A lot of important things happen, and get a brief flutter of attention in the media, but barely get noticed. You never hear about the occurrence again. Why is that? What's the deal with these "one-shot" news stories, anyway? More importantly, what about the stories we never hear about at all?
The story gets squelched. That's it. The powers that be kill the story by putting pressure on the news media. The threat is that the news media organ will be "shut out" of future stories. This threat works, too. We've all heard stories about impertinent reporters asking embarrassing questions at a White House press conference and getting his or her press pass canceled, or worse, never being allowed to ask a question again.
Stories about punished reporters get exactly one play. You never hear about the reporter again, that is, unless you're a foreigner and throw shoes at a US President. Remember Helen Thomas? She used to get to ask the first question at every presidential press conference, and to end the conference by saying, "Thank you, Mr. President." But, she pissed of W one time too many. I don't recall seeing her skewer the President to his face in a long time. The Wikipedia article suggests that she has been blackballed. We still occasionally hear about Ms. Thomas because she had become a celebrity in her own right, but we don't ever hear about lesser known reporters who get on the "shit list".
Tracking the careers of reporters who displease those in power is the public evidence of managed news. What evidence is there of news management that is successful? If it's completely successful, we see nothing at all in the public media, ever. There may be thousands of these, but I only know about a few. I'll tell you about them later. Some of these are so incredible that, to this day, people don't believe me when I tell the story. They say, "You're making that up!" I assure you that I am not. (This is an unabashed tease to get you to read the whole diary post.)
The more successful squelchings are the one-shot stories. If you hear about the story again, there is some kind of spin on it to muddy the waters and divert your attention from the heinous implications of the original story to something more benign. A recent example of this kind of spin is the story of Michael Connell's plane having had an engine replaced many years ago. We are supposed to start wondering whether his plane crashed by itself rather than being sabotaged or blown out of the sky to effect an assassination. How dumb do they think we are? Apparently, they think we're really, really dense. For the most part, they are right. How come people laugh when you suggest that higher-ups in the government routinely have people killed?
Here are a few of my favorite one-shot stories. What gets me about these is that as time goes by, the implications of suppressing the story become more ominous. We see how history was changed because public opinion was molded and sometimes manufactured by squelching the story or putting some kind of spin on it. I'm going to start with a few that you should know about because they are well-documented to demonstrate that I'm not jiving about this.
The CIA deposed Salvador Allende, the democratically-elected president of Chile, in 1973. This is common knowledge among older people and history wonks, but younger folks and the gullible masses think it an outrageous claim that we would usurp a nation's national sovereignty and install a puppet dictator. You may recall that after the very popular Allende died, Chile had to endure 16 years of fascist military dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet, our hand-picked, anti-communist despot. He turned Chile into a police state and committed some of the worst human rights atrocities ever recorded in the western hemisphere. This guy was a piece of work, and we not only tolerated him, but supported his regime because the CIA had engineered his rise to power.
To give you some sense of proportion on Pinochet and Allende, Nixon stood idly by and watched as Pinochet had at least 2,279 people murdered and a reported 30,000 or so tortured after the coup because being anti-communist was considered a reasonable justification in 1973 for human rights crimes. That is, it was a perfectly fine to murder people and otherwise ignore the rule of law as long as you were "defending democracy". This is the Vietnam era rationale of, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."
Allende's crimes, on the other hand, that Nixon felt justified having him removed, were being an avowed Marxist (but not a communist), being far too chummy with his local Communist Party, being a friend of Fidel Castro and having a close relationship with the Soviet Union. In those days, that was a lot worse than killing people. Nixon wanted him taken out and there is plenty of evidence that he did exactly that.
The real reason that Allende was anathema to the American President is that he had advocated seizing U.S.-owned property in Chile, such as the copper mines. It's all about the money, you know. It's never being a communist that gets you killed. It's trying to seize the assets of the corporations that have the ear of the President.
The part that I wonder about is how the President of Chile really died. Allende supposedly killed himself at the conclusion of the coup d'état with the AK-47 Castro had given him. I've also heard a story (one time, of course) that he was killed by a CIA hit squad of US Navy SEALs. I can't find anything about this on the internet now, but I've always wondered about what happened to the guy that claimed that he was part of that operation. At the time I heard him talking on the radio, his argument that putting more than a single round into one's own body with an automatic assault rifle takes some doing. This has some cachet with me. While in the Army, I held an AK-47 in my hand and know that an adult could easily turn the barrel toward one's own body and reach the trigger to fire the weapon. (It's about 21 inches from the tip of the barrel to the trigger.) Still, did he really do that? Was Allende killed by a single round, or did he take a spray of bullets to the chest fired by someone else? Why would somebody fabricate the story of the hit squad? I still wonder about this one.
