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Saturday, May 10, 2008 12:00 AM

How the military analyst program controlled news coverage: in the Pentagon's own words

"We develop a core group from within our media analyst list of those that we can count on to carry our water. They become the key go to guys for the networks and it begins to weed out the less reliably friendly analysts by the networks themselves."

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  • Saturday, May 10, 2008 10:16 AM

    michael aquino and paul vallely - "from psyops to mindwar"

    I got to know the guy who co-wrote this classic text, mike aquino, to some extent, because I briefly attached myself to his 'temple of set.' I wasn't terribly impressed : he's nothing like as sophisticated as the aleister crowley people are - but he does bring out a lot of practical aspects of psywar just by being a 'setian.' Most of his memoirs are on his personal web page, including "from psyops to mindwar":

    http://www.xeper.org/maquino/

    The fact that aquino was able to exploit the freedom of religion provisions to ensure that setian (and church of satan) 'chaplains' should be available within the US armed forces to any soldier who wishes to consult them is entertaining, but it isn't the fundamental point, which is much simpler and much more subversive : the basis of psywar is convincing the other guy that YOU - not HIM - are 'evil.' That is, if you want to frighten your opponent, painting yourself as 'good' and him as 'evil' is not the way to go.

    People may recall the madman theory in nuclear deterrence : Reagan, or Nixon, or whoever it was, was counseled to give the soviets the impression that he was irrational, slightly nuts, liable to flip and press the button, and needed to be handled with kid gloves. The problem here is that, while giving your opponent the impression that you are 'evil,' you have to try to give your own public, and the world public insofar as it is already predisposed to support you, the idea that you are 'the good guy.' So the finesse of this is delineating two psychological realms, in one of which (the 'friendly' realm) you paint yourself as 'good,' while in the other (the 'hostile' realm) you paint yourself as 'evil.'

    You won't find this in Aquino and Vallely - it's just my own inference, so that you can see how easy the basic ideas of psywar are, once you have overcome naive moral realism. Nor do I mean to suggest that Vallely is or ever was involved in satanism (or 'setianism') - he would probably be more interesting if he had been. The scariest people of all, in the sense of naive moral realism, are the jesus freaks in the air force, anyway.

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