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Digital Book Burners

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By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Another Day in the Empire

Jamie Fly, a former high-ranking Bush era neocon, believes you shouldn’t have the right to post on social media.

“Fly went on to complain that ‘all you need is an email’ to set up a Facebook or Twitter account, lamenting the sites’ accessibility to members of the general public. He predicted a long struggle on a global scale to fix the situation, and pointed out that to do so would require constant vigilance,” write  Jeb Sprague and Max Blumenthal. 

This attitude shouldn’t come as a surprise. Neocons believe they are a special breed, the chosen few of an intellectual crème de la crème, and the rest of us are merely bread and circus spectators on the sidelines as they forge our collective history (and increasingly possible ruin). 

Fly is a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations. He “served” in the National Security Council and the Defense Department during the Bush presidency. He also worked at the Claremont Institute and the American Enterprise Institute. Fly tutored presumptive presidential candidate Marco Rubio on foreign policy and he is the former director of the Foreign Policy Initiative, a staunch neocon advocacy group founded by arch neocons William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Dan Senor. 

He is now a senior fellow and director of the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund, an organization funded by the US government and NATO. The German Marshall Fund organized the Alliance for Securing Democracy and its Hamilton 68 effort to destroy alternative media under the false (and largely debunked) claim it is a cutout for Russia and Vladimir Putin who are, we are reminded daily, dedicated to destroying democracy and taking down the exceptional and indispensable nation. 

Jamie Fly and his coconspirators Laura Rosenberger and J.M. Berger know the Russians aren’t responsible for thousands of alternate media websites and social media accounts. They know this phenomenon, which began with the birth of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, is homespun and has absolutely nothing to do with Russia. It is their mission to make sure the establishment is free to promulgate its lies and war propaganda without counterbalance and the interruption of truth. 

These folks are digital book burners on par with Nazis who burned books in Berlin on the Opernplatz in May of 1933. Like the Nazis, they want to silence those who counter the narrative. For the Nazis, the targets were communists, socialists, anarchists, and all who opposed fascism, while our new book burners—liquidators of heresy against the ruling elite—are focused on groups and individuals challenging the lies and half-truths of the state regardless of ideology.

For the elite, populism and nationalism represent a twin threat to the emerging globalist scheme of a one-world government and currency directed by a cadre of unelected bureaucrats and ideologues. 

Donald Trump portrayed himself as a patriot and nationalist—Make America Great Again—however after the election the same old crowd of CFR operatives, Goldman Sachs alumni, and hardcore neocons staffed his administration, thus making the realization of his campaign promises virtually impossible. 

The ruling elite, their functionaries and proxies have declared war on “alternative facts,” that is to say information contrary and even hostile to the narrative. While it is true the corporate media has lost some influence, it still projects a powerful influence on public opinion, especially in the current highly polarized political climate.

For instance, it is now assumed a Trump supporter send bombs to Democrats, and this has become a trending topic on social media. There is zero evidence a Trump supporter had anything to do with this incident, and yet the hashtag “MAGABomber” has gone viral on social media, demonstrating how easily it is to sell lies and fabrications to a polarized public. 

Fly and his digital book burning associates will not stop until the last vestiges of the alternative media are wiped out. This process is underway now with a number of popular alternative media websites losing significant traffic following removal from social media. 

As Mr. Fly says, this is only the beginning. They will not stop until the challenge is defeated and the digital information landscape is once again completely in control of the psychopaths at the top and their well-paid minions pushing the idiotic lie that Putin and the Russians are responsible. 

The Psychology of Fascism

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By Robert J. Burrowes

The continuing rise of fascism around the world is drawing increasing attention particularly as it takes firmer grip within national societies long seen to have rejected it.

Some recent studies have reminded us of the characteristics of fascist movements and individuals, particularly as they manifest among politically active fascists. For example, in his recent book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us And Them Professor Jason Stanley has identified ten characteristics shared by fascists which have been simply presented in the article ‘Prof Sees Fascism Creeping In U.S.’

These characteristics, readily evident in the USA, Europe, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar and elsewhere today, include belief in a mythic (false) past, propaganda to divert attention and blame from the true source of corruption, anti-intellectualism and a belief in the ‘common man’ while deriding ‘women and racial and sexual minorities who seek basic equality as in fact seeking political and cultural domination’, promotion of elite dogma at the expense of any competing ideas (such as those in relation to freedom and equality), portrayal of the elite and its agents as victims, reliance on delusion rather than fact to justify their pursuit of power, the use of law and order ‘not to punish actual criminals, but to criminalize “out groups” like racial, ethnic, religious and sexual minorities’ which is why we are now ‘seeing criminality being written into immigration status’, and identification of “out groups” as lazy while attacking welfare systems and labor organizers, and promoting the idea that elites and their agents are hard working while exploited groups are lazy and a drain on the state.

In an earlier article ‘Fascism Anyone?’, published in the Spring 2003 issue of Free Inquiry Magazine, Professor Laurence W. Britt identified fourteen shared threads that link fascists. These include powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism, disdain for the importance of human rights, identification of enemies/scapegoats (such as communists, socialists, liberals, ethnic and racial minorities, traditional national enemies, members of other religions, secularists, homosexuals and ‘terrorists’) as a unifying cause, obsession with national security and avid identification with the military, sexism, a controlled/compliant mass media that promotes the elite agenda, a manufactured perception that opposing the power elite is tantamount to an attack on religion, corporate power protected by the political elite while the power of labor is suppressed or eliminated, disdain for intellectuals and the arts, expanded police power and prison populations in response to an obsession with the crime and punishment of ordinary citizens (while elite crimes are protected by a compliant judiciary), rampant cronyism and corruption, and fraudulent elections defended by a judiciary beholden to the power elite.

Offering a more straightforward characterization of fascism in the US context, which also highlights its violence more explicitly than the characterizations above, the eminent Norwegian peace research scholar Professor Johan Galtung explains it thus: ‘US Fascism? Yes, indeed; if by fascism we mean use of massive violence for political goals. US fascism takes three forms: global with bombing, droning and sniping all over; domestic with military weapons used across race and class faultlines; and then NSA-National Security Agency spying on everybody.’ See ‘The Fall of the US Empire – And Then What?’

Among other recent commentaries, one draws attention to a recent fascist gathering in the USA – see ‘Davos For Fascists’ – another to the ways in which fascism, under various names, is being effectively spread – see ‘How the new wave of far-right populists are using football to further their power’ – and another warns of focusing too narrowly on one issue and missing the wider threat that fascism poses. See ‘Fascism IS Here in USA’.

In any case, for those paying attention to what is happening in places like the United States, Europe, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar and elsewhere, it is easy to see that the rush to embrace fascism is accelerating.

But why? Surely, in this ‘enlightened’ age, notions such as freedom, democracy, human rights and equality are deeply embedded in our collective psyche, particularly in the West. We believe that elections should be, and are, ‘free and fair’ and not determined by corporate donations; we believe that the judiciary is independent of political and corporate influence. But are they?

Well, in fact, the evidence offered by the casual observation of events in the places mentioned above, as well as elsewhere around the world, tells us that none of this is any longer, if it ever was, the case. Let me explain why.

Fascism is a political label but, like any such label, it has a psychological foundation. That is, the political behavior of those who are fascists can be explained by understanding their psychology. Of course, all behavior can be explained by psychology but I will focus on the psychology of fascist behavior here.

There have been attempts to understand and explain the psychology of fascism, starting with the early work of Wilhelm Reich in The Mass Psychology of Fascism. So what is the psychology of individuals who are fascists?

You might not be surprised to read that the psychology of fascists is complex and is a direct outcome of the nature of the extraordinary violence to which they were subjected as children.

