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	<title>Comments on: Flashback: Cronkite Warned In Lead-Up To Iraq War &#8212; &#8216;We Are Going To Be In Such A Fix&#8217;</title>
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	<link>http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/19/cronkite-iraq-war/</link>
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	<lastBuildDate>Thu, 26 Nov 2009 18:51:31 -0500</lastBuildDate>
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		<title>By: Julie717</title>
		<link>http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/19/cronkite-iraq-war/comment-page-3/#comment-5730563</link>
		<dc:creator>Julie717</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2009 21:29:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thinkprogress.org/?p=51498#comment-5730563</guid>
		<description>Re: “when he stood up and announced that Americans shouldn’t trust the statements being made about the war by the U.S. Government and military, and that the specific claims they were making were almost certainly false” --he was talking about the Vietnam War.  The rest of the article talks about his opposition to Iraq, which is kind of confusing.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Re: “when he stood up and announced that Americans shouldn’t trust the statements being made about the war by the U.S. Government and military, and that the specific claims they were making were almost certainly false” &#8211;he was talking about the Vietnam War.  The rest of the article talks about his opposition to Iraq, which is kind of confusing.<a href="javascript:void(0)" title=""  onmouseover="window.status=''; return true" onmouseout="window.status=''; return true" onclick="ddrc_popup('http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/plugins/dd-report-comments/report.php?c=5730563', 400, 400)"></a></p>
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		<title>By: LeslieBurton</title>
		<link>http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/19/cronkite-iraq-war/comment-page-3/#comment-5730001</link>
		<dc:creator>LeslieBurton</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:06:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thinkprogress.org/?p=51498#comment-5730001</guid>
		<description>Doris Kearns-Goodwin said this morning on Morning Joe that George McGovern considered asking Walter Cronkite to be his running mate in 1972.  When Cronkite learned of this he said he would have taken him up on his offer.  Boy, that would have been really interesting.  May have changed the course of history.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Doris Kearns-Goodwin said this morning on Morning Joe that George McGovern considered asking Walter Cronkite to be his running mate in 1972.  When Cronkite learned of this he said he would have taken him up on his offer.  Boy, that would have been really interesting.  May have changed the course of history.<a href="javascript:void(0)" title=""  onmouseover="window.status=''; return true" onmouseout="window.status=''; return true" onclick="ddrc_popup('http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/plugins/dd-report-comments/report.php?c=5730001', 400, 400)"></a></p>
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		<title>By: dbadass</title>
		<link>http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/19/cronkite-iraq-war/comment-page-3/#comment-5729922</link>
		<dc:creator>dbadass</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2009 14:09:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thinkprogress.org/?p=51498#comment-5729922</guid>
		<description>And just when I think the privacy center can not come up with a lamer more trite noncomment to accompany their lame trite spamming...</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>And just when I think the privacy center can not come up with a lamer more trite noncomment to accompany their lame trite spamming&#8230;<a href="javascript:void(0)" title=""  onmouseover="window.status=''; return true" onmouseout="window.status=''; return true" onclick="ddrc_popup('http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/plugins/dd-report-comments/report.php?c=5729922', 400, 400)"></a></p>
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		<title>By: tokin librul</title>
		<link>http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/19/cronkite-iraq-war/comment-page-3/#comment-5729867</link>
		<dc:creator>tokin librul</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2009 13:04:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thinkprogress.org/?p=51498#comment-5729867</guid>
		<description>&lt;a href=&quot;http://walled-in-pond.blogspot.com/2009/07/what-has-happened-to-press.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;What Has Happened To The &quot;Free&quot; Press?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;

There&#039;s a one-word answer.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://walled-in-pond.blogspot.com/2009/07/what-has-happened-to-press.html" rel="nofollow">&#8220;What Has Happened To The &#8220;Free&#8221; Press?&#8221;</a></p>
<p>There&#8217;s a one-word answer.<a href="javascript:void(0)" title=""  onmouseover="window.status=''; return true" onmouseout="window.status=''; return true" onclick="ddrc_popup('http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/plugins/dd-report-comments/report.php?c=5729867', 400, 400)"></a></p>
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		<title>By: KayInMaine</title>
		<link>http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/19/cronkite-iraq-war/comment-page-3/#comment-5729862</link>
		<dc:creator>KayInMaine</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2009 12:31:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thinkprogress.org/?p=51498#comment-5729862</guid>
		<description>None of the bozo news people on any of the channels was listening to Walter Cronkite because they were too busy applauding &amp; cheerleading America&#039;s Dear Leader at the time! They all believed his rhetoric that Saddam Hussein could attack our nation in 45 minutes in the form of a mushroom cloud, they all believed gawd was backing George Bush in his waronterror and they all looked forward to the huge profits they would make on the backs of dead Iraqis and U.S soldiers! Nothing was going to get in their way.....not even that rational liberal guy, Walter Cronkite. Spit.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>None of the bozo news people on any of the channels was listening to Walter Cronkite because they were too busy applauding &amp; cheerleading America&#8217;s Dear Leader at the time! They all believed his rhetoric that Saddam Hussein could attack our nation in 45 minutes in the form of a mushroom cloud, they all believed gawd was backing George Bush in his waronterror and they all looked forward to the huge profits they would make on the backs of dead Iraqis and U.S soldiers! Nothing was going to get in their way&#8230;..not even that rational liberal guy, Walter Cronkite. Spit.<a href="javascript:void(0)" title=""  onmouseover="window.status=''; return true" onmouseout="window.status=''; return true" onclick="ddrc_popup('http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/plugins/dd-report-comments/report.php?c=5729862', 400, 400)"></a></p>
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		<title>By: noseeum</title>
		<link>http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/19/cronkite-iraq-war/comment-page-3/#comment-5729861</link>
		<dc:creator>noseeum</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2009 10:55:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thinkprogress.org/?p=51498#comment-5729861</guid>
		<description>&lt;em&gt;Oh, and tell dbadass I saw a blue grosbeak.&lt;/em&gt;
I tried to cheer him up.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em>Oh, and tell dbadass I saw a blue grosbeak.</em><br />
I tried to cheer him up.<a href="javascript:void(0)" title=""  onmouseover="window.status=''; return true" onmouseout="window.status=''; return true" onclick="ddrc_popup('http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/plugins/dd-report-comments/report.php?c=5729861', 400, 400)"></a></p>
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		<title>By: noseeum</title>
		<link>http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/19/cronkite-iraq-war/comment-page-3/#comment-5729860</link>
		<dc:creator>noseeum</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2009 10:52:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thinkprogress.org/?p=51498#comment-5729860</guid>
		<description>Farewell, Walter Cronkite.
Thank you for all your good works.
Television journalism has gone down the tube.
&lt;em&gt;(Pardon the pun)&lt;/em&gt;
And that&#039;s the way it is.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Farewell, Walter Cronkite.<br />
Thank you for all your good works.<br />
Television journalism has gone down the tube.<br />
<em>(Pardon the pun)</em><br />
And that&#8217;s the way it is.<a href="javascript:void(0)" title=""  onmouseover="window.status=''; return true" onmouseout="window.status=''; return true" onclick="ddrc_popup('http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/plugins/dd-report-comments/report.php?c=5729860', 400, 400)"></a></p>
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		<title>By: researcher</title>
		<link>http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/19/cronkite-iraq-war/comment-page-3/#comment-5729856</link>
		<dc:creator>researcher</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2009 07:45:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thinkprogress.org/?p=51498#comment-5729856</guid>
		<description>the mass media is more interested in numbers not in doing their job.

fox is very interested in pretty.

they do have some foxes on there channel.

nice to look at but dumber than dumb

this american&#039;s is the future of america

the decline is on but we had our day

like most nations that attain wealth arrogance sits in and the decline sits in soon after

but first we will have some hope ie lots of hope</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>the mass media is more interested in numbers not in doing their job.</p>
<p>fox is very interested in pretty.</p>
<p>they do have some foxes on there channel.</p>
<p>nice to look at but dumber than dumb</p>
<p>this american&#8217;s is the future of america</p>
<p>the decline is on but we had our day</p>
<p>like most nations that attain wealth arrogance sits in and the decline sits in soon after</p>
<p>but first we will have some hope ie lots of hope<a href="javascript:void(0)" title=""  onmouseover="window.status=''; return true" onmouseout="window.status=''; return true" onclick="ddrc_popup('http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/plugins/dd-report-comments/report.php?c=5729856', 400, 400)"></a></p>
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		<title>By: austininc4</title>
		<link>http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/19/cronkite-iraq-war/comment-page-3/#comment-5729847</link>
		<dc:creator>austininc4</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:49:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thinkprogress.org/?p=51498#comment-5729847</guid>
		<description>&quot;TRUER WORDS HAVE NEVER BEEN SPOKEN&quot;,  Cronkie was right about the war in Iraq.

