Wikileaks: The “Cognitive Infiltration” Operation Demanded by Cass Sunstein

Webster Tarpley
Empire Strikes Black

Awareness is growing around the world that the Wikileaks-Julian Assange theater of the absurd is radically inauthentic – a psyop. Wikileaks and its impaired boss represent a classic form of limited hangout or self-exposure, a kind of lurid striptease in which the front organization releases doctored and pre-selected materials provided by the intelligence agency with the intent of harming, not the CIA, nor the UK, nor the Israelis, but rather such classic CIA enemies’ list figures as Putin, Berlusconi, Karzai, Qaddafi, Rodriguez de Kirchner, etc. In Tunisia, derogatory material about ex-President Ben Ali leaked by Wikileaks has already brought a windfall for Langley in the form of the rare ouster of an entrenched Arab government.



At Foggy Bottom and Langley, a manic fit has been building since the flight of Ben Ali. US imperialist planners now believe they can re-launch their shopworn model of the color revolution, CIA people-power coup, or postmodern putsch against a whole series of countries in the Arab world and far beyond, including Italy. The color revolutions had been looking tarnished lately, as a result of the failure of the Twitter Revolution in Iran back in June 2009. Previously, the Cedars Revolution of 2005 had failed in Lebanon. The Orange Revolution in Ukraine had been rolled back with the ouster of NATO-IMF kleptocrats Yushchenko and Timoshenko. In Georgia, the Roses Revolution was increasingly discredited by the repressive and warmongering regime of fascist madman Saakashvili.

US Seeks to Mobilize a New Generation of Young Nihilists Across the Globe

But now, NSC, State, and CIA believe that the color revolution has a new lease on life, thanks to their estimate that the United States, because of Wikileaks and Assange, has captured the imagination of a new generation of young nihilists across the globe who are described as the post-9/11 generation, estranged from governments and opposition parties, and thus ready to follow Langley’s peroxide Pied Piper.

Assange started his intensive deployment phase this year with video of a Class A US war crime in Iraq, which was very graphic but which dealt with an incident which was already widely known. The second document dump focused on Iraq, but now the targeting had shifted to Prime Minister Maliki, and the Iranian asset whom the US by some strange coincidence was trying to oust as leader of Iraq in favor of the US puppet Allawi. With the third document dump, this time involving State Department cables, we found out much derogatory gossip about such classic CIA targets as Russian prime minister Putin, Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi, the Russian-Italian strategic alliance, President Fernandez de Kirchner of Argentina, and President Karzai of Afghanistan, along with jabs at supposed US allies who need to be kept off-balance and dependent, including the Saudi Arabian royal family, French President Sarkozy, and others. Wikileaks thus directs the vast majority of its fire against figures who are part of the CIA’s enemies list.

No Equal Time for CIA Covert Operations

Assange also provides a splendid pretext for draconian censorship and limitations on the freedom of the internet. The totalitarian liberal Senator Feinstein wants to bring back Woodrow Wilson’s infamous Espionage Act of 1917 in honor of Assange. Assange must be seen not as an activist, not as a journalist, and not as an entertainer, but rather as a spook.  John Young of Cryptome, according to some reports, has denounced Wikileaks, to which he formerly belonged, as a CIA front. In a December 29 RT interview, Young described the internet as “a very large-scale spying machine.”¹ The internet is indeed a vast battlefield, where the intelligence agencies of the US-UK, China, Israel, Russia, and many others clash every hour of the day, with commercial spies, hackers, anarchists, cultists, mercenary trolls, and psychotics all getting into the act as well. Intelligence agencies deliberately feed real and doctored material to various websites, sometimes using their own disgruntled employees as cutouts, conduits, and go-betweens. This means among other things that Bradley Manning cannot be taken at face value, although it is also clear that he like anyone else should not be tortured.

Assange is now famous, it might be argued. But the Wall Street controlled media can make anyone famous, from Lady Gaga to Justin Bieber to Snooki, and this is what they have done with Assange. It is wrong to capitulate to the demagogic power of these media by making it appear that there might be some legitimate value to Assange. Up to now, the CIA has been organizing color revolutions using Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and so forth as vehicles. Now they think they have a cult figure whom they can sell to the youth bulge in the Arab world and other developing countries, where most of the population is under 30. This is an operation which must be exposed.

