How the CIA started World War III in Ukraine: Everything you did not know about the capitalist mafia

[Side Note: Before feasting yourself on all covert operations of the CIA from Douglas Valentine’s book, please pass by Ben Garrison’s kitchen first and enjoy this breakfast…]

By Ben Garrison – US cartoonist

Our founding fathers never wrote the Central Intelligence Agency into our Constitution—and with good reason...

An unaccountable institution that can hide under the claim of ‘national security’ at every turn while conducting secret operations that include routine violations of our Bill of Rights and even outright torture would be unthinkable to the great men who started our Republic.

The CIA has over 21,000 employees under a $15 billion dollar annual budget and perhaps more (think about the missing trillions just before the 9-11 attack). Add up the budgets of all the secretive alphabet agencies and it pushes $50 billion per year. Combined with the tax dollars that are fire hosed into the military industrial complex and we’re looking at over $800 billion per year spent on a military empire controlled by operatives who are unaccountable to We The People. In other words, we aren’t allowed to know where much of the money is being spent. Hush hush! Just shut up and pay the shadow government.

The CIA had its origins in WWII. Spy operations and code cracking existed among the various military branches and the FBI, but it was decided in 1947 that a ‘centralized’ agency was needed to better coordinate and comprehend the data. Thus the CIA was created under The National Security Act of 1947. President Truman found that he had a private army theoretically under his power, but later on he expressed trepidation toward a ‘dangerous’ and secretive agency capable of all sorts of clandestine operations that could spark war and conflict with other countries.

Kennedy heeded Eisenhower’s warnings about the military industrial complex and secret organizations gaining too much control over our country and he decided to do something about it. CIA Chief Allen Dulles was instrumental in the coup in Iran that installed the hated Shah. He also was involved in the coup in Guatemala and failed coup against Castro.

Kennedy at first praised Dulles, but wised up later on during his administration and fired him. Allen Dulles was miffed. Kennedy was assassinated. Lyndon B. Johnson (US President who succeeded John F. Kennedy) appointed Dulles to head the Warren Commission, which helped cover up evidence while pinning the blame on a ‘lone gunman,’ Oswald. With Kennedy gone, the CIA and the Deep State were able to pursue Vietnam and rake in the dough while 58,220 Americans died in a futile war. LBJ himself profited handsomely because he controlled a huge amount of Bell Helicopter stock.

The CIA has grown use to overthrowing governments and they got away with it again when Kennedy was killed. Most people in those days trusted their government and the mainstream media. They swallowed what the Warren Commission shoveled. The CIA’s string of successes made them grow even bolder. It got so bad that President Ford set up an Intelligence Oversight Board to help stop abuses. The CIA promptly made sure the board was filled with cronies by the time Bush came along. The board did nothing. Whistle blowers were harassed and silenced.

The movie “Snowden” helped reveal the CIA’s modus operandi and it’s abhorrent. Edward Snowden is the quintessential whistle blower who believes in our Constitution. He showed how the CIA and its spinoff, the NSA routinely records everything we say on the Internet and on cell phones. People are being spied on through their own web cams on personal computers. Make sure you keep that covered! Computer microphones are turned on remotely and we are listened to. They can even track us through ’smart’ TVs. This is all a violation of our Fourth Amendment and each instance is a felony, but it helps them dig up dirt to extort us all and especially Congress.

The CIA chief under Obama, John Brennan, even hacked Congress directly and got away with it. It was Snowden’s duty to sound the alarm and he did that courageously. I believe he should be pardoned, but unfortunately President Trump doesn’t see it that way and even called Snowden a ‘traitor.’ You’re wrong, Mr. President. It’s the operatives in the CIA and the Deep State military industrial complex that are the traitors. It’s time to do what President Kennedy wanted to do: Break them up and make them accountable to the rule of law under our Constitution. And while you’re at it, let’s break up the central banks and end the Fed, too.

—Ben Garrison

THE CIA IN UKRAINE

By Douglas Valentine 

This Chapter is extracted from the book: The CIA as Organised Crime - The book was published in 2017...