The Psychology of Fascists

Let me briefly identify the psychological profile of fascists and the specific violence (‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’) that generates a person with this psychology. For a thorough explanation and elaboration of this profile, and explanations of the terms ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

First, fascists are terrified and they are particularly terrified of those individuals who perpetrated violence against them when they were a child although this terror remains unconscious to them. Second, this terror is so extreme that fascists are too terrified to consciously identify to themselves their own perpetrator (one or both parents and/or other significant adults who were supposed to love them) and to say that it is this individual or individuals who are violent and wrong.

Third, because they are terrified, they are unable to defend themselves against the original perpetrator(s) but also, as a result, they are unable to defend themselves against other perpetrators who attack them later in life. This lack of capacity to defend themselves leads to the fourth and fifth attributes – a deep sense of powerlessness and a deep sense of self-hatred. However, it is too terrifying and painful for the individual to be consciously aware of any of these feelings/attributes.

Sixth, because they are terrified of identifying that they are the victim of the violence of their own parents (and/or other significant adults from their childhood) and that this violence terrified them, fascists unconsciously delude themselves about the identity of their own perpetrator. They will unconsciously identify their ‘perpetrator’ as one or more individuals of whom they are not actually afraid from an existing ‘legitimized victim’ group such as children or people from a different gender, race, religion or class. This is also because their unconscious terror and self-hatred compels them to project onto people who are ‘controllable’ (because their original perpetrators never were). For this reason, their victims are (unconsciously) carefully chosen and are always relatively powerless by comparison.

This is easy to do because, seventh, children who become fascists have been terrorized into accepting a very narrow-minded and dogmatic belief set that excludes consideration of those in other social (including gender, racial, religious or class) groups. The idea that they might open-mindedly consider other beliefs, or the rights of those not in the ‘in-group’, is (unconsciously) terrifying to them. Moreover, because they have been terrorized into adopting their rigid belief set, fascists develop an intense fear of the truth; hence, fascists are both bigoted and self-righteous. In addition, the belief set of fascists includes a powerful and violently reinforced ‘lesson’: ‘good’ means obedient; it does not mean intrinsically good, loving and caring.

Eighth, and as a result of all of the above, fascists learn to unconsciously project their self-hatred, one outcome of their own victimhood, as hatred for those in the ‘out-groups’. This ‘justifies’ their (violent) behavior and obscures their unconscious motivation: to remain unaware of their own suppressed terror and self-hatred.

Ninth, fascists have a compulsion to be violent; that is, they are addicted to it. Why? Because the act of violence allows them to explosively release the suppressed feelings (usually some combination of fear, terror, pain, anger and powerlessness) so that they experience a brief sensation of delusional ‘relief’. Because the ‘relief’ is both brief and delusional, they are condemned to repeat their violence endlessly.

But the compulsion to be violent is reinforced by another element in their belief set, the tenth characteristic: fascists have a delusional belief in the effectiveness and morality of violence; they have no capacity to perceive its dysfunctionality and immorality.

And eleventh, the extreme social terrorization experience to which fascists have been subjected means that the feelings of love, compassion, empathy and sympathy, as well as the mental function of conscience, are prevented from developing. Devoid of conscience and these feelings, fascists can inflict violence on others, including their own children, without experiencing the feedback that conscience and these feelings would provide.

What Can We Do?

There is no simple formula for healing the badly damaged psychology of a fascist (or those who occupy a proximate ‘political space’ such as conservatives who advocate violence): it takes years of violent parental and adult treatment to create a fascist and so the path to heal one is long and painful, assuming the support for the individual to do so is available. Nevertheless, fascists can heal from the terror and self-hatred that underpin their psychology. See ‘Putting Feelings First’. And they can be assisted to heal by someone who is skilled in the art of deep listening. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

Unfortunately, given their cowardice, fascists are unlikely to have the courage to seek the appropriate emotional support to heal. In the meantime, those of us so inclined must resist their violence and, ideally, this should be done strategically, particularly if we want impact against fascist national leaders. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy or Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

The good news is that we can avoid creating fascists. If you want to nurture a child so that they become compassionate and caring, live by their conscience and act with morality and courage in all circumstances, including when resisting fascists, then consider making ‘My Promise to Children’.

You might also consider joining the worldwide movement to end all violence, fascist or otherwise, by signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

In essence: Fascists are terrified, full of self-hatred and powerless. But, too scared to feel their own terror, self-hatred and powerlessness, they unconsciously project this as fear of, and hatred for, the people in one or more ‘legitimized victim’ groups, including their own children (thus creating the next generation of fascists). They then try to ‘feel powerful’ by seeking violent control over these people themselves or by seeking to have violent control exercised over these people by various ‘authorities’, ranging from school teachers and religious figures to the police, military and various corporate and government agencies.

No matter how much control they have over others, however, it is impossible to control their own terror, self-hatred and powerlessness. So they are unconsciously and endlessly driven to seek (delusional) ‘relief’ by violently controlling those in legitimized victim groups. It is because their own children are the most immediately available ‘uncontrollable’ target that fascism is readily perpetuated.

 

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here. http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

Robert J. Burrowes
P.O. Box 68
Daylesford, Victoria 3460
Australia

Email: flametree@riseup.net

Websites:
Nonviolence Charter
Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth
‘Why Violence?’
Feelings First
Nonviolent Campaign Strategy
Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy
Anita: Songs of Nonviolence
Robert Burrowes
Global Nonviolence Network

Facebook Censorship of Alternative Media “Just the Beginning,” Says Top Neocon Insider

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At a Berlin security conference, hardline neocon Jamie Fly appeared to claim some credit for the recent coordinated purge of alternative media.

By Max Blumenthal and Jeb Sprague

Source: Gray Zone

This month, Facebook and Twitter deleted the accounts of hundreds of users, including many alternative media outlets maintained by American users. Among those wiped out in the coordinated purge were popular sites that scrutinized police brutality and U.S. interventionism like The Free Thought Project, Anti-Media, Cop Block and journalists like Rachel Blevins.

Facebook claimed that these sites had “broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.” However, sites like The Free Thought Project were verified by Facebook and widely recognized as legitimate sources of news and opinion. John Vibes, an independent reporter who contributed to Free Thought, accused Facebook of “favoring mainstream sources and silencing alternative voices.”

In comments published here for the first time, a neoconservative Washington insider has apparently claimed a degree of credit for the recent purge and promised more takedowns in the near future.

“Russia, China, and other foreign states take advantage of our open political system,” remarked Jamie Fly, a senior fellow and director of the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund. “They can invent stories that get repeated and spread through different sites. So we are just starting to push back. Just this last week Facebook began starting to take down sites. So this is just the beginning.”

Fly went on to complain that “all you need is an email” to set up a Facebook or Twitter account, lamenting the sites’ accessibility to members of the general public. He predicted a long struggle on a global scale to fix the situation, and pointed out that to do so would require constant vigilance.

Fly made these stunning comments to Jeb Sprague, who is a visiting faculty in sociology at the University of California-Santa Barbara and co-author of this article. The two spoke during a lunch break at a conference on Asian security organized by the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik in Berlin, Germany.

In the tweet below, Fly is the third person from the left who appears seated at the table.

The remarks by Fly — “we are just starting to push back” — seemed to confirm the worst fears of the alternative online media community. If he was to be believed, the latest purge was motivated by politics, not spam prevention, and was driven by powerful interests hostile to dissident views, particularly where American state violence is concerned.

Rise of a neocon cadre

Jamie Fly is an influential foreign policy hardliner who has spent the last year lobbying for the censorship of “fringe views” on social media. Over the years, he has advocated for a military assault on Iran, a regime change war on Syria, and hiking military spending to unprecedented levels. He is the embodiment of a neoconservative cadre.

Like so many second generation neocons, Fly entered government by burrowing into mid-level positions in George W. Bush’s National Security Council and Department of Defense.

