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Washington Post: Fake News Partner With the CIA

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Let’s frame the situation in simple terms. You work for a company that has a very lucrative partnership with a big-time money man. That money man gives you a piece of information and tells you it’s important.

What you do every day is spread information. That’s how you earn your living.

Are you going to take that piece of info from the money man and spread it, or are you going to question it and research it and shoot back hard-edged questions to the money man?

If you’re a loyal employee, and if you want to keep your job, and if you’re smart enough to understand how things work, you’re going to spread the money man’s piece of info and keep your head down.

You’re not going to worry your pretty little head about whether the piece of info is true.

Unless you’re a complete dolt, you certainly aren’t going to spread the info with a disclaimer stating that your source, the money man, has a major business contract with your company.

Getting the picture? The truth is irrelevant.

Here are key statements from Norman Solomon’s AlterNet article about the Washington Post, its owner, Jeff Bezos, and the CIA (12/18/13):

“The Post’s new owner, Jeff Bezos, is the founder and CEO of Amazon — which recently landed a $600 million contract with the CIA. But the Post’s articles about the CIA are not disclosing that the newspaper’s sole owner is the main owner of CIA business partner Amazon.”

“Even for a multi-billionaire like Bezos, a $600 million contract is a big deal. That’s more than twice as much as Bezos paid to buy the Post four months ago.”

“And there’s likely to be plenty more where that CIA largesse came from. Amazon’s offer wasn’t the low bid, but it won the CIA contract anyway by offering advanced high-tech ‘cloud’ infrastructure.”

“Bezos personally and publicly touts Amazon Web Services, and it’s evident that Amazon will be seeking more CIA contracts. Last month, Amazon issued a statement saying, ‘We look forward to a successful relationship with the CIA’.”

“As Amazon’s majority owner and the Post’s only owner, Bezos stands to gain a lot more if his newspaper does less ruffling and more soothing of CIA feathers.”

“Amazon has a bad history of currying favor with the U.S. government’s ‘national security’ establishment. The media watch group FAIR pointed out what happened after WikiLeaks published State Department cables: ‘WikiLeaks was booted from Amazon’s webhosting service AWS. So at the height of public interest in what WikiLeaks was publishing, readers were unable to access the WikiLeaks website’.”

“How’s that for a commitment to the public’s right to know?”

“Days ago, my colleagues at RootsAction.org launched a petition that says: ‘The Washington Post’s coverage of the CIA should include full disclosure that the sole owner of the Post is also the main owner of Amazon — and Amazon is now gaining huge profits directly from the CIA’…”

“While the Post functions as a powerhouse media outlet in the Nation’s Capital, it’s also a national and global entity — read every day by millions of people who never hold its newsprint edition in their hands. Hundreds of daily papers reprint the Post’s news articles and opinion pieces, while online readership spans the world.”

“Propaganda largely depends on patterns of omission and repetition. If, in its coverage of the CIA, the Washington Post were willing to fully disclose the financial ties that bind its owner to the CIA, such candor would shed some light on how top-down power actually works in our society.”

“Bezos personally and publicly touts Amazon Web Services, and it’s evident that Amazon will be seeking more CIA contracts. Last month, Amazon issued a statement saying, ‘We look forward to a successful relationship with the CIA’.”

“As Amazon’s majority owner and the Post’s only owner, Bezos stands to gain a lot more if his newspaper does less ruffling and more soothing of CIA feathers.”

“Amazon has a bad history of currying favor with the U.S. government’s ‘national security’ establishment. The media watch group FAIR pointed out what happened after WikiLeaks published State Department cables: ‘WikiLeaks was booted from Amazon’s webhosting service AWS. So at the height of public interest in what WikiLeaks was publishing, readers were unable to access the WikiLeaks website’.”

“How’s that for a commitment to the public’s right to know?”

“Days ago, my colleagues at RootsAction.org launched a petition that says: ‘The Washington Post’s coverage of the CIA should include full disclosure that the sole owner of the Post is also the main owner of Amazon — and Amazon is now gaining huge profits directly from the CIA’…”

“While the Post functions as a powerhouse media outlet in the Nation’s Capital, it’s also a national and global entity — read every day by millions of people who never hold its newsprint edition in their hands. Hundreds of daily papers reprint the Post’s news articles and opinion pieces, while online readership spans the world.”

“Propaganda largely depends on patterns of omission and repetition. If, in its coverage of the CIA, the Washington Post were willing to fully disclose the financial ties that bind its owner to the CIA, such candor would shed some light on how top-down power actually works in our society.”

