FBI, de spin in het Russiagate web……..

Er is al veel geschreven (althans in de alternatieve media) over de ware schuldigen achter Russiagate, met bewijzen werd en wordt aangetoond dat de geheime diensten FBI, CIA en NSA de ware schuldigen zijn achter Russiagate, waar overigens het campagneteam van hare kwaadaardigheid Clinton, aanstichter en mededader is…….

Gisteren op het blog van Stan van Houcke een artikel geschreven door Ray McGovern (ex-CIA) en gepubliceerd op de site van schrijver/journalist Paul Craig Roberts, die het overnam van Consortium News (kan je het nog volgen?). McGovern legt op een gedegen manier uit dat de FBI de ware grote dader is achter Russiagate.

Niet voor niets zegt nu zelfs de Wall Street Journal dat er een punt moet worden gezegd achter het Russiagate verhaal……. ha! Ha! Ha! Eerst liepen de persen van de Wall Street Journal zo hard op deze leugen dat ze bij wijze van spreken bijna vastliepen…….. Waar nu blijkt dat het Clinton campagneteam en de geheime diensten samen hebben gewerkt om te voorkomen dat Trump in het Witte Huis zou komen, wil deze bijna grootste krant van de VS dus een punt achter het enorme leugenverhaal dat Russiagate is………

Nogmaals toont een massamediaorgaan aan ‘fake news’ (of: nepnieuws) te hebben gebracht en daar het volk maandenlang over te hebben voorgelogen……

Lezen mensen, een geweldig stuk over dombo’s Strzak en Page, die dachten in het geheim te kunnen communiceren, maar van wie onlangs een eerste deel van hun lange correspondentie werd vrijgegeven en waardoor ten overvloede de FBI nog eens kan worden aangewezen als spin in het Russiagate web…….

The FBI Hand Behind Russia-gate


By Ray McGovern

January 15, 2018 Paul Craig Roberts.

As I have reported from the beginning, Russiagate is an orchestrated hoax by the security agencies for the purpose of preventing Trump from normalizing relations with Russia and, if necessary, for removing him from office. Russiagate is an act of treason by the security agencies. Those responsible must be arrested, prosecuted, and convicted. — PCR


“After months of breathless searching for ‘evidence’ of Russian-Trump collusion designed to put Trump in the White House, what now exists is actual evidence that senior officials of the Obama administration colluded to keep Trump out of the White House.” — Ray McGovern



Special Report: In the Watergate era, liberals warned about U.S. intelligence agencies manipulating U.S. politics, but now Trump-hatred has blinded many of them to this danger becoming real, as ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern notes. 



January 12, 2017, Information Clearing House

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48572.htm

The FBI Hand Behind Russia-gate


By Ray McGovern

Russia-gate is becoming FBI-gate, thanks to the official release of unguarded text messages between loose-lipped FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok and his garrulous girlfriend, FBI lawyer Lisa Page. (Ten illustrative texts from their exchange appear at the end of this article.)

Despite his former job as chief of the FBI’s counterintelligence section, Strzok had the naive notion that texting on FBI phones could not be traced. Strzok must have slept through “Security 101.” Or perhaps he was busy texting during that class. Girlfriend Page cannot be happy at being misled by his assurance that using office phones would be a secure way to conduct their affair(s).

It would have been unfortunate enough for Strzok and Page to have their adolescent-sounding texts merely exposed, revealing the reckless abandon of star-crossed lovers hiding (they thought) secrets from cuckolded spouses, office colleagues, and the rest of us. However, for the never-Trump plotters in the FBI, the official release of just a fraction (375) of almost 10,000 messages does incalculably more damage than that.

We suddenly have documentary proof that key elements of the U.S. intelligence community were trying to short-circuit the U.S. democratic process. And that puts in a new and dark context the year-long promotion of Russia-gate. It now appears that it was not the Russians trying to rig the outcome of the U.S. election, but leading officials of the U.S. intelligence community, shadowy characters sometimes called the Deep State.

More of the Strzok-Page texting dialogue is expected to be released. And the Department of Justice Inspector General reportedly has additional damaging texts from others on the team that Special Counsel Robert Mueller selected to help him investigate Russia-gate.

Besides forcing the removal of Strzok and Page, the text exposures also sounded the death knell for the career of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, in whose office some of the plotting took place and who has already announced his plans to retire soon.

But the main casualty is the FBI’s 18-month campaign to sabotage candidate-and-now-President Donald Trump by using the Obama administration’s Russia-gate intelligence “assessment,” electronic surveillance of dubious legality, and a salacious dossier that could never pass the smell test, while at the same time using equally dubious techniques to immunize Hillary Clinton and her closest advisers from crimes that include lying to the FBI and endangering secrets.

Ironically, the Strzok-Page texts provide something that the Russia-gate investigation has been sorely lacking: first-hand evidence of both corrupt intent and action. After months of breathless searching for “evidence” of Russian-Trump collusion designed to put Trump in the White House, what now exists is actual evidence that senior officials of the Obama administration colluded to keep Trump out of the White House – proof of what old-time gumshoes used to call “means, motive and opportunity.”

Even more unfortunately for Russia-gate enthusiasts, the FBI lovers’ correspondence provides factual evidence exposing much of the made-up “Resistance” narrative – the contrived storyline that The New York Times and much of the rest of the U.S. mainstream media deemed fit to print with little skepticism and few if any caveats, a scenario about brilliantly devious Russians that not only lacks actual evidence – relying on unverified hearsay and rumor – but doesn’t make sense on its face.

The Russia-gate narrative always hinged on the preposterous notion that Russian President Vladimir

Putin foresaw years ago what no American political analyst considered even possible, the political ascendancy of Donald Trump. According to the narrative, the fortune-telling Putin then risked creating even worse tensions with a nuclear-armed America that would – by all odds – have been led by a vengeful President Hillary Clinton.

Besides this wildly improbable storyline, there were flat denials from WikiLeaks, which distributed the supposedly “hacked” Democratic emails, that the information came from Russia – and there was the curious inability of the National Security Agency to use its immense powers to supply any technical evidence to support the Russia-hack scenario.

The Trump Shock

But the shock of Trump’s election and the decision of many never-Trumpers to cast their lot with the Resistance led to a situation in which any prudent skepticism or demand for evidence was swept aside.

So, on Jan. 6, 2017, President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released an evidence-free report that he said was compiled by “hand-picked” analysts from the CIA, FBI and NSA, offering an “assessment” that Russia and President Putin were behind the release of the Democratic emails in a plot to help Trump win the presidency.

Despite the extraordinary gravity of the charge, even New York Times correspondent Scott Shane noted that proof was lacking. He wrote at the time: “What is missing from the [the Jan. 6] public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack. … Instead, the message from the agencies essentially amounts to ‘trust us.’”

But the “assessment” served a useful purpose for the never-Trumpers: it applied an official imprimatur on the case for delegitimizing Trump’s election and even raised the long-shot hope that the Electoral College might reverse the outcome and possibly install a compromise candidate, such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell, in the White House. Though the Powell ploy fizzled, the hope of somehow removing Trump from office continued to bubble, fueled by the growing hysteria around Russia-gate.

Virtually all skepticism about the evidence-free “assessment” was banned. For months, the Times and other newspapers of record repeated the lie that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies had concurred in the conclusion about the Russian “hack.” Even when that falsehood was belatedly acknowledged, the major news outlets just shifted the phrasing slightly to say that U.S. intelligence agencies had reached the Russian “hack” conclusion. Shane’s blunt initial recognition about the lack of proof disappeared from the mainstream media’s approved narrative of Russia-gate.

Doubts about the Russian “hack” or dissident suggestions that what we were witnessing was a “soft coup” were scoffed at by leading media commentators. Other warnings from veteran U.S. intelligence professionals about the weaknesses of the Russia-gate narrative and the danger of letting politicized intelligence overturn a constitutional election were also brushed aside in pursuit of the goal of removing Trump from the White House.

It didn’t even seem to matter when new Russia-gate disclosures conflicted with the original narrative that Putin had somehow set Trump up as a Manchurian candidate. All normal journalistic skepticism was jettisoned. It was as if the Russia-gate advocates started with the conclusion that Trump must go and then made the facts fit into that mold, but anyone who noted the violations of normal investigative procedures was dismissed as a “Trump enabler” or a “Moscow stooge.”

The Text Evidence

But then came the FBI text messages, providing documentary evivdence that key FBI officials involved in the Russia-gate investigation were indeed deeply biased and out to get Trump, adding hard proof to Trump’s longstanding lament that he was the subject of a “witch hunt.”

Justified or not, Trump’s feeling of vindication could hardly be more dangerous — particularly at a time when the most urgent need is to drain some testosterone from the self-styled Stable-Genius-in-Chief and his martinet generals.

On the home front, Trump, his wealthy friends, and like-thinkers in Congress may now feel they have an even wider carte blanche to visit untold misery on the poor, the widow, the stranger and other vulnerable humans. That was always an underlying danger of the Resistance’s strategy to seize on whatever weapons were available – no matter how reckless or unfair – to “get Trump.”

Beyond that, Russia-gate has become so central to the Washington establishment’s storyline that there appears to be no room for second-thoughts or turning back. The momentum is such that some Democrats and the media never-Trumpers can’t stop stoking the smoke of Russia-gate and holding out hope against hope that it will somehow justify Trump’s impeachment.

Yet, the sordid process of using legal/investigative means to settle political scores further compromises the principle of the “rule of law” and integrity of journalism in the eyes of many Americans. After a year of Russia-gate, the “rule of law” and “pursuit of truth” appear to have been reduced to high-falutin’ phrases for political score-setttling, a process besmirched by Republicans in earlier pursuits of Democrats and now appearing to be a bipartisan method for punishing political rivals regardless of the lack of evidence.

Strzok and Page

Peter Strzok (pronounced “struck”) has an interesting pedigree with multiple tasks regarding both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump. As the FBI’s chief of counterespionage during the investigation into then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s unauthorized use of a personal email server for classified information, Strzok reportedly changed the words “grossly negligent” (which could have triggered legal prosecution) to the far less serious “extremely careless” in FBI Director James Comey’s depiction of Clinton’s actions. This semantic shift cleared the way for Comey to conclude just 20 days before the Democratic National Convention began in July 2016, that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring charges against Mrs. Clinton.

Then, as Deputy Assistant Director of the Counterintelligence Division, Strzok led the FBI’s investigation into alleged Russian interference in the U.S. election of 2016. It is a safe bet that he took a strong hand in hand-picking the FBI contingent of analysts that joined “hand-picked” counterparts from CIA and NSA in preparing the evidence-free, Jan. 6, 2017 assessment accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin of interfering in the election of 2016. (Although accepted in Establishment groupthink as revealed truth, that poor excuse for analysis reflected the apogee of intelligence politicization — rivaled only by the fraudulent intelligence on “weapons of mass destruction“ in Iraq 15 years ago.)

In June and July 2017 Strzok was the top FBI official working on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible links between the Trump campaign and Russia, but was taken off that job when the Justice Department IG learned of the Strzok-Page text-message exchange and told Mueller.

There is no little irony in the fact that what did in the FBI sweathearts was their visceral disdain for Mr. Trump, their cheerleading-cum-kid-gloves treatment of Mrs. Clinton and her associates, their 1950-ish, James Clapperesque attitude toward Russians as “almost genetically driven” to evil, and their (Strzok/Page) elitist conviction that they know far better what is good for the country than regular American citizens, including those “deplorables” whom Clinton said made up half of Trump’s supporters.

But Strzok/Page had no idea that their hubris, elitism and scheming would be revealed in so tangible a way. Worst of all for them, the very thing that Strzok, in particular, worked so hard to achieve — the sabotaging of Trump and immunization of Mrs. Clinton and her closest advisers is now coming apart at the seams.

Congress: Oversee? or Overlook?

At this point, the $64 question is whether the various congressional oversight committees will remain ensconced in their customarily cozy role as “overlook” committees, or whether they will have the courage to attempt to carry out their Constitutional duty. The latter course would mean confronting a powerful Deep State and its large toolbox of well-practiced retaliatory techniques, including J. Edgar Hoover-style blackmail on steroids, enabled by electronic surveillance of just about everything and everyone. Yes, today’s technology permits blanket collection, and “Collect Everything” has become the motto.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-New York, with almost four decades of membership in the House and Senate, openly warned incoming President Trump in January 2017 against criticizing the U.S. intelligence community because U.S. intelligence officials have “six ways from Sunday to get back at you” if you are “dumb” enough to take them on.

Thanks to the almost 10,000 text messages between Strzok and Page, only a small fraction of which were given to Congress four weeks ago, there is now real evidentiary meat on the bones of the suspicions that there indeed was a “deep-state coup” to “correct” the outcome of the 2016 election. We now know that the supposedly apolitical FBI officials had huge political axes to grind. The Strzok-Page exchanges drip with disdain for Trump and those deemed his smelly deplorable supporters. In one text message, Strzok expressed visceral contempt for those working-class Trump voters, writing on Aug. 26, 2016, “Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support. … it’s scary real down here.”

The texts even show Strzok warning of the need for an “insurance policy” to thwart Trump on the off-chance that his poll numbers closed in on those of Mrs. Clinton.

An Aug. 6, 2016 text message, for example, shows Page giving her knight in shining armor strong affirmation: “Maybe you’re meant to stay where you are because you’re meant to protect the country from that menace [Trump].” That text to Strzok includes a link to a David Brooks column in The New York Times, in which Brooks concludes with the clarion call: “There comes a time when neutrality and laying low become dishonorable. If you’re not in revolt, you’re in cahoots. When this period and your name are mentioned, decades hence, your grandkids will look away in shame.”

Another text message shows that other senior government officials – alarmed at the possibility of a Trump presidency – joined the discussion. In an apparent reference to an August 2016 meeting with FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Strzok wrote to Page on Aug. 15, 2016, “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office — that there’s no way he [Trump] gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk.”  Strzok added, “It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event that you die before you’re 40.”

Insurance Policy?

Senate Judiciary Committee chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, says he will ask Strzok to explain the “insurance policy” when he calls him to testify. What seems already clear is that the celebrated “Steele Dossier” was part of the “insurance,” as was the evidence-less legend that Russia hacked the DNC’s and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails and gave them to WikiLeaks.

If congressional investigators have been paying attention, they already know what former weapons inspector Scott Ritter shared with Veteran intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) colleagues this week; namely, that Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson, who commissioned the Russia dossier using Democratic Party money, said he reached out to Steele after June 17, just three days before Steele’s first report was published, drawing on seven sources.

“There is a snowball’s chance in hell that this is raw intelligence gathered by Steele; rather he seems to have drawn on a single ‘trusted intermediary’ to gather unsubstantiated rumor already in existence.”

Another VIPS colleague, Phil Giraldi, writing out of his own experience in private sector consulting, added: “The fact that you do not control your sources frequently means that they will feed you what they think you want to hear. Since they are only doing it for money, the more lurid the details the better, as it increases the apparent value of the information. The private security firm in turn, which is also doing it for the money, will pass on the stories and even embroider them to keep the client happy and to encourage him to come back for more. When I read the Steele dossier it looked awfully familiar to me, like the scores of similar reports I had seen which combined bullshit with enough credible information to make the whole product look respectable.”

It is now widely known that the Democrats ponied up the “insurance premiums,” so to speak, for former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele’s “dossier” of lurid — but largely unproven — “intelligence” on Trump and the Russians. If, as many have concluded, the   dossier was used to help justify a FISA warrant to snoop on the Trump campaign, those involved will be in deep kimchi, if congressional overseers do their job.

