CARACAS, Nov 28 (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on Wednesday CNN may have been instigating his murder when the U.S. TV network showed a photograph of him with a label underneath that read "Who killed him?"

The caption appeared to be a production mistake -- confusing a Chavez news item with one on the death of a football star..
http://uk.reuters.com/article/oilRpt/idUKN2856634620071128

Reports in the Dutch newspaper Trouw (2/21/00, 2/25/00) and France's Intelligence Newsletter (2/17/00) have revealed that several officers from the US Army's 4th Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) Group at Ft. Bragg worked in the news division at CNN's Atlanta headquarters last year, starting in the final days of the Kosovo War.

The story is disturbing. In the 1980s, officers from the 4th Army PSYOPS group staffed the National Security Council's Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD), a shadowy government propaganda agency that planted stories in the U.S. media supporting the Reagan Administration's Central America policies.

A senior US official described OPD as a "vast psychological warfare operation of the kind the military conducts to influence a population in enemy territory." (Miami Herald, 7/19/87) An investigation by the congressional General Accounting Office found that OPD had engaged in "prohibited, covert propaganda activities," and the office was soon shut down as a result of the Iran-Contra investigations. But the 4th PSYOPS group still operates.

CNN has always maintained a close relationship with the Pentagon. Getting access to top military officials is a necessity for a network that stakes its reputation on being first on the ground during wars and other military operations..
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1748
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1983

The TOPOFF 3 scenario will depict a complex terrorist campaign and drive the exercise play through the homeland security system, beginning in Connecticut and New Jersey, and leading to national and international response.

Over the course of several days fire personnel will conduct search and rescue, hospitals will treat the injured (played by role players), subject-matter experts will analyze the effects of the attack on public health, and top officials will deploy resources and make the difficult decisions needed to save lives.

An internal Virtual News Network (VNN) and news website will provide real-time reporting of the story like an actual TV network would. The mock media will keep players up-to-date on unfolding events and enable decision makers to face the challenge of dealing with the real world media. Only participating agencies can view the VNN broadcast.
http://www.iwar.org.uk/news-archive/2005/03-17-07.htm

The TOPOFF 3 scenario will depict a complex terrorist campaign and drive the exercise play through the homeland security system, beginning in Connecticut and New Jersey, and leading to national and international response.

Over the course of several days fire personnel will conduct search and rescue, hospitals will treat the injured (played by role players), subject-matter experts will analyze the effects of the attack on public health, and top officials will deploy resources and make the difficult decisions needed to save lives.

An internal Virtual News Network (VNN) and news website will provide real-time reporting of the story like an actual TV network would. The mock media will keep players up-to-date on unfolding events and enable decision makers to face the challenge of dealing with the real world media. Only participating agencies can view the VNN broadcast.
http://www.iwar.org.uk/news-archive/2005/03-17-07.htm

Why Portland?

Well, why not? Somebody's got to be the target. Putting random chance aside, there are several good reasons why Portland was chosen to host this year's main anti-terrorist event. We're told Portland's mayor and Oregon's governor actually requested that Portland be included in the exercises. I'm assuming those requests were made with one arm pinned behind their backs by an ex-pro wrestler turned spook who keeps raising the wrist just a tiny bit more.

In any case, the feds graciously honored the request and here they come, the honchos of the national security apparatus.

So why is Portland on the short list for a simulated nuclear terrorist attack on a major American city that may just "go live?" First, it's reachable by water, which preserves the old "suitcase nuke delivered by boat to a harbor near you" scenario we've all heard for years. Second, it's among the bluest of American coastal cities and, while San Francisco must present a tempting target, it's home to several major banks, insurance companies and other GOP infrastructure favorites. Third, LA and Seattle, a couple more anti-GOP cities with bull's-eyes on their civic centers, are too strategic to what's left of the economy. And fourth, Portland's kind of . . . disposable..

Was a Covert Attempt to Bomb Iran with Nuclear Weapons foiled by a Military Leak?
[quote]Vice President Cheney has taken a very prominent role in covert military operations and training exercises designed for the "seamless integration" of different national security and military authorities to possible terrorist attacks. On May 8, 2001, President Bush placed Mr. Cheney in charge of "[A]ll federal programs dealing with weapons of mass destruction, consequence management within the Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Justice, and Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other federal agencies".  LINK. Mr. Cheney subsequently played a direct role in supervising training exercises that simultaneously occurred during the 911 attacks..

