Chapter Nine:
Media Wars – Google, YouTube, Facebook and Embedded Global Media

Since President Woodrow Wilson openly enlisted the cooperation of Hollywood filmmakers to create propaganda to stir war fever among Americans, Hollywood and US media have been intimately linked with shaping consensus for US national strategy. By 2012 that combination was being turned to slowly make the Peoples’ Republic of China into what in perhaps a few short years would be portrayed as the new “Hitler Germany,” the new adversary. The US Pentagon and the military industrial complex, together with the New York Council on Foreign Relations and other select organizations of powerbrokers, developed a form of culture and media warfare which China was very susceptible to.

CIA and Control of US Media

With the creation of the Cold War came the NATO alliance, and the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). One of the first priorities of the first CIA Director in 1948, at the recommendation of US State Department Cold War strategist George Kennan, was to appoint Frank Wisner as first Director of the newly-created CIA Office of Special Projects (OSP), soon renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC).

The OPC became the covert action branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. Wisner was told to create an organization that concentrated on “propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.”[315]

Later in 1948 Wisner established what was code-named Operation Mockingbird, a CIA covert program to influence foreign media. Wisner recruited Philip Graham from the Washington Post to run the project. By the early 1950’s when Allen Dulles took over control of the CIA, Wisner “owned” key journalists of The New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications majors.”[316]

That early CIA link to influential American and international private media was merely the early stage of what became by 2012 a nearly complete control of major global “mainstream” media.

US Pentagon Perfects “Culture” warfare

During the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq, US Army Colonel Ralph Peters made a remarkably accurate military assessment of the awesome effectiveness of the interconnected US media and culture offensive in the world. The culture offensive included a cartel of Hollywood movie studios, the mainstream TV and print media, such as CNN and The New York Times. It includes, more recently, the enormously influential Internet and social media, including Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

Since President Woodrow Wilson openly enlisted the cooperation of Hollywood filmmakers to create propaganda to stir war fever among Americans, Hollywood and the US media have been intimately linked with shaping consensus for US national strategy. By 2012 that combination was being applied to slowly transform the Peoples’ Republic of China into what would be portrayed, within perhaps a few short years, as the new “Hitler Germany” adversary.

The US Pentagon and the military industrial complex, together with the New York Council on Foreign Relations and other organizations of powerbrokers, developed a form of culture and media warfare to which China was very susceptible. One of the clearest and most outspoken Pentagon analysts of this US cultural warfare, Colonel Ralph Peters, wrote in the US Army War College Quarterly:

Information destroys traditional jobs and traditional cultures; it seduces, betrays, yet remains invulnerable. How can you counterattack the information others have turned upon you? There is no effective option other than competitive performance. For those individuals and cultures that cannot join or compete with our information empire, there is only inevitable failure (of note, the internet is to the techno-capable disaffected what the United Nations is to marginal states: it offers the illusion of empowerment and community)…

Hollywood goes where Harvard never penetrated, and the foreigner, unable to touch the reality of America, is touched by America’s irresponsible fantasies of itself; he sees a devilishly enchanting, bluntly sexual, terrifying world from which he is excluded, a world of wealth he can judge only in terms of his own poverty.

…It is fashionable among world intellectual elites to decry “American culture…” But traditional intellectual elites are of shrinking relevance, replaced by cognitive-practical elites – figures such as Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Madonna, or our most successful politicians – human beings who can recognize or create popular appetites, recreating themselves as necessary. Contemporary American culture is the most powerful in history, and the most destructive of competitor cultures… The genius, the secret weapon, of American culture is the essence that the elites despise: ours is the first genuine people’s culture. It stresses comfort and convenience – ease – and it generates pleasure for the masses. We are Karl Marx’s dream, and his nightmare.

Secular and religious revolutionaries in our century have made the identical mistake, imagining that the workers of the world or the faithful just can’t wait to go home at night to study Marx or the Koran. Well, Joe Sixpack, Ivan Tipichni, and Ali Quat would rather “Baywatch.” America has figured it out, and we are brilliant at operationalizing our knowledge, and our cultural power will hinder even those cultures we do not undermine. There is no “peer competitor” in the cultural (or military) department. Our cultural empire has the addicted – men and women everywhere – clamoring for more. And they pay for the privilege of their disillusionment.