How, you might ask, could Strzok and associates undertake these extra-legal steps with such blithe disregard for the possible consequences should they be caught? The answer is easy; Mrs. Clinton was a shoo-in, remember? This was just extra insurance with no expectation of any “death benefit” ever coming into play — save for Trump’s electoral demise in November 2016. The attitude seemed to be that, if abuse of the FISA law should eventually be discovered — there would be little interest in a serious investigation by the editors of The New York Times and other anti-Trump publications and whatever troubles remained could be handled by President Hillary Clinton.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, who chairs the Judiciary Subcommittee of Judiciary on Crime and Terrorism, joined Sen. Grassley in signing the letter referring Christopher Steele to the Justice Department to investigate what appear to be false statements about the dossier. In signing, Graham noted the “many stop signs the Department of Justice ignored in its use of the dossier.” The signature of committee ranking member Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, however, was missing — an early sign that a highly partisan battle royale is in the offing.  On Tuesday, Feinstein unilaterally released a voluminous transcript of Glenn Simpson’s earlier testimony and, as though on cue, Establishment pundits portrayed Steele as a good source and Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson as a victim.

The Donnybrook is now underway; the outcome uncertain.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington.  He was an Army and CIA intelligence analyst for 30 years; prepared and briefed the President’s Daily Brief for Nixon, Ford, and Reagan; and is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

+++++++++++++

Sample text messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, released to Congress and the media on December 13, 2016

++++++++++++++

03/04/2016

Strzok – God Hillary should win. 100,000,000-0.

Page – I know

++++++++++++

04/02/2016

Page – So look, you say we text on that phone when we talk about Hillary because it can’t be traced, you were just venting, bc you feel bad that you’re gone so much but that can’t be helped right now.

++++++++++

07/08/2016

Strzok – And meanwhile, we have Black Lives Matter protestors, right now, chanting “no justice no peace” around DoJ and the White House…

Page – That’s awful.

+++++++++

07/14/2016

Page – Have you read this? It’s really frightening. For Whites Sensing Decline, Donald Trump Unleashes Words of Resistance http://NYTI/ms/29WCu5!

Strzok – I have not. But I think it’s clear he’s capturing all the white, poor voters who the mainstream republicans abandoned in all but name in the quest for the almighty $$$

Page – Yeah, it’s not good.

Strzok – Poll Finds Emails Weighing on Hillary Clinton, Now Tied With Donald Trump http://nyti.ms/29RV5gf

Page – It is

+++++++++++++

07/26/2016

Strzok – And hey. Congrats on a woman nominated for President in a major party! About damn time! Many many more returns of the day!!

Page – That’s cute. Thanks

++++++++++

08/06/2016

Page – Jesus. You should read this. And Trump should go f himself. Moment in Convention Glare Shakes Up Khans American Life http://nyti.ms/2aHulE0

Strzok – God that’s a great article. Thanks for sharing. And F TRUMP.

++++++++

08/06/2016

Page – And maybe you’re meant to stay where you are because you’re meant to protect the country from that menace. To that end comma, read this:

Page – Trump Enablers Will Finally Have to Take A Stand http://nyti.ms/2aFakry

Strzok – Thanks. It’s absolutely true that we’re both very fortunate. And of course I’ll try and approach it that way. I just know it will be tough at times. I can protect our country at many levels, not sure if that helps

++++++++++++

08/09/2016

Page – He’s not ever going to become president, right? Right?!

Strzok – OMG did you hear what Trump just said?

+++++++++++

08/26/2016

Strzok – Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support…

Page – Yep. Out to lunch with (redacted) We both hate everyone and everything.

Page – Just riffing on the hot mess that is our country.

Strzok – Yeah…it’s scary real down here

+++++++++

10/20/2016

Strzok: I am riled up. Trump is a f***ing idiot, is unable to provide a coherent answer.

Strzok – I CAN’T PULL AWAY, WHAT THE F**K HAPPENED TO OUR COUNTRY (redacted)??!?!

Page– I don’t know. But we’ll get it back. We’re America. We rock.

Strzok– Donald just said “bad hombres”

Strzok– Trump just said what the FBI did is disgraceful.

This article was originally published by Consortium News –

====

Was the DNC/Clinton campaign-funded dossier used to obtain warrants on Trump team from the secret court?

=============================

* Zie: ‘Wall Street Journal wil punt achter Russiagate

Zie ook: ‘WikiLeaks belooft The Guardian 1 miljoen dollar als het haar leugens i.z. Assange en Russiagate kan bewijzen…….

        en: ‘Russiagate? Britaingate zal je bedoelen!

        en: ‘Facebook gebruikte ‘fake news’ beschuldiging om de aandacht voor schandalen af te leiden

        en ‘Politico rapport bevestigt: Russiagate is een hoax

       en: ‘New York Times ‘bewijzen’ voor Russiagate vallen door de mand……

       en: ‘Russiagate sprookje ondermijnt VS democratie en de midterm verkiezingen

       en: ‘Google, de volgende ‘die advertentieruimte verkocht aan Putin zelf……’ ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!

       en: ‘Russiagate, of: hoe de media u belazeren met verhalen over Russische bemoeienis met de VS presidentsverkiezingen……..‘ 

       en: Publicly Available Evidence Doesn’t Support Russian Gov Hacking of 2016 Election

       en: ‘Democraten VS kochten informatie over Trump >> Forgetting the ‘Dirty Dossier’ on Trump

       en: ‘Russia Is Trolling the Shit out of Hillary Clinton and the Mainstream Media

       en: ‘Russische ‘hacks’ door deskundigen nogmaals als fake news doorgeprikt >> Intel Vets Challenge ‘Russia Hack’ Evidence

       en: ‘Rusland krijgt alweer de schuld van hacken, nu van oplichters Symantec en Facebook……. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!

       en: ‘CIA chef Pompeo waarschuwt voor complot van WikiLeaks om de VS op alle mogelijke manieren neer te halen……. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!

       en: ‘‘Russiagate’ een verhaal van a t/m z westers ‘fake news…..’

       en: ‘Rusland zou onafhankelijkheid Californië willen uitlokken met reclame voor borsjt…….

       en: ‘Clinton te kakken gezet: Donna Brazile (Democratische Partij VS) draagt haar boek op aan Seth Rich, het vermoorde lid van DNC die belastende documenten lekte

       en: ‘CIA deed zich voor als het Russische Kaspersky Lab, aldus Wikileaks Vault 8…..‘ (zie ook de andere links onder dat bericht)

       en: ‘Kajsa Ollongren (D66 vicepremier): Nederland staat in het vizier van Russische inlichtingendiensten……. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!

       en: ‘Ollongren gesteund door Thomas Boesgaard (AD), ‘Rusland verpakt het nepnieuws gekoppeld aan echt nieuws…..’ Oei!!‘ (ja ook deze D66 plork gaat plat op de bek!)

       en: ‘RT America één van de eerste slachtoffers in een heksenjacht op westerse alternatieve media en nadenkend links……

       en: ‘Rusland heeft niets van doen met manipulaties van de VS presidentsverkiezingen via Facebook, wel maakt Facebook meer kapot dan je lief is…….

       en: ‘‘False flag terror’ bestaat wel degelijk: bekentenissen en feiten over heel smerige zaken……….

        en:  ‘CIA 70 jaar: 70 jaar moorden, martelen, coups plegen, nazi’s beschermen, media manipulatie enz. enz………

       en: ‘CIA en 70 jaar desinformatie in Europese opiniebladen…………

       en: ‘Pompeo (CIA opperhoofd met koperen fluit): heeft alle aanwijzingen dat Rusland de midterm verkiezingen zal manipuleren……

       en: ‘‘Russiagate’ een complot van CIA, FBI, Hillary Clinton en het DNC………..


       en: De Russiagate samenzweringstheorie dient de machthebbers………

       en: ‘‘Fake News’ hysterie willens en wetens gelanceerd om sociale media tot zwijgen te brengen, Rusland te demoniseren en daarmee de waarheid te verbergen……..

Trumps uitlating over de atoomknop en de onverschilligheid bij zijn achterban, een dictatuur waardig………

Trump
stelde onlangs dat hij een veel grotere atoomknop heeft dan Kim
Yung-un van Noord-Korea*, waarbij hij ook nog eens toegaf te weten,
dat de raketten van Noord-Korea niet werken en dat de atoombom van
Noord-Korea ofwel niet bestaat, of dat deze nog lang niet op een raket
kan worden gemonteerd (niet klein genoeg), of zelfs dat Noord-Korea niet eens een atoombom heeft……**

Uiteraard
een uiterst infantiele manier van spreken (de mijne is groter en beter dan die
van jou), maar tevens een teken dat hij wat betreft z’n achterban
alles kan zeggen en doen, het maakt ze niet uit zolang het hun Donald
maar is…… Een houding die men vooral aantreft in dictaturen……..

Daniel
Ellsberg, eertijds een legeranalist, die de klok luidde over de
leugens waarmee het volk van de VS werd meegesleept in de Vietnam
oorlog, stelt dat e.e.a. nog veel verder gaat. Met de vraag van Trump
in gedachten: “We hebben kernwapens, waarom gebruiken we ze niet?” (iets
dat hij tot 3 keer toe herhaalde), stelt Ellsberg dat Trump daarmee
een gevaarlijk punt is gepasseerd. Hij gebruikt het atoomwapen als
een pistool dat hij richt op een, in zijn ogen, ‘gevaarlijke
vijand…..’

Ellsberg
is waarschijnlijk vergeten dat Obama als president in 2016 al heeft
gesteld, het atoomwapen niet langer als afschrikkingswapen te zien,
maar als een wapen dat gebruikt kan worden bij een eerste
aanval…….. Ofwel bij één van de illegale oorlog de de VS keer
op keer begint……..

Lees
het uitstekende artikel van Darius Shahtahmasebi hieronder, hij legt
de schuld voor de onverschilligheid bij de achterban van Trump tevens
bij de reguliere media, die deze achterban nooit serieus heeft
genomen (zoals hare kwaadaardigheid Clinton, die Trumps achterban
wegzette als een zootje niet nadenkende imbecielen….)….

Lees
en oordeel zelf:

Trump
Is a Madman Threatening Nuclear Annihilation and His Supporters Don’t
Care

Afbeeldingsresultaat voor Trump Is a Madman Threatening Nuclear Annihilation and His Supporters Don’t Care

January
5, 2018 at 7:49 am

Written
by 
Darius
Shahtahmasebi

(ANTIMEDIA Op-ed)  Donald
Trump’s speeches, interviews, and warmongering escapades on Twitter
are the markings of a madman. In a recent
 Twitter
tirade,
 the
president openly threatened nuclear war with North Korea, writing the
following:

North
Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is
on his desk at all times.’ Will someone from his depleted and food
starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button,
but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my
Button works!”

The
threat of nuclear war would typically send shivers down the spines of
those of us with the normal amount of empathy required to be a
well-adjusted human. According to whistleblower and former defense
analyst Daniel Ellsberg, Trump’s threats go further than mere empty
gestures. They are tantamount to actually using nukes indirectly.
As he recently
 stated
in an interview
 with Democracy
Now!
:

It’s
not a question of whether the president might use them. He’s using
them the way you use a gun when you point it at somebody in a
confrontation, whether or not you pull the trigger. And both Trump
and Kim are using their weapons in that encounter right now, as many
presidents have done…We use them on the hip.”

Why
would someone want to use the threat of nuclear annihilation that
way? Can they be trusted to operate the most powerful office in the
world?

At
the
 end
of December
,
Donald Trump did an interview with 
New
York Times

reporter Michael Schmidt, and the corporate media immediately
lambasted his comments. Trump’s nonsensical ramblings — on the
face of it — arguably portray someone who is by all accounts
mentally unfit to hold the office of the president. Whether or not
Trump is taking everyone for a ride as the master of manipulation,
the corporate media certainly holds the view that he is simply
cognitively incompetent.

Incoherent,
authoritarian, uninformed: Trump’s New York Times interview is a
scary read,” 
Vox opined.
“Trump’s rambling New York Times interview reveals a mind in
denial,”
 wrote Vanity
Fair
.
“Trump’s New York Times interview is a portrait of a man in
cognitive decline,” 
Esquire assertedCNN highlighted the
“47 most outrageous lines in Donald Trump’s New York Times
interview.” The 
Washington
Post
 lamented a
lesser “11 curious quotes from Trump’s New York Times interview.”

By
all accounts, if you care about verifiable facts and integrity, it
should be evident that the president is lying through his teeth
throughout his interview with Michael Schmidt. When he isn’t lying,
he’s barely making practical sense. Yet this was a man who the
American people saw suited to take up the nuclear codes in the
presidential hot-seat with full knowledge that this was how he
presented himself on a daily basis.

This
is a man who, like a petulant child, 
challenged his
secretary of state to an IQ test after this official
reportedly
 called
the president
 a
“fucking moron” in response to Trump asking three times in a
meeting, “
If
we have nuclear weapons, why don’t we use them
?”

Despite
all of this ridiculous behavior, no matter how many times the media
explains how much Donald Trump behaves like an incoherent buffoon,
their criticisms do absolutely nothing to exact serious change on the
people who matter most: his supporters. In fact, Trump’s ludicrous
behavior is likely intentionally directed at his support base, which
seems to love every narcissistic challenge he presents to the
neoliberal establishment and its media cohorts.

As
Charles J. Sykes
 wrote for
the 
New
York Times
 in
February of last year, Donald Trump “
understands
that attacking the media is the reddest of meat for his base, which
has been conditioned to reject reporting from news sites outside of
the conservative media ecosystem.

This
dynamic, unfortunately, swings both ways. If Trump attacks the media,
his support base will rally behind him. Equally, if the mainstream
media attacks Trump in the manner they have become so accustomed to,
his support base stays largely immune to it. These attacks only
strengthen their diehard support for Trump. Sykes explains further:

For
years, as a conservative radio talk show host, I played a role in
that conditioning by hammering the mainstream media for its bias and
double standards. 
But the price turned out to
be far higher than I imagined. The cumulative effect of the attacks
was to delegitimize those outlets and essentially destroy much of the
right’s immunity to false information
We
thought we were creating a savvier, more skeptical audience. Instead,
we opened the door for President Trump, who found an audience that
could be easily misled.
” [emphasis
added]

The
effects of this paradigm go far beyond that of people being simply
misinformed and needing to attain more credible research. As Sykes
points out, it “also means that the more the fact-based
media tries to debunk the president’s falsehoods, the further it
will entrench the battle lines.

In
other words, all of the articles attempting to criticize the New
York Times
 interview are completely pointless (it’s not
clear whether the media’s true aim is to change the hearts of
Trump’s core support base or simply pander to the anti-Trump crowd,
anyway). The people who read those articles and agree with them do
not require further proof that Trump is a madman; they can see it
quite clearly for themselves. The people who need convincing are
almost completely untouchable by the mainstream media, who they have
grown to completely distrust. In that context, the media is merely
preaching to the choir while the rest of us have to put up with the
potential horror of a nuclear winter simply because some Americans
love a president who is ‘strong’ and will stand up for America
(unlike that liberal Muslim commie we had a few years back, some
reason).

Sykes
explains that discrediting outlets that attack the president “helps
insulate him from criticism and it allows him to create his own
narratives, metrics and ‘alternative facts.’”

Sound
familiar
?