We have yet to see, the &quot;REPERCUSSION&quot;,  of that INVASION.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>&#8220;TRUER WORDS HAVE NEVER BEEN SPOKEN&#8221;,  Cronkie was right about the war in Iraq.</p>
<p>We have yet to see, the &#8220;REPERCUSSION&#8221;,  of that INVASION.<a href="javascript:void(0)" title=""  onmouseover="window.status=''; return true" onmouseout="window.status=''; return true" onclick="ddrc_popup('http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/plugins/dd-report-comments/report.php?c=5729847', 400, 400)"></a></p>
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		<title>By: DallasNE</title>
		<link>http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/19/cronkite-iraq-war/comment-page-3/#comment-5729823</link>
		<dc:creator>DallasNE</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2009 03:34:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thinkprogress.org/?p=51498#comment-5729823</guid>
		<description>&lt;blockquote&gt;“Every little country in the world that has a border conflict with another little country … they now have a great example from the United States,” Cronkite, 86, said in response to a question from Drew’s president, former Gov. Thomas Kean. [...]&lt;/blockquote&gt;

Sometimes the consequences will carry over in other ways too. The military coup in Honduras is likely another example of how this plays out.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<blockquote><p>“Every little country in the world that has a border conflict with another little country … they now have a great example from the United States,” Cronkite, 86, said in response to a question from Drew’s president, former Gov. Thomas Kean. [...]</p></blockquote>
<p>Sometimes the consequences will carry over in other ways too. The military coup in Honduras is likely another example of how this plays out.<a href="javascript:void(0)" title=""  onmouseover="window.status=''; return true" onmouseout="window.status=''; return true" onclick="ddrc_popup('http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/plugins/dd-report-comments/report.php?c=5729823', 400, 400)"></a></p>
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		<title>By: KEVKEV IN APACHE JUNCTION</title>
		<link>http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/19/cronkite-iraq-war/comment-page-3/#comment-5729818</link>
		<dc:creator>KEVKEV IN APACHE JUNCTION</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2009 03:31:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thinkprogress.org/?p=51498#comment-5729818</guid>
		<description>sorry...</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>sorry&#8230;<a href="javascript:void(0)" title=""  onmouseover="window.status=''; return true" onmouseout="window.status=''; return true" onclick="ddrc_popup('http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/plugins/dd-report-comments/report.php?c=5729818', 400, 400)"></a></p>
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	<item>
		<title>By: Zooey</title>
		<link>http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/19/cronkite-iraq-war/comment-page-3/#comment-5729810</link>
		<dc:creator>Zooey</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2009 03:24:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thinkprogress.org/?p=51498#comment-5729810</guid>
		<description>Kevkev, a link is sufficient.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Kevkev, a link is sufficient.<a href="javascript:void(0)" title=""  onmouseover="window.status=''; return true" onmouseout="window.status=''; return true" onclick="ddrc_popup('http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/plugins/dd-report-comments/report.php?c=5729810', 400, 400)"></a></p>
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	<item>
		<title>By: KEVKEV IN APACHE JUNCTION</title>
		<link>http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/19/cronkite-iraq-war/comment-page-3/#comment-5729807</link>
		<dc:creator>KEVKEV IN APACHE JUNCTION</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2009 03:19:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thinkprogress.org/?p=51498#comment-5729807</guid>
		<description>The Depraved Spies and Moguls
of the CIA&#039;s Operation MOCKINGBIRD
by Alex Constantine
Who Controls the Media?

Soulless corporations do, of course. Corporations with grinning, double-breasted executives, interlocking directorates, labor squabbles and flying capital. Dow. General Electric. Coca-Cola. Disney. Newspapers should have mastheads that mirror the world: The Westinghouse Evening Scimitar, The Atlantic-Richfield Intelligentser . It is beginning to dawn on a growing number of armchair ombudsmen that the public print reports news from a parallel universe - one that has never heard of politically-motivated assassinations, CIA-Mafia banking thefts, mind control, death squads or even federal agencies with secret budgets fattened by cocaine sales - a place overrun by lone gunmen, where the CIA and Mafia are usually on their best behavior. In this idyllic land, the most serious infraction an official can commit is the employment of a domestic servant with (shudder) no residency status.

This unlikely land of enchantment is the creation of MOCKINGBIRD.

It was conceived in the late 1940s, the most frigid period of the cold war, when the CIA began a systematic infiltration of the corporate media, a process that often included direct takeover of major news outlets.

In this period, the American intelligence services competed with communist activists abroad to influence European labor unions. With or without the cooperation of local governments, Frank Wisner, an undercover State Department official assigned to the Foreign Service, rounded up students abroad to enter the cold war underground of covert operations on behalf of his Office of Policy Coordination. Philip Graham, a graduate of the Army Intelligence School in Harrisburg, PA, then publisher of the Washington Post., was taken under Wisner&#039;s wing to direct the program code-named Operation MOCKINGBIRD.

&quot;By the early 1950s,&quot; writes former Village Voice reporter Deborah Davis in Katharine the Great, &quot;Wisner &#039;owned&#039; respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles, plus stringers, four to six hundred in all, according to a former CIA analyst.&quot; The network was overseen by Allen Dulles, a templar for German and American corporations who wanted their points of view represented in the public print. Early MOCKINGBIRD influenced 25 newspapers and wire agencies consenting to act as organs of CIA propaganda. Many of these were already run by men with reactionary views, among them William Paley (CBS), C.D. Jackson (Fortune), Henry Luce (Time) and Arthur Hays Sulzberger (N.Y. Times).

Activists curious about the workings of MOCKINGBIRD have since been appalled to find in FOIA documents that agents boasting in CIA office memos of their pride in having placed &quot;important assets&quot; inside every major news publication in the country. It was not until 1982 that the Agency openly admitted that reporters on the CIA payroll have acted as case officers to agents in the field.

&quot;World War III has begun,&quot; Henry&#039;s Luce&#039;s Life declared in March, 1947. &quot;It is in the opening skirmish stage already.&quot; The issue featured an excerpt of a book by James Burnham, who called for the creation of an &quot;American Empire,&quot; &quot;world-dominating in political power, set up at least in part through coercion (probably including war, but certainly the threat of war) and in which one group of people ... would hold more than its equal share of power.&quot;

George Seldes, the famed anti-fascist media critic, drew down on Luce in 1947, explaining that &quot;although avoiding typical Hitlerian phrases, the same doctrine of a superior people taking over the world and ruling it, began to appear in the press, whereas the organs of Wall Street were much more honest in favoring a doctrine inevitably leading to war if it brought greater commercial markets under the American flag.&quot;

On the domestic front, an abiding relationship was struck between the CIA and William Paley, a wartime colonel and the founder of CBS. A firm believer in &quot;all forms of propaganda&quot; to foster loyalty to the Pentagon, Paley hired CIA agents to work undercover at the behest of his close friend, the busy grey eminence of the nation&#039;s media, Allen Dulles. Paley&#039;s designated go-between in his dealings with the CIA was Sig Mickelson, president of CBS News from 1954 to 1961.

The CIA&#039;s assimilation of old guard fascists was overseen by the Operations Coordination Board, directed by C.D. Jackson, formerly an executive of Time magazine and Eisenhower&#039;s Special Assistant for Cold War Strategy. In 1954 he was succeeded by Nelson Rockefeller, who quit a year later, disgusted at the administration&#039;s political infighting. Vice President Nixon succeeded Rockefeller as the key cold war strategist.
&quot;Nixon,&quot; writes John Loftus, a former attorney for the Justice Department&#039;s Office of Special Investigations, took &quot;a small boy&#039;s delight in the arcane tools of the intelligence craft - the hidden microphones, the &#039;black&#039; propaganda.&quot; Nixon especially enjoyed his visit to a Virginia training camp to observe Nazis in the &quot;special forces&quot; drilling at covert operations.

