De neoconservatieve oorlogshitser en voorstander van censuur op het Internet, Jamie Fly, heeft gesteld dat de Facebook censuur van een groot aantal accounts nog maar het begin is van een grote zuivering die de alternatieve media te wachten staat.
Fly is o.a. directeur van het Asia programma van de neoconservatieve denktank German Marshall Fund (GMF), een organisatie die zowel door de VS overheid als haar oorlogshond de NAVO wordt betaald……. Ofwel de grootste terreurentiteit op aarde, de VS, die in feite het opperbevel heeft over de NAVO troepen, subsidieert een denktank die de ene leugen na de andere produceert…… Deze denktank verzint verhalen om zo als tegenwicht te dienen tegen het echte nieuws, dat niet door de reguliere media wordt gebracht, maar door de alternatieve media op het internet…….
Intussen een cliché op deze plek: mensen lees het hieronder opgenomen duidelijke artikel van Max Blumenthal en Jeb Sprague over de manier waarop men het volk wil blijven belazeren met verhalen over Russische (en andere) inmenging in de VS politiek (en die van andere westerse landen). Een berg leugens waaraan overigens intussen ook China werd toegevoegd. Lees het artikel en geeft het ajb door, het hele Russiagate verhaal is onderuit gehaald als een hoax*, echter dat interesseert figuren als Fly en organisaties als The Atlantic Council (een lobbyorgaan van de NAVO), het eerder genoemd German Marshall Fund en de andere oplichters van dit soort ‘denktanks’, geen ene zier, de kracht zit in de herhaling door de reguliere (massa-) media en politici, gewoon volhouden dat Rusland en landen als China (ook Iran wordt genoemd) de politiek in het westen beïnvloeden met leugens en andere zaken die de ‘publieke opinie’ zouden sturen……
In feite is de grote schuldige voor al deze ellende Hillary Clinton, die het stelen van de democratische voorverkiezingen door haar en het team dat haar terzijde stond, wilde verbergen en daarom kwam met het verhaal dat de Russen zaken zouden hebben gelekt naar de pers, een flagrante leugen, die de media maar al te graag oppakten in hun strijd tegen de alternatieve media op het internet…..
De continue herhaling van leugens over Russische en andere bemoeienis met de VS politiek, zorgt ervoor dat de leugens bij de gebruikers van die media als het ware in het hoofd worden geprint (een vorm van hersenspoeling), dit ondanks alle bewijzen van het tegendeel, bewijzen als officiële documenten van de VS overheid, die onder meer in WikiLeaks terug zijn te vinden…..
Vandaar ook dat de hierboven aangehaalde rechtse denktanks, die niet alleen de NAVO en de VS dienen, maar ook het militair-industrieel complex, hameren op censuur van de sociale media en dan m.n. de sites die nieuws brengen, ofwel dat nieuws op de juiste manier analyseren….. Die alternatieve media tonen verder de leugens aan die de westerse bevolking dagelijks over zich heen gekieperd krijgen via de reguliere media en het grootste deel van de westerse liegende politici, plus natuurlijk de leugens van die rechtse denktanks zelf….
Vergeet voorts niet dat er kilometers bewijs zijn voor juist de VS die de politiek in andere landen manipuleert en probeert te sturen via: -hacken, -verspreiding van fake news, -economische oorlogsvoering, -staatsgrepen en mocht dat allemaal niet lukken, desnoods middels -een illegale oorlog, die het deze eeuw al 5 keer is begonnen (en dat zijn enorme oorlogsmisdaden, waarvoor dit land niet wordt vervolgd….)……. 5 illegale oorlogen die intussen aan ruim meer dan 2 miljoen mensen het leven hebben gekost………
De wereld op z’n kop…..
Facebook
Purge of Alternative Media “Just the Beginning”: Top Neocon
Insider
(foto rechts Jamie Fly
October 24, 2018 at 11:21 am
Written
by Grayzone
Project
(GP) — This
October, Facebook and Twitter deleted the accounts of hundreds of
users, including many alternative media outlets maintained by
American users. Among those wiped out in the coordinated purge were
popular sites that scrutinized police brutality and U.S.
interventionism, like The Free Thought Project, Anti-Media, and Cop
Block, along with the pages of journalists like Rachel
Blevins.
Facebook claimed that
these pages had “broken our rules against spam and coordinated
inauthentic behavior.” However, sites like The Free Thought Project
were verified by Facebook and widely recognized as legitimate sources
of news and opinion. John Vibes, an independent reporter who
contributed to Free Thought,accused Facebook
of “favoring mainstream sources and silencing alternative voices.”
