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- The following story confirms that CNN had military personnel
from Fort Bragg's 4th Psychological Operations Group working at CNN during
the Kosovo war, apparently to help facilitate mass murder in Yugoslavia.
My only contention is with the implication that PsyOps didn't work at CNN
before or after. So what, these military PsyOps just walked into CNN one
day, asked if they could oversee their news and then walked away without
even so much as ripping the surface of the waters?! This latest news supports
an earlier report suggesting CNN may have conspired with NATO to murder
a Serbian official: http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/jul1999/cnn-j08.shtml
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- http://www.commondreams.org/views/032300-107.htm
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- SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS Thursday, March 23, 2000
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- The Military & CNN
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- By Alexander Cockburn
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- A handful of military personnel from the 4th Psychological
Operations Group (i.e. PSYOPs) based at Fort Bragg in North Carolina have
until recently been working in CNN's headquarters in Atlanta. An enterprising
Dutch journalist named Abe De Vries came up with this important story in
mid-February, and he remains properly astounded that no mainstream news
medium in the United States has evinced any interest in the story.
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- I came across translations of De Vries' stories on the
matter, after they had appeared in late February in Trouw, the foremost
quality newspaper in Holland.
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- De Vries later told me he'd originally come upon the
story via an article in the French Intelligence newsletter (available on
a pay-per-story basis on the Internet) Feb. 17, which described a military
symposium in Arlington, Va., held at the beginning of that same month,
discussing use of the press in military operations.
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- Col. Christopher St. John, commander of the U.S. Army's
4th PSYOPs Group, was quoted by a French Intelligence correspondent, present
at the symposium, as (in the correspondent's words) having ``called for
greater cooperation between the armed forces and media giants. He (St.
John) pointed out that some Army PSYOPs personnel had worked for CNN for
several weeks, and helped in the production of some news stories for the
network.''
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- Reading this in Belgrade, where he's Trouw's correspondent,
De Vries saw a good story, picked up the phone, and finally reached Maj.
Thomas Collins of the U.S. Army Information Service, who duly confirmed
the presence of these Army PSYOPs experts at CNN. ``PSYOPs personnel, soldiers
and officers,'' De Vries quoted Collins as telling him, ``have been working
in CNN's headquarters in Atlanta through our program `Training with Industry.'
They worked as regular employees of CNN. Conceivably, they would have worked
on stories during the Kosovo war. They helped in the production of news.''
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- I reported this interesting disclosure in my newsletter,
CounterPunch, and made it the topic of my regular weekly broadcast to ``AM
Live,'' a program of the South Africa Broadcasting Company in Johannesburg.
Among the audience of this broadcast was CNN's bureau in South Africa,
which lost no time in relaying news of it to CNN headquarters in Atlanta,
and I duly received an angry phone call from Eason Jordan, who identified
himself as CNN's president of news gathering and international networks.
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- Jordan was full of indignation that I had somehow compromised
the reputation of CNN. But in the course of our conversation, it turned
out that, yes, CNN had hosted a total of five interns from U.S. Army PSYOPs,
two in television, two in radio, and one in satellite operations. Jordan
said the program had begun on June 7 (just before the end of the war against
Serbia), and only recently terminated, I would guess at about the time
CNN's higher management read Abe De Vries' stories.
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- Naturally enough, Eason Jordan and other executives at
CNN now describe the Army PSYOPs intern tours at CNN as having been insignificant.
Maybe so. Col. St. John, the commanding officer of the PSYOPs group, certainly
thought them of sufficient significance to mention at that high-level Pentagon
pow-wow in Arlington about propaganda and psychological warfare. Maybe
CNN was the target of a PSYOPs penetration and is still too naive to figure
out what was going on.
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- It's hard not to laugh when CNN execs like Eason Jordan
start spouting, as he did to me, high-toned stuff about CNN's principles
of objectivity and refusal to relay government propaganda.
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- During the war on Serbia, as with other recent conflicts
involving the United States, CNN's screen was filled with an interminable
procession of U.S. officers. On April 27 of last year, Amy Goodman of the
Pacifica Radio network put the following question to Frank Sesno, who is
CNN's senior vice president for political coverage.
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- GOODMAN: ``If you support the practice of putting ex-
military men -- generals -- on the payroll to share their opinion during
a time of war, would you also support putting peace activists on the payroll
to give a different opinion during a time of war?
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- SESNO: ``We bring the generals in because of their expertise
in a particular area. We call them analysts. We don't bring them in as
advocates. In fact, we actually talk to them about that -- they're not
there as advocates.''
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- Exactly a week before Sesno said this, CNN had featured
as one of its military analysts, Lt. Gen. Dan Benton, U.S. Army Retired.
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- BENTON: ``I don't know what our countrymen that are questioning
why we're involved in this conflict are thinking about. As I listened to
this press conference this morning, with reports of rapes, villages being
burned, and this particularly incredible report of blood banks, of blood
being harvested from young boys for the use of Yugoslav forces, I just
got madder and madder. The United States has a responsibility as the only
superpower in the world, and when we learn about these things, somebody
has got to stand up and say, `That's enough, stop it, we aren't going to
put up with this.'''
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- Please note what CNN's supposedly non-advocatory analyst
Benton was ranting about: a particularly preposterous NATO propaganda item
about 700 Albanian boys being used as human blood banks for Serb fighters.
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- Let's give the last word to the enterprising Abe De Vries.
``Of course, CNN says these PSYOPs personnel didn't decide anything, write
news reports, etc. What else can they say? Maybe it's true, maybe not.
The point is that these kind of close ties with the Army are, in my view,
completely unacceptable for any serious news organization. Maybe even more
astonishing is the complete silence about the story from the big media.
To my knowledge, my story was not mentioned by leading American or British
newspapers, nor by Reuters or AP.''
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- Alexander Cockburn is a syndicated columnist. CounterPunch,
co-edited by Cockburn, is located on the web at www.counterpunch.org.
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- _____
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- GODDARD'S JOURNAL: http://www.erols.com/igoddard/journal.htm
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