Double Standard: CIA Leaks And Planted News Stories
CIA has controlled corporate news media for decades
On Monday, a former CIA employee, Jeffrey Sterling, was convicted of giving classified information to a New York Times reporter.
The leak concerned an effort by the CIA to sabotage plans for an Iranian nuclear reactor.
“The disclosures placed lives at risk,” said Attorney General Eric Holder. “And they constituted an egregious breach of the public trust by someone who had sworn to uphold it.”
Meanwhile, Dr. Udo Ulfkotte, the editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, says the CIA routinely plants stories in the establishment media, including stories that are not only untrue, but resulted in the death of thousands of people.
Ralph Lopez writes for Digital Journal:
“Among the stories Ulfkotte says he was ordered to plant in his newspaper over the years was a story that Libyan President Moammar Gaddafi was building poison gas factories in 2011.”
Bogus chemical weapons stories appeared in the media prior to the invasion of Libya that ultimately resulted in the death of 30,000 people.
Similar fake stories used as war propaganda in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq were summarily dismissed as “intelligence failures.”
While Holder and the U.S. justice system claim Mr. Sterling’s leak to the media constitutes “an egregious breach of the public trust,” no such criticism is directed at the CIA, which has controlled the corporate media for decades.
In fact, CIA control of the media is viewed as perfectly normal.
“From the Agency’s perspective, there is nothing untoward in such relationships, and any ethical questions are a matter for the journalistic profession to resolve, not the intelligence community,” renowned journalist Carl Bernstein wrote in the late 1970s after revelations by the Church Committee.
The actual scope and severity of CIA control of the corporate media, however, will never be known, as Bernstein wrote:
During the 1976 investigation of the CIA by the Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Senator Frank Church, the dimensions of the Agency’s involvement with the press became apparent to several members of the panel, as well as to two or three investigators on the staff. But top officials of the CIA, including former directors William Colby and George Bush, persuaded the committee to restrict its inquiry into the matter and to deliberately misrepresent the actual scope of the activities in its final report. The multivolurne report contains nine pages in which the use of journalists is discussed in deliberately vague and sometimes misleading terms. It makes no mention of the actual number of journalists who undertook covert tasks for the CIA. Nor does it adequately describe the role played by newspaper and broadcast executives in cooperating with the Agency.
