The Acceleration of Censorship in America

Posted on December 27, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Joe Lauria

Under increasing pressure from a population angry about endless wars and the transfer of wealth to the one percent, American plutocrats are defending themselves by suppressing critical news in the corporate media they own. But as that news emerges on RT and dissident websites, they’ve resorted to the brazen move of censorship, which is rapidly spreading in the U.S. and Europe. I know because I was a victim of it.

At the end of October, I wrote an article for Consortium News about the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign paying for unvetted opposition research that became the basis for much of the disputed story about Russia allegedly interfering in the 2016 presidential election.

The piece showed that the Democrats’ two paid-for sources that have engendered belief in Russia-gate are at best shaky. First was former British spy Christopher Steele’s largely unverified dossier of second- and third-hand opposition research portraying Donald Trump as something of a Russian Manchurian candidate.

And the second was CrowdStrike, an anti-Putin private company, examining the DNC’s computer server to dubiously claim discovery of a Russian “hack.” CrowdStrike, it was later discovered, had used faulty software it was later forced to rewrite. The company was hired after the DNC refused to allow the FBI to look at the server.

My piece also described the dangerous consequences of partisan Democratic faith in Russia-gate: a sharp increase in geopolitical tensions between nuclear-armed Russia and the U.S., and a New McCarthyism that is spreading fear — especially in academia, journalism and civil rights organizations — about questioning the enforced orthodoxy of Russia’s alleged guilt.

After the article appeared at Consortium News, I tried to penetrate the mainstream by then publishing a version of the article on the HuffPost, which was rebranded from the Huffington Post in April this year by new management. As a contributor to the site since February 2006, I am trusted by HuffPost editors to post my stories directly online. However, within 24 hours of publication on Nov. 4, HuffPost editors retracted the article without any explanation.

This broke with the earlier principles of journalism that the Web site espoused. For instance, in 2008, Arianna Huffington told radio host Don Debar that, “We welcome all opinions, except conspiracy theories.” She said: “Facts are sacred. That’s part of our philosophy of journalism.”

But Huffington stepped down as editor in August 2016 and has nothing to do with the site now. It is run by Lydia Polgreen, a former New York Times reporter and editor, who evidently has very different ideas. In April, she completely redesigned the site and renamed it HuffPost.

Before the management change, I had published several articles on the Huffington Post about Russia without controversy. For instance, The Huffington Post published my piece on Nov. 5, 2016, that predicted three days before the election that if Clinton lost she’d blame Russia. My point was confirmed by the campaign-insider book Shattered, which revealed that immediately after Clinton’s loss, senior campaign advisers decided to blame Russia for her defeat.

On Dec. 12, 2016, I published another piece, which the Huffington Post editors promoted, called, “Blaming Russia To Overturn The Election Goes Into Overdrive.” I argued that “Russia has been blamed in the U.S. for many things and though proof never seems to be supplied, it is widely believed anyway.”

After I posted an updated version of the Consortium News piece — renamed “On the Origins of Russia-gate” — I was informed 23 hours later by a Facebook friend that the piece had been retracted by HuffPost editors. As a reporter for mainstream media for more than a quarter century, I know that a newsroom rule is that before the serious decision is made to retract an article the writer is contacted to be allowed to defend the piece. This never happened. There was no due process. A HuffPost editor ignored my email asking why it was taken down.

Support from Independent Media

Like the word “fascism,” “censorship” is an over-used and mis-used accusation, and I usually avoid using it. But without any explanation, I could only conclude that the decision to retract was political, not editorial.

I am non-partisan as I oppose both major parties for failing to represent millions of Americans’ interests. I follow facts where they lead. In this case, the facts led to an understanding that the Jan. 6 FBI/NSA/CIA intelligence“assessment” on alleged Russian election interference, prepared by what then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper called “hand-picked” analysts, was based substantially on unvetted opposition research and speculation, not serious intelligence work.

The assessment even made the point that the analysts were not asserting that the alleged Russian interference was a fact. The report contained this disclaimer: “Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation, and precedents.”

Under deadline pressure on Jan. 6, Scott Shane of The New York Times instinctively wrote what many readers of the report must have been thinking: “What is missing from the public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack. … Instead, the message from the agencies essentially amounts to ‘trust us.’”

Yet, after the Jan. 6 report was published, leading Democrats asserted falsely that the “assessment” represented the consensus judgment of all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies – not just the views of “hand-picked” analysts from three – and much of the U.S. mainstream media began treating the allegations of Russian “hacking” as fact, not as an uncertain conclusion denied by both the Russian government and WikiLeaks, which insists that it did not get the two batches of Democratic emails from the Russian government.

Yet, because of the oft-repeated “17 intelligence agencies” canard and the mainstream media’s over-hyped reporting, the public impression has built up that the accusations against Russia are indisputable. If you ask a Russia-gate believer today what their faith is based on, they will invariably point to the Jan. 6 assessment and mock anyone who still expresses any doubt.

For instance, an unnamed former CIA officer told The Intercept last month, “You’ve got all these intelligence agencies saying the Russians did the hack. To deny that is like coming out with the theory that the Japanese didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor.”

That the supposedly dissident Intercept would use this quote is instructive about how unbalanced the media’s reporting on Russia-gate has been. We have film of Japanese planes attacking Pearl Harbor and American ships burning – and we have eyewitness accounts of thousands of U.S. soldiers and sailors. Yet, on Russia-gate, we have only the opinions of “hand-picked” intelligence officials who themselves admit their opinions aren’t fact. No serious editor would allow a self-interested and unnamed source to equate Russia-gate and Pearl Harbor in print.

In this atmosphere, it was easy for HuffPost editors to hear complaints from readers and blithely ban my story. But before it was pulled, 125 people had shared it. Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst, then took up my cause, being the first to write about the HuffPost censorship on his blog. McGovern included a link to a .pdf file that I captured of the censored HuffPost story. It has since been republished on numerous other websites.

Journalist Max Blumenthal tweeted about it. British filmmaker and writer Tariq Ali posted it on his Facebook page. Ron Paul and Daniel McAdams interviewed me at length about the censorship on their TV program. ZeroHedge wrote a widely shared piece and someone actually took the time, 27 minutes and 13 seconds to be exact, to read the entire article on YouTube. I began a petition to HuffPost’s Polgreen to either explain the retraction or restore the article. It has gained more than 2,000 signatures so far. If a serious fact-check analysis was made of my article, it must exist and can and should be produced.

Watchdogs & Media Defending Censorship

Despite this support from independent media, a senior official at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, I learned, declined to take up my cause because he believes in the Russia-gate story. I also learned that a senior officer at the American Civil Liberties Union rejected my case because he too believes in Russia-gate. Both of these serious organizations were set up precisely to defend individuals in such situations on principle, not preference.

In terms of their responsibilities for defending journalism and protecting civil liberties, their personal opinions about whether Russia-gate is real or not are irrelevant. The point is whether a journalist has the right to publish an article skeptical of it. I worry that amid the irrational fear spreading about Russia that concerns about careers and funding are behind these decisions.

One online publication decidedly took the HuffPost’s side. Steven Perlberg, a media reporter for BuzzFeed, asked the HuffPost why they retracted my article. While ignoring me, the editors issued a statement to BuzzFeed saying that “Mr. Lauria’s self-published” piece was “later flagged by readers, and after deciding that the post contained multiple factually inaccurate or misleading claims, our editors removed the post per our contributor terms of use.” Those terms include retraction for “any reason,” including, apparently, censorship.

Perlberg posted the HuffPost statement on Twitter. I asked him if he inquired of the editors what those “multiple” errors and “misleading claims” were. I asked him to contact me to get my side of the story. Perlberg totally ignored me. He wrote nothing about the matter. He apparently believed the HuffPost and that was that. In this way, he acquiesced with the censorship.

BuzzFeed, of course, is the sensationalist outlet that irresponsibly published the Steele dossier in full, even though the accusations – not just about Donald Trump but also many other individuals – weren’t verified. Then on Nov. 14, BuzzFeed reporter Jason Leopold wrote one of the most ludicrous of a long line of fantastic Russia-gate stories, reporting that the Russian foreign ministry had sent money to Russian consulates in the U.S. “to finance the election campaign of 2016.” The scoop generated some screaming headlines before it became clear that the money was to pay for Russian citizens in the U.S. to vote in the 2016 Duma election.

That Russia-gate has reached this point, based on faith and not fact, was further illustrated by a Facebook exchange I had with Gary Sick, an academic who served on the Ford and Carter national security staffs. When I pressed Sick for evidence of Russian interference, he eventually replied: “If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck…” When I told him that was a very low-bar for such serious accusations, he angrily cut off debate.

When belief in a story becomes faith-based or is driven by intense self-interest, honest skeptics are pushed aside and trampled. True-believers disdain facts that force them to think about what they believe. They won’t waste time making a painstaking examination of the facts or engage in a detailed debate even on something as important and dangerous as a new Cold War with Russia.

This is the most likely explanation for the HuffPost‘s censorship: a visceral reaction to having their Russia-gate faith challenged.

Why Critical News is Suppressed

But the HuffPost’s action is hardly isolated. It is part of a rapidly growing landscape of censorship of news critical of American corporate and political leaders who are trying to defend themselves from an increasingly angry population. It’s a story as old as civilization: a wealthy and powerful elite fending off popular unrest by trying to contain knowledge of how the elite gain at the others’ expense, at home and abroad.

A lesson of the 2016 campaign was that growing numbers of Americans are fed up with three decades of neoliberal policies that have fabulously enriched the top tier of Americans and debased a huge majority of everyone else. The population has likewise grown tired of the elite’s senseless wars to expand their own interests, which they to conflate with the entire country’s interests.

America’s bipartisan rulers are threatened by popular discontent from both left and right. They were alarmed by the Bernie Sanders insurgency and by Donald Trump’s victory, even if Trump is now betraying the discontented masses who voted for him by advancing tax and health insurance plans designed to further crush them and benefit the rich.

Trump’s false campaign promises will only make the rulers’ problem of controlling a restless population more difficult. Americans are subjected to economic inequality greater than in the first Gilded Age. They are also subjected today to more war than in the first Gilded Age, which led to the launch of American overseas empire. Today American rulers are engaged in multiple conflicts following decades of post-World War II invasions and coups to expand their global interests.

People with wealth and power always seem to be nervous about losing both. So plutocrats use the concentrated media they own to suppress news critical of their wars and domestic repression. For example, almost nothing was reported about militarized police forces until the story broke out into the open in the Ferguson protests and now the story has been buried again.

Careerist journalists readily acquiesce in this suppression of news to maintain their jobs, their status and their lifestyles. Meanwhile, a growing body of poorly paid freelancers compete for the few remaining decent-paying gigs for which they must report from the viewpoint of the mainstream news organizations and their wealthy owners.

To operate in this media structure, most journalists know to excise out the historical context of America’s wars of domination. They know to uncritically accept American officials’ bromides about spreading democracy, while hiding the real war aims.

Examples abound: America’s role in the Ukraine coup was denied or downplayed; a British parliamentary report exposing American lies that led to the destruction of Libya was suppressed; and most infamously, the media promoted the WMD hoax and the fable of “bringing democracy” to Iraq, leading to the illegal invasion and devastation of that country. A recent example from November is a 60 Minutes reporton the Saudi destruction of Yemen, conspicuously failing to mention America’s crucial role in the carnage.

I’ve pitched numerous news stories critical of U.S. foreign policy to a major American newspaper that were rejected or changed in the editorial process. One example is the declassified Defense Intelligence Agency document of August 2012 that accurately predicted the rise of the Islamic State two years later.

