Obama’s Ministry of Truth?: Analysis of Cass Sunstein’s “Cognitive Infiltration” Strategy

January 16, 2010 in Free Information and Media, Human Rights, I doubt, I think, The Big Brother, The wall
Tags: Cass Sunstein, disinformation, Ministry of Truth, obama

The best way to control opposition is to lead it ourselves – Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

To ensure survival, oppressive governments purposefully shape, distort, and conceal potentially damaging information. Public perception must be craftily managed, lest the house of cards collapse due to the implosive effect of exposure. The free-flow of information, particularly the sort divulging deep-seated political corruption and large-scale government illegality, would spark intense moral outrage leading to pesky legislative hearings, lost elections, criminal trials, impeachment proceedings, etc.

An oppressive government wishing to obscure its anti-democratic hubris, must taint the jury pool to avoid conviction in the court of public opinion. The following article is demonstrative of the methods and tactics employed by rogue governmental factions of the mistakenly labeled freest country on the face of the Earth to co-opt and marginalize information that is deemed too dangerous for public consumption.

From the Raw Story article “Obama staffer wants ‘cognitive infiltration of 9/11 conspiracy groups”:

President Barack Obama’s appointee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs advocated “cognitive infiltration” of groups that advocate “conspiracy theories” like the ones surrounding 9/11. Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor, co-wrote an academic article entitled “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures,” in which he argued that the government should stealthily infiltrate groups that pose alternative theories on historical events via “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine” those groups.

Sunstein’s article, published in the Journal of Political Philosphy in 2008 and recently uncovered by blogger Marc Estrin, states that “our primary claim is that conspiracy theories typically stem not from irrationality or mental illness of any kind but from a ‘crippled epistemology,’ in the form of a sharply limited number of (relevant) informational sources.”

In Cass Sunstein’s view, those who have a healthy functioning epistemology obtain their news and information from government-approved  mainstream media sources. Surely Sunstein is aware of the U.S. government’s long history of co-opting journalists and infiltrating news organizations to ensure favorable reporting (see Carl Bernstein’s 1977 Rolling Stone article The CIA and the Media and Alex Constantine’s book Mockingbird: The Subversion of the Free Press by the CIA). Former CIA Director William Colby once boasted that “The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the media.” The Pentagon pundit scandal (also referred to as “psy-ops on steroids”) is a recent example of the U.S. government shaping public perception through the recruitment of active and retired members of the military to sell the Iraq war to the American people through the MSM.

Those suffering from Sunstein’s diagnosis of “crippled epistemology” are merely individuals who obtain news and information from sources outside of the government’s long arm of control. From the government’s perspective, there is a risk that increasing numbers of citizens will resort to unapproved news outlets to feather their reality nests. When a critical mass of those who reject the state-engineered MSM corporate propaganda is reached, the state’s fragile body of lies is placed under heightened scrutiny.

Sunstein, whose article focuses largely on the 9/11 conspiracy theories, suggests that the government “enlist nongovernmental officials in the effort to rebut the theories. It might ensure that credible independent experts offer the rebuttal, rather than government officials themselves. There is a tradeoff between credibility and control, however. The price of credibility is that government cannot be seen to control the independent experts.” [see Pentagon pundit scandal (also referred to as “psy-ops on steroids.”]

Sunstein argued that “government might undertake (legal) tactics for breaking up the tight cognitive clusters of extremist theories.” He suggested that “government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action.”

Truth has a remarkably tenacious nature, and as a result, is quite difficult to suppress. Therefore, the malefactors promoting the deception must employ a variety of obfuscation tactics to derail attempts to bring their activities into the light. Through the use of agent provocateurs, the limited hang-out, ad hominem attacks, mis-info and dis-info campaigns, appeals to authority, and other deceptive tactics, the typical citizen is unlikely to question the architecture of his externally designed reality tunnel.

The controllers are well aware that perceptions are malleable.  Deference to authority is deeply ingrained through social conditioning and the subconscious desire for a strong unyielding leader. In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler expressed the propaganda power of the “big lie”:

[T]he broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.

The “big lie” is inconceivable to the average bloke whose daily life is rife with the telling of little white lies. Due to their ubiquity, these falsehoods of little import merely grease the wheels of social interaction, and as a result, are bandied about with minimal contemplation. The “big lie” requires not only more devious preparation, but also acts as a guilt-filled anchor continually punishing its purveyor. Governments and psychopaths have a distinct advantage in that they possess no conscience in need of assuagement.

Sunstein “wants to hold blogs and web hosting services accountable for the remarks of commenters on websites while altering libel laws to make it easier to sue for spreading ‘rumors,'” wrote Ed Lasky at American Thinker.

