Russia-Hack Story, Another Media Failure
By Joe Lauria | Consortium News | December 19, 2016
President Obama admitted in his press conference on Friday that his government hasn’t released any evidence yet of Russian interference in the election, but he said some would be coming.
That’s proof that an uncritical press has already printed stories as if true without any evidence just on the say-so of the Central Intelligence Agency, an organization long dedicated to deception, disinformation and meddling in other countries’ elections, not to mention arranging coups to overthrow elected governments.
Forty years ago, the established press would have been skeptical to buy anything the CIA was selling after a series of Congressional committees exposed a raft of criminal acts and abuses of power by the CIA and other intelligence agencies. Today’s journalists work for newspapers that fraudulently still bear the names New York Times and Washington Post, but they are no longer the same papers.
The vast U.S. news media also is not the same. The working journalist today is living off the reputation for skepticism and determination to get beyond government pronouncements that was established by their papers decades ago. Rather than add to that reputation, the credibility of the biggest newspapers continues to erode.
Both the Times and the Post should today be stained by their credulous reporting of official lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Instead of showing professional skepticism, the big papers became cheerleaders for an illegal invasion that killed hundreds of thousands of people and left behind a disaster that still reverberates today. Neither the Times nor the Post suffered any consequences and have picked up where they left off, still uncritically reporting anonymous U.S. officials without demanding proof.
On the contrary, any reporter who did demand evidence was in danger of career consequences. An editor for a newspaper chain that I was reporting for called me to chew me out because he said my stories were not in support of the Iraq war effort. He told me his son was a Marine. I told him I was sure he was proud but that my job was to report the news based on the evidence. On the very day when the invasion began, I was fired.
Of course, the television networks, including CNN, were most egregious for selling the war. I was shocked when I heard reporter Kyra Philips from aboard a U.S. warship in the Persian Gulf gleefully announce: “Welcome to Shock and Awe!” just after a cruise missile was shown being fired. The people it killed on the receiving end were almost never mentioned.
CNN, which has accepted Russian interference in the U.S. election as a given, is also living off its reputation of a once very serious news organization. On its very first broadcast on June 1, 1980, Cable News Network aired as its second story a lengthy investigative report on faulty fuel gauges in commercial airliners. It broadcast an in-depth live report from the Middle East, and veteran newsman Daniel Schorr interviewed and challenged President Jimmy Carter.
But 1980 was when the period of skeptical, professional journalism that demanded proof from its own government started to decline as Ronald Reagan was elected. He worked to stamp out the skepticism bred from Watergate, Vietnam and the Congressional intelligence hearings. Reagan did this, in part, by resurrecting the most obvious and adolescent myths about America. And he worked with the CIA to manage America’s perceptions away from the critical thinking of the 1970s, as journalist Robert Parry has extensively reported.
There have been a few periods in American journalism when demanding proof from government was expected. The muckraking period led by Lincoln Steffens of the Progressive Era was one. The 1970s was another. But mostly it has been a business filled with careerists who live vicariously through the powerful people they cover, disregarding the even greater power the press has to cut the powerful down to size.
Egregious Case
The reporting on the supposed Russian hack of the elections is one of the most egregious examples of unprofessional journalism since 2003, particularly because of the stakes involved.
There have now been a slew of stories, each of which seems to offer a new promise of evidence, such as one under the ludicrous New York Times headline, “C.I.A. Judgment on Russia Built on Swell of Evidence.” But when you read the piece, its only sources are still unnamed intelligence officials. A later 8,000-word Times article was the same, as though the length by itself was supposed to lend it more credibility.
If there were any doubts, Obama wiped them away with his admission that no evidence had been released. Worse still, perhaps, is that counter-evidence has been suppressed, another consistent feature of today’s journalism.
The former British diplomat Craig Murray, has written and told at least two radio interviewers that the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta emails were not obtained by WikiLeaks through hacks, but instead from leaks by American insiders.
This story was totally ignored by established media until the Daily Mail in London reported it online, but incorrectly said Murray had himself received the leak. In the U.S., only The Washington Times reported the story, quoting the Mail. But that story took a swipe at Murray’s reputation, merely saying he was “removed from his diplomatic post amid allegations of misconduct.” In fact, Murray was let go for blowing the whistle on U.K. use of evidence extracted by torture by the corrupt Karimov administration in Uzbekistan. The rest of the Washington Times story just repeats what every other reporter has written about Russian interference.
Two Obstacles
Even if it were proven that Russian government operatives hacked these emails as part of their intelligence gathering, there remains the additional evidentiary hurdle that they then supplied the data to WikiLeaks, when the recipients, including WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, say the source or sources weren’t Russians.
