Even now they're divorced, the Corporatist Media and Wikileaks still need each other, as each burnishes the importance of the other. In reality, none of the leaks that these media titans "exposed" bears comparison with the following:
Lebanese journalist Hassan Sabra who first revealed secret U.S. arms sales to Iran in his weekly magazine Ash-Shiraa. Or the reporter on a local Arkansas newspaper (her name escapes me) who first noticed the international scale of air traffic to and from Mena airport. Gary Webb's subsequent discovery of a CIA connection to cocaine dealers in the San Jose Mercury News, and the academic Alfred McCoy's need to find work in exile after showing how international drugs production closely tracks U.S. military activity abroad. Or freelance writer Douglas Valentine who got an interview with CIA Director Bill Colby, leading to a series of top-level conversations that revealed The Phoenix Program... and didn't finish there but demonstrated that it would one day "come home" and be applied on the streets of the U.S..
That is reporting and analysis.
Or Mae Brussell and Paul Krassner's revelations of the international fascist networks in The Realist (funded by John Lennon) and The Rebel (funded by Larry Flynt) and the international assassination teams like Permindex and their connection to Frank Terpil who "left the CIA" just like the Watergate burglars and sold arms to Idi Amin and Muammar Gaddafi... all the way up to today's one-person shows like former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds who exposed Gladio 2.0 and John Helmer who calmly dissects the shenanigans behind the latest war mongering at Russia.
Any one of those people's work is more significant by exposing the power networks and their pacts with the devil that threaten us all. And more important than any of the celebrated leaks, including Watergate and the Pentagon Papers.
WikiLeaks says it "has released more classified intelligence documents than the rest of the world press combined". That's probably a fair claim but it doesn't rule out collusion with, or manipulation by, the intelligence agencies.
The Watergate coverage, the most famous exposé by any newspaper in history, was in large part a charade. Bob Woodward was a naval intelligence operative whose entry into journalism was arranged by his bosses. You might expect a newspaper linked to the CIA through its publishers, as the Washington Post was and remains, to tell us honestly what transpired. After all, Watergate was itself a CIA operation. All the White House "burglars" were either CIA or FBI long-term operatives recently 'retired' and their agents. (A small tincture of sarcasm).
Carl Bernstein is closer to the idea of a journalist, though his 1977 Operation Mockingbird coverage for Rolling Stone was a limited hangout. https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Limited_hangout As an industry insider who who had participated in the Watergate charade five years earlier, he was in a position to go much further and reveal the extent of agency-journalist collaboration, as the late Udo Ulfkotte did in recent years. Bernstein chose not to.
The Pentagon Papers was a staged leak by Daniel Ellsberg. Webster Tarpley wrote a piece for Off-Guardian that's worth another read even if some of its conclusions are dated by later events.
"In 1620 Fra Paolo Sarpi, the dominant figure of the Venetian intelligence establishment of his time... recommended the method of saying something good about a person or institution while pretending to say something bad. An example might be criticizing a bloody dictator for beating his dog."
Or when The Guardian in 2018 said then candidate for Brazil's presidency, Jair Bolsonaro, was a misogynist.
In recent years the Panama Papers was a glaring intelligence operation for the plain reason that its exposé of global money laundering contained barely anything linked to the richest banks on Earth, nor any person or corporation linked to the richest nation. The Guardian wiped its nose, closed its eyes and raised its baton, and conducted a symphony of concocted outrage with the BBC, Le Monde, SonntagsZeitung, Falter, La Nación, German broadcasters NDR and WDR, and Austrian broadcaster ORF.
This is similar to the gaggle that promoted Assange on his first outing: NYT, Guardian, El Pais, Der Spiegel and Le Monde before dropping him like a hot potato.
