Afghan Papers Inadvertently Document WaPo’s Role in Spreading Official Lies
By Joshua Cho | FAIR | December 18, 2019
The Washington Post’s publication of the “Afghanistan Papers” (12/9/19) unveiled over 2,000 pages of unpublished notes of interviews with US officials involved in the Afghanistan War, from a project led by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) to investigate waste and fraud. Hailed by some as the “Pentagon Papers of Our Generation” after the Post won access to those documents under the Freedom of Information Act in a three-year legal battle, the Post’s exposé found that senior US officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.
The paper published direct remarks on the war by US officials who assumed that “their remarks would not be made public”:
“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to US military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”
While more explicit admissions of deception on the part of US officials involved in wars are always appreciated, one question rarely discussed among the reports and opinion pieces praising the “Afghanistan Papers” is what this scoop says about the Washington Post.
If the Post is now publishing material demonstrating that US officials have been “following the same talking points for 18 years,” emphasizing how they are “making progress,” “especially” when the war is “going badly,” shouldn’t the paper acknowledge that it has been cheerleading this same line for all of those 18 years? Doesn’t it have a responsibility to examine how it served as a primary vehicle for those officials to spread these same “talking points” to spin the coverage in the desired fashion?
FAIR has been tracking the Post’s coverage of the Afghanistan War from the very beginning, when the paper—along with the rest of corporate media—was actively following the Bush administration’s “guidance” on how to cover the war. In 2001, a FAIR survey (11/2/01) of the Post’s op-ed pages for three weeks following the September 11 attacks found that
columns calling for or assuming a military response to the attacks were given a great deal of space, while opinions urging diplomatic and international law approaches as an alternative to military action were nearly nonexistent.
Eight years later, FAIR (3/1/09) found that the Post’s cheerleading coverage didn’t change much from 2001, as 7 out of 9 Post op-eds and 4 out of 5 editorials supported some kind of military escalation from the day Barack Obama was elected president (11/4/08) through March 1, 2009, as the US was debating a “surge” of additional troops in Afghanistan later that year.
Another study (Extra!, 11/1/09) of the first ten months of the Post’s opinion columns that same year found that
pro-war columns outnumbered antiwar columns by more than 10 to 1: Of 67 Post columns on US military policy in Afghanistan, 61 supported a continued war, while just six expressed antiwar views. Of the pro-war columns, 31 were for escalation and 30 for an alternative strategy.
The Post offered this lopsided coverage even though there were several polls at the time showing a majority of the US public opposed the war, because they believed that the Afghan War was “not worth fighting.”
The Post also has a history of facilitating official spin for the war. When WikiLeaks posted tens of thousands of classified intelligence documents related to the Afghanistan War, FAIR (7/30/10) found that the Post either dismissed them as not being as important as the Pentagon Papers (7/27/10), or absurdly spun the leaks as good news for the US war effort (7/27/10) because the “release could compel President Obama to explain more forcefully the war’s importance,” and because they “bolstered Obama’s decision in December to pour more troops and money into a war effort that had not received sufficient attention or resources from the Bush administration.”
The Post also buried attempts by whistleblowers and other journalists who were working to expose official lies and war crimes in Afghanistan. When US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning was sentenced to serve 35 years in prison for sharing intelligence documents that first exposed what the “Afghanistan Papers” are now corroborating, the Post, along with other corporate outlets, largely neglected Manning’s legal trials and punishment (FAIR, 12/4/12, 6/18/14, 1/18/17, 4/1/19). The New York Times, to its credit, did give Manning space for an op-ed (6/14/19) to explain why she risked her freedom to expose matters that the US military recorded but left unreported, including hundreds of US military attacks on Afghan civilians. The Post, for its part, found room to publish frequent op-eds by the Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon (e.g., 11/16/09, 6/26/10, 6/3/11, 2/10/13, 7/12/13) spouting the same optimistic US official talking points that the Post’s “Afghanistan Papers” has now exposed as lies (FAIR, 1/3/14).
In fact, one major reason why the Afghanistan Papers are unnecessary to discern deceit from US officials is that—as Michael Parenti pointed out in The Face of Imperialism—when US officials constantly provide new and different justifications for invasions, it’s a sign that they’re being dishonest, not incompetent.
The Post (12/9/19) admits this when it mentions that the US “largely accomplished what it set out to do,” with Al Qaeda and Taliban officials “dead, captured or in hiding,” yet “veered off in directions that had little to do with Al Qaeda or 9/11.” This is consistent with FAIR’s finding (Extra!, 7/11) that corporate media largely ignored the question of whether to end the Afghanistan War after the ostensible goal of the invasion—to capture or kill the leader of the group that carried out the September 11 attack—was [allegedly] accomplished in the death of Osama bin Laden.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that the Post’s Afghanistan Papers have inadvertently exposed the Post as a subservient accomplice in disseminating US official lies; corporate media rely on official sources for free content and “scoops” to subsidize their journalism, which often spreads dishonest but convenient talking points by these same sources to retain “access” to this information, trustworthy or not (Extra!, 5/02; New York Times, 4/20/08; FAIR, 12/12/19).
Political cartoonist and journalist Ted Rall pointed out, in an account (Common Dreams, 12/11/19) of being marginalized by corporate outlets like the Post :
“The Afghanistan Papers” is a bright, shining lie by omission. Yes, our military and civilian leaders lied to us about Afghanistan. But they could never have spread their murderous BS—thousands of US soldiers and tens of thousands of Afghans killed, trillions of dollars wasted—without media organizations like the Washington Post, which served as unquestioning government stenographers.
Press outlets like the Post and New York Times weren’t merely idiots used to disseminate pro-war propaganda. They actively censored people who knew we never should have gone into Afghanistan and tried to tell American voters the truth.
It’s this mutually beneficial relationship between the need for corporate media outlets like the Post for “access” to US official sources, and US officials who need corporate media outlets to propagate their preferred spin on US foreign policy to manipulate public opinion, that explains what the Afghanistan Papers expose as the Post’s own role in deceiving the US public. It’s why the Post’s coverage and editorial board can argue that the Trump administration shouldn’t “abandon the country in haste” (even though it’s been 18 years), and rally around the US’s “forever war” in Afghanistan (FAIR, 1/31/19, 9/11/19), even as the paper investigates the official lies the continuing occupation depends on.
Of course, this is also the reason why it’s systemically impossible for corporate outlets like the Post to take the opportunity to raise more substantive and provocative questions about whether deceit is a constant and essential aspect of US foreign policy, and not merely confined to isolated military invasions of “quagmire” countries like Vietnam and Afghanistan, despite the Afghanistan Papers providing a perfect opportunity to do so. To say nothing of challenging a worldview that invokes “winnable” wars, in which predictions of increasing numbers of (enemy) human deaths are best described as “rosy.”