It’s also noteworthy that none of the information in the emails has been shown to be false. The leaks provided real insights into how the DNC favored Hillary Clinton over Sen. Bernie Sanders and revealed some shady practices of the Clinton Foundation as well as the contents of Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street bankers that she had tried to hide. In other words, the leaks gave voters more information about Hillary Clinton, confirming what many voters already believed: that she was beholden to the financial sector and benefited from her insider connections. But none of that was particularly news.
It is important to note, too, that Obama himself in his press conference said there is zero evidence Russia tried to hack into the electronic voting systems. In fact it now emerges from dogged reporting by a local Atlanta TV station that the Department of Homeland Security appears to have been behind earlier attempted hacks of voting systems in several states.
So, it would be virtually impossible to prove that the DNC and Podesta emails were the deciding factor in the election. Indeed, before the election, pro-Clinton corporate media downplayed the email-related stories and Podesta said the emails may have been faked (although none of them appears to have been made up).
The emails also revealed numerous instances of reporters colluding with the Clinton campaign before publishing stories, something no hard-boiled editor from an earlier era would have stood for.
Democratic Misdirection
By focusing on the alleged Russian role now, Democrats also have diverted attention from other factors that likely were far more consequential to the outcome, such as Clinton largely ignoring the Rust Belt and not going once to Wisconsin or her calling many Trump supporters “deplorables” and “irredeemable.” Further, Clinton was a quintessential Establishment candidate in an anti-Establishment year.
And, there was the fact that in the campaign’s final week, FBI Director James Comey briefly reopened the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server while Secretary of State, a move that reminded many Americans why they distrusted Clinton.
Yet, as the mainstream U.S. media now hypes as flat fact the supposed Russian role, there remains the inconvenient truth that the Obama administration’s intelligence community has presented no verifiable evidence that the Russians were the source of the leaks.
Demanding to see the evidence on Russia, the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee called the CIA, FBI and Office of the Director of National Intelligence to a closed-door briefing. Though these agencies are obligated to show up in response to requests from their Congressional oversight committees, the three agencies flatly refused. Then, DNI James Clapper refused to brief concerned Electoral College voters whose votes for or against Trump may have been influenced by the news media frenzy about alleged Russian interference. Clapper reportedly is preparing a report on Russia’s “hacking” for Congress.
Political Strategy
The Russia fiasco appears to have been part of a political strategy that I first wrote about on Nov. 5 – three days before the election – that a fallback plan, if Trump won a narrow victory, would be to influence the electors to reject Trump when they assemble in state capitals on Dec. 19. Playing the Russian card was designed to appeal to the electors’ patriotism to defend their country against foreign interference.
Assuming that Electoral College long shot failed, there would be one more chance for Clinton to stop Trump: on Jan. 6, when Congress meets to certify the election. The Clinton camp needs one Senator and one Representative to sign an objection to Trump’s certification (no doubt citing Russia) forcing a vote by both chambers.
If Trump loses – and there are a number of anti-Trump Republicans in Congress – the election would be thrown to the House where Clinton or a more conventional Republican could be selected as President.
Given those stakes for the American democracy and the risks inherent in U.S. relations with nuclear-armed Russia, the fact that the most influential establishment media has bought into this extremely flimsy story about Russian hacking should condemn them further in the minds of the public.
Joe Lauria is a veteran foreign-affairs journalist based at the U.N. since 1990. He has written for the Boston Globe, the London Daily Telegraph, the Johannesburg Star, the Montreal Gazette, the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers. He can be reached at joelauria@gmail.com and followed on Twitter at @unjoe.
Israel renews travel ban against Jerusalemite Palestinian woman
Ma’an – December 19, 2016
JERUSALEM – Israeli authorities renewed a travel ban against a Palestinian woman from occupied East Jerusalem on Sunday, after she has already been banned from the Old City’s Al-Aqsa Mosque compound as well as from the occupied West Bank.
Khadija Khweis told a Ma’an that Israeli intelligence summoned her to Jerusalem’s Russian Compound police station, where she was handed a renewable one-month travel prohibition order signed by the Israeli Minister of Interior.
A previous one-month travel ban against Khweis had expired on Wednesday.
According to Khweis, the new order read that she was prevented from traveling for “security reasons.”
“They say I have connections with the Murabitat group and think I could travel on missions to promote them,” she said.
In addition to being banned from international travel, Khweis has been prohibited from traveling to the West Bank for six months, an order that she said was still effective.
Furthermore, Khweis is on Israel’s so-called “blacklist” created by Israeli police in August 2015 to deny dozens of Palestinians access to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound.
Israeli authorities have also revoked Khweis and her family’s national insurance allowance.
In December last year, Khweis was banned from the entirety of the Old City as well as West Jerusalem.
She was also among a number of Palestinian women who were assaulted by Israeli forces when they were denied entry to Al-Aqsa for their affiliation with the Murabitat, a group of women who gather at the compound to demonstrate against what they see as increasing Israeli control over the holy site and provocative visits by Israeli rightists under armed guard.
