To my way of thinking, the entire subject is merely an old Capitalist
game called, "Bait and Switch". We'll get folks all worked up, or at
least suspicious about Russia, and then quickly bomb the Hell out of
North Korea...or maybe Iran...or any of them Thar Terrorists wanting
to take our Freedom away from us Free Americans. But still, there
seems to be a surge among Americans. We are beginning to tell that no
matter how it is dressed up, Bull Shit still smells like Bull Shit!
Carl Jarvis
On 12/15/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I have been listening very carefully to the arguments put forward by the
proponents of the Russiagate theory and To the folks like Perry, who
dismiss
the arguments. The people who represent the theory as being true, string
together a lot of unrelated facts and then make unsubstantiated inferences
based on what they've constructed. Today I read a long and interesting
article in The Atlantic about the guy who ran a well known white
nationalist
website. It was really a character study of a man who sounded as if he'd
been emotionally disturbed from a young age and whose family was
dysfunctional. He began as a left wing extremist and became a right wing
extremist. He did a lot of traveling, and lived in several locations
throughout the world. The last place where he lived was Russia. So the
author of the article managed to infer that because this guy lived in
Russia
and did some of his internetposting from there, Russia must have been
supporting him in his efforts. But most of his internet stuff was done in
the US before and after Russia.
Miriam
Consortiumnews
Protecting the Shaky Russia-gate Narrative
December 15, 2017
Exclusive: The New York Times continues its sorry pattern of falsifying the
record on Russia-gate, giving its readers information that the newspaper
knows not to be true, reports Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
If Russia-gate is the massive scandal that we are told it is by so many
Important People - across the U.S. mainstream media and the political world
- why do its proponents have to resort to lies and exaggerations to
maintain
the pillars supporting the narrative?
The New York Times building in Manhattan. (Photo credit: Robert Parry)
A new example on Thursday was The New York Times' statement that a Russian
agency "spent $100,000 on [Facebook's] platform to influence the United
States presidential election last year" - when the Times knows that
statement is not true.
According to Facebook, only 44 percent of that amount appeared before the
U.S. presidential election in 2016 (i.e., $44,000) and few of those ads
addressed the actual election. And, we know that the Times is aware of the
truth because it was acknowledged in a Times article in early October.
As part of that article, Times correspondents Mike Isaac and Scott Shane
reported that the ads also covered a wide range of other topics: "There was
even a Facebook group for animal lovers with memes of adorable puppies that
spread across the site with the help of paid ads."
As nefarious as the Times may think it is for Russians to promote a
page about "adorable puppies," the absurdity of that concern - and the
dishonesty of the Times then "forgetting" what it itself reported just two
months ago about the timing and contents of these "Russian-linked ads" -
tells you a great deal about Russia-gate.
On Thursday, the Times chose to distort what it already knew to be true
presumably because it didn't want to make the $100,000 ad buy (which is not
a particularly large sum) look even smaller and less significant by
acknowledging the pre-election total was less than half that modest amount
-
and even that total had little to do with the election.
Why would the Times lie? Because to tell the truth would undercut the
narrative of evil Russians defeating Hillary Clinton and putting Donald
Trump in the White House - the core narrative of Russia-gate.
Another relevant fact is that Facebook failed to find any "Russian-linked"
ads during its first two searches and only detected the $100,000 after a
personal visit from Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, the vice chairman of the
Senate Intelligence Committee and a leading legislator on Internet
regulation.
In other words, Facebook's corporate executives dredged up something to
appease Warner. That way, Warner and the Democrats could blame Russia for
the Trump presidency, sparing further criticism of Clinton's dreadful
campaign (in which she labeled half of Trump's voters "deplorables") and
her
neo-liberal economic policies (and neo-conservative foreign policies) that
have alienated much of America's working class as well as many
progressives.
Leaving Out Context
The Times also might have put the $100,000 in "Russian-linked" ads over a
two-year period in the context of Facebook's $27 billion in annual revenue,
but the Times didn't do that - apparently because it would make even the
full $100,000 look like a pittance.
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the third presidential debate in 2016,
during which Clinton called Trump Vladimir Putin's "puppet."
Trimming the total down to $44,000 and admitting that only a few of those
ads actually dealt with Clinton and Trump would be even worse for the
Russia-gate narrative.