One of the fugitives recruited by the American intelligence underground was heroin smuggler Hubert von Blücher, the son of a German ambassador. Hubert often bragged that that he was trained by the Abwehr, the German military intelligence division, while still a civilian in his twenties. He served in a recon unit of the German Army until forced out for medical reasons in 1944, according to his wartime records. He worked briefly as an assistant director for Berlin-Film on a movie entitled One Day ..., and finished out the war flying with the Luftwaffe, but not to engage the enemy - his mission was the smuggling of Nazi loot out of the country. His exploits were, in part, the subject of Sayer and Botting&#039;s Nazi Gold, an account of the knockover of the Reichsbank at the end of the war.

In 1948 he flew the coop to Argentina. Posing as a photographer named Huberto von Bleucher Corell, he immediately paid court to Eva Peron, presenting her with an invaluable Gobelin tapestry (a selection from the wealth of artifacts confiscated by the SS from Europe&#039;s Jews?). Hubert then met with Martin Bormann at the Hotel Plaza to deliver German marks worth $80 million. The loot financed the birth of the National Socialist Party in Argentina, among other forms of Nazi revival.

In 1951, Hubert migrated northward and took a job at the Color Corporation of America in Hollywood. He eked out a living writing scripts for the booming movie industry. His voice can be heard on a film set in the Amazon, produced by Walt Disney. Nine years later he returned to Buenos Aires, then Düsseldorf, West Germany, and established a firm that developed not movie scripts, but anti-chemical warfare agents for the government. At the Industrie Club in Düsseldorf in 1982, von Blücher boasted to journalists, &quot;I am chief shareholder of Pan American Airways. I am the best friend of Howard Hughes. The Beach Hotel in Las Vegas is 45 percent financed by me. I am thus the biggest financier ever to appear in the Arabian Nights tales dreamed up by these people over their second bottle of brandy.&quot;

Not really. Two the biggest financiers to stumble from the drunken dreams of world-moving affluence were, in their time, Moses Annenberg, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and his son Walter , the CIA/mob-anchored publisher of the TV Guide. Like most American high-rollers, Annenberg lived a double life. Moses, his father, was a scion of the Capone mob. Both Moses and Walter were indicted in 1939 for tax evasions totalling many millions of dollars - the biggest case in the history of the Justice Department. Moses pled guilty and agreed to pay the government $8 million and settle $9 million in assorted tax claims, penalties and interest debts. Moses received a three-year sentence. He died in Lewisburg Penitentiary.

Walter Annenbeg, the TV Guide magnate, was a lofty Republican. On the campaign trail in April, 1988, George Bush flew into Los Angeles to woo Reagan&#039;s kitchen cabinet. &quot;This is the topping on the cake,&quot; Bush&#039;s regional campaign director told the Los Angeles Times. The Bush team met at Annenberg&#039;s plush Rancho Mirage estate at Sunnylands, California. It was at the Annenberg mansion that Nixon&#039;s cabinet was chosen, and the state&#039;s social and contributor registers built over a quarter-century of state political dominance by Ronald Reagan, whose acting career was launched by Operation MOCKINGBIRD.

The commercialization of television, coinciding with Reagan&#039;s recruitment by the Crusade for Freedom, a CIA front, presented the intelligence world with unprecedented potential for sowing propaganda and even prying in the age of Big Brother. George Orwell glimpsed the possibilities when he installed omniscient video surveillance technology in 1948, a novel rechristened 1984 for the first edition published in the U.S. by Harcourt, Brace. Operation Octopus, according to federal files, was in full swing by 1948, a surveillance program that turned any television set with tubes into a broadcast transmitter. Agents of Octopus could pick up audio and visual images with the equipment as far as 25 miles away.

Hale Boggs was investigating Operation Octopus at the time of his disappearance in the midst of the Watergate probe.

In 1952, at MCA, Actors&#039; Guild president Ronald Reagan - a screen idol recruited by MOCKINGBIRD&#039;s Crusade for Freedom to raise funds for the resettlement of Nazis in the U.S., according to Loftus - signed a secret waiver of the conflict-of-interest rule with the mob-controlled studio, in effect granting it a labor monopoly on early television programming. In exchange, MCA made Reagan a part owner. Furthermore, historian C. Vann Woodward, writing in the New York Times, in 1987, reported that Reagan had &quot;fed the names of suspect people in his organization to the FBI secretly and regularly enough to be assigned &#039;an informer&#039;s code number, T-10.&#039; His FBI file indicates intense collaboration with producers to &#039;purge&#039; the industry of subversives.&quot;

No one ever turned a suspicious eye on Walter Cronkite, a former intelligence officer and in the immediate postwar period UPI&#039;s Moscow correspondent. Cronkite was lured to CBS by Operation MOCKINGBIRD&#039;s Phil Graham, according to Deborah Davis.

Another television conglomerate, Cap Cities, rose like a horror-film simian from CIA and Mafia heroin operations. Among other organized-crime Republicans, Thomas Dewey and his neighbor Lowell Thomas threw in to launch the infamous Resorts International, the corporate front for Lansky&#039;s branch of the federally-sponsored mob family and the corporate precursor to Cap Cities. Another of the investors was James Crosby, a Cap Cities executive who donated $100,000 to Nixon&#039;s 1968 presidential campaign. This was the year that Resorts bought into Atlantic City casino interests. Police in New jersey attempted, with no success, to spike the issuance of a gambling license to the company, citing Mafia ties.

In 1954, this same circle of investors, all Catholics, founded the broadcasting company notorious for overt propagandizing and general spookiness. The company&#039;s chief counsel was OSS veteran William Casey, who clung to his shares by concealing them in a blind trust even after he was appointed CIA director by Ronald Reagan in 1981.

&quot;Black radio&quot; was the phrase CIA critic David Wise coined in The Invisible Government to describe the agency&#039;s intertwining interests in the emergence of the transistor radio with the entrepreneurs who took to the airwaves. &quot;Daily, East and West beam hundreds of propaganda broadcasts at each other in an unrelenting babble of competition for the minds of their listeners. The low-price transistor has given the hidden war a new importance,&quot; enthused one foreign correspondent.

A Hydra of private foundations sprang up to finance the propaganda push. One of them, Operations and Policy Research, Inc. (OPR), received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the CIA through private foundations and trusts. OPR research was the basis of a television series that aired in New York and Washington, D.C. in 1964, Of People and Politics, a &quot;study&quot; of the American political system in 21 weekly installments.

In Hollywood, the visual cortex of The Beast, the same CIA/Mafia combination that formed Cap Cities sank its claws into the film studios and labor unions. Johnny Rosselli was pulled out of the Army during the war by a criminal investigation of Chicago mobsters in the film industry. Rosselli, a CIA asset probably assassinated by the CIA, played sidekick to Harry Cohn, the Columbia Pictures mogul who visited Italy&#039;s Benito Mussolini in 1933, and upon his return to Hollywood remodeled his office after the dictator&#039;s. The only honest job Rosselli ever had was assistant purchasing agent (and a secret investor) at Eagle Lion Productions, run by Bryan Foy, a former producer for 20th Century Fox. Rosselli, Capone&#039;s representative on the West Coast, passed a small fortune in mafia investments to Cohn. Bugsy Seigel pooled gambling investments with Billy Wilkerson, publisher of the Hollywood Reporter.

In the 1950s, outlays for global propaganda climbed to a full third of the CIA&#039;s covert operations budget. Some 3, 000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts. The cost of disinforming the world cost American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year by 1978, a budget larger than the combined expenditures of Reuters, UPI and the AP news syndicates.

In 1977, the Copely News Service admitted that it worked closely with the intelligence services - in fact, 23 employees were full-time employees of the Agency.

