Connecticut's tradition of vigorous civic institutions remains intact as a force for reform, as I saw during my lecture tour there last week.
This is good news for the rest of the country. Given the decline of the nation's watchdog institutions located in the capital, remedial action can only come "bottom up" from grassroots. Grassroots volunteerism is different from the phony "grasstop" organizations that special interests in Washington create whereby pseudo-populist groups manipulate public opinion.
My Connecticut trip June 18-20 was to discuss Presidential Puppetry, the first book about the Obama administration's second term. The strong civic institutions I saw and their reaction revealed positive signs amid discouraging news about national officials and the mainstream media.
In a message similar to my own these days, the prominent investigative editor Charles Lewis, for example, told a National Press Club audience June 24 in Washington, DC that "lying" by government officials has become standard operating procedure.
Lewis was announcing his memoir 935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America's Integrity at the 25th anniversary of the Center for Public Integrity. In 1989, he founded the pioneering (and now Pulitzer-winning) non-partisan, non-profit group in a spare room of his house after he resigned in frustration from hidden corporate pressures he had experienced as a producer for the top-rated CBS News show "60 Minutes."
Asked about the "commonalities" he has observed since then as a reporter and journalism professor, Lewis, shown at left, responded, "Not to be glib, but the commonalities are that if you were listening to government officials they were usually lying, or at least being non-responsive and kicking the problem down the road."
My column today compares his expert observations over his three decades with what I observed in Connecticut, where I began my reporting career in 1970 with 14 years at the Hartford Courant, the state's largest newspaper.
I started by observing the annual awards luncheon of the Connecticut Council on Freedom of Information (CCFOI) and hearing how civic volunteers are fighting secrecy in government. I wanted to hear especially the award presentation for columnist Andy Thibault, a fierce fighter against injustice who also kindly volunteered to arrange my lectures.
Next, I participated in the process by lectures and interviews that drew from Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters. The subtitle reflects its focus on what the mainstream media has missed about power brokers and such Republican officials as the Romney and Bush families, not just Democrats.
From these experiences, I share recommended measures for reform, as well as traps for the unwary. Some of these obstacles arise from masters of political intrigue who undertake despicable deeds with impunity because they can be confident that few are exposing their corruption in ways noticed by the public.
The work of the freedom of information council, CCFOI, is a great place to start our discussion.
Council Chairman James Herbert Smith, a longtime editor at the Courant and several other Connecticut newspapers, is shown at right presenting to Thibault the group's annual award to a journalist whose work best fostered open government during the previous year.
CCFOI is a private group that advocates support for the state's 1975 Freedom of Information law. Its annual budget the past year was just over $11,000, which was raised primarily from dues provided by the state's newspapers.
CCFOI's major spending was for lobbying at the state capitol to fight relentless efforts to curtail government information provided to the public. Smith, the CCFOI chairman, has been a prominent editor at multiple Connecticut newspapers, including the Hartford Courant.
The New Haven Register covered the event in Connecticut Council on Freedom of Information announces open government award recipients.
More specifics about the ceremony are worth describing.
CCFOI's efforts help protect the public from gross new restrictions of government information that has long been regarded as public.
My perspective includes experience in the late 1970s as a pro se litigant in a successful case that helped establish the reach of Connecticut's then-new Freedom of Information Act.
At the time, I was the Courant's reporter covering federal operations in Connecticut, including a federal trial of Hartford-based organized crime figures. Their convictions in nation's test case of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) Act paved the way for prosecutors to use the law to cripple the Mafia's power elsewhere in the United States, as I once described in a historical overview of prosecution efforts against organized crime, Learning from Heroes Who Fought the Mafia.
The Mafia (also known as La Cosa Nostra) was not especially powerful in central Connecticut. But the hard-fought disclosure battle against the City of Hartford ultimately revealed newsworthy relationships:
Via the case Kreig vs. City of Hartford, I obtained from the city records the secret identities of those who had recommended for a gun permit one of the two defendants in the mob case. Connecticut's Supreme Court issued the issued the decision in a pioneering but unpublished ruling. The late Ralph G. Elliott, the outside counsel of the Courant, expertly supported at the Supreme Court level what I had begun as a pro se filing and argumentl.
The recommendations for the mobster's right to carry a gun had come from Hartford's mayor, the chief state prosecutor for Connecticut's lower court system, and a prominent lawyer who represented scores of police unions. We published the findings, and the state prosecutor resigned the next day.
In part because of that experience, I looked on more recent developments under the FOI law with great interest last week.
The government-employed award winners included South Windsor Police Chief Matthew Reed and State Sen. Edward Meyer III (D-Guilford), each of whom has been helping sustain open government by force of example.
