Pseudo Whistleblowers

Watergate is the quintessential conspiracy, one that went all the way to the White House and took down a presidency. But it is a story that is almost always provided without context, and with no mention of certain key facts. J Edgar Hoover died only a couple of months before the Watergate break-in, so the FBI was in the midst of a succession crisis when they were hit with the most controversial investigation in their history. Did this lead their deputy director Mark Felt, passed over by Nixon for promotion, to leak the story to Bob Woodward under the guise of Deep Throat?

In 1971 DOD analyst and RAND Corporation employee Daniel Ellsberg leaked The Pentagon Papers - the DOD's Top Secret history of the Vietnam War. This is one of the biggest and most famous leaks in history, but there remain huge questions about why this happened. Was Ellsberg a genuine whistleblower? Or were the Pentagon Papers leaked as part of a distraction and disinformation campaign?

Former CIA officer and NSA contractor Edward Snowden has recently joined Twitter. While this is hardly headline news the story has gone around the world, reported on by dozens of major media outlets. A follow-up story, that Snowden accidentally received 47 gigabytes of emails as a result of joining Twitter also got enormous attention, despite being obviously untrue.

Guillermo Jimenez Presents Tom Secker
On this edition of De-Manufacturing Consent: Guillermo is joined by Tom Secker, host of the ClandesTime podcast and author of the book Secret, Spies, and 7/7.
We discuss the “Snowden-ISIS hoax,” the false “news” story that has been circulating through the internet over the past few weeks that claims former NSA contractor Edward Snowden released documents proving the CIA/MI6/Mossad are running the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and its leader Al-Badhdadi.

When Hillary Clinton appointed Marc Grossman as US Special Envoy News coverage of the appointment dutifully noted Grossman’s long career at the State Department and past accomplishments, including his appointment as Career Ambassador by President Bush in 2004 and his Secretary of State Distinguished Service Award in 2005.

We all know the official story of Plamegate by now: the Bush administration, angry at ex-Ambassador Joe Wilson’s op-ed accusing the White House of “twisting the evidence” to lead the country into war with Iraq, leaked his wife’s identity as a CIA agent to journalist Robert Novak, who then revealed it in the Washington Post. After a lengthy investigation, “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s Chief of Staff, was convicted for obstruction of justice and Richard Armitage took the fall for leaking the name in the first place.