For those following along, here is a blast from the past, as a journalist reveals that CIA propaganda techniques that were used during the illicit Iran-Contra drug running scheme were then used here, in America, to propagandize American citizens, and to “pull the wool” over the eyes of the sheeple.
Notes on “How and who to target“ in a CIA operation …but the most interesting part was that there was a section about how the Contras should use ‘selective use of violence’ to ‘neutralize civilian targets’ that is civilian officials, judges, people of that sort. And the idea was, apparently, that you would kill these people or at least, you know, incapacitate them somehow
If there is a spiritual Mecca for old school liberal’s, old school gangsters, money launderers and thieves; or retired CIA case agents and officers, and a cohort of crippled, gnarly members of LEIU’s to come together, it would probably be Santa Monica CA, where Whitey Bulger hid out for 28 years.
Talk about an earner! Whitey is said to have reluctantly relinquished his freedom and unwillingly foregone his potential defense of ” The CIA used me in LSD experiments” defense for the sake of protecting assets in the field. And look how that turned out (hat tip to the son of one of Wild Bill Donovan’s former partners in crime.
Put another way-institutional psycopaths and bleeding hearts frequently need to meet and greet each other, if only to verify that all is wrong in the world; or, that good and evil walk the same path and-sort of-sometimes-strike a balance, sort of like a Mexican standoff.
Related Stories: From torture to terrorism: How DEA-CIA collusion led to extraordinary rendition, agency bleed and domestic mission creep: The untimely, entirely preventable death of Kiki Camerena
Related: Whitey Bulger, FBI and CIA contract killer, coerced participant in CIA LSD experiments, and the LSD defense that never was
Related: How sexual humiliation works as a tool of psychological constraint on inmates, as Whitey Bulger is accused and shamed for “masturbating,” when in fact he claims he was putting medicated powder on his privates.
Here below we see a story from an AP journalist, Robert Parry, who spoke in Santa Monica in 1993, abut CIA bleed-over and mission creep, and how propaganda from ne ‘conflict’ was deliberately bled over into America to cover yet another conflict. does that sound conflicted? Well read on…. (let me know when you see a pattern here).
Fooling America: The Book about “How Washington Insiders Twist the Truth and Manufacture the Conventional Wisdom”, and A talk by Robert Parry, a former A.P. and Newsweek reporter, given in Santa Monica on March 28, 1993 ( I have edited many portions of this talk, but you can find it online)
Well, thank you for coming out tonight. I do want to first thank FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting) for inviting me. It’s always a pleasure to leave Washington and come to the West Coast. It’s a fascinating aspect of how Washington and Los Angeles interrelate these days. I’m not sure which city is more used to producing fantasy than the other, but I always think that LA’s fantasy is often more entertaining.
But there is this tremendous sense of both envy and concern between Washington and LA, but Washington will often look down at Los Angeles as a place that produces movies, sometimes like JFK, movies that were very upsetting to the Washington establishment because they suggested that there was a cover-up of the murder of the President back in the 1960s…..
And it struck me one day, as I was sitting around, that this administration had a thing about Central America. At the time there had been a number of atrocities that were occurring, and the four American churchwomen had been killed. And the explanations coming from this transition team were quite remarkable. If you remember, Jean Kirkpatrick suggested in one interview that these weren’t really nuns, they were more political activists, which always struck me as an amazing suggestion that it’s okay to kill political activists. Anyway, it seemed like a very important area to them, one that might end up driving much of what they did, at least in terms of foreign policy and national security issues.
So I began working on it. And that experience, in a way, shaped what I did for the rest of my time at the AP. And it was also striking to me that that experience was beyond anything I could have imagine, as an American citizen, watching. It was a case of wide- spread killing – political killing – of dissidents, torture, in the case of women often rape was involved; and this government was not just supporting it, not just providing the weapons and the military support, but trying to excuse it, rationalize it and essentially hide it.
Which is where I sort of came in and I think many people in the American press corps in Washington came in, and the press corp in Central America. At the time the press corps was still the Watergate press corp, if you will. We were fairly aggressive, we were not inclined to believe what we heard from the government, and sometimes we were probably obnoxious. But we were doing our jobs as I think, more or less, as they were supposed to be done. That is – to act, when necessary, in an adversarial way.
So when we began covering this topic in early 1981, we had some very brave people in the field in El Salvador particularly and throughout Central America, and some of them risked their lives to cover that story….
The plan was to, well, officially even to Congress the White House was saying we have no intention of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua – we’re simply trying to interdict weapons going to El Salvador. In their own files at CIA, the policy file for the Contra war contained this timetable to overthrow the government of Nicaragua. So this was their plan – except that it wasn’t working. And so by early ’83, it became clear even to people at CIA that the Contras weren’t what they hoped they’d be cracked up to be, and they ended up looking at this and saying we’re going to have to do some different things.
