LIMITED HANGOUT (1967-77): How to fool the citizens into thinking that government has been reformed
An MOR series (Part 1)
The LIMITED HANGOUT is an intelligence tactic by which an agency or operative discloses a portion of the truth—often damaging but controllable—in order to deflect attention from more serious or compromising information they seek to conceal. It is used to placate investigators, the media, or the public by appearing transparent—giving the impression of a ‘house cleaning’—while maintaining cover for deeper secrets, the revelation of which would be truly catastrophic for the bosses.
They’ll show you the tip and pretend it’s the iceberg.
They’ll hang an old panty out and call it the laundry.
They’ll leak a memo and call it the archive.
Wikipedia explains the limited hangout like this:
“Concept. According to Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a limited hangout is ‘spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.’ While used by the CIA and other intelligence organizations, the tactic has become popularized in the corporate and political spheres.”
The limited hangout is a daring damage-control strategy employed in what we call the management of reality (MOR). Essentially, the bosses say to you: Yes, we have been a bunch of mafiosi, but look: we are reforming, we will be good now.
The citizen gets the impression that bad stuff happened—yes, ‘rogue’ agents got out of control—but the system in the end kind of works, because the bad stuff was exposed and now it’s all getting fixed. Relax!
Except that nothing is really fixed—it’s a show. The entire system has gone rogue.
I have argued that Donald Trump is a Deep State actor pretending to be a Deep State opponent, and that his supposed house cleaning of the US government is a limited hangout.
In support of that, in this series, I will examine the most important limited hangout in US history: the scandals of 1967-77. This will teach you the structure of the US system, and it will establish the baseline plausibility for my arguments concerning Donald Trump.
The 1960s & 1970s
In 1967, a relatively small US magazine, Ramparts, shook the entire country when it exposed that the National Student Association (NSA), the biggest in the country, was a CIA front.
This raised a troubling question: What other crimes might US-government bureaucrats have been carrying out clandestinely? And that question set in motion a whole series of investigations.
It was shock after shell shock.
In addition to the exposure of the National Student Association as a CIA front, it was revealed that the CIA had corrupted and infiltrated a great many other organizations and institutions—a true octopus. Here follows a sampling:
Operation CHAOS. The CIA’s domestic spying operation, targeting all manner of citizen organizations—antiwar, civil rights, black power, and countercultural groups—with illicit surveillance, informants, and intelligence gathering within the U.S.
COINTELPRO. This is an FBI program that used illegal methods—wiretaps, false identity operations, smear campaigns, infiltration, provoking internal conflicts—to discredit, disrupt, and neutralize political activists, especially civil rights leaders and radical groups.
HTLINGUAL. The CIA and FBI were intercepting, opening, and photographing the correspondence of US citizens.
If all that were not enough, US bureaucrats had also launched criminal programs against the very minds and bodies of US citizens, treating them like lab rats.
MKUltra.The CIA’s mind control and behavior modification program. The objective was to learn how to break down a human mind and control it the way you might a robot, using LSD, hypnosis, electroshock, sensory deprivation, etc. The experiments were often conducted on unwitting subjects, and they caused severe psychological harm and sometimes death. One major objective of MKUltra was to produce a cohort of ‘Manchurian candidates’—remotely controlled assassins who would not remember who programmed or sent them. (You read correctly.)
BIOLOGICAL WARFARE ‘TESTS’ ON US CITIZENS. In addition, the U.S. Army was found to have conducted hundreds of secret open‐air biological warfare ‘tests’ between 1949 and 1969, releasing harmful agents in public spaces (airports, bus terminals, neighborhoods) without informed consent or any public knowledge. Millions of US citizens were sprayed in these ‘tests.’ (You read correctly.)
Taken together, what this period revealed was that the entire US government had been behaving as a criminal organization—on the scale of totalitarian States.
But it was exposed. And much of this was exposed via the Church Committee (named for Senator Frank Church) in the United States Senate. So, does that mean the democratic system was self-correcting, returning itself to health?
Not necessarily, because exposures can happen under the limited-hangout maneuver, when the exposures are limited as a stratagem to preserve—rather than reform—the criminal system.
To find out which model explains what happened, we need tests. One test looks at the judicial system. I do that below.
The judicial system test
We must consider the two competing hypotheses:
Self-correction hypothesis. The exposure of these scandals is evidence that the system of checks and balances was righting the US back to democratic equilibrium after a disruption. No, the system is not perfect, but it does have a design that allows for self-correction. And the system learned from this and got better.
Limited-hangout hypothesis. The exposure of these scandals was meant to give the impression of a self-correcting system—just enough to put US citizens back to sleep. In reality, nothing changed. The criminals are still in charge, and still at it.
Let us now extract the relevant predictions from these two hypotheses concerning the judicial system so that we can test against the evidence which hypothesis does better.
Self-correction → Predicts aggressive and very public prosecutions with serious punishments.
Limited hangout → Predicts impunity for the perpetrators, perhaps with the exception of one or two prominent scapegoats, if necessary, to give the appearance of justice being served.
So let us ask the test question:
For the entire 1967-77 decade of massive, clearly documented, and criminal U.S. government abuses against the citizens, how many people saw the inside of a jail cell?
The answer is: zero.
Zero for CHAOS.
Zero for MKUltra.
Zero for COINTELPRO.
Zero for the biowarfare tests.
This was not because a weak prosecutorial effort bungled the job, which already would justify the suspicion of a limited hangout. No, the truth is more extreme: there were zero prosecutions—not even one.
Not even to sell us a scapegoat.
On the judicial system test, then, the Church Committee exposures, which masqueraded as a corrective process, were a limited hangout.
Why did these crimes happen in the first place?
Two things must be considered in order to explain why criminal US bureacrats could act with impunity.
First, is the ideology of the US bosses—the people who really run the system—and who put together that system before WWII. We explore that question here:
Second, is the legal structure of the system. As it turns out, US Intelligence has explicit permission in the National Security Act to do whatever they want, without seeking authorization. And they may conceal what they have done indefinitely. They answer only to the President.
This is the statutory framework of a clandestine executive monarchy.
And that is what the US system is. It only pretends to be a representative republic.
Up next, we shall conduct another test:
Please do a video, interview, or podcast on this subject ASAP !
Now we're getting into the meat of the subject. Love it.