Reed, shown in a photo with longtime state Freedom of Information Commission Executive Director Mitchell Pearlman, told the luncheon audience that he instinctively leans toward public disclosure of information, unlike some of his police department peers in other communities.Meyer, a Yale Law School graduate and politician of long experience, was recognized for making sophisticated and at times unpopular arguments before the state legislature about the public benefits of photos and other information about crime scenes.
Most notably, he argued that information about the site of the Sandy Hook school massacre in Newtown was historically important, much like photos of battle deaths or war crimes, as in World War II concentration camps that portrayed identifiable victims.
Meyer aptly noted that parents of schoolchild victims and their legislators understandably prefer privacy as they endure their grief -- but that society would be the poorer without accurate information about horrific situations.
Hugh McQuaid, a reporter for the website Connecticut News Junkie, was recognized for his nuanced coverage of the massacre in Newtown.
Thibault, a syndicated columnist and author, received his award for, among other things, his relentless and successful efforts to vindicate a Connecticut woman falsely convicted nearly three decades ago for a homicide. He is an award-winning feature writer, investigative reporter, and author or co-author of four books, with a fifth due in the fall. Much of his work is collected on the Cool Justice Report, which exposes wrongdoing in the justice system. So does his 2002 collection, Law and Justice In Everyday Life, which has a glowing introduction by Howard Zinn, Thibault's former professor at Boston University.
The trip provided me with a close-up view of Thibault's investigative reporting, high energy and wide contacts. Five months ago, he wrote for three Connecticut newspapers a favorable review of Presidential Puppetry in Road map to master manipulators.
Then, in the spirit of Puppetry's recommendations for civic action on behalf of any reform effort a reader might admire, he kindly initiated arrangements for me to speak at the Hartford Club the evening of the CCFOI awards luncheon, and then on June 19 at Litchfield's Oliver Wolcott Library and the Litchfield Rotary Club.
Last week, I previewed here the content of those talks in Past, Present Connecticut Activists Provide Models For Reform.
Today, my follow up argues that the kind of local volunteerism I observed in Connecticut as a young reporter and again last week illustrates how we each have the power to start changing our communities for the better.
Revelation of scandal and serious discussion of the implications is exactly what I encountered in superb exchanges at the Hartford and Litchfield library venues, followed by significant broadcast and newspaper coverage of the lectures. The Oliver Wolcott Library in Litchfield recorded my talk in a podcast available here.
The book arose from my research about failures in the justice, political and media systems. Presidential Puppetry places those today's failures into a century-long pattern showing that, more than ever, national politics threatens economic and other freedoms.
The newspaper coverage included a Sunday column in the Torrington Register Citizen, Andrew Kreig makes an impact with new book. The author (shown in a file photo at left) was Owen Canfield, 80, a former Courant sports editor who had begun at the newspaper in 1965 and whose work there overlapped with my entire 14 years.I was thrilled that my passionate albeit controversial message resonated favorably so well with him after all these years. This is particularly so because he has built through the decades a reputation as all-around good guy -- a trait not always present in today's news industry or anywhere else.
The coverage has included also an hour-long show on West Hartford local cable access television with hosts Cheryl Curtis and Michael De Rosa. That led to invitations this week for further discussion broadcast on De Rosa's shows on WWUH, WHUS and WESU at the Universities of Hartford and Connecticut and at Wesleyan University, respectively. The shows began June 27 at noon and 7 p.m. on WWUH, which is keeping the show on archive for two weeks
Additionally, Litchfield Times reporter Shako Liu and the staff of the Litchfield public library stepped forward to make available the gist of the book's disclosures. Self-censorship in much larger media often prevents the public from ever hearing about the specific facts unerlying such issues as Benghazi even though the topics are continually floated without enough information to enable an opinion by anyone aside from partisans.
During a drive to the West Hartford cable studio June 19, Curtis and I spoke of the challenges for broadcasters in analyzing such complex fare. We discussed in particular our hope that those whom we knew at WNPR, the radio service of the Connecticut Public Broadcasting Network, would step up their efforts to complement commercial networks. Curtis is an unpaid volunteer host at both the cable access show and WWUH-FM.
By coincidence, two young staffers for WNPR approached us to undertake a taped survey as we walked toward the West Hartford studio. The staffers asked us to describe (apparently for potential on-air use) our favorite bizarre sport, our favorite TV game show, etc. It was part of a five-question survey.
Seizing the opportunity, Curtis said that her favorite sport was making fun of time-wasting surveys about trivia -- when networks like WNPR should be addressing important issues.