The forthcoming September 14 U.S. Air Force report will likely describe the B-52 incident as an "error" and an "isolated incident" as foreshadowed in the September 6 Press Statement. This will create some difficulty in exposing the actual role played by Cheney and any other government figures that supported him. There will be a need for continued public awareness of the true events behind the B-52 incident in order to expose the actual role of Mr. Cheney. Only in that way can Cheney be held accountable for his actions, and other government figures that supported his neo-conservative agenda be exposed. Regardless of whether Cheney's role as the prime architect of the B-52 incident is exposed to the public, the official backlash against his covert operation should force his resignation. In either case, a very dangerous public official would be removed from a powerful position of influence. More importantly, the world has been spared a devastating nuclear war by courageous American airmen who revealed the true contents of an otherwise routine B-52 landing at Barksdale, AFB headed for a covert nuclear mission to the Middle East.

"There have been many things swept under the carpet. And I think it's a shame in a government that you trust - I think it's a shame, the things that they chose to tell you and the things they choose not to tell you." -- Sept. 11 widow Julia Sweeney, whose husband Brian worked in the World Trade Center

"One of my greatest shames, as a journalist is that I still don't know who killed Jack Kennedy." -- Hunter S. Thompson

Last January, Mike Ward compared the post-9/11 conspiracy frenzy to what occurred in the aftermath of JFK’s murder. "Angry speculation -- focused mainly on government dirty dealings, ulterior motives, and potential complicity in the attacks -- has risen to a clamor that easily rivals what followed the Kennedy assassination,"

Inconsistencies in the official story always take their toll, particularly when there's a whiff of a cover-up. And certainly, news that the White House will edit sensitive documents before handing them over to the independent commission investigating Sept. 11 makes matters murkier. "The White House gets to cherry-pick how much access the nation's commission looking into 9/11 gets to crucial documents. I'm ready to vote for subpoenas right now," former Senator Max Cleland told CNN, evoking Warren Commission suspicion deja vu.

While it's not surprising, as a New York Times/CBS poll revealed, that 77 percent of Americans reject the Warren Commission's findings, it seems that several government officials did, too. Richard Nixon, for example, said that the Warren Commission was "the greatest hoax that has ever been perpetuated," while Bill Clinton reportedly asked Webster Hubble to find answers to two questions: "One, who killed JFK? And, two, are there UFOs?"

Bill Maher reflected what seems to be prevailing attitude towards JFK and Sept. 11 theories. Uttering a confounded "wow" after Chris Matthews admitted, "I believe in the single bullet theory," Maher nevertheless balked when an audience member suggested that Bush might have purposely dropped the ball on 9/11.

Though the press is meant to be a watchdog for "we the people," since 9/11, it's been clearly complicit in spreading governmental whoppers about everything from WMD to Jessica Lynch. At times, it spoon fed us doozies (remember the one about the hijacker’s passport surviving the fiery crash into the World Trade Center?), while often, it was merely guilty of sins of omission. 'I'm very disappointed in the press," 9/11 widow Kristin Breitweiser told Salon.com. 'I've been scheduled to go on 'Meet the Press' and 'Hardball' so many times and I'm always canceled. Frankly I'd like nothing better than to go head to head with Dick Cheney on 'Meet the Press.' Because somebody needs to ask the questions and I don't understand why nobody is."

This unholy alliance between the media and the government was intact after the JFK assassination, too. Bertrand Russell's 1964 essay, "16 Questions on the Assassination," for example, charged that the American media blindly propagated "blatant fabrications" and largely ignored "world-wide disbelief" in official US government claims. [liNK]

A 1992 Village Voice article entitled "JFK: How the Media Assassinated the Real Story" further chronicled government’s sins and the media’s complicity. In a move that rivals the Bush administration’s manipulation of WMD intelligence, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach determined what the Warren Commission's findings should be a year before the commission reached them. "We need something to head off public speculation or Congressional hearings of the wrong sort." Katzenbach wrote in a 1963 memo.

Chronicling ploys to achieve this end, the Voice outlined tactics that are startlingly familiar to the post-9/11 propaganda employed today. "[T]he working press was a lobster in a trap," Bill Moyers admitted. "Back then, what government said was the news." While this phenomenon was recently witnessed whenever anyone like Scott Ritter disputed the official story (Ritter was accused, as Paul Zahn put it, "of drinking Saddam Hussein's Kool-Aid"), such naivete was more forgivable during the pre-Watergate era. Because of this, Johnny Carson's reaction to Jim Garrison's Tonight Show appearancewas hardly out of bounds.

