It is a well-known and uncontested fact that the CIA has enjoyed a long and intimate relationship with some of the largest news organizations in the world, and has used this relationship to manipulate, censor, and even fabricate news stories in support of its own covert agenda.

Over the years, numerous specific examples of the agency’s manipulation of the news media have surfaced, including multiple instances where stories that had been outright fabricated by CIA assets had resulted in the justification for military intervention. And, recently we witnessed how the CIA steps in to stop the publication of certain stories when the agency threatened independent documentary filmmakers John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski from publishing the names of two recently identified CIA agents, Alfreda Frances Bikowsky and Michael Anne Casey.

It is no longer disputed that the CIA has maintained an extensive and ongoing relationship with news organizations and journalists, and multiple, specific acts of media manipulation have now been documented. But as long as the public continues to ignore the influence of intelligence agencies in shaping or even fabricating news stories, the agency will continue to be able to set the policy that drives the American war machine at will.

This is our EyeOpener Report by James Corbett presenting documented facts and examples of the CIA’s extensive and ongoing relationship with news organizations and journalists: ‘CIA in the News Media’

*The Transcript for this video is now available at Corbett Report: Click Here

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Click here for the transcript at Corbett Report: TRANSCRIPT

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Earlier this month, the public was overwhelmed with saturation coverage of the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. What is not being reported on with anything near the same zeal, however, is that this September 18th marked another solemn milestone, the 10th anniversary of the start of the anthrax attacks that paralyzed an already fear-stricken nation and actually shut down the US House of Representatives, three Senate buildings, and the Supreme Court.

That the government and the media are largely silent on this anniversary is hardly surprising. Rather than reinforcing the war on terror narrative, the anthrax investigation leads directly back to the heart of the US military-industrial complex, and a secretive biowarfare program that most Americans never knew existed.

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Money matters provide some of most compelling unanswered questions regarding the events of September 11, 2001.   These questions point to possible darker truths, in part because of the incomplete and/or misleading treatments in official investigations to date. Pressing questions remain in at least three issue areas, including money transfers, suspicious activity reporting, and informed securities trading.  In turn, cursory and misleading conclusions among relevant investigatory parties suggest a cover-up consistent with the possibility that the crimes of 9/11 were allowed to happen, or worse.

9/11-Money Transfers

In early October 2001, director of Pakistani intelligence services Lt. General Mahmood Ahmed was forced out of his position in the wake of published reports linking him to wire transfers totaling $100,000 into the bank account of alleged lead hijacker Mohamed Atta in Florida before 9/11.  Ahmed was actually in Washington having breakfast with leaders of the U.S. Congressional intelligence committees on the morning of 9/11. 

Ahmed’s removal and the possible link to Atta’s financing were reported in U.S. as well as foreign media sources in late 2001.  But the issue went unmentioned in the 9/11 Commission report.  And on p. 172 of its final report the Commission apparently washed our hands of further investigative responsibility while concluding that “To date, the U.S. government has not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9/11 attacks.  Ultimately the question is of little practical significance.  Al Qaeda had many avenues of funding.â€�  This shocking conclusion reeks of irresponsibility, at best, and its possible motivation is reflected in the Commission’s similar treatment of issues relating to possible informed/insider trading (see below). Read more È

Lorie Van Auken joins us and shares with us her reflections ten years on about the events of 9/11 and her loss. She discusses the still- classified 28 pages of the JICI dealing with terrorist financing, the 9/11 families’ stalled lawsuit to bankrupt the terrorists and the direct interventions by the White House to protect the Saudi regime against the justice-seeking families, and the many uninvestigated questions and facts covered up by the 9/11 commission. She questions our current many-fronted wars and the senselessness of the occupation of and our military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan with Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden both dead, while our economy is crashing here at home. Ms. Van Auken talks about the three versions of the NORAD timeline, the passage of the Patriot Act as a vehicle to erode our civil liberties, NSA’s illegal wiretapping of our domestic communications under the guise of security, and more!

Lorie Van Auken, the mother of two children, lost her husband Kenneth Van Auken in the September 11th terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. She is one of the “Jersey Girls� who, along with Kristen Breitweiser, Mindy Kleinberg, and Patty Casazza, fought the Bush administration for a commission to investigate the attacks. Ms. Van Auken is also a member of the September 11 Advocates.

