Agents Provocateurs and the Tea Parties
http://www.aim.org/aim-report/agents...e-tea-parties/
AIM Report | By Cliff Kincaid | April 14, 2010
During World War II we faced Tokyo Rose, the English-speaking broadcaster of Japanese propaganda. Her purpose was to demoralize American soldiers and sailors and undermine the war effort against the fascists and the Nazis. During the Cold War, the Soviets had their own version of Tokyo Rose. They would cite American and Western sources of information in an effort to convince the world that U.S. foreign policy was imperialist and corrupt. President Reagan launched an information counter-offensive, exposing communist disinformation and propaganda. The rest is history. Soviet lies were exposed, and the Soviets lost the Cold War.
But now they're back. The Russians, led by ex-president and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a former KGB spy, are using their state-owned media to besmirch the reputation of America. Their purpose is to weaken the United States internationally and cause distrust in American institutions. They don't care if the president is Obama or anyone else. Their target is America, just like it was when the Soviets were running the Kremlin's propaganda apparatus.
What has changed is how the Russian media use Americans to make their propaganda points. Russian television, especially the Russia Today (RT) network, is still quoting and featuring interviews with American communists. Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communist Party and Gloria La Riva of the Party for Socialism and Liberation have been on Russia Today denouncing America and calling for communist revolution.
What has changed is that Alex Jones, who calls himself an American patriot and whose infowars website is linked on the popular Drudge Report, has been appearing on the RT propaganda channel with regularity. In fact, RT calls Jones a "frequent guest." He even appeared on Russia Today to defend the Russian invasion of the independent country of Georgia, a former Soviet republic.
Jones, described as "the U.S. investigative journalist," was on Russia Today on August 26, 2008, insisting that the U.S. "private international military industrial complex" had "launched a sneak attack" on the "Russian enclaves" in Georgia in order to support the "U.S.-backed Georgians [and] the Israeli- and NATO-backed Georgians." Jones said the U.S. was guilty of "unprecedented crimes" and urged Russia to continue to occupy the regions it had invaded.
"I apologize as an American that we have let our government be taken over like this," said Jones, who went on to blame "the neo-cons in NATO, in the U.S. and Israel" who "want to have a new Cold War."
While Alex Jones shows up regularly on RT to bash the U.S. and its allies and promote his own conspiracy theories, there is little freedom of the press in Russia itself. As the New York Times notes, "Journalists who probe too deeply turn up dead." The Committee to Protect Journalists documents 52 Russian journalists killed since 1992.
Smearing America
RT, which also has an Arabic channel, has been taking out ads featuring superimposed images of President Barack Obama and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and asking "Who poses the greater nuclear threat?" The implication is that the U.S. nuclear arsenal is as much of a threat-or more-than nuclear weapons in the hands of Muslim fanatics in Iran. Another RT ad compares U.S. military troops to Islamic terrorists.
Like its Soviet-era predecessors, Russia Today television tends to emphasize stories and interviews that make the United States look bad internationally. As Heritage Foundation scholars Ariel Cohen and Helle C. Dale note in a new study, "The Kremlin is using anti-Americanism as a strategic tool for pursuing domestic and foreign policy goals. Through media controlled or owned by the state, the Russian government is deliberately spreading poisonous anti-U.S. propaganda at home and abroad, blaming many of Russia's problems on the West, particularly the United States."
In using Alex Jones, the Kremlin's purpose is obvious-to create the impression that the United States is no longer a democratic country, and that it is being controlled by sinister forces that want to exploit the world and start wars for nefarious reasons.
This is really a variation of the old Soviet propaganda theme that the U.S. is responsible for most of what goes wrong in the world. The Soviets even claimed the Pentagon made the AIDS virus-a charge picked up in the U.S. by Obama's pastor Jeremiah Wright. The purpose in using Jones is to create the impression that Americans have lost faith in their government-and their system-and that the rest of the world should, too. But there is something else. In having Jones on to defend Russia's invasion of Georgia, the purpose, quite clearly, was to suggest to the world that Americans support Russia's increasingly aggressive foreign policy.
Smearing The Tea Parties
Russia Today is eager to publicize Alex Jones and his claims about 9/11, the Bilderbergers, bankers, and various other villains and culprits because they divert attention from the increasingly totalitarian nature of the Russian regime and the military threat that Russia still poses to American interests. This is not to say that there may be some truth in some of the claims that Jones makes about some of the groups and individuals manipulating U.S. policy. But Jones takes these claims to a ridiculous extreme, in order to create the impression that he somehow has inside information about the government and the forces behind it.
