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Barbara Honegger, studied at Stanford University
Written 25 Nov 2014
I am the source for this quote, which was indeed said by CIA Director William Casey at an early February 1981 meeting of the newly elected President Reagan with his new cabinet secretaries to report to him on what they had learned about their agencies in the first couple of weeks of the administration. The meeting was in the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing of the White House, not far from the Cabinet Room. I was present at the meeting as Assistant to the chief domestic policy adviser to the President. Casey first told Reagan that he had been astonished to discover that over 80 percent of the ‘intelligence’ that the analysis side of the CIA produced was based on open public sources like newspapers and magazines. As he did to all the other secretaries of their departments and agencies, Reagan asked what he saw as his goal as director for the CIA, to which he replied with this quote, which I recorded in my notes of the meeting as he said it. Shortly thereafter I told Senior White House correspondent Sarah McClendon, who was a close friend and colleague, who in turn made it public.
Barbara Honegger
The US government has unbound the legal regulations against using propaganda against foreign audiences and American citizens. The intention is to sway public opinion by using television, radio, newspapers, and social media targeting the American and foreign people in controlled psy-ops.
The newest version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) has an amendment added that negates the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 (SMA) and the Foreign Relations Authorization Act of 1987.
These laws made propaganda used to influence foreigners and US citizens illegal. Without these laws, disinformation could run rampant throughout our information junkets.
This amendment added to the NDAA has passed into implementation as of this month.
SMA defines the prohibition of domestic access to influence information through a variety of means, from broadcast to publishing of books, media, and online sources by restricting the State Department.
The Broadcasting Board of Governors was created from SMA. This agency claims to “inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy”. They omit that their specialty is making sure propaganda is added to the informational flow we all depend on.
The amendment sanctions the US government, without restriction, the use of any mode of message to control how we perceive our world.
As of now, the level of propaganda in the mainstream media (MSM) is quite high, with all of our television, printed media and internet sites associated with MSM owned by only 5 corporations.
Without these laws, the lies purveyed as truth to foreigners would find their way to our doorsteps as a purposeful operation enacted by our government. And in the name of national security, the US government could, and probably would, disseminate misinformation to gain public support for otherwise decidedly deplorable actions.
Amendment 114 of the NDAA was approved by the House in May of 2012.
The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act (2012) reads:
Sec. 501. (a) The Secretary and the Broadcasting Board of Governors are authorized to use funds appropriated or otherwise made available for public diplomacy information programs to provide for the preparation, dissemination, and use of information intended for foreign audiences abroad about the United States, its people, and its policies, through press, publications, radio, motion pictures, the Internet, and other information media, including social media, and through information centers, instructors, and other direct or indirect means of communication.
(b)(1) Except as provided in paragraph (2), the Secretary and the Broadcasting Board of Governors may, upon request and reimbursement of the reasonable costs incurred in fulfilling such a request, make available, in the United States, motion pictures, films, video, audio, and other materials prepared for dissemination abroad or disseminated abroad.
According to Michael Hastings : “The new law would give sweeping powers to the State Department and Pentagon to push television, radio, newspaper, and social media onto the U.S. public. “It removes the protection for Americans,” says a Pentagon official who is concerned about the law. “It removes oversight from the people who want to put out this information. There are no checks and balances. No one knows if the information is accurate, partially accurate, or entirely false.”
Representatives Mac Thornberry (R-TX) and Adam Smith (D-WA) in the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act (2012) (H.R. 5736), advocate that it is time to liberate the authority of the US government to broadcast American produced foreign propaganda in the U.S.
The amendment, which was hidden within the NDAA, has remained relatively unnoticed. However, it empowers the State Department and Pentagon to utilize all forms of media against the American public for the sake of coercing US citizens to believe whatever version of the truth the US government wants them to believe.
All oversight is removed with Amendment 114 . Regardless of whether the information disseminated is truthful, partially truthful or completely false bears no weight.
Thornberry believes that with the use of the internet by terrorist groups like al-Qaeda, the federal government needs to have the freedom to circulate their own propaganda to combat terrorism effectively.
“I just don’t want to see something this significant – whatever the pros and cons – go through without anyone noticing,” says one source on the Hill, who is disturbed by the law. According to this source, the law would allow “U.S. propaganda intended to influence foreign audiences to be used on the domestic population.”
