Introduction

Even in democracies, the business of government is run by a tiny group of people, and the decisions are taken by an even tinier group: let us call these few decision makers ‘the ruling elite.’ In the United States, this tiny ruling elite at the top is composed disproportionately of members of the (very) wealthy classes, and their retainers. It may include people who do not have an official government position.

Now, since a person’s interests are largely determined by his or her position in the socio-economic structure, it follows that the ruling elite will tend to have interests quite at variance with those of the majority of the population. In fact, their ideology may be completely different -- even opposite.

Is this a problem? Not if the majority has sufficient oversight over what the ruling elite is doing, for in this case government officials who violate the wishes of the majority can be democratically replaced with others who do respect what the people want.

What can produce the sufficient level of oversight? A free and competitive news market.

Any free and competitive market will have certain basic properties. For example, if you and I both have competing taco stands, but my tacos -- going for a comparable price -- are cleaner and tastier, then people will flock to my taco stand and will abandon yours. Economics 101: obvious stuff. If we are running advertisements, I will point out how much better my tacos are than yours, the better to gain a larger market share. This will force you and other competitors of mine to improve the quality of your tacos without increasing the price too much, or else you will have to get out of the taco market.

This is what we expect will happen in any free and competitive market, so markets for other products will behave similarly, if they are free.

Without a free press, democracy is impossible.

In political theory the ‘free press’ is often referred to as the ‘fourth estate’ because an ‘estate’ is something like a main building block of political structure. In the United States, for example, the political structure is formally divided into:

1) the executive: the president and ‘the cabinet’ (a term for the president’s own employees, whom he hires and fires);

2) the legislative: the two houses of Congress; and

3) the judiciary: the courts.

Though not formally part of ‘government,’ a free press will act as a ‘fourth estate’ because, by investigating and reporting what the government does, it will effectively check that government. So long as there is a free press, then, it will be difficult for the government to betray the people, because a treasonous government stands a good chance of being exposed.

Of course, if the same ruling elite that runs the government also runs the press, then there is no oversight of government, and the press instead becomes an organ of the ruling elite’s power, distributing not news but propaganda that will help members of the ruling elite to employ government as a tool to advance their own interests over everybody else’s. Since control over the press would give the ruling elite such tremendous power, it is obvious that the ruling elite has a motive to corrupt the press.

But do they have opportunity? In other words, can they, in practical terms, do this?

That depends. If the government is not allowed to keep secrets, and if every dollar spent by the government has to be publicly accounted for, the ruling elite running the government will not find it so easy to corrupt the press. If, on the contrary, at least a few branches of government are given a relatively large budget with which to operate in complete secrecy, giving no account to the citizenry of how the monies are spent, there will be plenty of opportunity to corrupt the press.

With the power to use the taxpayer’s money in secret, the ruling elite can give publishers and editors (a small group of individuals) a choice between lucrative corruption or secret persecution (even death, at the limit). If publishers and editors happen already to come disproportionately from the same circles as the ruling elite, the choice will not be especially difficult: they will tend to choose corruption.

This top layer of the press decides what ordinary people get to see in print, on the radio, or on TV. Thus, control over this top layer in an apparently free press will result in tremendous power, because the appearance of a competitive market (produced by the proliferation of brands) will make the public terribly gullible. Instead of using coercion to force people to do what the ruling elite wants (which invariably produces a reaction), the controlled yet apparently free media can be used to manufacture realities such that ordinary people will ‘democratically’ demand the very things the ruling elite wants to do. For example, a war of aggression which the citizenry would never approve (since it is ordinary citizens who must die fighting) could be falsely represented as a defensive war by using the media to create the impression of a threat that in reality did not exist. Once scared, the citizenry would demand the very war that the ruling elite wanted to launch.

