Do You Think You’ll Ever Know, Now That You Have Handed Your Mind to the Machine?

by Edward Curtin / March 26th, 2025

We live in a 24/7 media society of the spectacle where brainwashing is cunning and relentless, and the consuming public is consumed with thoughts and perceptions filtered through electronic media according to the needs and lies of corporate state power.

This propaganda comes in two forms: covert and overt. The latter, and most effective form, comes with a large dose of truth offered rapid-fire by celebrated, authoritative voices via prominent media. The truth is sprinkled with subtle messages that render it sterile. This has long been the case, but it is even more so in the age of images on screens and digital media where words and images flow away like water in a rapidly moving stream. The late sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, updating Marx’s famous quote “all that is solid melts into thin air,” called this “liquid modernity.”

Welcome to Operation Pandemonium

See, these experts purport to say: What we tell you is true, but it is impossible to draw definitive conclusions. You must drink the waters of uncertainty forever lest you become a conspiracy nut. But if you don’t want to be so labelled, accept the simplest explanation for matters that disturb you – Occam’s razor, that the truest answer is the simplest – which is always the official explanation.  If this sounds contradictory, that is because it is. It is meant to be. We induce schizophrenia.

And it is, these experts suggest, because we live in a world where all knowledge is relative, and you, the individual, like Kafka’s country bumpkin, who in his parable “Before the Law,” tries to get past the doorkeeper to enter the inner sanctum of the Law but is never allowed to pass; you, the individual, must accept the futility of your efforts and accede to this dictum that declares that all knowledge is relative, which is ironically an absolute dictum. It is the Law. The Law of contradictions declared from on high.

Many writers, journalists, and filmmakers, while allegedly revealing truths about the U.S. and its allies’ criminal operations at home and abroad, have for decades slyly conveyed the message that in the end “we will never know the truth,” the real facts – that convincing evidence is lacking.

This refusal to come to conclusions is a sly tactic that keeps many careers safe while besmirching, intentionally or not, the names of serious researchers who reach conclusions based on overwhelming circumstantial evidence (the basis for most murder convictions) and detailed, sourced facts, often using the words of the guilty parties themselves, but are dismissed with the CIA weaponized term “conspiracy theorists.”

This often escapes the average person who does not read footnotes and sources, if they even read books. They read screens and the mainstream media, which should now be understood to include much of the “alternative” media. And they watch all sorts of films.

But this “we will never know” meme, this false mystery, is shrewdly and often implicitly joined to another: That we do know because the official explanation of events is true and only nut cases would believe otherwise. Propaganda by paradox. Operation chaos.

The JFK Assassination and the Release of Files

There are so many examples of this, with that of President Kennedy’s assassination being a foundational one. In this case, as with the current phony Trump release of more JFK assassination files, the ongoing “mystery” is always reinforced with the implicit or explicit presupposition that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy, but yet implying that there are more mysteries to explore forever because “people” are paranoid. (Trump’s position, as he recently told interviewer Clay Travis, is that he has always believed Oswald assassinated Kennedy, but he wonders if he may have had help.) They are paranoid not because of government and media lies, but because “popular culture” (not highbrow) has created paranoia. To spice this up, there is often the suggestion that President Kennedy was assassinated on the orders of the Mob, LBJ, Cuba, or Israel, when the facts overwhelmingly confirm it was organized and carried out by the CIA. A. O. Scott’s recent front page article in The New York Times in response to the JFK files release – “J. F. K., Blown Away, What Else Do I Have to Say?” (the title appropriately taken from a very fast-paced Billy Joel song and video) – is a perfect example of such legerdemain.

Thus the ruse to keep debating the assassination, get the latest documents, etc. to satisfy “people’s” insatiable paranoia. To pull out CIA fallback stories 2, 3, or even 4 when all else fails. Dr. Martin Schotz, the JFK researcher, rightly compares this to George Orwell’s definition of Crimestop:

‘Crimestop’ means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, or misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to [the powers that be]… and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. ‘Crimestop’, in short, means protective stupidity.

It’s the crazy people’s fault, not Scott’s or those who back him up at The Times, a newspaper that has been lying about the JFK assassination from day one. The same goes for the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, et al., and so many key events in U.S. history. It is a game of creating mental chaos by claiming we do know because the official explanation is correct but we don’t know because people have been infected with paranoia. If only people were not so paranoid! Unlike us at The Times, goes the implicit message.

The Epistemological Games of Certain Filmmakers

It is well known that people today are watching far more streaming film series and movies than they are reading books. That someone would lucubrate with pen in hand over a footnoted book on an important issue is now as rare as someone without a cell phone. The optical-electronic eye-ear screen connection rules most lives, mental and sensory. Marshall McLuhan, if a bit premature while referring in 1962 to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – the French philosopher, paleontologist, and Jesuit priest – wrote sixty-three years ago in The Gutenberg Galaxy:

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. [my emphasis] So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.

Four years ago this month, I wrote an article – “You Know We’ll Never Know, Don’t You?” – about a new BBC documentary film series by the acclaimed British filmmaker, Adam Curtis, “Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World.”

The series is a pastiche film filled with seven plus hours of fleeting, fragmented, and fascinating archived video images from the BBC archives where Curtis has worked for decades, accompanied by Curtis’s skeptical commentary about “a world where anything could be anything because there was no meaning anywhere.” These historical images jump from one seemingly disconnected subject to another to reinforce his point. He says it is “pointless to try to understand the meaning of why things happen.” He claims that we are all living as if we are “on an acid trip.”

While not on an acid trip which I have never taken, I was reminded of this recently as I watched a new documentary – Chaos: The Manson Murders (2025) – by the equally famous U.S. documentary filmmaker, Erroll Morris, a film about the CIA’s mind control operation, MKULTRA, and its use of LSD. As everyone knows, the CIA is that way-out hippie organization from Virginia that is always intent on spreading peace, love, and good vibes.

While the content of their films differs, Curtis’s wide-ranging and Morris’s focused on Manson and the book by Tom O’Neil, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, I was struck by both filmmakers tendency to obfuscate while titillating their audience with footage and information that belies their conclusions about not knowing. In this regard, Curtis is the most overt and extreme.

Morris does not use Curtis’s language, but he makes it explicit at Chaos’s end that he doesn’t believe Tom O’Neil’s argument in his well-researched book that Charles Manson was part of a CIA mind-control experiment led by the psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Jolyon “Jolly” West. West worked in 1967 for the CIA on MKULTRA brainwashing projects in a Haight Ashbury clinic during the summer of love, using LSD and hypnosis, when Manson lived there and was often in the clinic with his followers.

On April 26, 1964, West also just “happened” to visit the imprisoned Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald in the Dallas Police Department, and when West emerged from the meeting, he immediately declared that in the preceding 48 hours Ruby had become “positively insane” with no chance that this “unshakeable” and “fixed” lunacy could be reversed. What happened between the two men we do not know – for there were no witnesses – but one might assume West used his hypnotic skills and armamentarium of drugs that were integral to MKULTRA’s methods.

MKULTRA

MKULTRA was a sinister and secret CIA mind-control project, officially started in 1953 but preceded by Operation Bluebird, which was renamed Operation Artichoke. These operations started right after WW II when U.S. intelligence worked with Nazi doctors to torture Russians and others to reveal secrets. They were brutal. MKULTRA was run by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and was even worse. He was known as the “Black Sorcerer.” With the formula for LSD, the CIA had an unlimited amount of the drug to use widely, which it did. It figured prominently in MKULTRA mind control experiments along with hypnosis. Tom O’Neil sums it up thus:

The agency hoped to produce couriers who could imbed hidden messages in their brains, to implant false memories and remove true ones in people without their awareness, to convert groups to opposing ideologies, and more. The loftiest objective was the creation of hypno-programmed assassins. . . . MKULTRA scientists flouted this code [the Nuremberg Code that emerged from the Nuremberg trials of Nazis] constantly, remorselessly – and in ways that stupefy the imagination. Their work encompassed everything from electronic brain stimulation to sensory deprivation to ‘induced pain’ and ‘psychosis.’ They sought ways to cause heart attacks, severe twitching, and intense cluster headaches. If drugs didn’t do the trick, they’d try master ESP, ultrasonic vibrations, and radiation poisoning. One project tried to harness the power of magnetic fields. [my emphasis]

In 1973 during the Watergate scandal, CIA Director William Helms ordered all MKULTRA documents destroyed. Most were, but some were forgotten, and in the next few years, Seymour Hersh reported about it and the Senate Church Committee went further. They discovered records that implicated forty-four universities and colleges in the experiments, eighty institutions, and 185 researchers, Louis West among them. The evil cat and its large litter were out of the bag.