The document, which I confirmed with a Pentagon spokesman, said the U.S. and its Turkish, European and Gulf Arab allies, were supporting the establishment of a Salafist principality in eastern Syria to put pressure on the Syrian government, but the document warned that this Salafist base could turn into an “Islamic State.”

But such a story would undermine the U.S. government’s “war on terrorism” narrative by revealing that the U.S.-backed strategy actually was risking the expansion of jihadist-held territory in Syria. The story was twice rejected by my editors and to my knowledge has never appeared in corporate media.

Another story rejected in June 2012, just a year into the Syrian war, was about Russia’s motives in Syria being guided by a desire to defeat the growing jihadist threat there. Corporate media wanted to keep the myth of Russia’s “imperial” aims in Syria alive. I had to publish the article outside the U.S., in a South African daily newspaper.

In September 2015 at the U.N. General Assembly, Russian President Vladimir Putin confirmed my story about Russia’s motives in Syria to stop jihadists from taking over. Putin invited the U.S. to join this effort as Moscow was about to launch its military intervention at the invitation of the Syrian government. The Obama administration, still insisting on “regime change” in Syria, refused. And the U.S. corporate media continued promoting the myth that Russia intervened to recapture its “imperial glory.”

It was much easier to promote the “imperial” narrative than report Putin’s clear explanation to French TV channel TF1, which was not picked up by American media.

“Remember what Libya or Iraq looked like before these countries and their organizations were destroyed as states by our Western partners’ forces?” Putin said. “These states showed no signs of terrorism. They were not a threat for Paris, for the Cote d’Azur, for Belgium, for Russia, or for the United States. Now, they are the source of terrorist threats. Our goal is to prevent the same from happening in Syria.”

But don’t take Putin’s word for it. Then Secretary of State John Kerry knew why Russia intervened. In a leaked audio conversation with Syrian opposition figures in September 2016, Kerry said: “The reason Russia came in is because ISIL was getting stronger, Daesh was threatening the possibility of going to Damascus, and that’s why Russia came in because they didn’t want a Daesh government and they supported Assad.”

Kerry admitted that rather than seriously fight the Islamic State in Syria, the U.S. was ready to use its growing strength to pressure Assad to resign, just as the DIA document that I was unable to report said it would. “We know that this was growing, we were watching, we saw that Daesh was growing in strength, and we thought Assad was threatened. We thought, however, we could probably manage that Assad might then negotiate, but instead of negotiating he got Putin to support him.” Kerry’s comment suggests that the U.S. was willing to risk the Islamic State and its jihadist allies gaining power in order to force out Assad.

Why Russia Is Targeted

Where are independent-minded Western journalists to turn if their stories critical of the U.S. government and corporations are suppressed? The imperative is to get these stories out – and Russian media has provided an opening. But this has presented a new problem for the plutocracy. The suppression of critical news in their corporate-owned media is no longer working if it’s seeping out in Russian media and through dissident Western news sites.

Their solution has been to brand the content of the Russian television network, RT, as “propaganda” since it presents facts and viewpoints that most Americans have been kept from hearing.

As a Russian-government-financed English-language news channel, RT also gives a Russian perspective on the news, the way CNN and The New York Times give an American perspective and the BBC a British one. American mainstream journalists, from my experience, arrogantly deny suppressing news and believe they present a universal perspective, rather than a narrow American view of the world.

The viewpoints of Iranians, Palestinians, Russians, North Koreans and others are never fully reported in the Western media although the supposed mission of journalism is to help citizens understand a frighteningly complex world from multiple points of view. It’s impossible to do so without those voices included. Routinely or systematically shutting them out also dehumanizes people in those countries, making it easier to gain popular support to go to war against them.

Russia is scapegoated by charging that RT or Sputnik are sowing divisions in the U.S. by focusing on issues like homelessness, racism, or out-of-control militarized police forces, as if these divisive issues didn’t already exist. The U.S. mainstream media also seems to forget that the U.S. government has engaged in at least 70 years of interference in other countries’ elections, foreign invasions, coups, planting stories in foreign media and cyber-warfare, which Russian media crucially points out.

Now, these American transgressions are projected exclusively onto Moscow. There’s also a measure of self-reverence in this for “successful” people, like some journalists, with a stake in an establishment that underpins the elite, demonstrating how wonderfully democratic they are compared to those ogres in Russia.

The overriding point about the “Russian propaganda” complaint is that when America’s democratic institutions, including the press and the electoral process, are crumbling under the weight of corruption that the American elites have created or maintained, someone else needs to be blamed.

The Jan. 6 intelligence assessment on alleged Russian election meddling is a good example of this. A third of its content is an attack on RT for “undermining American democracy” by reporting on Occupy Wall Street, the protest over the Dakota pipeline and, of all things, holding a “third party candidate debates,” at a time when 71% of American millennials say they want a third party.

According to the Jan. 6 assessment, RT’s offenses include reporting that “the US two-party system does not represent the views of at least one-third of the population and is a ‘sham.’” RT also “highlights criticism of alleged US shortcomings in democracy and civil liberties.” In other words, reporting newsworthy events and giving third-party candidates a voice undermines democracy.

The assessment also says all this amounts to “a Kremlin-directed campaign to undermine faith in the US Government and fuel political protest,” but those protests by are against privileges of the wealthy and the well-connected, a status quo that the intelligence agencies were in essence created to protect.

There are also deeper reasons why Russia is being targeted. The Russia-gate story fits neatly into a geopolitical strategy that long predates the 2016 election. Since Wall Street and the U.S. government lost the dominant position in Russia that existed under the pliable President Boris Yeltsin, the strategy has been to put pressure on getting rid of Putin to restore a U.S. friendly leader in Moscow. There is substance to Russia’s concerns about American designs for “regime change” in the Kremlin.

Moscow sees an aggressive America expanding NATO and putting 30,000 NATO troops on its borders; trying to overthrow a secular ally in Syria with terrorists who threaten Russia itself; backing a coup in Ukraine as a possible prelude to moves against Russia; and using American NGOs to foment unrest inside Russia before they were forced to register as foreign agents.

Accelerated Censorship in the Private Sector

The Constitution prohibits government from prior-restraint, or censorship, though such tactics were imposed, largely unchallenged, during the two world wars. American newspapers voluntarily agreed to censor themselves in the Second World War before the government dictated it.

In the Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur said he didn’t “desire to reestablish wartime censorship” and instead asked the press for self-censorship. He largely got it until the papers began reporting American battlefield losses. On July 25, 1950, “the army ordered that reporters were not allowed to publish ‘unwarranted’ criticism of command decisions, and that the army would be ‘the sole judge and jury’ on what ‘unwarranted’ criticism entailed,” according to a Yale University study on military censorship.

After excellent on-the-ground reporting from Vietnam brought the war home to America, the military reacted by instituting, initially in the first Gulf War, serious control of the press by “embedding” reporters from private media companies. They accepted the arrangement, much as World War II newspapers censored themselves.

It is important to realize that the First Amendment does not apply to private companies, including the media. It is not illegal for them to practice censorship. I never made a First Amendment argument against the HuffPost, for instance. However, under pressure from Washington, even in peacetime, media companies can do the government’s dirty work to censor or limit free speech for the government.

In the past few weeks, we’ve seen an acceleration of attempts by corporations to inhibit Russian media in the U.S. Both Google and Facebook, which dominate the Web with more than 50 percent of ad revenue, were at first resistant to government pressure to censor “Russian propaganda.” But they are coming around.

Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, said on Nov. 18 that Google would “derank” articles from RT and Sputnik in the Google searches, making the stories harder for readers to find. The billionaire Schmidt claimed Russian information can be “repetitive, exploitative, false, [or] likely to have been weaponized,” he said. That is how factual news critical of U.S. corporate and political leadership is seen by them: as a weapon threatening their rule.

“My own view is that these patterns can be detected, and that they can be taken down or deprioritized,” Schmidt said.

Though Google would essentially be hiding news produced by RT and Sputnik, Schmidt is sensitive to the charge of censorship, even though there’s nothing legally to stop him.

“We don’t want to ban the sites. That’s not how we operate,” Schmidt said cynically. “I am strongly not in favor of censorship. I am very strongly in favor of ranking. It’s what we do.”

But the “deranking” isn’t only aimed at Russian sites; Google algorithms also are taking aim at independent news sites that don’t follow the mainstream herd – and thus are accused of spreading Russian or other “propaganda” if they question the dominant Western narratives on, say, the Ukraine crisis or the war in Syria. A number of alternative websites have begun reporting a sharp fall-off of traffic directed to their sites from Google’s search engines.

Responding to a deadline from Congress to act, Facebook on Nov. 22 announced that it would inform users if they have been “targeted” by Russian “propaganda.” Facebook’s help center will tell users if they liked or shared ads allegedly from the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, which supposedly bought $100,000 in ads over a two-year period, with more than half these ads coming after the 2016 U.S. election and many not related to politics.

The $100,000 sum over two years compares to Facebook’s $27 billion in annual revenue. Plus, Facebook only says it “believes” or it’s “likely” that the ads came from that firm, whose links to the Kremlin also have yet to be proved.

Facebook described the move as “part of our ongoing effort to protect our platforms and the people who use them from bad actors who try to undermine our democracy.” Congress wants more from Facebook, so it will not be surprising if users will eventually be alerted to Russian media reports as “propaganda” in the future.

While the government can’t openly shut down a news site, the Federal Communications Commission’s upcoming vote on whether to deregulate the Internet by ending net neutrality will free private Internet companies in the U.S. to further marginalize Russian and dissident websites by slowing them down and thus discouraging readers from viewing them.

Likewise, as the U.S. government doesn’t want to be openly seen shutting down RT operations, it is working around the edges to accomplish that.

After the Department of Justice forced, under threat of arrest, RT to register its employees as foreign agents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nuaert said that “FARA does not police the content of information disseminated, does not limit the publication of information or advocacy materials, and does not restrict an organization’s ability to operate.” She’d earlier said that registering would not “impact or affect the ability of them to report news and information. We just have them register. It’s as simple as that.”

The day after Nuaert spoke the Congressional press office stripped RT correspondents of their Capitol Hill press passes, citing the FARA registration. “The rules of the Galleries state clearly that news credentials may not be issued to any applicant employed ‘by any foreign government or representative thereof.’ Upon its registration as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), RT Network became ineligible to hold news credentials,” read the letter to RT.

But Russia-gate faithful ignore these aggressive moves and issue calls for even harsher action. After forcing RT to register, Keir Giles, a Chatham House senior consulting fellow, acted as though it never happened. He said in a Council on Foreign Relations Cyber Brief on Nov. 27: “Although the Trump administration seems unlikely to pursue action against Russian information operations, there are steps the U.S. Congress and other governments should consider.”

I commented on this development on RT America. It would also have been good to have the State Department’s Nuaert answer for this discrepancy about the claim that forced FARA registrations would not affect news gathering when it already has. My criticism of RT is that they should be interviewing U.S. decision-makers to hold them accountable, rather than mostly guests outside the power structure. The decision-makers could be called out on air if they refuse to appear.

Growing McCarthyite Attacks

Western rulers’ wariness about popular unrest can be seen in the extraordinary and scurrilous attack on the Canadian website globalresearch.ca. It began with a chilling study by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into the relatively obscure website, followed by a vicious hit piece on Nov. 18 by the Globe and Mail, Canada’s largest newspaper. The headline was: “How a Canadian website is being used to amplify the Kremlin’s view of the world.”