This sort of thing would be scary. But that doesn't mean it cannot happen. It has happened before. For example, in August 1939, Adolf Hitler, who had complete control over the press in Nazi Germany, complained that the Polish government was supposedly terrorizing the German minority in Poland, as follows:

"The wave of appalling terrorism against the [minority] inhabitants of Poland, and the atrocities that have been taking place in that country are terrible for the victims, but intolerable for a Great Power which has been expected to remain a passive onlooker. We will not continue to tolerate the persecution of the minority, the killing of many, and their forcible removal under the most cruel conditions."[1a]

This became Adolf Hitler's publicly given reason to attack the Polish state (which attack, we are told, precipitated World War II). But the Polish government had not been oppressing the German minority in Poland, and the trigger-excuse that the German Nazi government used to set in motion the invasion of Poland was a series of simulated attacks on Germany along the Polish-German border, carried out by the Nazis themselves, and blamed on the Poles (the most famous is the 'Gleiwitz incident').[1b]

Given that such things are possible, concerned US citizens should ask themselves the question: Have members of the US ruling elite had the opportunity to corrupt the press?

In this piece, I will argue that, unfortunately, such opportunity was formally given by the US Congress to the executive a long time ago, when it passed the National Security Act in 1947, creating branches of government that may do essentially anything they please in secret, and which dispose of a large budget. In other words, by law, since 1947, US taxpayers have not been told how their presidents have been spending a very big chunk of their taxes.

The secrecy provisions of the National Security Act
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“The National Security Act of 1947 mandated a major reorganization of the foreign policy and military establishments of the U.S. Government. The act created many of the institutions that Presidents found useful when formulating and implementing foreign policy, including the National Security Council (NSC). The Council itself included the President, Vice President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and other members (such as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency), who met at the White House to discuss both long-term problems and more immediate national security crises…

A lot that is of vital interest to the average US citizen is left out by the State Department’s summary. For example, most US citizens will be interested to know that Title V of the National Security Act, which is concerned with “Accountability For Intelligence Activities,” gave US Intelligence the power to do basically anything it wants in secret.

I will now demonstrate this by quoting the relevant sections of Title V. Instead of presenting them in order, I will choose an order of presentation that I find more pedagogic.

SEC. 501. [50 U.S.C. 413] (a)(2): “Nothing in this title shall be construed as requiring the approval of the congressional intelligence committees as a condition precedent to the initiation of any significant anticipated intelligence activity.”

Translation: Nothing that is said in Title V concerning the accountability of US Intelligence may be interpreted as a requirement that US Intelligence ask anybody for permission to do anything. US Intelligence may simply initiate any action it wants, in secret, at any time.

It is true that SEC. 501. [50 U.S.C. 413] (a)(2), above, is preceded by:

SEC. 501. [50 U.S.C. 413] (a)(1): “The President shall ensure that the congressional intelligence committees are kept fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States, including any significant anticipated intelligence activity as required by this title.”

You can probably see now why the section immediately above was placed first: “Fully and currently informed” sounds good, and if you read this first you will get a good feeling, which may linger. But the truth is that Title V itself renders meaningless the words “fully and currently.”

As you can see immediately above, the responsibility for informing Congress about what US Intelligence is doing falls to the president. Further clarifying this point, Title V states:

SEC. 501. [50 U.S.C. 413] (b): “The President shall ensure that any illegal intelligence activity is reported promptly to the congressional intelligence committees, as well as any corrective action that has been taken or is planned in connection with such illegal activity.”

I shall translate. US Intelligence is part of the executive branch, and therefore run by people whom the president hires and fires, and who must act with the president’s authority. What if they do illegal things? Who will be responsible for informing Congress about the president’s own “illegal intelligence activity”? The president.

Do you perceive a conflict of interest?

It is true that a bit further down, Title V states:

SEC. 501. [50 U.S.C. 413] (e): “Nothing in this Act shall be construed as authority to withhold information from the congressional intelligence committees on the grounds that providing the information to the congressional intelligence committees would constitute the unauthorized disclosure of classified information or information relating to intelligence sources and methods.”

And I agree that an ordinary mortal in a rush could be forgiven for reading the above and thinking this was a requirement of full disclosure. But that’s not what it is.

Here is the translation: US Intelligence may not say to the congressional intelligence committees, “You know what? We won’t share this information with you because that would be, you know, ‘unauthorized disclosure,’ as we call it.”