MKULTRA allegedly ended in 1973. But only the most naïve would think it did not continue under a different form. In 1964, McLuhan wrote that “the medium is the message.” The new medium that was developed in the decades since has been effectively pointed straight at the brain as you watch the screens. And the message?

Tom O’Neil’s Powerful Case

While admitting that he has not conclusively proven his thesis because he has never been able to confirm Manson and West being together, O’Neil amasses a tremendous amount of convincing circumstantial evidence in his book that makes his case very strong that they were, and that Manson’s ability to get his followers to kill for him was the result of MKULTRA mind control and the use of LSD, which he used extensively and which was introduced by the CIA and used by West. Both men had an inexhaustible amount of the mind-altering drug to use on their victims.

This is the subject of Morris’s film, wherein he interviews O’Neil on camera, who explains the extraordinary fact that Manson was able to mesmerize his followers to kill for him without remorse or shame. They “couldn’t get him out of their heads,” even many years later. This was, of course, the goal of MKULTRA – through the use of brainwashing and drugs – to create “Manchurian Candidates.” This case has much wider ramifications than the sensational 1969 Hollywood murders for which Manson and his followers were convicted; for clearly Mansion’s “family” that carried out the murders on his orders appeared in every way to be under hypnotic control. How did a two-bit, ex-con, pipsqueak, minor hanger-on musician learn to accomplish exactly what MKULTRA spent so many years working on?

Yet at the end of his film, Morris makes a concluding comment without even a nod to the possibility that O’Neil is correct. He says he doesn’t believe O’Neil. I found it very odd, jarring, as though O’Neil had been set up for this denouement, which I think he had. But at the same time I recognized it as Morris’s method of setting up and then undermining the narrative protagonists in his films that are ostensibly about getting to factual truths but never do; they are stories about how all we ever have are endless interpretations and the unknowable, confounded by human fallibility. Everything is lost in the fog of Morris’s method, which is no accident.

Frank Olson

I then found an interview that O’Neil did in 2021 in which he said he pulled out of Morris’s film proposal because Morris wanted to make a film that combined the Frank Olson story (a CIA biologist) with his about Manson. In the interview, O’Neil said he knew Eric Olson, Frank Olson’s son, who has spent a lifetime proving that the CIA murdered his father in 1953, but he didn’t explain why he pulled out of the project. However, he appears extensively throughout Chaos, being interviewed on camera by Morris, only to be undermined at the end. Why he eventually agreed to be part of the project I do not know.

I am certain he has seen Wormwood (2017), Morris’s acclaimed (they are all acclaimed) Netflix film series about the biologist/ CIA agent Frank Olson and his son, Eric Olson’s heroic lifelong quest to prove that the CIA murdered his father because he had a crisis of conscience about the agency’s use of torture, brainwashing, LSD, and U.S. biological weapons use in Korea, much of it in association with Nazis. The evidence is overwhelming that Frank Olson did not jump from a NYC hotel window in 1953 but was drugged with LSD to induce hallucinations and paranoia, smashed in the head, and thrown out by the CIA. [Read this and view this] Despite such powerful evidence available to him before making Wormwood, in another example of Morris’s method, he disagrees with Eric Olson’s decades of conclusive research that his father was murdered.

Conclusion

Filmmakers like Adam Curtis and Erroll Morris are examples of a much larger and dangerous phenomenon. Their emphases on the impossibility of knowing – this seeming void in the human mind, an endless acid trip down a road of kaleidoscopic interpretations – is much larger than them. It is deeply imbedded in today’s society. One of the few areas in which we are said to be able to know anything for certain is in the area of partisan politics. Here knowingness is the rule and the other side is always wrong. Fight, fight, fight for the home team! Here the nostalgia for “knowledge” is encouraged, as if we don’t live in a 24/7 media society of the spectacle where brainwashing is cunning and relentless, and the consuming public is consumed with thoughts and perceptions filtered through electronic media according to the needs and lies of corporate state power.

With the arrival of the electronic digital life, “knowledge” is now screening. If you don’t want to confirm McLuhan’s prediction – “as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside” – it behooves everyone to step back into the lamplight to read and study books. And take a walk in nature without your machine. You might hear a little bird call to you.

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Edward Curtin writes and his work appears widely. He is the author of Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies. Read other articles by Edward, or visit Edward's website.

'Cult making kids kill': Mysterious online figure linked to at least 2 school shootings

Photo by Philipp Katzenberger on Unsplash

Jordan Green

February 06, 2025
RAW STORY

Before 17-year-old Solomon Henderson fatally shot a fellow student and then took his own life at Antioch High School in Nashville, Tennessee last month, he left a trail of documents and social media posts that revealed his immersion in a swirl of violent white supremacy, occultism and edgy far-right memes.

He name-dropped a parade of white supremacist mass murderers and school shooters, while resharing terror manuals that goad impressionable and troubled teenagers like himself to gamify violence by encouraging efforts to improve on their predecessors’ lethality.

Henderson’s writings and social media posts also referenced “groomers” and “handlers.” Among the half-dozen nicknames Henderson dropped, one has been flagged for its association with three separate deadly attacks.

“Nitro groomed me,” Henderson wrote on his Bluesky account one day before he took a gun to school and killed a 16-year-old student. And in a diary that he left behind, Henderson mentioned Nitro, also known as “Nitrogen,” as being among his “top ‘groomers.’”

Henderson’s writings brim with dehumanizing tropes and grotesque descriptions of violence, suggesting, at least in part, that the purpose of his propaganda was to shock and alarm parents, teachers and other authority figures.

Carla Hill, director of investigative research for the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, told Raw Story in an email that Henderson’s post “may have been a trolling effort” or “perhaps an inside joke.” She added: “We have no evidence that Nitro played a direct role in guiding or mentoring Henderson. What is more likely and perhaps notable is that Henderson had to have been in online spaces either with Nitro or where he was discussed, because he was familiar with him and versed in his activities/reputation perhaps.”

While the exact role played by the “groomers” and “handlers” cited by Henderson remains unclear, the nicknames and social media accounts are likely to provide investigators with leads on a potential network of operators — part of a global network — who may be working behind the scenes to instigate terrorism.
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“They think we’re satanic pdf groomers. Part of super Mkultra cult making kids kill,” Henderson wrote in an X post that tagged Nitro in mid-December last year, referring to a CIA mind-control experiment. “They [sic] people are f---ing stretching. I’m just trolling; I barely know her.”

Henderson was talking about Natalie Rupnow, a 15-year-old who fatally shot a fellow student and teacher at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, WI before taking her own life. Rupnow’s attack turned out to be eerily similar to the one Henderson himself would carry out about a month later.

But privately, according to a diary entry from the same period, Henderson suggested he was much more closely connected to Rupnow.

Henderson took note of an X post by Rupnow shortly before she carried out her attack. In the post, Rupnow displayed a photo of herself making a hand sign. Henderson wrote in his diary that he recognized the gesture as the “white power symbol” used by Brenton Tarrant, the white supremacist who slaughtered 51 Muslims in an attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019.

Rupnow followed the photo with a post linking to a Google Docs version of her manifesto, although she neglected to make it public.

“Livestream it,” Henderson wrote in reply.

Later, he expressed excitement in his diary that Rupnow had followed two of his X accounts.

For his part, the person who goes by the name Nitro admitted to being in an online voice chat with Rupnow, and, according to the Center on Extremism, distributed a hoax version of her manifesto on X.

Nitro’s identity remains unknown, but based on an apparent recording of his voice reviewed by Raw Story, he appears to have an English accent and confirmed in the recording that he was in the time zone for the United Kingdom. An X post uncovered by the Center on Extremism indicates Nitro is 17 years old — the same age as Henderson was — and that he is a person of Russian heritage. The post displays a photo of a balloon that says, “Happy 17th Birthday” in Russian, while another X account uses a Russian flag in the bio.

