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[android]

Here is the guy they caught. I personally believe Bin Laden is dead, but there is just no proof so they have to keep the search going. He's probably buried somewhere in the montains between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/asiapcf/05/04/pakistan.arrest/index.html

 

[bionic77]

I already told you bastards where Bin Laden is!

If you want that reward you know what to do...

 

[xabre]

Planting newspaper articles about coups in faraway countries is not what xabre was talking about. He was talking about an Orwellian organization lying about an issue of vital national interest in order to control the minds of the population at large. Therein lies the leap of faith.

Why do you assume that propaganda is necessarily mind control? This is not about locking people up and drilling thoughts into their brains, that is your leap of faith. The issue here is not controlling what people do (i.e. people are not forced to think in certain ways in democratic countries as in your Orwellian state), the issue here is providing a base of fraudulent and slated information to orient the population toward a particular mindset. This is how propaganda works in democratic countries, it is a subtle model of pushing the opinions and beliefs of a population in a particular direction based upon biased sources of information that people use to form their ideas and beliefs, such as slanted radio programs, biased editorials, published books, academic journals, think-tanks etc.

Just when we think Bin Ladin is out of the spotlight, up pops "He may be captured soon", just like he's almost been captured several times already. We have had constant terror warnings of "spectacular attacks" on so many occasions too numerous to count, not to mention the constant "war on Terror" rhetoric; and on and on it all goes. All of this creates a framework of fear and distrust in a society and this is the precise intention of intelligence agencies such as the CIA. The fact is, it is entirely plausible (and I originally said this) that the US government has no idea on the whereabouts of Bin Ladin or whether he is alive or dead. I believe that he is dead, the point remains that the uncertainly over his status has created this assumed belief that he is 'in hiding', ready to strike any time. I believe intelligence organisations such as the CIA are responsible for disseminating information that maintains and reinforces this element of fear, that keeps the masses in line and backing the will of the elite in power. So does the CIA disseminate information that distorts and bends public opinions and ideas in the present day like they have done in the past? Most certainly they do, why wouldn't they? Do I have proof? No I don't. Is this beyond them? Most certainly not as history shows only too well, thus it becomes something akin to 'If they've done it before.....'

The CIA planted articles in order to influence the understanding of events on Cold War fronts and counter Pravda. That doesn't make me believe that today, in 2005, the CIA is actively lying about the status of bin Laden in order to gain control of my mind and make me "scared." I can't believe that without some actual evidence.

This thread should be of interest, I post under the name of Syphor. Also, This is long, but gives a broad outline on the activities of the CIA throughout it's history in relation to information dissemination.

Here are some important quotes -

That hidden history was first exposed by the Church and Pike Congressional Committees in 1975 and 1976 and by many researchers and reporters since. To carry out its strategies-of-tension , the CIA had its own wire service and publishing companies. It set up and supported magazines, newspapers, and radio stations with solidly biased and beholden editorial staffs. It established the largest news conglomerate in West Germany and major media in many countries (including Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and Voice of America with roughly 100 transmitters each, and many lesser-known regional radio stations beamed to Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa). Attorney William Schapp says the CIA

alone—not to mention its counterparts in the rest of the American intelligence community—owned or controlled some 2,500 media entities all over the world. In addition, it has people ranging from stringers to highly visible journalists and editors in virtually every major media organization.117 [To that we must add those controlled by the intelligence services of other nations.]

Canned Cold War editorials were prepared and sent to large and small newspapers all over the world. These editorials were available for any editor to restructure as his or her own creation. Large independent think-tanks were established, funded, and staffed with ideological supporters, as were think-tanks within universities.

Using negative buzzword labels to describe others such as communist dictatorship, subversives, and extremists and using only positive words -- freedom, justice, rights, and majority rule -- when talking of ourselves was the foundation of all social-control-paradigms (Eric Fromm's frameworks of orientation). This is designed to create fear (a strategy-of-tension) among the populations of the wealthy nations so they would support a policy of worldwide suppression and oppression under the cover of protecting freedoms and rights.

Ralph McGehee was a career CIA agent who spent the last few years of his career studying CIA archives. He concluded:

The CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency. It is the covert action arm of the President's foreign policy advisers. In that capacity it overthrows or supports foreign governments while reporting "intelligence" justifying those activities. It shapes its intelligence ... to support presidential policy. Disinformation is a large part of its covert action responsibility, and the American people [and legislators] are the primary target of its lies.120

To target the American people, American intelligence services must simultaneously target those the masses look up to for designing and interpreting our world—Congress, academia, and the media. Reformed CIA agent McGehee claimed that “He has never once seen a CIA official tell the truth to Congress. Instead came a steady stream of lies.”121 Even the information going to those with security clearances is controlled.

While McCarthyism—painting any progressive person or philosophy as communist—was in full swing, it was political, social, and career suicide to be objective and intellectually balanced. During those 40-years of suppression of dissenting opinion, the CIA paid compliant professors to write 25-to-30 fraudulent books a year. Right-wing think-tanks were set up to produce thousands of books based on those original planted volumes. Tens of thousands of CIA articles based on, and in turn supporting, those fraudulent books were planted in the media around the world (700 CIA articles were planted worldwide during the overthrow and assassination of Allende in Chile). Reporters were provided news scoops in exchange for publication of fraudulent articles. Some of the leading columnists in the world, therefore, were planting this nonsense.

For over two generations social scientists have used, and are still using, those fraudulent books and articles as the foundation of their research. Such books have been cited by official textbooks for 50 years and will be in the future. The intelligence agencies, corporate think-tanks, and state departments of all powerful nations were busy writing the same distorted history. Intellectual figures and skillful writers throughout the Western world supported and coordinated this building of, as Eric Fromm describes, a "framework of orientation." As the quote above (page 63, also 73-75) on the Congress for Cultural Freedom demonstrates, only academics and intellectuals on the fringe knew the difference and even they could only be very unsure of what was real and what was not. When it was learned that the CIA had supported the printing of these thousands of books, sincere academics sued for the titles to be revealed. But the Supreme Court ruled that this would expose CIA methods and endanger the national security.

 

[-=DoAvl=-]