Some of the hidden zippers in these jackets: "If I call you a “conspiracy theorist,” it matters little whether you have actually claimed that a conspiracy exists or whether you have simply raised an issue that I would rather avoid. As part of the machinery of interaction, the label does conversational work (Goffman 1967) no matter how true, false, or conspiracy-related your
utterance is. Using the phrase, I can symbolically exclude you from the imagined community of reasonable interlocutors (Hall 1970:21). Specifically, when I call you a “conspiracy theorist,” I can turn the tables on you: instead of responding to a question, concern, or challenge, I twist the machinery of interaction so that you, not I, are
now called to account. In fact, I have done even more. By labeling you, I strategically exclude you from the sphere where public speech, debate, and conflict occur."
In a culture of fear, we should expect the rise of new mechanisms of social control to deflect distrust, anxiety, and threat. Relying on the analysis of popular and academic texts, we examine one such mechanism, the label conspiracy theory, and explore how it works in public discourse to “go meta” by sidestepping the examination of evidence. Our findings suggest that authors use the conspiracy theorist label as (1) a routinized strategy of exclusion; (2) a reframing mechanism that deflects questions or concerns about power, corruption, and motive; and (3) an attack upon the personhood and competence of the questioner. This label becomes dangerous machinery at the transpersonal levels of media and academic discourse, symbolically stripping the claimant of the status of reasonable interlocutor—often to avoid the need to account for one’s own action or speech. We argue that this and similar mechanisms simultaneously control the flow of information and symbolically demobilize certain voices and issues in public discourse.
Dangerous Machinery: “Conspiracy Theorist” as a Transpersonal Strategy of Exclusion
"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people."--Henry Kissinger - 1970
The revelations about the intervention in Chile served as the prologue to the most famous news story ever printed on the CIA. On December 22,1974, Hersh revealed the existence of Operation MHCHAOS in another New York Times front-page scoop, setting the stage for the "Year of Intelligence."
President Gerald Ford initially hoped to head off a Congressional investigation by appointing Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to launch an inquiry into the allegations of domestic wrongdoing. The Rockefeller Commission issued a report in the summer of 1975, but it did not prevent both houses of Congress from creating separate investigative committees.
Senator Frank Church (Democrat-Idaho) held hearings in the fall of 1975, and his committee published several lengthy reports in April 1976. The investigation in the House of Representatives, which was led by Congressman Otis Pike (Democrat-New York), received less cooperation from the Ford administration than the Church Committee. The Pike Report was leaked to The Village Voice in February 1976.
The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence pg. 18
Of course it was the Chhurch Committe that revealed Operation Mockingbird.
In 1972, just months after Judge Bryan issued an injunction against Marchetti, CIA management once again attempted to interfere with a critical book when they convinced Harper & Row to send them a copy of Alfred W. McCoy's The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia prior to its publication. Concerned with the accusations leveled by McCoy about the CIA's knowledge· of illegal drug trafficking, Agency executives lobbied Harper & Row to reconsider sections of the manuscript, but the editors refused. Since McCoy, then a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University, had never worked for the CIA, the Agency could not legally censor his writings.
The CIA's public image had changed significantly in the decade separating the publication of The Invisible Government (1964) and The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (1974). Ramparts magazine had printed multiple exposes of the Agency in the mid-l960s that eventually prompted a shortlived inquiry within the executive branch in 1967.16 In retaliation for the articles, the Agency collected information on the citizens involved in Ramparts, and President Lyndon Johnson subsequently ordered Richard Helms to clandestinely monitor opponents of the Vietnam War.
This domestic covert operation, appropriately codenamed MHCHAOS, accelerated during the Nixon administration. Then, after the. botched Watergate burglary in 1972, Americans learned that several of President Richard Nixon's "plumbers" had connections to the CIA.
CounterSpy was an American magazine that published articles on covert operations, especially those undertaken by the American government.[1] It was the official Bulletin of the Committee for Action/Research on the Intelligence Community (CARIC). CounterSpy published 32 issues between 1973 and 1984 from its headquarters in Washington DC.
Former Central Intelligence Agency personnel Victor Marchetti, Philip Agee, and Stanley Sheinbaum joined CounterSpy’s advisory board aimed at mitigating some of the pressure being exerted on the magazine by the CIA.
CounterSpy was edited by Tim Butz and Winslow Peck.
By April 1979, Philip Agee was no longer associated with CounterSpy in any capacity, his only institutional relationship at that point being with CovertAction Information Bulletin.