You may recall that the Washington Post was a main player in launching stories about fake news sites after the presidential election.

One of the biggest fake news outlets in the world (cough, the Washington Post) took the lead in “exposing fake news.”

Then, on January 8, 2017, the Post ran a piece headlined: “It’s time to retire the tainted term ‘fake news’”. That was an attempt to stop the bleeding, because independent news sites all over the world were pointing out that mainstream news outlets had long been the biggest purveyors of fake news. The Post writer, Margaret Sullivan, stated:

“But though the term [fake news] hasn’t been around long, its meaning already is lost. Faster than you could say ‘Pizzagate,’ the label has been co-opted to mean any number of completely different things…”

Actually, the term has been around for quite a while. I named my site nomorefakenews.com in 2001. And the term, in 2016, wasn’t “co-opted.” It was turned against news outlets, like the Post, who were attacking independent media.

The Post is in bed with the CIA to the tune of $600 million. If that isn’t the foundation of fakery on a grand scale, what is?

Try to find one major news outlet that has exposed and pounded on this Washington Post-CIA marriage. You can’t. You see, the fakers protect their own. It’s a club. If you join, you keep your mouth shut about the inherent unholy alliances within the club. It’s a rule.

Memo to the New York Times, LA Times, CNN, FOX, NBC, CBS, ABC, BBC, Reuters, AP: If you want to prove you’re not fake, go after the Washington Post, hammer and tongs, on their marriage to the CIA. Don’t let up. Demand conflict of interest statements from the Post, for starters.

And here’s a talking point for you. Was Jeff Bezos’ cash purchase of the Washington Post a mere coincidence, placed next to his $600 million contract with the CIA, or did he buy the Post so he could offer the CIA an even tighter relationship with the number-one paper of record?

Get it? Or am I going too fast for you? (For more from the author of “Washington Post: Fake News Partner With the CIA” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

The CIA vs. The Presidency: This Is Not the First Time

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In 1947, the president of the United States, Harry Truman, decided: I’m going to create a snake and call it the CIA. Its watchword will be secrecy. It will collect secrets of our enemies and hold them secret and report the secrets to the president, who will decide what to do. Of course, the snake will remain under the president’s control. Its entire personality will be based on deception, but it will remain loyal to the president. No problem. Sure.

I’m thankful for Charles Hollander’s challenging piece on Thomas Pynchon’s novel, The Crying of Lot 49: “Pynchon, JFK and the CIA: Magic Eye Views of The Crying of Lot 49.”

Hollander offers vital reminders of the war between two parts of the Executive Branch: the presidency and the CIA.

“Implicit in Pynchon’s fiction is the view that events in recent American history have led to a virtual constitutional crisis, a challenge to the supremacy of the presidency by the intelligence community.”

“When Eisenhower made his ‘open skies’ proposal, in July 21, 1955, at a Geneva summit conference, calling for unrestricted but monitored overflight of national territories on both sides of the Iron Curtain, many observers felts its acceptance would have gone a long way toward thawing the Cold War. To make a gesture of good faith toward Soviet Premier Khrushchev, the president ordered the CIA (under Allen Dulles) to halt its U–2 photo–reconnaissance flights. But Dulles secretly arranged for the flights to continue. When Francis Gary Powers’s U–2 spy plane was shot down in the Ural mountains on May 1, 1960, and Khrushchev announced the facts to the world media, the embarrassed Eisenhower lied to cover up. To many it appeared that the CIA chief had disobeyed a direct order from the Commander–in–Chief. The St. Louis Post–Dispatch asked the next day, ‘Do our intelligence operatives enjoy so much freewheeling authority that they can touch off an incident of grave international import by low–level decisions unchecked by responsible policy–making power’?”

“Later, when Lee Harvey Oswald’s possible role in the U–2 affair became known, some observers felt Dulles’s action implied that the director of the CIA was above the president and that the military–industrial complex could do what it pleased, independent of the will of the people as expressed by the popularly elected and duly constituted chief executive. No wonder Ike [Eisenhower] was peeved: the CIA was running the U.S. the way it ran Latin America. The U–2 affair was no mere personality squabble, Ike vs. Dulles; it was two institutions of the executive branch vying for supremacy, the presidency vs. the CIA, hence the democratic process vs. a form of totalitarism.”

