The New York Times (6/26/20) front-paged what “intelligence says”—while offering very little explanation of why they say they believe it, or why we should believe them.
Based upon a bombshell New York Times report (6/26/20), virtually the entire media landscape has been engulfed in the allegations that Russia is paying Taliban fighters bounties to kill US soldiers.
The Washington Post (6/27/20) and the Wall Street Journal (6/27/20) soon published similar stories, based on the same intelligence officials who refused to give their names, and did not appear to share any data or documents with the news organizations. “The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post have confirmed our reporting,” tweeted the Times article’s lead author, Charlie Savage. The Post’s John Hudson seemed to back him up: “We have confirmed the New York Times scoop: A Russian military spy unit offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants to attack coalition forces in Afghanistan,” he responded.
Yet these statements were categorically untrue. The Times stressed how unsure they were about the allegations, using qualifying language throughout, such as “it was not clear” and “greater uncertainty.” And Hudson’s own article uses the phrase “if confirmed” in relation to the bounty claims, explicitly conceding they are not confirmed.
Despite the fact that the anonymous accusations were far from proven, and that both the Post and Journal included categorical denials from all those involved, including the White House, the Taliban and Moscow, much of corporate media treated the story as an established fact from the outset. “This is jaw-dropping,” fumed MSNBC host Rachel Maddow (6/26/20) about the “sickening” news. She throws in an “if this Times report is correct” before going on to treat is as “confirmed” information:
You know from this reporting in the New York Times, which has since been confirmed by the Wall Street Journal, that not only does the president know that Russia was paying for American soldiers’ deaths, paying rewards for Americans dead…his response to that is nothing except a friendly call.
CNN (6/26/20) ran the headline “Russia Offered Bounties to Afghan Militants to Kill US Troops,” while the Guardian (6/27/20) went with a British variant, “Russia Offered Bounty to Kill UK Soldiers”—in both cases presenting the allegations as facts.
‘Officials Said’
This would be troublesome enough, but there are a number of reasons to be skeptical of the veracity of the claims. Firstly, the Times, Post and Journal’s reports are all based on fundamentally untrustworthy actors who refuse to go on the record. Here is a list of all the sources mentioned in the Times report:
- “According to officials briefed on the matter”
- “Officials said”
- “Officials said”
- “Officials said”
- “Said Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary for President Vladimir V. Putin”
- “Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban, denied”
- “The officials spoke”
- “Russian government officials have dismissed such claims”
- “Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., the commander of American forces in Afghanistan at the time, said”
- “Officials were said to be confident”
- “Some officials have theorized”
- “Officials have also suggested”
- “The officials briefed on the matter said”
- “Western intelligence officials say”
- “American intelligence officials say”
- “American officials say”
- “Officials briefed on its operations say”
It is standard journalistic practice to name and check sources. The Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics insists that “reporters should use every possible avenue to confirm and attribute information before relying on unnamed sources,” and that we must “always question sources’ motives before promising anonymity,” because too many “provide information only when it benefits them.”
Without a name to go with the source, there are no consequences for sources (or journalists, for that matter) lying and spreading malicious rumors. Using an anonymous source is implicitly asking readers to trust a reporter’s judgment and credibility. The practice is less important with minor details in a story (e.g. “a city nurse said three people had been injured”), but grows exponentially more vital when the source is the basis for the article, and when there are massive consequences in publishing the story. That is why it should be reserved for whistleblowers or others facing serious harm if caught. The Times’ own guidelines on integrity strongly discourages the practice; “There is nothing more toxic to responsible journalism than an anonymous source,” wrote the paper’s public editor (New York Times, 5/30/04).
Allowing unnamed officials to set the agenda in news is something FAIR has constantly criticized (6/25/14, 3/29/16, 4/26/17), and regularly leads to outlets being burned (FAIR.org, 6/30/17, 12/3/18). Therefore, they should be used only when a reporter is completely confident in their veracity. Considering who the sources were for the Russian bounty scandal (intelligence officials), the story, as it was published, should never have left the drawing board. As we wrote recently (FAIR.org, 2/28/20):
It is the job of the covert security services to lie and manipulate. They are among the least trustworthy groups in the world, journalistically speaking, as part of their profession involves planting fake information. The only group less deserving of blind faith than spies would be anonymous spies.
