as AltaVista, Yahoo, AlltheWeb now all listed my page on Operation Mockingbird. They also have my Wikipedia entry on the first page. MSN Search of course don’t list it (in fact, they don’t carry any of my pages on CIA operatives or operations in its database). Others like AskJeeves, Lycos, Netscape, AOL Search, seem to rely on Google for its results.

My page on Bernardo de Torres is in all the databases except for MSN Search. As one could expect, this Microsoft search-engine is completely under the control of the CIA.

[Antti Hynonen]

John Simkin Posted Today, 08:08 AM

  Other search-engines such as AltaVista, Yahoo, AlltheWeb now all listed my page on Operation Mockingbird. They also have my Wikipedia entry on the first page. MSN Search of course don’t list it (in fact, they don’t carry any of my pages on CIA operatives or operations in its database). Others like AskJeeves, Lycos, Netscape, AOL Search, seem to rely on Google for its results.

My page on Bernardo de Torres is in all the databases except for MSN Search. As one could expect, this Microsoft search-engine is completely under the control of the CIA.

But John, you have to understand that the information you have put together and published in various easily accessible places (internet) poses a threat to national security. It is only for the benefit of the people that they be shielded from this type of information, as it may cause unrest if discovered by the masses. Surely you understand.

[John Simkin]

I am pleased to announce that my campaign against the blocking of my page on Operation Mockingbird at Google has been successful. It has been restored to the Google database. (It now appears at 3rd in the ranking). So also has my page on Frank Wisner, the man who established Mockingbird. Another person blocked, Mary Pinchot Meyer, is also back in (although John McAdams’ CIA disinformation page is still ranked at number 1).

As I expected, the publicity being generated by this was causing Google more problems than it was worth. Especially my journalist friends who took up my case with Google.

What is important in all this is that the CIA thought it necessary to pressurize Google into removing these pages from its database. I am obviously on the right track in my research.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmockingbird.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKwisner.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmeyerM.htm

[Pat Speer]

John, while I wouldn't be surprised if what you say is true, I've spent too much time on the internet and working with techies over the years not to point out that sometimes weird stuff happens with computers. There may very well have been a glitch in one of Googles computers, a glitch they just recently discovered. I'm pretty sure the FBI can't even do Google searches, let alone control them. And they would have more legal authority and resources to do such a thing than the CIA.

I seriously doubt there is anyone at the CIA at this time who knows what happened in Dallas, or what the CIA's role was in the assassination. If we're being tracked it's because we're saying things that reflect badly on the U.S.

I believe Operation Mockingbird as you call it was a two-way street with willing journalists out there co-operating with the CIA in building a New World Order. While it certainly seems that it continues on to this day, I don't think the current administration would have any problem with you outing Ben Bradlee or any of the other liberalls involved, the Georgetown set. Like Nixon hiring Hunt to forge the Diem cables, the current climate is such that conservatives will stop at nothing to try and discredit the prominent liberals of the past as hypocrites and liars. Like asking a conservative columnist to out a Bush critic's wife as a CIA employee.

[Steven Gaal]

Dear Pat. Bradlee is a false left man. "We" being tracked discredit the CIA. If the

CIA feels that ." Whats good for the CIA is good for the USA", then yes we are 'hurting" the USA. Per from what Ive heard from a researcher that went to NARA with other researchers = the CIA still has a active role at NARA. Ive posted here at the forum that a 40 page DOC on DEMOH,ONI,1942 is not electronically anymore listed at NARA -just a one (thats 1) pg ref that the file is in a (where??) DEMH ONI file. Mr. Simkin should note the following link,that puts Eugene Meyer and son-in-law as investors in ZAPATA. To me the file missing from NARA and decreased info on the POST owners link to one GHWB. Pat, I know you know whats on pg 42 of the Secret War Book. That Crichton and GHWB worked with business men and anti-Castro CIA

operations.

Mae Brussell was told the DALLAS shooters came up from Mexico with the help of the PEMARGO corporation (GHWB and Edwin Pauley set up PEMARGO). Pat Im also sure you have the self-published Dallas Coinspiracy by PD Scott. Just go Chapter 9 of that book, the Robert B. Anderson Chapter.

