Limited hangout

Limited hangout  (propaganda)
Interest of	Richard Nixon
A propaganda technique to try to suppress the revelation of secret information.

A "limited hangout" is the deliberate revelation of some information (e.g. about malfeasance) to try to confuse and/or prevent discovery of other information.

Limited hangout purposes

By presenting some true and useful information, a source may gain credibility, which can be put to use later, if a credible source is desired to disseminated disinformation. By presenting some information, an audience may be desensitized to an otherwise engaging or even shocking topic. If more information later emerges, the audience may feel "this is nothing new" (as the commercially-controlled media said about Gary Webb's watertight case that the CIA was engaged in the illegal drug business.

Selection of information

The more valuable the information that is 'hung out', the more an audience may be disposed to confer credibility on a source. It is easy to see how a subset of information can be chosen that makes it hard to guess the remainder - for example, if it is atypical or otherwise misleading.

Wikileaks

Full article: Wikileaks

Evidence that Wikileaks may be not what it seems was provided by Julian Assange himself, quoted in July 2010 as stating that "I'm constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud." It seems unlikely that he could miss such an obvious false flag. In 2009, Wikileaks leaked a huge set of pager messages for the day of 9/11 - which one might suspect would prove interesting, but which in practice has proven to be of relatively little interest. They freely admit that "it's impossible to tell whether the logs have been faithfully reproduced in their entirety". If the set of messages was purged before being posted, then this corresponds to a limited hangout. If false messages were inserted, a modified limited hangout. Webster Tarpley maintains a high level of suspicion of the commercially-controlled media and has voiced skepticism early about stories they promote. He suggests that examples of Modified limited hangout include:

Panama Papers

Full article: Panama Papers

Described by Edward Snowden the leak as the "biggest leak in the history of data journalism", the Panama Papers was the April 2016 release of ~2.6TB of data, apparently created by the Panamanian corporate service provider Mossack Fonseca - detailing >200,000 offshore companies, including the identities of shareholders and directors. This has a highly skewed distribution of people and nations, suggesting that it might be a partisan limited hangout.

Modified limited hangout

In a March 22, 1973 meeting between Richard Nixon, John Dean, John Ehrlichman, John Mitchell, and H.R. Haldeman, Ehrlichman incorporated the term into a new and related one, "modified limited hangout."

The phrase was coined in the following exchange:

“

PRESIDENT: You think, you think we want to, want to go this route now? And the -- let it hang out, so to speak? DEAN: Well, it's, it isn't really that -- HALDEMAN: It's a limited hang out. DEAN: It's a limited hang out. EHRLICHMAN: It's a modified limited hang out. PRESIDENT: Well, it's only the questions of the thing hanging out publicly or privately.

”

Before this exchange, the discussion captures Nixon outlining to Dean the content of a report that Dean would create, laying out a misleading view of the role of the White House staff in events surrounding the Watergate coup. In Ehrlichman's words: "And the report says, 'Nobody was involved,'". The document would then be shared with the Senate Watergate Committee investigating the affair. The report would serve the administration's goals by protecting the President, providing documentary support for his false statements should information come to light that contradicted his stated position. Further, the group discusses having information on the report leaked by those on the Committee sympathetic to the President, to put exculpatory information into the public sphere.

The phrase has been cited as a summation of the strategy of mixing partial admissions with misinformation and resistance to further investigation, and is used in political commentary to accuse people or groups of following a Nixon-like strategy.

Writing in the Washington Post, Mary McGrory described a statement by Pope John Paul II regarding sexual abuse by priests as a "modified, limited hangout".

Edward Snowden

Full article: Edward Snowden affair

Some commentators such as Webster Tarpley have suggested that Edward Snowden may not in fact be the dissident voice that he claims, but in fact be part of a modified limited hangout operation to chill resistance and encourage people to self-censor. His main evidence appears to be the facts that (i) Snowden's revelations have not touched on deep events such as the JFK assassination or 9-11, & (ii) the anomalous treatment of Snowden by the commercially-controlled media as compared to other whistleblowers. John Young and Deborah Natsios of Cryptome, as well as Sibel Edmonds have voiced strong critique about the Snowden affair in the past too.

 

Examples

Page name	Description
Afghanistan Papers	A set of documents published by The Washington Post which constitute an official opposition narrative that the invasion of Afghanistan was a mistake.
Donald Trump/Conspiracy theories	Wikipedia has an article listing all the "conspiracy theories" promoted by Donald Trump.
Hollywood/VIPaedophile	Over the years, many people have alleged that paedophilia is widespread in Hollywood. No systematic investigation has been carried out, but increasingly many insiders are personally testifying about the widespread nature of the business.
Incompetence	Incompetence is often a limited hangout.
Jeffrey Epstein/Associates List	Jeffrey Epstein's associates list was released in January 2024
Jeffrey Epstein/Black book	A list of contacts of Epstein. Many famous people. Nobody tried to investigate why, only cherry picked names and every confronted individual denied the book to mean anything other than a paper contact list, which doesn't seem plausible. Why some are still omitted is also not clear.
Lockdown Files	Matt Hanchock has his WhatsApp messages leaked
Mani pulite
National Security Archive	The largest repository of declassified U.S. documents outside the federal government.
Nieuwsuur	A state-funded TV program that replaced several award-winning current affairs programs that were "too biased"...meaning not following the official narrative.
Panama Papers	A huge (2.6TB) cache of confidential documents created by the Panamanian corporate service provider Mossack Fonseca that provide detailed information on more than 214,000 offshore companies, including the identities of shareholders and directors. Those identified include numerous wealthy and powerful political figures and organisations of many countries.
Pandora Papers	The most expansive leak of tax haven files in history
Paradise Papers	A set of 13.4 million confidential electronic documents about use of tax havens to house around $10 trillion. The highly skewed nature of the exposure (very little from the US) suggest it was a modified hangout
Pentagon Papers	Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force
Pizzagate	Important conspiracy in the US/2016 Presidential election campaign.
Project Pegasus revelations	Mass leak of info about Israel spyware
QAnon	Deep State perpetrated modified limited hangout cum distraction psyop to try to obscure the increasing public awareness of its presence
Rockefeller Commission	A limited hangout to try to control revelations about the US deep state's exploitation of the CIA.
The Twitter Files	Elon Musk buying Twitter resulted in the exposure of internal Twitter Inc documents
Wikileaks/Vault 7	Release of electronic surveillance and cyber warfare tools from the CIA arsenal.

 

Related Document

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:How to identify CIA limited hangout operation	article	18 June 2013	Webster Tarpley	Citing the Pentagon Papers as an example, Tarpley suggests that both Wikileaks and the Snowden affair are limited hangout operations by the CIA.

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