There’s quite a long history of US media assisting officials in fabricating moral pretexts for invasion—from fictional accounts of North Vietnamese attacks on American destroyer ships in the Gulf of Tonkin (FAIR, 8/5/17), to conflating very different Islamic groups like the Taliban and Al Qaeda, or claims that formerly US-backed dictator Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs and the intent to use them against the US (CounterPunch, 6/11/14; FAIR, 3/19/07).
Observers note that the Afghanistan Papers “only confirm what we already know” (Daily Beast, 12/14/19), or that “the shocking thing about the Post stories… is how unshocking they are” (Atlantic, 12/9/19); even the Washington Post (12/12/19) reminds us that only people who “haven’t been paying attention” to the Afghan War are “surprised” by what’s found in the Afghanistan Papers.
Perhaps instead of pursuing FOIA requests to confirm the obvious, the Post could just interrogate its own contradictory coverage of the Afghan War and stop functioning as credulous mouthpieces for the US government. But to do that would also require confronting the lie that this entire so-called “War on Terror” has any moral credibility, when the US is a leading terrorist state that consciously pursues imperial policies that inflame hatred against the US to serve corporate interests (FAIR, 3/13/19, 11/22/19).
Absent that, an exercise like the Afghanistan Papers come off more as a “please consider” note to the Pulitzer judges than as an earnest effort to use the spotlight of journalistic investigation to speak truth to power and halt the ongoing, generation-long destruction of a foreign nation.
NSA has been ‘lying to the courts all along,’ says whistleblower, as judges give warrantless surveillance the thumbs-up
National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters in Ft. Meade, Maryland © Reuters / Larry Downing
RT | December 21, 2019
The National Security Agency can gather the data of US citizens without a warrant – as long as it gathers this data by mistake, a court has ruled. However, this suits the agency just fine, whistleblower William Binney told RT.
The NSA is permitted to gather data on US citizens abroad, or “foreign connected” Americans at home. The dragnet surveillance operation necessary to gather this information also sucks up data on millions of Americans with no foreign contacts, a process critics say is unconstitutional.
On Wednesday, the 2nd Court of Appeals in New York declared this “incidental collection” of information permissible. The NSA has maintained that it is incapable of separating properly and improperly gathered data, but former NSA Technical Director William Binney told RT that this is simply untrue.
“They’ve been lying to the courts all along,” Binney said. “They’ve had the capability to sort that stuff out. It’s just that they don’t want to.”
“This gives them power over everyone, the ability to look into political opponents like they did with President Trump,” he continued.
While the court ruling gives the NSA free rein to suck up data on Americans’ phone and internet communications, it did not authorize the US’ other intelligence and law enforcement agencies to dig through this data. However, according to a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court ruling issued last year, the FBI accessed this data trove some 3.1 million times in 2017.
Did John Brennan’s CIA Create Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks?
By Larry C Johnson | Sic Semper Tyrannis | December 20, 2019
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report insists that Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks were created by Russia’s military intelligence organization, the GRU, as part of a Russian plot to meddle in the U.S. 2016 Presidential Election. But this is a lie. Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks were created by Brennan’s CIA and this action by the CIA should be a target of U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation. Let me explain why.
Let us start with the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment aka ICA. Only three agencies of the 17 in the U.S. intelligence community contributed to and coordinated on the ICA–the FBI, the CIA and NSA. In the preamble to the ICA, you can read the following explanation about methodology:
When Intelligence Community analysts use words such as “we assess” or “we judge,” they are conveying an analytic assessment or judgment
To be clear, the phrase,“We assess”, is intel community jargon for “opinion”. If there was actual evidence or source material for a judgment the writer of the assessment would state, “According to a reliable source” or “knowledgeable source” or “documentary evidence.”
Pay close attention to what the analysts writing the ICA stated about the GRU and Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks:
We assess with high confidence that the GRU used the Guccifer 2.0 persona, DCLeaks.com, and WikiLeaks to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets.
- Guccifer 2.0, who claimed to be an independent Romanian hacker, made multiple contradictory statements and false claims about his likely Russian identity throughout the election. Press reporting suggests more than one person claiming to be Guccifer 2.0 interacted with journalists.
- Content that we assess was taken from e-mail accounts targeted by the GRU in March 2016 appeared on DCLeaks.com starting in June.
We assess with high confidence that the GRU relayed material it acquired from the DNC and senior Democratic officials to WikiLeaks. Moscow most likely chose WikiLeaks because of its self-proclaimed reputation for authenticity. Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries.
Not one piece of corroborating intelligence. It is all based on opinion and strong belief. There was no human source report or electronic intercept pointing to a relationship between the GRU and the two alleged creations of the GRU–Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com.
Now consider the spin that Robert Mueller put on this opinion in his report on possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Mueller bluffs the unsuspecting reader into believing that it is a proven fact that Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks were Russian assets. But he is relying on a mere opinion from a handpicked group of intel analysts working under the direction of then CIA Director John Brennan.Here’s Mueller’s take (I apologize for the lengthy quote but it is important that you read how the Mueller team presents this):
DCLeaks
“The GRU began planning the releases at least as early as April 19, 2016, when Unit 26165 registered the domain dcleaks.com through a service that anonymized the registrant.137 Unit 26165 paid for the registration using a pool of bitcoin that it had mined.138 The dcleaks.com landing page pointed to different tranches of stolen documents, arranged by victim or subject matter. Other dcleaks.com pages contained indexes of the stolen emails that were being released (bearing the sender, recipient, and date of the email). To control access and the timing of releases, pages were sometimes password-protected for a period of time and later made unrestricted to the public.
Starting in June 2016, the GRU posted stolen documents onto the website dcleaks.com, including documents stolen from a number of individuals associated with the Clinton Campaign. These documents appeared to have originated from personal email accounts (in particular, Google and Microsoft accounts), rather than the DNC and DCCC computer networks. DCLeaks victims included an advisor to the Clinton Campaign, a former DNC employee and Clinton Campaign employee, and four other campaign volunteers.139 The GRU released through dcleaks.com thousands of documents, including personal identifying and financial information, internal correspondence related to the“Clinton Campaign and prior political jobs, and fundraising files and information.140
GRU officers operated a Facebook page under the DCLeaks moniker, which they primarily used to promote releases of materials.141 The Facebook page was administered through a small number of preexisting GRU-controlled Facebook accounts.142
GRU officers also used the DCLeaks Facebook account, the Twitter account @dcleaks__, and the email account dcleaksproject@gmail.com to communicate privately with reporters and other U.S. persons. GRU officers using the DCLeaks persona gave certain reporters early access to archives of leaked files by sending them links and passwords to pages on the dcleaks.com website that had not yet become public. For example, on July 14, 2016, GRU officers operating under the DCLeaks persona sent a link and password for a non-public DCLeaks webpage to a U.S. reporter via the Facebook account.143 Similarly, on September 14, 2016, GRU officers sent reporters Twitter direct messages from @dcleaks_, with a password to another non-public part of the dcleaks.com website.144
The dcleaks.com website remained operational and public until March 2017.”
