Geoff Metcalf
CNN employs military 'psychological operations'
Mon Aug 9, 2004 00:06
64.140.159.17

Subject: CNN employs military 'psychological operations' personnel

"CNN is the most watched and widely viewed news outlet in the world. During
Operation Desert Storm, Saddam Hussein regularly watched CNN for battlefield
intelligence. The symbiotic, intimate relationship between CNN and army
psyops specialists has raised many eyebrows, with critics saying it raises
doubts about CNN's journalistic integrity and independence."

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=17437
Friday, March 3, 2000
Army 'psyops' at CNN
News giant employed military 'psychological operations' personnel
By Geoff Metcalf
© 2000 WorldNetDaily.com

CNN employed active duty U.S. Army psychological operations personnel last year, WorldNetDaily has confirmed through several sources at Fort Bragg and elsewhere.

Maj. Thomas Collins, U.S. Information Service has confirmed that "psyops" (psychological operations) personnel, soldiers and officers, have worked in the CNN headquarters in Atlanta. The lend/lease exercise was part of an Army program called "Training With Industry." According to Collins, the soldiers and officers, "... worked as regular employees of CNN. Conceivably, they would have worked on stories during the Kosovo war. They helped in the production of news."

When asked if the introduction of military personnel into a civilian news organization was standard operating procedure, one source said, "That question is above my pay grade ... but I hope so. It's what we do."

The CNN military personnel were members of the Airmobile Fourth Psychological Operations Group, stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. One of the main tasks of this group of almost 1200 soldiers and officers is to spread 'selected information.' Critics say that means dissemination of propaganda.

Cable News Network suffered a major embarrassment in the wake of the 'Tailwind' story it aired, alleging the U.S. government used lethal sarin gas to kill suspected defectors during the Vietnam war. After WorldNetDaily was the first news organization to expose the fraudulent news production, two CNN producers were fired and, eventually, CNN veteran reporter Peter Arnett also was ousted. In that case, Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Perry Smith quit his long-time job as a military adviser to CNN.

What about now? Has the U.S. military been in a position to have influenced directly CNN's news reports about the crisis in Kosovo?

Collins claims a "handful" of military assets were assigned to CNN for weeks "to get to know the company and to broaden their horizons." The Major asserts "they didn't work under the control of the army."

Several sources have confirmed the temporary outplacement of U.S. Army psyops personnel started two or three years ago, and they have been integrated into "various sectors of society." The assignment durations have been short-term up to one full year, depending on the mission. When asked, "What were the missions?" responses to WND varied from "No comment.", "... need to know," to smiles, and, in one case, an obscene recommendation.

CNN is the most watched and widely viewed news outlet in the world. During Operation Desert Storm, Saddam Hussein regularly watched CNN for battlefield intelligence. The symbiotic, intimate relationship between CNN and army psyops specialists has raised many eyebrows, with critics saying it raises doubts about CNN's journalistic integrity and independence.

The Fourth Psyop Group has been involved in the Gulf War, the Bosnian War and the Kosovo crisis. American psyops troops attempt to influence media and public opinion in armed conflicts in which American state interests are said to be at stake.

News coverage of the war in Kosovo, by CNN and other media, has been criticized as "one-sided, overly emotional, over-simplified and relying too heavily on NATO officials," observed a report from the Netherlands.

CNN has not thus far commented officially on the allegations. Megan Mahoney, a CNN spokeswoman recently said, "I don't believe that we would employ military personnel; it doesn't seem like something we would normally do." However, now that the U.S. Army Information Service has confirmed the news, Mahoney said she would have to contact CNN's senior officials.

###

Geoff Metcalf is a staff reporter for WorldNetDaily.

========================

... Cronkite was lured to CBS by Operation MOCKINGBIRD's Phil Graham, according to Deborah
Davis. ... This scandal was known by its code name Operation MOCKINGBIRD. ...

Operation Mockingbird -
The Subversion Of America's
Free Press By The CIA
3-24-00


"You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month." CIA operative discussing with Philip Graham, editor Washington Post, on the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories. "Katherine The Great," by Deborah Davis (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991)

As terrible as it is to live in a nation where the press in known to be controlled by the government, at least one has the advantage of knowing the bias is present, and to adjust for it. In the United States of America, we are taught from birth that our press is free from such government meddling. This is an insideous lie about the very nature of the news institution in this country. One that allows the government to lie to us while denying the very fact of the lie itself.


The Alex Constantine Article


Tales from the Crypt The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD

By Alex Constantine

Who Controls the Media?

Soulless corporations do, of course. Corporations with grinning, double-breasted executives, interlocking directorates, labor squabbles and flying capital. Dow. General Electric. Coca-Cola. Disney. Newspapers should have mastheads that mirror the world: The Westinghouse Evening Scimitar, The Atlantic-Richfield Intelligentser . It is beginning to dawn on a growing number of armchair ombudsmen that the public print reports news from a parallel universe - one that has never heard of politically-motivated assassinations, CIA-Mafia banking thefts, mind control, death squads or even federal agencies with secret budgets fattened by cocaine sales - a place overrun by lone gunmen, where the CIA and Mafia are usually on their best behavior. In this idyllic land, the most serious infraction an official can commit __is a the employment of a domestic servant with (shudder) no residency status.

This unlikely land of enchantment is the creation of MOCKINGBIRD.

It 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.

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., 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, "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 (Time) and Arthur Hays Sulzberger (N.Y. Times).

Activists curious about the workings of MOCKINGBIRD have since been appalled to f__ind in FOIA 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.

"World War III has begun," Henry's Luce's Life declared in March, 1947. "It is in the opening skirmish stage already." The issue featured an excerpt of a book by James Burnham, who called for the creation of an "American Empire," "world-dominating in political power, set up at least in part through coercion (probably including war, but certainly the threat of war) and in which one group of people ... would hold more than its equal share of power."

George Seldes, the famed anti-fascist media critic, drew down on Luce in 1947, explaining tha__t "although avoiding typical Hitlerian phrases, the same doctrine of a superior people taking over the world and ruling it, began to appear in the press, whereas the organs of Wall Street were much more honest in favoring a doctrine inevitably leading to war if it brought greater commercial markets under the American flag."

On the domestic front, an abiding relationship was struck between the CIA and William Paley, a wartime colonel and the founder of CBS. A firm believer in "all forms of propaganda" to foster loyalty to the Pentagon, Paley hired CIA agents to work undercover at the behest of his close friend, the busy grey eminence of the nation's media, Allen Dulles. Paley's designated go-between in his dealings with the CIA was Sig Mickelson, president of CBS News from 1954 to 1961.

The CIA's assimilation of old guard fascists was overseen by the Operations Coordination Board, directed by C.D. Jackson, formerly an executive of Time magazine and Eisenhower's Special Assistant for Cold War Strategy. In 1954 he was succeeded by Nelson Rockefeller, who quit a year later, disgusted at the administration's political infighting. Vice President Nixon succeeded Rockefeller as the key cold war strategist.
FULL STORY:
http://www.rense.com/politics6/mockingbird.htm