This is my response to Our Government Lies to Us Man by the erudite and thoughtful Big Al. Please note that my comments are not a refutation of his.

From Why Were Government Propaganda Experts Working On News At CNN? of March 27, 2000:

The story is disturbing. In the 1980s, officers from the 4th Army PSYOPS group staffed the National Security Council’s Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD), a shadowy government propaganda agency that planted stories in the U.S. media supporting the Reagan Administration’s Central America policies.

A senior US official described OPD as a “vast psychological warfare operation of the kind the military conducts to influence a population in enemy territory.” (Miami Herald, 7/19/87) An investigation by the congressional General Accounting Office found that OPD had engaged in “prohibited, covert propaganda activities,” and the office was soon shut down as a result of the Iran-Contra investigations. But the 4th PSYOPS group still operates.

[snip]

An unofficial strategy paper published by the U.S. Naval War College in 1996 and written by an Army officer (“Military Operations in the CNN World: Using the Media as a Force Multiplier” by Leslie H. "Howdy" Belknap, Major, US Army) urged military commanders to find ways to “leverage the vast resources of the fourth estate” for the purposes of “communicating the [mission’s] objective and endstate, boosting friendly morale, executing more effective psychological operations, playing a major role in deception of the enemy, and enhancing intelligence collection.”

Considering what has since been done by the Pentagon with such "access and control", can it not be claimed that We the People have become the enemy to be deceived?

From Psyops 101: Psyops on the homefront by James Corbett of BoilingFrogsPost.com on November 6, 2012:

The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 seeks to update the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which prohibits the State Department’s public diplomacy organs from [domestically] disseminating propaganda intended for foreign audiences ...

[snip]

More general prohibitions on domestic propaganda also exist on the books. The 1913 Gillett Amendment, for example, now codified as USC Title 5 Section 3107, clearly states “Appropriated funds may not be used to pay a publicity expert unless specifically appropriated for that purpose.”

Moreover, every one of the annual appropriations bills passed by Congress since 1951 has included a stipulation that “No part of any appropriation contained in this or any other Act shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by the Congress.”

The Department of Defense has its own stipulation against domestic propaganda. Codified in USC Title 10 Section 2241a, the relevant passage reads: “Funds available to the Department of Defense may not be obligated or expended for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not otherwise specifically authorized by law.”

As we shall see, however, every one of these laws has been violated both in letter and in spirit by recently-exposed psyops campaigns, funded by the American taxpayer and aimed directly at the US population.

[snip]

...as weak and effective as this legislation already is, it in danger of being even further diluted by a proposed amendment to the 2013 edition of the National Defense Authorization Act.

This should have been ended after the 1987 revelations by the Miami Herald. Instead, we got upset about Poppy Bush raising new taxes after promising not to. Major Leslie H. "Howdy" Belknap, US Army, should have been exposed by any officer who took his oath to "defend the nation from all enemies, foreign and domestic" seriously. But none did, and Major Belknap more than likely got a huge promotion instead.

And does anyone remember The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012 by Colonel Charles J. Dunlap, Jr.? He clearly remembered his oath!

Dunlap cites what he considered a dangerous precedent, the 1981 Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act, an act that sanctioned US military engagement with law enforcement in domestic “support operations,” including “civil disturbance” operations. The act codified the lawful status and use of military “assets” in domestic police work. [Source]

See this long list of legalized encroachments upon the freedoms and liberties of Americans. Some of these date back to Vietnam if not a bit earlier. By the time of Vietnam, with growing domestic protests against the imperialist wars of corporate America, We the People had clearly become considered as the enemy whether we were or not. There can now be no doubt that currently we are considered the enemy regardless of when it began.

We the People were lazy about maintaining civilian control of both the government and the military. It is now likely too late to regain that control without pulling down the Empire upon our own heads, and I don't see a Samson among us to do it.