Who Are The Puppet Masters That Control The Media And Politicians?

Each of those experienced reviewers or interviewers dared to tackle Puppetry’s challenging thesis: Elite interests can wield power in certain instances that is almost beyond normal constraints envisioned in the Constitution, other law, two-party rivalries, the media or other watchdog institutions.

Lindauer, for example, describes the free-lance blogger Michael Collins as one of her saviors. Now editor/publisher of The Agonist, the unpaid Collins traveled at his own expense to cover proceedings against Lindauer in New York City. He repeatedly exposed as pro-prosecution propaganda the major mainstream coverage, which was primarily run by the New York Times. Another of her all-too-tiny collection of heroes was U.S. District Judge Michael Mukasey, a future Bush U.S. Attorney General who exerted his oversight powers to pressure prosecutors to become more fair.

Lindauer suffered greatly. Yet she is far from the only or even worst example of government oppression. As readers here know, vicious law enforcement and national security tactics are increasingly occurring, often without anything but biased, pro-prosecution coverage from the news media, book publishers and academics.

Puppetry traces the heavy influence of the CIA over the traditional media as a controlling factor in certain cases.

During the 1950s and early 1960s, for example, Washington Post Publisher Philip Graham helped lead the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird propaganda program, which at its peak involved nearly all of the leading news organizations via their top owners and other controlling executives.

In the same spirit, the State Department and CIA created a campaign to impugn critics of the Warren Commission as “conspiracy theorists,” according to now-declassified memos. Three days after JFK’s murder in 1963, the Justice Department’s deputy attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, notified the new president via Bill Moyers that all investigative efforts would directed at assuring the public that then-dead suspect Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, as we described here recently.

Later, CIA higher-ups worried that New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (left) would succeed during the 1960s in proving the CIA ties of a New Orleans businessman, Clay Shaw, who was accused of conspiring with both federal operatives and underworld elements to murder President Kennedy. Network news disparaged Garrison as a crank. To turn public opinion further against Garrison, shown at left, the CIA in 1967 distributed “Dispatch 1035-960” instructing agents to persuade their media contacts to smear any critics of the Warren Commission. The document is here in the original, and here in reformatted text of its summary.

A New Orleans jury acquitted Shaw following the death of a key witness, David Ferrie, and such other obstacles for Garrison as hidden federal records and the disappearance for three decades of Judyth Baker, a friend, co-worker and lover of Oswald. She wrote in a memoir, Me and Lee, that regarded Oswald as a patsy who was framed and murdered. She feared for her life after receiving a warning from Ferrie right after the 1963 murder of JFK. I met Baker in Dallas last fall, and she wrote me last week that she wanted to share information from her forthcoming book about Ferrie, scheduled later this year with new information.

Evidence hidden during Garrison’s probe but since declassified has proven that Shaw was, in fact, a CIA asset.

More generally, the term “conspiracy theorist” has become since 1967 a common insult that continues to today. Establishment journalists protect their sources and self-esteem by disparaging as incredible the research of anyone who raises the possibility of a crime committed by government law enforcement, military or intelligence operatives.

On a routine basis, I hear colleagues in the media use the term as a put-down, thereby foreclosing for them any need to examine evidence. Upon inquiry, it usually turns out that they have little understanding of the the rush to judgment to convict Oswald and, more generally, the long-running campaign to discourage evidence evaluation that reporters, historians and indeed every citizen should undertake on sensitive matters.

I expect to be tainted in similar fashion, especially after documenting shortcomings of both political parties and the media.

Just last week, I saw a fanatical smear-artist at work.

An outspoken Maryland retiree and blogger named Bill Schmalfeldt mentioned me on his website, Patriot-Ombudsman, because I had expressed sympathy for his legal plight. Schmalfeldt — disabled with Stage Four Parkinson’s Disease — was facing more than 300 criminal charges in a Maryland county court for naming a political foe in many insulting Twitter messages. Someone decided to get even with both of us the next day by leaving a disparaging, one-star “review” of Puppetry on its Amazon.com website. The review was signed “B. Schmuckfeldt.”

Clearly, the “reviewer” had had no time to buy and read the book, and so the comment was merely ill-natured sabotage amid reviews that were all four or five stars. Further examination of the unusual term “Schmuckfeldt” via Google indicated that it is a favorite term of a leader of a movement to hate the prophet Mohammad, thus stirring up religious strife. The impulse also seems to be anti-Semitic since the “Schmuckfeldt” name in one posting is attached to a video clip portraying Adolf Hitler as denouncing Schmalfeldt with violent rhetoric.

