Keep your eyes on SusanG’s diaries over at Kos (starting with this thread and this thread). There might be some real shit breaking over there. Jeff Gannon, of Talon News (the guy who was printing White House press releases word-for-word), could end up at the center of a bona fide conspiracy. Some of the Kossacks think they’ve found proof Talon News is a propaganda mill operated by the Pentagon, and that CIA agent Valerie Plame’s name was leaked through “Talon News.” Makes sense that the Pentagon would do it, since the Pentagon under Bush has spent four years emasculating the CIA. If that’s true, then high-ranking officials of the Pentagon are guilty of treason. Real treason. As in, treason people would have been executed for 100 years ago. And this guy Gannon, whose only journalistic training is a two-day seminar, curiously also has White House press credentials, and is frequently acknowledged by the White House press secretary Scott McClellan. This thing could snowball way up. Or, it could go nowhere. We’ll see.
UPDATE: Some background on Talon over at Media Matters.
UPDATE 2: Added “Gannongate” to the title of this post because it’s catchy.
UPDATE 3: After I wrote, “Or, it could go nowhere,” I should have written, “Or, this could be a CIA black-op meant to seriously fuck with everybody, but especially the Pentagon.” This quote by MeteorBlades was catchy :
[W]e ’60s-’70s activists used to joke that we were being too paranoid about government spies and agents provocateurs in our midst. When the Freedom of Information Act made it possible to see files kept on us by the FBI and other government agencies, we discovered that we had not been paranoid enough.
Disinformation - the purposeful creation and sneaky delivery of falsehoods for political gain through apparently credible sources - has long been a useful tool of governments seeking to gain advantage over other governments, particularly, but not exclusively, in wartime. As we learned from Operation Mockingbird, those “disinformed” include not just foreign governments but a nation’s own citizens. In an October 1977 article published by Rolling Stone magazine, Carl Bernstein reported that more than 400 American journalists worked for the CIA.
UPDATE 4: See also part III, which contains some more discussion about leads, and part IV, which gives an overview of where the research is and where it’s going over the next couple of days.
Rusty, do you think we are just spinning our wheels on this thing? I wonder if the people out there a.) are educated enough to see the Government machinery is buying the press and b.) do they not give a shit as long as they get their $400 tax cuts from Bush???
I know its cynical, but this thing really disturbs me to no end. I don’t see any response to it at all from the feds.
The government buying the press isn’t a new problem. It’s been going on in varying degrees since at least the 1940s (go read the Operation Mockingbird page as a starting point, though it’s the sort of stuff that will make you wonder if anything is worth reading). The difference might be in the sloppiness with which this particular operation was executed.