In a firm voice but with a humorous twinkle in the eye, she emphasized how the public needs to hear about serious issues. Also, she mentioned in passing that she was a broadcaster (at the cable show and WWUH-FM).
At the end, one of the young staffers, an intern, said to her (off microphone), "After I graduate I want to do shows like yours!"
The encounter reminded me of how we each have moments when we can learn from each other, often by force of others' example.
Later, I used the anecdote in my Litchfield library talk to illustrate also how the mainstream media increasingly tends to dwell on entertainment and other non-controversial topics, but that each of us can find ways to refocus attention on what we believe important.Yet we must appreciate also the immensity of the problem. What I experienced in Connecticut contrasts sharply with the partisan, selfish and narrow-minded practices I observed increasingly in Washington for the two decades, thereby leading me to found the Justice Integrity Project and write Puppetry as an overview.
Therefore, as I explained in Litchfield:
The Washington Post until last year was receiving just 4 percent of its income from newspaper sales, and only about 14 to 15 percent additionally from advertising. The means it profited very little financially from selling "news," particularly hard-hitting material that might antagonize powerful interests in the circle of the ownership family itself. As recounted in Puppetry, the family's roots were in banking, with its patriarch, the late Eugene Meyer, presiding as a chairman of both the Federal Reserve Bank and the World Bank at different times. In recent years, about 60 percent of the Washington Post's income has come from its Kaplan education subsidiary, which relied heavily on favorable federal regulation and government-guaranteed income. This created an inherent conflict of interest with aggressive news coverage of government officials that was virtually unknown by anyone except those directly involved.
A year ago, I continued, Amazon.co founder Jeffrey Bezos attended the secretive annual Bilderberg meeting outside of London, where attendees included longtime Washington Post Publisher Donald Graham and such other eminences as David Rockefeller among the 130 or so attendees. About a month later, Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million (minus Kaplan). Later in the year, Amazon.com won a $600 million contract from the Central Intelligence Agency to handle is advanced cloud network computing needs.
These are the kinds of relationships that obscure the pure news-gathering role of mainstream media regardless of whether the Post (or others) occasionally publish penetrating news accounts of prize-winning caliber. In fact, the Post this week won the Gerald Loeb aware for a series of stories that reported the extent of the National Security Agency's massive global surveillance programs. The nation's top business reporting accolade complemented other awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, that the Post and such others as Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian have won for reporting disclosures by, most notably, former NSA analyst Edward Snowden.
Such prizes by the Post and other major news organizations complicate but do not negate my fundamental theme that mainstream, commercial journalism often fails to provide the information the public now requires.The experience of author Charles "Chuck" Lewis illustrates a similar theme, as do the comments of many others of similar stature to his.
The impressive new Lewis book, 935 Lies, explores the many ways truth is obscured by governments and corporations. The title derives from a report by the Center for Public Integrity in a 380-word study by 25 researchers showing that President George W. Bush and six of his administration's other topic officials made 935 false statements justifying the United States invasion of Iraq they ordered in 2003.
Among the compelling trends Lewis noted in his Press Club speech this week:
- In 1960, one news reporting job existed compared to approximately one in public relations. Now public relations operatives outnumber reporters 4:1. "That's a problem."
- Twenty-seven states have no general circulation news reporter covering Washington news specifically pertaining to the state.
- Lewis himself resigned from the nation's most prestigious investigative show, "60 Minutes," after he encountered repeated self-censorship from some of the nation's leading news executives to protect, in his view, influential executives in both government and the private sector. These included the Wall Street, foundation and government eminence Peter Peterson, perhaps the nation's most effective voice in seeking a new level of austerity in social safety net programs.
To be sure, many in the mainstream media become defensive and otherwise dispute any suggestion they are not delivering all newsworthy information that meets publication standards. That pride in work is understandable for anyone. So is, especially in Connecticut, a lack of specific knowledge of the kinds of dastardly intrigues that are occurring when the payoff might be hundreds of millions of dollars for contracts, financial swindles and/or wars, not simply the corruption that can occur on a state or county level.
A vast number of unreported or under-reported major news stories are occurring, as indicated by the Presidential Puppetry narrative documented with more than 1,100 endnotes. The book shows, for example, that the CIA, acting on behalf of Wall Street and other elite interests, helped lead the way toward heavy control of the United States domestic political process, including influence over the news media through such programs as the long-secret and declassified Operation Mockingbird.
The Graham family at the Post was heavily involved along with leaders of most other major print and broadcast media in cooperating with CIA leaders in Operation Mockingbird, we now know. I documented these facts in my preview of my Connecticut speech and in the book.