“What once appeared to be a relatively harmless online refuge for conspiracy theorists is now seen by NATO’s information warfare specialists as a link in a concerted effort to undermine the credibility of mainstream Western media – as well as the North American and European public’s trust in government and public institutions,” the Globe and Mail reported.

“Global Research is viewed by NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence – or StratCom – as playing a key accelerant role in helping popularize articles with little basis in fact that also happen to fit the narratives being pushed by the Kremlin, in particular, and the Assad regime.” The website never knew it had such powers.

I’ve not agreed with everything I’ve read on the site. But it is a useful clearinghouse for alternative media.

Numerous Consortium News articles are republished there, including a handful of mine. But the site’s typical sharing and reposting on the Internet is seen by NATO as a plot to undermine the Free World.

“It uses that reach to push not only its own opinion pieces, but ‘news’ reports from little-known websites that regularly carry dubious or false information,” the he Globe and Mail reported. “At times, the site’s regular variety of international-affairs stories is replaced with a flurry of items that bolster dubious reportage with a series of opinion pieces, promoted on social media and retweeted and shared by active bots.”

The newspaper continued, “’That way, they increase the Google ranking of the story and create the illusion of multi-source verification,’ said Donara Barojan, who does digital forensic research for [StratCom]. But she said she did not yet have proof that Global Research is connected to any government.”

This sort of smear is nothing more than a blatant attack on free speech by the most powerful military alliance in the world, based on the unfounded conviction that Russia is a fundamental force for evil and that anyone who has contacts with Russia or shares even a part of its multilateral world view is suspect.

Such tactics are spreading to Europe. La Repubblica newspaper in Italy wrote a similar hit piece against L’Antidiplomatico, a dissident website. And the European Union is spending €3.8 million to counter Russian “propaganda.” It is targeting Eurosceptic politicians who repeat what they hear on Russian media.

High-profile individuals in the U.S. are also now in the crosshairs of the neo-McCarthyite witch hunt. On Nov. 25 The Washington Post ran a nasty hit piece on Washington Capitals’ hockey player Alex Ovechkin, one of the most revered sports figures in the Washington area, simply because he, like 86 percent of other Russians, supports his president.

“Alex Ovechkin is one of Putin’s biggest fans. The question is, why?” ran the headline. The story insidiously implied that Ovechkin was a dupe of his own president, being used to set up a media campaign to support Putin, who is under fierce and relentless attack in the United States where Ovechkin plays professional ice hockey.

“He has given an unwavering endorsement to a man who U.S. intelligence agencies say sanctioned Russian meddling in last year’s presidential election,” write the Post reporters, once again showing their gullibility to U.S. intelligence agencies that have provided no proof for their assertions (and even admit that they are not asserting their opinion as fact).

Less prominent figures are targeted too. John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent who blew the whistle on torture and was jailed for it, was kicked off a panel in Europe on Nov. 10 by a Bernie Sanders supporter who refused to appear with Kiriakou because he co-hosts a show on Radio Sputnik.

At the end of November, Reporters Without Borders, an organization supposedly devoted to press freedom, tried to kick journalist Vanessa Beeley off a panel in Geneva to prevent her from presenting evidence that the White Helmets, a group that sells itself as a rescue organization inside rebel-controlled territory in Syria, has ties to Al Qaeda. The Swiss Press Club, which hosted the event, resisted the pressure and let Beeley speak.

But as a consequence the club director said its funding was slashed from the Swiss government.

Russia-gate’s Hurdles

Much of this spreading mania and intensifying censorship traces back to Russia-gate. Yet, it remains remarkable that the corporate media has failed so far to prove any significant Russian interference in the U.S. election at all. Nor have the intelligence agencies, Congressional investigations and special prosecutor Robert Mueller. His criminal charges so far have been for financial crimes and lying to federal authorities on topics unrelated to any “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russians to “hack” Democratic emails.

There will likely be more indictments from Mueller, even perhaps a complaint about Trump committing obstruction of justice because he said on TV that he fired Comey, in part, because of the “Russia thing.” But Trump’s clumsy reaction to the “scandal,” which he calls “fake news” and a “witch hunt,” still is not proof that Putin and the Russians interfered in the U.S. election to achieve the unlikely outcome of Trump’s victory.

The Russia-gate faithful assured us to wait for the indictment of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, briefly Trump’s national security adviser. But again there was nothing about pre-election “collusion,” only charges that Flynn had lied to the FBI about conversations with the Russian ambassador regarding policy matters during the presidential transition, i.e., after the election.

One of Flynn’s conversations was about trying unsuccessfully to comply with an Israeli request to get Russia to block a United Nations resolution censuring Israel’s settlements on Palestinian land.

As journalist Yasha Levine tweeted: “So the country that influenced US policy through Michael Flynn is Israel, not Russia. But Flynn did try to influence Russia, not the other way around. Ha-ha. This is the smoking gun? What a farce.”

The media is becoming a victim of its own mania. In its zeal to push this story reporters are making a huge number of amateurish mistakes on stories that are later corrected. Brian Ross of ABC News was suspended for erroneously reporting that Trump had told Flynn to contact the Russians before the election, and not after.

There remain a number of key hurdles to prove the Russia-gate story. First, convincing evidence is needed that the Russian government indeed did “hack” the Democratic emails, both those of the DNC and Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta – and gave them to WikiLeaks. Then it must be linked somehow to the Trump campaign. If it were a Russian hack it would have been an intelligence operation on a need-to-know basis, and no one in the Trump team needed to know. It’s not clear how any campaign member could have even helped with an overseas hack or could have been an intermediary to WikiLeaks.

There’s also the question of how significant the release of those emails was anyway. They did provide evidence that the DNC tilted the primary campaign in favor of Clinton over Sanders; they exposed the contents of Clinton’s paid speeches to Wall Street, which she was trying to hide from the voters; and they revealed some pay-to-play features of the Clinton Foundation and its foreign donations. But – even if the Russians were involved in providing that information to the American people – those issues were not considered decisive in the campaign.

Clinton principally pinned her loss on FBI Director James Comey for closing and then reopening the investigation into her improper use of a private email server while Secretary of State. She also spread the blame to Russia (repeating the canard about “seventeen [U.S. intelligence] agencies, all in agreement”), Bernie Sanders, the inept DNC and other factors.

As for vaguer concerns about some Russian group “probably” buying $100,000 in ads, mostly after Americans had voted, as a factor in swaying a $6 billion election, it is too silly to contemplate. That RT and Sputnik ran pieces critical of Hillary Clinton was their right, and they were hardly alone. RT and Sputnik‘s reach in the U.S. is minuscule compared to Fox News, which slammed Clinton throughout the campaign, or for that matter, MSNBC, CNN and other mainstream news outlets, which often expressed open disdain for Republican Donald Trump but also gave extensive coverage to issues such as the security concerns about Clinton’s private email server.

Another vague Russia-gate suspicion stemming largely from Steele’s opposition research is that somehow Russia bribed or blackmailed Trump because of past business with Russians. But there are evidentiary and logical problems with these theories, since some lucrative deals fell through (and presumably wouldn’t have if Trump was being paid off).

Some have questioned how Trump could have supported detente with Russia without being beholden to Moscow in some way. But Jeffrey Sommers, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, wrote a convincing essay explaining adviser Steve Bannon’s influence on Trump’s thinking about Russia and the need for cooperation between the two powers to solve international problems.

Without convincing evidence, I remain a Russia-gate skeptic. I am not defending Russia. Russia can defend itself. However, amid the growing censorship and the dangerous new McCarthyism, I am trying to defend America — from itself.

An earlier version of this story appeared on Consortium News.

Brazile Fallout: Hillary Privatized the DNC with Help from a Washington Law Firm

Posted on November 13, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens

Source: Wall Street On Parade

Secret side agreements are a common maneuver by corporate law firms. Here’s how they work. An agreement that is legal and passes the smell test is drafted and submitted to a court or a regulatory body for public consumption. Then, a separate, secret side agreement is written and signed by both sides and it contains all of the smelly, shady, ethically questionable hard details on how the original agreement will be carried out.

Donna Brazile, the former interim Chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the 2016 presidential campaign, has written a new book, “Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House,” and has revealed the secret side agreement that the DNC had with Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

In 2015, Hillary Clinton’s campaign set up a joint fundraising committee called the Hillary Victory Fund (HVF) with the DNC and over 30 state democratic committees. The public portion of the agreement indicated that Hillary would raise funds for her own campaign while also allocating a portion to the DNC to help the overall Democratic Party as well as allocating funds to state democratic committees in order to support down-ballot candidates in their local elections. But the secret side agreement that effectively privatized the DNC, giving Hillary and her campaign lawyers control of the DNC and its money, had yet to see the light of day.

This is how Brazile describes the secret side agreement in her book:

“The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook [Clinton’s campaign manager] with a copy to Marc Elias [lawyer at Perkins Coie] — specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.”

The Clinton camp has now attempted to defend itself by saying these terms are standard because they were not going to kick in until the Democratic Party had chosen its official presidential nominee at its party convention in July 2016. But that’s not what the actual secret side agreement says. It indicates the following: “Beginning October 1, 2015,” the HVF would begin transferring $1.2 million to the DNC at the start of each month with that release “conditioned on” Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign personnel being consulted “and have joint authority over strategic decisions over the staffing, budget, expenditures, and general election related communications, data, technology, analytics, and research. The DNC will provide HFA advance opportunity to review on-line or mass email, communications that features a particular Democratic primary candidate.”

Additionally, the secret agreement states that “the DNC agrees that no later than September 11, 2015 it will hire one of two candidates previously identified as acceptable to HFA” (Hillary for America, the primary campaign fund for Clinton) as its Communications Director. All of this is occurring in the fall of 2015 with the official Democratic nominating convention not taking place until July 2016.

As Politico reported in May 2016, the Hillary Victory Fund was a sham in multiple other ways. First, Politico writes that less than 1 percent of the money raised stayed in the state’s coffers. The Treasurer of the Hillary Victory Fund actually had the power to move money in and out of state committee bank accounts. Politico reporters Ken Vogel and Isaac Arnsdorf cite the following example to show how things actually worked:

“…the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party received $43,500 from the victory fund on Nov. 2, only to transfer the same amount to the DNC that same day. The pattern repeated itself after the Minnesota party received transfers from the victory fund of $20,600 on Dec. 1 (the party sent the same amount to the DNC the next day) and $150,000 on Jan. 4 (it transferred the same amount to the DNC that day).

“That means that Minnesota’s net gain from its participation in the victory fund was precisely $0 through the end of March. Meanwhile, the DNC pocketed an extra $214,100 in cash routed through Minnesota — much of which the DNC wouldn’t have been able to accept directly, since it came from donors who had mostly had already maxed out to the national party committee.

“A similar pattern transpired with most of the participating state parties. As of March 31, only eight state parties (most of which were in battleground states such as Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire and Virginia) had received more from the victory fund than was transferred from their accounts to the DNC.”

Brazile backs up this account in her book, writing that “the states kept less than half of 1 percent of the $82 million they had amassed from the extravagant fund-raisers Hillary’s campaign was holding….”

Brazile notes in her book that the lawyer, Marc Elias, of the politically-connected law firm, Perkins Coie, was copied on the secret side agreement. Elias has repeatedly come under scrutiny for his multi-faceted roles in the 2015-2016 presidential campaign. Most recently, he was exposed as the guy behind the hiring of Fusion GPS which compiled the scandalous Russian dossier on Donald Trump, using both Hillary campaign funds and DNC funds. The Washington Post reported that Elias was allowed to spend these funds “without oversight by campaign officials, according to a spokesperson for his law firm.”

