Military Industrial Complex and Whitney Webbs Speech
Whitney Webb’s Speech to the First Annual Children’s Health Defense Conference, October, 2022. For those few who did not catch it on Malones substack I have copied it below, link and all. This is an important speech.
My thoughts first. Many of you are familiar with the Military Industrial Complex coined by Eisenhower in his farewell speech during the Cold War in 1961. In the same speech he warned about a Scientific Elite due to the influence of government funding of scientific research (Reagans expansion of Bayh- Doles scope in the early 80’s made this problem far, far worse) .
What most don’t know is Eisenhower originally used the term Military Industrial Congressional Complex before editing it out to avoid insulting Congress (from Alex Abella, Soldiers of Reason)
Eisenhower warned of an ominous threat to American liberty:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist . . . only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
In the penultimate draft of his speech, Eisenhower had referred to the military-industrial-congressional complex, but reportedly crossed out the last portion in deference to legislators. After all, they might be the last guarantors of traditional America, one where there was “no armaments industry [where] American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well.”
A lot has changed over the last 60 years. The MIC or MICC as you will has expanded enormously, not just the physical sciences but also now includes the social science and biological sciences as their weapons moved to psychological operations , -Cognitive and Information Warfare and Biological Weapons. This brought Medical Science, Big Pharma , MSM, Hollywood, Social Media into the MIC
Remember, Operation Mockingbird never went away, we just pretend it did. Today 5 MIC-connected companies control most of MSM and another handful of MIC Connected Tech companies control most of Social Media
Consider Anthropology (the movie Avatar shows Anthropologists in opposition to the Military to protect the natives, that ain’t happening here)
The post-9/11 political climate casts a pall of orthodoxy over critical discussions of militarization and national security, and the rise of anti-intellectual media pundits attacking those who question increasing American militarization adds pressure to muzzle dissent.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2010/04/09/silent-coup/
Human Terrain Systems (HTS) – a program with over 400 employees, originally operating through private contractors and now in the process of being taken over by the U.S. Army. Human Terrain embeds anthropologists with military units to ease the occupation and conquest of Iraqis and Afghanis – with plans to extend these operations in Africa through expanding units with AFRICOM
Supporters of HTS claim the program uses embedded social scientists to help reduce “kinetic engagements,” or unnecessary violent contacts with the populations they encounter. The idea is to use these social scientists to interact with members of the community, creating relationships to reduce misunderstandings that can lead to unnecessarily violent interactions.
HTS sells itself to the public through remarkably well-organized domestic propaganda campaigns that have seen dozens of uncritical articles on HTS, with personality profiles, as a “peaceful” means of achieving victory.
Human Terrain Systems is not some neutral humanitarian project, it is an arm of the U.S. military and is part of the military’s mission to occupy and destroy opposition to U.S. goals and objectives.
HTS’s goal is a gentler form of domination. Pretending that the military is a humanitarian organization does not make it so, and pretending that HTS is anything other than an arm of the military engaging in a specific form of conquest is sheer dishonesty.
HTS social scientists’ reports can be used by military and intelligence agencies in ways that can make studied populations vulnerable. Safeguards protecting gathered data for use by military or intelligence agencies are absent.
If you think this cant be applied within the US, think again
The Military invented the Internet (ARPA-Net) and so encompasses Big Tech as well. Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet Surveillance Valley, by Yasha Levine explains that well
More on Big Tech from Yasha Levines book
The Highlands Group was founded in 1994 by retired US Navy captain Dick O’Neill as an official Pentagon project at the appointment of Bill Clinton’s then defense secretary William Perry. Operating under the stewardship Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), and DARPA its purpose was for key DoD, industry, and academic IO experts” to coordinate Information Operations (IO) across federal military intelligence agencies.