Once again, perhaps you perceive the conflict of interest.

Let us then summarize the effective powers of the president. The president of the United States may, at any time, wield US Intelligence to initiate any action whatever, legal or illegal, without asking or notifying Congress, and he may legally postpone, indefinitely and at his own discretion, the report of any such activity to the congressional intelligence committees, which for the most part do not reveal much to the general public anyway.

What is this a recipe for? Absolute power, provided US Intelligence is given a sufficiently large budget.

Covert Action
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What could you do if you had this much power to act in secret?

You could, for example, secretly corrupt the publishers and editors who run the press in other countries. Such ‘covert actions’ are explicitly permitted in Title V of the National Security Act:

SEC. 501. [50 U.S.C. 413] (f) “As used in this section, the term ‘intelligence activities’ includes covert actions as defined in section 503(e), and includes financial intelligence activities.”

SEC. 503 (e): “As used in this title [Title V], the term ‘covert action’ means an activity or activities of the United States Government to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly…”

Translation: By law, the president of the United States need show zero respect for the internal political processes in other countries, and may use the might of the world’s greatest power to distort and disrupt them in secret. Once explicitly given this power in US law, what president could resist it? The rational expectation is therefore that the US has been hard at work corrupting the press and the political processes of foreign countries ever since the National Security Act was passed.

But is the president of the United States also allowed to treat democracy in the United States with such astonishing contempt? He is not. The immediately following paragraph states:

SEC. 503 (f): “No covert action may be conducted which is intended to influence United States political processes, public opinion, policies, or media.”

If you are a US citizen, and you find SEC. 503 (f) of the National Security Act in the least reassuring, allow me to remind you that, if the president chooses to secretly corrupt the US press, which SEC. 503 (f) forbids, the responsibility to inform Congress of such illegal activity will fall...to the president. And the president has the power to postpone indefinitely the report of this illegal intelligence activity to Congress -- all he has to do is invoke a supposed danger to ‘national security.’

Question: What do you have when you give the president the power to corrupt the US media and make it so that, in order to be discovered, the president must tell on himself?

Answer: The opposite of a mechanism to prevent the corruption of the US media. This is an invitation to do it.

As economists are fond of saying, people respond to incentives. Thus, if you set things up so that there are great rewards and zero punishments to do something, people will be very likely to do it. It will behoove us, then, to ask the next question.

Question: What kind of a president will refrain from breaking the law in order to corrupt the US media if he knows:

1) that he won’t get caught; and

2) that breaking the law in this manner will vastly increase his own power?

Answer: A president who is scrupulously ethical.

Is it likely that the most powerful man in the world, allowed by the National Security Act to corrupt the press in foreign countries, will be scrupulously ethical when it comes to keeping his hands off the US media?

Anyway, but let us take a look at the ethics of US Intelligence, the better to form an opinion about the likelihood that the US press has been corrupted.

The ethics of US Intelligence: The CIA was created by absorbing in secret lots of Nazi war criminals
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In 1988, The Washington Post wrote:

The Washington Post was reviewing “the archival sleuthing of [historian] Christopher Simpson,” which involved poring over many “documents...declassified under the Freedom of Information Act.” But The Washington Post misrepresented the truth above, so it denied the facts.

What the Post should have written is that the US government deliberately and systematically recruited not “thousands” but tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals. And since what Simpson demonstrated was that the CIA itself was created by absorbing in secret this Nazi multitude, and since the CIA has engaged in covert actions all over the globe, the Post shouldn't have written that covert actions took place only in “postwar Europe.” And neither should the Post have written that these Nazis were used to serve “American interests and purposes.” This is false. The recruited Nazis were used to serve the interests and purposes of the US ruling elite.[7a] Finally, the Post should have explained, as the Toronto Star did in its own review of Simpson’s book, that,

Coming back to The Washington Post, this paper also explained to its readers that the US government lied to the US citizen: “the American public was told that U.S. policy was to round up and punish (not entice and reward) those who had been instrumental in Hitler’s crimes against humanity.” What the Post fails to mention is that the US government had permission to lie, because this permission was granted by the same National Security Act of 1947 that also created the CIA out of these Nazi thugs.