In September last year, former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon outlawed the Murabitat and their male counterpart, the Murabitun.
The third holiest site in Islam, the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound is also venerated as Judaism’s most holy place as it sits where Jews believe the First and Second Temples once stood.
The fate of Jerusalem has been a focal point of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for decades, with numerous tensions arising over Israeli threats regarding the status of non-Jewish religious sites in the city, and the “Judaization” of East Jerusalem through detention campaigns targeting Palestinians, Israeli settlement construction, and mass demolitions of Palestinian homes.
Facebook’s ‘anti-fake news’ plan looks like effort to curb alternative media
By Bryan MacDonald | RT | December 18, 2016
There are serious concerns over a social media giant’s plans to debunk spurious news stories. And many are puzzled about the real agenda at play.
You don’t need to worship at the altar of George Orwell to see where this is going. Under tremendous assault from the American establishment media over the proliferation of what they define as ’fake news’ on the platform, internet behemoth Facebook has finally caved in and agreed to regulate content. While, in principle, the concept sounds relatively noble, the manner in which it’s proposed to implement it merits many questions.
Among them are the continuing dangers of American domination of the world wide web and the liberal bias of that country’s popular press. But most worrying is the uncharted territory we are entering. Because there has never been a media portal as dominant as Facebook. In the past, big broadcasters or newsagent chains might have enjoyed outsized influence, but Mark Zuckerbeg’s firm is an effective monopoly.
Whereas papers have always been curated by editors, their power was limited by the sheer number of competitors in every national market. And the more different they were, the better for society in general. However, there is only one Facebook, and its power, in this regard, is extraordinary.
Of course, another big problem here is that one person’s “fake news” could be another’s truth. And that’s before we mention how some of the outlets pressuring Facebook are often guilty of making up stories themselves.
Strange Bedfellows
To filter content, Facebook has joined up with Poynter, a self-proclaimed “international fact-checking network,” which presents itself as a neutral body with great integrity. Yet, a cursory glance at its funding sources is enough to set alarm bells ringing. They include Pierre Omidyar, George Soros and Washington’s National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA soft-power cutout. As it happens, regular RT readers will remember these three as the primary foreign backers of Ukraine’s Maidan coup in 2014.
Thus, it’s clear that this project could easily wind up as some sort of “ministry of truth” with only organizations who adhere to liberal Washington’s official line permitted unfettered access to Facebook’s primary news feeds. And this is very dangerous.
Additionally, the fact that Poynter’s sponsors, which also include Bill Gates and Google, almost uniformly supported Hillary Clinton in the recent US election is very troubling. Because it’s another indication of how, having endured a series of electoral setbacks this year, the globalist elite is now effectively trying to block out dissenting voices.
That said, nobody is disputing whether “fake news” is a problem. It’s just hard to find agreement on its definition. For instance, very few in the west would define the Washington Post, Guardian, Daily Telegraph or New York Times as providers of fictional reportage, but viewed from Moscow it’s often a different story.
Mainstream Muck
Only last month, WaPo accused 200 non-mainstream sites of acting on behalf of the Kremlin, in a story which has been definitively debunked by numerous credible sources. And, just last week, the NYT carried a front page story alleging that Vladimir Putin was using “kompromat” to destroy the reputations of his political opponents. For ‘proof’ they used the case of Vladimir Bukovsky, who was being investigated by British police over possession of child pornography.
The paper’s readers were greeted with this soft-soap intro from correspondent Andrew Higgins: “His indomitable will steeled by a dozen years in the Soviet gulag, decades of sparring with the K.G.B. and a bout of near fatal heart disease, Vladimir K. Bukovsky, a tireless opponent of Soviet leaders and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, is not a man easily put off his stride.” And to back up his yarn, Higgins made a series of unsubstantiated claims linking Russian state meddling to other similar schemes.
Yet, sadly for Higgins – and Bukovsky, of course – his hero admitted a few days later that he actually collected the child porn images himself, as “research.”
Then there’s the Guardian, where its former Moscow correspondent Luke Harding has been alleging for years that Putin is the richest man in Europe, if not on earth. A statement that is frequently repeated in similar outlets, where his fortune – without any explanation – suddenly leaped from $40 billion to $200 billion recently, according to the same Washington Post.
These journals of renown base their figures on a single, very shaky, source. And we can’t forget the Daily Telegraph, which appears to have given up on using professional journalists to cover Russia, and has produced some right porkies in recent times. Including outrageous stuff like Putin jetting to Switzerland, incognito, to oversee the birth of a love child and Moscow developing a Star Trek-esque teleportation device.
