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Thread: The Use of Crisis Actors

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    Last edited by enjoy being, 19th March 2018 at 00:13.

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    Senior Member Emil El Zapato's Avatar
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    I remember this well...

    ADAM WEINSTEIN MAY. 22, 2012 10:00 AM

    Late last Friday, Buzzfeed reporter and Rolling Stone contributor Michael Hastings broke what looked like a big scoop: Congress was quietly planning to lift a 64-year-old law preventing the US government from using propaganda on its own citizenry. Before the House passed its defense budget bill Friday afternoon, Hastings reported, a bipartisan group of congressmen tacked on an amendment that would “essentially neutralize” a set of time-tested guidelines “that had been passed to protect U.S. audiences from our own government’s misinformation campaigns.”

    Progressive thinkers balked at the news: Mideast expert Juan Cole decried the amendment as “the creeping fascism of American politics…by our representatives, who apparently have never read a book on Germany in the 1930s-1940s or on the Soviet Union in the Stalin period.” On civil libertarian Jonathan Turley’s site, guest blogger Elaine Magliaro asked: “How about some propaganda for the people paid for by the people being propagandized?”

    But the outcry in this case seems misguided. For starters, the proposed law doesn’t permit the spread of any information that isn’t already available to the American public. Moreover, the amendment could conceivably bring more of the government’s overseas information operations into the sunlight, a good thing.

    The actual text of the amendment, authored by Reps. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) and Adam Smith (D-Wash.), modifies the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948. That bill was the first to establish a post-World War II “public diplomacy” role overseas for the State Department and US media organs—think Voice of America and Radio Free Europe—but the law also barred those agencies from disseminating their “good news” to audiences at home in the United States.

    The amendment from Thornberry and Smith “updates” Smith-Mundt by lifting that ban, and it also clarifies that it never applied to other government agencies, including the Department of Defense. That, according to a concerned anonymous Pentagon official who spoke with Hastings, “removes oversight from the people who want to put out this information.” (It’s worth noting that Smith also sponsored bipartisan amendments in the defense bill to end indefinite military detention of inmates and address the problem of sexual assault in the service.)

    The absurdity here is that a simple web search will turn up much of this “forbidden” content.
    The argument against Thornberry’s and Smith’s amendment appears to be pretty straightforward: We only want US propaganda peddled to foreign populations, but not to our own! In reality, though, most “public diplomacy” is mundane boilerplate about America’s purple mountains’ majesties. (And a lot of it is laughably ineffective. I should know: I spent nearly a year preparing upbeat, if technically accurate, press releases for the US Army in Iraq about Sunni militias reconciling with the Shiite-dominated government. Four years later, the two sides still don’t get along very well.)

    Furthermore, there’s some value to knowing how the United States articulates itself to the rest of the world. In this regard, Smith-Mundt’s provisions have been a bureaucratic headache for sunshine activists: Federal courts have long held that, under the existing law, the State Department and associated US agencies don’t have to honor Freedom of Information Act requests from US citizens for records “when those records or information have been prepared by the Agency for audiences abroad.” Want to request a transcript of a Voice of America radio broadcast? Sorry, you’re not allowed. In fact, only members of Congress are legally permitted to receive any of this information. (ProPublica keeps a database of records requests that have been turned down on these grounds.)

    The absurdity here is that a simple web search will turn up much of this “forbidden” content: Just check out the websites for Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, or listen to Radio Sawa, Uncle Sam’s Arabic-language news station, online. (You paid for ’em, after all.) And anyone who thinks the military doesn’t already dabble in domestic propaganda has never watched a Pentagon press conference, viewed a Marine recruiting ad, or seen an admiral justify his budget in a congressional hearing. Beyond that, Smith-Mundt has nothing to say about self-promoting PR emanating from other government entities—say, the White House, Capitol Hill, or the FBI.

    In fact, Smith-Mundt’s origins were rooted in a desire to censor the State Department on the home front, placating members of Congress who distrusted it on ideological grounds. In the lead-up to the bill’s passage in 1948, conservative Democrats and Republicans alike argued that the US government’s foreign affairs staff had been infiltrated with communists and couldn’t be trusted. Rep. Christian Herter (R-Mass.) demanded guarantees from a State Department official that VOA was “not being used as a vehicle for distribution of left-wing philosophy and social and other ideas that many Republicans regard as dangerous.” Eugene Cox (D-Ga.) attacked State as “chock full of Reds” and “the lousiest outfit in town.”