The co-chair and “Yoda” of the Highlands Forum has been Andy Marshall, who headed up one of the Pentagon’s most powerful agencies, the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), which conducts highly classified research on future planning for defense policy across the US military and intelligence community. Appointed to the position by Nixon, Marshall remained in office until his retirement on January 2, 2015. Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts in The Last Warrior describe Marshall as “an intellectual giant comparable to such nuclear strategists as Bernard Brodie, Herman Kahn, Henry Kissinger, James Schlesinger, and Albert Wohlstetter.”
Marshall, who was strongly influenced by Friedrich Hayek, joined the RAND in 1949, at the behest of mentor W. Allen Wallis, who served as the treasurer of the Mont Pelerin Society, and who maintained a lifelong friendship with Milton Friedman, Aaron Director and George Stigler. Marshall was “the DoD’s most elusive” but “one of its most influential” officials, and “Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz” were among Marshall’s “star protégés.” A third co-chair was Anthony J. Tether, the director DARPA, and a Rumsfeld appointee. Before joining DARPA, Tether was vice president of SAIC’s Advanced Technology Sector.
Forum delegates include senior US military officials across numerous agencies and divisions , including ”captains, rear admirals, generals, colonels, majors and commanders” as well as “members of the DoD leadership.”Delegates have included senior personnel from SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton, RAND, Cisco, Human Genome Sciences, eBay, PayPal, IBM, Google, Microsoft, AT&T, the BBC, Disney, General Electric and Enron. Other participants have included David Ignatius, associate editor of the Washington Post and executive editor of the International Herald Tribune; New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, Le Cercle member and Washington Times editor Arnaud de Borchgrave, Steven Levy, a former Newsweek editor, senior writer for Wired and chief tech editor at Medium; Lawrence Wright, staff writer at the New Yorker; Noah Shachtmann, executive editor at the Daily Beast; Rebecca McKinnon, co-founder of Global Voices Online; Nik Gowing of the BBC; and John Markoff of the New York Times.
1994 , the same year the Highlands Forum was founded, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, then two young PhD students at Stanford University, made their breakthrough on the first automated web crawling and page ranking application. Brin and Page had performed their work with funding from the Digital Library Initiative (DLI), a multi-agency program of the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA and DARPA. While Page’s funding was provided through the NSF, Brin was funded through a grant to Stanford managed by Brin’s supervisor Prof. Jeffrey D. Ullman, who was in 1996 part of a joint funding project of DARPA’s Intelligent Integration of Information program.
Throughout the development of the search engine, Brin reported regularly to Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham and Dr. Rick Steinheiser, both representatives of a sensitive US intelligence community research programme on information security and data-mining. Steinheiser represented the CIA’s Office of Research and Devepment (ORD). Thuraisingham was chief scientist for data and information management for MITRE Corporation, a leading US defense contractor, where she managed the Massive Digital Data Systems initiative, a project sponsored by the NSA, CIA, and the Director of Central Intelligence, to foster innovative research in information technology.
According to Thuraisingham, in addition to the private sector, Brin’s seed-funding was provided in part by a program called Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) that she was administering when she was at the MITRE along with Steinheiser. The primary sponsors of MDDS were three agencies the NSA, the CIA’s Office of Research & Development, and the intelligence community’s Community Management Staff (CMS), which operates under the Director of Central Intelligence.
In 2003, Andrew Marshall (Yoda) commissioned a report for the Pentagon predicting that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies.
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA469325.pdf
Really? The Pentagon is on on the Climate Fraud too? Yup.
Military Intelligence is interlocked with CIA and Private Corporate intelligence Networks and covert operations by CIA and Special Operations require cooperations with Finance and Banking firms to launder money secretly, so the MIC also includes many Wall Street firms.