Iraqis intentionally shot down a US aircraft. This happened near the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war, when Saddam Hussein was "our guy" and we were nominally on Iraq's side. One of the aircraft from a carrier in the Persian Gulf got into Iraqi air space and was shot down, killing the pilot. The spin applied to this story was, again, that it was a mistake. If our foreign policy had been on the side of Iran, it would have been a justification for attacking Iraq ourselves. We had to wait until 2003 for the trumped-up excuse of weapons of mass destruction to do that. As for the plane incident, it seems to be gone. I can't find anything about it now, but I remember it well even though I heard the story only once. I said to myself, "Aha! It's OK to kill our people if you're 'on our side'!" That was only one guy, so it was easy to brush it under the rug. If one of our so-called "allies" kills a whole bunch of Americans, though, they have to go to greater lengths to distract public attention.
Israelis intentionally sank a US Navy ship and killed 34 sailors in 1967. What is important to note is that we heard nothing about this for years. Now that we are starting to get the story, no one seems to care. At the time, though, it was explained away as a "a tragic mistake". Yeah, right. But, now that the Israelis are blowing the crap out of Gaza, maybe we should reexamine our relationship with their government.
The case of the USS Stark (FFG-31) is another example of sacrificing our military for the "greater good" of maintaining cordial relations with an execrable regime. On May 17, 1987, in the latter part of the Iran-Iraq War, our buddies, the Iraqi Air Force blasted the ship with a couple of Exocet missiles and killed 37 sailors. Another 27 were injured. Oops.
Why didn't we side up with Iran and help them overthrow Saddam Hussein? Were we still miffed that the Iranians had overthrown our pet dictator, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, then taken over our embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979 and held our diplomats hostage for 444 days?
Or, could it be that the Iranians were still pissed off for something else, like, maybe, the US and UK staging a coup d'état in Iran in 1953? We removed Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq after he nationalized US and UK oil interests. The coup allowed the Shah to take power as an absolute monarch, such that he could murder and torture his enemies with impunity, instead of a being a figurehead constitutional monarch who was perilously close to being deposed by the democratically-elected Mosaddeq government.
The benefit to us and the British in preserving the Iranian monarchy was that no one would mess with our oil companies as long as the Shah stayed in power. The Iranians waited until 1979 to throw the Shah out, even though they had wanted to by 1952, when Mosaddeq started moving toward doing away with the monarchy.
The important dynamic in Iran is that it was about the oil and money. If we had been more cognizant of how our foreign policy hinges on the economic interests of corporations, we would have realized that the current Iraq War "is about oil" and might have avoided getting into it on the flimsy pretexts offered. Just as Nixon really didn't care all that much about communism (as evidenced by his overtures to the People's Republic of China), Bush didn't care all that much about democracy or human rights in the Middle East. It was about oil in 2003 in Iraq. It was about oil in 1953 in Iran. It was about copper in 1973 in Chile. See the pattern? Managed news helps to maintain the convenient fiction that we do anything in foreign relations for reasons other than money.
Now, for the stories you may have never heard about.
America and the Soviet Union fought a war against each other. This one is my favorite example of how most people have no idea what really happens. The news is managed so tightly that civilians don't generally know that in the Yom Kippur War in 1973, military personnel from the USA and USSR were directly involved in combat action against each other. This has several parts. I heard these stories from military personnel who were serving at the time. I heard all of them more than once from different people. The tellers were all eyewitnesses to the events.
Egypt's Third Army, trapped east of the Suez Canal by Israeli forces, was composed entirely of Soviet tanks manned by Soviet personnel. Until the war itself, Egypt supposedly only had two armies. When the first two got mauled by the Israelis, this third one, held in reserve, suddenly appeared. Most military people I've talked to about this say, "Everyone knew that!" Maybe in the military, but not we civilians. Before the war, Egypt had supposedly expelled the Soviet "advisers". They were just regular troops and they didn't go anywhere. The hasty truce arranged by the USA and USSR to end the war was to prevent the embarrassment of Soviet troops being captured by Israeli ground forces. They weren't going to fight to the death for Egypt.