These facts conflict with the Washington Post's reputation for Watergate coverage and similar revelations about government. But the facts are readily authenticated by those who read the source and secondary documentation.
Furthermore, Puppetry describes how all recent United States presidents, including President Obama, developed relationships with the CIA or FBI before they entered politics.
President Obama's post-college work for the CIA front company Business International Corp. thus places a new interpretation on his later work as a community organizer in Chicago's ghetto and his relationships with radicals. Furthermore, it helps explain his current foreign and domestic policies, including vigorous prosecution efforts using spy charges against government whistleblowers who cooperate with the media. Obama and his Justice Department have prosecuted more government whistleblowers on spy charges -- six -- than all other administrations in American history combined.
Important though this new information might be to the public, it is not attractive to partisan Democrats who would reject any notion that their leader has failed to disclose his past fully. Similarly, partisan Republicans prefer to portray Obama as a dangerous radical. The actual facts are far more nuanced.
Those in the major media prefer to ignore any such evidence because examination would show their readers and viewers that the news organizations have failed their watchdog role -- either because of adherence to conventional wisdom, deadline pressures on other topics, self-censorship, or (in a few instances at the top) knowing deceptions of the public to advance some agenda.
Much of this may seem almost unimaginable to those who follow the news with care but who are not in position to undertake deep research because of the time commitment. Therefore, I am going to cite several examples of matters in the news recently. These illustrate themes organized more coherently in Presidential Puppetry regarding the information missing from standard news accounts regarding the CIA, National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies that have had massive, secret operations to affect United States public opinion, politics and communications, especially recent electronic communications.
Above, I noted that Connecticut's CCFOI bestowed an award on State Sen. Meyer, shown at right with his 
award. From the remarks of the presenter, I sensed that the recipient, age 79, had accomplished many impressive goals during his career, which included early on work at the Justice Department under Attorney Gen. Robert F. Kennedy. This finding is readily confirmed by available news clippings, such as recent article about Meyer's retirement, Ted Kennedy Jr. considers run to succeed retiring Connecticut Sen. Edward Meyer.
award. From the remarks of the presenter, I sensed that the recipient, age 79, had accomplished many impressive goals during his career, which included early on work at the Justice Department under Attorney Gen. Robert F. Kennedy. This finding is readily confirmed by available news clippings, such as recent article about Meyer's retirement, Ted Kennedy Jr. considers run to succeed retiring Connecticut Sen. Edward Meyer.To learn more, I approached him and his wife as they were rushing to another appointment. In a brief but friendly conversation, he mentioned that his uncle had been the late author and pioneering CIA executive Cord Meyer, Jr.
A New York Times obituary in 2001, Cord Meyer Jr. Dies at 80; Communism Fighter at C.I.A., summarized Cord Meyer's career as "an articulate and passionate strategist who helped guide the young Central Intelligence Agency's efforts to contain Soviet communism at home and abroad," adding:
Mr. Meyer, whose career took extraordinary turns, from soldier to author to liberal activist to spy to newspaper columnist, died of lymphoma and other ailments at the Washington Home, a long-term health care facility. In his 26 years at the C.I.A., where he held management positions in the covert operations branch, Mr. Meyer drew criticism from many liberals for his role in efforts to subsidize student and labor groups in this country as counterweights to Soviet-backed groups in Europe. Yet, for all his ardent anti-communism, which associates said was a lifelong principle, Mr. Meyer faced accusations at the height of the McCarthy era that he was a Communist sympathizer.
Cord Meyer had been a World War II hero, Yale-educated scholar and world-renowned peace advocate.
He had also been one of the key implementers of Operation Mockingbird-style programs. His CIA colleague Frank Wisner dined on a weekly basis with Philip and Katharine Graham of the Washington Post, according to contemporary accounts, including Katharine Graham's memoir, Personal History.
My mention of the Mockingbird role here is not to cast any aspersion on Cord Meyer and certainly not on his nephew, Sen. Meyer -- only to highlight part of that history for the record.It is impossible to understand current events without an appreciation of the important role of intelligence agencies, their vital liaison role between financial titans and policy-makers, and other thought-leaders, including in the media and academia. These relationships are obscured from the public. But they were so important even by the early 1960s that all three of our first Cold War presidents were expressing serious concerns about the process they had initiated, as described in my column here and in a recent news analysis, Truman and first CIA director condemned the CIA after JFK assassination, based on documentation at the Truman Library in Independence, MO,
In that spirit, I report in my book oft-hidden relationships among the powerful and their implications. This is, in my mind, somewhat like the senator, Meyer, had done in his award acceptance speech in a similar context.