The MIC is now a Global Octopus and not just US Centric Organization. What they cant legally do in the US against US. Citizens they use intelligence agencies in Israel, UK, Canada, Australia to do and they return the favor. Five Eyes can see more than the One Eye
Within the USG the MIC includes HHS and most of the Executive Agencies. Indeed, the USG have become part of the MIC and not necessarily the dominant or controlling partner. Fauci derives 60% of his salary for his Biodefense Work. In 2004 Cheney had the brilliant idea to put Fauci as the head of the dual use Biodefense program Bush was building in the wake of Anthrax as a cover for the Militaries bioweapon research and development. Does anyone seriously think the military hands off Biodefense to Fauci?
Fauci takes orders
Most of the top Corporations in the US, many of whom are WEF Members, CFR or Atlantic Council are now part of this expanded MIC. CEO’s can take orders and many of the board members of these companies come from the Military, Congress, Intelligence and other Executive Agencies. Its an interlocking web of Corruption, or as Whitney calls it, The Blob
Indeed, the expansion of the MIC increased exponentially thanks to George H.W. Bush. Following his stint as CIA Director and after Carters CIA purge he set up The Enterprise
Interesting quote in Whitney Webbs book
“Who are these people? They are the group that is popularly called the Enterprise. They are in and outside [the] CIA. They are mostly Right Wing Republicans, but you will find a mix of Democrats, mercenaries, ex officio Mafia and opportunists within the group. They are CEOs, they are bankers, they are presidents, they own airlines, they own national television networks.
They own six of the seven video documentary companies of Washington, DC and they do not give a damn about the law or the Constitution or the Congress or the Oversight committees except as something to be subverted and character assassination, and planted stories, the incomplete thought and sentence. They burn and shred files if caught, they commit perjury, and when caught they have guaranteed sinecures with large US corporations. If you let them, they will take over not only [the] CIA but the entire government and the world, cutting off dissent, free speech, a free media, and they will cut a deal with anyone, from [the] Mafia to Saddam Hussein, if it means more power and money.
They stole $600 billion from the S & L’s and then diverted our attention to the Iraqis. They are ripping off America at a rate never before seen in history. They flooded our country with drugs from Central America during the 1980s, cut deals with Haro in Mexico, Noriega in Panama, and the Medillin and Cali cartels, and Castro, and recently the Red Mafia in the KGB. They ruin their detractors and they fear the truth. If they can, they will blackmail you. Sex, drugs, deals, whatever it takes.”
–Former CIA officer and Iran-Contra whistleblower Bruce Hemmings, circa 1990
I am pretty sure The Enterprise now includes many Retired Military in addition to retired Intelligence Officers and Business Men who may or may not be one or the other, not to mention Organized Crime.
While the MIC of 60 years ago was focused on Foreign Populations as potential Enemies now the Domestic Population is included in their focus. And yes, Homeland Security is part of the MIC
According to a report last year, their are as many as 60,000 Signature Disruption Forces working in US or abroad, many of them ex-Special Forces
https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-inside-militarys-secret-undercover-army-1591881
The largest undercover force the world has ever known is the one created by the Pentagon over the past decade. Some 60,000 people now belong to this secret army, many working under masked identities and in low profile, all part of a broad program called "signature reduction." The force, more than ten times the size of the clandestine elements of the CIA, carries out domestic and foreign assignments, both in military uniforms and under civilian cover, in real life and online, sometimes hiding in private businesses and consultancies, some of them household name companies
Funny how that story went away. Not a peep from anyone, even the so called alternative investigative media and activists.
And lest we forget in 2015 Bill Gates called for the militarization of the health system .
While the article does not mention the US military specifically one just has to look at the militarization of Operation Warp Speed
Just 29 of the roughly 90 leaders on the chart aren’t employed by the Department of Defense; most of them work for the Department of Health and Human Services and its subagencies.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/09/28/operation-warp-speed-vast-military-involvement/
And while much ado is made of Fauci department funding Eco Health Alliance (EHA) GOF, the DoD and CIA cut-out USAID funding of EHA greatly exceeded NIH/NIAID
EHA rcvd $41.91 million from Pentagon since 2008. ($13.17 million from the Department of Health and Human Services).