Crichton - Harold Byrd-Edwin Pauley all know each other and Pauley worked with Robert B. Anderson on the Stolen WWII Japanese Gold operation . Crichton knows Robert Stewart III and GHWB is in business with Edwin Pauley. THUS YOU have a GHWB-Crichton-Byrd-Pauley -Anderson- Stewart III nexus. I dont believe this is in Mr. Hancock's book (since he is concerned with who LBJ met post assassination) but the longest Sunday LBJ meeting was with Robert B. Anderson. THANKS STEVE GAAL BTW PAULEY and GHWB both know DEMOH. DEMOH has Pauley listed 4 (thats four times) in his phone book volumes, also with the rare "POPPY" name next to GHWB's phone number. ALSO DPD radio transcripts show that the truck stalled on the GK (and seen by Ann Mercer) was connected to construction at the FNBD,said bank was owned by Robert Stewart III.

Media

Part 1 of a two part-series

Secret admirers: The Bushes and the Washington Post

By Michael Hasty

Online Journal Contributing Writer

February 5, 2004—Ever since the days of the Watergate scandal, when a series of front-page articles by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon, the Post has had a reputation among many Americans as one of the elite bastions of the "liberal media."

This opinion is especially prevalent among conservatives, who also fault the Post for its publication (along with that other "liberal" icon, The New York Times) of the Pentagon Papers—an action they correctly view as having made a major contribution to undermining domestic support for the war in Vietnam. During the '70s, there was an angry conservative boycott of the paper in the Washington, DC, area, with "I Don't Believe the Post" bumper stickers appearing on cars and WP vending boxes.

At the heart of the Post's "liberal" reputation is the sense that its coverage represents the thinking of what used to be known as the "Eastern Liberal Establishment" back in the days when Republicans could be liberals (with a favorable view of internationalism and the welfare state) and before the Establishment moved to Texas and got saved by Jesus, its favorite political philosopher. This was the same period when the Central Intelligence Agency, still dominated by the Establishment Ivy Leaguers who organized the "oh-so-social" OSS in World War II, was also widely seen as a "liberal" institution.

With a 21st-century perspective, where internationalism has become globalization, and monopoly capitalism is so powerful it no longer needs to mask its agenda with welfare programs, we can see the Establishment's "liberalism" for the ruthless neoliberalism it has always been. Yet the more powerful and elite the ruling class, the greater its need for an effective propaganda system to maintain that power; and the Washington Post remains, as writer Doug Henwood described it in 1990, "the establishment's paper."

In an article published by the media watchdog group, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), Henwood traced the Post's Establishment connections to Eugene Meyer, who took control of the Post in 1933. Meyer transferred ownership to his daughter Katharine and her husband, Philip Graham, after World War II, when he was appointed by Harry Truman to serve as the first president of the World Bank. A lifelong Republican, Meyer had been "a Wall Street banker, director of President Wilson's War Finance Corporation, a governor of the Federal Reserve, and director of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation," Henwood wrote.

Philip Graham, Meyer's successor, had been in military intelligence during the war. When he became the Post's publisher, he continued to have close contact with his fellow upper-class intelligence veterans—now making policy at the newly formed CIA—and actively promoted the CIA's goals in his newspaper. The incestuous relationship between the Post and the intelligence community even extended to its hiring practices. Watergate-era editor Ben Bradlee also had an intelligence background; and before he became a journalist, reporter Bob Woodward was an officer in Naval Intelligence. In a 1977 article in Rolling Stone magazine about CIA influence in American media, Woodward's partner, Carl Bernstein, quoted this from a CIA official: "It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from." Graham has been identified by some investigators as the main contact in Project Mockingbird, the CIA program to infiltrate domestic American media. In her autobiography, Katherine Graham described how her husband worked overtime at the Post during the Bay of Pigs operation to protect the reputations of his friends from Yale who had organized the ill-fated venture.

After Graham committed suicide, and his widow Katharine assumed the role of publisher, she continued her husband's policies of supporting the efforts of the intelligence community in advancing the foreign policy and economic agenda of the nation's ruling elites. In a retrospective column written after her own death last year, FAIR analyst Norman Solomon wrote, "Her newspaper mainly functioned as a helpmate to the war-makers in the White House, State Department and Pentagon." It accomplished this function (and continues to do so) using all the classic propaganda techniques of evasion, confusion, misdirection, targeted emphasis, disinformation, secrecy, omission of important facts, and selective leaks.