Simpson’s book has been taken out of circulation, and all discussion of it seemed to die almost immediately. The last mention I could find of it in the Western media was in 1993, only 5 years after he published the book, and then only in passing. This can easily explain why you never heard anything about this, if you never did. But you may find Simpson’s book in libraries:

Simpson, Christopher. 1988. Blowback: America's recruitment of Nazis and its effects on the Cold War. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. [Read a summary with links to articles on this [9a]]

Since it was US President Harry Truman who signed the National Security Act into law in 1947, and who created the CIA out of multitudes of Nazi war criminals, it pays to review some aspects of his foreign policy. In 1947-48 US foreign policy was designed to destroy the fledgling state of Israel by assisting the genocidal Arab armies that openly called for the extermination of the Jews when they launched their attack. How did Harry Truman assist the Arabs?

1) After the attack began, the US government announced that it no longer recognized Israel;

2) The US government slapped an arms embargo on the Israeli Jews, making it harder for them to defend themselves; and

3) The US government supported British policy, which was to use British troops to assist the Arab armies in various ways, and also to send captured Nazi officers to lead them.

In stark contrast, the Marshall Plan, another major component of Truman's foreign policy, had for purpose restoring to health the very fascist countries that had plunged the entire world into a genocidal, antisemitic war: Germany and Japan. [Read more about all this [9b]]

Over the years, the behavior of the CIA has agreed with the values that attended its creation. The CIA is notorious for having destroyed democratic and progressive governments in many different parts of the world, installing in their stead repressive right-wing dictatorships that oppressed ordinary people.[9c] In other words, the Central Intelligence Agency has behaved in a manner perfectly consistent with what you would expect from a Nazi agency, which is of course what an agency composed of Nazis would be.

Now we may return to our question: Should we expect such an agency, with authority under the National Security Act to corrupt the foreign press, to have exercised restraint when it comes to corrupting the US press? Wouldn’t it be irrational to expect that?

So did the National Security Act destroy freedom of the press in the United States?
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Historian Christopher Simpson has documented that the US press was irreversibly corrupted almost immediately after passage of the National Security Act. One portion of Simpson’s documentation deals with something called the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE), which was an umbrella with which to disguise the CIA’s pro-fascist covert actions in Europe. To read about how NCFE promoted fascists in Europe -- financing their operations with the same money that the Nazis had stolen from the victims of the Shoah ('Holocaust') -- consult the footnote.[18] Here I am concerned with the point that the media cooperated with this CIA pro-fascist effort completely, and immediately after the National Security Act was passed. I quote below Christopher Simpson’s passage on the media’s cooperation:

[Quote from Christopher Simpson begins here]

“From the beginning the National Committee for a Free Europe depended upon the voluntary silence of powerful media personalities in the United States to cloak its true operations in secrecy. ‘Representatives of some of the nation's most influential media giants were involved early on as members of the corporation [NCFE],’ Mickelson notes in a relatively frank history of its activities. This board included ‘magazine publishers Henry Luce [of Time-Life] and DeWitte Wallace [of Readers Digest],’ he writes, ‘but not a word of the government involvement appeared in print or on the air.’ Luce and Wallace were not the only ones: C.D. Jackson, editor in chief of Fortune magazine, came on board in 1951 as president of the entire Radio Free Europe effort, while Reader's Digest senior editor Eugene Lyons headed the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia Inc., a corporate parent of Radio Liberation. Still, ‘sources of financing,’ Mickelson writes, were ‘never mentioned’ in the press.

