From Russia, with Panic

Posted on April 3, 2017 by Reid Mukai

Cozy bears, unsourced hacks—and a Silicon Valley shakedown

By Yasha Levine

The Russians hacked America.

After Donald Trump’s surprise victory in November, these four words reverberated across the nation. Democratic Party insiders, liberal pundits, economists, members of Congress, spies, Hollywood celebrities, and neocons of every stripe and classification level—all these worthy souls reeled in horror at the horribly compromised new American electoral order. In unison, the centers of responsible opinion concurred that Vladimir Putin carried off a brazen and successful plan to throw the most important election in the most powerful democracy in the world to a candidate of his choosing.

It seemed like a plotline from a vintage James Bond film. From his Moscow lair, Vladimir Putin struck up an alliance with Julian Assange to mount a massive cyber-offensive to discredit Hillary Clinton and her retinue of loyal Democratic Party operatives in the eyes of the American public.

The plot was full of twists and turns and hair-raising tangents, including tales of Russian-American retiree-agents sunning in Miami while collecting payoffs from Russia’s impoverished pension system. But the central ruse, it appears, was to enter the email server of the Democratic National Committee and then tap into the Gmail account belonging to John Podesta, founder of the Center for American Progress and premier D.C. Democratic insider.

As the long 2016 general election campaign unwound, WikiLeaks released a steady stream of embarrassing revelations from the DNC—though the disclosures were no more compromising than what you’d find in the correspondence of any mid-sized private-sector company: dumb boardroom gossip, petty press intrigues, and sleazy attempts to undermine a well-placed executive rival (namely Bernie Sanders). Truly, it would have been astonishing to learn that the DNC went about its business in any other way. But the sheer fact of the data breach was dispositive in the eyes of Democratic operatives and their many defenders in the liberal press. After all, WikiLeaks also reportedly collected data from the Republican National Committee, and did nothing with it. Clearly this was cyber-espionage of the most sophisticated variety.

On the Trump side of the ledger, things were murkier. Trump’s political advisers indeed had ties to Russia and Ukraine—but this was hardly surprising given the authoritarian-friendly lobbying climate within Washington. During the campaign the GOP nominee was disinclined to say anything critical about Putin. Indeed, breaking with decades of Republican tradition, Trump openly praised the Russian leader as a powerful, charismatic figure who got things done. But since the candidate also refused to disclose his tax returns, a commercial alliance with the Russian autocrat was necessarily a matter of conjecture. That didn’t stop theories from running wild, culminating in January with the titillating report from BuzzFeed that U.S. intelligence agencies believed that Putin had compromising footage of Trump cavorting with prostitutes at a Moscow hotel previously patronized by Barack and Michelle Obama. Not only was the Yank stooge defiling the very room where the first couple had stayed, but he allegedly had his rented amorous companions urinate in the bed. Behold, virtuous American republic, the degradation Vladimir Putin has in store for you!

Taking the Piss

The dossier published by BuzzFeed had been circulating for a while; on closer inspection, it appeared to be repurposed opposition research from the doomed Jeb Bush campaign. Its author was a former British intelligence operative apparently overeager to market salacious speculation. By the end of this latest lurid installment of the Russian hacking saga, no one knew anything more than they had when the heavy-breathing allegations first began to make their way through the political press. Nevertheless, the Obama White House had expelled Russian diplomats and expanded sanctions against Putin’s regime, while the FBI continued to investigate reported contacts between Trump campaign officials and Russian intelligence operatives during the campaign.

This latter development doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. As allegations of Russian responsibility for the DNC hack flew fast and furious, we learned that the FBI never actually carried out an independent investigation of the claims. Instead, agency officials carelessly signed off on the findings of CrowdStrike, a private cybersecurity firm retained by the Democratic National Committee. Far from establishing an airtight case for Russian espionage, CrowdStrike made a point of telling its DNC clients what it already knew they wanted to hear: after a cursory probe, it pronounced the Russians the culprits. Mainstream press outlets, primed for any faint whiff of great-power scandal and poorly versed in online threat detection, likewise treated the CrowdStrike report as all but incontrovertible.

Other intelligence players haven’t fared much better. The Director of National Intelligence produced a risible account of an alleged Russian disinformation campaign to disrupt the 2016 presidential process, which hinged on such revelations as the state-sponsored TV news outlet Russia Today airing uncomplimentary reports on the Clinton campaign and reporting critically on the controversial U.S. oil-industry practice of fracking as a diabolical plot to expand the market for Russian natural gas exports. In a frustratingly vague statement to Congress on the report, then-DNI director James Clapper hinted at deeper and more definitive findings that proved serious and rampant Russian interference in America’s presidential balloting—but insisted that all this underlying proof must remain classified. For observers of the D.C. intelligence scene, Clapper’s performance harkened back to his role in touting definitive proof of the imminent threat of Saddam Hussein’s WMD arsenal in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

It’s been easy, amid the accusations and counteraccusations, to lose sight of the underlying seriousness of the charges. If the hacking claims are true, we are looking at a truly dangerous crisis that puts America’s democratic system at risk.

The gravity of the allegation calls for a calm, measured, meticulously documented inquiry—pretty much the opposite of what we’ve seen so far. The level of wild assertion has gotten to the point that some of the most respected pro-Western voices in Russia’s opposition have expressed alarm. As much as they despise Putin, they don’t buy the bungled investigations. “In the real world outside of soap operas and spy novels . . . any conclusions concerning the hackers’ identity, motives and goals need to be based on solid, demonstrable evidence,” wrote Leonid Bershidsky. “At this point, it’s inadequate. This is particularly unfortunate given that the DNC hacks were among the defining events of the raging propaganda wars of 2016.”

The lack of credible evidence, the opaque nature of cyber attacks, the partisan squabbles and smears, and the national-security fearmongering have all made this particular scandal very difficult to navigate. It may be years before we find out what really happened. Meanwhile, I’d like to tell a cautionary tale. It’s a story about the last time American and European cyber experts accused Russia of launching an attack against another country—and nearly provoked a war with a nuclear power. The moral of the tale is that cyberwarfare is a fraught and high-stakes theater of conflict, in which the uncertain nature of cyber-attack attribution can be exploited to support any politicized version of events that one chooses.

All Georgians Now

On August 8, 2008, war broke out between Georgia and Russia. Backed up by heavy artillery, truck-mounted Grad rockets, and tanks, Georgia launched a surprise invasion of South Ossetia, a tiny mountainous breakaway republic on its northern flank that had been at the center of a long-simmering regional territorial dispute. A prolonged artillery barrage reduced parts of Tskhinvali, South Ossetia’s capital, to rubble. Civilians were given no warning—those not killed in the initial assault hid in basements or fled on foot. A Russian peacekeeping force, which had been stationed in South Ossetia under an Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe agreement since 1992, was targeted in the attack. By the end of the first day, Georgian troops were on the verge of taking the whole city.

Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s charismatic nationalist president, had campaigned on a nationalistic platform, promising to reabsorb the country’s breakaway regions. His initial success did not last long. Russian jets pounded Georgian military command posts and communications, while Russian troops streamed into South Ossetia. By the end of day two, the tide had turned: Georgian forces began retreating. By day five, Russian forces had control over South Ossetia and huge swaths of northern Georgia. Tanks and infantry entered several northern towns and moved around unimpeded just an hour away from Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, where euphoria and jubilation turned to sickly fear. News footage showed Saakashvili cowering as Russian jets flew overhead. He appeared on television nervously chewing his tie, prompting the BBC to ask wryly: “The Georgian president chews over his next move. Is he weaker or stronger than before?”

Weaker, definitely. But in the war’s aftermath, Russia and Georgia were each determined to claim victim status. Russia pointed out that Georgia had started the war; Georgia blamed Russia for launching a full-scale invasion. President Saakashvili appealed to the United States, hoping it would intervene militarily on Georgia’s behalf.

The Bush White House was firmly aligned with Georgia. For years, Georgia had been an important neocon project in a grander scheme to peel away former Soviet Republics from Moscow’s influence. American NGOs and soft-power outfits like USAID backed Saakashvili’s rise to power during the country’s “Rose Revolution.” Since 2004, the Bush administration had lavished military aid on Saakashvili’s government, outfitted its army, and trained its soldiers. John McCain and Hillary Clinton jointly nominated Saakashvili for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. Support for Georgia was bipartisan and continued right up to Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia; more than a thousand American troops held a joint exercise with Georgia near the South Ossetian border in July.

As a complement to the Georgia PR offensive, the Bush White House continued to hammer away at its stable of anti-Putin talking points. For years, the United States had portrayed Vladimir Putin as a strongman leader bent on world domination. The invasion of Georgia seemed to confirm the official narrative: Russia would stop at nothing to crush the democratic aspirations of its neighbors.

It was a dangerous moment. Vice president Dick Cheney pushed for directly engaging the Russians in “limited military options”—including aerial bombardment to seal the Roki Tunnel linking North Ossetia and South Ossetia that was being used to transport reinforcements. Luckily, president George W. Bush, who had a street in Tbilisi named after him, wavered, sensibly fearing a real war with Russia.

The episode occurred during a U.S. presidential election. Senator John McCain used the conflict to showcase his hawkish foreign policy bona fides, arguing that America needed to intervene to protect Georgia’s budding democratic society from the authoritarian Putin. Claiming that “today, we are all Georgians,” McCain called for NATO forces to be deployed against Russia, which would have triggered a war with a nuclear power.

I was in Moscow at the time, reporting on the war. Those who had covered the region understood that Georgia was no innocent. The ethnic conflict between Ossetians and Georgians has old, festering roots—indeed, Georgia’s invasion of South Ossetia was centuries in the making. The Ossetians consider the territory of South Ossetia to be native lands they have occupied for centuries, while Georgians view Ossetians as relatively recent interlopers. When South Ossetia declared its independence after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Georgia’s ultra-nationalistic first president attempted to quash the independence movement by force. After a short war, South Ossetia stood its ground—and Georgia and South Ossetia squared off in an uneasy peace administered by Russian, Georgian, and South Ossetian peacekeepers. Two-thirds of the breakaway republic were ethnic Ossetians. They feared Georgia and favored Russia as a military bulwark. Russia handed out Russian passports to South Ossetians and provided military protection, making the territory a de facto member of the Russian Federation.

Seasoned observers of the region’s tangled geopolitics understood that Russia shared amply in the blame but that the fault lay primarily with President Saakashvili. When he came to power, he took on the mantle of a medieval Georgian king who had unified the country. “Today Georgia is split and humiliated. We should unite to restore Georgia’s territorial integrity. Georgia has existed and will exist. Georgia will become a united strong country,” he declared in 2004. With deteriorating political support at home, Saakashvili was itching for a popular war. Skirmishes increased along Georgia’s border with Abkhazia and South Ossetia; finally, Georgia fired the first shot.

Suddenly, America found itself at the edge of a precipice: a war over a complex sectarian conflict in a remote part of the world. American policymakers wanted a simple explanation, and conveniently, they were offered one: cyber-aggression.

The Sites Go Out in Georgia

When war broke out, a slew of Georgian websites came under attack. The Central Bank of Georgia was hacked, according to Russian reports. Its internal networks were not penetrated, but the hackers tinkered with the homepage to give the Georgian unit of currency, the lari, a less than favorable exchange rate, forcing the government to issue an order that suspended all electronic banking services. Georgia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was hacked, its homepage replaced with a slideshow depicting Mikhail Saakashvili as Hitler. “And he will suffer the same fate,” read an ominous message beside it.

A Russian-language forum called “Stop Georgia” suddenly came online, hosted in, of all places, the United States. Against a green camouflage-inspired background, its creators decried Georgia’s propaganda war against Russia. “We, as representatives of the Russian hacker-underground, will not tolerate provocations from Georgia.” The forum was crude and looked like it had been put together in a few hours. Its primary function was to distribute a simple, easily available program permitting anyone with a computer and an internet connection to become part of a denial-of-service attack swarm. The forum conveniently provided a list of Georgian target websites and helped organize and direct the cyber-mob action.

Georgian officials proclaimed these cyber attacks a strategic maneuver by the Russian military designed to take out the country’s communication system, facilitating the Russians’ armed invasion. The coordinated nature of the attacks, they insisted, showed that Russia had planned the invasion long in advance. “The opening shots of the Russian invasion of Georgia were fired over the Internet, proving Russian online aggression predated Georgian actions,” declared an official report by the Georgian government. The government called the people behind the attack “cyber terrorists.”

Cybersecurity experts came out of the woodwork to confirm and expand on Georgia’s allegations. Some implicated a shadowy cybercrime group from St. Petersburg that analysts had dubbed the “Russian Business Network” and linked it to the FSB, Russia’s secret police. Others claimed that Nashi, a Kremlin-backed young nationalist group, was involved. American military officials weighed in, agreeing that Russia had used cyber attacks to confuse and disorient the Georgian government. “The Russians just shot down the government command nets so they could cover their incursion,” Michael Wynne, former U.S. Air Force Secretary, told the AP on August 13.