In other words,  if your conspiracy-busting, divide-and-conquer, dis-info strategy fails to stem the flow of damaging information, you can always wage war against the First Amendment.  Advocating an end-run around the First Amendment through legislative and/or judicial modification of defamation law would surely obtain the intended chilling effect on free speech, but at what cost? As a Constitutional law professor, surely Cass Sunstein understands the sanctity and the necessity of free speech in a democratic society. But then again, if we are to take him at his word, his allegiance must surely lie elsewhere.

If you don’t have this freedom of the press, then all these little fellows are weaseling around and doing their monkey business and they never get caught  ~ Judge Harold

Author: Johnny Peepers

One year and 100000 times Kassandra Project

December 11, 2008 in I doubt, I think
Tags: anniversary, civil rights, conspiracies, corporations, corruption, disinformation, freedom, global control, Human Rights, life, manipulation, news, politics, pollution

Dear readers,

we are proud to announce that the Kassandra Project reaches 100 000 visits in just one year of activity. This is a great goal and we thank you all for your support, for your help, for your presence.

We shared with you our knowledge, our thoughts, our ideas about:

• Pollution
• Freedom
• Corruption
• Corporation crimes
• Information and Media manipulation
• Global control and surveillance
• Privacy
• War crimes
• Civil and Human rights
• Documented governmental conspiracies

Our statistics tell us that three continents are daily reading our blog and that we have hundreds of feed subscribers. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” (G.Orwell)

World Bank Secret Report confirms Biofuel Cause of World Food Crisis

July 13, 2008 in The wall
Tags: biofuel, conspiracy, disinformation, ethics, food, life, news, ogm, politics, top-secret, world-bank

by F. William Engdahl

Global Research, July 10, 2008

A secret study by the World Bank, which reportedly has not been made public on pressure from the Bush Administration, concludes that bio-fuel cultivation in especially the USA and EU are directly responsible for the current explosion in grain and food prices worldwide. The US Government at the recent Rome UN Food Summit claimed that “only 3% of food prices” were due to bio-fuels. The World Bank secret report says that at least 75% of the recent price rises are due to land being removed from agriculture—mainly maize in North America and rapeseed and corn in the EU—in order to grow crops to be burned for vehicle fuel. The World Bank study confirms what we wrote more than a year ago about the madness of bio-fuels. It fits the agenda described in the 1970’s by Henry Kissinger, namely, ‘If you control the food you control the people.’

According to the London Guardian newspaper which has been given a copy of the suppressed report, the World Bank study was completed in April, well before the June Rome Food Summit, but was deliberately suppressed as “embarrassing to the position of the Bush Administration.” The President of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, is a former top Bush Administration official. Washington is trying to use a crisis which its bio-fuel subsidies created, since a new Farm bill passed in 2005, to advance the spread of Genetically Manipulated Organisms such as GMO maize, soybeans, rice and other crops patented by Monsanto and other “gene giants.”

Their strategy is to use the explosive rise in grain prices worldwide, a rise fuelled by hedge funds and troubled US and European banks and investment funds pouring billions of dollars into speculation that grain prices will continue to soar. In other words, the food “crisis” is a crisis of speculation in food futures. The planned EU and USA bio-fuel acreage quotas and the periodic droughts and floods in key growing regions such as the USA Midwest then provide backdrop for speculative price run-ups. But the main driver is that tens of millions of hectares of prime agriculture land in the world’s two largest food export regions—the USA and the EU– are being permanently removed from food production in order to grow raw material to be burned for vehicle fuel.

The suppressed study

The World Bank study, the most detailed analysis of the global food crisis so far, concludes that bio-fuels have forced “food prices up by 75%.” That is far more than previous estimates. That is a damning refutation of the politically-motivated US Department of Agriculture estimate that plant-derived fuels add only 3% to food prices. The report is expected to increase pressure on the European Union governments as well as Washington to change their present bio-fuel subsidy and support policies.

The report has been leaked just days before the important annual Group of 8 industrial nation leaders’ summit held in Hokkaido Japan. The food crisis will be a major topic there as pressure on governments grows to do something.

The World Bank report estimates that doubling and tripling of world food prices in the past three years have forced an added 100 million people below the poverty line. That has triggered food riots from Bangladesh to Egypt.

The report as well calculates that even the successive droughts in Australia and other major food regions have had only a “marginal” impact on food prices.

Within the EU, for example, as of April all vehicles in the UK must contain fuel with at least 2.5% bio-fuel. The EU has in place a target of mandatory 20% by 2020, a staggering amount.

