Google doesn't find any Straight Dope articles or Straight Dope Message Board posts on Operation Mockingbird.Now, I've long been a big fan of Cecil Adam's Straight Dope feature, but who considers him an expert on CIA history?
The article in question references CIA alums Thomas Braden and Cord Meyer, both of whom confirmed the existence of the program. The entry cites the Church Committee hearings on CIA abuses. It cites such well-known authors as John Loftus, Carl Bernstein and Jack Anderson. It cites John Ranelagh's The Agency, which many consider the standard one-volume history of the CIA.
None of that matters. Nothing is real unless Cecil Adams says it is real.
4 comments:
Let's go backwards in time to the birthday of the CIA. Hitler's intelligence chief for Eastern Europe, sat down with Allen Dulles (illegally since he was a war criminal since this was done in secret behind even Truman's backside), and cobbled to together an outside the box "hydra" with many heads, or departments, in order to hide the nazi war criminals from the common ordinary spooks recruited from the many ivy league colleges of that time.
So what we have is a rubics cube of tiny boxes under the umbrella of a Top Secret agency designed on paper to guard and defend and gather intelligence from the four corners of the world.
Keeping in mind the illegality of this enterprise any effort to cut open this birthday cake, there will be many pieces of that cake that will fall off the table because it was so designed.
In other words as the years have sped ny, and much of the "illegal" cubicles have formed "off the shelf" corporate shells and have settled into business as usual "private" mini hydras, independent of the original star crossed infant.
In different words, even the guys at the top that come and go have no way of distinguishing the various heads of hydra that have spun off into respectable businesses as fronts.
When Kennedy attempted to clean house, and fired Dulles he was himself "fired", and when Carter did the same housecleaning and fired his group of bad guys they just went to work for any number off well established business or off the shelf "enterprises" , only with paychecks signed by CEO's instead of the US government.
To further complicate this rubics cube puzzle many of the original cast of characters including the nazis that Gehlen and Dulles employed simply worked hand in glove with the SS, as they also formed corporations under the direction of Martin Bormann, Hitler’schosen one, to manage the new homogenized SS and their hundreds of multi national corporation. (google the book "Martin Bormann Nazi in Exile" by Manning to better understand the details of this mammoth global behemoth).
So all in all, this particular rubics cube has so many missing parts that it will be impossible to solve the riddle and complete the arrangement of all the cubes into a coherent whole again.
“All the Kings solders and all the Kings men could not put Humpty Dumpty back tougher again”. Remember, better, (more powerful and closer to the action (or Achtung), men than we have tried and failed. So roll over and just be harpooned, or probed because that is what has been happening for a long long time. Get used to it, and learn to love it or at least enjoy it. Just take some more of their drugs.
Joseph,
I'd written to Lisa Pease about this, and she wrote back asking how I knew they were thinking about deleting the entry.
It turns out the advisory box has been removed from the article. Since the article is still there, I assume the Wiki folks have decided to retain the listing.
So, some good news there, no?
All of this still points up a critical flaw in Wikipedia- it's acting as an "open-source" knowledge base, without the checks in place needed to assure veracity. And as far as I can see, it's simply too sprawling a database to have the ability to winnow out those who want to substitue agendas for facts- or who simply want to insert pranks and fantasies, for that matter.
Consdiering its inherent vulnerabilities, I find it amazing that Wikipedia has worked as well as it has up to this point, frankly. But in light of the recent findings of the Wiki-tracking software, as well as incidents like the "challenge" cited in this topic post, I think it's downhill from here, especially in regard to political and historical controversies. Honest history requires more discipline and integrity than simply "getting there fu'stest with the mostest."
I think the open-source approach found at a site like Cooperative Research is much to be preferred. Peer review in isn place to fact-check every proposed entry before it's accepted, and entries need to be linked to published sources, rather than simply daisy-chaining to other Internet sites.
Well, guess who is having trouble staying in business...
Cecil Adams is good for questions that can be answered simply by consulting arcane references, but less helpful for matters where there is serious dispute owing to something other than a lack of accessible sources.
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