Operation Mockingbird
2/21/2024 1:51 AM UTC by Jack
The Watergate scandal was a major political scandal in the United States involving the administration of President Richard Nixon from 1972 to 1974 that led to Nixon's resignation. The scandal stemmed from the Nixon administration's attempts to cover up its involvement in the June 17, 1972, break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C., at the Watergate Office Building. (Wikipedia)
Quote by Stuart Taylor, Jr. from his book The Big Snoop: Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Terrorists, "Watergate shocked the American public and spurred many of its representatives in Congress to demand an investigation into the past activities of [the FBI, CIA,] NSA [IRS] and others. The result was the creation of two congressional committees in 1975, chaired by Frank Church (D-ID) in the Senate and Otis Pike (D-N.Y.) in the House of Representatives. Their hearings exposed secret, arguably illegal wiretapping, bugging, and harassment of American citizens, including Supreme Court justices, reporters, and government officials, all in the name of collecting intelligence about threats to national security. The most notorious case, first exposed in the 1960s and fully documented by the Church Committee, was the wiretapping of Martin Luther King, Jr. by the NSA and by the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, who believed him to be part of a Communist conspiracy." 1
In 1977 Carl Bernstein published an article titled “The CIA and the Media” reporting that the CIA had covertly infiltrated America’s most influential news outlets and had over 400 reporters who it considered assets in a program known as Operation Mockingbird. (All three references in this single sentence in this article have been deleted from the internet. 4
Church Committee, "Do you have any people paid by the CIA today who are working for television networks? This I think it gets into the kind of uh getting into the details Mr. Chairman that I'd like to get into in an executive session." 3
The Church Committee’s investigations also led to passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978. The FISA court was originally designed to guard executive branch surveillance programs from the public while ensuring the other branches of government could oversee activities. 1
After the terrorist attacks on 9/11, and the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, attitudes toward government surveillance changed. “The emergence of this new menace to America and its allies,” Taylor wrote in his essay, “brought an upsurge in political and public support for aggressive surveillance of potential terrorists, and a muting of the concerns that had arisen in the 1970s about the past sins and excessive zeal of U.S. intelligence agencies.” 1
On June, 6, 2020, the NYT published an article about what later was named BountyGate. 5 They claimed that unnamed intelligence officials said that Russia was offering bounties to the Taliban for killing American troops. Glenn Greenwald then broke the story that it was the CIA that had told the NYT about the bounties. The Biden administration later stated that they had low to moderate confidence in the allegations. They quite literally ran a CIA press release and disguised it as a news story. At the time they used the story to discredit Trump's troop withdrawals from Germany and Afghanistan. 4
Quote by Stuart Taylor, Jr. from his book The Big Snoop: Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Terrorists, "Watergate shocked the American public and spurred many of its representatives in Congress to demand an investigation into the past activities of [the FBI, CIA,] NSA [IRS] and others. The result was the creation of two congressional committees in 1975, chaired by Frank Church (D-ID) in the Senate and Otis Pike (D-N.Y.) in the House of Representatives. Their hearings exposed secret, arguably illegal wiretapping, bugging, and harassment of American citizens, including Supreme Court justices, reporters, and government officials, all in the name of collecting intelligence about threats to national security. The most notorious case, first exposed in the 1960s and fully documented by the Church Committee, was the wiretapping of Martin Luther King, Jr. by the NSA and by the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, who believed him to be part of a Communist conspiracy." 1
In 1977 Carl Bernstein published an article titled “The CIA and the Media” reporting that the CIA had covertly infiltrated America’s most influential news outlets and had over 400 reporters who it considered assets in a program known as Operation Mockingbird. (All three references in this single sentence in this article have been deleted from the internet. 4
Church Committee, "Do you have any people paid by the CIA today who are working for television networks? This I think it gets into the kind of uh getting into the details Mr. Chairman that I'd like to get into in an executive session." 3
The Church Committee’s investigations also led to passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978. The FISA court was originally designed to guard executive branch surveillance programs from the public while ensuring the other branches of government could oversee activities. 1
After the terrorist attacks on 9/11, and the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, attitudes toward government surveillance changed. “The emergence of this new menace to America and its allies,” Taylor wrote in his essay, “brought an upsurge in political and public support for aggressive surveillance of potential terrorists, and a muting of the concerns that had arisen in the 1970s about the past sins and excessive zeal of U.S. intelligence agencies.” 1
On June, 6, 2020, the NYT published an article about what later was named BountyGate. 5 They claimed that unnamed intelligence officials said that Russia was offering bounties to the Taliban for killing American troops. Glenn Greenwald then broke the story that it was the CIA that had told the NYT about the bounties. The Biden administration later stated that they had low to moderate confidence in the allegations. They quite literally ran a CIA press release and disguised it as a news story. At the time they used the story to discredit Trump's troop withdrawals from Germany and Afghanistan. 4