An archived version of another X account shows Nitro telling another user that he planned to “get into contact with my FSB friends,” suggesting that he knows people who work for Russian intelligence.

Henderson’s dismissive post came in response to a post by another X user tagging the FBI and calling on the agency to detain Henderson and “Nitro” based on their apparent foreknowledge of Rupnow’s attack.

Three days later, Henderson posted a link in his diary to a video recording of Nitro giving an interview to an unidentified reporter about the Rupnow shooting. Nitro livestreamed the interview in a Discord group chat as four other anonymous users listened in and typed comments in the chat to help him script his responses.

There was no mistaking in the exchange that took place before the call started that Nitro’s intention was to misdirect the reporter.

“This is going to be fun,” Nitro told the other users in the group chat. “The greatest psy-op ever.”

In a comment in his diary accompanying the link, Henderson remarked that Nitro was “trolling” the reporter, adding a homophobic slur and the text acronym for “laugh out loud.”

During the interview, Nitro admitted that he and Rupnow had interacted in a Discord group chat, while presenting himself as an amused bystander. Based on the coaching from the other members of the chat and their celebratory post-interview assessment, it’s clear what they intended to present as a red herring to explain the motivation behind the attack.

About 10 minutes into the interview, a user with the screen name “Chud King” encouraged Nitro to talk about a concept called “radfem Hitler,” and that was the theme Nitro emphasized during the interview.

“So, radfem Hitler — it’s this really insane bats--- crazy misandrist, like racist woman on Twitter,” Nitro told the reporter. He added that when Rupnow started following the account that supposedly promoted radical feminism and Hitler worship, “that’s kind of when she spiraled.”

Another user in the group chat goes by the name Kristiyan on Discord and X.

In recent X posts, Kristiyan identifies himself as a pan-Slavist. He laments that Eastern Europeans “have this idiotic aggressive pettiness towards the people who are the most similar to them, which is how they end up conquered and taken over by total aliens.

Two days after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Kristiyan expressed disdain for Russian far-rightists who welcome the new U.S. president, writing, “The US will remain an enemy, and I’m grateful things are that way.”

Following Nitro’s phone call with the reporter seeking information about the Rupnow shooting, Kristiyan commented with wry satisfaction: “Journalist owned.”

In addition to playing up the “radfem Hitler” concept as a driver of the attack, Nitro also attempted to minimize connections between Rupnow and another attacker — an 18-year-old named Arda Küçükyetim, who stabbed five people at an outdoor café in the northwestern Turkish city of Eskisehir in August.

“Nobody actually knows about this Arda guy outside of probably people in Turkey, right?” Nitro said. “Nobody’s ever heard of him. He’s such a nothing-burger.”

The reporter asked Nitro whether Rupnow had ever mentioned Küçükyetim.

“No,” Nitro responded.

What Nitro didn’t mention was that both he and Rupnow were in a Telegram chat that had been set up in advance so they could watch Küçükyetim livestream his attack.

Hill at the Center on Extremism told Raw Story that her team found a Telegram chat group where Küçükyetim posted his manifesto. An associate known as “Hansen” then posted a link to a livestream of a promised attack. While the members of the chat group were waiting for the attack to begin, Hill said, Rupnow joined the chat through an invitation link, indicating she had a preexisting relationship with at least one other participant.

Afterwards, members of the chat group critiqued the attack.

By the standards of the accelerationist movement, where success is measured in kill counts, it was a disappointment to them: No one died.

“A for effort,” Nitro wrote in the chat.

“At least he did it,” Hansen said.

Rupnow concurred.

“Credit given for that at least,” she wrote.

This story is the second in a three-part series exploring how violent online subcultures provide the opportunity for teenagers attracted to accelerationism and inceldom to network and encourage one another to carry out terrorist attacks. Read Part 1 here.

Whistleblower Karen Silkwood’s Urgent Message for Us

Karen Silkwood died in 1974 while trying to expose dangerous conditions in her workplace. Her death — and the smear campaign that followed — highlights how retaliation against whistleblowers deflects scrutiny from power by targeting the messenger.

By Katherine Turk, Sarah Milov 

December 29, 2024

Source: Jacobin


Karen Silkwood



The decade-long battle over Karen Silkwood’s legacy — waged, on the one hand, by progressives who mythologized her as a courageous whistleblower and, on the other, by a corporation that vilified and sexualized her as an irresponsible traitor — offers valuable lessons for today. As we face an era where the levers of government power will be wielded by a president who has run on a platform rife with misogyny and vengeance, Silkwood’s story underscores a critical point: focusing on a whistleblower’s character distracts from the content of their claims.
The Illusion of Individual Resistance

Though little remembered today outside of Oklahoma, Silkwood’s employer, Kerr-McGee, epitomized the US energy establishment. Ranked 129 on the Fortune 500 in 1975, with more than a billion dollars in assets invested in oil, uranium, potash, helium, asphalt, and coal, the company was a household name across the American Southwest, where hundreds of gas stations bore the company’s trademark blue and red “K-M.”

Silkwood spent her shifts working with plutonium pellets in a laboratory glove box, a sealed container with glove access points, at a plant thirty miles north of KM’s Oklahoma City headquarters. She ground and polished the pellets before they were assembled into fuel rods and welded shut. She believed that these welds were faulty and that their required quality-control checks had been doctored — a claim later confirmed by government inquiries after her death.

Her own multiple plutonium exposures — as well as those of scores of her colleagues — exposed the plant’s dangerous safety lapses. She was on her way to meet a New York Times reporter when her car crashed into a concrete culvert just outside her workplace in rural Crescent, Oklahoma.

A car wreck in the darkness. A secret rendezvous between an activist employee and a famous journalist. A thin, white, attractive twenty-eight-year-old mother of three, dead inside a mangled car. An irradiated woman, just back from Los Alamos where she had undergone specialized full body testing after her home was found to have been contaminated with plutonium: Karen Silkwood’s death was cinematic, even before Meryl Streep portrayed her on screen.

The deceptions of Watergate, the US war in Vietnam, and the Church Committee’s revelations of widespread illegal surveillance of US citizens — mostly leftists — by the FBI and CIA stood as vivid reminders that the most powerful institutions in the world engaged in criminal acts with impunity. For this reason, liberals cheered the individuals and organizations that exposed such criminality.

Figures like Daniel Ellsberg, who copied and leaked the Pentagon Papers, and Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who broke elements of the Watergate affair, were revered not only because they revealed the sordid inner workings of power, but also because their very existence provided reassurance that exposure worked as a tool for democratic accountability.

It is not coincidental that the early 1970s is when the term “whistleblower” first came into political parlance. Ironically, because “Vietnam,” “Watergate,” and COINTELPRO were so confusing, and the cast of characters involved so large, the names of individuals associated with exposing these conspiracies took on outsize significance. Narratives demand simplicity; it takes a hero to take down a villainous regime.

“Karen Silkwood” was created as a folk hero by a left political culture that, while deeply cynical about institutions, still clung to the idealistic belief in the power of individual action to challenge systemic corruption or wrongdoing.
Death, Deception, and Nuclear Dangers

In the summer of 1975, leaders of the National Organization for Women (NOW) based in Washington, DC, began to organize around Silkwood’s story, linking the mystery of her death to the activism she carried out in life. To draw attention to Silkwood’s story, her death became the tantalizing hook in NOW’s demand for a Ccngressional investigation. NOW framed this demand as part of a larger effort to address violence against women and the dismissive attitudes of male officials toward outspoken women — Silkwood included.

By establishing November 13, 1975, as Karen Silkwood Day, NOW highlighted the broader issue of systematic disregard for women’s voices. In a letter to chapter members, NOW wrote, “If we allow her death to go by unacknowledged, unprotested, and uninvestigated, we will all be that much more vulnerable when the going gets tough.” NOW’s Karen Silkwood Day activism spawned protests nationwide and tens of thousands of signatures on petitions.

But such hero worship has its costs. Advocacy around Silkwood’s death, and the posthumous fame that ensued, diverted attention from the underlying plant conditions she sought to spotlight and the multiple exposures to deadly plutonium she sustained at the end of her life.

