Ever since the breaking of the news that the US government has a multibillion dollar program for rooting through everyone's mail, internet browisng habits and (of course) phone chatter, the journalists of the NYT have been engaged in a curious, sycnonized dance to rreassure and explain why. Could it have anything at all to do with the paper's long history of collusion with the secret government agencies?

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The CIA has long had a cozy relationship with media by Mystic Politics

Recall, as Carl Berstein does [1] , that the New York Times has long had a particularly close relationship with the secret US agencies. Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the CIA during the Cold War was the Times ' Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and (according to Bernstein) the  CIA officials put the Times at the top of the agency's asset list, along with CBS and Time Inc. It's position there was earned by its willinglness to help the CIA plant stories and perspectives in liberal media - because it was there and not in the right-wing press that opinion needed to be shifted.  The only important prerequisite for a loving relationship was that the newspaper or other media had to be 'pro-American big business', to use Berstein's term. The New York Times fitted then, and fits today, (with its hedge-fund backers) the bill very well. The disclosure a year ago of emails between Mark Mazzetti, the  Times ' national security and intelligence reporter, and CIA spokeswoman Marie Harf, should have reminded us of that fact.

Operation Mockingbird

But on to today's spy scandal. In a keynote piece  [2] published on June 11, 2013, by "The Editorial Board', the paper even advises the latest whistle-blower, Edward Snowden, that "he should brace himself for the charges and possible punishment that may come in its wake. Most likely, he will be charged with disclosure of classified information under the Espionage Act, which carries a possible 10-year jail term for each count'. For the Paper of Record:

"Mr. Snowden broke the agreement he made to keep these materials secret. He appeared forthright in confessing to the act and can use his testimony, should he be brought to trial, to make the case that he exposed a serious abuse of power (though, technically, he did not blow the whistle on fraud or criminal activity).'

This followed closely on the heels of a story published online on June 9, 2013, "Ex-C.I.A. Worker Says He Disclosed U.S. Surveillance' [3] which noted disdainfully that "the leaker is a relatively low-level employee of a giant government contractor', before adding sonorously that the episode "presents both international and domestic political difficulties for the Obama administration.'

It quoted at length a general statement from  James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, who was (and this is news, right!) worried that the revelations could create serious risks to national security. "We're very, very concerned about it,' he said. "For me, it is literally - not figuratively - literally gut-wrenching to see this happen, because of the huge, grave damage it does to our intelligence capabilities.'

Recall, as fellow writers here on OpEdNews have done [4], that before Edward Snowden there was Mark Klein, the telecommunications technician who revealed that AT&T was allowing the NSA access to vast amounts of customer data without warrants.

His allegations launched dozens of consumer lawsuits in early 2006 against the government and telecommunications companies for invasion of privacy- but guess what! nearly all fell flat on their faces when Congress granted the telecommunications industry retroactive immunity from legal challenges, an immunity which the Supreme Court upheld. Only one case was left - challenging the Justice Department's legal interpretation of the law that it was apparently relying on to collect consumers' electronic data without a warrant.- and who wanted this suit blocked too - James Clapper, like the loyal guard dog he is.

Clapper, the director of national intelligence, personally wrote to  US District Judge Jeffrey White to throw out the remaining lawsuit. claiming implausibly that the government risks "exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States" if forced to fight the lawsuit."

The Times even offered guidance to the administration in their efforts to get Snowden back, earnestly hoping: "that the new administration of President Xi Jinping of China ... may be more inclined than usual to put pressure on officials in Hong Kong to hand over Mr. Snowden.' In a kind of "other news just in' about Surveillance of Citizens by Government, came a story [5] that stronger rules for protecting personal data would provide back door for Russian law enforcement into services like Gmail, and the character assassination in a piece headed "For Snowden, a Life of Ambition, Despite the Drifting' [6]
 
But let's stick to the editorials. On July. 8, 2013, in "The Laws You Can't See'. the Times unveiled its preferred "solution' to the core Fourth Amendment problem of mass surveillance and civil liberties (detailed in a specific news story two days earlier,) centered on better Congressional oversight of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court -  because "until Americans have clear view of court's dealings, they can not meaningfully debate cost of national security', says the online article summary loftily.

The idea had been trailed by (amongst others [7]) Max Frankel, former New York Times editorial page editor, on Jun. 23, 2013 in an Op-Ed article calling for the creation of court dedicated to overseeing government intelligence programs.