One hack in particular became a sort of poster action for the sinister Russian cyber-offensive and conveniently doubled as a warning signal for greater Russian-authored threats ahead. In July, just after secretary of state Condoleezza Rice had visited Georgia and reaffirmed America’s support for the country’s desire to exit Russia’s sphere of influence, President Saakashvili’s site had been taken down by a stream of junk requests with a string of text that read: “win+love+in+Rusia.”

What did it all mean? The war had barely ended, but John Markoff, longtime technology reporter for the New York Times, offered an answer: “As it turns out, the July attack may have been a dress rehearsal for an all-out cyberwar once the shooting started between Georgia and Russia. According to Internet technical experts, it was the first time a known cyber attack had coincided with a shooting war.” Other journalists chimed in as well: the Wall Street Journal, CNN, the Washington Post. The consensus, according to cyber experts, was that Russia was indeed behind the attacks—and the rhetoric was getting more and more belligerent.

And so, within the space of a news cycle or two, internet analysts turned into warmongers and cyber-hawks, comparing rudimentary internet attacks to atomic weapons. “These attacks in effect had the same effect that a military attack would have. That suddenly means that in cyberspace anyone can build an A-bomb,” Rafal Rohozinski, a respected cyber analyst with Citizen Lab, told the Washington Post. The Financial Times concurred: “The crisis in Georgia has not only stoked fears of a belligerent Russia. It has also served as a reminder that a new style of warfare—potentially as devastating as those that terrified previous generations—is almost upon us: cyberwar.”

That’s right: defacing a government website with a repetitive string of crude slogans was now the twenty-first-century equivalent of a nuclear first strike. The hysteria sloshed around and spilled over into fears that America was defenseless against similar attacks from Russia. “It’s a grave concern be the same thing could happen here in America,” CNN host John Roberts exclaimed.

Point, Click, Panic

I began investigating the cyberwar as soon as it erupted. I knew something about the way computers, websites, and the internet worked, having spent two years studying computer science at UC Berkeley, and I had serious doubts about the cyber dimension of the Russia-Georgia War. The hacks and attacks all seemed rather crude and for the most part targeted non-critical cyber portals: ceremonial government websites, several news sites, the public-facing website of a central bank. This was hardly the ruinous infrastructure offensive that cybersecurity experts were warning people about. As I got deeper into the story—interrogating my contacts in Moscow, traveling to Georgia, interviewing hackers, politicians, and cyber experts in Europe, Russia, and the United States—the cyberwar battle cries sounded more and more like ideologically manufactured hysteria.

To be sure, the assaults were troubling. Hacks against Georgian websites took place, they were in some way connected to the war, and Russia’s cyber criminal world had ties to the country’s security establishment. But it was an enormous—and dangerous—leap to interpret these attacks as a pre-planned Russian intelligence operation, possibly justifying an American military response. What’s more, it seemed clear that most of the people doing the investigating were working backward. They started from the premise that Russia started the war and then proceeded to show that the cyber attacks were an element of this premeditated invasion.

Living in Moscow, I saw a striking split-screen effect taking hold around the Georgia crisis. America was freaking out about the danger of Russian cyber attacks, while people I talked to in Russia mocked the hysteria. Looking at my reporting notes from that time, I can’t find a single Russian source who took it seriously. Nikita Kislitsin, former editor of Russia’s Hacker magazine, laughed at Western cybersecurity experts who suggested that the Georgian attacks were the entering wedge of a sophisticated plan for complete Russian takeover, explaining that hackers can have all sorts of unconventional motives for taking part in a political web war. One regular contributor to his magazine’s how-to break-in section, for example, had hacked into a few Georgian sites just so he had something to write—and brag—about. Kris Kaspersky, a well-known Russian hacker and security expert, also ridiculed the notion that the Georgia hacks were hatched as part of a military intelligence campaign. “A prepubescent kid could have carried out the attacks,” Kaspersky told me. “A well-funded organization like the FSB can pull off much more effective Web site attacks.” Bringing down a few rinky-dink government and newspaper websites is a far cry from network warfare, Kaspersky argued. Indeed, it was at least as plausible that the hacks could have been self-inflicted: “In these kinds of conflicts, you have to look at who benefits,” he said. “If I was Georgia, I would attack myself.”

The Fog of the Data Log

There was a second, underreported side to the conflict: the cyber attacks went in both directions.

Even before the war broke out in August, South Ossetian websites came under attack. A few days before the shelling of South Ossetia began, someone skillfully broke into the website of the Republic’s television station, replacing news items on the number of Georgian troops killed in a shootout with South Ossetian troops with ones that claimed Russian mercenary fighters were among the casualties. As Georgian tanks rolled across the border, other South Ossetian news sites—some of which were hosted in Moscow—came under cyber attack. The website of South Ossetia’s Ministry of Information, a clearinghouse for South Ossetian news, buckled under a denial-of-service attack. At the same time, Russian news sites—including the Kremlin-funded Russia Today—were hit and suffered downtime during the war.

If you squinted at the conflict and looked at it from Russia’s and South Ossetia’s perspective, you could use the cyber attacks to prove the opposite of what Georgia and Western cyber experts were claiming: the cyber attacks proved that Georgia had planned its military invasion. And that was exactly what the South Ossetians were telling me. “They hoped that a media blackout of the atrocities they were committing against a civilian population would reduce resistance to the invasion, both locally and globally,” Yuri Beteyev, the founder and editor in chief of OsInform, South Ossetia’s only news agency, told me. He had been in Tskhinvali when Georgia’s heavy artillery rolled into town.

I traveled to Tbilisi, looking for evidence of the alleged Russian attack. I had scheduled interviews with newspapers, government agencies, and internet service providers. They all made grand claims about Russian cyber attacks, all of them short on specific evidence. Caucasus Online, one of Georgia’s largest ISPs, claimed the attacks started the day before the military action—which served in the company’s view as undeniable proof that the Russian government was coordinating them. But ISP officials could not provide any supporting data, and when I requested a sample of their logs from that day, company spokesmen claimed the data had been deleted.

I was shown a former Soviet government compound in the center of Tbilisi. The building was a modernist fortress: a slab of granite and concrete perched at the top of a steep hill. The seventh floor housed Georgia’s National Security Council, the coordinating body for the country’s military and intelligence agencies. In this ultrasecure location, Georgian officials spun a series of talking points about how the cyberwar proved Russian aggression. “For a small country like ours, information is the most powerful tool with which you can protect yourself. The Russians knew this,” Security Council director Alexander Lomaia told me. “One day, we find out that we are cut off from the world. All major websites—including government and media—were attacked. Their aim was to limit our ability to electronically communicate, and they succeeded.”

But Georgia is a poor, largely rural country with low internet connectivity outside the capital. Its level of cyber-activity ranked below that of countries like Nigeria, Bangladesh, Bolivia, and El Salvador. You could hardly launch a real cyber attack if you wanted too, since few Georgians outside Tbilisi used the internet at all, let alone for anything important. It was all hype and bluster—and very superficial.

Indeed, as in Moscow, critical journalists and techies in Georgia dismissed much of the hype. Yes, there were cyber attacks. Yes, they could have been directed by the Russian government. But they were so amateur and inconsequential that they had little effect. Their biggest contribution, in fact, was to bolster Georgian counter-propaganda claims, as each little hack was taken up by the Georgian government and broadcast as proof of Russian aggression. One journalist told me his colleagues had cheered news of Georgia-based cyber attacks against Russia. “A wave of jubilation spread through the forum when they managed to take down Russia Today for a few hours.” Patriotic hackers doing their part to fight Russia? This is exactly what cyber experts accused Russian security services of orchestrating against Georgia as part of the military invasion.

Following the Money

By the time I left Georgia in October, the cyberwar story was no longer obsessing political leaders and media producers in the West. Congress had voted to bail out Wall Street. The Georgia-Russia War dropped out of America’s collective memory almost as quickly as it had appeared, eclipsed by a scarier and much more direct threat to America: the meltdown of our financial system and the threat of a new Great Depression.

A year later, a European Union commission issued a detailed report that showed just how empty all the talk about cyber attacks and premeditated Russian war really was. The report put the blame for starting the war squarely on Georgia. But by then the Georgia-Russia War was ancient news. No one cared, and the report barely got a mention in the press. But Silicon Valley noticed.

While the financial industry was teetering on the brink of oblivion, another industry was being born: the cybersecurity complex. By now it is a multibillion-dollar boondoggle, employing shoddy forensic techniques and politicized investigations. But it is highly profitable. The boom has been driven by the grim leaky reality of our digital world. Not a month goes by without some huge corporation or government agency getting hacked, its data splattered across the internet or siphoned off for the exclusive use of scammers, corporate spies, and intelligence agencies.

Cybersecurity firms have stepped up to the challenge. They’ve attracted funding from the biggest and most powerful venture capital houses: Sequoia, Google Capital, and the like. Not surprisingly, the CIA’s in-house VC outfit, In-Q-Tel, has been a leading investor in this space. All these firms position themselves as objective forensic investigators, patiently sifting through the evidence to find the guilty party and then figuring out how to defend against it. They have been involved with diagnosing and attributing big hacks for shamefaced clients like Target, J.P. Morgan, and Sony Pictures. Investors and intelligence agencies sing the praises of the critical services these outfits offer in an online environment teeming with hostile threats.

But in private conversations, as well as little-noticed public discussions, security professionals take a dimmer view of the cybersecurity complex. And the more I’ve looked at the hysteria surrounding Russia’s supposed hacking of our elections, the more I’ve come to see it as a case study of everything wrong and dangerous about the cyber-attribution business.

Fancy Bears, Cozy Bears—Oh My!

Take CrowdStrike, the hottest cybersecurity firm operating today. Based in Irvine, California, CrowdStrike was launched in 2012 by two veterans of the cyber-attribution business: George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch. Both previously worked for McAfee, an antivirus-turned-massive-cybersecurity firm now partially owned by Intel. But Kurtz and Alperovitch saw a market opportunity for a new boutique type of cyber-defense outfit and decided to strike out on their own. They also brought on board Shawn Henry, a top FBI official who had been in charge of running the agency’s worldwide cyber investigations.

CrowdStrike positioned itself as a next-generation full-service cybersecurity firm. Company officials argued that cybersecurity was no longer just about defense—there was too much data and too many ways of getting at it to protect everything all the time. You had to know your attacker. “Knowing their capabilities, objectives, and the way they go about executing on them is the missing piece of the puzzle in today’s defensive security technologies,” wrote CrowdStrike cofounder George Kurtz. “By identifying the adversary . . . we can hit them where it counts.”

CrowdStrike hit the big time in 2015 with a $100 million infusion from Google Capital (now Capital G), Google’s first-ever investment in a cybersecurity company. It was good timing, because CrowdStrike was about to be catapulted into the front ranks of cyber-threat assessors. Sometime in April or May, CrowdStrike got a call from the Democratic National Committee to investigate a possible intrusion into their servers. The company’s investigators worked with surprising efficiency. As one DNC insider explained to the New York Times, the company was able to make a definite attribution within a day. There was no doubt, CrowdStrike told its DNC clients—the Russian government did it.

The results of CrowdStrike’s investigation were first broken by the Washington Post and then followed up in greater detail by CrowdStrike itself. In a post entitled “Bears in the Midst,” Dmitri Alperovitch attributed the hack to two distinct and very nefarious “Russian espionage” groups: Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, among the most sophisticated cyber-operators CrowdStrike had ever come across. “In fact, our team considers them some of the best adversaries out of all the numerous nation-state, criminal and hacktivist/terrorist groups we encounter on a daily basis,” he wrote. “Their tradecraft is superb, operational security second to none and the extensive usage of ‘living-off-the-land’ techniques enables them to easily bypass many security solutions they encounter.”

These cyberspooks were allegedly behind a string of recent attacks on American corporations and think tanks, as well as recent penetrations of the unclassified networks of the State Department, the White House, and the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to CrowdStrike, Cozy Bear was most likely the FSB, while Fancy Bear was linked to the “GRU, Russia’s premier military intelligence service.”

Here, the cyber experts were telling us, was conclusive evidence that both the FSB and the GRU targeted the central apparatus of the Democratic Party. CrowdStrike’s findings didn’t just cause a sensation; they carpet-bombed the news cycle. Reports that Vladimir Putin had tried to hack America’s democratic process raced around the world, making newspaper front pages and setting off nonstop cable news chatter.

The story got even hotter after a hacker who called himself Guccifer 2.0 suddenly appeared. He took credit for the DNC hack, called CrowdStrike’s investigation a fraud, and began leaking select documents pilfered from the DNC—including a spreadsheet containing names and addresses of the DNC’s biggest donors. The story finally started going nuclear when WikiLeaks somehow got hold of the entire DNC email archive and began dribbling the data out to the public.