“Democracy is corrupted when your government prevents you from knowing what the CIA is doing…” – Douglas Valentine

“They are the secretive military wing of the plutocrats…” – Ryan Dawson

“Capitalism’s Invisible Army…”  - Phil Agee

RYAN DAWSON: This is Ryan Dawson of the ANC (not related to the African National Congress political party of South Africa) Report . With me today is Doug Valentine. I'm going to be asking him tonight about the CIA's role in Ukraine and in infiltrating the media. Mr. Valentine, it's a pleasure to have you back on the show.

VALENTINE: It's my pleasure, thank you.

DAWSON: I want to ask you about this organization working with NGOs in the Ukraine. It's called United Action Centre. I want to read something short from their page and get your thoughts. It says: "The NGO Centre UA has a strong professional human potential. The team has experience running projects in the sphere of European and Euro-Atlantic integration. At the same time, the Centre UA consists of experts and activists who have experience in journalism, public service, PR, public activities, et cetera. Also, the Centre UA has an extensive database of contacts with international experts, politicians, and journalists. At the moment, The Centre UA is the coordinator of the New Citizen's Public Campaign which brings together around 40 NGOs."

We know from the Carl Bernstein report on the media how much the CIA has infiltrated the media. Could you give your thoughts about Centre UA and what they're doing there with 40 NGOs, supposedly to promote democracy and have activists and experienced journalists working together?

VALENTINE: The Centre UA is the organization that Pierre Omidyar co-funded two years ago. Center UA is an umbrella organization that is linked to various activist projects and NGOs, one of which is the New Citizen campaign which, according to the Financial Times, "played a big role in getting the protest up and running". In fact, according to the Kyivpost, the "Center UA received more than $500,000 in 2012, ... 54 percent of which came front Pact Inc., a project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Nearly 36 percent came from Omidyar Network, a foundation established by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife. Other donors include the International Renaissance Foundation, whose key founder is billionaire George Soros, and the National Endowment for Democracy, funded largely by the U.S. Congress." Why did Omidyar prove willing to come on board with such known regime-change sponsors as USAID and NED — to say nothing of Soros? Where else is he [co]operating? It should never be forgotten that this is the kind of company he keeps. Why?

While Omidyar was born in Paris and his parents moved to Maryland from France when he was young, he appears to be of Iranian descent. His mother was a Farsi linguist and as of 2016, is president of the Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute. As bizarre as it may seem, little information is publicly available about his father, including his name. He apparently was a urologist or surgeon at John Hopkins, and if that was the case, his name should be available. The secrecy suggests some sort of intelligence connection, perhaps to the type of upper class emigrant circles the CIA cultivates in America. It is a fact that the CIA station in Iran served as one of the Agency's main bases for agent operations against the Soviets. The CIA and MOSSAD created SAVAK, the Shah's notorious internal political security service, and the Shah in turn gave the CIA a free hand to run operations against the Soviets.

Maybe Pierre Omidyar is accessible to US foreign policy agencies due to some prior family connections. Maybe that accounts for why he spent a few hundred thousand dollars (a paltry sum for a billionaire) to help put the Centre UA in place in the Ukraine: so the CIA could run operations against the Russians, like it did out of Iran (during the reign of the Shah). I've never heard any explanation from inquisitive Glenn Greenwald. When it comes to his sugar daddy's monkey business, Greenwald's policy is simple "see no, hear no, speak no evil." Why? Is that the quid pro quo for the handout?

What I do know is that billionaires like Omidyar and George Soros and the Rockefellers — to say nothing of USAID and NED — aren't funding political action out of the goodness of their hearts. They're doing it to advance their interests. That's why an organization like Centre UA is created: to advance the interests of its financial backers. To me it looks like a CIA-facilitated mechanism to create a crisis in Ukraine and exploit it. The 40 NGOs it coordinates are perfectly placed to provide cover for covert CIA political action.

The Centre UA does, in fact, coordinate politicians and journalists with experts on international affairs and public relations. It says so on its website. All these people are involved in managing information; maybe they're linked on a private server like Hillary Clinton used while secretary of state. It will have occurred to the political and psywar experts in the CIA’s digital Dark Array that they could easily garner public support for their color revolutions by creating websites that unite and direct people; that they could manipulate potential rebels using the Sarre, albeit updated motivational indoctrination methods people like Frank Scotton pioneered in Vietnam.