In 2009, he was appointed director of the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), a rebranded version of Bill Kristol’s Project for a New American Century, or PNAC. The latter outfit was an umbrella group of neoconservative activists that first made the case for an invasion of Iraq as part of a wider project of regime change in countries that resisted Washington’s sphere of influence.

By 2011, Fly was advancing the next phase in PNAC’s blueprint by clamoring for military strikes on Iran. “More diplomacy is not an adequate response,” he argued. A year later, Fly urged the US to “expand its list of targets beyond the [Iranian] nuclear program to key command and control elements of the Republican Guard and the intelligence ministry, and facilities associated with other key government officials.”

Fly soon found his way into the senate office of Marco Rubio, a neoconservative pet project, assuming a role as his top foreign policy advisor. Amongst other interventionist initiatives, Rubio has taken the lead in promoting harsh economic sanctions targeting Venezuela, even advocating for a U.S. military assault on the country. When Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign floundered amid a mass revolt of the Republican Party’s middle American base against the party establishment, Fly was forced to cast about for new opportunities.

He found them in the paranoid atmosphere of Russiagate that formed soon after Donald Trump’s shock election victory.

PropOrNot sparks the alternative media panic

A journalistic insider’s account of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, Shattered, revealed that “in the days after the election, Hillary declined to take responsibility for her own loss.” Her top advisers were summoned the following day, according to the book, “to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up … Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.”

Less than three weeks after Clinton’s defeat, the Washington Post’s Craig Timberg published a dubiously sourced report headlined, “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news.’” The article hyped up a McCarthyite effort by a shadowy, anonymously run organization called PropOrNot to blacklist some 200 American media outlets as Russian “online propaganda.”

The alternative media outfits on the PropOrNot blacklist included some of those recently purged by Facebook and Twitter, such as The Free Thought Project and Anti-Media. Among the criteria PropOrNot identified as signs of Russian propaganda were, “Support for policies like Brexit, and the breakup of the EU and Eurozone” and, “Opposition to Ukrainian resistance to Russia and Syrian resistance to Assad.” PropOrNot called for “formal investigations by the U.S. government” into the outlets it had blacklisted.

According to Craig Timberg, the Washington Post correspondent who uncritically promoted the media suppression initiative, Propornot was established by “a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds.” Timberg quoted a figure associated with the George Washington University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, Andrew Weisburd, and cited a report he wrote with his colleague, Clint Watts, on Russian meddling.

Timberg’s piece on was PropOrNot was promoted widely by former top Clinton staffers and celebrated by ex-Obama White House aide Dan Pfeiffer as “the biggest story in the world.” But after a wave of stinging criticism, including in the pages of the New Yorker, the article was amended with an editor’s note stating, “The [Washington] Post… does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings regarding any individual media outlet.”

PropOrNot had been seemingly exposed as a McCarthyite sham, but the concept behind it — exposing online American media outlets as vehicles for Kremlin “active measures” — continued to flourish.

The birth of the Russian bot tracker

By August, a new, and seemingly related initiative appeared out of the blue, this time with backing from a bipartisan coalition of Democratic foreign policy hands and neocon Never Trumpers in Washington. Called the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), the outfit aimed to expose how supposed Russian Twitter bots were infecting American political discourse with divisive narratives. It featured a daily “Hamilton 68” online dashboard that highlighted the supposed bot activity with easily digestible charts. Conveniently, the site avoided naming any of the digital Kremlin influence accounts it claimed to be tracking.

The initiative was immediately endorsed by John Podesta, the founder of the Democratic Party think tank, Center for American Progress, and former chief of staff of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Julia Ioffe, the Atlantic’s chief Russiagate correspondent, promoted the bot tracker as “a very cool tool.”

Unlike PropOrNot, the ASD was sponsored by one of the most respected think tanks in Washington, the German Marshall Fund, which had been founded in 1972 to nurture the special relationship between the US and what was then West Germany.

Though the German Marshall Fund did not name the donors that sponsored the initiative, it hosted a who’s who of bipartisan national security hardliners on the ASD’s advisory council, providing the endeavor with the patina of credibility. They ranged from neocon movement icon Bill Kristol to former Clinton foreign policy advisor Jake Sullivan to ex-CIA director Michael Morrell.

Jamie Fly, a German Marshall Fund fellow and Asia specialist, emerged as one of the most prolific promoters of the new Russian bot tracker in the media. Together with Laura Rosenberger, a former foreign policy aide to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, Fly appeared in a series of interviews and co-authored several op-eds emphasizing the need for a massive social media crackdown.

During a March 2018 interview on C-Span, Fly complained that “Russian accounts” were “trying to promote certain messages, amplify certain content, raise fringe views, pit Americans against each other, and we need to deal with this ongoing problem and find ways through the government, through tech companies, through broader society to tackle this issue.”

Yet few of the sites on PropOrNot’s blacklist, and none of the alternative sites that were erased in the recent Facebook purge that Fly and his colleagues take apparent credit for, were Russian accounts. Perhaps the only infraction they could have been accused of was publishing views that Fly and his cohorts saw as “fringe.”

What’s more, the ASD has been forced to admit that the mass of Twitter accounts it initially identified as “Russian bots” were not necessarily bots — and may not have been Russian either.

“I’m not convinced on this bot thing”

A November 2017 investigation by Max Blumenthal, a co-author of this article, found that the ASD’s Hamilton 68 dashboard was the creation of “a collection of cranks, counterterror retreads, online harassers and paranoiacs operating with support from some of the most prominent figures operating within the American national security apparatus.”

These figures included the same George Washington University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security fellows — Andrew Weisburd and Clint Watts — that were cited as experts in the Washington Post’s article promoting PropOrNot.

Weisburd, who has been described as one of the brains behind the Hamilton 68 dashboard, once maintained a one-man, anti-Palestinian web monitoring initiative that specialized in doxxing left-wing activists, Muslims and anyone he considered “anti-American.” More recently, he has taken to Twitter to spout off murderous and homophobic fantasies about Glenn Greenwald, the editor of the Intercept — a publication the ASD flagged without explanation as a vehicle for Russian influence operations.

Watts, for his part, has testified before Congress on several occasions to call on the government to “quell information rebellions” with censorious measures including “nutritional labels” for online media. He has received fawning publicity from corporate media and been rewarded with a contributor role for NBC on the basis of his supposed expertise in ferreting out Russian disinformation.

Clint Watts has urged Congress to “quell information rebellions”

However, under questioning during a public event by Grayzone contributor Ilias Stathatos, Watts admitted that substantial parts of his testimony were false, and refused to provide evidence to support some of his most colorful claims about malicious Russian bot activity.

In a separate interview with Buzzfeed, Watts appeared to completely disown the Hamilton 68 bot tracker as a legitimate tool. “I’m not convinced on this bot thing,” Watts confessed. He even called the narrative that he helped manufacture “overdone,” and admitted that the accounts Hamilton 68 tracked were not necessarily directed by Russian intelligence actors.

“We don’t even think they’re all commanded in Russia — at all. We think some of them are legitimately passionate people that are just really into promoting Russia,” Watts conceded.

But these stunning admissions did little to slow the momentum of the coming purge.

Enter the Atlantic Council

In his conversation with Sprague, the German Marshall Fund’s Fly stated that he was working with the Atlantic Council in the campaign to purge alternative media from social media platforms like Facebook.

The Atlantic Council is another Washington-based think tank that serves as a gathering point for neoconservatives and liberal interventionists pushing military aggression around the globe. It is funded by NATO and repressive, US-allied governments including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Turkey, as well as by Ukrainian oligarchs like Victor Pynchuk.

This May, Facebook announced a partnership with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) to “identify, expose, and explain disinformation during elections around the world.”

The Atlantic Council’s DFRLab is notorious for its zealous conflation of legitimate online dissent with illicit Russian activity, embracing the same tactics as PropOrNot and the ASD.

