Clinton Donor Soros, Fake News Disseminator WashPo Among Facebook Fact Checkers
Sputnik – 17.12.2016
George Soros, a long-time liberal and massive supporter of Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential bid, is among a list of those who will finance Facebook’s third-party fact checker.
On Thursday Facebook detailed a plan to fight ‘fake news,’ asking users to flag suspicious articles, in hopes of limiting bogus stories from winding up in the Facebook news feed. George Soros, a major Clinton supporter, is among the list of donors for International Fact Checking Network’s (IFCN) code of principles. The Mountain View, California, company will partner with mainstream outlets including ABC News, FactCheck and Snopes. Later that list was updated to include The Washington Post. The code of principles states that the group is nonpartisan in approaching facts, but conservatives are clearly baffled and even outraged at Facebook’s reliance on mainstream media outlets.
Ironically, The Washington Post’s most famous ‘fake news’ expose was later acknowledged by the news outlet to itself be fake. The Post had listed over 200 websites from across the political and economic spectrum, from an anonymous, recently-started website called PropOrNot. The site accused popular sites such as The Drudge Report, Zero Hedge, TruthOut, WikiLeaks, and Sputnik News of promoting false narratives and so-called Russian propaganda. After a host of groups, including some outlets not listed by site, questioned PropOrNot’s findings, the Washington Post added an editor’s note saying, “The Post… does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings regarding any individual media outlet.”
Adrian Chen of the New Yorker, writes, “the prospect of legitimate dissenting voices being labelled fake news or Russian propaganda by mysterious groups of ex-government employees, with the help of a national newspaper, is even scarier,” than the prospect of bogus stories touted as true that favored Trump.
After the election, the social network was criticized for displaying news in a biased format. This prompted CEO Mark Zuckerberg to meet with so-called conservative ‘thought leaders’ where he promised that the site would give equal weight to different points of view.
FB’s new ‘Ministry of Truth’? Controversial 3rd party outlets among those to filter out ‘fake news’
RT | December 16, 2016
Facebook’s News Feed will defer to third parties such as ABC and AP to more closely police for hoaxes and fake news posts, but there are no Russian companies among the fact-checkers, that include two Ukrainian groups, one of which is hardline Russophobic.
The list of fact-checkers published online includes news corporations and agencies such as AP, ABC News, and the Washington Post, as well as some controversial choices such VoxUkraine.
And the list isn’t going to be updated anytime soon, a statement said.
“We are currently rethinking the application and compliance process. Due to our limited staff, we won’t be adding new signatories until the new process is concluded in the coming weeks,” Poynter wrote.
On Thursday, the social network unveiled “some updates we’re testing and starting to roll out” that include cracking down on spammers, making it easier for users to flag content, and teaming up with third party organizations to prevent false stories from making it onto the site’s News Feed.
“We’ve focused our efforts on the worst of the worst, on the clear hoaxes spread by spammers for their own gain, and on engaging both our community and third party organizations,” Facebook’s News Feed vice president, Adam Mosseri, said in a Newsroom blog post.
Among the 43 news companies that may be involved in fact-checking linked posts are ABC News, Factcheck.org, Politifact and Snopes, which will be the first four organizations to test the new procedures, according to the Business Insider. Fact-checkers will not be compensated, a Facebook representative told the news agency.
The Associated Press was also reported to be joining the effort, which will be based at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a nonprofit journalism school in St. Petersburg, Florida. The school is soliciting for sources to sign its “International Fact-Checking Network fact-checkers’ code of principles.”
Ironically, one of the fact-checkers has recently been spotted publishing fake news. At the end of November, the Washington Post cited “independent researchers” who claimed that Russian state media, including RT and Sputnik News, produced “misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy.”
The Washington Post was later forced to publish an editor’s note distancing itself from one of the main “independent researchers” it used as sources for the article, the website PropOrNot, which has proven to be a very questionable source.
Following its publication, quite a few renowned journalists and activists, as well as social media users, expressed outrage over the article. Glenn Greenwald, an essential figure in getting out the Snowden revelations, dubbed it “total journalistic garbage,” and many Twitter users fingered the Washington Post as the “real propaganda peddler,” accused the newspaper of publishing “crazy lies.”
In addition to Facebook’s third party monitors, Facebook users will also have a bigger role in content policing themselves, both when perusing or posting on the News Feed. Currently, there is a three-step process to report a post as “fake news,” but a small percentage of Facebook users in the US will reportedly be the first to notice a change, allowing them to report news as fake in just two steps. It should be noted that even just 1 percent of Facebook users in the US amounts to nearly 2 million people.
When it comes to posting articles, if the content has already been marked fake by more than one third-party fact-checker, the user will be warned that it is in dispute before being asked to “cancel” or “continue” the post. Once a story is recognized as fake by Facebook, it will be buried in the News Feed.
