Left I on the News

The subject line, minus the question mark, is the title of a truly remarkable opinion article by Max Boot in the Washington Post. Remarkable, even if you were to believe (which is simply assumed in this column) that Putin was responsible for Russian “meddling” and that those efforts were responsible for Trump’s election, both remarkably dubious assertions.

The article compares the pros and cons of Putin's alleged "gamble" of getting Trump elected. Here are the cons for Russia which Boot himself lays out: "he has authorized the sale of lethal weaponry to Ukraine, expanded sanctions to include 38 Russian individuals and companies involved in the invasion of Ukraine, requested more defense spending and launched a cruise missile strike on the Syrian regime of Russia’s ally Bashar al-Assad." Facts. He even omits some, like the fact that Trump hasn't even returned the seized Russian compounds.

Now check out the supposed pros for Russia which represent the “gamble paying off big-time”. Most of them are words: Trump "routinely trashes everyone from Oprah Winfrey to Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), [but] never has a negative word to say about Russian President Vladimir Putin." Trump "still plays down its [Russian meddling] importance and refuses to respond". The one actual deed he cites is the fact that Trump, via Mike Flynn, talked Russia into not immediately retaliating for Obama’s expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats. Wait, wasn’t that a good thing for the U.S.? How exactly did that benefit Russia?

Remarkable.

Earlier this week, the heads of the FBI, CIA, and NSA testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee, along with DNI head Dan Coats. They were testifying about the latest DNI report about "threats to the United States" but here's the interesting thing. The report is 28 pages long, and covers a wide variety of threats (or perceived or alleged threats). But virtually all the news coverage of that event focussed on just three paragraphs out of those 28 pages, the paragraphs which dealt with predictions (no evidence, mind you!) of Russian interference in the upcoming 2018 elections. Below is a selection of coverage from Google News and also the front page (above the fold!) from the San José Mercury News, showing the prominence this aspect of the story received. And of course this is just the print coverage; the same was echoed in broadcast coverage. Every broadcast I watched (several channels) featured this and only this aspect of the hearing; BBC World News featured a minutes-long interview with Leon Panetta on the subject.


Now part of this emphasis was due to the fact that questioning, particularly by Democrats, focused on that, but it's also because of the media's own predilections. Among other things, they wouldn't want you reading or viewing or listening to RT or Sputnik or TeleSUR and realizing there are other points of view, other information you aren't getting from reading the Times or Post or watching CNN.

So what was said? Coats claimed that the “U.S. is under attack by cyber [sic] to penetrate nearly every major action that takes place in U.S.” Quite a statement. How does he define that "penetration"? He's not talking about hacking. No, rather “Propaganda, social media, false flag personas, sympathetic spokesmen”. In other words, he's talking about free speech. Including mine.

This is the perfect time to recall the previous DNI report, the infamous one from last January which started the public allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election. That report contained 2 pages of "background", 2 pages of "summary", 5 pages of the actual report (consisting entirely of evidence-free claims like "We assess with high confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election", and then 7 pages of an Annex (written in 2012!) describing the supposedly nefarious functioning of Russian-funded broadcaster RT. That is to say, of the "meat" of the report, a whopping 58% of the report was actually devoted to describing the actions of RT (and their actions four years before the 2016 election at that)!

And what kind of accusations were hurled at RT in that Annex? They "aired shows that overwhelmingly focused on criticism of US and Western governments." They "broadcast, hosted, and advertised third-party candidate debates" and dared to suggest that "the US two-party system does not represent the views of at least one-third of the population." They "aired a documentary about Occupy Wall Street." They "allege widespread infringements of civil liberties, police brutality". They ran "anti-fracking programming, highlighting environmental issues and the impacts on public health". They were "a leading media voice opposing [illegal] Western intervention in the Syrian conflict."

Are you sensing a pattern? This is what Dan Coats is talking about when he talks about Russian "propaganda." These are the kind of discussions the U.S. government would dearly love to suppress from the media, and if they can stigmatize (or even outlaw) foreign outlets like RT and Sputnik (and, no doubt, TeleSUR as well), and brand anyone voicing similar ideas (guilty as charged) as "sympathetic spokesmen", they will have achieved their aim. They're not concerned with the 2018 election, that's just a cover story. Their real concern is our free speech, and the crimp it puts on their actions.

15 years ago today, Colin Powell delivered his infamous speech at the U.N., the speech which cemented the support of the U.S. political and media establishments for the invasion of Iraq, under the pretext of "weapons of mass destruction". This blog came into existence in August, 2003, a few months later, as one of the very first (if not the first) radical left blogs on the internet (there were a few leftish progressive Democrat blogs at the time, that was about it). Here are some of the posts from that time (and later) which talk about Powell's speech:

Here's a letter to the editor I wrote, before the blog started, but after Powell's speech. I had no special knowledge with which to analyze his speech, just the ability to listen, read, and analyze what was being said, rather than simply accept it at face value. That, unfortunately, was more than the editors of the New York Times, Washington Post, and almost all Democrats and Republicans were capable of.

Here's an article I wrote many years later, when people started asking George Bush and other politicians, "If you knew then what you know now...". That question was a distraction, an excuse, because, as I show in the article, there was plenty known then (more than I had known when I had written that letter to the editor), way more than enough to say that "WMD" was just an excuse to carry out yet another U.S. war of regime change.

And this article talks about a subject which I was practically the only one to ever write about — the fate of Iraqi General Amer al-Saadi, the Iraqi liaison to the weapons inspectors and the man who spoke the truth to Powell's lies. "'I have always told the truth about these old programs,' Saddam Hussein's top scientific adviser said in an interview with German TV last April [2003]. 'The future will show it.'" As I wrote in that article, "History has proven that every word al-Saadi spoke was true, and every accusation made by Colin Powell ('We know that Iraq has at least seven of these mobile biological agent factories...There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more...Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons.') was false." Remarkably, the fate of General al-Saadi, who was imprisoned after the war, remains unknown, while the fate of Colin Powell remains all too well-known.

The claim, widely repeated in the media (e.g., here), is that “Russian bots” increased the use of the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo by 233,000 percent! First, without knowing the numbers (from what to what), percent increases are meaningless. An increase from 1 to 2 is a 100% increase. Any low starting number (like 0, before the subject was even raised) can generate huge percentage increases. Nowhere I can see are the actual numbers reported.

But more importantly, the Hamilton 68 website (run by these people) that tracks these things does not track Russian “bots”, it tracks its alleged “pro-Russian influence network”, which consists of unknown people (could be me or you!), and even at that Hamilton 68 says “It should be reiterated that the presence of a hashtag on the Hamilton 68 dashboard does not necessarily suggest that the success of a hashtag is the result of Russian influence operations, nor does it mean that hashtag originated with the Russian-linked influence operation network we monitor.” None of these qualifiers are being reflected in the media coverage of this "story".