Most consumers of the corporate media were - and are - unaware of the effect that the salting of public opinion has on their own beliefs. A network anchorman in time of national crisis is an instrument of psychological warfare in the MOCKINGBIRD media. He is a creature from the national security sector&#039;s chamber of horrors. For this reason consumers of the corporate press have reason to examine their basic beliefs about government and life in the parallel universe of these United States</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The Depraved Spies and Moguls<br />
of the CIA&#8217;s Operation MOCKINGBIRD<br />
by Alex Constantine<br />
Who Controls the Media?</p>
<p>Soulless corporations do, of course. Corporations with grinning, double-breasted executives, interlocking directorates, labor squabbles and flying capital. Dow. General Electric. Coca-Cola. Disney. Newspapers should have mastheads that mirror the world: The Westinghouse Evening Scimitar, The Atlantic-Richfield Intelligentser . It is beginning to dawn on a growing number of armchair ombudsmen that the public print reports news from a parallel universe &#8211; one that has never heard of politically-motivated assassinations, CIA-Mafia banking thefts, mind control, death squads or even federal agencies with secret budgets fattened by cocaine sales &#8211; a place overrun by lone gunmen, where the CIA and Mafia are usually on their best behavior. In this idyllic land, the most serious infraction an official can commit is the employment of a domestic servant with (shudder) no residency status.</p>
<p>This unlikely land of enchantment is the creation of MOCKINGBIRD.</p>
<p>It was conceived in the late 1940s, the most frigid period of the cold war, when the CIA began a systematic infiltration of the corporate media, a process that often included direct takeover of major news outlets.</p>
<p>In this period, the American intelligence services competed with communist activists abroad to influence European labor unions. With or without the cooperation of local governments, Frank Wisner, an undercover State Department official assigned to the Foreign Service, rounded up students abroad to enter the cold war underground of covert operations on behalf of his Office of Policy Coordination. Philip Graham, a graduate of the Army Intelligence School in Harrisburg, PA, then publisher of the Washington Post., was taken under Wisner&#8217;s wing to direct the program code-named Operation MOCKINGBIRD.</p>
<p>&#8220;By the early 1950s,&#8221; writes former Village Voice reporter Deborah Davis in Katharine the Great, &#8220;Wisner &#8216;owned&#8217; respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles, plus stringers, four to six hundred in all, according to a former CIA analyst.&#8221; The network was overseen by Allen Dulles, a templar for German and American corporations who wanted their points of view represented in the public print. Early MOCKINGBIRD influenced 25 newspapers and wire agencies consenting to act as organs of CIA propaganda. Many of these were already run by men with reactionary views, among them William Paley (CBS), C.D. Jackson (Fortune), Henry Luce (Time) and Arthur Hays Sulzberger (N.Y. Times).</p>
<p>Activists curious about the workings of MOCKINGBIRD have since been appalled to find in FOIA documents that agents boasting in CIA office memos of their pride in having placed &#8220;important assets&#8221; inside every major news publication in the country. It was not until 1982 that the Agency openly admitted that reporters on the CIA payroll have acted as case officers to agents in the field.</p>
<p>&#8220;World War III has begun,&#8221; Henry&#8217;s Luce&#8217;s Life declared in March, 1947. &#8220;It is in the opening skirmish stage already.&#8221; The issue featured an excerpt of a book by James Burnham, who called for the creation of an &#8220;American Empire,&#8221; &#8220;world-dominating in political power, set up at least in part through coercion (probably including war, but certainly the threat of war) and in which one group of people &#8230; would hold more than its equal share of power.&#8221;</p>
<p>George Seldes, the famed anti-fascist media critic, drew down on Luce in 1947, explaining that &#8220;although avoiding typical Hitlerian phrases, the same doctrine of a superior people taking over the world and ruling it, began to appear in the press, whereas the organs of Wall Street were much more honest in favoring a doctrine inevitably leading to war if it brought greater commercial markets under the American flag.&#8221;</p>
<p>On the domestic front, an abiding relationship was struck between the CIA and William Paley, a wartime colonel and the founder of CBS. A firm believer in &#8220;all forms of propaganda&#8221; to foster loyalty to the Pentagon, Paley hired CIA agents to work undercover at the behest of his close friend, the busy grey eminence of the nation&#8217;s media, Allen Dulles. Paley&#8217;s designated go-between in his dealings with the CIA was Sig Mickelson, president of CBS News from 1954 to 1961.</p>
<p>The CIA&#8217;s assimilation of old guard fascists was overseen by the Operations Coordination Board, directed by C.D. Jackson, formerly an executive of Time magazine and Eisenhower&#8217;s Special Assistant for Cold War Strategy. In 1954 he was succeeded by Nelson Rockefeller, who quit a year later, disgusted at the administration&#8217;s political infighting. Vice President Nixon succeeded Rockefeller as the key cold war strategist.<br />
&#8220;Nixon,&#8221; writes John Loftus, a former attorney for the Justice Department&#8217;s Office of Special Investigations, took &#8220;a small boy&#8217;s delight in the arcane tools of the intelligence craft &#8211; the hidden microphones, the &#8216;black&#8217; propaganda.&#8221; Nixon especially enjoyed his visit to a Virginia training camp to observe Nazis in the &#8220;special forces&#8221; drilling at covert operations.</p>
<p>One of the fugitives recruited by the American intelligence underground was heroin smuggler Hubert von Blücher, the son of a German ambassador. Hubert often bragged that that he was trained by the Abwehr, the German military intelligence division, while still a civilian in his twenties. He served in a recon unit of the German Army until forced out for medical reasons in 1944, according to his wartime records. He worked briefly as an assistant director for Berlin-Film on a movie entitled One Day &#8230;, and finished out the war flying with the Luftwaffe, but not to engage the enemy &#8211; his mission was the smuggling of Nazi loot out of the country. His exploits were, in part, the subject of Sayer and Botting&#8217;s Nazi Gold, an account of the knockover of the Reichsbank at the end of the war.</p>
<p>In 1948 he flew the coop to Argentina. Posing as a photographer named Huberto von Bleucher Corell, he immediately paid court to Eva Peron, presenting her with an invaluable Gobelin tapestry (a selection from the wealth of artifacts confiscated by the SS from Europe&#8217;s Jews?). Hubert then met with Martin Bormann at the Hotel Plaza to deliver German marks worth $80 million. The loot financed the birth of the National Socialist Party in Argentina, among other forms of Nazi revival.</p>
<p>In 1951, Hubert migrated northward and took a job at the Color Corporation of America in Hollywood. He eked out a living writing scripts for the booming movie industry. His voice can be heard on a film set in the Amazon, produced by Walt Disney. Nine years later he returned to Buenos Aires, then Düsseldorf, West Germany, and established a firm that developed not movie scripts, but anti-chemical warfare agents for the government. At the Industrie Club in Düsseldorf in 1982, von Blücher boasted to journalists, &#8220;I am chief shareholder of Pan American Airways. I am the best friend of Howard Hughes. The Beach Hotel in Las Vegas is 45 percent financed by me. I am thus the biggest financier ever to appear in the Arabian Nights tales dreamed up by these people over their second bottle of brandy.&#8221;</p>
<p>Not really. Two the biggest financiers to stumble from the drunken dreams of world-moving affluence were, in their time, Moses Annenberg, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and his son Walter , the CIA/mob-anchored publisher of the TV Guide. Like most American high-rollers, Annenberg lived a double life. Moses, his father, was a scion of the Capone mob. Both Moses and Walter were indicted in 1939 for tax evasions totalling many millions of dollars &#8211; the biggest case in the history of the Justice Department. Moses pled guilty and agreed to pay the government $8 million and settle $9 million in assorted tax claims, penalties and interest debts. Moses received a three-year sentence. He died in Lewisburg Penitentiary.</p>
<p>Walter Annenbeg, the TV Guide magnate, was a lofty Republican. On the campaign trail in April, 1988, George Bush flew into Los Angeles to woo Reagan&#8217;s kitchen cabinet. &#8220;This is the topping on the cake,&#8221; Bush&#8217;s regional campaign director told the Los Angeles Times. The Bush team met at Annenberg&#8217;s plush Rancho Mirage estate at Sunnylands, California. It was at the Annenberg mansion that Nixon&#8217;s cabinet was chosen, and the state&#8217;s social and contributor registers built over a quarter-century of state political dominance by Ronald Reagan, whose acting career was launched by Operation MOCKINGBIRD.</p>
