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Home > McCarthyism Inc: Introducing the Counter-Terror 'Experts' Hyping
Russian Threats and Undermining Our Civil Liberties
McCarthyism Inc: Introducing the Counter-Terror 'Experts' Hyping Russian
Threats and Undermining Our Civil Liberties
By Max Blumenthal [1] / AlterNet [2]
November 10, 2017, 2:26 PM GMT
Read part 1 of this investigation here [3].
This September, Oklahoma GOP Senator James Lankford alleged [4] that the
widely popular #taketheknee Twitter hashtag that promoted NFL protests
against racial injustice was, in fact, a Russian influence campaign spawned
by Kremlin operatives. Hours later, Lankford's claims received uncritical
coverage [5] from the New York Times' Scott Shane and Daisuke Wakabayashi,
who asserted that Russia was attempting "to influence social media discourse
and foment division in the United States." The assertion by Lankford added
fuel to a wider narrative darkly insinuating covert Russian influence behind
Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements.
The New York Times cited a new organization called the Alliance for Securing
Democracy as the source of the allegations about the NFL protests. According
to the Times, the ASD has tracked 600 Twitter accounts supposedly "linked to
Russian influence operations" and exposed their nefarious agenda. A day
before Lankford's comments, the ASD asserted that a Russian online influence
network had amplified the trending hashtag promoting NFL protests,
#taketheknee, with the aim of promoting racial disharmony in the United
States. Given that ASD refuses to name the Twitter accounts it is
monitoring, the allegation is almost impossible to verify.
ASD researchers and advisors have become go-to pundits for mainstream
reporters seeking expert opinions on Russian online meddling. They have been
endorsed by John Podesta [6], the founder of the Center for American
Progress and chief of staff for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential
campaign. Julia Ioffe, the Atlantic's Russia correspondent, has also weighed
in [7] to promote the ASD's efforts. Both highlighted the ASD's Hamilton 68
Dashboard as a scientific barometer of Kremlin influence over the American
social media landscape.
According to the New York Times, the ASD is a "public policy research group
in Washington," and a "bipartisan initiative" with no apparent agenda other
than scrubbing the stain of subversion out of American democracy. Hosted by
the German Marshall Fund, one of the most respected think tanks in
Washington, the ASD has been granted the patina of credibility.
However, an investigation by AlterNet's Grayzone Project has yielded a
series of disturbing findings at odds with the established depiction. The
researchers behind the ASD's "dashboard" are no Russia experts, but rather a
collection of cranks, counterterror retreads, online harassers and
paranoiacs operating with support from some of the most prominent figures
operating within the American national security apparatus.
Andrew Weisburd, an ASD fellow who inspired and helped design its Hamilton
68 dashboard, has been solicited by the New York Times and Washington Post
for expert quotes on Russian meddling. Neither outlet bothered to mention
Weisburd's well-documented history of online vigilantism, including his
founding of a one-man, anti-Palestinian web monitoring initiative that
specialized in doxxing left-wing activists, Muslims and anyone he considered
"anti-American." Weisburd's murderous and homophobic fantasies about Glenn
Greenwald, the editor of a publication the ASD has flagged without
explanation as a vehicle for Russian influence operations, have also passed
without notice by reporters promoting his findings.
In recent days, the ASD's master Kremlinologists have branded major American
online outlets including the Intercept [8], Antiwar.com, ESPN, and even the
U.S. military newspaper Stars and Stripes [9] as vehicles for Kremlin
propaganda. ASD researchers emphasized that the outlets they placed within
Russia's supposed influence network were merely "relevant to Russian
messaging themes." But they failed to explain how they became relevant,
making it almost impossible to know why the outlets listed on the dashboard
were being amplified by any Russian influence operation, or whether they
were at all.