Guccifer 2.0
On June 14, 2016, the DNC and its cyber-response team announced the breach of the DNC network and suspected theft of DNC documents. In the statements, the cyber-response team alleged that Russian state-sponsored actors (which they referred to as “Fancy Bear”) were responsible for the breach.145 Apparently in response to that announcement, on June 15, 2016, GRU officers using the persona Guccifer 2.0 created a WordPress blog. In the hours leading up to the launch of that WordPress blog, GRU officers logged into a Moscow-based server used and managed by Unit 74455 and searched for a number of specific words and phrases in English, including “some hundred sheets,” “illuminati,” and “worldwide known.” Approximately two hours after the last of those searches, Guccifer 2.0 published its first post, attributing the DNC server hack to a lone Romanian hacker and using several of the unique English words and phrases that the GRU officers had searched for that day.146
That same day, June 15, 2016, the GRU also used the Guccifer 2.0 WordPress blog to begin releasing to the public documents stolen from the DNC and DCCC computer networks.
The Guccifer 2.0 persona ultimately released thousands of documents stolen from the DNC and DCCC in a series of blog posts between June 15, 2016 and October 18, 2016.147 Released documents included opposition research performed by the DNC (including a memorandum analyzing potential criticisms of candidate Trump), internal policy documents (such as recommendations on how to address politically sensitive issues), analyses of specific congressional races, and fundraising documents. Releases were organized around thematic issues, such as specific states (e.g., Florida and Pennsylvania) that were perceived as competitive in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Beginning in late June 2016, the GRU also used the Guccifer 2.0 persona to release documents directly to reporters and other interested individuals. Specifically, on June 27, 2016, Guccifer 2.0 sent an email to the news outlet The Smoking Gun offering to provide “exclusive access to some leaked emails linked [to] Hillary Clinton’s staff.”148 The GRU later sent the reporter a password and link to a locked portion of the dcleaks.com website that contained an archive of emails stolen by Unit 26165 from a Clinton Campaign volunteer in March 2016.149 “That the Guccifer 2.0 persona provided reporters access to a restricted portion of the DCLeaks website tends to indicate that both personas were operated by the same or a closely-related group of people.150
The GRU continued its release efforts through Guccifer 2.0 into August 2016. For example, on August 15, 2016, the Guccifer 2.0 persona sent a candidate for the U.S. Congress documents related to the candidate’s opponent.151 On August 22, 2016, the Guccifer 2.0 persona transferred approximately 2.5 gigabytes of Florida-related data stolen from the DCCC to a U.S. blogger covering Florida politics.152 On August 22, 2016, the Guccifer 2.0 persona sent a U.S. reporter documents stolen from the DCCC pertaining to the Black Lives Matter movement.153”
Wow. Sounds pretty convincing. The documents referencing communications by DCLeaks or Guccifer 2.0 with Wikileaks are real. What is not true is that these entities were GRU assets.
In October 2015 John Brennan reorganized the CIA. As part of that reorganization he created a new directorate–DIRECTORATE OF DIGITAL INNOVATION. Its mission was to “manipulate digital footprints.” In other words, this was the Directorate that did the work of creating Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks. One of their specialties, creating Digital Dust.
We also know, thanks to Wikileaks, that the CIA was using software specifically designed to mask CIA activity and make it appear like it was done by a foreign entity. Wikipedia describes the Vault 7 documents:
Vault 7 is a series of documents that WikiLeaks began to publish on 7 March 2017, that detail activities and capabilities of the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency to perform electronic surveillance and cyber warfare. The files, dated from 2013–2016, include details on the agency’s software capabilities, such as the ability to compromise cars, smart TVs,[1] web browsers (including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera Software ASA),[2][3][4] and the operating systems of most smartphones (including Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android), as well as other operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux[5][6
One of the tools in Vault 7 carries the innocuous name, MARBLE. Hackernews explains the purpose and function of MARBLE:
Dubbed “Marble,” the part 3 of CIA files contains 676 source code files of a secret anti-forensic Marble Framework, which is basically an obfuscator or a packer used to hide the true source of CIA malware.
The CIA’s Marble Framework tool includes a variety of different algorithm with foreign language text intentionally inserted into the malware source code to fool security analysts and falsely attribute attacks to the wrong nation.Marble is used to hamper[ing] forensic investigators and anti-virus companies from attributing viruses, trojans and hacking attacks to the CIA,” says the whistleblowing site.
“… for example by pretending that the spoken language of the malware creator was not American English, but Chinese, but then showing attempts to conceal the use of Chinese, drawing forensic investigators even more strongly to the wrong conclusion,” WikiLeaks explains.
So guess what gullible techies “discovered” in mid-June 2016? The meta data in the Guccifer 2.0 communications had “Russian fingerprints.”
We still don’t know who he is or whether he works for the Russian government, but one thing is for sure: Guccifer 2.0—the nom de guerre of the person claiming he hacked the Democratic National Committee and published hundreds of pages that appeared to prove it—left behind fingerprints implicating a Russian-speaking person with a nostalgia for the country’s lost Soviet era.
Exhibit A in the case is this document created and later edited in the ubiquitous Microsoft Word format. Metadata left inside the file shows it was last edited by someone using the computer name “Феликс Эдмундович.” That means the computer was configured to use the Russian language and that it was connected to a Russian-language keyboard. More intriguing still, “Феликс Эдмундович” is the colloquial name that translates to Felix Dzerzhinsky, the 20th Century Russian statesman who is best known for founding the Soviet secret police. (The metadata also shows that the purported DNC strategy memo was originally created by someone named Warren Flood, which happens to be the name of a LinkedIn user claiming to provide strategy and data analytics services to Democratic candidates.)
Just use your common sense. If the Russians were really trying to carry out a covert cyberattack, do you really think they are so sloppy and incompetent to insert the name of the creator of the Soviet secret police in the metadata? No. The Russians are not clowns. This was a clumsy attempt to frame the Russians.
Why would the CIA do this? The CIA knew that Podesta’s emails had been hacked and were circulating on the internet. But they had no evidence about the identity of the culprit. If they had such evidence, they would have cited it in the 2017 ICA.