<p>The commercialization of television, coinciding with Reagan&#8217;s recruitment by the Crusade for Freedom, a CIA front, presented the intelligence world with unprecedented potential for sowing propaganda and even prying in the age of Big Brother. George Orwell glimpsed the possibilities when he installed omniscient video surveillance technology in 1948, a novel rechristened 1984 for the first edition published in the U.S. by Harcourt, Brace. Operation Octopus, according to federal files, was in full swing by 1948, a surveillance program that turned any television set with tubes into a broadcast transmitter. Agents of Octopus could pick up audio and visual images with the equipment as far as 25 miles away.</p>
<p>Hale Boggs was investigating Operation Octopus at the time of his disappearance in the midst of the Watergate probe.</p>
<p>In 1952, at MCA, Actors&#8217; Guild president Ronald Reagan &#8211; a screen idol recruited by MOCKINGBIRD&#8217;s Crusade for Freedom to raise funds for the resettlement of Nazis in the U.S., according to Loftus &#8211; signed a secret waiver of the conflict-of-interest rule with the mob-controlled studio, in effect granting it a labor monopoly on early television programming. In exchange, MCA made Reagan a part owner. Furthermore, historian C. Vann Woodward, writing in the New York Times, in 1987, reported that Reagan had &#8220;fed the names of suspect people in his organization to the FBI secretly and regularly enough to be assigned &#8216;an informer&#8217;s code number, T-10.&#8217; His FBI file indicates intense collaboration with producers to &#8216;purge&#8217; the industry of subversives.&#8221;</p>
<p>No one ever turned a suspicious eye on Walter Cronkite, a former intelligence officer and in the immediate postwar period UPI&#8217;s Moscow correspondent. Cronkite was lured to CBS by Operation MOCKINGBIRD&#8217;s Phil Graham, according to Deborah Davis.</p>
<p>Another television conglomerate, Cap Cities, rose like a horror-film simian from CIA and Mafia heroin operations. Among other organized-crime Republicans, Thomas Dewey and his neighbor Lowell Thomas threw in to launch the infamous Resorts International, the corporate front for Lansky&#8217;s branch of the federally-sponsored mob family and the corporate precursor to Cap Cities. Another of the investors was James Crosby, a Cap Cities executive who donated $100,000 to Nixon&#8217;s 1968 presidential campaign. This was the year that Resorts bought into Atlantic City casino interests. Police in New jersey attempted, with no success, to spike the issuance of a gambling license to the company, citing Mafia ties.</p>
<p>In 1954, this same circle of investors, all Catholics, founded the broadcasting company notorious for overt propagandizing and general spookiness. The company&#8217;s chief counsel was OSS veteran William Casey, who clung to his shares by concealing them in a blind trust even after he was appointed CIA director by Ronald Reagan in 1981.</p>
<p>&#8220;Black radio&#8221; was the phrase CIA critic David Wise coined in The Invisible Government to describe the agency&#8217;s intertwining interests in the emergence of the transistor radio with the entrepreneurs who took to the airwaves. &#8220;Daily, East and West beam hundreds of propaganda broadcasts at each other in an unrelenting babble of competition for the minds of their listeners. The low-price transistor has given the hidden war a new importance,&#8221; enthused one foreign correspondent.</p>
<p>A Hydra of private foundations sprang up to finance the propaganda push. One of them, Operations and Policy Research, Inc. (OPR), received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the CIA through private foundations and trusts. OPR research was the basis of a television series that aired in New York and Washington, D.C. in 1964, Of People and Politics, a &#8220;study&#8221; of the American political system in 21 weekly installments.</p>
<p>In Hollywood, the visual cortex of The Beast, the same CIA/Mafia combination that formed Cap Cities sank its claws into the film studios and labor unions. Johnny Rosselli was pulled out of the Army during the war by a criminal investigation of Chicago mobsters in the film industry. Rosselli, a CIA asset probably assassinated by the CIA, played sidekick to Harry Cohn, the Columbia Pictures mogul who visited Italy&#8217;s Benito Mussolini in 1933, and upon his return to Hollywood remodeled his office after the dictator&#8217;s. The only honest job Rosselli ever had was assistant purchasing agent (and a secret investor) at Eagle Lion Productions, run by Bryan Foy, a former producer for 20th Century Fox. Rosselli, Capone&#8217;s representative on the West Coast, passed a small fortune in mafia investments to Cohn. Bugsy Seigel pooled gambling investments with Billy Wilkerson, publisher of the Hollywood Reporter.</p>
<p>In the 1950s, outlays for global propaganda climbed to a full third of the CIA&#8217;s covert operations budget. Some 3, 000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts. The cost of disinforming the world cost American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year by 1978, a budget larger than the combined expenditures of Reuters, UPI and the AP news syndicates.</p>
<p>In 1977, the Copely News Service admitted that it worked closely with the intelligence services &#8211; in fact, 23 employees were full-time employees of the Agency.</p>
<p>Most consumers of the corporate media were &#8211; and are &#8211; unaware of the effect that the salting of public opinion has on their own beliefs. A network anchorman in time of national crisis is an instrument of psychological warfare in the MOCKINGBIRD media. He is a creature from the national security sector&#8217;s chamber of horrors. For this reason consumers of the corporate press have reason to examine their basic beliefs about government and life in the parallel universe of these United States<a href="javascript:void(0)" title=""  onmouseover="window.status=''; return true" onmouseout="window.status=''; return true" onclick="ddrc_popup('http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/plugins/dd-report-comments/report.php?c=5729807', 400, 400)"></a></p>
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		<title>By: Zooey</title>
		<link>http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/19/cronkite-iraq-war/comment-page-3/#comment-5729806</link>
		<dc:creator>Zooey</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2009 03:17:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thinkprogress.org/?p=51498#comment-5729806</guid>
		<description>If anyone is interested, the trolls are pleasuring themselves on the DeMint thread.  :D</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>If anyone is interested, the trolls are pleasuring themselves on the DeMint thread.  :D<a href="javascript:void(0)" title=""  onmouseover="window.status=''; return true" onmouseout="window.status=''; return true" onclick="ddrc_popup('http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/plugins/dd-report-comments/report.php?c=5729806', 400, 400)"></a></p>
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		<title>By: Mr. Cobb</title>
		<link>http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/19/cronkite-iraq-war/comment-page-2/#comment-5729804</link>
		<dc:creator>Mr. Cobb</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2009 03:13:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thinkprogress.org/?p=51498#comment-5729804</guid>
		<description>The Family is the fundie mafia full of constitutional reconstructionists.  We warned that they were trying to secretly take over the country and institute a theocracy.  If it wasn&#039;t a religion, it would be called treason.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The Family is the fundie mafia full of constitutional reconstructionists.  We warned that they were trying to secretly take over the country and institute a theocracy.  If it wasn&#8217;t a religion, it would be called treason.<a href="javascript:void(0)" title=""  onmouseover="window.status=''; return true" onmouseout="window.status=''; return true" onclick="ddrc_popup('http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/plugins/dd-report-comments/report.php?c=5729804', 400, 400)"></a></p>
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		<title>By: KEVKEV IN APACHE JUNCTION</title>
		<link>http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/19/cronkite-iraq-war/comment-page-2/#comment-5729802</link>
		<dc:creator>KEVKEV IN APACHE JUNCTION</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2009 03:13:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thinkprogress.org/?p=51498#comment-5729802</guid>
		<description>REMARKS ON ACCEPTING THE 1999 NORMAN COUSINS GLOBAL GOVERNANCE AWARD
by Walter Cronkite

