Operation Mockingbird in FULL EFFECT on torture - prisonplanet analysis

Operation Mockingbird: CIA Media Manipulation

By Mary Louise

The CIA's secret activities, covert missions, and connections of control are all done under the pretense and protection of national security with no accountability whatsoever, at least in their minds. Considering the public is held accountable for everything we think, say, and do there is something seriously wrong with this picture. The CIA is the President's secret army, who have been and continue to be conveniently above the law with unlimited power and authority, to conduct a reign of terror around the globe.

The "old boy network" of socializing, talking shop, and tapping each other for favors outside the halls of government made it inevitable that the CIA and Corporate America would become allies, thus the systematic infiltration and takeover of the media.

Under the guise of 'American' objectives and lack of congressional oversight, the CIA accomplish their exploits by using every trick in the book (and they know quite a few) that they actually teach in the notorious "School of the Americas", nicknamed the "School of Dictators" and "School of Assassins" by critics. The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that 6 million people had died by 1987 as a result of CIA covert operations, called an "American Holocaust" by former State Department official William Blum. In 1948, the CIA recreated its covert action wing called the Office of Policy Coordination with Wall Street lawyer Frank Wisner as its first director. Another early elitist who served as Director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961 was Allen Dulles, a senior partner at the Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented the Rockefeller empire and other trusts, corporations, and cartels.

Starting in the early days of the Cold War (late 40's), the CIA began a secret project called Operation Mockingbird, with the intent of buying influence behind the scenes at major media outlets and putting reporters on the CIA payroll, which has proven to be a stunning ongoing success. The CIA effort to recruit American news organizations and journalists to become spies and disseminators of propaganda, was headed up by Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and Philip Graham (publisher of The Washington Post). Wisner had taken Graham under his wing to direct the program code-named Operation Mockingbird and both have presumably committed suicide.

Media assets will eventually include ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International (UPI), Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Service, etc. and 400 journalists, who have secretly carried out assignments according to documents on file at CIA headquarters, from intelligence-gathering to serving as go-betweens. The CIA had infiltrated the nation's businesses, media, and universities with tens of thousands of on-call operatives by the 1950's. CIA Director Dulles had staffed the CIA almost exclusively with Ivy League graduates, especially from Yale with figures like George Herbert Walker Bush from the "Skull and Crossbones" Society.

Many Americans still insist or persist in believing that we have a free press, while getting most of their news from state-controlled television, under the misconception that reporters are meant to serve the public. Reporters are paid employees and serve the media owners, who usually cower when challenged by advertisers or major government figures. Robert Parry reported the first breaking stories about Iran-Contra for Associated Press that were largely ignored by the press and congress, then moving to Newsweek he witnessed a retraction of a true story for political reasons. In 'Fooling America: A Talk by Robert Parry' he said, "The people who succeeded and did well were those who didn't stand up, who didn't write the big stories, who looked the other way when history was happening in front of them, and went along either consciously or just by cowardice with the deception of the American people."

Major networks are primarily controlled by giant corporations that are obligated by law, to put the profits of their investors ahead of all other considerations which are often in conflict with the practice of responsible journalism. There were around 50 corporations a couple of decades ago, which was considered monopolistic by many and yet today, these companies have become larger and fewer in number as the biggest ones absorb their rivals. This concentration of ownership and power reduces the diversity of media voices, as news falls into the hands of large conglomerates with holdings in many industries that interferes in newsgathering, because of conflicts of interest. Mockingbird was an immense financial undertaking with funds flowing from the CIA largely through the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) founded by Tom Braden with Pat Buchanon of CNN's Crossfire.

Media corporations share members of the board of directors with a variety of other large corporations including banks, investment companies, oil companies, health care, pharmaceutical, and technology companies. Until the 1980's, media systems were generally domestically owned, regulated, and national in scope. However, pressure from the IMF, World Bank, and US government to deregulate and privatize, the media, communication, and new technology resulted in a global commercial media system dominated by a small number of super-powerful transnational media corporations (mostly US based), working to advance the cause of global markets and the CIA agenda.

The first tier of the nine giant firms that dominate the world are Time Warner/AOL, Disney/ABC, Bertelsmann, Viacom/CBS, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation/Fox, General Electric/NBC, Sony, Universal/Seagram, Tele-Communications, Inc. or TCI and AT&T. This is just the head of the octopus which has its second and third tier tentacles working together in unison or feigned division. This would include The Washington Post/Newsweek, The New York Times/Weekly Standard, Tribune Co., US News, Gannett/USA Today, Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, Knight-Ridder, etcetera. A good site to visit for more information is Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a public interest media watchdog group, at www.fair.org/index.html, www.fair.org/mediafiles/index.html and www.fair.org/extra/9711/gmg.html. Media propaganda tactics include blackouts, misdirections, expert opinions to echo the Establishment line, smears, defining popular opinions, mass entertainment distractions, and Hobson's Choice (the media presents the so-called conservative and liberal positions).

"Who Controls the Media? The Subversion of the Free Press by the CIA, The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation Mockingbird", "The CIA: America's Premier International Terrorist Organization", and "Virtual Government: CIA Mind Control Operations in America" by Alex Constantine are an excellent source of information on this topic: www.alexconstantine.50megs.com/the_cia_and.html and www.alexconstantine.50megs.com.

David Guyatt has written books and many articles including one entitled "Subverting the Media" at www.deepblacklies.co.uk/subverting_the_media.htm. Then there are two articles called "A Timeline of CIA Atrocities" and "The Origins of the Overclass" by Steve Kangas that are very informative although from a more liberal perspective. Steve will not be writing anymore articles as he is no longer with us, having unfortunately met his untimely death that was 'apparently' from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. If you read about him on his web page that is still available, you will see that he did not seem like a person who was suffering from deep depression. In his memory, please take the time to read what he wrote at www.korpios.org/resurgent/CIAtimeline.html, www.korpios.org/resurgent/CIAtimeline.html, and www.korpios.org/resurgent/index.html.

CNN aired "Valley of Death" in June of 1998 and Time magazine (both owned by Time-Warner) ran a story about a secret mission called Operation Tailwind and the activities of SOG, Studies and Observations Group, a secret elite commando unit of the Army's Special Forces that used lethal nerve gas (sarin), on a mission to Laos designed to kill American defectors. Suddenly the network was awash in denials and the story was hushed up, as usual. Acknowledged use of this gas coming at a time when the U.S. government was trying to get Saddam to comply with weapons inspections, was an embarrassment to say the least. What hypocrisy! Having actually used the weapons on our own troops, then complaining and accusing Saddam of potential use of stored similar weapons, of which some were manufactured in and supplied by the U.S. The broadcast was prepared after exhaustive research and rooted in considerable supportive data. To decide for yourself what the truth is read Floyd Abrams' report on the CNN site at www.cnn.com/US/9807/02/tailwind.findings/index.html.

Journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward broke the stories on Watergate (late 70's) in the Washington Post, having gained access to what the CIA was trying to keep from congress about its program of using journalists at home and abroad, in deliberate propaganda campaigns. It was later revealed that Woodward was a Naval intelligence briefer to the White House and knew many insiders including General Alexander Haig. A high-level source told Bernstein, "One journalist is worth twenty agents." CFR/Trilateralist Katharine Graham, in a 1988 speech given to senior CIA employees at Agency headquarters said, "We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows." Maybe that's another reason why folks get the impression that a suspicious agenda lurks behind the headlines. "25 Ways to Suppress Truth: Rules of Disinformation" and "8 Traits of the Disinformationalist" at www.proparanoid.com/truth.htm, sums it up very well.

Ralph McGehee was a CIA agent for 25 years, mainly in South-East Asia where he witnessed bombing and napalming of villages, which caused him to examine closely what the CIA was really all about. He has written about Vietnam's Phoenix Program www.vwip.org/articles/m/McGeheeRalph_VietnamsPhoenixProgram.htm and after a long battle with CIA censors, he published the book "Deadly Deceits" in 1983. Ralph has been harassed by the CIA and FBI, involving bodily injury, and his CIABASE website was shut down on Spring of 2000. He copied some reports that can be found at http://serendipity.magnet.ch/cia/ciabase_report_1.htm (and 2.htm), http://serendipity.magnet.ch/cia/death_squads.htm, and www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/Deadly_Deceits.html. He concluded that the CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency but rather the covert action arm of the President's foreign policy advisors, of which disinformation is a large part of its responsibility and the American people are the primary target of its lies.

One of the primary reasons John F. Kennedy was assassinated had to do with the fact he dared to interfere in the framework of power. Kennedy was intent on exercising his ELECTED powers and not allowing them to be usurped by power-crazed individuals in the intelligence community, threatening to "splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind." There were four things that filled the CIA with rage and sealed his fate; JFK fired Allen Dulles, was in the process of founding a panel to investigate the CIA's numerous crimes, put a damper on the breadth and scope of the CIA, and limited their ability to act under National Security Memoranda 55.

There is such an overwhelming amount of information pertaining to the CIA that it is impossible to cover it all in one book, much less an article. Personally, I have come to the conclusion that the media is not only influenced by the CIA.....the media is the CIA. Many Americans think of their supposedly free press as a watchdog on government, mainly because the press itself shamelessly promotes that myth. One of the first tenets for the control of a population is to control all sources of information the population receives and mostly because of the pervasive CIA and Operation Mockingbird, the mainstream American Press is a controlled multi-national corporate/government megaphone. They are up to their eyeballs in dirty deeds and there will never be an end to the corruption that prevails unless the CIA is abolished. Otherwise, the CIA will just keep on using their tricks of propaganda, stuffed ballot boxes, purchased elections, extortion, blackmail, drug trafficking, sexual intrigue, kidnapping, beating, torture, intimidation, economic sabotage, false stories about opponents in the local media, infiltration and disruption of opposing political parties, demolition and evacuation procedures, death squads, and politically motivated assassinations.

The CIA is the epitome of organized crime run amuck!

more on propaganda

Propaganda - nobody does it better than America
By Paul Weber, 9th August 2002
http://www.thetexasmercury.com/articles/weber/PW20020120.html

Over the years, I have had the privilege of meeting and having discussions with people who came to America from countries known for their adherence to totalitarianism: China, Russia, and former east European satellites of the Soviet Union. When we discussed how the state managed to control public opinion under totalitarianism, these people would usually produce a weary, knowledgeable, cynical smile and point out that propaganda in those countries was really done quite incompetently.

If you really want to know propaganda, they said, you need to study American propaganda technique. According to them, it is, undeniably, the best in the world.

"How can that be?" I asked, honestly puzzled.

Propaganda in those countries was too obvious, they told me. As soon as you read the first sentence you knew it was a bunch of propaganda, so you didn't even bother to read it. If you heard a speech, you knew in the first few words that it was propaganda, and you tuned it out.

"But," I then queried, "How do you know when it's just propaganda?"

The expatriates explained that bad propaganda uses obvious terminology that anyone can see through. Anyone hearing the phrase "capitalist running dogs", knows he's listening to incompetent propaganda and tunes it out. Lousy propaganda, these knowledgeable but jaded individuals would tell me, appeals to an abstract theory, to a rational thesis that can be disproved. Even though communists had total control of the press, the people just tuned it out (except for those who were the most mentally defective). Most people, they assured me, just went about their lives as best they could, paid lip service to the state, and just tried to keep out of the way of the secret police. But hardly anyone really believed the stuff. The result, after many decades of suffering, was the eventual collapse of the old order once The Great Leader expired, whether his name was Brezhnev, Mao, or Tito.

American propaganda, however, is much cleverer. American propaganda, they patiently explained, relies entirely on emotional appeals. It doesn't depend on a rational theory that can be disproved: it appeals to things no one can object to.

American propaganda had its birth, so far as I can tell, in the advertising industry. The pioneers of advertising - a truly loathsome bunch - learned early on that people would respond to purely emotional appeals. Abstract theory and logical argument do nothing to spur sales. However, appeals to sexiness, to pride of ownership, to fear of falling behind the neighbors are the stock in trade of advertising executives. A man walking down the street with beautiful women hanging on his arms is not a logical argument, but it sure sells after-shave. A woman in a business suit with a briefcase, strolling along with swaying hips, assuring us she can "bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, but never let you forget you're a man" really sells the perfume.

Let's take a moment and analyze the particular emotions that this execrable ad appealed to. If you guessed fear, you win the prize. Women often have a fear of inadequacy, particularly in this confused age when they are expected to raise brilliant kids, run a successful business, and be unfailingly sexy, all the time. That silly goal-foisted upon us by feminists and popular culture - is impossible to reach. But maybe there's hope if you buy the right perfume! Arguments from intimidation and appeals to fear are powerful propaganda tools.

American advertising and propaganda has been refined over the years into a malevolent science, based on the assumption that most people react, not to ideas, but to naked emotion. When I worked at an ad agency many years ago, I learned that the successful agencies know how to appeal to emotions: the stronger and baser, the better.

The seven deadly sins

The seven deadly sins, ad agency wags often say, are the key to selling products. Fear, envy, greed, hatred, and lust: these are the basic tools for good propaganda and effective advertising. By far, the most powerful motivating emotion - the top, most sought-after copywriters will tell you in an unguarded moment, is fear followed closely by greed.

Good propaganda appeals to neither logic nor morality.

Morality and ethics are the death of sales. This is why communist propaganda actually hastened the collapse of communism: the creatures running the Commie Empire thought they should appeal to morality by calling for people to engage in sacrifice for the greater good. They gave endless, droning speeches about the inevitably of communist triumph, based on the Hegelian dialectic. Not only were they wrong: their approach to selling their (virtually unsellable) theory was not clever enough. American propagandists (we can be jingoistically proud to say) would have been able to maintain the absurd social experiment called communism a little longer. They would have scrapped all the theory and focused on appealing images. Though the Commies tried to do this through huge, flag-waving rallies, the disparity between their alleged ideals and the reality they created was just too great.

One tyrant who did take American propaganda to heart was Adolph Hitler. Hitler learned to admire American propaganda through a young American expatriate who described to him, in glowing detail, how Americans enjoyed the atmosphere at football games. This American expatriate, with the memorable name of Ernst "Putzi" Hanfst�ngl, told the F�hrer how Americans could be whipped up into a frenzy through blaring music, group cheers, and chants against the enemy. Hitler, genius of evil as he was, immediately saw the value in this form of propaganda and incorporated it into his own rise to power. Prior to Hitler, German political rhetoric was dry, intellectual, and uninspiring. Hitler learned the value of spectacle in whipping up the emotions; the famed Nuremberg rallies were really little more than glorified football halftime shows. Rejecting boring, intellectual rhetoric, Hitler learned to appeal to deeply emotional but meaningless phrases, like the appeal to "blood and soil." The German people bought it wholesale. Hitler also called for blind loyalty to the "Fatherland," which eerily echoes our own new cabinet level post of "Homeland" Security.

If you study Nazi propaganda, you will be struck by how well it appeals to gut-level emotions and images - but not thought.

You will see pictures of elderly German women hugging fresh-faced young babies, with captions about the bright future the F�hrer has brought to German. In fact, German propaganda borrowed the American technique of relying, not so much on words, but on images alone: pictures of handsome German soldiers, sturdy peasants in native costume, and the like. Take a look at any American car commercial featuring rugged farmers tossing bales of hay into the backs of their pickups, and you've seen the source from which the Nazis borrowed their propaganda techniques.

The Germans have a well-deserved reputation for producing a lot of really smart people, but this did not prevent them from being completely vulnerable to American-style propaganda. Amazingly, a nation raised on the greatest classical music, the profoundest scientists, the greatest poets, actually fell for propaganda that led them into a hopeless, two-front war against most of the world. Being smart is, in itself, no defense against skilled American propaganda, unless you know and understand the techniques, so you can resist them.

Emotional, gut-level appeals

American politicians learned, early in the twentieth century, that using emotional sales techniques won elections. Furthermore, they learned that emotional appeals got them what they wanted as they advanced towards their long-term goal of becoming Masters of the Universe. From this, we get our modern lexicon of political speech, carefully crafted to appeal to powerful emotions, with either no appeal to reason, or (better yet) a vague appeal to something that sounds foggily reasonable, but is so obscure that no one will bother to dissect it.

Franklin Roosevelt understood this, which is why he called for Social Security. Security is an emotional appeal: no one is against security, are they? Roosevelt backed up his campaign with a masterful appeal to emotions: images of happy, elderly grandparents smiling while hugging their grandchildren, with everything in the world going right because of Social Security. All kinds of government programs were sold on the basis of appealing images and phrases. Roosevelt even appealed to America's traditional love of freedom, spinning that term by multiplying it into the new Four Freedoms, including Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear. Well, what heartless human being could possibly be against that? The Four Freedoms were promoted with images of parents tucking their children cozily into bed, and a happy family gathered around a Thanksgiving dinner, obviously free from want. The campaign was also based on that most powerful of all selling emotions: fear. If you don't support Social Security, the ads suggested, you will live your last years in utter destitution.

Putzi Hanfst�ngl, viewing Roosevelt's evil brilliance from Nazi Germany, was probably jealous.

American advertising executives learned the value of presenting a single image or slogan, and repeating it over and over again until it became ingrained in the public's consciousness.

Thus we are all aware that Ivory Soap is so pure that it floats: a point that has been repeated for the better part of a century. I'm not sure why I should be impressed that a bar of soap floats, but on the other hand, it's not intended that I think that far. Politicians now sell their programs the way the advertising creeps sell soap: they dream up a slogan and repeat it over and over again. Thus we get empty slogans like The New Frontier, The New World Order (that one was poorly chosen; it sounds too much like an actual idea), or Reinventing Government (an idea that everyone should favor, except that the idea behind it really means Keeping Government the Same, only no one is supposed to think that far). Empty grandeur sells political products.

Both German and American politicians carried the use of banners to new heights. Flags are impressive emotional symbols, particularly when waved by thousands of enthusiastic people: it's a rare individual who can resist the collective enthusiasm of thousands of his fellow human beings, cheering about their collective greatness. Putzi Hanfst�ngl understood this, advising Hitler to fill his public spectacles with not just a few, but countless thousands of swastika flags. The swastika, too, was a brilliant stroke of advertising and propaganda: it has become, in the public consciousness, the official emblem of Nazism, even though it had nothing to do with Germany. In fact, swastikas were used by ancient Hindus and American tribes, but I'm not aware of it being used by anyone in Germany prior to Hitler.

Now observe how Americans in the current crisis have taken to displaying huge flags on their cars. Flags are not rational arguments; they are instruments for whipping up the Madness of Crowds. Observe how many Americans have, with a straight face, called for a constitutional amendment to outlaw flag desecration, oblivious to the obvious contradictions such an amendment would have with the rest of the Constitution. But again, if you learn nothing else about propaganda, learn that it must not appeal to rationality.

Politicians don't just use warm, fuzzy images to sell us on the road to tyranny. They also need emotional appeals to intimidate their enemies. Thus the small percentage of the population that really does use thought and reason more than emotion must be demonized. Roosevelt managed this with some masterful propaganda strokes. Those who opposed him were Isolationists, and Malefactors of Great Wealth! (The gut-level emotion appealed to here is envy.) Roosevelt thus showed himself to be an early master of what former California Governor Jerry Brown called "buzz words"; that is, words intended to silence counter-argument by appealing to unassailable emotional images. No one is for Isolation, and almost everyone reacts to an appeal to hate anyone who has a lot of money. The latter appeal, of course, had great power during the Great Depression, which Roosevelt managed to maintain for the entire length of his presidency, all the while blaming others for its evils. Was this guy an evil genius, or what?

The propaganda cleverness used in successfully branding anti-war people as Isolationists is breathtaking. After all, a rational person (ah, keep in mind, that's not a common individual) realizes that those who oppose war are the exact opposite of isolationists. The Old Right at the time called for peaceful, commercial relations with all nations, based on neutrality in foreign affairs. If anything, those who oppose war and meddling in other countries' affairs are the opposite of Isolationists as they really stand for open, profitable relationships with other countries. The people who stand for such ideas do not "sell" them by means of strictly emotional appeals, so they tend to lose the propaganda wars. When Roosevelt succeeded in whipping the country up into a war-frenzy after steering us into the Pearl Harbor fiasco, the Old Right realized their opposition to the war was hopeless.

Schools - propaganda camps

The role of the government propaganda camps known as public schools cannot be discounted in all this. Schools are not so much centers of learning as they are behavior conditioning camps in which children are taught to be unquestioningly obedient to authority. Since reason and morality are the death of propaganda, schools busy themselves with systematically stunting students' ability to reason and think in moral terms. Because the government owns the propaganda camps, it's not surprising that the beneficiary of the propaganda is almost always the government. Americans accept obvious absurdities because they were drilled into their heads, year after year, in the government propaganda camps until they became true and unquestionable.

Use of propaganda by "great presidents"

Thus, everyone knows Roosevelt got us out of the Great Depression, even though the worst depression years were precisely those in which he and his party controlled every branch of government. Everyone knows Lincoln was a great president because he saved "government by the people" and freed the slaves, even though he became a war tyrant and only freed the slaves when it was politically convenient to do so. Wilson, everyone knows, made the world "safe for democracy", evidently by instituting a draft and getting America involved in a European war that was fought for reasons no-one to this day can fathom. When minds are young and pliable - government experts understand this principle - you can fill them with nonsense that is practically impossible to root out. Laughable falsehoods in effect become true because everyone knows them to be true.

The role of "independent experts", housewives
and "the guy on the street"

Advertising executives learned, early on, that companies could not be too obvious in using their propaganda. If their agenda could be clearly seen, then it could also be rejected. The answer to this problem was the American propaganda technique of the "independent expert" and the "guy on the street." One of these appeals to our timidity before authority, and the other to our smugness when dealing with someone at or below our perceived social level. Of course, these two techniques are really just two sides of the same coin. In product advertising, sports heroes and celebrities are used to sell corn flakes because no one would listen to the president of Kellogg telling us why corn flakes are so good. In selling detergent, plain-looking housewives are preferable to sexy models because they look just like us. In political propaganda, "experts" are often trotted out to tell us, in convoluted, circular reasoning, why minimum wage laws are really good for us, why a little bit of inflation is good, or why we just can't rely on the free market for something so crucially important as education. Or, using the "guy on the street" approach, we are told to support idiotic wars because the common soldiers ("our boys"), cannot function unless they know we stand united behind them. If the rare sensible person tries to argue against war, he is accused of making things harder for "our boys."

War on Terror

This brings us to the latest iteration of masterful American Propaganda: the War on Terrorism. Any attempt to explain why the terrorists (crazed as they obviously were) felt motivated to attack the World Trade Center is looked on as "siding with the terrorists." Indeed, Ashcroft and Bush have said, in so many words, that if you don't support them in everything they do, you stand with the terrorists. Ashcroft and Bush have evidently studied their propaganda lessons from World War II, when Roosevelt silenced all opposition by accusing anyone who stood against him of undermining the war effort. Anyone who suggests we should not risk World War III by invading the Middle East is alternately accused of siding with the terrorists, of slandering the memory of those who died, or (of course) of not "standing by our boys" in times of great need. It's easy to feel alienated in a nation of flag-wavers singing patriotic hymns. The fact that they are marching lockstep to a world in which the government will monitor their e-mail, snoop into their bank accounts, and eventually throw them in jail for voicing opposition doesn't seem to bother them one bit.

Now, most libertarians or otherwise thoughtful people will react with dismay when told that most of their fellow human beings react so unthinkingly to sock-you-in-the-gut emotional propaganda. Unfortunately, most people are not capable of really thinking things out. Most people really do buy perfume because of the emotional imagery. Most people really do believe the "independent expert", whether in politics or buying a car. Most people want to go with the crowd, or follow the leader. To do otherwise requires independent thought and the willingness to be ostracized, which is an unbearable psychological burden for many.

If you want to take heart, remember that the Vietnam War ended because a few people just continued to speak against it, despite the overwhelming government propaganda for it. The fact that a lot of the anti-war protesters were motivated by the wrong reasons (support of commies), doesn't matter in light of the fact they were able to turn the tide. They were right, even if for the wrong reasons. If advocates of freedom continue to speak against the creeping tyranny that our masters justify on the phony grounds of the War on Terrorism, we might just be able to prevent the transition from Republic to Empire.

The thing about propaganda is that, once it is exposed for what it is, no one listens anymore. People tune it out, just as the slaves in Russia and China learned to tune out their official propaganda.

Paul Weber's novel, Transfiguration, is available at http://www.xlibris.com/Transfiguration.html