The U.S. intelligence community became aware around May 26, 2016 that someone with access to the DNC network was offering those emails to Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Julian Assange and people who spoke to him indicate that the person was Seth Rich. Whether or not it was Seth, the Trump Task Force at CIA was aware that the emails, which would be embarrassing to the Clinton campaign, would be released at some time in the future. Hence the motive to create Guccifer 2.0 and pin the blame on Russia.
It is essential to recall the timeline of the alleged Russian intrusion into the DNC network. The only source for the claim that Russia hacked the DNC is a private cyber security firm, CrowdStrike. Here is the timeline for the DNC “hack.”
Here are the facts on the public record. They are at odds with the claims of the Intelligence Community:
- It was 29 April 2016, when the DNC claims it became aware its servers had been penetrated. No claim yet about who was responsible. And no claim that there had been a prior warning by the FBI of a penetration of the DNC by Russian military intelligence.
- According to CrowdStrike founder, Dimitri Alperovitch, his company first supposedly detected the Russians mucking around inside the DNC server on 6 May 2016. A CrowdStrike intelligence analyst reportedly told Alperovitch that:
- Falcon had identified not one but two Russian intruders: Cozy Bear, a group CrowdStrike’s experts believed was affiliated with the FSB, Russia’s answer to the CIA; and Fancy Bear, which they had linked to the GRU, Russian military intelligence.
- The Wikileaks data shows that the last message copied from the DNC network is dated Wed, 25 May 2016 08:48:35.
- 10 June 2016–CrowdStrike waited until 10 June 2016 to take concrete steps to clean up the DNC network. Alperovitch told Esquire’s Vicky Ward that: ‘Ultimately, the teams decided it was necessary to replace the software on every computer at the DNC. Until the network was clean, secrecy was vital. On the afternoon of Friday, June 10, all DNC employees were instructed to leave their laptops in the office.”
- On June 14, 2016, Ellen Nakamura, a Washington Post reporter who had been briefed by computer security company hired by the DNC—Crowdstrike–, wrote:
- Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to committee officials and security experts who responded to the breach.
- The intruders so thoroughly compromised the DNC’s system that they also were able to read all email and chat traffic, said DNC officials and the security experts.
- The intrusion into the DNC was one of several targeting American political organizations. The networks of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were also targeted by Russian spies, as were the computers of some Republican political action committees, U.S. officials said. But details on those cases were not available.
- 15 June, 2016, an internet “personality” self-described as Guccifer 2.0 surfaces and claims to be responsible for the hacks but denies being Russian. The people/entity behind Guccifer 2.0:
- Used a Russian VPN service provider to conceal their identity.
- Created an email account with AOL.fr (a service that exposes the sender’s IP address) and contacted the press (exposing his VPN IP address in the process).
- Contacted various media outlets through this set up and claimed credit for hacking the DNC, sharing copies of files purportedly from the hack (one of which had Russian error messages embedded in them) with reporters from Gawker, The Smoking Gun and other outlets.
- Carried out searches for terms that were mostly in English, several of which would appear in Guccifer 2.0’s first blog post. They chose to do this via a server based in Moscow. (this is from the indictment,
“On or about June 15, 2016, the Conspirators logged into a Moscow-based server used and managed by Unit 74455”) - Created a blog and made an initial blog post claiming to have hacked the DNC, providing links to various documents as proof.
- Carelessly dropped a “Russian Smiley” into his first blog post.
- Managed to add the name “Феликс Эдмундович” (which translates to Felix Dzerzhinsky, also known as “Iron Felix”) to the metadata of several documents. (Several sources went beyond what the evidence shows and made claims about Guccifer 2.0 using a Russian keyboard, however, these claims are just assumptions made in response to the presence of cyrillic characters.)
The only thing that the Guccifer 2.0 character did not do to declare its Russian heritage was to take out full page ads in the New York Times and Washington Post. But the “forensic” fingerprints that Guccifer 2.0 was leaving behind is not the only inexplicable event.
Time for the common sense standard again. Crowdstrike detected the Russians on the 6th of May, according to CEO Dimitri Alperovitch, but took no steps to shutdown the network, eliminate the malware and clean the computers until 34 days later, i.e., the 10th of June. That is 34 days of inexcusable inaction.
It is only AFTER Julian Assange announces on 12 June 2016 that WikiLeaks has emails relating to Hillary Clinton that DCLeaks or Guccifer 2.0 try to contact Assange.
The actions attributed to DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 should be priority investigative targets for U.S. Attorney John Durham’s team of investigators. This potential use of a known CIA tool, developed under Brennan with the sole purpose to obfuscate the source of intrusions, pointing to another nation, as a false flag operation, is one of the actions and issues that U.S. Attorney John Durham should be looking into as a potential act of “Seditious conspiracy. It needs to be done. To quote the CIA, I strongly assess that the only intelligence agency that evidence indicates was meddling via cyber attacks in the 2016 Presidential election was the CIA, not the GRU.
Inside Journalist Tareq Haddad’s Spectacular Departure from Newsweek
A photo of Tareq Haddad is shown from his Twitter profile: @Tareq_Haddad
By Alan Macleod | MintPress News | December 20, 2019
It’s Manufacturing Consent meets Operation Mockingbird; in a long exposé essay that doubles as a goodbye to the profession, Newsweek journalist Tareq Haddad explained why he was very publicly quitting his job at the New York-based magazine. “Journalism is quickly dying. America is regressing because it lacks the truth,” he wrote.
The trigger for his decision was management suppressing his story on the bombshell news that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) hid a mountain of evidence suggesting the 2018 Douma Attack was staged, thus paving the way for more military intervention in Syria. But below the surface, it was about far more than that; Haddad’s essay described how journalists are worked to the bone and how media drives the public towards war, coordinating smears against politicians who stand against it. But most spectacularly of all, he alleges that there is a network of hundreds of government assets working as high-level editors in newsrooms across America, even naming the one at Newsweek.
Haddad knew the consequences of speaking out:
In the end, that decision was rather simple, all be it I understand the cost to me will be undesirable. I will be unemployed, struggle to finance myself and will likely not find another position in the industry I care about so passionately. If I am a little lucky, I will be smeared as a conspiracy theorist, maybe an Assad apologist or even a Russian asset—the latest farcical slur of the day,” he wrote.
MintPress News reached out to him for comment. He responded that he was certain that there were more capable and well-meaning reporters like him that could come forward. “Hopefully, those journalists will have the courage to push the issue with their editors or face the embarrassment the industry will experience when the truth of the matter is revealed to all,” he stated.
Newsweek was not alone in failing to report on the OPCW revelations. Virtually the entirety of the mainstream press (with the exception of Tucker Carlson) ignored or downplayed the findings that cast the Syrian Civil War in a considerably different light. In contrast, MintPress News, with a tiny budget compared to corporate media, has covered the story closely. Unsurprisingly, they have shown little interest in Haddad’s exposé of their corruption either.