Ben Nimmo, a DFRLab fellow who has built his reputation on flushing out online Kremlin influence networks, embarked on an embarrassing witch hunt this year that saw him misidentify several living, breathing individuals as Russian bots or Kremlin “influence accounts.” Nimmo’s victims included Mariam Susli, a well-known Syrian-Australian social media personality, the famed Ukrainian concert pianist Valentina Lisitsa, and a British pensioner named Ian Shilling.

In an interview with Sky News, Shilling delivered a memorable tirade against his accusers. “I have no Kremlin contacts whatsoever; I do not know any Russians, I have no contact with the Russian government or anything to do with them,” he exclaimed. “I am an ordinary British citizen who happens to do research on the current neocon wars which are going on in Syria at this very moment.”

With the latest Facebook and Twitter purges, ordinary citizens like Shilling are being targeted in the open, and without apology. The mass deletions of alternative media accounts illustrate how national security hardliners from the German Marshall Fund and Atlantic Council (and whoever was behind PropOrNot) have instrumentalized the manufactured panic around Russian interference to generate public support for a wider campaign of media censorship.

In his conversation in Berlin with Sprague, Fly noted with apparent approval that, “Trump is now pointing to Chinese interference in the 2018 election.” As the mantra of foreign interference expands to a new adversarial power, the clampdown on voices of dissent in online media is almost certain to intensify.

As Fly promised, “This is just the beginning.”

FACEBOOK’S PURGE OF POLITICAL PAGES FUELS DELUSION OF INSURGENT THREATS TO DEMOCRACY

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By Kevin Gosztola

Source: ShadowProof

Facebook’s purge of more than 500 pages and 250 accounts ahead of midterm elections in the United States represents a massive trend to police social media activity in ways that put freedom of expression at risk.

This trend effectively discourages users from engaging in radical politics. It may be viewed as part of a counterinsurgency effort by a powerful social media company to assure a passive majority of Americans that they are properly guarding a widely used platform from alleged threats to democracy.

On October 11, Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, and Oscar Rodriguez, the company’s product manager, published a press release about the purge.

“We’re removing 559 pages and 251 accounts that have consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior,” Gleicher and Rodriguez stated. “Many were using fake accounts or multiple accounts with the same names and posted massive amounts of content across a network of groups and pages to drive traffic to their websites.”

According to Gleicher and Rodriguez, these techniques were used by groups and pages to make content “appear more popular” than it truly was on Facebook.

Both suggested some of the pages and accounts were “ad farms” that misled users into believing they were “forums for legitimate political debate.”

Unfortunately, Facebook offered minimal transparency on the action. Administrators with removed pages or accounts were apparently given no specifics other than a notice that they were shut down.

Several of the pages and accounts removed were right-wing and known for boosting President Donald Trump and his administration’s agenda. There were also dozens of progressive or left-wing pages, which were taken down.

Anti-Media, an anti-establishment independent media site with two million followers, had its page removed. Carey Wedler, editor at Anti-Media, did not lose her personal Facebook page with over 100,000 followers, but almost simultaneously, Twitter sent a notice that Wedler’s account was suspended.

The Free Thought Project, Reverb Press, Press For Truth, and Rachel Blevins, an RT America correspondent, had their pages taken down.

Pages that document abuse by police were removed—Police the Police, Filming Cops, Cop Block, and Cop Logic. Both Police the Police and Filming Cops each had over a million followers.

“There are legitimate reasons that accounts and pages coordinate with each other—it’s the bedrock of fundraising campaigns and grassroots organizations,” Gleicher and Rodriguez stated. “But the difference is that these groups are upfront about who they are, and what they’re up to.”

Yet, none of the aforementioned pages, which have protested their removal, hid their missions from followers. They were very upfront about their political motives or agendas for social justice.

Gleicher and Rodriguez concluded, “As we get better at uncovering this kind of abuse, the people behind it—whether economically or politically motivated—will change their tactics to evade detection. It’s why we continue to invest heavily, including in better technology, to prevent this kind of misuse. Because people will only share on Facebook if they feel safe and trust the connections they make here.”

The last sentences of Facebook’s press release make it clear that the company took this action to protect their brand. They were concerned about how these pages or accounts were impacting the experience of more passive, or even apathetic, users.

Administrators also recognize that politicians on Capitol Hill are watching. As Senator Dianne Feinstein told executives during a recent Senate hearing, “You’ve created these platforms, and now they are being misused. And you have to be the ones to do something about it or we will.”

On October 17, Twitter also acknowledged pressure from upcoming midterm elections to guard against alleged “influence operations.” It released a dataset it said was linked to operations during the 2016 election.

“We will continue to proactively combat nefarious attempts to undermine the integrity of Twitter, while partnering with civil society, government, our industry peers, and researchers to improve our collective understanding of coordinated attempts to interfere in the public conversation,” the social media company pledged.”

No executives at any Silicon Valley tech corporation want the government to introduce regulations. With parts of the public, especially those in the liberal establishment clamoring for action, Facebook and other companies are taking steps to supposedly fix the problem.

Cracking Down On “Influence Campaigns”

Facebook’s mass removal of pages and accounts was the company’s most extensive crackdown on “influence campaigns” since it started policing its platform. Most U.S. media outlets described the offending pages and accounts as purveyors of “political spam.”

The New York Times reported on Facebook’s purge with an article that was headlined, “Facebook Tackles Rising Threat: Americans Aping Russian Schemes to Deceive.”

Ironically, this was misinformation. At no point did the Times demonstrate that the removed pages or accounts were inspired or influenced by “Russian schemes,” which may or may not have been employed during the 2016 presidential election.

What the Times did do is conflate Russia-based activity with the operation of these accounts because those users may have wielded similar tactics to extend their reach. This is as disingenuous as suggesting someone who relies on Internet privacy tools is using terrorist tactics because terrorists want to hide their location, too.

The push to impose more control over the exchange of information on Facebook stems from a widespread belief that the Russia-based Internet Research Agency conducted a campaign through more than 400 accounts and pages that relied on ads and false information to “create discord and harm” Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The content was supposedly viewed by as many as 126 million Americans.

But in a paper on the 2016 presidential election by Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen, and Jie Chen from the Institute for New Economic Thinking, they show that this number is rather paltry. Americans saw at least 33 trillion posts in their news feeds between 2015 and 2017. Facebook even said a quarter of ads may have never been viewed by anyone.

The Senate intelligence committee reported minuscule ad numbers in key battleground states. In Wisconsin, $1,979 was spent. All but $54 were spent during the primary. Pennsylvania absorbed $823 and Michigan $300. “Unless Facebook discloses some vast new trove, the conclusion has to be that this was no full court press,” the report stated.

As the authors note, a few studies labeled sites as “Russian” or “Russian-influenced” simply because they have “politically distasteful” views that perhaps align with the agenda of Russia or run counter to U.S. foreign policy. This inappropriately counted non-mainstream or so-called fringe websites as part of an alleged Russian influence operation.

A far more extensive influence operation was likely perpetrated by networks highly capable of spreading right-wing messages in sophisticated manners.

“Our clearest and most significant observation is that the American political system has seen not a symmetrical polarization of the two sides of the political map, but rather the emergence of a discrete and relatively insular right-wing media ecosystem whose shape and communications practices differ sharply from the rest of the media ecosystem, ranging from the center-right to the left,” a Harvard study [PDF] on the 2016 election concluded.

The infiltrators sowing discord were aligned with Republicans and based in the United States. Like Ferguson, Jorgensen, and Chen contend, “By 2016, the Republican right had developed internet outreach and political advertising into a fine art and on a massive scale quite on its own.”

“Large numbers of conservative websites, including many that tolerated or actively encouraged white supremacy and contempt for immigrants, African-Americans, Hispanics, Jews, or the aspirations of women had been hard at work for years stoking up ‘tensions between groups already wary of one another.’ Breitbart and other organizations were in fact going global, opening offices abroad and establishing contacts with like-minded groups elsewhere.”