In life, Karen Silkwood worked hard to focus her coworkers’ attention on the hazards of their jobs — jobs that had become more perilous over the course of her two-year employment as production pressures ramped up. Silkwood feared for her safety and that of her coworkers, who had been woefully misled by management about the dangers of the job.

The Kerr-McGee plant, where Silkwood worked, fabricated plutonium fuel rods for a government-owned experimental “breeder reactor” — a nuclear reactor that produces more fissile material than it consumes. During the high point of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil embargo, dreams of energy independence were pinned on the success of the breeder, which President Richard Nixon described in 1973 as “our highest priority target for nuclear research and development.”
The Union Struggle for Safety

As Kerr-McGee faced pressure to fulfill its contracts with the government, the plant began to cut corners on worker training. Required radiation training went from forty hours to just twenty-four — and even then, new personnel often began work without any training whatsoever. Silkwood saw this dangerous combination of a high turnover rate, lax regard for safety, and the handling of a dangerous substance as a recipe for disaster. Karl Z. Morgan, a pioneer in the field of medical physics, described the Cimarron facility as among the worst he had ever seen, betraying a “wanton disregard for the health and safety of its employees.”

Silkwood was especially alarmed by the inadequate training workers received. If inhaled, minute particles of plutonium can cause cancer, yet the word “cancer” was nowhere to be found in any corporate training material. Until Silkwood helped arrange a visit by two plutonium experts a month before she died, many plant workers did not realize that the material they handled was one of the world’s most powerful carcinogens.

“From human experience to date, we have nothing to worry about,” explained the plant’s former manager — a statement deliberately intended to reassure workers who were unaware of cancer’s latency period. By the time Silkwood became seriously contaminated — her home was found to have radioactive traces the week before her fatal car accident — she was quite worried. She feared she would die of cancer or have children born with severe disabilities. She even collected her used menstrual pads in hopes that Los Alamos scientists could analyze their radioactivity.

But Silkwood’s campaign, like those of many whistleblowers, was not purely altruistic. Her activism was also a labor tactic. As one of the three workers on her union’s collective bargaining committee — and the first woman to hold the position in the male-dominated workforce — Silkwood was deeply involved in union efforts.

As happened in many unionized workplaces in the 1970s, the Cimarron facility faced a decertification drive — an employee-initiated, management-supported effort to kick out the union. And anti-union sentiments were highest in the laboratory where she worked, where many of her coworkers resented her bitterly and considered her activism a running joke.

With the support of the Washington, DC–based leadership of her union, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW), Silkwood undertook what was to be a multipart plan. First, to fend off the decertification election, the union would prove its value through an education drive that highlighted the hazards of plutonium exposure and Kerr-McGee’s strategic campaign of ignorance.

Once the union narrowly avoided decertification, Silkwood was responsible for phase two of the plan: accumulating documentation that Kerr-McGee falsified quality-control records. The union hoped that the publicity surrounding these records would be “an exclusive bombshell to drop on the company” amid negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement.
Retaliatory Tactics

To some, these facts might make Silkwood less like a hero and more like a tactician focused on securing a better union contract. But we should avoid fixating on her supposed personal motives. A focus on the character attributes of a truth-teller rather than the context from which they emerge not only runs counter to the concept of whistleblowing — which is fundamentally about the disclosure of information that serves the public interest — but also plays into the hands of a retaliatory management.

This is why the most powerful whistleblower protection laws afford confidentiality. A boss has a harder time retaliating if he doesn’t know who blew the whistle, and an anonymous complaint keeps the focus on the behavior of the employer.

Karen Silkwood’s death eliminated the need for Kerr-McGee to use typical retaliatory tactics like dismissal, transfer, or blacklisting. Instead, it gave management free rein to engage in the most damaging form of retaliation: attacking a whistleblower’s credibility so as to divert from the unwanted questions she raises. Misogyny is a timeless tool for diminishing a woman’s credibility.

Because Silkwood died, she could not respond when Kerr-McGee suggested that she had been a drug addict who smuggled plutonium in her vagina, slept around, and abandoned her kids. When Silkwood’s family filed a lawsuit against Kerr-McGee, these insinuations became more overt in depositions.

In 1977, when corporate lawyers questioned Silkwood’s family and friends in sworn testimony, Kerr-McGee’s lawyer asked Silkwood’s father, “Did she ever become hysterical?” The same attorney probed Silkwood’s boyfriend: “Do you think Karen may have been what medical science classifies as a nymphomaniac?” The answer to both questions was “no.”
Bosses’ “Nuts and Sluts” Subterfuge

The flagrant misogyny of Kerr-McGee’s efforts at character assassination shouldn’t obscure the broader power dynamics at play. Retaliation against whistleblowers like Silkwood often appears to be an expression of revenge but is, in reality, a strategic way for management to discredit a whistleblower as troublesome and to discipline the workforce. By framing a complaint as resulting from an individual’s emotional disturbance rather than systemic corruption, employers shift attention away from structural issues and onto a whistleblower’s credibility.

Retaliation is fundamentally an affirmation of power, demonstrating the harm to one’s reputation, career, family, and sense of security that awaits those who confront authority. Although sexism was especially vivid in the Silkwood case, men who resist unethical and illegal workplace practices are also subject to these dynamics.

Indeed, dismissal, demotion, transfer, and blacklisting can be understood as techniques of emasculation insofar as work enables a man to provide for his family — and also highlights his dependence upon his bosses. Employment lawyers call these techniques of diversion the “nuts and sluts” strategy: casting doubt upon the message by focusing attention upon the messenger.

With this strategy, employers always have the upper hand, leveraging the real emotional toll of retaliation — which not infrequently results in depression, divorce, unemployment, and even suicide — as further evidence to undermine whistleblowers. John Barrett, a longtime quality-control manager at Boeing who publicly blew the whistle on defects on the Dreamliner, described the tension created by the hostile environment he faced at work and his efforts to concentrate on airplane safety.

“It has taken a serious mental and emotional toll on me,” Barrett said. “But you know I want to try very hard to keep the focus on the safety of the airplane. That’s what my story is about.” Barrett died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound in March of 2024 during his deposition for a suit he brought against Boeing for wrongful termination.
Whistleblowers Are Workers Too

In the next four years, many more lives will likely be devastated by retaliatory power. President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to radically roll back environmental, health, and consumer protection rules and has expressed a desire to strip civil service protections from tens of thousands of civil servants, and he will very likely continue his long-standing pattern of brazen corruption. As a result, whistleblowing is poised to become even more of a defining feature of Trump’s second term than it was during his first — a term bookended by women who accused him of wrongdoing and were sexualized and shamed for their testimony.

If and when whistleblowers emerge, Trump’s opponents should avoid the trap of focusing on their personal character — something they failed to do last time. After former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified before the January 6 Committee, Trump tweeted a broadside against her character (“total phony”) and her knowledge (“bullshit artist”). “This girl,” Trump later said in an interview with Newsmax, has “got serious problems, let me put it that way,” adding, “mental problems.” After her testimony, the former president and his allies floated stories attacking her character to Trump-allied media.

Meanwhile, Trump’s enemies rushed in to defend Hutchinson’s character. Republican representative Liz Cheney pointed out that many of Hutchinson’s “superiors, men many years older,” were “hiding behind executive privilege, anonymity and intimidation,” but “her bravery and patriotism were awesome to behold.”

Democratic House Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi reflected, “It was almost angelic to see her with the confidence and the clarity of message, the clear patriotism.” Pelosi called Hutchinson “a gift to our country.”

Many more Americans can conjure up an image of Hutchinson’s youthful beauty, her resolute posture and crisp white blazer, than can recall the details of her testimony and their significance. (Among many other things, she testified that despite knowing his supporters were armed, Trump wanted them to march to the Capitol because “they’re not here to hurt me.”)

While the desire to lionize a truth-teller — especially one who has experienced life-threatening retaliation from the most powerful forces on Earth — is understandable, it risks reducing them to symbols rather than addressing the crucial role they play. It is an unstable basis for an enduring politics that takes whistleblowers seriously for what they are: labor activists whose jobs afford them a view into domains where employers hold nearly unchecked power.