A Terrible System

CrowdStrike stuck to its guns, and other cybersecurity firms and experts likewise clamored to confirm its findings: Russia was behind the attack. Most journalists took these security savants at their word, not bothering to investigate or vet their forensic methods or look at the way CrowdStrike arrived at its conclusions. And how could they? They were the experts. If you couldn’t trust CrowdStrike and company, who could you trust?

Unfortunately, there were big problems with CrowdStrike’s account. For one thing, the names of the two Russian espionage groups that CrowdStrike supposedly caught, Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, were a fiction. Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear are what cyber monitors call “Advanced Persistent Threats,” or APTs. When investigators analyze an intrusion, they look at the tools and methods that the hackers used to get inside: source code, language settings, compiler times, time zones, IP settings, and so on. They then compare all these things against a database of previously recorded hacks that is shared among cyber professionals. If the attack fits an old profile, they assign it to an existing APT. If they find something new, they create a group and give it an official name (say, APT911) and then a cooler moniker they can throw around in their reports (say, TrumpDump).

CrowdStrike followed the protocols for existing APTs. Its investigation of DNC servers turned up two known threat actor groups: APT28 and APT29. Depending on the cybersecurity firm doing the analysis, these two APTs have been called by all sorts of names: Pawn Storm, Sofacy, Sednit, CozyCar, The Dukes, CozyDuke, Office Monkeys. Neither of them has ever been linked by any cybersecurity firm to the Russian government with certainty. Some firms have tried—most notably FireEye, CrowdStrike’s bigger and wealthier competitor. But FireEye’s evidence was ridiculously thin and inferential—in nearly any other industry, it would have been an embarrassment. Consider, for example, FireEye’s report on APT29:

We suspect the Russian government sponsors the group because of the organizations it targets and the data it steals. Additionally, APT29 appeared to cease operations on Russian holidays, and their work hours seem to align with the UTC +3 time zone, which contains cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Or consider FireEye’s report on APT28—which, among other things, attributes this attack group to a Russian intelligence unit active in Russia’s “invasion of Georgia,” an invasion that we know never took place.

They compile malware samples with Russian language settings during working hours consistent with the time zone of Russia’s major cities, including Moscow and St. Petersburg.While we don’t have pictures of a building, personas to reveal, or a government agency to name, what we do have is evidence of long-standing, focused operations that indicate a government sponsor—specifically, a government based in Moscow.

So, FireEye knows that these two APTs are run by the Russian government because a few language settings are in Russian and because of the telltale timestamps on the hackers’ activity? First off, what kind of hacker—especially a sophisticated Russian spy hacker—keeps to standard 9-to-5 working hours and observes official state holidays? Second, just what other locations are in Moscow’s time zone and full of Russians? Let’s see: Israel, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Moldova, Romania, Lithuania, Ukraine. If non-Russian-speaking countries are included (after all, language settings could easily be switched as a decoy tactic), that list grows longer still: Greece, Finland, Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Yemen, Ethiopia, Kenya—the countries go on and on.

The flimsiness of this evidence didn’t stop CrowdStrike. Its analysts matched some of the tools and methods used in the DNC hack to APT28 and APT29, slapped a couple of Russian-sounding names with “bear” in them on their report, and claimed that the FSB and GRU did it. And most journalists covering this beat ate it all up without gagging.

“You don’t know there is anybody there. It’s not like it’s a club and everyone has a membership card that says Fancy Bear on it. It’s just a made-up name for a group of attacks and techniques and technical indicators associated with these attacks,” author and cybersecurity expert Jeffrey Carr told me. “There is rarely if ever any confirmation that these groups even exist or that the claim was proven as correct.”

Carr has been in the industry a long time. During the Russia-Georgia war, he led an open-source intelligence effort—backed by Palantir—in an attempt to attribute and understand the actors behind the cyberwar. I read his reports on the conflict back then and, even though I disagreed with some of his conclusions, I found his analysis nuanced and informative. His findings at the time tracked with those of the general cybersecurity industry and bent toward implicating the Russian government in the cyber attacks on Georgia. But these days Carr has broken with the cyberworld consensus:

Any time a cyber attack occurs nowadays you have cybersecurity companies looking back and seeing a historical record and seeing assignments on responsibility and attribution and they just keep plowing ahead. Whether they are right or wrong, nobody knows, and probably will never know. That’s how it works. It’s a terrible system.

This is forensic science in reverse: first you decide on the guilty party, then you find the evidence that confirms your belief.

Not for Attribution

Over time, bad evidence was piled on top of unsubstantiated claims and giant inductive leaps of logic to the point that, if you tried to figure out what was actually happening, you’d lose all sense of direction.

Matt Tait, a former GCHQ analyst and founder of Capital Alpha Security who blogs under the influential Twitter handle @pwnallthethings, found a Word document pilfered from the DNC and leaked by Guccifer 2.0. As he examined its data signatures, he discovered that it had been edited by Felix Edmundovich—a.k.a. Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka. To him, it was proof that Guccifer 2.0 was part of the same Russian intelligence operation. He really believed that the super sophisticated spy group trying to hide its Russian ties would register its Microsoft Word processor in the name of the leader of the infamously brutal Soviet security service.

Meanwhile, Thomas Rid, a cyber expert based in London, drew a straight line from the DNC hacks to the attempted hacking of the Germans and TV5 to attacks on Georgia and Baltic States—even though on closer inspection none of those efforts had been linked to the Russian government.

John Podesta’s Gmail account was hacked with a rudimentary spear-phishing attack that tricked him into entering his password with a fake Google login page. His emails ended up on WikiLeaks, too. All sorts of people linked this to Russian military intelligence, with no concrete evidence to speak of.

Sensing its moment had arrived, CrowdStrike went into frenetic PR mode. The company released a series of cyber-attribution reports illustrated with sexy communist robots wearing fur hats, using visual marketing techniques in lieu of solid evidence.

After Donald Trump won the presidency, all these outlandish claims were accepted as unassailable truth. The “hacking” of the 2016 presidential election was the ultimate damning conclusion that cybersecurity experts were now working backward from. Just as Georgia’s compromised net infrastructure provided conclusive proof of Russia’s concerted plan to invade Georgia, Trump’s improbably successful presidential run demonstrated that Russian subterfuge, rather than the collapse of American political institutions, had elected a dangerous outsider president.

Watching this new round of cyber-attribution hysteria, I got a queasy feeling. Even Dmitri Alperovitch’s name sounded familiar. I looked through my notes and remembered why: he was one of the minor online voices supporting the idea that the cyber attacks against Georgia were some kind of Russian plot. Back then, he was in charge of intelligence analysis at Secure Computing Corporation, a cybersecurity company that also made censorship tools used by countries like Saudi Arabia. He was now not only running his own big shop, but also playing a central role in a dangerous geopolitical game.

In other words, the election-hacking panic was a stateside extension of the battle first joined on the ISP frontiers of the Georgia-Russia war. Impressionable journalists and Democratic party hacks who ignore this background do so at their peril—and ours.

The Deep State’s Dominant Narratives and Authority Are Crumbling

Posted on March 27, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

This is why the Deep State is fracturing: its narratives no longer align with the evidence.

As this chart from Google Trends illustrates, interest in the Deep State has increased dramatically in 2017. The term/topic has clearly moved from the specialist realm to the mainstream. I’ve been writing about the Deep State, and specifically, the fractures in the Deep State, for years.

Amusingly, now that “Progressives” have prostituted themselves to the Security Agencies and the Neocons/Neoliberals, they are busy denying the Deep State exists. For example, There is No Deep State (The New Yorker).

In this risible view, there is no Deep State “conspiracy” (the media’s favorite term of dismissal/ridicule), just a bunch of “good German” bureaucrats industriously doing the Empire’s essential work of undermining democracies that happen not to prostrate themselves at the feet of the Empire, murdering various civilians via drone strikes, surveilling the U.S. populace, planting bugs in new iPhones, issuing fake news while denouncing anything that questions the dominant narratives as “fake news,” arranging sweetheart deals with dictators and corporations, and so on.

The New Yorker is right about one thing–the Deep State is not a “conspiracy:” it is a vast machine of control that is largely impervious to the views or demands of elected representatives or the American people. The key to understanding this social-political-economic control is to grasp that control of the narratives, expertise and authority is control of everything. Allow me to illustrate how this works.

The typical politician has a busy daily schedule of speaking at the National Motherhood and Apple Pie Day celebration, listening to the “concerns” of important corporate constituents, attending a lunch campaign fundraiser, meeting with lobbyists and party committees, being briefed by senior staff, and so on.

Senior administrators share similarly crowded schedules, minus the fundraising but adding budget meetings, reviewing employee complaints and multiple meetings with senior managers and working groups.

Both senior elected officials and senior state administrators must rely on narratives, expertise and authority because they have insufficient time and experience to do original research and assessment.

Narratives create an instant context that “makes sense” of various data points and events. Narratives distill causal factors into an explanatory story with an implicit teleology–because of this and that, the future will be thus and so.

For example: because Iraq has weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the future promises the terrible likelihood (more than a possibility, given Iraqi deployment of poison gas in the Iraq-Iran War) that America or its allies will be devastated by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. This teleology leads to the inescapable need to eliminate Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction by any means necessary, and remove the political will to use them by removing Iraq’s leader from power.

Politicos and senior administrators rely on expertise and authority as the basis of deciding whether something is accurate and actionable. Professional specialists are assumed to have the highest available levels of expertise, and their position in institutions that embody the highest authority give their conclusions the additional weight of being authoritative. The experts’ conclusion doesn’t just carry the weight of expertise, it has been reviewed by senior officials of the institution, and so it also carries the weight of institutional authority.

So when the C.I.A. briefing by its experts claims Iraq has WMD, and the briefing includes various threads of evidence that the institution declares definitive, who is a non-expert to challenge this conclusion and teleology? On what technical basis does the skeptic reject the expertise and authority of the institution?

We can now define the Deep State with some precision. The Deep State is fundamentally the public-private centralized nodes that collect, archive and curate dominant narratives and their supporting evidence, and disseminate these narratives (and their implicit teleologies) to the public via the media and to the state agencies via formal and informal inter-departmental communication channels.

By gaining control of the narratives, evidence, curation and teleology, each node concentrates power. the power to edit out whatever bits contradict the dominant narrative is the source of power, for once the contradictory evidence is buried or expunged, it ceases to exist.

For example, the contradictory evidence in the Pentagon Papers was buried by being declared Top Secret. The bureaucratic means to bury skeptical (i.e. heretical) views or evidence are many. Sending the authors to figurative Siberia is remarkably effective, as is burying the heretical claims in a veritable mountain of data that few if any will ever survey.

Curation is a critical factor in maintaining control of the narrative and thus of control; the evidence is constantly curated to best support the chosen narrative which in turn supports the desired teleology, which then sets the agenda and the end-game.

The senior apparatchiks of the old Soviet Union were masters of curation; when a Soviet leader fell from favor, he was literally excised from the picture–his image was erased from photos.

This is how narratives are adjusted to better fit the evidence. Thus the accusation that “the Russians hacked our election” has been tabled because it simply doesn’t align with any plausible evidence. That narrative has been replaced with variants, such as “the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee.” Now that this claim has also been shown to be false, new variants are popping up weekly, with equally poor alignment with evidence.

The primary claim of each Deep State node is that its expertise and authority cannot be questioned. In other words, while the dominant narrative can be questioned (but only cursorily, of course), the expertise and authority of the institutional node cannot be questioned.

This is why the Deep State is fracturing: the expertise and authority of its nodes are delaminating because its narratives no longer align with the evidence. If various Security Agencies sign off on the narrative that “Russia hacked our election” (a nonsense claim from the start, given the absurd imprecision of the “hacking”–hacking into what? Voting machines? Electoral tallies?), and that narrative is evidence-free and fact-free, i.e. false, then the expertise and authority of those agencies comes into legitimate question.

Once the legitimacy of the expertise and authority is questioned, control of the narrative is imperiled. The control of the narrative is control of the teleology, the agenda and the end-game–in other words, everything. If the institution loses control of the dominant narrative, it loses its hold on power.

This is why the Deep State is in turmoil–its narratives no longer make sense, or are in direct conflict with other nodes’ narratives or have been delegitimized by widening gaps between “definitive” claims and actual evidence.

There is indeed a Deep State, but its control of dominant narratives, and thus its source of control and power, is crumbling. The gap between the narratives and the evidence that supports them has widened to the point of collapse.

The U.S. Deep State Rules – On Behalf of the Ruling Class

Posted on March 23, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Glen Ford

Source: Black Agenda Report

“The U.S. Deep State is unlike any other, in that there is no other global superpower bent on world domination.”

The Deep State is busy denying that it exists, even as it savages a sitting president and brutally bitch-slaps its host society, demanding the nation embrace its role as global psycho thug and kick some Russian ass. The New York Times, always available to divert attention from the essential facts of who rules America, points to Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan as the natural habitats of Deep States. Apparently, Deep State-infected countries tend to be nations with majority Muslim populations, whose military-intelligence apparatus hovers over society and periodically seizes control of the civil government.