$37.61 million was awarded to EcoHealth Alliance by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA)
https://nypost.com/2021/07/01/pentagon-gave-millions-to-ecohealth-alliance-for-wuhan-lab/
For a more detailed look at COVID beyond Fauci see this.
Anyways, here is Whitneys speech for those that did not catch it on Malone’s substack
For years, the censorship of factual information that is inconvenient to certain powerful actors, including the US Federal Government and Big Pharma, has been steadily increasing as “information warfare” has become an ever present force in our lives.
In a world where what were once obvious truths are under attack, even the very definitions of “journalist” and “journalism” have themselves become controversial and contested. Too often in this “information war”, the first casualty is the truth itself. Facts are rarely treated as sacred by the world’s largest and most influential media outlets, but instead are treated as something to be twisted and manipulated for the benefit of their paying sponsors. In this environment, too many media personalities have become mercenaries for hire and, as a consequence, public trust in the media is cratering. Meanwhile, those who do aim to champion truth in their work are targeted, smeared and censored by tech companies and platforms aligned with “mercenary media”, unaccountable intelligence services, and out of control oligarchs.
The following essay focuses on the ongoing insidious effort to normalize the censorship of factual information, the historical context of this war on dissenting voices, and how “journalism” today has increasingly become about protecting the powerful rather than holding them to account. Potential solutions to this existential crisis in journalism are also discussed.
Journalism in Crisis: The War on Dissent
With each passing day, it seems that Journalism is becoming less of a profession and more of a war zone. Indeed the difference between journalism and “information warfare” is becoming increasingly difficult to pinpoint.
Whereas journalism continues to be defined as “writing characterized by a direct presentation of facts or description of events without an attempt at interpretation” – in practice, it has become a battlefield where the most powerful media outlets - that is, those closest to the centers of power – deliberately manipulate or omit facts to craft narratives that expressly benefit the powerful while also colluding to censor their more truthful competition.
These media outlets act as mercenaries, with little or no regard for how their actions negatively impact our society and distort reality. Their allegiances lie not with the public, but with those with the deepest pockets.
In doing so, in many cases these media mercenaries actively work to suppress the facts and malign those in journalism who do strive to champion the truth above all else. Instead of holding the powerful to account, many so-called journalists today act more as accessories to the crimes committed by the powerful against the public.
Objective presentation of the facts, as far as the bulk of mainstream media is concerned, is dead and has been dead for some time. As a consequence, public trust in these media outlets has completely cratered. Yet, even the ostensible challenge to mainstream media, so-called independent or alternative media, is often troubled by similar issues, as the quest for clicks and fame can often supersede objective, factual reporting even outside the bounds of mainstream media. As a result, navigating the world of journalism has never been more difficult or more precarious than it is right now.
But if some get their way, navigating the media landscape in search of truth will soon become impossible. There are major efforts, years in the making, to censor dissenting opinions under the guise of censoring “misinformation.” As many readers are undoubtedly aware, what was last year’s “misinformation” with respect to COVID-19 injections has only recently undergone a dramatic change into “breaking news.” Yet, many of us who were right all along and were censored when factual information that is now recognized as true was erroneously labeled “misinformation,” have received no apologies or compensation from our lost income. In many cases, our old platforms have not been returned to us. The censorship hammer has not been wielded with incompetence, instead it has been and is being intentionally used to squeeze out those of us who would dare to speak the truth, no matter how inconvenient it may be at the time.
As the online censorship onslaught continues, it is becoming increasingly normalized. Growing restrictions, deplatforming and its other manifestations have become so pervasive that many have simply come to accept it as a “new normal.” This “new normal” for free speech is as insidious as it has been gradual, as we are being trained to accept unconstitutional limitations on what we can express on the websites that dominate online socialization.