If
you don’t believe me, take a look at this
 tweet from
January 2, 2018, where Donald Trump stated that “
[s]ince
taking office
 I
have been very strict on Commercial Aviation. Good news – it was
just reported that there were Zero deaths in 2017, the best and
safest year on record!

This
is by no stretch of the imagination,
 completely
false
,
and Donald Trump never presented any evidence that he had been strict
on commercial aviation – ever. Yet, this tweet has 83,514 likes and
15,192 retweets.

To
most of us, Donald Trump has the brain of a rambling, jealous child
who constantly takes credit for the good work done by other people
(or flat out lie instead). But to his support base, any attack on him
is automatically uncredible, and as Sykes reported, what we are now
witnessing in the age of Trump is nothing short of an “attack on
credibility itself.”

As
Sykes aptly explained:

The
Russian dissident and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov drew upon long
familiarity with that process when 
he
tweeted
:
‘The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push
an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate
truth.’

Mr.
Kasparov grasps that the real threat is not merely that a large
number of Americans have become accustomed to rejecting factual
information, or even that they have become habituated to believing
hoaxes. The real danger is that, inundated with ‘alternative
facts,’ many voters will simply shrug, asking, ‘What is truth?’
— and not wait for an answer.

In
that world, the leader becomes the only reliable source of truth; a
familiar phenomenon in an authoritarian state, but a radical
departure from the norms of a democratic society. 
The
battle over truth is now central to our politics.” 
[emphasis
added]

Creative
Commons
 / Anti-Media / Report
a typo

===========================================

* Zie: ‘Trumps atoomknop is groter dan die van Kim Yung-un, bovendien werkt de VS knop wel……. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!

** Er is immers nooit nucleaire straling gemeten bovengronds, op de locatie waar de Noord-Koreanen hun ‘kernproeven’ uitvoeren. Dit kan de dagen na zo’n kernproef worden gemeten, zelfs middels overgaande satellieten en dat zijn er in het geval van Noord-Korea ‘meer dan een paar…..’ Het lijkt dan ook om een potje blufkoker van het Noord-Koreaanse regime te gaan, een regime dat dom genoeg blij is met de onmiddellijke erkenning van het hebben van een atoombom door de internationale gemeenschap…… Dom genoeg, daar als dit inderdaad zo is, de afschrikking van een aanval op Noord-Korea niet werkt en daar was het dit land tenslotte wel om te doen…….

Zie ook: ‘VS sluit een nucleaire aanval niet uit als een mogelijke reactie op een ‘cyberaanval…….’

        en: ‘VS op weg naar daadwerkelijk gebruik van het kernwapen…………..‘ (plus 2 extra Engelstalige artikelen)

       en: ‘VN chef Guterrez geeft alarmcode rood af voor de wereld in 2018 en niet alleen vanwege het milieu of klimaat……

       en: ‘NAVO oefent op een nucleaire aanval tegen ‘een denkbeeldige vijand’, ofwel Rusland……….

       en: ‘Top VS generaal stelt dat er een grote oorlog met Rusland op komst is, ofwel: WOIII……

       en: ‘Trumps atoomknop is groter dan die van Kim Yung-un, bovendien werkt de VS knop wel……. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!

       en: ‘VN chef Guterrez geeft alarmcode rood af voor de wereld in 2018 en niet alleen vanwege het milieu of klimaat……

       en: ‘Trumps beleid t.a.v. kernwapens brengt de VS staatsveiligheid in gevaar (en die van de rest van de wereld)

Dan nog over het bedreigen van Noord-Korea door Trump met ‘Fire and Fury): ‘Noord-Korea verkeerd begrepen: het land wordt bedreigd door de VS, dat alleen deze eeuw al minstens 4 illegale oorlogen begon……..

En om nog even te herinneren aan de enorme agressie van de VS, die niet op een illegale oorlog meer of minder kijkt:  ‘VS buitenlandbeleid sinds WOII: een lange lijst van staatsgrepen en oorlogen……….‘ en:  ‘List of wars involving the United States‘    

Over de zogenaamde Russische dreiging: ‘NAVO uitbreiding in Oost-Europa is bewezen tegen gesloten overeenkomst met Rusland…….

RT America één van de eerste slachtoffers in een heksenjacht op westerse alternatieve media en nadenkend links……

RT
America is één van de eerste slachtoffers in de heksenjacht op alternatieve media en nadenkend links….. Hiermee wordt eens te meer aangetoond dat de VS in feite al een politiestaat is….. Na de heksenjachten op ‘communisten’ door de fascist McCarthy in de 50er jaren, tot voor kort algemeen veroordeeld, is de tijd aangebroken voor een nieuwe heksenjacht, ofwel het Mccarthyisme is terug van weggeweest en de reguliere media ondersteunen dit met tromgeroffel…….

De aanval op RT is niet ingegeven door de zogenaamde verspreiding van Russische propaganda, maar heeft alles te maken met RT als platform voor kritiek op de ijskoude, inhumane politiek, zowel in binnen- als buitenland, die door de VS wordt gevoerd…..

In een artikel van Truthdig, dat ik op het blog van Stan Van Houcke vond, stelt journalist en professor Chris Hedges dat de VS niet langer als een democratie kan worden gezien………

Via algoritmes van Google, Facebook en Twitter wordt de gebruiker weggeleid van linkse, progressieve en anti-oorlog websites, waarin zoals gezegd grote kritiek wordt geleverd op de ijskoude inhumane neoliberale en oorlogszuchtige politiek van de VS…….. Zo zag de World Socialist Web Site zag haar internetverkeer op Google dalen met 74%!!! Google heeft op haar YouTube kanaal RT verwijderd uit haar voorkeur zenders en Twitter heeft alle reclames voor RT geblokkeerd…….

Niet vreemd dus dat Hedges stelt dat ‘linkse critici’, na marginalisering door de staat, nu volledig moeten worden genegeerd……. (wat men ‘links’ noemt in de VS, is dat in veel gevallen niet in Europa)

Veel organisaties die eerder nog de persvrijheid verdedigden zoals Human Rights Watch, the Committee to Protect Journalists, ACLU en PEN, laten zich nu gebruiken als lakeien voor het fascistische neoliberalisme. Hierbij dient nog opgemerkt te worden dat het overgrote deel van de reguliere westerse media in handen is van ofwel superrijken dan wel commerciële conglomeraten, die de pest hebben aan alles wat maar kritiek heeft op de huidige neoliberale status quo en wat naar links ruikt (u snapt dat deze twee vaak uit dezelfde hoek komen……

De aanklacht dat mediaorganen als RT Russische propaganda verspreiden is een smerig excuus om de persvrijheid volledig de nek om te draaien…… Immers nog steeds is er geen flinter bewijs voor Russische inmenging in binnenlandse politiek, zowel in  de VS als de EU, terwijl men elkaar in de politiek en de reguliere media nakakelt dat dit wel zo is, heeft men keer op keer geen antwoord op de vraag naar bewijzen……

Het is in de EU overigens niet anders, men beschuldigt Rusland van het verspreiden van propaganda, zonder ook maar één voorbeeld te noemen. De reguliere (massa-) media doen hier braaf aan mee, terwijl je voor het brengen van nepnieuws, of ‘fake news’ zo u wilt, juist bergen bewijzen kan vinden in die reguliere media. Men wil simpelweg niet, dat de bevolking deze leugens kan doorprikken met feiten, die lullig genoeg nu juist op de sociale media zijn te vinden……

Lees het uitstekende artikel van Hedges en geeft het door!

RT
America Torched in Witch Hunt ’17

Chris
Hedges

NOV
12, 2017
TD
ORIGINALS

In
one of the most horrendous blows to press freedom since the
anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s, the U.S. Department of
Justice 
has
forced
 the
news broadcaster 
RT
America
 to
file under the 
Foreign
Agents Registration Act
 (FARA).

The
assault on RT America, on which I host the show “
On
Contact
,”
has nothing to do with the dissemination of Russian propaganda. It is
driven by RT America’s decision to provide a platform to critics of
American capitalism and imperialism, critics who lambast a system of
government that can no longer be called democratic. And it is
accompanied by the installation of algorithms by Google, Facebook and
Twitter that divert readers away from left-wing, progressive and
anti-war websites, including Truthdig. The World Socialist Web Site
has seen its search traffic from Google fall by 74 percent since
April. Google, in a further blow, this month removed RT from its list
of “preferred” channels on YouTube. Twitter has blocked all
advertising by the channel.

Put
the censorship campaigns together and the message is clear: Left-wing
critics, already marginalized by the state, must be silenced.

It
would seem, given how we are locked out of the corporate media and
public broadcasting, that the assault is overkill. But the ideology
that sustains the corporate state, the “free market”
and 
neoliberalism has
lost all credibility. The corporate state has no counterargument to
its critics. The nakedness of corporate greed, exploitation and
repression is transparent across the political spectrum. The
ideological fortress erected by corporate power and sustained by its
courtiers in the press and academia has collapsed. All it has left is
a crude censorship.

Complicit
in this censorship is a bankrupt liberal class. The institutions
tasked with defending press freedom—including the ACLU, Human
Rights Watch, the Committee to Protect Journalists and PEN—along
with major news outlets such as The New York Times, have served as
the corporate state’s useful idiots. Only a handful of journalists,
including 
Truthdig
Editor in Chief Robert Scheer
,
grasp and decry the very real danger before us.

The
charge that RT and these left-wing sites disseminate “foreign
propaganda” is the beginning, not the end, of a broad campaign
against press freedom. Once this precedent of state censorship is
normalized, far more tepid and compliant media outlets will be
targeted. Max Blumenthal wrote two good pieces on AlterNet about the
puppet masters behind the censorship campaign. [Click 
here and here.]

The
venom of the state toward its critics was displayed 
in
a report
 by
the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), “Assessing Russian
Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections,” issued Jan. 6.
In the report, seven pages were specifically directed at RT America,
much of the language focused on the journalist 
Abby
Martin
.
Martin became one of the best-known critics of the corporate state
during the Occupy movement. Her show on RT, “Breaking the Set,”
which had been off the air for nearly two years when the report was
published—a glaring error for an intelligence community awash in
budgets of tens of billions of dollars—was denounced as a
disseminator of “radical discontent.” The report complained that
RT gave airtime to third-party candidate debates. The document
attacked RT hosts for asserting that the two-party system does not
represent the views of at least one-third of the population and is a
sham. It excoriated the network for covering Black Lives Matter,
Occupy Wall Street and fracking.

The
report charged:

RT’s
reports often characterize the United States as a “surveillance
state” and allege widespread infringements of civil liberties,
police brutality, and drone use.

RT
has also focused on criticism of the US economic system, US currency
policy, alleged Wall Street greed, and the US national debt. Some of
RT’s hosts have compared the United States to Imperial Rome and
have predicted that government corruption and “corporate greed”
will lead to US financial collapse.

The
“Alice in Wonderland” quality of the report would be laughable if
it was not so ominous. The United States, in fact, is a surveillance
state. Civil liberties have been eviscerated. Police brutality is
endemic. Our drone wars have made us state terrorists. The economic
structure serves the wealthiest corporations and oligarchs. Wall
Street is run by a criminal class. Our debt is unsustainable,
especially once the dollar is no longer the world’s 
reserve
currency
,
and like all decaying empires we are headed for collapse. The DNI
report clarifies what the ruling elites fear—not fake news but the
truth. And the truth is that the elites have destroyed the country
and are traitors to democracy.

The
DNI report was followed by a congressional hearing on “Extremist
Content and Russian Disinformation Online,” held Oct. 31.
Executives of Facebook, Twitter and Google were grilled about their
roles in distributing fake news and extremist content that in the
words of Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley included “spread[ing]
stories about abuse of black Americans by law enforcement.” The
executives promised to double down on their censorship, and they did
so.

The
ruling elites are desperately trying to shift the focus away from the
cause of the political insurgencies on the left and the right:
extreme social inequality. It is for this reason that critics who
highlight and explore the roots and causes of social inequality must
be discredited or silenced. If social inequality is accepted as the
driving force behind the decay of the American state and the mounting
rage of much of the population, then the structures that profit from
this inequality will come under assault. All the elites have left is
to paint their critics as “agents of a foreign power.”

The
United States increasingly resembles a totalitarian state. Our anemic
democracy is on life support. A reasoned debate about social
inequality or the crimes and misjudgments of empire is becoming
impossible. This presages a frightening future. There will be many
“good” Americans who, when the history of this moment is
recorded, will be responsible. And one day, to their surprise, they
too will be victims.

Chris
Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, New York Times best
selling author, former professor at Princeton University, activist
and ordained Presbyterian minister. He has written 11 books,
including the New York Times best-seller “Days of Destruction, Days
of Revolt” (2012), which he co-authored with the cartoonist Joe
Sacco. His other books include “Wages of Rebellion: The Moral
Imperative of Revolt,” (2015) “Death of the Liberal Class”
(2010), “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of
Spectacle” (2009), “I Don’t Believe in Atheists” (2008) and
the best-selling “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the
War on America” (2008). His book “War Is a Force That Gives Us
Meaning” (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle
Award for Nonfiction and has sold over 400,000 copies. He writes a
weekly column for the website Truthdig in Los Angeles, run by Robert
Scheer, and hosts a show, On Contact, on RT America.

==================================

Zie ook: ‘WikiLeaks: Seth Rich Leaked Clinton Emails, Not Russia

FBI, de spin in het Russiagate web……..

Hillary Clinton en haar oorlog tegen de waarheid…….. Ofwel een potje Rusland en Assange schoppen!

Murray, ex-ambassadeur van GB: de Russen hebben de VS verkiezingen niet gemanipuleerd

‘Russische manipulaties uitgevoerd’ door later vermoord staflid Clintons campagneteam Seth Rich……… AIVD en MIVD moeten hiervan weten!!

Obama gaf toe dat de DNC e-mails expres door de DNC werden gelekt naar Wikileaks….!!!!

VS ‘democratie’ aan het werk, een onthutsende en uitermate humoristische video!

Democraten VS kochten informatie over Trump >> Forgetting the ‘Dirty Dossier’ on Trump

Hillary Clinton moet op de hoogte zijn geweest van aankoop Steele dossier over Trump……..

Flashback: Clinton Allies Met With Ukrainian Govt Officials to Dig up Dirt on Trump During 2016 Election

FBI Director Comey Leaked Trump Memos Containing Classified Information

Publicly Available Evidence Doesn’t Support Russian Gov Hacking of 2016 Election

Russia Is Trolling the Shit out of Hillary Clinton and the Mainstream Media

CIA chef Pompeo waarschuwt voor complot van WikiLeaks om de VS op alle mogelijke manieren neer te halen……. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!

Russische ‘hacks’ door deskundigen nogmaals als fake news doorgeprikt >> Intel Vets Challenge ‘Russia Hack’ Evidence

Rusland krijgt alweer de schuld van hacken, nu van oplichters Symantec en Facebook……. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!

Russiagate, of: hoe de media u belazeren met verhalen over Russische bemoeienis met de VS presidentsverkiezingen……..

CIA deed zich voor als het Russische Kaspersky Lab, aldus Wikileaks Vault 8…..‘ (zie ook de andere links onder dat bericht)

Campagne Clinton, smeriger dan gedacht…………‘ (met daarin daarin opgenomen de volgende artikelen: ‘Donna Brazile Bombshell: ‘Proof’ Hillary ‘Rigged’ Primary Against Bernie‘ en ‘Democrats in Denial After Donna Brazile Says Primary Was Rigged for Hillary‘) 

Clinton te kakken gezet: Brazile (Democratische Partij VS) draagt haar boek op aan Seth Rich, het vermoorde lid van DNC die belastende documenten lekte

Rusland zou onafhankelijkheid Californië willen uitlokken met reclame voor borsjt…….