Janine Jackson (Extra!, 11/11) noted that journalists’ anonymity agreement with official sources “works out swell for powerful people who’d prefer to avoid accountability for what they say, and terribly for citizens for whom that accountability is crucial.”
Unfortunately, reliance on such sources is near ubiquitous at the Times and the Post. In 2011, FAIR (1/11/11) found that virtually every article on Afghanistan appearing in the two outlets over the course of a week featured material from anonymous official US sources.
The information on the Russian bounties appears to have been both minimal and vague, with officials refusing to show any corroborating evidence or the documents they claimed to have, and were unable to link the accusations to any concrete, real-world events. Perhaps more solid information will be provided at a later date, but the fact that what has been presented so far has turned into a major story is bizarre in itself.
The first response of any credible journalist to receiving this tip, given to them by spooks who refused to put their names to it—and who freely admitted, as the Times report notes, that the information was derived from “interrogated” Afghan fighters, in a country were Human Rights Watch (4/17/19) says torture of detainees is “disturbingly high”—should have been to throw the story into the trash bin, at least until the officials agreed to go on the record. That the authors of the Times article share five Pulitzer Prizes between them suggests that this might not have simply been comically irresponsible and shoddy journalism, however, but something more intentional.
Endless War
As the three articles pointed out, the accusations come at a time when the Trump administration is negotiating with the Taliban and has committed to removing all troops from the country by next year (a move that is now being blocked by the House Armed Services Committee because of the bounty scandal). Crucial nuclear weapons limitations treaties are also expiring, with Moscow showing a keen interest in renewing them. But many officials argue the US should start a new atomic arms race, “spending” Russia into “oblivion.”
It’s bad news when the publication that tracks how close we are to the end of the world (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 1/23/20) switches its gauge from minutes to seconds.
Partially in response to the increased tensions between the two nations, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently moved its famous Doomsday Clock up to 100 seconds to midnight, signalling that they believe the world is closer than it has ever been to Armageddon, even than during the Cuban Missile Crisis. This background should have been a red flag from the outset. It is rare that poor journalism threatens the fate of the planet, but increasing hostility between two nuclear-armed foes might be doing just that.
If the Taliban is indeed being paid to kill American servicemen and women, they are not doing a particularly good job of it. US losses in Afghanistan have slowed greatly, from dozens dying every month during President Obama’s surge to only 22 in the past year. Over 1,700 died under Obama, compared to just a few dozen under Trump.
To anyone concerned about protecting the lives of US troops, the logical answer would be to remove them from Afghanistan, as both Obama and Trump have promised. Yet very few of the countless reports questioned either the wisdom or the legitimacy of the 19-year US occupation of the country.
If the story is true, Russia would be mirroring semi-official US policy with regard to their own troops. In 2016, former acting CIA Director Michael Morell appeared on the Charlie Rose Show (8/8/16), and said it was his job to “make the Russians pay a price” for their role in the Middle East. When Rose asked if that meant killing Russians, he replied: “Yes. Covertly. You don’t tell the world about it. You don’t stand up at the Pentagon and say, ‘We did this.’ But you make sure they know it in Moscow.” Going further back, the US channeled vast amounts of money to the Afghan Mujahideen in the 1980s “to make sure Afghans could do everything possible to kill Russians, as painfully as possible,” in the words of influential Rep. Charlie Wilson.
The Plot Thickens?
Following up on the story, the New York Times published two further viral articles, claiming that Trump had been made aware of the Kremlin plot as early as February (6/29/20) and that Russia had sent large financial transfers to a Taliban-linked account (6/30/20). Yet both these stories suffered from the same deficiencies as the first one, depending on anonymous official sources making relatively unspecific claims while offering no evidence. Indeed, the unnamed “analysts” were only willing to say that the cash transfers were “most likely” part of the bounty scandal the Times had broken four days earlier. Yet the effect was to bolster the veracity of what had come before in many people’s minds.
One source for Business Insider (7/1/20) says ” it was well-known that groups in need of money could work with Russians,” another says “there were many affiliated groups that have maintained ties with Russia,” and the third is someone whose name Business Insider doesn’t know that it communicated with only through Facebook.
Meanwhile, Business Insider (7/1/20) ran a story “confirming” the unfolding bounty scandal, claiming that they had spoken to three Taliban sources who told them Russia and Iran offered them payments. As with the Times, however, the sources were unwilling to put their names to the accusations. Perhaps more comically, Business Insider admitted that it did not even know the name of one of the “Taliban commanders” it cited, communicating to him only via Facebook. If this is how credulous Business Insider is, I know a Nigerian prince who is eager to talk to them about an urgent business proposal.
Independent journalist Caitlin Johnstone (Medium, 6/28/20) suggested that corporate media could not be this obtuse, and that the affair suggested active collaboration between deep state and fourth estate, writing:
All parties involved in spreading this malignant psyop are absolutely vile, but a special disdain should be reserved for the media class who have been entrusted by the public with the essential task of creating an informed populace and holding power to account.
Media like the New York Times and Washington Post pour scorn on Trump administration officials daily, yet appear to display complete reverence to the national security state, treating three-letter agencies’ every utterance as gospel. In the wake of a number of high-profile police lies during the George Floyd protests, the Washington Post (6/30/20) reported that newsrooms across the country are reflecting on their relationship with law enforcement and will no longer accept “police said” as fact. Perhaps they should do the same with intelligence officials.
I enjoy how all of you at Fair.org expose the lie at the heart of the right wing insanity. I certainly wish that the angry right would open a few books that might get their brains working at a functional level. After watching my brother become blind to results, historical records and common sense for the last 30 years, I have very little hope that he and the other Trump supporters will recover from the brain melt that talk radio and Fox news have caused.
So, if I understand correctly, you give more credence to Trump, Putin and the Taliban leadership than our intelligence services. Interesting. I know there’s a sordid history here but you’re playing a dangerous game by assuming that any reporting using the intelligence community as a source is automatically false. That comes with risks to your own credibility. You have already been proven wrong once by the Muller Report which you claimed would be a whitewash when it showed about 100 contacts between the Trump campaign and Rissian operatives.
Really, which of our Intelligence services assessed that Russia paid bounties to the Taliban, all of the sources were ‘unnamed officials’. These could be people who were shown some intelligence reports and made conclusions of their own. Named sources in the Pentagon and our CIA chief Gina Haskell say that the reports were uncorroborated. The NSA disagrees with this conclusion.
All we know is that the CIA received raw intelligence if we must always accept that as true then that gives our enemies an open door to manipulate us.
The “intelligence” community and its propaganda organs think we lack the intelligence to see through their unsubstantiated hate and war advocacy, but, alas, we prove them right repeatedly. Americans cannot recognize, much less evaluate, evidence or its absence, but they are champions at hating on cue.
Unexceptionable analysis. Thanks, Mr. MacLeod.
When it’s printed to fit
The facts don’t mean shit
Let us not forget all the lies about Vietnam, nor all the lies about the USS Liberty, and too the lies about the death of Ben Tillman—–murder by a jealous solider which is rarely discussed as even the military lied about that. My Lai lies, Gulf of Tonkin lies——and in the ME? Lies , lies lies—not to mention the waste of lives and taxpayer dollars with the Bush debacles, continued on by the Obama debacles and now the Trump debacles.
Oh yes, and the Russians did it is getting a bit old, don’t you think UK? The long ago Russian spy dissing his ow nation finds a home in the UK—but wait—soenone trees to polio him! Oh wait—what a coincidence—the poison center for the UK was right down the road from the ex-spy’s house! And, why would Russia bother with none too smart ex spy?
So lying and incompetent corporate media—-even your lies are disingenuous . Woodward and Bernstein seemed to be actual reporters. What has happened to you major media? No wonder no one even wants to even pay a dollar to read you. It seems quite bizarre that major media seems to be so shallow and uninterested in FREEEDOM of the PRESS.
Thank you, Alan. Great job!
Breath-taking hypocrisy, except that this pattern is all too normal.
* What makes anyone think an Afghan needs to be bribed to kill an invading soldier?
* And even if the story is true, what’s wrong with assisting a people to repel invaders?
* How much did Uncle Sam pay the mujahadeen to kill Russians and their Afghan allies?
* How much did Uncle Sam, illegally even under U.S. law, pay contras to kill Nicaraguans?
* How much did Uncle Sam spend in its (BBC-documented) 688 unsuccessful attempts to kill Fidel Castro?
* How much is Trump paying Venezuelan traitors to kill and displace their fellow citizens?
Last question: why is this new Russiagate wrinkle even remotely legitimate news?
It doesn’t matter how much the US spent. The crux of the issue is that the Trump administration was willing to help Russia in their world standing, knowing that Russia was working against their supposed plan to remove all troops from Afghanistan. When the US assisted the Afghans against Russia, the US wasn’t asking Russia to drop sanctions against us or allow the US back into the G8. Trump will not take any action against Putin.
What kind of nationalistic cognitive dysfunction has you even caring about that, lol?
> The crux of the issue is that the Trump administration was willing to help Russia in their world standing,
Hasn’t anyone told you that Russiagate has completely collapsed? Or do you get your “news” from Rabid Maddow?
> knowing that Russia was working against their supposed plan to remove all troops from Afghanistan
So? in what way? By handing a big-time Afghan pusher loads of money to bribe the Taliban (as per the latest version of this fantasy)?
I’m very skeptical of anything that comes from the lips of our intelligence agencies. At the same time, I’m far more skeptical at anything that emerges from the mouth of Trump (or, for that matter, Putin or the Taliban). When push comes to shove – when I must choose to believe either a somewhat-evil entity or an extremely-evil entity – I’m inclined to believe the former. The lesser of two evils.
Something that needed to be said is that Trump has throughout his term refused to even listen to the intelligence briefings. As untrustworthy as our intelligence agencies are, the president should at least *listen* to what they have to say and then incorporate that into his/her other sources of information. Every once in a while, our agencies are actually correct.
By writing this article, you are giving ammunition to Trump and his supporters. I can imagine them saying, “See, even FAIR believes that the NYT/Post/CNN are fake news.” Sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good. Do you not realize that our country is on the verge of fascism, and that this isn’t a time for splitting hairs? At this juncture, we need to have the attitude that *anything* that undercuts Trump and his minions is good, even if it isn’t 100% accurate or supported by named sources.
Cade, you have all the principles and integrity of a low-grade internet troll. If you want a site that takes issue with the truth in preference of lies go to CNN, CBS etc and dream you are saving the world from Hitler.
Hear hear!!! Exactly!
Alan MacLeod: don’t you find it a little strange to be splitting hairs in the interest of journalistic perfection when we have a fascist in the White House who is contributing to the out-of-control spread of coronavirus (as well as other abominations)? I’m almost tempted to say that it’s okay to lie about the Russian bounty story as long as it gets more Americans to distrust Trump and vote him out of office. I’m almost tempted to say that *anything* that gets Trump out of office – whether factual or not – is a good thing. But I won’t say this. Instead, what I’ll say is that, even though our intelligence agencies are hardly paragons of virtue and truthfulness, they are at least more trustworthy than the Ochre Abomination which currently inhabits the White House. Let’s get him gone, and *then* when we have a sane president in place we can split hairs vis-a-vis journalistic integrity.
Excellent points, Cade.
Macleod/FAIR live in a nice La-La land where they keep noticing for us dim-witted readers that our modern corporate journalism falls short of perfect idealistic integrity. Oh the horrors that “media like the New York Times and Washington Post pour scorn on Trump administration officials daily, yet appear to display complete reverence to the national security state, treating three-letter agencies’ every utterance as gospel.”
Damn those big circulation dailies for daring to “pour scorn on Trump officials.” Those poor, poor “Trump officials,” Macleod bleeds for thee!
Macleod couches his mealy-mouthed defense of these beleaguered administrative truth warriors with the thought that the evil papers “appear to display” something or other. What is the charge – actual “displaying” or “appearing” to “display”?
Yes, when writing about war/spy politics is would be most helpful if every source could be named, vetted, and given a Good Housekeeping seal of approval. Since that is not going to happen, let’s give Macleod/FAIR a Perfect Eagle Scout badge, a backstage pass to the next Trump administration maskless anti-deep state party, and get back to fun reading about the “fascist” in the White House, as Cate describes him.
Alan MacLeod: having said all that I’ve said, I do have to say that I agree with 95% of what you and other FAIR bloggers write in your articles. Your site is one of my favorites. It’s just that this particular article made me feel a little “off”.
It makes you feel “off” because you are “off”. Your hate is blinding you to basic reasoning and allowing you to compromise any shred of integrity you might have had once upon a time. It’s not about perfect journalism. It is about a supposedly legitimate news outlet deliberately spreading bullsh1t that they can’t backup because they, like you, are brainwashed into thinking that you are justified in selling your soul for the greater good. By selling your soul, you are helping to destroy the “good”. Make sense? If not, let me simplify it some more for you. It is really as simple as a fundamental ethic we all learned in kindergarten, “two wrongs don’t make a right”. Make sense now? Btw, I’m a USMC infantry veteran and I wouldn’t have given half a sh1t that Russia put a so-called bounty on my head.
“A spokesman for the Taliban has denied that they accepted Russia-paid bounties to carry out attacks on Americans and other coalition soldiers, saying that the group needed no such encouragement for its operations. But one American official said the focus had been on criminals closely associated with the Taliban.”
So not-Taliban-Taliban are the culprits now.
“… the Taliban are known to have hired local criminals as freelancers, said Gen. Zaman Mamozai, the former police chief of the province.”
This story gets more full of shit the more you read.
The central claim arrived with zero corroborating evidence that a wire transfer ever even happened.
When you’re talking about Afghan criminal networks with money, the obvious answer is: OPIUM TRAFFICKING. But, that gets no mention in the NY Times, as if there was no opium trafficking in the world’s #1 source for opium.
Suspicions of Russian Bounties Were Bolstered by Data on Financial Transfers
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/30/us/politics/russian-bounties-afghanistan-intelligence.html
My Dutch husband, who reads material from all over the world, said this one is real, that the European Intelligence agencies had confirmed it month’s ago. You might want to look further into this information.
My Irish grandmother says it’s false, and she’s sober at the moment.
MI6 thought there were “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, or so people believed.
The intelligence agencies also believed Putin bombed apartment buildings in his own country until their own agents in Al Qaeda found out this wasn’t the case.
You might want to try more reliable sources.
So a lot of story and plausible. Emotive reports indicating the Russians may be funding bounties for the Taliban. Despicable indeed but no verifiable proof, this is another distraction story which will perpetuate, maybe evolve or maybe peter out. It’s reasonable for FAIR to publish these reminders for us to read carefully and notice we’re being fed stories which cannot yet be proven or dis-proven.
As they say ‘you can’t believe everything you read in the papers’.
Peace and stay safe and well.
The deep state and its propaganda organs intend by this big lie to separate Trump from his base, who are dumb enough to believe anything that confirms the brainwashing to hate Russia that all Americans receive from kindergarten on. Idiot liberals already believe anything that reinforces their hatred for Trump. Facts and logic have no place in American electoral politics.
Bingo! Couldn’t have said it better.
And if we understand you correctly, you’ve ‘forgotten’ about the massive intelligence failure of the 2003 Iraq War(crime) where all the intelligence agencies were SURE (at least In their public statements), that the Saddam had WMDs and ‘had’ to be taken-out? Remember how that worked-out?? Even if you don’t want to believe all the previous revelations through the years about the CIA & friends, don’t you think that a MAJOR, indisputable failure like that should make one permanently wary of our intelligence community, replacing blind faith with healthy skepticism?
(Note; this was loaded as a ‘Reply’ to Howard Fernandez’s above comment, but somehow it doesn’t display as-such)
Lol@”Deep state”…As Louis XIV once said: “I am the state”.
But stupid conspiracy theories aside, there doesn’t seem to be irrefutable proof, just a “take our word for it”. And while there has been a pattern of this in which, eventually, the assertions bear fruit, I don’t see anything concrete as of yet.
The problem is, the expectation of honesty from the current administration has been completely obliterated. With similar denials about the Stormy Daniels thing, the “I never knew Lev Parnas”, “Perfect phone call with Ukraine”, denying a friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, Covid19 is the new democratic hoax, slowing down testing was said as a joke…the list is endles…so I think when a story like this comes out, a denial from the White House actually gives the accusations weight by default.
I have objections to the article because it engages in the analysis of trustworthiness and inherent biases. But I would spend at least one paragraph on what was implied by the statements attributed to anonymous sources. And these statements were terribly inconclusive.
First of all, the initial story did mention that no Russian was identified, and no American victims were identified “with certainty”, but there were SPECULATIONS that there could be one or more. That means that testimonies collected from “Taliban members and criminals” were hearsay, and the source of the hearsay could be truthful — or not.
Then there was an update: data about a money transfer was intercepted, from “a bank owned by Russian intelligence” to “an account linked to Taliban”. That could raise doubts how unique it is that during an unspecified time period a transfer is made, how it connects it with the story?