The argument that is often deployed to dismiss concerns regarding online censorship is the claim that the dominant social media companies are private, not public, entities. However, in reality, the Big Tech firms that dominate our online lives, particularly Google and Facebook, were either created with some involvement of the U.S. national security state or have become major U.S. government and/or military contractors over the past two decades. When it comes to censoring and deplatforming individuals for claims that run counter to U.S. government narratives, it should be clear that Google-owned YouTube, and other tech platforms owned by contractors to the U.S. military and intelligence communities, have a major conflict of interest in their stifling of speech.
The line between “private” Silicon Valley and the public sector has become increasingly blurred, and it is now a matter of record that these companies have illegally passed information onto intelligence services such as the NSA, for use in what are blatantly unconstitutional surveillance programs aimed at American civilians. All indications point to the military-industrial complex having now expanded into the military-technology-industrial complex.
These days, one need only look at important government commissions — such as the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which was headed by former Google/Alphabet CEO Eric Schmidt — to see how this de facto public-private partnership between Silicon Valley and the national security state functions, and its outsized role in setting important tech-related policies for both the private and public sectors. For example, that commission, largely comprised of representatives of the military, intelligence community and Big Tech, has helped set policy on “countering disinformation” online.
More specifically, it has recommended weaponizing Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the express purpose of identifying online accounts to deplatform and speech to censor, framing this recommendation as essential to U.S. national security as it relates to “information warfare.”
There are already several companies competing to market an AI-powered censorship engine to the national security state as well as the private sector, for use against journalists and non-journalists alike. One of these companies is Primer AI, a “machine intelligence” company that “builds software machines that read and write in English, Russian, and Chinese to automatically unearth trends and patterns across large volumes of data.” The company publicly states that their work “supports the mission of the intelligence community and broader DOD by automating reading and research tasks to enhance the speed and quality of decision-making.” Their current roster of clients includes not just the U.S. military and the U.S. intelligence community, but major American companies like Walmart and private “philanthropic” organizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Primer’s founder, Sean Gourley, who previously created AI programs for the military to track insurgents in post-invasion Iraq, asserted in an April 2020 blog post that “computational warfare and disinformation campaigns will become a more serious threat than physical war, and we will have to rethink the weapons we deploy to fight them.” In that same post, Gourley argued for the creation of a “Manhattan Project for truth” that would create a publicly available Wikipedia-style database built off of “knowledge bases [that] already exist inside many countries’ intelligence agencies for national security purposes.” Gourley wrote that “this effort would be ultimately about building and enhancing our collective intelligence and establishing a baseline for what’s true or not.” In other words, Gourley says we should let the CIA tell us what is true and what is false. He concludes his blog post by stating that “in 2020, we will begin to weaponize truth.” And, two years later, it seems that Gourley was right. That is what they have done.
Since that year, Primer has been under contract with the U.S. military to “develop the first-ever machine learning platform to automatically identify and assess suspected disinformation.” That the term “suspected disinformation” was used is no accident, as many instances of online censorship have involved merely assertions, as opposed to confirmations, that censored speech, including censored journalism, is part of a nation state-connected or “bad actor”-connected disinformation campaign.
While those campaigns do exist, legitimate and constitutionally protected speech that deviates from the “official” or government-sanctioned narrative are frequently censored under these metrics, often with little to no ability to meaningfully appeal the censor’s decision. In other cases, posts “suspected” of being disinformation or that which are flagged as such (sometimes erroneously) by social media algorithms, are removed or hidden from public view without the poster’s knowledge.
In addition, “suspected disinformation” can be used to justify the censorship of speech that is inconvenient for particular governments, corporations and groups, as there is no need to have evidence or present a coherent case that said content is disinformation — one must only cast suspicion upon it in order to have it censored. Further complicating this issue is the fact that some claims initially labeled “disinformation” later become accepted fact or recognized as legitimate speech. This has happened on more than one occasion during the COVID-19 crisis, where journalists had their accounts deleted or their content censored merely for broaching issues like the lab-leak hypothesis as well as questions over mask and vaccine efficacy, among many other issues. A year or two later, much of this supposed “disinformation” has since become acknowledged as legitimate avenues of journalistic inquiry. The initial bout of blanket censorship on these topics was done at the behest of public and private actors alike due to their inconvenience to what had once been the prevailing narrative.