The Centre UA’s public relations experts certainly guide pro-American candidates in Kiev the same way American PR people manipulated Boris Yeltsin in Moscow. As is well known, Yeltsin gave away the store after he became President of the Russian Federation. In the same way the CIA promoted Yeltsin, Centre UA journalists certainly make sure that pro-American politicians get favorable press. They spin the facts in such a way that Omidyar, who has made their operation possible, will be happy.

The Centre UA’s stated purpose was to pull Ukraine out of the Russian orbit and deliver it to Western corporations. And that's what happened, along with the obligatory political payoffs. Indeed, a few short years after Centre UA was established, Vice President Joe Biden's son joined the board of directors of the largest Ukraine gas producer Burisma Holdings. Hunter Bider heads Burisma’s legal department and liaises with international organizations.

The book Flashpoint in Ukraine provides ample evidence that the Obama regime and its privateering corporate partners overthrew the Pro-Russian Ukraine government and installed a government packed with neo-­Nazis and American elites. They did this for their own enrichment, and yet the US media never made it an issue. It's business as usual. The average Ukrainian citizen doesn't benefit; just the "super-predator" American elite who organized the coup. It's amazing to behold.

Biden's smash and grab operation occurred in 2014. In 2016, another super-predator, Natalie Jaresko, took control of Datagroup, the company that controls Ukraine's telecom market. Jaresko at one time held a top job at the State Department coordinating the trade and commerce agencies that dealt with the former Soviet Union, incIuding the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. Check her out on Wikipedia. She's part of the global elite: the IMF/World Bank/European Bank for Reconstruction and Development network. In the Clinton Administration she served as Chief of the Economics Section of the US Embassy in Ukraine, and helped paved the way for the coup d’état that occurred there 20 years later. These coups take years to organize. Many more are planned.

Jaresko acquired Ukrainian citizenship on the same day as her appointment as Minister of Finance of Ukraine in 2014. Next she squeezed her competitor, the owner of Datagroup, out of business using the kind of foreign currency loan debt scam favored by Mafia hoods and economic hitmen. That's how freewheeling capitalists work: they overload targeted nations and business people with debt and then clean them out. Again, not a word of protest from the mainstream media: it's "free trade" in action.

The CIA plays a central role in these schemes, doing the illegal but plausibly deniable things that require high tech espionage and underworld assets — reaching into police files or using private investigators to get dirt on people, then setting then up and blackmailing them. These kinds of subversion operations can't be done publicly by the likes of Biden or Jaresko or their PR people. Foreign shakedowns have to be done secretly through the criminal underworld, and that's where the CIA comes into play.

Other times the media plays the central role. In the US, for example, people win elections through negative campaigning. The Democratic Party hires investigators to get dirt on Republican candidates. Republicans do the same thing. The truth doesn't matter because events are happening instantaneously. Hyperbole becomes fact before anyone can respond. Senator Elizabeth Warren reportedly claimed to be part American in her application to Harvard, and once she started campaigning for Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump called her "Pocahontas" every chance he got. There are are all sorts of ways, within the constant presence of spectacular domination, of influencing events through manufactured scandals and misrepresentations without it being illegal or secret. It just requires celebrity status, a Twitter account, and the attention of the networks of information control.

As Guy Debord said long before the internet in his book Comments on The Society of the Spectacle, "One aspect of the disappearance of all objective historical knowledge can be seen in the way that individual reputations have become malleable and alterable at will by those who control all information: information which is gathered and also — an entirely different matter - information which is broadcast. Their ability to falsify is thus unlimited."

Anyone can be smeared, and apart from the unknown Protected Few in the CIA and National Security Establishment, there's no defense. Overseas, the CIA is perpetually collecting information on adversaries like Vladimir Putin and passing it along to the Western media, which rejoices in spinning it a million different ways.

What is less well known is that the CIA is engaged in tipping the balance in the domestic as well as international contests. That's why it's secret, and why all the privateers protect it. They share the same business ideology. CIA officers, PR people, journalists, politicians, and academics who get paid to give "expert" testimony on Fox or MSNBC, are knowingly manipulating social and political movements here in the US, just like they do for the Ukrainian opposition or the Venezuelan opposition.

The CIA sets up Twitter accounts and Facebook pages and social websites to move people into mass organizations to achieve its secret ends. In May 2016 Twitter "cut off U.S. intelligence agencies from a service that sifts through the entire output of Twitter's social media postings." The guilty party was the CIA's Open Source Enterprise, which contacted with a private contractor, Dataminr, through the CIA's ubiquitous venture capital fund In-Q-Tel, to spy on American citizens. Such super-secret "intelligence" operations are frequently used as cover for highly illegal "offensive counterintelligence" operations.

