Collateral Brain Damage? The Hollywood Propaganda Ministry
by Alex Constantine, July 2002 issue of High Times.
| “Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.” –General William C. Westmoreland, |
….
Brandon’s office was conceived on December 20, 1991 by the “Task Force on Greater CIA Openness” in a study undertaken at the request of then CIA director Robert Gates, a Bush, Sr. appointee, and immediately classified, though a few copies were leaked. The report proposed an image upgrade to neutralize public hostility. The task force was in “substantial agreement that we generally need to make the institution and the process more visible and understandable rather than strive for openness on specific substantive issues.” Forget openness, the Openness Task Force advised. The report “seems to recommend no real change in attitude,” complained The Excluded Middle, an anti-CIA Internet site, “only in the way that the agency presents itself to a hostile or at least an indifferent public.” The authors of the report boast arrogantly that the CIA’s Public Affairs Office (PAO) censored and had buried projects that it found objectionable in the past. Chase Brandon hails from the PAO. Contact with “every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly, and television network in the nation” was advised by the panel. The result was the Entertainment Liaison Office. (Anonymous, “CIA MEMO ON GREATER OPENNESS REVEALS CONTRADICTIONS,” Excluded Middle, http://www.elfis.net/tem/ciaduh.htm)
Read entire original articles at:
