Operation Mockingbird was a secret Central Intelligence Agency campaign to influence domestic and foreign media beginning in the 1950s.
The activities, extent and even the existence of the CIA project remain in dispute: the operation was first called Mockingbird in Deborah Davis' 1979 book, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and her Washington Post Empire. Davis' book, detailing how the media had been recruited and infiltrated by the CIA for propaganda purposes, was controversial and not always accurate.
Important note to readers: This differs from the published version. I made one really dumb error (bold below) and corrected a few typos and added some hotlinks to aid referencing. I apologize for my inexcusable mistake. Chuck Spinney
The United States has always meddled in other people's affairs. For those readers who think this statement is an exaggeration, I urge them to peruse the chronology of interventions compiled by the Congressional Research Service. This historical predilection for meddling, however, grew enormously in depth and breadth during the Cold War, and to make matters worse, it is now clear that it exploded after the end of the Cold War.
Following below are several headlines about the prospects for the Defense Budget. As an overarching summary, what you need to know is that, at the working level, the fiscal decrements are already impacting heavily. We simply do not have the resources to do the routine work necessary to steward the force and plan for the future. The division I work in is currently operating at less than 60 percent of the people we need and we are supposedly one of the elite places. Money for necessary travel has dried up for all but Generals and SES's and our capability to conduct necessary planning conferences has been formally terminated. So, at most optimistic and charitable characterization, the future looks dodgy.
Phi Beta Iota: Defense cuts will be at least 30% over the next ten years, and hopefully as much as 50%. What we have now is a circle of outright lies among all pertinent executive and legislative officials. An ethical Secretary of Defense would be identifying contracts, starting with most of what DARPA and the services are doing in the way of futures, and present a list to Congress of needed cuts irrespective of contract law, the US now being in a state of war and the exingencies of the situation mandating a legislative override of contract law. Salami slicing is the idiot's path to temporary relief. The entire US government is bloated and broken, not just the Department of Defense. This is not a system that can be repaired in the absence of intelligence and integrity. It needs to be replaced–or not even replaced, just routed around and starved to death.
I've enjoyed The War Nerd for years. Great, colorful writing. The author of the column, “Gary Brecher,” was never on the same page as me when it came to warfare. However, that's changed.
He now thinks, and makes an excellent case for global guerrilla thinking. In short: that blood and guts warfare is counter productive and that systems disruption (hiting network systempunkts/nodes to generate high ROI‘s and publicity) is a potential path to long term victory for guerrillas. In short: in the modern context, if you keep the blood/guts to a min, and keep the cost ratio massively in your favor while staying alive, you will eventually win.
To demonstrate this, he has a great article on how the IRA eventually adopted systems disruption:
“In 1994, they took the idea of non-lethal warfare a notch up by doing one of the most revolutionary things any guerrilla army has ever done: IRA mortar teams dropped shells on the runways at Heathrow Airport, totally stopping air traffic… but the shells weren’t even designed to explode. Intentional duds. That’s amazing; I’ve never heard of anything like that. It shows how far they’d come by that stage, away from the simple Al Qaeda maximum-blood crap I bought into in that earlier article. In contemporary urban guerrilla warfare, at least in Western Europe, killing civvies is counterproductive. What you want to do, what the IRA had mastered by the 1990s, was messing with the incredibly fragile and expensive networks that keep a huge city going. Interrupt them and you cost the enemy billions of dollars, and they don’t even have any gory corpses to shake in your faces. Fucking brilliant, and I was too dumb to see it!
UPDATED to add photo. Guards at the front door, no guards across the totally exposed back end. Sheraton San Salvador was attacked from the ravine. Deja vu.
Gunmen and suicide bombers strike the tightly secured Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, which has large foreign clientele. It was not immediately known how many people were killed or wounded.
Phi Beta Iota: Well-intentioned professionals like to say that if the US only has enough will to persist, it can prevail against any enemy. That is not correct. When the US engaged in elective wars and lacks legitimacy in the eyes of the occupied public, it will inevitably lose. When the US Government is delusional and ignoring the harsh realities at home, it loses its domestic legitimacy. Events like the Tet Offensive, or the increasing attacks in the heart of Kabul, accentuate the cognitive dissonance among all parties. This will not end well for the US.
ATLANTA, GA. USA — Members of the African Diaspora will hold a press conference with the “Dignity Delegation” this Wednesday June 29, 2011 at 10:00 a.m. in Atlanta on their eyewitness and investigative Fact-Finding Mission to Libya. The Press Conference will be led by the former congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and other members of the “Dignity Delegation”.
The press conference on Libya will be held in front of the office of Congressman John Lewis, located at 100 Peachtree St NW, Atlanta, Georgia. John Lewis who voted against the action in Libya did not vote to cut off the President’s funding. This vote essentially allows for the continued bombing, of which Cynthia McKinney, a former Presidential candidate and many African Diaspora leaders strongly oppose. The press conference will include key African Diaspora leaders, community activists and members of the Green Party.
The press conference is to provide an investigative report to the American people on the United States involvement in the French led NATO attack on Libya, rejected now by the African Union (AU) as a bogus war on Africa. Second, it is also to warn the African Union and Black leaders to take decisive actions to protect its people after centuries of colonialism and slavery to counter what is now confirmed by many as the “re-colonization” of Africa. Finally, the press conference is to urge the U.S. government to use its limited resources to support economic justice, jobs, education and peace across the U.S. and the world.
Those who would like to participate or support these efforts, please contact us at WADUPAM.ORG, the African Community Centers at 404-344-5454 or Bro. Sobukwe at 404-456-7962.
Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. And that's only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village (starting cost: $10,000).