George W. Bush has cynically claimed higher food prices are merely due to higher demand from India and China. The leaked World Bank study refutes that: “Rapid income growth in developing countries has not led to large increases in global grain consumption and was not a major factor responsible for the large price increases.”

“Without the increase in bio-fuels, global wheat and maize stocks would not have declined appreciably and price increases due to other factors would have been moderate,” the World Bank report states. The basket of food prices examined in the study rose by 140% between 2002 and February 2008. Higher energy and fertiliser prices accounted for an increase of only 15%. Bio-fuels have been responsible for a 75% jump over that period.

The study demonstrates that production of bio-fuels has distorted food markets in three main ways. First, it has diverted grain away from food for fuel, with over a third of US corn now used to produce ethanol and about half of vegetable oils in the EU going to production of bio-diesel. Second, farmers have been encouraged to set land aside for bio-fuel production. Third, it has sparked financial speculation in grains, driving prices up higher.

The real agenda behind the food crisis

The World Bank study is the first to include all three factors. What is missing from the World Bank study however is the longer-term geopolitical agenda behind the present global food and energy crises. As I document in great detail in my book, Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation, the long term agenda of powerful leading circles in the West, particularly represented in tax exempt private foundations such as the Rockefeller, Ford and Gates foundations and the private wealth behind them, is a long term agenda of population reduction, in the interests of the global economic and financial elites.

Food scarcity, higher prices for basic foods in developing countries as well as control of food seeds through patent and Terminator suicide seed sales by Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, Dow, BASF, Bayer and a few select agriculture chemical seed giants—the “horsemen of the GMO Apokalypse,” have been developed to advance the agenda of massive depopulation of the developing world.

The policy goes back, as the book documents in detail, to the early years of the 20^th Century when Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman, Gamble, H.G. Wells, Margaret Sanger, and other wealthy circles backed the development of eugenics research.  The Rockefeller Foundation financed the eugenics and forced sterilization research at the Berlin Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (today’s Max Planck Institute) until it became too politically hot in 1939.

. After the end of the war, Rockefeller and others in the eugenics movement decided for political reasons to change the name of eugenics. The new name they chose was “genetics.” GMO is a project, based on wrong science, financed with over $100 million of private money from the Rockefeller Foundation. The ultimate aim is for the first time in history to control life on the planet. As Henry Kissinger put in during the 1970’s food crisis, “control the food and you control the people.”

In this light it is worth noting that as a solution to a crisis which it deliberately created by its massive government subsidies to farmers to grow bio-fuels instead of food, the Bush Administration made and continues to make a major pressure at the Rome Food Summit in early June and after, to open the doors to GMO as the alleged “solution” to world hunger.

On June 13, just after the Rome UN Food Summit, John Negroponte, US Deputy Secretary of State, stated, “”We therefore are strongly encouraging countries to remove barriers to the use of innovative plant and animal production technologies, including biotechnology,” adding, “Biotechnology tools can help speed the development of crops with higher yields, higher nutrition value, better resistance to pests and diseases, and stronger food system resilience in the face of climate change.” Washington and the GMO companies now use the more deceptive term, “biotechnology” instead of the controversial GMO term, in a linguistic ploy to overcome opposition.

Independent scientific studies and countless farmer reports have shown that long-term planting of GMO or bio-tech crops as the gene giants prefer to call it, far from giving higher crop yields, lowers the yields and development of resistant “super-weeds” usually mean more, not less Roundup or other GMO-paired chemical herbicides and pesticides are needed. In short the glorious claims for GMO are marketing fraud.

According to highly informed reports, Washington had been told that Pope Benedict XVI would endorse the spread of GMO, something the Vatican until now has been strongly opposed to on moral and other grounds, as a solution to world hunger. At the last minute that endorsement did not happen for reasons only the Pope perhaps knows. Groups like Greenpeace and the London Independent newspaper in the days before the Rome UN summit reported interviews with senior Church figures stating that the policy reverse was expected.

There is strong circumstantial evidence that the entire Rome UN Summit was orchestrated by Washington, London’s Gordon Brown and other Malthusian governments in part to try to convince the Pope to reverse its policy on GMO. The Roman Catholic Church today stands as one of the most important moral barriers to widespread acceptance of GMO in many developing countries such as the Philippines and Latin America.

The leak of the World Bank report adds a dramatic new element into what is becoming one of the major political issues along with oil price manipulation.

F. William Engdahl is a leading analyst of the New World Order, author of Seeds of Destruction, Global Research,2007 [see below], and the best-selling book on oil and geopolitics, A Century of War: Anglo-American Politics and the New World Order,’ His writings have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

ethics, ogm, politics, news, life, disinformation, food, conspiracy, top-secret, world-bank, biofuel