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 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.
Apart 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 News, 11/18/16) 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.
Janine Jackson is the program director of FAIR and the producer and host of CounterSpin.
Connect the dots. CIA & Clinton Russia Hacking claims are connected: both are enraged that their Syria regime change plan is falling through. The CIA and NeoCons want war with Russia. They want to crush the Shia Crescent and partition Syria. Russia is ruining their plan
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2016/12/elite-coup.html#more
Right, but president Trump can find a way to start a war with Russia via Iran.
So just a different path.
The story of how the US stole the 1996 election for Yeltsin was actually made into a Hollywood motion picture with Jeff Goldblum:
http://russia-insider.com/en/if-russia-did-rig-us-election-it-would-only-be-payback-yeltsins-second-term/ri18129
Not only will America steal your elections, but we’ll make a Hollywood movie bragging about how awesome it is!
Of course we don’t even have to go back to 1996. The reason why the Putin administration (finally!) kicked out US NGOs, was because they were fomenting a color revolution in Russia itself, including playing a role in organizing the 2011 anti-government protests.
Imagine how what kind of brutal crackdowns there would be if Russia was behind Occupy or BLM. As it was, it was brutal enough.
Your are citing Consortium News? Really?
Would you prefer Addicting Info?
Probably the Washington Post.
/s
Yes, really. Oh wait, are you one of the sheeple who’s fallen for the “fake news” BS? Don’t be fooled. Consortium News has been a highly regarded and credible source for years.
Go back and check the ConsortiumNews articles/posts from 2003 regarding the ‘Iraq war fever’, compare it to the MSM coverage back then, and then compare it to what is now the generally accepted analysis of that period – – – you’ll see that ConsortiumNews was 95% correct while the MSM was 95% wrong. They earned a lot of credibility with that episode alone…
Three cheers for whoever brought the truth to the american voter.
The other thing that has to be made clear when we’re talking about the fake news outrage: For some reason, the fake news coming from websites you’ve never heard if is more of a problem than fake news plastered on the front pages of the New York Times and Washington Post, or broadcast from CNN’s news headquarters. So the outrage doesn’t have half as much to do with whether the news being reported is fake or real, but whether it’s going through the corporate media filters or around them.
Very true. Propaganda is all about ways to direct peoples thoughts.
http://www.unz.com/article/the-show-must-go-on/
It’s not just the corpress pimping this pap. “Progressive” outfits like MoveOn and the Working Families Party are screaming “Russkies!” from the top of their lungs in a desperate bid to reverse the Electoral College vote from Citizen KKKane to Madame Mayhem.
Of course the Demorats themselves view this as a godsend, diverting attention from their starring role in this fiasco of an election.
Whatever role Vlad the Vampire may have played, it pales in comparison to their betrayal of poor and working folks here and abroad.
I just got the email from MoveOn asking me to pitch in for some anti-Russia ad. The link to “donate” was easy enough to find, but I couldn’t find the one where I could tell them to F— OFF.
Greg, I fear “Unsubscribe” is as close as you can come.
I’ll eschew that option, as I think it’s useful to know what nonsense these party animals are up to.
So did I. I just deleted it. In fact, I’ve been ‘just deleting’ most of their emails lately, and especially through the election, as it seems they’ve adopted a more elite Dem agenda (or perhaps my own views have just shifted away from the Establishment mindset). I used to be a fan of Soros, too, until I learned he’s fully entrenched in that mindset.
I will hold off on unsubscribing for now, as I still think they do a lot of good. Sadly (or maybe not), this election had me unsubscribing from a few of the advocacy organizations to which I belonged, after they revealed their true colors.
Avaaz and Care2 as well — nauseating. Bad enough that Human Rights Watch and even Amnesty (U.S.) parrot the official line.
Glad to see FAIR, once again, telling it like it is. I remember well that remarkable Time exposé; it wasn’t just U.S. govt. agencies that twisted the Russian election but specific Republican operatives.
Funny how the CIA is suddenly the Font of Truth, innit?
The war-with-Russia fomenting media would like to use this ploy, the hope of getting Trump rejected somehow, to get liberals and lefties to join their cause, first by programming the idea that Russia is the source of all evil, and second by programming the idea that whistle blowing, as Assange, Manning, and Snowden have done, is just as bad.
An additional motive is to make people forget that it was Comey who performed the October Surprise this year, and as a Republican crypto fascist it makes sense that he’d be on Trump’s side. And who knows if there was more involved. This is where investigation SHOULD be focused.
The leaking of the DNC emails back in the spring had very little effect even on the Primaries. Rather than looking at the content of the leaks, the media immediately began painting Hillary as the victim–possibly of Bernie Boyz or Russians. Actual Bernie supporters were not surprised by the contents of the emails, there was already plenty of evidence the DNC was rigging everything they could to favor Hillary. And Hillary supporters didn’t care either, as they saw the DNC doing the right thing. So nothing actually came of this alleged “interference,” which could actually be seen as truth telling.
I’m astounded by how little you know and how much you and Biddle pretend to know. How dare you cast doubt on 16 national security agencies’ consensus? Do you expect them to lay out their intel for you to pick through? It’s INTELLIGENCE. A former agent who’d been posted in Afghanistan called an NPR news line to say he was furious that he’d risked his life to gather intel only to hear the whole of American Intelligence being dissed by ignorant carpers. Why have intel agencies if you expect them to spill all their facts and sources for the rest of the world to analyze and counter in detail?
Have any of you people studied American and world history?
Dear Gail, do you seriously call ‘intelligence’ what those (apparently 16) agencies produce? Remember what ‘intelligence’ led to the disastrous war in Iraq?
Maybe that should be a valid argument for more transparency and oversight?
And as for the ‘former agent posted in Afghanistan’, the US army did – and still does – understand little if anything at all in Afghanistan, in spite of all the psy-ops, PRT/USAID pseudo-development agents, etc etc etc.
That output is no yardstick for secret agents’ (sorry ‘officers’) credibility let alone professionalism. Afghanistan would be a better place if that gentleman and his colleagues had not risked their lives but would have stayed home in the US.
Pamela – I agree. I would just add that while there ARE some agents/’officers’ (whatever we call them) who produce useful intelligence, ultimately it’s up to their managers/agency heads as to what gets used vs unused. As you alluded to, in the lead-up to Iraq War II, while many CIA analysts saw NO indication that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, Cheney kept visiting them (reportedly 20 times — which was never done before by a VP) essentially to coerce them into eventually listening to a non-credible source (‘Curveball’) who told them what Cheney wanted to hear. Wanting to keep their jobs no-doubt, they passed along Curveball’s story (with qualifications), but Cheney dropped the qualifications and used it to help concoct the phony rationale for invading Iraq.
Also, these CIA ‘proofs’ don’t even cite anonymous sources as saying the know who-did-what-when, they simply say that it ‘strongly appears’ or ‘is consistent-with’ Russian involvement, which are just weasel-words so they can later backpedal and say “Oh, we never claimed we KNEW 100% that someone in Russia did this, we just said it was ‘consistent-with’ the appearance of Russian involvement”.
Below are the 16 Intel agencies (per Wikipedia). What’s amusing when it’s reported that they supposedly all concur in this vague assessment about Putin’s reputed ‘hacking’ is that you just know that a number of them have nothing at all to do with cyber-warfare (ie; Coast Guard Intelligence, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, etc) – – – it’s not their department.
Bureau of Intelligence and Research
Central Intelligence Agency
Coast Guard Intelligence
Defense Intelligence Agency
Intelligence and Security Command
Intelligence Branch Federal Bureau of Investigation
Marine Corps Intelligence Activity
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
National Reconnaissance Office
National Security Agency/Central Security Service
Office of Intelligence and Analysis
Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence
Office of National Security Intelligence
Office of Naval Intelligence
Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence
Twenty-Fifth Air Force
“Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,” he said. “The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.”
http://www.westernjournalism.com/assange-wikileaks-did-not-receive-documents-from-russian-government/
Have you? If you have, you’d know the CIA, FBI and other “Intel” agencies lie and deceive to get us into wars and overthrow foreign governments all the time. It’s what they do. So, no. We won’t believe what they say without some proof. Not this time; especially when their target is Russia.
Janine lets readers down. To talk about this story without informing readers about Craig Murray’s role in ‘proving’ Russia didn’t do any hacking in this particular case, but rather, info was ‘leaked’, is simple negligence, at best.
God bless FAIR, and Jeff C – wherever he is!