Elias served as the General Counsel to Hillary’s primary campaign committee, Hillary for America, as well as serving as one of a team of lawyers from Perkins Coie that provided legal advice to the DNC. (Elias also provided legal advice to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Democratic Governors Associations, according to the Perkins Coie web site last year.)

As a legal adviser to the DNC, Elias should have known that its charter mandated fairness and impartiality to all primary candidates. But when WikiLeaks released emails last year that had been hacked at the DNC, Marc Elias was caught giving advice on how to tar Senator Bernie Sanders after his campaign suggested that the Hillary Victory Fund was skirting Federal election law. The email from Elias read:

“My suggestion is that the DNC put out a statement saying that the accusations the Sanders campaign are not true. The fact that CNN notes that you aren’t getting between the two campaigns is the problem. Here, Sanders is attacking the DNC and its current practice, its past practice with the POTUS and with Sec Kerry. Just as the RNC pushes back directly on Trump over ‘rigged system’, the DNC should push back DIRECTLY at Sanders and say that what he is saying is false and harmful the [sic] the Democratic party.”

Writing for Politico in 2014, Ken Vogel detailed how Elias and Perkins Coie have not only been the legal go-to guys for the Democratic party over the years but how they have also tinkered with Federal election law to shift more power to the 1 percent. Vogel writes:

“Perkins Coie’s political law practice, anchored by Elias and former White House Counsel Bob Bauer, has something of a stranglehold on the Democratic Party’s election law business, representing not only the party committees themselves but everyone from [Harry] Reid (whose various committees have paid $317,000 in legal fees to Perkins Coie over the years) to Obama ($7.4 million) to the major Democratic super PACs ($19 million).”

The thrust of the article, however, is that Elias played a central role in further opening the spigots for legal revenues his firm might be expected to collect in the future by tinkering with Federal legislation at the eleventh hour. Vogel writes:

“A powerful Democratic lawyer helped craft a provision that was slipped into a year-end spending bill allowing political parties to raise huge new pools of cash — including some for legal fees that are likely going to be collected by his own firm…

“The change has the potential to halt or at least slow the erosion of power of the political parties, since it would increase the maximum amount of cash that rich donors may give to the national Democratic and Republican party committees each year from $97,400 to $777,600 or more.”

The question that no one seems to be asking is who are the main beneficiaries of Perkins Coie’s heavy influence at the top of the Democratic Party. Despite Obama’s re-election for a second term, the Democratic Party shed nearly 1,000 seats from coast to coast. The Republicans now control both houses of Congress and the Executive Branch. A man with the lowest approval rating in modern history now occupies the Oval Office.

The primary beneficiaries of this hubris have been the 1 percent – Wall Street and hedge fund titans – and giant multi-national corporations that dominate the client roster at Perkins Coie.

Those within the Clinton camp and DNC who are suggesting to the American people that there is nothing to see here, time to move along, are dead wrong. Just because the Republican presidential campaign may have been corrupted by outside forces doesn’t mean that the Democratic campaign wasn’t also corrupted by its own outside forces. It’s time to follow the obscene political money trail wherever it leads.

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Democratic Party crisis explodes in wake of Brazile revelations

Posted on November 8, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Patrick Martin

Source: WSWS.org

The political crisis in the Democratic Party, brought to the surface with the publication Thursday of excerpts of a campaign memoir by the former interim chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Donna Brazile, erupted into mutual denunciations over the weekend.

Brazile made public an unprecedented agreement between the DNC (under previous chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz) and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign that involved Clinton paying off the DNC’s debts and providing it a monthly subsidy in return for gaining control over the appointment of DNC officials and the right of approval over key operational decisions.

The deal was concluded in August 2015, six months before the first votes were to be cast in caucuses or primaries, when the DNC was required by its own rules to remain neutral in the contest between Clinton, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and several other candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination.

A further revelation from Brazile’s book was made public Saturday: she acknowledged discussions among leading Democrats in September 2016, after Hillary Clinton had collapsed at a ceremony in New York City marking the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, over whether Clinton should be replaced as the presidential candidate because of health concerns. Brazile writes that she herself considered Vice President Joe Biden as the logical replacement, but did not make the proposal.

Within hours of this report, 100 former Clinton campaign aides, headed by campaign chairman John Podesta and campaign manager Robby Mook, put their signatures on an open letter denouncing Brazile’s criticism of the Clinton campaign.

The “Open Letter From Hillary For America 2016 Team” makes use of the same Russia-baiting technique employed by the Democrats in their political conflict with the Trump White House, but this time directed against a former top Democrat. In assailing Brazile, the first paragraph of the open letter declares: “It is particularly troubling and puzzling that she would seemingly buy into false Russian-fueled propaganda, spread by both the Russians and our opponent, about our candidate’s health.”

The health questions about Clinton were fueled, however, not by Moscow, but by video broadcast over American cable television networks showing the candidate being lifted into a vehicle by aides and Secret Service agents, in visible distress. The characteristic duplicity of top campaign officials, who initially sought to conceal the incident, added to the ensuing furor.

Even more revealing is what is missing from the Clinton camp’s “Open Letter”: there is no reference whatsoever to the main revelation stemming from Brazile’s book—the secret joint fundraising agreement between the Clinton campaign and the DNC, six months before the first caucus in Iowa, giving Clinton effective control of the party apparatus. The Clinton aides do not dispute that this backroom deal occurred and make no attempt to justify it.

On Sunday morning, Brazile appeared on the ABC News program “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” The host, himself a former top political aide in the White House of Bill Clinton, provided a platform for Brazile to repeat her exposure of the collusion between the Clinton campaign and the DNC and discuss the “Open Letter” from the former Clinton campaign officials.

She bitterly denounced the Clinton camp, both for its treatment of the DNC while she was in charge, and for their ferocious response to her new book. “George, for those who are telling me to shut up, they told Hillary that a couple of months ago,” Brazile declared. “You know what I tell them? Go to hell! I’m going to tell my story.”

Brazile also touched on a topic of intense but largely behind-the-scenes discussion in official Washington: the July 2016 murder of Seth Rich, a low-level IT staffer at the DNC, who was shot to death in what police called a failed robbery attempt. The Trump White House and ultra-right media allies, including Alex Jones of InfoWars and Sean Hannity of Fox News, have portrayed Rich, rather than Russian hackers, as the likely source for the DNC emails obtained by WikiLeaks, and his killing as a retaliatory “hit” ordered by the Clinton campaign.

Brazile reportedly suggests in her book—which will not be available to the public until Tuesday—that Rich’s death, warnings from the Obama administration about Russian hacking and repeated online threats from Trump supporters had made her extremely concerned about security issues, to the point where she had her home swept for bugs and installed multiple security devices. In her interview Sunday with Stephanopoulos, she spoke of her fears for her own personal safety. Her mention of Seth Rich, entirely unsolicited, seemed a veiled warning to the Clinton camp that more revelations about 2016 campaign skullduggery could be forthcoming.

Current DNC Chair Tom Perez was interviewed Sunday on “Meet the Press” on NBC and directly rejected the two main issues raised by Brazile. He maintained, “The charge that Hillary Clinton was somewhere incapacitated is quite frankly ludicrous,” although he did not attribute that concern to Russian propaganda.

He went on to argue that Clinton won the Democratic primary contest by four million votes, and the DNC was not in control of those elections, which are run by the state governments, while noting that the caucuses, which are controlled by the party apparatus, were mostly won by Sanders, not Clinton. Perez would concede only that “the DNC fell short during critical moments of the primary,” in terms of openly favoring Clinton over Sanders.

Significantly, neither Sanders nor any of his top aides or supporters made an appearance on any of the Sunday television talk shows. Sanders issued a statement on Brazile’s revelations suggesting that the conduct of the 2016 campaign was a diversion from the effort to mobilize opposition to the Trump administration.

The fact is that Brazile informed Sanders of the joint fundraising agreement and the takeover of the DNC by Clinton more than a year ago, and he has chosen to say nothing about it. This is part of his effort to prop up the Democratic Party and prevent the millions of working people and youth who supported his campaign from drawing the political conclusion that it is necessary to break with the Democrats in order to conduct any genuine struggle against the billionaires who dominate the US political system.

The conflict within the Democratic Party has erupted under conditions where the Republican Party is bordering on civil war, with several Republican senators denouncing Trump as a threat to American democracy—and then announcing they would retire from office rather than oppose him—and a vicious conflict developing between the party establishment and the fascist-minded elements around Trump, spearheaded by his former chief political aide and campaign manager, Stephen Bannon, now returned to his position as chief executive of the ultra-right Breitbart News.

In recent days, it has been reported that in an upcoming book titled The Last Republicans, the author cites interviews with George H. W. Bush and his son George W. Bush in which the two last Republican presidents before Trump denounce the current occupant of the White House and reveal that they refused to vote for him in 2016. In response, Trump tweeted an attack on his Republican presidential critics.

The ABC “This Week” program on which Brazile was interviewed began with the presentation of a new Washington Post/ABC News poll showing public support for Trump falling to its low point for the year, only 37 percent, with 59 percent opposing. Trump’s showing was the worst for any first-year president since modern polling began. Other polls have shown public support for the Republican-controlled Congress hitting new lows as well.

The vast majority of working people are increasingly alienated from the two-party political system in the United States, correctly regarding both the Democrats and the Republicans as tools of the super-rich and looking for an alternative. The central political question is the building of a political movement of the working class that will fight the capitalist system as a whole and advance a program to defend jobs, living standards and democratic rights, and oppose imperialist war.

What Did Hillary Clinton Know?

Posted on October 30, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Robert Parry

Source: Consortium News

The revelation that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped pay for the notorious “Steele Dossier” of hearsay claims about Donald Trump’s relations with Russia is not surprising but is noteworthy given how long the mystery about the funding was allowed to linger.

Another mild surprise is that the Clinton campaign would have had a direct hand in the financing rather than maintaining an arm’s length relationship to the dossier by having some “friend of the campaign” make the payments and giving Clinton more deniability.

Instead, the campaign appears to have relied on its lawyer, Marc E. Elias of Perkins Coie, and a confidentiality agreement to provide some insulation between Clinton and the dossier’s startling claims which presumably helped inform Clinton’s charge in the final presidential debate that Trump was Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “puppet.” Indeed, how much Clinton personally knew about the dossier and its financing remains an intriguing question for investigators.

Ultimately, the facts about who commissioned the dossier were forced out by a congressional Republican subpoena seeking the bank records of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that hired former British intelligence operative Christopher Steele to compile the opposition research, known as “oppo,” against Trump.

As part of the legal wrangling over that subpoena, the Clinton/DNC law firm, Perkins Coie, wrote a letter releasing Fusion GPS from its confidentiality agreement.

After that letter, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday night that the Clinton campaign and the DNC had helped fund the Steele effort with attorney Elias retaining Fusion GPS in April 2016 and with Fusion GPS then hiring Steele.

The Post reported that “people familiar with the matter” disclosed that outline of the arrangement but still would not divulge how much the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid to Fusion GPS. One source told me that the total amount came to about $1 million.

‘Trash for Cash’

An irony about Hillary Clinton’s role in funding allegations about Trump’s connection to the Russians, including claims that he cavorted with prostitutes in a five-star Moscow hotel while Russian intelligence operatives secretly filmed him, is that the Clinton camp bristled when Bill Clinton was the subject of Republican “oppo” that surfaced salacious charges against him. The Clintons dismissed such accusations as “cash for trash.”