Algorithms will also be a factor in identifying chicanery. They may signal to Facebook when people click and read an article, within the Facebook app, but then decide not to share. Another suspicious act might be a user deleting a post, The Verge reported.
Furthermore, Facebook employees will have a hand in the endeavor. They will help determine whether a domain is masquerading as a well-known news source, such as “abcnews.com.co,” which is not actually ABC News. These phony pages will be barred from taking advantage of the advertising opportunities promoted by the social network.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, chairman and co-founder, posted from his account Thursday, saying that his company “is a new kind of platform different from anything before it.”
“While we don’t write the news stories you read and share, we also recognize we’re more than just a distributor of news,” he added. “We’re a new kind of platform for public discourse — and that means we have a new kind of responsibility to enable people to have the most meaningful conversations, and to build a space where people can be informed.”
Facebook’s News Feed vice president Mosseri also wrote Thursday: “We know there’s more to be done. We’re going to keep working on this problem for as long as it takes to get it right.”
Omar Nazzal and Adib Al-Atrash: Palestinian journalists ordered to further imprisonment without charge or trial
Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network – December 15, 2016
Palestinian journalist Omar Nazzal was ordered to three more months in administrative detention on Monday, 12 December. This marked the third renewal of his administrative detention order since he was seized by Israeli occupation forces on 23 April 2016 as he sought to cross the bridge to Jordan in order to travel to the European Federation of Journalists’ conference in Sarajevo. Nazzal is a member of the General Secretariat of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate and president of the Democratic Journalists’ Assembly.
At a previous hearing on 22 November, Nazzal’s administrative detention was limited to a one and a half month extension; he was told he would be released on 24 December. Instead, however, Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association reported that the extension of his detention was for a full three months.
On Wednesday, 15 December, fellow journalist Adib al-Atrash was also ordered to another three months in administrative detention without charge or trial. Arrested in June, this marks the third consecutive time al-Atrash has received an order for three months of imprisonment without charge or trial.
Tens of Palestinian journalists are imprisoned in Israeli jails, several in administrative detention without charge or trial, including Addameer media officer Hasan Safadi whose own detention was just extended for six months. Administrative detention orders are indefinitely renewable by Israeli military order and Palestinians can spend years at a time imprisoned without charge or trial.
Media reporting on hacked DNC emails acted as ‘arms of Russian intelligence’ – White House
RT | December 15, 2016
White House press secretary Josh Earnest has accused media outlets which reported on the contents of the hacked DNC emails as being “arms of Russian intelligence,” once again accusing Moscow of being behind the cyberattack.
The statement was made during the White House press briefing on Wednesday, in response to New York Times reporter Gardiner Harris, who, siding with the official White House rhetoric, stated that “from the first days, investigators knew it had Russian ties.”
Harris then asked why it took until October for Washington to announce it believed the hack was carried out by Russia, when the cyberattack was confirmed in April.
“That delay covered most of the presidential election, causing months of coverage of the leaks that were not properly informed by a formal government statement that this was an act of foreign espionage,” he said.
“Wasn’t that a mistake to take so long?” Harris asked.
Earnest had a lengthy response to that question, stating that the US intelligence community wanted to have “high confidence” that the Russians were behind the hack before announcing it, and said it wanted to be “as specific as possible in putting forward that assessment.”
The press secretary went on to agree with a Wednesday New York Times article which stated that “every major publication, including the Times, published multiple stories citing the DNC and Podesta emails posted by WikiLeaks, becoming a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence.”
Continuing his response to Harris, Earnest said “… There’s no denying that those materials [emails] were stolen property… there was no denial on the part of the US government that somehow the DNC had not been hacked, so even as news organizations were reporting on this information, they were reporting on information that they knew had been stolen and leaked…”
“… Those are editorial decisions that are made by independent news organizations. But even the excellent report that was included in your newspaper today about this incident makes clear that news organizations in the united states essentially became the arms of Russian intelligence,” Earnest said.
However, author and journalist Chris Hedges, who worked for the New York Times for 15 years, told RT that the White House’s approach is “clearly a form of red-baiting.”
“It is a form of intimidation. It is a way to essentially paint elements of the press, including the mainstream press, as essentially complicit in treasonous activity. It’s quite disturbing,” he said.
Hedges went on to state that publishing such information is simply “part of the game.”
“The question is not whether the information was leaked, the question is whether for instance the Podesta emails are authentic or not. And if they’re authentic, you publish them. That’s how it works…” he said.
Hedges stressed that there is “no conclusive evidence that Russia was behind the leaks, but even if they were, the US government does this all the time…
“… I was given all sorts of information by the US government to tarnish and in some cases totally discredit figures or regimes that they wanted discredited.”
Despite consistent claims by the US government that Russia was behind the hack, not everyone is convinced that is the case. Earlier this week, former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton suggested the hack could have been a false flag operation by the Obama administration.
Russia itself has dismissed the hacking allegations, as well as claims that it aimed to influence the US election, as “nonsense.”
“Does anyone seriously think that Russia can somehow influence the choice of the American people?” Putin asked in October. “Is America some sort of a banana republic?”
In November, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that the “whole story is from the field of myth-making.”
The Abnormalization of Dissent
corbettreport | December 13, 2016
The spin, lies, manipulation and deceptions are coming so fast and thick it’s increasingly difficult to document them all, let alone analyze them. But in the broad sweep of recent events we can see a common theme emerging: the abnormalization of dissent. And when political ideology boils down to nothing more than “real” and “fake” the control of political discourse through language itself is almost complete. Can outright censorship be far behind?
SHOW NOTES: https://www.corbettreport.com/?p=20792
See also:
It’s Beginning to Smell a Lot Like Totalitarianism, and I Don’t Mean Russia
By F. William Engdahl – New Eastern Outlook – 13.12.2016
If we smell precisely the stench of the totality of steps taken in NATO countries in recent months, especially in the United States and the European Union, we can smell the stench of totalitarian rule or some would call it, fascism, being quietly imposed on our basic human freedoms. Some recent examples give pause for reflection as to where we are allowing our world to drift.
Let’s begin with a most ominous, bizarre, Jesuitical interview that the Roman Catholic Pope Francis gave to a Belgian paper December 7, comparing what he calls defamatory news to what he called the “sickness of coprophagia.” He stated:
QUESTION – A final question, Holy Father, regarding the media: a consideration regarding the means of communication…
POPE – The communications media have a very great responsibility…It is obvious that, given that we are all sinners, also the media can…become harmful… They can be tempted by calumny, and therefore used to slander, to sully people, especially in the world of politics. They can be used as a means of defamation: every person has the right to a good reputation, but perhaps in their previous life, or ten years ago, they had a problem with justice, or a problem in their family life, and bringing this to light is serious and harmful… This is a sin and it is harmful. A thing that can do great damage to the information media is disinformation: that is, faced with any situation, saying only a part of the truth, and not the rest. This is disinformation… Disinformation is probably the greatest damage that the media can do, as opinion is guided in one direction, neglecting the other part of the truth. I believe that the media should… not fall prey – without offence, please – to the sickness of coprophilia, which is always wanting to communicate scandal… And since people have a tendency towards the sickness of coprophagia, it can do great harm.
Coprophilia is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “marked interest in excrement, especially the use of feces or filth for sexual excitement.” And coprophagia is eating feces by humans, literally, eating shit.
What people precisely, Holy Father, have a “tendency to towards the sickness of coprophagia”? Is this the dominant sickness of the human race? And if not, why do you make such a disgusting likeness between eating shit and citizens who read about politicians and their misdeeds or media that report on same? And who is to judge if factually true dissemination of facts about political figures from their past is relevant or not to help voters judge their character? I would say the comments are a perfect example of what he pretends to condemn.
Were it only a single, off-the-cuff remark by a religious figure, we could dismiss it along with claims such as the papal infallibility declaration proclaimed by the Vatican I on 18 July 1870. However, precisely because of such dogma and of the influence of the Roman Catholic Church and its Pope, notably in the countries of Western Europe, the United States and Latin America, such vague and dangerous remarks ought to be taken seriously as a signal of what lies ahead for the public freedom of speech.
“Fake News”
The papal comments on coprophagia and journalism come amid an explosion of charges in the USA and EU that Russia is planting “fake news” as it is now being called, about Hillary Clinton in the US media by way of certain alternative media. Robby Mook, Hillary Clinton’s former campaign manager, said “fake news” was a “huge problem” the campaign faced in the recent US election: “I still think we have to investigate what happened with Russia here. We cannot have foreign, and I would say foreign aggressors here, intervening in our elections. The Russian were propagating fake news through Facebook and other outlets, but look, we also had… Breitbart News, which was notorious for peddling stories like this.”
Online stories that claimed a Washington D.C. pizza restaurant, Comet Ping Pong, was used by candidate Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager John Podesta for child sex, the so-called “Pizzagate” Scandal, is now being used to drum up popular opinion for censorship of the Internet as well as Facebook and other social media.
Senior New York Times reporter David Sanger wrote a vague, anonymous “according to senior Administration sources,” article on December 9 under the headline, “Russia Hacked Republican Committee but Kept Data, US Concludes.” What we are seeing is precisely the kind of fake news that Hillary Clinton and the Pope talk about. But it is mainstream establishment media doing the fakery.
The fakery is being orchestrated by the highest levels of the mainstream media in collusion with NATO circles and intelligence agencies such as the CIA, which has saturated the ranks of mainstream media with their disinformation agents according to former CIA head William Colby, who once allegedly said, “The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media.”
The campaign will continue, likely with some horrendous stories about some psychopath taking a gun and bursting into Comet Ping Pong pizza place shooting innocent customers, because it was said he read in alternative media fake news about the pedophile ring. That already took place, but the man fired no shots. The population is being manipulated to accept extreme censorship of internet and other alternative media, something unimaginable just months ago.
Like clockwork, the “fake news” campaign has spread to the European Union. After announcing she will run again in 2017 for Chancellor, Angela Merkel spoke ominous words suggesting government censorship of independent “populist” (sic) media might be necessary: “Today we have fake sites, bots, trolls — things that regenerate themselves, reinforcing opinions with certain algorithms and we have to learn to deal with them.” She declared, “we must confront this phenomenon and if necessary, regulate it… Populism and political extremes are growing in Western democracies..” Her remarks came after Google and Facebook cut off ad revenue to what they declared to be “fake” news sites.
In the EU, especially Germany, populist has an implicit negative or even fascist connotation as in “right-wing populist” parties who oppose Merkel’s open door to war refugees policies, or who these days oppose almost anything her heavy-handed government puts forward.
War on Cash
Now if we begin to see stealth propaganda preparing us to accept severe clampdowns on the one remaining free media, the Internet and related social media, we can also see an equally ominous, indeed, totalitarian move to create acceptance for the idea we give up the right to hold paper money, giving private, often corrupt, banks total control over our money, and in turn giving government agencies total control over where we spend for what.
This is the so-called cashless society. Arguments put forward are that elimination of cash will be more convenient to consumers or that it will eliminate or greatly reduce organized crime and shadow economy that evades taxation. In the EU, Sweden has already virtually eliminated cash. Sweden cash purchases today are down to just three per cent of the national economy compared to nine per cent in the Eurozone and seven per cent in the US. Public buses don’t accept cash. Three of Sweden’s four largest banks are phasing out the manual handling of cash in bank branches. Norway is following the same path.
In France today, it’s now illegal to do cash transactions over €1,000 without documenting it properly. France’s finance minister Michel Sapin, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, blamed the attacks on the ability of the attackers to “buy dangerous things with cash.” Shortly after the Hebdo attacks he announced capital controls that included the €1,000 cap on cash payments, down from €3,000, to “fight against the use of cash and anonymity in the French economy.” In high-inflation Eurozone €1,000 is not a huge sum.
Even in conservative Germany, a leading member of the Merkel coalition proposed to eliminate the €500 note and capping all cash transactions at €5,000. Some weeks later the European Central Bank, where negative interest rates are the order of the day, announced it would end issue of €500 notes by December 2018 arguing it made it too easy for criminals and terrorists to act.
And in the United States, as the campaign to sell skeptical citizens on cashless digital bank payments increases, JP Morgan Chase, the largest and one of the most criminal banks in the US, has a policy restricting the use of cash in selected markets. The bank bans cash payments for credit cards, mortgages, and auto loans; and it prohibits storage of “any cash or coins” in safe deposit boxes. So if you have a rare cold coin collection, you better stuff it in the mattress…
Negative Rates and Cashless Citizens
As long as cash–bills and coins of a national currency–are the basis of the economy, the central banks of the USA and EU as well as Japan, are unable to impose a severe negative interest rate policy much beyond the flirtation today by the ECB and Bank of Japan. If central bank rates were to go very negative, banks would be charging customers the absurd charge to make them pay to keep their cash on deposit or in savings at those banks. Naturally, people would revolt and withdraw in cash to invest in gold or other hard, tangible valuables.
Harvard economist and member of the Economic Advisory Panel of the Federal Reserve, Kenneth Rogoff, an advocate of the “war on cash,” noted that the existence of cash “creates the artifact of the zero bound on the nominal interest rate.” In his 2016 book, The Curse of Cash, Rogoff urged the Federal Reserve to phase out the 100-dollar bill, then the 50-dollar bill, then the 20-dollar bill, leaving only smaller denominations in circulation, much like what the mad Modi has just done in India.
Any serious observer of the world economy, especially of NATO nations in Europe and North America since the financial crisis of September 2008, would have to realize the current status quo of zero or negative central bank interest rates to prop up banks and financial markets is not sustainable. Unless cash is eliminated that is.
On April 5, 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6102, “forbidding the Hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States.” That was rightly denounced by many as outright theft, confiscation of privately held gold, by the Government.
Radical solutions such as done by President Roosevelt in 1933, yet in a monetary order where gold no longer dominates, is clearly becoming more attractive to the major bankers of Wall Street and the City of London. Rather than confiscate citizens’ gold, today the Gods of Money would have to find a way to steal the cash of citizens. Moving to their “cashless” banking, limiting how much cash can be withdrawn and then eliminating cash entirely as Swedish banks are doing would enable tax authorities to have perfect totalitarian control on every citizen’s use of money. Moreover, governments could decree, as did FDR, that cash above certain levels must be taxed under some or another national declaration of emergency.
As such bold, radical moves advance, they would of course be vociferously attacked not on CNN or The New York Times or Financial Times or other mainstream media tied to those criminal financial institutions, but in alternative media. Keep in mind it was the uncritical New York Times and Washington Post that uncritically retailed the fake news that led to declaration of war on Iraq in 2003, namely that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction aimed at Washington. That war has spread death and destruction of a scale unimaginable. No one complained at the time about that fake news.
The protest over moves to confiscate citizens’ bank holdings would come through alternate, independent media such as Zero Hedge or countless others. Recently, US media uncritically republished a purported list of “fake news” blogs and websites prepared by Assistant Professor of Communications at Merrimack College, Melissa Zimdars. Zero Hedge was on it.
This is not about endorsing or not endorsing any alternative blog or website. It is about the essential freedom of us all to be able to read and decide any and all opinions or analyses and not to have government decide what I am or am not allowed to read. It’s about the freedom to keep privacy about what I choose to buy and not leave a digital trail that my bank could release to the tax authorities or to Homeland Security or the FBI, or sell to profiling consumer operations. Controlling public communication and controlling private money would go a long way to creation of the perfect totalitarian state. Not a good idea, I would say.
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University.
Prof. Anthony Hall Vindicated
By Kevin Barrettt | American Herald Tribune | December 12, 2016
The witch-hunt against University of Lethbridge professor Anthony Hall may have just ended not with a bang but with a whimper. And it is the Israel lobby group B’nai Brith Canada, and its flunkies at the University of Lethbridge, who are whimpering.
The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) just issued a stinging reprimand for University of Lethbridge president Mike Mahon, a glorified gym teacher who unilaterally suspended Professor Hall without pay because he disagrees with Hall’s political views. See:
Lethbridge University President Says He Can Fire Tenured Faculty at Will for No Reason
Here is CAUT’s statement:
CAUT is using extremely strong language. The statement accuses Mike Mahon of violating “all principles of due process and natural rights” and “denying… legal rights” i.e. violating the law.
CAUT is not only threatening all-out legal action, but also “imposing censure” on the University of Lethbridge. This is a formal process that amounts to a complete boycott of the University of Lethbridge by the entire Canadian academic community – a sort of scholarly BDS action. Professors would refuse to work there, students would refuse to study there, and all Canadian academicians would essentially consider that the “University of Lethbridge” no longer existed.
How could the University of Lethbridge resolve the situation? I spoke to Professor Hall this morning. He was optimistic about the long-term prospects of his academic freedom struggle, and grateful to CAUT for doing the right thing. But he also hastened to point out that Mike Mahon and others at the University had created an extremely hostile work environment for him, and that the University of Lethbridge needs to do much more than merely allowing him to return to teaching in the horrendous environment they have created for him.
By suspending Professor Hall without pay, without any form of due process, the University essentially endorsed the outrageous, libelous lies concocted by the B’nai Brith and its suspected confederates. The biggest lie, the one that launched the entire witch hunt, was a Zionist-fabricated “kill all Jews” image that was mysteriously planted on Professor Hall’s Facebook page without his knowledge. B’nai Brith and Facebook conspired to create a media scandal about the image, and despite Hall’s complete innocence, media outlets including the Lethbridge Herald and CBC labored to fabricate a spurious link between the horrific, genocidal image and Professor Hall in their coverage of the incident. Rather than reporting the truth – that Professor Hall was the innocent victim of a smear campaign – they absurdly implied that Professor Hall himself wanted to “kill all Jews” !
The genocidal image was created by a Florida-based Jewish Zionist false flag terrorist named Joshua Goldberg (who has been arrested for plotting fake “Islamic terrorism”) and then planted on Professor Hall’s Facebook page by persons unknown. Though the planted image was credited to “Glen Davidson,” an Alberta resident, Davidson says he was not the source of the image, and does not know how it came to be surreptitiously planted, under his name, on Professor Hall’s Facebook page. See:
The PLANTED weaponized image that got Professor Anthony Hall suspended
Why would B’nai Brith and its accomplices target Professor Hall for this kind of slander operation? Presumably they disapprove of Hall’s research and public statements on various controversial issues, especially his work on false flag terrorism. (Hall has interpreted such events as 9/11 and the Ottawa capitol shooting as apparent false flag public relations stunts designed to further the Zionist war on Islam and Muslims.)
The University of Lethbridge, by implicitly endorsing B’nai Brith’s libelous big lie, has managed to tarnish Professor Hall’s reputation on campus to the point that many students and colleagues have accepted the false notion that Hall is a “genocidal anti-Semite.” Hall has suffered hostile treatment on and off campus as a result of the University’s going along with the B’nai Brith’s witch hunt.
At a very minimum, the University needs to:
*Fire president Mike Mahon and Board Chairman Kurt E. Schlachter;
*Apologize in the strongest possible terms;
*Vow to support Professor Hall’s academic freedom to study, write, and speak about any and all issues;
*And make it absolutely clear that Professor Hall has done nothing wrong, but has in fact been doing exactly what all tenured professors are implicitly required to do by virtue of their tenure: Investigate the most controversial issues and pursue the truth wherever it leads, no matter how much powerful interest groups may be displeased.
Democratic Losers and their Media Backers Seek a Scapegoat for Their Own Disaster
The fake campaign to blame ‘the Russians’
By Dave Lindorff | This Can’t Be Happening! | December 11, 2016
The New York Times and Washington Post, the nation’s two top national newspapers, have been breathlessly reporting of late, with little sign of any appropriate journalistic skepticism, on a purported massive and successful Russian conspiracy to throw the US election to their “favored” candidate, Donald Trump. But the Chicago Tribune has weighed in with a more measured piece, suggesting that while the CIA, a particularly secretive and politically driven organization, may be making that claim, the FBI is not convinced.
While even the Tribune sometimes ignores inserting the requisite “alleged” that should precede any reference to unproven claims that Russia is behind the hacking of the Democratic Party’s (and the Republican Party’s) email server, the paper does also note that Democrats in particular are “frustrated” by the “murky nature” of the FBI’s analysis, with outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), calling on FBI Director James Comey to resign.
The reason for the Democrats’ frustration is also made clear. As the Tribune reports:
With so much of the evidence about Russia’s alleged role in the election shrouded in secrecy because of strict classification rules, Democrats and Republicans in Washington who have access to the underlying intelligence say they have struggled to make their respective cases, leaving an already deeply divided public convinced that both sides are shading their conclusions to help the candidate they backed on Election Day.
The reality is that the CIA has presented no hard evidence that Russia is behind the hacking of the DNC’s or or Clinton’s private home server. The excuse is given that the Agency doesn’t want to disclose any of its sources, so the reader is left with the pathetic plea, from both the Agency and the White House: “Trust us.”
But why would anyone trust the CIA or the White House on anything? We’re talking about an agency and a Executive Branch that between them are known to have lied (during the GW Bush years) about anthrax labs in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, lied about what were aluminum tubes imported to make irrigation equipment being evidence of missile-building, lied about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda, and (during the Obama years) lied about Syria’s government using Sarin gas on its own people in Damascus, lied about the details of the killing of Osama Bin Laden, lied about the role of a murderous CIA agent captured by Pakistani police while posing as a US consular employee, lied about the extent of National Security Agency Spying both at home and abroad, and lied about Russia invading Ukraine and shooting down a civilian Malaysian jumbo jet.
If one were to take a moment and think about what is being alleged here by Democrats — that a national presidential election was successfully subverted by the releasing of hacked emails showing major corruption and malfeasance by the Democratic Party leadership in undermining the fairness of the party’s presidential primary to benefit one candidate — Hillary Clinton — and to destroy the candidacy of her opponent Bernie Sanders — it should lead to one of two alternative conclusions.
Either the Russians did Americans a favor, by exposing the epic corruption of one of their two major parties and one of the candidates seeking to become president — something that a more independent and aggressive domestic media would have and should have done on their own, if not by hacking then by paying attention to, instead of ignoring and blacking out, what frustrated insiders like DNC Vice Chair Tulsi Gabbard, the Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii who quit in disgust saying the DNC was undermining the primaries on behalf of Clinton’s campaign. Or alternatively, we’re being told that our 240-year-old democracy is so shriveled and weak that an outside government can easily undermine it and manipulate the outcome as if we were some corrupt and fragile banana republic.
Either conclusion is rather pathetic and depressing to contemplate.
Meanwhile, the media feeding frenzy over unsubstantiated claims over Russian subversion of our last election ignores the reality that this kind of thing is something the US has been doing abroad at least since the end of World War II and the onset of the Cold War. Not content to just undermine elections through dirty tricks, fake news and secret payments in Europe, Latin America, later in Eastern Europe and Russia, and in Asia, the US has also fomented countless coups to overthrow or attempt to overthrow existing elected governments, most recently in Honduras, Ukraine, Venezuela and Brazil, and so has no grounds to complain by claiming that the Russians were allegedly doing the same thing here.
On the other hand, if the Democratic Party leadership had kept its hand off the scale during the primaries, and had not made such heavy-handed efforts to get major news organizations like the Times, MSNBC, the Daily News, Post and others to help it undermine Bernie Sanders, Sanders would have won both the party’s nomination and the presidency, and probably the Congress also into the bargain, and we wouldn’t be looking at a looming Trump presidency and Republican Congress.
Not only that, but with a genuinely popular candidate running for president in both parties (like it or not Trump was wildly popular among a significant segment of the population), no Russian propaganda campaign would have had a prayer of impacting voter opinion or the results of the voting.
If indeed there really was a Russian effort to swing this recent election, it could only have succeeded in a situation where the electorate was disgusted by its choices and was voting negatively for a lesser evil. And that situation only could arise where the two major parties were so corrupted that they were trying desperately to keep genuinely popular candidates from winning the nomination.
In fact that is what happened. The Republican leadership tried mightily to keep Donald Trump, a loose cannon who has disavowed many basic and long-held Republican principles, such as backing US empire and Israel, supporting any and all trade agreements, and viewing Russia as an existential enemy, from winning their party’s nomination. They failed, but not for lack of trying. The Democratic leadership tried everything, too, to prevent insurgent self-described “socialist” candidate Sanders from winning the nomination, and thanks to underhanded manipulation of the primaries, corrupt meddling in media coverage of Sanders, an anti-democratic voting block of locked-in “super delegates,” committed to backing Clinton whatever the result of the primaries, and some crooked efforts to depress voting in key primary states including New York and California, they succeeded in throwing the nomination to Clinton. She of course was doomed, by their very ham-handed interference in the primaries, to go on to lose the general election.
That corrupt fiasco has left Democratic Party leadership hacks and their backers in the corporate media with nothing to do but find a scapegoat for their disastrous performance, hence the fake “Russia-did-it” claims.
It’s a sad commentary on the pathetic decline of democracy in the United States, but is also a clarion call for a rebirth of grassroots democratic resurgence.
If there’s a bright spot in the new situation, it’s that progressives, socialists, radicals and disaffected citizens of all kinds now should have a clear understanding of how corrupt the Democratic Party really is.
One of two things must happen. That party must be completely swept clean of the hacks, frauds, crooks, compromisers and charlatans who populate its leadership and who hold most of the elected posts remaining in Democratic hands in Congress. Alternatively, the Democratic Party must be abandoned as unsalvageable, with progressive forces, from labor organizations, advocates of the poor and elderly, environmental activists, human rights and peace groups, women’s rights and minority rights organizations, civil libertarians and others rallying both to create something new to replace it, and organizing in the street to resist the new Trump government.
Any new left party needs to abandon the fraudulent tactics of so-called “identity politics,” in which a basically pro-corporate Democratic Party has sought to appease and cajole support for its corporatist candidates and agenda by catering to individual issues of various groups leaning its way by default. Instead, the really big issues need to be tackled head on: expanding Social Security, making Medicare universal for everyone of all ages, restoring genuine progressive taxation on the wealthy, ending foreign wars, closing overseas bases and slashing the military, obeying international law (including treaties with sovereign Native American nations), making public college free to all, nationalizing support for primary and secondary education so that all communities have well-funded, quality public schools, declaring a national mobilization to quickly end reliance upon fossil fuels to combat climate change, and creating jobs for everyone through a massive public spending program on job training and infrastructure repair and modernization.
These and other ideas are things that most Americans can and would get behind, not simply efforts to pander to various specific interest groups.
Do this and the Russians — assuming they even have been trying to manipulate our elections — wouldn’t have a chance of influencing anyone.
Facebook Suppresses Truth
By Craig Murray | December 11, 2016
So far 564 people believe they have shared on Facebook my article conclusively refuting the CIA’s invention of lies about Russia hacking the DNC, using the share button on this site. Another 78 have tried to share it from my Facebook page. The total amount of incoming traffic from these 650 people sharing? 22 people. Almost nobody can currently reach this site through Facebook, as the “came from” interface on my statcounter below shows. Nothing from Facebook. Facebook are actively colluding in preventing social media from contradicting the mainstream media lies about Russian involvement in the US election campaign.
Don’t believe me? If you think you shared the article on Facebook, phone one of your Facebook friends and ask if it appeared for them.
The only way to defeat this is to republish the article yourself. I waive any copyright. If you have access to a blog, copy and paste it there and post a link to that blog on Facebook. Or simply cut and paste my whole article and copy it to your Facebook page, in sections if required.
I am similarly ghost banned on Twitter. The work round to this, which plenty of people have found, is to create a new tweet yourself with a link to my site, rather than retweet one of my tweets. As with the Facebook share, if you do retweet you will be unaware it doesn’t work.
There are profound implications for society in the compliance of the major social media corporations with establishment demands to prevent social media from effectively challenging the mainstream media narrative – and I cannot think of a more classic example than this case. I do urge you to take action as described above, to show that the people will not stand for it.
Facebook is rolling out its censorship initiative
By Guilherme Schneider | The Duran | December 11, 2016
According to the latest news, Facebook began testing new tools to carry out its “censorship plan” with the convenient name of “tackling fake news.”
One of the tools being tested will enable users to inform Facebook if certain news stories are using “misleading language”. Some users posted images of a Facebook survey asking them the following question: “To what extent do you think that this link’s title withholds key details of the story?”
It is still unclear what kind of actions will be carried out after this additional user data is collected, but it is likely that some sort of a database, containing the list of “misleading” news websites, will be generated.
In a not so distant past, content curators from Facebook confirmed that they received direct orders from the company to decrease the relevance or even hide from the newsfeed stories and content with conservative language. While this happened in the US, similar stories have been reported in Brazil, the United Kingdom around the time of the Brexit, and in other countries.
Recently, there were other reports that Facebook developed a special software for the Chinese market, that would enable “third parties” to authorize the contents before posting it to the users’ timelines. The initiative would aim to lift the current ban of the social network in the country.
The main difference between this new software and the current content restrictions in some countries is that instead of reacting to a government request to hide some specific content, Facebook would be giving the option to some parties to censor and take down content before it is even posted on the network.
It is true that when you create a profile on Facebook or any other social network, you have to accept their terms and conditions in exchange of the “non-paid” use of their platforms. Most of these terms and conditions allow the social networks to analyze the information you are publishing and reading for several proposes, including targeted advertisements and many others, but is it ethical to take advantage of this information in order to define what content you should or should not see?
Since Snowden’s NSA information leak we know that we can be monitored at any given time by government agencies. The realization of this fact, however, didn’t stop us from using the same networks, nor did it prompt the closure of the NSA or other agencies involved in the perpetual recording and storage of our data.
But now we are entering a whole new level in which companies and governments will attempt to define what is right and wrong for us to see, read and talk about. What’s even more bizarre is that the CEO of Facebook could potentially run for office, while retaining control over one of the most popular social networks in the world, with the capability of retrieving and accessing anyone’s data without any sort of legal process or request.
This Orwellian trend is truly scary and we should really start questioning ourselves about the extent to which we are willing to continue handing out personal data and information to these networks.
BREAKING: The CIA Never Ever Lies
By David Swanson | War Is A Lie | December 10, 2016
At moments like these, when every good responsible and enlightened liberal is recognizing the need to destroy the world in order to save it, by getting World War III started with Russia before Trump can move in and damage anything, I believe it is important to remember a few facts that will strengthen our resolve:
The oligarch who owns the Washington Post has CIA contracts worth at least twice what he paid to buy the Washington Post, thus making the Washington Post the most reliable authority on the CIA we have ever, ever had.
When the CIA concludes things in secret that are reported to the Washington Post by anonymous sources the reliability of the conclusions is heightened exponentially.
Phrases like “individuals with connections to the Russian government” are simply shorthand for “Vladimir Putin” because the Washington Post has too much good taste to actually print that name.
Claims to know extremely difficult things to know, like the motivations of said individuals, are essentially fact, given what we know of the CIA’s near perfect record over the decades.
Getting this wrong, much less questioning something or asking to see any evidence, would endanger us all and threaten innocent children with having false statements made about them in a Russian accent.
The fact that the group of people producing our information is referred to as “the Intelligence Community” means it is intelligent and communal, while the fact that people within that community refused to go along with its claims or allow them to become a so-called national intelligence estimate means that there are traitors right in the heart of our holy warriors’ sanctuary.
If you doubt that the CIA is always, always right you need only focus your attention on the fact that there are Republicans questioning these claims, including Republicans who are terrible people, on top of which Donald Trump is a racist, sexist pig.
Good people are loyal Democrats, and when the Democrats did the thing that we now know was revealed by Putin in order to make Trump president (namely cheating its politically and morally superior candidate out of its nomination) that was done as a generous sacrifice for us and our children.
Claims made without public evidence have never turned out to be false or exaggerated in the slightest in the past, certainly not in Ukraine, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Vietnam, Nicaragua, or any other part of the earth.
When I looked into every past war and discovered that they were always preceded by lies, it was because I had secret psychic information that at some future date Vladimir would reward me. I should wait patiently for his payment and then report it to the CIA/Washington Post.
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Insanely disproportionate use of violence against unarmed civilians… continue
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