In
comments published here for the first time, a neoconservative
Washington insider has apparently claimed a degree of credit for the
recent purge — and promised more takedowns in the near future.
“Russia,
China, and other foreign states take advantage of our open political
system,” remarked Jamie Fly, a senior fellow and director of the
Asia program at the influential think tank the German Marshall Fund,
which is funded
by the U.S. government and NATO.
“They can invent stories that get repeated and spread through
different sites. So we are just starting to push back. Just this last
week Facebook began starting to take down sites. So this is just the
beginning.”
Fly
went on to complain that “all you need is an email” to set up a
Facebook or Twitter account, lamenting the sites’ accessibility to
members of the general public. He predicted a long struggle on a
global scale to fix the situation, and pointed out that to do so
would require constant vigilance.
Fly
made these stunning comments to Jeb Sprague, who is a visiting
faculty in sociology at the University of California-Santa Barbara
and co-author of this article. The two spoke during a lunch break at
a conference
on Asian security organized
by the Stiftung
Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP) in
Berlin, Germany.
In
the tweet below, Fly is the third person from the left who appears
seated at the table.
The
remarks by Fly — “we are just starting to push back” — seemed
to confirm the worst fears of the alternative online media community.
If he was to be believed, the latest purge was motivated by politics,
not spam prevention, and was driven by powerful interests hostile to
dissident views, particularly where American state violence is
concerned.
Jamie
Fly, Rise of a Neocon Cadre
Jamie
Fly is an influential foreign policy hardliner who has spent the last
year lobbying for the censorship of “fringe views” on social
media. Over the years, he has advocated for a military assault on
Iran, a regime
change war on
Syria, and hiking military spending to unprecedented levels. He is
the embodiment of a neoconservative cadre.
Like
so many second-generation neocons, Fly entered
government
by burrowing into mid-level positions in George W. Bush’s National
Security Council and Department of Defense.
In
2009, he was appointed director of the Foreign
Policy Initiative
(FPI), a rebranded version of Bill Kristol’s Project for a New
American Century, or PNAC. The latter outfit was an umbrella group of
neoconservative activists that first made the case for an invasion of
Iraq as part of a wider project of regime change in countries that
resisted Washington’s sphere of influence.
By
2011, Fly was advancing the next phase in PNAC’s blueprint
by clamoring for
military strikes on Iran. “More diplomacy is not an adequate
response,” he argued. A year later, Fly urged the
US to “expand its list of targets beyond the [Iranian] nuclear
program to key command and control elements of the Republican Guard
and the intelligence ministry, and facilities associated with other
key government officials.”
Fly
soon found his way into the senate office of Marco Rubio, a
neoconservative pet project, assuming a role as his top foreign
policy advisor. Amongst other interventionist initiatives, Rubio has
taken the lead in promoting harsh economic sanctions targeting
Venezuela,
even advocating for a U.S. military
assault on
the country. When Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign floundered
amid a mass revolt of the Republican Party’s middle American base
against the party establishment, Fly was forced to cast about for new
opportunities.
He
found them in the paranoid atmosphere of Russiagate that
formed soon after Donald Trump’s shock election victory.
PropOrNot
Sparks the Alternative Media Panic
A
journalistic insider’s account of the Hillary Clinton presidential
campaign, Shattered, revealed that “in the days after
the election, Hillary declined to take responsibility for her own
loss.” Her top advisers were summoned the following day, according
to the book, “to engineer the case that the election wasn’t
entirely on the up-and-up … Already, Russian hacking was the
centerpiece of the argument.”
Less
than three weeks after Clinton’s defeat, the Washington Post’s
Craig Timberg published a dubiously
sourced report headlined,
“Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news.’” The
article hyped up a McCarthyite effort by a shadowy, anonymously run
organization called PropOrNot to blacklist some 200 American media
outlets as Russian “online propaganda.”
The
alternative media outfits on the PropOrNot
blacklist included
some of those recently purged by Facebook and Twitter, such as The
Free Thought Project and Anti-Media. Among the criteria
PropOrNot identified as signs of Russian propaganda were “Support
for policies like Brexit, and the breakup of the EU and Eurozone”
and “Opposition to Ukrainian resistance to Russia and Syrian
resistance to Assad.” PropOrNot called for “formal investigations
by the U.S. government” into the outlets it had blacklisted.
According
to Craig Timberg, the Washington Post correspondent who uncritically
promoted the media suppression initiative, Propornot was established
by “a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy,
military and technology backgrounds.” Timberg quoted a figure
associated with the George Washington University Center for Cyber and
Homeland Security, Andrew Weisburd, and cited a report he wrote with
his colleague, Clint Watts, on Russian meddling.