    A different strain of conservative political activism on the issue reared its head in the 1990s. As one communicator from the now-defunct US Information Agency told a media researcher in 1994, congressional Republicans chafed at allowing a Clinton-run government agency to articulate the Democratic administration’s goals. “[T]hey’re unhappy with the policies, and they read the VOA editorials saying what we’re doing or not doing in Somalia or Bosnia, for example, and they go up a stump about it,” the official said. “It’s one thing if the editorials are intended to be available for foreign audiences. But if they are readily available and are in fact distributed as well to folks in North Carolina, you can bet your bottom dollar we’re going to have problems with Sen. Helms and others.”

    Does its checkered past mean that Smith-Mundt should be repealed outright? Even purveyors of “public diplomacy” who favor updating the law think there’s value in its long-standing division between foreign and domestic PR roles. “Tear down that firewall, and it will be a matter of time before resources and personnel who focus on talking about America overseas are diverted in favor of domestic ‘public affairs,’ the short-term political imperative of any administration,” Gregory Garland, a foreign service officer, wrote in 2009. “In other words, given the choice about writing about jazz for a world hungry to know about America’s unique art form, or a presidential news conference, guess which will win? Smith-Mundt protects us from that false choice.”

    But realistically, in the internet age, such a firewall is now essentially meaningless; anybody in the United States (and in many other places) can access most of this otherwise open info. And isn’t the American public capable of sorting through self-serving state PR? (As Cole points out, even government officials seeking a minority report have praised him “for having an accurate bull crap meter.”)

    Of course, we should never be too cavalier about powerful entities—governments, corporations, individuals—being able to shape perceptions with manipulative media. But rather than acting shocked, shocked! to find that there’s government propagandizing going on in the media, perhaps progressives can keep doing what they’ve always done best: expose the pablum and its purveyors, and use the truth to put them in their place.


    S. 1867 (112th): National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012: It was a bipartisan vote ... 44 dems 48 repubs

    Obama's signing statement:
    In his Signing Statement, President Obama explained: "I have signed the Act chiefly because it authorizes funding for the defense of the United States and its interests abroad, crucial services for service members and their families, and vital national security programs that must be renewed...I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists".
    Last edited by Emil El Zapato, 19th March 2018 at 00:56.
    “El revolucionario: te meteré la bota en el culo"

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    They didn’t need a Law, they were doing it already.

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    Name-calling is a cheap shot and a fallacy of reason.

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    Who's calling names?

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    Quote Originally posted by Dreamtimer View Post
    Who's calling names?
    You can read the thread yourself to find name-calling, can you not?
    Last edited by WantDisclosure, 19th March 2018 at 16:39. Reason: Typo

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    Is it the comment about Fetzer being in the Encyclopedia of American loons?

    Alex Tsakiris is in there. It didn't stop me from posting about him here. He doesn't always follow the mainstream rules which is why he's in the alternative community.

    That list of loons would be subjective in any case and no-one here is being targeted.

    My brother is wedded to fallacies. It makes it easier to not think and not listen. And I just ignore them and try to stay on topic as much as possible.

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    Quote Originally posted by Dumpster Diver View Post
    They didn’t need a Law, they were doing it already.
    That's exactly the point...They don't need permission to do anything. SO, in my estimation if they let the public in on anything by implication they are trying to help.
    “El revolucionario: te meteré la bota en el culo"

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    Quote Originally posted by KeepTrying View Post
    Quote Originally posted by Dreamtimer View Post
    Quote Originally posted by KeepTrying View Post
    Name-calling is a cheap shot and a fallacy of reason.
    Who's calling names?
    You can read the thread yourself to find name-calling, can you not?
    Given that I'm already in your bad books, I think I can afford to indulge in saying what needs to be said, which is that I find it highly peculiar how defensive you are of people who — in spite of their popularity on YouTube — still have everything to prove, while at the same you are being equally dismissive toward people who have done the research, who have already proven themselves and who know what they're talking about, but whose recounts just so happen to disagree with what your YouTube idols are saying.