The first part of this investigation introduced the ASD's most prominent
figure, Clint Watts, the self-styled national security expert whose
high-profile-and factually deficient-Senate testimony introduced America to
the supposed menace of Russian bots. Watts flaunts a bio that makes it
appear as though his opinions on Russian "active measures" are backed by
academic credentials. However, he has no record of scholarship on Russia,
does not appear to speak Russian and has no professional experience inside
Russia. He has, however, confessed to wasting "billions" of taxpayer dollars
on a failed "influence operation" allegedly waged by the U.S. military in
the Middle East. As a fellow at the right-wing Foreign Policy Research
Institute, Watts has urged American intelligence agencies to encourage
jihadists to carry out terrorist attacks against Russia and Iran.
The composition of the ASD's advisory council [10] has also been exempted
from mainstream media scrutiny. A look at the Beltway power players behind
the group reveals a collection of military interventionists from both
parties, all united in their desire for intensified conflict with Russia.
They include neoconservative former Bush advisors like Kori Schake and
Democrats like Jake Sullivan, an ardent military interventionist who served
as the top foreign policy advisor to the 2016 Clinton campaign. Another
Clinton surrogate, the former CIA director Michael Morrell, advises the ASD.
Morrell has said [11] that the U.S. should support Islamist insurgents in
Syria in order to "have the Russians and the Iranians pay a little price."
Morrell added that he wanted to "bomb [Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's]
offices in the middle of the night."
To round out its board of advisors, the ASD recruited the most recognizable
face of neoconservatism in Washington, Bill Kristol. A founder of the
Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and a vocal supporter of every war the
U.S. has waged, Kristol complained in 2014 that Americans were "war weary."
He clamored for a public relations campaign [12] to influence them in favor
of open-ended military operations, urging a "rallying" of pro-war spirit.
This year, Kristol openly endorsed [13] a "deep state" coup to oust the
Trump administration.
(Kristol's son-in-law, Matthew Continetti, is the editor-in-chief of the
Free Beacon, the neoconservative online outlet that served as the initial
financial channel [14] for funding the "dirty dossier" composed by a former
British MI5 officer named Christopher Steele. Produced by Fusion GPS, an
opposition research firm, the 35-page memo alleged that Vladimir Putin
manipulated Trump through "kompromat" [compromising material] he gathered by
secretly filming prostitutes urinating on Trump in the presidential suite of
Moscow's Ritz Hotel. The document's most lurid claims remain [15]
unsubstantiated.)
The ASD appears to have only one figure on its board of advisors who could
be described as a Russia specialist-Michael McFaul, the former U.S.
ambassador to Russia under the Obama administration. In the early days of
his tenure. McFaul invited tensions with Moscow by hosting a series of
meetings [16] inside the American embassy with protest leaders and internal
opponents of the country's leadership. The former diplomat has become a
human factory for quotes on Russiagate, serving reporters with a reliable
stream of soundbites reinforcing the narrative of Russian interference. He
is currently housed [17] at the Hoover Institution, a right-wing think tank
[18] that has provided a place for fellow militarists like Condoleeza Rice
and Donald Rumsfeld to cool their heels, while sponsoring neoconservative
initiatives like the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
The ASD's main sponsor is the German Marshall Fund, a trans-national think
tank founded under the watch of German Chancellor Willy Brandt in 1972 to
advance the special relationship between the US and Germany. As journalist
James Carden explained [19], the Marshall Fund's sponsorship of a group like
ASD signals a radical break with Brandt's conciliatory approach, which
carefully balanced ties to Washington with an "Ostpolitik" that stressed
diplomacy toward his neighbors in the Warsaw Pact. The German Marshall Fund
has not named the ASD funders pumping donations into its coffers, describing
them on its website [20] as "family foundations." German Marshall Fund
public relations manager Kelsey Glover responded to specific questions about
credentials of ASD researchers and the funders behind the initiative by
directing me to explanations already featured on ASD's website.
Defining 'content attacking the U.S. and Europe' as Russian propaganda
The ASD's Hamilton 68 dashboard purports to "help journalists and ordinary
people alike identify Russian messaging themes and detect active
disinformation or attack campaigns at the start." At first glance, it
appears to be a scientifically accurate device for tracking Russian online
influence. However, a closer examination of this seemingly data-centric
initiative reveals a hyper-politicized project grounded in dubious
methodology.