Nevertheless, just as conspiratorial accusations about the Clintons gave rise to the Whitewater investigation and a rash of other alleged “scandals,” which bedeviled Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Steele Dossier provided a map that investigators have followed for the ongoing Russia-gate investigation into President Trump.

Much like those Clinton allegations, Steele’s accusations have had a dubious track record for accuracy, with U.S. government investigators unable to corroborate some key claims but, I’m told, believing that some are true nonetheless.

In the 1990s, even though the core allegations of wrongdoing about the Clintons and their Whitewater land deal collapsed, the drawn-out investigation eventually unearthed Bill Clinton’s sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky and led to his impeachment in the House although he was acquitted in a Senate trial.

Some Democrats have openly hoped for the impeachment of President Trump, too, and they have hitched many of those hopes to the Russia-gate bandwagon.

There is also no doubt about the significance of the Steele Dossier in spurring the Russia-gate scandal forward.

When Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, offered what amounted to a prosecutor’s opening statement in March, his seamless 15-minute narrative of the Trump campaign’s alleged collaboration with Russia followed the trail blazed by Steele, who had worked for Britain’s MI-6 in Russia and tapped into ex-colleagues and unnamed sources inside Russia, including supposedly leadership figures in the Kremlin.

Steele’s Methods

Since Steele could not reenter Russia himself, he based his reports on multiple hearsay from these anonymous Russians who claim to have heard some information from their government contacts before passing it on to Steele’s associates who then gave it to Steele who compiled this mix of rumors and alleged inside dope into “raw” intelligence reports.

Besides the anonymous sourcing and the sources’ financial incentives to dig up dirt, Steele’s reports had other problems, including the inability of FBI investigators to confirm key elements, such as the claim that several years ago Russian intelligence operatives secretly videotaped Trump having prostitutes urinate on him while he lay in the same bed at Moscow’s Ritz-Carlton used by President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.

That tantalizing tidbit was included in Steele’s opening report to his new clients, dated June 20, 2016. Apparently, it proved irresistible in whetting the appetite of Clinton insiders. Also in that first report were the basic outlines of Russia-gate.

But Steele’s June report also reflected the telephone-tag aspects of these allegations: “Speaking to a trusted compatriot in June 2016 sources A and B, a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure and a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin respectively, the Russian authorities had been cultivating and supporting US Republican presidential candidate, Donald TRUMP for a least 5 years.

“Source B asserted that the TRUMP operation was both supported and directed by Russian President Vladimir PUTIN. Its aim was to sow discord and disunity both within the US itself, but more especially within the Transatlantic alliance which was viewed as inimical to Russia’s interests. … In terms of specifics, Source A confided that the Kremlin had been feeding TRUMP and his team valuable intelligence on his opponents, including Democratic presidential candidate Hillary CLINTON, for several years. …

“The Kremlin’s cultivation operation on TRUMP also had comprised offering him various lucrative real estate development business deals in Russia, especially in relation to the ongoing 2018 World Cup soccer tournament. However, so far, for reasons unknown, TRUMP had not taken up any of these.”

Besides the anonymous and hearsay quality of the allegations, there are obvious logical problems, especially the point that five years before the 2016 campaign, virtually no one would have thought that Trump had any chance of becoming President of the United States.

There also may have been a more mundane reason why Trump’s hotel deal fell through. A source familiar with those negotiations told me that Trump had hoped to get a half interest in the $2 billion project but that Russian-Israeli investor Mikhail Fridman, a founder of Russia’s Alfa Bank, balked because Trump was unwilling to commit a significant investment beyond the branding value of the Trump name.

Yet, one would assume that if the supposedly all-powerful Putin wanted to give a $1 billion or so payoff to his golden boy, Donald Trump, whom Putin anticipated would become President in five years, the deal would have happened, but it didn’t.

Despite the dubious quality of Steele’s second- and third-hand information, the June 2016 report appears to have impressed Team Clinton. And once the bait was taken, Steele continued to produce his conspiracy-laden reports, totaling at least 17 through Dec. 13, 2016.

Framing the Investigation

The reports not only captivated the Clinton political operatives but influenced the assessments of President Obama’s appointees in the U.S. intelligence community regarding alleged Russian “meddling” in the presidential election.

Still, a careful analysis of Steele’s reports would have discovered not only apparent factual inaccuracies, such as putting Trump lawyer Michael Cohen at a meeting with a Russian official in Prague (when Cohen says he’s never been to Prague), but also the sort of broad conspiracy-mongering that the mainstream U.S. news media usually loves to ridicule.

For instance, Steele’s reports pin a range of U.S. political attitudes on Russian manipulation rather than the notion that Americans can reach reasonable conclusions on their own. In one report dated Sept. 14, 2016, Steele claimed that an unnamed senior official in Putin’s Presidential Administration (or PA) explained how Putin used the alleged Russian influence operation to generate opposition to Obama’s Pacific trade deals.

Steele wrote that Putin’s intention was “pushing candidate CLINTON away from President OBAMA’s policies. The best example of this was that both candidates [Clinton and Trump] now openly opposed the draft trade agreements, TPP and TTIP, which were assessed by Moscow as detrimental to Russian interests.”

In other words, the Russians supposedly intervened in the U.S. presidential campaign to turn the leading candidates against Obama’s trade deals. But how credible is that? Are we to believe that American politicians – running the gamut from Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren through former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to President Donald Trump – have all been tricked by the Kremlin to oppose those controversial trade deals, which are also broadly unpopular with the American people who are sick and tired of trade agreements that cost them jobs?

Of course, the disclosure that the Clinton campaign and the DNC help pay for Steele’s opposition research doesn’t necessarily discredit the information, but it does suggest a possible financial incentive for Steele and his collaborators to sex-up the reports to keep Clinton’s camp coming back for more.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazonand barnesandnoble.com).

The Morgan Freeman Psy-Op Proves How Desperate The ‘Deep State’ Has Become

Posted on September 25, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Andrew Korybko

Source: Sputnik International

Morgan Freeman’s latest publicly stunt permanently stained his legacy after the famous actor decided to join the fake news industry by passing off a blockbuster script as a true story.

Morgan Freeman declared in his latest two-minute video that “We have been attacked. We are at war”, but he’s wrong in saying that Americans have been victimized by Russia, but should have rather told the truth that they’re under attack by their own government. To channel Freeman, “Imagine this movie script”, albeit modified to reflect real-life events instead of conspiratorial ones:

A globalist power cabal made up of the permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (the “deep state”), in conjunction with the Democratic Party, “Cultural Marxist” professors, the Mainstream Media, and Hollywood have attacked American democracy using non-stop infowar operations against their own fellow citizens to spread propaganda and false information aimed at convincing people that the Republican candidate and future President of the United States is really a Russian puppet.

A few years ago this might have sounded just as ridiculous as the narrative that Freeman read off in front of the cameras, but the difference is that this actually happened whereas his story still remains the realm of fiction. The conspiracy theory that Russia somehow swayed the 2016 election has no basis in reality, and it’s very condescending to the millions of average Americans in the Midwest who swayed the election for Trump to even infer that these patriotic citizens were under the influence of a foreign intelligence operation at the time.

Midwesterners didn’t tip the election for Trump because President Putin, the FSB, RT, or Sputnik told them to — which they didn’t — but because they had enough of the old order of business in the US and were desperately craving a change, any change, to improve the all-around deteriorating conditions that have come to define their lives. Trump promised law and order, jobs and strong borders, and a no-nonsense approach to American domestic politics, the complete opposite of Hillary’s platform and exactly what Midwesterners wanted to hear.

Even without the DNC leaks, many of those folks would never have countenanced voting for Hillary due to her husband’s toxic legacy and that of his party. Moreover, these voters didn’t need proof of Hillary and the Democrats’ corruption because they had suspected it all along, though the amplification of their crimes by the global media vindicated them for what The Establishment had falsely claimed for years was just another tinfoil hat “conspiracy theory”.

Now about actual conspiracy facts, many people could never have thought that their own government would turn against them and attack America’s sacred political system, its electoral democracy, through the incessant demonization of Donald Trump and the plethora of fake news that they disseminated about him. When Trump claimed that his campaign was under surveillance by the Obama Administration, he was dismissed as a crackpot, but it’s since emerged just the other day that former National Security Advisor Susan Rice did in fact authorize the spying of Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort.

On top of that, the never-ending assertions that Trump is in cahoots with the Russian government or somehow under the nefarious influence of shadowy Kremlin agents are regularly debunked by listening to the President and his Administration constantly talk about “Russian aggression” and watching them use this pretext to make hostile moves against Moscow. These actions strongly refute the claims of a secret Trump-Russian connection and most Americans understand that, but the “deep state” and their cohorts in the “Cultural Marxist” corners of academia, the Mainstream Media, Hollywood, and the masked mob of “Antifa” rioters believe that the population is just too stupid to see this and could therefore be easily misled into believing their fake news narrative that Putin’s proxy is in control of the White House.

The whole point behind this massive infowar operation against the minds of the American public is to delegitimize Trump’s election in a last-ditch bid to give the Democrats a chance to win back Congress during next year’s midterm elections. It’s also designed to influence the President’s domestic and foreign policy decision making, and it actually has succeeded to a degree in that respect if one holds the view that Trump truly believed what he said on the campaign trail but was later pressured by the “deep state” to take a decidedly neo-conservative stance towards International Affairs after he entered into office. Regardless, what’s important to focus on in this context are the American people themselves, who largely dismiss the conspiratorial, never-proven, and constantly debunked accusations that Morgan Freeman shamelessly told the American public with a straight face.

There’s a popular saying that one shouldn’t “shoot the messenger”, but that doesn’t mean that the said messenger is above criticism. Morgan Freeman is a beloved household name who’s universally praised for his excellent acting skills and the unforgettable memories that he’s imbued his audiences with, but politics isn’t his element, and no matter how much the “Committee to Investigate Russia’ pleads that it’s “non-partisan”, former National Intelligence Director James Clapper’s open involvement in the project proves that it’s linked to the same anti-Trump “deep state” that’s been undermining American democracy for over the past two years. Morgan Freeman should have known better than to lend his acting talent to pretending that a movie script is a real-life story, and that’s why so many people are disappointed in him on a deep, personal level.

The irony of it all is that Morgan Freeman could have actually done a lot of good if he had the courage to say the truth. Instead of imploring Trump to sit down in front of the American people, elaborate on Hillary’s “Russia Did It!” conspiracy theory, and then “legitimize” it through a full-blown nationwide anti-Russian witch hunt stretching from the Office of the Presidency all the way down to the paupers in the inner city, he himself could have sat down in front of the American people just as he did in his two-minute psy-op video and calmly explain the actual real-life “deep state” conspiracy against Trump and the American people. He didn’t do that, so there’s no use in speculating about “coulda, shoulda, woulda”, but for the sake of cracking a smile and thinking about what might have been, it sure would have been powerful if he channeled his blockbuster script but adapted it to actual events by saying:

“My fellow Americans, during this past election, we came under attack by our own government. I’ve called on the patriotic members of Congress and our intelligence community to use every resource available to conduct a thorough investigation to determine exactly how this happened. Our citizens are demanding accountability. For 241 years our democracy has been imperfect but nevertheless something to aspire to, and we owe it to the brave people who have fought and died to protect this great nation and save democracy. And we owe it to our future generations to continue the fight.”

But then again, Hollywood by its very nature is fake and deceptive, so it might be too much to ever hope for an American movie icon to stand up and say those brave words that were imagined above, though that doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t have resonated with tens of millions of dyed-in-the-wool patriotic Americans who are sick and tired of the “deep state’s” manipulative mind games.