The Times quoted high-ranking operatives of the Deep State to prove that such structures are alien to the U.S. Michael V. Hayden, who ran the CIA under Democratic President Obama and Republican George Bush, recoiled at the term. He “would never use” the words Deep State in connection with his own country. “That’s a phrase we’ve used for Turkey and other countries like that, but not the American republic.”

Loren DeJonge Schulman, a former Obama National Security Council official, claimed to be repelled by the very idea of an American Deep State. “A deep state, when you’re talking about Turkey or Egypt or other countries, that’s part of government or people outside of government that are literally controlling the direction of the country no matter who’s actually in charge, and probably engaging in murder and other corrupt practices,” she said.

Apparently, Ms. Schulman did not consider it murder when Obama and his top national security advisors met every Tuesday at the White House to decide who would be assassinated by drone or other means. But she is “shocked” to hear “that kind of [Deep State-phobic] thinking from” President Trump “or the people closest to him.”

Once the Times had located the nexus of Deep Statism in the Muslim world, the lesser lights at The New Yorker endorsed the corporate media consensus that the U.S. is Deep State-free. Staff writer David Remnick admits that U.S. presidents “have felt resistance, or worse, from elements in the federal bureaucracies,” citing Eisenhower’s warnings against the military-industrial complex, Lyndon Johnson’s “pressure from the Pentagon,” and the “rebuke” of Obama’s Syria policy through the State Department’s “dissent channel.” However, he denies that any “subterranean web of common and nefarious purpose” threatens the orderly and transparent processes of the U.S. political system.

In reality, the U.S. Deep State is by far the world’s biggest and most dangerous version of the phenomenon; a monstrous and not-so subterranean “web of common and nefarious purpose” that is, by definition, truly global, since its goal is to rule the planet. Indeed, the Deep States of Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan — all nominal U.S. allies – are midgets in comparison and must operate in a global environment dominated by Washington’s Deep State apparatus. So vast is the imperial Deep State, that its counterparts in other nations exist largely to collaborate with, resist, or keep tabs on the U.S. behemoth, the predator that seeks to devour all the rest.

What is a Deep State? The U.S. Deep State is unlike any other, in that there is no other global superpower bent on world domination. (Washington’s political posture is also unique; no other nation claims to be “exceptional” and “indispensable” and thus not subject to the constraints of international law and custom.) Indeed, the U.S. is so proudly and publicly imperialist that much of what should be secret information about U.S. military and other capabilities is routinely fed to the world press, such as the 2011 announcement that the U.S. now has a missile that can hit any target on the planet in 30 minutes, part of the Army’s “Prompt Global Strike” program. Frightening the rest of the world into submission — a form of global terrorism — is U.S. public policy.

However, arming and training Islamic jihadist terrorists to subvert internationally recognized governments targeted by the U.S. for regime change is more than your usual variety of covert warfare: It is a policy that must forever be kept secret, because U.S. society would suffer a political breakdown if the facts of U.S. and Saudi nurturing of the international jihadist network were ever fully exposed. This is Deep State stuff of the highest order. The true nature of U.S. foreign policy in the 21^st century, and the real character of the current wars in Syria and Iraq, must be hidden from the U.S. public at all cost. An alternative reality must be presented, through daily collaboration between corporate media, corporate universities, and the public and covert organs of the U.S. State.

What part of the New York Times coverage of the war against Syria is a lie? Damn near all of it. What role does the Deep State play in crafting the lies dutifully promulgated by the corporate media? That’s impossible to answer, because the Deep State is a network of relationships, not a clearly delineated zone or space or set of organizations. The best way to describe the imperial Deep State is: those individuals and institutions that are tasked with establishing the global supremacy of the corporate ruling class. Such activities must be masked, since they clash with the ideological position of the ruling class, which is that the bourgeois electoral system of the United States is the world’s freest and fairest. The official line is that the U.S. State is a work of near-perfection, with checks and balances that prevent any class, group or section from domination over the other. The truth is that an oligarchy rules, and makes war on whomever it chooses — internationally and domestically — for the benefit of corporate capital.

The Deep State and its corporate imperatives manifestly exists when corporate lobbyists and lawyers are allowed to draw up the Trans Pacific Partnership global “trade” agreement, but the contents are kept secret from the Congresspersons whose duty is to vote on the measure. The Deep State is where corporate power achieves its class aims outside the public processes of government. It’s where the most vicious class warfare takes place, whether on a foreign killing field, or in the corporate newsroom that erases or misrepresents what happened on that battlefield.

At this stage of capitalism, the U.S. ruling class has less and less use for the conventional operations of the bourgeois state. It cannot govern in the old way. More and more, it seeks to shape events through the levers of the collaborating networks of the Deep State. It’s number one global priority is to continue the military offensive begun in 2011, and to break Russia’s resolve to resist that offensive. The ruling class and its War Party, now consolidated within the Democratic Party and regrouping among Republicans, have effectively neutralized a sitting president whose party controls both Houses of Congress, less than two months into his term.

Only a Deep State could pull that off.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

Glen Ford’s blog

The Democrats’ Dangerous Diversion

Posted on March 21, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Nicolas J S Davies

Source: Consortium News

The current debate over “fake news” has reminded me of a conversation I had several years ago with a former citizen of East Germany, now living in the United States. He explained that, in East Germany, everybody knew that what the media told them about their own country was a bunch of lies and propaganda. So they assumed that what the media told them about the West was just propaganda, too.

Now living in the U.S., he had come to realize that a lot of what the East German media said about life in the U.S. was actually true. There really are people living on the street, people with no access to healthcare, widespread poverty, a lack of social welfare and public services, and many other problems, as the East German media accurately reported, and as the Chinese government also noted in its latest report on human rights in the U.S.

My friend wished he and his countrymen had understood the difference between what their media told them about their country and what they reported about the West. Then they could have made more intelligent choices about which aspects of life in the West to adopt, instead of allowing Western experts to come in and impose the entire neoliberal model on their country.

In the West, of course, the state media of East Germany and other Communist countries were held up to ridicule. I remember hearing that people in the U.S.S.R. would open their newspapers in the morning and have a good laugh at the latest “fake news” in Pravda. But, as my German friend eventually understood, there was some truth amongst the propaganda, and the hidden danger of such a corrupted media system is that people end up not knowing what to believe, making informed democratic choices almost impossible.

In the end, people all over Eastern Europe were cornered into a false choice between two ideological systems that both came as top-down package deals, instead of being able to take charge of their own societies and democratically decide their own future.

In the U.S., we live under a two-party political system, not a one-party system as in East Germany, and our media reflect that. As each of our two main political parties and our media have fallen more totally under the sway of unbridled plutocratic interests, our mass media has devolved into a bifurcated version of what my friend observed in East Germany, triply corrupted by commercial interests, partisan bias and ideological and nationalist propaganda.

Down the Rabbit Hole

Since the 2016 election campaign, our political system seems to have devolved into something like the nonsense world of Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland, with Donald Trump as the Queen of Hearts, Hillary Clinton as Humpty Dumpty, the Republicans and Democrats as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the election as the Caucus Race (which Lewis Carroll based on U.S. political caucuses) and the whipsawed American public as the permanently baffled Alice.

In Lewis Carroll’s Caucus Race, an assortment of creatures ran randomly around a racetrack with no start or finish line, until the Dodo called the race over, declared them all winners and told Alice (the public?) she had to give them all prizes.

In similar fashion, the 2016 election between two of the most unpopular presidential candidates in U.S. history seems to have no finish line, but to live on in round-the-clock campaigns to corral the public into one of its two camps. The artificial, top-down nature of both these campaigns should be a warning that, like the election campaigns they grew out of, they are designed to corral, control and direct masses of people, not to offer real solutions to any of the serious problems facing our country and the world.

On one hand, we have President Trump, Republican Congressional leaders, Breitbart, Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, spouting nonsense worthy of Lewis Carroll, even in major presidential speeches, while dismissing criticism as “fake news.”

The Trump camp will never acknowledge that only a quarter of voting-age Americans voted for him, nor that even less of us share his views or the interests he represents. In this corrupt two-party system, no effort or expense is spared to persuade the public that we must vote for one of the two major party presidential candidates, whether we agree with either of them or not. But that cuts both ways, leaving most of the public unrepresented no matter who wins, and depriving any new government of a genuine popular mandate.

But Republican leaders play a more straightforward winner-take-all game than the Democrats. So they will try to ride Trump’s victory and their Congressional majorities as far as they will take them on all fronts: more tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations; more draconian cuts in social spending; more privatization of healthcare, education and other public services; more detention and deportation of immigrants; a more aggressive police response to social problems and public protest; more destruction of the natural world and the climate; and more increases in a military budget that already broke post-WWII records under Bush and Obama, to fuel a more openly aggressive and dangerous war policy – in other words, more of all the things that most Americans would agree we have already had too much of.

On the other side, Democratic Party leaders and the CIA, supported by the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC, have conjured up unproven charges that Russia stole the election for Trump as the heart of their campaign against him. In Trump, history has handed them a political opponent with a piñata of vulnerabilities, from unprecedented conflicts of interest to policies that benefit only his own wealthy class to willful ignorance of how almost everything he is responsible for as president really works.

And yet the cabal formerly known as the Clinton campaign shows little interest in pointing out that our new Emperor has no clothes on, let alone in seriously resisting his repressive, plutocratic policies, and is instead obsessed with convincing the public that a birthmark on his naked bum looks like a hammer and sickle.

A Saving Grace?

Paradoxically, if Trump really reduced tensions between the U.S. and Russia, as his hawkish Democratic opponents fear, that could be the saving grace of his entire presidency. George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s regime change wars, NATO expansion and the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine have ignited a new Cold War that many respected scientists believe has raised the risk of human mass extinction to its highest level since the 1950s.

In the pursuit of false security based on post-Cold War triumphalism and a fleeting mirage of military supremacy, our corrupt leaders have jeopardized not just our security but our very existence, leaving us at two and a half minutes to midnight on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS)’ Doomsday Clock.

As Jonathan Marshall at Consortiumnews.com reported on March 10, experts from the Federation of American Scientists, the Natural Resources Defense Council and MIT wrote in a recent BAS article that new “super-fuzes” installed on U.S. nuclear warheads since 2009 have significantly increased the danger of nuclear war by giving the U.S. the ability to destroy all Russia’s fixed land-based nuclear missiles with only a fraction of U.S. own weapons.

Coupled with President Obama’s deployment of a formerly illegal ABM (anti-ballistic missile) system on Aegis missile destroyers and at bases in Eastern Europe, the authors wrote that this upgrade to U.S. nuclear warheads is “exactly what one would expect to see if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike.” They concluded that “Russian planners will almost surely see the advance in fuzing capability as empowering an increasingly feasible U.S. preemptive nuclear strike capability.”

In the case of a suspected Russian nuclear missile launch, the U.S. satellite-based early warning system can give President Trump 30 minutes to judge whether we are really facing a nuclear attack or not. But Russia’s land-based early warning system is not so generous. In the case of a suspected U.S. nuclear launch targeting Russia, President Putin would have as little as 7 to 13 minutes to decide whether Russia was really under nuclear attack and whether to retaliate.

In the midst of escalating tensions over Syria, Ukraine, Iran or some other new crisis, a realistic fear of a U.S. first strike could force a hasty decision by Russian officials and seal the fate of humanity. The BAS authors believe that this predicament leaves Russia little choice but to pre-delegate its nuclear launch authority to lower levels of command, increasing the risk of an accidental or mistaken launch of nuclear weapons.

In an epitome of understatement, they point out that, “Forcing this situation upon the Russian government seems likely to be detrimental to the security interests of the United States and its Western allies.”

While U.S. officials are largely silent about the dangers of these developments in U.S. nuclear weapons policy, President Putin has spoken frankly about them and expressed dismay that the U.S. has rejected every Russian offer of cooperation to reduce these risks. Talking to a group of journalists at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June 2016, he concluded, “I don’t know how this is all going to end. … What I do know is that we will need to defend ourselves.”

But despite the existential dangers of deteriorating relations with Russia, Democratic Party leaders have grasped the CIA’s unproven “assessments” that Russia may have tried to influence the outcome of the U.S. election as a lifeline by which to salvage their positions of power after their party’s electoral implosion.

Since the leadership of the Democratic Party was taken over by the corporate-backed Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) a generation ago, it has followed an unwritten rule that it must never accept responsibility for losing an election, nor respond to signs of public disaffection with any weakening of its commitment to pro-corporate, neoliberal policies. In its desperation to prevent the democratic reform of the Democratic Party, it is aggressively tarring nuclear-armed Russia with the same brush it used to tar and feather Ralph Nader after the 2000 election.