What will be, will be. My view is there is no way to discuss our nation’s hidden history without a risk of offending fanatics and those too who use put-downs to avoid serious inquiry. Maybe the sheeple using the term “conspiracy theory” to avoid their civic duties should be embarrassed. Conspiracies do exist. Otherwise, prosecutors would not be using the charge every day in court cases across the nation.

When Presidents Dared Speak Out

The first three United States Cold War presidents all expressed strong concern that the CIA was amassing too much power. My book charts that history, as does my 12-part “Readers Guide to the JFK assassination,” especially The JFK Murder, The CIA, and 8 Things Every American Should Know. One landmark in that research was former President Harry Truman’s op-ed in 1963 in the Washington Post “Limit CIA Role To Intelligence” urging his successors after the JFK assassination to cut back the CIA’s powers to its original function: simply advising the president. A few months later (after the Post spiked his column from its later editions) he protested in a separate letter what he called “strange adventures” by CIA that he never envisioned when he created it.

Another well-connected protester was the late Col. Fletcher Prouty (left) — a top liaison at the Pentagon between the CIA and the Defense Department during both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations between 1955 and 1963, Prouty argued before his death in 2001 that the CIA was heavily involved in Kennedy’s murder and cover-up.

Prouty wrote one of the first exposés of the CIA. He entitled his 1973 book The Secret Team, which was Prouty’s umbrella term for the dangerous oligarchs in the private sector who control the spy agencies with a grip more powerful than a president’s.

In later years, Prouty, below left, suspected that his book had been sabotaged or otherwise suppressed. Perhaps by coincidence and what Prouty may not have known, his publisher Prentice Hall employed as a high-ranking, part-time editor William Casey, a former Office of Strategic Services officer, media tycoon and future Reagan campaign manager and CIA director.

Little known to the public, influence by the CIA and such other spy agencies as NSA continues in ways difficult but not impossible to track.

Amazon.com founder Jeffrey Bezos, for example, bought the Washington Post last year for $250 million shortly before the CIA awarded a $600 million contract to Amazon.com to handle the CIA’s cloud computing needs. Although Amazon.com and the Post are separate entities all of the interests converge at the top in way nearly impossible for the public to understand except the denials by all concerned that any conflict could exist.

We see also such mixed messages as the Washington Post’s leadership in covering the surveillance scandal following the disclosures by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. We see also that President Obama’s panel former close confederates has proposed reforms of NSA. Moreover, we see that the CIA, far from restricting its activities, has developed extensive military capabilities (including its own air force) to undertake wars never authorized by Congress and impossible for the public to oversee otherwise.

In sum, President Obama State of the Union promises need to be understood in a larger context. To be clear, my portrayal is not that CIA or similar work is a bad thing. I disclose that my mother, a prominent writer, was also a secret CIA asset in the patriotic spirit of the era. Now, however, the level of secrecy and the massive scope of operations and surveillance has become a problem.

A Journey of Many Steps

Realistically, a book like Puppetry is not going to be welcomed by most in the major media. It documents a century of hidden history, most notably in recent years. Furthermore, even bold and independent-minded journalists work in a field that emphasizes what’s topical, as I know from my years as a reporter and columnist.

Therefore, many of my media efforts are broadcast commentaries on specific stories. Often, I am introduced as editor of the Justice Integrity Project with no mention of the book. That’s fine with me. The purpose of all such interviews is to be concise and say something helpful about the topic at hand.

Thus the CBS-affiliate WWL AM/FM in New Orleans usually introduces me for political commentaries as editor of the Justice Integrity Project even though the show broke the major findings of Puppetry in a nearly hour-long interview by its prominent mid-day host, Garland Robinette.

Also in that pattern, syndicated radio host Alan Colmes of Fox News invited me last month to discuss the continued jailing of Alabama blogger Roger Shuler on a trumped-up charges of contempt of court arising out of a libel case.

So did HuffPost Live Freedom Watch host Alyona Minkovsky, shown at left.

In New Jersey, Carson’s Corner radio host Bob Carson interviewed me last month on my years of study of disgraceful abuses of power by Gov. Chris Christie.

