{"id":86038,"date":"2017-01-30T12:00:46","date_gmt":"2017-01-30T12:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=86038"},"modified":"2017-01-29T13:52:25","modified_gmt":"2017-01-29T13:52:25","slug":"a-valiant-verbal-warrior-demythologizes-the-cia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/01\/a-valiant-verbal-warrior-demythologizes-the-cia\/","title":{"rendered":"A Valiant Verbal Warrior Demythologizes the CIA"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cOnce there is a suspicion that a religion is a myth, its power has gone.\u201d<\/em>
\n— Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>28 Jan 2017 – <\/em>Like Odysseus, Douglas Valentine is a wily warrior who managed to enter the enemy\u2019s stronghold disguised as a gift.\u00a0 Not Troy, and not within a wooden horse, but in the guise of a nice young \u201cNobody,\u201d he was able, thirty or so years ago, to breach the walls of the CIA through William Colby, a former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.\u00a0 The guileful thing he brought was his proposal to demystify the Phoenix program, \u201cthe controversial CIA assassination program that resulted in the deaths of thousands of civilians during the Vietnam War,\u201d with which Colby was notably associated.<\/p>\n

Colby naively assumed \u201cdemystify\u201d meant justify, so he welcomed Valentine into his inner sanctum. As in days of yore, Colby, and the CIA officers he referred Valentine to, were so disarmed by the bright young trickster that they divulged their secrets without being asked, defeating themselves in the boastful ways of men drunk on their own youthful exploits.\u00a0 Wanting to be heroes in their own myths, they became unwitting accomplices in their own besmirchment. So much for intelligence.<\/p>\n

When the Trojan Horse that became Valentine\u2019s 1990 book, The Phoenix Program: America\u2019s Use of Terror in Vietnam<\/em>, was opened, and many truths rushed out to slay them, they reacted with shocked outrage that they had been double-crossed by an amateur counter-spy.<\/p>\n

Legends fall, of course, battles are lost, but when the self-anointed heroic warriors of the CIA fell, they summoned their acolytes and media scribes to silence the counter-spy who did not love them.\u00a0 It was not the Valentine that these spurned lovers were expecting.<\/p>\n

In this case, their defender was the media celebrity reporter, Morley Safer, who had reported from Vietnam and was friendly with William Colby. Safer owed Colby a favor.\u00a0 When he was in Vietnam, Safer had accepted Colby\u2019s Mephistophelian offer to take a tour of the infamous Phoenix program\u2019s interrogation centers and meet the counterterrorism teams, but with one stipulation.\u00a0 In Safer\u2019s words, delivered to a conference in 2010: \u201cI showed up and [Colby] said, \u2018Okay, here are the rules\u2026.You can\u2019t take notes and you can\u2019t report anything you hear\u2026.to this day, I still feel constrained in terms of talking about [what he saw and heard].\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Valentine: \u201cAnd like Don Corleone dispensing favors in The Godfather<\/em>, Colby knew that one day Safer would be obligated to return it.\u00a0 That is how the CIA, as the organized crime branch of the US government, functions like the Mafia through its old boy network of complicit media hacks.\u201d<\/p>\n

So The<\/em> New York Times<\/em>, which Valentine had criticized in his book for not reporting the truth about the CIA\u2019s Phoenix program, had Safer write a book review of The Phoenix<\/em> Program: America\u2019s Use of Terror in Vietnam<\/em>.<\/a>\u00a0 He wrote a scathing review in which he said the book was \u201cas turgid and dense and often incomprehensible book as I have ever had the misfortune to open.\u201d\u00a0 Thus Valentine\u2019s work was disappeared like the Vietnamese victims of the Phoenix program. (Safer\u2019s \u201cmisfortune,\u201d however, became our fortune when in 2014 Open Roads publishers announced a \u201cForbidden Bookshelves\u201d series and resurrected Valentine\u2019s expos\u00e9 in a new edition.)<\/p>\n

In his latest book, The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America And The World<\/em><\/a>, Valentine explains it thus:\u00a0 \u201cBut the left\u2019s leadership is part of the CIA\u2019s old boy network and like all American intellectuals, they look to the Times<\/em> for direction and validation.\u00a0 So the word went out to ignore the book, not just because it revealed CIA secrets, but because it identified the media, and the Times<\/em> in particular, as the reason why the public can\u2019t see the CIA clearly for what it is: a criminal conspiracy on behalf of wealthy capitalists.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Valentine had been \u201cneutralized,\u201d and over the next quarter century the CIA, through its placement of its people throughout the media, including Hollywood and television, resurrected its mythic image \u2013 phoenix like \u2013 from the fleeting and rarely examined ashes Valentine had reduced it to.\u00a0 Using what the CIA officer Frank Wisner called the agency\u2019s \u201cMighty Wurlitzer\u201d \u2013 its deep penetration of the news and cultural apparatus \u2013 it played the American people to a tune of CIA heroes defending the \u201chomeland\u201d from mad Muslim terrorists and evil drug dealers besieging the U.S. citadel through deception and direct attack. Movies, television shows, cognitive infiltration of the mainstream media across platforms repeated the message over and over again: We are the good guys in this mythic battle of good against evil.\u00a0 We are defenders of the \u201cHomeland.\u201d<\/p>\n

But over these years Valentine had not disappeared, despite the CIA\u2019s wish that he had.\u00a0 It took him fifteen years to recover from his \u201cneutralization,\u201d and then he wrote two books \u2013 The Strength of the<\/em> Wolf<\/em><\/a> and The Strength of the Pack<\/em><\/a> \u2013 that examine the nexus between the CIA, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and the Drug Enforcement Administration in which he explains in documented detail how the CIA hijacked drug enforcement as it became a prime player in international drug trafficking.\u00a0 Joining hands with organized crime and corrupting law enforcement, the drug running and murder that was crucial to the CIA\u2019s Phoenix program went international.<\/p>\n

Most importantly, the Phoenix program\u2019s organizational structure became the template for these world-wide bloody operations: among them, the Salvadoran Option, undertakings throughout South and Central America, the Middle-East, and later the war on terror, \u201cthe greatest covert op ever.\u201d\u00a0 And the Phoenix became the conceptual model for The Department of Homeland Security, as \u201cboth are based on the principle that governments can manage societies through implicit and explicit terror.\u201d<\/p>\n

Valentine shows how the federal drug agencies protect the CIA\u2019s drug running assets and operations, and spread addiction throughout the \u201chomeland.\u201d\u00a0 This is accomplished by CIA agents posing as federal narcotics agents. \u201cThe DEA has a public affairs branch staffed by creative writers who filter out anything bad and tell you only what the bosses want you to know.\u00a0 The media echoes what the DEA and the CIA PR people say.\u00a0 But it\u2019s a big lie and it\u2019s pervasive.\u201d<\/p>\n

But those important books had little effect on a drug addled population.\u00a0 They appeared in the midst of the dramatic rise in the use of \u201clegal\u201d pharmaceutical drugs (see Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime<\/em>: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare<\/em><\/a> by Dr. Peter C. Gotzsche) and the epidemic of heroin (Greek, heros<\/em>, hero + German chemical suffix, ine<\/em>, coined in 1898 by the Bayer Company as a morphine substitute) that has reduced so many people to walking zombies, while minorities have long had their neighborhoods devastated by CIA facilitated crack cocaine. The zombie myth itself has become a staple of American culture \u2013 pure entertainment for a brain devouring and brain dead population – entertainment for dummies.<\/p>\n

It is no wonder. Because from 1990 when Valentine\u2019s The Phoenix Program<\/em> was trashed by the Times<\/em> until today, the U.S. government and the scientific\/media establishment have worked to convince Americans that all our lives revolve around our brains and that the answers to our problems lie with more brain research, drugs, genetic testing, etc. It\u2019s been a quarter century deluge of propaganda of scientific materialism and biological determinism that we are not free but victims of our genes, neurotransmitters, brains\/computers, and chemicals.\u00a0 Having lost our minds and fixated on our brains as instructed, we have chosen to be determined to be determined, not free.<\/p>\n

It is not coincidental that the U.S. government, beginning with ex-CIA Director and then President George H.W. Bush, declared the 1990s the decade of brain research, followed up with 2000-2010 as the decade of the behavior project, and our present decade being devoted to mapping the brain and artificial intelligence, organized by the Office of Science and Technology Project and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.\u00a0 Brains and drugs, Big Pharma and the CIA, drug running and drug dealing, deaths at home and deaths abroad – a neat circle that has corrupted the country at the deepest levels.<\/p>\n

This corruption is dependent on the creation of fictions that penetrate public consciousness to the level of myth. \u201cThe government,\u201d Valentine writes, \u201cis creating conditions across the board that are conducive to taking drugs.\u00a0 The pharmaceutical industry is part of the problem, along with its co-conspirators in the advertising industry; every time you turn on the TV there\u2019s a commercial telling you to take a pill.\u00a0 The next commercial says don\u2019t take that pill, take this pill.\u00a0 This is the free market at work, sucking the life out of people.\u201d<\/p>\n

But myths rise and fall, and recently the CIA\u2019s invincibility has come under increased scrutiny.\u00a0 As the Greeks warned us long ago, hubris leads to humiliation.\u00a0 Today, more and more Americans are learning, through independent internet sources and a growing list of books, how to deconstruct the ways the CIA \u201cuses language and mythology to control political and social movements.\u201d The fight is on.<\/p>\n

Valentine, a warrior of astute knowledge from his wanderings in the CIA\u2019s labyrinth, has reemerged with his new guidebook to the Minotaur\u2019s deadly ways.\u00a0 The CIA As Organized Crime<\/em> is a tour de force<\/em>, a counterpuncher\u2019s no-holds-barred passionate battle to reverse \u201cthe terrible truth \u2026 that a Cult of Death rules America and is hell-bent on world domination.\u201d Unlike many writers, he holds back nothing.\u00a0 He names names.\u00a0 He is adamantine in his accusations against those he considers accomplices \u2013 in particular, \u201cthe compatible left\u201d \u2013 \u201cliberals and pseudo-intellectual status seekers who are easily influenced\u201d \u2013 in the CIA\/media\/elite\u2019s efforts at domination and mind-control.\u00a0 He claims that media celebrities of the left serve the function of pacifying the liberal bourgeoisie in these enterprises.<\/p>\n

But knowing how way leads on to way and one can easily get lost in a labyrinth, let me not tell the story of the man, Valentine, skilled in all ways of contending with such a formidable foe as the CIA.\u00a0 Better to give you a sampling of his words that explain what he has learned in his long wanderings in these strange and sick worlds.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have a very broad approach \u2026. psychological, political, anthropological, sociological, historical, philosophical. When I look at a subject I look at it comprehensively from all those different points of view.\u00a0 Literary criticism teaches the power of symbolic transformation, or processing experience into ideas, into meaning \u2026. one must, above all, understand the archetypal power of the myth of the hero.\u00a0 That way you can transform, through words, Joe the Plumber or even a mass murderer, into a national hero.\u00a0 When I decided to research and write about the CIA\u2019s Phoenix program, that was how I went at it.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThey [CIA] create the myths we believe.\u00a0 If we were allowed to understand the CIA, we\u2019d realize it\u2019s a criminal organization that is corrupting governments and societies around the world.\u00a0 It\u2019s murdering civilians who haven\u2019t done anything wrong.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cNowadays, the only way you can discern what\u2019s going on is by studying and understanding the historical arc of these bureaucracies.\u00a0 Where did the CIA come from?\u00a0 Where is it going?\u00a0 If you look at it historically, you can see beyond the spin and it becomes demystified.\u00a0 And that is not a happy story.\u00a0 As power gets more concentrated in the security services, the media is no longer simply compliant, it\u2019s functioning as their public relations arm.\u00a0 It simply ignores anything that contradicts the official line.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe most important fiction of all is the need for secrecy to preserve our national security.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cIf you want to understand the CIA, you have to understand how it\u2019s organized\u2026.The media organizes itself the way the CIA does.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cJournalism in the US is a traditional cover for CIA officers.\u00a0 And when the owners of the media aren\u2019t covering for the CIA, they\u2019re selling commercial time slots to the multi-national corporations that in turn are selling you commodities made in sweatshops in foreign nations that have been subverted by the CIA.\u00a0 You could almost say there is no such thing as factual reporting\u2026.The CIA and the media are part of the same criminal conspiracy.\u00a0 You\u2019re never going to learn anything substantive by reading what mainstream reporters dish out about the CIA.\u00a0 You can\u2019t take a journalism course in CIA Criminal Conspiracies 101.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m sure the anthrax scare after 9\/11 was a CIA provocation designed to justify a mail intercept program codenamed HTLINGUAL.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe CIA and the military hire the smartest anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists to figure out how to do this stuff [social engineering]\u2026.That\u2019s why you need a broad historical view. \u00a0If you focus on just what\u2019s happening now, you\u2019re shocked every day by what you see.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the United States took over drug law enforcement in Afghanistan, opium production increased dramatically.\u00a0 All of a sudden Afghan heroin is flooding the US and Europe.\u00a0 It still is.\u00a0 You can say it\u2019s a coincidence, except all the opium warlords are on the CIA payroll.\u00a0 The DEA sends six hundred agents to Afghanistan to make sure nobody knows about it.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cPhoenix is the conceptual model for the DHS [Department of Homeland Security]. Both are based on the principle that governments can manage societies through implicit and explicit terror.\u00a0 The strategic goal is to widen the gap between the elites and the mass of the citizenry, while expunging anyone who cannot be ideologically assimilated.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThrough their control of the media, political and bureaucratic systems, America\u2019s secret rulers engage in terrorism abroad and at home for economic purposes\u2026.The objective is to maximize profits and concentrate wealth and political power in fewer and fewer hands.\u00a0 The global War on Terror and its domestic homeland security counterpart are flip sides of the same coin.\u00a0 They are the capitalist ideology\u00a0\u00a0 applied to foreign and domestic security policy.\u00a0 And like the capitalist system it serves, an unstated national security policy is consolidated in fewer and fewer ideologically correct hands as the empire expands and its contradictions become more apparent.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

This sampling of Valentine\u2019s insights should be enough to show the depth and breadth of his demythologization of this \u201creligious\u201d cult of death that is the CIA. Yet myths die hard. And even when they do, they often rise again, especially when one controls the levers of a society\u2019s storytelling powers, as does the CIA to a great extent through its incestuous coupling with the mainstream corporate media. That is why it is so important for people to take the time to read Valentine\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

While The CIA As Organized Crime<\/em> is filled with detailed information labyrinthine in its complexity, his primary goal is to help us grasp the big picture, to see how the myth and the mythmaking work and how we might break through these fictions. He repeatedly reminds us that we are truly caught in the belly of the whale, in the underworld that will overwhelm us if we do not make the sustained effort to get beyond the blur of daily events and understand how the illusionists who are deluding us create and structure their evil propaganda.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the only way to heaven is through hell, as Dante told us.\u00a0 Vergil was his guide.\u00a0 The valiant Valentine can be ours, if we are willing to accompany him on the journey.<\/p>\n

___________________________________<\/p>\n

Edward Curtin<\/em> is a writer whose work has appeared widely.\u00a0 He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is <\/em>http:\/\/edwardcurtin.com\/<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like Odysseus, Douglas Valentine is a wily warrior who managed to enter the enemy\u2019s stronghold disguised as a gift. Not Troy, and not within a wooden horse, but in the guise of a nice young \u201cNobody,\u201d he was able, thirty or so years ago, to breach the walls of the CIA through William Colby, a former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86038\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}