 


I am greatly honored to receive this Norman Cousins Global Governance Award for two reasons. First, I believe as Norman Cousins did: that the first priority of humankind in this era is to establish an effective system of world law that will assure peace with justice among the peoples of the world.

Second, I feel sentimental about this award because half a century ago Norman offered me a job as spokesman and Washington lobbyist for the World Federalist organization, which was then in its infancy.

I chose instead to continue in the world of journalism. For many years, I did my best to report on the issues of the day in as objective a manner as possible. When I had my own strong opinions, as I often did, I tried not to communicate them to my audience.

Now, however, my circumstances are different. I am in a position to speak my mind. And that is what I propose to do.

Those of us who are living today can influence the future of civilization. We can influence whether our planet will drift into chaos and violence, or whether through a monumental educational and political effort we will achieve a world of peace under a system of law where individual violators of that law are brought to justice.

For most of this fairly long life I have been an optimist harboring a belief that as our globe shrank, as our communication miracles brought us closer together, we would begin to appreciate the commonality of our universal desire to live in peace and that we would do something to satisfy that yearning of all peoples. Today I find it harder to cling to that hope.

For how many thousands of years now have we humans been what we insist on calling &quot;civilized?&quot; And yet, in total contradiction, we also persist in the savage belief that we must occasionally, at least, settle our arguments by killing one another.

While we spend much of our time and a great deal of our treasure in preparing for war, we see no comparable effort to establish a lasting peace. Meanwhile, emphasizing the sloth in this regard, those advocates who work for world peace by urging a system of world government are called impractical dreamers. Those impractical dreamers are entitled to ask their critics what is so practical about war.

It seems to many of us that if we are to avoid the eventual catastrophic world conflict we must strengthen the United Nations as a first step toward a world government patterned after our own government with a legislature, executive and judiciary, and police to enforce its international laws and keep the peace.

To do that, of course, we Americans will have to yield up some of our sovereignty. That would be a bitter pill. It would take a lot of courage, a lot of faith in the new order.

But the American colonies did it once and brought forth one of the most nearly perfect unions the world has ever seen. The circumstances were vastly different, obviously. While the colonies differed on many questions, at least the people of the colonies were of the same Anglo-Saxon stock. Yet just because the task appears forbiddingly hard, we should not shirk it.

We cannot defer this responsibility to posterity. Time will not wait. Democracy, civilization itself, is at stake. Within the next few years we must change the basic structure of our global community from the present anarchic system of war and ever more destructive weaponry to a new system governed by a democratic UN federation.

I suppose I&#039;m preaching to the choir here. So let&#039;s not talk generalities but focus tonight on a few specifics of what the leadership of the World Federalist Movement believe must be done now to advance the rule of world law.

For starters, we can draw on the wisdom of the framers of the US Constitution in 1787. The differences among the American states then were as bitter as differences among the nation-states in the world today.

In their almost miraculous insight, the founders of our country invented &quot;federalism,&quot; a concept that is rooted in the rights of the individual. Our federal system guarantees a maximum of freedom but provides it in a framework of law and justice.

Our forefathers believed that the closer the laws are to the people, the better. Cities legislate on local matters; states make decisions on matters within their borders; and the national government deals with issues that transcend the states, such as interstate commerce and foreign relations. That is federalism.

Today we must develop federal structures on a global level. We need a system of enforceable world law-- a democratic federal world government--to deal with world problems.

What Alexander Hamilton wrote about the need for law among the 13 states applies today to the approximately 200 sovereignties in our global village:

&quot;To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent, unconnected sovereignties in the same neighborhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages.&quot;
Today the notion of unlimited national sovereignty means international anarchy. We must replace the anarchic law of force with a civilized force of law.


Ours will neither be a perfect world, nor a world without disagreement and occasional violence. But it will be a world where the overwhelming majority of national leaders will consistently abide by the rule of world law, and those who won&#039;t will be dealt with effectively and with due process by the structures of that same world law. We will never have a city without crime, but we would never want to live in a city that had no system of law to deal with the criminals who will always be with us.

Let me make three suggestions for immediate action that would move us in a direction firmly in the American tradition of law and democracy.

Keep our promises: We helped create the UN and to develop the UN assessment formula. Americans overwhelmingly want us to pay our UN dues, with no crippling limitations. We owe it to the world. In fact, we owe it as well to our national self-esteem. 
Ratify the Treaty to Ban Land Mines, the Law of the Sea Treaty, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the Convention to Eliminate All forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Most important, we should sign and ratify the Treaty for a Permanent International Criminal Court. That Court will enable the world to hold individuals accountable for crimes against humanity. 
Consider, after 55 years, the possibility of a more representative and democratic system of decision making at the UN. This should include both revision of the Veto in the Security Council and adoption of a weighted voting system for the General Assembly. The World Federalists have endorsed Richard Hudson&#039;s Binding Triad proposal. George Soros, in his recent book, &quot;The Crisis of Global Capitalism&quot; has given serious attention to this concept which would be based upon not only one-nation-one-vote but also, on population and contributions to the UN budget. Resolutions adopted by majorities in each of these three areas would be binding, enforceable law. Within the powers given to it in the Charter, the UN could then deal with matters of reliable financing, a standing UN Peace force, development, the environment and human rights. 
Some of you may ask why the Senate is not ratifying these important treaties and why the Congress is not paying our UN dues. Even as with the American rejection of the League of Nations, our failure to live up to our obligations to the United Nations is led by a handful of willful senators who choose to pursue their narrow, selfish political objectives at the cost of our nation&#039;s conscience.

They pander to and are supported by the Christian Coalition and the rest of the religious right wing. Their leader, Pat Robertson, has written that we should have a world government but only when the messiah arrives. Any attempt to achieve world order before that time must be the work of the Devil!

This small but well-organized group, has intimidated both the Republican Party and the Clinton administration. It has attacked each of our Presidents since FDR for supporting the United Nations. Robertson explains that these Presidents were and are the unwitting agents of Lucifer.

The only way we who believe in the vision of a democratic world federal government can effectively overcome this reactionary movement is to organize a strong educational counteroffensive stretching from the most publicly visible people in all fields to the humblest individuals in every community. That is the vision and the program of the World Federalist Association.

The strength of the World Federalist program would serve an important auxiliary purpose at this particular point in our history. There would be immediate diplomatic advantages in just the world knowledge that this country was even beginning to explore the prospect of strengthening the UN. We would appear before the peoples of the world as the champion of peace for all by the equitable sharing of power. This in sharp contrast to the growing concern that we intend to use our current dominant military power to enforce a sort of pax Americana.

Our country today is at a stage in our foreign policy similar to that crucial point in our nation&#039;s early history when our Constitution was produced in Philadelphia.

Let us hear the peal of a new international liberty bell that calls us all to the creation of a system of enforceable world law in which the universal desire for peace can place its hope and prayers. As Carl Van Doren has written, &quot;History is now choosing the founders of the World Federation. Any person who can be among that number and fails to do so has lost the noblest opportunity of a lifetime.&quot;


