http://www.onlinejournal.com/Media/020504Hasty/020504hasty.htmlThis is a long article and I've picked 4 of the meatier paragraphs to post, but the whole article is very interesting
-snip-
Philip Graham, Meyer's successor, had been in military intelligence during the war. When he became the Post's publisher, he continued to have close contact with his fellow upper-class intelligence veterans—now making policy at the newly formed CIA—and actively promoted the CIA's goals in his newspaper. The incestuous relationship between the Post and the intelligence community even extended to its hiring practices. Watergate-era editor Ben Bradlee also had an intelligence background; and before he became a journalist, reporter Bob Woodward was an officer in Naval Intelligence. In a 1977 article in Rolling Stone magazine about CIA influence in American media, Woodward's partner, Carl Bernstein, quoted this from a CIA official: "It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from." Graham has been identified by some investigators as the main contact in Project Mockingbird, the CIA program to infiltrate domestic American media. In her autobiography, Katherine Graham described how her husband worked overtime at the Post during the Bay of Pigs operation to protect the reputations of his friends from Yale who had organized the ill-fated venture.
After Graham committed suicide, and his widow Katharine assumed the role of publisher, she continued her husband's policies of supporting the efforts of the intelligence community in advancing the foreign policy and economic agenda of the nation's ruling elites. In a retrospective column written after her own death last year, FAIR analyst Norman Solomon wrote, "Her newspaper mainly functioned as a helpmate to the war-makers in the White House, State Department and Pentagon." It accomplished this function (and continues to do so) using all the classic propaganda techniques of evasion, confusion, misdirection, targeted emphasis, disinformation, secrecy, omission of important facts, and selective leaks.
-snip-
"Bush quickly mastered the skills of the independent oil man," Yergin writes, including, "of course, making the pilgrimage back East to round up money from investors." Here's where things get interesting. "On a brisk morning in the mid-1950s, near Union Station in Washington, DC, he even closed a deal with Eugene Meyer, the august publisher of the Washington Post, in the back seat of Meyer's limousine. For good measure, Meyer also committed his son-in-law to the deal. Meyer remained one of Bush's investors over the years."
A consideration to keep in mind here is the greater-than-even likelihood that at this point in his career, George H.W. Bush was already working as a covert CIA operative. This stems not only from his class and pedigree—Yale University had a reputation as "the alma mater of spies"—but from the fact that the CIA often "borrows" the private assets of businesses, especially those with international operations, to provide support for its covert actions. Most compelling, perhaps, is a cryptic reference found in a Warren Commission document, concerning an FBI briefing about the JFK assassination given in Texas to a "Mr. George Bush of the CIA." When asked about this years later, Bush gave the explanation that it must have referred to a CIA employee with the same name. That individual, a low level bureaucrat, denied to reporters that he had ever been to Texas, much less that in his position he would have received such a briefing.
-snip-
---------------------------------
this is Part 1 of a two part article
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