But perhaps most revealing of all was the editorial of July 3, following on the heels of an Op-Ed piece, July. 2, 2013 by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, "California Democrat and liberal lioness', which challenged liberals by defending the NSA's surveillance programs and arguing that the danger from terrorists not only justifies but demands an aggressive national security apparatus. In similar spirit, the editorial questioned the "authenticity of outrage' expressed by European governments over the NSA spying. In both cases, the message was: governments spying on citizens is a normal part of life. So much for the supposed Op-Ed page policy of airing a range of opinions!

Perhaps the most dishonest piece appeared on June. 20, 2013, where a technological explanation is offered for the mass surveillance, which insists, contrary to all the evidence that the rise of "data mining, both as an industry and as crucial intelligence tool', has created a "complex reality'. Here, it is accepted that  both government and private corporations hunt, often collaboratively, for ways to collect, analyze and exploit large pools of data about millions of Americans, but (it is insisted) for vastly different reasons; "Silicon Valley does it to make money, while the National Security Agency does it for intelligence'. So what's dishonest about that?

But two facts that should not have eluded the Grey Lady's journalists, is that first, this story of mass interception of civilian communications is a not only a very old one, and secondly, that it has nothing to do with protecting the public, and everything to do with economics - an economics that is red in tooth and claw. Because, like everything else in the US, spying is big business.

Although we have all read many times (so it must be true) that the US security services (like the CIA and nowadays too, the NSA) primary mission during the Cold War was to fighting communism, and after 9/11 its job has been fighting terrorism, the subversive sociolinguist philosopher, Noam Chomsky has pointed out that actually, its priority has always been fighting democracy. From planting propaganda, corrupting elections to overthrowing democratic governments, from assassinating elected leaders to installing murderous dictators, the CIA has invariably opposed human rights and social justice and preferred instead dictatorships and the world-wide dominance of US based corporations. Not for nothing do the secret security services always recruit the nation's elite: millionaire businessmen, Wall Street brokers, members of the national news media, and Ivy League scholars.

Take Allen Dulles, for instance. The Director of the CIA at the height of the Cold War, was a senior partner at the Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, representing the Rockefeller empire and other mammoth trusts, corporations and cartels. He was also a board member of the J. Henry Schroeder Bank, with offices in Wall Street, London, Zurich and Hamburg. The CIA has always been the property of businessmen, run for business reasons. Democracy doesn't come into it. In fact, democracy is rather a nuisance, along with concepts like "truth', "openness' and 'impartiality'.

It is for that reason that, as Chomsky puts it, the media is actually a mechanism for pervasive "thought control" of the masses in the favour of an elite, and that before reading a newspaper, let alone looking at a TV program, citizens need to "undertake a course of intellectual self-defence to protect themselves from manipulation and control""

The US security establishment today is made up of the huge defense contractors - corporations like Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon and Endgame via (until recently) less well-known companies like Booz Allen and Hamilton, who employed not only the now famous whistle-blower Edward Snowden but also one Mike McDonnell, a former head of the NSA. Scarcely surprising that Booz has been entrusted with so many juicy defense contracts out of a NSA "secret-defense' budget estimated at around $10 billion a year. (The NSA's new centre for stocking computer records at Bluffdale, Utah will cost on its own $2 billion.)

That's a lot of public money to spend with nothing formally to show for it. But the reality is, as the French newspaper, the Figaro, put it, quoting an unnamed senior figure in the French defence department who had been entertained at those secret briefings in Fort Meade (the ones that Snowden leaked the Powerpoints of), ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall, "the NSA has been 80% preoccupied with economic intelligence.'

Curiously, the Times does not seem to know this despite the fact that there have been several public inquiries into the mass interception of civilian communications in the US and a large (multi-year) investigation by the Scientific and Technological Options Assessment arm of the European Parliament published in 1999. (I  was a visiting researcher at STOA, in the 1990s, and even I "exposed' the NSA eavesdropping in a book in 2005 [8].)

As I recently argued on OpEdNews [9], the STOA report explains why the American interest is so great. The claim made by the authors (by Duncan Campbell and others) is that mass communications interception and processing is a system which enables the countries using it to obtain significant economic information and, hence, to secure a leading position on the commercial markets. There are numerous, soundly demonstrated, examples where American companies have secured contracts as a result of communications having been intercepted including.

* In January 1994 an arms supply contract worth 30 million francs with Saudi Arabia ended up with McDonnell-Douglas, the rival of the Airbus consortium, because the former was privy to the financial terms offered by Airbus thanks to the electronic interception system.

* The French electronics giant, Thomson lost a contract worth 1.4 million dollars for the supply of a surveillance system to Brazil because the Americans had intercepted details of the negotiations and passed them on to the US Raytheon Corporation, which subsequently won the contract.

