William Colby: "the CIA owns everyone..."

[Wombaticus Rex]

Was surprised to see what I had always thought to be an utterly fictional quote invoked on, of all places, Education Forum:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... ntry263536

"The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media."

is there any evidence that this quote is non-fiction? I seem to recall this zirconium gem first showed up in a Dave McGowan book prior to being blasted through the internees echo chamber. Any data is much appreciated.

[undead]

Do you mean to ask if Colby in fact said that, or if the sentence itself is true? I couldn't be bothered to spend any time arguing the obvious, although I think it would be more accurately put that Transnational Capitalism owns everyone in the mainstream media, and the CIA as well.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Just curious: do you really think I'd be asking the latter?

[undead]

No, I didn't think you would ask that, but the grammar you used was confusing. It would have been more clear to say, "Did he actually say that?". And besides it isn't the CIA that does the owning, really, since they are some of the most strictly owned people there are. Maybe it's a good idea to occasionally re-examine assumptions that are taken for granted . Certainly the CIA is a major tool for those who own everything, and maybe the people at the very top of it are some of the owners, but not simply through their being in charge of the CIA.

It would be more clear to say ""The CIA threatens and blackmails everyone of any significance in the major media an behalf of their owners."

[Wombaticus Rex]

An excellent point, I did manage to mangle that nicely.

[JackRiddler]

Supposedly first quoted by McGowan - did he have a citation?

[Wombaticus Rex]

A poignant thread here:

http://metabunk.org/threads/158-Debunke ... media-quot

Quickly veers from the confines of "did Colby say that?" into a crossfire of misunderstanding and character attacks. Glad that sort of thing never happens here.

Note that nothing in that thread constitutes evidence -- just that someone online who writes in list format claims there is no attribution in the book. Will have to secure my own copy to verify that.

[harry ashburn]

too bad there are so many 'accidental deaths' like Colby's, there aren't enough investigators to investigate them. Drowned while kayaking the Potomac?? ReallY? And anybody who swallows that "single paddle theory" is dreaming.

[semper occultus]

pg 13 of Derailing Democracy - definitely no citation.....

the chapter specifically relates to corporate control of the media rather than any Mockingbird style shenanigans......the index under "CIA and the media" gives one ref.......to page 13 !

the other quote on the page is :

"You know one things that's wrong with this country? Everybody gets a chance to have their fair say." President Clinton

which does seem to have been said

Let me tell you something -- wait a minute. You know one things that's wrong with this country? Everybody gets a chance to have their fair say. My budget did more to fight AIDS than any in history, and we're having to put up with this. (Applause.) Tell them to let me talk. (Applause.) If you want to give a speech -- go out there and raise your own crowd. We'll be glad to listen to you. (Applause.) So there were those -- (interruption) -- I'll make you a deal. I'll ignore them if you will. (Applause.) Response to hecklers, courtyard of Philadelphia City Hall (May 28, 1993)

[Wombaticus Rex]

Thank you sir. Loose attribution aside, is the book worth purchasing?

[semper occultus]

....well its 95% themed chapters made up of short quotes from various diverse sources which you won't see counter-posed anywere else very easily - mash-up of US MSM, alternative/activist media, Amnesty International, senate reports etc etc - topped & tailed by minimal original content - the aforesaid introduction & a closing chapter on Kosovo....I'd wouldn't pay > £5 tbh

[8bitagent]

Gonna download and watch the new documentary about the life of William Colby


Curious if it touches on his highly suspicious death. I consider the last known possible Franklin coverup related hit that I can think of.

[elfismiles]

Well I don't have any direct info for your question but I did just come across this quote recently:

As documented by Kathryn Olmstead: 1996,Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI, 1996, Univ. of North Carolina Press, who notes that Watergate investigative reporter Carl Bernstein found (p. 21) " that the total number of U.S. journalists who worked for the CIA was actually much higher. In a controversial article in 'Rolling Stone', Bernstein showed that more than 400 American journalists secretly carried out assignments for the CIA from the early 1950's to the mid-1970's. The 'New York Times' alone, Bernstein insisted, provided cover for ten CIA officers from 1950 to 1966."