“In any functioning democracy the Tareq Haddad affair should occupy mainstream media for weeks” Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Professor Emeritus of Bowling Green State University (Department of Journalism and Communications) told MintPress News. However, he noted, “We have neither a fully functioning democracy nor the uncontaminated information ecosystem that would enable such a thing.” Newsweek, for the record, claimed that the matter was much more mundane: “The writer pitched a conspiracy theory rather than an idea for objective reporting. Editors rejected the pitch,” it said in a statement.
The “conspiracy theory” referenced is that multiple whistleblowers have come forward to publicly accuse the OPCW of suppressing their evidence in order to reach a predetermined conclusion about the Douma attacks– one that supported military intervention. On the new evidence, former head of the OPCW Dr. Jose Bustani said it “confirmed doubts and suspicions I already had” about the incoherent report, claiming that “the picture is clearer now, although very disturbing.”
Truth, Haddad wrote, is “the most fundamental pillar of this modern society we so often take for granted,” claiming that, despite going into the profession after reading radical critiques of the media like Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, and knowing others (like Chris Hedges) had been fired for opposing war, “I believed that honest journalism could be done. Nothing I read, however, came close to the dishonesty and deception I experienced while at Newsweek.”
He spoke of constantly self-censoring and modifying his language as to not rock the boat and how staff were totally overworked. Haddad himself wrote an average of four articles per day on complicated topics he admitted he often had no experience with whatsoever. This is a phenomenon called “churnalism” by academics, where reporters are turned into cogs in giant news machines, churning out vapid and shallow writing or copying corporate press releases for the profit of the outlet. This is one reason why trust in media has been falling since the 1970s, and particularly in the last few years.
He also discusses how the media manufactured public consent for military intervention in Syria. One example of this was his boss’s refusal to publish another of his stories questioning the legitimacy of Bana Alabed, the youthful face of the pro-intervention movement. Meanwhile, those who stand up against war are smeared as assets of foreign powers. He condemns what he describes as coordinated attacks launching “preposterous accusations” against antiwar voices such as Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.
Academics found the case remarkable, but not particularly unusual. When asked for comment by MintPress News, Tabe Bergman, Lecturer in Journalism at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China replied,
“Sadly, the resignation of Tareq Haddad is merely the latest in a long series of dedicated journalists quitting their job at mainstream news organizations that try to squeeze every penny out of the ‘news product’ while placating the powers that be.”
Operation Mockingbird 2.0
Perhaps the most truly alarming claim Haddad makes in his tell-all treatise is that there is a network of hundreds of deep state assets placed into newsrooms across the country, working to control what the public sees and hears, planting stories and quashing others. As he says:
“The U.S. government, in an ugly alliance with those that profit the most from war, has its tentacles in every part of the media — imposters, with ties to the U.S. State Department, sit in newsrooms all over the world. Editors, with no apparent connections to the member’s club, have done nothing to resist. Together, they filter out what can or cannot be reported. Inconvenient stories are completely blocked.”
Dr. Boyd-Barrett compared his revelations to Operation Mockingbird, a widespread CIA infiltration of hundreds of agenda-setting news outlets throughout the United States during the 20th century, placing agents in key positions or persuading existing reporters to work with them. “The use of journalists has been among the most productive means of intelligence‑gathering employed by the CIA,” wrote the legendary investigative journalist Carl Bernstein, who broke the story for Rolling Stone in 1977. As such, Boyd-Barrett told us there is “nothing essentially new” with Haddad’s exposé:
“Discerning critics have long assumed the wholesale penetration of our media ecosystem and universities by intelligence agencies and other special interests and every so often something emerges accidentally to confirm their worst fears.”
While initially fearing he might never work in the profession again, Haddad said that he is still weighing his options and is considering crowdfunding as a model to finance new investigations as an independent journalist.
“There are numerous stories that haven’t had the attention they deserve in the mainstream press and they are well worth investigating further. Also, it’s worth noting that because of my initial piece, several journalists have reached out to me with information I wasn’t previously aware of so there are several threads to be investigated more,” he revealed.
Haddad’s exposé of the corruption and collusion at the heart of modern journalism is something long-discussed by academics such as Bergman and Boyd-Barrett, but rarely does such a clear example present itself. His account undermines the credibility of the entire for-profit corporate model of news that prevails across the world, precisely the reason why you are unlikely to hear about it on CNN or in the New York Times.
Alan MacLeod is a MintPress Staff Writer as well as an academic and writer for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. His book, Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting was published in April.
Why Western Media Ignore OPCW Scandal
Strategic Culture Foundation | December 20, 2019
The credibility of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is on the line after a series of devastating leaks from whistleblowers has shown that the UN body distorted an alleged CW incident in Syria in 2018. The distortion by the OPCW of the incident suggests that senior directors at the organization were pressured into doing so by Western governments.
This has grave implications because the United States, Britain and France launched over 100 air strikes against Syria following the CW incident near Damascus in April 2018. The Western powers rushed to blame the Syrian government forces, alleging the use of banned weapons against civilians. This was in spite of objections by Russia at the time and in spite of evidence from independent investigators that the CW incident was a provocation staged by anti-government militants.
Subsequent reports by the OPCW later in 2018 and 2019 distort the incident in such a way as to indict the Syrian government and retrospectively exculpate the Western powers over their “retaliatory” strikes.
However, the whistleblower site Wikileaks has released more internal communications provided by 20 OPCW experts who protest that senior officials at the organization’s headquarters in The Hague engaged in “doctoring” their field reports from Syria.
Copies of the doctored OPCW reports are seen to have suppressed important evidence casting doubt on the official Western narrative claiming that the Syrian government was to blame. That indicates the OPCW was engaged in a cover-up to retrospectively “justify” the air strikes by Western powers. This is a colossal scandal which implies the US, Britain and France wrongly attacked Syria and are therefore guilty of aggression. Yet, despite the gravity of the scandal, Western media have, by and large, ignored it. Indicating that these media are subordinated by their governments’ agenda on Syria, rather than exposing the truth as independent journalistic services.
An honorable exception is Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson who has given prominence to the scandal on US national TV. So too has veteran British journalist Peter Hitchens who has helped expose the debacle in the Mail on Sunday newspaper.
Apart from those sources, the mainstream Western media have looked away. This is an astounding dereliction of journalistic duty to serve the public interest and to hold governments to account for abusing power.
Major American news outlets have been engrossed in the Trump impeachment case over his alleged abuse of power. But these same media have ignored an arguably far more serious abuse of power with regard to launching missiles on Syria over a falsehood. That says a lot about the warped priorities of such media.