On their Hamilton 68 dashboard, ASD researchers claim to track the
activities of 600 Twitter accounts supposedly linked to the Kremlin, along
with the media outlets that seem to echo their messaging. If visitors to the
dashboard read the group's explanation of its monitoring methodology [21],
however, they will learn that not all of the accounts it tracks are
controlled by Russian trolls. Some are simply "openly pro-Russian users," or
those who "amplify themes promoted by Russian government media," while
others that are monitored "have been influenced by the first two groups" and
"may or may not understand themselves to be part of a pro-Russian social
network." No information is provided to explain how Russian "themes" are
identified.
Virtually any theme that emanates from Russian news services like RT and
Sputnik is grounds for monitoring by ASD, even when they are based in fact
and have little connection to any Russian foreign policy initiative. As
Carden documented [19] in the Nation, ASD researchers have a penchant for
labeling factual reporting featured on RT and Sputnik's Twitter accounts as
"Russian propaganda" purely on the grounds that it casts the US and its
allies in a negative light. The ASD openly states on its dashboard that it
considers any "content attacking the U.S. and Europe" to be Russian
propaganda.
More curiously, ASD has explicitly refused to name [22] the Russian bot
accounts that it claims to track. The group explained, "We are not willing
to publicly attribute even one specific account incorrectly." This makes it
impossible to know if the group has attributed any accounts correctly.
In perhaps the only case [23] in which the ASD named one of the "Russian"
Twitter accounts it was tracking, the group fingered a Twitter user named
Marcel Sardo, branding him as the possibly robotic ringleader of a sinister
Kremlin-driven influence operation. But when the New York Times' Scott Shane
investigated [24] Sardo's identity, he discovered that the account in
question belonged to an actual human-a 48-year-old computer programmer from
Zurich with no ties to the Russian government. Indeed, Sardo was a private
individual who openly sympathized with Russian foreign policy.
The questionable methodology behind ASD's Hamilton 68 dashboard was
conceived by a team of researchers who earned their stripes in the so-called
war on terror. They include J.M. Berger, a self-styled terror expert who has
focused exclusively on Sunni jihadism. Also lending a hand was Jonathon
Morgan, a computer scientist who worked with [25] the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Neither of these figures has demonstrated
any record of research, scholarship or journalism on Russia.
Then there was Andrew Weisburd, an ASD fellow whose vigilante tactics have
provoked allegations of bigotry, extremism and malicious harassment.
Islamophobic agitator and former Putin admirer
In early 2015, as tensions between U.S. and Russia simmered over conflicts
in Syria, Ukraine and NATO expansion in eastern Europe, a computer
programmer named Andrew Weisburd created a blog called "Kremlin Trolls
[26]." The site aimed to undermine recognizably pro-Russian news and opinion
sites by publicizing their domain locations, IP providers and the personal
details of those behind their operations, including phone numbers. This
project was soon folded into a blog [27] purporting to expose "KGB style
active measures," which relied on the same techniques of blacklisting,
doxxing and harassing that Weisburd had perfected years before when earned
notoriety for his role in the mass shuttering of websites of Palestinians,
Islamists and leftists.
According to the Atlantic [28], Weisburd launched his online crusade
"because he was mad-mad that Yasir Arafat had rejected the peace plan at
Camp David in 2000, mad that al-Qaeda had blown up the buildings in
Manhattan he grew up around, and mad because he had read that Hamas was
teaching Palestinian kindergartners to hate Israelis."
There was also a strong body of evidence suggesting that Weisburd himself
was simply mad.
Raised by parents in a mixed Catholic-Jewish marriage, Weisburd confessed
[29] that he developed a strong attraction to Jewish identity after his
mother sent him to Catholic school at an early age. He also complained about
the presence of "gay priests" in his school. As he came of age, Weisburd
developed a strong attachment to the state of Israel, and an apparent
affinity for some of its most extreme elements. While targeting websites he
considered extremist, he sprinkled in a heavy dose of ultra-Zionist
commentary, Islamophobia and fulsome admiration for Vladimir Putin.