On the fiftieth anniversary of Karen Silkwood’s death, we should honor her legacy by strengthening whistleblower protections while we still can. This means moving beyond character-driven narratives and recognizing whistleblowers not as sinners or saints, but as workers trying to improve their workplaces for themselves, and for all of us too.




20 Years After His Death, Gary Webb’s Truth Is Still Dangerous

By Belen Fernandez

December 30, 2024

Source: FAIR

Twenty years ago this month, on December 10, 2004, former San Jose Mercury News investigative reporter Gary Webb died by apparent suicide, following a stretch of depression. The subject of the 2014 film Kill the Messenger, Webb had left the newspaper in 1997 after his career was systematically destroyed because he had done what journalists are supposed to do: speak truth to power.

Journalist Gary Webb (1955–2004)

In August 1996, Webb penned a three-part series for the Mercury News (8/18–20/96) that documented how profits from the sale of crack cocaine in Los Angeles in the 1980s had been funneled to the Contras, the right-wing, CIA-backed mercenary army responsible for helping to perpetrate, to borrow Noam Chomsky’s words, “large-scale terrorist war” against Nicaragua. At the same time, the crack epidemic had devastated Black communities in South Central LA—which meant that Webb’s series generated understandable uproar among Black Americans across the country.

But Webb’s revelations should hardly have been a newsflash. As FAIR’s Jim Naureckas (10/21/14) noted in a 2014 dispatch, the CIA was informed


as early as September 1981 that a major branch of the Contra “leadership had made a decision to engage in drug-smuggling to the United States in order to finance its anti-Sandinista operations,” according to the CIA inspector general’s report.

Not that the CIA was any stranger to drug-running—as indicated by, inter alia, a 1993 op-ed appearing in the New York Times (12/3/93) under the headline “The CIA Drug Connection Is as Old as the Agency.” The essay traced CIA ties to narco-trafficking back to the Korean War, while the Vietnam War reportedly saw heroin from a refining lab in Laos “ferried out on the planes of the CIA’s front airline, Air America.” The piece went on to emphasize that “nowhere…was the CIA more closely tied to drug traffic than it was in Pakistan” during the Afghan/Soviet war of 1979 to 1989.

Decade-long suppression of evidence

Norman Solomon (Extra!, 1–2/97): “Besides self-serving denials, journalistic critics of the Mercury News offered little to rebut the paper’s specific pieces of evidence.”

And yet, in spite of such established reality, Webb was subjected to a concerted assault by the corporate media, most notably the New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times, as detailed in a 1997 intervention by FAIR’s Norman Solomon (Extra!, 1–2/97). The media hit job relied heavily on denials from the CIA itself—as in “CIA Chief Denies Crack Conspiracy” (11/16/96), one of the examples cited by Solomon—which is kind of like saying that the bear investigated the sticky goo on his paws and determined that he was not the one who got into the honeypot. In December 1997, the same month Webb left the Mercury News after being discredited across the board and abandoned by his own editors, the New York Times (12/19/97) reassured readers that the “CIA Says It Has Found No Link Between Itself and Crack Trade.”

As Solomon argued, “The elite media’s attacks on the series were clearly driven by a need to defend their shoddy record on the Contra-cocaine story—involving a decade-long suppression of evidence” (Extra!, 7/87; see also 3–4/88). Time and again, the nation’s leading media outlets had buried or obstructed news suggesting Contra-cocaine links; Naureckas (10/21/14) pointed out that the Washington Post


ignored Robert Parry and Brian Barger’s groundbreaking AP article (12/20/85), which first revealed the involvement of Contras in drug-running, and then failed to follow up as smaller papers reported on Contra-related cocaine traffic in their backyards (In These Times, 8/5/87).

As a senior Time magazine editor acknowledged to a staff writer whose 1987 story on Contra-related cocaine traffic was ultimately scrapped (Extra!, 11/91) : “Time is institutionally behind the Contras. If this story were about the Sandinistas and drugs, you’d have no trouble getting it in the magazine.”
‘Hospitable to the most bizarre rumors’

In addition to attacking Webb, many media commentators took care to suggest that the reason Black Americans were so up in arms over the Mercury News series was that they were simply prone to conspiracy theories and paranoia. In October 1996, for instance, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (10/24/96) declared pompously that “a piece of Black America remains hospitable to the most bizarre rumors and myths—the one about the CIA and crack being just one.” Bizarre, indeed, that Black folks might be not so trusting of the government in a country founded on, um, slavery—where to this day, racist persecution remains standard operating procedure rather than rumor.

Furthermore, much of the CIA’s behavior over the years beats any conspiracy theory hands down. The agency’s mind-control program MKUltra comes to mind, which operated from 1953 until the early 1960s and entailed administering drugs like LSD to people in twisted and psychologically destructive experiments. Stephen Kinzer, author of Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, described in an interview with NPR (11/20/20) how MKUltra


was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps. Not only was it roughly based on those experiments, but the CIA actually hired the vivisectionists and the torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that we could build on their research.

In 2012, NBC News reported on a lawsuit against the US federal government by the “sons of a Cold War scientist who plunged to his death in 1953 several days after unwittingly taking LSD in a CIA mind-control experiment.” In short, who needs conspiracy theories when you have the CIA?

Connecting the dots

Peter Hart (FAIR.org, 5/20/13): “If accountability for genocide is an important value, then it would stand to reason that US media would pay some attention to a genocide that our own government facilitated.”

The question remains, however, as to why Webb underwent such a vicious assault when, at the end of the day, Contra drug-running was no more nefarious than anything else Washington was up to in the Americas. Objectively speaking, reports of the infliction of “large-scale terrorist war” against Nicaraguan civilians should have raised the same alarms, and prompted as extreme an establishment backlash, as narco-activity by CIA mercenaries. Plus, the whole Iran/Contra scandal should have already alerted Americans to their government’s propensity for lying—not to mention violating its own laws.

Around the same time that the US was enabling Contra crimes, of course, it was also backing genocide in Guatemala, facilitating mass slaughter by the right-wing Salvadoran military and allied paramilitary groups, and nurturing Battalion 316, “a CIA-trained military unit that terrorized Honduras for much of the 1980s”—as the Baltimore Sun (6/13/95) put it. In December 1989, the US went about bombing the living daylights out of the impoverished Panama City neighborhood of El Chorrillo, killing up to several thousand civilians and earning the area the moniker “Little Hiroshima.”

While Contra drug-running thus cohered just fine with imperial foreign policy, it seems that Webb’s fundamental crime was connecting the dots between US-backed wars on civilians abroad and the US war on its own domestic population, which continues to disproportionately target Black communities. After all, under capitalism, all men are not created equal, and the institutionalized overlap of racial and socioeconomic inequality partially explains why African Americans have a lower life expectancy than whites—and how we’ve ended up in a situation in which white police officers regularly shoot unarmed Black people.

But there we go again with those “bizarre” conspiracy theories.

Now, two decades after Webb’s death, the US government obviously hasn’t managed to kick the habit of wreaking lethal havoc at home and abroad—including in the Gaza Strip, where US funding of the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians has been accompanied by a calculated media campaign to obscure reality. Rather than speak truth to power, journalists have lined up to faithfully spout one untruth after another on power’s behalf, rendering themselves effectively complicit in genocide itself. And as the major outlets trip over each other to toe the establishment line, the corporate media is more of a conspiracy than ever.

Truth, Love and Hope

Carlson at the Bolshoi

by T.P. Wilkinson / February 20th, 2024

Broadly speaking three kinds of reactions to the recent Tucker Carlson-Vladimir Putin interviews can be detected. Aside from the official condemnations that find their echo wherever dementia and other intellectual impediments prevail, there is ecstasy, skepticism, and loyalty.

The ecstatic present this interview as something akin to the visions of Fatima. The skeptics point out that Fatima is a fraud. The loyal include those who have held Tucker Carlson for a hero or at least a very worthy member of their national conservative side in the ongoing US political wars. Nonetheless all these groups of viewers, commentators (pod or web) and officials high and low agree that there is something extraordinary about the event, the interview or conversation recorded in Moscow on or about 9 February 2024. Is it a sign of information liberation? Has Carlson together with those who have offered him platforms to distribute the interview without charge broken the sound bite barrier in the US (NATO) war against Russia and its own middle class and working class? Has this event revealed mysteries hitherto concealed except from those whom divine powers have deigned to speak? Is this yet another psychological operation where the son of the former director of Voice of America has launched the campaign that will end so-called “alternative media”?