Four billion dollars per year is spent by the Pentagon on propaganda aimed at the American public; as well as $202 million spent by the Department of Defense on misinformation operations in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2011.
Currently, the Pentagon is using “ sock puppet ” (fake handles) on social media sites to purvey false information, harass users and enact psy-ops to influence Americans.
A California corporation is working with the US Central Command (CENTCOM) in spreading propaganda overseas. They provide “online persona management service” that allows active duty military to set up an estimated 10 different false identities that are used worldwide.
Each fake persona comes complete with a background history and safeties to prevent “sophisticated adversaries” from discovering the lie.
CENTCOM spokesman Commander Bill Speaks said: “The technology supports classified blogging activities on foreign-language websites to enable CENTCOM to counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the US.”
Sophisticated software allows military to engage in online conversations with coordinated answers, blog comments and instant messaging remarks that are solely meant to spread pro-American propaganda.
US Army whistleblower, Lieutenant Col. Daniel Davis believes there is a definitive aspiration within the US government “to enable Public Affairs officers to influence American public opinion when they deem it necessary to “protect a key friendly center of gravity, to wit US national will.”
Edward Bernays would be proud.
Chief Editor | Investigative Journalist OccupyCorporatism.com
Trent Lapinski
Entrepreneur. Tech Executive. Growth Hacker. Business Developer. Technologist. Cyber Security. MysticLabs.com / WPdocker.com
Dec 20, 2016
As a species, humans don’t often like to admit that sometimes our brains still respond to the world through emotions, triggers, and switches which were pre-programmed into us millions of years ago. It is frightening to consider that our free will can so easily be manipulated without us really understanding how or why.
Since Donald Trump won the Presidency something shocking and frightening is taking place in the media and on the Internet. Instead of acknowledging that the mainstream media was wrong about the entire election, the media, tech companies, and Hillary supporters are instead blaming Clinton’s loss on “fake news” and a Russian conspiracy. The media is essentially refusing to accept the results of the election, and are continuing to ignore the truth of everything that was exposed by Wikileaks.
Meanwhile, the Senate just passed the “Countering Disinformation And Propaganda Act”, and Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube have announced a partnership to create a centralized censorship database. While both the Propaganda Act and the censorship database are supposedly to protect the American people from terrorists, they also create the legal and technical mechanisms required to censor the Internet.
This overreaction to losing the election is by far the most aggressive attack on free speech the open Internet, the United States of America, and the World has ever seen. The globalists, US government, media, and tech companies are essentially plotting against the free will of the American people because we did not vote the way they wanted us to.
Definition of propaganda: ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one’s cause or to damage an opposing cause.
The core concepts of propaganda and public relations as we know them today were crafted in the 1920’s by Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud. He combined the research of psychoanalysts such as Freud to create reproducible tactics to manipulate mass groups of people for both political and business purposes.
Bernay’s believed it was his moral responsibility to control the masses, and dictate what products people should buy, and who they should vote for under the illusion of free choice, and open competition. He did not believe in true democracy, and instead believed an elite ruling class or “invisible government” should select our rulers, and dictate our conduct by manipulating the news, inflating personality, and misleading the masses into believing in identity politics. Bernays created the entire philosophy behind modern day information control, public relations, marketing, celebrity, and news media.
In 2012, just eighty-four years after Edward Bernays published his book Propaganda, President Obama legalized propaganda against the American people. In other words, President Obama legalized the governments ability to mislead the public with false information and fake news, and has been doing so for over 4-years now.
That means everything we witnessed during the 2016 election needs to be put into perspective. The rhetoric we just witnessed was because the media knew they had a blank check to lie on behalf of the White House. Worse yet, both the White House and the media are still manipulating the masses, and there is no one left but the people to hold them accountable and they’re now doing anything they can to discredit everyone but themselves.
Before Obama legalized propaganda the US government routinely used propaganda anyway, dating as far back as World War 2, and likely beyond. A notable recent use of propaganda by the US Government includes politicizing of 9/11 to justify the Patriot Act which eliminated many American freedoms. There was also the Iraq war, which had nothing to do with 9/11 as the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, and financed by the Saudi government.