American culture is criticized for its impermanence, its “disposable” products. But therein lies its strength. All previous cultures sought ideal achievement which, once reached, might endure in static perfection. American culture is not about the end, but the means, the dynamic process that creates, destroys, and creates anew. If our works are transient, then so are life’s greatest gifts – passion, beauty, the quality of light on a winter afternoon, even life itself. American culture is alive. This vividness, this vitality, is reflected in our military; we do not expect to achieve ultimate solutions, only constant improvement. All previous cultures, general and military, have sought to achieve an ideal form of life and then fix it in cement. Americans, in and out of uniform, have always embraced change..

The films most despised by the intellectual elite – those that feature extreme violence and to-the-victors-the-spoils sex – are our most popular cultural weapon, bought or bootlegged nearly everywhere. American action films, often in dreadful copies, are available from the Upper Amazon to Mandalay. They are even more popular than our music, because they are easier to understand. The action films of a Stallone or Schwarzenegger or Chuck Norris rely on visual narratives that do not require dialog for a basic understanding. They deal at the level of universal myth, of pre-text, celebrating the most fundamental impulses (although we have yet to produce a film as violent and cruel as the Iliad). They feature a hero, a villain, a woman to be defended or won – and violence and sex. Complain until doomsday; it sells. The enduring popularity abroad of the shopworn Rambo series tells us far more about humanity than does a library full of scholarly analysis.

…We use technology to expand our wealth, power, and opportunities. The rest get high on pop culture. If religion is the opium of the people, video is their crack cocaine.

There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.[317]

This disguised and extremely effective weapon of US cultural warfare was targeting China ever more. Google was a major part of that.

CIA and US Government behind Google

In March 2010, US-based Internet search engine colossus Google Inc. left mainland China for Hong Kong over a dispute with the Chinese government concerning restrictions on Google’s search engine inside China.

Google had earlier alleged on its blog in January 2010 that it had been the victim of a cyber-attack which they claimed originated from China. As a result of the attack, Google said it was reviewing its business in China. On that same day, United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned the attacks and requested a response from China. Earlier the Chinese government had secured cooperation with Google on restricting access to certain Google sites. The Beijing Government had begun to place more restrictions on Google’s search engine, with some sensitive searches blocked altogether.[318]

The attempt by the Chinese Government to restrict Google was more than a mere superficial conflict. It involved an effort to restrict one of the most important new weapons of Pentagon and CIA media control: control of information found on the Internet.[319]

What the US Secretary of State did not say to the public in the Google affair is the reality that Google and its subsidiaries such as YouTube are an integral part of the US Government cyber-warfare apparatus.

The California-based Internet giant Google was founded by two Stanford University students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. They received covert financial support from the CIA who realized that the two entrepreneurs had come up with an ingenious search technology that could dominate the emerging Internet. Former CIA officer Robert David Steele told US media in 2006 that CIA seed money helped get Google established. He went so far as to name the CIA contact with Google: “Let me say very explicitly - their contact at the CIA is named Dr. Rick Steinheiser, he’s in the Office of Research and Development,” said Steele.[320]

In addition to the CIA funding, Google had deep ongoing ties to Washington’s top secret spy agency, National Security Agency (NSA). According to investigations and public information, Google had a close working relationship with the National Security Agency. Google provided the software, hardware and technology support to NSA and other US intelligence agencies to create a vast closed source database for global spy networks to share information.[321]

Furthermore, Google and the CIA were partners in a cyber joint-venture. Google had jointly invested with the CIA in an Internet monitoring project that scours Twitter accounts, blogs and websites for all sorts of information, and can also predict the future. Google Ventures, the investment arm of Google, injected $10 million, along with the CIA’s In-Q-Tel – which handled investments for the CIA and the wider intelligence network – into a company called Recorded Future.[322]

Moreover Google executives have even boasted of playing a major role in the Egyptian Facebook “revolution” of 2011. During the 2011 uprising in Egypt, Google took the opportunity to insert itself into key news stories about the mass protests. Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Google admitted that Google senior executive, Egyptian cyber-activist, Wael Ghonim, played a significant role in building up and organizing the Tahrir Square and other protests via Facebook and Twitter. That was critical in the early days of the anti-Mubarak protests.