Advisory board
Fred Branfman, Co-Director, Indochina Resource Center.
Sylvia Crane, Author, National Committee Against Repressive Legislation.
Dave Dellinger, Liberation Magazine.
Dr. Ralph Lewis, Criminal Justice Research Director, Michigan State University.
Victor Marchetti, Author, former agent, Central Intelligence Agency.
K. Barton Osborn, former agent, military intelligence and Central Intelligence Agency.
Col. L. Fletcher Prouty (ret.), Author, former military liaison, Central Intelligence Agency.
Marcus Raskin, Co-Director, Institute for Policy Studies.
Kirkpatrick Sale, Author.
Stanley Sheinbaum, American Civil Liberties Union.
William Turner, Author, former agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Touchstone Pictures was an American film distribution label of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, created and owned by The Walt Disney Company. Touchstone was in reality a CIA front company.
The CIA & the cult of secrecy
David Shamus McCarthy
College of William & Mary - Arts & Sciences
Abstract
This dissertation re-conceptualizes the scandals that engulfed the intelligence community
in the mid-1970s. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) confronted an unprecedented crisis during these years: the Pike hearings in the House of Representatives, the Church
Committee in the Senate, and an executive branch commission led by then Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. Historians and political scientists have studied these events before, but I present a nuanced interpretation of the intelligence investigations by placing them in a broader political and cultural context. To fully understand the impact of the so-called "Year of Intelligence," I argue that scholars need to focus on what was happening outside of Congress. The CIA encountered a backlash from both ends of the political spectrum. I provide the first history of Counter-Spy, a left wing magazine founded in 1973 that called for the abolition of covert action. The magazine's editors directly challenged the "culture of secrecy" at the CIA by publishing the names of Agency operatives. At the same time, conservatives embarked on a very different confrontation with the Agency. Like CounterSpy, they charged that the CIA was keeping secrets from the American people, but their concern was with Agency analysis of the Soviet Union, not covert action.
[......]
Agency officials have been obsessed with protecting their image, and this obsession has frequently undermined historical research. Robert M. Gates launched an openness initiative in February 1992, but the culture at the Agency was not fundamentally changed. In fact, George Tenet shut down the voluntary de-classification program at the CIA in 1998. A key conclusion of this study is that the "culture of secrecy" at the Agency remains firmly entrenched. Since the
CIA cannot be reformed from within, I argue that outside intervention is required.
In 1963, John McCone, the director of the CIA, discovered that Random House intended to publish Invisible Government by David Wise and Thomas Ross. McCone discovered that the book intended to look at his links with the Military Industrial Congress Complex. The authors also claimed that the CIA was having a major influence on American foreign policy. This included the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran (1953) and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (1954). The book also covered the role that the CIA played in the Bay of Pigs operation, the attempts to remove President Sukarno in Indonesia and the covert operations taking place in Laos and Vietnam.
McCone called in Wise and Ross to demand deletions on the basis of galleys the CIA had secretly obtained from Random House. The authors refused to made these changes and Random House decided to go ahead and publish the book. The CIA considered buying up the entire printing of Invisible Government but this idea was rejected when Random House pointed out that if this happened they would have to print a second edition. McCone now formed a special group to deal with the book and tried to arrange for it to get bad reviews. It was the first full account of America's intelligence and espionage apparatus. In the book Wise and Ross argued that the "Invisible Government is made up of many agencies and people, including the intelligence branches of the State and Defense Departments, of the Army, Navy and Air Force". However, they claimed that the most important organization involved in this process was the CIA.
John McCone also attempted to stop Edward Yates from making a documentary on the CIA for the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). This attempt at censorship failed and NBC went ahead and broadcast this critical documentary.
In June, 1965, Desmond FitzGerald was appointed as head of the Directorate for Plans. He now took charge of Mockingbird. At the end of 1966 FitzGerald discovered that Ramparts, a left-wing publication, was planning to publish that the CIA had been secretly funding the National Student Association. FitzGerald ordered Edgar Applewhite to organize a campaign against the magazine. Applewhite later told Evan Thomas for his book, The Very Best Men: "I had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt their circulation and financing. The people running Ramparts were vulnerable to blackmail. We had awful things in mind, some of which we carried off."
