“The Russians are Coming!”: Where Is This ‘Digital Watergate’ Propaganda Campaign Going?

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ABOVE IMAGE: Michael Morrel, a prominent player in the pro-Clinton wing of the CIA, and part-time propagandist on CBS.


By Daniel Espinosa Winder


propaganda

The Russians are coming! Once again, the structural bias of the American news media in favor of the ‘official version’ turns them into a propaganda tool. Intelligence sources point out Russian interference in recent elections. However, WikiLeaks-related sources say the Democratic Party’s mail leak was the working of a whistleblower within that institution.

“Experts point out…”, “Specialists agree…”, “There is a consensus among intelligence agencies …” While the plot’s been cooking for several months now, it was the DNC leaks and Hillary Clinton’s subsequent defeat against Donald Trump what finally put the ‘serious’ press, mainly the Washington Post and the New York Times, working in its propagandistic role: ‘the Russians are trying to destroy American democracy’, they say.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a key tool of the US executive, was created in 1947 and has since been involved in well over a dozen coups, attempted assassinations, and a long list of covert operations around the world. However, this record does not seem to matter to the American corporate press, which continues uncritically channeling its official statements.

Mossadegh in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Goulart in Brazil, Allende in Chile, are just some of the leaders in the long list of CIA successful hits. Where it did not operate directly, as in Iraq in 2003, the CIA fabricated intelligence information indispensable to justify military aggression, with the dire consequences already known to the world.


The disinformation plague hits home

It was inevitable, and now they have brought it home: A substantial segment of the intel community, which openly supported Hillary, doesn’t like Trump, and little more than a month away from January the 20th, intelligence reports, full of circumstantial evidence and ‘official’ opinions, have already caused the New York Times to begin comparing the alleged incursion of Russian hackers into the Democratic mailing servers with Watergate, the incident that saw Richard Nixon’s departure from the White House in 1972. The was not too difficult to accomplish as these two major US newspapers had been acting literally as cheerleaders for Hillary Clinton throughout the campaign.

However, indications that this is all about the working of a whistleblower, probably within the Democratic Party, and not an army of Russian hackers, seems more convincing:

I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they’re certainly not Russians, he’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; they are two different things. If what the CIA says is true, and their statements refer to people they know is related to the Russian state, they would arrest someone if he was inside the United States … (who) has not been shy about arresting whistleblowers or extraditing Hackers. They just do not have any knowledge.

(CIA Concludes Russia Interfered to Help Trump Win Election, the Guardian, 12/10/16)

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his insistence on involving the Russians was at first useful to divert attention from the incriminating contents of John Podesta’s and DNC’s mails, but now we see it mutate into something far more dangerous, with monolithic support from mass media, as every time their masters smell blood, the New York Times and the Washington Post soon dedicate front pages to it and the world’s corporate media simply goes along. But where is this going?

As Craig Murray points out, when the media speak of ‘credible’ sources, and all this Russian charade is based on this supposedly blind trust in American officials, what it is saying is that they are establishment sources,for whom presenting solid evidence has been always optional. We say “supposedly blind trust” because many of these media misinformers do not believe for a second what they are reporting, but they do it nonetheless. It’s not so much a question of “trusting” the government, as a matter of protecting and advancing their careers while marching in lockstep with the rest of the conformist pack.

In a statement to the Daily Mail, Murray, a former United Kingdom ambassador to Uzbekistan, said he was the one to receive the documents from a Democratic Party employee in Washington, after the boycott suffered by Bernie Sanders in the primaries, which ended in the resignation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and caused the condemnation by many operatives and sympathizers of the Democratic Party.

This kind of renewal of the 50’s McCarthyism was carried out on several fronts, one of vital importance being referred to the alarm regarding the proliferation of ‘false news’. The Washington Post published an article on November 24, citing the findings of an organization called Propornot, an anonymous group that drew up a list of 200 media devoted to ‘Russian propaganda’ and ‘false news’.

Propornot’s analysis against these media was made using a methodology that would embarrass even the laziest of school boys, since no real association was necessary with the Russian State: they simply incorporated the vast majority of alternative journalism blogs that had something critical to say about US foreign policy, which generated the univocal rejection of both mainstream and independent journalism and a later clarifying —but woefully inadequate—note by the WP.

When the media that ‘set the agenda’, such as the Washington Post, The New York Times or CNN, publish an article, the world’s media follows obediently. What we observe, in short, in all these cases, is a transmission of information based on a questionable concept of authority, not facts.

Let us remember Iraq. At the inaugural rally of President George W. Bush’s (January 30, 2001) the issue of removing Saddam Hussein was put at the top of the list, as recalled by former US Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill:

It was about finding a way to do it. The president said, ‘Go find me a way to do this.’

