by Eric Zuesse, The Duran:

The former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein headlined in Rolling Stone on 20 October 1977, “The CIA and the Media”, and he wrote that, “The history of the CIA’s involvement with the American press continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception.” Subsequently, John Simkin established in September 1997 his phenomenal website on deep history, including its comprehensively linked 6,000-word article, “Operation Mockingbird”, which was about the CIA operation that Frank Wisner had set up in 1948 in order to get the American public to hate and fear Russia so that in post-World-War-II-America, the corporations that had been making all or most of their money from selling weapons to the U.S. Government weapons during WW II, could now continue making and selling weapons to the Government, even during ‘peacetime’, in a now ‘purely’ ‘ideological’ war against ‘communism’, the Cold War (which was, for America’s wealthiest, really a military and diplomatic mission to take over and control ultimately the entire world in the first-ever total-global empire).

Its basic idea was that in order to be able to continue arms-production after the actual fighting war (WW II) was over, there now needed to be an excuse which was purely ideological, irrespective of whether there was any country that actually endangered us. The Soviet Union had been crucial to the Allied victory in WW II. In order to get the American public to hate and fear Russia so that in post-World-War-II-America the arms-makers would continue to thrive, ideology needed to be the PR focus; and, therefore, after WW II, the ‘enemy’ would be communism instead of fascism. But this had to be the case despite there being no threats (much less, invasions) against either the U.S., or any of its (non-Soviet) allies. There was nothing like the Pearl Harbor attack by the Soviet Union. Communism did not threaten the American people. The post-FDR CIA was rabidly against FDR’s vision of the future of U.S. international relations — a vision which focused against there being any imperialism, by any nation, but instead only the sovereign equality of all nations, under the jurisdiction of the United Nations.

When FDR came up with the idea for the U.N. late in 1941, he called it “the United Nations” so as to leave imperialism behind as being only in the past and never in the post-WW-II world. The Axis powers had constituted real and physical threats, of invasion, against American national security, and not only an alien ideology — which during WW II had been fascism. What was therefore now needed, in order to continue arms-production (despite the War’s end) was to focus against communism as an ideology, irrespective of whether any given communist country was actually hostile against (a mortal threat to) the United States. Such a purely ideological ‘war’ would hypothetically last forever until “victory,” and would thus assure continued and steady success for investors in military armaments — the people who profit from the (as Eisenhower subsequently called it) “military industrial complex” or “MIC.” This type of non-national, or purportedly ideological, ‘war’ could be sold to the taxpayers (the ultimate purchasers of the U.S. military’s weapons) as being a ‘fight’ for ‘freedom and democracy’, instead of as being a fight to conquer some foreign land where the government planned to conquer our land. (At the end of WW II, there was actually no such nation.) A fight to capture some country that posed no threat to conquer America would have had almost no support from Americans. (America, after all, had been established in 1776 in a war against imperialism, not as a war for imperialism. The propagandists knew that trying to get public support which would be overtly for a U.S. imperialism would have been a nonstarter, and this is why an ideological excuse was therefore essential for them, in order to serve those investors, who also controlled almost all of the top advertised brands.)

So, one of the reasons why the CIA was established was in order to control the propaganda in order to demonize “communism” (such as in Vietnam, China, and the Soviet Union) instead of to demonize Russians, Chinese, etc. (foreign lands, and the people who lived on them). What the weapons-makers needed wasn’t only propaganda in foreign countries; the CIA  also very much (if not especially) needed propaganda within the United States.

So, right from the CIA’s very start, controlling the U.S. press was essential. It was so essential that, even at that time, back in 1948, the CIA established what has always since been and still remains an off-the-books system for funding its operations, by means of skimming from organized crime and especially from the international narcotics traffic, and money-laundering those illicit proceeds so as to be able to fund its coups, bribes, etc., which provide indispensable off-the-books, additional, and entirely secret, backup financial support, to the MIC, and which also provide a major reason why, for the entire “Special Operations” ‘intelligence’ operation part of the MIC, narcotics need to be illegal instead of regulated and taxed. If narcotics were legalized — regulated and taxed — then only prostitution and other non-addictive, far less lucrative, organized crimes would be funding the CIA’s “special” operations. Congressional appropriations for the CIA would then need to soar, and this would force some of the massive “Confidential” and “Top Secret” records of the U.S. Government to become “Public.” Government behind the public’s back is dictatorship, not democracy, and that’s what we’ve had ever since 26 July 1945.