Then there was an update to the update: it was not a money transfer, but the owner of the stash of dollars claimed to bring it to Afghanistan personally. Now the story hinges not on veracity of unnamed patriotic American sources but on veracity of a person characterized as a drug dealer with no extra corroborations. Can criminals be interested in evading the truth when they are interrogated? I am not a criminologist, but cases of false testimonies show up in American press, and it is not like drug dealers are inherently more reliable than, say, bereaved spouses.
The second update raises a question how story from anonymous intelligence source could be garbled to such an extend. Sometimes we complain about journalists being reduced to stenographers. But now we cannot even trust their stenographic skills!
To summarize, we cannot consider if the story could be true “prima facie”, assuming that everything delivered by a chain of informal communications from source to source is true, because these communications happened to be seriously inconsistent. But assuming any of the versions, it is still extremely inconclusive.
And folks who deny seriousness and “actionability” include NSA and Phigh ranked officials. Thus the story is terribly inconclusive and NAMED authorities claim that it is terribly inconclusive, but we are supposed to believe that it is as conclusive as it should be as more because of ANONYMOUS sources?
Re: “Perfect phone call with Ukraine”. Now Biden and Trump can compete whose phone calls were more perfect. At least masonry of Trump’s dwelling seems more sturdy than Biden’s.
The bounty story is pretty dumb for several reasons:
1: If Moscow wants dead Americans in Afghanistan, they would get more dead Americans then 8. Even if they want to be deniable about it.
2: Moscow talks to essentially everyone, all the time, and that includes its enemies like the Taleban. Talking gives you information, talking gives you options, talking gives you leverage. In particular, Afghanistan had recent hostilities between Taleban aligned and IS aligned faction. The Taleban, who are Pashto Deobandies, take considerable umbrage at ISIS calling them heretic unbelievers (yes, ISIS does that, only their brand of stone age Islam is proper Islam, even if Pastho Deobandi Islam is even more stoneage then IS Islam in some aspects, the Talebs do not belief that Bagdadi was/is the Caliph and thus entitled to their eternal fealty, and this is clearly heresy as far as IS is concerned!).
If the Taleban want to wash off their crimes with the blood of ISIS, well, Russia is sure as hell being to be highly receptive about it.
The US has pretty well declared war on Russia (sanctions and attacking their allies). We have killed 250 Russians in Syria (mercenaries or not). We have illegally attack Syria (Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and etc. (congress never declared war)). We have supported Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria. We have supported Al Qaeda against Russia in Afghanistan in the 1980’s. We are supporting Saudi Arabia genocide in Yemen. I could go on for days!
The problem with this story is that it doesn’t even matter if this story is true because we are clearly hypocrites!! We’ve killed millions of innocent civilians in the middle east but we clearly only care about our soldiers?! This is why we’ve have lost in the middle east and why a fascist country like Russia will win by simply playing the good guy to our James Bond evil villainy.
If you people cared about a troops then pull them out of these unwinnable wars!!!!
The main stream media truly doesn’t care what they lie about these days. I wonder if they actually realize that most people with any sense knows it; doubtful.
There used to be a time they wouldn’t report anything unless they had a source on record and actual proof.
Russiagate/Obamagate was based on similar lies from “unnamed” sources that said exactly what the mainstream/Trump hating media needed to hear. Nobody in Afghanistan needs a reason to kill invading and occupying US forces other than the fact that they illegally and immorally invaded, destroyed, and continue to occupy their supposedly sovereign nation. Any red-blooded American would do the same thing if our nation was illegally invaded and occupied. Sad that most don’t seem to understand this. American “exceptionalism” at its finest.
Thank You, Alan MacLeod and FAIR
This the BEST piece of journalism I have read on the “Russian Bounty” story. “Anonymous sources” should only be used to protect whistleblowers and not as a cover for the spy agencies. I can no longer bear to watch Rachel Maddow and the msnbc hosts who parrot this propoganda and Shame on the MSM for putting out these serious allegations as facts with the Doomsday clock 100 seconds to Midnight.
Pretty valid critique, but ya lost me once you referenced the questionable Caitlin Johnstone
US intelligence agencies can always rely on the apparently bottomless well of media Russophobia to distract the public from from the far more pressing issue of getting the US out of Afghanistan.