The mortal aversion of Democratic Party leaders to progressive reform suggests that they prize their own control of the party even above winning elections, the rational purpose of any political party. Their ugly smear campaign against Keith Ellison, the progressive candidate for Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair, mirrored the DNC’s corrupt campaign to undermine Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries and the DLC cabal’s bare-knuckles response to progressive challengers for the past 30 years.

For the DLC Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of the long-term victory that the country’s shifting demographics seem to guarantee their party requires a truly historic level of corruption.

Their unshakable commitment to fight tooth and nail for the interests of their wealthy campaign contributors over those of poorer, younger and darker-skinned voters in every election, every national, state and local party committee and on every issue, even as they pretend they are doing the exact opposite, could only be a viable political strategy in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. In the real world, their demonstrated disdain for the people from whose votes they derive their power is a strategy for political suicide.

Different Kind of Politics

These corrupt party leaders and their corporate media cheerleaders dare not remind us that Bernie Sanders’s candidacy for president inspired more enthusiasm and drew bigger crowds than Trump’s or Clinton’s, despite one eightieth of the early media promotion lavished on Trump by some corporate media and the fact that almost the entire Democratic Party establishment lined up against him.

For decades, DLC Democrats have run on vague messages about “values” to avoid being cornered into explicit progressive policy positions that might alienate their wealthy patrons. Sanders was greeted with open arms by younger voters ready for a renaissance of real politics based on actual policies that solve real problems, like universal healthcare, free college tuition, progressive taxation to pay for it all and a more cautious approach to U.S.-backed “regime change” in other countries.

By contrast, an analysis of campaign messaging by the Wesleyan Media Project found that “Clinton’s message was devoid of policy discussions” when compared to other recent presidential campaigns, including even Trump’s, and that this was a critical factor in her failure.

According to opinion polls, Bernie Sanders may now be the most popular politician in America. Polls consistently showed that Sanders was likely to beat Trump in the general election if the Democratic Party allowed him to get that far, but the DNC fundraising machine pulled out every trick in the book to make sure that didn’t happen. If truth be told, Sanders’s success was probably a more accurate reflection of the evolving political views of a majority of Americans in 2016 than the billion-dollar auction of the presidency between the Game Show King and the Queen of Chaos.

These two camps represent factions of the powerful interests that have controlled American politics for decades, from the military-industrial complex and the CIA to the dirty energy and for-profit “healthcare” industries, to say nothing of the commercial media industry itself, which covered this election all the way to the bank and for whom the show must go on and on and on … and on.

Lies of Both Sides.

Like the people of East Germany in the 1980s, we now face the challenge of a society in crisis, compounded by a treacherous media environment, with not just one, but two competing camps presenting us with false, self-serving interpretations of the multi-faceted crisis their corruption has spawned. While they compete for our trust, they share a common interest in insisting that one of the two mythological worldviews they have staked out must be right.

But as Cornel West recently told the students at my local high school in Miami in a Black History Month speech, “You don’t have to choose between the lies on one side and the lies on the other side.” So the question becomes where to turn for something other than lies, and how to recognize the truth when we stumble across it.

The paradox of our Internet age is that we nearly all have access to a wider range of media than ever before, yet we are still exposed and susceptible to corporate, partisan and ideological propaganda. In theory, we no longer have to be victims of for-profit media whose business models prioritize their profits over their duty to inform the public. But in reality, we do not form our views of the world as independently as we think we do.

This is easier to grasp in the case of commercial advertising than in the arena of political or ideological indoctrination. There is a well-known dictum in the business world that goes, “I know that half the money we spend on advertising is wasted. I just don’t know which half.” The flip-side of this is that the other half is not wasted.

So the advertising industry in the United States spends $220 billion per year, $700 for each man, woman and child in the country, to sell us products and services. And yet we still like to think that we make independent, rational choices about our spending, based on enlightened self-interest and cultivated tastes, not on the work of copywriters churning out pitches, images and jingles in ad agency cubicles.

One of the by-products of the mass monetization of American politics since the 1980s is that politics has become a profitable new arena for advertising, marketing and public relations firms. Its practitioners apply the techniques and experience they’ve developed in other areas to the world of politics, helping politicians and parties to convert the money they raise from wealthy campaign contributors into votes, and ultimately into power over all our lives. So we should be just as wary of political marketing and advertising as of the commercial variety. We should also be more humble in recognizing our own vulnerability to these profitable forms of persuasion and deception.

My copy of Alice in Wonderland has a quotation from James Joyce in the front of the book: “Wipe your glasses with what you know.” What we know is often our best protection against being misled by advertisers, politicians and pundits, if we will only remember what we know and trust it over the misinformation that surrounds us.

“Wiping our glasses with what we know” can provide a reality check on the current Russophobia campaign. We know very well that the U.S. and Russia possess the bulk of the world’s nuclear weapons, and that war between our two countries would likely mean death for ourselves and our families and the end of life as we know it for people everywhere.

We also know that it is our country and its allies, not Russia, that have launched invasions, military occupations, bombing campaigns, coups and drone wars against at least ten countries in the past 20 years, while Russia only recently become engaged in two of these conflict zones when its interests were directly impacted by our actions.

So we can see that the greatest danger in this relationship is not the threat of some unprovoked and unprecedented act of Russian aggression. The more real and serious danger is that a confrontation with Russia over one of the hot spots we have ignited will lead to an escalation of tensions in which a mistake, a misunderstanding, a miscalculation, a bluff called, a “red line” crossed or some other kind of failed brinksmanship will trigger a war that will escalate to the use of nuclear weapons, and from there to Armageddon.

Even with the lines of communication set up after the Cuban missile crisis and the stabilization of the Cold War balance of terror by the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), we now know that we came very close to Armageddon many times, including simply by accident.

Instead of being corralled by either side in the “Russia did it” campaign, we should be urging our leaders to sit down and talk seriously with Russia’s leaders, to stop taking dangerous actions that exacerbate tensions, uncertainties and mutual isolation, and to return to serious negotiations to leave our children and grandchildren a peaceful world, free of nuclear weapons, where these dangers will no longer threaten them.

Amid lies and distortions on all sides, the corruption of politics and media by commercial interests and the billion dollars per year our government spends directly on public relations and propaganda, James Joyce’s advice can still serve us well. Make sure to wipe your glasses with what you know as you read or watch “news” from any source or listen to politicians of any party, and we may just find a way out of this rabbit hole before the roof crashes in on us.

Nicolas J S Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. He also wrote the chapters on “Obama at War” in Grading the 44th President: a Report Card on Barack Obama’s First Term as a Progressive Leader.

The New Media World Order

Posted on March 20, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Thierry Meyssan

Source: Voltairenet.org

In only a few months, the content of the Western national and international medias has undergone profound change. We are witnessing the birth of an Entente about which we know almost nothing – neither the real initiators, nor the real objectives – but whose direct anti-democratic consequences can be noticed immediately.

The West is currently going through an unprecedented systemic change – powerful forces are progressively orienting the totality of medias in a single direction. At the same time, the content of the medias is mutating– only last year, they were still logical, and tended towards objectivity. They offered one other mutual contradiction in a spirit of healthy competition. Now they act in gangs, basing their coherence on emotions, and becoming vicious when they are facing people they condemn.

The idea of an Entente between the medias is an extension of the experience of the International Consortium for Investigative Journalism (ICIJ), which does not unite the medias, but only individual journalists. It made itself famous by publishing information stolen from the accounts of two law firms in the British Virgin Islands, and from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the bank HSBC, and the Panamanian firm Mossack Fonseca. These revelations were mainly used to discredit the Russian and Chinese leaders, but also, once in a while, to shine some light on genuine offences committed by the Westerners. Above all, under the honourable pretext of the struggle against corruption, the violation of the confidentiality of lawyers and banks seriously damaged thousands of their honest clients without any reaction from public opinion.

Over a period of approximately forty years, we have been witnessing the progressive grouping of medias within certain international trusts. Currently, 14 groups share more than two thirds of the western Press (21st Century Fox, Bertelsmann, CBS Corporation, Comcast, Hearst Corporation, Lagardere Group, News Corp, Organizações Globo, Sony, Televisa, The Walt Disney Company, Time Warner, Viacom, Vivendi). From now on, the alliance operated by Google Media Lab and First Draft is forging links between these groups, which already enjoyed a dominant position. The presence in this Entente of the three most important Press agencies on the planet (Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Reuters) guarantees it hegemonic power. This is without any doubt an «illicit entente», established not with the goal of price-setting, but mind-setting, the imposition of an already dominant thought.

We may have noticed that all the members of the Google Entente – without exception – have already, over the last six years, given unequivocal visions of the events that occurred in the Greater Middle East. And yet there had been no prior agreement between them, or at least, none of which we were aware. It is intriguing to note that five of the six international television channels which participated in the NATO propaganda cell are part of this Entente (Al-Jazeera, BBC, CNN, France24, Sky, but apparently not al-Arabiya).

In the United States, France and Germany, Google and First Draft assembled the medias present locally in the countries concerned, and others present on the international scale, to check the veracity of certain arguments. Besides the fact that we do not know who is hiding behind First Draft, and what political interests may have influenced a commercial company specialised in computer science to finance this initiative, the results achieved have little to do with a return to objectivity.

First of all because the allegations are not chosen for the place they occupy in the public debate, but because they have been quoted by individuals that the media Entente intends to vilify. We might imagine that these verifications enable us to get a little closer to the truth, but that is not the case at all – they reassure the citizen in the idea that the medias are honest, while the people they are condemning are not. This approach is not aimed at better understanding the world, but at beating down the people to be sacrificed.

Next, because an unwritten rule of this media Entente stipulates that only allegations from sources outside the Entente should be checked. The members agree not to use any critical faculty in the mutual appreciation of their work. They agree to reinforce the idea that the world is divided in two – «we» who tell the truth, and «the others» who are liars. This approach is damaging for the principle of pluralism, a precondition for democracy, and opens the way to a totalitarian society. This is not a new phenomenon, because we saw it at work during the coverage of the Arab Springs and the wars against Libya and Syria. But for the first time, it is aimed at a Western line of thought.

Finally, because the allegations that have been qualified as «false» will never be envisaged as errors, but always as lies. The point is to charge the «others» with Machiavellian intentions in order to discredit them. This approach damages the presumption of innocence.

That is why the functioning of the ICIJ and the Entente created by Google and First Draft violates the Munich Charter adopted by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) (Title II, articles 2, 4, 5 and 9).

It is no coincidence that certain absurd legal actions have developed against the same targets as those in the sights of the media Entente. In the United States, the Hogan Law has been dragged out for use against the Trump team, despite the fact that this text has never, absolutely never, been applied since its promulgation two centuries ago. And in France, the Jolibois Law has been revived for use against the political tweets of Marine Le Pen, despite the fact that jurisprudence had limited the application of that law to the distribution of a few ultra-pornographic magazines lacking a plastic wrapping. Since the principle of the presumption of innocence for scapegoats has been eradicated, it is now possible to put anyone on trial for any legal pretext. Furthermore, the legal actions mounted against the Trump team and Marine Le Pen, in the name of the laws named above, should also be be brought against a great number of other people – but they are not.

Moreover, citizens no longer react when the media Entente itself broadcasts false allegations. Thus, in the United States, they imagined that the Russian secret services had a compromising dossier on Donald Trump and were blackmailing him. Or, in France, this Entente invented the idea that it is possible to employ a fictitious parliamentary assistant, and went on to accuse François Fillon.

In the United States, the large and small medias which are members of the Entente went after the President. They garnered their own information from the wire-tapping of the Trump team which had been illegally ordered by the Obama administration. They work in coordination with the magistrates, who are using them to block the actions of the present government. This is without doubt a Mafia system.

The same US and French medias are attacking two candidates for the French Presidential election – François Fillon and Marine Le Pen. To the general problem of the media Entente is added the false impression that these targets are victims of a Franco/French conspiracy, whereas in fact, the instigator is a US citizen. The French notice that their medias are rigged, wrongly interpret the conspiracy as being directed against the right wing, and continue erroneously seeking the manipulators in their own country.

In Germany, the Entente is not yet effective, and probably will not be until the general elections.

During Watergate, the medias claimed to represent a «Fourth Estate», after the Executive, the Legislative, and the Judiciary. They affirmed that the Press exercised a function of control over the government in the name of the People. We can ignore for a moment the fact that President Nixon was charged with a similar offense to that of President Obama – bugging his opponent. We know today that the Watergate source, «Deep Throat», far from being a «whistle-blower», was in reality the Director of the FBI, Mark Felt. The treatment of this affair was a battle between a part of the administration and the White House, in which the electors were manipulated by both sides at once.

The idea of a «Fourth Estate» supposes that we recognise the same legitimacy for the 14 corporate trusts which own the great majority of the Western medias as for the citizens. This is to affirm the substitution of an oligarchy for democracy.