Kajsa Ollongren (D66 vicepremier): Nederland staat in het vizier van Russische inlichtingendiensten……. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!

Ollongren gesteund door Thomas Boesgaard (AD), ‘Rusland verpakt het nepnieuws gekoppeld aan echt nieuws…..’ Oei!!

‘Fake News’ hysterie willens en wetens gelanceerd om sociale media tot zwijgen te brengen, Rusland te demoniseren en daarmee de waarheid te verbergen……..

Mijn excuus voor de belabberde weergeving.

‘Russiagate’ een verhaal van a t/m z westers ‘fake news…..’

Een bericht ‘bijna uit de oude doos’ van 1 september jl., dat echter nog even actueel is: de ontleding van ‘Russiagate’ in een propagandaslag van de reguliere (massa-) media.

Bijvoorbeeld de samenwerking van Trump met Vladimir Putin over een te bouwen ‘Trumptower’ in Moskou. Ondanks het feit dat dit verhaal later nepnieuws bleek te zijn, blijft dit verhaal herhaald worden….. De WashingtonPost, de New York Times en de reguliere media die deze twee kranten volgen, zien in het mislukken van de bouw van deze toren het bewijs dat Rusland de verkiezing van Trump heeft gekocht. Uiteraard vertellen deze media er niet bij, dat Putin geen vinger heeft uitgestoken om het al bij voorbaat mislukte project te redden en als daar al iets over gemeld werd, is dit weggemoffeld op een plek waar de meeste mensen die niet zullen hebben gelezen……..

Dan speelt er ook nog Oekraine in een strijd tussen de VS en Rusland (overgortemn met een dikke saus van anti-Rusland, anti-Putin propaganda, daarover moet niet vergeten worden, dat Janoekovytsj aanbood verkiezingen uit te schrijven, voordat een door de VS georganiseerde opstand tot een coup leidde, waarbij hij moest aftreden t.b.v. van de uiterst corrupte VS en neonazi-vriend Porosjenko…… De VS (o.l.v. Obama en Hillary Clinton) kocht deze coup voor maar liefs 4 miljard dollar……. Oekraïne is intussen zo goed als failliet en is bovendien in chaos gedompeld…… Overigens zijn de hiervoor staande feiten een aanvulling op het artikel na mijn schrijven.

Wat betreft ‘Russiagate’ is het nu topgraaier Zuckerberg van Facebook, die is gezwicht onder de druk van de geheime diensten in de VS en heeft verklaard dat (in feite) de Russische overheid reclames heeft gekocht, waarmee Trump de verkiezingen kon winnen. Het gaat hier om een bedrag van $ 100,000 en dat op een reclamebudget voor die verkiezingen, waarbij vergeleken die $ 100,000 een fooi is en toch heeft Rusland daarmee Trump aan de macht geholpen……. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!

Lees het volgende uitstekende stuk van Robert Parry, eerder geplaatst op Consortium News en overgenomen van Anti-Media:

Russiagate:
What You’re Not Being Told About the Media’s Misleading
Propaganda

September
1, 2017 at 7:31 am

Written
by 
Robert
Parry

The
U.S. mainstream media is touting a big break in Russiagate, emails
showing an effort by Donald Trump’s associates to construct a
building in Moscow. But the evidence actually undercuts the
“scandal.”

(CN) — There
is an inherent danger of news organizations getting infected by
“confirmation bias” when they want something to be true so badly
that even if the evidence goes in the opposite direction they twist
the revelation to fit their narrative. Such is how The Washington
Post, The New York Times and their followers in the mainstream media
are reacting to newly released emails that actually show Donald
Trump’s team having little or no influence in Moscow.

On
Tuesday, for instance, the Times published 
a
front-page article
 designed
to advance the Russiagate narrative, stating: “A business associate
of President Trump promised in 2015 to engineer a real estate deal
with the aid of the president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin, that he
said would help Mr. Trump win the presidency.”

Wow,
that sounds pretty devastating! The Times is finally tying together
the loose and scattered threads of the
Russia-influencing-the-U.S.-election story. Here you have a supposed
business deal in which Putin was to help Trump both make money and
get elected. That is surely how a casual reader or a Russiagate true
believer would read it – and was meant to read it. But the lede is
misleading.

The
reality, as you would find out if you read further into the story, is
that the boast from Felix Sater that somehow the construction of a
Trump Tower in Moscow would demonstrate Trump’s international
business prowess and thus help his election was meaningless. What the
incident really shows is that the Trump organization had little or no
pull in Russia as Putin’s government apparently didn’t lift a
finger to salvage this stillborn building project.

But
highlighting that reality would not serve the Times’ endless
promotion of Russiagate. So, this counter-evidence gets buried deep
in the story, after a reprise of the “scandal” and the Times
hyping the significance of Sater’s emails from 2015 and early 2016.
For good measure, the Times includes a brief and dishonest summary of
the Ukraine crisis.

The
Times reported: “Mr. Sater, a Russian immigrant, said he had lined
up financing for the Trump Tower deal with VTB Bank, a Russian bank
that was under American sanctions for involvement in Moscow’s
efforts to undermine democracy in Ukraine. In another email, Mr.
Sater envisioned a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Moscow. ‘I will
get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected,’ Mr.
Sater wrote.”

But
the idea that Russia acted “to undermine democracy in Ukraine” is
another example of the Times’ descent into outright propaganda. The
reality is that the U.S. government supported – and indeed
encouraged – a coup on Feb. 22, 2014, that overthrew the
democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych even
after he offered to move up scheduled elections so he could be voted
out of office through a democratic process.

After
Yanukovych’s violent ouster and after the coup regime dispatched
military forces to crush resistance among anti-coup, mostly ethnic
Russian Ukrainians in the east, Russia provided help to prevent their
destruction from an assault spearheaded by neo-Nazis and other
extreme Ukrainian nationalists. But that reality would not fit the
Times’ preferred Ukraine narrative, so it gets summarized as Moscow
trying “to undermine democracy in Ukraine.”

Empty
Boasts

However,
leaving aside the Times’ propagandistic approach to Ukraine, there
is this more immediate point about Russia-gate: none of Sater’s
boastful claims proved true and this incident really underscored the
lack of useful connections between Trump’s people and the Kremlin.
One of Trump’s lawyers, Michael Cohen, even used a general press
email address in a plea for assistance from Putin’s personal
spokesman.

Deeper
in the story, the Times admits these inconvenient facts: “There is
no evidence in the emails that Mr. Sater delivered on his promises,
and one email suggests that Mr. Sater overstated his Russian ties. In
January 2016, Mr. Cohen wrote to Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S.
Peskov, asking for help restarting the Trump Tower project, which had
stalled. But Mr. Sater did not appear to have Mr. Peskov’s direct
email, and instead wrote to a general inbox for press inquiries.”

The
Times added: “The project never got government permits or
financing, and died weeks later. … The emails obtained by The Times
make no mention of Russian efforts to damage Hillary Clinton’s
campaign or the hacking of Democrats’ emails.”

In
other words, the Russia-gate narrative – that somehow Putin foresaw
Trump’s election (although almost no one else did) and sought to
curry favor with the future U.S. president by lining Trump’s
pockets with lucrative real estate deals while doing whatever he
could to help Trump win – is knocked down by these new disclosures,
not supported by them.

Instead
of clearing the way for Trump to construct the building and thus –
in Sater’s view – boost Trump’s election chances, Putin and his
government wouldn’t even approve permits or assist in the
financing.

And,
this failed building project was not the first Trump proposal in
Russia to fall apart. A couple of years earlier, a Moscow hotel plan
died apparently because Trump would not – or could not – put up
adequate financing for his share, overvaluing the magic of the Trump
brand. But one would think that if the Kremlin were grooming Trump to
be its Manchurian candidate and take over the U.S. government, money
would have been no obstacle.

Along
the same lines, there’s the relative pittance that RT paid Gen.
Michael Flynn to speak at the TV network’s tenth anniversary in
Moscow in December 2015. The amount totaled $45,386 with Flynn
netting $33,750 after his speakers’ bureau took its cut. Democrats
and the U.S. mainstream media treated this fact as important evidence
of Russia buying influence in the Trump campaign and White House,
since Flynn was both a campaign adviser and briefly national security
adviser.

But
the actual evidence suggests something quite different. Besides
Flynn’s relatively modest speaking fee, it turned out that RT
negotiated Flynn’s rate downward, a fact that The Washington

Post buried deep
inside an article on Flynn’s Russia-connected payments. The Post
wrote, “RT balked at paying Flynn’s original asking price. ‘Sorry
it took us longer to get back to you but the problem is that the
speaking fee is a bit too high and exceeds our budget at the moment,’
Alina Mikhaleva, RT’s head of marketing, wrote a Flynn associate
about a month before the event.”

Yet,
if Putin were splurging to induce Americans near Trump to betray
their country, it 
makes
no sense
 that
Putin’s supposed flunkies at RT would be quibbling with Flynn over
a relatively modest speaking fee; they’d be falling over themselves
to pay him more.

So,
what the evidence really indicates is that Putin, like almost
everybody else in the world, didn’t anticipate Trump’s ascendance
to the White House, at least not in the time frame of these events –
and thus was doing nothing to buy influence with his entourage or
boost his election chances by helping him construct a glittering
Trump Tower in Moscow.

But
that recognition of reality would undermine the much beloved story of
Putin-Trump collusion, so the key facts and the clear logic are
downplayed or ignored – all the better to deceive Americans who are
dependent on the Times, the Post and the mainstream media.

By Robert
Parry
 /
Republished with permission / 
Consortium
News
 / Report
a typo

=====================================

Zie ook:

Putin vraagt en Trump levert: een lijst met ‘alle goede zaken die Trump voor Rusland regelde’

Russiagate: VS en buitenlandse geheime diensten hebben de VS presidentsverkiezingen in 2016 gemanipuleerd

Russiagate: nog overtuigd van bestaan daarvan? Lees dit!‘ (en zie de links in dat bericht)

Geen rectificaties voor meer dan 2 jaar brengen van fake news over het kwaadaardig sprookje Russiagate

Russiagate gelovigen krijgen nieuwe klap: WikiLeaks kreeg de DNC mails van een klokkenluider, niet van Rusland…..

Tulsi Gabbard (pres. kandidaat VS) krijgt volgens NBC Russische steun op claim van firma die ‘Russische data’ fabriceert voor Republikeinen

De verregaande anti-Russische propaganda in de VS en de rest van het westen

De VS dreigt de grondwet te wijzigen ten voordele van censuur en de afschaffing van de vrijheid op meningsuiting

 ‘WhatsApp beperking in strijd tegen fake news

Als Martin Luther King nog zou leven was hij onderwerp van censuur en was zijn Facebook pagina verwijderd

Massamedia VS vallen keihard door de mand met ‘vers’ geschoten Russiagate bok >> publiek wordt om vertrouwen gevraagd

Jacht in VS op alternatief (echt) nieuws in volgend stadium: journalist wordt vastgehouden zonder aanklacht

NewsGuard, het nieuwste wapen van Big Brother VS tegen de alternatieve media

Netflix censureert aflevering van humoristisch programma, ‘na een geldig verzoek’ op grond van Saoedische wetgeving….

Lichtgelovige ‘atheïst’ gelooft Russiagate leugens….
Britse militaire geheime dienst bedient zich van moddergooien en andere manipulaties om Europese en VS politiek te manipuleren, zo blijkt uit gelekte documenten

Bedrijf dat voor ‘Russische bots’ waarschuwde, heeft een leger met nep-Russische bots

‘Fake news’: alternatieve media en bloggers in het westen zouden onzin brengen, echter niet als dit soort groepen wat roepen in landen die het westen niet welgevallig zijn

Waarom de burgers van de VS de illegale oorlogen steunen

Democraten deden zich voor als Russen in false flag operatie om Roy Moore (Republikein) zwart te maken tijdens verkiezing…..

Der Spiegel, groot bestrijder van ‘fake news’ bracht zelf jarenlang dit soort ‘nieuws’

BBC: Rusland ‘misbruikt humor’ om Russiagate te ontkrachten….. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!

Uitgelekte telefoongesprekken tussen Trump en Putin bewijzen dat ‘Russiagaters gelijk hebben……’

WikiLeaks belooft The Guardian 1 miljoen dollar als het haar leugens i.z. Assange en Russiagate kan bewijzen…….‘ (zie ook de links naar Russiagate berichten in dat bericht)

New York Times ‘bewijzen’ voor Russiagate vallen door de mand……

Facebook gebruikte ‘fake news’ beschuldiging om de aandacht voor schandalen af te leiden

Politico rapport bevestigt: Russiagate is een hoax

Obama gaf toe dat de DNC e-mails expres door de DNC werden gelekt naar Wikileaks….!!!!

De Israëlische manipulatie van de VS presidentsverkiezingen, gaat veel verder dan wat men Rusland in de schoenen schuift…..

FBI, de spin in het Russiagate web……..

‘Russiagate’ een complot van CIA, FBI, Hillary Clinton en het DNC………..

Publicly Available Evidence Doesn’t Support Russian Gov Hacking of 2016 Election

Democraten VS kochten informatie over Trump >> Forgetting the ‘Dirty Dossier’ on Trump

Russia Is Trolling the Shit out of Hillary Clinton and the Mainstream Media

Mediaorgaan Sinclair dwingt ‘TV ankers’ propaganda op te lezen‘ (Sinclair bedient rond de 70% van de VS bevolking van ‘lokaal nieuws’)

CIA chef Pompeo waarschuwt voor complot van WikiLeaks om de VS op alle mogelijke manieren neer te halen……. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!

Russische ‘hacks’ door deskundigen nogmaals als fake news doorgeprikt >> Intel Vets Challenge ‘Russia Hack’ Evidence

Rusland krijgt alweer de schuld van hacken, nu van oplichters Symantec en Facebook……. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!

 ‘Russiagate, of: hoe de media u belazeren met verhalen over Russische bemoeienis met de VS presidentsverkiezingen……..

CIA deed zich voor als het Russische Kaspersky Lab, aldus Wikileaks Vault 8…..‘ (zie ook de andere links onder dat bericht)

Kajsa Ollongren (D66 vicepremier): Nederland staat in het vizier van Russische inlichtingendiensten……. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!

Ollongren gesteund door Thomas Boesgaard (AD), ‘Rusland verpakt het nepnieuws gekoppeld aan echt nieuws…..’ Oei!!

Ollongren (D66 minister) schiet een levensgrote bok met fake news show

RT America één van de eerste slachtoffers in een heksenjacht op westerse alternatieve media en nadenkend links……

Alarm Code Geel: Lara Rense (NOS) voedt Rusland-haat

Kaspersky Lab (antivirus) aangevallen met agressief ‘Grapperhaus virus’

Afghanistan, aantal burgerdoden door oorlog wordt angstvallig verzwegen in de westerse massamedia

Het volgende artikel van Adam Johnson, o.a. geplaatst op Anti-Media, ligt alweer vanaf 24 augustus jl. op de berg concepten die ik heb liggen.