As one of the most recognizable news reporters in American journalism, Cronkite is best known for his unbiased reporting that has spanned such major world events as World War II, the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War, the 1969 lunar landing, and the Watergate scandal. Following the war, from his UPI outpost in Brussels, Cronkite served as the chief correspondent during the Nuremberg trials. By 1962, he had become sufficiently established to headline his own news program. &quot;The CBS News with Walter Cronkite&quot; aired from 1962-1981 and featured Cronkite&#039;s trademark nightly send-off, &quot;And that&#039;s the way it is,&quot; at the end of every news broadcast. In 1973, an opinion poll voted Cronkite &quot;the most trusted man in America.&quot; He has long supported the work of the World Federalist Association. He was presented the 1999 Norman Cousins Global Governance Award at a ceremony at the United Nations for his comparison in his autobiography of the need for global federal government today with the political courage of the American founders in 1787.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>REMARKS ON ACCEPTING THE 1999 NORMAN COUSINS GLOBAL GOVERNANCE AWARD<br />
by Walter Cronkite</p>
<p>I am greatly honored to receive this Norman Cousins Global Governance Award for two reasons. First, I believe as Norman Cousins did: that the first priority of humankind in this era is to establish an effective system of world law that will assure peace with justice among the peoples of the world.</p>
<p>Second, I feel sentimental about this award because half a century ago Norman offered me a job as spokesman and Washington lobbyist for the World Federalist organization, which was then in its infancy.</p>
<p>I chose instead to continue in the world of journalism. For many years, I did my best to report on the issues of the day in as objective a manner as possible. When I had my own strong opinions, as I often did, I tried not to communicate them to my audience.</p>
<p>Now, however, my circumstances are different. I am in a position to speak my mind. And that is what I propose to do.</p>
<p>Those of us who are living today can influence the future of civilization. We can influence whether our planet will drift into chaos and violence, or whether through a monumental educational and political effort we will achieve a world of peace under a system of law where individual violators of that law are brought to justice.</p>
<p>For most of this fairly long life I have been an optimist harboring a belief that as our globe shrank, as our communication miracles brought us closer together, we would begin to appreciate the commonality of our universal desire to live in peace and that we would do something to satisfy that yearning of all peoples. Today I find it harder to cling to that hope.</p>
<p>For how many thousands of years now have we humans been what we insist on calling &#8220;civilized?&#8221; And yet, in total contradiction, we also persist in the savage belief that we must occasionally, at least, settle our arguments by killing one another.</p>
<p>While we spend much of our time and a great deal of our treasure in preparing for war, we see no comparable effort to establish a lasting peace. Meanwhile, emphasizing the sloth in this regard, those advocates who work for world peace by urging a system of world government are called impractical dreamers. Those impractical dreamers are entitled to ask their critics what is so practical about war.</p>
<p>It seems to many of us that if we are to avoid the eventual catastrophic world conflict we must strengthen the United Nations as a first step toward a world government patterned after our own government with a legislature, executive and judiciary, and police to enforce its international laws and keep the peace.</p>
<p>To do that, of course, we Americans will have to yield up some of our sovereignty. That would be a bitter pill. It would take a lot of courage, a lot of faith in the new order.</p>
<p>But the American colonies did it once and brought forth one of the most nearly perfect unions the world has ever seen. The circumstances were vastly different, obviously. While the colonies differed on many questions, at least the people of the colonies were of the same Anglo-Saxon stock. Yet just because the task appears forbiddingly hard, we should not shirk it.</p>
<p>We cannot defer this responsibility to posterity. Time will not wait. Democracy, civilization itself, is at stake. Within the next few years we must change the basic structure of our global community from the present anarchic system of war and ever more destructive weaponry to a new system governed by a democratic UN federation.</p>
<p>I suppose I&#8217;m preaching to the choir here. So let&#8217;s not talk generalities but focus tonight on a few specifics of what the leadership of the World Federalist Movement believe must be done now to advance the rule of world law.</p>
<p>For starters, we can draw on the wisdom of the framers of the US Constitution in 1787. The differences among the American states then were as bitter as differences among the nation-states in the world today.</p>
<p>In their almost miraculous insight, the founders of our country invented &#8220;federalism,&#8221; a concept that is rooted in the rights of the individual. Our federal system guarantees a maximum of freedom but provides it in a framework of law and justice.</p>
<p>Our forefathers believed that the closer the laws are to the people, the better. Cities legislate on local matters; states make decisions on matters within their borders; and the national government deals with issues that transcend the states, such as interstate commerce and foreign relations. That is federalism.</p>
<p>Today we must develop federal structures on a global level. We need a system of enforceable world law&#8211; a democratic federal world government&#8211;to deal with world problems.</p>
<p>What Alexander Hamilton wrote about the need for law among the 13 states applies today to the approximately 200 sovereignties in our global village:</p>
<p>&#8220;To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent, unconnected sovereignties in the same neighborhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages.&#8221;<br />
Today the notion of unlimited national sovereignty means international anarchy. We must replace the anarchic law of force with a civilized force of law.</p>
<p>Ours will neither be a perfect world, nor a world without disagreement and occasional violence. But it will be a world where the overwhelming majority of national leaders will consistently abide by the rule of world law, and those who won&#8217;t will be dealt with effectively and with due process by the structures of that same world law. We will never have a city without crime, but we would never want to live in a city that had no system of law to deal with the criminals who will always be with us.</p>
<p>Let me make three suggestions for immediate action that would move us in a direction firmly in the American tradition of law and democracy.</p>
<p>Keep our promises: We helped create the UN and to develop the UN assessment formula. Americans overwhelmingly want us to pay our UN dues, with no crippling limitations. We owe it to the world. In fact, we owe it as well to our national self-esteem.<br />
Ratify the Treaty to Ban Land Mines, the Law of the Sea Treaty, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the Convention to Eliminate All forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Most important, we should sign and ratify the Treaty for a Permanent International Criminal Court. That Court will enable the world to hold individuals accountable for crimes against humanity.<br />
Consider, after 55 years, the possibility of a more representative and democratic system of decision making at the UN. This should include both revision of the Veto in the Security Council and adoption of a weighted voting system for the General Assembly. The World Federalists have endorsed Richard Hudson&#8217;s Binding Triad proposal. George Soros, in his recent book, &#8220;The Crisis of Global Capitalism&#8221; has given serious attention to this concept which would be based upon not only one-nation-one-vote but also, on population and contributions to the UN budget. Resolutions adopted by majorities in each of these three areas would be binding, enforceable law. Within the powers given to it in the Charter, the UN could then deal with matters of reliable financing, a standing UN Peace force, development, the environment and human rights.<br />
Some of you may ask why the Senate is not ratifying these important treaties and why the Congress is not paying our UN dues. Even as with the American rejection of the League of Nations, our failure to live up to our obligations to the United Nations is led by a handful of willful senators who choose to pursue their narrow, selfish political objectives at the cost of our nation&#8217;s conscience.</p>
<p>They pander to and are supported by the Christian Coalition and the rest of the religious right wing. Their leader, Pat Robertson, has written that we should have a world government but only when the messiah arrives. Any attempt to achieve world order before that time must be the work of the Devil!</p>
<p>This small but well-organized group, has intimidated both the Republican Party and the Clinton administration. It has attacked each of our Presidents since FDR for supporting the United Nations. Robertson explains that these Presidents were and are the unwitting agents of Lucifer.</p>
<p>The only way we who believe in the vision of a democratic world federal government can effectively overcome this reactionary movement is to organize a strong educational counteroffensive stretching from the most publicly visible people in all fields to the humblest individuals in every community. That is the vision and the program of the World Federalist Association.</p>
<p>The strength of the World Federalist program would serve an important auxiliary purpose at this particular point in our history. There would be immediate diplomatic advantages in just the world knowledge that this country was even beginning to explore the prospect of strengthening the UN. We would appear before the peoples of the world as the champion of peace for all by the equitable sharing of power. This in sharp contrast to the growing concern that we intend to use our current dominant military power to enforce a sort of pax Americana.</p>
<p>Our country today is at a stage in our foreign policy similar to that crucial point in our nation&#8217;s early history when our Constitution was produced in Philadelphia.</p>
<p>Let us hear the peal of a new international liberty bell that calls us all to the creation of a system of enforceable world law in which the universal desire for peace can place its hope and prayers. As Carl Van Doren has written, &#8220;History is now choosing the founders of the World Federation. Any person who can be among that number and fails to do so has lost the noblest opportunity of a lifetime.&#8221;</p>
<p>As one of the most recognizable news reporters in American journalism, Cronkite is best known for his unbiased reporting that has spanned such major world events as World War II, the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War, the 1969 lunar landing, and the Watergate scandal. Following the war, from his UPI outpost in Brussels, Cronkite served as the chief correspondent during the Nuremberg trials. By 1962, he had become sufficiently established to headline his own news program. &#8220;The CBS News with Walter Cronkite&#8221; aired from 1962-1981 and featured Cronkite&#8217;s trademark nightly send-off, &#8220;And that&#8217;s the way it is,&#8221; at the end of every news broadcast. In 1973, an opinion poll voted Cronkite &#8220;the most trusted man in America.&#8221; He has long supported the work of the World Federalist Association. He was presented the 1999 Norman Cousins Global Governance Award at a ceremony at the United Nations for his comparison in his autobiography of the need for global federal government today with the political courage of the American founders in 1787.<a href="javascript:void(0)" title=""  onmouseover="window.status=''; return true" onmouseout="window.status=''; return true" onclick="ddrc_popup('http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/plugins/dd-report-comments/report.php?c=5729802', 400, 400)"></a></p>
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		<title>By: KEVKEV IN APACHE JUNCTION</title>
		<link>http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/19/cronkite-iraq-war/comment-page-2/#comment-5729799</link>
		<dc:creator>KEVKEV IN APACHE JUNCTION</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2009 03:10:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thinkprogress.org/?p=51498#comment-5729799</guid>
		<description>Walter Cronkite: Most Trusted Asset of Operation Mockingbird  
Published on 07-19-2009 Email To Friend    Print Version  
 

By Kurt Nimmo

“It is impossible to imagine CBS News, journalism or indeed America without Walter Cronkite,” said Sean McManus, president of CBS News, on the passing on Walter Cronkite. “More than just the best and most trusted anchor in history, he guided America through our crises, tragedies and also our victories and greatest moments.&quot; 


I wonder if Mr. McManus knew the real Cronkite — Cronkite the a former intelligence officer who was lured away from his UPI Moscow desk by Operation Mockingbird’s Phil Graham.