DAWSON: We saw the National Endowment for Democracy, which is totally CIA, at the forefront in the Ukraine. But why does the CIA need so many NGOs as middlemen? What is their purpose for having 40 different non-governmental organizations?

VALENTINE: I'll give you an example. When the CIA moved into Vietnam, which had a culture the US hadn't dealt with before, the first thing it did was buy a lot of property. This was during the First Indochina War and they did this clandestinely, through cut-outs, so they'd have safe houses to set up organizations later on. It's always best for them to buy real estate during times of crisis when prices are down. Like Trump always says, "Buy low." And when are prices lowest? As Baron Rothschild famously said, "When there's blood in the streets."

The CIA bought huge tracts of property in Saigon between 1952 and 1955, during the First Indochina War, when there was blood on the streets. The CIA bought prime property at ten percent of its value. That's the first step – get your nose in the tent. These buildings served as places where CIA officers could meet their agents and plot dirty deeds. They passed some to NGOs and civil organizations to operate.

William Colby introduced me to one of his cohorts, Clyde Bauer, the CIA officer who ran Air America in Vietmam in the early days. Bauer told me he set up South Vietmam’s Foreign Relations Council, Chamber of Commerce and Lions Club, "to create a strong civil base" That's what the CIA is doing in Ukraine through the Centre UA It's creating a pro-American civil base, from which political candidates emerge.

The CIA influences politics in foreign nations in many ways. CIA officers are constantly funneling money to all political parties, right and left, and establishing long-range agents to monitor and manipulate political developments. That's standard operating procedure.

The next thing the CIA does is seize control of a nation's secret services. That's what they did in Vietnam, and in Ukraine. As I've explained elsewhere, they offer training and high tech gadgettry to people in the secret services; they corrupt them and use them for their own purposes, like they used SAVAK in Iran. It's highly illegal to suborn (incite to commit a crime or an evil deed) officials in foreign nations. We don't like it when it's done to us, and it's not something even an influential billionaire like Omidyar is trained to do (although his private security force is probably staffed by former CIA officers who do know how to do it).

The CIA infiltrates all the political parties and as soon as a politician they own is in place, right or left, they can elevate him or her to Defense Minister or Interior Minister. These ministers are on the CIA payroll and appoint military, security and police officials who do the CIA’s bidding. The CIA tries to place its people throughout the captured nation's government and civil society. In South America they recruit junior military officers via the School of the Americas (now innocuously renamed) and when the time is right, have them stage a coup with the support of all the other people they have been cultivating for years, sometimes decades.

US corporations need the CIA to put these parallel governments in place. The CIA penetrates the military and security services, and simultaneously creates a civil base through deniable organizations like Centre for UA. This is how societies are ruled when there's no overwhelming popular support: through the ownership of property and by having the proper people in government and civic institutions.

The CIA recruits people in places like Lech Walesa in Poland. Often the people running the unions are on the CIA payroll; people running the education system too. The CIA can recruit these people because it has so much money. The Russians can't compete (financially), when billionaires like George Soros are sprinkling a million here and five million there — money that goes into building civic institutions that are ideologically attuned.

Whether people do it for love of money, or belief of a brighter future, the CIA is manipulating the social and political processes. Its officers and their agents are recruiting people and putting them in place, having them sign contracts that effectively say, "In exchange for working for us in advancing our interests here in Kiev you will get $100,000 in a Swiss bank account and your life will be rosy."

It's illegal. It's treasonous. You can't take money from a foreign intelligence agency and work against your own country, but that is what the CIA is doing in the Ukraine (and South Africa) right now and around the world on a massive scale.

DAWSON: I wanted to ask you about that Human Intelligence. What is the Intelligence Community Directive 304?

VALENTINE: That came out in 2009. If anybody wants to read it, it's only four or five pages long— It spells out in broad, simplistic terms what the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Defense do for the National Director of Intelligence, in terms of HUMINT.