Johnson betoogt terecht in zijn schrijven dat de reguliere (massa-) media in de VS wel aandacht hebben voor het feit dat de VS voorlopig niet van zins is Afghanistan te verlaten, maar geen woord vuil maakt aan het aantal burgerslachtoffers, die werden vermoord met VS geweld. Uiteraard wel aandacht voor het sturen van meer VS troepen naar dit land, dat al meer dan 15 jaar zucht onder de terreur van de VS en een aantal van haar NAVO partners………

Waar ik nog aan toe zou willen voegen, dat er bij diezelfde media amper aandacht is voor het mislukken van deze oorlog, een zaak die men al vanaf 2006 kon waarnemen, ook in deze wel aandacht van diezelfde media voor de ‘successen’ die de VS coalitie maakt, successen als het uitschakelen van een Taliban-kopstuk, het uitschakelen van Taliban-strijders, of het mislukken van een Taliban-aanslag………..

Johnson betoogt voorts in zijn artikel, dat de massamedia in de VS het liefst geen aandacht schenken aan het aantal VS militairen dat omkwam in Afghanistan, of wat de enorme kosten voor de belastingbetaler zijn van deze illegale oorlog…….

Hetzelfde geldt voor de oorzaak van deze oorlog, het in feite illegaal binnenvallen van een soeverein land door de VS, een enorme terreurdaad die uiteraard niet zo wordt verwoord door diezelfde media (als het voorgaande, geldt dit ook voor de verdere westerse massamedia)…… Alsof de VS met een nobel voornemen de bijna grootste oorlogsmisdaad begon die te bedenken is, een illegale inval (ofwel oorlog) in een land waar het niets te zoeken had of heeft……..

De Taliban moesten niets hebben van Al Qaida, bovendien is het intussen duidelijk, dat Osama Bin Laden, zogenaamd het brein achter de 911 aanslagen, zich niet eens in Afghanistan bevond…… Daarnaast is het intussen wel duidelijk, dat de aanslagen van 911 grotendeels in de VS zijn uitgebroed……..

Door deze illegale oorlog van de VS tegen Afghanistan, zijn intussen meer dan 31.000 Afghanen vermoord, waaraan Nederland mede schuld is…………

Hetzelfde kan overigens over Jemen worden gesteld, ook hier amper aandacht voor het enorme aantal burgerslachtoffers, al moet gezegd worden, dat daar enige verandering is te bespeuren*.

Mainstream
Media Reporting on Afghanistan Escalation Conveniently Omits Dead
Civilians

s

August
24, 2017 at 8:49 am

Written
by 
Anti-Media
News Desk

(FAIR) — As
President Donald Trump tries to make the case for staying
indefinitely in Afghanistan, the stakes for those actually living
there are rarely broached by US corporate media.

In
dozens of write-ups, recaps and reports on Trump’s “major”
Afghan War speech, almost no outlets took time out to note the plight
or condition of the people the US is nominally there to save. The 
New
York Times
 (8/21/178/22/17), Washington
Post
 (8/21/17), Chicago
Tribune
 (8/22/17), CNN (8/21/178/21/17), NBC
News
 (8/21/17), ABC
News 
(8/21/17)
and 
CBS
News 
(8/21/17),
among others, didn’t mention the Afghan death toll at all in their
summary of events in the region.

Almost
all, however, reserved airtime and column inches to mention the
number of US soldiers and cost to the US treasury—presumably the
only moral metric that matters. One notable exception was Ali Velshi
at 
MSNBC (8/21/17),
who did mention live on air how many Afghans were killed in the first
half of 2017—a scope curiously limited to the term of the current
Republican president, but an improvement on silence nonetheless.

US
media also continued their 
rich
tradition
 of
not blaming the US or Trump for the war—instead laying
responsibility at the feet of some unknown geopolitical dark matter
that has forced the US to occupy Afghanistan permanently. The US
isn’t waging ongoing war in the Central Asian country; it is simply
“stuck,” according to the 
AP (8/21/17)
and the 
Washington
Post
’s Karen
Tumulty
.
Trump isn’t continuing the occupation; according to the 
Sacramento
Bee
 (8/21/17);
he “Keeps US Stuck in Afghanistan Quagmire.” The US doesn’t
seek further war and occupation, but to “break free from the
quagmire,” the 
Chicago
Tribune
(8/22/17)
spells out.* Bush, Obama and Trump didn’t make a deliberate choice
to bomb Afghanistan, according to 
PBS’s
Judy Woodruff (
8/21/17);
 attacking the country just became “the burden of three
presidents.” War was consistently depicted as being thrust upon the
US government by forces outside of its control.

The
number of Afghan civilians killed during the 16-year US military
occupation is well over 31,000, 
according
to researchers
 at
Brown University. The average American couldn’t possibly know this
fact, since it’s almost never mentioned when weighing the
cost/benefit ratio of further military occupation and bombing.

Just
as the thousands killed in Yemen by US-backed Saudi bombing 
don’t
inform coverage
 of
the famine there, the causal effect of US military action on poor,
faceless brown people is never clearly laid out. The US bombs and, on
a totally separate note, people are dying. That the United States may
be causing the suffering, and could choose to stop doing so, is never
really considered, much less argued in any meaningful way.

*The Chicago
Tribune
 editorial does
mention civilian deaths, referring to a 
2016
UN report
,
but the paper attributes them solely to “ambushes and suicide bomb
attacks” by insurgent forces, whereas the UN holds the US and the
US-backed government responsible for nearly a quarter of the carnage
there. The 
Tribune also
misstates the UN civilian death toll more than threefold, confusing
deaths with casualties (which include injuries).

By Adam
Johnson
 / Creative
Commons
 / FAIR.org / Report
a typo

===========================================

* Zie: ‘Jemen: VN
zet zwakke commissie in voor onderzoek naar ‘oorlogsmisdaden’,
terwijl er een genocide plaatsvindt……..

Russiagate, of: hoe de media u belazeren met verhalen over Russische bemoeienis met de VS presidentsverkiezingen……..

De VS regering geeft tientallen miljoenen dollars uit, om ‘Russische propaganda’ te bestrijden, het gevolg is een berg ‘studies’ door ‘deskundige’ ngo’s, die desgevraagd (tegen een fikse beloning) bevestigen wat de overheid de VS burgers op de mouwen spelt: ‘Rusland heeft de VS presidentsverkiezingen gemanipuleerd……..’

De reguliere (massa-) media in de VS en de rest van het westen, lepelen deze ‘studies’ op als was het de waarheid en het leven, hoe beroerd die ‘studies’ ook in elkaar steken, precies zoals die media de leugens van de Democratische Partij, plus die van de geheime diensten CIA, NSA en FBI, keer op keer blijven herhalen, terwijl er geen nanometer bewijs wordt gegeven….. Aan de andere kant zijn er stapels bewijzen van het tegendeel: zoals het bewijs dat een medewerker van het Clinton campagneteam de documenten lekte, waarin te vinden is hoe Clinton haar democratische concurrent Bernie Sanders de voorverkiezing tot democratisch presidentskandidaat heeft ontstolen……….

The New York Times (NYT), CNN en The Washington Post spelen ook hier weer een prominente kwalijke rol, door de bevindingen van deze ngo’s over te nemen. Zo nam de NYT ‘de constatering’ over dat een groot aantal ‘aan Rusland gelinkte’ Twitteraccounts, zijn gebruikt in het ‘NFL-schandaal’, u weet wel de de VS voetbalspelers, die ‘niet in de houding wensten te staan’ bij het spelen van het VS volkslied……

Met andere woorden: alles wat er mis gaat in de VS wordt intussen toegeschreven aan Rusland…..

Lees het volgende uiterst getailleerd artikel van Robert Parry op Consortium News, overgenomen door Anti-Media. Uiteraard zal dit artikel, zoals intussen zoveel andere, de reguliere media niet halen, daar dan de door deze media maandenlang gebrachte anti-Russische propaganda als één grote leugen zal worden ontmaskerd………. De westerse bevolking zou daarna pas echt weten, wie er m.n. nepnieuws (of: ‘fake news’) brengen: de reguliere media………

The
Truth About Russiagate: What the Media Doesn’t Want You to Know

September
28, 2017 at 10:41 pm

Written
by 
Robert
Parry

As
the U.S. government doles out tens of millions of dollars to “combat
Russian propaganda,” one result is a slew of new “studies” by
“scholars” and “researchers” auditioning for the loot,
reports Robert Parry.

(CN— The
“Field of Dreams” slogan for America’s NGO’s should be: “If
you pay for it, we will come.” And right now, tens of millions of
dollars are flowing to non-governmental organizations if they will
buttress the thesis of Russian “meddling” in the U.S. democratic
process no matter how sloppy the “research” or how absurd the
“findings.”

And,
if you think the pillars of the U.S. mainstream media – The
Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN and others – will apply
some quality controls, you haven’t been paying attention for the
past year or so. The MSM is just as unethical as the NGOs are.

So,
we are now in a phase of Russiagate in which NGO “scholars”
produce deeply biased reports and their nonsense is treated as
front-page news and items for serious discussion across the MSM.

Yet,
there’s even an implicit confession about how pathetic some of this
“scholarship” is in the hazy phrasing that gets applied to the
“findings,” although the weasel words will slip past most
unsuspecting Americans and will be dropped for more definitive
language when the narrative is summarized in the next day’s
newspaper or in a cable-news “crawl.”

For
example, a Times 
front-page
story
 on
Thursday reported that “a network of Twitter accounts suspected of
links to Russia seized on both sides of the [NFL players kneeling
during the National Anthem] issue with hashtags, such as #boycottnfl,
#standforouranthem and #takeaknee.”

The
story, which fits neatly into the current U.S. propaganda meme that
the Russian government somehow is undermining American democracy by
stirring up dissent inside the U.S., quickly spread to other news
outlets and became the latest “proof” of a Russian “war”
against America.

However,
before we empty the nuclear silos and exterminate life on the planet,
we might take a second to look at the Times phrasing: “a network of
Twitter accounts suspected of links to Russia.”

The
vague wording doesn’t even say the Russian government was involved
but rather presents an unsupported claim that some Twitter accounts
are “suspected” of being part of some “network” and that this
“network” may have some ill-defined connection – or “links”
– to “Russia,” a country of 144 million people.

Six
Degrees from Kevin Bacon’

It’s
like the old game of “six degrees of separation” from Kevin
Bacon. Yes, perhaps we are all “linked” to

Kevin
Bacon somehow but that doesn’t prove that we know Kevin Bacon or
are part of a Kevin Bacon “network” that is executing a grand
conspiracy to sow discontent by taking opposite sides of issues and
then tweeting.

Yet
that is the underlying absurdity of the Times article by Daisuke
Wakabayashi and Scott Shane. Still, as silly as the article may be
that doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous. The Times’ high-profile
treatment of these gauzy allegations represents a grave danger to the
world by fueling a growing hysteria inside the United States about
being “at war” with nuclear-armed Russia. At some point, someone
might begin to take this alarmist rhetoric seriously.

Yes,
I understand that lots of people hate President Trump and see
Russiagate as the golden ticket to his impeachment. But that doesn’t
justify making serious allegations with next to no proof, especially
when the outcome could be thermonuclear war.

However,
with all those millions of dollars sloshing around the NGO world and
Western academia – all looking for some “study” to fund that
makes Russia look bad – you are sure to get plenty of takers. And,
we should now expect that new “findings” like these will fill in
for the so-far evidence-free suspicions about Russia and Trump
colluding to steal the presidency from Hillary Clinton.

If
you read more deeply into the Times story, you get a taste of where
Russiagate is headed next and a clue as to who is behind it:

Since
last month, researchers at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a
bipartisan initiative of the German Marshall Fund, a public policy
research group in Washington, have been publicly tracking 600 Twitter
accounts — human users and suspected bots alike — they have
linked to Russian influence operations. Those were the accounts
pushing the opposing messages on the N.F.L. and the national anthem.

Of
80 news stories promoted last week by those accounts, more than 25
percent ‘had a primary theme of anti-Americanism,’ the
researchers found. About 15 percent were critical of Hillary Clinton,
falsely accusing her of funding left-wing antifa — short for
anti-fascist — protesters, tying her to the lethal terrorist attack
in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012 and discussing her daughter Chelsea’s
use of Twitter. Eleven percent focused on wiretapping in the federal
investigation into Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign
chairman, with most of them treated the news as a vindication for
President Trump’s earlier wiretapping claims.”

The
Neocons, Again!

So,
let’s stop and unpack this Times’ reporting. First, this Alliance
for Securing Democracy is not some neutral truth-seeking organization
but a neoconservative-dominated outfit that includes on 
its
advisory board
 such
neocon luminaries as Mike Chertoff, Bill Kristol and former Freedom
House president David Kramer along with other anti-Russia hardliners
such as former deputy CIA director Michael Morell and former House
Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers.

How
many of these guys, do you think, were assuring us that Iraq was
hiding WMDs back in 2003?

This
group clearly has an ax to grind, a record of deception, and plenty
of patrons in the Military-Industrial Complex who stand to make
billions of dollars from the New Cold War.

The
neocons also have been 
targeting
Russia for regime change
 for
years because they see Russian President Vladimir Putin as the chief
obstacle to their goal of helping Israel achieve its desire for
“regime change” in Syria and a chance to bomb-bomb-bomb Iran.
Russiagate has served the neocons well as a very convenient way to
pull Democrats, liberals and even progressives into the neocon agenda
because Russiagate is sold as a powerful weapon for the anti-Trump
Resistance.

The
Times article also might have mentioned that Twitter has 974 million
accounts. So, this alarm over 600 accounts is a bit disproportionate
for a front-page story in the Times, don’t you think?

And,
there’s the definitional problem of what constitutes
“anti-Americanism” in a news article. And what does it mean to be
“linked to Russian influence operations”? Does that include
Americans who may not march in lockstep to the one-sided State
Department narratives on the crises in Ukraine and Syria? Any
deviation from Official Washington’s groupthink makes you a “Moscow
stooge.”

And,
is it a crime to be “critical” of Hillary Clinton or to note that
the U.S. mainstream media was dismissive of Trump’s claims about
being wiretapped only for us to find out later that 
the
FBI apparently was wiretapping
 his
campaign manager?

However,
such questions aren’t going to be asked amid what has become a
massive Russiagate groupthink, dominating not just Official
Washington, but across much of America’s political landscape and
throughout the European Union.

Why
the Bias?

Beyond
the obvious political motivations for this bias, we also have had the
introduction of vast sums of money pouring in from the U.S.
government, NATO and European institutions to 
support
the business
 of
“combatting Russian propaganda.”

For
example, last December, President Obama signed into law a $160
million funding mechanism entitled the “Combating Foreign
Propaganda and Disinformation Act.” But that amounts to only a drop
in the bucket considering already existing Western propaganda
projects targeting Russia.

So,
a scramble is on to develop seemingly academic models to “prove”
what Western authorities want proven: that Russia is at fault for
pretty much every bad thing that happens in the world, particularly
the alienation of many working-class people from the
Washington-Brussels elites.

The
truth cannot be that establishment policies have led to massive
income inequality and left the working class struggling to survive
and thus are to blame for ugly political manifestations – from
Trump to Brexit to the surprising support for Germany’s far-right
AfD party. No, it must be Russia! Russia! Russia! And there’s a lot
of money on the bed to prove that point.

There’s
also the fact that the major Western news media is deeply invested in
bashing Russia as well as in the related contempt for Trump and his
followers. Those twin prejudices have annihilated all professional
standards that would normally be applied to news judgments regarding
these flawed “studies.”