Graham herself rationalized this policy in a speech she gave at CIA headquarters in 1988. "We live in a dirty and dangerous world," she said. "There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows."

I guess it depends on what you mean by "democracy."

At any rate, this brief overview of the Washington Post's covert history serves as a useful backdrop to information revealed in "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power," written by oil industry insider Daniel Yergin, and a national bestseller when it was published in 1991.

In a bit of fortuitous timing, Yergin's book was released in the immediate aftermath of the Persian Gulf War. He unequivocally states in his introduction that "oil was at the heart of [this war]," contradicting the denials of then-President George H.W. Bush, who had insisted in a now-familiar litany that the war against Iraq was really about "freedom." And because of Bush's own professional roots in the oil industry, and the industry's consequent influence on his policies in office, Yergin includes some biographical nuggets that shed an interesting light on Bush's relationship with the Washington Post.

Quoting from a Fortune magazine article about a "swarm of young Ivy Leaguers" who had settled in Midland, Texas, soon after World War II, and "created a most unlikely outpost of the working rich . . . a union between the cactus and the Ivy," Yergin provides an account of the early days of Zapata Oil, Bush's first company.

"Bush quickly mastered the skills of the independent oil man," Yergin writes, including, "of course, making the pilgrimage back East to round up money from investors." Here's where things get interesting. "On a brisk morning in the mid-1950s, near Union Station in Washington, DC, he even closed a deal with Eugene Meyer, the august publisher of the Washington Post, in the back seat of Meyer's limousine. For good measure, Meyer also committed his son-in-law to the deal. Meyer remained one of Bush's investors over the years."

A consideration to keep in mind here is the greater-than-even likelihood that at this point in his career, George H.W. Bush was already working as a covert CIA operative. This stems not only from his class and pedigree—Yale University had a reputation as "the alma mater of spies"—but from the fact that the CIA often "borrows" the private assets of businesses, especially those with international operations, to provide support for its covert actions. Most compelling, perhaps, is a cryptic reference found in a Warren Commission document, concerning an FBI briefing about the JFK assassination given in Texas to a "Mr. George Bush of the CIA." When asked about this years later, Bush gave the explanation that it must have referred to a CIA employee with the same name. That individual, a low level bureaucrat, denied to reporters that he had ever been to Texas, much less that in his position he would have received such a briefing.

What is particularly fascinating about Yergin's revelation of the long term financial link between Bush and the Graham family—a revelation also confirmed by Katherine Graham in her memoir—is that George H.W. Bush spent much of his political career complaining about the "liberal" reporting in the Post. Yergin, whose sketch of Bush's career covers only a few pages in this lengthy book, is slyly aware of this seeming contradiction, so he has some fun with the game Bush was playing. He includes a quote from a note then-Congressman Bush sent to Treasury Secretary David Kennedy in 1969, thanking him for meeting with some Texas oilmen at Bush's home in Houston. "I was also appreciative of your telling them how I bled and died for the oil industry," Bush wrote. "That might kill me off in the Washington Post but it darn sure helps in Houston." A curious comment indeed, considering the Grahams' investment in his business.

This arms-length public posture sometimes went to hilarious extremes. In his book, "Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate," Bob Woodward includes much of the substance of a handwritten three-page reply he received from Bush denying Woodward's request for an interview. Criticizing Woodward's Watergate reporting, Bush wrote, "For me Watergate was a major event, for as you correctly point out, I was chairman of the GOP during those tumultuous times . . . I think Watergate and the Vietnam War are the two things that moved Beltway journalism into this aggressive, intrusive, 'take no prisoners' kind of reporting that I can now say I find offensive."

Just past Watergate's thirtieth anniversary, Bush's comments here bring several observations to mind that have been generally ignored. One is that there had been growing dissatisfaction among the nation's ruling class with the presidency of Richard Nixon, whose environmental and social legislation has led some revisionist commentators to refer to him as "the last liberal president." More importantly, Nixon was also seeking to reorganize the intelligence services. These facts have inspired some out-of-the-mainstream journalists, like Doug Henwood and the late investigative reporter Steve Kangas, to suggest that Woodward's "Deep Throat" contact was actually someone in the CIA. Kangas had also suggested that the semi-conscious and dying William Casey, director of Central Intelligence in the Reagan administration and Woodward's controversial leading "source" for his book, "Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987," was in actuality the "alter ego" of Woodward's real source: George H.W. Bush.