“The CIA had already planned the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion before Kennedy took office in January, and when the invasion failed, Kennedy felt that the CIA had set him up. He let it be known he intended to dismantle the CIA and assign its functions to the other intelligence units within the government. He reportedly vowed ‘to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds’… Kennedy, a Democrat, forced the Republican Allen Dulles to resign, along with other senior CIA officers. But the CIA was too deeply involved just then in operations around the world to be disassembled. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, in a way that implicated the CIA…critics of the Warren Commission Report, maybe even J. Edgar Hoover—believed the CIA had some hand in Kennedy’s assassination and the coverup. If it had, the CIA was again demonstrating that the presidency was subordinate to the CIA.”

“In a very short time, two presidents, a Republican and a Democrat, ran afoul of the CIA. The result amounted to a constitutional crisis, a change in our actual form of government without benefit of a duly ratified constitutional amendment. The crisis is reminiscent of that period in Roman history when the Praetorian Guard could sell the office of Emperor to the highest bidder and then, after a time, assassinate him and have a new auction. To this day, the president has never again challenged the CIA, though the agency has made its share of egregious errors. With the selection of former CIA director George H.W. Bush, the presidency and the CIA effectively merged…”

These days, President Trump is in his own war against the CIA and other parts of the intelligence community (IC).

In his case, he has overtly criticized the IC and called them disseminators of fake news and lies. He claims he’s putting an end to foreign wars of conquest. He’s already canceled a major Globalist trade treaty, the TPP.

But the IC believes it owns the Presidency and sets his agenda.

This is not a recent assumption. It goes all the way back to the early days of the CIA; Eisenhower, Kennedy.

In 2016, the IC leadership decided Trump would be a threat to their power, so they leaked/invented information about the Russians influencing the election on behalf of Trump. This effort was aimed at corroding his right to claim that he was the legitimate president.

The war continues.

The IC doesn’t want presidents with independent ideas.

They’re the bosses, and they intend to keep it that way.

—The snake slithers in the sun and the shade. It moves deftly and collects information and decides what to do with it. It compiles its own private list of enemies and allies. It senses its own power. Why should it honor its mandate? There is an Empire to be gained. (For more from the author of “The CIA vs. The Presidency: This Is Not the First Time” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Declassified Docs: CIA Spent Decades Studying Psychic Powers

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The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released 13 million pages of declassified documents detailing the agency’s 1,864 investigations into the use of psychic powers.

The data dump contains 1,864 instances in which the CIA seriously investigated psychic phenomena, including the use of psychics by law enforcement, research with the Pentagon, using psychics to spy on the Soviet Union and attempts to debunk scientists skeptical of psychic powers.

CIA scientists even tested celebrity psychic Uri Geller in 1973. They found he “demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner.” The documents indicate Geller partly replicated images drawn in another room with relative accuracy.

The CIA’s research into psychic powers does a lot more to prove the agency’s shoddy research methods than it does to demonstrate the actual existence of psychic phenomena. Most mainstream scientists suspect that psychic phenomena do not exist, but investigators often produce experimental statistical evidence for alleged occurrences of potentially psychic events.

The CIA’s scientific investigation of psychic power likely indicates that any science which heavily relies on statistics may have a powerful “placebo effect.” Researchers are able to “remember the hits and forget the misses” simply by repeating testing until it produces “experimental evidence” that meets typical scientific standards for statistics purely by chance. (Read more from “Declassified Docs: CIA Spent Decades Studying Psychic Powers” HERE)

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CIA Unveils New Rules for Collecting Information on Americans

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The Central Intelligence Agency on Wednesday unveiled revised rules for collecting, analyzing and storing information on American citizens, updating the rules for the information age and publishing them in full for the first time.

The guidelines are designed “in a manner that protects the privacy and civil rights of the American people,” CIA General Counsel Caroline Krass told a briefing at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

The new rules were released amid continued public discomfort over the government’s surveillance powers, an issue that gained prominence following revelations in 2013 by former government contractor Edward Snowden that the National Security Agency (NSA) secretly collected the communications data of millions of ordinary Americans.

The guidelines were published two days before President elect-Donald Trump is sworn into office and may be changed by the new administration. Trump has said he favors stronger government surveillance powers, including the monitoring of “certain” mosques in the United States.

The CIA is largely barred from collecting information inside the United States or on U.S. citizens. But a 1980s presidential order provided for discrete exceptions governed by procedures approved by the CIA director and the attorney general. (Read more from “CIA Unveils New Rules for Collecting Information on Americans” HERE)

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Journalist Who Exposed CIA’s Media Control, Conspiracy with Banks, Found Dead at 56

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Dr Udo Ulfkotte, the former German newspaper editor whose bestselling book exposed how the CIA controls German media, has been found dead. He was 56.