However, their indifference to the OPCW scandal also reflects their culpability in fomenting the narrative blaming the Assad government, and thereby setting up the country for military strikes. In short, the corporate media are complicit in a deception and potentially a war crime against Syria. Therefore they ignore the OPCW scandal.
That illustrates how Western news media are not “independent” as they pompously claim but rather serve as propaganda channels to facilitate their governments’ agenda.
An enlightening case study was published by Tareq Haddad who quit from Newsweek recently because the editors censored his reports on the unfolding OPCW scandal. Haddad explained that he had important details to further expose the OPCW cover-up, but despite careful deliberation on the story he was inexplicably knocked back by senior editors at Newsweek who told him to drop it. There is more than a hint in Haddad’s insider-telling that senior staff at the publication are working as assets for Western intelligence agencies, and thus able to spike stories that make trouble for their governments.
Given the eerie silence among US, British and European media towards the OPCW scandal it is reasonable to posit that there is a systematic control over editorial policies about which stories to cover or not to. What else explains the blanket silence?
The scandal comes as Western powers are attempting to widen the powers of the OPCW for attributing blame in such incidents. Russia has objected to this move, saying it undermines the authority of the UN Security Council. Given the scandal over Syria, Russia is correct to challenge the credibility of the OPCW. The organization has become a tool for Western powers.
Russian envoy to the OPCW and ambassador to the Netherlands Alexander Shulgin says that Moscow categorically objects to expanding the OPCW’s functions and its powers of attributing blame. The extension of powers is being recommended by the US, Britain and France – the three countries implicated in abusing the OPCW in Syria to justify air strikes against that country.
The Russian envoy added: “The OPCW’s attribution mechanism is a mandate imposed by the US and its allies, which has nothing to do with international law and the Chemical Weapons Convention’s provisions. Any steps in this direction are nothing more than meddling in the UN Security Council’s exclusive domain. We cannot accept this flagrant violation of international law.”
Thus, the OPCW – a UN body – is being turned into a rubber-stamp mechanism by Western powers to legalize their acts of aggression. And yet despite the mounting evidence of corruption and malfeasance, Western corporate media studiously ignore the matter. Is it any wonder these media are losing credibility? And, ironically, they have the gall to disdain other countries’ media as “controlled” or “influence operations”.
Democrat advice for ‘combating online disinformation’ is common sense buried under hypocrisy and censorship
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | December 19, 2019
There is actually some good advice in the Democratic National Committee’s five suggestions for avoiding “disinformation” online. Too bad it’s buried in hypocrisy and promotion of literal disinformation shops, grifters and frauds.
On Tuesday, as Democrats launched their final impeachment push in the House of Representatives, the DNC posted a set of recommendations to its followers to protect themselves from “disinformation.” While the jokes about flogging the dead horse of ‘Russiagate’ write themselves at this point, some of the advice offered is actually quite solid.
For instance, it makes perfect sense to actively seek out information from multiple sources. The DNC spoils it, however, by insisting the sources have to be “authoritative.” As in what, approved by the Party? Well, no, merely by the self-appointed gatekeepers such as MediaBiasFactCheck and NewsGuard.
We’ve written about NewsGuard before. As for MBFC, it lists the Alliance for Securing Democracy – operators of the ridiculous Hamilton68 dashboard – and Bellingcat as “least biased” news sources. Enough said.
“Ask yourself who the author of online content is,” also amounts to good advice. That too is tempered by the realization that in its more commonplace, lazy form it amounts to identity politics: stuff “our” people create has to be correct, while anything done by “them” is suspect.
The third point is perhaps the strongest: “When you share, make sure you are sharing content that is true and helpful to others, not as a knee-jerk reaction to content that angers or scares you.”
One only wishes the Democrats would take their own advice, given how widespread the “woke rage clickbait” business model has become. A whole bunch of online outlets have catered to hate-clicks of Democrats perpetually aggrieved by Donald Trump’s presidency, until they went out of business and fired their staff.
The fourth piece of advice urges people to “try to inject truth into the debate” using fact-checkers like Snopes or PolitiFact. Leaving aside the proliferation of partisan fact-checkers and the whole industry of “arguments” based on redefining the meaning of words, this method is somewhat of a rare bird – mainly because of too many people following points two and three too literally, and generally launching personal attacks rather than debating the issues.
By far the worst offender, however, has to be the fifth point, urging DNC followers to “educate” themselves by reading a variety of articles, books and reports that actually peddle outrageous propaganda.
For example, one of the recommended resources is a report on disinformation by New Knowledge – a Democrat-funded shop that literally faked an army of Russian “bots” to sway a 2017 US Senate race in Alabama.
Another is a New York Times “documentary” on a Soviet conspiracy to “tear the West apart” that tells more about its authors than anything they claim.
Other recommendations include “smart civil society groups” that are literally disinformation shops run either by the Democrats themselves (Media Matters for America), or the Atlantic Council and NATO (Disinfo Portal). There is also Graphika, an outfit currently employing the Atlantic Council’s former chief troll-hunter Ben Nimmo, a disinformation story unto himself.
But wait, there’s more! Among the recommended authorities are Russiagate pushers Clint Watts and Malcolm Nance, CNN and MSNBC authorities on “disinformation” and “Russian bots” despite being repeatedly and colossally wrong on everything pretty much all the time.
Needless to say, DNC’s advice has attracted far more derision than appreciation on Twitter, with responses dominated by snark along the lines of “Tell us more about this and the Steele dossier,” or “disinformation [is] information that doesn’t lead to election of Democrats.”
Nor was all of the negative feedback from conservatives. “Coming from those who rigged the 2016 Democratic primary, no thanks. I don’t take advice from criminals,” quipped one diehard Bernie Sanders fan.
Tough luck, Democrats. Do better.
US Democratic Party Warns Supporters of ‘Disinformation’ from Russia’s RT and Sputnik
Sputnik – December 20, 2019
The US Democratic National Committee has published a list of recommendations on how to combat online disinformation.
This list of “tips and additional resources” mentions Russian “propaganda outlets like RT & Sputnik.”
“Don’t let yourself be manipulated. Be aware of Russian propaganda outlets like RT & Sputnik and educate yourself on Russian propaganda lines,” the text on the committee’s website says.Apart from this, the recommendations include “reading longer works documenting disinformation and propaganda”, such as George Orwell’s 1984 and Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election by the US Department of Justice.
The authors of this list of recommendations name what they believe to be reliable sources of information: the Senate Intelligence Committee, reports on disinformation by Harvard and Oxford, and some others.
Earlier this month, the European Values Centre for Security Policy think tank unveiled a report headlined Kremlin Watch Strategy for Countering Hostile Russian Interference, calling on European countries not to view RT and Sputnik as “free press” outlets and to ban its journalists from attending press conferences.