The position of Director of National Intelligence didn't exist until Bush became president in 2001. Until then, the person who supervised all intelligence operations was the director of the CIA, who doubled as director of all intelligence agencies. After 9/11 the CIA director was no longer officially overseeing all other intelligence agencies. That role passed to the new Director of National Intelligence, which, since 2010, is a position held by James Clapper. The DNI job was created by Bush to enable more political control over domestic intelligence operations.

In 2009, the Director of National Intelligence issued Directive 304 to define the jobs of the military, CIA, and FBI. The most recent online copy has editings. They cut out parts about what the CIA does. It's standard to classify the names of CIA officers in the Ukraine, what their cover positions are, who they've bribed and suborned. If the president of the Rotary Club or the police chief in Kiev is a CIA agent, those things are classified, because they are illegal. But now, thanks to Directive 304, you can't even know what is unclassified about CIA operations. That is how bad it has gotten.

Again, it's all about the control of information. They don't want you to know anything. That's how they exert power over you. Your rulers are obsessed with controlling information and not letting you know what goes on, the same way Greenwald hides his treasure trove of NSA documents obtained from Snowden and dribbles out only what he wants you to see. Because a person's or an institution's power is directly equivalent to its ability to control the information upon which its power depends.

DAWSON: And to profit from it!

VALENTINE: That's the whole point. Democracy is corrupted when your government prevents you from knowing what the CIA is doing. That kind of secrecy is the antithesis of democracy. If the public doesn't know what's going on, then it has no control over its fate. Americans have given up so much control, so much freedom.

DAWSON: Every time they declassify something, we find out it had nothing to do with sensitive secrets; it's just hiding illegal activity, that's it!

VALENTINE: The CIA isn't conducting secret, illegal actions around the world to bring class, gender and racial harmony to America, or encourage Palestinians and Jews to hold hands and sing Pepsi commercials together. The CIA is doing this on behalf of the Clintons and the Bushes. They do it for Omidyar and Bill Gates and George Soros and the people who rule us.

DAWSON: They are the secretive military wing of the plutocrats.

VALENTINE Yep. Phil Agee called the CIA "Capitalism's Invisible Army". The CIA isn't doing illegal things so the minimum wage will go up, or so that bankers will be more careful about selling mortgages to people who can't afford them. They're working with the bankers. They want Ukrainians putting their money in a Morgan Stanley brokerage firm in Kiev. They want to suck the life out of Ukranians. That is what the CIA is there for, and they are very careful and cautious about whom they recruit to achieve that goal.

DAWSON: They want things that have intrinsic value: property, farming.

VALENTINE: Yea, the first thing they want is property, and the best way to drive prices down is to start a war. People are fleeing war zones in Iraq, Libya and Syria. As soon as that happens, prices go down and corporate privateers like Omidyar, Biden and Jaresko go swooping in.

DAWSON: The IMF engages in predatory lending to push people into debt, so they have to start selling assets to pay the piper. When Ukraine started making deals with the Russians, suddenly there's a coup d’état. It just makes me laugh that the NGOs that are coordinated by the Centre UA are talking about spreading democracy, when the current government in Western Ukraine was appointed!

VALENTINE: Sure. The history of the US intelligence operations in Ukraine is educational. OSS officers in World War Two released Stepan Bandera from prison in 1941. Bandera was a Nazi collaborator whose militia slaughtered Poles, Jews and communist workers on the eastern front. The US recruited Bandera so he could fight the advancing Soviet Union. Nothing has changed. Just over ten years ago the CIA initiated its "Orange Revolution" for the same purpose — to thwart the Russians. It was one of the fist color revolutions and it involved the same people the CIA employed in its coup in 2014.

DAWSON: The dioxin poison scandal.

VALENTINE: The wife of the acting president of the Ukraine (in 2014) is an American, and she's part of a Ukrainian exile faction. The CIA has a stable full of exiles from everywhere. Ngo Dinh Diem was living in exile in America when Ed Lansdale and the CIA installed him as president in South Vietnam. He was sweeping floors at Maryknoll seminary in Lakewood, New Jersey. They keep their exiles in storage and activate them and their agent networks when required. A current example is Fethullah Gulen, the America-based, Turkish exile and business magnate who tried to overthrow Prime Minister Erdogan in July 2016. As Joshua Cook reported in 2014, Gulen, "came to the United States in 1999 due to cited health problems and has stayed in the United States after gaining his visa with help from former CIA officials. The FBI previously resisted granting permanent residency status to Gulen. According to leaked cables, parts of the US government believe that Gulen "is a 'radical Islamist' whose moderate message cloaks a more sinister and radical agenda."

