Pentagon Will “Catapult the Propaganda” Via U.S. Media

By Paul Joseph Watson, Prison Planet.com, 31 October 2006

Military, government indoctrination wing formally declares psychological warfare on the American people

The Pentagon has formally declared psychological warfare on the American people by announcing it will engage in propaganda and indoctrination by using the Internet and media to “set the record straight” on the war on terror.

Recent history clearly indicates this is just the latest outreach of an insipid brainwashing agenda that is totally unlawful and anathema to the U.S. Constitution.

In the past, the military or the government did not announce that they were planting surreptitious propaganda to target U.S. audiences, they did it secretly and for a very good reason—because it was and still is illegal.

But since George W. Bush, backed by his renegade legal advisors, officially announced the end of the Republic and the birth of the “decidership,” he can arbitrarily create out of thin air, ignore, or amend any law he likes and to all intents and purposes is above the Constitution and has ascribed to himself total dictator power. The only thing that remains is, in his own words, to “catapult the propaganda,” in an attempt to legitimize his absolute rule and assure the blind obedience of the American people to his junta's future desecrations of foreign lands and the bill of rights at home.

The new program is simply another wing of the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence, publicly announced after 9/11 but simply the latest incarnation of a PR brainwashing scam that spans back decades. The OSI exploited legal loopholes by planting its propaganda in foreign newspapers that would later be picked up by U.S. newswires. In today's environment even that seems quaint, with the Pentagon openly and proudly shouting from the rooftops that they will knowingly violate the law to indoctrinate the American people.

Perhaps the most alarming case of the military's information tentacles burrowing their influence deep into media circles in recent years was in February 2000, when another branch of the same Pentagon propaganda bureau, Psychological Operations Command (PSYOPS), had placed their operatives “in the news division at CNN's Atlanta headquarters as part of an “internship” program starting in the final days of the Kosovo War.”

FAIR speculated that the purpose was twofold, one to directly propagandize the American people via CNN and also potentially to allow the “military to conduct an intelligence-gathering mission against the network itself,” because the “military needed to find ways to “gain control” over commercial news satellites to help bring down an “informational cone of silence” over regions where special operations were taking place.”

With the knowledge that government propagandists were utilizing U.S. news network hubs at CNN to run what was described as a “vast psychological warfare operation of the kind the military conducts to influence a population in enemy territory,” and that this took place over six years ago—just imagine how infested today's networks and newsrooms are with paid agent provocateur propagandists whose sole job specification is to orchestrate methods of mind control over the population of the United States.

In October 2005 Government Accountability Office investigators concluded that the Bush administration's secret policy to pay off influential journalists to plant fake news and positive spin on Bush's policies was illegal and that the “administration had disseminated “covert propaganda” in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban.”

The consequences were not the drafting of new legislation that would clearly outlaw such actions in future, nor any form of criminal proceedings against the protagonists. The upshot of it all was a slap on the wrist for Armstrong Williams and a request that he pay back part of the money that the government had given him—not even all of it.

“Armstrong Williams is going to pay back $34,000 to the government for work he failed to deliver, but who's going to pay the taxpayers for the rest of the quarter million dollars Williams was paid for his propaganda services to the administration?,” asked Congressman George Miller, as the Justice Department hurried a settlement and swept the whole sordid affair under the rug.

Impromptu mass e mail circulations and talking points spread around messageboards and social networking websites that triumph the moral virtues of the war on terror have been rife for years and are clearly part of a gargantuan propaganda campaign that has been insipid for years but is only just being announced now.

Here are a couple you’ll probably remember from the past few months.

A recent diatribe that was forwarded more times than an annoying “meet the love of your life” chain letter concerned a visit to the White House by a man who was overwhelmed by the intensely warm and gracious personality of George W. Bush, and astounded by the negative media stereotype of his nature. The man just felt the need to share his tear-jerking story of how the President shook him by the hand, looked in his eyes and made him feel like the most important person in the room—and by a miracle it just happened to bypass our spam guards and end up in tens of millions of Americans' inboxes.

Another example that similarly wormed its way through MySpace bulletin boards was an attempt at bolstering the credibility of the flagging war on terror and countering the progress of the 9/11 truth movement by simply listing terror attacks over the last three decades and their alleged perpetrators. A modified version of this was used in a speech by Bush propaganda architect Karl Rove just a week ago where he referenced terror attacks that had occurredbefore the invasion of Iraq, therefore attempting to absolve charges that the Iraq invasion provoked an increase in terrorism. So under that twisted logic, drug dealers shouldn’t worry about creating more addicts by selling drugs because there were always drug addicts before them!

In both cases, as soon as you read the first paragraph of these screeds, the big fat stinking rat of covert government propaganda scuttled across the computer screen.

Now the modern day gang of Goebbels wannabees seek to sink their teeth even further into the last outpost of free speech—the Internet—and impose a blackout on any dissent under the auspices of “disseminating enemy propaganda.”

The White House has made it perfectly clear that it will target American citizens for propagating information harmful to the interests of the U.S.

government and classify them as enemy combatants. This is codified in sub-section 27 of section 950v. of the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

Bush's own strategy document for “winning the war on terror” identifies “conspiracy theorists,” meaning anyone who exposes government corruption and its lies about major domestic and world events, as “terrorists recruiters,” and vows to eliminate their influence in society.

In a speech given last Monday, Homeland Security director Michael Chertoff identified the web as a “terror training camp,” through which “disaffected people living in the United States” are developing “radical ideologies and potentially violent skills.”

Chertoff has pledged to dispatch Homeland Security agents to local police departments in order to aid in the apprehension of domestic terrorists who use the Internet as a political tool.

A program on behalf of CENTCOM is also underway to infiltrate blogs and message boards to ensure people, “have the opportunity to read positive stories,”presumably about how Iraq is a wonderful liberated democracy and the war on terror really is about protecting Americans from Al-CIAda.

The eminently hypocritical tenet of the Pentagon's justification for the propaganda program—that they need to correct “inaccurate statements” and “set the record straight” is borne out by the fact that they participated in the dissemination of the most lurid and damaging propaganda since Hitler's final speech—a deliberately fomented lie about weapons of mass destruction that killed 655,000 Iraqis and thousands of American soldiers.

How dare this gaggle of criminals lecture us about how the insurgents control the media while equating anyone who even mildly criticizes their bloodlust with being a terrorist?

They are the liars, they are the crooks, they are the propagandists and it is we the alternative media—the fifth estate—that should mobilize like never before to counter their spurious deception.