* The NSA intercepted phone calls between Thomson-CSF and Brazil concerning SIVAM, a $1.3 billion surveillance system for the Amazon rain forest. The contract was awarded to the US Raytheon Corporation - who announced afterwards that "the Department of Commerce worked very hard in support of U.S. industry on this project,' as well they might.

Finally, a well-informed press report in the Baltimore Sun as long ago as 1995 noted that: "from a commercial communications satellite, NSA lifted all the faxes and phone calls between the European consortium Airbus , the Saudi national airline and the Saudi government. The agency found that Airbus agents were offering bribes to a Saudi official. It passed the information to U.S. officials pressing the bid of Boeing Co and McDonnell Douglas Corp., which triumphed last year in the $6 billion competition.'

Other accounts have been published by reputable journalists and some firsthand witnesses citing frequent occasions on which the US government has utilized covertly intercepted communications for national commercial purposes. These include targeting data about the emission standards of Japanese vehicles; 1995 trade negotiations the import of Japanese luxury cars; French participation in the GATT trade negotiations in 1993; the Asian-Pacific Economic Conference (APEC), 1997.

Norman Solomon the American journalist,  and antiwar activist  has pointed out [10] the curious synchronized dance of  New York Times columnists David Brooks, Thomas Friedman and Bill Keller, all of whom have responded to Snowden's revelations by siding with the secret agencies of the U.S. government. Brooks even denounced Snowden as "a traitor' during a June 14 appearance on the PBS NewsHour, saying indignantly: "He betrayed his oath, which was given to him and which he took implicitly and explicitly. He betrayed his company, the people who gave him a job, the people who trusted him. . . . He betrayed the democratic process. It's not up to a lone 29-year-old to decide what's private and public. We have - actually have procedures for that set down in the Constitution and established by tradition.'

So, for the New York Times and much of the political establishment, it is  speaking out, not listening in that thus is against the Constitution. Thus the Grey Lady once again manages to turn Black into White.

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Links and notes
1. http://carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php]

2. click here

3. click here
(in print on June 10, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition. The authors were MARK MAZZETTI and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

4. for example, click here=a&id=163348

5. on July. 15, 2013

6. click here

7. For example, other advice on the correct way to spy on your citizens comes later in the form of an Op-Ed article by "policy experts' Leonard H Schrank and Juan C Zarate who daringly assert that the Obama administration must demonstrate that programs are not only valuable and legal, but also that government's use of data can be constrained and verified.

8. An extract is at click here

9. "NSA spying - another side of the story-- Data Privatized For Corporate Use' click here

10. Soloman was writing at: http://my.firedoglake.com/nsolomon/tag/surveillance/

Authors Website: http://www.philosophical-investigations.org

Authors Bio:

Martin Cohen is a well-established author specializing in popular books in philosophy, social science and politics. His most recent projects include the UK edition of Philosophy for Dummies (Wiley June 2010); How to Live: Wise and not-so-wise Advice from the Great Philosophers (MSU, 2014); Mind Games: 31 days to rediscover your Brain (Blackwell, July 2010) and The Doomsday Machine: The High Price of Nuclear Energy, the World's Most Dangerous Fuel.

He recently left Op-Ed News in protest at what he saw as the increasingly ILLIBERAL style of the site, and in particular an editorial line in support of the Russian annexation of Ukraine.

One post (not printed) argued that the views of RTV (Russia TV), featured on the site, were illiberal, especially since RTV was now firmly under the control of the Russian state news agency, led by Dmitry Kiselev, a talk show host notorious for his suggestion that "gays' hearts should be incinerated in ovens." He was also unhappy to be associated with a site that ran a series of 'headlined' articles in praise of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. One such, by former Reagan staffer, Paul Craig Roberts's, for example, praised "Putin's calm leadership, the absence of provocative statements and threats, and his insistence on legality".

He wrote another post about the Energy and economics issues (see the Philosophical-investigations blog) behind the conflict that was likewise rejected twice on 'technical grounds (like 'not enough references') and then finally like this:

"You submitted an article titled:
Putin's other Cronies?

This article was submitted with category OpEdNews_Op_Eds and tags Energy, Investors, Markets, Oil, Oil, Pipeline, Putin, Russia

Thank you but this article doesn't meet our writing standards. You may NOT resubmit this or post it, even with modifications, as a diary, poll or comment. See our writers guidelines and FAQ for more info."

This clearly confirmed to Martin that the site is indeed not a suitable place for progressive writers and thinkers.