In October 2017, the organisation published a list of 2,327 US, British and European politicians, diplomats and military officials who had previously talked to RT. The list features Donald Trump, John McCain and Boris Johnson. According to Sputnik and RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan, the publication of that list changed absolutely nothing. She added that the organisation was founded in the Czech republic and receives donations from different sources, including the British Foreign Ministry and the US embassy in Prague.
Trump Impeachment… Slapstick Diversion From Reality
By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | December 20, 2019
Fittingly for the jolly season, the House of Representatives’ vote to impeach Trump was more pantomime than serious politics.
“Oh yes, he is!.. Oh no, he isn’t!..” and so it went on for nearly 10 hours of to-and-fro between Democrats and Republicans. Eventually, the finale came when black-clad Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi hammered the gavel, announcing President had been impeached – only the third-ever in two-and-half centuries of 45 presidents.
It was a foregone conclusion given the Democrat majority in the House. The next step in the impeachment process goes to the Republican controlled Senate next month where Trump will almost certainly be acquitted.
For all the grandstanding drama and feverish media coverage, the storyline – like all pantos – is scant in credibility. The accusations against Trump of abusing his office in a phone call with the Ukrainian president and of obstructing subsequent Congressional inquiry are light on evidence while heavy on innuendo. For all his flaws, Trump and the Republicans are right in their call that the Democrats and anti-Trump media are hamming it up in a desperate bid to overturn the 2016 election. For the past three years, Washington has been fixated with Trump Derangement Syndrome.
With faux solemnity, Democrat leader Nancy Pelosi said the impeachment vote was a “sad and tragic day” for US democracy. Then she had to quickly check Democrats from bursting into cheers and applause when the impeachment vote was announced. So much for a “sad day”! The Democrats were elated that their three-year plan to oust Trump was at last happening – albeit for a short-lived period until the Senate takes up the matter.
What was truly sad, however, is how the impeachment fiasco dominated other news, thereby drawing the curtain on several far more significant events.
On the same day as the House brouhaha, over in the Senate Inspector General Michael Horowitz was continuing to give withering testimony from his report into FBI wiretapping of the Trump election campaign back in 2016. The misconduct by the FBI in carrying out surveillance on private American citizens is a shocking abuse of power by the intelligence agency. All the implications suggest that the Obama administration engaged with secret services to sabotage the election campaign of Donald Trump in 2016 with phony allegations about Russia collusion. The constitutional violations by the FBI are colossal.
Knowing the murky past of the FBI and its dirty tricks, we shouldn’t be surprised by Horowitz’s findings. A follow-up report by attorney John Durham promises to be even more damning. But what is so astounding is how the US media, by and large, had their focus on the impeachment debacle instead of this far bigger show of grave importance. Perhaps not really astounding given that major media outlets like CNN, New York Times, MSNBC and Washington Post have invested so much capital in whipping up the Russia claims. Their ignoring the FBI misconduct is vital for self-preservation by avoiding accountability for their “Russia collusion” fantasies.
Another blockbuster story roundly ignored was the unfolding scandal at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). The number of whistleblowers from the UN body has grown to 20, according to Wikileaks. They allege that an OPCW report published in 2018 into a purported chemical weapon incident in Syria was “doctored” to wrongly incriminate the Assad government for carrying out an attack on civilians. As a result of the incident on April 7, 2018, the United States, Britain and France days later launched over 100 air strikes against Syria in apparent revenge. President Trump labeled Assad “an animal”. According to the whistleblowers, the OPCW report later in 2018 was deliberately suppressed by senior officials in the organization’s headquarters in The Hague under pressure from the American government. The implication is that the US, British and French air strikes against Syria were naked aggression based on false information. Indeed, the incident on April 7 has the hallmarks of a false-flag operation carried out by Western-backed anti-government militants.
Despite the urgent public interest of this scandal, the Western corporate media have largely ignored the matter, apart from notable exceptions, such as Tucker Carlson at Fox and Peter Hitchens in Britain’s Mail newspaper.
Surely on any objective scale, the OPCW scandal is worth far more media attention than the turgid proceedings in the House. But then again invoking objectivity is a naive request when the polarized politics in the US have become so hyper-subjective.
Other important stories that got sidelined this week include the appeal by 100 Australian doctors demanding the release of Julian Assange from prison in Britain. They reiterated similar concerns expressed by Nils Melzer, the UN special rapporteur, warning that Assange could die in prison if he is not given immediate medical care. The Wikileaks founder is awaiting extradition to the US where he faces 175 years in jail for “espionage”. As the leaks this week from Wikileaks regarding corruption at the OPCW demonstrate the real “offense” committed by Assange is his exposure of war crimes by the US and its Western allies. He is being tortured for telling the truth by Western governments that claim to be bastions of democracy and law. Why aren’t Western media covering this bombshell?
Still another huge story to be buried this week under the avalanche of impeachment popcorn was the report that over 90 US companies on the Fortune 500 list paid zero tax in the year 2018, despite having made combined profits of $100 billion. The companies include Amazon, Bank of American, Chevron, General Motors, Goodyear, Honeywell, JP Morgan Chase, Starbucks, and Verizon, to mention only a few. These companies were able to reduce their federal tax bill to zero because of corporate tax breaks and accounting loopholes introduced by President Trump in 2017.
If the Democrat party was a genuine political opposition to Trump then it should be taking up issues that really matter to ordinary citizens. Issues like abuse of power by unelected state agencies that spy illegally on civilians. But the Democrats this month voted for the latest edition of the Patriot Act extending such powers. They also voted for a record $738 billion spend on the US military, instead of deploying some of that for public good in healthcare and education.
If the Democrat party was a genuine political opposition, then it would be highlighting the crimes of illegal wars the US carries out on foreign countries with impunity. It would be defending the rights of whistleblowers like Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden who have exposed systematic state crimes.
If the Democrat party was a genuine political opposition, it would be campaigning for US corporations to pay their fair share of taxes so that working families can benefit from a decent society. They would be going after Trump for aiding and abetting the corporate kleptocracy that America has become.
But they don’t. Because the Democrats – most of them anyway – are part of the same bipartisan corporate feeding trough and war machine that is Washington.
The obscenity is so disgraceful that’s why the need for an impeachment pantomime. And the corporate media dutifully obliges.
Democrats Target Own Population by Trump Impeachment – Paul Craig Roberts
Sputnik -December 20, 2019
WASHINGTON – The Democrats are targeting their own population by impeaching President Donald Trump, former US Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts said.
On Wednesday, Trump became the third president in US history to be impeached when the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives voted to find him guilty of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress after investigations concluding he invited foreign meddling in the American electoral process.