An attic in Carbondale, Illinois, was the base for Weisburd's one-man war
against online extremism. He focused heavily on hardline Islamists and
jihadists, publishing the phone numbers of their IP providers and
encouraging his followers to pester them until they agreed to shut the sites
down. He also hounded Palestinian political factions and their supporters,
as well as American leftists. His vehicle was Internet Haganah, a personal
blog he described as "one part combat mission, one part intelligence
operation, one part grassroots political action."
Though Weisburd's website has been defunct for years, a portion [30] of its
archives [31] was recovered for this article, and it offers a portrait of an
enthusiastic Zionist rallying support for the Israeli military's draconian
crackdown on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank city in 2002.
The blog also features pornographically Islamophobic screeds blaming Arab
Muslims for the Holocaust and accusing Palestinians of "child sacrifice."
Internet Haganah was also a platform for the writings of Daniel Pipes, a
vehemently anti-Muslim scholar who has accused [32] Barack Obama of being a
Muslim apostate, called for the razing [33] of entire Palestinian villages
and described Muslim immigrants as "brown-skinned peoples cooking strange
foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene."
Weisburd might be known today for his obsessive efforts to counter Russian
interference, but back in the months and years after 9/11, he was an
unabashed admirer of Vladimir Putin. On Nov. 12, 2002, in a post on Internet
Haganah [31], Weisburd honored Putin as his "Tough Jew of the Week." Putin
is a member in good standing of the Russian Orthodox Church, but Weisburd
concluded that an angry tirade the Russian leader launched against radical
Islamist terror somehow qualified him for the "Tough Jew" award.
By 2005, national media was taking notice of Weisburd's prolific efforts and
puffing him in lengthy features as an online anti-terror hero, or a "solo
maverick," as the Atlantic put it. None of these outlets, from Wired [34] to
Newsweek [35], seemed interested in Weisburd's anti-Muslim extremism, and
few scrutinized the ethically dubious tactics he was accused of employing
against his targets. Weisburd had boasted to reporters that he had forced
hundreds of Islamic extremist websites offline, however, it was unclear
which of these sites deserved to be censored.
Naziri, an administrator of a chat community for Shia Muslims called
fitriyyah.org, protested that his site had been forced offline by Weisburd's
vigilante efforts. Naziri claimed [36] that his site was targeted for
supporting terrorism despite its opposition to the tactics that Sunni
extremist groups like Al Qaeda have used to massacre his fellow Shia. Naziri
maintained, "we always have and always will unequivocally oppose the
aforementioned illegal and immoral actions which masquerade under the term
'jihaad.'"
He explained how the host of his site had been "threatened over one hundred
times in one weekend when Weisburd called for [the site host] to be
'pressured' to stop hosting us. It was all people calling him and
threatening his life and safety over the weekend that Internet Haganah
called for these illegal tactics to be implemented." Naziri claimed that
many of the threats emanated from the Jewish Defense League, a violent
extremist group which has been responsible for the terrorist assassination
of an Arab-American civil rights organizer, firebombing Russian diplomats
and Palestine solidarity activists, and attempting to murder Rep. Darrell
Issa.
By his own admission, Weisburd did not speak Arabic, had no scholarly
background in Islam or the politics of the Middle East, and no record of any
time spent in the region. What's more, he had no credentials in law
enforcement, though he would later earn a master's in criminology. He was an
ideologically driven vigilante, acting according to his own rules, and
according to his targets, was walking a fine line between legal conduct and
malicious harassment. But Weisburd's methods were not without utility to a
government that was surveilling and prosecuting American Muslims and antifa
activists with unprecedented ferocity.
Victims of Weisburd
In a post at the left-wing news and discussion forum, Indymedia, a group of
anonymous leftists who described themselves as Victims of Weisburd [37]
spoke out about the tactics they had withstood. "Weisburd decides what is
'threatening,'" the authors complained. "He has decided that effective
criticism of George Bush, for example, is threatening. He has decided that
display of upside-down U.S. flags on websites is threatening. He considers
all effective dissent threatening."