Without Facebook, without Twitter, without Google, without You Tube, the regime change would never have happened, Ghonim told the media, suggesting that the search engine was responsible for an entire revolution. Google’s Egyptian executive Ghonim was administrator of the Facebook page, “We are all Khaled Saeed,” which helped spark the revolution.[323]

It was clear that China had good reason to be overly cautious about letting Google have free reign in Chinese cyberspace.

Control of Major US media

In addition to the intimate links between Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube with the US intelligence community, the major mainstream US media formed a giant information cartel in which freedom of speech had become a relic of the pre-September 11, 2001 era.

The wartime Prime Minister of Great Britain, Sir Winston Churchill, a former Lord of the Admiralty, once remarked, “In war-time, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” A bodyguard of lies was the best description of the version of reality doled out by the major globalized media controlled out of the United States in 2012.

As the Iraq war demonstrated openly, major US and international media were allowed access to warzones only if they were “embedded” journalists travelling with US military forces. Propaganda control was complete. US media had become an essential accomplice in creation of the permanent War State, the Washington doctrine of “pre-emptive wars” to “spread democracy.”

So long as the perceptions of reality of ordinary Americans could be manipulated to support the global agenda of the establishment, the American population could be manipulated into being unwitting implementers of that New World Order, sending their sons and daughters to die in a senseless brutal slaughter in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

That powerful and controlled US media propaganda machine was now being turned against China, the new “adversary” as President Obama termed China in the Presidential debate of October 2012.

US Global Media Cartel

Since World War II and creation of the Psychological Strategy Board in the CIA and State Department, the CFR and the inner circles of the US elite have devoted enormous resources to the control of global media. By the year 2000, the American media were more tightly controlled behind the scenes by members of the elite Council on Foreign Relations than were the openly state-owned media of either Russia or the People’s Republic of China. The control was subtle so that most Americans were blind to the fact that their every political thought was being spoon-fed and manipulated from above.

To reflect changing priorities in the era of globalization of their control since the early 1990’s, the major media giants were reorganized, centralized and globalized in a tiny few hands with Government approval and anti-monopoly laws removed to allow it, as follows:

AOL-TimeWarner: The largest US media group today is AOL-TimeWarner, which in turn controls: CBS television; CNN; HBO, the largest US pay-TV network; Time magazine group, the largest magazine publisher, which includes Sports Illustrated and numerous others; Warner Bros. and other Hollywood film studios. AOL is the largest private Internet provider in the US. Gerald Levin is the Chairman of AOL-TimeWarner.

Walt Disney Co.: The second largest US media giant is the Walt Disney Co. headed by CEO Michael Eisner, an outsider with no ties to the Disney family. Disney today controls several TV production companies, including Touchstone TV and Buena Vista TV; Hollywood film companies, including Walt Disney Motion Pictures, Touchstone, Caravan and Hollywood Pictures. It also owns Capital Cities/ABC the second largest TV network with many subsidiaries in Europe.

Viacom Inc.: The third member of the US media cartel is Viacom Inc. It also owns the cable sports network ESPN, Women’s Wear Daily, Viacom Inc., Paramount Pictures, and it recently bought CBS from TimeWarner. Viacom controls the worldwide youth market through its cable network MTV, which promotes violence and sex via song videos, and Nikelodeon, and Showtime. MTV shows its rock-rap videos to 210 million homes in 71 countries. It is one of the world’s most influential communications companies.

News Corporation : Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch is the owner of the fourth largest US media group, News Corporation. He owns Fox TV, whose programs are dominated by neo-conservative propaganda in favor of Israel. Murdoch also owns the New York Post and numerous other newspapers including the neo-conservative Weekly Standard of William Kristol. Murdoch’s former business associate, Haim Saban, a Hollywood billionaire who was close to Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu and a pro-Israel hawk, recently bought Germany’s largest TV group, Pro-7 Media.

Newhouse Group: The fifth largest media conglomerate is the Newhouse Group, owned by billionaire Si Newhouse. Newhouse owns 12 TV stations, 87 cable TV systems, the largest circulation Sunday magazine Parade, the New Yorker, Vogue, Mademoiselle, Vanity Fair magazines; and the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Newark Star-Ledger, and New Orleans Times-Picayune newspapers.

