Journalism and the CIA-- Who in MSM is on the payroll as NOC ?

[EVDebs]

An all around splendid article, snips below, needs vast updating by our MSM. Yet MSM currently lacks the cajones to do it. How can we get this topic once again before House and Senate Oversight committees ? This NEEDS to happen ! Non official cover journalists need to be exposed. Valerie Plame can take care of herself; who's looking out for objectivity within the media that ISN'T on the Operation Mockingbird payola ?

Journalism And The CIA: The Mighty Wurlitzer
by Daniel Brandt, NameBase NewsLine, April-June 1997
http://www.freedomofthepress.net/journalismandtheciathemightywurlitzer.htm

>snip>

""... In 1976 the CIA began cranking up their Wurlitzer on the matter of Richard Welch, a station chief in Athens who was assassinated by urban guerrillas at the end of 1975. The CIA's exploitation of this timely tragedy had both an immediate target and a general target. Ostensibly the CIA was complaining about an obscure Washington magazine called CounterSpy, which had been printing CIA names. In the same spirit, Philip Agee's just-published diary of CIA tricks in Latin America was loaded with names, and was already an international sensation. But the general target of this campaign was more important -- the CIA managed to change the nature of the debate. Suddenly it was no longer a question of what dirty work the CIA might be doing, but rather a question of what happens when the press recklessly endangers the lives of our brave boys overseas.

The fact that Welch's name had been published by the East Germans five years earlier, and that he could be identified as a CIA officer from his listing in the unclassified 1973 State Department Biographic Register, were both ignored. In any case, it was hardly a secret in Athens -- the group that killed Welch had been stalking his predecessor, Stacy Hulse, until Welch moved into the Hulse residence five months earlier. Colby eventually admitted to a House subcommittee that Welch's cover was inexcusably weak, and that the publication of his name in an Athens newspaper had only an indirect effect on his assassination.<10>

Colby could say this two years later because by then his comments were destined for a back page. The battle to rein in the CIA was already lost. In 1982 Congress passed a controversial new law that made publication of CIA names a felony under certain conditions. Although these conditions rarely applied to journalists, the wide coverage on this issue served to intimidate most publishers and editors.""

This whole Welch episode with Philip Agee is the basis for the current Plame case. Barbara Bush even was sued by Agee to change her book naming him in the Welch murder.

It it irony of the highest order that now Agee is getting the 'last laugh' on the old agency.

[hootinholler]

1. Gosh, this looks timely.

kick and rec.

-Hoot