US pilots were the Israeli Air Force. At the beginning of the war, Israel lost so many planes and pilots that they were about to lose control of the sky. A lot of planes were lost attacking the Egyptian air bases and to ground-to-air missiles. The Americans started bringing in planes and pilots, and they started flying combat missions immediately. At first, the pilots climbed into the Israeli planes available, but as these started to run out, aircraft from Sixth Fleet carriers started flying to Israeli bases where they were repainted with Israeli insignia. When the paint dried, the pilots took off again on Israeli missions. The Egyptian air force was wiped out, too, so the American planes and pilots let the Israelis regain control of the air.
Here's one about the pilots. An Air Force sergeant stationed at the Torrejón (or was it Zaragoza?) US air base in Spain in early November, 1973, saw a large group of identically-dressed young men with aviator sunglasses in a boarding area waiting room. They all had crew-cut hair, white shirts, black slacks, black military dress uniform shoes and a little non-military travel bag, the kind you hand carry on an airplane when you go on a short trip. The sergeant wandered in and tried to chat with the men, curious about who they were. "You civilians?" That got no response. Some of them looked toward a slightly older man sitting in the corner chair in the front row. He said, "We're pilots." Then he clammed up. Another Air Force sergeant, with a couple more stripes, came into the room and shooed the chatty sergeant away. The consensus in the barracks was that these were "CIA pilots", which means military pilots attached to the CIA. The pilots got onto a chartered civilian passenger craft and took off to the east, presumably to Israel.
US personnel in Europe took a lot of stuff to Israel. Most people remember the footage of "Israeli C5A's" unloading stuff at Israeli military bases. What? The Israeli Air Force didn't have any C5A transport planes. Those were US planes repainted with Israeli insignia. I only saw that about the "Israel C5A's" once. Somebody got wise and told the media to stop saying that.
Most of the Israeli tanks were US Army tanks. A motor pool mechanic at the Baumholder base in Germany participated in a Herculean effort by everyone available to repaint all the tanks from the darker, European forest camouflage colors to lighter, desert camouflage colors. The painted non-stop for a couple of days, only breaking to wolf down meals brought in for them. When he asked if he was to add the standard US insignia, he was told, "We don't have time." When they finished, they barely managed to return to their barracks before collapsing. The mechanic eventually woke up, went to the mess hall for a meal, and found the facility curiously empty. He wandered over to the motor pool and idly asked his sergeant when he needed to report back for work since the regular schedule had been disrupted. He was told, "Don't worry about it. You can pick up a three-day pass from the company clerk if you want one." He then glanced out the window to the motor pool yard. All the tanks were gone. The tank crews weren't anywhere to be found, either. Either they had gotten passes, too, because their tanks were gone, or they were in their tanks in the desert. How had the tanks gotten there? Well, the C5A was, at the time, the only transport big enough to carry a tank.
Over the years, I've heard several anecdotes about American pilots on their way to the front in the Yom Kippur War. This is another one of those "common knowledge" things in the military. The contention that US and Soviet troops faced each other directly is based on the presumption that at some point they must have since the Israeli forces were full of Americans and the Egyptian forces were full of Soviets. The Israeli offensive stopped abruptly and the Egyptian 3rd Army was not attacked because US and Soviet diplomats didn't want their troops to go up against each other. Without Egyptian air cover, the "Israeli" planes would have attacked the "Egyptian" tanks and destroyed them. Neither the US or USSR could have their proxy war expand into a direct conflict. Until the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the lessons learned by both sides helped maintain the uneasy truce of the Cold War.
Francisco Franco died at least six months before his death was announced. I knew a Navy radioman who was near Spain at the time Franco "took sick" in 1975. A top secret communiqué was received that announced the dictator's death. This was in the spring. In November, the radioman was eating in the galley and a shipmate rushed in, very excited, and blurted out that Armed Forces Radio said that Franco had just died. The radioman raised an eyebrow, took another sip of coffee and said, "Yeah. I heard." Those with security clearances don't discuss what they see in classified messages. Once the guy was dead, though, it didn't matter that much exactly when he died. The joke here is that it took the Spaniards about six months to figure out exactly what to do. They decided to honor Franco's wish that the monarchy be restored.
So, how many of these did you know about? Is any one of them a story that you have never heard, or hear just once in the media, but have other evidence that leads you to believe that it's true? Have you got any others? I need a few more to add to my conversational repertoire.