Part of this problem though was still that, the longer this thing dragged out, the harder it was to keep all these secrets – plus the Contras were still going out and killing people left and right. So Bill Casey was stuck with a bit of a problem. And he approached it – as he was a very – Bill Casey is often, I think, misperceived – he was a very smart man, and he was extremely committed ideologically to what he was doing, and he was a person who believed in making things happen – whatever the rules might be, or whatever the red tape might be. And so he sat down and developed some strategies in 1983 on what to do. One thing is they would need more time to train the Contras – they weren’t going to work the way they were going. Secondly, they had to create the impression the Contras were better than they were, so people wouldn’t get tired of supporting them in Congress. So they decided the CIA would have to start sending in its own people, its own specially-trained Latino assets to begin doing attacks which the Contras could then claim credit for, like blowing up Corinto where they blew up this oil depot in the little town of Corinto on the coast, they sabotaged some oil pipeline in Porto San Dino, and these were all being done now by the CIA except that after they’d be done the agency guys would call up the Contra spokesmen, in this case often Edgar Chimorro, and they’d get them out of bed and say, “Now you’re going to put a news release out saying that you guys have done this.” Now the reason of course for that was to create the impression in the United States, to fool the American public and the Congress, to make the American public think the Contras were really quite effective – that they were now running sea assaults on Nicaragua – pretty sophisticated stuff for a paramilitary force.
And Casey had some other ideas. He also began to put together what became known later as the Psychological Operations Manual or the Assassination Manual, and he authorized that in the Summer of 1983, to be prepared – plus they prepared another little booklet on how if you’re a Nicaraguan how you sabotage your own government – it was a delightful comic book which I later wrote about at AP – and it showed how you’d start off with, you know, calling in sick was one of the strategies to sabotage, and you’d build up to putting sponges in the toilet to make them back up, as if any of these things work in Nicaragua to begin with, and then they taught you how to make your own malatov cocktails, it was sort of – you graduated – you moved up in your sabotage – and they’d take these little comic books and the Contras were supposed to leave them behind wherever they’d go, so the people could then start calling in sick.
So that was one of his ideas. The other one was to do this book – this very sophisticated book in many ways. It made reference to ancient scholars, and how you gave speeches, but the most interesting part was that there was a section about how the Contras should use ‘selective use of violence’ to ‘neutralize civilian targets’ that is civilian officials, judges, people of that sort. And the idea was, apparently, that you would kill these people or at least, you know, incapacitate them somehow, but what was the most remarkable thing about that point was that, when this was finally uncovered when I did a piece on this a year later or so, the CIA then argued, “Well, you don’t understand. We were trying to get the contras to be selective in their violence against civilians, not indiscriminate.” And that became actually the defense that was used by the CIA to explain why they were running this booklet.
But anyway, these things were things that Casey put together in the summer of ’83 but he had other plans, which is one section – one of the sections of my book deals with this most remarkable operation that he came up with at that time which is called the Public Diplomacy Apparatus. And what the Public Diplomacy Apparatus did was to make more systematic, to better staff, better finance this campaign to shape the reality that the American public would see. They had a phrase for it inside the administration. It was called ‘perception management’ and, with US. taxpayers dollars, they then went out and set up offices, mostly at the State Department – there was this Office of Public Diplomacy’ for Latin America – but secretly it was being run out of the National Security Council staff. And the person who was overseeing it was a man named Walter Raymond. And Mr. Raymond had been a thirty- year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency and was the top propaganda expert for the agency in the world. He shipped it over to essentially run similar programs aimed at the American public. And overseeing all of this was the Director of Central Intelligence, William Casey.
The documentation on this now is extremely strong and clear, that even on matters of personnel, as well as on matters of general strategy, Casey would be given reports, asked to provide assistance, he would help or his people would help arrange bringing in people to staff this office.
They even turned to psychological warfare experts from Fort Bragg, who were brought up to handle the cable traffic coming in from Central America. And, as they say in their own documents, the purpose of these psychological warfare specialists was to identify exploitable themes that could be used against – with the American public – to excite the American public to be more and more angry about what was happening in Central America.
The documentation is also clear that the idea was to find our ‘hot buttons’ and to see what – how they could turn, twist, spin certain information to appeal to various special groups. They’d reached the point, and this was really being directed by the CIA, of breaking down the American people into subgroups, and there were people that they thought might be, for instance the press – they developed the themes relating to freedom of the press in La Prensa, which was the newspaper in Nicaragua, which was opposed to the Sandinistas. They targeted Jewish Americans – they had a special program to attack the Sandinistas or to paint them as anti- Semitic, which of course is one of the most, to my view, one of the most heinous things a person or any group could be. But, the idea in Nicaragua was to create this image, and then use it to build support among Jewish Americans for the Contras.
They did run into a bit of a problem with this, when they first devised it, which was that, they had not yet purged the US. Embassy of honest foreign service officers, so when they were preparing this, the Embassy, Ambassador Cranton (?? couldn’t hear the name), sent up a cable – couple of cables – they were classified and I was later able to get ahold of them – which said it isn’t true! That the Sandinistas are a matter of many things that are nasty and bad, but they’re not anti-Semitic, and he said there was no verifiable ground upon which to make this charge. So what the White House did was they kept that classified and went ahead with the charge anyway. It was just too good a theme….
Gang Stalking is "community policing" aka "communist policing," and it poses a threat to Democracy and public safety 