The disturbing aspect of all these possibilities is that they are rooted in the fundamentally religious culture of the United States (and to the extent its missionaries have succeeded, in the various vassal states, e.g. the EU). In the first place the interview was a performance, if not a spectacle. This is not an issue of culpability. Rather it is an affirmation that the Carlson interview in Moscow by its very nature and cultural context is a show. That is just the way American culture works. If it had not been staged as a show — to the extent that Carlson and President Putin agreed on the format — it would have been incomprehensible to an American or American indoctrinated public. It is meanwhile tiresome to analyze all the speculation about “narratives” — that gratuitous contribution of literary scholarship to the lingual franca of the mass media through whatever channel. The corollary to Coolidge’s dictum is that the business of America is also show business. Religion is the ultimate show as the plethora of radio, TV and auditoria evangelists easily testifies.

Of course Tucker Carlson, like his father, has been a part of the public-private partnership that constitutes the American propaganda system. Anyone who works at an establishment media outlet is — wittingly or unwittingly. That is how American journalism was founded by Pulitzer and Hearst at the end of the 19th century. It is superfluous to criticize Carlson for doing what every professional journalist has been trained to do, whether at one of the corporate sponsored journalism faculties, or as a well-connected freelancer. That cannot be the starting point for understanding the Moscow interview (as opposed to Oliver Stone‘s 2017 interview— which was also framed in cinematic terms rather than journalistic).

The starting point ought to be with the facts. What did Carlson say? What questions did he ask? What answers did he receive? And what has happened since, to him and to those who watched the interview? Carlson spoke in a rather poor interview format in Dubai this week. It was apparent from his statements that whatever he may have expected from his interview, the confrontation with Russia and President Putin induced him to make statements he has not previously made. Those statements about the character of the US regime, his values as an American patriot, his confusion as he attempts to integrate the experience into his personal and professional personae, ought to be taken for what they are statements of fact — about in the first instance Tucker Carlson, American.

Some skeptics have speculated that Carlson is the thin edge of a crowbar that will undermine through infiltration and acquisition the so-called alternative media. They point to his curriculum vitae and his career as a corporate propagandist. All that is a matter of public record. However it is necessary to recall that since the founding of the CIA (and before that the FBI) there have been innumerable people whose careers were in the “opposition” and only very late — if not posthumously— were identified as government agents or assets. Just as the public curriculum vitae creates a presumption to be rebutted. It is extremely difficult to know who among those with “spotless” opposition credentials are merely working under deep cover.

The long-time followers are probably the least disappointed or skeptical. For this audience Tucker Carlson already enjoys a certain star status. If they are anti-Russian then their star has shown courage in the face of battle. He did not let himself be intimidated by what the Germans call the “Ivan”. They may have wondered that Carlson was unable to carry an American spy back to the homeland with him. However, they would have had no problem explaining that. Carlson sat in the Kremlin in front of the cameras and showed American strength and character. His personal meeting with the Russian president was evidence that American values can be defended even in Moscow — while the Democrats and the bizarre “Left” try to destroy their country.

There is another way to assess the interview and Tucker Carlson‘s subsequent statements. This is where the role of the appraiser ought to be more carefully considered than that performed by the performance appraised. Carlson performed the role of an American journalist on a stage partly structured like those stages upon which American audiences are accustomed to see such performances. Although the interview was extraordinary in a limited sense, it was overdetermined as performance. Anyone who had listened to President Putin’s speeches over the past ten years would not have found anything very new in what he said. However, that is the key point. The audiences before which Carlson sought to perform had never seen this stage or this show. It was a premiere in a very real sense, even if not held at the Bolshoi or on Broadway.

Much of the analysis and appreciation of this performance by the generous and sympathetic critics misses the point. In Dubai Carlson found himself unable to answer all the stock questions his poor, corpulent, interlocutor posed. He also was very clear about that incapacity. Anyone his age — 54 — or older ought to be able to recall the kinds of albeit naive basic principles and optimism with which his generation was still educated at home if not at school. The under-40, who have by and large been indoctrinated with the ostensible absence of positive doctrine or history, do not even understand the problem of recognizing that one‘s personal history and one‘s national history cannot explain the current conditions of the country in which one lives. They have been trained in the history of the brand, where the past is merely a “retro” design of the present. Tucker Carlson is a child of the Establishment, at least once removed. Yet there are far more people who share the history in which he was raised than our current youth fetishism recognizes.

The question that still bears serious consideration is that of what Tucker Carlson the performer means in the overall context of political warfare? This is a fair question, but until now I have only noticed feeble expressions of this issue. If instead of applying rigid forensic dissection of Carlson’s role, like those found in those atrocities of film criticism, one distinguishes between Tucker the journalist and Tucker the man, then one can also say that Tucker the journalist is susceptible to every subterfuge and political warfare tactic to which the entire profession is open. Then one must look at the way the journalist role is played now and in future — not only by Carlson. At the same time, a humanist appreciation must distinguish between the man, Tucker Carlson and what he does and says in that role. Serious intellectual effort, cultural-historical method, is needed to detach oneself from the constant role of “show perceiver” and learn to master the role of perceiving ordinary humans as they act in their daily lives. That applies to Tucker Carlson, his wife and four children, even if he lives in a wealthy neighborhood of La Jolla, California, where smoking Cannabis at breakfast is not allowed.

Hostage Nation

by T.P. Wilkinson / February 19th, 2024

In his Moscow interview, Tucker Carlson also asked the president of the Russian Federation to release a young American citizen convicted of espionage in Russia from imprisonment. Vladimir Putin replied that the man was arrested, tried and convicted by a Russian court of a crime under Russian law, espionage, by secretly receiving classified documents from someone in Russia.

Carlson’s plea was based not on respect for Russian law — or understanding of the crime of espionage — but on a widely held prejudice in the West. Namely there is a presumption that Westerners, in particular Americans, if arrested in countries listed as enemies of the West or the US, are never incarcerated for their acts but taken as hostages. Thus Carlson’s appeal was phrased in terms of a plea for mercy to an outlaw. President Putin rejected that implication and explained both the specifics of the crime committed and the customary practice for reciprocal release of agents caught by opposing special (secret) services. While not ruling a release out, the Russian president made clear that this was not a case for executive clemency.

Why, one might ask, did Carlson not grasp that fact? The obvious and superficial reason is that the request was gratuitous and theatrical. The “hostage release” mission is a typical form of quasi-diplomatic grandstanding. However there is a deeper level at which this segment can and ought to be understood. There is an ancient tradition — prior to 7 October — of states at war taking leaders of the opposing side as hostages to induce and guarantee negotiations to end hostilities or to enforce the conditions to which belligerents subsequently agreed. Medieval warfare is full of such incidents. Also other cultures have availed themselves of these in personam guarantees for treaties between warring parties. These guarantees have continued in the rituals of prisoner exchanges during truces.

The late 20th century was accompanied by proliferation in the West of a new kind of hostage taking. Whereas the ancient mode usually involved the capture or surrender of belligerents (soldiers and officers) or high officials and dignitaries, modern Western warfare focussed on holding civilians, especially non-combatants, as hostage. This became a central tactic of counter-insurgency warfare. This was condemned in the treaties after World War 2 as a form of collective punishment and prohibited under the Geneva Conventions (or protocols to the Hague Convention on the Laws of Land Warfare).

The practice of the French in Algeria was one of the most notorious post-war examples. Although almost universally condemned (at least beyond the West) it found its way into the annals of counter-insurgency doctrine through Roger Trinquier. His book Modern Warfare formed the core of CIA-US military strategy in Vietnam. The conduct of war Trinquier proposed based on his service in Indochina and Algeria was fundamentally opposed to the spirit of the Geneva Conventions. By arguing that there was no more distinction between combatants and civilians he provided the example and the theory upon which all modern wars are waged by the West. World War 2 was the first modern war in which non-combatant casualties and death exceeded those of the armed forces. That was the reason for the Geneva protocols. Triquier circumvented this essentially by claiming that the organized self-defense and armed struggle against colonial occupation was not protected by the laws of land warfare since they protected states and their regular armed forces, while colonies were not states and could therefore not field armies in terms of international law.