The practical effect of this arrangement was the creation of a powerful lobby inside American media that tended to suppress critical news concerning the CIA’s propaganda projects. This was not simply a matter of declining to mention the fact that the agency was behind these programs, as Mickelson implies. Actually the media falsified their reports to the public concerning the government’s role in Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation for years, actively promoting the myth -- which most sophisticated editors knew perfectly well was false -- that these projects were financed though nickel-and-dime contributions from concerned citizens. Writers soon learned that exposés concerning the NCFE and RFE/RL were simply not welcome at mainstream publications. No corporate officers needed to issue any memorandums to enforce this silence: with C.D. Jackson as RFE/RL's president and Luce himself on the group's board of directors, for example, Time's and Life's authors were no more likely to delve into the darker side of RFE/RL than they were to attack the American flag.”[19] (my emphasis)

[Quote from Christopher Simpson ends here]

In 1953, which is around the same time, the CIA staged a coup that destroyed the progressive and democratic Iranian government of Mohammed Mossadeq, replacing it with the dictatorial and repressive right-wing puppet regime of Mohammed Reza Shah. At this time, too, the US media lied to the US public, cooperating very closely with the CIA. How closely? Well, consider that the following is just one item in a longer list (consult the footnote for a fuller picture):

“The Iran desk of the State Department...was able to place a C.I.A. study in Newsweek, ‘using the normal channel of desk officer to journalist.’ The article was one of several planted press reports that, when reprinted in Tehran, fed the ‘war of nerves’ against Iran’s prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh.”[20]

The US government planted a CIA 'study' in Newsweek -- only one of several propaganda attacks against Mossadeq that were planted in the press -- using “the normal channel of desk officer to journalist...”

In addition to the above, I will make the following observation: the hypothesis that the Western mass media has been corrupted by pro-Nazi interests, like any hypothesis, makes predictions. For example, we know that the persecution of the Jews is central to Nazi ideology, and therefore if one hypothesizes that the CIA, created by absorbing tens of thousands of Nazis, has corrupted the press, one can make the following reasonable prediction: the press will be attacking the Jews.

The following HIR investigation contains a mountain of data supporting the view that the Western mass media is attacking the Jews in a way eerily reminiscent of the propaganda attacks against the Jews in the prelude to the WWII Final Solution, and which made that genocide possible:

The power of US Intelligence
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All of the above supports the view that US Intelligence will turn out to be the single most powerful political organ in the United States, because it has had, in over a half century, plenty of time to corrupt the entire political process.

Consider the case of Allen Dulles.

As documented by Christopher Simpson, Allen Dulles was one of the main architects of the creation of the CIA out of a multitude of Nazis. But then the April 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco happened: a disastrous CIA operation to invade Cuba using Cuban exiles trained by the US Special Forces,[10] which, as Simpson documents, were full of Nazis that US Intelligence had brought over and given US citizenship to.[10a]

It is not imposible that the Bay of Pigs experience forced Kennedy to reconsider the adventurous policies of the US 'national security' establishment. According to an article that appeared later in the New York Times, "President Kenndy, as the enormity of the Bay of Pigs disaster came home to him, said to one of the highest officials of his Administration that he wanted to 'splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.'"[10b] In September of 1961 Kennedy fired Allen Dulles and his personal staff.

In November of 1963 Kennedy was assassinated in the city of Dallas, Texas, in circumstances so mysterious they continue to fascinate. The government of Lyndon B. Johnson, the next president, created the Warren Commission to investigate the murder and produce a report, which commission consisted, at the top, of seven senior members. These were:

Do you perceive a conflict of interest when a professional liar and veteran of political assassinations is put in charge of investigating the assassination of the President who fired him after a tremendous fiasco? I do.

Famously, the Warren Commission's report, which defends a 'lone gunman' theory stating that nobody in the entire world had anything whatsoever to do with Kennedy's assassination but private citizen Lee Harvey Oswald, has convinced almost nobody. Is it not possible that the CIA perceived a threat in Kennedy's direction after Bay of Pigs and removed him? It is possible. This hypothesis is quite popular among those who study the Kennedy assassination, mostly amateur buffs because professional historians avoid the topic like the plague.