    If you want to become a researcher, then start looking at the evidence, and do it with a critical eye, as opposed to taking somebody's word at face value because they happen to have a YouTube channel and/or a website, or because they are telling you exactly what you were hoping to hear.


    With kind regards,
    "the brick wall".
    = DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR =

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    I find name-calling a particularly fun way of smoking folks out...

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    Quote Originally posted by Dumpster Diver View Post
    I find name-calling a particularly fun way of smoking folks out...
    Yes, we all have different ways of doing things.

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    Quote Originally posted by KeepTrying View Post
    On Jim Fetzer’s blog posted Thursday, March 15, 2018 is a story about the February 14, 2018 Parkland, Florida shooting. The story is by Dan Cromer, posted March 13, 2018 on the State of the Nation website.
    The following is from a follow-up post on that article by Dan Cromer on Jim Fetzer’s blog dated March 20, 2018:


    OPERATION HOGGWASH: The Strange Case of Emma's Enigmatic Parents


    [Editor's note: From scratch, Emma and David seemed to be too perfect for their roles as though they had been cast in a staged "school shooting" production. When I learned of the interview on 60 Minutes, it seemed highly likely to me that her "parents" had been cast for those roles, too. And that if that were the case, the parents would be lowlifes, willing to scam the public for their own benefit (which could be in the form of payment, expunging their records or other forms of reward). That they turn out to have criminal backgrounds, including drug dealing and child molestation, therefore, came to me as no surprise. How much did 60 Minutes know? Thanks to Dan for another brilliant expose.]

    http://jamesfetzer.blogspot.com/2018...e-case-of.html

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    Quote Originally posted by KeepTrying View Post
    To be clear, a false flag event can have real deaths sometimes and no deaths sometimes.

    Staged events can have patsies sometimes and no patsies sometimes.

    Sometimes, all they have is crisis actors.
    It will take some time for Jim Fetzer to gather information about the March 20, 2018 Great Mills High School, Maryland shooting, where the report is that two students were injured and a gunman killed.

    I will be watching for the results of his investigation, that is, if he has time to tackle it, with all of the other events he has to follow up on and continue to write about them and be interviewed about them.

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    Quote Originally posted by KeepTrying View Post
    On Jim Fetzer’s blog posted Thursday, March 15, 2018 is a story about the February 14, 2018 Parkland, Florida shooting. The story is by Dan Cromer, posted March 13, 2018 on the State of the Nation website.
    The State of the Nation website had previously posted “Operation Hogg Wash: Phase I of Deep State’s Psyop to Impose Strict Gun Control Measures Nationwide.”

    It is a pattern with terror events that calls for removing guns from citizens follow like clock work.

    Another quote from Jim Fetzer's March 15, 2018 blog post:

    It was pointed out in the same exposé that a highly radioactive scandal would eventually result from this glaring psyop now known as H O G G g a t e. See HOGGgate: The Inevitable Consequence of OPERATION HOGG WASH

    However, we had no idea at that time just how much “Hogg Wash” we were really fed by the MSM. For instance, with each passing day more hard evidence is uncovered which clearly indicates that the alleged shooter Nikolas Cruz is completely innocent and was set up as a patsy.

    http://jamesfetzer.blogspot.com/2018_03_15_archive.html
    Apparently, Dan Cromer is a citizen journalist who passes his findings on to Jim Fetzer, who passes them to The State of the Nation (SOTN) website:

    State of the Nation
    March 13, 2018

    N.B. Our sincere thanks to Jim Fetzer for sending us the brilliant analysis posted below. Dan Cromer has done an outstanding job of piecing together a critical part of the Parkland puzzle.
    Last edited by WantDisclosure, 26th March 2018 at 21:04. Reason: Typo

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    Quote Originally posted by KeepTrying View Post

    Apparently, Dan Cromer is a citizen journalist who passes his findings on to Jim Fetzer, who passes them to The State of the Nation (SOTN) website:

    ... and Jim Fetzer, for some reason, believes everything he's told as long as it fits his agenda


    I'm afraid Mr Cromer is way off the mark.

    Emma Gonzalez's mother is not a woman called "Kathy" as he claims, with his elaborate series of complete meaningless
    screenshots. In reality, she's called Beth, and she's in this clip for a 60 minutes interview:


    Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0c9uRqUm9M


    So, yet again, it's proven that Jim Feltzer is not a reliable source.

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