The remains one point which needs clarification – how have the targets of the Entente been chosen? The only obvious link between Donald Trump, François Fillon and Marine Le Pen is that all three hope to re-establish contacts with Russia, and fight with her against the breeding ground of jihadism – the Muslim Brotherhood. Although François Fillon was the Prime Minister of the goverment implcated in these events, all three of them represent the train of thought which contests the dominant vision of the Arab Springs and the wars against Libya and against Syria.

Let’s Give the CIA the Credit It Deserves

Posted on March 10, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Norman Solomon

Source: OpEdNews.com

For months now, our country has endured the tacit denigration of American ingenuity. Countless statements — from elected officials, activist groups, journalists and many others — have ignored our nation’s superb blend of dazzling high-tech capacities and statecraft mendacities.

Fortunately, this week the news about release of illuminating CIA documents by WikiLeaks has begun to give adequate credit where due. And not a moment too soon. For way too long, Russia has been credited with prodigious hacking and undermining of democracy in the United States.

Many Americans have overlooked the U.S. government’s fantastic hacking achievements. This is most unfair and disrespectful to the dedicated men and women of intelligence services like the CIA and NSA. Far from the limelight, they’ve been working diligently to undermine democracy not just overseas but also here at home.

Today, the massive new trove of CIA documents can help to put things in perspective. Maybe now people will grasp that our nation’s undermining of democracy is home-grown and self-actualized. It’s an insult to the ingenious capacities of the United States of America to think that we can’t do it ourselves.

Contrary to all the public relations work that U.S. intelligence agencies have generously done for them, the Russians don’t even rank as peripheral to the obstacles and prospects for American democracy. Rest assured, throughout the long history of the United States, we haven’t needed foreigners to get the job done.

In our current era, can Vladimir Putin take any credit for purging huge numbers of African Americans, Latinos and other minority citizens from the voter rolls? Of course not.

Did Putin create and maintain the barriers that prevented many low-income people from voting on November 8? Only in his dreams.

Can the Kremlin hold a candle to the corporate-owned cable TV channels that gave Donald Trump umpteen free hours of uninterrupted air time for speeches at his campaign rallies? Absolutely not.

Could any Russian operation claim more than a tiny sliver of impact compared to the handiwork of FBI Director James Comey as he boosted Donald Trump’s prospects with a pair of gratuitous announcements about a gratuitously re-opened probe of Hillary Clinton’s emails during the last days of the 2016 campaign? No way.

Is Putin anything but a miniscule lightweight in any efforts to manipulate the U.S. electorate compared to “dark money” American billionaires like the Koch brothers? Give us a break.

And how about the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? The Kremlin can only marvel at the way that the CIA, the NSA and the bipartisan leadership in Washington have shredded the Fourth Amendment while claiming to uphold it.

To sum up: The CIA’s efforts to tout Russia add up to jaw-dropping false modesty! The humility of “deep state” leaders in Langley is truly awesome.

Let’s get a grip. Overwhelmingly, the achievements of thwarting democracy in America have been do-it-yourself operations. It’s about time that we give adequate credit to the forces perpetuating this country’s self-inflicted wounds to American democracy.

To loosely paraphrase the beloved comic-strip character Pogo, when the subject is grievous damage to democracy at home, “We have met the ingenuity and it is U.S.” But we’re having a terrible time recognizing ourselves.

The Duran’s Alex Christoforou: Treating Russia As The ‘Bogeyman’ Has Failed

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Michael Nevradakis

Source: MintPress News

ATHENS — So-called “fake news” has been in the news in recent months, and this debate over what is and what isn’t legitimate news reflects the political divisiveness that is increasingly prevalent in the United States and in Europe.

Like MintPress News, another website which was accused of purveying “fake news” is The Duran, a recently-launched website which offers perspectives and analysis on geopolitical issues which are frequently not found in mainstream U.S. and European media.

As the news cycle moved at lightning speed in recent months, MintPress had the opportunity to conduct a series of interviews with Alex Christoforou, one of the co-founders and writers for The Duran. In this wide-ranging interview, Christoforou discusses Trump’s election, foreign policy rhetoric and maneuvers thus far, the Russian reaction to the NATO buildup along its border, the anti-Russian sentiment in the U.S. political arena and mass media, developments in Syria and the Ukraine, the recent Cyprus reunification talks which were held in Geneva, the role of Turkey in the region and Turkish relations with the U.S. and Russia, the Trump administration’s support for “Brexit” and the possibility of a “Grexit,” the accusations of “fake news,” and more. These interviews first aired on Dialogos Radio in January and February.

MintPress News (MPN): President Trump has spoken out in favor of improved U.S. relations with Russia and with Vladimir Putin. Do you believe that Trump will make good on this pledge, in light of the challenges he is facing?

Alex Christoforou (AC): That’s an interesting question, and I think that’s something that everyone’s debating right now, how sincere he is in creating an atmosphere of detente between the U.S. and Russia. The first thing is that Obama was absolutely terrible for U.S.-Russia relations. He pretty much threw the whole relationship back into the Cold War era. Trump has got a lot of ground to cover, and there’s a lot of forces at work right now which are adamant about not having Trump create an atmosphere of detente with Russia. So Trump is really in a tough position here, especially given the initiatives that the Obama administration took up, which was really an effort by the outgoing administration to box Trump in.

They’ve created a hysteria of Russian hacking which has no evidence whatsoever, no evidence has been presented to the public at all. You have various media outlets really publishing a lot of fake news about Trump’s relationship with Putin and Russia. The fact is that Trump has never even met Vladimir Putin. So you have this interesting dynamic; if Trump does approach Russia with a much friendlier foreign policy and a much more workable foreign policy, right away Trump is going to be labeled by the mainstream media, the establishment media as a Putin stooge, as a Kremlin stooge, as a Russian “useful idiot,” and they’re going to point fingers and say, “Look, we told you so, Trump is the Manchurian candidate of the Kremlin.” It’s all absolutely ridiculous, to be honest.

My opinion is, sure the Kremlin was relieved to have Trump win the presidency, but not for the reasons that people think. Putin has made no secret of the fact that he wants a good partner in the United States and that the last eight years, especially the second term of Obama, have been very tense between Russia and the U.S. So Putin is probably looking forward to having a world leader that he can speak with on equal terms. Obama definitely was not that world leader. Without a doubt, Obama and Putin did not get along.

I think from that standpoint, Russia understands that in Trump they may have a leader that they can speak with. On the other hand, there’s this misconception that Russia was happy to see Hillary Clinton lose. This is false. Yes, Hillary Clinton was a dangerous prospect for a U.S. president. She was very bullish, very much a war hawk on Russia, especially with regard to Syria and the Ukraine, which are two geopolitical regions that are extremely important to Russia. But saying that, Putin definitely got the best of Obama on just about every single foreign policy initiative that the two countries faced in the last eight years. So the Kremlin pretty much knew that it if was going to be four years of Hillary Clinton, it would be a very easy go as to dealing with the U.S. on various challenges that the two countries faced.

On the one hand, I think they’re looking forward to Trump, and speaking with a world leader that they could work with. On the other hand, I think there’s a big part of Russia and a big part of the Kremlin that says, “We really ran over Obama pretty easily,” as far as geopolitics is concerned, and Hillary Clinton likely would have been a lot easier of an opponent to deal with. Will Trump stand by his word? I think he will. He’s a negotiator and I think he’s going to want to do deals.

MPN: The Trump administration’s foreign policy could be characterized as contradictory thus far, with this opening toward warmer relations with Russia on the one hand and an increased rhetoric against Iran on the other hand. Where do you believe these foreign policy contradictions can lead?

AC: I don’t think anybody knows yet where it could lead. Certainly we are seeing a change. On the one hand, we see that Trump would like better relations with Russia, which is what he was saying during his campaign as well. However, the mass media and most politicians from both sides of the aisle are quite hostile toward Russia. Trump has continued to maintain, however, that he desires good relations with Putin’s government. On the other hand, we see that Iran has taken over the “bogeyman” role which Russia held during the Obama administration, and it is evident that the Trump administration wants to do something about Iran. What this something will be, we don’t know just yet. The Trump administration is acting in a hostile manner toward Iran, including President Trump himself and [Secretary of Defense James] Mattis. Until now, we haven’t seen any concrete actions, other than a reinstatement of certain sanctions. But I do fear what action the Trump administration might decide to take against Iran. We will just have to see.

I do think that Trump, so far, is testing the waters, and it is clear that he does want better relations with Russia, while with Iran he is not following the same path as Obama. What these changes will be though and what policies will be adopted is not yet certain. It is still early, though, and much can change.

I think you definitely have a Cabinet that’s got mixed feelings about Russia, a Cabinet that’s very deep in its military experience. That could be seen as a good thing or a bad thing. One thing that military people seem to understand is the price of war and the risks of war, and that’s a good thing. They’re just not flippant about going into war because they understand what’s at stake and the human tragedy of war. On the other hand, military Cabinet picks tend to be a lot more hawkish and a lot more eager to project America’s military superiority.

I don’t agree with all of Trump’s Cabinet selections, but I think the most significant selection of all is that of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. The Obama administration and Hillary Clinton and John Kerry left behind so much chaos, so many problems that Tillerson really has his work cut out for him. It’s not just Russia, but Syria, the Ukraine, Libya, ISIS, China, and Iran. For the first time, though, a successful businessperson will be in charge of the State Department, and it will be interesting to see which policies he will enforce.

I think at the end of the day, Trump will await people’s opinions, but I think the buck will stop with him. At least that’s the impression that I get as to what type of leader he will be. I think all the decisions will begin and end with his final word. It’s going to be a wait-and-see, but all signs show that he’s going to take a very CEO type of approach to running the country.

MPN: Do you believe that the fierce backlash that the Trump administration has faced is precisely a result of this desire for developing better relations with Russia?

AC: Yes, of course. That’s part of it. This panic over Russia began with Obama, continued with Hillary Clinton, and it seems that all of Washington, all of the advisers and certainly all of the media, are trying to undermine any efforts toward achieving detente between the two countries. My opinion is that this is an effort to smear Trump and to claim that he is unfit for the presidency.

For the time being, I don’t think we will see a significant shift in U.S.-Russia relations. I think we’ll be in a better position to judge things after six months or a year of the new administration. For now, the Russia hysteria has been thrust to the forefront to cast a negative cloud over Trump. However, the average American does not care about what’s happening with Russia. They are concerned with jobs, jobs, jobs. That is how they will evaluate the Trump administration and the new president. I think that this tactic of blaming Russia for everything and casting Putin as the bogeyman has failed, as proven by the election result itself, and I think it will continue to fail. The American people don’t care about what’s happening with Russia. They care about what’s happening at home.

MPN: Where do you believe all of the anti-Russian fearmongering can ultimately lead?

AC: It can lead to a hot war. It definitely has led to a cold war. The last thing we want is a hot war. You have two nuclear powers who are inching closer to each other in conflict, and I think that needs to be scaled back, and scaled back right away. I think we’ve already seen various proxy wars between the U.S. and Russia take place. We saw it in the Ukraine, we saw it in Syria. We already see the two sides engaging with each other, though they’re not engaging directly with each other. NATO troops moving up to Russia’s border is very provocative. We should never forget that the last time forces amassed on Russia’s border was during World War II, and during that war we cannot forget that Russia lost 28 million people. They paid a very, very heavy price for defeating Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front. So if there’s one thing that there’s any red lines that Russia is very firm about, it’s about having troops amassed on their border, and the other red line was about having any countries that are bordering them, for example the Ukraine, be integrated into NATO. These are red lines that Russia has been very firm in saying may not be crossed.

Saying that, Trump has really got to scale back the aggressive posturing of Obama. The media has helped to portray Russia as the aggressor, but when you take a step back and see who has provoked all the conflict in the various hot spots of the world, Russia has been very reactionary. The Ukraine was a coup d’etat. The U.S. and the European Union overthrew a democratically-elected government. That’s a fact. It’s indisputable, and that coup d’etat was initiated by [Assistant Secretary of State] Victoria Nuland and Ambassador [Geoffrey] Pyatt in Athens. This coup d’etat was instigated by a neoconservative faction in Washington. They put in place a far-right government, and some factions of that far-right party are openly fascist and neo-Nazi, and Russia reacted. Syria is the same thing. In Syria, you see a situation where the United States, with the help of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, went to overthrow a secular sovereign leader, once again, internationally recognized by the United Nations. They went to overthrow that leader, and they created chaos. Russia, once again, reacted to that, to the facts on the ground, and you have what’s been a complete disaster in Syria.

You have a very deep state and neocon faction in the U.S. that’s combined forces with this Hillary Clinton-neoliberal faction to create a lot of tension between U.S.-Russia relations. You have the mainstream media, which was in the tank with the neoliberal Hillary cabal from the get-go, fueling the fires of Russian hysteria, but the situation is anything but Russia being the aggressor. Russia has actually reacted to the facts being created by these neoconservatives and neoliberals that have really just run roughshod over the world disastrously, in Syria, in Libya, in Somalia, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the Ukraine. It’s been one disaster after another, and Putin has been very correct in really castigating the United States and saying, during his U.N. speech, “Do you realize what you’ve done?” That’s a profound statement, in telling the world this cannot continue, this regime change policy, this constant war-like attitude toward the Middle East has to stop, otherwise we’re going to turn a cold war and various proxy wars into hot war. The mainstream media is not helping, that’s for sure.

MPN: Recently, NATO forces have been mobilized in Germany and in Eastern Europe, the Russian ambassador to Turkey was murdered and the Russian ambassador to Greece lost his life under unclear circumstances. We had the Russian diplomats that were expelled from Washington in the final days of the Obama administration, and of course the accusations of Russian hacking and meddling in the U.S. elections. How has Vladimir Putin responded to all of this, in your view?

AC: Brilliantly, I think. Vladimir Putin’s response to all of this has really been wait-and-see. He was well within his diplomatic range and his diplomatic standing to retaliate against Obama’s kicking out of the 35 diplomats and the closing down of the two Russian locations in the U.S., but he didn’t. He took a very smart attitude of “Obama is gone in two or three weeks, let’s wait and see what Trump says and what Trump does when he comes into office.”

It was, in my opinion, such childish behavior from Obama toward Trump and toward the transition. Obama should not have been doing these things. It was very childish of him, and I think he lost a lot of respect from a lot of people on the world stage, as just being a very spiteful and childish world leader. He should not have taken these actions against Russia with only two, three weeks left in office. He should not have tried to sabotage Trump’s transition, and he should have really worked with the Trump administration to create a smooth transition.

The diplomat that died in Greece was actually a very underreported news story. Very, very few mainstream media outlets even picked up on that story, and it was, from what I’m seeing in the Greek media that’s reporting on it, under very unclear, very suspicious circumstances. No one really knows much about it. So that was an interesting story that was not picked up.

MPN: On the part of Russia, we have not seen much of a response to new Ukrainian attacks against the Donbass. What is the Ukraine trying to achieve, and why has Russia seemingly not responded?

AC: It’s very simple. The Ukraine is one of the problems that was created by Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Victoria Nuland, and the EU. Let’s not forget that they overthrew the Ukrainian government. This was an illegal and provocative action, and in any event, the Ukraine was scheduled to hold elections the following year. There was no need for the U.S. and the EU to undertake this action against the Ukraine, the Ukrainian people, and against Russia, but they did so.

Now, I believe that the Ukraine is trying to start a new conflict and to once again draw attention to itself, because Kiev fears that Trump does not care much about the Ukrainian issue. I think Trump has shown this thus far. Trump recently spoke with Ukrainian President [Petro] Poroshenko, and it was the first time that the U.S. president did not use the phrase “Russian aggression toward the Ukraine,” which Obama would repeatedly state. Trump said that a solution has to be found for the Ukraine, that the two sides need to sit at the same table. This rhetoric was much different from that which was employed by Obama all these years, and I think the Ukrainian authorities are in shock. I detect some panic on their part, but instead of trying to find a solution to this problem, they are going in the opposite direction and trying to provoke a new conflict, hoping that the U.S. will intervene and side with them and that this will undermine the positive relations that Trump is seeking to develop with Putin. This is an incorrect strategy and it will not succeed. Europe cannot handle a war in the Ukraine. I think German Chancellor Angela Merkel understands this and Putin clearly stated this to her, that the Ukrainian government must halt these actions and sit at the negotiating table again and enforce the Minsk Protocol.

For the time being, I think Russia is holding steady with regard to the Ukraine and won’t make a move, because Russia knows, as does the EU, Merkel, and Trump, that the Ukraine is in a difficult situation. It’s a failed state. The efforts of the Obama administration and the EU in the Ukraine have failed, the Ukraine can’t handle any more. It is a corrupt state, its people are suffering, their current government is facing tremendous difficulties, and I think it’s a matter of time before we see major changes in the Ukraine.

MPN: What is the situation on the ground in Syria presently, how is Russia currently involved, and what might we expect to see from the Trump administration with regard to its policy toward Syria?

AC: In Syria you had a situation where Russia came in and they pounded the hell out of ISIS and al-Qaida. Al-Qaida, a.k.a. al-Nusra [Jabhat al-Nusra, the former name of the group now known as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham], a.k.a. the “moderate rebels” that the mainstream media seems to love, were lumped in along with ISIS as terrorist groups, which they are. Russia did not separate the two, and they took over military operations within that country along with Iran and the Syrian army. They defeated these terrorist organizations in Aleppo, and they liberated and gained control of the city. The people in Aleppo were extremely happy, they were celebrating. These are things that were not reported in the establishment media. All the reports were saying that [Syrian President Bashar] Assad was going to Aleppo and burning people. These reports have been proven to be 100 percent false. Aleppo is now under the sovereign, internationally-recognized control of the Syrian government, and now that they have control of the major cities in Syria, you’re going to see a campaign to push ISIS, al-Qaida, and al-Nusra out of the country.

Russia has now worked with Turkey to hammer out a ceasefire plan and a plan toward peace. Interestingly enough, the United States was left out of this deal. This was a huge blotch on Obama’s foreign policy record. Here, you have for the first time other powers in the region — Russia, Turkey, Iran — actually hammering out a peace deal without the United States. For Obama and John Kerry, this was probably the lowest point in their foreign policy record over the past eight years. Not only did they destroy a secular, internationally-recognized country, a secular nation that gave women rights, that gave freedom of religion to the all the people, that had health care, that had university education for all, they destroyed that country by trying to move it into the hands of al-Qaida/al-Nusra. But they also were pushed out of the peace plan for that country.

After Aleppo was liberated, I don’t see many people talking about Syria any longer. This was followed by Russia, Iran, and Syria working together to draft a new constitution, without American input, and to try to achieve a solution for Syria, again without U.S. involvement. This is significant. Now, with Trump, we just have to wait and see what his stance toward Syria will be. One thing is certain, though: Trump does not view Assad as the problem. He views ISIS as the problem, and I believe he will be able to collaborate with Russia to fight ISIS wherever it exists. For the time being, I wouldn’t say that the situation in Syria has calmed, it is still an ugly situation there, but there are efforts being made to find a solution. I think this solution will come from the defeat of ISIS and from Assad staying in power. This is clear. Assad is going nowhere.

I just want to make one more note, as far as the way that the press and the media has been covering this war. It was not a civil war. What happened in Syria was an invasion. It was an invasion of foreign jihadist, Wahhabi, ISIS, al-Qaida, al-Nusra forces, and they destabilized the nation and destroyed what was one of the few secular, stable nations in the region. This is a huge point. It’s very, very good that Syria did not go the way of Libya. Hopefully, the Syrian people can get rid of ISIS, can get rid of al-Qaida’s foreign invaders, and can get back to being the secular and peaceful nation that they were. It’s been a disastrous six years for the Syrian people.

MPN: In the closing days of the Obama administration, outgoing Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland was dispatched to broker a solution regarding the divided island of Cyprus. Who is Victoria Nuland and what was her role in the Ukraine?

AC: She overthrew the government, plain and simple. I mean, we have it on tape. Do we not have her calling the ambassador to the Ukraine at that time, Geoffrey Pyatt, pretty much telling him who’s going to be in government? They were going over all the government appointees, they said the famous words about the EU, and the people that they talked about being placed into government were the people, in fact, that were placed into government. Victoria Nuland overthrew a democratically-elected government.

The previous government, as corrupt as it may have been or as unpopular as it may have been by 50 percent of the population that saw it in unfavorable terms, was still a democratically-elected government. Ukraine was going to have elections in a years’ time anyway, so what happened in the Ukraine was extremely regretful. It was the most blatant and obvious coup d’etat that has happened in probably the last 100 years.

[Author’s Note: The husband of Victoria Nuland, Robert Kagan, is a senior fellow with the Project on International Order and Strategy in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, and the self-described “liberal interventionist” is widely regarded as a leading neoconservative.]

MPN: Victoria Nuland was one of the major players in these talks, which were held in Geneva in January, regarding the potential reunification in Cyprus. What was the outcome of these talks?

AC: If there’s one person that has taken the Cyprus reunification talks very seriously from the U.S. side, it has been Joe Biden. He’s shown a very big interest in solving the Cyprus problem. Joe Biden, as a politician, has always historically been very warm with the Greek-American population, and he seems to take Greek foreign policy issues very much to heart. Victoria Nuland has shown an interest in solving the Cyprus problem, though I would caution that Victoria Nuland does not seek a solution because she wants to create peace within the island of Cyprus. She sees things more from a geopolitical standpoint, of making sure that Cyprus is aligned with Western Europe, with NATO, and used as very much a geopolitical tool against Russian influence within the region.

The players involved in solving the Cyprus issue are, of course, the Greek Cypriots and the Turkish Cypriots, and along with them are the three guarantor states, which are the United Kingdom, Greece, and Turkey. For this solution to crystallize, it’s my belief that the framework of having a “guarantor nation,” in other words, to guarantee the peace on the island between the two communities, those guarantor nations have to be removed. That means that the 40,000 Turkish soldiers stationed on the island obviously have to leave, the Greek soldiers that are stationed on the island have to leave, and Cyprus has to find its path toward being a unified nation.

The negotiations right now are taking place between the two communities, the U.N. is very actively involved, and we’re very close to hammering out a deal between the two communities. The guarantor nations — Turkey, Greece, and the United Kingdom — will most likely be called in to oversee and to weigh in on whatever deal is finalized between the two sides. I believe that the concept of having “guarantor states” of a sovereign nation is going to be a thing of the past, and I think Cyprus will be a sovereign nation, not a divided island anymore. Victoria Nuland is out, so whatever influence she had in the negotiation process is all but over. Rex Tillerson, as the new Secretary of State, will take over from here on out, and we’ll see how engaged [the U.S. is] or how disengaged it is. We’re very close, and we’ll see how things play out. There’s a few issues at hand that they have to hammer out, very sticky issues, very tough issues, but we’re very, very close to seeing a unified Cyprus.

Saying that, what you’re looking at is a bi-zonal, bi-communal federal state, so you’ll have one country, but you’ll have a two-state solution. Each state will have its laws and certain powers to govern their side of the island, but you will also have one executive branch, which will also govern the island as a whole; a whole member of the international community, of the EU, of the U.N. You’re really looking at a “United States of Cyprus,” and that’s the solution that will most likely be brought to the table.

Regarding the talks, I think that Turkey got what it was looking for — namely, for nothing significant to happen with the Cyprus issue until the Turkish constitutional reforms have been passed. Until then, I believe talks will proceed slowly, step by step, but we won’t see any significant developments until Turkey is ready. Until then, we will only see minor developments. I foresee we will see more developments toward the summer, beginning in May and June and thereafter. Everything, however, will depend on Turkey, and I think that Turkey is not yet ready to express a clear position on the Cyprus issue.

MPN: Where do things stand at the present time with regard to Russian-Turkish relations? Is Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan once again turning away from the U.S./NATO/EU sphere and moving toward Russia?

AC: That’s a good question. Erdogan, he’s something else. I think Erdogan is a survivor, he’s extremely controversial, he’s a very tough person to deal with both for the Russians and for the Americans. There’s no doubt that Erdogan has been hot and cold with Russia. They’ve had huge moments of disparity and very tense moments in recent months, but they’ve also found ways to bridge those gaps and to move past those tense moments. The same holds true with the United States. Erdogan has been playing the U.S. hot and cold as well for the past six months to a year.

I would say, two or three years ago, Erdogan had a vision of a “grand Ottoman resurgence,” a grand Ottoman empire in which Turkey would have influence over Syria, over Iraq, etc. I think now Erdogan has been forced to scale that vision down, and I would say that now Erdogan’s number one concern is the Kurds in the north of Syria. His number one foreign policy initiative is that he cannot allow a Kurdish state to form in the north of Syria and the north of Iraq. That would be disastrous for Turkey and would probably lead to the breakup of Turkey, given that Turkey has, I believe, an estimated 15 million Kurds who reside in the borders of the Turkish state. Having any type of autonomous Kurdish region in the north of Syria and the north of Iraq would be a red line that Erdogan would caution both the United States and Russia cannot be crossed.

Erdogan has scaled back his grand Ottoman vision and is now looking more to consolidating his power in Turkey and making sure that the Turkish state remains intact, without any Kurdish interference. Russia, with regard to Turkey, it’s been hot and cold in recent months, but they keep the channels of communication open. The relations are not the same as they were five to ten years ago, but they are steady, and Russia and Turkey are collaborating on Syria and have found some common ground on this issue. The same holds true for the United States. Erdogan is not an easy world leader to deal with. That’s just a fact.