The self-described Victims of Weisburd went on to accuse him and his allies
of "hacking into the personal computers of their targets," "getting
'volunteers' inside of web service providers and telecom companies to
illegally provide the information," and "report[ing] innocent Americans
engaged in legal dissent to federal authorities provoking wasteful
investigations which take resources away from the fight against terrorism."
Evan Kohlmann, another self-styled terror expert who has collaborated with
federal authorities, painted Weisburd's tactics as self-defeating. "I
understand the sentiment but they are doing damage. They are making these
guys stronger," Kohlmann commented [35] to Newsweek, referring to
anti-jihadist vigilantes. "They are giving them antibodies."
A decade after Weisburd was credited for driving hundreds of supposedly
extremist sites from the internet, it is unclear what has contributed to the
fight against online terrorist enlistment. Today, the internet is filled
with an unprecedented number of jihadist websites and recruitment videos
that boast eye-popping aesthetic sophistication, and social media is
bristling with supporters of Islamist extremism. But as the online
jihadisphere expands, so does the bog of national security agencies and
private contractors that specialize in transforming geopolitical crises into
fantastic profits. For characters like Weisburd, this has meant a wealth of
lucrative opportunities.
Murderous fantasies about Greenwald, blacklisting his publication
By 2011, Weisburd had transformed himself from solo maverick to a respected
cybersecurity expert called to testify before Congress. In December of that
year, Rep. Patrick Meehan introduced Weisburd to a hearing of the House
Committee on Homeland Security as an expert who had overseen "training and
briefings to the FBI and CIA" and supposedly authored a textbook "comparing
jihadi and street gang videos on YouTube" for the FBI Counterterrorism
Division.
The hearing was dedicated to the danger of online jihadist messaging and was
held two months after President Obama authorized the assassination of Al
Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki and his 15-year-old son, Abdelrahman,
both American citizens. According to a congressional transcript [38],
Weisburd's anti-Muslim Internet Haganah was profusely promoted during the
hearing.
Within three years, after earning a living at the intersection of the
counterterror and Islamophobia industries, Weisburd expanded his repertoire
to encompass the Russian menace. Once an admirer of Vladimir Putin, whom he
bizarrely hailed as a "tough Jew," Weisburd now mocked [39] the Russian
president as a gay "queen" who "will slay you in the outhouse." Weisburd
also speculated [40] that Putin had personally recruited journalist Glenn
Greenwald, who is openly gay, as his personal concubine.
Greenwald had earned international attention when he oversaw the release of
confidential National Security Agency files provided to him by the
whistleblower Edward Snowden. Published at the Guardian and Intercept, the
damning revelations of a Big Brother-style surveillance state sent national
security hardliners like Weisburd into a petulant frenzy. On Twitter,
Weisburd openly fantasized about the murder of Greenwald, whom he branded as
a "traitor [41]."
"When Glenn Greenwald accidentally drowns in 2" of water it will not be the
slightest bit surprising," Weisburd commented. Upon hearing that Greenwald
was set to testify before Congress, he wrote, "I wonder if The Greenwald has
lined up a... bodyguard yet for this trip?" (Weisburd has appeared to
fantasize about poisoning [42] Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.) In another
instance, Weisburd mocked Greenwald's sexuality and imagined [43] deploying
a "honeytrap" operation to compromise the journalist's integrity.
Though this sort of blood-curdling banter is hardly unfamiliar in the halls
of America's national security state, where even Hillary Clinton was accused
by State Department sources of proposing [44] a drone strike to kill
Assange, what made Weisburd's vendetta against Greenwald significant was the
way it revealed ASD's Hamilton 68 Dashboard as a de facto political
blacklist.
On September 28, Greenwald published a factual report on how a widely
disseminated story alleging that Russian government hacked voting machines
in 21 states was debunked. Hours later, Weisburd took to Twitter to proclaim
[45], "The Kremlin's minions are pushing Greenwald's latest at the Intercept
hard tonight. Is it permissible yet to say Glenn is a Kremlin tool?"