Most recently, Wikileaks has played a role in the CIA’s new “Jasmine Revolution” in Tunisia by publishing some State Department cables about the sybaritic luxury and lavish lifestyle of the Ben Ali clan, leading to the downfall of that regime. The CIA is now gloating that with the help of Wikileaks it can now topple all the Arab regimes at will, from Mubarak to Qaddafi to Bouteflika, and replace them with new and more pliable puppets eager to clash with Iran, Russia, and China.

If Assange ever launches his much-touted doomsday machine against the Bank of America or some other financial institutions, we will be justified in asking that the Securities and Exchange Commission make public the extent of short interest in those stocks by certain hedge funds, especially those controlled by George Soros. And as far as Assange’s attacks on the Vatican are concerned, they fit neatly into four centuries of British intelligence warfare against the Holy See, going back to Guy Fawkes and Lord Robert Cecil’s Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and beyond. Not much new or radical here.

Wikileaks: No Serious Derogatory Information about US, UK, Israel

It is illuminating that none of Assange’s document dumps have revealed any notable scandals involving Great Britain or Israel. No US public figures have had to resign because of anything Wikileaks has done. No major ongoing covert operation or highly placed agent of influence has been blown. After all these months, there are still no US indictments against Assange, even though we know that a US grand jury will readily indict a ham sandwich if the US Attorney demands it. If the CIA had wanted to silence Assange, they could have subjected him to the classic kidnapping aka rendition, meaning that he would have been beaten, drugged, and carted off to wake up in a black site prison in Egypt, Poland, or Guantanamo Bay. Otherwise, the CIA could have had recourse to the usual extralegal wetwork. We must also assume that the new US Cybercommand with its vast resources would have little trouble shutting down the Wikileaks mirror sites, no matter how numerous they might be. The same goes for Anonymous and other flanking organizations of Wikileaks. But these considerations are purely fantastic. Assange emerges today as the pampered darling and golden boy of The New York Times, Der Spiegel. The Guardian, El Pais — in short, of the entire Anglo-American official media Wurlitzer. He reclines today in baronial splendor in the country house of a well-connected retired British officer who should be quizzed by the media about his ties to British intelligence. The radical-chic world, from Bianca Jagger to Michael Moore, is at Assange’s feet.

Cass Sunstein Present at the Creation of Wikileaks

Wikileaks was apparently founded in 2006. Originally, the group was programmed to attack China, and its board was heavily larded with fishy Chinese dissidents and “democracy” activists from the orbit of the Soros foundations. Interestingly, the first big publicity breakthrough for Wikileaks in the mainstream US media was provided by an infamous totalitarian liberal today ensconced in the Obama White House – none other than Cass Sunstein. In Sunstein’s op-ed published in theWashington Post of February 24, 2007 under the title “Brave new Wikiworld,” we read: “Wikileaks.org, founded by dissidents in China and other nations, plans to post secret government documents and to protect them from censorship with coded software.” How interesting that Sunstein was present at the creation of the new Wikileaks psywar operation!

This is the same Sunstein who today heads Obama’s White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. In his January 2008 Harvard Law School Working Paper entitled “Conspiracy Theories,” Sunstein infamously demanded that the United States government deploy groups of covert operatives and pseudo-independent agents of influence for the “cognitively infiltration of extremist groups” – meaning organizations, activists and Internet websites who espouse beliefs which Sunstein chooses to classify as “false conspiracy theories.”

Wikileaks = Cass Sunstein’s Program for Cognitive Infiltration In Action

It should be clear that Assange and Wikileaks are precisely the practical realization of Sunstein’s program for “cognitive infiltration” shock troops to counteract and overwhelm any real mass understanding of oligarchical domination in the modern world, and any discussion of what kind of economic policies are needed to secure a recovery from the present world depression.
In line with Sunstein’s recipe, Assange is a self-declared enemy of 9/11 truth. As Assange told Belfast Telegraph reporter Matthew Bell last July, “I’m constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud.” In other words, Assange argues that the truth about 9/11 truth is not nearly as radical as the various scandals which Wikileaks claims to expose. But the scandals Assange is offering target mostly the adversaries of the CIA.

Assange must also be seen as a deeply troubled individual and a possible psychopath. He has the ravaged emotional complexion that we might expect from an alumnus of one of the many MK-Ultra operations. He reportedly spent several years in the menticidal Anne Hamilton-Byrne cult (also known as The Family and Santiniketan) near Melbourne, Australia. Here little children were separated from their parents and made to ingest LSD, Anatensol, Diazepam, Haloperidol,Largactil, Mogadon, Serepax, Stelazine, Tegretol, Tofranil, and other potent psychopharmaca. Dozens of children were told that Hamilton-Byrne was their real mother, and had their hair dyed blond. Anne Hamilton-Byrne reportedly regarded blond hair as a sign of racial superiority. Careful observers will have noted that Assange’s hair is sometimes blond, sometimes more brownish, raising the question of whether his grooming practices are a residue of his time with Hamilton-Byrne, whom he says he does not remember. When other kids were getting cookies and milk, was Assange being lobotomized by LSD and other potent psychopharmaca dished up by Hamilton-Byrne? There is evidence pointing in that direction.

With Assange, we thus have the tragic spectacle of the emotionally mutilated product of a CIA (or MI-6) covert operation of 40 years ago, who has now been given a prominent role in a key counter-insurgency ploy of the present time. Will the youth of the world, already burned by their recent fatuous obsession with Obama, be duped again by such an impaired individual?

The Precedent: Pentagon Papers Whitewashed CIA, Blamed Army, Demonized Kennedy

Assange’s revelations mainly involve communications labeled Confidential or Secret, and which in reality would be over-classified if marked Official Use Only. In other words, Assange is in reality a purveyor of low level cable traffic, not of earth-shattering secrets. This reminds us of an earlier CIA limited hangout operation, the one known as the Pentagon Papers. This was a carefully screened selection of historical documents, supplemented by outright forgeries, relating to the Vietnam War and compiled by Morton Halperin and Leslie Gelb, both of whom have gone on to glittering careers in the imperialist foreign policy establishment – Gelb became president of the Council on Foreign Relations, while Halperin serves today as chief political officer of the Soros wolfpack of foundations. The papers were leaked by former RAND Corporation official Daniel Ellsberg, who had been a very bellicose hawk in Vietnam before a suspicious Damascus Road conversion to pacifism, and then published in the US establishment press – similarly to Assange today. There was nothing in the Pentagon papers which a casual reader of LeMonde or Corriere della Sera did not already know. But, as Mort Sahl later said, left liberals have generally had very few heroes, so they battened on to Ellsberg and lionized him – led by Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and some others. (This is a syndrome which we see again today: at the moment when Obama’s treacherous sellout on the Bush tax cuts was providing a final disillusionment for many gullible left libs, Assange arrived on the scene as their new Savior. Not by chance, Ellsberg has now designated Assange as his own reincarnation, and thus surely the new Messiah.)

The Pentagon papers had been carefully selected by the CIA itself to cover up CIA war crimes in Vietnam, blaming these on the US Army wherever possible, while also obscuring the CIA’s massive program of drug production and narcotics smuggling. The Pentagon Papers systematically hid the salient political fact of the entire Vietnam era, which is that President John F. Kennedy before he was assassinated was preparing to end the de facto US combat role in that country. Instead, Kennedy was systematically demonized and smeared, emerging as the villain of the piece. Needless to say, the Pentagon papers throw no light whatsoever on the CIA role in the Kennedy assassination – in the same way that Assange’s various document dumps tell us nothing of importance about 9/11, the Rabin assassination, Iran-contra, the 1999 bombing of Serbia, the Kursk incident, the various CIA color revolutions, or many of the other truly big covert operations of the past decades.

The limited hangout is not new; it was described in a secret memorandum by Venetian intelligence chief Paolo Sarpi to the Venetian Senate in 1620 as the art of “saying something good about somebody while pretending to be saying something bad.” That is the common denominator of the CIA’s limited hangout operations from Ellsberg to Philip Agee to Assange, with so many other “former” CIA operatives turned “whistleblowers” along the way.
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¹John Young of Cryptome, “‘Internet a very large-scale spying machine’ – info leaking site co-founder,” RT, 29 December, 2010, at http://rt.com/news/cryptome-classified-secret-wikileaks/