“Whatever the Russians were up to, they could hardly hope to add much value to the vast Made in America bombardment already underway. Nobody sows chaos like Breitbart or the Drudge Report, as the New York Times documented in one Idaho town,” the paper added.

Recognizing the influence of right-wing messaging networks during the 2016 election is critical. In fact, a list of removed pages posted by Western Journal suggests the vast majority of pages and accounts removed were right-wing. A minority were cop watch pages or libertarian pages against government abuses. An even smaller minority were liberal or Democratic pages.

Therefore, journalists are wrong to suggest there is some kind of balance between the left-wing and right-wing when it comes to spreading “fake news” or misinformation on social media platforms.

Part Of The Counterrevolution

It is difficult to discern whether police accountability or alternative media pages, which protested their removal, were targeted for the dissenting perspectives on their pages. What is more likely is that these pages were flagged by a Facebook algorithm.

“Bad content” to Facebook includes “false news,” “hate speech,” “spam,” “graphic violence,” “clickbait,” and “links to low quality web experiences (ad farms).” Given the company’s description of an “ad farm,” a page that linked to a website cluttered with ads, which were embedded to ensure server bills were paid, could be construed as an “ad farm.”

As Emma Llansó, the director of the Free Expression Project for the Center for Democracy and Technology, told the Guardian, there are a  “lot of people who fervently believe their political views and are trying to drive traffic to their posts and ideas. They’re probably also running ads on their sites to make money off doing so. The line between spammer activity with a financial motive and spammy-looking political advocacy is incredibly hard to draw.”

Facebook’s press release demonstrated indifference to the administrators of political pages, who use “backup” or fake accounts in order defend themselves from political opponents who may campaign to have their real accounts suspended.

Reverb’s page was verified by Facebook. As the Guardian reported, Reverb editor-in-chief Edward Lynn was never contacted by anyone with the company about any violations of standards.

Similarly, Brian Kolfage, who administered the Right Wing News page, which was shut down with three other pages, emailed back and forth with a Facebook executive. There were plans for a meeting so he could better understand how to comply with policies. The company chose not to work with Kolfage.

On October 17, Facebook deleted a video featuring journalist George Monbiot on the brutal colonial legacy of Christopher Columbus. It was up more than a week and had 900,000 views before it was taken down.

Again, the social media company was completely opaque in its decision. It may have been flagged as a result of graphic images in the video, but Facebook did not bother to offer an explanation.

Facebook announced a partnership in May with an influential think tank known as the Atlantic Council to help the company detect “emerging threats” and “disinformation campaigns.”  The organization formed after the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in 1949, and it is committed to maintaining America’s global dominance.

When Facebook removed 32 “suspicious pages” that were run by activists in August, it relied on the think tank’s Digital Forensic Research Lab to “point out similarities to fake Russian pages from 2016.” However, one of the pages removed was an event page for a counter-protest against a Unite the Right rally in Washington, D.C.

In Bernard Harcourt’s book, The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went To War Against Its Own Citizens, he outlines his theory of the current paradigm citizens live under in the United States. Counterinsurgency has been systematically domesticated, even though there is “no real insurgency or active minority.”

“The Counterrevolution” creates this illusion of an “active minority.” When it comes to social media, the “active minority” is fringe political pages that are sowing discord by spreading “fake news” or misinformation. It is remarkable that part of the crackdown involved police accountability pages because law enforcement, which perpetuates this paradigm, benefits greatly from passive Americans believing cop watch pages on Facebook are “political spam.”

Or, more sinisterly, the pages and accounts are seen as employing tactics similar to Russian influence operations, which increases the fear of doing nothing to shut them down and justifies dramatic action—even if wholly innocent pages or users are censored.

Facebook may not be silencing dissenting perspectives deliberately, but in “The Counterrevolution,” it does not have to bother with restoring pages and accounts wrongfully taken down. Those pages and accounts are collateral damage. They were not specifically targeted. The social media company can claim it never intended to crack down on political speech and defend an action that is designed to give consumers and political elites the illusion that they are guarding the internet from perceived threats.

That is not to say there are no threats to democracy in the United States. A few weeks before Election Day, there are countless reports of voter suppression. But these threats do not manifest themselves in one’s news feed on Facebook. Rather, they come from Republican officials who use state apparatuses to make it harder for citizens to challenge their destructive and discriminatory agendas.

Why Is Russiagate Rumbling Into the 2018 Midterms?

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By Alan Macleod

Source: FAIR

The November 6 midterms are fast approaching, yet much of the media is still looking back to the 2016 elections, and specifically the alleged Russian interference in them.

The New Yorker (10/1/18) published a 7,000-word article headlined “How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump.” Considering other explanations for Trump’s victory and Clinton’s loss, such as her tactical campaign errors, gerrymandering, vote suppression, racism and the actions of James Comey for only a paragraph, it quotes one expert claiming, “It stretches credulity to think the Russians didn’t” win it for him.

Meanwhile, the New York Times (9/20/18) released an intensive 10,000-word history and analysis of the Trump/Russia story, explaining to its readers that it was Putin’s “seething” ambivalence towards the West and his “nostalgia for Russia’s lost superpower status” that were the driving forces behind Russia’s nefarious actions.

There is also a great deal of fear about supposed hacking of the upcoming midterms. USA Today (10/9/18) warned, “As Russia and perhaps other foreign governments seek to undermine democratic elections, Congress and states need to get serious about defenses.” The PBS NewsHour (10/11/18) quoted one official who noted, “Given our experiences of 2016 and what we saw the Russians attempt to do across the nation’s election equipment, the election infrastructure, we certainly have a degree of concern of what their capability is.” Meanwhile, the Washington Post(9/26/18) writes, “While Russia is clearly trying to influence the 2018 elections, this time the United States is prepared and taking action to counter it.”

There is little concrete evidence offered in these reports; see Gareth Porter in Consortium News (10/10/18) for a dash of cold water on the New York Times’ narrative. Yet even the lack of evidence is an ominous sign for some. The Daily Beast (10/8/18) published an article headlined, “No Evidence That Russia Is Messing with Campaign 2018—Yet.” Despite that lack of evidence, the article asserted that the US should brace itself: “Russia has an arsenal of disruption capabilities… to sow havoc on election day,” it said, and “everyone is expecting the 2016 shock and awe” again.

The concern of the media over Russian actions has not resonated with the public more generally; a July Gallup poll reported that the number of Americans who considered Russia a top problem for the country was less than 1 percent. On the subject of the midterms and threats to their legitimacy, NPR (9/17/18) found that large majorities feel voter fraud or suppression to be a much greater danger to election integrity than foreign interference. Yet these concerns are not addressed nearly as thoroughly by the media. A search for “Russia” and “election” in the New York Timesdatabase generates 4,489 stories since the start of 2017, as compared to just 234 for “voter suppression” and “election,” 306 “gerrymandering” and “election” and 727 “racism” and “election.”

The question is not whether Russia, like other countries with extensive intelligence apparatuses, seeks to influence the elections of foreign nations. The question is why corporate media are concentrating on foreign interference, and not the other threats to democracy. In a previous article (FAIR.org, 7/27/18), I argued that the Democrats are using Russia to deflect anger and discontent away from their own failings. If Russia is to blame, there is no need for introspection, nor to address the deep race and class divides in the country that are addressed by surging political movements on the left, from Sanders to Black Lives Matter, and exploited by Trump and the alt-right. The focus on Russia as the sole reason for Trump’s victory allows establishment Democrats to continue as normal, without need for radical internal or policy change. As Clinton said, “America is already great.” To deflect pressure from the left, they can construct a narrative to explain why they lost to the most unpopular candidate ever.

