Who Controls the CIA Controls the Media

It's a long established but little-known fact that the CIA has a particularly cozy relationship with the media in this country. If you've never seen the full version of Carl Bernstein's amazing article, titled "The CIA and the Media," published in Rolling Stone 10/20/77, you owe it to yourself to find a copy. To date, the full article is not online, although you can read snippets here. Ask your local library to help you find a copy. The relationship is openly admitted to in a CIA document made public about ten years ago. Scroll to section 9.A. for the relevant part. And as Robert Lederman wrote, "The media is not influenced by the CIA - the media is the CIA."

Why am I bringing this up now? Because Porter Goss is wreaking havoc in the Agency right now. Rather than going in and listening to the employees to figure out what is working and what isn't, he's smashed his way in like a bull in a china shop, demanding loyalty first and foremost not to the truth, but to George Bush. As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal described, while reform is desperately needed within the Agency,

Less appealing are leaks that suggest Goss and his aides are punishing people at the CIA who denied a meaningful connection between Hussein and al-Qaida, and especially people who leaked these denials to the media. Goss, in an internal memorandum leaked this week, warned CIA employees that their job is to “support the administration and its policies in our work ” and warned them not to “identify with, support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies.”

The scary and accurate George Orwell wrote, who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. I would add, who controls the media controls the present, and who controls the CIA controls the media. I shudder to think of the propaganda barrage to come.

Well, Florida is tough because people vote strangely

LIBERTY 2000 election results:

GORE 1,017 42%
BUSH 1,317 55%

Why would someone vote for Democrats at the lower levels of government and Republicans at the upper levels? Either way, you're voting against yourself. But c'est la vie. It's still, just barely, a free country.

Manufacturing History in Florida?

Here’s something to ponder.

According to Florida’s Liberty County election site, we find that of the 4075 registered voters as of “bookclosing” on 10/4/04, there were:

3597 Democrats and
320 Republicans, with 158 others.

But the Presidential election results show that

1070 voted for Kerry,
1927 voted for Bush and 24 votes went to others.

That is even MORE odd in light of the fact that just a few short months ago, in the primary election, the proportion of Democrats to Republicans was much closer to the number of registered voters than the number who voted for Bush.

On 8/31/04,

1658 people cast a ballot for Betty Castor (D) and 774 voted for another Democrat.
157 votes were cast for all the Republican Senate candidates combined.

Would it surprise you to learn that the system used to count the votes was ES&S?

Election Systems & Services (formerly Data Mark Systems and American Information Systems) was founded by Todd and Bob Urosevich. Today, Todd is Vice President of Customer Support for ES&S. Bob, however, is now the President of Diebold. So we have the appearance, but not necessarily the reality, of competition among the vendors. ES&S’s history bears a heavy Republican presence.

ES&S has a bit of a sordid history. Former Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel was both an investor of and a beneficiary of this company, as ES&S was used when he won his surprise election to the Senate in 1996. He claimed to have ended his involvement with ES&S in 1995, but in reality held shares in the McCarthy Group, which owned the company that became ES&S. In addition, Hagel’s campaign treasurer, Michael McCarthy, was the McCarthy in the “McCarthy Group”. These sorts of conflicts of interests should not be allowed so close to our vote.

ES&S is into the scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours game that lobbyists in Washington know all to well. Do business with us today and we’ll give you a job tomorrow. ES&S has done exactly that - hiring former secretaries of state from Florida and California after those same people held positions that required them to recommend an electronic voting vendor.