In terms of the CIA, Presidential Puppetry reveals that my late mother, Margaret Kreig, had been an undercover CIA asset on occasion even while pursuing a more public career as a prominent investigative reporter, editor and best-selling author.
My belief is that her CIA work was like that of contemporaries during that Cold War era, arose largely from a sense of patriotism and other civic pride. During the 1960s, she confided that she directly reported on occasion to J. Caldwell King, the high-level chief of Western Hemisphere operations and formerly a prominent Wall Street lawyer, like many in the agency's leadership.
This was much like her decision to drop out of college in 1943 and volunteer to become one of the first female members of the U.S. marines in the fight against the Axis Powers, and then become a crusading medical editor for Parents Magazine and jungle explorer working with scientists to learn from witch doctors.
Similarly, she undertook secret undercover work for federal agents to investigate organized crime. She later testified before Congress against the mob in 1967 as the star witness of the first congressional hearings specifically citing the Mafia following the disclosures from informer Joe Valachi of a nationwide crime organization with a silence code, omerta, enforced by murder.
An undercover surveillance photo of her pretending to be a madam making a drug buy in that era is at left, part of her bold cooperation with federal agents to help them build cases and to get exclusives for her writing. This resulted in, among other works, her 1967 book Black Market Medicine, illustrated by her photo by the National Science Foundation, at right.In sum, we each have opportunities to learn and to chart a course on what to do with disturbing information that appears to threatens us, our community and others.
Let's work together. Litchfield's librarian recommended me and my talk to peers in the state, and so I hope to return soon there to other venues -- as well as elsewhere around the country. In the meantime, Presidential Puppetry is available until July 4 via Amazon.com and elsewhere for its introductory price of $2.99 for the electronic version before its price increases to $8.99 after that. Additionally, the first five people to write me here will receive it free electronically. My address for that, questions, criticism or other comment is Andrew.Kreig at gmail.com.
Whether or not you hear me, or Charles ("Chuck") Lewis or any one of hundreds of others with similar messages, let's join forces.
New Haven Register, 
award on Andy Thibault (Robert Theisman Photos). A police chief, a state senator, an FOI Commission employee and two journalists have won the annual open government awards from the nonprofit Connecticut Council on Freedom of Information, which has been advocating for freedom of information for six decades. South Windsor Police Chief Matt Reed was presented the Bice Clemow Award for his goal to “put out as much information as possible” to the public about crime in his community. Blogger and Digital First Media columnist Andy Thibault received the Stephen A. Collins Award for his dogged pursuit on virtually every FOI battlefront in the past year. Thibault was instrumental in ensuring that the clemency hearing of convicted murderer Bonnie Foreshaw proceeded in public, according to the CCFOI. State Sen. Edward Meyer received the Champion of Open Government Award for consistently voting for transparency in government and the people’s right to know. “He was one of only two senators to vote against making secret crime scene photos and emergency phone calls after the Sandy Hook school shooting,” the CCFOI said in its statement. Champion of Open Government awards also went to reporter Hugh McQuaid of the CTNewsjunkie for his “nuanced, straightforward, fair, insightful and alert” coverage on the governors task force on Victim Privacy and the People’s Right to Know, and the debates over the issue in the General Assembly; and to Thomas Hennick, public information officer of the FOI Commission.
Oliver Wolcott Library Litchfield, CT, 
Dissident Voice, 
Wayne Madsen Report (WMR),
Justice Integrity Project, 
Noel St. John) and William Binney will testify before a German parliamentary committee on July 3. They both will give testimony as part of an inquiry into details of NSA surveillance in Germany, which have been revealed through news stories based upon documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The Bundestag committee will likely be asking questions about surveillance by the “Five Eyes” states—United States of America, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand—and their collection of data and interception of communications in Germany. The committee will also ask about how data was collected, retained, checked and analyzed by surveillance programs operated by the NSA and the British spy agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), as well as how private companies helped these agencies. It also hopes to learn more on the use of diplomatic missions or military sites for surveillance and to what extent German, European or international laws were violated.
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Hillary Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden want you to think they are penniless?" All over the press corps, a large assortment of lazy script-readers quickly echoed the guild’s new line about Hillary Clinton being too wealthy, or out of touch, or possibly too gaffe-ridden. The fact that the obscenely wealthy Diane Sawyer initiated this wildly premature discussion has officially struck no one as strange. But then, everyone agrees on one key rule of life in the Washington press corps — the massive wealth of our leading “journalists” must never be discussed. This brings us to Dickerson’s early life as the reigning “Fresh Prince of Merrywood.” See also, 
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