Consider the 9/11 truth movement. Jones has become the face of that movement, even though another Jones, former Obama official and communist Van Jones, is another prominent advocate of the view that America attacked itself on 9/11.
The Russians, who have themselves suffered from terrorism committed by Islamic extremists, know better than most that the worldwide Islamic threat is real. But Russia Today television seizes on the 9/11 truth movement, even running a series on 9/11 being an "inside job," in order to demonstrate to its viewers around the world that the United States is incapable of understanding and dealing with this threat. The Kremlin propagandists must be laughing out loud at the thought that some Americans actually believe the U.S. Government engineered an attack on itself on 9/11 and blamed the Muslims.
If we are to believe the 9/11 truth movement, the Bush Administration put the plot together-or finalized it-in a short period of time, only eight months, after Bush took office in January 2001. Then, after 9/11, an elaborate cover-up was engineered, with the connivance of top Bush officials, in order to keep the public in the dark.
Make no mistake that important questions remain unanswered about 9/11 and serious figures such as Rachel Ehrenfeld and Peter Lance have been raising them. It is mind-boggling that President Bush gave George Tenet, CIA director at the time of 9/11, a presidential Medal of Freedom. Tenet is the official who told Bush that finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq would be a slam dunk.
An Absurd Theory
Which raises the question: if U.S. officials orchestrated 9/11, in order to go to war in the Middle East, why couldn't these same officials have planted weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in order to justify the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime? That would have been relatively easy, compared to the complicated and elaborate schemes required to strike the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and then to blame the attacks on Muslim Arabs hijacking U.S. commercial aircraft.
"Inside Job" Not Possible
If the Bush Administration carried out 9/11, a monumental undertaking of planning and coordination, why couldn't it have blamed the post-9/11 anthrax attacks on Muslim Arabs as well, thus giving greater impetus to the alleged desire to go to war in the Middle East? In fact, there was evidence of a foreign or al-Qaeda connection to the anthrax attacks but it was glossed over by the FBI, which came under pressure from liberal Senators Patrick Leahy and Thomas Daschle and "progressive" groups to find a right-wing culprit.
Such common-sense questions have been thrust aside because the 9/11 "truth movement" was not concerned about the real truth but political gain for the opponents of the Bush Administration. That is why a communist like Van Jones, and others like him from the "progressive" side of the political spectrum, were a major part of that apparatus.
This is not to say that there are not anomalies and problems in the official story. We know that a military intelligence unit, Able Danger, had identified several of the 9/11 hijackers in the U.S. a year before the 9/11 terrorist attacks were carried out. Nothing was done with the information by Clinton Administration officials who could have exposed and possibly stopped the plot.
But no amount of official accountability or reform of our incompetent or corrupt intelligence agencies will satisfy Alex Jones and his collaborators.
The LaRouche Connection
Consider another individual closely associated with Alex Jones who also appears regularly on Russian TV-Webster Tarpley, a former associate of cult leader Lyndon LaRouche. Jones and Tarpley work hand-in-glove, including on Jones' films, "The Obama Deception" and "Fall of the Republic." Tarpley's mentor, Lyndon LaRouche, served prison time on financial fraud charges and operates what critics have called an anti-Semitic or neo-fascist cult.
Americans disagreed about the Iraq War, but the LaRouche movement supported the bloodthirsty Saddam Hussein dictatorship. In a December 14, 1990, statement appearing in a LaRouche publication known as Executive Intelligence Review (EIR), LaRouche declared that Iraq represented the idea of "transforming the Arab population" through "scientific and technological progress." The LaRouche movement, during the 1980s and the time of President Reagan's critical confrontation with the Soviets throughout the world, was a mouthpiece for the Soviet line, defending Soviet foreign policy and Soviet client states, such as the one in Iraq.
Convicted con man LaRouche is considered the intellectual author of the 9/11 truth movement because he started questioning whether Muslims had staged the attacks right after they occurred. Larouche started out as a Marxist and, in a 1976 lecture, titled, "What Only Communists Know," declared his desire to bring into being "a new Marxist international..." The "inside job" theory of 9/11 is a Marxist view holding that a rogue or "imperialist" U.S. administration has covered up its own diabolical role in the events of that terrible day and blamed Muslim Arabs for the attacks. Once again, we see the propaganda theme that Muslims are poor victims of American foreign policy, cleverly diverting our attention from the very real and dangerous Islamic threat.