How to identify CIA limited hangout, by Webster Tarpley, June 2013 https://off-guardian.org/2018/01/04/how-to-identify-cia-limited-hangout/
Lebanese journalist Hassan Sabra who first revealed secret U.S. arms sales to Iran in his weekly magazine Ash-Shiraa. Or the reporter on a local Arkansas newspaper (her name escapes me) who first noticed the international scale of air traffic to and from Mena airport. Gary Webb's subsequent discovery of a CIA connection to cocaine dealers in the San Jose Mercury News, and the academic Alfred McCoy's need to find work in exile after showing how international drugs production closely tracks U.S. military activity abroad. Or freelance writer Douglas Valentine who got an interview with CIA Director Bill Colby, leading to a series of top-level conversations that revealed The Phoenix Program... and didn't finish there but demonstrated that it would one day "come home" and be applied on the streets of the U.S..
That is reporting and analysis.
Or Mae Brussell and Paul Krassner's revelations of the international fascist networks in The Realist (funded by John Lennon) and The Rebel (funded by Larry Flynt) and the international assassination teams like Permindex and their connection to Frank Terpil who "left the CIA" just like the Watergate burglars and sold arms to Idi Amin and Muammar Gaddafi... all the way up to today's one-person shows like former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds who exposed Gladio 2.0 and John Helmer who calmly dissects the shenanigans behind the latest war mongering at Russia.
Any one of those people's work is more significant by exposing the power networks and their pacts with the devil that threaten us all. And more important than any of the celebrated leaks, including Watergate and the Pentagon Papers.
WikiLeaks says it "has released more classified intelligence documents than the rest of the world press combined". That's probably a fair claim but it doesn't rule out collusion with, or manipulation by, the intelligence agencies.
The Watergate coverage, the most famous exposé by any newspaper in history, was in large part a charade. Bob Woodward was a naval intelligence operative whose entry into journalism was arranged by his bosses. You might expect a newspaper linked to the CIA through its publishers, as the Washington Post was and remains, to tell us honestly what transpired. After all, Watergate was itself a CIA operation. All the White House "burglars" were either CIA or FBI long-term operatives recently 'retired' and their agents. (A small tincture of sarcasm).
Carl Bernstein is closer to the idea of a journalist, though his 1977 Operation Mockingbird coverage for Rolling Stone was a limited hangout. https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Limited_hangout As an industry insider who who had participated in the Watergate charade five years earlier, he was in a position to go much further and reveal the extent of agency-journalist collaboration, as the late Udo Ulfkotte did in recent years. Bernstein chose not to.
The Pentagon Papers was a staged leak by Daniel Ellsberg. Webster Tarpley wrote a piece for Off-Guardian that's worth another read even if some of its conclusions are dated by later events.
"In 1620 Fra Paolo Sarpi, the dominant figure of the Venetian intelligence establishment of his time... recommended the method of saying something good about a person or institution while pretending to say something bad. An example might be criticizing a bloody dictator for beating his dog."
Or when The Guardian in 2018 said then candidate for Brazil's presidency, Jair Bolsonaro, was a misogynist.
"In the case of Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers, very little was revealed which was not already well known to a reader of Le Monde or the dispatches of Agence France Presse. Only those whose understanding of world affairs had been filtered through the Associated Press, CBS News, the New York Times, and the Washington Post found any of Ellsberg’s material a surprise.
Upon examination, we find that the Pentagon papers tend to cover up such CIA crimes as the mass murder mandated under Operation Phoenix, and the massive CIA drug running associated with the proprietary airline Air America. Rather, when atrocities are in question, the US Army generally receives the blame...
But a clique around Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn loudly intervened to praise the quality of the exposé and to lionize Ellsberg personally as a new culture hero for the Silent Generation."
In recent years the Panama Papers was a glaring intelligence operation for the plain reason that its exposé of global money laundering contained barely anything linked to the richest banks on Earth, nor any person or corporation linked to the richest nation. The Guardian wiped its nose, closed its eyes and raised its baton, and conducted a symphony of concocted outrage with the BBC, Le Monde, SonntagsZeitung, Falter, La Nación, German broadcasters NDR and WDR, and Austrian broadcaster ORF.
This is similar to the gaggle that promoted Assange on his first outing: NYT, Guardian, El Pais, Der Spiegel and Le Monde before dropping him like a hot potato.
How to identify CIA limited hangout, by Webster Tarpley, June 2013 https://off-guardian.org/2018/01/04/how-to-identify-cia-limited-hangout/
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