I believe that Turkey is waiting for the constitutional reforms to pass, so that Erdogan attains absolute power. Until then I don’t believe we’ll see significant developments coming out of Turkey, and I think everyone is waiting to see what policy Trump and Rex Tillerson will adopt toward Turkey. I think we’ll see Turkey take an active role again in about six months. It will not make any moves until Erdogan attains absolute power. We will likely see some adverse developments, perhaps even some positive ones, but we will just have to wait and see.

MPN: Recently, we have seen an increase in Turkish belligerence toward Greece. Do you believe that Erdogan is angling toward fueling a conflict with Greece?

AC: No. There is no chance of such a development. I don’t believe we’ll see anything happen with Turkey. Erdogan, of course, will remain Erdogan. He’ll do what he does, he’ll be provocative toward Greece, Syria, NATO, and Cyprus. But I do not think we’ll see anything major happen until Erdogan attains full control. Turkey is slated to hold a referendum on constitutional reform in April, and in the new system the president will hold absolute power. In other words, we’ll be talking about “Sultan Erdogan” in a couple months’ time. Until this happens, nothing of significance will come out of Turkey. Erdogan will continue to be provocative, that’s his style, but we won’t see anything more until the constitution is changed and power is concentrated in his hands.

MPN: The Trump administration seems to have adopted a positive stance toward Brexit, while Trump’s nominee for the U.S. ambassadorship to the EU, Ted Malloch, has made a series of interesting statements recently, stating that the eurozone is headed toward collapse and predicting that Greece will unilaterally depart from the eurozone. What position do you believe we will see from the Trump administration going forward with regard to the EU, the euro, and issues like Brexit and Grexit?

AC: I think that Malloch and the Trump administration view Brexit positively. I believe that following Brexit, Trump will draw Britain closer to the U.S. sphere and put them against EU interests. Let’s not forget that Trump is a businessman and he is looking for certain things from Europe and from NATO members. He’s been clear about this, and I think he will use the United Kingdom, post-Brexit, to get what he wants from Europe, and in a manner which favors the interests of the United States. That’s how Trump operates; he’s a businessman above all.

Regarding Europe, the EU is doing a fine job destroying itself without the assistance of the United States, Trump, or Brexit. The EU, on its own, has managed to be a dysfunctional institution and European officials are performing a “miracle” in managing to destroy the EU from within. It’s nonsense for Brussels to blame Trump and Brexit for the EU’s problems, when Brussels is managing quite nicely on its own to destroy the EU. The EU has no one to blame but itself.

MPN: It’s been two years since the Syriza government took over power in Greece. How do you evaluate the current situation in the country and the first two years of Syriza’s reign in office?

AC: I think that it’s been terrible. Greece has been in an eight or nine year period of slow suffering. We’ve seen the country hollowed out economically and socially. It’s been just an economic crisis that seems to be never-ending, and you see it on the ground when you’re in Athens. The shops are closing, the people really have very, very few options as far as employment and earning an income. The Syriza government, in my opinion, has done everything in its power to make sure that the public sector is okay but the private sector is just marginalized and, I would say, almost demolished. The taxes have just become so sky high that it’s just destroyed any form of entrepreneurship, any form of desire within the people to start businesses, to run a business, because you just can’t pay the high taxes to keep that business open.

It’s not looking good for Greece, and they definitely need to figure out a way to either remove themselves from the euro and find a way to get back to some sort of economic sustainability, or they need to find a way to get that €350 billion debt wiped off the books, and that’s not going to happen. Germany has been very firm on their stance over the debt. But as long as that debt is hanging over the Greeks’ heads, that situation will never improve. It just cannot, it’s fiscally impossible.

MPN: Let’s talk about the site you write for, The Duran. This is a new online news initiative and you are one of its co-founders. Share with us a few words about it.

AC: The Duran is a publication that we started about eight or nine months ago. Myself, Peter Lavelle, Alexander Mercouris and Vladimir Rodzianko are the co-founders of The Duran, and we take an approach to geopolitics and news from a realpolitik standpoint. In other words, we try to see things from a very logical standpoint. The site is not about feel-good values and what should be right and what should be wrong. It takes a look at news from a perspective of how the world is and from the perspective that nation-states have interests, nation-states approach each other with those interests in mind, some states are big and powerful, some states are not big and powerful. The way the world works is not so much through what I would say has been, the last eight years, a value-based kind of outlook, that our values are morally superior to your values. We take an approach that each nation-state has certain interests and they’re going to deal with each other with those interests in mind and create a realpolitik type of an approach to world order.

The Duran is definitely not looking at things from the left, but we’re also not looking at things from the right. We try to take a much more balanced approach and just look at things from a very logical standpoint in terms of how we cover the news. We’re 100 percent independent. We’ve been accused of being Kremlin or Russia stooges. That’s not the case. We’re very transparent and open with our readers, we have live events with our readers where they can ask us questions via Facebook Live. We don’t try to hide our positions as to how we see geopolitics and the news that’s coming out of the U.S., Europe, etc., and we challenge people and leaders to give us their leaders and to engage in debate. That’s the only way we’re going to understand what has become a very complicated world, and it’s not going to get easier. There’s a lot of moving parts, and we’re moving away from U.S. hegemony to a more multipolar type of world order, where China has become a world power, where Russia has become a world power, where the EU is in a bit of disarray, where the United States with Trump and the election [are going through] a very divisive period, so it’s a very challenging time to cover news, but it’s also a very interesting time to cover news.

Mainstream Media’s ‘Victimhood’

Posted on March 6, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Robert Parry

Source: Consortium News

It’s heartwarming that The New York Times and The Washington Post are troubled that President Trump is loosely throwing around accusations of “fake news.” It’s nice and that they now realize that truth does not reliably come from the mouth of every senior government official or from every official report.

The Times is even taking out full-page ads in its own pages to offer truisms about truth: “The truth is hard. The truth is hidden. The truth must be pursued. The truth is hard to hear. The truth is rarely simple. The truth isn’t so obvious. …” On Sunday, those truth truisms ran opposite an alarmist column by Jim Rutenberg entitled, “Will the Real Democracy Lovers Please Stand Up?” Meanwhile, The Washington Post launched its own melodramatic slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

Yet, it was only weeks ago when the Post and Times were eagerly promoting plans for silencing or blacklisting independent news sites that didn’t toe the line on what the U.S. government and its allies were claiming was true.

On Nov. 20, the Times published a lead editorial calling on Facebook and other technology giants to devise algorithms that could eliminate stories that the Times deemed to be “fake.” The Times and other mainstream news outlets – along with a few favored Internet sites – joined a special Google-sponsored task force, called the First Draft Coalition, to decide what is true and what is not. If the Times’ editorial recommendations were followed, the disfavored stories and the sites publishing them would no longer be accessible through popular search engines and platforms, essentially blocking the public’s access to them. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “What to Do About ‘Fake News.’”]

On Thanksgiving Day, the Post ran a front-page story citing an anonymous group, called PropOrNot, blacklisting 200 Web sites, including Consortiumnews.com and other important sources of independent journalism, because we supposedly promoted “Russian propaganda.”

Although PropOrNot and the Post didn’t bother to cite any actual examples or to ask the accused for comment, the point was clear: If you didn’t march in lockstep behind the Official Narrative on, say, the Ukraine crisis or the war in Syria, you were to be isolated, demonized and effectively silenced. In the article, the Post blurred the lines between “fake news” – stories that are simply made up – and what was deemed “propaganda,” in effect, information that didn’t jibe with what the U.S. State Department was saying.

Back then, in November, the big newspapers believed that the truth was easy, simple, obvious, requiring only access to some well-placed government official or a quick reading of the executive summary from some official report. Over the last quarter century or so, the Times, in particular, has made a fetish out of embracing pretty much whatever Officialdom declared to be true. After all, such well-dressed folks with those important-sounding titles couldn’t possibly be lying.

That gullibility went from the serious, such as rejecting overwhelming evidence that Ronald Reagan’s Nicaraguan Contra rebels were deeply involved in drug trafficking, to the silly, trusting the NFL’s absurd Deflategate allegations against Tom Brady. In those “old” days, which apparently ended a few weeks ago, the Times could have run full-page ads, saying “Truth is whatever those in authority say it is.”

In 2002, when the George W. Bush administration was vouching for a motley crew of Iraqi “defectors” describing Saddam Hussein’s hidden WMDs, Iraq’s purchase of some “aluminum tubes” must have been for building nuclear bombs. In 2003, when Secretary of State Colin Powell showed some artist drawings of “mobile chemical weapons labs,” they must really exist – and anyone who doubted Powell’s “slam-dunk” testimony deserved only contempt and ridicule.

When the Obama administration issued a “government assessment” blaming the Syrian military for the sarin gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013, there was no need to scrutinize its dubious assertions or ask for actual proof. To do so made you an “Assad apologist.”

When a bunch of U.S. allies under the effective control of Ukraine’s unsavory SBU intelligence service presented some videos with computer-generated graphics showing Russians supplying the Buk missile that shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, there was no need to examine the holes in the evidence or note that the realistic-looking graphics were fictional and based on dubious assumptions. To do so made you a “Moscow stooge.”

In other words, when the U.S. government was gluing black hats on an “enemy” and white hats on a U.S. “ally,” the Times never seemed to object. Nor did pretty much anyone else in the mainstream media. No one seemed to note that both sides usually deserved gray hats. With very few exceptions – when the State Department or other U.S. agencies were making the charges – the Times and its cohorts simply stopped applying responsible journalistic skepticism.

Of course, there is a problem with “fake news,” i.e., stories that are consciously made up for the purpose of making money from lots of clicks. There are also fact-free conspiracy theories that operate without evidence or in defiance of it. No one hates such bogus stories more than I do — and they have long been a bane of serious journalism, dating back centuries, not just to the last election.

But what the Times, the Post and the rest of the mainstream media have typically ignored is that there are many situations in which the facts are not clear or when there are alternative explanations that could reasonably explain a set of facts. There are even times when the evidence goes firmly against what the U.S. government is claiming. At those moments, skepticism and courage are necessary to challenge false or dubious Official Narratives. You might even say, “The truth is rarely simple. The truth isn’t so obvious…”

A Tough Transition

During the transition from the Obama administration to the Trump team, the Times, the Post and other mainstream media outlets got caught in their own transition from trusting whatever the outgoing officials said to distrusting whatever the incoming officials said. In those final days, big media accepted what President Obama’s intelligence agencies asserted about Russia supposedly interfering in the U.S. election despite the lack of publicly available evidence that could be scrutinized and tested.

Even something as squirrelly as the attack on Trump’s National Security Adviser Michael Flynn – with Obama holdovers citing the never-prosecuted Logan Act from 1799 as the pretext for ginning up some kind of criminal-sounding case that scared Trump into firing Flynn – was treated as legitimate, without serious questions asked. Since Obama officials were doing the feeding, the no-skepticism rule applied to the eating. But whatever statements came from Trump, even his few lucid moments explaining why war with nuclear-armed Russia wasn’t such a great idea, were treated as dangerous nonsense.

When Trump scolded the mainstream press for engaging in “fake news” and then applied the phrase “enemy of the people,” the Times, the Post and the rest went into full victimization-mode. When a few news companies were excluded from a White House news briefing, they all rushed to the barricades to defend freedom of the press. Then, Trump went even further – he rejected his invitation to the White House Correspondents Dinner, the black-tie/evening-gown event where mainstream media stars compete to attract the hottest celebrity guests and hobnob with important government officials, a walking-talking conflict-of-interest-filled evening, an orgy of self-importance.

So, the Times, the Post and their mainstream-media friends now feel under attack. Whereas just weeks ago they were demanding that Google, Facebook and other powerful information platforms throttle those of us who showed professional skepticism toward dubious claims from the U.S. government, now the Times, the Post and the others are insisting that we all rally around them, to defend their journalistic freedom. In another full-page ad on Sunday, the Times wrote: “Truth. It’s more important now than ever.”

I would argue that truth is always important, but especially so when government officials are leading countries toward war, when lives are at stake, whether in Iraq or Syria or Ukraine or the many other global hotspots. At those moments in the recent past, the Times did not treat truth – in all its subtlety and nuance – as important at all.

I would argue, too, that the stakes are raised even higher when propagandists and ideologues are risking the prospect of nuclear war that could kill billions and effectively end human civilization. However, in that case, the American people have seen little truly professional journalism nor a real commitment to the truth. Instead, it’s been much more fun to demonize Russian President Vladimir Putin and paint black-and-white pictures of the evil Russians.

At such moments, those New York Times’ truisms about truth are forgotten: “The truth is rarely simple. The truth isn’t so obvious. …”

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 Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

	You Don’t Have To Wa… on You Don’t Have To Wait For Hal…
	ALL OUT WAR ON THE L… on ALL OUT WAR ON THE LIFE F…
	Pacific.scoop.co.nz… on Killing the Biosphere to Fast-…
	Reid Mukai on Saturday Matinee: Wizards
	Lara/Trace on Saturday Matinee: Wizards

After the Crash

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

Tag Archives: Russia