Timberg’s
piece on was PropOrNot was promoted widely by former
top Clinton staffers and celebrated by
ex-Obama White House aide Dan Pfeiffer as “the biggest story in the
world.” But after a wave of stinging criticism, including in the
pages of the New
Yorker,
the article was amended with an editor’s note stating, “The
[Washington] Post… does not itself vouch for the validity of
PropOrNot’s findings regarding any individual media outlet.”
PropOrNot
had been seemingly exposed as a McCarthyite sham, but the concept
behind it — exposing online American media outlets as vehicles for
Kremlin “active measures” — continued to flourish.
The
Birth of the Russian Bot Tracker — with U.S. Government Money
By
August, a new, and seemingly related initiative appeared out of the
blue, this time with backing from a bipartisan coalition of
Democratic foreign policy hands and neocon Never
Trumpers
in Washington. Called the Alliance
for Securing Democracy (ASD),
the outfit aimed to expose how supposed Russian Twitter bots were
infecting American political discourse with divisive narratives. It
featured a daily “Hamilton
68”
online dashboard that highlighted the supposed bot activity with
easily digestible charts. Conveniently, the site avoided naming any
of the digital Kremlin influence accounts it claimed to be tracking.
The
initiative was immediately endorsed
by John Podesta,
the founder of the Democratic Party think tank the Center for
American Progress, and former chief of staff of Hillary Clinton’s
2016 presidential campaign. Julia Ioffe, the Atlantic’s chief
Russiagate correspondent, promoted the
bot tracker as “a very cool tool.”
Unlike
PropOrNot, the ASD was sponsored by one of the most respected think
tanks in Washington, the German
Marshall Fund,
which had been founded in 1972 to nurture the special relationship
between the US and what was then West Germany.
The
German Marshall Fund is substantially funded
by Western governments,
and largely reflects their foreign-policy interests. Its top two
financial sponsors, at more than $1 million per year each, are the
U.S. government’s soft-power arm the U.S. Agency for International
Development (USAID)
and the German Foreign Office (known in German as the Auswärtiges
Amt). The U.S. State Department also provides more than half a
million dollars per year, as do the German Ministry of Economic
Cooperation and Development and the foreign affairs ministries of
Sweden and Norway. It likewise receives at least a quarter of a
million dollars per year from NATO.
The
US government and NATO are top donors to the German Marshall Fund.
Though
the German Marshall Fund did not name the donors that specifically
sponsored its Alliance for Securing Democracy initiative, it hosts a
who’s who of bipartisan national-security hardliners on the
ASD’s advisory
council,
providing the endeavor with the patina of credibility. They range
from neocon movement icon Bill Kristol to former Clinton foreign
policy advisor Jake Sullivan and ex-CIA director Michael Morell.
Jamie
Fly, a German Marshall Fund fellow and Asia specialist, emerged as
one of the most prolific promoters of the new Russian bot tracker in
the media. Together with Laura Rosenberger, a former foreign policy
aide to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, Fly appeared in a series
of interviews and
co-authored several op-eds emphasizing
the need for a massive social media crackdown.
During
a March 2018 interview
on C-Span,
Fly complained that “Russian accounts” were “trying to promote
certain messages, amplify certain content, raise fringe views, pit
Americans against each other, and we need to deal with this ongoing
problem and find ways through the government, through tech companies,
through broader society to tackle this issue.”
Yet
few of the sites on PropOrNot’s blacklist, and none of the
alternative sites that were erased in the recent Facebook purge that
Fly and his colleagues take apparent credit for, were Russian
accounts. Perhaps the only infraction they could have been accused of
was publishing views that Fly and his cohorts saw as “fringe.”
What’s
more, the ASD has been forced to admit that the mass of Twitter
accounts it initially identified as “Russian bots” were not
necessarily bots — and may not have been Russian either.
“I’m
Not Convinced on This Bot Thing”
A
November 2017 investigation by
Max Blumenthal, a co-author of this article, found that the ASD’s
Hamilton 68 dashboard was the creation of “a collection of cranks,
counterterror retreads, online harassers and paranoiacs operating
with support from some of the most prominent figures operating within
the American national security apparatus.”
These
figures included the same George Washington University Center for
Cyber and Homeland Security fellows — Andrew Weisburd and Clint
Watts — that were cited as experts in the Washington Post’s
article promoting PropOrNot.