It is problematic for this hypothesis that -- despite what the New York Times reported about Kennedy's reaction to the Bay of Pigs operation -- he did not develop an immediate aversion to CIA clandestine operations. On the contrary. For example, right after the Bay of Pigs disaster Kennedy approved Operation Mongoose: "the largest operation that the CIA had ever undertaken."[11] And the point of Mongoose? Replace Castro! But Mongoose was another disaster, for the activities surrounding its preparation, in addition to other anti-Cuban activities of the United States, worried Castro so much that he asked the Soviets to place nuclear missiles on the Island, leading to the famous Cuban Missile Crisis.[12] (Kennedy has been much celebrated for handling that crisis in such a way that it did not become an atomic war; perhaps it would be more reasonable to criticize him for producing the crisis in the first place).

But this coin has another side, too. The hypothesis so many Kennedy assassination buffs like may not be so bad.

In March 1962 Operation Northwoods was presented for consideration. This was a plan of sabotage and terror against the United States -- which even contemplated murdering US citizens -- in order to blame it on Cuba and thus justify another attempted invasion.[12a] Where did such ideas come from? The CIA was full of Nazis that Allen Dulles had helped absorb, and Nazi sympathizers such as Allen Dulles; as mentioned earlier, the Nazis had staged a simulated Polish attack on Germany to justify their invasion of Poland.

What was Kennedy's reaction to Northwoods? He rejected it. It is not impossible that a president who much enjoyed clandestine warfare against other countries could have been offended by a plan to murder US citizens. And if he was offended, US intelligence leaders may have grown uncomfortable, especially after Operation Mongoose led to the Cuban Missile Crisis, which took place in October 1962 and which probably did affect Kennedy's opinion of US Intelligence, for it almost destroyed him -- and his country. From that point onwards US Intelligence leaders may have grown worried about what their president might do. That feeling would have tended to gel in loyalty towards the dismissed former CIA director Allen Dulles. It remains terribly suspicious that Dulles should have overseen the investigation into the president's murder and that the report of this investigation should be so strange. That investigation had been ordered by Lyndon B. Johnson, and the impression it leaves is that he had not the slightest intention of producing an honest inquiry into the possible role of US Intelligence in the murder: he would behave.

An obvious historical parallel here is to the Roman Empire. This empire was created by the Roman aristocrat Augustus Caesar (born Octavian), who at the same time created a mercenary force under his personal control called the Praetorian Guard.

The Praetorians were the real power in Rome. Consider that,

For example, Gaius’ successor, Claudius Caesar,

If you wanted to be emperor and stay emperor, you had to make the Praetorian Guard happy, because they were the real power in Rome. This is not a 'conspiracy theory'; it is history. There is certainly nothing outrageous in such historical events: they make perfect sense. The Praetorian Guard had the power to crown and remove emperors, so it did. The same argument applies: the CIA has the power to crown and remove presidents. Is it outrageous to suggest that it does precisely this? I would submit that a US president has to keep the CIA happy, because the CIA is the real power in Washington. I like the following hypothesis: after the CIA made an example of Kennedy, every occupant of the White House has followed Johnson's example and behaved.

Now, if the CIA is the real power in Washington, then the apparent alternation in power between the Democratic and Republican parties should not affect the conduct of US foreign policy in the least, and we should find, upon examination, that this policy is always identical, regardless of which party is in office. Much of the work on this website has documented precisely this. For example, HIR’s series to understand Bush Jr.’s war on Iraq has documented that US foreign policy towards Iran and Iraq has been the same for many years: pro-Islamist. It matters not who sits in the White House.

US foreign policy towards the Jewish state has also been perfectly consistent: it has been consistently and radically anti-Israel regardless of who is president, as another HIR investigation has demonstrated:

This again agrees nicely with the fact that the CIA was created out of tens of thousands of Nazis.

Final Remarks
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There has been a lot of noise in the media concerning the powers granted to the executive branch in the Patriot Act, which was signed into law in the wake of 9-11. I would submit that the entire debate is a propagandistic distraction. The executive branch of the United States was already given something very close to absolute power in the National Security Act of 1947. It has been able to do anything it wants since then. Once that sinks in, the noise around the Patriot Act begins to look like a decoy: its purpose is merely to generate a debate around it, there to create a theater of democracy. But democracy, I would submit, died some time ago, when the free press was abolished by US Intelligence.