Cook reported that "Gulen-inspired schools are the largest charter network in the US and receive approximately $150 million a year in taxpayer’s money. There are about 130 of these charter schools in 26 states where the majority of the teachers are from Turkey (and) many of the contracts for construction and operation have gone to Turkish businesses. Those actions have raised red flags for the US government." People like Diem and Gulen come out from under their rocks and fill the governmental and civic institutions the CIA creates in nations it subverts. This is another thing it does all around the world.

DAWSON: We saw in Cuba, for example, the CIA actually hired out Meyer Lansky and the Mafia to do its ditty work. Then we see the Ukrainian government hiring out a bunch of neo-Nazis.

VALENTINE: As usual, I was taking the long road to get to my point, but yes, the CIA has been operating with Ukrainian exiles since the end of World War Two, when they hired Reinhard Gehlen. Gehlen had been the chief anti-Soviet spy for the German Army. US army intelligence hired Gehlen in 1945, but as soon as the CIA was formed it grabbed him and put him in charge of Eastern Europe. The CIA used this former Nazi to re­activate the spy networks he had in Ukraine, Poland, Latvia, all the Eastern European countries, and these old Nazi spies and saboteurs went to work for the CIA.

DAWSON: They did the same thing in Japan. They got Yakuza and former Japanese spies to spy on the Chinese They needed that intelligence, and they didn't have enough Chinese speakers or people who could infiltrate. So they kept the same imperial Japanese who had been there during World War Two.

VALENTINE: All of this is illegal, but this is what the CIA does all around the world. It's been doing it in the Ukraine for generations. It has the grandchildren of Nazis on its payroll, an incredible infrastructure of neo-­Nazi secret agents who've been battling against Russia for seventy years.

The Russians know their names, where they^• live, where the CIA has its safe houses. But the American public has no clue. They think the crisis began today because of the way the news is presented. The journalists, their editors, the industry owners,  the publishers — which now include Omidyar —don't want you to know about all the illegal activities the CIA is involved in on their behalf. So the owners of The New York Times and the Washington Post hire editors who will direct reporters in such a way that they never report on what the CIA is doing.

DAWSON: Some of them are CIA.

VALENTINE: Journalism in the US is a traditional cover for CIA officers. And when the owners of the media aren't covering for the CIA, they're selling commercial time slots to the multi-national corporations that in turn are selling you commodities made in sweatshops in foreign nations that have been subverted by the CIA. You could almost say there's no such thing as factual reporting. It's as valuable as most of the over-priced commodities people buy to elevate their status. Everything is twisted and delivered in nine second sound bites, so you'll buy something, not know something, or forget about something.

DAWSON: If anyone is confused, just look at the reporting on Ukraine, or the reporting during the build-up to the Iraq War. Look how uniform all these three-letter networks were. The reporting got debunked online. Yet on television you had a completely one-sided story. It's pro-war, pro-coup d’état.

VALENTINE: The problem, in my opinion, is not that the CIA infiltrated journalism, but rather that the CIA is promoting the business of journalism — which is actually the advertising branch of capitalism. They're working together. The "reliable" journalists who report on the CIA — guys like Seymour Hersh — never say the things I'm saying here. The CIA and the media are part of the same criminal conspiracy. You're never going to learn anything substantive by reading what mainstream reporters dish out about the CIA. You can't take a journalism course in CIA Criminal Conspiracies 101.

DAWSON: That's why I made a documentary film called "Decades of Deception" that went over a bunch of covert operations — that have been busted wide open — that the CIA was involved with or completely in control of. But, getting that out there is a drop in the bucket compared to what the mass media disseminates, and how much bull we're fed in school and from television.

VALENTINE: American society since its creation 240 years ago has had as its goal the enrichment and empowerment of a small group of property owners and their succeeding generations who, after they conquered the continent, took over the world. The civic and government institutions in the USA have been organized for over 240 years to advance that purpose. The fact that the CIA came along 70 years ago and pushed the process forward by doing illegal things on an industrial basis hasn't changed the thrust of the American empire and its front men.