Some of the hidden zippers in these jackets: "If I call you a “conspiracy theorist,” it matters little whether you have actually claimed that a conspiracy exists or whether you have simply raised an issue that I would rather avoid. As part of the machinery of interaction, the label does conversational work (Goffman 1967) no matter how true, false, or conspiracy-related your
utterance is. Using the phrase, I can symbolically exclude you from the imagined community of reasonable interlocutors (Hall 1970:21). Specifically, when I call you a “conspiracy theorist,” I can turn the tables on you: instead of responding to a question, concern, or challenge, I twist the machinery of interaction so that you, not I, are
now called to account. In fact, I have done even more. By labeling you, I strategically exclude you from the sphere where public speech, debate, and conflict occur."
Ginna Husting - Boise State University
Martin Orr - Boise State University
Dangerous Machinery Conspiracy Theorist pdf
\\][//
In a culture of fear, we should expect the rise of new mechanisms of social control to deflect distrust, anxiety, and threat. Relying on the analysis of popular and academic texts, we examine one such mechanism, the label conspiracy theory, and explore how it works in public discourse to “go meta” by sidestepping the examination of evidence. Our findings suggest that authors use the conspiracy theorist label as (1) a routinized strategy of exclusion; (2) a reframing mechanism that deflects questions or concerns about power, corruption, and motive; and (3) an attack upon the personhood and competence of the questioner. This label becomes dangerous machinery at the transpersonal levels of media and academic discourse, symbolically stripping the claimant of the status of reasonable interlocutor—often to avoid the need to account for one’s own action or speech. We argue that this and similar mechanisms simultaneously control the flow of information and symbolically demobilize certain voices and issues in public discourse.
Dangerous Machinery: “Conspiracy Theorist” as a Transpersonal Strategy of Exclusion
Ginna Husting
Boise State University
Martin Orr
Boise State University
\\][//
"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people."--Henry Kissinger - 1970
The revelations about the intervention in Chile served as the prologue to the most famous news story ever printed on the CIA. On December 22,1974, Hersh revealed the existence of Operation MHCHAOS in another New York Times front-page scoop, setting the stage for the "Year of Intelligence."
President Gerald Ford initially hoped to head off a Congressional investigation by appointing Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to launch an inquiry into the allegations of domestic wrongdoing. The Rockefeller Commission issued a report in the summer of 1975, but it did not prevent both houses of Congress from creating separate investigative committees.
Senator Frank Church (Democrat-Idaho) held hearings in the fall of 1975, and his committee published several lengthy reports in April 1976. The investigation in the House of Representatives, which was led by Congressman Otis Pike (Democrat-New York), received less cooperation from the Ford administration than the Church Committee. The Pike Report was leaked to The Village Voice in February 1976.
The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence pg. 18
Of course it was the Chhurch Committe that revealed Operation Mockingbird.
\\][//
In 1972, just months after Judge Bryan issued an injunction against Marchetti, CIA management once again attempted to interfere with a critical book when they convinced Harper & Row to send them a copy of Alfred W. McCoy's The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia prior to its publication. Concerned with the accusations leveled by McCoy about the CIA's knowledge· of illegal drug trafficking, Agency executives lobbied Harper & Row to reconsider sections of the manuscript, but the editors refused. Since McCoy, then a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University, had never worked for the CIA, the Agency could not legally censor his writings.
The CIA's public image had changed significantly in the decade separating the publication of The Invisible Government (1964) and The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (1974). Ramparts magazine had printed multiple exposes of the Agency in the mid-l960s that eventually prompted a shortlived inquiry within the executive branch in 1967.16 In retaliation for the articles, the Agency collected information on the citizens involved in Ramparts, and President Lyndon Johnson subsequently ordered Richard Helms to clandestinely monitor opponents of the Vietnam War.
This domestic covert operation, appropriately codenamed MHCHAOS, accelerated during the Nixon administration. Then, after the. botched Watergate burglary in 1972, Americans learned that several of President Richard Nixon's "plumbers" had connections to the CIA.
The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence pg.6
\\][//
CounterSpy was an American magazine that published articles on covert operations, especially those undertaken by the American government.[1] It was the official Bulletin of the Committee for Action/Research on the Intelligence Community (CARIC). CounterSpy published 32 issues between 1973 and 1984 from its headquarters in Washington DC.
Former Central Intelligence Agency personnel Victor Marchetti, Philip Agee, and Stanley Sheinbaum joined CounterSpy’s advisory board aimed at mitigating some of the pressure being exerted on the magazine by the CIA.
CounterSpy was edited by Tim Butz and Winslow Peck.
By April 1979, Philip Agee was no longer associated with CounterSpy in any capacity, his only institutional relationship at that point being with CovertAction Information Bulletin.
Advisory board
Fred Branfman, Co-Director, Indochina Resource Center.