That same day, Weisburd boasted [46] that ASD had listed the Intercept on
its Hamilton 68 Dashboard as a top platform for Kremlin influence. He thus
revealed the censorious agenda behind the ASD's methodology. As with the
leftist and Islamic-oriented websites Weisburd had targeted for destruction
in his halcyon days, he and his colleagues were seeking to suppress outlets
that deviated too sharply from the official American line on
"Russiagate"-and to punish any journalist that rankled their sensibility.
Kelsey Glover, the public relations manager of the German Marshall Fund, did
not respond to specific questions regarding Weisburd's violent fantasies
about Greenwald, or his apparent use of the Hamilton 68 Dashboard as a
vehicle to settle scores with the journalist. The George Washington
University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, where Weisburd is housed
as a senior fellow, also did not respond to a list of questions sent by
email.
Lobbying for government labeling of media
The ASD's dashboard is not the first initiative aimed at stamping media
organizations with the "Russian influence" label. Soon after Trump's
inauguration, a mysterious new group called PropOrNot published a blacklist
[47] of some 200 American media outlets, branding them all as Russian
"online propaganda." Those named by PropOrNot included an array of
progressive outlets including Counterpunch, Black Agenda Report, and
Truthdig. Among the criteria PropOrNot identified as signs of Russian
propaganda were, "Support for policies like Brexit, and the breakup of the
EU and Eurozone" and, "Opposition to Ukrainian resistance to Russia and
Syrian resistance to Assad." PropOrNot called for "formal investigations by
the U.S. government" into the outlets it had blacklisted.
The Washington Post's Craig Timberg promoted [48] the flagrantly McCarthyite
initiative with a favorable front-page write-up, whitewashing the anonymous
figures behind PropOrNot as "a nonpartisan collection of researchers with
foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds"-almost exactly how
mainstream reporters have described the ASD's staff. Timberg even quoted
Weisburd and cited a post-election report he co-authored with Watts on
supposed Russian meddling. (Weisburd has no known role in PropOrNot.)
The Washington Post's puff piece on PropOrNot was promoted widely by
Clintonite dead-enders [49] and hailed [50] by former Obama White House
staffer Dan Pfeiffer as "the biggest story in the world." But the operation
swiftly fell apart as a chorus [51] of progressive journalists exposed the
shambolic methods and anti-democratic agenda behind it. An expose of
PropOrNot eventually found its way into the pages of the New Yorker, where
Adrian Chen branded the group [52] as a propaganda operation in its own
right. Ultimately, the Washington Post was compelled to append its report
[53] with a lengthy editor's note stating, "The Post. does not itself vouch
for the validity of PropOrNot's findings regarding any individual media
outlet."
While PropOrNot has faded into obscurity, the ASD is treated by mainstream
media as a serious and eminently scientific initiative despite its use of
the same shoddy, hyper-politicized methodology. The difference between the
two outfits lies primarily in marketing: ASD has publicized the identities
of its researchers and flaunted their national security credentials. More
importantly, its reputation has been burnished by an elite cast of advisors
and the august reputation of the German Marshall Fund.
But behind both PropOrNot and the ASD lies a censorious agenda that aims to
deter news consumers from dissident sources of information. This was made
clear when the most prominent figure attached to the ASD, Clint Watts,
lobbied Congress to impose a social media rating system of all online media,
and with a specific eye on "Russian influence." Citing an op-ed he wrote
with Weisburd, Watts called for a "Consumer Reports for news." To counter
"Russian disinformation specifically," Watts urged Congress [54] to support
a social media rating system. His plan called for news to be given a "score"
for accuracy and political "orientation," describing the system as "the
equivalent of a nutrition label for information."