The striking fact about this concentration of media power today in America is that all the top companies, from Disney to AOL-TimeWarner to Fox News to Viacom, are controlled by individuals affiliated with the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The fact remains that US media today is more concentrated than ever in history, and that the control is held by a small clique. It is little wonder that most Americans have a lopsided view of world events or of the Iraq war. They have little chance to see a larger, more neutral view of news.

Because of the control of small local or regional newspapers by these giant media companies, no newspaper is able to afford independent journalists, let alone international news bureaus. They must buy their “news” from services such as AP, Reuters, the New York Times, Dow Jones-Wall Street Journal, or the Washington Post Company. All are controlled by this same cartel of interests.

The New York Times: The New York Times is owned by the Arthur Sulzberger family. The New York Times Corp. owns the Boston Globe and 33 other regional papers as well as McCalls’ and Family Circle magazines, radio and TV stations. New York Times News Service sells news stories to 506 papers around the US.

The Washington Post Corporation: The Washington Post, the most influential paper in Washington, is run by the descendants of banker Eugene Meyer, a former partner of Bernard Baruch, through the late Catherine Meyer Graham’s son, Donald. The Washington Post owns TV stations, 11 military publications, Newsweek magazine, Cable One TV, and until recently, it co-published the largest foreign English language newspaper, International Herald Tribune with the New York Times.

Under the rules passed by the Bush Administration’s Federal Communications Commission chairman, Michael Powell, son of Secretary of State Colin Powell, this handful of media giants were being allowed to merge and control even more local TV and media across America, making their control of public opinion, outside the worldwide web, virtually total, as total as under Stalin in the wartime Soviet Union. The control was more subtle, however, so that evident differences of opinion were allowed, in order to give the illusion of genuine debate. The parameters of that debate were all within the parameters of support for the American Century agenda of Bush, Cheney, and the permanent establishment driving for global empire – “Full Spectrum Dominance.”

Since the communications industry pressed Congress to give it a deregulated open field in 1996, newspapers, radio, TV, cable and telecommunications had all been allowed to create giant global monopolies of information control, all in the name of “free” enterprise. Their control of the media is one of the hidden levers of control of the US-based establishment in their push for global empire. Yet they did it in such a way that most Americans believe they enjoy a “free press.”

Through their creation of a mass-based, ideologically-driven movement driving towards war – the American people, underpinned by a deluded belief that they were fighting a new Holy Crusade – the leading circles of the American Century appeared to be nearing their goal of a global New World Order. China was about to feel the heat of that massive media machine as it increasingly tried to assert national Chinese interests, whether over its rights in the South China Sea, over freedom of speech or its restraints in China, over Chinese economic and currency policies and other spheres of vital activity.

When the totality of the assault by NATO and allied agencies on the Peoples’ Republic of China is understood, only then is it possible to plan a sovereign strategy to defend against this total warfare form of outside aggression. It is a strategy drawing on the marvelous principles of Sun Tzu. This is what we will now discuss.

[315] Wikipedia, “Operation Mockingbird,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird#cite_note-2

[316] Deborah Davis, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington Post, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979, pp. 137-138.

[317] Ralph Peters, “Constant Conflict, Parameters,” US Army War College Quarterly, Summer 1997, pp. 4-14, http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/parameters/Articles/97summer/peters.htm.

[318] Hillary Clinton, “Statement on Google Operations in China,: Secretary of State, Washington, DC, January 12, 2010, http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2010/01/135105.htm.

[319] Jessica Guynn and David Pierson, “China puts new limits on Google search results,” Los Angeles Times, March 24, 2010, http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/24/business/la-fi-china-google24-2010mar24.

[320] Paul Joseph Watson, “Ex-Agent: CIA Seed Money Helped Launch Google,” Prison Planet, December 6, 2006, http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/december2006/061206seedmoney.htm.

[321] Steve Watson & Paul Watson, “Don’t Be Evil: 10 Ways In Which Google Runs The World,” Infowars.com, February 18, 2011, http://www.infowars.com/dont-be-evil-10-ways-in-which-google-runs-the-world/.

[322] Ibid.

[323] Ibid.