An earlier version of this article can be found at: https://www.globalresearch.ca/weaponizing-the-term-conspiracy-theory-disinformation-agents-and-the-cia/5524552
“’Conspiracy theory’ is a term that strikes fear and anxiety in the hearts of most every public figure, particularly journalists and academics. Since the 1960s the label has become a disciplinary device that has been overwhelmingly effective in defining certain events as off limits to inquiry or debate. Especially in the United States, raising legitimate questions about dubious official narratives destined to inform public opinion (and thereby public policy) is a major thought crime that must be cauterized from the public psyche at all costs…CIA Document 1035-960 played a definitive role in making the ‘conspiracy theory’ term a weapon to be wielded against almost any individual or group calling the government’s increasingly clandestine programs and activities into question.” – From CIA Document 1035-960
“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”-- William Casey, Ronald Reagan’s first CIA Director (from Casey’s first staff meeting, 1981)
“It is quite easy for a disinformation agent to spin a rich disinformation tale and then craft several different versions of the tale with new ‘facts’ to support the story in each one. These tales are usually a good mix of verifiable facts and cleverly designed lies, so that people who check the ‘facts’ tend to believe the lies that are mixed in.” -- from: http://www.wanttoknow.info/g/disinformation-agents
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Definitions to Help Understand Disinformation Entities that Use the Term “Conspiracy Theory” to Discredit Legitimate Investigative Journalists and Whistle-blowers
In an attempt to explore the interactions between the pejorative term “conspiracy theory” and the widespread prevalence of “disinformation agents”, here some relevant definitions of terms, obtained from easily accessible online sources:
Conspiracy: A secret plan by a group of two or more people to do something unlawful or harmful.
Conspiracy theory: An unproven accusation against two or more people of having conspired (and then covered up) an unlawful of harmful event or phenomenon of great social, political, or economic impact. Such “theories” are frequently proven to be truthful when the disinformation campaigns of the actual conspirators are revealed to be false, misleading, impossible and/or unscientific. The term was invented by the secretive US Central Intelligence Agency – which is in the business of secretly planning unlawful or harmful acts against supposed foreign and domestic “enemies of the state/ The likely reason for the invention of the term was the proven fact that, contrary to the “official Government explanation” there had been a conspiracy between more than one assassin to kill President John F. Kennedy. The term “conspiracy theory” has been widely used since then (and reinforced in the public mind by propaganda campaigns involving the mainstream media) as a derogatory, libelous or slanderous epithet against honorable whistle-blowers and investigative journalists that have exposed a large number of actual conspiracies, any number of them originating in the CIA, governmental agencies and profiteering corporate/business entities.
False flag operation: A covert operation that is designed to deceive in such a way that the operation appears as though it is being carried out by entities other than those who actually planned and executed them. Usually there is an ulterior motive, such as starting a war or invasion under false pretenses and blaming the war on some other entity, such as the victim of the false flag op.
Misinformation:False or inaccurate information.
Disinformation:False information that is intended to mislead, especially propaganda issued by a government organization or a corporate advertiser.
Troll:A supernatural creature of Scandinavian folklore. Living in hills, mountains, caves, or under bridges, they are stupid, large, brutish, hairy, long-nosed, and bug-eyed. Trolls were said to eat small children.
Internet troll: A person, usually operating under a pseudonym, who posts deliberately provocative messages to a newsgroup or message board with the intention of provoking dissension and doubt by writing dis-informational letters to the editors of newspapers.. They are often paid by nefarious sources but sometimes are motivated to do so for their own amusement. A person who deliberately starts an online or media argument in a manner which attacks others on a forum without in any way listening to the arguments proposed by other commenters. They will often use ad hominem attacks.
Internet shill: Someone who promotes something or someone online for pay without divulging that they are associated with the entity they shill for. Shills promote companies, products, public figures and viewpoints for profit, while pretending to have no motivation for doing so other than personal belief. Alternatively, they sometimes denigrate someone or something, such as a political viewpoint or a competitor’s product, that is in conflict with the entity they serve. Shills operate from temporary offices which are frequently moved to avoid detection.
Conventional wisdom: opinions or beliefs, often theoretical and even erroneous, that are held or accepted by most people. Often such “wisdom” contradicts known facts. (Ex: “The earth is flat” was at one time conventional wisdom for over 99% of the population.)
Propaganda:Information of a biased or misleading nature used to repeatedly promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view. Corporations call it advertising.
Clandestine/Covert:Referring to secrecy or concealment, especially for purposes of subversion or deception.
