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Comedian Mort Sahl in 1976: The CIA Staffs the Left

Dave Emory’s entire life­time of work is avail­able on a flash dri­ve that can be obtained HERE [1]. The new dri­ve is a 32-giga­byte dri­ve that is cur­rent as of the pro­grams and arti­cles post­ed by the fall of 2017. The new dri­ve (avail­able for a tax-deductible con­tri­bu­tion of $65.00 or more.)

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[5]COMMENT: One of sev­er­al role mod­els who inspired Mr. Emory to do his life’s work is polit­i­cal come­di­an Mort Sahl. One of Jim Gar­rison’s inves­ti­ga­tor [6]s, Sahl paid the price for his engage­ment. From an enter­tain­ment and media super­star, he became rel­e­gat­ed to the mar­gins of expo­sure and earn­ing pow­er.

In his 1976 auto­bi­og­ra­phy Heart­land [7], he chron­i­cled some sus­pi­cious vio­lent events in New Orleans that imme­di­ate­ly pre­ced­ed Gar­rison’s cam­paign for re-elec­tion. Sahl sur­mised that this was prob­a­bly part of a CIA cam­paign to destroy Gar­ri­son. In our long series on Jim DiEu­ge­nio’s Des­tiny Betrayed [8], we not­ed that for­mer CIA direc­tor Richard Helms com­mit­ted the Agency to destroy­ing Gar­rison’s efforts before, dur­ing and after the tri­al of Clay Shaw. That these events may have been part of the “after” is some­thing to be care­ful­ly con­sid­ered.

In his text, Sahl also notes that part of the CIA’s task is ” . . . . to staff the left. They don’t staff the right–that’ll take care of itself; they staff the left. They give a fel­low a lib­er­al cre­den­tial, they’ll let you trust him, and they’ll always give you a cook­ie. A guy writes an arti­cle for Ram­parts and says, ‘The Gulf Oil com­pa­ny wants to start a war so they can drill off­shore in Viet­nam.’ The read­er says, ‘Wow, what rev­e­la­tions.’ that’s your cook­ie. . . .”

Heart­land [7] by Mort Sahl; Har­court Brace Jovanich [HC]; Copy­right 1976 by Mort Sahl; ISBN 0–15-139820–8; pp. 129–131. [7]

. . . . Believe me, actu­al sin is a lot tougher to take than orig­i­nal sin. It was busy in New Orleans. The Black Pan­thers had bar­ri­cad­ed them­selves in a hous­ing project and said they would die in a sui­cide mis­sion for equal hous­ing. They did­n’t live there obvi­ous­ly, because no ten­ant would ever defend those apart­ments with such fer­vor. In keep­ing with the unique col­or of New Orleans, the project was named “Desire.”

In case the Indi­ans at Wound­ed Knee were too remote to be a threat, a Navy yeo­man arrived on the roof of Howard John­son’s in New Orleans and turned out to be a good enough marks­man to take just about every­body out. There was total anar­chy except, as usu­al, some offi­cial finds the explana­to­ry note in the charred ruins which says: “I did it because I hate white folks” or “I did it because I hate cap­i­tal­ism.” (Just in case you don’t know who your ene­mies are or you lost your way in some oth­er fash­ion.) It looked very much like a Com­pa­ny job to keep the issue con­fused. Sud­den­ly Evans and Novak are down there and Novak is writ­ing how great May­or Lan­drieu is, pulling this town together–and all this is pri­or to Gar­rison’s run for re-election–because the D.A. isn’t tak­ing care of law and order. Novak also went on to say (on Los Ange­les KHJ Chan­nel 9) that the most dam­ag­ing thing in this coun­try are peo­ple like Mort Sahl, who issue reports that the gov­ern­ment killed the Pres­i­dent and make charges which divide us a nation. . . .

. . . . There are no anony­mous mur­ders any­more. When a com­put­er is blown up, we hear peo­ple say, ‘Well, we found in the charred ruins a sign say­ing, ‘We did it because we hate cap­i­tal­ism. Sin­cere­ly yours, the Left.’ ” They’re very smart, the CIA. I’ve said they’re uneth­i­cal, I’ve said they’re mur­der­ers, but you may note I’ve yet to say they’re not pro­fes­sion­al. Well., what else have they got to do? And they’ve got all the mon­ey in the world to do it with. Our mon­ey. To sit there and plan these things, day by day and hour by hour, to come up con­tin­u­al­ly with capers to con­vince you the sys­tem is fal­li­ble. And most­ly, to choose a posi­tion on the left, to staff the left. They don’t staff the right–that’ll take care of itself; they staff the left. They give a fel­low a lib­er­al cre­den­tial, they’ll let you trust him, and they’ll always give you a cook­ie. A guy writes an arti­cle for Ram­parts and says, “The Gulf Oil com­pa­ny wants to start a war so they can drill off­shore in Viet­nam.” The read­er says, “Wow, what rev­e­la­tions.” that’s your cook­ie. . . .”