While it is true that Trinquier insisted that treatment of civilians should distinguish between criminals to be tried and sentenced by the regular courts and “terrorists”, this distinction was no more than academic in the CI context. The CIA’s Phoenix Program extended to forcing the RVN legislature to criminalize political opinions and activities so that they could be punished as “civilian” crimes. As then CIA station chief William Colby explained, the Phoenix directorate in Saigon also insisted that political crimes be handled by the special branch of the national police so as to keep the military “clean” for regular warfare. However in Algeria, as in Vietnam, there was almost no contact between the regular forces of the two sides until the CI was virtually at an end. Moreover the personnel overlap between military and police in the colonies made the distinction more a question of clothes than substance.

The use of hostages in counter-insurgency expanded throughout the era of wars against national independence movements regardless of the prohibitions under international law. There was also a major innovation in 1972.

The conventional story is that a group of activists desiring to call attention to the ongoing occupation of Palestine by European settler-colonialists plotted to take the Olympic competition squad sent by the State of Israel to Munich hostage. Presumably this surprising move would compel the international community (as the US calls itself) to listen to the pleas of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, pleas for just treatment to resolve the conflict in compliance with international law.

The immediate result was dramatic and has been repeatedly dramatized. A special paramilitary squad from the German national police, GSG 9, stormed the rooms where the hostages were held and killed everyone, hostages and alleged hostage-takers. After that international air travel to and from Palestine was subjected to security measures that would then be standardized for all air travel in 2001. The immediate result was not the opening of international venues to the Palestinian cause but the opposite. The PLO became a certified “terrorist organization” and its members were declared outlaws. One should recall here what the term “outlaw” actually means. The naive understanding is misleading. Since the days of the Medieval Inquisition there has been a clear legal distinction between criminal and outlaw. A criminal is someone accused and convicted of violating the law. Nonetheless he is also governed by the law and enjoys its protection. Only the authorities have the right to seize and punish a criminal. An outlaw however is deemed literally beyond the law, enjoying neither rights nor protection. Hence an act of violence, even killing, against an outlaw is no offense. Anyone is free to treat an outlaw as he likes. An outlaw has no claims whatsoever.

One of the principles by which counter-insurgency is waged is by creating outlaws and removing them from the sight or oversight of the regular government and social infrastructure. This has also been done through what is now called “disappearing”. However hostage taking by the counter-insurgency agencies and their operatives has the perfidious effect of creating outlaws in the public perception by staging hostage incidents that appear to be perpetrated by the so-called “terrorists”. Thus the mythic propaganda of the deed is turned against those engaged in struggle — whether or not armed — to elicit the revulsion among the target population commensurate with this violation of the Geneva protocols.

Leaving aside the plethora of staged hijackings in the 1970s, there are two high jacking-hostage incidents that bear consideration. Indeed they too relate to Palestine. The first is the Entebbe incident in which Israeli military force was applied to near universal acclaim to the recovery of a passenger liner taken there by “terrorists”.

In June 1976, an Air France flight to Tel Aviv carrying some 248 passengers was diverted to Uganda’s capital. (Ironically Uganda had been one of Britain’s proposed sites for a future Zionist state.) Israel special forces attacked the airport and liberated the aircraft, killing some Ugandan soldiers and apparently violating Ugandan sovereignty to perform the raid. The ruler of Uganda, Idi Amin, apparently supported seizure of the airliner. In the course of the action practically all non-Israelis were released. The Israeli forces shot their way in and recovered all those passengers except for some collateral damage. Amin had been receiving and continued to receive exceptionally bad press. The review of his years in Uganda is only relevant to show that whatever domestic political struggles were underway in Britain’s former colony, Amin was one of several African leaders punished for supporting the citizens of Palestine in their armed struggle.

The second incident involved a TWA flight from Athens to San Diego that was diverted to Beirut in June 1986. In the course of this action a US Navy diver was killed. While this death is treated as a civilian casualty, since it was not a military flight, the reported actions of a man trained in what is essentially a special forces MOS may have led to his death as combat-induced. Nonetheless the remarkable aspect of this hostage incident was not only the negotiated exchange of 19 hostages unharmed in return for fuel. Eventually all the hostages were released. In this case the Israeli government released prisoners it held while denying that the incident had forced them to do so.

One of the hostages released was a Texas original, a businessman from that archconservative oil and ranching state. He was actually interviewed on network television just after he reached the tarmac. (The man disappeared from public view shortly thereafter.) He told assembled reporters that he was not only treated well but that they had made a case for their political objectives that he found very reasonable. He practically asked the governments concerned to listen and take his captors seriously. That was the last time he spoke in public- at least where cameras could record it.

The case of TWA flight 847 ended with the released passengers being flown by USAF transporter to Frankfurt am Main, the center of US intelligence services in Germany, for “debriefing” before a quasi-heroic reception in the US. That Texas businessman who had spoken soberly to journalists asking why no one was listening to the people in Palestine, was declared to have incurred “Stockholm syndrome”.

Stockholm syndrome is a pseudo-medical term invented in the early 1970s as a faux psychiatric disorder whereby captives allegedly become bonded with their captors and sympathetic to them. It has become a term of trade for discrediting anyone who by virtue of a politically motivated hostage-taking exhibits a sympathetic response to the political issue at hand, no matter how rational that sympathy may be articulated. To confuse matters the “syndrome” is sometimes compared with the established “attractions” in abusive relationships, e.g. wife-beating, child-beating, rape, etc. While there are plausible explanations for the persistence of abusive relationships the elements of time and social/ familial status are very different from those of temporary hostage situations.

The purpose of Stockholm syndrome is to pathologize the responses of people caught in political conflict who begin to consider rationally or even humanely the terms of those conflicts in officially prohibited ways. The origin of the term “brainwashing” was similar. When US POWs were released after the Armistice in Korea, many were forced to retract statements made in captivity about war crimes they had been ordered to commit. To explain these retractions and conceal the threats made to extract them, the returning prisoners were alleged to have been victims of Korean brainwashing. This also served as convenient cover for what is now known as MKUltra, the CIA psychological warfare program which included the mass marketing of LSD.

Throughout the so-called Cold War the Soviet Union was accused of conducting all the psychological and pharmament operations against its dissidents that the CIA was performing in the US, Canada and other countries under its control. The battlefield “mind” predates the Internet- in fact it has been the main battlespace since 1913.

The history of modern hostage taking for political purposes could bear far more examination than this space permits. However to return to the Carlson-Putin interview and Carlson’s plea for a “hostage release” we should ask from what position Carlson’s request is actually addressed?

That is most simply revealed in his opening questions.

On February 22, 2022, you addressed your country in your nationwide address when the conflict in Ukraine started and you said that you were acting because you had come to the conclusion that the United States through NATO might initiate a quote, “surprise attack on our country”. And to American ears that sounds paranoid. Tell us why you believe the United States might strike Russia out of the blue. How did you conclude that?

Tucker Carlson, consciously or not, was speaking with the voice of the real “hostage-taker”. The US, in NATO extended, began to take the world hostage no later than August 1945. It held for a brief period the absolute atomic monopoly, until the Soviet Union followed by China acquired a deterrent. Then until 1990 the US claimed to be the hostage of a country half its population and subjected to more than twenty years of US-supported war mainly against its civilian population. In addition it held the world hostage while it carpet-bombed Korea and Vietnam (plus Laos and Cambodia), murdering over six million people from the air. At the same time it held as much of Africa, Latin America and the Pacific archipelagos hostage through military dictatorships, with or without civilian faces. Then through brain drain and strategic immigration policy it created an international hostage pool paying ransom in return for a chance to send money to impoverished families at home. Ultimately the psychological and economic warfare to which all inhabitants of the US are subjected is calculated to create a strong emotional bond with their captors, the real but unnamed hostage-takers who rule the Anglo-American Empire.