Sylvia Crane, Author, National Committee Against Repressive Legislation.
Dave Dellinger, Liberation Magazine.
Dr. Ralph Lewis, Criminal Justice Research Director, Michigan State University.
Victor Marchetti, Author, former agent, Central Intelligence Agency.
K. Barton Osborn, former agent, military intelligence and Central Intelligence Agency.
Col. L. Fletcher Prouty (ret.), Author, former military liaison, Central Intelligence Agency.
Marcus Raskin, Co-Director, Institute for Policy Studies.
Kirkpatrick Sale, Author.
Stanley Sheinbaum, American Civil Liberties Union.
William Turner, Author, former agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation.
\\][//
Touchstone Pictures was an American film distribution label of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, created and owned by The Walt Disney Company. Touchstone was in reality a CIA front company.
The CIA & the cult of secrecy
David Shamus McCarthy
College of William & Mary - Arts & Sciences
Abstract
This dissertation re-conceptualizes the scandals that engulfed the intelligence community
in the mid-1970s. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) confronted an unprecedented crisis during these years: the Pike hearings in the House of Representatives, the Church
Committee in the Senate, and an executive branch commission led by then Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. Historians and political scientists have studied these events before, but I present a nuanced interpretation of the intelligence investigations by placing them in a broader political and cultural context. To fully understand the impact of the so-called "Year of Intelligence," I argue that scholars need to focus on what was happening outside of Congress. The CIA encountered a backlash from both ends of the political spectrum. I provide the first history of Counter-Spy, a left wing magazine founded in 1973 that called for the abolition of covert action. The magazine's editors directly challenged the "culture of secrecy" at the CIA by publishing the names of Agency operatives. At the same time, conservatives embarked on a very different confrontation with the Agency. Like CounterSpy, they charged that the CIA was keeping secrets from the American people, but their concern was with Agency analysis of the Soviet Union, not covert action.
[......]
Agency officials have been obsessed with protecting their image, and this obsession has frequently undermined historical research. Robert M. Gates launched an openness initiative in February 1992, but the culture at the Agency was not fundamentally changed. In fact, George Tenet shut down the voluntary de-classification program at the CIA in 1998. A key conclusion of this study is that the "culture of secrecy" at the Agency remains firmly entrenched. Since the
CIA cannot be reformed from within, I argue that outside intervention is required.
The CIA & The Cult of Secrecy -- PDF
\\][//
In 1963, John McCone, the director of the CIA, discovered that Random House intended to publish Invisible Government by David Wise and Thomas Ross. McCone discovered that the book intended to look at his links with the Military Industrial Congress Complex. The authors also claimed that the CIA was having a major influence on American foreign policy. This included the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran (1953) and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (1954). The book also covered the role that the CIA played in the Bay of Pigs operation, the attempts to remove President Sukarno in Indonesia and the covert operations taking place in Laos and Vietnam.
McCone called in Wise and Ross to demand deletions on the basis of galleys the CIA had secretly obtained from Random House. The authors refused to made these changes and Random House decided to go ahead and publish the book. The CIA considered buying up the entire printing of Invisible Government but this idea was rejected when Random House pointed out that if this happened they would have to print a second edition. McCone now formed a special group to deal with the book and tried to arrange for it to get bad reviews. It was the first full account of America's intelligence and espionage apparatus. In the book Wise and Ross argued that the "Invisible Government is made up of many agencies and people, including the intelligence branches of the State and Defense Departments, of the Army, Navy and Air Force". However, they claimed that the most important organization involved in this process was the CIA.
John McCone also attempted to stop Edward Yates from making a documentary on the CIA for the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). This attempt at censorship failed and NBC went ahead and broadcast this critical documentary.
In June, 1965, Desmond FitzGerald was appointed as head of the Directorate for Plans. He now took charge of Mockingbird. At the end of 1966 FitzGerald discovered that Ramparts, a left-wing publication, was planning to publish that the CIA had been secretly funding the National Student Association. FitzGerald ordered Edgar Applewhite to organize a campaign against the magazine. Applewhite later told Evan Thomas for his book, The Very Best Men: "I had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt their circulation and financing. The people running Ramparts were vulnerable to blackmail. We had awful things in mind, some of which we carried off."
https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm
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Referencing knowledgeable sources is far better than using ones own personal opinions as a foundation. The following is a good reference:
https://dcdirtylaundry.com/remember-when-implantable-tracking-microchips-were-just-a-conspiracy-theory-thanks-to-covid-theyre-now-a-reality/
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