The Bush administration simply made up any connection to Iraq, and claimed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when they did not. Much like the Clinton campaign, and the Obama White House are now claiming Russia hacked the election even though their only sources are two anonymous CIA agents who have yet to present any evidence, merely conclusions.
The key psychological principles behind propaganda, influence, and persuasion include: reciprocation (give and take), commitment and consistency (repetition), social proof, likability, authority, and scarcity. While there are dozens of books covering all of these topics, I am going to focus on authority since it is the primary weapon of choice used by the government and mainstream media to manipulate the masses into believing in fake news and misleading information.
The vast majority of news today is owned by just 6 corporations. That means if you pay attention to even one of these corporations you are letting them dictate your reality. By establishing themselves as an authority on the news they can dictate how millions of Americans view what is true or false without having to provide any evidence. People simply trust them because of their reputation, brand, and authoritative position in modern society.
The reason people believe them is because they have established themselves as the authority on what is, and is not “news”. As long as you believe that the media you watch only reports the “real news” then you stop questioning the individual truth of each story, and simply assume what you’re consuming is the accurate truth even though you personally haven’t reviewed all the facts. They’ve established themselves as a credible authority by persuading the public into believing they only tell the truth, and have the publics best interests in mind. However, the 2016 election and Wikileaks proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the mainstream media does not always tell the truth, and can be bought and paid for by politicians and corporations to spread false news and biased information.
To put it simply, the media has convinced the public that they shouldn’t get their news from anyone other than themselves by establishing themselves as an authority. Their intention is to convince the public they are the only source of real news, and all other sources should be discredited immediately. Yet the only proof they have to show of this is their reputation, which is that of 6 mega-corporations who have never had the people’s best interests at heart, who only care about profits, and who’s entire business model is to regularly sell out their audience to the highest political bidders and advertisers.
The media uses what are called “narratives” to reshape facts into bite size stories that are oversimplified, easily repeatable, and dumbed down so even a child who cannot read can understand them. However, narratives also enable the media to lie by omission.
News narratives often purposely leave details out of a story and headlines to shape how you perceive them, their importance, and how they relate to other similar events. The media will even compete with itself occasionally dropping exclusives across different networks, but never actually exposing the big picture forcing people to try and fit the puzzle pieces of a story together themselves.
Narratives are commonly used to control the masses perception of events, and are commonly adjusted over time to mislead and misinform the public. In fact, sometimes the media purposely creates multiple narratives around the same story in an attempt to create confusion, so no one knows what the truth is. Other times they all report the exact same narrative no matter what network you’re watching making sure you see the same narrative repeatedly which creates a false sense of social proof.
To put it simply, narratives are news told as a story, that fits a particular format that people have been brainwashed into believing represents the unbiased truth. However, they typically do not contain evidence, or proof, and merely report conclusions which can often be manipulated.
A false flag is a covert operation that is designed to look like it was carried out by someone other than the person who actually planned and executed the operation. For example, 9/11 resulted in two wars with two countries who had nothing to do with 9/11. The public was mislead into believing Iraq and Afghanistan had something to do with 9/11, even though they did not. Therefore, 9/11 was a false flag used as propaganda to conduct two unrelated wars.
If you don’t believe me, the US Government recently released the 28 pages from the 9/11 report confirming Saudi Arabia’s involvement in 9/11, and not Iraq or Afghanistan.
This means thousands of Americans lost their lives, and millions of civilians have either lost theirs or been displaced because of propaganda that brought on both the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. This also means there are likely still people who were responsible for 9/11 who have not been brought to justice.
It is because of articles like this one people are waking up. They’re realizing that no one has the authority to tell them what the news is, and they have a choice in seeking the truth instead. Every day more people become aware of the fact that politicians are lying to them, talking heads on television don’t have their best interests in mind, corporations are colluding and controlling monopolies against them, and an elite class of globalist billionaires are now running the World.
“Fake news” is merely the globalists latest propaganda narrative to give the elites the tools they need to silence entire generations, and control our ability to organize and communicate on the Internet. It is a false flag based on authoritative reasoning that creates a false narrative to control the masses against their best interests by giving up their freedom of speech without even realizing it. Anything the mainstream media claims is fake news should be investigated thoroughly.
Fake news is propaganda, but not for the reasons the mainstream media is claiming.