Here is our guest Lorie Van Auken unplugged!

Interview with Lorie Van Auken [ 48:26 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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The state’s use of psychological warfare to bend the population to war is as old, if not older than the existence of states themselves. But it was perhaps Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering whose statement while on trial at Nuremberg best summed up the cynical simplicity of the logic.

“Of course people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders, that is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger.�

Psychological warfare in the form of propaganda comes in all shapes and sizes as well as shades of black, grey or white.  America’s coordinated use of psychological warfare began in earnest during World War II and ever since has grown and expanded into public relations, advertising, cinema, radio and television, electronic video games and now social media. Its pro-war boosterism extends over sports, religion, education, news and entertainment (and of course the military) to form a seamless electronic cocoon-like web. It is employed on an ever growing list of those deemed as enemies of America as well as on a confused and agitated American public – whose corporate news networks frame and manage an increasingly shallow narrative while engaging in a kind of Orwellian Kabuki Theatre of fairness and balance.

Americans were heavily propagandized to support a U.S. entry into World War II and again heavily propagandized to accept the morality of deploying the atomic bomb to end it, despite dissent from within the scientific community. Even Mickey Mouse was conscripted for America’s total war effort along with the minds of America’s youth. Following the war Americans were heavily propagandized to accept the Cold War, the need for maintaining a permanent army, navy and air force as well as the buildup of a nuclear weapons arsenal.

 Since 9/11 Americans have been bathed in psychological warfare on Islamic terrorism despite the fact that only a handful of incidents in the West can be attributed to radical Islamists. What is generally not appreciated by America’s leadership about this kind of prolonged use of propaganda on the American public is that it exposes the rationale for the longest war in American history in Afghanistan as flimsy and unconvincing and completely sidesteps the outright lies and deceptions used to justify the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The origins of Washington’s war in Afghanistan have always been strategic, long term and particularly black, obscured throughout the Cold War by a narrative adapted from Britain’s 19^th century colonial expansion. Read more È

Former National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-Terrorism Richard Clarke suggests that former CIA Director George Tenet blocked the sharing of information within the government on two members of al Qaeda in the United States, information that Clarke believes could have prevented 911. The CIA admits it knew about the two future hijackers but claims the Director was not informed.

“In early 2000, a number of more junior personnel (including FBI agents on detail to CIA) did see travel information on individuals who later became hijackers but the significance of the data was not adequately recognized at the time.“

Clark claims to have been very close to Tenet and to find this impossible to believe. Clarke maintains that the Director must have been informed and must have made the decision not to share the information with Clarke and others. Clarke speculates that the presence of these two al Qaeda members was kept secret because the CIA had tried to recruit, or “flip,” those al Qaeda members and failed. Yet he has no evidence of such attempts. Read more È

Recent allegations made by former counterterrorism “tsar� Richard Clarke against former CIA Director George Tenet and two other former CIA managers, Cofer Black and Richard Blee, have thrown one of the key unanswered questions of 9/11 into sharp relief. What happened at Alec Station, the CIA’s bin Laden unit, after an officer there discovered that two of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, had entered the US?

The officer, Margaret Gillespie, says she made the discovery on August 21 and the record indicates she began to notify the FBI and other government agencies on this day. However, while a substantial amount of information has been made public about how the news circulated around the FBI, almost nothing is known of how Alec Station dealt with it.

In an interview recently broadcast as a trailer for the forthcoming audio documentary “Who Is Rich Blee?� Clarke alleged that the CIA had deliberately withheld from him information about Almihdhar and Alhazmi—in particular the news that Almihdhar had a US visa—for over twenty months before 9/11. Clarke also highlighted the importance of the information, saying it was more important than, for example, any of the key pieces of intelligence discussed at a controversial meeting with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on July 10, 2001.