For corporate media, the story of Russia covertly influencing the country promotes a climate where they can re-tighten their grip on the means of communication by accusing alternative media on both left and right of being Russian-sponsored “fake news.” As previously reported (FAIR.org, 8/22/18), under the guise of protecting readers, big media companies like Google, YouTube and Bing have changed their algorithms, resulting in devastating drops in traffic for reputable alternative media sites. Alternative media has been deleted, de-ranked, de-listed and de-monetized, effectively sidelining them. In response to ostensible Russian meddling, media giant Facebook announced last week (Washington Post, 10/11/18) it had shut down over 800 US accounts and pages for “inauthentic behavior,” a term even more nebulous than “fake news.” Included in the 800 were several police accountability watchdog groups and other alternative media, adding to its recent (temporary) deleting of TeleSUR English.

However, the best example of fake news and “inauthentic behavior” by media outlets in the modern age remains the manufacture of consent for the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, with the crucial assistance of corporate outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post and NBC (FAIR.org, 11/1/01; 3/18/03; 10/23/17). Forty-five percent of Americans get their news from Facebook, but it seems doubtful the tech giant will remove accounts belonging to those publications.

While it is clear that Moscow has an interest in who the US elects and doesn’t elect, the media’s focus on Russiagate through the midterm elections has as much to do with its political utility as with the evidence. With President Trump accusing China of midterm interference (CNN, 8/26/18), it appears that both major parties have sown doubt into the process and have a pre-made excuse if they fail on November 6. Both sides undermining trust in the democratic process does not augur well for the future of US politics.

The US military’s vision for state censorship

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By Andre Damon

Source: WSWS.org

In March, the United States Special Operations Command, the section of the Defense Department supervising the US Special Forces, held a conference on the theme of “Sovereignty in the Information Age.” The conference brought together Special Forces officers with domestic police forces, including officials from the New York Police Department, and representatives from technology companies such as Microsoft.

This meeting of top military, police and corporate representatives went unreported and unpublicized at the time. However, the Atlantic Council recently published a 21-page document summarizing the orientation of the proceedings. It is authored by John T. Watts, a former Australian Army officer and consultant to the US Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security.

The Atlantic Council, a think tank with close ties to the highest levels of the state, has been a key partner in the social media companies’ censorship of left-wing views. Most notably, Facebook acted on a tip from the Atlantic Council when it shut down the official event page for an anti-fascist demonstration in Washington on the anniversary of last year’s neo-Nazi riot in Charlottesville.

Confident that none of the thousands of journalists in Washington will question, or even report, what he writes, Watts lays out, from the standpoint of the repressive apparatus of the state and the financial oligarchy it defends, why censorship is necessary.

The central theme of the report is “sovereignty,” or the state’s ability to impose its will upon the population. This “sovereignty,” Watts writes, faces “greater challenges now than it ever has in the past,” due to the confluence between growing political opposition to the state and the internet’s ability to quickly spread political dissent.

Watts cites the precedent of the invention of the printing press, which helped overthrow the feudal world order. In the Atlantic Council’s estimation, however, this was an overwhelmingly negative development, ushering in “decades, and arguably centuries, of conflict and disruption” and undermining the “sovereignty” of absolutist states. The “invention of the internet is similarly creating conflict and disruption,” Watts writes.

“Trust in Western society,” he warns, “is experiencing a crisis. The 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer has tracked this erosion, showing a 30 percent drop in trust in government over the last year in the United States.”

Watts notes that this collapse in support for the government cannot be explained merely by the rise of social media. This process began in the early 2000s, “at the dawn of the social media age but before it had become mainstream.” Left out are the major reasons for the collapse of popular support for government institutions: the stolen election of 2000, the Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction, unending war and the impact of the 2008 financial crisis.

However, while it is “hard to argue that the current loss of trust results solely from the emergence of social media,” Watts writes, there “can be little doubt that it acted as a critical amplifier of broader trends.”

He continues: “Technology has democratized the ability for sub-state groups and individuals to broadcast a narrative with limited resources and virtually unlimited scope.” By contrast, “In the past, the general public had limited sources of information, which were managed by professional gatekeepers.”

In other words, the rise of uncensored social media allowed small groups with ideas that correspond to those of the broader population to challenge the political narrative of vested interests on an equal footing, without the “professional gatekeepers” of the mainstream print and broadcast media, which publicizes only a pro-government narrative.

When “radical and extremist views” and “incorrect ideas” are “broadcast over social media, they can even influence the views of people who would not otherwise be sympathetic to that perspective,” Watts warns. “When forwarded by a close friend or relation, false information carries additional legitimacy; once accepted by an individual, this false information can be difficult to correct.”

People must be isolated, in other words, from the “incorrect” ideas of their friends and family, because such ideas are “difficult to correct” by the state once disseminated.

But how is this to be done? The growth of oppositional sentiment cannot be combatted with “facts” or the “truth,” because “facts themselves are not sufficient to combat disinformation.” The “truth” is “too complex, less interesting, and less meaningful to individuals.”

Nor can the growth of political opposition, for the time being, simply be solved by “eliminating” (i.e., killing or jailing) political dissidents, because this only lends legitimacy to the ideas of the victims. “Eliminating those individuals and organizations will not be sufficient to combat the narrative and may in fact help amplify it.” He adds, “This is also the case for censorship as those behind the narrative can use the attempt to repress the message as proof of its truth, importance, or authenticity.”

Enter the social media companies. The best mechanism for suppressing oppositional viewpoints and promoting pro-government narratives is the private sector, in particular “technology giants, including Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Twitter,” which can “determine what people see and do not see.”

Watts adds, “Fortunately, shifts in the policies of social media platforms such as Facebook have had significant impact on the type and quality of the content that is broadcast.”

The private sector, therefore, must do the dirty work of the government, because government propaganda is viewed with suspicion by the population. “Business and the private sector may not naturally understand the role they play in combating disinformation, but theirs is one of the most important…. In the West at least, they have been thrust into a central role due to the general public’s increased trust in them as institutions.”

But this is only the beginning. Online newspapers should “consider disabling commentary systems—the function of allowing the general public to leave comments beneath a particular media item,” while social media companies should “use a grading system akin to that used to rate the cleanliness of restaurants” to rate their users’ political statements.

Strong-arm tactics still have a role, of course. Citing the example of WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange, Watts declares that “governments need to create consequences” for spreading “disinformation” similar to those meted out for “state espionage” – which can carry the death penalty.

What Watts outlines in his document is a vision of a totalitarian social order, where the government, the media, and technology companies are united in suppressing oppositional viewpoints.

The most striking element of the document, however, is that it is not describing the future, but contemporary reality. Everything is in the present tense. The machinery of mass censorship has already been built.

The Atlantic Council report, based on high-level discussions within the military and state, is a confirmation of everything the World Socialist Web Site has said about the purpose of changes in the algorithms of internet and social media companies over the past year-and-a-half.

On August 25, 2017, the WSWS published an open letter to Google alleging that the company is “manipulating its Internet searches to restrict public awareness of and access to socialist, anti-war and left-wing websites.” It added, “Censorship on this scale is political blacklisting.”

Over the subsequent year, key details of the open letter have been indisputably confirmed. At congressional hearings and in other public statements, leading US technology companies have explained that they reduced the propagation of political views and statements targeted by US intelligence agencies, and did so in secret because they feared a public outcry. At the same time, they have explained the technical means by which they promoted pro-government, pro-war news outlets, such as the New York Times and Washington Post.

But the Atlantic Council document presents the most clear, direct and unvarnished explanation of the regime of state censorship.

The struggle against censorship is the spearhead of the defense of all democratic rights. The most urgent task is to unify the working class, which is engaged in a wave of social struggles all over the world, behind the struggle against censorship as a component of the fight for socialism.

 

How the American Media Was Destroyed

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By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

In my September 24 column, “Truth Is Evaporating Before Our Eyes,” https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/09/24/truth-is-evaporating-before-our-eyes/ I used the destruction of the CBS news team that broke the Abu Ghraib story and the story of President George W. Bush’s non-performance of his Texas Air Force National Guard duties to demonstrate how accusations alone could destroy a Peabody Award winning, 26 year veteran producer of CBS News, Mary Mapes, and the established news anchor Dan Rather.