The people who control the Centre UA and manage its operations in Ukraine are doing the same thing here. It's the same rulers. It's the same PR people and journalists, the same politicians, and they are doing the same things. Just trace the origin of so many of them.

DAWSON: And they can distort massive events. I mean trying to get one newspaper or one talking head to mention that Palestine is under occupation. It will never happen, never.

VALENTINE: And yet people really think: they have freedom here. I guess it is all relative, but if you start to know a little bit, you realize you don't know much "truth" at all.

DAWSON: The internet is making a small dent in it, but not enough. Not yet, but I have hope in it anyway.

VALENTINE: I'm sixty-six; when I started writing back in the early 1980s, it could take a month to get in touch with someone to learn a particular fact. Things are faster now. But CIA is faster now too. It created a new Digital Directorate so it can more perfectly control internet information. The control of scientific and technological information is as important as the control of words – the intellectual information that is written down or broadcast. Control of scientific information is a means of controlling our ideas and assumptions about things. Just as the CIA is at the forefront of Propaganda on the Internet, its science and technology division is at the forefront of shaping the industries than run the world.

The CIA is at the forefront of drone and weapons technology – any kind of technological advancements that only serve and enrich the ruling class. The CIA is at the forefront of that research and development, and that goes for the Internet, too.

Back in the mid-1990s I took a class in the hypertext language. And to  my surprise, we were taught that all information was routed through super processors in Langley (the CIA headquarters in Virginia, US). Putin recently said that the Internet was a CIA special project and he was right. I remember when the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency came out with ARRANET, which started helping us to access information in college libraries back in the early 1990s. It was all done under the Department of Defense, which was fronting for the CIA.

So our Internet capabilities are a new freedom, but at the same time we enjoy this freedom by the leave of the CIA. If they wanted to, they could shut it down in a minute. They control it and they monitor every aspect of it. If we actually were doing something that threatened them, they would know about it in a nanosecond and our activities would be stopped. But we're just mosquitoes.

DAWSON: The FCC has already moved to destroy internet neutrality in the US. I see that Internet freedom as kind of a black swan. You have all these commercial purposes, definitely: people like Omidyar making money selling things online, but I am not sure if they worried that there would be people who would become self-made journalists and start reporting on all the horrible things they do.

VALENTINE: People are addicted to the Internet now and if Bill Gates or Omidyar wanted to, they could start charging you a dollar a day. It's like a drug. The first shot is for free. Now it's the time for them to start charging.  Nothing happening on the Internet right now is indicative of what's going to be going on in five years. This whole Internet fantasy could turn nightmarish very soon.

DAWSON: Well, that's pretty dark, but you may be right. At least they are charging people on the service end to provide it, and they are not happy about it. But you can completely control information if you can decide who is fast and who is slow; that is all it takes.

VALENTINE: If you were an Internet entrepreneur, how many different ways do you think you could come up with making millions off it? People are addicted to iPhones and texting. The entrepreneurs are hanging around the school yard and they are giving you free Skype. The CIA too. If the Brits could get away with pushing opium on China in 1848, what makes you think the CIA won't do it here, now?

DAWSON: Do opium? Ha!

VALENTINE: We'll have to come back in five years and see if I'm right.

DAWSON: I'm not arguing against you. I just don't want to believe it. You know, because it's dark.

VALENTINE: Enjoy the good times, because these little bits of freedom that we have now may be the last. "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." It's like Directive 304, which you could once find online, but is now classified. Civil liberties are diminishing not increasing. The Supreme Court just said that nobody can challenge Obama's right to detain.

VALENTINE: They can do anything and it's not going to get better, as resources diminish. As the income inequality gap widens, these trends are just going to get worse.

DAWSON: Yeah, they had the largest corporate bailout in history, and no one went to jail. There were some protests, but then it faded away. And that was after a sixteen-trillion-dollar bailout of these financial institutions, plus the Federal Reserve jumping in after that with even more money.

VALENTINE: That is the perfect example of why we do not live in a democracy. At the time they did some polls, and ninety percent of the American public did not want the government to bail out the banks. These were decisions made by our secret rulers. All the big decisions in our democracy are made by them.

DAWSON: And mass media agreed with it: “Too big to fail!”

VALENTINE: Yea, that’s a catchy slogan. And there are fewer rulers all the time and more of us idiots on the outside who are paying their bills.

DAWSON: Well, get out your pitchforks, people!