Vladimir Putin responded to Tucker Carlson’s plea in the manner appropriate to a traditional statesman, schooled in statecraft from an age before the US was even conceived as a place, let alone as a nation. Also that point eluded the American journalist. President Putin’s repeated injunction that Tucker Carlson should ask the actors themselves (in the US) why they act as they do? was also a polite indication that for all his curiosity, sincerity and goodwill, Carlson was himself a captive, a hostage. He remains a captive of a hostage nation.

Journalism and Entertainment

Tucker Carlson interviews Vladimir Putin

by T.P. Wilkinson / February 17th, 2024

This week former Fox News commentator, now self-employed audio-visual journalist, Tucker Carlson interviewed the president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin. According to his own account, it was a mission opposed—secretly by the agencies of the “Vatican on the Potomac” and with it the hierarchy of the American Church. A summary of the sermons and homilies published by its national and international propaganda organs indicates concerted efforts to spin this encounter in ways that profess the faith and confirm the purported apostasy of the successor to that patriarch of the beloved if short-lived Russian-American Church, Boris Yeltsin.

Carlson has acquired a wide and varied following not only because of the topics he began to cover but by some things conspicuously absent from the broadcasting and cable genre in which he made his career—a robust sense of humor and allowing the people to whom he talks to speak without rude interruptions. Throughout the illegal and unconstitutional mass incarcerations starting in 2020 he insisted without reservation that Americans have rights that are being violated. George Carlin would have said their temporary privileges had been suspended or revoked. As a personally wealthy individual from an establishment background, Carlson is essentially a believer in the status quo or at least the status quo of the era in which he grew up. As a media professional he is sensitive to the way the business works and the role people like him play in it. He does not pretend to identify with everyone he meets. Despite his clearly conservative position he has acquired a reputation for sincerity throughout what is called “alternative journalism”. There was an age, long forgotten by many, when a journalist of reputation or representing a major media outlet did not have to explain publicly why he chose to report on something or talk to somebody. The fact that Tucker Carlson felt compelled to give several introductory explanations for speaking to the elected leader of a major nation with whom his country has been at war (unofficially since 1917) reflects the dismal state of affairs even in a profession subject to corruption since its institutionalization by magnates like Pulitzer, Hearst, Rothermere and Beaverbrook.

By his own admission, Carlson was surprised at among other things the history lesson he was given in the first third of the interview. One might ask if in the course of his preparation he had viewed Oliver Stone’s extensive interviews with the Russian president in 2017? Anyone who watched them would not have been surprised by Vladimir Putin’s style or substance. Stone, who had much more time, asked many of the same questions Carlson asked. In those interviews President Putin was very detailed in his answers with frequent historical explanations given as context. Perhaps that is what most surprised Carlson since the absence of context is the primary characteristic of what passes for journalism in the West. However Tucker Carlson, began no later than the 22 February 2022 Russian intervention, to add context and history to his own reporting. What is more logic acquired a greater role than dogma. So what role was Tucker Carlson performing?

Perhaps his questions were formulated to simulate the kind of bar, living room and dinner table discussions his viewers are likely to have when the subjects of Putin or Russia are raised. If one wants to inform a notoriously isolated and ignorant population one has to start with their knowledge base and the things they are likely to ask. President Putin asked Carlson after the first question, was this a talk show or a serious conversation? By surrendering to a serious conversation he was breaching the unstated barrier of all domestic political gossip and chatter. Yet it was too late to change either his style or his pattern of questions. Without diminishing the value of the interview as a whole, it is worth considering the role model upon which Carlson explicitly drew. He has mentioned Barbara Walters. Those who can still recall her career in American television will remember how she became the first woman to co-anchor that TV slot for the nightly news. She replaced Chet Huntley after he died to share the NBC show with David Brinkley. Then she went on to conduct “star” interviews with world leaders. Those performances raised the TV presenter to a certain mutual celebrity in the penumbra of the personality interviewed. It also created a new platform for selected leaders to be displayed to a mass television audience, not unlike the 1969 broadcast of the putative moon landings. Political leaders obtained a new kind of pulpit with this precursor to the ubiquitous talk show. Performers from the news theater genre were able to enhance their credibility as conduits for official views presented in living room conversation format. David Frost was the master of this format- although even his famous Nixon interviews were just a bit too English for an average US audience (unless sedated by Masterpiece Theater episodes). Barbara Walters in contrast was the Maria Callas of the grand interview. At least Maria Callas knew she was only a performer and used her own voice. Tucker Carlson can be forgiven for avoiding the David Frost style. However had he learned something from Oliver Stone he might have transcended the living room TV style and focussed on things Americans and Westerners really need to understand.

Repeated questions to Vladimir Putin were couched in phrases like “why do you think America does something?” From the Stone interviews he would have learned that the Russian president does not try to guess why other people act as they do. He merely describes the actions as he sees them and what he thinks they mean for Russia. Carlson’s approach indirectly reflects the absence (or impossibility) of any serious questioning by Americans as to why their government acts as it does? Vladimir Putin pointed both Stone and Carlson toward home saying essentially- Ask the people who act for their reasons. I can only tell you why we act as we do. The critical viewer will immediately recognize that Western policy is never honestly explained. Hence while the whole world (except the citizens of NATO countries) can know why the Russian Federation acts, no one has an honest answer from those in the West who drive US actions.

Another curious aspect of the interview is Carlson’s questions about diplomacy and the implied question about the “special services”. Tucker Carlson’s father was a journalist working with the American “special services” or other government agencies. The level of passive and active cooperation between the corporate media and the CIA (or FBI) is a matter of record. Originally discrete, they even operate overtly today. As a former intelligence officer (like George H W Bush), the Russian president respects the rules by which those services operate. In contrast to the legions of CIA assets in the US and the West as a whole, Vladimir Putin neither denies this stage in his career nor does he trivialize the functions these services perform. Yet he comes just short of suggesting that the lead Western services drive policy. In contrast one hears little to indicate that the Russian president is run by his country’s covert action branch. Does Carlson appreciate this difference? Vladimir Putin answers Carlson with the rhetorical question, who is Boris Johnson? To which Carlson seemed to have no answer. Again a critical viewer could understand the insinuation. Boris Johnson, who was no longer British prime minister was in Kiev on someone’s behalf. Johnson himself, unlike a member of the Biden family, had no obvious personal interest in Ukraine. Yet his words were apparently enough to destroy the Istanbul format where Russia and Ukraine had initialed accords that according to President Putin would have ended the war. So on whose behalf was the backbencher sent? What did he offer or threaten to persuade Kiev to renounce what they had already accepted? Even if Tucker Carlson did not know the answer the question was hard to overlook.

Already before FOX sacked him Tucker Carlson had begun to question the appearances of government in the US. However little attention has been paid to the “secret team”, the term Prouty used to describe the permanent government, and how it rules and disseminates propaganda. So little critical attention is given to covert government because it also transcends the political and social categories in which the mass and sacraments of the American Church are celebrated. Carlson ended his interview with questions couched in the language of Christian catechism. He asked the Russian president, as a Christian, if he would not act in accordance with a platitude of that same Sunday school version of Christianity characteristic of the West: “why don’t you turn the other cheek?” Sensibly Vladimir Putin responded as a head of state and not a pupil summoned to the principal’s office for fighting on the playground. He said with calm neutrality that the West was more “pragmatic” than Russia. Without demeaning the West, Vladimir Putin answered in a way deeply consistent with the Orthodox Christianity overthrown by Rome in the Fourth Crusade. His conviction was that Russians had a life and soul that were indivisible. The implication was that the West in its pragmatism could dispense with one or the other.

Certainly the enormous viewer numbers Tucker Carlson reaches will uniquely benefit if they really listen to the conversation. Nonetheless the legacy of Walters will be hard to transcend. Carlson as the celebrity interviewer risks not just being unheard. There is still the opportunity for a new news entertainment brand to emerge by which the medium remains the message. Tucker Carlson then would join the pantheon of celebrity with surprising but increasingly superficial product. The Church has always known how to absorb divergence into entertainment (if it could not be suppressed) and its grand corporate successors, who Putin correctly identified as directly or indirectly controlling almost all the world‘s mass media, have refined those methods using both natural and artificial intelligence.

Dr T.P. Wilkinson writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket between the cradles of Heine and Saramago. He is also the author of Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa. Read other articles by T.P..