I have many times written that it was President Bill Clinton who destroyed the independent US media when he permitted 90 percent of the US media to be concentrated in six mega-corporations that were in the entertainment and other businesses and not in the news business. This unprecedented concentration of media was against all American tradition and destroyed the reliance that our Founding Fathers placed on a free press to keep government accountable to the people.

Until I read Mary Mapes book, Truth and Duty (St. Martin’s Press, 2005), I was unaware of how this monopolization of the media in violation of the Sherman Anti-trust Act and American tradition had proceeded to destroy honest reporting.

Here is what happened. The Texas Air National Guard was a place the elite placed their sons to avoid the Vietnam War draft. Copies of documents written by Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian describing George W. Bush’s ability to jump the large waiting list hoping to avoid the war, Bush’s non-compliance with National Guard requirements and Bush’s unauthorized departure to another state were given to CBS. The CBS team worked for many months to confirm or discredit the documents. The information in the documents proved to be consistent with the interviews of people acquainted with George W. Bush’s time in the Texas National Guard.

It was a carefully prepared story, not a rushed one, and it fits all the information we now have of Bush’s non-performance.

The problem for the CBS news team, which might not have been realized at the time, was that the documents were copies, not originals that experts could authenicate as real beyond question. Therefore, although the documents were consistent with the testimony of others, no expert could validate the documents as they could originals.

The Republicans seized on this chink in the armor to turn the issue away from the truthfulness of the CBS 60 Minutes report to whether or not the copies were fakes.

CBS had two other problems. One was that Viacom, its owner, was not in the news business, but in the lobbying business in Washington wanting to enrich the company with legislative perks and regulatory permissions. Truthful news from CBS, exposing US torture in the face of the Bush regime’s denials and showing that Bush was too privileged to be held accountable by the Texas National Guard, was damaging Viacom’s highly paid lobbying effort.

When the right-wing bloggers took after CBS, the Viacom executives saw how to get rid of the troublesome CBS news team. Viacom executives refused to support their reporters and convened a kangeroo count consisting of Republicans to “investigate” the 60 Minutes story of Bush’s failure to comply with his obligations to the Texas National Guard.

Viacom wanted to get rid of the independent news constraint on its lobbying success, but Mary Mapes and her lawyers thought truth meant something and would prevail. Therefore, she subjected herself to the destructive process of watching the orchestrated destruction of her career and her integrity.

CBS’ other problem was that, with or without justification, CBS and Dan Rather were regarded in conservative Republican circles as liberal, a designation equivalent to a communist. For millions of Americans the controversy was about liberal CBS trying to harm George W. Bush and leave us exposed to Muslim Terrorism. In right-wing minds, Bush was trying to protect America from Muslim terrorists who blew up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and CBS was trying to smear President Bush.

Mary Mapes, Dan Rather, and the CBS news team were too focused on news to take into account the dangerous situation in which they were operating. Therefore, they walked into a trap that served Dick Cheney’s Middle Eastern wars, which served Halliburton and Israel, and into a trap that served conservative hatred of “liberal” news.

Why didn’t the American media defend CBS’ careful reporting? The answer is that this was a time when TV news media was dying. The Internet was taking over. The rest of the media saw in the demise of CBS a chance to gain that market and have a longer life.

So the rest of the media took up the fake news that 60 Minutes had presented a report based on fake documents. The media did not realize that they were signing their own death warants. Neither did the right-wing bloggers that the Republicans had sicced on CBS. Today, these bloggers are themselves shut off from being able to express any truth.

Truth in America is being exterminated, and the destruction of CBS news was the starting point. As Mary Mapes reports in her book, as soon as Viacom was entirely rid of 60 Minutes with the firing of the entire staff, on the very next day Viacom held a triumphant annual investor meeting. Chairman Sumner Redstone was awarded a a $56 million paycheck for 2004. Chief operating officers, Les Moonves and Tom Freston “each pocketed a whoopping fifty-two million for the year.”

And the CBS news team went without mortgage, car, or health insurance payments.

Mapes writes: “Just a few years ago, this kind of corporate executive largesse was unheard of. Now, these media Masters of the Universe have taken over the public airwares and they have one obligation: making a profit.” Ever a larger one, which requires protecting the government and the corporate advertisers from investigative reporting.

The consequence today is that the American media is totally unreliable. No reader can rely on any report, not even on a New York Times obituary.

Boycott Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Here’s Why

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

NATO — the neoconservatives, the marketeers for firms such as Lockheed Martin and BAE — has taken over the social-media giants and much of online international ‘news’-reporting, including that of virtually all independent news-sites and blogs.

Facebook, Twitter, and Google, in recent days, delivered what might be the death-blows.

NATO’s main PR agency, think-tank, and lobbying organization, is ‘non-profit’ — a legal tax-dodge that’s financed by donations from those weapons-making firms and their supporting firms and their ‘non-profits’, so that the taxes that it doesn’t pay will need to be paid instead by the general public. Billionaires know how to avoid taxes, and they hire politicians who write the laws with all the ‘right’ loopholes for them — and only for the very richest — to use. This PR agency is called “The Atlantic Council,” and it was set up in 1961, the exact same year that U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower left office warning that “the military-industrial complex” might take control of the U.S. Well, it did so, with The Atlantic Council’s help; and, now, it is finally lowering the boom against democracy itself — at least among the U.S. and its allied nations (the governments whose weapons-manufacturing firms are in, and sell to, NATO governments). The aim is to drive up the percentage of government-expenditures there that go to pay those firms, and so to reduce the percentages that go to pay everything else. The aim, in short, is the permanent-warfare-economy. After all, firms such as Lockheed Martin and BAE sell only to allied governments. They have virtually no consumers except those governments. So: their (and their ‘charities’) basic message is ‘austerity’ — except on ‘defense’ or realistically called “aggression.” This is national ‘defense’ such as against Iraq in 2003, and against Libya in 2011 — it is instead sheer aggression. George Orwell predicted “Newspeak” — well, here it is. It’s today’s norm, so normal that the public think it’s just natural, and conservatives and even many liberals think it’s the way that ‘a free market’ ought to be.

Here was Facebook’s announcement, on October 11th:

——

newsroom.fb.com

11 October 2018

Removing Additional Inauthentic Activity from Facebook

Today, we’re removing 559 Pages and 251 accounts that have consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior. Given the activity we’ve seen — and its timing ahead of the US midterm elections — we wanted to give some details about the types of behavior that led to this action. Many were using fake accounts or multiple accounts with the same names and posted massive amounts of content across a network of Groups and Pages to drive traffic to their websites. Many used the same techniques to make their content appear more popular on Facebook than it really was. Others were ad farms using Facebook to mislead people into thinking that they were forums for legitimate political debate.

——

Those 559 and 251 weren’t identified; none of them were. Facebook wants them to need to scream in order for them to be able to be noticed at all by the public. The announcement didn’t even say by what criteria they were measuring ‘Inauthentic Activity’ versus ‘legitimate political debate’. Their announcement did say “we look at these actors’ behavior – such as whether they’re using fake accounts or repeatedly posting spam – rather than their content when deciding which of these accounts, Pages or Groups to remove,” but unless they make public what the actual algorithms are by means of which they remove sites, no one should trust them, at all, because they can remove whatever NATO or The Atlantic Council (neither of which their announcement even mentioned) want them to remove.

The background for this act by the war-economy’s billionaires had already been reported at Mint Press on May 18th, “Facebook Partners With Hawkish Atlantic Council, a NATO Lobby Group, to ‘Protect Democracy’”, where Elliott Gabriel opened:

Facebook is hoping that a new alliance with the Atlantic Council — a leading geopolitical strategy think-tank seen as a de facto PR agency for the U.S. government and NATO military alliance – will not only solve its “fake news” and “disinformation” controversy, but will also help the social media monolith play “a positive role” in ensuring democracy on a global level.