Morgan Freeman, David Frum, and the no-good non-profit (The Baffler)

New York Times stokes anti-Russia campaign to promote Facebook, Twitter censorship

Posted on September 18, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Bill Van Auken

Source: WSWS.org

The New York Times has mounted a concerted campaign promoting a crackdown on political expression on social media on the basis of unsubstantiated allegations of Russian government interference in the 2016 US presidential election.

In conjunction with a public statement by Facebook last Wednesday on political advertising allegedly originating in Russia, the Times published a sensationalist “investigative” report titled “The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election,” an op-ed piece indicting Facebook for failing to exercise greater censorship of political content and an editorial Saturday touching on the same themes.

Facebook briefed members of both the Senate and House intelligence committees on its findings on September 6. It said it found $50,000 in spending on 2,200 “potentially politically related” ads “that might have originated in Russia” over a two-year period beginning in June 2015. It added that this included Facebook accounts and pages “with very weak signals of a connection and not associated with any known organized effort,” including “accounts with US IP addresses but with the language set to Russian.”

The vast majority of the ads, Facebook’s chief security officer Alex Stamos added, “didn’t specifically reference the US presidential election, voting or a particular candidate,” but rather appeared to focus on amplifying “divisive social and political messages.”

The testimony was seized upon by Democratic politicians attempting to promote the theme of Russia meddling in the US elections in support of Trump. Representative Adam Schiff, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called the highly ambiguous Facebook findings “deeply disturbing and yet fully consistent with the unclassified assessment of the intelligence committee.”

The Times “investigation” was as weak in its substantiation of a Russian government operation to influence the 2016 presidential election as the Facebook report, but far more inflammatory.

It described an “unprecedented foreign intervention in American democracy” and a “cyberarmy of counterfeit Facebook and Twitter accounts, a legion of Russian-controlled impostors whose operations are still being unraveled.”

It repeated the unproven allegations that Russia was responsible for the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails exposing the party leadership’s attempts to sabotage the presidential campaign of self-described “socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders, while accusing Russian media outlets like RT and Sputnik of having “battered” Hillary Clinton with a “fire hose of stories, true, false and in between.”

The story focuses, however, on the alleged Russian use of Facebook and Twitter, darkly accusing the two companies of failing to prevent themselves from “being turned into engines of deception and propaganda.”

The “evidence” uncovered by the Times consisted of linking “suspect” Facebook accounts, since taken down by the company, that posted material linking to a website, DCLeaks.com, that published hacked emails from billionaire financier and Democratic Party donor George Soros, a former NATO commander, and Democratic as well as Republican functionaries. With no substantiation, the newspaper claims that “United States intelligence concluded” that the site was a creation of the Russian military intelligence agency GRU.

The article also accuses Russia of exploiting Twitter, using “hundreds of accounts” for “posting anti-Clinton messages and promoting leaked material.”

It further charges that the alleged Russian campaign employed “automated Twitter bots, which send out tweets according to built-in instruction.”

According to Twitter’s own estimate, there are some 48 million such bots on Twitter, and they accounted for fully 19 percent of all election-related tweets during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The Times report acknowledges that it investigated Twitter accounts identified as “Kremlin trolls” to discover that there were real people behind them with no ties to the Russian government. It quoted one of them, Marilyn Justice, 66, from Nova Scotia, who told the newspaper she believed that “Hillary’s a warmonger” and that she was hostile to the anti-Russian bias in the Western media. Another so-called “troll” turned out to be a web producer in Zurich, who expressed sharp disagreement with Western narratives on the Ukraine and Syria.

The existence of such views, the Times concluded was “a victory for Russia’s information war—that admirers of the Kremlin spread what American officials consider to be Russian disinformation on election hacking, Syria, Ukraine and more.”

The Times followed up its “investigation” with an op-ed piece accusing Facebook of having “contributed to, and profited from, the erosion of democratic norms in the United States” by having allowed the posting of “anti-Hillary ads precisely aimed at Facebook users whose demographic profiles implied a vulnerability to political propaganda.”

It went on to comment: “Unfortunately, the range of potential responses to this problem is limited. The First Amendment grants broad protections to publishers like Facebook.”

The Times editorial published Saturday questions whether “any federal agency is focused on” the alleged “problems” uncovered in the newspaper’s report: “foreign intervention through social media to feed partisan anger and suspicion in a polarized nation.”

There is a farcical element to the Times exposé. The idea that the spending of $50,000, vaguely linked to Russia, on Facebook ads over a two-year period undermined US elections in which total spending is estimated at roughly $7 billion is ludicrous.

Whatever actions may have been taken by the government of Vladimir Putin to promote the international interests of Russia’s ruling oligarchy, Moscow’s alleged Internet activities pale in comparison to the unrelenting campaigns mounted by US government agencies, from the CIA to the Pentagon and the National Endowment for Democracy, to rig foreign elections, engineer regime change operations and militarily destroy entire countries. As the former US assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland proudly acknowledged, Washington sunk some $5 billion into promoting pro-Western regime change in Ukraine.

Even more preposterous is the attempt to attribute the sharp social tensions and intense political antagonisms that are ripping apart the seams of American society to Russian propaganda. Both are the product of the crisis of American capitalism, characterized above all by the uninterrupted growth of social inequality.

There is, however, a sinister and deadly serious content to the campaign by the Times editorial board, which functions as a reliable conduit for CIA propaganda. It has joined its long-running campaign around allegations of Russian interference in the US election with the demand for a crackdown on political expression on social media.

The two are inextricably linked. Underlying the Times campaign around Moscow’s supposed assault on the “integrity of American democracy” lies the political agenda of powerful factions within the US ruling establishment, which are demanding the continuation and intensification of the drive toward regime change in, and military confrontation with, Russia.

The preparations for war abroad are inevitably accompanied by the growth of censorship and political repression at home. The Times ’ criticisms of Facebook and Twitter notwithstanding, these corporations, along with Google, are collaborating closely with the US government and its intelligence agencies in the attempt to suppress freedom of speech and thought and censor anti-capitalist and anti-war reporting and opinion.

Under the phony banner of combating “fake news,” Google announced a change in its search algorithms last April that was clearly directed at slashing the readership of anti-war and left-wing websites, with the World Socialist Web Site being hit the hardest, losing more than two-thirds of its traffic from Google search results.

Facebook has followed suit, rolling out a similar announcement in June that it was updating its own News Feed algorithm aimed at “deprioritizing” posts viewed as “problematic” promoting “low quality content” “sensationalism” and “misinformation.”

The attempts by these multi-billion-dollar corporations to arrogate to the themselves the power of gatekeepers of the Internet, censoring content that conflicts with the interests of the American ruling oligarchy and its military-intelligence apparatus has aroused broad popular hostility. The WSWS has spearheaded the opposition to these attacks, with 3,500 people from more than 80 different countries signing it petition demanding that Google cease its censorship of the Internet.

New York Times Propagates Russia Hacking Conspiracy Theory

Posted on September 14, 2017 by Reid Mukai

The New York Times reports as fact that Russia hacked the 2016 US presidential election despite failing to present any evidence to support this claim.

By Jeremy R. Hammond

Source: Foreign Policy Journal

In late 2002 and early 2003, those of us who were warning that the US government was lying, that there was no evidence that Iraq still possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), much less active WMD manufacturing programs, were frequently dismissed as “conspiracy theorists”.

Of course, in reality, it was the US mainstream media that was propagating the government’s unfounded conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein had such weapons and, further, had a cooperative relationship with Al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization held responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The New York Times served the government in its campaign of deception by spearheading the media’s dissemination of the lies out to the public, thus manufacturing Americans’ consent for this illegal war of aggression.

Spreading government propaganda is a function the Times never ceases to serve well — the lesson from its own reporting during the run-up to the Iraq war, and from the mainstream media’s reporting in general, having been dutifully disregarded.

One of the latest government conspiracy theories the Times is helping to propagate, by serving effectively as the political establishment’s very own public relations firm, is the claim that the government of Russia was responsible for hacking into computers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and email accounts of John Podesta, who was then chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

In a report published September 1, 2017, the Times elaborated on this conspiracy theory under the headline “Russian Election Hacking Efforts, Wider Than Previously Known, Draw Little Scrutiny”.

In it, the Times reports as fact that Russia was responsible not only for hacking the DNC and Podesta’s email account, but also for hacking directly into the US election system itself. All that’s old news, however, so the Times‘ new spin is that Russia’s efforts to hack state electoral systems were much more extensive than previously thought.

However, the Times presents not one shred of evidence to support the underlying claim that Russia hacked these systems, much less that this alleged hacking was much more widespread than previously reported.

To the scrutinous reader who is familiar with the propaganda techniques mainstream media use in order to manufacture consent for various government policies, the total lack of evidence is apparent. In fact, the Times actually acknowledges that there is no evidence to support the claim it is making in the headline. Yet, through obfuscation, use of deceptive language, and various other techniques, the Times leads the general reader to believe that its headline is true.

An examination of the article is useful to see just how the Times manages to lead readers to the conclusion the Russia hacking is a demonstrated fact when, in reality, it remains just another conspiracy theory originating from the government that the Times is all too happy to help propagate.

The Alleged Russian Hacking of US Electoral Systems

The first thing to note about this New York Times piece is its title. The headline makes two claims: 1) it’s a fact that Russia tried to hack the US election, and this fact has been known publicly for some time; and 2) the Times has new information showing not only that US election systems were hacked and that Russia was responsible, but also that Russia’s hacking efforts even more widespread than previously known.

The story begins with the case of Durham county, North Carolina, where, we learn, various irregularities occurred at polling stations on election day last November (bold emphasis added throughout):

Dozens were told they were ineligible to vote and were turned away at the polls, even when they displayed current registration cards. Others were sent from one polling place to another, only to be rejected. Scores of voters were incorrectly told they had cast ballots days earlier. In one precinct, voting halted for two hours.

Susan Greenhalgh, a troubleshooter at a nonpartisan election monitoring group, was alarmed. Most of the complaints came from Durham, a blue-leaning county in a swing state [North Carolina]. The problems involved electronic poll books — tablets and laptops, loaded with check-in software, that have increasingly replaced the thick binders of paper used to verify voters’ identities and registration status. She knew that the company that provided Durham’s software, VR Systems, had been penetrated by Russian hackers months before.

“It felt like tampering, or some kind of cyberattack,” Ms. Greenhalgh said about the voting troubles in Durham.

Note that the Times does not say that Ms. Greenhalgh “believed” or “had heard” that Russian hackers were responsible for earlier hacking VR Systems, but that she “knew” this was so. With this verb choice, the Times is asserting that this claim is a proven fact.

The purpose of this assertion is to establish credibility in the mind of the reader that its headline is true, that the evidence shows that Russian hacking efforts were more widespread than previously known. If it is a fact that Russia hacked US election systems, then it is not hard to believe that its hacking was more extensive than previously thought.

But what evidence does the Times present to support its assertion that this earlier Russian hacking of VR Systems occurred?

Well, to answer that question, let’s first look at how Ms. Greenhalgh “knew” that Russians had hacked VR Systems. Much further into the article, more than halfway through, the Times tells us:

As the problems mounted, The Charlotte Observer reported that Durham’s e-poll book vendor was Florida-based VR Systems, which Ms. Greenhalgh knew from a CNN report had been hacked earlier by Russians. “Chills went through my spine,” she recalled.

So there were irregularities at the Durham county polling stations, and Durham county used VR Systems for its polling system, which Ms. Greenhalgh “knew” Russians had hacked because she’d heard it on CNN.

