Of course, the New York Times and the Washington Post are only doing what their spook handlers want them to do. In 1948, Frank Wisner, director of the Office of Special Projects (soon to become a wing of the CIA), established Operation Mockingbird, “a program to influence the domestic American media,” according to Joseph J. Trento (author of the Secret History of the CIA). “Wisner recruited Philip Graham (Washington Post) to run the project within the industry” and dozens of well-known journalists were commissioned, including James Reston of the New York Times. By 1953, when CIA director Allen Dulles took over Mockingbird, “over 25 newspapers and wire agencies” were recruited to dispense CIA propaganda.

“According to researchers such as Steve Kangas, Angus Mackenzie and Alex Constantine, Operation Mockingbird was not closed down by the CIA in 1976 [after the Church Committee intelligence investigation]. For example, in 1998 Kangas argued that CIA asset Richard Mellon Scaife ran ‘Forum World Features, a foreign news service used as a front to disseminate CIA propaganda around the world’” (it was later admitted that Forum World Features was indeed a CIA front; see Citizen Scaife, published in the Columbia Journalism Review). It appears that Kangas paid with his life for revealing Scaife’s connections, although his death was (in standard fashion) dismissed as a suicide.

It should be noted that the billionaire Scaife funds neocon operations such as the Committee on the Present Danger, the Federalist Society, the Hudson Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and other reactionary operations, including David Horowitz’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture (and considering Scaife’s documented link to the CIA—his father worked for the OSS, the forerunner to the CIA—it is not a stretch to conclude the CIA has something to do with the neocons, although we are told they are engaged in an ideological war).

Thus there is a documented history of the CIA buying off not only journalists but entire newspapers and news organizations. Naturally, the CIA does not dispense with sound intelligence assets—unless they are no longer useful, as Saddam Hussein apparently no longer was (he eventually became more useful as an overnight enemy, as did Manuel Noriega, another former CIA asset). As we know, military personnel from the Fourth Psychological Operations Group based at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, worked at CNN, according to the Dutch journalist Abe de Vries. Of course, military intelligence is not the CIA, although these days, with the centralization of and cooperation between intelligence “services” effectively resulting in a spook and covert op monolith, it is becoming difficult to tell the difference.

Malkin, naturally, is ignorant of any of this because she is a neocon shill enraptured with the possibility the New York Times and the Washington Post may receive a token wrist slap for publishing “leaked” information about the neocon snoop project. Of course, all of this is part of the program—call it a take on the Chewbacca Defense, a propaganda strategy that seeks to overwhelm us with nonsensical arguments and information.

Malkin does not realize that all the information we receive through the corporate conduits—from “revelations” about the neocon rape and torture apparatus to “leaks” about Bush’s effort to snoop all suspicious Americans—is information engineered for our consumption. Our government, hijacked years ago by vicious Machiavellian Straussists (a Zionist take on the neolib paradigm), wants us to know about the rape and torture camps, the death squads, and now they want us to fear—or those of us who are activists or write blogs—the roving eye of Big Brother, neocon-style. It’s all part of the Bushcon Fear Quotient, part and parcel of the mathematics of fascism.

But then, for all I know, Michelle Malkin may take a CIA stipend for her services. Such is suspicion and paranoia in the Age of the Straussian Neocon, Zionists who live by deception, illusion, down and dirty Rovian tricks, and above all the perceived ability to create reality.