News Blackout in Effect
Matt Taibbi
An all-time media blackout is in effect. We’re experiencing real-time Sovietization. (1)
It transpires that the infamous incident before the 2020 election in which 50 former intelligence officials signed an open letter declared a New York Post expose about Hunter Biden's laptop to have the “classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” was, allegedly at least, instigated at the behest of the Joe Biden campaign. This at least is the allegation in a letter to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken released by Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, and Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government.
In that letter, which is not easy to find, you’ll see three snippets of dialogue from questioning of Morell, who appears to have organized the open letter. In the first snippet, he explains that the idea originated with a call from Blinken, then of the Biden campaign, and that absent that call, Morell wouldn’t have done what he did:
In the second snippet Morell bluntly explains that he did it because “I wanted him to win,” him being Joe Biden:
By any marker, this is an enormous news story. If we go by the usual measuring stick of American scandal, the Watergate story, this potentially meets or exceeds that, on almost every level. Does it reach into the current White House? Check. Was it a craven attempt to subvert the electoral process? Check again. Did a presidential candidate engineer a massive public deception? Yes, resoundingly. Did it involve intelligence agencies? Yes, and these weren’t amateurs like Nixon’s plumbers. These were 50 of the most powerful people in the intelligence world — including five former heads or acting heads of the Agency in Morell, John Brennan, Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, and John McLaughlin — conspiring to meddle in domestic politics on a grand scale. ...
Time to Get Spies Out of Politics
The Michael Morell story demonstrates that the intelligence community needs sweeping reform, beginning with getting spies all the way out of domestic political life
On September 08, 2002, New York Times writers Michael Gordon and Judith Miller wrote a blockbuster, titled, “U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts.” It began:
Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today.
In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium.
That same day, Vice President Dick Cheney went on “Meet The Press” and told Tim Russert Iraq had “reconstituted” its nuke program, citing “a story in the New York Times this morning.”
The Cheney-MTP episode set a standard for laundering disinformation through media. The Times got its “A-Bomb Parts” story by citing “Bush administration officials,” and Cheney sold the same story to the world by citing the New York Times. This merry-go-round is a perfect way for politicians and spooks to introduce bogus news into the world without leaving fingerprints.
The new story about former acting CIA director Michael Morell looks like a similar game of disinformation telephone. Again, the House Weaponization of Government Committee led by Jim Jordan recently questioned Morell. His answers suggest he may have been “triggered” by a call from then-Biden campaign official Anthony Blinken to organize a group letter signed by 50 former intel officials, opining the Hunter Biden laptop story looked like a “Russian information operation.”
A little-noticed detail about the letter is in its next-to-last paragraph, where officials worked the word “disinformation” into the text:
In addition, media reports say that the FBI has now opened an investigation into Russian involvement in the case. According to USA Today, “…federal authorities are investigating whether the material supplied to the New York Post by Rudy Giuliani is part of a smoke bomb of disinformation pushed by Russia.”
The USA Today piece was published two days before the group letter. Citing a “person familiar with the matter,” it said the FBI was investigating the “smoke bomb of disinformation,” a USA Today characterization of the “person’s” assessment.
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This is the same circular firing squad trick Cheney employed. Nameless official is source for news outlet, news outlet becomes source for different official, and in the end, no one has to take credit for making the wrong claim. This is the template for information delivery in a world run by spooks, where we won’t get news but what the Russians call versii, or versions — takes on takes on reality, with the origin source too far away to see. We’ll know what we’re supposed to think, but less and less effort is being put into the problem of giving us reasons to believe what we’re told. ...
The above is a "preview" of Taibbi's longer account of this topic, which is behind a paywall on his substack blog, Racket News.
(1) EDITOR'S NOTE : Comparisons with the Soviet Union are always iffy, at best, if not downright tendentious for Americans and other Westerners still very much ensconced in the highly polluted ethnocentric American bubble. What is going on today in the US empire did not happen in substance or intent in the USSR. Taibbi, like other Western observers, confuses a country's well-advised right to protect its informational space from Western propaganda—the most potent, malicious and ubiquitous of all—or fortify a difficult process aiming to build an entirely new social system, a form of"censorship". They are wrong. Too much simplification becomes a lie. Far more nuance and understanding are needed to evaluate that kind of reality. See, for example, what Prof. Paul Hollander, certainly no Soviet admirer, has to say about the Soviet Union experience in his indispensable work, Soviet & American Society. (Oxford University Press).
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