By David Swanson
http://davidswanson.org/node/5403
http://davidswanson.org/node/5403
The U.S. government has now generated numerous news stories
and released multiple "reports" aimed at persuading us that Vladimir
Putin is to blame for Donald Trump becoming president. U.S. media has
dutifully informed us that the case has been made. What has been made is
the case for writing your own news coverage. The "reports" from the
"intelligence community" are no lengthier than the New York Times and Washington Post articles about them. Why not just read the reports and cut out the middle-person?
The New York Times calls the latest report "damning and
surprisingly detailed" before later admitting in the same "news" article
that the report "contained no information about how the agencies had
collected their data or had come to their conclusions." A quick glance
at the report itself
would have made clear to you that it did not pretend to present a shred
of evidence that Russia hacked emails or served as a source for
WikiLeaks. Yet Congresswoman Barbara Lee declared the evidence in this
evidence-free report "overwhelming." What should progressives believe,
the best Congresswoman we've got or our own lying eyes?
Supposedly the evidence has been made public and is overwhelming, but
try to find it and you'll come up dry. Ask why, and you'll be told that
of course the evidence cannot be made public as that would
risk revealing how the U.S. government came upon the information. Yet
the same government feeds the U.S. media with the story that it
intercepted communications of top Russian officials just after the U.S.
election celebrating Trump's victory. Did that story not run that risk?
The U.S. government feeds the U.S. media (specifically the "free" press
of the Washington Post whose owner makes more money from the CIA than from the Washington Post)
that Russia has hacked Vermont's electrical supply, and -- because this
was a claim that could be checked by an independent party -- the secret
methods of the CIA quickly turned out to be these: they had simply made
the thing up.
If you read the "reports" that the U.S. government releases, and
understand that the term "assess" is a synonym for "to claim without
evidence," it will very quickly become clear that reports on Russians'
motives for their alleged crimes (as well as for their non-criminal
public actions, such as running a television network) are purely
guesses. It also becomes clear that the U.S. government is not even
claiming to have any evidence that Russia was a source for WikiLeaks.
And, with a bit of help, it should become evident to anyone that the
U.S. government is not claiming to have any actual evidence of the
Russian government hacking Democratic emails.
Even the NSA will commit only to "moderate" confidence in what
millions of Democrats will now stake their lives (and potentially
everybody else's) on. Former top NSA expert on this stuff William Binney
swears the claims are utter nonsense. IP addresses produced as supposed
evidence turn out in at least many cases to have nothing to do with
Russia at all, much less the Russian government.
When the "17 intelligence organizations" put their collective
multi-billion-dollar brains together and report on anything that's
publicly available, they tend to get it wrong. The facts about Russia's
television network in this latest "report" misidentify personnel,
describe old programs as new ones, and screw up dates by failing to
recognize that in some parts of the world people list the day before the
month. Yet we are supposed to believe that anything they say about
topics not publicly available must be true -- despite having proved
false over and over again for decades.
WikiLeaks, which never claimed Iraq had WMDs, never alleged Gadaffi was about to commit a massacre, never sent missiles from drones into a single wedding or hospital, never concocted tales of babies taken from incubators, never screwed up its claims re chemical weapons attacks or the shooting down of airplanes, and in fact has never, as far as we know, tried to lie to us at all, says Russia was not its source. Julian Assange clearly does not think Russia used someone else to pass information to him. He could be wrong. But Craig Murray, a diplomat with a stellar reputation for honesty, claims to know at least one source and to place them in either the NSA or the Democratic Party.
Of course, having a plausible alternative account is not necessary to
recognize that the U.S. government has no evidence to support its
account. But the fact is that Murray's and numerous other scenarios are
perfectly plausible. One ought to await evidence before declaring one of
them fact. But we can go ahead and declare the CIA's story less and
less likely with each passing day. NSA whistleblowers like Binney
believe that if this story were true the NSA would have evidence of it.
It is safe to assume that if the NSA had evidence of it, some outline of
that evidence would have been made public by now, rather than all the
fluff, nonsense, and incompetent false attributions of IP addresses to
Russia, etc.
As each new perfumed pig of a report is released in Friday evening news dumps, we can advance ever closer to declaring that, while the Russian government has indeed done far worse things, it did not do this.
In fact, the latest report doesn't just produce no evidence of hacking and providing to WikiLeaks. It also tries to change the subject to things Russia openly and publicly did, that nobody disputes, but that the "intelligence" agencies still manage to screw up all the details on. I once, no kidding, invited a former CIA agent to speak at an event on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and the guy was late because he was unable to find it.
The accusations against Russia in the latest "overwhelming" report
include: favoring proposals to work with Russia over proposals to build
hostility (shocking!), and running a television network that many people
in the United States choose to watch (the outrage! how capitalistic!).
And the television network is accused of cheering for Trump's election
-- as if the British media wouldn't have cheered for Clinton's -- as if
the U.S. media doesn't cheer for election winners abroad all the time.
This network, RT, is also accused of covering third-party candidates,
fracking, Occupy, vote suppression, flaws in the U.S. election system,
and other forbidden topics.
Well why do you think people watch it? If the U.S. media gave good
time to third-party candidates, would people have to turn elsewhere to
learn about them? If the U.S. media could be trusted not to claim a U.S.
government report was "damning" in the same article that would later
admit it was devoid of evidence, would people in the U.S. search for
alternative sources of information? If the U.S. media allowed honest
reporting on Occupy or fracking, if it opened itself up to a wide range
of points of view and debate, if it allowed serious criticism of U.S.
government policies supported by both big parties, would people despise
it the way they do? Would people cheer when a fascist buffoon like Trump
denounces the media? Isn't the U.S. media's awfulness, combined with
the incredible free airtime it gave Trump, a fair target of blame for
his becoming president?
When I go on RT and suggest that the United States should end all its wars, and that Russia should too, I'm invited back on. The last U.S. network to have me on was MSNBC, and I opposed U.S. warmaking and was never heard from again. Perhaps most people watching U.S. media don't quite realize that there are no antiwar voices allowed, no voices that actually want to abolish war. Yet most people feel there is something missing, on this and most topics. There's lots of supposed debate on U.S. media, yet a dim -- or glaring -- awareness among viewers and readers that the debate is severely limited.
Here's an example close-to-hand: Whoever revealed to the U.S. public
additional evidence that the Democratic Party had slanted its primary
against Bernie Sanders did us all a favor. Those who still wanted to
vote for Hillary Clinton (which was clearly most if not all the people
who did before) could still do so. But anyone who approved of Hillary
Clinton's disastrous decades-long record and yet objected to the unfair
primary could choose not to vote for her. An informed public is a more
democratic one, not less. Whoever informed us aided our democracy. They
didn't damage it. And whoever informed us was not themselves
responsible for rigging the primary against Sanders. That was the
Democratic Party. But this point of view is neither permitted in the
U.S. media nor consciously missed, because the topic has been focused on
whodunit rather than what-did-they-do.
A second example is this: Those in the U.S. government pushing for
greater cold, if not hot, war with Russia, with increased desperation
during these next two weeks will be benefitting weapons profiteers and
perhaps "news" profiteers, but just about nobody else, while risking
incredible death and destruction. If I were an "intelligence" agency, I
would "assess" with "high confidence" that corruption was afoot. And I'd
get 16 friends to join me in calling that "assessment" a "report" if it
helped you to take it seriously.
--
David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. He is a 2015 and 2016 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee.
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