Hate group:A group whose members have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people. They all have websites. (A few examples from the courageous Southern Poverty Law Center are at: https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map: Ku Klux Klan, White Nationalist, Racist Skinhead, Christian Identity, Neo-Confederate, Holocaust Denial groups, Anti-LGBT groups, Anti-Immigrant groups, Anti-Muslim groups, etc.
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It wasn’t very many years after the world-wide web became operational that it was contaminated by secret conspiratorial disinformation agencies and also by individuals that were eventually called internet trolls. Trolls (defined above) began interjecting themselves – uninvited and unwanted - into otherwise useful and productive conversations involving web-groups of like-minded individuals.
These trolls, intent on scurrilously confusing various website commenters, seemed to delight in angering up certain online groups. Typically, a lot of time and effort was wasted in such fake arguments before members of the group finally realized that they had been ambushed by a disinformation agent.
Many folks might recall how promising were the prospects for the internet’s new method of communication that was affordable, quick and paperless. Many envisioned an internet that was “without commercial interruptions” and a way to promote healthy interactions between well-meaning people of different races, religions, politics, commitments, lifestyles and cultures.
Progressive-thinking folks without ulterior motives saw the internet as a new way to explore and solve some of the common threats to them or the planet. Peacemakers saw the internet as a tool that could expose the ideological enemies of the exploited 99% and perhaps even unite against the predatory elites in the ruling 1%. Some saw opportunities to expose and then eliminate fascism, racism, militarism, corporatism, bigotry, pollution, over-population and income inequality (and, more recently, global climate change) and to foster understanding and cooperation between various cultures.
Tragically, before you could say “corrupt crony capitalism”, the web was dominated – and then essentially owned - by multinational corporations that saw world peace and cooperation (and even affordable preventive medicine and non-prescription drug treatments) as a threat to their greedy profiteering goals. (Peace is never as profitable as war or the rumors or war to the gloval investors in the military/industrial complex.)
In the viewpoint of amoral corporations, the internet was seen as just another way to market their products to otherwise inaccessible consumers, even if their infernal advertisements were uninvited and unwanted by most internet users (albeit sometimes entertaining) .
But, while Big Business and the investor classes took over the internet, the web also became a recruitment tool for assorted hate groups like white supremacists, religious bigots, racists and neo-fascist talk show hosts who all developed a following and websites that allowed them to spew their hate, bigotry and disinformation much more efficiently.
Why and How Propaganda Works
The internet, like so much of what passes for technological advancement in our commercialized society, has, predictably, become a force for ill, not unlike how Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi Party used the universally-accessible and very affordable radio to spew their right-wing hate propaganda in the 1930s and 40s (after first smashing the liberal media’s printing presses, of course).
But the ruling elites who own the trans-national mega-corporations also own our legislative bodies and our mainstream media. That often nefarious Gang of Four has brain-washed their way into our hearts, minds and bank accounts. Many of them can be seen eagerly feeding at the trough of more than one governmental bureaucratic agency that may be busily granting no-bid contracts behind closed doors.
The transnational corporations, in the interest of unlimited (and unsustainable) share price growth, have been compelled by their stakeholders to plunge head-long into the soul-destroying muck of the dog-eat-dog-competition that exists in both business and political spheres. The muck has become much less embarrassing - but no less odious - since the democracy-destroying Citizen’s United Supreme Court decision of 2011 that legalized the anonymous bribery of most political candidates and made the fiction of corporate personhood the law of the land.
Symbols of America’s CIA, Britain’s MI6 and Israel’s Mossad
As an example of how propaganda works, we need to encourage the examination of the national espionage agencies around the world (every nation has one or more), especially the CIA, America’s major national intelligence agency and propaganda machine.
The unofficial motto of the CIA, “Admit Nothing, Deny Everything and Make Counter-accusations.” was blurted out by Porter Goss, George W. Bush’s second CIA director in 2005. (It happens, incidentally, that US President Donald Trump adopted the CIA’s motto long before he became president.)
The official motto of Britain’s CIA-equivalent MI6 is “Semper Occultus” (Always Secret) and, according to the whistle-blowing, ex-Israeli Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky, the Mossad’s motivating motto has always been “By Way of Deception, Thou Shalt Make War” (derived from a passage from the book of Proverbs).
Weaponizing the Term “Conspiracy Theory”
But the fact (not just the theory) of widespread official conspiracies (along with the obligatory disinformation and cover-up operations) isn’t really new. As one prime example, the CIA (which by law is supposedly forbidden to have anything to do with domestic affairs [which is the FBI’s job]) has been a huge disinformation agency for as long as it has been in existence.