In any event, Woodward's "Shadow" undercuts what he describes as Bush's "hatred" of the press with an account of an episode where the Post served to neutralize an aspect of the Iran-contra scandal that Bush saw as a danger to his upcoming presidential campaign. "On Friday, February 6, 1987," Woodward writes, "Bush dispatched one of his top aides to my house to deliver a copy of a three-page top-secret memo." He goes on to describe how, after Bush saw the headline on the Post's lead story two days later, he called the aide who had delivered the memo to offer congratulations. Woodward's judgment is that, "It was perhaps a shrewd use of the news media by Bush."

Yergin's book also discusses an illuminating episode where the Post offered protective cover for Bush. In a trip to Saudi Arabia in April 1986, then-Vice President Bush appeared to be taking a position in favor of higher oil prices that contradicted the free-market policies of the Reagan administration, and he was receiving a lot of criticism in the American media.

"Columnists denounced him for cuddling up to OPEC," Yergin writes. "Of course, within the oil states he was much commended for what he said. But outside the oil patch, it seemed that just about the only voice that had anything good to say about Bush's position was none other than the editorial page of the Washington Post, the newspaper he had once feared would kill him off for expressing pro-oil industry sentiments. On the contrary, the Post now said that the Vice President was on to a very important point in his warning of how low prices would undermine the domestic energy industry, even if no one wanted to admit it."

Naturally, it could be argued that the Graham family was merely protecting its own investments. But this protective influence extended to other events in Bush's political career, including the major scandals that erupted throughout the Reagan and Bush administrations—Iran/contra, BCCI, Iraqgate, savings-and-loan, CIA drug dealing, HUD—in virtually all of which Bush himself was implicated. As a paper of record and a news source for local and regional papers across the country, the Post was able to keep a muzzle on these scandals, and frame the national coverage in such a way that "respectable" media didn't stray too far from "conventional (which is to say, elite) wisdom."

It was a system that also served the Post's interests. The paper's standing as an important source of news was elevated by its constant diet of confidential information and intelligence leaks from Bush and his allies, and its exclusive access to the inner circles of power. Bush was also able to protect the Post from the exposure of its intimate connections with the CIA when the US Senate's Church Committee hearings were investigating Project Mockingbird in the mid-'70s. As CIA director when those investigations were conducted, Bush successfully fought the release of the names of CIA media contacts to the committee.

Following Bush's one-term presidency, the Post continued to serve the Bush agenda. It was unstinting in its criticism of the Clinton administration, and lurid and exhaustive in its coverage of the various scandals that dogged Bill and Hillary Clinton, invariably conveying the sense that the nation's capital had been invaded by so much Arkansas trailer trash. The Post's Whitewater reporter, Susan Schmidt, was such a reliable conduit of leaks and information from Independent Counsel Ken Starr (Bush's Solicitor General), that she became known to some media critics as "Steno Sue." The paper's voracious approach to Whitewater is all the more revealing in light of the fact that the Whitewater investigation was initiated in the last days of the 1992 campaign by Bush's White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray, and that—as reformed conservative David Brock documents in his book, "Blinded by the Right"—the "vast right wing conspiracy" that sought to depose Clinton essentially constituted a "Bush government in exile."

The Washington Post's traditional and solicitous portrayal of George H.W. Bush as a well-bred man of integrity has of course also been extended to his son, George W. Bush. The often absurd and transparent lengths to which the newspaper has gone to serve this function will be the subject of the second part of this article.

Michael Hasty is a writer, activist, musician, carpenter and farmer. He lives in West Virginia. In his youth, he was a low level employee of the CIA.

Email editor@onlinejournal.com

Copyright © 1998-2005 Online Journal™. All rights reserved.

Edited June 15, 2005 by Steven Gaal

[Pat Speer]

So Katie Graham's father invested in a Senator's son's oil company? Sounds like a good way of keeping the FCC off your back. The fact seems to be that the east coast elite Nixon hated so much, right and left, knew each other and invested in each other's companies. Averill Harriman, who Tim thinks was a communist, was GHW Bush's father's boss and business partner.

