Ladies and gentlemen, the votes are in. And I’d like to announce this year’s winner of the First Annual “Corpsy” award. The award for most Archonic Corpsoration goes to a little company with a secretly big impact, Strategic Communication Laboratories.
[Wait for applause]
… Ahem. Is this thing on? Well if you haven’t heard of them, SCL recently made their public debut at an international arms fair in London. Sharon Weinberger of MSN’s Slate has the scoop here. SourceWatch has also put together a decent collection of quotations from the SCL website such as this gem:
“A strategic communication centre puts influence, control and power back into the hands of the government and military. It is an essential component for Homeland Security, Conflict Reduction, International Public Diplomacy and un-mediated Government communications. Over the last 15 years the military use of Psyop has saved thousands of lives on both sides of military conflicts. In the future, conflicts may well be resolved on the global media stage, so that direct action becomes an unnecessary tactic,” it states on its website.
Whew! It’s a good thing that influence, control and power are being put back in the hands of the government and military. For a second there, I think we were all a little worried that they were slipping!
SCL calls itself “the Hearts and Minds Agency” and even though they publicly state that their custom-built disinformation Opcentres can “override all national radio and TV broadcasts in time of crisis,” they don’t like to be called propagandists. Weinberg has the “money” quote on that topic:
“If your definition of propaganda is framing communications to do something that’s going to save lives, that’s fine,” says Mark Broughton, SCL’s public affairs director. “That’s not a word I would use for that.”
Hehe. Cute. I don’t think that’s ANYBODY’s definition of propaganda though. Certainly not mine. Nevermind that since this is a private firm, they’ll more than likely be able to circumvent prohibitions against the CIA interfering in domestic affairs (not like that’s ever stopped them, of course). But concerns like your’s and mine don’t matter though, because it’s all good:
Yes, Broughton acknowledges, the ops center is not exactly giving the truth, but he adds, “Is it not worth giving an untruth for 48 hours to save x million people’s lives? Sometimes the means to an end has to be recognized.” [...]
Well aware that the company may face controversy, particularly with its push into the defense market, Broughton emphasizes the company’s role in saving lives.
“It sounds altruistic,” he said. “There is some altruism in it, but we also want to earn money.”
Oh shit! Is that what’s going on here? I totally thought this was all about helping people. Boy am I stupid!
PS. Did you know that Allen Dulles ordered the Bible quote “For ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free,” carved into marble at the entrance to the Pentagon? How funny is that!
[Slate article found via Daily Grail]
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7 Comments
This has to be a joke. This has to be a joke.
1. Yikes. Yikes, again.
2. “The Opcentre can override all national radio and TV broadcasts in time of crisis.â€
3. Why do they need this when they already have the Opcentres called CNN, BBC, FOX, MSNBC, NPR, and Judith Miller?
4. I wonder how goes typical chit-chat around an Opcentre coffee machine.
Yeah, I dropped em a little while back in another thread. Since then, I’ve been doing a bit more research on them.
They are actually frightening.
” Is it not worth giving an untruth for 48 hours to save x million people’s lives? ”
There’s no such thing as lying in the service of The Good.
“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
—Benjamin Franklin
It’s no joke man! It’s one of the companies that obtains information (personal and customized) about us, what we buy, basically our preferences and sell it to companies especially advertising agency and unfortunately politicians (both sides of the party used it for last year 2004 elections) to mani…i mean to persuade us to buy their products and to vote for them. They call this NARROWCASTING.
If you want to know more checkout this PBS website:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/
yes, i know about narrowcasting. wrote about it the othe day in fact. but this doesnt seem like it to me.