Ulfkotte was an editor at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of the largest newspapers in Germany, when he published Bought Journalists, the bestselling book that cost him his job and perhaps his life.

German media, who were banned from reporting on his work in recent years, are reporting he died of “heart failure”.

Acknowledging that his life was under threat, Ulfkotte explained that he was in a better position than most journalists to expose the truth because he didn’t have any children who could be threatened.

Speaking to the Russian newspaper Russian Insider, Ulkfotte said: “When I told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Ulfkotte’s newspaper) that I would publish the book, their lawyers sent me a letter threatening with all legal consequences if I would publish any names or secrets – but I don’t mind. You see, I don’t have children to take care of.“

His fears for a war in Europe, lead him to his decision to tell the truth about corporate media being controlled by intelligence services on behalf of the financial class.

(Read more from “Journalist Who Exposed CIA’s Media Control, Conspiracy with Banks, Found Dead at 56” HERE)

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Report: DHS Official Protected San Bernardino Terror Suspect From Authorities

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How is it that a federal official is allowed to impede a terrorism case and face no punitive repercussions? This is what happened in the case where U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services-USCIS (part of the Department of Homeland Security-DHS) supervisor Irene Martin restricted access to five armed DHS agents. The agents were sent in response to FBI knowledge that Enrique Marquez, the man who allegedly provided weapons to the perpetrators of the San Bernardino shooting, was arranged to have an interview (along with his wife, Mariya Chernykh) with Martin’s personnel the day after the actual attack.

At the time Marquez and his wife were likely under suspicion by immigration services for their fraudulent marriage. Authorities later described the intention of the two individuals noting, “They wed so she could obtain immigration benefits unavailable to her as a Russian citizen without legal status in the U.S.” Investigators assert Marquez in return received $200 per month to ‘marry’ Mariya Chernykh (sister to the wife of Syed Raheel Farook/older brother to one of the terrorists in San Bernardino shooting).

So, when federal officials went to USCIS to apprehend Marquez, Martin denied them access to the suspect. Fox News reports on the incident:

It is not clear what disciplinary action Martin could face, but the report last week faulted her for making agents wait more than 90 minutes before she gave them access to related files on the suspected terrorist, and then she dismissively ordered them to hand copy files, according to the federal report. Agents told building security they intended to arrest Marquez to prevent him from killing anyone, but Martin had them wait 30 minutes just to see her. When questioned by IG investigators later, Martin repeatedly changed her story and also contradicted what other witnesses said.

(Read more from “Report: DHS Official Protected San Bernardino Terror Suspect From Authorities” HERE)

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Declassified Cable: Pakistani Intelligence Agency Funded Deadly Attack on CIA Personnel. US Gov’t Won’t Comment

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The_CIA_Original_Headquarters_BuildingIt was the deadliest attack sustained by the CIA in 26 years, and according to a just-declassified U.S. intelligence cable, Pakistan’s military intelligence agency paid a notorious Islamist terror group $200,000 to carry it out.

State Department spokesman John Kirby, asked about the claim Thursday, declined to “speak about intelligence matters.”

The shock allegation – that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate financed the Haqqani network’s suicide bombing that killed seven CIA employees at Camp Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan on December 30, 2009 – is contained in a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document, marked secret and dated February 6 of the following year.

It was obtained, in heavily-redacted form, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Security Archive, an independent non-governmental research institute at The George Washington University.

Claims about collusion between the ISI and terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan are not new, but the document indicates that the military intelligence agency of a major recipient of U.S. military funding directly financed the costliest attack against CIA personnel since Hezbollah bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983. (Eight CIA personnel were among 17 Americans killed in Beirut, where a total of 63 people died.) (Read more from “Declassified Cable: Pakistani Intelligence Agency Funded Deadly Attack on CIA Personnel. US Gov’t Won’t Comment” HERE)

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Top Journalist Admits Mainstream Media Is Completely Fake: ‘We All Lie for the CIA’ [+video]

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With the increasing propaganda wars, we thought a reminder of just how naive many Westerners are when it comes to their news-feed. As Arjun Walia, of GlobalResearch.ca, notes, Dr. Ulfkotte went on public television stating that he was forced to publish the works of intelligence agents under his own name, also adding that noncompliance with these orders would result in him losing his job.