According to a statement recently released by Tenet, Black and Blee, neither Tenet nor any other senior CIA official was told of the visa or of travel to the US by Alhazmi and Almihdhar before 9/11. This was also the 9/11 Commission’s conclusion, although this conclusion was hedged. If this is true, then one appropriate question would be: why not? Read more È

By Elizabeth Gould & Paul Fitzgerald

 9/11. The number still rings in the mind as if chosen to act as a Pavlovian trigger: Outrage, anger, paranoia, retribution. A shadowy band of religious zealots fly not one, but two commercial airliners into the heart of America’s financial community while others deal a deadly blow to the Pentagon. It was a Hollywood movie, an act of war rivaling Pearl Harbor. Why did it happen? Who would do this to Americans, to America? How could a band of ragged terrorists plotting from a cave in faraway Afghanistan have accomplished such a complex task given the size and pervasiveness of the largest and most expensive military/intelligence apparatus in the history of the world? And even more curiously, why would Islamic radicals give the ideology-driven neoconservative administration of George W. Bush exactly the pretext they needed to launch a bloody invasion and further occupation of the Middle East?

According to the official narrative, 9/11 was an attack on everything American and in so doing changed everything about America. Like Kafkaesque characters who’d suddenly found themselves on the other side of a Cold War “Iron Curtain� mirror, Americans would now have to “watch what they say and watch what they do,� open up to questioning or face jail when prodded by squinty-eyed border guards and forsake any hope of privacy or dignity in a new world of electronic spies and full body scans. Former National Security Advisor, Admiral John Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness program would be enacted and a preexisting “Patriot Act� would be signed into law to clamp down on dissent and real or imagined domestic terrorism.

Some careful observers like Anthony Lewis of the New York Times had already noticed the bizarre coup-like changes coming over Washington in the months leading up to the attack as the George W. Bush administration inaugurated radical shifts in domestic and foreign policy that seemed un-American and alien to anything that had gone before. But those concerns would soon be forgotten in the race for revenge. 

9/11 would ultimately give President George W. Bush and his neoconservative advisors all the public approval they needed to transform America and invade Afghanistan and Iraq to cleanse the world of evil in an endless “war on terror.� In the end it would turn America’s reputation for racial and religious tolerance, military invincibility and economic dominance on its head.

Looking back on the carnage of the last ten years it’s easy to see how the psychology of 9/11 changed America. What’s not easy to see is how a long standing campaign of covert psychological warfare built up since the early days of World War II had made the slow destruction of American democracy and the ascension of rule by secrecy inevitable, long before the planes ever left the runway on 9/11.  Read more È

 Zacarias Moussaoui, one of the numerous “20th hijackers,� was arrested ten years ago next Tuesday, outside the Residence Inn in Eagan, Minnesota. The arrest was one of the first events in a case that gave the FBI a chance to blow open the 9/11 plot, but resulted in abject humiliation for the bureau when its headquarters’ string of errors was exposed in the press.

The Moussaoui case is a poster boy for the state of our knowledge about the attacks: we have some of the details, but know some are missing. Also, two key questions remain unanswered. This despite the wealth of information that came out at the trial and the fact that Moussaoui, although largely ignored by the 9/11 Commission’s final report—partly due to the forthcoming trial—was a major topic of the Justice Department inspector general’s report into the FBI’s pre-attack failings.

These are the bare bones of the case: Moussaoui had been a known extremist for years prior to his arrest. Before the bureau first heard his name on August 15, he had been under surveillance by French and British intelligence and the CIA, although the agency would claim it only knew him under an alias. He was sent to the US for flight training by alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, possibly to participate in 9/11, possibly to participate in a follow-up operation. However, he was a poor student and dropped out of basic flight school before obtaining a licence and went to learn about flying a Boeing 747, which aroused suspicion.

When the FBI was brought in, the Minneapolis agents realized he was dangerous and arrested him on an immigration violation—despite being told not to do so by headquarters. This was the first of many times the Minneapolis field office and FBI headquarters clashed over the case. Essentially, even though they did not know he was linked to al-Qaeda, the local agents understood the risk Moussaoui posed—one even speculated he would fly a large airliner into the World Trade Center—and they wanted a warrant to search his belongings to get information that would lead to his accomplices. On the other hand, headquarters seemed to think they were alarmist and there was nothing to the case. They kept throwing up roadblocks. Read more È