The reality is that the Washington Post is a left-slanted newspaper, and has been for decades. They led the way on many top stories, including Watergate and Abu Ghraib, and were hated by Hoover and other anti-Communists. The Reagan-era Republicans hated it so much that they encouraged the cult-leader the Rev. Sun Myung Moon to create an alternative paper for Republicans, the Washington Times. He owns it to this day and continues to push a hard-right agenda. He knows where the bread is buttered.

While the Post, the New York Times and the L.A. Times play footsie with the government most of the time, they also occasionally break major stories. As conservative as they might seem from afar, to the eyes of middle-America, they're anti-American and slightly pink.

Edited June 15, 2005 by Pat Speer

[John Simkin]

John, while I wouldn't be surprised if what you say is true, I've spent too much time on the internet and working with techies over the years not to point out that sometimes weird stuff happens with computers.  There may very well have been a glitch in one of Googles computers, a glitch they just recently discovered.  I'm pretty sure the FBI can't even do Google searches, let alone control them.  And they would have more legal authority and resources to do such a thing than the CIA.

This is not just a case of “computer glitch”. Let me explain how the Google database works. Every couple of days the Google “spider” visits my website. It collects every one of my pages and places them in its database. I have a device on my website that monitors this activity.

My pages on Operation Mockingbird, Frank Wisner and Mary Pinchot Meyer entered the Google database soon after I initially created them. In fact, they remained in Google’s UK database. However, they were removed from Google’s main database. This meant that when you did a search from http://www.google.co.uk/ these pages appeared at the top of the rankings. However, when you did a search via its main site: http://www.google.com they were not there. The only time that this has happened before was over my page on Bernardo de Torres. The pattern was very similar. My complaints to Google were ignored. However, after I got my journalist friends to contact Google about it, the page returned to the database.

See the following for more on the way Google censors certain websites:

http://www.google-watch.org/jobad.html

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/google/

http://www.google-watch.org

[John Simkin]

Google is not the only one using search-engines to censor the web. There is an article in today's Guardian about how Bill Gates is working with the Chinese government in order to block free debate.

I am of the opinion that China will eventually replace the United States as the world’s major economic power. The main reason I say this is that it has been able to successfully merge aspects of capitalism and communism. In fact, I would argue that it has developed a new system called state capitalism. Using capital from the western democracies and the state control of the labour force, it’s economy is growing at a tremendous rate. Without free trade unions Chinese labour costs are likely to remain low. This will continue to keep the price of goods lower than their main competitors. Bill Gates recently described what is going on in China as “a brand new form of capitalism, and as a consumer it’s the best thing that ever happened.” What he means of course is that it is the best thing that has happened for capitalists like Bill Gates.”

Gates is willing to do what he can to make the Chinese capitalist revolution possible. Microsoft has joined forces with the Chinese government to prevent freedom of expression in China. It has created software that searches for Chinese websites and blogs that uses words like “freedom”, “democracy”, “communism”, “socialism” and “capitalism”. These are then blocked from Chinese search-engines. A Microsoft spokesman said the “restrictions were the price the company had to pay to spread the positive benefits of blogs”.

[Steven Gaal]

Dear Pat, Washington Post 'red' ????? See below, I can go on all day on this. Its the CIA paper (in general), some think the CIA lefty-- the POST is establishment. You know Pat the establisment that made welfare last 5 years,the establishment that doesnt support national health care,the establishment that has Defense money equal 95 % of the rest of the world's defense spending combined,the establishment that spends billions on Export-Import Bank that sends USA factories overseas,the establishment that supports the PATRIOT ACT........ Pat I can go to FAIR and show you scores ( actually my search returned 804 items at FAIR alone !!! ) of articles that the POST supports the globalist conservative agenda. ....Perception of midwesteners that POST is 'lefty' ??, well PAT ,between u me and the tree...if wishes were fishes ,ect,ect,ect THANKS STEVE GAAL http://www.fair.org/activism/post-expulsions.html , the lefty Post see http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2494 , see here POST protecting GHWB , http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1065 Dear PAT, I can list stuff till the end of time...POST conservative globalist (secular) rag-sheet that supports BUSH.

Edited June 15, 2005 by Steven Gaal