Rep. Kennedy Denounces Mockingbird Media Over War

From http://www.infowars.com/rep-kennedy-denounces-mockingbird-media-over-war/

Rep. Kennedy Denounces Mockingbird Media Over War






Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
March 11, 2010

The House has voted down a resolution to pull troops out of Afghanistan by the end of the year. After three hours of debate by a miniscule number of antiwar Democrats, the House voted 356 to 65 to reject the withdrawal proposal. Five Republicans joined 60 Democrats in support of pulling out while 189 Democrats and 167 Republicans were opposed.
The House has defeated Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s resolution to bring the troops home.
The resolution was introduced by Ohio Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich. His resolution would have invoked the War Powers Act to force the withdrawal of American troops within 30 days.
The War Powers Act was passed in 1973. It was a feeble attempt to reign in the executive. “Does the President assert — as the kings of old — that as Commander in Chief he can order American forces anywhere for any purpose that suits him?” asked then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after Nixon illegally sent bombers to Cambodia in violation of the Constitution.
Under Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, only Congress has the power to declare war. Congress has not officially declared war since World War 2. The wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and numerous other conflicts declared by the executive are violations of the Constitution.
In the mid-1970s, after Nixon’s fall from grace for attempting to cover-up Watergate, Congress passed the War Powers Act, eliminated the draft, demanded oversight of the CIA, cut the budget for the Pentagon’s Special Operations Forces, and curtailed the ClA’s paramilitary capabilities. “The lesson of Vietnam is that we must throw off the cumbersome mantle of world policeman,” said then senator Edward Kennedy.
On Wednesday, Kennedy’s nephew, Rep. Patrick Kennedy, went on the floor of the House to denounce the ongoing war in Afghanistan and skewer the corporate media’s role in its perpetuation.
“It’s despicable, the national press corps right now,” declared an angry Kennedy. “Cynicism is that there’s one, two press people in this gallery. We’re talking about Eric Massa 24/7 on the TV! We’re talking about war and peace, three billion dollars, 1,000 lives and no press! No press!” said Kennedy as he pointed to media seats overlooking the House floor. “It’s because the press, the press of the United States, is not covering the most significant issue of national importance, and that is the laying of lives down in the nation for the service of our country.”
Lewd references to Eric Massa and 24/7 coverage of mindless bread and circuses covered by the corporate media are no mistake. By the early 1950s, the CIA owned the corporate media and used it to promulgate propaganda.
Former Wall Street lawyer Frank Wisner created Operation Mockingbird in 1948 and recruited Philip Graham of the Washington Post to run the project. Mockingbird eventually controlled news reported by the New York Times, Newsweek, the New York Herald Tribune, Time Magazine, and hundreds of other newspapers and magazines in the United States and around the world.
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By the 1950s, according to Alex Constantine (Mockingbird: The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA), “some 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts.” Wisner was also able to restrict newspapers from reporting about certain events. For example, the CIA plots to overthrow the governments of Iran and Guatemala.
During the brief period in the 1970s mentioned above, the Church Committee (Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) revealed that Operation Mockingbird was alive and well.
“The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets,” the Church Committee reported in 1975.
Operation Mockingbird, then and now, is all about keeping the American people in the dark as the elite perpetuate highly profitable war and endless crimes against humanity. “It is primarily from U.S. citizens that the U.S. Government must keep the true nature and real purpose of so many of its domestic and foreign acts secret while it manufactures fear and falsehood to manipulate the U.S. public,” write Ellen Ray and William H. Schaap (Covert Action: the Roots of Terrorism).

Kennedy railed about the Mockingbird media’s focus on the lurid shower room escapade of Eric Massa at the expense of an anti-war resolution in the House. At the same time, the CIA-dominated media seriously exaggerated the imagined threat of an insane woman, Colleen LaRose, also known as Jihad Jane.
In addition to mindless sex scandals and moronic reality television shows and sitcoms, the corporate media and entertainment industry under the direction of the CIA and the Pentagon — the latter has long had operatives in newsrooms — creates all manner of fatuous and absurd pretense to keep the manufactured global war on terror rolling along.
Jihad Jane, the engineered face of white al-Qaeda in America, is but only the most recent example.