That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and institute new Government. US Declaration of Independence
The government of the Western nations, whether monarchical or republican, had passed into the invisible hands of a plutocracy, international in power and grasp. It was, I venture to suggest, this semi-occult power which ... pushed the mass of the American people into the cauldron of World War I. Major General J F C Fuller, 1941
The invisible government that Bernays had in mind brought together all media – PR, the press, broadcasting, advertising. And their power of branding and image-making, in other words disinformation. And I suppose I’d like to talk today about this invisible government’s most recent achievement – the rise of Barack Obama and the silencing of much of the left. John Pilger, lecture Socialism Chicago 2009
Why has so much journalism succumbed to propaganda? Why are censorship and distortion standard practice? Why is the BBC so often a mouthpiece of rapacious power? Why do the The New York Times and the The Washington Post deceive their readers?
Why are young journalists not taught to understand media agendas and to challenge the high claims and low purpose of fake objectivity? And why are they not taught that the essence of so much of what’s called the mainstream media is not information, but power?
These are urgent questions. The world is facing the prospect of major war, perhaps nuclear war – with the United States clearly determined to isolate and provoke Russia and eventually China. This truth is being turned upside down and inside out by journalists, including those who promoted the lies that led to the bloodbath in Iraq in 2003.
The times we live in are so dangerous and so distorted in public perception that propaganda is no longer, as Edward Bernays called it, an ‘invisible government’s. It is the government. It rules directly without fear of contradiction and its principal aim is the conquest of us: our sense of the world, our ability to separate truth from lies.
The information age is actually a media age. We have war by media; censorship by media; demonology by media; retribution by media; diversion by media – a surreal assembly line of obedient clichés and false assumptions. John Pilger, article December 2014, ‘War by Media and the Triumph of Propaganda’
You start out breaking foreign laws ... And then you end up breaking the law at home, and coming to feel a contempt for the law, your colleagues and associates, for the Congress and public and for the Constitution. What you have is a growing gap between the perceptions inside the Executive branch about what threats there are to our national security and the beliefs of the Congress and the public about the threats to national security. And that leads to secrecy. Morton Halperin, former National Security Council, Director Washington Office of the American Civil Liberties Union
Shadow Government is at Work in Secret: After Attacks, Bush Ordered 100 Officials to Bunkers Away From Capital to Ensure Federal Survival. Washington Post staff report 1st March 2002
This pageantry cloaks the British constitution. But what’s really at its heart? Have you ever heard of parts of it called Misc 7, OD, Odsa, Gen 29, Misc 94 or the LF – what do you think they are? In some ways these organisations are more secret than MI5 or MI6. And there are many more of them. These mysterious initials are amongst any prime minister’s most closely regarded secrets. These are the organisations who have really decided critical national issues over the last ten years. Duncan Campbell, Secret Society: The Secret Constitution, Secret Government Committees, BBC 1987
That power is most vulnerable but most critical at the time of a general election. In the last two elections outgoing governments used such committees for unusual tactics, which like details of the committees themselves, have no place in the textbooks that are supposed to teach us about the British constitution. ibid.
People talk about the invisible government – I talk about it as an evil-archy. As a group, well, members of the Council on Foreign Relations ... members of the Trilateral Commission, members of the Club of Rome, the Skull and Bones fraternity, the Bohemian Society; there’s a group of presidents up there with black robes like Klansmen sitting around this huge bonfire at the Bohemian Grove worshipping a giant owl. Anthony J Hilder, Lucifer 2000
A Secret Government is an interlocking network of official functionaries, spies, mercenaries, ex-generals, profiteers and super-patriots who for a variety of motives operate outside the legitimate institutions of governments. Presidents have turned to them when they can’t win the support of Congress or the people, creating that unsupervised power so feared by the framers of our Constitution. Bill Moyers, The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis, 1987
For forty years a secret government has been growing behind these stately tributes to American ideals. Growing like a cancer on the constitution. ibid.
All this: the contempt for Congress, the defiance of law, the huge mark-ups and profits, the secret bank accounts, the shady characters, the shake-down of foreign governments, the complicity and death and destruction, they did all this in the dark, because it would never stand the light of day. Secrecy is the freedom zealots dream of. ibid.
But the Secret Government had also waged war on the American people. The Hearings examined a long train of covert actions at home, from the bugging of Martin Luther King by the FBI and of Kennedy and Johnson to gross violations of the law and of civil liberties in the 1970s. ibid.
How does it happen that to be anti-communist we have become anti-democratic, as if we have to subvert our society to save it? This is partly the answer: the powers claimed by presidents in national security have become the controlling wheel of government driving everything else. ibid.
Guatemala, 1954: flushed with success America’s Secret Government decided another troublesome leader must go. This time it was Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected President of Guatemala ... President Arbenz had admired Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and his government voted often with the American position at the United Nations. But in trying to bring a new deal to Guatemala, Arbenz committed two sins in the eyes of the Eisenhower administration: first, when he opened the system to all political parties he recognised the communists too. Arbenz also embarked on a massive land reform program. Less than 3% of the landowners owned 70% of the land. ibid.
We suffered then the passion of the time that America’s defense and security were at stake in Vietnam. But our obsession was the real threat. Vietnam pushed the Cold War morality to its extreme conclusion: exorbitant means to accomplish limited ends – anything goes. The wounds still run deep. ibid.
Looking back its stunning how easily the Cold War enticed us into surrendering popular control of government to the national security state. We’ve never come closer to bestowing absolute authority on the President. Setting up White House groups that secretly decide to fight dirty little wars is a direct assumption of the war powers expressly forbidden by the Constitution. ibid.
We operated from the premise that everything we did do was legal. Colonel Oliver North
All secret committees are set up on the prime minister’s own authority. Chris Price, MP Lewisham West 1974-1983
The problem today is there’s no place to go. We’re going to have to turn and we’re going to have to confront Big Brother and we’re going to have to struggle if we are going to maintain our individual liberty and freedom. Jim Marrs
For forty years secret terrorist organisations, many trained by Western intelligence agencies, have manipulated the political control of European sovereign states by a campaign of terror and murder. Originally part of a secret network, these groups changed from being defenders of state security into attackers of the established political order. Until two years ago that secret network was generally known by the single word Gladio. Timewatch: Operation Gladio: The Ring Masters
As the Germans withdrew they left behind secret agents in the countries they’d occupied. The secret services called such groups ‘stay-behinds’. For the retreating Germans they were the staunchest believers. They were selected from the SS and fascist black legions. They would become the foot soldiers of the next war about to begin – the Cold War. ibid.
Secret Service documents from several member countries reveal Gladio to be a European-wide organisation including Denmark, Norway, Holland, Spain, Turkey and Greece. All Gladio’s secret information is coordinated in Brussels through the CPC – Clandestine Planning Committee – which meets periodically, with the chairmanship being handed from one country’s secret service to the next. The entire organisation is handled outside NATO. ibid.
In 1980 a bomb exploded at Bologna Railway Station which killed eighty-six people. Six years later an official report revealed the existence of an invisible government in Italy run by the state secret services and groups of political terrorists. It also identified a military and civilian organisation under which neo-fascist groups were allowed to commit atrocities against civilians for political motives. Timewatch: Operation Gladio: The Pupeteers
On December 7th 1970 Prince Valerio Borghese organised neo-fascists in an attempt to overthrow the Italian government. The Italian ministry of the interior was to be captured. But after units had moved into position, a telephone call cancelled the entire operation. In the aftermath of the aborted coup, the existence of the parallel structures of Gladio was uncovered. ibid.