As mentioned above, the CIA institutionalized the term “conspiracy theory” in its very successful attempt to derail the honest attempts to investigate the roles of various governmental agencies and individuals that were involved in the execution of JFK in 1963.
Of course, all clandestine state-sponsored secret service agencies (like the CIA, MI6 and the Mossad) routinely and shamelessly make use of lies, secrecy, deception and false flag operations in their daily affairs. It is a fact of life for such secret agencies and it is all accomplished in the name of patriotism and “national security”.
The CIA has admitted that it routinely “plants” stories in the mainstream media. Those “press releases” contain disinformation that influences the perceptions of the electorate and thus national policy. See the evidence for that in the following video (and the narrative that follows): http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2012/02/29/cia-admits-using-msm-to-manipulate-the-usa-video/.
It is a certainty that the FBI, the NSA, the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the White House (and most corporations) do the same.
Secret intelligence agencies such as the CIA routinely concoct conspiracies that involve - as a matter of course – secret spying, regime changes, de-stabilization of foreign governments, expansion of military bases and even torture, disappearances, “suicides” and extrajudicial assassinations. Of course, all leaked evidence of what are often unethical, immoral or even criminal deeds are denied.
Good examples of actual assassination conspiracies involving the CIA (and have been called conspiracy “theories” include the now-proven secretly-planned assassinations – followed closely by the conspiratorial cover-ups of the (“Great Reset”) deaths of progressive national heroes like President Jacobo Árbenz of Guatemala,Salvador Allende of Chile, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy, Paul Wellstone, the USS Liberty, etc, etc.
Each of these planned assassinations and then their cover-ups are well-understood by unbiased historians, investigative journalists and knowledgeable whistle-blowers who have researched and then courageously written about them. to have been proven conspiracies.
If You See Something, Say Something (Unless it’s Conspiratorial)
We American citizens have been advised by our government to “say something if we see something”, so those whistle-blowing patriots who loved their country enough to have a lover’s quarrel with it, kept pointing out the improbability – indeed impossibility - of the Bush White House’s own ridiculous conspiracy theory (that a group of Saudi Arabian nationals conspired to fly two jets into two buildings, causing office fires that rapidly burned out yet caused the collapse of three concrete, massively steel-reinforced, non-flammable high-rise towers, with each of the three buildings successively explosively disappearing into fine powder in less than 12 seconds). Unbelievable – and disprovable.
9/11/01 Was A Proven Inside Job
On the fateful date of 9/11/01, for example, many investigative journalists and alert citizens saw with their own eyes that the three WTC towers had obviously been suddenly brought down by classical controlled demolitions. Their suspicions were confirmed by a multitude of videos that showed the explosive collapse of the towers into their own footprints. (Please start your own edification by listening to professional architects and engineers who know the real science of controlled demolitions and the impossibility of structural collapse of modern skyscrapers in ways other than by controlled demolition. Click on: http://www.ae911truth.org/ and/or jimtheconspiracyguy.com.
The conspiratorial group voted “most-likely-to-be-among-the-conspirators-behind-911”, was the pro-war, pro-militarism, imperialistic, right-wing think tank of the Cheney/Bush administration, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC. To obtain the essential information about PNAC and its likely role in 9/11/01, go to https://duluthreader.com/articles/2019/09/12/18142_a_think_tank_named_pnac). The Cheney/Bush administration failed to silence those patriotic observers from speaking out when it held a very unconvincing press conference denigrating those who espoused “outlandish conspiracy theories” about 9/11/01.
And then every obedient mainstream media outlet (including the New York Times, which falsely claims to publish “all the news that’s fit to print”) got thoroughly in line with the cover-up conspiracy. Since then, anybody who did not actually see what really happened on that day (and whose video evidence has been deleted by YouTube and Google) has been effectively brain-washed to believe whatever the mainstream media dis-informs them about, and that includes most of the millennials who were too young or yet-to-be-born at the time of the evil deed!
Tragically, most distracted, deceived or too busy Americans succumbed to the Big Lie because of the propaganda efforts and their in-bred need to be obedient to authority figures; and thus most Americans have been led to believe the deniers of the truth rather than the powerful evidence of the actual conspiracies to commit and then cover-up the important truths about 9/11/01.
Vaccine-Induced Allergies, Autism, Autoimmune Disorders, Alzheimer’s And Serious, Incurable Chronic Illnesses of Childhood
Another reason that I am addressing this topic is the fact that there have been any number of examples of disinformation in my local media about real conspiracies about which I have enough expertise to be able to disprove the libelous “conspiracy theory” claims that are being made about the issue of vaccine-induced allergies, autism, autoimmune disorders, Alzheimer’s dementia and serious, incurable chronic illnesses of childhood.
Many letters to the editor in my local newspaper have regurgitated the disproven “conventional wisdom” that live virus, mercury-containing or aluminum-containing vaccines are all safe and effective, that they never cause neurological damage to infants and that the infamously-smeared British gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield’s research on autism and vaccines was a fraud.
(For those uninformed or misinformed about the Big Pharma-manufactured Wakefield pseudo-controversy: In 1998, the once-prestigious British Lancet medical journal published Dr Wakefield’s ground-breaking research that proved the connection between (the British pharmaceutical company) GlaxoSmithKline’s live measles virus-containing MMR vaccine and a disabling measles virus-caused inflammatory enterocolitis disorder in a group of severely-regressed autistic kids (each of whom had been developing normally until being injected with the scheduled MMR vaccination). The validity of the study, incidentally, has been replicated by other researchers, but the pharmaceutical firm Glaxo cunningly executed a massive disinformation campaign that resulted in the complicit British Medical Association stripping Wakefield of his license to practice medicine!) For documentation of the Wakefield smear campaign, go to a series of videos, starting with this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14I9cx3k0DI.Access the important information at: https://www.transcend.org/tms/2017/03/aluminum-autoimmunity-autism-and-alzheimers/; www.autismone.org or www.vactruth.org, etc. Then watch VAXXED and VAXXED II or go online to read the massive amount of information at www.autismone.com as a start.
Toxic, Weather-modifying Chemtrails are Real and They are NOT the Same as Condensation Trails
Another recent article in my local newspaper falsely claimed that the persistent aerosol spray that can occasionally be seen coming from large, non-commercial tanker jets are simply “contrails” that are capable of making hazy the cloudless blue skies that the weatherman had forecast the night before. (Contrails are an abbreviation of “condensation trails” that can indeed represent frozen water vapor from jet engine exhaust, but that only momentarily freezes at the extremely cold temperatures at extremely high altitudes and then evaporates rapidly.)
The proven fact of the matter is that any jet plane trail that lasts longer than a few seconds is actually a “chemtrail” that is composed of metallic nanoparticles such as aluminum, barium or strontium that are sprayed, as part of secret governmental/military weather modification experiments, but which persist in the air, potentially cooling the earth slightly by reflecting the sun’s rays upward (watch www.geoengineeringwatch.orgfor the documentation).
The Double Conspiracies of CIA-orchestrated Assassination Plots
Of course, there are any number of other examples of now-proven actual conspiracies that resulted in assassinations or CIA-related coups d’etat of foreign governments that had to also be covered-up by equally conspiratorial propaganda campaigns.
Such double conspiracies (first the secret planning of the evil deed and secondly, the obligatory secret planning of the cover-up of the evil deed) have been so persistently and repeatedly propagandized as simple “theories” that many well-meaning citizens believe provably false, often libelous accusations.
There are a multitude of powerful and wealthy entities that secretly meet behind expensive corporate, government or White House boardroom walls and therefore can – by definition – be justly accused of secretly planning conspiracies that those who aren’t at the meeting are not to know about. Such powerful entities logically fear that their reputations will be besmirched if their planning of unethical or unlawful activities got out to the public.
Sadly the propaganda has been so cunningly contrived (by entities that are often hidden from view) that legitimate whistle-blowers are often (intentionally and unjustly) compared with non-conspirator trolls that claim that the earth is flat or that lizard people exist or that Elvis is not dead – all ridiculous stories that DO NOT constitute a conspiracy that is secretly planned by two or more people to do an evil or illegal deed. Discuss.
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Dr Gary G. Kohls lives in the USA and writes a weekly column for the Duluth Reader, Duluth, Minnesota’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns deal with the dangers of American Friendly Fascism, corporatism, Oligarchy, militarism, racism, malnutrition, and Big Pharma’s over-drugging and over-vaccinating agendas as well as other movements that threaten the environment, democracy, civility, health and the sustainability and livability of the planet and the future of the children.
Dr. Kohls is a past member of Mind Freedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. His practice of holistic medicine mainly involved helping the survivors of psychiatry that had often been mis-diagnosed, over-diagnosed and always over-medicated with un-approved and un-tested-for-safety cocktails of neurotoxic psychiatric drugs that not only had sickened them but to which they had also become addicted.
His Duty to Warn columns have been re-published around the world for the last decade. They deal frequently also deal with Big Vaccine’s over-vaccinating, Big Medicine’s over-screening, over-diagnosing and over-treating agendas