That’s where the CIA comes in. The American anthropologist David Price has studied the agency for two decades and agrees with former agent Philip Agee that the CIA is, “the secret police of American capitalism.” In addition, he believes that Trump is embracing political allies that would point to a strengthening of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to the detriment of the CIA.

An interesting month awaits us.

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NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS • PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP. JUST CLICK HERE.


 DANIEL ESPINOSA WINDER serves as Associate Editor & Special Editor, Spanish Edition

Daniel lives in Caraz, a small city in the Andes of Peru. He graduated in Communication Sciences in Lima and started researching mainstream media and more specifically, propaganda. His writings are often a critique of the role of corporate mass media in our society. Daniel also serves as Editorial Director for TGP’s Spanish Language edition 

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Russia Responds to Baseless US Election Hacking Accusations

ABOVE: Obama, a front man for 8 years of the fraud that passes for democracy in the United States, pontificating sanctimoniously about the holiness of US elections. 

black-horizontalDispatches from
STEPHEN LENDMAN

stevenlendmanbanner
 T    hankfully, Moscow only has to put up Obama’s neocon infested administration another five weeks. Bipartisan congressional and scoundrel media hostility remain major challenges. Trump’s intentions aren’t certain until he, his diplomatic corps and others in his administration begin dealing with Russia directly – hopefully more responsibly than Obama and his criminal gang.


On Friday, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov blasted groundless US accusations of Russian election interference, saying, “(t)hey should either stop talking about that or produce some proof at last.” He called baseless accusations “ludicrous nonsense.” Obama’s vow to retaliate against nonexistent Russian hacking “at a time and place of our choosing” could launch cyberwar, risking far greater consequences.
 ..
Moscow categorically denies interfering in America’s election, Putin and Sergey Lavrov scoffing at what never happened – Russia’s Foreign Minister, saying he was “astonished” about the NBC News report claiming Putin’s involvement. “(T)here is not a chance that anybody could believe that,” he stressed. Sadly, daily repetition gets most people to believe almost anything, most of it fake news.
 ..
On December 13, Britain’s Daily Mail interviewed former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray, close to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. The broadsheet said “Murray insisted that the DNC and Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks did not come from the Russians, and were given to the whistleblowing group by Americans who had authorised access to the information.” Leaks, not hacking, occurred, not from Russia, from internal US sources with “legal access to the information.”
 ..
Murray explained “leakers were motivated by ‘disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders.’ “ Murray said he retrieved the package “from a source during a clandestine meeting in a wooded area near American University, in northwest D.C.”   He said the individual he met with was not the original person who obtained the information but “an intermediary.’ “
 ..
Unlike Obama, other rogue administration officials and media scoundrels, Murray is a figure of impeccable integrity, a rarity in US and UK politics.  His account exposed Washington’s fake news. No Russian US election hacking occurred.  Believe nothing from Washington officials and supportive media scoundrels, regurgitating their fake news ad nauseam.

NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS • CONTINUE THE DEBATE ON OUR FACEBOOK PAGE. CLICK HERE. 


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Screen Shot 2016-02-19 at 10.13.00 AM

STEPHEN LENDMAN lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III."  ( http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html ) Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com



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Hypocrisy of Russia-Did-It Stories Is Hard to Stomach

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By Janine Jackson, FAIR


Meddling in other countries’ elections is an exciting adventure–when it’s the United States doing the meddling.

It is, of course, worth knowing what involvement any other country might have had in the US election, but elite media’s consumption with the Russia-did-it storyline so far is discouraging to say the least.

The Intercept‘s Sam Biddle (12/14/16) has a breakdown of what public evidence there is that Russia was behind hacks of DNC email accounts. He concludes that while it’s plausible that the Russians or even Russia was involved, it’s a very long way from proven, different agencies dispute it, all the sources we’re reading are anonymous and the assessments themselves are secret.

It should go without saying that the repercussions of such an accusation are serious. As Biddle writes:

What we’re looking at now is the distinct possibility that the United States will consider military retaliation (digital or otherwise) against Russia, based on nothing but private sector consultants and secret intelligence agency notes. If you care about the country enough to be angry at the prospect of election-meddling, you should be terrified of the prospect of military tensions with Russia based on hidden evidence.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]part from the slipperiness between the possible and the proven, the gap between the confidence of the headlines and the caution buried deep inside, it’s weird to see media skip over the story’s center: that the alleged meddling consisted of revealing true information about the Democratic Party and Clinton campaign. As journalist Bob Parry (Consortium News11/18/16) notes, a sort of hysteria in official Washington is now clumsily conflating such real—if embarrassing—news with the phenomenon of “fake news,” though reporting has tracked that phenomenon not to the Kremlin but to Millennials in Macedonia, for example, who figured out how to make money with crazy click-bait stories.

But in back of it all, what makes the umbrage of elite media so hard to stomach is the hypocrisy. This is, after all, the same elite media that supports outsider-induced “regime change” anywhere and everywhere they see an official enemy, from Iraq to  Honduras to Libya to Syria—and wait, what’s this? A cover from Time magazine (7/15/96): a chipper Boris Yeltsin holding an American flag, and the line “Yanks to the Rescue! The Secret Story of How American Advisers Helped Yeltsin Win.” You can make “one law for me, another for thee” your credo, but you can’t be too surprised when others are unimpressed.

Whatever story there is to be told about Russia and the 2016 election, corporate media have squandered the credibility it would take to tell it.



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 Janine Jackson is the program director of FAIR and the producer and host of CounterSpin.  

Note to Commenters
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Pro-Hillary Dark Forces Plot Anti-Trump Coup

black-horizontalDispatches from
STEPHEN LENDMAN

stevenlendmanbanner
 I      t shouldn’t surprise. Since the deplorable Clinton co-presidency, America has been on a slippery slope toward full-blown tyranny – notably post-the-9/11 mother of all false flags. 


 It was followed by an array of police state laws, new ones recently enacted, flagrant constitutional violations, media scoundrels silent on an unprecedented abuse of power.


NB: This is not intended to endorse Trump, whom we oppose, albeit on an issue by issue basis, but to highlight the treachery of the Democrats. Every media organ associated with them is shouting the “Russian hacking” accusation from the rooftops—NPR, Rachel Maddow, DemocracyNow!, CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, Daily Kos, MoveOn, AVAAZ, and scores of liberaloid shills and establishment magazines, as well as almost the entire Hollywood celebrity establishment. It makes for a powerful megaphone, but all the sanctimonious shouting and theatrics won’t make a big lie into a truth. Oh, by the way, it was not hacking, but an insider leak.—Ed.


 McCarthyism is back on steroids. Truth-telling is now considered fake news and/or pro-Russian. We’re perilously close to criminalizing content or advocacy for anything opposing America’s deplorable agenda, its imperial wars, its high crimes against humanity at home and abroad.


Perhaps I and others like me are considered Kremlin agents for supporting Putin’s anti-war, anti-imperial, anti-uni-polarity agenda, a leader supporting rule of law principles and mutual cooperation among all nations.

It’s polar opposite how America operates, a rogue state like no others earlier, threatening humanity’s survival like never before, a terrifying reality too few people realize.
 ..
Now there’s a plot afoot to deny Trump his electoral triumph – the Clintons, their supporters and other dark forces behind it, their goal to turn America into an illegitimate putschist state like Nazi-run Ukraine, installed by Obama. According to Politico, Hillary’s top political advisor, John Podesta, wants an intelligence briefing on phony charges of Russian election hacking given Electoral College members before they vote on December 19. In a Monday statement, he said:
 ..
Electors have a solemn responsibility under the Constitution…(O)ur campaign decried the interference of Russia in our campaign and its evident goal of hurting our campaign to aid Donald Trump. Despite our protestations, this matter did not receive the attention it deserved by the media in the campaign. We now know that the CIA has determined Russia’s interference in our elections was for the purpose of electing Donald Trump. This should distress every American.”
 ..
Reliable independent sources debunked the fabricated allegation. Not a shred of evidence supports it. None exists. Even the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) refuses to endorse it “because of a lack of conclusive evidence.” So does the FBI for the same reason.
 ..
In November congressional testimony, DNI head James Clapper said US intelligence agencies lack evidence pointing to Russian US election hacking.  Can any thinking person believe Russia cost Hillary the election? It defies logic. It’s an absurdity on its face, a disgraceful Big Lie and an affront to the sensibility of everyone. Parties trying to reverse November’s electoral result should face sedition or treason charges. Their attempt confirms America’s deplorable state more than ever. The nation was never a democracy from inception. Now it’s a fascist police state, waging permanent war on humanity, exceeding anything before in world history – rule of law principles out-the-window entirely.

NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS • CONTINUE THE DEBATE ON OUR FACEBOOK PAGE. CLICK HERE. 


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Screen Shot 2016-02-19 at 10.13.00 AM

STEPHEN LENDMAN lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III."  ( http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html ) Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com



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But I thought the Cold War was supposed to have been about ideology.

horiz-black-wideDispatches from Eric Zuesse
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Was the Cold War against communism, or against Russia? Russia was our ally in World War II, and we’d have a Nazi world today if 26 million Russians hadn’t died from Hitler’s bombs and attacks while Russia fought on with courage amidst desperation, finally to crush his regime. 


ABOVE IMAGE: Polish NATO troops on parade. Poland, traditionally an extremely reactionary country, has become (with Ukraine) a battering ram for America’s designs against Russia.  Foolhardy for the Poles to lend themselves to such dangerous maneuvers.

But Russia was communist, so the Cold War developed after that alliance (the Allies in WW II) ended. Then, Russia abandoned communism in 1990, and ended its own Warsaw Pact military alliance in 1991, while America’s military alliance NATO expanded right up to Russia’s borders — and yet the West claims that Russia and not NATO are the ‘aggressor’ here? Sorry: I don’t get it. I really do not. Not at all.
 ..
The Cold War should have ended in 1991 when communism and the Warsaw Pact did, but instead it continued on in the form of NATO (very profitable for what Dwight Eisenhower called “the military-industrial complex” — and its U.S. military is also the employer, direct or indirect, of much of our workforce, especially when arms-manufacturers are counted in). And now Donald Trump is being called by haters-of-Trump (who are almost exclusively lovers-of-Hillary) a U.S. national-security risk because he wants to end the Cold War on the U.S. side — 25 years after it had ended in 1991 on the communist side. Oh, it’s still too soon to do that? Really?
 ..
On December 12th, appeared a call for a re-do of the election (technically it was a letter to the CIA urging an immediate report to members of the Electoral College on whether Trump is a secret Russian agent or won by means of Russian manipulation of the election), and it was signed by 9 Electoral College electors for Hillary Clinton, and by 1 Electoral College elector for Donald Trump (the latter of whom, Chris Suprun of Texas, had written in the New York Times on December 5th pouring hatred against Trump and lauding George W. Bush, who “led us through the tragic days following the [9/11] attacks. His leadership showed that America was a great nation” — so we won’t need to wonder what type of President he admires).

“The bipartisan electors’ letter raises very grave issues involving our national security,” Clinton campaign chair John Podesta said.
‘Bipartisan’ — my foot!


Democrats (the Party I left during Obama’s second term, as he ratcheted-up fake charges against Russia, and cooperated with the neocons — most of whom then were Republicans — to bring the Cold War back to a boil) are trying every trick they can to un-do the election’s result, and this is merely their latest such tactic. 


The only valid claim they can make (but they don’t) is that Hillary Clinton (she’s their candidate — the Obama Administration’s super-neocon and the bloodthirsty hawk who had famously said upon learning of Muammar Gaddafi’s gory ending, “We came, we saw, he died. Ha ha!” — oh, wasn’t that a wonderful victory ‘we’ can all be proud of!) beat Trump by 2% in the popular vote. But that claim is irrelevant under the Constitution. (We’re supposed to be a nation under laws, under the U.S. Constitution — right?) 

 ..
This isn’t the first time in our nation’s history when a President was elected who had lost the popular vote. Unless and until we amend our Constitution to impose a popular-vote Presidency (and so to remove the existing regional-state role in the selection of our President and Commander-in-Chief), Donald Trump won the 2016 election. Any Electoral College elector who was sworn prior to the election to vote for a candidate but who after having been elected on that basis, has gone turncoat against that candidate, is turncoat against our nation. He (or she) should consider, in this light, what he has done. He’s turncoat not against Russia, but against America, and against the voters whom that person represents (or is supposed to represent). But, above all, he’s turncoat against the Constitution itself, whose 12th Amendment says of members of the Electoral College:
 ..
… They shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President. … The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted. The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President. …
 ..
The presumption is that each person who “pledged” to vote there for a particular candidate will write that person’s name onto one of the 538 ballots and hand it in to be counted for that person, once all of the 538 ballots have been collected and the final tally of the 538 is publicly counted in Congress, in Washington DC.
 ..
If Mr. Suprun fails to honor that commitment or “pledge,” then his only punishment — if any — for having done so, will be his own conscience (presuming that he has any), but as far as the law is concerned, he will have committed no crime, and not even a misdemeanor, even though his action on that occasion (his vote in the Electoral College) will have violated his very solemn “pledge,” on the very basis of which pledge he had acquired this awesome right, and extraordinary privilege, in our ‘democracy’. As an Elector he represents around 600,000 voters, maybe none of whom have even heard his name, and yet he will be their lone voice in selecting America’s next President.
 ..
Though Suprun, and the nine other signatories (among the 538 Electoral College members), might actually believe that, as their letter says, this is about “a foreign power, namely Russia, [which] acted covertly to interfere in the presidential campaign with the intent of promoting Donald Trump’s candidacy,” it’s really about America — what type of nation we really are, not what type of nation Russia is.


About the author

EricZuesseThey're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.



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