On
Thursday, The Washington Post ran its own
banner-headlined 
story drawn
from the same loose accusations made by that neocon-led Alliance for
Securing Democracy, but instead the Post sourced the claims to Sen.
James Lankford, R-Oklahoma. The headline read: “Russian trolls are
stoking NFL controversy, senator says.”

The
“evidence” cited by Lankford’s office was one “Twitter
account calling itself Boston Antifa that gives its geolocation as
Vladivostok, Russia,” the Post reported.

By
Thursday, Twitter had suspended the Boston Antifa account, so I
couldn’t send it a question, but earlier this month, Dan Glaun, a
reporter for Masslive.com, 
reported
that the people
 behind
Boston Antifa were “a pair of anti-leftist pranksters from Oregon
who started Boston Antifa as a parody of actual anti-fascist groups.”

In
an email to me on Thursday, Glaun cited 
an
interview
 that
the Boston Antifa pranksters had done with right-wing radio talk show
host Gavin McInnes last April.

And,
by the way, there are 
apps
that let you manipulate
 your
geolocation data on Twitter. Or, you can choose to believe that the
highly professional Russian intelligence agencies didn’t notice
that they were telegraphing their location as Vladivostok.

Mindless
Russia Bashing

Another
example of this mindless Russia bashing appeared just below the
Post’s story on Lankford’s remarks. The Post 
sidebar cited
a “study” from researchers at Oxford University’s Project on
Computational Propaganda asserting that “junk news” on Twitter
“flowed more heavily in a dozen [U.S.] battleground states than in
the nation overall in the days immediately before and after the 2016
presidential election, suggesting that a coordinated effort targeted
the most pivotal voters.” Cue the spooky Boris and Natasha music!

Of
course, any Americans living in “battleground states” could tell
you that they are inundated with all kinds of election-related
“junk,” including negative TV advertising, nasty radio messages,
alarmist emails and annoying robo-calls at dinner time. That’s why
they’re called “battleground states,” Sherlock.

But
what’s particularly offensive about this “study” is that it
implies that the powers-that-be must do more to eliminate what these
“experts” deem “propaganda” and “junk news.” If you read
deeper into the story, you discover that the researchers applied a
very subjective definition of what constitutes “junk news,” i.e.,
information that the researchers don’t like even if it is truthful
and newsworthy.

The
Post article by 
Craig
Timberg, who apparently is using Russiagate
 to
work himself off the business pages and onto the national staff,
states that “The researchers defined junk news as ‘propaganda and
ideologically extreme, hyperpartisan, or conspiratorial political
news and information.’

The
researchers also categorized reports from Russia and ones from
WikiLeaks – which published embarrassing posts about Democrat
Hillary Clinton based on a hack of her campaign chairman’s emails –
as ‘polarizing political content’ for the purpose of the
analysis.”

So,
this “study” lumped together “junk news” with accurate and
newsworthy information, i.e., WikiLeaks’ disclosure of genuine
emails that contained such valid news as the contents of Clinton’s
speeches to Wall Street banks (which she was trying to hide from
voters) as well as evidence of the unethical tactics used by the
Democratic National Committee to sabotage Sen. Bernie Sanders’s
campaign.

Also
dumped into the researchers’ bin of vile “disinformation” were
“reports from Russia,” as if everything that comes out of Russia
is, ipso facto, “junk news.”

And,
what, pray tell, is “conspiratorial political news”? I would
argue that the past year of evidence-lite allegations about “Russian
meddling” in the U.S. election accompanied by unsupported
suspicions about “collusion” with the Trump campaign would
constitute “conspiratorial political news.” Indeed, I would say
that this Oxford “research” constitutes “conspiratorial
political news” and that Timberg’s article qualifies as “junk
news.”

Predictable
Outcome

Given
the built-in ideological bias of this “research,” it probably
won’t surprise you that the report’s author, Philip N. Howard,
concludes that “junk news originates from three main sources that
the Oxford group has been tracking: Russian operatives, Trump
supporters and activists part of the alt-right,” according to the
Post.

I suppose
that since part of the “methodology” was to define “reports
from Russia” as “junk news,” the appearance of “Russian
operatives” shouldn’t be much of a surprise, but the whole
process reeks of political bias.

Further
skewing the results, the report separated out information from
“professional news organizations [and] political parties” from
“some ‘junk news’ source,” according to the Post. In other
words, the “researchers” believe that “professional news
organizations” are inherently reliable and that
outside-the-mainstream news is “junk” – despite the MSM’s
long record of getting major stories wrong.

The
real “junk” is this sort of academic or NGO research that starts
with a conclusion and packs a “study” in such a way as to
guarantee the preordained conclusion. Or as the old saying goes,
“garbage in, garbage out.”

Yet,
it’s also clear that if you generate “research” that feeds the
hungry beast of Russiagate, you will find eager patrons doling out
dollars and a very receptive audience in the mainstream media.

In
a place like Washington, there are scores if not hundreds of reports
generated every day and only a tiny fraction get the attention of the
Times, Post, CNN, etc., let alone result in published articles. But
“studies” that reinforce today’s anti-Russia narrative are sure
winners.

So,
if you’re setting up a new NGO or you’re an obscure academic
angling for a lucrative government grant as well as some flattering
coverage in the MSM, the smart play is to join the new gold rush in
decrying “Russian propaganda.”

[For
more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “
The
Rise of the New McCarthyism
”;
WPost
Pushes More Dubious Russia-Bashing
”;
The
Crazy Imbalance of Russiagate
”;
and “
More
Holes in Russiagate Narrative.
”]

By Robert
Parry
 /
Republished with permission / 
Consortium
News
 / Report
a typo

================================================

Zie ook: ‘FBI, de spin in het Russiagate web……..

        en: ‘Publicly Available Evidence Doesn’t Support Russian Gov Hacking of 2016 Election

        en: ‘Democraten VS kochten informatie over Trump >> Forgetting the ‘Dirty Dossier’ on Trump

        en: ‘Russia Is Trolling the Shit out of Hillary Clinton and the Mainstream Media

        en: ‘CIA chef Pompeo waarschuwt voor complot van WikiLeaks om de VS op alle mogelijke manieren neer te halen……. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!

        en: ‘Russische ‘hacks’ door deskundigen nogmaals als fake news doorgeprikt >> Intel Vets Challenge ‘Russia Hack’ Evidence

        en: ‘Rusland krijgt alweer de schuld van hacken, nu van oplichters Symantec en Facebook……. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!

        en: ‘‘Russiagate’ een verhaal van a t/m z westers ‘fake news…..’

       en: ‘Fake News’ hysterie willens en wetens gelanceerd om sociale media tot zwijgen te brengen, Rusland te demoniseren en daarmee de waarheid te verbergen……..

        en: ‘Rusland zou onafhankelijkheid Californië willen uitlokken met reclame voor borsjt…….

        en: ‘Clinton te kakken gezet: Donna Brazile (Democratische Partij VS) draagt haar boek op aan Seth Rich, het vermoorde lid van DNC die belastende documenten lekte

         en: ‘CIA deed zich voor als het Russische Kaspersky Lab, aldus Wikileaks Vault 8…..‘ (zie ook de andere links onder dat bericht)

         en: ‘Kajsa Ollongren (D66 vicepremier): Nederland staat in het vizier van Russische inlichtingendiensten……. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!

         en: ‘Ollongren gesteund door Thomas Boesgaard (AD), ‘Rusland verpakt het nepnieuws gekoppeld aan echt nieuws…..’ Oei!!

        en: ‘Ollongren (D66 minister) schiet een levensgrote bok met fake news show

         en: ‘RT America één van de eerste slachtoffers in een heksenjacht op westerse alternatieve media en nadenkend links……

       en: ‘Pompeo (CIA opperhoofd met koperen fluit): heeft alle aanwijzingen dat Rusland de midterm verkiezingen zal manipuleren……

       en: ‘‘Russiagate’ een complot van CIA, FBI, Hillary Clinton en het DNC………..


       en: ‘Ollongren (D66 minister) schiet een levensgrote bok met fake news show


       en: ‘Kaspersky Lab (antivirus) aangevallen met agressief ‘Grapperhaus virus’

New York Times met schaamteloze anti-Russische propaganda en ‘fake news….’

Robert Parry legt op Consortium News uit, in een artikel overgenomen door Anti-Media, waar goed journalistiek werk o.a. aan moet voldoen: een teken dat een artikel het product is van slordige of oneerlijke journalistiek, kan gezien worden als de kern van het verhaal als feit wordt neergezet, terwijl dit niet bewezen is, of onderdeel is van een serieuze discussie. Veelal wordt zo’n artikel het fundament voor andere (niet bewezen) claims, waarmee een verhaal ‘wordt gebouwd’, dat gefundeerd is op los zand….

Dergelijke journalistiek zou niet in de reguliere media terecht mogen komen, echter tegenwoordig is het tegendeel vaak de praktijk, zoals we zien in de reguliere westerse (massa-) media. Neem de berichtgeving over de illegale oorlogen van de VS tegen Afghanistan, Irak, Libië en nu weer tegen Syrië. ‘Voldongen’ leugens werden en worden als feiten en de enige waarheid neergezet…….

Hetzelfde geldt voor alle belachelijke claims, dat Rusland de VS verkiezingen zou hebben gemanipuleerd middels hacken en het publiceren van artikelen door o.a. Sputnik en Russia Today (RT). Daarbij worden  naast een ‘tsunami’ aan berichten op Facebook en Twitter, nu ook advertenties genoemd, die werden geplaatst op Facebook……. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! Voor al deze zogenaamde feiten, is geen nanometer bewijs, maar ze worden desondanks door diezelfde reguliere media en het merendeel van de westerse politici als de enige waarheid gezien, dit terwijl het overtuigende bewijs van het tegendeel terzijde wordt geschoven………

Parry schrijft over een artikel dat afgelopen vrijdag over 3 pagina’s werd geplaatst in the New York Times (NYT). Daarin wordt betoogt dat Rusland ‘een leger van nep-Amerikanen’ heeft gebruikt om de VS verkiezingen te beïnvloeden……. Of wat dacht u van: ‘met een vloed aan Facebook en Twitterberichten hebben bedriegers haat en verdeeldheid gezaaid in de VS…..’ ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! Ja, ze durven wel hè, terwijl die zogenaamde Amerikanen elkaar al een paar eeuwen de strot kunnen afbijten!! (neem alleen al de nog steeds bestaande grove discriminatie van gekleurden in de VS….)

Facebook weigert intussen nog steeds om de advertenties vrij te geven, die volgens haar door de Russische overheid werden geplaatst……. Kortom Facebook beschuldigt een land van uiterst grove handelingen en stelt daarna vrolijk dat men maar moet geloven op de blauwe ogen van de redactie……..

Lees het volgende uitstekende artikel van Parry en zegt het voort!

Has
the New York Times Gone Completely Insane?

September
16, 2017 at 11:31 am

Written
by 
Robert
Parry

Crossing
a line from recklessness into madness, The New York Times published a
front-page opus suggesting that Russia was behind social media
criticism of Hillary Clinton, reports Robert Parry.

(CN) For
those of us who have taught journalism or worked as editors, a sign
that an article is the product of sloppy or dishonest journalism is
that a key point will be declared as flat fact when it is unproven or
a point in serious dispute – and it then becomes the foundation for
other claims, building a story like a high-rise constructed on sand.

This
use of speculation as fact is something to guard against particularly
in the work of inexperienced or opinionated reporters. But what
happens when this sort of unprofessional work tops page one of The
New York Times one day as a major “investigative” article and
reemerges the next day in even more strident form as a major Times
editorial? Are we dealing then with an inept journalist who got
carried away with his thesis or are we facing institutional
corruption or even a collective madness driven by ideological fervor?

What
is stunning about the 
lede
story
 in
last Friday’s print edition of The New York Times is that it offers
no real evidence to support its provocative claim that – as the
headline states – “To Sway Vote, Russia Used Army of Fake
Americans” or its subhead: “Flooding Twitter and Facebook,
Impostors Helped Fuel Anger in Polarized U.S.”

In
the old days, this wildly speculative article, which spills over
three pages, would have earned an F in a J-school class or gotten a
rookie reporter a stern rebuke from a senior editor. But now such
unprofessionalism is highlighted by The New York Times, which boasts
that it is the standard-setter of American journalism, the nation’s
“newspaper of record.”

In
this case, it allows reporter Scott Shane to introduce his thesis by
citing some Internet accounts that apparently used fake identities,
but he ties none of them to the Russian government. Acting like he
has minimal familiarity with the Internet – yes, a lot of people do
use fake identities – Shane builds his case on the assumption that
accounts that cited references to purloined Democratic emails must be
somehow from an agent or a bot connected to the Kremlin.

For
instance, Shane cites the fake identity of “Melvin Redick,” who
suggested on June 8, 2016, that people visit DCLeaks which, a few
days earlier, had posted some emails from prominent Americans, which
Shane states as fact – not allegation – were “stolen … by
Russian hackers.”

Shane
then adds, also as flat fact, that “The site’s phony promoters
were in the vanguard of a cyberarmy of counterfeit Facebook and
Twitter accounts, a legion of Russian-controlled impostors whose
operations are still being unraveled.”

The
Times’ Version

In
other words, Shane tells us, “The Russian information attack on the
election did not stop with the hacking and leaking of Democratic
emails or the fire hose of stories, true, false and in between, that
battered Mrs. Clinton on Russian outlets like RT and Sputnik. Far
less splashy, and far more difficult to trace, was Russia’s
experimentation on Facebook and Twitter, the American companies that
essentially invented the tools of social media and, in this case, did
not stop them from being turned into engines of deception and
propaganda.”

Besides
the obvious point that very few Americans watch RT and/or Sputnik and
that Shane offers no details about the alleged falsity of those “fire
hose of stories,” let’s examine how his accusations are backed
up:

An
investigation by The New York Times, and new research from the
cybersecurity firm FireEye, reveals some of the mechanisms by which
suspected Russian operators used Twitter and Facebook to spread
anti-Clinton messages and promote the hacked material they had
leaked. On Wednesday, Facebook officials disclosed that they had shut
down several hundred accounts that they believe were created by a
Russian company linked to the Kremlin and used to buy $100,000 in ads
pushing divisive issues during and after the American election
campaign. On Twitter, as on Facebook, Russian fingerprints are on
hundreds or thousands of fake accounts that regularly posted
anti-Clinton messages.”

Note
the weasel words: “suspected”; “believe”; ‘linked”;
“fingerprints.” When you see such equivocation, it means that
these folks – both the Times and FireEye – don’t have hard
evidence; they are speculating.

And
it’s worth noting that the supposed “army of fake Americans”
may amount to hundreds out of Facebook’s 
two
billion or so monthly users
 and
the $100,000 in ads compare to the company’s annual ad revenue
of 
around
$27 billion
.
(I’d do the math but my calculator doesn’t compute such tiny
percentages.)

So,
this “army” is really not an “army” and we don’t even know
that it is “Russian.” But some readers might say that surely we
know that the Kremlin did mastermind the hacking of Democratic
emails!

That
claim is supported by the Jan. 6 “intelligence community
assessment” that was the work of what President Obama’s Director
of National Intelligence James Clapper called “hand-picked”
analysts from three agencies – the Central Intelligence Agency,
National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation. But, as
any intelligence expert will tell you, if you hand-pick the analysts,
you are hand-picking the conclusions.

Agreeing
with Putin

But
some still might protest that the Jan. 6 report surely presented
convincing evidence of this serious charge about Russian President
Vladimir Putin personally intervening in the U.S. election to help
put Donald Trump in the White House. Well, as it turns out, not so
much, and if you don’t believe me, we can call to the witness stand
none other than New York Times reporter Scott Shane.