Of course he did. Because the corporate media, at least at the level Walter Cronkite occupied, is rife with spooks, government agents, and disinfo operatives. The CIA has “important assets” inside every major news publication in the country, a fact established by numerous FOIA documents. A rare glimpse was also provided by Frank Church’s committee in the mid-70s.

Some of the journalists working the CIA’s side of the street “were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors-without-portfolio for their country,” Carl Bernstein wrote in an article published in Rolling Stone in October, 1977. “Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested it the derring-do of the spy business as in filing articles, and, the smallest category, full-time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad.”

“It was not until 1982 that the Agency openly admitted that reporters on the CIA payroll have acted as case officers to agents in the field,” writes Alex Constantine in The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA’s Operation MOCKINGBIRD. “Most consumers of the corporate media were — and are — unaware of the effect that the salting of public opinion has on their own beliefs.”

“In the 1950s, outlays for global propaganda climbed to a full third of the CIA’s covert operations budget. Some 3, 000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts. The cost of disinforming the world cost American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year by 1978, a budget larger than the combined expenditures of Reuters, UPI and the AP news syndicates.”

Cronkite was a trusted and valued part of that huge mass propaganda effort.

Cronkite betrayed his kindly and fatherly demeanor in 1999 when he accepted the Norman Cousins Global Governance Award at the ceremony at the United Nations:

It seems to many of us that if we are to avoid the eventual catastrophic world conflict we must strengthen the United Nations as a first step toward a world government patterned after our own government with a legislature, executive and judiciary, and police to enforce its international laws and keep the peace. To do that, of course, we Americans will have to yield up some of our sovereignty. That would be a bitter pill. It would take a lot of courage, a lot of faith in the new order. But the American colonies did it once and brought forth one of the most nearly perfect unions the world has ever seen.

It is said Cronkite “somehow spoke for the nation he spoke to,” according to the Los Angeles Times, when in fact — like all corporate media figures — Cronkite was reading from a script provided by the CIA at the behest of the ruling elite.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Walter Cronkite: Most Trusted Asset of Operation Mockingbird<br />
Published on 07-19-2009 Email To Friend    Print Version  </p>
<p>By Kurt Nimmo</p>
<p>“It is impossible to imagine CBS News, journalism or indeed America without Walter Cronkite,” said Sean McManus, president of CBS News, on the passing on Walter Cronkite. “More than just the best and most trusted anchor in history, he guided America through our crises, tragedies and also our victories and greatest moments.&#8221; </p>
<p>I wonder if Mr. McManus knew the real Cronkite — Cronkite the a former intelligence officer who was lured away from his UPI Moscow desk by Operation Mockingbird’s Phil Graham.</p>
<p>Of course he did. Because the corporate media, at least at the level Walter Cronkite occupied, is rife with spooks, government agents, and disinfo operatives. The CIA has “important assets” inside every major news publication in the country, a fact established by numerous FOIA documents. A rare glimpse was also provided by Frank Church’s committee in the mid-70s.</p>
<p>Some of the journalists working the CIA’s side of the street “were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors-without-portfolio for their country,” Carl Bernstein wrote in an article published in Rolling Stone in October, 1977. “Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested it the derring-do of the spy business as in filing articles, and, the smallest category, full-time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad.”</p>
<p>“It was not until 1982 that the Agency openly admitted that reporters on the CIA payroll have acted as case officers to agents in the field,” writes Alex Constantine in The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA’s Operation MOCKINGBIRD. “Most consumers of the corporate media were — and are — unaware of the effect that the salting of public opinion has on their own beliefs.”</p>
<p>“In the 1950s, outlays for global propaganda climbed to a full third of the CIA’s covert operations budget. Some 3, 000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts. The cost of disinforming the world cost American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year by 1978, a budget larger than the combined expenditures of Reuters, UPI and the AP news syndicates.”</p>
<p>Cronkite was a trusted and valued part of that huge mass propaganda effort.</p>
<p>Cronkite betrayed his kindly and fatherly demeanor in 1999 when he accepted the Norman Cousins Global Governance Award at the ceremony at the United Nations:</p>
<p>It seems to many of us that if we are to avoid the eventual catastrophic world conflict we must strengthen the United Nations as a first step toward a world government patterned after our own government with a legislature, executive and judiciary, and police to enforce its international laws and keep the peace. To do that, of course, we Americans will have to yield up some of our sovereignty. That would be a bitter pill. It would take a lot of courage, a lot of faith in the new order. But the American colonies did it once and brought forth one of the most nearly perfect unions the world has ever seen.</p>
<p>It is said Cronkite “somehow spoke for the nation he spoke to,” according to the Los Angeles Times, when in fact — like all corporate media figures — Cronkite was reading from a script provided by the CIA at the behest of the ruling elite.<a href="javascript:void(0)" title=""  onmouseover="window.status=''; return true" onmouseout="window.status=''; return true" onclick="ddrc_popup('http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/plugins/dd-report-comments/report.php?c=5729799', 400, 400)"></a></p>
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		<title>By: RUCeriousMaggot!</title>
		<link>http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/19/cronkite-iraq-war/comment-page-2/#comment-5729796</link>
		<dc:creator>RUCeriousMaggot!</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2009 02:50:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thinkprogress.org/?p=51498#comment-5729796</guid>
		<description>Rather than THE fourth Estate, Cronkite had it right, we have about 1/4th of an Estate.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Rather than THE fourth Estate, Cronkite had it right, we have about 1/4th of an Estate.<a href="javascript:void(0)" title=""  onmouseover="window.status=''; return true" onmouseout="window.status=''; return true" onclick="ddrc_popup('http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/plugins/dd-report-comments/report.php?c=5729796', 400, 400)"></a></p>
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		<title>By: P.D.</title>
		<link>http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/19/cronkite-iraq-war/comment-page-2/#comment-5729790</link>
		<dc:creator>P.D.</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2009 02:42:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thinkprogress.org/?p=51498#comment-5729790</guid>
		<description>Zooey@95, This is just another example how the Repugs brain-washed the American people that they care more about the troops. The fact is, Bush and his cronies used our military like tissues, and when things went downhill? They blamed the troops. Remember the infamous remark Rumsfeld made? &quot;Hey you go with the military you have, not the military you wish you had&quot; I know I&#039;m getting the direct quote wrong, but you get the gist of it. And of course Tillmans death AND the horrible conditions at Walter Reed. The list goes on and on.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Zooey@95, This is just another example how the Repugs brain-washed the American people that they care more about the troops. The fact is, Bush and his cronies used our military like tissues, and when things went downhill? They blamed the troops. Remember the infamous remark Rumsfeld made? &#8220;Hey you go with the military you have, not the military you wish you had&#8221; I know I&#8217;m getting the direct quote wrong, but you get the gist of it. And of course Tillmans death AND the horrible conditions at Walter Reed. The list goes on and on.<a href="javascript:void(0)" title=""  onmouseover="window.status=''; return true" onmouseout="window.status=''; return true" onclick="ddrc_popup('http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/plugins/dd-report-comments/report.php?c=5729790', 400, 400)"></a></p>
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		<title>By: Zooey</title>
		<link>http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/19/cronkite-iraq-war/comment-page-2/#comment-5729787</link>
		<dc:creator>Zooey</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2009 02:36:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thinkprogress.org/?p=51498#comment-5729787</guid>
		<description>I found it, PD.  Thanks for the heads-up.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I found it, PD.  Thanks for the heads-up.<a href="javascript:void(0)" title=""  onmouseover="window.status=''; return true" onmouseout="window.status=''; return true" onclick="ddrc_popup('http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/plugins/dd-report-comments/report.php?c=5729787', 400, 400)"></a></p>
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