He recently made an appearance on RT news to share these facts:

I’ve been a journalist for about 25 years, and I was educated to lie, to betray, and not to tell the truth to the public.

But seeing right now within the last months how the German and American media tries to bring war to the people in Europe, to bring war to Russia — this is a point of no return and I’m going to stand up and say it is not right what I have done in the past, to manipulate people, to make propaganda against Russia, and it is not right what my colleagues do and have done in the past because they are bribed to betray the people, not only in Germany, all over Europe.


(Editor’s note: Keep in mind, “RT News” is a Russian-government influenced – some say “controlled” – news network.)

It’s important to keep in mind that Dr. Ulfkotte is not the only person making these claims; multiple reporters have done the same and this kind of truthfulness is something the world needs more of.

(Read more from “Top Journalist Admits Mainstream Media Is Completely Fake: ‘We All Lie for the CIA'” HERE)

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The Appearance of Disappearance: The CIA’s Secret Black Sites

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Twelve years ago, in a village on the edge of a pine forest not far from Lithuania’s elegant capital Vilnius, workmen constructed an unusual warehouse. It was the size of an Olympic swimming pool with no windows, many air vents and no stated purpose. The site had formerly been a riding stables and a paddock. It had also served as a local watering hole — a welcome one since the village lacked a bar or restaurant. The new building was shiny and modern, incongruous amid the tumbledown farm buildings and Soviet-era housing blocks. The convivial atmosphere of the riding club was replaced, in the words of one local inhabitant, by “this certain emptiness”.

Naturally, the neighbours were curious. They speculated about the new building’s function. Was it a military listening post? A drug factory? A clandestine organ transplant lab? None of them guessed that it might be a key facility in the US Central Intelligence Agency’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation programme, one of a secret network of “black sites”, set up in half a dozen countries to house undisclosed prisoners out of reach of lawyers, the Red Cross or other branches of the US government. Why should they? Lithuania was a long way from the front lines of the war on terror, and the village of Antaviliai, although only 20 minutes by car from the capital, was known for summer lake swims rather than for covert operations.

The secret detention programme, as it was gradually uncovered, stretched across the globe. The network of sites we have documented encompasses Antaviliai and Kabul, North Carolina and Skopje, Columbia County, Milan, Tripoli and Bucharest. In our journeys through this material, we have sought to portray the appearance of disappearance.

Sceptics like to invoke the power of photography, its ability to show what is real. Three years ago, at a hearing for a European Parliament civil liberties committee inquiry into complicity in illegal detentions, one MEP asked if he could see a photograph of a prisoner on a plane. Failing that, he would remain convinced of the fictional world in which it didn’t happen. In the same way, Valdas Adamkus, a former president of Lithuania, when asked during a visit to London in 2011 about CIA prisoners being held in his country, stated firmly that: “Nobody proved it, nobody showed it.” (Read more from “The Appearance of Disappearance: The CIA’s Secret Black Sites” HERE)

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‘Eyewash’: How the CIA Deceives Its Own Workforce About Operations

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Senior CIA officials have for years intentionally deceived parts of the agency workforce by transmitting internal memos that contain false information about operations and sources overseas, according to current and former U.S. officials who said the practice is known by the term “eyewash.”

Agency veterans described the tactic as an infrequent but important security measure, a means of protecting vital secrets by inserting fake communications into routine cable traffic while using separate channels to convey accurate information to cleared recipients.

But others cited a significant potential for abuse. Beyond the internal distrust implied by the practice, officials said there is no clear mechanism for labeling eyewash cables or distinguishing them from legitimate records being examined by the CIA’s inspector general, turned over to Congress or declassified for historians.

Senate investigators uncovered apparent cases of eyewashing as part of a multi-year probe of the CIA’s interrogation program, according to officials who said that the Senate Intelligence Committee found glaring inconsistencies in CIA communications about classified operations, including drone strikes.

At least two eyewashing cases are cited in the classified version of the committee’s final report, according to officials who have reviewed the document. In one instance, leaders at CIA headquarters sent a cable to the agency’s station in Pakistan saying operators there were not authorized to pursue a potentially lethal operation against the alleged al-Qaeda operative known as Abu Zubaida . But a second set of instructions sent to a smaller circle of recipients told them to disregard the other message and that the mission could proceed. (Read more from “‘Eyewash’: How the CIA Deceives Its Own Workforce About Operations” HERE)

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