Ironically, the Times' latest false depiction of the $100,000 in ads as
designed "to influence" the 2016 election appeared in an article about
Facebook determining that other Russian-linked ads, which supposedly had a
powerful effect on Great Britain's Brexit vote, totaled just three ads at
the cost of 97 cents. (That is not a misprint.)
According to Facebook, the three ads, which focused on immigration, were
viewed some 200 times by Britons over four days in May 2016. Of course, the
response from British parliamentarians who wanted to blame the Brexit vote
on Moscow was to assert that Facebook must have missed something. It
couldn't be that many Britons had lost faith in the promise of the European
Union for their own reasons.
We have seen a similar pattern with allegations about Russian interference
in German and French elections, with the initial accusations being widely
touted but not so much the later conclusions by serious investigations
knocking down the claims. [See, for instance, Consortiumnews.com's "German
Intel Clears Russia on Interference."]
The only acceptable conclusion, it seems, is "Russia Guilty!"
These days in Official Washington, it has become almost forbidden to ask
for
actual evidence that would prove the original claim that Russia "hacked"
Democratic emails, even though the accusation came from what President
Obama's Director of National Intelligence James Clapper acknowledged were
"hand-picked" analysts from the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency.
These "hand-picked" analysts produced the evidence-lite Jan. 6 "assessment"
about Russia "hacking" the emails and slipping them to WikiLeaks - a
scenario denied by both WikiLeaks and Russia.
When that "assessment" was released almost a year ago, even the Times'
Scott
Shane noticed the lack of proof, writing: "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 Times soon "forgot" what Shane had inconveniently noted and began
reporting the Russian "hacking" as accepted wisdom.
The 17-Agencies Canard
Whenever scattered expressions of skepticism arose from a few analysts or
non-mainstream media, the doubts were beaten back by the claim that "all 17
U.S. intelligence agencies" concurred in the conclusion that Russian
President Vladimir Putin had ordered the hacking to hurt Hillary Clinton
and
help Donald Trump. And what kind of nut would doubt the collective judgment
of all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies!
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (right) talks with
President
Barack Obama in the Oval Office, with John Brennan and other national
security aides present. (Photo credit: Office of Director of National
Intelligence)
Though the 17-agency canard was never true, it served an important purpose
in establishing the Russia-gate groupthink. Wielding the "all 17
intelligence agencies" club, the U.S. mainstream media pounded politicians
and policymakers into line, making any remaining skeptics seem more out of
step and crazy.
So, in May 2017, when Clapper (along with former CIA Director John Brennan)
admitted in congressional testimony that it wasn't true that all 17
agencies
concurred in the Russian hacking conclusion, those statements received very
little attention in the mainstream media.
The New York Times among other major news outlets just continued asserting
the 17-agency falsehood until the Times was finally pressured to correct
its
lie in late June, but that only led to the Times shifting to slightly
different but still misleading wording, citing a "consensus" among the
intelligence agencies without mentioning a number or by simply stating the
unproven hacking claim as flat fact.
Even efforts to test the Russian-hack claims through science were ignored
or
ridiculed. When former NSA technical director William Binney conducted
experiments that showed that the known download speed of one batch of DNC
emails could not have occurred over the Internet but matched what was
possible for a USB-connected thumb drive - an indication that a Democratic
insider likely downloaded the emails and thus that there was no "hack" -
Binney was mocked as a "conspiracy theorist."
Even with the new disclosures about deep-seated anti-Trump bias in text
messages exchanged between two senior FBI officials who played important
early roles in the Russia-gate investigation, there is no indication that
Official Washington is willing to go back to the beginning and see how the
Russia-gate story might have been deceptively spun.
In a recently released Aug. 15, 2016 text message from Peter Strzok, a
senior FBI counterintelligence official, to his reputed lover, senior FBI
lawyer Lisa Page, Strzok referenced an apparent plan to keep Trump from
getting elected before suggesting the need for "an insurance policy" just
in
case he did. A serious investigation into Russia-gate might want to know
what these senior FBI officials had in mind.
But the Times and other big promoters of Russia-gate continue to dismiss
doubters as delusional or as covering up for Russia and/or Trump. By this
point - more than a year into this investigation - too many Important
People
have bought into the Russia-gate narrative to consider the possibility that
there may be little or nothing there, or even worse, that it is the
"insurance policy" that Strzok envisioned.