Shane wrote at
the time: “What is missing from the [the Jan. 6] public report is
what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back
up the agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the
election attack. … Instead, the message from the agencies
essentially amounts to ‘trust us.’”

So,
even Scott Shane, the author of last Friday’s opus, recognized the
lack of “hard evidence” to prove that the Russian government was
behind the release of the Democratic emails, a claim that both Putin
and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who published a trove of the
emails, have denied. While it is surely possible that Putin and
Assange are lying or don’t know the facts, you might think that
their denials would be relevant to this lengthy investigative
article, which also could have benefited from some mention of Shane’s
own skepticism of last January, but, hey, you don’t want
inconvenient details to mess up a cool narrative.

Yet,
if you struggle all the way to the end of last Friday’s article,
you do find out how flimsy the Times’ case actually is. How, for
instance, do we know that “Melvin Redick” is a Russian impostor
posing as an American? The proof, according to Shane, is that “His
posts were never personal, just news articles reflecting a
pro-Russian worldview.”

As
it turns out, the Times now operates with what must be called a
neo-McCarthyistic approach for identifying people as Kremlin stooges,
i.e., anyone who doubts the truthfulness of the State Department’s
narratives on Syria, Ukraine and other international topics.

Unreliable
Source

In
the article’s last section, Shane acknowledges as much in citing
one of his experts, “Andrew Weisburd, an Illinois online researcher
who has written frequently about Russian influence on social media.”
Shane quotes Weisburd as admitting how hard it is to differentiate
Americans who just might oppose Hillary Clinton because they didn’t
think she’d make a good president from supposed Russian operatives:
“Trying to disaggregate the two was difficult, to put it mildly.”

According
to Shane, “Mr. Weisburd said he had labeled some Twitter accounts
‘Kremlin trolls’ based simply on their pro-Russia tweets and with
no proof of Russian government ties. The Times contacted several such
users, who insisted that they had come by their anti-American,
pro-Russian views honestly, without payment or instructions from
Moscow.”

One
of Weisburd’s “Kremlin trolls” turned out to be 66-year-old
Marilyn Justice who lives in Nova Scotia and who 
somehow
reached the conclusion
 that
“Hillary’s a warmonger.” During the 2014 Winter Olympics in
Sochi, Russia, she reached another conclusion: that U.S. commentators
were exhibiting a snide anti-Russia bias perhaps because they indeed
were exhibiting a snide anti-Russia bias.

Shane
tracked down another “Kremlin troll,” 48-year-old Marcel Sardo, a
web producer in Zurich, Switzerland, who dares to dispute the West’s
groupthink that Russia was responsible for shooting down Malaysia
Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine on July 17, 2014, and the State
Department’s claims that the Syrian government used sarin gas in a
Damascus suburb on Aug. 21, 2013.

Presumably,
if you don’t toe the line on those dubious U.S. government
narratives, you are part of the Kremlin’s propaganda machine. (In
both cases, there actually are serious reasons to doubt the Western
groupthinks which again lack real evidence.)

But
Shane accuses Sardo and his fellow-travelers of spreading “what
American officials consider to be Russian disinformation on election
hacking, Syria, Ukraine and more.” In other words, if you examine
the evidence on MH-17 or the Syrian sarin case and conclude that the
U.S. government’s claims are dubious if not downright false, you
are somehow disloyal and making Russian officials “gleeful at their
success,” as Shane puts it.

But
what kind of a traitor are you if you quote Shane’s initial
judgment after reading the Jan. 6 report on alleged Russian election
meddling? What are you if you agree with his factual observation that
the report lacked anything approaching “hard evidence”? That’s
a point that also dovetails with what Vladimir Putin has been saying
– that “IP addresses can be simply made up. … This is no
proof”?

So
is Scott Shane a “Kremlin troll,” too? Should the Times
immediately fire him as a disloyal foreign agent? What if Putin says
that 2 plus 2 equals 4 and your child is taught the same thing in
elementary school, what does that say about public school teachers?

Out
of such gibberish come the evils of McCarthyism and the death of the
Enlightenment. Instead of encouraging a questioning citizenry, the
new American paradigm is to silence debate and ridicule anyone who
steps out of line.

You
might have thought people would have learned something from the
disastrous groupthink about Iraqi WMD, a canard that the Times and
most of the U.S. mainstream media eagerly promoted.

But
if you’re feeling generous and thinking that the Times’ editors
must have been chastened by their Iraq-WMD fiasco but perhaps had a
bad day last week and somehow allowed an egregious piece of
journalism to lead their front page, your kind-heartedness would be
shattered on Saturday when the Times’ editorial board penned 
a
laudatory reprise
 of
Scott Shane’s big scoop.

Stripping
away even the few caveats that the article had included, the Times’
editors informed us that “a startling investigation by Scott Shane
of The New York Times, and new research by the cybersecurity firm
FireEye, now reveal, the Kremlin’s stealth intrusion into the
election was far broader and more complex, involving a cyberarmy of
bloggers posing as Americans and spreading propaganda and
disinformation to an American electorate on Facebook, Twitter and
other platforms. …

Now
that the scheming is clear, Facebook and Twitter say they are
reviewing the 2016 race and studying how to defend against such
meddling in the future. … Facing the Russian challenge will involve
complicated issues dealing with secret foreign efforts to undermine
American free speech.”

But
what is the real threat to “American free speech”? Is it the
possibility that Russia – in a very mild imitation of what the U.S.
government does all over the world – used some Web sites
clandestinely to get out its side of various stories, an accusation
against Russia that still lacks any real evidence?

Or
is the bigger threat that the nearly year-long Russia-gate hysteria
will be used to clamp down on Americans who dare question fact-lite
or fact-free Official Narratives handed down by the State Department
and The New York Times?

By Robert
Parry
 /
Republished with permission / 
Consortium
News
 / Report
a typo

=================================

Zie ook: ‘JULIAN ASSANGE OFFERS U.S. GOVERNMENT PROOF RUSSIA WASN’T SOURCE OF DEMOCRATIC PARTY LEAKS, SAYS WSJ‘ (op Stan van Houcke die het overnam van Global Research)

Washington Post medewerkers is verboden grote adverteerders te bekritiseren….. Of hoe miljonairs en miljardairs de voorheen onafhankelijk pers beheren

De medewerkers van de Washington Post is het verboden om op wat voor manier dan ook kritiek te uiten op de adverteerders van deze krant…….. Kortom de krant de ooit faam verkreeg door het onderzoek naar de Watergateschandaal is in handen en onder redactie van de grote bedrijven…….

Niet alleen dat, ook de CIA mag niet langer bekritiseerd worden, daar de eigenaar van de Post, topgraai miljardair Jeff Bezos zaken doet met de CIA……… Vandaar ook dat de WaPo vorig jaar de berechting van Edward Snowden bepleitte, terwijl het eerder NB zelf uit WikiLeaks had gepubliceerd…..

Lees dit ontluisterende relaas en u zult gegarandeerd nog beter begrijpen, waarom het fout is, dat mediaorganen in handen zijn van grote investeerders en supergraaiers. In Nederland is het overigens niet veel beter, vandaar ook dat je maar al te vaak ziet dat men kritiekloos uitermate foute standpunten van bijvoorbeeld de inhumane neoliberale regering Rutte als zaligmakend neerzet. Zelfcensuur in de reguliere westerse media is aan de orde van de dag en dat is niet voor niets……..

Het is nu zelfs al zo zot, dat de WaPo en de New York Times mogen beslissen van wat wel of niet als nepnieuws moet worden gezien…….

Washington
Post Staff Banned From Criticizing Corporate Advertisers

July
17, 2017 at 9:26 am

Written
by 
Whitney
Webb

A
new policy at the Washington Post will punish its employees for using
social media to make critical statements about the paper’s
corporate advertisers. The policy was approved by Jeff Bezos, the
billionaire head of Amazon who purchased the newspaper in 2013.

(MPN) — The Washington
Post
’s
journalistic decline over the past several years has been remarkable,
especially following the newspaper’s
 2013
purchase
 by
Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos, the world’s
 second-richest
man
 after
Bill Gates.

In
the face of controversies concerning the use of
 anonymous
and often inaccurate
 sources
and
 the
publication of false news
 in
order to foment anti-Russia hysteria, the 
Post is
now set for another scandal thanks to a new Bezos-approved
company-wide policy that seeks to prevent employee criticism of the
newspaper’s corporate backers and advertisers.

The
policy, which took effect in May,
 now
prohibits 
Post employees
 from
using social media in such a way that “adversely affects The Post’s
customers, advertisers, subscribers, vendors, suppliers or partners.”
According to the policy, the paper’s management team reserves the
right to take disciplinary action against violators “up to and
including termination of employment.”

A
clause of the policy
 cited
by the 
Washingtonian
 also
encourages employees to rat out other employees for potentially
violating the policy: “If you have any reason to believe that an
employee may be in violation of The Post’s Social Media Policy […]
you should contact the Post’s Human Resources Department.”

Adam Troudart @AdamT4U

The Washington Post threatens to ‘terminate’ employees who disparage advertisers on  | via @thedrumhttp://ow.ly/F5vW30dbmJi 

Photo published for The Washington Post threatens to ‘terminate’ employees who disparage advertisers on social media


The Washington Post threatens to ‘terminate’ employees who disparage advertisers on social media

The Washington Post has unveiled a new social media policy which threatens the ultimate sanction against any employee found to be bad mouthing advertisers on social media.

thedrum.com


The Post confirmed
the existence of the policy and its more controversial clauses and
provisions to the 
Washingtonian,
though the paper’s management later attempted to soothe the nerves
of rattled journalists
 by
assuring them
 that
“no one would get in trouble for such social media activity […]
But that’s the way the policy is written.”

While
the Post’s own journalists are sure to feel the
heat from this new policy, several of the newspaper’s corporate
advertisers and backers are likely relieved that critical content
targeting them or their products will now be absent from the social
media activity of the paper’s employees – and likely its
reporting as well.

This
new policy offers a simple loophole to corporations that wish to
avoid criticism from the Post, as becoming a sponsor
of the paper would quickly put an end to any unfavorable coverage.

Among
the 
Washington
Post’s
 advertisers
are corporate giants like
 GlaxoSmithKline, Bank
of America
 andKoch
Industries
.
With the new policy, social media posts criticizing
 GlaxoSmithKline’s
habit
 of
making false and misleading claims about its products, inflating
prices and withholding crucial drug safety information from the
government will no longer be made by 
Post employees.

The
policy also suggests that criticisms of Bank of America, one of the
nation’s
 most
lawless banks
 and a
key player
 in
provoking the 2008 financial crisis, will go unvoiced, as well those
regarding
 the
toxic empire
 that
is Koch Industries,
 an
integral part
 of
the U.S. fracking industry.

Another Washington
Post
 sponsor, though unofficially, is the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency.

Four
months after purchasing the 
Post,
Jeff Bezos
 landed
a $600 million contract
 with
the CIA for Amazon Web Services, a web hosting service that now
serves the entire U.S. intelligence community.

xileen worcester⚘ @xileenie

Jeff Bezos Is Doing Huge Business with the CIA, While Keeping His Washington Post Readers in the Dark @alternethttp://www.alternet.org/media/owner-washington-post-doing-business-cia-while-keeping-his-readers-dark 

Photo published for Jeff Bezos Is Doing Huge Business with the CIA, While Keeping His Washington Post Readers in the...


Jeff Bezos Is Doing Huge Business with the CIA, While Keeping His Washington Post Readers in the…

News media should illuminate conflicts of interest, not embody them.

alternet.org


Long
before this latest policy was put into effect, some had speculated
that the connections between the CIA and the 
Post were
already affecting its reporting. For example, last year,
the 
Post openly
called for the prosecution
 of
Snowden, despite having previously used the whistleblower’s leaks
for their Pulitzer Prize-winning report on illegal NSA spying.

The
CIA
 has
long called
 for
Snowden to be tried for treason within the United States for leaking
details of the NSA’s domestic spying program.

While
criticism of the CIA is not technically prohibited by the new policy,
former 
Post reporters
have suggested that making such criticisms could endanger one’s
career. As former 
Post writer
John Hanrahan
 told
Alternet in 2013
:
With 
Post employees
severely limited in what they can post on social media and discuss in
their writing, this new policy will only continue to erode trust in
the mainstream media, especially in light of the benefits it may
bring to its corporate and government backers.

Post
reporters and editors are aware that Bezos, as majority owner of
Amazon, has a financial stake in maintaining good relations with the
CIA — and this sends a clear message to even the hardest-nosed
journalist that making the CIA look bad might not be a good career
move.”

With Post employees
severely limited in what they can post on social media and discuss in
their writing, this new policy will only continue to erode trust in
the mainstream media, especially in light of the benefits it may
bring to its corporate and government backers.

By Whitney
Webb
 /
Republished with permission / 
MintPress
News
 / Report
a typo

===============================

Zie ook: ‘How Russia-gate Met the Magnitsky Myth‘ (een artikel op ICH, met ‘een mooie rol’ voor de afhankelijke Washington Post en New York Times. Onder dat artikel kan u klikken voor een vertaling)

Facebook stelt perstituee van New York Times aan als censuur-agent…… ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!      

May, premier GB, wil als reactie op de aanslagen in Londen en Manchester, de mensenrechten buiten werking stellen en censuur op het internet doorvoeren……….        

Boris Johnson wil (sociale) media controleren en censureren…….

Censuur teistert het internet: video over aanslag Las Vegas verwijderd door YouTube…………. 

Google censuur en toch echt nieuws volgen? Gebruik een andere browser naast die van Google, of dump Google helemaal!!

Democraten VS kochten informatie over Trump >> Forgetting the ‘Dirty Dossier’ on Trump

Het volgende artikel komt van Information Clearing House en handelt o.a. over het niet-schandaal van de ontmoeting van Trump jr. met een Russische advocaat. De schrijver Lee Perry, merkte eerder o.a. al op dat het heel normaal is, dat gekozen presidenten voor hun inwijding (inauguratie) tot president, contact hebben met buitenlandse mogendheden, zo is het al decennia de gewoonste zaak van de wereld dat deze gekozen presidenten en/of hun staf contact hebben met de Israëlische regering.

Perry merkt op, dat het verzamelen van stront over Trump door de Democraten, allesbehalve is vergeten, iets dat de Democraten wel graag willen….. Met grote bedragen werd de Britse ex-spion Steele door de Democraten betaald, om in Rusland bagger over Trump te verzamelen. Als er grote bedragen worden geboden, is de kans levensgroot dat de vergaarde informatie op z’n zachtst gezegd onbetrouwbaar is (Ap).

Lees dit onthullende artikel van Perry, daaronder vindt u de link naar het volledige verhaal, op die webpagina kan u ook klikken voor ‘een Dutch vertaling’:

Forgetting
the ‘Dirty Dossier’ on Trump

By
Robert Parry

Exclusive:
The new Russia-gate furor is over Donald Trump Jr. meeting a Russian
who claimed to have dirt on Hillary Clinton, but the Clinton team’s
Russian cash-for-trash search against Trump Sr. is all but forgotten,
writes Robert Parry.

Essentially,
Trump’s oldest son is being accused of taking a meeting with a
foreign national who claimed to have knowledge of potentially illegal
activities by Trump’s Democratic rivals, although the promised
information apparently turned out to be a dud.