Weisburd,
who has been described as one of the brains behind the Hamilton 68
dashboard, once maintained a one-man, anti-Palestinian web monitoring
initiative that specialized in doxxing left-wing activists, Muslims
and anyone he considered “anti-American.” More recently, he has
taken to Twitter to spout off murderous and homophobic fantasies
about Glenn Greenwald, the editor of the Intercept — a publication
the ASD flagged without explanation as a vehicle for Russian
influence operations.
Watts,
for his part, has testified before Congress on several occasions
to call on
the government to “quell information rebellions” with censorious
measures including “nutritional labels” for online media. He has
received fawning publicity from corporate media and been rewarded
with a contributor role for NBC on the basis of his supposed
expertise in ferreting out Russian disinformation.
However, under
questioning during
a public event by Grayzone contributor Ilias Stathatos, Watts
admitted that substantial parts of his testimony were false, and
refused to provide evidence to support some of his most colorful
claims about malicious Russian bot activity.
In
a separate interview with Buzzfeed,
Watts appeared to completely disown the Hamilton 68 bot tracker as a
legitimate tool. “I’m not convinced on this bot thing,” Watts
confessed. He even called the narrative that he helped manufacture
“overdone,” and admitted that the accounts Hamilton 68 tracked
were not necessarily directed by Russian intelligence actors.
“We
don’t even think they’re all commanded in Russia — at all. We
think some of them are legitimately passionate people that are just
really into promoting Russia,” Watts conceded.
But
these stunning admissions did little to slow the momentum of the
coming purge.
Enter
the Atlantic Council
In
his conversation with Sprague, the German Marshall Fund’s Fly
stated that he was working with the Atlantic Council in the campaign
to purge alternative media from social media platforms like Facebook.
The
Atlantic Council is another Washington-based think tank that serves
as a gathering point for neoconservatives and liberal
interventionists pushing military aggression around the globe. It
is funded by
NATO and repressive,
US-allied governments including
Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Turkey, as well as by Ukrainian oligarchs
like Victor Pynchuk.
This
May, Facebook announced a
partnership with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research
Lab (DFRLab) to “identify, expose, and explain disinformation
during elections around the world.”
The
Atlantic Council’s DFRLab is notorious for its zealous
conflation of legitimate online dissent with illicit Russian
activity, embracing the same tactics as PropOrNot and the ASD.
Ben
Nimmo, a DFRLab fellow who has built his reputation on flushing out
online Kremlin influence networks, embarked on
an embarrassing witch hunt this year that saw him misidentify several
living, breathing individuals as Russian bots or Kremlin “influence
accounts.” Nimmo’s victims included Mariam
Susli,
a well-known Syrian-Australian social media personality, the famed
Ukrainian concert pianist Valentina
Lisitsa,
and a British pensioner named Ian Shilling.
In
an interview with Sky News, Shilling delivered a memorable
tirade against
his accusers. “I have no Kremlin contacts whatsoever; I do not know
any Russians, I have no contact with the Russian government or
anything to do with them,” he exclaimed. “I am an ordinary
British citizen who happens to do research on the current neocon wars
which are going on in Syria at this very moment.”
With
the latest Facebook and Twitter purges, ordinary citizens like
Shilling are being targeted in the open, and without apology. The
mass deletions of alternative media accounts illustrate how national
security hardliners from the German Marshall Fund and Atlantic
Council (and whoever was behind PropOrNot) have instrumentalized the
manufactured panic around Russian interference to generate public
support for a wider campaign of media censorship.
In
his conversation in Berlin with Sprague, Fly noted with apparent
approval that, “Trump is now pointing to Chinese interference in
the 2018 election.” As the mantra of foreign interference expands
to a new adversarial power, the clampdown on voices of dissent in
online media is almost certain to intensify.
As
Fly promised, “This is just the beginning.”
Jeb
Sprague is
a visiting faculty at the University of California, Santa
Barbara. He is the author of “Globalizing the Caribbean: Political
economy, social change, and the transnational capitalist class”
(Temple University Press, 2019), “Paramilitarism and the assault on
democracy in Haiti” (Monthly Review Press, 2012), and is the editor
of “Globalization and transnational capitalism in Asia and Oceania”
(Routledge, 2016). He is a co-founder of the Network for the Critical
Studies of Global Capitalism.
Max
Blumenthal is
an award-winning journalist and the author of books including
best-selling Republican
Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party, Goliath:
Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, The
Fifty One Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza,
and The Management of Savagery, which will be published later this
year by Verso. He has also produced numerous print articles for an
array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries
including Je
Ne Suis Pas Charlie and
the forthcoming Killing
Gaza.
Blumenthal founded the Grayzone Project in 2015 to shine a
journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its
dangerous domestic repercussions.