Mid-article, however, the Times also quotes Ms. Greenhalgh acknowledging, with respect to the specific case of Durham county, “We still don’t know if Russian hackers did this.”

If we don’t know whether Russian hacking was responsible for the supposed irregularities in Durham county’s polling station, why is the Times using it as an example to support the claim made in its headline that this hacking was more extensive than previously thought? If there are cases where there is evidence, why not feature one of those, instead?

The answer is that no such evidence exists; the Times has no evidence to support that claim in its headline. In fact, it acknowledges this in several other places in the article. What the Times is trying to do is to build the case that we can safely assume that what happened in Durham county was a consequence of Russian hacking. After all, if Russia hacked VR Systems, that certainly could explain those election-day irregularities, right?

But how solid is the Times‘ premise that Russia hacked VR Systems in the first place?

The Times doesn’t attempt to support this premise solely with hearsay about something CNN reported. It exerts slightly greater effort to convince the reader. Nine paragraphs into the article, we read:

Beyond VR Systems, hackers breached at least two other providers of critical election services well ahead of the 2016 voting, said current and former intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the information is classified. The officials would not disclose the names of the companies.

Note here that the Times is once again acknowledging that it doesn’t actually have any evidence to support the claim that Russia hacked other companies in addition to VR Systems, which it is using to support the claim made in its headline that the Russian hacking was more widespread than previously thought. The Times is simply parroting government officials who’ve made this claim.

The Times‘ case crumbles even further the deeper one reads into the article. With respect to the Durham county irregularities, the Times next notes:

There are plenty of other reasons for such breakdowns — local officials blamed human error and software malfunctions — and no clear-cut evidence of digital sabotage has emerged, much less a Russian role in it. Despite the disruptions, a record number of votes were cast in Durham, following a pattern there of overwhelming support for Democratic presidential candidates, this time Hillary Clinton.

But months later, for Ms. Greenhalgh, other election security experts and some state officials, questions still linger about what happened that day in Durham as well as other counties in North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia and Arizona.

So keep in mind as we proceed that the Times is here once again acknowledging that no evidence exists to support the suspicion that the Durham county irregularities were due to Russian hacking. Yet it attempts to lead readers to that conclusion by suggesting that Russians did hack states’ electoral systems:

After a presidential campaign scarred by Russian meddling, local, state and federal agencies have conducted little of the type of digital forensic investigation required to assess the impact, if any, on voting in at least 21 states whose election systems were targeted by Russian hackers, according to interviews with nearly two dozen national security and state officials and election technology specialists.

Note that here the Times is attributing the claim that Russia hacked into states’ electoral systems to various sources. In its next paragraph, however, the Times does away with attribution and transforms this claiminto an ostensibly verified fact:

The assaults on the vast back-end election apparatus — voter-registration operations, state and local election databases, e-poll books and other equipment — have received far less attention than other aspects of the Russian interference, such as the hacking of Democratic emails and spreading of false or damaging information about Mrs. Clinton. Yet the hacking of electoral systems was more extensive than previously disclosed, The New York Times found.

Here we see that the Times is back to asserting as fact that the Russian hacking was more extensive than previously reported, even though it has admittedly not yet provided even a single piece of supporting evidence! How can it do that? Well, transparently, what is important to the Times is that its readers believe that its headline is true, not to actually demonstrate it. Whether it is actually true does not matter; it is just the belief that the Times is aiming to instill.

This is the nature of propaganda.

Turning to the premise, note that the Times is here claiming as fact that, one, US electoral systems were extensively hacked, and, two, Russia was responsible.

It continues:

Intelligence officials in January reassured Americans that there was no indication that Russian hackers had altered the vote count on Election Day, the bottom-line outcome. But the assurances stopped there.

Government officials said that they intentionally did not address the security of the back-end election systems, whose disruption could prevent voters from even casting ballots.

That’s partly because states control elections; they have fewer resources than the federal government but have long been loath to allow even cursory federal intrusions into the voting process.

That, along with legal constraints on intelligence agencies’ involvement in domestic issues, has hobbled any broad examination of Russian efforts to compromise American election systems. Those attempts include combing through voter databases, scanning for vulnerabilities or seeking to alter data, which have been identified in multiple states. Current congressional inquiries and the special counsel’s Russia investigation have not focused on the matter.

Note here how the Times is explaining that the federal government has not really focused much on investigating US election systems irregularities even while continuing to assert as fact that there were Russian efforts to compromise those systems! Further:

“We don’t know if any of the problems were an accident, or the random problems you get with computer systems, or whether it was a local hacker, or actual malfeasance by a sovereign nation-state,” said Michael Daniel, who served as the cybersecurity coordinator in the Obama White House. “If you really want to know what happened, you’d have to do a lot of forensics, a lot of research and investigation, and you may not find out even then.”

In interviews, academic and private election security experts acknowledged the challenges of such diagnostics but argued that the effort is necessary. They warned about what could come, perhaps as soon as next year’s midterm elections, if the existing mix of outdated voting equipment, haphazard election-verification procedures and array of outside vendors is not improved to build an effective defense against Russian or other hackers.

So, again, the Times is acknowledging that the kind of forensic investigation that would be required to determine whether US election systems were hacked have not actually been conducted. How, therefore, can the Times report as fact not only that such hacking occurred, but that Russia was responsible?

It gets worse. The Times at this point in the article has already acknowledged that there could be perfectly benign explanations for what happened in Durham county. As we continue reading, we learn that the those supposedly alarming irregularities the Times opened the article with were not actually all that irregular (and hence not all that alarming). To the contrary:

Still, some of the incidents reported in North Carolina occur in every election, said Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an expert on election administration.

“Election officials and advocates and reporters who were watching most closely came away saying this was an amazingly quiet election,” he said, playing down the notion of tampering.

The Times next quotes Ms. Greenhalgh’s admission that there’s no evidence hackers got into Durham county’s system (much less that Russia was responsible).

Keep in mind that the claim the government and media have been making is that Russia interfered in the US election to throw the vote to Donald Trump. Yet, in the case of Durham county, the result was that, as the Times informs, “Hillary Clinton won 78 percent of the 156,000 votes”. This is a strange outcome if we are to assume that Russia hacked the system to tamper with the election!

But the Times is not unskilled in the art of propaganda, so it has an explanation ready for us: Russia tried to hack the system there, but was just unsuccessful! It continues:

Details of the breach did not emerge until June, in a classified National Security Agency [NSA] report leaked to The Intercept, a national security news site. That report found that hackers from Russia’s military intelligence agency, the G.R.U., had penetrated the company’s computer systems as early as August 2016, then sent “spear-phishing” emails from a fake VR Systems account to 122 state and local election jurisdictions. The emails sought to trick election officials into downloading malicious software to take over their computers.

The N.S.A. analysis did not say whether the hackers had sabotaged voter data. “It is unknown,” the agency concluded, whether Russian phishing “successfully compromised the intended victims, and what potential data could have been accessed.”

VR Systems’ chief operating officer, Ben Martin, said he did not believe Russian hackers were successful. He acknowledged that the vendor was a “juicy target,” given that its systems are used in battleground states including North Carolina, Florida and Virginia. But he said that the company blocked access from its systems to local databases, and employs security protocols to bar intruders and digital triggers that sound alerts if its software is manipulated.

Take note again of the Times choice of verb: the NSA report “found” that hackers working for Russian intelligence had penetrated VR Systems’ computer systems. Through this choice of verb, the Times is communicating that it is a verified fact that Russia hacked VR Systems. But is it? To answer that, let’s turn to the Times‘ source.

The Intercept reported on this alleged hack much earlier, on June 5, 2017. Unlike the Times, however, The Intercept provided the following important caveat:

While the document provides a rare window into the NSA’s understanding of the mechanics of Russian hacking, it does not show the underlying “raw” intelligence on which the analysis is based. A U.S. intelligence officer who declined to be identified cautioned against drawing too big a conclusion from the document because a single analysis is not necessarily definitive.

To reiterate, the supposed evidence that exists proving that Russia hacked VR Systems is classified and still unknown to either the public or the media, including The Intercept and New York Times.

As The Intercept notes, the NSA report “states unequivocally in its summary statement that it was Russian military intelligence, specifically the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, that conducted the cyber attacks described in the document.”

But upon what actual evidence is that unequivocal statement based?

The Intercept, like the Times, proceeds to accept this unequivocal summary statement as fact despite its acknowledged lack of access to the evidence supposedly supporting this claim:

The NSA has now learned, however, that Russian government hackers, part of a team with a “cyber espionage mandate specifically directed at U.S. and foreign elections,” focused on parts of the system directly connected to the voter registration process, including a private sector manufacturer of devices that maintain and verify the voter rolls.

Here The Intercept is being as disingenuous with its readers as the Times. Note again the deceptive verb choice. The NSA had not actually “learned” that Russia tried to hack US electoral systems; it had rather assessed that this was so. As the manufactured “intelligence” about Iraq’s WMDs should have taught us, those are far from the same thing.

Conveniently, The Intercept provides a graphic image from the NSA report illustrating the point:

The key element of this chart to note is in the left column, where it identifies the “Operators” responsible sending Phishing emails — emails designed to trick the recipient into giving away login credentials for whatever system the hackers were trying to get into. Note that, according to the NSA, these “Operators” were “Probably within” the GRU.

“Probably”.

So, does the NSA know that the Russian government was responsible for these Phishing emails?

No.

The NSA is claiming this is so. But the supposed evidence it is basing this claim upon has not been shown to even exist.

Now, perhaps the NSA has solid reasoning to arrive at this conclusion. Perhaps it has solid, though not definitive, evidence to back this up.

But the New York Times ought to be properly informing its readers that the Russian hacking of VR Systems is an allegation. It ought to be including the caveat with this information that this is according to the government, but that it has not yet been proven. Moreover, the Times ought to be informing its readers that the evidence supposedly supporting this conclusion has not been made public, and, further, that nobody at the Times has been able to verify it even exists.

But continuing in its propaganda effort, the Times reminds us that, “In an assessment of Russian cyberattacks released in January, intelligence agencies said Kremlin spy services had been collecting information on election processes, technology and equipment in the United States since early 2014.”

But that was just another example of the government making a claim for which no evidence has actually been provided. Each of these claims simply builds upon those that preceded it. In the next manifestation, the New York Times‘ claim that Russia’s supposed hacking was even more extensive than previously known will likewise be presented as fact, and the acknowledgments about the lack of supporting evidence will be omitted, just as the Times omitted that important caveat from The Intercept.

Of course, to write and publish this kind of story requires extreme cognitive dissonance on the part of journalists and editors at the Times. This psychological phenomenon of holding two fundamentally contradictory beliefs at the same time is palpable throughout the piece. Once more, even while reporting its headlined claim as fact, the Times acknowledges that it has no evidence to support it:

Beginning in 2015, the American officials said, Russian hackers focused instead on other internet-accessible targets: computers at the Democratic National Committee, state and local voter databases, election websites, e-poll book vendors and other back-end election services.

Apart from the Russian influence campaign intended to undermine Mrs. Clinton and other Democratic officials, the impact of the quieter Russian hacking efforts at the state and county level has not been widely studied. Federal officials have been so tight-lipped that not even many election officials in the 21 states the hackers assaulted know whether their systems were compromised, in part because they have not been granted security clearances to examine the classified evidence.

Of course, nobody at the New York Times has seen that evidence, either, to be able to verify that it even exists.

The Times closes by noting that, unlike Ms. Greenhalgh, Durham county officials “have rejected any notion that an intruder sought to alter the election outcome.” Nevertheless, the county has turned over computers to the North Carolina State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement in order for the matter to be investigated.

Of course, the Times‘ purpose with this piece, rather than being to properly inform the public, is to lead readers into the belief that, regardless of whether it happened in Durham county, there were extensive efforts by the government of Russia to hack into state electoral systems.

Never mind that the Times presents not one shred of actual evidence to support either of the two claims it makes in its headline.

Conclusion

We can again recall how the media, including the New York Times, piled lie upon lie in order to manufacture consent for the US’s war of aggression against Iraq.

Here, again, the political establishment has an agenda. Donald Trump campaigned on a platform of seeking improved relations with Russia, a deescalation of tensions, and greater cooperation with Moscow. The so-called “Deep State” was upset by Hillary Clinton’s loss. In order for the national security state to retain the authoritarian powers it has assumed supposedly in order to keep Americans safe, it needs to convince Americans that they need protecting. Russia has been selected to serve as a useful “enemy” to that end.

Framing Russia as an enemy of the United States also serves the interests of the military/security complex and the goal of maintaining and expanding US hegemony across the globe. This narrative has been used, for example, to prevent Trump from deescalating in Syria and increasing cooperation with Russia there. Trump had indicated that he would shift US policy away from the Obama administration’s goal of seeking regime change in Syria and only focus on combating the so-called “Islamic State” (a.k.a., ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh). The national security state has maneuvered rather to ensure that relations between the US and Russia remain tense and that US policy remains effectively to prolong the violence.

Whatever the motives for the propaganda campaign, we can observe that this propaganda campaign is occurring. Members of the establishment media have not only failed to learn the relevant lesson from their reporting about Iraqi WMD, but refusing to do so almost seems a job prerequisite.

News consumers should not make the same mistake.

Scrutinize. Question. Think.

If we want the mainstream media to change its behavior and actually do its job of properly informing the public, then news consumers need to change their behavior. Ever news consumers knows the old adage that you can’t believe everything you read in the newspaper. Nevertheless, all too habitually, that is precisely what they do — just as the journalists and editors they are relying on for information all too habitually accept claims from government officials as fact.

It is supposed to be the job of news media to analyze information, assess the veracity of sources, question government claims, and reveal the truth. Yet the establishment media not only fail to do so, but actively serve to propagate conspiracy theories originating from the government, and thus to manufacture consent for various government policies and the private agendas of the politically and financially powerful.

In light of how the mainstream media serve this function, it is critical for the consumers to develop the analytic skills necessary to determine the truth for themselves and be able to identify state propaganda when they see it.

Hopefully, this exercise has provided some useful insights into how to do just that.

Corbyn Teaches Us to Embrace the Change We Need

Posted on June 15, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers

Source: The Unz Review

The shocking election result in the United Kingdom – the Conservatives losing their majority and the creation of a hung Parliament; and Jeremy Corbyn being more successful than any recent Labor candidate – cutting a 20 point Theresa May lead down to a near tie – gives hope to many that the global shift to the right, fueled by the failures of governments to meet the basic needs of their population and growing economic insecurity, may be ending.

Corbyn is a lifelong activist whose message and actions have been consistent. He presented a platform directed at ending austerity and the wealth divide and was openly anti-war. There are a lot of lessons for the Labor Party in the UK from this election but there are also lessons for people in the United States. We review what happened and consider the possibilities for creating transformative change in the United States.

The Corbyn Campaign Results

The Corbyn campaign showed that a political leader urging a radical progressive transformative agenda can succeed. Many in his own party, the neo-liberal pro-war Blairites, claimed Corbyn could not win, tried to remove him from leadership, and sabotaged and refused to assist his campaign.

Corbyn showed he could win the leadership of the UK in the future, maybe sooner than later. While Theresa May is in the process of forming a minority government with a small radical conservative party from Northern Ireland, there has already been a backlash, mass petitions and protests against it and UK history has shown in similar circumstances that the second place finisher, may, in the end form the government. Corbyn is taking bold and radical actions. He is preparing to present a Queen’s speech in which he will say that he and his party are “ready to serve” and will continue to push his program through Parliament. He is calling on other parties to defeat the government in Parliament.

Corbyn did better than any recent Labor leader. Jonathan Cook, a British political commentator, writes in “The Facts Proving Corbyn’s Election Triumph” that Corbyn received 41 percent of the vote against May’s 44 percent. This was a big improvement in Labor’s share of seats, the largest increase since 1945. Cook points out that Corbyn won more votes than “Ed Miliband, Gordon Brown and Neil Kinnock, who were among those that, sometimes noisily, opposed his leadership of the party.” Even Tony Blair does not look all that good compared to Corbyn, Cook recounts:

“Here are the figures for Blair’s three wins. He got a 36 per cent share of the vote in 2005 – much less than Corbyn. He received a 41 per cent of the vote – about the same as Corbyn – in 2001. And Blair’s landslide victory in 1997 was secured on 43 per cent of the vote, just two percentage points ahead of Corbyn last night.

“In short, Corbyn has proved himself the most popular Labour leader with the electorate in more than 40 years, apart from Blair’s landslide victory in 1997.”

Bhaskar Sunkara, the founding editor of Jacobin, writes that Corbyn was not only campaigning against the Tories and Theresa May, but battling his own party – yet he still “won”:

“This is the first election Labour has won seats in since 1997, and the party got its largest share of the vote since 2005 — all while closing a twenty-four point deficit. Since Corbyn assumed leadership in late 2015, he has survived attack after attack from his own party, culminating in a failed coup attempt against him. As Labour leader he was unable to rely on his parliamentary colleagues or his party staff. The small team around him was bombarded with hostile internal leaks and misinformation, and an unprecedented media smear campaign.

“Every elite interest in the United Kingdom tried to knock down Jeremy Corbyn, but still he stands.”

The Blairites were taught a lesson by Corbyn. Many of his harshest critics are now changing their tune and embracing Corbyn. Hopefully they will join in creating a party in Corbyn’s image – a party for the many, not the few. Corbyn has rebuilt the mass base of Labor. The party is now the largest in Europe with half a million members. It is time for the “leaders” of Labor to follow the lead of the people and of Jeremy Corbyn.

What can we learn regarding US politics?

Sunkara argues Corbyn demonstrated that a winning campaign strategy is “to offer hopes and dreams to people, not just fear and diminished expectations.” In current US terms that means it is insufficient just to oppose Trump, a positive vision for the future that shows what a candidate and party stand for is needed, e.g. it is not just enough to defend the failing Affordable Care Act and oppose the Republican’s American Health Care Act, you must stand for something positive: National Improved Medicare for All. This is one example of many.

Sunkara provides more detail:

“Labour’s surge confirms what the Left has long argued: people like an honest defense of public goods. Labour’s manifesto was sweeping — its most socialist in decades. It was a straightforward document, calling for nationalization of key utilities, access to education, housing, and health services for all, and measures to redistribute income from corporations and the rich to ordinary people.

“£6.3 billion into primary schools, the protection of pensions, free tuition, public housing construction — it was clear what Labour would do for British workers. The plan was attacked in the press for its old-fashioned simplicity — “for the many, not the few” — but it resonated with popular desires, with a view of fairness that seemed elementary to millions.

“The Labour left remembered that you don’t win by tacking to an imaginary center — you win by letting people know you feel their anger and giving them a constructive end to channel it towards. ‘We demand the full fruits of our labor,’ the party’s election video said it all.”

Corbyn showed how important it is to have the correct analysis on foreign policy. Twice during the campaign, the UK was hit by a terrorist attack. Corbyn responded by telling the truth: part of the reason for terrorism is the UK foreign policy, especially in Libya. He also opposed the use of nuclear weapons. The Conservatives thought these anti-war positions would hurt Corbyn, instead they helped.

This is even more true in the United States with the never ending wars the country is fighting. But, the unspeakable in the United States, as Paul Street calls it, is acknowledging that terrorism is conducted by the US. This taboo subject makes it hard for people to understand that the US is constantly committing acts of terrorism around the world, which lead to predictable blow back from US militarism, regime change and war. No elected official will tell these obvious truths, which the people of the United States would instinctively understand if they were voiced.

Although the U.S. is often portrayed as a ‘center-right’ nation and progressives are called extremists, the reality is that there is majority support for a progressive agenda. There is a developing national consensus in the United States for transformational change, and Bernie Sanders articulated some of that consensus, at least on domestic issues, in his run for president, but the problem is that U.S. elections are manipulated by the elites in power who make sure that their interests are represented by the winner

Sunkara ends his article on Corbyn saying “Also, Bernie Sanders would have won.” We do not know what would have happened in a Trump-Sanders election. The closest example may be McGovern’s 1972 campaign against Nixon which he lost in a landslide. In that campaign, the Democrats deserted their candidate, even the AFL-CIO and big unions did not support McGovern and Nixon demonized him in the media. Would Clinton-Democrats have stood with Sanders or would they have sabotaged him like the party did to McGovern?

A key to Corbyn’s success was retail politics. The population of the UK is 65 million, compared to the US population of 321 million. Retail politics can work in the UK, while in the US paid media advertising drives the campaign, which means money often determines the outcome. This gives great power to big business interests, and while it can be overcome, it is a steep hill to climb.

Despite their significant losses, the Democrats are still controlled by Clinton-Obama Wall Street and war neo-liberals as we saw in the recent DNC chair election where Clinton protégé, Tom Perez, was elected. We are not optimistic that the US can apply the Corbyn model within the Democratic Party because it has been a party representing the oligarchs from its origins as the party of plantation slave-owners.

The duopoly parties that represent Wall Street, war and empire will not allow voices that represent “the many, not the few” to participate in US elections. They shut them out whether they run as an insurgent inside a party, as people learned from the mistreatment of Bernie Sanders by the DNC, or if they run outside of the two parties. The bi-partisans make independent party runs nearly impossible with unfair ballot access laws, barriers to voter registration, secret vote counting on unverifiable election machines, exclusion from the debates and exclusion by the corporate media, who are in cahoots with the bi-partisans.

It Comes Down to Building An Independent Mass Political Movement

We live in a mirage democracy with managed elections, as we describe in the article “Fighting for A Legitimate Democracy By and For the People,” on the long history of wealth dominating politics in the U.S.

Historically, transformations have occurred because of mass social movements demanding change and participating in elections through independent parties that have grown out of a movement with candidates from the movement (Corbyn has been involved in every anti-war movement, anti-apartheid, anti-austerity, pro-peace and human rights movements among others). Showing mass electoral support, even without winning, has resulted in significant changes – union rights, women’s voting rights, the eight-hour workday – indeed the New Deal came out of third party platforms. It is important to resist the duopoly parties in order to get to the root of the problems we face; as Patrick Walker explains, the “grassroots resistance must oppose Democrats as well as Trump.”

A broad and diverse social movement whose demands are articulated by an independent party platform has forced one of the two parties to capitulate to the movement or disappear. That still seems to be the most likely path to real change for the US.

Corbyn teaches that we should embrace the radical transformational change that is needed, whether in elections or as a movement, to inspire people to take action and shift the realm of the possible. The people thirst for change as their economic situation becomes more insecure. There needs to be a movement that addresses that insecurity through a human rights lens, or else the insecurity will be channeled towards hatred and violence.

The key first step is to show the many, we are with them; that we are listening and acting consistent with their beliefs. Taking this correct first step, lights the path ahead of us.

Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers co-direct Popular Resistance.

Related Article: The Breaking of the Corporate Media Monopoly

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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

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Corbyn Teaches Us to Embrace the Change We Need