Are all these not examples of “fake news?” But given that they are establishment names in the western press, don’t expect Poynter to subject them to the same treatment as newer alternative outlets. And this is the problem with the entire exercise.
Fragile Foundations
The list of signatories to the International Fact-Checking Network also sets alarm bells ringing. For they include some fairly dubious organizations. Take Politifact, for example. This group has been accused of having a left-wing bias and openly favoring Clinton during the US election campaign. As Breitbart observed: “When Trump said Clinton wants “open borders,” PolitiFact deemed his statement “mostly false” — despite the fact that Clinton admitted as much in a private, paid speech to a Brazilian bank on May 16, 2013. “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders,” she said at the time.”
There is no doubt that blatantly made up, let alone poorly fact-checked, stories are poisoning political discourse. And Facebook is right to tackle the type of companies who produce twaddle such as “Hillary invented the Aids virus” or “Trump wants to distribute Mein Kampf to school kids” or whatever nonsense is being pushed today.
However, will it also censure “respected” mainstream outlets who allege that Putin has stolen $200 billion for himself or is planting child porn on dissidents?
Because unless they are also labelled with the “fake news” badge, this looks more like an exercise in the US liberal establishment trying to gain control of the distribution of news on social media, as they once did with newspapers and broadcasters.
Orwell might have called it a sort of “Minitrue.”
UN Security Council unanimously passes resolution on monitoring Aleppo evacuations
RT | December 19, 2016
The UN Security Council has unanimously passed a resolution requiring the monitoring of evacuations from Aleppo.
The resolution, initially drafted by France, was originally called a “disaster” by Russia’s UN envoy Vitaly Churkin.
However, Moscow and Paris came to an agreement on the text after more than three hours of closed-door consultations by the Council on Sunday.
The resolution asked UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon “to take urgent steps to make arrangements, including security arrangements in consultation with interested parties, to allow the observation by the United Nations and other relevant institutions of the well-being of civilians… inside the eastern districts of the city of Aleppo.”
It asked for “adequate, neutral monitoring and direct observation” of the evacuations to take place, as well as for all parties to provide monitors with “safe, immediate, and unimpeded access.”
The evacuations are part of a Russia- and Turkey-brokered deal between the Syrian government and opposition. It allows for the evacuations of militants and their families from eastern Aleppo, in exchange for the departure of civilians from the northern rebel-held villages of al-Foua and Kefraya, Idlib province.
Syria’s UN ambassador, Bashar Jaafari, said the final evacuations of militants are currently taking place in Aleppo, and the city will be “clean” by Monday evening.
“The last terrorists… are evacuating their strongholds and Aleppo this evening will be clean,” he said, as quoted by Reuters.
British cluster bombs used in Saudi Arabia’s Yemen campaign, research finds
RT | December 19, 2016
Despite strenuous denials, UK-made cluster bombs are indeed being used by Britain’s theocratic ally Saudi Arabia in its war on impoverished Yemen, according to the government’s own inquiries.
The new details have emerged through a leak to the Guardian from sources which claim that internal investigations support claims in the media that the outlawed munitions are in use.
The source said that the findings had been known by the government for up to a month.
However, the paper has also been told that Saudi Arabia – a major UK ally and one of its top arms customers – has not confirmed itself that the banned munitions are being used.
The revelations seem set to pile even more pressure on the UK to stop selling arms to the authoritarian regime.
The UK is a signatory to the 2010 treaty banning cluster munitions, which drop many tiny bomblets from the main device and can create what is in effect a minefield.
A senior defense source told the Guardian that the issue had been “raised at the highest possible levels and we have been trying to establish definitively for some time [if cluster bombs have been used].”
The “highest levels” are said in this case to include Defence Secretary Michael Fallon.
In statement Monday after a spokesman for the military said: “The Government takes such allegations very seriously.
“We have analysed the case carefully using all available information, considering all possibilities, and raised the issue with the Saudi-led coalition.”
The UK has also been involved in training Saudi forces in air warfare skills and artillery, it emerged in 2016. Royal Air Force (RAF) personnel are also embedded in Saudi operations headquarters.
It was reported in April that courses were being run by RAF officers as recently as 2015 on ‘international targeting’ over three separate three-week blocks.
This included training on the Storm Shadow missile, which is launched from aircraft to destroy enemy bunkers.
Gunnery instruction on targeting and locating enemy gun batteries was also carried out by a seven-strong detachment of personnel from the Royal Artillery.
The artillery team delivered 52 hours of training to Saudi gunners and included a senior major, a captain, a sergeant major and a sergeant.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) said the course had been delivered to “a mixed group of soldiers and officers” from the Royal Saudi Land Forces (RSLF) field artillery.
The military said its personnel were not involved in “carrying out strikes, directing or conducting operations in Yemen or selecting targets, and are not involved in the Saudi targeting decision-making process.”