Watts' proposal might have seemed novel, but it was not unprecedented. Back
in the early 1990s, as white suburbanites fretted over the impact of rap
music on their children, ultra-conservative moral crusader William Bennett
and former civil rights leader C. Dolores Tucker lobbied Congress [55] to
obstruct the sale of gangsta rap. Though Bennett and Tucker failed to
realize their most censorious goals, they managed to pressure the music
industry to apply labels to music containing explicit content. Sales of rap
music continued to skyrocket despite the warning labels, or perhaps because
of them.
The congressional hearings convened this month on Russian social media
meddling presented a liberal analog to the conservative freakout over Snoop
Dogg and Too Short's lascivious lyrics. Cries for the suppression of
"Russian disinformation" reverberated from Capitol Hill, as lawmakers called
for [56] driving Russian-backed media like RT and Sputnik off American
airwaves and demanded [57] YouTube ban their material from its platform
solely on the basis of its foreign source. The U.S. Department of Justice
recently demanded [58] that RT's American bureau register as a foreign
agent, an unprecedented request from a credentialed news agency, while
pressure from Congress prompted Twitter to ban advertising [59] from RT.
To justify its seemingly arbitrary decision, Twitter cited a widely panned
U.S. intelligence agency report [60] that accused RT of "promoting radical
discontent." According to the report, RT's transgressions included
"alleg[ing] widespread infringements of civil liberties," hosting a third
party presidential candidates' debate, and "opposing Western intervention in
the Syrian conflict."
As the government's crusade against Russian meddling widens, it appears
increasingly like a pretext for online surveillance, ramped up
securitization of social media and the suppression of dissent. In such a
paranoid environment, the labeling of online news with a "nutrition value"
may not be far off. Wherever the meltdown leads, Americans can rest assured
it will all be justified in the name of preserving our democratic freedoms,
while ASD's Watts calls [61] on the government to "quell information
rebellions" with censorious measures imposed from above.
Max Blumenthal is a senior editor of the Grayzone Project at AlterNet, and
the award-winning author of Goliath [62], Republican Gomorrah [63], and The
51 Day War [64]. He is the co-host of the podcast, Moderate Rebels [65].
Follow him on Twitter at @MaxBlumenthal [66].
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Source URL:
https://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/terror-cranks-sold-america-russia-
panic
Links:
[1] https://www.alternet.org/authors/max-blumenthal
[2] http://alternet.org
[3]
https://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/clint-watts-fake-russia-expert
[4]
http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/football/ct-james-lankford-russian-trol
ls-nfl-national-anthem-20170927-story.html
[5]
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/technology/twitter-russia-election.html
[6]
https://twitter.com/johnpodesta/status/892818113531654147?ref_src=twsrc%5Etf
w&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fmeduza.io%2Fen%2Ffeature%2F2017%2F08%2F03%2Ftrac
king-russian-propaganda-in-real-time
[7]
https://twitter.com/juliaioffe/status/892778139939688448?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fmeduza.io%2Fen%2Ffeature%2F2017%2F08%2F03%2Ftrack
ing-russian-propaganda-in-real-time
[8] https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/913518006357172226
[9] https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/914623741811937281
[10] http://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/team/advisory-council
[11] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ivt2NmbyGg
[12] http://www.weeklystandard.com/war-weariness-excuse/article/784895
[13] https://twitter.com/billkristol/status/831497364661747712?lang=en
[14]
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/washington-free-beacon-funded-initial-fusion-gp
s-anti-trump-research-dossier/
[15]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2017/live-updates/trump-white-house/j
ames-comey-testimony-what-we-learn/comey-alluding-to-classified-information-
says-the-fbi-knew-sessions-would-recuse-himself/?utm_term=.ef25cddf18b7
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[17] https://www.hoover.org/profiles/michael-mcfaul
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[37] http://neworleans.indymedia.org/news/2005/04/3157.php
[38]
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[67] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=Typo on McCarthyism Inc:
Introducing the Counter-Terror 'Experts' Hyping Russian Threats
and Undermining Our Civil Liberties
&body=URL:http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/terror-cranks-sold-americ
a-russia-panic
[68] https://www.alternet.org/
[69] https://www.alternet.org/%
