Abuse Your Illusions: The Disinformation Guide to Media Mirages and Establishment Lies (Disinformation Guides) Paperback – May 1, 2003

Illegal US Bioweapons Program. Under international treaty and federal law, it is illegal for the US to make biological weapons for offensive purposes; they can only be created in order to study ways to defend against them. Using the Freedom of Information Act, the Sunshine Project has unearthed documents which show that the military is proposing—and is already working on—bioweapons for use in warfare. These declassified documents are the smoking guns that prove the military is violating an international treaty and federal law. The Sunshine Project discusses what they’ve discovered, how they discovered it, and what it means. "Abuse Your Illusions" reproduces two of the documents in question. According to Edward Hammond, one of Sunshine’s cofounders, a New York Times reporter interviewed him about this for 45 minutes and was eager to do a story on it, but the Times’ editors killed it.

Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. When he leaked a massive classified study of the Vietnam War, former State Department analyst Daniel Ellsberg earned a place in history books. In "Speer," he writes about the day he turned himself in to the authorities for giving the Pentagon Papers to the media. He also discusses how Albert Speer—the number-three Nazi, whom Ellsberg believes was rehabilitated—became the only member of the Third Reich to accept full responsibility for not only his own actions but the actions of the entire government. It’s something that no other government official has apparently ever done. In a second article, "Are Secrecy Oaths a License to Lie?" Ellsberg looks at the troubling aspects of the secrecy oaths that many government employees must sign.

Rape and Sexual Harassment in the US Military. Rapes at the Air Force Academy have caused a scandal in the past few months. The authorities assure us, though, that sexual assault of service members by other service members is only a problem in this one institution of this one branch of the service. Terri Spahr Nelson knows better. The author of a book on the subject, this Army veteran’s article "The Enemy Within" exposes the rape crisis in all branches of the military. According to the Defense Department’s own studies, 55 percent of women and 14 percent of men on active duty experienced unwanted sexual attention at work in the year prior to the surveys. And 4 percent of active-duty women experienced rape or attempted rape in the preceding year. This is an average across all branches; members of the Army and the Marines experience even more sexual harassment and violence. Spahr Nelson uses the military’s own findings to blow the lid off of this disturbing situation, and she shows why it’s happening.

Operation Tailwind. In pack-dog fashion, the media excoriated April Oliver’s CNN report on Operation Tailwind after the Pentagon and veterans screamed that it wasn’t true and CNN subsequently withdrew it. In "Unanswered Letters," Oliver mounts a hard-hitting defense of her story about an operation to kill American defectors with nerve gas in a North Vietnamese prison located in Laos. She reveals exactly who has lied about the incident and her reporting of it. She discusses the unpublicized results of lawsuits in her favor, and she digs up hard documentary evidence to back her up. "Abuse Your Illusions" contains this previously unpublished evidence, including a Kissinger email and an uncut interview with Admiral Thomas Moorer, who was the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when Tailwind occurred.

The Creation of Panama. We know that certain Wall Streeters and political operatives will go to great lengths to make money, but would they create a nation just for that purpose? Yes, they would, and they did. Panama-born Ovidio Diaz-Espino has discovered the roots of his home country by digging through crates of old newspapers, evidence from Congressional investigations, the memoirs of participants, and other contemporaneous sources. The plot is pretty complicated, but it boils down to this: A group of powerful businessmen and political insiders found a way to make an outrageous fortune through the building of the Panama Canal. The problem was that Panama was a part of Colombia, and the Colombian government was starting to balk. So this group of powerbrokers engineered a revolution in which Panama seceded from Colombia, and the new Panamanian government allowed the building of the canal. This is hidden history at its more important and amazing best.

The Creation of the UN. Once again the Freedom of Information Act has proved indispensable in liberating forgotten truths. Former reporter Stephen Schlesinger, now head of the World Policy Institute, got his hands on intelligence documents that show in graphic detail how the United Nations was really created: The United States intercepted and decoded the encrypted diplomatic cables of almost every country involved. Using this purloined knowledge, the US was then able to manipulate the proceedings to its advantage. This important article was published in an obscure cryptology journal eight years ago; "Abuse Your Illusions" is bringing it to a much larger, wider audience.

The CIA’s Radiation Weapons. John Kelly is one of the world’s foremost experts on the CIA, having produced and/or written numerous documentaries on the Agency, including a six-part series for the BBC. In "The Agency and the Atom," he breaks new ground by revealing the CIA’s attempts to create radioactive and atomic weapons for use by saboteurs and assassins. He also examines the CIA-funded experiments in which unwitting citizens were subjected to radioactivity simply to see what would happen. Based on interviews, newly-released documents, and articles in dusty medical journals, Kelly has recovered a forgotten aspect of the CIA’s misdeeds.

Watergate. More than 30 years later, the central question of Watergate remains unanswered: What was the purpose of the break-in? Two recent trials provide some important clues. Jim Hougan—author of the Watergate classic Secret Agenda—took part in the defamation trials of G. Gordon Liddy, and in "Watergate Redux," Hougan provides fascinating, previously unreported accounts of what happened. The evidence strongly suggests that the "plumbers" were trying to dig up dirt on a call-girl ring run out of Democratic National Headquarters.

High-ranking Doubters of the Warren Commission. Everyone knows that only ridiculous conspiracy theorists don’t believe the official version of President Kennedy’s assassination. To doubt the Warren Commission’s findings is the height of paranoid lunacy. If that’s the case, then there are some very powerful people on the roster of lunatic conspiracy nuts. William W. Turner—the first FBI agent to publicly blow the whistle on J. Edgar Hoover—has assembled, for the first time, quotes from Presidents, Senators, and other uppermost political officials who say that the lone-nut, single-shooter theory is bogus. Their numbers include President Johnson, President Nixon, Robert Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, Texas Governor John Connally, two of Kennedy’s assistants who were in Dealey Plaza, and two members of the Warren Commission. Even Chief Justice Earl Warren—the head of the Commission—never ruled out the possibility of a conspiracy.