"The function of the Warren Commission was to make the American people feel that the [JFK assassination] had been looked into so that there would be no further inquiries," Garrison told an incredulous Carson.

"I just can't understand how you think that these men think they can get away with it or for what reason they would do it," Carson later responded..

As far back as the 1970s, during a turf battle between the C.I.A.'s William Colby and James Jesus Angleton, a great deal of evidence attesting to the existence of this covert infrastructure was partially unveiled during a number of congressional investigations. Officially, we learned of a covert project to infiltrate the American media with C.I.A. assets, code-named Project Mockingbird. In Rolling Stone magazine, one of the poster boys of "mainstream" investigative journalism, Carl Bernstein (of Watergate fame), estimated that there were as many as 500 journalists in the United States on the C.I.A. payroll. Moreover, former C.I.A. Director William Colby had gone on record as revealing, "The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any major significance in the major media." Congressional House investigator Gaeton Fonzi has gone on record as demonstrating how the political and covert structure has operated to obstruct and obscure certain investigations when they had threatened to expose politically unpleasant facts. Director Colby's good friend, former Senator John De Camp —who believes that Colby was later murdered—has documented cover-ups involving child prostitute rings, many of which have been used to compromise various political figures and expose them to bribery. Put simply, a surprisingly large number of "mainstream" sources have attested to aspects of what we can reasonably conjecture as a widespread covert infrastructure of control and information. As I have conjectured elsewhere in this paper, we can see how certain corrupt networks like BCCI have served as the model for taking this infrastructure global.

Further, we have seen how the Official 9/11 Legend has been overlain with a number of equally plausible cover stories and counter-legends, involving various neocons, Saudis, Pakistanis, Israelis, or even Iraqis. Again, we have seen a precedent for this type of information campaign, as it has heretofore most successfully been used in obfuscating the facts behind the J.F.K. investigation. Indeed, it is as if the J.F.K. Assassination Legend has served as the textbook model for framing the 9/11 Legend and its offshoots. As with the 9/11 Legend, the J.F.K. Assassination Legend also had its various equally plausible offshoots, each with their own proponents.

Thus, while most of the mainstream media—and, most famously, Gerald Posner, who authored Case Closed—have mostly ignored the last official congressional investigation in 1979, which deemed the assassination a "probable conspiracy," figures as high as Lyndon Johnson had voiced suspicions of a "foreign" conspiracy, while C.I.A. bigwig James Angleton had mischievously pushed a Soviet conspiracy. Others, like House Chief Counsel Robert Blakey, have pushed a mob conspiracy, while still others have attempted to build a case implicating pro-Castro Cubans, anti-Castro Cubans, right-wing John Birchers (the forerunners of the recent militia threat), or Texas oil barons. Certainly, evidence can be marshaled to show each and every one of these elements percolating along the edges of the "Official" lone-gunman theory. But my main point is that, like the Official 9/11 Legend, these counter-legends exist—and indeed were built in—so as to furnish a number of false leads, thereby obscuring the most essential fact that a long-standing covert infrastructure has stage-managed both the crimes and the cover-ups, while parceling out the information to various witting—and unwitting—operatives. It is the classic case of not seeing the forest for the trees.

As for the existence of this infrastructure, it, too, has been obscured by various false leads and counter-legends—most perniciously, through super-natural, extra-terrestrial, or anti-Semitic theories, all of which share in common a tendency to discredit mainstream discussion of elite covert networks. Whether these theories come by way of long-exposed hoaxes like The Report From Iron Mountain or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; whether the U.F.O. tales are stoked by individual military/intelligence disinformation operatives unveiling "secret" groups like MJ-12; or whether we get a "unified field theory" of all these theories by way of authors like David Icke (who claims to have psychically "channeled" the revelation that our world leaders are, in truth, reptilian shape-shifters)—the main effect, if not intent, is to distract truly interested observers from the more dry (and potentially more damaging) writings of researchers like Peter Dale Scott, Greg Palast, Lisa Pease, Donald Gibson, John De Camp, and others who have credibly documented real evidence of political and corporate corruption..