“The impeachment circus is a political act by the House Democrats. It is a political orchestration without any evidence or credible testimony,” Roberts said. “What is disturbing about the impeachment… is that these orchestrated actions are an attempt to overturn a democratic election. The US now engages in actions against its own population like the actions Washington recently engaged in against Venezuela, Bolivia, Honduras, and Ukraine.”
The Democratic Party, Roberts added, decided to fabricate a scandal with Ukraine after Russiagate fell apart.
“The Democrats are after power. They were frustrated by the Russiagate failure, and orchestrated a hoax that, even if it were true, would not be an impeachable event,” he said.
Roberts continued to say that the House Democrats are able to “get away with this hoax” because the American media is against Trump.
“It is disturbing also because it demonstrates that there is no integrity in the media or the security agencies,” he explained. “Without the support of the media and security agencies, the Democrats would not be able to orchestrate such obvious hoaxes.”
Roberts believes that the impeachment proceedings are not hurting Trump’s election chances, and even help him.
“As the impeachment proceedings unfolded, the public turned against the proceedings, recognizing them as a purely political action,” Roberts said. “The Democrats hoped that some of the mud would stick to Trump and reduce his reelection chances, but it seems the impeachment is helping Trump.”
The president will have to face trial in the US Senate but is unlikely to be removed from power as the higher legislative decision-making body is controlled by members of his Republican party, who have made it clear that they viewed his impeachment as a sham.
“The Senate will not convict Trump of the charges, unless enough Republican senators can be blackmailed by the FBI, CIA, and NSA, police state institutions that have spy folders on everyone, or unless the military/security complex can bribe the Republicans with large sums of money to vote against Trump,” Roberts said. “I think this is unlikely as it would be too obvious even for insouciant Americans not to notice.”
Roberts also said that Russiagate and the impeachment “have radicalized” and divided the United States.
“The population is now split in a new way. On the one hand we have the people who elected Trump, ordinary traditional Americans now demonized as “racists” and “white supremacists,” Roberts said. “On the other hand we have the Democrats, no longer the party of the working people.”
House Democrats launched their impeachment inquiry in September to probe whether Trump tried to pressure Ukraine into investigating his political rival Joe Biden, the current Democratic front-runner in the presidential primaries. Lawmakers initiated the inquiry after a whistleblower sent a complaint to the Congress claiming that Trump threatened to withdraw military aid for Ukraine if Kiev failed to investigate Biden and his son Hunter over the latter’s business dealings in the country.
Trump has denied any wrongdoing, repeatedly dismissing the impeachment inquiry as a witch hunt aimed at reversing the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
Commenting on Wednesday’s vote, the president said that “this lawless, partisan impeachment” was “political suicide” for the Democratic Party. He also expressed confidence that he would be fully exonerated by the Senate, pledging to “continue to work tirelessly to address the needs and priorities of the American people.”
You Can’t Fool All the People All the Time
By Daniel Lazare | Strategic Culture Foundation | December 18, 2019
You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time. So said Abraham Lincoln – maybe. But whoever it was forgot to mention an important corollary: fun as it may be to pull the wool over people’s eyes, you’ll writhe in agony for an equal period once the truth emerges and the fraud is exposed.
This is the significance of Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s devastating report on the FBI investigation of Russiagate suspect Carter Page.
For years, the FBI and its allies in the Democratic Party have had a grand time pillorying Page as the centerpiece of a gigantic Kremlin conspiracy to help Trump win the White House and bend America to its will. Thousands of headlines about this or that bombshell revelation, scores of talking heads proclaiming that “the walls are closing in” – it was all so much fun that revelers barely paused when Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller announced last March that he was unable to “establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government.”
Sure, a few Democrats perked up. But they quickly decided that even though Mueller didn’t come up with enough evidence to prove collusion, that didn’t mean that he came up with no evidence at all. So the myth continued unabated.
But payback time is now upon us. The Horowitz report is not some ordinary rebuke, but an epic assault that has left the FBI reeling. After fawning over the bureau for years, the New York Times tried to salvage a shred of self-respect by declaring that even though it “painted a bleak portrait of the FBI as a dysfunctional agency,” all was not lost because the inspector general uncovered “no evidence that the mistakes were intentional or undertaken out of political bias.”
This was incorrect. Horowitz made it clear in his Dec. 11 appearance before the Senate judiciary committee that while there was “no evidence that the initiation of the investigation was motivated by political bias,” the question gets “murkier” when it comes to subsequent FBI actions like withholding or doctoring evidence. Considering that FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith, the man who allegedly falsified evidence against Page, is a never-Trumper who once texted “viva le resistance,” it’s hard to see how bias could not have been a factor.
The inspector general lists seventeen “significant errors” the bureau made in applying for a secret surveillance warrant. It failed to inform the court that Page had been a CIA informant for years and had been found to have been truthful throughout; that he told an undercover agent that he “literally never met” or “said one word to” Paul Manafort, his alleged co-conspirator, and that Manafort had never responded to any of his emails; that a source for ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele’s famous “golden showers” dossier was known to be a “boaster” and an “egoist” who may “engage in some embellishment”; and that professional associates of Steele said he “[d]emonstrates lack of self-awareness [and] poor judgment” and “pursued people with political risk but no intelligence value.”
Steele, the man who turned US politics upside down, was a flake in other words while Page was more likely on the up and up. Yet the FBI assumed the opposite. Perhaps the most amazing section in Horowitz’s report concerns a Steele informant who confessed that reports of Trump’s sexual escapades in the Moscow Ritz Carlton were “just talk,” conversations he or she “had with friends over beers,” and statements made in “jest.” Yet the Steele dossier reported them as a real, and a credulous press lapped them all up. Steele’s supposed high-level Kremlin contacts, the source added, were individuals “who may have had access” – and, then again, may not have. Corroboration of Steele’s findings was meanwhile “zero.”
Yet this is the document that the FBI continued using to pursue Page and Trump and convince the public that collusion was genuine.
As devastating as all this is, US Attorney John Durham’s long-awaited report on the origins of Russiagate promises to be broader and even harder-hitting. On Dec. 9, he issued an unusual statement saying that he disagreed with Horowitz’s finding that the FBI was legally warranted in launching an investigation. This implies that maybe – just maybe – he’s come up with evidence that the intelligence agencies concocted the whole episode from the outset as skeptics have long suspected.
If so, the agony of those responsible for the Russiagate fiasco can only intensify while, for the rest of us, the fun has just begun. So lean back and enjoy the show. It going to be a doozy.
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Not Hamas-Israeli conflict: The Palestinian cause belongs to the world
By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | October 15, 2023
This, in his thinking, could only mean one thing: “Never before has Israel stood more honored and revered by the nations of the world.”
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- The Nakba at 78: A statistical snapshot of Palestine
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