In what appears to be the apparent fulfillment of Primer AI’s pleas, the Biden administration has recently announced a push to “increase digital literacy” among the American public, while censoring also “harmful content” disseminated by so-called “domestic terrorists” as well as by “hostile foreign powers seeking to undermine American democracy.” The latter is a clear reference to the claim that critical reporting of U.S. government policy, particularly its military and intelligence activities abroad, is synonymous with “Russian disinformation,” a now-discredited claim that has been used to heavily censor independent media.
Regarding “increasing digital literacy,” the policy documents from the Biden administration make it clear that this refers to a new “digital literacy” education curriculum that is currently being developed by the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S.’ domestically-focused intelligence agency, for a domestic audience.
This “digital literacy” initiative would have previously violated U.S. law, until the Obama administration worked with Congress to repeal the Smith-Mundt Act, which lifted the World War II-era ban on the U.S. government directing propaganda at domestic audiences.
The Biden administration’s war on domestic terror policy also makes it clear that the censorship, as described above, is part of a “broader priority” of the administration, which it defines as follows:
“[…] enhancing faith in government and addressing the extreme polarization, fueled by a crisis of disinformation and misinformation often channeled through social media platforms, which can tear Americans apart and lead some to violence.”
In other words, fostering trust in government while simultaneously censoring “polarizing” voices who distrust or criticize the government is a key policy goal behind the Biden administration’s domestic-terror strategy. In addition, this statement implies that Americans not agreeing with each other is problematic and frames that disagreement as a driver of violence, as opposed to a normal occurrence in a supposed democracy that has constitutional protections for freedom of speech. From this framing, it is implied that such violence can only be stopped if all Americans trust the government and agree with its narratives and “truths.” Framing deviations from these narratives as national security threats, as is done in this policy document, invites the labeling of non-conforming speech as “violence” or as “inciting violence” through the fomentation of disagreement. As a result, those who post non-conforming speech online may soon find themselves being labeled as “terrorists” by the state if this policy is not reversed.
So what does this mean for journalists? Must all journalists conform to government-approved talking points lest they be accused of “inciting violence” and “terrorism”? If a journalist reports truthful information that makes the public angry at certain government institutions, are they to be deemed a national security threat in such a framework? While such a scenario may seem fantastical to some, one need look no further than the case of Julian Assange, who is currently being treated as a terrorist for publishing factual information that was inconvenient to powerful factions that manage the American empire.
Information warfare, when waged by the powers that be in this country, is a war on the truth. It is a war to replace the truth with a narrative that supports their needs, not ours. It is a war to distort reality and to manipulate the public to support policies that are against their best interests. While they may frame such measures as necessary to “protect” democracy, the elimination and imminent criminalization of legitimate speech and legitimate journalism is the true threat to democracy, one that should deeply disturb all Americans. If the national security state controls and enforces the only permissible narratives and the only permitted version of the “truth,” whether for journalists or everyday Americans, they will then also control human perception, and — as a consequence — human behavior. One could argue that this is the ultimate goal of so much of what we are facing today – total control over human behavior.
Thankfully, for those that seek to “weaponize” the truth and stamp out dissent, the truth is not as easily manipulated and distorted as they may think. At a visceral level, people gravitate towards the truth. They may succeed in hiding the truth from many or even most of us for a time, but – once it comes out – it spreads like wildfire. Governments around the world, the biggest media outlets in the world and even groups like the World Economic Forum are desperate to “rebuild trust” with the public. Despite these efforts, polls indicate that the public trusts them less than ever before. They may deplatform the truth, they may censor the truth and they may imprison those who tell the truth or label them terrorists – but their lies and their distortions can never, ever replace it.