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/12 ... r-bob.html

[Wombaticus Rex]

An excellent and useful catch, I really appreciate you posting that, Miles.

Surely the most amusing part of that "debunking" thread I posted earlier was the calming notion that, of course, all these programs stopped in the 1970's. if there's anything you can rely on institutions to do, it's give up their own power for the greater good.

[MinM]

@SpyTalker: William E. #Colby: The Gray Man
https://twitter.com/SpyTalker/status/330383712871129089

The Gray Man
‘Shadow Warrior,’ by Randall B. Woods
By EVAN THOMAS
Published: May 3, 2013

William E. Colby, right, with another former director of central intelligence, George H. W. Bush, in 1978.

During the Vietnam War, Bill Colby of the Central Intelligence Agency ran the Phoenix program, which set out to “neutralize” the Viet Cong by capturing or killing them. In 1972, when Colby came home to a nation that had turned against the war, his face began appearing around Washington on “Wanted” posters. He was jeered on the street and peppered with death threats. Every day at 5 a.m., he was awakened at home by the same crank caller, accosting him as a murderer and a war criminal. Colby did not bother to get his home number changed. Instead, he began to use the predawn call as an alarm clock...

In “Shadow Warrior,” we get the occasional glimpse of emotion. When one of his young sons began arguing with him about the morality of the Vietnam War, Colby became “red-faced,” the son recalled, and “shouted that war was brutal — it brutalized everyone who came into contact with it — but sometimes there was no alternative. He himself, he admitted, had killed men in war, even with his bare hands.” But such moments of self-­revelation are fleeting. Mostly Colby presented himself as Galahad in a fallen world, a modest knight to be sure, but bent on finding the grail amid sin and corruption. “He was a man who could distinguish between illusion and reality,” Woods, a professor of history at the University of Arkansas, writes. “Or so he convinced himself.”

In 1954, President Eisenhower commissioned Gen. James Doolittle to write a secret report on the state of American intelligence. Faced with an “implacable enemy,” the report found, the West would have, in effect, to fight fire with fire. Fair play was out: dirty tricks were in.

The realpolitik of the cold war raised an ancient philosophical question: If you adopt the underhanded tactics of the enemy, if you stoop to his level, do you become like him? Colby does not seem to have been troubled by the problem. He did not become a drunk or turn half-mad like so many spies and spy chasers of that tortured time, most notably James Jesus Angleton, the head of counterintelligence, who was Colby’s antagonist at the C.I.A. Colby was always rather a Boy Scout (indeed, he led a Boy Scout troop when he was at home on the weekends, and worshiped at the Church of the Little Flower). ...

In Vietnam, Colby, like many agency men, rejected a purely military solution, preferring to win “hearts and minds” by nation building. But, as always, he faced moral compromises. The Phoenix program was used by local chieftains to carry out vendettas. Colby objected to the word “assassination” and insisted that the killing was justified. He believed that the C.I.A.’s pacification programs were working in Vietnam, and that the American effort just ran out of time.

When, during the Watergate era, Congressional investigators demanded to know the agency’s dirty secrets, Colby, then the C.I.A. head, turned them over without remorse. The 693-page document, known as the “family jewels,” detailed assassination plots, drug experiments, domestic spying and the like. It all seemed sensational at the time, but Colby observed that for an intelligence agency operating for 25 years at the height of the cold war, the list of misdeeds was “surprisingly mild.” Partly because he had been a bit too forthcoming, Colby was pushed out of the C.I.A. by President Ford. Colby drove away from Langley headquarters on his last day in January 1976, in his wife’s dilapidated Buick Skylark, “an unassuming man making an unassuming exit,” as Woods artfully describes him. ...

On a warm night in April 1996, Colby went off in his canoe on a tributary of the Potomac River and never came back. The local coroner determined that he suffered a heart attack and drowned, but there were rumors of foul play or suicide. It is tempting to think that Colby somehow got lost in what T. S. Eliot called the “wilderness of mirrors.” Or perhaps he always knew what he was doing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/books ... share&_r=0

Bob Marley & Carl Colby