More than four years previously, Carson and I had pointed out on the show how Christie’s election had been enabled by his abusive behavior as U.S. attorney. For years, Christie and his federal appointees had used their office for political purposes. Christie wanted to show that he was among the “loyal Bushies.” That way, Christie could avoid being fired in the Bush administration’s unprecedented mid-term purge in 2006 of nine of the nation’s 94 powerful U.S. attorneys, who control criminal and civil litigation in their regions.

Christie went on to win election as governor in 2009 in part by ruthlessly prosecuting political targets on a highly selective basis that rewarded his friends and punished the powerless. The mainstream media avoided the story because it was enthusiastic about Christie’s image as a crime-fighter with bipartisan appeal.

Carson is a progressive who for years has questioned on air why Obama or his Justice Department did not review the Christie record and other policies congruent with the president’s rhetoric. So, Carson was eager to transition our discussion last month from the Christie scandal to book themes.

In that spirit, I described how the result of the Christie scandal was likely to help Jeb Bush win the GOP nomination for president in 2016, as amplified in this column last month. My theme was that Christie’s continued viability as a 2016 candidate helps Jeb Bush up to a point by keeping public attention off his own record.

Puppetry has three chapters about the strange, secret and sordid past of the Bush family extending back nearly a century to its national prominence in the arms industry during World War I and work on Wall Street through the 1930s to the eve of World War II to serve the interests of Adolf Hitler’s chief funder, German industrialist Fritz Thyssen.

Also, the book examines how Jeb Bush was instrumental in arranging one of the greatest public scandals of the past century: The theft of the 2000 presidential election by data processing manipulations to wrongly eliminate more than 90,000 eligible voters, most of them Democrats and/or African-Americans on bogus claims they were convicted felons ineligible to vote.

Florida is a rare state that allows election officials and the private contractors they use to sort registered voters by party and race. That, as reported by BBC’s Greg Palast, was the real reason for the Florida swung the election to George W. Bush. It was the chads, the disgraceful U.S. Supreme Court ruling halting a vote recount, and the nearly as disgraceful lack of protest by timid Democrats and media.

These are matters that the Republicans and especially the Bush family do not want re-examined. So, Jeb Bush needs to avoid the extra scrutiny that front-runner status for the 2016 nomination would bring.

But Republicans will need a candidate, and it will not be Christie. Bush is best positioned because he is the scion of the nation’s most powerful political family. Little known to the public, the Bush family also holds unparalleled expertise in a largely secret nationwide network of voting machine experts whom family retainer Karl Rove has groomed again and again for effective action.

The mainstream media and major political parties will not touch the issue of electronic voting machine fraud.

So, anything is possible in a general election, especially if the final polls are within what is regarded as a crucial 3 percent difference providing a close enough margin so that an upset would not arouse too many complaints.

The White House photo at right shows Jeb and George H.W. Bush meeting President Obama at the White House in 2012.

Later, all three attended the annual dinner of the Alfalfa Club, which the Washington Post described as the capital city’s most elite black-tie gathering of public and private sector officials at the highest level. It was the first visit for Obama and it came on the night when Jeb Bush was humorously nominated (in a humorous tradition) as the club’s choice for president.

The photo and accompanying gossip page news brief doubtless passed at the time of publication as a routine display of bipartisan bonhomie in an otherwise partisan city.

I hope that readers here see an additional dimension after reading the column above and reflecting on its implications. The elder Bush, like Obama, became a CIA asset soon after college graduation while working under a front organization. That was long before George H.W. “Poppy” Bush enter politics.

He and the other most important Republicans doubtless know of Obama’s secret past, and use it for leverage. Having hate groups demonize Obama as a radical keeps the president and his supporters timid and ineffective. But Obama can hardly admit at this late date that he sold himself to the public with a deceptive bio that include half-truths.

But don’t the ordinary voters of this country deserve the same knowledge and leverage as the powerful hold over him?

At this point, we can learn from many researchers who courageously documented important but long-ignored findings. My role is to connect the dots. See the full picture in the excerpts of Puppetry published here this month. Join what I’m calling the Truth Patrol, a non-partisan effort. Contact me. Invite me to your community to speak by phone or in person. Let’s take back the country.

Remember, a better future starts with this KEY: “Knowledge Empowers You.”