Yet,
on Monday, the Times led its newspaper with a story about this
meeting – and commentators on MSNBC and elsewhere are labeling
Trump Jr. a criminal if not a traitor for hearing out this lawyer.

Yet,
no one seems to remember that Hillary Clinton supporters paid large
sums of money, reportedly about $1 million, to have ex-British spy
Christopher Steele use his Russian connections to dig up dirt on
Trump inside Russia, resulting in a salacious dossier that Clinton
backers eagerly hawked to the news media.

Also,
the two events – Trump Jr.’s meeting with the Russian lawyer and
the Clinton camp’s commissioning of Steele’s Russia dossier –
both occurred in June 2016, so you might have thought it would be a
journalistic imperative to incorporate a reference or two to the
dossier.

But
the closest the Times came to that was noting: “Political campaigns
collect opposition research from many quarters but rarely from
sources linked to foreign governments.” That would have been an
opportune point to slide in a paragraph about the Steele dossier, but
nothing.

But
the Steele dossier is a more immediate and direct example of close
Hillary Clinton supporters going outside the United States for dirt
on Trump and collaborating with foreign nationals to dig it up –
allegedly from Kremlin insiders. Although it is still not clear
exactly who footed the bill for the Steele dossier and how much money
was spread around to the Russian contacts, it is clear that Clinton
supporters paid for the opposition research and then flacked the
material to American journalists.

As
I wrote on March 29, “An irony of the escalating hysteria about the
Trump camp’s contacts with Russians is that one presidential
campaign in 2016 did exploit political dirt that supposedly came from
the Kremlin and other Russian sources. Friends of that political
campaign paid for this anonymous hearsay material, shared it with
American journalists and urged them to publish it to gain an
electoral advantage. But this campaign was not Donald Trump’s; it
was Hillary Clinton’s.

And,
awareness of this activity doesn’t require you to spin conspiracy
theories about what may or may not have been said during some
seemingly innocuous conversation. In this case, you have open
admissions about how these Russian/Kremlin claims were used.

Indeed,
you have the words of Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democratic member
of the House Intelligence Committee, in his 
opening
statement
 at
[a] public hearing on so-called ‘Russia-gate.’ Schiff’s
seamless 15-minute narrative of the Trump campaign’s alleged
collaboration with Russia followed the script prepared by former
British intelligence officer Christopher Steele who was hired as an
opposition researcher last June [2016] to dig up derogatory
information on Donald Trump.

Steele,
who had worked for Britain’s MI-6 in Russia, said he tapped into
ex-colleagues and unnamed sources inside Russia, including leadership
figures in the Kremlin, to piece together 
a
series of sensational reports
 that
became the basis of the current congressional and FBI investigations
into Trump’s alleged ties to Moscow.

Since
he was not able to go to Russia himself, Steele based his reports
mostly on multiple hearsay from anonymous Russians who claim to have
heard some information from their government contacts before passing
it on to Steele’s associates who then gave it to Steele who
compiled this mix of rumors and alleged inside dope into ‘raw’
intelligence reports.

Besides
the anonymous sourcing and the sources’ financial incentives to dig
up dirt, Steele’s reports had numerous other problems, including
the inability of a variety of investigators to confirm key elements,
such as the salacious claim that several years ago Russian
intelligence operatives secretly videotaped Trump having prostitutes
urinate on him while he lay in the same bed in Moscow’s
Ritz-Carlton used by President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.

That
tantalizing tidbit was included in Steele’s opening report to his
new clients, dated June 20, 2016. Apparently, it proved irresistible
in whetting the appetite of Clinton’s mysterious benefactors who
were financing Steele’s dirt digging and who have kept their
identities (and the amounts paid) hidden. Also in that first report
were the basic outlines of what has become the scandal that is now
threatening the survival of Trump’s embattled presidency.


Hier de link naar het volledige verhaal:

Forgetting the ‘Dirty Dossier’ on Trump

Zie ook: ‘Hillary Clinton moet op de hoogte zijn geweest van aankoop Steele dossier over Trump……..‘ (een vervolg op het bovenstaande bericht)

       en: ‘Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump‘ (artikel in Nederlands)

       en: ‘Flashback: Clinton Allies Met With Ukrainian Govt Officials to Dig up Dirt on Trump During 2016 Election

       en: ‘FBI Director Comey Leaked Trump Memos Containing Classified Information

       en: ‘Publicly Available Evidence Doesn’t Support Russian Gov Hacking of 2016 Election

       en: ‘Russia Is Trolling the Shit out of Hillary Clinton and the Mainstream Media

       en: ‘CIA chef Pompeo waarschuwt voor complot van WikiLeaks om de VS op alle mogelijke manieren neer te halen……. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!

       en: ‘Russische ‘hacks’ door deskundigen nogmaals als fake news doorgeprikt >> Intel Vets Challenge ‘Russia Hack’ Evidence

       en: ‘Rusland krijgt alweer de schuld van hacken, nu van oplichters Symantec en Facebook……. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!

       en: ‘Russiagate, of: hoe de media u belazeren met verhalen over Russische bemoeienis met de VS presidentsverkiezingen……..

       en: ‘Walls Closing in on Russiagate Conspiracy Theorists: Evidence Mounts That DNC Emails Provided to WikiLeaks By Inside Source

       en: ‘WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange Drops Russiagate Shell!!!‘ (video).

       en: ‘‘Russiagate’ een verhaal van a t/m z westers ‘fake news…..’

       en:  ‘FBI, de spin in het Russiagate web……..

       en: ‘New York Times met schaamteloze anti-Russische propaganda en ‘fake news….’

       en: ‘BBC World Service: Rusland heeft VS verkiezingen gemanipuleerd……. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!

       en: ‘Hoe Clinton en haar team de wereld op scherp hebben gezet >> Did Hillary Scapegoat Russia to Save Her Campaign?

       en: ‘Brekend nieuws: door Rusland betaalde reclames van Shell, Calvé pindakaas, AH boerenkool en Hema worst >> doel Rutte 3 ten val te brengen!!!

       en: ‘CIA deed zich voor als het Russische Kaspersky Lab, aldus Wikileaks Vault 8…..‘ 

Koenders: NYT en Ass. Press gaven toe dat Russia-gate een canard is, waar blijft jouw openlijke schuldbekentenis?

Associated Press (AP) en de New York Times (NYT) hebben toegegeven dat de bewering als zouden alle 17 geheime diensten in de VS achter de claim staan, dat Rusland de VS presidentsverkiezingen zouden hebben beinvloed t.b.v. van het beest Donald Trump.

De directeur van de National Intelligence (DNI), Clapper, die over alle geheime diensten gaat, zou hebben bedoeld dat het om 3 diensten ging, de CIA, de FBI en de NSA. Echter daar deze directeur over 17 diensten gaat, nam men aan, dat het de bevinding van 17 diensten was, dat Rusland de verkiezingen t.g.v. het beest Trump had beïnvloed……..

De democratische kandidaat, hare kwaadaardigheid Clinton stelde dat er geen twijfel is als alle 17 diensten hetzelfde stellen……….

Eerlijk gezegd snap ik al niet, dat er nog iemand is, die ook maar gelooft wat welke geheime VS dienst dan ook verklaart, daarvoor hebben deze diensten, om het zachtjes te stellen, iets te vaak laten zien, dat liegen één van hun belangrijkste eigenschappen is……….

Het is dan ook aan politici als Koenders en Rutte en de reguliere westerse media te danken dat de leugens van de bedoelde VS diensten hier als waarheid worden verkocht…….

Hier kan nog het volgende punt bij opgeteld worden: NB de NSA heeft bewezen ingebroken in computers en telefoons van regeringen in het buitenland, zelfs van haar partners zoals Duitsland (en gegarandeerd ook in Nederland), m.a.w. de zwarte pot verwijt een niet zwarte ketel zwart te zijn!!! Daarnaast is de VS sinds 1945 verantwoordelijk voor een flink aantal staatsgrepen (ook voor 1940, ‘maar goed….’)……

Moet je nagaan, hoeveel onzinnige energie en hysterie er al in de valse claim is gestoken, dat Rusland alles en iedereen zou hacken en manipuleren…….. Als gevolg waarvan men geen maatregelen nam, de boel beter te beveiligen, zo bleek onlangs weer met de 2 ransomware aanvallen…….

Benieuwd hoe lang figuren al Hubert Smeets, Rob de Wijk, Han ten Broeke (VVD hufter), Arend Jan Boekestijn (ook al VVD, maar dan een echte sufferd) en vele anderen uit de politiek en de reguliere westerse media, de leugen blijven volhouden dat Rusland de VS (en andere) verkiezingen heeft gemanipuleerd…….

New
York Times and AP Finally Retract False Claims on Russia Hacking

July
2, 2017 at 7:54 am

Written
by 
Jason
Ditz

(ANTIWAR.COM) — Among
the most oft-repeated claims of the entire Russia election hacking
scandal is that of absolute unanimity among US intelligence agencies,
with media and politicians regularly claiming that “
all
17 US intelligence agencies have agreed that Russia tried to
influence the 2016 election to benefit Donald Trump
.”
It’s not true.

Nearly
a year into the hacking scandal, both the 
New
York Times
 and
the 
Associated
Press
 are
finally copping to the fact that this allegation is untrue, and
retracting it outright. The AP confirmed falsely making the claim in
at least four distinct articles, 
most
recently on Thursday
.

What
actually happened? The Director of National Intelligence made the
allegation, claiming it was based on information from three US
agencies, the CIA, FBI, and NSA. The Director of National
Intelligence nominally represents all 17 intelligence agencies, and
that was quickly and incorrectly extrapolated into all 17 agencies
being in consensus.

In
practice, however, the DNI is an increasingly politicized office, and
their publications aren’t necessarily in line with actual reality,
let alone proof of a consensus among the intelligence agencies.
Indications are that the overwhelming majority of the US intelligence
agencies were never even involved in assessing the Russia hacks.

Nor
would they be expected to be. It would be bizarre if the Pentagon’s
intelligence agency, for example, was probing US elections, or if the
National Reconnaissance Office, which operates spy satellites looking
for missile launches, was chiming in on the Trump Campaign.

It
sounded better, particularly for those trying to make this into a
bigger scandal, however, to claim that “all 17” US intelligence
agencies had agreed on the narrative, because this would give the
impression that it’s indisputable fact, as opposed to a heavily
politically-motivated assertion backed up by limited circumstantial
evidence dug up by a couple of US spy agencies.

By Jason
Ditz
 /
Republished with permission / 
AntiWar.com / Report
a typo

===============================================

Hier een bericht van Information Clearting House, geschreven door Robert Parry, dat iets uitgebreider bericht over deze zaak (onder dat artikel kan u klikken voor ‘een Dutch vertaling’):

NYT
Finally Retracts Russia-gate Canard
A
founding Russia-gate myth is that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies
agreed that Russia hacked into and distributed Democratic emails, a
falsehood that The New York Times has belatedly retracted, reports
Robert Parry.
By
Robert Parry

June
30, 2017 “Information
Clearing House
” – The New York Times has finally admitted
that one of the favorite Russia-gate canards – that all 17 U.S.
intelligence agencies concurred on the assessment of Russian hacking
of Democratic emails – is false.

On
Thursday, the Times appended 
a
correction to a June 25 article
 that
had repeated the false claim, which has been used by Democrats and
the mainstream media for months to brush aside any doubts about the
foundation of the Russia-gate scandal and portray President Trump as
delusional for doubting what all 17 intelligence agencies supposedly
knew to be true.

In
the Times’ White House Memo of June 25, correspondent Maggie
Haberman mocked Trump for “still refus[ing] to acknowledge a basic
fact agreed upon by 17 American intelligence agencies that he now
oversees: Russia orchestrated the attacks, and did it to help get him
elected.”

However,
on Thursday, the Times – while leaving most of Haberman’s
ridicule of Trump in place – noted in a correction that the
relevant intelligence “assessment was made by four intelligence
agencies — the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the
Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and
the National Security Agency. The assessment was not approved by all
17 organizations in the American intelligence community.”

The
Times’ grudging correction was vindication for some Russia-gate
skeptics who had questioned the claim of a full-scale intelligence
assessment, which would usually take the form of a National
Intelligence Estimate (or NIE), a product that seeks out the views of
the entire Intelligence Community and includes dissents.

The
reality of a more narrowly based Russia-gate assessment
was 
admitted in
May by President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James
Clapper and Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan in sworn
congressional testimony.

Clapper testified before
a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on May 8 that the Russia-hacking
claim came from a “special intelligence community assessment” (or
ICA) produced by selected analysts from the CIA, NSA and FBI, “a
coordinated product from three agencies – CIA, NSA, and the FBI –
not all 17 components of the intelligence community,” the former
DNI said.

Clapper
further acknowledged that the analysts who produced the Jan. 6
assessment on alleged Russian hacking were “hand-picked” from the
CIA, FBI and NSA.

Yet,
as any intelligence expert will tell you, if you “hand-pick” the
analysts, you are really hand-picking the conclusion. For instance,
if the analysts were known to be hard-liners on Russia or supporters
of Hillary Clinton, they could be expected to deliver the 
one-sided
report
 that
they did.

Politicized
Intelligence

In
the history of U.S. intelligence, we have seen how this selective
approach has worked, such as the phony determination of the Reagan
administration pinning the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul
II and other acts of terror on the Soviet Union.

CIA
Director William Casey and Deputy Director Robert Gates 
shepherded
the desired findings through the process
 by
putting the assessment under the control of pliable analysts and
sidelining those who objected to this politicization of intelligence.

The
point of enlisting the broader intelligence community – and
incorporating dissents into a final report – is to guard against
such “stove-piping” of intelligence that delivers the politically
desired result but ultimately distorts reality.

Another
painful example of politicized intelligence was President George W.
Bush’s 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s WMD
that 
removed
State Department and other dissents
 from
the declassified version that was given to the public.

Since
Clapper’s and Brennan’s testimony in May, the Times and other
mainstream news outlets have avoided a direct contradiction of their
earlier acceptance of the 17-intelligence-agencies canard by simply
referring to a judgment by “the intelligence community.”

That
finessing of their earlier errors has allowed Hillary Clinton and
other senior Democrats to continue referencing this fictional
consensus without challenge, at least in the mainstream media.

For
instance, on May 31 at a technology conference in California, 
Clinton
referred
 to
the Jan. 6 
report,
asserting that “Seventeen agencies, all in agreement, which I know
from my experience as a Senator and Secretary of State, is hard to
get. They concluded with high confidence that the Russians ran an
extensive information war campaign against my campaign, to influence
voters in the election.”

The
failure of the major news organizations to clarify this point about
the 17 agencies may have contributed to Haberman’s mistake on June
25 as she simply repeated the groupthink that nearly all the
Important People in Washington just knew to be true.

But
the Times’ belated correction also underscores the growing sense
that the U.S. mainstream media has joined in a political vendetta
against Trump and has cast aside professional standards to the point
of repeating false claims designed to denigrate him.

That,
in turn, plays into Trump’s Twitter complaints that he and his
administration are the targets of a “witch hunt” led by the “fake
news” media, a grievance that appears to be energizing his
supporters and could discredit whatever ongoing investigations
eventually conclude.

Investigative
reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The
Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest
book, 
America’s
Stolen Narrative,
 either
in 
print
here
 or
as an e-book (from 
Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

Click
for
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Op 18 december 2017 heb ik de kop en een het label AP aangepast. Waar eerder AP stond, staat nu Ass. Press, (Associated Press), daar de letters ‘AP’ al werden gebruikt voor de Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens.