Document:Wikileaks and the Mighty Wurlitzer
| An in-depth discussion of how dissident organisations are co-opted and or otherwise used, abused, controlled or discredited and destroyed by the secret information services. |
article by Zahir Ebrahim dated 7 August 2010Subjects: Wikileaks, CIA
Source: Human Beings First (Link)
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Wikileaks and the Mighty Wurlitzer
What is the 'Mighty Wurlitzer'?
It used to be the honorific of Frank Wisner, the first chief of political warfare for the Central Intelligence Agency, used to describe the C.I.A.’s plethora of front organizations and newsmedia stooges that he was capable of playing (like a great organ with many keyboards) for synthesizing any propaganda tune that was needed for the day. [1]
The fact that such an omnipresent Message-Machine is not ancient history but very much current affairs, is underscored by this NYT headline “Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand” [2]
Therefore, today, I use the term "Mighty Wurlitzer" as a metaphor to pluralistically refer to the same message-machine, i.e., the intelligence apparatus for manufacturing consent and controlling dissent- and the concomitant conscious manipulation of peoples' thoughts, feelings, actions and in-actions - in order to serve the primacy interests of the ruling-elite. The latter are, invariably, also the de-facto owners of the complete messaging-system, now even more globally ubiquitous than when Frank Wisner played the world for a fool.
This "grand organ" is now even more able to synthesize, implant, and reinforce, the right belief sets (myths) among the entire world's public – by suitably combining 'events' with imaginative 'expo' writing – which appropriately primes world populations to acquiesce to the oligarchic agendas. While playing this orchestra is now an integral part of all state-craft, its major musical themes are entirely determined by the 'behind the scenes' owners of the system. While some might refer to the underlying techniques as propaganda and psy-ops, "Mighty Wurlitzer" singularly captures the messaging-system controlled under a unified purpose of command, which is both highly compartmentalized and cellularized. Only the Mighty Wurlitzer knows the entire tune.
To catch barely a glimpse of how it's (partially) done, the following description by Col. Fletcher Prouty from the Preface to the first edition of his 1973 book “The Secret Team” is instructive:
There is another category of writer and self-proclaimed authority on the subjects of secrecy, intelligence, and containment. This man is the suave, professional parasite who gains a reputation as a real reporter by disseminating the scraps and "Golden Apples" thrown to him by the great men who use him. This writer seldom knows and rarely cares that many of the scraps from which he draws his material have been planted, that they are controlled leaks, and that he is being used, and glorified as he is being used, by the inside secret intelligence community.
Allen Dulles had a penchant for cultivating a number of such writers with big names and inviting them to his table for a medieval style luncheon in that great room across the hall from his own offices in the old CIA headquarters on the hill overlooking Foggy Bottom. Here, he would discuss openly and all too freely the same subjects that only hours before had been carefully discussed in the secret inner chambers of the operational side of that quiet Agency. In the hands of Allen Dulles, "secrecy" was simply a chameleon device to be used as he saw fit and to be applied to lesser men according to his schemes. It is quite fantastic to find people like Daniel Ellsberg being charged with leaking official secrets simply because the label on the piece of paper said "top secret," when the substance of many of the words written on those same papers was patently untrue and no more than a cover story. Except for the fact that they were official lies, these papers had no basis in fact, and therefore no basis to be graded top secret or any other degree of classification. Allen Dulles would tell similar cover stories to his coterie of writers, and not long thereafter they would appear in print in some of the most prestigious papers and magazines in the country, totally unclassified, and of course, cleverly untrue.
In every case, the chance for complete information is very small, and the hope that in time researchers, students, and historians will be able to ferret out truth from untruth, real from unreal, and story from cover story is at best a very slim one. Certainly, history teaches us that one truth will add to and enhance another; but let us not forget that one lie added to another lie will demolish everything. This is the important point. Consider the past half century. How many major events -- really major events -- have there been that simply do not ring true? How many times has the entire world been shaken by alarms of major significance, only to find that the events either did not happen at all, or if they did, that they had happened in a manner quite unlike the original story?
Coldly implicit in Col. Prouty's afore-quoted empirical statement: “and the hope that in time researchers, students, and historians will be able to ferret out truth from untruth, real from unreal, and story from cover story is at best a very slim one”, is the Machiavellian notion of sewing faits accomplis into current affairs by straight-jacketing all public discourse in deception, and leaving the ferreting out of 'truth' to future generation of scholars and historians when separating myths from the calculus of hegemony can at best only be a bogus academic exercise, entirely irrelevant to reversing the faits accomplis already sewn. [3]
Wikileaks and the 'Afghan War Diaries'
A pertinent example of Col. Fletcher Prouty's fabricated leaks noted above, is Wikileaks' recent disclosures of 'The Afghanistan War Diaries'. Wikileaks has always been a rather transparent Mighty Wurlitzer ops. It is trivial to see through the absurdity of its existence despite it promoting itself as being a sort of watchdog upon the empire, and therefore, ostensibly, being inimical to its unbridled quest for “full spectrum dominance” – just like Al Jazeera television based in Qatar, which, absurdly enough, exists in the same nation as America's CENTCOM headquarters, but still operates unchallenged bringing all the visual details of the gory crimes of empire inflicted by CENTCOM and its NATO Allies upon innocent Muslim civilians. The intended purpose of course being social engineering – the sine qua non for waging modern warfare upon civilian populations which can span the gamut from manufacturing consent to manufacturing pretexts and ripen conditions for “clash of civilizations” – in order to sustain the otherwise untenable “imperial mobilization”.
How can one tell manufactured reportage and fabricated leaks from the real stuff? How can one see through the Mighty Wurlitzer?
As daunting as it might appear to the mainstream television watcher, it is in fact rather straightforward for those unencumbered by blind faith in governments and its statecraft. Just look for the core-lies and unquestioned axioms of empire that are typically retained in the “leaks” and reportage which, in order to sound credible, often openly expose what is mostly already known anyway or judiciously employ some variation of “Limited Hangout” wrapped in a veneer of dissent or 'freedom of the press'.
It’s the exact same recipe as is used by all the other fabricated and controlled dissent assets of empire when they are not outright spinning patent lies, for spinning half-truths requires far more brilliance. It is not for nothing that James Angleton, Head of CIA Counter Intelligence 1954-1974, is quoted in the 1992 BBC-2 Documentary on Operation Gladio: “Deception is a state of mind and the mind of the State”.
The core-lies retained in the recent Wikileaks' disclosure, is to once again reaffirm that there is a real nemesis called “Osama Bin Laden”, that the “war on terror” is real, that it is being inflicted upon the West from Pakistan-Iran nexus, and to re-substantiate the handoff of former President George W. Bush's clairvoyance to the Obama Administration that
“If another September 11 style attack is being planned, it is probably being plotted in Pakistan, and not Afghanistan”! and that, when such a “planned” attack transpires, it “will make Sept. 11 pale by comparison”. [4]
The successful handoff of “imperial mobilization” to Pakistan and Iran, now further sprightly underscored by Wikileaks' documents, is once again demonstrated by President Obama's Secretary of State Hilary Clinton's recent remark to the BBC:
“There are still additional steps that we are asking and expecting the Pakistanis to take. But there is no doubt in anyone's mind that should an attack against the United States be traced to be Pakistani, it would (have) a very devastating impact on our relationship”.
And that is merely just another echo from the Obama Administration of what the Pakistanis themselves have been made to parrot the past 9 years, as demonstrated by its own Ambassador's remark in 2008: '[On] Wednesday, a media report quoted Pakistan’s envoy to Washington as saying that US leaders had warned Islamabad that if the United States suffered an attack that was traced back to Pakistan Washington would retaliate. “Those (statements) have been made,” Ambassador Hussain Haqqani told editors and reporters at The Washington Post. “We want to make sure that it doesn’t come to that.”'. To show Pakistan's unflinching willingness to do as much more as was asked, the Ambassador of Pakistan had further stated in an interview to Reuters in 2008:
Pakistan would attack Osama bin Laden the moment it had reliable intelligence on the Al Qaeda leader's whereabouts, Ambassador Husain Haqqani said on Wednesday. Haqqani also said he was confident Pakistan could help foil any Al Qaeda plans to attack the United States, although he did not know of any right now. “A cooperative effort between all the allies, and that includes Afghanistan, Pakistan and the United States and NATO – I think we can thwart any potential plans for an attack,” Haqqani said in an interview with Reuters. He said Pakistani intelligence had helped defeat many of the “several dozen” Al Qaeda plots detected worldwide since the September 11, 2001, attacks, but government officials knew of no immediate threats to the United States. Haqqani said Pakistan would act on its own against Al Qaeda if necessary. “If Pakistan, Afghanistan or the United States had specific intelligence on the location of Osama bin Laden, they would have acted on it. No reservations would have come in the way of action on that, and none will even in the future,” he said. “If any of us had that actionable intelligence we would all act. We would act separately, we would act in tandem, we would act cooperatively – we would act.”
So, could these 'Afghanistan War Diaries' have been any more convenient as a casus belli, carrying forth the same core-lies now entering its tenth year? If Wikileaks' dramatization grabbing all the world's headlines isn't an officially sponsored “modified limited hangout” for exactly that purpose of reinforcing the core-lies, then the White House not even bothering to stop the New York Times – whose own motto is 'All the news that's fit to print' – from publishing it, even giving it “all got gold stars” as the Salon put it, is downright inexplicable:
“So, uh ... why was all of this information classified and top secret? If it's old news, and it just confirms what "everyone" already knows, what was the rationale for keeping it classified and calling WikiLeaks all sorts of mean names for publishing it?”
What would it matter afterwards, after Iran and Pakistan have been bombed, what were lies and what was truth? Did the bogus mia culpa by the 2005 Presidential Commission on intelligence failure, the Iraq Study Group's disingenuous conclusion: “We conclude that the intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. This was a major intelligence failure,” reverse the decimation of Iraq? Did the New York Times 2008 revelation of Pentagon's Message Machine after 'all the barbers in town already knew it', return back to its silos each and every cruise missile that was dropped upon the innocent civilians of Iraq?
That is the real import of the craftsmanship of the Mighty Wurlitzer!
Those attempting to see through its fog of deception when a fait accompli can still be averted – before missiles have left their silos, before pen has been put to legalisms – are labeled as 'kooks' and 'conspir
- ↑ Frank Wisner and Operation Mockingbird
- ↑ Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand - New York Times 20 April 2008
- ↑ Convince People of Absurdities and get them Acquiescing to Atrocities:The Enduring Power of Machiavellian Political Science
- ↑ ‘Bin Laden’: Key enabler of “imperial mobilization” and nuclear attack on Iran-Pakistan
