02feb01
De berichten (login en pass: daanspeak) in de media over de Amerikaanse plannen om officieus beleid (liegen tegen de burgers) nu officieel te maken met de oprichting van het Office of Strategic Influence, doen DaanSpeak denken aan Operation Mockingbird. Deze geheime operatie 'was conceived in the late 1940s, the most frigid period of the cold war, when the CIA began a systematic infiltration of the corporate media, a process that often included direct takeover of major news outlets', schrijft Alex Constantine voor (voormalig?) tijdschrift Prevailing Winds.

Constantine vervolgt: 'In this period, the American intelligence services competed with communist activists abroad to influence European labor unions. With or without the cooperation of local governments, Frank Wisner, an undercover State Department official assigned to the Foreign Service, rounded up students abroad to enter the cold war underground of covert operations on behalf of his Office of Policy Coordination. Philip Graham, a graduate of the Army Intelligence School in Harrisburg, PA, then publisher of the Washington Post [en echtgenoot van Katherine Graham], was taken under Wisner's wing to direct the program code-named Operation MOCKINGBIRD.

"By the early 1950s," writes formerVillage Voice reporter Deborah Davis in Katharine the Great [een boek over Katherine Graham, de vorig jaar overleden uitgeefster van de Washington Post, bekend bijwoonster van de Bilderbergbijeenkomsten, die publicatie van het boek probeerde te verhinderen], "Wisner 'owned' respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles, plus stringers, four to six hundred in all, according to a former CIA analyst." The network was overseen by Allen Dulles, a templar for German and American corporations who wanted their points of view represented in the public print. Early MOCKINGBIRD influenced 25 newspapers and wire agencies consenting to act as organs of CIA propaganda. Many of these were already run by men with reactionary views, among them William Paley (CBS), C.D. Jackson (Fortune), Henry Luce [oprichter van Time/Life en lid van Skull & Bones] (Time) and Arthur Hays Sulzberger (N.Y. Times).

Activists curious about the workings of MOCKINGBIRD have since been appalled to find in FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] documents that agents boasting in CIA office memos of their pride in having placed "important assets" inside every major news publication in the country. It was not until 1982 that the Agency openly admitted that reporters on the CIA payroll have acted as case officers to agents in the field.'

[...]

In the 1950s, outlays for global propaganda climbed to a full third of the CIA's covert operations budget. Some 3, 000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts. The cost of disinforming the world cost American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year by 1978, a budget larger than the combined expenditures of Reuters, UPI and the AP news syndicates.'

Deze snipper lag nog op de grond: De Volkskrant 18dec01: 'Geheime peilingen kostten acht ton'
'Het kabinet heeft de afgelopen drie maanden 800 duizend gulden uitgegeven aan geheime opiniepeilingen over de oorlog tegen het terrorisme. [...] Het kabinet weigert de opinie-onderzoeken vrij te geven, ondanks verzoeken daartoe van de Tweede Kamer.'

DaanSpeak
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