By Max
Blumenthal and Jeb
Sprague / Republished
with permission / Grayzone
Project / Report
a typo
=============================
* Zie o.a.: ‘Politico rapport bevestigt: Russiagate is een hoax‘
Zie ook:
‘Facebooks departement voor censuur: een hoognodige uitleg over een maatregel die alleen in een dictatuur thuishoort‘
‘Facebook gebruikte ‘fake news’ beschuldiging om de aandacht voor schandalen af te leiden‘
‘New York Times: eerste Israëlische inval in Gazastrook sinds 2014 >> fake news!‘
‘Noord-Koreaans ‘bedrog met nucleaire deal’ is fake news o.a. gebracht door de New York Times‘
‘Russiagate sprookje ondermijnt VS democratie en de midterm verkiezingen‘
‘Bolsonaro, de fascistische nieuwe president van Brazilië, werd volgens Avaaz en fake news brengers als de NYT gekozen door manipulatie via WhatsApp‘
‘Twitter weert waarheid: Paul Craig Roberts in de ban, Roberts >> de grote criticus van de illegale oorlogen die de VS voert‘
‘The US military’s vision for state censorship‘
‘Israël en VS werken samen in tegenwerken van critici op beleid t.a.v. Palestijnen‘
‘Facebook censureert de waarheid over Columbus en de verovering van de Amerika’s…….‘
‘Facebook censuur gestuurd door het westers militair-industrieel complex en de NAVO in het bijzonder……….‘
‘Why the Coordinated Alternative Media Purge Should Terrify Everyone‘ (Tyler Durden op Zero Hedge)
‘First They Came for Alex Jones — We Told You We Were Next — We Were‘ (Matt Agorist op The Free Thought Project)
‘CNN, de grote brenger van ‘fake news!!!’‘
‘Facebook en Twitter verwijderen nu volledige accounts………‘
‘Facebook (en Twitter) onderdrukt meningsvorming door het verwijderen van (echt) onafhankelijke media‘
‘Wie het nieuws controleert, controleert de wereld……‘
‘Facebook en Twitter verwijderen de eerlijke journalistiek en oprechte opinie >> censuur…..‘
Facebook verlaat ‘tranding news’ voor ‘brekend nieuws’ van 80 reguliere mediaorganen, ofwel nog meer ‘fake news…..’‘
‘Facebook komt met nieuwsshows van betrouwbare media als CNN en Fox News…. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!‘
‘Censuur op het internet met vliegende start in de VS, ‘het land van het vrije woord….’‘
‘Facebook en NAVO werken samen in censuur op niet welgevallig nieuws……‘
‘Facebook helpt Saoedi-Arabië: doodstraf door onthoofding van vrouw die het waagde kritiek te uiten…..‘
‘Aanval op alternatieve media ‘succesvol’: meer en meer sites worden van het net geweerd………‘
‘ThinkProgress eiste censuur van Facebook en werd inderdaad gecensureerd…. ha! ha! ha! ha!‘
‘VS staatscensuur op Facebook (ook in de EU)‘
‘Facebook stelt perstituee van New York Times aan als censuur-agent…… ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!‘
‘Het echte Facebook schandaal: manipulatie van de gebruikers en gratis diensten voor eertijds presidentskandidaat Obama…….‘
‘Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook doneerde aan de politici die hem in de VS aan de tand voelden >> in het EU parlement maakte hij gebruik van megalomane EU politici…..‘
‘Facebook wil samen met door Saoedi-Arabië gesubsidieerde denktank censureren…. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!‘
‘Media Too Busy Defending John McCain to Report the News That Actually Affects You‘ Onder andere aandacht voor PRISM.
‘Westerse massa misleiding in aanloop naar WOIII……‘
‘VS gebruikt sociale media om ‘fake comment’ te verspreiden en de bevolking te hersenspoelen met leugens, ofwel ‘fake news….’‘
‘Eis een nee tegen censuur op het internet!‘
‘Facebook e.a. hebben lak aan AVG (GDPR), misbruik persoonsgegevens gaat gewoon door…….‘
‘Jeremy Corbyn wordt gedemoniseerd als antisemiet…….‘
‘VS gebruikt sociale media om ‘fake comment’ te verspreiden en de bevolking te hersenspoelen met leugens, ofwel ‘fake news….’‘
‘Facebook: verrijking van oliemaatschappijen en andere grote bedrijven, plus wereldwijde corruptie…….‘
‘Rusland krijgt alweer de schuld van hacken, nu van oplichters Symantec en Facebook……. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!‘