The new partnership will effectively ensure that Atlantic Council will serve as Facebook’s “eyes and ears,” according to a company press statement. With its leadership comprised of retired military officers, former policymakers, and top figures from the U.S. National Security State and Western business elites, the Atlantic Council’s role policing the social network should be viewed as a virtual takeover of Facebook by the imperialist state and the council’s extensive list of ultra-wealthy and corporate donors.

Then, on October 12th, Mint Press’s Whitney Webb bannered “Facebook Purges US-Based Independent Media For Political Disinformation”, and reported that,

Notably, Facebook’s statement on the mass purge of pages was co-authored by Facebook Head of Cybersecurity Nathaniel Gleicher, who is a former White House National Security Council director of cybersecurity policy.

Twitter also banned many of the pages targeted for deletion by Facebook on Thursday, suggesting a coordinated censorship effort between the two most popular social media platforms.

Many of the pages banned had millions of likes, such as the Free Thought Project (3.1 million likes), Antimedia (2.1 million), Cop Block (1.7 million), and Police the Police (1.9 million). Several of the pages that were deleted on Thursday had been targeted by Facebook in recent months, both through new censorship algorithms and Facebook’s controversial team of “fact checkers.”

For instance, the Free Thought Project had been flagged earlier this year as “fake news” by Facebook “fact checking” partner organizations, including  the Associated Press (AP) and Snopes. In one case, a story published by the Free Thought Project was flagged as “false” by the AP. That story, which detailed the documented case of Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) being forcibly removed from a DHS migrant detention center that had once been a Walmart, was marked false because the AP asserted that the article made the claim that Walmart was housing immigrants for DHS. However, the article does not make the claim, instead accurately noting that the facility used to be a Walmart.

Censorship algorithms had also greatly affected traffic to the recently deleted pages for much of the past year. In the case of Antimedia, its traffic dropped from around 150,000 page views per day in early June to around 12,000 by the end of that month. As a reference, in June of last year, Antimedia’s traffic stood at nearly 300,000 views per day.

Also on October 12th, heavy dot com bannered “‘Facebook Purge’: List of Some Deleted Accounts on Left & Right” and listed a few dozen sites that the article’s writer had seen online screaming about having been removed.

Meanwhile, in UK’s very mainstream Daily Mail (the second-largest-circulation of all UK’s newspapers), columnist Michael Burleigh headlined on October 13th “Putin’s taking over Libya by stealth in order to point a new weapon at the West — millions of desperate migrants” and he opened:

So bloody and extensive is President Putin’s record of aggression, not least in Syria and Ukraine, that an incursion into the empty deserts of North Africa might hardly seem worth noting.

Yet the discovery that Russia is moving troops and missiles into war-torn Libya has rightly caused alarms to sound throughout the capitals of Europe.

It is a step of huge significance, and one with potentially disastrous results for Western nations.

The discovery that Vladimir Putin, above, and his government is moving troops and missiles into war-torn Libya has rightly caused alarm. Russia – this time in the form of Rosneft, the huge oil company controlled by Putin’s sinister crony Igor Sechin – is interested in a slice of Libya’s vast oil reserves, the largest in Africa

Libya has both oil and Mediterranean ports, and Russia is hungry for both.

But was it Russia that in 2011 had invaded and destroyed Libya, or was it U.S., UK, and France, who invaded and destroyed Libya — a country that like Iraq, Syria, Yemen and others which The West has destroyed, had never threatened nor invaded any of them?

Burleigh continued:

– cause enough for concern, perhaps. Yet the real fear for European governments is this: Libya, with its porous southern borders, has become the main jumping-off point for the hundreds of thousands of African migrants now seeking to cross the Mediterranean to the shores of the EU and, in particular, Italy.

So, his own country, UK, had helped with the bombing of Libya that had caused all those ‘migrants’ (actually refugees) into Europe, but now he’s trying to blame Putin for it, as if Russia and not UK, U.S., and France were the cause of it. Doesn’t that “mislead people”?

But is the Daily Mail being strangled by Facebook, Twitter, and Google; or is it instead being done to the small-fry political sites, which aren’t owned and controlled by the aristocracies of the U.S., UK, France, and their allied aristocracies — all the aristocracies that are in NATO and promoted by The Atlantic Council?

Here is yet more from Elliott Gabriel’s excellent news-report at Mint Press on May 18th, providing background to the present purges and censorships:

The announcement, made last Thursday in a Facebook Newsroom post, explained that the social network’s security, policy and product teams will coordinate their work with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) to analyze “real-time insights and updates on emerging threats and disinformation campaigns from around the world.”

DFRLab employees include pro-war media activist Eliot Higgins (of Bellingcat fame) and Ben Nimmo — a senior fellow for information defense at the Atlantic Council, who earned infamy for his groundless accusations that actual Twitter users are Russian trolls.

Read more on Facebook

Continuing, Facebook global politics and government outreach director Katie Harbath explained:

“This will help increase the number of ‘eyes and ears’ we have working to spot potential abuse on our service — enabling us to more effectively identify gaps in our systems, preempt obstacles, and ensure that Facebook plays a positive role during elections all around the world.”

“We know that tackling these problems effectively also requires the right policies and regulatory structures, so that governments and companies can help prevent abuse while also ensuring that people have a voice during elections. The Atlantic Council’s network of leaders is uniquely situated to help all of us think through the challenges we will face in the near- and long-term.”

“The think-tank’s Digital Research Unit Monitoring Missions will also be tapped by the social network during elections and “other highly sensitive moments” to allow Facebook the ability to zero in on key locales and monitor alleged misinformation and foreign interference.”

Who is the Atlantic Council?

Hillary Clinton at the 2013 Atlantic Council Distinguished Leadership Awards (Photo: Atlantic Council)

The Atlantic Council was recently in the news for receiving a donation of $900,000 from the U.S. State Department for a “Peace Process Support Network” program to “promote non-violent conflict resolution” in support of Venezuela’s scattered opposition, with which the council enjoys very close ties. The council also advocates the arming of extremist militants in Syria (a “National Stabilization Force”) and a hard-line policy toward Russia.

Established in 1961 by former U.S. Secretaries of State Dean Acheson and Christian Herter, the Atlantic Council of the United States was originally conceived as a means to drum up support for the Cold War-era NATO alliance, which had formed in 1949 as the basis of the Euro-Atlantic security architecture during the post-WWII competition with the Soviet Union. Dozens of similar Atlantic Councils were eventually established throughout the NATO and Partnership for Peace states.

The council is a part of the Atlantic Treaty Association, a NATO offshoot that claims to unite “political leaders, academics, military officials, journalists and diplomats in an effort to further the values set forth in the North Atlantic Treaty, namely: democracy, freedom, liberty, peace, security, and the rule of law.”

In general, groups such as the Atlantic Council are meant to secure the legitimacy of U.S. policies and neoliberal economics in the eyes of world audiences and academia, whether they live in the “advanced democracies” (the imperialist center) or “developing democracies” (the post-colonial and economically exploited nations).

Mint Press — a real news-operation, instead of the fake-news operations that are being boosted by Facebook, Twitter, and Google — apparently hasn’t yet been removed by Facebook, but the permanent-war-economy is only just starting to lower the boom. And, who knows what’s next, in American ‘democracy’, now?

The way to boycott Facebook, Twitter, and Google, is to NOT respond to their ads, but instead to blacklist their advertisers and all media that rely upon those giant social-media sites. There are competitors, and those need to be aggressively favored by anyone who doesn’t want to be mentally strangulated by these three giant corporations.

These media-giants want to strangle the public; so, the public needs to strangle them first.