However, at the start of the 1990s, something unforeseen happened and Russia ended communism there. America’s President at that time, George Herbert Walker Bush (a former head of the CIA), secretly instructed America’s allies that the Cold War was to continue on, as being a war to conquer Russia, regardless, and the public weren’t ever to know this. The myth that America’s military-industrial complex or “MIC” was ideological, instead of purely imperialistic, needed to continue, because conquest was the goal from the very outset of the ‘Cold War’, on 26 July 1945. (Get that, there: Truman, on that precise date, at the very start of the ‘Cold War’, privately said “Russia and Poland have gobbled up a big hunk of Germany,” instead of “the Soviet Union has liberated Poland and much of Germany from Hitler’s racist tyranny” — which is what had actually happened; and, so, from that exact day forward, when he came personally to believe this, America’s actual aim was to conquer the Soviet Union, and to grab Poland and all of Germany, including the third of Germany that the Soviets had liberated. It did not start (not at all), like ‘historians’ say it did, from Churchill’s 5 March 1946 “Iron Curtain” Fulton Missouri speech. Such ‘historians’ are mere propagandists, not historians.)

Though in the former Soviet Union the Government owned the military manufacturers and so there was no foreign-policy impact from private investors, America’s arms-makers are all privately owned, and this provides a strong impulse (from America’s wealthiest) for the country to be imperialistic. Even in post-U.S.S.R. Russia, the armaments-firms continue to be majority-owned by the Government, so that private investors won’t control foreign policies. But in America, private investors do own the armaments-manufacturers. Privatizing the arms-makers means privatizing the nation’s foreign policies, and especially its military policies. It’s virtually a law of nature that any country where the arms-manufacturers are privately owned and controlled is imperialistic.

The U.S. Government does everything possible to hide the extent to which the MIC controls — or even has any capacity to control — America’s international relations. For example: In August 2010, Robert Reich somehow calculated that there were 3,833,000 U.S. military employees. That would have constituted 2.7% of the entire U.S. workforce. (The federal statistics for August 2010 showed that there were a total of 139 million employed Americans at that time; so, 3.8 million would have constituted 2.7% of the nation’s entire workforce in those U.S. federal statistics. But there is no separate category for “military” nor even for “armed forces,” shown in those statistics, much less do they show the workers and lobbyists for the giant military contractors. The U.S. Government hides, instead of exposes, how the giant weapons-making firms control U.S. foreign policies.) Reich’s article was titled “America’s biggest jobs program: The US military”. (Of course, in Congress, it’s a vastly higher representation than 2.7%. It is closer to 95%, because the money behind the MIC is immense, private, and secret. This is how an empire functions. Corruption is at its core.)

That’s the historical background.

TODAY’S SITUATION

The propaganda-situation hasn’t much changed since at least around 1977.

Here will be just a quick run-down of some recent examples displaying how today’s Washington Post carries out its tasks for the military-industrial complex (actually for its contractors, such as Lockheed Martin, which might as well own the newspaper) (and see Simkin’s  “Operation Mockingbird” in order to understand how this control over the mass-media functions).

On May 20th, the Washington Post bannered “Ukrainian lawmaker releases leaked phone calls of Biden and Poroshenko”, and opened by reporting that,

A Ukrainian lawmaker who met with Rudolph W. Giuliani late last year released recordings of private phone calls several years ago between Vice President Joe Biden and Petro Poroshenko, then Ukraine’s president, in a new broadside against the presumptive Democratic nominee for U.S. president that has raised questions about foreign interference in the 2020 election.

Andriy Derkach, an independent member of Ukraine’s parliament who previously aligned with a pro-Russian faction, said at a news conference in Kyiv on Tuesday that he had received the tapes — which consist of edited fragments of phone conversations Biden and Poroshenko had while still in office — from “investigative journalists.” He alleged they were made by Poroshenko.

Derkach has past links to Russian intelligence. He attended the Dzerzhinsky Higher School of the KGB in Moscow. His father served as a KGB officer for decades before becoming head of independent Ukraine’s intelligence service in the late 1990s. His father was fired from that post amid a scandal over a Ukrainian journalist who was kidnapped and murdered.

The recordings played at the news conference Tuesday shed relatively little new light on Biden’s actions in Ukraine, which were at the center of President Trump’s impeachment last year. They show that Biden, as he has previously said publicly, linked loan guarantees for Ukraine to the ouster of the country’s prosecutor general in 2015. But Derkach used the new clips to make an array of accusations not proven by the tapes.

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